urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa48008 doi: 10.11143/48008 launching a new article type in fennia: data descriptions the journals of the geographical society of finland are launching a new article type: data descriptions (datankuvauksia in finnish, beskrivningar av data in swedish). the autumn issue of terra (3/2014) pioneers the new article type. with this announcement we welcome manuscripts of this kind also to fennia. openness, transparency, and reproducibility are hallmarks of scientific methods as they enable the peer-evaluation of the quality and accuracy of research. in practice, however, most research carried out today cannot be reproduced or replicated by others and thus evaluated in detail. this is due to limitations in access to original data, vague or insufficient method descriptions or simply difficulties in accessing the publications that describe the research work. during the recent years, these issues have been gaining increasing attention. the so called open science movement has gained popularity among individual scientists, research groups and research fields, physics being one of the leaders. simply put, the open science movement aims at making scientific publications, research data and methods openly available for others to evaluate and develop further. in addition, research administration has also been interested in advancing and supporting these developments. for example, the ministry of education and culture in finland aims at creating “top conditions for research in finland” through the open science and research initiative (http://openscience. fi/). for an individual researcher, the benefits of open access publishing are clear as it may broaden the audience and readership of the results. sharing research data may, however, feel like sharing researcher’s valuable capital on the research market. this is particularly the case as the reward mechanisms for opening up research data – in comparison to publishing an article – are still immature or non-existing. to support individual researchers in opening up their research data, some international scientific publishers have established journals for data descriptions. geoscience data journal by wiley and scientific data by nature publishing group are examples of such endeavors that have taken place recently. instead of traditional primary research articles presenting novel research results, these journals publish articles that describe scientifically valuable datasets and their production history. in other words, data publications help readers to understand “the when, how and why data was collected and what the dataproduct is”. the principle is that the description and the data are being peer-evaluated, which establishes the robustness of the data production line. the journals of the geographic society of finland have been following carefully the recent trends in scientific publishing as well as in the open science movement. fennia took the first step already in 2010 when it became an open access journal. now both fennia and terra are continuing the same evolution by launching a new article type called data descriptions (datankuvauksia in finnish, beskrivningar av data in swedish). the first article of this type, presenting an openly available spatial data set on the multimodal travel times in the helsinki region has been published in the most recent issue of terra (toivonen et al. terra 3/2014). the publishingprocess followed the normal peer-review steps, which considerably improved both manuscript and the data. in this case, the data had been made available through helsinki region infoshare (http://www.hri.fi/en). from this issue onwards, also fennia welcomes manuscripts describing openly available, scientifically valuable datasets and their production process as data description articles. datasets may be either quantitative or qualitative in nature and the descriptions aim at providing understanding on how the data has been produced and what it can and cannot be used for. fennia follows the common practice of data journals meaning that at the time of manuscript submission, the data should be made available to the peer-reviewers and later to everyone through a suitable data repository (such as those provided in finland by csc – it center for science or finnish social science data archive) and a suitable license (such as cc-by). when appropriate, we also encourage researchers to openly share their data processing implementation – for ex2 fennia 192: 2 (2014)tuuli toivonen and paola minoia ample code or configuration files – using collaborative platforms, such as github (https:// github.com/). with this new article type, fennia hopes to help researchers in sharing their datasets and being merited accordingly through publications and increased visibility. more broadly, we wish to encourage everyone to participate in the transition to a new and more open research culture in geography. tuuli toivonen will be acting as a guest editor for this new article type. tuuli toivonen, department of geosciences and geography, university of helsinki. e-mail: tuuli.toivonen@helsinki.fi paola minoia, department of geosciences and geography, university of helsinki. e-mail: editor.fennia@geography.fi tourism and development urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa50999 doi: 10.11143/50999 tourism and development tourism is a large and growing global-scale phenomenon with a wide range of socio-cultural, economic, ecological and political impacts. while it has a multitude of elements and dimensions, tourism as an activity is often seen – sometimes solely – through an economic lens. according to the world bank (2012), for example, tourism is a threebillion-a-day business, and estimates suggest that it accounts for approximately 9% of global production. also in geographical research tourism was firmly located under economic geography until the early 1970s. however, since then many elements and views related to the nature of tourism have changed. although some scholars may still regard tourism as a service sector issue, a purely economic phenomenon and/or an academically tedious activity based on wealthy people’s voluntary mobility and related consumption during their free time, research on tourism geographies since the 1970s has promoted much more pluralist and critical views on the phenomenon and the relationship between tourism and development and tourism and places, for example (see britton 1982; hall & page 2009). in addition, as chris gibson (2008: 418) has noted, tourism geography “appears to be on the whole more cosmopolitan” with “its own geography of production and circulation, variegated differently than for other parts of geography.” obviously the economic dimension in geographical tourism research is still important and tourism is often studied (and used) as a vehicle for economic development. indeed, the economic emphasis is one relevant perspective on tourism as an industry in regional settings. even in that context, however, the tourism – (regional) development nexus is not necessarily seen as being straightforward; instead, it is regarded as involving a complex set of interlinkages and non-linkages, inclusions and exclusions, continuations and breaks. thus, even from an economic perspective, tourism is not always ”just an economy” but also a form of governing localities with implications for local livelihoods, ways of living, socio-political networks, culture, biopolitics, access to resources and the environment, and so on. since the 1990s, the development thinking in tourism geographies was further broadened when the ideology of sustainability became visible and hegemonic in tourism and development research. recently, ethical aspects in tourism and development and related modes of production and consumption have been emphasised in tourism geographies (fennell 2006, 2012), with links to elements such as climate change, global poverty reduction, post/neo colonialism, political economy and the empowerment of previously marginalised and disadvantaged groups (see gibson 2010; scheyvens 2011; hall 2013; nepal & saarinen 2016). this special issue brings together research papers focusing on tourism and development and how tourism connects with places and people. kulusjärvi’s research explores the connections between resort-oriented tourism development and tourism business cooperation in the tourist destination of ruka-kuusamo, north-east finland. kulusjärvi emphasises how local cooperative networks at ruka are spatially constructed within a larger tourism destination. interestingly, her results indicate that resort-oriented tourism development does not distribute significant benefits to the wider destination region. this finding implying inclusions and exclusions in development is in contrast with the hegemonic tourism and public investment thinking highlighted in current finnish tourism policies and governance models. in a regional policy context, almstedt, lundmark and petterson focus on the role of tourism in rural development with an aim to investigate the distribution of public spending on tourism in rural areas of sweden. in addition, they seek to analyse how policy-makers understand the idea and contribution potential of rural tourism. their results show that a relatively small amount of total public spending actually targets tourism. thus, they conclude that although public efforts are focused on adequate parts of the industry, the “‘rhetoric efforts” cannot be expected to contribute significantly to the actual restructuring of the rural economy. in the rural swedish context, möller continues to study how tourism affects young residents’ perceptions of and affective bonds to rural touristic spaces in the ski resort of sälen. based on the results, young people experience that tourism contributes to a more vital community, without eliminating the positive aspects associated with a rural way of living. thus, the socio-economic and cultural development contributions of tourism are © 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 2 fennia 194: 1 (2016)jarkko saarinen seen positively, making sälen a more attractive to young adults to stay and live in. gutberlet’s paper expands the tourism-development nexus to the socio-cultural impacts of largescale cruise tourism by analysing the tourism impacts on the traditional bazaar (souq) in the district of mutrah, oman. her results indicate that due to increasing mass scale tourism, the bazaar has transformed into a ”tourist bubble”, with related problems of crowding. this has partially displaced local residents, who avoid the place due to the large number of tourists. in a different mass tourism context, vainikka analyses tourist guides’ relationship with tourism destinations, with a case study that focuses on finnish package tourism spaces in crete. she studies the situated spatial relationships within destination spaces and the positionality of the guides. according to her results, the guides work with two ideas of spatiality, namely intensive and extensive, through which the spatialities of mass tourism are interpreted on an ideal and a practical level. in the final paper, kavita and saarinen review the existing policy and planning frameworks in namibia that relate to tourism and rural development. their research note particularly targets communitybased tourism (cbt) policies initiated by the namibian government. while the cbt projects can be locally important, the review concludes that there is a need for a comprehensive national-level tourism policy that could integrate the mainstream tourism industry into rural and community development needs more widely in the future. jarkko saarinen, department of geography, university of oulu, oulu, finland. e-mail: jarkko. saarinen@oulu.fi references britton s 1982. the political economy of tourism in the third world. annals of tourism research 9: 3, 331–358. http://dx.doi:10.1016/0160-7383(82)90018-4. fennell d 2006. tourism ethics. channelview, clevedon. fennell d 2012. tourism and animal ethics. routledge, new york, ny. gibson c 2008. geographies of tourism: internationalising geography? progress in human geography 32: 1, 1–16. http://dx.doi: 10.1177/0309132507086877. gibson c 2010. geographies of tourism: (un)ethical encounters. progress in human geography 34: 4, 521–527. http://dx.doi: 10.1177/0309132509348688. hall cm 2013. framing tourism geography: notes from the underground. annals of tourism research 43, 601–623. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2013.06.007. hall cm & page s 2009. progress in tourism management: from the geography of tourism to geographies of tourism – a review. tourism management 30: 1, 3–16. http://dx.doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2008.05.014. nepal s & saarinen j (eds) 2016. tourism and political ecology. routledge, london. scheyvens r 2011. tourism and poverty. routledge, london. world bank 2012. transformation through tourism: development dynamics past, present and future (draft). world bank, washington dc. no trenches: toward inclusive and hybrid methodologies – commentary to tulumello urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa79837 doi: 10.11143/fennia.79837 reflections no trenches: toward inclusive and hybrid methodologies – commentary to tulumello guntram h. herb herb, g. h. (2019) no trenches: toward inclusive and hybrid methodologies – commentary to tulumello. fennia 197(1) 155–157. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79837 my critical reflection on simone tulumello’s intervention focuses first on the need to make a clear distinction between methodologies and epistemologies, asking the author to explain his own perspective. a second area of concern is the analogy he draws between structures engineered with concrete and human societies and how this appears to simplify the debate he initiates. in the third part i suggest that the goal should be to transcend the tensions between paradigms through inclusive and hybrid methodologies. keywords: epistemologies, positivism, quantitative methodologies, qualitative methodologies guntram h. herb, department of geography, middlebury college, middlebury, vermont 05753 usa. e-mail: herb@middlebury.edu simone tulumello, you are not simply throwing down the gauntlet, but you come out swinging and artfully dissect a positivist exemplar. i greatly appreciate the critical salvo that you fire with a ‘common sense of the engineer’ and your virtuous passion to level the epistemological playing field (tulumello 2019). your intervention reminds me of the battles over epistemologies in the 1970s–1990s that were carried out in conference panels, academic journals, and among faculty colleagues. it makes me think about the difference between epistemologies and methods, the analogy of engineering and human geography, and the need for inclusivity and hybridity in research. there is much to learn, but also some of concern in these three regards. in short, i have three critical remarks that are centered on: conceptualization, argumentation/analogy, and the goals of epistemological debates. my critique comes with a real sense of gratitude for this intervention. it is a stimulating piece – it made me think and i have a feeling it will keep me thinking for a while. conceptually, i am concerned with 1) the conflation of positivism and quantitative methods and 2) the binary of quantitative/positivist methods versus qualitative methods. you argue that there are links between quantification (large data sets and sample sizes), generalizations, and theory building – and that practitioners using quantitative methods deny qualitative methods the ability to generalize due to small data sets. but quantitative methods are not simply positivist, they are also used in other epistemologies, such as structuralism. even if your concern is only with positivist quantitative methods, there is an imbalance here because you associate one method with an epistemology, but not the other. given the wide range of epistemologies that use qualitative methods, which one are you championing in your piece? you advocate for qualitative methods, but do not foreground the assumptions or shortcomings of your own approach – even though you demand positivists do that. to help us better understand your argument, you need to explain how the context of the type of © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79837 156 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections research you practice and your positionality influence the text you write. i looked up your work – something that cannot be done in a double-blind review, and it provides a hint of your positionality. as livingstone (1992) explained for the history of geography, it helped me consider how your text and context might be reciprocally constituted. your argument makes sense in the context of your work in urban geography and planning. the preference for models, big data, and quantitative methods in these fields—and public statements about the superiority of epistemologies employing the “scientific method” (e.g. shearmur 2008) – would certainly make it wearisome to publish even superbly designed qualitative case studies there, indeed. however, methods are not synonymous with epistemologies; you need to distinguish more clearly the two opposing camps you set up in your intervention. the argumentation of your intervention is clever in that it seeks to destabilize quantitative/positivist methods from within by applying the ‘common sense of the engineer’. you make a convincing argument that significant error lurks in positivist generalizations, but can you really compare the epistemology behind the construction of buildings to the complexity of human societies and human-environment interaction? granted, you point out that human societies are “much more complex” than your example of concrete and that therefore even more error is to be accounted for in human societies, but you use this disclaimer only to justify increased vigilance about positivist work. i have two issues here. first, concrete is fundamentally different from society because there is no agency inherent in concrete. yes, actor-network theory has shown that objects can have agency, but not in their own destruction. the analogy is therefore not fully applicable. second, your ‘concrete’ analogy is essentially about true and false: whether the concrete structure collapses or whether it endures the weight placed on it. quantitative social scientific research does not deal with such clear and definite outcomes and there are no such truth claims in the article by ellen, lens and o’regan (2012) about housing vouchers that you dissect for potential errors in its findings. the authors of the article make a claim that contradicts existing explanations (backed up with evidence), but they do not posit that this is the only explanation. you argue that their evidence should be subjected to a larger margin of error and that the authors (and other positivist works for which you consider it to be an exemplar) should acknowledge that. but how did you arrive at the potential error of ‘0.2’? positivists might claim the right to make generalizations, but their epistemology also embraces the incremental and contradictory progress of knowledge, with falsification of claims being key to the process. your intervention asks each epistemology to recognize and explicitly state its assumptions and its shortcomings and to respect and accept the “findings produced through different methodological and epistemological lenses” (tulumello 2019, 126). such a call for self-critical reflexivity is laudable, even if it is not a new story. in the 1970s and 1980s, feminist geographers had to convince their quantitative positivist modeling colleagues – the vast majority of whom were male – that the qualitative feminist approach to ‘situated’ knowledge was as insightful as a quantitative positivist one. humanistic geographers such as tuan had to defend the validity of their assertion that there were universal ways in which humans experience space, place and the environment. in the 1990s, postmodernists and post-structuralists rallied against metanarratives and prefaced their works with statements about positionality. but are we still mired in paradigmatic trench warfare? emanating from your lines – at least in my reading – is a view that puts qualitative work in a position of victimhood. ergo the need to tear down the supposed aura of superiority of quantitative/positivist geography. but why go only on the attack, why not also point out the unique and powerful insights of qualitative methods or, even better, showcase the shared merits of quantitative and qualitative methods? in the end, the debate should not be about qualitative versus quantitative, but about respect, inclusivity, and hybridity. there are journals out there that are geared toward qualitative research and there are journals that are more wed to quantitative approaches, so there are ways to evade the epistemological assaults of ‘reviewer 2’ on the integrity of your method. other journals, such as fennia and the annals of the american association of geographers, cast a wide and welcoming net, epistemologically. more importantly, researchers increasingly triangulate methods to augment the robustness of their claims. our world is not just marked by walls and wallstreet profits, but also touched by flows and scapes that transcend b/orders. given the ensuing relational spatiality linking global and local, humans and the more than human world, geographers can no longer study human societies effectively with a single method. the epistemological challenge is not to create a fennia 197(1) (2019) 157guntram h. herb level playing field for warring approaches, but to celebrate methodological inclusivity and hybridity in our investigations. references ellen, i. g., lens, m. c. & o’regan, k. (2012) american murder mystery revisited: do housing voucher households cause crime? housing policy debate 22(4) 551–572. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482. 2012.697913 livingstone, d. (1992) the geographical tradition: episodes in the history of a contested enterprise. blackwell, oxford. shearmur, r. (2008) chicago and l.a.: a clash of epistemologies. urban geography 29(2) 167–176. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.29.2.167 tulumello, s. (2019) generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers. fennia 197(1) 121–131. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2012.697913 https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2012.697913 https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.29.2.167 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70294 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70294 reflections who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill jen bagelman bagelman, j. (2018) who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 108–110. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 this review is written as a letter, and addressed to my colleague nick gill. it is an effort to continue conversations about the politics of welcome as they relate to practices of asylum and our academic modes of inquiry into this field of study. in particular, this letter reflects upon gill’s piece, the suppression of welcome’, which is based on his keynote lecture at the finnish geography days 2017 in turku. keywords: asylum, decolonize, host, migration, welcome jen bagelman, department of geography, university of exeter, streatham campus, northcote house, exeter ex4 4qj, uk. e-mail: j.bagelman@exeter. ac.uk, twitter: @bagel_woman i would like to begin by reflecting on the question of ‘welcome’ raised by nick gill’s intervention specifically in relation to the welcome extended here, and one we regularly receive as academics. that is, the invitation to review. this invitation, to enter the intellectual worlds of our colleagues, is largely mediated by journals as host. while the journal may differ, the style of invitation is predictably consistent: double-blind review. ‘please, dr. x, would you consider reviewing this article which is written by someone you probably know, but who will remain nameless?’ as both reviewer and author, we are blinded to our interlocutors. one may ask: while such anonymity (rarely complete) might facilitate impartiality, what is lost or – to borrow a term from gill’s (2018) title – ‘suppressed’? if we are to take arendt’s (1985) famous assertion that we become political through our interactions with others and that this involves a process of disclosure and acknowledgment of the other, perhaps what is supressed through blind-review is the possibility of political interlocution and politics itself. what i appreciate about this open, online forum is the attempt to experiment with academic rituals of intellectual engagement, and thus politics. to embrace this opportunity i address you, nick, more personally and offer my stream-of-consciousness comments in the spirit of promoting ongoing conversation… dear nick, i really enjoy how you foreground the swell of spontaneous, solidarisitic expressions of welcome that we see emerging (despite/against hostile government policies). the sanctuary movement, to which you allude, is a concrete and lively example. i happen to know your understanding of this movement is rooted in personal experience of participating as a trustee for the charity, city of sanctuary. i also know that you’ve been particularly involved in cultivating the ‘universities of sanctuary’ stream that aims to secure equal access to higher education for refugees. i wonder how you see this work enacted through campus geographies connecting with, what massey (2004) calls, extended ‘geographies of responsibility’? and, what further work needs to be done to ensure that this sanctuary activism © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 fennia 196(1) (2018) 109jen bagelman remains ‘outward-looking’ such that we continue to address not only issues of resettlement but also the structural conditions forcing people to move in the first place? in an earlier conversation we had, i mentioned that magnusson’s (2010) work (particularly seeing like a city) could be theoretically helpful in fleshing out this distinction between sovereign/statist forms of governing from the spontaneous/everyday politics of welcome to which you refer. i really like how you’ve incorporated some of his work here. you carefully make the case that statist approaches tend to be enacted as clunky, cold, top-down and highly calculative. on the other hand, you gesture to the local as a place of community where more organic, warm, bottom-up and spontaneous forms of welcome emerge. the local, you suggest, is full of surprise that serves to challenge a suppressed, statist welcome. i find this distinction provocative, yet i am curious how you see these forms of governance bleeding into one another? as has been made explicit in the news these past few weeks through the windrush scandal, ‘hostile environments’ are produced through exclusionary state policy and sustained by daily enactments within our local geographies. i am thinking here also about the blanket ‘study bans’ that are denying asylum seekers the right to education in the uk, a government policy that takes shape through acts of daily compliance on campus. if hostility is not simply a top-down policy, but rather a wider socio-cultural-political environment it seems that we must think more critically about our localities as both spaces of hospitality, and spaces wherein hostilities are made manifest. your piece also makes me reflect upon the temporal relationship between spontaneous and sustainable activism. as you rightly point out, we need to ensure that the ‘surprising’ forms of welcome that have emerged in response to spectacularly tragic stories of global displacement continue to support people with precarious even as surprise in the spectacular begins to wane. i was recently in berlin for a geography fieldtrip during which time students noted the host of ‘pop-up’ provisional services in the city, providing everything from housing to health-care for refugees. while these diy politics are essential, your attention to questions of sustainability remind me that such improvised urbanisms must also address the protracted and structural challenges of, say, gentrification that render such spaces and forms of care temporary. your provocation left me wondering: can we at once engage in pop-up politics while still challenging the long-standing (capital, colonial…) structural forces that deepen and extend precariousness? though the spontaneous forms of activism that have fallen under the rallying cry ‘refugees welcome’ may be effective, you also provide a compelling critique of this discourse. you suggest that exclusively affixing attention to ‘the refugee’ problem, risks occluding those in forgotten corridors, the internally displaced who never cross a state border, asylum seekers held indefinitely waiting even for the designation ‘refugee.’ this discursive bordering limits our ability to respond to displacement as an intersectional and intractable problem. i would like to continue to push you on how the displacement of refugees and the dispossession born out of settler colonialism might be thought (albeit uncomfortably) together? how can we as academics heed the call made by activist walia (2013) in her book border imperialism, to forge necessary solidarities that challenge state violence that displace both refugee and indigenous communities? i appreciate how you draw out a more intersectional approach through your gendered critique of ‘the’ refugee crisis discourse. you evoke scholars like lauren wolfe who have argued that while we hear relatively little about women from women we paradoxically see women in the ‘current’ crisis. the female body, and her baby, often stands in metonymically for humanitarian crisis. wright argues this is, in fact, not so much strange but strategic. there is a strategic visibility, whereby women and children come into focus as spectacular victims yet their stories of migration and agency remain submerged and out of sight. they are, in other words, the poster-child of a crisis in which they are often absented, largely forgotten. i found it productive how you explore how this gets refracted in ostensibly welcoming discourses. i wonder how we might queer these conversations: in what ways do determination processes, and our own academic languages, rely upon and reify gender norms that deny an acknowledgement of those lives that do not fit within tidy binaries? nick, you end with a critical reflection on experiential knowledge. you suggest that, “an overemphasis on numeric aspects of welcome over lived experiences undermines the basis of welcome itself” (gill 2018, 93). i read this as a powerful call to attend more carefully to intimacies and expertise 110 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections born from experience. as you point out, in our current academic landscape, this call is increasingly articulated in terms of an imperative to do community-engaged research with ‘impact.’ while this agenda may be a welcome turn towards widening participation you suggest we should remain critical of the conditions placed on this invitation. circling back to my opening comments regarding the spaces of welcome enacted within the academy, and in light of your intervention, i am minded to ask: in a metric-driven environment, who measures the success of an invitation to participate in research? who profits from this welcome? and, most significantly, who is the host? these questions that are invited through your work represent a welcome challenge – one that compels us to think less about our benevolence and more about unsettling academic privilege. thanks, jen references arendt, h. (1958) the human condition. university of chicago press, chicago. gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 magnusson, w. (2010) politics of urbanism: seeing like a city. routledge, london. massey, d. (2004) geographies of responsibility. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 86(1) 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00150.x walia, h. (2013) undoing border imperialism. 6th ed. ak press, chico. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00150.x six sideways reflections on academic publishing urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa67833 doi: 10.11143/fennia.67833 six sideways reflections on academic publishing to examine the world is to reveal divergences, a range of potential polities, societies, and spaces, other to the conventional defined space of the research paper on the page. yet it is possible to push at the edges of a research paper, and kick back against the standardization of scholarship. for variety and a breadth of scholarship is a symbolic and important characteristic of geography as a discipline. a present tragedy of publishing in the academic world is that, as international scholars, we are all increasingly pressured to produce research papers that meet certain externally imposed standards. this monitoring of academia through corporate/capitalist frameworks, can lead to the publishing of ‘safe pieces’, in place of texts that move disciplinary debates radically forward. the reflections section of this journal was set up with this exact issue in mind. in order to produce lively, critical, inventive interjections on current societal issues, and to open-out what is considered geographical endeavor through creative practice, and in essence, to subvert the research paper itself. it is dedicated to publishing reflections on issues relevant to, and in, contemporary geographies, offering a space for empirically grounded as well as theoretically informed research. pushing at the margins of the discipline is its aim, and its revolutionary agenda is to argue that the traditional craft of essay writing perhaps needs to be returned to the forefront of academia; essays that take a walk beyond the norm, other to the standardized research paper format of present (forsdick 2005). it seems that nowadays more regularly, rather than writing what we want to write as scholars we are instead – through an increasingly crude quantitative measurement – writing what we think we have to write. yet, we suggest here, that research papers which subvert the traditional way-of-doingthings, have precisely the potential to become polemic, discipline changing, impactful pieces. one of the tragedies related to peer reviewed research papers is that, after publication, we may be left with a sense that our work has in some way been highjacked and tampered with, and the finished article does not accurately reflect what we wanted to say. revision rounds, serving multiple purposes, can lead to a diluted version of the issue with which we sought to engage. furthermore, as we look around the publishing landscape – as authors, editors, and reviewers – uneasy feelings arise, about enabling a narrowing, a cleansing, a streamlining of our research in print to fit the current corporate/capitalist agenda. in our view, this devalues much of the labor that goes into the research paper itself, before and beyond its processing in a journal, the time that goes into the gathering of data and analysis, and the placing of each word, each sentence, and each paragraph on the page. these contradictions loom larger, and can be contextualized with reference to a longstanding and ever growing body of literature on neo-liberalization within academia, and as such, academic publishing (castree & sparke 2000; dowling 2008; mountz et al. 2015). ever more assessments and criteria, models and formula are creating a widening disconnection between university management and academic staff, and are indeed reducing the quality of academic research, preventing critical interrogations, critical thought and pedagogy, for fear of not fitting into this narrow model (gray 2003). a research paper will not have impact, we worry, if it does not fit neatly into or is not suitable for framework assessments. these assessments, as such, seek to demarcate what geography is, what is geographical, what is correct or suitable geography. thus, it is vital to critically interrogate them and to fight back against their neo-liberalization of the academy, for these assessments are in fact decreasing the breadth of geography, and in so doing, are reducing its quality, its excellence. this failure of an excellence framework, as such, to live up to its billing as a measure of excellence – rather instead prescribing a capitalist/corporate version of excellence – reveals that the model itself is essentially flawed. unfortunately, we, as academics, are becoming overinvested in the idea of publish or perish, publish in this journal and not that journal, publish research papers and not book chapters, as a foundation stone of present-day scholarship. consequently, our capacities to move beyond this neo-liberal formulation of academic publishing completely, are gradually diminishing. in the editorial setting up the previous issue of fennia, we sought to re-engage academics with another possibility, to suggest it does not have to be this way altogether, and to flesh-out an alternative publishing model, for there are subtle radical moves that can be made (for continuation, see the © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 162 fennia 195: 2 (2017)editorial: reflections editorial of this issue, kallio & hyvärinen 2017). fennia has a specific and radical publication policy. it is non-profit, open access, in favor of open reviewing, and respecting of the rights of authors (under creative commons, with cope, indexed in doaj and esci). its aims and scope are broad, encompassing all fields of geography, with an attentiveness to northern dimensions, while topical and politicized issues arising from any part of the world and in any empirical context are particularly welcomed. the six sideways reflections on publishing in this issue of fennia, seek to build upon this initial editorial in the previous issue, on subtle radical moves in academic publishing. they offer an alternative to the staid mode of paper writing and the thorny issue of wanting to publish your work in academic journals, yet not wanting to reproduce the neo-liberalization of academia in printed form. timely reflections, they raise the problem with disseminating academic work through the straightjacketed research paper as a creative and critical form, and approach the problematic of the conventional publishing model in different ways. we begin with a substantive piece on the measuring of research quality, quantitatively, from michael jones, based on his experience of editing the norsk geografisk tidsskrift–norwegian journal of geography (ngt–njg), over a period of sixteen years. this is followed by a reflection on socially just publishing, from simon batterbury, which argues geographers can also be publishers, and offers a different experience of editing a free online journal, the journal of political ecology. following on from this reflection, the editors of the radical geography journal human geography seek to reclaim value from academic labor, offering routes around corporate/capitalist academic publishing. weighing in on the nature of the problem, they reveal what they are doing in response as a journal, what successes they have had, and what challenges remain. similarly, in reaction to the ever-increasing pressure placed on academics to publish within the neoliberal university, the editors of acme: an international journal for critical geographies state that scholars are increasingly declining to participate in peer review, and that this is the biggest obstacle they face as a journal. they argue persuasively that peer review should be considered as a form of mutual aid, which is rooted in an ethics of cooperation, perhaps other to the neoliberal university within which we operate as scholars. the final two reflections which follow in this lively and timely debate, focus on the dominance of english language publishing in international academic work, and the broader geopolitics of knowledge production. derek ruez argues that contexts, approaches, and modes of knowledge are regularly devalued, placing concurrently critique on the finnish and nordic ranking systems, in line with the first reflection from michael jones. while sara fregonese offers a critical take on english as lingua franca, stating more reflection is needed in order for academic english not to become once again part of a disenfranchising process. it is perhaps this disenfranchising that we must give more thought to in a future issue of reflections in fennia, a finnish geographical journal published in english, ensuring academic english does not become an excluding barrier, both in the writing and peer review stages of publishing. a critical review essay brings this issue of reflections to a close, in which elisa pascucci reflects upon and cites a far more complex reality than the one presented in the book, refuge: transforming a broken refugee system (betts & collier 2017). pascucci states that fundamental research on refugees is missing from the controversial book, which asks the question: can capitalism help refugees? a lack of engagement with historical and empirical precedents should not be overlooked here for pascucci, for it is precisely this lack of engagement, which allows the authors to express an optimism about refugeefriendly capitalism. returning to the six reflections on academic publishing that follow, to end, we would like to state precisely what it is that we are aiming at with this discussion. we aim here, to contribute to a critical discussion on the neo-liberal direction in which academia is travelling, among geographers and other scholars, between academics and political actors, globally and nationally, in institutional settings and scientific communities, in order to halt a corporate/capitalist creep into the academy. we welcome responses to the six reflections published here, in future issues, whether that is through the articulation of alternative perspectives, or, in a form that builds upon the arguments and radical agenda presented. suggestions for similar discussions on focal topics are encouraged and will be given a critical space within the reflections section of fennia in upcoming issues. we would like now, for you to critically engage with the vital reflections that follow, circulate them widely, and to repel the neo-liberalization of academia! fennia 195: 2 (2017) 163james riding & kirsi pauliina kallio james riding fennia reflections editor kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief references betts, a. & collier, p. (2017) refuge: transforming a broken refugee system. penguin random house, london. castree, n. & sparke, m. (2000) professional geography and the corporatization of the university: experiences, evaluations, and engagements. antipode 32(3) 222–229. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00131 dowling, r. (2008) geographies of identity: laboring in the ‘neoliberal’ university. progress in human geography 32(6) 812–820. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507088032 forsdick, c. (2005) de la plume comme des pieds: the essay as a peripatetic genre. in forsdick, c. & stafford, a. (eds.) the modern essay in french: movement, instability, performance, 45–60. peter lang, bern. gray, a. (2003) cultural studies in birmingham: the impossibility of critical pedagogy? cultural studies 17(6) 767–782. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238032000150011 kallio, k. p. & hyvärinen, p. (2017) a question of time – or academic subjectivity? fennia 195(2) 121– 124. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67834 mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j. walton-roberts, m., basu, r., whitson, r., hawkins, r., hamilton, t. & curran w. (2015) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 14(1) 1235–1259. the timely return of the repressed – commentary to walton urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa69822 doi: 10.11143/fennia.69822 reflections the timely return of the repressed – commentary to walton andy inch inch, a. (2018) the timely return of the repressed – commentary to walton. fennia 196(1) 99–102. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69822 this reflection discusses my response to william walton's research paper in this issue of the journal. in it i explore how a timely invitation to take part in the open review process prompted thoughts about my ongoing involvement in the politics of planning in scotland. drawing on experience of campaigning for a fair and inclusive planning system, i briefly reflect on why the post-political has proven such an attractive theoretical lens for recent attempts to understand urban planning under neoliberalism. suggesting that it seems to capture something important about ongoing attempts to reshape planning ideas and practices in scotland, i go on to consider how walton’s paper brings to light important concerns about the loss of democratic accountability. overall, i try to explore how the repression of energies required to sustain a post-political settlement may nonetheless provide a resource for acting in and against the dominance of market rationalities. keywords: planning, post-politics, democracy, public participation andy inch, instituto de ciências sociais, universidade de lisboa, av. prof. a. de bettencourt, 9, lisbon, 1600-189, portugal. e-mail: andy.inch@ics.ulisboa.pt it doesn’t happen to me all that often but sometimes you can end up reviewing a paper for an academic journal that is relevant to more than just scholarly debates and concerns. as luck would have it, being part of the open review process for william walton’s (2018) paper in this issue of fennia was such an occasion. as i write this commentary i am on a train heading north towards edinburgh. when i get there, i will be giving evidence to the local government and communities committee of the scottish parliament on behalf of a non-profit organisation called planning democracy (pd) i work with. pd campaigns for a fair and inclusive planning system in scotland and over recent years have built up a network of supporters across the country1. typically these are groups and individuals who have reached out for assistance, mostly in frustration, as they struggle to influence how places they care about are being changed. the evidence session has been called because the scottish government (sg), currently led by a minority scottish nationalist party administration, has drafted new planning legislation. assuming this is passed in some form or other, it will be just the second time that scotland has made use of its powers to legislate on planning matters since devolution in 1999. walton’s paper offers a timely, critical appraisal of some as yet under-examined consequences of changes introduced on the previous occasion in 2006. the current draft planning bill emerged following more than two years of deliberation amongst “stakeholders” during which hundreds of groups have devoted thousands of hours to a succession © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69822 100 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections of consultations, working groups, seminars, evidence sessions and the like. many including pd have done so on an almost entirely voluntary basis. and, to be honest, at times we’ve questioned why we’re bothering. throughout the process, there has been a strong suspicion that the sgs surprise decision to seek a ‘root and branch’ review of the planning system was driven by lobbying from the development sector, particularly the housebuilding industry. the housebuilders’ view is that planning processes are little more than a bureaucratic burden, imposing costs and delay which prevent the market from efficiently “delivering”, whether on quasi-magical promises of “growth” or the levels of new housing required to meet projected needs. this has become central to the ruling common-sense about planning in scotland. it is a hegemonic logic that constructs spatial planning as a problem rather than a positive means of realizing any publicly defined objectives for the use and development of land. in turn, this logic generates reforms whose primary purpose is to streamline planning processes, seeking to speed up decision-making and minimize regulation. related problematizations of planning have, of course, become core to the repertoire of neoliberal spatial governance, performed with minor variations in many places in recent years. the “planning as a barrier” discourse has become an article of ideological faith to the extent that it can be reproduced with little regard to anything as considered as evidence. in response, the lacanian planning theorist michael gunder (2016) suggests that the scapegoating of planning is playing a part in sustaining the powerful ideological fantasies that underpin neoliberal rule. the effect of this discourse is to discipline the role of planning to facilitation of the market-led development on which “growth” is seen to rely. increasingly, sustaining land and property markets has become the key public good that policy-makers seek from planning. it is an approach that is broadly unquestioning of the nature and structure of those markets themselves, representing them as something like the weather whose vicissitudes need to be lived with but cannot be changed. so far so familiar. seen in these terms, it is not hard to see why the “post-political” has proven such an attractive concept for planning scholars, capturing as it does how the terms of debate have been narrowed, shutting out anything that might challenge the neoliberal settlement around “light touch” regulation and market-led planning (see metzger (2018) for a sympathetically critical review on the post-political in planning). sustaining this reductive and largely negative view of the role of planning also involves closing down other possibilities. from my perspective, however, walton’s analysis of how the implementation of the 2006 planning etc. scotland act has limited scope for effective democratic scrutiny of what goes into development plans is not just another example of post-political planning. it also has considerable relevance for the work of groups like pd at the moment, laying down a challenge for thinking and acting in and against the contemporary conjuncture. in this regard, one of the instructive lessons to come from the paper concerns how seemingly technical alterations to administrative processes can play a more significant role than even the decision-makers who sign them off intend. indeed, the empirical evidence in the paper suggests that members of the scottish parliament (msp) did not realise they were agreeing to substantially limit the role and remit of plan inquiries/examinations. the loss of this forum for scrutinising development plans has reduced a potential source of friction, enabling the allocation of large areas of land for new residential settlements in aberdeenshire. the dominant logic says this will smooth the path towards the market-led delivery of projected housing need. but at what cost? many scholars, walton included, point towards what is variously displaced, repressed, undermined, or otherwise lost in the service of a post-political settlement. one of the other tenets of the postpolitical is the threat that what has been repressed may return, sometimes with a vengeance. the emergence of various more and less authoritarian populisms in recent years is, of course, the paradigmatic example of this. trumpism, brexit or the five star movement in italy all seem to be marked by the return, in disfigured form, of the repressed resentments of those shut out from the benefits of neoliberal capitalism. the politics of planning takes place in a less dramatic register but it is worth considering how planning’s post-political settlement might come under pressure from the fennia 196(1) (2018) 101andy inch return of its own repressed energies. in doing so we might even come to see possibilities for reimagining planning and resources for making alternatives possible. the current planning reform process in scotland, for example, has begun to open up questions about some core aspects of the dominant logic. prominent here has been a growing questioning of whether getting planning out of the way is actually a good way of “delivering” housing. communities, like those the article focuses on in aberdeenshire, are asking searching questions about the quality of new development, its affordability and the failure to resource infrastructure adequately. others meanwhile are asking whether the large speculative house-building firms that dominate the market are equipped to produce the quantity of new homes that projections suggest are needed; particularly in so far as their business models are premised on profiting from land rather than actually building on it. the possibility of funding more proactive public planning by better capturing increases in land values is therefore back on the agenda and suggests a degree of openness to public intervention ‘making the weather’ and seeking to actively shape markets (e.g. lord & o’brien 2017). the voices of affected communities have also begun to be heard and, as walton suggests, they have made very clear their sense of frustration and mistrust at a system that does not (or cannot) listen or take their concerns seriously. tokenistic forms of public engagement have long been used to depoliticize planning processes and have been identified as a central facet of post-political planning. if the answer to nearly any question about development is known before it is even asked, the scope for meaningful engagement is inevitably limited. the longer-term, cumulative impacts of such tokenism on the legitimacy of planning and development may, however, be significant. much of this debate is currently crystalizing around the issue of appeal rights2. at present, applicants for development permits have the right to appeal against refusals of consent but there is no parallel right for communities to appeal against approvals, however controversial or questionable. this historical anomaly provides a clear focus for discontent about the unequal balance of power within the planning system in scotland. pd have therefore been campaigning for the introduction of an “equal right of appeal” that would involve restricting the existing rights of applicants and extending them to affected communities. whilst not an issue that opens up the kind of fundamental fault-lines in society that might excite theorists of radical democracy, the issue is nonetheless a polarizing one. the scottish government, backed by a cosy corporatist alliance of professional and developer interests, have made their position very clear; seeking to close down debate, largely on the basis that such changes would work against the dominant logic of streamlining planning. there are msps from across the political spectrum, however, who are more sympathetic, often because they regularly hear from disgruntled constituents about imbalances of power in the planning system. as a result, pd are hopeful that the issue will not be dismissed this time, at least not without a bit of a stooshie3. hence my train journey. through his focus on development plan inquiries/examinations, walton’s paper points to another significant aspect of the planning process in scotland that has been quietly depoliticized. unlike appeal rights, it is not an issue that is being much discussed at the moment. as such, it is a useful illustration of the multitude of ways in which the dominant logic of neoliberal planning has worked its way deep into the fabric of law and policy. this makes influencing planning reform in and against the dominant logic all the more daunting whilst also highlighting that it does remain worth bothering with. any such work needs to operate simultaneously on at least two levels; engaging the battle of ideas over the proper definition and purposes of planning at a broad level whilst remaining attentive to the multiple fronts and more forensic levels of detail where the devil often lurks. i’m grateful for the reminder of how far there still is to travel. notes 1 see http://www.planningdemocracy.org.uk/ or inch (2015) where i discuss some of this work in a more academic frame. 2 an issue that was also considered but ultimately rejected in the run up to the 2006 act. 3 a scots word meaning a row or argument. http://www.planningdemocracy.org.uk/ 102 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections acknowledgements this response was supported by a grant from fct in portugal (grant number sfrh/bpd/110582/2015). references gunder, m. (2016) planning's “failure” to ensure efficient market delivery: a lacanian deconstruction of this neoliberal scapegoating fantasy. european planning studies 24(1) 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2015.1067291 inch, a. (2015) ordinary citizens and the political cultures of planning: in search of the subject of a new democratic ethos. planning theory 14(4) 404–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095214536172 lord, a. & o’brien, p. (2017) what price planning? reimagining planning as “market maker”. planning theory & practice 18(2) 217–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2017.1286369 metzger, j. (2018) ‘postpolitics and planning’. in gunder, m., madanipour, a. & watson, v. (eds.) the routledge handbook of planning theory, 180–193. routledge, abingdon. walton, w. (2018) deregulated free -for-all planning , new set tlement s and the spec tre of abandoned building sites in scotland ’s crisis-hit oil economy. fennia 196 (1) 58 –76. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2015.1067291 https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095214536172 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2017.1286369 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 governing the future: perspectives from literary studies – commentary to jones urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80379 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80379 reflections governing the future: perspectives from literary studies – commentary to jones lieven ameel ameel, l. (2019) governing the future: perspectives from literary studies – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 145–148. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.80379 taking its cue from rhys jones’s article “governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act”, this commentary reflects on some of the challenges attached to attempts to govern the future. it proposes perspectives from literature and literary studies to enrich how we imagine the future. this commentary maps out how literary fiction and other forms of future storytelling associated with qualia – the “how it feels” of future possible worlds – may provide an important complementary to other, more distancing, modes of envisioning the future. keywords: narrative, fiction, embodied, embedded, governance lieven ameel, turku institute for advanced studies, comparative literature, kaivokatu 12, 20014, university of turku, finland. e-mail: lieven.ameel@utu.fi rhys jones’s (2019) article in this issue of fennia starts out from the urgent need to consider attempts to govern the future, in particular from a perspective of geography. examining a unique case – the wellbeing of future generations act in wales – it argues that governance of the future will have to be informed by considerations of justice and wellbeing, and that a geographical approach can be beneficial to promote social justice in any attempt at governing the future. in this commentary, i take jones’s article as a starting point to emphasize a view of the future as a site invested with embedded and embodied presence, and to argue that literary fiction and other forms of future storytelling that are associated with qualia – the “how it feels” of future possible worlds – may provide an important complementary to other, more distancing, modes of envisioning the future. jones’s (2019) article feeds into a broader shift towards future matters that has arguably come to define our current time. if in the final decade of the last century, there was briefly a sense, at least in the western world, that history had come to an end (with a nod to francis fukuyama), a host of factors (including globalization, disruptive innovation, the spectre of mass extinction, lethal global warming and radical climate change) have since conspired to impose a perspective of out-of-control time racing forward with increasing speed toward multiple uncertain futures. such a perspective has also set a moral imperative on citizens as well as on policy makers to make themselves acquainted with the future, and to let their tentative knowledge of the future inform their present action. but what kind of form should such engagement take, besides worrying? rhys jones’s article lays out some ways forward. attempts to govern the future raise important questions. a first question is what is meant with concepts such as “justice” and “wellbeing” in the context of governing the future. the importance of © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80379 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80379 146 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections an explicit assessment of what is meant with such concepts as “good”, “inclusive”, “democratic”, and “just” is also (and perhaps especially) important in the context of new governance practices that may draw on potentially skewed consultation of particular interests groups. one person’s idea of justice may well be another’s idea of injustice – and a particular society’s “spatial justice” will always be dependent on political decisions, values, and ideological positions. the question of (minority) language, which comes up from time to time in reference to the well-being of future generations act, is one such issue that is never a given, but always dependent on particular positions. in public space in the context of multiple languages with an official status, one person’s freedom to speak their minority mother tongue will be dependent on majority language speakers’ ability and willingness to understand and/or speak a second language, and if policy acts to protect a minority language, one person’s linguistic freedom may become another person’s linguistic obligation. the example of language is not trite: legislation for multiple language use is bound up with complex, culturally and historically specific contextualizations that cannot be easily transposed to other contexts in space or time (e.g. robertson 2016, 72 ff.). at the same time, language use is inexorably tied to the body of the speaker, who can never fully dissociate themselves from an acquired mother tongue. rhys jones (2019) takes into account such situatedness by a focus on significant geographies and on different scales of governance, but other perspectives may be added. thinking of governance of the future thus also means considering the situatedness of particular positions across space and time. we only have to consider our current (very tentative and constantly shifting) consensus of what is just and unjust, sustainable or unsustainable, and compare this to ideas of one or two generations back in time, to consider the difficulties in trying to draw the outlines of future generations’ just governance from today’s perspectives. one era’s bright future may be another’s nightmare. one example from historical utopian literature that envisioned possible arrangements of future governance may well illustrate the fleetingness of particular future visions. bellamy’s utopian novel looking backward: 2000–1887 (1888) sets forth a future boston governed in a just manner; the novel aimed in particular to envision means to alleviate the plight of the working poor in the late nineteenth-century united states. but in his reading of the novel, a reading informed by totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century, literary critic frye claims that “most of us today would tend to read it [looking backward] as a sinister blueprint of tyranny, with its industrial ‘army’, its stentorian propaganda delivered over the ‘telephone’ to the homes of its citizens, and the like” (frye 1965, 29). many readers will still agree with frye today. all this should not, of course, be taken as an impediment to engage with the future, on the contrary, it further emphasizes the need to comprehensively consider futures in all their complexities, in a way that incorporates multiple scales and perspectives as well as various types of forecasting, future visions, and modes of conjecture. perspectives from literary studies the reference to utopian literature brings me to a second part of my commentary: what can fictional texts contribute to our thinking of the future? the example of bellamy’s looking backward, a literary novel that in its time was influential within urban planning and policy, provides one obvious reference, illustrating how utopian literature, nineteenth-century scientific romance, or science fiction can posit alternative societies. but literary fiction, in its various forms, has always been concerned with counterfactuality – with imagining the not-yet; with juxtaposing different possible worlds and with considering possible futures, from small-scale deliberations about whom to marry (the famous dilemma of rastignac, in balzac’s le père goriot [1835]), to momentous changes in world history (such as in dick’s the man in the high castle [1962]). westphal (2007, 59, 63), in geocriticism, considers literature as “experimental field of alternative realities,” and a “laboratory of the possible”. more generally, literature does not only describe possibilities, it is arguably also about extending an awareness of the possible into the world of the reader, providing readers with an expanded sense of possibility (meretoja 2017). literary studies has in turn long developed methods and frameworks to speak of possible worlds, also in relation to future possibilities (see ameel & neuvonen 2016). fennia 197(1) (2019) 147lieven ameel peopling the future two important assertions can be made about the future. first, everything we can say about the future is non-factual (which does not exactly mean the same as fictional), or, in the words of de jouvenel (1964, 15), a founding figure in futures studies: “the future is the domain of uncertainty”. second, if there is a future to govern, this future will be inhabited by real human beings in real, embodied and embedded contexts. both assertions gesture towards a role for fictional narratives in our thinking of the future, for which only narratives with no truth value are at our disposal, and for which an insight into contextualized experiences is an important complementary to distancing and quantitative modes of futuring. in focusing on situated, embedded and embodied experiences of the future, i am indebted to future matters (2007) by adam and groves, in which the authors warn against an “emptying of the future” (ibid., 2), in which the future is “emptied of content and extracted from historical context” (ibid., 13). they emphasize the importance of approaching the future not in terms of “present futures” – “futures that are imagined, planned, projected, and produced in and for the present” (ibid., 28), but rather by way of “future presents”, a future that is already partly locked in by our current actions, and peopled with embedded and embodied presents we have the duty to imagine. adam and groves (2007) foreground the importance of traditional forms of divination and imaginative methods from futures studies that would allow a focus on “future presents”. literary fiction can be seen as one important complementary resource for imagining future presents. it has long been emphasized to be crucially about providing readers with qualia – about “how it feels like” to be in a particular, embodied and embedded situation. when so many of the dominant perspectives with which futures are currently imagined take a distancing view, with an emphasis on numbers and quantitative data, on abstract diagrams and on panoramic views of future flood plans or future ice sheet extension, literary resources may allow access to the exact opposite: a sense of what it feels like to be within a situated future present, embedded within particular context and tied to embodied experiences. insightful qualia in future narratives are bound up, for example, with experiencing recognisable settings changed almost beyond recognition, such as the experience of walking by the iconic stockmann department store in helsinki, turned into a militarized zone during a near future, climatewrecked christmas shopping period in tuomainen’s parantaja (2010). and narrative experientiality is tied also to the privileged access to individual thoughts and feelings made possible by literary fiction: the moral dilemmas faced by individual characters when disaster strikes, as in rich’s odds against tomorrow (2013); or the sense of loss and mourning in some of the more recent environmentally oriented future fiction. but even individual words in a literary storyworld can give intriguing insights into possible future presents. several of the more gripping future narratives of the past decades have drawn the reader’s attention to how far removed possible futures will be, in material properties and cultural conceptualizations, by deliberately inventing a debilitated or convoluted language of the future. mccarthy’s the road (2006) and its use of an ever sparser language to describe irretrievable losses in the natural and cultural world has become one standard reference. the momentous changes that have lead to the future world of the final section of mitchell’s cloud atlas (2004) are left largely untold, but the strange, distorted english used by the narrator and characters vividly suggest the radical transformations that have lead up to the narrated point in time. similarly, in rimbereid’s solaris korrigert (2004), the strangeness of a future stavanger is made tangible by the defamiliarizing language in which this epic poem is written, mixing various languages and dialects spoken today around the north sea, suggesting the far-reaching cultural interaction that must have been involved in the historical developments leading up to ad 2480. sometimes, a few mere words are enough to sketch such developments: in smith’s doggerland (2019), which describes two men working a wind farm in a future when much of the lands along the north sea are drowned, little direct reference is made to drowned cities or climate migrants. but the characters sparsely use dutch swear words, interspersed in their english, as if to suggest that, while the netherlands may no longer exist, some substratum of the dutch language will be preserved in the language of the future north sea. these examples provide but some of the ways in which literature fiction can make us look at possible futures with a new awareness of the situated future lives that will inhabit them. 148 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections i would like to conclude with one caveat about the use of literary studies and literary fiction within the broader debate on governance of the future. as always, concepts, sources and methods that travel from one discipline to another come with certain baggage. perhaps what defines literary studies most is that it tends not to attribute ready-made meaning, but aims to keep open different possibilities of meaning; to unpack complexities without resolving them; to let possible worlds exist simultaneously. similarly, literature fiction evades easy fixation of meaning. even when it involves some measure of closure at the end of the narration, its meanings always develop as part of the progression that takes places between the opening sentence and the final words, in an oscillation between various counterfactualities. and its narrative form – its language, rhetoric commonplaces, and plot structures, are always informed by shifting genre and period conventions. this makes it at first sight a daunting toolbox for the disciplines that are mostly associated with governing the future: planning and policy, which are aimed at fixing practices and meaning, rather than keeping things indeterminate. but it is perhaps also literary fiction’s ambiguity and indeterminacy that make it – when applied in a way that also takes into account its specificities – an insightful resource for imagining the future, which is a field that is multiple and protean, indeterminate and ambiguous, but at the same time populated already with situated future presents that are in part locked in by our own present actions. references adam, b. & groves, c. (2007) future matters. action, knowledge, ethics. brill, leiden. https://doi. org/10.1163/ej.9789004161771.i-218 ameel, l. & neuvonen, a. (2016) utopian jälkeen: vaihtoehtoisia tulevaisuusvisioita kirjallisuudessa ja kaupunkistrategioissa. terra 128(4) 215–220. bellamy, e. (1889/1941) looking backward, 2000–1887. houghton mifflin company, boston. balzac, h. (1835/1995) le père goriot. librairie générale française, paris. dick, p. k. (1961/2011) the man in the high castle. mariner books, boston. frye, n. (1965) varieties of literary utopias. daedalus 94(2) 323–347. jones, r. (2019) governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act. fennia 197(1) 8–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 de jouvenel, b. (1964) l’art de la conjecture. éditions du rocher, monaco. mccarthy, c. (2006) the road. alfred a. knopf, new york. meretoja, h. (2017) the ethics of storytelling: narrative hermeneutics, history, and the possible. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649364.003.0002 mitchell, d. (2004) cloud atlas. random house, new york. rich, n. (2013) odds against tomorrow. farrar, straus and giroux, new york. rimbereid, o. (2004) solaris korrigert: dikt. gyldendal, oslo. robertson, c. d. (2016) multilingual law: a framework for analysis and understanding. routledge, abingdon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315596280 smith, b. (2019) doggerland. 4th estate, london. tuomainen, a. (2010/2011) parantaja. like, helsinki. westphal, b. (2007) geocriticism: real and fictional spaces. palgrave, new york. https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230119161 https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004161771.i-218 https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004161771.i-218 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649364.003.0002 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315596280 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119161 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119161 governing a just future: what and how to govern? – commentary to jones. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80208 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80208 reflections governing a just future: what and how to govern? – commentary to jones pia bäcklund bäcklund, p. (2019) governing a just future: what and how to govern? – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 137–140. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.80208 in dealing with the topic of “governing the future”, it is fundamental to understand how different practices define justice in content as well as in processual sense. premises of justification can be seen as essential indicators of the future direction of societal decision-making in governance networks, as well as in determining whose realities play a part when defining future imaginaries. we are dealing with a complex entity and we need to ask whether a future as such can be distinguished from how it is produced in different governing practices? i would also like to emphasize that the concept of ‘governance’ needs to be taken under careful scrutiny. governance has not replaced government, as most often both of these management logics are present simultaneously. this is creating tensions within the public sector. my comments to the issues presented in rhys jones’ article (in this issue) are grounded in planning theory and my ongoing research concerning justification of new spatial planning practices in the nordic countries. keywords: spatial planning, governance, justness, politics of knowing, depoliticization pia bäcklund, department of geoscience and geography, yliopistonkatu 3, 00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: pia.backlund@helsinki.fi i thank rhys jones (2019) for an inspiring text. my comments to the issues presented in the article are grounded generally in planning theory and specifically in my research project justification for agreementbased approaches in nordic spatial planning: towards situational direct democracy? (justde). justde research connects with the themes of regional development and equality. the project investigates, in a nordic comparative framework, how new agreement-based practices of city-regional strategic spatial planning include and exclude actors and groups, how administrative planning processes define and demarcate what is considered necessary knowledge, and how these practices enable situated political agoras. through these issues, our aim is to answer the question concerning the ways in which different actors justify the logics of these strategic, territory-spanning planning practices. these justification premises can be seen as essential indicators of the direction societal decision-making in governance networks is taking in the future, and whose realities may play a part in the knowledge practices of planning. in dealing with the topic of “governing the future”, how different practices define justice in content as well as in processual sense is a fundamental issue. for example, agreement-based approaches in spatial planning, while defining actors based on relations, issues and situations, and swiftly crossing administrative territories, utilize seemingly technocratic inclusion and exclusion that, in reality, is © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80208 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80208 138 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections deeply political. nevertheless, in the absence of clear legitimacy of such approaches, the actors are forced to justify themselves through indirect attachment to territorially defined representative democracy and institutional administrative structures. i see that this incoherence of action defines the justification of societal decision making in a manner that does not fulfill the preconditions of either representative or direct democracy (see also bäcklund et al. 2018). this is why it is important to ask what kind of operational governing modes become acceptable in the public sector, and why. i see that when it comes to governing the future and the spatial justice it produces, we are dealing with a complex entity, where the different parts also interact. can a future be distinguished as such from how it is produced in different management practices? the future cannot be known, but the future is thought to be based on different things and phenomena that are believed or desired to happen in the future. for example, in planning research the future is seen to be depicted through spatial imaginaries (davoudi 2018). spatial imagining always involves the naturalization of certain things, that is, denial of their political nature. in governing the future, there needs to be a starting point, an image, idea or issue, to be anticipated. the ways of governing the future can equally produce the future they are trying to manage, not just react to an already existing one. urbanization and city-regionalization in general are typical of public administration rhetoric in which things just “happen”, and administrative practices must be able to react to them in the future. the question about whose imaginaries of the future are dominant, unwanted or undesirable deals profoundly with spatial and social justice. concerning the spatial dimension of governing the future, one of the starting points is that planning is inevitably focused on a limited and defined spatial dimension. jones’ (2019) article pointed out the way in which administrative practices – planning at this point can be thought more broadly as a practice of steering public action – are based on established spatial scales (national, regional, local) and at the same time define what phenomena are central to these scales. an issue that is important at national level is not necessarily noteworthy locally – and vice versa. the latter was presented through a concrete example by jones: an issue of language, the meaning of which varies locally in individuals’ experiential realities. as we are discussing future governance practices, i would also like to emphasize that the concept of ‘governance’ in itself does not eliminate the fact that there are still ‘governments’ that operate according to their own logic in governance networks (see, for example, mäntysalo & bäcklund 2017; bäcklund et al. 2018). governance has not replaced government, as both logics are present simultaneously. the tension between governance networks and bureaucratic government in spatial planning can be seen, for example, in the tensioned positioning of public-public partnerships within the state apparatus. according to our research, for instance state-backed agreement-based cityregional planning practices in finland are conflicting with statutory planning processes and creating gray areas regarding conformance to legislation. hence, public administration should be accurately conceptualized when dealing with its role in governing or even directing futures: are we talking about one or many actors and rationalities? there were also good examples of internal government ambivalence in jones’ (2019) article. particularly interesting were the personal experiences and perceptions of officials concerning the extent to which they have the opportunity to learn to see and do otherwise in their work. i consider such an approach, namely the application of the concept of experiential knowledge to the analytical treatment of public administration, to be of great importance (cf. bäcklund et al. 2014). the conception of an individual as experiencing her/his environment, as well as of the knowledge concepts that guide individuals and groups in collective decision-making, is strongly linked to the foundation of hermeneutical interpretation and understanding. thus, i see that action in public administration is a construct of various practices and their interpretations. these interpretations also define the logics of justification of these practices. this field of study is not well portrayed in human geography, yet the thematic is highly relevant, since it combines the issues of how individuals make sense of their world and how societal questions are defined and managed inside public sector activities based on those individual, but intersubjective, interpretations. i wish to call for more empirical research into different societal contexts and different actors’ viewpoints concerning this ambiguity inside public administration. international knowledge transfer has been significant in the appearance of these new practices, yet failures to carefully adapt the new fennia 197(1) (2019) 139pia bäcklund practices into new contexts may lead to unintended consequences (healey 2007; cf. stead 2012). this is a particularly important point of departure in the nordic countries, having a self-image of peripherality in european and global contexts. this has prompted accelerated attempts – especially for the metropolitan city-regions – to ‘catch up’ in the international competition, often with hastily adopted concepts and practices that do not ‘ground’ into local realities (cf. smas & schmitt 2015). i see that contemporary spatial planning discussions concretize well the challenges of governing the future from the point of view of justice. following deweyan pragmatist thinking that has later been addressed in planning theory by for example john friedmann, i hold that planning deals with the linkage between knowing and (organized) action. planning is a mode of governing that always includes/ excludes certain actors and logics of knowledge/knowing – hence also different issues. our interest in justde lies in those processes that define and reproduce the subject matter of planning, and the justifications of the processes. from this starting point, we are studying the new forms of governance and democratic practices as important components of spatial development within the situated public sector constructs that produce spatial and territorial (in)equalities. with the appearance of ‘strategically’ redistributive planning practices that target localities unevenly and selectively, the democratic underpinnings of planning and public governance are seen to be under threat of erosion in an unprecedented manner (bäcklund & kanninen 2015; mäntysalo et al. 2015; bäcklund et al. 2018). when discussing the content and modes of governing for the future, i like to use the concept “politics of knowing” (bäcklund 2007) that refers to conceptualizing knowing as an active deed, which means actively making choices about what things are worth knowing – and what the definitions of legitimate knowledge are (bäcklund et al. 2014). in this respect, the main questions deal with what kind of interpretations of knowledge and knowledge management practices are utilized to justify planning and plans. the tension between the so-called objective knowledge, perceived as factual, and interpretive knowledge impedes the formation of a common understanding concerning what kind of information, in general, is necessary regarding the issue in question (e.g. davoudi 2012). for example, should the city-regional planning issues be focused on and “technicalised” into economic growth and competitiveness, if the consequence is remarkable narrowing of what is considered appropriate knowledge (see also swyngedouw 2009; purcell 2013). like many future-oriented activities of envisioning and planning, the agreement-based processes “invite” actors to “ready-made tables,” thus leaving the agenda-setting power hidden. the outcomes may be presented as flowing naturally from the premises, not requiring political contemplation. allmendinger and haughton (2012) point out that this does not mean conflict has been cast away. it is likely to be just more intricately “choreographed”: smokescreened, sidetracked, located elsewhere or marginalized (cf. beveridge 2012; kanninen 2018). this means depoliticizing both the form and content of the process. such action points at a democratic ideal of deliberate, situational selectivity. from its own viewpoint, this sort of democracy is equally catering for the good of the involved “us” as is representative democracy for the good of all “citizens” (bäcklund et al. 2018; cf. ranciere 1995). what is just and democratic in the future? the relevant starting point for the analysis of justice in the future could incorporate the democracy-theoretical and politico-philosophical views of mouffe (2000), concerning agonistic confrontation as an integral part of societal action. even if mouffe’s theoretical standpoint has been criticized (e.g. roskamm 2015), also communicative planning proponents are accepting the agonistic approach as the best fit for planning situations (e.g. innes & booher 2015). agonistic undertaking of differences also needs a public sphere to enable politicization of issues, which is well portrayed by jones’ (2019) article. thus, planning conflicts can be seen desirable – not problematic – for the development of democracy (hillier 2003; bäcklund & mäntysalo 2010; kanninen et al. 2013) and justness (fainstein 2018), insofar as they, in the spirit of agonism, create spaces that advance democracy, diversity and equity. references allmendinger, p. & haughton, g. (2012) postpolitical spatial planning in england: a crisis of consensus? transactions of the institute of british geographers 37(1) 89–103. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x 140 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections beveridge, r. (2012) consultants, depoliticization and arena-shifting in the policy process: privatizing water in berlin. policy sciences 45(1) 47–68. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-011-9144-4 bäcklund, p. (2007) tietämisen politiikka. kokemuksellinen tieto kunnan hallinnassa [politics of knowing. experiential knowledge in city governance]. doctoral dissertation. department of geography, faculty of science, university of helsinki. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-473-991-7 bäcklund, p. & kanninen, v. (2015) valtaistetut asukkaat: neighbourhood planning ja asuinalueperustaisen osallistumisen rajaamisen taktiikat [empowered citizens: neighbourhood planning and the tactics of demarcating residence-based participation]. alue & ympäristö [finnish regional and environmental studies] 44(1) 4–16. bäcklund, p. & mäntysalo, r. (2010) agonism and institutional ambiguity: ideas on democracy and the role of participation in the development of planning theory and practice – the case of finland. planning theory 9(4) 333–350. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210373684 bäcklund, p., kallio, k. & häkli, j. (2014) residents, customers or citizens? tracing the idea of youthful participation in the context of administrative reforms in finnish public administration. planning theory & practice 15(3) 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2014.929726 bäcklund, p., häikiö, l., leino, h. & kanninen, v. (2018) bypassing publicity for getting things done: between informal and formal planning practices in finland. planning practice & research 33(3) 309–325. davoudi, s. (2012) the legacy of positivism and the emergence of interpretive tradition in spatial planning. regional studies 46(4) 429–441. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2011.618120 davoudi, s. (2018) kaupunkiseudun imaginaari [the city-regional imaginary]. the finnish journal of urban studies 56(3). fainstein, s. (2018) urban planning and social justice. in gunder, m., madanipour, a. & watson, v. (eds.) the routledge handbook of planning theory, 130–142. routledge, london. healey, p. (2007) urban complexity and spatial strategies: towards a relational planning for our times. routledge, london. hillier, j. (2003) agonizing over consensus: why habermasian ideals cannot be r̀eal’. planning theory 2(1) 37–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095203002001005 innes, j. & booher, d. (2015) a turning point for planning theory? overcoming dividing discourses. planning theory 14(2) 195–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095213519356 jones, r. (2019) governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act. fennia 197(1) 8–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 kanninen, v. (2018) postpolitics of (scottish) planning: gatekeepers, gatechecks and gatecrashers? – commentary to walton. fennia 196(1) 131–134. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 kanninen, v., bäcklund, p. & mäntysalo, r. (2013) trading zone and the complexity on planning. in balducci, a. & mäntysalo, r. (eds.) urban planning as a trading zone, 159–178. springer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5854-4_10 mouffe, c. (2000) the democratic paradox. verso, london. mäntysalo, r. & bäcklund, p. (2017) flexibly networked, yet institutionally grounded: the governance of planning. in gunder, m., manadipour, a. & watson, v. (eds.) the routledge handbook of planning theory, 237–249. routledge, new york and london. mäntysalo, r., kangasoja, j. k. & kanninen, v. (2015) the paradox of strategic planning: a theoretical outline with a view on finland. planning theory & practice 16(2) 169–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14649357.2015.1016548 purcell, j. (2013) the right to the city: the struggle for democracy in the urban public realm. policy & politics 43(3) 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557312x655639 ranciere, j. (1995) on the shores of politics. verso, london. roskamm, n. (2015) on the other side of “agonism”: “the enemy,” the “outside,” and the role of antagonism. planning theory 14(4) 384–403. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095214533959 smas, l. & schmitt, p. (2015) brave new ’megaregional worlds’? reflections from a north european perspective. in harrison, j. & hoyler, m. (eds.) megaregions: globalization s new urban form?, 146– 174. edgar elgar, cheltenham. stead, d. (2012). best practices and policy transfer in spatial planning. planning practice & research 27(1) 103–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2011.644084 swyngedouw, e. (2009) the antinomies of the postpolitical city: in search of a democratic politics of environmental production. international journal of urban and regional research 33(3) 601–620. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00859.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-011-9144-4 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-473-991-7 https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210373684 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2014.929726 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2011.618120 https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095203002001005 https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095213519356 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5854-4_10 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2015.1016548 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2015.1016548 https://doi.org/10.1332/030557312x655639 https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095214533959 https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2011.644084 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00859.x the anti-mining movement in brazil in the 2010s urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa115235 doi: 10.11143/fennia.115235 reflections: lectio praecursoria the anti-mining movement in brazil in the 2010s mariana galvão lyra galvão lyra, m. (2021) the anti-mining movement in brazil in the 2010s. fennia 199(2) 294–298. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115235 in this lectio praecursoria, which i presented as part of my doctoral defense at the university of eastern finland on 5 november 2021, i delve deep into the brazilian anti-mining movement to understand the context in which activism take place, their main strategies and course of actions, and their ability to influence the overall mining debate in brazil in the 2010s. it sheds light on the key challenges faced by groups fighting for more environmental and social justice in mining conflictual situations. more specific, the research covers the 2013–2017 time frame, when discussions on the mining framework and a severe tailings dam failure happened. these two cases are analyzed and their effects on anti-mining activism are explored through a twofold focus on social movements and environmental justice studies. the study contributes to scientific discussions on mining and society by seeking conceptual bridges across political-ecologically oriented studies on social movements against mineral extraction. it also expands, significantly, analyses of social movements in brazil by contributing to the international comparative literature on the social and environmental impacts of mining, brazilian and latin american studies, studies on mining history, sociology of mining, and mining policy. keywords: environmental justice, social movements, extractivism, latin america, environmental conflicts mariana galvão lyra (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1928-013x), school of business and management, yliopistokatu 34, 53850 lappeenranta, lappeenranta university of technology, finland. e-mail: mariana.lyra@lut.fi mr. custos, madam opponent, ladies and gentlemen: i am not an activist. and you also don’t necessarily need to be one to be interested in what i am about to say. today is the 5th of november of 2021. it is a bit overwhelming to think that it was on the 5th of november of 2015, exactly six years ago, when a mining disaster happened in brazil. the fundão tailings dam failed. fundão was in operation since 2008 and was part of an iron ore pellets production in minas gerais state. complexes of iron ore extraction in brazil usually encompass an open pit mine with a tailings dam as a by-product reservoir. in other words, the mineral wastes from such extractions are disposed and stored in areas as big as thousands of olympic swimming pools. © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115235 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1928-013x mailto:mariana.lyra@lut.fi fennia 199(2) (2021) 295mariana galvão lyra as a correlated illustration, in a diamond for a ring, for every carat of a diamond almost 3 tons of mineral waste is generated. in tailings dam, waste is stored together with water and other substances. in the fundão dam, it was calculated that between 30 to 55 million cubic meters of the slurry, or simply put, “mud”, went down, reaching the doce river and, 17 days later, the atlantic ocean. that is the equivalent of approximately 25,000 olympic swimming pools. this event, changed the course of the mining industry in brazil, changed the course of my doctoral studies and changed the life of many people. nineteen people died, thousands were terrified by having experienced a “mud tsunami” invading their villages, their houses, their lives. forever changing their perception about the future, about mining, changing, in many ways, their reality. the indemnification process for the victims is ongoing still, facing a series of disagreements between the authorities and companies involved. events such this are very unfortunate. besides all entailed environmental, social and economic consequences, it exacerbates the controversies inherent to mining activities. authors such as bebbington (2015) and svampa (2019) have been studying mining controversies within the latin american context. the main controversies surrounding mineral extraction are: the uneven distributions of risks and benefits at the local level; local land use versus the use of land for the expansion of multinational projects; and the still remaining question on whether it is possible to consider mining exploration a sustainable and equitable activity. these controversies are even more salient in peak periods of extraction, such as the last mineral boom in the early 2000s. the mining industry’s global production networks usually follow boom-bust cycles, with rapid increases in demand and production followed by periods of recessions. mineral extraction stages several conflicts around the globe. as pointed out in a study by franks and colleagues (2014), conflicts are extremely costly to mining companies. the research identified conflict as a further means through which environmental and social risks are translated into business costs and decision making. mining companies are constantly facing the risk of a production stoppage due to a blockade, a scratch on their reputation due to a protest or campaign, witnessing watchdog organizations and non-governmental organizations (ngos) gaining legitimacy and threatening corporate decisions and actions. martinez-alier and his team developed an environmental justice atlas project to document and catalog social conflict around environmental issues. more than 3,000 conflicts around the globe were mapped. temper and colleagues (2018) have used data from the atlas and concluded that the cumulative number of new mining conflicts in the world have repeatedly increased from 2000 to 2016. my literature review on mining conflicts revealed that they are happening regardless of the national level of development or good governance status: australia, papua new guinea, finland, sweden, namibia, canada, south africa, and latin american countries. activism is common where these types of conflicts arise. consequently, my research demonstrates how context not only is relevant but also plays a large part in explaining anti-mining activism. having a better understanding about the context in which activism establishes and develop allows to a deeper appreciation on why activism happen, who takes part in it, what kind of strategies and actions take place. also, it allows interpretations on how activism is influencing the mining sector. resistance and activism against mining cannot be merely translated into or interpreted as the non-acceptance of the mining industry existence. nor can they be interpreted as an obliviousness towards the relevance minerals and metals have in our current society. as the american historian blanc (2019) explains, rural movements in brazil not necessarily object to development projects, but they are against corporation policies that take place when planning and executing such projects. in my thesis, ‘anti-mining’ is used to qualify groups of activists resisting and opposing mining debates, activities, and decisions. activism is the most important activity of people who join social movements. social movements are “networks of interactions between individuals, and organizations, engaged in political or cultural conflicts, and based on shared collective identities”, according to diani’s (1992, 1) definition. thus, shared identities and beliefs are in the core of what a social movement is. these are socially constructed and rely inside the social fabrics of societies. thus, for the purpose of this research, antimining activism is considered an inherent part of the brazilian societal context. in particular, antimining activism is considered part of the social movements and conflicts context. this line of thinking 296 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: lectio praecursoria follows touraine’s (1971) suggestion that the most relevant conflicts are in the cultural realm and in the historical context of a given society. the title of my work is “against the plunder of our ores” (lyra 2021). it is between quotation marks because it is part of the anti-mining movement chant. they would say: towards a sovereign and honorable country! against the plunder of our ores! protests have always been closely connected with sound. it is an action concerned with the amplification of a message – wanting to make sure it is heard. protesters’ voices have found power in unison. call and response chants are somewhat common among activists to create a social synchrony and feelings of social belonging. activists use them in their organizing meetings and, also in action, during protests, documents, or blog posts. access to a research setting is never a given. it was difficult to find the gatekeepers and gain access to the activists. my objective was to understand their world in their own terms. my methodological choices have to do with recognizing activists as knowledge-producing subjects, following chesters (2012) study, without however accepting their narrative as the ultimate truth. the goal of learning how a movement actually establishes and grows instead of testing a detailed hypothesis a priori calls for an exploratory study. current theories on mining and society and antimining activism are underdeveloped. in fact, bebbington (2015) argued that both scholarly and activist worlds are not well-tooled to work on extractivism. thus, my research is mainly qualitative. qualitative methods are used to explain complex phenomena. and i inductively focused on the research participants’ views to understand their perspectives and experiences rather than framing them in pre-determined categories or concepts. i have collected data from interviews, participant observation, books, reports, discussion forums, webpages, and pamphlets as source of information. i have used the historical sociological approach as method to re-collect past events in social movement’s history, case study methods to investigate the events associated with the mining code draft and the fundão dam disaster. i have also used literature review as a method. for the analysis, i have performed content analysis followed by cluster analysis to correlate the findings with the primary literature reviewed. i have introduced my results in terms of context, response and influence. first, to explain the context in which the anti-mining movement was established and developed. then, what strategies and actions took place as a response to events that happened between 2013–2017. and finally, to interpret the influence the movement had in the mining sector in the same period. by using historical sociology approach, i was able to evidence the proximity of actors, symbols and actions when three social movements were born in brazil: the landless workers’ movement, the antidam movement and the anti-mining movement. this was an effort to better understand the context in which the anti-mining movement was born, and to prove that resistance is not happening only when a mining project is about to start, but comes from long before, has historical roots, and those roots are deeply connected to rural and land struggle in brazil. my analysis showed that the front against mining in brazil has a variety of actors. they range from groups struggling with mining impacts and using disruptive ways to protest against it to groups seeking to enhance procedural justice as a way to alleviate environmental injustice. this latter group, that i called rights-based one, also worked bringing and translating information and knowledge to help the ones struggling with mining. not only that, but these two groups forging the coalition were putting efforts to balance their differences, seeking for consensus, negotiating agendas, and even making use of strategies such as deliberately not consulting some members before making decisions to avoid internal splits in the coalition. i trust that despite how much one understands about mining and its consequences, we can all agree that mining disasters should be prevented and avoided. in the fundão dam failure case, i decided to understand how different actors have responded in the first 60-days after the dam collapsed. that choice was made so that i could understand to what capacity companies and authorities have dealt with the disaster remediation. considering that little or no activism responses would have happened, have the capacity to deal with the aftermath been effective. fennia 199(2) (2021) 297mariana galvão lyra the analysis revealed how activists mobilized themselves and changed the political dynamics in the aftermath. due to activism, companies involved in the disaster had to change their strategies and course of actions. besides, activism had played an important role in raising the awareness about the risks and consequences inherent to mining activities in brazil. also, more activist skills and knowledge came out of this experience. finally, using literature review as a method together with north american colleagues from the environmental sociology field, we built theoretical links between natural resource extraction and intersecting injustices. it adds to the discussion the lack of inclusion of marginalized voices in the extractive decisions and debates, and intersections of privilege, and oppression for the ones impacted by mining, such as workers, rural farmers, and local community members. my results contribute with evidence to spillover discussions on social movements’ theory. by demonstrating the movement-movement influence across time and space in rural brazil, i contribute not only to meyer and whittier (1994) conceptualizations, but also, and perhaps more interesting, i push the social movement research agenda forward, as suggested by oliver, cadena-roa and strawn (2003), by expanding the theory view to regions such as latin america. i complement rosa’s (2007) work on movements mirroring the landless workers movement’s symbols and actions, by adding rural movements such as the anti-dam and the anti-mining movement which were not contemplated on his studies. my work contributes to movement outcome’s discussions on social movements’ theory. it corroborates with staggenborg’s (1995) categorization of social movements’ outcome, considering, too, the efficacy of mobilization as a successful result of social movements. my results provide novel theoretical contributions in the social scientific mining literature by linking environmental justice and natural resource extraction in the brazilian context, which remains very under-researched. finally, my work has societal impact. the activists’ responses to mining events can work as useful roadmaps for social movements in general and other stakeholders to learn how the anti-mining movement engages in disputes with powerful actors. by shedding light on the social and economic injustices associated with mining and perceived by the activists, my research allows new avenues for reflections on ways to make the mining industry more sustainable and just. curiously, the word for extracting natural resources from the earth is extractivism. the word extractivism has activism in it. meaning that extractivism and activism co-exist even there. thus, there is no extractivism without activism. how to make better outcomes of this interplay? that is the question. references bebbington, a. (2015) political ecology, policy networks and moments of government. in perreault, t. a., gavin, b. & mccarthy, j. (eds.) the routledge handbook of political ecology, 198–208. routledge, new york. blanc, j. (2019) before the flood: the itaipu dam and the visibility of rural brazil. duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478005322 chesters, g. (2012) social movements and the ethics of knowledge production. social movement studies 11(2) 145–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.664894 diani, m. (1992) the concept of social movement. the sociological review 40(1) 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1992.tb02943.x franks, d. m., davis, r., bebbington, a. j., ali, s. h., kemp, d. & scurrah, m. (2014) conflict translates environmental and social risk into business costs. proceedings of the national academy of sciences 111(21) 7576–7581. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1405135111 lyra, m. g. (2021) “against the plunder of our ores”: the anti-mining movement in brazil between 2013–2017. dissertations in social sciences and business studies no. 257. university of eastern finland, joensuu. https://erepo.uef.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/26346/urn_isbn_978-952-614335-4.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y meyer, d. s. & whittier, n. (1994) social movement spillover. social problems 41(2) 277–298. https://doi.org/10.2307/3096934 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478005322 https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.664894 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1992.tb02943.x https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1405135111 https://erepo.uef.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/26346/urn_isbn_978-952-61-4335-4.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://erepo.uef.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/26346/urn_isbn_978-952-61-4335-4.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://doi.org/10.2307/3096934 298 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: lectio praecursoria oliver, p. e., cadena-roa, j. & strawn, k. d. (2003) emerging trends in the study of protest and social movements. research in political sociology 12(1) 213–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0895-9935(03)12009-8 rosa, m. (2007) para além do mst: o impacto nos movimentos sociais brasileiros. antropolítica 2 23. staggenborg, s. (1995) can feminist organizations be effective? in ferree, m. m. & martin, p. y. (eds.) feminist organizations: harvest of the new women’s movement, 339–355. temple university press, philadelphia. svampa, m. (2019) las fronteras del neoextractivismo en américa latina: conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias. transcript verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839445266 temper, l., demaria, f., scheidel, a., del bene, d. & martinez-alier, j. (2018) the global environmental justice atlas (ejatlas): ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability. sustainability science 13(3) 573–584. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0563-4 touraine, a. (1971) the post-industrial society; tomorrow’s social history: classes, conflicts and culture in the programmed society, vol. 6813. random house, new york. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0895-9935(03)12009-8 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839445266 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0563-4 the state of palestinian youth – commentary to habashi urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80098 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80098 reflections the state of palestinian youth – commentary to habashi david j. marshall marshall, d. j. (2019) the state of palestinian youth – commentary to habashi. fennia 197(1) 151–154. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80098 this reflection is a response to habashi's article "palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era." it considers the unique scalar and temporal challenges of researching with palestinian children in the context of a territorially fractured palestine. keywords: palestine, youth, generations, religion, islam, creative methods david j. (sandy) marshall, department of history and geography, elon university, 100 campus drive, elon, nc 27244, usa. e-mail: dmarshall8elon.edu as i write this reflection, we are approaching the one-year anniversary of the great march of return. these demonstrations started in gaza on 30 march 2018 (land day) as a series of weekly friday demonstrations demanding the freedom of movement and the right of palestinian refugees to return to their lands. although organizers originally planned the protests to culminate on 15 may 2018, the 70th anniversary of the palestinian nakba, the weekly protests, which swelled to 30,000 participants at their height, have yet to cease. so far, israeli soldiers have shot over 6,000 unarmed protestors, killing close to 200 of them (human rights council 2019). israel faces charges of potential war crimes and appears poised for yet another pre-election escalation. meanwhile, hamas faces growing internal turmoil and tensions have spilled over into the west bank. these tensions come on the heels of unilateral us concessions to israel, including recognizing sovereignty over the forcefully annexed areas of jerusalem and the golan heights, in contravention of longstanding legal norms and international consensus. such moves have prompted proclamations that hopes for a peace agreement based on the “two state solution,” which have long been on life support, are now completely dead. even senior palestinian negotiators like saeb erekat are admitting that the only option left for palestinians is to struggle for one state based on equal rights for all (landau & khoury 2017). janette habashi’s research (this issue), as usual, gives us great insight into the views of young people in palestine, at a time when the peace process has died but a new path forward has yet to be born. in particular, this paper illustrates how the conceptions of palestinian national identity shift alongside shifts in the national struggle. the period covered in habashi’s (2019) paper, 2007–2011, represents a very turbulent time for internal palestinian politics following the victory of hamas in palestinian legislative elections in 2006. this situation during this period, which i have referred to as the “double occupation” of palestine (marshall 2011), has been dominated by the split between a hamas-governed gaza and a fatah-controlled palestinian authority (pa) in the west bank, with ramped up security coordination between the pa and israel. while reading about how palestinian children articulate their hopes for national unity and reconciliation within a context of political and territorial divisions, two issues stood out to me, issues that speak specifically to the palestinian case presented here, but which are also relevant to the study of children’s political geography more broadly. specifically, this paper prompts me to consider some conceptual and methodological concerns related to the issue of spatial scale that continues to vex children’s geographies, as well as the issue of temporal scale, typically measured in generations when in studies of children and youth. © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80098 152 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections habashi’s (2019) paper sets out to examine how palestinian children read and respond to “local” political events and realities – such as the aforementioned hamas/fatah split, repeated israeli onslaughts against gaza, continued settlement encroachment, and ongoing imposition of checkpoints and barriers – in terms of their national identity. however, the way that participants blurred scalar boundaries between the local, national, and international spheres in their reactions to these political events and issues is itself interesting. the quotes and empirical vignettes that pepper habashi’s paper pivot between the intimate, immediate and familiar on the one hand, and the broad, distant, and abstract on the other. one participant interweaves the family memories of displacement with a historical narrative of a collective refugee “we,” returning from lebanon, syria, and jordan. similarly, stories vacillate between experiences at local rallies and arrests of local youths by pa police, to discussions of news coverage from gaza, pronouncements by politicians on jerusalem, us foreign policy, and the significance of national symbols like the flag and the dome of the rock. even the concrete features of the palestinian landscape, such as checkpoints and the apartheid wall, are discussed as both material, embodied obstacles as well as abstract symbols of oppression and national struggle. the question of how young people form and perform a sense of national identity within the mundane spaces of their everyday lives remains a longstanding methodological challenge within children’s geographies, one that is particularly challenging for those of us working in palestine, where even these mundane spaces are highly politically, emotionally and symbolically charged. habashi’s study strives to include a geographically representative sample of young people from cities, villages and refugee camps across the west bank and finds broad conformity in the feelings of national identity across these spaces. on the one hand, this is testament to the strength of palestinian national identity, which persists despite, and in some ways because of, experiences of ongoing colonization, fragmentation, and exile. on the other hand, with the exception of some examples from hebron, it is hard to get a feel for a distinct sense of a place or the everyday lives of children who participated in this study. how do young people imagine and perform a sense of national identity and belonging within their surrounding environments, and how might children from villages that abut settlements imagine this belonging differently from children in refugee camps? in short, are their geographic variations in how palestinians imagine national identity, and how do palestinians overcome geographic and political divisions to produce a sense of national belonging? this question clearly relates to the ongoing settler-colonial project in palestine under israeli occupation. as the paper rightly emphasizes, palestine is territorially and demographically fragmented and dispersed. the oslo accords divided the west bank into areas of graduated semi-sovereignty between areas a, b, and c, and h1 and h2 in hebron (gordon 2008). walls surround jerusalem and gaza remains a besieged and isolated enclave. meanwhile, palestinians living under occupation, within israel, or in refugee camps, all differ in their abilities to express and enact their national identities and self-determination, or even get counted as palestinians (tawil-souri 2011). how can researchers working within these spaces work together to confront the architecture of occupation and settler colonialism, rather than reproduce its restrictive geographic boundaries? how can researchers overcome various travel and funding restrictions to include children from gaza, haifa, jerusalem, and shatila camp in research like this? one possibility is the use of digital technology. habashi (2019) has made creative and productive use of journaling in her research with palestinian young people. how could digital photos snapped by now ubiquitous smart phones help to ground their narratives of national identities more solidly in their local surroundings? how could messaging apps and microblogs, combined with longer form blogs or vlogs, give us a more fine-grained sense of the everyday issues confronting young people in palestine? could these technologies be used to enable participants to interact with each other across divisions in virtual focus groups, and what ethical, privacy and security related-issues would that raise? i remain skeptical about the ability of technology to break down barriers, and i think we should always use extreme caution when adopting any geo-locating technology that could be hacked, tracked and surveilled. nevertheless, the potential benefits of such tools should at least prompt their serious consideration, even among those of us who tend to be technologically unplugged and disinclined. alongside the question of how to attend to a specific sense of a place, without obscuring the broader geopolitical context, is a related temporal question of how to attend to the everyday, present fennia 197(1) (2019) 153david j. marshall realities that young people face, while also getting a sense of how they understand their lives within the broader historical passage of time. as this paper indicates, the history of the palestinian struggle is often narrated in teleological fashion, as the work of successive generations of palestinians each with their particular role to play. the jeel an-nakba (nakba generation of 1948), struggled to keep alive the memory of historic palestine, whereas the jeel ath-thawra (generation of revolution) connected the palestinian struggle to broader third world liberation struggles, and the jeel al-intifada, sometimes called the jeel al-hajar (intifada generation or generation of stones) directly confronted the israeli occupation from within (collins 2004; peteet 2005). in my research, i have sometimes heard palestinian adults refer to young people today, with a mix of disdain and hope, as jeel al-facebook, and sometimes even as the jeel al-kitkat (the easily broken “kit kat” generation). parents have told me that the peace process gave them hope for a normal future, so they tried to spoil their children with the normal childhoods they never had. what role do these young people growing up in ayyam oslo or ayyaam abbas (the days of oslo, or the days of abbas) – including new (female) icons of the palestinian struggle like ahed tamimi – see for themselves within (or outside) the struggle, and what form will that struggle take? how do palestinian girls and boys, and young men and women make sense of the collective memories of struggle in the context of present circumstance and how do they apply nationalist narratives to their own (gendered, situated, embodied) lives? mannheim (1952/2012) defines a generation as a group of people who, beyond being born around the same time, share a common significant experience, like war or dramatic social or political change, which gives rise to a common sense of political consciousness. it is tempting to see the palestinian struggle as weighted down by memory and mired in history, with each successive generation merely experiencing its own round of conflict within a much longer history of repeated violence. yet, each generation also experiences fresh contact with new configurations of the world that past events have brought into being. though research in children’s geography has thoroughly examined the ways in which the notions of childhood are socially constructed in different ways across time and space, the social construction of generations and intergenerational relations remain ripe for further conceptual and methodological exploration (see mitchell & elwood 2013; vanderbeck & worth 2014; vanderbeck 2017). though habashi’s (2017) ecological model of socialization takes into account child/adult mutual socialization even as it disrupts top-down adult-centered models of youth socialization, the emphasis of childhood agency and child-centered methods in children’s geographies (combined, perhaps, with the western conceptions of childhood smuggled into our work), has reproduced a tendency to exclude adults from our research with children. yet, the moment described in habashi’s (2019) paper in which one of the participants asks their father about his memories of displacement during the 1967 war is a powerful one. in my own recent work with palestinian refugee children in the west bank, i have used place-based intergenerational digital storytelling as a method for understanding how young people form a sense of local belonging to the camp even as they articulate a longing for return to a national homeland. this is just one way of exploring how children understand their present surroundings in the context of wider geographic imaginaries and collective memories. finally, the last point habashi’s paper has inspired me to reflect on, is an issue that presents a further challenge to the above-mentioned issues of spatial and temporal scale in children’s geography, namely, religion. as in her earlier work (habashi 2008, 2011, 2013, 2017), this article is sensitive to the centrality of religious practices, views and ethics in the construction of self and nation in palestine. challenging the narrow interpretations of political islam, this paper sheds light on how palestinian children reject crude politicization of religion and its use as a tool for division, instead appealing to the emphasis that islam places on harmony and compromise as a way of achieving national unity. at the same time, palestinian children also stress the multi-faith character of palestinian national identity, expressing solidarity with christian palestinians and recognizing the historic presence of jews in palestine. beyond religion’s role in national politics, habashi’s (2019) research also underscores religion’s role in the palestinian practices of patience and perseverance in the face of oppression. while we could read this in terms of the mere psychological utility of a religious belief system, these insights gesture at a broader cosmic/temporal worldview through which palestinian children experience and interpret events around them. at the risk of reproducing problematic framings of the so-called “palestinian-israeli conflict” as a primordial religious conflict, rather than a modern political 154 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections struggle over national sovereignty, i think the secular worldview that informs most academic scholarship, has made it difficult for researchers to take seriously how religious perspectives profoundly shape the everyday lives of people in the region. we have a tendency to treat religion in narrow demographic or ideological terms, rather than a lived reality. habashi’s work problematizing top-down models of religious socialization of youth (often read as indoctrination) has been an important step toward rethinking young people’s spiritual lives. although impasse remains the watchword of politics in israel/palestine, it is hard to fight the feeling that palestine is on the precipice of change. though about half of all palestinians still support a twostate solution, most palestinians feel it is no longer practical or possible in the near term, and most also feel that life has gotten worse since yasser arafat signed the oslo accords in 1993 (pcpsr 2019). although nearly 140 un member states recognize the state of palestine, that state exercises very limited sovereignty over a very limited territory, and many palestinians have begun to question whether the palestinian struggle is a struggle for statehood or for freedom. perhaps ayyam oslo and ayyam abbas are coming to an end. whatever future directions the palestinian national movement takes, habashi’s (2019) research with young palestinians in the west bank has once again yielded valuable insights into how a new generation of palestinians views these developments and how they view themselves as palestinians. references collins, j. (2004) occupied by memory: the intifada generation and the palestinian state of emergency. new york university press, new york. gordon, d. n. (2008) israel’s occupation. university of california press, berkeley, ca. https://doi. org/10.1525/california/9780520255302.001.0001 habashi, j. (2008) palestinian children crafting national identity. childhood 15(1) 12–29. https://doi. org/10.1177/0907568207086833 habashi, j. (2011) children’s agency and islam: unexpected paths to solidarity. children’s geographies 9(2) 129–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011.562377 habashi, j. (2013) children’s religious agency: conceptualising islamic idioms of resistance. area 45(2) 155–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01126.x habashi, j. (2017) political socialization of youth: a palestinian case study. palgrave macmillan, new york, ny. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47523-7 habashi, j. (2019) palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era. fennia 197(1) 77–93. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 human rights council (2019) report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the protests in the occupied palestinian territory, a/hrc/40/74 25, february 2019. <https://www. ohchr.org/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/coiopt/a_hrc_40_74.pdf> 28.3.2019. landau, n. & khoury, j. (2017) ‘two-state solution is over,’ top palestinian diplomat says after trump’s jerusalem speech’. haaretz 7.12.2017. <https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/. premium-two-state-solution-is-over-top-palestinian-diplomat-says-1.5627973> 28.3.2019. marshall, s. (2011) the double-occupation of palestine. human geography 4(1). <https://hugeog.com/ tdoopv2n4d1234/> mannheim, k. (1952/2012) essays on the sociology of knowledge. forgotten books, london. mitchell, k. & elwood, s. (2013) intergenerational mapping and the cultural politics of memory. space and polity 17(1) 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780712 pcpsr (palestinian center for policy and survey research) (2019) public opinion poll no (71). press release 19.3.2019. <http://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/poll%2071%20english%20press%20 release%20march%202019.pdf> 28.3.2019. peteet, j. (2005) landscape of hope and despair: palestinian refugee camps. university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, pa. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812200317 tawil-souri, h. (2011) colored identity: the politics and materiality of id cards in palestine/israel. social text 29(2(107)) 67–97. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1259488 vanderbeck, r. (2017) intergenerational geographies in theory and practice. in skelton, t. & aitken, s. (eds.) establishing geographies of children and young people, 1–23. springer singapore (geographies of children and young people), singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-88-0_4-1 vanderbeck, r. & worth, n. (2014) intergenerational space. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520255302.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520255302.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568207086833 https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568207086833 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011.562377 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01126.x https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47523-7 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 https://www.ohchr.org/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/coiopt/a_hrc_40_74.pdf https://www.ohchr.org/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/coiopt/a_hrc_40_74.pdf https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-two-state-solution-is-over-top-palestinian-diplomat-says-1.5627973 https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-two-state-solution-is-over-top-palestinian-diplomat-says-1.5627973 https://hugeog.com/tdoopv2n4d1234/ https://hugeog.com/tdoopv2n4d1234/ https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780712 http://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/poll%2071%20english%20press%20release%20march%202019.pdf http://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/poll%2071%20english%20press%20release%20march%202019.pdf https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812200317 https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1259488 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-88-0_4-1 evaluating otherwise: hierarchies and opportunities in publishing practices urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66884 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66884 reflections: on publishing evaluating otherwise: hierarchies and opportunities in publishing practices derek ruez ruez, derek (2017). evaluating otherwise: hierarchies and opportunities in publishing practices. fennia 195: 2, pp. 189–193. issn 1798-5617. this short paper responds to the provocations set out in kirsi pauliina kallio’s recent editorial on ‘subtle radical moves in scientific publishing’ and emerges out of my participation in a fennia-organized panel at the 2017 nordic geographers’ meeting where participants reflected on the challenges and opportunities of creating a more equitable and pluralistic international publishing environment. given the dominance of english language publishing in international academic work and the broader geopolitics of knowledge production through which some contexts, approaches, and modes of knowledge are regularly devalued, i suggest that – to the extent that publishing outlets are evaluated or ranked – they should be evaluated and ranked, in part, based on their contribution to a pluralistically international academy. this revaluation could help shape the informal assessments made by scholars in the context of hiring, funding, and other key decisions. it could also be integrated into more formal channels, such as within the deliberations of the boards who produce publication rankings in, for example, finland’s publication forum. such a tactic need not preclude other work to contest rankings hierarchies and audit cultures as they advance the neoliberalization of academic work, but it does 1) suggest the importance of paying attention to what and how scholars value when we evaluate publishing outlets and 2) point toward the potential of critical and creative engagement with the range of processes (i.e. indexing, accrediting, measuring, ranking etc.) that surround and subsist within academic publishing. keywords: publishing practices, journal rankings, anglophone hegemony, research assessment, geopolitics of knowledge derek ruez, relate centre of excellence/space and political agency research group, university of tampere, kanslerinrinne 1, tampere fi-33014, finland. e-mail: derek.ruez@uta.fi introduction the publication of research and other kinds of critical and creative work is crucial to the unfolding of collective academic conversations and to the individual careers of scholars. as such, it would likely always be the site of some anxiety, but, in the current moment, the systems through which scholars publish their work have become the source of significant dissatisfaction within and beyond the academy. the paywalls behind which much scholarly work is housed limit access – particularly to those outside of the academy and without access to institutional journal subscriptions – at a time when many scholars, whether motivated by their own political commitments or by funding imperatives, seek to increase the © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 190 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing impact of their work beyond the academy. meanwhile, large, for-profit commercial publishing companies extract profit from a process that involves significant public investment and tremendous amount of unpaid labor by academics. the contradictions and limits of the current models, while long visible, are increasingly prompting a range of changes, including funder and institutional mandates around publishing open access, new institutional and field-specific repositories, increasingly sophisticated file sharing infrastructures for bypassing paywalls, experiments in non-commercial publishing, and new forms of negotiation with publishers. the potential scale and impact of such shifts going forward calls for critical consideration by everyone engaged in academic work. this period of flux in academic publishing and its controversies over access and value, while obviously important in their own terms, also represents an opportunity to consider how changing publication practices can move us in the direction of a more pluralistically international academy. of course, scholars across a range of contexts are already facing pressures to produce work that responds to internationalization imperatives, but this often means publishing in in ‘international’ (i.e. highranking, english-language) outlets (paasi 2015). as geographic discussions around anglophone hegemony have made clear, the ‘international’, with its connections to the dominance of english, can and often does result in more provincial geographies and puts significant obstacles in the way of achieving a more pluralistically international academy (garcia ramon 2003; germes & husseini de araújo 2016). the extent, contour, and implications of english-language dominance have been critically debated (e.g. rodríguez-pose 2004), but, however one might approach the question of english as a lingua franca, it seems clear that these dynamics contribute toward a situation where certain argumentative styles and theoretical frames are privileged over others and where important intellectual contributions may go unrecognized (fall & minca 2013; fall 2014). i also follow desbiens and ruddick (2006: 4) in thinking that “to cast aside the question of language in geography” would be “to obscure those practices that do work to maintain various unequal power relations”. thus, there remains an uneven playing field that eases the way for some scholars, such as an anglophone researcher like myself, while putting up obstacles in front of others. the dynamics of language are, of course, only one part of the broader geopolitics of knowledge production in a plural and uneven world (mignolo 2002; timár 2004; peake 2011). there are a growing number of projects that have emerged seeking to open up knowledge production in geography in new ways, including exciting work articulated around decolonizing geographic thinking (sundberg 2014; radcliffe 2017), provincializing hegemonically-universalized approaches and worlding subaltern urbanisms in urban geography (roy 2009; sheppard et al. 2013), and opening up new possibilities for collaboration and conversation across linguistic and material divides (nagar 2014). much of this work gestures toward the need for broad epistemic shifts and substantive political change in both the academy and the broader world. building on kirsi pauliina kallio’s (2017) editorial on subtle radical moves in academic publishing, my goal here is to offer some further reflections on an area of publishing practices where potential interventions, even small ones, could be made toward creating a more pluralistically international publishing environment – as one modest step toward decolonizing the discipline. obstacles and opportunities at the risk of stating the obvious, one important sticking point holding back efforts to create a more pluralistically international publishing environment is the existing system of incentives that tend to channel scholars into producing certain kinds of publications and submitting them to certain kinds of outlets. due to the competitive nature of launching an academic career, early career scholars experience intense pressure to publish as much as possible in the ‘best’ journals possible. often, ‘best’ is understood either in terms of formal metrics, like impact factor or national rankings systems, or in terms of a more diffuse, but still quite real, common sense within particular scholarly communities about the outlets that matter most. this pressure extends beyond the early career-stage, of course, although that is a particularly important moment, both in terms of the acute nature of the pressure and the way it helps set the stage for what follows. while the influence of metrics and the details of that scholarly common sense can vary significantly across contexts, the journals that matter in this fennia 195: 2 (2017) 191derek ruez way are most often published in english and included as part of web of science (wos) rankings (cf. schuermans et al. 2010; paasi 2013). this hierarchy of publishing outlets effectively narrows the kinds of approaches and contributions that are likely to be made. i use the language of incentives and pressures, but, as others have pointed out (e.g. kitchin 2005), it is more than that. academics are not first neutral actors who then encounter these incentives, but rather subjects who have, in many cases, been trained and positioned to care about publishing in high ranking, international journals and who evaluate their own and others’ scholarly credentials, at least in part, in relation to these publication records. here, the production of academic subjectivities is central – as are questions of value, to name the interrelated issues of the economic value that is produced in academic publishing and the system of valuation that determine what publication venues are accorded the most status in communities in which that status is a key currency. kirsi pauliina kallio’s (2017) articulation of the different steps and actors involved in the publishing process nicely provides a kind of road map toward potential areas of intervention in the publishing process. to that, i would add the evaluation and ranking of publishing outlets as an area where academics may be able to alter our own practices to move toward a more pluralistic and equitable publishing environment. even as there are a variety of external pressures, i think it remains largely true “that it is academics themselves who decide what is ‘valuable’ and oversee many of the accounting systems that govern their practices” (kitchin 2005: 12). i have in mind both the formal ranking exercises, such as finland’s publication forum or the norwegian register for scientific journals, series and publishers, as well as the ways that impact factors and more ‘common sense’ understandings of quality within particular fields affect how journals and the individual scholars who publish in them are evaluated by other scholars. in terms of formal ranking exercise, scholars themselves do not exercise independent control over whether and how these systems emerge, nor how the rankings are used, but they – at least the often-senior scholars who sit on advisory boards – do generally control the evaluation process that assigns rankings to particular journals. it is also scholars themselves who often do the more informal evaluating that reproduces a common sense about the quality and significance of particular outlets and applies that common sense to the evaluation of job candidates, funding proposals, and promotion prospects. among the more formal practices, the national accreditation and ranking systems for academic publishing outlets in norway, denmark, and finland merit more critical attention (see paasi 2013; berg et al. 2016; jones 2017). in finland, for example, the publication forum ranks journals on a scale of 1–3, with a 3 being awarded to a small percentage of the highest quality and impact journals, and 1 being awarded to the largest number of journals that meet certain basic standards. the higher the ranking, the more a publication in that outlet is worth in terms of the distribution of public funding to the university. while these rankings are ostensibly not meant to be applied to individual scholars, it is difficult to imagine that they do not influence how particular publications, authors, and research groups are perceived and evaluated among themselves and in relation to university administrations. the circulation of these mechanisms – for example, south africa’s department of higher education and training adopted norway’s registry for use in its own accreditation exercises in 2016 – and the potential consolidation being pursued in the form of a jointly-maintained ’nordic list’ that aims to create a shared registry among the nordic countries and potentially beyond together make these a potentially important point of intervention. here, i suggest that those scholars who take on the work of evaluating publication outlets in this way ought to integrate into their considerations of quality and significance the extent to which the journal contributes to a more pluralistically international publishing environment. this is not just a form of positive discrimination, although it would be justifiable if it was, but a reflection of the intellectual value of creating a more pluralistic environment. the kind of contributions that could be recognized in this way would necessarily vary, but include much that has already been suggested in work responding to anglo-hegemony or in the distinct but related project of decolonizing the academy. this could entail the publication of abstracts in multiple languages, the publication of original work in multiple languages, the translation of articles, the development of publisher and editorial policies that reduce barriers to publishing in english for those for whom english is not a first language, the publication of articles that build connections across scholarly (and other) traditions, and the highlighting of particular contexts, questions, or forms of 192 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing knowledge production that are underrepresented or devalued in the context of anglo-hegemony and the broader colonial geopolitics of knowledge. evaluating differently in advocating for a kind of critical engagement with ranking and evaluation of publishing outlets, what i have in mind is, in one sense, analogous to the kind ‘conscientious engagement’ with citation practices recently discussed by mott and cockayne (2017). to be sure, ranking and evaluating publication outlets is not actually necessary or productive for scholarly work in the way that citation is (and, indeed, is frequently counterproductive to such work—see mountz et al. 2015; berg et al. 2016). however, to the extent that ranking and evaluating remain an influential feature of the academic landscape, i suggest that it makes sense for scholars who have the opportunity to help shape these rankings to do so in the interest of creating evaluations that more accurately represent the value of, as well as contribute to, the creation of a more pluralistically international academy. such a tactic need not preclude other work to contest rankings hierarchies and audit cultures as they advance the neoliberalization of academic work, but it does suggest the importance of paying attention to what and how we, as scholars, value when we evaluate publishing outlets – a task which would likely not disappear entirely, even in the absence of neoliberalizing tendencies and competitive audit cultures. as debates about the dominant for-profit journal publishing model continue to unfold, i think it is critical to support efforts to imagine and pursue alternatives that can broaden access to academic work and challenge existing inequalities in knowledge production. moreover, as much as possible of the value produced in academic work should be brought back into the hands of the scholars where it could support things like translation, which bring new arguments and approaches to broader audiences, or language services that help level the playing field for scholars working to publish in english. scholars should also take this opportunity to critically ask what kinds of publication rankings, metrics, and citation indices, if any, do or should we actually value? what productive ends do they support in their current form? what ends might they be put toward? if we allow that there may be some scholarly use for some of these mechanisms – a point on which i am not altogether convinced in the case of rankings, although for citation indices the case is clearer – by whom and how should these be governed? what are the implications of having so much of this in the hands of private profitseeking corporations, like clarivate analytics and google? what are the possibilities for indexing, accrediting, measuring, evaluating, and ranking otherwise? that final question, which must also include the possibility of not doing some of those things – as exemplified by acme’s longstanding refusal to be included in wos rankings – is meant to gesture toward the need to think beyond producing better rankings and measurements, at least in the usual sense of debates about the importance of recognizing quality over quantity or the virtue of article-level versus publication-level metrics, and toward the potential impact of critically and creatively transforming the broader infrastructures that surround and subsist within our publication practices. references berg, l. d., huijbens, e. h. & larsen, h. g. (2016) producing anxiety in the neoliberal university. the canadian geographer/le géographe canadien 60(2) 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261 desbiens, c. & ruddick, s. (2006) speaking of geography: language, power, and the spaces of anglo-saxon ‘hegemony ’. environment and planning d: society and space 24 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1068/d2401ed fall, j. (2014) writing (somewhere). in lee, r., castree, n., kitchin, r., lawson, v., paasi, a., philo, c., radcliffe, s., roberts, s. m. & withers, c. (eds.) the sage handbook of progress in human geography, 296–315. sage, london. fall, j. & minca, c. (2013) not a geography of what doesn’t exist, but a counter-geography of what does: rereading giuseppe dematteis’ le metafore della terra. progress in human geography 37(4) 542-563. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512463622 garcia-ramon, m. d. (2003) globalization and international geography: the questions of languages and scholarly traditions. progress in human geography 27(1) 1–5. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 193derek ruez https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132503ph409xx germes, m. & husseini de araújo, s. (2016) for a critical practice of translation in geography. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 15(1) 1–14. jones, m. (2017) can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing – experiences from norway. fennia international journal of geography 195(2) 164–174. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 kallio, k. p. (2017) subtle radical moves in scientific publishing. fennia international journal of geography 195(1) 1–4. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 kitchin, r. (2005) commentar y: disrupting and destabilizing anglo-american and englishlanguage hegemony in geography. social & cultural geography 6(1) 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936052000335937 mignolo, w. (2002) the geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. the south atlantic quarterly 101(1) 57–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-101-1-57 mott, c. & cockayne, d. (2017) citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement ’. gender, place & culture 24(7) 954–973. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2017.1339022 mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j., walton-roberts, m., basu, r., whitson, r., hawkins, r., hamilton, t. & curran, w. (2015) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 14(4) 1235–1259. nagar, r. (2014) muddying the waters: coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism. university of illinois press, urbana. paasi, a. (2013) fennia: positioning a 'peripheral' but international journal under the condition of academic capitalism. fennia international journal of geography 191(1) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.11143/7787 paasi, a. (2015) “hot spots, dark-side dots, tin pots”: the uneven internationalism of the global academic market. in meusburger, p., gregory, d. & suarsana, l. (eds.) geographies of knowledge and power, 247–262. springer netherlands, dordrecht. peake, l. (2011) in, out and unspeakably about: taking social geography beyond an anglo-american positionality. social & cultural geography 12(7) 757–773. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.610245 radcliffe, s. a. (2017) decolonising geographical knowledges. transactions of the institute of british geographers 42(3) 329–333. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12195 rodríguez-pose, a. (2004) on english as a vehicle to preserve geographical diversity. progress in human geography 28(1) 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph467xx roy, a. (2009) the 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory. regional studies 43(6) 819– 830. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343400701809665 schuermans, n., meeus, b. & de maesschalck, f. (2010) is there a world beyond the web of science? publication practices outside the heartland of academic geography. area 42(4) 417–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2010.00938.x sheppard, e., leitner, h. & maringanti, a. (2013) provincializing global urbanism: a manifesto. urban geography 34(7) 893–900. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2013.807977 sundberg, j. (2014) decolonizing posthumanist geographies. cultural geographies 21(1) 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067 timár, j. (2004) more than ‘anglo-american’, it is ‘western’: hegemony in geography from a hungarian perspective. geoforum 35(5) 533–538. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.01.010 dialogical peer-review and non-profit open-access journal publishing: welcome to fennia urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70470 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70470 dialogical peer-review and non-profit open-access journal publishing: welcome to fennia “i remember a bad day last year: it just about took my breath away, it sickened me when i heard the expression for the first time, barely understanding it, the expression crime of hospitality [delit d'hospitalité]. in fact, i am not sure that i heard it, because i wonder how anyone could ever have pronounced it [...] no, i did not hear it, and i can barely repeat it; i read it voicelessly in an official text. it concerned a law permitting the prosecution, and even the imprisonment, of those who take in and help foreigners whose status is held to be illegal. this “crime of hospitality” (i still wonder who dared to put these words together) is punishable by imprisonment. what becomes of a country, one must wonder, what becomes of a culture, what becomes of a language when it admits of a “crime of hospitality,” when hospitality can become, in the eyes of the law and its representatives, a criminal offense?” (derrida 2001, 133) welcome to fennia. in this issue of the journal, we offer a critical discussion of welcome and the suppression of welcome in relation to the refugee ‘crisis’ (gill 2018; and associated commentaries bagelman 2018; norum 2018; vainikka & vainikka 2018; vuolteenaho & lyytinen 2018; sparke forthcoming). as such, here in this editorial, we would like to think about the idea of welcome a bit further. how in a neoliberal age for many european nations the act of welcoming, of mutual aid, of solidarity could potentially be a radical action, in itself? academic journals can be unwelcoming places with paywalls now commonplace, making research accessible only to a privileged minority. so here, we would like to begin by stating some of the things that we are trying to do to make academia and journal publishing more welcoming and accessible for all. we do this through the prism of fennia, as a space for radical critique, for rigorous research, for performative interventions, and as a space wherein which geographical dialogues can take place on contemporary and politicized issues. in the past year and a half, over the pages of three issues, as editors of fennia, we have attempted to expand the journal beyond the standard double-blind peer-reviewed scientific research article format that is often considered the ‘gold standard’ of academic endeavor. we are not however, considering a removal of outstanding and rigorous double-blind peer-reviewed research articles from this journal, rather we would like to encourage an openness and in a sense a ‘welcoming’ approach by adding some subtle and radical alternatives. as described in the editorial by metzger & kallio (2018; see also kallio & hyvärinen 2017 and kallio & riding 2017), these include dialogical attempts to create a more equal and convivial environment when publishing academic outputs in scientific journals. the associated attempts made by us as editors of the journal, are firstly, the creation of a doubleopen dialogical peer-review practice employed where appropriate, secondly, a yearly fennia lecture and associated commentaries, thirdly, a new reviews and essays section (previously review articles) which provides the opportunity to create peer-reviewed (either open or blind) essays which differ in form and style from the standard research article, and fourthly, an opportunity for fennia authors to publish popularized versions of their research articles via versus. we make these attempts due to certain negative experiences when publishing in academic journals, and they emerge from discussions in person and in print with editors of other radical non-profit fully open-access journals, such as acme (springer et al. 2017) and human geography (finn et al. 2017). we decided to tread this alternative path in part because of the concerns that we have, regarding the current state of academic publishing and the neoliberalization of knowledge production. more often than not nowadays, the process of submitting an article is highly dehumanized, as it takes place via (nearly) faceless manuscript submission systems. the presence of big publishing houses looms large over the necessary process of the dissemination of academic research, often through the publication of an article. the unhealthy demands placed upon, especially early career researchers, and those who are not considered to be native english speakers (fregonese 2017), can mean the act of submitting an article to a journal is alienating and demoralizing. this unease we experience when not knowing where exactly and whom exactly we are sending our work to, and whom this research is subsequently owned by – what for-profit ‘big five’ academic © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. http://versuslehti.fi/english fennia 196(1) (2018) 5james riding & kirsi pauliina kallio publishing corporation the journal represents the interests of – occurs before we even reach the gatepost of peer-review. when we do reach this peer-review point, what occurs can be contradictory, elusive, and difficult to overcome or understand. as academics, we all have stories of an anonymous ‘reviewer 2’, whose comments are presented in a form and in a way, which can give over a sense of nit-picking negative critique. a list of comments can appear merely as obstacles, an attempt to derail the submitted article, rather than a proper and fair peer-review, which acknowledges the concomitant relationship between reviewer and author. we propose that peer-review can also be viewed as a form of mutual aid – as simon springer and the editorial team of acme (springer et al. 2017) argued in the previous issue of fennia – undertaken in order to help create a full, rigorous, and distinctive research article through constructive critique, even when the article is not yet fully envisaged and may be rejected or a resubmission requested. perhaps, in order to encourage the reviewer to undertake the free labor of peer-review, the doubleopen review process that we are trialing is a way forward. we all, in the current academic climate, undertake free labor which is seemingly feeding a neoliberal status quo. thus, we encourage an alternative wherein which this free academic labor is acknowledged, through a dialogical practice that offers the reviewers the opportunity to discuss their perspectives openly, and further, to publish commentaries on the articles in the journal. to give over a sense of how this welcoming approach is facilitated by us as editors and in return by the authors themselves, we would now like to introduce you to the pieces which make up this extensive and varied issue of fennia. the first issue of fennia in 2018 includes four original research articles. three articles that went through double-blind reviewing begin the issue, and interestingly for the reader, employ markedly different methodological approaches. the article mapping the distributive environmental justice of urban waters by arto viinikka, riikka paloniemi and timo assmuth discusses the distribution of urban space and ecosystem services in the helsinki metropolitan area, finland, from the perspective of distributive environmental justice. by means of a gis-based spatial clustering analysis, and drawing from spatial statistics, viinikka, paloniemi and assmuth (2018) map the potential patterns of socio-economic and demographic characteristics of urban waters, finding opportunities wanting for particular population groups, including children, foreign language groups, and people with low socio-economic status. based on an autoethnographic study, maartje roelofsen’s article performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the airbnb experience in sofia, bulgaria explores subjective understandings of home in relation to ‘co-performances’ of home, in the context of peer-to-peer accommodation platforms. via a thorough empirical analysis, based on a study in sofia, bulgaria, roelofsen (2018) makes explicit the inherently contested nature of home that appears in the everyday experiences and practices of this sharing economy. the article goes on to raise questions of how the home is conceived, presented, performed and put into circulation by the various actors involved in the airbnb business, including importantly, related value production. ari aukusti lehtinen in an article called degrowth in city planning focuses on recent urban development policies and practices taking place in joensuu, finland, and its counter-forces mobilized most importantly by kohtuusliike. kohtuusliike is a critical environmental movement that has promoted cultural, political and economic changes in north karelia for about ten years, as part of the international degrowth movement. emphasizing overconsumption along with climate and environmental issues as major sources of the economic challenges that the city is facing, lehtinen (2018) makes a theoretically informed and empirically grounded argument for agonistic co-planning. an agonistic co-planning, which could be helpful in opening up the present planning culture in joensuu and other cities where it currently proceeds through hidden contracts, tactical manoeuvres and systematic noncommunication with(out) citizens. lehtinen’s article sits well alongside the fourth research article by william walton called deregulated free-for-all planning, new settlements and the spectre of abandoned building sites in scotland’s crisis-hit oil economy – undergone double-open reviewing – which also focuses on questions of planning and democracy. its empirical focus is scotland, specifically in the aberdeenshire region, where walton (2018) traces the development of planning policies and practices from the 1970s to the present. rigorous policy analysis leads walton to a conclusion regarding the current situation, where communities have largely lost trust in the planning system, as people are systematically silenced in a 6 fennia 196(1) (2018)editorials local planning system that serves economic purposes only, made possible by the neoliberalization of housing land provision. he contends that the removal of the right to hearings into major development proposals is symptomatic of a post-political condition, which seeks to promote neoliberal values by squeezing out dissenting voices. walton’s article is an example of the ‘welcoming’ double-open review practice in fennia. the peer reviewers for his article, andy inch and vesa kanninen, were invited to engage in an open discussion throughout the review process and, finally, to publish their comments on this geographically situated piece in the reflections section of the journal. inch (2018), in a response entitled the timely return of the repressed, explores how a timely invitation to take part in this process prompted thoughts about his ongoing involvement in the politics of planning in scotland. from his perspective, walton’s analysis is not just an example of post-political planning, but is significant for the work of groups like the non-profit organization planning democracy, which campaigns for a fair and inclusive planning system in scotland, challenging the contemporary conjuncture. kanninen’s (2018) commentary seeks to offer, not an alternative, but a complementary analysis of the post-political condition, dwelling in the empirically and theoretically grounded interpretation of planning practice that walton’s work identifies. traversing with mouffe and laclau through landscapes drawn by ranciere and žižek, he skillfully illustrates that to walk the intellectual path of post-politics is by no means a meager undertaking. in our new reviews and essays section we offer one review and one essay. the literature review (double-blind peer-reviewed) dissonance: scientific paradigms underpinning the study of sound in geography by daniel paiva, introduces sonic geographies, providing a tentative history of sound in geography through its different conceptions. the acoustic journey traverses from quantifiable noise to experiences and performances of soundscapes and landscapes, to affect and expanded listening. paiva (2018) posits that the conceptual vocabulary is partly unclear and requests that the relations between the concepts used are addressed in further detail to build a common language to sonic geographies. the essay by nick gill (2018) is based on the 2017 fennia lecture in turku and is entitled the suppression of welcome. it is a call for geographers to think seriously about ‘welcome’, and what it means as a spatial, political, and at the same time intimately human construct. gill’s essay asks us to critically consider what we mean when we say we are welcoming, and to consider what welcome is. in relation to the recent refugee ‘crisis’, gill’s essay suggests one way to think about how ‘refugee welcome’ has taken place in europe, drawing attention to tensions between governmental and grassroots responses to emerging situations. gill’s (2018) essay asks the commentators a series of questions which probe what welcoming is, especially when employed in civic discourse by multiple actors as a term associated with the arrival of refugees, and uses a range of metaphors drawn from sometimes seemingly distinct and distant worlds, including luxury tourism: “how can genuine, spontaneous welcome be preserved under the pressure of statist and nationalistic logics and demands? or how can we hold onto welcome as something meaningful when it seems to be under attack from not only right wing nationalists and factions that draw spurious connections between refugees and security threats, but also the very architecture of bureaucracy?” in her commentary jen bagelman (2018), one of gill’s reviewers, provides a welcoming letter addressed to him personally, in a shift away from the grand notions of scholarly critique often received and felt in standard double-blind peer-review. the tone of the piece allows bagelman to discuss the politics of welcome in relation to practices of asylum and academic modes of inquiry, specifically asking the question, who hosts a politics of welcome? matthew sparke (forthcoming) adds to this conversation, wondering whether it is also necessary to look at how reactionary right wing responses represent a radically different but parallel assemblage of local emotional investment with transnational ties, networks, representational schemas, and a counter-point assemblage with deadly rejectionist results. this effective (and highly affective) mixing of the hyper-national with the transnational seems especially potent and damaging in the eu context. the three further responses to the suppression of welcome, coming from the conference audience, probe what welcome is, how the concept is mobilised or emotionally enacted, often referencing as gill fennia 196(1) (2018) 7james riding & kirsi pauliina kallio suggests in his own piece, the tourism industry. roger norum (2018) provides a travelogue of ‘welcome’ in a variety of regions, presenting a romantic grand tour of europe in a darker tone, framed by the context of contemporary global mobility. he evocatively represents a history of welcome and its discontents, arguing that various aspects of the recent so-called european migration crisis enable us to further question long-fixed categories through which mobile actors are often classified. while, in a different yet complimentary tone, jani vuolteenaho and eveliina lyytinen (2018) expand the notion of welcome from three interrelated perspectives, borrowing from lefebvre’s conceptual triad of social space. analysing welcome via emotional geographies, they argue that many actors convey more ambiguous and contextually varying attitudes to (un)welcoming immigrants, and suggest that gill’s conceptualization could be further expanded to the practiced and societally recompensing aspects of everyday spatiality and welcoming. the final piece comes from vilhelmiina vainikka and joni vainikka (2018). again and importantly, this reflection seeks to question a universality of welcome, and analyses how we come to our conclusions as scholars when generalizing welcome across lived space. for example, they ask, “how is this mass response itself defined and delimited and, second, how does a general welcome condition everyday encounters with the (entitled) stranger?” to end this attempt at outlining our ‘welcoming’ approach since becoming the editors of fennia, we would like to state that despite the pressures made to bear upon alternative academic journal publishing in a neoliberal age, we are particularly proud of this issue of fennia. not only because there are great texts included in it, but also because it involves an array of voluntary work which people have carried out without prejudice towards our developing review processes and the associated development of new areas of the journal itself. the authors have written their articles in relation to multidimensional discussions raised during review processes, be they double-blind or -open, and reviewers have carefully engaged with the texts to provide respectful yet critical feedback that has helped us, as editors, in our work. we sincerely hope that each openly accessible piece of work is broadly circulated and widely read in the academic community and beyond, for they truly deserve to be! james riding fennia reflections section editor kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief references bagelman, j. (2018) who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 108–110. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 derrida, j. (2001) negotiations: interventions and interviews 1971–2001. stanford university press, stanford, california. finn, j., peet, r., mollett, s. & lauermann, j. (2017) reclaiming value from academic labor: commentary by the editors of human geography. fennia 195(2) 182–184. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 fregonese, s. (2017) english: lingua franca or disenfranchising? fennia 195(2) 194–196. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67662 gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70040 hannonen, o. (2017) bordering the “other”: the case of the finnish-russian border. fennia 195(1) 113–117. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63674 houtum, h., & bueno lacy, r. (2017) the political extreme as the new normal: the cases of brexit, the french state of emergency and dutch islamophobia. fennia 195(1) 85–101. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64568 inch, a. (2018) the timely return of the repressed – commentary to walton. fennia 196(1) 99–102. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69822 kallio, k., & hyvärinen, p. (2017) a question of time – or academic subjectivity? fennia 195(2) 121–124. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67834 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67662 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63674 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64568 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69822 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67834 8 fennia 196(1) (2018)editorials kallio, k., & riding, j. (2017) six sideways reflections on academic publishing. fennia 195(2) 161–163. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67833 kanninen, v. (2018) postpolitics of (scottish) planning: gatekeepers, gatechecks and gatecrashers? – commentary to walton. fennia 196(1) 103–107. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 lehtinen, a. a. (2018) degrowth in city planning. fennia 196(1) 43–57. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65443 metzger, j. & kallio, k. (2018) ’alternative’ journal publishing and the economy of academic prestige. fennia 196(1) 1–3. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70469 norum, r. (2018) from welcome to well ... come: the mobilities, temporalities and geopolitics of contemporary hospitality – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 111–117. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 paiva, d. (2018) dissonance: scientific paradigms underpinning the study of sound in geography. fennia 196(1) 77–87. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69068 riding, j. (2017b) extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semi-periphery of the postneoliberal europe. fennia 195(1) 106–112. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.59633 roelofsen, m. (2018) performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the airbnb experience in sofia, bulgaria. fennia 196(1) 24–42. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66259 scott, j. (2017) extreme and extremist geographies: commentary on the revanchist impulse and its consequences for everyday bordering. fennia 195(1) 102–105. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63677 sparke, m. welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill. fennia [online jun 17 2018] https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 springer, s., houssay-holzschuch, m., villegas, c., & gahman, l. (2017) say ‘yes!’ to peer review: open access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia. fennia 195(2) 185–188. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 vainikka, v. & vainikka, j. (2018) welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 124–130. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 viinikka, a., paloniemi, r., & assmuth, t. (2018) mapping the distributive environmental justice of urban waters. fennia 196(1) 9–23. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64137 vuolteenaho, j. & lyytinen, e. (2018) reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 walton, w. (2018) deregulated free-for-all planning, new settlements and the spectre of abandoned building sites in scotland’s crisis-hit oil economy. fennia 196(1) 58–76. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67833 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65443 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70469 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69068 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.59633 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66259 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63677 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64137 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 the fragility of welcome – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa75756 doi: 10.11143/fennia.75756 reflections the fragility of welcome – commentary to gill jonathan darling darling, j. (2018) the fragility of welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 220–224. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.75756 in this commentary, i take nick gill’s discussion of the ‘suppression of welcome’ and the politics of hospitality, as a starting point for reflection on how ‘cultures of welcome’ are produced. in exploring the work of those supporting asylum seekers and refugees in sheffield, uk, i argue that welcome may encompass a range of practices, with varying levels of intention and recognition attached. yet what draws these practices together are two factors, first, a positive engagement with difference that holds the potential to promote solidaristic, or at the very least non-violent, relations. and second, a fragility that means that welcome is always at risk of being suppressed or commandeered for other purposes. in considering the implications of the ‘suppression of welcome’, i argue for a focus on welcoming as a negotiated process that involves varying durations, demands and levels of commitment. keywords: asylum, hospitality, ethics, sanctuary jonathan darling, department of geography, durham university, science laboratories, south road, durham, dh1 3le, uk. e-mail: jonathan.m.darling@ durham.ac.uk introduction over a decade ago i began fieldwork in a drop-in centre for asylum seekers and refugees in the city of sheffield, uk. twice a week, asylum seekers, refugees, and volunteers would gather in a small hall to discuss their lives, share experiences, practice language skills, and develop friendships. for a year, i was part of this routine as i studied the practices of hospitality that shaped sheffield’s response to asylum (darling 2011, 2014). in reading gill’s (2018) discussion of the ‘suppression’ of welcome in a context of both grassroots support for the ‘refugee welcome’ movement and a growth in right-wing nationalism across europe, i was reminded of sheffield and of two prominent signs i encountered during my time in the city. the first hung at the entrance to the drop-in centre. the sign, a hand-painted montage of different colours on a white background, read ‘welcome’ in thirty-six different languages. english, french, mandarin, russian, urdu, welsh, all competed for prominence on the board, and were all written by different hands. the sign was intended to represent all of the languages and dialects that the drop-in had encountered among its members, with new ‘welcomes’ being added if members arrived with new languages. it represented a form of cosmopolitan openness that was a source of considerable pride amongst the members of the drop-in. the second sign occupied the windows and doors of a number of cafes, public buildings, and churches in the city. in white lettering on a red background, it read ‘we welcome asylum-seekers and © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.75756 fennia 196(2) (2018) 221jonathan darling refugees’, and was an indication of support for the city of sanctuary movement. city of sanctuary, at this point, was very much in its infancy, a movement organised by two residents of sheffield to promote a ‘culture of welcome and hospitality’ in the city (barnett & bhogal 2010). it would later grow into the nationwide movement it represents today, comprising a network of grassroots groups focused on advocating for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. during the movement’s infancy i witnessed the gradual multiplication of these ‘welcomes’ across sheffield as an indication of growing public support for sanctuary in the city. in this commentary, i want to reflect on the forms of welcome that these two signs represent, and to consider how such welcome is ‘suppressed’ in gill’s (2018) terms. i argue that welcome may encompass a range of practices, with varying levels of intention and recognition attached. yet what draws these practices together are two factors, first, a positive engagement with difference that holds the potential to promote solidaristic, or at the very least non-violent, relations. and second, a fragility that means that welcome is always at risk of being suppressed or commandeered for other purposes. in what follows, i foreground both of these factors to argue for a focus on welcoming as a negotiated process that involves varying durations, demands and levels of commitment. welcome, to be effective, must have some endurance. in this sense, i argue that to be welcoming is not a baseline condition that is suppressed by social and political forces, as gill (2018) implies, but rather a practice that involves considerable work to achieve. to explore these tensions further, i begin by considering what ‘welcome’ might mean. cultures of welcoming etymologically, ‘welcome’ refers to an individual whose arrival is pleasing, or an arrival who is desired in some way. as such, to be welcome, or to be welcomed, should be a pleasant experience, one should feel the warmth of being desired and the reassurance that others feel pleased to be in your presence. thus, as gill (2018) argues, welcome is an interpersonal dynamic, an emotive and affective relation that conveys the pleasure we might feel in the company of others. yet at the heart of gill’s (2018) discussion of welcome are the tensions that come to the fore when this welcome becomes something more than an interpersonal relation. in particular, gill is concerned with how welcome comes to bear the weight of ethical and political reflection on migration, hospitality, and rights, and of how a culture or presumption of welcome has been abused by states in an effort to exclude migrants (gibson 2016). one such tension lies in the distinctions between “the official response and the grassroots response” that gill (2018, 90) notes in relation to the ‘refugee crisis’. another lies in the distinction between welcoming as a form of interpersonal relationship, and welcoming as a more generalised ethos or ethic. it is this latter distinction that is highlighted if we consider the two signs i encountered in sheffield. the first, at the entrance to the drop-in centre, was a singular expression of welcome. a hand-made sign produced specifically for this hallway and unique in its design, colours, and set of languages. in the years since, i have seen many similar ‘welcome’ signs, often displaying a similarly cosmopolitan mix of expressions. but each is in some way unique. the qualities of this sign reflected the practice of welcome undertaken by those attending the drop-in centre itself. this was a space in which welcome was performed in the ways that gill foregrounds, as those present in the drop-in centre were offered “a perception that [their] presence brings about joy or satisfaction in someone else” (gill 2018, 90). the drop-in centre was a space for meeting and making friends, supporting one another, sharing food, drink, and stories, and enjoying the presence of other people. it was therefore a space founded on the importance of welcoming, of conveying a pleasure in meeting others and sharing time with them. tasks of guidance and support were certainly undertaken here, from translating home office letters and offering advice, to providing food supplies to those with no recourse to public funds, yet in the main the drop-in centre was a space for people to offer their time, and their presence, for being with others. i would thus argue that it represented one of the many spaces of welcome that sparke (2018, 215) refers to as “in-between spaces” in which the violence of an exclusionary asylum system is “contested and countered, however incompletely”. however, it is important to note that this was a very specific space, and a specific form of welcome. welcome was arrived at here through considerable 222 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections hard work on the one hand, from both the volunteers and the asylum seekers who together created an environment in which all could feel safe, and considerable trial and error on the other, with questions over who had access to resources and what expected roles volunteers should play coming to the fore. the culture of welcome that operated here was not pre-given, it was developed and refined as members negotiated how they wanted to interact with each other, what they wanted from the space, and how those expectations were recast as new members brought their own ideas and experiences to bear on it. at the same time, this was an intentional welcome, shared and embodied through the choice to be present. it is this that distinguishes it from the second mode of welcoming. the second mode is tied to the presence of city of sanctuary ‘welcome’ signs across the city. these signs were precisely not the singular and interpersonal expression of the drop-in centre. they were professionally designed and printed, and distributed to businesses that supported the social movement. they expressed a much broader sensibility of welcome, one not tied to specific acts or forms of friendship, but to a generalised disposition towards asylum seekers and refugees. the businesses that displayed such signs were not committing themselves to employing, accommodating, or training asylum seekers necessarily, although some did offer voluntary opportunities for asylum seekers as a means to address social isolation and cultural barriers in the city (darling & squire 2013). rather, they were committed to displaying an affinity with a message of support for asylum seekers and refugees in the midst of an otherwise repressive political and public mood towards migration of all forms. these signs did not indicate the kind of highly personal welcome that developed in the drop-in centre. instead, they sought to indicate a less demanding and less personal sense of welcome, of a generalised support in public for asylum seekers and refugees in the city. in this way, they were one part of a series of minor gestures of sociality that could make people feel welcome, even if only momentarily. it was this accumulated sense of welcoming that asylum seekers referred to in interviews when discussing what made the city feel ‘welcoming’. smiles and nods from passers-by in the street, a kind person offering directions to an otherwise lost new arrival, bus drivers interrupting their routes to point out the shortest way home, conversations started with strangers about the weather in doctors’ waiting rooms, all of these were cited as examples of how ‘welcoming’ the city and its people were. in this context, the public display of signs reading “we welcome asylum seekers and refugees” became a means of reiterating the sociality of welcoming, and was seen by asylum seekers in sheffield as a positive indicator of the friendliness of the city. indeed, the relatively modest nature of such signs, and the lack of expectation attached to them, meant that they reached a far wider constituency than the more demanding relations of the drop-in centre. these two signs thus point us to two modes of welcoming. on the one hand, the city of sanctuary signs and the ethos of welcome they expressed in public space, reflect a sociality that involves minor gestures of welcome and civility. these are moments of kindness, even possibly warmth towards strangers, but they are not enduring relationships. on the other hand, the drop-in centre and its more personal practice of welcoming, expresses a commitment to welcoming strangers that seeks to forge lasting connections between individuals, to promote forms of solidarity between those present, and to position the feeling of being welcome as a shared experience. for those asylum seekers i worked with in sheffield, these two modalities of welcome worked together to shape a sense of the city as welcoming, and to offer that form of respite that sparke (2018) notes in his discussion. respite of this kind is part of the emotional contours of refuge, as it can offer minor points of coping that can, as vainikka and vainikka (2018, 125) note in their commentary, be incredibly important in promoting a “sense of certainty and security” amidst the insecurity of the asylum system. it is this insecurity that gill (2018) returns to in highlighting the ‘suppression’ of welcome, and i want to now consider how such ‘suppression’ may be intertwined with the labour of welcoming. indifference to welcome the suppression of welcome is, as gill (2018) illustrates, a multifaceted process. it encompasses the rise of far-right nationalists, the increasing use of extraterritorial detention and processing to keep asylum seekers at a distance from diverse publics, and the pervasive labelling of asylum seekers as fennia 196(2) (2018) 223jonathan darling figures who ‘abuse’ the hospitality of the nation-state. these trends all place the culture of welcoming expressed in cities like sheffield under threat. however, they may also serve to foster dissent and promote the critical articulation of alternatives, as sparke’s (2018) discussion of welcoming in the context of migrant activism illustrates. in the context of the uk though, two further trends place the articulation and maintenance of a public culture of welcome at risk. these are trends tied to a diminishing sense of asylum, and the demands of responsibility and justice that seeking asylum brings to the fore, as properly public issues or concerns. the first trend is thus in the professionalization of welcome, such that welcoming loses its sense of interpersonal dynamic and becomes a transactional property. we might see parallels here to friese’s (2010) discussion of how migrants have been received on the island of lampedusa, and how localised cultures of informal hospitality have been undermined by the emergence of professional support services. in this case, gestures of hospitality enacted by local residents, were transformed into forms of “good practice”, and migrants were confined to segregated spaces and removed from public view as they became part of an emergent economy of “welcome” and “migration management” (friese 2010, 334). the significance of this transformation is in how the enrolling of private actors and professional services can act to not only enclose mobility, such that welcoming becomes a procedural matter, but also that this insulation leaves no opportunity for other forms of relation to develop. what is lost in this context, is an exposure to others in ways not directly managed by a system of enforced mobility, or by a contractual relationship that conditions the forms that contact can take (see wilson 2017). this mode of professionalization risks strictly defining the possibilities and limits of any form of welcoming, and undermining the grounds on which something like a ‘culture of welcoming’ might be developed. in concert runs a second threat, one focused on the public sociality of welcoming discussed in sheffield. in part this arises from decades of asylum and migration policy that has sought to coarsen public discourse on such issues. the privatisation of asylum accommodation and support services in the uk is one facet of this trend, but so too is the focus on creating a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants, such that policy is directed at deterring those not seen to be ‘worthy’ of welcome in the country. the effects are manifold, from a growth in xenophobia in public discourse to the structural marginalisation of migrant groups. but i want to foreground a more pervasive effect: that this coarsening of public mood has promoted a rise of indifference towards strangers. this is an indifference that does not set out to harm, but does not seek to welcome either. of course, indifference may still be preferable to the anger and hatred generated towards migrants in recent years, and sparke (2018) is right to remind us of the need to explore not just the emotional politics of welcome, but also the production of hate so readily associated with anti-immigrant positions. yet there is an important need to also recognise that for many the politics of migration and refuge may also inspire apathy, resignation, or what sontag (2003) termed “compassion fatigue”. in this sense, public indifference also has its emotional and affective dimensions, not of rage or frustration, empathy and compassion, but of mild irritation, resignation, or of a briefly felt concern that never accumulates into a desire to act, or a need to be welcoming. there is then a need to consider not just how the rejection or suppression of welcome is fostered, but also how an indifference to welcome, and an indifference to strangers, is also shaping collective responses to claims for refuge. the durations of welcome in this commentary, i have focused on how the practice of welcome, and the production of a culture of welcoming, can be fragile and laborious. it involves not just progressive sentiments and interpersonal connections, but also hard work, commitment, and a desire to welcome others. it is the gains of this hard work, and the resonance of this desire, that is under threat as gill (2018) draws our attention to. in response, he outlines various ways in which welcome might be protected and reanimated. i will not repeat these here, but i do wish to conclude by commenting on how such reanimation might proceed through a concern with acknowledging the multiple forms and durations that welcome may take. if welcoming involves labour alongside its attributes of interpersonal warmth and consideration, then the duration of welcome matters. beyond a singular moment of welcome, the process of 224 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections welcoming entails the work of ensuring that strangers feel the sense of security and possibility that welcome implies, perhaps indefinitely. welcoming as a process thus calls us to consider, as vainikka and vainikka (2018, 124) assert, the importance of who is undertaking this work of welcoming and how they are, or are not, able to maintain this process. as noted in sheffield, different modalities of welcome demand different resources and capacities. the willingness to offer directions to an uncertain stranger demands far less than the commitment to teach conversational english once a week, or the willingness to begin new friendships with those experiencing the isolation of the asylum system. in both senses, being welcoming can be open-ended, it does not have a set duration or time limit, and this means that acknowledging the challenges of welcoming as a process, as a labour of different demands and expectations, is critical in responding to the suppression of welcome. recognising the varying forms welcome may take is essential in finding ways to support and maintain the fragile cultures of welcome that do exist, not least because such cultures necessarily entail multiple modes of welcoming. at the same time, as many responses to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ illustrate, there is often an immediacy to the demand to welcome. it is in response to such immediacy that a ‘culture of welcoming’ either comes to the fore or is found wanting. it is this question of response, which returns us to welcoming as an ethical responsibility, for as derrida (2002) argues, welcoming cannot be fully organised and known in advance, rather it represents a disposition towards others that is drawn upon in a moment, an ethics that is embodied and felt. it is this thread of responsiveness, of expressing welcome as a form of social justice, that runs through the varied modes of welcoming i have sought to foreground in this commentary. such forms are not always successful in this endeavour, but it is in the labour of keeping such signs visible and keeping such friendships alive, that the ground work of maintaining a culture of welcoming is done. the fragile labour of welcoming is then a critical part of rediscovering; a taste for living in a culture, a language, and a country in which hospitality is no longer a criminal offence, a country whose national representation no longer proposes to punish the welcoming of a foreigner, and in which no one again dares speak of a “crime of hospitality” (derrida 2002, 144). references barnett, c. & bhogal, i. (2010) becoming a city of sanctuary. plug and tap, sheffield. darling, j. (2011) giving space: care, generosity and belonging in a uk asylum drop-in centre. geoforum 42(4) 408–417. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.02.004 darling, j. (2014) emotions, encounters and expectations: the uncertain ethics of ‘the field’. journal of human rights practice 6(2) 201–212. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huu011 darling, j. & squire, v. (2013) everyday enactments of sanctuary: the uk city of sanctuary movement. in lippert, r. & rehaag, s. (eds.) sanctuary practices in international perspectives: migration, citizenship and social movements, 191–204. routledge, london. derrida, j. (2002) negotiations: interventions and interviews, 1971–2001. translated by e. rottenberg. stanford university press, stanford. friese, h. (2010) the limits of hospitality: political philosophy, undocumented migration and the local arena. european journal o social theory 13(3) 323–341. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431010371755 gibson, s. (2016) ‘abusing our hospitality’: inhospitableness and the politics of deterrence. in molz, j. g. & gibson, s. (eds.) mobilizing hospitality: the ethics of social relations in a mobile world, 159– 175. routledge, london. gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70040 sontag, s. (2003) regarding the pain of others. penguin, london. sparke, m. (2018) welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 215–219. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 vainikka, v. & vainikka, j. (2018) welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 124–130. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 wilson, h. f. (2017) on the paradox of ‘organised’ encounter. journal of intercultural studies 38(6) 606–620. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2017.1386631 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.02.004 https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huu011 https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431010371755 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2017.1386631 untitled regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland kai-veikko vuoristo vuoristo, kai-veikko (2002). regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 251–259. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in this article, general and regional patterns of tourism in finland are compared with the preconditions for tourism development. a new model of the ‘regionalism’ of finland’s tourism is presented. a comparison of regional tourism demand (actual tourist flows) with preconditions and supply shows that actual tourism development does not yet correspond sufficiently to the predominant image of finland as a destination of nature-based recreation activities. the author suggests the promotion of tourism by means of a new image of “modern periphery” and its specific application to different tourist segments and nationalities. keywords: tourism, regionalism of tourism, tourism flows, preconditions for tourism. kai-veikko vuoristo, talvisillankatu 1 c 14, fin-05860 hyvinkää, finland. e-mail: vuoristo@hkkk.fi destination “modern periphery” finland has relatively good qualifications for tourism development. the strengths of the country are its physical attractiveness, modern infrastructure, political stability, and favorable geographic location in regard to wealthy european markets, i.e., the continent’s tourist potential. conditions for the emergence of real mass tourism are not very favorable, however, as the following discussion shows. finland has been portrayed as “the country of a thousand lakes” for a long time (cd-fig. 1). indeed, there are approximately 200,000 lakes as a heritage of geological history (see tikkanen 2002), but the lakes are not the only attraction of the finnish landscape. it would be more appropriate to speak of a special tourism topography (a combination of hydrography, relief, and vegetation), which in many places is quite suitable for recreational use. finland’s rich hydrography consists of lakes, lake chains, rivers, and, especially, the magnificent archipelagos of the coastline. this hydrography thus includes an abundant variety of islands and islets. forests, beautiful eskers, and hill country complete the landscape, which in the north and east is sparsely inhabited wilderness. in this natural environment, lapland has a special status among tourists and hikers as a country of reindeer, midnight sun, winter sports centers, and santa claus. also, the highest elevations are to be found in lapland. on the basis of this tourism topography, climate, a well-developed economy, and geographic location, finland is best suited for active vacations and outdoor recreation in which naturebased activities and experiences dominate. indeed, one could expect that the value of finnish nature as a recreational and entertainment environment will grow as urbanization proceeds elsewhere. “tourist country finland” can thus be described as a modern periphery: an excellent symbiosis of general peripheral attractiveness (where natural environment has been spared) and modern services and facilities available for tourists almost everywhere (vuoristo & vesterinen 2001). another strength of tourist development concerns finland’s role as one of the world’s leading destinations for congress tourism. in 1999, finland hosted 170 international congresses with 50,000 participants, according to the helsinki– finland congress bureau (kongressiuutiset 2000). the reasons for this development include memberships in numerous international organizations, the existence of modern congress centers, high252 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai-veikko vuoristo standard accommodations, and suitable attractions for short excursions around the congress cities (vuoristo 1991: 92–94). the principal center of congress tourism and other culture-oriented tourism is the southern part of finland, the country’s historical and modern core region (cd-fig. 2). the largest cities – the most popular tourist centers – are located there. the capital city helsinki is the leading destination of both domestic and foreign tourism. southern finland is also an important gateway region for tourist flows en route to russia (tourism statistics 1998). it has been said in fun that st. petersburg is finland’s main tourist destination. regional structure of tourism finland is divided into five macro regions according to the general preconditions for tourism development (artman et al. 1978) (fig. 1.): 1) southern and southwestern cultural finland 2) central lake region 3) ostrobothnia 4) eastern hill region 5) lapland this division gives only a general idea of those possibilities and limitations that prevail in different parts of the country. it does not reveal much about the actual distribution of attractions and tourism facilities or the orientation of tourist flows (destination choices of tourists). in fact, major parts of the macro regions are outside the proper tourism industry. therefore, a more exact picture of the ‘regionalism’ of tourism demand and supply is needed in order to understand the geography of finland’s tourism. “the inner regionalism of finland as a tourist country” (vuoristo & vesterinen 2001: 113–121) is revealed by examining: (1) different regional or national models and concepts of tourism and recreational travel (eriksen 1974: 327–348; campbell 1967: 85–90; gunn 1972, cit. travis 1989: 489–491; rognant 1990, cit. pearce 1997: 94–95); (2) a classification of recreation areas by clawson and knetsch (1966: 36–39); and (3) the criteria for the selection of tourism destination development areas by balmer and crapo corporation (tourism development… 1980, cit. travis 1989: 491). the outcome of this analysis is a model of the regional structure of tourism in finland (vuoristo & vesterinen 2001: 118–121) (fig. 1). the model is dynamic because the suggested regional division changes over time: for example, some attraction complexes may expand to a neighboring complex and new attraction complexes or tourist centers may emerge. the basic elements of the finnish tourism system are: • individual attractions • proper tourist services and enterprises • tourism centers: (a) popular cities where tourism is only one segment of the local economy; (b) rural tourism agglomerations, especially in eastern and northern finland • tourism regions or attraction complexes (specialized regions or zones that consist of tourism centers and routes, separate attractions, and enterprises) • potential attraction complexes • travel routes, especially scenic roads with tourist services • highway-oriented service establishments (especially firms established particularly for tourists) • wilderness areas (extensive uninhabited areas in lapland, including the country’s most attractive national parks and other legal entities) in addition, the emergence of special regional tourism clusters is also possible in the future. this means specialization in the manufacturing of tourism and recreation products around the growth poles of some important macro regions. the geographical distribution of attraction complexes shows an orientation towards south, east, and north, while there are only scattered tourist centers in ostrobothnia in the west (fig. 1). the principal center, however, is southern finland, where most domestic and foreign tourists visit. indeed, the lake region, the actual “country of a thousand lakes,” has so far received only a very small share of the international tourist flow, as the enclosed diagrams and maps indicate. in northern finland things are ‘better’ in this respect. the main tourist centers, the old cities in the southern part of the country, are typically located in an attractive environment and have versatile service facilities and good traffic connections. tourism resorts complement this pattern in central finland, where many of the resorts are relatively new winter sports centers. in northern finfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 253regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland fig. 1. tourism regions in finland: i = helsinki region; ii = hanko peninsula and lohja ridge; iii = turku archipelago coast; iv = åland islands; v = kotka–hamina; vi = hämeenlinna–tammela; vii = lahti and southern lake päijänne region; viii = tampere region; ix = central finland; x = lake näsijärvi and suomenselkä wilderness; xi = lappeenranta– imatra; xii = savonlinna–punkaharju; xiii = verla–vihersalmi; xiv = inner lake saimaa region; xv = upper savo; xvi = northern karelia; xvii = kainuu; xviii = koillismaa–salla; xix = kemi–tornio–aavasaksa; xx = rovaniemi and luosto– pyhätunturi; xxi = saariselkä–vuotso; xxii = western lapland (vuoristo & vesterinen 2001). 254 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai-veikko vuoristo land attraction complexes have grown in the uninhabited wilderness around emerging ‘tourism towns’ (fig. 2). this development has often been ‘wild’ and catalytic at first – planning, control, and integrated development have followed later. illustrative examples are lapland’s saariselkä and ruka where different stages of typical resort development (exploration, involvement, development, consolidation) are visible (for details, see butler 1980; kauppila 1995: 17–19; vuoristo 1998: 152–162). region i in figure 1 includes the capital helsinki and its surroundings within a 50-kilometer radius. as the leading cultural and economic center of the country, this region is the most important destination of foreign and domestic tourists (cf. fig. 3 & cd-fig. 3). the sub-urban fringe around helsinki is a very popular zone of weekend tourism, which is directed to numerous outdoor recreation centers and attractive towns (especially medieval porvoo). within a 30-minute drive, the nuuksio national park offers an introduction to the finnish lake land and wilderness (cd-fig. 4). adapting the original concept of clawson and knetsch (1971: 36–38), this region could be regarded as user-oriented due to its proximity (“close to users”), i.e, market-oriented. about 1.1 million people live within region i, and the demand for recreation and entertainment facilities is great both in the fringe and in the cities themselves. according to clawson and knetsch, areas of this type are most suitable for day trips and located “on whatever resources are available” (clawson & knetsch 1971: 37). in the fig. 2. an example of finnish attraction complexes: western lapland (xxii). the boundary of the new ylläs national park is not presented on the map. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 255regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland case of helsinki, several rural areas and landscapes within the city’s jurisdiction are suitable for recreational use, enabling lively weekend tourism. several of the country’s most popular tourism destinations are located in this region: the amusement park linnanmäki and the fortifications of suomenlinna in helsinki are among the leading attractions (over 1 million and 600,000 annual visitors, respectively). suomenlinna was constructed under the direction of a. ehrensvärd in 1748–1788 according to the famous bastion system ideas of a french engineer officer, s. vauban. as a unique example of military architecture, it is one of unesco’s world cultural heritage monuments (cd-fig. 5). attraction complexes in the east and the north are typically resource-based regions, which “may be distant from most users” and “where outstanding resources can be found” (clawson & knetsch 1971: 37) (fig. 2). their strengths are comprehensive areas that include very attractive natural sights and opportunities for diverse activities. the very strong demand by people living in southern finland has made these peripheral suppliers of tourism facilities economically profitable – in spite of the short, nationwide economic depression in the early 1990s. winter sports have become particularly popular, which has leveled seasonal variation remarkably. many foreign tourists have also discovered northern finland, partly because of the important travel routes connecting lapland to the neighboring countries. the regions of southern and central finland, excluding helsinki and its surroundings, represent an intermediate type. regions of this type “must not be too remote from users” and they should locate “on best resources available within distance limitation” (clawson & knetsch 1971: 37). some local demand generally exists, but the largest cities form the main market of these regions. advantages are the availability of space and other resources for tourism development. the proportion of foreign tourists of all visitors varies considerably. southwestern coastal regions are more popular than the interior. in the eastern frontier region particularly, the number of russian tourists stands out (vuoristo & vesterinen 2001: 165, 203, 325– 326). a special feature of finnish tourism and recreation is associated with second homes. most finns own, or have an opportunity to use, a vacation cottage during holidays and weekends. these second homes were previously called “summer cottages,” but today they are very commonly used through the year. almost 460,000 cottages are dispersed almost all over the country, but a clear concentration is visible along the southern and southwestern coastlines and in the southern parts of the lake region (cd-fig. 6). private apartments and log cabins in the tourism agglomerations of northern finland represent a special type of vacation homes. in fact, a majority of the accommodations offered to tourists in the large resorts of lapland and northeastern finland are privately owned. generally, second homes are of a considerable local importance because of the direct and indirect income effects they create in the economy of rural municipalities (see vuoristo & arajärvi 1990). fig. 3. distribution of tourist nights, by region and month (tourism statistics 1998). the pattern has not changed significantly since the late 1990s. 256 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai-veikko vuoristo a destination for european tourists foreign tourists choose finland as their destination for different reasons, which vary somewhat according to nationality (cd-fig. 7). several motives are connected to the natural environment. russian tourists especially have a shopping motive, the japanese are particularly interested in cultural attractions and events. foreign tourists as a whole, however, prefer urban attractions to natural environments in spite of the growing pull force of lapland. thus, helsinki is by far the most popular tourist center where both domestic and foreign visitors meet. 3.8 million foreign visitor nights were registered in finland in 1999 (24% of all visitor nights in accommodation establishments) (fig. 4). the number of visitor arrivals was 1.8 million (tourism statistics 2000: 49). most of the foreign tourists came from sweden, germany, russia, and the united kingdom. outside of europe, important countries of origin were the usa and japan, both of them significant sources of tourism income due to these travelers’ generous spending habits. naturally, the share of europe is considerable, approximately 80 percent of all foreign visitors to finland. neighboring sweden and russia and the world’s most significant single country of origin, germany, dominate the incoming tourism, but finland attracts an increasing number of tourists from southern europe as well. some nationality-bound orientation is visible in the geographical distribution of foreign visitors. by way of example, the majority of norwegians and swedes travel in northwestern and western finland, while the germans favor the lake region and the eastern hill region. the russians prefer eastern finland as well. geographical proximity thus explains partly these nationality-bound orientations. finland’s balance of tourism expenditure and tourism receipts is persistently negative (cf. cdfig. 8 & cd-fig. 9), because the finns are among the top 40 tourism spenders in the world (ranking 33rd in 1997 in wto’s statistics) (wto tourism statistics 2000: 16). tourism’s share of finland’s gross domestic product (gdp) has normally been only one percent (4% of the exports) (stv 1999: 217). seasonal features and trends due to its climatic location, finland is a country of four seasons. there are no extreme weather oscillations that could restrict noticeably the development of tourism. yet, the weather conditions are unstable to some extent, and long sunny and warm summer tourism seasons or sunny and moderately cold seasons fitted for winter sports cannot be guaranteed. however, the preconditions are sufficient for two main tourism seasons, summer and winter, and for a short fall period between them (fig. 3 & fig. 5). this ruska season in the fall is famous for the bright colors of vegetation as the plants prepare for the forthcoming cold. lapland is the main destination of this tourism. the influence of the greenhouse effect on finland’s tourism development is difficult to predict. according to some recent scenarios, it is to be fig. 4. visitor nights spent in finland, by country of origin and by macro regions, in 1999 (tourism statistics 2000: 49). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 257regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland feared that winter tourism in south and central finland will be damaged. thus, the value of lapland and the eastern hill region as major winter recreation areas will rise. on the contrary, the summer season in the south is expected to become longer and warmer. the duration of the seasons varies considerably in different regions. in southern finland, the summer season lasts from may to august, but in lapland only from june to august. in contrast, the northern winter is very long, over six months approximately. in other words, when summer has already begun in helsinki, the winter sports season still continues in the north. the winter season in the eastern hill region is also long, at least five months in duration. traditionally, the peak of the winter tourism period has been reached during february, march, and april, but two minor peaks have emerged recently: the so-called first snow weeks in november and the christmas season that lasts beyond the new year. the former peak reflects the growing popularity of winter sports and cross-country skiing (cd-fig. 10), the latter is also an expression of the lure of santa claus. santa’s attractiveness is exploited in the santapark complex at the arctic circle outside the city of rovaniemi. already before the opening of the theme park, michael pretes (1995) analyzed the finnish “santa claus industry” as an expression of postmodern tourism development. the rise of special ‘snow business’ activities and innovations in finland is based on the possibilities associated with winter and snow. examples of several innovations within this sector are mighty snow castles (sizeable snow constructions that contain hotel rooms, churches, etc.) and ‘ski tubes’ which allow skiing even in the summer. manufacturing industries have employed the benefits of the ‘snow business’: some automobile companies test their new models in the extreme winter conditions of northernmost finland and choose tourist hotels as their base for many weeks in the mid-winter, which normally is off-season. in spite of the growing winter tourism, summer remains the most important season. the finns, who form the vast majority of all tourists in finland, spend much of their holidays during the summer months, especially in july. likewise, most foreign tourists visit finland during the summer. thus, the significance of winter tourism so far focuses on the smoothing effect on the seasonal variation. also the relatively short fall season levels seasonal variation, but the emergence of the bright ruska colors in the natural vegetation depends on weather conditions. business tourism also levels seasonal variations because its focus remains outside the summer season. roughly every third foreign tourist comes to finland for professional reasons. a nature destination? actual tourist flows and the geographical preferences of foreign tourists regarding destinations do not correspond well to the afore-mentioned assumption about finland’s image as a nature-based tourism country, even though outdoor activities are not available in those urbanized countries fig. 5. the seasonal rhythm of tourism varies according to the geographic location and characteristics of each destination. mid-summer is the top season in the suomenlinna fortifications, a unesco world cultural heritage monument in helsinki (above). the busiest seasons of the spa hotel saariselkä in lapland are late winter months, early fall (ruska season), november, and december (the first snow weeks and christmas–new year) (below). 258 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai-veikko vuoristo where the foreign visitors come from. most foreign tourists, however, visit southernmost finland and the largest cities. elsewhere, their proportion of all tourists is relatively small, particularly in the lake and hill regions, where preconditions for summer tourism are the best. the conclusion is that the suggested definition of finland’s image as a “modern periphery” that is most suitable for active outdoor holidays may be correct, but its validity remains to be proved. finland is still a potential tourist country whose capacity is not in full use. one reason for this is quite simply that the greatest demand for outdoor recreation and activities is still forthcoming. the lure of northern europe will gain strength as the pressure on nature-based vacation destinations by the urban masses increases in the most urbanized societies that exhaust their own facilities. this also means a growing demand for sustainable tourism facilities, which finland is able to develop in abundance for both summer and winter conditions. there is, of course, some contradiction between sustainable tourism products (reindeer or dog safaris, boating, fishing, rafting, hiking, etc.) and such forms of ‘techno tourism’ as the skidoo safaris that are increasingly popular. environmental factors have been taken into consideration by planning an extensive network of skidoo routes which covers the most important tourism regions but avoids ecologically valuable environments, such as national parks, special areas included in the nature conservation program of the european union (natura), and other sensitive zones better suited to eco-tourism. it is probable that the future marketing of finland as a tourism destination will have a twofold focus. the first emphasizes selected nationalities, as stated in the recent strategic plans of the central tourism board of finland (mekin uudet… 2000). the second underscores specialized market segments who prefer the type of nature-based activities finland can offer, partly in cooperation with the neighboring countries within the barents area and the baltic sea region (see agenda 21… 1997; vuoristo 1998: 201–204). a general image of finland is not a sufficient tool for marketing the country to foreign tourists (vuoristo 1998: 178). besides this, carefully designed, specific images and market brands are necessary in order to make different activity groups or segments choose the “modern periphery” as their destination. references agenda 21 for baltic sea region tourism (1997). ministry of trade and industry, finland, working papers 16. artman h, r helle & k-v vuoristo (1978). suomen matkailun aluerakenne. mek a 12. butler r (1980). the concepts of a tourist area cycle of evolution: implications for management of resources. canadian geographer 24: 1. campbell c (1967). an approach to research in recreational geography. bc geographical series 7. clawson m & j knetsch (1971). economics of outdoor recreation. 2nd ed. johns hopkins, baltimore. eriksen w (1974). regionalentwicklung und fremdenverkehr in argentinien. zur problematik der erschliessung peripherer räume. in matznetter j (ed). studies of the geography of tourism. frankfurter wirtschaftsund sozialgeographische schriften, 327–346. gunn c (1972). vacationscape: designing tourist regions. bodr, university of texas, austin. kauppila p (1995). matkailukeskuksen elinkaari – esimerkkinä kuusamon ruka. nordia geographical publications 24, 1–130. kongressiuutiset (2000). helsinki-finland congress bureau, helsinki. mekin uudet toimintalinjaukset (2000). matkailusilmä 3, 8–9. pearce d (1997). tourism today. a geographical analysis. longman. singapore. pitkänen m (1990). virtain matkailututkimus 1989. virtain kaupunki,virrat. pretes m (1995). postmodern tourism. the santa claus industry. annals of tourism research 28, 1–15. rognant l (1990). un géo-systeme touristique national: l´italie, essai systemique. centre des hautes etudes touristiques, aix-en-provence. stv 1999 = statistical yearbook of finland 1999 (1999). statistics finland, helsinki. tikkanen m (2002). long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland. fennia 180, 31–42. tourism development in ontario: a framework for opportunity (1980). balmer & crapo, regina. tourism statistics (1998). transport and tourism 1998: 11. statistics finland, helsinki. tourism statistics (2000). transport and tourism 2000: 11. statistics finland, helsinki. travis a (1989). tourist destination area development. in witt s & l moutinho (eds). tourism marketing and management handbook, 487–498. prentice hall, new york. ulkomaalaiset matkailijat suomessa kesällä 1993 (1994). mek a 84. vuoristo k-v (1991). kongressimatkailun maantieteelliset ulottuvuudet. in löytönen m & j pietala (eds). reijo helle 60 vuotta. acta academiae oeconomicae helsingiensis, series a 77, 81– 100. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 259regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland vuoristo k-v (1998). matkailun muodot. wsoy, helsinki. vuoristo k-v & t arajärvi (1990). methodological problems of studying local income and employment effects of tourism. fennia 168, 153–177. vuoristo k-v & m paajanen (1991). espoon matkailututkimus 1990–91. espoon kaupunki, espoo. vuoristo k-v & n vesterinen (2001). lumen ja suven maa. suomen matkailumaantiede. wsoy, helsinki. wto tourism statistics (2000). world tourism organization, madrid. mapping the ‘gray area’ – commentary to tulumello urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80011 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80011 reflections mapping the ‘gray area’ – commentary to tulumello jouni häkli häkli, j. (2019) mapping the ‘gray area’ – commentary to tulumello. fennia 197(1) 158–159. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80011 as a response to simone tulumello’s essay ‘generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers’, in this commentary i reflect on some of the issues that i consider key elements in his provocative original text. i mainly pay attention to the question of balancing between ideal-typical simplification and nuance in tulumello’s argumentation, pointing at the risks involved in a writing strategy that seeks not only to engage and inspire but also persuade and convince. keywords: methodology, generalization, reflexivity, subjectivity jouni häkli, space and political agency research group (sparg), faculty of management and business, tampere university, finland. e-mail: jouni. hakli@tuni.fi simone tulumello’s (2019) paper is an essay that addresses some major methodological issues in social research in an engaging and somewhat provoking manner, and indeed playfully. proposing an original take on methodological reflection, largely through analogy with the study and practice of civil engineering, the text is written with wit and as such, it provides an entertaining read. tulumello succeeds in provoking the reader to notice some major differences in how generalization is performed and justified in quantitative and qualitative social research, and how quality control operates through methodological caution, reflection and transparency. in so doing, he also touches on the question of methodological monism and pluralism in social sciences. in tulumello’s view, the proponents of quantitative methods tend to adopt a monist stance where quantitative analyses and theory building are proposed as a model for all social scientific work. those working with qualitative approaches, again, largely agonize with uncertainty that ensues from methodological pluralism (see, e.g., sheppard & plummer 2007; rosenman et al. 2019). the paper’s perhaps greatest merit is the way it manages to bring two very different worlds of social research under the same rubric, and to discuss their differences in relation to each other instead of simply focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of one of them. tulumello’s polemical style succeeds in engaging and provoking the reader, but obviously also runs the risk of producing two methodological caricatures, one quantitative and one qualitative. the risk is further increased when ideal-typical notions of quantitative and qualitative methodology are employed in discussing their different modes of generalization, methodological transparency and scientific attitude (e.g. poon 2005; scott 2010). to do so is an understandable writing strategy in a polemical text, but i believe that the argument could be strengthened by including more reflection about the “gray area” between these opposite ends. what i mean is taking explicit notice of the following kinds of possible counter-arguments. first, not all quantitative social research operates with sophisticated statistical methods and causal models as © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80011 fennia 197(1) (2019) 159kirjoittaja the mode of theory building – there is a lot of scholarship that employs quantitative data in a rather straightforward manner to illustrate or evidence conceptual points in much the same way that qualitative researchers do their analytical and theoretical work. second, some qualitative researchers, too, make subjective choices concerning their conceptual, philosophical and ontological starting points “upstream”, as tulumello (2019) puts it, thus pushing their subjectivism out of sight in a way that has implications on the generalizability of their findings. third, it seems obvious that some researchers using quantitative methods also employ subjective judgement “downstream”, when interpreting their findings. finally, not all qualitative researchers work with case study, and this has implications on how they frame (or leave aside) the question of generalizability. these are examples of the objections that readers familiar with less categorical variants of social research may have for the paper’s argument. along these lines we could also ask, whether the idea of theory in qualitative and qualitative research is similar enough to merit comparison in terms of generalizability – could it rather be, as sayer (1982) proposed already in the early 1980s, that we are comparing apples and oranges, so that the whole notion of generalization is set up and argued for differently, and with dissimilar aims as a mode of knowledge production? should this be the case, it would be useful to discuss the issue to help cement the paper’s point (excuse the pun). there is no doubt tulumello (2019) is well aware of how the grey area between qualitative and quantitative extremes complicates the argument he proposes. this is indicated by his use of terms such as “quantitative/positivist” that adds some precision as to who he actually aims to refer to in the context of quantitative social research. he also makes a note of the rise of mixed methods approaches as a methodological strategy, which is why i believe tulumello could well incorporate some of this reflection to his argument. there is one final minor point that i laid a critical eye on. in discussing safety factors used in engineering, tulumello characterizes social reality metaphorically as concrete. while this makes sense in the context of his argument, and is in alignment with the adopted style of writing, i would add a sentence that explicitly notes that this is a (deliberately) mechanistic metaphor that in itself could be criticized as reductionistic. these observations and remarks notwithstanding, tulumello’s essay has a particular merit. i hope the essay, and the comments that each in their own way expand on the original argument, increase our awareness of the importance of methodological transparency, caution, and reflection as part of social research quality control. acknowledgements i wish to thank fennia editors kirsi pauliina kallio and james riding for the possibility to engage in a stimulating conversation with simone tulumello on his inspiring essay. references poon, j. p. (2005) quantitative methods: not positively positivist. progress in human geography 29(6) 766–772. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph583pr rosenman, e., loomis, j. & kay, k. (2019) diversity, representation, and the limits of engaged pluralism in (economic) geography. progress in human geography [online feb 27 2019] https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132519833453 sayer, a. (1982) explanation in economic geography: abstraction versus generalization. progress in geography 6(1) 68–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913258200600103 scott, j. (2010) quantitative methods and gender inequalities. international journal of social research methodology 13(3) 223–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2010.482258 sheppard, e. & plummer, p. (2007) toward engaged pluralism in geographical debate. environment and planning a 39(11) 2545–2548. https://doi.org/10.1068/a40205 tulumello, s. (2019) generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers. fennia 197(1) 121–131. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph583pr https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519833453 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519833453 https://doi.org/10.1177/030913258200600103 https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2010.482258 https://doi.org/10.1068/a40205 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 geopolitical lives of children – commentary to habashi urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80159 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80159 reflections geopolitical lives of children – commentary to habashi sunčana laketa laketa, s. (2019) geopolitical lives of children – commentary to habashi. fennia 197(1) 149–150. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80159 i write this piece as a commentary to habashi’s article (this issue) on the national identity of palestinian children. habashi reminds us here that national identities are not static and fixed and that children need to be considered as active agents in constructing and reconstructing national and global politics. i take her long-standing commitment to palestinian children’s narratives of their own geopolitical worlds to consider the geopolitical lives of children in my own home country – bosnia and herzegovina. keywords: children, youth, geopolitics, national identity, school, bosnia and herzegovina sunčana laketa, institute of geography, university of neuchâtel, espace louisagassiz 1, 2000 neuchâtel, switzerland. e-mail: suncana.laketa@unine.ch as i write this commentary, i am reminded of an on-going struggle for democratic open and empowering education in the city of jajce in bosnia and herzegovina (bih) where i grew up. specifically, the children and youth of jajce collectively stood up against the confines of nationally-driven education that perpetually pits one ethno-national group against the other. it all started in 2016 when the ministry of education announced the plan to establish a separate high-school for bosniak (or bosnian muslim) students in the city. when students were notified of this decision, they organized a series of public protests against further efforts at segregation in this post-conflict city. it was one of the first public outcries against divided education organized by children and youth themselves, and it brought to public attention the importance of taking young people’s voices seriously. in the words of nikolas rimac, one of the high-school students who organized the protest: “unfortunately, they did not ask us anything, we suddenly found out about the division last year. they said it was an issue for the parents... of course, we should be consulted because you cannot have a school without pupils, can you” (bešlija 2017). rimac and his peers took active ownership of their education in ways that challenged their assumed passivity in the field most heavily targeted by antagonistic nation-building processes. children are often instrumentalized in various nation-building projects, as habashi’s (2019) work testifies. nationbuilding takes different shapes and forms through which a sense of belonging to a national community is formed. children learn to become bosnian, palestinian or swiss through informal interactions in families, communities and localized places. but they also find themselves as targets of nation-building through more formal institutions, primarily the schools. in bih, education is completely divided among the three ruling ethno-national groups, a situation that was created during the war of 1992–1995 and that continues to this day. reflecting the system of segregated education, the new school in jajce was an effort to construct a so-called “two schools under one roof” model, an educational monstrosity that segregates children, teachers, textbooks and school administration on an ethno-national basis. it is part of a continuous effort by political elites to maintain ethnically “clean” spaces of education where © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.68860 150 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections “apples and pears don’t mix”, to paraphrase the infamous statement of greta kuna, the former education minister in bih. the self-other construction that habashi explores in her work becomes an institutionalized binary in the spaces of the “two schools under one roof”. however, “you cannot have schools without pupils”, as rimac powerfully remarks. joined and supported by some of their teachers, the children and youth staged collective walk-outs, marches and protests, slowly gaining publicity from national and international media. it was a year-long struggle that ended with a victory: the ministry of education finally abandoned the plan for the separate school. the event represents a step on a long-path to construct a socially just society, but an important step as well as the effects continue to resonate among other communities and schools in bih. similar to their peers in palestine, the children of jajce are not simply victims of the precarious post-conflict environment that they inherited but are rather actively constructing their geopolitical worlds. even more, the events in jajce testify to the political power of youth to contest dominant narratives. finally, as i use habashi’s (2019) article as a sounding board for some of the complexities of children’s national identities in bih, i would like to end with a few words on the open-review process for this article. it was an enlightening process that i was happy to be a part of. i found it to be an open form of dialogue that is filled with challenging, yet productive interactions. without the comfort of anonymity, the peer-review becomes a much more ethical and responsible endeavour. the process enables us to discuss each other’s work with grace and respect even in the moments of disagreement and friction. i would like to thank janette habashi, sandy marshall and kirsi kallio for doing peerreview differently together. references bešlija, a. (2017) nikolas rimac: we are not afraid of revenge, our teachers are with us! interview.ba 28.3.2017 <https://interview.ba/interview/item/137-b-nikolas-rimac-b-we-are-not-afraid-of-revengeour-teachers-are-with-us> habashi, j. (2019) palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era. fennia 197(1) 77–93. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 https://interview.ba/interview/item/137-b-nikolas-rimac-b-we-are-not-afraid-of-revenge-our-teachers-are-with-us https://interview.ba/interview/item/137-b-nikolas-rimac-b-we-are-not-afraid-of-revenge-our-teachers-are-with-us https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 tourism and rural community development in namibia: policy issues review urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46331 doi: 10.11143/46331 tourism and rural community development in namibia: policy issues review erling kavita and jarkko saarinen kavita, erling & jarkko saarinen (2016). tourism and rural community development in namibia: policy issues review. fennia 194: 1, 79–88. issn 1798-5617. during the past decades, the tourism sector has become an increasing important issue for governments and regional agencies searching for socio-economic development. especially in the global south the increasing tourism demand has been seen highly beneficial as evolving tourism can create direct and indirect income and employment effects to the host regions and previously marginalised communities, with potential to aid with the poverty reduction targets. this research note reviews the existing policy and planning frameworks in relation to tourism and rural development in namibia. especially the policy aims towards rural community development are overviewed with focus on community-based tourism (cbt) initiatives. the research note involves a retrospective review of tourism policies and rural local development initiatives in namibia where the ministry of environment and tourism (met) initiated a community-based tourism policy. the policy emphasises structures and processes helping local communities to benefit from the tourism sector, and the active and coordinating involvement of communities, especially, is expected to ensure that the benefits of tourism trickle down to the local level where tourist activities take place. however, it is noted that in addition to public policy-makers also other tourism developers and private business environment in namibia need to recognize the full potential of rural tourism development in order to meet the created politically driven promises at the policy level. in this respect, a national tourism policy could provide an enabling framework, integrating the tourism sector’s development aims to rural and community development needs in future. in addition, there is a need to coordinate a comprehensive vision of what type of rural tourism development or tourism in rural environments holds the most potential to benefit both local communities and the mainstream sector. keywords: tourism, community-based tourism, rural development, conservancies, namibia erling kavita, department of hospitality and tourism, polytechnic of namibia, private bag 13388 windhoek, namibia, and tourism management division, department of marketing management, university of pretoria, private bag x20 hatfield, pretoria 0028, south africa. e-mail: ekavita@polytechnic.edu.na jarkko saarinen, department of geography, po box 3000, 90014-university of oulu, finland, and tourism management division, department of marketing management, university of pretoria, private bag x20 hatfield, pretoria 0028, south africa.. e-mail: jarkko.saarinen@oulu.fi introduction during the past decades, tourism has become an increasingly important sector for governments and regions searching for socio-economic development and employment creation. especially in the global south the growing tourism demand is seen highly beneficial as evolving tourism can create direct and indirect income and employment effects to the host regions, which have further emphasised community involvement and community-based tourism initiatives in many countries (sinclair & stabler 1997; binns & nel 1999; saarinen & rogerson 2014), including namibia (novelli & © 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 80 fennia 194: 1 (2016)erling kavita and jarkko saarinen gebhardt 2007; jänis 2009; lapeyre 2011). tourism services and facilities can also improve the general level of infrastructure of a region which benefits local population by providing new, or maintaining the old, services and infrastructure (see brown & hall 2008). tourism businesses generate tax revenues, including revenues from employees. in addition, tourism promotion creates positive destination images attracting not only tourists but also businesses, capital investments and new skilful employees, like the so called creatives (see florida 2002; hall 2008). in relation to the global south contexts, sinclair and stabler (1997) have suggested that increasing tourist demand has a significant impact on developing countries’ economies. therefore, in many governmental strategies, the global south tourism has emerged as a driver for development that goes beyond economic issues and the sector is also used for promoting economic diversification and strengthening national economies (unctad 2010). however, sinclair (1998) has further indicated that the economic aspects of tourism should be placed in an equation consisting of both the advantages and disadvantages of tourism development. therefore, the economic costs, such as inflation, leakages, land use changes, security needs, crime and the increase of domestic prices should be considered. in addition, tourism creates cultural, social and environmental changes and impacts while issues such as opportunity costs are rarely discussed in relation to tourism development and planning strategies. all these aspects may have serious direct or indirect socio-economic implications, and, thus, eventually create costs for the host regions. in order to manage the costs and benefits of tourism development, many countries and regions have created strategies that aim to highlight the social responsibility of the sector and its benefit by sharing capacity at local and regional levels. this has sparked various participatory planning and community-based tourism and natural resource management strategies, programmes and projects which emphasise the sustainability of the businesses and local participation needs (aref 2011). by involving local communities, the benefits of tourism are expected to trickle-down to a local level where the tourist activities and impacts actually take place (see saarinen 2011). this review paper aims to discuss and review the policy issues relating to the development of tourism in the namibian context. especially the policy aims towards rural community development are overviewed with focus on communitybased tourism (cbt) initiatives. cbt can be defined as an activity which “through increased intensities or participation, can provide widespread economic and other benefits and decision-making power to communities” (tribe 2006: 365). as a policy tool, the cbt aims to ensure that members of the local communities hold a high degree of control over tourism activities and can receive a significant portion of the benefits (see novelli & gebhardt 2007; lapeyre 2011). recently, the ethical aspects of tourism consumption and production have been emphasised referring to development processes where tourism would be used as a tool for reducing poverty, ensuring environmental sustainability, developing a global partnership and empowering previously neglected communities and social groups (scheyvens 2002, 2011), as it was also highlighted in the un millennium development goals (saarinen & rogerson 2014). in human geographical approaches to regional development and tourism, these issues of ethics, inequalities and sustainability, for example, are highly relevant both academically and societally (see binns & nel 1999; gibson 2010; saarinen 2014). especially in the context of tourism and development, the local participation, tourism awareness, the devolution of power and benefit sharing have been highlighted with an emphasis on community-based tourism initiatives, which are highly relevant in the namibian and wider southern african development policy contexts (rogerson 2006; jänis 2009; saarinen 2011). based on this relevance the paper uses namibian community-based related policy documents by analysing their emphasised key aims which guide community participation in tourism development. tourism development in namibia after the independence in 1990 the government of namibia embarked on a new programme of economic development, which indicated that tourism could significantly contribute to the overall development of the country in the future (weaver & elliot 1996). consequently, the cabinet declared tourism a priority sector in 1991 (jenkins 2000). the main tourism products of the country are based on wildlife and wilderness experiences and arid landscapes. in addition, the ethnic groups and rural populations are visibly utilised in the tourism profennia 194: 1 (2016) 81tourism and rural community development in namibia motion but their actual role is sometimes marginalised (see novelli & gebhardt 2007; saarinen & niskala 2009; lapeyre 2011; ndlovu et al. 2011). at a general level, the growth of tourism in namibia has been positive. in the tourism peak year 2007, the sector directly contributed 16.3% to gdp and 73,000 jobs representing 17.7% of total employment (wttc 2006). indeed, prior to the start of global financial crises in 2008 the namibian tourism sector registered a good growth in the tourist arrivals, but the development has been relatively moderate since 2008 (fig. 1). regionally, the tourism development is highly polarised and concentrates on the capital city of windhoek, coastal towns and resort environments, such as swakopmund and walvis bay, and etosha national park. although tourist activities are concentrated on certain hot spots, tourism in rural communal areas and particularly community involvement in tourism were actively promoted from the start of the new economic development thinking in the 1990s, both by the government and non-governmental organisations (ngos) (ashley 2000). currently the role of communities and cbt is highlighted in the national development policies with an aim to use the tourism sector as a medium for achieving economic and social goals at various levels (see met 2007). since the independence, namibia has managed to distinguish itself as a country with an enabling environment for development in general and for a cbt enabling environment in particular. key enablers include peace and political stability, good governance, transport, developed information and communication technologies (icts) infrastructure, sound economic policies and community-based natural resource management (jänis 2009). namibia also has good prospects for accelerating growth. however, despite an enabling environment and good growth prospects, the country has consistently experienced difficulties in meeting its development goals and performance targets. poverty is endemic with close to 35% of the population living on less than one us$ per day while nearly 56% live on less than two us$ per day (naher 2006). income inequalities are among the highest in the world (a gini coefficient of 0.70) (wef 2001) and namibia’s low-middle income status alongside per capita income of us$ 2,156 indicates severe inequalities (marope 2005). the national average unemployment rate is about 52%. unemployment is highest among the unskilled and youth (novelli & gebhardt 2007). to better respond to these challenges, the government has aimed to reform the national development strategy. the reform agenda is encapsulated in a long-term vision for national development – vision 2030. a key aspiration of vision 2030 is to rapidly transform namibia into a high-income and more equitable knowledge economy (scholz 2009). the broad goals of the reform are to accelerate economic growth and social development, eradicate poverty and social inequality, reduce un0 200000 400000 600000 800000 1000000 1200000 1400000 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 ar ri va ls year fig. 1. number of tourist arrivals in namibia (adapted from ntb 2012: 14). 82 fennia 194: 1 (2016)erling kavita and jarkko saarinen employment, especially youth unemployment, and curb the spread of hiv/aids. as a result, the namibian government regarded tourism as a sector making a vital contribution to poverty alleviation. the national poverty strategy states that over the next decade, no other segment of the economy has as much potential to create jobs and generate income for namibia’s rural communities than the tourism sector. like many other developing countries, namibia’s tourism has been viewed from four perspectives by cole (2006: 630): a) economists generally see tourism as a route to macro-economic growth and particularly a means of generating foreign exchange; b) for the private sector tourism is a commercial activity, so the main concerns are product development, competitiveness and commercial returns; c) many conservationists now see tourism as a form of sustainable use of wild resources and as a way to enhance incentives for conservation; and d) for rural people and the development ngos that support them, tourism is one component of rural development. the interests of the namibian government embrace all four perspectives, with central ministries focusing on macro-economic objectives, the conservation and environment directorates on conservation incentives and the tourism directorate on the development of the sector in conjunction with the private sector. ashley (2000: 8) notes a growing interest in tourism contribution to local rural development, which is now seen as a key element in each of the above perspectives. several ngos working in conservation and development include tourism development in their work with communities (dixey 2008; jones & weaver 2009; owen-smith 2010). furthermore, the importance of tourism is clearly acknowledged by the namibian government in the national development plan (ndp) and in the national poverty reduction action programme (nprap) 2001–2005. in the latter, action 26 assigns the ministry of environment and tourism (met) the role of assisting rural and disadvantaged communities to setup cbt projects, such as business and joint-ventures, to facilitate training and enable capacity building. furthermore, on the basis of the general premises of cbt, namibia has initiated a cbt policy, which aims to explore ways in which local communities can benefit from the tourism sector (nacso 2007; saarinen et al. 2009). the policy has strong links with the namibian community-based natural resource management (cbnrm) programme and communal conservancy system (ccs) (long 2004) that have served the development of cbt in the country. conservancies are based on communal lands that are in general managed by communities aiming to use the natural resources of these areas in conservation and development purposes. thus, conservancies take responsibility for the natural resources, especially wildlife, in a sustainable way, which often involves the development of tourist activities (nacso 2007). community-based tourism in namibia historical background although rural communities inhabiting communal lands had some usufruct rights, the south african government retained ultimate control over land users before independence (long 2004). in particular, the colonial state kept full decision-making power over commercial and hunting rights in communal lands and captured most revenues from photographic tourism and hunting activities. by contrast, in 1975, commercial farmers on private lands gained additional ownership rights over certain natural resources, especially game species, and thus could exclusively use available resources and fully benefit from both consumptive (hunting) and non-consumptive (photographic) tourism (see also owen-smith 2010). at the independence, the new namibian government inherited a highly skewed land distribution (massyn 2007). in that period, freehold lands comprised 44%, protected areas 15%, and communal areas, where most of the people lived, 41% of the lands (fuller et al. 2006). consequently, the majority of rural inhabitants stayed in a limited and overcrowded portion of arid land and natural resources were depleted, thereby threatening environmental sustainability. currently, the pattern of poverty in namibia mirrors the unequal distribution of land. furthermore, the uneven allocation of land and resources commonly led to underdevelopment and poverty among rural communities (ashley & maxwell 2001). in this context, redistributing land through land reform and devolving rights over resources became the highest priority of government to redress past inequalities and to reconcile conservation and development. hence, the 1995 policy on wildlife management, utilization, and tourism in communal arefennia 194: 1 (2016) 83tourism and rural community development in namibia as clearly intended to “amend the nature conservation ordinance of 1975 so that the same principles that govern right to wildlife utilization on commercial land are extended to communal land” (lapeyre 2010: 758). the policy stated that 1) the right to utilise and benefit from wildlife on communal land should be devolved to a rural community that forms a conservancy; 2) each conservancy should have the right to utilise wildlife within the boundaries of the conservancy to the benefit of the community, once quotas have been set; 3) the conservancy should be able to enter into a business arrangement with private companies; and 4) the conservancy would also have the right to establish tourism facilities (see massyn 2007). in order to harness the potential of these policy aims for rural community development, another tourismfocused framework was needed: the communitybased tourism policy. community-based tourism policy in the report commissioned by the overseas development institute (odi), ashley and haysom (2008) observed that the ministry of environment and tourism (met)’s vision of cbt is in many ways different from what is found in the literature. met is interested in a large scale, ambitious and implementable approach to rural tourism development. for this reason, cbt in namibia has been conceptualised in its widest sense meaning “tourism that occurs at a local level and seeks to benefit local communities in its impact” (ashley 2000: 16). there is a broad acceptance of tourism as a strategy for rural development in namibia. especially the cbt approach and its adoption by the government and powerful ngos have highlighted the profile of tourism in regional development in rural areas and communities. in this respect, major international donors have assisted in building community tourism, organisation and programme development (lapeyre 2011). within this highly supportive context, cbt projects have flourished in namibia. in particular, three distinct forms of cbt were promoted and supported through donor funded programmes: 1) community-based tourism enterprises (cbtes) owned and managed by a community as a group; 2) indigenous enterprises, owned and managed by individuals coming from a rural community; and 3) community-private sector joint ventures where a rural community is commercially partnering with a private operator to own and run a tourism facility. these programmes and approaches are based on a legislative change in 1994 that made possible for communities in rural communal areas to acquire limited common property rights to manage and use their wildlife resources (barnes & novelli 2008). communities were enabled to register conservancies through which they could take on rights and manage and use wildlife resources, with the assistance of ngos and the government. a conservancy is a territorial unit where resource management and utilisation activities are undertaken by an organized group of people. to register as a conservancy the following criteria should be in place: a defined membership; elected committee members; agreed boundaries; a constitution including resource management strategy and a plan for equitable distribution of benefits (libanda & blignaut 2007; nacso 2007). with a long term support from donors and government to develop namibia’s cbt programme (table 1), communities in rural parts of the country have established some 50 conservancies on large portions of communal lands. namibia’s conservancy programme is regarded as one of the most innovative and effective community conservation and development initiatives in the world (lapeyre 2011). this programme, which had its beginning in the early 1980s, has evolved through a number of phases, growing from an embryonic community game guard project in northwest namibia into a full blown, national rights -based communal conservancy movement, covering more than 20% of namibia’s surface. on the basis of the creation of legal ground for conservancies and the positive prospects of cbt, the ministry of environment and tourism (see met 2007) initiated the cbt policy, which aims to explore ways that local communities can benefit from the tourism sector (nacso 2007; saarinen 2010). the policy has strong links to the namibian community-based natural resource management (cbnrm) programme and communal conservancy system (ccs) (long 2004). the key issues in the namibian cbt policy are related to the previously raised questions of participation and empowerment: “how to integrate local communities in tourism planning and how to ensure a sufficient level of power and control in the decision-making process concerning the use of natural and cultural resources in tourism” (lapeyre 2011: 307). clearly, the legal framework aims at involving rural communities in tourism at three levels. first, communities must be involved in the design and planning of tourism on their lands. second, communities must 84 fennia 194: 1 (2016)erling kavita and jarkko saarinen take part in the operation and management of tourism activities, either through community facilities or through commercial partnerships with the private sector. finally, communities must capture benefits (revenues) from the operation of tourism activities on their land (see ashley 2000). discussion: towards a national tourism policy in namibia? although the principal benefits of cbt are widely recognised (hall 2008; lapeyre 2010; saarinen 2011), the actual socio-economic benefits to the community can be difficult to achieve. blackstock (2005), for example, calls cbt as naive and unrealistic due to its focus in practice on sector development compared to community empowerment. in addition, she states that cbt often ignores the internal dynamics of communities and the external barriers, such as inequality between developers and local community members that affects the degree of local control. therefore, despite presenting an alternative response to traditional forms of tourism development, there are several elements that may explain the lack of significant economic impact from cbt in namibia. first, rural communities and supporting ngos have limited capacity in tourism project management. many local communities have low managerial capacity to deal with management issues (flexible decision making, accounting, pricing, punctuality, stock taking, forward booking, etc.) and business issues (advertising and distribution networks) (simpson 2007). in namibia, murphy (2004) also provides further evidence that communal management of community-based tourism enterprises (cbtes) is time consuming and often in contradiction with the sector’s standard time scale. in addition, development agencies and ngos often lack sector knowledge and are “notoriously illequipped to deal with product quality requirements and the promotion of tourism initiatives” (simpson 2007: 187). also in namibia, the namibia community-based tourism association (nacobta) and other implementing field-based ngos are staffed with community-focused workers with little or no knowledge of the international and namibian tourism sector. thus, they may have limited capacity and lack an appropriate orientation and the financial business skills needed in table 1. major steps in the development of the namibian community-based tourism (cbt) (adapted from jones & weaver (2009: 145). 1996 parliament approves the new conservancy legislation. 1998 the first communal area conservancy is gazetted on 16 february. three more communal area conservancies are gazetted by mid-year. the national community-based natural resource management (cbnrm) coordinating body is launched to promote synergy and lesson sharing in the development and support of communal area conservancies. president san nujoma officially launched the namibian communal area conservancy programme in september. the innovative nature of the programme is recognized by wwf’s gift to the earth’ award. 1999 the second phase of life programme begins, to run for further five years. 2000 the namibia association of cbnrm support organization (nacso) is constituted in march (the association was previously known as the cbnrm association of namibia). 2004 31 communal area conservancies are registered and more than 50 others are in the process of being formed. the national programme is supported by three major donors (life plus, the integrated community-based ecosystem management (icema) project funded by the global environment facility and irdnc activities in kunene and caprivi regions funded by wwf, uk). 2007 50 communal area conservancies are registered and 20–30 are under development. 2008 the life project ends in april, but the cbnrm programme continues with the support of government and other donors. 2008– 2012 usa government millennium challenge corporation largely invested in cbt: an estimated us$ 85 million. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 85tourism and rural community development in namibia tourism (hirsch 1978; rapley 2002). in this context, while necessary and highly laudable, ngos’ support to cbt fails to efficiently resolve such issues as the limited capacity within a single particular community. indeed, most ngos and donors involved in the development of cbt in namibia are specialised and focused on biodiversity conservation and rural development programmes rather than on tourism as a business, management and marketing. second, cbt is only marginally integrated in the very competitive tourism value chain (lapeyre 2011). communities are new entrants in the tourism sector with little or no previous experience (kiss 2004; simpson 2007). as a result, most communities have limited knowledge about the tourism sector and limited skills in tourism management and operation (tosun 2000). despite valuable training efforts by the nacobta, communities in namibia still have poor awareness about, and knowledge of, the tourism market. third, we consider that there is further need for a broader policy framework for tourism development better integrating business perspectives with community needs. while the cbt policy is in place, it may not guide a wider tourism development if it is not integrated into the mainstream tourism policies. the actual national tourism policy that focuses on the mainstream tourism sector has been under development since 1995. the first comprehensive draft was circulated to stakeholders in 2005 and the most recent draft was completed in 2007 (jänis 2009). both drafts state that the policy aims to provide long-term national development plans 2001/2–2005/6 and 2007/8– 2011/12 (see ntb 2012). however, the earlier draft from 2005 is more explicit about how tourism can contribute to the development objectives, while the 2007 draft is more focused on tourism as a viable and competitive economic sector and it has less emphasis on the role of tourism in national development priorities. as the 2007 draft was prepared by an external consultant provided by the european union (eu), it can be questioned whether this change in emphasis reflects the views of the namibian government or the consultant. what is clear is the difference between the two versions and how the role of tourism is placed in the national and regional development contexts. the 2005 draft highlights the importance of preparing a national tourism strategy and action plan to articulate the practical implementation of the policy (met 2007). however, the 2007 draft proposes a national tourism growth strategy that implies a clear emphasis on a growth-focused neoliberal approach as adopted by the namibian government (jauch 2001; met 2007). furthermore, the 2005 draft discusses the challenges and opportunities of cbt as a means of distributing the benefits of tourism, whereas the 2007 draft omits cbt and mentions only the need for partnerships between the private sector and local communities in order to distribute the benefits (jänis 2009). in general, tourism in namibia is considered to have major potential for employment and income generation in the country, and the role of communitybased tourism and community-based natural resource management with tourism development elements in particular are highlighted by national policies (saarinen 2010). conclusions tourism is increasingly used as a mechanism for achieving different societal and economic goals in namibia. in general, tourism is considered having major potential for employment and income generation. especially, the role of community-based natural resource management with tourism development is highlighted in government policies and supported with legal reforms and new frameworks. the reforms providing a basis for the creation of community conservancies in namibia were motivated by a combination of different contextual factors. these include the conservation gains witnessed in private ranges in the 1970s and 1980s, following the transfer of authority over wildlife to private landowners. the community-based programmes were also initiated in northwest namibia in the early 1980s by a local conservation organisation (owen-smith 2010). in addition, there were emerging lessons from international examples to utilise (e.g. zimbabwe’s communal areas management programmes for indigenous resources). as a result, over 54 conservancies have been established, with about 17% of namibia’s total land area now falling under their jurisdiction (nacso 2007). while it is true that the rights granted to communities are conditional and fall short of full ownership of wildlife (e.g. the determination of hunting quotas is still largely the responsibility of central government officials (ngoitiko et al. 2010)), the extent of devolution is relatively robust (long 2004). the ministry of environment and tourism (met) initiated a community-based tourism policy, which 86 fennia 194: 1 (2016)erling kavita and jarkko saarinen explores how local communities could benefit from the tourism sector. the policy has strong links to the namibian community-based natural resource management (cbnrm) programme and communal conservancy system (ccs) (see long 2004; saarinen 2010; suich 2010). the involvement of communities is expected to ensure that the benefits of tourism trickle down to the local level: the level where tourist activities actually take place. however, in addition to public policymakers, tourism regulators (e.g. met) and various ngos, the tourism developers and private business environment in namibia need to recognize the full potential of rural tourism development in order to meet the political promises. based on the current and somewhat competing versions of national level tourism policies, it is obvious that better integration between tourism, national and regional development aims is urgently needed. otherwise tourism development actions may serve more the sector and less the people in the future, manifesting contemporary modes of neoliberal governance and political economy in tourism, community and conservation relations. in this context, currently missing national tourism policy could provide an enabling framework, integrating the tourism sector’s development aims to rural and community development needs. thus, in order to guide the mainstream business growth and develop benefit sharing models between the large scale tourism businesses (contrast to cbt or cbe driven initiatives) and rural communities, a legislative or other regulative framework and coordination are highly needed. this coordination could also assist and empower local communities in “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps” through (rural) tourism development, as binns and nell (1999, 2002) have observed in south african context. after all, as stated by scheyvens (2009), we cannot really assume that the mainstream tourism sector has a strong and widely existing ethical commitment to ensure that its businesses really contribute to the rural community development, empowerment and alleviation of poverty. for that, ensuring international and nation-state based structures are still needed. references aref f 2011. sense of community and participation for tourism development. life science journal 8: 1, 20–25. ashley c 2000. the impact of tourism on rural livelihoods: namibia's experience. overseas development institute, london. ashley c & haysom g 2008. the development impacts of tourism supply chains: increasing impact on poverty and decreasing our ignorance. in spenceley a (ed). responsible tourism: critical issues for conservation and development, 129–156. earthscan, london. ashley c & maxwel s 2001. rethinking rural development. development policy review 19: 4, 395– 425. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-7679.00141. barnes j & novelli m 2008. trophy hunting and recreational angling in namibia – an economic, social and environmental comparison. in lovelock b (ed). tourism and the consumption of wildlife, hunting, shooting and sport fishing, 155–168. routledge, london. binns t & nel e 1999. beyond the development impasse: the role of local economic development and community self-reliance in rural south africa. the journal of modern african studies 37: 3, 389–408. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x99003067. binns t & nel e 2002. tourism as a local development strategy in south africa. the geographical journal 163: 3, 235–247. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-4959.00051. blackstock k 2005. a critical look at community based tourism. community development journal 40: 1, 39–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsi005. brown f & hall d. 2008. tourism and development in the global south: the issues. third world quarterly 29: 5, 839–849. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436590802105967. cole s 2006. information and empowerment. journal of sustainable tourism 14: 6, 139–160. http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/jost607.0. dixey l 2008. the unsustainability of community tourism donor projects: lessons from zambia. in spenceley a (ed). responsible tourism: critical issues for conservation and development, 323–342. earthscan, london. florida r 2002. the rise of the creative class and how it's transforming work, leisure and everyday life. basic books, new york. fuller d, howard m & buultjens j 2006. indigenous community development and self-employment: with case studies in eco-tourism in north australia, central queensland. university press, rockhampton. gibson c 2010. geographies of tourism: (un)ethical encounters. progress in human geography 34: 4, 521–527. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132509348688. hall c m 2008. tourism planning, policies, process and relationships. prentice hall, harlow. hirsch f 1978. social limits to growth. routledge, london. jauch h 2001. playing for globalization game: the implications of economic liberalization for namibia. larri, windhoek. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 87tourism and rural community development in namibia jenkins c 2000. the development of tourism in namibia. in dieke p (ed). the political economy of tourism development in africa, 113–128. cognizant communication corporation, new york. jones b & weaver c 2009. cbnrm in namibia: growth, trends, lessons and constraints. in suich h, child b & spenceley a (eds). evolution and innovation in wildlife conservation: parks and game ranches to transfrontier conservation areas, 223– 242. cabi, london. jänis j 2009. tourism development strategies in namibia: private and community perceptions on the national policy. in hottola p (ed). tourism strategies and local responses in southern africa, 8–26. cabi, oxon. kiss a 2004. is community-based ecotourism a good use of biodiversity conservation funds? trends in ecology and evolution 19: 5, 232–237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2004.03.01. lapeyre r 2010. community-based tourism as a sustainable solution to maximize impacts locally: the tsiseb conservancy case, namibia. development southern africa 27: 5, 757–772. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0376835x.2010.522837. lapeyre r 2011. governance structures and the distribution of tourism income in namibia communal lands: a new institutional framework. journal of economic and social geography, 102: 3, 302–315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2011.00665.x. libanda b & blignaut j 2007. tourism’s local benefits for namibia’s community-based natural resource management areas. international journal for ecological economics and statistics 10: w08, 249–259. long s 2004. livelihoods and cbnrm in namibia: the findings of the wild project. directorate of environmental affairs, met, windhoek. marope m 2005. namibia human capital and knowledge development for economic growth with equity. africa region human development working paper series. the world bank, new york. massyn pj 2007. communal land reform and tourism investment in namibia’s communal areas: a question of unfinished business? development southern africa 24: 3, 381–392. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03768350701445384. [met] ministry of environment and tourism 2007. national tourism policy for namibia. draft (september 2007). government of namibia, windhoek. murphy p 2004. strategic management for tourism communities: bridging the gaps. channel view, london. nacso 2007. namibia's communal conservancies: a review of progress and challenges. namibia association of cbnrm support organization, windhoek. naher e 2006. the contribution of community-based tourism to regional rural development: the case of namibia. unpublished ma thesis. university of bayreuth, bayreuth. [ntb] namibia tourism board 2012. namibia tourism satellite account. namibia tourism board, windhoek. ndlovu j, nyakunu e & kavita e 2011. re-defining the rural space in the kuiseb delta: examining the potential tourism benefits for the topnaars in namibia. journal of hospitality management 2: 4, 48–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.5897/jhmt11.028. ngoitiko m, sinandei m, meitaya p & nelson f 2010. pastoral activities: negotiating power imbalances in the tanzanian serengeti. in nelson f (ed). community rights, conservation and contested land: the politics of natural resources governance in africa, 269–289. earthscan, london. novelli m & gebhardt k 2007. community-based tourism in namibia: reality show or window dressing? current issues in tourism 10: 5, 443–479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2013.806583. owen-smith g 2010. an arid eden: a personal account of conservation in the kaokoveld. ball publishers, johannesburg. rapley j 2002. understanding development theory and practice in third world. boulder/co, new york. rogerson cm 2006. pro-poor local economic development in south africa: the role of pro-poor tourism. local environment 11: 1, 37–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549830500396149 saarinen j 2010. local tourism awareness: community views in katutura and king nehale conservancy, namibia. development southern africa 27: 5, 713–724. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0376835x.2010.522833. saarinen j 2011. tourism, indigenous people and the challenge of development: the representations of ovahimbas in tourism promotion and community perceptions towards tourism. tourism analysis 16: 1, 31–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.3727/10835421 1x12988225900009. saarinen j & niskala m 2009. selling places and construction local cultures in tourism: the role of the ovahimba in namibian tourism promotion. in hottola p (ed). tourism strategies and local responses in southern africa, 61–72. cabi, oxon. saarinen j & rogerson cm 2014. tourism and the millennium development goals: perspectives beyond 2015. tourism geographies 16: 1, 23–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2013.851269. saarinen j, becker f, manwa h & wilson d 2009. introduction: call for sustainability. in saarinen j, becker f, manwa h & wilson d (eds). sustainable tourism in southern africa: local communities and natural resources in transition, 3–19. channel view, bristol. scheyvens r 2002. tourism for development: empowering communities. prentice hall, harlow. scheyvens r 2009. pro-poor tourism: is there value beyond the rhetoric? tourism recreation research 34: 2, 191–196. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2009.11081590. scheyvens r 2011. tourism and poverty. routledge, london. scholz s 2009. tourism, nature conservation and environmental legislation in namibia. in saarinen j, becker f, manwa h & wilson d (eds). sustainable 88 fennia 194: 1 (2016)erling kavita and jarkko saarinen tourism in southern africa: local communities and natural resources in transition, 150–168. channel view publications, bristol. simpson m 2007. an integrated approach to assess the impacts of tourism on community development and sustainable livelihoods. community development 44: 2, 186–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsm048. sinclair m 1998. tourism and economic development. journal of development studies 34: 5, 1–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220389808422535. sinclair m & stabler m 1997. the economics of tourism. routledge, london. suich h 2010. the livelihood impacts of the namibian community based natural resource management programme: a meta-synthesis. environmental conservation 37: 1, 45–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0376892910000202. tosun c 2000. limits to community participation in the tourism development process in developing countries. tourism management 21: 3, 413–633. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1096348004268196. tribe j 2006. the truth about tourism. annals of tourism research 33: 2, 360–381. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2005.11.001. [unctad] united nations conference on trade and development 2010. the contribution of tourism to trade and development. geneva, 3-7 may 2010. weaver d & elliot k 1996. spatial patterns and problems in contemporary namibian tourism. the geographical journal 162: 2, 205–217. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3059877. [wef] world economic forum 2001. the african competitiveness report. oxford university press, new york. [wttc] world travel and tourism council 2007. namibia: the impact of travel and tourism on jobs and the economy. world travel and tourism council (wttc) booklet, windhoek. a question of time – or academic subjectivity? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa67834 doi: 10.11143/fennia.67834 a question of time – or academic subjectivity? it's just a question of time / it's running out for you (gore 1986) a bit over 30 years ago an electronic band depeche mode released a single a question of time, written by one of the band members martin gore (1986). the lyrics speak terrifically well to the present academic life. time, indeed, seems to be in question as we lead our lives, simultaneously carrying out research and applying funding for it, providing teaching and supervision, taking care of administrative duties, participating in scientific meetings and events, acting in positions of trust, taking up editorships and peer reviewing, organizing conferences, seminars, workshops, sessions and panels, giving back to individuals and communities engaged in our research projects, taking stands in academic and popular debates, circulating research results to different audiences – and living our personal lives somewhere in between. ‘finding the time’ is what academics often struggle with, when considering interesting new projects and activities as well as apologizing for not being able to fulfil commitments in due course. yet the mentioned piece of music is not concerned of time as something we may run out of or have hard time finding. rather, the song is about subject formation. it talks about the haunting, corrupt forces that seek to mould us to meet their own ends and turn promising young subjects into bulk. it's just a question of time / before they lay their hands on you / and make you just like the rest / they've persuasive ways / and you'll believe what they say / it won't be long until you'll do / exactly what they want you to these two facets of time, intertwined, have emerged in our publishing development project julkea! [dare!], coming to an end of its first year. it is a two-year “bold initiative”, funded by the kone foundation that promotes academic research, culture, art and the popularisation of research with the specific purpose of “providing alternatives to the mainstream”. in the project, three scientific societies – society for regional and environmental studies, geographical society of finland, and finnish society for environmental social science – and the referee journals they publish (including fennia), are working together with and for the finnish academic society, with the aims to advance publishing practices, infrastructures, communities, and conventions in the fields of geography and regional and environmental studies. the project is carried out in alliance with related national efforts seeking to foster open science by means of supporting society-based publications in finland (kotilava) in response to the open science and research initiative 2014–2017 launched by the ministry of education and culture: the objective is for finland to become one of the leading countries in openness of science and research by the year 2017 and to ensure that the possibilities of open science will be widely utilised in our society. the finnish academic publication scene is quite different from that in many other countries. nearly all academic journals are still published by scientific societies, as non-profit organizations relying on the support of their members, state subsidies and external funding, mainly independently of commercial publishing houses. universities and research institutes assume some responsibility for this publishing tradition, as their employees and students act in positions of trust in the societies, publishing the journals as part of their academic work. this implicit support has, however, started to wane out, increasingly during the 2000s as the universities have been transferred from state accounting offices into independent legal entities separate from the state, acting either as corporations under public law or foundations under private law. the general aim of the reform was to strengthen the autonomy of the universities, yet critical interpretations point towards neoliberalization (e.g. moisio 2009; kouhia & tammi 2014; ylöstalo 2014). among other things, the recent developments include establishing more and more individualistic and productive academic subjectivities, which gets us back to questions of time and its disempowering features. © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://koneensaatio.fi/en/# http://www.ays.fi/english http://geography.fi/english http://www.yhys.net/in-english/ http://kotilava.fi/19-elokuu-2016-1247/kotilava-%e2%80%93-finnish-academic-journals-towards-immediate-open-access 122 fennia 195: 2 (2017)editorial i can see them now / hanging around / to mess you up / to strip you down / and have their fun / with my little one the first half of the julkea! project has taught us that many people in the finnish academy warmly welcome the efforts to develop the current publishing system, to meet the demands of the present academic work, instead of letting it collapse and be replaced by commercial formats. institutions, similarly, express their support for non-commercial open publishing, at least if it does not expect their commitment or practical support. the current process where society-based journals are seeking to build a national consortium as a cost structure for non-profit open access publishing, enforced by the federation of finnish learned societies and the national library, has proven enlightening in this regard. the key actors – university libraries – are deliberating the request for voluntary payments in a situation where international commercial publishing houses demand high payments from them, which does not make it easy for the libraries to agree on shared responsibility. in the present situation, researchers are particularly aware of and annoyed by the measuring systems used to direct their agencies – to publish rather in journals than books, internationally before nationally, in publications with high impact figures, and so on (cf. jones 2017; ruez 2017). at the same time, finnish scholars find less and less time to engage with the society-based publishing system that requires even more voluntary work than academic publishing in general. running the societies, editing the journals and reviewing for them come on the top of everything else – the everything that needs to be done in time, albeit often running late. we suggest that this experienced shortage of time, often very concretely present in the form of schedules and deadlines and overlapping workloads, is tied to the academic subjectivities presently fostered in universities and in the academy as a whole. granted that scholarly work has always involved devotion and intensities, pressures from states and research funders, and mutual competition, there is something paradoxical in how we currently see and feel ourselves as scholars – hooked between critical minds and competing agencies. instead of using time for matters that require it, time seems to be using us, to purposes that cannot be explained in academic terms. we will give one example that resonates strongly with what michael jones (2017) brings up in his reflection on publishing, in the discussion series of this issue of fennia. the revise and resubmit processes, commonly used in journals with a high rejection rate, take plenty of time from the many scholars involved in them. it is not exceptional that the editors and authors work together for years, with an alternating group of reviewers, before they can agree – or disagree – on the version that can be published. the time spent is not necessarily proportionate with the gains in quality, while the papers surely transform in the process, as the introduction to the discussion series ‘on publishing’, in this issue, highlights (riding & kallio 2017). this results on one hand from that, peer reviewers do not always have the best expertise regarding the papers, and the time for reading the manuscripts and writing the reports is restricted. there are just too many manuscripts continually under review to meet the ideal criteria and, thus arguably, all academic journals struggle with finding reviewers and receiving review reports in reasonable time. this is pointed at by simon springer and the acme collective (2017) who, as part of their editorial work, are encouraging researchers to actively ‘make time’ for peer reviewing in oa journals, while acknowledging the overburdening and harsh prioritization of responsibilities in the neoliberal academia. moreover, the journal editors dealing yearly with tens of papers are neither experts of everything, as they apparently should be to serve the amplifying number of submission. editors may hence find it challenging to take an active role between the reviewers and the authors, to decide on the revisions needed for quality improvement. due to these practical facts, the r&r practice originally intended for assessing and improving the quality of publications may end up serving the publication process itself; the process eats time whilst the time for developing better papers lessens. this is not beneficial for anyone, yet the reality many of us know of and live with. the question is ever more essential to scholars coming from beyond the anglophone world. in her reflection on academic publishing sara fregonese (2017) – a fluent english speaker working in a british university and doing research on several languages – notes that nonnative speakers of english may face additional obstacles in review processes, ranging from picky fennia 195: 2 (2017) 123kirsi pauliina kallio & pieta hyvärinen comments on writing style to calling into question field work on languages foreign to the reviewer, which lengthen publication processes further. approaching the same dilemma, derek ruez (2017) suggests that new publishing practices are needed for leveling the playing field for non-anglophone scholars and to dispute the anglo-hegemony of the academy. these ideas and endeavors are not completely novel and they have been presented by others in previous discussions on socially just academic publishing, yet concrete measures remain few and little has changed in the big picture. a lesser amount of papers and journals would allow that authors, editors and reviewers could use their time for developing good quality and socially just publications, instead of being exhausted by their large quantity (cf. batterbury 2017; finn et al. 2017). this would ideally involve language editing as part of the standard process, where necessary. yet research funders and institutions do not easily share the ideas ‘less is more’ or ‘plurality as a value in itself’ but are, instead, constantly asking for more quantifiable research results as their performance depends on that as well, stemming from the competition state ideology (moisio 2009; paasi 2013). so being, have we no choice but to be used by time in the hectic and overcrowded publishing industry, producing more and more peer reviewed papers that, in their quantity, may not take things forward any better than a smaller number of publications could do? are we completely caught by the system as it is, in simon batterbury’s (2017, 175) words, “strongly linked to the individual reputation of authors, their prestige and job and promotion prospects”? publish ‘til you drop? a grim picture arises from this thinking. there seems to be no one there to be blamed, nowhere to appeal. in contrast with depeche mode’s song, and faithfully to foucault, ‘they’ cannot be seen hanging around us, messing up our new enthusiastic students and stripping scholars down from solidarities and alternative attitudes. the forces that make us so busy that we don’t have time for the matters that perhaps matter the most are, first, too global to be seen up close, yet at the same time too close, internalised in our academic selves. we don’t have a solution, and we are not going to pretend that we have one. in our different stages of academic life, we are both experiencing time as a hinder rather than a resource, and we have not found overpowering weapons of the weak to combat the dominating state of affairs. yet we believe that by paying attention to the paradoxical elements of our shared academic lives it is possible to make visible some sources of the experienced (socially constituted) lack of time and, perhaps also, draw attention to alternative resources that provide for using time in ways we choose to, and concurrently, to contest the faceless forces shaping us towards docile profitable academic subjecthood. hanging on to this fragile thought, we continue our commitment to developing better publishing policies and practices, as well as science politics based on plural values, even if we often have to admit: apologies but i just don’t have the time for this right now. this issue of fennia includes two peer reviewed research articles, one reflective book review, and a discussion series ‘on publishing’, introduced in more detail in a separate editorial text (riding & kallio 2017). the first article is by matthew sawatzky and moritz albrecht, based at the university of eastern finland in joensuu, drawing from their original research on reunion island. they have taken the french overseas department and region as a case study to explore the application potential of local energy governance processes, including aspects shaping regional translation of national and eu policy, and the potential effects of energy transition. the second research article is by christoph d. d. rupprecht from the research institute for humanity and nature in kyoto, japan. it engages with more-than-human cities as spaces of coexistence, arguing for a better recognition of informal green space as territories of encounter allowing for conciliatory engagements and interspecies interactions. the paper presents a rare approach in the present literature by, instead of juxtaposing humanity with the non-human and materiality, sets out to ask and explore what fruitful coexistence may mean in urban space, and how the individuals, collectives and institutions concerned about their cities could better sustain them by acknowledging the different capacities of non-human actors and elements. the book review included in our reflections section, by elisa pascucci at the university of tampere in finland, engages with ongoing refugee situations, policies and practices in the mediterranean region, broadly understood, and offering a critical approach to how alexander betts and paul collier couple humanitarian principles and capitalist economic development in their recent co-authored book 124 fennia 195: 2 (2017)editorial refuge. the critical discussion series on academic publishing includes contributions from michael jones, simon batterbury, derek ruez, sara fregonese, and the editors of human geography (finn et al. 2017) and acme (springer et al. 2017), preceded by an editorial introduction (riding & kallio 2017). we hope that this issue of fennia will be widely read and broadly circulated among geographers and beyond. the journal wishes to acknowledge the engaged work of all authors and peer reviewers involved in the publication processes – thank you for working with us with the ‘quality rather than quantity’ agenda in mind! kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief pieta hyvärinen julkea! project coordinatort references batterbury, s. (2017) socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals. fennia 195(2) 175–181. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66910 finn, j.c., peet, r., mollett, s. & lauermann, j. (2017) reclaiming value from academic labor: commentary by the editors of human geography. fennia 195(2) 182–184. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 fregonese, s. (2017) english: lingua franca or disenfranchising? fennia 195(2) 194–196. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67662 gore, m. (1986) a question of time. produced by depeche mode, gareth jones daniel miller, with mute records. jones, m. (2017) can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing – experiences from norway. fennia 195(2) 164–174. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 kouhia, a. & tammi, t. (2014) akateemisen kapitalismin uusliberaali tutkijasubjekti kasvatustieteellisessä tohtorikoulutuksessa. kasvatus & aika 8(2) 22–39. moisio, s. (2009) suomen valtion aluerakenteen muuntautuminen: teoreettisia merkintöjä ja empiirisiä havaintoja. politiikka 51(3) 155–173. open science and research initiative 2014–2017. https://openscience.fi/ paasi, a. (2013) fennia: positioning a 'peripheral' but international journal under the condition of academic capitalism. fennia 191(1) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.11143/7787 riding, j. & kallio, k. p. (2017) six sideways reflections on academic publishing. fennia 195(2) 161–163. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67833 ruez, d. (2017) evaluating otherwise: hierarchies and opportunities in publishing practices. fennia 195(2) 189–193. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66884 springer, s., houssay-holzschuch, m., villegas, c. & gahman, l. (2017) say ‘yes!’ to peer review: open access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia. fennia 195(2) 185–188. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 ylöstalo, h. (2014) työntekijäkansalaisia vai maailman muuttajia?: opiskelijat uusliberalistisessa yliopistossa. sukupuolentutkimus 27(4) 5–16. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66910 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67662 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 https://openscience.fi/ https://doi.org/10.11143/7787 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67833 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66884 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 understanding (un)certainty in human geographic quantitative spatial analysis – commentary to tulumello urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80216 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80216 reflections understanding (un)certainty in human geographic quantitative spatial analysis – commentary to tulumello ossi kotavaara kotavaara, o. (2019) understanding (un)certainty in human geographic quantitative spatial analysis – commentary to tulumello. fennia 197(1) 160–162. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80216 this commentary reflects uncertainty in human geographic quantitative spatial analysis within the context of simone tulumello’s essay (in this issue). epistemologically, positivism, logical empiricism and behaviourism must be understood as historical stages in the evolution of quantitative human geography, even though the analytical legacy is clear. a more recognisable quantitative methodological framework, related to postmillennial human geographic studies, seeks sufficient evidence, which supports or refutes a particular line of thought. in general, the consideration of uncertainty and error is deeply tied to the methodological knowledge in quantitative analysis. regardless of methodology or discipline, however, the risks of reporting over-certainty or clear misconduct are essential ethical questions. uncertainty is linked also to the limits of conceptualisation and information catchment, but robust information revealing otherwise-hidden patterns is often highly valuable. keywords: human geography, quantitative, uncertainty, spatial analysis, statistical modelling ossi kotavaara, geography research unit, university of oulu, p.o. box 3000, fi-90014, oulu, finland. e-mail: ossi.kotavaara@oulu.fi fragile, valuable and functional scientific constructions tulumello’s (2019) essay opens with an intriguing and playfully provoking debate concerning certainty, uncertainty and also maybe something that could be defined as ‘pseudo certainty’ in human geographic quantitative spatial analysis. in this spirit, i dare to state that positivism, logical empiricism, and behaviourism should be understood as historical strata buried deep under the actual foundations of present human geographic quantitative spatial analysis, instead of understanding them as vigorous paradigms in this field (sheppard 2001). as the heritage of the quantitative revolution, however, substantial selection of useful analyses still has a significant role in building information, knowledge and society in the postmodern era. in general, quantitative human geographic research seeks large and complex patterns, and the methodology includes built-in error sources. this methodology, however, can produce new and evident information and, potentially be used to develop society. again, qualitative human geography searches for something special, particular and, sometimes, unique that has the potential to be used to develop society. it is indeed worthy of attention that occasional studies, regardless of discipline and methodology, portray the research findings with more solid bases than they evidentially have. thus, tulumello’s (2019, 127) conclusion that, “but, after all, it is important to acknowledge the scientific construction for its fragility, not solidity; for its continuous need of © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80216 fennia 197(1) (2019) 161ossi kotavaara maintenance, refurbishing and restructuring. for, precarious as it is, it is the only shelter we have,” leads to openness and reflectivity in constructing any type of information, knowledge or theory. with this understanding, the reported collisions between qualitative and quantitative frameworks are actually the consequences of poor-quality teaching of analytics or narrow-minded thinking of scientists, not of the very debate with the present state-of-the-art or mainstream quantitative human geography. indeed, the actual positivistic paradigm from the 19th century and logical empiricism from the early 20th century were strong and legitimate in the history of human geographic research. in studies carried out during or after the ‘quantitative revolution’ in the 1950s, a positivistic framework can accurately be included, but the idea of homo economicus was, to the best of my knowledge, largely rejected during the 1970s (johnston & sidaway 2016). the quantitative methodological framework related to human geographic studies that is reported and discussed in journal articles and conferences follow closely the logic of fotheringham, brunsdon and charlton (2000, 5): in (quantitative) human geography, where the subject matter is typically clouded by human idiosyncrasies, measurement problems and uncertainty, the search is not generally for hard evidence that global “laws” of human behaviour exist. rather, the emphasis of quantitative analysis in human geography is to accrue sufficient evidence which makes the adoption of a particular line of thought compelling. i carefully suggest, therefore, that the positivistic paradigm could be applied mainly to clarify the historical paradigm and not to define the context of post-millennial quantitative human geography. some thoughts related to the uncertainty, dependence, causality and reality quantitative analytical human geographic research has an extensive analytical framework relying on spatial and statistical methodologies. condensing even the key epistemological discussions about some quantitative approaches would need significant efforts (e.g. töttö 2000). in general, measuring uncertainty and level of error are deeply tied to the methodological knowledge in quantitative analysis. even in the most basic levels of teaching, statistical dependence and causality are conceptually and analytically distinguished from each other. there are still researchers reporting over-certainty in findings or even producing misleading information, either negligently or purposely (fanelli 2009). high-quality refereeing processes and ethical standards are needed, regardless of methodology or discipline, but also reporting inconsistencies and uncertainties openly should be supported more widely in the academic community and publishing process. to discuss concisely uncertainty in modelling within human geography, i contradictory adopt the arrangement of levins (1966) from the field of ecology (i.e. a field of hard natural science also considering spatial components) that out of generality, reality and precision, only two out of three desirable model properties can be improved simultaneously. guisan and zimmermann (2000) have built a representation of this trichotomy of models. the first group of models focuses on generality and precision, and they are designed to predict accurate responses within a limited or simplified reality. these models are applied, for example, in exploring and predicting population trends, health risks or land-use changes. the second group of models is designed to be realistic and general. these mechanistic or process models are based on real cause-and-effect relationships, and they may be considered as universally valid by the functional relationships. a model of this group is not judged primarily on predicted precision, but rather on the theoretical correctness of the predicted response. similar to studies related to traffic safety (e.g. effects of using seatbelt, risk of drunk driving or benefits of replacing pedestrian crossing with underpass), it is possible to build highly valid models approaching causality with probabilities. the third group of models sacrifices generality for precision and reality. these empirical models are not expected to describe realistic causality, nor do they inform about supposed functions and mechanisms; instead, these models’ main purpose is to condense empirical facts. for instance, a large questionnaire about housing preferences and residential satisfaction, connections between different types of responses may be explored deeply or condensed in understandable form; generalising the results to other areas, however, would be irrelevant. in quantitative human geographic literature, significant efforts are paid to the applicability of methods. put simply, sample size and spatial and statistical distributions limit available methods. to 162 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections mention some classically recognised and common challenges, omitted-variable bias refers to a model where one or more relevant variables are not included, and their effects are attributed fallaciously to the other, included variables. ecological fallacy refers to misleading deduction where conclusions considering individuals are based on observations related to a group. again, the modifiable areal unit problem can significantly transform observations when small-scale measures are aggregated to largescale units or different spatial divisions. uncertainty is linked also to the limits of conceptualisation and information catchment. couclelis (1982) derives well the need for simplification and uses the example of increasing complexity in building a spatial model for urban functions. construction of the entity begins with euclidean geometry, coordinate system and spatial information; it continues with measurable values, their institutional and social determinants, and it ends with person specific subjective valuations changing by time and context. thus, the steps towards more realistic models from the simplest formal descriptions of information will, at some point, turn to numerous observer-dependent perceptions changing in time if a certain level of abstraction is not allowed. the balance between real and simple, therefore, may be best set at a level where enough robust information revealing otherwise-hidden patterns may be condensed to understandable and measurable form. again, even though the methodology and analyses themselves are objective, this framework should encourage us to emphasise more that questions asked in research will be somewhat subjective. references couclelis, h. (1982) philosophy in the construction of geographic. in gould, p. & olsson, g. (eds.) a search for common ground, 105–138. pion limited, london. fanelli, d. (2009) how many scientists fabricate and falsify research? a systematic review and metaanalysis of survey data. plos one 4(5) e5738. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738 fotheringham, a. s., brunsdon, c. & charlton, m. (2000) quantitative geography: perspectives on spatial data analysis. sage publications, london. guisan, a. & zimmermann, n. e. (2000) predictive habitat distribution models in ecology. ecological modelling 135(2–3) 147–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-3800(00)00354-9 johnston r. & sidaway, j. (2016) geography and geographers: anglo-american human geography since 1945. 7th ed. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203523056 levins, r. (1966) the strategy of model building in population biology. american scientist 54(4) 421–431. sheppard, e. (2001) quantitative geography: representations, practices, and possibilities. environment and planning d: society and space 19(5) 535–554. https://doi.org/10.1068/d307 tulumello, s. (2019) generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers. fennia 197(1) 121–131. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 töttö, p. (2000) pirullisen positivismin paluu. laadullisen ja määrällisen tarkastelua. vastapaino, tampere. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-3800(00)00354-9 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203523056 https://doi.org/10.1068/d307 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing – experiences from norway urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66602 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66602 reflections: on publishing can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing – experiences from norway michael jones jones, michael (2017). can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing – experiences from norway. fennia 195: 2, pp. 164–174. issn 1798-5617. in this article i reflect on ways in which the neoliberal university and its administrative counterpart, new public management (npm), affect academic publishing activity. one characteristic feature of npm is the urge to use simple numerical indicators of research output as a tool for allocate funding and, in practice if not in theory, as a means of assessing research quality. this ranges from the use of journal impact factors (if) and ranking of journals to publication points to determine what types of work in publishing are counted as meritorious for funding allocation. i argue that it is a fallacy to attempt to assess the quality of scholarship through quantitative measures of publication output. i base my arguments on my experiences of editing a norwegian geographical journal over a period of 16 years, along with my experiences as a scholar working for many years within the norwegian university system. keywords: bibliometrics, editing, impact factor (if), new public management (npm), norway, peer review, publication points, research quality michael jones, department of geography, norwegian university of science and technology, no-7491 trondheim, norway. e-mail: michael.jones@ntnu.no introduction a debate over publication points arose in norwegian media after the death of the distinguished norwegian political scientist, professor frank aarebrot, in september 2017. publication points are allocated for published scholarly works with the aim of making research measurable as a means of allocating funding to higher-education and other research institutions on the basis of scholarly production rather than, for example, on the basis of the number of academic positions in an institution (hansen 2015). professor emeritus in education svein sjøberg (2017) pointed out that although aarebrot was widely acclaimed as one of the most visible, productive and significant researchers in public debate and considered as an inspirational lecturer by students, only two articles that gave publication points were reported during his last ten years – yet he had 841 registered contributions in the form of newspaper articles, contributions in other media and public lectures. sjøberg argued that norway needs such academics, who ‘live up to the best ideals of the academic’s role as an informed participant in a living democracy’. however, the publication points system favours articles written in english in peer© 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 165michael jones reviewed journals. sjøberg claimed that this was used as an indicator of research quality when academics apply for jobs, promotion and pay rises. sjøberg’s article provoked a reply from undersecretary at the ministry of education and research (kunnskapsdepartmentet), bjørn haugstad (2017). he argued that lack of publication points had not hindered the recognition of aarbrot’s work in teaching and public dissemination, although he stated that in this respect aarebrot’s contribution was untypical. however, attempts to introduce an indicator for public dissemination had been abandoned because it was found to involve too much reporting and administration without a clear benefit. moreover, haugstad claimed that publication points were not intended to serve as a means of assessing an individual researcher’s productivity and quality. their use was simply to measure the volume of peer-reviewed publications as part of the funding system of universities, and moreover accounted for only 1.6% of the universities’ total funding. one of the instigators of the norwegian publication indicator, professor gunnar sivertsen (2009, 25, 29), has similarly argued that it was not intended as a measure of quality or meant to replace the qualitative evaluation of scholarly work. nonetheless, if publication points are not intended as a measure of quality but only of quantity, one is left wondering how publication volume can logically be justifiable as an instrument for allocating part of university funding (beyond the fact that the indicator is simple and easy to use for bureaucrats). however much it is denied, the underlying assumption in practice seems to be that a high rate of publication in selected journals is the most important determinant of research quality, without taking into consideration the complexity of different types of academic endeavour by a multiplicity of scholars that is necessary to secure quality. the neoliberal university and new public management despite strong protests from many academic staff, the university sector throughout europe as well as elsewhere in the world has in recent years been undergoing a radical process of transformation from public service institutions to what is variously termed as the neoliberal university, academic capitalism, or the commodification of knowledge (kjeldstadli 2010; paasi 2013; halffman & radder 2015, 2017; lund 2015; van reekum 2015; myklebust 2017a, 2017b). according to neoliberal ideology, universities are expected to adapt to market thinking and serve economic growth. universities should function organizationally like businesses with strong top-down managerial steering. the aim is to promote efficiency by adopting principles of management from the private sector. the emphasis is on performance indicators, competition and cost-effectiveness. the field of education is still to a large extent financed through taxation and public funding rather than through the free market, but pseudomarket indicators have been developed to measure performance. ranking and scores are examples of pseudo-market indicators, designed to stimulate competition between actors as if they were acting in a market. new public management (npm) is the bureaucratic instrument whereby universities are to be pushed in a neoliberal direction. among features of npm that directly impinge on publication activity is the increasing use of performance indicators in the allocation of funding along with increased reporting and auditing of results. performance indicators are measurable values that are intended to show how effectively a company or organization is in achieving its key objectives. one of the key objectives of universities and other research organizations is to achieve high quality research. in this article, i question whether the objective of research quality can be validly measured through quantitative performance indicators. i discuss publication points and journal impact factors (if) as two commonly used and mutually related performance indicators. i contrast these with types of scholarly work that are generally not ‘counted’ by performance indicators but which are nevertheless important, often vital, for ensuring the quality of scholarship. i discuss intended and unintended consequences for academic publication activities of this differential use of performance indicators. i use examples from my experiences of editing norsk geografisk tidsskrift–norwegian journal of geography (ngt–njg) from 1999 to 2014 and my wider experiences as a scholar working in the norwegian university system from 1973 to the present. 166 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing publication points – the norwegian case bibliometrics – the measuring and weighting of publications (also termed in norway the ‘publication indicator’1) – was introduced into the norwegian university sector in 2006 as an indicator of research productivity. bibliometrics originated in the mid-20th century within the history of science and sociology of knowledge as a tool for studying the development of modern science and social networks within it, and only later became a tool of research evaluation, to begin with in natural sciences (roll-hansen 2009, 72–73). the background to the introduction of the norwegian publication indicator has been given by gunnar sivertsen (2009). models based on it have subsequently been adopted in other nordic countries, including finland (paasi 2013, 6; sivertsen 2016, 79). the allocation of publication points is intended to stimulate increased scholarly publication. to be allocated publication points, research must be published in approved scientific or scholarly channels, meaning that articles are to be published in authorized journals, and books and book chapters are to be published by authorized publishers. authorized publication channels are approved in two categories, level one and level two. those considered as the 20% ‘most prominent and influential’ publication channels are credited as level two (hansen 2015). proposals for publication channels can be made by researchers to the norwegian centre for research data (nsd, norsk senter for forskningsdata). to be approved, publication channels must be identifiable by a valid issn or isbn. journals must have an editorship comprising researchers as well as routines for external peer-reviewing, while book publishers must have routines for evaluation by external consultants. the range of authors must be national or international (nsd 2017). to be eligible for level two, proposals sent by the national committees for different disciplines are assessed by the national publications committee of the norwegian association of higher education (uhr, universitets og høgskolerådet). the national publications committee updates the list of publication channels on level two annually (uhr n.d.). researchers register their publications in the database of the current research information system in norway (cristin, det nasjonale forskningsinformasjonssystemet). predecessors of the cristin database originated as a general register for all types of output by academics, a function it still has, and it was later developed into a bibliometric instrument for allocating funding. hence a distinction is practised between general registration of output and reporting for bibliometric purposes. bibliometric reporting applies to a strictly defined category of approved scientific or scholarly publications, referring to those that are admissible to level one or level two publication channels. there are routines intended to prevent double registration, for example of digital and printed versions of a work, original and revised versions, and original works and translations (cristin 2017). the publication points allocated for different types of approved publication are shown in table 1. types of output that are not accredited with publication points include textbooks, books aimed at the general public, popular science works, debate books, working reports, memorandums, reference works, translations, factual prose and technical literature not based on original research, and fiction. not all types of article in approved publications are eligible for publication points. editorials, leaders, commentaries, debate articles, obituaries, interviews, bibliographies, and book reviews are examples of academic output that are not accredited in this way. however, peer-reviewed overviews and review articles in journals receive the same publication points as ordinary research articles (cristin 2017; fossum-raunehaug 2017). publication type level one level two article in periodical or series (journal article) (issn) 1 3 monograph (book) (issn/isbn) 5 8 chapter in anthology (isbn) 0.7 1 table 1. publication points given to different types of approved scientific or scholarly publication in the norwegian model (cristin 2017). fennia 195: 2 (2017) 167michael jones in 2013 the danish centre for research analysis (dansk center for forskningsanalyse) at aarhus university was commissioned by the norwegian association of higher research institutions to undertake an evaluation of the norwegian publication points system. it concluded that the norwegian system was simple, academically well thought-out, and relatively cheap, and had resulted in a considerable increase in output in relation to the available resources. however, adjustments were proposed to stimulate greater cooperation between researchers nationally and in particular internationally, and the weighting system was changed in 2017 to encourage more co-authorship between universities and countries. a new formula for weighting co-authorship between institutions was devised. this was intended to reduce discrepancies that had arisen in the allocation of points between different types of research institution, to counteract the tendency to list more authors than strictly necessary, and to make it more difficult to use the publication points as an indicator at the level of the individual researcher. other problems identified in the evaluation were lacking transparency and legitimacy of the annual journal nomination process, and use of the publication indicator for allocating funding and incentives internally within institutions, faculties, departments and even at individual level (aagaard et al. 2014, 2015; kunnskapsdepartementet 2016, 69–70; sivertsen 2016, 85–87). critiques of bibliometric methods have raised a number of issues, summarized in a report to the norwegian academy of science and letters (dnva – det norske videnskaps-akademi) (østerud 2009). it was argued that publication points weight research quantity rather than quality. they do not sufficiently consider differing publication traditions in different disciplines. they may result in strategic adaptation towards certain types of publishing that does not necessarily lead to better research. they do not reward research communication in non-scientific channels. there is a danger that they may in practice be used as a measure of quality for assessing the work of individual researchers. the quality of the measuring methods is uncertain, and high journal rankings may reflect popularity rather than quality. in the same report, nils roll-hansen (2009, 76), professor in the history and philosophy of science, argued that the introduction of publication points reflects increasingly bureaucratic management of research, which is based not so much on an understanding of the research being undertaken as on applying formal measures of productivity. in europe generally, a move to classify journals into levels by the european science foundation through the european reference index for the humanities (erih) led to a joint response from editors of 56 journals in the history of science, technology and medicine. they stated that classifying journals in this way was doubtful, arbitrary and formalistic, and undermined the broad debate that academic renewal and critical evaluation of research quality is dependent on. on the subject of creativity, it was pointed out: truly ground-breaking work may be more likely to appear from marginal, dissident or unexpected sources, rather than from a well-established and entrenched mainstream (andersen et al. 2009, 4, cited in roll-hansen 2009, 79). the use of quantitative measures for research assessment in the humanities as well as in social sciences has raised widespread concern among scholars in a range of european countries. a recent report coordinated by the university of zürich revealed a diversity of views regarding how best to assess research in the humanities but found there was no easy way. regarding bibliometrics, it was concluded that for the humanities ’bibliometric analysis of publications cannot be used as a sole assessment tool’ as it is ‘an instrument that is too simplistic and one-dimensional to take into account the diversity of impacts, uses and goals of humanities research’ (ochsner et al. 2016, 8). i have observed a number of issues of contention regarding publication points in discussions with colleagues at my university. a general issue is that since the number of publication points has increased without a corresponding increase in resources, the funding allocation per publication point has decreased over time. another issue is the expectation that research articles should aim at publication in high-status international english-language journals, referring to journals published principally in the usa and the uk. overlooked is the fact that english-language journals published in small countries outside this core may be more international in submissions and article provenance than many anglo-american journals. yet the latter tend to have higher ifs and constitute the majority 168 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing of level two journals. a further matter is that discussions and decisions regarding which 20% of journals should be considered as level two journals is subject to negotiation, compromise and political positioning between disciplines and sub-disciplines more than on the unbiased quality assessment of journals, although if clearly plays a part in these decisions. which journals are to be on level two is reviewed annually, and this can result in journals changing status from one level to another from one year to the next. due to the time lapse between acceptance and publication, an article accepted for a level two journal may end up being published at level one if the journal is demoted in the meantime, or vice versa. a further issue concerns the classification of publications. books that have the word ‘encyclopedia’ in their title are deemed to be reference works and hence such contributions are ineligible for publication points. yet writing them often involves a disproportionate amount of work in relation to their length, and is not infrequently based on considerable original research. entries in the dictionary of human geography, for example, are in many cases similar to overview or review articles published in journals, but unlike the latter do not receive points. as journal editor, i experienced that it could be difficult to find book reviewers, as book reviews do not earn points and therefore tend to be given reduced priority in a busy work schedule. yet book reviews are an important source of information for researchers and their inclusion in academic journals can make a significant contribution to the critical discussion of research quality. again, obituaries are not allocated points, yet require not inconsiderable research and are a potentially useful source for the history of knowledge. the exclusion of textbooks and books aimed at the general public from the publication points system, despite the amount of work and not infrequently research that they involve, renders writing for this type of output less attractive for many university scholars. there is no doubt that the system of publication points influences what is given priority to and what is not. the current system of publication points results in several paradoxes. the number of points given to journal articles is disproportionate to those given to monographs in terms of size and work involved. at level one, five short journal articles are given the same weight as a book and, at level two, three journal articles weigh more than a book, even if the latter may have required several years of painstaking and detailed research (sandnes 2016). norwegian medical professor per o. seglen (2009, 40) states that there is no documentation to support the notion that articles in journals on level two are of higher quality than level one. he argues that the difference in weightings between levels one and two is arbitrary and has no justification. a recent study found that, although as whole articles in level two journals are cited more often than those at level one, the frequency of citation varies considerably and not all articles at level two are cited. the same study found that articles in open access journals are cited more frequently than those in other types of journal – as one would expect because of their greater accessibility. however, few of the open access journals were on level two (aksnes 2017). the question arises as to how far do bibliometrics for research funding lead to high-quality research and how far merely to mass production of low-quality research (gjengedal 2017). in sweden, bibliometric methods of research evaluation were critically discussed at a conference arranged by the academy of letters, antiquities and history in stockholm (kvhaa – kungl. vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien). it was pointed out that, especially in natural sciences, publication points may encourage ‘salami publication’, that is ‘slicing research results into the “smallest possible publishable units”’ to get as many publications as possible from one study (waarenperä 2011, 29). researchers are rewarded for frequent publication but not for devoting time to peer-reviewing the research of others. the conference report further emphasized that research creativity and productivity were two different things, but only the latter is measured (waarenperä 2011, 36, 39). impact factors academics are expected to aim to publish their research in the internationally most prominent and influential journals in their field. it is widely considered that an academic journal’s prominence and influence are indicated by its impact factor (if). impact factors were introduced in 1975 by the institute for scientific information (isi), now part of the commercial organization web of science, which in 2014 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 169michael jones indexed more than 12,000 journal titles. if is used as a proxy to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating how often its articles are cited in indexed journals. it measures the frequency with which articles in the journal are cited in a given period. a journal’s if is normally calculated by first counting the number of times articles published in the journal during two consecutive years are cited in the following year in all journals in an indexed database (a); the number of cited articles is then divided by the total number of citable articles published in the journal in the same two-year period (b), that is if = a/b. ‘citable articles’ are those that present original research and have undergone peer review before publication. critical voices warned twenty years ago of the dangers of using the impact factor of journals to evaluate research. seglen (1997) pointed out that high impact factor is implicitly considered an indicator of journal prestige, which is widely used as an evaluation criterion. nonetheless, he stated, a journal cannot be regarded as representative of an individual article published in the journal. apart from being non-representative, he argued, journal if has technical shortcomings, such as bias caused by the manner of calculation. he referred to studies showing that while the database of citable articles was limited to standard research articles, research notes and review articles, the number of cited articles included in addition those cited in, for example, editorials, letters and conference reports. this favoured journals that included ‘meeting reports, interesting editorials and lively correspondence’ (seglen 1997, 500). the fact that the citation count refers only to articles published in the previous two years also leads to temporal fluctuations in a journal’s if. furthermore, research fields where a significant part of scientific output consists of books, which are not included in the journal article database, may be discriminated against in a research evaluation based on if. such technicalities are unrelated to the scientific quality of research output. another aspect is that the dominance of englishlanguage journals in the citation index database contributes to low if for the comparatively few nonenglish language journals that are included ‘since most citations to papers in languages other than english are given by other papers in the same language’ (ibid., 500). large english-language research communities such as north america tend to cite mainly other papers in english, thus increasing the citation rate and journal impact of their own community (ibid., 500–501). seglen (1997, 502) concluded: ‘…citation impact is primarily a measure of scientific utility rather than of scientific quality, and authors’ selection of references is subject to strong biases unrelated to quality. for evaluation of scientific quality, there seems to be no alternative to qualified experts reading the publications.’ it is paradoxical that a citation count may be boosted by poor quality articles that are cited when they are criticized for poor research. in sweden, it was argued at the conference on bibliometric methods that especially in the humanities citation ranking can lead to scholarly overstatement to gain attention and that publication of controversial work may result in increased citations. a fixation on citations and ranking has led discussions away from what good research entails. there is uncertainty regarding whether research quality actually benefits from a citation index (waarenperä 2011, 29, 34, 36). geography professor anssi paasi (2013) has summarized in fennia the debate concerning how the web of science and ifs have come to determine what are considered as the most significant international journals. inclusion in the web of science database has become a ‘“synonym” for quality’ (paasi 2013, 2) among researchers, university managers, science policy-makers, and commercial academic publishers. publishing in journals with a high if is used as an indicator in the international rankings of universities (ibid., 4–5). since ‘most of the ostensibly “internationally significant” journals’ (i.e. those in the web of science) are published by major publishing houses in the uk and usa, this maintains the global hegemony of english as ‘a global synonym for “international”’ (ibid., 3). although the web of science has widened its range to include more journals outside the anglophone world, journals published in non-english language countries tend to come at the bottom of the if hierarchy. these journals thus underscore the (assumed) ‘excellence of the very established, high impact factor journals coming from the solid core of anglophone publishing businesses’ (ibid., 7). paasi argued that journals are in effect ‘classified according to their impact factors and in practice “quality” is still related to the journal’s position in this hierarchy’ (paasi 2013, 4), resulting in demands from research administrators specifying which journals researchers should publish in, that is those at the top of the web of science hierarchy. 170 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing the journal that i was formerly editor-in-chief for, ngt–njg, was admitted to the web of science index in 2008. in the nature of things, the if was low in the years immediately after ngt–njg became an indexed journal. hence, raising the journal’s if became a regular topic of discussion at the editors’ meetings. it was suggested that review articles should be encouraged as they often had relatively high citation rates, indicating the usefulness of this type of article, although they give an overview of a research field rather than presenting the results of a particular, specialized research project. it was further suggested that the inclusion of the journal in the citation database was contributory to increased manuscript submissions. on the other hand, it was found that an increase in the size of the journal from four to five issues a year to allow publication of more articles appeared to be counterproductive as it led, given the same number of citations (a), to a lowering of the if due to the increased number of citable articles (b). another consequence of the increasing focus on if was that a generalist geography journal such as ngt–njg, which initially aimed to include a relatively even balance between the number of articles in physical geography and those in human geography, no longer received the same amount of submissions in physical geography as earlier. physical geographers preferred to submit to specialist journals in geosciences with higher ifs. this phenomenon has also been noticed in other, more prominent generalist geographical journals, such as annals of the association of american geographers and transactions of the institute of british geographers (despite their higher if compared with ngt–njg). this appears to have occurred less in specialist fields within human geography (although paasi (2013, 7) has provided evidence to suggest that it has occurred to some extent in the case of economic geography). the underlying assumption is that journals with high if will attract the best scholars and hence the highest quality research will be published in them. this assumption is based on the reputation of such journals. yet this assumption is not accompanied by a genuine discussion of what constitutes research quality nor of any real assessment of the quality of articles published in journals with high if compared with those published in journals with lower if. academic ‘volunteer work’ – peer-reviewing and editing kirsi pauliina kallio, in a recent editorial in fennia, pointed out ‘that the process of publishing a referee journal article contains a significant amount of academic “volunteer work” by authors, editors and reviewers’ (kallio 2017, 2). to illustrate this voluntary work, she outlined 20 steps in the interaction between author, editor and reviewer in the process from manuscript submission to final publication. in the following i focus on the role of reviewers and editors. a rigorous peer-review process by independent and unbiased fellow researchers is designed to ensure that the research is of sufficient quality to be worthy of publication. peer reviews are qualitative and discursive rather than quantitative. they receive their legitimacy through intersubjective understandings among scholars of what makes for research quality, and involve often informal rules to ensure fairness within disciplines (lamont & guetzkow 2016, 31–32). without reliable and fair peer reviews, the system of quality control of scholarly output would collapse. peer-reviewing is a takenfor-granted part of academic work, and often forgotten in the allocation of funding and budgeting of time for teaching and research. peer-reviewing is undertaken voluntarily and gains no merits in the form of publication points, yet the academic publishing system is entirely dependent on it. answers to a recent brief e-mail questionnaire survey that i conducted among colleagues at the department of geography in trondheim indicate how peer-reviewing is perceived as a work task. the survey was sent to those in tenured academic positions. with one exception, the respondents replied that they had undertaken at least one and up to seven peer reviews during the first nine months of 2017. in deciding whether to accept an invitation to undertake a peer review, most replied that they primarily considered the title and abstract of the manuscript. just under a third of the respondents said they generally accepted review invitations, although it depended for many on time available and work pressure otherwise. several emphasized that their competence in the research field of the manuscript was decisive. the majority paid some or significant consideration to which journal the invitation came from, but in all cases the journal’s if was considered of little or no importance. one respondent replied that the focus on publication points resulted in more manuscripts circulating that fennia 195: 2 (2017) 171michael jones need peer reviews or re-reviews, adding to work pressure or resulting in some academics choosing not to review manuscripts because this work took time away from writing articles. most respondents had clear criteria for what they emphasized as important in undertaking a peer review. frequently mentioned criteria included originality, topicality, correspondence between research questions and research findings, methodological soundness, conceptual or theoretical foundation, soundness of arguments, good structure, clarity of language, reader friendliness, and referencing of relevant and up-to-date literature. several referred in addition to the individual journals’ guidelines. the responses indicate that the task of peer-reviewing is considered as a necessary part of academic work, it is taken seriously, and conducted systematically on the basis of qualitative criteria.2 editing journals and books is another task that is voluntary and for which publication points are not awarded. through my personal experience of having edited or co-edited eleven books on geographical and social-science topics, and five special issues of ngt–njg, in addition to serving as the journal’s editor-in-chief, i can confirm that this is time-demanding work. increasing submissions meant that the work load of journal editing increased over time, and in my last year as editor-in-chief i spent more than 560 hours on the journal. in addition came the work put in by the co-editors. neither the editorin-chief nor the co-editors received direct remuneration. the editor’s royalty went towards paying a part-time editorial assistant, whose work was invaluable. however, my work as editor-in-chief received recognition from the department in the form of reduced teaching obligations. considerable free time was also used. the work of editor-in-chief involved contact with the publisher, reading and making decisions on manuscripts, allocating as appropriate submitted manuscripts to co-editors, overseeing special issues, following up deadlines, and corresponding with authors, reviewers, co-editors, and the journal’s owner (the norwegian geographical society). the journal is international – 55% of the submissions in 2014 came from outside norway, the great majority from non-english-speaking countries. even though responsibility lies with authors for ensuring that manuscripts have been language-checked and are in accordance with the journal’s guidelines, considerable editorial work went into correcting language, improving style, reducing wordiness, fact-checking, and checking references. the less costly and less satisfactory alternative would be to accept a lower quality of writing. the work involved in editing and its contribution to ensuring research quality tends to be little understood by those who have not done it and is frequently little acknowledged. the norwegian publication register does not even offer a category for journal editing. it is a paradox that the rhetoric of improving quality and publishing more gives so little thought to the role of editors, without whose work there would be no journals or anthologies to publish. difficult though it might be to explain to colleagues, there is nonetheless a certain satisfaction to be gained from editing, derived from facilitating imperfect but promising research manuscripts to reach publication and hence realize their qualitative potential. australian geography professor and former journal editor iain hay (2015, 159) has summarized the challenges and paradoxes of journal editing as well as its professional and personal rewards as follows: although journal editing is central to scholarly enterprise, helping to maintain academic standards and shape disciplines, it is frequently discouraged within the academic assemblages that depend on it. … despite strong disincentives, journal editing offers valuable opportunities for selfdevelopment and deepening professional networks, as well as for refining the discipline. despite having a ‘problematic place in “academic capitalism”’ (hay 2015, 159), peer-reviewing together with journal and book editing belong alongside writing book reviews, obituaries, commentaries and debate articles to the sphere of academic services that contribute to the dynamics of a scholarly research community. these activities can be regarded as part of a care ethic, in which members of the research community strive collectively to promote maximum quality, as an alternative to the individualistically oriented, competitive academic ethos of the neoliberal university. concluding remarks impact factors and the weighting of publications favour production of articles in international, peerreviewed journals at the expense of time-consuming books, which receive relatively few points in 172 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing relation to their size and the work involved. similarly, popular science and presentation of research to the general public through communication and interpretation receive only limited recognition. further, writing book reviews is no longer given priority because book reviews do not give publication points; they are not valued – except by the readers. moreover, publication points are not given to the work of peer-reviewing and editing, which provides an important guarantee of quality. without peer reviewers and editors, articles cannot be published in trustworthy academic journals. the number of publication points is determined by whether an article is published in a first-level or second-level journal. yet the process of deciding what is a top-level journal is determined by impact factors and negotiation rather than any real quality assessment. a high if is claimed to be a mark of a journal’s quality, yet it is calculated in such a way that, if a new or expanding journal increases the number of articles published in a year, the if goes down. the reliance on if as a measure of quality favours the long-established and most well-known english-language journals, which are mostly published by large international commercial publishers. pressure to publish, stimulated by the publication points system, does not provide a guarantee that the published research is of high quality, and might even be detrimental to achieving the best quality. market indicators can tell something about the quantity and popularity of the products being sold, but not their quality as such. the quasi-market indicator of if appears to rest on the false assumption that popularity attracts and reinforces the best research. if is an indicator that was invented by and continues to serve commercial interests in the dominant english-speaking world. despite attempts to widen its use to non-english language journals, its practice remains discriminatory to publication in other languages than english. in many cases, this also applies to publication of specialized research in regions far from the major world centres of research activity. such research is not infrequently considered to be only of ‘local’ interest regardless of whether it is published in english or not and regardless of the quality of the research. that an article has a potentially high number of readers by being published in a journal with a high if is no guarantee of quality in itself. the guarantee is only provided by a properly functioning peer-review system. measuring quality by quantitative measures ends up as measurement of quantity rather than quality. quality is poorly amenable to quantification but requires critical reflection. critical scholarship should be the hallmark of the university, but it can be questioned whether critical reflection and scholarship are best served by the system of control and auditing by numerical performance indicators that is favoured in new public management. control mechanisms and auditing require increasing managerial resources. critical scholarship requires on the other hand autonomous scholars working in an atmosphere of trust and democratic debate. quality and quantity are two different things and one cannot logically be substituted for the other. quality is expressed through verbal discourse, while quantity is expressed by numbers and statistics. furthermore, numbers require interpretation though qualitative discussion. i argue that it is a contradiction in terms, indeed a fallacy, to act as if research quality can validly be expressed by numerical measures. notes 1 the publication indicator is more commonly known in norwegian as the tellekant system. the term tellekant (literally ‘counting edge’) is derived from the clothing business, where piled items of folded clothing can easily be counted when the folds or edges are neatly placed on top of one another. 2 the e-mail survey was undertaken between 25 september and 5 october 2017. questions were circulated to 16 colleagues and responses received from all 16. references aagaard, k, bloch, c. & schneider, j. w. (2015) impacts of performance-based research funding systems: the case of the norwegian publication indicator. research evaluation 24, 106–117. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvv003 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 173michael jones aagaard, k., bloch, c., schneider, j. w., henriksen, d., ryan, t. k. & lauridsen, p. s. (2014) evaluering af den norske publiceringsindikator. dansk center for forskningsanalyse, aarhus universitet, aarhus. <https://npi.nsd.no/dok/eval2014/evaluering_af_den_norske_publiceringsindikator_2014.pdf> 2.11.2017. aksnes, d.w. (2017) artikler i nivå 2-tidsskrifter blir mest sitert. forskerforum. 5.10.2017. <http://www. forskerforum.no/artikler-i-niva-2-tidsskrifter-blir-mest-sitert/> 2.11.2017. andersen, h., ariew, r., feingold, m., bag, a. k., barrow-green, j., dalen, b., benson, k., beretta, m. blay, m., bleker, j., borck, c., bowker, g., leigh star, s., buccianti, m., camerota, m., buchwald, j, gray, j., cappelletti, v., cimino, g., carson, c., clark, m., keller, a., cline, r., clucas, s, gaukroger, s., cook, h., hardy, a., corry, l., metraux, a., renn, j., dolan, b., luckin, b., duerbeck, h., orchiston, w., epple, m., hård, m., rheinberger h-j., roelcke, v., farber, p., fissell, m., packard, r., fox, r., frasca spada, m., french, s., good, j., hackmann, w., hllieux, r., holmqvist, b., home, r., hoskin, m., inkster, i., jardine, n., levere, t., lightman, b., lüthy, c., lynch, m., mccluskey, s., ruggles, c., morris, p., rhys morus, i., nelson, e. c., perez, l., rigden, j., stuewer, r. h., samsó, j., schaffer, s., schappacher, n., staudenmaier sj, j., strom, c., unschuld, p., weingart, p., zamecki, s. & zuidervaart, h. (2009) journals under threat: a joint response from history of science, technology and medicine editors. centaurus 51 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0498.2008.00140.x cristin [det nasjonale forskningsinformasjons-systemet] (2017) reporting of academic publications in the health, institute and he sectors. 28.3.2017. cristin – current research information system in norway, oslo. <http://www.cristin.no/english/resources/reporting-instructions/> 1.11.2017. fossum-raunehaug, s. (2017) publication points and reward of publications at level 1 and 2. 3.7.2017. nmbu – norwegian university of life sciences, ås. <https://www.nmbu.no/en/research/for_ researchers/publishing-abc/node/25300> 2.11.2017. gjengedal, k. (2017) kvalitet er meir enn siteringar. forskerforum 49(8) 6–7. halffman, w. & radder, h. (2015) the academic manifesto: from an occupied to a public university. minerva 53(2) 165–187. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11024-015-9270-9 halffman, w. & radder, h. (eds.) (2017) international responses to the academic manifesto: reports from 14 countries. social epistemology review and reply collective, special report 2017. <http://wp.me/ p1bfg0-3fv> 2.11.2017. hansen, t. i. (2015) tellekantsystemet. in store norske leksikon. 20.2.2015. <https://snl.no/ tellekantsystemet> 2.11.2017. haugstad, b. (2017) om aarebrot og tellekanter. khrono. 27.9.2017. <https://khrono.no/debatt/snodigom-aarebrot-og-tellekanter> 2.11.2017. hay, i. (2015) ‘why edit a scholarly journal? academic irony and paradox. the professional geographer 68(1) 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2015.1062704 kallio, k. p. (2017) subtle radical moves in scientific publishing. fennia 195(1) 1–4. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 kjelstadli, k. (2010) akademisk kapitalismen. forlaget res publica, oslo. kunnskapsdepartementet (2016) orientering om statsbudsjettet 2017 for universitet og høgskolar: etter vedtak i stortinget 17. desember 2016: mål for universitet og høgskolar, budsjett og endringar i løyving og finansieringssystemet. kunnskapsdepartementet, oslo. <https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets /31af8e2c3a224ac2829e48cc91d89083/orientering-om-statsbudsjettet-2017-for-universiteter-oghoegskolar_ny-versjon160217.pdf> 2.11.2017. lamont, m. & guetzkow, j. (2016) how quality is recognized by peer review panels: the case of the humanities. in ochsner, m., hug, s. e. & daniel, h-d. (eds.) research assessment in the humanities: towards criteria and procedures, 31–41. springer open. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29016-4_4 lund, r.w.b. (2015) doing the ideal academic: gender, excellence and changing academia. doctoral dissertations 98/2015. aalto university, helsinki. myklebust, j. p. (2017a) in search of a new form of university governance. university world news 450. 10.03.2017. <http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2017030918094136> 7.9.2017. myklebust, j. p. (2017b) should universities be run like businesses? university world news 473. 8.9.2017. <http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20170908102945748> 7.9.2017 nsd [norsk senter for forskningsdata] (2017) register over vitenskapelige publiseringskanaler: kriterier for godkjenning av publiseringskanaler. nsd – norsk senter for forskningsdata, bergen. <https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/omkriterier> 2.11.2017. ochsner, m., hug, s. e. & daniel, h-d. (2016) research assessment in the humanities: introduction. in ochsner, m., hug, s. e. & daniel, h-d. (eds.) research assessment in the humanities: towards criteria and procedures, 1–10. springer open. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29016-4_1 østerud, ø. (2009) forord. in østerud, ø. (ed.) hvordan måle vitenskap? søkelys på bibliometriske metoder, 5–7. det norske videnskaps-akademi – novus forlag, oslo. <http://www.dnva.no/binfil/ download.php?tid=41358> 2.11.2017. 174 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing paasi, a. (2013). fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal under conditions of academic capitalism. fennia 191(1) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.11143/7787 van reekum, r. (ed.) (2015) the new university: a special issue on the future of the university. krisis 2015(2). <http://krisis.eu/the-new-university/> 2.11.2017. roll-hansen, n. (2009) om å “måle” kvalitet av forskning. in østerud, ø. (ed.) hvordan måle vitenskap? søkelys på bibliometriske metoder, 71–80. det norske videnskaps-akademi – novus forlag, oslo. <http://www.dnva.no/binfil/download.php?tid=41358> 2.11.2017. sandnes, f. e. (2016) hvordan melke nye tellekanter. khrono 27.4.2016. <https://khrono.no/debatt/ hvordan-melke-tellekanter-i-2016> 2.11.2017. seglen, p. o. (1997) why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. bmj 314, 498–502. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.314.7079.497 seglen, p. o. (2009) er tidsskrift-renommé og artikkeltelling adekvate mål for vitenskapelig kvalitet og kvantitet? in østerud, ø. (ed.) hvordan måle vitenskap? søkelys på bibliometriske metoder, 39–70. det norske videnskaps-akademi – novus forlag, oslo. <http://www.dnva.no/binfil/download. php?tid=41358> 2.11.2017. sivertsen, g. (2009) publiseringsindikatoren. in østerud, ø. (ed.) hvordan måle vitenskap? søkelys på bibliometriske metoder, 11–37. det norske videnskaps-akademi – novus forlag, oslo. <http://www. dnva.no/binfil/download.php?tid=41358> 2.11.2017. sivertsen, g. (2016) publication-based funding: the norwegian model. in ochsner, m., hug, s. e. & daniel, h-d. (eds.) research assessment in the humanities: towards criteria and procedures, 79–90. springer open. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29016-4_7 sjøberg, s. (2017) null poeng til aarebrot? khrono. 19.9.2017. <https://khrono.no/debatt/null-poeng-tilfrank-aarebrot> 2.11.2017. uhr [universitetsog høgskolerådet] (n.d.) publiseringskanaler. universitetsog høgskolerådet, oslo. <http://www.uhr.no/rad_og_utvalg/utvalg/det_nasjonale_publiseringsutvalget/publiseringskanaler> 2.11.2017. waarenperä, u. (ed.) (2011) universitetsrankning och bibliometriska mätningar: konsekvenser för forskning och kunskapsutveckling. konferenser 74. kungl. vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, stockholm. <https://vitterhetsakad.bokorder.se/sv-se/article/2103/universitetsrankning-och-bibliometriska-matni> a time-geographical mixed-methods approach: studying the complexities of energy and water use in households urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa68860 doi: 10.11143/fennia.68860 a time-geographical mixed-methods approach: studying the complexities of energy and water use in households helena köhler and kristina trygg köhler, h. & trygg, k. (2019) a time-geographical mixed-methods approach: studying the complexities of energy and water use in households. fennia 197(1) 108–120. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.68860 the objective of this study is to describe and assess a methodology based on a time geographical approach for studying energy and water use in households. energy and water resources are often used in routinized activities, and in activities considered as private, normal and ordinary, which makes them difficult to explore in research. in this article, we give an account of a mixed-methods approach using time diaries, metering data, interviews and simple observations, and analyse and discuss its methodological and empirical implications from two swedish case studies. we conclude that the suggested combination of methods, despite some complications, provides a comprehensive account of household energy and water use to which various theoretical perspectives could apply. energy and water using activities are defined in terms of time, place, quantity, material and social context, and are related to user perspectives on resource use and usage data. such knowledge provides important input for information campaigns, technological retrofitting and other systemic changes in striving towards sustainability. keywords: time geography, methodology, water, energy, households, everyday life helena köhler, department of thematic studies – environmental change, linköping university, se-581 83 linköping, sweden. e-mail: helena.kohler@liu.se kristina trygg, department of thematic studies – technology and social change, linköping university, se-581 83 linköping, sweden. e-mail: kristina. trygg@liu.se introduction a key to sustainable development is to reduce the use of natural resources (un 2015). households could contribute by using more environmentally friendly products, using fewer resources and being more efficient. seemingly mundane and simple activities such as washing, cleaning, airing and cooking are critical simply because they are repeatedly done by many people. are there any ways such activities can be done differently and less often, and be less resource intensive? to approach this issue, we must study individuals’ activities in households and their rationale. in this article, we suggest a comprehensive methodological approach; a combination of time diaries, metering data, interviews and simple observations, to unveil and recognize household resource use in its material and socio-cultural context, and thereby enable an understanding of everyday practices and their significance in terms of resource usage. mixed-methods approaches have the potential to disclose different perspectives and provide a deeper examination of the issue in focus (valentine 2001). the © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.68860 fennia 197(1) (2019) 109helena köhler & kristina trygg complexity will become visible and thereby subject to analysis (widerberg 2002). also, with the use of multiple methods the weaknesses of a single method can be counterbalanced (e.g. rose 1993; mclafferty 1995; moss 1995). the methodological combination described and assessed in this article is theoretically based on time geography. time geography has been found to be a suitable approach to cover the seemingly insignificant and taken for granted, yet vital, aspects of everyday life (ellegård 1999). time-geography focuses on the individual’s possibilities to execute activities in relation to the site-specific material and social situation at hand – the action space. everyday life is defined by all individual activities, but when studying it, a certain aspect or activity is usually in focus. the time-geographical analysis stresses the importance of acknowledging the continuous interaction between all individual activities and the entire activity context, irrespective of which everyday life aspect interests us in research. during the course of a day, activities with different goals and meanings succeed and also inflect each other, since they take place in a time-space constrained environment (see pink et al. 2015a). a time-geographical approach has been used in a range of research studies on individual activities related to, for instance, energy use (e.g. ellegård & palm 2011; hellgren 2015; isaksson & ellegård 2015), water use (krantz 2005), working life (ellegård et al. 1994; trygg 2014; trygg & hermelin 2017), rehabilitation (andersson 2009; åström 2009; orban et al. 2012; bendixen & ellegård 2014; örmon et al. 2015), mobility (schwanen & kwan 2008; vilhelmson & thulin 2008; chen et al. 2011) and gender differences (kwan 1999, 2000; schwanen et al. 2008; scholten et al. 2012). commonly, studies inspired by the time-geographical approach use the time-diary method to collect empirical material. the method is based on a time-geographical perspective on the constitution of everyday life, and enables an individual’s routines, rhythms and activity patterns to be captured. the time-diary method also forms the basis for the mixed-methods approach presented here. a time diary should not be mistaken for a respondent diary, a written biography (systematically) describing a period of an individual’s life (clifford et al. 2016). nor should the present time-diary method be confused with the many national time-use studies conducted for statistical purposes, with pre-established activity categories, ‘main’ activities and time intervals. these studies do not consider the contextual relationship between activities and the social and physical time-space orders, known as the action space. for an extended review of such time-use studies, see hellgren (2015). the time-diary method proposed here is more open-ended, which increases the likelihood that minor and uncontemplated activities such as routines will also be noted (ellegård & nordell 1997). there are several studies on household energy use using time-diary data in isolation (widén & wäckelgård 2010; aerts et al. 2014; hellgren 2015), aggregating and modelling behaviour aspects of energy use. in studies with qualitative ambitions, time diaries and interviews are used in combination (e.g. ellegård & palm 2011), sometimes also adding metering data (krantz 2005; karlsson & widén 2008). metering data is also used as a single empirical material when modelling household energy use (hjerpe 2005; widén et al. 2009; rohdin et al. 2012). the founder of time-geography, torsten hägerstrand, warned against the use of aggregated and out-of-context approaches when studying human practices: “one risks becoming lost in a description of how aggregate behaviour develops as a sum total of actual individual behaviour, without arriving at essential clues toward an understanding of how the system works as a whole” (hägerstrand 1970, 11). hence, in the following we put forward a mixed-methods approach that provides broad and detailed empirical material on the contextual premises of individual and household water and energy use, allowing for various kinds of qualitative analyses and theoretical applications. everyday-life studies in homes – theoretical framework when studying everyday life aspects, the focus is on individual activities and how these constitute meaningful parts in an individual’s life. time-geography appears to advocate an individualistic perspective on activities, but in a household where several individuals live and interact, each of the different individuals’ activities must be studied in combination. a household is often seen as one unit, forgetting that it is a social entity commonly including several individuals (isaksson & ellegård 2015). the social relations within a household matter for how the 110 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays home time-space is arranged. a household is both a social entity and a physical entity. therefore, when studying everyday life features in households, it is important to study both the physical context in relation to individual activities and the social interaction, displaying for instance gender roles, division of household work, household negotiations and norms of conduct. everyday life is a totality from the household members’ perspective and hence must be treated as such when being researched (ellegård & palm 2011). a simple definition of a household is one or more individuals living in the same dwelling. the household social context entails members being involved in common tasks together, but with a dependency on each other for the execution of individual plans and projects. water and energy are resources used for the fulfilment of different household undertakings and are often allocated by negotiations. evidently, individuals in households also use resources in other places, but with the household as the category, the focus is on the resource use taking place within the home. in connection with home as ‘place’, massey (2005) suggests that it is a collection of stories, articulations and processes – a spatio-temporal event. in buttimer’s (1976, 277) terminology, it is the “lifeworld”: “the culturally defined spatiotemporal setting or horizon of everyday life”, whereas sense of lifeworld is everyday experiences consisting of routinely accepted patterns of behaviour and interaction. to the spatio-temporal event of a home, pink et al. (2015b) add practices, discourses, materiality and energies. lifeworld should be seen as an experienced world where time and space limit the experience. to be able to study and recognise the lifeworld, routinized behaviour should be at the centre of attention (buttimer 1976). tuan (1975) describes the home as the centre of meaning and the pivot of daily routines, constructed of experiences. the home is the place of constant return: “we go to all kinds of places but return to home” (ibid., 155). specific parts of the home might be private to the individual (e.g. the bedroom, the rocking chair). when such places change, the focus, physical world and meaning for the individuals living there will change at the same time (tuan 1975). hence, to understand how to approach the household use of energy and water, it is important to understand the complicated interaction between individual everyday life activities, socio-cultural norms, social negotiations, gender roles, economic constraints, technological systems and buildings, etc. commonly, research aiming to investigate and understand the household use of energy and water resources relies on few data collecting methods and often presents aggregated, estimated, modelled or simulated individual behaviour (widén et al. 2009; willis et al. 2011; hellgren 2015). even though no modelled or simulated person exists, such studies are useful in the sense that they provide information on possible ‘critical’ activities or attitudes in relation to for instance the use of energy and water, and what time of day usage can be expected to peak. however, they are less concerned with questions such as why resources are used at all, how everyday routines and activities relate to actual usage, or if, how and why routine change transpires. these qualitative aspects of everyday life are important to cover, since they may reveal the not so obvious reasons behind the use of water and energy resources, and may suggest other methods to make resource use more efficient. time-geography emphasizes the importance of materiality and space for human activities, but also recognizes the social and cultural dynamics behind physical arrangements. the socio-cultural norms are powerful when it comes to defining individual needs and wants. it is the social aspects, for example our ideas of a good life, norms, regulations and values, and the negotiations taking place around them, that affect which activities are prioritized and how time-space is arranged to enable their execution (hägerstrand 1985, 323-324). the use of water and energy are often related to our understanding of what it means to be ‘clean’, what is ‘convenient’ and how to achieve ‘comfort’ (shove 2003). hence, water and energy use is not an activity in itself but is integrated into numerous everyday activities of different characters. therefore, it is not possible to study energy or water use as such to answer questions about how resource use generates, develops and changes, but it is necessary to include the entire household activity pattern. some activities using water and energy are done frequently in a repetitive and often unreflecting manner – the routines (e.g. ellegård 2001; latham 2003). thanks to taps, sockets, power buttons and electrical switches, resource use takes place effortlessly and in an uncontemplated manner. the routinized use of water and energy resources is further reinforced by their provision fennia 197(1) (2019) 111helena köhler & kristina trygg through large technical systems, the operations of which are not transparent to the user (krantz 2012). in addition, water and energy use sometimes relates to private activities. hence, the elusive character of water and energy using activities makes the study of them challenging and requires certain approaches and methods. there are different ways to generate empirical material for understanding everyday life. interviews, questionnaires, observations and focus groups can all provide insightful material. however, unawareness of one’s own routines and disclosed technical systems are conditions that challenge the use of such methods in isolation. only by raising individual awareness of one’s own routines can they be fruitfully discussed in a research interview. a mixed-methods approach – study design in the following, we propose combining time diaries, interviews, metering data and simple observations to get a more comprehensive understanding of household use of water and energy. the potential of the mixed-methods approach is illustrated by two swedish case studies. the methodological approach is constructed from theory and empirical experience, and is thought to work as a researcher’s guide for similar studies. the study design should be regarded as a rough description of applicable elements in the research process, which may have to be adapted to the specific research objective and other case-specific circumstances. the study design is divided into seven steps (fig.1). the researcher’s individual path (a timegeographical concept illustrating the movements of a physical object or human in time-space) can be followed throughout the research process. fig. 1. study design. 112 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays step 1: (fig. 1): households are selected according to the study focus and research questions. the households are approached by an invitation letter and/or a phone call. step 2: studies of household activities are ideally made where they take place – in the home of the respondent. during the first encounter, the researcher introduces the time diary to the study participants and explains how to journalize it. the researcher can take the opportunity to conduct an open interview and simple observations to cover contextual aspects (social as well as physical). it is important that study participants are informed about the study focus and central activities to record in the time diary. a time diary is often activity-driven (ellegård 2001), which means that the activity itself is the starting point. one activity ends when a new activity starts. a basic time diary layout and authentic examples of information content are illustrated in table 1. table 1. time diary layout and example of content. day: ___________ time activity place with whom electrical appliances comments 00.00 sleeping bedroom 02.20 toilet bathroom torch, lamp, toilet feeling cold and tired 02.25 sleeping bedroom 05.15 toilet bathroom torch, lamp, toilet 07.05 wake up, help with compression stocking bedroom employee 07.15 toilet, taking medicines bathroom toilet 07:30 rest bedroom feeling tired 08.15 preparing breakfast kitchen micro 08.30 breakfast kitchen 09.00 washing face and hands. toothbrush. bathroom electric toothbrush 09.15 getting dressed bedroom cold 09.30 making the bed bedroom cold 09.45 newspaper kitchen cold 10.20 telephone kitchen mobile phone get contact with health care. 10.30 newspaper kitchen cold 11.00 tv living room tv cold fennia 197(1) (2019) 113helena köhler & kristina trygg activities and information related to each activity are recorded horizontally from left to right, starting with the time of day when the activity begins, continuing with what the activity is, where it is carried out and with whom. depending on the study focus, it is possible to add columns detailing the activity, for example use of electrical appliances or water usage. a comments column is also usually added, enabling respondents to clarify things or add information. the traditional time diary is in paper format, but digital applications and online methods have been developed recently, where study participants can register activities on their mobile phone or tablet and share these electronically (vrotsou et al. 2014). metering equipment must be in place or be installed. to enable correlation with the time diary, metering data needs to be of high resolution and be defined at least by the hour. simple observations can contribute valuable information aiding the analysis of time diaries, metering data and interviews. observations can be done in a structured way, by asking the study participant for a tour of the house or apartment, or in a more disclosed manner (as mentioned above). the private nature of some activities, such as those taking place in the bathroom, and the time aspect limit the possibility to observe actual routines. thus, the observations are rather about studying participants’ use of their home, the physical arrangements and available apparatus and tools. simple observations could also be used to perceive the natural environment and climatic conditions and how they relate to household activities. step 3: study participants record their activities in an individual time diary. ideally, the time diary covers one week to capture the weekly activity rhythms, but shorter time intervals can also be chosen. metering data is registered simultaneously. step 4: metering data and time diaries are collected. if the researcher personally collects the time diary, it is possible to take the opportunity to ask about the respondent’s experience of the study and time diary and add further observations. such reconciliations may increase the researcher’s understanding of the time-diary information quality. time and distance can, however, constrain this practice. then, the study participants are given a stamped envelope during the introduction to the time diary to send in the time diary, and questions are asked at a later stage (for example in the interview). step 5: time diaries are analysed together with the metering data and simple observations. the time-diary analysis can be supported by using the software, “vardagen” (“everyday life”) (ellegård & nordell 2011). respondents’ activities are encoded according to a set list of codes available in the program (e.g. paid work has the code 900, toilet visit 480) and when entered into the software it generates an individual activity path (fig. 2). in figure 2, time is marked on the y-axis, and the codes for different sites are marked on the x-axis. the red line represents activities, the green line represents locations and movements, the dark blue line represents electronic devices, the light blue line represents moods and the purple line represents togetherness. since all activities are defined in time, actual metering data on water and/or energy use can be related to each activity. a meter registers resource usage at household level, which elevates the importance of trying to cover all household members’ individual activities. from the combined information in time diaries and metering data, household-specific questions can be added to a general interview protocol. step 6: the study participants are contacted again and asked for a follow-up interview at home. the interview, which can be individual or conducted with the household as a group, can be about clarifications on the execution of activities and routines, thoughts about one’s own and others’ resource use, and ideas on different options for how to act. interviews are used to understand the time-diary recordings and to get more information regarding the purpose of the study. the interview questions should both address the research question and follow up on new things that could be vital for understanding the issue under scrutiny. consequently, the interviews are preferably semistructured, since the main purpose is to explore individual activities and routines, which could vary decidedly in terms of both practice and motivations between different respondents. if applicable, this is also the time to provide participating households with some results from the time-diary and metering data. more observations can be carried out. step 7: at this stage, all empirical material is collected and the final analysis starts. 114 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays application of the mixedmethods approach in the following section, examples of methodology application are provided from two actual cases. the first case concerned a building complex in need of renovation, where the study aimed to understand the reasons behind the high energy usage and to what extent it involved residents’ activities. study participants wrote a time diary for a week covering all individual activities. metering data on temperature, carbon dioxide concentration, humidity and electricity consumption were collected for each apartment. metering data and time diaries were followed up by interviews of approximately one to two hours, individually or in groups. the second case aimed to study the household use of hot water before and after the implementation of individual metering and debiting (imd) of hot water. the mixed-methods approach was used to map the original water use routines, when costs for hot water usage were collectively shared and included in the basic rent. study participants wrote an individual “water time diary” for three consecutive days, two weekdays and one weekend day. individual (apartment) metering data on hot water usage was obtained from the housing company with a precision of 1 litre registered at hourly intervals. all study participants were interviewed individually or in groups. the combination of methods provides empirical material on the same topic but of different characters. the examples below are only meant to visualize the usefulness of merging empirical data from different methods and do not fully demonstrate all major ideas developed or the total analysis of the two cases. case 1 in the first case, focusing on household energy use, activities in relation to apartment ventilation emerged as fi g. 2 .t im e d ia ry – a ct iv it y p at h . fennia 197(1) (2019) 115helena köhler & kristina trygg interesting. the metering data from a three-room rented apartment on the second floor showed recurrent drops in apartment temperature to under 19 °c. usually, the indoor temperature was around 22 °c. the apartment holder, a single woman aged 58, noted “airing” in the time-diary activity column at corresponding times, but the rationale behind this activity was unclear. during the followup interview, taking place in the woman’s apartment, she explained (our translation from swedish): “i air my sheets every morning. at the same time i let the cats out on the balcony […] i want to let some fresh air into the apartment.” she continued explaining that the balcony door was usually wide open for about 20 minutes once every morning and once every evening. she also let the cats out on the balcony several times for shorter periods during the day, resulting in a generally low apartment temperature. the metering data and the time diaries were from november 11–24, a period where the average daily temperature in this part of sweden is 3 °c. when asked about her apartment ventilation, she was unaware of its existence. researchers pointed it out to her (connected to the kitchen fan), and at the same time they noted (simple observation) that she had turned it off. when asked about it, she responded that she found the sound to be too loud. apart from the balcony door, she also opened the windows every morning, many of which stayed open all day during all seasons. she said that this routine was due to waking up in the morning and sensing no air in the apartment, which gave her headaches. another ventilation example came from a retired couple aged 65 living in a three-room rented apartment on the third floor. the metering data and the time diaries were from january 27 to february 1. the metering data showed that the carbon dioxide concentration was high, and that the temperature peaked at 25 °c (from 22–23 °c) at specific times. the time diary revealed that the temperature peaks primarily occurred when the respondents used the kitchen. during the simple observations, it was noted that the kitchen fan, ventilating the whole apartment, was turned off. in the interview, the male explained (our translation from swedish): “i think it is too cold in the apartment so i turn off the kitchen fan.” he explained that he had cut his electricity costs by half by this measure. the ventilation (the kitchen fan) is operated by electricity. even though he wanted his apartment to be warmer, he also wanted to lower his electricity bill. case 2 in the second case, focusing on household hot water use, one can conclude that bathing and showering habits have notable effects on volumes used. a single woman aged about 70 lived on the third floor in a two-room rental flat with kitchen and a bathroom. the metering data for a winter period between mid-october and the end of january displayed irregular usage, varying between 10 and 320 litres of hot water a day, with usage peaking about two times a week. the three time-diary days displayed metering data of 12, 29 and 183 litres of hot water. during the day with the highest usage (183 litres), the time diary noted “filling up a hot bath” and “having a bath, shower afterwards” at the same time as the metering data showed 167 litres of hot water. hence, bathing seemed to be a critical activity in terms of resources, which was followed up on during the interview. about her bathing and showering habits, she said (our translation from swedish): “i have no showering habits, i never shower, only after baths… […] it is maybe because one gets cold, one has aches, i have a little bit of eczema and so on… it is to feel good… it is cure… treatment…” she explained her preference for bathing partly being a generational issue. in the 1960s, it was common to rent a room and one had to ask the property owner for permission to use the bath, which usually took place on fridays. showers were not part of daily routines, which continues to inform her habits to this day. showers are taken out of necessity, to remove shampoo, soap and ‘dirt’ from the hair and body after bathing, and when visiting others. she provided a vivid example of the difference between a bath (at home) and a shower (at her daughter’s) (our translation from swedish): (when bathing) i have steaming hot water… almost to the point that i burn myself […] and i fill the tub as much as i can without it spilling over […] i am glad i can get in and out of my tub because i cannot take baths at my daughter’s house – she has no handle to grab, it is so big and you have to turn like this and you feel like a walrus… i don’t like these big bathtubs… at my daughter’s i have to 116 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays take showers […] we had a discussion, my daughter and i, about hygiene… she thinks i do not shower enough and i say it is a hassle and cold and i do not want to… but it is convenient with underfloor heating and it gets dry and you stand behind those cabin doors… but no… […] here (at home) you are alone and when you have taken a bath you can walk around naked and air-dry. later in the interview, she also told what bathing meant to her and how she planned to be able to continue this activity in the future (our translation from swedish): i can take a bath two times a day if i feel cold or have aches or other difficulties and i can bath once a week and everything between […] bathing is one of my favourite things in life, nestling down into a hot bath is positive […] if you look at other apartments, you cannot live on the third floor forever if you experience difficulties with stairs with increasing age […] i want a balcony and a bathtub. i asked the janitor if i could get a handrail over the bathtub, but it had to be approved by the area manager. results and discussion – evaluation of the mixed-methods approach when placing individual activities at the centre of attention, we can discover how people experience, behave and perform at specific places. the examples from the two cases show the intimate connection between routines, resource use, technology, materiality, and personal experience of comfort, cleanliness and social relations – for example the situated experience of the home (tuan 1975; buttimer 1976; massey 2005; pink et al. 2015a). activities organized and performed at home, such as airing or taking a bath, are the result of many different aspects, for example experience of the material and technological arrangements of the home (feeling cold, bad air causing headaches), economics (cost of electricity and water), health, age, social negotiations and cultural aspects (e.g. norms of cleanliness, gender roles). the mixed-methods approach can capture all these issues. activities at home are often routinized and go unnoticed in the sense that individuals do not think of the extensive coordination of people and things involved in seemingly simple activities such as laundry and cooking, and how activities related to different aspects of everyday life succeed each other. as the examples show, the time diary is the underlying method in our mixed-methods approach, to which information from the other methods is added. time diaries are suitable for understanding what activities individuals engage in at different times, where and with whom, and are intimately connected to the time-geographical perspective bringing the importance of time, place, space and materiality into the analysis of individual routines. at the individual level, a rhythmic pattern may occur, visualizing for example the central role of the home, appropriate locations for specific activities and the importance of technologies and social relations for the execution of everyday activities. the timediary method enables the researcher to ‘virtually’ experience how study participants lead their everyday life. the basis for useful empirical material is accurate time diaries. sometimes respondents do not know which everyday activities to focus on, for instance which activities use hot water or energy, which also emphasizes the importance of instructing study participants to write down all activities. however, if the study focus will entail recording many small activities (like water usage), it can be necessary to instruct study participants primarily to focus on particular activities. otherwise, potential study participants may consider their involvement to be too demanding, jeopardizing their contribution. nevertheless, even time diaries with less information are of importance since they can provide important information about everyday life activity patterns and be used as preparatory materials for interviewing. in practice, the information content of time diaries varies, and women are generally more detailed. this also implies that it might be difficult to get all family members to fill in the time diary since it is time consuming and it is also difficult for children to participate. hence, the method risks being biased towards covering more comprehensive information from single households and pensioners, compared to families with children, where only the adults participate. in a time diary, study participants can deliberately exclude activities or forget to record them. the fact that study participants can choose what to reveal is both a strength and a weakness of the method. it is a strength because respondents can maintain their personal privacy, and a weakness since it may mean important information is left fennia 197(1) (2019) 117helena köhler & kristina trygg out. the latter emphasizes the need for other methods to triangulate the time-diary information, and the triangulation enhances the possibility to detect such empirical difficulties. since the time diary records the time when activities are carried out, it is appropriate to combine time-diary information with metering data based on volumes or quantities per unit of time. as the case examples indicate, it has been very important to discover energy and water using activities of primary importance in relation to the aim of study. the time diary can be designed to instruct study participants to provide estimates of resource use in relation to activities, for instance noting time spent in the shower or estimates of water used when washing dishes. these estimates can subsequently be contrasted with metered usage. the simple observations provide information on the physical context of activities in the home in particular, which is helpful when analysing the time diary. in the ventilation example, simple observations noting that the kitchen fan was off were crucial for interpreting the metering data and asking the respondent relevant interview questions. everyday life routines that are previously unfamiliar to the researcher are exposed and open to exploration. studying the content of a person’s constant flow of activities and related resource usage creates questions in relation to the overarching questions of how activities are carried out and why activities are carried out at all and in a certain manner. hence, the fact that bathing and showering practices use large amounts of water is hardly a novel finding per se, but since the methodology also provides knowledge of the wider social and physical contexts of use, it is possible to find answers to how changes in use can come about. the time-diary information, together with metering data, provides a foundation for constructing relevant interview questions and the interviewing process. for the respondents, the time-diary writing enhances a reflective approach towards their own routines, making them possible to verbalize. prior to partaking in the study, individuals in households might not understand the relationship between routines and water and energy usage. however, the awareness effect may also lead to routine change, which may be problematic if this is a non-intended effect. to install or read meters with the respondents’ knowledge is also a bias in this sense, although it is difficult to bypass this ethical issue. this methodological implication should be treated with care. the empirical examples show the importance of the interview method including the importance of tactile experiences, feelings and reasoning surrounding the resource using activities. the importance of home as a spatio-temporal event becomes especially evident when, as in the bathing example, activities at home are contrasted with when similar activities are performed in another spatiotemporal setting. the empirical material provided from the mixed-methods approach is very dense; even a small selection of households would provide a great deal of information. the ‘thicknesses’ of the empirical material makes the methodological approach time-consuming. the methodological process involving meetings, time diary writing and interviewing means that study participants must invest significant time to be part of the research project. this might also make it more challenging to find study participants compared to only using one single method (e.g. interviews or enquiries). the triangulation of methods increases the potential to carry out an accurate analysis of household water and energy use, since mismatches between self-reported data (interviews and/or time diaries) and metering can generally be sorted out. the study participant sometimes does not want to reveal and discuss certain routines, and then it is difficult to push the issue further. in our experience this is not a common problem, but most of the time there is a good correlation between the different empirical materials. conclusions knowledge of households’ conditions of use of water and energy is important to support resource efficiency. in this article, we emphasize the importance of combining several methods to learn about households’ everyday resource use. we argue that in the specific cases the energy and water using routines would not have been captured in such a comprehensive and detailed manner without the combination of methods. the time diary is a method that discovers routines in a more secure manner, and at the same time enables respondents to reflect on their own activities, thereby enhancing the interview situation. adding metering data to the time diary, we can also show the importance of a 118 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays certain routine or activity in terms of resource usage. from this information, interviews are constructed to understand what is behind routinized activities (why they are executed in the first place and in certain ways) and how study participants reason on different courses of action. simple observations complement the picture and provide information on the physical arrangements for resource using routines in particular, enhancing the interpretation of the other empirical material. use of energy and water have been in focus, but the time-diary method can also be used for other research questions, and with other combinations of methods. for example, working life studies have added time schedules, norms in the work place, measured distance to work and policy analysis to grasp the working life context (see kwan 1999; trygg 2014), and studies of travel patterns have combined time diaries with physical visualizations and geographical information systems (gis) (see kwan 2002; lee & kwan 2011). also, when using survey time-diary data, the individual activities can be presented as a sequence analysis over time (longitudinal study) with tools such as visual-timepacts (vrotsou et al. 2009). the proposed study design is an ideal case, but as the cases show, there is a need for adjustments and variations in the details depending on for example the character of the study, the geographical distance to the case study area and available metering data. future research could also benefit from recent technological developments, enabling recording activities, coding and analysis in digital applications. in addition, if digital time diaries could be matched with digital metering energy or water use data, this would speed up the analytical process. acknowledgements this work was supported by the swedish research council formas [grant number 2008-1335] and the swedish energy agency [grant number 37492-1]. the authors also would like to express their gratitude to professor emerita kajsa ellegård and anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. references aerts, d., minnen, j., glorieux, i., wouters, i. & descamps, f. (2014) a method for the identification and modelling of realistic domestic occupancy sequences for building energy demand simulations and peer comparison. building and environment 75 67–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. buildenv.2014.01.021 andersson, g. (2009) vardagsliv och boendestöd: en studie om människor med psykiska funktionshinder [everyday life and community-based social support : a study of persons with psychiatric disabilities]. phd dissertation. institutionen for sociat arbete, socialhögskolan, stockholms universitet, stockholm. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-26933 bendixen, h. j. & ellegård, k. (2014) occupational therapists' job satisfaction in a changing hospital organisation a time-geography-based study. work 47(2) 159–171. https://doi.org/10.3233/wor121572 buttimer, a. (1976) grasping the dynamics of the lifeworld. annals of the association of american geographers 66(2) 277. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1976.tb01090.x chen, j., shaw, s-l., yu, h., lu, f., chai, y. & jia, q. (2011) exploratory data analysis of activity diary data: a space–time gis approach. journal of transport geography 19(3) 394–404. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2010.11.002 clifford, n., cope, m., gillespie, t. & french, s. (2016) key methods in geography. 3rd ed. sage publications, london. ellegård, k. (1999) a time-geographical approach to the study of everyday life of individuals a challenge of complexity. geojournal 48(3) 167–175. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007071407502 ellegård, k. (2001) att hitta system i den välkända vardagen. in ellegård k. & wihlborg e. (eds.) fånga vardagen, 41–66. studentlitteratur, lund. ellegård, k., engström, t., johansson, b., johansson, m., medbo, l. & nilsson, l. (1994) reflektiv produktion: produktionssystem som tar människan till utgångspunkt vid förnyelse av teknik. nordisk ergonomi okt.(3) 2–7. ellegård, k. & nordell, k. (1997) att byta vanmakt mot egenmakt. johansson & skyttmo, stockholm. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2014.01.021 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2014.01.021 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-26933 https://doi.org/10.3233/wor-121572 https://doi.org/10.3233/wor-121572 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1976.tb01090.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2010.11.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2010.11.002 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007071407502 fennia 197(1) (2019) 119helena köhler & kristina trygg ellegård, k. & nordell, k. (2011) vardagen (computer program). ellegård, k. & palm, j. (2011) visualizing energy consumption activities as a tool for making everyday life more sustainable. applied energy 88(5) 1920–1926. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. apenergy.2010.11.019 hellgren, m. (2015) energy use as a consequence of everyday life. phd dissertation. department of thematic studies, linköping university, linköping. https://doi.org/10.3384/diss.diva-122253 hjerpe, m. (2005) sustainable development and urban water management: linking theory and practice of economic criteria. phd disertation. department of water and environmental studies, linköping university, linköping. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-2996 hägerstrand, t. (1970) what about people in regional science? papers of the regional science association 24(1) 6–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01936872 hägerstrand, t. (1985) time-geography: focus on the corporeality of man, society, and environment. in aida, s. (ed.) the science and praxis of complexity: contributions to the symposium held at montpellier, france, 9-11 may, 1984, 193–216. united nations university, tokyo. isaksson, c. & ellegård, k. (2015) anchoring energy efficiency information in households' everyday projects: peoples' understanding of renewable heating systems. energy efficiency 8(2) 353–364. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-014-9299-x karlsson, k. & widén, j. (2008) hushållens elanvändningsmönster identifierade i vardagens aktiviteter. department of thematic studies, linköping university, linköping. krantz, h. (2005) matter that matters: a study of household routines in a process of changing water and sanitation arrangements. phd dissertation. the tema institute, department of water and environmental studies, linköping university, linköping. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:s e:liu:diva-4887 krantz, h. (2012) water systems meeting everyday life: a conceptual model of household use of urban water and sanitation systems. public works management & policy 17(1) 103. https://doi. org/10.1177/1087724x11415285 kwan, m-p. (1999) gender, the home-work link, and space-time patterns of nonemployment activities. economic geography 75(4) 370–394. https://doi.org/10.2307/144477 kwan, m-p. (2000) gender differences in space-time constraints. area 32(2) 145. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2000.tb00125.x kwan, m-p. (2002) feminist visualization: re-envisioning gis as a method in feminist geographic research. annals of the association of american geographers (4) 645. https://doi.org/10.1111/14678306.00309 latham, a. (2003) research, performance, and doing human geography: some reflections on the diary-photograph, diary-interview method. environment and planning a 35(11) 1993–2017. https:// doi.org/10.1068/a3587 lee, j. y. & kwan, m-p. (2011) visualisation of socio-spatial isolation based on human activity patterns and social networks in space-time. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie ( journal of economic & social geography) 102(4) 468–485. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2010.00649.x massey, d. b. (2005) for space. sage, london. mclafferty, s. l. (1995) counting for women. professional geographer 47(4) 436–442. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1995.00436.x moss, p. (1995) embeddedness in practice, numbers in context: the politics of knowing and doing. professional geographer 47(4) 442. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1995.00442.x orban, k., edberg, a-k. & erlandsson, l-k. (2012) using a time-geographical diary method in order to facilitate reflections on changes in patterns of daily occupations. scandinavian journal of occupational therapy 19(3) 249–259. https://doi.org/10.3109/11038128.2011.620981 pink, s., mackley, k. l. & moroşanu, r. (2015b) hanging out at home: laundry as a thread and texture of everyday life. international journal of cultural studies 18(2) 209–224. https://doi. org/10.1177/1367877913508461 pink, s., morgan, j. & dainty, a. (2015a) other people's homes as sites of uncertainty: ways of knowing and being safe. environment and planning a 47(2) 450–464. https://doi.org/10.1068/a140074p rohdin, p., dalewski, m. & moshfegh, b. (2012) indoor environment and energy use in historic buildings – comparing survey results with measurements and simulations. the international journal of ventilation 10(4) 371–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733315.2012.11683962 rose, d. (1993) on feminism, method and methods in human geography: an idiosyncratic overview. canadian geographer 37(1) 57–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1993.tb01543.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2010.11.019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2010.11.019 https://doi.org/10.3384/diss.diva-122253 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-2996 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01936872 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-014-9299-x http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-4887 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-4887 https://doi.org/10.1177/1087724x11415285 https://doi.org/10.1177/1087724x11415285 https://doi.org/10.2307/144477 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2000.tb00125.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2000.tb00125.x https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00309 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00309 https://doi.org/10.1068/a3587 https://doi.org/10.1068/a3587 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2010.00649.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2010.00649.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1995.00436.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1995.00436.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1995.00442.x https://doi.org/10.3109/11038128.2011.620981 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877913508461 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877913508461 https://doi.org/10.1068/a140074p https://doi.org/10.1080/14733315.2012.11683962 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1993.tb01543.x 120 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays scholten, c., friberg, t. & sandén, a. (2012) re-reading time-geography from a gender perspective: examples from gendered mobility. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie [ journal of economic and social geography] 103(5) 584–600. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2012.00717.x schwanen, t. & kwan, m-p. (2008) the internet, mobile phone and space-time constraints. geoforum 39(3) 1362–1377. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.11.005 schwanen, t., kwan, m. p. & ren, f. (2008) how fixed is fixed? gendered rigidity of space-time constraints and geographies of everyday activities. geoforum 39(6) 2109–2121. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.002 shove, e. (2003) converging conventions of comfort, cleanliness and convenience. journal of consumer policy 26(4) 395–418. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1026362829781 trygg, k. (2014) arbetets geografi: kunskapsarbetets organisation och utförande i tidrummet [the geography of work : knowledge work in time-space]. phd dissertation. kulturgeografiska institutionen, stockholms universitet, stockholm. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-100797 trygg, k. & hermelin, b. (2017) work practice among advanced producer service firms – project work in space-time. geografisk tidsskrift danish journal of geography 117(1) 1–11. https://doi.org/10.10 80/00167223.2016.1259078 tuan, y-f. (1975) place: an experiential perspective. geographical review 65(2) 151–165. https://doi. org/10.2307/213970 un (2015) transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. a/res/70/1. united nations. valentine, g. (2001) at the drawing board: developing a research design. in limb, m. & dwyer, c. (eds.) qualitative methodologies for geographers: issues and debates, 41–54. arnold, london. vilhelmson, b. & thulin, e. (2008) virtual mobility, time use and the place of the home. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie [ journal of economic and social geography] 99(5) 602–618. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2008.00494.x vrotsou, k., bergqvist, m., cooper, m., & ellegård, k. (2014) podd: a portable diary data collection system. in avi: international working conference on advanced visual interfaces, 27–30 may 2014, 381–382. association for computing machinery. vrotsou, k., ellegård, k. & cooper, m. (2009) exploring time diaries using semi-automated activity pattern extraction. international journal of time use research 6(1) 1–25. https://doi.org/10.13085/ eijtur.6.1.1-25 widén, j., lundh, m., vassileva, i., dahlquist, e., ellegård, k. & wäckelgård, e. (2009) constructing load profiles for household electricity and hot water from time-use data—modelling approach and validation. energy and buildings 41(7) 753–768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2009.02.013 widén, j. & wäckelgård, e. (2010) a high-resolution stochastic model of domestic activity patterns and electricity demand. applied energy 87(6) 1880–1892. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. apenergy.2009.11.006 widerberg, k. (2002). kvalitativ forskning i praktiken. studentlitteratur, lund. willis, r. m., stewart, r. a., panuwatwanich, k., williams, p. r. & hollingsworth, a. l. (2011) quantifying the influence of environmental and water conservation attitudes on household end use water consumption. journal of environmental management 92 1996–2009. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jenvman.2011.03.023 åström, e. (2009) att lära, att göra, att klara: förmedling av datortekniska hjälpmedel till barn med synnedsättning. från förskrivning till vardaglig användning i skola och hem [learning, doing, becoming self sufficient : mediation of assistive computer technologies for children who are blind or partially sighted. from prescription to everyday use in school and at home]. phd dissertation. linköping university electronic press, linköping. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-20312 örmon, k., torstensson-levander, m., bahtsevani, c. & sunnqvist, c. (2015) the life course of women who have experienced abuse – a life chart study in general psychiatric care. journal of psychiatric & mental health nursing 22(5) 316–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12177 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2012.00717.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.11.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.002 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1026362829781 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-100797 https://doi.org/10.1080/00167223.2016.1259078 https://doi.org/10.1080/00167223.2016.1259078 https://doi.org/10.2307/213970 https://doi.org/10.2307/213970 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2008.00494.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2008.00494.x https://doi.org/10.13085/eijtur.6.1.1-25 https://doi.org/10.13085/eijtur.6.1.1-25 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2009.02.013 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2009.11.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2009.11.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2011.03.023 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2011.03.023 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-20312 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpm.12177 generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa77626 doi: 10.11143/fennia.77626 generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers simone tulumello tulumello, s. (2019) generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers. fennia 197(1) 121–131. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 in this essay i debate critically, and somehow playfully, some assumptions and shortcomings of quantitative/positivist social research, using a dash of common sense typical of engineers. civil engineers, in designing concrete structures, particularly those made up of concrete, have to continuously consider the error embedded in the limits of available systems of calculation, ending up adopting substantial factors of safety as counter-measures. the study of resistance of concrete structures is a good metaphor for social research; and yet, quantitative/ positivist researchers, in their search for “falsifiable generalizations”, often forget about the omnipresence of error, let alone adopt the factors of safety. in short, the common sense of engineers is useful to casts some not-so-frequently-considered doubts over the capacity of quantitative methods and positivist epistemologies to create generalizable social science findings in face of uncertainty and the complexity of human societies. by casting such doubts, i advocate for a more relaxed (but not less rigorous) approach to social research and its complexity. keywords: epistemology, quantitative research, qualitative research, research methods, peer-review, falsifiable generalizations simone tulumello, universidade de lisboa, instituto de ciências sociais, urban transitions hub, av. prof. a. bettencourt 9, 1600-189, lisbon, portugal. e-mail: simone.tulumello@ics.ulisboa.pt this essay is more than the result of my own ideas and work. not only does its final form result from a lively and insightful conversation allowed by fennia’s open review process, but that very conversation continues within the text: having guntram herb, jouni häkli and ossi kotavaara generously agreed to publish their comments alongside my essay, i had the opportunity to explicitly engage with their insights. this allowed me to structure the essay as follows: the main text contains the main argument, which, for the sake of crafting a text i wanted to be provocative and engaging, is quite straightforward and direct – at times indeed reductionist; and i used footnotes quite heavily to provide nuance to the argument and engage in conversation with the reviewers’ comments. as such, there are more ways to read this essay, with or without the footnotes, by itself or jumping back and forth to the three comments. i am thus very grateful to guntram, jouni and ossi; and to editor-in-chief kirsi pauliina kallio for offering the opportunity of the open review process and her support throughout the editorial process. i am also grateful to pedro magalhães, who read an older version of this essay and with whom i have discussed issues of epistemology several times. though they may not be aware of that, i was inspired by discussions with a number of fellow scholars and friends, including andy inch, andrea pavoni, eleonora tulumello, marco allegra and rui costa lopes. this notwithstanding, this essay’s many shortcoming – and especially the insolence that may surface here and there – are my own responsibility. © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 122 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays prologue: a qualitative researcher’s reviewer 2 as a researcher that has been mainly, indeed almost exclusively, employing qualitative methods and case study research, i have lost the count of the times a peer-reviewer has criticized my work on the basis of the refrain “thou shalt not generalize from one case!” when it happens, that is, almost every time i submit an article, my first reaction is i want to write the editors an angry response, something on the lines of: “dear editors, please provide peer-reviewers with the actual competences to assess case study research, that is, judge whether, in light of the assumptions of case study research, my article is capable (or not) of building that kind of theory that (a fitting reviewer must know!) case study can indeed produce.”1 but then, most often, once i have read the feedbacks and editorial decision, i would take a few days to let off steam, before sitting down and decide what to do. eventually, if i was lucky enough to get a major revision or revise and resubmit (that kind of reviews is never followed by requests of minor revision), i would give up. i would expand the methodological section with more references on “how to theorize from case study research”, temper the tone of the discussion and add a line in the conclusions that sounds like: “although the preliminary findings of this article need to be confirmed by further research with wider panels of data, we can set out the following conclusions…” although they usually help clearing the peer-review and have the paper published (as my fellows precarious researchers out there know, this is not a secondary matter), these changes signal an implicit abdication to the (allegedly) superior role of generalization to that of theorization in knowledge production – and, besides, they take space (the word limit…) that could be more profitably used to provide a better description of the case or theoretical discussion. one of the last times this happened, i shared my frustration on the facebook page reviewer 2 must be stopped, which is frequented by scholars from the most different backgrounds, ensuing a lively debate among those that were sympathetic with my frustration and those who would insist i cannot generalize from one single case.2 there is one simple evidence coming out from this, and other, more rigorous, debates (e.g. flyvbjerg 2004, 285–286): while qualitative social scientists, and especially those working with case studies,3 are often even too conscious of the assumptions behind, and the shortcomings of, their epistemological approaches, quantitative/positivist4 researchers tend to consider “real science” that which stems from their epistemological assumptions only – most often, analyses over statistically significant samples or experiments said to produce “falsifiable generalizations”.5 for instance, most methodological works about case study research are extremely, if often excessively, cautious, as if their authors were expecting at any moment a reviewer 2 to shout “thou shalt not generalize from one case!”6 on the contrary, in articles grounded on a quantitative/ positivist paradigm, i have barely found explicit discussions of the epistemological assumptions and shortcomings of those methods: those assumptions go without saying, so to speak, and their shortcomings are easily forgotten, let alone debated (but see pepinski 2016, for an exception).7 in this essay, i will debate, somehow playfully, some of those assumptions and shortcomings, using a dash of common sense typical of engineers – before embracing human geography and social sciences, i took a master’s in civil-engineering. the common sense of engineers, i will suggest, casts some not-so-frequently-considered doubts over the capacity of quantitative methods and positivist epistemologies to create generalizable social science findings. by casting such doubts, i hope to contribute to a more relaxed (but not less rigorous) approach to social research and its complexity. some insolent remarks on quantitative research quantitative, positivistic-oriented social research works, to put it bluntly, through the creation of simplified models of social phenomena. by simplification i mean the process by which the researcher would select a number of variables they consider sufficient and adequate to create a realistic model, that is, a model capable of describing a given (social) phenomenon with acceptable accuracy. more variables, and more nuanced relations among the variables, more reliable the model will be, but at the cost of more work and computation. the perfect model, the society itself, is made up of an infinite number of variables, hence the need for infinite time to collect data and infinite time to process fennia 197(1) (2019) 123simone tulumello findings – werner heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (published in 1927) made precisely this point with regard to physics.8 the core of the “scientific” work quantitative/positivist researchers do, apart from the mechanic work of collecting data and running the models, is deciding what variables, hence what data, are to be used and how to create links among those variables. in so doing, the researchers obviously influence the results on the grounds of their judgment – unfortunately however, in the public domain this is as obvious as edgar allan poe’s purloined letter. in flyvbjerg’s (2006, 235) words: the element of arbitrary subjectivism will be significant in the choice of categories and variables for a quantitative or structural investigation, such as a structured questionnaire to be used across a large sample of cases. and the probability is high that (1) this subjectivism survives without being thoroughly corrected during the study and (2) that it may affect the results, quite simply because the quantitative/structural researcher does not get as close to those under study as does the casestudy researcher and therefore is less likely to be corrected by the study objects “talking back”. put in other words, all social scientists employ judgment based on their epistemological and theoretical assumptions. while qualitative researchers employ it mainly “downstream”, that is, when critically interpreting their findings; quantitative/positivist scientists employ most of it “upstream”, that is, in the design of the models.9 it is exactly the placement of judgment upstream the production of findings that which creates the illusion quantitative/positivist science is “objective”. this is the very first reason to be skeptical of the alleged superior capacity of quantitative research to produce generalized theory, when compared with qualitative research. to move a step further, let me now use a dash of engineering common sense. studying civil engineering; and a ventured metaphor to begin with, let me briefly outline the way civil engineers are trained in italy. during the first couple of years (of five, my degree was an integrated bachelor/master), the aspiring engineers would study almost exclusively theoretical classes such as mathematical analysis, geometry, classical physics. in these classes, theoretical problems are always resolved through rigorous mathematical methods. during these years, “error” means the same as “mistake”. during the third year, the aspiring engineers would study building science (scienza delle costruzioni), which starts as a theoretical class too. the students would learn the mathematics behind the equations that could, theoretically, solve any real structural problem. but, one day midway through the course, the professor would say that, unfortunately, there is no way to solve those equations with mathematical methods: they are too complex. some simplifications are then introduced that allow the equations to be solved, but at the cost of introducing elements of uncertainty to the solution. for the first time, the aspiring engineers are faced with the existence of the error. the following year, in the course building techniques (tecnica delle costruzioni), the aspiring engineers would learn how to calculate a real structure, being introduced to further problems with mathematics and practice: on the one hand, that even the simplified equations they had learned in building science cannot be solved once they are applied to complex structures typical of real life; and, on the other, that it is not even possible to know with absolute precision the load real materials are capable of absorbing before breaking. eventually, the engineers will be trained to use the software they will employ in their profession, software that uses simplified models of structures. this organization of the degree may well be delusional for some students; but i happened to enjoy it, because it forces the aspiring engineers to face several crises of their previous knowledge, thus stimulating them to keep searching for different ways to solve problems. moreover, this process trains engineers to preliminarily assess the resistance of structures at a first sight: they learn how to look at the preliminary design of a structure and rapidly assess whether it may be feasible, how it may be feasible and – what else could be more important in a capitalist world? – how much it could cost. this common sense helps engineers in several ways: while calculating a structure, they will start running tentative models, which will not be too far from the final one; or, they would usually be capable of warning the architects pretty early that the particular structure they have in mind will probably not be feasible (or would cost much more than they are trying to sell to their clients) before spending time in running complex models. at the same time, and crucially for my argument, engineers are trained to recognize where errors appear, and estimate their magnitude before calculating structures. 124 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays because of the use of simplified models and the resulting errors, engineers would eventually apply a factor of safety to their results, meaning that they will load the real structure with a fraction of the maximum loads the model can resist. the factor of safety depends on both the geometry of the structure (an estimation of the calculation error) and the material used. with regard to materials, the factor of safety is smaller when using steel (in common structures, less than 10%), which is a homogeneous and highly predictable material. the factor of safety becomes much bigger for concrete: in common concrete structures it can go up to 50% – meaning that the structure will be designed to resist 1.5 times the maximum real loads. the factor of safety is particularly high for concrete because of its complexity. concrete is a composite, made of coarse aggregate (sand, gravel, crushed stones) bonded together with fluid cement. the variables that determine the strength of concrete are several: at the macro level, the average size of aggregate grains, the quality of the cement, and the proportion of aggregate, cement and water used; at the micro level, the ways the various grains and the cement are organized (the distance between grains, the respective position of edges and surfaces). the point i want to make here is that the study of the resistance of structures made up of concrete works as a good metaphor for social research.10 let’s say each grain represents an individual human being, while the cement is the bond of relationships and affects among them, characterized by complex mutual tensions. the whole structure, the society, is made up of pillars and beams (and interactions thereof), that is, interacting sub-divisions of the society: families, groups, communities, classes, races, genders, you name it. qualitative case study research can be seen, from this perspective, as the in-depth study of a small piece of concrete looking at the micro-variables. quantitative social science can be seen as the study of the resistance of the entire structure, or of a part of it (a beam, a pillar, a node…) through macro-level variables (shape, estimated resistance of the concrete…). the day i remembered of my engineering training keeping this in mind, let me recall the day my rusty engineering common sense was awaken while i was reading quantitative social findings. during the very same days i was discussing what is “real science” on reviewer 2 must be stopped, i happened to read an article on crime and security in us cities by ellen, lens and o’regan (2012). the article has a very ambitious and important goal, that is, testing the commonplace that housing vouchers policies heighten crime. in the usa, housing vouchers have been given to households previously living in public housing “projects”, where crime rates tend to be high; and, the commonplace goes, the displacement and dispersion of those households will displace and disperse crime, which will thus increase in the neighborhoods of destination. indeed, rich evidence exists of the correlation between settlement of households with vouchers and crime increase.11 however, the causal relation has always been given for granted, but never “scientifically” verified, in public and even some academic debates – a process that accurately defines a “commonplace”.12 ellen and her colleagues thence decided to study those causal relations, using a longitudinal analysis (1996–2008) and regression models over panel data at the census tract level from 10 large us cities. not only does the article cast serious doubts on the commonplace, but it finds some evidence of the reverse causal history: the authors conclude that voucher holders may tend to move to neighborhoods where crime is already increasing – there, rental prices may be lower for that very reason and more landlords may then accept to rent in the voucher market. while i was reading the article, i could feel my engineering common sense raising the eyebrows. let me put this very clear, i am not criticizing the validity or the rigor of the article: it is well written, rigorous in the use of methodology and convincing in its line of thought; and, though i have no specific skills to judge the regressions, the article cleared peer-review in a good journal and i thus give for granted the quantitative work was well done. not the quality of the research, rather the underlying epistemological assumptions about the capacity of these methods to generalize social science findings stimulated my engineering common sense – in short, let me be reviewer 2, for once. so, what is the problem? as every experienced researcher knows, collecting data about human beings and their interactions is everything but a simple task. in order to collect perfect data and be capable of picking the variables that best fit a model, the researchers should have access to every fennia 197(1) (2019) 125simone tulumello possible information about each individual in the population “sample”. of course, collecting all possible data on every individual would entail immense amount of work, including detailed ethnographies. while following the “objects” of study in their daily life, and paraphrasing what werner heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has taught us, the better ethnographic data is collected, the more the action of the “objects” of study is influenced.13 back to our concrete, perfect data means knowing without margin of error the size and shape of every grain and its exact position: to do this, we have no other chance but ultimately break it. indeed, researchers accustomed to participant observation and action research are well aware of their role in changing the very processes they are observing. this is why quantitative/positivist researchers, whose aim is studying social phenomena without influencing them, use above all aggregated data collected by other parties (statistical data) or data provided by the “objects” of study themselves (surveys) – they construct a simplification of the average composition of the concrete and look more widely at the structure, or maybe one specific pillar or beam. this mediation creates error, because statistical data is always a simplification of the reality and surveys, well, for instance there really is no way to know the extent to which the respondent is being sincere. this is well evident in the article by ellen and her colleagues (2012). the authors use administrative data and admit they have faced important challenges.14 the authors employ several smart tactics to deal with such challenges, using linear interpolations among available data, comparing models that make or make not use of problematic data, comparing the whole model with a smaller model where cities with problems with data have been removed. the point is, there is no exact way to measure the error that the aggregate effect of such problems will produce. in fact, “error” is barely quantified in this kind of studies – with the exception of the statistical error of regressions. let me stress that these problems with data are not specific to this particular article: every set of statistical or aggregated data suffer of some kind of error for, as the principle of uncertainty tells us, there is no way to collect perfect data about any given phenomenon without influencing it. i know reviewer 2 is ready to shout at me i am generalizing from one single case, but the harsh reality is there is no quantitative/positivist study that does not suffer of some problem with data – if reviewer 2 has some doubts, they may want to pick a statistically significant sample of said articles and look into them, one after the other. moreover, and this is another common issue with this kind of articles, ellen and her colleagues (2012) do not discuss whether, and with what accuracy, are the 10 selected cities representative of the urban usa. so, what does this mean for the main finding of the research, the value of the variable chosen to test the causal history reverse to the commonplace? according to linear regressions, the variable is statistically significant in the three models used: 0.167 (p < 0.01), 0.157 (p < 0.05) and 0.160 (p < 0.05) (ellen et al. 2012, table 4). this means that, according to the data available and their causal model, a household with voucher will be about 16% more likely to move to a census tract where crime increased in the previous year. the engineer in me would ask, what is the margin of error of the model? is it 0.05 (meaning that the likeliness in the real world would still be positive, between 11 and 21%)? or is it 0.20 (meaning that the likeliness in the real world could be between 37% or slightly negative)? looking at the size of problems with data, my engineering common sense suggests, i am afraid, that the latter is more likely than the former. against generalization? again, my goal here is not falsifying the robust findings a rigorous research has produced in light of its epistemological assumptions. this is to say, in light of such assumptions, taking in consideration the risk that voucher holders may end up moving to neighborhoods where crime is already increasing makes a lot of sense, both conceptually and practically. these findings help better understand the effects of vouchers (e.g. reconsider “freedom of choice” rhetoric) and support a more informed policy decision at the local level (e.g. in extremely unequal and segregated cities, vouchers not accompanied by further policies may cause more problems than those they solve). as for the “generalization” of a socio-spatial trend (“where do voucher holders go?”), however, we have no way to be sure what the margin of error is and, frankly, i do not think there is a way to be. does anyone know of any method 126 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays to systematically measure the error of quantitative/positivist social research (the error with data, the error with the simplification made by the model, and the cumulated error of both)? remember, engineers use factors of safety precisely to account for the impossibility to determine the error with accuracy. and, for a complex material like concrete, it is a very big factor, most often too big. but it is written down in laws, because we all acknowledge that protecting houses from crumbling down is more important than wasting some construction material: legal protections of this kind show the capacity, in the political and public sphere, to understand the limits of engineering studies and research. surprisingly, the political and public discourses seem to have much less capacity to discern the limits of generalizations made in quantitative/positivist social research, which, by the way, can produce more significant damages than a house crumbling down.15 the magnitude of damages of the economic crisis started in 2007, together with the role certain assumptions and certain models used to “predict” how markets work had in creating the conditions for the crisis, is a case in point.16 so what? taking research cum grano salis i could have stopped here, but this is exactly where flyvbjerg (2001) would ask the “so what” question. what is the point of my critique? or, what does an engineering common sense suggest to social scientists? on the one hand, it suggests qualitative scientists to be aware that the particular piece of concrete they are studying may not represent the whole structure – and, as we all know, this is pretty well accepted among reviewers, particularly reviewer 2. on the other hand, it suggests quantitative/ positivist scientists to remember to always use very big factors of safety when interpreting their findings, inasmuch as human societies are at least as complex as concrete – to be honest, much more complex, if anything because concrete changes very slowly in time.17 unfortunately, this latter suggestion is barely heard around, let alone listened to. now, i am not suggesting reviewer 2 to shout loud “thou shalt not generalize from panel data findings!” – while, i am afraid, this is at least as valid a claim as “thou shalt not generalize from one case!” what i am advocating is that it is high time we accept taking the generalizations of social phenomena based on panels of actually-existing data cum grano salis, that is, with the same caution we take theory produced through qualitative research. we need to learn that there is no such thing as “real science” and “hard data”, as opposed to “high-quality journalism” (as several positivist scientists still consider ethnography and qualitative research) – quite the opposite, that the alleged objectiveness of some methods is a sharp way to conceal judgment within the process. on the contrary, social research would benefit a lot by the internalization that our work is always contingent to some assumptions, that is, the acceptance of the very irreducibility and different value of findings produced through different methodological and epistemological lenses. is not, after all, reviewer 2 basically the incapacity to accept such an irreducibility and the pretense to force one’s assumptions upon others’ research?18 is not reviewer 2 the incapacity to accept that generalization is not the hallmark of social research, and that the production of theory – as opposed to laws – is as relevant an endeavor? in conclusion, and beyond the politics of peer-review, are we ready to embrace the fact that contradictions are inherent expressions of the complexity of the human (and non-human) world?19 and, well, let me conclude with a personal suggestion. always discuss your research ideas and methods with an engineer before running complex models or making lengthy on-field research: that can help save a lot of time! epilogue: the shelter we have (social) science has been traditionally imagined as a gothic cathedral, a perfect construction that will be completed and perfected in the moment the keystone will be put in its place. of course, scientists have always been aware that the process was complex, slow and painful; and that external events may had forced reconstructing a part or even reconsidering something in the foundations. but the keystone has always been, and still seems to be for many, the ultimate goal, the ultimate answer – “42!”, douglas adams would say.20 fennia 197(1) (2019) 127simone tulumello then, this has been put into debate, from the uncertainty principle all the way to deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-modernism and the like. in time, the building has been savaged and seems now to be more a messy structure made up of ruins, shining glasses, shacks. there is the neoclassic glass and steel skyscraper from which economists enjoy the real world follow different paths, while sipping champagne, blaming state regulation, and accusing people and politicians of not abiding by the rules of the system. there is the post-structuralist field of ruins of the relentless critique, where the “so what” question echoes perennially. the construction seems to be now made up of parts that do not interact or, worst, create mutual structural problems.21 but, after all, it is important to acknowledge the scientific construction for its fragility, not solidity; for its continuous need of maintenance, refurbishing and restructuring. for, precarious as it is, it is the only shelter we have. notes 1 throughout the text, i distinguish purposefully between generalization and theory as two rather different goals of social research and knowledge production (see especially the concluding section “so what?”) – jouni häkli suggested i should pay special attention to this distinction. 2 reviewer 2 must be stopped is a quasi-ironic forum for sharing hanger and discussing bad peerreview. the discussion is publicly available here: www.facebook.com/groups/reviewer2/ permalink/10153956215715469/. 3 here and afterwards, i use case study as the main point of reference when discussing qualitative methodological approaches for two reasons: first, because it has recently assumed a central role in qualitatively-oriented urban and geographic research; and, second, because it is the methodology i have most experience with. 4 let us not forget – as ossi kotavaara and guntram herb correctly pointed out – that not all quantitative research seeks, from a positivist paradigm, to build global societal “laws”, thence the use of “quantitative/positivist” throughout the text. 5 i am aware that the dichotomic opposition i adopt throughout the essay is a simplification of the landscape of social research – and, at times, runs the risk of building two “caricatures”, as pointed out by jouni häkli. for one, the dichotomy qualitative versus quantitative/positivist methodologies/ epistemologies is often fuzzy, as there is a growing “gray area” (a definition suggested by häkli) made up of experimentation with different approaches, the use of mixed methods and cross-fertilization among long-separated methodological and epistemological “fronts”. in retrospect, hanson (2008) argues that the dichotomy is more “apparent than real” throughout the history of social research. more recently, a group of scholars based at the sciences po médialab (founded by bruno latour) has developed an argument about the capacity of digital methods and big data analysis to overcome the quantitative/qualitative divide, creating a more “continuous” sociology (venturini et al. 2017). and yet, the reality of actually-existing social research is characterized by fierce debate and contraposition among different schools of thought, the consequences of which we all have, sooner or later, came to experience, for instance when receiving a report by reviewer 2. guntram herb also spotted an imbalance in the quantitative/positivist versus qualitative dichotomy. indeed, methods and epistemologies are not straightforwardly and directly associated (see bryman 1984, for a discussion). and yet, with regard to the argument i develop on the relationship between methodologies/epistemologies and the production of social research, i see that, independently from their epistemological orientation, qualitatively-oriented scholars more or less agree on the limits of their own epistemological assumptions – and hence “qualitative research”, throughout the text, means “qualitative research informed by a diverse set of epistemological assumptions”. at any rate, i agree with herb where he suggested i owe the reader sharing openly my own approach, because this informs my perspective over the issues at stake. i see my personal epistemological endeavor as the search for critical theory, which i understand to have a twofold meaning: on the one hand, “a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: the criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be” (marx 1978 [1844], 13; emphasis in the translation http://www.facebook.com/groups/reviewer2/permalink/10153956215715469/ http://www.facebook.com/groups/reviewer2/permalink/10153956215715469/ 128 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays quoted); and, on the other hand, a theory that seeks to foster, inform and support transformative action (see marcuse 2010). 6 even yin (1994), author of case study research, now at its sixth revised edition and possibly the most used reference in this field, seems to believe case study is a minor research method that, being incapable of building “social science generalizations”, should mostly be used as a preliminary or exploratory tool. another example of this approach is an otherwise adorable article on persuasion in case study research by suggelkow (2007). flyvbjerg (2004, 2006) is, to the best of my knowledge, the scholar that has been most straightforward in advocating for, and fully exploiting, the potentialities of case study research for theorization. 7 this may not be particularly the case for human geography, ossi kotavaara suggests. i agree, and wish to speculate that this may be in part due to the relatively young history of human geography when compared to disciplines such sociology, anthropology or political science – all disciplines with longer and fiercer epistemological/methodological debates, from which human geography could learn from. the main target of my reflection is what kotavaara suggested terming the “quantitative positivist paradigm or discourse” (a definition i fully embrace). what prompted me to write this essay is that it seems to me that the quantitative/positivist paradigm is still pretty strong within the whole body of social sciences – maybe not as an ideology but indeed as a “practice” of research and research evaluation (see flyvbjerg 2004, 285–286) – and in particular in disciplines like sociology, social psychology or political science (e.g. desch 2019). 8 according to uncertainty, there is no way to know with absolute accuracy both the position and speed of a particle at a given moment, because the more careful the observation, the bigger the impact over the particle’s trajectory. one of the implications is that forecasting the future trajectory of a single particle – and by extension of any system – is, pure and simply, impossible. it is quite surprising to me how this principle, a basic tenet of natural sciences, is basically ignored in many strands of social sciences, where it should be a truism. the ultimate version of the refusal to acknowledge uncertainty in social sciences is epitomized in grand claims, by some advocates of big data, about the “end of theory”: “scientists no longer have to make educated guesses, construct hypotheses and models, and test them with data-based experiments and examples. instead, they can mine the complete set of data for patterns that reveal effects, producing scientific conclusions without further experimentation” (prensky 2009; see kitchin 2014, for a critical overview). 9 jouni häkli correctly pointed out that subjective judgement plays “upstream” in qualitatively-driven research as well, as it shapes “conceptual, philosophical and ontological starting points” (in his words). i perfectly agree, and this is why i use of the term “mainly” in this sentence. still, i have two responses: one, that the concepts of positionality and reflexivity have been developed – in qualitatively-oriented research – exactly to acknowledge and embrace the role of one’s own judgement (and even prejudice); and, two, that my main point here is emphasizing the generalized lack of such an acknowledgement in quantitative/positivist research. 10 as jouni häkli and guntram herb commented, this is a “deliberately mechanistic” (in häkli’s words) and, indeed, reductionist metaphor. indeed, my goal is not so much using the study of concrete to reflect on social research latu sensu, but rather using it to focus on the differences among methodological and epistemological approaches. 11 a caveat is necessary from a critical criminological standpoint (e.g. sutherland & cressey 1978; reiner 2016). one should always remind that crime statistics describe “reported crimes”, that is, those crimes that are known to the police and the judiciary, which definitely do not correspond to the totality of crime as a social phenomenon. reported crime is heavily influenced by the likeliness that a particular crime is reported, by reporting methodologies and by police priorities – certain crimes, for instance drug crimes, are almost never reported and are thus registered only when actively enforced by the police, which may prioritize this or that typology of crime, this or that location for their activity. more than that, crime itself is a socio-political construction, as many activities that cause harm are not legally defined as crimes – think of the fact that “honor killing”, that is, killing a wife, is still legal in many countries and was legal in many more just a few decades ago. as such, using crime statistics to conclude that “crime is high in the projects” may be problematic in the first place. moreover, one could hypothesize that (ellen and her colleagues (2012) did not consider this possibility), having policing fennia 197(1) (2019) 129simone tulumello been historically particularly aggressive with (poor, mostly black or latinx) people living in public housing, the dispersion of those households may be followed by a “dispersion of policing” and, ceteris paribus, contribute to the dispersion of (reported) crime. that said, i will nonetheless consider reported crime as crime – like the article under analysis does – for the sake of the argument and because incorporating those reflections would just add strength to the point i will make about the uncertainty surrounding findings based on crime data. 12 in particular, ellen and her colleagues (2012) were prompted by the conclusions of a journalistic report on the case of memphis published on the atlantic (rosin 2008). 13 for a brief presentation of the principle, see note 8 above. 14 a list of some of the simplifications and problems they point out (ellen et al. 2012, 557–558 and appendix 1) follows: crime data are collected at the census tract scale for all cities but one, where they are available at the “neighborhood” level (usually made up of two or three census tracts); voucher data are missing in some cities during some periods of time (in some cities they are not available for the large majority of years in the period of study); anomalies on voucher data are found and attributed to geocoding problems (census track id is missing, each year, in 8 to 20% of cases; in about 2% of tract/ years values deviate sharply from precedent and following years); demographic data are available only for 1990, 2000 and an average for 2005–2009. 15 the most evident example of this is the simplification and spectacularization of research findings by mass media – epitomized by sentences like “scientists say…”, “according to [insert highly-ranked university]…” while researchers cannot automatically be blamed for the simplifications and distortions of science reporting, this trend has fed back into the way quantitative/positivist social research is carried out, as researchers are increasingly pushed to produce novel, confirmatory, “groundbreaking” findings in order to publish in top-ranking journals. one of the effects is the growing concern with “p-hacking”, the use of various strategies (from data mining to unduly influencing data collection techniques) to forcefully extract statistically significant findings from vast collections of data – see the overview by head and colleagues (2015) and the (in)famous case of the retraction of several articles by food behavior scientist wansink (resnick & belluz 2018). 16 in his work on austerity politics, blyth (2013, 32 ff.) focuses on the role played by models – based on neoclassical understandings of economics and used in the financial industry to measure the risk of loss from investments – in justifying the decisions that brought to the 2007 financial crash. according to the metrics provided by such technologies, systemic crises of financial markets – those very crises that have recurrently happened during the last century or so – should basically never occur. 17 guntram herb suggested that the metaphor is not fully applicable for two reasons: first, because concrete has no agency or, at the very least, it has much less agency than humans have; and, second, because the testing of a structure is essentially about true or false (“will the concrete hold?”), while social research deals with less clear outcomes. beyond reiterating that this metaphor is above all useful to focus on differences among paradigms (see note 10), let me add a couple reflections. first, let us not forget that there are both positivist and post-positivist perspectives that would conceptualize agency quite differently. for instance, radical structuralism would suggest that the individual human being under a capitalist system is not really more free to act than an individual grain within a concrete conglomerate; and actor network theory would maybe contest that the point is measuring and comparing the agency of concrete and human beings – and rather advocate considering agency as the network of relationships among them. at any rate, second, it seems to me that applied quantitative/ positivist research prioritizes seeking “solutions” to social problems – that is, it often mimics the true/ false approach of structure testing. here, i wish to add that the core endeavor of critical social research (see note 5) is precisely that of questioning the definition of social problems as opposed to seeking direct, (allegedly) neutral and technical, solutions to them – see gusfield’s (1989) discussion of the relationship between “political issues” and “social problems”, and my transposition of his argument to the field of urban security (tulumello 2017). 18 i believe virtually anyone has, at least once in their life, received (and given!) a review that suggested rejection on the basis of comments that basically denied the very epistemological or ontological assumptions of the manuscript under analysis. the common comment on the impossibility to generalize from one case often tells precisely of the incapacity, on the side of the reviewer, to 130 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays conceptualize that valid social research exists that has no interest in producing generalizations in the first place. 19 one such attempt is the project of the school of transdisciplinarity led by nicolescu (see nicolescu 2010, for a summary), which posits that different “levels of reality” exist, and that every discipline is incomplete because it has to remain within one of those levels. this breaks open with classical rational logic and its axioms of identity and non-contradiction (ibid., 29): the idea, at the core for instance of classical physics, that “a is a” and “a cannot be not-a”. as quantum mechanics has shown that entities exist that are at the same time a and not-a, the existence of different levels of reality explains how both classical physics and quantum mechanics can be internally correct and rigorous despite the inherent contradictions among their core assumptions and their findings. 20 spoiler alert: i am referring to adams’ epic sci-fi series the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, which revolves around the research of the answer to the “ultimate question of life, the universe and everything” – which eventually turns out being… “42”. 21 another metaphor for scientific knowledge is spencer’s (1863) “sphere” floating in a space of ignorance. as the sphere grows, also the surface of contact with ignorance grows, allowing for both a pessimist and an optimist interpretation: if the amount of knowledge is represented by the radius of the sphere, this grows more slowly than the surface, meaning that the process will produce a relative increase of ignorance; if knowledge is the volume of the sphere, then it grows faster than the surface, and ignorance will relatively decrease in time. while spencer’s sphere is way a more elegant metaphor than my cathedral, it is quite typical of a positivist conception of knowledge as a homogeneous, harmonic totality, which makes scarce space for conflict, debate, contradiction and the messiness of the real world. references blyth, m. (2013) austerity: the history of a dangerous idea. oxford university press, oxford. bryman, a. (1984) the debate about quantitative and qualitative research: a question of method or epistemology? the british journal of sociology 35(1) 75–92. http://doi.org/10.2307/590553 desch, m. c. (2019) how political science became irrelevant. the field turned its back on the beltway. the chronicle of higher education 27.2.2019. <www.chronicle.com/article/how-political-sciencebecame/245777/> 26.4.2019. ellen, i. g., lens, m. c. & o’regan, k. (2012) american murder mystery revisited: do housing voucher households cause crime? housing policy debate 22(4) 551–572. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482. 2012.697913 flyvbjerg, b. (2001) social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511810503 flyvbjerg, b. (2004) phronetic planning research: theoretical and methodological considerations. planning theory and practice 5(3) 283–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464935042000250195 flyvbjerg, b. (2006) five misunderstandings about case-study research. qualitative inquiry 12(2) 219–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405284363 gusfield, j. r. (1989) constructing the ownership of social problems: fun and profit in the welfare state. social problems 36(5) 431–441. https://doi.org/10.2307/3096810 hanson, b. (2008) wither qualitative/quantitative?: grounds for methodological convergence. quality and quantity 42(1) 97–111. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-006-9041-7 head, m. l., holman, l., kahn, a. t. & jennions, m. d. (2015) the extent and consequences of p-hacking in science. plos biology 13(3) e1002106. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002106 kitchin, r. (2014) big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. big data and society 1(1). https:// doi.org/10.1177/2053951714528481 marcuse, p. (2010) in defense of theory in practice. city: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 14(1–2) 4–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810903529126 marx, k. (1978 [1844]) for a ruthless criticism of everything existing. in tucker, r. c. (ed.) the marxengels reader, 12–15. 2nd ed. w.w. norton & company, new york. nicolescu, b. (2010) methodology of transdisciplinarity – levels of reality, logic of the included middle and complexity. transdisciplinary journal of engineering and science 1(1) 19–38. pepinsky, t. (2016) methods debates for humanists. tom pepinsky 17.06.2016. <https://tompepinsky. com/2016/06/17/methods-debates-for-humanists/> 26.4.2019. http://doi.org/10.2307/590553 http://www.chronicle.com/article/how-political-science-became/245777/ http://www.chronicle.com/article/how-political-science-became/245777/ https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2012.697913 https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2012.697913 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511810503 https://doi.org/10.1080/1464935042000250195 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405284363 https://doi.org/10.2307/3096810 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-006-9041-7 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002106 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714528481 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714528481 https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810903529126 https://tompepinsky.com/2016/06/17/methods-debates-for-humanists/ https://tompepinsky.com/2016/06/17/methods-debates-for-humanists/ fennia 197(1) (2019) 131simone tulumello prensky, m. (2009) h. sapiens digital: from digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom. innovate. journal of online education 5(3) article 1. reiner, r. (2016) crime. the mystery of the common-sense concept. polity, cambridge. resnick, b. & belluz, j. (2018) a top cornell food researcher has had 15 studies retracted. that’s a lot. vox 24.10.2018. <www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/brian-wansink-cornellfood-brand-lab-retractions-jama> 26.4.2019. rosin, h. (2008) american murder mystery. the atlantic july/august 2018. <www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2008/07/americanmurdermystery/306872/> 26.4.2019. spencer, h. (1863) first principles. williams and norgate, london. suggelkow, n. (2007) persuasion with case studies. academy of management journal 50(1) 20–24. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.24160882 sutherland, e. & cressey, d. r. (1978) criminology. lippincott, philadelphia. tulumello, s. (2017) toward a critical understanding of urban security within the institutional practice of urban planning: the case of the lisbon metropolitan area. journal of planning education and research 37(4) 397–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x16664786 venturini, t., jacomy, m., meunier, a. & latour, b. (2017) an unexpected journey: a few lessons from sciences po médialab’s experience. big data and society 4(2) 205395171772094. https://doi. org/10.1177/2053951717720949 yin, r. (1994) case study research. design and methods. sage, thousand oaks. http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/brian-wansink-cornell-food-brand-lab-retractions-jama http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/19/17879102/brian-wansink-cornell-food-brand-lab-retractions-jama http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/americanmurdermystery/306872/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/americanmurdermystery/306872/ https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.24160882 https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x16664786 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717720949 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717720949 untitled contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas örjan pettersson pettersson, örjan (2001). contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas. fennia 179:2, pp. 159–173. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. during the 1990s most municipalities and rural areas in northern sweden have experienced renewed depopulation. at the same time, many regional centres (mainly university cities), but also some rural areas, have shown significant population growth. this article focuses on the latter rural areas and describes their geographical location and the socio-demographic characteristics of their populations. three types of rural areas with population growth have been identified. firstly, there are the rural areas within daily commuting distance from regional centres. secondly, there is a group of rural areas that has benefited from the tourist industry. most of these tourist resorts are mountain villages close to the border with norway. finally, there are also a few rural areas characterised by attractive residential environments and leisure housing. örjan pettersson, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, se-90187 umeå, sweden. ms received 19th june, 2001 (revised 29th october, 2001) rural areas going against the stream of depopulation in sweden, the 20th century has implied a major shift in the population distribution, away from the rural areas to the urban areas. this urbanisation process has primarily taken place within the regions, i.e. from surrounding rural areas to nearby localities and cities, and to much less extent meant a redistribution of the population between different parts of the country (andersson 1987; borgegård et al. 1995). however, the patterns concerning population concentration and dispersion observed at different scales of spatial resolution have shifted several times since the beginning of the 19th century (håkansson 2000). although the main trend in sweden has been towards population concentration and urbanisation, there have also been shorter periods characterised by dispersion and counterurbanisation, in sweden especially manifested during the ‘green wave’ of the 1970s. furthermore, while most rural areas have experienced population decline in recent years, there have nevertheless been rural areas with substantial in-migration and population growth. there are also examples of expanding rural areas in depopulating regions, and vice versa. however, such tendencies are difficult to trace with statistical data for counties and municipalities. by using socio-demographic data with a higher degree of spatial resolution it is though possible to analyse changes within the municipalities. the purpose of the article is to identify and describe the rural areas in northern sweden that have experienced population growth during the past decades and also to emphasise some of the characteristics of these rural areas. the main focus is on the period after 1985, in particular the first half of the 1990s. earlier studies of population changes in swedish rural areas have often dealt with the whole country or focused on rural areas within comparatively densely populated metropolitan regions. by contrast, northern sweden exhibits substantial variation between on the one hand moderately large cities and densely populated rural areas mainly along the coast and on the other hand large tracts of extremely sparsely populated areas in the interior parts of the region. even though the article primarily deals with the situation in northern sweden the results should be of some relevance in other sparsely populated regions in the nordic countries, especially regarding finland with many similarities in settlement patterns and population trends (see for instance tervamäki 160 fennia 179: 2 (2001)örjan pettersson 1987; vartiainen 1989a; karjalainen 1989; räisänen et al. 1996; rusanen et al. 1997; wiberg 2000). the tendencies towards a population turnaround, i.e. counterurbanisation, in many developed countries all around the world have generated an extensive literature. the counterurbanisation phenomenon has been studied and discussed in numerous publications. berry (1976) was one of the pioneers. other often cited contributions have been written by fielding (1982), cochrane and vining (1988), vartiainen (1989b), geyer and kontuly (1993) and champion (1989, 1992, 1994). more recent publications include for instance halfacree (1997), champion (1998), kontuly (1998), lewis (1998), dahms and mccomb (1999), ford (1999) and stockdale et al. (2000). there have also been a number of contributions dealing with the situation in the nordic countries, for instance ahnström (1980, 1986), court (1989), hansen (1989), vartiainen (1989a), borgegård et al. (1993), illeris (1994), borgegård and håkansson (1997), amcoff (1997, 2000) and westlund and pichler (2000). in the article’s first section focus is on swedish literature relating to the phenomenon and various explanations to these tendencies. main emphasis is on swedish households’ motives for moving to the countryside. in the next section there is a presentation of contemporary population changes in northern sweden. finally, we take a closer look on certain rural areas in the two counties of dalarna and västerbotten (see fig. 1). the county of dalarna was chosen since it contains some traditional rural municipalities with surprisingly high in-migration and relatively steady population growth since the 1970s. the choice of västerbotten was due to the county’s large internal differences in population density and development. within the county there is also great variety in residential environments; from cities and villages in agricultural districts along the coast to scattered towns and settlements in forest dominated landscapes or even mountainous surroundings in the interior parts of the region. counterurbanisation in sweden during the late 1980s in sweden there were signs of a renewed interest in living in the countryside. based on data from statistics sweden it is possible to conclude that the 1980s was the first decade in a very long time that had an absolute increase in the numbers of inhabitants living in rural areas (carlquist 1992). this trend shift led to speculations about the occurrence of a ‘new green wave’ similar to the ‘green wave’ of the 1970s and similar to the counterurbanisation trend observed in several other countries. it was in the metropolitan regions that these tendencies were most obvious, but there was also growth in rural population in some sparsely populated counties. the last delimitation of urban and rural areas was performed in 1995 (statistics sweden 1997). in sweden urban areas are defined as localities with at least 200 inhabitants. by definition all areas outside these localities are rural areas. since 1990 these rural areas can be further subdivided statistically into rural agglomerations (with 50– 199 inhabitants) and other rural areas (i.e. very sparsely populated areas and scattered settlements). the last delimitation of urban and rural areas seemed to indicate that there had been a return to rural depopulation for the period 1990– 1995. this change, however, was mainly due to reclassification of rural areas into localities, thus in reality implying continued population growth in villages and small towns (statistics sweden 1997). some researchers claim that there is a tendency towards polarisation with increasing population growth in the major cities and in rural areas, whereas small and medium-sized towns are growing at a slower rate or even losing inhabitants (amcoff 2000; westlund and pichler 2000). the renewed interest for living in the countryside during the 1980s has been explained in sweden by changes related to economic development and various structural phenomena, for instance the incentive to move to the metropolitan regions diminish during recessions (johansson and persson 1991). furthermore, the expansion of the public sector and various regional policy measures resulted in improved service accessibility and new job opportunities in sparsely populated regions (borgegård et al. 1995). other researchers maintain that the changes are due to a shift in the general sense of values and residential preferences (eriksson 1989; forsberg and carlbrand 1993). in a post-industrial society it becomes more important with a pleasant housing environment than closeness to place of work (bengtsson and johansson 1992), whereas technological advances and commuting make a more dispersed settlement pattern possible (the population 1991). other aspects are that different generations have different fennia 179: 2 (2001) 161contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas fig. 1. counties, municipalities and centres of municipalities in northern sweden. 162 fennia 179: 2 (2001)örjan pettersson sets of values (johansson and persson 1991) and that certain age groups more often choose to live in the countryside (amcoff 1997). the increase in the population living outside urban areas could largely be assigned to a process whereby leisure housing in metropolitan regions has been turned into permanent dwellings (nyström 1989; carlqvist 1992). swedish households’ motives for moving to the countryside the tendencies towards an increased rural population during the 1980s also led to a number of studies of the motives of households for moving to the countryside (borgegård et al. 1987; nyström 1989; ennefors 1991; borgegård et al. 1993; forsberg and carlbrand 1993; kåks and westholm 1994; amcoff 2000; garvill et al. 2000; stenbacka 2001). in this short overview a few of all the possible reasons are emphasised. in the studies many households gave priority to what could be called countryside features in their residential environment. besides the actual house and the immediate surroundings, other environmental factors, such as access to nature and the open scenic landscape, are often mentioned as important. it is, though, often unclear what so-called environmental motives really are and how important such reasons are for in-migrants to rural areas. it has even been suggested by socio-biologists that the preferences for open landscapes are deeply rooted in our genes (for a discussion, see amcoff 2000). nonetheless, many households emphasise the improved possibilities to perform various outdoor activities and other hobbies, for instance hiking, hunting, gardening and doing handicraft. the move to the countryside could also be a part of a self-realisation or choice of life-style. many in-migrants to rural areas are so-called returnees who have kinship with local people or are in fact moving back to the homestead. high housing costs in newly built areas and city-regions could also be a driving force behind in-migration to rural areas. by purchasing a house outside urban areas households with low incomes can fulfil their wish for a house of their own. families with children moving to rural areas often state that the countryside offers a more suitable environment for children to grow up in. new and improved communication technology and less rigid working conditions, for instance working from a distance and flexible working hours, make it possible for more workers to settle in rural areas. some households mention that it is strategic to settle down in rural areas between two or more cities. in this way they have access to more than one local labour market within commuting distance. there is also a quite large group of households, mainly pensioners, who are not dependent on nearness to large labour markets. they are thus free from an important restriction concerning their choice of where to live. the relative importance of different motives for moving to the countryside varies from study to study. this could partly be explained by the fact that many swedish studies are based on interviews with a limited number of households. it is also likely that the in-migrants’ motives, at least to some extent, vary between different types of rural area. the situation is further complicated by the fact that many households mention more than one reason. nevertheless, several studies highlight the importance of environmental and social motives (such as housing, access to nature, family situation or nearness to friends and relatives) behind the move to the countryside. based on the answers from nearly 500 in-migrants to the countryside all over sweden, garvill et al. (2000) conclude that 70 per cent of the respondents gave emphasis to environmental or social motives. in comparison, only 20 per cent mentioned workrelated reasons such as education, unemployment and finding a new job. gentrification of the countryside and the rural idyll in recent years and especially in literature focusing on changes in the british countryside there has been a great deal of interest in the motives and socio-economic characteristics of the in-migrants to rural areas (see for instance champion and watkins 1991; marsden et al. 1993; murdoch and marsden 1994; clout 1996; cloke et al. 1998; fielding 1998). these studies show that a substantial part of the in-migrants belongs to a well-educated and relatively prosperous middle-class. often they have settled in amenity-rich and picturesque villages and small towns. this gentrification process has also led to conversion of farm buildings and rural land into new uses, such as exclusive housing and golf courses. closely linked with gentrification of the countryside is the concept of rural idyll whereby the countryside is perceived as quiet, calm, clean, safe and inhabited by allfennia 179: 2 (2001) 163contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas white nuclear families with traditional values. little and austin (1996) argues that the notion of rural idyll maintains traditional gender roles and emphasises women’s roles as mothers. the rural idyll concept is also associated with neighbourliness and sense of community. based on case studies in the metropolitan region of stockholm, amcoff (2000) claims that gentrification of the countryside is a relatively marginal phenomenon in sweden. nevertheless, such tendencies are though likely to be observed in some rural areas, such as österlen in southernmost sweden (hjort and malmberg 1996). population redistribution in northern sweden during the period between 1950 and 1974 several reforms were carried out in order to reduce the number of municipalities in sweden from approximately 2,300 to fewer than 300. one of the main purposes was to construct municipalities with populations large enough to secure the provision of services, mainly in the public sector. christaller’s central-place theory (1966) provided the theoretical basis for a hierarchical centralplace system. the centre of the municipality was supposed to provide local people with everyday services, while the major cities, the so-called regional centres, were supposed to provide highlevel services to the inhabitants in larger regions. however, many genuine rural areas continued to lose inhabitants while the centres of the municipalities, primarily the major cities, experienced population growth. during the 1990s it was mainly municipalities in the metropolitan regions and regional centres, in particular university cities, that had substantial population growth, whereas many rural municipalities, industrial communities and small and medium-sized cities outside the metropolitan regions experienced decreases. the study area, northern sweden, is a very sparsely populated region (fig. 1). the region extends from the gulf of bothnia to the mountainous border with norway. in the north-eastern part, the region borders on finland. in this article northern sweden is defined as the six northernmost counties. the area consists of 69 municipalities covering approximately 270,000 square kilometres. northern sweden has 1.5 million inhabitants; thus the average density is 5.5 inhabitants per square kilometre. this means that only 16 per cent of the swedish population live on two thirds of the total land area. the population is unequally distributed over the region, however, and most people are in fact concentrated in cities and the coastal areas. within the interior parts of the region most inhabitants live in the river valleys and administrative centres at different levels. many of the municipalities, especially those in the interior parts of the region, have had a negative population trend during the last decades. since 1970 more than every second municipality in northern sweden have lost more than ten per cent of their population. at the same time, many of the major cities with nearby municipalities have experienced strong population growth. table 1 shows that during the 1990s there were more municipalities with population losses and fewer with a growth rate above the national average. the maps in figure 2 illustrate that population growth is increasingly concentrated to a few regional centres, mainly those with universities. this process has accelerated in recent years and, at least at the municipality level, it seems as if the 1990s has implied a shift back to strong urbanisation. according to persson and nygren (2001) this trend is likely to continue at least during the first decades of the 21st century. contemporary changes in rural areas in northern sweden in sweden, however, county and municipality table 1. population changes by municipalities 1970–2000. northern sweden (statistics sweden 1995, 1996, 1997). number of municipalities with: 1970–1974 1975–1979 1980–1984 1985–1989 1990–1994 1995–2000 population decrease 39 32 43 42 39 66 increase less than country average 10 08 05 14 23 01 increase more than country average 20 29 21 13 07 02 164 fennia 179: 2 (2001)örjan pettersson fig. 2. population changes by municipalities 1970–2000. northern sweden (statistics sweden 1995, 1996, 1997). note: municipalities with population growth above the country average during the period are shaded with black. the municipalities with population increase below the average are shaded with grey, while those exhibiting population decrease are white. averages often conceal a great deal of the geographical variations in population change and socio-economic development within the regions. for this reason, we have in several research projects employed data with a higher degree of spatial resolution than municipalities, mostly electoral wards or even smaller geographical entities. these geographical subdivisions are by statistics fennia 179: 2 (2001) 165contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas sweden considered to represent homogeneous housing environments. this has also made it possible to group the wards according to various features, for instance by distance to localities of different sizes. the empirical data utilised in this article is mainly derived from three research projects (pettersson et al. 1996; johansson and pettersson 1997; pettersson and westholm 1998). the data has been analysed in a rather straightforward way. firstly, we identified the rural areas with population growth. secondly, by combining statistical analyses with visual interpretations of the geographical patterns we were able to generalise the rural areas with population growth into three broad categories. these are presented in the final section of the article. it should though be mentioned that we have only had access to data concerning the number of inhabitants in the wards (together with some demographic and socio-economic characteristics) at different times. for this reason we are not able to analyse whether a population increase is due to natural increase or net in-migration. however, most rural areas have a long history of net out-migration of young people and therefore nowadays exhibit skewed demographic profiles with many elderly. subsequently these rural areas are usually characterised by natural decrease and therefore necessitate net in-migration in order to avoid further population losses. figure 3 shows that the population growth rate decreases with distance from the centres of the municipalities. nevertheless, rural areas can have substantial growth, both in sweden as a whole and in northern sweden. in northern sweden, however, the growth zones do not extend as far out into the periphery as in other parts of sweden. a comparison between the six counties in northern sweden also shows that there are obvious variations within the region. during the period 1990–1995 relatively many municipalities in northern sweden have had population growth in rural areas near towns and cities (i.e. within a distance of 5–15 kilometres from the centre of their own municipality). on the other hand, few rural areas farther away from the centres show an increased population. not only do rural areas at different distances show differfig. 3. average population change in wards grouped into distance zones from their local municipality centres 1990–1995 (statistics sweden 1995, 1996, 1997). note: all distances are calculated as the crow flies (between the geographical centroid of the electoral ward and the centroid of the centre of the municipality). in this way, the distance measure is only a rough approximation of the actual road distance. 166 fennia 179: 2 (2001)örjan pettersson ing population trends but their populations also differ in various aspects. the rural areas within the 15-kilometre zone of the centre of the municipality are characterised by relatively many families with children and households where both partners work outside the home. it is mainly in the peripheries of the municipalities that it is possible to trace obvious signs of a far-reaching depopulation and a high proportion of elderly people. in general, the rural areas with a rapid population increase have relatively many young inhabitants, families with children and households where both partners work outside the home (table 2). contrary to the depopulating rural areas with an ageing population, the average age is decreasing and the high proportion of inhabitants below 45 years of age indicates that these areas are attractive for families with children. the county of västerbotten – growing villages in the expanding umeå-region the county of västerbotten is characterised by large internal differences. in particular, the contrast between the expanding city of umeå and the extremely sparsely populated interior parts of the county is manifested. the municipality of umeå has experienced dramatic population growth during the last decades. in 1950 umeå had 46,000 inhabitants and in 2000 the total number of inhabitants had risen to almost 105,000 (i.e. an average annual growth rate of almost 1.7 per cent). one important explanation to this development is the founding of umeå university in the 1960s. at the same time other municipalities in the county have had a stagnating population or a decrease in the number of inhabitants. within the county note: only areas with more than five kilometres to the centre of their own municipality are included in the table. table 2. population statistics for rural areas in northern sweden (statistics sweden 1995, 1996, 1997). fennia 179: 2 (2001) 167contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas there has been a concentration of people to the large localities, most of all to the centres of the municipalities and especially to umeå, skellefteå and lycksele. however, figure 4 shows that many rural areas close to the major localities also have had population growth during the period 1985– 1995. during the first half of the 1990s most of the centres of the municipalities in the interior parts of the county had decreasing populations (fig. 5). at the same time most localities in the coastal region showed population growth. within commuting distance from the cities we also find many rural agglomerations with growth. the spatial pattern indicates the importance of the major roads, thus demonstrating a kind of extended suburbanisation. however, there are some rural areas and villages with population growth lying outside the commuter zones of the major localities. some of these are characterised by strong entrepreneurial traditions or expansive firms. unexpectedly, relatively many rural agglomerations close to the border with norway have maintained or even increased their number of inhabitants. often these are villages benefiting from an expanding tourist industry. in particular, the hemavan area show increased population figures (see also wiberg 2000). a research project concerning the geographical distribution of welfare in the county of västerbotten showed that there are substantial differences in living conditions between various parts of the county (pettersson et al. 1996; pettersson 2001). usually, the expanding rural areas surfig. 4. population changes in electoral wards 1985–1995. the county of västerbotten (statistics sweden 1995, 1996, 1997). 168 fennia 179: 2 (2001)örjan pettersson rounding the cities have populations characterised by general well-being in terms of employment, educational level and incomes. another common feature is the high proportion of families with children. some of these rural areas have benefited from scenic surroundings and are located in traditional agriculture landscapes, in river valleys, close to lakes or by the sea. the county of dalarna – picturesque villages around lake siljan and ski resorts in sälen like västerbotten, the county of dalarna is a region with large internal differences. for instance, there is a sharp contrast between the municipalities in the south-eastern part of the region and the municipalities around lake siljan (fig. 6). the first mentioned region is part of bergslagen, a large region extending over many counties united by the history of their mining industry. the siljan region is characterised by a scenic landscape and old traditions. the area around lake siljan is often regarded as a national symbol of the old rural sweden as it was during the 19th century. in a historical perspective, however, it is a little ironic that the rural areas around lake siljan were considered as backward and underdeveloped during the indusfig. 5. population changes in rural agglomerations and localities 1990-1995. the county of västerbotten. agglomerations with at least 50 inhabitants (statistics sweden 1995, 1996, 1997). fennia 179: 2 (2001) 169contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas trial era of bergslagen. today, bergslagen is one of the swedish problem regions due to restructuring difficulties and depopulation. the siljan region, on the other hand, has had an increasing population since the 1970s. nevertheless, not only different parts of dalarna but also various rural areas in the region have shown quite different population trends. in this section we shall take a closer look on two examples of rural areas in the county of dalarna, namely the countryside around lake siljan and the sälen area, both with stable or increasing populations in recent years. during the last decades the countryside around lake siljan has had an inflow of migrants and a steady population growth. the number of inhabitants in the area has increased by five per cent during the period 1985–1995 and nowadays more than 25,000 people live in the rural parts of the region. the in-migrants have moved in mainly from other municipalities in dalarna and the stockholm region. some of these in-mifig. 6. case-study areas in the county of dalarna. 170 fennia 179: 2 (2001)örjan pettersson grants have resided in the genuine countryside while others have settled down in large villages and small towns. the in-migration cannot be explained by such factors as expansion in a certain industry, a single company investment or a university establishment. due to the long distances to major cities in dalarna, such as falun and borlänge, it is unlikely that the possibility for commuting is the sole cause of the population growth (see also kåks and westholm 1994). during the period 1985–1995 the growth rate in the rural areas around lake siljan has been above the county average. the area is characterised by a relatively low proportion of families with children and instead the proportion of elderly people is higher. as shown before, this is unusual for those rural areas in northern sweden that are distinguished by substantial population growth. in recent years, several municipalities in the siljan area have started losing inhabitants, although at a slower rate than most rural municipalities in northern sweden. earlier studies have shown that, in particular, the people living in the municipality of leksand generally have a high and evenly distributed living standard (pettersson and westholm 1998). perhaps it is a combination of general well-being, the image of being the original sweden, the scenic landscape, tourism, small-scale businesses and self-employment that has generated both a renewal and in-migration to traditional rural areas where one would rather have expected depopulation. the second rural area of interest in dalarna is the sälen area. the sälen area is situated in the mountainous region close to the border with norway. there are only 2,000 people living in these ski resorts. due to the in-migration of young people the area has experienced a ten per cent population increase during the period 1985–1995. the ski tourism has led to a development that differs in many ways from other peripheral rural areas in northern sweden. the large tourist establishments provide job opportunities in a region where there are few alternatives and the employment rate is, in fact, seven percentage units higher than the county average. one third of the labour force works in the private service sector. in the sälen area we find many young people and single persons, mostly single men. in comparison with the county average and most rural areas in northern sweden, the sälen area has very few families with children. concluding remarks in recent years most municipalities and rural areas in northern sweden have experienced renewed depopulation. nevertheless, some rural areas have shown significant population growth, at least during the first half of the 1990s. this population growth in rural areas in northern sweden is concentrated to the commuter belts surrounding the major cities, while more peripheral rural areas generally exhibit population decrease. access to large labour markets and access to services are still factors that make the countryside close to cities attractive. this rather suggests suburbanisation around major cities than a general and widespread counterurbanisation of the countryside in northern sweden. however, the rural areas with growth that do not fit the description of being within the commuter belts of cities are often areas that have benefited from the tourist industry. this means that some of the most peripheral rural areas in northern sweden have often managed better than more common types of rural areas. the redistribution of the population in northern sweden since the 1970s together with the fact that many rural municipalities have experienced a renewed strong depopulation during the 1990s puts further pressure on the rural municipalities’ economic situation and possibilities for maintaining an acceptable standard of service provision for their inhabitants. moreover, many municipality centres in northern sweden have started to lose inhabitants in recent years. westlund and pichler (2000) maintain that it is the small and mediumsized towns outside metropolitan regions that presently are facing the most severe difficulties in attracting in-migrants and maintaining their populations. forthcoming delimitations of urban and rural areas will reveal if this tendency has become even stronger in the late 1990s. however, different rural areas have dissimilar preconditions, for instance in terms of job opportunities, service accessibility, quality of infrastructure, distance to major cities, housing supply, landscape features, recreational possibilities, social networks, image and status. due to that different rural areas are likely to attract a wide range of combinations of in-migrants, for instance regarding age, family situation, stage in the life-cycle, purchasing power and choice of life-style. altogether this generates a rather complex geographical pattern of rural areas with more or less unique characteristics and preconditions for fufennia 179: 2 (2001) 171contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas ture development. nevertheless, the rural areas in northern sweden that have experienced population growth during the studied period can, in most cases, be grouped into three types according to their relative location and characteristics: i) rural areas close to cities: here we often find a combination of low housing costs (at least in comparison with housing costs in residential districts within the cities) and possibilities for daily commuting to workplaces in the cities. furthermore, these areas are characterised by a relatively high proportion of families with children and, in general, high standards of living. in some cases these rural areas are strategic locations between two or more cities. ii) tourist resorts: in northern sweden these rural areas are mostly ski resorts found in the mountainous areas close to the border with norway. obviously, tourism and recreation have generated job opportunities in truly peripheral areas. the effects, however, seems to be concentrated to relatively small geographical areas such as single villages or specific mountain valleys. in a sense they can be seen as ‘urban satellites’ attracting visitors and sometimes even young in-migrants from cities and metropolitan regions. iii) other attractive rural areas: in this group we often find rural areas with a distinctive historical and cultural heritage combined with an attractive scenic landscape, but also areas with a large proportion of leisure housing (especially along the coast). in these rural areas one can expect a high proportion of households that are not dependent on proximity to large labour markets, for instance pensioners, distance workers, some self-employed persons and the like. here we often find ‘lifestyle’ arguments among the in-migrants (kåks and westholm 1994). perhaps it is even possible to identify gentrification tendencies in this type of rural areas. of course, there are rural areas where two or more of the above features are combined, for instance in leksand in the area around lake siljan, and that to some extent fit into the above description of all three types of rural areas. however, there are also some rural areas with population growth that cannot easily be placed in one of the categories mentioned before. in some cases we find single successful firms, often small-scale manufacturers, or a history of entrepreneurial traditions in these rural areas. finally, it would be interesting to take a closer look at the rural areas that have had a relatively strong development despite being located outside the commuter belts of the major cities. how and why are these areas managing this well? are there successful local firms or industries, entrepreneurs, tourist businesses, local action groups or development projects that might have contributed? or are there other explanations? and what about people’s preferences of where to live? which groups of people are attracted to different types of rural areas and why? these questions require further research. acknowledgements an earlier version of the article has been published in gourlay d (ed) (1999). marginal rural areas in the new millennium. proceeding from the pima98 international conference at the scottish agricultural college, aberdeen, june 26–29th 1998. references ahnström l (1980). turnaround-trenden och de nordiska huvudstadsregionernas utveckling efter 1950. nordrefo 1980: 3/4, 43–100. ahnström l (1986). the turnaround trend and the economically active population of seven capital regions in western europe. norsk geografisk tidskrift 40: 2, 55–64. amcoff j (1997). kontraurbanisering i sverige? in westlund h (ed). lokal utveckling för regional omvandling, 13–29. rapport 100, sir, stockholm. amcoff j (2000). samtida bosättning på svensk landsbygd. geografiska regionstudier 41, kulturgeografiska institutionen, uppsala universitet, uppsala. andersson r (1987). den svenska urbaniseringen. kontextualisering av begrepp och processer. geografiska regionstudier nr 18, kulturgeografiska institutionen, uppsala universitet, uppsala. bengtsson t & m johansson (1992). befolkningens geografiska rörlighet – minskar den? in persson lo & m wångmar (eds). 90-talets befolkningsfrågor, 41–71. ds 1992: 16, stockholm. berry b (1976). the counterurbanization process: urban america since 1970. in berry b (ed). urbanization and counterurbanization, 17–30. sage, beverly hills, california. borgegård l-e, u fransson, j håkansson & a tollef172 fennia 179: 2 (2001)örjan pettersson sen (1993). att flytta till glesbygden. om beskrivningsfaktorer bakom inflyttningen till nordanstigs kommun. gerum nr 20, geografiska institutionen, umeå universitet, umeå. borgegård l-e & j håkansson (1997). population concentration and dispersion in sweden since the 1970s. in borgegård l-e, am findlay & e sondell (eds). population, planning and policies, 9– 29. cerum report no. 5, umeå university, umeå. borgegård l-e, j håkansson & g malmberg (1995). population redistribution in sweden – long term trends and contemporary tendencies. geografiska annaler b 77: 1, 31–45. borgegård l-e, e rhodes & o siksiö (1987). inflyttare till ljusdals kommun. meddelande m:13, statens institut för byggforskning, gävle. carlquist t (1992). fler i glesbygd. välfärdsbulletinen 1992: 3, 28–30. champion ag (ed) (1989). counterurbanization: the changing pace and nature of population deconcentration. edward arnold, london. champion ag (1992). urban and regional demographic trends in the developed world. urban studies 29: 3/4, 461–482. champion ag (1994). population change and migration in britain since 1981: evidence for continuing deconcentration. environment and planning a 26: 10, 1501–1520. champion ag (1998). studying counterurbanisation and the rural population turnaround. in boyle p & k halfacree (eds). migration into rural areas, 21–40. john wiley & sons, new york. champion ag & c watkins (1991). introduction: recent developments in the social geography of rural britain. in champion ag & c watkins (eds). people in the countryside. studies of social change in rural britain, 1–21. paul chapman publishing, great britain. christaller w (1966). central places in southern germany. englewood cliffs, n.j. cloke p, m phillips & n thrift (1998). class, colonisation and lifestyle strategies in gower. in boyle p & k halfacree (eds). migration into rural areas, 166–185. john wiley & sons, new york. clout h (1996). changing countrysides. in douglas i, r huggett & m robinson (eds). companion encyclopedia of geography, 752–771. routledge, london. cochrane s & d vining (1988). recent trends in migration between core and peripheral regions in developed and advanced developing countries. international regional science review 11, 215– 243. court y (1989). denmark: towards a more deconcentrated settlement system. in champion ag (ed). counterurbanization: the changing pace and nature of population deconcentration, 121–140. edward arnold, london. dahms f & j mccomb (1999). ‘counterurbanization’, interaction and functional change in a rural amenity area – a canadian example. journal of rural studies 15: 2, 129–146. ennefors k (1991). att leva mellan stad och land – livskvalitet i den urbaniserade glesbygden. cwp 1991:15, cerum, umeå university, umeå. eriksson o (1989). bortom storstadsidéerna. en regional framtid för sverige och norden på 2010talet. carlssons, stockholm. fielding aj (1982). counterurbanisation in western europe. progress in planning 17: 1, pergamon, oxford. fielding t (1998). counterurbanisation and social class. in boyle p & k halfacree (eds). migration into rural areas, 41–60. john wiley & sons, new york. ford t (1999). understanding population growth in the peri-urban region. international journal of population geography 5: 4, 297–311. forsberg g & e carlbrand (1993). mälarbygden – en kreativ region? en studie av mälardalens landsbygd i förändring. forskningsrapport nr 107, kulturgeografiska institutionen, uppsala universitet, uppsala. garvill j, g malmberg & k westin (2000). värdet av att flytta och att stanna: om flyttningsbeslut, platsanknytning och livsvärden. statens offentliga utredningar (sou) 2000: 36 rapport 2, stockholm. geyer hs & t kontuly (1993). a theoretical foundation for the concept of differential urbanization. international regional science review 15: 2, 157–177. halfacree k (1997). contrasting roles for the postproductivist countryside. a postmodern perspective on counterurbanisation. in cloke p & j little (eds). contested countryside cultures, 70–93. routledge, london. hansen jc (1989). norway: the turnaround which turned around. in champion ag (ed). counterurbanization: the changing pace and nature of population deconcentration, 103–120. edward arnold, london. hjort s & g malmberg (1996). landsbygdsgentrifiering – en projektskiss. a project proposal presented at forskarforum in östersund, 13–14 november 1996, unpublished. håkansson j (2000). changing population distribution in sweden – long term trends and contemporary tendencies. gerum kulturgeografi 2000: 1, kulturgeografiska institutionen, umeå universitet, umeå. illeris s (1994). regional development and the urban system in denmark. in illeris s (ed). essays on regional development in europe, 7–28. research report 101, department of geography and international development studies, roskilde university, denmark. johansson m & lo persson (1991). regioner för generationer. allmänna förlaget, stockholm. johansson p & ö pettersson (1997). glesbygdens utveckling och lantbrevbäringen – tendenser i fennia 179: 2 (2001) 173contemporary population changes in north swedish rural areas bosättningsmönster samt analys av marknad för en utvidgad serviceroll för lantbrevbäringen. gerum arbetsrapport 1997-05-15, kulturgeografiska institutionen, umeå universitet, umeå. karjalainen e (1989). migration and regional development in the rural communes of kainuu, finland in 1980–85. nordia 23: 1, 1–89. kontuly t (1998). contrasting the counterurbanisation experience in european nations. in boyle p & k halfacree (eds). migration into rural areas, 61–78. john wiley & sons, new york. kåks h & e westholm (1994). en plats i tillvaron – studier av flyttning till landsbygden. dfr-rapport 1994: 8, dalarnas forskningsråd, falun. lewis g (1998). rural migration and demographic change. in ilbery b (ed). the geography of rural change, 131–160. addison wesley longman. little j & p austin (1996). women and the rural idyll. journal of rural studies 12: 2, 101–111. marsden t, j murdoch, p lowe, r munton & a flynn (1993). constructing the countryside. restructuring rural areas 1, ucl press, london. murdoch t & t marsden (1994). reconstituting rurality. restructuring rural areas 2, ucl press, london. nyström j (1989). from the city to the city’s countryside. geografiska annaler b 71: 3, 183–200. persson lo & o nygren (2001). det enkelriktade sverige. tjänstesektorn och den framtida regionala befolkningsutvecklingen. tco-rapport, stockholm. pettersson ö (2001). microregional fragmentation in a swedish county. papers in regional science 80: 4, 389–409. pettersson ö, lo persson & u wiberg (1996). närbilder av västerbottningar – materiella levnadsvillkor och hälsotillstånd i västerbottens län. regional dimensions working paper no. 2, cerum, umeå universitet, umeå. pettersson ö & e westholm (1998). gräddhyllor och fattigfickor. en mikroregional analys av välfärdens geografiska fördelning i dalarna. dfr-rapport 1998: 1, dalarnas forskningsråd, falun. the population (1991). volume in the national atlas of sweden. sna förlag, stockholm. rusanen j, a naukkarinen, a colpaert & t muilu (1997). differences in the spatial structure of the population between finland and sweden in 1995 – a gis viewpoint. research reports 221, statistics finland, helsinki. räisänen s, j rusanen & a naukkarinen (1996). socio-economic grid data and gis for analyzing changes in the finnish countryside. in rumor m & r mcmillan (eds). geographical information: from research to application through cooperation, 651–660. ios press, netherlands. statistics sweden (1995). småorter 1990. statistiska meddelanden be16sm9401. statistics sweden (1996). tätorter 1995. statistiska meddelanden be16sm9601. statistics sweden (1997). småorter 1995. statistiska meddelanden be16sm9602. stenbacka s (2001). landsbygdsboende i inflyttarnas perspektiv. intention och handling i lokalsamhället. geografiska regionstudier nr 42, kulturgeografiska institutionen, uppsala universitet, uppsala. stockdale a, a findlay & d short (2000). the repopulation of rural scotland: opportunity and threat. journal of rural studies 16: 2, 243–257. tervamäki e (1987). migration in finland, a multilevel system of regions. fennia 165: 1, 1–88. vartiainen p (1989a). the end of drastic depopulation in rural finland: evidence of counterurbanisation? journal of rural studies 5: 2, 123–136. vartiainen p (1989b). counterurbanisation: a challenge for socio-theoretical geography. journal of rural studies 5: 3, 217–225. westlund h & w pichler (2000). en ny grön våg? glesbygdstillväxt under storstadsexpansionens 90-tal. working paper 2000: 16, sir, östersund. wiberg u (2000). norrland – glest, glesare, glesast. in hjelmskog s (ed). hemort sverige, 88–123. integrationsverket, norrköping. nick gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70040 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70040 the suppression of welcome nick gill gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 one way to interpret the organisation of refugee welcome in europe is by thinking about the tension between the official response and the grassroots response to the events. this tension has evolved in different ways in different countries, but in general it is possible to distinguish between a bureaucratic tendency to abstract welcome into a specific problem or policy domain, and a different, often opposite, tendency to welcome in spontaneous, solidaristic and autonomous ways. starting from the premise that welcome necessarily entails more than simply permitting entry and is inherently emotional and relational, this lecture explores a series of questions. how can genuine, spontaneous welcome be preserved under the pressure of statist and nationalistic logics and demands? how can we hold onto welcome as something meaningful when it seems to be under attack from not only right-wing nationalists and factions that draw spurious connections between refugees and security threats, but also the very architecture of bureaucracy? what relationship does welcome share with legalistic logics and practices? to what extent can welcomers and welcoming initiatives be supported by international cooperation, global organisational and communication systems, and resource-gathering mechanisms? and what role can research play in improving our understanding of welcome? by raising these questions the lecture aims to initiate a discussion about the nature, practicalities and possible futures of welcome in geography and the social sciences more broadly. keywords: welcome, sanctuary, migration, refugees, asylum, hospitality nick gill, department of geography, amory building, university of exeter, rennes drive, exeter, ex4 4rj, uk. e-mail: n.m.gill@exeter.ac.uk on the occasion of finland’s 100th anniversary of independence the annual meeting of finnish geographer’s conference 2017 chose the theme of ‘welcome to finland’. given the events of the preceding few years in relation to migration, and in particular europe’s response to the refugees displaced by unrest in the middle east, this theme is extremely pertinent. it offers the opportunity to reflect upon the struggle over welcome in europe. a starting point is to recognise how poorly government policy reflects popular welcoming sentiments. a survey commissioned by amnesty international (2016) asked more than 27,000 people in 27 countries globally about their attitudes towards refugees. contrary to what the right-wing newspaper commentaries might have us believe, it demonstrated that government policy was out of step with the attitudes of most people, with two thirds of respondents stating that they thought their government should do more to help refugees1. this finding reflects badly on democracy2. governments were either unwilling or unable to carry out the wishes of their electorates, who supported greater liberalisation of border controls and the delivery of more aid to those who had been displaced during © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 fennia 196(1) (2018) 89nick gill the so-called ‘refugee crisis’3. the result was that international aid efforts were under-supported. the united nations high commission for refugees was able to raise only just over half of the required aid needed to respond to the humanitarian needs of the displaced by mid-2016. faced with the inertia of national governments and driven by strong discourses of compassion and solidarity, a range of grassroots organisations acted autonomously in europe during 2014, 2015 and 2016, including delivering supplies, finding accommodation, offering medical, legal and educational support, and raising public awareness. they were galvanised by high levels of social media support, notably around the twitter hashtag #refugeeswelcome, which rose to prominence following the publication of pictures of the drowned toddler alan kurdi, rapidly spread through other social media platforms, gained ‘trending’ status, filtered through into mainstream news media and ensured that ‘refugees welcome’ became a politically potent slogan (barisione et al. 2017). to be sure, these developments were not above reproach. the refugees in question were usually taken to be syrians, which came to overshadow refugees fleeing other countries and situations, as well as the many millions of internally displaced people that did not or could not cross an international border and therefore did not qualify as refugees. as such the way that the refugee welcome movement was interpreted sometimes reflected a discursive narrowing even as it gained in popularity. nevertheless, its sheer prominence meant that the ‘refugee’ question took centre stage in the collective consciousness of ordinary europeans, shifting the matter of borders, in part at least, from a geopolitical issue framed by elite politicians and policy makers and approached via top-down interventions, to a geosocial issue (mitchell & kallio 2017) framed by social media discourse and impacted by the collective agency of individuals. alongside funds from the european union, these events helped to alleviate the difficulties some countries faced in responding to increased numbers of migrants that needed support. as rozakou (2016, 185) describes it with reference to the greek case: “in 2015, an unprecedented stream of material aid was transported to greek islands from all over the world and different parts of greece ... the recipients of these offerings were various solidarity initiatives and associations, some of which had recently emerged as a response to the huge numbers of people who crossed the greek–turkish sea borders. delivery companies undertook the pro-bono transfer of parcels to non-governmental organisations (ngos) and collectivities. a single transport company transferred more than 6,100 packages, weighing over 95 tons, between november 2015 and january 2016. storehouses were full of clothes, food and other items. the internet was flooded with crowd-funding campaigns by people from abroad who gathered contributions in order to travel and volunteer in different parts of greece. local groups already active in refugee assistance were startled by the amount of donations in objects and money, and the number and enthusiasm of new volunteers who came to join their activities. tourists in the greek islands decided to turn their vacations into the systematic assistance of border-crossers, distributed water and food or transferred people with their cars.” many of these groups and initiatives had existed before 2015, but grew in number, magnitude and influence as the issue of refugee welcome gained prominence. the response has attracted some criticism for its inefficiency, the way it diverted resources away from the developing world, and the extent to which international humanitarian professionals rather than the greek government or those working in the refugee sector before the increase in migrant arrivals had the final say on how to distribute the resources (howden & fotiadis 2017). these incursions into the greek management of the humanitarian response were commensurate with the crisis-fuelled establishment of european ‘super-state’ powers (painter et al. 2017, 259) that culminated in the genesis of ‘hotspots’ as novel humanitarian devices fusing care and control4 (tazzioli & garelli 2018). for all its misdirection, however, a high degree of solidarity was in evidence. ‘donations were so many that in autumn 2015’, rozakou recounts (2016, 196), ‘collectivities in lesvos had to ask publicly for a halt until they sorted and distributed the items they had accumulated’. in the uk too, a marked tension arose between government responses and the activities of grassroots campaigns. when then prime minister david cameron announced that the uk would only resettle an additional 20,000 syrian refugees over five years in mid-2015, financial and material donations to refugee charities increased dramatically. the charity city of sanctuary, for example, a grassroots organisation committed to welcoming refugees, saw its british group membership double and its financial donations increase exponentially between early 2015 and 20175. 90 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays if the spontaneous welcome of refugees had been a response to the lacklustre efforts of many governments in europe however, the eu-turkey deal can be seen as a counter-measure: instituting a form of organisation of refugee reception that reinstated the old, familiar pattern of exteriorisation of border controls. the deal secured €6 billion to support turkish assistance for refugees, and granted turkish nationals visa-free travel to europe. but it aimed to return every migrant arriving irregularly on the greek islands back to turkey6. it consequently re-established refugee reception as a matter of negotiation and calculation. this meant exposing asylum-seekers to unsafe conditions and inadequate legal safeguards (amnesty international 2017), as well as turning the greek islands into places of detention, containment and deportation7. alongside heightened security measures in the mediterranean, europe’s exteriorisation of refugee management hollowed out welcome itself. one way to interpret the organisation of refugee welcome in europe, then, is by thinking about the tensions between the official response and the grassroots response to the events. distinguishing between institutionalised, statist ways of seeing and responding to events, and more organic, extemporaneous responses is key (see magnusson 2013). this tension has evolved in different ways in different countries, but in general it is possible to distinguish between a bureaucratic tendency to abstract welcome into a specific problem or policy domain, and a different, often opposite, tendency – which is sometimes a reaction to the first – to welcome in spontaneous, solidaristic and autonomous ways. how can genuine, spontaneous welcome be preserved under the pressure of statist and nationalistic logics and demands? how can we hold onto welcome as something meaningful when it seems to be under attack from not only right wing nationalists and factions that draw spurious connections between refugees and security threats, but also the very architecture of bureaucracy? in these dilemmas about welcome we encounter the limits of bureaucracy itself, embedded in cold, efficient and impersonal rules that were conceived for the just administration of supposedly advanced, territorially contained societies, but which have come to form an ‘iron cage’ (weber et al. 1930) that ultimately dehumanises, and restricts those very societies from developing beyond their origins. in what follows i discuss the various mechanisms that have threatened to suppress welcome in europe (to varying degrees of success), in an attempt to throw into relief the workings of exclusionism and protectionism. then i examine some of the questions these mechanisms raise for the movement towards welcome in europe over the coming years, and conclude with a comment on the role of qualitative research in sustaining welcome. first of all, though, it is worth clarifying the essence of welcome itself. what is welcome? the distinction between orientating towards newcomers in terms of a set of laws, rules and obligations, and doing so in more impulsive, instinctive, emotionally-invested and inter-personal ways has animated debate about cosmopolitanism for some considerable time in the social sciences (levinas 1979, 1981; derrida 2001). on the one hand, ‘hospitality’ has been understood in terms of duties and rights (derrida 2000). scholars have argued that there is a connection between hospitality shown towards friend and enemy and hospitality itself has been thought of as the process of converting the latter into the former (selwyn 2000). as such it entails serious risks and cannot be too warm, unguarded or enthusiastic. it has consequently often had a practical, rather than emotional, focus: emphasising the provision of food, drink and shelter (lynch et al. 2011)8. on the other hand, scholars who have studied welcome emphasise its emotional and relational character (chauchard 1971; gouirand 1991; leblanc 2000; mouradian 2015). ‘feeling welcome’ is induced by a perception that your presence brings about joy or satisfaction in someone else. refugees’ accounts of welcome often emphasise these inter-personal aspects. consider the following account by a syrian refugee housed in germany who had waited for about a month for accommodation in 2015, and could not speak german: “one day, a volunteer came to us to help us with everything. she’s teaching us german and we call her migy. i call her my german mother in my heart. i owe her a lot of things. it occurs to me that everyone here is smiling at us, but we are not smiling. it seems like we forgot how. it seems that in the end i didn’t need food or money or even a safe country. all i needed was a good honest smile.” (jamous 2016) fennia 196(1) (2018) 91nick gill what is telling about this brief account is that the narrator values the human emotional element – the smile – extremely highly. such intimacies ground global events (pratt & rosner 2012). moreover, the benefits of a genuine welcome such as this should be obvious: it creates the conditions for the development of mutual respect and trust, which is crucial to refugees’ well-being (lyytinen 2017). welcome is more than simply permitting entry. it involves conveying to the newcomer the positive reception of their presence. welcome relies upon human warmth and, to a degree, the vulnerability of the welcomer. as such it cannot be mechanistic and unfeeling. indeed, it may be impossible to welcome someone in an emotionally cold and disconnected manner since the emotional content is integral to the object of the encounter itself9. welcome demands intimacy and occupies a world of inter-relational subjectivity and shared vulnerability; admission, on the other hand, speaks of permission and concession, occupying a world of economics and calculation. of course, this should not be taken to imply that all emotionality associated with questions of border control and migrant entry is of a welcoming nature. distrust, political alienation and frustration with perceived ruling elites has also been linked to the rise of the political right in europe as well as further afield in recent years (see aisch et al. 2017). working class, low skilled voters in many western economies are facing unemployment, falling real wages, rising personal debt and a mismatch between their skills and the skills required by largely tertiary and quaternary industrial economies. the rise of right wing populism in the united states and britain, for example, has been driven by structural changes in their economies that have made this social group feel disillusioned and politically unrepresented (ford & goodwin 2014). similarly in much of continental europe, the economic difficulties of the late 2000s, including the sovereign debt crisis that erupted at the end of 2009, produced rising unemployment levels, fuelling right wing sentiments and increasing pressure on politicians to restrict numbers of immigrants, including asylum seekers and refugees (greven 2016). although radical right-wing parties are once again ”a force to be reckoned with” (akkerman et al. 2016, 3), the most notably feature of the right-wing parties that have benefitted from these developments is their strengthened mainstream appeal; policies and rhetoric that might once have been considered radically right-wing are becoming more acceptable and politically potent. while this lecture is concerned with the tension between bureaucracy and sentiments of welcome and inclusion then, it is worth noting that similar tension has animated the relationship between bureaucracy and protectionism in recent years. the mechanics of suppression with the emotional and relational character of welcome in mind, it is possible to outline a set of geopolitical and governmental factors that have threatened to suppress practical efforts towards welcome in europe in recent years. circumstances have not been favourable to the nurturing of the budding wave of welcoming sentiments that swept europe in 2015. a series of events, from brexit and the election of donald trump to the ascendance of the political party alternative für deutschland (alternative for germany, afd) in germany and the paris attacks, have brought about a heightening of protectionist rhetoric in global politics and bolstered the momentum of the political right, undermining confidence in openness generally. terrorism in particular should be highlighted as a factor that has suppressed welcome. while the political right is often to be heard drawing associations between liberalism and the risk of terrorism, it is clear that terrorism has negatively impacted on the efforts of social liberals in europe to create a safe and welcoming community. the operation of terrorists should therefore be conceptualised as an attack on openness and solidarity, since their very objective is to spread fear and mistrust. as with other, more everyday, forms of violence and fear that play a central role in the orchestration of contemporary political life (including the structural, hidden violences of neo-colonialism, discrimination and exploitation that underwrite the global economy – see pain and smith (2016)) the responses that they tend to elicit are typically those of recoil, withdrawal, closure and mistrust: all anathema to intimacy with others, all anathema to welcome. in terms of governmental factors, i take government to refer to a broad set of mentalities of governing that may or may not coincide with the activities of nation-states. central to the 92 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays governmentality of welcome is the conceptualisation of the phenomenon of welcome in terms of policies and logistics, facilitated by a set of representational techniques including laws, statistics, demographics, charts, maps, surveys and expenditure. spontaneous, emotional welcome is translated into these governmental forms via a process of abstraction. from a geographical perspective, we might understand abstraction by distinguishing between ‘abstract’, ‘planned’ space on the one hand and what has been called ‘lived’ or ‘everyday’ space on the other (lefebvre 1991, 2009). lefebvre holds that abstract ways of organising space and social activity carry with them the risks of inattention or insensitivity to the concerns of real people and their everyday experiences. he calls these spaces, typically used by the ‘scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers’ (lefebvre 1991, 38), ‘lethal’ (ibid., 370) because they seek to appropriate and subsume alternative ways in which space can be lived and organised. for lefebvre, abstract spaces seek a translation from the represented to the concrete, such that concrete matters are to be arranged according to imagined notions of how social life should ideally proceed. the risk is that the representations are used to dominate and dictate reality: to ‘reduce the lived to the conceived’ (lefebvre 2009, 229). this sort of reduction can be counter-productive in the refugee context in at least two respects. first, the legalistic approach to welcome, in particular, typically obfuscates the complexity of human stories by subjecting them to classification, rendering them comparable and countable, assessing them for credibility and consistency, and presuming to be able to discern the most salient elements contained within them. refugee narratives, filled with emotion, are distilled to bare facts (see smith 2015). this makes the assumption that appeals against injustice and moral harms can be made without recourse to emotion and passion as key resources in conveying meaning. this assumption is becoming increasingly critically viewed in political theory (shklar 1990; barnett 2017). having been thus formulated however, refugee experiences are assessed against a whole range of legal concepts, many of which are geographical (e.g. ‘burden sharing’, ‘dispersal’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘territorial sovereignty’, ‘hotspots’). whatever the official outcome of this process, there is a widespread, systematic underestimation of the consequences of undergoing it for the ability to live a full human life. legal systems make temporal and spatial demands of their subjects that frequently become unbearable: including extended periods of waiting (conlon 2011)10 and unrealistic requirements to either move or stay put (hynes 2009). a central pillar of the common european asylum system, for example, is the principle that an asylum claim received by a member state should be determined by the country in which it is first lodged11. this principle subordinates any desire to relocate to areas of the eu that may have greater capacity to welcome newcomers, or that may host concentrations of compatriot refugees, to bureaucratic and administrative convenience (brekke & brochmann 2015). if asylum seekers are found to be claiming protection in the ‘wrong’ country they can be deported back to the country in which they first lodged a claim, with all the violence and disruption this entails. germany, for example, carried out over 3,000 such deportations in the first half of 2017 alone (su 2017). this policy acts not only as a form of literal containment of refugees at the external edges of europe, but also a mechanism of estrangement and disconnection between many europeans and asylum seeking newcomers. unsurprisingly, it is a primary cause of migrants choosing clandestine approaches, as a way to autonomously reclaim their independence of movement (tazzioli et al. 2014). many refused asylum seekers have sought church asylum in germany, for example, as a way to defy the ’first safe country’ principle and have their claims determined in the german legal system (su 2017). the dublin principle embodies a blunt application of a spatio-legal abstraction that is not attuned to the realities of migrants' lives. instead it attempts to force them to contort themselves in uncomfortable ways in order to conform to an idealised spatial schema. another way in which the abstraction of welcome can be counter-productive is by paradoxically eliding humanitarianism and dehumanisation. take the case of british universities and refugee or asylum-seeking students. in 2012 british universities offered 24 bursaries in total to refugee or asylum seeking students (article 26 2018). by 2016 they offered 111 undergraduate and 29 postgraduate bursaries, an increase of over 400%. it has allowed many of them to claim that they welcome refugees. but recent research has demonstrated that students from a refugee background in higher education fennia 196(1) (2018) 93nick gill in developed countries, including the uk, face a whole gamut of barriers and prejudices (mangan & winter 2017). educationally, very little provision is made for different styles of learning. educators speak too fast, refuse requests for clarification, do not give refugees and asylum seekers the chance to speak in class, and mark their work down harshly for poor grammar or punctuation. socially, asylum seeking and refugee students face racism and discrimination in the class and on campus. they are frequently not included in study groups and their ideas are routinely pushed aside. as a result they often study and eat alone. an over-emphasis on numeric aspects of welcome over lived experiences undermines the basis of welcome itself. to be sure, the bursaries and scholarships are well-meaning, but they can easily become detached from the everyday life of students. as a result, the asylum seeking and refugee students in mangan and winter’s (2017) research often did not feel welcomed at all, despite being formally admitted12. the same pattern of humanitarian ‘welcome’ in an abstract sense, coupled with dehumanisation in practice, is discernible in various other contexts. elisa pascucci (2017) has identified the way in which contractions in material refugee aid are legitimated by humanitarian discourses of communityand self-help among refugees living in shelters in cairo. humanitarianism here masks real deficiencies in the ability to welcome refugees. in a different context, ehrkamp and nagel (2017) critically discuss the ‘differential inclusion’ (ibid., 318) of migrants in us churches: supported in highly conditional and selective ways which end up widening rather than reducing social inequalities. their research illustrates how, when welcome is organised through institutions, it can become banal and ineffective (see also mitchell 2017). in general, a set of circumstances and governmentalities have created the conditions for the suppression of welcome as an inter-personal ethic in europe. i do not want to suggest that welcome everywhere has been emptied of its meaning – this would overlook the continuing work of a whole range of highly effective grassroots organisations. at the same time it is important to recognise the threat of these circumstances and governmentalities, and to scrutinise the mechanics of their operation. sustaining welcome this raises the question of how to respond to these developments from the perspective of sustaining and nurturing the movement towards welcome in europe. in this section i reflect on the challenges confronting this movement, and pose some practical questions about how best to meet them in future years. we need to be aware that spontaneous and autonomous work in everyday spaces of compassion and solidarity comes with its own difficulties. some of the most striking instances of welcome in recent years have been south-south, refugee to refugee, welcome, such as palestinian refugees in lebanese camps welcoming syrians (fiddian-qasmiyeh 2015), and acehnese fishermen rescuing hundreds of displaced rohingya who were stranded in the andaman sea in 2015 (missbach 2015). perhaps what we are seeing in these instances is the politicising and mobilising effect of shared vulnerabilities, driven by a recognition of mutual inter-dependence that is, paradoxically, harder for the rich, safe and powerful to partake in, or even acknowledge (butler 2015). but these initiatives face real challenges in terms of their financial and material sustainability. welcome can quickly become extremely – sometimes prohibitively – costly to these communities. welcoming refugees necessitates certain aptitudes and resources, such as the ability to communicate with those being welcomed, the time to spend with them and, often, the interpersonal skills to interact appropriately with traumatised people. it is also true that not everybody will feel safe hugging survivors on the shores of lesvos13 or befriending male detainees in harmondsworth immigration removal centre14: there are important gender dynamics involved in the practicalities of welcome that are relatively underexplored. the image of the female body, and her baby, often prominently displayed in media representations of refugee ‘crises’, are regularly made to stand in for the voices and experiences of refugee women themselves15. women and children are the spectacular victims of humanitarian crises, and yet their stories of migration remain obscured (wright 2002; alhayek 2014; wolfe 2015). 94 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays welcoming also entails emotional labour that can often be undervalued. asylum and refugee support groups constantly struggle with the burnout, depletion and secondary trauma of their personnel (gill et al. 2012); and state bureaucracies routinely underestimate the risks of secondary trauma amongst their decision-makers (gill 2016). for these reasons it is vital to consider whether and how welcomers and welcoming initiatives can be supported by international cooperation, global organisational and communication systems, and resource-gathering mechanisms. perhaps elements of the formal state system can and should be exploited and appropriated in the service of these goals? to abandon the state entirely as a hopelessly neoliberal or exclusionary phenomenon may be to ‘cede too much’ (martin & pierce 2012, 67; cooper 2017). cooper (2017) suggests that we orientate towards the state not from a position of pure critique or negation, but with a view to nurturing its progressive elements. these include how certain western developed states function to ‘provide social welfare, steward resources, establish fora for public debate, make new, critical forms of knowledge possible and … protect populations’ (ibid., 338). could the international state system ever be mobilised against the violence and wastefulness of border controls themselves16? if we are to defend welcome as an interpersonal ethic a balance must be struck between the necessity to maintain the human touch in order for welcome to be more than simply admittance, and the importance of finding resources and coordinating efforts in such a way as to make welcome sustainable and just, and to distribute its costs in ways that are equitable. welcome needs to be both emotional and organisational, a tall order given the tendency of emotion to defy rationalistic calculation (levinas 1981), and of bureaucratic organisation to evacuate personal emotion (weber 1948). a progressive perspective on welcome might therefore highlight those instances in which this delicate balance has been struck at local, national and international scales17. the sanctuary movement is a concrete and lively example of such politics. by describing itself as simultaneously an organisation, a movement and a network it seeks to balance the need for organisational coherence with the importance of grassroots, local and interpersonal action and relationships (city of sanctuary 2017). conclusion this leaves us with a set of questions. given that we can surely expect more international displacement of the scale recently witnessed in the years to come, where are we to look for progressive innovations in the arrangement and practice of welcome? how can we get better at protecting genuine welcome from its suppression via abstraction and bureaucracy? to what extent should states be engaged in efforts to organise welcome, given their place in the international state system that underpins exclusionary and subjugating border control in the first place? and how can the different ingredients of local, autonomous, spontaneous initiatives on the one hand, and globally coordinated, logistically sophisticated responses on the other, be effectively blended? i want to end by examining the role that qualitative research can play in meeting some of these challenges. research engages in representations of its own, and we should always be mindful of the representational politics involved in attempting to speak on behalf of others. researchers are increasingly required to generate measurable and demonstrable impact, which can instrumentalise relationships between refugee communities and researchers in uncomfortable and inappropriate ways, contributing to the alienation of research subjects and to research fatigue (sukarieh & tannock 2013). refugee communities themselves have raised concerns about these risks and called for vigilance among those seeking to work with asylum seekers and refugees. they have requested that the principle ‘nothing about us without us’ is adhered to, and set out a series of considerations to highlight and minimise the ways in which bias and privilege can structure work with refugees (canas 2015). the challenge facing researchers, then, is to carry out their work in solidarity and partnership with participants, with careful consideration given to how refugees and their communities can be best presented and included in work, as well as how they might benefit from it. when approached in this way qualitative research can be an effective means of critique of the dehumanising tendencies inherent to bureaucracies of migration management and control. research that gives space to refugee voices and experiences helps to develop a sharper focus on the emotional aspects of welcome by maintaining personalism and conveying nuance and contextual richness. for instance, following calls fennia 196(1) (2018) 95nick gill in social theory to attend more closely to grounded and felt injustices alongside abstract notions of justice (e.g. shklar 1990; barnett 2017), the corollary in the case of welcome is to undertake research into what precipitates feeling unwelcome (see lynch 2017). this would be helpful in illustrating to bureaucrats and administrators the distinction between being admitted, and feeling as though your presence brought joy or satisfaction to someone else. by foregrounding welcome-as-experienced, qualitative research that is approached and executed carefully and sensitively can act to challenge some of the more abstract interpretations of welcome that underpin its governmentalisation. notes 1 europe was no exception, with an average of 67.8% of respondents either somewhat or strongly agreeing with the statement ‘our government should do more to help refugees fleeing war or persecution’. the european countries included in the survey were spain, germany, greece, the uk, france and poland. 2 the majority of the countries included in the survey would be widely recognised as democracies. 3 there were exceptions. for example, angela merkel’s germany allowed many syrian refugees entry initially, and sweden accepted a high number of refugees relative to its population. 4 humanitarianism and saving lives has become more central to european borderwork itself over the last decade, in large part as a product of the obliteration of safe and legal routes out of conflict and away from human rights abuses or poverty, which produces a level of violence that states, including the european union, must be seen to be responding to (pallister-wilkins 2016). 5 i was a trustee of the national charity during this time. 6 although provision was made in the deal to relocate one syrian refugee from turkey to the eu for every syrian returned from the greek islands to turkey, the rate of relocation to the eu was ‘negligible’, at least in the early phases of the deal (amnesty international 2017, 6). 7 while it may be argued that it is unsafe for migrants to attempt to reach greece irregularly from turkey, an emphasis on facilitating safe and legal routes to greece and further into europe could have avoided the recourse to forcibly containing them in turkey. 8 in the opening editorial of the journal hospitality and society for example, the editors, in outlining their vision for a broad, intellectually inclusive approach to hospitality, make only brief reference to the emotions of hospitality (lynch et al. 2011). 9 this is why it is possible to talk about one computer platform ‘hosting’ another, but one cannot talk about a computer platform ‘welcoming’ another – the distinction is emotional. 10 although these are not always spent passively, and can be periods of – albeit limited agency in asylum seekers’ lives (rotter 2016). 11 this principle is to be found in the dublin convention and its subsequent amendments. 12 it is for these reasons that i and others have been involved in attempts to promote a more holistic approach to refugee welcome in universities in recent years via an initiative called ‘universities of sanctuary’ (see finlinson et al. 2016). 13 i am indebted to eeva kemppainen and tomi haapa-alho for this point. 14 one of europe’s biggest detention centres, located in britain. 15 for work that is critical of the trope of ‘crisis’ as it comes to be applied to migration, see mountz and heimstra (2014), lindley (2014) and gill and good (forthcoming). 16 i reflect on this possibility in greater detail in a forthcoming book co-edited by cooper, dhawan, and newman (forthcoming). 17 recent interest in ‘emotional states’ could be helpful in this regard (jupp et al. 2016). acknowledgements i am grateful to the organisers and attendees of the annual finnish geographers’ conference 2017 in turku, finland. i am also grateful to kirsi pauliina kallio and james riding for their editorial assistance, jen bagelman and matt sparke who acted as referees in fennia’s open review process of this article and the members of the geography department at the university of exeter who organised and 96 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays attended the changing geographies discussion session at which i presented an earlier version. i acknowledge financial support from the european research council, grant number: stg-2015_677917; acronym: asyfair. references aisch, g., pearce, a. & rousseau, b. (2017) how far is europe swinging to the right? the new york times 23.10.2017 <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/22/world/europe/europe-rightwing-austria-hungary.html>. 18.05.2018 akkerman, t., de lange, s. l. & rooduijn, m. (2016) inclusion and mainstreaming? radical right-wing populist parties in the new millennium. in akkerman, t., de lange, s. l. & rooduijn, m. (eds.) radical right-wing populist parties in western europe: into the mainstream?, 1–28. routledge, london. alhayek, k. (2014) double marginalization: the invisibility of syrian refugee women's perspectives in mainstream online activism and global media. feminist media studies 14(4) 696–700. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.935205 amnesty international (2016) refugees welcome survey 2016 the results. <https://www.amnesty. org/en/latest/news/2016/05/refugees-welcome-survey-results-2016/>. 31.01.2018. amnesty international (2017) a blueprint for despair: human rights impact of the eu-turkey deal. amnesty international, london. article 26 (2018) student bursaries. <http://article26.hkf.org.uk/student-bursaries>. 31.01.2018. barisione, m., michailidou, a. & airoldi, m. (2017) understanding a digital movement of opinion: the case of #refugeeswelcome. information, communication & society [online dec 08 2017] https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1410204 barnett, c. (2017) the priority of injustice: locating democracy in critical theory. university of georgia press, athens. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt43v brekke, j.-p. & brochmann, g. (2015) stuck in transit: secondary migration of asylum seekers in europe, national differences, and the dublin regulation. journal of refugee studies 28(2) 145–162. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feu028 butler, j. (2015) notes toward a performative theory of assembly. harvard university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495548 canas, t. (2015) 10 things you need to consider if you are an artist not of the refugee and asylum seeker community looking to work with our community. rise: refugees, survivors and exdetainees. <http://riserefugee.org/10-things-you-need-to-consider-if-you-are-an-artist-not-of-therefugee-and-asylum-seeker-community-looking-to-work-with-our-community/>. 28.03.2018. chauchard, p. (1971) l'accueil. editions universitaires, paris. city of sanctuary (2017) city of sanctuary charter 2017. city of sanctuary, sheffield. <https:// cityofsanctuary.org/2017/05/16/city-of-sanctuary-conference-and-agm-2017/>. 28.03.2018. conlon, d. (2011) waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility. gender, place & culture 18(3) 353–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2011.566320 cooper, d. (2017) prefiguring the state. antipode 49(2) 335–356. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12277 cooper, d., dhawan, n. & newman, j. (eds.) (forthcoming) reimaging the state: the challenge for progressive transformative politics. routledge, london. derrida, j. (2000) of hospitality: anne dufourmantelle invites jacques derrida to respond. stanford university press, stanford. derrida, j. (2001) on cosmopolitanism. in derrida, j. (ed.) on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, 3–24 routledge, new york. ehrkamp, p. & nagel, c. (2017) policing the borders of church and societal membership: immigration and faith-based communities in the us south. territory, politics, governance 5(3) 318–331. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2017.1290545 fiddian-qasmiyeh, e. (2015) refugees helping refugees: how a palestinian camp in lebanon is welcoming syrians. <https://theconversation.com/profiles/elena-fiddian-qasmiyeh-192354>. 31.01.2018. finlinson, e., grace, a. & gill, n. (2016) universities of sanctuary resource pack. city of sanctuary, shef f ield.< ht tps: //uni ver si ties .ci t yof sanc tuar y.org / wp content /uploads /si tes /68 / 2016 /03/ universities-pack.pdf>. 19.05.2018. ford, r. & goodwin, m. j. (2014) revolt on the right: explaining support for the radical right in britain. routledge, london. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/22/world/europe/europe-right-wing-austria-hungary.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/22/world/europe/europe-right-wing-austria-hungary.html https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.935205 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/05/refugees-welcome-survey-results-2016/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/05/refugees-welcome-survey-results-2016/ http://article26.hkf.org.uk/student-bursaries https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2017.1410204 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt43v https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feu028 https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495548 http://riserefugee.org/10-things-you-need-to-consider-if-you-are-an-artist-not-of-the-refugee-and-asylum-seeker-community-looking-to-work-with-our-community/ http://riserefugee.org/10-things-you-need-to-consider-if-you-are-an-artist-not-of-the-refugee-and-asylum-seeker-community-looking-to-work-with-our-community/ https://cityofsanctuary.org/2017/05/16/city-of-sanctuary-conference-and-agm-2017/ https://cityofsanctuary.org/2017/05/16/city-of-sanctuary-conference-and-agm-2017/ https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2011.566320 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12277 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2017.1290545 https://theconversation.com/profiles/elena-fiddian-qasmiyeh-192354 https://universities.cityofsanctuary.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/68/2016/03/universities-pack.pdf https://universities.cityofsanctuary.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/68/2016/03/universities-pack.pdf fennia 196(1) (2018) 97nick gill gill, n. (2016) nothing personal? geographies of governing and activism in the british asylum system. john wiley & sons, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118315996 gill, n., conlon, d., oeppen, c. & tyler, i. (2012) networks of asylum support in the uk and usa: a handbook of ideas, strategies and best practice for asylum support groups in a challenging social and economic climate. university of exeter, exeter. gill, n. & good, a. (eds.) (forthcoming) asylum determination in europe: ethnographic perspectives. palgrave, london. gouirand, p. (1991) origines et perspectives historiques de l'accueil. téoros 10 3–9. greven, t. (2016) the rise of right-wing populism in europe and the united states. friedrich ebert foundation, berlin. <http://www.fesdc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/rightwingpopulism. pdf>. 28.03.2018. howden, d. & fotiadis, a. (2017) where did the money go? how greece fumbled the refugee crisis. the guardian 09.03.2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/09/how-greece-fumbledrefugee-crisis>. 31.01.2018. hynes, p. (2009) contemporary compulsory dispersal and the absence of space for the restoration of trust. journal of refugee studies 22(1) 97–121. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen049 jamous, h. (2016) safe in germany, a syrian refugee learns to smile again. syrian observatory for human rights. <http://www.syriahr.com/en/?p=47466>. 18.05.2018. jupp, e., pykett, j., & smith, f. m. (ed.) (2016) emotional states: sites and spaces of affective governance. taylor & francis, oxford. leblanc, m. (2000) une étude exploratoire : vers une échelle de mesure de l’accueil touristique. loisir & société 23(1) 197–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2000.10715609 lefebvre, h. (1991) the production of space. blackwell, oxford. lefebvre, h. (2009) space and the state. in brenner, n. & elden, s. (eds.) state, space, world: selected essays, 223–253. university of minnesota press, minneapolis and london. levinas, e. (1979) totalit y and the infinite: an essay on ex teriorit y. springer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9342-6 levinas, e. (1981) otherwise than being or beyond essence. springer, new york. lindley, a. (ed.) (2014) crisis and migration: critical perspectives. routledge, abingdon. lynch, p. (2017) mundane welcome: hospitality as life politics. annals of tourism research 64 174–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2017.04.001 lynch, p., molz, j. g., mcintosh, a., lugosi, p. & lashley, c. (2011) theorizing hospitality. hospitality & society 1(1) 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp.1.1.3_2 ly y tinen, e. (2017) refugees’ ‘journeys of trust ’: creating an analy tical framework to examine refugees’ exilic journeys with a focus on trust. journal of refugee studies 30(4) 489–510. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/few035 magnusson, w. (2013) politics of urbanism: seeing like a city. routledge, abingdon. mangan, d. & winter, l. a. (2017) (in) validation and (mis) recognition in higher education: the experiences of students from refugee backgrounds. international journal of lifelong education 36(4) 486–502. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2017.1287131 martin, d. & pierce, j. (2013) reconceptualizing resistance: residuals of the state and democratic radical pluralism. antipode 45(1) 61–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.00980.x missbach, a. (2015) the rohingya in aceh: solidarity and indifference. university of melbourne, melbourne. <http://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/the-rohingya-in-aceh-solidarity-andindifference/>. 18.05.2018. mitchell, k. (2017) freedom, faith, and humanitarian governance: the spatial politics of church asylum in europe. space and polity 21(3) 269–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2017.1380883 mitchell, k. & kallio, k. p. (2017) spaces of the geosocial: exploring transnational topologies. geopolitics 22(1) 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 mountz, a. & heimstra, n. (2014) chaos and crisis: dissecting the spatiotemporal logics of contemporary migrations and state practices. annals of the association of american geographers 104(2) 282–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.857547 mouradian, c. (2015) the art of welcome: what are the innovative practices that would enhance the guests’ experience in luxury hotels? the vision for the front-office. skema business school, university of nice, nice. pain, r. & smith, s. j. (2016) fear: critical geopolitics and everyday life. in pain, r. & smith, s. j. (eds.) fear: critical geopolitics and everyday life, 19–40. routledge, abingdon. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118315996 http://www.fesdc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/rightwingpopulism.pdf http://www.fesdc.org/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/rightwingpopulism.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/09/how-greece-fumbled-refugee-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/09/how-greece-fumbled-refugee-crisis https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen049 http://www.syriahr.com/en/?p=47466 https://doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2000.10715609 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9342-6 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2017.04.001 https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp.1.1.3_2 https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/few035 https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2017.1287131 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.00980.x http://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/the-rohingya-in-aceh-solidarity-and-indifference/ http://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/the-rohingya-in-aceh-solidarity-and-indifference/ https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2017.1380883 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.857547 98 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays painter, j., papada, e., papoutsi, a. & vradis, a. (2017) hotspot politics―or, when the eu state gets real. political geography 60 259–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.02.012 pallister-wilkins, p. (2016) humanitarian border work. in günay, c. & witjes, n. (eds.) border politics: defining spaces of governance and forms of transgressions, 85–106. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46855-6_6 pascucci, e. (2017 ) communit y infras truc tures: shelter, self-reliance and polymorphic border s in urban refugee governance. territor y, politics , governance 5(3) 332–3 45. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2017.1297252 pratt, g. & rosner, v. (2012) the global and the intimate: feminism in our time. columbia university press, new york. https://doi.org/10.7312/prat15448 rotter, r. (2016) waiting in the asylum determination process: just an empty interlude? time & society 25(1) 80–101. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x15613654 rozakou, k. (2016) socialities of solidarity: revisiting the gift taboo in times of crises. social anthropology 24(2) 185–199. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12305 selwyn, t. (2000) an anthropology of hospitality. in lashley, c. & morrison, a. (eds.) in search of hospitality: theoretical perspectives and debates, 18–37. butterworth-heinemann, oxford. shklar, j. (1990) the faces of injustice. harvard university press, cambridge. smith, k. (2015) stories told by, for, and about women refugees: engendering resistance. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 14(2) 461–469. <https://www.acme-journal.org/index. php/acme/article/view/1174>. su, a. (2017) as german police attempt to deport refugees, hundreds of churches are trying to shelter them. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-germany-churches-offerunofficial-asylum-for-muslim-refugees/2017/09/05/1c068b68-88e6-11e7-96a7-d178cf3524eb_story. html?utm_term=.4ce4150e2a3a>. 31.01.2018. sukarieh, m. & tannock, s. (2013) on the problem of over-researched communities: the case of the shatila palestinian refugee camp in lebanon. sociology 47(3) 494–508. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038512448567 tazzioli, m., de genova, n., mezzadra, s. & garelli, g. (2014) migrant struggles. new keywords: migration and borders. cultural studies 29 80–83. tazzioli, m. & garelli, g. (2018) containment beyond detention: the hotspot system and disrupted migration movements across europe. environment and planning d: society and space [online feb 19 2018] https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818759335 weber, m. (1948) politics as vocation. in weber, m., gerth, h. & mills, c. w. (eds.) from max weber: essays in sociology, 77–128. routledge, london. weber, m., parsons, t. & tawney, r. (1930) the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. g. allen & unwin, london. wolfe, l. (2015) the missing women of the mediterranean refugee crisis. <http://www. womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/missing-women-of-the-mediterranean-refugee-crisis>. 28.03.2018. wright, t. (2002) moving images: the media representation of refugees. visual studies 17(1) 53–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586022000005053 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.02.012 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46855-6_6 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2017.1297252 https://doi.org/10.7312/prat15448 https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x15613654 https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12305 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1174 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1174 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-germany-churches-offer-unofficial-asylum-for-muslim-refugees/2017/09/05/1c068b68-88e6-11e7-96a7-d178cf3524eb_story.html?utm_term=.4ce4150e2a3a https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-germany-churches-offer-unofficial-asylum-for-muslim-refugees/2017/09/05/1c068b68-88e6-11e7-96a7-d178cf3524eb_story.html?utm_term=.4ce4150e2a3a https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-germany-churches-offer-unofficial-asylum-for-muslim-refugees/2017/09/05/1c068b68-88e6-11e7-96a7-d178cf3524eb_story.html?utm_term=.4ce4150e2a3a https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038512448567 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818759335 http://www.womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/missing-women-of-the-mediterranean-refugee-crisis http://www.womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/missing-women-of-the-mediterranean-refugee-crisis https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586022000005053 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46476 doi: 10.11143/46476 geographical and temporal variation of regional development and innovation in finland teemu makkonen and tommi inkinen makkonen, teemu & tommi inkinen (2015). geographical and temporal variation of regional development and innovation in finland. fennia 193: 1, 134– 147. issn 1798-5617. variations in regional development are basically carried forward by technological development together with spatial concentrations of production and finance. the main argument behind this paper is that innovation and regional development variables have temporal variations in a spatial context. analysis was conducted using principal component indices from the years 1995–2007 to provide a temporal trend perspective of the most successful locations in innovation activity and regional development. availability of an extensive workforce, income and higher education have steadily been the most “distinct” variables corresponding to regional development in finland, whereas innovation occupies a stable middling position among explanative variables. regional development and innovation activity is still concentrated in the core urban regions, but this tendency has lost at least some of its importance. keywords: education, finland, innovation, local administrative unit, principal component analysis, regional development teemu makkonen, department of border region studies, university of southern denmark, alsion 2, dk-6400 sønderborg, denmark. e-mail: teemu@sam.sdu.dk tommi inkinen, department of geosciences and geography, university of helsinki, p.o. box 64, fi-00014 helsinki, finland. e-mail: tommi.inkinen@helsinki.fi introduction regional innovation research has an extensive and rich history. as copus et al. (2008) have argued, there are two lines of tradition for studying regional innovation activity in contemporary literature: region-focused and firm-focused. thus, there is a dissonance in the literature on which factors (region-specific vs. firm-specific) are more significant in determining the total innovativeness of a region (sternberg & arndt 2001). following international trends (shearmur 2011), finnish innovation research has concentrated on firms (ebersberger & lehtoranta 2005; simonen & mccann 2010). still, arguably, the overall innovation performance is not dependent only on the innovation performance of firms, since regional knowledge resources, such as the existence of an educated workforce and a highly developed technology infrastructure, are crucial elements for regional innovation performance (doloreux 2002; fagerberg 2005). what is agreed on in the most empirical research on innovation is that innovation has been assumed to be an important driver of economic development (e.g. van oort 2002; hasan & tucci 2010). this paper provides a regional case study analysis from finland and attempts to explain temporal and geographical variations in regional development and innovation to assess these statements on the importance of innovation in regional development. the choice of case study location was motivated by finland’s measured success in international comparisons on innovation, education and other variables of regional development (e.g. oinas 2005). an extensive amount of work has already been conducted concerning regional development and innovation variables, but empirically they have fennia 193: 1 (2015) 135geographical and temporal variation of regional development... been studied separately in finland. some scholars have addressed the issue of development and welfare (siirilä et al. 2002; lehtonen & tykkyläinen 2010), whereas others have concentrated their attention on research and development (r&d) and innovations (piekkola 2006; valovirta et al. 2009). however, recent analysis by makkonen (2011) shows the extent of interconnectedness between regional innovation variables and other regional variables of development and concludes that they are significantly correlated, but with a temporally limited dataset and without geographical considerations. this paper explores the geographical patterns of innovation and regional development in finland by presenting the results of a multivariate analysis on the relationship between innovation activity and regional development in finland. it also provides a temporal trend of the most successful locations in innovation activity and regional development. additionally, since the strong finnish geographical tradition on analysing regional development with multivariate methods seems to have almost faded away entirely, it is interesting to update the discussion on the factors contributing to regional development into a new millennium to see whether the composition of the explanative variables has changed to a significant degree (ylijokipii 2005). the present work applies socio-demographic, economy-industry, and education and innovation variables, namely granted patents and r&d activity in terms of expenditure, to assess regional development. in finland, the innovation system is largely led by the national government. however, the innovation policy between regional and national arenas can be described as co-evolutionary (sotarauta & kautonen 2007) and regional knowledge resources are dependent on regional socioeconomic variables. these location variables involve desirable housing options, social cohesion and sufficient economic activity. this leads us to the first research question: (1) what are the most ‘distinct’ socio-economic variables jointly corresponding to regional development in finland and how has the composition of these variables changed from 1995–2007? the relationship between innovation and regional (economic) development has been described as bidirectional and accumulative (gössling & rutten 2007; makkonen & inkinen 2013). the level of development of a region affects the innovation output of that region, which in turn is transformed, directly or indirectly, to growth and further regional development. therefore, the tendency to innovate and the ability to transform innovation into growth appear to concentrate geographically (boschma & fornahl 2011). these notions create the foundation for the second research question: (2) to what extend have regional development and innovation activities been concentrated on the core urban regions of finland? the paper shows that 1) innovation activities and socio-economic overall performance are not solely synonymous and that innovation activities have (only) a medium-level connection to other variables of regional development, 2) that workforce and higher education are nowadays the ‘leading’ variables for explaining regional development and 3) that where innovation is concerned traditional industrial regions in finland have also been able to gain a position amongst the top regions. regional development and innovation in earlier research international and finnish context international case studies and cross-country comparisons have suggested that there is a strong relationship between innovation activity and regional development. social and economic conditions lead to different reactions to innovation and to development. some regions exhibit stronger (innovation-prone) and some exhibit weaker (innovationaverse) than expected economic growth relative to their r&d activity. still, investments in economic and human resources, resulting in higher r&d activities on the national and regional levels commonly pay off in economic terms, resulting in higher location-bound innovation production and growth (e.g. rodríguez-pose 1999; agüeros et al. 2013). however, studies on european and us regions have shown that the developmental level of the region matters: investment and employment in r&d activity require critical mass to gain positive marginal benefits (varga 2000; greunz 2005). thus, innovation activity, as is regional development, is unevenly distributed across the global geographic landscape, between and within re136 fennia 193: 1 (2015)teemu makkonen and tommi inkinen gions (copus et. al. 2008). moreover, innovation activities seem to cluster geographically (florida 2002; asheim & gertler 2005). all in all, the level and efficiency of innovation activity should be higher in the core urban regions than in more remote and peripheral regions (fritsch 2004; capello et al. 2012). thus, as us studies have shown, although the core-periphery disadvantage may decrease, the peripheral and rural regions are still at a technological disadvantage where the geography of innovation is concerned (ceh 2001; monchuk & miranowski 2010). indeed, both the results obtained with european firm-level data and the observations made with us data, have confirmed that innovation activities are geographically concentrated and their impacts highly localised (jaffe et al. 1993; audretsch & feldman 1996; sternberg & arndt 2001; crescenzi & rodríguez-pose 2013). in addition, regional concentration stimulates innovation, thus in general leaving the peripheral regions at a disadvantage on the levels of r&d and innovation activity (tödtling & trippl 2005). the finnish regional policy has traditionally been aimed at alleviating socio-economic differences between the most and the least developed regions through direct supportive funding, the relocation of national agencies and establishment of provincial universities (tervo 2005; jauhiainen 2008). despite these efforts, marked regional variations in socio-economic development (or wellbeing) remain. remote and rural municipalities, especially in northern and eastern finland, still lag behind urban regions in southern and western finland, when measured by unemployment or educational levels at least (siirilä et al. 1990, 2002): in fact, lehtonen and tykkyläinen (2010) have demonstrated that, despite various policy measures, the self-reinforcing processes envisioned by classic cumulative causation theories (myrdal 1969) still hold weight in finnish regions and have resulted in a socio-economically polarized regional system. in other words, regional success has been concentrated in a small number of growth centres, of which the most evident example is the helsinki capital region (heikkilä 2003; loikkanen & susiluoto 2012). on a national level migration and economic dynamics have caused polycentric concentration in other core urban regions, for example oulu and tampere (antikainen & vartiainen 2005). therefore, when considering finland, the helsinki capital region and other core urban regions have traditionally been in advantageous positions when compared with their peripheral counterparts. with specific reference to regional development and well-being, the evidence shows that the clustering of the population and economic activity has been centripetal (mikkonen 2002; siirilä et al. 2002; lehtonen & tykkyläinen 2010). in finland the government-led innovation policy, which has been endorsed from the 1990s onwards, has been implemented through actions in line with the concept of national innovation systems together with regional cluster policies (romanainen 2001; miettinen 2002; jauhiainen 2008). this has worked well, raising finland up among the top-nations in country rankings of innovation (oinas 2005). however, innovation activities are still mostly concentrated towards a few dominant core urban regions (inkinen 2005). measurement of regional development and innovation the term ‘development’ is in colloquial language associated with existing positive attributes resulting from progress. the main question, however, is which attributes are measured. thus, the concept of development is largely a covenanted issue and requires agreement on what is measured (and to what extent) and how these measurements actually represent what is meant by development. thus, the findings and propositions of earlier research are the foundations of the variable selection and index calculus. in our study, variable selection combines conceptual arguments with empirical observations; the variables appropriate for an applied theoretical framework provide higher validity and reliability (isard et al. 1998). in choosing the variables, the criteria listed by the advisory board for regional development in finland (kehitysalueiden neuvottelukunta 1973), originally stated as 1) quantitative measurement, 2) instrumentality, 3) comprehensiveness, 4) significance, 5) disaggregability and 6) exclusiveness, were pursued. in addition, other studies of regional development in finland (e.g. siirilä et al. 1990, 2002; rantala 2001; mikkonen 2002; lehtonen & tykkyläinen 2010, 2011) have been taken advantage of. for example, in these studies the economic success of regions was strongly associated with workforce properties. therefore, our analysis includes variables on unemployment and the educational level and sectoral composition of the workforce. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 137geographical and temporal variation of regional development... moreover, variables commonly associated with regional economic development, i.e. variables on the income level and regional gross domestic product (gdp), where used to describe the efficiency and intensity of economic activity. the social structures of the regions were measured with data on migration and number of children and with variables related to social cohesion, namely dependency ratio and gender structure. the negative impacts of the concentration of population, where taken into account by using variables on housing conditions and the crime rate. to sum up, the variables chosen include various socio-economic variables, such as gdp, unemployment, sources of livelihood, and the percentage of the adult population with higher education (table 1). in the selection of study variables we also need to consider the temporal aspect of regional development, as what is ‘agreed’, in the literature, to constitute development changes over time (pike et al. 2007). for example, the degrees of industrialization and services have been traditionally considered as the main indicators of development in individual locations (dicken & lloyd 1991). however, since the 1990s innovationdriven developmental rhetoric has increased steadily (jauhiainen 2008). therefore, due to limitations in technology variables concerning regional development and growth, several other newly found concepts highlighting the importance of innovation have been used to describe this “techno-scientific” development (nonaka & takeuchi 1995; florida 2002; webster 2002). however, there are problems in the measurement of innovation – defined in the traditional sense as the first introduction of an invention in the market (sternberg 2009) – particularly in regional contexts, because the availability of coherent data from interregional sources is often limited. therefore, r&d and patent statistics were used here despite their limitation of being measures for technological product innovations (less suitable for measuring other types of innovation) and innovation inputs (rather than actual outputs), as they are among the most commonly used indicators of innovation, since they provide valuable information on the regional innovation activities and offer good regional data availability (makkonen & van der have 2013). table 1. chosen variables depicting regional development and innovation (in this study). regional development  population change  net population change % (natural population change and migration) workforce  percentage of population in workforce  children  percentage of children (under 15 years of age)  dependency ratio   amount of nonworking (unemployed, pensioners, children etc.)  population compared with working population  education  percentage of adult population with higher education   gender structure  number of women compared with 1000 men   unemployment  unemployment rate %  agriculture and forestry  percentage of working population in agriculture and forestry sector  industry  percentage of working population in industry sector  service  percentage of working population in service sector  gdp  gross domestic product / inhabitant  gdp change  growth in gross domestic product %  gva  gross value added / inhabitant  income  gross income / inhabitant  housing  percentage of small and/or inadequate housing crime  crimes against human life and health compared with 1000 persons  patents granted  patents granted / 1000 inhabitants  r&d spending  r&d spending € / inhabitant  138 fennia 193: 1 (2015)teemu makkonen and tommi inkinen empirical material data considerations the analysed data was compiled and calculated from the official statistics finland’s databases (altika and statfin). the calculations make the applied dataset unique; statistics finland, the provider of the original datasets, does not have these calculated data sources. the employment of community innovation survey data was also considered. however, as a sample data of firms it poorly fits our purposes. the amounts of gdp and gross value added (gva), as well as r&d and patent data, were compiled from previous data from the older local administrative units (lau-1) division. consequently, a few smaller contemporary municipalities are misplaced in the lau-1 division of 2010 used in this study. the missing data on certain lau-1s from individual years were estimated as the moving averages of contiguous years. the percentage of missing data points in the original dataset is 1.7%. in addition, the classification of higher education in the finnish official statistics changed in 1998 so the data from 1995–1997 is based on an earlier educational division. the data were gathered from the years 1995–2007. in spatial terms, the data covers all (68) of the lau-1s in mainland finland and åland as a whole due to missing data on the lau-1 level in åland (fig. 1). the unit of observation issues was considered according to glaeser (2000), who discussed the problems of analysis with spatial units. the use of lau-1 classification was decided because it has considerably more units than the old nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (nuts) classification, regional scale used for example in regional innovation scoreboard of the european union (hollanders et al. 2009), enabling the use of statistical methods with available innovation data. the smaller lau-2 units still suffer from a too large extent of missing data. there are also some limitations to lau-1 categories, because in a respect they present “a medium” option. the selection is however grounded because the regional concept of lau-1 is a more coherent regional entity that would better entail the idea of “functional area” in regional analyses rather than lau-2 which involves more detailed information on a legislative municipal level. the lau-1 units are thus a good compromise in terms of ‘local’ and ‘regional’, because in finland they are more robust concerning functional areas of daily commuting. finally, the innovation policy is strongly influenced by the national level (sotarauta & kautonen 2007). moreover, lau-1 level regions do not have a direct role in local innovation systems but they always include the smaller regional units of cities and municipalities that may organize their own respective development functions. remarks on principal component analysis (pca) finland has a long history of geographical studies on regional development with multivariate methods (yli-jokipii 2005). here, also, regional development was measured with a combination of variables describing regional development and innovation activity for which multivariate analysis provided the best analytical toolkit. pca was used for several reasons. first, it is robust enough to withstand limitations in missing values, considering the overall size of the data (n=69) that fig. 1. finnish lau-1 division in 2010 (regions mentioned in the text are highlighted). fennia 193: 1 (2015) 139geographical and temporal variation of regional development... can be considered as average in regional studies. the missing case treatment used in this study also provided a decent alternative for conducting pca without risking the reliability or validity of the study. second, pca is a good tool for identifying patterns and highlighting similarities and differences within the data. in a regional context, this is particularly beneficial. notwithstanding, and even though there is ample empirical support to underline the importance of endogenous socioeconomic factors for local economy and innovation processes (e.g. crescenzi et al. 2007), the limitation of the “spatial objects pca” approach applied here is that it does not take into account the possible impacts of spatial autocorrelation (demšar et al. 2013). pca compresses the information contained by several variables into a small number of principal components (dimensions), which ensures that as little of the original information as possible is lost. at the same time, the impacts of different variables on regional development are weighted. here, also, lies the value added of pca. recently, studies on regional development in finland (e.g. siirilä et al. 2002; makkonen 2011) have taken the variables employed as granted without testing the importance and the composition of these variables against regional development as a whole. pca in turn offers a means of exploring the interconnectedness and the weight of different variables of regional development, which allows us to investigate which variables, in fact, are ‘important’ for regional development. analysis also indicates the underlying dimensions that unify the groups of variable loadings on each principal component. the methodological considerations and applications of pca can be found in jolliffe (2002) and tabachnick and fidell (2007). the most common tests (the bartlett test of sphericity and the kaiser-meyer-olkin (kmo) measure of sampling adequacy) and measures (communalities, loadings and eigenvalues) of pca suitability were used in this study. pca always requires meaningful interpretations for the principal components produced. otherwise, another method should be used. the designation of the principal component reflects the interpretation, because it requires consideration of what types of variables are loaded on the principal component. therefore, it is important that the name given to the principal component describes the aggregate that it represents. additionally, the research design of this study asks how regions are situated in relation to the principal component scores (pcs). calculation of the pcs is carried out in a similar fashion to that of the regression model by weighting the variables with coefficients produced by pca. the advantage of this approach lies in the way that changes in pcs will reflect both the importance (loadings) of the various indicators included in the analysis over time and shifts in regions’ positions relative to each other (fagerberg et al. 2007). however, at the same time this renders the statistical comparison of pcs between different years less feasible. thus, the decision to concentrate on the regions’ standings based on the pcs was made, i.e. the relative differences between the regions are not shown in our results. key results of principal component analysis the preconditions for successful pca were fulfilled in the data concerning variables used to assess regional development for every year (table 2). a large number of variables showed significant loadings concerning the first principal component (table 3). the first principal components can thus be interpreted as “regional development”. this paper will now focus further on the interpretation of these first principal components. as table 3 suggests, a significant workforce and higher education are the “leading and distinct” variables of regional development (in terms of covariation of the explanatory variables) giving an answer to the first explicit research question. this means that an educated workforce correlates highly with other indicators depicting regional development and can be described as an important re1995 1998 2001 2004 2007  kmo  0.686  0.719  0.733  0.717  0.705  bartlett's  < 0.001  < 0.001  < 0.001  < 0.001  < 0.001  eigenvalues  8.563  8.905  8.626  8.520  8.034  % of variance  47.57  49.47  47.93  47.34  44.63  table 2. key figures of pca for “regional development”. 140 fennia 193: 1 (2015)teemu makkonen and tommi inkinen source for regional development. the changes in the composition of the leading variables have been subtle. table 3 shows, however, that workforce and higher education have preceded income level in terms of loadings, which in the 1990s was still the single most ‘distinct’ variable corresponding to regional development. the changes in the order of the other variables are more sporadic when all the years (1995–2007) are considered, although the dependency ratio and agriculture and forestry are now established as the fourth and fifth most ‘distinct’ variables of regional development. population change is also positively associated with regional development. in addition, gva, income, and gdp are high in more developed regions. since agriculture and forestry are negatively associated with other variables depicting regional development, it can be stated that predominantly rural regions are not at the peak of development and it appears that more developed regions are in fact service-oriented (services are positively associated with other variables depicting regional development). accordingly, unemployment, limited and low housing conditions and a high dependency ratio are negatively, whereas a nonbiased gender structure is positively, associated with other variables depicting regional development. the variables chosen here to depict innovation, namely r&d spending and patents, have gained a stable middling position (in terms of covariation of the explanatory variables) among the other variables of regional development. the recent decrease in the loadings of patents is evident from the total number of patents in finland (fig. 2), which have declined drastically since 2005. in contrast, the amount spent in r&d in finland has increased steadily and the loadings of r&d have not undergone such distinct changes than patents. also, the time lag for the economic realization of patents is longer (makkonen 2011). however, it has to be noted that r&d activities and patents reflect only a part of the total innovation inputs and outputs. thus, the total innovative efforts in a region are not represented through these two variables. furthermore, outsourcing and dispersal of firm’s innovation activities to outside its home-region can lead to an underestimation of the real innovativeness of some regions and overestimation of others. table 3. loadings of the principal component “regional development” for the years 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2007 (arrows represent the subsequent shifts in the order of the variables according to their values of principal component loadings; loadings under the value of 0.3 are excluded). 1995  1998  2001  2004  2007  income  0.932  income  0.933 ↘ workforce  0.926  workforce  0.922 workforce  0.926  workforce  0.902  workforce  0.925 ↗ income  0.914  ↘  education  0.899 education  0.889  agriculture  ‐0.863  ↓  dependency   ‐0.874 ↘ education  0.893  ↗  income  0.869 income  0.859  dependency  ‐0.856   ↗  pop. change  0.870 ↘ dependency   ‐0.871  dependency   ‐0.862 dependency   ‐0.852  education   0.852  education  0.860 ↑ pop. change  0.866  ↓  agriculture   ‐0.846 agriculture   ‐0.846  housing   ‐0.828  ↓  agriculture   ‐0.823 agriculture   ‐0.845  ↗  gva  0.815 ↘ pop. change  0.786  gva  0.779  gva  0.810 gva  0.800  ↗  gdp  0.813 ↘ gva  0.751  gdp  0.775  gdp  0.809 gdp  0.795  ↗  pop. change  0.792 ↑ gdp  0.749  gender  0.768  ↘  housing   ‐0.764 ↘ gender  0.765  gender  0.747 ↘ housing   ‐0.738  pop. change  0.756  ↑  gender  0.750 ↗ housing   ‐0.737  housing   ‐0.742 ↗ gender  0.717  r&d spending  0.700  r&d spending  0.694 r&d spending  0.658  r&d spending  0.666 r&d spending  0.609  patents granted  0.495  patents granted  0.625 patents granted  0.620  patents granted  0.635 ↓ services  0.584  unemployment   ‐0.537  unemployment   ‐0.595 unemployment   ‐0.599  unemployment   ‐0.562 unemployment   ‐0.495  services  0.453  ↘  gdp change  0.500 *  services  0.465  services  0.544 ↑ patents granted  0.393  industry  0.409  ↘  services  0.374 ↗ †children  0.300 children   0.363  gdp change  0.340  ↑  industry  0.361 *             †crime  0.361  note:  ↗↘ change of one rank ↑↓  change of more than one rank blank no change * change to a loading under the threshold of 0.3 † change from a loading under the threshold of 0.3 fennia 193: 1 (2015) 141geographical and temporal variation of regional development... some minor changes that are not evident from the table 3 are highlighted in figure 3 which suggests that industry is no more a ‘distinct’ feature of regional development. an opposite path to industry can be seen in the importance of services. in the mid-1990s services and industry had almost equal loadings, but after 1998 these two variables have taken quite different directions: the loadings of services have increased steadily whereas the loadings of industry have fallen to negligible. industry was at one time almost a synonym for development, but it has been replaced by other more sophisticated “techno-scientific factors”. since the loadings of the principal component are low, the percentage of children and levels of crime are not associated with regional development to a noticeable degree. however, it is interfig. 2. the total number of patents and combined r&d spending in finnish lau-1s. esting that the loadings of the percentage of children to the regional development have increased from a negative effect to a modest positive association. this means that the positive connections between the number of children and the other variables of regional development are likely to strengthen in the future. on the contrary gdp change, which had a modest association with regional development in the 1990s, has now fallen under a loading of 0.3, which means that nowadays it does not have a notable connection to other variables depicting regional development. this is an interesting side note, which is hard to explain as it would seem plausible that gdp growth should be interlinked with regional development. one reason is the use of lau-1s as the units of observation. in lau-1s, there are tremenfig. 3. selected extracts of the loadings of different variables to “regional development”. 0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 r&d spending million €patents  patents r&d spending ‐0.300 0.000 0.300 0.600 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 loadings services industry crime children gdp change 142 fennia 193: 1 (2015)teemu makkonen and tommi inkinen dous fluctuations in the growth percentage of gdp between individual years. according to previous literature, innovation variables are associated with the variables of regional development. in line, the results presented here are somewhat encouraging: in finland innovation was positively associated with regional development. however, innovation is not among the predominant variables (in terms of covariation of explanatory variables) of regional development. in fact there are several other variables with higher loadings to regional development than innovation. thus, innovation variables, r&d spending and granted patents are interlinked with the other variables depicting regional development, but they are not among the “leading and distinct” variables of regional development. innovation and principal component scores for regional development the following comparisons are based on variations between a sum ranking of patents and r&d spending (the standings of the regions in both patent and r&d rankings were summed up: low scores indicate good performance) and the pcs ranking of “regional development” (where 0 indicates the average and positive value above average performance). as seen from the pcs rankings, the most developed regions in finland are the core urban regions (fig. 4 and table 4). in contrast the rural and peripheral parts of eastern and northern finland are less developed. regional clustering is clearly visible: provincial centres have higher data scores than surrounding regions. the pcs rankings show that statistically the most developed regions are also the most innovative (fig. 4 and table 4). their counterparts are the rural and peripheral regions, which also have the lowest r&d inputs and patenting intensity. to single out one region, åland, is a clear exception to this positive correlation rule, because it has high developmental scores but low scores for innovation variables. the autonomous åland differs considerably from the regions of continental finland in terms of economic activity. for example, leisure travel is a high income source in åland and one factor explaining this anomaly. the most innovatable 4. the most innovative, in the sum ranking of r&d spending and granted patents, regions in finland and the standings in the principal component score ranking of “regional development” for the years 1995, 2001 and 2007. innovation      regional development          1995  2001  2007     1995  2001  2007  1  oulu  oulu↓  tampere  1  helsinki  helsinki  helsinki  2  salo  salo↓  vaasa  2  turku↓  tampere  tampere  3  jyväskylä↓  helsinki  helsinki  3  oulu  oulu  oulu  4  helsinki↗  tampere↑  oulu  4  åland  åland  åland  5  tampere↗  jyväskylä  jyväskylä  5  tampere↑  turku↘  vaasa  6  porvoo  porvoo*  salo  6  salo↓  porvoo↘  turku  7  etelä‐pirkanmaa  etelä‐pirkanmaa*  †forssa  7  porvoo↗  jyväskylä↓  porvoo  8  vaasa  vaasa↑  äänekoski  8  vaasa  vaasa↑  salo  9  turku  turku*  †rauma  9  jyväskylä↑  salo↗  jyväskylä  10 forssa*  †äänekoski↑  †pori  10  kuopio  kuopio  kuopio  note: ↗↘ change of one rank ↑↓ change of more than one rank blank no change * has fallen outside the top ten † new in top ten fennia 193: 1 (2015) 143geographical and temporal variation of regional development... fig. 4. sum ranking scores of r&d spending and granted patents in a) 1995 and c) 2007 (highest ≤ 35; above average = 36–75; below average = 76–105; lowest > 105) and principal component score rankings for lau-1 “regional development” in b) 1995 and d) 2007 (highest > 0.75; above average = 0.00–0.75; below average = -0.75–0.00; lowest < -0.75). for explanation of the numbers, see table 4. 144 fennia 193: 1 (2015)teemu makkonen and tommi inkinen tive, in terms of patents and r&d spending, (and developed) regions are consistently university regions (one visible exception is the region of salo). the relatively high position of the salo region in the r&d and patents ranking was due to nokia’s strong influence in the region: nokia’s r&d conducted in finland still accounted for almost half of the total business sector r&d in finland ten-tofive years ago (ali-yrkkö & hermans 2004). as for the changes in time it can be said that the extremes in innovative regions have narrowed between the years 1995–2007: the explicit dualism between the urban and peripheral regions has decreased (fig. 4 and table 4). still, oulu, jyväskylä, tampere, helsinki, and vaasa are and have been the most innovative region, in terms of r&d spending, and among the top regions measured in patents, in finland during the time period analysed. however, there are also highly innovative regions that have developed themselves with the significant branches of traditional forest and marine industry. these regions include äänekoski (a strong forest industry region), rauma and pori (both important marine industry regions). they are now among the most innovative regions in finland, whereas at the beginning of the observation period the most innovative regions were more predominantly core urban regions (cf. table 5). the changes in the order of the most developed regions have been subtler and there have been shifts back and forth, but helsinki maintained its position as the most developed region between the years 1995–2007. in sum, the core urban regions are still the drivers of the national economy. interestingly, the regions in figure 4 and table 4 are rather dispersed table 5. size classes of finnish regions (average population 1995–2007). throughout finland. thus, multi-centrality is also visible and provincial centres tend to have high innovation capacities. however, the northern and eastern parts are still underrepresented in terms of regional development and innovation. the comparisons show that, innovation and regional development are positively associated. this was evident from the results of the pca, which show that the innovation variables were loaded on the first principal component depicting regional development. discussion and implications the case study location, finland, has been considered as one of the countries that have been the most successful at creating and promoting innovation through a national innovation system together with regional cluster policies. finnish regional policy has a long tradition of balancing goals in regional development. in theory, all municipalities should provide the same conditions for the quality of life throughout the country. however, in geographical terms, the results show that the developmental level in finland follows a north-south trend, with the exception of provincial centres, following the existence of the main explanative variables: the southern parts are the most developed, but provincial centres in other parts of finland also emerge as developed locations. moreover, some traditional industry regions have gained a position among the most innovative regions in finland. as stated, the most developed regions in finland are also among the most innovative regions. although other significant socioeconomic variables have to be taken into account, one can see a two-way implication: innovations boost regional development and developed regions are more prone to innovation. thus, steps to promote innovation can also be seen as steps to improve the developmental stage of a region. the broader implications derived from the results have interesting insights for other countries, besides finland, to follow regionally inclusive growth paths. first, the heavy investments on education in finland appear to have paid off in (regional) economic terms. second, indicatively the success of a variety of regions in terms of regional development and innovation points towards a conclusion that the finnish way of implementing cluster based regional development and innovation policies seems to have worked relatively well as pointed out by valovirta et al. (2009). however, over 200 000 inhabitants (n = 3), including: helsinki; tampere; turku 100 000 ‐ 200 000 inhabitants (n = 7), including: oulu; jyväskylä; pori; kuopio 50 000 ‐ 99 500 inhabitants (n = 14), including: vaasa; porvoo; rauma; salo 25 000 ‐ 49 500 inhabitants (n = 23), including: etelä‐pirkanmaa; forssa; åland below 25 000 inhabitants (n = 22), including: äänekoski fennia 193: 1 (2015) 145geographical and temporal variation of regional development... third, relying solely on techno-scientific inputs (r&d) in regional development does not guarantee economic growth. fourth, the development policies aimed at alleviating the differences between the most and the least developed regions in finland (jauhiainen 2008) seem to have, in their part, secured a multi-centred landscape of economic activities. thus, in short, these successful finnish examples offer guiding lines to other countries aiming at implementing regionally-balanced development policies. conclusions and remarks for future research this paper explained the temporal variations of regional development in the light of innovation production. the variables used are interrelated and jointly contribute to regional development, but the analysis illustrates that workforce and higher education has replaced income levels as the “leading and distinct” variables of regional development, even though temporal changes may be considered modest. thus, to answer the first research question, workforce and higher education are the ‘leading’ variables for explaining regional development, whereas innovation activity is only of mediocre importance in explaining regional development and economic success. this is partly to do with the time lag between innovation variables and their economic realization, but it also shows that, even though innovative activity might be important for regional development, other actions including the support of education and attracting a (skilled) workforce should not be ignored vis-à-vis regional development policies. to answer the second research question, the empirical results show that the levels of regional development and innovative activity are higher in the core urban regions than in the periphery, i.e. innovation and regional development appear to cluster geographically. statistics support the statements that peripheral regions are at a disadvantage on the levels of r&d and innovation production. however, this tendency of clustering of innovative activities towards the core urban regions has levelled off to some extent. in conclusion the data were collected in finland and thus the results are pertained to the situation in finland. in other countries the contexts are different and the implemented policies and public sector functions concerning regional development may also vary. however, the results provide a coherent comparative starting point, at least for other countries with similar gdp and r&d levels. furthermore, the lau-1 classification is an official statistical unit currently used in the european context. lau-1 classification provided a more robust way to understand regional variations compared to nuts-3 classification that we consider too broad and general for innovation analysis. accordingly, applying innovation output data as in makkonen and van der have (2013) as well as other (less common) indicators of regional development might raise interesting further insights into the relationship between innovation and regional development. finally, more qualitative and quantitative approaches are needed in order to assess the impacts of innovation activities and policies in the regional level. an extensive amount of work has already been conducted separately, but the triangulation of quantitative variables to ad hoc qualitative data as well as applying pca with spatial autocorrelation (see demšar et al. 2013) requires further efforts. acknowledgements this work is a part of the project 127213 funded by the academy of finland. we thank mr. arttu paarlahti, dr. gareth rice and the anonymous reviewers for their help in improving the paper. references agüeros m, casares-hontañón p, coto-millán p, de castro p & pesquera m 2013. a new approach to innovation and its application to the countries of the european union. quaestiones geographicae 32: 2, 5–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/quageo-2013-0009. ali-yrkkö j & hermans r 2004. nokia: a giant in the finnish innovation system. in schienstock g (ed). embracing the knowledge economy: the dynamic transformation of the finnish innovation system, 106–127. edward elgar, cheltenham. antikainen j & vartiainen p 2005. polycentricity in finland: from structure to strategy. built environment 31: 2, 143–152. http://dx.doi.org/10.2148/benv.31.2.143.66257. asheim b & gertler m 2005. the geography of innovation: regional innovation systems. in fagerberg j, mowery d & nelson r (eds). the oxford handbook of innovation, 291–317. oxford university press, oxford. 146 fennia 193: 1 (2015)teemu makkonen and tommi inkinen audretsch d & feldman m 1996. r&d spillovers and the geography of innovation and production. american economic review 86: 3, 630–640. boschma r & fornahl d 2011. cluster evolution and a roadmap for future studies. regional studies 45: 10, 1295–1298. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2011.633253. capello r, caragliu a & lenzi c 2012. is innovation in cities a matter of knowledge-intensive services: an empirical investigation. innovation – european journal of social science research 25: 2, 151–174. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2012.660326. ceh b 2001. regional innovation potential in the united states: evidence of spatial transformation. papers in regional science 80: 3, 297–316. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/pl00013634. copus a, skuras d & tsegenidi k 2008. innovation and peripherality: an empirical comparative study of smes in six european union member countries. economic geography 84: 1, 51–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2008.tb00391.x. crescenzi r & rodríguez-pose a 2013. r&d, socioeconomic conditions, and regional innovation in the u.s. growth and change 44: 2, 287–320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/grow.12011. crescenzi r, rodríguez-pose a & storper m 2007. the territorial dynamics of innovation: a europe–united states comparative analysis. journal of economic geography 7: 6, 673–709. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbm030. demšar u, harris p, brunsdon c, fotheringham as & mcloone s 2013. principal component analysis on spatial data: an overview. annals of the association of american geographers 103: 1, 106–128. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2012.689236. dicken p & lloyd p 1991. location in space: theoretical perspectives in economic geography. longman, london. doloreux d 2002. what we should know about regional systems of innovation. technology in society 24: 3, 243–263. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-791x(02)00007-6. ebersberger b & lehtoranta o 2005. patterns of innovative activities among finnish firms. vtt, espoo. fagerberg j 2005. innovation: a guide to the literature. in fagerberg j, mowery d & nelson r (eds). the oxford handbook of innovation, 1–26. oxford university press, oxford. fagerberg j, srholec m & knell m 2007. the competitiveness of nations: why some countries prosper while others fall behind? world development 35: 10, 1595–1620. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.01.004. florida r 2002. the rise of the creative class. basic books, new york. fritsch m 2004. cooperation and the efficiency of regional r&d activities. cambridge journal of economics 28: 6, 829–846. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cje/beh039. glaeser e 2000. the new economics of urban and regional growth. in clark g, feldman m & gertler m (eds). the oxford handbook of economic geography, 83–98. oxford university press, oxford. gössling t & rutten r 2007. innovation in regions. european planning studies 15: 2, 253–270. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654310601078788. greunz l 2005. intraand inter-regional knowledge spillovers: evidence from european regions. european planning studies 13: 3, 449–473. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654310500089746. hasan i & tucci c 2010. the innovation–economic growth nexus: global evidence. research policy 39: 10, 1264–1276. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2010.07.005. heikkilä e 2003. differential urbanisation in finland. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 94: 1, 49–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00236. hollanders h, tarantola s & loschky a 2009. regional innovation scoreboard 2009. european commission, brussels. inkinen t 2005. european coherence and regional policy: a finnish perspective on the observed and reported territorial impacts of eu research and development policies. european planning studies 13: 7, 1113–1121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654310500242139. isard w, azis i, drennan m, miller r, saltzman s & thorbecke e 1998. methods of interregional and regional analysis. ashgate, aldershot. jaffe a, trajtenberg m & henderson r 1993. geographic localization of knowledge spillovers as evidenced by patent citations. quarterly journal of economics 108: 3, 577–598. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2118401. jauhiainen j 2008. regional and innovation policies in finland: towards convergence and/or mismatch? regional studies 42: 7, 1031–1045. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343400701543140. jolliffe i 2002. principal component analysis. springer, new york. kehitysalueiden neuvottelukunta 1973. vyöhykejaon tutkimusryhmän raportti: selvitys kehittyneisyyden alueellisista eroista ja aluejakovaihtoehdoista aluepolitiikassa. valtioneuvoston kanslian julkaisuja 1973: 2. lehtonen o & tykkyläinen m 2010. self-reinforcing spatial clusters of migration and socio-economic conditions in finland 1998–2006. journal of rural studies 26: 4, 361–373. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2010.02.003. lehtonen o & tykkyläinen m 2011. spatial divergence in living standards during an economic growth phase in the periphery: a case study of north karelia. fennia – international journal of geography 189: 2, 47–62. loikkanen h & susiluoto i 2012. suurimpien seutukuntien kokonaistaloudellinen kehitys 1975– 2008. helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, helsinki. makkonen t 2011. innovation and socio-economic development: evidence from the finnish local administrative units. bulletin of geography – socioeconomic series 15: 1, 27–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/v10089-011-0002-0. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 147geographical and temporal variation of regional development... makkonen t & inkinen t 2013. innovative capacity, educational attainment and economic development in the european union: causal relations and geographical variations. european planning studies 21: 12, 1958–1976. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.722968. makkonen t & van der have rp 2013. benchmarking regional innovation performance: composite measures and direct innovation counts. scientometrics 94: 1, 247–262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0753-2. miettinen r 2002. national innovation system: scientific concept or political rhetoric? edita, helsinki. mikkonen k 2002. the competitive advantage of regions and small economic areas: the case of finland. fennia – international journal of geography 180: 2, 191–198. myrdal g 1969. ekonomisk teori och underutvecklade regioner. tidens förlag, stockholm. monchuk d & miranowski j 2010. the impact of local innovation and innovative spillovers on employment and population growth in the u.s. midwest. journal of regional analysis and policy 40: 1, 61–70. nonaka i & takeuchi h 1995. the knowledge-creating company. oxford university press, oxford. oinas p 2005. finland: a success story? european planning studies 13: 8, 1227–1244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654310500336618. piekkola h 2006. knowledge and innovation subsidies as engines of growth: the competitiveness of finnish regions. etla, helsinki. pike a, rodríguez-pose a & tomaney j 2007. what kind of local and regional development and for whom? regional studies 41: 9, 1253–1269. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343400701543355. rantala o 2001. regional economic development in finland in the 1990s and the outlook to 2005. finnish economy and society 2, 64–70. rodríguez-pose a 1999. innovation prone and innovation averse societies: economic performance in europe. growth and change 30: 1, 75–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0017-4815.00105. romanainen j 2001. the cluster approach in finnish technology policy. in den hertog p, remoe s, bergman e & charles d (eds). innovative clusters: drivers of national innovation systems, 377–388. oecd, paris. shearmur r 2011. innovation, regions and proximity: from neo-regionalism to spatial analysis. regional studies 45: 9, 1225–1243. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2010.484416. siirilä s, hautamäki l, kuittinen j & keski-petäjä t 1990. regional well-being variations in finland. fennia – international journal of geography 168: 2, 179–200. siirilä s, vaattovaara m & viljanen v 2002. well-being in finland: a comparison of municipalities and residential differentiation in two cities. fennia – international journal of geography 180: 2, 141–149. simonen j & mccann p 2010. knowledge transfer and innovations: the role of the labour markets r&d co-operation between agents and institutions. papers in regional science 89: 2, 295–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1435-5957.2010.00299.x. sotarauta m & kautonen m 2007. co-evolution of the finnish national and local innovation policy approach. regional studies 41: 8, 1085–1098. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343400701292284. sternberg r 2009. innovation. in kitchin r & thrift n (eds). international encyclopedia of human geography, 481–490. elsevier, amsterdam. sternberg r & arndt o 2001. the firm or region: what determines the innovation behaviour of european firms? economic geography 77: 4, 364–382. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2001.tb00170.x. tabachnick b & fidell l 2007. using multivariate statistics. pearson education, boston. tervo h 2005. regional policy lessons from finland. in felsenstein d & portnov b (eds). regional disparities in small countries, 267–282. springer-verlag, berlin. tödtling f & trippl m 2005. one size fits all: towards a differentiated regional innovation policy approach. research policy 34: 8, 1203–1219. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2005.01.018. valovirta v, pesonen p, halonen m, van der have rp & ahlqvist t 2009. suomalaisten innovaatioiden maantiede. työja elinkeinoministeriö, helsinki. van oort f 2002. innovation and agglomeration economies in the netherlands. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93: 3, 344– 360. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00207. varga a 2000. local academic knowledge transfers and the concentration of economic activity. journal of regional science 40: 2, 289–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0022-4146.00175. webster f 2002. theories of information society. routledge, london. yli-jokipii p 2005. suomen alueellinen kehittyneisyys ja aluepolitiikka maantieteen tutkimuskohteena. in moisio s (ed). maantiede mun silmäni avaa, maapalloa katselemaan, 9–21. turun yliopisto, turku. from pragmatism to meritocracy? views on in-house family ties on the swedish labour market urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa73001 doi: 10.11143/fennia.73001 from pragmatism to meritocracy? views on in-house family ties on the swedish labour market katarina haugen & kerstin westin haugen, k. & westin, k. (2019) from pragmatism to meritocracy? views on in-house family ties on the swedish labour market. fennia 197(2) 268–279. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.73001 in-house family ties within workplaces are a non-negligible phenomenon on the labour market. drawing on organizational and geographical perspectives and based on thematic analysis of 40 interviews with human resource managers, we analyse how family ties are viewed and managed in organizations on the swedish labour market. based on the empirical analysis, we suggest that there are two different logics of human resource management concerning in-house family ties: a traditional, pragmatic and informal logic which expresses an accepting view; and a modern, meritocratic and formal logic associated with a disapproving view. moreover, the informal logic seems to be increasingly challenged by formalization of human resource processes in both urban and rural settings. however, the analysis indicates that in smaller labour markets this shift is somewhat restrained by the limited supply of labour and socially tight knit local communities. also, it seems that the change often meets resistance from supporters of the informal logic, and there is dissonance across different professional groups across and within organizations. keywords: family ties, labour market, human resource management, qualitative interviews, thematic analysis, sweden katarina haugen, human geography unit, department of society and economy, school of business, economics and law, university of gothenburg, po box 25, se 405 30 gothenburg, sweden. e-mail: katarina.haugen@gu.se kerstin westin, department of geography and economic history, umeå university, se 901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: kerstin.westin@umu.se introduction the importance of social networks – professional contacts, friends or family – for finding employment cannot be disregarded. through these connections, potential job seekers are provided with information about job opportunities, and employers are provided with information about potential recruits (petersen et al. 2000). the european community household panel has revealed that 25–45% of employed individuals reported having found their job through referrals (pellizzari 2010), and in the us there are indications that a majority of workers found their job via their social network (galenianos 2014). empirical studies of job search processes are often consistent with granovetter’s (1973) seminal theory of strong © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 197(2) (2019) 269katarina haugen & kerstin westin and weak ties. weak ties, such as acquaintances and contacts on social media, are argued to be the most important for finding a job because they are more numerous; but strong ties consisting of family, relatives and friends may also play a role (brown & konrad 2001; obukhova 2012). moreover, the impact of family ties does not necessarily cease when the recruitment process is completed, but rather continues to influence the workplace and organization in various ways, for example through positive and/or negative effects on the social work environment (haugen & westin 2016). favouring family when employing staff is an expression of an ancient and still commonplace ‘organizing tendency’ (jones 2012a) – nepotism. the phenomenon can be defined as a form of ‘particularistic in-group solidarity’ based on social proximity and resulting in preferential treatment of the family group and hence unequal treatment of those not included in this group (kragh 2012, 249), or as ‘a set of psychological and social processes associated with observed phenomena with respect to family membership (broadly defined) in and around organizations’ (jones 2012a, 2). generally, the term nepotism has a negative connotation, and is frequently associated with corruption (vinton 1998; o’connor & fischer 2012). however, this view is somewhat problematic, given that the existence of family ties within organizations can be the outcome of a wide range of processes and diverse rationales including ‘deliberate career choice and meritorious hiring of family members’ as well as ‘familial coercion’ (stout et al. 2007, cited in jones 2012a, 3). hence, the commonplace negative interpretation of nepotism as ‘not just hiring a relative, but hiring one who is grossly incompetent’ (bellow 2004, 11) does not necessarily describe either the conditions at a workplace where there are in-house family ties present or the reasons and process that led to this situation (holm et al. 2017). for this reason, and because nepotism remains an underresearched topic in organizational and human resource management studies (vinton 1998; jones 2012a; kragh 2012;), it is useful to approach it from a descriptive rather than normative perspective (jones 2012a). in line with this, alternative and more agnostic terms such as ‘kinship ties’ and ‘family ties’ are also used in the literature. we use the term ‘in-house family ties’, which emphasizes the micro-geographical social workplace context (haugen & westin 2016). we study in-house family ties from the perspective of human resource managers (hrms). based on interviews with hrms, our aim is to analyze how family ties are viewed and managed on the swedish labour market, including if any differences can be discerned across different types of organizations or geographic settings. the role of family networks on the labour market the importance of family networks for access to jobs appears to have increased in advanced societies during the latter part of the 20th century (bellow 2004; ioannides & datcher loury 2004). in contrast to granovetter’s (1973) emphasis on the importance of weak ties, more recent studies argue that strong ties can in fact be key in getting a job, particularly for young and low-educated people (e.g. stone et al. 2003; kramarz & nordström skans 2014). the extent of in-house family ties is difficult to estimate, as this information is typically not recorded. however, these ties are not unusual in either private firms or public organizations (bertrand & shoar 2006). in a study from 1993, 88% of the surveyed organizations reported having employees who were related to each other (society for human resource management 1993, cited in vinton 1998). a recent study of the total swedish workforce (holm et al. 2017) showed that the kinship density at an average swedish workplace was 14 %, measured as the total number of individual kinship links. previous studies have highlighted the importance of context. for instance, according to haugen and westin (2016), both organizational size and labour market size can play a role in the emergence of in-house family ties. the phenomenon of family-ties within workplaces is more prevalent in small towns and narrow labour markets, where both jobs and applicants are in short supply (holm et al. 2017). in small towns and rural areas, especially those experiencing population decline, it can be more or less impossible to avoid family ties among employees, particularly at larger workplaces (korang adjei et al. 2016). however, although family ties within workplaces have been found to be more common in rural regions compared to metropolitan areas, the variation cannot be explained solely by population density (holm et al. 2017). employers in rural regions face different problems than do firms in metropolitan areas. this is especially the case when it comes to attracting and retaining 270 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays professionals, considering that the labour market has a limited supply of highly skilled labour (hemphill & kulik 2011). this segment of the labour force tends to remain in larger cities and/or move away from rural areas (miles et al. 2006), which reinforces the shortage of professional skills in the latter. organizations can also deliberately recruit couples (dual or ‘tandem’ recruitment) as a strategy for attracting qualified staff. particularly when accepting a job requires geographical relocation by the potential employee, their decision is often dependent on their spouse’s job opportunities (masuda & visio 2012). both positive and negative impacts of in-house family ties have been pointed out in previous research. advantages of family ties have been observed both in the recruitment process and afterwards in daily operations. for example, using family referrals can be a fast and efficient way of recruiting (e.g. abdalla et al. 1998). it can also reduce the need for subsequent monitoring of new staff (e.g. dyer 2006), since the referral effectively functions as an informal pre-evaluation of candidates. family ties can also add to a positive social environment at the workplace (e.g. van hooft & stout 2012; jaskiewicz et al. 2013; haugen & westin 2016). however, numerous studies also point out the disadvantages of family ties at workplaces. for example, the phenomenon can signal unfairness to other employees and thus damage morale within the organization (padgett & morris 2005; fu 2015), and simultaneously the nepot can perceive being negatively judged by co-workers (padgett & morris 2005) and therefore feel discouraged from participating in discussions on firm organization and performance (haugen & westin 2016). conflicts of interest may arise if family obligations are placed above loyalty to the employer (pearce 2015; haugen & westin 2016). moreover, the presence of family members in a firm can, for example, reduce the capacity for innovation within the organization (e.g. ertug et al. 2014), and relying on family referral recruitment can therefore potentially be detrimental to organizational development in the long term (haugen & westin 2016). western countries, particularly the us, can be described as ‘postkinship’ societies. this entails a social context in which norms connected to ‘increasing individualism, mobility and the dissipation of family bonds’ imply that nepotism is frowned upon (bellow 2004, 18). in a wider perspective, such traits are also hallmarks of modernization (cf. inglehart & baker 2000) and the outcome of the transition from a pre-industrial, rural society to an industrial (or post-industrial), urban society, which has also entailed a shift from the dominance of norms centred around family and kinship to those that emphasize equal rights and treatment along with utility and merit. however, it cannot be assumed that this transformation is devoid of tension or contestation. rather, the old and new principles are likely to co-exist at least for a period, with the new approaches possibly being resisted and even ‘overrun’ by the old ones (kragh 2012). hr management processes (e.g. recruitment) are generally becoming more formalized and hierarchical, that is with dedicated hr functions; especially in large organizations (kotey & sheridan 2004). changed approaches can be conceptualized as innovation diffusion processes, which often have certain geographical characteristics (hägerstrand 1967). early adopters are often affluent and found in urban areas, whereas laggards are more commonly found in economically low-performing areas (fischer 1992). applied to organizational change, this could imply for instance that new hr processes in regard to, for instance, recruitment are gradually spread from major cities to other regions, and from larger to smaller organizations. the formalization of hr processes reflects an emphasis on ’”job-related and rational” standards for decision making’ (jones 2012b, xi). it is common for organizations to implement anti-nepotism policies in attempts to eradicate the phenomenon (jones 2012a) and/or avoid potential negative effects of family ties within organizations. these policies link to the notion of meritocracy, that is merits or talent – rather than privilege, wealth, class, family ties and so on – should be decisive when appointing people to positions (liu 2011). on a more general level, this is also connected to public policy and legislation in regard to equality and inclusion (swedish government 2008). meritocracy entails several dimensions: merit, distributive justice, equality of opportunity, and social mobility. merit is regarded as an intangible and abstract quality, and is often associated with personal traits such as talent, skill, intelligence, and ability. distributive justice concerns the relationship between merit and reward, whereby for instance the most talented should be given greater reward than the less talented, such as by being offered a job. equality of opportunity refers to everyone being given the same opportunity, for example being included in screening or tests for a job opening. given that this is the case, social fennia 197(2) (2019) 271katarina haugen & kerstin westin inequality (class, family, income) on a more general level is accepted so long as talent is the distinguishing criterion (liu 2011). the rationale behind anti-nepotism policy is to avoid conflicts of interest between work-related and family-related obligations, to reduce favouritism (or the appearance of it), and to prevent intra-family conflicts from affecting the workplace (padgett & morris 2005). while there is a generally broad acceptance of anti-nepotism policies and of the principles of meritocracy (castilla & benard 2010), these policies have been criticised for being discriminatory, as they disqualify eligible candidates simply because they have relatives at the workplace (abramo et al. 2014). this can be problematic for example in regard to changes in the workforce, such as women’s entry into gainful employment and the associated increase in dual-career couples (werbel & hames 1996). meritocracy per se is arguably also an ‘unfulfillable promise’ because people have unequal starting positions, background and family circumstances which influence their chances of developing their merits. there is a risk that such differences are legitimized by referring to meritocratic principles (mijs 2016). interviews with hr-staff and executives the empirical focus of this paper is hrms’ perceptions and experiences of in-house family ties at swedish workplaces, both in connection to recruitment and in the ongoing operations of the organization. we have adopted an informant interview approach based on semi-structured interviews focused on providing an insider perspective on how in-house family ties are viewed and treated. the empirical material consists of 40 interviews with 44 hrms (four of the interviews featured double informants, hence the ‘mismatching’ numbers) in workplaces on the swedish labour market, conducted in the period may 2014–february 2015. the interviews lasted 35–75 minutes, and on average approximately one hour. thirty-four interviews were conducted face-to-face, and six over the telephone. the informants include specialized hr-officials (in primarily large workplaces) and executives with responsibility for personnel matters (mainly in small businesses without specialized hr functions). a majority, 26 of 44, of the informants were women. in order to produce as rich and varied data as possible (coyne 1997), and thus give a multifaceted picture of the studied phenomenon, the informants were chosen from a wide range of workplaces. the workplaces were located in different geographical settings, ranging from metropolitan to rural areas. they also varied in organization size, from micro firms with fewer than ten employees to major workplaces with up to 2,000 employees. the workplaces represented a phletora of businesses, including industry (technical, wood, food), primary sector activity, retail, tourism, restaurant, hotel, financial services, architecture, communication, life sciences, cleaning services, transportation, logistics, public services, state authority/public utility, and municipal administration. of the 40 workplaces, 30 belonged to the private sector and the remainder to the public sector. among the private-sector organizations, nine were self-identified family-owned businesses, and the remainder were non-family businesses. the family businesses were included because of an expectation that there may be a greater openness and willingness to discuss the – potentially controversial – issue of family ties within organizations where this is a self-evident feature. a majority of the informants were contacted through the following procedure: persons with responsibility and insight into recruitment practices and broader staff issues within the organizations were identified with the help of ‘gatekeepers’ (feldman et al. 2003a) and were subsequently approached via cold calling (feldman et al. 2003b). in addition, snowball sampling based on the participants’ personal and/or professional networks was also used as a strategy to recruit additional informants. a few informants were also identified with assistance from the researchers’ personal networks. prior to the interviews, the informants were presented with a copy of the interview guide which covered the main issues to be addressed during the interview, thus giving those of them who wished to do so a chance to prepare. key issues in the interview guide were organizational recruitment processes – and specifically the use of family referral recruitment – and the extent, consequences and management of in-house family ties within the organization. the guide was used as a flexible point of departure in the interviews, and informants were encouraged to bring up other issues which they deemed relevant (qu & dumay 2011). 272 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays the interviews were recorded with the consent of the informants under the condition of confidentiality. the material was transcribed verbatim, and was analyzed thematically using maxqda software for qualitative analysis, in line with the principles outlined by braun and clarke (2006). hence, the process of analysis included systematic coding line-by-line and the gradual development of themes, which were continuously refined and adjusted to fit the data. analytic memos (saldaña 2016) were recorded and used throughout the analysis process. views on and strategies for in-house family ties acceptance and disapproval: competing and shifting views two main approaches in the hrms’ views on in-house family ties can be distinguished: acceptance and disapproval, respectively. informants who subscribe to the accepting view are found in organizations in both the private and public sectors, and within family as well as non-family businesses in the former. according to this view, the presence of family ties is understood as positive and ‘natural’, and in many cases it is something that is largely unreflected on. it is not an issue that is discussed within the organization, and no eyebrows are raised when family members are recruited, among either workers or executives. some informants consider including relatives of incumbent workers as a sign of positive organizational traits such as openness and flexibility. for these informants, family referral recruitment is just another form of network-based recruitment and hence no different from non-family referral recruitment. there are several testimonies to family referral recruitment as a common practice and an integral part of the way business is run, and which is not questioned: it’s just been there. like, this is how we do things. so it’s not something you think about specifically. /…/ but it’s completely accepted to bring in family and friends [into the workplace as employees]. there’s nothing to say that we can’t do that. it feels completely natural, really. [#25, metropolitan; hotel; small organization] however, the accepting view is not unconditional but is rather subject to certain reservations. familytied employees must act in what is deemed as an appropriate, professional manner. the spilling over of private issues and conflicts into the work environment is frowned upon, and there are tacit expectations about individual behaviour in a context where private and work relationships effectively intersect. this tends to entail leaving private matters, including any grievances, at home and not allowing them to interfere with the work domain. the parties involved must show good judgement, which in turn is seen as dependent on personal qualities, for example ‘temper’ and ‘maturity’. many informants agree that family members should treat each other like any other co-workers and not allow private and professional roles to blur: …if you didn’t know they were married you’d never be able to tell. there was no way of telling, they acted very professionally. [#13; large city; technical industry; large organization] another requirement expressed by several informants – not least representatives of family firms – is competence. family referral recruitment whereby incumbent employees’ relatives are given positive special treatment is seen as unproblematic only provided that the nepot possesses adequate competence for the position and performs well on the job once hired. under these circumstances it is considered appropriate and reasonable recruitment, and the type of social network within which the candidates are found and the characteristics of the recruitment process are rendered irrelevant: the competence must be there somehow. if that’s in place and things work out, then i don’t mind, absolutely not. i guess it’s, it’s very nice. and maybe it’s not so much a thing in our culture right now, but there are many other cultures where there’s only family and relatives /…/ it feels very machinelike if you were to argue that ‘no, we have to be able to prove that there’s someone better out there’. like, what the heck. family’s family after all. you take care of it. [#23; metropolitan, restaurant; micro-sized organization] however, the type of employment or position in question can play a part. several informants argue that although allowing for family referrals may be tolerated for short-term or low-skilled jobs, they tread more carefully and strictly follow formalized recruitment polities when it is a matter of permanent fennia 197(2) (2019) 273katarina haugen & kerstin westin or high-level positions. in line with this, many informants subscribe to an approach that is markedly disapproving and critical of in-house family ties. this group, which notably includes most informants from public-sector organizations (whose processes are more strictly regulated compared to private sector organizations), calls for cautiousness and restrictiveness. this is motivated by several reasons: a general awareness of the potential risks associated with in-house family ties, particularly when combined with power asymmetries; personal experience among the hrm informants of problematic situations in which such ties are salient; anxiety in regard to potential (media) scrutiny and criticism; and a perceived lack of reliability of family referrals. most informants express this stance using relatively soft wording, for example ‘avoidance’ of in-house family ties, but there are also examples of pronounced anti-nepotism policies: …and then it’s too bad, really, because /…/ [one of our employees,] she works with labour law/…/ and has a really capable son /…/ who’s getting a degree in hr. but we can’t employ him, unfortunately, so long as i’ve got [his mother] [employed] here. because we don’t want to end up in a situation like that. so in this case, he’s rejected for being a relative. [#22; metropolitan; municipal administration; large organization] nevertheless, even when organizations have a pronouncedly critical and restrictive stance with respect to family referrals and in-house family ties, there is an exception to (almost) every rule when the circumstances so require. there are various examples in the interviews of the principles having been waived or there being a certain openness to do so if deemed necessary. this happens mostly in situations of an urgent and/or temporary need for staff which motivates bending the rules, and in some cases with regard to ‘tandem recruitment’, whereby a trailing partner being offered a job in the organization makes it possible to attract specialist professionals. in certain scenarios, in-house family ties are difficult to prevent or eliminate, for instance couple formation among co-workers. strictly applied anti-nepotism policies in all aspects of the business activities would require the sanctioning of such situations by, for example, forcing one party to resign or if possible transferring them to another division. this course of action is seen by several informants as rather radical and as one that many employers would be reluctant to take. based on the interview material, the critical approach to in-house family ties appears to be linked to a shift in the general view of the phenomenon, particularly in regard to recruitment. according to the informants’ experiences, this transition, whereby new perspectives and norms have emerged and grown stronger, seems to have taken place in the past few decades. several informants within both private and public sector organizations describe how the views within their organizations have undergone a marked change from traditional, and substantially informal, recruitment approaches often involving family referral to current approaches characterized by professionalization, meritocratic principles, and transparency. some informants describe this as an ‘enlightenment’. the shift to some extent influences the way incumbent in-house family ties are managed, but primarily entails a new view on and approach towards recruitment: maybe it was easier in the past. when the processes weren’t so rigorous. /…/ there are more needle’s eyes to pass through today in a recruitment process compared to at least ten years ago or 20 years ago. /…/ we have to be completely transparent in how we work. [#13; large city; technical industry; large organization] some informants also suggest that organizations, which have previously been largely internally oriented with a non-negligible degree of referral recruitment, have increasingly begun to open up. the existence of dedicated hr functions has become self-evident in many, particularly larger, organizations as part of efforts to improve strategic competence provision. external competition can also force organizations to generate the best possible preconditions for productivity, survival and success; and one aspect of this is ensuring that recruitment is based on merit: it’s the competition that places higher demands on the company, and then everyone realises that we must place demands on those we hire, the requirement can’t be family ties. so it’s, the competition has increased the demands on the company and then the professionalism has increased. [#4; metropolitan; food industry; large organization] 274 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays particular geographical preconditions can also influence organizations’ views and strategies towards family ties in recruitment processes. in rural areas generally and peripheral areas specifically, the possibility of recruiting somebody who has no family ties to the incumbent employees can be limited. there is often a high likelihood of some kind of connection. also, as a result of social proximity within the community, the employer may have quite substantial informal knowledge about their employees and their families: good knowledge about the families and the persons [who live] in this municipality is part of our [staff] selection. /…/ it’s difficult to hide in a municipality this size. [#27; small town; industry, large organization] moreover, tandem recruitment appears not to be unusual in small towns and rural areas with small and non-diverse labour markets. offering a job not only for the main applicants but also for their partners can be necessary to attract qualified staff when accepting the job would involve household migration. the data indicates that there is intra-organizational dissonance in views in the wake of the described transition towards professional recruitment practices. organizations within the public sector, unsurprisingly, generally appear to have moved further along the path of change compared to the private sector. nevertheless, even within parts of the public sector, traditional views remain. many informants, especially those who are hr specialists, tend to portray themselves as representatives of a meritocratic and formal model of recruitment. however, people in leading positions within the workplaces, for instance managers involved more closely in daily operations, have opinions that according to the hrm informants are sometimes more inclined towards the traditional model of recruitment. this can include a bias towards the employees‘ family networks: this isn’t something you can change […] in one generation. of course the view, the culture is still there, and the will to do things the way they’ve always been done because you think ‘it was so good, it turned out so well, we got things our way’. /…/ so there’ll be resistance, yes, and this resistance may come from the highest level. /…./ …it takes [more than] one generation before we phase out the old culture. [#26; metropolitan; state authority; large organization] support for the culture of family referral recruitment is also found among workers who sometimes overtly or covertly resist changes in organizational policy and practice. according to several informants, staff members – sometimes with the support of labour unions – expect that the ‘old way of doing things’ will still be in place in terms of openings for family members to find employment. overall, the interviews suggest that dissonance within organizations in the views on family referral recruitment is relatively common. according to the informants, this is often expressed as efforts by employees to help their relatives find work on the one hand, and managers who are increasingly unwilling to allow this on the other. however, there are also cases in which there is agreement across the different levels of the organization (workers, operations managers and hrms). in some cases, the consensus is that family referral recruitment is neither desirable nor acceptable, while in other cases there is agreement that it is an efficient recruitment strategy that yields good results. managing and coping with in-house family ties on an overarching strategic level, the management of in-house family ties ranges from strict and explicitly stated policy to guidelines with softer edges. such guidelines can take the form of, for instance, a generally formulated recruitment plan that emphasizes the equal treatment of all applicants and that employee-referred applicants should not receive special treatment, without targeting family ties specifically. however, the interviews suggest that views on in-house family ties, and whether or not special policies are considered necessary, may vary depending on geographical context. for example, this informant believes that there are differences across metropolitan areas and small towns, whereby in the latter it can be expected that there is less rigidity in both views on and ways of dealing with the phenomenon: i know that for example in stockholm, at a small consultancy firm, there were two [employees] there who became a couple and then they were informed that ‘one of you has to leave’. and then they had to deal with it. and it was like a matter of principle. and i think, had that firm been in [a fennia 197(2) (2019) 275katarina haugen & kerstin westin small town] then maybe it wouldn’t have been handled in the same way. [#36; medium-sized city; financial services; medium-sized organization] the data include various examples of explicit anti-nepotism policies and strategies for handling emerging family ties within the workplace, that is a formalized expression of the abovementioned disapproving approach to in-house family ties. yet, even when formal policies are in place they are seldom absolute. if implemented strictly, they can effectively obstruct competence provision, particularly on small local labour markets where recruiting appropriate staff can be difficult even when family referral recruitment is accepted. this can serve as motivation for branches located in these regions to be allowed to diverge from general corporate policy to some degree since it is the lesser of two evils: of course, if we were to exclude those who in some way have close family connections to us, we would limit the labour market in a silly way /…/ we’d become worse, potentially a worse company. [#27; small town; industry; large organization] a common feature of employer strategies for dealing with in-house family ties is to separate relatives so that they are organizationally and/or physically distant from each other at the workplace. the opportunity of taking these measures is mainly a benefit of large organizations. this is done as a preventive measure, and to quickly obviate problems should they arise, and thus reflects the employer’s views that there are latent risks associated with in-house family ties. through strategic placement or transfers within the organization, the employer can ensure that in-house relatives work in different divisions, are on different teams, and work on different projects. this is particularly important if there are hierarchical differences between the individuals in question. separation also offers a way to legitimize the presence of in-house family ties in relation to other workers: it’s really not so much about [the relatives], it’s more about everyone else around them, so we’re very strict /…/ there have been times when we’ve moved people around, they got to decide for themselves who would move. especially when there was a manager involved, then of course the subordinated person would move. [#33; large city, municipal administration; medium-sized organization] on the level of managers who work close to the staff, there are variegated approaches to dealing with in-house family ties. some are passive, some are cautious, and some adopt an active and controlling leadership style. managers who take the passive approach do not deem it necessary to act upon the presence of family ties but rather consider the individuals involved as capable of handling the situation without external intervention: as employers, we would never sit two people down in a room and tell them how to behave. that has never been necessary. /…/ considering that we’ve never experienced that there’s been a problem /…/, it’s been a non-issue for us, i think. /…/, i don’t think we’d gain anything by making it more rule-based and inflexible. [#30; large city; kibs; medium-sized organization] the passive approach can be connected to explicit or implicit expectations that staff should act professionally, and trust in their ability to do so. also, at large workplaces it can be motivated by the fact that related workers need not ‘run into each other’ at work and thus the family link is less likely to become an issue. however, it may also be the case that managers are somewhat naïve and therefore leave events to unfold, or that they do not know how to deal with the situation. the passivity on the part of the employer and manager is sometimes compensated for by actions taken by the in-house relatives themselves which effectively remove the need for managers to get involved. several informants describe how, for example, recently formed or divorced couples who share a workplace tend to choose to change their work circumstances, either by requesting to be transferred within the organization or by looking for a job elsewhere. this results in the abovementioned separation of related staff members, although the rationales may differ compared to when this is the outcome of the employer’s strategic actions. from the workers’ point of view, it can be a work-life balance strategy of compartmentalization in order to maintain a distance between the private and professional domains of life. managers who take the cautious approach are more risk-aware and appear to have reflected somewhat more on the phenomenon of in-house family ties. they have experience of how latent risk can 276 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays morph into manifest problems. to prevent situations featuring conflicts of interest or loyalty, or suspicion and distrust among other co-workers, these managers act proactively by, for instance, encouraging individuals to recuse themselves or proclaim their disqualification in matters concerning their relatives: i think you should maintain a broad buffer against exposing yourself, even to the risk of being suspected [of inappropriate behaviour]… you shouldn’t give anyone the chance to even suspect, you should maintain a proper distance to the situation. [#2; small city; technical industry; large organization] i have a co-worker whose husband is a manager, and we’re on the same board of directors, he and i. but i would never, i mean i never, expose her to questions that have to do with him in any way. [#27; small town; industry; large organization] many informants agree that a key aspect of coping with in-house family ties is a clear leadership style. by clarifying the (otherwise implicit) rules and/or expectations as soon as possible, they assume that any risks will remain at an acceptable level. simultaneously, they create a sense that they are in control of the situation and that workers can trust that they will be treated fairly and equally. for example, in cases of family referral recruitment, the manager can legitimize this practice by making a point of ensuring other employees that the new hire is qualified for the position. should problems nevertheless arise despite the precautions, the strategy is often to ‘nip it in the bud’ and thus prevent for instance emerging distrust from escalating into a hostile work environment. clear leadership in day-to-day operations also entails communicating, explaining the reasons why certain decisions are made, and confronting any rumours that may circulate among employees: it’s very important to lay down the rules of the game /…/ and [clarify that] ‘you’ll be treated the same as everyone else’ and… to really lay down the rules of the game in a clear way /…/ almost like a pre-nuptial agreement, [and] this has to be in place beforehand so you [the nepot] realise that ‘i won’t get any benefits because i’m… family’, that it’s the same for everyone. [#11; medium-sized city; kibs; small organization] when the people in the surroundings see that things are handled in good order, then i think most people are satisfied. there’s a clearness about it. you see that someone’s taking responsibility. so there’s trustworthiness in how the issue is dealt with. [#24; metropolitan; municipal administration; large organization] towards meritocracy? based on a comprehensive qualitative material consisting of 40 informant interviews with hrms at a broad range of swedish workplaces, this paper aimed to analyze how family ties are viewed and managed within organizations. we find two overarching views regarding family referral recruitment and in-house family ties among the informants: acceptance (positive) on the one hand, and disapproval (negative) on the other. in general, informants who were critical express their views clearly, whereas those whose views are more positively inclined tend to discuss the matter in a less upfront way. this is presumably because of a higher degree of reflection on, or problematizing of, the issue among the former and less so among the latter. however, even those informants who take a critical position can frequently recall occasions on which recruitment policy is treated quite flexibly; for example, the rules are not necessarily absolute but can be bent under certain conditions. not least, the limited opportunities for recruitment of qualified staff in small and peripherally located local and regional labour markets can motivate exceptions and soft interpretations and implementation of corporate anti-nepotism policy. the view on in-house family ties is also translated into matching strategies for managing and coping with the phenomenon in both recruitment processes and in daily operations. if the view is accepting, then conscious policy and (pro)active risk management are usually absent. if the view is critical, then different strategies and even anti-nepotism policies are often in place. the findings from the interview material suggest that a shift is perhaps underway in the ‘logic’ behind the functioning of the swedish labour market with respect to normative views on and handling of in-house family ties. within these different logics – which largely correspond to the accepting and disapproving views, respectively – the phenomenon is interpreted very differently. there is a traditional fennia 197(2) (2019) 277katarina haugen & kerstin westin logic which is characterised by informality and pragmatism. this entails a largely unreflected position in regard to in-house family ties, which are often considered a ‘natural’ feature of working life (cf. bellow 2004). conversely, the modern logic is characterised by formality and meritocracy. here, inhouse family ties are seen as either irrelevant since it is believed that they should not lead to special treatment of any kind – either positive or negative – or as a potentially problematic issue due to perceived risks associated with the phenomenon. while the formal logic appears to be increasingly displacing the informal logic, the transition seems to still be ongoing and therefore there is a degree of co-existence of both logics. this indicates a certain inertia of the informal logic and associated resistance to the change (cf. kragh 2012), which is also expressed in the actions of individuals and groups which highlight tension between the logics within workplaces. dissonance in the views on in-house family ties can be found not only across (e.g., public sector versus private sector organizations) but also within organizations. while particularly hr professionals typically tend to see themselves as representatives of the disapproving view and advocates of the formal logic, there are other groups who, according to the hrms, hold the accepting view and whose agendas and actions constitute efforts to defend and preserve the informal logic. the latter include employees who do not have an executive position, but also many managers, including some in high positions. hence, the principles represented by the hr function seem to actively challenge other power structures within these organizations. the presumably ongoing shift can be interpreted as a diffusion process (cf. hägerstrand 1967) which is still far from ‘completion’. this appears to be the case especially outside the metropolitan regions, in small and peripheral labour markets where the prevalence of in-house family is higher than in the densely populated regions (holm et al. 2017). this difference on a general level may of course be due to spatially varied views on the phenomenon and its importance within organization. another likely explanation is that this is related to the preconditions for recruitment which depend on the structure of the labour market, where the supply of potential employees is limited and the likelihood of family connections between incumbent employees and candidates is high. such effects may become even more amplified in cases where the labour market is dominated by one major employer. however, it should also be noted that the accepting view of in-house family ties was not unique for organizations located in small towns and rural areas. rather, we found various examples of this approach in organizations in the metropolitan regions, notably also in some public sector organizations. hence, despite the indications that views do vary over a rural–urban continuum, the findings are not clear-cut in this regard. the changing logic of how the labour market functions in regards to views on and ways of managing in-house family ties, as indicated by the interview material, should not be seen as an isolated process. rather, this is likely to be connected to other, broader societal shifts. one such process is the general trend towards individualisation whereby the freedom of each person to direct their own biography is emphasized (holdsworth et al. 2013), for example when it comes to a vocational choice. this can be contrasted to the previous condition, in which structural conditions arguably were stronger constraints. today, professional and occupational choice is not just a matter of ‘walking in your parents’ footsteps’. nevertheless, occupational inheritance remains quite common (mannon & schreuders 2007) and social proximity in the form of family ties retain their importance within workplaces and organizations. even in today’s ‘postkinship’, modern society (inglehart & baker 2000; bellow 2004), strong social ties (granovetter 1973) in the form of family connections maintain a nonnegligible role in recruitment on the labour market and have a bearing on finding employment as well as on daily working life at the workplace. the empirical findings indicate the possibility of important ongoing processes of change on the swedish labour market, and which may potentially have parellels in other similar contexts. however, as a final note of caution, we must point to some caveats concerning the present study. given that the empirical analysis is based on a small, non-representative sample, we obviously cannot draw any definitive conclusions. in particular, a small material does not allow for systematic analysis of different categories of organisations. since the empirical material is also cross-sectional, it should be duly noted that the suggested shift in labour market logic with regard to in-house family ties, while reported by many informants, is by no means an empirical fact based on this analysis alone. as always, further research is needed, and in this case one fruitful way forward might be to use the findings from the 278 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays present study as a basis for a large-scale survey of swedish workplaces in order to gain a clearer view of patterns in, and causes and consequences of, how in-house family ties are viewed and managed. acknowledgements this work was supported by the bank of sweden tercentenary foundation [grant 2011-1702], and by the umeå university programme “mobility, transformation and regional growth” [grant umu-300-2054-12]. references abdalla, h. f., maghrabi, a. s. & raggad, b. g. (1998) assessing the perceptions of human resource managers toward nepotism. international journal of manpower 19(8) 554–570. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437729810242235 abramo, g., d’angelo, c. a. & rosati, f. (2014) relatives in the same university faculty: nepotism or merit? scientometrics 10181) 737–749. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1273-z bellow, a. (2004) in praise of nepotism. anchor books, new york. bertrand, m. & shoar, a. (2006) the role of family in family firms. journal of economic perspectives 20(2) 73–96. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.20.2.73 braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006) using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology 3(2) 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa brown, d. w. & konrad, a. m. (2001) granovetter was right – the importance of weak ties to a contemporary job search. group & organization management 26(4) 434–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601101264003 castilla, e. j. & benard, s. (2010) the paradox of meritocracy in organizations. administrative science quarterly 55(4) 543–576. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.2010.55.4.543 coyne, i. t. (1997) sampling in qualitative research. purposeful and theoretical sampling; merging or clear boundaries? journal of advanced nursing 26(3) 623–630. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2648.1997.t01-25-00999.x dyer, w. g. jr. (2006) examining the “family effect” on firm performance. family business review 19(4) 253–273. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6248.2006.00074.x ertug, g., hedström, p. & kotha, r. (2014) whose nepot should we hire? the influence of kin of initial employees on the survival of new firms. emnlp '11: proceedings of the 2011 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing, edinburgh, scotland, uk, july 27–31. research collection lee kong chian school of business. <https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/4961/> feldman, m. s., bell, j. & berger, m. t. (2003a) making initial contact. in feldman, m. s., bell, j. & berger, m. t. (eds.) gaining access – a practical and theoretical guide for qualitative researchers, 23–34. altamira press, walnut creek. feldman, m. s., bell, j. & berger, m. t. (2003b) finding informants. in feldman, m. s., bell, j. & berger, m. t. (eds.) gaining access – a practical and theoretical guide for qualitative researchers, 3–12. altamira press, walnut creek. fischer, c. s. (1992) america calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940. university of california press, berkeley fu, i-p. (2015) favoritism: ethical dilemmas viewed through multiple paradigms. journal of valuesbased leadership 8(1) article 6. galenianos, m. (2014) hiring through referrals. journal of economic theory 152 304–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2014.03.009 granovetter, m. (1973) the strength of weak ties. american journal of sociology 78(6) 1360–1380. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469 haugen, k. & westin, k. (2016) ‘not a problem until it becomes a problem’: a qualitative study of values and risks of in-house family ties in swedish workplaces. nordic journal of working life studies 6(4) 67–86. https://doi.org/10.19154/njwls.v6i4.5613 holdsworth, c., finney, n., marshall, a. & norman, p. (2013) population and society. sage, los angeles. holm, e., westin, k. & haugen, k. (2017) place, kinship and employment. population, space and place 24(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2118 hemphill, e. & kulik, c. t. (2011) myth busting rural labour shortages. a market segmentation approach reveals new recruitment opportunities. australasian journal of regional studies 17(2) 174–203. <https://search.informit.com.au/documentsummary;dn=204523734735013;res=ielhss> van hooft, e. a. j. & stout, t. (2012) nepotism and career choice, job search, and job choice. in jones, r. g. (ed.) nepotism in organizations, 67–92. routledge, new york. hägerstrand, t. (1967) innovation diffusion as a spatial process. chicago press, chicago. fennia 197(2) (2019) 279katarina haugen & kerstin westin inglehart, r. & baker, w. e. (2000) modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values. american sociological review 65(1) 19–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657288 ioannides, y. m. & datcher loury, l. (2004) job information networks, neighborhood effects, and inequality. journal of economic literature 42(4) 1056–1093. https://doi.org/10.1257/0022051043004595 jaskiewicz, p., uhlenbruck, k., balkin, d. b. & reay, t. (2013) is nepotism good or bad? types of nepotism and implications for knowledge management. family business review 20(10) 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894486512470841 jones, r. g. (2012a) defining a psychology of nepotism. in jones, r. g. (ed.) nepotism in organizations, 1–10. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203805886 jones, r. g. (2012b) preface. in jones, r. g. (ed.) nepotism in organizations, xi–xiv. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203805886 kragh, s. u. (2012) the anthropology of nepotism: social distance and reciprocity in organizations in developing countries. international journal of cross cultural management 12(2) 247–265. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470595812439869 kramarz, f. & nordström skans, o. (2014) when strong ties are strong – networks and youth labour market entry. review of economic studies 81(3) 1164–1200. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdt049 korang adjei, e., eriksson, r. h. & lindgren, u. (2016) social proximity and firm performance: the importance of family member ties in workplaces. regional studies, regional science 3(1) 304–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681376.2016.1189354 kotey, b. & sheridan, a. (2004) changing hrm practices with firm growth. journal of small business and enterprise development 11(4) 474–485. https://doi.org/10.1108/14626000410567125 liu, a. (2011) unraveling the myth of meritocracy within the context of us higher education. higher education 62(4) 383–397. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9394-7 mannon, s. e. & schreuders, p. d. (2007) all in the (engineering) family? – the family occupational background of men and women engineering students. journal of women and minorities in science and engineering 13(4) 333–351. https://doi.org/10.1615/jwomenminorscieneng.v13.i4.20 masuda, a. & visio, m. (2012) nepotism practices and the work-family interface. in jones, r. g. (ed.) nepotism in organizations, 147–170. routledge, new york. mijs, j. j. b. (2016) the unfulfillable promise of meritocracy: three lessons and their implications for justice in education. social justice research 29(1) 14–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-014-0228-0 miles, r., marshall, c., rolfe, j. & noonan, s. (2006) the attraction and retention of professionals to regional areas. australasian journal of regional studies 12(2) 129–152. obukhova, e. (2012) motivation vs. relevance: using strong ties to find a job in urban china. social science research 41(3) 570–580. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2011.12.010 o’connor, s. & fischer, r. (2012) predicting societal corruption across time: values, wealth, or institutions? journal of cross-cultural psychology 43(4) 644–659. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022111402344 padgett, m. y. & morris, k. a. (2005) keeping it “all in the family:” does nepotism in the hiring process really benefit the beneficiary? journal of leadership and organizational studies 11(2) 34–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/107179190501100205 pearce, j. l. (2015) cronyism and nepotism are bad for everyone: the research evidence. industrial and organizational psychology 8(1) 41–44. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2014.10 pellizzari, m. (2010) do friends and relatives really help in getting a good job? industrial labor and relations review 63(3) 494–510. https://doi.org/10.1177/001979391006300307 petersen, t., saporta, i. & seidel, m.-d. l. (2000) offering a job: meritocracy and social networks. american journal of sociology 106(3) 763–816. https://doi.org/10.1086/318961 qu, s. q. & dumay, j. (2011) the qualitative research interview. qualitative research in accounting & management 8(3) 238–264. https://doi.org/10.1108/11766091111162070 saldaña, j. (2016) the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage, london. stone, w., gray, m. & hughes, j. (2003) social capital at work: how family, friends and civic ties relate to labour market outcomes. research paper no 31, australian institute of family studies. swedish government (2008) discrimination act 2008:567. vinton, k. l. (1998) nepotism: an interdisciplinary model. family business review xi(4) 297–304. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6248.1998.00297.x werbel, j. d. & hames, d. s. (1996) antinepotism reconsidered. group and organization management 21(3) 365–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601196213006 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa48291 doi: 10.11143/48291 effect of latitude and mountain height on the timberline (betula pubescens ssp. czerpanovii) elevation along the central scandinavian mountain range arvid odland odland, arvid (2015). effect of latitude and mountain height on the timberline (betula pubescens ssp. czerpanovii) elevation along the central scandinavian mountain range. fennia 193: 2, 260–270. issn 1798-5617. previously published isoline maps of fennoscandian timberlines show that their highest elevations lie in the high mountain areas in central south norway and from there the limits decrease in all directions. these maps are assumed to show differences in “climatic forest limits”, but the isoline patterns indicate that factors other than climate may be decisive in most of the areas. possibly the effects of ‘massenerhebung’ and the “summit syndrome” may locally have major effects on the timberline elevation. the main aim of the present study is to quantify the effect of latitude and mountain height on the regional variation of mountain birch timberline elevation. the study is a statistical analysis of previous published data on the timberline elevation and nearby mountain height. selection of the study sites has been stratified to the scandinavian mountain range (the scandes) from 58 to 71o n where the timberlines reach their highest elevations. the data indicates that only the high mountain massifs in s norway and n sweden are sufficiently high to allow birch forests to reach their potential elevations. stepwise regression shows that latitude explains 70.9% while both latitude and mountain explain together 89.0% of the timberline variation. where the mountains are low (approximately 1000 m higher than the measured local timberlines) effects of the summit syndrome will lower the timberline elevation substantially and climatically determined timberlines will probably not have been reached. this indicates that models of future timberlines and thereby the alpine area extent in a warmer world may result in unrealistic conclusions without taking account of local mountain heights. keywords: scandinavia, forest limit, multiple regression, ecology, global warming, massenerhebung arvid odland, telemark university college, hallvard eikas plass, 3800 bø, norway. e-mail: arvid.odland@hit.no introduction the scandinavian mountain range (the scandes) stretches from 58 to 71o n. along its central part, mountain height is highly variable with peaks higher than 2100 m only in south central norway (ca. 69o n) and in northern sweden (ca. 79o n). mountain height is particularly low in the southernmost and northernmost parts, but also relatively low in the central parts (63–64o n). published isoline timberline (forest limit) maps show major variations, with elevation limits from a maximum higher than 1200 m to sea level (moen 1999; heikkinen 2005). it is well known that in terms of temperature, latitude compensates for altitude, and timberline elevation decreases generally toward north. as a rule of thumb, one degree increase in latitude is roughly equal to a 122 m decrease in elevation, and to a 0.55 oc temperature decrease (lee 1969; montgomery 2006). also vegetation zones are often projected northwards, parallel with the timberfennia 193: 2 (2015) 261effect of latitude and mountain height on the timberline line decrease. when viewed globally, timberline elevation decreases with latitude (wieser & tausz 2007; berdanier 2010), but there are considerable variations. as shown by körner (2012), the latitudinal decrease is not monotonic, and the highest timberlines are found in tibet (30o n) where the mountains are highest. consequently, it is obvious that factors other than latitude influence the position of the timberlines (e.g. daubenmire 1954; gorchakovsky 1989). the actual measured timberlines can, however, be limited by numerous other environmental factors (holtmeier 2003; wieser & tausz 2007) but if no other factors are critical, the timberline elevation is assumed to be a response to summer temperature which is then defined as the climatic timberline. it has long been recognized that large mountain systems create their own surrounding climate, influencing both temperatures and general climate character (the degree of continentality). the effects of mountain height on climate and timberline elevation were originally described as the massenerhebungseffect (or mass elevation effect) from the alps, but have now also been applied globally to explain timberline variations (e.g. dolukhanov 1978; holtmeier 2003). in general, the larger the mountain mass, the more its climate will vary from the free atmosphere at any given altitude. the effect of low mountain height on the timberline elevation has been described as the mountain syndrome, and several hundred metres of mountain terrain above the measured timberline have to be available for the development of climatic timberlines (körner 2012). mountains serve as elevated heat islands where solar radiation is absorbed and transformed into long-wave heat energy, resulting in much higher temperatures than those found at similar altitudes in the free air (e.g. barry 2008). it has been shown that timberlines in the middle parts of the alps where the mountains are highest lie several hundred metres higher than in the southern and northern parts where the mountains are lower. effect on timberline elevation is, however, not well known in other areas. the most comprehensive work on alpine timberlines in norway was performed by aas (1964). he used both his own measurements and previously published data to develop timberline isoline maps for the whole of norway. his original, unpublished map has later been extended to include also the northernmost parts of sweden and finland, and different versions have later been published. all maps show the same trends, but the degree of smoothing of the isolines has varied. the timberlines decrease toward north, west, south and east from their maximum elevation in the jotunheimen mountain range, central south norway. an average decreasing trend of the timberlines from the alps to north scandinavia has previously been estimated to be 75.6 m per degree increase in latitude (odland 2010). the isoline maps show, however, major regional deviations from this latitudinal trend. the timberlines in northernmost scandinavia are particularly interesting because here both the northern (arctic) and the alpine timberlines intermingle at sea level and here the limits have been used to separate the arctic, alpine, and boreal biomes. it is essential that possible factors limiting local timberline elevation are assessed. for any plant to reach its potential geographic distribution, suitable growth sites must be available, which is a basic assumption in all studies of causal autecology. in fennoscandia there are several topographic and edaphic factors that can restrict the elevation and latitudinal distribution of trees. the ecological interpretation of local timberline measurements can be difficult, and the measured timberline distribution limits have probably far too often been classified as ‘climatic’. the climatic limits of tree growth will occur only if no other factors, such as substrate, orography or human impact, prevent tree growth from reaching their climatically determined altitudinal or latitudinal limits (holtmeier & broll 2005). according to dahl (1998) and körner (2012), mountains need a certain height for true climatic treelines to be formed, and treelines on low mountain ranges have probably nothing to do with the climatic timberline. on the other hand, mountain height also influences air temperatures (barry 2008), and timberlines may therefore reach their climatic (temperature) limit at lower elevations on low mountains. the alpine biome is by definition defined as areas above the climatic timberline. grabherr et al. (2003) maintain that relatively low mountains may also have a timberline (topographic timberline) but their treeless vegetation was described as pseudo-alpine. an essential question is then if the published isoline maps show the climatic timberlines in fennoscandia or not. the effects of mountain height on the elevation distribution of timberlines are also essential when future effects of global warming are modelled. some studies in different parts of the world have quantified the effects of latitude and mountain height on timberline elevations. in south-eastern 262 fennia 193: 2 (2015)arvid odland eurasia (north of 32o n), han et al. (2012) found that latitude, longitude and mountain height explained 49, 24 and 27% respectively of the timberline variation, and zhao et al. (2014) found that latitude, continentality and mountain height explained ca. 45, 6, and 49% respectively of the timberline elevation in the northern hemisphere. in the appalachian mountain range, western north america, leffler (1981) found that only a few summits in the northern parts were assumed to exhibit true, temperature-controlled alpine timberlines. in the southern parts, the actual timberlines were situated several hundred metres below the theoretically estimated climatic timberline. the main aims of this study are to 1) quantify the relative importance of mountain height and latitude on the variation of timberline elevation along the central part of the scandinavian mountain range; 2) discuss the results in relation to possible explanatory variables and other timberline studies; and 3) discuss the significance of the results in relation to models on effects of global warming in the future. study area and methods the study is based on previously published data on the timberlines along a latitudinal gradient from southern norway to northernmost scandinavia, sampled before the possible impacts of recent climate change. the study area has been stratified to the central part of the scandinavian mountain range where the mountains and forest limits reach their highest elevations. the selected timberline measurements (fig. 1, table 1) lie within the geographic area where the highest timberlines have been found as shown by the isoline areas drawn by heikkinen (2005). aas (1964) defined the timberline as the elevation where the distance between trees taller than 2.5 m became larger than 30 m, and only forest stands that were assumed to represent climatic limits were included. in addition to measurements given in aas (1964), available data from sweden have been included; mainly arwidsson (1943), åberg (1952), kilander (1955), and kullman (1979). altitudes of the nearest highest mountains are given for all study sites. if data on mountain heights were not given in the studies, the altitudes were obtained from topographic maps. the term timberline is here used instead of the term “forest limit” which has mostly been used in previous scandinavian studies. west of the study area is a strong decrease in both mountain height, timberline elevation and a decrease in ‘continentality’ (e.g. tuhkanen 1984; moen 1999; tikkanen 2005; holten & aune 2011). in the eastern parts, the mountains are mostly lower than 800 m (corner 2005). as a quantification of continental versus maritime characteristics, the study can be allocated to different vegetation sections as defined by moen (1999). along the latitudinal gradient, the sites lie within three different sections: the slightly oceanic section (o1), the indifferent section (oc), and the slightly continental section (c1), and this stratification has excluded the most maritime parts from this data set. results variations in maximum timberline elevation and associated mountain heights from 58 to 71o n are shown in figure 2 based on data shown in the table 1. a linear trend line is drawn between the highest timberline elevations in s norway and n sweden fig. 1. map showing the areas where data on timberlines and mountain heights were available. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 263effect of latitude and mountain height on the timberline ta b le 1 . g eo gr ap h ic l o ca ti o n a n d m ea su re m en ts f ro m t h e ac tu al m o u n ta in a re as ( t e = t im b er li n e el ev at io n , m h = m o u n ta in h ei gh t, n = n o rt h in g, e = e as ti n g, m h –t l = el ev at io n d if fe re n ce b et w ee n m o u n ta in h ei gh t an d t im b er li n e) . m ou nt ai n/ a re a te ( m ) m h ( m ) n e m h –t l m ou nt ai n/ a re a te ( m ) m h ( m ) n e m h –t l m ou nt ai n/ a re a te ( m ) m h ( m ) n e m h –t l ly ng da l n 70 0 84 6 58 .6 2 7. 10 14 6 se ls ka m pe n 12 23 14 81 61 .5 0 9. 10 25 8 st or a sö fa lle t 81 0 20 01 67 .2 8 18 .2 5 11 91 k na be n 75 4 97 1 58 .7 0 6. 99 21 7 sk og ad al en 12 10 21 57 61 .5 0 8. 09 94 7 fe rr as 74 0 16 09 66 .9 6 16 .1 8 86 9 å se ra l 81 0 10 26 58 .8 0 7. 27 21 6 tr on fje ll 99 6 16 65 62 .1 7 10 .7 0 66 9 ta rr ek aj se 71 0 18 00 67 .0 3 17 .3 7 10 90 å dn er am 80 0 11 98 58 .9 9 6. 99 39 8 g ri m sd al en 11 28 15 11 62 .0 5 9. 47 38 3 på rt ef jä lle t 87 0 17 00 67 .2 0 17 .5 8 83 0 v al le 10 00 11 61 59 .2 1 7. 59 16 1 sø ln kl et te n 10 80 18 27 62 .0 0 10 .2 9 74 7 k eb ne ka is e 80 0 21 06 67 .9 0 18 .5 2 13 06 b yk le 10 95 13 08 59 .3 9 7. 33 21 3 n ip fjä lle t 92 0 11 91 61 .9 2 12 .5 2 27 1 ta rf al la tjå kk o 80 0 18 30 67 .9 2 18 .6 2 10 30 h ov de n 10 30 13 00 59 .6 0 7. 31 27 0 så nf jä lle t 90 5 12 77 62 .2 8 13 .5 3 37 2 n is so nt jä rr o 75 0 18 04 68 .2 5 18 .9 0 10 54 h au ke lis æ te r 10 70 12 49 59 .8 2 7. 24 17 9 ja ko bs hö jd en 92 5 11 00 62 .1 1 12 .3 3 17 5 pa lle m tjä kk o 75 0 17 59 67 .8 5 18 .9 0 10 09 b jå en 11 00 13 03 59 .6 2 7. 58 20 3 o rm ru et 90 0 11 00 62 .5 8 12 .5 8 20 0 so m as la ki 75 0 17 44 68 .2 3 18 .7 0 99 4 k al ho vd 11 10 13 40 60 .0 5 8. 47 23 0 b ra ttr ie t 95 5 11 21 62 .4 3 12 .3 7 16 6 n ju ni s 70 0 17 17 68 .6 0 19 .5 0 10 17 m øs va tn 11 00 14 31 59 .7 6 8. 27 33 1 h am ra fjä lle t 97 5 11 38 62 .5 7 12 .3 0 16 3 r ai sd uo tta rh al ti 60 0 13 61 69 .4 0 21 .4 0 76 1 v as tu la n 11 16 14 37 60 .2 5 8. 44 32 1 h el ag ss tö te n 98 0 17 96 62 .5 4 12 .2 8 81 6 b es ka da s 50 0 64 9 69 .5 0 23 .5 0 14 9 im in gf je ll 11 35 13 20 60 .2 1 8. 62 18 5 a nå fjä lle t 10 00 13 32 62 .6 0 12 .7 5 33 2 h ál ka vá rr i 37 5 10 45 69 .9 0 25 .3 8 67 0 tu nh ov d 11 00 13 14 60 .3 4 8. 92 21 4 st or sy le n 92 0 17 62 63 .0 1 12 .1 2 84 2 b ea hc eg ea lh ál di 58 0 13 26 69 .9 0 22 .0 0 74 6 g ei lo 11 25 18 59 60 .5 9 8. 10 73 4 g et ry gg en 83 0 13 82 63 .1 1 12 .1 8 55 2 st ab bu rs da le n 40 0 10 05 69 .9 8 24 .5 0 60 5 h em se da l 11 40 13 99 60 .8 8 8. 38 25 9 sn as ah ög ar ne 80 0 14 62 63 .1 3 12 .2 0 66 2 r ás tti gá is á 33 0 10 67 70 .0 0 26 .1 5 73 7 fl en ts pi ke n 11 10 12 39 60 .3 7 9. 17 12 9 v äs tr a bu m m er st öt en 86 0 15 54 63 .0 7 12 .3 0 69 4 r ah pe sv ar ri 35 0 52 5 70 .3 1 24 .2 7 17 5 v is da le n 11 17 14 74 61 .6 9 8. 42 35 7 g ås en 92 0 14 62 63 .2 1 13 .2 8 54 2 v ie ks a 25 0 36 9 70 .3 7 25 .8 3 11 9 fi le fje ll 11 34 17 80 61 .2 0 8. 16 64 6 o ttf jä lle t 86 1 12 65 63 .2 1 13 .2 8 40 4 b ør se lv fje lle t 25 0 45 0 70 .3 3 26 .0 0 20 0 b iti ho rn 11 00 16 07 61 .2 7 8. 87 50 7 g its fjä lle t 80 0 10 62 64 .8 7 15 .2 5 26 2 n or dk in n 30 0 61 9 70 .5 1 28 .8 1 31 9 g je nd es he im 11 70 17 43 61 .5 0 8. 76 57 3 m ar sf jä lle n 90 0 15 64 65 .1 3 15 .1 2 66 4 b lå fje lle t 22 5 46 8 70 .5 4 27 .1 6 24 3 g rå hø 11 30 17 79 61 .4 0 9. 00 64 9 sø dr a g ar df jä lle t 80 0 12 28 65 .3 1 15 .2 6 42 8 g ar de va rr i 20 0 63 3 70 .6 1 24 .9 3 43 3 si ki ls da ls hø 12 39 17 78 61 .5 0 8. 90 53 9 n or ra g ar df jä lle t 80 0 12 28 65 .4 3 15 .2 7 42 8 n or dk in n 20 0 33 8 70 .6 7 27 .3 3 13 8 si ki ls da ls ho rn 12 81 15 65 61 .5 0 9. 00 28 4 jin je je va er ie 90 0 13 90 64 .3 2 13 .9 9 49 0 n or dk in n 10 0 26 9 70 .9 6 27 .6 0 16 9   264 fennia 193: 2 (2015)arvid odland (cf. odland 2010). the lowess smoother lines give trends in timberline elevation and mountain height along the latitudinal gradient. figure 2 shows that there is not a monotonic timberline decrease from south to north, and in most of the mountain range the measured timberlines lie far below the linear trend line drawn between the highest mountains. the deviations are especially large in the southern and northern parts (cf. fig. 1, table 1). the elevation of the highest mountains close to where the timberlines have been measured varies also strongly from south to north. the highest mountain massifs lie in central south norway (jotunheimen 61.5o n) with peaks up to 2469 m, and in north sweden (lule lappmark ca. 67o n) with peaks up to 2012 m. in the central scandes, the mountains are mostly lower than 1500 m, and in the northernmost areas the mountains rarely reach 500 m. relationship between the timberline elevation (te in m), mountain height (mh in m) and latitude (l, o n) was analysed by multiple linear regression with te as the dependent variable. this gave the following equation (eq. 1): te = 3710 + 0.315*mh – 51.3*l (1)  where n = 72, r2 = 89.3 and p < 0.0001. a stepwise regression showed that latitude explained 70.9% while both latitude and mountain height explained 89.0%. discussion the present study area includes major variation in timberline elevation, and it is evident that latitude alone cannot explain this variation. a problem with the comparisons of timberline measurements from different sources may be associated with the vast number of forestand tree limit definitions used both in scandinavia and globally (e.g. aas 1964; holtmeier 2003; walsh et al. 2003). one may, however, expect that ‘errors’ related to timberline measurement lie within the range of the treeline (tree limit) and the timberline (forest limit) i.e. within the timberline ecotone. studies show that this difference is mostly smaller than 55 m (kjällgren & kullman 1998; moen et al. 2004). körner (2007) maintained that whoever looks for precision better than 50 m in elevation or 100 m on a slope, overlooks “the nature of the ecotone”, and the debate becomes fruitless if greater precision is attempted. a 50 m difference in elevation corresponds to ca 0.3 °c difference in air temperature, which according to körner (2007) is too small to permit meaningful biological interpretations. the central parts of the scandes include areas where the influence of a maritime climate upon mean air temperatures is relatively low (mostly less than 5 °c according to tikkanen 2005), except in the northernmost coastal parts. the study areas lie fig. 2. variation in measured forest limits and maximum mountain height from south to north scandinavia with lowess smoothers. a potential maximum timberline is drawn between the highest mountain areas in s norway and n sweden (cf. odland 2010). fennia 193: 2 (2015) 265effect of latitude and mountain height on the timberline mostly between the slightly oceanic and slightly continental vegetation sections according to moen (1999). this indicates that the effect of a maritime climate on the actual timberlines is strongly reduced, but in some regions there may be an effect (cf. kjällgren & kullman 1998; öberg & kullman 2012). effects of human influence were also reduced during timberline measurements (aas 1964). accordingly, most of the variation in timberline elevation may be assumed to reflect the effects of latitude (temperature) and mountain height. as a parallel, the explanatory effect of continentality was by zhao et al. (2014) estimated to be 6% based on data from the whole northern hemisphere. effects of latitude and mountain height the study shows that latitude explained approximately 71% of the timberline variation, but also mountain height contributed significantly with an explanatory rate of nearly 20%. the potential timberline drawn between areas (from 46.5 to 68.6o n) assumed to be high enough for trees to reach their potential climatic elevation, decreased approximately by 76 m latitude-1 (odland 2010). this result is surprisingly similar to trends found in other studies in the northern hemisphere (table 2). data sampled in 10 areas north of 45o n (table 2) show an average decrease of 78 ± 10 m latitude-1. this indicates that if the mountains were sufficiently high all along the studied latitudinal gradient, the timberlines should follow a linear decreasing trend. major deviations from this trend are particularly found in the southernmost and northernmost parts of the scandes. in areas where the timberlines are highest, the mountains are 900–1300 m higher than the timberline, and where they are lower than the trend, the mountains are less than 600 m higher (cf. table 1). also in some previous studies the effect of low mountain height on the timberline elevation has been shown, e.g. perttu (1972), leffler (1981), han et al. (2012), and zhao et al. (2014). a study of the maximum elevation limits of vascular plants in some central scandinavian mountains indicated that mountain heights were 200–600 m too low to allow vascular plants to reach their potential elevation (odland 2010). körner (2012) gives an example of the mountain syndrome from the vosges mountains (france) where the actual timberline lay between 1300–1500 m, which was estimated to be 300–500 m below the expected climatic timberline. leffler (1981) measured latitudinal variation in timberlines along the appalachian mountains, eastern usa. in the southern parts of this mountain range, the estimated climatic limit was assumed to lie some 1000 m above the actual measured timberline. the present study therefore indicates that mountain height has a conclusive effect on the timberline elevation and that the scandinavian mountains, with few exceptions, are too low to allow forests to reach their potential climatic limit. table 2. measured latitudinal timberline decreases in different study areas. rate of elevational decrease is given in m latitude-1. area and latitudinal span (o n) rate reference n europe, 46.5–61.5° n 75.6 odland (2010) northern asia 70-90 malyshev (1993) northern appalachian, usa, 44–55° n 83 cogbill & white (1991) forest zone, n america, 49–57° n 75 klinka et al. (1996) n canada, 55–60° n 60-65 payette et al. (2001) central sweden 62–68.5° n 75 kullman & hofgaard (1987) eastern ural, 59–68° n 100 shahgedanova et al. (2002) western ural, 59–67° n 88 shahgedanova et al. (2002) n america, 35–70° n 110 daubenmire (1954) appalachian, usa, 31–55° n 121 leffler (1981)   266 fennia 193: 2 (2015)arvid odland effects of climate previous studies have shown that there are significant linear decreases in air temperatures along the latitudinal gradient in the northern hemisphere (table 3). it is generally assumed that the climatic timberlines are associated with a minimum heat requirement for tree growth for which the mean 10 oc july isotherm has frequently been used as proxy (e.g. holtmeier 2003; wieser & tausz 2007). studies have, however, found values varying between 9 and 12 oc (cf. odland 1996; körner 1998, 2003; macdonald et al. 2008). jobbagy and jackson (2000) found that thermal variables explained 79% of the global variability of timberline. regional deviations from the 10 oc isotherm have often been related to the degree of continentality (zhao et al. 2014). in maritime areas the mean july temperature at the timberlines lie mostly higher than in continental areas, and in scandinavia the timberlines are strongly correlated with distance to the coast (e.g. odland 1996; kjällgren & kullman 1998; holten & aune 2011). a major problem with this relationship is that both the degree of continentality and the general mountain height decrease toward coastal areas. in a regional study from central scandinavia (62o 25`n63o 20`n), kjällgren and kullman (1998) found that latitude explained 66% and distance to the sea explained 52% of the timberline elevation. also other climatic variables have been used to explain the timberlines, especially soil temperatures (körner & paulsen 2004), wind, and snow load (autio & colpaert 2005; vajda et al. 2006). the strong regional deviation in timberline elevation along the latitudinal gradient (fig. 2) compared to the general linear decreasing temperature variables (table 3) indicates that the studied timberlines in most parts of fennoscandia should be described as ‘observed’ and not climatic. only in the south central norway and north sweden are the mountains high enough to allow the forests to reach their potential climatic elevation limits. the effect of mountain height (mass elevation effect) on both the timberline elevation and air temperatures have recently been demonstrated by yao and zhang (2014) from the tibetan plateau. they showed that the mass elevation effect of the central high mountain areas pushed the 10 oc isotherm upward in the warmest month up to elevations of 4600–4700 m, which enabled the treeline altitude to be situated 500–1000 m higher than along the eastern edge where the mountains reached only 1000 m a.s.l. this effect therefore contributes to the occurrence of the highest treeline in the northern hemisphere, which in the most favourable sites reached nearly 4900 m. at an elevation of 4500 m, table 3. rate of change in average temperatures (oc) for each degree increase in latitude (maat = mean annual air temperature, mjuly = mean july temperature). variable rate area reference maat -0.49 fennoscandia laaksonen (1976) maat -0.73 northern extratropical hemisphere de frenne et al. (2013) maat -0.75 european alpine zone nagy & grabherr (2009) maat -0.97 northern appalachian, usa, 44–55o n cogbill & white (1991) maat -0.72 north america, 40–60o n montgomery (2006) maat -0.57 w euope, 42–62o n diaz & bradley (1997) maat -0.25 north america and greenland, 40–60o n montgomery (2006) mjuly -0.53 northern appalachian, usa, 44–55o n cogbill & white (1991) mjuly -0.37 nordic countries tveito et al. (2000) mjuly -0.48 northern extra-tropical hemisphere de frenne et al. (2013)   fennia 193: 2 (2015) 267effect of latitude and mountain height on the timberline the monthly mean temperature differences between the high mountain area and the low mountain areas ranged from 1.6 oc (july) to 7.7 oc (march). implications for future effects of climate change the strong effect of mountain height on the timberline elevation may also have major implication for evaluations of the possible effects of global warming. if a mountain height is low, an increase in temperature may result in no or small timberline uplift. studies on the elevation changes of timberlines during the last decades have not been unambiguous despite the fact that the temperatures have increased, and there are different opinions also about the future effects of climate change. timberline advance does not appear to be a worldwide phenomenon (holtmeier & broll 2007). a global study showed that only 52% of all 166 global tree line sites had advanced over the past 100 years despite documented amplified climate warming in high-elevation areas and northern latitudes (harsch et al. 2009). in fennoscandia, temperatures have increased by 1–2 oc during the last decades. estimated by temperatures only, nearly 300 m increases in timberline could be expected since the 1960s. recent studies have, however, found relatively low uplift rates. in an area with relatively low mountains (hardangervidda, s norway, e.g. odland 2010), rannow (2013) found a mean upslope migration of only 2.3 ± 1.6 m between 1965 and 2004 even though the temperatures had increased during this period. similarly, van bogaert et al. (2011) found that the tree line in the abisko area, n sweden, had shifted only 24 m since 1912. kullman (2010) maintained that it is unlikely that projected future climate warming would substantially threaten the continued existence of an extensive alpine zone in the scandes because local topoclimatic constraints commonly prevent timberlines from obtaining their potential thermal limits. some recent studies emphasize that geomorphic and topographic factors may control the upward timberline shift more than the climatic input in the future, and so the use of climate models to predict the timberline uplift should take such factors into account (autio & colpaert 2005; virtanen et al. 2010; leonelli et al. 2011; macias–fauria & johnson 2013). donato (2013) suggested also that upward timberline shifts in a warming climate may be heavily constrained by geologic factors that influence the availability of growing substrates at high elevations, leading to much less, or at least much slower, tree colonization into alpine areas than predicted by climate alone. by a simple extrapolation of the relation between present climate and present plant distribution, an estimated 3–4 oc increase in mean annual temperature has been suggested to result in an uplift of 500–1000 m or a 300–400 km shift in latitude of the timberlines (grace et al. 2002). similarly, moen et al. (2004) estimated, on the basis of the modelled temperature increase and the general adiabatic temperature lapse rate, a forest uplift of several hundred metres and thereby projected a threat to the persistence of an extensive alpine zone in scandinavia. according to öberg and kullman (2012) this is a quite unrealistic output. they found a treeline uplift of 3.0 m yr-1 in the maritime parts of the southern swedish scandes differed significantly from a retreat by 0.4 m yr-1 in the continental part. palaeoecological studies also indicate that the upslope migration of treelines during the holocene warm periods was much smaller than the estimated temperature increases would suggest (paulsen et al. 2000). according to öberg and kullman (2011) as well as kullman (2012) it is, however, documented that most of the mountains in the continental area have supported tree and forest growth virtually up to the highest peaks during periods with more favorable climates. it is therefore obvious, as maintained by scheffer et al. (2012), that the way boreal forests respond to global warming is still poorly understood. effects of mountain height appear to be very important, but also other factors such as differences in available substrate, historic and present cultural impacts, degree of a maritime influence, and effects of diverging timberline definitions should be considered. conclusions the geographic variation of timberline elevation along the central mountain range of scandinavia was mainly explained by latitude (71%) but it was also significantly influenced by the nearest mountain height, and together these factors explained 89% of the variation. in most parts of the scandes, the mountains are assumed to be far too low to allow trees to reach their climatic limit. this is particularly evident in the northernmost and south268 fennia 193: 2 (2015)arvid odland ernmost parts where the mountain heights are low. the observed timberlines may be situated several hundred metres below the potential climatic timberline drawn between the highest mountain ranges in the scandes, and the published timberline isoline maps from fennoscandia therefore probably show mostly actual local timberlines and not the climatic distribution limits. most recent timberline studies in fennoscandia have found low uplift rates despite the fact that temperatures have increased by 1–2 oc during the last decades. one reason for this may be a consequence of low mountain heights. modelling of future timberlines in a warmer world without taking account of the actual mountain heights may therefore result in unrealistic conclusions. acknowledgements i am indebted to shea allison sundstøl for improving the language of this manuscript. references aas b 1964. bjørkeog barskogsgrenser i norge. unpublished thesis. university of oslo, oslo. arwidsson th 1943. beobachtungen über die höhengrenzen der hochalpinen gefässpflanzen. acta phytogeographica suecia 17, 1–274. autio j & colpaert a 2005. the impact of elevation, topography and snow load damage of trees on the position of the actual timberline on the fells in central finnish lapland. fennia 183: 1, 15–36. barry rg 2008. mountain weather and climate. routhledge, london and new york. berdanier ab 2010. global treeline position. nature education knowledge 3:10, 11. cogbill cv & white ps 1991. the latitude-elevation relationship for spruce-fir forest and treeline along the appalachian mountain chain. vegetatio 94: 2, 153–175. corner gd 2005. scandes mountains. in seppälä m (ed). the physical geography of fennoscandia, 229– 254. oxford university press, oxford and new york. dahl e 1998. the phytogeography of northern europe. cambridge university press, cambridge. daubenmire r 1954. alpine timberlines in the americas and their interpretation. butler university botanical studies 11: 1, 119–135. de frenne p, graae bj, rodríguez-sánchez f, kolb a, chabrerie o, decocq g, de kort h, de schrijver a, diekmann m, eriksson o, gruwez r, hermy m, lenoir j, plue j, coomes a & verheyen k 2013. latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species’ responses to temperature. journal of ecology 101: 3, 784–795. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.12074. diaz hf & bradley rs 1997. temperature variations during the last century at high elevation sites. climatic change 36: 3–4, 253–279. dolukhanov ag 1978. the timberline and the subalpine belt in the caucasus mountains, ussr. arctic and alpine research 10: 2, 409–422. donato dc 2013. limits to upward movement of subalpine forests in a warming climate. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 110: 20, 7971–7972. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1305505110. gorchakovsky pl 1989. horizontal and altitudinal differentiation of the vegetation cover of the ural mountains. pirineos 133, 33–54. grabherr g, nagy l & thompson dba 2003. an outline of europe`s alpine areas. in grabherr g, nagy l, körner ch & thompson dba (eds). alpine biodiversity in europe, 3–12. ecological studies 167. springer, berlin heidelberg. grace j, berninger f & nagy l 2002. impacts of climate change on the tree line. annals of botany 90: 4, 537–544. han f, yao y, dai s, wang c, sun r, xu j & zhang b 2012. mass elevation effect and its forcing on timberline altitude. journal of geographical sciences 22: 4, 609–616. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11442-012-0950-1. harsch ma, hulme pe, mcglone ms, & duncan rp 2009. are treelines advancing? a global metaanalysis of treeline response to climate warming. ecology letters 12: 10, 1040–1049. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01355.x. heikkinen o 2005. boreal forests and northern and upper imberlines. in seppälä m (ed). the physical geography of fennoscandia, 185–200. oxford university press, oxford and new york. holten ji & aune ei 2011. altitudinal distribution patterns of alpine plants. studies along a coast-inland transect in southern scandes, northern europe. tapir academic press, trondheim. holtmeier f-k 2003. mountain timberlines. ecology, patchiness, and dynamics. kluwer, dordrecht. holtmeier f-k & broll g 2005. sensitivity and response of northern hemisphere altitudinal and polar treelines to environmental change at landscape and local scales. global ecology and biogeography 14: 5, 395–410. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-822x.2005.00168.x. holtmeier f-k & broll g 2007. treeline advance – driving processes and adverse factors. landscape online, 1–33. jobbagy eg & jackson rb 2000. global controls of forest line elevation in the northern and southern hemispheres. global ecology and biogeography 9: 3, 253–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2699.2000.00162.x. kilander s 1955. kärlväxternas övre gränser på fjäll i sydvästra jämtland samt angränsande delar av härjedalen och norge. acta phytogeographica suecia 35, 1–198. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 269effect of latitude and mountain height on the timberline kjällgren l & kullman l 1998. spatial patterns and structure of the mountain birch tree-limit in the southern swedish scandes – a regional perspective. geografiska annaler 80a: 1, 1–16. klinka k, wang q, carter re & chen hyh 1996. height growth-elevation relationships in subalpine forests of interior british columbia. the forestry chronicle 72: 2, 193–198. http://dx.doi.org/10.5558/tfc72193-2. kullman l 1979. change and stability in the altitude of the birch tree-limit in the southern swedish scandes 1915–1975. acta phytogeographica suecica 65, 1–121. kullman l 2010. one century of treeline change and stability – experiences from the swedish scandes. landscape online 17, 1–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.3097/lo.201017. kullman l 2012. the alpine treeline ecotone in the southernmost swedish scandes – dynamism on different scales. in myster r (ed). ecotones between forest and grassland, 271–298. springer, new york. kullman l & hofgaard a 1987. klimatisk hasardgräns i fjällnära skogar. sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, umeå. körner c 1998. a re-assessment of high elevation treeline positions and their explanation. oecologia 115: 4, 445–459. körner c 2003. alpine plant life. functional plant ecology of high mountain ecosystems. springer, heidelberg. körner c 2007. climatic treelines: conventions, global patterns, causes. erdkunde 61: 4, 316–324. körner c 2012. alpine treelines. functional ecology of the global high elevation tree limits. springer, basel. körner c & paulsen j 2004. a world-wide study of high altitude treeline temperatures. journal of biogeography 31: 5, 713–732. laaksonen k 1976. the dependence of mean air temperatures upon latitude and altitude in fennoscandia 1921–1950. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae 119, series a, 5–19. lee r 1969. latitude, elevation, and mean temperature in the northeast. professional geographer 21: 4, 227–231. leffler rj 1981. using climatology to estimate the altitude of appalachian. in second conference on mountain meteorology, 70–74. american meteorological society, steamboat springs, co. leonelli g, pelfini m, di cella & garavaglia v 2011. climate warming and the recent treeline shift in the european alps, the role of geomorphological factors in high-altitude sites. ambio 40: 3, 264–273. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13280-010-0096-2. macdonald gm, kremenetski kv & beilman dw 2008. climate change and the northern russian treeline zone. philosophical transactions of the royal society b 363: 1501, 2285–2299. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2200. macias-fauria m & johnson ea 2013 warming-induced upslope advance of subalpine forest is severely limited by geomorphic processes. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 110: 20, 8117–8122. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1221278110. malyshev l 1993. levels of the upper forest boundary in northern asia. vegetatio 109: 2, 175–186. moen a 1999. national atlas of norway. vegetation. norwegian mapping authority, hønefoss. moen j, aune k, edenius l & angerbjörn a 2004. potential effects of climate change on treeline position in the swedish mountains. ecology and society 9: 1, 16. montgomery k 2006. variation in temperature with altitude and latitude. journal of geography 105: 3, 133–135. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221340608978675. nagy l & grabherr g 2009. the biology of alpine habitats. oxford university press, oxford. odland a 1996. differences in the vertical distribution pattern of betula pubescens in norway and its ecological significance. paläoklimaforschung palaecoclimate research 20: 13, 43–59. odland a 2010. importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal distribution limits of vascular plants in scandinavia, are the mountains high enough? fennia 188: 2, 149–162. paulsen j, weber um & körner c 2000. tree growth near treeline, abrupt or gradual reduction with altitude? arctic, antarctic, and alpine research 32: 1, 14–20. payette s, fortin m-j & gamache i 2001. the subarctic forest–tundra, the structure of a biome in a changing climate. bioscience 51: 9, 709. perttu k 1972. skogsgränsens beroende av olika klimatologiska och topografiska faktorer. institutionen för skogsföyngning. rapporter och uppsatser 34, 1–91. rannow s 2013. do shifting treelines in south-west norway keep up with climate change? scandinavian journal of forest research 28: 6, 574–580. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2013.793776. scheffer m, hirota m, holmgren m, van nesa eh & chapin iii fs 2012. thresholds for boreal biome transitions. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 109: 52, 21384–21389. shahgedanova m, perov v & mudrov y 2002. the mountains of northern russia. in shahgedanova m (ed). the physical geography of northern eurasia, 284–313. oxford university press, oxford. tikkanen m 2005. climate. in seppälä m (ed). the physical geography of fennoscandia, 97–112. oxford university press, oxford and new york. tuhkanen s 1984. a circumboreal system of climaticphytogeographical regions. acta botanica fennica 127, 1–135. tveito oe, førland e, heino r, hanssen-bauer i, alexandersson h, dahlström b, drebs a, kernhansen c, jónsson t, vaarby e laursen & westman y 2000. temperature climate in the nordic region. nordic temperature maps. rapport 09/00. det norske meteorologiske institutt, oslo. 270 fennia 193: 2 (2015)arvid odland vajda a, venäläinen a, hänninen p & sutinen r 2006. effect of vegetation on snow cover at the northern timberline: a case study in finnish lapland. silva fennica 40: 2, 195–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.14214/sf.338. van bogaert r, haneca k, hoogesteger j, jonasson c, de dapper m v & callaghan tv 2011. a century of tree line changes in sub-arctic sweden shows local and regional variability and only a minor influence of 20th century climate warming. journal of biogeography 38: 5, 907–921. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2010.02453.x. virtanen r, luoto m, rämä t, mikkola k, hjort j & grytnes j-a, birks hjb 2010. recent vegetation changes at the high-latitude tree line ecotone are controlled by geomorphological disturbance, productivity, and diversity. global ecology and biogeography 19: 6, 810–821. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00570.x. walsh sj, butler dr, malanson gp, crews-meyer ka, messina jp & xiao n 2003. mapping, modeling, and visualization of the influences of geomorphic processes on the alpine treeline ecotone, glacier national park, mt, usa. geomorphology 53: 1–2, 129–145. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0169-555x(02)00350-1. wieser g & tausz m 2007. current concepts for treelife limitation at the upper timberline. trees at their upper limit. in wieser g & tausz m (eds). treelife limitation at the alpine timberline, 1–18. springer, dordrecht. yao y & zhang b 2014. the mass elevation effect of the tibetan plateau and its implications for alpine treelines. international journal of climatology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/joc.4123. zhao f, zhang b, pang y & yao y 2014. a study of the contribution of mass elevation effect to the altitudinal distribution of timberline in the northern hemisphere. journal of geographical science 24: 2, 226–236. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11442-014-1084-4. öberg l & kullman 2011. ancient subalpine clonal spruces (picea abies): sources of postglacial vegetation history in the swedish scandes. arctic 64: 2, 183–196. http://dx.doi.org/10.14430/arctic4098. öberg l & kullman l 2012. contrasting short-term performance of mountain birch betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii treeline along a latitudinal continentality-maritimy gradient in the southern swedish scandes. fennia 190: 1, 19–40. åberg b 1952. kärlväxternas höjdgränser i lule lappmark och i graubünden, en jämförelse. svensk botanisk tidsskrift 46: 3–4, 286–312. life satisfaction among inbound university students in northern sweden urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70337 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70337 life satisfaction among inbound university students in northern sweden per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke nilsson, p. a. & stålnacke, b. m. (2019) life satisfaction among inbound university students in northern sweden. fennia 197(1) 94–107. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.70337 will life satisfaction among international students change after having an experience of studying abroad? some previous studies indicate inequalities and issues of social mobility embedded in international student mobility. international student mobility implies physical movement and new experiences gained while studying abroad. the ubiquity of international students and their generally successful adaptation makes it necessary to understand how they manage to turn a seemingly difficult situation into satisfying adaptation. one area of such concern that this study sought to explore was the students’ level of satisfaction with life. this study investigated the self-reported life satisfaction of inbound university students upon arrival to a university in northern sweden and at follow-up six months later. after the study period abroad, the students’ levels of perceived satisfaction with their somatic health and activities of daily living had significantly increased. higher levels, while non-significant, were found for the domains life as a whole, study situation and economy. these findings may indicate that studying abroad could have an impact on students’ reported life satisfaction, which highlights the value of a period of studying abroad. however, when exploring life satisfaction outcomes among internationally mobile students, it seems pertinent to study student mobility within a context. this study mostly targets international student mobility in a western/ european context. keywords: inbound students, student mobility, life satisfaction, sweden per a. nilsson, department of geography, umeå university, 901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: per.a.nilsson@umu.se b. m. stålnacke, department of community medicine and rehabilitation, umeå university, 901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: britt-marie.stalnacke@umu.se introduction as the number of international students increases globally (oecd 2014), the need to understand and address these students’ cultural and psychological adjustment to a new country becomes increasingly important. the experience of studying abroad involves adapting to a new culture and new surroundings, where the culture, religion, language and social life often differ from those of the student’s home country (cf. lin & yin 1997; rode et al. 2005; russell et al. 2010; rienties & tempelaar 2013). the degree to which the students adapt to new settings will have an impact on how satisfied they are with their life as an international student. life satisfaction, described as an overall cognitive and judgmental assessment of personal quality of life according to self-selected criteria (shin & johnson 1978; pavot © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70337 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70337 fennia 197(1) (2019) 95per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke et al. 1991), has been used as a social indicator of the meaningfulness of life (melin 2003). life satisfaction concerns the individual’s contentment with life, and whether his or her aspirations and achievements have been accomplished (jacobsson & lexell 2013). in evaluations of students’ contentment with life after a sojourn abroad, their reports on life satisfaction can be useful for exploring different dimensions of mobility, and lifestyle-led mobility can be an expression of social differentiation and inequality (urry 2000, 2002; murphy-lejeune 2002). international student mobility implies both spatial and upward social mobility, indicating inequalities embedded in student mobility favouring those who have the means and resources to study abroad. some previous studies have turned to studying social differences within the globalizing higher education system (cf. findlay et al. 2012; bilecen & van mol 2017; börjesson 2017). other researchers view this as an expression of new mobilities, emphasizing a search for a better life somewhere else, which is a defining characteristic of contemporary life (cresswell 2006; sheller & urry 2006). in relation to non-mobile students internationally, mobile students have been found to be a selected group of students (waibel et al. 2017). students have different individual expectations before becoming international students, which colour their experiences after having studied in a foreign country (benson & o’reilly 2009) and may affect their satisfaction with life. however, in most previous studies of international student mobility, the students have only been surveyed on one occasion (e.g. paige et al. 2009); few studies have captured a study-abroad experience via both preand post-surveys (kennedy 2010). to our knowledge, there is also a lack of studies of life satisfaction in relation to international student mobility. therefore, this article aims to answer the following question: will life satisfaction among international students change after having an experience of studying abroad? studies of life satisfaction among internationally mobile students can add knowledge to procedural perspectives on mobility practices and move away from a static perception of international student mobility (lysgård & rye 2017). for the purpose of this article, international student mobility implies temporary movement (king et al. 2010); the term is used with the interpretation that the students relocate to other places temporarily, implying at least an ambition to return to the place of departure. temporary movement of international students geographers have become more interested in international student mobility (e.g. brooks & waters 2010; deakin 2014; prazeres 2018), mainly focusing on the relationship between education and mobility. for example, perkins and neumayer (2014) explore the uneven flows of international students and beech (2014) the role of social networks. the discipline itself has witnessed a large increase in studies on various aspects of mobility, for instance the awareness of the interplay between mobility and migration within the context of contemporary globalization, transnationalism, and mobility (hall & page 2009). hall, williams and lew (2014) emphasize dimensions of temporary mobility and circulation, the multidisciplinary realm of mobility studies, and the integration of disciplinary perspectives. for geographers’ studies of mobility have been essential for decades; not only physical movements but also interaction when it comes to communication and exchange of information have been addressed, for example virtual mobility, a shift in mobility as a convergence of physical travel and communications (bell & ward 2000; janelle & hodge 2000; urry 2000, 2002). as a concept mobility has shown to be complex and multifaceted, and together with other disciplines a ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (cf. cresswell 2006; sheller & urry 2006) has been developed, turning away from a static way of viewing mobility to emphasizing that in contemporary life it has become an important dimension and something that continues throughout the life course. it is obvious that movements of people are embedded in the complexity of their everyday lives and experiences. bogren (2008) argues that it is a challenge to draw a line between mobility and migration due to how mobility and circulation are conceptualized in contemporary society, characterized by repeated moves, even though some have labelled time-limited migration across national borders ‘temporary migration’ (boyle et al. 1998). many scholars have pointed out that living abroad can last anywhere from a short period, such as being a tourist, to a long duration (åkerlund 2017), and the discussion has circled around the accuracy of using migration and/or mobility. the discussion has concerned distance, boundaries and duration 96 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays in regard to movements (boyle et al. 1998). some researchers have studied temporary migration such as seasonal migrants, commuter migrants, tourists, and degree-seeking students (cf. king & ruizgelices 2003). meanwhile, others have studied long-term migration, for instance workers seeking permanent employment elsewhere, business migrants who establish a business in the receiving country, or forced migration due to political or religious reasons (boyle et al. 1998). when reflecting on the international experience of living in a foreign country among students, the migration/mobility division is complex. it is evident that international student mobility is blurred in regard to the concepts of migration and mobility, for instance exchange students who study abroad but return to their home university to finish their studies and receive a degree. for many students, such as erasmus students, international mobility is about temporarily studying abroad. the erasmus programme, financed by the european union, enables students to study and train abroad for a period of at least three months for studies and for a two-months period for an internship (european commission 2014). thus, the time frame for an international experience differs; knight (2012) has explored different categories of student mobility and what is included in the concept. students can be restricted to studying at the university and/or country where they are admitted, or to agreements between the home university and a foreign higher education institution (hei). some students do not have much of a choice while others can choose freely; but for most students, at least in the western world, studying abroad is an available option. international student mobility implies a high probability of returning for those participating in credit mobility (exchange students) with a short duration. a degree student is a student who participates in an entire programme to complete an education; for these students, especially from developing countries, this implies a long or even permanent residence abroad (king et al. 2010). in our society, distant places are brought closer together due to the decreased travel time between locations. this is often labelled space-time compression (hall 2005a, 2005b). for those with sufficient time and money, mobility has become easier. time-space convergence suggests that accessibility between some places increases as technologies enable more rapid communications, and regards it as a multiple process rather than a one-way ticket (murphy-lejeune 2002). moreover, student mobility also includes aspects of social mobility motivating students from different socio-economic backgrounds whose careers will benefit from studies abroad (findlay et al. 2006). a person’s move can indicate upward social mobility, for instance a move from an economically less advanced to an economically more advanced country where a hei is viewed as superior in academic quality. teichler (2017) refers to this as vertical mobility. consequently, horizontal mobility refers to a move to a hei of equal quality, which would be true for many of the students enrolled in exchange student programmes such as the erasmus programme. the study destination is more or less on equal terms with the home hei and the country of origin. this indicates that mobile students do not expect a higher level of teaching or substance of knowledge being taught. students’ backgrounds and inequalities students often have a blend of motives for choosing to study abroad, and mobility can be a way of achieving their lifestyle aspirations and contentment with life. while there are many positive individual motives for studying abroad, such as personal development, finding a job after graduation and academic challenge, some scholars have discussed the obstacles embedded in student mobility (souto-otero et al. 2013). in a western/european context, these obstacles can involve aspects such as the student’s social background or academic confidence (ibid.; ukä 2016). previous research has shown that studying abroad is highly dependent on students’ background characteristics. students from academic families are more liable to go abroad than those from non-academic families (cf. hauschildt et al. 2015), and are therefore more likely to gain the benefits of studying abroad. having access to heis in other countries will also form the individual’s career trajectory. studying abroad implies not only access to formal knowledge but also, and perhaps more importantly, social and cultural knowledge. thus, international spatial mobility is often considered to be a way to achieve upward social mobility, and it is essential to scrutinize the relationship between spatial mobility and social mobility. fennia 197(1) (2019) 97per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke it has been shown that english-speaking countries attract internationally mobile students, but that students from english-speaking countries are travelling to a lesser degree to other countries for studies (unesco 2014). for uk students, the place of study is pertinent for their further life planning. in a study by findlay and colleagues (2012), outbound students from the uk were concentrated in a few countries with prestigious heis. the study concluded that different dimensions of social and cultural capital are accumulated through studying abroad, and, furthermore, that study abroad can be viewed in the light of students’ wider life course aspirations and not only as a way of receiving a formal education; it is more about being part of a wider process including socially and culturally constructed knowledge, producing a global hierarchy of heis (ibid.). for studying the intersection with social mobility, findlay and colleagues (2012) have suggested that place studies of international mobility within a context – such as western/european and/or mobility from developing countries – are best for scrutinizing new patterns of inequalities and differences embedded in international student mobility. the costs for developing countries when university students move to better opportunities at heis and businesses in the developed world is another expression of the inequality and differentiation embedded in international student mobility (bhagwati 1976). some scholars have used the term brain circulation to emphasize the transfer of knowledge included in the process of student mobility when students move to a foreign country, integrating in the destination country and at the same time maintaining contact with the home country (olutayo 2017). it is evident that many students are in search of better opportunities, such as higher salaries, standard of living, and quality of life. however, some will return home or maintain their links to the home country, generating brain gain and circulation; according to welss (2014), there is no credible evidence that internationally mobile students contribute to brain drain. in sweden, international student mobility is judged to be an asset in a global knowledge-based economy and to be beneficial to students as well as the country (sou 2018, 3). even though mobility is encouraged in a swedish context, it seems that in practice the choice is not available for most students. börjesson (2005) concluded that the ‘social elite’ has the most to gain from an internationalization of higher education. studies have shown that students’ socio-economic background will influence their possibilities to study abroad, indicating issues of inequality and difference in swedish student mobility (cf. ukä 2016). life satisfaction among international students mobility can be a way to achieve one’s lifestyle aspirations and greater life satisfaction. life satisfaction has been used as an overall social indicator of the meaningfulness of life (fugl-meyer et al. 2002), and has been defined as a person’s overall evaluation of his or her life (shin & johnson 1978; pavot et al. 1991). life satisfaction represents an individual’s contentment with his or her life, and the degree of the individual’s subjective appraisal as to whether his or her aspirations and achievements have been accomplished (jacobsson & lexell 2013). in studies comparing life satisfaction between nations it has been shown that living conditions exert a strong influence over average life satisfaction with a higher average life satisfaction in economically wealthy countries than poorer nations (helliwell et al. 2017). concerning the variance in life satisfaction between nations, it has been shown that more highly educated countries experience higher levels of satisfaction. however, from the perspective of individuals the effect of education on life satisfaction is stronger when few people within a country have gained a high level of education. this means that a person with an academic degree in a country with low average education probably experiences a higher life satisfaction than a person with an academic degree in a more highly educated country (salinas-jiménez & salinasjiménez 2011). some studies have examined life satisfaction among students and found that this concept seems to be of importance as an indication of how well students adjust to the new situation of studying abroad (salimi 2011; yalçun 2011). according to chow (2005), age, stress, physical health, style of studying, parenting style, lifestyle, and personality constructs are major determinants of life satisfaction among populations of university students. in addition, studies have observed the extent of loneliness and/or isolation among international students (cf. sandhu 1994; sawir et al. 2008; russell et al. 2010). 98 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays exposure to an unfamiliar environment can create anxiety, confusion and depression, leading to experiences of insomnia and physical illness, all of which can interfere with a student’s studies, friendships, and social life (lin & yin 1997). moreover, financial concerns and being away from home have been identified as common stressors among international university students (bhandari 2012). in a study by sam (2001) on life satisfaction among a group of international students in norway, it was found that on the whole the students reported good satisfaction with life. however, students from europe and north america were generally more satisfied than their peers from africa and asia (ibid.). economic situation, social networking, and perceived discrimination are factors that have significance for life satisfaction (shin & johnson 1978; pavot et al. 1991; rode et al. 2005; russell 2010; rienties & tempelaar 2013). even though some previous research has shown that studying in a foreign country can be demanding because of the need to adjust to a new culture, studies have also shown that students participating in student mobility, especially exchange students, report a desire to travel, to experience another culture, and to enhance their language skills as reasons for wanting to study abroad (cf. teichler 2002; bracht et al. 2006). accordingly, studies on life satisfaction have shown differences between students of different origins, for instance between western/european countries and developing countries (sandhu 1994; sawir et al. 2008; kondakci 2011). these studies mostly report ‘negative’ experiences for students from outside western/european countries such as demanding studies, having to deal with life in a new culture, stress, and loneliness. international students face both shared and unique problems, and this can be explained partly by different objectives for studying abroad and the place the students originally come from (sandhu 1994; sawir et al. 2008). the purpose of studying abroad can also differ between degree and credit students, with regard to life course aspirations such as starting an international career (bracht et al. 2006; varghese 2008; wiers-jenssen 2008). there are also driving and restraining forces embedded in life satisfaction. drivers for studying abroad can emerge closer to students’ home countries with a cultural familiarity, or far away where the cultural differences are huge (e.g. burns 1991; sandhu 1994; sawir et al. 2008; russel et al. 2010; bhandari 2012). studying abroad can be a chance to leave the country for other lifestyle opportunities than what is possible at home. this can also entail a great effort for students to participate in the globalized world with its many competitions and constraints. this can lead to a reduction in perceived life satisfaction when place attachment and social relations are decreased, such as separation from families and friends, and mental health problems (cf. sandhu 1994; sawir et al. 2008; russel et al. 2010; forbes-mewett & sawyer 2016). still, some studies indicate that students engage in ‘life planning’ embedded in their future life course aspirations, with mobility offering a way to achieve these objectives (findlay et al. 2012). studying student mobility with the life satisfaction questionnaire procedure umeå university is a comprehensive university in northern sweden, with approximately 33,000 students at the time of the investigation. an important profile of umeå university is sports, exercise, and outdoor activities. the proportion of inbound students as a share of the total student population is approximately 7%. umeå university can offer international students service and social support. a buddy programme is specially designed to offer students from the host country the chance to connect with international students and to share their culture and help them integrate with the rest of the student community. the data used here were collected through surveys directed at inbound students at umeå university. these students were recruited from the group of who had enrolled before the beginning of the 2008 autumn term. all inbound international students who attended an introduction day, 400 individuals, received the survey upon arrival, and 296 students ultimately responded. after six months of studying abroad, the responders were invited to a follow-up. the panel consisted of 116 respondents, that is students who had answered the survey upon arrival and after six months of studying abroad. fennia 197(1) (2019) 99per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke the arrival survey yielded a response rate of 74% and the follow-up survey 40%. the characteristics of the panel are shown in table 1. the analyses are based on the follow-up data from the survey monitoring the students’ life satisfaction while studying abroad. reported life satisfaction was measured before and after their period of studying abroad, which was approximately six months. the strength of this study is its focus on a follow-up of international students’ life satisfaction after having an experience of studying abroad, and that the same students (individuals) were surveyed both before and after a period of studying abroad. this study has some limitations, being a small survey measuring stated behaviours by students responding to questions in a survey, rather than actual change of action (behaviour), that is using data collected from what the students expressed as their experiences. no comparison groups of nonmobile students were included. this implies that the presented conclusions apply mainly to the population studied. we declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research covered in this article. however, it should be recognized that one of the authors was working at the international office at umeå university, sweden, at the time the article was written. the questionnaire the survey used items from the life satisfaction questionnaire (lisat-11). lisat-11 is a further development of lisat-9 (fugl-meyer et al. 1991). it has a stable construction, and has been found to be valid for a general population. levels of satisfaction are rated on a six-grade ordinal scale (from 1 = very dissatisfied to 6 = very satisfied), with higher scores indicating higher levels of life satisfaction. in accordance with previous studies and for purposes of comparison in using the lisat-11 (fugl-meyer et al. 2002; melin et al. 2003), the scale was dichotomized into either satisfied (5–6) or dissatisfied (1–4). the questionnaire comprised estimations of life satisfaction in general as well as with specific domains of one’s life, such as one’s academic situation, finances, leisure time, contact with friends and acquaintances, daily life, family life, partnership, somatic health, and psychological health. since life satisfaction is an important indicator of how a person adjusts to new situations, this highlights the value of including aspects of it when studying international student mobility. the students were asked the question how satisfactory are these different aspects of your life? indicate the number which best suits your situation for each of these statements. this study used a standardized questionnaire, the life satisfaction questionnaire (lisat), which is a validated instrument that has been shown to have a robust and stable construct. in addition, the instrument was originally developed as a checklist for satisfaction of life for clinical and research purposes within rehabilitation medicine, and has been found to be valid for a general population. statistics data are presented as mean and standard deviation, where appropriate. relative frequencies were calculated for the six response levels for the lisat-11 domains before and after a period of studying abroad. all statistical analysis was performed using spss, version 21.0 for windows. non-parametric statistics were used to analyse the data. differences in levels of life satisfaction (satisfied or dissatisfied) before and after six months of studies abroad were detected and analysed using mcnemar’s test. multivariate binary logistic regression analyses were performed to analyse associations between gender, citizenship and length of studies and the domain life as a whole at follow-up. the level of statistical significance was set at p<0.05. results from the study table 1 shows student characteristics for the first and second surveys; that is, what constitutes the panel. most students were participating in credit mobility, studying for one or two terms as an exchange student. most were citizens of an eu/eea country (including switzerland), and most were studying the social sciences, including law and business administration. the panel consisted of approximately the same proportions of men and women. the non-respondents were also compared 100 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays with the respondents in the follow-up survey regarding life satisfaction on lisat-11 before the study period abroad (fugl-meyer et al. 2002; melin et al. 2003). they reported a significantly lower level for the domain contact with friends (p=0.013). in addition, an analysis of the non-respondents did not indicate any bias with respect to gender, age, or study programme. the relative distribution of the inbound students among six levels of life satisfaction is shown in table 2. the majority (61%) were satisfied to very satisfied with life as a whole before studying abroad, and an even greater proportion (67%) were satisfied to very satisfied after studying abroad. half (50%) of the 116 students were satisfied with their study situation before studying abroad, and this proportion had increased to 56% after the period of studying abroad. at follow-up, students had become more positive in reporting satisfaction with activities of daily living, finances, and somatic health. before studying abroad, students reported being satisfied to very satisfied with their leisure activities, contact with friends, family life, partner relationship and psychological health, but after the experience abroad they reported less satisfaction in these domains. in table 3, differences in self-reported levels of life satisfaction on lisat-11 (5–6) are compared before versus after having studied for a period abroad in inbound students and in subgroups of female and male students and, furthermore, european verssus non-european students. the whole group of inbound students reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction after the experience in the domains activities of daily living and somatic health. non-significant higher levels were found for the domains life as a whole, study situation, and economy. the male students reported significantly higher satisfaction in the domains activities of daily living and somatic health at follow-up in comparison with before studying abroad. although the female students also reported higher levels in these domains at follow-up, the results were non-significant. in addition, the results in table 3 show that a low proportion of the noneuropean students were satisfied with their economy both before and after studying abroad. multivariate logistic analyses a multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to analyse associations between satisfaction with the domain life as a whole at follow-up after six months and the variables gender, citizenship, and length first survey n=296 (%) panel n=116 (%) gender female male 156 (53) 139 (47) 57 (49) 59 (51) mean age 23.3 ±2.8 24.5 ±2.8 citizenship eu/eea non-eu/eea missing 196 (66) 95 (32) 5 (2) 85 (73) 30 (26) 1 (1) field of studies humanities social sciences (incl. law & business) teacher training natural sciences and technology medicine and odontology healthcare arts and fine arts missing 17 (6) 162 (55) 12 (4) 59 (20) 22 (7) 9 (3) 2 (1) 13 (4) 12 (10) 52 (45) 6 (5) 25 (22) 12 (10) 4 (3) 0 6 (5) length of studies exchange students (1 or 2 terms) degree students (3 or more terms) 244 (83) 51 (17) 95 (82) 21 (18) table 1. a description of the participants in the first survey and the panel (i.e. the students who answered both surveys). fennia 197(1) (2019) 101per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke of studies. a statistically significant association was only found between shorter length of studies (1–2 terms) and life as a whole at follow-up (or=2,750, ci:1,213–6,232, p=0.015). discussion international students arrive with a set of feelings and emotions, and depart with their own unique experience of life satisfaction. this study shows that the inbound students reported significantly higher satisfaction at follow-up after six months in the domains somatic health and activities of daily living. these findings could be related to lifestyle changes since sports, exercise, and outdoor activities are common at umeå university. physical activity has been shown to be related to satisfaction with life (pedišić et al. 2015), participating in such activity during their stay may have affected the results for these students. this is also supported by an annual survey targeting international students, the international student barometer, in which international students top-ranked the sport facilities at the university (i-graduate 2015). higher (nonsignificant) levels were found for the domains life as a whole, study situation and economy. in our study, we found a significant association with shorter study length and the overall life satisfaction domain life as a whole. one possible explanation for this could be that exchange students who have enrolled for one or two semesters are highly motivated to study abroad, while degree students aiming for a degree from a foreign hei are under more pressure to succeed in their studies. the findings of this study indicate that the inbound students reported a slightly higher level of satisfaction with their study situation after their experience of having studied abroad. this might be a consequence of their appreciating the academic, teaching, and learning experience. this experience covers a whole range of items, such as the academic content of courses, assessments and explanation of marking criteria, learning spaces, class size, the english proficiency of support staff, the learning technology (pcs, networking, etc.), and the physical library facilities. some previous studies have reported higher life satisfaction among female students regarding social support among peers, and significantly greater emotional loneliness in male than female students (salimi 2011; yalçun 2011). these findings were not confirmed in our study; the female students reported slightly lower levels of life satisfaction as regards contact with friends and psychological health at follow-up, in contrast to the male students, who v e ry s a ti sf ie d s a ti sf ie d r a th e r s a ti sf ie d r a th e r d is sa ti sf ie d d is sa ti sf ie d v e ry d is sa ti sf ie d b e fo re a ft e r b e fo re a ft e r b e fo re a ft e r b e fo re a ft e r b e fo re a ft e r b e fo re a ft e r l if e a s a w h o le 2 1 2 5 4 0 4 2 3 3 2 2 5 8 1 4 s tu d y s it u a ti o n 1 5 1 6 3 5 4 0 3 9 2 7 1 0 1 4 1 3 e co n o m y 1 5 1 4 2 3 2 8 3 6 2 8 1 7 1 5 7 1 3 2 2 l e is u re 1 9 2 2 4 4 3 2 2 4 3 1 1 1 9 1 6 1 c o n ta ct w it h f ri e n d s 3 4 2 9 4 0 4 4 1 7 1 7 7 3 2 6 1 a ct iv it y o f d a il y l iv in g 3 4 4 4 4 0 4 4 2 1 8 3 3 1 1 1 f a m il y l if e ( n = 1 0 3 /9 0 ) 4 5 4 1 3 2 3 4 1 5 1 7 6 4 3 p a rt n e r re la ti o n sh ip ( n = 6 9 /5 8 ) 4 9 3 5 2 9 3 6 7 2 1 1 2 3 1 2 1 3 s o m a ti c h e a lt h 2 6 3 7 4 0 4 5 2 1 1 1 9 9 3 9 1 1 p sy ch o lo g ic a l h e a lt h 3 3 3 5 4 7 4 3 1 3 1 0 3 9 3 3 1 ta b le 2 . p er ce n ta ge s (% ) o f se lfre p o rt ed le ve ls o f lif e sa ti sf ac ti o n in t h e p an el o f in b o u n d s tu d en ts ( n =1 16 ) b ef o re a n d a ft er a p er io d o f st u d yi n g ab ro ad . 102 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays reported a higher level of satisfaction with friends after a period of studying abroad. several studies indicate that financial concerns have a significant impact on life satisfaction (e.g. sam 2001; paolini et al. 2006) regarding, for instance, cost of living, textbooks, accommodations, and leisure. in the present study, it is worth noting that students’ satisfaction with their economy was the only domain rated below 50%. in addition, the non-european students rated satisfaction with their economy lower than 20%. exchange students participating in the erasmus programme receive a stipend that aims to make it easier for all students, including those with the least resources; this in contrast to many noneuropean students, for whom earning money while studying is a major concern. the findings indicate that studying abroad has an impact on students’ reported life satisfaction, which is to some extent in line with some previous studies (cf. burns 1991; sandhu 1994; snow andrade 2006; sawir et al. 2008; russel et al. 2010; bhandari 2012). this might suggest that life satisfaction can be intertwined with and related to intrapersonal factors and how the students interact with peers when studying abroad (sandhu 1994). the experience of being an international student covers different domains of life satisfaction and how the students appreciate the study situation, academic teaching and learning experience, leading towards issues of lifestyle aspirations. life satisfaction is one way of evaluating students’ contentment with their life after a sojourn abroad. life satisfaction highlights the degree to which the students are able to attain their objectives; it should also be viewed as interrelated with lifestyle among youth. lifestyle mobility indicates a search for a better life somewhere else, such as a warmer climate, cosmopolitan experiences from big cities, and some studies have observed back-and-forth waves of circular mobility as an expression of defining characteristics of contemporary life (cf. cresswell 2006; sheller & urry 2006; king 2017). lifestyle mobility is a project for pursuing self-realization, and suggests movements mostly of free will and related to individuals’ life values (cf. benson & o’reilly 2009; duncan et al. 2013; åkerlund 2013; cohen et al. 2015). these studies conceptualize individuals’ behaviour patterns in activities, attitudes, interests, opinions, and values pertinent to mobility. it often also reflects people’s self-image – the way they see themselves and believe they are seen by others (cf. urry 2002; jonsson 2003; benson & o’reilly 2009; kennedy 2010; åkerlund 2013). cohen, duncan and thulemark (2015) argue that, for some, being on the move has become a way of life and something that continues throughout the life course. king (2017) argues that youth mobility in europe is not only dictated by work, income, career and so forth, but also shaped by a search for a better life. inbound students (n=116) inbound women (n=57) inbound men (n=59) eu/eea (n=85) (%) non-eu/eea (n=30) (%) life as a whole 61/66 66/68 56/66 63/68 53/60 study situation 51/56 46/47 56/66 49/56 53/53 economy 38/42 37/47 39/36 46/52 17/13 leisure 63/53 70/58 57/48 68/59 48/37 contact with friends 74/73 79/74 69/73 78/77 67/63 activity of daily living 75/88** 75/84 75/91* 75/89* 73/83 family life 77/74 (n=103/90) 84/72 (n=49/48) 78/73 (n=55/42) 81/79 (n=78/70) 72/65 (n=25/20) partner relationship 78/71 (n=69/58) 87/74 (n=36/27) 87/75 (n=33/31) 80/71 (n=51/45) 72/69 (n=18/13) somatic health 66/82** 67/81 66/83* 67/83** 63/77 psychological health 80/79 82/75 78/83 81/80 77/73 table 3. differences in self-reported levels of life satisfaction (in percentages of very satisfied and satisfied, dichotomized as ‘satisfied’ in accordance with the developer of lisat-11) for inbound students, inbound women, inbound men, european students, and non-european students before vs. after studying abroad (** p<0.01, * p<0.05). fennia 197(1) (2019) 103per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke some geographers have studied aspects such as diaspora and affinity in relation to what is conceptualized as domestic and foreign (ho 2017; ho & mcconnell 2017). it seems evident that some international students struggle with their new identities, relationships, networks, rights, and responsibilities. some have an affinity with the international community and others are experiencing feelings of between two worlds affecting how satisfied they are with their life studying abroad. for international students, it is important to be connected with peers and the overall student community, as well as with family and friends at home (e.g. burns 1991; sandhu 1994; sawir et al. 2008; russel et al. 2010; bhandari 2012). this was also indicated in the present study by the findings of somewhat lower levels of satisfaction with family life and partner relationship after the study period. the development of information and communication technologies has opened up new possibilities, and the world has become more accessible. thus, social media can help students stay connected with their family and friends, creating a sense of home away from home (gomes et al. 2014). even if technical facilities and devices continue to improve the situation for all international students, problems with adaptation need to be addressed. studies have shown that, when in unfamiliar surroundings, foreign students fail to actively seek help (cf. russel et al. 2010; morris-lange & brands 2015). therefore, universities need to be aware of at-risk students and provide them adequate support. at umeå university, a buddy programme offers international students social support aimed at integrating them with the rest of the student community. the way students are connected is crucial for their wellbeing and for helping them avoid feelings of loneliness and isolation. the roles of academic and social integration, as well as academic and social adjustment, are significant regarding retention and persistence in higher education. furthermore, the issue of being connected – maintaining relationships with family and peers – has been shown to be important for life satisfaction (russell et al. 2010). those who are ‘positively connected’ indicate higher levels of life satisfaction and, furthermore, those who are ‘positively connected’ mix with peers from the whole student population and participate in activities outside the community of students from where they originated (ibid.). most of the international students participating in this study were exchange students, and are thus doing this voluntarily and highly motivated (nilsson 2015). as teichler (2017) pointed out, the vast majority of exchange students do not expect a higher level of teaching or substance of knowledge taught. they have other aims, such as living in another country, exploring a new culture, or personal development (ibid.). still, the experience made the students change their stance on certain items after a sojourn abroad in comparison to what they had expected. in comparison with a swedish reference sample of 2,533 individuals aged 18–64 (fugl-meyer et al. 2002), the participants in the present study scored higher estimates in the domains contact with friends and somatic health. although the reference sample includes different ages and not only students, our results may suggest that internationally mobile students are different from non-mobile comparison groups, and form a selection of the population studying abroad. different aspects of inequality require more studies (bilecen & van mol 2017), and this article adds to a discussion on the relationship between international student mobility and inequalities, by using panel of inbound students. some students lack the means to travel, and cresswell (2006) has coined the expression ‘mobility poor’ to conceptualize a power relation embedded in international student mobility. moreover, in a previous study including the umeå university inbound students, they reported positive perceptions of working abroad in the future (nilsson 2015), the positive ratings of several of the life satisfaction domains at follow up may have contributed to these attitudes. conclusion the transition from one’s home country to a university abroad is a significant life event for the individuals, and students studying abroad may experience numerous challenging life events (cf. bochner et al. 1977; black & mendenhall 1990; fitria 2013); thus, it is important to understand the adjustment to a new country. some scholars have focused on the adjustment among international students to a new study system and a new country. even though internationally mobile students are a select group of students with different backgrounds and preparations for studying abroad, it is also likely that they differ from non-mobile students (waibel et al. 2017). this study showed that 104 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays international student mobility may have an effect on certain aspects of life satisfaction. in general, inbound students were satisfied with different domains of life satisfaction, both before and after a period of studying abroad. it was shown that the domains somatic health and activities of daily living were significantly higher at follow-up. however, more follow-up studies are needed with regard to the life satisfaction of international students as well as individual students’ assessments and future lifestyle aspirations, moving away from a static perception of international mobility. references beech, s. e. (2014) international student mobility: the role of social networks. social & cultural geography 16(3) 332–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.983961 bell, m. & ward, g. (2000) comparing temporary mobility with permanent migration. tourism geographies 2(1) 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/146166800363466 benson, m. & o’reilly, k. (2009) migration and search for a better way of life: a critical exploration of lifestyle migration. the sociological review 57(4) 608–625. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2009.01864.x bhagwati, j. (1976) “the brain drain, international integration of markets for professionals and unemployment: a theoretical analysis”. journal of development economics 1(1) 19–42. https://doi. org/10.1016/0304-3878(74)90020-0 bhandari, p. (2012) stress and health related quality of life of nepalese students studying in south korea: a cross sectional study. health and quality of life outcomes 10(26). https://doi. org/10.1186/1477-7525-10-26 bilecen, b. & van mol, c. (2017) introduction: international academic mobility and inequalities. journal of ethnic and migration studies 43(8) 1241–1255. https://doi.org/10.1080/136918 3x.2017.1300225 black, j. s. & mendenhall, m. (1990) cross-cultural training effectiveness: a review and a theoretical framework for future research. academy of management review 15(1) 113–136. https://doi. org/10.5465/amr.1990.11591834 bochner, s., mcleod, b. m. & lin, a. (1977) friendship patterns of overseas students. journal of social psychology 110(2) 265–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1980.9924253 bogren, h. (2008) flytta eller stanna? betydelsen av plats och platsförankring för den kvalificerade arbetskraftens internationella migration. doctoral thesis in the department of social and economic geography. lund university, lund. (in swedish) boyle, p., halfacree, k. & robinson, v. (1998) exploring contemporary migration. addison wesley longman, new york. bracht, o., engel c., janson, k., over, a., schomburg, h. & teichler, u. (2006) the professional value of erasmus mobility. final report of the valera project. international centre for higher education research (incher-kassel), university of kassel, kassel. brooks, r. & waters, j. (2010) social networks and educational mobility: the experience of uk students. globalization, societies and education 8(1) 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767720903574132 burns, r. b. (1991) study and stress among first year overseas students in an australian university. higher education research & development 10(1) 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436910100106 börjesson, m. (2005) transnationella utbildningsstrategier vid svenska lärosäten och bland svenska studenter i paris och new york. doctoral thesis in the department of education. uppsala university, uppsala. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahuke wij _d7y4rpg ahujw zokhejda14qfja aegqibr ac&url=ht tp%3a%2f%2fw w w.skeptron.uu. se%2fbroady%2fsec%2fsec-37.pdf&usg=aovvaw2wlbbwvlbtdkgzeb02bzdb börjesson, m. (2017) the global space of international students in 2010. journal of ethnic and migration studies 43(8) 1256–1275. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300228 chow, h. p. h. (2005) life satisfaction among university students in a canadian prairie city: a multivariate analysis. social indicators research 70(2) 139–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205004-7526-0 cohen, s. a., duncan, t. & thulemark, m. (2015) lifestyle mobilities: the crossroads of travel, leisure and migration. mobilities 10(1) 155–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2013.826481 cresswell, t. (2006) on the move. mobility in the modern western world. routledge, new york. deakin, h. (2014) the drivers to erasmus work placement mobility for uk students. children's geographies 12(1) 25–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.851063 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.983961 https://doi.org/10.1080/146166800363466 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2009.01864.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2009.01864.x https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3878(74)90020-0 https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3878(74)90020-0 https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7525-10-26 https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7525-10-26 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300225 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300225 https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1990.11591834 https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1990.11591834 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1980.9924253 https://doi.org/10.1080/14767720903574132 https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436910100106 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahukewij_d7y4rpgahujwzokhejda14qfjaaegqibrac&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.skeptron.uu.se%2fbroady%2fsec%2fsec-37.pdf&usg=aovvaw2wlbbwvlbtdkgzeb02bzdb https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahukewij_d7y4rpgahujwzokhejda14qfjaaegqibrac&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.skeptron.uu.se%2fbroady%2fsec%2fsec-37.pdf&usg=aovvaw2wlbbwvlbtdkgzeb02bzdb https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahukewij_d7y4rpgahujwzokhejda14qfjaaegqibrac&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.skeptron.uu.se%2fbroady%2fsec%2fsec-37.pdf&usg=aovvaw2wlbbwvlbtdkgzeb02bzdb https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300228 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-004-7526-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-004-7526-0 https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2013.826481 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.851063 fennia 197(1) (2019) 105per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke duncan, t., scott, d. s. & bauman, t. (2013) the mobility of hospitality work: an exploration of issues and debates. annals of tourism research 41 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.10.004 european commission (2014). erasmus: facts, figures & trends: the european union support for student and staff exchanges and university cooperation in 2012–2013. publications office of the european union, luxembourg. findlay, a. m., king, r., geddes, a., smith, f.m., geddes, a. & skeldon, r. (2012) world class? an investigation of globalization, difference and international student mobility. transactions of the institute of british geographers 37(1) 118–131. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00454.x findlay, a. m., king, r., stam, a. & ruiz-gelices, e. (2006) ever reluctant europeans: the changing geographies of uk students studying and working abroad. european urban and regional studies 13(4) 291–318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776406065429 fitria, d. (2013) life satisfaction and social anxiety among international university students. master thesis from faculty of education and human development, sultan idris education university, perak, malaysia. forbes-mewett, h. & sawyer, a-m. (2016) international students and mental health. journal of international students 6(3) 661–677. fugl-meyer, a. r., bränholm, i-b. & fugl-meyer, k. s. (1991) happiness and domain specific life satisfaction in adult northern swedes. clinical rehabilitation 5(1) 25–33. https://doi. org/10.1177/026921559100500105 fugl-meyer, a. r., melin, r. & fugl-meyer, k. s. (2002) life satisfaction in 18to 64-year-old swedes: in relation to gender, age, partner and immigrant status. journal of rehabilitation medicine 34(5) 239–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/165019702760279242 gomes, c., berry, m., alzougool, b. & chang, s. (2014) home away from home: international students and their identity-based social networks in australia. journal of international students 4(1) 2–15. hall, c. m. & page, s. j. (2009) progress in tourism management: from the geography of tourism to geographies of tourism – a review. tourism management 30(1) 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. tourman.2008.05.014 hall, c. m. (2005a) space-time accessibility and the tourist area cycle of evolution: the role of geographies of spatial interaction and mobility in contributing to an improved understanding of tourism. in butler, r. (ed.) the tourism life cycle: conceptual and theoretical issues, 83–100. channelview publications, clevedon. hall, c. m. (2005b) tourism. rethinking the social science of mobility. prentice hall, harlow, essex. hall, c. m., williams, a. m. & lew, a. a. (2014) tourism conceptualizations, disciplinarity, institutions, and issues. in lew, a., hall, c. m. & williams, a. m. (eds.) the wiley blackwell companion to tourism, 3–24. wiley, chichester. hauschildt, k., gwosć, c., netz, n. & mishra, s. (2015) social and economic conditions of student life in europe. synopsis of indicators. eurostudent v, 2012–2015. w. bertelsmann verlag. helliwell, j. k, huang, h. & wang, s. (2017) social foundations of world happiness. in helliwell, j., layard, r. & sachs, j. (eds.) world happiness, 8–47. un sdsn, new york. ho, e. l-e. & mcconnell, f. (2017) conceptualizing ‘diaspora diplomacy’: territory and populations betwixt. the domestic and foreign. progress in human gepgraphy 1–21. ho, e. l-e. (2017) mobilising affinity ties: kachin internal displacement and the geographies of humanitarianism at the china–myanmar border. transactions of the institute of british geographers 42 84–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12148 i-graduate (2015) international student barometer. umeå university results when participating in the survey. umeå, sweden. jacobsson, l. & lexell, j. (2013) life satisfaction 6–15 years after a traumatic brain injury. journal of rehabilitation medicine 45(10) 1010–1015. https://doi.org/10.2340/16501977-1204 janelle, d. g. & hodge, d. (2000) information, place and cyberspace: issues in accessibility. springerverlag, berlin. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04027-0 jonsson, g. (2003) rotad, rotlös, rastlös [rooted, rootless and restless young]. gerum kulturgeografi 2003(3) doctoral thesis in the department of geography. umeå university, umeå. (in swedish). kennedy, p. (2010) mobility, flexible lifestyles and cosmopolitanism: eu postgraduates in manchester. journal of ethnic and migration studies 36(3) 465–482. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830903426838 king, r. & ruiz-gelices, e. (2003) international student migration and the european ‘year abroad’: effects on european identity and subsequent migration behavior. population, space and place 9(3) 229–252. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijpg.280 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.10.004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00454.x https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776406065429 https://doi.org/10.1177/026921559100500105 https://doi.org/10.1177/026921559100500105 https://doi.org/10.1080/165019702760279242 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2008.05.014 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2008.05.014 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12148 https://doi.org/10.2340/16501977-1204 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04027-0 https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830903426838 https://doi.org/10.1002/ijpg.280 106 fennia 197(1) (2019)reviews and essays king, r. (2017) theorising new european youth mobilities. population space and place 24(1) 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2117 king, r., findlay, a. & ahrens, j. (2010) international student mobility literature review. higher education funding council for england (hefce), bristol. knight, j. (2012) student mobility and internationalization: trends and tribulations. research in comparative and international education 7(1) 20–33. https://doi.org/10.2304/rcie.2012.7.1.20 kondakci, y. (2011) student mobility reviewed: attraction and satisfaction of international students in turkey. higher education 62(5) 573–592. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9406-2 lin, j. g. & yin, j. k. (1997) asian international students adjustment: issues and program suggestions. college student journal 31(4) 473–480. lysgård, h. k. & rye, s. a. (2017) between striated and smooth space: exploring the topology of transnational student mobility. environment and planning a 49(9) 2116–2134. https://doi. org/10.1177/0308518x17711945 melin, r. (2003) on life satisfaction and vocational rehabilitation outcome in sweden. doctoral thesis in faculty of medicine. uppsala university, uppsala. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/ diva2:162949/fulltext01.pdf melin, r., fugl-meyer, k. s. & fugl-meyer, a. r. (2003) life satisfaction in 18to 64-year-old swedes: in relation to education, employment situation, health and physical activity. journal of rehabilitation medicine 35 84–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/16501970306119 morris-lange, s. & brands, f. (2015) train and retain: career support for international students in canada, germany, the netherlands and sweden. svr’s research unit: study 2015-2. berlin, germany. murphy-lejeune, e. (2002) student mobility and narrative in europe. the new strangers. routledge, london. nilsson, p. a. (2015) expectations and experiences of inbound students: perspectives from sweden. journal of international students 5(2) 161–174. oecd (2014) education at a glance 2014: oecd indicators. oecd publishing, paris. olutayo, a. o. (2017) money drain, the diaspora remittance issue and higher education in nigeria. journal of international mobility 1(5) 13–42. https://doi.org/10.3917/jim.005.0013 paige, m. r., fry, g. w., stallman, m. e., josic, j. & jon j-e. (2009) study abroad for global engagement: the long-term impact of mobility experiences. intercultural education 20(1–2) s29–s44. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14675980903370847 paolini, l., yanez, a. p. & kelly, w. (2006) an examination of worry and life satisfaction among college students. individual differences research 4(4) 331–339. pavot, w., diener, e., colvin, c. r. & sandvik, e. (1991) further validation of the satisfaction with life scale: evidence for the cross-method convergence of well-being measures. journal of personality assessment 57(1) 149–161. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa5701_17 pedišić, z., greblo, z., phongsavan, p., milton, k. & bauman, a. e. (2015) are total, intensityand domain-specific physical activity levels associated with life satisfaction among university students? plos one 10(2) e0118137. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118137 perkins, r. & neumayer, e. (2014) geographies of educational mobilities: exploring the uneven flows of international students. the geographical journal 180(3) 246–259. https://doi.org/10.1111/ geoj.12045 prazeres, l. (2018) unpacking distinction within mobility: social prestige and international students. population, space and place. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2190 rienties, b. & tempelaar, d. (2013) the role of cultural dimensions of international and dutch students on academic and social integration and academic performance in the netherlands. international journal of intercultural relations 37(2) 188–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. ijintrel.2012.11.004 rode, j. c., arthaud-day, m. l., mooney, c. h., near, j. p., baldwin, t. t., bommer, w. h., & rubin, r. s. (2005) life satisfaction and student performance. academy of management journal of learning and education 4(4) 421–433. https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2005.19086784 russell, j., rosenthal, d. & thomson, g. (2010) the international student experience: three styles of adaption. higher education 60(2) 235–249. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9297-7 salimi, a. (2011) social-emotional loneliness and life satisfaction. procedia – social and behavioral sciences 29 292–295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.241 salinas-jiménez, a. & salinasjiménez, j. (2011) education as a positional good: a life satisfaction approach. social indicators research 103(3) 409–426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9709-1 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2117 https://doi.org/10.2304/rcie.2012.7.1.20 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9406-2 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x17711945 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x17711945 http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:162949/fulltext01.pdf http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:162949/fulltext01.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/16501970306119 https://doi.org/10.3917/jim.005.0013 https://doi.org/10.1080/14675980903370847 https://doi.org/10.1080/14675980903370847 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa5701_17 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118137 https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12045 https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12045 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2190 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2012.11.004 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2012.11.004 https://doi.org/10.5465/amle.2005.19086784 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9297-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.11.241 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-010-9709-1 fennia 197(1) (2019) 107per a. nilsson & britt-marie stålnacke sam, d. l. (2001) satisfaction with life among international students: an exploratory study. social indicators research 53(3) 315–337. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007108614571 sandhu, d. s. (1994) an examination of the psychological needs of the international students: implications for counselling and psychotherapy. international journal for the advancement of counselling 17(4) 229–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01407739 sawir, e., marginson, s., deumert, a., nyland, c. & ramia, g. (2008) loneliness and international students: an australian study. journal of studies in international education 12(2) 148–180. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1028315307299699 sheller, m. & urry, j. (2006) the new mobilities paradigm. environment and planning a 38(2) 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268 shin, d. & johnson, d. (1978) avowed happiness as an overall assessment of quality of life. social indicators research 5(1–4) 475–492. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00352944 snow andrade, m. (2006) international students in english-speaking universities. journal of research in international education 5(2) 131–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240906065589 sou (2018) en strategisk agenda för internationalisering. delbetänkande av utredningen om ökad internationalisering av universitet och högskolor. statens offentliga utredningar 2018(3). statens offentliga utredningar, stockholm. (in swedish) souto-otero, m., huisman, j., beerkens, m., de wit, h. & vujić, s. (2013) barriers to international student mobility: evidence from the erasmus program. educational research 41(2) 70–77. https:// doi.org/10.3102/0013189x12466696 teichler, u. (2002) erasmus in the socrates programme. findings of an evaluation study. bonn, lemmens. teichler, u. (2017) internationalisation trends in higher education and the changing role of international student mobility. journal of international mobility 1(5) 177–216. https://doi. org/10.3917/jim.005.0179 ukä [swedish higher education authority] (2016) årsrapport [annual report]. 2016:10. universitetskanslersämbetet, stockholm (in swedish). unesco (2014) global flew of tertiary level students. updated every year. <http://uis.unesco.org/en/ uis-student-flow> urry, j. (2000) sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the twenty-first century. routledge, london. urry, j. (2002) mobility and proximity. sociology 36(2) 255–274. https://doi. org/10.1177/0038038502036002002 varghese, n. v. (2008) globalization of higher education and cross-border student mobility. research papers iiep. international institute for educational planning. paris. waibel, s., rüger, h., ette, a. & sauer, l. (2017) career consequences of transnational educational mobility: a systematic literature review. educational research review 20 81–98. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.edurev.2016.12.001 wells, a. (2014) international student mobility: approaches, challenges and suggestions for further research. procedia – social and behavioral sciences 143 19–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. sbspro.2014.07.350 wiers-jenssen, j. (2008) does higher education attained abroad lead to international jobs? journal of studies in international education 12(2) 101–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315307307656 yalçun, i. (2011) social support and optimism as predictors of life satisfaction of college students. international journal for the advancement of counselling 33(2) 79–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10447-011-9113-9 åkerlund, u. (2013) the best of both worlds. aspirations, drivers and practices of swedish lifestyle movers in malta. doctoral dissertation in geography at the department of geography and economic history. gerum 2013:2. umeå university, sweden. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/ get/diva2:664246/fulltext01.pdf åkerlund, u. (2017) strategic lifestyle management in later life: swedish lifestyle movers in malta seeking the ‘best of both worlds’. population, space and place 23(1) e1964. https://doi.org/10.1002/ psp.1964 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007108614571 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01407739 https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315307299699 https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315307299699 https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00352944 https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240906065589 https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x12466696 https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x12466696 https://doi.org/10.3917/jim.005.0179 https://doi.org/10.3917/jim.005.0179 http://uis.unesco.org/en/uis-student-flow http://uis.unesco.org/en/uis-student-flow https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038502036002002 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038502036002002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2016.12.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2016.12.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.07.350 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.07.350 https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315307307656 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10447-011-9113-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10447-011-9113-9 http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:664246/fulltext01.pdf http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:664246/fulltext01.pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1964 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1964 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7894 doi: 10.11143/7894 sex in the city: gender mainstreaming urban governance in europe. the case of sweden and italy martin zebracki zebracki, martin (2014). sex in the city: gender mainstreaming urban governance in europe. the case of sweden and italy. fennia 192: 1, pp. 54–64. issn 1798-5617. this article reviews gender mainstreaming in practices of urban governance in europe by comparing sweden and italy, which have distinct welfare-state systems: that of the former is firmly embedded in institutional and social structures, whereas that of the latter is markedly more familistic. this review illustrates this relatively strong contrast case on the basis of a literature and policy analysis, and elaborates how the everyday policies of urban governance regarding the living environment are considerably more gender-sensitive in sweden than is the case in italy. the main explanation for this difference lies in sweden’s political socialism and longer socio-democratic tradition of incremental and equity-planning approaches in urban governance, in contrast to italy’s social tradition of rather more conservative corporatism and patriarchal commune tactics. socio-political and formal-institutional barriers, which are impeding both the top-down and the bottom-up implementation of gender-sensitive initiatives, could be overcome by creating more mental and formal legislative room for urban-based gender mainstreaming. such room would challenge prevailing patriarchal societal structures and policy narratives. keywords: sweden, italy, gender, gender mainstreaming, urban governance, literature and policy analysis martin zebracki, school of geography, university of leeds, university road, leeds ls2 9jt, united kingdom; cultural geography group, wageningen university, droevendaalsesteeg 3, wageningen 6708 pb, the netherlands. e-mail: m.m.zebracki@leeds.ac.uk introduction: the gendered city this research reviews contemporary gender mainstreaming practices of urban governance in europe, particularly seen in the context of the european union (eu). a number of urban geographers have recently been critically revisiting cities through gender lenses (e.g. moss & al-hindi 2008; jarvis et al. 2009; raju & lahiri-dutt 2011; chant 2013). the general critique presented by geographers concerned with gender is that both the field of geography and the practice of urban governance − the latter being the methods of governing and the way of developing and implementing policies at the local level − are too masculinist and gender-blind (cf. doan 2010). their argument runs that women’s presence in space is highly constrained by gender roles, and that urban governance in every sphere is oriented towards the needs and routines of especially male city users (watson & gibson 1995; mcdowell 1999, see also walby 2005a, 2005b; lavena & riccucci 2012). in that respect, a good while ago, monk and hanson (1982: 44) made a plea for “a more [gender-]fully human geography”. even though most urban scholars acknowledge that gender equality matters in cities across the world (cf. eriksson 2010), the topic of gender and urban governance still has a relatively modest position on the academic agenda, whereas the discussion of urban governance with regard to the welfare state and the neoliberal production of new state spaces is highly developed (cf. jessop 2002; brenner 2004). what the ‘gendered city’ in all its fennia 192: 1 (2014) 55sex in the city: gender mainstreaming urban governance... diversities implies in terms of urban governance and modes of governing remains compelling and debatable (cf. beall 1996; huairou commission and un-habitat 2004; parker 2004; moss & alhindi 2008). broadly speaking, a shift has been taking place in cities in the eu from governmental responsibilities to governance-oriented structures. this has led to increased interest in bottom-up initiatives. presuming that ‘good’ urban governance (cf. unchs 2000; huairou commission and un-habitat 2004) requires being equitable, sustainable and effective, the question here concerns the extent to which urban governance in europe is gender-sensitive. in accordance with the criteria of the unchs (2000) for ‘good’ urban governance and sound gender politics in global governance and transnationalism (cf. meyer & prügl 1999; true & mintrom 2001), gender mainstreaming governance strives not only to promote the capacity building of particularly women − essentially those in community-based organizations and local authorities (cf. droste et al. 2005) as well as in transnational advocacy networks (cf. lang 2009) − but also to include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) service providers and users (cf. stone 2010). on this, woodward (2003: 84) argues, in respect to town and country planning more widely, that “gender awareness [should be] a given and equality [of sexes] [should be] a constant goal”. accordingly, he states that “mainstreaming suggests that equal opportunities for women and men should no longer be achieved solely through equal-opportunity-earmarked policies. a multistranded and total approach is necessary” (ibid: 66). european cities are mainly characterized by densely populated areas with a large share of social housing, and by large families, high densities of young people, immigrant populations and ageing cohorts of mostly female residents. moreover, female-headed households are becoming increasingly common in dense urban areas (cf. becker 2003; huairou commission and un-habitat 2004; anxo et al. 2007) − hence this review’s focus on cities. in the light of todays’ integrated and governance-oriented urban administration, including bottom-up initiatives, the role of women as specifically both heads of family and potential political leaders is significant and therefore deserves attention in the field of gender mainstreaming. europe’s different forms of welfare-state system and nation building have shaped a heterogeneous, complex social environment as regards gender sensitivity, also at the urban governance level, which is highly related to the governmentalities at regional and national levels (cf. esping-andersen 1990; hamnett 1996; dean 1999; tuori 2007). this article provides a brief policy comparison between sweden and italy. the rationale behind this selection is that these two countries have distinct welfare-state regimes and gender-social conditions (cf. borchorst & siim 2008) and are therefore a telling contrast case study. sweden has a robustly implemented welfarestate system, whereas italy’s is generally strongly familistic (cf. droste et al. 2005; anxo et al. 2007). ciccia and verloo (2011) classified sweden as a full “universal caregiver model” (ibid: 6), while acknowledging that this model does not exist as such, as parental leaves are considered too short even in nordic countries (see also pfau-effinger 2004). furthermore, as conveyed by kröger (1997) and gustafsson and szebehely (2009), it is appropriate to contemplate sweden as consisting of multiple welfare communities rather than one uniform welfare state. sweden’s local service provision cannot be typified by a uniform pattern, and local governments have substantial autonomy, which gives them room to manage services like schools and geriatric care via not-for-profit or private actors (cf. argento et al. 2010). on italy, saraceno (1994) stated that its familialism does not let the state intervene directly in family relations and hence, in the main, leaves families (that is, women in particular) to carry the burden of care. moving beyond such generalization, italy also presents a nuanced, differentiated profile in regard to welfare, especially since the local and regional government reforms of the 1990s. salient anomalies in this respect are the rather centre-left regional and municipal governments of tuscany, umbria and emilia-romagna, which have historically witnessed policies of equal employment opportunities (cf. rizza & sansavini 2010). they explicitly draw in the rights of women, provide highquality and low-cost childcare, promote social integration of the elderly (women in particular), deliver support to women who have fallen victim to domestic abuse, and so on (cf. ibid.). comparatively, sweden and italy may thus be seen as fairly opposite poles within a continuum between welfare statism and familialism. 56 fennia 192: 1 (2014)martin zebracki based on a discourse analysis of academic literature and policy documents, this article addresses the following three research questions. to what extent is the current swedish and italian practice of urban governance gender-sensitive? how can the differences between these countries be explained? and how could gender mainstreaming urban governance in europe be generally advanced? the article first presents a critical conceptual overview of gender mainstreaming urban governance, and then clarifies and reflects upon the gender mainstreaming differences between sweden and italy. a number of comparative conclusions are provided, together with some general recommendations for furthering structural frameworks that may enhance gender mainstreaming awareness and implementation within urban governance. gender mainstreaming on critical display what are the needs of women in the urban built environment, and how do they differ from those of men? and what are the differences within ‘the different’? how does urban governance affect women and men differently, and how could it be adapted in order to affect them equally? urban scholars have been occupied with these and cognate questions for more than 40 years (for further background on the urban gender condition and gender histories across various epistemologies, see lin & mele 2013 and gabaccia & maynes 2013, respectively). urban policymakers and planners broadly acknowledge that the implementation of policies on equal opportunities and gender mainstreaming is often problematic and unsuccessful (legates & stout 2000; parker 2004). the term ‘gender’ came into critical academic usage in the late 1960s and 1970s, and is now well-trod ground in humanities and social science literature. as commonly understood, contrary to the term ‘sex’, ‘gender’ serves a useful purpose in distinguishing those aspects of life that are more easily attributed to − or understood to be of − social and cultural rather than biological origin (cf. deaux 1985; unger & crawford 1992). more specifically, ‘gender’ refers to the socially and culturally defined differences between women and men, the relationships between them, the diversity and relativity of their roles within the community, and the social negotiations and power structures in which they are embedded (cf. butler 1990). in line with this, butler (1990) and lorber (1995) conceived of ‘gender’ as a social construction and institution, and one of the main principles of societal order. liinason (2010) argued that discursive gender construction pursues quite multifarious approaches in academia. studies by moss and al-hindi (2008) and lavena and riccucci (2012) indicated that gender mainstreaming is contested and surrounded by ambiguities, paradoxes and counteractions from critical perspectives of organizational theory (stressing transformative gender-equality strategies via policy and practice, cf. rees 1998, 2005), poststructuralist social movement theory (focusing on the socio-political power relationships in achieving gender-differentiated policy awareness, cf. mazey 2000) and feminist theory (emphasizing diversity as a socio-cultural construction of sex without over-fetishizing immanent equalities and differences between men and women, cf. harding 2004; kronsell 2005). the above theories move beyond trivial and indiscriminate generalizations in that they deconstruct ‘the’ needs of women in particular and show the fluidities of gender construction. analogously, scholars do not deal with one and the same gender subject, but discuss ‘gender proper’, ‘gender sensitivity’, ‘gender mainstreaming’ or ‘gender equality’. the discourses on gender are complicated by a mixture of analytical and political conceptions stemming from sundry structuralist and poststructuralist ontological and epistemological dispositions. thus, as inferred from walby (2005a, 2005b), verloo (2006, 2007) and eriksson (2010), gender and gender sensitivity/ mainstreaming/equality are interrelated at the analytical and empirical level, and as such they are discursively and socially constructed and contested. west and zimmermann (1987) imparted that the human production of space depends upon everyone’s constantly ‘doing’ gender (see also butler 1990). they posited that the social construction of gender affects all aspects of life and hence the culture of urban governance. west and zimmermann (1987) and bayes et al. (2001) moreover claim that people’s knowledge of gender constructs can be enhanced through an alteration in education and institutional culture. this is rather challenging, however, as gender is mostly ‘done’ unconsciously, on top of which everyday environfennia 192: 1 (2014) 57sex in the city: gender mainstreaming urban governance... mental practices often neutralize gender, as conveyed by rocheleau et al. (2006). as derived from booth and benneth (2002) and lavena and riccucci (2012), this article takes gender mainstreaming governance as the process of making gender-sensitive criteria a routine element in the development of organizations, plans and policies in relation to the social environment. originally inspired by feminist theory, gender mainstreaming has been employed as a publicpolicy strategy since the 1990s (cf. true 2003; lavena & riccucci 2012). although gender mainstreaming entails a contested approach and a plethora of ambiguous notions (cf. walby 2005a, 2005b), gender theorists are usually aware that the interface between gender mainstreaming and societal change needs a stronger articulation (cf. daly 2005). if governance implies the idea of a plurality of actors involved at different steps and levels in the programming and implementation of policies, it is apparent that the degree to and the way in which gender is incorporated into practices of urban governance become crucial (council of europe 1998; european commission 2009). here, the main challenge for urban governors is to avoid reinforcing stereotypes along the lines of sex and gender. daly (2005) and lavena and riccucci (2012) indicate that gender issues are still on the periphery rather than at the centre of both theories and practices of urban governance. for all that, there has been progress since the 1960s in rendering and implementing academic work on gender into practice, primarily within the scope of european integration (cavanagh 1998; kronsell 2005). modifications should go beyond merely adjusting the built environment as such (fenster 1999; darke et al. 2000). sandercock and forsyth (1992), greed (2003) and hafner-burton and pollack (2009) stressed the need to make changes in gender awareness in a wider sense, namely in education and in the culture of urban and regional planning and governance, think moreover of community engagement and joined-up governance (which are all highly differentiated and multiscalar in themselves, cf. yúdice 2003; swyngedouw 2005; biesta 2011; healey 2012). legates and stout (2000: 447) noted the academic responsibility for increasing gender awareness: “research and theory building can help change the culture of planning so that gender considerations become an accepted part of practice by all planners, male and female.” the challenge in this context is to identify, operationalize and apply gender-differentiated methods in a coherent and consistent fashion that enjoys rapport with societal communities at large. nonetheless, as expressed by daly (2005), such a translation of gender mainstreaming into urban governance is seen as an obstacle rather than a challenge: “the lack of clarity in the concept/approach at the present time is causal. it provides fertile ground for political expediency, for example − because mainstreaming is so elastic, it is easy to make a claim to be doing mainstreaming. in addition, one could attribute the tendency toward technocratization to lack of clarity in definition and conceptualization.” (ibid: 439) that said, gender mainstreaming − technocratic in approach or not − has gained socio-political importance since wwii. western gender criticism of urban governance, and hence gender awareness, arose in the urban sphere as well as urban literature in the 1950s and 1960s (hayden 1980; parker 2004; essed et al. 2009), when feminists began to criticize the physical and social constraints that cities put particularly on women. on the basis of sandercock and forsyth (1992), mcdowell (1997), cavanagh (1998), booth and bennett (2002) and lavena and riccucci (2012), one can discern three important theoretical developments on the topic of gender in urban governance over the last 40 years. first, a shift in focus from women as carers to women as carers and waged workers took place as a result of this new double role that women had achieved in society. secondly, initially stress was often laid on just the differences between women and men, whereas attention is now paid to diversity within especially the group of women; not every woman is, for instance, a white, heterosexual, middle-class homemaker. thirdly, the terminology of gender, and consequently its methodological structure, was modified. what began as ‘women and urban governance’ became ‘equal opportunities’ and then ‘gender sensitivity’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’. the last two terms basically imply the move from difference thinking towards gender reasoning, in which an attempt is made to stress and treat both women’s and men’s needs evenly, impartially and dialectically. in the mid-1970s, considerable difficulties arose from the change in the traditional family pattern in the western world. substantially more 58 fennia 192: 1 (2014)martin zebracki women took up paid labour, and this permanently altered their mobility and space needs. however, the conventional homes and built environment did not fully satisfy the needs of employed women in particular. since then, women’s restrictions in space (in respect of e.g. commuting, safety/violence, childcare and leisure) have been one of the main topics in the literature and policy discourse on gender and urban governance (hayden 1980; huairou commission and un-habitat 2004). influential gender pioneers like dolores hayden started to explore the interrelationships between gender, class and power in the built environment in the 1970s. inspired by marxist literature on spatial design, hayden (1980) made a plea for enabling women to become equal members of society by assailing the accustomed division between public and private space. hayden managed to link human activity to geographical scales, and in doing so focused on the differentiation between particularly women and all their assorted needs in time and space (cf. hayden 1980; sandercock & forsyth 1992, see also scholten et al. 2012). women’s and men’s lives − their work, earned income, situated roles, shared relationships, and so on − are shaped by social norms and traditions that treat women and men differently. the attributes, needs and desires of women and men, and the way in which they shape social, political and economic life, differ among as well as between women and men, which should be reckoned with in gender awareness (hayden 1980; beall 1996; parker 2004). hayden’s (1980) main criticism of the modern built environment was that it underrepresents ‘good’ neighbourhoods: living areas that unite the services, housing and jobs that are demanded by both men and women in all their diversities (cf. huairou commission and un-habitat 2004). such gender mainstreamed space is one of the goals of the eu (cf. european commission 2000; lombardo & meier 2008). however, lavena and riccucci (2012: 134) stated that the eu has made “less progress in terms of results”, especially on the deep-seated social level, despite its implementation of gender-sensitive policy regulations. they ascribed this lack of progress to the non-coherent ways in which diverse eu regimes conceptually and practically engage with gender mainstreaming, and to the complex, contradictory and multiscalar reality of gender mainstreaming governance, which ranges from local to regional, national and global levels (ibid.). sweden and italy: differentiated perspectives on gender mainstreaming in the purview of gender mainstreaming urban governance in europe, there is, relatively seen, a considerable contrast between the political policy histories of sweden and italy. whereas sweden broadly embodies a highly developed welfarestate regime (cf. anxo et al. 2007), italy generally harbours a highly familistic welfare-state regime that corresponds to a traditional society in which women are predominantly typified as carers (cf. hamnett 1996; anxo et al. 2007). in addition to the differentiating notes as given in the introduction to this article, the differences between swedish and italian gender mainstreaming urban governance, and the internal differences on both sides, should also be delicately understood from the various roles and related social and legal responsibilities of local authorities that are in interplay with regional and national governments, as further contextualized in the following. the chief participatory channel in urban governance is through political and institutional bodies (droste et al. 2005). in both countries, principally some women’s groups have established bottom-up, grassroots initiatives in order to mainstream gender in the political and institutional realm. despite empowerment-oriented movements like these, eu gender-equality pacts, in juxtaposition to sweden, usually still challenge the gender sensitivity of urban governance practices in italy (cf. anxo et al. 2007; pettersson 2012). on this, it should be acknowledged that urban policies are normally beyond the eu’s competences. nevertheless, some urban policy programmes, such as urban, are formally embedded in the eu (cf. tofarides 2003). the eu has, moreover, the potential to advocate regional and urban policies, including gender-sensitive initiatives, and thus to be a public educator in this context (cf. biesta 2011; lavena & riccucci 2012). according to hamnett (1996), droste et al. (2005) and rizza and sansavini (2010), over the last 20 years a gender-sensitive approach has been gradually incorporated into the political and social culture of the italian regime, and consequently into urban governance. on the basis of their insights, to boot, one can find that although the italian political landscape is increasingly regionally polarized and political power chiefly remains a male privilege in italy today, the female presence fennia 192: 1 (2014) 59sex in the city: gender mainstreaming urban governance... in politics and urban administration in particular is increasing due to a generally augmenting permissive mindset (for facts and figures on italy’s genderequality machinery in multilevel governance, see guadagnini & donà 2007; ortbals et al. 2011). this may have a positive influence on policy commitment to social welfare and cultural difference (cf. chen 2010, and see notes on italy in krook & childs 2010). even so, it should be argued that, over the last 20 years, the italian gender-permissive mindset has found itself doing battle with antiprogressive tactics and policies, also related to the domestic sphere, which has restrained the potential to further implement gender-sensitive approaches in the political arena and to promote alternative gender imageries in italian society (cf. saraceno 1994; guadagnini & donà 2007). although the female presence in italian urban governance is still quite modest as compared to sweden, there is gender improvement in italy particularly on account of the opportunities provided by two objectives of legislative intercession. namely, the further closing of gender gaps in education and at the professional level, and the supply of ad hoc institutions supervising the implementation of gender-equality rationales, which includes the provision of workshops on job training, and campaigns aimed at combatting gender violence and improving the health of women (ortbals et al. 2011, see also droste et al. 2005). these legislative endeavours, stirred by the ministry of equal opportunities and the national committee for equal opportunities at work, are supposed to advance equal socio-economic opportunities regarding work, education, entrepreneurship, provision for maternity and paternity, and the like. not only do such top-down endeavours matter, but so too do the responsibilities and powers of regional governments, above all in the fields of transport, planning, social services and healthcare. gender policies in these fields are mainly instituted at the regional level; municipal gender-sensitive incentives are less common (cf. barbera & vettor 2001; zajczyk 2003; anxo et al. 2007). a prominent empirical example of gender mainstreaming urban governance in italy is the case of proper working time schedules, which were first drawn up after the public administration reform of the early 1990s. although the contents of italian urban gender policies are generally forward-looking, as they include gender-inclusive socio-spatial interventions, the gender approach tends to be rather expedient, and, more fundamentally, remains within the sphere of male-dominated decision making and corporate governance (cf. ponzellini 2006). furthermore, in contrast to sweden, a substantial share of italian gender-sensitive initiatives and policies are dependent on the actions of single local actors like mayors and other city managers (cf. mattei 2007); this has especially been the case since the 2001 constitutional reform, when municipalities gained more autonomy (cf. argento et al. 2010). in italy, gender mainstreaming within urban governance often lacks synergy, a coherent and strategic vision, and accurate action planning (cf. zajczyk 2003; droste et al. 2005). moreover, in comparison with sweden, in italy there is a dearth of statistical information − and therefore evidence − on female representation in decision making and the overall condition of women. this lack of statistics, however, does not prevent italian policy innovations from engaging in gender mainstreaming (cf. statistical commission and economic commission for europe 2000; guadagnini & donà 2007; rizza & sansavini 2010). gender is historically strongly mainstreamed in swedish social policies (hamnett 1996). saliently, sweden has one of the world’s highest proportions of women in decision-making positions at the national, regional and local level (for facts and figures, see unchs 2001; anxo et al. 2007; european commission 2012). over the last 35 years, sweden has implemented advanced gender-equality policies, albeit through a rather top-down, prescriptive legislative framework. considerable policies are the equal opportunities act of 1991 and its related national, regional and local mainstreaming schemes. these policies have been followed through with specific strategies, pilot projects and gender-training courses in the public domain with the purpose of increasing gender parity and awareness (cf. division for gender equality 2005; anxo et al. 2007; european institute for gender equality 2012). the swedish equity planning has acknowledged the innumerable conflicting social interests within a transforming society. through their recognition of marginalized interests, the far-reaching swedish equity planning and policymaking have interlinked feminist planning criticism, the deconstruction of dualist conceptions of gender in societal power relations, and the gender mainstreaming strategy as an instrument to change these relations in a drastic, socio-politically inclusive way (cf. lister 2003; droste et al. 2005; liinason 2010). 60 fennia 192: 1 (2014)martin zebracki as an empirical illustration, national schemes run by the swedish agency for economic and regional growth promote women’s entrepreneurship, and are intrinsically aimed at gender inclusiveness at all levels of government (cf. european commission 2012; pettersson 2012). moreover, municipalities organize projects on gender equality, which primarily touch on matters related to female representation in decision making (cf. woodward 2003). local development agreements (ldas), furthermore, have been implemented in sweden to stimulate civic participation and incite the deeper and broader citizenship of both women and men. for example, ldas have enabled the foundation of women’s policy agencies − which are also encouraging initiatives by distinct local communities that include women of different ethnic origins, who might experience discrimination (think specifically of migrants and ethnic minorities). ldas have additionally led to metropolitan programmes at the meso-level that are intended to boost gender parity and articulate and cherish gender differences among the urban population by combating segregation along economic, social and ethnic lines (cf. lukkarinen 2004; schulz et al. 2007). despite these endeavours, there is some criticism in sweden regarding the allegedly inadequate capacity of swedish welfare communities to achieve full diversity, owing to their prioritization of gender over other socio-cultural inequalities concerning, for example, class and ethnicity (cf. siim 2007; borchorst & siim 2008). concluding remarks the comparative findings of this research have shown that the key factor in creating opportunities − or rather constraints − for mainstreaming gender into urban governance bears on the institutionalization of gender mainstreaming. in sweden, gender mainstreaming is considerably more interwoven with the socio-political fabric than is the case in italy. the most important reason for this lies in the much longer swedish democratic tradition of incremental egalitarian planning and policymaking in practices of urban governance, and in sweden’s overall higher political pressure on gender-sensitive practices. as also inferred from guadagnini and donà (2007), borchorst and siim (2008), the european commission (2000, 2011, 2012), ortbals et al. (2011) and pettersson (2012), other underlying reasons are the comparatively higher educational level of women in sweden and their commonly stronger capacity to empower themselves (which is related to the remarkably more pronounced double role of swedish women as carers and waged workers); the relatively low level of female political participation in italy, which in general has led to a paucity of gender awareness; the rather more ad hoc instruments for implementing gender mainstreaming policies in italy; and the substantially more male-streamed culture of urban governance in italy, which to a large extent depends upon its widespread traditional, patriarchal society. all in all, sweden has witnessed a comparatively stronger institutionalization of gender awareness and a more structural embedding of gender mainstreaming within urban governance than italy. although the gender sensitivity of urban governance in sweden can by and large be regarded as fairly strong, there is, as is the case in italy, a certain lack of gender awareness, particularly regarding women’s safety in land-use planning (cf. sandercock & forsysth 1992; anxo et al. 2007). this lack is often considered part and parcel of the largely male-streamed european society (cf. ottes et al. 1995; rees 2005). in both sweden and italy, the impact of gendersensitive policies varies across urban governance fields, and on that account there remains a plethora of gender gaps. strikingly, and perhaps relatedly, the level of female socio-political participation in institutionalized ‘classic’ domains like public transport is relatively lower than in ‘unconventional’, participatory-based domains such as community building (cf. carlsson-kanyama et al. 1999; droste et al. 2005; anxo et al. 2007). furthermore, as a general challenge within the european context of urban governance, lavena and riccucci (2012) stated that the current economic crisis has indirectly led european countries and regional and local governments to prioritize economic competitiveness over gender diversity and awareness in public policy, and as a result, the gender neutrality of european policies should be questioned (see also woodward & meier 1998 for gender impact assessment in the changing socio-political landscape of europe). in addition, the degree of public willingness to report cases of gender discrimination puts another fennia 192: 1 (2014) 61sex in the city: gender mainstreaming urban governance... complexion on the matter (cf. lavena & riccucci 2012). this study suggests that using the interstices left by the programmes and policies of urban governance to intertwine top-down and bottom-up structures and initiatives − and hence interlink actions − might produce the most effective results as far as gender mainstreaming in the city is concerned. in the light of such ‘good’ urban governance, the regional, the national and the supranational eu level could together play an essential role in fostering and revving up policies apropos of gender sensitivity from above. at the same time, ‘good’ urban governance should further stimulate the role of civil society actors and public movements in advocating and reifying gender mainstreaming in local policy and planning. this article is work in progress and argues that further, deeper research is needed on the sociospatial construction of gender issues in urban policymaking and their regional differences. on this, nuanced critical insight is required into people’s social and cultural backgrounds, including class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, age and ability/disability (cf. european commission 2009; brown 2012; leslie & catungal 2012), and their resources and knowledges in time and sociophysical as well as virtual spaces (cf. green & adam 2001, see haraway 2004 for ‘situated knowledges’ as a helpful epistemological and methodological tool in such endeavour). this would make ‘doing’ gender in both academia and urban governance a plausible outlook for citizenship in a post-nationalist vein more broadly (cf. braidotti 2010) and sexual citizenship in particular (cf. mann 2013; zebracki 2014). such intellectual as well as ‘real-world’ gender mainstreaming (cf. mazey 2000) relies on the awareness of the gender-differentiated public as the ultimate voice in the formulation of policy and planning means and ends. acknowledgements while any errors are my own, i should like to thank the anonymous referees and the editor paola minoia for their useful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. this research was conducted in the cultural geography group at wageningen university and received no specific grant from any funding agency. references anxo d, flood l, mencarini l, pailhé a, solaz a & tanturri m 2007. time allocation between work and family over the life-cycle: a comparative gender analysis of italy, france, sweden and the united states. institute for the study of labor, bonn. argento d, grossi g, tagesson t & collin s 2010. the ‘externalisation’ of local public service delivery: experience in italy and sweden. international journal of public policy 5: 1, 41–56. http://dx.doi. org/10.1504/ijpp.2010.029780. barbera m & vettor p 2001. the case of italy. in behning u & pascual a (eds). gender mainstreaming in the european employment strategy, 259–272. european trade union institute, brussels. bayes j, hawkesworth m & kelly r 2001. globalization, democratization and gender regimes. in kelly r, bayes j, hawkesworth m & young b (eds). gender, globalization and democratization, 1–14. rowman and littlefield, boulder. beall j 1996. urban governance: why gender matters. united nations development programme (undp) gender in development monograph series 1. united nations development programme, new york. becker r 2003. what’s wrong with a female head? the prevalence of women-headed households and its impact on urban development and planning. in terlinden u (ed). from the local level to the global level and back again. city and gender: international discourse on gender, urbanism and architecture, 151–173. leske und budrich, opladen. biesta g 2011. the ignorant citizen: mouffe, rancière, and the subject of democratic education. studies in philosophy and education 30: 2, 141– 153. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9220-4. booth c & bennett c 2002. gender mainstreaming in the european union: towards a new conception and practice of equal opportunities? european journal of women’s studies 9: 4, 430–446. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13505068020090040 401. borchorst a & siim b 2008. woman-friendly policies and state feminism: theorizing scandinavian gender equality. feminist theory 9: 2, 207–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1464700108090411. braidotti r 2010. european citizenship: a post-nationalist perspective. in may t (ed). the history of continental philosophy: emerging trends in continental philosophy, 127–148. acumen, durham. brenner n 2004. urban governance and the production of new state spaces in western europe, 1960–2000. review of international political economy 11: 3, 447–488. http://dx.doi.org/10.1 080/0969229042000282864. brown m 2012. gender and sexuality i: intersectional anxieties. progress in human geography 36: 4, 541– 550.http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132511420973. 62 fennia 192: 1 (2014)martin zebracki butler j 1990. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. routledge, london. carlsson-kanyama a, lindén a & thelander å 1999. insights and applications: gender differences in environmental impacts from patterns of transportation – a case study from sweden. society & natural resources: an international journal 12: 4, 355–369. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/089419299279641. cavanagh s 1998. women and the urban environment. in greed c & roberts m (eds). introducing urban design: interventions and responses, 168– 177. longman, essex. chant s 2013. cities through a “gender lens”: a golden “urban age” for women in the global south? environment and urbanization 25: 1, 9–29. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956247813477809. chen l 2010. do gender quotas influence women’s representation and policies? the european journal of comparative economics 7: 1, 13–60. ciccia r & verloo m 2011. who cares? patterns of leave regulation in an enlarged europe: using fuzzy-set ideal types to assess gender equality. institut für die wissenschaften vom menschen, quality in gender+ equality policies (quing), vienna. council of europe 1998. gender mainstreaming: conceptual framework, methodology and presentation of good practices. council of europe, strasbourg. daly m 2005. gender mainstreaming in theory and practice. social politics: international studies in gender, state & society 12: 3, 433–450. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxi023. darke j, ledwith s & woods r 2000. women and the city: visibility and voice in urban space. palgrave, oxford. dean m 1999. governmentality: power and rule in modern society. sage, los angeles. deaux k 1985. sex and gender. annual review of psychology 36: 1, 49–81. http://dx.doi. org/10.1146/annurev.ps.36.020185.000405. division for gender equality 2005. gender equality in sweden – a summary. <http://www.epfound. a m / f i l e s / s w e d e n _ g e n d e r _ e q u a l i t y. p d f > 19.03.2013. doan p 2010. the tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy. gender, place & culture 17: 5, 635–654. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2010.503121. droste c, molina i & zajczyk f 2005. restructuring large housing estates: does gender matter? in van kempen r, dekker k, hall s & tosics i (eds). restructuring large housing estates in europe, 299– 320. the policy press, bristol. eriksson a (ed) 2010. equality, growth & sustainability: do they mix? linköping electronic conference proceedings, no. 58. forum for gender studies and equality, linköping university, linköping. < h t t p : / / l i u . d i v a p o r t a l . o r g / s m a s h / g e t / diva2:413708/fulltext02.pdf> 05.04.2013. esping-andersen g 1990. the three worlds of welfare capitalism. polity press, cambridge. essed p, goldberg d & kobayashi a 2009. a companion to gender studies. wiley-blackwell, malden. european commission 2000. gender equality in the european union: examples of good practices (1996–2000). office for official publications of the european communities, luxembourg. european commission 2009. gender mainstreaming active inclusion policies. <http://www.isotita.gr/ var/uploads/policies/plhroforiako%20 y l i ko / g e n d e r % 2 0 m a i n s t r e a m i n g % 2 0 a c tive%20inclusion%20policies_ec_2010.pdf> 11.02.2013. european commission 2011. data and information on women’s health in the european union. <http://ec.europa.eu/health/population_groups/ docs/women_report_en.pdf> 18.01.2013. european commission 2012. women in economic decision making in the eu: progress report. <http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/ files/women-on-boards_en.pdf> 16.01.2013. european institute for gender equality 2012. mapping of gender training policies and practices in the european union. summary of findings. <http://eige.europa.eu/sites/default/files/gender%20training%20-%20summary%20of%20 findings.pdf> 08.02.2013. fenster t (ed) 1999. gender, planning and human rights. routledge, new york. gabaccia d & maynes m (eds) 2013. gender history across epistemologies. wiley-blackwell, oxford. greed c 2003. the rocky path: 'from women and planning' to gender mainstreaming. faculty of the built environment, university of the west of england, bristol. green e & adam a (eds) 2001. virtual gender: technology, consumption and identity. routledge, london. guadagnini m & donà a 2007. women’s policy machinery in italy between european pressure and domestic constraints. in outshoorn j & kantola j (eds). changing state feminism, 200–230. palgrave, new york. gustafsson r & szebehely m 2009. outsourcing of elder care services in sweden: effects on work environment and political legitimacy. in king d & meagher g (eds). paid care in australia: politics, profits, practices, 81–112. sydney university press, sydney. hafner-burton e & pollack m 2009. mainstreaming gender in the european union: getting the incentives right. comparative european politics 7: 1, 114–138. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/cep.2008.37. hamnett c 1996. social polarisation, economic restructuring and welfare state regimes. urban studies 33: 8, 1407–1430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0042098966727. haraway d 2004. situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. in harding s (ed). the feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political controversies, 81–102. routledge, new york. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 63sex in the city: gender mainstreaming urban governance... harding s (ed) 2004. the feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political controversies. routledge, new york. hayden d 1980. what would a non-sexist city be like? speculations on housing, urban design, and human work. signs: journal of women in culture and society 5: 3, 170–187. http://dx.doi. org/10.1086/495718. healey p 2012. the universal and the contingent: some reflections on the transnational flow of planning ideas and practices. planning theory 11: 2, 188–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1473095211419333. huairou commission and un-habitat 2004. local to local dialogue: a grassroots women’s perspective on good governance. urban governance toolkit series. un-habitat, nairobi. jarvis h, cloke j & kantor p 2009. cities and gender. routledge, new york. jessop b 2002. liberalism, neoliberalism, and urban governance: a state–theoretical perspective. antipode 34: 3, 452–472. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00250. kronsell a 2005. gender, power and european integration theory. journal of european public policy 12: 6, 1022–1040. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501760500270703. krook m & childs s (eds) 2010. women, gender, and politics: a reader. oxford university press, new york. kröger t 1997. the dilemma of municipalities: scandinavian approaches to child day-care provision. journal of social policy 26: 4, 485–507. http://dx. doi.org/10.1017/s0047279497005126. lang s 2009. assessing advocacy: european transnational women’s networks and gender mainstreaming. social politics: international studies in gender, state & society 16: 3, 327–357. http://dx.doi. org/10.1093/sp/jxp016. lavena c & riccucci n 2012. exploring gender mainstreaming in the european union. international journal of public administration 35: 2, 122–136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01900692.2011.61699. legates r & stout f 2000. the city reader. routledge, london. leslie d & catungal j 2012. social justice and the creative city: class, gender and racial inequalities. geography compass 6: 3, 111–122. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00472.x. liinason m 2010. institutionalized knowledge: notes on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in gender studies in sweden. nora — nordic journal of feminist and gender research 18: 1, 38–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08038741003626973. lin j & mele c (eds) 2013. the urban sociology reader. routledge, new york. lister r 2003. citizenship: feminist perspectives. new york university press, new york. lombardo e & meier p 2008. framing gender equality in the european union political discourse. social politics: international studies in gender, state & society 15: 1, 101–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxn001. lorber j 1995. paradoxes of gender. yale university press, new haven. lukkarinen m 2004. local development agreements as a tool to stop segregation in vulnerable metropolitan areas: synthesis report. european commission. <http:// www.euro.centre.org/data/1138964131_1181. pdf> 02.03.2013. mann e 2013. regulating latina youth sexualities through community health centers: discourses and practices of sexual citizenship. gender & society 27: 5, 681–703. mattei p 2007. from politics to good management? transforming the local welfare state in italy. west european politics 30: 3, 595–620. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/01402380701276444. mazey s 2000. introduction: integrating gender — intellectual and ‘real world’ mainstreaming. journal of european public policy 7: 3, 333–345. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501760050086062. mcdowell l 1997. capital culture: gender at work in the city. blackwell, oxford. mcdowell l 1999. gender, identity and place. understanding feminist geographies. polity press, cambridge. meyer m & prügl e (eds) 1999. gender politics in global governance. rowman and littlefield, lanham. monk j & hanson s 1982. on not excluding half of the human in human geography. the professional geographer 34: 1, 11–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ j.0033-0124.1982.00011.x. moss p & al-hindi k 2008. feminisms in geography: rethinking space, place, and knowledges. rowman & littlefield, lanham. ortbals c, rincker m & montoya c 2011. politics close to home: the impact of meso-level institutions on women in politics. publius: the journal of federalism 42: 1, 78–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjr029. ottes l, poventud e, van schendelen m & segond von banchet g (eds) 1995. gender and the built environment: emancipation in planning, housing and mobility in europe. van gorcum, assen. parker s 2004. from pillar to post: culture, representation and difference in the urban world. in urban theory and the urban experience: encountering the city, 138–158. routledge, london. pettersson k 2012. support for women’s entrepreneurship: a nordic spectrum. international journal of gender and entrepreneurship 4: 1, 4–19. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1108/17566261211202954. pfau-effinger b 2004. development of culture, welfare states and women’s employment in europe. ashgate, aldershot. ponzellini a 2006. work–life balance and industrial relations in italy. european societies 8: 2, 273–294. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616690600645043. raju s & lahiri-dutt k (eds) 2011. doing gender, doing geography: emerging research in india. routledge, new delhi. 64 fennia 192: 1 (2014)martin zebracki rees t 1998. mainstreaming equality. in watson s & doyal l (eds). engendering social policy. open university press, buckingham. rees t 2005. reflections on the uneven development of gender mainstreaming in europe. international feminist journal of politics 7: 4, 555–574. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/14616740500284532. rizza r & sansavini m 2010. welfare e politiche di conciliazione: il caso dell’emilia-romagna [welfare and work–life balance policies: the case of emilia-romagna]. sociologia del lavoro 119, 78– 96. rocheleau d, thomas-slayter b & wangari e 2006. gender and the environment: a feminist political ecology perspective. in haenn n & wilk r (eds). the environment in anthropology: a reader in ecology, culture, and sustainable living, 27–33. new york university press, new york. sandercock l & forsyth a 1992. a gender agenda: new directions for planning theory. journal of the american planning association 58: 1, 49–59. http://dx. doi.org/10.1080/01944369208975534. saraceno c 1994. the ambivalent familism of the italian welfare state. social politics: international studies in gender, state & society 1: 1, 60–82. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1093/sp/1.1.60. scholten c, friberg t & sandén a 2012. re-reading time-geography from a gender perspective: examples from gendered mobility. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 103: 5, 584–600. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 1 1 / j . 1 4 6 7 9663.2012.00717.x. schulz s, vidén s & chandra s 2007. general overview of the problems, needs and solutions in the swedish urban building envelopes. in melgaard e, hadjimichael g, almeida m & verhoef l (eds). cost c16 improving the quality of existing urban building envelopes — needs, 131–139. ios press, amsterdam. siim b 2007. the challenge of recognizing diversity from the perspective of gender equality: dilemmas in danish citizenship. critical review of international social and political philosophy 10: 4, 491–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698230701660196. statistical commission and economic commission for europe 2000. making gender mainstreaming a national priority. working paper no. 14. <http://www. u n e c e . o r g / f i l e a d m i n / d a m / s t a t s / d o c u ments/2000/10/gender/14.e.pdf> 11.03.2013. stone a 2010. diversity, dissent, and decision making: the challenge to lgbt politics. glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 16: 3, 465–472. http://dx. doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2009-040. swyngedouw e 2005. governance innovation and the citizen: the janus face of governance-beyond-thestate. urban studies 42: 11, 1991–2006. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/00420980500279869. tofarides m 2003. urban policy in the european union: a multi-level gatekeeper system. ashgate, aldershot. true j 2003. mainstreaming gender in global public policy. international feminist journal of politics 5: 3, 368–396. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616740320 00122740. true j & mintrom m 2001. transnational networks and policy diffusion: the case of gender mainstreaming. international studies quarterly 45: 1, 27–57. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/0020-8833.00181. tuori s 2007. cooking nation: gender equality and multiculturalism as nation-building discourses. european journal of women’s studies 14: 1, 21–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350506807072315. unchs 2000. policy paper on women and urban governance. <http://www1.aucegypt.edu/src/engendering/documents/home%20page/women%20 and%20urban%20governance.pdf> 04.05.2013. unchs 2001. urban governance. women in local leadership. <http://www.un.org/ga/istanbul+5/102.pdf> 27.05.2013. unger r & crawford m 1992. women & gender: a feminist psychology. mcgraw-hill, new york. verloo m 2006. multiple inequalities, intersectionality and the european union. european journal of women’s studies 13: 3, 211–228. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1350506806065753. verloo m 2007. multiple meanings of gender equality: a critical frame analysis of gender policies in europe. central european university press, budapest. walby s 2005a. gender mainstreaming: productive tensions in theory and practice. social politics 12: 3, 321–343. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxi018. walby s 2005b. introduction: comparative gender mainstreaming in a global era. international feminist journal of politics 7: 4, 453–470. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/14616740500284383. watson s & gibson k 1995. postmodern cities and spaces. blackwell, oxford. west c & zimmermann d 1987. doing gender. gender & society 1: 2, 125–151. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 0891243287001002002. woodward a 2003. european gender mainstreaming: promises and pitfalls of transformative policy. review of policy research 20: 1, 65–88. http://dx. doi.org/10.1111/1541-1338.d01-5. woodward a & meier p 1998. gender impact assessment: a new approach to changing policies and contents of citizenship? in ferreira v, tavares t & portugal s (eds). shifting bonds, shifting bounds: women, mobility and citizenship in europe, 95– 106. celta, oeiras. yúdice g 2003. the expediency of culture: uses of culture in the global era. duke university press, durham. zajczyk f 2003. la povertà a milano. distribuzione territoriale, servizi sociali e problema abitativo [poverty in milan. geographical distribution, social services and housing issues]. f. angeli, milan. zebracki m 2014. explosive multiscalar negotiations of sexual citizenship: the 2014 russian winter olympics countdown. antipode <http:// a n t i p o d e f o u n d a t i o n . o r g / 2 0 1 4 / 0 2 / 0 7 / t h e 2014-russian-winter-olympics-countdown/> 07.02.2014. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46303 doi: 10.11143/46303 bisexuals in space and geography: more-than-queer? emiel maliepaard maliepaard, emiel (2015). bisexuals in space and geography: more than queer? fennia 193: 1, pp. 148–159. issn 1798-5617. geographies of sexualities mainly focusses on the lived experiences and sexual identity negotiations of gay men and lesbian women in a society based upon binary divisions of sex, gender, and sexualities. this review article wants to consider a more theoretically informed relational approach to understand the creation and sustaining of the binary system, and the everyday lived experience of bisexuals. this article will review contemporary studies on queer space and studies on the intersections of bisexual theory and queer theory. drawing inspiration from queer theory, speech act theory, and relational geographies, i propose a focus on encounters, language, embodied practices, and embodied experiences to understand the lives of sexual minorities, and bisexuals in particular. while heteronormativity and monosexuality are important factors (or contexts) in the everyday lived experience, they are not all determining for the everyday experiences of people who desire more-than-one gender. keywords: bisexual spaces, more-than-representational theories, queer theory, queer space, language, practices emiel maliepaard, department of human geography, institute for management research, radboud university nijmegen, thomas van aquinostraat 3, 6525gd nijmegen, the netherlands. e-mail: e.maliepaard1@gmail.com introduction it has been concluded before that geographies of sexualities lack research on bisexuals, bisexual spaces, and bisexual geographies (bell 1995; binnie & valentine 1999; hemmings 1997, 2002; mclean j 2003). hemmings (1997), in queers in space, observed that clear demarcated bisexual spaces do not exist, except from some conference spaces and specific bisexual support groups. these conclusions that demarcated bisexual spaces do not exist (see hemmings 1997; mclean j 2003) can be traced down to dominant ideas on sexual spaces which are based upon a one-to-one link between the sexual coding of space(s) and the dominant sexual identity in those spaces. as concluded by hemmings, bisexuals and bisexual identities are never dominant in spaces as bisexuals are often misread as being heterosexual or homosexual and, thus, invisible (hemmings 1997; see also mclean j 2003; mclean k 2007, 2008). she concludes that bisexuals occupy space within existing gay (and lesbian) and straight spaces; a conclusion which holds true in her theorising of sexual space as depending on a one-to-one link with the dominant sexual identity. similar to bell’s (1995) activist approach in challenging the placelessness of geographies of bisexualities (also binnie & valentine 1999), this paper is an attempt to critically revise conceptualisations of sexual space, and bisexual space in particular. this review article approaches bisexual spaces and bisexual geographies from a more theoretical point of view by reviewing the intersections of queer theory, queer space, bisexuality theory/theorising, and more-than-representational geographies. as such, this article wants to contribute to hemmings (1997) call for more coherent theorising of bisexual spaces. pioneering work by clare hemmings (2002), her book bisexual spaces, is understood as an excellent starting point for this paper as it successfully opens up questions on sexual spaces, bisexual spaces, and bisexuality. albeit my interest is mainly in the geographies of sexualities, which i read as the overarching field of queer geographies and lesbian and gay geografennia 193: 1 (2015) 149bisexuals in space and geography: more-than-queer? phies (but see browne 2006 for a different reading), i will elaborate on intersections with queer theory and queer space and discuss the usefulness of conceptualising bisexual spaces. in this paper i aim to bring forward a more theoretical relational approach to (bi)sexual space which challenges queer space and queer theory as i favour an approach which extends norms, values, and orthodoxies, instead of (only) transgressing heterosexual norms, values, and orthodoxies of contemporary society. the paper will firstly review queer space and the intersections of queer theory and bisexuality theory, before taking a more-than-representational approach to space and the everyday embodied experiences of sexual subjects. space (still) matters: queer space as well? south african sociologist smuts (2011) concluded in her research into coming out stories of lesbians in johannesburg: “[a]nother theme that was prominent in the participants' narratives was the importance of social space. the findings indicate that respondents' sexual identities were linked and influenced by the social spaces in which they found themselves. some stressed that certain spaces would determine which of their identities would emerge at particular points in time, and whether they would hide their sexual identities” (2011: 32−33; emphasis added). this conclusion regarding the intertwinedness of space and identity/identities resembles both geographical inquiries into the everyday lives of sexual minorities (e.g. bell et al. 1994; johnston & valentine 1995; myslik 1996; valentine 1996; kirby & hay 1999; kitchin & lysaght 2003; browne 2007) and geographical inquiries into affective atmospheres (e.g. anderson 2009; bissell 2010; duff 2010). space, or the sexual coding of space, impacts the sexual identity negotiations of sexual subjects as well as sexual identity negotiations influence the sexual coding of space. as such, they mutually enforce and/or challenge each other. but what about queer space? gay and lesbian geographies (e.g. adler & brenner 1992; forest 1995; rothenberg 1995; myslik 1996; sibalis 2004; knopp 2007; see also brown 2014) have been enriched by a queer geographical approach since the early nineties (e.g. bell et al. 1994; binnie 1997, 2007; brown 2000; brown et al 2007; knopp 2007). this queer geographical approach can be understood as a set of geographical adaptions of queer theoretical work. michael brown’s (2000) closet space provides the closest reading of the linguistic origins of queer theory, especially the speech-act theory which partly underlies butler’s (1990, 1993) foundational work on gender and sexuality. drawing on austin (1975: quoted in brown 2000), brown (2000: 29) elaborates on the point that “sometimes the spoken or written word doesn’t simply exist, but often performs some sort of task by virtue of its presence, audibly or textually". interesting is the elaboration on etiolatic speech acts; speech acts that neither fail nor succeed but “where meaning is produced in a context where language is being used in a very self-conscious way” (brown 2000: 29–30). the linguistic origins of queer theory are interesting as recent research suggests that language has a certain temporality and spatiality (blommaert et al. 2005). this can be linked with the queer theoretical emphasis on the performativity of certain heterosexual norms and orthodoxies (e.g. butler 1993), a concept which emphasises the constant repetition of certain acts, habits, and practices in order to naturalise certain norms and values as essential and part of human nature. as such, people will experience these heterosexual norms and values as natural and as a fact of life. although queer theory lacks notions of context, space, and place (brown 2000), (critical) geographers have tried to introduce queer theory in geographies of sexualities, and introduce notions of space and place in queer theory in order to carve out heteronormative and queer spaces. space is, also within queer geographies, often seen as naturally heterosexual (e.g. bell et al. 1994; brown 2000; visser 2008, 2013) and this space needs to be queered by sexual minorities (e.g. oswin 2008 for a critique; visser 2008). such queered spaces – or queer spaces – are dissident, loose, or transgressive spaces which provide non-heterosexuals with the opportunity to express their sexual identities as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer etcetera. as the myslik (1996) study shows, gay men found the freedom and safety to be gay and to perform their gay identity and lifestyle in these spaces. brown (2000) reiterates an encounter – “a little slice of urban life” (2000: 27) – in capitol hill, seattle when a camp gay man entered a bus and a heterosexual (opposite-sex) couple seemed to challenge the behaviour of the camp gay man. this urged the gay man to loudly state: “well if you don’t like it, girlfriend, what the hell you doin’ up 150 fennia 193: 1 (2015)emiel maliepaard on capitol hill in the first place!” (2000: 27; emphasis in the original). while i was, of course, not part of these encounters, the statement of the camp guy can be read as a "queer act" to resist heterosexuality and heteronormativity, and to claim queer space: capitol hill is queer. academically, as well as societally, we seem to identify spaces in binary and exclusive language: heterosexual versus gay/lesbian/queer space. important, reflexive, work on queer space has been done by oswin (2008) who observed that queer space is often seen, by critical geographers, as a “space of resistance” or a space which is inhabited by gay men, lesbian women, and/or queers. she continues by saying, “in the work of bell, binnie, valentine, and others queer space is thus established as a concrete space that is carved out by sexual dissidents (read: gays and lesbians)” (oswin 2008: 90; also browne & bakshi 2011). as such we can wonder to which extent queer geography succeeded in rendering space fluid, still one of the hallmarks of queer geographies (see browne 2006). in this work, queer spaces are not only seen as spaces of resistance, but also as spaces which are relatively free from the influences of heteronormativity and free of heterosexual people. wayne myslik (1996: 156) observed that according to “gay men who are at risk of prejudice, discrimination and physical and verbal violence throughout their daily lives (...) queer spaces are generally perceived as safe havens from this discrimination and violence”. myslik (1996: 168) concludes with the observation that “queer spaces create the strong sense of empowerment that allows men to look past the dangers of being gay in the city and to feel safe and at home”. such a conclusion resembles work on gay and lesbian spaces in which these spaces are often seen as liberal spaces. discussing the need for safe spaces for bisexuals, jo eadie (1993) argues that such spaces are needed for a number of reasons. in the first place, eadie argues that bisexuals need a space free from oppressive regimes and social groups. we can understand this as free from gay, lesbian, and straight communities and orthodoxies. this point indeed resembles much work on queer space and gay and lesbian geographies that tried to carve out safe havens for gay men and to a lesser extent lesbian women. a second reason is the need for bisexuals to share similar experiences and set agendas for bisexual activists; a very political reading of bisexual spaces which emphasises the importance of bisexual space to unite bisexuals, empower bisexuals, and pave the path for bisexual activists/activism. thirdly, and finally, eadie describes bisexual safe spaces as places free of fears and anxiety caused by members of oppressive groups. this third reason resembles, again, work on gay and lesbian spaces as liberal spaces and spaces of resistance. in short, we can understand that this call for bisexual safe spaces is relatively utopian and based upon similar assumptions as, for instance, the gay men in the myslik study. although i understand the political reasons behind the call for bisexual safe spaces, i doubt that such idealistic and utopian spaces would exist beyond the clear demarcated bisexual spaces as identified in early work by hemmings (1997). regarding nightlife spaces for sexual minorities youth, both valentine and skelton (2003) as well as holt and griffin (2003) refer to gay and lesbian nightlife as nightlife in which sexual minority youth can live (and explore) their sexual identity, free from everyday sexual identity negotiations and constraints in heterosexual life. it is interesting that both studies acknowledge that gay and lesbian nightlife also should be understood as loose and risky spaces where social pressure renders gay and lesbian youth uncertain. the paradoxal nature of the gay and lesbian scene, already, provides a critique towards the conceptualisations of queer space as demarcated “space of resistance” against heterosexism and heteronormativity which organises contemporary society and everyday public and private space (see also johnston & valentine 1995; duncan 1996). oswin (2008), discussing the nash and bain (2007) article on toronto queer spaces, points out that multiple processes of exclusion are in play in everyday spaces. power is everywhere and is negotiated in everyday encounters between people (and non-human entities). of course, not only sexual identities are negotiated, processes of racism, ageism, sexism, class-discrimination, and genderism, amongst others, should not be forgotten. a review by johnston and longhurst (2008) comes to a similar conclusion and criticised anglo-american studies into sexuality for its narrow focus on sexuality. they argue that work on sexuality in australia, new zealand, and the asia-pacific region “doesn’t just pay attention to sexuality, but rather to the intersections between sexuality, postcoloniality, indigeneity, ‘race’, and racism” (johnston & longhurst 2008: 251–252). from the united kingdom, gill valentine (2007) shows how different social categories intersect in multiple stories fennia 193: 1 (2015) 151bisexuals in space and geography: more-than-queer? in the life of a d/deaf lesbian woman and how she experienced multiple forms of exclusion in her everyday life. also several studies on the gay scene show that sexual minority people are excluded in certain spaces (e.g. hemmings 2002; binnie & skeggs 2004; bassi 2006; mclean k 2008; brown 2009). regarding gaybourhoods it has been noted that such spaces are often male dominated and predominantly ‘white’ (brown 2014). angloamerican work on queer space, thus, could be criticised on the basis of its narrow focus on gay and lesbian identities in a heteronormative world, without taken into account other sexual identities and other kinds of exclusion which affects the life of sexual minorities too. queer theory and bisexuality: mismatch? “yet, as an effect of modernity, sexuality is far from being objective or scientific. indeed, it is predicated on western definitions of love, which, in its romantic and erotic expressions, is thereby considered “superior” when it is exclusive. that is, western “love” often relies on the imposition of a binary: we think of the lover and the beloved, the pursuer and the pursued, single or married, the man and the wife and the male and the female” (anderlini-d’onofrio & alexander 2009: 198). a special issue of the journal of bisexuality (see anderlini-d’onofrio & alexander 2009) is dedicated to the intersections, connections and discussions between queer theory and bisexual theory and theorising. of course, it should be said that bisexual theory and theorising is relatively new (angelides 2006) and often assumed to be rather weak (de plessis 1996). the conclusions of this collection are, nevertheless, quite straightforward. it is observed that queer theory ignored, and continues to ignore, issues of bisexuality and bisexual identities (callis 2009; erickson-schroth & mitchell 2009; gurevich et al. 2009). the reason for this ignorance is found in the way that queer theories benefit certain sexual identities, in particular gay identities (see yoshino 2000; angelides 2006; callis 2009; erickson-schroth & mitchell 2009; gurevich et al 2009). erickson-schroth and mitchell (2009) go one step further by arguing that homosexuality is prioritised and privileged to a level similar to the institutionalisation of heterosexuality or heteronormativity. building upon the erase of bisexuality (yoshino 2000) the authors argue that there might be a compromise between the heterosexual and homosexual/lesbian community, that both communities do not mention bisexuality in order to erase the existence of a sexual identity that falls outside the binary division of sex, gender, and sexuality. while i think that this is perhaps too radical, the concept of (compulsory) monosexuality or monosexism is very useful as it identifies a social ideology that one-to-one links sexual activities/performances with sexual identities (e.g. ault 1996; james 1996; hemmings 2002; gurevich et al. 2009; green et al 2010). sexual performances and activities with someone from the opposite sex leads to the conclusion that someone is heterosexual, while activities with someone from the same sex lead to the conclusion that someone is gay or lesbian. bisexuality, as sexual identity which is not limited to a person of one sex or gender, is thus made invisible and non-existing. interestingly, james (1996) understands monosexism or compulsory monosexuality as essential part of the heterosexist or heteronormative system that polices our desires. the concept of monosexuality is a useful analytical tool and a constant reminder of the privilege of certain types of heterosexuality and homosexuality in our society. the special issue of the journal of bisexuality, a couple of years later published in the book bisexuality and queer theory (alexander & anderlinid’onofrio 2012), also discusses the added value of bisexual theory to enrich queer theory via several different perspectives. interesting is the article by callis (2009) who discusses the seminal work of foucault (1978) and butler (1990). the discussion on butler is particularly interesting as bisexuality is often seen as a sexual identity – if already authentic – which enforces the binary system of sex, gender, and sexualities as it represents the middle ground (see hemmings 2002; lingel 2009). work by fritz klein and alfred kinsey – albeit they both incorporate bisexuality – considers bisexuality as the middle ground between heterosexuality and homosexuality as such work still relies on the sex binary, gender binary, and the rigid link between gender and sexual identity. in fact, “even the term bi-sexual denotes that the person who identifies with this term is attracted to two different things, reinforcing the gender binary, and also excluding transgender and intersex people as objects of affection” (erickson-schroth & mitchell 2009: 304). steven angelides (2006), building upon his book a history of bisexuality (angelides 152 fennia 193: 1 (2015)emiel maliepaard 2001), argues that “in the history of discourses of sexuality bisexuality is both the stabilising and destabilising element in the epistemic construction of sexual identity; its erasure in the present tense stabilises the hetero/homosexual opposition whilst simultaneously and perpetually destabilising the very terms of the opposition” (angelides 2006: 142). angelides (2006: 142) continues to argue that bisexuality “has been the category through and against which modern sexual identity itself has been discursively constructed”. callis (2009: 227–228) criticises queer theory as she observes that “[judith] butler does not address bisexuality in her arguments about the interconnectedness of sexuality and gender, nor in her section on the performative nature of gender (…). when addressing gender performativity, she turns specifically to the process of drag. however, i believe that bisexuality, taken as an identity, serves as a way of starting gender trouble”. butler prefers to discuss homosexuality and especially lesbian identities when discussing the assumed interconnection between sexuality and gender. it seems that butler fell in the monosexual trap when challenging heteronormativity and the constant repetition of heterosexual norms, values, and orthodoxies. callis (2009: 228), however, discusses the potential of including bisexuality in queer theoretical discussions to deconstruct the link between gender and sexual identity by arguing that “bisexuality (…) cannot be so easily matched, because it does not allow gender to be wholly tied with sex object choice. if a person is choosing both sexes as erotic partners, her or his gender cannot be matched with sexuality”. thus, callis approaches queer theory as being a contemporary result of constantly being embedded in heteronormative and monosexual thinking (see also du plessis 1996). next, callis (2009) argues that the bisexual’s choice for both men and women challenges notions of femininity and masculinity as this option, again, is not present in our perception of femininity and masculinity. while butler focusses on drag performances to address gender roles, focussing on bisexuals’ negotiating and changing gender roles in everyday life could be fruitful to challenge the rigid distinction between man/woman, male/female, and masculinity/femininity. to summarise, bisexuality has the option to both cause “gender trouble” and question the interconnection between sexuality and gender; thus it has the potential to challenge the compulsory monosexuality and heteronormative discourse that governs contemporary sexual politics, desire, and society. a similar conclusion can be found in ericksonschroth and mitchell (2009) who argue that bisexuality has not only the option to question the monosexual social ideology of sexuality but also question and destabilise the heterosexist binary system of sex, gender, and sexualities in general. as such, the authors hope that merging bisexual theory and queer theory would result in a shift from a monosexual paradigm towards a more open-ended paradigm. not surprisingly they conclude that “by focusing on the relationship between homosexuality and heterosexuality, queer theory has stopped short of addressing the structures of power that underlie our organization of sexuality—something bisexuality speaks to on a daily basis” (erickson-schroth & mitchell 2009: 312–313). angelides (2006), however, warns that queer theory is too busy with reinforcing the heterosexual/homosexual binary, by focussing on (homosexual and heterosexual) identities, instead of focussing on the historical and epistemological forces that constructed and still construct the binary discourse of sexualities. erickson-schroth and mitchell (2009) are not the only ones who identify an added value of bisexuality for queer theory or, broader, sexualities research. gurevich et al. (2009) touch upon another important added value of bisexuality theory or research: knowledge production regarding sexual subjects. they argue that “in considering how sexualities are theorised, examining the bisexual frame can expand the domain of questions that address how knowledge about sexual subjects is produced, disseminated and regulated, and how sexual subject positions are taken up, deployed, or rejected” (gurevich et al. 2009: 247). this could be read as addressing the dominant heterosexist and monosexist system, but also as a focus on the concrete impacts of this system on how sexual subjects negotiate this system. the authors take this argument further by arguing – based on sociologist and queer theorist seidman – that the basis of queer theory is on exploring how the heterosexual/homosexual boundary as a power/knowledge regime shapes behaviour, social institutions, and the everyday social environment. this suggested focus on how life takes shape as a spatial and temporal result of the compulsory monosexual heterosexist system could be understood as a call to geographers and other social scientists to engage with the everyday – and embodied – experiences of bisexual sexual subjects. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 153bisexuals in space and geography: more-than-queer? geographical inquiries taking up the above mentioned observations by gurevich et al. (2009) and angelides (2006) regarding knowledge production, i am convinced that geographers can contribute to knowledge production by focussing on the everyday lives of bisexuals. unfortunately, contemporary empirical geographical research on this topic is lacking (but see mclean j 2003) which requires us to focus upon other social sciences for empirical studies. one of the rare –but important – studies is conducted by hemmings (2002) who explored bisexual spaces based upon her own experiences in the usa and the uk. building upon gay and lesbian geographies, she provides the reader with a cartography of bisexuality. in essence, her argumentation that space is representation makes it difficult to identify bisexual spaces seeing the difficulties of bisexual representation in word and visuals (bereket & brayton 2008; hartman 2013). derived from epistemological concerns, hemmings (2002) provides a number of examples regarding bisexual spaces; the point is that these spaces are defined on their relation with gay, lesbian, and straight spaces. a quite similar study, although related to communities instead of spaces, has been conducted in the usa (rust 2000) which, interestingly, provides mental maps of bisexuals how they relate bisexual communities with straight, lesbian, and gay communities. the point is, however, that bisexual communities are rather difficult to identify. i think that bisexual spaces, as conceptualised via relating with gay, lesbian, and straight spaces would face the same difficulty. not surprisingly, hemmings (2002) concludes that spatial theorising and bisexual theory do not always sit comfortable with each other. i would like to add that especially the one-to-one link between sexual space and dominant sexual identity makes it more difficult to explore bisexual spaces. the emphasis on spaces as representations adds, in my opinion, to the difficulty of identifying bisexual spaces as bisexuality is often erased or made invisible because of the dominant monosexual discourse in contemporary society. i, also, find geographical inspiration in morethan-representational geographies (e.g. lorimer 2005, 2008; laurier & philo 2006; thrift 2007; anderson & harrison 2010a; laurier 2010; ) to focus on knowledge production regarding the heterosexual/homosexual binary, gender binaries, and monosexuality. especially work by david crouch on allotment gardening and caravanning – quite far away from the field of sex, gender, and sexualities – is inspirational and insightful for proposing an alternative approach to sexual space, sexual identity negotiations, and embodied experiences in everyday public and private space. crouch (2003: 1945) seeks “to bring the discussion of space closer to a practical realisation of performativity and explore the potential of the individual to reconstitute life through an articulation of spacing”. the concept of ‘spacing’ is used “to identify subjective and practical ways in which the individual handles his or her material surroundings. spacing is positioned in terms of action, making sense (including the refiguring of “given space”), and mechanisms of opening up possibilities” (crouch 2003: 1945). thus, spacing can be understood as the actions taken as response to the embodied and sensory experiences of mundane activities. people make sense of everyday encounters and events through the body (e.g. hetherington 2003; mccormack 2003; macpherson 2009; middleton 2010; nayak 2010). crouch (2001) argues that the human body does not only make sense of space by sensory and embodied experiences, but also by doing he defines this as feeling-by-doing (also harrison 2000; crouch 2001; anderson & harrison 2010b). this concept shows that the embodied practice or performance itself, the doing, is the basic modus of experiencing everyday life. in the words of hayden lorimer (2005: 84) when describing the focus of more-than-representational theories: “the focus falls on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions”. while i agree with lorimer (2005) to focus upon seemingly insignificant encounters, and the doing in these kind of encounters, i would like to add a focus on the encounters between two or more bodies in which surprise, tension, or conflict is present (see sara ahmed 2000). such remarkable encounters might be less abundant, but definitely have an impact on the embodied and sensory experiences of people. geographies of sexualities always focused on the human body in space, however, only a limited number of studies focussed on the intersections of geographies of sexualities and more-than-representational geographies (e.g. lim 2007; brown 154 fennia 193: 1 (2015)emiel maliepaard 2008). for instance, gavin brown’s (2008: 929) inspirational analysis of cruising in public toilets in several parts of london shows the importance of the human body in the experience of the cruising practice: “the affective cruising encounters witnessed in this paper exceed the limits and expectations placed on bodies by preconceived understandings of sexuality and sexual identities”. the human body, the sexualised human body, has the potential to perform many roles in everyday space and these performances are continuously negotiated in practices and encounters. as brown shows, the body tries to make sense of the material surroundings – “ceramics of a urinal, the clothing men wear, the grass and the ivy in a cemetery, the midges on the common at dusk, amyl nitrate, or the aroma of stale sweat and urine” (brown 2008: 929) – and open up possibilities for affective sexual cruising encounters. although i do not want to posit that sexual space is the only space in which the practice of sex and sexualities are performed, this paper clearly shows how the cultural values and contexts influence the embodied and affective experiences of the men cruising, but not more than the material surroundings do. regarding identities, crouch (2003: 1958; emphasis added) argues that: “identities may be characterised in practice and performativity, and then negotiated in contexts. through our bodies we expressively perform who we are. the fluidity and openness of performativity may be used to refigure identities, working alongside (other) contexts”. identities are negotiated and formed in practices and performed through the human body. crouch explains contexts as social categories or attributes such as gender or culture/cultural values. these contexts come together in an encounter or practice, however we should be careful by prioritising certain contexts over others. of course, we need to take into account the above described heterosexual/homosexual binary, monosexuality, as well as the sex and gender binaries in geographies of sexualities when studying the everyday life experiences and sexual identity negotiations of bisexuals, and other sexual minority groups. the point is, however, that such processes of monosexuality and binary thinking, or ‘contexts’, are not all determining in doing bisexuality. the focus on bisexual bodies could provide insight into the personal experiences of bisexuals and their negotiations of the different contexts. how do these contexts contribute to the affirmation, negation, or (more neutral) the negotiation of bisexuality and bisexual identities? in essence, how do bisexual bodies make sense of their material and social surroundings? before-mentioned work on affective atmospheres (anderson 2009; bissell 2010; duff 2010) discusses how identities are influenced by space. inspired by more-than-representational geographies i posit that spaces are “temporal-spatial stabilisations of social (including linguistic) practices”. extrapolating from this working definition, sexual spaces are, thus, temporal-spatial stabilisations of social and sexual practices. following this, i build upon crouch (2001: 69) who argues that “through activities and dispositions, touch and movement, it is possible to express feeling, subjectivity, and unique personality that endow spaces with particular value”. the body is, then, the means to express the “emotional relationship with – and in – its immediate surrounding world” (crouch 2001: 69). bodies are influenced by space, but also have an impact on the coding of space via activities and dispositions, touch and movement. identifying bisexual practices and bisexual spaces, thus, is an important exercise to understand the production, reproduction, negotiations, and contestations of sexual space and bisexuality as sexual identity. a way forwards: focus on mundane spaces and practices as stated by erickson-schroth and mitchell (2009: 312), “homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality are categories based on the sex or gender of those to whom an individual is attracted. although this system is convenient, it is by no means selfevident”. this quote inspires me in two ways. firstly, it acknowledges that sexual identity categories – heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual – do exist and are often convenient in everyday lives. we, society, need these categories as it provides guidelines for identification, as much as many bisexuals reject labels and embrace a society without ‘boxes’. angelides (2006: 152) argued that, “it is important to reiterate (…) that to argue that each of these terms are meaningful only in relation to the other two – that is, that each requires the other two for its self-definition – is not to argue that these terms are somehow truthful reflections of individual sexualities” (see also oswin 2008; gurevich et al. 2009). the second point is, of course, that the system is by no means self-evident, a conclusion fennia 193: 1 (2015) 155bisexuals in space and geography: more-than-queer? which speaks for itself and asks for thorough investigation of the position of sexual minorities – but also of heterosexuals, their everyday life experiences, and how they deal with heteronormativity (see also philips 2006; hubbard 2008) and monosexuality. while the adjective “queer” is defined as an attitude to challenge existing binaries of sex, gender, sexualities, and space, and render these categories fluid (e.g. browne 2006) – i would like to reconsider the use of queer theory and queer geography, shift away from queer space, and focus upon a more-than-representational inspired approach to understanding sex, gender, and sexualities in space. relational theories of sexual identity, sexual identity politics, need relational theories of space to understand how sexual identity politics are played out in everyday urban and rural lives. nathalie oswin (2008: 92) observes that “sexual identity politics is frequently about recognizing or accepting the ‘other’. it is about extending the norm, not transgressing or challenging it”. i agree with this observation and the aim to extend norms, however, to include bisexuality in sexual identity politics and sexual citizenship discussions we need to address the binary system of sexual identities (heterosexual/homosexual). only when addressing the binary system and the monosexual logic underlying the system, bisexuality can be included in contemporary sexual politics, sexual citizenship, and society. in other words: “hence, the bisexual ‘real’ is a discursive context where the nature of love changes from an exclusive, dyadic system to an inclusive one that expands beyond the dual and into the multiple” (anderlinid’onofrio & alexander 2009: 198). translating the deconstructing task for social scientists in the field of sex, gender, and sexualities into practice, especially within the field of geographies, i propose an approach to focus upon the everyday mundane activities and embodied practices and experiences. this approach should not been seen as replacing existing foci, but as an addition to the existing foci in the geographies of sexualities. in fact, there are many other challenges such as the demise of the gaybourhood (e.g. brown 2014) or a new mobilities paradigm to explore lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (gbtq lives in the city (nash & gorman-murray 2014) which have added value for (geographical) research into bisexualities and deconstructing the binary system of sex, gender, and sexualities. these foci have much to offer too, such as questions how bisexuals and others who do not identify with homonormative gay and lesbian identities experience living in such, often commodified, gay enclaves or questions related to motives why (not) living in such enclaves. the incorporation of the new mobilities paradigm reminds us to focus on concrete mobilities (and practices) “that constitute flows, patterns, and linkages amongst and between place, creating constantly reformulating relational geographies” (nash & gorman-murray 2014: 762). informed by more-than-representational theories, queer theories, bisexual theory, and the before-mentioned speech-act theory, i propose an approach that focusses on the everyday negotiations of bisexual subjects to do or not to do their bisexuality/sexual identity. keeping in mind the concept of feeling-by-doing and thoughtin-action, we need to understand how people act in certain encounters, and spaces, and why they act/perform the way they act/perform. in my opinion, to focus upon mundane social and sexual practices might shed light on the processes which construct and sustain the binary system on a day to day basis as it provides insight in politics and power relations that construct but also are constructed by these encounters. to understand these processes, it is important to look at the human bodies as well as the material surroundings which bisexuals encounter during their embodied everyday practices. based on the klein sexual orientation grid (e.g. klein et al. 1985), bisexual practices can be identified as attraction to both men and women, sexual behaviour with men and women, and thirdly sexual fantasies about men and women. self-identification (being, feeling bisexual) can be added as another important bisexual practice. i would like to follow recent bisexual scholarship which complicates this conceptualisation of bisexual practices by replacing “men and women” by “more-than-one gender” as the current definition of bisexual practices is too narrow to match bisexual realities (e.g. halperin 2009; barker et al. 2012). indeed, people who are bisexual often look beyond categories of men and women regarding attraction, sexual behaviour, and sexual fantasies. regarding self-identification, and i would like to add self-realisation and self-expression (see richardson 2000), i propose a focus on language as language is not only representation, it is also a way of doing and daily practices. language is a way of doing (and not doing) and performing (and not performing) sex, gender, and/or sexual identities. as such we can incorporate du 156 fennia 193: 1 (2015)emiel maliepaard plessis’ (1996) suggestion that focussing on not doing bisexuality, or the negation of bisexuality, or passing as heterosexual/gay/lesbian might shed more light on how bisexual subjects position themselves in a society based upon compulsory monosexuality and how bisexual subjects are impacted by processes of monosexuality. instead of a historical and epistemological approach, the here proposed approach focusses on the present – without forgetting the past: “memory is vital, as past (virtual) and present (actual) coexist, pushing forward in duration, the dynamic continuation of movement and sensation” (mchugh 2009: 209). while this argument focusses on the individual, the case has been made that also communities evolve through the gradual alteration of shared memories and practices – including communicative registers and routines (lehtinen 2011). finally, to conceptualise bisexual spaces as spatial-temporal stabilisations of bisexual social (including linguistic) and sexual practices is not only helpful to deconstruct the functioning of the binary system of sexualities (and sex and gender), it is also helpful to identify bisexual homes and perhaps even safe havens. as stated before, hemmings (1997) argued that specific demarcated bisexual spaces do not exist besides some conference spaces and support groups, which implies that bisexuality has no presence and no home. again, like the myslik (1996) study, home is translated as a space where someone is able to be oneself. i suggest, however, that bisexual spaces and homes exist in many everyday social and sexual practices – in sexy as well as in unsexy spaces (see phillips 2006; hubbard 2008; caudwell & browne 2011). concluding remarks it serves an academic and societal interest to identify bisexual spaces and articulate their existence seeing the interdependence of identities, identity negotiations, and spaces. not in the last place because studies on the lived experiences of bisexuals – or people who desire more-than-one gender – are limited in number. awareness of this interdependence might contribute to the self-identification, self-realisation, and self-expression of bisexuals’ sexual identity/identities. identifying bisexual spaces might also stress the temporality of the sexual coding of spaces which serves a wider value, beyond the bisexual community. recognising that different contexts impact the embodied practice and experience of everyday routines and habitual activities, also provides a temporal answer to the critique of oswin (2008) that not only sex, gender, or sexualities is in play but also other categories such as class, race, and ethnicity. work on queer theory failed to incorporate bisexual theories and bisexual realities, whereas queer space failed to go beyond notions of gay (and lesbian) space. in fact, it seems that queer theory only addresses and challenges heteronormativity as context and process that impacts the sexual coding of spaces and lived experiences of lesbians and gay men, instead of extending norms and incorporating other sexual minorities. nevertheless, work on performativity is important and influences my thoughts about bisexual space. work on queer space is important as it, theoretically, reiterates the fluidity of sex, gender, sexualities, and space. work on heteronormativity and monosexuality is relevant; however, i believe that the basic mode of experiencing life is the embodied and sensuous experience of the very mundane practices (and mobilities) in everyday spaces. heteronormativity and monosexuality are indeed two important contexts, but not all determining in the everyday embodied experiences and practices of bisexuals. a longitudinal study from finland shows, for instance, that the legal and cultural changes (e.g. the alleged increase in tolerance) in finland regarding sexual minorities impacted the embodied experiences of finnish bisexuals, however not to the same degree for all interviewees (kangasvuo 2011). the story of jonna, one of the interviewees, shows how the workplace, work environment, social environment, and internal confusion regarding sexual attraction (and identity) interact with each other and make up the daily experiences of this interviewee; the impact of legal and cultural changes seem to be rather limited in the story of jonna. language plays an important role – from a speech-act theory point of view (see brown 2000) – in experiencing life and making sense of everyday life; language does (doing-by-saying) and provides or produces meaning. such an emphasis on language is not incompatible with an emphasis on the embodied practice and embodied experiences of bisexual individuals – bisexual bodies (see also de plessis 1996) and communities. the (sexualised) body communicates, in relation with different contexts, and makes sense of everyday life via the senses, gestures, actions, body language, and language itself. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 157bisexuals in space and geography: more-than-queer? references adler s & brenner j 1992. gender and space: lesbians and gay men in the city. international journal of urban and regional research 16: 1, 24−34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1992.tb00463.x. ahmed s 2000. strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. routledge, london. alexander j & anderlini-d’onofrio s 2012. bisexuality and queer theory: intersections, connections, and challenges. routledge, abingdon. anderlini-d’onofrio s & alexander j 2009. introduction to the special issue: bisexuality and queer theory: intersections, diversions, and connections. journal of bisexuality 9: 3−4, 197−212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316489. anderson b 2009. affective atmospheres. emotion, space and society 2: 2, 77−81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005. anderson b & harrison p 2010a. taking-place non-representational theories and geography. ashgate, farnham. anderson b & harrison p 2010b. the promise of non‐ representational theories. in anderson b & harrison p (eds). taking-place non-representational theories and geography, 1−34. ashgate, farnham. angelides s 2001. a history of bisexuality. university of chicago press, chicago. angelides s 2006. historicizing (bi)sexuality. journal of homosexuality 52: 1−2, 125−158. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/j082v52n01_06. barker m, yockney j, richards j , jones r, bowes-catton h & plowman t 2012. guidelines for researching and writing about bisexuality. journal of bisexuality 12: 3, 376−392. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2012.702618. bassi d 2006. riding the dialectical wares of gay political economy: a story from birmingham’s commercial gay scene. antipode 38, 213–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2006.00577.x. bell d 1995. bi-sexuality – a place on the margins. in whittle s (ed). the margins of the city: gay men’s urban lives, 129−141. ashgate, aldershot. bell d, binnie j, cream j & valentine g 1994. all hyped up and no place to go. gender place and culture 1: 1, 31−47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09663699408721199. bereket t & brayton j 2008. “bi” no means: bisexuality and the influence of binarism on identity. journal of bisexuality 8: 1−2, 51−61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710802142234. binnie j 1997. coming out of geography: towards a queer epistemology? environment and planning d: society and space 15: 2, 223−237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d150223. binnie j 2007. sexuality, the erotic and geography: epistemology, methodology and pedagogy. in browne k, lim j & brown g (eds). geographies of sexualities: theory, practices and politics, 29−38. ashgate, aldershot. binnie j & skeggs b 2004. cosmopolitan knowledge and the production and consumption of sexualized space: manchester’s gay village. the sociological review 52, 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2004.00441.x. binnie j & valentine g 1999. geographies of sexuality – a review of progress. progress in human geography 2: 2, 175−187. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030913259902300202. bissell d 2010. passenger mobilities: affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport. environment and planning d: society and space 28: 2, 270−289. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d3909. blommaert j, collins j & slembrouck s 2005. spaces of multilingualism. language and communication 25, 197−216. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2005.05.002. bowes-catton h, barker b & richards c 2011. ‘i didn’t know that i could feel this relaxed in my body’: using visual methods to research bisexual people’s embodied experiences of identity and space. in reavey p (ed). visual methods in psychology: using and interpreting images in qualitative research, 255−270. routledge, london. brown g 2008. ceramics, clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters. social and cultural geography 9: 8, 915−932. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802441457. brown g 2009. thinking beyond homonormativity: performative explorations of diverse gay economies. environment and planning a 41: 6, 1496−1510. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a4162. brown g, browne k & lim j 2007. introduction, or why have a book on geographies of sexualities. in browne k, lim j & brown g (eds). geographies of sexualities: theory, practices and politics, 1−18. ashgate, aldershot. brown m 2000. closet space: geographies of metaphor from the body to the globe. routledge, london. brown m 2014. gender and sexuality ii: there goes the gayborhood? progress in human geography 38: 3, 457−465. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132513484215. browne k 2006. challenging queer geographies. antipode 38: 5, 885−893. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2006.00483.x. browne k 2007. (re)making the other, heterosexualising everyday space. environment and planning a 39: 4, 996−1014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a38165. browne k & bakshi l 2011. we are here to party? lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans leisurescapes beyond commercial gay scenes. leisure studies 30: 2, 179−196. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2010.506651. butler j 1990. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. routledge, london. butler j 1993. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. routledge, london. callis as 2009. playing with butler and foucault: bisexuality and queer theory. journal of bisexuality 9: 3−4, 213−233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316513. caudwell j & browne k 2011. sexy spaces: geography and leisure intersectionalities. leisure studies 30: 2, 117−122. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2011.561977. crouch d 2001. spatialities and the feeling of doing. social and cultural geography 2: 1, 61−75. 158 fennia 193: 1 (2015)emiel maliepaard http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360020028276. crouch d 2003. spacing, performing, and becoming: tangles in the mundane. environment and planning a 35: 11, 1945−1960. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a3585. duff c 2010. on the role of affect and practice in the production of space. environment and planning d: society and space 28: 5, 881−895. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d16209. duncan n 1996. renegotiating gender and sexuality in public and private spaces. in duncan n (ed). bodyspace: destabilising geographies of gender and sex, 127−145. routledge, london. du plesses m 1996. blatantly bisexual; or, unthinking queer theory. in hall de & pramaggiore m (eds). representing bisexualities: subjects and cultures of fluid desire, 19−54. new york university press, new york. eadie j 1993. activating bisexuality: towards a bi/sexual politics. in bristow j & wilson ar (eds). activating theory: lesbian, gay, bisexual politics, 31−46. lawrence & wishart, london. erickson-schroth l & mitchell j 2009. queering queer theory, or why bisexuality matters. journal of bisexuality 9: 3−4, 297−315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316596. forrest b 1995. west hollywood as symbol: the significance of place in the construction of a gay identity. environment and planning d: society and space 13: 2, 133−157. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d130133. foucault m 1978. the history of sexuality: volume one. vintage books, new york. gurevich m, bailey h & bower j 2009. querying theory and politics: the epistemic (dis)location of bisexuality within queer theory. journal of bisexuality 9: 3−4, 235−257. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316539. halperin d 2009. thirteen ways of looking at a bisexual. journal of bisexuality 9: 3−4, 451−455. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316679. harrison p 2000. making sense: embodiment and the sensibilities of the everyday. environment and planning d: society and space 18: 4, 497−517. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d195t. hartman je 2013. creating a bisexual display: making bisexuality visible. journal of bisexuality 13: 1, 39−62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2013.755727. hemmings c 1997. from landmarks to spaces: mapping the territory of a bisexual geneaology. in ingram gb, bouthillette a & retter y (eds). queers in space: communities, public spaces, sites of resistance, 147−162. bay press, seattle. hemmings c 2002. bisexual spaces: a geography of gender and sexuality. london, routledge. hetherington k 2003. spatial textures: place, touch, and praesentia. environment and planning a 35: 11, 1933−1944. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a3583. holt m & griffin c 2003. being gay, being straight, and being yourself: local and global reflections on identity, authenticity, and the lesbian and gay scene. european journal of cultural studies 6: 3, 404−425. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13675494030063008. hubbard p 2008. here, there, everywhere: the ubiquitous geographies of heteronormativity. geography compass 2: 3, 640−658. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00096.x. james c 1996. dismissal and appropriation of bisexuality in queer, lesbian, and gay theory. in beemyn b & liason m (eds). queer studies: a lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender anthology, 217−240. new york university press, new york. johnston l & longhurst r 2008. queer(ing) geographies ‘down under’: some notes on sexuality and space in australasia. australian geographer 39: 3, 247−257. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049180802270457. johnston l & valentine g 1995. wherever i lay my girlfriend, that’s my home: the performance and surveillance of lesbian identities in domestic environments. in bell d & valentine g (eds). mapping desire: geographies of sexualities, 8−103. routledge, london. kangasvuo j 2011. “there has been no phase in my life when i wasn't somehow bisexual”: comparing the experiences of finnish bisexuals in 1999 and 2010. journal of bisexuality 11: 2−3, 271−289. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299716.2011.571989. kirby s & hay i 1997. (hetero)sexing space: gay men and straight space in adelaide, south australia. the professional geographer 49: 3, 295−305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00078. kitchin r & lysaght k 2003. heterosexism and the geographies of everyday life in belfast, northern ireland. environment and planning a 35: 3, 489−510. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a3538. klein f, sepekoff b & wolff t 1985. sexual orientation: a multi-variable dynamic process. journal of homosexuality 11: 1−2, 35−49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/j082v11n01_04. knopp l 2007. from lesbian and gay to queer geographies: past, prospects and possibilities. in browne k, lim j & brown g (eds). geographies of sexualities: theory, practices and politics, 21−28. ashgate, aldershot. laurier e 2010. representation and everyday use: how to feel things with words. in anderson b & harrison p (eds). taking-place non-representational theories and geography, 131−146. ashgate, farnham. laurier e & philo c 2006. possible geographies: a passing encounter in a café. area 38: 4, 353−363. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2006.00712.x. lehtinen aa 2011. from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi ‘geographs’ and the promise of concentric geographies. fennia 189: 2, 14−30. lim j 2007. queer critique and the politics of affect. in browne k, lim j & brown g (eds). geographies of sexualities: theory, practices and politics, 53−68. ashgate, aldershot. lingel j 2009. adjusting the borders: bisexual passing and queer theory. journal of bisexuality 9: 3−4, 381−405. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710903316646. lorimer h 2005. cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’. progress in human geography 29: 1, 83−94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph531pr. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 159bisexuals in space and geography: more-than-queer? lorimer h 2008. cultural geography: non-representational conditions and concerns. progress in human geography 32: 4, 551−559. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132507086882. macpherson h 2009. the intercorporeal emergence of landscape: negotiating sight, blindness, and ideas of landscape in the british countryside. environment and planning a 41: 5, 1042−1054. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a40365. mccormack dp 2003. an event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. transactions of the institute of british geographers 28: 4, 488−507. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.2003.00106.x. mchugh ke 2010. movement, memory, landscape: an excursion in non-representational thought. geojournal 74, 209−218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9222-0. mclean j 2003. daily desires: everyday geographies of bisexual men. simon fraser university, burnaby. mclean k 2007. hiding in the closet? bisexuals, coming out and the disclosure imperative. journal of sociology 43: 2, 151-166. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1440783307076893. mclean k 2008. inside, outside, nowhere: bisexual men and women in the gay and lesbian community. journal of bisexuality 8: 1−2, 63−80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710802143174. middleton j 2010. sense and the city: exploring the embodied geographies of urban walking. social and cultural geography 11: 6, 575−596. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2010.497913. myslik wd 1996. renegotiating the social/sexual identities of places: gay communities as safe havens or sites of resistance? in duncan n (ed). bodyspace: destabilising geographies of gender and sex, 155−168. routledge, london. nash cj & bain a 2007. 'reclaiming raunch'? spatializing queer identities at toronto women's bathhouse events. social and cultural geography 8: 1, 47−62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360701251809. nash cj & gorman-murray a 2014. lgbt neighbourhoods and ‘new mobilities’: towards understanding transformations in sexual and gendered urban landscapes. international journal of urban and regional research 38: 3, 756−772. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12104. nayak a 2010. race, affect, and emotion: young people, racism, and graffiti in the postcolonial english suburbs. environment and planning a 42: 10, 2370−2392. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a42177. oswin n 2008. critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space. progress in human geography 32: 1, 89−103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132507085213. pennington s 2009. bisexuals “doing gender” in romantic relationships. journal of bisexuality 9: 1, 33−69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15299710802660029. phillips r 2006. heterosexuality, respectability and the travellers' aid society. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 5: 2, 163−190. richardson d 2000. constructing sexual citizenship: theorizing sexual rights. critical social policy 20: 1, 105−135. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/026101830002000105. rothenberg t 1995. and she told two friends: lesbians creating urban space. in bell d & valentine g (eds). mapping desire: geographies of sexualities, 165−181. routledge, london. rust p 2000. make me a map. journal of bisexuality 1: 2−3, 47−108 http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/j159v01n02_03. sedgwick ek 1990. epistemology of the closet. university of california press, berkeley. sibalis m 2004. urban space and homosexuality: the example of the marais, paris’ “gay ghetto”. urban studies 41: 9, 1739−1758. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0042098042000243138. smuts l 2011. coming out as a lesbian in johannesburg, south africa: considering intersecting identities and social spaces. south african review of sociology 42: 3, 23−40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2011.621231. thrift n 2007. non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. routledge, london. valentine g 1996. (re)negotiating the ‘heterosexual street’: lesbian productions of space. in duncan n (ed). bodyspace: destabilising geographies of gender and sex, 145−154. routledge, london. valentine g 2007. theorizing and researching intersectionality: a challenge for feminist geography. the professional geographer 59: 1, 10−21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9272.2007.00587.x. valentine g & skelton t 2003. finding oneself, losing oneself: the lesbian and gay `scene' as a paradoxical space. international journal of urban and regional research 27: 4, 849−866. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2003.00487.x. visser g 2008. the homonormalisation of white heterosexual leisure spaces in bloemfontein, south africa. geoforum 39: 3, 1347−1361. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.11.004. visser g 2013. challenging the gay ghetto in south africa: time to move on? geoforum 49, 268−274. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.12.013. yoshino k 2000. the epistemic contract of bisexual erasure. stanford law review 52, 353−461. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1229482. welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70999 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70999 reflections welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill matthew sparke sparke, m. (2018) welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 215–219. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 this article argues that geographies of welcome complicate simple binary oppositions between fully enfranchised citizenship and what is often theorized as the ‘bare life’ of refugee rejection in ‘spaces of exception’. ranging from sanctuary cities and squats to clinics, classrooms, kitchens and gardens, spaces of welcome instead offer islands of limited enfranchisement, agency and hope amidst seas of sub-citizenship, subjugation and fear. the concept of sub-citizenship can be used thus to elucidate how welcome and its suppression create a spectrum of intermediate experiences between the abstract poles of biopolitical belonging and necropolitical rejection. geographies of welcome thereby become legible as in-between spaces in which the damage done by the suppression of welcome is contested and countered, however incompletely. keywords: migration, refugees, sanctuary, sub-citizenship, biopolitics matthew sparke, politics department, merrill, ucsc, santa cruz, ca 95064, usa. e-mail: msparke@ucsc.edu inspired by nick gill’s invitation to reflect on the suppression of welcome for refugees, i would like to use this commentary to highlight how spaces of welcome complicate simple binary oppositions between fully enfranchised citizenship and what is often theorized after agamben (2000) as the ‘bare life’ of refugee rejection in ‘spaces of exception’ (but see owens 2009). ranging from sanctuary cities and squats to clinics, classrooms, kitchens and gardens, spaces of welcome instead offer islands of limited enfranchisement, agency and hope amidst seas of sub-citizenship, subjugation and fear. the concept of sub-citizenship can be used thus to elucidate how welcome and its suppression create a spectrum of intermediate experiences between the abstract poles of biopolitical belonging and necropolitical rejection (sparke 2017). geographies of welcome thereby become legible as in-between spaces in which the damage done by the suppression of welcome is contested and countered, however incompletely. similar to the ‘in-between space’ traced by puar (2017) as subtending the disabled/non-disabled binary, geographies of welcome can be understood as offering ‘capacitation’ amidst ‘debilitation’ (ibid., xvii). conceptualizing sub-citizenship in this way, we can also follow gill to notice how social struggles to expand refugee inclusion, agency and movement in everyday life are in ongoing embodied tension with the bureaucratization of humanitarian welcome as well as with the obliteration of welcome by state and non-state terror (gill 2018). in turn, the complex geographies of all the resulting in-between spaces complicate critiques of liberal humanitarianism, neoliberal exception and illiberal expulsion that assume some sort of absolute ontological divide between citizenship and its exceptional others. as vuolteenaho and lyytinen (2018) suggest in their own response to gill, such critical geographical © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 216 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections sensitivity further brings into focus “more ambiguous and contextually varying attitudes to (un)welcoming immigrants” (ibid., 118). in greece in december 2016 many scenes testified to the wide variety and ambiguity of spaces of welcome (fig. 1). from street graffiti and the successful city plaza hotel squat in athens to lesvos solidarity’s camp for especially vulnerable refugees in a former summer camp for children, such spaces of welcome were easy to find during a three-week research visit.1 they included informal everyday solidarity spaces such as kitchens and couches, as well as humanitarian care sites such as clinics. they also featured schooling spaces for children that were evolving over time to include connections between volunteer-run classrooms on-site and off-site local government schools. such connections, though, were very hard won and tenuous. more generally the connections across the overall archipelago of welcome remained extremely precarious, frequently overwhelmed by the violence of suppression across a wide variety of scales. at city plaza the poster (created by an allied german refugee solidarity group) featuring life jackets transformed into a welcoming couch signaled a resistant recoding of this precarity. it could be read thus as a reminder at the entrance to the squat’s lounge-bar with its own welcoming couches that welcome across the eu remains haunted by all the refugees who have died at sea wearing fake life-jackets or no lifejackets at all: deaths that have in turn been shown with forensic analysis to be directly attributable to the eu’s suppression of welcome at sea (heller & pezzani 2018). it needs to be remembered, therefore, that in-between spaces of welcome are in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the forces of suppression. as easily linked as they are as representational space in photographs and articles, the suppression of welcome has continued to operate in the opposite direction – including through bureaucratic re-presentations of the same spaces – to reduce the in-between spatial practices available to refugees, pushing their experiences of sub-citizenship fig. 1. photographs (by matthew sparke) of welcome featuring – clockwise from top left – a poster at the entrance to the city plaza lounge-bar, athens street graffiti, the kitchen that prepares free food everyday at city plaza, sign-up sheet for classes at city plaza, lesvos graffiti, the garden at lesvos solidarity, and the clinic caravan at lesvos solidarity. fennia 196(2) (2018) 217matthew sparke back towards the pole of active exclusion and rejection, or, just as damagingly, violent inaction (davies et al. 2017). pulling in the opposite direction, refugee solidarity work provides practical guides for navigating between the welcome spaces with agency and autonomy. city plaza has been able in this way to help many of its residents connect to welcome elsewhere in europe, and a poster on the wall at lesvos solidarity highlighted the elaborate ecosystem of welcome spaces available to refugees making the journey from lesvos to the area in athens close to city plaza (fig. 2). these, then, are articulatory politics in both a very practical sense of connecting sites of welcome as well as in the sense of articulating a kind of counter-public of welcome within a wider field of suppressionist hegemony. in these ways they also articulate ideas about biopolitical belonging representationally, prefiguring a wider form of political enfranchisement too, and thereby anticipating the broad-based refugee services, health rights and human rights that would turn sub-citizenship into more fully fledged forms of social and civil citizenship. but it is precisely such articulatory and prefigurative movements – movements towards citizenship and refugee agency – that have been disabled by the suppression of welcome, trapping refugees in limbo and sub-citizenship. it is to these kinds of suppression that we now turn, and at least three different versions need to be disaggregated. first, there are all the illiberal exclusion effects created by rising rejectionism and xenophobia globally. president donald trump’s dehumanizing racist rhetoric about immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries and his administration’s increasing militarization of us borders are only the most egregious examples of this reactionary suppression of welcome around the world. most countries and contexts have their own mix of racist or religious rationales for such rejectionism, and yet it appears that these distinctive regional reaction formations are also now inter-articulating globally alongside the same market globalization that so often sets the scene for their expressions of xenophobic nationalism (sparke 2013, chapter 10). following feminist geographers, we clearly need to address the emotional and intimate political geographies animating these global dynamics (hyndman & mountz 2006). and thus alongside the emotion of welcome underlined by gill, it is also critical to remember how reactionary rejectionism globally is itself articulated emotionally, albeit through the personal production of hate instead of hope (compare mostafenezhad 2017; and gökariksel & smith 2018). in fig. 2. poster at lesvos solidarity articulating with welcome in athens and prefiguring citizenship rights to free services. photograph by matthew sparke. 218 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections turn, the resulting suppression of welcome and the associated stigmatization of refugees as bringing global threats of disease, crime and terror lead towards all sorts of new border control and deportation dynamics that terrorize refugees at a deep emotional level too. in other words, just like welcome itself, both the production and experience of illiberal exclusion is as emotionally affective as it is practically effective (kallio & riding 2018). second, there are the neoliberal exclusion effects of recent innovations in border-regime governmentality, innovations that in europe range from the economically-incentivized outsourcing of frontier policing to non-eu neighbors in north africa and turkey to the implementation of the hotspot programs in frontline countries such as greece (painter et al. 2016). denationalizing and deterritorializing in terms of pan-european coordination and biometric data collection, they simultaneously renationalize and re-territorialize borders onto unprivileged bodies like other biometrics systems elsewhere (sparke 2009). often announced in the name of reducing deaths at sea and efficiently triaging asylum applications, these programs have in practice widely compounded the dangers facing refugees, turning welcome into waiting or deportation, and making the safe movements supported by solidarity groups into increasingly unsafe journeys, including unsafe returns to unsafe spaces that are nevertheless declared ‘safe’ in order to comply administratively with the geneva conventions. in each of these cases it is possible to see how solidarity around welcome continues to work against suppression to contest and counter the illiberal and neoliberal exclusions. but what of liberal humanitarianism and its limits? both city plaza and lesvos solidarity have sought to set themselves apart from other more traditional liberal humanitarian projects that have been bureaucratized and instrumentalized as a result of their involvement in the co-management of reception in places such as the hotspots. but they also illustrate the importance of gill’s (2018) argument about the need to recognize how welcome sometimes involves compromise and cooperation with liberal and even neo-liberal state-making – thereby underlining the importance of bagelman’s (2018) question about ‘who hosts?’. creating local school access for refugee children has been an example of this kind of cooperation in both cases. lesvos solidarity is further involved in various grant-funded entrepreneurial efforts to create work opportunities for refugees that in turn raise funds for small acts of enfranchisement like providing free bus tickets – thereby enabling micro-movements between spaces of welcome on lesvos with micro-spaces of enterprise. set against small advancements in enfranchisement like this, and attuned to their liberal and neoliberal compromises, it seems mistaken to move from abstract critiques of liberal humanitarianism to assumptions of it inevitably being controlling, exclusionary and exceptionalist. instead, gill’s call to examine the suppression of welcome reminds us that in-between spaces may be linked up with the liberal humanitarian management of welcome to offer sanctuary amidst sub-citizenship (see also carney et al. 2018). by countering and contesting exclusion and exception such efforts might further be understood as articulating and prefiguring the wider enmeshment of refugee resilience with resistance too (bourbeau & ryan 2017). and by illustrating ongoing opportunities for such agency in the face of suppression, they surely also suggest that we need to abandon or at least supplement abstract critiques of liberal humanitarianism that assume that exceptionalism and rejectionism are always and everywhere inevitable. notes 1 for more information on city plaza see their facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ sol2refugeesen/. for more information on lesvos solidarity (previously known as pikpa) see their website at https://lesvossolidarity.org/en/. acknowledgements many thanks to kirsi pauliina kallio and the excellent editorial team at fennia for all their work in supporting the innovative open review process and associated discussions enabled by nick gill’s important intervention. https://www.facebook.com/sol2refugeesen/ https://www.facebook.com/sol2refugeesen/ https://lesvossolidarity.org/en/ fennia 196(2) (2018) 219matthew sparke references agamben, g. (2000) means without end: notes on politics. translated by v. binetti & c. casarino. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. bagelman, j. (2018) who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 108–110. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 bourbeau, p. & ryan, c. (2017) resilience, resistance, infrapolitics and enmeshment. european journal of international relations 24(1) 221–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066117692031 carney, m., gomez, r., mitchell, k., vannini, s. (2018) sanctuary planet: a global sanctuary movement for the time of trump. society and space. <http://societyandspace.org/2017/05/16/sanctuary-planeta-global-sanctuary-movement-for-the-time-of-trump/> davies t., isakjee a. & dhesi, s. (2017) violent inaction: the necropolitical experience of refugees in europe. antipode 49(5) 1263–1284. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12325 gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70040 gökariksel b. & smith, s. (2018) tiny hands, tiki torches: embodied white male supremacy and its politics of exclusion. political geography 62 207–215. heller, c. & pezzani, l. (2018) mare clausum: italy and the eu’s undeclared operation to stem migration across the mediterranean. forensic oceanography, forensic architecture agency, goldsmiths, university of london london. <http://www.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/05/2018-05-07-fo-mare-clausum-full-en.pdf> hyndman, j. & mountz, a. (2006) feminist approaches to the global intimate. womens studies quarterly 34 (1&2) 446– 463. kallio, k. & riding, j. (2018) dialogical peer-review and non-profit open-access journal publishing: welcome to fennia. fennia 196(1) 4–8. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 mostafenezhad, m. (2017) celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the thai-burma border. political geography 58 67–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.02.002 owens, p. (2009) reclaiming ‘bare life’? against agamben on refugees. international relations 23(4) 567–582. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117809350545 painter, j., papoutsi, a., papada, e. & vradis, a. (2016) flags flying up a trial mast: reflections on the hotspot mechanism in mytilene. society and space. <http://societyandspace.org/2016/11/08/flagsflying-up-a-trial-mast-reflections-on-the-hotspot-mechanism-in-mytilene/> puar, j. (2017) the right to maim: debility, capacity disability. duke university press, durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372530 sparke, m. (2009) on denationalization as neoliberalization: biopolitics, class interest and the incompleteness of citizenship. political power and social theory 20 287–300. https://doi. org/10.1108/s0198-8719(2009)0000020017 sparke, m. (2013) introducing globalization: ties, tensions and uneven development. wiley-blackwell, new york. sparke, m. (2017) austerity and the embodiment of neoliberalism as ill-health: towards a theory of biological sub-citizenship. social science and medicine 187 287–295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. socscimed.2016.12.027 vuolteenaho, j. & lyytinen, e. (2018) reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 https://doi.org/10.1177/135406611769203 http://societyandspace.org/2017/05/16/sanctuary-planet-a-global-sanctuary-movement-for-the-time-of-trump/ http://societyandspace.org/2017/05/16/sanctuary-planet-a-global-sanctuary-movement-for-the-time-of-trump/ https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12325 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 http://www.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-05-07-fo-mare-clausum-full-en.pdf http://www.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-05-07-fo-mare-clausum-full-en.pdf https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.02.002 https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117809350545 http://societyandspace.org/2016/11/08/flags-flying-up-a-trial-mast-reflections-on-the-hotspot-mechanism-in-mytilene/ http://societyandspace.org/2016/11/08/flags-flying-up-a-trial-mast-reflections-on-the-hotspot-mechanism-in-mytilene/ https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372530 https://doi.org/10.1108/s0198-8719(2009)0000020017 https://doi.org/10.1108/s0198-8719(2009)0000020017 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.12.027 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.12.027 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7394 doi: 10.11143/7394 included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the support given by european aid programmes paola minoia minoia, paola (2012). included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the support given by european aid programmes. fennia 190: 2, pp. 77–89. issn 1798-5617. this article analyses some problems emerging in aid practices aimed to support civil society in developing countries. first, it reports the debate emerged in critical development studies regarding non-state actors, and particularly nongovernmental organizations, which have progressively substituted public institutions in service provision and in representative forums, often as a consequence of external pressures made by international donors. secondly, it analyses the european aid programme named “non-state actors and local authorities in development”, whose aim is to fight poverty and increase governance through actions empowering local organisations. more specifically, it evaluates the programme’s coherence and effectiveness in five visited countries (georgia, occupied palestinian territory, zimbabwe, rwanda and cameroon) and, particularly, in two projects based in rwanda. these two case studies show very different results as far as local involvement. interviews, field visits and analyses of project reports reveal the diverse nature of the various organizations that compose the non-state actors, and their different capacity to express local agency. external donors need to redefine their aid relations in a way to effectively empower the most vulnerable groups. keywords: non-state actors, nongovernmental organisations, european aid, local agency, rwanda paola minoia, department of geosciences and geography, po box 64 (gustaf hällströmin katu 2), 00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: paola.minoia@helsinki.fi introduction: research questions and context this article presents some points of reflection about aims, means and results of european community (ec) programmes aiming to support civil society groups in developing countries. it includes some findings of a study in which the author has been recently engaged, as part of a team reviewing the first phase (2007−10) of the ec-funded programme non state actors and local authorities in development (nsa-la) (ec 2007; mccormick et al. 2009). the main goal of this programme, which is still ongoing, is to strengthen local livelihoods and democratic participation of civil society by funding initiatives proposed by non-state actors (nsas) and local authorities (las). however, the involvement of las is still marginal compared to the stronger role of nsas; therefore, this article will have a specific focus on nsas. the involvement of nsas is meant to bridge the gap between communities and donors. nongovernmental organizations, civil society and particularly, vulnerable communities and deprived groups, are the main targets of this programme, in line with the millennium development goals that were officially established following the united nations millennium declaration (un 2000; undp 2012). the idea behind this choice is that nsas can operate more effectively and liberally than state authorities when dealing with civil society; therefore, they are considered to be in the best position to support grassroots initiatives and empower communities. in the next chapter, i will discuss how this idea is coherent with a broader, neoliberal approach that has become internationally predominant in the aid sector. 78 fennia 190: 2 (2012)paola minoia the choice to give a stronger role to nsas and las is based on their double accountability: on one hand, they can operate closely with local communities, assess their needs, upscale their grassroots initiatives, and represent them in front of public authorities or within large and transnational networks (down accountability, desai 2008); on the other hand, compared to the informal grassroots groupings they represent, nsas and las are provided with sufficient structural organization and financial capacities, which make them accountable towards the donors (upward accountability, ibid.). according to the ec guidelines, the nsa category includes nongovernmental organizations (ngos), trade unions, professional associations and small and medium enterprises (smes); however, ngos and, particularly, international ngos (ingos) are the predominant actors because of their more advanced professionalization in the aid industry, where cosmopolitanism and professionalization, entrepreneurial organisation, financial capacity and competitiveness are important assets (baillie smith & jenkins 2011). the las group includes decentralized public authorities (pas) such as regions, provinces, municipalities, specialized public bodies as well as pas associations. as far as it was observed in several ec projects, las are also often closely supported by ngos with particular expertise to access external funding. based on theories and field assessment work, the aim of this article is to discuss the pertinence of the european ‘nsa-la programme’ to effectively address the needs of vulnerable groups, empower civil society, and respect their agency and local ownership. the critical aspects are both in the power-relations between ngos and informal communities, and in the logics of the project-cycle approach. in fact, external and frequently rushed expectations operating through business plans may deplete the true potential of the cooperation between civil society and the ngos or other intermediation bodies (holmén 2009). this paper is based both on critical development theories and on field research carried out as part of consultancy work for the ec. critical theories have helped in locating the nsas empowerment within a global trend of state disempowerment and shift of responsibility towards private organizations, social associations and decentralized authorities. through the field work i could approach different case studies and observed that these same principles were behind the current european policies of aid towards civil society organizations. nevertheless, it was relevant to see if specific programmes like this one have been beneficial towards community-based initiatives; if the professionalism of strong ngos has favoured or rather challenged the deployment of grass roots initiatives; and what have been the most determining factors of failure or success at the project level. a relevant part of the assessment questioned about the involvement of local communities in project design and implementation. was the funding granted to nsas (often ingos) concretely supporting local initiatives? how were the partnerships between grant holders and beneficiaries formed? were the involved actors representing vulnerable and deprived community groups; did they reflect their needs and were they able to empower them? did they involve local activists, and how was the project approach operationally functioning to support local agency? and finally, were calls for proposals adequate to select communityrelevant actions? the fieldwork was conducted between september and december 2009. it initially involved a review of academic literature, official documents and reports and other sources. thereafter, semistructured interviews and focus groups were organized in europe (belgium and italy) and in five beneficiary countries (georgia, occupied palestinian territory, zimbabwe, rwanda and cameroon) with eu and national civil servants, ngos operators, trade-unionists and cooperative workers engaged in aid activities. a few project sites were also visited. each one of the visited countries has shown different nsas’ needs and working conditions1. debating non-state actors in public fields programmes of direct support from large donor institutions towards ngos have been criticized for being politically biased towards goals conceived externally, rather than reflecting local interests. critical and post-development scholars have highlighted the controversial relations that are embedded in aid activities characterized by external inference into the local sovereignty, and recognized as post-colonial relations (escobar 1995; sparke 2006). nowadays, proposals that do not refer to the millennium development goals, or that are not aligned with policy goals of economic liberalfennia 190: 2 (2012) 79included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the … ism and western-style democracy, end up with little support from international donors. contradictions and risks are caused by various pressures for paths of change. some common features have been observed in the literature. first of all, pressures for democratic reforms are often driven by external actors, either directly or indirectly, rather than by intrinsic political dynamism (willis 2005). second, the newly empowered actors are often professional mediators, far from being expressions of the social capital available within the target systems (casson et al. 2009). a third common aspect relates to the global neoliberal environment which calls for the nsa to engage in service provision that was previously under the public administrations’ responsibility. in developing countries, where public budgets have been severely cut by structural adjustment programmes promoted by the world bank since the eighties in order to decrease state spending, vital services have been transferred either to the private sector, particularly when the service has a secure market value (e.g. municipal water supplies, energy distribution, public transport), or to other non-for-profit associations (harvey 2005). in neoliberal environments, discourses and ideological contexts have been constructed to not only legitimize reduced state control over their own territories, but to make it normatively desirable (swyngedow 2007). forms of public-private partnership have been introduced, raising important questions of governance, because of shifts in the axis of responsibilities, traditionally assigned to state actors representing the public good, towards private entities. in some cases, state’s withdrawals and transfer of responsibilities are embedded in the discourses of local communities’ empowerment, and associations have been created by top-down regulations, with no sufficient transfer of capacities and financial means to act in technically complex situations. the result has often been far from a social empowerment; instead, further deprivation and emigrations of affected communities have been observed (minoia & guglielmi 2008). from the johannesburg summit (un 2002) onwards, practices of the state’s disengagement and intervention of non-public entities have become widely accepted and have incorporated new values. particular emphasis has been given to the political aspects of governance. ngos are generally considered to be able to act closer to the people and thus, to have better potential to respond adequately to their needs. they are seen as complementary to public institutions not only to provide basic services to marginalized communities, but also as community-speakers in front of institutional authorities, and as representatives of the civil society. moreover, they are considered to enhance democratic relations and to respect human rights, playing the role of watchdog relative to the practises of public authorities (welch & nuru 2006). the role of ngos in good governance has been recognized to be fundamental for the achievement of the millennium development goals and their involvement is a requirement in the poverty reduction strategy of the world bank (levinsohn 2003). a undp report (2002) even considers the number of developmental ngos as an ‘objectively good governance’ indicator. other points of view, however, consider this transition from representative governments to governance as a serious problem of democracy inherent in neoliberal systems (harvey 2005). this problem appears more evident when it involves private business companies, but it is seldom recognized when it involves ngos. in critical development literature, ideas of mystification of the ngos roles have been further unveiled, to the extent that a tyranny in participation has been conceptualised (cooke & kothari 2001). the critique regards the strong influence of ngos in establishing the agenda of local development, despite a lack of delegation from the targeted civil society. according to these arguments, the ngo strengthening would pre-empt true democracy, because of a lack of transparency vis-à-vis the mode of formation, appointed boards of representatives and core missions of these powerful bodies. progress in this concept has also deployed a polarization of ngos: on the one hand, large and mainly international ngos are able to increase their business and influence, while on the other hand, weaker entities engage their participation in a form of subjection towards this donor-centred system and with a de-politicization of their original agenda (williams 2004). this debate has recently reached donors and is being considered by the european officers in charge of international aid programmes. compared to other public institutions (i.e. usaid), the european union is relatively new to forms of direct cooperation with nsa, not channelled via state bodies of the beneficiary countries. for this reason, a mid-term evaluation was called in 2009 to assess the effectiveness of this form of aid through 80 fennia 190: 2 (2012)paola minoia the new programme nsa-la. funds are granted through competitive calls for proposals to nsa, mainly ngos, and to a minor degree to la, which are also relevant actors in countries where state authorities have launched decentralization processes. the following section will present issues that have emerged during this programme review. strong and weak actors within the nsa group at the time of the review (mccormick et al. 2009), the nsa-la programme had only been under implementation for two years2. it was based upon earlier ngo financing programmes and decentralised cooperation instruments, and presented four main points of innovation. first, it applied the eu de-concentration policy, making eu delegations responsible for managing calls for proposals for incountry projects. in this way, local ec offices would have better possibilities to get local contacts and to respond to the country’s needs. second, the new programme targeted nsas, and therefore involved, besides the traditional ngos, a variety of structured organisations, i.e. trade unions and cooperatives. third, the programme also introduced local authorities as new actors for decentralized cooperation. last but not least, southern nsas or las were allowed to propose and coordinate actions without having to involve eubased nsas, contrarily to what was a pre-requirement in earlier aid programmes. for the sake of clarity, it is also relevant to mention that the nsa-la programme is not the only ec instrument supporting civil society. others are also in place, i.e. the broad european development fund (edf) in the african, caribbean and pacific group of states (acp), based on the cotonou agreement of 2000; the european instrument for democracy and human rights (eidhr); and other thematic financing programmes targeting specific issues like migration, food security and the environment. all these programmes are funded through calls for proposals. however, in some countries, and particularly in those affected by war or political crisis, the nsa programme (sometimes without the la component) is the only cooperation instrument of the ec providing direct support to the affected communities. this possibility is ensured by the fact that the funded projects do not require to be negotiated with the governments of the beneficiary countries, since the principle is to support local civil society organisations. in the case of the occupied palestinian territory (opt), iran and zimbabwe, for instance, no other eu cooperation mechanisms are in place3. as already said, it is evident that despite the programme’s title, ngos still dominated the grantreceiving projects: trade unions and cooperatives are too new to the scene to compete for grants with strong, established, experienced ngos, as are local authorities. essentially, the playing field is not even, and the actors the programme intended to target are at a distinct disadvantage compared with ngos and ingos. in some instances, these smaller/newer actors were not even given a chance to compete, and some interviewed ngo representatives were unaware about this programme; cooperatives and smes met in georgia were not recognized as not-for-profit organizations and therefore said they were not eligible for this grant. local authorities were also new in this field, and their participation in the calls was constrained by various circumstances. in georgia, las proposals were coordinated by ngos as las were considered as not sufficiently capable of producing acceptable project documents. furthermore, the central government was not in favour of allowing las to receive external financing beyond local taxation and state provision. as for the palestinian occupied territories, including hamas’ ruled municipalities, the european parliament declared las ineligible to receive funding from this programme. in cameroon, the european commission only activated the nsas component because of wide corruption problems in the public sector. also in countries where las are eligible for this programme, their involvement is generally weak. for instance, in rwanda the information about this funding was blocked by certain las in order to limit the competition. in rwanda, zimbabwe and georgia, ladedicated calls did not have sufficient respondents, which demonstrates that basic information about grant opportunities have higher market value than the very capacity to build good partnerships for development and sustainable initiatives. powerand competitive relations the core aim of the nsa programme is to provide support for local actors and their initiatives, no matter what their sectors of intervention. the programme is said to be actor-oriented and to respect the right of initiative of the proposers. however, a fennia 190: 2 (2012) 81included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the … first contradiction appears in the definition of priority areas that are presented in the calls for proposals. although not generally and unilaterally preconceived, these are decided at the country level in meetings organized by the ec delegation and involving nsas. while ingos and other strong, mainly capital-based ngos are effectively involved, most deprived, rural and remotely-based civil society organisations that theoretically constitute the core beneficiary group of this programme, encounter a series of practical constraints (logistical, digital, relational, political etc.) that make them out of reach. this first selection of thematic areas consequently weakens those actors aiming at initiatives that are not included in the calls’ priorities. problems arise because civil society is difficult to be conceptualized and even recognized, given its multiple forms and informal practices (mcewan 2009). this is the first main challenge that donors face when they aim to financially support community-based initiatives. communities and activist groups are linked together through informal networks orienting their practices: e.g. groups related by gender, ethnicity, neighbourhoods, ancestral lands, spatial practices and interests; while in very limited cases their agency is expressed in the form of associations (green & haines 2012). therefore, despite the programme’s intentions, ngos and ingos end up being the main actors engaged, instead of the local community organizations. this is because informality is not accepted by donors who work under neoliberal pressures to securitize the financial transfer to selected grant holders. these have to be organisations with legal status, pre-acquired financial capacities and documented project experiences. groups deprived of financial and operational assets, no matter their strong human, social and cultural capitals, need to build partnerships with structured organisations, if they want to benefit from the european aid programmes. as a matter of fact, as we will see later in this chapter, in most cases it is the other way round: external nsas look for locally-based organisations to carry out parts of their projects. in both cases, project activities are coordinated by external nsas taking responsibility despite poor linkages with the target communities. similar problems appear when active associations are not legally recognised by their own states, often for political reasons. this precludes them from finding funders outside their own state as well, e.g. in opt, georgia and zimbabwe. in many countries, activists said that the aid industry was dominated by large ngos and ingos in terms of physical and human capitals, i.e. internet access, data sources and specialized knowledge in project writing, administration and reporting. in particular, the project-cycle approach seems to be limiting the potential of local initiatives. it derives from procedures elaborated in external formal environments that are poorly adapted to the intervention areas and practically constraint the effective support to local actors. project elaborations need to include convincing narratives in the official language of the ec (mainly english or french), work plans and budgets; all applications and other communications have to be dealt through the internet. the language is already a relevant barrier for the majority of the visited areas, since other languages are locally used. the administrative and financial aspects require specialized knowledge of the european rules and regulations, for which dedicated professionals are needed. internet access is an issue, particularly in rural areas and remote regions, but also in large and the capital cities. these problems, and many others, contribute to widening the distance between community-based organisations and donors, and even between local beneficiaries and granted ngos that coordinate the programmes. at the same time, ingos’ capacity to address bureaucratic complications empowers them as suitable gateways for the european aid towards the local areas and their development problems. these problems were acknowledged by the interviewed ec officers, but explained away as part of a short-term learning curve and a set of things that eventually solve themselves. for them, partnerships with these large, experienced ngos would somehow allow professionalism and resources to be transferred on local partners: a learning exercise for the newer, smaller organisations. this laissez-faire approach sounded quite naïve, however. first of all, multi-partnership is not new but has existed for decades, and in poor areas it has mostly failed to produce operational autonomy or to generate sufficient financial capacities to take over the development business. large ngos, well equipped in terms of country offices, skilled personnel and fund-raising support from their headquarters, will probably remain highly competitive for a long period ahead. in some cases, ingos having their headquarters out of europe, have also acquired official addresses in europe 82 fennia 190: 2 (2012)paola minoia and even in southern countries, to be eligible for ec funding. their longstanding presence in project areas has strengthened their professionalization and upward accountability, while at the same time it has deepened their capacities to influence local development and even act on behalf of local communities in front of donors. during the interviews, some local activists argued that the ngos paternalistic attitude and local control was undermining the self-reliance of beneficiary groups. there is the need, then, to produce objective assessments of the down accountability of granted ngos towards the target communities. interviews with staff of ingos benefiting from ec funding also revealed other constraints caused by the project-cycle approach. they agreed that the project selection was prioritizing well-packed proposals against locally-rooted ideas that were not expressed in accordance with the guidelines. call openings were seen as occasions to elaborate new project ideas, rather than to provide opportunities to strengthen and upscale pre-existing ideas or initiatives carried out by actors operating in poor conditions. interviewed development practitioners said that the funded proposals had been entirely planned in their offices, and that local partners were often selected at a later stage, mainly to provide specific services to local communities, with tasks based on contracts. relations between coordinating and executing partners were sometimes problematic; in a project based in palestine, a local partner was even replaced since it was failing to deliver in accordance with the contract agreement. other constraints were caused by the available budgets in the calls for proposals, which in various cases influenced the work plans. for example, one ingo’s operator mentioned that commonly “nsa budgets limits are 400,000 euros per project, which provides a maximum roof of two years of work for international personnel in the field plus other running costs, including the ngo office rental”. after two years, then, their human resources need to be re-employed in new projects. surely local employees would cost less, but their priority was to guarantee the job to their international staff, who had invested their professional life there. these practices constitute serious obstacles to the goals of local empowerment. in the worse cases, project-cycles involved complex actions implemented in tight schedules, no matter what the community requirements, absorptive capacities, ownership and consolidation of the results. partnerships in the field: rwanda the field work included some visits to selected project sites or at least to project personnel. the majority of the actions funded by the nsa-la programme were located within the capital regions, and only a few were based in peripheral areas. besides project-specific and technical problems, the issues of the local agency’s representation emerged in most visits. some projects were clearly following a top-down approach and were granted because of their professionalism in fund raising, while only a few of them were truly communitybased initiatives with clear local ownership. these latter ones also deserved attention, particularly for the way in which the local agency was expressed. i will now briefly present two case studies based in rwanda. the first one represents the category of projects elaborated from distant offices and giving the implementing ngo a dominant role over the involved communities, while the second one represents a best practice, in which the leading ngo provides administrative and financial support to a genuinely local initiative. a) ‘support to social and economic integration of historically-marginalized people (batwa)’ this project was located in the kayonza province, a peripheral region of rwanda (fig. 1). although the proposal was designed and coordinated by a rwandese ngo, a group of professionals headed by a former un-officer and based in kigali, the application was formally submitted by the kayonza district for two reasons: to facilitate the approval under the las-dedicated call that did not have as much competition as the nsa sub-call, and also because the project responded to a specific need of the province, to comply with tasks assigned by the national government. in fact, the kayonza mayor needed to resettle 200 batwa families, who had been displaced from a forest region at the border with the rd congo. the national government asked the province of kayonza to take care of the housing needs of this group of 1057 people, and the la chose two villages, nyamirama and kageyo, where returnees from refugee camps in tanzania, mainly of tutsi origin, had already been settled. batwa’s displacement was due to a national conservation project for which their presence was a factor of disturbance to the equilibrium of living species (conservation refugees, dowie 2009), although their past fennia 190: 2 (2012) 83included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the … fig. 1. map of rwanda. history proves that they were part of the forest ecosystem (robbins 2004). in the new relocation areas, batwa families were not allowed to keep their nomadic life but were obliged to settle. the project also reflected the national priority of social reconciliation in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide (kinzer 2008). a basic principle of president kagame’s policy was the peaceful cohabitation in mixed neighbourhoods, with no more signs of racial distinctions that were a legacy of the colonial rulers from the 1920s and 1930s (hintjens 1999). therefore, it was decided that the two communities, despite their cultural differences, had to live together in the new village areas. batwa families had to find shelter and basic earning in those villages, while the returnees had a relatively better situation, particularly in nyamirama, where houses had already been built by an international christian association. the action also included start-up activities of poultry and beekeeping for basic earning in both villages. the situation in the field revealed a situation of dominant power relations of the implementing ngo towards the local population. the district administration had delegated the project coordination role to the ngo, which had full responsibility for any provision of services (e.g. purchase of materials, design of the housing project, relation with the building company, etc.). the absence of active involvement of the target communities was evident, particularly within the batwa group, whose relocation had weakened their traditional liveli84 fennia 190: 2 (2012)paola minoia hoods and social capital. there was a different status between batwa and returnees: while the first group was heavily affected by racial prejudice and was maintaining a silent relation with both the ngo and the other group, the latter had a progressively better situation and in nyamirama they had one member employed by the project as a reference point for the management group. the passive acceptance of the project by the batwa group allowed the works to proceed, despite the fact that the action was revealing strong weaknesses: poor house construction materials, no connection to drinking water, sanitation networks, or electricity; lack of chimneys or ventilation despite the practice of indoor fires; no economic start-ups initiated (by the time of the visit, that was only few months before the end of the project), because the arrival of chicks and bees had been delayed; and no civil society empowerment-related activities, at all. clearly, the empowerment of civil society along self-determined development patterns, which was proposed as project goal, did not have realistic bases. extreme poverty of the target group, deprivation of capital assets and destruction of social networks made the local groups so much weaker that local authorities could operate through the leading non-local ngo, top-down interventions of social re-engineering, and livelihoods rebuilding from zero (scoones 1998). the external ngo operated in full adherence with the main national policies. the coherence with the principles of national pacification was sufficient to attract european funding, to the extent that neither the specific goals of the project, its methodology, operational modalities or cost-effectiveness, had been questioned. on the contrary, the implementing ngo was complying with the existing nsa-la guidelines, and were therefore successful in front of the ec (upward accountability), despite low linkages with the target communities (down accountability). the project was in a remote area and visits from ec officers had not taken place, since ec procedures did not prescribe project assessments during or at the end of the implementation4. finally, the programme guidelines did not ensure that the top-down intervention would create sustainable benefits to the locals; this kind of partnership has not enhanced local capacities. there does not appear to have been an improvement of local organisational ability, or position to (for instance) apply for a grant like this themselves someday. b) ‘empowering nyamirambo women’s centre’ this small-scale project was formally proposed by a slovenian ngo, to support an idea expressed by a local women’s association based in nyamirambo, a poor and multicultural suburb of kigali. the idea was simple but very strong: to empower local women by strengthening the nyamirambo women’s centre (nwc). the small centre was shared by a group of 18 women, some of which were single mothers and/or had been subjected to violence. the methodology was based on the acquisition of tools that could qualify them to manage the centre and to provide learning initiatives and vocational training for themselves and for other women in the same situation. some members had a university degree, but did not have adequate opportunities to generate income or political interest about issues of social vulnerability of women in their neighbourhood. the visit to the centre revealed the presence of a group of active members, animated by interests that were at the same time political and practical: on the one hand, to sensitize about gender-based violence and women’s and children’s rights, and on the other hand, to enable participation of women in local decision making, particularly where gender segregation is stronger for matters of education. the participation of the slovenian ngo coordinating the project was limited to the provision of training on project design, financial accounting, administration and evaluation. self-organised activities included awareness campaigns and educational programs aimed to improve knowledge and employability of nwc members (e.g. to run small commerce or acquire property of land, house and vehicles), and to widen the group of associates from nyamirambo and beyond. the strategy also included initiatives of responsible tourism, to favour the cultural encounter between nwc members and external visitors. tourists could experience local life styles, sleep in local houses and learn local handcraft skills, and they could voluntarily contribute to the nwc activities by offering short training sessions. courses of written english and ict were among the most popular initiatives. this type of international networking, locally based, could scale up the good practice and favour further cooperation opportunities (nwc 2012). like the previous project based in kayonza, this one was also clearly aligned with the national polfennia 190: 2 (2012) 85included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the … icy on multi-ethnic cohabitation, and it was also respondent to the millennium development goals, with particular reference to the goal ‘promote gender equality and empower women’. however, the success of this project was primarily based on local agency, clear ownership of the initiative, and on fair relation between partners. the foreign nsa was effectively instrumental to the local agency and maintained the double focus on both down and upward accountability. another factor of success was the combination of practical initiatives with a clear political agenda of this women group. the nwc was a community-based organization that was becoming increasingly structured, and strong. the project size was small and easily manageable as it was mainly relying upon local resources, but it could potentially increase in a successive run, would the group suggest a more complex activity plan. therefore, this cooperation was overall sustainable and contributed in building up the basis for future initiatives of the centre. the localization of the centre played, however, a relevant role. being in the capital area, the group could attract highly educated activists and be in touch with international travellers and volunteers, as well as with donors. another issue to be considered is then: how to reach groups that are geographically and digitally remote? the solution to create partnerships between centrally-based ngos, acting as a philtre for international cooperation, and marginal community groups, is highly risky, as it has been proved for the kayonza project. the question of how to create networks involving remote civil society groups remains open for discussion. differentiating nsas as a means to empower local agency during the period of the programme evaluation, some ec delegations involved in the nsa-la programme invited local stakeholders to participate in civil society forums. the arguments of local agency and partnerships were debated, and strong ingos were criticized by local nsas for their paternalistic attitude towards grassroots organisations, and for their business-oriented approach in project implementation. as a matter of fact, during my field work, i met many consultants working for ngos engaged in projects, highly educated and skilled in diplomatic and business work. local ac-local ac-ocal activists revealed that new ngos were created to respond to the new funding opportunities. as a response to this criticism, some ingos ensured that in their plans they would need to boost the numbers of local employees and that capacity building activities would be included in their projects to favour local empowerment. however, the evidence of the hegemonic role of ingos has recently caused an important change in the eu strategy. to decrease the influence of european ngos and ensure effective support to local actions, it has been decided that southern partnerships can be granted directly, without any northern nsa necessarily involved. concord (2009: 2), the european ngo confederation for relief and development, reacted with a letter claiming the important role that ingos play in development: “european civil society organizations (csos) were founded in the spirit of north-south solidarity, poverty reduction, empowerment and nonprofit interests. we work together as members of international advocacy network to influence decision-makers on global issues (…). synergy and solidarity between southern and northern ngos should be supported. rather than exacerbating the competitive environment, we would welcome dialogue on new approaches to reward learning, sharing and capacity building. european csos have learnt the value and impact of investing in capacity-building with southern partners to support dialogue with the ec, other donors and their governments”. according to concord, ingos’ role is to upscale local causes and to activate international interest on them. also at the local level, ingos consider that their own disempowerment would not facilitate the entrance of new and weaker actors (e.g. from remote, vulnerable areas or representing minorities) in the programme and that it would cause a higher competitive, rather than supportive, environment. indeed, as we have seen in the two rwandan cases, neither foreign ngos did necessarily cause failures in the expression of grassroots initiatives, nor was participation of national actors a guarantee per se of local ownership of the action. these considerations help to go beyond a superficial vision of nsa partnerships and to overcome the simplistic dichotomy that differentiates local from international nsas. it is evident that the nsa category is too broad and undefined, and that even within the group of development ngos 86 fennia 190: 2 (2012)paola minoia there are very diverse associations, more or less related to local communities. in a parallel study undertaken for the ec, floridi et al. (2009) propose a structural analysis of nsas into 4 groups, namely: 1) grassroots organizations; 2) associations with simple structure, statute, legal recognition and focus (e.g. cultural, local development, professional); 3) corporate associations provided of central headquarters and local branches; and, on the top, 4) international coalitions. grassroots organizations are described as being provided with substantial community-based knowledge, social mobilization’s capacity, but poorer organization, often lacking access to information and financial means. on the other hand, other competences are recognized as belonging to nsas at the intermediate and higher structural levels: advocacy and political influence, operational and financial capacity, networking etc. these requisites become stronger, going up to higher structural levels, while local agency and ownership progressively decrease. this structural analysis opens new potentials. it helps elaborating guidelines to support fair partnerships between nsas of different structural levels and to prioritize actions where local agency is ensured by the presence of grassroots organisations and focus on social learning and empowerment. some relevant attempts have been made by ec delegations to address this goal. in the opt, where ec funding was widely granted to fourth-level nsas, the ec delegation introduced a new mechanism in project budgets: a window of sub-grant components to be disbursed by the coordinating nsas to first-level organizations through microtenders. however, according to some local activists, these tenders should remain under the competence of the ec delegations. otherwise they further increase the power of strong ngos that become project selectors and distributors of funds. in fact, coordinating ngos were often considered as donors by the recipient groups. in any case, the ec delegation could not take this task for reasons of work overload and poor cost-effectiveness of an activity that required careful selection procedures for small disbursements. similar problems occurred in another eu programme, the european instrument for democracy and human rights (eidhr): grassroots organizations were involved as ‘informal partners’ and were not asked to satisfy the same eligibility criteria as the formal applicants, which shall assume financial and accounting liability for all expenses incurred by the informal partners. this mechanism allowed ec funding to reach community-based groups, but did not guarantee their freedom of utilization without prior negotiation with the leading ngo. another relevant attempt was made in cameroon, through a project aiming to civil society structuring, funded by the european development fund (edf). the project organizes training in operational and financial management and project writing, helps the participant organizations in getting a formal status so as to become eligible for funding, and launches simplified calls for small-scale initiatives. this is an appreciated activity, though it only supports administrative skills, thus reflecting a bureaucratic approach in solving constraints of local agency. the question is, are pre-stated guidelines for new calls for proposals suitable means to stop hegemonic partner relations? in a field where information, financialization and professionalization are fundamental assets, and where cultural influences inevitably pass through the working practices, is it realistic to think that community-based groups involved in project implementation maintain their social capital intact, or is there a risk of internal disempowerment (holland & skinner 2008)? these issues remain open for discussion, and new ideas are needed. conclusions this article has addressed various issues related to aims, practice and effectiveness of the european nsa-las funding programme; the role of granted nsas in it, and their accountability towards civil society, public authorities and donors. the focus was mainly on ngos agency, since other nsas and also las had a marginal involvement in the nsa-la programme at the time of the study. moreover, the paper has presented several constraints that impede effective financial support to civil society’s initiatives in the fields of poverty alleviation and democratic participation. based on critical theories and field analysis, it has highlighted unbalanced relations in multi-partnerships in favour of strong ngos, and their causes. some project documents have been de-constructed and con-confronted with the interests of interviewees met in the project areas. in some cases, it was clear that external ngos were coordinating actions and implementing policies that were designed outside the target communities. fennia 190: 2 (2012) 87included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the … the poor accessibility of new and vulnerable actors to this programme is a key issue that requires specific attention. the hegemonic role that strong nsas acquire through project grants, despite their earlier distance from the beneficiaries, is based upon two misleading ideas regarding nsas. the first is that any registered nsas can represent the civil society, express its needs and plans, and pledge for funding on behalf of it. in the best case reported in this article, the coordinating ngo supported ideas of a local group but was not representing it in front of either the ec delegation, or the public authorities; this distinction made the action sustainable and clearly owned by the active group. the second misconception is that nsas, although forming a differentiated group, have uniform development missions. in fact, development practitioners have the tendency to treat nsas as they were forming a monolithic body. on the contrary, they present a world of very diverse organizations, with different thematic aims and levels of structural complexity (floridi et al. 2009); different interests towards civil society and local agency; and different attitudes towards social learning in development action (foley 1999). each actor has specific needs, points of strength and interests, and therefore should be targeted in a more differentiated, demand-based way. in many observed cases, the involvement of strong nsas was rather unbalanced as it reproduced north-south, urban-rural relations of power, and did not allow local groups to use their own capacities and assets. in general, communitybased organizations are vastly under-represented in the current implementation mechanisms of the nsa-la programme. they have enormous potential in terms of respect for civil society’s identities, social capital and local livelihood assets and can provide solid background for sustainable planning. however, their initiatives have not been sufficiently supported, because of practical difficulties to convert them into a successful project format. the current funding mechanisms are not suitable for local groups and often suffocate community initiatives. the paper has identified various bottle-necks and also some solutions applied by the ec delegations. other constraints are caused by insufficient evaluations of ongoing projects. while monitoring reports carefully inform about work plans and budget expenditures, they often neglect local impacts and sustainability factors. community participation and equity across the overall project cycle should be evaluated by participatory appraisals with the beneficiary groups (i.e. iied 2006). in some observed cases, like in the kayonza project, paternalistic relations engaged by external ngos and situations of subjection of weaker partners could be clearly recognised, would donors pay evaluation visits to the project sites, also in remote areas. a more coherent selection process of proposals should be operated, in line with the set priorities of local agency. the civil society’s right of initiative should not be stopped for required alignment with ec parameters of either bureaucratic or thematic nature. stronger weight should be given to ideas coming from local groups, rewarding their engagement and social rooting, no matter their informal status or poor financial wealth, which are the current discriminating factors. the current competitive criteria based on the nsa’s operational and financial capacity, previous experience in international projects, work plan, budget formulation and short term deliverables, make projects a product of the aid industry and not for communities; they therefore reward the most competitive groups instead of the more needy and deprived ones. different funding mechanisms for different types of nsas might pose a possible strategy, and the ec should make a choice by using this specific nsa-la programme to prioritize community local knowledge and agency by giving support to their ideas. participatory appraisals should be utilized to evaluate the project impacts; periodical stakeholders’ dialogue in the fields and visits to the project sites by the ec officers in the delegations should enter in their working routine. this was also the wish of the interviewed ec personnel, who found it difficult to familiarize with their projects only through activity and budget reports. this approach would be more coherent with the idea of projects as learning environments: not only for local civil society organizations, but for all parties involved. notes 1 differences with other countries in latin america and asia, visited by the other members of the review team, were even stronger. a summary report and different thematic annexes were produced. the report was published online and presented in a public forum, to allow stakeholders to discuss the findings. this was a good opportunity to collect very valuable feedback to be incorporated into the final report (mccormick et al. 2009). 88 fennia 190: 2 (2012)paola minoia 2 the nsa-la programme has different sub-areas, responding to 3 main objectives: 1) support to development actions; 2) promoting education for development in the eu, and 3) development of networks in eu countries. the second and third sub-areas are out of the scope of this study. the first sub-area includes either multi-country or in-country initiatives, but this article will only consider the in-country sub-programme that involves the largest funding share and is central to the topics discussed. this sub-programme is managed by the ec delegations in developing countries and has gained increasing popularity in the beneficiary countries for being one of the few funding mechanisms theoretically accessible to ngos. 3 the political implications and reactions that this direct cooperation entails, though relevant, cannot be discussed here. 4 my visit had a different purpose, since it was made in the framework of the overall nsa-la programme assessment. references baillie smith m & jenkins k 2011. disconnections and exclusions: professionalization, cosmopolitanism and (global?) civil society. global networks 11: 2, 160–179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111% 2fj.1471-0374.2011.00317.x. casson mc, della giusta m & kambhampati us 2009. formal and informal institutions and development. world development 38: 2, 137−141. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.worlddev.2009. 10.008. concord – confederation européenne del ong d’urgence et the développement 2009. evaluation of ec aid delivery through civil society organisations: response from concord. funding development and relief working group (written document, unpublished). february 2009, bruxelles. cooke b & kothari u 2001. participation: the new tyranny? zed books, london. desai v 2008. the role of non-governmental organizations (ngos). in desai v & potter rb (eds). the companion to development studies, 525–529. 2nd ed. hodder education, london. dowie m 2009. conservation refugees. the hundredyear conflict between global conservation and native peoples. the mit press, massachusetts. escobar a 1995. encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. princeton university press, princeton. ec (european commission) 2007. thematic programme. non state actors and local authorities in development. strategy paper 2007−2010. <http:// ec.europa.eu/europeaid/what/civil-society/documents/nsa_la_strategy_paper_2007_2010_en. pdf> 8.12.2012. floridi m, sanz corella b & verdecchia s 2009. etude de capitalization des programmes d’appui au renforcement des capacities des acteurs non etatiques sous le 9ème fed. ec/ibf, bruxelles. foley g 1999. learning in social action: a contribution to understanding informal education. zed books, london. green gp & haines a 2012. asset building and community development. 3rd ed. sage, los angeles. harvey d 2005. a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford university press, new york. hintjens hm 1999. explaining the 1994 genocide in rwanda. the journal of modern african studies 37: 2, 241−286. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2fs0 022278x99003018. holland d & skinner d 2008. literacies of distinction: (dis)empowerment in social movements. journal of development studies 44: 6, 849−862. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f0022038080 2058180. holmén h 2009. snakes in paradise: ngos and the aid industry in africa. kumarian press, sterling. iied (international institute for environment and development) 2006. mapping for change: practice, technologies and communication. participatory learning and action 54, london. kinzer s 2008. a thousand hills: rwanda’s rebirth and the man who dreamed it. wiley, hoboken, nj. levinsohn j 2003. the world bank’s poverty reduction strategy paper approach: good marketing or good policy? g-24 discussion paper series 21. unctad, new york and geneva. mccormick d, rambaud y & minoia p 2009. midterm review of the ec thematic programme “non state actors and local authorities in development”. technical report. <http://ec.europa.eu/development/icenter/files/europa_only/consultat i o n _ n o n _ s t a t e _ a c t o r s _ m a i n _ r e p o r t . p d f > 8.12.2012. mcewan c 2009. postcolonialism and development. routledge, new york. minoia p & guglielmi f 2008. social conflict in water resource management and environmental impacts in south-eastern tunisia. in efe r, cravins g, öztürk m & atalay i (eds). natural environment and culture in the mediterranean region, 257−270. cambridge scholars press, newcastle upon tyne. nwc 2012. nyamirambo women’s centre. <http:// www.nwc-kigali.org/> 8.12.2012. robbins p 2004. political ecology. blackwell, hong kong. scoones i 1998. sustainable rural livelihoods. a framework for analysis. ids working paper 72. institute of development studies, university of sussex. sparke m 2006. political geography: political geographies of globalizations (ii) – governance. progress in human geography 28, 357−372. http://dx.doi. org/10.1191/0309132506ph606pr. swyngedow e 2007. dispossessing h2o. in heynen n, mccarthy j, prudham s & robbins p (eds). neoliberal environments. false promises and unfennia 190: 2 (2012) 89included or excluded? civil society, local agency and the … natural consequences, 51−62. routledge, new york. un (united nations) 2000. resolution adopted by the general assembly 18 september 2000. 55/2. united nations millennium declaration. <http:// www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e. pdf> 9.12.2012. un (united nations) 2002. johannesburg summit 2002. <http://www.johannesburgsummit.org/> 9.12.2012. undp (united nations development programme) 2002. human development report 2002. deepening democracy in a fragmented world. undp, new york. undp (united nations development programme) 2012. the millennium development goals. <http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/ mdgoverview.html> 9.12.2012. welch g & nuru z (eds) 2006. governance for the future: democracy and development in the least developed countries. undp, new york. williams g 2004. evaluating participatory development: tyranny, power and (re)politicization. third world quarterly 25: 3, 557−578. willis k 2005. theories and practices of development. routledge, new york. r.i.p. reslience urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80093 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80093 reflections r.i.p. resilience silje aurora andresen andresen, s. a. (2019) r.i.p. resilience. fennia 197(1) 168–170. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.80093 resilience was set to rest on 30 june 2016 in trondheim, norway. after a two-year quest for meaning, the concept now lies with its neoliberal supporters. resilience and i first crossed paths at the beginning of my phd journey in geography. i was driven by curiosity and an eagerness to put resilience to use: after all, who doesn’t want to be resilient? as the months passed by, i discovered the many different meanings the concept was associated with. indeed, resilience refused to be put in a box. yet, the concept contained some questions that i set out to try to answer in the “real” world. however, curiosity soon developed into frustration – resilience revealed a rootlessness that was disturbing. was it a means to measure? a means to conceptualize why some people make it and some do not? or, was it in fact, just a means to get funding? certainly, it was not a means to explain. therefore, resilience will for me forever be remembered as an approach to enter and structure an interview guide, but now we must bid one another farewell. your legacy will continue to live on in the neoliberal agenda. keywords: resilience, phd crisis, neoliberal universities, passitivity silje aurora andresen, department of geography, no-7491 trondheim, norwegian university of science and technology (ntnu), norway. e-mail: silje.a.andresen@ntnu.no r.i.p. resilience. this paper is a personal account of my journey with the concept of resilience – from the beginning, where the somewhat naive idea was to qualitatively explore perceptions of resilience in a norwegian context, to a midway phd crisis. as the title suggests, i bid farewell to resilience after the crisis. to some degree, this paper is about why. more so, it is about the issues i became aware of during my journey with resilience: the first is how predetermined concepts in phd or project announcements can lead to an expectation that you should deliver as you “promised” in your application. the second issue is the passitivity, meaning the acceptance of the use of problematic concepts because “we cannot escape them” within the university. i blame both issues on the neoliberal agenda that is seeping into the veins of universities causing a societal embolism. as has been pointed out in editorials in fennia before (kallio 2017; kallio & riding 2018), the neoliberal agenda has reduced knowledge and dissemination to profit for market-driven publishing corporates, where the hours spent doing academic housekeeping (lund 2018) is not even acknowledged. this essay could be regarded as yet another self-absorbed piece on the challenges faced during a phd journey. in that case, at least it could be considered therapeutic for me. on the other hand, i suspect that the issues might be recognizable, and hence spilling my guts may have value to others. to start from the beginning. i applied for a phd position in geography that was part of a project © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80093 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80093 fennia 197(1) (2019) 169silje aurora andesen aiming to “assess resilience” in relation to climate change and natural hazards in norway. hence, in my project description i wrote that i wanted to “assess what resilience means, how it is acted upon in local communities, and what variations exist within and between different communities”. my part was to contribute to a qualitative understanding of resilience; thus i began by trying to figure out how that could be done. this proved challenging and not least, frustrating. literature studies identified that “resilience continues to be mainly externally defined by expert knowledge from academia, international organizations and governmental agencies” (weichselgartner & kelman 2015, 257). my idea was to respond to this shortcoming by conceptualizing resilience from the point of view of those who are at risk of experiencing hazards: the local communities. this could then be part of the proposed contribution from geography to the resilience research agenda: the consideration of context, space and time (weichselgartner & kelman 2015). however, one dilemma i struggled with was how i, as part of academia, could theorize perceptions in a more just way for those who were the focus of my study without becoming part of what i was criticizing. i asked myself how and why we should legitimize conceptualizations that do not have roots in the people who ultimately experience them. i saw the need to contribute to policies that could be formed more intimately with those who are affected by them, and i had the ideal of working in a bottom-up rather than top-down fashion. at this point, i set out to develop a critical resilience research agenda by including the normative and political ideals from political ecology. this, i argued, would better facilitate the inclusion of various actors and knowledges in disaster management policies. hence, i broadly conceptualized resilience as a metaphor for how communities prepare for, act during and recover after a crisis (norris et al. 2008). i found support in rogers’ (2015) argument that contextually sensitive frameworks together with highquality case studies, equally preoccupied with the positive potential of resilience as with the potential negative impacts, should guide resilience research. i figured that after fieldwork, the value of resilience would be clearer. instead, fieldwork made the shortcomings of resilience even more haunting. put bluntly, resilience explained nothing. after several attempts to reconcile a concept of resilience with the empirical material, i entered into a midway crisis. it became clear to me that resilience, in a conceptual manner, did not work for my case study. it remained an abstract top-down expert conceptualization, unconnected to those facing and dealing with disasters on the ground. furthermore, it did not make sense to explore the perceptions of resilience in a norwegian context, as resilience [resiliens] was not a commonly used word in norwegian. but most of all, it was its neoliberal connotation that bothered me. as argued by chandler (2013), evans and reid (2014) and tierney (2015), resilience accords well with a neoliberal agenda that individualizes challenges and responsibility. it facilitates the comfortable explanations of the causes and effects of crises for the elites: it is the individual’s responsibility to be resilient, that is create opportunities from an inevitable unstable situation, rather than a structural responsibility that should be addressed. hence, resilience effectively restricts a space of the political in which the neoliberal structures that create vulnerabilities can be contested. yet, resilience was the concept i had “promised” to use in my project description. opportunely, during this period of the phd journey i was also engaged in critical discussions concerning neoliberal developments in the university, where together with colleagues i took part in a minor “academic spring” (andresen et al. 2015). during this awakening, i developed a strong sense of who i wanted to be as an academic and what values i stood by. consequently, i reflected on what doing a phd at the university entails today. increasingly, phd positions are tied to externally funded projects with predetermined concepts. the ripple effect of this is that you feel you have to deliver a product that complies with the concepts that secured money for the project. like a consultant, you are hired to assess resilience or other taken-for-granted concepts. as a result, the idealistic pursuit of truth risks being swallowed by the instrumental production of knowledge. at the time of my break up with resilience, it felt like i had wasted two years on something i could not make use of. this can be daunting when you have four years to complete a thesis. but i could not make myself continue with a concept the use of which i disagreed strongly with. this brings me to the second issue i encountered during my journey with resilience: passitivity within the university. early career researchers, attempting to take a critical stand towards buzzword concepts, can be met by 170 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections problematic statements that encourage passitivity. for example, i was told by a senior colleague that i should just stop brooding and go along with the pros and cons of resilience – i could not escape the “new wine” within disaster research. this statement came more out of passitivity than anything else: it is easier to just go along with something than to take an active stand against it. this passitivity is killing the university as a true critical actor in society. to a large degree, this has to do with the neoliberal values that guide the practices of universities: being evaluated by publication points and the amount of external funding you bring in probably reduces people’s ability to do anything else. we have become “individualistic and productive academic subjectivities” (kallio & hyvärinen 2017, 121), chasing academic merit to the point where you do not even have time to critically question what you are obeying. to survive, you comply. still, is not this compliance, or passitivity, a reason why the neoliberal agenda continues to prosper? it seems as though plenty of academics are not satisfied with the neoliberal cloak that turns them into capital. but nothing will change as long as passitivity is the chosen path. in 1946, orwell reflected on how economic forces are threatening the independence of writers, but also, how the attacks on intellectual liberty come from within. as other orwellian reflections of society, this unfortunately seems just as relevant today: everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to [him] from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. but in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side: that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he is in the right. (orwell 2017, 131) acknowledgements thank you to hilde refstie, silje mathisen, teklehaymanot g. weldemichel and michael jones for believing in the idea and commenting on my drafts. references andresen, s. a., epremian, l., jakobsen, t. s., jones, m. & refstie, h. (2015) fighting fog – the case of creeping neoliberalism and weakening university democracy in norway. krisis – journal of contemporary philosophy 2 27–33. chandler, d. (2013) resilience and the autotelic subject: toward a critique of the societalization of security. international political sociology 7(2) 210–226. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12018 evans, b. & reid, j. (2014) resilient life: the art of living dangerously. polity press, cambridge. kallio, k. p. (2017) subtle radical moves in scientific publishing. fennia 195(1) 1–4. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.63678 kallio, k. p. & hyvärinen, p. (2017) a question of time – or academic subjectivity? fennia 195(2) 121– 124. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67834 kallio, k. p. & riding, j. (2018) dialogical peer-review and non-profit open-access journal publishing: welcome to fennia. fennia 196(1) 4–8. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 lund, r. (2018) the social organisation of boasting in the neoliberal university. gender and education 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2018.1482412 norris, f. h., stevens, s. p., pfefferbaum, b., wyche, k. f. & pfefferbaum, r. l. (2008) community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness. american journal of community psychology 41(1–2) 127–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-007-9156-6 orwell, g. (2017) the prevention of literature (1946). in milner, d. (comp.) orwell on truth, 130–140. harvill secker, london. rogers, p. (2015) researching resilience: an agenda for change. resilience 3(1) 55–71. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/21693293.2014.988914 tierney, k. (2015) resilience and the neoliberal project: discourses, critiques, practices – and katrina. american behavioral scientist 59(10) 1327–1342. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215591187 weichselgartner, j. & kelman, i. (2015) geographies of resilience: challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept. progress in human geography 39(3) 249–267. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132513518834 https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12018 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67834 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2018.1482412 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-007-9156-6 https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2014.988914 https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2014.988914 https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215591187 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513518834 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513518834 earth, wind and fire: island energy landscapes of the anthropocene urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa113455 doi: 10.11143/fennia.113455 earth, wind and fire: island energy landscapes of the anthropocene edward h. huijbens and karl benediktsson huijbens, e. h. & benediktsson, k. (2021) earth, wind and fire: island energy landscapes of the anthropocene. fennia 199(2) 188–202. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.113455 carbon-based systems of energy are rapidly unravelling. the imperative of climate emergency is reshaping energy landscapes, in some instances leading to the reappraisal of energy options hitherto sidelined. this paper deals with the emerging energy landscapes of the netherlands and iceland through historically informed tales that focus on islands. while vastly different in historical and geographical context and scale, these cases reveal the necessity of geographical nuance facilitated by the ways insular places offer insights into energy imaginaries of the anthropocene. the former is a historicised narrative about the reinvention of wind energy as natural gas is being ousted. it focuses on the proposed dogger bank power link islands, the first of which is scheduled to emerge in the coming years. the latter, also historically informed, identifies the context for current large wind energy proposals in iceland, and then contrasts these with the authors’ empirical observations from the small peripheral island of grímsey. there wind energy is also being reinvented for ousting the predominant oil infrastructure on the island. these cases represent experimental opportunities for envisioning anthropocene futures intended to destabilize imaginaries of growth in ways that open spaces for negotiation and contestation. they problematize dominant narratives that render wind energy development visible and knowable as a necessary intervention. emergent from this is wind’s decentred energy landscape in the anthropocene; an epoch where energy is revealed in its importance to our societies, dispelling the human exceptionalism implicit in the nomenclature whilst at the same time showing how our actions come to matter. the collision of the earth and ourselves under the terms of climate emergency begs the question whether our differences are the only ones that matter? but also, if it matters what we have done, then surely it matters what we have not done and chosen to ignore. keywords: iceland, netherlands, anthropocene, islands, energy, wind edward h. huijbens (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1939-1286), cultural geography group (geo), wageningen university & research, wageningen campus, building 101 (gaia), room b-302, droevendaalsesteeg 3, 6708pb wageningen, the netherlands. e-mail: edward.huijbens@wur.nl karl benediktsson (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5383-9254), faculty of life and environmental sciences, university of iceland, iceland. tæknigarður dunhaga 5, 107 reykjavík, iceland. e-mail: kben@hi.is © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.113455 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1939-1286 mailto:edward.huijbens@wur.nl https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5383-9254 mailto:kben@hi.is fennia 199(2) (2021) 189edward h. hujbens & karl benediktsson introduction new energy landscapes are taking shape, animated by the imperatives of climate change. this paper deals with the emerging energy landscapes of the netherlands and iceland through historically informed tales that focus on islands. while vastly different in historical and geographical context and scale, we contend that these cases reveal the necessity of geographical nuance facilitated by the ways insular places offer insights into energy imaginaries of the anthropocene. the former case is a historicised narrative about the reinvention of dutch wind energy as natural gas is being ousted, through the forming of artificial islands channelling electricity from immense offshore wind turbine arrays to the mainland. the latter example, also historically informed, identifies the context for recently tabled large-scale wind energy proposals in iceland, and then describes in some detail the peripheral island of grímsey, where small-scale wind energy is being promoted for ousting the predominant oil infrastructure on the island. although vastly different in most aspects, these island-centred proposals represent experimental opportunities for imagining anthropocene futures and landscapes. ‘landscape’ is of course a staple concept of geography, albeit one which has given rise to myriad interpretations, which we do not dwell on here (but see e.g. wylie 2007; benediktsson & lund 2011; kolen et al. 2015). for us, landscapes are at once material and non-material: they are the result in the present of past imaginings of the future, embodying choices that have been made, and, importantly also, alternatives that were suggested but not chosen. nowhere is this more obvious than in energy landscapes – the spatially variegated physical manifestations of energy systems together with the imaginaries that have brought them into being. the concept of the ‘imaginary’ has indeed gained much attention in recent studies of sociotechnical systems (jasanoff & kim 2009, 2015). it has proved particularly productive for understanding how energy systems come to be assembled in particular ways (benediktsson 2021), resulting in a range of ‘scapes’. the particular energy landscapes this paper focuses on is inspired by recent geographical work on islands. an example is bonnett (2020), who claims that the world has entered the “age of islands”. similarly, pugh and chandler (2021, 1) assert that ”there are only islands after the end of the world”, placing emphasis on the island as increasingly important for both policy orientation and critical imaginaries as the looming climate catastrophe is becoming evident. drawing on the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially readily observable relational entanglements and sensitivities, these authors encourage a geographically nuanced focus on its peoples and modes of life. seen from this perspective, the island space provides grounds for interrogating new energy infrastructures proposed in response to the climate crisis. indeed, “[o]ur power to reshape the planet is stark on new islands” (bonnett 2020, 4), but also on older ones. the reshaping and making of island spaces is thereby bound with hope, as much as with the fact that islands often manifest disasters and dynamics of climate change playing out with particular intensity. moreover, in the energy transition, islands have come to be seen as important laboratories for putting new socio-technical imaginaries into practice (skjølsvold et al. 2020). the title of the article draws attention to the dominant harnessing of earthly fires of fossilised hydrocarbon in the two cases narrated, and how these are supposed to be replaced with wind under the current climatic regime. this is a climatic regime dominated by humans and our evergrowing powers to transform the face of the earth with our ingenuity and technology. the earthshifting geo-power of our technology and its earth system impacts, has prompted the naming of a new geological epoch, that of the anthropocene, or the geological epoch of man (pálsson 2019). however, this epoch is one where certain ‘men’ in certain places, and not humanity as a whole everywhere, have brought about transformations to various earth systems on a planetary scale. while we do not want to recount how the ways in which europe amassed its wealth through rather violent and morally dubious means of appropriation that heralded this era (lewis & maslin 2018), the anthropocene represents to us a story of how the ‘end of the world’ is spatially differentiated (wakefield 2020), drawing attention to plurality and the importance of scale (tornel & lunden 2022). at the same time, global political and technological arrangements have developed into what mitchell (2011) labelled ‘carbon democracy’. the resulting energy landscapes based on fossilized carbon – or ‘carbonscapes’, to use the term of haarstad and wanvik (2017) – require scrutiny, but so do the 190 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper ideas and proposals for their alternatives. through the recognition of this differentiation, allowed for through the analytical lens of islands, this paper will attempt to ‘re-story’ the anthropocene. the departure point is that the global energy system and its concomitant geographies are structures we can historicise, which reveals that “the extraction, conversion, transportation and consumption of energy are unstable processes that we use significant resources to contain, control and put into order” (haarstad & wanvik 2017, 445). as a consequence, energy landscapes need to be seen as place-specific, open-ended, emergent assemblages, where events are generative of a plurality of times and futures and wherein choices made matter. beyond the necessary analysis of aesthetics and acceptance (e.g. sepänmaa 2010), this article focuses on looking back at the formation of two particular carbonscapes and reappraising them. the paper will attempt to create a rupture in the current way the energy systems of the netherlands and iceland are perceived and chart a more geographically nuanced vision of the future. the two different stories are intended to destabilize imaginaries of growth in ways that open spaces for negotiation and contestation, problematizing dominant narratives that render wind energy development visible and knowable as a necessary intervention. the specificities of the spaces described accentuate the need to geographically diversify the meaning of the anthropocene and the moral imperative of going green to save the world. energy and the anthropocene steffen and colleagues (2015) label the massive post-war economic and consumptive boom, evident through several socio-economic indicators, the ‘great acceleration’. moreover, in their proposal they hinge the onset of the anthropocene on the ‘drafted consumption’ of the people of the affluent north, to keep the productive capacity of the war machine churning (lebow 1972) through demonstrating its decisive earth system effects. their proposal was meant to address the debate on the start of the anthropocene, a new geological epoch superseding the holocene, representing a move beyond the geologic conditions characteristic of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years and a shift into a novel and perilous epoch whose signature is irreversible human impact on earth and life processes. many have further speculated on the meaning of the anthropocene, but more importantly, upon which pivotal event this human epoch in geology can be hinged. the proposals are numerous in a geological sense (biello 2016, 44–46; chwałczyk 2020; faber 2018, 52–54) but also conceptually (castree 2014). the debates around stratigraphic markers which can represent a decisive epochal shift are addressed in detail by zalasiewicz and colleagues (2019). they claim that the anthropocene indeed represents a distinct chrono-stratigraphical unit but conclude that the only ‘golden spike’ marker possibly representing a shift measurable on geological time is the global dispersion of radionuclides after mid-twentieth century nuclear testing. however, in accordance with the elaboration of a ‘geology of mankind’ as presented by crutzen (2002), one of the clearest earth system indicators identified by steffen and colleagues (2015) is the extremely rapid increase of atmospheric co2. this particular greenhouse gas is a by-product of the pervasive use of fossilized hydrocarbon fuels, not least for generating electricity. the particular resulting carbonscapes have become dominant, not only in the affluent global north, but also around the planet in emerging economies, most notably china, which today tops the charts in total co2 emission. strategies for moving away from this fossil fuel dependency were the primary bone of contention in the most recent conference of the parties (cop) of the united nations framework convention on climate change in glasgow. with such strategies now considerably accelerated in europe due to perceived need of energy independence from russia, the primary candidates to replace fossil fuels for energy are wind, solar and water power, whilst nuclear power has been sidelined by popular concerns, not least after the fukushima daiichi nuclear disaster (wang & kim 2018). appropriating wind and solar energy to counter fossil fuel hegemony is, however, a particularly volatile and spatially demanding enterprise, making for unsolved challenges of long-range distribution and storage of accumulated energy. hydropower partially addresses this, but is also rather land-use intensive and reliant on particular topographies which are either too remote to be feasible or in densely populated areas requiring population displacement and dispossession. moreover, very often fennia 199(2) (2021) 191edward h. hujbens & karl benediktsson hydropower development has substantial impacts for fragile ecosystems and habitats. on the global scale, jacobson and colleagues (2019) claim that total land area needed for a complete energy transition to wind, water and solar is 0.65 per cent of the earth’s total land area, or roughly 1.85 times the size of the us state of california. yet, due to the challenges associated with these sources, these will be concentrated where the energy is needed. the future energy landscape is thus one where “[r]enewable energy technologies are no longer endemic, singular plants or facilities, but almost omnipresent landscape elements. thousands of tall wind turbines, millions of roof-mounted solar panels and thousands of photovoltaic parks cannot be hidden; societies are challenged by new elements, new sceneries and new landscapes” (stremke & schöbel 2019, 17; see also owens 2019). whilst this reshuffling of the global energy infrastructure and carbonscapes is underway in a range of guises, such as the us green new deal and the eu green deal, it is important to highlight that the current ways in which energy systems are developing under the climate imperative can be characterised as ‘eco-modernization’, effectively not breaking in any way with the global system of economic growth, consumption, wealth generation, and fundamental inequalities arguably responsible for our current anthropocenic predicament (lewis & maslin 2018). current proposals to reanimate wind come uncomfortably close to swyngedouw’s critical description of the zeitgeist: “[a] global intellectual and professional technocracy has spurred a frantic search for ‘smart’, ‘sustainable’, ‘resilient’, and/or ‘adaptive’ socio-ecological management and seeks out the socioecological qualities of eco-development, retrofitting, inclusive governance, the making of new inter-species eco-topes, geoengineering, and technologically innovative – but fundamentally market conforming – eco-design in the making of a “good” anthropocene” (swyngedouw 2019, 253; see also parikka 2014). the problem is that the rollout of renewable energy infrastructures is emulating the same processes which brought about the climate crisis to begin with. this can best be exemplified in ideas of geoengineering, where scientists in the hearths of the affluent north in pursuit of the ‘good anthropocene’ see it fit to suggest experiments with the global atmosphere to fix a singularly identified problem, for the benefit of humankind, also singularly defined. apart from the obvious lack of global consultation on the currently proposed experiments, the perceptions of the earth system and humanity as uniformly rationalised entities are particularly concerning (gupta & mason 2014). they rely upon certain culturally conceived, humanistic notions of the unity of the subject, and the earth system as manipulable and almost linear – like a machine that just needs fixing. according to swyngedouw (2019), this type of thinking is ‘obscene’. in the context of this paper, this obscenity lies in neither recognising the flexible and multiple identities and subject positions of a variegated humanity nor the locally specific conditions of weather and the capacity of particular topographies along with marine and terrestrial ecosystems to allow for renewable energy generation and the cultural and societal acceptance that needs to come with that. the cautioning words of the potential obscenity associated with the pursuit of the ‘good’ anthropocene urges a geographically nuanced and critical valuing of the future prospects of the energy transition. following stengers (2015) we propose looking back towards the future from the present. this serves a particular purpose: “to characterize is to go back to the past starting from the present that poses the question, not so as to deduce this present from the past but so as to give the present its thickness: so as to question the protagonists of a situation from the point of view of what they may become capable of, the manner in which they are likely to respond to this situation” (stengers 2015, 34). stengers advocates for cultivating the art of paying attention to the possible, starting with attending to all the manners in which we can escape the pervasive grip of modern-day consumptive capitalism. inspired by this standpoint, we grapple in this paper with the ways in which we can revalue human and material relations towards a plurality of anthropocene futures, through the simultaneous production of the present by the past and the future in geographically variegated island settings (kallis & march 2014). heeding castree (2021), we contend that dissonant forms of knowledge and argument about the earth in the present and future will be key to forging a ‘good anthropocene’, informing an open, honest and wide-ranging debate around what constitutes the ‘good’. 192 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper doggerland – an emerging island of the anthropocene as bonnett (2020, 27) points out, humanity has gained more land than has been lost since 1985, despite measured sea-level rise. this is largely due to land reclamation efforts and literal islandbuilding. the planet is veritably studded with artificial islands. the dutch are at the forefront of many of these land reclamation efforts and island building projects worldwide, building on their longstanding expertise in negotiating with the encroaching north sea on the ‘low lands’. during the last period of glaciation, the current british isles and what is now the netherlands and belgium were connected by a land-bridge named ‘doggerland’. this was a consequence of water tied up in the ice sheets covering the north and south hemispheres, which at the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, meant that sea levels were lower by about 100 metres on average globally (pillans et al. 1998, 7). however, as the ice receded and melted at the end of the glaciation period, sea levels started to rise. from 12,000 bce until 7,000 bce, doggerland was slowly submerged by rising sea levels. a tsunami (5,500 bce), generated by an undersea mudslide off the coast of norway, dealt the penultimate blow, leaving only a small archipelago of the coast of modern-day skegness. these islands were soon to disappear and what now remains are only submerged sandbanks, called the dogger bank (walker et al. 2020). that name is derived from ‘dogger’, a mid-17th century word used for a two-masted boat of the type that trawled for fish in the area in medieval times, exploiting the banks’ fertile fishing grounds. during its time, doggerland would have been a flat prairie-like landscape, ideal for the seasonal lifestyle of the hunter-gatherers of the time (graeber & wengrow 2021). this plain can be seen as extended through the netherlands and then ringed by the hills of the ruhr, the ardennes and the pennine foothills. as the land was slowly eaten away by encroaching seas, the hominid tribes would relocate, settling further and further ‘upland’ on the now british isles and mainland europe, as they got decimated or absorbed into the advancing homo sapiens species emanating from the african heartlands in waves (hajdinjak et al. 2021). the eventual tribal structure to emerge developed a particular relationship with the land in the low lands, setting up villages and means of transport navigating a bog-infested landscape, waterlogged and under constant threat from further encroaching seas (van beek et al. 2019). the low lands were mostly a flat sandy glacial outwash plain continually transformed by the meandering rhine and maas rivers and smaller effluences through complex eustacy dynamics to which people adapted. more importantly, this sandy plain does not have much to offer in terms of readily minable wealth or natural resources, apart from clastic deposits and biomass, accumulating since the end of the last glaciation period. gravel, silt and clay aside, the accumulated biomass made for peatlands and raised bogs (hoogvenen in dutch). the emergence of early medieval cities, growing population density and excessive forest harvesting in the western parts of the current netherlands led to the excavation of these peatlands (van beek et al. 2015). as a result, the peatlands in the western and central parts of the netherlands subsided by a total of six metres in the period between 1,000 and 2,000 ce (groenewoudt 2012). the mining activities left the landscape potholed and further waterlogged (van bavel & luiten 2004, 505, 521). the peat, however, was cheap and ready for the taking by those who were permitted to do so. its use was a necessary condition for the emergence of the netherlands in the ‘long sixteenth century’ (1451–1648) as a world power and cradle of capitalism (de zeeuw 1978; moore 2015). this ‘brown gold’ was easily transported by canals, emerging partly as effects of the mining, and sustained the economy of the growing cities. but as the cities grew, peat became scarce and more expensive and was gradually replaced by cheaper imported coal (patel & moore 2018, 168–171). today, only experts will recognise the legacy of peat mining in the landscape and landscape of former peatlands is considered natural by contemporary dutch. this ‘polder’ landscape is even celebrated as the idyllic countryside and an icon of dutchness. due to the land subsiding in the already low lands, these mined-out peatlands required sophisticated techniques for water management. these included the building and maintenance of dikes and the development of windand watermills. to counter the unfolding process of ‘drowning’ (groenewoudt 2012), harnessing of wind power was of pivotal importance for propelling pumps that would drain water from behind the dikes and eventually out to the sea beyond the dunes, which traditionally protected the netherlands, most of the time, against floods. intricate socio-technical assemblages and fennia 199(2) (2021) 193edward h. hujbens & karl benediktsson institutions were developed for cooperation in dike maintenance and water management to achieve this protection (kaijser 2002). while the main institutions are still important, today’s water pumps are powered by electricity from the grid, or in some instances, by diesel engines. the iconic windmills that represent the netherlands now are mostly relegated to heritage status, the preeminent example being the mills of kinderdijk, which is an established unesco world heritage site. the windmill-studded polder landscape is thus the dutch ur-energy landscape, having emerged due to the intensity of use of particular parcels of land, that led to more intense use and management, which required ever more ingenuity and knowledge application. as a source of energy however, wind was always secondary to the ‘brown gold’ of peat that fuelled the birth of mercantile capitalism in the emerging cities of the low lands. this in turn fuelled the colonial enterprise, albeit using vessels that were propelled by wind. as the peat supplies dwindled, and with a brief intermezzo of reliance on coal from the ruhr and the southern and eastern parts of the netherlands, oil exploration started in the late 19th century, eventually yielding several fields with mainly gas around the country (van hulten 2009). largest of these was a natural gas field near the city of groningen. much cheaper to exploit than coal, and with the added price hike of oil in the wake of the 1973 opec oil crisis, the gas represented an abundant source of domestic and relatively clean energy. following the gas find in 1959, the whole country was rigged with gas infrastructure in just over a decade. gas pipelines and boreholes in the northern province of groningen therefore quickly replaced the polder windmills and peat pits as the energy landscape of the netherlands. with netherlanders cosily relying on the abundant gas fields of the north and other energy infrastructure relegated to heritage status, the drive for alternative energy sources in the wake of the opec oil crises halted, with no domestic market for such alternatives. domestic companies, for instance in wind turbine production, lost out to danish and german competition (faber 2018, 131–132). most recently though, and due to earthquakes as the gas fields subsided, the dutch government decided on 17 january 2014 to cut output from the gas field, and on 29 march 2018 announced its complete termination by 2030 for safety reasons, although this decision is begin revised due to the current war in ukraine and the urgent need to wean europe off russian gas and oil. the announced closure re-sparked the alternative energy debate that had followed in the wake of the post-opec crises. the search for alternatives is further bolstered by the goals set out in the paris agreement, calling for 42 per cent reduction of electricity generation from fossil fuels by 2030. to meet this, a total of 84 twh need to be generated per annum with renewable energy in the netherlands. up to 60 per cent of this can be met with offshore windfarms in the north sea and visions are already being promoted to this extent (van hattum 2021). bonnett (2020) describes how dutch engineering and dealings with the sea have thereby become animated by ‘going with the flow’ of wind and water and the need to bring nature back, on land at least. although any such exercise will “look fake and feel clumsy”, it is the “right thing to do”, bonnett (2020, 56) claims. in this context, faber (2018) refers to the north sea as an ‘anthropocene park’ (fig. 1). seeking to harness the winds of the north sea to combat climate change and its concomitant threat of sea level rise represents effectively a ‘u-turn to the future’, in the sense that traditional means of managing the energy landscapes of the low lands are being reinvented under the climate imperative. the ‘cultures of energy in the twenty-first century’ (strauss et al. 2013), have brought to the surface our voracious energy needs, causing the netherlands to step up its efforts of claiming land from the sea. scaled up, the challenges of ending fossil fuel use on a global scale call for new energy infrastructure and expanded collaboration. land reclamation and associated technological development are going into overdrive, reclaiming the submerged doggerland as the ‘dogger bank power link islands’ where artificial islands will be created at the northeast end of the dogger bank, just outside the continental shelf of the united kingdom and near the point where the borders between the territorial waters of netherlands, germany, and denmark come together. at the north seas energy forum in brussels on 23 march 2017, the dutch and german arms of transmission system operator tennet together with the danish energinet.dk signed a trilateral agreement to cooperate in further development of the project promoting it as a contribution to meeting commitments of the paris accord. these partners hope that norway, the united kingdom, and belgium will also join them, but so far only the dutch gasunie and the port of rotterdam have joined the consortium. the aim of the project is to help develop a cluster of interconnected offshore http://energinet.dk 194 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper wind parks. these will replace the current radial setup of wind farms, where each individual country draws on their own, with a modular ‘hub-and-spoke’ setup along with the supporting infrastructure required to transport the energy and use it directly or feed so-called ‘power-to-x’ (p2x), such as for converting electricity into gas to balance different national energy systems based on real-time demand and stored energy capacity. according to the results of the project's assessment phase, presented in july 2019, the network of linked islands in the north sea would operationalise 180 gigawatts offshore wind. this could be achieved by 2045 by the consortium’s approach, with interconnections to the north sea countries by undersea cables which will make international trade in generated electricity possible. the first power link island is scheduled for completion 2030–2050. it will be an artificial island of about 6 square kilometers, located at the centre of some 10,000 wind turbines spread out over the north sea (fig. 1). in other words, “[t]he north sea is being reimagined: turned from an empty in-between space into a heartland” (bonnett 2020, 222). currently the question is if the social practices of dike and canal maintenance, of which the windmills stand as an iconic testimony to all over the country, can be reanimated at the current juncture. however, the dutch, as used as they are to energy coming from ‘nowhere’, most ardently reject wind turbines on land and would like to see them pushed to the sea. this is perhaps at its clearest in the case of the proposed data centre of meta, the mother company of facebook, near the town of zeewolde. there the municipal authorities have approved (in december 2021) a 166 hectares plot to build the centre, which will need 1380 gwh a year to run. the amount of energy needed by the data centre is comparable to the total energy use of the dutch dominant railway company, the ns. if built, it will be one of five ‘hyperscale’ data centres in the netherlands, three of which are already in operation. the difference is that the one proposed by meta comes with the demand that all energy provided is ‘green’. the energy needed can be provided by 115 windmills of the biggest sort, ones that rise 175 meters above the ground. this is the same height as the iconic euromast landmark in rotterdam, fig. 1. dogger bank island link island. source: vaughan (2017). fennia 199(2) (2021) 195edward h. hujbens & karl benediktsson which resonates as a scale figure with the dutch. but that green energy cannot be sourced locally on land due to opposition, the solution proposed by the local authorities is to push it to the sea. capitalising on the skills developed through centuries, anthropocene islands will thereby emerge that link together offshore wind turbines and channel their energy onwards to the mainland. the impetus for this energy need are mainly places like the meta data centre – serving a company at the core of the obscene wealth concentration and growing inequalities in the age of ‘platform capitalism’ (srnicek 2016). in cahoots with the local community council of zeewolde, which has the planning mandate, the promise of economic growth, jobs and prosperity is pushing the demand for wind from the north sea, although the locals resist. the social practices that brought the iconic windmills into being are not animating the current development of wind energy, as it is dissociated from society. wind is primarily a means for profit and an engine for growth, fuelling capitalist aspirations that most people have lost touch with in their everyday life, as clear from the rationale for approval provided by the municipality of zeewolde. a modern wind turbine in the backyard does not have the same sociocultural resonance as a heritage windmill. the dominant anthropocene imaginary in the dutch case is one of doggerland to be reclaimed as sea levels rise, but this time transformed from prairie to airy energy through a forest of wind turbines to be planted at the seabed for energising further growth and capital gains. while doggerland was a heartland for hunter-gatherers before, it is re-emerging as a heartland for growth-driven aeolian hunter-gatherers of the obscenely wealthy 1 per cent tribe. it will thereby return to the centre as faber (2018) postulates, as the cross-roads today. the question is whether our descendants will find our bones at the bottom of the sea, as we are finding still today the bones of the hunter-gatherers of past, as a current exhibit at the university of leiden, entitled doggerland, demonstrates (faber 2018, 204–205). the energy that the dogger bank power link islands are supposed to channel is really destined to feed a growth engine that will see no end to the rise in sea levels. iceland and the island of grímsey very different natural conditions and historical particularities are revealed when we turn the attention to iceland and its energy situation. although endlessly promoted for its ‘wilderness’ landscapes (sæþórsdóttir et al. 2011), more or less the whole island country can in fact also be considered a landscape of ruin – albeit not the ‘managed ruin’ of mercantile capitalism as the dutch former peat pits, but of pre-capitalist exploitation of indiscriminate deforestation and grazing. pastoral land use has turned a good part of the country into grassland, and severe overgrazing has contributed to tremendous soil loss (arnalds 1987; barrio et al. 2018). much of the birch forest dominating the settlement and medieval landscape was also cleared to obtain building materials and fuel. wood, charcoal and peat were the most important energy sources for a subsistence society that for a long time seemed to be perpetually teetering on the brink of disaster, or until economic changes ushered in capitalist industrial modernity during the latter part of the 19th century (karlsson 2000). when capitalism finally arrived in iceland, several domestic energy options were untapped and available. however, at the very start of the modernist economic development trajectory, the easiest solution had been taken: imported coal – the defining commodity of the carbon democracies of the time (mitchell 2011). later oil, by then a globally traded commodity, became the energy source of choice. energy from fossil fuels has continued to play a substantial role to this day, but two forms of renewable energy eventually came to dominate as industrialisation picked up pace, notably hydropower for electricity and geothermal energy for heating (and later also for electricity). looking at the primary energy mix today, these two sources provide by far the largest part, or about 90 per cent (statistics iceland 2021). seen from the outside at least, iceland therefore seems to be in an enviable position regarding energy. the transition to renewables has advanced further than in most other countries, although some important sectors of the economy, such as transportation, fishing and shipping, are still fuelled by oil. particularly noteworthy is the extensive harnessing of geothermal energy from both lowand hightemperature fields. its use was at first very local and small-scale, making use of hot water available at the surface and thus readily accessible, for purposes such as bathing and later also the heating of 196 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper greenhouses. large-scale exploitation of the resource started in the 1930s in reykjavík, where a municipal hot water distribution system was installed for piping water from boreholes both within and outside the urban area. this involved major infrastructural investments over several decades, but eventually geothermal hot water reached all buildings in the city. other towns and some rural areas followed the capital’s successful example, first those with known geothermal fields close by. as in the netherlands, the oil crises of the seventies then led to a partial rethink of the energy situation in iceland. in particular, much effort was expended into searching for new geothermal sources for heating to replace oil, with considerable success. gradually more and more towns and villages could take advantage of this precious resource (pálmason 2005). now about 90 per cent of the housing stock is heated geothermally (orkustofnun 2021). in addition to direct use, high-temperature geothermal fields have in recent decades increasingly been put to work for producing electricity. this is somewhat problematic, however, as the long-term renewability of such use is by no means certain (arnórsson 2017). moreover, the conversion of geothermal steam into electricity is quite inefficient, with much of the initial energy dissipated in the process. nevertheless, geothermal technology is considered among the fields where iceland has a competitive edge, and there has been much enthusiasm for developing this resource further (clark 2019). articulated by geoscientists, engineers, politicians, and businesspeople, a distinct ‘geothermal sociotechnical imaginary’ (benediktsson 2021) with clear ecomodernist characteristics, can be identified in the country, striving for the ‘good’ anthropocene and contributing to a ‘new nordic extractivism’ (kröger 2016). but because of ample hydroand geothermal energy, wind – for sure a ubiquitous resource on an island where calm weather is a scarce good – has never been utilised as an energy source to any significant extent. this is about to change. resistance to further development of hydroelectric stations has been growing, and a national planning procedure put in place to ease the tensions between conservationists and developers is considered too lengthy and cumbersome by the latter. despite iceland already topping the global list of electricity production per capita, many developers and investors have indicated an interest in establishing wind parks. whereas the hydroand geothermal sectors are mostly in the hands of domestic companies, many of the wind proposals are backed by international players in the wind sector, including the france-based qair corporation, the norwegian company zephyr, and wind turbine manufacturers such as vestas and siemens gamesa. numerous large wind park projects are entering the environmental impact assessment stage, with planning authorities somewhat ill-equipped to deal with this new category of land use (skipulagsstofnun 2017). the tourism sector views this with some trepidation, as wind development would inevitably alter visitors’ perception of much of iceland as ‘wilderness’ landscapes (sæþórsdóttir et al. 2021). if experience from other countries is considered, opposition by local people should also be expected. but iceland still is very much an island in the physical sense. the national grid is not hooked up with the european one, which makes it impossible for electricity producers to participate fully in the vigorous energy market of mainland europe – upon which the dogger bank power link islands are set to capitalise. additional electricity would therefore be used domestically, either by heavy industry (which now gobbles up almost 80 per cent of all electricity produced in the country), or by new users such as data centres, which have already made some inroads. also, there are ideas of establishing large-scale facilities to produce hydrogen or synthetic fuels that might then be exported. all this seems to fit rather closely the characterization by swyngedouw (2019) that we referred to earlier. wind energy is entering iceland in a technocratic and market-driven manner. the picture becomes somewhat more complicated when we shift from the national level to a more fine-grained scale of analysis. some isolated places have remained stubbornly dependent on fossil fuels, such as grímsey, a small (5.3 km2), cliff-ringed island, located just north of the mainland of iceland. it is home to perhaps one million birds, but also some 40–50 people. for centuries the human presence on the island has been supported by small-scale fishing. this is still very much the case, but now tourism has additionally become a source of employment in summer. the tourists come for example to gaze at the ubiquitous puffins, although the main attraction of the island is an invisible human construct, namely the arctic circle. most tourists arrive either on the ferry from the mainland or on cruise ships, the exhaust fumes from their large diesel engines sometimes giving a yellow tinge to the sky in the vicinity of the island. fennia 199(2) (2021) 197edward h. hujbens & karl benediktsson but diesel fuel has long played a different and fundamental role in the daily life of the people in grímsey. electricity is provided by a diesel-powered generator that sits in the middle of the small village, humming relentlessly around the clock, all year round. moreover, every back yard is graced by a fuel tank, the contents of which provide warmth for the inhabitants. the extra cost of having to use oil boilers for space heating is partially compensated through state subsidies. grímsey is, in other words, one of the very few places remaining in iceland that are neither linked up with the national electricity grid nor has access to any geothermal sources. the islanders’ surprisingly many vehicles, ranging from tractors to snowmobiles to pickup trucks, are of course also dependent upon fossil fuels. the contours of the carbonscape are thus still very much in evidence on this small island, which remains linked to the global fossil fuel trade – to oil derricks, refineries, pipelines, commodity trading markets and other material and immaterial things in faraway countries that are part of the carbonscape assemblage. fossil fuels still reign supreme, whereas the wind blows freely without being interrupted by turbine blades. so why not wind? some interesting experimentation with wind energy did in fact take place on the island in the early 1980s. scientists from the university of iceland erected a rather small experimental wind turbine, albeit not for generating electricity, but to heat water directly through friction (dagur 1982). some similar experiments were also being done in other places at this time, mainly by individual enthusiasts and tinkerers. the novel idea was apparently proven to be workable, but the friction mechanism in the grímsey turbine was prone to failure (dagur 1985, 1986). after a few years the trial was wound down, and similar experiments taking place elsewhere in iceland also faded away. it contributed to the lacklustre interest that oil prices eventually dropped again, so the incentive to continue with the development of the technology was removed. the turbine is still standing at the southern end of the island, its silhouette visible from the village, although upon closer inspection it is not looking particularly attractive after years of disuse and neglect – if it ever did (fig. 2). wary of this original enterprise and its results, the islanders seem to have not shown particular interest in wind power since. the current climate anxiety is, however, creating new openings for change. with gradual outmigration from this marginal fishing community, the islanders finally decided in 2009 to join a much larger municipality, akureyri. a town of some 18,000 people, akureyri has since taken an active stand in climate politics, for example by participating in the global covenant of mayors for climate and energy (see global secretariat office n.d.) and by adopting an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality (akureyrarbær n.d.). in collaboration with other municipalities in fig. 2. the experimental windmill on grímsey. picture by huijbens, 23 july 2021. 198 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper the region, a local ecopower company, vistorka, has been set up to work towards this goal (vistorka n.d.). and what better location to put words into action than the microcosmic grímsey? a new trial project is underway, which will involve the installation of two 9 meters tall wind turbines (similar in height as that on fig. 2), each with 6 kw installed power, in a plot where radio and mobile phone masts are already located. the electricity from these small turbines will be fed into the local power grid, possibly with solar cells and batteries added later. the vistorka protagonists of the experiment see grímsey as a potential showcase of the world situation in miniature, where distributed production and consumption of electricity has the potential to radically alter the centralized structures that undergird current energy regimes and carbonscapes. grímsey is thus being mobilised as yet another ‘island laboratory’, which is intended to bring new energy imaginaries into material existence (grydehøj & kelman 2017; watts 2018; skjølsvold et al. 2020). the islanders are somewhat divided in their opinions about the imminent new trial project. some point to the failure of existing infrastructure (fig. 2), others worry about noise, which seems rather far-fetched, as the new (and very small) wind installations will be placed in the middle of the island, far from the village. in any case, the constant hum of the old diesel generator has been part of local lives for a long time. more substantial concerns perhaps are those that relate to adverse effects on the island’s extremely rich birdlife. the charismatic puffin seems an unlikely casualty though, as it lives on the coast, from where it flies out to sea in search for food. another winged summer inhabitant might be more at risk: the arctic tern. however, to what extent this supremely agile bird – which nests in dense colonies around the island – would fall prey to the rotor blades is not certain. wind energy development can certainly affect not only human, but also non-human, lives. the windmill experiment of the 1980s came to grímsey as an outside intervention and technological trial. in a similar way, the current proposals are driven by ‘mainlanders’ climate concern and are not unreservedly gaining local support. the main lesson to be drawn, so that the proposed wind turbines will not to suffer the fate of neglect and disinterest as their predecessor, is that it would probably have been best if the initiative had come from the local inhabitants. at least, local traction needs to be gained and invested in before the project proceeds much further. whilst the large-scale wind park proposals on the mainland are designed to create profit for corporate capital, the grímsey project is much more modest and small-scale. still, it is motivated by outside aspirations that seem somewhat removed from the main daily concerns of the local community. conclusions brought together, these two rather divergent island energy landscapes and associated imaginaries demonstrate to us two things: firstly, that local involvement in, and attachments to, proposed energy infrastructure matters, and secondly, that choices made before have strong bearing on the present. these rather commonly professed points however gain traction when employed to problematize the dominant narratives that render anthropocene imaginaries of wind energy development singularly visible and knowable as a necessary intervention under the climate imperative. gaining such ‘thickness’, in the words of stengers (2015, 34), the examples show how it is possible that we do not all set out for the same future trajectory, but opt for myriad imaginaries of futures on one planet, at different times and in different places. the two cases presented, and the ways in which their histories were engaged with, can inform current proposals for emerging new energy landscapes and counter the seemingly pervasive ecomodernising imaginaries evident in large-scale corporate-driven energy projects. the gigantic dogger bank power link wind project is the clearest example, but also many of the icelandic energy projects, existing and planned, fit this image. countering these, the cautioning words of swyngedouw (2019) call for a geographically nuanced and critical valuing of the future prospects of the energy transition, through looking back, re-appraising the future from the present. what is clear is that through the emerging transition, renewable energy is fast becoming an omnipresent and even dominant part of our landscapes. it is in the distributed network of energy options, maintained by reinvented locally arranged socio-technical assemblages, that we see a more promising future, providing geographically variegated imaginaries to inform the ongoing debate of the ‘good’ anthropocene. for this, we see the fennia 199(2) (2021) 199edward h. hujbens & karl benediktsson case of grímsey as a potentially promising indication of where to head, if worked from the ground up rather than imposed from the top down. the history of energy is replete with bifurcations, where suddenly the course is taken towards a particular energy source or technology whereas other sources or technologies are neglected or abandoned. our two landscape tales hint at just such lost opportunities or greatly delayed transitions. in the netherlands, the sudden abundance of cheap natural gas, searched for and exploited under the terms of the dominant global carbonscape, furthered the abandonment of an age-old sociotechnical assemblage of wind power. in the meantime, other countries continued to develop wind turbine technology and work towards their placement in a new energy landscape. in the netherlands, interest in wind has only recently been resurrected, in a form which perfectly fits the ecomodernist imaginary, feeding the hubris of platform capitalism and the growth imperative, and actually sustaining active local resistance to wind energy generation. in iceland, the abundance of hydroand geothermal power meant that hardly any interest at all was shown in other renewable energy forms. brief experimentation with novel wind technology in the 1980s faded out, with nothing to show for it, except a decaying structure in a small and marginal community right at the arctic circle. one could speculate what might have happened if the direct friction heating technology would have been paid continued attention and developed further. in its derelict guise it seems only to provide for a cautionary tale for locals about outside intervention. underscored by the two landscape narratives are the geographical specificities of emerging energy landscapes of the anthropocene: an epoch where energy is revealed in its importance to our societies. once historicised and scrutinised in their specific geographical contexts, the emerging energy landscapes of the anthropocene can dispel the human exceptionalism implicit in the naming of the epoch, whilst at the same time showing how our actions come to matter, inspiring hope at our current climatic juncture. the collision of the earth and ourselves under the terms of climate emergency begs the question whether we humans are the only ones that matter? but also, if it matters what we have done, then surely it matters what we have not done and chosen to ignore. sidelining wind has played a part in keeping the world stuck on a trajectory of carbon dependency. charting a more geographically nuanced development path into the future through reinventing wind is part of unmooring this dependency, but that needs to happen through the involvement of people in each locality that is entering the future landscape of distributed renewable energy generation. the prevailing eco-modernist imaginary countered with the two cases is the latest reincarnation of a tenacious universalism, which, true to its enlightenment origin, entails a technocratic negation of diversity, and is based on a sharp distinction between humanity and the earth. warnings about the perils of such ‘purification’ (latour 1993) have proliferated. davis (2021, 1) asserts that “geographic scholarship in island environments is a particularly effective nail in the coffin of modernist thinking”. in this she echoes recent arguments made about the ‘anthropocene island’ condition (chandler & pugh 2021; pugh & chandler 2021). islands are best understood as “potential amplifying sites which hold differences and relations often in tension or contradiction: thus, the traces, hauntings and spectres disrupt easy separations between pasts, presents and futures” (pugh & chandler 2021, 143). our account of two islands – one of these being a piece of volcanic rock in the arctic ocean; the other a not-yet-materialised sandbank in the north sea – have sought to reveal some of these ‘tracings, hauntings and spectres’. both have entered into present energy imaginaries, albeit in quite divergent ways. those who plan for these and other new energy landscapes being formed in the present, would do well to draw more explicitly on what has happened in the past and what is imagined as a desirable future. such landscapes remain hybrid; they consist not only of matter in itself, but also of imaginaries that reveal what is being thought to matter, and/or what can come to matter – can be materialised under the conditions of the anthropocene. indeed, “the anthropocene can very well be seen as the great hybridization, in that it fuses together humanity and nature under the impulse provided by human aggressive adaptation” (arias-maldonado 2015, 125). global challenges associated with the current carbonscapes are manifested in land-grabbing, war, climate change and petrol price riots (tynkkynen 2019). the way forward will entail coming to terms with geographical specificities and dissonant knowledges and voices in different places of the critical zone of earth, wind and fire, where our lives unfold. 200 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper references akureyrarbær (n.d.) loftslagsmál. <https://www.akureyri.is/is/thjonusta/umhverfismal/loftslagsmal> 8.1.2022. arias-maldonado, m. (2015) environment and society: socionatural relations in the anthropocene. springer, cham. arnalds, a. (1987) ecosystem disturbance in iceland. arctic and alpine research 19(4) 508–513. https://doi.org/10.1080/00040851.1987.12002633 arnórsson, s. (2017) jarðhiti og jarðarauðlindir. hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, reykjavík. barrio, i. c., hik, d. s., thórsson, j., svavarsdóttir, k., marteinsdóttir, b. & jónsdóttir, i. s. (2018) the sheep in wolf’s clothing? recognizing threats for land degradation in iceland using state-and-transition models. land degradation & development 29(6) 1714–1725. https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.2978 van bavel, b. j. p. & luiten, j. (2004) the jump-start of the holland economy during the late-medieval crisis, c.1350–c.1500. the economic history review 57(3) 503–532. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2004.00286.x van beek, r., maas g. j. & van den berg, e. (2015) home turf: an interdisciplinary exploration of the long-term development, use and reclamation of raised bogs in the netherlands. landscape history 36(2) 5–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2015.1108024 van beek, r., candel, j. h. j., quik, c., bos, j. a. a., gouw-bouman, m. t. i. j., makaske, b. & maas, g. j. (2019) the landscape setting of bog bodies: interdisciplinary research into the site location of yde girl, the netherlands. the holocene 29(7) 1206–1222. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683619838048 benediktsson, k. (2021) conflicting imaginaries in the energy transition? nature and renewable energy in iceland. moravian geographical reports 29(2) 88–100. https://doi.org/10.2478/mgr-2021-0008 benediktsson, k. & lund, k. a. (eds.) (2011) conversations with landscape. routledge, london. biello, d. (2016) the unnatural world: the race to remake civilization in earth's newest age. scribner, new york. bonnett, a. (2020) the age of islands. in search of new and disappearing islands. atlantic books, london. castree, n. (2014) the anthropocene and geography iii: future directions. geography compass 8(7) 464–476. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12139 castree, n. (2021) framing, deframing and reframing the anthropocene. ambio 50 1788–1792. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01437-2 chandler, d. & pugh, j. (2021) anthropocene islands: there are only islands after the end of the world. dialogues in human geography 11(3) 395–415. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820621997018 chwałczyk, f. (2020) around the anthropocene in eighty names – considering the urbanocene proposition. sustainability 12(11) 4458. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114458 clark, n. (2019) political geologies of magma. in bobbette, a. & donovan, a. (eds.) political geology. active stratigraphy and the making of life, 263–292. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_10 crutzen, p. j. (2002) geology of mankind. nature 415 23. https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a dagur (1982) vindmylla reist í grímsey 12.8.1982, p. 1. dagur (1985) það er slæmt að geta ekki virkjað vindinn 12.8.1985, p. 1. dagur (1986) vindmyllan hitar tvö hús. 19.3.1986, p. 1. davis, s. (2021) islands, modernity and other worlds that never end. dialogues in human geography 11(3) 416–419. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206211017441 de zeeuw, j. w. (1978) peat and the dutch golden age. the historical meaning of energy-attainability. aag bijdragen 21 3–31. faber, a. (2018) de gemaakte planeet. leven in het antropoceen. amsterdam university press, amsterdam. global secretariat office (n.d.) global covenant of mayors for climate & energy. <https://www. globalcovenantofmayors.org>. 3.5.2022. graeber, d. & wengrow, d. (2021) the dawn of everything. a new history of humanity. allen lane, new york. groenewoudt, b. (2012) history continuous: drowning and desertification. linking past and future in the dutch landscape. quaternary international 251 125–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2011.07.015 grydehøj a. & kelman i. (2017) the eco-island trap: climate change mitigation and conspicuous sustainability. area 49 106–113. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12300 gupta, a. & mason, m. (eds.) (2014) transparency in global environmental governance: critical perspectives. mit press, cambridge, ma. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262027410.001.0001 https://www.akureyri.is/is/thjonusta/umhverfismal/loftslagsmal https://doi.org/10.1080/00040851.1987.12002633 https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.2978 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2004.00286.x https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2015.1108024 https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683619838048 https://doi.org/10.2478/mgr-2021-0008 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12139 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01437-2 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820621997018 https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114458 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98189-5_10 https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206211017441 https://www.globalcovenantofmayors.org https://www.globalcovenantofmayors.org https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2011.07.015 https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12300 https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262027410.001.0001 fennia 199(2) (2021) 201edward h. hujbens & karl benediktsson haarstad, h. & wanvik, t. i. (2017) carbonscapes and beyond: conceptualizing the instability of oil landscapes. progress in human geography 41(4) 432–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516648007 hajdinjak, m., mafessoni, f., skov, l., vernot, b., hübner, a. fu, o., essel, e., nagel, s., nickel, b., richter, j., moldovan, o., constantin, s., endarova, e., zhariev, n., spasov, r., welker, f., smith, g. m., sinetmathiot, v., paskulin, l., fewlass, h., talamo, s., rezek, z., sirakova, s., sirakov, n., mcpherron, s. p., tsanova, t., hublin, j-j., peter, b. m., meyer, m., skoglund, p. kelso, j. & pääbo, s. (2021) initial upper palaeolithic humans in europe had recent neanderthal ancestry. nature 592 253–257. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03335-3 van hattum, t. (2021) nederland in 2120. <https://www.wur.nl/nl/landingspagina-redacteuren/nl/ dossiers/dossier/nederland-in-2120.htm>. 4.1.2021. van hulten, f. f. n. (2009) brief history of petroleum exploration in the netherlands. <http://www.f-vanhulten.com/geology/van_hulten_2009.pdf>. 10.12.2021. jacobson, m. z., delucchi, m. a., cameron, m. a., coughlin, s. j., hay, c. a., manogaran, i. p., shu, y. & von krauland, a-k. (2019) impacts of green new deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries. one earth 1(4) 449–463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.12.003 jasanoff, s. & kim, s-h. (2009) containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the united states and south korea. minerva 47(2) 119–146. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 jasanoff, s. & kim, s-h. (eds.) (2015) dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. university of chicago press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001 kaijser, a. (2002) system building from below: institutional change in dutch water control systems. technology and culture 43(3) 521–548. kallis, g. & march, h. (2014) imaginaries of hope: the utopianism of degrowth. annals of the association of american geographers 105(2) 360–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973803 karlsson, g. (2000) the history of iceland. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. kolen, j., renes, h. & hermans, r. (eds.) (2015) landscape biographies: geographical, historical and archaeological perspectives on the production and transmission of landscapes. university of amsterdam press, amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089644725 kröger, m. (2016) spatial causalities in resource rushes: notes from the finnish mining boom. journal of agrarian change 1(4) 543–570. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12113 latour, b. (1993) we have never been modern. harvard university press, cambridge. lebow, v. (1972) free enterprise, the opium of the american people. oriole editions, new york. lewis, s. l. & maslin, m. (2018) the human planet. how we created the anthropocene. yale university press, new haven. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2c3k261 mitchell, t. (2011) carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. verso, london. moore, j. w. (2015) capitalism in the web of life. ecology and the accumulation of capital. verso, london. orkustofnun (2021) energy statistics for iceland 2020. <https://orkustofnun.is/gogn/os-onnur-rit/ orkutolur-2020-enska.pdf>. 30.12.2021. owens, b. n. (2019) the wind power story: a century of innovation that reshaped the global energy landscape. john wiley and sons, london. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118794289 parikka, j. (2014) the anthrobscene. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. patel, r. & moore, j. w. (2018) a history of the world in seven cheap things. a guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. verso, london. pálmason, g. (2005) jarðhitabók – eðli og nýting auðlindar. hið íslenska bókmenntafélag, reykjavík. pálsson, g. (2019) the human age. how we created the anthropocene epoch and caused the climate crisis. welbeck, london. pillans, b., chappell, j. & naish, t. r. (1998) a review of the milankovitch climatic beat: template for plio–pleistocene sea-level changes and sequence stratigraphy. sedimentary geology 122(1–4) 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0037-0738(98)00095-5 pugh j. & chandler d. (2021) anthropocene islands: entangled worlds. university of westminster press, london. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1v3gqxp sepänmaa, y. (2010) from theoretical to applied environmental aesthetics: academic aesthetics meets real-world demands. environmental values 19(3) 393–405. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327110x519899 skipulagsstofnun (2017) um skipulag og vindorkunýtingu. <https://www.skipulag.is/media/pdf-skjol/ um-skipulag-og-vindorkunytingu.pdf>. 8.1.2022. skjølsvold, t. m., ryghaug, m. & throndsen, w. (2020) european island imaginaries: examining the actors, innovations, and renewable energy transitions of 8 islands. energy research & social science 65 101491. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101491 srnicek, n. (2016) platform capitalism. wiley, london. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516648007 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03335-3 https://www.wur.nl/nl/landingspagina-redacteuren/nl/dossiers/dossier/nederland-in-2120.htm https://www.wur.nl/nl/landingspagina-redacteuren/nl/dossiers/dossier/nederland-in-2120.htm http://www.f-van-hulten.com/geology/van_hulten_2009.pdf http://www.f-van-hulten.com/geology/van_hulten_2009.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.12.003 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9124-4 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973803 https://doi.org/10.5117/9789089644725 https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12113 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2c3k261 https://orkustofnun.is/gogn/os-onnur-rit/orkutolur-2020-enska.pdf https://orkustofnun.is/gogn/os-onnur-rit/orkutolur-2020-enska.pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118794289 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0037-0738(98)00095-5 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1v3gqxp https://doi.org/10.3197/096327110x519899 https://www.skipulag.is/media/pdf-skjol/um-skipulag-og-vindorkunytingu.pdf https://www.skipulag.is/media/pdf-skjol/um-skipulag-og-vindorkunytingu.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101491 202 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper statistics iceland (2021) gross energy consumption by source 1940–2020. <https://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/ pxweb/en/umhverfi/umhverfi__4_orkumal__2_framleidslaognotkun/>. 30.12.2021. steffen, w., broadgate, w., deutsch, l., gaffney, o. & ludwig, c. (2015) the trajectory of the anthropocene: the great acceleration. the anthropocene review 2(1) 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785 stengers, i. (2015) in catastrophic times resisting the coming barbarism. open humanities press, london. strauss, s., rupp, s. & love t. (eds.) (2013) cultures of energy: power, practices, technologies. left coast press, walnut creek. stremke, s. & schöbel, s. (2019) research through design for energy transition: two case studies in germany and the netherlands. smart and sustainable built environment 8(1) 16–33. https://doi.org/10.1108/sasbe-02-2018-0010 swyngedouw, e. (2019) the anthropo(obs)cene. in jazeel, t, kent, a., mckittrick, k., theodore, n., chari, s., chatterton, p., gidwani, v., heynen, n., larner, w., peck, j., pickerill, j., werner, m. & wright, m. w. (eds.) keywords in radical geography: antipode at 50, first edition, 253–258. wiley blackwell, hoboken. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119558071.ch47 sæþórsdóttir, a. d., hall, c. m. & saarinen, j. (2011) making wilderness: tourism and the history of the wilderness idea in iceland. polar geography 34(4) 249–273. https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937x.2011.643928 sæþórsdóttir, a. d., wendt, m. & tverijonaite, e. (2021) wealth of wind and visitors: tourist industry attitudes towards wind energy development in iceland. land 10(7) 693. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10070693 tornel, c. & lunden, a. (2022) editorial to re-worlding: pluriversal politics in the anthropocene. nordia geographical publications 51(2) 1–9. https://doi.org/10.30671/nordia.116927 tynkkynen, v-p. (2019) the energy of russia: hydrocarbon culture and climate change. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham. vaughan, a. (2017) is this the future? dutch plan vast windfarm island in north sea. guardian 29.12.2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/29/is-this-the-future-dutch-planvast-windfarm-island-in-north-sea>. 3.1.2022. vistorka (n.d.) vistorka ehf. <https://www.vistorka.is/is/um-vistorku>. 8.1.2021. wakefield, s. (2020) anthropocene back loop: experimentation in unsafe operating space. open humanities press, london. walker, j., gaffney, v., fitch, s., muru, m., fraser, a., bates, m. & bates, r. (2020) a great wave: the storegga tsunami and the end of doggerland? antiquity 94(378) 1409–1425. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.49 wang, j. & kim, s. (2018) comparative analysis of public attitudes toward nuclear power energy across 27 european countries by applying the multilevel model. sustainability 10 (1518). https://doi.org/10.3390/su10051518 watts, l. (2018) energy at the end of the world: an orkney islands saga. mit press, cambridge, ma. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10910.001.000 wylie, j. (2007) landscape. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203480168 zalasiewicz, j., waters, c. n., williams, m. & summerhayes, c. p. (2019) the anthropocene as a geological time unit. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108621359 https://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/umhverfi/umhverfi__4_orkumal__2_framleidslaognotkun/ https://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/umhverfi/umhverfi__4_orkumal__2_framleidslaognotkun/ https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785 https://doi.org/10.1108/sasbe-02-2018-0010 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119558071.ch47 https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937x.2011.643928 https://doi.org/10.3390/land10070693 https://doi.org/10.30671/nordia.116927 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/29/is-this-the-future-dutch-plan-vast-windfarm-island-in-north-sea https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/29/is-this-the-future-dutch-plan-vast-windfarm-island-in-north-sea https://www.vistorka.is/is/um-vistorku https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2020.49 https://doi.org/10.3390/su10051518 https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10910.001.000 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203480168 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108621359 envisioning human security – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa76029 doi: 10.11143/fennia.76029 reflections envisioning human security – commentary to gill john morrissey morrissey, j. (2018) envisioning human security – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 225–229. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76029 prompted by nick gill’s review essay, ‘the suppression of welcome’, this commentary additionally reflects on attendant questions of security and responsibility in seeking to conceptualize a more human-centred vision of populations and population management in our current moment of refugee crisis in europe. it charts how we might productively conceptualize and enact a ‘human security’ vision of population management, how such a vision requires us to think differently and cooperatively about security, and ultimately how this compels us to supplant a prevailing narrative of external threat and risk with a story of shared precarity, human empathy and collective responsibility. keywords: european refugee crisis, human security, responsibility john morrissey, school of geography and archaeology, national university of ireland, galway, university road, galway h91 cf50, ireland. e-mail: john. morrissey@nuigalway.ie introduction nick gill’s (2018) essay, ‘the suppression of welcome’, correctly calls out the impoverished logics and bureaucratic architectures of traditional statist security concerns. his piece is also abounding in hope and belief in the spirit of human empathy for the most marginalized in our societies. in sharing that hope, i want to take up a salient question he poses: “[t]o what extent can welcomers and welcoming initiatives be supported by international cooperation, global organisational and communication systems, and resource-gathering mechanisms?” (gill 2018, 88). it is a key question, primarily because it signals the importance of transnational cooperation in dealing with a crisis that is transnational in scale. but within any transnational organisational framework lie states, and when we shift our focus from the ‘state’ to the ‘transnational’, we tend to invoke the import of global institutions in a way that frequently lets the state off the hook. we often fail subsequently in theorizing the effective implementation of cooperation, and in insisting upon the responsibilities to do so. in responding to nick’s piece, i am wondering about a certain reluctance to call for the state and its various administrative structures and legal armatures to support and enact ‘welcome’. an ongoing sustained critique of (neo)liberal state interventionary urges is important, for sure, but i think there may be more to be said in terms of state responsibilities, and the responsibilities of transnational, collective-state organisations such as the european union (eu), towards human security and the protection of human rights for refugees and asylum seekers. to this end, i want to reflect here on how we might productively conceptualize a ‘human security’ vision of population management in a transnational context, which behoves us to think differently and cooperatively about ‘security’, and, crucially, to vigorously contest how its parameters are discursively defined and framed. © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76029 226 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections a crisis comes into view the current humanitarian crisis emanating from north africa and the middle east first came into mainstream view for europeans and the rest of the world in 2015. the intensive media coverage of three-year old alan kurdi’s tragic drowning in september of that year elevated international attention on the unfolding crisis in the mediterranean sea. photographs of his little body washed up and so hauntingly alone on a turkish beach were profoundly affecting and elicited a combination of outrage, empathy and calls for action. the outrage and calls for action were transitory, as is so often the case as media interest and public consciousness wanes. glaringly missing too in the ensuing debates was any noteworthy self-reflexive critique of the crisis, particularly in terms of historicizing western interventionary violence and the broader geopolitics of displacement across the middle east and north africa over the previous 15 years. nonetheless, what became variously known as the ‘european migrant crisis’ or ‘mediterranean refugee crisis’ brings into sharp focus the dreadful consequences of continued cyclical violence in our world today, and presents states across europe with a common challenge: how to intervene responsibly in both support and mitigation; and, vitally, what instruments of policy we must enact to that end. international human rights law (ihrl) and international humanitarian law (ihl) are designed to protect civilians, including refugees. yet, the implementation of binding ihrl or ihl agreements has been a persistent challenge. the international committee of the red cross refers to what it sees as an “institutional vacuum” in terms of implementation, and recently called for states across the globe to strengthen their capacities to implement their “obligations” (international committee of the red cross 2015). ‘obligations’ is a nebulous designation, of course. if there are little or no consequences to obligations not being met, then the implementation of protections will remain a tenuous objective. but, even more importantly, the absence of a vision for why the implementation of ‘protections for all’ actually benefits all is too often absent from political discourse. this is where a vision for ‘human security’ can aid us, i think, in terms of embracing an empathetic and ethical position on the most precarious in society, but also in adopting a collective and cooperative position on security – for all. a vision for human security in 1994, the united nations development programme (undp) declared ‘human security’ as its primary global development goal. in the foreword to its human development report that year, the undp’s vision announced a “people-centred development” that set out a human security agenda for the 21st century. it was security defined by “development, not arms”, with a focal concern for “human life and dignity” (united nations development programme 1994, iii, 1, 22). human security, as the primary objective of locally-attuned interventionism, has been adopted across the global south since 1994 by governments, transnational institutions, ngos and community leaders (elliott 2012). however, this new post-cold war model of interventionism had limited impact in the global north where old statist understandings of security have persisted. in fact, the ‘hard’ security issues of borders, bombs and bullets were emboldened under the auspices of the war on terror. in recent years, for example, the us model of interventionism in the middle east led by the us military command, centcom, has been underpinned by a traditional military-economic framing of security (morrissey 2017). as an academic working in geopolitics and international relations, i am all too familiar with the clinical and abstracted manner in which western interventionism and military-economic security interests work. typically, the profound human geographical consequences are out of view. the current refugee crisis in the eu has much to do with prior western interventionism over the last half century or more on the borders of europe, in the middle east, central asia and north africa. the effects of the last 15 years of pragmatic geopolitics are especially evident. long-term refugees are a direct consequence and it is imperative to critically analyse the geopolitics of their displacement. in recent years, i have been trying to think about ways to insist upon broader visions of security, and this led me to the creation of an irish research council project entitled ‘haven’, which draws upon the undp’s concept of ‘human security’ (morrissey 2018). haven is focused on europe’s response to the mediterranean crisis, and has involved field research in france, greece, hungary and ireland, an fennia 196(2) (2018) 227john morrissey international symposium of academic, activist and ngo speakers and an edited book currently being completed for edward elgar publishing. the haven book documents key dimensions of the crisis, including the legal mechanisms enabling or blocking asylum, the biopolitical systems for managing displaced peoples, and the multiple, overlapping historical precedents of today’s challenges. the book and the broader project is about presenting an alternative ‘human security’ envisioning of western interventionism that critiques the kinds of military and economic definitions of security that commonly involve recurring mechanisms of governmental violence and clinical regimes of population management. human security calls for investing in, and resourcing, interventions of a different kind: in protecting human rights; in insisting upon humanitarian law; in supporting civil society; and in enabling locally-attuned rather than toptown security measures. crucially, human security involves a mobilisation of the law in coalescing human rights concerns with a human security vision, as detailed by estrada-tanck (2016). such a vision speaks in multiple ways to the current ad hoc security system of camps, holding centres and direct provision measures in the european union (eu) – from ireland to greece. the human security paradigm advanced and supported by the un places particular emphases on legally-binding human rights law, which challenges governments across the eu to take responsibility for, and think cooperatively about, a more collective and sustainable sense of security. we need to pay attention, of course, to the selective invocation and use of the law, which governments across the global north, in particular, have become adept at in recent years – both in terms of violent military interventions and humanitarian responses to crises (morrissey 2015). in showing how “procedures for registering, assessing, protecting and managing refugees rework the trauma of war and violence”, loyd, erkampt and secor have outlined how refugees in turkey are “caught in a prolonged limbo, during which they are subject to layers of bureaucracy, repeated interviews and ongoing demands to prove their deservingness” – and all of this is happening “within the international humanitarian logic that governs their access to care and resettlement” (loyd et al. 2018, 377, 386). the discursive battle for ‘security’ current state mechanisms of refugee population management across the eu divulge an impoverished security thinking and strategy. the focus on ‘risk’ is instructive, as it legitimates the so-called exceptional management of individuals who are not citizens and therefore not deserving of our care. their vulnerabilities are neither recognized nor acknowledged. instead, refugees are typically presented as a threat and the source of insecurities, rather than their consequence – further serving to reinforce the appropriateness of biopolitical governmental measures to manage such threats, and in a manner that is out of sight and out of mind. a fundamental and vital discursive challenge is to render visible precarity, and to foreground a story of vulnerability in the place of narratives of risk. this is where a human security conceptualisation can aid us. such a goal involves an old postcolonial concern, of course: enabling the subaltern, the marginalized to speak – those whose lives, homes and worlds have been wrecked and displaced by relentless interventionary violence, always in the name of a particular type of ‘security’. the prevailing statist understanding of security across the eu is mirrored in the overwhelming predominance of instrumental and technocratic research calls on security and migration supported by current eu funding. faced with this monopolisation of how security is defined and what its concerns are, we need to increasingly and collectively advocate for a broader human security agenda, supporting research that brings together scholars, policy makers, activists and (crucially) refugees themselves, in creatively considering how to respond responsibly to what is one of the most pivotal ‘societal challenges’ for the eu since its formation. such a plea ties in with the important concerns raised by earlier responses to nick’s piece here in fennia, about being attentive to the conditions of how we are expected to do and measure ‘societal impact’ in an age fixated with metrics and economized values (bagelman 2018; vainikka & vainikka 2018). there is a need too to refuse and challenge how the media and many political parties across europe negatively portray migration and its effects. we must insist upon and successfully distil more humane, 228 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections nuanced and historically and geographically sensitive accounts of the crisis, which resist the allure of simplified responsive logics of walls, borders and separations of ‘us’ and ‘them’; and we need to increasingly do this via engaged public scholarship, especially in an era of post-truth politics. conclusion the picture of how eu citizens view and welcome refugees is not straightforward. vuolteenaho and lyytinen are correct to point out that there are “ambiguous and contextually varying attitudes to (un) welcoming immigrants” (2018, 118). no doubt too, the “quizzical looks, the questions, the hesitation and disquiet” towards ‘outsiders’ will continue from various quarters (norum 2018, 116). but how do we build upon what gill (2018, 88) cites as a grassroots majority who believe that “their governments should do more to help refugees”? and how do we remember, as sparke (2018, 216) so usefully puts it, that the “in-between spaces of welcome are in constant danger of being overwhelmed by the forces of suppression”? i have argued here that a key starting point in advancing welcome and support for refugees is the collective envisioning of a ‘human security for all’, which negates simplified and populist arguments that divisively separate out ‘us’ and ‘them’. a human security agenda for dealing with the mediterranean refugee crisis requires a careful and repeated documenting of the precarious and marginalized worlds of forced migrants across the eu. it necessitates bringing such worlds into view. it also must involve critique beyond the academy and support for a politics of solidarity with an ‘other’ rarely seen. thinking through how to strategize for, and enact, a people-centred security for all is not straightforward, but it is not impossible. a critical responsibility lies with the eu in setting out and tasking individual member states to meet an agreed obligation to support a collective sense of security, inspired by a human security vision. this might be admittedly difficult to imagine given the current ubiquity of statist understandings of security across the eu, but prevailing discourses of security have always centrally involved shaping what the security problem is deemed to be – and by extension the response. in other words, defining security and acquiring resources for the kind of ‘security solution’ deemed necessary is paramount. recognising this compels us to formulate and communicate coherent and compelling narratives about the kind of security we all want – for whom and from what. human security, as both a discourse and an interventionary strategy, can aid us in considering complicated questions of displacement, migration, human rights and humanitarian responsibility. it can conceptualize the intricacies of the challenges faced and it can also build a politics of solidarity in working solutions that call out the failure of top-down, technocratic security measures and herald instead the success and hopes of locally-attuned, people-centred interventions. human security is ultimately about envisioning shared precarity, interlinked risk and cooperative security responses for all. acknowledgements my thanks to kirsi pauliina kallio and james riding at fennia for their intellectual vision and editorial support in facilitating a broadened conversation on nick gill’s important intervention. references bagelman, n. (2018) who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 108–110. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 elliott, l. (ed.) (2012) climate change, migration and human security in southeast asia. rajaratnam school of international studies, singapore. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203107775 estrada-tanck, d. (2016) human security and human rights under international law: the protections offered to persons confronting structural vulnerability. hart publishing, oxford. gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 international committee of the red cross (2015) meeting of states on strengthening compliance with international humanitarian law. international committee of the red cross <www.icrc.org/en/ document/meeting-states-strengthening-compliance-international-humanitarian-law>. 30.10.2018. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203107775 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 http://www.icrc.org/en/document/meeting-states-strengthening-compliance-international-humanitarian-law http://www.icrc.org/en/document/meeting-states-strengthening-compliance-international-humanitarian-law fennia 196(2) (2018) 229john morrissey loyd, j. m., secor, a. j. & ehrkamp, p. (2018) a geopolitics of trauma: refugee administration and protracted uncertainty in turkey. transactions of the institute of british geographers 43(3) 377–389. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12234 morrissey, j. (2015) securitizing instability: the us military and full spectrum operations. environment and planning d: society and space 33(4) 609–625. https://doi.org/10.1068/d14033p morrissey, j. (2017) the long war: centcom, grand strategy, and global security. university of georgia press, athens (ga). morrissey, j. (2018) haven: intervening for human security. irish research council <havenprojectblog. wordpress.com>. 30.10.2018. norum, r. (2018) from welcome to well ... come: the mobilities, temporalities and geopolitics of contemporary hospitality – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 111–117. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70403 sparke, m. (2018) welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 215–219. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 united nations development programme (1994) human development report 1994: new dimensions of human security. oxford university press, new york. vainikka, v. & vainikka, j. (2018) welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 124–130. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 vuolteenaho, j. & lyytinen, e. (2018) reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12234 https://doi.org/10.1068/d14033p http://havenprojectblog.wordpress.com http://havenprojectblog.wordpress.com https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa45243 doi: 10.11143/45243 contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities: examining policies of governance, europeanisation and co-option in marseille and lyon joseph downing downing, joseph (2015). contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities: examining policies of governance, europeanisation and co-option in marseille and lyon. fennia 193: 2, pp. 185–197. issn 1798-5617. the past decade has seen a dynamic and contradictory treatment of difference in french policy-making, both nationally and locally. however, the means by which local difference orientated policies redefine the national is understudied. this article bridges this gap with a case study analysis of marseille and lyon to assess and typologize the ways that difference is deployed in local policy to influence, contest and negotiate the discursive performance and construction of the nation. of particular importance here are modes of municipal governance, the influence of european government and the co-option of local voluntary groups into policy. this article concludes that both marseille and lyon provide rich examples of not only how municipalities are increasingly concerned with the notion of difference in policy-making, but also how their policies and engagement with local actors in dealing with nationally salient issues might lead to a redefinition of the national. keywords: france, diversity, migrants, national, local, state joseph downing, european institute, london school of economics and political science, houghton street, london, wc2a 2ae, united kingdom, e-mail: j.s.downing@lse.ac.uk introduction the past decade has seen scholars identify an increasingly contradictory and negotiated process of formulating recognition-based policies in france that deploy notions of ethno-cultural and religious ‘difference’ (bhabha 1994). this challenges the nationally ordained policy of assimilation, based around individual, formal, legal and political equality, in addition to the separation of church and state (laïcité), which has long worked as the guarantor of social integration and equality (wihtol de wenden 2003; hargreaves 2007). the inability of this policy to resolve the socio-economic deprivation and discrimination experienced by communities from france’s ex-colonies (cesari et al. 2001; hargreaves 2007) has indeed pushed policy makers to look for alternatives. the move away from assimilation towards difference-orientated policies has however taken place in a contradictory and contested manner, at both the national (modood 2012; dixon 2012) and local (moore 2003; doytcheva 2007; raymond & modood 2007) scales. this article seeks to add to this debate by shedding further light on the increasing use of such discursively constructed notions of difference at the local level (moore 2003; doytcheva 2007) and reflecting on their impact on the national1. in so doing, it assesses and typologizes how municipalities in marseille and lyon are deploying notions of difference in their policies, which end up challenging mainstream discourses of the national. to achieve this, the analysis conducted here begins with the idea that the local provides a medium through which shifting notions of national identities are articulated, negotiated and reproduced (appleton 2002). accordingly, as local municipali186 fennia 193: 2 (2015)joseph downing ties deploy difference in various ways to address issues relevant to migrant communities, they indirectly influence how the national is articulated and constructed. this is not, however, to negate how discourses hostile to immigrants continue to inform the national public debate. rather, this article aims to nuance the salience of these discourses in france by demonstrating how local policies and practices may also work to dovetail with, and reconfigure, them. to this end, the article pursues a comparative analysis across three areas of policy activity in marseille and lyon. first, it will consider the relationship of the local french state to creating and deploying notions of difference in municipal governance and how these impinge on notions of french nationhood. secondly, it will continue this analysis by examining the influence of european policy principles on the deployment of difference to contest or re-negotiate the national. finally, it will look at the ways in which the local state is using notions of difference as a rationale dictating how it funds and co-opts local voluntary organisations and how this in turn resonates with a different understanding of the french nation. nation, assimilation, and diversity in france much has been written about assimilation rising to prominence in france (brubaker 2001; alba 2005; bleich 2011). however, assimilation should not be seen as a unitary and static policy. while it has been venerated for successfully integrating france’s diverse regions (weber 1976) and multiple waves of immigrants from south and eastern europe (weil 2008), this process has remained contradictory. it has never been a simple assimilation to a single, essential and unchanging notion of frenchness, untouched by social and temporal developments. rather, as norial (1988) states, notions of frenchness were remade by the very waves of immigration that the state sought to assimilate and resulted in new versions of frenchness being forged (swamy 2011). today the state continues, in a number of ways, to define the national in often contradictory terms, by deploying notions of difference in some measures, while maintaining assimilationist policies in other areas. evidencing the application of principles of difference, modood (2012) cites the creation of the french council of the muslim faith (cfcm, conseil français du culte musulman) to represent muslims in matters regulating worship and ritual and the creation of france’s first national black association (cran, conseil représentatif des associations noires de france) as important evidence of a possible shift towards multicultural policies in france. this, however, is not a completely novel development on the french scene, with a similar national jewish association existing for over 50 years (crif, conseil représentatif des institutions juives de france). these developments also occurred in tandem with assimilationist measures, such as the 2007 introduction of french language tests for migrants (contrat d’accueil et d’intégration) and the 2010 ban on the full face veil (loi interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l'espace public). within this, it has long been argued from the latter half of the 20th century that the ability of assimilation to adequately integrate migrants from france’s ex-colonies is extremely limited. this criticism stems in large part from the state’s inability to resolve the severe socio-economic deprivation and xenophobic discrimination levelled at those immigrant communities from france’s ex-colonies in the post-world war ii epoch (cesari et al. 2001; hargreaves 2007). thus, hargreaves (2007) explains the participation in the 2005 riots of those from post-migration communities as a result of their alienation from the material and social benefits, owing to significant socio-economic disadvantage and racial and ethnic discrimination. this point is particularly important, because it connects the national and the local in an important way. the discrimination and marginalisation felt by those rioting in 2005 is a multifaceted process. at one level, this marginalisation is reproduced through national processes and discourses hostile to the place of migrants and their descendants in france. however, equal if not more important is the reproduction of this marginalisation locally, through a range of measures including direct employment discrimination, and sub-standard housing. in fact, as shall be demonstrated below, attempts to ameliorate social marginalisation in france have focused on the local contexts deemed such key dimensions in marginalisation’s reproduction (raymond & modood 2007). understanding the role of the local in this contradictory context is vital. this is because it has important implications for identifying and analysing how difference-orientated policies are defennia 193: 2 (2015) 187contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities ployed locally. the emergence of these policies does not occur in a vacuum, rather they are part of a broader process redefining and re-negotiating the relationship between difference and discursively formed notions of frenchness. within this relationship between notions of difference and the national, the local level has long been conceptualised as being notably dynamic in a number of ways (raymond & modood 2007). the application of principles of difference in local policies is particularly notable for its plurality of forms across a plethora of locales. moore’s (2003) comparison of local policies of the management of difference in manchester and marseille highlights this trend. here, moore (2003) concludes that the french are moving towards a ‘socio-cultural’ model of multiculturalism, through the local authority’s recognition of ethno-religious difference in the local policies. however, at the time of his research in the early 2000s, these policies remained covert and implicitly implemented without making a formal explicit statement that marseille had decided to abandon assimilation and move towards a policy of recognition. this concurs with another broad observation in the literature that difference-orientated policies are frequently formulated and applied in france, without overt declarations. doytcheva (2007) echoes this sentiment, by identifying the application of difference-orientated policies in the domain of an equality-driven model, where resources are funnelled to minority populations under the guise of urban renewal. doytcheva’s (2007) research in the garges-les-gonesse and vitry areas of paris identifies a “french affirmative action” being practiced at the local level that singled out minorities for special funding, without making reference to such a policy goal. this picture remains highly dynamic, with policy makers increasingly referencing the differenceorientated nature of their policies. one such example is the work by marseille’s ex-mayor, jean vigouroux, who attempted to reconcile the difference-orientated vision of the marseille espérance forum2, based on the notion of religious difference, with french secularism. for vigouroux, his approach is an attempt at instituting a “secularism + religion” working framework (vigouroux & ouaknin 2005). here, bringing religion into the state is set as part of a tradition of “open secularism” (vigouroux & ouaknin 2005) that does not contradict or jeopardise the neutrality (laïcité) of the central state. as such, the local and the national are locked into interplay where the national attempts to dictate policy principles locally, and the local replies with a negotiation of exactly how to interpret and apply these principles. as such, with important implications for this study, this example demonstrates how the national principles are moulded and applied locally. in other words, individuals will experience the nationally defining principle of laïcité at least partly through their application in the local context. this experience of the local being a prism for the experience of the national is a well-established phenomenon in the literature where local processes are involved in not only representing, but also reproducing the nation (appleton 2002; confino & skaria 2002; jones & fowler 2007). it is through the interplay between the local and the national that the nation as a discursive formation is reproduced (jones & desforges 2003). as theorised in the literature (billig 1995; yoshino 1999; brubaker et al. 2006), this discursive formation requires constant reproduction through performance, while also taking into account variations of interpretation by ordinary people as to a nation’s meanings (laitin 2007). thus, the local provides a medium through which shifting notions of national identities are articulated (appleton 2002). therefore, one should not take the local as being subsumed within the national, rather the local is transcended into higher levels of existence by becoming part of the national, as well as existing alongside it (confino & skaria 2002). bringing this discussion down to the empirical example of france, confino and skaria (2002) criticise weber (1976), who asserted that the move from local peasants into frenchmen was central to the making of the french nation. for them, instead, weber (1976) mistakenly assumes that local identities are obliterated by the creation of the national. rather, it is more accurate to assert that the local appropriates the national in such a way that the nation has various local meanings (confino & skaria 2002). in summary, drawing on these arguments and applying them to the cases analysed here, it can be argued that at the local level, the spaces and places of local politics have an important effect in influencing the reproduction of the nation. this is even the case where local politics do not overtly seek to reproduce the nation, as bodnar (1994: 16) argued: “citizens view the larger entity of the nation through the lens of smaller units and places that they know first-hand”. this assertion of the local’s importance in reshaping the national with the implementation of 188 fennia 193: 2 (2015)joseph downing difference-orientated policies should not be taken, however, as an unproblematic endorsement of such difference-orientated policies. the observation that multiculturalism remains a multivalent and often contradictory, albeit important policy tool (modood & uberoi 2013) rings as true today as ever. any discussion of difference-orientated policies engages an enormous range of measures that are often reactionary, sometimes contradictory, owing to their ad-hoc evolution in response to temporal, social and economic changes (modood 2007). however, under rising inequality imposed by the combined constraints of neo-liberal economic policies and post-2008 austerity, ensuring real economic equality for minority populations through multicultural policies is becoming an increasingly marginalized aim of such policies (young 2009). rather, socio-cultural models of multiculturalism have come to the fore (young 2009), focusing on providing cultural and religious concessions to minorities and offering minorities ‘recognition’ of the validity of their cultures in the public realm, in a means analogous to taylor’s (1994) “politics of recognition”. the issues with this policy platform have been long debated, including but not limited to the allegations of post-colonial ‘paternalism’ (littler & naidoo 2011), enshrining gender inequality (phillips 2009) or abandoning overarching national identities (modood 2012). therefore, an a-historicised focus on the separation of minority cultures from unified mainstream that in some way should be preserved in its separateness and uniqueness has been correctly critiqued as divisive (appingnanesi 2011) and cannot form the foundation of a viable socio-cultural model of multiculturalism. both appingnanesi (2011) and littler and naidoo (2011) assert that the issue of cultural diversity should not be handled as something that is either new, or something that will seep out into wider society in the future, but something that is part of the historical fact of cultures. this development of socio-cultural multiculturalism is important because, across europe, the questions of race and ethnicity remain at the centre of debates about national heritage (littler & naidoo 2011; modood & uberoi 2013). public culture, and the socio-cultural concessions possibly granted by multiculturalism remain important sites of cultural politics where power relations can be established, reproduced and importantly unsettled (hall et al. 2013) by subverting and negotiating the hierarchies of symbolic and cultural power. situating the case studies: marseille and lyon as france’s second and third largest urban agglomerations, marseille and lyon, respectively, play an important role in redefining the national through the policy stances that they adopt. this is not to say that this redefinition is happening in similar ways. rather, as can be expected, two separate cases will demonstrate varying degrees of commonality and difference in both socio-economic structures and policy trajectories. lyon sits at the centre of one of the richest regions in europe while marseille is marked as a centre of urban precarity. urban poverty in the rhone department, of which lyon is the capital, was 13.4% in 2011 compared to 17.8% in bouches du rhone, of which marseille is the capital (insee 2011, cited in hargreaves 2007). marseille houses a “triangle of poverty”, an area unparalleled in france for the proportion of the population living in poverty (moore 2003). this very populous area is where the city’s poor housing, unemployment and social problems are concentrated. although marseille is a much poorer city compared to lyon, the latter has a higher level of income inequality; with significant poverty pockets concentrated in its suburban public housing estates, particularly to the south and east (coudène 2010). in both cities, poverty overlaps with ethnicity, as areas of deprivation in both marseille and lyon coincide with areas inhabited by people with migrant background, primarily from france’s excolonies (hargreaves 2007). the pitfalls of french ethnic minority statistics are well documented (hargreaves 2007; maxwell 2012), with the french census not collecting statistics on ethnicity or religion. however, researchers have challenged this state of affairs by making estimates. hargreaves (2007), citing the insee statistics of foreign-born populations, indicates that 57.5% of these foreign-born reside in only three regions of france – île de france, with paris at its centre, rhône-alpes, with lyon at its core, and provencealpes-côte d’azur, with marseille at its middle. out of these, both rhône-alpes and provencealpes-côte d’azur have similar proportions of this population, at 11% and 10%, respectively. policy wise, it is important to understand the historical situations of both cities that show significant differences. marseille, as the main harbour of the french colonial empire, saw largescale migration earlier and in larger numbers fennia 193: 2 (2015) 189contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities than lyon (temine 1999; gastaut 2003). after the independence of algeria, over two million piedsnoirs3 entered france through marseille, where many settled. this was alongside a well-established north-african population of economic migrants, whose numbers grew throughout the 20th century (temine 1999). this led to early issues of discrimination and racism in marseille that required the intervention of the municipal authorities to stop police violence against those of north african origin (gastaut 1993). lyon, however, saw inward migration from france’s ex-colonies later, beginning in the middle of the 20th century with the arrival of north african migrant workers to fill industrial jobs in the greater lyon region. therefore, it is not surprising that marseille and lyon have been conceptualized as exhibiting distinct policy responses to the treatment of postmigration difference. moore (2003) and mitchell (2011) have asserted the unique nature of marseille as an early adopter of multicultural policies, while dikec (2007) and the council of europe (2008) have both identified lyon as a case where the state has not engaged in the deployment of such policies. the differing governing structures existing in the two cases also complicates this picture. marseille and its suburban concentrations of poverty are governed within the same urban municipality. lyon, however, sits separately to its poor suburbs that exist in different communes, such as vaulx-en-velin and vénissieux. while these are incorporated together in the urban community of lyon (communauté urbaine de lyon, grand lyon) they retain considerable autonomy and separate planning and policy functions that have hampered efforts at greater incorporation of deprived suburbs into the lyon urban area (dikec 2007). however, this situation remains extremely dynamic, with lyon being later identified as redefining the national by “taking a positive approach to interculturalism which is quite distinctive within the french context” (wood 2010: 98), through its membership of the intercultural cities program. in order to analyse the two examples of lyon and marseille, this article adopts a case study methodological approach. here, it aims to sketch the key arguments about how municipal authorities in both cities are redefining the discursive nature of the national at the local level through the formulation and application of differenceorientated policies. case studies are widely used in the social sciences. they serve a deductive purpose in their established use in research methodology as a means to highlight a more general theoretical point (eckstein 1975). case study methodology clearly has many shortcomings – especially in terms of generalisation, where it is not possible to discriminate between theoretical causations from the single data point presented from one case study (eckstein 1975). however, in a well-structured and logically reasoned deductive case study analysis important observations can be made about the nature of trends within a given situation (king et al. 1994). a case study research design suites the analysis conducted here. while the goal of research is often to make inferences that go beyond particular observations (king et al. 1994), and while this study has wider implications, generalisations will be kept to a minimum. to pursue the arguments within the key themes of this article, a deductive and theoretical approach will be adopted. this means that specific examples of the formulation and implementation of a redefinition of the national in difference-orientated policies will be selected as illustrations of the broader claims that policies formulated and applied in both cases demonstrates ways in which the discursive formation of the national is influenced at the local level. as such, the examples used are intended to paint a coherent yet incomplete account of process of the redefinition of the national at a particular place (marseille and lyon) and time. the author collected primary data through direct fieldwork in marseille and lyon, during 2011/2012. a total of ten interviews were conducted with policy-makers and organizations based in the two cities. however, important issues exist with making direct interview quotations in france, where permission is required from the local state to directly attribute quotes to a civil servant. in addition, interviews were often not set up as interviews to be quoted directly because of the mentioned constraints. rather, interviews were used as a means to guide this research through the exploration of real policy events and occurrences, which have been researched mainly through archival data. this included examining policy documents, the archives held by the organisations themselves (often available online) and newspaper reports about the particular activities of local actors. importantly, these examples have been selected in line with the case study method criteria of choosing deductive examples that highlight a broader trend. it is from 190 fennia 193: 2 (2015)joseph downing these deductive examples that the key arguments made in this article emerge. this approach is not intended, however, to ignore the broader, deep and persistent structural socio-economic problems in either marseille or lyon. nor is the focus presented in this article a denial of the significant issues created for the redefinition of the national by media and political discourses in france that marginalise migrants and their descendants. rather, the illustrative examples of the redefinition of the national discussed here serve to identify and analyse the various ways that principles of difference are deployed to challenge, negotiate and redefine the national. redefining the national in the local: diversity and municipal governance in marseille and lyon as discussed above, the deployment of principles of difference remains contradictory and contested nationally. the local state, however, has been identified as more willing to deploy notions of difference in local policy (raymond & modood 2007). as such, the local state and its modes of governance have played an important role in mediating how the discursively formed national can be redefined towards one that can include notions of difference. this is a critical observation for this study, in that the local prism through which individuals experience the national is being redefined in important ways. as such, it represents an important means by which the relationship between being french and notions of difference is being rewritten from the “bottom up” and demonstrates how the local does not exist independently of the national and vice-versa (appleton 2002; confino & skaria 2002; jones & fowler 2007). as such, this local performance of the national contributes to the redefinition of the national context alongside, and in contestation with, measures from the central state hostile to difference, such as the headscarf ban (simon 2005). the ways in which marseille and lyon are deploying notions of difference that contribute more or less directly to redefine the national are multifarious. in marseille, difference is primarily deployed in municipal governance as religious difference. this stems in part from local realities, where the municipality attempts to engage with an urban context that has seen both violent antijewish and anti-muslim incidents (gastaut 1993; temine 1999). a civil servant interviewed for this research identified this communal violence as a starting point for thinking around policies that would enable the municipal authorities to engage directly with fighting racism and mediating disputes in the city. initial attempts in this direction centred on identifying difference in an ethnic form to set up an inter-ethnic forum in the city. the civil servant interviewed stated that this resulted in too many groups being identified, somewhere in the hundreds, that would have made the forum unworkable. it was at this point that it was decided to use religious difference as the foundation to create the forum in marseille. out of this context came the centrepiece of marseille’s urban governance strategy, the marseille espérance forum. the forum deploys religious difference to define membership based upon the city’s seven largest religious communities – muslim, jewish, catholic, protestant, armenian, greek orthodox, and buddhist. this then brings the religious leaders of these communities together to undertake a number of municipal projects in the public domain. the public activities of the group are important in redefining the national for several reasons. the municipal authorities took the nascent principles of recognising religious difference used by the french state for some time, locally in alsace-lorraine4, and nationally in creating a council for jewish affairs (conseil représentatif des institutions juives de france). owing to colonial and post-colonial history, those of north african muslim descent also suffered significant economic marginalisation and direct racial discrimination in the post-war period nationally (gastaut 2003). the municipality also gives the marseille espérance forum a high public profile by providing direct material support to the yearly marseille espérance intercultural gala event, where performances by various cultural community groups take place. this continues with the organisation of a “marseille espérance jury” each year at the marseille documentary film festival, where they award the “marseille espérance prize”, endowed by the city of marseille. however, its activities are not linked just to these symbolic events, as it also plays a more pronounced role in addressing local issues. marseille espérance’s public endorsement of marseille’s grand mosque project demonstrates its concrete role in working on behalf of disadvantaged communities. the construction of this fennia 193: 2 (2015) 191contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities mosque can be read as an important step by the local state in reshaping the national so to incorporate ethno-religious difference. however, the importance placed on this development should not be overstretched, in that this event remains very much tied up in local considerations and occurs in a continued hostility towards muslims in the french press. importantly, the use of difference as a policy principle is not a phenomenon limited to marseille, but, in different ways, it is also at work in lyon. here, the explicit focus on difference deployed in marseille is absent. rather, difference is formulated in broader terms, also touching on notions of ethnicity that the french central state has been historically reluctant to engage with (wihtol de wenden 2003). the deployment of a broad definition of difference can be seen in the municipal authorities’ ratification of the charter of diversity against discrimination in the workplace. this is a charter that seeks to fight discrimination in workplaces so to have workforces that “better reflect… the diversity of the french population” (charte de la diversité 2013: 1). lyon was the first municipal authority in france to sign such a charter. this is significant given the trend of french state institutions being reluctant to deploy notions of difference to promote the need to fight discrimination in the economic sphere. previously, the central state has deemed a focus on individual equality before the law as being a sufficient guarantor of equality in the domain of employment (withol de wenden 2003; hargreaves 2007). now, as clearly evident in the case of lyon, the french population is no longer treated as ethnically homogenous, but rather made up of a plurality of groups. ethnically diverse citizens are subject to comparative disadvantages based on group membership and as such they require protection against discrimination. this explicitly difference-orientated approach designed to address endemic social issues through the recognition of group difference also applies to lyon’s creation of an “equality task force” to combat discrimination and promote equal opportunities, most importantly in housing and employment (council of europe 2012). this directly engages again with the questions of difference defined in both religious and ethnic terms, something that the central french state is yet to do. these measures, while again not expressly identifying the national as their scale of activity, can be argued to be influencing the construction of the national at the local level through the performance of the discursive formation of the nation in that they cast ethnic and religious discrimination as inappropriate. as such, this public performance by the local state of a difference-orientated policy stance redefines how the legitimate conceptions of approaching the question of national identity are defined. as discussed under the promotion of equality in employment measures in the charter of diversity, the french population moves from being a homogenous national whole, to one that is constituted by both ethnic and religious difference. again, however, this is happening in a broader context where such policies are yet to be implemented nationally, thus limiting the effect these measures have in redefining the national community as a whole. european influence on difference: redefining the national with europeanisation in marseille and lyon the ability of the local to influence the discursive forms of the nation towards recognizing difference in both marseille and lyon is not limited to the activities of the local state in the domain of governance. rather, this is also occurring through the application of european principles to cultural policy of both cities. marseille and lyon demonstrate a nascent, emergent trend within the french treatments of difference. namely, the influence of european levels of government is being strongly felt in the aspects of both municipalities’ cultural policies. this is important, because in both cities the cultural policies pursued by the municipal authorities are another important domain where the local french state is deploying difference in a number of ways. the character of the cultural production facilitated by the municipalities in both cases clearly points towards a redefinition of the nation as a discursive form towards one that accommodates various forms of difference. importantly, this ability of municipal public culture to inform discursive formations in this way is not limited to the cases of marseille and lyon. rather, there exists a literature addressing how municipal cultural policy has taken an active role in the redefinition of the national in, for instance, the uk, canada and the us (taylor 1994; modood 2012; littler & naidoo 2011). this is not to say that these activities have not been 192 fennia 193: 2 (2015)joseph downing seen as problematic, as scholars have argued that they reinforce otherness and represent minority cultures as unitary entities with little room for heterogeneity (littler & naidoo 2011). however, even their most adamant critics acknowledge that they are important means to redefine the national and challenge power hierarchies (hall et al. 2013), providing they acknowledge the inherent diversity of both majority and minority cultures (littler & naidoo 2011) and cast minorities in the positive positions of equality (modood 2012). however, what has been under-researched is how european levels of government are impinging on how such notions of difference are deployed in municipal cultural policies. both marseille and lyon represent important examples of how this trend is becoming increasingly important in france. in marseille, the influence of european governance is felt through the city’s participation in the european capital of culture initiative in 2013. here, the activities of the municipality in public culture have used difference in several forms. this represents an important example of how european principles are being applied to difference at the local level in france and it also results in an important contribution to the redefinition of the national. the use of cultural policies to inform the discursive reproduction of the national has in fact been central to the programme of marseille’s 2013 european capital of culture (marseilleprovence 2013). in my interviews with civil servants working on marseille-provence 2013 (mp2013), they specifically identified as a focus of the programme the use of culture to represent and include all of the city’s diverse residents. they placed significant importance on the role that mp2013 could play in challenging the negative conceptions of race and ethnicity not just in marseille, but also in france more generally. this is important, because a key factor of the tendering process to hold the capital of culture title is to have a workable and viable means to express the difference present in potential candidate cities. thus, in contesting for this european title, the municipality in marseille was required to deploy difference in particular manners. the way this was operationalized was through recourse to the importance of the cultures of the mediterranean region in contributing to the founding and growth of marseille, from which the vast majority of marseille’s post-migration populations originate. as such, the notion of ‘mediterraneaness’ in its application of difference could be argued to be a vector for a broader engagement with the contemporary cultural and ethnic difference present in marseille. this theme runs through a number of flagship projects, for example, the maison de la région, which was specially refitted in 2013 to include an interactive space to allow visitors to “discover the [mediterranean] region” (marseille-provence 2013). located in central marseille in a prominent position on the city’s best-known and busiest street, la canebière, the maison de la région commemorates the history and culture of the entire mediterranean region. inside there are posters, exhibitions and stone cladding on the walls showcasing all of the alphabets of the mediterranean region, including latin, hebrew, arabic, armenian, and phoenician. in addition, the centre régional de la méditerranée à marseille (crm), located on marseille’s docks, is another example of this process of recognizing difference in public culture through the 2013 program. its mission statement is to be a “symbol of the exchange of knowledge and continuing dialogue between the cultures of the contemporary mediterranean world” (marseille-provence 2013: 44). the centre acts as a forward thinking forum and marketplace where, at the same time “the commons roots of mediterranean people are remembered” (marseille-provence 2013: 44). the above shows how the eu is indirectly influencing the treatment of difference in france towards its acceptance in the public realm. this trend, again centred on the use of the idea of the mediterranean as a vector for engaging with the city’s difference, continues in the museum of european and mediterranean civilisations (musée des civilisations de l’europe et de la méditerranée — mucem), also opened in 2013. the museum is designed to commemorate the cultures and civilizations that have existed in the mediterranean with a focus on their achievements. the museum hosts permanent collections from different mediterranean civilizations as well as rotating exhibitions. one of the first of these exhibitions has been about different maps of the mediterranean region from the 18th century onwards. the exhibition place europe and france on par with north africa and the eastern mediterranean and thus it implicitly recognizes that all these actors have contributed to the civilization of each other. these large projects emanating from 2013 can be read as a clear attempt to re-tell the story of the national to take account of the contribution of regions and people from outside france. importantly, in this case, these ‘outsides’ that have confennia 193: 2 (2015) 193contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities tributed to constituting france are places from where large proportions of post-migration populations have originated, thus opening up a space for them in the national narrative not simply to be assimilated, but as entities to be recognised for their contributions to france. as such, the reproduction and performance of the discursive form of the nation take on an interesting form here, where the contribution of those outside of the national frame adds to the national story. this theme of european influence on the treatment of difference in cultural policy continues in lyon through a different route. while in marseille this influence has been exercised through the eu’s european capital of culture initiative, in lyon it has been through the intercultural cities programme (icp), co-produced by the eu and the council of europe. this is a program that specifically sets out to engage with challenging issues presented by difference in a way not present per se in the european capital of culture programme. the icp seeks to facilitate member cities to combat discrimination and racism through the construction of meaningful dialogue between different cultural groups (wood 2010). central to lyon’s membership of the icp has been the adoption of the citywide charter of cultural cooperation (charte de coopération culturelle). while the charter was first drafted in 2004, it has been ratified during the 2012–2015 period. the attempt to redefine the national at the local level can be seen in a clause in the latest draft of the charter, ratified by all of the city’s large, flagship cultural institutions, for the “valorisation of diversity, more visibility of minorities” and to promote “inter-culturality to introduce new arrivals [to lyon]” (ville de lyon 2012: 1). this is a very important means to challenge the xenophobic constructions of the nation so prevalent in contemporary french discourse. by bringing minorities into the public displays of culture in the city directed by the local french state, the charter validates the place of these groups in society. this is a very important aspect of how theorists such as taylor (1994) and honneth (2007) have seen the provision of public recognition working. in addition, the anti-racism efforts widely documented in the usa and the uk demonstrate how the local level works as a very important vector in challenging national problems such as racism and discrimination (modood 2007). thus, given the fact that citizens also view the national through the prism of the local (bodnar 1994), this could be said to be another measure by which, at least partially, the discursive form of the nation is being influenced. however, membership of the icp did not initially translate into difference-orientated policies in lyon. rather, lyon has only actively undertaken this process much more recently. in 2008, lyon was noted for a municipal cultural policy where diversity was still a ‘non-issue’ (council of europe 2008). this questionable start, however, has given way to significant dynamism. lyon’s municipal endorsement of deploying difference to redefine how minorities are included in broader discursive constructions of the national involves the co-option of local organisations working in closely related areas, among which is the abrahamic group of la duchère. originating in the working class neighbourhood of la duchère in 1986, the initial focus of the group was concerned with sharing spaces of worship and facilitating interreligious dialogue in la duchère between muslim, jewish and christian groups (centre resource prospective du grand lyon 2012). however, given the state’s commitment to laïcité, which removes religion from public life, the local state did not become involved in these activities until its icp membership. this points to the importance of the european level of governance in the ways difference is deployed locally. as such, the eu plays an important part in redefining how the national is performed locally, by facilitating the state’s greater engagement with overtly religious groups locally. so far, this has resulted in the organisation, at the publically funded musées gadagne, of an exhibition about the religious minorities of lyon. the event included discussions of the armenian christian, jewish and muslim presence in the city, with a session discussion of how “lyonnais islam” has been represented over the decades by community associations such as the rhône-alpes council for the muslim faith (musées gadagne 2013). this is a significant step in redefining the national with the engagement of a key issue in the treatment of diversity in france. speaking of a “lyonnais islam” redefines the national and local in important ways. it casts religion, importantly islam, as something internal to the city at a time when the french media and political establishment have focused on islam as external, alien and threatening to republican values, through such political events as the banning of the headscarf in french schools in 2004. this incorporation of difference, 194 fennia 193: 2 (2015)joseph downing however, should again not be over stated, given the remaining significant issues france is experiencing with discrimination against muslim communities. rather, it should be seen as an example of how the negotiation and contestation of the nation are very much still occurring, at multiple scales, and are far from settled. redefining the national from below: cooperating with ngos in marseille and lyon another means by which the local state in marseille and lyon is offering recognition to difference is through the funding and cooperation agreements with local non-governmental organisations (ngos). by influencing how difference is played out in local spaces, ngos are taking part in redefining the discursive performance and re-production of the national. this is because they are using notions of religious and ethno-cultural difference to validate the place of those of migrants in society. thus, this is in direct confrontation with the performance of the nation present in france, where discussions about ethnic and religious difference are depicted as incompatible with french society. this is specifically prevalent around the depictions of those of muslim of north african origin, with measures such as the banning of praying in the streets in france (vinocur 2011). this ban occurred after extensive media and political debate during which marine le pen, the leader of the far-right national front, declared praying in the street a form of occupation and invasion. as previously demonstrated, the exact implementation of this co-option of local ngos and the implications this has for applications of difference principles varies between marseille and lyon. for marseille, ngos such as the union of muslim families of the bouches-du-rhône have received direct funding from the city municipal authorities for activities such as the “eid in the city” festival. given the considerable hostility towards religion in recent french legislation, particularly directed towards islam, marseille’s stance as the only city in france that funds a public celebration of the muslim holiday of eid al adha poses a significant challenge to the national mainstream. the “l'aïd dans la cité” (eid in the city) festival is therefore a unique example of how a city is rewriting locally a sense of the national to publically validate and normalize a minority religion in the public realm (pervis 2007). eid in the city is considered to be a valuable opportunity to meet other members of the local community in a festive context, and it helps counter the more negative images of muslims that tend to predominate and get the most attention (open society foundations 2011). it is also important to note that this example of the redefinition of the national is not simply concerned with, and serving, the muslim community, as the event specifically invites members of the non-muslim community and regularly achieve 30% attendance by non-muslims (pervis 2007). the celebration of the festival takes a broader approach than a focus on religion, since it offers a vast range of activities so that a wide community and family audience can join in the festive atmosphere. here, the use of public space and municipal funds to perform the validity of the place of muslims in france is a powerful means by which national and local prejudice is countered, challenged and renegotiated. this overt character of locally based measures offering the public recognition of diversity in france is also evident in the relationship between ngos and the local state in lyon. in this case, the means by which difference is addressed overlaps with, and varies from, measures deployed in marseille. the religious overtones deployed in the support of eid in the city in marseille are absent while the actual substantive cultural content bears many similarities between the two cases. an example of this is the collaboration with the rhône-alps centre of traditional music (centre des musiques traditionnelles rhônes-alpes, cmtra). while working for several decades on “valorizing heritage and recognizing the cultural diversities of the territories of rhône-alps” (centre des musiques traditionelles rhone-alps 2012: 1), the cmtra has only recently been co-opted by the lyon’s municipality to aid in their implementation of the icp. the municipality has provided the cmtra with a public space to hold “world music thursdays” (ville de lyon 2012). this can also be read as an effort to open up lyon to music whose origin makes cultural diversity present in the public realm. here, the cmtra concentrates on bringing out in the public sphere music and cultural forms that may otherwise be confined into the private sphere of the family and religious services. to this end, among other projects, they generated a “sound atlas” of the 8th arrondissement (an ethnically diverse area of fennia 193: 2 (2015) 195contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities lyon), which is available online (www.cmtra.org). it was accomplished over a two-year period by a team of researchers who lived in the area and who employed anthropological ethnographic methods to document the stories and daily lives and music of musicians living in the area, meeting them in their houses and taking pictures for online publication. in total this atlas showcases 13 acts from africa, south america, the arab world, and the caribbean. this is another example of how work being done to recognise difference in lyon is being co-opted and, therefore being given greater exposure, by the local state. conclusion the varying ways in which difference is deployed in france to renegotiate and redefine the national remains an important issue for scholarship. as seen from the evidence presented here, the national remains in france a very dynamic subject. in identifying the flexibility of local politics to deal with questions of difference-orientated policies, this article has added to the earlier work of raymond and modood (2007). however, building on the work of moore (2003) and dyotecheva (2007), the article has also demonstrated that the formulation of difference-orientated policies are increasingly occurring in the public realm, with overt recourse being made to notions of difference in public policy. more importantly for the analysis conducted here is how this increased attention to difference dovetails with redefining and contesting the national. building on various scholarships (bodnar 1994; appleton 2002; confino & skaria 2002; jones & fowler 2007) that have demonstrated the importance of the local in defining the national, the article has also shown how the national is reproduced and performed in a plurality of discursive ways (billig 1995; yoshino 1999; brubaker et al. 2006). the local is important in redefining the national both as a vector for the contestation of national grievances and also as the lived experience through which individuals encounter and make the national present. the analysis has also demonstrated the importance of local policy initiatives in tackling discourses of xenophobia and discrimination that remain nevertheless prevalent in how the french nation is reproduced. however, one should remain cautious about the extent to which the measures discussed here have a general effect. these policy innovations remain indeed situated in france within a context of heightened anti-immigrant, specifically anti-muslim, rhetoric. this has significant implications for attempting to redefine the national locally, in a context where paradoxical and contradictory messages of exclusion have significant visibility. in addition, the enduring conditions of austerity in the french social policy context mean that it is unlikely that, in the medium term, the measures discussed here will be coupled with concerted efforts to reduce economic marginalisation in post-migration communities. nevertheless, with these limitations in mind, it is worth reflecting on how the examples discussed above reflect an important evolution in the ways in which the national might be redefined ‘bottom-up’. firstly, measures like marseille espérance and lyon’s commitment to fighting racial discrimination in its workforce demonstrate how local policies initiatives can address the issues of marginalisation faced by those of migrant origin in france. it is important to note that measures to tackle difference-related issues are also influenced by european government. both marseille and lyon demonstrate how efforts to validate the place of minorities in society through european initiatives such as the european capital of culture or the icp can be harnessed by policy makers to redefine the national via local activities. finally, this analysis demonstrates how ngos are being co-opted to further these processes of providing recognition to minorities in marseille and lyon. this is an important point, because as well as a national trend, the social and economic dimensions of discrimination and racism are indelibly local in their manifestation. thus, by offering some elements of inclusion at the local level, inclusion in the national can be created by extension. notes 1 echoing antonsich and matejskova (2015), i use the term ‘national’ to refer to both an identity discourse and a spatial register which intervenes in political, social or economic contexts. 2 the marseille espérance forum was instituted in 1990 by the then mayor robert vigouroux in response to a rise in anti-semitic activity that culminated in the desecration of the historic jewish cemetery in carpentras, 100 kilometres outside of marseille, by far right extremists. it brings together the leaders of the city’s largest religious communities to engage in an ongoing cross-cultural dialogue. 3 pieds noirs was the name given to european settlers who migrated to france in the aftermath of the independence of french north african colonies. 196 fennia 193: 2 (2015)joseph downing 4 alsace-lorraine was part of the german empire when the law of 1905 separated church and state in france. as such, the french state directly funds the four recognized religions enshrined in concordat of 1801 in alsace-lorraine in variance to the rest of france. acknowledgements i would like to thank marco antonsich for organising this special issue and also for his indispensable support in the preparation of this article. references alba r 2005. bright vs. blurred boundaries: secondgeneration assimilation and exclusion in france, germany, and the united states. ethnic and racial studies 28: 1, 20–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0141987042000280003. antonsich m & matejskova t 2015. immigration societies and the question of ‘the national’. ethnicities 15: 5, 1–14. appingnanesi r 2011. introduction: ‘whose culture?’ exposing the myth of cultural diversity <http:// www.creativecase.org.uk/introduction-whoseculture> 12.07.2012. appleton l 2002. distillations of something larger: the local scale and american national identity. cultural geographies 9: 4, 421–447. bhabha hk 1994. the location of culture. routledge, london. billig m 1995. banal nationalism. sage, london. bleich e 2011. social research and ‘race’ policy framing in britain and france. the british journal of politics & international relations 13: 1, 59–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-856x.2010.00439.x. bodnar j 1994. remaking america: public memory, commemoration and patriotism in the twentieth century. princeton university press, princeton. brubaker r 2001. the return of assimilation? changing perspectives on immigration and its sequels in france, germany, and the united states. ethnic and racial studies 24: 4, 531–548. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870120049770. brubaker r, feischmidt m, fox j & grancea l 2006. nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a transylvanian town. princeton university press, princeton. centre des musiques traditionelles rhone-alps (cmtra) 2012. <http://www.cmtra.org/> 12.07.2012. centre resource prospective du grand lyon (crpl) 2012. groupe abraham de la duchére <http:// www.millenaire3.com/affichage-de-la-ressource. 122+m51a10fb25bd.0.html> 12.07.2012. cesari j, moreau a & schleyer-lindenmann a 2001. plus marseillais que moi, tu meurs ! migrations, identités et territoires à marseille. editions l’hartmann, paris. charte de la diversité 2013. charte de la diversité: une initiative d’enterprises <http://www.chartediversite.com/charte-diversite-la-charte.php> 12.07.2012. confino a & skaria a 2002. the local life of nationhood. national identities 4: 1, 7–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608940120115657. coudène m 2010. grand lyon : la précarité reste concentrée à l'est de l'agglomération <http://insee.fr/fr/themes/document.asp?reg_id=8&ref_ id=16691#sommaire> 21.07.2014. council of europe 2008. intercultural cities. council of europe, strasbourg <www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/culture/cities/lyonprofile_en.pdf> 12.07.2012. council of europe 2012. projects and policies that help to make lyon a lively cultural city. council of europe, strasbourg. <http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/cultureheritage/culture/cities/lyonprojets_en.asp> 17.08.2012. dikec m 2007. badlands of the republic: space, politics and urban policy. blackwell, london. dixon c 2012. decolonising the museum: cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. race & class 53 :4, 78–86. http:/dx.doi.org/10.1177/1469605313501582. doytcheva m 2007. une discrimination positive a la française? ethnicité et territoire dans les politiques de la ville. broché, paris. eckstein h 1975. case study and theory in political science. in greenstein f & polsby n (ed). handbook of political science, 79–138. addison-wesley, boston. gastaut y 1993. la flambée raciste de 1973 en france. revue européenne de migrations internationales 9: 2, 61–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/remi.1993.1355. gastaut y 2003. marseille cosmopolite après les décolonisations: un enjeu identitaire. cahiers de la méditerranée 67, 269–285. hall s, evans j & nixon s (ed). 2013. representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. sage, london. hargreaves a 2007. multi-ethnic france: immigration, politics, culture, and society. routledge, london. honneth a 2007. disrespect: the mormative foundations of critical theory. polity, london. jones r & desforges l 2003. localities and the reproduction of welsh nationalism. political geography 22:3, 271–292 http:/dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0962-6298(02)00096-3. jones r & fowler c 2007. placing and scaling the nation. environment and planning d: society and space 25:2, 332–354. http:/dx.doi.org/10.1068/d68j. king g, verba s & keohane r 1994. designing social inquiry: scientific inference in qualitative research. princeton university press, princeton. laitin d 2007. nations, states and violence. oxford university press, oxford. littler j & naidoo r 2011. the politics of heritage: the legacies of 'race'. routledge, london. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 197contesting and re-negotiating the national in french cities marseille-provence 2013. marseille 2013 european capital of culture programme. <http://www. mp2013.fr/ext/avp-en/> 01.07.2012. maxwell r 2012. ethnic minority migrants in britain and france. cambridge university press, cambridge. mitchell k 2011. marseille's not for burning: comparative networks of integration and exclusion in two french cities. annals of the association of american geographers 101: 2, 404–423. http:/dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2010.545290. modood t 2007. multiculturalism: a civic idea. polity press, cambridge. modood t 2012. still not easy being british: struggles for a multicultural citizenship. trentham books, stoke on trent. modood t & uberoi v 2013. inclusive britishness: a multiculturalist advance. political studies 61: 1, 23–41. http:/ dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00979.x. moore d 2003. ethnicité et politique de la ville en france et en grande-bretagne. editions l’harmattan, paris. musées gadagne 2013. les minoritiés religieuses a lyon de moyen age a nos jours. <http://www.gadagne. musees.lyon.fr/index.php/histoire_fr/histoire/programmation/conferences-colloques/histoire-de-lyon/histoire-des-eglises-a-lyon> 27.04.2013. norial g 1988. le creuset francais: histoire de l’immigration xixe-xxe siecles. seuil, paris. open society foundations 2011. muslims in marseille. open society foundations, london. pervis a 2007. marseille's ethnic bouillabaisse: some view europe's most diverse city as a laboratory of the continent's future. <http://www.smithsonianmag. com/travel/marseille-200712.html> 12.07.2014. phillips a 2009. multiculturalism without culture. princeton university press, usa. raymond g & modood t 2007. the construction of minority identities in france and britain. palgrave, london. simon p 2005. la république face à la diversité: comment décoloniser les imaginaires? in bancel n, blanchard p & lemaire s (ed). la fracture colonial, 241–251. poche, paris. swamy v 2011. interpreting the republic: marginalisation and belonging in contemporary french novels and films. lexington books, new york. taylor c 1994. the politics of recognition. in guttman a (ed). multi-culturalism and ‘the politics of recognition’, 25–73. princeton university press, princeton. temime e (ed) 1999. migrance: histoire des migrations a marseille. editions jeanne laffite, paris. vinocur n 2011. france bans street prayer. <http:// www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/16/us-francemuslims-idustre78f4cc20110916> 24.07.2014. weber e 1976. peasants into frenchmen: the modernization of rural france, 1870, 1914. stanford university press, stanford. weil p 2008. how to be french: nationality in the making since 1789. duke university press, durham. wihtol de wenden 2003. multiculturalism in france. international journal on multicultural societies 5: 1, 77–88. wood p 2010. intercultural cities: towards a model for intercultural integration. council of europe, strasbourg. vigouroux r & ouaknin j 2005. laicite + religions: marseille espérance. transbordeurs, marseille. ville de lyon 2012. charte de coopération culturelle. <http://www.polville.lyon.fr/static/polville/contenu/ culture/charte%20%203.pdf> 27.04.2013. yoshino k 1999. consuming ethnicity and nationalism: asian experiences. wiley, london. young i 2009. structural injustice and the politics of difference. in christiano t & christman j (ed). contemporary debates in political philosophy, 362–383. blackwell, oxford. socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66910 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66910 reflections: on publishing socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals simon batterbury batterbury, simon (2017). socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals. fennia 195: 2, pp. 175–181. issn 1798-5617. there have been a range of protests against the high journal subscription costs, and author processing charges (apcs) levied for publishing in the more prestigious and commercially run journals that are favoured by geographers. but open protests across the sector like the ‘academic spring’ of 2012, and challenges to commercial copyright agreements, have been fragmented and less than successful. i renew the argument for ‘socially just’ publishing in geography. for geographers this is not limited to choosing alternative publication venues. it also involves a considerable effort by senior faculty members that are assessing hiring and promotion cases, to read and assess scholarship independently of its place of publication, and to reward the efforts of colleagues that offer their work as a public good. criteria other than the citation index and prestige of a journal need to be foregrounded. geographers can also be publishers, and i offer my experience editing the free online journal of political ecology. keywords: academic publishing, open access, geography journals, social justice, journal of political ecology simon batterbury, lancaster environment centre, lancaster university, lancaster la1 4yq, uk & school of geography, university of melbourne, 3010 vic, australia. e-mail: simonpjb@unimelb.edu.au introduction publishing articles in academic journals is a mainstay of scholarly activity. it is not done just to disseminate research findings, or to craft an elegant argument. it is strongly linked to the individual reputation of authors, their prestige and job and promotion prospects, and it also affects the reputations of departments and academic institutions that employ them. in this article i argue that the ownership and production of geographical knowledge is long overdue for change. a few for-profit corporations have set the terms of mainstream academic publishing for many years. today they are cleverly charging authors as well as libraries and readers, and they patrol their “ownership” of knowledge through legal threats (as in november 2017, with actions taken against researchgate and academia.edu). it is extremely important to envision a different and socially just future for geographical publishing. we need to marshal the collective will to do so. what should geographers do with their publications? confusion exists over academic journal publications. for some, it is perfectly acceptable to cede author copyright to companies that prepare and sell them, thereby losing ownership and management of that intellectual property. others, myself included, believe their published work is a contribution to © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 176 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing public knowledge, and therefore a public good – this means access should be available to anybody. these two opposing views were debated even before the rollout of the internet in the early 1990s, which offered a great improvement in the archiving and dissemination of public knowledge. but argument has become more trenchant as the bulk of journal publications may now, in theory at least, be accessed in online form. many commentators predicted that the dawn of the internet would bring about the end of corporate control of academic publishing, but this has not happened (buranyi 2017). vigorous debate about who can and should control access to articles, and the knowledge they contain, continues. for their part, academic publishers, in an astute move, are increasingly charging the authors through upfront ‘author processing charges’ (apcs) to publish open access (oa) articles, in exchange for losing their corporate copyright. there is, it seems, no free lunch. academic geographers should be taking a stance on these debates, with vigorous and regular discussion. but remarkably, the majority are not (but see the authors in this reflection, and kallio 2017). the gold standard for publishing long-form academic articles remains a small number of entirely anglophone journals produced by the world's largest academic publishing houses, with some being commercial enterprises running a suite of scholarly journals (like geoforum or political geography). others work in partnership with companies but editorial control remains with professional societies, like the american association of geographers (the annals of the aag), and the institute of british geographers/rgs (transactions of the ibg). across the discipline, there also many specialist and regional journals, and other titles in which geographical scholarship is welcomed. but there are at least 65 reputable journals of geography, and many more in related fields like planning and the earth sciences, offering open access publishing at zero cost to readers, as well as zero to moderate fees to authors.1 currently, according to citation and impact metrics, almost all of them have less 'prestige', which means a diminished presence in the eyes of junior and senior geographers. many of the latter were, like me, acculturated into a system in which the existence of the hierarchy of journals, and the ownership of the knowledge therein, was scarcely questioned. this affects their perception of scholarly reputation, as i discuss below. for people with online library access through a university or other institution, it is still easy to access and read online copies of almost any article, and so the claims made by open access enthusiasts supporting public scholarly knowledge, can seem rather irrelevant to many of them. the problem there are at least five reasons to challenge this state of affairs. firstly, the top anglophone geography journals are all published by corporations. their publishing models include some profit-sharing arrangements with universities and departments (like economic geography, run from clark university since 1925 but now published by taylor & francis). some societies, like the american anthropological association, use profitable ‘flagship’ journals to support loss-making ones, while others use commercial licensing agreements (esposito 2017). these arrangements need scrutiny because they have become expensive – for geography journals, a quantitative study showed “commercial presses charged 50 percent more for journals published on behalf of universities and societies than those published by universities or learned societies themselves“ (coomes et al. 2017, 259). there is a growing literature, and campaigns following the “academic spring” of 2012, signalling a discontent with the prices charged for commercial journals (examples include coomes et al. 2017 and a new british venture, radical open access2. scholars point out that academic publishing has for some time been a lucrative business with a largely captive market – first exploited by businesspeople like robert maxwell, who ran pergamon press as a highly profitable publisher until it was sold to elsevier in 1991. little has changed – company profits, particularly in the stem disciplines, are large and corporate executives command salaries in the millions. for example elsevier’s margin3 exceeded 35% in 2010, over 40% in 2012 and 2013, and 37% in 2016. smaller companies are constantly being purchased by the five largest ones (buranyi 2017). for example pion, publishers of the environment and planning journals, was bought by sage in 2015, and bepress, which provides useful oa services to universities by subscription, by elsevier in mid2017. the five large publishers (relx group including elsevier, wiley-blackwell, springer, taylor & fennia 195: 2 (2017) 177simon batterbury francis and sage) published an extraordinary 70% of social science articles and 20% in the humanities in 2015, using web of science data (larivière et al. 2015). while many universities struggle to maintain access to their commercial subscription journals, publishers are clearly making a lot of money. specifically, coomes and colleagues show the large inequalities in geography journal pricing – “commercial presses charge substantially more than society and university presses for their products – their journals are 2.3 times as expensive, articles are twice the price, and the price per citation is four times greater” (coomes et al. 2017, 259). the latter statement is something most professional geographers will find unjust – our ‘recognition’ could surely come cheaper, without this degree of multinational corporate domination. horizontal corporate acquisition is worsening inequalities, contributing to “accumulation by dispossession” (harvey 2004). in its worst form, authors of scholarly articles are dispossessed of them by a publisher who copyrights them or takes a large fee to publish, and then sells the journals it still has copyright for back to the same institution to accumulate profit, frequently bundled in a ‘big deal’ with many other journals. these subscriptions ‘deals’ are non-transparent, but often costing over $1.3m/ €1.13m/£1m per institution per publisher (harvie et al. 2013; bergstrom 2014; gowers 2016, the latter two studies based on freedom of information requests). secondly, for countries and universities without the financial means to purchase key journals needed by their staff and students, article access to 'paywalled' journals is not easy. without an institutional subscription, doing a literature search requires a web trawl, perhaps a subscription to online repositories like researchgate and academia.edu or the contentious sci-hub, emailing the author, or asking someone with university access for a copy. requests for copies of human geography articles appear almost daily on the crit-geog-forum listserv, for example, often from academics in countries where they lack access to the full gamut of subscription-only journals. thirdly, large academic publishers are not always fantastic employers. profits may be accrued, but not necessarily by the lowly members of the workforce doing fantastic work, in stark contrast to the executive salary payouts. operations vary, but many operations are globalised away from european or north american headquarters, to lower-cost countries; proofreading is done there at unknown wage rates, or by sub-contractors. low costs are not always passed on in journal subscription pricing. admittedly, some scholars are paid to be chief academic editors of commercial journals and some handling editors are also paid (up to $40,000/€34,000/£30,000 and $8,200/€7,000/£6,200 for these two tasks per year), sometimes with an administrative assistant, but my data for geography journals is anecdotal and the figures can be higher and lower than these. functions that article authors would really like, like a small post-hoc edit to a published online article, or a longer article length, are usually refused as too costly. of course not all publishers act the same, and there are great staff and some decent initiatives. these include the antipode foundation international workshop award and grants paid out by geoforum, both obtained under previous pressure from their boards. fourthly, the true democratising spirit of the open access movement, which dates back to the beginnings of the web in 1992–1993, is weakly embraced. globally, efforts to make material universally free to read by anybody with an internet connection – which seems a reasonable goal for publishing in our social conscious discipline – have advanced over 25 years, evidenced by initiatives like research4life offering free access in developing countries. but recouping costs through apcs is not so democratic, and often run to $3,000/€2,600/£2,300 per article or more. it is doubtful that actually processing an article expediently (refereeing, laying up, sometimes editing mildly, archiving and dissemination) really costs this much, and new corporate oa journals are indeed starting to charge less. apcs may be a 'last gasp' from the conventional publishers to maintain their stranglehold in an era of almost universal internet access, but they are currently sticking to their guns. fifthly, incommensurability and guilt. for scholars with critical or radical intent, or professional pride and strong personal ethics, an ethical publication strategy should be essential (batterbury 2015). geographers apply these criteria in other stages of the research process, so releasing a final product into the commercial badlands should seem like a climbdown. operationalising ‘just’ publishing could be based on considerations of where the profit from any sale of work goes, who can read it, and who owns it. on these criteria alone, a journal article sitting behind a paywall, with a copyright signed away to a publisher that owns and sells it or to whom you just paid a large fee, would seem less desirable 178 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing than an article that is publicly available, and over which the author retains control. incommensurability between professional aspirations and publication actions is haunting among critical and radical scholars, and should have resulted in a wholesale shift away from the prevailing model long ago. unfortunately it has not, because publishers have 'fought back' through offering oa publishing at medium to high cost, by making small concessions to editorial boards, and because of worries among scholars about conforming to publishing norms. solutions the first solution to bringing about a wholesale migration away from commercial journal publishers (if they cannot be reformed) is changing the mentality of senior academics. they have, by and large, not abandoned the publishing culture they were embedded in at earlier career stages. to do this, they must define scholarly excellence through quality of work and visibility, not place of publication. this will assist job applicants and promotion cases. while we may assume an article in a top journal is a good one, authors should be able to choose to publish elsewhere, to reach a particular audience, in a language other than english, or to be ‘socially just’. they should not be penalised for this or looked down on, if the quality of their work is excellent. their work in a progressive oa or society journal should also be read and appraised fairly. failing to do this is a major reason the status quo of journal impact factors and hierarchies of outlets remains in place, largely in control of the “big five” companies, and with a huge influence on jobs and promotions. this also behooves senior academics, especially those reared on the hierarchy of journals from past decades, to keep up to date with other developments in publishing as well – as the importance of social media posting, film, visual materials, and policy briefs has increased. secondly, embrace open access as the standard approach to publishing. oa in itself does not equate with social justice. as i have explained, many major publishers are guilty of exploiting the oa model to charge high apcs to authors. the new breed of oa geography journals like geo: geography and environment are certainly not cheap (rgs/ibg and wiley, $1,800/£1,150/€1,480 apc per article, before any discounting). these are big numbers for many human geographers or those without grant or institutional support. but more positively, any scholarly work published oa is instantly available to anybody and in most cases, with authorial control retained. by any measure, this is better than paywalled content, or breaching copyright (leonelli et al. 2015). free-to-publish oa journals are already the norm in the spanish and portuguese-speaking world where departments and societies assemble and publish them, and in eastern europe, and they have strong representation in france and scandinavia1. oa publication seems to attract more citations too (although the evidence for this is not watertight). so why have the aag or the rgs/ibg not offered a free oa journal? the aaa has – cultural anthropology has been free and oa since 2014, with a tiny charge to non-members of $23. of course, as critics protest, there are also many low quality, moneymaking oa journals that publish almost anything for a fee. today, intelligent geographers can assume that journals that spam our email inboxes should just be ignored. thirdly, reward and practice socially just publishing, rather than penalise it. scholars can, particularly at and early career stage, be rewarded for careful consideration of the ethics of their publishing choices with journals like human geography (finn et al. 2017) and acme (springer et al. 2017). their choices do vary, but should not be driven by the rankings and impact factors that plague universities and make or break academic careers. evidence suggests that at present, early career researchers support non-commercial publishing, but cannot pursue it to the degree they wish (nicholas et al. 2017). steinberg (2015) is incorrect when he says that publication in non-commercial oa scholarly society geography journals is difficult – there are still plenty of those, as i have shown through my own survey. fourthly, help build socially just publishing. most of the journals on my list of reputable, free or low cost open access journals are run by "community economies" of unpaid academics, university libraries or departments, or scholarly societies1. this goes for most of the 65 geography journals on that list, and they deserve more submissions, and more attention. geographers and other scholars have demonstrated that they can 'take back' publishing effectively, by running journals with or without fennia 195: 2 (2017) 179simon batterbury subsidies or financial support, and as a smaller first step, by choosing who to referee articles for (kallio 2017, springer et al. 2017). an example other commentators in this reflection speak to their own experiences with journal publishing and academic labour. i have edited the journal of political ecology since 2003, when i first became aware of the debates over learned publishing4. jpe began in 1994 as one of the first free open access journals in the social sciences, with a small grant from the university of arizona to jim greenberg and tad park. others began to emerge in the mid-1990s as online alternatives to the mainstream commercial print journals of the era. still run by two academics and with an international editorial board, jpe is part of the "diy sector" for journal publishing. we (casey walsh and myself) use part of our week to edit and manage journal production. we publish from 30–60 articles a year (with no word count or graphics restrictions), which is a manageable number. we choose to be indexed in scopus and the web of science emerging sources index – perhaps this may change if indexing (actually a useful corporate function) attracts a charge. this publishing model does not require any operating budget – just time, expertise, goodwill and a laptop (and file storage and occasional help at arizona’s library, where we are currently doing site upgrades to the ojs freeware). no money changes hands. authors, now including some of the world’s top social scientists, hold cc-by copyright. we do close editing of articles when required, reading and if necessary editing every word and reference. this level of service is not often free in the commercial world, but it is a professional responsibility, particularly to ‘non-english as a first language’ authors. with the reorganisation of the environment and planning suite of journals in 2017, we now have a commercial competitor – but we are not really in ‘competition’ at all, since no jobs are on the line. we have rejected several offers to buy or publish the journal, or to place content in other commercial information services. scholarly publishers are persistently dismissive of the “diy” journal sector. commentators repeatedly suggest someone has to pay hard cash to run any journal, and i have even been told by publishers i should stop editing in order to concentrate more on my 'real job', research and teaching! and yet, park and greenberg have sustained involvement for over 20 years; myself for 15, all with full teaching and research loads. in sum, this small example shows academics can edit and publish outside the commercial sector, and without charging authors or readers, if they are so-minded. the task is to gain recognition for this work in their own institutions; to raise the profile of alternative journals; and to treat authors that publish in them with fairness, no matter what stage they are at in their careers (finn et al. 2017). conclusion it is frustrating that the bold aspirations accompanying open access journal publishing dating from the early 1990s, where articles began to be seen as a public good, have been overtaken by accelerating corporate activity, and through charging high apcs. the stranglehold that major publishers have over scholarly journals has actually worsened, through corporate takeovers. geography is not a large and lucrative academic discipline, but it is directly affected. takeovers, for example of blackwell and pion, have created ever tighter ownership of key geography journals by five companies. these continue to charge our libraries, occasional readers, and now authors, a lot of money, while arguing that they are providing value for money, a statement for which there is little evidence (coomes et al. 2017). resistance to horizontal acquisition and price increases has been patchy and surprisingly muted in the discipline. while steinberg (2015) argues “it is likely that few academics will have the stomach (or time) to launch organized insurgent movements“, we could still surprise ourselves. they need to be supported from above, by senior gatekeepers. commercial journal boards are resigning and ‘flipping’ to establish socially just alternatives, and resistance to price gouging is continual, by national research bodies, libraries, and individual scholars. and yet, we can move inexorably towards better access to scholarly articles, at low or no cost, in journals run by 180 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing academics and not-for-profit organisations and societies. we have leverage because ultimately, without us on board, there is no ‘product’ and no ‘market’. “diy” and non-commercial geography journals may need greater recognition, but the hard work they involve is straightforward, convivial, and already practiced by thousands of scholars. i call on readers to support their efforts, and to adopt an ethical strategy in the publication their own work. i fear, however, that if we really begin to compete with the large corporate publishers, there will be tough times ahead. notes 1 see the geography section of my curated directory, https://simonbatterbury.wordpress. com/2015/10/25/list-of-open-access-journals, which also lists which journals are recognised by scopus and web of science indexing services. 2 http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk 3 https://www.relx.com/investors/annual-reports/2016, p17 4 http://jpe.library.arizona.edu acknowledgements thank you to prof. casey walsh, and the board members, authors and referees at the journal of political ecology. participants in my session on "journal publishing in geography: non-commercial alternatives, and restoring control by academics" at the boston aag meeting in april 2017, several of them writing in this reflections section, helped extend and challenge these arguments. references b a t te r b ur y, s . p. j . ( 2015) w h o a re t h e r a di c a l a c a d e m i c s to da y? t h e w in n o w e r. <https://thewinnower.com/papers/327-who-are-the-radical-academics-today> 17.11.2017. bergstrom t. c., courant, p. n., mcafee, r. p. & williams, m. a. (2014) evaluating big deal journal bundles. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 111 9425–9430. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403006111 buranyi, s. (2017) is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? the guardian 27.6.2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-businessscientific-publishing-bad-for-science> 17.11.2017. coomes o. t., moore, t. r., & breau, s. (2017) the price of journals in geography. the professional geographer 69(2) 251–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2016.1229624 esposito, j. (2017) how societies structure deals with their partners. the scholarly kitchen blog 2.5.2017 <https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/05/02/societies-structure-deals-partners/> 17.11.2017. finn, j. c., peet , r ., mollet t , s. & l auermann, j. (2017 ) reclaiming value from academic labor: comment ar y by the editor s of human geography. fennia 195(2) 182–18 4. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 gowers, t. (2016) time for elsexit? gowers’s weblog 26.11.2016 <https://gowers.wordpress. com/2016/11/29/time-for-elsexit/> 17.11.2017 harvey, d. (2004) the 'new' imperialism: accumulation by dispossession. socialist register 40 63–87. <http://www.socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5811> harvie, d., lightfoot, g., lilley, s. & weir, k. (2013) publisher, be damned! from price gouging to the open road. prometheus 31 229–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2014.891710 kallio, k . p. (2017 ) subtle radical moves in scientif ic publishing. fennia 195(1) 1– 4. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 larivière, v., haustein, s. & mongeon, p. (2015) the oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. plos one 10(6) e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 leonelli, s., spichtinger, d. & prainsack, b. (2015) sticks and carrots: encouraging open science at its source. geo: geography and environment 2(1) 12–16. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/geo2.2/pdf> nicholas, d., rodríguez-bravo, b., watkinson, a., boukacem-zeghmouri, c., herman, e., xu, j., abrizah, a. & świgoń, m. (2017) early career researchers and their publishing and authorship practices. learned publishing 30(3) 205–217. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1102 https://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/list-of-open-access-journals https://simonbatterbury.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/list-of-open-access-journals http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk https://www.relx.com/investors/annual-reports/2016 http://jpe.library.arizona.edu https://thewinnower.com/papers/327-who-are-the-radical-academics-today https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403006111 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2016.1229624 https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/05/02/societies-structure-deals-partners/ https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/11/29/time-for-elsexit/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/11/29/time-for-elsexit/ http://www.socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/view/5811 https://doi.org/10.1080/08109028.2014.891710 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/geo2.2/pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1102 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 181simon batterbury springer s., houssay-holzschuch, m., villegas, c. & gahman, l. (2017) say ‘yes!’ to peer review: open access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia. fennia 195(2) 185–188. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 steinberg , p. (2015) reclaiming societ y publishing. publications 2 150 –15 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications3030150 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 https://doi.org/10.3390/publications3030150 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa4444 perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of private and company owned forests in north-karelia, finland moritz albrecht albrecht, moritz (2012). perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of private and company owned forests in north-karelia, finland. fennia 190: 1, pp. 3–18. issn 1798-5617. the integration of improved environmental or sustainable aspects in forest management is often affiliated with the rise of market-driven governance systems, such as forest certification. in terms of forest resource peripheries, like northkarelia, finland, these are often attributed to environmental business and consumer demands from the green central european markets. while acknowledging these aspects related to the supply chains of wood-based products, this study evaluates the actual perceptions about environmental forest governance and its spaces in the resource peripheries themselves. it displays the perceived changes and practices in forestry by comparing private and corporate ownership and their governance networks. this is accomplished by a qualitative, interview based case study of north karelian and finnish forestry actors. transnational forest governance is hereby treated as a relational space, with forest certification systems as possible technologies used to achieve improved, sustainable forest management. utilizing the north-karelian forestry sector, the varying positionalities of actors and institutions within such a relational space shape the knowledge networks, perceptions and decision-making. the study evaluates how these local-global positionalities of actors and individuals shape their understanding, and guide the direction of sustainable forest management in finland while it (re-)produces opposing regimes of practice. with the discourse on forest certification being twofold, a more complex picture emerges if aspects of even versus uneven-aged forest management in finland are integrated. shaped by the actor’s positionalities and related knowledge networks, perceptions regarding the quality of forest management practices and technologies used to achieve sustainability differ and thereby shape governance processes. the green markets are not perceived as the main driving force and a strong governmental influence, particularly related to private ownership aspects, is noted in the finnish case. forest certification systems, and other political technologies for sustainable forest management, are embedded in or strongly restricted by these aspects. keywords: finland, forest governance, qualitative case-study, sustainable spaces, ownership positionalities, certification moritz albrecht, department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, p.o.box 111, 80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: moritz. albrecht@uef.fi. introduction regarding sustainable forest management (sfm), finnish forestry has publicly provided a twofold picture on the international scale during the last decade. on the one hand, a positive image of sustainable managed forestry, almost entirely covered by forest certification appears and is promoted by large forest and wood-based companies, as well as forest owner associations and the state forest service metsähallitus (e.g. metsähallitus 2009; ffif 2011a; fma 2011a). on the other hand, large environmental non-governmental organizations (engo) blame finnish forestry for following unsustainable management practices and promoting the destruction of europe’s last remaining old4 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht growth forests (e.g. harkki 2004; harkki 2008; greenpeace 2009). even though international protests about the destruction of old growth forests in finnish lapland have ceased after joint agreements (ffif 2010), debates about the sufficient means and management tools or practices to achieve sfm in finnish forestry continue (e.g. luonto-liitto et al. 2009; pefc 2011). a continuous integration of environmental aspects into forest management, harvesting practices and related laws is taking place in finnish forestry (e.g. mielikäinen & hynynen 2003; parviainen & västilä 2011). increased integration of environmental and sustainable aspects into forest management are often attributed to market driven governance systems, such as forest certification, based on customer demands and engo protest campaigns in the central european markets (cashore et al. 2004; albrecht 2010a). however, it remains unclear how implementing actors outside the academic or expert communities perceive changes in environmental criteria as well as their drivers. for finland, multiple studies are concerned with forest owners’ opinions about conservation or environmental management practices (e.g. karppinen 1998; horne 2004; hänninen & kurttila 2004), yet, taking into account that up to 95% of commercial forestry is carried-out by contracting companies, these are the main implementing actors for management practices in finland (koneyrittäjät 2009). these actors’ perceptions are of primary importance when evaluating aspects of environmental forest governance. as perceptions and rationalities guide actors’ activities (merlingen 2003), it is important to understand the varying actors’ values regarding what has been achieved and what is regarded as sufficient for sfm, and how they define such sustainable forest spaces. while local forestry stakeholders’ perceptions on uneven-aged forest management are described in a swedish casestudy by axelsson and angelstam (2011), their account primary treats the knowledge of the stakeholders on technical aspects of forest management. suitable for certain comparison, it lacks the relational and spatial aspects evaluated by this study. on account on these aspects presented above the paper utilizes the following research questions as a guideline to provide an improved account of the processes at work in transnational forest governance: (i) how do the perceptions of actors, involved or linked to forestry, differ in terms of their attitudes/definitions towards sfm? (ii) what is the impact of the actors’ positionality in regard to the (re-)production of their rationalities on, and regimes of practice for sfm? (iii) how do such perceptions of their sustainable spaces of forestry guide their decision making and acceptance of various technologies for sfm? (iv) how do these varying positionalities and perceptions shape the (re-)production of finnish forestry in terms of sfm and transnational forest governance spaces in general? these questions should not be understood in a normative fashion to determine general patterns in finnish or transnational forestry but aim to highlight the multiplicity of processes which shape forest governance and the utilization of related technologies such as certification. transnational forest certification systems are prominently utilized to define sfm, whereby two systems play a major role in global forestry. first, there is the strongly engo backed forest stewardship council (fsc) and second, the programme for the endorsement of forest certification (pefc), which is mostly supported by forest owner associations and forestry institutions (e.g. albrecht 2010b). in finland, with a pefc coverage of 95% in commercial forests (fma 2011b) compared to a just recently approved and marginally implemented fsc the debate can be viewed as the defence of pefc as a tool for sfm by promoting its achievements. generally, also in finland, fsc entails stricter protective criteria and requires to set 5% of the certified forest aside for conservation of biodiversity (see also pefc 2009; fsc 2011). nevertheless, since national standards and implementation differs, the paper refrains from ranking the certification systems on their practical achievements for sfm. this has been studied elsewhere with varying results (e.g. harkki 2004; upm 2005; schlyter et al. 2009; indufor 2010). additionally, governmental means such as the forestry act of 1996 (mmm 1996) or guidelines by varying forestry related institutions play a decisive role in regard to the sfm debate in finnish forestry. hereafter, environmental transnational forest governance is regarded as a relational space, including the core market – resource periphery relations of wood product commodity chains (albrecht 2010a, 2010b, 2012). the local case of the north-karelian forest sector aims to display how actors in the resource peripheries (fig. 1) perceive sfm based on their locally embedded relations. as they are integrated to (re-)produce the relational space they fennia 190: 1 (2012) 5perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of … are entangled with, this paper argues that this local positionality based on ownership patterns and other relations challenges purely market-driven modes and influences resource governance. finnish and north-karelian forestry systems finnish as well as north-karelian forestry are distinguished by their high private, non commercial ownership of 52% (forest centre pk 2010; metla 2010). regarding productive forests the share of private owners in finland is as much as 60%, while the share of final felling in private forests is 77% of finnish forestry (metla 2010). company ownership of finnish forests amounts to 9% whilst 35% of forests are state owned, of which only 26% are productive forests. in terms of company-owned forests, north-karelia deviates from the finnish mean with 23% (forest centre pk 2010). this is due to the prominent role of tornator oy (tornator) in north-karelia, an affiliated company of the global forest product company stora enso and responsible for the management of stora enso’s former forest areas. state ownership is 20%. in relation to management operations and wood harvesting, despite the large share of private ownership, forestry operations are carried-out by contracting companies in 95% of cases (koneyrittäjät 2009). apart from the age structure of private forest owners, with 56% being over 60 in age, this owes to the specific forest planning and management system for private forests (metla 2010). finland has 13 forestry districts and regional forestry centres, north-karelia being one. aside preparing the regional forestry programme the forestry centres have several tasks concerning private owned forests: preparation of 10 year management plans for private forest owners and their holdings, and distribution of information, support for forest management, subsidies and education for forest owners and professionals. additionally, by approving forest use declarations prior to loggings and carrying-out follow-up evaluations in chosen harvesting sites, forest centres are the responsible institutions for supervising the implementation of the finnish forest act (forest centre 2011). hence, they strongly guide and influence forest management in finland. other important actors are the forest management associations (fma) and the forest owners union (fou). the fma has legislative rights to collect a forest management fee, private forest owners are automatically members of the fma (fma 2011a). the fma supports forest owners in terms of planning, education and timber sale. harvesting and management plans are developed and tenders for logging rights are offered by power of attorney. north-karelia’s fma buys all plans made by the forest centre and integrates them into its forestry planning support. harvesting activities in private forests are carried-out twofold. for thinning and intermediate felling, the fma marks stands and hires contractors, while for final felling this task is primarily done by the companies after acquisition of logging rights. the fou, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with broader organizational aspects and supports cooperation among local fmas. additionally, the fou holds and administers the regional pefc certificate for its forestry district. in north-karelia, compared to most fig. 1. finnish administrative regions and location of case study area of north-karelia in a north european context. 6 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht other forestry districts, the fma and the fou are one entity separated only on paper. company forests are less embedded into this structured system. while being obliged to prepare forest use declarations to forest centres the same as private forest owners, follow-up checks are carried out by the forest development centre tapio (tapio) in most cases. management planning is carried-out by their own staff while the marking of logging sites is mostly performed by the respective buyers’ personnel. in the case of tornator, up to 90% of logging rights are sold to stora enso which hires contractors to carry-out logging activities. with respect to state owned forests, most responsibilities and duties rest with the state forestry service metsähallitus. the large majority of protected areas are situated in state-owned forest (metla 2010). private and corporate owned forests entail numerous entities involved in forest management, who are influencing forest governance with their perceptions, knowledge and the resulting practices. since these entities are affected by their relations among each other and towards external actors or aspects of environmental forest management, the next section will present the underlying theoretical framework of this study based on relational space and knowledge networks. perceiving sustainable spaces of forest governance local actors and entities are part of a wider space of transnational forest governance. hereafter, space is regarded as relational (e.g. massey 2005; murdoch 2006), just as transnational environmental forest governance is perceived as a relational space (e.g. albrecht 2010a, 2010b, 2012). interlinked actors involved within this space, whether on a global or on a local scale, (re-)produce and affect the performativity of this space, due to the varying relations they are entangled with. relations in this regard include social and biophysical components (massey 2005). for example, knowledge or cooperation networks, varying forestry practices, or ecological aspects of forests are relations which enable or restrict entities in their activities or choices (e.g. albrecht 2010b). as relational spaces are open and (re-)produced by a multiplicity of relations and actors (massey 2005), murdoch (2006) points out its consensual and contested character. this notion is highly visible in the debate about sfm practices, if on a global scale, or in localized examples, like the finnish debate discussed by this paper. a common problem in debates on sfm and its practices lies in the definition of the criteria necessary for one to achieve sustainability. as stressed by hudson (2005) in his account on sustainable economic practices, flows and spaces, the delineation of sustainable spaces is critically dependent upon the definition of sustainability in the realm itself. taking into account the social co-construction of nature (castree & braun 2001), the varying perceptions of actors, and entities and their knowledge networks on what is claimed to be the truth, respectively, the necessary means to achieve sfm are steering governance processes and individual table 1. list of acronyms with english and original (finnish) names. acronym english name finnish name engo environmental non-governmental organization fanc finnish association for nature conservation suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto ffif finnish forest industry federation metsäteolisuus ry fma forest management association metsänhoitoyhdistys fou forest owner union metsänomistanjien liitto fsc forest stewardship council nl nature league luonto-liitto pefc programme for the endorsement of forest certification tapio forest development center tapio tapio sfm sustainable forest management wwf world wide fund for nature (finland) fennia 190: 1 (2012) 7perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of … behaviour (rutherford 2007; dean 2010). thus, evaluating perceptions of actors and entities directly linked to and involved in forest management provides information on the overall performance of transnational and local forest governance. it further enables one to critically access claims about non-state market-driven processes of environmental forest governance via forest certification (e.g. cashore et al. 2004, 2007). the two forest certification systems, fsc and pefc, are utilized as instruments for sfm by multiple actors, to varying degrees. thus, these systems can be seen as governmental technologies promoted by competing regimes of practice (baldwin 2003; dean 2010). according to dean (2010), regimes of practice produce and distribute knowledge based on their internal, yet multiple rationalities and thereby stress varying problematizations related to the space to be governed. the lack of conservation in forest management stressed by engos might be regarded as such. regimes of practice with their knowledge networks can be a relatively stable set of relations which struggle for supremacy, possibly marginalizing competing regimes (murdoch 2006; dean 2010). however, due to the open character of space, these sets are prone to change and marginalization might be overcome (massey 2005). yet, if maintained and kept more or less together, a set of relations with its dominant regime of practice may appear increasingly natural (sheppard 2002). the institutional setting of fmas, fous and forestry centres is the dominant regime of practice in the finnish forest sector. yet, the perceptions and rationalities of actors, for instance on environmental aspects of forest management, influence those regimes and guide their behaviour (dean 2010). actors and entities in practical forest management guide their decisions about what they perceive as truth and what suits their rationality in terms of sfm requirements. these perceptions are influenced by the actors’ positionality within the respective space. positionality as proposed by sheppard (2002: 318) might be used “...to describe how different entities are positioned with respect to each other in space/time”. thereby, the actors’ positionality and the resulting rationalities are influenced by external influences. in terms of sfm, this means that rationalities concerned with the issue are not merely (re-)produced based on knowledge or perceptions directly related to the subject but include various aspects. for instance, economic reasons, personal values or institutional structures shape perceptions and thereby decisionmaking and management. additionally, perceptions about the drivers for environmental achievement are possible indicators on how certain regimes of practice, based on their positionality and problematizations, promote various governmental technologies such as certification, forestry guidelines or law for their aims. evaluating perceptions of environmental achievements, changes and conflicts, as well as investigating the opinions about their driving forces, enables one to integrate a local case into the wider processes of transnational environmental forest governance (e.g. albrecht 2010a, 2010b, 2012). a qualitative case-study of north karelian private forestry this study has been conducted as a qualitative case-study of the private and corporate owned forest sector in north-karelia, finland. in-depth, open-ended interviews were conducted with managers and owners of three forestry contracting companies1 in north-karelia and with the directors of the north-karelian forestry centre, the fma and the fou. empirical data on corporate owned forests was retrieved from the forest company tornator, as it represents the largest private/ corporate ownership in the region. group interviews were conducted with the companies’ forestry and resource manager, the corporate responsibility superintendent and a forestry team manager. additionally, two visits to logging sites, one thinning and one final cut, with contractors and an extended visit to tornator’s forests were conducted in january 2011. these forest visits provided additional information from forest workers. further, an engo representative for the regional forestry council was interviewed. several institutions on the national scale have been integrated. interviews were conducted with officials from engos; the finnish association for nature conservation (fanc), the nature league (nl) and the world wide fund for nature finland (wwf). further, a certification and auditing expert from tapio and the head of forestry affairs of the finnish forest industry federation (ffif) were interviewed. altogether, 17 persons have been interviewed in direct relation to this study. to support the qualitative data and to provide, as stressed by yin (2003), a multiplicity of data sources, position papers of the respective, as well as other institu8 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht tions, were evaluated and interview data from previous studies was utilized (albrecht 2010a, 2010b, 2012). owing to the study’s main focus on the actors’ perceptions of environmental related management changes and their drivers, in-depth expert interviews are most suited to provide valuable data (yin 2003; silverman 2006) and provide the bulk of information. being a possible point of criticism, the choice to not include private forest owners’ opinions in the study is due to the fact that the focus is on forest management practice and the previously mentioned low number of forest owners being involved in active management of their forests (koneyrittäjät 2009). the forest organizations and contractors were chosen as the focus due to their deemed importance in relation to the topic (cloke et al. 2004) and according to the administrational structure underlying finnish forestry. interviewees were asked to present their views on the state of sfm. in addition to providing an answer on the whether or not sfm is practiced in finnish forestry, their views on specific achievements and problems, as well as the related drivers for those issues were evaluated. due to the in-depth, open-ended character of the interviews and the heterogeneity of involved entities no standardized set of questions was utilized but the interviewees were requested to tell about aspects of sfm they deemed important. thereby, their perceptions, requirements and rationalities on their sustainable spaces in forest management are displayed with a reduced danger to be pulled into a certain direction by the interviewers’ preconceptualized framework about the topic (silverman 2006; dean 2010). the following section describes these various perceived achievements and problems of environmental forest management and its related driving forces or technologies. hence, impacts and aspects related to forest certification will be scrutinized, as are the finnish forest act and further means to achieve sfm or improve environmental performance in forestry. perceptions of sustainability and its drivers in finnish forest management keeping in mind the twofold representation of finnish forestry from the outset, it is important to be aware of some aspects concerning environmental issues and practices in finland to understand and evaluate the actors’ perceptions. in finland, about 95% of commercial forests are pefc certified by regional group certification (fma 2011b). being a member of fma, the private forest owners become automatically part of the regional group certificate. this system is criticized, as it lacks audits prior to certification and may include actors unaware of their certification (e.g. harkki 2004; greenpeace 2011). regional forest management institutions or regional contracting companies apply for participation in this regional group certificate. in early 2011, after a discussion that lasted almost 10 years (albrecht 2010b), a finnish fsc standard was approved and first areas of the global forestry company upm-kymmene have been certified (upm 2011). demanded by engos, this fsc standard should improve finnish forestry towards sfm. the most prominent national debate concerning practical forest management concerns the issue of even-aged versus uneven-aged forest management2. the former has been well-established practice for more than three decades and promoted by forest law, while the latter, being commonly practiced until the 1960s (siiskonen 2007), has recently gained support as environmental and further non-economical management aspects increase. while a forest professional and academic discourse on the feasibility of the two approaches takes place (e.g. tahvonen 2007; kuuluvainen 2009; laiho et al. 2011; pukkala et al. 2011), the inclusion of uneven-aged forest management into forest law is being discussed by politics and separates the minds of institutions and actors related to forestry. a similar process is taking place in sweden (e.g. axelsson & angelstam 2011). thus many of the perceptions presented below concerning environmental forest governance in finland circulate around these governmental technologies being used to promote sfm. forestry institutions’ perceptions according to the forest centre and fma/fou representatives, the current forest management system, backed by the finnish forest act, tapio’s recommendations for sfm and pefc group certificates, is generally perceived as sufficient to achieve sfm in finnish and north-karelian forestry. environmental aspects addressed by law and the additional requirements by pefc were described to be well integrated into the management system with only minor breaches appearing. fennia 190: 1 (2012) 9perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of … hence, it was specifically pointed out that new approaches, for instance stricter certification criteria through fsc or uneven-aged forest management as demanded by most engos, are deemed unnecessary. accordingly, a recent proposal by a working group of the ministry of agriculture and forestry on liberalizing the possibilities of forest management, thus including uneven-aged forest management, is seen as critical. nevertheless, it was mentioned that law as well as certification are minimum requirements for sfm from an environmental protective aspect, while the criteria could always be tightened, however related to massive cost increases on the forest owner and management side. the finnish forest act, in particular its 10th section concerning the protection of valuable habitats is seen as a major driving force for guaranteeing sfm practices, while pefc is seen as an extra topping, adding some criteria. for instance, valuable habitats, additional to the legal requirements found in pefc criteria were mentioned in this regard. however, certification is also regarded as a cost-raising factor driven mainly by company demand. in the case of fsc, it was pointed out that companies only demand it to please the engos. both certification systems, particularly fsc, were said to require unnecessary bureaucratic efforts, while stricter environmental criteria could be imposed without them if wished so by involved actors. market-driven influences aside certification demands by companies are based on economical aspects, as wood prices, and not in relation to direct changes in environmental management practices, as stated by some interviewees. private forest owners are not regarded as drivers for improved environmental protection in forestry; yet, hostile attitudes towards environmental aspects and protection created by engo campaigns and the weakly planned implementation of natura 2000 areas in the past are deteriorating. according to the interviewees, this development is mainly due to the metso protection program with its voluntary protection approach (see table 2). in relation to private forest owners, it was further stressed that their knowledge of environmental criteria or certification varies strongly. this owes much to the well-structured management system of forest centres, fma/fou and contracting companies, while most forest owners rely upon that these management aspects are taken care of by professionals, who do the planning and harvesting of their forests. acceptance of environmental regulations when directly explained is high. as to their own impact on the environmental performance of forest management, it was stated that environmental aspects, based on law, pefc and tapio’s sfm recommendations are integrated into several processes. for instance, environmental issues are handled aside from economical aspects, in the regional forestry programme by the forest centre, while fma follows all environmental criteria deriving from law and certification in their forestry planning and harvesting. further, the forest centre controls the environmental quality of regional forestry practices by recording breaches of law, as well as the implementation of environmental criteria like retention trees and valuable habitat demarcation. additionally, both institutions provide and organize education and information about environmental related forestry practices to forest professionals and forest owners. the contractors’ view information retrieved from the interviews with managers and owners of the three north-karelian contracting companies displayed a cohesive pictable 2. metso 2008−2016, overview (mmm 2010). metso forestry biodiversity programme for southern finland 2008–2016 • compensation based protection scheme for private and state owned forest lands (voluntary forest owner agreements) • first step: 2008-2012, 180 million € funds • ~14.000 ha protected in 2008–2009 (3661 ha in private forests) • ~6.400 ha restored habitats (300 ha in private forests) targets • improved protection/management of valuable habitats • improve network of protected areas in southern finland • halt decline of forest based species main critics • insufficient funding • mainly active forest owners participate 10 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht ture about recent forestry practices and their applicability for sfm with the associations’ perceptions voiced above. nevertheless, aspects of environmental forest management were stressed from the implementation side, while several problems or discourses concerned with the same were mentioned. this relates to the aspect that contracting companies work for organizations in private, state or company owned forests, yet are not representing those ownerships but merely providing services based on the customer demands. still, they are most concerned with the practicality of environmental criteria. according to the contractors, change concerning the integration of environmental aspects into forest management has appeared on two levels. first, practical issues, such as improved protection of valuable habitats, water protection through buffer zones and protection of waterways, as well as protection of retention trees, have improved the environmental quality of forest management. second, parallel to the appearance of these practices, attitudes have shifted and the above-mentioned protection measures are described as becoming common practice while their purpose is being slowly understood among forestry professionals. one of the interviewees stressed that there remains a need to explain, especially to machine drivers, the importance of even small protective areas or habitats. nevertheless, the current environmental criteria are regarded as sufficient for sfm, one contractor stating that some habitats such as “trickles on hill slopes” do not need to be protected due to their abundance in finnish forests. this statement must be understood in reference to requirements laid down by the section 10 (2/1) of the forest act (mmm 1996) and pefc criterion 10 (pefc 2009). describing the law as a basic and obligatory framework for environmental criteria, most specific changes are attributed to pefc certification. hence retention trees and required buffer zones on lake shores, both not demanded by law, were mentioned as examples (cf. forest act 1996). the environmental quality of the former, consisting of a required minimum of 5−10 trees/hectare left standing after harvesting, were found to improve with increasing machine-driver understanding of their importance (cf. pefc 2009). still, in some cases, retention trees are logged in the post harvesting period by misinformed private owners for fire wood. a contractor specialized in insular logging pointed out that the latter, while contributing to water protection measures in general, has positive impacts on landscape protection values when moving on finnish waterways. regarded as a critical aspect of finnish forestry is the missing management agenda of many private forest owners, which leads to neglected and bushy forest stands, a view commonly shared by swedish foresters (axelsson & angelstam 2011). it was further mentioned that the protection of valuable habitats related to law and pefc have led to a fragmentation of logging sites making the job of contractors more challenging as more and more aspects and restrictions have to be taken into account. this results in smaller logging sites and constantly requires environmental education for machine drivers and planning professionals. to ensure proficient knowledge for machine drivers most large customers were said to demand an environmental management degree of them. this degree, provided by tapio in cooperation with forest centres requires 4−6 days of courses and an additional amount of self-study to prepare forest professionals to recognize valuable habitats and to take environmental aspects in forest management and harvesting into account (tapio 2011). contractors stated that most of their employees, if not all, possess this degree. in addition, the large companies, like stora enso or upm-kymmene, provide environmental education to keep their contractors up-to-date on environmental regulation or changes in law. attitudes among contractors towards these trainings varied to some degree. on the one hand, it was mentioned that training should be made mandatory in general and that a lack of possibilities for training exists, while on the other hand, the amount of training was regarded as too high. the additional costs (only educational costs are covered by the large companies) are criticized due to the loss of valuable working time if employees have to take classes instead of being in the forest logging. information in general was presented as being of the utmost importance to guarantee the performance of sfm practices in forestry. since harvesting is done preferably in winter times with frozen soils, finland’s often extensive snow cover restricts recognition of valuable habitats, such as small springs, rivulets or bird-nesting sites. machine drivers have to rely on their harvesting plans. harvesting plans are mostly prepared in summer by the companies hiring the contractors’ work, based on management plans for the respective forest sites. thereby, quality of mapping was said to fennia 190: 1 (2012) 11perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of … differ. for instance, when harvesting for stora enso in a forest owned by tornator, valuable areas were described as well charted and provided as a gps map to contractors, partially even including premarked retention tree groups. thus, it is easy for machine drivers to recognize the environmentally important areas by using their built-in gps devices, while in private forests, even though for the same company, such digital maps are often absent, which increases the risk of mistakes. apart from its benefits, the continuous shift to digital maps and gps is seen as critical, since marking in the forests ceases, and the abilities of machine drivers to use new systems were described as still limited. generally, it was pointed out that harvesting guidelines provided by large companies take environmental issues of law and certification strongly into account, while at least for fma this was questioned to some degree. as for the drivers, no specific group was mentioned in relation to the increasing regulation and environmental criteria. assumptions about environmentalists, some institutional authority and customer demands were provided as drivers for certification. the need for additional certification systems, specifically with stricter criteria was strongly denied and a critical attitude was expressed concerning uneven-aged forest management. however, engo demands are partially seen as rightful, yet not a large problem for contractors and in most cases regarded as solvable. it appeared from the interviews that contractors and their association take a more neutral stance towards the larger political debates and leave those to politics, large forestry and wood-based product companies and forest owner associations while concentrating on the practical issues of sfm. company perceptions: tornator oy with forest holdings of 595,000 hectares in finland, tornator is the third largest forest owner in finland while its focus on eastern finland makes it the most important non-state owner in northkarelia. managing the forests formerly owned by stora enso which still holds 41% of tornator shares, between 80−85% of cutting rights from its forests are sold to stora enso (tornator 2011). forest maintenance and planning is largely carriedout by the own forestry professionals while harvesting activities, specifically final felling, is carried-out by external contractors, mostly by karel wood, stora enso’s main contractor in northkarelia. the companies own forests are completely pefc certified. planning and maintenance services are further offered to private owners in the vicinity of tornator’s forest areas. in addition to commercial management, tornator has recently set aside some 1,250 hectares of its forest as part of several state promoted protection programmes, terminating negotiations with the ministry of environment lasting almost two decades. additionally, two areas have been included within the metso programme since 2009, the latest being a 74 hectare storm damaged area in north-karelia (tornator 2011). the metso programme has been a focus of tornator’s own environmental responsibility programme in 2009 and its forest superintendents have been trained to identify its habitats (tornator 2010). as burning over criteria have been tightened in pefc, trials to burn over retention tree areas in each forestry team have been promoted as part of metso habitat management (tornator 2011). tornator representatives regard the major changes of integrating environmental aspects into forest management in a similar way to the contracting companies. primary, specifically pefc certification is said to have united the efforts of different actors to work on and integrate environmental aspects into forestry. it was stressed that forestry organizations, contractors and private owners are now collected within a single framework to handle environmental aspects. second, in relation to practical changes which promote and improve sfm, retention trees, protection of valuable habitats, water protection and nature management of commercial forests (e.g. metso) were mentioned. forest and related environmental laws are considered to provide means for most of these practical changes, while specifically retention trees are credited to pefc. another effect brought about by the different environmental regulations is a concentration on economically valuable forest areas away from less productive stands, thus investment in, for instance, peat land has ceased. sfm is stressed as an important aspect in tornators’ own forest management activities. hence, requirements by forest law, pefc and tapio’s recommendations for sfm are always integrated into forestry activities. for that purpose, own contractors for forest maintenance and stora enso’s logging contractors are obliged by agreement to participate in training programs organized by the two companies, often taught by the forest centre or tapio specialists. contractors are provided with 12 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht gps maps entailing valuable habitats and other areas restricted for harvesting practices. information on retention trees might be provided and respective areas should already be delineated at first thinnings. nevertheless, this relatively new practice was described as being in need of improvement. despite the digital support, the above-mentioned trainings should enable machine drivers to decide upon and recognize valuable areas also by themselves. it follows that tornator perceives pefc as widely sufficient, while, for instance, fsc is recently perceived as too strict and based on complicated criteria, and thus it is regarded critically. yet, implementation would be possible and requests from stora enso were received concerning this issue. nevertheless, increased costs due to logging losses and additional costs in administration are expected and require evaluation, while being a matter of debate between stora enso and tornator concerning plans for fsc certification. fsc demand by stora enso is perceived to be customer driven. one aspect highlighted as endangering sfm in finnish forestry is a decreasing knowledge and activity among a growing number of forest owners. consisting mainly of young owners living in long distance to their forests, these owners were found to neglect their holdings, which might lead to insufficiently managed forests. being eventually positive for biodiversity in the short term, this development reduces forest productivity and value for forest owners; both considered aspects of sfm as well. despite its acclaimed achievements in sfm in its forests (e.g. tornator 2010, 2011) tornator, aside from upm-kymmene, is blamed by engos for neglecting the protection of valuable habitats based on metso criteria. the nl in cooperation with its parent organization fanc and with greenpeace finland mapped large areas of tornator and upm-kymmene owned forests in 2008 and 2009 delineating 77 exemplifying areas, valuable for protection, 20 of which are situated in tornator’s forests (luonto-liitto et al. 2009). not being pleased by these engo demands, it was agreed to evaluate the areas marked using one’s own discretion. no concrete details were provided in the interviews. however, it was mentioned that some areas do meet metso criteria while others, a marked sapling stand was described as an example, lack any protective values and are not considered for possible protection. it was further mentioned that stora enso, as buyer of most logging rights, is closely following the happenings and requests full information if respective stands are marked for cutting. interestingly, opposite to the often mentioned “carrot and stick” approach (e.g. cashore et al. 2004) fsc was not regarded as a means to avoid such campaigns but was more expected to increase the level of demands brought forward by engos. engo protests and market campaigns are recognized as drivers for environmental changes and seen as a push factor for fsc. parallel to this, engo attention is described as shifting from lapland to southern finland, where forest owning companies appear as major targets for such campaigns. on the other hand, rethinking in forest policy is regarded as an important driver as well, since certain environmental measures have positive economical impacts in today’s forestry-based business environment. ngo perceptions: countering claims of sfm perceptions of finnish engo on achievements and the state of sfm in finland counter most attitudes expressed by the three actor groups above. first, none of the engo representatives regard finnish forestry to be managed in a sustainable manner. on the contrary, most issue a quite low performance for finnish forestry in terms of sfm and environmental protection. within their criticism, the interviewees mentioned improvements and at least some positive development. it is interesting to note that they pointed out the very similar improvements mentioned by the previous actor groups; however they regard them as insufficient to reach sfm according to their definition. additionally, these improvements, like retention trees, buffer zones and valuable habitats, are commonly attributed to law or the sfm recommendations by tapio then to pefc, despite being part of pefc criteria. in general, pefc is rejected as a system providing sfm in finland, due to its weak criteria, and lax implementation and control. criteria exceeding law, like retention trees or lakeside buffer zones were deemed a nice thought but too weak to bring about significant changes. only the representative of wwf finland attributed improvements and certain positive aspects to pefc as a system to refer immediately to the high amount of loopholes, and inferiority to fsc. despite its annual regional audits, pefc was described more as a toothless tiger, as several breaches of criteria disfennia 190: 1 (2012) 13perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of … covered by ngos remained with no consequences for the certificate holders. apart from these aspects, engos criticized the fact that the minor improvements achieved with retention trees, buffer zones and the protection of some valuable habitats are promoted by forestry associations and partially by industry as the solution to the problem of insufficient sfm. according to the representatives of engos, finland’s forestry is in need of restructuring on a larger scale then with beauty corrections such as five retention trees per hectare. therefore, the debate of even-aged versus uneven-aged forest management was more prominent in their talks. opposing the positions of forest associations and some contractors, engos promote uneven-aged forest management as the better alternative. in addition to environmental aspects such as improved biodiversity, economic gains through savings in forest regeneration and planting are presented to back their claim. in this regard, the political sphere was described as moving towards more possibilities for forest owners, however in a slow manner with fmas opposing changes to the recent system. the campaign which aimed at tornator and upm-kymmene differed widely to the public protest campaigns related to old-growth forest destruction in lapland. instead of large publicity or protests to blame the respective companies, proposals based on fieldwork findings by nl concerning valuable habitats were submitted to the companies. while the data was published in finnish online, no large publications (cf. greenpeace 2009) have been prepared to target an international audience as compared to the lapland forest conflict. mapping of valuable habitats was conducted based on metso criteria and on the improved connection of protected networks (luontoliitto et al. 2009). the response of upm-kymmene was described as cooperative; tornator, on the other hand, was described as more reserved on the issue. it was stressed though that for tornator, with its main revenues deriving from forest management and wood sale, decisions on excluding areas from exploitation weight heavier than for a transnational, integrated forest-product company like upm-kymmene. yet, to increase pressure, proposals were sent to stora enso, the main customer of tornator. as company owned forests were described as thoroughly managed, yet not sustainable in most cases, the situation for private forests was described as strongly variable. criticized by the regional forestry institutions and contractors, the forest owners’ lack of a management agenda was coupled with positive effects for biodiversity (e.g. no thinnings). concerning certification, finnish engos expect the major companies to certify their forests with fsc in the future, upm taking the first-mover role. private owners, especially due to the negative attitudes of their associations are seen as less likely to switch to fsc in the coming years. surprisingly, and contrary to the public chorus of international engos, like wwf or friends of the earth, fsc is not regarded as the sole solution to achieve sfm in finland. although it would improve forest management in commercial forests, it was described as unsustainable with regards to forest energy harvesting, while increased political efforts were stressed in order to improve the network of protected areas. thus while finnish engos’ perceptions on finnish forestry varies from that of most other forestry related actors, it also differs from the international, public ngo chorus. the above-mentioned examples display the various rationalities, based on the differing positionalities of actors, which aim at stabilizing or including their regimes of practice in local and transnational forest governance. political technologies (e.g. baldwin 2003; dean 2010) are thereby promoted to different ends and attributed with varying effects. the following critically discusses the performance of these various perceptions and their possible effects on the processes of transnational environmental forest governance. discussion the twofold public promotion of finnish forestry practices is (re-)produced throughout the interviews as all actors, apart from the finnish engos, regard finnish forestry as sustainable on their account. yet, keeping in mind that those perceptions about sfm are closely tied to the actors’ rationalities and influenced by various regimes of practice (dean 2010), a more diverse picture unfolds. rationalities of actors are co-produced by their positionality (sheppard 2002), which makes actor groups or regimes of practice to focus on problematizations from their perspective (dean 2010). hence, perceptions expressed by the interviewees relate to a heterogeneous playing field despite an apparently unified arena. so, the question is not merely if there is sfm in finland but which aspects of forestry are included in the rationalities of in14 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht volved entities to decide upon that matter and how varying positionalities of corporate and private forest owners affect the processes of forest governance. the actors in this study are largely concerned with commercial forestry and its sustainability. thus, they access forestry with regard to commercially utilized forests and aspects of their management (see also axelsson & angelstam 2011). engos, on the other hand, see forests from a more universal, environmental perspective. hence, one must assume a variety of underlying definitions concerning the criteria and values of sfm on which the delineation of sustainable spaces rests (hudson 2005). while an in depth evaluation of those definitions is not the aim of this paper, the utilization and promotion of different political technologies promoted on the basis of those is accessed. pefc certification, forest law and tapio’s sfm recommendations are the most prominent technologies mentioned in the finnish debate. yet, they are attributed with various achievements towards different ends. supported by the dominant regime of practice consisting of forest centres, fma and fou the role of pefc is the one of the defending champion, while fsc is yet to rise to become a contestant in the same weight class in finland. the unifying role accredited to pefc in environmental issues in the interviews is an important aspect of its strength. since it is backed-up by the monopoly like structured institutions of finnish forestry it has a large capacity to promote itself. this was supported by an engo forestry expert who stressed the onesided, pro pefc information provided throughout this monopoly system to forest owners and professionals. however, based on positive third party audits, as well as on checkups carried-out by its supportive institutions, pefc has been able to improve forestry and, further, to strengthen forest law enforcement, as pointed-out by a forest industry representative (see also indufor 2010). while engos oppose this claim, some of the advertised improvements are accepted, yet attributed to different drivers. achievements such as retention trees, lake-side buffer zones or additional habitats are affiliated with tapio’s sfm recommendation rather than to pefc, despite pefc criteria being theoretically binding rather than tapio’s recommendations. this shows how even insufficient deemed achievements are attributed to another political technology rather than to run the danger of creating an eventual support/agreement with an opposed regime of practice. generally, engos describe the achievements mentioned throughout the actor groups as green-washing of forestry practice by forestry institutions and companies, while distracting from the larger problem such as decreasing biodiversity due to a lack of protected areas. with respect to these wider problematizations stressed by engos, it has to be taken into account that this plays only a marginal role within the contractors’ or forest owning companies’ perceptions of sfm. exemplified by a tapio forestry expert statement that not all species can be expected to cope in commercially used forests, wider aspects such as large protected areas, or high biodiversity rankings are not necessarily regarded as part of their business. at least not without sufficient compensation paid (e.g. metso). this stresses the importance of positionality effects related to actors’ rationalities and their resulting practices (albrecht 2010b), and is akin to findings in swedish forestry (axelsson & angelstam 2011). thus, as the debate about sfm includes multiple forest images, the common attempt by engos to kill two birds with one stone, for instance with fsc, buries risks of rejection. these spheres are separated in the perceptions of contractors, institutions and tornator. thus, while pefc, forest law and tapio’s sfm recommendation provide sufficient means for sfm in commercial forests, increasing a protected area network seems to not be affiliated within their direct range of tasks. while, compared to the global fsc equals sfm chorus by many engos, finnish engos, on the contrary, are aware of that issue and try to avoid accusations of confusing sfm with forest conservation, an accusation mentioned in an interview with a large finnish forestry company. with rationalities related to sfm being influenced by deemed external relations as well, for instance distrust in engos or private ownership aspects (albrecht 2012), pefc, while deemed sufficient, is not promoted as the solution to all problems, even by its supporters. problems like varying quality of retention trees due to changing forest professional knowledge and interest, or their post harvesting removal by forest owners for their firewood are acknowledged. the latter is a common problem in sweden, despite its fsc and pefc forests as well (hysing & olsson 2005). however, the achievements in commercial forestry, the felt fragmentation of logging sites due to habitat and buffer zone protection, and the high amount of environfennia 190: 1 (2012) 15perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of … mental related education requirements for forest workers are relations that shape rationalities and provide most forest professionals with the perception that they are doing their share to improve forestry. as even pefc certification is regarded a burden, requiring costs, education and changed practices, the attitude towards increased restrictions and regulations, be it fsc or any other involuntary measures, are prone to be rejected for the time being. this also seems to relate to perceptions of finnish sfm practices in global comparison. interviewees from fma, fou, ffif and tapio regarded them as top level, while, for instance, forestry in russia was not seen as being superior despite its fsc certification. additionally, the demand for certification by the large buying companies is seen as only being for their reputational sake, and not necessarily based on altruistic attitudes to save the environment. the fact that upm refrained from fsc certification of all its forests, due to low market demand, and disconnection to its own processing facilities, supports these claims (woodmark 2011). it was criticized by contractors and by tornator that many costs remain with them while the companies which demand certification restrain from paying higher prices for those sustainable products. this aspect additionally shapes a positionality that creates rationalities which rejects further regulations. thereby, pefc, in concert with finnish forest law and tapio’s sfm recommendation based on the positionalities of most finnish forest actors, continues to (re-)produce itself as the dominant regime of practice (e.g. dean 2010). this, in turn, has strong implications for transnational forest governance. as the majority of finnish forestry products are exported (ffif 2011b), pefc products continue to dominate the certified product market by numbers. yet, as stated by massey (2005) on account of the relative instability and openness of space, such domination is constantly challenged. in finland, the debate of evenvs. uneven-aged forest management is just such an unfolding problematization which affects the various regimes of practice and the space they aim to govern (dean 2010). thereby, even-aged forest management, which, following sheppard (2002), is concurrently promoted as the “natural” regime of practice by forest centres, fma and fou is in jeopardy. the opening up of forestry practices, thus including uneven-aged forest management on a large scale, is also related to the dismantling of the monopoly structure of the forest centres and fmas. thus, forest owners not only should be enabled to choose their mode of harvesting but have free choice from where to acquire consultation and management services. as such a change is currently politically debated, it is highly welcomed by engos and is further supported by the ffif and, to some degree, the fous, based on the right of forest owners to do as they wish with their forest property. further, the increased distance of forest owners from their holdings diminishes the influence and informational flow deriving from regional forest centres or fmas, thus detaching the owners from those still dominant regimes of practice. while such a shift might provide more possibilities for fsc and other alternative practices to be integrated, it by no means equals an abrupt end to the dominant regime consisting of the amalgamation of forest law, pefc and tapio’s recommendations. additionally, influences on forest management and utilization are not merely seen as positive for sfm or biodiversity. the lack of a management agenda by private forest owners and the resulting increase in unmanaged, bushy forests criticized by contractors was to some degree affiliated by engos with the onesided management possibilities of the current system. as these areas often entail increased biodiversity, due to their natural character, opening up new management possibilities might lead to a reintegration of such areas into commercial forestry, thereby resulting in a possible loss of biodiversity, as stressed by a tapio expert. further, a possible decrease of dead wood was described as a possible effect, while missing expertise regarding large scale uneven-aged forestry was stressed to be the main hindering factor (see also axelsson & angelstam 2011). nevertheless, while being probably less productive, uneven-aged forestry is seen as less costly since reforestation and clear-cut site management costs lapse. the fact that forest regeneration is tornator’s largest single expense fosters that claim (tornator 2011). nevertheless, uneven-aged forestry is seen as more likely to be integrated into private forest holdings by the interviewees compared to corporate holdings, due to their focus on wood production. yet, implications on the certification systems as political technologies for sfm performance (baldwin 2003; albrecht 2010b) in finland remain tied to the positionalities of the implicating actors in their local settings. being recently promoted due to business demand through large companies like upm-kym16 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht mene and stora enso, both being supportive for pefc in finland at the same time (albrecht 2012), the awaited opening-up of forestry management services adds possibilities for fsc to gain its share of the previously dominated pefc market. this especially accounts for corporate holdings, as they are prone to engo campaigns and market pressure, while implementation of complex standards is facilitated due to their large-scale and professional management. the recent certification of upm-kymmene forest areas is a good example of this. yet, the rationalities of implementing forest actors are (re-)produced by their positionalities (sheppard 2002; murdoch 2006). thus, despite the new possibilities opening up, the current system of forest law/pefc seems better suited to target the sustainable spaces perceived by most implementing actors. hence, the strong and positive role affiliated by most interviewees to the state driven metso programme counters the all-in-one market driven sfm alternatives, to some degree. it separates the struggle for sfm in commercial forests, according to most actors sufficiently managed by forest law/pefc, and improves protection measures through state funds on a voluntary basis. the metso programme, based on its wide recognition, apart from the criticism of insufficient funding by engos and ffif, has managed to be a supported political technology that fits the rationalities of most actors belonging to opposing regimes of practice. thereby, from a local perspective, it strongly influences market driven aspects such as certification demand and further highlights the importance of local steering mechanisms for transnational environmental forest governance. conclusions the debate on sufficient measures for sfm will continue in finland, with an expected increase in its complexity, due to the integration of wood energy aspects. the system’s current restructuring opens up possibilities for previously excluded alternative political technologies to be integrated into finnish forestry since positionalities change and with them the rationalities of involved entities. it is, however, questionable if these changes will bring the awaited improvements hoped for by engos or if the current dominant regime of practice entails the resilience to maintain its position. while fsc is expected to increase on corporate owned land, due to business demand, the positionality of forest owners in finland is preventing such a sudden change and there can be doubt if it will rise to become the dominant system in finland. on the other hand, uneven-aged forest management is more likely to be integrated into privately owned forests. thus, it remains to be seen if respective forest owners choose fsc in concert or if forest centres, fmas and fous provide uneven-aged aside from even-aged forestry with a continuous reliance on pefc as the more pragmatic and forest owner trusted system. thus, will they adjust their system to remain the dominant regime of practice? following the research aims presented in the introduction, this paper has displayed how local perceptions based on the positionality of actors (re-)produce the various rationalities of actors on sfm. further, they display these rationalities’ influence on decision-making and practices for sfm and transnational forest governance per se. while the positionality of corporate forest owners, tied to market demand and vulnerable to engo campaigns, is more strongly affected by market driven aspects of forest governance (cashore et al. 2004; albrecht 2010b), private forest owners are strongly influenced by their locally embedded relations which (re-)produce their positionality. these include governmental instruments (e.g. metso), knowledge networks or practicalities which all play their role in influencing and shaping transnational forest governance practices, and the utilization and promotion of its political technologies as forest certification schemes. thus, local regimes of practice in resource peripheries with their affiliated knowledge networks have the strength to resist and shape market-driven domination in forest governance. based on the theoretical approach of this paper, it is likely that these findings can be generalized to other areas of natural resource management (e.g. sustainable bioenergy), as long as private ownership exists alongside corporate and state owned premises. however, to strengthen this claim further research is required. notes 1 one of the companies, anaika wood had just changed its focus from forestry contracting to bioenergy production, nevertheless it was active in contracting during recent years. 2 even-aged forest management is commonly practiced by a rotational process of thinnings, clear-cuts fennia 190: 1 (2012) 17perceiving sustainable forest spaces: governance aspects of … and reforestation. uneven-managed forest management refers to practicing continuous growth forestry (uneven aged tree cover) with selective loggings and mostly natural regeneration (e.g. axelsson & angelstam 2011). acknowledgements the research has been funded as part of the academy of finland project (no. 14770) “transnationalization of forest governance” and by the university of eastern finland (project no. 931429). special thanks go to eija kärkkäinen for her valuable help with the finnish interviews and translations. further i like to thank the north karelian forestry companies, institutions and finnish ngos who have participated in this research. references albrecht m 2010a. sustainable forest management through forest certification in russia’s barents region: processes in the relational space of forest certification. in fryer p, brown-leonardi c, & soppela p (eds). encountering the changing barents: research challenges and opportunities, 24−34. arctic-centre, rovaniemi. albrecht m 2010b. company positionality and its effects on transnational forest governance: two companies and their approaches to forest certification. geographische zeitschrift, 98: 2, 116−132. albrecht m 2012. public procurement and forest governance: a german case study of governmental influences on market-driven governance systems. social sciences, in press. axelsson r & angelstam pk 2011. uneven-aged forest management in boreal sweden: local forestry stakeholders’ perceptions of different sustainability dimensions. forestry, 84: 5, 567–579 baldwin a 2003. the nature of the boreal forest: governmentality and forest-nature. space & culture, 6: 4, 415−428. cashore b, auld g & newsom d 2004. governing through markets: forest certification and the emergency of non-state authority. yale university press, london. cashore b, egan e, auld g & newsom d 2007. revising theories of nonstate market-driven (nsmd) governance: lessons from the finnish forest certification experience. global environmental politics 7: 1, 1−44. castree n & braun b (eds) 2001. social nature: theory, practice, and politics. blackwell, oxford. cloke p, cook i, crang p, goodwin m, painter j & philo c (eds) 2004. practising human geography. sage, london. dean m 2010. governmentality: power and rule in modern society. 2nd ed. sage, london. ffif 2010. extensive forest conservation network encompasses northern finland. <http://www. forestindustries.fi/infokortit/extensive%20forest%20conservation%20network%20encompasses%20northern%20finland2/pages/default. aspx> 10.08.2011. ffif 2011a. paper and wood insights. <http://www. forestindustries.fi/> 10.08.2011. ffif 2011b. basics of forest industry. <http://www. forestindustries.fi/statistics/tilastokuviot/basics/ forms/allitems.aspx> 16.08.2011. fma 2011a. forest management associations. <http://www.fma.fi/fma/english> 10.08.2011. fma 2011b. metsien sertifiointi. <http://www.fma.fi/ fma/metsanomistajanasialla/fi_fi/sertifiointi/> 11.08.2011. forest centre pk 2010. metsänomistus. <http://www. metsakeskus.fi/web/fin/metsakeskukset/pohjoiskarjala/metsat/pkmetsat_metsanomistus.htm> 10.08.2011. forest centre 2011. forestry centres − the finnish regional forestry network. <http://www.metsakeskus.fi/web/eng> 10.08.2011. fsc 2011. fsc standard for finland. finnish fsc association, helsinki. greenpeace 2009. kein kahlschlag für kopierpapier. greenpeace, hamburg. greenpeace 2011. on the ground: the controversies of pefc and sfi. greenpeace. harkki s 2004. certifying extinction? an assessment of the revised standards of the finnish forest certification system. greenpeace, helsinki. harkki s 2008. out of control: high conservation value forest logging und fsc controlled wood in finland. greenpeace, helsinki. horne p 2004. forest owners‘ acceptance of incentive based policy instruments in biodiversity conservation – a choice experiment based approach. australian agricultural and resource economics society conference, melbourne. hudson r 2005. towards sustainable economic practices, flows and spaces: or is the necessary impossible and the impossible necessary? sustainable development 13, 239−252. hysing e & olsson j 2005. sustainability through good advice? assessing the governance of swedish forest biodiversity. environmental politics, 14: 4, 510−526. hänninen h & kurttila m 2004. metsänomistajien tiedot luonnon monimuotoisuutta vaalivan metsänhoidon velvoitteista ja suosituksista. metsätieteen aikakauskirja 3, 285−301. indufor 2010. comparison report on the changes in the revised pefc fi 1002 standard and their impact on forest management. indufor, helsinki. karppinen h 1998. values and objectives of non-industrial private forest owners in finland. silva fennica, 32: 1, 43−59. 18 fennia 190: 1 (2012)moritz albrecht koneyrittäjät 2009. forestry contracting. <http:// www.koneyrittajat.fi/?id=122> 20.12.2010. kuuluvainen t 2009. forest management and biodiversity conservation based on natural ecosystem dynamics in northern europe: the complexity challenge. ambio 38: 6, 309−315. laiho o, lähde e & pukkala t 2011. unevenvs even-aged management in finnish boreal forests. forestry, 84: 5, 547–556. luonto-liitto, suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto & greenpeace 2009. <http://www.forestinfo.fi/etelasuomi/ yhtiot/index.htm> 20.06. 2011. massey d 2005. for space. sage, london. merlingen m 2003. governmentality: towards a foucauldian framework for the study of igos. cooperation and conflict: journal of the nordic international studies association 38: 4, 361−384. metla 2010. statistical yearbook 2010. finnish forest research institute, vantaa. metsähallitus 2009. metsähallitus − annual report 2009. <http://www.metsa.fi/sivustot/metsa/en/ whatsnew/publications/documents/annual%20 report%202009.pdf> 08.08.2011. mielikäinen k & hynynen j 2003. silvicultural management in maintaining biodiversity and resistance of forests in europe-boreal zone: case finland. journal of environmental management 67, 47−54. mmm 1996. forest act (1093/1996). ministry of agriculture and forestry, helsinki. mmm 2010. the forest biodiversity programme metso 2008-2016. <http://www.mmm.fi/attachments/metsat/metso/5sygf2ldc/metso_kalvot_eng_2010_pptx.pdf> 13.08.2011. murdoch j 2006. post-structuralist geography: a guide to relational space. sage, london. parviainen j & västilä s 2011. state of finland’s forests 2011. ministry of agriculture and forestry, helsinki. pefc 2009. criteria for group certification; level of forest centre or a forest management association. pefc finland, helsinki. pefc 2011. on the ground 2011 – the controversy of greenpeace (annexes). <http://www.pefc.co. uk/images/stories/documents/greenpeace/ ontheground2011.pdf> 18.08.2011. pukkala t, lähde e, laiho o, salo k & hotanen j 2011. a multifunctional comparison of even-aged and uneven-aged forest management in a boreal region. canadian journal of forest research 41: 4, 851−862. rutherford s 2007. green governmentality: insights and opportunities in the study of nature’s rule. progress in human geography 31: 3, 291−307. schlyter p, stjernquist i & bäckstrand k 2009. not seeing the forest for the trees? the environmental effectiveness of forest certification in sweden. forest policy and economics 11: 5−6, 375−382. sheppard b 2002. the spaces and times of globalization: places, scales, networks and positionality. economic geography 78: 3, 307−330. siiskonen h 2007. the conflict between traditional and scientific forest management in 20th century finland. forest ecology and management 249, 125−133. silverman d 2006. interpreting qualitative data: methods for analysing talk, text and interaction. 3rd ed. sage, london. tahvonen o 2007. optimal choice between even and unevenforest management systems. working papers of the finnish forest research institute, 60. tapio 2011. metsäalan luonnonhoitokortti: luonnonhoidon tietotaidon varmistaja. <http://metsavastaa.net/files/metsavastaa/pdf/lhk_esite_netti. pdf> 19.05.2011. tornator 2010. annual report 2009. tornator, imatra. tornator 2011. annual report 2010. tornator, imatra. upm 2005. parallel field testing of forest certification standards. upm forestry and wood sourcing environmental forestry affairs, valkeakoski. upm 2011. upm awarded fsc certificate for company’s forests in finland. <http://www.upm.com/ en/media/all-news/pages/upm-awarded-fsccertificate-for-company%27s-forests-in-finland001-tue-27-sep-2011-09-30.aspx> 28.09.2011. woodmark 2011. woodmark forest certification public report: upm-kymmene corporation. <http:// info.fsc.org/publiccertificatedetails?id=a024000 0006whvfaa2> 28.09.2011. yin rk 2003. case study research: design and methods. 3rd ed. sage, thousand oaks. untitled forest industry on the map of finland jarmo kortelainen kortelainen, jarmo (2002). forest industry on the map of finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 227–235. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the map of finland would look quite different if the forest industry had not had such an important role in the finnish national economy and society. the production of pulp, paper, sawn timber, plywood and furniture concentrated people in dozens of mill towns and industrial centres. the harvesting and transportation of roundwood, in turn, dispersed people in hundreds of rural villages in different parts of the country. together these localities formed the settlement systems of the forest sector, in which each of the localities had a certain economic and productive role. during the first half of twentieth century this settlement system expanded with increasing production, but during the second half of the century both lumberman–smallholder villages and mill communities faced serious difficulties. the restructuring processes within the forest sector decreased jobs in forestry and industrial production, although the production volumes continued to increase. both the growth periods and restructuring periods have created spatial inequalities between localities and regions within the settlement system of the forest sector. jarmo kortelainen, department of geography, university of joensuu, p. o. box 111, fin-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: jarmo.kortelainen@joensuu.fi introduction finland has been called a forest-sector society, highlighting the importance of forestry and the forest industry for the national economy and society in general (see koskinen 1985; oksa 1992). as the country’s leading export sector, the forest industry has provided income for hundreds of thousands of people in almost every part of the country. the settlement system of the forest sector emerged, and it changed the spatial systems in large parts of the country. we can thus say that the generation, evolution, and restructuring periods of the forest sector have deeply influenced finland’s regional development. the settlement system of the forest sector and its effects on regional development can be examined from several perspectives. the common way to analyse settlement patterns is to see them as functional systems where each locality has certain functional roles in the spatial division of labour of industrial production, retail, or government. in this article, the settlement system is interpreted more as a system of social exchange. this highlights social, economic, and cultural aspects instead of pure material functions and flows. in the case of the forest sector, raw material and products flowed to the industrial centres, but there was a simultaneous contra-flow in which money, services, technology, cultural influences, and political ideas dispersed to the localities in the settlement system (koskinen 1994a: 17–19; kortelainen 1996: 43). the forest sector’s system of social exchange supported numerous localities in different parts of the country. it did not treat them equally, however, but created and deepened disparities between localities and regions. this article presents and analyses the ways of how the forest sector affected the formation of the regional characteristics and the restructuring of settlement patterns in the twentieth-century finland. on the one hand, the forest sector’s role in regional development in the different stages of its development is examined. on the other hand, the ways of how the forest sector influenced the generation of regional differences and inequalities during the twentieth-century are analysed. the article is based on my own research work on the topic and on the results of other studies of forestsector settlements. 228 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jarmo kortelainen the settlement system of the forest sector the forest industry became big business in finland in the second half of the nineteenth century. demand grew rapidly in the already-industrialized european countries. wood was needed for construction and paper products for communication and packaging. improving transport techniques made long-distance transportation possible and steamships began to carry finnish products to western european markets. national economic and political regulation had previously prohibited the use of steam power in saw milling, but this policy changed in the mid-nineteenth century. dozens of sawmills and paper mills emerged within a few decades. the forest industry led the rapid industrialisation of finland’s agrarian society (kortelainen 1999b: 208–209). two important preconditions in the finnish natural environment made the large-scale forest industry possible. the vast forest resources were the primary attraction, but another important natural feature was the extensive lake and river system reaching almost every part of the country. the water systems provided the only feasible transportation routes that gave companies access to more remote timber supply areas in the late nineteenth century (mead 1968: 233–239). logs were floated throughout the entire lake and river system to mills in downstream locations. a huge nationwide production system was constructed. it utilised forests, rivers, lakes, and people in almost all parts of the country (kortelainen 1999a: 238). the regionally dispersed production system supported existing settlements in large areas of the country, but it gave birth to totally new settlements as well. the spatial division of labour within the forest sector consisted of such activities as timber cutting, transport of logs, production, and transport of products, all scattered in different locations along the floating routes. in the early days, every stage of the production system was relatively labour-intensive, and a lot of workers were needed in logging, floating, loading, and production. communities grew around each activity and a settlement system of the forest sector was formed. it reached from the remote forests and villages in upstream regions of the floating routes to industrial centres and harbours in downstream locations (fig. 1) (see kortelainen 1992). lumberman–smallholder villages appeared in the vicinity of vast companyor state-owned forests. log-floating villages arose along the floating fig. 1. the settlement system of the forest industry in finland. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 229forest industry on the map of finland routes near log-sorting plants. small mill communities were constructed around non-integrated and separate pulp mills, sawmills, or plywood mills, which were not integrated with other production locally. larger industrial centres grew in locations with integrated production. in these centres, pulp and paper mills, sawmills, and other wood processing industry formed diversified complexes. there were also settlements close to seaports, where forest industry products were loaded onto ships (mead 1968: 240–245; kortelainen 1998: 209). the functional role of the localities in the spatial division of labour and their position in power structures affected greatly the way how the forest sector benefited them. this, in turn, determined how social, cultural and economic circumstances developed in each community. these processes created several inequalities within the system and between the localities. localities with integrated production and demand for highly skilled workforce benefited the most, because salaries were relatively high and the companies provided abundant services. the villages of forest workers, in turn, were in the worst position (koskinen 1999: 226). forestry as a supporter of backwood settlement when the forest sector linked the finnish countryside to its spatial division of labour, income from forest work and from wood sales began to flow to rural villages. it has been said that there is no other country where the development of rural areas has relied on forests and forestry to the extent that it has in finland (see, e.g., rannikko 1999a). this connection has been strongest in the eastern and northern parts of the country (cd-fig. 1). in southern and western finland, agriculture has always been more important than forestry because of better soils and more favourable climatic conditions. these regions have never gained an extensive population of forest workers, because the farmers have owned most of the forests and carried out the timber felling by themselves (rannikko 1999a: 223). in the northern and eastern parts of finland, where the companies and the state owned extensive tracts of forest, felling operations required paid labour. work was seasonal, however, and had to be combined with other sources of income. an occupational combination of lumberman– smallholder thus appeared. during winter and spring, they earned their income from forest work and log floating and, during summer, they cultivated their small farms. neither forest work or agriculture could have provided year-round livelihood for people in the villages, but together they guaranteed a modest income for tens of thousands of lumberman–smallholder families in eastern and northern finland (see oksa & rannikko 1988: 221–222). the state supported this development, carrying out several land reforms and resettlement acts during the twentieth century. in these reforms, a large number of previously landless people became landowners. finland was among the few west european countries where the number of farms continued to grow in the 1950s. the farms remained so small, however, that men had to seek additional sources of income from forestry. the land reforms thus assured the forest industry of a supply of workers willing to accept low wages and supported the formation of lumberman– smallholder villages in the more remote parts of the country (oksa & rannikko 1988: 219). the living conditions in lumberman–smallholder villages were relatively poor. the forest workers remained in an inferior position compared to other occupations until the 1960s. companies provided them practically nothing else but a modest salary during wintertime. work conditions in the forests were poor, and men spent most of the winter months in forest camps far away from their homes. this left their wives with an immense workload because all house and farm work rested on their shoulders (see rannikko 1999a: 223– 224). trade unions were weak and they had difficulties to recruit new members due to the wide dispersal of felling operations and the seasonal nature of employment. thus, the unions could not much improve the situation in the forests and villages. because of strong population growth, there was no lack of labour, and skill requirements were not very high either in forestry (rannikko 1999a: 223). companies did not have to compete for forest workers, which kept the wage level low. along with the increase in forestry jobs new political ideas spread within the settlement system, having impacts on the political geography of the twentieth-century rural finland. due to poor living and working conditions, the lumberman– smallholder villages became enclaves of the po230 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jarmo kortelainen litical left. the strong support of the communist party in these villages was in a sharp contrast to the traditional and politically more conservative peasant villages. this remote form of political activity has sometimes been called “backwoods communism” (oksa & rannikko 1988: 222; oksa 1992: 994). life “in the light of the factories” at the same time when forestry jobs dispersed in the backwoods, the forest industry concentrated jobs in large plants and communities grew around them. when the large-scale forest industry arrived in finland, industrialists had to find profitable locations for the mills. transportation costs and availability of energy were the main factors that affected the formation of the spatial structure of forest industry production. the early sawmill industry in the late nineteenth century clustered at the mouths of major rivers such as kymijoki, kokemäenjoki, oulujoki, and kemijoki (cd-fig. 1). roundwood was floated to these points from far away upstream and sawn timber was loaded directly on ocean-going ships. the availability of water power, on the other hand, determined the location of early paper mills (see mead 1968: 239–240). paper production consumed a lot of energy, and the mills were scattered in different parts of southern and eastern finland in the vicinity of powerful rapids and water falls. later, with the expansion of the railway network, sawmills, paper mills, and plywood mills were set in the midst of rural areas, at locations where log-floating routes and railways intersected. these were favourable locations due to the prevailing transport technology, since timber could be floated to the mills and products could be transported by train to seaports (kortelainen 1999b: 209). thus, in most cases, industrial sites had to be constructed in places that lacked any significant human settlement. that is how many of finland’s present industrial centres (including kotka, kuusankoski, valkeakoski, kemi, jämsänkoski, and myllykoski) and dozens of other localities of varying sizes appeared on the map. the majority of them had already come into being by the beginning of the twentieth century, but the growth of the forest industry gave rise to new factories and mill communities up to the 1960s (kortelainen 1999b: 209). as the mills were often established in sparsely populated areas, it was necessary to have a functioning community in which mill workers could live. the companies had to create these communities. they were forced to attend to questions of housing and building of public facilities and services for the workers in these communities. water supplies, sewage systems, electricity, schools, and even law enforcement were organised by the companies in the beginning. the companies constructed, maintained, and ruled these communities (see koskinen 1994b.) finnish mill communities have often been characterised by the title of a famous novel by toivo pekkanen (1960, originally 1932) as life “in the shadow of a factory.” according to this image, mill communities were regarded as places that suffered from difficult social problems and fierce political conflicts. this picture has begun to change in recent decades. many researchers have started to speak of life “in the light of a factory,” in the words of the social historian pertti haapala (1986). according to this view, the standard of living in mill communities was higher than in the countryside and most of the urban settlements in finland. sociologist tarmo koskinen (1999: 202) has argued that the industrial localities “became welfare communities before the welfare state in finland had come into being.” in addition to relatively well-paid jobs, the companies provided a wide spectrum of services for their workers and their families. mutual dependence between workers and companies created economic prosperity and service provision in the mill communities. a good description of the social work done in mill communities in post-war finland is provided by the publication teollisuuden sosiaalinen toiminta (“social welfare work in industry”), published by the federation of finnish employers in 1948 (keravuori 1948). it shows that in addition to economic support, which included, e.g., financial support and housing provision, companies attended to health care, sports activities, cultural services and vocational education. many of these services were absent in most of the other localities in finland at that time. nevertheless, there were great differences between mill communities in overall living conditions and benefits provided by the companies. the communities that formed the centre of the companies’ management and operations obtained maximum benefits. the most distinctive division, fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 231forest industry on the map of finland however, can be made between paper mill communities, which grew close to pulp and paper mills, and wood industry communities, which were formed around single sawmills or plywood mills. paper mill communities were the elite in this respect, with the highest income levels and standards of living. some companies provided even such luxuries as indoor swimming pools, bowling alleys, art schools, and cinemas (koskinen 1994b: 432). moreover, pulp and paper mills offered relatively permanent employment and continuity from one generation to another, with the sons following in the footsteps of their fathers. in order to make paper mill communities pleasant and attractive living environments, companies hired famous architects to draw city plans and design buildings and housing stock. the association between architects and paper producers created many true pearls of finnish architecture. the hand of the internationally best-known finnish architect alvar aalto, for example, is visible in several paper mill communities in finland (see schybergson 1988: 41–49; schildt 1994). lower wage levels, lower standards of industrial safety, and less adequate housing and living conditions characterised those communities that emerged in the vicinity of mechanical wood industry. the companies ensured only the basic necessities and nothing else, which was visible also in the more austere and less attractive built environments. economic fluctuations, unstable labour markets, and consequent flows of migration also characterised these communities. the differences in the standards of living are still evident today: the average wage level of mechanical wood production is circa 30 percent lower than the corresponding level in the pulp and paper industry (stv 1997: 225). paper mill communities were better off because of their favourable functional roles in the spatial division of labour of the forest sector. production in the pulp and paper mills required plenty of highly skilled workers, and the companies competed for them intensely. in order to succeed in this competition and keep their skillful workers, companies had to provide permanent employment, good living conditions, high-quality housing, and a wide variety of services. the requirement for professional skills was much lower and competition for the workers less intensive in saw mills and plywood mills. these companies did not have to pay as much attention to the level of services and attractiveness of their communities. that is why the light of the mill shone much brighter in paper mill communities than it did in woodprocessing communities. decline of backwood villages the restructuring of the forest sector started from the countryside, and its effects were most dramatic there as well. during the couple of decades after the 1950s, most of the jobs disappeared from the forestry and floating activities. this had profound consequences on the rural development in finland. there were two main stages of restructuring in forestry (fig. 2). first, forest work and transport were mechanised and motorised during the 1950s and 1960s, which meant a very fast and dramatic fall in jobs available in forest work. the second period of rapid change started in the late 1980s, when the multi-purpose forest harvesters started to replace forest workers. in the early 1950s, forest work and transport were mainly carried out by utilizing the muscle power of men and horses and the hydropower of the floating routes. forest work was manual work with frame saws and axes, and the horse was the most important ‘forest machine’. sociologist pertti rannikko has estimated that more than half a million men worked in forestry in the early 1950s (rannikko 1999a: 224–227). backwood villages fig. 2. employees, commercial fellings, and restructuring periods of forestry in finland, in 1955–1998 (mtv 1971, 1986, 1997, 1999; stv 1982, 1987, 1991). 232 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jarmo kortelainen flourished in other ways, too. new houses and farms were built, land was cleared for the fields, children were born, and schools, shops, and other services were established (rannikko 1999a: 224–227). this began to change when new technological inventions appeared in the finnish forests. the breakthrough of modern technology ruined the lumber–smallholding economy that sustained forestry settlements in eastern and northern finland. during the mechanisation of forestry, which started in the 1950s and intensified in the 1960s, tractors, chain saws, and lorries replaced the muscle power of men and horses in the forests and along the floating routes. mechanisation began a little later in finland than in the other leading forest countries. however, when it really got under way, it happened extremely fast and dramatically, and the number of men working in forestry declined rapidly (rannikko 1999a: 225). the former forest workers lost a major part of their income when the jobs in forestry became scarce. their small farms could not provide a sufficient income for their families, and the only possibility was to seek work elsewhere. jobs were hard to find nearby, and many former forest workers had to move to places far away from their home regions. the restructuring of forestry was one of the main reasons for a massive migration wave known as the ‘great move’. between the years 1965 and 1975, the working age population of rural villages in eastern and northern finland thinned out as people moved to cities in southern finland and sweden. the effects of this migration were especially strong in the lumberman–smallholder villages (see oksa & rannikko 1988: 227–228; rannikko 1999a: 225–226). modern technology made forest work a yearround profession distinct from agriculture, and, as a consequence, the lumberman–smallholder disappeared from the finnish forests. he was replaced by the professional forest worker, who did not necessarily live in a remote village. it was usual that the modern forest worker lived in a municipal centre, driving daily to the logging sites. some of the lumberman–smallholder villages found a role in providing housing for modern forest workers who commuted daily to wood-cutting sites in the surrounding regions. the state forestry board built apartments for the forestry workers to rent in these villages (oksa 1992: 994). most of the traditional and remote lumberman– smallholder villages, however, lost their productive roles and became dwelling places of pensioners and the unemployed. local policies also speeded up the depopulation of these villages. municipalities started to concentrate housing and services in their local centres in the 1970s, attracting people to move to these centres – to the vicinity of other people and services. today, the most typical inhabitant of a remote village is an elderly grandmother living alone in her cottage, her children scattered in towns and cities in different parts of the country (see oksa 1992: 994). the decline of forestry jobs slowed down in the 1970s. the situation continued to be relatively stable until the mid-1980s, when a new stage of restructuring began (fig. 2). rates of employment plunged within a few years, and there were more forest workers unemployed than employed in many areas in northern and eastern finland. the reason for this was a further rationalisation of logging operations through the introduction of forest harvesters to the logging sites. timber harvesting carried out by forest harvesters increased fast: in the mid-1990s, only one-fifth of loggings was done by a forest worker with a chain saw (rannikko 1999a: 224–226). pertti rannikko (1999b: 227) gives an illustrative example of the process that he calls “a silent tragedy of outlying villages.” he shows how one lumberman–smallholder village, kontiovaara, in eastern finland, went through the restructuring period. after world war ii, the village flourished and the number of inhabitants increased along with large-scale timber felling programmes in the region. when the restructuring of forestry began in the mid-1950s, the number of inhabitants in the village started to decrease immediately. in 1975, only 40 people remained, instead of the 280 inhabitants in 1955. the decline slowed down, but continued steadily. in the late 1990s, only nine people lived in the village in a few scattered houses. kontiovaara might be one of the most extreme examples, but it is not a unique case. all remote lumberman–smallholder villages have undergone similar development paths. the rise and fall of finnish backwoods have been tightly connected to the history of forest work. in recent decades forestry has no longer been able to support life in remote settlements, and it seems now that these backwood villages are gradually dying and disappearing from the map of finland. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 233forest industry on the map of finland deindustrialisation in mill towns the mill communities and industrial centres have also experienced several restructuring periods. the companies withdrew gradually from their community obligations and restricted their activities within the mill gates. the transfer of the companies’ service provision to the public sector started already in the early twentieth century when many mill communities became autonomous and attained municipal status. the role of the companies as important providers of diverse services continued up to the mid-1970s, however. the period thereafter has been called a “welfare-state stage” of mill communities because the companies transferred their community responsibilities to the municipalities, the local representatives of the welfare state (koskinen 1994b: 429). the world market changed when the growth of the traditional markets slowed down and international competition intensified in the forest industry (see watt 1994). the harsher competitive international environment forced the companies to seek new ways of cutting their costs. the described rationalisation of forestry was one reform that aimed to reduce expenses. the other one was to cut down the community services in mill communities. the rapid growth of the welfare state and of the public sector enabled this to be done (kortelainen 1999b: 212–213). international competition has compelled companies also to rationalise and modernise production, which has meant reduced demand for labour. although the traditional ‘smoke-stack industry’ in the western industrial countries has been cutting back on jobs since the 1960s, this trend begun in finland as recently as in the early 1980s. firms have tried to cut costs by rationalising production and investing in new technology. jobs in the forest industry have therefore declined in spite of heavy investments and growth of production volumes. old mills have had to give way to larger and automatic production lines. not even sizeable investments have resulted in new jobs (koskinen 1994b: 433; kortelainen 1998: 205–206). due to these changes, the life in mill communities has altered considerably during the recent decades. mill closures and lay-offs have created an atmosphere of uncertainty in these localities. previously, the companies represented continuity for the mill community residents, often providing a lifelong job. after the 1970s, nothing was certain or safe anymore: many lost their jobs and none could take employment for granted. moreover, in many paper mill communities the transfer of community responsibilities to local administration meant decline in the quality of services and the overall quality of life. this process has been described as “a shift from the light of the factory to the shadow of the municipality” (koskinen 1989: 188). in wood industry communities this change was not so negative, because inadequate housing conditions, for example, had improved when municipalities took over public housing. development paths of mill communities in the 1980s it was common among researchers to predict that many mill communities would wither away due to deindustrialisation. even though industrial communities became problem regions characterised by unemployment and outmigration, not even the most remote mill communities were abandoned (kortelainen 1999b: 213). in order to give a more versatile picture of contemporary finnish mill communities, four development types can be distinguished. first, there is a group of merging mill communities, which have become parts of larger city regions. some of the mill towns have gained new appreciation as attractive residential areas. in this way, many old mill communities within larger city regions have functionally merged with adjacent urban areas. their social and political structures have changed profoundly, because newcomers have usually represented service sector and middle classes whose behaviour and worldviews differ sharply from the traditional ways in mill communities (see konttinen 1994). second, some of the localities can be described as diversified mill communities. this means that the previously one-sided economic basis of these communities has diversified. many of the larger industrial towns have become administrative and service centres, and other manufacturing branches have gained importance in many places. one example is äänekoski in central finland, where nokia and other electronics companies have become employers almost as important as the local pulp mill during the 1990s (a portrait… 1999: 109). there are also some examples of small, attractive mill communities that have attracted artists and artisans who have given these places a totally new look (kortelainen 1996: 137). 234 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jarmo kortelainen third, there are remaining or even reviving mill communities that have managed to keep their position in the industrial system. they have received new investments and kept their productive role. in spite of investments, the number of employees has usually decreased. in uimaharju, a small mill community in eastern finland, the number of pulp mill workers decreased although the production volume quadrupled during the early 1990s (kortelainen 1999b: 213). there are other examples, however, where the decline of jobs has turned into a new growth stage. in vuohijärvi, a tiny community in south-eastern finland, the local veneer mill (formerly plywood mill) was almost bankrupt in the late 1980s. it revived, however, and the number of employees increased from below 100 to about 170 (see kortelainen 1998). fourth, there are marginalised mill communities, which are remote and declining. they have lost their role in the production system or their role has become less important. some of the communities have lost the mill that previously formed their economic basis. in the other marginalised communities the number of jobs is gradually decreasing. the fate of these localities resembles the fate of the lumberman–smallholder villages in many ways. the population is ageing, unemployment levels are high, and a great deal of the houses are empty (kortelainen 1996: 137–138). conclusions: regional development and the forest sector forestry and the forest industry greatly affected the regional development and changes in finland during the twentieth century. the role of the forest sector changed several times. localities based on the forest sector formed an expansive part of the settlement system in the first half of the twentieth century. by contrast, most of them have faced problems in recent decades. three periods can be distinguished. they all created different types of spatial inequalities between localities and regions. the first phase started in the late nineteenth century and continued to the 1960s. during this time, the forest industry had an active role in creating new localities and dispersing settlement to the more remote areas of the country. the most significant regional difference was formed between rural areas and towns, because overall living conditions in mill communities were much better than in lumberman–smallholder villages. distinct differences also existed in living standards between paper mill communities and wood industry communities, however. during the second phase, from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, forest sector had a role as a concentrator of population. the restructuring of forestry caused depopulation in rural areas, but, concurrently, the jobs in the forest industry increased, concentrating people in industrial centres. this phase even deepened the uneven relationship between rural and urban areas. while industrial localities flourished with heavy investments and increasing numbers of jobs, the mechanisation of forestry ruined the economic base of numerous rural villages in eastern and northern parts of the country. in the third phase, the forest sector had lost its role as a supporter of settlement growth. during a couple of recent decades, decisions made by the forest industry companies have caused a decline both in jobs and population in almost all localities and regions. although the forest sector is an important economic actor, it has lost its role as an engine of regional development in contemporary finland. lumberman–smallholder villages are faced with extinction, emptying the backwoods of eastern and northern finland. dozens of mill communities still exist in various parts of the country, but they are either declining or becoming more diversified (cd-fig. 2). references a portrait of finnish cities, towns and functional urban regions (1999). committee for urban policy, ministry of the interior, helsinki. avain suomen metsäteollisuuteen (1995). metsäteollisuus ry., helsinki. haapala p (1986). tehtaan valossa: teollistuminen ja työväestön muodostuminen tampereella 1820– 1920. vastapaino, tampere. keravuori k (1948). teollisuuden sosiaalinen toiminta. suomen työnantajien keskusliitto, helsinki. konttinen e (1994). kansalaisyhteiskunnan leimahdus säynätsalossa. in lehtinen a & p rannikko (eds). pasilasta vuotokselle. ympäristökamppailujen uusi aalto, 116–138. gaudeamus, helsinki. kortelainen j (1992). kylät ja tehdasyhdyskunnat metsäsektorin yhdyskuntajärjestelmässä. terra 104, 61–69. kortelainen j (1996). tehdasyhdyskunta talouden ja ympäristötietoisuuden murrosvaiheissa. joensuun yliopiston yhteiskuntatieteellisiä julkaisuja 24. kortelainen j (1998). mill closure – options for a restart: a case study of vuohijärvi mill community fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 235forest industry on the map of finland in finland. in neil c & m tykkyläinen (eds). the potential for local economic development in rural resource communities, 205–225. un university press, tokyo. kortelainen j (1999a). river as an actor-network: forest industry utilization of the finnish lake and river systems. geoforum 30, 235–247. kortelainen j (1999b). forest industry communities – in the light or shadow of the mill? in reunala a, i tikkanen & e åsvik (eds). the green kingdom. finland’s forest cluster, 208–213. otava, helsinki. koskinen t (1985). finland – a forest sector society? sociological approaches, conclusions and challenges. in lilja k, k räsänen & r tainio (eds). problems in the redescription of business enterprises: proceedings of the first summer seminar of the group on the theory of the firm. publications of helsinki school of economics b 73, 45–52. koskinen t (1989). metsäsektori suomalaisen muutoksen veturina ja jarrumiehenä. in suhonen p (ed). suomi: muutosten yhteiskunta, 181–190. wsoy, helsinki. koskinen t (1994a). elämää yhteisössä: elämänkerroista kertomukseksi. in koskinen t (ed). elämää yhteisössä. muistijälkiä, ihmisääniä ja joukkosydämen lyöntejä tehdasyhteisön rakentumisen ja rapautumisen kausilta. vaasan yliopiston julkaisuja, tutkimuksia 176, sosiologia 9, 13–44. koskinen t (1994b). life and labour in a paper mill community. in koskinen t (ed). elämää yhteisössä. muistijälkiä, ihmisääniä ja joukkosydämen lyöntejä tehdasyhteisön rakentumisen ja rapautumisen kausilta. vaasan yliopiston julkaisuja, tutkimuksia 176, sosiologia 9, 420–437. koskinen t (1999). the forest cluster: economic order and societal integration in finland. in reunala a, i tikkanen & e åsvik (eds). the green kingdom. finland’s forest cluster, 202–207. otava, helsinki. mead wr (1968). an economic geography of the scandinavian states and finland. university of london press, london. mtv 1971 = statistical yearbook of forestry 1971 (1971). the finnish forest research institute, helsinki. mtv 1986 = statistical yearbook of forestry 1986 (1986). the finnish forest research institute, helsinki. mtv 1997 = statistical yearbook of forestry 1997 (1997). the finnish forest research institute, helsinki. mtv 1999 = statistical yearbook of forestry 1999 (1999). the finnish forest research institute, helsinki. oksa j (1992). regional and local responses to restructuring in peripheral rural areas in finland. urban studies 29, 991–1002. oksa j & p rannikko (1988). the social consequences of the differentiation of agriculture and forestry. a case study of two villages in finnish forest periphery. acta sociologica 31, 217–229. pekkanen t (1960). tehtaan varjossa. wsoy, porvoo. rannikko p (1999a). forest work as the cause of settlement and depopulation in the remote parts of finland. in reunala a, i tikkanen & e åsvik (eds). the green kingdom. finland’s forest cluster, 222– 226. otava, helsinki. rannikko p (1999b). the rise and fall of kontiovaara. in reunala a, i tikkanen & e åsvik (eds). the green kingdom. finland’s forest cluster, 227. otava, helsinki. schildt g (1994). alvar aalto: a life’s work. otava, helsinki. schybergson p (1988). tätort kring ett företag. historisk tidskrift för finland 1988, 41–56. stv 1982 = statistical yearbook of finland 1982 (1982). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1987 = statistical yearbook of finland 1987 (1987). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1991 = statistical yearbook of finland 1991 (1991). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1997 = statistical yearbook of finland 1997 (1997). statistics finland, helsinki. suomen kartasto (1960). suomen maantieteellinen seura, helsingin yliopiston maantieteen laitos & otava, helsinki. watt g (1994). global competition and the nature of trade in the european community’s pulp and paper industry. economic geography 70, 60–71. everyday materialities, territorial bordering, and place-identity defined by recent administrative reform: reactions from estonian dispersed ruralities urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa116940 doi: 10.11143/fennia.116940 everyday materialities, territorial bordering, and place-identity defined by recent administrative reform: reactions from estonian dispersed ruralities kadri kasemets and raili nugin kasemets, k. & nugin, r. (2022) everyday materialities, territorial bordering, and place-identity defined by recent administrative reform: reactions from estonian dispersed ruralities. fennia 200(2) 228–244. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116490 population decline in rural areas has been a concern for many european countries for decades. to deal with shrinking, several measures have been taken in different countries. the study focuses on one of such measures – the administrative reform passed in estonia in 2017, which merged smaller municipalities into regional municipality centres. this article examines the impact of this reform on rural transformation, concentrating on shifts in everyday mobilities, governance, and territorial identity at the village level. the research data is contextualised with the new mobilities paradigm, examining the relational everyday materialities that include interviews reflecting on changes at the regional, structural, and ideological levels. the analysis is based on in-depth interviews (n=60) with local activists and inhabitants in three study areas in sparsely populated parts of estonia. the creation of municipality districts with representative bodies within larger municipalities have influenced these rural villages in various ways. in some cases, it has caused shifts in the mechanisms of civil governance that shape community activism. in others, strengthened awareness of representations of the rural appeared, offering a meaningful territorial identity and self-realisation to local people. however, the study also indicates that the distribution of rural municipalities into municipality districts can jeopardise local coherence and socio-cultural sustainability. keywords: administrative reform, community, governance, mobility, territorial identity kadri kasemets (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9527-3129) & raili nugin (https:// orcid.org/0000-0003-1428-5724), centre for landscape and culture, tallinn university, estonia. email: kadrisem@tlu.ee, raili.nugin@tlu.ee © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction the issue of shrinking has been a significant concern for network-oriented regional planning, where territorial cohesion is considered an important factor in governance policies to foster balanced regional development (lang et al. 2022; oecd 2022). one of the common strategies used to address this issue in european regional policy is the amalgamation of municipalities through administrative reform (kauder 2014; thuesen 2017). estonia adopted such reform in 2017. by merging rural https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116490 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9527-3129 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1428-5724 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1428-5724 mailto:kadrisem@tlu.ee mailto:raili.nugin@tlu.ee fennia 200(2) (2022) 229kadri kasemets & raili nugin municipalities with declining populations, the reform intended to spare administrative costs and raise the financial base for better social and physical infrastructure. for inter-municipal co-operation and democratic ends, specific municipality districts with representative assemblies were created. according to the oecd rural study report about shrinking in estonia (oecd 2022), though the merging of municipalities increased the municipal population, nearly 60% of them had still shrinking populations in 2020. therefore, the report suggested to not focus on a growth policy connected to inhabitants’ numbers and investments on socio-physical infrastructure, but rather to orient at a degrowth policy connected to the idea of ‘smart shrinking’. this perspective suggests that the state should concentrate on preserving the current socio-spatial condition of shrinking areas by maintaining the local vitality and the standard of living of the residents. the municipalities should value the particular, local socio-spatial identity connected to its landscape, people, and history, and promote collaboration with civil society and other municipalities. these measures should increase the place attractiveness, promote economic development, and strengthen the cultural identity of the place (oecd 2022). thus far the effects of the reform have gained attention from several angles (haldusreformi seireraport 2022). however, only some experts have studied the effects of the reform on everyday governance and territorial identity at the micro level (taluste 2018; lõhmus 2021, 2022). to contribute to this research area, the current article positions the individual and local community with its everyday practices in the focus, when examining the administrative reform. we are interested in how dynamics in the territorial merging process have influenced local material circumstances, citizen involvement, and identity bordering. we reveal the role of the local activists, who are often involved in diverse rural/urban networks. the study focuses on the dynamics of municipality district governance and communities within them as well as the development of local infrastructure. these developments may potentially contribute to smart shrinking, as they represent the rural as a space for self-realisation by participating in local governance and foster place-bound identity (syssner & meijer 2017). driven by a new mobilities paradigm that deals with relational everyday materialities (ellingsen 2017), this study draws on fieldwork in three different rural areas in estonia, specifically in-depth interviews with the members of these communities (n=60). based on this data, we examine the influence of the reform on the everyday materialities and mobilities of rural people from three specific angles. first, we analyse the impact of the reform on the infrastructure and planned environment of the area, paying attention to people’s general expectations for local development, opportunities of everyday mobilities, and rural-urban relations. second, we concentrate on changes in governance at the level of village and municipality district, showing how within the creation of municipal districts the local power hierarchies are reorganised and the roles of previous organisations are changing. third, we look at how administrative bordering processes (i.e., dissolving the village borders and creating municipality districts) affect territorial identity. we conclude that sustainable regional development is fostered when the territory of administrative governance corresponds with the local socio-cultural dynamics and regional identity of the residents. setting the context for endogenous governance one of the most crucial factors for rural sustainability is interconnectivity, for instance, rural-urban linkages and the co-operation among regional units, that enable rural inhabitants to access different resources and social infrastructure (bock 2016; li et al. 2019). this view on regional planning is commonly associated with endogenous, neo-endogenous, and nexogenous governance (meador 2019). these governance types rely on local knowledge, bottom-up planning, and the kind of social capital that brings together the immediate community and wider structural networks (bosworth et al. 2016; westerink et al. 2017). the endogenous development principle became gradually dominant in the eu after the exogenous governance type with top-down planning was losing its grip in the 1990s. the latter tended to ignore the capacities of the local community and its needs (steiner & farmer 2018). the endogenous approach surfaced in eu policies after pioneering leader programs were piloted in some eu regions in 1991–1992, which providing project money for local activities and investments. these programs were successful in fostering a bottom-up area-based participatory approach to rural development (convery et al. 2010). in the framework of endogenous governance, the role of local social 230 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper capital as a particular ‘soft infrastructure’ was stressed, as through it the skilled local communities could manage specific material, financial, and natural resources (barraket et al. 2019). thus, communitybased local governance was established, linking in this way communities and institutional power, and enabling connectivity between stakeholders for managing rural development (barraket et al. 2019; meador 2019). after a while, a neo-endogenous approach was developed, which united top-down and bottom-up planning strategies by increasing both networks and local potential (bosworth et al. 2016). neo-endogenous development progressed further into a nexogenous approach, which emphasises connectivity as most important factor for reconnecting different forces across space, especially in terms of social innovation with rural-urban linkages included (bock 2016). according to several authors, social innovation with networking facilitates entrepreneurial investments to the area and helps in creating novel solutions for managing local challenges (makkonen & inkinen 2015; kumpulainen & soini 2019). post-productivist countryside endogenous, network-oriented development is an integral part of the post-productivist countryside that emerged in the 1990s in tandem with counter-urbanisation processes (šimon 2014; hunt 2019). studies focusing on rural mobilities have indicated how the post-productivist countryside has brought along new forms of local attachment and collective place identity. today, an urban middle class with specific knowledge and skills has migrated to the countryside, bringing with them new ways of social infrastructure management, transforming the perception of nature, general knowledge about the environment, and views about the rural (willet & lang 2018; creamer et al. 2019; gieling et al. 2019). these processes can potentially decrease the previous stigmatisation of rural peripheries, especially by reproducing the local images in the process of place marketing and investing into new economic activities (jøhannesson et al. 2003; argent 2019). in this way, rural peripheries can avoid marginalisation by attracting skilled middle class professionals who shape the discourses about these rural regions by reproducing a rural idyll as idealised by urban people (marsden et al. 2003). however, counter-urbanisation processes related to network-oriented governance can also entail certain threats to local development, particularly in jeopardising the existing power relations and social justice in local governance and citizen involvement (steiner & farmer 2018; gieling et al. 2019). on the local level, power inequality has been described as the ‘institutionalisation of villages’ which can transform the organically emerged patterns of local governance (kumpulainen & soini 2019; see also rönkkö & aarevaara 2017). in this way, an institutionalised endogenous governance style can potentially reproduce the lack of balance in power, as communities with less social and cultural capital may face difficulties establishing citizen initiatives and thus lag behind, increasing the existing cleavages even further (mcareavey 2006; mustonen 2013, 2014). locals can lose control over the development of their places, not only in the economic sense, but also in producing social, political, and cultural meanings of those localities (görmar et al. 2019). for example, government-funded community sustainability projects are often led by incomers with urban backgrounds (creamer et al. 2019), whose perspective on local development can conflict with the needs of the locals (mustonen 2014; li et al. 2019). therefore, the micro-level creativity, local identity, and community cohesion of local actors remain very important in addition to social innovation and economy in regional development (görmar et al. 2019). the landscape governance literature emphasises how individual experiences and memories contribute to landscape identity, continuity, and regional characteristics, thereby affecting landscape management dynamics (soini et al. 2006; loupa ramos et al. 2016, 2019). the idea of endemic timespaces for instance values bottom-up history-led knowledge on landscape management, strengthening the particular place identity (mustonen 2014, 2017). such territorial identities are needed for locals to distinguish themselves from their neighbouring regions (jürgenson 2004). administrative reform in estonia population decline has been one of the most severe issues faced by rural areas in estonia. before the reform, many municipalities had deficient social infrastructure and high operational costs, a lack of comprehensive regional planning networking practices, and weak self-governance (raagmaa & kroon fennia 200(2) (2022) 231kadri kasemets & raili nugin 2005). the municipalities were merged based on a criterion of population numbers. according to the reform, the optimal population size was at least 5,000 inhabitants per municipality, which was regarded as a minimum for enabling local public services (kaldaru 2018). the new municipalities mainly merged around municipal functional centres (taluste 2018). before the administrative reform (2017), estonia had 213 municipalities, with 169 municipalities less than 5,000 residents. after the reform estonia had 79 municipalities, with only 17 municipalities less than 5,000 inhabitants (noorkõiv 2018) (fig. 1). fifteen municipalities of the newly established reform were classified as urban and 64 as rural (oecd 2022). fig. 1. estonian municipalities before and after administrative reform and case study areas (author: anu printsmann). one of the important virtues of the administrative reform was its pluralist governance model, which potentially can involve ideas and competencies of multiple parties and agents in the new merged municipalities. however, it was difficult to find balance in the power relations in integrating bottom-up civil governance and the community’s historical knowledge within the new power hierarchies (noorkõiv 2018). in addition, as the territorial borders of smaller communities stretch over different districts and municipalities, many feared that the decision-making process would move further away from their communities and the bigger centres will dominate in the new municipalities (taluste 2018). before the reform, local level decisions that included community opinion were enacted for instance through the village head/association, who proposed their ideas to the municipality council. to preserve the local centre of democratic power, and for subsidiarity purposes, local sub-district decision-making bodies were created within the merged municipalities. to preserve local identity and citizen involvement, it was mandatory to create municipality districts (osavald) with municipality district assemblies (osavallakogu), or other voluntary local territorial or community-based representative assemblies (kant, kogukonnakogu) with similar functions. the municipality district is territorially defined and regulated by law. in usual cases these assemblies followed former municipality borders, however some representative bodies were looking for natural community borders. territorial or community-based community representative assemblies emerged based on bottom-up grassroots initiatives and the particular community identity (lõhmus et al. 2016; lõhmus 2021, 2022) (fig. 2). our case studies contained territorial and community-based community representative assemblies whose members in some instances were involved in the municipality council. we study how these new emerging municipality districts, with their particular governance bodies and material investments, influence territorial identity dynamics, and how everyday mobilities shape these municipal structures (nugin & kasemets 2021). we also analyse how the local people with their social and cultural capital shape and mould the discourses of rural identities and how these discourses affect everyday living (raagmaa 2002). 232 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper the new-mobilities paradigm and everyday relational materialities we chose villages and municipality districts in three different regions in estonia: in saaremaa (5 villages in area a), saue (3 villages in area b), and põlva (2 villages in area c) (fig. 1). our aim was not to study the three regions separately, but to reveal interrelated issues connected to rural development. a – saaremaa municipality is located on saaremaa island on the western border of estonia. the reform united 12 smaller municipalities by creating the now largest rural self-government with about 32,000 residents. area a is located 35–40 km from the regional centre of kuressaare (13,300 inhabitants), which is a popular tourist destination with many spa hotels and attractive seaside. b – saue municipality is located in the western part of harju county, neighbouring tallinn municipality in northern estonia. after the reform, three smaller municipalities and saue town were united. the municipality has about 22,000 residents. the commute to tallinn lasts approximately 40 minutes, thus, many people in the area work, study, and shop in tallinn. area b is situated in a historically dispersed area, which gained a particular status within the new administrative reform, entailing certain tax exemptions aimed at preserving the dispersed settlement (sepp & noorkõiv 2018). area b is not a particularly popular tourist destination, apart from occasional local tourism and second-home owners. c – põlva municipality is located in the south-eastern part of estonia. while the region is shrinking both economically and demographically, it is known and valued for its beautiful nature, making the municipality suitable for a tourism-based economy and recreation. area c is situated (depending on the village) 6–10 km away from põlva. after the reform, five municipalities merged there, having now about 15,000 residents. it has a convenient railway connection (50 min) with estonia’s second largest town tartu (100,000 inhabitants), situated 55 km away, and also with tallinn, about 230 km away. area c has a centre-hinterland connection with the town of põlva (5,500 inhabitants, though not considered an important regional functional centre (raagmaa 2018). our fieldwork consisted of several visits and periodical living during different time periods in the researched areas (the fieldworks were conducted separately by both authors). this also involved using the local infrastructures (transportation, shops), attending local events, and observing the movements in the region during different seasons. such an approach provided the background data and local knowledge that helped in gathering research data, asking follow-up questions, as well as analysing the data. this has given us a deeper research perspective in understanding the changes that occurred during this time and getting better access to research subjects. the main body of data consists of 51 in-depth semi-structured interviews with 60 informants (a=19, b=20, c=21) that were conducted in 2017–2020. the duration of the interview varied with an average of approximately an hour. our sample consists of 24 male and 36 female informants (born in 1926– 1992). most of the people interviewed were permanent residents of the area except for nine informants who were tied to the location through having a second home or kinship relations there. fig. 2. decentralisation of municipality with community involvement possibilities (adapted from lõhmus et al. 2016, 46). fennia 200(2) (2022) 233kadri kasemets & raili nugin the sample consists predominantly of people who were involved in community life and were socially active. we compiled our sample by looking at the website of a village activists’ organisation, but also via social connections and the snowball method. to compensate for the elite-prone sample, we also approached people that were not actively involved in community life, but this part of sample was smaller. the interviews followed different approaches. many interviews started with questions about informants’ involvement in the area and their everyday arrangements, which reflect their place attachment. we also inquired about the use of social and physical infrastructures and individual involvement in community activities. some interviews employed the biographical approach (rosenthal 2011), starting off with informants’ life course and then moving on to the questions about their everyday practices, place attachment, and belonging. though the structure varied, the general topics were coordinated between the researchers and, thus, the interviews reveal similar research data. we also asked informants for individual reflections about the administrative reform and village institutions. the interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. the names of the informants were changed for anonymity purposes. for the analysis, the directed qualitative content analysis method was used (hsieh & shannon 2005), in which the research data is analysed following a specific context related to the new mobilities paradigm (sheller & urry 2006). the new mobilities paradigm is an approach that, in addition to studying mobilities themselves, involves analysing the urban-rural interconnections, structural conditioning, and relational everyday practices that are intertwined with mobilities (sheller& urry 2006; goodwin-hawkins 2015; ellingsen 2017). this paradigm is attentive to different factors affecting the dynamics of socio-spatial mobilities, taking into account the lived experience as well as political and economic processes (willett & lang 2018; merriman 2019). our study looks at how these relational materialities are shaped by transformations at the administrative level, and how the specific new norms of governance mould rural landscapes, everyday practices, ideologies, and representations (ellingsen 2017; willett & lang 2018). each transcribed interview was read, re-read, and coded by both authors separately, after which the codes were compared and analysed. after comparing and unifying the codes, we discussed the empirical material from the viewpoint of new mobilities paradigm related to relational materialities, creating broader categories under which the codes were organised. in this way three general themes emerged, according to which also the analysis section is organised. first, we study the investments into socio-physical infrastructure and examine how these investments influence perceptions of the local landscape, nature, and rural-urban relations. from the relational perspective, the way people thematise road conditions, usage, structure, design, function, and state of repair gives insight how infrastructures affect local identities and practices (waitt & lane 2007; merriman & jones 2017). material structures are interdependent with social structures and roads may be used strategically to transform values and beliefs (wilson 2017). in addition, housing and dwelling reveal lifestyles that help contextualise everyday environments and experiences in particular locations (ash & simpson 2016; coulter et al. 2016). the second analysis theme involves developments in everyday governance with a particular emphasis on social capital and policy issues. here, social capital is defined as ‘social materiality’, as certain type of ‘class space’ (marsden et al. 2003), or ‘soft infrastructure’ (barraket et al. 2019), which forms an important part in the construction of local communities (scott et al. 2017). third, we pay attention to the administrative territorial bordering process and identity creation related to municipality district governance. we are interested in how the administrative and political bordering processes (bock 2016) are intertwined with rural/urban representations and relational physical and symbolic mobilities (ellingsen 2017). physical infrastructure and everyday materialities administrative reform always affects the socio-spatial infrastructures, changing local materialities and mobilities, but also communities’ expectations on what is about to change and what should change. some of these changes are obvious and inevitable, while others are interconnected with 234 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper social and symbolic aspects of the community in ways not always acknowledged. in the following, we detail several examples where the material changes after merging municipalities affect both the territorial and social community and vice versa. social and physical infrastructure the bigger financial base of the merged municipalities brought along better prospects to renovate several social and physical infrastructural objects, which would have been impossible considering the budget limits in previous municipal units. related to smart shrinking, these prospects may involve for instance upgrading public buildings (oecd 2022). one of such examples is a, in which merging enabled the renovation of a local community centre (accommodating rooms for a youth centre, sports activities, medical care, library, concert hall, etc). for locals, it meant a lot and they saw it as a way to attract also new people. however, for a local activist (meelis), not only was the renovation of the building important, but also the process how the renewal was achieved. though within the bigger municipality the budget enabled to invest into the house that was in decay, the initial plan for renovation did not suit the locals, as in it the house was to be diminished. the local community joined to fight to accomplish their own version of the project. this fight, peaking with the renovation of the house in the form the locals had wanted, was in meelis’s (from a, b 1970) view important for the entire local community: this community feeling emerged… during these fights for the mutual goal, this sense of community has risen. i think that /…/ this fight is an important part of the history of this house; if it will be preserved and renovated, it has strengthened the identity of community, which… well, it may have existed before, but it was not so strong. hence, maintaining or erecting material infrastructure is not only important in providing services or fulfilling people’s everyday needs. it may also strengthen their identity and foster their will to act together, indicating a positive co-operation example between the municipal government and civil society (bock 2016; steiner & farmer 2018). besides the built environment, one of the most important topics for locals in all the study areas was the condition of the local roads. the quality of roads influences everyday mobilities and the choices regarding the usage of the local services (kaldaru 2018). this consideration may also influence municipal road repair decisions. for example, before the merging of the municipalities, the local government in a chose not to asphalt a road that was a shorter way to the nearby town. according to mati (from a, b 1983), it was because the municipality wanted that the children of the parents working in town to attend the local school instead of the one in town. the longer way to town, which passed the local school, was covered with asphalt. though longer, this route was preferred by locals because of its quality and thus people passed the local school on their way to work in the nearby town. on the other hand, to some extent gravel roads were highlighted by locals because of their emotional value. in area b, several informants said that for them these gravel roads represent the image of the rural and signify resistance to the urbanisation pressure in the area, associating the urban with monotonous infrastructure (cf. rönkkö & aarevaara 2017). it is noteworthy that these ideas were expressed only in area b, which was situated near the capital. it was an area that was moving towards becoming a suburb of tallinn. this meant its road structure was also becoming more like that of suburban regions, with plans to build a network of light traffic roads to enhance access to the area. kertu (from b, b 1961) pondered about the urbanisation of the place: well, the city has already reached almost until the road junction and… there is no more [rural]. and people are talking about this [light traffic road] /…/ then it would come right from here… and that would make the road crossing for the cattle even more difficult… other informants with urban backgrounds were, however, very enthusiastic about the prospect of a light traffic road, which was expected to become an important encountering place related to the emergence of new public spaces (cf. martens et al. 2021), offering options for safe movement. the interviewees complained that the cars go too fast, and the bus stops are not at appropriate locations, and thus during the dark hours it is dangerous to walk home from the bus stations. fennia 200(2) (2022) 235kadri kasemets & raili nugin public transportation was a topic that came up often during the interviews. though considered an important component of rural life, most interviewees in all studied areas admitted that they still preferred their individual cars to public transport. the bus transportation was considered inconvenient, time consuming, and logistically challenging. sometimes, the bus stop was situated too far from home. several informants mentioned that public transport was important for retired people and school children. yet, the interviewed elderly in our sample were not always eager to use public transportation either, relying on their children’s help. often, their adult children took them to the doctor by car and supplied them with groceries. but even in these cases the presence and accessibility to public transportation was considered very important, suggesting that extended networks offer a certain sense of security, which is needed both for identity and local development (jürgenson 2004; martens et al. 2021): i am so glad that we don’t live near [a place with scarce transportation options]. /…/ you cannot go to town, there are no buses or trains. /…/ here, it’s so good that it’s close to põlva. (mare, from c, b 1948) besides being situated close to the municipality centres saue and põlva respectively, both b and c areas have also an urban settlement nearby, where access to these cities/towns was also very important in terms of medical care, employment opportunities, and even sometimes food supply. in b, these places were keila and tallinn, in c, primarily tartu (but also, occasionally tallinn, võru, or räpina). this indicates that the mobility network of rural people exceeds the borders of regional centres, depending on infrastructural options, conveniences connected to regional transport (kaldaru 2018), and availability of services in functional regional centres. while kilometre-wise area c was situated as far from the capital as region a, the transportation options differed. area a’s island location made the trip to tallinn quite long and inconvenient. however, in c there was a direct train connection to tallinn and many informants mentioned that this had made the capital more accessible, especially as they could work during the train ride. buildings similar to roads, the location, structural arrangement, and appearance of the houses becomes important in terms of everyday mobilities and community activities, affecting also the identity and representation of a particular municipality district. the structural arrangement of the houses depends a lot on the potential of mobilities (nugin 2020). for example, b was situated near the capital and many new houses were built there, threatening to turn the area into densely populated location. to avoid this, the pre-reform municipality had established a regulation according to which new buildings should not be closer than 300 m to other buildings. in addition, some areas in b were in the green belt zone, where building activity was prohibited. these regulations supported both environmental and cultural awareness related to landscape quality, where infrastructural developments may have negative impacts (oecd 2022). the previous village head in b justified the regulation, stressing that “all village inhabitants are interested that dispersed settlement will persist” (mari-ann, from b, b 1962). some interviewees from b reasoned, however, that the regulation was established by a handful of urban incomers to prevent urbanisation pressure in the region. thus, the urban image of rural idyll gets reproduced by a small group of people with social capital within the process of counterurbanisation (willet & lang 2018; gieling et al. 2019). inhabitants with local roots had ambiguous feelings towards this regulation. though they acknowledged that a dispersed settlement preserves the beautiful natural environment and the rural idyll, they also pointed out it can hinder development in the area. some informants suggested that abolishing this regulation could foster population growth. others were disappointed that they could not build a new house next to the old one: … they did not get a permission for building a new house. they have an old house. well, the old one had already sunk into the ground. they wanted to build a new one [on the spot of the old one], but they were told that they could not tear down the old one. /…/ i have a plot, but i cannot do anything. /…/ for example, we have a foundation for a sauna. we wanted to build a sauna on it. no, we cannot, we should not. /…/ there should be 300m between the houses. i said [to the municipality] that the different farm buildings have always been close to each other… (kätlin, from b, b 1985) 236 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper these regulations affected also the ways of living in rural areas, riho (from b, b 1954) pointed out that these big plots with farmlands can be burdening for the owners, as one must take care of the land, and it could be tiresome to manage 1.5 ha of it. the neighbouring districts in the municipality did not have this restriction, so after merging the particular regulation was changed, establishing a minimum distance between the houses to 100 m. the ban to build houses in the green belt zone remained. thus, in a way, all the villages in the researched areas had to deal with a paradoxical dilemma. on the one hand, it was clear that preservation of a certain rural idyll – a dispersed settlement with few people – reduces population shrinkage by attracting people who value this kind of environment. on the other, too many people moving in may create a dense settlement, ruining in this way the valued quality of the landscape connected to anonymity and beautiful nature. social materiality: everyday governance after the reform, local governance patterns changed, particularly in areas a and b (in c, the regional centre and the surrounding municipalities remained more or less the same). as we will show, this merge worked in both directions: in some sense, it created a certain distance between the municipal government and local people. on the other hand, in several cases, it created opportunities for people to locally unite to fulfil and fight for local community goals within the bigger municipality. the scale of governance and community coherence many interviewees in a and b pointed out that in a bigger municipality, communication errors emerged, which created the feeling of being left aside and the decisions that came were felt as imposed rather than discussed. the notion of the new municipal government now being distant both mentally and physically was voiced and people were concerned that they were unable to participate in strategic discussions (cf. laan et al. 2018). a few years before the reform of 2017, a large merger took place in a in which three small neighbouring municipalities formed a bigger one. after the administrative reform, this municipality became a district-based representative assembly. during the interviews in a, these two administrative formations were constantly compared. for many, this intermediate municipality (2014–2017) was compact, with the information moving smoother and the decision process thus being closer to the inhabitants. joonas (from a, b 1975) recalled that after the first unification, an active communication between different villages began, mutual events were organised, and the community activism grew stronger. in the new municipality, however, the situation was different: this previous municipality, it kind of spoiled us, there the communication and stuff were effective. when something was discussed, the information about it reached us and our governors. /…/ it was far more transparent, one can say. but in the new municipality, i don’t get it, somewhere the information gets stuck. after the second merger, according to katrin (from a, b 1964), the local villages ceased to communicate with each other. smaller village units activated as the new municipality was too big to create a sense of a single community. therefore, in 2020, the representative assembly including three previous municipalities was divided into three independent representative assemblies (lõhmus 2022). for joonas, this was too confusing, but katrin had noticed that in many locations, it enabled them to create district bodies for small communities. an active community has the potential to attract newcomers to move into the areas (argent 2019; barraket et al. 2019). risto, who bought a former school building and moved to c from tallinn, argued that for him it was indeed an important consideration: i read the village development plan /…/ and i noticed that there was a library next to our plot and… and there was an active community. this was certainly a plus. in addition to the active village association uniting the three villages in c, there were other locals who were involved in different local activities outside the local association, which offered them self-realisation. fennia 200(2) (2022) 237kadri kasemets & raili nugin some informants, however, pointed out that as the decisions were not taken on a local community level any longer, local political intrigues tend to disappear. instead, people united on different issues to achieve mutual local goals within a bigger municipality. the informants also acknowledged better options for communication and networking. marika (from a, b 1992) indicated that the reform created possibilities for different villages to learn from each other. in her view, different localities could achieve better transportation or social aid by acting together. another informant (laura, form b, b 1965) also pointed out the potential of a merged municipality to bring together people with extensive social capital. this was indicated especially when in some locations active people expressed ‘involvement fatigue’: they had already contributed their voluntary work for years and felt they could take a break. the effect of the loss of social capital had already been experienced by a, as an active participant drew back from the village association, causing communication breakdowns that affected local community projects. one of the aims of the reform was to give locals the chance to take responsibility and communicate about larger investment projects, which would benefit the community. this aim, though promoting micro-level activism, created at times the feeling that the local village community only met when there was a need to write project applications, reducing the local governance to an institutionalised projectwriting mechanism (cf. kumpulainen & soini 2019). karin in a pointed out that the model of applying for project grants can be rather complicated for those village heads who have not done it before, giving developmental advantage to villages institutions with better social and human capital (mustonen 2013; görmar et al. 2019). however, not all local issues can be solved based on village-level project applications. in c, the village head spoke about the need to tidy up the village’s riverbed. yet, as the river passed through different regions, broader co-operation was needed across the region, taking into account also environmental research, regional tourism, and local knowledge, for this project to succeed. policy involvement as the local district under the new municipality was small, katrin in a felt that one had to become active politically to have any say in the overall issues of regional development. when previously the municipality was small enough for everyone to know everyone, which helped one get elected a member of municipal council, now the municipality was too big for this; candidates had to join some bigger political party to gain access to the municipal council. thus, the feeling of being left aside could be deepened if the local activists did not manage to become members in municipal governing bodies. for example, in b, some activists who were previously involved in the municipality governance receded themselves from the citizen activism after not being involved with the reformed municipality council. in c, where the local village head continued to be a member in the municipality council, such dispositions were not expressed. some interviewees recalled personal intrigues and power abuse in personal interests in the previous municipality and current municipality district formations. for example, in region b one local activist who was working in the school and was involved in the municipality council was criticised by some others for concentrating too much on developing physical infrastructure connected to the school when dealing with local issues and ignoring other, more pressing ones. this indicates how spatial decisions at the local level are made by actors with social capital upholding particular individual interests (oecd 2022). the importance of networked cultural and social capital and municipality governance involvement is particularly well illustrated in region c, where an active village head had been involved in local development for almost two decades, being a member of the municipal council, having good knowledge about local structural organisation, and maintain good relations with both locals and people in the public sector. he moved to the area in 2000, having quit his job in town, looking for selfrealisation. besides his individual place attachment, his life cycle and readiness to participate at the local government level influenced the emergence of the particular political governance of the area: i was about 50 then /.../. and then i found this place. it was very shabby and hardly visible, drowned in brushwood and weed /…/. the place had lacked the spirit of life already for four or five years /…/. and it is exactly three times that i have been engaged in the work of the local government /…/. and for this, there is only one option. to win the community's support. (sander, from c, b 1948) 238 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper he emphasised his own role in improving the social and material conditions in the village – asphalting roads and renovating and widening the local library into a village centre. bordering and regional identity the borders of the new administrative units defined in the framework of the administrative reform influenced everyday practices of the locals and shaped territorial identity (cf. raagmaa 2002; jürgenson 2004). the re-structuring process, with its intention to create municipality districts, was in many cases based on the historical borders. however, the borders drawn in the reform plans did not necessarily coincide with the ideas of the locals, who had pragmatic expectations on territorial coherence. for example, in b, the locals felt that district borders drawn by the municipality were arbitrary and did not take into account the current everyday functioning of the villages (cf. lõhmus 2022). the newly established district community (kant) initiated a new development plan that supervised the change in the borders intended in the reform. according to this plan, the district would include some additional dispersed villages further away that were not originally in the plan and leave out some densely populated settlements from it. the district representative assembly reasoned this by the historical pattern of this sparsely populated area, which needed to preserve its uniqueness. besides the historical and cultural reasons, the district activists also needed to attain a certain population number to preserve the status of a community district as service centre, which secured certain budget facilities for local cultural activities initiated by locals themselves. according to liisa (from b, b 1962), one of the aims of re-arranging the municipality district was also to make their small villages more visible: we formed the district ourselves. those borders that [the rural municipality] draw on the map, did not coincide with the character of our district, because for us, the district is around [name of a highway], they have a similar, say, historical background, traditional dispersed village area. there are similar habits and customs. the [name of a densely populated area] doesn’t have anything to do with us. she also added that rearranging the original plan helped them to manage the transportation issues, as their commuting needs differed from the region they had left out. apparently, the district transportation would have been planned considering the entire district, and that would mean local people would have to travel first to the densely populated area to get the bus to the capital. in some interviews in a, however, it was argued how within the merged municipality the district borders have now become vaguer (cf. taluste 2018). this affected people’s perception about what community they represent. for example, sirje (from a, b 1967), responsible for managing the local community house, complained: today, when i call up a man from our village and tell him i have a problem, /…/ the shed door has come off due to the storm, would you come and fix it? well, of course he comes. but… this is not the same anymore. but when we used to have this smaller [name of] rural municipality, you had to stand for it/…/ you were proud of it! /…/ this [name of] rural municipality, it was our little home, you stood for it, you represented it. you did it without asking reward. now, in the big rural municipality, its more anonymous. the same concerns were expressed elsewhere. in the b region, in riho’s words, it was now harder to find people to compete in local sports games in the name of their new municipality district. according to him, previously people had no trouble knowing where they are from, but now, people asked in whose name are they competing. in areas b and c, historical village borders have been restored, being initiated by active inhabitants with local roots. these borders, however, though in accordance with the biography of landscape, carried rather cultural and symbolical value than practical. in b, several interviewees identified their own territorial identity commonly with the name of the municipality district rather than the historical village name. in c, by contrast, the historical village name was commonly used, particularly by the older generation. while some informants remained indifferent or accepting towards the symbolic establishment of historical village borders and names, others took these changes far more personally. in c, ivo (b 1944) initiated the process of restoring a historical village name with its historical borders. in his view, he was the only one who bothered about it, stating bitterly: “for others, it was nothing.” yet, he got forty-five supporting signatures for his cause. when the decisions about the village borders fennia 200(2) (2022) 239kadri kasemets & raili nugin were taken, he could not unfortunately attend the meeting and his proposal about the enlarged village borders did not pass. ivo commented on this emotionally that “they just gave it away,” concluding that “besides me, there were no other patriots.” however, another inhabitant, paula (b 1954), saw it differently, saying that it makes little difference where the exact borders are. for her, it was important that the three villages (with total number of inhabitants 140) under one village association would act together: “if everyone started to act on their own, there will be nothing left.” restoring village names and borders can be important for a specific territory’s identity, but also have significant value for local and regional visibility and socio-cultural development. for example, the rehabilitated village in b is active on the village association level, influencing local matters related to its municipality district. discussion relying on new mobilities paradigm, our research focused on the relational everyday materialities and mobilities, material infrastructures, governance, and territorial identity bordering in sparsely populated areas after the administrative reform. this view highlighted how structural policy arrangements influence everyday life and spaces connected to it. we examined the administrative reform through the lens of smart shrinking, considering the current living conditions of the residents and their selfrealisation connected to the civil governance. these issues are connected both to the individual and collective identity bordering, which shapes the territorial character of a particular community. examining changes in the physical infrastructure, everyday materialities, and everyday mobilities, our analysis showed how access and relations with regional functional centres become very important in the lives of rural inhabitants (kaldaru 2018; laan et al. 2018). nevertheless, the functional municipality is multi-layered (raagmaa 2018; sepp & noorkõiv 2018). connectivity and potential accessibility to these centres shapes mobility practices to the centre, but also vice versa: it can add attractiveness to rural localities and be appealing for in-migrants with social capital (jøhannesson et al. 2003; scott et al. 2017). the transportation options to other functional centres becomes important as well. in c, the convenient railway transportation to both tartu and tallinn enlarged the mobility options for local people, making these centres important in relational rural/urban networking. in b, the closeness to the capital connected mostly to work mobility diminished the importance of saue as regional centre in people’s everyday mobility practices. in addition, the formation of a municipality district influenced the access to the municipality centre and to tallinn, as within these units the mutual transportation options are considered. regional networks become important in managing everyday living in rural villages, as contemporary villages are not autonomous anymore (thissen et al. 2021). according to this perspective, liveability in rurality is related to mobilities and accessibility rather than the availability of services locally (gieling & haartsen 2017). investments in material infrastructure connected to contemporary mobilities remain significant for rural viability, thus, the actual mobility trajectories of the inhabitants should be studied. one of the aims of the administrative reform was to improve local infrastructures, and these issues were highlighted in all studied areas. the increased financial base in the municipalities opened discussions for asphalting gravel roads, which were considered important not only because of improved driving conditions (and better access), but also symbolically, signifying modern ways of rural living. however, these development issues also reflected ambiguous attitudes about further developments connected to the post-productivist countryside. the infrastructural renovation projects influence the image of the rural and the local place identity and branding (jøhannesson et al. 2003; mcareavey & mcdonagh 2011), but for some people, road modernising is associated with urbanisation and creating the “monotonous concrete infrastructure” (rönkko & aarevaara 2017, 399). similar development ambiguities emerge in relation to the building regulations. on the one hand, these regulations help to preserve the historical dispersion of the rural area and the cultural and environmental quality of the landscape. on the other hand, the regulations diminish building options for locals. the recent oecd report about shrinking in estonia (2022) suggests solving this potential conflict by setting temporary limits on expansion by establishing green belts, which meet the municipality’s strategic objectives and socio-economic development plans. such 240 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper issues with potential conflicts should be openly discussed in order to ensure sustainable and dynamic change in the landscape (semm & palang 2010). the article also investigated the impact of the new governance model on the community’s involvement. since the borders of the new municipalities grew bigger, several interviewees indicated that their chances to participate in actual governance had diminished. some activists felt that their powers were now limited to organising local events, instead of having a say in larger issues. at the same time, for some, citizen activism with village heads had not been strategically and financially effective anymore, either. the increased financial base under the new municipal system was welcomed, since it enabled smaller peripheral villages (with sufficient human and social networks) to attain project funding for local development (sepp & noorkõiv 2018). in some cases, the further distancing of the municipality actually helped to ease some previous local tensions. for instance, in region a, the district community united in fighting for mutual goals in municipality, strengthening this way the sense of community (cf. noorkõiv 2018). however, in some places, the inhabitants felt that the community activists who were networked and active also on a rural municipality level were being too selfish and preferred some institutions within the district to others. in other words, the smaller the unit, the greater the risk that personal biases of the leaders can jeopardise regional development. for region c, the impact of the reform was smaller compared to a and b, as the areas in c were belonging to the same municipality and connected to a functional regional centre also prior to the reform. however, c illustrates vividly how the active village head with excellent urban/rural networking skills, political capital, and community involvement can foster local development (bosworth et al. 2016). being also a member in the rural municipality council, he managed to have access to social capital resources enhancing the development of the village areas. c also exemplifies that a functional village association can remain important as a community centre. besides offering gathering space for the local community, the village association was important also for non-locals, visitors, or part-time residents as it strengthens the impression of a viable rural community (kumpulainen & soini 2019). examining territorial bordering and regional identity highlighted how the administrative reform affects regional identity and the discourse about it in several ways (vainikka 2013). the governance pattern of the reform established several new municipal units, which affected reorganisation of some regions within different borders. though many of those borders had existed in the past under some previous municipal formulations, some of them were reshaped and included villages that had not belonged there before. the formation of the municipal district in b showed that historical borders are symbolically important, but can be re-shaped according to the current development perspectives (martens et al. 2021). besides, the reasoning was along the lines of rural/urban representation, and in the narratives of the locals, the newly included dispersed villages represented the rural and the excluded densely populated area the urban. this indicates that the discourses about the rural and the urban have direct impact on the managing of the everyday governance. here a question remains of how large the local and municipal district units should be in order to ensure such networking and the feeling of being involved in local and regional development. the feelings of alienation should be taken seriously, as due to this many former local activists may step aside and quit local activities, potentially causing the decline in community activism, which may also affect the place-attachment of other inhabitants. this may lead to new power hierarchies among the community and the erosion of endemic knowledge about place character (mustonen 2013, 2014). conclusion the estonian administrative reform in 2017 sought coherent and cost-effective municipality arrangements, but at the same time aimed to ensure larger infrastructural developments and the involvement of locals in sparsely populated settlements. our research showed that though the economic effect was acknowledged in most settlements, the reform impacted various other aspects of rural lives, particularly the civil governance bound to territorial identity. the study showed how the reform accelerated new interregional municipality districts, which have initiated and carried through projects improving the material infrastructure (houses, roads). these, from its part, have a potential to enhance local socio-cultural activities and services. fennia 200(2) (2022) 241kadri kasemets & raili nugin the reform affected the endogenous governance, showing vividly the importance of the role of local community activists and human capital. one could speculate that the role of local individual activism increases, particularly individuals’ capability of networking and activating the local community. in our view, even though the role of local individuals remains high in the framework of the new administrative reform, the pattern of supporting volunteers should be preserved to empower local governance. these findings confirm earlier research on smart shrinking that emphasises interconnectedness of formal and informal planning practices for the interest of the local community considering available resources (syssner & meijer 2017; küpper et al. 2018). our study also indicated that the rural administrative processes should be analysed through a prism of rural/urban networks and mobilities. in the local arrangements, people rely on the decisions based on what they consider appropriate for the rural (versus the needs of the urban). these representations affect not only the managing of the rural, but also the everyday lives of the residents, which are intertwined with rural/urban connectivities. therefore, the regions are not only defined by their geographical borders, but also by social and discursive constructs connected to political spatial distinctions, in which identity narratives connected to a particular territory and self-realisation become important. acknowledgements the authors thank editors, other authors of this issue, the reviewers for their valuable comments, and anu printsmann for drawing the map. this research has been financed by the estonian research agency prg 398 landscape approach to rurbanity. references argent, n. (2019) rural geography iii: marketing, mobilities, measurement and metanarratives. progress in human geography 43(4) 758–766. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518778220 ash, j. & simpson, p. (2016) geography and post-phenomenology. progress in human geography 40(1) 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514544806 barraket, j., eversole, r., luke, b. & barth, s. (2019) resourcefulness of locally-oriented social enterprises: implications for rural community development. journal of rural studies 70 188–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.12.031 bock, b. b. (2016) rural marginalisation and the role of social innovation; a turn towards nexogenous development and rural reconnection. sociologia ruralis 56(4) 552–573. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12119 bosworth, g., annibal, i., carroll, t., price, l., sellick, j. & shepherd, j. (2016) empowering local action through neo-endogenous development; the case of leader in england. sociologia ruralis 56(3) 427–449. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12089 convery, i., soane, i, dutson, t. & shaw, h. (2010) mainstreaming leader delivery of the rdr in cumbria: an interpretative phenomenological analysis. sociologia ruralis 50(4) 370–391. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2010.00519.x coulter, r., van ham, m. & findlay, a. m. (2016) re-thinking residential mobility: linking lives through time and space. progress in human geography 40(3) 352–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515575417 creamer, e., allen e. & haggett, c. (2019) ‘incomers’ leading ‘community-led’ sustainability initiatives: a contradiction in terms? environment and planning c: politics and space 37(5) 946–964. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x18802476 ellingsen, w. (2017) rural second homes: a narrative of de-centralisation. sociologia ruralis 57(2) 229–244. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12130 gieling, j. & haartsen, t. (2017) liveable villages: the relationship between volunteering and liveability in the perceptions of rural residents. sociologia ruralis 57(s1) 576–597. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12151 gieling, j., vermeij, l. & haartsen, t. (2019) out of love for the village? how general and selective forms of attachment to the village explain volunteering in dutch community life. journal of rural studies 71 181–188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.06.008 goodwin-hawkins, b. (2015) mobilities and the english village: moving beyond fixity in rural west yorkshire. sociologia ruralis 55(2) 167–181. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12043 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518778220 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514544806 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.12.031 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12119 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12089 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2010.00519.x https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515575417 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x18802476 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12130 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12151 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.06.008 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12043 242 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper görmar, f., lang, t., nagy, e. & raagmaa, g. (2019) re-thinking regional and local policies in times of polarisation: an introduction. in lang, t. & f. görmar (eds.) regional and local development in times of polarisation, new geographies of europe, 1–25. palgrave, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1190-1_1 haldusreformi seireraport 2022: viis aastat hiljem (2022) <https://www.fin.ee/riik-ja-omavalitsusedplaneeringud/kohalikud-omavalitsused/haldusreform-2015-2017#haldusreformi-seirer>. 12.12.2022. hsieh h-f. & shannon s. e. (2005) three approaches to qualitative content analysis. qualitative health research 15(9) 1277–1288. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305276687 hunt, r. (2019) exploring the quiet politics of ‘out-dwelling’. environment and planning c: politics and space 37(2) 219–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418784944 jøhannesson, g. p., skaptadóttir, u. d. & benediktsson, k. (2003) coping with social capital? the cultural economy of tourism in the north. sociologia ruralis 43(1) 3–16. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9523.00226 jürgenson, a. (2004) on the formation of the estonians' concepts of homeland and home place. pro ethnologia 18 97−114. kaldaru, h. (2018) elanikkonna suhtumine haldusreformi aastatel 2013–2016. <https://www. rahandusministeerium.ee/sites/default/files/kov_haldusref_maavalitsus/haldusreform_2017.pdf>. 12.12.2022 kauder, b. (2014) incorporation of municipalities and population growth: a propensity score matching approach. ifo working paper, no 188. ifo institute – leibniz institute for economic research at the university of munich, munich. https://doi.org/10.1111/pirs.12148 kumpulainen, k. & soini, k. (2019) how do community development activities affect the construction of rural places? a case study from finland. sociologia ruralis 59(2) 294–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12234 küpper, p., kundolf, s., mettenberger, t. & tuitjer, g. (2018) rural regeneration strategies for declining regions: trade-off between novelty and practicability. european planning studies 26(2) 229–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 laan, m., kattai, k., noorkõiv, r. & sootla, g. (2018) ühinemisläbirääkimised volikogude algatusel. <https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf>. 12.12.2022. lang, t., burneika, d., noorkõiv, r., plüschke-altof, b. (2022) socio-spatial polarization and policy response: perspectives for regional development in the baltic states. european urban and regional studies 29(1) 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764211023553 li, y., westlund, h. & liu, y. (2019) why some rural areas decline while some others not: an overview of rural evolution in the world. journal of rural studies 68 135–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.03.003 loupa ramos, i., bernardo, f., ribeiro, s. c. & van eetvelde, v. (2016) landscape identity: implications for policy making. land use policy 53 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.01.030 loupa ramos, i., bianchi, p., bernardo, f. & van eetvelde, v. (2019) what matters to people? exploring contents of landscape identity at the local scale. landscape research 44(3) 320–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2019.1579901 lõhmus, m. (2021) detsentraliseeritud valitsemisja juhtimiskorralduse mudelid kohaliku omavalitsuste üksustes ii. ekspertarvamus. <https://omavalitsus.fin.ee/static/sites/5/2021/03/ detsentraliseeritud_korralduse_mudel_kov.pdf?fbclid=iwar0_tmzahtgjcf6r3q_u2-d0iuyktpa7xt2s4 y4uo2pruwhq9oleiqvrkpg>. 12.12.2022. lõhmus, m. (2022) osavallad ja teised kogukondade kaasamise vormid ühinenud kovides. haldusreformi seireraport 2022: viis aastat hiljem. <https://www.fin.ee/riik-ja-omavalitsusedplaneeringud/kohalikud-omavalitsused/haldusreform-2015-2017#haldusreformi-seirer>. 12.12.2022. lõhmus, m., sootla, g., kattai, k. & noorkõiv, r. (2016) soovituslikud juhised detsentraliseeritud valitsemisja juhtimiskorralduse mudeli ülesehitamiseks kohaliku omavalitsuse üksuses. rahandusministeerium. tallinn, taebla. <https://omavalitsus.fin.ee/static/sites/5/2021/03/ detsentraliseeritud_korralduse_mudel_kov.pdf>. 12.12.2022. makkonen, t. & inkinen, t. (2015) geographical and temporal variation of regional development and innovation in finland. fennia 193(1) 134–147. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.46476 marsden, t., milbourne, p., kitchen, l. & bishop, k. (2003) communities in nature: the construction and understanding of forest natures. sociologia ruralis 43(3) 238–256. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9523.00243 martens, s., van damme, s. & devisch, o. (2021) ‘the making of hoepertingen’: debating change in a village in haspengouw (belgium). journal of rural studies 87 455–464, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2020.09.003 mcareavey, r. (2006) getting close to the action: the micro-politics of rural development. sociologia ruralis 46(2) 85–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2006.00407.x https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1190-1_1 https://www.fin.ee/riik-ja-omavalitsused-planeeringud/kohalikud-omavalitsused/haldusreform-2015-2017#haldusreformi-seirer https://www.fin.ee/riik-ja-omavalitsused-planeeringud/kohalikud-omavalitsused/haldusreform-2015-2017#haldusreformi-seirer https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732305276687 https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418784944 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9523.00226 https://www.rahandusministeerium.ee/sites/default/files/kov_haldusref_maavalitsus/haldusreform_2017.pdf https://www.rahandusministeerium.ee/sites/default/files/kov_haldusref_maavalitsus/haldusreform_2017.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/pirs.12148 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12234 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764211023553 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.03.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.01.030 https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2019.1579901 https://omavalitsus.fin.ee/static/sites/5/2021/03/detsentraliseeritud_korralduse_mudel_kov.pdf?fbclid=iwar0_tmzahtgjcf6r3q_u2-d0iuyktpa7xt2s4y4uo2pruwhq9oleiqvrkpg https://omavalitsus.fin.ee/static/sites/5/2021/03/detsentraliseeritud_korralduse_mudel_kov.pdf?fbclid=iwar0_tmzahtgjcf6r3q_u2-d0iuyktpa7xt2s4y4uo2pruwhq9oleiqvrkpg https://omavalitsus.fin.ee/static/sites/5/2021/03/detsentraliseeritud_korralduse_mudel_kov.pdf?fbclid=iwar0_tmzahtgjcf6r3q_u2-d0iuyktpa7xt2s4y4uo2pruwhq9oleiqvrkpg https://www.fin.ee/riik-ja-omavalitsused-planeeringud/kohalikud-omavalitsused/haldusreform-2015-2017#haldusreformi-seirer https://www.fin.ee/riik-ja-omavalitsused-planeeringud/kohalikud-omavalitsused/haldusreform-2015-2017#haldusreformi-seirer https://omavalitsus.fin.ee/static/sites/5/2021/03/detsentraliseeritud_korralduse_mudel_kov.pdf https://omavalitsus.fin.ee/static/sites/5/2021/03/detsentraliseeritud_korralduse_mudel_kov.pdf https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.46476 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9523.00243 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2020.09.003 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2006.00407.x fennia 200(2) (2022) 243kadri kasemets & raili nugin mcareavey, r. & mcdonagh, j. (2011) sustainable rural tourism: lessons for rural development. sociologia ruralis 51(2) 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2010.00529.x meador, j. e. (2019) reaching rural: identifying implicit social networks in community development programmes. journal of rural studies 68 285–295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.12.006 merriman, p. (2019) relational governance, distributed agency and the unfolding of movements, habits and environments: parking practices and regulations in england. environment and planning c: politics and space 37(8) 1400–1417. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419830976 merriman, p. & jones, r. (2017) nations, materialities and affects. progress in human geography 41(5) 600–617. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516649453 mustonen, t. (2013) oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration – co-management and watershed knowledge in jukajoki river. fennia 191(2) 76–91. <https://fennia.journal.fi/article/ view/7637>. 12.12.2022. mustonen, t. (2014) endemic time-spaces of finland: aquatic regimes. fennia 192(2) 120–139. <https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/40845> 12.12.2022. mustonen, t. (2017) endemic time-spaces of finland: from wilderness lands to ‘vacant production spaces’. fennia 195(1) 5–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.58971 noorkõiv, r. (2018) haldusreformi taustad ja -trendid. <https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/ haldusreform-2017.pdf>. 12.12.2022. nugin, r. (2020) space, place and capitals in rural youth mobility: broadening the focus of rural studies. sociologia ruralis 60(2) 306−328. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12276 nugin, r. & kasemets, k. (2021) stable mobilities and mobile stabilities in rural estonian communities. european countryside 13(2) 222–241. https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2021-0016 oecd (2022) shrinking smartly in estonia: preparing regions for demographic change. oecd rural studies. oecd publishing, paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/77cfe25e-en raagmaa, g. (2002) regional identity in regional development and planning. european planning studies 10(1) 55–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310120099263 raagmaa, g. (2018) kuivõrd haldusreform arvestas asustuse pikaajalise ümberkujunemise ja kohtade globaalse konkurentsivõimega? <https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/ haldusreform-2017.pdf>. 12.12.2022. raagmaa, g. & kroon, k. (2005) the future of collective farms’ built social infrastructure: choosing between central place and network theories. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 87(3) 205–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2005.00193.x rosenthal, g. (2011) biographical research. in seale, c., cobo, g., gubrium j. f. & silverman, d (eds.) qualitative research practice, 48–64. sage, london. rönkkö, e. & aarrevaara, e. (2017) towards strengths-based planning strategies for rural localities in finland. european countryside 9(3) 397–415. https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2017-0024 scott, m., murphy, e. & gkartzios, m. (2017) placing ‘home’ and ‘family’ in rural residential mobilities. sociologia ruralis 57(s1) 598–621. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12165 semm, k. & palang, h. (2010) landscape accessibility: spaces for accessibility or spaces for communication? living reviews in landscape research 4 1–36. https://doi.org/10.12942/lrlr-2010-4 sepp, v. & noorkõiv, r. (2018) haldusreformi kesksete kriteeriumite valik: kuidas tuli 5000 ja 11 000 elaniku nõue. <https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf>. 12.12.2022. soini, k., palang, h. & semm, k. (2006) from places to non-places? landscape and sense of place in the finnish and estonian countryside. in terkenli, th. s. & d’hauteserre, a-m. (eds.) landscapes of a new cultural economy of space, 117–148. springer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4096-2_5 sheller, m. & urry, j. (2006) the new mobilities paradigm. environment and planning a 38 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268 steiner, a. & farmer, j. (2018) engage, participate, empower: modelling power transfer in disadvantaged rural communities. environment and planning c: politics and space 36(1) 118–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654417701730 syssner, j. & meijer, m. (2017) informal planning in depopulating rural areas. a resource-based view on informal planning practices. european countryside 9(3) 458–472. https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2017-0027 šimon, m. (2014) exploring counterurbanisation in a post-socialist context: case of the czech republic. sociologia ruralis 54(2) 117–142 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2012.00576.x taluste, o. (2018) haldusreformi alused ja õiguslikud valikud, 69–110. <https://haldusreform.fin.ee/ static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf>. 12.12.2022. thissen, f., loopmans, m., strijker, d. & haartsen, t. (2021) guest editorial: changing villages; what about people? journal of rural studies 87 423–430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.06.001 thuesen, a. a. (2017) local democracy in large municipalities: co-creating democracy and rural development through multi-level participation structures and local development plans. town planning review 88(3) 327–348. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.21 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2010.00529.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.12.006 https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654419830976 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516649453 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/7637 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/7637 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/40845 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.58971 https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12276 https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2021-0016 https://doi.org/10.1787/77cfe25e-en https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310120099263 https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2005.00193.x https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2017-0024 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12165 https://doi.org/10.12942/lrlr-2010-4 https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4096-2_5 https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268 https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654417701730 https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2017-0027 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2012.00576.x https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://haldusreform.fin.ee/static/sites/3/2018/07/haldusreform-2017.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.06.001 https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.21 244 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper vainikka, j. (2013) the role of identity for regional actors and citizens in a splintered region: the case of päijät-häme, finland. fennia 191(1) 25–39. <https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/7348>. 12.12.2022. waitt, g. & lane, r. (2007) four-wheel drivescapes: embodied understandings of the kimberley. journal of rural studies 23(2) 156–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.07.001 westerink, j., opdam, p., van rooij, s. & steingröver, e. (2017) landscape services as boundary concept in landscape governance: building social capital in collaboration and adapting the landscape. land use policy 60 408–418. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.11.006 willet, j. & lang, t. (2018) peripheralisation: a politics of place, affect, perception and representation. sociologia ruralis 58(2) 258–275. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12161 wilson, h. (2017) on geography and encounter: bodies, borders, and difference. progress in human geography 41(4) 451–471. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516645958 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/7348 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.07.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.11.006 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12161 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516645958 open policies, open practices – open attitudes? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80428 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80428 open policies, open practices – open attitudes? openness is the current buzzword in discussions regarding academic publishing, and 2020 is the year when many related efforts of this new supposedly open approach will begin in earnest. the european union has launched an open access strategy known as ‘plan s’, which states that “from 1 january 2020, all scholarly publications resulting from public research funding must be published in open access journals or on open access platforms” (science europe 2018). this is in line with european commission funding instruments, which similarly state that “all projects receiving horizon 2020 funding are required to make sure that any peer-reviewed journal article they publish is openly accessible, free of charge” (see european commission 2019). in finland, where fennia is based, similar aims and requests have been presented by the state, in the form of the finnish open science and research initiative, and through the national research council academy of finland that has set out to develop plan s together with other european research councils. universities and libraries are responding to these strategic alignments with their own open science strategies and plans of action. like other actions, they struggle to balance scholarly interests to publish in high-quality journals and the so-called hybrid publishing practices that most (if not all) of the publishers of the leading journals employ. in short, they contain long embargos and high open access payments per paper, on top of high journal subscription fees. as we write negotiations between finelib – the national consortium that makes the deals with commercial publishers in finland – have hit the wall with taylor & francis, and the same process is underway with wiley that similarly seeks increasing profit from open science. while these public activities are moving in the right direction and – in pushing back against market-domination in academic publishing – are welcomed initiatives (for initial outcomes, see the latest editorial of geoforum by the editors undefined 2019), they have thus far offered little support to publications that already follow open policies and practices. neither the eu nor the finnish state have announced specific actions in support of scholar-led free-of-charge open publications even if opportunities towards such have been pursued. in finland, 12 journals piloted non-commercial open publishing in the kotilava project that aimed at creating a new funding model in broad national collaboration, fennia being one of them. the project ended last year and, from our perspective, led to nothing but us becoming more aware of the troubling issues and inequalities related to open publishing. research funders have introduced means to cover the costs of open publishing; however, in a rather market-oriented manner. the open science research funding encouraged in the budgeting of h2020 and academy of finland research projects, for instance, is based on author fees. the money never reaches journals like ours, as we do not want to compensate subscription fees with author fees. firstly, to promote equality between scholars, secondly, to maintain our accessibility to authors who perhaps publish in fennia as an ethical choice in the current academic publishing climate due to our fully open access format, and thirdly, to remain distinct from many other supposedly radical publications for whom open access is merely another clandestine source of revenue. money hence flows mostly to the surplus of the ‘big five’ that collect voluntary author fees on top of subscription fees, the latter forming another mechanism through which taxpayers end up supporting the commercial publishing business in the name of open science (also kallio 2017). obviously, as a fully open access journal, fennia receives no payments from libraries as our openly accessible content does not require subscription, and attempts to create non-market-based payment systems have proved in vain (also kallio & hyvärinen 2017). to avoid growing tired of the whole question of open science, which in itself is of utmost importance, in fennia we have turned our attention to what we can do in the current situation, with the resources we have. as our most important resource, we have identified the international academic community that encompasses extensive competences and enormous power to enforce openness, not only in the form of policies and practices but also as open attitudes. © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. http://kotilava.fi/19-elokuu-2016-1247/kotilava-–-finnish-academic-journals-towards-immediate-open-access 2 fennia 197(1) (2019)editorial for a couple of years, we have been inviting scholars to take part in publication processes that are open in every sense that we can imagine. the authors and the reviewers who have participated in them have contributed to developing new ways of doing things with an open attitude, without compromising rigorous peer reviewing or editorial practices. the latest results of our open peer review process can be found in this issue, and the specific aspects of each process are highlighted as the papers are introduced below. this said we have also tried to stay attuned to the fact that open practices, too, may generate and reproduce unequal power relations, which means that we need to create several opportunities to openness. our other attempt to grow more open, concerns societal engagement. by the end of the year, we hope to have succeeded in making our publications better accessible beyond the academy, by directing editorial efforts more to the popularization of our content through the online research forum versus. so what lies at the heart of openness, as an attitude, in academic publishing? to us two aspects seem central. first, open attitudes should be encouraged within the academic community. regarding peer reviewing this involves, in the first place, contributing to publication processes of other scholars in exchange for their equivalent efforts, that is, openness towards peer reviewing in journals that you value. during the review, openness means approaching each other with dignity as scholars, treating the work of others in a respectful and equitable manner, and appreciating the work of everyone involved by presenting critique and responding to it in a thoughtful manner. our experience from the past two years as editors indicates that open review processes invite people to appreciate these kinds of principles. as simone tulumello (2019) brings up in this issue, dialogical engagement cannot be taken for granted in peer reviewing. high-quality dialogical engagement can of course be requested in double-blind processes as well, yet the difference is that in open reviewing the responsibility for openness is shared among authors, reviewers and editors, whereas in blinded processes editors end up doing (or leaving undone) more of this work. another important aspect regarding open attitudes in scholarly publishing concerns the reach beyond the academy. bringing research into dialogue with people and societies, and communicating the published results to different audiences is something journals can encourage as part of their publication processes. in fennia, we ask the reviewers from open processes to write their comments into an easily accessible format that can be published in our reflections section along with the article. this, we think, enhances the visibility and approachability of the published research. from our authors we request popularised versions of their articles, to be published at the versus platform where we invite professionals and scholars to comment on them. the first outcomes from these processes are debates around ari lehtinen’s (2018) article degrowth in city planning and the article by matthew sawatzky and moritz albrecht translating eu energy policy for insular energy systems: re-union island’s quest for energy autonomy. all authors in the present issue have been invited to contribute to the versus research debate, and we hope to produce vivid and influential discussions based on their work. this is how fennia seeks to promote openness in academic publishing, on its 130th anniversary. we invite geographers and scholars from related fields to join in and develop these attitudes, practices and policies further with us, in the roles of authors, reviewers, commentators and visiting editors. this is what we can do, as an academic community. the first issue of fennia in 2019 includes five original articles in the research papers section, two of which are accompanied by commentaries. in the reviews and essays section, we have two review articles and one essay, the last of which with three commentaries. the reflections section contains altogether eleven pieces, nine commentaries based on the articles and essay mentioned, one lectio praecursoria, and one standalone intervention. the first research article in this issue is crafted from the annual fennia lecture given by rhys jones at the finnish geography days 2018 in helsinki. the article is concerned with the idea of governing the future and it investigates this through a meticulous case study of wales’ well-being of future generations act (2015), calling for geographers to take the lead in exploring attempts to achieve spatial justice in the present and the future. it is accompanied by four commentaries, two of which are based upon the open dialogical review process that we have been piloting in the journal in order to create more inclusive and open exchanges to produce rich and original geographical articles. we will https://www.versuslehti.fi/english/ https://www.versuslehti.fi/tiededebatti/megatrendeja-ja-kasvukipuja-kiinteistonjalostuksesta-laadulliseen-kaavoitukseen/ https://www.versuslehti.fi/tiededebatti/translating-eu-energy-policy-into-energy-independence-reunion-islands-rocky-road-as-a-french-overseas-territory/ https://www.versuslehti.fi/tiededebatti/translating-eu-energy-policy-into-energy-independence-reunion-islands-rocky-road-as-a-french-overseas-territory/ fennia 197(1) (2019) 3kirsi pauliina kallio, james riding introduce each of the four commentaries and remark upon this open review process, following a critical introduction to the article that emerged out of a visible initiative for the journal, the annual fennia lecture (see van houtum 2017; gill 2018) – the next of which will be at the nordic geographers meeting in trondheim in june 2019. governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act (jones 2019), suggests that there needs to be a more explicit examination of the significant geographies that characterize the governance of the future. arranged across five sections, this article is an extensive call to geographers to re-consider and remember the imagined future in the writing of present contested spaces of the governmental and the political, yet importantly it is vividly geographical, deeply detailed and grounded in a particular case study. the article provides an examination of the various ways in which the governance of the future has been approached to date and background detail on the case study – an act that has the notion of justice, understood in relation to the concept of well-being, at its heart, for jones. it does not end there though, as the article begins to map out the way in which geographers could begin to contribute to this governance of the future, for the wellbeing act – as it is shortened to throughout the article – has sought to govern the future across and between three distinct, yet interconnected scales. these are sketched out by jones, plainly giving over a sense of just how geographers might clearly have something to contribute here to governmental imaginings of possible futures, before he reflects more broadly on the significance of geography and scale for the governance of more hopeful futures. given the opportunity to revise the paper in light of the open comments by the two referees, lieven ameel and juho luukkonen, jones writes of the review process that he found the comments to be immensely useful and they helped to strengthen and sharpen the arguments made in the paper. the comments provided were in the spirit of collegial yet rigorous critique of known fellow academics and this is surely what peer-review should be for, to improve already excellent academic endeavor, and chimes with comments made by the editors of acme (in this journal) to consider peerreview as a form of mutual aid (springer et al. 2017). indeed, in light of the comments made by the reviewers, the need to see the future as an object of governance (from a foucauldian perspective) was made more explicit, and amongst other things enabled the author to state clearly that the idea of multiple and contested futures is implicit in the use of the term, geography of the future. the significance of the consultation exercise that preceded the well-being act and the opaque nature of this process, the implicit privileging of the urban within imaginations of the future, and the need to define what is meant by geography and the role that geographers can play in promoting spatial justice and defining justice itself were also discussed. the commentaries on the governance of the future in the reflections section of this issue of fennia are by sami moisio, pia bäcklund, juho luukkonen and lieven ameel. moisio (2019) forcefully suggests that the constant production of governmental imaginaries dealing with the future should be understood as future work that is an essential dimension of a broader phenomenon of territory work whereby processes of re-territorialization and de-territorialization come together. the second commentary like the original article draws upon a case study. of clear concern here, for bäcklund (2019), are attempts to define justice and how different practices attempt to define what justice is, and indeed the need to determine whose realities play a part when defining more just future imaginaries, chiming with the comments made by the reviewers. the two last commentaries come from the reviewers of the original article. this allows luukkonen (2019) to take up the discussion by stating a foucauldian perspective on governance as a problematizing activity, and to bring to the fore a critical debate regarding the future and governing the future, that is, the future is not something that waits out there to be seized by rulers but a social and political construction dictated by the conditions of the present. the fourth commentary asks what can fictional texts contribute to our thinking of the future? drawing upon examples from historical utopian literature that envisioned possible arrangements of future governance, ameel (2019) illustrates the fleetingness of particular future visions – the very ambiguity and indeterminacy of literary fiction make it a useful geographical resource for imagining the future, taking into account the complexity of the world. the second original article, titled land for agriculture? conflicts and synergies between land use in two parts of scandinavia, by elin slätmo (2019), discusses conflicts and synergies related to land use in two 4 fennia 197(1) (2019)editorial empirical contexts, hållnäs in sweden and sandnes in norway. taking agriculture as her starting point, slätmo first analyses in each case the degree to which different uses of land seem commensurable with agriculture, and then compares the cases in the same regard. her final results suggest that agricultural lands can be seen as positively linked with a range of values, related to soil protection, biodiversity, cultural heritage and outdoor recreation for instance. hence, instead of creating oppositions, according to slätmo local and regional planners should focus on identifying synergies between different uses of land. in the third research paper, maija halonen (2019) sets out to challenge the idea of peripheries as merely static locations and, instead, highlights their dynamicity and adaptation. her article the longterm adaptation of a resource periphery as narrated by local policy-makers in lieksa focuses on a rural location in finland, a hinterland forming around the town of lieksa and located by the russian border, representing a resource periphery in the industrialised north. the results of the analysis emphasise institutional changes as a key element in the economic evolution of places. presenting critique towards quantitative approaches typically used in the socio-economic analysis of rural development, halonen stresses that a ‘human perspective’ can offer different insights that may fit better the perspectives of local actors and dwellers, and be more productive in the actual development processes. halonen’s article went through a mixed review process where two of the reviewers worked openly and one chose the double-blind option. the process was very efficient as all reviewers provided carefully written reports and the author created a detailed revision plan upon the editor’s request. when the plan was accepted by everyone involved in the open process, the author made the revisions following her plan. the reviewers were so content with the revision that they did not feel the need to write commentaries as their perspectives were already included in the final article. this first mixed review process in fennia showed us that it does not complicate the process if reviewers choose to participate in different roles. our fourth research article is by virpi kaisto and olga brednikova (2019), titled lakes, presidents and shopping on mental maps: children’s perceptions of the finnish–russian border and the borderland. it focuses explicitly on the finnish-russian border, analysing children’s spatial conceptions and identifications through mental maps, with the aim of shedding light on the complexity of bordering processes in borderlands. on the one hand, the results indicate that the significance of the national framework in the processes of spatial socialisation is not diminishing. on the other hand, the local borderland context where the participants lived appears in a very important role in how people form local and national perceptions. thus, kaisto and brednikova argue that local border-related phenomena and border-crossing experiences are increasingly relevant for national and local identification processes. the last original article in this issue links thematically with the previous, focusing on the processes of political socialisation and identity formation in palestine. janette habashi’s (2019) paper palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era is based on longstanding research in the west bank where she has worked with children and youth. approaching national identities from the perspectives of young palestinians, the article analyses the journals that the participants wrote on the researcher’s request. they initially focused on what is happening in their current communities yet as it had appeared that they wanted to write specifically about being palestinian, national identities became an important theme of the study. by introducing seven dimensions of ‘the self’ and five dimensions of ‘the other’, habashi makes visible the dynamic processes of political socialisation in the context of the palestinian occupied territories. habashi’s article is accompanied by two commentaries by sunčana laketa and david j. marshall based on an open review process, and they are included in the reflections section of this issue of fennia. laketa (2019) takes up habashi’s long-standing commitment to palestinian children’s narratives of their own geopolitical worlds by considering the geopolitical lives of children in her home country, bosnia and herzegovina. drawing our attention here to a school in jajce, laketa describes the socalled ‘two schools under one roof’ model and the children and youth-led resistance to it. while reading about how palestinian children articulate similar hopes for national unity and reconciliation within a context of political and territorial divisions, two issues stood out for marshall (2019), issues that speak specifically to the palestinian case presented, but which are also relevant to the study of fennia 197(1) (2019) 5kirsi pauliina kallio, james riding children’s political geography more broadly. marshall is prompted by habashi’s article to consider some conceptual and methodological concerns related to the issue of spatial scale that continues to vex children’s geographies, as well as the issue of temporal scale, typically measured in generations in studies of children and youth. habashi’s article went through an open review process that involved several phases. the reviewers first presented comments to the author and the author responded with clarifications, in agreement as well as in disagreement with the comments. the reviewers then responded to her in a dialogical spirit, accepting most of the responses yet emphasising some aspects from their own perspectives. at this stage, the editor requested revisions and continued to work with the author. the author, however, decided to share the revised version of the manuscript with the reviewers, too, to offer them the opportunity to assess her work once more. this last round of engagement led to the final acceptance of the paper, after which the reviewers agreed on writing their comments into reflection pieces. this process, we hope, demonstrates to those sceptical of the critical aspects of open reviewing that the processes can be very thorough and allow the participants to present various kinds of justified views. in the reviews and essays section, this issue of fennia has two review articles. the first one concerns higher education student mobility with specific focus on life satisfaction after a study period abroad. in their article life satisfaction among inbound university students in northern sweden, per anders nilsson and britt-marie stålnacke (2019) introduce a study on the self-reported life satisfaction of students who came to study at the geography department of umeå university in northern sweden, for an exchange period. using the life satisfaction questionnaire (lisat-11) they found that, especially regarding somatic health and activities of daily living, exchange students seem to have significantly higher life satisfaction after staying in the host country for six months, which may be related to their changing life styles and forming peer relations. the second review article, by helena köhler and kristina trygg (2019), presents insights from using time-diary as a method in a mixed-method study, focusing on energy and water consumption in finnish households. the paper brings forth that placing people’s activities at the centre of the study, instead of merely measuring consumption quantitatively, allows the analysis of people’s contextual experiences, behaviour and performances. together the mixed-methods data can be helpful in creating research with practical value, for developing means towards sustainable consumption. the essay included in this issue focuses on methodological differences that, according to the author simone tulumello (2019), may build obstacles to some scholars in academic publishing. tackling mainly issues of peer reviewing, his provocative text generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers brings up discrepancies between quantitative and qualitative research traditions and highlights how they may encounter in ways nonproductive, especially in referee journal publication processes that do not identify these differences adequately. the essay is accompanied by three commentaries from the open review process that, in this case, led to a completely new publication format. while tulumello’s essay itself did not change much during the process, the final version is accompanied by a vivid discussion between the author and the reviewers, presented in the form of endnotes and reflections commentaries. the commentaries to tulumello come from two scholars whose work is qualitative, guntram herb and jouni häkli, and one scholar following a quantitative tradition, ossi kotavaara. in his commentary, herb (2019) takes up the distinction between methodologies and epistemologies by discussing the plurality of quantitative and qualitative geographical research. in a similar spirit, häkli (2019) draws attention to the ‘grey area’ where questions of generalisability, for instance, do not appear as straightforward as in the methodological caricatures portrayed by tulumello. kotavaara’s (2019) commentary suggests that collisions between qualitative and quantitative frameworks often do not take into account a present state-of-the-art or mainstream quantitative human geography and carefully goes on to suggest, that the positivistic paradigm could be applied mainly to clarify the historical paradigm and not to define the context of post-millennial quantitative human geography. in all, the review discussion adds significantly to tulumello’s essay that engages in direct dialogue with the commentaries through the endnotes. written in an easily accessible manner, the discussion suits well also the purposes of methodology teaching and research training. 6 fennia 197(1) (2019)editorial in addition to the mentioned commentaries to research articles, the reflections section includes a lectio praecursoria by saija niemi (2019), titled lectio praecursoria: theory of control tuning – the processing of control in migration-related place coping. the doctoral lecture comes from the finnish academic tradition where the candidate gives a presentation based on her thesis at the opening of the public phd defense. upon the acceptance of the thesis, it is customary to publish the lecture in a scholarly journal and thus give the study more public visibility. niemi’s lecture introduces the theoretical approach of ‘control tuning’, developed in her doctoral research, focusing on different migration actors’ practices of control that help them to manage and govern feelings, information, actions and people as well as ownership of situations and objects. to end this editorial, we draw your attention to the final piece included in this issue of fennia and the eleventh piece in the reflections section. a standalone interjection on resilience (andresen 2019), which we include due to its critical analysis of a neoliberal agenda consuming academia that we have been pointing out, working against, alongside and within, as editors of this journal for the past five issues of fennia. the reflection eloquently skewers the increasingly worrying task facing early-career academics, those who are faced with this neoliberal model of academia (and academic publishing) from the very beginning. for creativity, joy, and inspiration are becoming stifled through an ever more instrumental production of knowledge, which is surreptitiously turning the endeavour of writing a thesis into a simultaneously overwhelming and yet predefined exercise. this process of neoliberalization is framing and enclosing grant proposals, research articles, academic journals, and geography, and to repeat: it must be resisted with a truly open academic publishing model and an open scholarly attitude as we have suggested here in fennia. kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief james riding fennia reflections section editor references ameel, l. (2019) governing the future: perspectives from literary studies – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 145–148. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80379 andresen, s. a. (2019) r.i.p. resilience. fennia 197(1) 168–170. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80093 bäcklund, p. (2019) governing a just future: what and how to govern? – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 137–140. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80208 european commission (2019) open science: open access. <https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/ index.cfm?pg=openaccess> 24.4.2019. gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 habashi, j. (2019) palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era. fennia 197(1) 78–94. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 halonen, m. (2019) the long-term adaptation of a resource periphery as narrated by local policy-makers in lieksa. fennia 197(1) 40–57. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74368 herb, g. h. (2019) no trenches: toward inclusive and hybrid methodologies – commentary to tulumello. fennia 197(1) 155–157. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79837 houtum, h., & bueno lacy, r. (2017) the political extreme as the new normal: the cases of brexit, the french state of emergency and dutch islamophobia. fennia 195(1) 85–101. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.64568 häkli, j. (2019) mapping the ‘gray area’ – commentary to tulumello. fennia 197(1) 158–159. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.80011 jones, r. (2019) governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act. fennia 197(1) 8–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 kallio, k. (2017) subtle radical moves in scientific publishing. fennia 195(1) 1–4. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.63678 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80379 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80093 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80208 https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=openaccess https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=openaccess https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74368 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79837 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64568 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64568 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80011 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80011 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 fennia 197(1) (2019) 7kirsi pauliina kallio, james riding kallio, k., & hyvärinen, p. (2017) a question of time – or academic subjectivity? fennia 195(2) 121–124. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67834 kaisto, v. & brednikova, o. (2019) lakes, presidents and shopping on mental maps: children’s perceptions of the finnish–russian border and the borderland. fennia 197(1) 58–76. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.73208 kotavaara, o. (2019) understanding (un)certainty in human geographic quantitative spatial analysis – commentary to tulumello. fennia 197(1) 160–162. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80216 köhler, h. & trygg, k. (2019) a time-geographical mixed-methods approach: studying the complexities of energy and water use in households. fennia 197(1) 108–120. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.68860 laketa, s. (2019) geopolitical lives of children – commentary to habashi. fennia 197(1) 149–150. https:// doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80159 lehtinen, a. (2018) degrowth in city planning. fennia 196(1) 43–57. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65443 luukkonen, j. (2019) future as an object of governance – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 141–144. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80372 marshall, d. j. (2019) the state of palestinian youth – commentary to habashi. fennia 197(1) 151–154. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80098 moisio, s. (2019) governing political spaces through “future work” – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 132–136. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80205 niemi, s. (2019) lectio praecursoria: theory of control tuning – the processing of control in migrationrelated place coping. fennia 197(1) 163–167. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79471 nilsson, p. a. & stålnacke, b. m. (2019) life satisfaction among inbound university students in northern sweden. fennia 197(1) 94–107. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70337 sawatzky, m., & albrecht, m. (2017) translating eu renewable energy policy for insular energy systems: reunion island’s quest for energy autonomy. fennia 195(2) 125–141. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.60312 science europe (2018). communication on ‘plan s’. 11.7.2018. <https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/07/plan_s_communication_110718.pdf> 24.4.2019. slätmo, e. (2019) land for agriculture? conflicts and synergies between land use in two parts of scandinavia. fennia 197(1) 25–39. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63074 springer, s., houssay-holzschuch, m., villegas, c., & gahman, l. (2017) say ‘yes!’ to peer review: open access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia. fennia 195(2) 185-188. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.66862 the editors undefined (2019) the future of scholarly publishing: paywalls and profits or a new plan? geoforum 102 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.03.005 tulumello, s. (2019) generalization, epistemology and concrete: what can social sciences learn from the common sense of engineers. fennia 197(1) 121–131. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.67834 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.73208 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.73208 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80216 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.68860 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.68860 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.68860 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65443 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80372 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80098 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80205 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79471 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70337 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.60312 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.60312 https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/plan_s_communication_110718.pdf https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/plan_s_communication_110718.pdf https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63074 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66862 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.03.005 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77626 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa6803 three years ago, fennia transformed into a solely digital open access journal. after a careful consideration and planning together the finnish society of geography, the departure from the traditional print form was justified by better global visibility and access. although it is difficult – and possibly premature – to make an assessment of the success of this revolution, one can clearly see an increase in the number and spatial coverage of submissions. this issue included, altogether 26 papers have been published in the oa system. printed back issues since 2001 can also be accessed through the oa system. apart for the abstracts available for articles between 1989 and 1999, full articles do not exist in digital form. their inclusion in the system would require tedious scanning. hopefully such digitalisation could be accomplished in the future, potentially as part of the national digital library campaign. in the meantime, earlier articles can be scanned and sent upon request. the current issue also testifies an important change in the journal. prof. jukka käyhkö resigns as the editor of fennia after ten years in the office, first as the managing editor and since 2004 as the chief editor, and hands over the duties to dr. paola minoia. paola is a senior lecturer in development and tourism geography from the university of helsinki and has taken over the editorial tasks with great enthusiasm and new ideas. it is necessary to change the people from time to time, even more so with a small editorial team of two to three people who produce fennia with the support from the editorial advisory board. on the one hand, the journal deserves innovative ideas and thinking out of the box that can only materialise through fresh people. on the other hand, taking care of a journal is rather wearing business, and during an academic career, there are times when one needs an opportunity to concentrate on other things, too. so this change is mutually beneficial. changes are also happening in the managing editorial board. dr. helka kalliomäki (formerly moi lanen), a post-doctoral research fellow in human geography from the university of turku, will continue in her duty and will be supported by dr. editorial rami ratvio, a senior lecturer in urban geography from the university of helsinki. raisa mantila, from the publisher vammalan kirjapaino oy, will continue as the layout manager. we are grateful to the finnish academy of science and letters for the financial support it provides to the geographical society to cover the publication costs of our journal. we are also indebted to the reviewers and all editorial board members who collaborate on a voluntary basis to help us producing the new issues. the new winds will bring about changes in the editorial advisory board structure, with an international team larger than before, to represent more widely different topics and sub-disciplines in both human and physical geography. we thank the previous board members for their cooperation, and welcome the new ones. the board now includes the following members: thomas allen (east carolina university), marco antonsich (university of loughborough), jørgen bærenholdt (roskilde university), lawrence berg (university of british columbia), diane k. davis (university of california), bruce forbes (university of lapland), francois gemenne (sciences po paris), david c. harvey (university of exeter), hill kulu (university of liverpool), niina käyhkö (university of turku), rachael mcdonnell (university of oxford), anssi paasi (university of oulu), petri pellikka (university of helsinki), jarkko saarinen (university of oulu), gunhild setten (norwegian university of science and technology), heidi soosalu (tallin university of technology), markku sotarauta (university of tampere), and benno werlen (friedrich schiller university of jena). the journal will continue in keeping an attention on studies related to finland, but simultaneously, its intent is to become more international in scope. therefore, we strongly encourage submissions from researchers and scholars from europe and the rest of the world. these coming months and years will see an attempt to improve the quality status of fennia in the publishing realm. despite some discordant notes, the most widely employed measures of quality are various citation indices and the journal ranking in them. following the ‘publish or perish’ concept, fennia, in spite of its long tradition in the editorial world of geography, cannot continue much longer without an established ranking index, as a growing number of institutions only take into account papers published in ranked journals. various questions are being raised regarding the best possible strategies to acquire more relevance and international visibility. one question is, for instance, whether fennia should continue as a journal published independently by the geographical society of finland, or should it join a commercial publishing house, a decision that has been done by some other nordic journals in geography. this fundamental question, together with other related ones, will be raised and discussed in a roundtable session during the forthcoming annual geography days to be held in helsinki on 26–27th october 2012. jukka käyhkö, department of geography and geology, university of turku. e-mail: jukka.kayhko@utu.fi paola minoia, department of geosciences and geography, university of helsinki. e-mail: paola.minoia@helsinki.fi urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7637 doi: 10.11143/7637 oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration – co-management and watershed knowledge in jukajoki river tero mustonen mustonen, tero (2013). oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration – co-management and watershed knowledge in jukajoki river. fennia 191: 2, pp. 76–91. issn 1798-5617. this article explores local oral histories and selected communal written texts and their role in the severely damaged watershed of jukajoki [and adjacent lake jukajärvi watershed] located in kontiolahti and joensuu municipalities, north karelia, finland. all in all 35 narratives were collected between 2010 and 2012. four narratives have been presented in this paper as an example of the materials. empirical materials have been analysed by using a framework of both integrated ecosystem management and co-management. three readings of the river jukajoki and the adjacent watershed emerged from the materials – sámi times, savokarelian times and times of damages, or the industrial age of the river. local knowledge, including optic histories, provided information about pre-industrial fisheries, fish ecology and behaviour and bird habitats. lastly, special oral histories of keepers of the local tradition provided narratives which are consistent with inquiries from other parts of finland, non-euclidian readings of time and space and hint at what the indigenous scholars have proposed as an intimate interconnection between nature and human societies extending beyond notions of social-ecological systems. empirical oral histories also conceptualize collaborative governance with a formal role of local ecological knowledge as a future management option for the jukajoki watershed. watershed restoration and associated baseline information benefits greatly from the oral histories recorded with people who still remember pre-industrial and pre-war ecosystems and their qualities. keywords: north karelia, jukajoki, co-management, oral history, optic history tero mustonen, the department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, p. o. box 111, 80101 joensuu, finland, e-mail: tero@ snowchange.org introduction this paper investigates severely damaged watershed of jukajoki [and adjacent lake jukajärvi watershed] located in kontiolahti and joensuu municipalities, north karelia, finland. they are a part of the larger pielisjoki river watershed. jukajoki river has received national attention in 2010 and 2011 due to fish deaths caused by discharges of highly acidic waters from the peat production site linnunsuo owned by the finnish state-owned energy company vapo. both regional state agencies and the company have tried to control and limit the ecosystem damages using science-based methods, knowledge production and monitoring. they have failed to restore the ecosystem health, nor they have been able to detect the fish deaths that occurred and were identified by the local subsistence fishermen both in 2010 and 2011. the key question explored in this paper is related to the need of an improved management of watersheds in the case of an industrial discharge. more specifically, i explore, what are the possibilities that finnish local knowledge embedded in oral histories can provide as a source of information both on current events and as a baseline material for restoration actions? secondly, in light of international scholarship, what are the needs and advantages for a collaborative management of jukajoki? fennia 191: 2 (2013) 77oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration theoretical framework this paper explores models and differing geographical discourses of time and space in the context of watershed restoration and recovery from peat production and other watershed damage, such as ditch drainage (tanskanen 2000). theoretically emphasis will be on introducing unorthodox methods (berkes 1999; berkes 2012) and knowledge production regimes (see on the need of a grounded approach ingold 2000, 2004; martinez 2011; mustonen 2012a) in the context of addressing damages of peat production. i am arguing that by using integrated ecosystem management, and more specifically processes leading to ecosystembased fisheries management (ebfm) with a strong local knowledge focus possibly more successful conservation and restoration results can be achieved than single-focus site-specific actions in restoration1. this builds on the ideas and approaches developed by berkes (1999; carlsson & berkes 2005; berkes 2012; berkes & ross 2013). the village landscape of selkie is the product of interaction of humans and nature and has been designated as a national landscape by the government of finland in 2000. first records of inhabitants are from 1500s, but pre-historic sámi population utilized the area prior to this time (selkien kyläyhdistys 2004: 112, see on the toponymic sámi place names of eastern finland in aikio 2007, 2012). geomorphologically the soil is filled with phyllites extending to the lake pyhäselkä in the west. in these phyllites there are large concentrations of iron that affects the colour of the minerals. these phyllites indicate that the soil has been affected by lack of oxygen on a former seabed roughly 2000 million years ago. sulphur and iron play dominant part in the jukajoki soil phyllites and are the root cause for the high presence of iron in the discharge waters from the peat production sites (nykänen 1971; pekkarinen 1979; kesola 1998; lehtinen et al. 1998). west of jukajoki valley there are sand dunes of moraine as a result of the last ice age. the glaciers flowed lastly in northwest-southeast direction, which is the predominant positioning of water bodies within the territory of selkie village (lyytikäinen 1982; kesola 1998). in finland the role and use of local knowledge is emerging (mustonen 2009; mustonen 2012a) as a field of practice, and it is connected to the debates regarding the arctic (stammler 2005; watson & huntington 2008) and indigenous sámi knowledge (helander 1999; lehtinen 2011; mustonen 2012b). hence it refers also to the finnish local communities and to their subsistence activities (luotonen 2006; mustonen 2009). here subsistence means fisheries, hunting, gathering and other such uses of renewable resources from a watershed that is not done for professional or monetary gain, rather for complementary and cultural purposes. in the context of discontinued traditions of eastern finland and north karelia, a more proper term than traditional knowledge is local ecological knowledge (luotonen 2006) – here referring to those individuals that are living and habiting sites of change and who have capacities for ecosystem observations and interpretations. however this local ecological knowledge in north karelia is not limited to a set of technical observations of birds, fish, landscapes, mires and so on. individuals and families who have habited local communities in karelia from pre-industrial times and are still involved in subsistence activities, such as berrypicking, fisheries, hunting, mushroom gathering and other practices continue to possess deeper readings and discourses of this place. luotonen (2006: 204−222) provides a groundbreaking reading of a coastal finnish local knowledge and the multi-dimensionality of selkämeri region as a lived landscape3 (ingold 2000, 2004). there is a difference between documented knowledge and oral histories. it can be summarized by saying that living oral histories (burch 1991; macdonald 2000; eicken 2010; mustonen 2012a) as opposed to documented local knowledge are communal exercises– the people themselves provide the oral matrix and transfer of knowledge that is needed to understand the wider spectrum of multi-faceted and multi-dimensional lived knowledge. such an act leads to an authentic representation of local community epistemologies as opposed to anecdotes, which often have been taken out of context in the documented local ecological knowledge materials. macdonald (2000) provides a convincing case of a long-running community based oral history archive and its contextual advantages from the community of igloolik, nunavut, canada. oral histories by the communities themselves are currently largely missing from the assessments of ecosystem change and their meanings (burch 1991; mustonen 2012a). toponymic and placename knowledge as a social-ecological source of information is central to this local knowledge ma78 fennia 191: 2 (2013)tero mustonen trix (mustonen 2009). for the case here, the example provided by macdonald (2000) is appropriate – the uses of the watersheds by the local populations in rural finland are to a large extent invisible in decision-making and analysis. according to martinez (2011) such oral histories provide important knowledge of what has changed and how in the context of ecological restoration. oral histories are always the product of human agency, with their flaws, faults and other possibilities for misinformation, either intentional or unintentional. however, as burch (1991) and macdonald (2000) remind us, potential for a more wide understanding of social-ecological systems (berkes & ross 2013) is possible, if the oral histories are done with the people, as opposed to treating the locals as informants or passive targets of scholarly action. long-term residence in the community from which the oral histories emerge also grounds them into a reflective process over several years. currently the human uses of the watershed of jukajoki are to a large extent uncoordinated – they are simultaneous and layered4, some zoning on regional scale directs the process, but specifics, both from the community and ecosystem perspectives are missing5. this contributes negatively to the social-ecological systems (berkes & ross 2013) in the area. a possible solution to this can be found from the recent scholarship on joint stewardship of natural resources. while recognizing the faultlines and emerging practices of models of collaborative management of natural resources (howitt 2001; carlsson & berkes 2005; berkes 2012), especially land use and fisheries will be introduced from theoretical viewpoint and compared with the situation on the ground. more specifically the paper argues that the linear science-based readings of time and space connected with established means of watershed restoration do not address the local context adequately. rather the local knowledge embedded in the residents of the watershed, if properly and respectfully investigated, can produce non-euclidean time-spaces (massey 2005, 2009) which will widen the scope, means and substance of watershed and ecosystem restoration efforts. massey (2009) makes the case for a new understanding of open, unbounded place, such as quantum animisms6. bridging tools can be found from the co-management regimes (carlsson & berkes 2005) that take both kinds of time-space processes into account. in terms of methodology and fieldwork thirtyfive oral histories were collected in the watershed of jukajoki over a two-year period from autumn 2010 to november 2012. the age group included people from their 30s to their 80s. the interviews were conceptualized around themes related to the affected watershed and human histories around it, but allowing the interviewees to steer the conversations in the preferred direction. one-to-one interviews were paralleled with mid-size group sessions of about 5−12 people (hunters, fishermen) and larger-scale communal events with over 40 people (4 sessions). the oral history collection is a part of a larger, multi-year scientific study and restoration efforts of the watershed. four selected documented narratives of oral histories will be used in this article to support case-relevant observations and community views. they have been chosen as a sample because they provide narratives of traditional fisheries, ecological change and past baselines, connections with the landscape through myriad ways and lastly, opinions that are supportive of a collaborative management as a solution to the contemporary crises. subsistence fishermen and their oral histories were instrumental in identifying the problems caused by the peat production in the first case. to summarize, these four interviews that were chosen as themes of the research come visible both in the articulation of oral history and the individuals being able to illustrate the watershed condition and impacts well, in a historical-traditional continuum. gender balance was proportionate with a slight emphasis on male respondents. interviews were documented using digital recorders, transcribed in finnish, returned to the interviewed person for a review and then stored at the snowchange oral history archive, which is a community-based node of oral histories from the boreal and arctic subsistence communities of eurasia. the paper is driven by auto-ethnographical research as the author is the head of the community of selkie. this village together with alavi, the second settlement in the watershed, leads the post-peat production restoration work in the watershed. the position of a researcher as both an actor and an analyser of events has its pros and cons. an insider view provides better access to the events and materials but also produces biases and “blindness” to issues at hand. the author is aware of these problems and has tried to identify them through this inquiry and avoid pitfalls created by such a process. berkes (2012) while exploring marine fisheries calls for a widespread reform of natural resource fennia 191: 2 (2013) 79oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration management in the context of rapid ecosystem change. he (2012: 466) argues that ecosystembased management (ebm) approach involves and includes a holistic view of managing resources in the context of their environment (see also howitt 2001; pretty 2011). it contains a consideration of habitat issues and system resilience. by identifying gaps in case studies around the world (mostly in oceanic ecosystems), berkes (2012: 466−468) emphasizes that ecosystem-based fisheries management (ebfm) based solely on fisheries biological science captures only one slice of the ebm pie. a broad ecosystem-based approach that includes social as well as ecological considerations has been identified as a “social-ecological system” (berkes 2012: 466−468; berkes & ross 2013), which manifests as a complex adaptive system that includes social (human) and ecological (biophysical) subsystems in a two-way feedback relationship (see also mustonen 2012a). in short a socialecological system perspective is a major departure from the conventional view in rural finland. in the context of finnish resource governance, new approaches are urgently needed as the previous models of using natural and raw materials have proved to be socially and ecologically unsustainable (for example on hydroelectric power, see mustonen et al. 2010; mustonen 2012b). of course equity and power problems associated with natural resources production have a global reach too (howitt 2001; pretty 2011). in the finnish (non-sámi) context it is well known that the business as usual, for the most part, has wrecked the natural habitats and left the local communities, some of which also embrace largescale natural resources production, without a voice. local environmental knowledge as a key source of additional and non-euclidean knowledge regarding ecosystem change can be identified as a remedy for this context. integrated ecosystem management, with a strong emphasis on fisheries7 and realized through a possible co-management regime (carlsson & berkes 2005) may prove to be a crucial new step in the emerging field of ecosystem restoration (martinez 2011). it can combine the oral histories of the affected people (mustonen 2012a) as a valid source of pre-use ecosystem characteristics8. oral histories of living people are relevant, because as opposed to archival materials, they are a part of the agency in the watershed – actors with an active role and interest in restoration processes. the overwhelming size and speed of mire-marshland territory extraction within the last 60 years (tanskanen 2000) provides possibilities of baseline information to be gathered from those who lived and used the little-disturbed watersheds prior to their alterations. berkes (2012: 470) argues that the system change, whether in terms of climate or ecosystems, requires us to address management in a whole new context of principles. the transformation from management into governance has to include a set of tools to be successful. he identifies amongst some co-management or sharing of resource use power, in some cases also adaptive comanagement, which would mean an on going, self-organised, dynamic process. social learning, inclusive management and integrative science have been established decades ago as valid approaches to the emerging new natural conditions, but interestingly enough berkes suggests clumsy solutions, more specifically defined as “exploratory solutions that include inputs from a broad range of stakeholders along the fishing chain and require information-sharing, knowledge synthesis and trust-building” (2012: 470). these unexpected, “fuzzy” solutions may provide new avenues for ecosystem stewardship, which berkes identifies as being a “strategy to respond to and shape socialecological systems under conditions of uncertainty and change to sustain the supply and opportunities for use of ecosystem services to support human well-being” (2012: 470). in the context of jukajoki watershed, both the special natural conditions (acidic soils, phyllites) combined with severe ecosystem damages resulting from drainage of wetlands, peat production, ditches, clear cuts, extractive soil enterprises, human-altered water bodies and infrastructure construction over a period of a relatively short time (50 years) produce a context where extraordinary and new mechanisms of ecosystem restoration are needed. established, institutionalized land management and uses cannot provide sufficient answers any more. in this article the role of fisheries plays a crucial role as the fish have been an indicator of ecosystem degradation in 2010−2011, and a source of local knowledge for the people in the surrounding communities. ecosystem-based fisheries management is therefore both needed and may provide new ground for restorative work in the watershed. berkes (2012: 473) argues that ebfm is revolutionary because it would involve dealing with multiple disciplines, scales and objectives simultaneously. addressing ebfm would 80 fennia 191: 2 (2013)tero mustonen offer the possibilities to expand management into a notion of governance that includes cooperative, multilevel approaches involving partnerships, social learning and knowledge co-production. so if local knowledge is an important source of management in the case of jukajoki watershed and it receives a full expression through the various oral histories from the communities, where does this lead us in terms of governing the river? the answer lies potentially in the role of collaborative management of resources which has been defined for example as follows: • co-management is a situation in which two or more social actors negotiate, define and guarantee amongst themselves a fair sharing of the management functions, entitlements and responsibilities of a given territory, area or set of natural resources. • co-management of common-pool resources, such as fisheries and forests, are depicted as some kind of power-sharing arrangements between the state and a community of resource users. • collaborative management, co-management, is defined as the sharing of power and responsibility between the government and local resource users. • co-management is a situation in which two or more social actors negotiate, define and guarantee amongst themselves a fair sharing of the management functions, entitlements and responsibilities of a given territory, area or a set of natural resources. • it is an association of co-management with natural resources management: co-management as a partnership between public and private actors. co-management is not a fixed state but a process that takes place along a continuum. (adapted from carlsson & berkes 2005: 65−66, see also berkes & ross 2013) from this set of definitions we can say that comanagement is therefore an approach to governance. it is a form of governance that, if properly designed, addresses the concerns identified by ettlinger (2011) and foucault (2005) with the notions of governance, governmentality and (ab)uses9 of power. carlsson and berkes (2005: 65) identify that “communities” and “the state” have many faces. most importantly, they feel these actors need to concentrate on the function, not on the formal structure of a system. optimistically carlsson and berkes (2005: 66) see management as a right to regulate internal use patterns and transform the resource by making improvements. in the finnish context of state dominance and abuse of power in resource management (for example mustonen et al. 2010) the co-management regime is a new concept. only recently some initiatives have begun to emerge, for example in the case of the sámi people and the hammastunturi wilderness area in lapland. however while consultation and participation have been guaranteed in the environmental impact assessments and hearings regarding various scales of resource exploitation in finland, no meaningful power sharing or local contextualisation has taken place (luotonen 2006; mustonen 2012a, 2012b). carlsson and berkes (2005: 66−67) identify the type of agency with which arrangements are made to be usually agency with jurisdiction over an area (usually a state agency) and local communities. communities are rarely “coherent and homogenous units” (ibid.). they are constantly changing and they are multidimensional, cross-scale social-political units. in terms of investigations of time-space, they may contain and produce non-euclidean narratives of a place (massey 2005, 2009; luotonen 2006; mustonen 2009; ettlinger 2011). carlsson and berkes (2005: 66−67) interpret comanagement as a continuum from the simple exchange of information to formal partnership. it supposes that parties have agreed on an arrangement, but the actual arrangement often evolves. they (2005: 67−68) emphasize that it is a dynamic and iterative system, a process which is constantly re-adjusted because ecosystems and how they respond to resource exploitation may be highly unpredictable. according to them “command-and-control kind of resource management is a poor fit for ecological uncertainty…nature is seldom linear.”(2005: 67, 68) hence “the evolution of co-management networks is the substantial result of ongoing processes of problem-solving.” (2005: 74). lastly, according to pinkerton (1989 in carlsson & berkes 2005: 71), there are an identifiable number of tasks for a well-functioning co-management, which should include: 1. data gathering 2. logistical decisions: who harvests and where 3. allocation decisions 4. protection of resource from environmental damage 5. enforcement of regulations 6. enhancement of long-term planning 7. more inclusive decision-making in addition i propose also new steps and methods in ecosystem and watershed-based restoration work. in the context of jukajoki it is hard to establish a baseline view of the former fennia 191: 2 (2013) 81oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration healthy ecosystem and of the human interaction as we do have only limited written materials from the region from 1930s onwards. on the other hand we have plenty of texts regarding finnish tradition and regional history from 1500s onwards (locally see selkien kyläyhdistys 2004; for north karelia, see mustonen 2009). a successful combination of both written and oral histories combined with the innovative, “clumsy” approaches suggested by berkes (2012) may provide new avenues of improving this social-ecological system of jukajoki. as martinez (2011) proposes we need alternative baseline assessments in the context of determining the scope, extent and aims of ecosystem restoration work. firstly, old photographs of the area, and in some cases old maps, may prove to be crucial in determining the situation of low or no disturbance on the river (ibid.). secondly, a method which is applied in this paper, the role of documented oral histories as a (re)source of landscape restoration should not be underestimated (martinez 2011). ecological restoration in the context of severe damage such as in jukajoki and jukajärvi watersheds demands a range of innovative, extraordinary and unconventional methods (berkes 2012) in addition to more mundane technical solutions. oral histories can help us determine what has changed. they act as a crucial source of complimentary, and in some cases, primary vehicles of trying to determine the extent of change. oral histories can also provide investigations into why certain change happens, and what can be done to address change. lastly they may, if we are open to radical and differing geographical time-space discourses (massey 2005; mustonen 2009, 2012a), provide unique non-euclidean views on a place (ingold 2000, 2004; sheridan & longboat 2006; massey 2009). most importantly, in the context of this paper, the role of these lived oral histories provides evidence and targets for watershed restoration work as limited written records hinder a baseline assessment. oral history can also provide a qualitative and rooted aim of a restoration work (martinez 2011), meaning that it identifies the most important factors that need to be aimed at during such a process. therefore the oral histories, if they get expressed in culturally-appropriate ways, may be avenues of social change in a context where local voices otherwise are dismissed in natural resources and land use debates. four rivers across time and in time – results from the oral history work the 35 collected oral histories over 2010−2012 identify a large corpus of observations, themes, traditions, counter-narratives and opinions regarding the jukajoki and jukajärvi watersheds. for the purposes of this article only small segments of the cultural texts from the villages of selkie and alavi have been chosen from the corpus10. more precisely the oral histories here consist mainly of four narrative texts11. integrated ecosystem view has been applied, which means all human uses as well as natural processes of a watershed have been surveyed. both written communal texts (selkien kyläyhdistys 2004) as well as oral histories have been employed. toponymic and place-name knowledge of the chosen people is used to demonstrate the quality and scale of local knowledge contents, but a full portrayal of this theme awaits future publication. the oral history materials which have been collected during the fieldwork as well as the communal written texts and histories related to selkie (palomäki 1960; selkien kyläyhdistys 2004) portray three “rivers” across time with a fourth reading as an emerging, non-euclidean time-spaces (mustonen 2009) of the river. in short they are “jukajoki in sámi times” [from time immemorial to the closure of pre-history in linear time, roughly 1500s], “jukajoki as a savo-karelian river” [from 1500s of first written records through dispelling of karelians in 1640s to 1940s], “jukajoki as a damaged river” [from 1940s to 2010s], and lastly, partially sitting outside these readings, “jukajoki as a dream river” [communal oral history from 1930s through to future, with prophetic and non-euclidean time-space qualities]. jukajoki in sámi times we can characterise the jukajoki watershed in sámi times as having a very low human impact (selkien kyläyhdistys 2004). the siidas12 (aikio 1992; helander 1999; mustonen & mustonen 2011; aikio 2012) of those sámi nations13 that used and occupied the watershed as a part of their hunting and fishing seasonal cycles are reflected in the regional place-name knowledge, such as in toponyms as “eno” [a big river/rapids] (aikio 2007; vesajoki & pihlatie 2011; aikio 2012) along the 82 fennia 191: 2 (2013)tero mustonen pielisjoki watershed adjacent to jukajoki. most likely these communities were connected with the lake pielisjärvi siida communities (mustonen & mustonen 2011). by 1500s, sámi people living in these communities were either driven further north, assimilated to the arriving karelians or disappeared for other reasons from the watershed (selkien kyläyhdistys 2004; aikio 2012). this manifestation of the jukajoki watershed social-ecological system can be characterized as having low human impact and fairly natural ecosystem health in this understanding of the landscape. jukajoki as a savo-karelian river first written records locate the village of selkie on maps around 1500s when the habitants belonged to karelian culture (for summary of settlement histories see selkien kyläyhdistys 2004; saloheimo 2010). the river was harvested for lake-bound atlantic salmon and other fishes and the meadows along the shores of the river were most likely important source of natural hay. information about the land use and occupancy of these people remain vague, even though we do know some details of specific houses thanks to taxation sources. in mid-1600s the karelians were driven out, or according to some materials, left willingly, to other parts of russian empire [namely to tver region] before the advancement of savo-karelian peoples from the west who belonged into the lutheran religion attached to the swedish crown (saloheimo 2010). this expansion was driven by slash-andburn agriculture called kaski, which required roughly one hectare of land per year per family for this style of farming. fishing, gathering and hunting economies remained strong alongside foods acquired through farming. small mills existed along the river jukajoki (selkien kyläyhdistys 2004). meadowlands along the rivers were used according to family territorial use – this system had characteristics of seasonal transhumance even though the village was the primary place of habitation (snowchange selkie oral history tape 300810). characteristics of local ecological knowledge of these peoples were rooted in the tradition of the area. the key person in the community to possess otherworldly and cosmological information was the tietäjä, “he who knows” (mustonen 2009). “power of nature flowed through him” has been one oral history by which such people were described in the north karelian communities (ibid.). as our focus is on the wetland uses of the area of jukajoki, the oral histories of an 80-year-old male describe the mires in the following: “the mires were far wetter before. it caused the lake great damages when the ditches were made and mires drained to the lake – these waters went straight into the lake. it caused great damages. they used to be cloudberry mires, and we of course went there constantly.”14 (snowchange alavi oral history archive 171012) jukajärvi lake and jukajoki were sources of lake iron in the late 19th century, more precisely the activity started in 1860−62. this iron oxide was produced into iron in the region. it is mostly located in 1−3 m depth. all ore was taken by hand. on jukajoki river a small smelter produced chunks of iron from the natural ore. its capacity was for approximately 1020 kg of ore in 24 hours. iron was mostly used to make everyday items for the small farms in the region. in 1862 in total 42500 kg of iron was produced but already in 1865 the amounts went down to 3400 kg. this enterprise was discontinued in 1865 (selkien kyläyhdistys 2004: 21). fisheries have been and continue to be a crucial subsistence activity in the watershed. in earlier times they provided food security for the communities and even today remain a source of cultural and subsistence harvest. the land-locked atlantic salmon came up the jukajoki river in 1930s, providing to be a key indicator of a healthy river (snowchange selkie oral history tape 300810; vesajoki & pihlatie 2011). hydroelectric power stations and subsequent ecological damage has discontinued these habitats (vesajoki & pihlatie 2011). oral histories from an 80-year-old man on lake jukajärvi provide a view to the fisheries in 1930s and 1940s: “i have memories being 10-years old fishing with my grandfather, the father of my father…he used to walk to the lake with a walking stick and i was the rower. my cousin was there and my little sister liisa, always were together…we made the nets ourselves. the spawning times of bream [lat. abramis brama] was our main fishery prior to midsummer and at the time of midsummer the big breams came to spawn close to the shore and then we got them. two-three kilogram fish. our neighbour made so-called ancient fish traps from strips of pinewood. spawning times of the fish were known well, smaller bream spawned prior to midsummer and on midsummer the big breams fennia 191: 2 (2013) 83oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration started to spawn…when we got the big breams our boat bottom was covered with them, we never had to go to fish and return empty-handed, i do not recall we ever came back empty-handed.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 171012) the savo-karelian times along the river started to display impacts from the human uses, but both oral histories and written texts (palomäki 1960) indicate that this level of disturbance remained fairly low or took place in the context of subsistence farming, fisheries and small-scale harvest of timber. iron harvest towards the end of 19th century represents one of the first larger-scale harvests of natural resources from the watershed. but things were about to change towards the end of 1930s and 1940s with the ww2 looming on the horizon. in terms of socio-ecological system there was a great shift in late 1940s when families arrived from the ceded karelia after the continuation war and were re-settled along the jukajoki river (palomäki 1960). they cleared new fields and farm sites from the forests in the watershed. then in 1959 the local farmers with state agencies supporting them decided to lower the water levels on lake jukajärvi for the third time. the purpose of the act was to receive new farmlands from the emerging lake bottom. this was partially successful. however the process had great consequences for the whole watershed below jukajärvi. also impacts to the fishery in the lake and river were tremendous. it is clearly a key marker in the past 100 years in the ecosystem. subsistence fishermen resisted this draining of lakes as is evident from one oral history by a male, 80 years old: “a piece of paper was circulated in the village where you had to sign your agreement, indicating that you approve of the draining of the lake. i recall my father and a certain vartiainen…they did not sign the paper even though they went through whole village all the way to pyhäselkä to collect signatures…there was a need for farmland then. that was the primary reason and it caused benefits to a certain family, they could now make a new road that they could use. they had to travel through the forests prior to the road. those that signed the letter approved of it. my father and vartiainen did not protest further but they refused to sign this letter, as they were suspecting that there would be no more fish in the lake as a result. the people from the villages of heinävaara, särkivaara and alavi approved it and then they made needed changes to the river jukajoki, digging the river up and so forth… and then the waters started to move, it was wintertime. ice was left on air as more water was drowned out from the lake than was planned…we went to see it and wondered… it caused negative changes as the shoreline we used to have was real good and it was wrecked… at first it was ok, but then water plants and mud arrived to the shores and you could not swim there…fish disappeared completely after the draining. i do not know if they went to river pielisjoki or where…slowly they started to make a comeback and new stocks were brought also from small lakes from heinävaara, mostly perch and roach which was caught by the local fishermen with a fish trap and brought here…” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 171012) breams15 which were introduced to the lake after the 1959 draining have started to reproduce rapidly, as is evident in the observations made by one subsistence fisherman, 58-year-old from alavi: “those that are still trying to catch bream have noticed it has become really small. when the lake lost its fish it was a great mistake then to reintroduce bream there in those numbers as the lake is so eutrophic that it is an ideal environment for the bream.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) place names and toponymic knowledge along the watersheds was still mostly in its oral form. they reflected the savo-karelian land use and seasonal rounds, where hunting, gathering and fisheries formed crucial subsistence activities. they were recorded on finnish maps by the state cartographers in the 20th century. these toponyms provide crucial indicators of ecosystem health when combined with the oral histories. as an example of such a process two place names are discussed here. “hirviniemi” means “moose cape”, an area through which the moose crossed the lake jukajärvi on their way to their winter pastures – a cycle that had been in place most likely since post-glacial times. information about this toponym is provided in the narrative of a subsistence fisherman, 58-year-old from alavi: “hirviniemi…when i moved here there used to be a lot of moose here on the move as there was very little human habitation on the opposite shore. the lake used to have a real strong bottom here and it could hold the weight of a moose. in summertime large herds crossed here too. i could see them when they came and ate and then they went over to the särkivaara area. they fed themselves here, large herds. but then when human habitation increased on the cape the natural crossing point was abandoned. now they have to go around the lake, 84 fennia 191: 2 (2013)tero mustonen and cross the road to ilomantsi, which means a lot of car crashes on the road. there is a tremendous amount of moose tracks here and territories where there is food, food for them and peace. these are good wintering grounds for them. around mire valkeasuo they had an aerial surveys for herds and they could spot 200 moose at once on these wintering areas. and towards riuttavaara it is a good area for calving too.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) further north as a part of this hunting-gathering subsistence economy the toponym “linnunsuo” [marsh of the bird] had been allocated to a marshland, which is situated along the jukajoki river and adjacent watershed. this toponym is based on the central role of capercaillie (lat. tetrao urogallus) and black grouse (lat. lyrurus tetrix) in the subsistence hunting complex16 (berkes 2009) for the villages of the region. a famous ethnographer r.e. nirvi who worked in the villages in early 20th century documented that in the local dialect the marsh was called “linnonsuo” (nirvi 1974: 977). the marshland was a crucial moose hunting and berrypicking area too (snowchange selkie oral history archive 2010−2012). nirvi also confirms the locals considered this place to be a crucial berrypicking area (nirvi 1974: 977). this area was wrecked by the peat production started in 1970s and 1980s (vesajoki & pihlatie 2011; vapo 2012). we can establish that the end of the period for jukajoki as a savo-karelian river took place around 1930s. jukajoki as a damaged river due to the massive changes in society ushered in by the war and subsequent state-sponsored industrial land use projects from 1940s to 1990s (tanskanen 2000), the jukajoki also was impacted by these developments. most of the mires were drained, amount of discharge from ditches for forestry altered water quality and peat production changed whole water regimes on linnunsuo mire. additional impacts came from the hydroelectric stations that were constructed along the river pielisjoki (vesajoki & pihlatie 2011). as a result, the time when it was still possible to fish atlantic salmon and trout along the river came to an end. in the 2000s the state-owned energy company vapo produced peat in the former mire of linnunsuo. on 17th july 2010 a local subsistence fisherman living in tiittala [a part of village of selkie], along jukajoki observed four dead fish floating down the river (snowchange selkie oral history archive 220710). observation was made three km downstream from the vapo production site. on 18th july 2010 far more dead fish were seen and a large flock of seagulls flying back and forth along the river, eating the dead fish. the acidic discharges from the production site killed all the fish in the river downstream from the vapo site both in 2010 and 2011. these damages bypassed the monitoring regimes of the company and the state environmental authorities. the local knowledge of the fishermen still made relevant observations, 50 years into the large-scale alteration of landscapes and watershed by humans. case samples of the oral histories from this period illustrate the scope and quality of knowledge today. how do the people living in the contemporary times conceptualize this watershed and how are skills learned? answers can be sought from an oral history of a 58-year-old fisherman: “we fished for burbot a lot, also with fish traps actively. we tried those old spots harvested by the old people, we asked where they had been fishing.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) this excerpt from the oral history account is relevant for a number of reasons. the finnish communities and peoples have often been identified as having lost their traditions through the modernisation process in our country (mustonen 2009). here something remains. first off, the people are still targeting a non-game species, the burbot using fish traps. secondly they are harvesting spots passed on from the “old people” and they have actively sought these spots and sources of oral knowledge themselves. as long as the subsistence activities, such as fishing persist, so do remnants of the larger body of local knowledge. building on this surviving body of knowledge, emerging observations of ecosystem health can be gathered. for example a 58-year-old fisherman shares his observations about the lake jukajärvi. the lake suffers from the discharge of organic matter from several dozen forestry ditches: “in the deep spots and on the edge of the deep people have tried to fish and have noticed that there seems to be a lack of oxygen in the winter, not even pike perch persists there. in the summertime the nets become so slimy that i do not really have an interest to fish there anymore.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) fennia 191: 2 (2013) 85oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration another excerpt by him addressed the discharges from the drained mires and their impact on lake jukajärvi, portraying the baseline information that martinez (2011) supports too: “i am wondering as i used to set nets here on my shore, perhaps ten years ago, i was using nets which were at least two meters tall. now there is not even that much water there, perhaps one meter twenty centimetres.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) the same fisherman, known for his skills in the community of alavi, commented on bream in his narrative: “then it is a time when the bays are sloshing when big bream fish come to spawn, they are midsummer bream, it comes around both sides of midsummer. the water temperature affects it and also air needs to be still and hot, over 25 °c. when the air is still you can see their fins. there is not a lot of bream and when nets become dirty so easily we do not fish them so much.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) this narrative is relevant for a number of reasons. again, traditional calendar built around bream spawning times and harvests seems to have been passed on from the people who mastered it in the 1930s (see snowchange alavi oral history archive 171012) despite the modernization process. secondly the knowledge contains information about seasonal marker (midsummer), water temperature (over 25 °c, in finnish helle) and wind (it needs to be still). lastly optic history17 is used to confirm that the big bream fish enter the bays (“you can see their fins”). during the times of damaged watershed another human impact was restocking. a male fisherman in his 60s observed that: “until 2008 or 2009 and when pikeperch started to flourish in the lake due to restocking, we used to fish with winter nets in the deep parts of the lake…across the deep part. then we started to wonder as the nets were three meters tall and in the lower part, perhaps for a half a meter or a meter, a brown rust colour emerged. we could not wash it off with anything. usually we checked nets once a week and if there was a pikeperch on the lower part of the net and it had gone into the bottom mud its gills and mouth were filled with this rust goo.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 130912) in this narrative fisherman has identified the restocking as a source of subsistence fishery. he continued the winter net fishing and made observations of the deep part of the lake, more specifically about a phenomenon of emerging goo from the deep. it had impacted pikeperch caught in the nets. regarding other species, observations of birds can be seen in the following narrative by a male, 58 years old: “i went to the shore where the pier is and duck had ducklings there, eight of them. swans, usually two pairs. there was a crane and a swan nests close to each other here in the bay of iso rapalahti. but some autumns ago swans stopped here on the bay and i am not lying, they must have been in their thousands...the bay was all white. last autumn this was not the case however.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) some of the fishermen along the watershed have observed events and phenomena that they cannot explain easily, as is the case in a narrative told by a fisherman in his 60s: “i went to fish towards kissapuro creek and it was a still morning. to my big surprise i heard kind of splashing, water splashes, and i was thinking it must be breams spawning. then i rowed closer and i noticed that a bay covered with weeds and grasses produced these great bubbles of air.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 130912) in this oral history fisherman is visiting an area he knows well. sounds are heard and he positions them to the seasonal event for the bream spawning. to his surprise this is not the case, as it is unexplainable bubbles emerging from the lake bottom to the surface. the polluted waters contrast with the memories from the deep knowledge of a cleaner watershed. the surviving local knowledge systems act as a pool of self-reflection too. an 80-year-old fisherman, who also worked as a farmer from the 1940s to 2010s, says regarding the draining of mires and creation of ditches that: “i believe some kind of a matter has flowed from the forests, and i have to confess that i have played a part in it too myself…as the waters have flowed through my fields and we have used fertilizers to make them fertile. these fertilizers are accumulating and start to grow hay on the lakeshores, and then waves bring these substances to the shores… it was not there when i was a child…it used to be clear sandy beaches, now there is soft and muddy 86 fennia 191: 2 (2013)tero mustonen materials in meters at the bottom, in my shore over four meters deep, they say those researchers who have made drilling samples there.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 171012) this part has focused on surviving elements of local knowledge in the context of jukajoki as a damaged river and watershed from 1930s to 2010s. subsistence fishermen continue to make observations that have relevance for the whole river and lake. they also observe throughout their fishing areas anomalies like the lack of oxygen, presence of iron, and unexplainable chemical processes in the form of bubbles. lastly those in the community who lived through the state-sponsored alteration campaigns of ecosystems, especially mire drainages, reflect on the damages and position themselves as a part of the problem, admitting that mistakes were made. jukajoki as a dream river three readings of rivers embedded in the local knowledge have been identified and categorized according to the amount of human impacts the watershed has received. lastly, an element of the local ecological knowledge that contains multiple “time-spaces” is explored. during the oral history documentation work some of the older ladies (in their 70s to 80s) in the villages were interviewed. these women from the lake and riverside spoke openly about what has been called with various terms, including “sacred”, “hidden” or “mystical” elements that local knowledge may have. for example the role of dreams as an information tool to know about things to come is central to this process. sheridan and longboat (2006) as representatives of indigenous societies have ventured the furthest in academic literature and made the claim that instead of forming “socio-ecological systems”, those humans with rooted connections with their home areas belong to those places – meaning there are connections that exist beyond the euclidean (ettlinger 2011) readings of time and space. such elements are present in one oral history we recorded in late summer 2010 when the damages were most pronounced. this older woman from the village of selkie is known in the region for her knowledge of the local tradition. she fished for salmon as a young girl with her father in 1930s. through 1930s to 1950s she was able to meet and listen to the oral knowledge from one of the last publicly known tietäjä, a spiritual person of selkie, who lived in palovaara. she told me18: i was remembering jukajoki and all those experiences that came to my mind, and then i saw this dream the other night, and in this dream we were walking along the river…it was on the meadow [next to the river], to the right at the bridge, towards river pielisjoki. i do not remember who was with me. perhaps my father or someone else. the meadow had turned into humus, turned upside down, it was no longer a meadow. and this river jukajoki was as narrow as it is today for a stretch of one kilometre. but [the river] was filled up with soil or with some kind of mud which had dried up there. all of a sudden the river widened up into its former width and there was a sandy bottom– though no water at all. and in such form it flowed to the river pielisjoki. i remember also in the dream that i became so glad when i saw that there was sand and that the river is wide again; i gave a shout in the dream, that there is sand here! and thus it ended. (snowchange selkie oral history archive 300810) while the more specific meanings of this event will remain within the community, what is noteworthy is that as this oral history demonstrates the people and the river have very sensitive and intimate connections that can manifest as dreams. the old woman sees the different stages of life of the river from the salmon stream, through the damages of today into things that are perhaps yet to come, a sandy, wide, healthy river. such power stories of intimate connections that local people may have demonstrated that their knowledge is not only a set of observations. instead it can be read as a wide-ranging “cosmovision” where past, present and possible futures create non-euclidean (ettlinger 2011) renderings of time-spaces that need to be assessed carefully and within their cultural matrixes. conclusions integrated ecosystem management in heavily damaged post-industrial watersheds in finland through co-management lastly the questions of management of the watershed were explored in the corpus of the 35 oral histories collected between 2010 and 2012. local people of alavi and selkie have witnessed, as is evident, the events, which have happened, they have been involved in some of them through workforce (snowchange alavi oral history archive 171012) or instigators of change (ibid.) as is the case with lowering the waterlevels of lake jufennia 191: 2 (2013) 87oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration kajärvi. they have also witnessed impacts from imposed industrial uses of land as is the case of fish deaths as a result of peat production. how do they then think of “integrated ecosystem management” in heavily damaged areas in their own terms? in those oral histories that are presented here, answers range from a set of technical-land use decisions into governance. the former is present in the narrative of a male, 58 years, from alavi: “in my view it would be most important to tackle the existing ditches that have been done back in the old days, the forest and mire draining, they should be the target of the first set of actions. there should be proper dam structures and lessening of water flow to the extent that that organic matter, the solid matter in the flow, would stay in the pools of the dams…regarding the field zones, there should be protective zones that are mandatory today, the pressure coming from the watershed to the lakes should be fixed, and then we could start to consider the water levels, dredging and cutting hay, and fishing for ´coarse fish’, if there was a need, and that is about all there is to it…” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612) in this view the local man positioned the role of surrounding watershed as a primary target of restorative actions prior to actions on the lake and river itself. instalment of dams to control the organic and solid matters flowing from the ditches and the proper zones to the fields could control the damages according to him. dredging and other management options on the lake would only come later. in another narrative a male subsistence fisherman in his 60s linked governance (ettlinger 2011) to the responsibility that both society and the local communities have: “around the lake there are several villages and joint management would presuppose good and clear cooperation between these communities… perhaps if there was a joint cooperative body to which representatives of different villages would be chosen to…i do not know what such governance would mean to us if it became…but at least it would mean that this [cooperative body] would collect information and observations about the lake and would see a range of uses and values for the lake…a joint land ownership…what would be the economic building blocks for such a thing or to a governance…it is a process we ought to consider and think about. but all in all the future of the lake depends on funds from society at large to repair this lake, because those that have caused all of this remain active in the watershed and society has received funds through their activities, such as through forestry…a joint responsibility should be clear in the sense that the impacts are taken care of too, all of what they have caused. it is almost the same, we can compare this to the large sawmill sites in north karelia or former gas stations…in those locations the environment was totally ruined due to the company and what they did, so in fact it is the society that has to pay for these impacts. we can make a direct comparison to here, this environment has been heavily used and we can see the impacts here, i cannot believe the local people would have the financial resources to correct these results by themselves.” (snowchange alavi oral history archive 130912) in this oral history there are several key concepts that link almost precisely to the definitions of a co-management regime proposed by carlsson and berkes (2005). firstly the person identifies the need of the villages to be in close proximity to each other. secondly he drafts an organ that would be a joint representative body in a future arrangement for cooperative management. however he has no experiences from such events so he is not yet quite sure what does it mean but at least it should collect “information and observations”, referring to both science and local knowledge of oral histories. lastly the person identifies responsibilities, saying that the local people cannot possess resources for the damages caused by the industrial activities. carlsson and berkes (2005) identified the comanagement of a given territory as a power-sharing arrangement. berkes (2012) while discussing fisheries called for “fuzzy” and “clumsy” solutions on the basis that ecosystem change, including impacts of climate change (arctic council 2005), require us to think outside the box. the local oral histories collected from the local people in the empirical materials link autonomously similar needs for the jukajoki watershed and go on to identify how it should be organised and providing mandates for local knowledge observations to be included in the valid sources of decisions regarding this area. they reposition a village as an actor regarding its lands, manifesting traditional governance through possible co-management arrangements. importantly enough such proposals emerge from the oral histories of people living in ecosystems, or socio-ecological systems that have been affected by a full range of modern and industrial activities, causing severe damages. it means that 88 fennia 191: 2 (2013)tero mustonen the communal arrangements and knowledge regarding the watershed has lasted through the various stages of this process and are re-emerging, again strengthening the argument for non-euclidian readings of time-space if viewed from the grassroots subsistence level. discussion the purpose of the paper was to explore (mis-) management in the context of severe ecosystem damage on the river jukajärvi and adjacent watershed. more specifically, questions emerged on what are the possibilities that finnish local knowledge embedded in oral histories can provide as a source of information both on current events and as a baseline material for restoration actions? secondly, in the light of international scholarship, what are the needs and advantages for a collaborative management of jukajoki? this article has explored local oral histories and selected communal written texts and their role in the severely damaged watershed of jukajoki [and adjacent lake jukajärvi watershed] located in kontiolahti and joensuu municipalities, north karelia, finland. all in all 35 narratives were collected 2010−2012. four narratives have been presented in this paper as an example of the materials. empirical materials have been analysed using the framework of both integrated ecosystem management and co-management proposed by carlsson and berkes (2005) and berkes (2012). three readings of the river jukajoki and the adjacent watershed emerged from the materials – sámi times, savo-karelian times and times of damages, or the industrial age on the river. in the case of jukajoki, the local knowledge played a crucial role in detecting fish death, and as the oral and optic histories were documented between 2010−2012 many additional observations on health of watershed were discovered. it provided information about pre-industrial fisheries, fish ecology and behaviour and bird habitats. the oral histories contain non-euclidean, or specific categories and ways of discussing the area and species. such cultural texts range from spawning times of bream fish as an indicator of lake use into intimate, mystical connections in dreams regarding the river. these are, as indigenous scholars have proposed (sheridan & longboat 2006) as an intimate interconnection between nature and rooted human societies possibly extending beyond notions of social-ecological systems (berkes & ross 2013). empirical oral histories also conceptualized collaborative management with a formal role of local ecological knowledge as a future management option for the jukajoki watershed. watershed restoration and baseline information it needs benefits greatly from the oral histories recorded with people who still remember pre-industrial and pre-war ecosystems and their qualities, as suggested by martinez (2011). the current times with multiple, layered interests for the area of the watershed need to be coordinated better to avoid further damages, and collaborative management could be developed to achieve that goal. berkes (1999, 2012) highlights local or traditional knowledge as being a crucial basis for such systems of collaborative management and inclusion of a larger knowledge base in fisheries. many of the examples he draws on such as sub-arctic canada (ibid. 1999), marine fisheries and tropical regions discuss mostly indigenous populations which position their knowledges in a marked difference with the mainstream or state expert knowledge. often also the land base and uses of these communities differ from the mainstream society. in the case of eastern finland, exportability issue emerges while applying the frameworks of berkes (1999) and colleagues (carlsson & berkes 2012). the ownership of land, composition and role of kylä -communities in rural finland and the invisibility of subsistence and even commercial fisheries (mustonen 2009) practices in relationship to the state decision making provide an exciting, emerging inquiry filled with tensions, expectations and possibilities20. for the future, next steps of investigating the role and scales of local knowledge in jukajoki point to a need of a land use and occupancy mapping, as this could be a potential tool to bring forwards the “unseen” realities from ground up. while maps are always limited, two-tothree dimensional representations of a much wider multi-dimensional reality, they are a tool that administrators and companies understand. lastly the use of oral histories may (macdonald 2000) provide us with radically new and relevant readings of nature and human societies, which allow more sustainable societies to emerge. for eastern finland, this potential should be explored in a systematic manner for a wide range of communities engaged in subsistence uses of land. as a resident of the jukajoki watershed, the oral history and ecological restoration work along the river and fennia 191: 2 (2013) 89oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration lake has been a tremendous journey into a landscape pulsating with lived (ingold 2000) stories, human experiences and our living tradition, so often pronounced dead. notes 1 majority of watershed and post-peat production restorative actions in finland rest on natural sciences-based options. see e.g. pellikka (2001). 2 this document, a village book, contains both summaries of scientific studies of the natural conditions in selkie, as well as stories, reflections, poems and songs written by the villagers. the latter group represent ”communal texts” – materials authored by the residents in the village. 3 this statement emphasizes the need to experience, with various senses, the places of dwelling and occupancy as opposed to seeing them as linear timespaces. 4 to name a few overlapping processes, a copper and gold mine exploration licence has been provided on an area that contains protected areas, fisheries, forestry zones, a village habitation of heinävaara, hunting territories, a railroad and so on. furthermore, all industrial uses of the land are built on rather euclidean notions of time-space. 5 priority, in the form of publicity, public support and infrastructure is given often to large-scale natural resources extraction land uses over other activities in north karelia. 6 here the non-euclidean space refers to multiple, culturally-grounded understandings of places in space, which are not bound (massey 2009). they may manifest in and through dream experiences, altered states of consciousness, long-term experiences with a river through fisheries and so on. most importantly, they put the emphasis on the groundedness of the human experience of space (ingold 2004). i am arguing that the local oral histories focusing on relationships with watersheds from on-going village life in eastern finland is to a large extent unexplored, exciting representation of a time-space that needs to be further investigated. it contains continuums of tradition in the middle of lost traditions of finnish society, such as the role of dreams in connection with a landscape. 7 both commercial and subsistence in the case of jukajoki. 8 other innovative materials can include old maps, aerial and other photographs, written historical narratives, catch records or diary entries. in finland the ecological restoration plans tend to lead towards natural sciences with oral histories dismissed as ”anecdotes” or supplementary data (see mustonen et al. 2010). 9 use and/or abuse of power depends on the point of view. those in power, when using it, may produce results in the targets of power, if this relationship is asymmetrical and without checks and balances. the local communities in rural finland have very little possibilities to contribute to uses of power within village territories (kylä), as there is no legal context for it. villages are only represented through third sector associations. 10 the full oral history corpus regarding jukajärvi and jukajoki watersheds is located at the snowchange oral history archive, www.snowchange.org as well as the affected individuals. all in all the corpus contains over 1,000 pages of documented oral histories from july 2010 to december 2012. cultural texts here include oral histories, diary entries from the villages, written lay texts and other narratives, which emerge in the local context and community. 11 they have been qualitatively chosen based on the information related to past fisheries and tradition, relationship with landscape and watershed and lastly, thoughts for the better management of the ecosystem. this choice reflects the role martinez (2011) puts on those oral histories, which are relevant for a comprehensive ecosystem assessment, leading to restoration. these texts are not exhaustive, others could have been chosen. 12 siidas were and to certain extent still are the sámi indigenous tribal communities prior to large-scale colonial influences. they had specific territories, and governance bodies, such as the eastern sámi sobbar village council. 13 aikio (1992) makes the case of multiple sami ”nations” in this part of finland – however, no historical records exist to confirm or deny this claim. if compared with other existing, specific sami peoples, it seems clear that ”nations” could exists side-by-side within a fairly small territorial base, see more for eastern sámi siidas in mustonen and mustonen (2011). 14 the oral histories are available as transscripts and and audio tapes from the author in finnish. 15 the finnish local fisheries are organised as osakaskunta – local fisheries bodies consisting of local people who can decide issues related to permits and stocking, for the most part. they have very limited powers. 16 knowledge-practice-belief complex as defined by berkes (1999). however the questions of belief aspect of the knowledge apparatus require further research in the eastern finnish communities and await future research. 17 optic histories are an exciting and emerging field of engagement with subsistence and other fishermen on their observations of ecosystem change. mustonen and feodoroff (2013) provide a number of definitions and uses of the term – it refers to visually observed events narrated using oral history, but also to digital photos taken by practitioners themselves on their terms of change that they position as meaningful. ingold (2004) hints at this direction with the emphasis on felt and grounded experiences as a source of information. 18 i have reviewed the use of this sequence of her 90 fennia 191: 2 (2013)tero mustonen oral history in detail with her for public use several times and she has approved it, saying that it is important these issues are discussed too. 19 peat production, forestry and gravel companies. 20 in finland the role and scales of local knowledge embedded for example in fish harvest data is mostly located in the sámi areas. differences between local and indigenous knowledges in finland have been discussed in mustonen and feodoroff (2013). in short, the sámi knowledge contains elements of surviving ways of cosmologies and interactions with nature that have for the most part been broken in the finnish communities as communal exercises. to what extent such knowledge and practices can be revived, see more the conclusions section in mustonen (2009). acknowledgements this article has been made possible by the turvetuotanto ja vesistövaikutusten hallinta: relevanteista faktoista tehokkaisiin normeihin/water management and peat production: from the relevant facts to effective norms (wapeat) (suomen akatemian hanke 263465) project. i am thankful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided crucial comments to the manuscript. i am also thankful to dennis martinez, kaisu mustonen, ari lehtinen, hilkka heinonen, john macdonald, pirkko and veikko siltala, leena leskinen and terho törrönen as well as all the interviewed people for their helpful contributions to the framing and writing of the text. references oral sources file snowchange selkie oral history archive 220710. male, age 50 years. file snowchange selkie oral history tape 300810. female, age 80 years. file snowchange alavi oral history archive 220612. male, age 58 years. file snowchange alavi oral history archive 130912. male, in his 60s. file snowchange alavi oral history archive 171012. male, 80 years. martinez d 2011. head of the indigenous peoples ecological restoration network. interview, 25th september, 2011. sevettijärvi, finland. written sources aikio s 1992. olbmot ovdal min – samiid historja 1700-logu radjai. ohcejohka, girjegiisa. aikio a 2007. the study of saami substrate toponyms in finland. in pitkänen r & saarikivi j (eds). the borrowing of place-names in the uralic languages. onomastica uralica 4, 159−197. debrecen, helsinki. aikio a 2012. an essay on saami ethnolinguistic prehistory. in grünthal r & kallio p (eds). a linguistic map of prehistoric northern europe. suomalaisugrilainen seura, helsinki. arctic council 2005. arctic climate impact assessment. <http://www.acia.uaf.edu> 19.10.2013. berkes f 1999. sacred ecology – traditional ecological knowledge and resource management. taylor & francis, philadelphia. berkes f 2012. implementing ecosystem-based management: evolution or revolution? fish and fisheries 13, 465−476. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.14672979.2011.00452.x. berkes f & ross h 2013. community resilience: toward an integrated approach. society & natural resources: an international journal 26: 1, 5−20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2012.73660 5. burch e 1991. from skeptic to believer: the making of an oral historian. alaska history 6: 1 16. carlsson l & berkes f 2005. co-management: concepts and methodological implications. journal of environmental management 75, 65−76. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.jenvman.2004.11.008. eicken h 2010. indigenous knowledge and sea ice science: what can we learn from indigenous ice users? in krupnik i, aporta c, gearheard s, laidler g & holm l. siku: knowing our ice – documenting inuit sea-ice knowledge and use, 357-376. springer, new york. ettlinger n 2011. governmentality as epistemology. annals of association of american geographers 101: 3, 537-560. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080% 2f00045608.2010.544962. foucault m 2005. tiedon arkeologia [l’archéologie du savoir]. vastapaino, tampere. helander e 1999. sámi subsistence activities: spatial aspects and structuration. acta borealia 2, 7–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f08003839908580495. howitt r 2001. rethinking resource management: justice, sustainability and indigenous peoples. routledge, london. ingold t 2000. the perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. routledge, london. ingold t 2004. culture on the ground: the world perceived through the feet. journal of material culture 9, 135. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183504046896. kesola r 1998. suomen geologinen kartta 1: 100000, lehti 4242 eno. enon kartta-alueen kallioperä. geologian tutkimuslaitos. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 91oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration lehtinen a 2011. from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi ‘geographs’ and the promise of concenctric geographies. fennia 189: 2, 14–30. lehtinen m, nurmi p & rämö t 1998. suomen kallioperä – 3000 vuosimiljoonaa. suomen geologinen seura, jyväskylä. luotonen e 2006. vapaa-ajan kalastajan oura. in häyrynen m, luotonen e, mustalampi e & bruk e 2006. tuntematon saaristo – selkämeren saariston eletty maisema, 204-222. otava, helsinki. lyytikäinen a 1982. pohjois-karjalan harjumaiseman kehitys sekä nykyisen tilan ja maankäytön yleispiirteet. valtakunnallinen harjututkimus, raportti 22, joensuu. macdonald j 2000. the arctic sky – inuit astronomy, starlore and legend. royal ontario museum, toronto. massey d 2005. for space. sage, london. massey d 2009. the possibilities of a politics of place beyond place? a conversation with doreen massey. scottish geographical journal 125: 3−4, 4 0 1 − 4 2 0 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 % 2f14702540903364443. mustonen t 2009. karhun väen ajast-aikojen avartuva avara. university of joensuu press, joensuu. mustonen t, mustonen k, aikio a & aikio p 2010. drowning reindeer, drowning homes – indigenous sámi and hydroelectricity in sompio, finland. snowchange cooperative, kontiolahti. mustonen t & mustonen k 2011. eastern sámi atlas. snowchange cooperative, kontiolahti. mustonen t 2012a. rebirth of indigenous arctic nations and polar resource management: critical perspectives from siberia and sámi areas of finland. biodiversity 14: 1, 19-27, http://dx.doi.org/1 0.1080/14888386.2012.725652, 2012. mustonen t 2012b. kohti saamelaistutkimuksen uutta tulkintakehystä. in lehtola v-p, piela u & snellman h. saamenmaa – kulttuuritieteellisiä näkökulmia, 254-264. sks, helsinki. mustonen t & feodoroff p 2013. ponoi and neiden collaborative management plan. snowchange cooperative, kontiolahti. nirvi r 1974. kiihtelysvaaran murteen sanakirja iv. joensuu: karjalaisen kulttuurin edistamissäätiö. nykänen o 1971. suomen geologinen kartta 1: 100000, lehti 4241 kiihtelysvaara. geologian tutkimuslaitos. palomäki m 1960. post-war pioneering in finland with a special reference to the role of the settlement areas. in smeds h (ed). three faces of finland – guidebooks prepared for the three finnish excursions at the xix international geographical congress. fennia 84, 43-68. finnish geographical society, helsinki. pekkarinen l 1979. the karelian formations and their depositional basement in the kiihtelysvaara-värtsilä area, east finland. geological survey of finland, bulletin 331. pellikka p 2001. suopohjat kierrätykseen – mitä tehdä vanhoilla turvetuotantoalueilla? suo 52: 2, 75−77. pinkerton e 1989. cooperative management of local fisheries, new directions for improvement, management and community development. ubc press, vancouver. pretty j 2011. interdisciplinary progress in approaches to address social-ecological and ecocultural systems. environmental conservation 38: 2, 127– 1 3 9 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 7 % 2 fs0376892910000937. saloheimo v 2010. selkien vuodinjako 1774. in mustonen t (ed). selkien perinteestä ja luonnosta, 11-16. selkien kyläyhdistys, selkie. selkien kyläyhdistys 2004. selkie – kulttuurikylä. jyväskylä. sheridan j & longboat rd 2006. the haudenosaunee imagination and the ecology of the sacred. space and culture 9: 4, 365–381. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f1206331206292503. stammler f 2005. reindeer nomads meet the market: culture, property and globalisation at the ‘end of the land’. lit verlag, berlin. tanskanen m 2000. näkyvän takana – tutkimus metsäojitetun suomaiseman kulttuurisuudesta. joensuun yliopisto, joensuu. vapo 2012. peat production on sulfide soil. case linnunsuo in eastern finland. in geological survey of finland. 7th international acid sulfate soil conference. towards harmony between land use and the environment. proceedings volume. vaasa. vesajoki h & pihlatie m 2011. pielisjoki – elämän virta, stream of life. hyvinkää. watson a & huntington h 2008. they’re here – i can feel them: the epistemic spaces of indigenous and western knowledges. social & cultural geography 9: 3, 257–281. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080% 2f14649360801990488. studying brownfields: governmentality, the post-political, or non-essential materialism? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70295 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70295 studying brownfields: governmentality, the post-political, or non-essentialist materialism? william conroy conroy, w. (2018) studying brownfields: governmentality, the postpolitical, or non-essential materialism? fennia 196(2) 204–214. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.70295 this paper sets out to evaluate several common theoretical frameworks employed in critical studies of brownfield redevelopment. specifically, it analyzes the relevance of governmentality, the post-political, and non-essentialist materialism in that context. to do so, it explores how these theoretical frameworks map on to bridgeport, connecticut’s bgreen 2020, and its approach to the redevelopment of vacant and underutilized land – and brownfields more specifically. it argues that these frameworks come up short when applied to this empirical case because they put forth untenable ontological claims regarding the constitution of the subject and political agency. going further, it asserts that these frameworks fail to identify a way forward for those seeking emancipatory political interventions in the context of brownfield redevelopment and urban environmental politics. in closing this paper suggests that jason w. moore's recent writing on “capitalism as world-ecology” can provide a way forward where these other frameworks fail. keywords: brownfields, world-ecology, governmentality, post-political, new materialism william conroy, independent researcher. e-mail: william.conroy.93@gmail.com introduction when one thinks of urban environmental contamination and brownfields in the united states, connecticut – the country’s wealthiest state by per capita income (kuriloff & martin 2015) – is almost certainly not the first place to come to mind. further still, fairfield county, connecticut, which recently included the single wealthiest metropolitan area in the country (bertrand 2014), is even less likely to be considered. however, despite this impression, fairfield county was also recently named the most unequal metropolitan area in the united states (ibid.). and, the city of bridgeport – fairfield county’s largest urban center – is home to enclaves of deep post-industrial decline just miles from the geographic epicenter of american finance capital (moran 2013). in fact, the city in many ways demonstrates the (so-called) “moral economy” upon which american racial capitalism operates (buna & wang 2018); some have called the city the “dumping ground” of the state (knapp 2008), while others have dubbed it the fourth “dirtiest” city in the nation (forbes 2012). as such, brownfields – or, properties, “the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant” (epa 2016) – are central to bridgeport’s environmental and economic concerns. their emergence largely dates back to the 1970s, when the city experienced a major decline in its industrial sector – which only deepened in the 1980s, when the city lost half of its manufacturing jobs (knapp © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70295 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70295 fennia 196(2) (2018) 205william conroy 2008). de-industrialization triggered a wave of racialized abandonment (“white flight”) and disinvestment (carpenter 2006), and left a trail of brownfields in its wake. according to recent reports, the city still has 772 acres (or, about 312 hectares) of brownfields, which disproportionately burden low income and minority communities (bgreen 2020 2010). in light of this, bridgeport’s local government launched a program in 2010, known as bgreen 2020, partly as an attempt to rebrand the city’s vacant and underutilized land – and, as such, its brownfields – as potential sites of “green” investment and accumulation (cf. kern 2015). therefore, when given a closer look, bridgeport seems to provide fertile ground for the study of brownfield redevelopment. however, significant debate remains within the critical geography and brownfield literature surrounding the most appropriate theoretical framework to employ when studying the material and discursive nature of neoliberal brownfield redevelopment (see, for broader context, latour 2004; smith 2005). as such, this paper will draw on a close reading of bridgeport’s land use agenda under bgreen 2020 to see how several of the most prominent theoretical frameworks map on to this empirical case. specifically, it will read for the ways in which brownfields are discussed – both implicitly and explicitly – throughout the bgreen 2020 sustainability plan and its companion documents, attending closely to the plan’s subsection titled “greenfields and green wheels,” which deals directly with “vacant and underutilized” land. then, this article will consider this empirical material in relation to the conceptual heuristics provided by work on governmentality, the post-political, and nonessentialist materialism. ultimately, it will suggest that each of these theoretical frameworks comes up short in their analysis of bgreen 2020 because they put forth untenable ontological claims regarding the constitution of the subject and political agency – which also limits their relevance for future emancipatory political projects. in closing, the paper will offer a brief discussion of how emerging work in “world-ecology” might provide more sound theoretical ground for the analysis of neoliberal brownfield redevelopment – and provide a way forward for anti-racist, post-capitalist, and feminist urban environmental politics. before we proceed, however, we should underscore two caveats that inform and guide this paper. first, this paper will address each of the aforementioned theoretical approaches as a discrete body of thought – exploring, specifically, how they have appeared in work on urban land and brownfields, and generally ignoring the many ways in which these frameworks have been thought together. and yet, despite its ostensible tension with recent calls for “a multiplicity of [theoretical] starting points” within urban studies, this paper will also remain “stubbornly” attentive to the distinct ways in which each of these “local epistemologies” allows us to understand brownfield redevelopment in bridgeport – avoiding, as much as possible, “polemical procedures and defensive rhetorical maneuvers” (brenner 2018, 573–584). second, this paper will focus predominantly on the negative aspects of bgreen 2020’s brownfield agenda, generally ignoring the plan’s nods to more “community-oriented” modes of redevelopment related to affordable housing and urban agriculture, for instance. to do so, of course, is not to suggest individual nefariousness – or that urban planning in bridgeport necessarily rearticulates an ideology of neoliberal space (gunder 2010). however, following the critical literature on brownfields, it is to suggest that bgreen 2020 is grounded by logics that inhibit its capacity to introduce the “non-reformist reforms” that the current conjuncture demands. a note on theory in order to develop the argument laid out above, it is important to first outline the key theoretical frameworks that have been employed in recent scholarship on brownfield redevelopment. governmentality, to begin with, has been applied in a wide range of work on brownfields and environmental gentrification (e.g. brand 2007; leffers & ballamingie 2013). developed by michel foucault in the late 1970s (foucault 1991), governmentality “denotes the micropolitical practices through which a governing agency conditions people to act in specific ways and through which people govern themselves” (mcconnell 2012, 78). this concept extends the notion of government by moving it beyond the “top-down” coercive work of institutions, so as to include the work done by discourses, norms, and other forms of internalized disciplinary self-regulation (ferguson & gupta 2002). therefore, for those that employ a governmentality perspective in the brownfield literature, power is no longer 206 fennia 196(2) (2018)reviews and essays seen as centralized or solely emanating from the “state” or “capital” (murdoch 2004; rutherford 2007). much of this literature notes how power/knowledge creates “regimes of truth” related to brownfields, which variously shape subjectivities and the ways in which the world is known (atkinson 1999). in doing so, this approach stresses an understanding of the “productive” dimensions of brownfield governance (rutland & aylett 2008; cochran 2012). as such, the governmentality perspective makes several provocative claims regarding the constitution of the subject and political agency, which are of central importance for the study of brownfield redevelopment. for one, it sees the production of the subject as inextricably bound to processes of biopower and governmental rationality. in fact, the concept of governmentality links “technologies of the self with technologies of domination, [and] the constitution of the subject to the formation of the state” (lemke 2000, 3). therefore, with a governmentality perspective nearly any aspect of one’s subjectivity can be read as the “cooperation of [that] subject to the goals of governance” (cf. lemos & agrawal 2006, 311). this seemingly collapses any separation between agency and subjectification in the context of brownfield redevelopment and urban environmental management (brand 2007). taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests that any subversive or emancipatory act in the context of brownfield politics cannot be outside of “power itself” (butler 1990, 29). therefore, new urban spatialities are understood to emerge via “citational practices which produce and subvert discourse and knowledge” (gregson & rose 2000, 433). in addition, much of the recent critical brownfield literature draws on the work of post-marxist scholarship on the post-political (cf. checker 2011). following thinkers such as rancière, badiou, and žižek, these writers argue that due to the hegemony of techno-managerial and consensual forms of neoliberal governance, recent years have seen the foreclosure of political dissensus (swyngedouw 2009). they claim that under the prevailing post-political order, environmental problems, including brownfield redevelopment, are all handled in the same way (swyngedouw 2009; ioris 2013). for many, this represents the dominance of “the police” – or the established socio-environmental order – over the “distribution” of names, functions, and places (dikeç 2005, 175). these thinkers assert that a truly political gesture in the context of brownfield redevelopment is that which poses a rupture in the police order by the “part who have no part” – a previously unidentifiable subjectivity – according to the “logic of equality” (may 2007). they maintain that a “properly political” gesture is always a potentiality in the context of brownfield redevelopment, because the police is never able to fully “suture” social space (dikeç 2005); but, they often contend that such a gesture remains unforeseeable, and only recognizable in retrospect (badiou 2006). in this writing on the post-political, the notion of the subject and political agency is somewhat ambiguous. for those that draw on rancière, the subject is never fully constituted by discursive power (swyngedouw 2009). instead, political subjectivity is understood in relation to the contingent “distribution, or partitioning, of the sensible” (dikeç 2012, 82). because the subject is not fully constituted by hegemonic discourses, these writers are able to maintain a notion of political agency that is premised on the ability of a collectivity of subjects to introduce a radical rupture in the police order (rancière 2004). however, for those that draw on chantal mouffe, another thinker that is highly influential for the post-political paradigm, the subject cannot exist outside of authoritarian discourse (mouffe 1999). she asserts that “the master signifier” always distorts the “symbolic field…[and] curves its space” (ibid., 751). however, because she claims that “both the subject and society are constituted through [lacan’s] lack” (homer 2005, 114), the possibility of antagonistic political articulations remains “ever present” (mouffe 2005, 17). finally, recent writing on brownfield redevelopment has drawn on what can be heuristically referred to as non-essentialist materialism (e.g. kern 2015). drawing on thinkers like haraway (1991), deleuze and guattari (1987), and latour (2000), this work rejects “arborescent” thinking – with its binary structures – and, in its place, puts forth a “rhizomatic” ontology that sees all beings on the same plane (deleuze & guattari 1987; latham et al. 2009). as such, non-essentialist materialists see brownfields as the “contingent outcome of [human and non-human] practices or performances” (anderson & braun 2008, xv). these thinkers are often eager to employ the notion of agencement to illustrate the constant “coming together” and becoming of humans and non-humans, and their collective ability “to cause effects” in the context of brownfields (hinchliffe & whatmore 2006; anderson & braun 2008, fennia 196(2) (2018) 207william conroy xv). and, in doing so, non-essentialist materialists are keen to illustrate how “non-human nature resists its incorporation into particular political-economic and spatial forms” (braun 2008, 668), with case studies focusing on both agricultural and urban land (cf. bryson 2013; li 2014). of course, this framework also poses several challenging claims regarding subjectivity and political agency for brownfield scholarship. this thinking attempts to unsettle the subject/object binary so that the subject is seen to exist only in relational terms and through heterogeneous assemblages (st. pierre 2013). in addition, this thinking moves away from an understanding of political agency as “something possessed” by an “intentional human subject” and toward an understanding that sees it as a temporary achievement gained through the interaction of human and non-human collectivities (lorimer 2007, 913). given this distributed notion of subjectivity and agency, “proper” political action in the context of brownfield redevelopment is generally presented as that which attends to the “multiplicity of more-than-human inhabitants” at any given site (whatmore 2006). this is a politics of accommodation to always-emerging difference, which is attuned to the notion that a “political actor” does not simply “decide” to live convivially, but does so through a multiplicity of socio-material assemblages (lorimer 2008; chilvers & kearnes 2015). brownfield redevelopment and bgreen 2020 in light of the brief introduction to bridgeport’s brownfields above, and the subsequent note on theory, we can now turn to an in-depth look at the city’s recently developed and implemented agenda for the redevelopment of vacant and underutilized land – and brownfields more specifically. as noted, this agenda was introduced in 2010 in the city’s bgreen 2020 inaugural planning document, which outlined a 10-year sustainability plan for bridgeport across a range of “environmental” sectors.1 two key components of bgreen 2020 will be presented below, which relate to brownfield redevelopment. these include the plan’s focus on deepened private sector engagement in vacant and underutilized land redevelopment, and its emphasis on increasing the city’s “perceived livability” – and amenability to private investment – via knowledge production and subject formation. first, the city’s emphasis on deepened private sector engagement in urban environmental governance is clear throughout bgreen 2020, and its approach to land redevelopment. in fact, private sector partners developed most of the bgreen 2020 sustainability plan itself; the plan is the “result of a public-private partnership between the city of bridgeport and the bridgeport regional business council, a consortium of local business groups” (bgreen 2020 2010, 16). and, the organizational structure established to define the plan’s various policy strategies contained a wide range of private sector populated technical subcommittees. for instance, roughly half of the members within the greenfields and green wheels subcommittee, which oversaw the development of bgreen 2020’s land use interventions, were private sector representatives (bgreen 2020 appendices 2010). further still, under bgreen 2020 the city has indicated a strong interest in redeveloping vacant and underutilized sites for “class a” private sector partners – or “prestigious” tenets willing to pay above-average rents (bgreen 2020 progress report 2013). generally, this seems to illustrate an ambition to partner with major financial services corporations (bgreen 2020 2010, 28); and, in addition to such office conversions, public investment in brownfield redevelopment is presented as a means to incentivize profitable ventures in housing, retail, and even tourism, as illustrated by the plan’s celebration of the steelpointe harbor redevelopment (ibid., 14–15; de avila 2014). relatedly, the bgreen 2020 land use redevelopment agenda places noteworthy emphasis on increasing the city’s “perceived livability” among potential private sector investors (bgreen 2020 2010, 28). in this register, the plan identifies the importance of producing capital-friendly knowledge regarding the city’s land in order to “facilitate redevelopment to the highest and best use” (ibid., 27). one tool identified to facilitate this knowledge production is gis, to map parcels and take account of known environmental factors that might inhibit – or enhance – future accumulation. this technology is understood to allow “every interested party and municipal planning department” the ability to make “informed decisions regarding a particular site’s…development and development costs” (ibid., 27). following the implementation of bgreen 2020 in 2010, first steps toward these modes of “optimized data” production were introduced, so as to contribute to more effective “capital planning” – and city 208 fennia 196(2) (2018)reviews and essays branding (bgreen 2020 progress report 2013). in fact, such technologies were used to monitor local level “sustainability projects,” broadly understood under bgreen 2020 as central to the promotion of the city to private sector investors in the urban land market (ibid.). finally, the creation of a new “environmental” subjectivity is also identified as necessary under bgreen 2020 – no doubt intersecting with the plan’s land use agenda, and its interest in increasing the city’s perceived livability and environmental ethos. with this view, the production of such a subjectivity – particularly in low income and minority communities – is linked to efforts to attract private investment in the city’s vacant and underutilized land, and attempts to attract “middle-class residents” (bgreen 2020 2010, 6). in a somewhat cynical register, it is possible to read this process of (undoubtedly racialized) subjectification in the city’s conservation corps, an organization that promotes the internalization of effective strategies for sustainability; though, without a doubt, this program also intends to produce a host of other, more socially just outcomes (ibid., 40). here, it is useful to note that the city’s writing on the conservation corps – and other, comparable initiatives – often slips between the language of environmental education and promotional marketing. “[s] ustainability education and youth engagement opportunities” are positioned within the broader “bgreen brand…[which aims to] attract residents and employers” to bridgeport’s neighborhoods (bgreen 2020 2010, 41). put differently, it is possible to read these nominally “green” educational initiatives as attempting to create subjects that are not only “environmentally aware,” but “unified” in their vision of bridgeport’s “sustainable” future, and attractive in a land market that is driven by racialized biopolitical capital (ibid., 6). making sense of bgreen 2020 thus, bgreen 2020’s brownfield agenda – read, albeit, somewhat indirectly through its broad discussion of vacant and underutilized land – illustrates both the relevance and limitations of the dominant theoretical approaches employed in the brownfield literature. to begin with, bridgeport’s land use redevelopment strategy under bgreen 2020 illustrates some of the useful insights provided by a foucauldian governmentality perspective. the program’s planning documents alone clearly demonstrate a desire to construct a regime of truth in which bridgeport’s relative poverty is seen in isolation, rather than in reference to the political-economic structures – such as racialized post-fordist economic restructuring – that have played a large role in the production of vacant and underutilized land since the 1970s. as a governmentality perspective would expect, the city seems to combine power/knowledge and subject formation in order to pursue “urban corporatization” under bgreen 2020, which is (arguably) most clearly seen in its use of the conservation corps. in a sense, such practices also illustrate the ostensibly “productive” dimension of governmentality, as they generate new forms of knowing and being. however, while these efforts at knowledge production and subject formation under bgreen 2020 give some credence to the governmentality perspective, they also illustrate the limits of this theory and its ontological foundations. given governmentality’s general reluctance to identify causal structures, this theoretical lens is ultimately unable to identify why such knowledge and subjectivities are being produced in bridgeport. in part, a governmentality approach is lacking here because (broadly speaking) its notion of the subject and political agency is discursive “all the way down.” therefore, the common sense ideologies expressed in bgreen 2020 regarding private sector engagement and subject formation can only be read as the result of myriad “cultural inscriptions and habitual practices,” seemingly “abstracted from social, spatial, and economic production” (houston & pulido 2002, 404). in contrast to a governmentality reading, a thorough review of bgreen 2020 seems to suggest that the common sense articulations embedded in this program emanate from the very material and racial logics of (biopolitical production and) capital accumulation. notably, bgreen 2020 primarily seems interested in opening up “arenas to [racialized] private capital accumulation and exchange value considerations,” which, given the ideological hegemony of capital, are presented as common sense by city planners (gramsci 1996; harvey 2014, 23). the post-political lens also proves to be limited when applied to the case of brownfield redevelopment under bgreen 2020, given its ontological claims regarding the subject and political fennia 196(2) (2018) 209william conroy agency. specifically, its limitations are in its inability to guide future emancipatory political action, rather than in its analysis of the redevelopment program itself. in fact, this lens is quite useful for recognizing that bgreen 2020 – with its deep emphasis on private-sector engagement – illustrates an attempt to foreclose dissensus in the context of land redevelopment. it helps to illuminate that this shift toward private sector engagement enables the suturing of potential urban commons. however, this lens fails to provide a way forward for those that desire a just urban commons, rather than an urban landscape defined by the “closed spaces of malls, freeways, and gated communities” (hardt 1998, 141). this is because the post-political literature tends to understand political agency as illustrated either by an unforeseeable and momentary rupture in the police order, or by an antagonistic articulation in the context of (always) provisional hegemony. and, given the depth of the post-political condition in bridgeport, such formulations seem insufficient. instead, the issue of brownfield redevelopment in bridgeport demonstrates the need for modes of political subjectification and political agency that can function as motors for “transformation and duration” (cf. hardt 2011, 676, emphasis added). finally, a close reading of bgreen 2020 is also not very sympathetic to understandings of brownfield redevelopment that draw on non-essentialist materialism. of course, the bgreen 2020 program forces us to recognize that the materiality of brownfield sites matters, and that non-human actants are constitutive of capital accumulation, knowledge production, and other “fundamentally social” activities, which complicates liberal notions of subjectivity and agency. this is evident in the context of the plan’s gis initiatives, which seek to catalog the “materiality” of potential redevelopment sites, and to identify the opportunities and barriers to profitability and accumulation that they present. still, despite what many non-essentialist materialists would suggest, this insight only gets us so far in reference to the bgreen 2020 literature – suggesting that an understanding of vacant land and brownfield redevelopment in bridgeport depends on more than a recognition of human/non-human relationality. in fact, while it remains clear from bgreen 2020 that human subjectivity is “always within, and dialectically bound to, nature as a whole,” it also seems clear that brownfield redevelopment in bridgeport should not be understood according to the theoretical lexicon of “generalized symmetry” (moore 2013, 4). put differently, the non-essentialist materialist lens proves to maintain relatively little analytical purchase for addressing questions of power and political agency in the context of bridgeport’s brownfields (for context, see escobar 2008, 130). clearly, in bridgeport some actants – namely, white private sector stakeholders – hold much more sway in brownfield redevelopment – and land use generally – and are able to delineate the boundaries of certain assemblages. however, the flat ontology of non-essentialist materialism fails to provide the grammar for a historically grounded causal analysis that accounts for these differentials in political power, or their positionality in the broader cartography of global capitalism (fine 2005). moreover, this approach proves to be relatively silent on bridgeport’s place in the increasingly unequal production of urban space over the past 40 years (lefebvre 1991), and on the racialized nature of bgreen 2020’s new subject forming efforts, which seek to create subjects that will encourage white middle-class consumption (cf. brahinsky et al. 2014; dillon 2014). without a means to analyze these questions of power and political agency, this approach’s calls for openness to immanence, fluidity, and difference seem relatively futile. conclusion: brownfields and capitalism’s world-ecological contradictions so far, this paper has attempted to rise “from the abstract to the concrete” (marx 1857) to illustrate the limitations of several commonly employed theoretical perspectives in the brownfields literature: governmentality, the post-political, and non-essentialist materialism. it has done so by exploring how these approaches map on to the empirical case of bridgeport, connecticut’s bgreen 2020, and its (implicit as well as explicit) approach to vacant and underutilized land redevelopment – and brownfield redevelopment in particular. ultimately, through their application to this empirical case, these theoretical perspectives have come up short given their ontological claims regarding the constitution of the subject and political agency. therefore, going forward it will be necessary to reconsider the theoretical framework used to both analyze brownfield redevelopment in the neoliberal city, and to formulate the basis for an anti-racist, post-capitalist, and feminist urban environmental politics. 210 fennia 196(2) (2018)reviews and essays in light of this necessary reformulation, moore’s recent work on “capitalism as world-ecology” seems to be particularly useful (for an introduction, see moore 2015a). this may seem like an odd proposition to those broadly familiar with moore’s world-ecology framework. this is because moore has taken the development of capitalism over the longue durée as his primary empirical object of inquiry. and, he has taken as his primary theoretical foil, the latent “green arithmetic” found in marxian theories of metabolic rift. in doing so, he has explored the emergence of the ceaseless, planetary expansion of “relations of exploitation and appropriation” under capitalism. that is, the “historical and logical nonidentity between the value form and its necessarily more expansive value relations” (moore 2017a, 328) – as well as the problematique of “overproduction” (in fixed capital) and “underproduction” (in circulating capital) (moore 2015b, 12). further still, in a more explicitly philosophical register, moore has primarily worked to call into question a host of cartesian binaries so as to both understand capitalism’s “double internality” (moore 2014), and to explain what previous theorists have only presupposed: an ontology of “nature as external” (moore 2017b, 8). put differently, moore’s work has largely avoided those mundane issues of brownfield redevelopment and contemporary urban environmental governance – and, to a large extent, the three theoretical perspectives at issue in this paper. however, despite his ostensibly peripheral set of historical and theoretical concerns, moore’s writing on world-ecology has much to offer in relation to the ontological issues outlined throughout this paper – and, thus, to the study of brownfields. put bluntly, his primary assertion is that capitalism is not an economic system that acts upon an external “nature,” but is rather a “continually shifting dialectical unity of accumulation, power and appropriation within ‘the web of life’” (soper 2015). therefore, he argues that capitalism and capitalists emerge through the oikeia – used to name “the creative, historical, and dialectical relation between, and also always within, human and extra-human natures” (moore 2013, 2) – establishing a number of dialectical human/non-human “bundles” that enable accumulation, including the “bundles” of nature and society (moore 2013). he maintains – drawing heavily on the work of feminist and anti-racist critiques (e.g. fanon 1961; robinson 1983; mies 1986; federici 2012) – that capital not only extracts surplus value from labor but also necessarily appropriates the work of those (racialized and gendered actors) that it has historically relegated to the cartesian category of nature (moore 2017b). (here, world-ecology differs most significantly from those existing theoretical frameworks that understand brownfield redevelopment through institutional and network analysis (see doak & karadimitriou 2007a, 2007b).2) and, he notes that these processes of accumulation and appropriation are only possible with the help of new knowledges, subjectivities, and state formations (moore 2012). that is, he identifies the centrality of particular “state-capitalscience complexes” (moore 2015c, 22) to the extension of frontiers for capitalization and appropriation. in doing so, moore is able to resolve several of the key tensions that plague critical writing on brownfield redevelopment. unlike the governmentality perspective, he is able to provide a reading of brownfield knowledge production and racialized subject formation that recognizes capillary forms of power and modes of internalized disciplinary self-regulation, while also remaining aware of the repetitive material architecture – namely, the capitalist drive for profit – at the root of such projects. furthermore, he is able to account for the post-political condition of the neoliberal city – which emerges here largely as the result of capital’s historically contingent technics – while also providing an understanding of political subjectivity that is not limited to “the part who have no part” – including all those subjected to capital’s methods of exploitation and appropriation, within the web of life. finally, this framework enables us to reject the nature/society binary that many non-essentialist materialists are keen to reject in their brownfield writing, while also stressing that capitalism operates through, and depends upon, that “peculiarly modern” ontology. that is, while noting that this binary establishes “conditions for [the] revival of profitability” (moore 2011, 139), predicated on a racialized and gendered “logic of cheapening in an ethico-political sense” (moore 2018, 242). moreover, a world-ecological perspective also helps to address some of the problems that inevitably arise when one attempts to construct a radical urban environmental politics out of the theories outlined above. specifically, it leaves open the possibility of political action beyond citational gestures, momentary and unforeseeable ruptures, and empty claims regarding the construction of open and multi-natural assemblages. as noted, the world-ecology framework suggests a coalitional politics that includes all those subjected to capital’s methods of exploitation and appropriation, across the web of fennia 196(2) (2018) 211william conroy life – quite clearly gesturing toward the contours of a lasting, more-than-human, ontological politics “grounded in interdependence and solidarity rather than unidirectional management, ownership, or stewardship” (battistoni 2017, 7). further still, this perspective specifically suggests how such a politics might also be articulated in reference to the “state-capital-science” nexus, given its discursive and material role in the re-articulation of ontological cheapening; and, it does not simply take equality as axiomatic, but calls for a “new conception of wealth, in which equity and sustainability in the reproduction of life (of all life) is central” (moore 2016, 10). therefore, unlike governmentality, the post-political, and non-essentialist materialism, a world-ecological perspective explicitly leads us toward a brownfield politics – and, more broadly, an urban environmental politics – that poses a new vision outside of both capitalist valuation and cartesian dualism. in doing so, it demands new transformative modes of being in the web of life (moore 2016). notes 1 the city’s implementation of this program – based on available documentation – seems to have petered out since the mayoral election of joe ganim in 2015, given that it was a particular priority of the city’s former mayor, bill finch, who was in office from 2007–2015. 2 many thanks to an anonymous peer reviewer for drawing my attention to this literature. at its best, this work maintains a passing resemblance to moore’s. it understands the notion of “structure” as that which “potentially privileges ‘some actors, some identities, some strategies, some spatial and temporal horizons’ over others” while understanding that actors operate on this “differential privileging through ‘strategic-context’ analysis when undertaking a course of action” (jessop 2005 quoted in doak & karadimitriou 2007b, 214). nevertheless, this literature largely fails to attend to the racialized and gendered character of capital accumulation, and as such, is less fitting for brownfield analysis than moore’s framework. acknowledgements this article would not have been possible without the insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers, and the generous editorial support of kirsi pauliina kallio and hanna salo. all errors, of course, remain mine. references anderson, k. & braun, b. (2008) introduction. in anderson, k. & braun, b. (eds.) environment: critical essays in human geography, xi–xx. ashgate, london. atkinson, r. (1999) discourses of partnership and empowerment in contemporary british urban regeneration. urban studies 36(1) 59–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098993736 badiou, a. (2006) metapolitics. verso, london. bailey, h. (2015) where ‘brownfield’ is a pretty word for ‘toxic dump’. the atlantic 9.17.2015 <http:// w w w.theatlantic.com/politics/archive /2015/09/ wherebrownf ieldisa pret t yword-fortoxicdump/432843/>. 5.12.2016. battistoni, a. (2017) bringing in the work of nature: from natural capital to hybrid labor. political theory 45(1) 5–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716638389 bertrand, n. (2014) this connecticut metro area is the most unequal place in america. business insider 9.12.2014 <http://uk.businessinsider.com/this-northeast-metro-area-is-the-most-unequalplace-in-america-2014-12>. 15.9.2016. bgreen 2020 (2010) bgreen 2020: a sustainability plan for bridgeport, connecticut. bridgeport, city of bridgeport. <http://library.rpa.org/pdf/bgreen-2020.pdf>. 13.11.2016. bgreen 2020 appendices (2010) bgreen 2020: appendices. bridgeport, city of bridgeport. <https:// w w w.bridgepor tc t .gov/ f iles tora ge / 3 41650/ 3 41652 / 3 47099/bgreen -2020 a ppendices .pd f >. 14.11.2016. bgreen 2020 progress report (2013) bgreen 2020: a sustainability plan for bridgeport, connecticut: 2013 progress report. bridgeport, city of bridgeport. <http://library.rpa.org/pdf/bgreen-20202013-progress-report.pdf>. 13.11.2016. https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098993736 http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/where-brownfield-is-a-pretty-word-for-toxic-dump/432843/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/where-brownfield-is-a-pretty-word-for-toxic-dump/432843/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/where-brownfield-is-a-pretty-word-for-toxic-dump/432843/ https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716638389 http://uk.businessinsider.com/this-northeast-metro-area-is-the-most-unequal-place-in-america-2014-12 http://uk.businessinsider.com/this-northeast-metro-area-is-the-most-unequal-place-in-america-2014-12 http://library.rpa.org/pdf/bgreen-2020.pdf https://www.bridgeportct.gov/filestorage/341650/341652/347099/bgreen-2020-appendices.pdf https://www.bridgeportct.gov/filestorage/341650/341652/347099/bgreen-2020-appendices.pdf http://library.rpa.org/pdf/bgreen-2020-2013-progress-report.pdf http://library.rpa.org/pdf/bgreen-2020-2013-progress-report.pdf 212 fennia 196(2) (2018)reviews and essays brahinsky, r., sasser, j. & minkoff-zern, l. (2014) race, space, and nature: an introduction and critique. antipode 46(5) 1135–1152. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12109 brand, p. (2007) green subjection: the politics of neoliberal urban environmental management. international journal of urban and regional research 31(3) 616–632. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00748.x braun, b. (2008) environmental issues: inventive life. progress in human geography 32(5) 667–679. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507088030 brenner, n. (2018) debating planetary urbanization: for an engaged pluralism. environment and planning d: society and space 36(3) 570–590. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818757510 bryson, j. (2013) the nature of gentrification. geography compass 7(8) 578–587. https://doi. org/10.1111/gec3.12056 buna, m. & wang, j. (2018) carceral capitalism: a conversation with jackie wang. los angeles review of books 13.5.2018 <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/carceral-capitalism-conversation-jackiewang/#!>. 3.7.2018. butler, j. (1990) gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. routledge, new york. carpenter, l. (2006) a house caught in the rundown. the washington post 21.4.2006 <http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/ar2006042002252.html>. 10.11.2016. checker, m. (2011) wiped out by the ‘greenwave’: environmental gentrification and the paradoxical politics of urban sustainability. city and society 23(2) 210–229. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1548-744x.2011.01063.x chilvers, j. & kearnes, m. (2015) science, democracy and emergent publics. in chilvers, j. & kearnes, m. (eds.) remaking participation: science, environment and emergent publics, 1–28. routledge, london. cochran, r. (2012) growth machines and governmentality: the new urbanism and the creative class within atlanta, georgia. phd dissertation. university of illinois at urbana-champaign. de avila, j. (2014) bridgeport’s steel point redevelopment nears launch. the wall street journal 7.4.2014 <http://www.wsj.com/articles/sb10001424052702303987004579477663954504136>. 14.12.2016. deleuze, g. & guattari, f. (1987) a thousand plateaus. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. dikeç, m. (2005) space, politics, and the political. environment and planning d: society and space 23(2) 171–188. https://doi.org/10.1068/d364t dikeç, m. (2012) beginners and equals: political subjectivity in arendt and rancière. transactions of the institute of british geographers 38(1) 78–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00508.x dillon, l. (2014) race, waste, and space: brownfield redevelopment and environmental justice at the hunters point shipyard. antipode 46(5) 1205–1221. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12009 doak, j. & karadimitriou, n. (2007a) actor networks: the brownfield merry-go-round. in dixon, t., raco, m., catney, p., & lerner, d. (eds.) sustainable brownfield regeneration: liveable places from problem spaces, 67–88. blackwell, oxford. doak, j. & karadimitriou, n. (2007b) (re)development, complexity and networks: a framework for research. urban studies 44(2) 209–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980601074953 epa (2016) brownfield overview and definition. epa <https://www.epa.gov/brownfields/brownfieldoverview-and-definition>. 15.12.2016. escobar, a. (2008) development, trans/modernities, and the politics of theory. focaal—european journal of anthropology 52 127–135. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2008.520109 fanon, f. (1961) the wretched of the earth. grove press, new york. federici, s. (2012) revolution at point zero: housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. pm press, oakland. ferguson, j. & gupta, a. (2002) spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. american ethnologist: journal of the american ethnological society 29(4) 981–1002. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981 fine, b. (2005) from actor-network theory to political economy. capitalism nature socialism 16(4) 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455750500376057 forbes (2012) america’s 20 dirtiest cities. forbes <http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mef45ilmk/ americas-dirtiest-cities/#51450b864b37>. 20.11.2016. foucault, m. (1991) governmentality. in burchell, g., gordon, c., & miller, p. (eds.) the foucault effect, 87–104. the university of chicago press, chicago. gramsci, a. (1996) selections from the prison notebooks of antonio gramsci. lawrence and wishar t, london. gregson, n. & rose, g. (2000) taking butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. environment and planning d: society and space 18(4) 433–452. https://doi.org/10.1068/d232 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12109 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00748.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00748.x https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507088030 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818757510 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12056 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12056 https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/carceral-capitalism-conversation-jackie-wang/#! https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/carceral-capitalism-conversation-jackie-wang/#! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/ar2006042002252.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/ar2006042002252.html https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-744x.2011.01063.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-744x.2011.01063.x http://www.wsj.com/articles/sb10001424052702303987004579477663954504136 https://doi.org/10.1068/d364t https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00508.x https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12009 https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980601074953 https://www.epa.gov/brownfields/brownfield-overview-and-definition https://www.epa.gov/brownfields/brownfield-overview-and-definition https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2008.520109 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981 https://doi.org/10.1080/10455750500376057 http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mef45ilmk/americas-dirtiest-cities/#51450b864b37 http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mef45ilmk/americas-dirtiest-cities/#51450b864b37 https://doi.org/10.1068/d232 fennia 196(2) (2018) 213william conroy gunder, m. (2010) planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space. planning theory 9(4) 298–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210368878 haraway, d. (1991) simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. routledge, new york. hardt, m. (1998) the global society of control. discourse 20(3) 139–152. hardt, m. (2011) for love or money. cultural anthropology 26(4) 676–682. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01119.x harvey, d. (2014) seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism. profile books, london. hinchliffe, s. & whatmore, s. (2006) living cities: towards a politics of conviviality. science as culture 15(2) 123–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430600707988 homer, j. (2005) jacques lacan. routledge, new york. houston, d. & pulido, l. (2002) the work of performativity: staging social justice at the university of southern california. environment and planning d: society and space 20(4) 401–424. https://doi. org/10.1068/d344 ioris, a. (2013) the urban political ecology of post-industrial scottish towns: examining greengairs and ravenscraig. urban studies 51(8) 1576–1592. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013497408 jessop, b. (2005) critical realism and the strategic-relational approach. new formations 56 40–53. kern, l. (2015) from toxic wreck to crunchy chic: environmental gentrification through the body. environment and planning d: society and space 33(1) 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1068/d13150p knapp, c. (2008) assessing the potential for integrating community benefits agreements into brownfield redevelopment projects: case studies from three northeastern cities. ma dissertation. tufts university. kuriloff, a. & martin, t. (2015) connecticut, america’s richest state, has a huge pension problem. the wall street journal 5.10.2015 <http://www.wsj.com/articles/connecticut-americas-richest-state-hasa-huge-pension-problem-1443996813>. 15.11.2016. latham, a., mccormack, d., mcnamara, k., & mcneill, d. (2009) key concepts in urban geography. sage, london. latour, b. (2000) when things strike back: a possible contribution of ‘science studies’ to the social sciences. british journal of sociology 51(1) 107–123. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2000.00107.x latour, b. (2004) why has critique run out of steam? from matters of fact to matters of concern. critical inquiry 30(2) 225–248. https://doi.org/10.1086/421123 lefebvre, h. (1991) the production of space. wiley-blackwell, oxford. leffers, d. & ballamingie, p. (2013) governmentality, environmental subjectivity, and urban intensification. local environment 18(2) 134–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.719016 lemke, t. (2000) foucault, governmentality, and critique. in rethinking marxism conference. amherst, massachusetts, 21–24 september 2000. university of massachusetts, amherst. lemos, m. & agrawal, a. (2006) environmental governance. annual review of environment and resources 31 297–325. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.energy.31.042605.135621 li, t. (2014) what is land? assembling a resource for global investment. transactions of the institute of british geographers 39(4) 589–602. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12065 lorimer, j. (2007) nonhuman charisma. environment and planning d: society and space 38(3) 377–405. https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j lorimer, j. (2008) living roofs and brownfield wildlife: towards a fluid biogeography of uk nature conservation. environment and planning a 40(9) 2042–2060. https://doi.org/10.1068/a39261 marx, k. (1857) grundrisse: introduction. marxists <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm>. 18.12.2016. may, t. (2007) jacques rancière and the ethics of equality. substance 36(2) 20–36. https://doi. org/10.1353/sub.2007.0033 mcconnell, f. (2012) governmentality to practise the state? constructing a tibetan population in exile. environment and planning d: society and space 30(1) 78–95. https://doi.org/10.1068/d0711 mies, m. (1986) patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: women in the international division of labour. zed books, london. moore, j. (2011) ecology, capital, and the nature of our times: accumulation & crisis in the capitalist world-ecology. journal of world-systems research 17(1) 108–147. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2011.432 moore, j. (2012) crisis: ecological or world-ecological? in wiedemann, c. & zehle, s. (eds.) depletion design: a glossary of network ecologies, 31–36. institute of network cultures, amsterdam. moore, j. (2013) from object to oikeios: environment-making in the capitalist world-ecology. <http:// www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/moore_ _from_object_to_oikeios_ _ for_website_ _may_2013.pdf >. 19.11.2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210368878 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01119.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01119.x https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430600707988 https://doi.org/10.1068/d344 https://doi.org/10.1068/d344 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013497408 https://doi.org/10.1068/d13150p http://www.wsj.com/articles/connecticut-americas-richest-state-has-a-huge-pension-problem-1443996813 http://www.wsj.com/articles/connecticut-americas-richest-state-has-a-huge-pension-problem-1443996813 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2000.00107.x https://doi.org/10.1086/421123 https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.719016 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.energy.31.042605.135621 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12065 https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j https://doi.org/10.1068/a39261 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2007.0033 https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2007.0033 https://doi.org/10.1068/d0711 https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2011.432 http://www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/moore__from_object_to_oikeios__for_website__may_2013.pdf http://www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/moore__from_object_to_oikeios__for_website__may_2013.pdf 214 fennia 196(2) (2018)reviews and essays moore, j. (2014) toward a singular metabolism: epistemic rifts and environment-making in the capitalist world-ecology. in ibañez, d. & katsikis, n. (eds.) new geographies 06: grounding metabolism, 10–19. harvard university press, cambridge. moore, j. (2015a) capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital. verso, london. moore, j. (2015b) nature in the limits to capital (and vice versa). radical philosophy 193 (sept/oct) 9–19. moore, j. (2015c) cheap food and bad climate: from surplus value to negative value in the capitalist world-ecology. critical historical studies 2(1) 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1086/681007 moore, j. (2016) introduction. in moore, j. (ed.) anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism, 1–11. pm press, oakland. moore, j. (2017a) value in the web of life, or why world history matters to geography. dialogues in human geography 7(3) 326–330. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820617736605 moore, j. (2017b) the capitalocene, part i: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. the journal of peasant studies 44(3) 594–630. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036 moore, j. (2018) the capitalocene, part ii: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy. the journal of peasant studies 45(2) 237–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.201 6.1272587 moran, m. (2013) in connecticut, two sides of a deep economic divide. npr 17.1.2013 <http://www. npr.org/2013/01/17/169509521/in-connecticut-two-sides-of-a-deep-economic-divide>. 12.11.2016. mouffe, c. (1999) deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism? social research 66(3) 745–758. mouffe, c. (2005) on the political. routledge, new york. murdoch, j. (2004) putting discourse in its place: planning, sustainability and the urban capacity study. area 36(1) 50–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00304.x rancière, j. (2004) who is the subject of the rights of man? the south atlantic quarterly 103(2/3) 297–310. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-297 robinson, c. (1983) black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. zed books, london. rutherford, s. (2007) green governmentality: insights and opportunities in the study of nature’s rule. progress in human geography 31(3) 291–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507077080 rutland, t. & aylett, a. (2008) the work of policy: actor networks, governmentality, and local action on climate change in portland, oregon. environment and planning d: society and space 26(4) 627– 646. https://doi.org/10.1068/d6907 smith, n. (2005) neo-critical geography, or, the flat pluralist world of business class. antipode 37(5) 887–899. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00538.x soper, k. (2015) capitalocene. radical philosophy 197 (may/june) 49–51. st. pierre, e. a. (2013) the appearance of data. cultural studies<—>critical methodologies 13(4) 223– 227. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487862 swyngedouw, e. (2009) the antimonies of the postpolitical city: in search of a democratic politics of environmental production. international journal of urban and regional research 33(3) 601–620. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00859.x whatmore, s. (2006) materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-thanhuman world. cultural geographies 13(4) 600–609. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474006cgj377oa https://doi.org/10.1086/681007 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820617736605 https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036 https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587 https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1272587 http://www.npr.org/2013/01/17/169509521/in-connecticut-two-sides-of-a-deep-economic-divide http://www.npr.org/2013/01/17/169509521/in-connecticut-two-sides-of-a-deep-economic-divide https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00304.x https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-297 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507077080 https://doi.org/10.1068/d6907 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00538.x https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487862 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00859.x https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474006cgj377oa research collaboration outputs between the european union and africa: the case of co-authored scientific articles between finland and africa urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa115611 doi: 10.11143/fennia.115611 research collaboration outputs between the european union and africa: the case of co-authored scientific articles between finland and africa jussi jauhiainen jauhiainen, j. (2023) research collaboration outputs between the european union and africa: the case of co-authored scientific articles between finland and africa. fennia 201(1) 94–107. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115611 i analyzed co-authored international peer-reviewed scientific articles that resulted from research collaborations between scholars in the european union (eu) and african countries, with a particular focus on the case of finland. among the 28 eu member states, finland ranked 13th in terms of the quantity of co-authored scientific articles produced through these collaborations. i found that from 2015 to 2021, scholars from universities, research institutes, and other organizations in african countries and finland co-authored more than 4,700 international peer-reviewed articles. despite the doubling of coauthored finland–africa peer-reviewed scientific articles in international journals annually during this period, these articles accounted for less than one percent of all international peer-reviewed scientific articles in africa, and their proportional share decreased over time. the most common fields of collaboration were medical sciences and natural science. of finland–africa articles, almost 1,500 focused on africa. the university of helsinki and south african universities were the most active collaborators. given these findings, it is crucial to address the implementation of the european commission’s strategy for partnerships with africa and finland’s collaboration strategies with africa to encourage more inclusive research collaboration among scholars from finland, europe, and africa. keywords: finland, africa, european union, scientific article, research collaboration, co-author jussi jauhiainen (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8095-8240), department of geography and geology, university of turku, finland. institute of ecology and the earth science, university of tartu, estonia. e-mail: jusaja@utu.fi © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction over the recent years, collaboration and partnership with africa in research, development and innovation (rdi) have gained significant attention in the european union (eu), including finland. africa is a continent of great diversity, and its rapid changes increasingly impact the development, economy, and policies of the eu and its member states. in the 2020s, there is hope that europe and africa will engage in more symmetrical and equal partnerships (european commission 2020; köhler 2020), although some remain skeptical (haastrup et al. 2021). https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115611 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8095-8240 mailto:jusaja@utu.fi fennia 201(1) (2023) 95jussi jauhiainen the focus of this study was on research collaboration between the eu and africa, which is expected to increase the volume of international research and have research-driven positive impacts on both regions. horizon europe, the eu’s primary funding instrument and research framework program, is providing significantly greater resources in 2021–2027 for research projects with african organizations (european commission 2021). concrete examples of research collaboration with scientific results can be found in co-authored international peer-reviewed scientific articles published by universities, institutes, and scholars in esteemed international scientific journals. obviously, article co-authorship does not encompass all forms of collaborations, and not all individuals involved in the preparation of an article are cited as co-authors. however, according to glänzel and schubert (2004), analyzing co-authorship provides valuable insights into the interactions between collaboration, scientific communication, and scientists’ performance (tahmooresnejad et al. 2021). furthermore, the recent growth in scientific publications in europe almost entirely rests on internationally co-authored publications (kwiek 2021). the web of science (wos) database by clarivate, owned by thomson reuters, is a commonly used source for quantitative studies of research collaboration. with more than 18,000 scientific journals and dozens of millions of publications from various disciplines, it provides a comprehensive resource. while other databases such as scopus and google scholar contain more books, journals, and articles than wos, the scientific impact of publications cited in wos is generally greater than that of scientific publications solely quoted outside of it (martín-martín et al. 2018). in this study, i examined research collaboration between finland and africa by analyzing their co-authored articles from 2015 to 2021 in journals covered by wos. only articles in which at least one representative, typically a staff member from a university or research institute, from both an organization in finland and another in africa participated as writers were considered. books and seminar publications were excluded from the analysis as their peer-review process is not necessarily rigorous. among the 28 eu nations, finland ranked 13th in terms of research collaboration with african countries. my research questions were: how many finland–africa co-authored articles were published from 2015 to 2021? what were the primary research topics and areas covered in these articles? who were the collaborators involved in these articles? what was the scientific impact of these articles? research collaboration strategies and partnerships with africa, and the case of finland the internationalization of scientific collaboration is part of the expanding global geography of science (see olechnicka et al. 2019). the development of advanced information and communication technologies, coupled with mobility restrictions resulting from the covid-19 pandemic, has further accelerated research collaboration between geographically distant partners. in the 2010s, international research collaboration in african countries was already significantly higher compared to the rest of the world (pouris & ho 2014), partly due to research funding originating from outside of africa. however, such research in africa is often guided by donors’ interests, follow their scientific paradigms, and is thus vulnerable to their changing priorities and preferences (samoff & bidemi 2004). in the past, african researchers have faced persistent challenges in proper recognition and impact in international science (tijssen 2007). in the production of knowledge, too often africa has been relegated to the role of a mere research data source for europe, perpetuating hierarchies in international research activities. there the global north centers dominate with their epistemologies and methodologies, and scholars in the global south peripheries need to follow these in research collaboration (see marginson 2021; jauhiainen 2023). african organizations have not been adequately involved in research design or publication of results, so empirical material was removed from africa, and valuable knowledge was created elsewhere. this has hindered the development of engaged research practices originating and based in africa, as well as the use of scientific results to promote more grounded development in society (samoff & bidemi 2004; tijssen 2007; seth 2009; matunhu 2011; cloete et al. 2018; ndofirepi & gwaravanda 2019; bernard 2020). international research collaboration has become increasingly common worldwide. as research topics have become more complex, international collaboration is often necessary due to the diversity 96 fennia 201(1) (2023)reviews and essays of phenomena studied or expertise required. scientific outputs such as articles in international journals can be more easily facilitated by collaboration between researchers from different countries. achieving a ‘world class’ status in global rankings (such as shanghairanking consultancy 2021; see marginson 2021) indicates that a university is thriving. however, organizational support and individual scholars’ willingness to collaborate internationally are also essential, as well as finding suitable partners (lee & bozeman 2005; kwiek 2021). to understand the research collaboration between finland and africa, it is important to consider the context: what makes finland an attractive partner for african scholars and institutions, and why is africa an interesting collaborator for finland? from an african perspective, finland may be considered a small country within the eu due to its population (5.5 million) and economy (gdp eur249 billion), which represents 1.2% and 1.8% of the eu’s population and gdp, respectively, and its distant location away from africa. however, finland is a leading nation in technology and innovations. finland’s commitment to economic competitiveness, rdi, carbon-free sustainability transition, people’s welfare, and anticorruption measures has earned it a prominent global ranking (schwab et al. 2020). similar orientations are on the agenda of many african countries. finland’s recent interest in intensifying research collaboration with africa is driven by three overlapping issues. first, finland’s development policy toward africa has changed. for many years, finland has engaged in long-term development collaboration with several sub-saharan african countries, including tanzania, namibia, and kenya. following political changes in south africa during the 1990s, finland expanded its intensive collaboration with the country. previously, finland’s aid delivery was based on a traditional donor–receiver policy, with little expectation of economic returns. however, since the early 2000s, finland has sought mutual economic interests with african countries, shifting away from pure altruism. the current policies have emphasized rdi, with a focus on private sector involvement as the government substantially reduced public development aid. such shift is evident in recent development collaboration between many european countries and africa (jauhiainen & hooli 2020). second, finland, as a member state of the eu, is actively participating in new high-level initiatives aimed at fostering collaboration between europe and africa. in 2020, the european commission (2020) published a comprehensive eu–africa strategy, which outlines key objectives, such as preventing harmful climate change, promoting the green economy and the transition to it, creating sustainable growth and jobs, and supporting digitalization, democracy, equality, peace, and migration management. the strategy aims to establish strategic collaboration between europeans, including the eu, and africans, including the african union, regional organizations, countries, businesses, and individuals in africa. finland’s involvement in these partnerships has been facilitated by the appointment mrs. jutta urpilainen, a finn who is in the european commission’s commissioner in charge of international partnerships, including those with africa. she belongs to the same political party as the finnish prime minister who oversaw the launch of finland’s africa strategy (ministry for foreign… 2021). africa’s demographic growth, rapid urbanization, advancing digitalization, and geopolitical impacts are critical considerations for the european commission’s and finland’s africa-related strategies. according to the united nations (2022), half of the world’s population growth between 2020 and 2050 is expected to occur in africa, leading to a projected increase of 900 million inhabitants in africa. however, the covid-19 pandemic, related lockdowns, and declining business activities have exacerbated poverty in africa, particularly for those who rely on daily hands-on income (bargain & aminjonov 2021). climate change is also causing significant harm to many parts of africa (united nations 2020), contributing to aspirations among many africans to migrate both within and beyond the continent. the european commission’s strategy emphasizes its commitment with africa. at the same time, there is a shift in the eu’s narrative towards africa to maximize the benefits of the green transition, minimize threats to the environment, enhance european economic competitiveness and support the securitization of the eu’s geopolitical interests in africa and beyond (european commission 2020; teevan et al. 2021). in finland, however, african countries accounted for only 2.5 percent of the country’s total exports in the late 2010s (impiö et al. 2020), and thus, the finnish government is keen to participate more in africa’s growing economy. however, finnish nongovernmental development fennia 201(1) (2023) 97jussi jauhiainen organizations have criticized finland’s africa-related collaboration strategy, arguing that it emphasizes the country’s economic and political interests in africa, while not sufficiently considering sustainable development, responsible business practices, or gender equality (fingo 2021). furthermore, the strategy had been criticized for not addressing transformative innovations in africa’s development and society (see jauhiainen & hooli 2020). third, the european commission and the finnish government prioritize creating useful knowledge with broader societal impacts. to this end, more funding will be available for african research organizations in the eu’s research framework program (european commission 2021). however, finland has historically lacked significant africa-related research funding. for example, the academy of finland, the country’s primary research funding agency, supported research collaboration related to africa with approximately eur24 million from 2011 to 2019, which was well below one percent of the academy’s total funding for research. of the africa-related funding, about half went towards development research and other projects jointly funded by the academy of finland and the south african national research foundation, and various eu–africa multilateral donor collaboration networks (lindfors 2021). finland’s ministry of education and culture has taken steps to enhance research and teaching collaborations with africa by financing four global projects from 2021 to 2024, in which africa is at least a part of it. all thirteen of finland’s universities and nineteen out of twenty-four finnish universities of applied sciences are involved in these projects, aiming to internationalize finnish higher education organizations, create rdi projects, attract and recruit international talent, especially in relation to africa, boost networking in finland and among african partners, and foster a positive image of finland worldwide. the state budget allocated for this initiative is eur 55.6 million (see jääskeläinen 2021). in addition, the university of helsinki, which leads in implementing africa-related research and teaching, has developed its africa program for 2021–2030. its primary goals, which support the university’s overall strategy, are to establish and nurture new interactive, useful, and equal partnerships; promote multidisciplinary research; and encourage open science, infrastructure, and sustainability (university of helsinki 2020). while many other finnish universities’ internationalization strategies and objectives also mention africa, the university of helsinki places a greater emphasis on the continent. finland’s strategy for africa recognizes the importance of africa-related research in finland to enhance understanding and knowledge of africa’s diversity (see aroalho 2020). the strategy aims to support finnish universities, research institutes, and think tanks to improve scholarly expertise, innovation, and sustainable development (ministry for foreign… 2021). they are encouraged to establish useful partnerships with their african counterparts and promote researcher exchanges between finland and african countries, facilitated by eu funding such as horizon europe and erasmus mundus. the finnish strategy aligns with the european commission’s strategy, encouraging scientific and research collaboration in green structural change and mechanisms to prevent harmful impacts of climate change, such as emigration from africa. in addition, the strategy recognizes that finnish scholars could benefit from african know-how, including in science and health (ibid.). changing knowledge creation practices to be fully inclusive regarding africa in the eu will not be an easy task. the recent strategies of the european commission and finnish government did not adequately scrutinize the possible colonial practices in knowledge production concerning africa (see ezechukwu 2022). this includes the role of africans, both in africa and the diaspora, in implementing and benefitting from the strategies. the problematic history of europeans in africa casts a shadow over the construction of the current eu–africa partnership. for centuries, knowledge produced about colonized africa was gathered to directly benefit european states. furthermore, modern scientific interests, techniques, and practices from europe and the global north were used to dictate what was scientifically relevant and proper to perform in africa (seth 2009). academic collaboration is also about soft power in international relations. although finland never had colonies in africa, its missions in namibia stretch back to the nineteenth century. namibia has also been a key recipient of finland’s development aid, and finns are still involved in numerous higher education and research projects in the country. scholars engage in international scientific collaboration for various reasons, including enhancing academic prestige, gaining scientific recognition, and accessing research funding. these individual 98 fennia 201(1) (2023)reviews and essays motivations contribute to the accumulation of prestige in organizations, such as departments, institutes, universities, and countries, in which collaborators are present (kwiek 2021). as a small nation, finland requires strong international research collaboration for rdi. there is a strong parallelism between research expenditure per capita and research output (north et al. 2020). finland, with its high tertiary enrollment rate, good quality universities, and mostly free-of-charge tertiary education, provides an excellent research collaboration choice for many scholars from africa. the finnish government’s strategic idea to recruit talent from africa to finland could contribute to africa’s brain drain if talented african scholars do not return to africa or continue engaging with african organizations and scholars. however, if they do return or continue to engage, it could positively influence ‘brain circulation’ (see radwan & sakr 2018; doh & jauhiainen 2021). international peer-reviewed co-authored articles as empirical material and their quantitative methods international peer-reviewed co-authored articles indicate that research collaboration between finland and africa got verifiable scientific results. the material of this study consists of scientific peer-reviewed articles or scientific review articles (here called finland–africa co-authored articles) between 2015 and 2021 published in journals indexed in the wos database and involved at least one author from an organization in finland and another from an organization in africa, as indicated in the article’s byline. after screening the entire wos database as of march 21, 2022, five datasets were identified: (1) all finland–africa co-authored articles (4,713 articles), (2) all finland–africa co-authored articles exclusively between organizations from finland and africa (i.e. not featuring any organizations from other countries, 746 articles), (3) all finland–africa co-authored social science articles exclusively from organizations from finland and africa (266 articles), (4) all africa-topic finland–africa co-authored articles exclusively between organizations from finland and africa (169 articles), and (5) all africa-topic articles in which the organization was from finland (1,455 articles). as regards the latter, an article was considered to be in general about africa when the article’s title, summary or keyword created by the author or system (the wos category ‘topic’) mentioned the word ‘africa’ or ‘african’, but not ‘african american’. i conducted a quantitative analysis of the materials primarily using descriptive statistics, with a focus on differences across the datasets. firstly, i analyzed the volume of these articles and their proportion in relation to all international peer-reviewed articles in finland and in africa from 2015 to 2021. secondly, i identified the most common research topics and geographical areas covered in the finland–africa co-authored articles using the vosviewer (visualization of similarities) program and its algorithms to establish connections among the main topics, research areas, and organizations. thirdly, i examined the articles’ scientific impact, including their accessibility, publication venues, and citation counts. development of the number of finland–africa co-authored scientific articles from 2015 to 2021, the wos database contained 4,713 articles with at least one organization from finland and one organization from africa. in comparison, there were approximately 112,000 articles in wos featuring a scholar in an organization in finland and 518,000 articles featuring scholars in organizations from africa during the same period. finland–africa co-authored articles accounted for 4.2 percent of finland’s research output and 0.9 percent of africa’s research output. in africa, 55.0% of articles published in wos involved collaboration with non-african organizations. the most important research partners were organizations from the united states (13.8%), the united kingdom (9.2%), france (8.2%), germany (5.3%) and china (4.8%). notably, highly prolific researchers in africa, who produce more scientific publications and highly cited articles, tend to collaborate more frequently with non-african partners, particularly frontier universities, as noted by confraria, blanckenberg and swart (2018). regarding finland’s research partners in africa-related research (see fig. 1), the quantitatively most significant partners (in terms of co-authored articles in wos) were scholars in organizations from the united states (present in 17.7% of all articles), the united kingdom (15.9%), germany fennia 201(1) (2023) 99jussi jauhiainen (14.1%), and sweden (13.4%). this trend aligns with broader academic trends where scholars from organizations in (quantitatively) leading countries are increasingly participating in international research, as discussed by kwiek (2021). france emerged as a leading partner in research collaborations with africa, with 20,008 co-authored articles (3.9% of all international peer-reviewed articles from african organizations) originating from africa collaborations; followed by 14,016 (2.7%) from the united kingdom, and 6,684 articles (1.3%) from germany. these countries also featured prominently in multi-partner research networks, with french scholars particularly active in french-speaking africa. finland’s contribution to bilateral research collaboration with africa was very modest, with only 746 articles (0.1% of all wos articles in which scholars in africa participated) featuring exclusively authors both from finland and one or more african countries. norway and denmark, countries with similar population sizes with finland, have stronger research output with african partners, with 1,568 articles (0.3%) exclusively from norwegian partners with africa and 1,077 articles (0.2%) exclusively from danish partners. sweden, norway and denmark have stronger presence and tradition in africa research, and they provide more funding for africa research and africa-related development policies. the annual number of co-authored finland–africa publications doubled by 99% from 2015 to 2021. however, finland’s overall share of articles related to africa decreased. the growth rate for articles exclusively between finnish and african partners was lower at 74%, compared to multi-partner international research collaborations. the government of finland’s africa strategy (ministry for foreign… 2021) and the internationalization program by finland’s ministry of education and culture (jääskeläinen 2021) recommend intensifying finland–africa research collaboration. in africa, south africa was the most frequent partner for co-authored publications with finland, accounting for 2,061 (43.7%) of the articles. of these articles, 89.2% also had a third partner. egypt, with 1,456 articles (30.9%), was the next most common research partner for finland in africa, followed by kenya (339; 7.2%), nigeria (303; 6.5%), ghana (281; 6.0%), morocco (223; 4.8%), ethiopia (213; 4.5%), algeria (199; 4.3%), tunisia (171; 3.6%), tanzania (171; 3.6%), malawi (141; 3.0%), and cameroon (121; 2.5%). in all, scholars from organizations in finland co-authored with scholars from 50 out of 54 african countries. however, in most countries, only a few co-authored articles were published, and finland’s presence was often limited to being a partner in wider international research networks (fig. 1). fig. 1. international peer-reviewed scientific articles in finland–africa collaboration, 2015–2021. source: own calculation from web of science (2022). 100 fennia 201(1) (2023)reviews and essays research topics of the finland–africa co-authored scientific articles the large majority of finland–africa collaboration articles in wos were from science subjects, with 78.9 percent indexed in the science citation index expanded (scie), and 10.2% indexed together with articles in social sciences citation index (ssci). of all finland–africa articles, 15.0 percent were from the ssci (including those indexed together with scie). however, there were only a few articles from the arts & humanities citation index (0.3%) and the emerging sources citation index (5.0%). compared to the entire wos database, finland–africa co-authored articles appeared substantially more frequently in consolidated science journals (with 16.9 percent units more) and less often in emerging sources journals (with 16.5 percent units less). themes and methods in medical science and science are more universal to publish than many social science themes that need to be contextualized for african contexts. collaborative scientific research between finland and africa covered a broad range of topics. in fact, of the 256 subcategories in wos, 148 (58.3%) were mentioned at least once per year on average in the finland–africa co-authored articles from 2015 to 2021. the most frequent fields included physics particles, astronomy and astrophysics, nuclear physics, and environmental sciences (table 1). interestingly, research collaboration based exclusively on finnish and african organizations was different. the most common fields included environmental sciences and ecology, education, electric engineering, and multidisciplinary sciences. in social science articles, the most common fields were education, business, tourism, and psychology. furthermore, in exclusively bilateral finland–africa publications, the relative share of social science articles was more than double of all finland–africa articles, accounting for 38.1 percent of the total (table 1). on the contrary, much of science-related publishing was conducted in international research networks with the presence of finnish scholars. all articles (n=4,713) articles with only finland and africa (n=746) research area n % research area n % physics 1,079 22.9% environmental sciences & ecology 98 13.1% astronomy & astrophysics 598 12.7% engineering 93 12.5% environmental sciences & ecology 471 10.0% chemistry 59 7.9% science & technology other topics 325 6.9% science & technology other topics 55 7.4% engineering 297 6.3% materials science 47 6.3% chemistry 245 5.2% education & educational research 45 6.0% public, environmental & occupational health 156 3.3% agriculture 30 4.0% materials science 142 3.0% computer science 30 4.0% general & internal medicine 135 2.9% physics 30 4.0% computer science 122 2.6% public, environmental & occupational health 30 4.0% table 1. research areas in finland–africa co-authored international scientific articles in 2015–2021. source: own calculation from web of science (2022). research topics among all finland–africa co-authored articles were closely linked to global research interests in medical sciences, ecology, and biology. the most common topics included nuclear structure, model, management, performance, health, and content management system (fig. 2). in some articles, africa (or a specific region within africa) was used as a reference for comparison. other articles focused on plants or animals, or on health conditions in africa. however, broader multidisciplinary themes were less common, with sustainability being the key topic in only 1.9 percent and innovation in 1.6 percent of finland–africa articles. among all africa-topic articles in which a scholar in an organization in finland was involved, the most common topics referred to evolution, nature conservation, biodiversity, management, and mortality (fig. 3). fennia 201(1) (2023) 101jussi jauhiainen fig. 2. topics of international peer-reviewed scientific articles with involvement of organizations in finland and africa, 2015–2021 (n=4,713). source: own calculation from web of science (2022). fig. 3. topics of international peer-reviewed africa-topic scientific articles with involvement of organizations in finland, 2015–2021 (n=1,455). source: own calculation from web of science (2022). 102 fennia 201(1) (2023)reviews and essays in terms of geographical focus of all finland–africa co-authored articles, south africa was most frequently mentioned (8.7% of articles), followed by kenya (1.7%) and ghana (1.4%). of 29 out of 54 african countries was published more than one article per year. however, french-speaking african regions were significantly less investigated in finland–africa articles compared to african regions where english is more commonly used. in co-authored articles exclusively between finland and africa, south africa (7.9%), tanzania (5.9%) and ghana (3.9%) were the countries that appeared most frequently (fig. 4). fig. 4. geography of international peer-reviewed scientific articles with involvement of organizations exclusively in finland and africa, 2015–2021 (n=746). source: own calculation from web of science (2022). collaboration networks in finland–africa co-authored articles the internationalization of research collaboration and funding has led to the production of peerreviewed articles with numerous authors from various countries, particularly in the fields of science and medical sciences. external funding has played a critical role in fostering international collaboration, although its impact varies across different regions in africa (pouris & ho 2014; doh et al. 2021). an organization from outside finland and africa was involved in 84.5 percent of finland–africa coauthored articles from 2015 to 2021.typically, these organizations based in the united states, united kingdom, sweden, or germany. many articles resulted from global research projects involving dozens of authors from the fields of medical science and natural science. such knowledge is often not firmly grounded in the contexts from which the empirical material derives. fennia 201(1) (2023) 103jussi jauhiainen in africa-related research collaborations funded by the academy of finland from 2011 to 2019, scholars in finnish organizations collaborated with scholars in 22 african countries. the most frequent partners were from south africa, kenya, tanzania, ethiopia, and uganda (lindfors 2021). among co-authored articles with organizations in finland, south africa was the most common african partner and fourth among all countries. egypt ranked 15th and kenya 61st as the next most common african partner countries. in terms of research organizations, there were no african universities among the hundred most common collaboration partners in finland–africa co-authored articles. the top ten most frequently involved universities included three from italy, two from the united states, two from france, and the rest from three other countries. however, in articles that exclusively included organizations from finland and africa, the top ten most common african universities featured seven from south africa and three from egypt – all top ranked universities within africa. the university of helsinki is the main contributor to finland–africa research collaboration, accounting for almost half (46.0%) of all finland–africa co-authored articles. this collaboration is expected to increase with the implementation of its africa program (university of helsinki 2020). of these co-authored articles, 86.0 percent involved third party collaborators, while 14.0 percent were exclusively with african partners. compared to other finnish universities, the university of helsinki had broader networks involving most frequently collaboration partners from the united kingdom, the united states, and south africa. however, finland–africa co-authored articles represent only 1.2 percent of all international peer-reviewed articles indexed in the wos database at the university of helsinki between 2015 and 2021. other universities in finland that actively collaborated with partners in africa were the lappeenranta university of technology (16.9%) and the university of turku (12.2%) (table 2). finland africa global name number of articles arwu rank name number of articles arwu rank name number of articles arwu rank u of helsinki 2,166 82 egyptian knowledge bank 1,428 – u of california system 1,429 – lappeenranta u tech 796 > 1000 egyptian network of hep 704 – cnrs 1,354 – u of turku 578 301–400 u of cape town 613 201–300 helmholz association 1,291 – u of oulu 505 401–500 u of witwatersrand 462 301–400 russian academy of sciences 1,229 – u of jyväskylä 445 701–800 cairo u 419 401–500 u paris-saclay 1,183 13 tampere u 422 501–600 north west u 284 601–700 u of padua 1,140 151–200 aalto u 366 301–400 u of kwazulunatal 260 601–700 united states doe 1,123 – u of eastern finland 287 601–700 stellenbosch u 234 401–500 sapienza u 1,116 151–200 finn meteor inst 108 – u of johannesburg 204 601–700 infn 1,115 – nat inst health welf 106 – u of pretoria 186 401–500 u of bologna 1,090 201–300 table 2. most frequently appearing organizations in co-authored finland–africa peer reviewed international articles. source: web of science (2022). scientific impact of africa-related articles assessing the scientific impact of finland–africa co-authored articles is a complex task that involves evaluating various factors such as article accessibility, publication venue prestige, and citation count. the number of articles in different research fields vary as well as the prestige of journals making it difficult to make meaningful comparisons. unfortunately, not all scientific results originating from finland–africa research collaboration are freely accessible to scholars in africa and around the world. only 36.1 percent of all finland– africa co-authored articles were fully accessible everywhere through the internet (gold access), but 80.6 percent followed some open access practices. for co-authored articles exclusively involving organizations from finland and africa, these shares were 28.0 percent and 60.5 percent, respectively, and for africa-topic articles, 32.5 percent and 62.1 percent, respectively. recently, the national 104 fennia 201(1) (2023)reviews and essays authorities in finland reached an agreement with several international publishing houses to make articles from finnish organizations open access. publishing articles in high-impact factor journal is considered a significant achievement for authors and organizations. finland–africa co-authored articles were published in 1,624 different serial publications. on average at least one article per year per publication venue appeared in 82 serial publications. international research networks involving multiple parties tended to publish more frequently in prestigious journals with higher impact factors (table 3). these authors and organizations typically had more publications and higher citation rates. however, some of these journals collect article processing charges (apcs), which may be challenging for many african organizations to afford. citations are a commonly used measure of the academic impact of articles. articles in medical sciences and natural sciences usually receive more citations and more quickly than social sciences or humanities articles. many of the studied articles were recent and had not yet accumulated citations. out of the ten most cited finland–africa co-authored articles, eight were from medical sciences, and two were from astrophysics. the most frequently cited article was from astrophysics, with over 5,200 citations. the hundredth most cited finland–africa co-authored article received 388 citations, and the median citation count was nine. for co-authored articles exclusively written by scholars in organizations in finland and africa, the most cited had 151 citations, the hundredth had 18, and the median citation count was six. measuring academic relevance and impact can be done through various methods, including the share of highly cited articles that belong to the top one percent in each field per year. in the case of finland–africa co-authored articles in 2015–2021, a significantly higher share (6.9%) was highly cited compared to finnish articles overall (1.8%) and to articles co-authored exclusively by scholars in organizations from finland and africa (1.4%). mirzenami and beaudry (2022) have shown that international collaboration positively impacts african scholars’ research impacts, including citation and journal scores, and increases the likelihood of publishing a top-cited article. african scholars in international collaboration tend to perform better and have a longer-lasting impact than their noncollaborating counterparts. however, it is noteworthy that none of the twenty most prolific scholars in finland–africa articles had an african background or were from africa or finland. conclusions the partnership with africa is currently a priority on the agenda of the european commission and finland, with significant funding opportunities available for increased participation in eu–africa research collaborations. much focus is on useful knowledge that enhances eu’s economic competitiveness and securitization (european commission 2020; ministry for foreign… 2021). scientific articles represent a clear and legitimate scientific output of research collaboration between scholars in universities and research institutes in finland and african countries. finland with also third country organization(s) only finland–africa organization(s) name number share if name number share if journal of high energy physics 299 6.4% 5.810 plos one 18 2.4% 3.204 physical letters b 231 4.9% 4.771 minerals engineering 8 1.1% 4.765 european physical journal c 152 3.2% 4.843 scientific reports 8 1.1% 4.379 astronomy astrophysics 134 2.9% 5.802 applied sciences basel 7 0.9% 2.679 physical review letters 99 2.1% 9.227 forests 7 0.9% 2.633 physical review 96 2.0% 5.296 ieee access 7 0.9% 4.098 table 3. most common international journals of co-authored finland–africa articles. source: own calculation from web of science (2022). fennia 201(1) (2023) 105jussi jauhiainen 4,713 articles is positioned in the middle range among eu member states with respect to the number of international peer-reviewed articles co-authored with scholars in an organization from one eu member state and at least one in africa. while finland–africa articles more than doubled annually from 2015 to 2021, their relative share of all collaborative scientific articles in africa decreased. furthermore, co-authorship with organizations in africa is growing as a faster pace among non-eu member states, with brexit fostering such collaboration with the united kingdom, and china is otherwise increasing its impact. these trends indicate that the global geography of science is expanding along different trajectories (see olechnicka et al. 2019). the scientific articles resulting from finland–africa research collaboration mostly concentrated in the fields of medical sciences and natural science, and those exclusively between finland and africa in environmental sciences and education as well as multidisciplinary. africa was often used only as an empirical source or for international comparisons in globally relevant scientific themes, which primarily benefited the competitiveness of the global north and eastern research networks and their scholars. this resembles the practices of modern scientific research and colonialism in africa and the academic hierarchies between the center and periphery (see seth 2009; ndlovugatshen 2020; jauhiainen 2023). in the future, research collaborations related to africa are likely to continue between key universities in the eu, united states, the united kingdom, south africa, and increasingly, egypt, nigeria, and ghana. this should strive for collaborations with africa, for more equal and symmetric long-term partnerships that involve a wider range of partners beyond the usual ones. africans need to publish more in international peer-reviewed journals, and international research collaboration supports this. however, the research process should be redesigned to be more inclusive, from idea generation to openly accessible research outputs, and providing opportunities for science renewal being open to epistemologies and methodologies of african origin. this would enable mutual and respectful learning, and the resulting outputs could benefit academic partners, society, and communities in africa and beyond for generations to come. future research on eu–africa research collaboration could explore qualitative aspects of research partnership with africa in practice, including how africans in africa and in the diaspora engage with these partnerships, and how research design, implementation, and outputs can be carried out together, including in co-authored international peer-reviewed articles. it is important to critically examine what ‘africa’ means in these collaborations, and whether collaboration is truly mutual and respectful for all parties involved. additionally, there is a need to scrutinize the africa orientation of horizon europe—is it with africa, about africa, or without africa? references aroalho, s. (2020) kulttuuri ja luova talous yhteiskunnan rakentajina afrikassa – kohti afrikan unionin ja euroopan unionin ihmislähtöisen kumppanuuden vahvistamista. opetusja kulttuuriministeriön julkaisuja 2020:33. https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/handle/10024/162592 bargain, o. & aminjonov, u. (2021) poverty and covid-19 in africa and latin america. world development 142 105422. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105422 bernard, h. (2020) the africa we want and the africa we see: how scholarship from africa stands to enrich global scholarship. african journal of management 6(2) 132–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322373.2020.1753493 cloete, h., bunting, i. & van schalkwyk, f. (2018) research universities in africa. african minds, cape town. https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928331872 confraria, h., blanckenberg, j. & swart, c. (2018) the characteristics of highly cited researchers in africa. research evaluation 27(3) 222–237. https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvy017 doh, p. & jauhiainen, j. (2021) multilevel analysis of the factors and talent-building elements of aspiring african star scientists in their international scientific networks. african journal of science, technology and innovation 13(5) 573–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/20421338.2020.1769251 doh, p., jauhiainen, j. & boohene, r. (2021) synergistic role of academic entrepreneurship patterns in entrepreneurial university transformation: analysis across three african subregions. african journal of science, technology and innovation 14(5) 1227–1239. https://doi.org/10.1080/20421338.2021.1943815 https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/handle/10024/162592 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105422 https://doi.org/10.1080/23322373.2020.1753493 https://doi.org/10.47622/9781928331872 https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvy017 https://doi.org/10.1080/20421338.2020.1769251 https://doi.org/10.1080/20421338.2021.1943815 106 fennia 201(1) (2023)reviews and essays european commission (2020) towards a comprehensive strategy with africa. join(2020) 4 final, brussels 9 march 2020. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=celex:52020jc0004>. european commission (2021) horizon europe. <https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/ funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe_en>. 9.6.2023. ezechukwu, g. (2022) negotiating positionality amid postcolonial knowledge relations: insights from nordic-based sub-saharan african academics. race, ethnicity and education 25(1) 92–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718087 fingo (2021) afrikka-strategia saa kehitysjärjestöiltä kritiikkiä, mutta myös kiitosta. <https://fingo.fi/ ajankohtaista/uutiset/afrikka-strategia-saa-kehitysjarjestoilta-kritiikkia-mutta-myos-kiitosta/>. 9.6.2023. glänzel, w. & schubert, a. (2004) analysing scientific networks through co-authorship. in moed, h., glänzel, w. & schmoch, u. (eds.) handbook of quantitative science and technology research, 257–276. dordrecht, springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2755-9_12 haastrup, t., duggan, n. & mah, l. (2021) navigating ontological (in)security in eu–africa relations. global affairs 7(4) 541–557. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2021.1981144 impiö. j., nokelainen, p., vuorio, p. & ranta, j. (2020) afrikka-politiikan uusi aika kuinka moninkertaistamme kaupan ja kehitysvaikutukset? elinkeinoelämän keskusliitto, helsinki. jauhiainen, j. (2023) collaboration and knowledge creation processes through co-authored scientific articles between africa, sweden and finland. nordic journal for african studies 32(2) 130–152. jauhiainen, j. & hooli, l. (2020) innovation for development in africa. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429328978 jääskeläinen, a. (2021) internationalization program of higher education institutes. why, what, how? presentation at round table-webinar of the internationalization program of higher education institutes in finland. 27.5.2021. [in finnish] kwiek, m. (2021) what large-scale publication and citation data tell us about international research collaboration in europe: changing national patterns in global contexts. studies in higher education 46(12) 2629–2649. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1749254 köhler, h. (2020) crisis and credibility – towards new honesty in eu-africa relations. cesifo forum 21(2) 11–15. lee, s. & bozeman, b. (2005) the impact of research collaboration on scientific productivity. social studies of science 35(5) 673–702. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312705052359 lindfors, p. (2021) afrikka kiinnostaa. suomen akatemian blogipalsta 11.1.2021. <https://www.aka.fi/ suomen-akatemian-toiminta/ajankohtaista/blogi/2021/afrikka-kiinnostaa/>. 6.1.2023. marginson, s. (2021) what drives global science? the four competing narratives. studies in higher education 47(8) 1566–1584. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1942822 martín-martín, a., orduna-malea, e. thewall, m. & lópez-cósar, e. (2018) google scholar, web of science, and scopus: a systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories. journal of informetrics 14(4) 1160–1177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.09.002 matunhu, j. (2011) a critique of modernization and dependency theories in africa: critical assessment. african journal of history and culture 3(5) 65–72. ministry for foreign affairs of finland (2021) finland´s africa strategy. towards a stronger political and economic partnership. publications of the finnish government 2021(21). http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-383-580-1 mirzenami, s. & beaudry, c. (2022) does experiencing international research collaboration permanently affect the impact of scientific production? evidence from africa. journal of african economies 31(3) 251–271. https://doi.org/10.1093/jae/ejab008 ndlovu-gatshen, s. (2020) the cognitive empire, politics of knowledge and african intellectual productions: reflections on struggles for epistemic freedom and resurgence of decolonisation in the twenty-first century. third world quarterly 42(5) 882–901. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2020.1775487 ndofirepi, a. & gwaravanda, e. (2019) epistemic (in)justice in african universities: a perspective of the politics of knowledge. educational review 71(5) 581–594. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2018.1459477 north, a., hastieb, w. & hoyer, l. (2020) out of africa: the underrepresentation of african authors in high-impact geoscience literature. earth-science reviews 208 103262. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2020.103262 olechnicka, a., ploszaj, a. & celinska-janowicz, d. (2019) the geography of scientific collaboration. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315471938 pouris, a. & ho, y. (2014) research emphasis and collaboration in africa. scientometrics 98(3) 2169–2184. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1156-8 radwan, a. & sakr, m. (2018) exploring ‘brain circulation’ as a concept to mitigate brain drain in africa and improve eu–africa cooperation in the field of science and technology. south african journal of international affairs 25(4) 517–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2018.1551151 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=celex:52020jc0004 https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe_en https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718087 https://fingo.fi/ajankohtaista/uutiset/afrikka-strategia-saa-kehitysjarjestoilta-kritiikkia-mutta-myos-kiitosta/ https://fingo.fi/ajankohtaista/uutiset/afrikka-strategia-saa-kehitysjarjestoilta-kritiikkia-mutta-myos-kiitosta/ https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2755-9_12 https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2021.1981144 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429328978 https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1749254 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312705052359 https://www.aka.fi/suomen-akatemian-toiminta/ajankohtaista/blogi/2021/afrikka-kiinnostaa/ https://www.aka.fi/suomen-akatemian-toiminta/ajankohtaista/blogi/2021/afrikka-kiinnostaa/ https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2021.1942822 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2018.09.002 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-383-580-1 https://doi.org/10.1093/jae/ejab008 https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2020.1775487 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2018.1459477 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2020.103262 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315471938 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1156-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/10220461.2018.1551151 fennia 201(1) (2023) 107jussi jauhiainen samoff, j. & bidemi, c. (2004) the promise of partnership and continuities of dependence: external support to higher education in africa. african studies review 47(1) 67–199. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0002020600027001 schwab, k., zahidi, s. & world economic forum (2020) the global competitiveness report special edition 2020. how countries are performing on the road to recovery. world economic forum, geneva. <https://www3.weforum.org/docs/wef_theglobalcompetitivenessreport2020.pdf>. seth, s. (2009) putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial. postcolonial studies 12(4) 373–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790903350633 shanghairanking consultancy (2021) 2021 academic ranking of world universities. <https://www. shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2021>. 21.5.2023. tahmooresnejad, l., beaudry, c. & mirnezami, s. (2021) the study of network effects on research impact in africa. science and public policy 48(4) 462–473. https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scab030 teevan, c., medinilla, a. & sergejef, k. (2021) the green deal in eu foreign and development policy. ecdpm briefing note no. 131. <https://ecdpm.org/application/files/2516/5546/8575/green-deal-euforeign-development-policy-ecdpm-briefing-note-131-2021.pdf> 7.1.2023 tijssen, r. (2007) africa’s contribution to the worldwide research literature: new analytical perspectives, trends, and performance indicators. scientometrics 71(2) 303–327. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1658-3 united nations (2020) climate change is an increasing threat to africa. un climate change news 27 october 2020. <https://unfccc.int/news/climate-change-is-an-increasing-threat-to-africa>. 8.1.2023. united nations (2022) the 2022 revision of world population prospects. <https://population.un.org/ wpp/download/standard/mostused/>. university of helsinki (2020) africa programme 2021–2030. university of helsinki, helsinki. web of science (2022) web of science database. <https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/summary/ c14a245e-d826-4ff8-b13b-a607f93bdfeb-889c99ea/relevance/>. 21.3.2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0002020600027001 https://www3.weforum.org/docs/wef_theglobalcompetitivenessreport2020.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790903350633 https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2021 https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2021 https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scab030 https://ecdpm.org/application/files/2516/5546/8575/green-deal-eu-foreign-development-policy-ecdpm-briefing-note-131-2021.pdf https://ecdpm.org/application/files/2516/5546/8575/green-deal-eu-foreign-development-policy-ecdpm-briefing-note-131-2021.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-007-1658-3 https://unfccc.int/news/climate-change-is-an-increasing-threat-to-africa https://population.un.org/wpp/download/standard/mostused/ https://population.un.org/wpp/download/standard/mostused/ https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/summary/c14a245e-d826-4ff8-b13b-a607f93bdfeb-889c99ea/relevance/ https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/summary/c14a245e-d826-4ff8-b13b-a607f93bdfeb-889c99ea/relevance/ reclaiming value from academic labor: commentary by the editors of human geography. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66683 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66683 reflections: on publishing reclaiming value from academic labor: commentary by the editors of human geography finn, john c., richard peet, sharlene mollett and john lauermann finn, john c., richard peet, sharlene mollett & john lauermann (2017). reclaiming value from academic labor: commentary by the editors of human geography. fennia 195: 2, pp. 182–184. issn 1798-5617. there have long been discussions about the need for an alternative publishing model for academic research. this has been made clear by the september 2017 scandal involving third world quarterly. the editor’s deeply problematic decision to publish an essay arguing in favor of colonialism was likely meant as click-bate to drive clicks and citations. but we should not lose sight of the fact that this latest scandal is only one recent manifestation of a long-simmering problem that has periodically commanded significant attention in the academic literature, blogs, email lists, conference sessions, and the popular press. as a direct result, over the last decade or more, new journals have been created that specifically endeavor to offer routes around corporate/capitalist academic publishing, and several existing journals have removed themselves from this profitdriven ecosystem. in this commentary, the editorial team of the journal human geography weighs in on what we see as the nature of the problem, what we are doing in response, what our successes have been, and what challenges remain. keywords: academic labor, academic publishing, human geography, radical geography john c. finn, christopher newport university, 1 avenue of the arts, newport news, va 23606, usa, & book review editor of human geography. e-mail: john.finn@cnu.edu richard peet, graduate school of geography, clark university, 950 main street, worcester, ma 01610, usa, & editor of human geography. e-mail: rpeet@ clarku.edu sharlene mollett, university of toronto, scarborough, 1265 military trail, toronto, on, canada, m1c 1a4, & opinions editor, human geography. e-mail: sharlene.mollett@utoronto.ca john lauermann, medgar evers college, city university of new york, 1650 bedford ave, brooklyn, ny 11225, usa, & web editor of human geography. e-mail: jlauermann@mec.cuny.edu there have long been discussions about the need for an alternative publishing model for academic research. this has been made clear by the september 2017 scandal involving third world quarterly. the editor’s deeply problematic decision to publish an essay arguing in favor of colonialism was likely meant as click-bate to drive clicks and citations. but we should not lose sight of the fact that this latest scandal is only one recent manifestation of a long-simmering problem that has periodically commanded © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 183john c. finn, richard peet, sharlene mollett & john lauermann significant attention in the academic literature, blogs, email lists, conference sessions, and the popular press. as a direct result, over the last decade or more, new journals have been created that specifically endeavor to offer routes around corporate/capitalist academic publishing, and several existing journals have removed themselves from this profit-driven ecosystem. in this commentary, the editorial team of the journal human geography weighs in on what we see as the nature of the problem, what we are doing in response, what our successes have been, and what challenges remain. it seems to us that the nature of the problem is fairly clear. first, as we know, the vast majority of research published in peer-reviewed academic journals (at least in geography and similar disciplines) is funded by universities, government agencies, non-profit organizations, non-governmental organizations, and the academics themselves (who dedicate significant uncompensated time to research, especially in summer months when many of us are ‘off-contract’ with our university employers). academics once again perform significant and almost always uncompensated labor acting as editors of those journals, reviewing manuscripts for those journals, and sitting on those journals’ editorial boards. those manuscripts are then published as peer-reviewed articles in journals that profit mightily by selling the very articles back to universities, laboratories, other institutions, and individuals. or, as robert darnton, now emeritus university librarian at harvard university, succinctly remarked: “we faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices” (quoted in sample 2012, 1). second, largely because of the tenure system in which individual faculty members are evaluated based largely upon citations and impact measures, there is overwhelming pressure, especially on junior faculty, to publish in ‘ranked’ journals, which, with few exceptions, fall within the corporate/ capitalist model of academic publishing. this, for obvious reasons, becomes self-perpetuating. and thus, we have ended up with is a system in which there are very few ‘valued’ publishing options outside of this corporate/capitalist structure of knowledge production and dissemination. the journal human geography was created specifically in response to this. one of the primary motivations in the creation of the journal was precisely our recognition of the need to retain control of the value produced by academic labor. as we write on our website, and paraphrased here, over the last twenty years, journals that once were owned and produced by universities and academic and professional associations have come to be controlled, in part or in whole, by publishing houses that increasingly are concentrated in a few multinational media conglomerates. this means that the surplus value produced by the academic labor that writes the content of journals ends up as profit for media capital. it also means that corporations control the fund of knowledge produced by academic labor. we are determined to resist this trend. hence in 2007 we founded a non-profit corporation—the institute for human geography, inc.—and in 2008 we published the first issue of the journal human geography. in the years since, neither the institute nor the journal has established relations of any kind with commercial publishing houses. even so, human geography is not an open access, web-based journal. individual subscriptions are offered at a low cost ($40 per year print and online access, $20 per year online only), and institutional subscriptions at a moderate cost ($600/$540). these subscription fees cover the material costs of producing the journal—editors work on a purely volunteer basis—and all surplus is put toward sponsoring radical research (more on that below). to date we have achieved significant successes. first, one only needs to quickly glance through the journal’s table of contents to see articles by some of the discipline’s most influential thinkers intermingled with contributions from younger, lesser known scholars. this is a direct result of the international reputation of the journal’s editorial board on the one hand, and the journal’s explicitly stated mission to create a space for young scholars to publish critical, radical, political, and politicized scholarship on topics under-represented in mainstream/corporate/capitalist academic journals on the other. second, the journal has also undertaken a significant effort to organize book review symposia on important new texts within geography and beyond. as with the traditional articles published in the journal, contributions to these book review symposia come from well-known and junior scholars alike. third, and perhaps most directly related to the journal’s founding goal to wrest the accumulated surplus value of our academic labor out of the hands of the corporate/capitalist 184 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing publishing industry, in october 2015 we announced our small grants program, offering grants of up to $5,000 each to sponsor radical research, activism, and writing. it is incredibly satisfying to report that to date we have funded over 25 different projects, disbursing a grand total of nearly $120,000. that said, there are significant challenges that come with our uncompromising stand to be entirely free and independent of the corporate/capitalist publishing industry. as peet (2008) remarks, journals that are not indexed on indices such as the isi web of knowledge (which are generally corporate controlled) “might just as well not exist. writers that this corporation does not follow, write in thin air. our work is not known if they choose not to notice us. we are judged, ranked and ordered via criteria decided upon by a media corporation” (peet 2008, 1). human geography is not ranked in these indices, nor are the articles we publish included in google scholar search results. and nonetheless, we exist. the journal’s website received nearly 70,000 unique visitors in the last 12 months (september 2016 – august 2017), and the pdf files of our most viewed articles were downloaded over 500 times each in the past 12 months. to get to this point we have depended heavily on the reputation of the journal, its editor, and its editorial board, and on the high quality of articles, reviews, symposia, and opinions we publish, both for continuing to attract high quality submissions, and also (and equally importantly) for authors who need their publications in human geography to be valorized on their cvs, job applications, and tenure packets. as an editorial team, we will continue to work tirelessly to increase the quality of the journal, and we sincerely hope that critical and radical geographers from all over the world and in all areas of the discipline will continue to send us the fruits of their academic labor, and will continue to respect the scholarship of their colleagues who publish in human geography and other alternative, non-capitalist outlets, even if, especially if, our neoliberal system of tenure, promotion, and self-valorization says we should not. references peet, r. (2008) editorial: the noliberalization of knowledge. human geography 1(1) 1–2. sample, i. (2012) harvard university says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices. the guardian 24.04.2012. <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices> 30.10.2017. governing political spaces through “future work” – commentary to jones. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80205 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80205 reflections governing political spaces through “future work” – commentary to jones sami moisio moisio, s. (2019) governing political spaces through “future work” – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 132–136. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.80205 this reflections article is a comment upon rhys jones’ paper (in this issue) which deals with the geographies of the governance of the future. i suggest that the constant production of governmental imaginaries dealing with the future should be understood as “future work” that is an essential dimension of a broader phenomenon of “territory work” whereby processes of re-territorialization and de-territorialization come together. the active attempt to “know” and cope with the future should be understood as an essential constituent of all governing activities without which the rationality of governance would lose much of its meaning. governance of the future, as it occurs in governmental practices and associated imaginaries that translate the future into a governable object, is an essential dimension in the ongoing remaking of territories of wealth, power and belonging. this process merits more geographical examination and commentary. keywords: governance, future work, political space, capitalism sami moisio, department of geosciences and geography/helsinki institute of urban and regional studies, yliopistonkatu 3, po box 4, 00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: sami.moisio@helsinki.fi introduction as the enlightening paper by professor rhys jones (2019) underscores, the spatiality of the future is produced in the present in diverse practices of governance, steering, political economy and institutional arrangements. the study of the governance of the future is therefore too important to be left to futures studies, let alone to futurologists for whom the future is synonym to technological development or economic calculus. in his book seeing like a state, scott (1998) suggest that the central dimension of the modern state is “legibility”, which refers to the practices of rationalizing and standardization of state space into administratively convenient format. arguably, these practices of making the state as an object of governance include diverse future-oriented practices such as urban and regional planning, economic forecasting, standardization of legal discourse, and the organization of transportation. if the premodern states were “blind” with regard to society and environment, the modern state is, in turn, constantly re-worked through detailed “maps” of its territory and population. in modern statecrafting, both society and the environment is refashioned by “state maps of legibility” (ibid., 3) as particular simplifications that selectively produce knowledge on “society” and “environment” of a given state. this selectivity notwithstanding, state simplifications are powerful and transformative by nature, and © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80205 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80205 fennia 197(1) (2019) 133sami moisio thus play a key role in bringing about the future. in short, they enable “much of the reality they depicted to be remade” (ibid., 3). by following the logic of scott, i suggest that the constant production of governmental imaginaries dealing with the future should be understood as “future work” that is an essential dimension of a broader phenomenon of “territory work” whereby processes of re-territorialization and deterritorialization come together (moisio & luukkonen 2017). this kind of future work takes place not only in the standing committees for the future that one finds in many national parliaments, for instance. rather, the active attempt to “know” and cope with the future should be understood as an essential constituent of all governing activities without which the rationality of governance would lose much of its meaning. governance of the future, as it occurs in governmental practices and associated imaginaries that translate the future into a governable object, is an essential dimension in the ongoing remaking of territories of wealth, power and belonging. cities, regions and states are constantly re-worked, transformed and maintained in and through future work, whereby diverse actors – politicians and political authorities operating at various scales, consultants, representatives of trade unions and business confederations, and academic scholars – articulate the challenges, threats, possibilities and hopes that a given political community is facing. this essay proceeds in three sections. section two discusses the geographical perspective to the analysis of the governance of the future outlined by rhys jones. in section three, i briefly discuss the role of future work in the context of knowledge-based economization that merits rigorous geographical investigation and commentary. geographies of the governance of the future as jones (2019) argues in his paper, human geography has much to offer for the study of the governance of the future. as a response to his own call, jones develops a multi-layered geographical perspective to the spatial study of the governance of the future. by using the concept of “geographies”, he seeks to spatialize the analysis of the governance of the future. accordingly, geographers may elaborate how the “governance of the future occurs differently in different places and emerges as a result of a movement of people, things and ideas from one location to another” (jones 2019, 9). this perspective explicitly connects the study of the governance of the future to the literature of policy transfer and policy mobility. these are fields of scholarship on which geographers have already made significant contributions (for an overview, see e.g. temenos & mccann 2013). second, jones highlights what can be called the geographical variegation of the governance of the future; the ways in which governance of the future “becomes embedded” in various ways in different states, nations and regions. third, jones suggest that the scalar dynamics of the governance of the future merit more scholarly explication. importantly, jones adds a normative component to the geographical study of the governance of the future. he suggests that a focus on the geographical dimensions on the governance of the future potentially enables one to imagine and promote “a more hopeful and just version of the future” (ibid., 8). even if this idea is not fully developed in his paper, jones proposes that a spatial interrogation of the geographies of the governance of the future has the potential to impact on the definition and promotion of spatial justice. this is a bold argument that seeks to bring geographical analysis closer to political practice: to the ways in which spatial justice is actually defined and practiced in political strategies, as well as enacted by policy-makers and civil servants at various scales. jones elaborates his arguments through a vivid examination of the development and implementation of wales’ well-being of future generations act (hereafter, well-being act). the well-being act is actually an interesting part of the executive devolution of power that wales experienced in 1999. in this capacity, the goal was to define welsh models of policy delivery, whether in relation to education, health or sustainable development, and to consider the impact of present policies on future generations in wales. the well-being act articulates a goal to create a better and more just wales by the year 2050. it is supposed to create a prosperous, resilient, healthy, and more equal wales that would be 134 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections characterized by cohesive communities, global responsibility, as well as thriving welsh language and culture by 2050. for jones, the well-being act seems to signal a positive and inclusive attempt of the welsh government to achieve spatial justice in the future. tailoring this vision was not only based on a relatively democratic process of consultation, but it also included new ways of approaching justice and well-being. in his article, jones (2019) puts together a three-tier scalar analysis of the well-being act. he first scrutinizes the way in which the well-being act is embedded in a national welsh scale, and points out that the homogenizing emphasis on the nation has some potentially negative repercussions for the realization of spatial justice in a spatially diversified wales. while perceiving the local operationalization of the well-being act as potentially enriching from the perspective of spatial justice, jones ends up making a set of equally critical observations dealing with the local operationalization and reasoning of the programme. the third scale jones elaborates in his paper is the most enlightening to me. it introduces the mind of a civil servant as a pivotal terrain of governance and highlights the embodied ways of working on the well-being act. interestingly, the well-being act has been accompanied by notable efforts on behalf of various political authorities and organizations to encourage public servants to analyse the long-term impact of their initiatives and decisions. public servants are therefore encouraged to ask themselves what they are actually doing. by echoing the era of spatial keynesianism, “slow” and “rational” working in policy-making is encouraged in the context of the well-being act, especially if that kind of orientation leads to action that takes into consideration the long-term implications of policymaking. the emphasis on behavioural change related to thinking and acting differently is most interesting in the contemporary historical conjuncture that is characterised by increasing pressure towards the public sector to develop fast policies, to deliver effectively, and to create impressive economic outcomes as effectively as possible. at least implicitly, the well-being act hence seeks to release the civil servant from the trap of the electoral cycle, which inescapably underscores the need for short-term gains. in this capacity, the well-being act at least potentially swims against the processes of neoliberalization. it may hence be an interesting example of an alternative policy process that political authorities operating in different geographical contexts may well like to study in more detail. it is, of course, an entirely different thing to speculate how the future work such as the well-being act actually contributes to the well-being in wales, and how it is related to the broader politicaleconomic developments in wales and beyond, including the distribution of both public and private assets. the paper by jones (2019) however succinctly discloses the fact that the well-being act is already more than a paper tiger. moreover, his article is successful in demonstrating that the making of the future as an object of governance has at least three geographical dimensions that merit scholarly attention: 1. it is a geographical process in itself. in other words, all ideas regarding the future are historically contingent, spatially rooted (contextual) and connected to broader transnational webs of ideas and processes. 2. geographical spaces are under re-making in the present in the practices of governance that focus on the future. 3. geographical inquiry into the governance of the future may contribute to the tailoring of policies and discourses that enhance the construction of more spatially just political communities. this would also require developing methods and data that do not foreclose the future but rather open it up to debate that motivates creative and bold imagining of alternative futures of hope. coda: future work in the context of knowledge-based economization future work can be understood as inescapably selective and political way of knowing and framing the future and, thus, guiding societal change. with regard to actorness, a distinction can be made between four forms of future work. the first of these manifests itself in various future programmes and future roadmaps, which are launched by political authorities and tailored through official procedures. the well-being act discussed by jones (2019) falls into this category. fennia 197(1) (2019) 135sami moisio the second form of future work covers the whole spectrum of mundane governance and steering practices, which are premised on particular widely shared views of “preferred” futures. today, this mundane governance work recycles the basic vocabularies of post-fordist capitalism, combined with the various discourses of sustainable development. the everyday governance and steering work of the state is related to the fourth form of future work: that made by consultant companies. in this context, future appears almost invariably through the notion of harsh inter-spatial economic competition: future is conceived as a threat or as a challenge that needs to be governed and managed through particular expertise. this kind of future work operates through all manner of predictions and scenarios dealing with societal developments. governing challenging futures through precaution, preparedness and forecasting has therefore become a lucrative business, and the analyses by consultancies are widely utilized by state administrations in different geographical contexts. the fourth form of future work manifests itself in the world of academic scholarship. indeed, the sheer societal power of conceptual frames and key ideas developed by guru scholars in the field of urban studies or business management, for instance, is at least partly based on their tendency to portray not only how the world is, but also how it should be. popular academic theories that touch upon issues such as societal change, competitiveness and urbanization thus have a particular role in future work. these theories are not only descriptive but also prescriptive, and they hence embody a form of productive power regarding the future. it seems clear that the contemporary production of the state as a territory of wealth, power and belonging under capitalist globalization touches upon both state spatiality and population and brings together many forms of future work outlined above. in its various attempts to “respond” to the perceived inevitable futures of capitalism, the state has actively brought about the different forms of post-fordist regimes of capitalist accumulation since the late 1980s. i have conceptualized this process as knowledge-based economization (moisio 2018a). one topic that merits more geographical scholarship is exactly the statist and political production of the imagined economic forms of the future. human geographical analysis on the ways in which the contemporary knowledge-intensive form of capitalism is constituted through active re-working of political spaces and populace might increase understanding on how the discursive envisioning of the future, when combined with state power, actually contributes to the generation of new economic forms such as the “start-up economy”. the imaginaries of knowledge-intensive form of capitalism are extremely future-oriented and “positive” in their representational qualities. this is why jessop (2004) connects the knowledge-based economy with what he calls a new economic imaginary which has performative and constitutive force. the imaginaries of the knowledge-intensive form of capitalism have become so strong that, within the oecd-sphere in particular, the political parties from right to left seem to be touchingly unanimous on one thing: that the bright future of their political communities is dependent on the capacity to cope with the “rules” of the global knowledge-intensive capitalism. these geographical contexts are therefore increasingly characterized by future work that envisions entire cities and states as nests of innovation, agglomeration, talent, particular skills, creativity, entrepreneurship, and start-ups, to name but a few. it is, for instance, interesting to notice that the increasingly powerful narrative on the shift of the political community called finland “from technology to content” gives rise to new cityand metropoliscentered spatial imaginaries of the state (moisio 2018b). it is equally notable how such future work draws from popular academic theories dealing with urban agglomeration economies, for instance. the process of knowledge-based economization has involved imagining the “useful” capacities and orientations of national populace, as well as the new spatial forms of the state that may contribute to state’s international competitiveness. it is for this reason why the process of knowledge-based economization is challenging also from the perspective of spatial justice. there is a danger that emphasising a set of national priorities in relation to economic competitiveness lead to a focusing of attention, services and funding on certain areas more than others. moreover, the ways how human capabilities and orientations are today valued in knowledge-based economization disclose clear connections with neoliberal dogma. knowledge-based economization is about governing living resources, and it gives and denies value to particular human conducts and human mentalities. it can thus be argued that “knowledge-based economization places a relatively narrow faction of population 136 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections in the driver’s seat of societal development. in other words, knowledge-based economization is not only characterized by the financial and political success of its ‘happy subjects’ but also by its capacity to abandon certain populations and to situate them outside political normativity” (moisio 2018a, 161). by following the tenor of rhys jones’ (2019) insightful paper, one may thus legitimately ask whether the future work regarding the knowledge-intensive form of capitalism has the capacity to define a future that can both express hope and enable social and spatial justice. references jessop, b. (2004) critical semiotic analysis and cultural political economy. critical discourse studies 1(2) 159–174. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900410001674506 jones, r. (2019) governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act. fennia 197(1) 8–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 moisio, s. (2018a) geopolitics of the knowledge-based economy. routledge, london. moisio, s. (2018b) urbanizing the nation-state: notes on the geopolitical growth of cities and cityregions. urban geography 39(9) 1421–1425. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2018.1454685 moisio, s. & luukkonen, j. (2017) notes on spatial transformation in post-cold war europe and the territory work of the european union. in vihalemm, p., masso, a. & operman, s. (eds.) the routledge international handbook of european social transformations, 224–238. routledge, abingdon, oxon and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315612942-15 scott, j. c. (1998) seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. yale university press, new haven and london. temenos, c. & mccann, e. (2013) geographies of policy mobilities. geography compass 7(3) 344–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12063 https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900410001674506 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2018.1454685 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315612942-15 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12063 untitled geography among the sciences ronald f. abler abler, ronald f. (2001). geography among the sciences. fennia 179:2, pp. 175–179. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. speech at the inauguration ceremony of the new building of the department of geography of the university of helsinki. ronald f. abler, executive director, association of american geographers. secretary general, international geographical union. association of american geographers, 1710 sixteenth street nw, washington dc 20009, usa. ms received 19th november 2001 (revised 19th november, 2001). geography and the geographers who construct it enjoy distinctive opportunities and respond to distinctive challenges compared to those who profess and practice other disciplines. geographers address an unusually wide variety of topics, and employ remarkably diverse methods in their attempts to solve problems and achieve understanding. consequently, geography exhibits extensive internal specialization, which often engenders confusion on the part of colleagues in other disciplines about geography’s intellectual core and substantive domain. to maintain its vital role among the sciences, geographers would be wise to articulate more clearly the ways they can contribute to the grand challenges facing contemporary science and humanity more generally, which in turn demands rethinking of traditional patterns of thought and practice. geography’s distinctive breadth not uniquely among the sciences, but distinctly and perhaps unmatched in degree, geographers seek to understand and explain phenomena across a wide spectrum of intellectual realms. some ply the trade alongside botanists, atmospheric scientists, or earth scientists. others engage primarily in social science pursuits by exploring the geometry and choreography of cultural, economic, political, social phenomena. yet others view the world in humanistic terms, describing, interpreting, and explaining places and landscapes in ways that resonate with personal emotion and experience. still others have found a behavioral viewpoint exciting and satisfying in their work on navigation and way finding, and on how people perceive, respond to, and alter their surroundings. supporting and intertwining with this rich substantive array are the geographers who create and refine the discipline’s distinct techniques of mapmaking, remote sensing, and geographic information systems (gis). what lends coherence and unity to an intellectual enterprise with the audacity to assert dominion across the natural, social, and behavioral sciences as well as the humanities? a deep and abiding conviction that location matters. whether they focus their analytical and explanatory skills on patterns of weather and climate, on the ways cities organize and reorganize their neighborhoods and hinterlands, on how immigrants try to reproduce the look and feel of their homelands in new settings, on the ways flood plain dwellers credit or discredit the threats posed by floods, or on how to make computerized maps easier to draw and interpret, geographers attend always to where things are, why they are there, and how they are connected to other things at other places. meteorologists more likely than not attend primarily to the physics of atmospheric processes. a geographically trained climatologist will attend primarily to the ways atmospheric physics produces temporal patterns of weather extending over years and decades at specific places and in specific regions. every coherent, self-conscious intellectual enterprise (my definition of a discipline) has at its core one fundamental truth that can be elaborated indefinitely within its realm of applicability. negate that basic proposition, and the enterprise necessarily collapses. economics has arisen from 176 fennia 179: 2 (2001)ronald f. abler the undeniable existence of scarcity, and all of the grandeur and horror of the dismal science follow from the fact of scarcity. were everything that human beings wanted ubiquitously abundant, economics would not-could not-exist as an intellectual enterprise. if natural and human systems did not exist in a temporal continuum with a past, present, and probable future, neither history nor cosmography would be viable or even thinkable concepts. everything and everybody would just be rather than having been nascent, then being, and then have been. geography’s intellectual superstructure is built on the friction of distance, which in turn arises from terrestrial space-an aspect of existence as fundamental as time. the undeniable existence of terrestrial space and the need to move individuals, commodities, goods, and services among places within terrestrial space is the foundation of geography’s intellectual superstructure. whether apparent or not, any movement of people, things, or even ideas among places entails costs. the costs may be monetary, political, social, or psychological, but nothing moves in the natural or human world without the expenditure of one of these forms of energy. the friction of distance is geography’s sine qua non, in the same way that scarcity gives rise to economics and time gives rise to history. eliminate the friction of distance, and geography becomes nonsensical. but because the friction of distance can never be eliminated at terrestrial scales, geography has always been, is, and will remain vital. what we call geography then is the necessarily continuous teasing out of the nature and consequences of the costs of overcoming the friction of distance in human and natural systems. individuals or groups of people who wish to exchange goods must find ways to move them about, and the constantly changing costs of moving them about shape not only the networks that carry the goods but in the long run, the fortunes of the places participating in the exchanges. air and water and gravity combine to overcome the friction of distance for materials ranging from molecules to immense boulders, and sculpt the shape of the earth in doing so. geographers profess and practice across many diverse substantive topics because they seek understanding of the ways the frictions of distance play out in specific subjects. the distinctive methods geographers bring to bear on the problems and topics they pursue arise from geography’s traditional focus on distance and patterns (sets of distances) and they offer admirably affective ways of portraying and analyzing those dimensions of human experience and natural systems. geographers and kindred spirits have been making maps for thousands of years. computerization has greatly enhanced the power and utility of maps in recent years. geographic information systems (gis) are to geography what telescopes are to astronomy and microscopes are to biology – and more. rendering maps into digital form has fostered the development of powerful new tools for analyzing patterns and processes that unfold simultaneously in space and time at terrestrial scales. equally important is the capability digital storage and manipulation of maps offers for synthesis, and especially for synthesizing different kinds of data such as the geographical relationships between natural and social phenomena. comparing more than two or three paper maps to see how different features are geographically related to each other is difficult. comparing five or six is almost impossible. when maps have been converted to digital form, however, they can readily be compared to each other with considerable rigor, engendering much improved understanding of the ways numerous features of the natural and social environment combine to produce individual places and regions. consequences of geography’s breadth and perspective a discipline that spreads its attentions as widely as geography enjoys a constant tension between fission and cohesion. for better or for worse, geography has spawned what sometimes appears to be an embarrassment of specialized subgroups to provide local foci within its wide beam. the association of american geographers, for example, hosts 53 specialty groups with interests ranging from africa to the world wide web, and three affinity groups for geographers employed by community colleges, those who are graduate students in geography, and those who are retired. membership in the specialty groups ranges from more than 1,400 for the gis specialty group, to fewer than 100 for several of the more specialized groups. the disparity evident in the existence of 53 specialty groups within geography versus the 24 sections in the american association for the fennia 179: 2 (2001) 177geography among the sciences advancement of science (aaas), which represents all of science, has not gone unnoticed or unremarked by those concerned about geography’s expansive purview. internationally, similar internal specialization prevails. the international geographical union (igu) boasts 22 commissions, ten study groups, and two task forces. maintaining cohesion within such topical diversity can be difficult, but to date it has been possible through occasional adjustments in the structure and operations of geography’s scholarly societies. the aag established specialty and affinity groups in response to the increasing size and diversity of its membership and its annual meetings. at its march 2001 annual meeting in new york city, for example, 4,750 participants attended more than 3,000 presentations organized into some 750 sessions. specialty and affinity group organization and sponsorship of sessions at the annual meetings helps meeting participants find presentations and sessions of interest amidst an almost bewildering array of possibilities. similarly, the 2000 segmenting of the annals of the association of american geographers into four sections devoted respectively to environmental sciences; methods, models, and geographical information sciences; nature and society; and people, place, region was instituted to highlight the four major intellectual realms in which geographers work. restructuring disciplinary meetings and publications helps maintain cohesion within geography but it does little to alleviate the second consequences of geography’s diverse interests and applications – the confusion among colleagues in other disciplines about geography’s goals. in many instances, geographers have failed to articulate adequately to non geographers the conceptual core that unifies their diverse substantive interests. in many instances, geographers have spread their expertise so thinly over so many regions or topics that they have failed to achieve the critical mass prerequisite to providing trenchant explanation or understanding. these shortcomings were cast into sharp relief at the opening session of the 2001 annual meeting of the association of american geographers. keynote speaker john noble wilford, a seasoned science writer for the new york times observed that while he as a non scientist could articulate clearly the overriding research agendas now being pursued by astronomers and archeologists (two of the other disciplines he covers in addition to geography), he could not do so for geography. wilford is a sympathetic friend of the discipline, a councillor of the american geographical society and author of a number of books on topics related to geography, including the mapmakers (knopf 1981), and the mysterious history of columbus (knopf 1991). wilford recommended that geographers identify, and identify their individual work with, large scientific undertakings, the grand challenges that face humankind in general. it's possible that geography is congenitally incapable of consensus on such big questions, but i’ve always preferred to think there is a big picture in geography, basic themes that do unify its diverse manifestations, and that our difficulty has been in voicing it clearly and in linking it in productive ways to major problems. accordingly, i will devote the concluding section of today’s remarks to ways i think geographers can and should respond to the challenges posed generally by their own diversity of interests and more specifically to that posed by wilford. responses to the challenge of diversity certainly some of the grand challenges facing science today are suitable, worthy, and even noble causes in which geographers should enlist. more important, emerging efforts in earth systems science, sustainability science, and vulnerability science will be less than fully effective if geographers in large numbers do not participate in their formulation and elaboration. the explanation and understanding of nested and coupled natural and human systems sought by scholars in earth systems science are inherently geographical. global changes are the summations of events that occur in localities. any workable strategies for mitigating the causes of global change or for responding to its consequences will operate at locality scale. modifying the forces that drive global change will require refined analysis of the ways local actions are linked to global processes, tempered by local knowledge of how decisions are made at locality scale. geographers excel at producing those kinds of knowledge and understanding. much the same is true with respect to the attempts to identify the limits on process that form the core of sustainability science and the efforts to map peoples and places at risk from anthropogenic and natural hazards in vulnerability science. 178 fennia 179: 2 (2001)ronald f. abler meeting the grand challenges outside geography proper will require overcoming some obstacles to progress that have arisen inside the discipline because of its fragmented nature (turner 2002). foremost among these is the need to state clearly and forcefully, as i have tried to do today, the validity and value of the perspective that unifies the work geographers do. that location matters is an ineluctable reality of human existence and of most of humankind’s intellectual constructs. geographers would do well to clarify that message by providing examples of how their ways of thinking enhance the insights of the disciplines and specialties pursued by their non geographer colleagues. meeting that challenge will in turn require attention to a linked series of subsidiary objectives: reducing somewhat geography’s internal diversity by finding commonalities among its plethora of sub specialities; contributing more effectively to the formulation of the research agendas of science; building intellectual bridges to colleagues in other disciplines cognate with geography’s major realms of research and application; strengthening the discipline’s scholarly and professional societies; and a reduction in the proportion of the discipline’s effort that is expended in pursuing isolated, diminutive projects. that work has been undertaken in the united states with the formation of a new division within the association of american geographers. the goals of the aag research and strategic initiatives division are to promote more effective links between the aag and geographers in government agencies and private firms; enlarge aag participation in government programs, foster research and teaching partnerships among the academic, government, and private sectors, collaborate more closely with cognate organizations, and take deliberate steps to secure appointments for geographers to positions of leadership in the broader scientific establishment of the united states and in international scientific organizations. geography among the sciences in finland i apologize for presenting such a parochial view of geography among the sciences today. while i have greatly enjoyed and profited by the greater acquaintance with finnish science and finnish geography i have acquired during my few days here under markku löytönen’s expert guidance, my very limited prior knowledge of both forced me to rely largely on my own experience in my own country in preparing these remarks. there are many similarities in the practice of science and geography in finland and the united states, and there are certainly no differences between the two countries in the theory and conceptual components of the enterprises, but important differences in the cultural and social contexts in which geography and science are conducted should not be forgotten. foremost among those differences is scale, a factor that is often overlooked by those not sensitive to it, and a dimension of process that can profoundly affect outcomes. scale certainly affects the degree of division of labor and specialization of task that can be achieved. a small country such as finland incurs all the fixed costs of maintaining a scientific infrastructure without being able to spread those costs over the larger corps of scientists that would exist in a larger country. that in turn results in multiple obligations for those who do choose science and geography as careers in finland. i see your university faculty and students in geography playing substantially less specialized roles than their counterparts in the united states, where such tasks as teacher training or developing and maintaining links with geographers in government and the private sector are often performed by individuals who enjoy the luxury of specializing in those roles. from what i have seen, however, generally and at the university of helsinki, geography thrives here despite its small size, both as an individual enterprise and as a vital component of finnish science. i spent most of my academic career at penn state university where geography is a part of penn state’s college of earth and mineral sciences. the penn state department of geography was rated the best graduate program in geography in a 1995 national academy of sciences ranking of doctoral programs in the sciences. i believe that much of that accomplishment is attributable to the ways penn state’s geographers profited by their close association with the natural scientists – geologists, metallurgists, meteorologists, petroleum engineers, and others – who were their colleagues in that college. i see pleasant and promising parallels between geography’s home among the university sciences at penn state and geography’s past and new home here at the university of helsinki. fennia 179: 2 (2001) 179geography among the sciences personally and on behalf of the association of american geographers and the international geographical union, i offer warmest congratulations to you on the occasion of the dedication of the magnificent physicum as a new home for geography and science at the university of helsinki. you have our best wishes for continued and increased success in your teaching, research, and service to your country and to international science. references turner bl (2002). contested identities: human-environment geography and disciplinary implications in a restructuring academy. annals of the association of american geographers. [in press]. future as an object of governance – commentary to jones urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa80372 doi: 10.11143/fennia.80372 reflections future as an object of governance – commentary to jones juho luukkonen luukkonen, j. (2019) future as an object of governance – commentary to jones. fennia 197(1) 141–144. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80372 in this commentary, i reflect rhys jones’ (in this issue) suggestion for geographers to take part in exploring and enabling the most effective governmental configurations for just futures. starting from a foucauldian perspective on governance as a problematizing activity, i bring to the fore that the future is not something that waits out there to be seized by rulers but a social and political construction dictated by the conditions of the present. moreover, i also highlight that a conventional scalar framework is not sufficient for understanding complex networks of governance in an increasingly globalized policy world. accordingly, in studying the future as an object of governance we need to be aware of the engagement of nationally/regionally situated policies with prevailing power relations which extend well beyond the territorial boundaries of governance and which regulate our capacities to imagine the future(s). this is of utmost importance for geographers entering the policy world. keywords: future, policy object, scale juho luukkonen, relate centre of excellence, department of geosciences and geography, pl 4 (yliopistonkatu 3), university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: juho.luukkonen@helsinki.fi in his article “governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act” rhys jones discusses the governing of the future from a geographical perspective. in the article jones argues that there is a need for geographical studies since the governance of the future is an inherently spatial phenomenon which is “embedded in various ways in particular states, nations and regions” (jones 2019, 9) and “played out across a series of connected geographical scales” (jones 2019, 9). jones’ remarks on the scalar structuration and embeddedness of governance illustrate nicely how ambiguous policy objects such as “future” and “spatial justice” are prone to competing interpretations and parochial usages. in this reflective response, i focus on four broader themes which in my opinion merit further attention. first, i discuss the becoming and invention of the “future” as an object of governance. leaning on a foucauldian reading of government as a problematizing activity, i argue that the future is not something that waits out there to be seized by rulers. instead, it is a social and political construction dictated by the prevailing power relations and conditions of the present. in the second section, i focus on the scalar understanding of governance and discuss alternative ways of approaching governance in an increasingly transnational world of policy making. in the final section, i briefly comment on jones’ suggestion for geographers to take the leading role in exploring the impacts of geographies on the governance of more equal and just futures. © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80372 142 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections the invention of the “future” as an object of governance in his article, jones (2019) notes that the future emerges as an indeterminate becoming which carries with it a wide range of more hopeful and just alternatives. however, throughout the paper he uses expressions such as the “governing the future” and “governance of the future” (emphasis added). while the definite article and the possessive preposition may be used for grammatical purposes only, the formulations prompt questions related to the essence and becoming of the “future” as a target of governmental activities. in her recently published textbook on the post-world war ii future politics and studies, andersson (2018, 22) has noted that “the future is a product of the historical contingencies and power structures of the present that make certain conjectures possible and others not in distinct historical universes.” andersson’s notion refers to a clichéd constructionist idea that the “future” is a political and social construction of the powerful. the argument is obvious for most scholars and an inadequate conclusion in itself. however, it is a good reminder that the future is not something that waits out there to be discovered and governed by genuine bureaucrats but is invented and made up in those very same governmental practices which seek to address it. perhaps more importantly, her argument orients one to take a “present-as-reality” perspective on the construction of the future as an object of governance (e.g. flockhart 2010). in other words, the future as a governmental object is inescapably bound by our present understandings and diagnostic capacities and is thus in a permanent process of reconstitution and reconstruction. seeing the future as a social and political construction, which is regulated by present structures and processes, resonates with foucauldian policy studies which do not take policies as responses to selfevident problems but pay attention to the construction of policy objects and problems as an inherent feature of public policy processes (e.g. rose 1999; dikeç 2007). broadly speaking these studies stem from the idea that government is “a problematizing activity… intrinsically linked to the problems around which it circulates” (rose & miller 1992, 181). in other words, policy making is not only about reacting to perceived societal problems or challenges but an art of diagnostics which actively makes up its objects. the foucauldian perspective on the production of the future as an object of governance and policy practices opens possibilities for scrutinizing the ways in which politicians, policy-makers and other stakeholders have contributed to the construction and reduction of the undetermined future(s) to a singular object of research and governmental activities. furthermore, the perspective opens avenues for pondering how certain hegemonic ideologies, imaginaries, or modes of knowledge frame attempts to study and govern the future(s) in different geographical contexts. this perspective seems even more relevant in the light of the author’s suggestion that geographers should take a more visible role in exploring the geographies of the future governance. transnational spaces of governance in his article, jones (2019) makes an important argument by stating that scale possesses consequences for the governance of the future. however, the discussion of the well-being act on three scales, national, local and individual, leaves aside the role and the implications of the international scale for the governance of wales in general and for attempts to operationalize the national well-being act at the local scale and at the level of individual civil servants. as various studies on the geographies of governance and policy mobilities have noted, in an increasingly interconnected world policies are neither conducted within hierarchically arranged and vertically leveled “chains of command” nor within enclosed territorial arenas (e.g. stone 2012; temenos & mccann 2013; prince 2016; moisio et al. 2018). instead, practices of governance and policy-making occur in complex networks of actors which extend temporally and spatially well beyond the present and the jurisdictional boundaries of formal administrative structures. accordingly, the framing of the future as an object of governance in wales or elsewhere is not solely a “domestic matter” but essentially affected by international actors and trends. the role of international policy networks in regulating domestic policies is not only a matter of academic interests but is essentially tied to the author’s notion of spatial justice as the right and the fennia 197(1) (2019) 143juho luukkonen possibility to take part in political life and in the governance of the future(s). the increased involvement of international actors in policy processes and the delegation of powers beyond democratically selected public bodies – such as consultancies and expert organizations – may lead to the narrowing down of the scope of alternative future paths and to a situation whereby the voices of relevant stakeholders are not heard in the envisioning of the desired national futures. the emergence of the “urban” as an episteme of our time which sets “the condition of possibility for understanding major aspects of contemporary global economic, social and political life” (brenner & schmid 2015, 155) offers an illustrative example of the narrowing down of the “public sphere” and of possibilities to engage in political life. in finland, for instance, as in various other western societies, the “urban” has become a central spatial imaginary regulating the ways of how and by whom the future(s) of the country are addressed and envisioned in policy debates and public discussions. despite the fact that urbanization is often articulated through the depoliticizing notions of “general interest” and “common good” as a nationally necessary project, it is a highly exclusive imaginary which not only leads potentially to spatially unjust futures but may also lead to spatially unjust governance arrangements as certain actors or localities are considered irrelevant stakeholders in the envisioning of the (urban) futures of the state (luukkonen & sirviö forthcoming). in envisioning increased urbanization as an appropriate and necessary future vision for the country, politicians from the core urban regions have played an active and prominent role. yet, the role of various international expert organizations (e.g. oecd, eu, wto), well-known individual consultants and academic gurus has also been remarkable. their recommendations and viewpoints have been used successfully in depoliticizing urban-centered national visions and in politicizing and marginalizing alternative non-urban future visions. geography and governance – what role and for whom? in his concluding remarks, jones (2019) suggests a more active role for geographers both in exploring the impacts of geographical themes on attempts to achieve spatial justice in the future and in enabling the most effective governmental configurations to be developed within specific geographical settings. the suggestion is a bit problematic as it bundles a vast set of very diverse “geographies-of-this-andthat” under a singular banner as if there was a peculiar overarching quality which qualifies all geographers to ponder the most effective governmental configurations within different geographical settings. if that is the case, what are the peculiar skills or capacities that justify geographers’ role in the making of more just futures? is it geographers’ mythical virtue of understanding human–nature relations as promulgated in seminal disciplinary textbooks (e.g. peet 1998)? or is it rather our understanding of the inherent spatiality of human life? while the answer lies probably closer to the latter option, it is worth accentuating that the capability to see the spatiality of things is not enough to make geographers experts on issues of governance. this is especially the case given that geographers’ monopoly over the concept of space has been broken down as scholars across the social sciences – often better equipped to understanding governance and policy processes – have become increasingly aware of the inherent spatiality of social and political life (e.g. gieryn 2000; berezin & schain 2003). the fact that understanding geographies of governance necessitates also other virtues than the “spatial gaze” leads to another crucial question: if only some of the geographers possess capabilities for taking a leading role, then who among us would/should they be? some geographers – whose ontological and epistemological commitments probably resonate better with current political tastes than others or those who have been able to engage with “sexy” empirical issues – have already been able to get their voices heard. however, those scholars who operate in the margins of geography, with marginal topics or against the prevailing political fashion may confront difficulties in finding their ways to the arenas where the future(s) are formulated and governed. the third crucial issue which is worth reflecting on is the double hermeneutic role of social sciences. this refers to the idea that as researchers, we are not only observing social reality from a distance but simultaneously contributing actively to the construction of the world (giddens 1987). altogether, we need to be aware of the prevailing power relations, hegemonic ideologies, imaginaries, sedimented thoughts, and knowledges that guide and regulate our possibilities to think 144 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections of the future(s) as well as of the consequences of our research practices and outputs in delimiting potential future avenues (cf. beaumont et al. 2005). history is fraught with examples of how the too intimate fraternization of scholars with the rulers has led to the blunting of the critical and analytical bite of research (see peck 2016). in the most extreme cases consequences have been anything but just (see barnes & minca 2013). references andersson, j. (2018) the future of the world: futurology, futurists, and the struggle for the post-cold war imagination. oxford university press, oxford. barnes, t. j. & minca, c. (2013) nazi spatial theory: the dark geographies of carl schmitt and walter christaller. annals of the association of american geographers 103(3) 669–687. https://doi.org/10.1 080/00045608.2011.653732 beaumont, j., loopmans, m. & uitermark, j. (2005) politicization of research and the relevance of geography: some experiences and reflections for an ongoing debate. area 37(1) 118–126. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2005.00606.x berezin, m. & schain, m. (2003) (eds.) europe without borders: remapping territory, citizenship and identity in a transnational age. johns hopkins university press, baltimore. brenner, n. & schmid, c. (2015) towards a new epistemology of the urban? city 19(2–3) 151–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712 dikeç, m. (2007) space, governmentality, and the geographies of french urban policy. european urban and regional studies 14(4) 277–289. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776407081162 flockhart, t. (2010) europeanization or eu-ization? the transfer of european norms across time and space. journal of common market studies 48(4) 787–810. http://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2010.02074.x giddens, a. (1987) social theory and modern sociology. stanford university press, palo alto. gieryn, t. f. (2000) a space for place in sociology. annual review of sociology 26(1) 463–496. https:// doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463 jones, r. (2019) governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act. fennia 197(1) 8–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 luukkonen, j. & sirviö, h. (forthcoming) politics of depoliticization and the constitution of cityregionalism as a dominant spatial-political imaginary in finland. moisio, s., luukkonen, j. & jonas, a. e. g. (2018) political geographies of globalization. in kloosterman, r. c., mamadouh, v. & terhorst, p. (eds.) handbook on the geographies of globalization, 135–147. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785363849.00018 peck, j. (2016) economic rationality meets celebrity urbanology: exploring edward glaeser’s city. international journal of urban and regional research 40(1) 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/14682427.12321 peet, r. (1998) modern geographical thought. blackwell publishers, oxford. prince, r. (2016) the spaces in between: mobile policy and the topographies and topologies of the technocracy. environment and planning d: society and space 34(3) 420–437. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263775815618401 rose, n. (1999) powers of freedom: reframing political thought. cambridge university press, cambridge and new york. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511488856 rose, n. & miller, p. (1992) political power beyond the state—problematics of government. british journal of sociology 43(2) 173–205. https://doi.org/10.2307/591464 stone, d. (2012) transfer and translation of policy. policy studies 33(6) 483–499. https://doi.org/10.10 80/01442872.2012.695933 temenos, c. & mccann, e. (2013) geographies of policy mobilities. geography compass 7(5) 344–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12063 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.653732 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.653732 http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2005.00606.x http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2005.00606.x http://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1014712 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776407081162 http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2010.02074.x http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2010.02074.x http://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463 http://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785363849.00018 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12321 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12321 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815618401 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815618401 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511488856 https://doi.org/10.2307/591464 http://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2012.695933 http://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2012.695933 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12063 untitled from colonization to cyberspace – some challenges for contemporary geography hille koskela koskela, hille (2001). from colonization to cyberspace – some challenges for contemporary geography. fennia 179:2, pp. 185–187. helsinki. issn 00150010. comment on professor ronald f. abler’s speech. hille koskela, department of geography, po box 64, 00014 university of helsinki, finland. ms received 22nd november, 2001 (revised 29th november, 2001). it has been claimed that geography, as an academic discipline, has its roots in natural science. the core of geography in the 19th century – a core that one could identify – was tied closely to natural science. from another point of view, geography has historical roots in two processes that describe its role in the society: in colonialism and in nationalism. these roots are perhaps not exactly contradictory to the definition ’natural science’ but tell us another story where geography is seen as making social contributions. in finland, for instance, geography was important in the early building of the national identity. these tasks meant that geographers also had an important role in the academic community. geography was respected and acknowledged by other disciplines. this is an historical point of view. from the present perspective one can ask, provocatively, whether there still is a discipline called ’geography’? divisions begun to appear a long time ago and, lately, fragmentation has been ever more intense. the question we face now is whether geography still might have a core that would unite its various branches? has it been inevitably dispersed? do we still need a synthetic perspective, and if yes, what might that include? how does geography look like now? from inside the academy, and from outside of it? it is clear, that there is a risk that a discipline that is wide-ranging and dispersed, will look like a discipline not worth noticing. it might be perceived as empty inside – ’like a donut’. this has partly contributed to the fact that geographers often have a weak self-esteem. a lot of time is spent in discussions around the question ’what is geography?’ in geography departments world-wide. however, one might form the question in another way. the most crucial point here, arguably, is not ’what geography is?’ but rather ’to which questions geographers are seeking answers for?’ are these questions trivial and without social meanings, or are they in the center of the contemporary discussion? what do geographers do? are there research questions addressed that might unite various divisions within geography? what are the most important challenges for this discipline right now? what are ’the geographies’ of the information society? i will now go on in discussing some topics that can be described as current challenges. my purpose is by no means to claim that these would exclude other research themes as less relevant. rather, i wish to use some research topics as examples that show the point that despite dispersion there still are common areas of research. at least four significant focus points can be identified. first, environmental problems are in the very heart of present geographical research. sustainability is a crucial challenge. ’the risk society’ (beck 1992) is here and now. human impact on the nature and global environmental change are traditional geographical topics but their role seems to be ever more important in the contemporary world. the influence of this is clear in physical geography, but environmental problems are also included in planning geography where environmental impact assessment plays a crucial role from basic research to its applications. in the most recent research, basic research and applications come close to each other. indeed, the dis186 fennia 179: 2 (2001)hille koskela tinction between physical geography – as ’pure’ – and applied geography – i.e. the application of geographical knowledge to solve problems within society – is not perhaps as exact as we are used to think. the aims for sustainable development and solution of environmental problems are identical. second, globalization has been one of the most widely discussed subjects lately – this summer it has had quite a lot of attention in the finnish media, for example. cultural, political, economic and environmental processes now operate at a global scale more than before. globalization has sometimes been described as ’the end of geography’. local uniqueness is, if not disappearing, at least fundamentally changing (meyer & geschiere 1999). paradoxically, this is a field where geographers do important and valid research ranging from the understanding of the time-space compression to the finding of new scales at which different processes operate. it must be emphasized that change does not occur everywhere in the same way: the processes of globalization are not geographically uniform. geography matters – even in the globalized world. if this is acknowledged, then geographers have new challenges to meet. third, regionalism is currently perhaps a more important question than ever before. new boundaries and new meanings for a region or regional identity have been one of the most widely discussed subjects, especially in contemporary europe. although conventional boundaries have been contested, the fact that modes of production, social relations and identities are locally specific has not changed. research on borderlands and conflict areas show that there are various reasons for new regionalism: for example, cultural, religious or those based on the share of natural resources. here, again, geographers from different subdivisions have had their important role. regions and identities of place have always been in the focus of geographical research but the re-evaluation of the traditional concept of region is essential for understanding the new forms of regionalism. fourth, perhaps not so obvious, focus point is the concept of cyberspace. namely, the alternative worlds created by computers. ’a there that was not there’ as william gibson (1999) originally described. geographers play a crucial role in this discussion from two different perspectives: with their technological skills as well as with their developing of the theoretical concept of space. from theoretical point of view, it has been argued that cyberspace is changing our notions of space, distance, and the meaning of place, for example by creating ’virtual cities and communities’. the ’online geographies of power and exclusion’ modify not only spatial but also social relations (dodge & kitchin 2001). from practical point of view, one must note the fact that geographers spend more and more time using computers. sometimes, however, it is forgotten that a computer is a tool, a method perhaps, but not the research question itself, not to speak about ’theory’. the geographers involved with theoretical reasoning on cyberspace and those developing practical computer skills – gis, for example – have, until now, been ideologically quite far from each other. however, both dimensions are clearly part of the present geography, and it is interesting to see how these relations will change in the near future. these four subjects of research all show where geographers, and geography stands: in the very center of the most important scientific discussions of our time. they are all interdisciplinary. further, these are all very different in their relations to our society than the historical themes of colonialism and nationalism were. the aim is to explain, understand and emancipate, rather than exploit or colonize. these four subjects were only examples but they do, i believe, show an important point. geography might be dispersed as regards theories, methods or even epistemologies used, but it might still be surprisingly solid in relation to the research questions asked. however, if we take geography seriously, it becomes more important to look at its role in the society than its self-esteem. clearly, we should be more concerned about problem solving than disciplinary orthodoxy. academic discipline has no value of its own, torn apart from its context. to some extent, specialization is inevitable – and important. it is essential if we wish to take seriously the tasks ahead. it is common for geographers to ask ’what is our scientific identity?’ or even ’what do others think about geography and about what geographers do?’. indeed, we spend a lot of time in convincing ourselves, as well as others, that what we do is important. perhaps we should re-direct these thoughts, and ask, as i suggested, ’what are the questions we seek answers for?’ and another question ’how important are these questions – locally, globally, scientifically, and politically?’. this fennia 179: 2 (2001) 187from colonization to cyberspace – … would not only help us to find our true identity as a discipline called geography, but would also help us to develop this discipline further. the historical perspective might teach us another lesson. all knowledge is power. and once created, can be used in a variety of ways. these ways may be more or less acceptable. most of us do, nowadays, look at colonialism very critically, although it might be agreed that it was one of the roots of geography as a discipline. as regards more up to date problematic questions we tend to be silent. this applies, for example, to gis technology used in the 1991 gulf war, gps technology and the risk of invading privacy, or cartographic attempts to justify serbia’s claims to macedonia, or similar processes in other conflict areas. a discipline with true and solid identity should not avoid difficult questions, or deny its responsibility as a producer of scientific knowledge. knowledge can be produced to promote particular political projects. it is not enough that we teach our students the methods and technological skills required in new geography. a wider context of understanding should always be included – both in relation to the strengths of our discipline and in relation to the dangers we face. while doing research on sustainability, we should maintain sustainability within our own profession. we should not deny that there are important questions concerning social justice and ethics – in every field of science – including geography. the more these are discussed and the more seriously they are taken, the clearer and stronger is our scientific identity. references beck u (1992). risk society. towards a new modernity. sage, london. dodge m & r kitchin (2001). mapping cyberspace. routledge, london. gibson w (1999). neurovelho. wsoy, helsinki. meyer b & p geschiere (eds) (1999). globalization and identity: dialectics of flow and closure. blackwell, oxford. untitled science policy and research in finland kai husso and pauliina raento husso, kai & pauliina raento (2002). science policy and research in finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 261–274. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. we investigate the evolution of finnish science policy and its impact on universities and scientific research. finnish research is currently enjoying far greater international visibility, impact, and esteem than previously. the role of universities in society has broadened. apart from their traditional tasks of research and teaching, universities have established closer links with business and responded to regional needs. a number of national reforms carried out in the 1990s launched a heated debate between universities and public authorities. contested topics include the ‘centre of excellence’ policy, large-scale research programmes, and graduate schools. these reforms injected new dynamism into finnish universities, but created new challenges as well. the structure of university research funding changed significantly during the 1990s. in real terms, research expenditure covered from government budget sources increased by 17 percent, while external, often competitive funding increased by twofold. we believe that this dependency on outside funding may make research more short-sighted and vulnerable over the long run. in order to maintain the quality of finnish research, science policy ought to be anchored to the needs of universities and scientific research more firmly than during the 1990s and budget funding ought to be increased. these actions would guarantee a more stable development of scientific enterprise and thus strenghten the positive socio-economic impact of research on regions and on society as a whole. kai husso, academy of finland, p. o. box 99, fin-00501 helsinki, finland. e-mail: kai.husso@cec.eu.int pauliina raento, department of geography, p. o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: pauliina.raento@helsinki.fi introduction the contributions of universities and scientific research to the welfare of a nation and to its competitiveness have attracted growing attention in all oecd countries since the 1960s (e.g., government… 1966; general… 1971). this interest reached completely new heights in the 1990s. it is now widely agreed in western industrialised countries that a highly trained workforce, research, and technological development are the key conditions for innovation and economic success of a country or a region (e.g., technology… 1998; oecd… 2000). the role of universities and scientific research has thus taken on new political and economic emphases. for example, according to the oecd, there is a “growing demand for economic relevance” of research and “universities are under pressure to contribute more directly to the innovation systems of their national economies” (university… 1998: 8). in the oecd countries, universities have seen this kind of views as a threat to their traditional principal task, i.e., long-term basic research. the finnish debate regarding the role of scientific research and universities in the country’s (regional) economic development has been very lively since the mid-1990s (e.g., allardt 1997, 1998; raivio 1998; häyrinenalestalo et al. 2000). knowledge and know-how are vital to the production of goods and services. during the past ten years, production has become increasingly based on the efficient use and application of scientific knowledge, on the extensive utilisation of new technologies, and on the command of complex production processes. this trend is evident in the national and international statistics on research and development (r&d), technology, and inno262 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai husso and pauliina raento vation (see main… 2001; science… 2001; towards… 2001). these statistics show that in most of the oecd countries, r&d expenditures, the production volume of high technology products, the turnover and employment of r&d-intensive companies, and the volume of foreign trade in high technology products have increased significantly. according to these statistics, finland has done well from the early 1990s onwards. the image of finland as an r&d-intensive hi-tech country is nevertheless quite recent. in this article we investigate how finnish science policy and conditions for scientific research have changed over the past twenty years. the aim is to answer two questions: »what are the current problems and immediate future prospects of universities and scientific research in finland?» and »how does finland rank among the world’s top research countries?» we will place these questions in the context of public debates on science policy and universities. our material consists of recent domestic and international statistics on r&d investments and data on the outputs and impacts of scientific research on society. the volume of investment in r&d can be considered an indirect measure of a society’s innovation potential and of the status and prestige of research in general. these figures also reflect the r&dand technology-related economic potential in individual countries and regions. science, technology, and economic development the role of r&d and high technology in national and regional economic development has been studied through the concept of techno-economic paradigm (e.g., freeman 1987, 1992; freeman & soete 1987; dosi et al. 1988). the paradigm refers to the technological changes in industrial and service sectors over time and at different geographical scales. currently, the focus is especially on hi-tech industries and fields of research that specialise in electronics, information technology and biotechnology, and on production and production process innovations based on these technologies. from the viewpoint of regional development, a novel feature is the mushrooming of new centres of expertise, each with its own area of specialisation. these centres are typically located near universities, public research institutes, and industrial and service businesses that rely on new research and technologies. there exist also various kinds of spin-off companies whose business concepts are based on current technological solutions. the changes in economic activities in regions and the co-operative relations inside and between regions are partly the outcome of the dynamics of technological change. according to freeman and perez (1988: 47–49, 58–59), the concept of techno-economic paradigm refers also to a combination of interrelated technological, organisational, and managerial innovations that embody an increase in productivity for all or most of the economy. this opens up a new range of investment and profit opportunities. such a change implies a new combination of technological and economic advantages. one needs to bear in mind, however, that a full constellation of the current paradigm’s characteristics goes far beyond the technological change itself. the paradigm brings along a restructuring of the productive system and new forms of interplay between the actors of the economy. thus, at stake are also social and cultural changes, and new types of market behaviour adopted by private and public organisations. in addition, the current paradigm involves (a) new ‘best-practice’ forms of organisational structure in firms and research establishments; (b) increasing demand of high quality labour force in the knowledge-intensive sectors of economy; (c) new patterns in the location of investment both nationally and internationally; (d) increasing public and private funding devoted to activities which enhance the capacity to create, introduce, and apply new knowledge in the private sector; and (e) new waves of investment designated to facilitate the wide use of the new products and processes in the economy (freeman & perez 1988: 59; freeman 1992). the described developments have led to a situation where information has become a highly valued commodity and know-how an important production factor. this has highlighted the importance of investment in technological development in business firms and scientific research conducted in universities. given the key role of research and high technology as engines of industry, governments have naturally wanted to develop their political measures. indeed, most of the oecd countries (including finland) made a conscious effort in the 1990s to enhance their science and technology policy measures and integrate them in industrial and regional policies more closely. governments have increased their own r&d fifennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 263science policy and research in finland nancing, supported development work conducted by business companies, and promoted co-operation between companies, universities, and public research institutes (technology… 1998; oecd… 1999, 2001). the development of finnish science system illustrates the benefits and threats that these changes in the economic and political environment have presented to universities. especially in recent years, both policy-makers and the end-users of r&d findings and new knowledge have begun to underline the importance of applicable research results. the development of the finnish science system the relationship of finnish universities and scientific research with the surrounding society has faced almost constant pressure of change since the late 1950s (see paavolainen 1975; skyttä 1975: 267–280). the current pressures are therefore nothing new. the emphasis of the debate has fluctuated over time, but some of the themes and issues have remained constant, as we will demonstrate later. table 1 describes the main periods and events in the development of science policy and operational environment of universities in finland. the systematic development of the national science system was launched during the late 1960s and early 1970s, following an extensive debate in the 1960s regarding science policy, the social significance of scientific research, and the importance of industrial r&d. it was believed that research and technology could help to alleviate social problems and increase welfare in society. the public sector began to support industrial r&d by investing more in research and promoting industrially-oriented applied research. budget funding for universities was increased significantly. in 1966–1970, expansion of the university system was initiated, the science administration was reorganised and the academy of finland was established (1970)1 . with increasing funds at its disposal, the academy began to support university research. r&d in finland was still fairly limited in the early 1970s in comparison with most other oecd countries. the development of the national science policy and universities was continued under favourable atmosphere until the mid-1970s, however. the oil crises then sent the economy to a long-term recession causing the government to cut back its budget funding to universities. during that period, balanced and ‘experimental’ development of the science system was severely disturbed, as were the conditions for conducting basic research. the 1980s: a decade of growth economic stagnation in the late 1970s and early 1980s caused serious problems for traditional industrial production in most of the oecd countries. at that time, industrial countries started to turn to new high technology and other fields of special expertise. it was believed that economic up-swings and future market growth would be based on knowledge and products of information and communication technologies. in finland, the decision to favour research-oriented economic and political strategies was supported by the relatively high standard of the country’s education system and by the development of the national science system in the 1960s and 1970s. r&d expenditure increased favourably throughout the 1980s (fig. 1 & cd-fig. 1). overall, this decade was a period of stable development of the science system and its infrastructure. in a drive to increase welfare and affluence in finland and to strengthen the competitiveness of the national economy, the government pursued a consistent policy of promoting r&d, investing in the production of hi-tech products and increasing the share of these products in the country’s exports. the same priorities formed the basis of the science and technology policy of the 1990s and continue to be highlighted today. budget funding for universities and resources allocated to public research institutes increased steadily during the 1980s. the status of research and researcher training were strengthened. these favourable developments were in large part made possible by legislation aimed at the development of the universities. for example, the 1986 act on the development of universities guaranteed a steady increase in the amount of appropriations to universities until 1996. the resources made available to the academy of finland also continued to increase. measures introduced to encourage research and development in business companies included tax concessions. another significant measure was the founding of the national technology agency2 (tekes) in 1983. the agency began to 264 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai husso and pauliina raento table 1. main periods of the development of science policy in finland (see paavolainen 1975; häikiö & hänninen-salmelin 1979; kaukonen 1987; suomen… 1988; raatikainen & tunkkari 1991; häyrinen-alestalo et al. 2000; a forward… 1993; husso & raento 1999; the graduate… 2000; husso 2001). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 265science policy and research in finland fund r&d primarily in business firms but also in universities. the decade’s other main administrative and organisational reform was the founding of the science and technology policy council in 1987. this was a novel experiment in the western world, and it was thus unknown how this kind of governmental body would impact science and technology policies and their institutional status. one of the factors behind the creation of the council was the oecd country study on science and technology policy in finland (reviews… 1987). the study stated that science policy and technology policy planning and co-ordination should be enhanced to guarantee the efficient use of the existing research know-how and technological potential in the country. the report underscored some of the problems associated with traditional sectoral policy: co-operation between science and technology policies were seen as insufficient (reviews… 1987: 8, 22–23; see raatikainen & tunkkari 1991: 26–28). towards the end of the decade, the emphasis of science and technology policy started to shift slowly towards stressing the importance of co-operation between universities, public research institutes, and business companies. the aim was to encourage closer interaction and exchange between basic and applied research and development. at the same time, attitudes regarding research were changing. the new primary objectives in both public and private sector were to strengthen technological development in industry and to develop research-intensive products, i.e., to maintain the industry’s strategic competitiveness. research was required to show greater efficiency, productivity, and impact. this new way of thinking was captured in such slogans as »research and know-how: the foundation of competitiveness» and »product development and technological know-how: key conditions for industrial success.» the 1990s: conflicting trends the economic recession in the beginning of the 1990s halted the real growth of r&d expenditure. in the private sector r&d expenditure began to decline in 1991. in universities this happened two years later, in the public sector, four years later. the overall impacts of the recession (1991–1996) on the total volume of r&d were not very dramatic or very long-lived, however. since the mid1990s, the government guaranteed continuity by considering investment in r&d and technological innovation the key to competitiveness in the future (see finland... 1996). it was believed that this investment would eventually help to heal the national economy. the recession did leave its mark, however: the funding structure of r&d changed and caused significant diversification within the national science system in terms of the conditions for conducting research (fig. 1 & cdfig. 1). in recent years, r&d expenditure has grown due to private sector investment in the developfig. 1. finland’s r&d expenditure in real terms, in 1971–1999 (index 100 = 1985, prices in 1985) (source: statistics finland r&d database). 266 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai husso and pauliina raento ment of high technology. during the recession, government investment in research was cut back, which reduced the amount of core funding available to public research institutes and universities. the balanced development of the entire r&d system was seriously disturbed. on the one hand, universities found themselves struggling with a lack of resources that threatened the continuity of their long-term basic research. on the other hand, since 1993, private business invested more money than ever before in applied research and development that was aimed at creating new products and upgrading production processes. business firms were not interested in conducting basic research, however. throughout the 1990s, only five percent of all r&d expenditure in the private sector was spent on basic research type activities, i.e., on work that was not directly aimed at new products or processes (tutkimusja… 1997, 2000). universities felt immediately the effects of economic recession, the cutbacks in government research appropriations and the neo-liberal policy in the early 1990s (see alestalo 1991, 1993). the situation was quite desperate, especially if mirrored against the 1986 act on the development of universities. as saarinen (1997: 16) observes, the third section of the act guaranteed to universities an increase in their appropriations equivalent at least to the rise in cost levels in 1987– 1996. paradoxically, the government decided in 1993 that this section should no longer be applied – in precisely the kind of situation for which it had been originally designed. government officials began to emphasise efficiency, performance, productivity, and impacts of r&d. the way of thinking evident in these catchwords was entirely alien to the universities, and the simultaneous cutbacks in their budget funding further complicated the pursuit of positive development. it was unfortunate that the management by results and efficiency indicators were introduced on a broader scale in universities at the very same time in the early 1990s as political measures were introduced to reduce budget funding. finnish universities have resorted increasingly often to outside sources in order to meet the shortfall of funding caused by budget cutbacks. research funding by the academy of finland almost doubled from 1995 to 2000. simultaneously, the academy introduced new measures in order to support the science system. the most important measures were the foundation of the graduate school system, introduction of the programme on ‘centres of excellence’ in research, and the development of large-scale research programmes (see husso et al. 2000: 20–32, 94–98, 106–107). the general aims of these measures have been (a) to help finnish research to reach the international forefront and (b) to increase co-operation between research groups, between disciplines, between universities, and between business firms and universities. these favourable developments have not, however, eliminated the problems that resulted from decreasing total budget funding for universities. indeed, universities’ total r&d expenditure may have shown fairly strong growth, but their total budget funding (i.e., the general grant received from the ministry of education in support of all university activities) in 1998 was still at a lower level than at the beginning of the decade (tutkimusedellytystyöryhmä… 1998: 26). also the budget funding for scientific research showed poor development. from 1991 to 1999, in real terms, research expenditure covered from government budget sources increased by 17 percent, while external funding increased by twofold (for a detailed analysis, see husso 2001). in some academic fields or departments the scarcity of budget funding meant an absolute decrease in research funding even when outside sources of support were available. according to nenola (2000: 4), those who argued that external funding compensates for the lack of core resources did not appreciate this. in many university departments, the small tenured teaching and research staff had to redirect most of their time and capacity away from research and towards securing that as large a number of students as possible would get their undergraduate or graduate degree. another legacy of the 1990s is that scientists are now expected to work increasingly on practical questions. according to this line of thinking, the emphasis of research should be on fulfilling industrial and societal needs and on technological development aimed at new products and production processes. already in the 1990s, this endangered the sufficiency of resources allocated to the real engine of applied research and development, i.e., basic research. as a response, universities began to call for a science policy that would safeguard the diversity of domestic research and its capacity for regeneration. from the perspective of the social sciences and humanities, the stressing of economic benefits was seen as probfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 267science policy and research in finland lematic – more resources were poured into research in such fields as biotechnology and information technology or, more generally, into research that was expected to produce results with immediate application and innovative potential. in the latter part of the 1990s, a key booster of r&d funding in finland was the decision by the cabinet committee on economic policy in 1996 to raise the level of government financing by a further 1.5 billion marks (eur 250 million) by 1999 (compared to 1997 budget appropriations). the total additional r&d funding increased by some fim 3.2 billion (eur 540 million) from 1997 to 1999 (prihti et al. 2000). the aim was to strengthen the entire r&d system, to enhance cooperational networks and clusters, and to support the national economy, business, and employment. most of the funds (55%) were allocated through the national technology agency. thus, the emphasis of use of additional appropriation was on applied research and development. the total share of universities and the academy of finland on the additional appropriation was some 40 percent. with the help of this new investment, the graduate school system was extended, and universities’ equipment and other research facilities were updated, among other improvements. these measures did not help universities in their difficult economic situation. an international comparison r&d intensity, i.e., research expenditure’s share of the gdp, is commonly used in international comparisons of r&d investment. it is not an entirely accurate and reliable measure, however, because the exact measurement of gdp and r&d expenditure is extremely difficult. nonetheless, r&d intensity provides a relatively useful general-level measure of how much a country invests in r&d and technological development in relation to the value of its total production. table 2. r&d intensity, the government’s share of total r&d financing, and the share of universities of total r&d expenditure in selected oecd countries, in 1999, 1994, and 1989 (or the closest year available) (main… 1995: 16, 20, 22, 1998: 16, 20, 22; oecd… 1999: 126, 128, 2001: 147, 149, 151). 268 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai husso and pauliina raento the highest figures for r&d intensity in 1999 were recorded in sweden, finland, and japan (table 2). finland’s r&d intensity grew very rapidly in the 1990s. in 1989–1999, finland ranked among the top five oecd countries in terms of r&d intensity growth (together with iceland, ireland, south korea, and sweden). finland’s r&d intensity was still below the oecd and eu averages in the late 1980s, but by 1994 it was 0.19 percentage points above the oecd average and 0.46 percentage points above the eu average. in 1999, finland showed an r&d intensity of 3.2 percent, while the average for all oecd countries was 2.2 percent and for eu countries, less than 1.9 percent (main… 1995, 1998, 2000; oecd… 1999). in general, the level of research intensity in almost all eu countries has always been much lower than in the union’s toughest rivals, japan and the united states. in the late 1990s, some individual countries (belgium, denmark) have managed to narrow down the gap, but only slightly (main… 2001: 18). from the viewpoint of the ratio between research intensity and per capita gdp, the top oecd countries in 1997 were sweden, finland, and japan (see husso 2001: 32). on this measure, investment in research is also higher than average in france, switzerland, and germany. the results indicate that countries with a high per capita gdp generally invest more in research than others. one of the distinctive features of research in the eu countries in comparison with japan and the united states is to be found in private sector research: measured in terms of research expenditure, private business in the eu (with the exception of sweden) accounts for a smaller proportion of r&d than is the case in japan and the united states. in 1991, the private sector accounted for (on average) 64 percent of total research expenditure in the eu countries, while this figure was 71 percent in japan and 73 percent in the united states. the situation remained largely unchanged throughout the 1990s (main… 1995: 22, 2001: 22). in finland, business investment in r&d accounted for roughly 57 percent of total r&d expenditure in 1991. the sectoral breakdown of research expenditure changed considerably in the late 1990s, however. for instance: the business sector accounted for 60 percent of the total finnish r&d expenditure from 1985 to 1995, while the shares of public sector and universities were some 20 percent each. the share of the business sector increased rapidly from 1995 onwards, while that of universities and the public sector (mainly research institutes) declined. in 1999, the business sector already accounted for some 69 percent of total r&d expenditure. with the exception of the late 1990s, both the nominal and real trends for public sector research expenditure were declining. the balance of the entire r&d system was thus threatened. the same applied to most other oecd countries. the government’s share of total r&d financing and the universities’ share of total r&d expenditure both declined through the 1990s (table 2). according to the estimates by statistics finland (science… 2001), the share of business probably continues to rise over the next few years unless the government invests additional funds into r&d as it has done in recent years. the oecd has given a very positive assessment of the sharp increase in r&d investment by the business sector and of its growing share of the total r&d expenditure in finland. these have been interpreted as positive developments that will help to improve the competitiveness of the national economy in the global markets (technology… 1998; oecd… 2000, 2001). at the same time, however, finnish universities have repeatedly been anxious about the risk of unbalanced development of the r&d system. we fear that in the future, the emphasis in r&d may shift too heavily towards business companies. this may distort the balance of the entire r&d system, seriously undermine the position of universities and scientific research in that system, and reduce the secured resources available for long-term research. in terms of the role of universities in r&d cooperation and the output of scientific research, finnish universities showed internationally healthy development in the 1990s. innovation studies from eu countries indicate that in the mid1990s finland and sweden were the two countries with the highest frequency of contract-based co-operation between business firms and universities and public research institutes. according to the survey results (oecd… 1999), some 45 percent of swedish and 38 percent of finnish innovative business firms had contractual co-operation with universities or government research institutes in the mid-1990s. in other countries, the proportion of firms working closely with public research institutes varied from 9 to 19 percent. according to an innovation survey (for the period 1994– fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 269science policy and research in finland 1996) by statistics finland (leppälahti 1998), almost 30 percent of finnish industrial companies regarded universities as important sources of information for innovation. over 19 percent thought the same of public research institutes. these results lead us to conclude that in finland public research organisations are important partners to a large number of firms and that there has been close and extensive collaboration at least since the early 1990s. scientific research produces results whose impacts on society and economy are most typically of an indirect nature and therefore difficult to measure. the main outputs of research appear in the form of publications. according to the isi database (see husso & miettinen 2000), a total of some 7,000 articles authored by finns were published in international scientific series in 1999. the number of publications increased on average by more than six percent per year during 1991– 1999. the figure was the ninth highest in the oecd. of all publications, finland accounted for roughly one percent in 1999. since the early 1990s, this figure has increased considerably. in addition, relative to population and gdp, finland is currently one of the world’s biggest publishers. on these indicators finland ranks among the top four countries in the world. also the results of citation analysis are favourable for finland. finnish publications were cited more often than ever before in 1995–1999: they received 15 percent more citations than world publications on average. this was the ninth highest ranking in the oecd group. if analysed by bibliometric indicators, finland ranks among the top ten countries in the oecd area. the leading research countries in the oecd are switzerland, sweden, the netherlands, and the united states (for more, see husso et al. 2000: 72–93). regional analysis of research spatially uneven development is arguably an unavoidable feature of the process of technological change and capital accumulation (dicken 1992). researchand innovation-related activities play an important role in these processes. it has been shown that research, innovations inspired by r&d, and their various spin-off effects have a major beneficial effect on the regional economy (e.g., florida & smith 1993; feldman & florida 1994; regional competitiveness… 1997). of course, technological and economic development in the regions depends not only on r&d, but on a number of closely interrelated factors, such as the local industry’s capacity for regeneration, level of education and social capital, and intellectual capacity to generate new business and to adapt to technological, economic, and social change (e.g., temple 2000; sotarauta & mustikkamäki 2001). the interplay between the involved factors is highly complex and difficult to demonstrate. the theoretical approaches and models adopted in the fields of economics and geography regarding the regional economics, r&d, innovation, agglomeration tendency, and local milieus has been discussed recently in an article by husso (2001). the following analysis of the breakdown of r&d by regions provides an overall view of the current potential of r&dand high-technologydependent regional economic development in finland. finland had an r&d intensity of 3.19 percent in 1999. the regions above this figure were uusimaa, pirkanmaa, north ostrobothnia, and varsinais-suomi. the figure exceeded one percent in central finland, ostrobothnia, south karelia, north savo, north karelia, kanta-häme, and satakunta. the figures for r&d expenditure per capita show similar results (cd-fig. 2). in sum, a regional analysis of the value of gdp and r&d expenditure shows that the two sets of figures correlate with one another. the highest figures for r&d expenditure in 1999 were recorded for uusimaa, which accounted for 47 percent of all r&d (table 3). the share of uusimaa thus declined (51% in 1995). the other regional centres of r&d, pirkanmaa (14%), north ostrobothnia (11%), and varsinais-suomi (10%), together accounted for 82 percent of the country’s total r&d expenditure. the figure for 1995 was 79 percent, which suggests that regional concentration continued in the late 1990s. the location of such public institutions as stateowned companies, research institutes, and universities has shaped regional development and regional division of r&d. the tendency of regional concentration is strongest for research in the public sector. two-thirds (65%) of the work is done in uusimaa. in the private sector, the corresponding figure for uusimaa is 42 percent, for the universities, 44 percent. the metropolitan helsinki district alone accounts for two-fifths of r&d by private business in finland (tutkimusja… 2000). only in häme the public sector accounted for most of the r&d expenses (56%) in 1999. private 270 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai husso and pauliina raento r&d-intensive firms and universities were apparently few in this region. the universities held the largest share of total r&d expenditure in north karelia (41%; university of joensuu) and north savo (36%; university of kuopio). the private sector accounted for the majority of r&d in all other regions. most of the research by private business was concentrated in large firms with a personnel of over 500. they were responsible for over 70 percent of private sector research, while the figure for small business with a staff of less than 50 people was only about ten percent. all in all, the most notable changes during the 1990s at the regional level were the decrease in the share of uusimaa and the increase in that of pirkanmaa and north ostrobothnia. in absolute terms, r&d investments increased most significantly in uusimaa. the r&d expenditure in absolute terms increased favourably also in pirkanmaa, north ostrobothnia and varsinais-suomi, and in central finland, north savo, ostrobothnia, and north karelia (especially due to growth in business firms) (cf. table 3). r&d is heavily concentrated within the regions, most notably in their principal urban centres. for instance, the metropolitan helsinki district accounted for 99 percent of uusimaa’s r&d expenditure in 1999. oulu and its surroundings (in north ostrobothnia) were responsible for 96 percent and tampere district (in pirkanmaa) for 94 percent of the region’s r&d expenditure. in central finland, jyväskylä district recorded 80 percent of the region’s r&d expenditure, and in varsinaissuomi, the districts of turku and salo, 62 and 32 percent, respectively (tutkimusja… 2000: 31– 33). the success of the relatively small salo district (of 51,000 inhabitants) draws from the nokia corporation’s notable presence in the area. the combined r&d expenditure of the abovementioned six districts (out of 85 districts in all in finland) was fim 18.7 billion (eur 3.14 billion), or 81 percent of the country’s total r&d expenditure. from the viewpoint of regional development, it is noteworthy that the same six districts were the only ones to receive clear migration gain during the latter part of the 1990s (regional development… 2001: 2). the regional concentration of r&d has shown no signs of decreasing. the government has thus introduced new measures in order to avoid the table 3. r&d expenditure by region and by sector of performance, in 1995 and in 1999 (tutkimusja… 1997: 18, 2000: 31). fim 5.94573 = eur 1. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 271science policy and research in finland situation where know-how, research, and innovation are heavily concentrated in very few growth centres. for example, the second phase of the national centre of expertise programme (1999– 2006) aims to create a dense nationwide network of r&d-intensive regional knowledge centres (cd-fig. 2). in addition to the fourteen centres of expertise included in the map, there are two regionally dispersed national centres – or networks – of expertise that focus on wood products and on food technologies. the two entities bring together numerous universities, research institutes, and business companies from various parts of the country. the first phase of the centre of expertise programme (1994–1998) provided rather encouraging results: 8,000 new jobs were created, 300 new high-technology firms were established, and 130 firms moved to the knowledge centres (see hämäläinen et al. 2000). the current programme seeks, i.e., to (1) identify regional strengths and create economic growth (2) increase the number of competitive products, services, enterprises, and jobs based on the highest standard of expertise (3) reinforce and regenerate regional expertise (4) create conditions for innovation and commercialisation (5) make the latest knowledge and expertise readily available (6) promote regional, national and international networking and collaboration between and within centres of expertise and fields of expertise (7) improve co-ordination between local, regional, and national development measures (centre… 1999). in sum, the nodes are generally expected to offer know-how services, funding, and social and human capital throughout their own area of influence. the links between regional policy and the location of high-tech industries and universities are strong. new initiatives and programmes do not therefore change the impression that the government’s policies favour the regions that are already advanced and have (economically) the best chances to be successful in the global market. the current link between regional and industrial policies seems to be strong as well. according to the office of the prime minister’s expert group, “promoting competition and raising real competitiveness have meant replacing traditional business subsidies with support for research and development. [t]his has shifted the main focus [of the policies] to the big university cities” (regional development… 2001: 5). due to this change, it is possible that the above-mentioned programmes fail to decrease the regional imbalance in the future. we do not contest the government’s support of the potential ‘winner cities’ – quite the contrary. we do suggest, however, that more attention should perhaps be directed to those regions that are located near the knowledge centres and to those areas that lag behind socio-economically. in order to safeguard the favourable development of regional economies and promote general welfare, policy-makers should make every effort to remove those barriers that hinder spatially widespread diffusion and utilization of new knowledge and research findings. the authorities need to address such problems as the shortage of co-operative links and the lack of resources and (communication) channels that facilitate regionally extensive transfers of codified and tacit knowledge between business firms, universities, and the government sector. discussion the general conditions for r&d in finland developed very favourably during the latter half of the 1990s and the national strategic significance of research continued to increase. in order to break loose from economic recession (1991–1996) and to inspire growth, the government decided to start investing more in education, know-how, research, and technology (see finland… 1996). this decision deviated clearly from the oecd mainstream policy-lines. the government’s additional funding programme (1997–1999) wanted to raise the level of research intensity in finland to 2.9 percent by 1999. this goal was reached ahead of schedule. the findings of evaluation reports published in 2000 (husso et al. 2000; prihti et al. 2000) indicate that the increase in r&d expenditure had a beneficial impact on employment and the economy. the diversity and comparatively high quality of the educational infrastructure and universities in finland, on the one hand, and the strong growth of the national economy since the mid272 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai husso and pauliina raento 1990s, on the other hand, supported the positive assessment. the relationship between science and technology, and between universities and business, grew closer and more interactive than ever before in the 1990s. the development and production of goods and services currently relies heavily on the use and application of scientific research and on new knowledge. consequently, the importance of developing new tools for science and technology policies has been recognised widely. in the future, one of the most critical tasks is to maintain a balance in the relationships between universities and business firms. increased co-operation is in the interests of both parties, provided that there is a proper division of labour and that academics are given the opportunity to focus on long-term basic research. enough space for the independent development of the science system should be guaranteed. universities’ own internal objectives that are not at least primarily constructed through co-operation with industry or activities aimed at innovations should be respected more. everything should look generally good: during the latter part of the 1990s, the total funding of r&d was increased, new science policy measures that aimed at upgrading the conditions for conducting research were introduced, and co-operation within the science system and between universities and business firms increased favourably. finnish research reached the international forefront in many fields of science. unfortunately, however, this is not the entire picture – at least not from the viewpoint of universities and scientific research. the insufficient level of budget funding for research is clearly one of the current defects in the science system. the problem is not only the level of funding, but also the allocation of these funds. according to husso et al. (2000: 110), funding for scientific research is increasingly allocated on a competitive basis; to an extent one could argue that there is too much competition for funding. core funding to universities as well as financing between the faculties are frequently allocated on the basis of quantitative measures and repeated peer reviews and evaluations. [this development ties] in closely with the adoption […] of management by results, the aim of which is to raise the quality standards of research and to give closer attention to performance and productivity in the allocation of resources. [u]niversities still remain quite divided in their views on how well the new management philosophy really has worked and on how fair it is. a common criticism against management by results is that in a strict application, it gives too much weight to short-term activities and to quantitative results and efficiency requirements at the expense of quality and long-term development. government officials have recently drafted plans to maintain the positive trend in total r&d funding. some indications suggest that the increase in r&d expenditure will continue in the near future (see review… 2000). this, however, will require careful planning and co-ordination – without forgetting the risks of excessive science policy planning and outside manipulation of scientific research. a key question […] is the extent to which research needs to be […] planned and organised; how far can research be steered […] before it becomes excessive? the key factors in this regard are the ability and willingness of funding bodies and research scientists to take risks and to pioneer new fields of research. in addition, it is important that research funds are always available that are not tied in advance to any specific purpose and that free research is given the space and resources it needs. to make sure that universities can […] work in a positive and encouraging atmosphere, it is essential that the government […] continues to underline the importance of scientific research and its relevance to well-being in society. (husso et al. 2000: 115) if universities are to make justified calls for additional funding in the near future, they have to provide proof of the benefits and impact of their work. in order to convince the funding bodies and decision-makers, universities have to show continuous improvement in international success and visibility of scientific research, to make their organisational structure and administration more practical and flexible, and to reform their financial procedures and rules for co-operative agreements with extramural organisations. in regional policy terms, public funding for r&d is highly selective. most of the funds go to growth centres, further increasing regional imbalances. investment thus tends to flow especially to the areas of greatest opportunity and return to investment. it is difficult, however, to allocate funds to areas where there is no research or where the standards of research are not high. in recent years, the government’s policy regarding universities and r&d funding has nonetheless been to emphasise regional considerations (e.g., korkeakoulujen… 2001). also, the aim of the centre of expertise programme has been to enhance regional fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 273science policy and research in finland strengths in various parts of the country. on the other hand, the national technology agency has wanted to stress the quality of applications received, the viability of proposed projects, and their potential technical and economic impacts. about one half of the agency’s research appropriations go to uusimaa. since r&d is risky business, we expect to see more risks taken in funding decisions as well – especially now that more and more money is being invested in research. this would be particularly valuable to small and promising research teams and to those organisations that work outside today’s major research centres. networking among these parties and co-operation with researches from the principal urban r&d centres will help to create new opportunities in less developed regions. notes 1 the academy of finland is the national organisation for science administration operating under the ministry of education. the academy’s responsibilities include the advancement of scientific research and the encouragement of its exploitation, and the enhancement of international scientific co-operation. the main function of the academy is to finance high-quality scientific research conducted in universities. in 2001, the academy’s annual funding volume was fim 1.1 billion (eur 184 million). this represented about 14 percent of the total government r&d financing (see research… 2000: 6; academy... 2002). 2 the national technology agency (tekes), which operates under the ministry of trade and industry, is the principal source of public funding for applied technological research and industrial r&d. in addition, tekes is the main implementing body of finland’s national technology policy. in 2001, tekes’ funding totalled some fim 2.3 billion (eur 387 million), of which two-thirds were devoted to industrial r&d and the rest to research by universities and research institutes. this represented almost 30 percent of the total government r&d financing (see research… 2000: 7; tekes... 2002). references a forward look (1993). academy of finland, helsinki. academy of finland, annual report 2001 (2002). academy of finland, helsinki. <www.aka.fi/eng/> alestalo m (1991). science and politico-economic system. social change, transformation of political structures, and the social value of science. publications of the academy of finland 2/1991. alestalo m (1993). the rise of neo-liberalism in finland. from the politics of equal opportunity to the search for scientific excellence. science studies 6: 2, 35–47. allardt e (1997). tieteellisen työskentelyn muutokset ja nykyisen tiedepolitiikan vaarat. tiedepolitiikka 4/1997, 5–11. allardt e (1998). teknologiaretoriikka suomalaisen todellisuuden konstruoimisen välineenä. tiede & edistys 2/1998, 85–95. centre of expertise programme (1999). ministry of the interior, department for regional development. <www.intermin.fi/suom/oske/> dicken p (1992). global shift. paul chapman, london. dosi g, c freeman, r nelson, g silverberg & l soete (eds) (1988). technical change and economic theory. frances pinter, london. feldman mp & r florida (1994). the geographic sources of innovation: technological infrastructure and product innovation in the united states. annals of the association of american geographers 84, 210–229. finland: a knowledge-based society (1996). science and technology policy council of finland, helsinki. florida r & df smith jr (1993). venture capital formation, investment, and regional industrialization. annals of the association of american geographers 83, 434–451. freeman c (1987). technology policy and economic performance. lessons from japan. frances pinter, london. freeman c (1992). the economics of hope. essays on technical change, economic growth and the environment. frances pinter, london. freeman c & c perez (1988). structural crises of adjustment. in dosi g, c freeman, r nelson, g silverberg & l soete (eds). technical change and economic theory, 38–66. frances pinter, london. freeman c & l soete (eds) (1987). technical change and full employment. basil blackwell, oxford. general report: gaps in technology (1971). oecd, paris. government and allocation of resources to science (1966). oecd, paris. häikiö m & e hänninen-salmelin (1979). tiedepolitiikka tienhaarassa. korkeakouluja tiedepoliittisen tutkimussäätiön julkaisusarjan raportteja 27. hämäläinen tj, g schienstock & t pentikäinen (2000). policy case studies finland. a paper prepared for the oecd focus group on innovative networks. oecd, paris. häyrinen-alestalo m, k snell & u peltola (2000). pushing universities to market their products: redefinitions of academic activities in finland. comparative social research 19, 165–212. husso k (2001). universities and scientific research in the context of the national innovation system of finland. fennia 179, 27–54. husso k & m miettinen (2000). scientific research and bibliometric indicators. in husso k, t parkka274 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kai husso and pauliina raento ri & s karjalainen (eds). the state and quality of scientific research in finland. a review of scientific research and its environment in the late 1990s. publications of the academy of finland 7/2000, 129–138. husso k, t parkkari & s karjalainen (eds) (2000). the state and quality of scientific research in finland. a review of scientific research and its environment in the late 1990s. publications of the academy of finland 7/2000. husso k & p raento (1999). tutkimuksen huippumaa? in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 160–163. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. kaukonen e (1987). tiedeyhteisö ja tieteellinen kommunikaatio periferiassa. in lehti r & m häyry (eds). tiedeyhteisö – onko sitä?, 115–131. publications of the academy of finland 4/1987. korkeakoulujen alueellisen kehittämisen työryhmän muistio (2001). opetusministeriön työryhmien muistioita 28/2001. leppälahti a (1998). innovaatiotutkimus 1996. statistics finland, science and technology 3/1998. main science and technology indicators 1995/2 (1995). oecd, paris. main science and technology indicators 1998/1 (1998). oecd, paris. main science and technology indicators 1999/2 (1999). oecd, paris. main science and technology indicators 2000/1 (2000). oecd, paris. main science and technology indicators 2001/1 (2001). oecd, paris. nenola a (2000). mitä tapahtuu yliopistotutkimukselle? tieteessä tapahtuu 7/2000, 3–4. oecd science, technology and industry outlook 2000 (2000). oecd, paris. oecd science, technology and industry scoreboard 1999. benchmarking knowledge-based economies (1999). oecd, paris. oecd science, technology and industry scoreboard 2001. towards a knowledge-based economy (2001). oecd, paris. paavolainen j (1975). linkomiehen komiteasta uuteen akatemiaan. suomen akatemia, helsinki. prihti a, l georghiou, e helander, j juusela, f meyer-krahmer, b roslin, t santamäki-vuori & m gröhn (2000). assessment of the additional appropriation for research. sitra reports 2. raatikainen p & h tunkkari (1991). nopeammin, tehokkaammin, tuloksellisemmin – tiedepolitiikka 1990-luvulla? gaudeamus, helsinki. raivio k (1998). yliopisto ja markkinoiden näkymätön käsi. yliopisto 13/1998, 5–7. regional competitiveness and skills (1997). oecd, paris. regional development and regional policy in finland (2001). prime minister’s office, publications 2/ 2001. research in finland (2000). ministry of education, helsinki. review 2000. the challenge of knowledge and know-how (2000). science and technology policy council of finland, helsinki. reviews of national science and technology policy: finland (1987). oecd, paris. saarinen t (1997). tehokkuudesta laatuun ja vaikuttavuuteen: tuloksellisuudesta palkitseminen suomessa. in nyyssölä k & t saarinen (eds). näkökulmia korkeakoulujen tuloksellisuuteen. turun yliopisto, koulutussosiologian tutkimuskeskuksen raportti 41, 15–32. science and technology in finland 2000 (2001). statistics finland, science and technology 2/2001. skyttä k (1975). akatemiataistelu 1945–1948. werner söderström, porvoo. sotarauta m & n mustikkamäki (eds) (2001). alueiden kilpailukyvyn kahdeksan elementtiä. suomen kuntaliitto, julkaisusarja acta 137. suomen akatemian toimintalinjat (1988). academy of finland, helsinki. technology, productivity and job creation: best policy practices (1998). oecd, paris. tekes annual review 2001 (2002). the national technology agency, helsinki. <www.tekes.fi/eng/> temple j (2000). growth effects of education and social capital in the oecd countries. oecd, economics department, working papers 263. the graduate school system in finland (2000). ministry of education, helsinki. the management of science systems (1999). oecd, paris. towards a european research area. key figures 2001 (2001). european commission, brussels. tutkimusedellytystyöryhmä 98:n muistio (1998). opetusministeriön työryhmien muistioita 17/ 1998. tutkimusja kehittämistoiminta 1995. taulukot (1997). statistics finland, science and technology 1/1997. tutkimusja kehittämistoiminta 1999 (2000). statistics finland, science and technology 3/2000. university research in transition (1998). oecd, paris. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa48089 doi: 10.11143/48089 interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and changing practices piret pungas-kohv, riste keskpaik, marko kohv, kalevi kull, tõnu oja and hannes palang pungas-kohv, piret, riste keskpaik, marko kohv, kalevi kull, tõnu oja & hannes palang (2015). interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and changing practices. fennia 193: 2, 242–259. issn 1798-5617. over the centuries mires have been considered to be mostly useless, even dangerous places. adopting a landscape semiotic perspective the article delineates the current common perceptions of estonian mires based upon 767 questionnaires. today the mire is commonly perceived as undisturbed wilderness offering possibilities for various recreational as well as traditional activities. the image of mires in popular consciousness is predominantly based on touristic experience of protected areas. the history of the most widespread practices in the mires over the 20th century reveals three general paradigmatic frames of reference: traditional where mire appears to be liminal; industrial where it is encultured; and ecological where mire is aestheticized. in its orientation towards aesthetic and emotional values the common perspective diverges from the landscape ecological definition. tourism to non-protected, partly meliorated mires should be encouraged to give a more realistic perspective of the mires to nonprofessionals. keywords: mire, raised bogs, phenomenology, perception piret pungas-kohv & tõnu oja, department of geography, university of tartu, vanemuise 46, 50410. e-mail: piret.pungas@ut.ee, tonu.oja@ut.ee riste keskpaik & kalevi kull, department of semiotics, university of tartu, jakobi 2, 51014. e-mail: riste.keskpaik@ut.ee, kalevi@ut.ee marko kohv, department of geology, university of tartu, ravila 14a, 50411. email: marko.kohv@ut.ee hannes palang, center for landscape and culture, estonian institute of humanities, tallinn university, uus-sadama 5, 10120. e-mail: hannes.palang@tlu.ee introduction during the last half-century, mires, together with other wetlands, have gained considerable attention as very important providers of various ecosystem services such as greenhouse gas regulation, water supply and regime management, nutrient buffering during the last decades (costanza et al. 1997; de groot et al. 2006). however, as giblett (1996) points out, the cultural meaning and importance of the mires have been rather marginal and negative for centuries as those areas are generally poorly suited for human settlements. he tries to deconstruct the negative meaning about the wetlands using examples from the whole world. more detailed investigations are available for iceland (huijbens & pálsson 2009) and england (van de noort 2004). the process and background of draining mires in russia due to land shortages have been described by french (1964). among other things he highlights the detrimental influence of mires on the health of people. “the wet lands were notoriously unhealthy for man and beast. in the northern provinces/…/ anthrax was endemic in swamp areas. in poles’ye, ague, or malarial fever and elflock/…/ were widespread” (french 1964: 176– 177). tanskanen (2011) discusses the historical background of mires, attitudes towards them and fennia 193: 2 (2015) 243interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and practices in them in finland. among negative attitudes she mentions the people’s fear of mires as an environmental factor potentially conducive to night frosts that would increase the likelihood of the failure of agricultural crops during the brief vegetation period. lehtinen (2000) describes the negative attitude of the finnish people towards the mires up to the 1960s that saw them as “threatening landscapes of expanding mosses” that were considered as “challenging the basic identity construction and economic development of finland” (lehtinen 2000: 178). in recent decades, next to ecological values, the general attitudes towards the mires have been shifting. this new shift can be clearly tracked because of the conspicuous distinctiveness of the mires that is attracting the attention of the rapidly growing tourism industry which is seeking places that offer new and different experiences. the mainly negative connotations of mires as predominantly creepy and worthless places have in recent decades been positively replaced with those of valuable wilderness (howarth 2001), a rich resource for (tourism) marketing in the globalizing world. in turn, the changes of cultural concepts and practices direct and sometimes initiate the future human actions in mires and therefore influence the size and ecological quality of those areas. the perception of mires in the estonian context has changed rather abruptly during the 20th century, together with the accompanying modifications of institutional practices (pungas & võsu 2012). archaeological sites, that date back to 8900 bc in estonia, are often found close to today’s mires (kriiska 2004), which at that time rather used to be lakes and were used as water roads, indicating ancient ambiguous relations to the wetlands/ water bodies (pungas & võsu 2012). nowadays peat lands, that incorporate both natural mires and drained mires, cover over 1/5 of the estonian territory (paal & leibak 2011). definition of mires in the landscape ecological sense mires are part of the broadly defined ‘wetlands’, habitats with the common quality of being excessively water rich. the definition by the international ramsar convention (www.ramsar.org) covers a quite large number of very different habitats like shallow (< 6 m) lakes and seas, peat lands, frequently flooded meadows, etc. wetlands are considered as one of the most valuable ecosystems of the entire earth (costanza et al. 1997). natural mires are important providers of various ecosystem services (kimmel et al. 2010). the term ‘mire’ in the ecological sense is usually defined via peat – a mire is an area where peat thickness exceeds 30 cm and peat accumulation continues at present (paal & leibak 2011). approximately 22% of the estonian territory is covered with peat (valk 1988) but most (three quarters) of it is artificially drained and therefore the accumulation of peat has currently ceased. the term “peat land” is used to describe such drained areas together with active mires (joosten & clark 2002). therefore only ca. 1/4 of the peat land in estonia can still be defined as mires with ongoing peat accumulation (paal & leibak 2011). the cultural perception of mires the landscape ecological definition of mires is fairly recent compared to the age of the human settlement in estonia. people’s long-term relations with mires are reflected in language: the word soo (mire) was assumedly used already in the stone age 6000–7000 years ago (ilomets et al. 2007). for instance, a thesaurus of the estonian language published in 1958 (saareste 1958) reflects a rich vocabulary relating to bogs and mires (nearly 300 replies to searches in the web database), the majority of which has vanished from actual use by today. in popular usage soo (mire) and raba (bog) are used interchangeably or often as a pair of words in the plural (sood-rabad) to denote all kinds of wet areas unsuitable for cultivation (masing 1968). however, in everyday conversations those terms have a wider meaning than that of a scientific description – for example, drained peat lands or any wet, soft mineral soils are still described as soo. the narrowing of the term’s content in popular usage occurs as well – people often do not describe wet forests as soo although those habitats are mires according to the landscape ecological definition. objectives and aims of the article today the fate of natural mires in estonia is determined by mainly two different institutional aims: their industrial use and/or conservation. both viewpoints rely on technical definitions of what mire is. these institutional definitions as well as the following management decisions are not necessarily compatible with people’s and local communities’ uses and perceptions of the mire (see for ex244 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. ample lehtinen 2010, 2011). we were interested in this tension between the technical landscapeecological definition and the perception of the mire in popular consciousness; to what extent are they compatible, and to what extent not. what significant aspects of the mire for people are disregarded in institutionally driven decision-making? a better understanding of local perspectives should enhance the communication of institutional aims (e.g. conservationist) to the public if institutions want acceptance of their decisions from the public. it would also improve the quality of management decisions regarding the future of mires taking into account the diversified uses and meanings that the landscape enables for stakeholders. the aims of the present study are: a) to identify the current common perception of mires in estonia; b) to analyze the common perception of mires and compare it with the landscape ecological perspective; and c) to suggest ways to bring the aspects of mires that are usually missing from common perception (such as the extent of managed mires) to public awareness. theoretical framework the theoretical framework of the study is based on two fundamental questions: how to connect the landscape-ecological definition of the mire with landscape semiotics and what discourse within the landscape semiotics is the most useful in our case? from the latter, we may say that the possible contribution of semiotics to landscape studies is not limited to representationalist accounts departing from the structuralist semiology of the saussurean tradition such as for example cosgrove (2003). rather, the broader framework of general semiotics pertaining to the processes of communication and meaning-making constitutes a capable theoretical-methodological basis proceeding from which landscape can be defined as an interactive dynamic process, integrating its material dimensions with symbolic ones. providing an overview of the relations between landscape semiotic studies and disciplinary semiotics, lindström et al. (2013: 97–98) conclude that although “there has been little explicit usage of semiotic terminology in landscape studies [...] a wealth of inherently, albeit implicitly, semiotic scholarship has been produced on topics such as landscape representations and preferences, the manifestation of power relations and the embodiment of social structures and memory in landscapes. there are many works that could potentially belong to landscape semiotics but which do not identify themselves as such”. we will use theoretical help from ecosemiotics to bridge the gap between landscape ecology and landscape semiotics. the term ‘ecosemiotics’, denoting semiotic interrelations between organisms and their environment, has been in use since 1996 (see kull 1998; nöth 1998). the central focus of ecosemiotics is concerned with the impact of the conceptual structure of humans’ knowledge of the environment upon the environment itself, that is, how the linguistic and cognitive aspects of the human umwelt influence human actions towards the surrounding nature. the trans-disciplinary field of humanist landscape studies and ecosemiotics (nöth & kull 2001; maran & kull 2014) intersect befittingly in the works of the anthropologist tim ingold. ingold’s contribution to both landscape studies and the semiotic studies of the environment lies in the cognitive manner in which he demonstrates how meaningfulness is inherent and arises from being embodied in the material world – in the processes that he, drawing upon heidegger (1971), calls dwelling (ingold 2000). in the dwelling perspective organism as an embodied center of agency (human and non-human) is in a mutually interactive relationship with its material surroundings: the organism is constantly changing the environment but at the same time needs to adapt to the same changing environment. dwelling, however, is necessarily a semiotic entanglement, since a living being is not interacting directly with its ‘true’ environmental conditions, but towards a (species-specific) representation of the environment rendered to the organism by its ensemble of various sense organs. the theoretical basis for this approach has been provided by jakob von uexküll (1982 [1940], 1992 [1934]) in his umwelt-theory. in this context the term ‘landscape’ is used to refer specifically to the shape that the physical surroundings have taken and are taking in the course of dwelling activities (tasks) that are being carried out there (see ingold 2000: 193). meaning is thus not something inscribed upon the “inert matter of nature” from the ‘outside’, by social codes and contexts external to it but is “immanent in people’s pragmatic engagement with the world” (ingold 2000: 154, 2011: 333). discovery of the meaning in the human landscape, he argues, has to begin fennia 193: 2 (2015) 245interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and from the recognition of its temporality, from identifying the past interactions and processes that have contributed to its present form. the dwelling perspective on landscape may help to bridge the gap between the landscape ecology approach that implicitly gives precedence to the (natural) environment surpassing the beings in (and their perceptions of) it and the humanistic constructivist perspectives that give primacy to cultural representations. we hold that the meaning of landscape is constructed by people constantly and non-linearly evolving a multilayer perception that combines materialistic, symbolic and behavioral aspects (see keisteri 1990). methods our methodological approach in this article derives from a phenomenological understanding in wider sense. as an interdisciplinary work, it draws upon a perspective on landscape that is more general than the phenomenological one, and still mainly indebted to ingold’s thought. we take practical engagement with the mires to be the basis for their meaningfulness to people and follow how the socio-economic changes in the practical relationship have affected the physical form of estonian mires. those practices are intertwined with cultural perception, people’s fundamental conception of the world, of the natural environment and themselves in relation to it. we apply both quantitative and qualitative methods in data compilation and analysis. questionnaire the poll was carried out in 2006–2007; in total 1,000 questionnaires (in estonian) were distributed. the distribution of the questionnaires between the counties followed the general population distribution. public libraries were chosen as focal points for questionnaire distribution, chosen because of the relatively wide coverage among the population subgroups, as convenient places to fill in questionnaires and also as one of the most economical choices available. the questionnaire consisted of 23 questions and it took approximately 20 minutes to complete. 43 (90%) libraries returned 592 filled questionnaires to the researchers. as the numbers of filled-out questionnaires from the capital tallinn were low, three schools in tallinn were asked to distribute questionnaires (86) to students in the winter 2006, and additional 89 questionnaires were handed out to tallinn residents on the tallinn–tartu train in 2007. the total number of the filled questionnaires is 767. the respondents were divided into seven age groups (fig. 1). young people (15–29) were more responsive compared to their share in the population. children (0–14) are the most underrepresented age group – the youngest (0–7) usually do not visit libraries on their own. the share of responses from female respondents (64.9%) is slightly higher than that in the population (53.4%). the share of responses from 15 counties plus tallinn is presented in figure 2 as compared to the share of the estonian-speaking population in the particular region. tallinn and harju county are relatively underrepresented, but as the total number of respondents from both is high, there is no reason to believe that qualitative answers are missing. a relatively high return of responses came from viljandi – the county where soomaa nature park, one of the best known wetland areas in estonia, is located. altogether the cohort of respondents corresponds reasonably well to the share of the respective groups in society and therefore the generalization of the findings is justified. in order to check the possible variability of the answers, subsamples were formed from the full samples pertaining to each question (767 answers each), leaving out blocks of 50 answers that differ in each subsample. the subsamples and the mean values of the answers to the full sample were compared. the differences between the subsamples are negligible; the coefficients of variation fig. 1. the age distribution of the respondents and share in estonian speaking population. 246 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. for the eight most popular keywords are 1–2%. also, a similar test was carried out comparing 19 subsamples of different sizes from 618 to 767 each, formed by leaving out responses from one region (county or city) in each subsample. the variability between the subsamples is very low also here (cv percentage for eight most popular keywords are 1–3%). the differences between male and female respondents are a bit higher (cv percentage 5–9%) than regional differences but the principal sequence of the keyword frequency is the same. similar tests were carried out also for the responses about visiting frequency and purposes and the variability between the subsamples remains low. therefore we can conclude that the findings are representative to the estonian-speaking population. in this article, we refer to the answers to four questions presented in the questionnaire that describe the person’s practical and emotional relations with mires. the questions were: 1) how often do you visit mires; 2) when do you visit mires; 3) why do you visit mires; and 4) what would be the five main keywords you would use to describe a mire. answers to those questions were open for respondents. any additional clues or selective answers were not presented. content analysis was used to process the answers (flick 1998). classification of the answers was done by two experts to ensure consistency. word counts were weighed according to the number of the keywords in the answer (for example: one keyword weighed 0.33 if the respondent provided three keywords; 0.2 in case of five keywords etc.). the weights of the classes were finally summarized. the classes that remained under the 1% threshold after grouping are not included in the current study or have been mentioned only if qualitatively significant. the responses were content analyzed using spss 8.0 and excel. the results of the content analysis are interpreted within the context of changing mire practices. the overview of historically most common practices was compiled on the basis of an extensive review of popular scientific literature. literature as a source for finding descriptions of the most common mire practices through time descriptions of the most common mire practices come from popular science literature published in estonia since the 1920s including textbooks, travel guides, project reports, journals, etc.; fiction was excluded (tüür & maran 2005). it was assumed that this kind of literature has a more considerable impact on people’s personal meaning of mires as some of it is mandatory literature (especially school textbooks). fig. 2. division of the respondents county wise on the background of mires (light grey). fennia 193: 2 (2015) 247interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and mire practices were defined as behaviors and practices that led to personal contacts with mires. changing practices – a historical overview traditionally mires were feared and avoided; farmers had no business there, except when going hunting or picking berries. in traditional lore, the mire is first and foremost reflected as a dangerous place populated by evil-minded creatures and supernatural forces. according to the estonian folklore archives the following creatures and curious phenomena can be found in the mire: the nixes, will-o’-the-wisps, skeletons, souls of the dead, revenants, snake kings, spooks. “a peat land landscape instilled a feeling of insecurity. moving on a soft peat land surface was dangerous for both livestock and humans. drowning in bog pools or being swallowed up by a quagmire was long remembered and retold” (hiiemäe 1988: 221). the most characteristic tales about mires to be found in the estonian folklore archives concern the creation of mires, mythic creatures and folktale-style measuring of the depth of bog pools – the latter were, of course, bottomless. the property of peat to conserve wood or casual items lost in the mires supported popular beliefs about hidden treasures. refuges difficult to cross even for those well acquainted with the local conditions, mires have provided shelter for those escaping from war, oppression or diseases since ancient times. by the beginning of the 13th century supposedly only 6–9% of population could find shelter in ancient strongholds (some of which were located on bog islands) in case of threat, so the majority of the population had to find alternative refuges closer to home (tõnisson 1972). mires were well-suited for that purpose. in estonia over 80 wooden track ways laid in bogs and marshes are known based on archaeological investigations as well as the oral tradition (lavi 1998). from the 16th–18th centuries the wooden track ways were of remarkable military importance. the stockholm state archive houses a map ordered by the swedish authorities between 1616 and 1629 representing a number of these track ways in the territories of estonia and livonia (einer 1980; lavi 1998). wars and oppressions have been common throughout estonian history, so the need for refuges has persisted. in times of serfdom, peasants sometimes escaped to the mires to avoid punishment by hostile landlords; in the 19th century young men escaped from the conscription to the russian military service that lasted for 25 years. during world war ii and the post-war period some ancient asylums in bog islands and forests were adopted by anti-communist guerrillas. winter roads up until as late as the beginning of the 20th century estonia's abundant marshy areas presented a great obstacle to travel and transport. roads had to go round them and in warm season many back-country corners were nearly unapproachable. there was no actual need to complete or maintain long-distance roads for some time as sledge caravans usually travelled in winter along the temporary network of winter roads (einer 1980). the long northern winter enabled to create an alternative and shorter network of winter roads that did not coincide with that of summer traffic. only in primeval forests did the summer and winter tracks coincide (see läänelaid & loosalu 1978). mires are naturally open areas, therefore generally suitable for fast transport and the only obstacle, soft ground, is naturally eliminated when water freezes. mires are also usually very well connected to the river network that served as a naturally forming road network as well (for further details, see joandi 1990; kask 1990). beside their importance for foreign trade winter roads were vital for the local livelihood, enabling to transport timber and firewood out from the forests, or bring home hay from marshy grasslands (einer 1988). all that has remained of former winter roads over mires are trails perceivable from aerial photographs, tavern ruins and episodic data from historical archives. in places they have been used for transporting timber or renewed for the purposes of tourism. berry picking estonian mires are naturally abundant in wild berries, especially cranberries (vaccinium oxycoccus), bilberries (vaccinium myrtillus), bog bilberries (vaccinium uliginosum), cloudberries (rubus chamaemorus) and lingonberries (vaccinium vitisidaea) grow on the fringes or on bog islands. cloudberries are considered delicacy as they occur less 248 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. often. before the passing of the land act in 1919 estonian peasants had limited rights to collect wild berries from the land that belonged to the baltic german nobility. usually, they had to share the harvest with the landlords. nevertheless people went to pick berries, often in secrecy, to diversify their diet. during the first period of independence (1918– 1940) berry picking and preserving for individual use was relatively modest, even though the export of wild berries was quite significant in the 1930s and activities related to consumption provided additional income for rural inhabitants. after world war ii the deficiency economy and the lack of officially distributed goods forced people both from rural as well as urban regions to turn back to traditional gathering and to conserve wild berries for sustenance. under the soviet rule, the land was nationalized in 1945 and collective forest enterprises were formed that were also supposed to manage the by-products of forestry. “since the export of wild berries and mushrooms provided the soviet union with highly valued foreign currency, collecting norms were imposed upon the states. /–/ gathering peaked in the 1960s and 1970s” (paal 2011: 70). gathering at that time was so intensive that to prevent half-ripened berries from being picked prematurely official dates for picking had to be established (paal 2011). as the living standards gradually improved but the prices for state purchase remained low, the interest in gathering wild berries was reduced. the increasing use of cultivated garden berries also contributed to this. the so called “berry-economy” collapsed together with the collapse of the soviet union as the old purchase system broke down and no new one had been established. limits to personal consumption were set by the deficiency of sugar before the 1990s and later by high sugar prices. in the middle of the 1990s, the purchase of wild berries started to gather new momentum. wild berries have added variety to the estonians’ diet throughout times, but the intensity and meaning of berry picking has been varying together with changes in the socio-economic conditions (see bardone & pungas-kohv 2015). melioration and peat-cutting while traditional practices had hardly any remarkable or long-term effects on mires, economic interests and the accompanying melioration works, especially over the last century, have totally transformed the whole mire landscape in estonia. the draining of mires for agricultural and peat mining purposes started already in the 17th century. peat is an important natural resource in estonia and holds the third position as fuel after oil shale and wood. peat-mining increased considerably at the end of the 18th century when it was adopted as fuel in manor distilleries, but it was used also for heating farmhouses and as litter for cattle (paal & leibak 2011). by the 19th century the draining and burning of peat fields for agricultural ends was widespread. in 1908, the baltic mire improvement society was founded in tartu in order to provide scientific assistance to farmers and manor owners concerning drainage methods and systems. human labor was gradually replaced by machines and the extent of the drainage systems increased rapidly in the 20th century, especially after world war ii. under the soviet regime melioration for agricultural and forestry purposes peaked in the 1970s. according to the analysis of different data, by the 1990s around 70% of estonian peat lands had been drained or affected by draining to the extent that further peat forming had stopped (paal & leibak 2011). conservation the greatest threat to mires has been and still is melioration, but nowadays also the increasing demand for horticultural peat has to be taken into consideration. estonia currently holds from third to fourth position in the world (paal & leibak 2011) as exporter of horticultural peat. since the 1970s the significance of the ecological role of mires has increasingly been acknowledged, as well as the need to defend them from further economic pressure. the protection of mires in estonia actually arose from the need to protect eagles (aquila chrysaetos), who prefer to nest in the mires which form extended enough natural areas: a reservation was founded in ratva bog in 1938. in 1957, several large nature reserves containing wetlands were formed, including matsalu (floodplain and coastal grasslands), nigula (bog) and viidumäe (spring fens) as well as a number of asylums of local importance. in 1968 a heated discussion (masing 1968) started between scientists and ameliorators in the popular magazine eesti loodus (estonian nature), in the course of which the ecological value of peat-lands was brought into public attention. this process has later been referred to as “the war about fennia 193: 2 (2015) 249interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and mires”. as a result, 30 new mire reserves were established in 1981 (valk 1988). after regaining independence in 1991, estonia has joined a number of international conventions regulating nature conservation, the preservation of biodiversity and quality of environment. in 1994 two conservation areas rich in mires and marshes were created – soomaa national park and alampedja nature reserve. in 2012, 72.5% of the remaining natural mires in estonia were under protection (kohv & salm 2012). as a new initiative, some small-scale wetland restoration projects have been proposed during the last decade. first wetland restoration projects are currently evolving in estonia with the help of the european union funds. tourism and nature education specific tourist services as well as the concept of mire tourism have appeared mostly in the last decade (see for example tooman & ruukel 2012); however, the recreational value of mires has been recognized for much longer. the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the initiative of creating nature education trails, encouraging people to learn about and to experience directly local communities (eilart 1986). the existence of infrastructure is especially important in case of mires as without boardwalks mires would be accessible only to a few adventurous individuals. in 2005, paas counted the total of about 60 nature trails (about 75 km) consisting wholly or partly of wooden boardwalks in estonia, the majority of which had been laid in the last decade. in estonia boardwalks have mostly been built into mires, or to wet spots on other nature trails (paas 2005). boardwalks are often accompanied by viewing towers (32 in number), adding a different dimension to the mire experience (printsmann et al. 2004). according to the state forest management centre (2014), who is the manager of all nature trails since august 2010, the number of visitors to the mires was around 76,000 during the high season between 2009 and 2011. according to one wilderness tourism entrepreneur there are currently 15 enterprises offering snow shoeing tours in estonia, introducing mire landscape to around 5,000 to 10,000 people a year (rähni 2012). since the 1990s wilderness tourism has been gaining popularity globally. extreme environments not suited for (human) habitation that have therefore escaped (visible) human impact and (assumably) retained their naturalness are increasingly opened/adopted for tourist experience/possibilities/ends. this is often interpreted also as a possibility to protect them from other, more intense economic pressures – as in the case of ecotourism. results of the questionnaire frequency of visits according to the replies of the questionnaire, most of the respondents visit mires a few times a year (38.7%). 18% go to mires less than once every two years and an almost equal number (17.5%) visit mires once a year (fig. 3). generalizing the answers to the entire estonian-speaking population (around 0.92%) says that around 500,000 people visit mires annually. obviously, the vast majority of the respondents answered the questionnaires for the very reason that they have had contact with mires. only 8.6% of the respondents stated that they have not visited mires. therefore the following results can be generalized to the people who have visited mires at least once in a lifetime. seasonality of visits autumn and summer are almost equally popular seasons for visiting mires: 37% and 29.7% of the answers correspondingly (fig. 4). this is congruent with the fact that picking berries appears as the main purpose of visiting the mire (fig. 5). the possibility rediscovered by (mire) tourism entrepreneurs to use snowshoes for creating eventful hikes to mire also in wintertime (2.2% of the answers) helps even out the seasonality of visits. since the rapid disappearance of the importance of winter roads in the last century, the mires have been visited primarily in the warm season. the number of respondents going to the mire in spring (12.1% of the answers) or around the year (11.3%) may also refer to the increase in the recreational purposes of visiting: in addition to springtime hiking and study trips, for example also bird watching and nature photography. purpose of visits the greatest number of respondents (42.1%) goes to the mire to pick berries (cloudberries, cranberries), sometimes also mushrooms or herbs. recreation, most notably in the form of walking, hiking and (study) trips is a common purpose too (36.6%). 250 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. among recreational activities also skiing, canoeing, orienteering, photography, swimming and sunbathing, hunting and fishing were mentioned. 4.1% report to have been working professionally or temporarily in the mires, their jobs being related to peat mining, foresting, melioration, nature protection and tour guiding. the category of professional work also includes research that has been done in the mires. temporary or voluntary work fig. 3. frequency of visiting mires. fig. 4. seasonality of visits. most often consists in the building of walkways, clean-up, or, more traditionally, making hay or firewood. 1.3% of respondents marked the mire as a residence. five keywords the most popular group of keywords (20.0%) relates to water, wet pools and the insecurity of walking on soft and turfy ground (fig. 6). water, the wetness of mires as their most distinctive feature arouses contradictory feelings. the rather frequent mention of the fear of sinking, drowning or just getting caught in the gurgling slough reflects the archetypal fear of liminal or borderline phenomena, which runs deeper than just practical considerations – in traditional lore the mire has been described as “land, but it is not walkable, [there is] water, but not navigable” (well-known proverb). although hollows (älves) are actually more dangerous, in common consciousness the danger of the mires is related to wet pools (open water bodies). also the unpleasant sensations of wet feet or squashy boots have been mentioned, unless one is wearing rubber boots suited for the purpose. on the more positive side of the water in the mires fresh water reservoirs and the pleasure of swimming in wet pools have been described. this is sometimes encouraged but sometimes altogether prohibited by the information tables. the distinctive appearance of mires vastly results from their characteristic vegetation. 15.4% of the keywords can be related to plants, or also, more generally to the mire as an exceptional ecological community. characteristic plants like sundew (drosera), heather (calluna), mosses (sphagnum) and lichens, bog pines, dwarf birches, sedges have been mentioned as well as some general features of plant life in the mires – thin and poor vegetation, lack of nutrients, lack of diversity. a realistic danger, also referred to by some respondents, is losing orientation in the mire as the (visually) unvarying mire landscape often lacks in distinguishable landmarks. keywords related to the visual beauty and other sensory perceptions of the mires constitute the third important group (12.9%). although vision is still the dominant sense, there are references to other senses as well. the picturesque and spacious views, autumn colors, sunrise and sunset are accompanied by the distinctive smell (of labrador tea) (ledum palustre) and particular sounds like the whooping of cranes (grus grus). fig. 5. purpose of visits. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 251interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and 11.5% of the keywords address the emotions and states of mind that arise in the mire. the vast open perspective, peace and quiet, lack of timemotion contributes to the mystical feelings of being in contact with something ancient, reverence, renewal and deep unity with nature. some respondents express joy and emotional pleasure arising from the natural beauty and exoticism. others experience sadness and forsakenness, the insignificance of human beings. 11.2% of the keywords relate to gathering as the most common activity in the mires. similar and almost equally important for the respondents is the untouched wilderness of the mires (10.4%). clean air, fresh water, lack of human presence or (visible human) impact contributes to an aura of pristine nature and the idea of an ecologically balanced environment. encounters with bird and animal life are memorable and create excitement (5.9% of the keywords). birds’ migration, eagles’ nests, grouse play, cranes, frogs, elks and animal burrows belong to the exciting side. annoying bugs, horseflies and snakes on the other hand are rather repellent. it could be the case that due to thin vegetation birds and animals are easier to notice in the mire, but also the information tables or bird watching towers often direct attention to the signs of wildlife. 5.2 % of the keywords directly refer to recreational activities (physical activity and endurance, different sports, being healthy, a chance to be alone and to relax) and tourism (trips and hiking). the related infrastructure – wooden walkways, information boards, observation towers, forest huts – as well as good company and friends have been mentioned as well. 2.1% mentioned peat or peat industry; fear is reflected by different keywords altogether by 1.8% of the respondents; 1.3% did not give any response. the categories of keywords below 1% include research and education (0.4%), nature protection and environmentalism (0.3%), weather and seasons (0.5%) and the inaccessibility of mires (0.4%) and other. discussion the results of the questionnaire demonstrate that respondents, generally people who have had contact with mires at least once in their lifetime, tend to visit mires relatively often – more than 50% of the respondents go there at least once a year. it indicates that most people have positive personal experience of being in the mire environment in addition to the information about them from media or school curriculum. next to gathering, with its practical reasons, other objectives for going to the mire today are almost invariably touristic, recreational or emotional. among ordinary visitors, the mire is rarely associated with work or industries. scientific/ecological references to mires are of minor importance. fig. 6. frequency of the five keywords associated with mire. 252 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. assumedly, the shift in practice and perspective has also brought about a shift in the seasonal distribution of the visits. traditionally, mires were made most use of in wintertime when the land was frozen. generally open wetlands were used as winter roads, thus invigorating communication and commerce. today, only a rare hunter or hiker could be found wandering in the mire in winter as the function of winter roads is long gone. abundance of the summer and spring visits to the mire is a new phenomenon as traditionally it has been the time of the fewest visits. this increase is clearly related to nature tourism and recreation – activities almost unknown to general public before the middle of the 20th century (kimmel et al. 2010; reimann et al. 2011; tooman & ruukel 2012). earlier this period of the year was ‘filled’ with excessive farm work and there was no practical reason to go to the mires as those areas were unsuitable for the common spring-summer economic activities. late summer and autumn has consistently been the most common time for visiting mires as berries and other gifts of nature ripen during that time. however, berries were traditionally harvested by the socially marginal groups, the children and the elderly, as the adult population was occupied with urgent harvest labors. the times at which the berries ripen are coinciding with periods of the most important traditional summer and autumn farm labors: haymaking time=bilberry, cloudberries; oats=lingonberries; rye=bog bilberries; potatoes=cranberries (see bardone & pungas-kohv 2015). berry picking was the most often mentioned singular activity that drives people to the mires even nowadays. in data analysis, we labelled the category ‘gathering’ as herbs and mushrooms were also mentioned on some occasions. gathering appears to have been one of the main reasons for visiting mires throughout the centuries. the context and motives for gathering have varied over time (see for example bardone & pungas-kohv 2015), but the physical form of the practice has not changed much. according to ingold (2000), meaningful and sustainable relations to the natural environment are above all to be found in the task-oriented bodily engagement with one’s natural surroundings. we suggest that berry picking nowadays is a rare practice which helps to sustain or recreate a practical and immediate engagement with the natural environment characterized by ingold as the dwelling perspective (ingold 2000; ingold & kurttila 2000). the following aspects help to explicate this point: 1. berry picking in the mires requires remarkable amount of knowledge and skill. not only has one to know when and where to go to find berries, but also various other practical details regarding what to wear or carry and how to find one's way. this knowledge, however, is not usually pronounced, save formalized, but is normally obtained through first-hand experience in the course of the activity itself – a process that ingold (2000) has termed enskilment in opposition to discursive learning characteristic of the modern perspective. the practice is often picked up in childhood going to gathering trips with family or friends, or – and much more rarely – during institutional outings (that were common in the soviet period). thus, it supports intergenerational ties as well as ties with the traditional locality in some cases. 2. berry picking is a corporeal, multisensory experience, much more so than leisurely walking or hiking. the experience includes the feel and taste of berries as well as getting wet feet, aching backs, bug bites and stained fingers. berrypickers are dexterously in touch with the practical taskscape rather than oriented at the visual consumption of sights. corporeality is inseparable from the embodied skill that gathering entails. berry pickers normally find their own way around depending on the pre-established infrastructure only occasionally when it befits their aims, although nowadays gps can help to find the way home. similarly to traditional hunters the movement of the present-day gatherers is hardly linear but discontinuous “following the harvest” and involving the regular attunement of attention to their surroundings. 3. berry-picking relies on and (re)creates locality/ landscape insiderness through wider cultural memory. because of the manor system, until the mid-19th century most of the peasants were not landowners. thus the habit of berry picking in estonia has not remarkably depended on personal land ownership, but rather on the familiarity with ones’ surroundings, and the attitude of the landlord. even if personal ties to particular (ancestral) places have become cut by now, this has not much affected the popularity of gathering permitted by everyman’s right. places of abundant yield are remembered and revisited. information about them is distributed selectively, keeping it secret from the ‘outsiders’. in the dwelling perspective the meaning of landscape is intertwined with temporality, enfennia 193: 2 (2015) 253interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and compassing past/memory as well as anticipation and care for the future. apart from gathering, the most common activities in the mires are walking, hiking and excursions – recreational practices. historically, “walking was understood to enable deeper and closer appreciation of natural scenery, and, as a physical, visual, and educational activity, it was seen as a way of bettering oneself, of becoming a physically and morally healthier person” (wylie 2007: 129). such pastimes (in nature) became generally popular together with the advancement of modernization, technological progress and urbanization whereby more and more people stopped working in the fields or woods and lost the immediate practical contact with the natural environment. recreational visitors can choose the time and place of visits more freely, their visits tend to understandably concentrate on the least ‘stressful’ places and times: such as sunny, calm days and easily accessible and physically undemanding routes. at first, some places, such as riversides were chosen or preferred because they naturally had those qualities, but active alteration, building special routes with bridges, stairs etc. quickly became a norm as the number of recreational visits increased. active alteration also opens landscapes that were formerly considered as unsuitable for mass recreation such as mires that are naturally very demanding to cross. today, walking in the mire in estonia is normally facilitated by specific infrastructure – wooden boardwalks together with viewing towers and information boards. the role of this infrastructure is ambiguous since on the one hand it renders the impassable landscapes accessible to the public, yet on the other hand, it effectively shapes and controls the experience. macnaghten and urry (1998) argue that routing constitutes one of the means by which visitors to natural areas are subjected to control and surveillance. moreover, viewing towers and information boards that present information and guide visitors' attention and expectations confine tourists to specific sites/ sights, and orient their senses mostly towards visual experience. as franklin (2003) remarks, the other side of this process is the obscuring, bracketing off and ‘protection’ of other sites/experiences. active alteration of landscapes for recreational purposes tends to cut off perception(s) achieved through the tactile and other more immediate senses, and enhance input from remote senses like visual perception. macnaghten and urry (1998: 113) argue that “this increasing hegemony of vision in european societies /–/ produced a transformation of nature as it was turned into spectacle”. the perception that are considered ‘unpleasant’ like the sense of sinking in mires can be nullified via active alteration of the landscape – building non-slippery boardwalks – or weakened by the alteration of the visitor – the usage of snowshoes/bog shoes. active alteration of the landscape instead of the visitor leads to visiting natural areas like museums or reducing them to an aesthetically pleasing backdrop, essentially unimportant to the activity at hand. nature is being stared at as an exhibit, with the idea of minimal mutual effect. the touristic forms of (dis)engagement with the wild thus appear to aim at creating an “authentic experience” without affecting nature or being affected by it at the same time. this is also pointed out by franklin (2003: 240) who writes: “tourist organizations promise close contact but the structuring of the tour ritually and technically serves to create a distance between the tourist and the wild”. after all, wilderness has always been, and has to remain, unaffected by definition. more widespread bog shoe hiking would preserve an important perception related to mires (“soft ground”) but usage of this equipment would reduce the negative association with mires (“sinking, drowning”) to a level acceptable for general public. compared to the fixed structures like boardwalks, such trails can be also more easily altered and less expensive, shifting for example because of the seasonal variation in landscape, as the ‘alteration’ is related to the visitor, not to the landscape. they cannot replace boardwalks entirely but would supplement existing trails for the more demanding visitor. other recreational activities in the mire include various sports (hiking, skiing, orienteering). these activities are not that common, but the attachment with the mire is far more varied than simple walking on wooden roads. mires, as difficult terrain to pass and navigate, are challenging, and therefore good landscapes for physically demanding recreational activities like amateur sport. creative recreational activity such as photography is one of the emerging reasons to visit mires. relatively open mires (specially raised bogs) are visually accessible and attractive as they are different from every-day landscapes. already existing boardwalks and viewing towers offer a very good platform for photography. the latter is closely tied with other recreational activities: some people go 254 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. to the mire to take photographs, other take photographs because they are in mire. mire in the common perception the most common keywords associated with mires demonstrate dissimilarities with the directly formulated purposes and activities that draw people to the mires. for example, picking berries is one of the top reasons for going to the mire, but it is not so prominent among the given keywords. the most popular keywords arise from roughly two considerations: the attempt to define what mire is by specifying its most distinctive features, and the sensory and emotional experience of mires. the most distinctive feature of the mire is related to excessive water and lack of solid ground. the kinesthetic experience of walking on the soft ground is fundamentally unsettling and is perhaps one of the sources of fright that dominates the common lore about mires. it is remarkable that in the age of boardwalk-dominated visits the kinesthetic sense is still so important in the popular definition of mire, although it is not a common experience anymore. sinking or drowning in the mires is possible only in particular parts of the mires such as hollows or quagmires. both microforms are easily recognizable but it seems that this knowledge is largely forgotten and frightening associations are spread over the entire mire landscape. the most commonly visited place, the raised bog is actually relatively safe to cross. quite remarkable references to plants and vegetation can be related to the distinctive visual characteristics of bogs, or also, to the school biology curriculum. the plant species mentioned are characteristic of raised bogs and easily visually recognizable (for instance different types of sphagnum, andromeda, calluna vulgaris etc.) or have other specific characteristics that attract attention: for instance, ledum palustre is recognizable because of its smell. plants that are more common in transitional bogs or in fens have been mentioned less often. this may be explained through the respondents’ experiences – people have mostly visited bogs. other references to landscape ecological information about mires (e.g. lack of nutrients, lack of diversity) were rare. the predominance of the sensory and emotional associations in relation to the mire indicates the contemporary social construction of mires as (touristic) wilderness. in sociological theories, tourism has essentially been interpreted as an escape of the modern man from his standardized and alienating everyday/work environments and his search for authentic experience and mythical structures (maccannell 1976; urry 1990). these qualities have most often been projected upon historical and heritage sites, rural landscapes and pristine nature – “the peripheries of the modern world, where nature, wildernesses, and indigenous or other cultural groups untouched by modernity are situated” (saarinen 2004: 438). although tourist landscapes are largely symbolic creations representing the dreams of their consumers and are also consumed symbolically through the “tourist gaze” (urry 1990, 1995), they also entail physical involvement with real physical surroundings and multisensory embodied experience is increasingly sought after in tourist encounters (see for example markwell 2001; franklin 2003). all senses receive ‘uncommon’ input in mire and this overwhelming combination of unusual stimuli may be the reason for the distinctive liminal, ‘different’ perception of the mires. this natural property of mires has already been noticed by tourist operators and the potential of mires as a tourist attraction is very high. common perception of the mire today is mostly shaped by the role of the tourist/symbolic consumer vis-à-vis wild nature. the mire appears as a beautiful pristine place, peaceful and wild wet and soft ground. in its orientation to the aesthetic and emotional values of the landscape, the common perspective diverges from the technical definition in landscape ecology built upon quantifiable features (at least 30 cm thick peat-layer). however, these definitions are complementary as the cultural definition adds emotional descriptions to the distinctive soil properties – what the landscape looks like and how does it make people feel. changes in the meaning of mires over the 20th century this chapter presents changes in the perception of mires in estonia in the context of major socio-economic shifts in the 20th century and the corresponding paradigmatic shifts in the cultural perception of culture-nature relationships. stage 1. traditional: mire as liminal landscape in traditional perception, the mire lies semiotically at the utmost border of familiar and inhabited fennia 193: 2 (2015) 255interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and space representing thus an interface, a meeting ground with the “other side” (pungas & võsu 2012). such status was marked by the numerous warnings, prohibitions and rules of conduct reflected in the cultural heritage about mires (hiiemäe 1988; pungas & printsmann 2010) that evoked the feelings of uneasiness and fear, and consequently, a heightened awareness of one's surroundings while in the mire. on the other hand, in cases of acute threat the mire could temporarily be adopted as home. also, during more peaceful times the symbolic status of mires did not prevent or prohibit people from taking advantage of the naturally available resources of bogs and mires. traditional communities' relationship to the mire could thus be characterized as adaptable and pragmatic accommodating diverse ways of practical engagement within a defined set of communal values. stage 2. industrial: enculturing the mire endeavors to transform the landscape into something more useful – cultivable land, if not suitable for harvesting food crops then at least forest or peat – mark a transition to modern mentality. the shift occurred gradually over time as the first systematic melioration projects in estonia were documented in the 17th century, but the process peaked only in the 20th century. from the exclusively industrial point of view natural mires appeared unambiguously useless and thus automatically became subjects for alteration. the speed at which they were vanishing accelerated in accordance with the advancement of relevant technologies and only abated as the voices of environmentalists got more alarming. industrial mentality evaluated mires or the natural environment altogether first and foremost in terms of direct resources exploitable for human ends. the variegated traditional relations were thus at least officially replaced with a single-dimensional ideological perception. the tendency towards disambiguity is illustrated by the scientific pursuits to define mires upon a single measurable parameter, the thickness of peat-layer for example. the development of tools increased the physical as well as symbolic distance between man and natural environment with the relationship becoming increasingly virtual while immediate multisensory contact with the environment has been gradually replaced by indirect contact mediated by technology. stage 3. ecological: aestheticization of mire a second shift in the meaning of mires in estonia can be dated to around 1970 when an influential naturalist viktor masing published a series of articles in a popular magazine eesti loodus (estonian nature) to eradicate prevalent negative prejudices about the mires and to present an alternative to the undisputed agenda of their melioration (masing 1970a, 1970b, 1970c). among other arguments he also referred to the recreational, aesthetic, scientific and ethical values of mires and argued that for these as well as for ecological reasons the remaining natural mires would best be left unspoiled. his arguments echoed the more general process of redefining wilderness/nature in the post-industrializing west that was stemming from at least two sources. on the one hand, the symbolic desire for authentic existence projected upon the past and upon ‘unspoiled’ natural environment gave birth to tourism (as an economy as well as existential condition) (wilson 1992). on the other hand, the perceptible loss of natural areas contributed to the quick advancement of ecological science and to the rise of ecological awareness more generally. establishing of protected areas and natural parks has been seen as a practical solution to both of these concerns. however, the socio-cultural aspects of their creation have not been critically analyzed until quite recently (see for example lindahl elliot 2006; west et al. 2006). these analyses demonstrate that cultural perceptions about what can pass as genuine nature appear to be as important as ecological reasons in the creation of protected areas. in the establishment of “natural landscapes” semiotic and ecological processes are intertwined (kull 1998). the problem with the conservationist approach lies in its excluding some chosen areas from the human inhabitable realm and leading to nature becoming an enclave, spatially as well as symbolically (see edensor 2001, 2009 for enclavic space). these natural enclaves then become attractions for tourism and true examples of ‘nature’ leaving the inhabited or managed environments out of the definition and depriving them from relevant concern. the result of the questionnaire reveals that the respondents know that almost 1/4 of estonian territory is covered by mires; however, they do not perceive that most of these are actually seriously altered. the gained experience and knowledge about the visited mires (almost exclusively raised bogs) are assumed to be true to all mires. the spa256 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. tial extent of all mires (22% of the estonian territory) is remembered from school textbooks, which until very recently used to refer to the technical definition of the mire based on peat thickness. as a result, people overestimate the extent of the mires that they can remember from their personal experience from visits and visual media. the fact that nearly 2/3 of former mires are now drained is not common knowledge. another problem lies in the contradiction inherent in tourism industry that both creates as well as destroys its destinations. the creation of tourist destinations is first and foremost symbolical (knudsen et al. 2013) but often leads to physical developments, for instance the relevant infrastructure. these developments and the increasing flow of tourists, however, erode the very same qualities upon which the destination was established. for example, leivits et al. (2009) show that a new boardwalk that caused a fivefold increase in the number of visits has had a clear negative impact on the breeding of rare birds in nigula nature reserve. in the case of fragile natural communities and protected areas it is necessary to set some limits to tourism development. the initiatives of sustainable tourism or ecotourism have emerged as forms of self-regulation of the tourism industry to cope with this problem and to help to create a balance of tourist and preservation goals in protected areas. practical solutions because of the problems described above, a controversy appears between the purpose of establishing nature protection areas and the list of activities practiced there. as kimmel (2009: 21) mentions: “according to the assessment of total economic value of the main ecosystem services provided by wetlands (de groot et al. 2006) the amenity and recreation services have higher monetary value than provisional or regulatory services, whereas the highest average value is related to aesthetic information services”. it is necessary to consider both – to protect rare, often very sensitive ecosystems from further human impact and maintain nature trails in order to offer possibilities for personal contacts with nature. visitors should be channeled mostly to partially drained mires as such areas lack the very ‘prime’ quality and therefore are not under protection, being also quite resilient to further modest continuous human impact such as boardwalks and visits because “the sensitive part” is already gone. at the same time, they offer the same emotional experiences as the ‘prime’ areas. the difference between them often lies in the size and diversity of the landscape complex, while the scale cannot be perceived during short-time visits, or in the presence of some rare, sensitive species, that are hard to recognize and even harder to spot at all. such partially drained areas should be located in the buffer zones of protected mires as specific zones with a clearly stated educational purpose – allowing visitors to state “i visited this unique nature reserve”, but preserving its most valuable parts from actual impact. educational nature trails should also present and describe mires altered by humans; for this purpose slightly damaged (drained, harvested for peat) mires can be used as these demonstrate direct human impact on the mire. the added option of demonstrating traditional practices like peat cutting, winter roads, etc. in such slightly damaged sites could provide extra value from the (cultural) heritage point of view. the traditional boardwalks should be accompanied with shifting bog shoe trails allowing profounder experiences/contact for a more demanding visitor. in parallel, people’s direct attachment with the surroundings would be enhanced. this makes slightly altered mire areas even more valuable than natural wild mires from the human point of view, and institutional aims will cover more precisely people cultural understanding of mire. conclusions perception of a landscape is inherently tied to and affecting its physical shape. the generally negative perception of mires as useless land has led to the fast disappearance of natural mires in estonia over the 20th century. the recognition of their ecological value as well as recreational potential near the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries has changed this general perception. the most common activities that have taken people to the mires have considerably changed over the centuries, altering also the perception of and cultural attitudes towards the mire. folkloric material shows that traditionally mires were feared and avoided as ambivalent places. they were only populated in disruptive times when seeking refuge from wars and plagues, although some pragmatic engagements like hunting, gathering, winter transport etc. would occasionally still take people to the mire. in the traditional frame of reference mires fennia 193: 2 (2015) 257interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and can be interpreted as liminal places at the borderline of the everyday cultural world and its outside. while traditional practices had hardly any remarkable or long-term effects on mires, economic interests and melioration works that accompanied modernization processes over the 20th century totally transformed the whole mire landscape in estonia. mires were mostly drained for peat extraction and agricultural (forestry) purposes. industrial mentality encultured mires were encultured physically as well as symbolically. the third frame of reference, which we can term as ecological, started to emerge around the 1970s when the need to protect the remaining natural mires surfaced. attributing value to the “peripheries of the modern world”, tourism industry contributed to this attitude, exhibiting wild nature as a resource of aesthetic and emotional pleasure. gathering appears as a somewhat exceptional practice that has persisted through time accommodating to the shifting paradigms. today it can be performed merely as a recreational practice or else as a practical engagement contributing to one’s livelihood and intimate contact with the mire. a study of 767 questionnaires revealed that the common associations with the mire today are mostly related to its aesthetic and emotional value based upon personal sensory experiences in the mire as tourists as well as upon its symbolic representations. the common perception diverges from the landscape ecological perspective which approaches the mire from a quantitative, pragmatic viewpoint acknowledging its ecological value. the extent of natural mires is overestimated in common perception since it is based on experiences mainly gained from protected mires that actually form only a small proportion of all peat-lands. to align the popular image of and ecological information about mires and relieve tourist pressure on protected habitats it is suggested that more visitors be directed to partly drained mires. the manner in which nature tourism entrepreneurship combines embodied experience and traditional practices with educational aims in consumer contexts can contribute to new possibilities for more sustainable mire management in the future. acknowledgements this article has been supported by the european union through the european regional development fund (center of excellence in cultural theory, cect); the estonian ministry of education target-financed project iut sf0180049s09; the institutional research funding projects iut3-2, iut2-44 and iut2-16; and the estonian science foundation (grant no. 8040). ene-reet soovik is most gratefully appreciated for language revision. references bardone e & pungas-kohv p 2015. changing values of wild berries in estonian households: recollections from an ethnographic archive. journal of baltic studies. accepted. cosgrove de 2003. landscape: ecology and semiosis. in palang h & fry g (eds). landscape interfaces: cultural heritage in changing landscapes, 15–21. kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht. costanza r, d´arge r, de groot r, farber s, grasso m, hannon b, limburg k, naeem s, o’neill r v, paruelo j, raskin rg, sutton p & van den belt m 1997. the value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. nature 387, 253–260. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/387253a0. de groot r, stuip m, finlayson m & davidson n 2006. valuing wetlands: guidance for valuing the benefits derived from wetland ecosystem services. ramsar technical report 3/cbd technical series 27. ramsar convention secretariat, gland and secretariat of the convention on biological diversity, montreal. eilart j 1986. looduse õpperajad. valgus, tallinn. einer v 1980. vanade soosildade jälgedel. eesti loodus 3, 188–189. einer v 1988. korilasrajast kiirteeni. valgus, tallinn. edensor t 2001. performing tourism, staging tourism: (re)producing tourist space & practice. tourist studies 1, 59–82. edensor t 2009. tourism and performance. in jamal t & robinson m (eds). the sage handbook of tourism studies, 543–557. sage publications, london. flick u 1998. an introduction to qualitative research. sage publications, london, thousand oaks and new delhi. franklin a 2003. tourism: an introduction. sage publications, london, thousand oaks and new delhi. french ra 1964. the reclamation of swamp in prerevolutionary russia. transactions of the institute of british geographers 34, 175–188. giblett r 1996. postmodern wetlands: culture, history, ecology. edinburg university press, edinburgh. heidegger m 1971. building dwelling thinking. poetry, language, thought. harper colophon books, new york. hiiemäe m 1988. sood rahvapärimuses. in valk u (ed). eesti sood, 221–223. valgus, tallinn. howarth w 2001. reading the wetlands. in adams pc, hoelscher s & till ke (eds). textures of place. 258 fennia 193: 2 (2015)piret pungas-kohv et al. exploring humanist geographies, 55–83. university of minnesota press, london and minneapolis. huijbens eh & pálsson g 2009. the bog in our brain and bowels: social attitudes to the cartography of icelandic wetlands. environment and planning d: society and space 27, 296–316. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d9508. ilomets m, kimmel k, stén c-g & korhonen r 2007. sood eesti ja lõuna-soomes. ngo geo guide baltoscandia, tallinn. ingold t 2000. the perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. routledge, taylor & francis group, london and new york. ingold t & kurttila t 2000. perceiving the environment in finnish lapland. body and society 6: 3–4, 183–196. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1357034x00006003010. joandi j 1990. taliteid viljandimaa ja pärnu vahel. eesti loodus 41: 4, 257–261. joosten h & clark d 2002. the wise use of mires and peat lands. <http://www.mirewiseuse.com/> 01.05.2014. kask i 1990. miks pärnusse otse ei saa? eesti loodus 41: 4, 254–256. keisteri t 1990. the study of change in cultural landscapes. fennia 168: 1, 31–115. kimmel k 2009. ecosystem services of estonian wetlands. dissertationes geographicae universitatis tartuensis 38. tartu university press, tartu. kimmel k, kull a, salm j-o & mander ü 2010. the status, conservation and sustainable use of estonian wetlands. wetlands ecology and management 18: 4, 375–395. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11273-008-9129-z. knudsen dc, metro-roland m, rickly-boyd & jillian m 2013. landscape studies and tourism research. in howard p, thompson i & waterton e (eds). the routledge companion to landscape studies, 286– 295. routledge, taylor & francis group, london and new york. kohv m & salm j-o 2012. soode taastamisest eestis. eesti loodus 4, 10–16. kriiska a 2004. aegade alguses. 15 kirjutist kaugemast minevikust. tallinna raamatutrükikoda, tallinn. kull k 1998. semiotic ecology: different natures in the semiosphere. sign systems studies 26, 344–371. lavi a 1998. eesti vanadest sooteedest. eesti arheoloogia ajakiri 2, 65–93. lehtinen aa 2000. mires as mirrors. peat-lands – hybrid landscapes of the north. fennia 178: 1, 125– 137. lehtinen aa 2010. politics of decoupling: breaks between indigenous and imported senses of the nordic north. journal of cultural geography 29: 1, 105–123. lehtinen aa 2011. from relations to dissociations inspatial thinking: sámi ‘geographs’ and the promise of concentric geographies. fennia 189: 2, 14– 30. leivits m, leivits a, klein a, kuus a, leibak e, merivee m, soppe a, tammekänd i & tammekänd j 2009. effects of visitor disturbance to the golden plover (pluvialis apricaria) habitat suitability in nigula bog. hirundo 22, 53–63. lindahl elliot n 2006. mediating nature. routledge, london. lindström k, palang h & kull k 2013. semiotics of landscape. in howard p, thompson i & waterton e (eds). the routledge companion to landscape studies, 97–107. routledge, london and new york. läänelaid i & loosalu j 1978. kaubandus ja unustatud taliteed. perioodika, tallinn. maccannell d 1976. the tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. schocken books, new york. macnaghten p & urry j 1998. contested natures. sage, london, california and new delhi. maran t & kull k 2014. ecosemiotics: main principles and current development. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 96: 1, 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/geob.12035. markwell k 2001. an intimate rendezvous with nature? tourist studies 1: 1, 39–57. masing v 1968. rabadest, nende arengust ja uurimisest. eesti loodus 8, 451–458. masing v 1970a. kas rabad on tõesti nii kohutavad? eesti loodus 7, 386–391. masing v 1970b. mida teha rabadega? eesti loodus 8, 473–477. masing v 1970c. mida teha rabadega? eesti loodus 9, 515–520. nöth w 1998. ecosemiotics. sign systems studies 26, 332–343. nöth w & kull k 2001. introduction: special issue on ecosemiotics and semiotics of nature. sign systems studies 29.1, 9–11. paal j & leibak e 2011. estonian mires: inventory of habitats. regio, tartu. paal t 2011. metsamarjade ja seente varumine. in kusmin t & meikar t (eds). akadeemilise metsaseltsi toimetised xxv. metsa kõrvalkasutus eestis, 67–72. eesti metsaselts, tartu. paas m 2005. laudtee – üks loodushoiu võimalustest. diploma thesis, räpina. printsmann a, külvik m & alumäe h 2004. miljonivaade eestimaale. eesti loodus 10, 40–42. pungas p & printsmann a 2010. soo rollid ja sookollid. in kalmre e (ed). tulnukad ja internetilapsed: uurimusi lasteja noortekultuurist. tänapäeva folkloorist 8, 257–280. publishing house of estonian literary museum, tartu. pungas p & võsu e 2012. the dynamics of liminality in estonian mires. in andrews h & roberts l (eds). liminal landscapes: travel, experience and spaces in-between, 87–102. routledge, london and new york. reimann m, lamp m-l & palang h 2011. tourism impacts and local communities in estonian national parks. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 11: 1, 87–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2011.638206. rähni b 2012. personal communication. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 259interpreting estonian mires: common perceptions and saareste a 1958. eesti keele mõistelise sõnaraamatu indeks. <http://www.eki.ee/cgi-bin/saareste. cgi?osa=p&sona=so> 01.05.2014. saarinen j 2004. tourism and touristic representations of nature. in lew aa, hall mc & williams am (eds). a companion to tourism, 438–449. blackwell publishing, blackwell. state forest management centre (sfmc) 2014. sfmc suggest – berries and mushrooms are ready. <http://www.rmk.ee/teemad/metsasoprade-klub i / u u d i s k i r j a d / j u u l i 2 0 0 9 / r m ks o o v i t a b > 20.06.2014. tanskanen m 2011. the cultivated mire landscape as a mirror of finnish society. in roca z, claval p & agnew j (eds). landscapes, identities and development: europe and beyond, 195–206. ashgate, farnham. tooman h & ruukel a 2012. sustainable development of a remote tourist destination. the case of soomaa national park, estonia. in legrand w, simons-kaufman c & sloan p (eds). sustainable hospitality and tourism as motors for development. case studies from developing regions of the world, 276–295. routledge, london and new york. tüür k & maran t 2005. eesti looduskirjanduse lugu. in maran t & tüür k (eds). eesti looduskultuur, 237–270. eesti kirjandusmuuseum, tartu. tõnisson e 1972. mida teame muistsetest pelgupaikadest? eesti loodus 3, 168–172. urry j 1990. the tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies. sage, london. urry j 1995. consuming places. routledge, london. valk u 1988. eesti sood. valgus, tallinn. van de noort r 2004. the humber wetlands: the archaeology of a dynamic landscape. windgather press ltd, bollington and macclesfield. von uexküll j 1982 [1940]. the theory of meaning. semiotica 42: 1, 25–82. von uexküll j 1992 [1934]. a stroll through the worlds of animals and men: a picture book of invisible worlds. semiotica 89: 4, 319–391. west p, igoe j & brockington d 2006. parks and peoples: the social impact of protected areas. annual review of anthropology 35, 251–277. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 4 6 / a n n u r e v. a n thro.35.081705.123308. wilson a 1992. the culture of nature: north american landscape from disney to the exxon valdez. blackwell, oxford. wylie j 2007. landscape – key ideas in geography. routledge, london. lectio praecursoria: theory of control tuning – the processing of control in migration-related place coping urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa79471 doi: 10.11143/fennia.79471 reflections lectio praecursoria: theory of control tuning – the processing of control in migration-related place coping saija niemi niemi, s. (2019) lectio praecursoria: theory of control tuning – the processing of control in migration-related place coping. fennia 197(1) 163–167. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79471 in this lectio praecursoria, which i presented as part of my doctoral defence at the university of helsinki on 26 october 2018, i introduce a new migration-related control theory that i developed in my doctoral research. the theory of control tuning is a middle-range theory that closes the gap between empirical data and formal theory. the theory is mainly based on primary data from south sudanese migration, which i brought from the descriptive level to the conceptual level by using classic grounded theory methodology. the theory of control tuning explains how various migration actors process control in their everyday life in order to manage and govern feelings, information, actions and people as well as ownership of situations and objects. control tuning refers to the action of modifying control, and it occurs through particular control-tuning paths. these control-tuning paths consist of control-tuning causes, strategies, outcomes, intervening factors and conditions. control-tuning paths appear in relation to the behavioural arena of migration. this behavioural arena includes the elements, circumstances, relationships and objects of the physical, social, political, cultural and economic world with which migration actors come into contact and interact. the main activities in the behavioural arena of migration are place coping, knowledge dealing, encountering authority and link keeping. the theory of control tuning demonstrates that control tuning occurs regardless of whether migration is international or internal or forced or voluntary and irrespective of the status of a migrant, or whether the actor is a local resident or an authority, or whether migration actors move or stay put. moreover, the theory of control tuning demonstrates that control has significance for individuals and groups of migration actors. keywords: control tuning, control, migration, place, grounded theory, south sudanese migration saija niemi, helsinki institute of urban and regional studies, university of helsinki, yliopistonkatu 3, p.o. box 4, 00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: saija.niemi@helsinki.fi mr custos, madam opponent, ladies and gentlemen: the spanish sociologist joaquín arango (2000, 295) remarks: “perhaps the greatest difficulty of studying migration lies in its extreme diversity, in terms of forms, types, processes, actors, motivations, © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79471 164 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections socio-economic and cultural contexts, and so on. it is no wonder that theories are at odds when trying to account for such complexity.” in turn, another sociologist, adrian favell (2008, 260) comments: “there could hardly be a topic in the contemporary social sciences more naturally ripe for interdisciplinary thinking than migration studies.” favell also calls for a renewal of the conceptual tools with which we think about and recognise migration. migration-related research has long lacked up-to-date theories that would provide us with both a novel understanding of the diversity of migration and new concepts to use when talking about and researching migration. migration researchers seem to have been somewhat reluctant to theorise migration due to a general call for an all-encompassing migration theory that would include everything there is in the phenomenon. some researchers have indeed considered constructing a theory that would synthesise existing migration theories into one, all-explaining theory. by contrast, other migration researchers have considered this an impossible and potentially futile task. attempts to theorise the complex phenomenon of migration have often failed, and it seems most researchers have thus abandoned the attempt. conversely, an increasing amount of migration research has been conducted at the descriptive and empirical level. migration research has also been strongly characterised by binary thinking, such as international versus internal, agency versus structure, micro versus macro and forced versus voluntary. this has somewhat hampered theory formation, as researchers have struggled to theorise such extreme concepts with descriptive data and inadequate methodologies. my doctoral study (niemi 2018) has four aims. the main aim is to understand the common main concern of various actors in migration, regardless of its type, nature and geographical area. the second aim is to close the gap between empirical data and formal theory by generating a new middlerange migration theory. the third aim is to advance research in the field of migration, geography, social sciences and grounded theory methodology, and in any other discipline relevant to the new theory. finally, the fourth aim is to explore the possibilities for multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in the mentioned disciplines through a genuinely multiand interdisciplinary grounded theory. i have provided science and practice with a new theory called the theory of control tuning, which allows us to see migration from a fresh perspective. when i began the study, i had no idea that i would be studying control and migration for the many years to come. unlike the often-used approach of starting with particular research questions and ready hypotheses, i began with an interest in understanding the similarities between different actors involved in migration, such as asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, recognised refugees, educationand employment-induced migrants, those migrating for other personal reasons, local residents and authorities linked to migration. i wanted to hear what all these actors considered important rather than starting from a literature review to see what other researchers had done and what they had thought to be significant. i wanted to see if there were similarities rather than differences. consequently, i adopted classic grounded theory as my methodology and embarked on fieldwork in several geographical areas in finland, egypt, uganda and sudan. at that point, south sudan did not yet exist as an independent state. however, i was particularly interested in investigating south sudanese migration, as it is geographically extensive and covers different types of migration actors and migration movements. south sudanese migration provides information on asylum-seeking occurring due to a conflict within a state and while migrating to neighbouring countries and other continents, migration for education and employment purposes and for other personal reasons, and quota refugees and return migration to different types of places. moreover, south sudanese migration involves many organisations and authorities as well as local residents from a variety of places, which was significant for understanding the behaviour of various migration actors. i conducted interviews, discussions and observations in camps for the internally displaced, refugee settlements, border towns, urban centres, rural areas, the homes of local residents and the offices of authorities. at times, the fieldwork was dangerous and mentally and physically exhausting due to working in environments of conflict and violence, in areas with challenging infrastructure and among people with severe mental and physical health issues. many of the interviewees had experiences of fleeing, being raped, being tortured, witnessing a murder and other horrible events. some authorities fennia 197(1) (2019) 165saija niemi had mistreated migrants, while some felt despair about being unable to help them. by contrast, some local residents were upset about being surrounded by such different cultures and people with different ways of behaviour; however, others enjoyed meeting new people from far-away places. in the interviews of migrants with different statuses, my main question was “can you please tell me about your migration experiences?” this question was designed to “instil a spill”, that is to give the interviewees a chance to discuss anything they wanted, thereby allowing me to see what was important to them. in turn, with authorities, the interviews were often more formal, and with local residents the nature of the interview depended on the interviewee. i recorded the fieldwork data as field notes and research diaries. in addition, i also used secondary data, such as maps, statistics, photos and the literature. in grounded theory methodology, one of the most important actions is to memo one’s ideas and use those memos as the backbone of a new theory. through the procedure of open and selective coding, constant comparison, memoing, sorting and theoretical coding, i was able to bring the primary and secondary data from the descriptive level to the conceptual level. in addition to the new theory, the study also offers several new concepts for the migration lexicon, concepts such as control tuning, place picking, emotional ride, dividing space and okaying. the theory of control tuning explains the main concern – the processing of control – of migration actors in relation to the aspects of their lives affected by migration. in this study, control is understood in broad terms and includes tactics and strategies for managing and governing feelings, actions, information and people as well as ownership of situations and objects. the theory demonstrates how migration actors resolve challenges related to control by control tuning in connection with a behavioural arena that consists of activities like place coping, knowledge dealing, encountering authority and link keeping. behaviour that occurs in relation to place, knowledge, authority and linking with others produces control situations that require actors to process the control that they themselves or others possess and use and the control that they face through the behaviour of others. the theory of control tuning has two important foci: control-tuning paths, which explain how control is processed, and the behavioural arena of migration, which demonstrates what control is processed in relation to. the concept of control tuning refers to the action of modifying control for different purposes in relation to managing events, situations, feelings, objects and people during and in relation to migration. control can be acceptable, unpleasant or insignificant from the viewpoint of the actors concerned. therefore, control is processed in different ways depending on its importance and the situation or situations where it appears. control tuning occurs due to what is often a series of control situations that generate particular control-tuning paths. control-tuning paths consist of control-tuning causes, strategies, outcomes and intervening factors and conditions. in the data, i identified control-tuning causes such as the need to accept control, wanting to force control and the need to increase control; i found control-tuning strategies such as sharing control, handing over control and dealing with obstructing control; and i discovered control-tuning outcomes such as fluctuating control, gained control and non-existent control. on these control-tuning paths, causes for migration actors to react to their own or others’ control arise. thus, these actors adopt a strategy or strategies in order, for instance, to promote or hinder their own or others’ control to reach an outcome that they consider appropriate. however, even if migration actors, either consciously or subconsciously, aim to reach a suitable level or degree of control, they may not always achieve to the desired degree. when migration actors intend to change or maintain the control situation but the outcome is unsatisfactory, they may adopt a different strategy or strategies, or remain with the same strategy in an attempt to process control and transform the control situation. control situations are affected by several intervening factors that modify the control-tuning paths, thus influencing the need for a particular strategy or strategies. intervening factors can be control supportive or control preventing. in the theory of control tuning, the intervening factors are divided into three categories: basic factors such as age, sex, ethnicity and appearance, varying factors such as gender roles, health and personal skills, and control supportive instruments such as various means and abilities, for instance means of communication and the ability to forgive. 166 fennia 197(1) (2019)reflections a control-tuning outcome appears at the end of a control-tuning path. however, as many controltuning paths appear simultaneously, even if one control-tuning path ends, others are often still pursued and new ones begin. control tuning occurs when there is dissatisfaction and a negative condition, and only when migration actors experience a positive condition, that is when they are successful and/or satisfied in the processing of control, is there no need to seek a strategy or strategies for further processing control by control tuning. migration actors process control by control tuning while both traveling through various environments and remaining in spaces and places. control-tuning paths appear in relation to the behavioural arena of migration. the behavioural arena of migration explains what migration actors process control in relation to. the behavioural arena includes the elements, circumstances, relationships and objects of the physical, social, political, cultural and economic world with which migration actors come into contact and interact. link keeping, encountering authority, knowledge dealing and place coping, which are the main activities in the behavioural arena of migration, all contain other sub-activities and their properties. in my dissertation, i introduce place coping in more detail. multi routing, place sensing, spatial manoeuvring, establishing a new normal, re-rooting home and problem confronting are all important aspects of place coping. i also illustrate practical incidents of place coping by taking the theory back to its roots to the empirical data. this is an experimental twist in the use of grounded theory methodology. in grounded theory studies, the researcher does not attempt to verify the work of others; rather the new theory is synthesised with what already exists in relation to it. in my dissertation, i demonstrate how the theory of control tuning relates to and provides new perspectives for the research and conceptualisation of control, space and place, and migration. in addition, i show how the theory of control tuning connects and contributes to research and concepts of migration-related central binaries, grounded theory studies, multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. i also demonstrate how my study strengthens knowledge on conducting demanding data collection and fieldwork. even though grounded theory methodology does not contain any epistemological or ontological positions per se – as it stands firmly on its own as a methodology – i present the study’s interfaces with phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophies as a loose philosophical framework. i also position the study within the disciplinary context of humanistic geography. i conclude the dissertation by discussing the achievement of the research aims, the limitations of the study and the possibilities for future research. i also reflect on my personal learning and share practical and policy recommendations. i believe that my study and the theory of control tuning contribute to science and practice in important ways. the new theory is able to place, within one theory, a behavioural pattern that occurs in migration irrespective of the status or type of migration actor, the internal or international nature of migration or the direction of migration between rural and urban areas. moreover, the theory demonstrates that control tuning occurs in all types of migration movements and also while staying put, regardless of the voluntary or forced nature of that migration. the theory also reveals that space and place are not losing their meaning in migration, quite the contrary. in fact, space and place are highly significant and appear as both migration-related actions and characteristics. coping in different kinds of spaces and places is one of the most important activities that generate control-tuning paths. the theory of control tuning contributes to both theoretical and conceptual knowledge through presenting novel, previously unseen connections and new vocabulary. furthermore, the theory has fit, relevance and grab. i present a theory which demonstrates that rather than viewing control and migration from the common migration management perspective where states and international alliances control migration in their geographical areas, control should be understood as a crucial aspect of the everyday life of individuals and groups. as i mentioned earlier, a grounded theory study does not begin with a hypothesis. rather, it is only possible to form a hypothesis after a new theory has been developed. thus, i end my presentation, as i ended my study, with the hypothesis of the research: “the main concern of migration actors is the processing of control, which they resolve on a continuous basis by control tuning in the behavioural arena of migration, regardless of the nature, type, length, geographical area, actors, time, level and life sphere of that migration.” it is now the task of others to determine how they view and use the theory of control tuning. i look forward with great interest to seeing how the theory shows its strength in both academia and practice. fennia 197(1) (2019) 167saija niemi references arango, j. (2000) explaining migration: a critical view. international social science journal 52(165) 283– 296. http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2451.00259 favell, a. (2008) rebooting migration theory: interdisciplinarity, globality, and postdisciplinarity in migration studies. in brettell, c. b. & hollifield j. f. (eds.) migration theory: talking across disciplines, 259–278. routledge, new york. niemi, s. (2018) theory of control tuning: the processing of control in migration-related place coping. department of geosciences and geography a66. painosalama oy, turku. https://helda.helsinki. fi/handle/10138/247811?locale-attribute=en http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2451.00259 https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/247811?locale-attribute=en https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/247811?locale-attribute=en english: lingua franca or disenfranchising? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa67662 doi: 10.11143/fennia.67662 reflections: on publishing english: lingua franca or disenfranchising? sara fregonese fregonese, sara (2017). english: lingua franca or disenfranchising? fennia 195: 2, pp. 194–196. issn 1798-5617. conceiving academic publishing as a long-term process that often includes oral communication and knowledge exchange at academic conferences, this commentary offers a critical take on english as lingua franca. contrarily to the historical use of lingua franca as a simplified system of transnational communication that facilitates the pragmatics of economic and cultural exchange, academic english is instead used vernacularly and becomes an excluding barrier. in the writing and peer review stages of publishing, the linguistic positionality of both authors and peer reviewers thus needs more reflection in order for academic english not to become once again part of a disenfranchising process. keywords: lingua franca, english, academic publishing, peer review sara fregonese, school of geography, earth and environmental sciences, university of birmingham, b15 2tt, birmingham, uk. e-mail: s.fregonese@bham.ac.uk in 2005, an intervention titled “anglophones: if you want us to understand you, you will have to speak understandably!” (belina 2005) appeared in the journal antipode. it resulted from a debate on the question of the hegemonic use of english at academic conferences that took place at the international conference of critical geography in mexico city in january 2005. there, aside from the language debate, several delegates volunteered to translate or summarise paper presentations from english into other languages (and primarily spanish), and speakers had the possibility to present in spanish. although the debate and the resulting antipode intervention are mainly about the language used at conferences, it is also valid for publishing, and especially if we focus not on “the fact that english is used […], but want to make some simple propositions concerning how it is used” (belina 2005, 853). i am a non-anglophone geographer, trained and fluent in a number of languages, who has lived and worked in the uk long enough to acquire dual nationality. yet, as a colleague recently put it to me, english native speakers “always have one draft less” to write. from my position, two points become worth of analysis when it comes to the politics of language in publishing in the anglo-centred academia: the first regards the problematic nature of and the assumptions around the idea of english being a lingua franca of academic interaction; the second concerns the implications of these assumptions in the process of publication and peer-review. academic publishing is only the culmination of a much wider process of knowledge production and exchange that, very often, includes predominantly oral discussions, presentations, and debates that take place at international academic conferences. the notion of lingua franca in publishing ought to be deconstructed in the light of what happens in these early phases of the publishing process, where the exchange, feedback and validation of concepts and ideas and knowledge production happen orally. this oral phase is important, but while there has been debate in geography around english as © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 195sara fregonese a vehicle of academic cultural homogenization (short et al. 2001), of uneven/exclusionary communication due to differential fluency/clarity (belina 2005), and of linguistic cultural hegemony (kitchin 2005), the very notion of lingua franca referred to and relied upon in these contributions, has specific geographical, pragmatic and political connotations that have not yet been critically dissected. this brief commentary suggests instead that it is by drawing on history and linguistics and by looking at how language (and language difference) actually works, that we can start to (dis)place the predominance of english in the anglo-centred academia. the popular usage of the term “lingua franca” is that of, simply, a common language. however, a historical look highlights a rather more nuanced meaning. the word derives from the arabic lisān al-faranj, that is “language of the europeans”: geographically, faranj distinguished the rest of europe from greece (treccani 2017). for centuries, lingua franca was used for commerce between arabs, europeans and turks in the mediterranean, consisting of an in-between language with a simplified grammar and a predominance of italian, spanish and arabic words. more generically, it has come to denote every language adopted in a simplified form for the pragmatic purpose of communication in a multicultural environment. but lingua franca, exactly because it was franca (i.e. free, exempt) belonged to no one, and to everyone at the same time. one of the most common assumptions, is that english is a lingua franca because it is by far the most widely spoken language at international academic conferences. however, the mere ability to speak english does not in itself equate to speaking lingua franca. academic english spoken and heard at conferences is often not franca, but vernacular: it is the kind of english spoken by natives in that language, and assuming that they will be understood by others, just by speaking english. as belina (2005) also showed, it is used with in heavy accents, fast pace, as well as extensive use of abbreviations, idiomatic expressions, and even tricky double entendres that – contrarily to what lingua franca aims to achieve – might make english less accessible to those who are not native speakers, even if they are very fluent. more than words get lost in the orality of conferences: bits of discussions go amiss, conversation are subject to misunderstanding, participation might be compromised or even intimidated. in other words, the power (and the energy) to hear correctly, listen and comprehend, and be able to participate and respond, becomes often a crucial – but underconsidered – driver of the politics of academic interaction. english is assumed to be a lingua franca, but is more often not used as such by those who speak it vernacularly. thus, english becomes not a simplified and shared system of free-flow communication, but a system of potential linguistic disenfranchisement. the impact of this assumption about english being a lingua franca even when it is, in fact, a vernacular, carries on into the politics of academic geographical publishing. being bilingual but having almost always to write in english as a second language, is not simply about translation: it is about sourcing thoughts and terms from two, or often more, languages. this sourcing and sorting works as an integrated system, an interlanguage (canagarajah 2007), an in-between linguistic realm in which one can very easily become stranded. linguists very rarely talk of inter-linguistic processes only as “translation”. they use complex terms, such as “cross-linguistic activation”, “cross-language lexical interference”, and “codemeshing”. all of these describe a process of “translanguaging” , that is “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (canagarajah 2011, 401). how does one deal with this as a non-anglophone academic author? it is beyond the scope of this short commentary to offer firm conclusions on this, but one question emerges: should authors disclose the bior multi-lingualism that shapes their writing, in the same way they disclose research funding that allowed the research or the positionality that shaped the data collection? recently, one academic reviewer described my written english as “hard to follow”. shortly after this remark, the reviewer required a justification for having conducted fieldwork in four languages (the three languages spoken in my area of research, plus my own native language for a number of interviews with italian speakers) and of the process and pitfalls of translation. in other words, i had to justify both my shortcomings in english and my proficiency in four languages for research. what might seem very ordinary comments to a reviewer, can be perceived as undermining, unappreciative or simply contradictory for an author. as authors, we are required to reflect on our research positionality and explain rigorously our methodological choices. should a similar level of reflexivity also happen for 196 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing reviewers? the anonymity of the double-blind review process is meant to ensure fairness and avoid conflict of interest. however, authors are not on a level playing field when it comes to language (among many other things): should authors who write in english as second or even third language have a right to disclose their positionality? the opportunity to reflect on diversity aspects such as language and multilingualism as part of an author’s positionality should be accompanied by an opportunity for referees to become more mindful of linguistic difference. this would constitute an opportunity to embrace language difference as an empowering realm of knowledge production, rather than a disenfranchising one. references belina, b. (2005) anglophones: if you want us to understand you, you will have to speak understandably! antipode 37 853–855. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00534.x canagarajah, s. (2007) lingua franca english, multilingual communities, and language acquisition. the modern language journal 91 923–939. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2007.00678.x canagarajah, s. (2011) codemeshing in academic writing: identif ying teachable strategies of translanguaging. the modern language journal 95 401–417. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01207.x kitchin, r. (2005) commentary: disrupting and destabilizing anglo-american and english-language hegemony in geography1. social & cultural geography 6 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936052000335937 short, j. r., boniche, a., kim, y., li, p. l., 2001. cultural globalization, global english, and geography journals. the professional geographer 53 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00265 treccani (2017) lingua franca. enciclopedia on line. <http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lingua-franca/> 23.11.2017. welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70227 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70227 reflections welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger – commentary to gill vilhelmiina vainikka and joni vainikka vainikka, v. & vainikka, j. (2018) welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 124–130. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 identity politics create distinctions, narratives and shared conceptions, and where distinctions can be made, differences arise. contemporary states, organisations, companies and communities have procedures to level out these social boundaries, but the process of hospitality and welcome is at times more problematic than exclusion. the key question concerns the universality of welcome. if our welcome is extended to the masses, is the mass itself defined and delimited and, second, how does a general welcome condition everyday encounters with the (entitled) stranger. in this reflection, we concentrate on the concept of welcome on two different levels. the mass and interpersonal encounters and argue that whether refugees, migrants or tourists the spatiality of the welcome needs to be considered from both individual and collective viewpoints. keywords: welcome, refugee, tourist, stranger, mobility, finland vilhelmiina vainikka, glase-consortium, geography research unit, university of oulu, oulu, finland fi-90014. e-mail: vilhelmiina.vainikka@oulu.fi joni vainikka, relate centre of excellence, geography research unit, university of oulu, oulu, finland fi-90014. e-mail: joni.vainikka@oulu.fi introduction in a world where the possibility to connect is omnipresent, the concept of welcome has become both topical and political. the masses of tourists, migrants and refugees constitute a continual flow of movement or a gust of displacement. much too often mobility scholars concentrate on the mobile agent and the ways mobility transforms and gives meaning to space, without considering how welcome is addressed, organised and felt (see molz & gibson 2007). this overlook partly relates to the christian ethos on which much of european norms and values have been founded (valéry 1962 [1926]), where welcoming the stranger is a virtue since one never knows the true benefits of welcoming. such welcome is directed to the individual and not the masses of people. whether people have been forced to leave their home or they are seeking safer and more stable living conditions, welcoming the masses hits a different register than the individual welcome. nick gill (2018) essays to connect hospitality and refugees with welcome at the state and interpersonal level. this approach is more than welcomed. beyond the welcome of the stranger, the question of who is the community behind the welcome is very critical. in public spaces, after the moment of arrival, the newcomers meet a mass of people they might profile as nationals of the country to which they arrived. gill paints a picture of a visibly positive receiving community ready to associate itself with the label #refugeeswelcome. yet, understanding the fears, concerns, © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 fennia 196(1) (2018) 125vilhelmiina vainikka & joni vainikka misconceptions and ideologies of those not welcoming or not issuing their welcome is just as important to understand and conceptualize. sometimes the welcome is not only directed to the displaced, hopeful and often traumatised refugees but also as a statement against non-welcome. there are merits in analysing the state policies that concern refugees, but seeing the receiving community as a singular mass sharing the same charity unnecessarily writes of sectarianism in civil society. a useful conceptualisation in understanding how the welcome becomes normalised in everyday life could be to think how the stranger entitles oneself to the new space, how the welcome, in its emotional or superficial guises, influences on how the stranger is capable of forging attachment and connections the new social space. in this, we think through the stranger as part of a mass in tourism and migration. the shades of welcoming in tourism welcome is a self-conscious term. it can be a compliment, a gesture and an invitation at the same time. a term that can be more uplifting than up-anchoring, since it organises space as an emotional discourse more definitely than as an impetus for movement. the tourism industry mediates a generic welcome, one that is normalised within the confines of the resort or hotel, where the local life does not have a lasting interpersonal connection with a tourist. yet, for the receptionist or worker, encounters with the client and the other way around usually have a personal element (see vainikka v 2015; lynch 2017). such meetings with the stranger, although fleeting and superfluous, can be essential for the traveller's sense of certainty and security. the magnitude of the tourism phenomenon engenders tourism spaces that are filled with strangers making only fleeting appearances, who nevertheless are touched by emotions from awe to anxiety, but who in general are unable to settle among the locals. the tourist is, like patrick modiano (1982) writes, a person from the beach, whose footsteps are washed away with the next tide. the tourist leaves no permanent mark to the location but is a rather changeable element within the place. welcoming the masses can be associated with success and as an indicator of the “cosmopolitan” character of the city. it can also convey struggles in tourism and recreation. in many european locations – from barcelona to helsinki or from st. ives to lapland – masses of travellers in the peak seasons transform the place. to describe this sporadic crowdedness that surpasses previous ideas of mass, journalists, practitioners and scholars have used the term “over-tourism” that underlines tourism that has grown so large that it induces feelings and expressions of “tourismophobia” among the local community (milani et al. 2017). torres (2016), columnist of politico, even notices that barcelona seems to have declared a ‘war on tourists’. mass demonstrations against tourism have taken place, and even attacks on tourist buses have been reported in barcelona. the welcome in tourism is often selective. planners, businesses and other local stakeholders wish to define what kinds of tourists they want to attract: luxury tourists, special interest tourists or the undifferentiated ‘mass’. the mass has often been used as a term of magnitude characterising problems and challenges in tourism, while it could be discussed in a more analytically and diverse way (vainikka v 2015; butcher 2017). in addition to the formal tourism sector, mass tourism has diversified from the conventional tour operators and package tourists to include internet booking websites, low-cost carriers and airbnb accommodation. mass tourism ranges from visiting friends and relatives to business tourism to several special interest tourists. these developments have expanded the tourism pressure to residential areas (gutiérrez et al. 2017). with airbnb and other developments, travel and tourism have penetrated and disturbed the spaces of everyday even more than the “on the beaten track” tourism. sights and tourist attractions have become more mundane. the act of gathering generic photos from top sights has given way to the quest for authentic, more personalised experiences, memories and souvenirs. tourists today are more and more entitling (vainikka j 2012, 2015a) themselves to the local lifestyle and adopting and virtually claiming the locality as part of their identity. travelling in the time of social media has generated a need to be like a local and the requirement to empathise with the place to know the local lifestyle. the neighbours in apartment buildings and local neighbourhoods have become part of the welcome, whether they like it or not. the scale of the change in tourism has 126 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections resulted in distortions in the real estate market as the local residents may have a hard time renting affordable housing. within this scheme, the more or less continuous, unpredictable crowds, that are seen and felt as congestion all translate the problem of non-fixed, shifting communities where trust has to be reforged ceaselessly. these changes have spawned discussions of new collaborative ways of developing tourism, where peer-to-peer practices reframe the tourist welcome (dredge 2017). in this discussion, interest is directed to an alternative, that is creative, embodied and ethical, with arrangements of social life and hospitality that address and overcome “disruptive tourism and its untidy guests” (veijola et al. 2014). welcome sometimes means that one needs to step out of one’s comfort zone and challenge the sense of self for the sake of the other. höckert (2015) studied ethics of hospitality in the context of development studies and community-based tourism and discovered that often the helper enters assuming the welcome of the participating locals: because i am the helper i am welcome (see also griffiths 2017). voluntary tourism in this sense seems like a sort of heroism, not necessarily because of helping others but because it romanticises keeping a stringent budget while bootstrapping in a new environment. this, in turn, restricts the benefits from the community and underlines asymmetrical relationships. voluntary tourism is part of the movement that regards cheap travel as a status symbol where the individualistic traveller identity is separated from mass tourism. the epistemological question of how do we separate ourselves from the masses does not itself merit to forget mass behaviour since everyone is more or less part of it. it is easy to think the masses of tourists or masses of refugees as a categorical horde by their numbers or as a group of strangers that form their own community that is disturbingly separate from the welcoming hosts (veijola et al. 2014; vainikka v 2015). large numbers of people mean the impossibility of knowing all of them well. as much as a nation can be imagined or categorised as a community, the mass as well can be a grouping defined by the status of the movement. such status can be very superficial or serious, but the impetus for movement draws from the splendour, excitement, secureness or safety that the origin does not provide. the mass in itself is not a bad thing or concept rather it is very complex indeed (vainikka v 2015) but to see one’s position in the larger picture, requires self-critical analysis and stepping outside ones “comfort zone”. the antipodes of welcome when confronting masses the point we would like to make is that welcome has a mass quality. welcoming the stranger aims to change the status of the stranger into someone known (see koefoed & simonssen 2012) in a situation where the hosts are more powerful than the stranger. even though this power asymmetry is not a conscious choice, the hosts hold pedagogical and symbolic power of what in the local is perceived natural. the extent to which this asymmetry can be bend tests territorial power structures. welcoming the masses entails a change in the social structure of the hosts especially when the welcome becomes integration. it is always easier to recognise one stranger than a mass. in finland, welcoming the masses cannot be discussed without taking note of the displaced populations after the second world war. the massive relocation operation that involved 420,000 people from mainly karelia, but also lapland and the outer islands in the gulf of finland meant that 11% of the population was integrated to the rest of the nation. while this relocation is often told as a national survival story, with suppressed emotional longing, it is also a story of welcomed and unwelcomed experiences (hyytiäinen 2005; kuusisto-arponen 2009). in this case, welcome would not have been possible without strong government guidance, and one could argue that the relocation process paved the way for the finnish welfare state (cf. kettunen 2001) as the negotiation of old cultural boundaries at the local level administration spawned new ways of political practice. if the war itself is one of the landmarks of the discourse of finnish unity, the relocation of karelians should be the point when the cultural cleavages within finns were stitched up. nevertheless, the relocated people did not always fit in the local social sphere. cultural and at times religious differences catered suspicions for decades. the experience of welcoming and living with masses of people who represent the internal other (johnson & coleman 2012) or people who bring the antecedent otherness (vainikka j 2015b) to their doorsteps was not easily reconciled. fennia 196(1) (2018) 127vilhelmiina vainikka & joni vainikka for many, the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 provoked the difficulties of the late 1940s and their legacies. some argued that finns as a nation have dealt with masses of people without homes before, others claimed that the relocation concerned finns and pleaded that finland as a peripheral country should not extend their welcome. the public discussion quickly turned into a debate between the acknowledgement of human rights, humanitarian aid and international commitments and the imaginary of a small nation unable to house massive amounts of refugees, fear of being overwhelmed and sheer racism. suddenly the media created a bipolar juxtaposition between the tolerant and nationalist bigots that are separated by what columnist paretskoi (2016) termed ‘tolkun ihmiset’ (people of reason). paretskoi’s column was unexpectedly picked up by president niinistö (2016), who a week later from the column noted in his speech of the opening of parliament that the uncontrolled immigration is talked about by people who in their heated discussion verbally abused and slurred their imagined antipodes. in his speech, niinistö also noted that: “migration is a serious problem. europe, finland, the western way of thinking and our values have all been challenged by it. this is a stark transformation; just a few years ago we were exporting our values and regarded them as unquestionable, now we are having to consider whether even we ourselves can preserve them.” this passage highlights the effect a mass can have to the welcoming host but also the fact that the society tends to swiftly move in the direction where the bigger threat is canvassed. what niinistö’s speech underscores is that finnish politics has traditionally been more realistic than idealistic, where the capacity to cope gives way to values. when politics is swayed this way – be it by geopolitical, ecological, economic, social or nationalistic threats – it subsumes the threat in the political agenda before the threat turns into a movement beyond political control. since autumn 2015, the legal instruments and management practices concerning immigration were accustomed to the increased number of refugees (ministry of interior 2017). for example, some countries like iraq were perceived safer than they actually were. the legislation was changed to address the residence requirement. family reunification criteria’s were reviewed to consider the income levels. humanitarian grounds were annulled as an argument for residence permits. the handling for asylum appeals was decentralised. legal aid was restricted to public service providers. in addition, the share of negative asylum decisions increased considerably. these elements have been in stark contrast with humanitarian values and were underlined as exceptional measures in a time crisis, but have, with the clean-up of much social media commenting, prevented further and wider cleavages in the society. at the same time, legislative changes were made to smooth the migration of talent from the rest of the european union. these legislative changes were an attempt to manage the masses of refugees and control migration. the changes in migration policies challenged drastically from universal ideas of humanitarian aid and the welcome of the stranger. migration policies have become more and more selective and driven by economic reasoning. one could argue in line with mountz and hiemstra (2014) that structures of crises and chaos were organised into exceptional moments for ideological and geopolitical reasoning, but the government action prevented the nationalist movement to gather too much force that could endanger the political process. at the same time, such policies lined in with fears and anxieties brought by economic recession and terrorism. the suppressing political action underlined the role of third-sector organisations. the discrepancies between cold government policies and compassionate organisations as nick gill (2018) illustrates makes it seem that the welcome of the host is moving with two different carriages. the receiving communities responded to mass migration with help and welcome, volunteering, accommodating asylum seekers in their homes and donating clothes and other essentials. most donated without ever meeting the refugees, some feared disapproval of the negative factions of society. the polarised public discussion prompted some to devote their time for the welcome. indeed, as gill (2018, 93) states “welcoming refugees necessitates certain aptitudes and resources”. for many, it is not only confronting traumatized migrants that become a mental obstacle, but the crossing of the everyday comfort zone to encounter the stranger. for many, civil organisations themselves are communities of their own, and not necessarily felt easily approachable, although 128 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections that is what they aim to be. within this moment of exception, the pressure to help must have made many those not previously part of the activity, take their step forward. we feel that equally important discussion, in a longer run, would be how the welcome could be acted within the diverse contextual positions of individuals. not only organized help but also everyday encounters in public space matter. the faction that opposes irregular, or in many cases any kind of immigration felt threatened by the large numbers and were at times openly hostile towards reception centres, their workers, civic organisations and the concept of welcome in general. they quickly labelled civic organisations and those promoting liberal sentiments as ‘suvakit’ (the tolerant in a derogatory form). in the faceless social media sphere, this label could be attached to anyone who held on to the humanist values unquestioned before 2015. for the antagonists of migration, these values had turned naïve, innocent and hampering solutions (kaján 2017). at the same time, mainstream media got questioned for drawing even a neutral picture of refugees or migration, and conspiracy theories about hiding the real costs of migration flew wild. the freedom to connect and share opinions created a crisis of media and expertise. this social turmoil is the kind of breeding ground that gives room for openly racist extremist movements to turn visible. the ‘patrolling’ groups only generated unrest among the public. for example, a recent study shows that extremist movements caused mainly feelings of worry, fear and distress among local communities of border towns tornio and lappeenranta (prokkola et al. 2017). the threat the extremist movements underlined was of their own making, not the one they canvassed to the social fabric. escaping fear generated fear elsewhere. the refugees struggled for a voice, but this voice was transmuted and distorted into a fear of a mass of strangers that strengthened the need to address welcome for those holding on to their humanist values. we must recognise that within the society, everyone will not connect easily to strangers. nevertheless, entitling the stranger with safety, a place to call home, new spatial identity and means for pursuing happiness does not remove these values and feelings from anyone else. we need to investigate what and what kind of circumstances contribute to people feeling threatening by immigration or to a feeling that people are not heard. in this, we should go beyond the saintsimonian structural explanation of an idle class or those socially marginalised since distrust does not turn into trust and welcome simply with a paycheck. polarized discussion causes fear as proand anti-immigration debate easily pushes the other further just to make room for their own argument (see puustinen et al. 2017). this quarrel and throwing stigmatised labels only diverts the core issues from the debate. in the heat of it all, the root causes for social malaise and the universality of human rights were sidelined. using terms like refugee crisis, chaos in europe or communities on alert gives too much latitude to the economisation of our values (crawley & skleparis 2018) and seeing people as cost items instead of turning the discursive welcome into interpersonal co-being. short discussion we have discussed welcoming in two contexts: tourism and irregular immigration. the welcome and hospitality are essential dimensions of human relations and include various asymmetrical positionalities, historical legacies, spaces and politics. welcoming the masses is not a straightforward issue, and requires attention from researchers, politicians, journalists, civic organisations and ordinary citizens. being one of the many and experiencing the shades of welcome of the hosting mass are critical to understanding how the interpersonal encounters are conditioned. sometimes the stranger needs only one good connection to become part of the greater mass. all this expresses that the mass should be not used in a taken-for-granted manner. in addition, the ability to host, who is permitted to be a guest, how to host the other and how the host’s self is defined (molz & gibson 2007, inspired by kant 1996 [1795]) are central aspects to consider in contexts of hospitality and welcome (see also rapport 2012). at its best, welcoming makes visible the togetherness between strangers in a day-today basis and works to entitle the stranger as equal. fennia 196(1) (2018) 129vilhelmiina vainikka & joni vainikka acknowledgements the authors would like to thank nick gill for his excellent keynote at the geography days at the university of turku in october 2017 and glase consortium (strategic research council at the academy of finland #303480, #303527) and relate centre of excellence (project #307348) for support. references butcher, j. (2017) the morality of tourism. in harrison, d. & sharpley, r. (eds.) mass tourism in a small world, 28–39. cabi, wallingford. crawley, h. & skleparis, d. (2018) refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in europe’s ‘migration crisis’. journal of ethnic and migration studies 44(1) 48–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1348224 dredge, d. (2017) responsibility and care in the collaborative economy. in dredge, d. & gyimóthy, s. (eds.) collaborative economy and tourism: perspectives, politics, policies and prospects, 41–58. springer verlag, heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51799-5_4 griffiths, m. (2017) from heterogeneous worlds: western privilege, class and positionality in the south. area 49(1) 2–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12277 gutiérrez, j., garcía-palomares, j. g., romanillos, g. & salas-olmedo, m. h. (2017) the eruption of airbnb in tourist cities: comparing spatial patterns of hotels and peer-to-peer accommodation in barcelona. tourism management 62 278–291. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2017.05.003 gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70040 hyytiäinen, m. (2005) vaeltavien sielujen paikka. in huovila, m. & willman, t. (eds.) karjala lahdessa, 109–126. palmenia kustannus, lahti. höckert, e. (2015) ethics of hospitality: participatory tourism encounters in the northern highlands of nicaragua. acta universitatis lapponiensis 312. university of lapland, rovaniemi. http://lauda. u l a p l a n d .f i / b i t s t r e a m / h a n d l e / 10 0 2 4 /6 2 2 0 0 / h % c 3 % b 6 c ke r t _ e m i l y_ a c t a e _18 0 _ p d fa . pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y johnson, c. & coleman, a. (2012) the internal other: exploring the dialectical relationship between regional exclusion and the construction of national identity. annals of the association of american geographers 102(4) 863–880. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.602934 kaján, e. (2017) hate online: anti-immigration rhetoric in darknet. nordia geographical publications 46(3) 3–22. kant, i. (1996 [1795]) toward perpetual peace: a philosophical project, practical philosophy: the cambridge edition of the works of immanuel kant. heinemann, cambridge. kettunen, p. (2001) the nordic welfare state in finland. scandinavian journal of history 26(3) 225–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/034687501750303864 koefoed, l. & simonsen, k. (2012) (re)scaling identities: embodied others and alternative spaces of identification. ethnicities 12(5) 623–642. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796811434487 kuusisto-arponen, a.-k. (2009) the mobilities of forced displacement: commemorating karelian evacuation in finland. social & cultural geography 10(5) 545–563. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360902974464 lynch, p. (2017) mundane welcome: hospitality as life politics. annals of tourism research 64 174–184. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2017.04.001 milani, c., novelli, m. & cheer, j. m. (2017) call for papers: overtourism and tourismophobia. a journey through four decades of tourism development, planning and local concerns. tourism planning and development journal 1–4. ministry of interior (2017). maahanmuuton tilannekatsaus 1/2017. sisäministeriön julkaisu 4/2107. ministry of interior, helsinki. modiano, p. (1982) rue des boutiques obscures. gallimard, paris. molz, j. g. & gibson, s. (2007) introduction: mobilizing and mooring hospitality. in molz. j. g. & gibson, s. (eds). mobilizing hospitality: the ethics of social relations in a mobile world, 1–27. ashgate, aldershot. mountz, a. & hiemstra, s. (2014). chaos and crisis: dissecting the spatiotemporal logics of contemporary migrations and state practices. annals of the association of american geographers 104(2), 382–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.857547 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1348224 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51799-5_4 https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12277 https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2017.05.003 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 http://lauda.ulapland.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/62200/h%c3%b6ckert_emily_actae_180_pdfa.pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y http://lauda.ulapland.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/62200/h%c3%b6ckert_emily_actae_180_pdfa.pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y http://lauda.ulapland.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/62200/h%c3%b6ckert_emily_actae_180_pdfa.pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.602934 https://doi.org/10.1080/034687501750303864 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796811434487 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360902974464 https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2017.04.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.857547 130 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections niinistö, s. (2016) speech by president of the republic sauli niinistö at the opening of parliament on 3 february 2016. 3.2.2016 <http://www.tpk.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=341376&nodeid=44810 &contentlan=2&culture=en-us>. paretskoi, j. (2016) tolkun ihmiset. iisalmen sanomat. 28.1.2016 <http://www.iisalmensanomat.fi/ news/tolkun-ihmiset/>. 18.04.2018. prokkola, e.-k., vainikka, v. & kaján, e. (2017) everyday security and demonstrations in the border towns of lappeenranta and tornio. nordia geographical publications 46(3) 37–48. puustinen, a., raisio, h., kokki, e. & luhta, j. (2017). kansalaismielipide: turvapaikanhakijat ja turvapaikkapolitiikka. ministry of interior publications 9/2017. http://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/ bitstream/handle/10024/79477/09_2017_kansalaismielipide%20turvapaikanhakijat%20ja%20 turvapaikkapolitiikka.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y rapport, n. (2012) anyone. the cosmopolitan subject of anthropology. berghan books, new york. torres, d. (2016) barcelona’s war on tourists. politico 23.11.2016. <http://www.politico.eu/article/adacolau-barcelona-mayor-war-on-tourists/>. 23.11.2016. vainikka, j. (2012) narrative claims on regions: prospecting for spatial identities among social movements in finland. social & cultural geography 13(6) 587–605. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649 365.2012.710912 vainikka, j. (2015a) identities and regions: exploring spatial narratives, legacies and practices with civic organizations in england and finland. nordia geographical publications 44(3) 1–172. vainikka, j. t. (2015b) reflexive identity narratives and regional legacies. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 106(5) 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12118 vainikka, v. (2015) rethinking mass tourism. professional discourses of contemporary mass tourism and destinations. nordia geographical publications 44(2) 1–99. valéry, p. (1962 [1926]) history and politics. translated by d. folliot & j. mathews. bollingen foundation, new york. veijola, s., molz, j. g., pyyhtinen, o. & höckert, e. (eds.) (2014) disruptive tourism and its untidy guests. alternative ontologies for future hospitalities. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. http://www.tpk.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=341376&nodeid=44810&contentlan=2&culture=en-us http://www.tpk.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=341376&nodeid=44810&contentlan=2&culture=en-us http://www.iisalmensanomat.fi/news/tolkun-ihmiset/ http://www.iisalmensanomat.fi/news/tolkun-ihmiset/ http://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/79477/09_2017_kansalaismielipide%20turvapaikanhakijat%20ja%20turvapaikkapolitiikka.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y http://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/79477/09_2017_kansalaismielipide%20turvapaikanhakijat%20ja%20turvapaikkapolitiikka.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y http://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/79477/09_2017_kansalaismielipide%20turvapaikanhakijat%20ja%20turvapaikkapolitiikka.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y http://www.politico.eu/article/ada-colau-barcelona-mayor-war-on-tourists/ http://www.politico.eu/article/ada-colau-barcelona-mayor-war-on-tourists/ https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2012.710912 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2012.710912 https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12118 from welcome to well ... come: the mobilities, temporalities and geopolitics of contemporary hospitality – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70403 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70403 reflections from welcome to well ... come: the mobilities, temporalities and geopolitics of contemporary hospitality – commentary to gill roger norum norum, r. (2018) from welcome to well ... come: the mobilities, temporalities and geopolitics of contemporary hospitality – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 111–117. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 in this reflection, i take nick gill’s contribution to this issue on the politics of hospitality and welcome as a point of departure to address three specific concerns, framed by the context of contemporary global mobility. first, i argue that various aspects of the recent so-called european migration crisis enable us to further question some of the long-fixed categories through which mobile actors are often classified. second, i speak to the critical nature of temporality as a governing factor not just in how states manage mobile peoples, but in how people imagine, understand and experience individual and group processes of welcome. finally, i suggest that just as geopolitical discourse plays a clear role in how migration is understood and experienced, so too are geopolitics deeply embedded in the encounters, practices and regimes of hospitality across tourism. keywords: mobility, tourism, migration, borders, time, hospitality roger norum, relate centre of excellence, geography research unit, university of oulu, p.o. box 8000, fi-90014, oulu, finland. e-mail: roger. norum@oulu.fi introduction ”how long should, can and may a guest stay?” (simon 2016, 167) over a few weeks in 1995, one particularly snarky billboard ad began cropping up all over downtown new york city. "welcome to new york. now get out,” the advertisement proclaimed proudly. coined by the weekly entertainment listings magazine time out new york, the publication had co-opted a phrasal verb’s double entendre, leveraging that famously obnoxious new york attitude to sell copies. the sense of the ad was that if you’d managed to make it all the way to the big apple, congratulations and well done and all that, but it’s really time to leave your hotel room and start seeing the city. however, the brusque tagline long stuck in my mind for another reason. the demographic of time out’s readership comprises both locals and tourists – people settled somewhere and people passing through. indeed, new york has been one of the world’s great destinations, today largely for tourists and a hundred years ago for impoverished migrants from europe. between 1892 until 1954, the city’s ellis island was the united states’ busiest immigrant inspection station and a gateway for more than 12 million immigrants. then a nascent, burgeoning cosmopolis, new york readily took in europe’s tired, poor, huddled masses, processed and documented them, and then sent them off to settle their new american lives, often somewhere else. albeit © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 112 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections unintentionally, the time out new york ad campaign served as a subtle reminder that this school-ofhard-knocks city had long opened its arms to welcome anyone and everyone – so long as they didn’t all think to stick around. i raise the example of ellis island here because it has become a core symbol in the mythologised, multicoloured narrative of us immigration history, having served both as a space of governance for refugee arrivals and, latterly, as a tourist attraction to celebrate them. the island now holds a hi-tech, interactive museum that teaches (tourists, primarily) about the role played by immigrants in the development of the us as a global power – and as a one-time beacon for the once-vaunted tenets of freedom, tolerance and truth. nick gill’s (2018) considered examination of the challenges of european welcoming is a muchneeded and timely contribution to research on contemporary social exchange, human mobility and their constitutive tensions, and his work raises a number of compelling questions facing contemporary global society. in this reflection, i address three related issues which gill speaks to in his writing. first, i argue that several aspects of global mobility (and the 2015–2016 european migration ‘crisis’ in particular) call into question some of the long-fixed categories through which mobile actors have long been classified. second, i point out the critical nature of temporality as a governing factor not just in how states manage mobile peoples, but in how people imagine, understand and experience structures of welcome and hospitality. finally, i demonstrate how, just as geopolitical discourse plays a clear role in how migration is understood, experienced and regulated, so too are geopolitics deeply embedded in the encounters, practices and regimes of hospitality across tourism. mobility’s mobile and immobile categories for many, the defining images of 2015 were those indelible, interminable landscapes of human railways: thousands of people aboard rafts, trains, buses or just barefoot, one alongside the other, braving the elements and the odds in search of freedom and safety. the media spectacle presented them camped out in budapest’s central train station, squeezed into train carriages bound for vienna, hoofing it alongside the autobahn outside munich, hopping the eurostar tracks in calais, or clinging to overfilled boats forging across the ferocious, hungry mediterranean. these migrants, many of them young people with families who had escaped war and death at home, endured thousands of kilometres of uncertainty in the hopes of landing somewhere that would welcome them. an amnesty international global survey from 2016, gill (2018) observes, produced an at once heartening and concerning statistic: two thirds of respondents stated they believed their governments should be doing more to help the plight of refugees. indeed, even despite the marked rise of european populist and conservative discourse over the past several years, open displays of hospitality were readily visible throughout the crisis. thousands of citizens across numerous european cities came out to welcome these huddled masses with red carpets, bright bunting, fresh flowers, bear-hug embraces, children’s toys and homemade meals. some even travelled elsewhere to bring their hospitality right up to where the refugees were landing on the continent’s shores. gill (2018) notes the solidarity of tourists to the mediterranean’s many isles, who took detours on planned holidays of sea, sun, sand and sex to welcome the new arrivals with whom they shared the warm beaches. there, they offered charity and assistance in the form of money, gifts and their own labour, distributing food, shuttling people around in their cars and brandishing a welcoming smile at the bow end of a tattered life raft. not everyone celebrated the arrivals with open arms, however, and the ensuing debate raised very real questions about where all these newcomers were going to live, and how europe was going to house them (reig & norum in press). the contradictions of contemporary mobility were exemplified by these juxtaposed scenes of leisure and despair across a number of such shared public spaces (orsini 2015). one stony, 30 km² outcrop that lies roughly 100 km east of tunisia and 300 km north of libya, the island of lampedusa is home to 5,000 year-round residents who live largely off tourism and a withering fishing industry. like the turkish beach on which drowned toddler alan sardi was found, lampedusa is one of many revitalised tourist spaces, which have used the dollars of western visitors to prop up economies ravaged by changes in european fishing policy and the advent of new trends in tourism (mostafanezhad fennia 196(1) (2018) 113roger norum & norum in press). the enduring hospitality of lampedusa’s community has been challenged over the past several decades by the island’s need to reinvent itself economically and politically: first as fishing harbour, then as tourist heaven, and more recently as refugee haven for migrants trying to reach europe by sea. when in 2015 and 2016 the island’s tourists, residents and humanitarian workers came together to welcome and assist its refugees, the tweeted and instagrammed images of tanned tourists alongside olive migrants become a new type of souvenir bearing a new type of cultural capital. such images contest the banality of the beach vacation trip, infusing the ordering of tourism (franklin 2004) with new modes of authenticity (melotti 2017). the point here is not to conflate the harsh realities of many refugee experiences with the privileged positionalities of leisure tourists, but to recognise that the spaces and spatialities of such groups can today often overlap in new forms of encounter. the links between tourism and migration here are pertinent, and not uncoincidental. scholars in recent years have written about the continuum of mobility that encompasses, and can often complicate, multiple forms of movement (nagy & korpela 2013), from the most hedonistic of tourist desires (norum 2006) to human trafficking and so-called irregular movement (de genova 2013). in their struggle to strike a balance between local identity and external and global pressures, the diverse communities such as those on lampedusa become “laboratories” for encounters between new selves and new others just as the thresholds of possible hospitable interaction become spaces for realising the moral dramas of welcome (barnett 2005; melotti et al. 2017). if there is a liquid nature to contemporary society, as bauman (2000) suggests, it is helping to redraw lines between and spaces around these figures and their movements, enabling encounter, encouraging exchange and challenging categorisations. thinking critically about hospitality encourages a reassessment of the “proximities” that engender and surround moments of welcome and of the estrangements that occur when selves are shifted from one place and positionality to another (dikeç et al. 2009). timely guests scholarship on notions of hospitality and welcome has emerged in recent years largely alongside identity politics debates that seek to understand belonging, inequality and cosmopolitanism in postcolonial, multicultural societies (candea & da col 2012). though social scientists have long been interested in the social processes of exchange that constitute relationships of hospitality (see e.g. smith 1977; mauss & beauchat 1979 [1904–1905]; morgan 2003 [1881]; shryock 2004), it is new questions around contemporary encounter and neighbourliness between people from different social and cultural (e.g. ethnic or religious) affiliations that have highlighted the renewed importance of hospitality as an analytical concept (laachir 2007; saxer & zhang 2017). but much work done on the welcoming and the welcomed reinforces facile, monoaural relationships among these groups to space and time. traditional understandings of the trajectories and temporalities of migration have typically held a linear model: arrival to integration, visitor to resident, alien to citizen. similarly, literature that foists a hospitality framework onto the mobile figure can frequently presume and reproduce firm, intransigent social categories in which, for example, migrants or tourists are seen to be mobile/dynamic while locals or hosts are framed as immobile/static (molz & gibson 2012). meanwhile, recent academic debates have brought to the fore the contemporary anxieties of time, considering in particular the social effects of societal and technological acceleration and atomization (fuchs & detmers 2017; ssorin-chaikov 2017). while gill (2018) does not speak directly to temporality, he does allude to its role in the relationship of the guest to place. indeed, the core existential anxiety of the guest is the question of time: how long? for the primary demarcating boundary of the space of the guest is that of time; as simon (2016, 168) puts it, “the guest is only a guest when he neither leaves nor stays”. take, for example, the gastarbeiter who may come for three years but stay for thirty. she is both legally and societally compelled to integrate into her new home and shake her guest-ness; and yet at the same time in most european contexts, she (and her progeny) may never be able to fully shed their guest identities. the paradox of the guest is that, once integrated, she is no longer a guest, since she would then become one of ”us”. once accepted into the position of guest, she cannot be turned away; yet she must also remain a stranger, never to be integrated (simon 2016). 114 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections the processes involved in global migration vary in duration and complexity, as boundaries between permanent and temporary mobility become more and more porous and contingent (robertson 2014). moreover, migration today is far from a temporally linear process, and studying its trajectories according to a spatially simplistic structure fails to capture the multiple and varied movements which comprise migration. its complex nature betrays multiple and variegated times, rhythms and tempos, involving diversion, repetition, simultaneity and open-endedness (griffiths et al. 2013). investigating experiences and regimes of time and these attendant components reveals the uneven mobilities present in the hospitality encounter, since mobile practice, discourse and imagination are mediated by multiple, diverse temporalities, shaping the social experience of place (norum & mostafanezhad 2016). through a consideration of the temporal, one better appreciates the boundary-blurring between categories of mobility such as temporary/permanent, legal/illegal, skilled/unskilled and sojourner/settler. moreover, framed against the spatial disand relocation implicit in various forms of human movement, reflecting on hospitality’s multiple temporalities compels us to attend to “the possibility of encounters with others that do not simply only occur in time or space, but are themselves generative of new times and spaces” (dikeç et al. 2009, 1). through the circulations of diverse temporal regimes, we can destabilise binary categories, enabling us to think anew about “the way such unevenness is reproduced through discourses of hospitality that determine which strangers are (or are not) invited and welcome” (molz & gibson 2012, 8). a temporalities of hospitality thus allows us to consider the profound tensions created by time, the multi-faceted assemblage of spatialities and relations articulated in and through mobility, and the complexities of the guest’s desire for becoming through the moment of welcome (cf. collins 2018). geopolitical hospitality, hospitable geopolitics human mobility, encompassing the meanings embedded in various forms of movement, has long been a barometer of geopolitical action and imagination. but this goes far beyond commonly placed conceptualisations of a geopolitics of mobility that is bound primarily to migration politics and the trajectories of displaced migrants (or the state’s attempts to track, control and contain them) (see hyndman 2012). as the recent summer juxtapositions of migrants and tourists on hotspots such as lesvos and lampedusa show, tourism, too, becomes enrolled in geopolitical discourses, practices and imaginations. tourism, in fact, has long been geopolitical, and mobilities of leisure have often had less than leisurely undertones. some of the earliest forms of organized travel were articulations of imperial dominion, colonial sway, political interest and social positioning. the romantic age’s grand tour, for example, was a bourgeois fashion that brought young members of the upper class from overcast, northern countries to soak up the sunny cultures of the south: first, italy and greece; later, spain and turkey. the practice was a mode of cultural exploitation and social class reaffirmation that has persisted well into the 21st century through economies such as the gap year or volunteer abroad programme, experiences of privilege that these days crop up on many an undergraduate student’s cv. manifold tourism narratives and imaginaries can reveal disengagements from pressing, pertinent and increasingly omnipresent global geopolitical events and encounters, contributing to what hannam (2017) has noted to be an “erasure of the geopolitical” across multiple tourism industry practices and relationships. indeed, perhaps because political overtones are often swept under the surface of everyday tourist encounter, little work has been done to understand regimes of tourism as geopolitically fertile spaces, bringing the microgeographies of inter-state processes into plain view (see, however, enloe 1989; gonzalez 2013; lisle 2016). both historically and contemporarily, tourism has been predicated on multiple uneven power relationships, and as such, has propagated various politicized forms of social and cultural exploitation. but the complexity of both contemporary tourism and modern geopolitics often obscures the relationship between these two entities. as these links proliferate, globalization and the accelerated circulation of capital reflect various forms of control, from soft power to hard hegemony. the processes, practices and the pervasive imaginaries of tourism reflect and reproduce global, national and local forms of power and control. through geopolitically fennia 196(1) (2018) 115roger norum dictated regimes of practice, certain people and places are deemed desirable and profitable while others are kept far from the pass of the tourist’s contactless debit card. tourism, as an industry and an assemblage of socio-cultural practices, is capable of at once constituting and reflecting geopolitical discourse, while also spatializing international politics and mediating tourists’ affective experience of and in place. these linkages are perhaps most evident in phenomena that juxtapose varying forms of mobile practice and varying types of political subjects. for example, as sheller (2016) considers in her analysis of chinese artist-activist ai weiwei’s refugee project, the sights of migrant deaths such as tourist beaches become easily re-mediated as sites for reassembling the social through making a portable public sphere. as mediterranean islands are turned into “places of detention, containment and deportation” (gill 2018, 90), the authenticity of human mortality supersedes any bottled or packaged tourist authenticity. in such encounters, the leisurely spaces of the beach, produced by various intermingling desires, have become liminal spaces in extremis – landscapes where the sensuous hedonism of life co-exists alongside the darkness of senseless death. though the geopolitical implications of such phenomena may be vast and far reaching, understanding their constituent social elements can in fact be quite simple to grasp. as the artist summed up in a recent guardian opinion piece, “the refugee crisis isn’t about refugees. it’s about us” (weiwei 2018). conclusion: the hospitality industry as a social process predicated on unequal relationships of value, the welcome embeds social transactions in both material and immaterial exchanges. it speaks to notions of identity, alterity, belonging; sovereignty, politics, and inequality. it is comprised both of negotiations of reciprocity and multiple inherent tensions: tolerance/xenophobia; generosity/parasitism; friendship/enmity; spontaneity/calculation (candea & da col 2012). importantly, for researchers, hospitality raises complex questions relating to economy, sociality and time. with respect to derrida, levinas and their acolytes, hospitality is all too often taken at face value and accepted critically. to many working in tourism, for instance, hospitality refers first to an industry, and then to a human sentiment. while hospitality seems a universal category, particular contexts will show its particularly problematic textures. in this reflection, i have outlined several ways in which considerations of hospitality can contribute to contemporary debates on mobility, time and the political. i have aimed to use gill’s (2018) work to show that different kinds of mobile people may be confronted with the different faces of the polyhedron of hospitality, from open arms and hot soup to conditional acceptance or a gesture showing one the door. a few years ago, i visited a museum exhibition while travelling up north. entitled “come to finland,” it showcased a collection of evocative vintage marketing posters and brochures that sold finland as an inviting travel destination during the golden age of european travel. the lithographs, rife with nostalgic tropes of tourist adventure and romance, depicted simple scenes of untrammeled landscapes of forests and lakes, inviting an adventurous euro-american public to experience the wonder of north. through simply designed imagery and alluring bygone slogans (e.g. “it's off to finland for winter sport!”), the posters flaunted finnish society as progressive, international and open. open, that is, to the visiting guest. one of the earliest of these travel posters was designed in 1893 by national romantic finnish artist akseli gallen-kallela: an impressionistic representation of the eastern finnish town of imatra, superimposed with a map of the surrounding area labelled in both french and russian. at the time, finland existed under the grand duchy of the russian empire, and tens of thousands of russians – soldiers, merchants, civil servants and even tourists – lived in the country, some as permanent residents, some temporarily. today, the country has comparatively little foreign immigration; as of 2016, there were 364,787 people with non-finnish backgrounds residing in finland, comprising under 7% of the population (statistics finland 2017) and a markedly lower percentage than in neighboring norway and sweden.1 as a temporary migrant myself to the nordic countries on several occasions over the past two decades, i have found myself incredibly welcomed by nearly everyone – that is, until the odd person 116 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections learns that i am due to stay for more than a few days. then come the quizzical looks, the questions, the hesitation and disquiet over how to process and frame me and my intentions. in today’s hospitality, in many places, an initial warm welcome extended from host to guest can become mollified and mitigated as a lukewarm exhortation to, well ... come – so long as the guest remembers that, at some point, it might behoove him to get out. notes 1 the figure here refers to a person either born abroad or born in finland to two parents who themselves had both been born abroad. for comparison, the figure for 2017 in norway was 17.3% of the population (statistics norway 2018) and in sweden 24.1% (statistics sweden 2018). acknowledgements i acknowledge support from the academy of finland, relate centre of excellence [project 307348]. i am also grateful to mary mostafanezhad, alejandro reig, alessandro rippa and katie ritson for their critical comments on an earlier version of this manuscript, and to james riding, kirsi pauliina kallio and hanna salo for their encouragement and patience. references barnett, c. (2005) ways of relating: hospitality and the acknowledgement of otherness. progress in human geography 29(1) 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph535oa bauman, z. (2000) liquid modernity. polity press, cambridge. candea, m. & da col, g. (2012) the return to hospitality. journal of the royal anthropological institute (n.s.) s1–s19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01757.x collins, f. l. (2018) desire as a theor y for migration studies: temporality, assemblage and becoming in the narratives of migrants. journal of ethnic and migration studies 44(6) 964–980. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1384147 de genova, n. (2013) spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion. ethnic and racial studies 36(7) 1180–1198. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.783710 dikeç, m., clark, n. & barnett, c. (2009) extending hospitality: giving space, taking time. paragraph 32 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3366/e0264833409000376 enloe, c. (1989) bananas beaches and bases: making feminist sense of international politics. pandora, london. franklin, a. (2004) tourism as an ordering: towards a new ontology of tourism. tourist studies 4(3) 277–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797604057328 fuchs, a. & detmers, i. (2017) our temporal anxieties and the longing for time. oxford german studies 46(3) 257–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2017.1345429 g i l l , n . ( 2 018) t h e s u p p r e s s i o n o f w e l c o m e . f e n n i a 19 6 (1) 8 8 – 9 8 . https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 gonzalez, v. v. (2013) securing paradise: tourism and militarism in hawai’i and the philippines. duke university press, durham. griffiths, m., rogers, a. & anderson, b. (2013) migration, time and temporalities: review and prospect. compas resources paper, march. compas, university of oxford, oxford. hannam, k. (2017) tourism, mobilities and the geopolitics of erasure. in hall, d. (ed.) tourism and geopolitics: issues and concepts from central and eastern europe, 345–356. wallingford, cabi, oxfordshire. https://doi.org/10.1079/9781780647616.0345 hyndman, j. (2012) the geopolitics of migration and mobilit y. geopolitics 17(2) 243–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2011.569321 laachir, k. (2007) hospitality and the limitations of the national. in molz, j. g. & gibson, s. (eds.) mobilizing hospitality: the ethics of social relations in a mobile world, 177–192. ashgate, london. lisle, d. (2016) holidays in the danger zone: entanglements of war and tourism. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. mauss, m. & beauchat, h. (1979 [1904–1905]) seasonal variations of the eskimo. routledge & kegan paul, london. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph535oa https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01757.x https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1384147 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.783710 https://doi.org/10.3366/e0264833409000376 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797604057328 https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2017.1345429 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.1079/9781780647616.0345 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2011.569321 fennia 196(1) (2018) 117roger norum melotti, m. (2017) beyond lampedusa: heritage, tourism and migration. in del re, e. c. & larémont, r. r. (eds.) pursuing stability and a shared development in euro–mediterranean migrations, 323–371. aracne editrice, rome. melotti, m., ruspini, e. & marra, e. (2017) migration, tourism and peace: lampedusa as a social laboratory. anatolia [online 19 dec 2017] https://doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2017.1414441 molz, j. g. & gibson, s. (2012) introduction: mobilizing and mooring hospitality. in molz, j. g. & gibson, s. (eds.) mobilizing hospitality: the ethics of social relations in a mobile world, 1–25. ashgate, london. morgan, l. h. (2003) houses and house-life of the american aborigines. university of utah press, salt lake city. mostafanezhad, m. & norum, r. (in press) tourism in the post-selfie era. annals of tourism research. nagy, r. & korpela, m. (2013) introduction: limitations to temporary mobility. international review of social research 3(1) 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1515/irsr-2013-0001 norum, r. (2006) popular pleasures and discursive moralities: ‘sex tourism’, the middle east and the (re) orienting of desire. unpublished master’s thesis. university of oxford, oxford. norum, r. & mostafanezhad, m. (2016) a chronopolitics of tourism. geoforum 77 157–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.10.015 orsini, g. (2015) lampedusa: from a fishing island in the middle of the mediterranean to a tourist destination in the middle of europe’s external border. italian studies 70(4) 521–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2015.1120945 reig, a. & norum, r. (in press) migrantes. ediciones ekaré, barcelona. robertson, s. (2014) the temporalities of international migration. the occasional papers 5(1). <https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/publications/ics_occasional_paper_series>. saxer, m, & zhang, j. (2017) making relations across china's borders. university of amsterdam press, amsterdam sheller, m. (2016) on the maintenance of humanity: learning from refugee mobile practices. cargc paper 5 2–15. <https://www.asc.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/documents/cargc-paper%205.pdf>. shr yock , a . (20 0 4) the new jordanian hospit alit y : house, hos t , and gues t in the culture of public display. comparative studies in societ y and histor y 4 6 35 – 62. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417504000039 simon, r. (2016) the temporality of hospitality. in göttsche, d. & lang, p. (eds.) critical time in modern german literature and culture, 165–182. peter lang, oxford. smith, v. (1977) hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism. university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. ssorin-chaikov, n. (2017) two lenins: a brief anthropology of time. hau books, chicago. statistics finland (2017) immigrants in the population. <http://www.stat.fi/tup/maahanmuutto/ maahanmuuttajat-vaestossa_en.html>. 10.05.2018. statistics norway (2018) immigrants and norwegian-born to immigrant parents. <https://www.ssb. no/en/befolkning/statistikker/innvbef/aar>. 10.05.2018. statistics sweden (2018) nya svenska medborgare från drygt 160 länder. <https://www.scb.se/hittastatistik/statistik-efter-amne/befolkning/befolkningens-sammansattning/befolkningsstatistik/pong/ statistiknyhet/folkmangd-och-befolkningsforandringar-2017>. 10.05.2018. weiwei, a. (2018) the refugee crisis isn’t about refugees. it’s about us. the guardian 02.02.2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/refugee-crisis-human-flow-ai-weiweichina>. 15.04.2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2017.1414441 https://doi.org/10.1515/irsr-2013-0001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.10.015 https://doi.org/10.1080/00751634.2015.1120945 https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/publications/ics_occasional_paper_series https://www.asc.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/documents/cargc-paper%205.pdf https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417504000039 http://www.stat.fi/tup/maahanmuutto/maahanmuuttajat-vaestossa_en.html http://www.stat.fi/tup/maahanmuutto/maahanmuuttajat-vaestossa_en.html https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/statistikker/innvbef/aar https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/statistikker/innvbef/aar https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/befolkning/befolkningens-sammansattning/befolkningsstatistik/pong/statistiknyhet/folkmangd-och-befolkningsforandringar-2017 https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/befolkning/befolkningens-sammansattning/befolkningsstatistik/pong/statistiknyhet/folkmangd-och-befolkningsforandringar-2017 https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/befolkning/befolkningens-sammansattning/befolkningsstatistik/pong/statistiknyhet/folkmangd-och-befolkningsforandringar-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/refugee-crisis-human-flow-ai-weiwei-china https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/refugee-crisis-human-flow-ai-weiwei-china local responses to state-led municipal reform in the finnish-swedish border region: conflicting development discourses, culture and institutions urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa69890 doi: 10.11143/fennia.69890 local responses to state-led municipal reform in the finnishswedish border region: conflicting development discourses, culture and institutions fredriika jakola jakola, f. (2018) local responses to state-led municipal reform in the finnish-swedish border region: conflicting development discourses, culture and institutions. fennia 196(2) 137–153. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.69890 this paper scrutinises the intersections and collisions of different development discourses in the kemi-tornio sub-region which lies alongside the finnish-swedish border within the political context of municipal reform initiated by the finnish government in 2011– 2015. by drawing on cultural political economy and institutional regional theory, this paper studies how local actors utilize different development discourses produced at (and producing) different scales to justify or contest the municipal amalgamation within the kemi-tornio region. in addition, the specific interest is on the how local institutional environment, and border location in particular, are mobilized and strategically used in these processes. the results, based on policy documents and qualitative interviews with key municipal actors, highlight the coexistence of three different, yet overlapping development discourses. while some municipal actors support the state-led development discourse with justification of economic reasoning, there is a strong opposing discourse emphasising the region’s history, identity and municipal self-autonomy. the latter, interestingly, resonates with the eu’s cross-border co-operation discourse; offering an alternative development strategy. together with the pathdependent regional history, this intersection creates unbalanced power relations between municipalities both with and without a state border. thus, this paper illustrates how different scalar discourses and institutional structures are actively utilized in municipal reform processes. keywords: regional development, institutions, culture, discourse, municipal reform, finnish-swedish border fredriika jakola, geography research unit p.o. box 8000, 90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: fredriika.jakola@oulu.fi introduction european border municipalities are sites where different scalar institutional structures and political discourses meet and, often, collide. however, the tensions and intersections between state and eu regional policies, and how they become intertwined with local interests in local decision making, have not been sufficiently studied. while a number of studies have been conducted in the framework of eu regional policies, often investigating the processes of re-territorialisation and re-scaling of governance practices (knippenberg 2004; prokkola 2008; hansen & serin 2010; nelles & durand © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69890 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69890 138 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper 2014), the methodological emphasis of these studies is on the transnational scale and the institutional structures of states are typically seen as rather static (such as laws and bureaucratic obstacles). this overruns both the states’ active roles in the regional development of border regions and the diverse interest of local governmental actors. to fill this gap, this paper examines how these three scalar dimensions of development and the discourses they promote have come together in northern finland’s border municipalities in the political context of the state-led municipal reform process. although municipal reforms and amalgamations have gained a relatively large amount of academic interest during recent decades in finland (halme & kuukasjärvi 2010; zimmerbauer & paasi 2013; harjunen et al. 2017), and elsewhere in europe (vetter & kersting 2003; harbo 2015; terlouw 2016; askim et al. 2017), the particular contextual environment of border regions has not been taken into account. the finnish government introduced a sweeping plan for municipal reform in 2011, which is considered the most radical reform ever envisioned in finland. two of its major objects were reform of the municipal territorial structure and reform of health care services. in this paper, the focus is on the former. the main argument behind reforming the municipal territorial structure was the economic efficiency of local governments, which, according to state government, needed to be improved to respond to endogenous demographic challenges and the more exogenous challenges resulting from changes in the global economic environment. amalgamations were seen as a suitable way to increase the average population of municipalities, which in turn would produce economies of scale (zimmerbauer & paasi 2013; terlouw 2016). however, being one of the most decentralised oecd countries, finland has a strong tradition of municipal self-autonomy (andré & garcía 2014) and with certain exceptions local governments have decision-making power over possible amalgamations. consequently, this has created political tension between municipal and state levels. in this paper, the implementation of municipal reform is empirically studied in the kemi-tornio region representing an industrialised sub-region with 6 municipalities and 63,000 inhabitants located on the finnish side of the finnish-swedish border. the functional centres of this region are the two similarly sized cities of tornio and kemi, located only 35 kilometres apart from each other. this particular sub-region offers a fertile research context for studying the intersection of scalar development strategies for two major, yet interrelated, reasons. firstly, the sub-region was established on the basis of economic reasoning. however, culturally and politically it is relatively divided, being based on divergent economic histories, settlement patterns and old administrative borders (hedman 1976; julku 1991; teerijoki 2010). secondly, throughout the history of finnish independence there have been political tensions between state government and the border municipalities concerning the regional development of this area and especially operation across the state border (jakola 2016). moreover, the bilateral co-operation between tornio and haparanda (sweden) is considered one of the model examples of successful cross-border co-operation (cbc) in the eu (e.g. häkli 2009). accordingly, the research questions are: 1) how do local actors utilize different development discourses produced at (and producing) different scales to justify or contest the municipal amalgamation in the kemi-tornio region?, and 2) how are the local institutional environment, and border location in particular, mobilized in these processes? theoretically, the paper is inspired by institutionalist regional approaches (amin 1999; rodriguezpose 2013) and the cultural political economy (cpe) (see the inclusive summary by jessop & sum 2013). institutionalist approaches on local and regional development emphasise the importance of local agency and path-dependent social, cultural and political institutional conditions within regions in shaping economic development trajectories (pike et al. 2006). thus, institutions are seen as reasons why rather top-down development policies do not translate into desired result outcomes at the local level (rodriguez-pose 2013). however, the institutionalist regional approach has been criticised for having too little focus on questions of politics and scale (tomaney 2014). accordingly, it has argued that it is precisely “politics which mediate the relationship between institutions and economic performance” (dellepiane-avellaneda 2010, 211). in subscribing to this criticism, this paper uses the methodological premises of the cpe (see jessop & sum 2013) to examine how local actors strategically mobilize different scales and their related development discourses and institutional structures in the political struggle for and against municipal reform. fennia 196(2) (2018) 139fredriika jakola this relates to the question of power which is seen in this paper as the ability of to have an effect (allen 2003) with regard to municipal amalgamation and regional development. the actors’ ability to have an effect is seen, however, to be related to the surrounding institutional legacies and development discourses which can empower and/or constrain certain actors, groups, interests, strategies etc. (cumbers & mackinnon 2011). nevertheless, this relationship between ability and the surrounding institutions and discourses is not fixed but mutable and dependent on active mobilisation; power relations become materialised in local politics. thus, while in cpe institutions are mainly understood as formal political institutions, this paper stresses the role of both formal social institutions and communal informal institutions such as norms, values and habits. dialogue between the cpe and the institutional regional approach is needed to gain a more nuanced understanding not only about the role of the socio-cultural environment and local agency in the construction and re-scaling of economic spaces but also of the contested relations between different scales and the governmental levels participating in these processes. the paper is structured as follows: the conceptual section scrutinises how the politicisation of regional development strategies and its scalar dimensions within certain institutional contexts can be studied by applying the ideas of the cpe. this is followed by an introduction of research material and analysis methods used. in the following chapter, the history of finnish municipalities and municipal reforms is briefly presented to open up the particular political context and the municipalities-state positioning. the empirical analysis is presented in the next chapter and finally, the relevance of the study and the results are considered in the last chapter. theoretical insights: the selectivity of development strategies and local institutions the way local and regional ‘development’ is defined in the context of municipal reform, and by whom, is not unproblematic but a contested and context-dependent process. the institutional legacies of any given place shape the way in which actors “define, understand, interpret and articulate what is defined and meant by local and regional development” (pike et al. 2007, 1260) and importantly, how this ‘development’ should be achieved. thus, spatial planning and policy making are in a state of constant struggle with regard to meanings and values on ‘suitable’ and ‘right’ development strategies which are played out in local everyday practices and discussions (jensen & richardson 2003), not only between different governmental levels, but also between political parties and officials and politicians, for instance. these development strategies may represent different development discourses, ‘commonsense understanding’ on the premises of local and regional development which can be defined as “ensembles of ideas, assumption and categorisations which are produced, sustained and transformed in a particular set of practices” (hajer 1995, 44). by giving meaning to physical and social realities, discourses produce the possibility for particular statements, practices and power relations to be valid or acceptable (hajer 1995, 44; cresswell 2013, 276). in nordic countries, the power relations between municipalities and state government are of particular interest because municipalities are traditionally seen as “extensions of the welfare state” (dannestam 2008, 353), which are heavily dependent on state subsidies. thus, the strong selfautonomy, which forms a crucial element of the institutional environment and identity of municipalities today, is largely explained by the crucial role of local governments in the construction of welfare states after the world wars (moisio 2012). yet comprehensive state-led regional development policies were already being questioned in northern europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s and more local-/ regional-based development strategies and policies started to emerge, also across state borders (prokkola 2011; jakola 2016). however, the political discourse on the role of the state as a dominant institution of governance still prevails, and the intention of states is to strongly intervene and guide the development of the state territory as a whole. top-down municipal reform is an immense effort by state government to use its executive power over local governments. while considering the important role of the eu’s cbc policies for local municipalities, from the perspective of state development strategies, however, eu border region policies are rarely a central concern, but appear more as a supplementary strategy and secondary to this kind of state-led development discourse (jakola 2016). although municipal reform and cbc schemes are not seen as contradictory on a rhetoric 140 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper level, the question is more complex when viewed from the perspective of the daily practices of local governmental actors. moreover, there is broad academic and political agreement that regions and cities cannot be treated as static and univocal subjects of policy decisions and ‘one-size-fits-all’ development strategies, but as complex and contested political entities with diverse and multiple interests and goals with increasing potential to make their own political choices in response to these demands (bristow 2010). accordingly, municipal reform is not understood here through the restructuring of municipal borders or service structures per se, but it is seen primarily as a state-led development strategy which embedds the idea of state being a legitimate actor in defining and guiding the development of municipalities. when studying municipal mergers and the guiding development discourses in the context of border municipalities, the cpe (jessop & sum 2013) helps in understanding the role of meaningmaking as a method of complexity reduction and acknowledges the importance of meanings, practices and language in the study of the political economy of places (moulaert et al. 2007, 198). according to the cpe approach, in order for a discourse to become dominant and hegemonic in society, it needs to go through evolutionary stages of variation, selection, retention and reinforcement (jessop & sum 2013). particular development discourses from a variety of discourses become ‘selected’ and prioritised discourses depending on their ability to interpret and explain particular events, as well as how they support particular local interests. this is followed by a process of ‘retention’ when discourses are built into institutional sites, roles and strategies. finally, the process of ‘reinforcement’ is where these discourses are embedded in institutional structures, rules and regulations to such an extent that they become a naturalised, ‘common sense’ discourse (bristow 2010, 157). when local and regional actors make sense of the benefits of municipal mergers they need to evaluate them in the context of a changing economic and political environment. recontextualisation and selection of particular development discourses and related policies in certain context depends on how they resonate with the institutional legacy of that region (jessop 2001). in the kemi-tornio region, for some municipalities cbc has become a key development strategy as it has resonated with both the regional cultural heritage and the resources available, such as interreg funding. the cbc as a development strategy has become institutionalised through different common agreements and organisations. from the perspective of cpe it is crucial how a given discourse may privilege some actors and local development strategies and actions over others and how actors utilize this differential privileging through ‘strategic-context analysis’ (jessop 2001, 1223; dannestam 2008). by legitimizing certain kinds of ideas, interests, strategies, norms, regulations etc. development discourses can further the power position of some actors or organisations by increasing their abilities to have an effect on regional development. accordingly, politics of scale refers to “the strategies used by actors to explain, justify and defend the link between a particular scale or scalar configuration and a political project” (gonzales 2006, 838). in the context of municipal mergers, actors mobilise and select different scales, development discourses and institutional structures to give coherence and legitimacy to their political opinions and practices concerning the territorial ‘base unit’ of regional development and planning, be it the municipality, the planned merged of a municipality, a cross-border region or something else. it is noteworthy, however, that actors may select a certain scale and development discourse, such as cbc, and adapt its related lexicon and rhetoric in pursuing and funding their own local interests and strategies which may not in themselves be so directly related to the wider policy objectives of the european union, such as european economic integration or transnationalisation (johnson 2009; luukkonen 2011; prokkola et al. 2015; stoffelen & vanneste 2017). thus, as gonzales (2006, 853) aptly points out, “the language and rhetoric are not mere accessories”; through discursive strategies actors are normalising the space of regional development to make their political decisions seem as selfexplanatory as possible (gonzales 2006). research material and analysis the main research material consists of 21 qualitative interviews with key politicians and officials from tornio, kemi, keminmaa, tervola, simo and ylitornio (fig. 1). interviews addressed not only the fennia 196(2) (2018) 141fredriika jakola municipal reform process itself but also the challenges and possibilities of regional development and dynamics of municipal co-operation. the interviews were conducted in 2014 at locations suggested by the interviewees. permission to record the interviews was granted by all (with the exception of one) and anonymity was secured by using specific codes for each interview, following responsible research conduct consistent with the finnish advisory board on research integrity (2012). there are four interviews from each of the border municipalities of tornio and ylitornio, three interviews from kemi and keminmaa, and two from simo. additionally, one interview was conducted in swedish haparanda and one in the development organisation of kemi-tornio. in addition to interviews, key policy reports related to municipal reform from the ministry of finance served as contextualisation and to aid in understanding the reasoning and justification used by state government. the research design follows the principles of intensive research in which the objective is, through contextual studies, to understand better how causal processes, in this case the regional development path, work out in a particular area (sayer 1992). the analysis method is based on core manners of critical discourse analysis (de cillia et al. 1999; hajer 2003; fairclough 2010a), a method which helps us to identify and locate the power relations and dialogues between different actors and the development discourses they promote. critical discourse analysis, however, is not a uniform or unproblematic method but has different variations and applications depending on whether it is based more on critical realist (fairclough 2010a) or post-structuralist (howarth & griggs 2012) traditions (fairclough 2010b). this paper draws on the standpoints of fairclough (and others) as it supports and enriches the political-economic theory of the cpe. in spite of their differences, concerning for instance understanding of language, they share a dialectical understanding between discourse and practice (fairclough 2010b); how discourse constitutes social practice, such as municipal reform, while at the same time being constituted by it (de cillia et al. 1999, 157)¹. as sayer (1992, 248) aptly points out, “context is rarely just background; the exploration of how both the political and cultural institutional environment is constructed and how the key agents interact, constitute and contest it, is vital for a viable explanation”. critical discourse analysis provides particular insights into the struggle between different strategies for transforming society through rhetorically oriented analysis on how strategic differences are fought out in dialogues and debates figure 1. the study area (original layout by mikko kesälä, edited by the author). 142 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper between different actors (fairclough 2010a). local governmental practices, such as meetings, decision making or informal discussions, are sites in which power relations and conflicts between different ideas, strategies and discourses are being manifested (hajer 2003). here the analytical emphasis is on the practices of local politics and how interviewees discuss and construct their argumentation for or against municipal amalgamation, and which kind of alternative strategies they bring forward. concerning language, the focus during the analysis was on the key terms, expressive conventions and narratives; for example, narratives on regional differences, as well as on the style of language, meaning how, for instance, certain things are impressed as ‘common sense’. when mapping local government practices, emphasis was put on agents – who are included and who are excluded, formal/ informal institutions, contextualisation, events, conflicts and resources that were used to legitimise particular regional development strategies (jensen & richardson 2003, 59). the analysis was conducted in two phases. in the first phase, the main reform related policy documents were thoroughly examined to ascertain the main reasons and justifications for the reform imposed by the ministry of finance. these were read in comparison with the literature on municipal amalgamation and the argued neoliberal ideology behind these processes. in the second phase, the ways in which local actors support or contest this strategy was examined, as was how they utilize the institutional structures and discourses produced at different scales. although the starting point of the paper was to examine the intersection and collision of different scalar development discourses and which kind of development trajectories they result in the border regions, these three scales of local/regional, state and eu were not taken as given; however, the tensions between these three scales were strongly present in the interviews. in spite of the fact that, all of these development discourses presented in the analysis promote regional growth, the governance methods and the preferred power structures between different scalar actors and organisations vary. municipalities under reform pressures in finland with the aim of achieving economic efficiency, the territorial and functional reforms which have recently taken place in many western european countries represent the most extensive reform activities since the second world war (vetter & kersting 2003). in finland, municipalities have a long history and have always played a strong institutional role. the finnish regional structure is based on the state, provinces and municipalities as “a mix of overlapping old, historical regions that have become institutionalised over time” (zimmerbauer & paasi 2013, 34). today, municipalities provide a wide range of statutory services: besides social welfare and comprehensive and upper secondary education, municipalities are responsible for land use management and infrastructure such as water and energy supply, road maintenance and waste management, but also strategic development (kuusi 2011). the number of municipalities has decreased slowly over the past decades in finland; between 1940 and 2016 their number had reduced by almost half (table 1)². when the building of the finnish welfare state started after the second world war and the municipalities’ institutional role as a provider of basic public services strengthened (jauhiainen & niemenmaa 2006; moisio 2012), securing an economically efficient municipal territorial structure accordingly rose to prominence on the political agenda. in the early 1960s, the government instructed regional counties (lääni) to investigate suitable possibilities in their municipal structures, but because of political disagreements the envisioned reform never materialised (moisio & uusitalo 2003). nevertheless, during the 1960s and 1970s voluntary municipal amalgamations were relatively frequently formed as many rural municipalities merged with urbanised municipalities (moisio & uusitalo 2003). overall co-operation between municipalities increased in the 1970s and alongside municipal mergers different kinds of federations of municipalities were created, reflecting the strengthening role of local governments and increased horizontal relations between regionaland local-level actors as well as across state borders (prokkola 2011; moisio 2012). in the kemi-tornio region as well, the history of regional co-operation between the six municipalities dates back to the fennia 196(2) (2018) 143fredriika jakola late 1960s when the kemi-tornio regional economic union (after 1991, the development organisation of kemi-tornio) was established ‘in order to harmonise municipalities’ and the business sector’s efforts to develop the regional economy’ (kemi-tornio talousalueliitto 1969)³. since then, the development organisation of kemi-tornio has played an important role in lobbying the state government concerning large investments and investigating the possibilities of co-operation and a common service structure. however, during the 1980s and 1990s there were few municipal mergers in finland, despite the fact that the regional structure was under political discussion and other adjustments were made. when finland joined the eu in 1995, the way development resources were allocated and structured changed significantly; they became administered at the regional level and development work became more project-based (vartiainen 1998). the kemi-tornio region became an official sub-region (seutukunta)⁴ in 1994 when the finnish government divided the country’s municipalities into subregions in order to bring the finnish municipal structure into compliance with the eu’s nuts4 classification. these sub-regions still did not have legitimate decision making or regulative tasks, but were based on voluntarism. eu membership effected a change in the relationship between the regions and the state in finland. according to moisio (2012) this was especially the case after the adoption of the so-called lisbon strategy in 2000, which emphasised the agential role of regional and local actors in defining their endogenous resources and development potential. municipal reform again appeared on the finnish political agenda in 2006 when the paras project (reform of municipal and service structures) was launched. a target minimum municipal size was set to 20,000 inhabitants, but the reform was based on voluntarism. the results were mixed, ranging from big amalgamations of several municipalities to complete inaction (sandberg 2015). the reform process was, nevertheless, relatively successful as it resulted in over 57 amalgamations between 2006 and 2011, including 95 municipalities, and overall increased inter-municipal co-operation in finland (kuntaliitto 2011). however, when prime minister jyrki katainen’s cabinet began their administration in 2011, they ended the paras project and launched a mandatory and more radical reform plan in reference to the predicted severe demographical and economic challenges of the future: the ongoing demographic changes are challenging municipalities’ ability to organise basic services in the 2020s and 2030s. the dramatic shift in the age structure and the dependency ratio over the next 20 years, domestic migration, side effects of globalisation, and the instability of both the global and finnish economy directly threaten the operations of local governments. (ministry of finance 2012a, 17) in the very first drafts of the plan, the sought-after number of municipalities was less than one hundred. a law on municipal structure came into operation in 2013, obligating municipalities to investigate potential municipal mergers. the law also re-legalised forced mergers under certain conditions. however, the government halted the process in august 2015 due to strong opposition both at the municipal and parliamentary levels. in the end, the process resulted in only a few amalgamations and the study of the kemi-tornio region exemplifies well how the unwillingness from the part of the municipalities is played out at the local level in a whole myriad of complex ways. year number of municipalities (january 1) absolute change mean population (december 31) 1940 602 6,139 1960 548 -54 8,114 1980 464 -84 10,318 2000 452 -12 11,463 2010 342 -110 15,715 2016 313 -29 17,582 table 1. fluctuation in the number of municipalities in finland (tilastokeskus 2017). 144 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper to merge or not: diverging development discourses in the kemi-tornio border area state-led competitiveness discourse the kemi-tornio region, like many other smalland medium-sized sub-regions in northern and eastern finland today, is dealing with development challenges arising from demographic changes and problems associated with regional economics and public budgets. decreasing job opportunities and a diminishing and aging population (table 2) with a high dependency ratio⁵ are forcing both municipalities themselves and the state government to re-evaluate municipalities’ operations. in the kemi-tornio region there have been two studies on a municipal merger initiated by the ministry of finance, first in 2010 as a part of the paras project and again in 2014. no amalgamation resulted from these processes; in 2010 only kemi supported the amalgamation and in the most recent reform process only kemi and simo were supportive. in a report from 2012 written by the working group appointed by the ministry of finance, the planned regional amalgamation was justified on grounds of economic functionality and on how the region needs to be developed as a whole: the municipal amalgamation would bring together [two] city regions and their immediate municipalities, which are now developing separately. if implemented, the development challenges of this region would be efficiently met. the new municipality would largely be the functional equivalent of the region of kemi-tornio, which itself forms a coherent functional entity in terms of accessibility, commuting and business potential. (ministry of finance 2012b, 329) it is a common argument that creating larger administrative units and merging administrative structures results in economic savings. this, however, is a controversial argument as there is no scientific agreement about the timeframe concerning when such savings would be realised (harbo 2015; terlouw 2016). moreover, a recent study from finland concludes that the paras project did not result in economic savings for the merged municipalities (harjunen et al. 2017). the expected economies of scale are, however, very closely related to the broader and more universal question of competitiveness and how bigger territorial units are seen as a remedy for the challenges of globalisation and the globalised economy (zimmerbauer & paasi 2013). in the interviews, those actors supporting the amalgamation selected this state-led competitiveness discourse, in which the state was presented as a governing institution from where the initiative for structural changes needs to come. as one interviewee from simo strongly pointed out: “those decisions [concerning the amalgamations] should be made in helsinki [in the central government]” –simo2. it is noteworthy that the actors supporting the reform in the kemi-tornio region did not raise the question of money or the possibility of economic savings the amalgamation was argued to produce, probably because opposing municipalities were sceptical of how the large public loans of kemi, particularly, would be shared between all municipalities. conversely, they used, in addition to the possible increased legal regional legitimacy, improved ‘regional competitiveness’ as a primary argument, within which they referred to kemi-tornio’s position in competition with other city regions, municipality 2000 2010 2015 population jobs population jobs population jobs kemi 23,689 10,314 22,537 9,669 21,758 8,814 keminmaa 8,930 2,258 8,573 2,449 8,388 2,406 simo 3,891 796 3,489 663 3,238 607 tervola 3,895 1,166 3,444 1,157 3,195 932 tornio 22,617 8,341 22,513 9,202 22,199 8,603 ylitornio 5,535 1,699 4,731 1,411 4,291 1,310 total 68,557 24,571 65,287 24,551 63,069 22,672 table 2. population and job development 2000–2015 (tilastokeskus 2017). fennia 196(2) (2018) 145fredriika jakola especially rovaniemi and oulu, both in northern finland. these arguments were in line with the central government’s rhetoric, which emphatically emphasised the need for unity: the biggest step toward better [development] positions would be that these municipalities would be merged. these challenges start to be so big that even kemi and tornio look like rather small players, even though we are middle-sized municipalities. –kemi3 if we are talking about a city of meri-lappi with 65,000 inhabitants, investors will be much more interested than if there would be 30,000 inhabitants. these are just the kinds of realities we face. –simo2 the interviewees referred to attracting investors and people, which in itself reflects a sort of neoliberalist economic rationale of governance. they also provide evidence as to how economic processes retell certain neutrally presented ‘realities’, which in this case referred to increased attractiveness and the need for the municipality to reach a certain number of inhabitants, although the regional population would, in fact, remain the same. this manner of de-politicisation and normalisation of capitalist economic processes has had a vital role in the rhetoric of neoliberal development discourse (see swyngedouw 2011). as zimmerbauer and paasi (2013, 34) aptly emphasise, “amalgamations are not merely technical, administrative acts that reduce the number of institutional regional units, but also reflect internationally dominant ideas and state policies”. presenting regions and their population as entrepreneurial ‘place-sellers’ in a global market fits with neoliberal ideologies which are promoted not only by the business community but also by states themselves (bristow 2010, 8; painter 2013). as the institutional environment in which political decisions are made on courses of action they tend to be path-dependent, oftentimes the creation of a new path and the subsequent selection of new development strategies requires an initiation. political and economic crises are understood to create the space for ‘strategic interventions’ that can significantly redirect the course of events (jessop 2010, 346–347). using certain indicators, such as high income tax rates and low economic selfsufficiency, kemi and simo have the acutest economic challenges which may force them to make radical changes, such as in this case supporting municipal amalgamation. in interviews it was noted how in 2012, when the first investigation on municipal amalgamation was underway, it was expected that finland’s sixth nuclear power plant would be placed in simo, which would have had extensive regional economic impacts on the municipality, extending to the whole region as well. in that situation, actors in simo did not see the municipal amalgamation suggested by the central government as preferable as it did not serve their interest at that moment. [a key official in simo] was bragging that we don’t need co-operation; others can join simo if they like. now when it [the placement of nuclear power plant] didn’t happen, concern is already strong... for those whose budget is weaker… –tornio3 this exemplifies the complexity and context-dependency of policy processes and the inherent selectivity of development strategies. actors make plans and political decisions based on their knowledge and value evaluation on possible options at that particular moment, a process in which different interests and preferences are confolated with processes of path-dependency. it is noteworthy as to how, in the state documents, the competitiveness and welfare rhetorics go hand in hand. as dannestam (2008) notes, in nordic countries the welfare state heritage has such a prominent position in society that it ‘cannot’ be dismissed in political life. however, it is the manifestation of the competitiveness discourse, for instance creating bigger municipal units to benefit the ‘economies of scale’, which is said to create and improve welfare. accordingly, welfare and social inclusion are not understood as ideological values per se, but as things resulting from growth oriented policy actions (dannestam 2008 citing cochraine 2007, 86). moreover, the welfare rhetorics are used to legitimize growth oriented policy actions. in the case of the kemi-tornio region those interviewees supporting the amalgamation, however, did not come forward with the issue of improving welfare. on the contrary, welfare and social inclusion were mentioned in a few opposing arguments concerning accessibility to public services. the fear that services would move too far from the people has been widely acknowledged to be one of the main hindering issues in the municipal amalgamation processes (see terlouw 2016). instead of prioritizing economic saving, actors see the social aspect as being more important. 146 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper i mean if we started counting every euro, we would only have these high schools with 500 students [state government’s recommendation]. […] by having only high schools like that, we would have only one school in whole of lapland. i am sure it would be cheaper to have only one high school but then people would suffer. distances would get longer and youths could not stay home with their parents after comprehensive school. a lot of different kinds of side effects would appear. – tervola1 it is precisely the value of social inclusion and welfare what opposing interviewees are demanding. this kind of normalization of peoples’ “right” to good accessibility to public services irrespective of where they live originates from the institutionalization of welfare state policies based on a ‘social rationale’ as to how the state is in the last resort responsible for the welfare of an individual, something which dates back to the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries (miller & rose 2008). as the public services tend to be centralizing, relatively dense territorial structures and smaller units are being seen, at least to some extent, as a safety mechanism for sustaining services close to the people. the opposing discourse on local institutional legacy and regional identity while interviewed actors in kemi, simo and partly in keminmaa supported the central government’s reasoning on municipal reform, others did not see that restructuring of municipal borders would be the best and most desirable solution for improving regional growth and ‘vital municipal and service structure’ (ministry of finance 2012a) under current geographical, cultural, economic and political circumstances. these interviewees suggested alternative co-operation models such as federations of municipalities instead of an amalgamation. accordingly, there was a strong discourse on local institutional legacy and regional identity, in which different practices, trust relations, regional narratives, values and institutional structures, such as municipal self-autonomy, are intertwined as elements of resistance and are used to legitimate the opposition to the reform (zimmerbauer & paasi 2013). those interviewed actors opposing the state-led municipal reform constructed their argument firstly on the polarisation of the region, which according to them stems from regional history. the kemi-tornio region lies at the convergence of the tornio river valley and the kemi river valley. historically, settlement patterns followed the rivers, forming distinct cultural regions. a strong narrative about the historical and cultural division between tornio and kemi is included in the local discourse and thus, this narrative is actively reproduced and sustained by local actors in public discussions to sustain the legitimacy of the discourse. thereby, they may strengthen their power position and ability to have an effect with regard to decision whether municipal amalgamation is taking place or not. there is this tribal or zonal border, each river valley forms its own tribe. the tornio river valley and kemi river valley form distinct tribes and the border between them goes somewhere around keminmaa. they have totally different cultural heritage and spirit. –tornio3 they [tornio and kemi] are like fire and water. they are difficult to bring together. -ylitornio3 in addition to the cultural division, interviewed actors also emphasised the political and economic history in their argumentation. kemi has a longer tradition of heavy industry dating back to the 1930s, while tornio did not become an industrial city until the early 1970s. because of a strong industrial emphasis and a large proportion of working class inhabitants, left-wing parties have traditionally had a strong dominance in the local government in kemi, while the centre party have dominated in other municipal governments, mirroring the situation elsewhere in northern finland (yle kuntavaalit 2017), which can be explained by the more agricultureand trade-oriented economic structures of these areas. many actors also brought forward the different decision making cultures between tornio and kemi which were seen as a result of the divergent political and economic histories of the cities. kemi is an old industrial city which has been built in a certain way. is it a socialist ideology or whatever? but it is totally a different way to approach things. tornio is an old agricultural city, the steel industry is a rather new business sector and that particular industrial culture hasn’t developed there. the decision-making culture is totally different. –tornio2 fennia 196(2) (2018) 147fredriika jakola opposing actors strategically use the discourse of regional identity, and more precisely, the narratives on ‘identity of region’ referring to the differing socio-cultural and symbolic characteristics and boundaries between the cities of tornio and kemi that have resulted through the institutionalisation process of these municipalities (paasi 2003). however, it is not ‘only’ a question of using this narrative of regional differences in political struggle to promote their interests, but how it is sustained through everyday local governmental practices when they are linked with different kinds of path-dependent trust-relations, values and norms. different decision-making cultures and failed co-operation experiences have created mistrust between actors, primarily with respect to vested interests. the actor from kemi aptly portrays the path-dependent characteristics of trust relations and other informal institutions in the following: it feels like this mistrust [between tornio and kemi] is somehow really deep... maybe the depth has surprised me a bit [when coming from outside]. nobody is right or wrong, just for some reason different backgrounds and paths in history have led to…. it is easier to disagree than agree [with each other] –kemi3 this highlights the interdependency of discourse and practices and how they sustain one another. in order for discourses to remain the dominant way of understanding a surrounding society, they need to be continuously ‘repaired’ and reproduced by actors (bristow 2010). this, however, is not always so intentional and strategically oriented, but sometimes the institutional legacy itself guides the development as it ‘resonates’ so strongly with the minds of actors and how they evaluate different development strategies in relation to this legacy, which, nevertheless, might become a burden. the opposing discourse on local institutional legacy and regional identity questions the hegemonic power of the state and who can decide how the regional ‘development’ is achieved, specific to resistance identity (castells 1997; zimmerbaeur & paasi 2013). the absolute value of local autonomy as a formal institution, and the governmental power and legitimacy related to it, has itself been seen as a strong reason for opposition to municipal amalgamations (zimmerbauer & paasi 2013). it seems the longer the historical and institutional basis of municipalities, the more difficult major reforms are to realise (askim et al. 2017). the long history of sovereignty of local services and land use, not only rooted in bureaucratic institutional structures but also in peoples’ identities and everyday practices, supports the sustaining of the local development discourse and gives it legitimacy. local actors perceive that the central government does not respect municipal autonomy and top-down policies themselves, thus provoking resistance among local actors: i myself believe that if we needed municipal mergers or if they are useful, they would emerge from the grass-roots level. now when it is dictated from outside that you should merge with that municipality, it indeed raises more resistance. as if people here at the local level could not decide what is best for them. –tornio1 the central government is forcing us to go in a direction which we do not [want to]. each municipality still has statutory self-autonomy –tervola1 related to the value of self-autonomy, one interviewee put forward the traditions of land ownership, something which has not been profoundly discussed in municipal amalgamation literature. nevertheless, the role of land use issues in institutional change, in general, have been rather neglected (cox 2011). in tornio, and in other surrounding municipalities, there have been long standing traditions of owning and cultivating land which have been passed down from one generation to another starting from the general parceling of land in the mid-18th century. however, in kemi this kind of tradition does not exist, firstly because of the smaller municipal area and secondly because many people have moved to this city from outside to work in the wood processing factories. this might also affect the issue that people who have grown up in communities with these kinds of land-owning traditions respond more personally to land as such and the power they feel they have over their own territory. the eu’s locally contested cbc discourse since the 1970s, the eu has promoted a transnational development discourse on socially cohesive and economically competitive border regions, something which is achieved through cbc funding 148 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper schemes such as interreg. after finland and sweden joined the eu in 1995, tornio quickly adopted the rhetoric of the eu cbc policies enabled by a strong institutional foundation of cooperation with haparanda dating back to the 1960s and a long common cultural history in the tornio river valley (jakola 2016). therefore, tornio has frequently utilised interreg a funding in their projects; the most extensive and ongoing project is called ‘on the border’ in which tornio and haparanda are building a common city centre in order to further the development of the retail sector (prokkola et al. 2015). thus, cbc has become a key development strategy while co-operation with kemi and other surrounding municipalities is seen as secondary and connected more to lobbying the central government for funds and investments than actual co-operation and development projects. moreover, the eu’s transnational discourse has furthered the institutionalisation of the cbc between tornio and haparanda and given it legitimacy (jakola 2016), a factor which is used in particular when justifying the resistance to the kemi-tornio municipal amalgamation. in the case of the kemi-tornio region, the question of competition and co-operation is crucial (jakola & prokkola 2018), and this is also tightly related to municipal sovereignty. trust-building processes across the border are easier when actors do not compete for the same economic resources and do not think their self-sovereignty is threatened. the state border as a formal institution is seen as more stable and, as the eu’s cbc policies are based on voluntarism, they are seen more as enforcing the self-autonomy of local governments while municipal borders are both governed and oppressed by the central government’s control of politics, thereby creating resistance among local actors. hence, the ‘strategical context analysis’ done by actors in tornio concludes that their institutional environment is more favourable for the selection of cbc as a development strategy: it is easier to co-operate [with haparanda] as we do not pursue the same state subsidies or education quotas, and suchlike. although people have wondered how it can be easier to co-operate across the border.… but it is precisely like that; we can both seek means whereby we could better further our common interests. is it from helsinki or is it from stockholm? this is the basic starting point. it is a totally different situation [compared to kemi]. and the state border between us… [...] somehow it gives security but at the same time it gives freedom; it is easier to co-operate. – tornio2 another aspect that influences the strategic decision to support cbc at the expense of national regional co-operation is the market value of the “tornio-haparanda” brand (cf. hospers 2006). actors in tornio see cbc as a better development strategy for improving regional competitiveness, which in this case means attracting investors, visitors, publicity, etc., rather than co-operation or amalgamation with other regional municipalities. mobilisation of regional history and identity has become an important means in improving regional attractiveness (paasi 2013; stoffelen & vanneste 2017). the narrative on the identity of the torne river valley has become an important part of marketing and development rhetoric (jakola 2016). the tornio river valley has an interesting history as it formed a culturally, economically and politically united region from the 11th century until finland was annexed to the russian empire in the treaty of hamina in 1809 and a new border between the kingdom of sweden and the russian empire was agreed, located at the tornio and muonio rivers (teerijoki 2010). this exemplifies how, in local politics, socio-cultural and economic reasoning are intertwined and can boost one another. some of the interviewed actors emphasised that the border location at the head of the bay of bothnia is an important resource for regional development, especially in terms of reaching wider markets and becoming a logistical gateway to the arctic. local and regional-level cbc is seen as an important tool for activating the potential development opportunities on both sides of the border. thus, the border location is well acknowledged in the operations of the kemi-tornio development organisation; for most of the surrounding municipalities the border and its resources remain rather remote. although the actors in municipalities without an actual border with sweden would be equally eligible to apply for the same eu funds, most foresaw that only tornio would benefit from the border and related resources from interreg programmes. in an attempt to emphasise the importance of coherent regional co-operation at the kemi-tornio sub-region level, many actors use the discursive strategy of downplaying the significance of bilateral municipal cbc between tornio and haparanda. they justify their opinions by arguing that the scale of fennia 196(2) (2018) 149fredriika jakola the bilateral cbc operation is rather small and is an insufficient response to the present economic and developmental challenges they face. furthermore, many of the actors highlighted how the cbc should not be exclusive and some of the interviewees not only downplayed the cbc but also ‘re-bordered’ the state border which represents the state-led discourse in which the border is divided based firstly on the constitution, but also on national socialisation. it is really good that we have the state border there and i think people in this region have well utilised haparanda and the border location. i think it is an important matter but it shouldn’t be emphasised too much, as it somewhat hinders other forms of co-operation. when the attitude [in tornio] is like we can’t disperse our resources because we have this and that project going on in the on the border project. –kemi1 if tornio sees it [haparanda] as the only direction [for co-operation], it is wrong from the perspective of the people of meri-lappi [the kemi-tornio region]. […] it should be remembered that the state border still hinders the co-operation. and that’s a fact and it always will be. –simo2 thus, the state border as a formal institution is intertwined differently in different discourses, and actors use it differently based on their own interests. this highlights the path-dependent characteristics of the border region as an operational environment. those actors who do not operate across the border see the role of the state border differently than those who have decades of experience of cbc and have built trusted relationships based on successful projects. over the course of time, positive personal trust relations and their materialisation may also generate institutional trust, which embeds and stabilises relationships within current co-operation networks (murphy 2006), such as has happened in tornio. i have grown as a part of this twin city thing… those politicians, many of whom are still in the municipal government, decided that we should establish a common school for tornio and haparanda, and i belong to the next generation that went to that school. –tornio1 as jessop and sum (2013) note, in order to be selected from the various kinds of possible alternatives, a development strategy needs to resonate on personal, organisational and institutional levels, all of which are dependent on discursive and material factors as well as on existing power relations. the surrounding municipalities do not see the border as an opportunity; mainly because of geographical distance, and the fact that tornio stands between them, but also because, more importantly, the governance culture and the values, norms and beliefs concerning the border region as an operational environment are different. conclusion this paper has scrutinised the intersections and collisions of different development discourses in the kemi-tornio region in the political context of municipal reform led by the finnish government. by applying the insights of the cpe it can be observed that the way in which the selection of different scalar development discourses operates depends both on how they resonate with municipal actors’ understanding about the premises and values of regional development, and on the institutional legacies of the place in question. local governmental actors operate in a certain spatio-temporal institutional context, and in order to make the ‘best possible’ political decisions concerning the municipal amalgamations, they give value to certain development discourses and institutional structures (jessop 2001). the analysis shows that in the kemi-tornio region some of the actors have supported the state-led competitiveness discourse through which the municipal reform has been justified. this, however, is being challenged by a local development discourse emphasising municipal sovereignty and regional identity. why no big amalgamation was implemented in the kemi-tornio region is explained by the fact that the majority of key municipal actors valued ‘soft’ informal factors, such as cultural differences and trust relations and self-autonomy more than ‘rational’ economic reasoning promoted by the central government. it is not a question of ignoring future development challenges, but a question of power and sovereignty: who can decide how regional growth is being achieved and what is ‘best’ for us? although municipal reform is only one strategy pertaining to how the central government aims to control and direct the regional development of municipalities, this paper has shown that it offers a 150 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper very interesting research framework as it brings together the questions of municipal sovereignty and local agency and their role in the restructuring of economic spaces. therefore, what makes the kemi-tornio region interesting is the border location and how the local development discourse actually resonates with the eu’s cbc policies. actors in tornio see that the eu’s regional policy actually embraces municipal autonomy and they feel more ‘safe’ when cooperating across the state border. preferring cross-border co-operation to co-operation in a national setting is also related to branding and how cbc is seen to have more market value and as a better strategy to improve ‘regional competitiveness’. however, actors in tornio are not empowered only by their geographical location next to border, but also because of their and their predecessors long-term strategical focus on cross-border co-operation. this emphasises the path-dependent characteristics of border regions as operational environments. the political mobilisation of narratives of regional identity can be understood as a struggle over meaningful memories of history, and, as stoffelen and vanneste (2017, 8) point out, it “is as much future oriented as historically grounded, and thereby intrinsically power-laden” (see also paasi 2013). in the case of the kemi-tornio region, these narratives are mobilised for different political purposes. although different forms of regional co-operation between municipalities have become a part of the everyday practices of local governmental actors in finland, municipalities often wish to maintain their self-autonomy. the strength of municipal autonomy as a formal institution should not be underestimated. such an institution gives legitimacy to soft informal issues such as trust relations. as socio-cultural conditions affect the political processes and decisions concerning municipal amalgamations, they cannot be considered merely as secondary factors compared to ‘hard’ economic rationalities. hence, finnish municipal reform has partly failed because the central government used its executive power to establish the schemed amalgamated municipalities and defined the ‘new municipal borders’ without the consent of local governments (sandberg 2015) and irrespective of their different development trajectories. this happened, for example, in relation to cbc. thus, it would be wise for state governments to not subordinate municipalities, but to consider them more as equal partners. this would force dialogue between both endogenic local and state-led development discourses, which is sorely needed to find far-reaching solutions for the future development challenges of local governments. notes ¹ while in postructuralist discourse analysis practices are seen as a part of discourse (howarth & griggs 2012). ² however, this decline is partly explained by a 1944 peace treaty between finland and the soviet union which moved the state border and ceded certain parts of eastern finland to the soviet union. ³although ylitornio is no longer either officially part of kemi-tornio municipal co-operation or allocating resources to the municipal co-operation, in this paper it is counted as a part of the kemitornio sub-region. ⁴ finnish sub-regions’ official status was ceased in 2015. ⁵ dependency ratio means how many young or elderly people there are per 100 working aged persons. acknowledgements i wish to express my gratitude to anssi paasi and eeva-kaisa prokkola for their encouraging and valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. in addition, i want to thank katharina koch for her helpful suggestions. the coe relate has been supportive for this study, for which i am grateful. finally, i wish to thank two anonymous referees for their thorough and constructive reviews on the previous draft. references allen, j. (2003) lost geographies of power. wiley, maiden, oxford and melbourne. https://doi. org/10.1002/9780470773321 https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470773321 https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470773321 fennia 196(2) (2018) 151fredriika jakola amin, a. (1999) an institutionalist perspective on regional economic development. international journal of urban and regional research 23(2) 365–378. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00201 andré, c. & garcía, c. (2014) local public finances and municipal reform in finland. oecd economics department working no 1121, oecd publishing, paris. askim, j., klausen, j., vabo, s. & bjurstrøm, k. (2017) territorial upscaling of local governments: a variable-oriented approach to explaining variance among western european countries. local government studies 43(4) 555–576. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2017.1310102 bristow, g. (2010) resilient regions: re-‘place’ing regional competitiveness. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 3(1) 153–167. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp030 castells, m. (1997) the power of identity. blackwell, oxford. cochraine, a. (2007) understanding urban policy: a critical approach. blackwell publishing, oxford. cox, k. (2011) institutional geographies and local economic development. in pike, a., rodŕiguezpose, a. & tomaney, j. (eds.) handbook of local and regional development, 272–282. routledge, london. cresswell, t. (2013) geographical thought: a critical introduction. wiley-blackwell, chichester. cumbers, a. & mackinnon, d. (2011) putting ‘the political’ back into the region: power, agency and a reconstituted regional political economy. in pike, a., rodŕiguez-pose, a. & tomaney, j. (eds.) handbook of local and regional development, 249–258. routledge, london. cumbers, a., mackinnon, d. & mcmaster, r. (2003) institutions, power and space: assessing the limits to institutionalism in economic geography. european urban and regional studies 10(4) 325– 342. https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764030104003 dannestam, t. (2008) rethinking local politics: towards a cultural political economy of entrepreneurial cities. space and polity 12(3) 353–372. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562570802515267 de cillia, r., reisigl, m., & wodak, r. (1999) the discursive construction of national identities. discourse & society 10(2) 149–173. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926599010002002 dellepiane-avellaneda, s. (2010) review article: good governance, institutions and economic development: beyond the conventional wisdom. british journal of political science 40(1) 195–224. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007123409990287 fairclough, n. (2010a) critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. 2nd ed. pearson, harlow. fairclough, n. (2010b) critical discourse analysis and critical policy studies. critical policy studies 7(2) 177–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2013.798239 gonzales, s. (2006) scalar narratives in bilbao: a cultural politics of scales approach to the study of urbam policy. international journal of urban and regional research 30(4) 836–857. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00693.x hajer, m. (1995) the politics of environmental discourse: ecological modernization and the policy process. clarendon press, oxford. hajer, m. (2003) a frame in the fields: policymaking and the reinvention of politics. in hajer, m. & wagenaar, h. (eds.) deliberative policy analysis: understanding governance in the network society, 88–110. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511490934.005 halme, e. & l. kuukasjärvi (2010) uusi kunta vai kuntaliitos: kuntalaisen itsehallinto. kunnallisalan kehittämisäätiön polemia-sarjan julkaisu nro 76. vammalan kirjapaino oy, sastamala. hansen, p. & serin, g. (2010) rescaling or institutional flexibility? the experience of the cross-border øresund region. regional and federal studies 20(2) 201–227. https://doi. org/10.1080/13597561003731646 harbo, l. (2015) a new wave of reforms sweeping over the nordic countries. nordregio news 3 1–5. harjunen, o., saarimaa, t. & tukiainen, j. (2017) political representation and effects of municipal mergers. vatt working papers 98. vatt institute for economic research, helsinki. hedman, o. (1976) kemin historia 2. pohjolan sanomat oy offsetpaino, kemi. howarth, d. & griggs, s. (2012) poststructuralist policy analysis: discourse, hegemony and critical explanation. in fischer, f. & gottweis, h. (eds.) the argumentative turn revisited: public policy as communicative practice, 305–342. duke university press, durham and london. hospers, g. (2006) borders, bridges and branding: the transformation of the oresund region into an imaged space. european planning studies 14(8) 1015–1033. https://doi. org/10.1080/09654310600852340 häkli, j. (2009) boundaries of trust: building a transnational space in haparanda–tornio. in häkli, j. & minca, c. (eds.) social capital and urban networks of trust, 205–232. ashgate, aldershot. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00201 https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2017.1310102 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp030 https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764030104003 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562570802515267 https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926599010002002 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007123409990287 https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2013.798239 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00693.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00693.x https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511490934.005 https://doi.org/10.1080/13597561003731646 https://doi.org/10.1080/13597561003731646 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310600852340 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310600852340 152 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper jakola, f. (2016) borders, planning and policy transfer: historical transformation of development discourses in the finnish torne valley. european planning studies 24(10) 1806–1824. https://doi.or g/10.1080/09654313.2016.1194808 jakola, f. & prokkola, e-k. (2018) trust building or vested interest? social capital processes of crossborder co-operation in the border towns of tornio and haparanda. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 109(2) 224–238. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12279 jauhiainen j. s. & niemenmaa, v. (2006) alueellinen suunnittelu. vastapaino, tampere. jensen, o. b., & richardson, t. (2003) making european space: mobility, power and territorial identity. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401972 jessop, b. (2001) institutional re(turns) and the strategic-relational approach. environment and planning a 33(7) 1213–1235. https://doi.org/10.1068/a32183 jessop, b. (2010) cultural political economy and critical policy studies. critical policy studies 3(3–4) 336–356. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171003619741 jessop, b. & sum, n. l. (2013) towards a cultural political economy: putting culture in its place in political economy. edwar elgar publishing limited, cheltenham. johnson, c. (2009) cross-border regions and territorial restructuring in central europe: room for more transboundary space. european urban and regional studies 16(2) 177–191. https://doi. org/10.1177/0969776409102190 julku, k. (1991) kemin ja tornion vanha raja. studia historica septentrionalia 19. kemi-tornio talousalueliitto (1969) toimintakertomus 1969. kemi-tornion talousalueliitto, kemi. knippenberg, h. (2004) the maas-rhine euroregion: a laboratory for european integration? geopolitics 9(3) 608–626. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040490478675 kuntaliitto (2011) paras-hanke tuotti 59 kuntaliitosta: rakenneuudistukset eivät tuota pikavoittoja. <https://www.sttinfo.fi/tiedote/paras-hanke-tuotti-59-kuntaliitosta-rakenneuudistukset-eivat-tuotapikavoittoja?publisherid=2133&releaseid=52666>. 5.10.2018. kuusi, s. (2011) the local government system in finland. kuntaliitto, helsinki. luukkonen, j. (2011) europeanization of spatial planning: exploring the spatialities of european integration. phd dissertation. department of geography, university of oulu, oulu. miller, p. & rose, n. (2008) governing the present. polity press, cambridge. ministry of finance (2012a) elinvoimainen kuntaja palvelurakenne. kunnallishallinnon rakennetyöryhmän selvitys. osa 1 selvitysosa. valtionvarainministeriö, helsinki. ministry of finance (2012b) elinvoimainen kuntaja palvelurakenne. kunnallishallinnon rakennetyöryhmän selvitys. osa 2 alueellinen tarkastelu. valtionvarainministeriö, helsinki. moisio, s. (2012) valtio, alue, politiikka: suomen tilasuhteiden sääntely toisesta maailmansodasta nykypäivään. vastapaino, tampere. moisio, a. & uusitalo, r. (2003) kuntien yhdistymisten vaikutukset kuntien menoihin. sisäasiainministeriön monistamo, helsinki. moulaert, f., martinelli, f., gonzáles, s. & swyngedouw, e. (2007) introduction: social innovation and governance in european cities. european urban and regional studies 14(3) 195–209. https://doi. org/10.1177/0969776407077737 murphy, j. (2006) building trust in economic space. progress in human geography 30(4) 427–450. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph617oa nelles, j. & durand, f. (2014) political rescaling and metropolitan governance in cross-border regions: comparing the cross-border metropolitan areas of lille and luxembourg. european urban and regional studies 21(1) 104–122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776411431103 paasi, a. (2003) region and place: regional identity in question. progress in human geography 27(4) 475–485. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132503ph439pr paasi, a. (2013) regional planning and the mobilization of ‘regional identity’. from bounded spaces to relational complexity. regional studies 47(8) 1206–1219. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.201 2.661410 painter, j. (2013) regional biopolitics. regional studies 47(8) 1235–1248. https://doi.org/10.1080/0034 3404.2011.653333 pike, a., rodriguez-pose, a. & tomaney, j. (2006) local and regional development. routledge, abingdon, oxon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203003060 pike, a., rodriguez-pose, a. & tomaney, j. (2007) what kind of local and regional development and for whom. regional studies 41(9) 1253–1269. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343400701543355 prokkola, e. k. (2008) making bridges, removing barriers. cross-border cooperation,regionalization and identity at the finnish-swedish border. phd dissertation. department of geography, university of oulu, oulu. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2016.1194808 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2016.1194808 https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12279 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401972 https://doi.org/10.1068/a32183 https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171003619741 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776409102190 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776409102190 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040490478675 https://www.sttinfo.fi/tiedote/paras-hanke-tuotti-59-kuntaliitosta-rakenneuudistukset-eivat-tuota-pikavoittoja?publisherid=2133&releaseid=52666 https://www.sttinfo.fi/tiedote/paras-hanke-tuotti-59-kuntaliitosta-rakenneuudistukset-eivat-tuota-pikavoittoja?publisherid=2133&releaseid=52666 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776407077737 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776407077737 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph617oa https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776411431103 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132503ph439pr https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.661410 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.661410 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2011.653333 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2011.653333 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203003060 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343400701543355 fennia 196(2) (2018) 153fredriika jakola prokkola, e. k. (2011) cross-border regionalization, the interreg iii a initiative, and local cooperation at the finnish-swedish border. environment and planning a 43(5) 1190–1208. https://doi. org/10.1068/a43433 prokkola, e. k., zimmerbauer, k., & jakola, f. (2015) performance of regional identity in the implementation of european cross-border initiatives. european urban and regional studies 22(1) 104–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776412465629 rodriguez-pose, a. (2013) do institutions matter for regional development? regional studies 47(7) 1034–1047. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.748978 sandberg, s. (2015) why did the finnish local government reform of 2011 fail? nordregio news 3 11– 13. <http://www.nordregio.org/nordregio-magazine/issues/reforms-sweeping-over-the-nordiccountries/why-did-the-finnish-local-government-reform-of-2011-fail/>. sayer, a. (1992) method in social science. revised 2nd ed. routledge, london and new york. stoffelen, a. & vanneste, d. (2017) the role of history and identity discourses in cross-border tourism destination development: a vogtland case study. journal of destination marketing & management 8 204–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2017.04.003 swyngedouw, e. (2011) interrogating post-democratization: reclaiming egalitarian political spaces. political geography 30(7) 370–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.08.001 teerijoki, i. (2010) tornion historia 3, 1918–2000. ws bookwell oy, porvoo. the finnish advisory board on research integrity (2012) guidelines of the finnish advisory board on research integrity 2012. finnish advisory board on research integrity, helsinki. terlouw, k. (2016) territorial changes and changing identities: how spatial identitities are used in the up-scaling of local government in the netherlands. local government studies 42(6) 938–957. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2016.1186652 tilastokeskus (2017) statfin-tilastotietokanta. <http://tilastokeskus.fi/tup/statfin/index.html>. 5.10.2018. tomaney, j. (2014) region and place i: institutions. progress in human geography 38(1) 131–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513493385 vartiainen, p. (1998) suomalaisen aluepolitiikan kehitysvaiheita. sisäasiainministeriö, aluekehitysosasto. vetter, a. & kersting, n. (2003) democracy versus efficiency? comparing local government reforms across europe. in kersting, n. & vetter, a. (eds.) reforming local government in europe: closing the gap between democracy and efficiency, 11–28. springer, opladen. zimmerbauer, k. & paasi, a. (2013) when old and new regionalism collide: deinstitutionalization of regions and resistance identity in municipality amalgamations. journal of rural studies 30 31–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2012.11.004 yle kuntavaalit (2017) maakunnat. <https://vaalit.yle.fi/tulospalvelu/kv2017/maakunnat>. 5.10.2018. https://doi.org/10.1068/a43433 https://doi.org/10.1068/a43433 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776412465629 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.748978 http://www.nordregio.org/nordregio-magazine/issues/reforms-sweeping-over-the-nordic-countries/why-did-the-finnish-local-government-reform-of-2011-fail/ http://www.nordregio.org/nordregio-magazine/issues/reforms-sweeping-over-the-nordic-countries/why-did-the-finnish-local-government-reform-of-2011-fail/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2017.04.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.08.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2016.1186652 http://tilastokeskus.fi/tup/statfin/index.html https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513493385 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2012.11.004 https://vaalit.yle.fi/tulospalvelu/kv2017/maakunnat who welcomes? the geographies of refugee aid as care work – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa76588 doi: 10.11143/fennia.76588 reflections who welcomes? the geographies of refugee aid as care work – commentary to gill elisa pascucci pascucci, e. (2018) who welcomes? the geographies of refugee aid as care work – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 236–238. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.76588 drawing on my recent research with aid workers in jordan and lebanon, as well as on examples from greece and italy, in this commentary i propose the concept of care work as one of the possible ways to achieve a grounded critical understanding of welcome, one that goes beyond solidarity versus institutionalization, bureaucracy versus generosity and state versus civil society dichotomies. framing the issue in such a way means asking three fundamental questions: not only, as gill poignantly does, what is welcome, but also where is welcome actually located and, most importantly, who welcomes. these questions illuminate the many overlooked forms of affective and physical labour without which statecentred, institutional, and internationally organized aid and “welcome” would not be possible. the task, i contend, is to unearth the labour of care that the governance of migration and refuge requires, labour that is mostly feminized, racialized, and precarious. by illuminating the forms of care and interdependencies upon which the reproduction of our societies depends – in all its aspects, including border regimes – this perspective opens up an emancipatory pathway to the politicization of welcoming and aid to migrants and refugees, alternative to humanitarian discourses. keywords: refugees, welcome, care, labour, feminist geography elisa pascucci, eurostorie centre of excellence, university of helsinki, siltavuorenpenger 1 a, p.o. box 9, 00014 helsinki finland. e-mail: elisa. pascucci@helsinki.fi nick gill’s (2018) commentary “the suppression of welcome”, based on the keynote address given at the 2017 annual meeting of finnish geographers, in turku, and published in fennia earlier this year, focuses on the tension between bureaucratic, state-centred forms of welcome and the emotional and intimate character of grassroots and spontaneous solidarities towards migrants and refugees. the essay offers a number of extremely important insights that go into the direction of challenging eurocentric and institutional humanitarian conceptions of welcoming refugees. among other important points, gill mentions the centrality of emotional labour in practices of welcome, and the emerging south-south geographies of hospitality, although he does not fully engage with these concepts. the author concludes by stressing the need for welcoming efforts to accommodate both organizational, institutional and systematic elements, and the emotionally lively, in-depth, intersubjective exchanges that characterize “welcome as experienced”– “a delicate balance”, he writes, to be “struck at the local, national and international level” (gill 2018, 94). © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76588 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76588 fennia 196(2) (2018) 237elisa pascucci gill is right to see in greece an important site for the struggle over welcome that characterizes contemporary migration and refugee politics. indeed, the greek landscape of abject containment through camps and militarized borders, resulting from the enforcement of the eu-turkey deal on refugees of march 2016, is not only about controlling the movement of migrant bodies. it is also a way to channel and govern the outpour of local and transnational solidarities that had characterized the 2015 so-called “refugee crisis” in the southern balkans (mitchell & sparke 2018, pallister-wilkins 2018). yet the case of greece, like those of other southern european and southern mediterranean countries, also highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relation between bureaucratic control and the affective, embodied, spontaneous and caring character of “alternative” forms of welcome. drawing on my recent research with aid workers in jordan and lebanon (pascucci 2018), as well as on examples from greece and italy, in this commentary i propose the notion of refugee welcome as care work as one of the possible ways to achieve such grounded critical understanding. framing the issue in such a way means asking three fundamental questions: not only, as gill (2018) poignantly does, what is welcome, but also where is welcome actually located and, most importantly, who welcomes. these questions illuminate the many overlooked forms of affective and physical labour without which state-centred, institutional, and internationally organized aid and “welcome” would not be possible. rather than reproducing dichotomies such as solidarity versus institutionalization, bureaucracy versus generosity and state versus civil society, the task, i contend, is to unearth the labour of care that the governance of migration and refuge requires, labour that is mostly feminized, racialized, and precarious. by illuminating the forms of care and interdependencies upon which the reproduction of our societies depends – in all its aspects, including border regimes – this perspective opens up an emancipatory pathway to the politicization of welcoming and aid to migrants and refugees, alternative to humanitarian discourses. most of us are now familiar with the unhcr statistics that show how the vast majority of syrian refugees – to mention but one of the recent mass displacement crises, and the one that, having directly affected europe, received the most attention by international media – are displaced within the middle east, particularly in syria’s neighbouring countries like turkey and lebanon (unhcr 2017). however, not everyone is aware of existing research estimates according to which up to 90% of the workforce employed today in the humanitarian sector in the global south, including refugee aid, is constituted by locally-recruitedstaff, whose labour is regulated by the often inadequate insurance and contractual standards enforceable in many post-conflict and developing countries (egeland et al. 2011). these two facts powerfully question common views of aid and welcome as following a northsouth, affluent-to-poor, and sedentary-to-mobile (many aid agencies employ staff who have a migrant background themselves) trajectory, and demand that we pay more attention to where welcome actually takes place – to what are its locations, mobilities and directions. the answer to the question who welcomes is often a precariously employed care and social worker from the global south or southern europe. during my fieldwork in lesvos and athens, in 2016, few months after the eu-turkey agreement had come into force, it was not uncommon for the staff of local and international aid organizations to comprise greek graduates to whom – after difficult experiences of protracted unemployment – the so-called “refugee crisis” had offered the first, if precarious, job opportunity. the experience of young jordanian and lebanese workers employed by un offices and international non-governmental organizations (ngos) in the assistance to syrian refugees is marked by similar trajectories. these workers often highlight the racialized hierarchies that exist within aid organizations, and which operate through a division of labour that puts the burden of emotionally and physically draining tasks disproportionately on non-white, non-expatriate staff (pascucci 2018; see also fluri & lehr 2017 on the case of local aid workers in afghanistan). as gill (2018) also remarks, welcoming and assisting refugees “on the ground”, be it in camps, reception centres, or legal assistance offices, necessitates skills, particularly languages and the manual and interpersonal skills that care work demands. yet state institutions and non-governmental aid organizations rarely acknowledge these skills, and the labour of the lower-rank aid workers that hold them, as valuable. considering refugee assistance as care work exposes the gendered and racialized labour relations that obscure such practical and embodied knowledges. 238 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections how can geography assist us in such endeavour, and why is it relevant? feminist postcolonial geographers have long advocated a “dislocation” of care studies beyond the global north that would allow us to assess what “the actually-existing global variations of care imply for our ethico-political theorizing” (raghuram 2016, 517). when not entirely “suppressed”, to borrow the term gill (2018) uses in his title, by racist hostility and violent border enforcement, institutional and state-centred welcome often presumes the inherent fragility of the welcomed other and the effortful generosity of the powerful “host” (see raghuram et al. 2009). instead, it is imperative that we shed light on the actuallyexisting “labour of welcoming” performed by low-paid, precarious care workers, as part of a broader critical geographical project that focuses on “potential connections and disconnections between responsibility, care and power, at a variety of scales” (raghuram et al. 2009, 10). exposing the interrelated geometries of care and labour that are concealed by global borders and global inequalities is an essential precondition for economic, social and political change (folbre 2014; pascucci 2018). the experience of the italian assemblea dei lavoratori dell’accoglienza (a.l.a. – the assembly of welcome workers), an association of – mostly precarious – care and social workers in the migration and refugee reception sector, active in particular in rome and bologna, has shown how the demand for better working conditions in the private and public care sector can become an essential ally to struggles for migrant rights.1 contesting the precarization of their own labour conditions, these workers have exposed the various attempts at privatization and securitization of asylum seekers reception that have accompanied the implementation of the so-called “security laws” (decreto or pacchetto sicurezza) approved by recent governments in italy. their intersectional, interdependent “alliance of the exploited and the precarious”, in the assemblea’s own words, is a testament of the political potential of looking at welcome as care work. notes 1 <http://www.sialcobas.it/2016/02/1-marzo-lappello-dei-lavoratori-dellaccoglienza-di-roma/> references egeland, j., harmer, a. & stoddard, a. (2011) to stay and deliver: good practice for humanitarians in complex security environments. policy development and studies bureau, un office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (unocha), new york. <https://www.humanitarianoutcomes. org/publications/stay-and-deliver-good-practice-humanitarians-complex-security-environments> 19.11.2018. fluri, j. & lehr, r. (2017) the carpetbaggers of kabul and other american–afghan entanglements: intimate development, geopolitics and the currency of gender and grief. university of georgia press, athens. folbre, n. (2014) who cares? a feminist critique of the care economy. rosa luxemburg stiftung, new york. <http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/folbre_whocares.pdf> 19.11.2018. gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70040 mitchell, k. & sparke, m. (2018) hotspot geopolitics versus geosocial solidarity: contending constructions of safe space for migrants in europe. environment and planning d: society and space. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818793647 pallister-wilkins, p. (2018) hotspots and the geographies of humanitarianism. environment and planning d: society and space. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818754884 pascucci, e. (2018) the local labour building the international community: precarious work within humanitarian spaces. environment and planning a: economy and space. https://doi. org/10.1177/0308518x18803366 raghuram, p. (2016) locating care ethics beyond the global north. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 15(3) 511–533. raghuram, p., madge, c. & noxolo, p. (2009) rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world. geoforum 40 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.07.007 unhcr (2017) syria regional refugee response: inter-agency information sharing portal. <http:// data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php> 19.11.2018. http://www.sialcobas.it/2016/02/1-marzo-lappello-dei-lavoratori-dellaccoglienza-di-roma/ https://www.humanitarianoutcomes.org/publications/stay-and-deliver-good-practice-humanitarians-complex-security-environments https://www.humanitarianoutcomes.org/publications/stay-and-deliver-good-practice-humanitarians-complex-security-environments http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/folbre_whocares.pdf https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818793647 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818754884 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x18803366 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x18803366 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.07.007 http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46363 doi: 10.11143/46363 gis and field data based modelling of snow water equivalent in shrub tundra yury dvornikov, artem khomutov, damir mullanurov, ksenia ermokhina, anatoly gubarkov and marina leibman yury dvornikov, artem khomutov, damir mullanurov, ksenia ermokhina, anatoly gubarkov & marina leibman (2015). gis and field data based modeling of snow water equivalent in shrub tundra. fennia 193: 1, 53–65. issn 1798-5617. an approach for snow water equivalent (swe) modelling in tundra environments has been developed for the test area on the yamal peninsula. detailed mapping of snow cover is very important for tundra areas under continuous permafrost conditions, because the snow cover affects the active layer thickness (alt) and the ground temperature, acting as a heat-insulating agent. the information concerning snow cover with specific regime of accumulation can support studies of ground temperature distribution and other permafrost related aspects. special attention has been given to the presence of shrubs and microtopography, specifically ravines in a modelling approach. the methodology is based on statistical analysis of snow survey data and on gis (geographical information system) analysis of a range of parameters: topography, wind, and shrub vegetation. the topography significantly controls snow cover redistribution. this influence can be expressed as increase of snow depth on concave and decrease on convex surfaces. specifically, snow depth was related to curvature in the study area with a correlation of r=0.83. an index is used to distinguish windward and leeward slopes in order to explain wind redistribution of snow. it is calculated from aspect data retrieved from a digital elevation model (obtained by field survey). it can be shown that shrub vegetation can serve as a ‘trap’ for wind-blown snow but is not a limiting factor for maximum snow depth, since the snow depth can be higher or lower than shrub height dependent on other factors. keywords: snow water equivalent, gis, modelling, topography, snow survey yury dvornikov, artem khomutov, damir mullanurov & ksenia ermokhina, earth cryosphere institute, russian academy of sciences, siberian branch, malygin street 86, tyumen 625000, russia, e-mails: ydvornikow@gmail.com, akhomutov@gmail.com, damir.swat@mail.ru, diankina@gmail.com marina leibman, earth cryosphere institute, russian academy of sciences, siberian branch, malygin street 86, tyumen 625000, russia & tyumen state oil and gas university, volodarsky street 38, tyumen 625000, russia, e-mail: moleibman@mail.ru anatoly gubarkov, tyumen state oil and gas university, volodarsky street 38, tyumen 625000, russia, e-mail: agubarkov@gmail.com introduction the systematic observations of snow cover in russia have been initiated by a.voeykov, who noted that snow was an important component of the environment (voeykov 1889). in permafrost regions, snow cover plays an important role because it directly influences the thermal regime of frozen ground, as it is a natural thermal insulator (dostovalov & kudryavtsev 1967). snow water equivalent (swe) can be used as a proxy for the integral characteristics of snow depth and density, which define the insulating properties of snow. swe allows the calculation of the land surface snow stor54 fennia 193: 1 (2015)yury dvornikov et al. age and is also used for the assessment of the water regime of rivers and lakes and the activation of various cryogenic processes (kuz’min 1960; gray & male 1981; marsh et al. 1995). in arctic tundra strong winds also play a significant role in snow drift and can be responsible for the increase in snow density (kuz’min 1957). zhitkov (1913), based on his field observations in yamal, western siberia, russia, already noted that on the flat surfaces of tundra, unrelated to hilltops, snow accumulates up to 20–30 cm depth. however, it is documented in trofimov (1975) that snow with a depth up to 3–4 meter can accumulate in depressions, while in most areas snow depth is usually less than 15 cm. this small depth is caused by low winter precipitation in the arctic (kuz’min 1960). however, there are recent observations, which show the increase of maximal snow storage in russia, including the northern part of western siberia (krenke et al. 2000; kitaev & kislov 2008). according to the “map of snow depth” (richter 1948), mean values of snow depth do not exceed 30–50 cm for the yamal peninsula. these data are consistent with those published by kopanev (1978), who noted that the average perennial snow depth for yamal does not exceed 30 cm in the second half of march. more recent studies indicate that the maximal snow storage for yamal is about 150 mm swe (kotlyakov 2004) or 50 cm of snow with the average density of 0.3 g/cm3 (trofimov 1975). previous studies on snow depth and swe modelling at the local scale have been carried out for regions with different environmental conditions: alpine (purves et al. 1998; winstral et al. 2002; geddes et al. 2005; clow et al. 2012), and arctic tundra (könig & sturm 1998; essery & pomeroy 2004). practically the same parameters (independent variables) have been used in these studies for modelling, such as topography, wind, vegetation, differing only in the importance assigned to each variable. the main purpose of this study is to model the snow accumulation processes for tundra landscape (elevation range 56 meters) where woody vegetation is absent. three main parameters are considered: topography, wind, vegetation. the degree of each control’s weight in the process of snow redistribution is discussed as well. additionally the use of gis enables the spatial and landscape consideration of all the parameters. analysis is characterized by a high level of detail corresponding to micro-level research (gray & male 1981). study area the “vaskiny dachi” research station is located in central yamal (70º20’n, 68º51’e) to the southeast of the bovanenkovo gas field (leibman & kizyakov 2007). the topography is represented by stepped plain, dissected by ravines, lake basins, small rivers and complicated by a complex of cryogenic processes, mainly cryogenic landsliding (leibman et al. 2012). the field observations of snow cover in this area in the beginning of the 20th century have shown that the strong dissection has some influence on the distribution of snow depth: the deflation from hilltops and accumulation in depressions, such as the ravines and foot of the slopes (zhitkov 1913), under the influence of strong winds is a very significant component of the study area (trofimov 1975). according to the marre-sale weather station records (www. rp5.ru), prevailing wind direction for the cold season of 2012–2013 was from south-east. during our snow survey in late march 2013 the same prevailing ese wind direction was observed with a maximum wind speed of 14 m/sec, and an average wind speed of 7.4 m/sec. the total sum of precipitation during the cold season up to the end of the snow survey amounted to 118 mm swe. the study area is located in the bioclimatic subzone d (cavm team 2003), which is characterized by about 9 °c mean july temperature. zonal vegetation on gently sloping upland surfaces consists of sedges, prostrate and erect dwarf (<40 cm tall) shrubs and mosses (http://www. a r c t i c a t l a s . o r g / m a p s / t h e m e s / c p / cpbzunit?queryid=d). shrub willows (salix glauca, s. lanata) and dwarf-birch (betula nana) are widely distributed here (rebristaya & khitun 1998). plant communities with dense shrub layer mostly occupy valley bottoms and gentle hill slopes. willows grow up to 2 m high in some places, so the structure of plant communities may affect snow distribution significantly. modelling was carried out for the local area represented by a 1.65 km long and 250 m wide transect (fig. 1). the transect crosses the main geomorphologic units of the study area (“vaskiny dachi” research station) and is characterized by different surface properties and vegetation complexes. the transect includes a site for active layer depth monitoring (calm) with an extent of 100x100 m (fig. 1, calm site) (brown et al. 2000, http://www.gwu.edu/~calm/). fennia 193: 1 (2015) 55gis and field data based modeling of snow water equivalent methodology snow survey the field snow survey in the study area was undertaken between 16th–31st march 2013. snow depth was measured using a metal ruler with 1 mm interval and snow density with the snow sampler vs-43. this device is mostly used in russian meteorological stations and designed for snow density measurements during snow surveys (slabovich 1985). it consists of a metal cylinder and scales. at one end of the cylinder is a ring with cutting elements while the other end is closed by a lid. snow depth was measured at 233 points, including 121 points on the calm site, and density was measured at 55 points. fig. 1. study area with snow survey locations (march 2013), total 7 km2 (transect, monitoring sites, specific areas). dem with 25 meter resolution pixels based on a 1:25,000 topographic map as background. 56 fennia 193: 1 (2015)yury dvornikov et al. digital elevation model the application of a gis allows the spatial analyses of snow depth (evans et al. 1989; purves et al. 1998). since topography significantly controls the redistribution of snow in arctic landscapes, a detailed dem is of high importance for swe modelling (litaor et al. 2008). in summer 2011, a topographic survey was carried out using a tachymeter topcon gts-235 (accuracy of angle measurements 5') to produce a detailed dem with 5x5 m cell size. based on this raster dataset, terrain derivatives were calculated. slope aspects within 0–360 degree range were grouped according to the main directions: n-ne-e-se-s-sww-nw, as well as a curvature ranging from -4 to +4. such a range of curvature corresponds to the dissected topography of the site (marchand & killingtveit 2001). curvature shows the convexity and concavity degree of topographic patterns, i.e. of one raster cell relative to other eight surrounding raster cells (zeverbergen & thorne 1987). negative curvature values correspond to concave and positive to convex patterns. the significance of this index in the studies of snow cover has been noted by many researchers (e.g. freindlin & shnyparkov 1985; golding 1974; woo et al. 1983; sexstone & fassnacht 2014), from which it has been observed that greater snow accumulation occurs on concave slopes rather than on convex hilltops. a correlation analysis was conducted to reveal the relationship, if any, of snow depth with the above topographic parameters. for each point with measured snow depth, and coverage by the detailed dem, aspect and curvature values were extracted according to their spatial referencing. wind-induced redistribution of snow it is well documented that snow is blown away from windward slopes and accumulated on leeward slopes (evans et al. 1989; winstral et al. 2002; litaor et al. 2008). the prevailing wind direction is also considered in our model. it is selected as southeastern according to the marre-sale weather station records. to consider the influence of the wind, an empirical correction w, which depends on the aspect value of each raster cell, is introduced (eq. 1): w = 0.5×(cosa-sina)×k (1) where w is a correction for the initial value of simulated snow depth, a the slope aspect, and k a coefficient which is calculated empirically and depends on the amount of snow precipitation as well as on wind speed. vegetation-induced snow redistribution shrub vegetation on the key site is an important factor for the redistribution of snow masses, being a ‘trap’ for snow drift as well as a factor decreasing the wind activity (benson & sturm 1993) for both windward and leeward slopes (essery & pomeroy 2004). however, it is also documented that these trapping processes do not always take place as snow might be partially blown away from shrub vegetation complexes (pomeroy & gray 1995). during field work in summer 2011, shrubs (salix glauca, s. lanata, betula nana) were documented in terms of depth and shrub projective coverage for each waypoint. for vegetation analysis in the gis, shrub contours on the transect were manually digitized using a very high spatial resolution geoeye-1 image (id 2009081507005801603031603318) acquired on 15th august 2009 (nga license, university alaska fairbanks, nasa lcluc yamal). based on field descriptions from 2011 (unpublished data), shrub height values were assigned to each polygon. snow water equivalent model a methodology was developed to build a map of swe, including the consideration of parameters: topography, wind, and vegetation (independent variables). the general scheme of gis-based modelling is shown in figure 2. the dem was converted to a point vector data model with 5 m spacing. curvature and aspect values for each point have been added to the attribute table. a shrub height measure was assigned based on the field descriptions to shrub vector polygons retrieved from satellite imagery interpretation. the initial value of snow depth was calculated based on the established dependence between the field measured snow depth and extracted curvature values. to obtain final values of calculated snow depth, corrections based on the wind and vegetation data have been made. the field measurements of snow density were used in transition from snow depth values to swe. if the density was measured layer-by-layer, the average density for the entire section was used in the model. comparison of two parameters (snow depth and swe) showed a linear defennia 193: 1 (2015) 57gis and field data based modeling of snow water equivalent pendence (r2 = 0.99), which has been used in the calculation of swe from snow depth. after all, the raster surface was interpolated. results and discussion snow survey the measured snow depth varies, depending on the type of terrain, from 0 to 315 cm. the average snow depth ranges on sub-horizontal surfaces between 15 and 30 cm. in depressions, snow depth exceeds 1 m and can reach several meters. density also varies depending on the geomorphology: from 0.17 g/cm3 on the flat hill tops to 0.67 g/cm3 on concave portions of the slopes. the total results of the snow survey are summarized in table 1. the data presented in table 1 show that snow depth is a very irregular parameter for our site mainly due to relief control. in general, the results of snow depth and snow density measurements match that of previous research (richter 1948; trofimov 1975; kopanev 1978; kotlyakov 2004). an anomalously high maximum value of snow density measured in the field on the hilltop surface (0.67 g/cm3) points to a strong wind influence that has led to snow cover compression. topographic controls the relation of measured snow depth to curvature appears to be very strong (fig. 3), and hence the topography has been selected as a main factor for calculation of the initial snow depth value for the transect. the curvature has been used before as a secondary independent variable in snow modelling (goldfig. 2. workflow for the calculation of snow water equivalent (swe) using gis and remote sensing (rs) data. snow depth, cm snow density, g/cm3 number of measurements 233 55 minimum value 0 0.17 maximum value 315 0.67 average value 29 0.33 standard deviation 38 0.09 table 1. the results of the snow survey in march 2013. 58 fennia 193: 1 (2015)yury dvornikov et al. ing 1974; woo et al. 1983; winstral et al. 2002, clow et al. 2012). a study of the dependence between snow depth and curvature for the area of norway showed a very low correlation (marchand & killingtveit 2001). the authors analyzed a linear model of the dependence and used a low resolution 100x100 meters dem, which – as they mentioned – can adversely affect the degree of correlation. in contrast, studies of snow cover in khibiny mountains (freindlin & shnyparkov 1985; kontsevaya et al. 1989) show the high correlation between these two parameters and the authors used a linear regression model for snow depth calculation. kasurak et al. (2009) and sexstone and fassnacht (2014) also confirm that curvature is well correlated with snowpack properties even for alpine terrain. in this paper, this variable is used as a main parameter. it appears to be obvious that strong inverse correlation (-0.83) between this parameter and snow depth was revealed only because the detail of the used dem (5x5 m, which corresponds to 1:1000 mapping scale) allows an accurate description of topography and therefore a more detailed derivative surface. the dem with lower resolution used for the same area results in the substantially lower correlation between these parameters (fig. 4). curvature is very sensitive to the source dem resolution because the depth values of the eight surrounding cells are taken into account in the calculation procedure for each raster cell. it was also observed in the field that the influence of microtopography is high too. the measured snow depth varied up to 10–20 cm in an area of less than 4–10 m2. however, the acquisition of a dem with such a detail is a very timeconsuming process. processed stereo-pairs of airborne and satellite images or lidar data may serve as an additional source along with a field topographic survey. modelling the wind-induced redistribution of snow equation (1) allows to index leeward slopes positively and windward slopes negatively relative to the prevailing wind direction. in figure 5, fig. 3. the relation of field measured snow depth (cm) to surface curvature. fig. 4. the relation of field measured snow depth (cm) to surface curvature derived from a 25 meters resolution dem based on 1:25,000 topographic map. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 59gis and field data based modeling of snow water equivalent correction values with a different aspect with respect to the prevailing wind direction are schematically shown. the ranges of correction (1) were established according to the mean measured snow depth analysis on the slopes of different aspect (fig. 6). inventories of wind impact on snow redistribution using gis have been carried out by other researchers (purves et al. 1998; winstral et al. 2002; clow et al. 2012) with a similar scheme: 1) the identification of a prevailing wind direction; and 2) indexing a raster surface according to the main established pattern; blowing of snow away from windward slopes and accumulation on leeward slopes. following our approach for a more accurate analysis of snow redistribution by wind, the field measurements were subdivided into two groups: 1) collected within the sites with positive curvature values (convex sites), and 2) collected within sites with negative curvature values (concave sites). fig. 5. correction values to the modelled snow depth according various slope aspects in relation to prevailing wind direction (see eq. 1). the data shown in figure 6 demonstrate that, on average, accumulation is up to 20–30 cm more on the leeward slopes than on windward slopes from which snow is blown away. in order to be consistent with these data, the coefficient k for the correction of w was assumed to be 25. this value allows for the expansion of the value of corrections up to ± 20 cm. this wind correction was entered in the initial calculated snow depth value according to the graph in the attributive table with aspect values. so far, the dependence between snow depth and curvature – wind group is not combined into one index because we are yet unable to account for the prevailing wind direction variations from year to year. it’s the main reason why the initial value and wind correction are used separately and this combination remains to be solved. such combinations have been successfully applied using binary regression trees (elder et al. 1995; erxleben et al. 2002; winstral et al. 2002; molotch et al. 2005). fig. 6. the distribution of average measured snow depth (cm) for slopes with different aspects: field dataset for convex sites (curvature > 0) (a); field dataset for concave sites (curvature < 0) (b). 60 fennia 193: 1 (2015)yury dvornikov et al. modelling the vegetation-induced redistribution of snow shrub willow distribution highly depends on relief. the tallest shrubs (1–1.5 m) occupy concavities: the valleys of small rivers and slopes of erosion features (ukraintseva 1997) with the negative values of curvature. research carried out in the tundra of alaska also showed an increase of snow density in relation to canopy height, branch diameter (mcfadden et al. 2001), as well as shrub density (sturm et al. 2001). according to the data, shrub communities accumulate 27% more snow than hummocky tundra. the relationship between snow depth, shrub presence and shrub height was similar to the one with the wind: the measurements were compared depending on surface convexity/concavity. figure 7 shows the correlation between shrub height and snow depth versus the convexity/concavity index. the data were graded according to this index to study the impact of shrubs on snow specifically at convex sites, as at concave areas this relationship is overridden completely by relief as shown in fig. 7. in the first case, strong dependence of snow depth on shrub height is shown, in the second case this dependence is not observed. this is due to the biologically caused impossibility of shrub growth over 1.5 m in sites where snow depth exceeds this value (leibman 2004). figure 8 shows sorted values from the dataset for convex slopes. this confirms that the shrub vegetation can serve as a ‘trap’ for snow (essery & pomeroy 2004). following from this, sites with low shrubs (less than 15 cm) control the snow depth, but for higher shrubs (more than 15 cm) only a part of blown snow is trapped and so they do not control the snow depth. it could be seen through the behavior of curves on figure 8: at lower shrub height they correlate, but above 15 cm the “shrub height” curve starts to be markedly higher than the “snow depth” curve, which generally is going up simultaneously. this threshold possibly depends on the total amount of fallen snow. according to the regression equation (fig. 7), the limitation value for calculated snow depth with the presence of shrubs with certain height is (eq. 2): (2) where x is snow depth, and y is shrub height. the value for each modelling point, which are defined by the shrub vector polygons, was compared to the initial swe value and corrected for the wind redistribution impact. when the limitation value was higher, then the calculated value was assumed equal to the limitation value. in this case, the shrub vegetation was accepted as a limit for snow accumulation according to the field data. fig. 7. the relation between snow depth and shrub height. the dataset is subdivided into two groups: points located on convex places (curvature > 0), and points located on concave places (curvature < 0). � � �� � 10.5�1�1.0562   fennia 193: 1 (2015) 61gis and field data based modeling of snow water equivalent results of this study provide the evidence that shrub height can affect the snow depth, but does not fully control this parameter. the relationship is better understood when the topography factor is excluded. the correlation between these parameters is stronger in this case (e.g. fig. 7). the assumption that the vegetation acts as a secondary factor contradicts data for other regions, where shrubs – and not topography – have been established as a main control for snow depth (e.g. mcfadden et al. 2001). for the area, which is densely dissected by erosion processes, topography plays a more important role for the redistribution of snow. our analysis shows a linear relationship of the ‘trap’ effect of shrubs with snow depth. creation of swe map the swe map is shown in figure 9. the resolution of the final raster model is equal to the source dem with 5x5 m. modelling and mapping of snow cover in this paper is done at the local scale. therefore, results cannot well describe the distribution of snow fig. 8. the dependence between snow depth and shrub height (samples located on convex places). within different areas, such as neighboring floodplains. similar conclusions were suggested by other researchers, who dealt with small test sites (litaor et al. 2008). environmental features of the area specify the number of independent variables describing the distribution of snow in tundra more accurately (evans et al. 1989; mcfadden et al. 2001; sturm et al. 2001; essery & pomeroy 2004). even though independent variables, which control swe, do not correlate linearly with snow distribution (elder et al. 1995; molotch et al. 2005), linear regression models have already been used (golding 1974). generally, it is obvious that all the factors influencing the redistribution of snow in the site are interdependent and complex. validation of results the reliability of the model for snow depth distribution was estimated through comparison with the model based exclusively on field measurements. for this purpose, the results of snow depth measurements from the entire transect including number of points snow depth (min), cm snow depth (max), cm snow depth (mean), cm r volume of snow (calm site), m3 field 0 315 29.12 2683 model 190 0.94 276 33.06 0.82 2793 table 2. the comparison of field and calculated snow depths for the transect. 62 fennia 193: 1 (2015)yury dvornikov et al. fig. 9. snow water equivalent map for central part of the transect. fig. 10. snow depth on the calm site (a – interpolation of field data, b – calculated values). calm site (see fig. 1) were used, as well as a detailed dem based on the ground survey. field data from the calm site deliberately were not used for the statistical analysis of the snow depth controls. snow depth was modelled for each point on the transect. the analysis showed that there is a quite high correlation factor between the two value arrays (r=0.82). field and modelled datasets for calm site are shown in figure 10: the volume of snow was calculated for both the in situ and the modelled version (table 2). this shows that the values of modeled snow depth and accordingly the values of swe reflect the real snow cover distribution well. conclusions our observations of the snow cover in the study area showed that the topography of the central yamal tundra caused the extremely uneven distribution of snow. they also confirmed the importance of fennia 193: 1 (2015) 63gis and field data based modeling of snow water equivalent wind drifting from the hilltops and accumulation of snow in the concavities, as observed by other researchers. snow redistribution is due to strong winds and the lack of significant natural barriers. the data analysis confirmed a pattern specified by many authors previously: blowing away of snow from the windward slopes and accumulation on the leeward slopes in accordance with the prevailing wind direction. to account for this pattern in the general model proposed here we introduce a correction based on the slope aspect. this correction allows for an indexing of the slopes with respect to the prevailing wind direction and facilitates automation. the impact of shrubs is estimated as ‘traps’ for the snow or limiting control, depending on the combination of shrub height and surface shape. the relationship between shrub height and snow depth is well expressed when concave landforms do not prejudge the accumulation of snow exceeding the height of shrubs. as high shrubs in the key area are linked to depressions, the limited impact of shrub communities on the depth of the snow is observed. however, shrubs retain part of the snow cover, providing a limiting effect which is used in the model. based on field data and identified relationships between various controls and snow cover depth, a technique for gis-based modelling of the snow water equivalent was developed, which is applicable to a particular type of landscape. these studies can be applicable in the detailed permafrost mapping and modeling of the number of parameters, such as active layer or ground temperature on the local scale, as well as for the hydrological studies of the tundra environments with the link to the various cryogenic processes’ activation. acknowledgements this research was conducted within the framework of the program of fundamental research department of earth sciences no. 12 “the processes in the atmosphere and cryosphere as factors of environment changes”, the rfbr grant 13-05-91001-anf_a, presidential grant for scientific schools no. 5582.2012.5 and 3929.2014.5, as well as international projects calm and tsp. references benson cs & sturm m 1993. structure and wind transport of seasonal snow on the arctic slope of alaska. annals of glaciology 18, 261−267. brown j, hinkel km & nelson fe 2000. the circumpolar active layer monitoring (calm) program: research designs and initial results. polar geography 24: 3, 165−258. cavm team 2003. circumpolar arctic vegetation map. conservation of arctic flora and fauna map (caff) map no. 1. u.s. fish and wildlife service, anchorage, ak. clow dw, nanus l, verdin kl & schmidt j 2012. evaluation of snodas snow depth and snow water equivalent estimates for the colorado rocky mountains, usa. hydrological processes 26: 17, 2583–2591. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hyp.9385. dostovalov bn & kudryavtsev va 1967. general permafrost. moscow state university press, moscow (in russian). elder k, michaelsen j & dozier j 1995. small basin modelling of snow water equivalence using binary regression tree methods. in tonnessen ka, williams mw & tranter m (eds). biogeochemistry of seasonally snow-covered catchments, 129–139. iahs press, wallingford. erxleben j, elder k & davis re 2002. comparison of spatial interpolation methods for estimating snow distribution in the colorado rocky mountains. hydrological processes 16: 18, 3627–3649. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hyp.1239. essery rlh & pomeroy jw 2004. vegetation and topographic control of wind−blown snow distributions in distributed and aggregated simulations for an arctic tundra basin. journal of hydrometeorology 5: 5, 734−744. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/15257541(2004)005%3c0735:vatcow%3e2.0.co;2. evans bm, walker da, benson cs, nordstrand ea & peterson gw 1989. spatial interrelationships between terrain, snow distribution and vegetation patterns at an arctic foothills site in alaska. holarctic ecology 12: 3, 270–278. freindlin v & shnyparkov a 1985. metodology of the snow storage calculations for the small alpine catchments. in proceedings of glaciological investigations 53, 96–99. (in russian). geddes cia, brown dg & fagre db 2005. topography and vegetation as predictors of snow water equivalent across the alpine treeline ecotone at lee ridge, glacier national park, montana, usa. arctic antarctic and alpine research 37: 2, 197−205. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 6 5 7 / 1 5 2 3 0430(2005)037%5b0197:tavapo%5d2.0.co;2. golding dl 1974. the correlation of snowpack with topography and snowmelt runoff on marmot creek basin, alberta. atmosphere 12: 1, 31–38. gray dm & male dh 1981. handbook of snow: principles, processes, management & use. ontario pergamon press canada, willowdale. kasurak a, kelly r & brenning a 2009. mixed-effects regression for snow distribution modeling. in proceedings of the 66th eastern snow conference, 177–195. niagara-on-the-lake, on. kontsevaya vv, sokolov vm & freindlin vs 1989. investigations of snow accumulation on the differ64 fennia 193: 1 (2015)yury dvornikov et al. ent topographic patterns in khibiny mountains. in proceedings of the third soviet union conference on avalanches, 232–240. gidrometeoizdat, leningrad (in russian). kopanev id 1978. snow cover on the territory of ussr. gidrometeoizdat, leningrad (in russian). kitaev lm & kislov av 2008. regional differences of snow accumulation – contemporary and future changes (on the example of northern europe and northern part of west siberia). earth cryosphere (kriosfera zemli) xii: 2, 98–103. (in russian). kotlyakov vm 2004. snow cover and glaciers of the earth. nauka, moscow (in russian). krenke an, kitaev lm & razuvaev vn 2000. snow in the cis and its regions under the global warming. earth cryosphere (kriosfera zemli) iv: 4, 97– 106. (in russian). kuz’min pp 1957. physical properties of snow cover. gidrometeoizdat, leningrad (in russian). kuz’min pp 1960. the formation of snow cover and methods of snow storage calculation. gidrometeoizdat, leningrad (in russian). könig m & sturm m 1998. mapping snow distribution in the alaskan arctic using aerial photography and topographic relationships. water resources research 34: 12, 3471–3483. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/98wr02514. leibman mo 2004. mechanisms of formation of cryogenic translational landslides and conditions for their indication by high willow shrubs on central yamal. transactions of the moscow center of russian geographical society. biogeography 12, 89– 94. rashn, moscow (in russian). leibman mo & kizyakov ai 2007. cryogenic landslides of the yamal and yugorsky peninsulas. earth cryosphere institute sb ras, moscow (in russian). leibman mo, gubarkov aa & khomutov av 2012. research station vaskiny dachi. excursion guidebook. in proceedings of the 10th international conference on permafrost. tyumen pechatnik, salekhard. litaor mi, williams m & seastedt tr 2008. topographic controls on snow distribution, soil moisture, and species diversity of herbaceous alpine vegetation, niwot ridge, colorado. journal of geophysical research: biogeosciences 113: g2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2007jg000419. marchand w-d & killingtveit å 2001. analyses of the relation between spatial snow distribution and terrain characteristics. in hardy j & frankenstein s (eds). proceedings of the 58th eastern snow conference, 71–84. ottawa, on. marsh p, quinton w & pomeroy jw 1995. hydrological processes and runoff at the arctic treeline in northwestern canada. in sand k & killingtveit å (eds). proceedings of 10th international northern basins symposium and workshop, 368–397. sintef, rep. stf 22. trondheim, norway. mcfadden j, liston ge, sturm m, pielke r & chapin f 2001. interactions of shrubs and snow in arctic tundra: measurements and models. in dolman aj, hall aj, kavvas ml, oki t & pomeroy jw (eds). sixth scientific assembly of the international association of hydrological sciences, 317−325. iahs−aish publication, maastricht. molotch np, bales rc, colee mt & dozier j 2005. estimating the spatial distribution of snow water equivalent in an alpine basin using binary regression tree models: the impact of digital elevation data and independent variable selection. hydrological processes 19: 7, 1459–1479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/hyp.5586. pomeroy jw & gray dm 1995. snow accumulation, relocation and management. national hydrology research institute science report 7. environment canada, saskatoon. purves rs, barton js, mackaness wa & sugden de 1998. the development of a rule based spatial model of wind transport and deposition of snow. annals of glaciology 26, 196−202. rebristaya ov & khitun ov 1998. botanical−geographic specifics of the central yamal’s flora. botanical journal (botanicheskiy zhurnal) 83: 7, 37–52. (in russian). richter gd 1948. role of snow cover in the physical− geographical processes. academy of sciences ussr publishing, moscow and leningrad (in russian). sexstone ga & fassnacht sr 2014. what drives basin scale spatial variability of snowpack properties in northern colorado? the cryosphere 8: 2, 329– 344. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/tc-8-329-2014. slabovich gi (ed) 1985. instructions for hydrometeorological stations and posts. gidrometeoizdat, leningrad (in russian). sturm mj, holmgren jp, mcfadden ge, liston fs, chapin f & racine c 2001. snow − shrub interactions in arctic tundra: a hypothesis with climatic implications. journal of climate 14: 3, 336–344. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 7 5 / 1 5 2 0 0442(2001)014%3c0336:ssiiat%3e2.0.co;2. trofimov vt (ed) 1975. yamal peninsula. moscow state university press, moscow (in russian). ukraintseva ng 1997. willow tundra in yamal as the indicator of salinity of superficial sediments. in the results of fundamental research of the earth cryosphere in arctic and subarctic, 173–182. nauka, novosibirsk (in russian). ukraintseva ng 1998. peculiarities of distribution of shrubby tundra on yamal. transactions of the moscow center of russian geographical society. biogeography, 46–53. rashn, moscow (in russian). voeykov ai 1889. snow cover, its impact on the soil, climate and weather and ways of research. in proceedings of russian imperial geographical society xviii 1. st−petersburg (in russian). winstral a, elder k & davis re 2002. spatial snow modeling of wind-redistributed snow using terrainbased parameters. journal of hydrometeorology 3: 5, 524−538. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/15257541(2002)003%3c0524:ssmowr%3e2.0.co;2. woo m, heron r, marsh p & steer p 1983. comparison of weather station snowfall with winter snow fennia 193: 1 (2015) 65gis and field data based modeling of snow water equivalent accumulation in high arctic basins. atmosphereocean 21: 3, 312−325. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07055900.1983.9649171. zeverbergen lw & thorne cr 1987. quantitative analysis of land surface topography. earth surface processes and landforms 12: 1, 47–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/esp.3290120107. zhitkov bm 1913. yamal peninsula. in proceedings of imperial russian geographical society xlix. stasyulevich mm typography, st−petersburg (in russian). conditional welcome and the ambivalent self – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa76101 doi: 10.11143/fennia.76101 reflections conditional welcome and the ambivalent self – commentary to gill jussi p. laine laine, j. p. (2018) conditional welcome and the ambivalent self – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 230–235. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.76101 this brief reflection is written from the standpoint that much of the witnessed suppression of welcome derives from either a lack of fully understanding, or misunderstanding, the reasons for and circumstances of the perceived crisis, as well as of the histories and motivations of the people who have arrived in europe in great numbers. rather than simply depicting the governmental perspective in opposition to that of the people, the argument put forth here is rather that the reactions to this extraordinary situation have been torn at best, and it is the mounting polarization, rather than the immigrants as such, that are putting europe’s democracies, social model, cooperation as well as values to the test. the anxieties caused by immigration have become intertwined with deep insecurities triggered by originally unrelated societal changes, whereby the question of the suppression of welcome has a lot to do with the difficulty in finding an appropriate balance with one’s own benefits, preferences of association and responsibilities towards others. efforts need to be taken to debunk tenacious false narratives about migration, and to provoke debate in a fashion that will lead to a nuanced understanding of the root causes and motivating factors behind the migrant flows, as this would enable us to take proper action in addressing them. keywords: welcome, identitary bordering, ontological security, refugees, values jussi p. laine, university of eastern finland, yliopistokatu 2, aurora (p.o. box 111), fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail jussi.laine@uef.fi introduction in his essay on the suppression of welcome, gill (2018) contemplates how genuine, spontaneous welcome could be preserved under the widespread pressure of statist and nationalistic logics and demands. the essay functions as ideal discussion starter, rather than seeking to provide clear-cut answers to the complex phenomena under scrutiny, as it turns our attention to a number of crucial questions in desperate need of a holistic examination. in this brief response to his insights, i will highlight the significance of the processes of identitary bordering and the psychological need for ontological security in seeking to address gill’s inquiry into what extent should states be engaged in efforts to organise welcome, given their place in the international state system that underpins exclusionary and subjugating border control in the first place. this brief reflection is premised on a standpoint that much of the witnessed suppression of welcome derives from either the lack of fully understanding or misunderstanding the reasons for and circumstances of the perceived crisis, as well © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76101 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76101 fennia 196(2) (2018) 231jussi p. laine as of the histories and motivations of the people who have arrived in europe in great numbers. thus, while gill’s essay explored the question, what is welcome and how is it suppressed, my aim here is to unravel who is welcomed and why others are not? gill’s (2018) intervention makes an important recognition in stating that there has been a disjuncture between the policing-oriented government policies and the more welcoming popular sentiments towards refugees. indeed, in addition to the survey commissioned by amnesty international (2016) that he refers to, a more recent survey by the pew research center (2018) found that a majority of people in several european countries support taking in refugees and disapprove of the way the eu has addressed with the issue. while the logic gill follows based on this realisation is compelling and genuine, it is necessarily not enough to capture the entire picture, as the reactions have been multifarious, at times inconsistent, rather than a simplified juxtaposition of welcome or unwelcome would lead us to believe. extraordinary situation, extraordinary measures undeniably, the eu as well as a number of its member states have indeed prioritized policing, surveillance, and border securitisation over its own commitments to asylum, assimilation, or human rights protections in their responses to the recent surge of migrants (cf. bilgic & pace 2017). yet, the eu continues to be deeply divided over the matter, and the debate within individual member states have been far from uniform. despite the prevalent securitisation focus, individual, yet very influential politicians have shown even unexpectedly welcoming attitudes to refugees. while the hard liners, perhaps the most noticeably orban, salvini, le pen and kurz, have certainly dominated the picture with their blunt anti-immigrant stands. for instance, the german chancellor angela merkel defended her “open door” migration policy actively and the prime minister of finland, juha sipilä, outlined that finland should set an example to the rest of europe on migration increasing the number of refugees it was willing to accept. to prove his point, mr. sipilä offered to give up his private residence for refugees to use. gill’s (2018, 88) further assertion that the “[g]overnments were either unwilling or unable to carry out the wishes of their electorates, who supported greater liberalisation of border controls and the delivery of more aid to those who had been displaced,” seems appealing yet somewhat disproportionate. alongside the widespread humanitarian approach amongst the people that he describes, expressions of xenophobic, nationalistic, if not racist mind-set, have neither been rare. the nationalist and farright parties have made significant electoral gains across europe and less formal anti-immigration movements have become widespread. rather than simply depicting the government perspective in opposition to that of the people, the argument put forth here is rather that the reactions to this extraordinary situation have been torn at best and it is the mounting polarization, rather than the immigrants as such, that is putting europe’s democracies, social model, cooperation as well as values to the test. thus, a key question to unravel is how come the same phenomenon can trigger so different reactions in different people? that is, why welcome is not the same for all? what most seem to agree upon is that the witnessed recent influx of immigrants into europe has been extraordinary. as andersson (2016, 1060–1061) explains, the prevalent emergency frame, in repeatedly presenting the migratory situation as an ”unprecedented crisis”, does not only enable a two-faced reactive response of humanitarian action and more policing, but also project these two in opposition to one another. this is illuminated, for example, in the way how the rescues are often thought of in opposition to border security, despite the recent trend whereby an increasing integration of these responses within a common emergency frame has become reality (cuttitta 2014; pallisterwilkins 2015). nevertheless, the argument put forth here is that particularly the public, but also ensued political debate, has not only sought to pit the pros and cons of immigration against one another, but revealed also something much profounder about the host societies. the anxieties caused by immigration have become intertwined with deep insecurities triggered by originally unrelated societal changes, such as the precarisation of the labour market and a dissolving social security. consequently, little about the immigration debate has actually been about immigration itself, but rather about internal societal changes that have left many feeling left behind and frustrated. in this 232 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections equation, anonymous immigrants have come to serve as an easy target for enraged, emotional gut spilling, lacking both clarity and rationality. what is needed is debate, which, without pre-judgment, seeks to bring clarity to the complex phenomena we are facing. instead of a ‘refugee crisis’, it is commonly argued that the eu faces a management crisis – and a lack of political will – as it struggles to cope with the increased uncertainly and anxiety caused by this era’s turbulent and unpredictable environment, where constant multiple crises have become the new normal, challenging european societies’ response capacity and resilience. the offers of a strong nation state as a solution for the perceived chaos have resonated well with the consequential public discourse in many eu member states, whereby the original idea of open borders has become effectively shot down (ahtisaari 2017). a more thorough assessment of the situation reveals that call for stricter border enforcement and control cannot be taken simply as an attempt to close state spaces, but rather to filter and sort out the people crossing them to those who are considered welcome and those that are unwanted. thus, we are also witnessing a crisis of cultural encounter, for the underlying criteria on which basis the sorting is done and the inherent politics of difference they imply to carry clear elements of identitary and normative, if not civilisational, bordering. furthermore, the prevalent situation reveals that black and white categorisation of a border as either open or closed is distorted, for borders are not the same for all and the ability to cross them depends on a lot on who we are and to where we are perceived to belong. a conditional welcome whereas the then un secretary-general, ban ki-moon (2016) called the unprecedent surge of migrants to europe, a ‘monumental crisis’ that would require a response based on ‘monumental solidarity’, the eu and many of its member states in particular turned however to the end-of-pipe solution of closing their borders in an attempt to restrict the incoming or transiting movement of people. these practices, in the context of the strength of anti-immigrant movements across europe, conveyed an image of immigrants as a threat not just to our land, but also culture, identity, values and conventional ways of life. within such narratives, refugees and asylum seekers – if not all immigrants – tend to be constructed as deviant or alien to the host society (gilbert 2013) challenging not so much the control over space but the social glue that is believed to hold a society together. when framed as a threat, migration becomes a security issue, as something that needs to be combatted, inflicting in turn an impression of borders as protective, yet at the same time vulnerable, walls safeguarding the inside from a perceived threat from the outside (laine 2018). the major question gill (2018) turns our attention to is to what extent should states be engaged in efforts to organise welcome, given their place in the international state system that, he states, underpins exclusionary and subjugating border control in the first place. indeed, states’ right to control their borders and decide who should be admitted and who should not are often taken for granted as a legitimate aspect of their political self-determination. in the recent past, this right to exclude has been coercively enforced in many instances around europe and harsh measures have been implemented against immigrants who fail to satisfy the legal requirements for entry. from this perspective, a state’s legitimate right to freedom of association entitles it to choose whether or not to admit immigrants; that is the freedom of association also entitles one to refuse to associate with others (wellman 2008). studies have revealed that in general, european citizens have a strong preference towards refugees with a similar religious background and higher levels of education, and the greater the expected economic benefit leads to the greater the acceptance (banksak et al. 2016). the visigrád states in particular, have formally articulated a strong preference for taking christian refugees before others. the recent surge of migrants has, however, made exploring the grounds for the right to exclude ever more necessary given the intrinsic moral and ethical concerns that it implies. these concerns appear in a different light, if instead of the usual retroactive responses, we consider the root causes of the migrant flows. immigration, particularly that of an irregular kind, is seldom driven by mere wanderlust, but rather brought about by the disparities of wealth, peace, and political freedom across the world. not everyone is entitled to work, live or even visit wherever they please, but our mobility fennia 196(2) (2018) 233jussi p. laine and thus our chances in life remain largely determined by our place of birth. while people have always migrated and moved around, the idea that we are from a certain place remains etched into our minds so profoundly that it seems difficult to challenge. this fundamentally arbitrary fact together with the artificial lines on a map need both to be rethought, if indeed we take it that there is a migration problem or crisis to be solved. a key reason why welcome has been suppressed and refugees opposed may be attributed to widespread and intrinsic not-in-my-backyard or not-my-problem attitudes. such perspectives suggest not only a hollowing out of the very values upon which the very idea of europe is commonly considered to rely upon, but also seem fundamentally distorted. the moral obligation towards others, particularly the displaced, stems not only from a humanitarian principle, but is also based upon the realities of today’s interconnected world (benhabib 2004). while high moral value has been assigned to national borders and state sovereignty, and protecting human rights and dignity does involve also respect for the self-determination of states, we are no longer simply a part of isolated national communities detached from the broader developments of today's networked global society. the suppression of welcome seems particularly self-centred if we consider that some of the conflicts, which have driven people from their homes, such as those in syria, iraq, afghanistan, and libya have been affected in various ways by the foreign policy decisions of the united states and many european powers (betts 2015). the universal human right to leave any country and to return to one’s country is in the end rather meaningless without the right to enter another state (cole 2000). these developments are indicative of how the states and their borders continue to function in the postmodern era of post-national polices and non-territorial flows. we have witnessed an apparent fracturing of the eu surface, as member states respond with local policies restricting and scaling back their openness in response to public pressures. the witnessed regression into state-centric thinking has not only weakened the eu’s integrationist momentum and social model, but implies also, as betts (2015) maintains, that states’ commitment to asylum has become increasingly conditional. accordingly, i argue, the question of the suppression of welcome has a lot to do with the difficulty in finding an appropriate balance between our and their rights. that is, to what extent can one prioritise one’s own benefits, preferences of association and responsibilities towards one’s co-citizens before those of immigrants, particularly refugees? the value of our values? looking at the situation even more from the perspective of an individual, the concept of ontological security is revealing in that it draws attention to the need of an individual to enjoy a stable and whole existence in reality, as opposed to anxiety and a loss of meaning that could threaten everyday experiences and self’s integrity and identity (laing 1960). it relies on a sense of trust in the continuity of the social order, a disruption in the conscious awareness of which can provoke anxiety, paralysis, and even self-fragmentation. to be able to go on and maintain the stability of one’s self-existence amidst the turbulent and unpredictable environment, individuals seek continuous affirmation on their meaningful presence and self-narrative as well as a sense of confidence and trust that the world is what it appears to be (kinnvall 2004; mitzen 2006). in an existential sense, an ontologically secure person has a stable and unquestioned sense of self and of his/her place in the world in relation to other people and objects, while an ontologically insecure person does not accept the reality or existence of things, themselves, and others (giddens 1991; hewitt 2010). a focus on ontological security is of use here when the suppression of welcome is being discussed for it allows us to tie the logic of security to the production and reproduction of identities. following mitzen (2006), ontological level security dilemmas, such as one many felt at the sudden surge of refugees, often posed in terms of challenging the conventional social glue perceived to hold ’us’ together, may actually reinforce the sense of being and identity of the actors involved. this is to say that in confronting otherness, rationality may be overridden in the search for continuity, even if this might compromise the values and norms otherwise held dear. the insights presented above hardly provide answers to the set of questions gill (2018) concluded his essay with, yet in addition to emphasising the complexity and multifacetedness of welcome, the 234 fennia 196(2) (2018)reflections aim here has been to underline that welcome is not about mere admittance or something that can be determined by a particular policy. efforts need to be taken to debunk tenacious false narratives about migration and to provoke debate in a fashion that will lead to a nuanced understanding of the root causes and motivating factors behind the migrant flows, and that would enable us to take proper action in addressing them. a key part is to break away from the dominant migration-security nexus by pointing towards the opportunities welcoming migrants can bring and elucidating them as valuable resources, rather than a burden, or ‘ills’ affecting the body of ‘national’ societies. acknowledgements this work was supported by the strategic research council at the academy of finland, multilayered borders of global security (glase) [decision number 303480]. references ahtisaari, m. (2017) statement during the discussion organised by the european commission representation in finland on the european values and the future of the eu at the finnish parliament annex on 21 november 2017. amnesty international (2016) refugees welcome survey 2016 – the results. <https://www.amnesty. org/en/latest/news/2016/05/refugees-welcome-survey-results-2016/>. 31.01.2018. andersson, r. (2016) europe’s failed ‘fight’ against irregular migration: ethnographic notes on a counterproductive industry. journal of ethnic and migration studies 42(7) 1055–1075. https://doi.or g/10.1080/1369183x.2016.1139446 banksak, k., hainmueller, j. & hangartner, d. (2016) how economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape european attitudes toward asylum-seekers. science 354(6309) 217–222. https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.aag2147 benhabib, s. (2004) the rights of others. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi. org/10.1017/cbo9780511790799 betts, a. (2015) the normative terrain of the global refugee regime. ethics & international affairs 29(4) 363–375. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0892679415000350 bilgic, a. & pace, m. (2017) the european union and refugees: a struggle over the fate of europe. global affairs 3(1)1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2017.1322252 cole, p. (2000) philosophies of exclusion: liberal political theory and immigration. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. cuttitta, p. (2014) ‘borderizing’ the island: setting and narratives of the lampedusa ‘border play.’ acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 13(2) 196–219. giddens, a. (1991) modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late-modern age. polity press, cambridge. gilbert, l. (2013) the discursive production of a mexican refugee crisis in canadian media and policy. journal of ethnic and migration studies 39(5) 827–843. https://doi.org/10.1080/136918 3x.2013.756693 gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70040 hewitt, b. a. (2010) ontological insecurity. in jackson, r. l. & hogg, m. a. (eds.) encyclopedia of identity, 511–512. sage, london. ki-moon, b. (2016) remarks on forced displacement: a global challenge. un news centre, washington, dc. <http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full.asp?statid=2997#. v0drkcmrib1> 12.10.2018. kinnvall, c. (2004). globalization and religious nationalism: self, identity, and the search for ontological security. political psychology 25(5) 741–767. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00396.x laine, j. (2018) the ethics of bordering: a critical reading of the refugee ‘crisis.’ in besier, g. & stoklosa, k. (eds.) how to deal with refugees? europe as a continent of dreams, 278–301. lit verlag, berlin. laing, r. d. (1960) the divided self: an existential study in sanity and madness. penguin, london. mitzen, j. (2006). ontological security in world politics: state identity and the security dilemma. european journal of international relations 12(3) 341–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066106067346 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/05/refugees-welcome-survey-results-2016/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/05/refugees-welcome-survey-results-2016/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2016.1139446 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2016.1139446 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag2147 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag2147 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511790799 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511790799 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0892679415000350 https://doi.org/10.1080/23340460.2017.1322252 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2013.756693 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2013.756693 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full.asp?statid=2997#.v0drkcmrib1 http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full.asp?statid=2997#.v0drkcmrib1 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00396.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00396.x https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066106067346 fennia 196(2) (2018) 235jussi p. laine pallister-wilkins, p. (2015) the humanitarian politics of european border policing: frontex and border police in evros. international political sociology 9(1) 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12076 pew research center (2018) a majority of europeans favor taking in refugees, but most disapprove of eu’s handling of the issue. <http://www.pewresearch.org/ fact-tank/2018/09/19/a-majority-of-europeans-favor-taking-in-refugees-but-most-disapprove-of-eushandling-of-the-issue/>. 25.10.2018. wellman, c. h. (2008) immigration and freedom of association. ethics 119(1) 109–141. https://doi. org/10.1086/592311 https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12076 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/19/a-majority-of-europeans-favor-taking-in-refugees-but-most-disapprove-of-eus-handling-of-the-issue/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/19/a-majority-of-europeans-favor-taking-in-refugees-but-most-disapprove-of-eus-handling-of-the-issue/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/19/a-majority-of-europeans-favor-taking-in-refugees-but-most-disapprove-of-eus-handling-of-the-issue/ https://doi.org/10.1086/592311 https://doi.org/10.1086/592311 say ‘yes!’ to peer review: open access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66862 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66862 reflections: on publishing say ‘yes!’ to peer review: open access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia simon springer, myriam houssay-holzschuch, claudia villegas and levi gahman springer, simon, myriam houssay-holzschuch, claudia villegas & levi gahman (2017). say ‘yes!’ to peer review: open access publishing and the need for mutual aid in academia. fennia 195: 2, pp. 185–188. issn 1798-5617. scholars are increasingly declining to offer their services in the peer review process. there are myriad reasons for this refusal, most notably the everincreasing pressure placed on academics to publish within the neoliberal university. yet if you are publishing yourself then you necessarily expect someone else to review your work, which begs the question as to why this service is not being reciprocated. there is something to be said about withholding one’s labour when journals are under corporate control, but when it comes to open access journals such denial is effectively unacceptable. make time for it, as others have made time for you. as editors of the independent, open access, non-corporate journal acme: an international journal for critical geographies, we reflect on the struggles facing our daily operations, where scholars declining to participate in peer review is the biggest obstacle we face. we argue that peer review should be considered as a form of mutual aid, which is rooted in an ethics of cooperation. the system only works if you say ‘yes!’. keywords: critical geographies, mutual aid, neoliberal university, open access, peer review, publishing simon springer, university of victoria, 3800 finnerty road, victoria, bc, canada, v8p 5c2 unceded coast salish and straits salish territories of the lekwungen and wsáneć peoples & managing editor of acme: an international journal for critical geographies. e-mail: simonspringer@gmail.com myriam houssay-holzschuch, university grenoble alpes, institut d’urbanisme et de géographie alpine, umr 5194 pacte, 14 avenue marie reynoard, 38100 grenoble, france & editor of acme: an international journal for critical geographies. e-mail: myriam.houssay@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr claudia villegas, clacso working group “borders, regionalization and globalization in latin america”, mexico city & editor of acme: an international journal for critical geographies. e-mail: videcla@gmail.com levi gahman, university of the west indies, indies, department of geography and institute for gender & development studies, st. augustine campus, trinidad and tobago & editor of acme: an international journal for critical geographies. e-mail: levi.gahman@gmail.com acme: an international journal for critical geographies is a journal that was founded on the principle of providing an open access platform for critical geographical scholarship as a means of reclaiming our collective labour from the corporate stranglehold that currently defines most of contemporary academia (moss et al. 2002). open access publishing should go hand in hand with a collective © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 186 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing organizational form and supportive ethos, which is a key component of acme’s identity. functioning as a collective is not intrinsic to the open access model. instead, it is a choice, and a political one at that. a collective approach goes hand in hand with a number of risks and opportunities including, most notably the human dimension. it requires a high level of trust, interdependence, commitment to open lines of communication, and horizontal organization (springer 2014). there are also financial concerns, as we have to seek external funding, which comes from the social science and humanities research council (sshrc) of canada, who have particular nationalist criteria that we do not necessarily agree with and yet necessarily have to fulfill. while a spirit of independence is central to the mission of the journal, like all collectives we require sustainable funding to survive, and thus make a concession about maintaining the requisite number of editors based in canada. yet the primary challenge with acme is not keeping our heads above water financially, even if this frequently weighs heavy on our minds. it is the day-to-day challenges of peer review that occupies most of our time and is the achilles’ heel of our entire operation. in short, we rely on mutual aid (kropotkin 1902 [2008]), or mutually beneficial cooperation, which requires an ethic of commitment and a willingness to participate among the scholarly community we service. in this regard, the idea that acme is a collective extends beyond the editorial collective and the international advisory board we maintain, and includes anyone who reads and/or publishes in the journal. unfortunately, in recent years we have experienced a rampant lack of willingness to review papers. while we don’t want to name and shame, we are astonished that so many of our authors, and sadly even some of our international advisory board members, routinely refuse to provide us with reviews. in order to sustain the efforts of the journal we absolutely rely on a system of reciprocity and good will. given our limited funding, none of the editors receive a stipend for the labour we put into the journal. it is a huge responsibility that requires an extraordinary time commitment, but we are dedicated to our area of study, to supporting the work of other scholars, and to providing the knowledge that is produced free of charge to the general public. we don’t have the means to offer any other enticements. for example, some journals offer discount vouchers for books by the same publisher. other journals offer free access to the journal a referee reviews for, which seems somewhat perverse from our perspective, since we offer free access to all. unlike the competition, when we ask people to commit to peer review, it is not an exploitative relationship that puts further profits into the pockets of an overpaid ceo. it is a simple request to commit to the ethics of cooperation, and to view the production of knowledge and the vitality of academic life as more than a capitalist transaction (soley 1995). very simply, acme is working from the premise that people should have bigger hearts for peer review when it comes to open access. while we appreciate that people are busy, and the strains of the neoliberal academy puts undue pressures on our time and well being (jubas 2012; berg et al. 2016), it is ok to slow things down and take a trail-moseying approach in response (mountz et al. 2014). we also feel that saying ‘yes’ to an open access journal when it comes to peer review raises a larger set of ethical considerations. when it comes to corporate publishers, we understand the hesitations that come with knowing that one’s labour is being abused. many of us still agree to participate in the process because of an affinity for our field of study and a concern for supporting other authors, but we are usually also acutely aware that someone is profiting off our collective work, which gives reason for pause. yet with independent open access journals like acme there is an entirely different set of relations at stake. if critical geography is concerned with envisioning a better world beyond the current neoliberal nightmare (castree 2000; blomley 2006), commitment to peer review for open access journals is about valuing the means of realizing this goal. it is a prefigurative politics of possibility (ince 2012; springer et al. 2012). finding reviewers is super hard work. if you have ever wondered why it takes several months to get reviews back on a paper, it has very little to do with how long it takes people to read and respond, and almost everything to do with the undertaking of finding willing participants. securing reviewers is a task that keeps getting harder and harder. this sentiment remains true regardless of whether a journal is open access or not, and is perhaps mostly due to the intensifying pressure to publish within the contemporary academy. people really are overburdened, and the result is a prioritization of responsibilities. unfortunately this ranking of commitments often comes at the expense of the greater fennia 195: 2 (2017) 187simon springer et al. good. we understand that this is part and parcel of the neoliberalization of academia, where we all become rationalizing subjects, but there is a distinct need to push back and to continue to contribute to the sharing economy of peer review (hall & ince 2017). we feel that reviewing should be taken seriously as a political decision and not only as strategic for forwarding one’s own career (kallio 2017). it should be treated as an expression of mutual aid. in other words, peer review should proceed as reciprocity by reviewing for journals where one has published, reviewing as explicit support for the journals we love, and encouraging (not imposing) an open review process, as a more personal, constructive, and responsible approach to scholarship that defies the spirit of competition (zabel 2017). it is about making room for a plurality of voices, rather than a toeing of particular lines or making a spoof out of the process (see bohannon 2013). all of us – intentionally or not – are now part of the problem. however, we can also be a part of the solution. so framing peer review as a practice of mutual aid should change our outlook, but only when reciprocity works horizontally, not as a guilt-inducing, exploitative, or instrumentalized framework. such a view also changes the role of an editor. acme has developed an idea of ‘shepherding’ a paper towards publication (especially when the author is an emerging scholar, or a non-anglo researcher writing in english). this requires greater attention to the notion of ‘care’ as a means of also being ‘open’ (lawson 2009). it is important to reflect on the idea of ‘open access’ beyond the narrow definition of simply being work that is ‘not hidden behind a paywall.’ open access is also about a creative commons licence and creating the conditions for the dissemination of knowledge. it is about more creative forms of writing (such as poetry) (mccann 2015; boyd 2017), and creative expression (such as video and art) (de leeuw & craig 2017; mason 2017). it is about welcoming non-anglo theoretical traditions (díaz-cortés & sequera 2015), breaking with eurocentric conventions (vasquez-fernandez et al. 2017), and not just promoting non-anglo work in an anglo context, but promoting especially, multilingualism to open up ideas beyond the anglo scene (de araújo & germes 2016). such an approach creates open access insofar as anglo readers rarely read beyond the anglo world. acme is an english journal (so it is read and recognized by anglophone academia) but is also much more than that. we publish articles in many other languages, thus allowing our articles to be read more broadly in facilitating a more horizontal circulation of knowledge (see springer 2016, which acme published in 12 languages). open access is deeply political. for us, it is fundamentally about defending and protecting certain ideals about what research should be, a necessary step towards what must be done to fight against the cynical and savage version of academia that we have created for ourselves (berg et al. 2014). to critique and learn from the work of others is vital for the wheel of knowledge production to keep turning, and for that to happen, we need research to be accessible and open to all. it means embracing a form of anarchist thinking and organizing in the sense of not having to wait for the great answers or magic solutions, but rather to start looking for the small things that we can do that change our immediate surroundings in the here and now (springer 2012). this ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos is part of this picture for acme. it starts with making a collective effort to find creative ways to convince people of the value of not-for-profit peer reviewing as a realization of mutual aid. as former acme editor katherine mckittrick once said, “mutuality is the lifeblood of radical journals.” accordingly, we must remember that none of us are anything without those who preceded us, and we are also nothing without those who will follow in our footsteps. and so we ask you to consider, what path do we want future generations to traverse? references de araújo, s. h. & germes, m. (2016) for a critical practice of translation in geography. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 15(1) 1–14. berg, l. d., gahman, l. & nunn, n. (2014) neoliberalism, masculinities and academic knowledge production: towards a theory of ‘academic masculinities’. in kopkins, p. & gorman-murray, a. (eds.) masculinities and place, 57–74. ashgate, burlington, vt. berg, l. d., huijbens, e. h. & larsen, h. g. (2016) producing anxiety in the neoliberal university. the canadian geographer/le géographe canadien 60(2) 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261 188 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: on publishing blomley, n. (2006) uncritical critical geography? progress in human geography 30(1) 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph593pr bohannon, j. (2013) who’s afraid of peer review. science 342(6154). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.342.6154.60 boyd, c. (2017) research poetry and the non-representational. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 16(2) 210–223. castree, n. (2000) professionalisation, activism, and the university: whither ‘critical geography’? environment and planning a 32(6) 955–970. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3263 díaz-cortés, f. & sequera, j. (2015) introducción a “geografías del 15-m: crisis, austeridad y movilización social en españa”. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 14(1) 1–9. hall, s. & ince, a. (2017) introduction: sharing economies in times of crisis. in ince, a. & hall, s. (eds.) sharing economies in times of crisis: practices, politics and possibilities, 1–16. routledge, new york. ince, a. (2012) in the shell of the old: anarchist geographies of territorialisation. antipode 44(5) 1645– 1666. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01029.x jubas, k. (2012) on being a new academic in the new academy: impacts of neoliberalism on work and life of a junior faculty member. workplace: a journal for academic labor (21) 25–35. kallio, k. p. (2017) subtle radical moves in scientific publishing. fennia: international journal of geography 195(1) 1–4. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 kropotkin, p. (1902 [2008]) mutual aid: a factor in evolution. forgotten, charleston, s.c. lawson, v. (2009) instead of radical geography, how about caring geography? antipode 41(1) 210– 213. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00665.x de leeuw, s. & craig, b. (2017) mapping justice with letter press printing: the bold type work of amos kennedy. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 16(1) 138–148. mason, k. (2017) ghosts of the future: a normative existentialist critique of nuclear weapons, mutually assured destruction and deterrence. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 16(1) 149–155. mccann, c. (2015) east of sweden. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 14(1) 344–354. moss, p., berg, l. d. & desbiens, c. (2002) the political economy of publishing in geography. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 1(1) 1–7. mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j., walton-roberts, m., basu, r., whitson, r., hawkins, r., hamilton, t. & curran, w. (2014) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 14(4) 1235–1259. soley, l. c. (1995) leasing the ivory tower: the corporate takeover of academia. south end press, boston, ma. springer, s. (2012) anarchism! what geography still ought to be. antipode 44(5) 1605–1624. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01034.x springer, s. (2014) human geography without hierarchy. progress in human geography 38(3) 402–419. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513508208 springer, s. (2016) fuck neoliberalism. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 15(2) 285–292. springer, s., ince, a., pickerill, j., brown, g. & barker, a. j. (2012) reanimating anarchist geographies: a new burst of colour. antipode 44(5) 1591–1604. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01038.x vasquez-fernandez, a. m., hajjar, r., shuñaqui sangama, m. i., lizardo, r. s., pérez pinedo, m., innes, j. l. & kozak, r. a. (2017) co-creating and decolonizing a methodology using indigenist approaches: alliance with the asheninka and yine-yami peoples of the peruvian amazon. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 16(4). zabel, g. (2017) against peer review. unpublished paper. <https://www.academia.edu/16384860/ against_peer_review> untitled where lies the horizontal scientist? jukka käyhkö käyhkö, jukka (2001). where lies the horizontal scientist? fennia 179:2, pp. 181–184. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. comment on professor ronald f. abler’s speech. jukka käyhkö, department of geography, university of turku, fin-20014 turku, finland. ms received 19th november, 2001 (revised 21st november, 2001) professor abler, dear colleagues, dear friends. it is indeed a great pleasure to be here at the opening of the geography department’s new premises in kumpula. knowing that the good old sofa is still to be found somewhere at the department and seeing the numerous familiar faces in the audience makes one feel at home. i have to admit, however, that there is one aspect to be longed for: the revolving doors of porthania. would it still be possible to negotiate with the architect about reconsidering this small detail? it is an equal pleasure and honour to have the opportunity to comment on professor ron abler’s presentation on geography among the sciences. it is, however, also a grand challenge. anyone would find himself in a rather exciting position commenting on such a thorough and knowledgeable presentation. professor abler did very well indeed in covering the whole discipline. therefore, it is best not to try to re-invent geography here. instead, i shall give a snapshot of a narrow slice of the neighbouring, newly emerging fields of science which professor abler referred to as the grand challenges, namely earth system science, and its close relative, global change science. in this presentation, i shall briefly try to formulate the relationship between these disciplines and geography, as we know it. environmental scientists often make the headlines nowadays as global environmental problems, such as climate change or land degradation, are tackled. the complexity and interconnections of various environmental problems have set whole new requirements for the research community. politicians and decision-makers in general currently harass scientists with the most convoluted queries about, say, whether there are indeed any harmful changes in nature, what causes these changes, and how we should mitigate or adapt to these dilemmas. questions arise, such as whether our energy sector should invest in nuclear energy or natural gas, whether we should protect old growth forests or concentrate on increasing biodiversity in commercial forests, how to allocate aid to developing countries, or how to balance urbanisation, increasing poverty and inequality on a regional and global scale, just to give a few examples. suddenly, environmental sciences are all very policy relevant. a beautiful example of an increasing demand for scientific expertise in policy is climate change. i suppose we all clearly remember the international meeting on emission reductions in bonn in july. the participants encountered severe problems and disagreement about carbon sinks and forest accounting, with perhaps less emphasis on true emission reductions. the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the ipcc, had slightly earlier published its third assessment report on climate change. we remember how the us president, george w. bush, questioned the scientific merit of the “summary for policymakers” (ipcc 2001) and established a small group of experts within the national science foundation to review the report. the outcome of the review was that the ipcc report was scientifically valid, but this finding did not stop president bush from withdrawing from the kyoto protocol. global environmental problems have indeed taken science onto a completely new level of policy relevance. however, let us move back to geography now. 182 fennia 179: 2 (2001)jukka käyhkö the complexity of mother earth has opened the eyes of many scientists to realise that a narrow, traditional, discipline-oriented approach will not suffice. among other researchers, dr. hansjoachim schellnhuber, a renowned physicist who has lately been appointed as the director of the multidisciplinary tyndall centre for climate research in the uk, has suggested earth system science (ess) as an aid in solving global environmental problems (schellnhuber 1999). the diagram (fig. 1, the right hand panel excluded) presents the earth as a simplified, conceptual model, which is referred to as the earth system. as geographers we are naturally familiar with this flow model of the earth. it includes various ecosystems, oceans and biogeochemical cycles. however, something is lacking: the human factor. in the earth system science approach, the human dimension has been reduced to the three ellipsoids on the right. it does not look too comprehensive as an approach to a geographer, does it? but let me come back to this ess issue slightly later. similarly, dr. john lawton, a biochemist and the head of the natural environment research council in the uk, stated in the editorial of science in june (see the insert on page 184), that earth system science is the ultimate solution to environmental problems (lawton 2001). it studies not only the main components of the planet earth, such as the atmosphere, the oceans etc., but also their interactions – a revolutionary approach. professor abler critically commented on this “not-so-revolutionary” view in the aag newsletter later in the summer from the geographer’s point of view (abler 2001). indeed, let us go back to the schellnhuber diagram for a second and revise it somewhat by adding some socio-economical aspects and humanities (cf. fig 1, right hand panel included). now we have a more complete model of the planet earth, as we geographers know it. the earth system appears now more realistic with topics such as development, technology, urbanisation and transportation included. it is, however, also much fig. 1. the proposed scientific approach, “the global change science”, consists of the (physical) earth system science (e.g., schellnhuber 1999) and the socio-economic (human) system plus their interaction. the scope therefore reminds that of traditional geography, but the vast spatial dimension calls for multidisciplinary collaboration. fennia 179: 2 (2001) 183where lies the horizontal scientist? less readily predictable! suddenly we have to deal with democratic elections, revolutions, black tuesdays on the stock market, even wars. the world is not only stirred – it is shaken. i may not be the first one, but i call this approach global change science. it is probably enlightening to stress here that global change is not a synonym for climate change, as is so often mistakenly considered to be, even in scientific contributions. global change is much more than climate. it covers all spheres, both natural and human systems. however, why call it global change? what’s wrong with good old geography? very simply, geography cannot do this all by itself. very few of us geographers do atmospheric modelling, calculate the national price tag for kyoto emission reductions, or investigate the juridical matters with regard to the biodiversity convention and the rights of aboriginal tribes in the amazon region. geographers use the results for regional syntheses, but they do not necessarily undertake the primary work. there is still a clear, justified need for specialists, and we know it. i shall try to conceptualise global change methodology in a simple diagram (fig. 2), showing the various research fields needed to implement the approach. first, we need traditional (what i call) “vertical scientists” (physicists, chemists, geologists, economists, lawyers etc) to dig deep into their own fields of speciality and feed facts into the database. second, we need futures researchers: scientists investigating potential, largely unpredictable futures with various scenario approaches. this is an autonomous field of research in its own right. third, someone has to build the enormously complex models to run the scenarios. we need modellers to do the trick. finally, in the middle of the diagram (cf. fig. 2), “lies” the horizontal scientist – we may wish to call him a geographer – who understands interactions, spatial and regional entities, and both natural and anthropogenic processes, to aid in putting together the model of mother earth, or a part of it. this whole entity is global change science. it is more than what can be accomplished by geographers on their own, but it will be difficult to complete without one. what is surprising, and annoying as well, i guess, is the fact that geographers seem not to have been able to sufficiently show their abilities. it is as if the whole discipline of integration had been invented only now, when our fellows among the vertical scientists have realised that integration is the magic word in better understanding our environment. let me give an example from finland. the finnish global change research programme, figare, is funded by the academy of finland and consists of nearly 40 projects from all over finland. to my knowledge, there is only one geographer among the 120 researchers. hardly any geographer sent in an application three years ago when the global change research programme was established. why don’t geographers get excited of a topic, which should by definition be their slice of bread? i believe that there is a paradox here. the strength of geography lies in its unified approach, its ability to bridge the natural sciences and humanities into purposeful and practical applications. however, these very same qualities may dilute the scope and aims in the contemporary world. it is difficult to be a specialised generalist. perhaps we geographers are not very good in marketing our expertise and ourselves. perhaps we should stop jealously protecting our own discipline and look confidently for collaboration, proud of the strengths of geographical approach, to offer ourselves as linkages between vertical scientists. nobody will do this for us. whether or not geography will be among the big-s sciences in the future, as professor abler expressed it, is up to you and me. fig. 2. a conceptual ‘global change science’ approach showing the four fields of research required for the completion of the system. 184 fennia 179: 2 (2001)jukka käyhkö i would like to end here by thanking professor abler for his thought-provoking presentation, and wishing the geography department a successful future. the new, once again unified premises of kumpula will certainly serve for geography’s benefit. i would also like to invite geographers to collaborate and integrate forces, not only within your own department, but also with colleagues working elsewhere in finland and abroad. viribus unitis. references abler r (2001). earth system science. aag newsletter of the association of american geographers 36: 8, 2. ipcc (2001). summary for policymakers. report of the working group i of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. ipcc third assessment report. <http://www.ipcc.ch> käyhkö j (2001). global change science – a revolutionary approach in climate change research. the northern review (in press). lawton j (2001). earth system science. science 292, 1965. schellnhuber hj (1999). ‘earth system’ analysis and the second copernican revolution. nature 402: 6761, supplement, c19–c23. prof. john lawton, science editorial, 15 june 2001 (partially) one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century is to forecast the future of the planet earth. as human activities push atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations far beyond anything seen for nearly half a million years (prompting the strongest statement yet from the intergovernmental panel on climate change that human activities are warming the world), we find ourselves, literally in uncharted territory, performing an uncontrolled experiment with planet earth that is terrifying in its scale and complexity. wrestling to understand these challenges is the young, still emerging, discipline of earth system science (ess). … ess takes the main components of planet earth – the atmosphere, oceans, freshwater, rocks, soils and biosphere – and seeks to understand major patterns and processes in their dynamics. to do this, we need to study not only the processes that go within each component, but also interactions between these components. it is the need to study and understand these between-component interactions that defines ess as a discipline in its own right. … it is hard to imagine a more important discipline than earth system science. we urgently need to overhaul our thinking and rejig our institutions to allow this crucial new science to flourish. ) narratives of and in urban change and planning: whose narratives and how authentic? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa115636 doi: 10.11143/fennia.115636 reflections: book review narratives of and in urban change and planning: whose narratives and how authentic? mark tewdwr-jones tewdwr-jones, m. (2021) narratives of and in urban change and planning: whose narratives and how authentic? fennia 199(2) 285–290. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115636 lieven ameel's book the narrative turn in urban planning offers a critical examination of the role of narratives and story-telling in questions concerning urban planning in future deliberations of urban change. the discussion provides an excellent way to identify, define and construct our understanding about narratives in and of planning, including the construction of a typology for the first time. but narratives of and for planning tend to mask wider meta-narrative issues that will affect how places are shaped and are changed in the future. these drivers of change not only encompass a range of socio-economic and environmental challenges. they will also have profound implications for our use of technology, and for the way our democratic processes operate. such dramatic changes will impact on the context and form of planning, wherever you are in the world. and we are likely to see greater polarisation in attitudes toward urban and regional change, some of which may not only be proactive, but deeply reactive, subjective and selective. if the narrative turn will become more prominent in planning, we need to be ready for the likely proliferation of disruptive and insurgent narratives that will emerge and reflect the deep-seated vested interests that possess stakes in how and whether places change on their terms. keywords: planning, narrative, authenticity, story-telling, urban change, digitisation mark tewdwr-jones (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8786-6434), centre for advanced spatial analysis, ucl, 90 tottenham court road, london. w1t 4tj. uk. e-mail: m.tewdwr-jones@ucl.ac.uk “the city does not see things, but images of things that mean other things”. italo calvino’s (1974, 13) invisible cities has always served as a perennial reminder, to those with the audacity to think they can plan and reshape urban areas, that how the city is seen and thought of by others matters a great deal. cities are in a constant state of flux, constantly building and rebuilding, through successive waves of clearance, development, investment, and decline. they can rise up spectacularly quickly thanks to massive amounts of economic growth, as we have seen in such diverse places as shanghai, kuala lumpur, berlin and london. or they can crash just as quickly thanks to economic decline, as in detroit, the rust belt regions of north america, and deindustrialised parts of northern england. © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115636 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8786-6434 mailto:m.tewdwr-jones@ucl.ac.uk 286 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: book review lieven ameel’s (2021) book the narrative turn in urban planning starts to unpick urban change as they are told through narratives and stories, and advocates for their use and acceptance within and for planning for cities. taking examples from helsinki’s waterfront developments, he makes a good case for us to start to think of urban change in a broader perspective; not as the product of some long winded legalistic real estate set of negotiations or the eventual outcome of long-term blueprint planning, but rather as a suite of narratives that shape attitudes, behaviour and decisions about urban change in quite profound ways. the book offers a rich seam of discussion that dissects what narratives in and of planning might mean. but it also has provided thought-provocations about how narratives are expected to fit into planning, on whose terms, and in what context, during an era where wider climatic and political processes are unfolding at a rapid pace. from meta-narratives to micro change narratives can certainly tell us a great deal about meta-events such as economic growth and decline. equally, the impact on humans of catastrophic events can lead to dramatic changes to places and their inhabitants in short amounts of time. the devastating events we have seen all too readily unfurl in iraq, afghanistan, syria, palestine, yemen, and more recently in ukraine with cities such as mariupol, amount to the complete erasure of the urban fabric, of homes, businesses, and essential services. the bombing out of communities not only truly wipes the slate clean for the aggressor, it causes a massive humanitarian effort to be undertaken and the mass migration of maybe hundreds of thousands of people to safe havens. that, in turn, changes the shape, content and look of cities perhaps thousands of miles away from conflict zones. the same patterns of events are being seen in the context of climate change around the world, as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, droughts and water shortages combine to form perfect storms and have life changing impacts on people living in these places. these drivers of change continue to affect land, habitation, where and how we build, the essential natural resources and infrastructure we rely on, and our ability to thrive. and they, too, can cause human migratory patterns from affected areas to safer and certainly more prosperous locations. in each of these cases, there are stories to be told about how such circumstances came about. and such stories fit with particular narratives about general climatic patterns prevalent, from the success or failure of government policies in the management of these places, in the preferences of global investors and ease or difficulty of flows of trade, in the provision or lack of infrastructure spending, and in sudden catastrophic events. both history and contemporary circumstances show us that not only do meta-events cause ebbs and flows in the fortune and shape of cities, wherever you are in the world, they can also have differential impacts over time and space, can be read in different ways by those that have experienced or even have played a part in precipitating events, and those watching from some distance, both contemporaneously and with the benefit of hindsight. for those of us interested in observing and analysing urban change, narratives – and the stories within them – play a significant role in our understanding of events. for the most part, they are partial or selective constructs, told from particular vantage points. they can – with hindsight – shine a greater and perhaps unfair light on people and places, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes quite deliberately. this is in order to skew the narrative in a particular direction, or to nullify consequential roles or effects, or even to obfuscate pivotal moments in time. narratives are not new constructs within planning, and the book offers us a useful typology of narratives for us to consider. one type of narrative that has been featured within planning, scenarios, have been employed across nations and cities over many decades to help us think about alternative futures and make political choices (dixon & tewdwr-jones 2021). by focusing on long term futures, scenarios can be a popular way to set out alternative options for places and generate reactions to those options, leading to discussion and trade-offs about desirable or undesirable courses of action. but narratives can also be employed at the micro scale too. flyvbjerg’s (1998) groundbreaking book rationality and power is a dramatic work that unearths the politics, presentation and choices about, ostensibly, the planning and building of a new bus station in aalborg. in global terms, such a development fennia 199(2) (2021) 287mark tewdwr-jones may seem relatively inconsequential. but on a local or regional scale, even one type of development can provoke a ferocious public reaction, generate heated political debate, and address much more strategic choices about how we live and work in future than one development site in the middle of a city. all this contention points to the use, deployment and argumentation of narratives of the city, narratives within planning, and the relationship between particular narratives and past, present and future stories. narratives within contentious decision making the fact that governments, developers, professionals and even citizens can all have and retell different stories to represent the same event in the same place at the same time illustrates the high contestation associated with urban change and also our inner values. but it also reveals an important dimension often lost in academic accounts of urban planning. as james throgmorton (1996) has reminded us in his book, planning as persuasive storytelling, planning can be a process of rhetorical construction of urban change; it is both a discipline and a professional practice that rests on judgement, evidence, increasingly-scientific intelligence, politics, but also – crucially – human behaviour and perceptions. even if a person is not directly affected by plans for part of a city, or on a proposal for a specific plot of land, everyone can possess an opinion about those plans or that proposal. and, in most advanced democracies, everyone is also given the right to express those opinions. with so much contention surrounding how we navigate change in places, depending on one’s viewpoint, agenda and perspective, it is worth noting that planning is, nor cannot ever be, a completely scientific endeavour; nor is it an entirely rational process. it is always easy to rationalise a decision about change after it is occurred. the planning decision is entirely the hostage of argument, debate, negotiation, compromise, and consensus; and, even then, a particular outcome may not be universally appreciated or accepted by those advocating a completely different result after a decision has been made. one of the more popular forms of narratives about planning in recent years have been stories of the unbuilt: why cities have not changed in the way planners had advocated, or had not been built in line with the visionary ambitious masterplans devised many years previously (beanland 2021). history is littered with these examples, from wren’s unrealised plans for a rebuilt city of london after the great fire of 1666, to the 1946 bruce plan for glasgow. the public have become as much fascinated by planning failures as planning achievements, particularly if the resultant physical and architectural forms would have led to completely different cities to experience. this may be the stuff of whim, mixed with nostalgia for a long vanished past that never was. but it also suggests something deeper occurring within spatial imaginaries (watkins 2015) about how urban change occurs, who has responsibility for change, why things do not always work out in the ways intended, and whether the final built result is better or worse than what had been there previously. and, critically, citizens are interested in all of these issues, even the aspects of urban change that cannot be seen or never occurred. this reaction may be peculiar to planning, correspond to emotional attitudes towards planning, and see planning as the agency of change that in no small measures creates cities as palimpsests of urban form and style. but it also suggests that the way narratives are formed about urban change are not simply the construct of planning systems or the consequence of conscious decisions made by professional planners to initiate discussion about narratives of change. we also know that planning does not normally result in a linear pathway of change, but rather meanders according to opportunity and constraint by and between actors, over time, during which time alternative, overlapping and contradictory narratives may emerge. all this navel-gazing about the art and science of planning decision making may sound, at best, a bit too metaphysical and, at worse, a throwback to 1960s-styles of rational planning debates. but such elements lie at the heart, or beneath the veneer, of urban planning. they shape narratives of planning and urban change, and also lead to contentious and agonistic dilemmas for those charged with making decisions. it is certainly true that professionals have always had to wrestle with ethical dilemmas about different courses and consequences of planning choices, dilemmas between personal views and professional judgement or employers’ practices (marcuse 1976). there has been a perennial debate within the planning discipline about values in planning, and which causes are supported to justify particular planning pathways. this has especially occurred through questions concerning urban 288 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: book review welfarism and social justice (scott & roweis 1977), especially if planning outcomes continue to favour wealthier members of society, or directly or indirectly disadvantage those most in need. and the more planning stays rooted, legally, in questions about land, development and property, one could be forgiven for thinking that the activity remains very much tilted in favour of pro-development – and therefore wealthy and powerful – interests. the more urban societies witness extreme polarisation in cities socially, economically, environmentally and technologically, the more planning will either be looked at to respond on ethical grounds, to address such marked differentials. or the greater likelihood that it will be revealed as a tool of the wealthy minority with vested interests in advancing change. the pint here is that narratives will be central to those debates and employed by critics and societies to challenge, reveal and question not only the purpose of urban change and the role of urban planning, but also the impacts they cause unevenly to society and places. all of this means that narratives of urban planning are not, and should not be, only the preserve of the planning elite, but are much more profound when they are set within wider debates about the future of democracy and the state of politics. escalating planning narratives through digitisation and social media ameel’s (2021) book examines the role of narratives in some of these debates quite skilfully, but is largely quiet on these wider democratic and polarising issues, issues which cannot be separated from narratives of place shaping, planning, and urban growth and decline. and those narratives of global and national shifts, of the ebbs and flows in spatial configurations, and of political struggles, shape the ability of local actors to plan their own places in ways they may desire. to take just one illustration of these wider drivers of change – technology – that has profound implications of not only how the problems of places may be analysed and could be managed, but also adds a significant means on the ability for everyone to create and disseminate their own narratives about urban change, way beyond the control of planners (batty 2018). we live in an era when social media plays a dominant and perhaps overwhelming role in all our lives. it is a time when citizens and other interested parties are much more likely to express opinions, tell stories, and advance causes digitally rather than through traditional non-digital planning and democratic modes associated with elected government (wilson & tewdwr-jones, 2022). we have also witnessed how social media platforms can play a pivotal role in jolting people, rapidly, into mass movement, whether that’s in relation to the black lives matter campaign, extinction rebellion climate change protests, or even attempts by make america great again to overthrow democratic election results. narratives may be used in reactive ways, as well as proactively. it will come as little surprise to learn that social media is now also being used within planning debates by all sides through which to tell stories about urban change, and those stories are set within particular frames that define an author’s preferred narrative. the stories may change, may be over-emphasised for effect, employ hyperbole, intend first and foremost to agitate or provoke, or are even used to challenge other stories and consensus around existing narratives. but there is also the possibility for set narratives to be undermined, or presently falsely. we are too familiar with the notion of fake news, widely promulgated trumpian-like both before and during the us presidential election in 2020. platforming narratives through social media that do not fit a particular ideology must be seen as a deliberate provocation and an attempt to disrupt the status quo, even if those narratives are factually inaccurate. planning is not immune from this pattern of reaction. when there is so much contention with urban change, not only are we witnessing – for the most part, through digital forms – the increasing proliferation of multiple narratives of the same future event or development, but also a desire on the part of some advocates to demolish the narrative. evidence of these type of reactions are only starting to emerge in planning debates at the present time, but one can foresee their possible escalation in the future if planning is required to address certain agendas over others. that may mean, for example, at a meta level, addressing climate change emergencies over economic growth, or health and wellbeing issues rather than car dependency, or prioritising housing for migrants, to name but three issues – issues that have significant localised and planning implications and which cause emotive reactions. different sides in these debates have long fennia 199(2) (2021) 289mark tewdwr-jones used their own tactics to present their cases, employ their own evidence bases, and make strident attempts to win their arguments. but social media now enables those sides to accelerate both the means of their narratives and their questioning of opposing sides, and escalate their ideological stances. it is difficult to find any middle grounds here, and a space for compromise, because the stances are so deeply entrenched. and that may mean proponents are prepared to employ a battery of rhetorical devices and falsehoods to gain advantage in these debates, while encouraging possibly tens of thousands of others to side with their argument. at a micro level, we have already seen a tendency on the part of some developers and their architects to portray visual impressions of prospective new developments as something that may often be seen to be too glossy and attractive to be true. resultant developments may not be as treelined or green as was first showcased. the design of the buildings may not be as attractive as was first illustrated, if the developer reduces the design quality for cost saving purposes at some later date. the density and scale of a development may be more intense than had been shown to the public in an artist’s impression. all of which leads to the question whether this skewed portrayal of future urban change is a deliberate move on the part of some in the built environment to obfuscate the narrative and play down likely citizen concerns. more recently, advanced visualisation and graphic techniques are beginning to be harnessed both by local government and by active insurgent civil societies (miraftab 2009), in an attempt to get an accurate picture of possible urban change or challenge those in positions of power. this, in itself, is an interesting paradox. for all the moves towards the smart city and the internet of things, where the life and management of urban change can be analysed digitally, systemised, and visualised almost instantaneously, so too are we witnessing heightened interest and awareness on the public’s part of the processes of urban change, and the consequence of unbridled development, with a greater desire to not only become more involved with decision making, but to shape and control the narratives too. planning narratives and the need for authenticity when you relate all this to the use of narratives in planning, or consider narratives of planning, it becomes evident that extending the possibilities of narratives for better planning could well be accompanied by associated questions of accuracy, trust, legitimacy, and authenticity. it is this aspect of the ameel’s book that could be developed further by researchers in future. narratives are not only there to serve the office of the planner or the planning authority, or assist in some eventual and inevitable pathway to development. narratives can be employed by anyone with an opinion about place-change. and whereas traditional planning consultation may have plannerdefined legal and procedural parameters within which facts, rather than emotions, are considered and addressed, narratives told and repeated through social media platforms cannot be subject to procedural and institutional boundaries. by all means let us open up conversations about the city. employ methods and tactics for a larger constituency of interests to get involved directly in shaping their own places. find innovative ways to include and motivate so-called hard to reach and the voiceless groups in planning and democracy. but we must be prepared for interested parties to use whatever means they can to try to skew the debates and outcomes to their pre-existing beneficial agendas. and this begs some final questions: will planners have to pass judgement in assessing the relevance and legitimacy of different narratives promoted by different vested interests on the same set of issues? what skills sets will be needed by which different narratives and their stories are arbitrated, if those narratives are going to play a more prominent role in deciding cities’ future courses of action? and, more pertinently, are planners really the right people to perform such a role? references ameel, l. (2021) the narrative turn in urban planning: plotting the helsinki waterfront. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 290 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: book review batty, m. (2018) reinventing futures cities. mit press, cambridge ma. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11923.001.0001 beanland, c. (2021) unbuilt: radical visions of a future that never arrived. batsford, london. calvino, i. (1974) invisible cities. harcourt brace jovanovich, new york. dixon, t. & tewdwr-jones, m. (2021) urban futures: planning for city foresight and city visions. policy press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447330936.001.0001 flyvbjerg, b. (1998) rationality and power: democracy in practice. university of chicago press, chicago. marcuse, p. (1976) professional ethics and beyond: values in planning. journal of the american institute of planners 42(3) 264–276. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944367608977729 miraftab, f. (2009) insurgent planning: situating radical planning in the global south. planning theory 8(1) 32–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095208099297 scott, a. j. & roweis, s. t. (1977) urban planning in theory and practice: a reappraisal. environment and planning a 9(10) 1097–1119. https://doi.org/10.1068/a091097 throgmorton, j. a. (1996) planning as persuasive storytelling: the rhetorical construction of chicago’s electric future. university of chicago press, chicago. watkins, j. (2015) spatial imaginaries research in geography: synergies, tensions, and new directions. geography compass 9(9) 508–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12228 wilson, a. & tewdwr-jones, m. (2022) digital participatory planning: citizen engagement, democracy and design. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003190639 https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11923.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447330936.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1080/01944367608977729 https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095208099297 https://doi.org/10.1068/a091097 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12228 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003190639 the commons and emergent land in kvarken archipelago, finland: governing an expanding recreational resource urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa69022 doi: 10.11143/fennia.69022 the commons and emergent land in kvarken archipelago, finland: governing an expanding recreational resource kristina svels and ulrika åkerlund svels, k. & åkerlund, u. (2018) the commons and emergent land in kvarken archipelago, finland: governing an expanding recreational resource. fennia 196(2) 154–167. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69022 in this article, we explore governance structures of the recreational landscape of kvarken archipelago in western finland, an area where shore displacement occurs due to land rise and emergent (pristine) land is continuously created. traditionally a production landscape, of fishing and small-scale agriculture, the recreational value of the archipelago has been acknowledged. the area is a popular second home destination and was designated unesco world heritage in 2006. there are roughly 10,000 second homes within the study area, of which 14% are leaseholds located on emergent land. the emergent land thus makes up a common-pool resource system where private and collective use rights overlap. this article aims to understand the implications for recreational use (second home ownership) through interviews with different local stakeholders such as municipality planners, representatives of commons, local communities, and with environmental and land survey authorities. especially, it sets out to ask, what kinds of value are created within the recreational resource system, what power relationships within the commons steer the management of the recreational resource system, and what are the implications for recreational use of the landscape. the results show different logics of recreational resource management locally in the studied commons. access to second homes located within the collectively owned emergent land is limited to part-owners of the commons and tend to be less commercialized and also less modernized than privately owned second home plots. keywords: commons, emergent land, recreational resource system, reresourcing, post-productive landscape, second homes kristina svels, nordland research institute, 8049 bodø, norway. e-mail: ksv@ nforsk.no ulrika åkerlund, karlstad university, department of geography, media and communication, 651 88 karlstad, sweden. e-mail: ulrika.akerlund@kau.se introduction at the narrowest part of the gulf of bothnia between sweden and finland, scattered islands and skerries form a shallow archipelago off the coast of ostrobothnia county in finland. originating from glacial pressures during the latest ice age, the land rises continuously within this area creating large zones of emergent land, which is the reason for the area’s designation as unesco world heritage (wh) kvarken archipelago in 2006 (unesco 2006; svels 2011a). emergent land, also called accretion © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69022 fennia 196(2) (2018) 155kristina svels & ulrika åkerlund area, is the visible result of land elevation as former water areas are converted to solid land. the elevation rate within the study area is approximately 8–9 mm/year which due to the shallow sea level results in an annual land growth of roughly 1 km2 (jones 1977; svels 2017). visible traces of the land elevation are the natural creation of skerries and shifting shorelines, which causes the need for dredging waterways and moving harbors and berths outwards to the sea (jones 1969; bonn 1997). the emerging land areas constitute a growing resource for the local communities. since the great partition in the mid-18th century, the water areas including all emergent land have been collectively owned by local village commons (jones 1987). the recreational value in the archipelago was generally realized with the boom in second home construction, which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s when new second homes were primarily purpose-built rather than converted from other types of dwellings (jansson & müller 2003). emergent land, instead of being considered rather worthless, became a valuable resource as demand increased. kvarken archipelago is today an attractive second home area with approximately 10,000 second homes (svels 2011a). the greater part of second home plots is privately owned; however, the municipality planners estimate that about 14% of the stock are built on leasehold plots owned by the commons. in this article, we focus on the implications of commons as a management structure for the recreational landscape, and on the use of second homes in the area. kvarken archipelago makes up a complex multiple-unit and multiple-user resource system (edwards & steins 1999), attractive for a variety of users. in the archipelago, originally constituting a low-value agricultural and fishery resource (rautio & ilvessalo 1998), the commons are today able to draw a significant revenue stream from the recreational value, mainly through the leasing of second home plots. the second home owners have different opportunities to participate in decision-making regarding the resource system, depending on their ownership shares in the commons. as old traditions of common land use for hunting, fishing and agriculture encounter modern phenomena, such as second home tourism, the present governance structures are being challenged. as large local landowners, the commons have become important stakeholders in the local societies, able to control revenue from and access to emergent land. the aim of the article is to examine the operational structure of the kvarken archipelago commons concerning the expanding land resource, in order to build an understanding about their role as managers and controllers of the resource system. the research questions are the following: 1) what kinds of value are created within the recreational resource system?, 2) what power relationships within the commons steer the management of the recreational resource system?, and 3) what are the implications for recreational use of the landscape? to answer the first question, we describe how the commons have developed in the local context of a growing resource system and changing resource value recognition. the second question considers the collective-choice level of commons management and will elaborate on their differing dividend logics and how the value is realized and managed in the local society. the third question focuses on how power relationships affect the use of the resource system and subsequent implications for the recreational landscape. in the next section, we present the study area and the development of the archipelago from a low-value agricultural landscape to a valuable recreational resource system, followed by a discussion on the theoretical concepts of resource systems and common-pool property regimes. next, we explain the research methods, based on 17 semi-structured interviews with representatives of the commons, spatial planners, land survey representatives, environmental authorities and second home owners. the results then describe five commons in kvarken archipelago, the recreational value of the landscape, the commons’ role in society and the distribution of power within the studied commons. finally, we discuss the implications for the recreational landscape, finalized by our main conclusions. kvarken archipelago from production landscape to recreational resource the area constituting the kvarken archipelago at present day, was inhabited during the 11th century and was until the early 20th century dominated by traditional economic activities including fishing, hunting (seal), small-scale farming and forestry, trade and seafaring (rautio & ilvessalo 1998). the 156 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper value of the archipelago land resources was long considered less important than the mainland resources. however, during the 20th century an increase in the provision of new, non-traditional, rural goods and services, including tourism and second homes, diversified the local economy (svels 2011b). multifunctional landscapes where traditional modes of production have gradually shifted toward a focus on (recreational) amenities, economic diversification and environmental and cultural preservation have been described as ‘post-productive’ landscapes (mccarthy 2005; woods 2011; almstedt et al. 2014). this development is understood as ‘re-resourcing’ where the resource system’s value realisation moves from production value to aesthetic value (perkins 2006; overvåg 2010), that is from the extraction of natural resources to the recreational use of the landscape, such as viewing, hiking, and second home living. such activities have become increasingly commodified with the growth of tourism as a business (perkins 2006). this means that two types of value can be created in recreational resource systems: use value created for users (recreationists) from either free or commercialized recreation, and exchange value for producers. in the post-productive landscape of kvarken archipelago, new (high yield) exchange value of the resource is realized that was earlier low yield production value. this is driven by demand from recreationists (tourists and second home owners) and by producers (landowners/the commons) realizing a profit from the exchange value. in order to understand the importance of the growing recreational resource system in the local area, and the commons’ role in managing it, we frame this research from two points of departure. the first point is to understand the complexity of multiple-user/multiple-unit resource systems. in complex resource systems, multiple property regimes overlap, controlling users’ access and rights to resource units. furthermore, in such systems the rather fluid use of recreational resource units by temporary user groups adds to this complexity. the second point of departure relates to the management structure of the commons, and to their role as the local institutions of land use governance. the commons’ management structure relates to their role as locally embedded institutions, and as the organizations of collective action in the management of local resources. complex resource systems natural and built resources, for example land and water areas, game populations, production forests, roads, wells and irrigation constructions, are increasingly understood as existing within socialecological (resource) systems (ostrom 2009). resource systems are multi-layered, or mixed, as they comprise a variety of resource units (e.g. fish stocks, second home plots, waterways and viewing points), ownership types (private land owners, commons, municipalities) and users (commercial fishers, second home owners, visiting recreationists) (ostrom 1999; fennell 2011). the access and use rights of resources can be formal or informal and are controlled in property rights regimes (edwards & steins 1999). an efficient property rights regime has three basic characteristics: 1) exclusivity (costs and benefits related to ownership accrues to the owner), 2) transferability (freedom of exchange of property rights), and 3) enforceability (security from encroachment or seizure by non-owners). four general classes of resource units to which property rights are bound within a resource system are defined by carlsson (2008): 1) open access resources which are freely accessible for many users, 2) public or state resources where access is controlled by government bodies, 3) private resources where access is strictly exclusive, and 4) common-pool resources where access is shared within an exclusive group of users. within these classes exist also toll resource units where access is controlled through fees, for example entrance fees or lease agreements. most natural resource systems, such as complex systems of archipelagos, rivers or forests that contain several or all of the resource classes, are used by multiple user groups for extractive and/or non-extractive purposes, and are managed under a mixture of property regimes (edwards & steins 1999). naturally, the range of users or user groups perform varying degrees of interaction and influence over the economic and social coordination, management and governing of property and use rights in a complex resource system. therefore, a crucial resource management issue is balancing multiple interests. fennia 196(2) (2018) 157kristina svels & ulrika åkerlund even though the majority of research on resource systems consider regimes, where the main resource value is productive or for means of sustenance, such as timber extraction or water irrigation, almost all natural resource systems hold some level of recreational value. recreational resource systems are often mixed, meaning that several property regimes exist, and therefore external users (e.g. recreationists) may enter the resource system and utilize a wide variety of natural, sociocultural or built resource units. in the scandinavian countries, recreation is generally an open access resource, freely accessible for the public. the tourism sector relies on the collective control of the natural resource units while exploiting the tourism revenue stream privately (healy 1994; sandell & fredman 2010), through services and access to built resources or lease agreements. there are thus different producers and management systems involved in controlling the use and protection of recreational resource units (briassoulis 2002). external users may interfere with existing use rules, and they also influence the value recognition of resources. the commons play a significant role in sustainable tourism development, for example by stipulating environmental and moral ethics to delimit the overuse of resources (kaltenborn et al. 2001; holden 2005). common-pool property regimes common-pool property regimes (also referred to as the commons) represent a distinct form of resource governance as property and use rights are shared among a group of part-owners which can comprise physical or juridical persons (such as government and non-government organizations) with varying entitlements and decision-making power. common-pool resources are subtractable or rivalrous in their consumption, and excluding users is costly (mckean 2000). rules relating to the exclusivity, transferability and enforceability of the resource units are stipulated through either formal (juridical) or informal (traditional or customary) law. the commons’ management functions are in most aspects significantly self-organized and autonomous (ostrom 1990; hysing 2009). however, it has been noted that the state still holds a significant steering role through the legislation on management of the commons (ostrom 1990; ostrom et al. 1994; holmgren et al. 2010; lidestav et al. 2013). ostrom (1990) has identified three levels of management within commons: 1) the legislative or constitutional level regulated by the state, 2) the collective-choice level controlled through the commons’ stipulated by-laws or statutes, and 3) the operational level where decided rules and control functions are implemented. the commons are per definition collaborative institutions, however, due to overlapping property regimes and diverse part-owner communities, collective action situations are not always frictionless (edwards & steins 1999; sandström et al. 2013). collective action is encouraged through a group’s shared interests, and influenced by the size and productivity of the resource system (ostrom 2009), for example realized value, scarcity and accessibility of the resource units, and social and human capital within the part-owner community (lidestav et al. 2017). it is delimited by, for instance, the alienation of certain user groups, locked power relations and conflict situations (heinmiller 2009; sandström et al. 2013). as revenue may be created through the extraction or external consumption of resource units, the management problem of the commons is thus not only to sustain and protect the resources but also to manage and distribute profits fairly to the part-owner community (mckean 2000; lidestav et al. 2013). it has been noted that, especially when it comes to complex natural resource systems, the commons’ goals are sometimes not only to contribute to the welfare of their own part-owner community but to participate in local development more broadly (lidestav et al. 2013, 2017). a challenge is therefore to adapt the commons’ functions and regulatory framework to changing circumstances (dietz et al. 2003). one of the problems is path dependency, where assets are locked up and power distribution concentrated, due to for example vested interests of certain part-owners, especially if combined with a strong hierarchy or concentration of power. approaching the kvarken archipelago commons the study focuses geographically on five commons situated within the wh area: sundom commons (city of vaasa), överand yttermalax commons (malax municipality), molpe village commons (korsnäs 158 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper municipality), björkö commons (korsholm municipality) and maxmo archipelago commons (vörå municipality). they are historically connected with villages and fishery areas in the region, and together they own more than half of the water areas within the wh kvarken archipelago. we used qualitative research methods in data collection and analysis. the data is collected through semi-structured interviews conducted between october 2014 and february 2015. we used a purposive sampling approach, identifying respondents by theoretical and snowball sampling techniques (hennik et al. 2011). in total, 17 interviews were conducted. the aim was to obtain a holistic picture of land rise effects, resource management and use, overlapping property regimes and governance structures present in the area. therefore, the interview cluster included not only representatives of the studied commons (5 interviews) but also municipality (5 interviews) and regional planners (1 interview), land survey and environmental authorities and associations (4 interviews) and second home leaseholders (2 interviews). the respondents chose to participate alone or together with colleagues or partners to combine their areas of expertise. of the municipality planners three out of five participated as a group (2–5 people), likewise the regional planners and environmental authority (2–3 people). one common organization chose to be represented by the whole executive committee (5 people) and the others only by their chairman. one second home leaseholder participated alone, the other was joined during the interview by the spouse. interviewing in groups can be risky if interviewees are uncomfortable to give their opinions openly within the group. on the other hand, interviewees can help each other to give fuller answers as they discuss issues together. during these interviews, we did not detect any discomfort between the participants in the group interviews, as the group formation was on their own initiative, and they all knew each other beforehand. to understand in what ways the archipelago resource system, and the emergent land resource in particular, is used and managed, all respondents were asked questions regarding their perception of land rise effects, their interests in the resource system, and their perception of the commons’ role as local institutions. however, as the respondents represent different areas of expertise, specific sets of questions were asked. to the representatives of the commons queries covered their operational functions, management principles, revenue management and their perceptions of their own role in society. municipality and regional planners, and environmental authorities and associations answered questions regarding shore planning, environmental effects of land rise and of resource use, strategic visions and the significance of the archipelago as a recreational landscape. the land survey representatives answered questions regarding land rise and property law, partitions and transfer of property rights, and mapping procedures in the archipelago. the second home owners answered questions regarding their access to emergent land and what use rights they enjoy, as well as questions regarding their decision-making power when it comes to the common-pool resource (svels & åkerlund 2018). the interviews with planners and authorities can be described as expert interviews conducted to build an understanding about the legal and regulatory framework, whereas the interviews with representatives of the commons and second home owners are perception oriented and aim to build an understanding of the experiences and opinions of the stakeholders. the interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours, and have all been transcribed. in addition to the interviews, written documents have complemented the empirical material. this includes the constitutionalized statutes (by-laws) of all five commons, and the law of the commons (finsk författningssamling 1989). the interview transcripts have been analyzed through a qualitative thematic analysis (braun & clarke 2006), thus repeated patterns of meaning were sought within the interview data set. thematic analysis is inherently flexible, and strongly characterized by the theoretical position within which it is situated. this makes the approach well suited for research aiming to contextualize the identified patterns within the data, while it also acknowledges the active role of the researcher in developing themes (braun & clarke 2006). through several coding sequences, the raw interview data were classified into loose categories and subsequently developed into three main themes; 1) resource value recognition – how stakeholders perceived the resource system to be of material and symbolic value to them, and how it could be valued in monetary revenue, 2) operational and democratic structures of the commons institutions – including, among others, voting procedures, concentration of power and fennia 196(2) (2018) 159kristina svels & ulrika åkerlund human and social capital, and 3) the commons as significant local institutions – their role in local resource management. the kvarken archipelago commons – managers of local recreational resource after the great partition and subsequent redistributions of land in the 1920s, the water areas, including grazing meadows, shore areas and islets, remained in collective ownership and commons organizations were established (fig. 1). emergent land continuously accrues to the common-pool resource stock, increasing its size yearly in the kvarken archipelago. the part-owner communities of the studied commons (table 1) include juridical (e.g. municipalities and ngos) and private persons. part-ownership is based on the ownership of private land properties in the villages and scaled according to hide (in swedish mantal): the old measure for taxation of land the commons and emergent land in kvarken archipelago, finland: governing an expanding recreational resource figure 1. the world heritage municipalities and the studied commons (svels & åkerlund, 2018) figure 1. the world heritage municipalities and the studied commons (svels & åkerlund 2018). 160 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper properties (jones 1987). shares are thus formally tied to the size of land parcels, and normally passed in inheritance to following generations. membership can, technically, be acquired through purchasing a land property with tied shares. however, there is a reluctance to divest shares in this manner and they are now largely separated from the land properties. individuals with no previous family connections to the village thus have very limited means of acquiring membership in the commons. there was originally little state intervention into the ways the commons managed themselves and how they developed organically depending on local contextual factors, for example composition of part-owners, size of the resource system and means of livelihood. in 1940, the management of the commons were regulated in finnish law, and subsequently developed into the law of the commons (finsk författningssamling 1989), which lays down general rules for decision-making, transfer of property rights, distribution of dividends and other management issues. the larger commons adopted statutes (by-laws) as stipulated in the law and became constitutionalized. a difference can be noticed regarding the official constitution of the commons. malax, björkö, maxmo and molpe are all fairly ‘new’ commons, registered according to the 1989 law of the commons whereas the statutes of sundom commons are still based on the legal text from 1940. realizing the recreational value the post-productivist era on the finnish coast since the 1970s is characterized by the utilization of natural resources being determined by values, aspirations and powers related to leisure, tourism and nature conservation (salmi 2018). the kvarken archipelago area begun to be commodified in the 1960s and 1970s when second home construction boomed, and the rural areas in immediate connection to the city of vaasa started to experience a population increase. acquiring second homes in the archipelago became popular among the urban and suburban population. however, as environmental preservation and shoreline protection measures have delimited the amount of building permits and land rise effects create the continuous need for dredging, demand has remained higher than supply. second home plots in the more popular areas now have a relatively high exchange value. this means that exchange value is also realized as monetary profit for the commons, creating a significant revenue stream: in a way we view it [the second home settlement] perhaps positively since the village lives up during the summer. a lot of people around and securing business and so on, that can be useful during the winter season. (molpe commons’ representative) being able to fully acquire the land is highly desired by leaseholders, however second home plots are very rarely divested from the common-pool property regime: sometimes, in some divestment in the archipelago the land owner above the emergent land has been able to acquire it. but they [the commons] do not sell otherwise. not happily i’d say. it’s their goldmine after all. (second home owner, sundom) the main form of revenue realized for the part-owners of the commons arises through leasing contracts, and in a few instances state compensation for production losses in relation to the environmental protection programs and private land redemptions. some commons also engage in offering recreational services, for example malax commons own a number of purpose-built cottages in the archipelago, which are rented on short term contracts. in björkö for some years, the commons björkö maxmo molpe sundom malax total areal, ha 26,513 24,530 13,210 21,591 47,049 water areal 20,206 18,600 8,600 15,585 20,410 part-owners in common 638 2,850 960 1,320 4,742 table 1. areal and number of part-owners in the studied commons. fennia 196(2) (2018) 161kristina svels & ulrika åkerlund have been running tourism development projects on their premises, for example public parking spaces and an exhibition center. thus, even though the number of second home lease plots are limited, the overall value of the resource system increases yearly. the commons’ role in local society much previous research on commons regard the governance of limited extractive resource units, such as game populations or water irrigation systems, where a primary management issue is sustainability and delimiting overuse. in kvarken archipelago, the resource system is growing and the use value is primarily recreational. therefore, management issues do not revolve around use rules, but rather preserving the recreational value, and distributing profits in the best interest of partowners. as significant local resource management institutions, the commons’ dividends logics become of interest also for the wider community. according to statutes, revenue is to be used in the best interest for the commons and the part-owners. this is interpreted differently in the studied commons. three logics are noted: for the best of 1) the community, 2) the resource system, and 3) the part-owners. the first logic follows the idea that as the commons are constituted through the villages, the best of the community means the village and the local community. molpe village commons is the most striking example in this respect. dividends are used for the benefit of the village in a broad sense, for example to renovate road lighting, bicycle paths and village assembly halls, also where located outside of the common properties. the operation in its whole is inclusive, as benefits also consider non-owners. it’s about traditions… commons are [...] a village community and you know that in old documents the commons is the village, that’s the way they have interpreted it [...] we have invested in the village. we have agreed on spending it on the community. (molpe commons’ representative) also, björköby commons adopt a village-perspective in their operation, although in björkö shares have very rarely been divested, and most residents of the village are also part-owners. to protect the village and to make sure the emerging land belongs to the people in björkö, that has been an important thing. [...] the second home owners are mostly locals from björkö village. [...] well, yes, there are a few from outside the village but they still have a connection to björkö and they have obtained the second home leases through inheritance. (björköby commons’ representative) a generally more applied logic, the second one, sees to the best for the resource system itself, and for preserving the recreational value of the resource system. this could include environmental protection measures such as keeping the archipelago clean. however, more often it has got to do with ensuring access to the archipelago for its users. dividends are distributed to organizations and actors engaged with management or maintenance of the resource system, such as compensation to boat clubs for upkeep of waterways and marinas, renovation of piers and other infrastructure in the archipelago and to fishing guilds for managing the fish stock. normally the grants are distributed yearly after organizations have applied for compensation. the leases give money. after that, the general assembly decides on what to do. you can apply for contributions. [...] yes, most often we try to steer the use of the dividends towards the archipelago. the navigation club gets a contribution. they take care of marking the waterways. [...] sometimes we have paid half the dredging of areas where there are a few second home owners so they have free waterway access to their second homes. they have to make an application to the general assembly. (malax commons’ representative) the third logic, protecting the best interest of part-owners, is central for all studied commons, however, less adopted as the main institutional goal. sundom stands out as the only common, which pays dividends to individual part-owners as cash payment on a regular basis, proportional to their size of shares. sundom archipelago is an attractive part of the area, not least among recreationists and second home owners. within the common, there are approximately 460 second home leaseholds, which is slightly more than the other four commons own combined. sundom also charges the highest prices for leaseholds, 420 € (in 2014–2015), to be compared with the range of 100–160 € in the other studied commons. sundom commons have thus secured a large and steady stream of revenue. this 162 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper approach may be described as a ‘business-logic’ where the recreational value of the resource system is turned into personal profit for part-owners. our duty [as the part-owners’ representatives] is to make sure the part-owners interests in sundom are taken into account, and to manage the part-owners property in sundom in the best way. that is the foundation. (sundom commons’ representative) the management logics of the kvarken archipelago commons thus make them rather different local institutions, even though their organization and statutes are very similar. this difference rather lies in the interpretation of statutes and is grounded in the traditional view of property rights and community. the first and second logics are based on a more “social democratic” idea where the community’s (partowners) goal is to maintain the use values of the resource system. the realized exchange values are returned for upkeep of the landscape, either the village as a whole, or more directly to the commons’ part-owners when directed to their use value of the archipelago. the resource system’s use value is in focus (logic 2) or is viewed as embedded in the wider community resources (logic 1). meanwhile, the third logic represents a business-approach, which is similar to a holdings company where large shareholders make personal profit on the realized exchange values. according to this logic (logic 3), the resource system is viewed more from a production point of view (creating exchange value) than from a use value point of view, and community is understood as the part-owner community exclusively. the exchange value realization drawn from second home leases play a significant role in the interpretation of dividends logics. whereas the revenue stream is large in sundom commons, and the cash payments can be quite significant, this is not the case in the other studied commons: you can say it’s impossible. the sums are so small, there’s not enough money to go around. it could be that someone gets 10 euros and some get 50 cent. it’s unnecessary. [...] there’s rather large costs for maintenance too. we have marinas that need maintenance and waterways that need dredging. (malax commons’ representative) keeping the temptation of cash payment at a minimum can even be a strategy to ensure a more inclusive use of dividends, by keeping the prices of leaseholds low and focusing on continuous maintenance of the resource system: if you keep the cash box at such a low level, try to spend money continuously so that you know that… [...] then you can stress that we need a little margin, we want to do it for the community. (molpe commons’ representative) the distribution of power the shares provide the basis of power distribution in the part-owner community. most decisions are taken through voting procedures at the general assembly (ga). in the matter of routine management issues, decisions are normally taken at a per capita vote. for issues of importance, for example election of executive committee, distribution of dividends or special leasehold agreements, voting is executed by a proportional register. the electoral register is scaled to the individual sizes of shares meaning that small-scale owners hold an inferior position. whereas in some of the studied commons the distribution of shares is rather even, the situation is not the same in all. sundom commons is an example of the latter, where uneven power distribution and the common’s revenue management logic have created a strong local elite. well, you vote according to your share in the common. you have a certain weight to your vote due to your share. so, there are really only a few people who steer the commons, because there are some with enormous amount of shares, and often they are the ones in the executive committee. (second home owner and part-owner, sundom) this dominating group consists of individuals who own large forest parcels with tied shares adjacent to the village. early institutional decisions laid down the present rules for voting, giving the larger shareholders an advantage in decision-making. furthermore, as revenue refunds are scaled to share sizes, the interests of the local elite group in terms of changing the voting system as well as revenue management are vested. fennia 196(2) (2018) 163kristina svels & ulrika åkerlund most often when they sell [property] they exclude shares in the commons and keep them to themselves. [...]. shares [in the commons] have become commodity. (sundom common representative) the superiority of large shareholders is further strengthened by a concentration of human and social capital comprising social resources needed to support development, such as networks, trust, reciprocity, exchanges, and levels of knowledge and skills among shareholders. in a broad sense, knowledge regarding the commons is poor among the public. the ga’s are usually attended by a fraction of the part-owners, notably by those with a higher level of knowledge, and holding a larger part of shares. older landowner generations are aware and informed about its history and meaning and their rights to the common-pool resource. younger generations, if not landowners themselves, are quite unaware of this institution and the way the archipelago resource system is managed in finland. there are part-owners who understand this [how the commons’ institution works]. it has been discussed to arrange some kind of seminars and to educate people. i think that would benefit everyone. (sundom commons representative) the management regime structure, for instance dividends logic, property rights, transfers and managerial procedures such as voting, is fairly unknown even within the part-owner community. this means that conflicts arise and sometimes become rather infected when part-owners feel they have been wronged or marginalized, and that likelihood of changes are unlikely as individuals do not understand how they could engage to bring changes about. implications for the recreational landscape altogether, in the studied commons, there are just over 860 second home plots on leasehold, normally sized 2,000 m2. the lease prices vary between the commons, ranging from 100 to 420 € per annum. the building itself is usually privately owned by the second home owner, whereas the leasehold plot is contracted. principally, leases are only available for part-owners in the common, however some commons accept exemptions if no part-owners are willing to rent the plot. in björkö non-members of the commons are allowed to lease a plot for a higher price than the part-owners. thus, the commons’ leasehold plots form pockets of exclusive property rights regimes in the popular and otherwise open access second home landscape of kvarken archipelago. plots on common-pool property are ensured for the locals who have been resident in the area for many generations, effectively excluding “outsiders” and new inhabitants. the leasehold contracts are designed as regulated in the statutes, and regulate the leaseholders’ rights to the property primarily in three ways: contract length, transfer rights and management of the plot. the length of leasehold contracts is normally 5 years, in seldom cases up to 30 years. the reason for adopting shorter contracts can be traced to the law of the commons (finsk författningssamling 1989, § 15) stating that renewing contracts longer than five years need a ga consent, which would make the process complicated. normally, the renewal process is automatic given that the leaseholder is not guilty of serious neglect or disturbance. however, the short time span of contracts is inconvenient for the second home owner as bank loans and building permissions are usually not permissible for such short contracts. this can have restrictive consequences when it comes to the upkeep of the property, especially in the case of larger renovation projects. in the case of transferring a leasehold contract to another person, the right to make decisions is entirely held by the commons. transferring within the family through inheritance is normally not a difficult issue, given that the heir is a part-owner. when a second home is sold to a third party, the ga hold the right to approve the new leaseholder. as a general rule, the buyer must own shares in the commons to be eligible for transfer of leaseholder rights, and subsequently for purchasing the private second home. we have our summer house here that we can rent to our friends if we can’t find the time to get out there ourselves. we lease it but rent it out. but if we want to sell it to the people who have been using it for ten years, the commons can say that ‘these people cannot buy’. (second home owner, sundom) 164 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper in effect, this means that the second home owners, in principle, are not allowed to sell private property (the building itself) to anyone not approved by the ga, ensuring that leasehold plots are kept within the exclusive group of part-owners. for the second home owner, it could delimit the chances of selling the property to its ‘normal’ market value, as the number of potential buyers is decreased. in this way, the commons’ second home leaseholds rectify the commercialization of the second home landscape. the leaseholders are obliged to maintain the second home property in good condition during their lease. within most commons, the conduct of eliminating vegetation is free upon the leaseholders’ judgement; in others, the conduct is strictly controlled, and the leaseholder needs to ask permission even for rather small alterations. the same control conduct is due in dredging operations although this is anchored in legal matters. the decision of dredging is legally taken by the property owners, in these cases the commons. the reason for dredging as well as where to place the sediment have to be decided by the commons together with the leaseholders. the work leaseholders invest in developing the second home property are not necessarily reduced from the yearly leasing fee or refunded when selling the second home leasehold property. these rights and obligations of second home leaseholders have left some subtle, yet visible traces in the second home landscape. second homes leaseholds tend to be simpler constructions due to the practical implications of short contract length and bureaucratic procedures prior to maintaining the plot. leaseholds are also due to their ownership status guaranteed to stay as second homes, whereas it is now in kvarken archipelago, as in other attractive second home areas, rather popular to transform second homes into permanent year-round dwellings. conclusions the commons in kvarken archipelago manage a growing natural resource system consisting of a former low value agricultural and fishing/hunting resource. this archipelago has transformed into a recreational landscape where second home living and leisure boating are important activities for locals and visitors alike. through re-resourcing (perkins 2006; overvåg 2010) use values for recreationists and exchange value for the commons, who are able to draw revenue by leasing second home plots, are now realized from the resource system. this makes the kvarken archipelago a good example of a post-productive recreational landscape (almstedt et al. 2014). the results also exemplify the complexity of natural resource systems, where values are mixed and different user groups draw from the resource units simultaneously (rannikko & salmi 2017): leisure and commercial fishing is underway while permanent dwellers, second home owners, tourists and even large transport ferries use the archipelago landscape on a daily basis. as demonstrated above, when a diverse number of actors and institutions are involved in land use, decision-making and management becomes complex (markey et al. 2008). therefore, the power relations and decisionmaking procedures within the commons become of interest in order to understand implications for recreation in the resource system. the commons are, per definition, collective organizations where the part-owners jointly make decisions at the ga. however, each part-owner’s vote is scaled according to the sizes of shares in the commons, and the distribution of shares are tied to the old measure of mantal which in turn is tied to the old production values of the natural resources. with mantal as the basis, the large producers of exchange value hold the largest shares and thus the greatest decision-making powers in the commons. in this way, a large amount of shares does not necessarily equal a long-term use and interest in the water resources as such. however, with the changing value realization in the archipelago, the forest owners have also become managers of the water resource. the results of this study exemplify how an institutional path based in a historical setting creates conditions for resource management in the post-productive landscape. originally, the management issue revolved around maintaining opportunities for meagre agriculture, fishing and hunting activities. today, a differing view on which type of values should be maintained and differing views on the commons’ roles as local institutions are what have created the three logics of dividends distribution. the distribution logics are not exclusive, and more examples might be identified with further research of other commons. fennia 196(2) (2018) 165kristina svels & ulrika åkerlund with use values in focus, especially recreational use of the archipelago, combined with a view of the commons as managers of the resources and village association, logics 1 and 2 (best for the resource system and best for the village) are adopted and revenue is used for maintenance of the natural resources, upkeep of built infrastructure and village development. it is a rather inclusive view as it benefits many users, also ones who are not part-owners in the commons. when, on the other hand, exchange values become a focal point and the main concern is to see to the best of the exclusive partowner community, the adopted logic may become more “business-oriented” and personal profit interests are secured besides maintenance of the resource base. this does not necessarily imply that personal profit is secured at the expense of maintenance or other activities. however, if the interests of a strong local elite becomes vested and the organization’s decision-making procedures are locked in its historical path, there is risk of personal gain and conflictual situations. when it comes to implications for the recreational landscape, we draw the conclusion that the view upon recreation as either an open access or a commercial activity corresponds loosely to the different logics discussed above. however, as the resource system is mixed and contains multiple resource units and multiple types of users, it can also be claimed that both activities may occur simultaneously within the resource system. the common-pool resource, here the second home leasehold plots, is though a resource unit that in all studied commons is maintained more exclusively for the use of the commons’ part-owner community. as such the second homes become, as stated above, “pockets” where exclusive use rights exist within the otherwise open access regime in the archipelago. visibly, due to the collective decision-making procedures, the collectively owned second home leasehold plots tend to differ slightly from the general privately owned second home plots. whereas the second home landscape in kvarken archipelago has undergone similar changes as in other attractive natural landscapes in finland, such as upgraded modernized standard (electricity, hot water, water closets, winter insulation etc.) and transformation into permanent dwellings, the second home leaseholds tend to be less often renovated and maintained due to the short-term lease contracts and the need to ground plot maintenance with the ga. while research on the commons is now a rigid body of literature, few studies have focused on common management of recreational resource systems. this paper has added to the literature by bringing together commons research and recreational resources with the rather modern phenomenon of second home living. the changes which have recently occurred in society combined with the longterm changes in the landscape have in turn changed the commons’ prerequisites to manage the resource. the recently recognized opportunity to create a steady inflow of revenue from recreational activities on emergent land has altered the commons’ raison d´etre. the fact that the recreational resource is continuously growing further increases this opportunity. therefore, a longer-term study would be useful to shed light on the process of adaptation. acknowledgements we thank all respondents for sharing their knowledge and experience of second home living and the commons’ management systems in kvarken archipelago, finland. references almstedt, å ., brouder, p., karlsson, s. & lundmark, l. (2014) beyond post-productivism: from rural polic y discourse to rural diversit y. european countr yside 6(4) 297–306. https://doi. org/10.2478/euco-2014-0016 bonn, c. (1997) landhöjning i kvarken. kvarkenskustens pilotprojekt [land elevation in kvarken: the kvarken coast pilot project]. österbottens förbund, vasa. braun, v. & clarke, v. (2006) using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology 3(2) 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa briassoulis, h. (2002) sustainable tourism and the question of the commons. annals of tourism research 29(4) 1065–1085. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(02)00021-x carlsson. l. (2008) omstridd natur i teori och praktik [contested nature in theory and practice]. in sandström, c., hovik, s. & falleth, e. i. (eds.) omstridd natur: trender och utmaningar i nordisk https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2014-0016 https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2014-0016 https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(02)00021-x 166 fennia 196(2) (2018)research paper naturförvaltning [contested nature: trends and challenges in nordic nature management], 33–59. boréa bokförlag, umeå. dietz, t., ostrom, e. & stern, p. c. (2003) the struggle to govern the commons. science 302 1907–1912. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1091015 edwards, v. m. & steins, n. a. (1999) a framework for analysing contextual factors in common pool resource research. journal of environmental policy and planning 1(3) 205–221. https://doi. org/10.1080/714038536 fennell, l. a. (2011) ostrom’s law: property rights in the commons. international journal of the commons 5(1) 9–27. https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.252 finsk författningssamling (1989) law of the commons 18.8.1989/758. healy, r. g. (1994) the “common pool” problem in tourism landscapes. annals of tourism research 21(3) 596–611. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(94)90122-8 heinmiller, t. (2009) path dependency and collective action in common pool governance. international journal of the commons 3(1) 131–147. https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.79 hennik, m., hutter, i. & bailey, a. (2011) qualitative research methods. sage, london. holden, a. (2005) achieving a sustainable relationship between common pool resources and tourism. journal of sustainable tourism 13(4) 339–352. https://doi. org/10.1080/09669580508668561 holmgren, e., keskitalo, c. e. h. & lidestav, g. (2010) swedish forest commons – a matter of governance? forest policy and economics 12(6) 423–431. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. forpol.2010.05.001 hysing, e. (2009) statslös samhällsstyrning? governance i svensk skogspolitik [stateless social governance? governance in swedish forest politics]. in hedlund g. & montin s. (eds.) governance på svenska [governance in swedish], 107–127. santérus academic press, stockholm. jansson, b. & müller, d. k. (2003) fritidsboende i kvarken [recreational dwellings in kvarken]. kvarkenrådet, umeå. jones, m. (1969) landhöjningen i vasatrakten [land elevation in the vasa area]. nordenskiöldsamfundets tidskrift 29 89–99. jones, m. (1977) finland, daughter of the sea. archon books, chatham. jones, m. (1987) landhöjning, jordägoförhållanden och kulturlandskap i maxmo [land rise, land property conditions and cultural landscape in maxmo]. doctoral thesis. societas scientarium fennica, helsingfors. kaltenborn, b. p., haaland, h. & sandell, k. (2001) the public right of access: some challenges to sustainable tourism development in scandinavia. journal of sustainable tourism 9(5) 417–433. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669580108667412 lidestav, g., poudyal, m., holmgren, e. & keskitalo, c. h. (2013) shareholder perceptions of individual and common benefits in swedish forest commons. international journal of the commons 7(1) 164– 182. https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.323 lidestav, g., bogataj, n., gatto, p., lawrence, a., stjernström, o. & wong, j. (2017) forests in common and their contribution to local development. in keskitalo, c. e. h. (ed.) globalisation and change in forest ownership and forest use: natural resource management in transition, 261–302. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. markey, s., halseth, g. & manson, d. (2008) challenging the inevitability of rural decline: advancing the policy of place in northern british columbia. journal of rural studies 24(4) 409–421. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.03.012 mckean, m. (2000) common property: what is it, what is it good for, and what makes it work. in gibson, c. c., mckean, m. & ostrom e. (eds.) people and forests: communities, institutions and governance, 27–55. massachusetts institute of technology, cambridge. mccarthy, j. (2005) rural geography: multifunctional rural geographies – reactionary or radical? progress in human geography 29(6) 773–782. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph584pr ostrom, e. (1990) governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511807763 ostrom, e. (1999) private and common property rights. in bouckaert b. & de geest, g. (eds.) encyclopedia of law and economics, 332–379. edwar elgar. <http://encyclo.findlaw.com/index.html> ostrom, e. (2009) a general framework for analysing sustainability of social-ecological systems. science 325(5939) 419–422. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1172133 ostrom, e., gardner, r. & walker, j. (1994) rules, games and common-pool resources. university of michigan press, ann arbor, mi. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9739 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1091015 https://doi.org/10.1080/714038536 https://doi.org/10.1080/714038536 https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.252 https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(94)90122-8 https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.79 https://doi.org/10.1080/09669580508668561 https://doi.org/10.1080/09669580508668561 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2010.05.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2010.05.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/09669580108667412 https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.323 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.03.012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.03.012 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph584pr https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511807763 http://encyclo.findlaw.com/index.html https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1172133 https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9739 fennia 196(2) (2018) 167kristina svels & ulrika åkerlund overvåg, k. (2010) second homes and maximum yield in marginal land: the re-resourcing of rural land in norway. european urban and regional studies 17(1) 3–16. https://doi. org/10.1177/0969776409350690 perkins, h. c. (2006) commodification: re-resourcing rural areas. in cloke, p., marsden, t., & mooney, p. (eds.) handbook of rural studies, 243–257. sage publications ltd, london. rannikko, p. & salmi, p. (2017) towards neo-productivism? – finnish paths in the use of forest and sea. sociologia ruralis 58(3) 625–643. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12195 rautio, l. m. & ilvessalo, h. (1998) miljöns tillstånd i västra finland [the state of the environment in west finland]. västra finlands miljöcentral, österbottens förbund and etelä-pohjanmaan liitto, seinäjoki. salmi, p. (2018) post-productivist transformation as a challenge for small-scale fisheries: changing preconditions and adaptation strategies in the finnish archipelago sea region. regional studies in marine science 21 67–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsma.2017.08.016 sandell, k. & fredman, p. (2010) the right of public access: opportunity of obstacle for nature tourism in sweden? scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 10(3) 291–309. https://doi.org/10.1080 /15022250.2010.502366 sandström, c., wennberg digasper, s. & öhman, k. (2013) conflict resolution through ecosystembased management: the case of swedish moose management. international journal of the commons 7(2) 549–570. https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.349 svels, k. (2011a) maccannell revisited in kvarken archipelago, finland. journal of tourism and cultural change 9(3) 259–269. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2011.620124 svels, k. (2011b) världsarv, landsbygdsomvandling och turism: stenar som ruralt kapital [world heritage, rural transformation and tourism: stones as rural capital]. licentiate’s thesis. åbo akademi university, vaasa. svels, k. (2017) world heritage governance and tourism development: a study of public participation and contested ambitions in the world heritage kvarken archipelago. doctoral thesis. åbo akademi university, vaasa. http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/134803/svels_kristina. pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y svels, k. & åkerlund, u. (2018) second homes and the commons: terms for second home leaseholds and collective action in kvarken archipelago, finland. in hall, m. & müller, d. m. (eds.) routledge handbook for second home tourism and mobilities, 39–51. routledge, london. unesco world heritage centre (2006) 30com 8b.27 – extension of properties inscribed on the world heritage list (kvarken archipelago/high coast). <http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/996> 1.9.2017. woods, m. (2011) rural. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776409350690 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776409350690 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12195 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsma.2017.08.016 https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2010.502366 https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2010.502366 https://doi.org/10.18352/ijc.349 https://doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2011.620124 http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/134803/svels_kristina.pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/134803/svels_kristina.pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y http://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/996 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa4445 economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper industry − a case study esa hämäläinen hämäläinen, esa (2011). economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper industry − a case study. fennia 189: 2, pp. 63–75. helsinki. issn 00150010. the main purpose of this paper is to reveal the finnish paper industry from the economic geographic perspectives. there have been many mill and machine line closures especially in finland after 2001. therefore, it is interesting to research the development of manufacturing and transportation costs and paper prices during 2001−2008 in a large case mill. the research tradition of economic geography concerning the paper industry is scanty in the nordic countries, and not many discussions have been published. this paper attempts to narrow the gap between theoretical and empirical discussions concerning the paper industry. the empirical data is obtained from one large integrated mill, and the research data covers cost components from the years 2001–2008. the results show that the economic performance has lowered clearly in the case mill. an interesting finding was that in overseas distant deliveries, transit costs can even decrease due to inexpensive sea transportation and paper prices slightly increase, probably due to lowered competition in the exported paper qualities. although the mill data has been examined in detail, it only covers one large paper mill with several machine lines. therefore, the results can only be generalized to some extent to other export-dependent paper industries operating in peripheral areas with minimal local demand. our study shows that the empiric methods of economic geography offer interesting views highlighting such spatial heterogeneities in the paper industry. the industry’s location affects competition through transit costs, and this topic should be included more in location and economic studies. keywords: economic geography, paper industry, performance, transportation, costs esa hämäläinen, department of geography and geology, fi-20014 university of turku, finland. e-mail: esa.hamalainen@utu.fi introduction since 2002, finnish paper mills have been facing particularly challenging times concerning their existence and operation. the paper companies have closed over 20 machine lines, including several paper mills (oinonen 2008; tappi 2008; hetemäki & hänninen 2009). during the past few years, the economic situation in the finnish paper industry has been affected by lowering demand (forestindustries 2009). the purpose of this empirical case study is to examine in detail the performance and the development of a finnish paper mill through economic variables during the past years. it is described how a paper mill’s economic factors, like transport costs, behave in a spatial context and how these factors influence the mill’s gross margin. this survey, from the viewpoint of the case mill, may help us to better understand the economical transformation in the finnish paper industry. the topic of this study, the paper industry, has been examined marginally in finland from the perspectives of both economy and geography together. under these disciplines, researchers have published few papers in nordic research journals (see e.g. lähtinen 2007; arlbjørn et al. 2008; koskinen 2009). hämäläinen and tapaninen (2008) found that transportation costs increase in the spatial context in the european market. later, 64 fennia 189: 2 (2011)esa hämäläinen hämäläinen and tapaninen (2010) showed that there are big monthly variations in paper deliveries at the country as well as the customer level. these variations in customer deliveries are probably one reason for the long and costly warehousing times, which koskinen and hilmola (2008) and koskinen (2009) presented in their papers. basically, the finnish paper industry was derived and developed because of many competitive advantages (see e.g. diesen 1998; dieter & englert 2007): the availability of reasonable priced fiber; inexpensive hydro energy; large, modern and efficient paper machines; skilled personnel; and growing demand in the main markets until the late 20th century. the value of forest products was approximately half of the total export in 1995, and in 2008 it was still around 18% (forest industries 2009). in many rural areas of finland, a local paper mill is the only significant employer in the community. finland is a member of the eu monetary union, and forslid et al. (2002) stress that a common worry in the nordic region is that economic integration may lead to the loss of industries and jobs in the peripheral regions (see also krugman 1991). therefore, it is interesting to study the paper industry from empirical and economic geographical perspectives. the subject is novel and it is particularly concerned with paper mills operating in peripheral areas with minimal local demand. the main research objectives are: • to study the characteristics of the home market and export market through delivered tons and profits; • to examine the development of economic performance in euro per machine hour; • to examine the development of paper prices, manufacturing costs and transit costs; and • to study the correlation between transportation costs vs. gross margin in an example european market. in this study, the main economic geographical research topic, transportation, is understood as a process in which the packed paper rolls are transmitted from the mill warehouse to the customers with common transportation means. the key economic variables are paper prices, variable and fixed costs and especially transportation costs. the transportation costs include all functions from the mill to the end consignees. the variable costs include timber, fiber, chemicals, energy, and logistics costs during the manufacturing process (including packaging costs). all the costs and prices and their correlations are calculated at the country level to explore the interesting economic geographic differences. gross margin is the margin remaining when transportation, variable and fixed costs are subtracted from sales prices. the structure of the paper is as follows: theories of economic geography, which contributed to the ideas in this study, are presented in section 2. in section 3, a closer look at the paper mill’s valueadded functions is taken. the used case study methods, the origin of the data, the data mining and methods are described in section 4. the detailed results, which are based on empirical data analysis, are presented in section 5. discussion and conclusions are summed up in section 6, and finally, in section 7, some future research topics are introduced concerning the paper industry in the nordic countries. theoretical background economic geography as a research method in this section, economic geography is briefly reviewed from two interesting and relatively novel angles: traditional economic geography and new economic geography (neg). both of these research perspectives have contributed to the ideas in this paper. generally, the term “economic geography” refers to the study of economic activities from a geographical viewpoint (martin 1999; scott 2004, 2006). the discipline studies where economic industrial activities are located and why they are located in those areas. economic geographers generally use multidisciplinary methods, like mathematics and statistics, in order to better understand the processes found locally and globally. ever since weber (1909/1929), there has been a permanent interest in the transportation aspects of the location problem of the firm; transportation facilities are considered a major location factor, and the minimization of total transportation costs is regarded as a basic objective. isard (1956) has been concerned with the impact of concave transportation costs on the firm location. in economic geography, there is a large number of relevant contributions, such as the so-called german location researchers. these theorists provide general location theories, such as weber’s transportation orientation, market (and purchasing) area theory and lösch’s spatial designs. fennia 189: 2 (2011) 65economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper … alfred weber’s work (1909/1929) is considered to have grounded the roots of modern location theories. particularly weber assumed that firms will choose a location in order to minimize their costs. weber’s model assumes perfect competition, implying a high number of firms and customers and a perfect knowledge of market conditions, both for the buyers and the suppliers. at present, it can be considered that the european paper market is obviously in a state of perfect competition in many qualities due to lowering demand and oversupply (risi 2009). according to weber, three main factors influence industrial location; transportation costs, labor costs and agglomeration economies and location thus imply an optimal consideration of these factors. activities having a high level of use of raw materials tend to locate near supply sources, such as aluminum factories locating near energy sources (electricity) or port sites. aiura and sato (2009) show that firms try to differentiate geographically in order to avoid price competition and that firms have an interest in locating in the proximity of the raw material site in order to reduce transportation costs. the existing paper industry in finland and other nordic countries was originally built near hydro energy locations and raw material sources. the material index (weber 1909/1929) in a paper mill is approximately 1.5–3, as around three tons of timber and other materials are needed for a ton of paper. later, the finnish mills were placed near export harbors due to logistics reasons. the 2008 nobel prize winner krugman (1991, 1995) has stressed that geographic economic issues have been at the periphery of mainstream economics for a long time. krugman considers that in a world characterized both by increasing returns and transportation costs, there will be an obvious incentive to centralize manufacturing near its largest market. the simple reason is that by locating the production near the largest market, one minimizes transportation costs. location and economic geographical characteristics have been regarded as irrelevant factors until now in many theoretical economic studies (arbia 2001). in a recent study, behrens et al. (2009) remind that although transportation costs are a key ingredient of economic studies, the transportation sector is usually abstracted, and freight rates are taken in as parametric and are not set by the market. bullock and cliff (2004) stress that purely economic discussions say little about geographical space and its relation to the adaptive behavior of businesses. essletzbichler and rigby (2007) point out that the economic performance of regions fluctuates because of differences in their characteristics. regions, economy and companies are not static entities, and this environment may be radically transformed, especially in foreign trade dependent firms counting on demand development and changes in consuming behaviors. this type of a process can be observed to be happening in the paper industry due to the news media heading in a digital direction and the traditional paper media suffering in the future (hetemäki & nilsson 2005). kilkenny and thisse (1999) point out that companies exporting their production outside the region in which they are located must set a price that is high enough to cover trade costs but that is low enough when compared to local competitors. ottaviano et al. (2003) state that when trade costs are sufficiently low, firms are able to export profitably to a foreign region. the high transportation costs could be naturally surpassed with higher economic efficiency than that of the competitors, which is often neglected in economic geographical studies. as a summary, it seems there is also a place for traditional geographical examinations that are based on empirical data. it can be noted that economic geographical research methods reveal especially interesting space-linked issues. this empirical orientation also provides some ideas for discussions that put their main effort into explaining the complexity of space with purely theoretical assumptions and models. empirically oriented approaches might be better compromises for the purposes of studying spatially diffused objects, especially those that have not been examined in detail before. some characteristics of paper mill functions an integrated paper mill consists of manufacturing and a complicated mixture of transportation and cost management functions. figure 1 presents the value chain factors, which in this paper are understood as covering the process functions from the timber yard to the end customers. customers order specific machine-based production grades. these qualities have unique production tons per hour, required moisture, surface, gloss, base weight, density, color and predefined roll width for the printing machines. the actual costs are calculated 66 fennia 189: 2 (2011)esa hämäläinen by summing up all the manufacturing costs and transportation costs of the sales on a monthly basis. the fixed costs are allocated to the grades by the production performance of the grades in tons per machine hour. the exporting of the paper products from finland to the markets occurs in many stages: storing at the mill’s warehouse; short domestic truck or train transportation; domestic port transportation; intermediary converting and repackaging; intermediary warehousing; and the final local transportation to the customers. these distribution centers are located abroad, where consignees pick up their rolls. the exported paper qualities are mainly so-called improved grades, which usually have a lower supply and therefore higher prices. during the 80s and 90s, finnish paper companies expanded by merging with e.g. european paper producers to acquire market share and to be more competitive closer to the market (lamberg & ojala 2006). the key idea was to precisely control the market, supply and prices. the paper mills became more like production units than profit centers. certain paper grades, e.g. office bulk papers, could be produced not only in one but in many mills and delivered to customers from the closest one. the finnish paper machines could stay in competition by being efficient with large units. the export transportation of forest products is a top priority for today’s executives of the forest products industry (hölsä 2005), but the whole supply chain has not been extensively studied using a holistic approach. koskinen and hilmola (2008) believe that logistics does not support the hoped improvements in the paper industry, because paper rolls remain in the inventories for approximately 45 days. there is room for the paper industry to improve its logistics management in order to decrease capital costs during inventories (gallis 1997). lehtonen (1999) and hameri and lehtonen (2001) also present comparable conclusions in their study. according to them, speedier transit operation easily generates direct cost savings amounting to 2–5% of annual turnover. transportation problems, especially the long and costly warehousing and slow deliveries that eloranta et al. (1994) observed in the early nineties, still exist in 2008 (koskinen & hilmola 2008). the finnish bulk paper mills are usually integrated units that have both fiber and paper machine lines. due to the high productivity of the machines, especially the fixed costs in euro per paper ton are usually lower than those of the competitors. this has helped finnish mills to overcome rising distance costs but not the currency challenges, like the relation of the euro to the u.s. dollar and the swedish krona. empirical data and survey methodology lewis (1998) considers that case studies offer a potentially efficient means for comparing complex fig. 1. the origin of the research data: the case mill’s basic data sources, the mill database (allocations) and the reporting modules. fennia 189: 2 (2011) 67economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper … and disparate operation settings. their iterative triangulation employs systematic iterations between literary review, interviews, case evidence, and intuition. the case study methods are well suited for producing context-dependent knowledge (flyvbjerg 2006), and case study research can provide microeconomic discoveries which are not possible to acquire through other methods (mccutcheon & meredith 1993). ballou (2001) reminds that the acquisition of correct and reliable data is crucial to the successful practical application of any model. even the best model, if implemented with incorrect data, will produce false supply/demand chain configurations. according to baxter and chua (1998), one of the greatest practical difficulties in conducting case study research is the lack of access to field sites. yin (2003) emphasizes that the “distinctive need” in conducting case study research lies in the “desire to understand complex phenomena”. economic geography with multidisciplinary methods seems to fit well for research purposes where the target is to study how an exporting industrial site functions both spatially and economically. the research ideas of this study are based on theories from microeconomic and transportation geography combined with statistical analysis. the target of the study is a single exporting mill located in southern finland, close to an exporting port. the mill manufactures all of its products locally in a certain region, but acts very globally because of the high export dependency and transportation of the final products to dozens of countries. this spatial connection in particular separates economic geographical studies from the purely economic ones. the empirical data covers exhaustively the period between 1/2001 and 12/2008 (96 months). we obtained the data from the case mill’s cost management sql database (fig. 2). this extensive quantitative database holds the mill’s past and present information, which is affirmed by economic controllers and official authorities. the figures have been checked and reported in the mill’s annual economic reviews. the machine hours used in this study are net hours, when the machine has been in production. there are fixed and variable costs as well as spatial aspects, such as transportation costs and paper prices to points of destination. the variable costs also cover transportation costs of timber from forests to the timber yard at the mill. calculated transportation costs of the final product cover total logistics costs from the mill warehouse to the customers. these figures have been transformed into a single large dataset based on packed net tons and euro. within the dataset, the processed figures are proportionate, valid and fully intercomparable, and all data is linked to the same time period, 2001–2008. the parameters are calculated mainly in €/t or in percentages, which gives the possibility to make relevant comparisons. the results of the calculations are shown as ratios to maintain business confidentiality, and the key objective was to determine the relevant value-added factors. the research data covers prices, delivered tons and transportation up to 73 countries, tens of different paper grades, and millions of delivered paper tons. from the viewpoint of triangulation, we carried out a number of interviews and discussions with the financial management of the case mill and additionally with mill personnel in other local and foreign mills. these discussions significantly helped us focus our research on the relevant topics. the research data was transferred into excel spreadsheets and into stat 4.1 for statistical correlation analysis. the correlation was calculated to reveal the dependency between the transportation costs and the gross margins. all the economic figures were reported out for research purposes only. our study attempts to link the industrial and timebased performance values with geographical dimensions, which is not a very common research fig. 2. the paper mill’s demand-supply chain. 68 fennia 189: 2 (2011)esa hämäläinen subject, when considering the finnish paper industry. findings and results in this section, the research data of the case mill is examined to find some typical and specific economic characteristics of the finnish paper industry from different perspectives. firstly, a closer look is taken from the market’s point of view, and figure 3 presents the monthly development of both the share of the home market of the total mill sales and the share of the profits during 2001–2008. the case mill is a typical finnish mill exporting around 90% of its total production. figure 3 clearly shows that local demand varies between 6 and 14% of the total sales and, during the past years, local sales have decreased slightly. compared with the local sales, the mill gained operating profit from the local market yearly from 10 to 15% of total operating profits. during the past years, the share of the locally based profit has slightly increased, which shows that the mill has lost its competitiveness in the export markets. generally, the home market effect in the finnish paper deliveries has always had a minor impact on the mill’s sales and economy. the finnish mills must adapt to serve long-distance customers, mainly printing houses, in foreign markets as cost-efficiently as possible. if paper demand should decrease in some export market, new markets and buyers must be searched for continuously in other foreign locations. the finnish and other european paper markets are matured, and demand will not increase very much, if at all (hetemäki & hänninen 2009; risi 2009). in may 2005, there were strikes and block-outs in finland, which caused large and severe production disturbances in the paper industry. paper manufacturing experienced a total shutdown of several weeks. the foreign sales and even deliveries were significantly lowered or even stopped, which essentially decreased profits. the paper mills were only able to deliver normally to local customers. during these strikes, total profits from foreign sales dropped dramatically, and the finnish mills may have lost customers to foreign mills during the incidence, even permanently. the peripheral location of the case mill can be easily illustrated by utilizing the transportation costs as presented in figure 4. the finnish mills lack the clear and measurable cost advantage in transportation costs and delivery times of their local european competitors, which the finnish mills must adapt to in some way, mainly with scale in production. figure 4 implicitly supports the earlier studies (e.g. hameri & lehtonen 2001; koskinen 2009); when a finnish mill exports a large part of its sales, the paper products need local intermediate storage, which produces high logistics costs. the export transportation costs (€/t) are averagely ten times higher than those for deliveries in the fig. 3. share of the home market in percent of total and the home market’s monthly share of total profit during 2001−2008. fennia 189: 2 (2011) 69economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper … home market. this is one of the key challenges to be solved in the future. when examining how the mill’s economic performance has developed during the past years, three important values have been selected – variable costs (materials and energy), net profit and machine hours – to highlight how the economic efficiency has evolved (fig. 5). this topic has been neglected in geographical studies earlier. figure 5 clearly reveals that the mill’s economic performance has decreased, costs per machine hour have increased and the mill has made less profit per machine hour. it is highly alarming when economic productivity decreases. this development can also be presented from another perspective, when we look at how the main economic variables have developed during the research period (fig. 6). average paper prices have measurably lowered, while manufacturing and transportation costs have increased, lowering incomes. the case mill has not succeeded in compensating the decreasing prices by lowering manufacturing costs. the finnish mills have obviously lost some part of their competitive advantage in paper markets. this economic development (price–cost relation) has naturally been one of the main reasons for single machine lines, and even for large paper mills, having been closed in finland and all over europe. as many regional and economic geographical scientists from weber (1909/1929) to krugman (1995) have discovered earlier, our empirical data shows that at present, transportation and manufacturing costs have a remarkable influence on total costs and, later, inevitably on location in the paper industry. from the ‘weberian’ perspective, transportation costs combined with manufacturing costs increase, and lowering paper prices together with decreasing economic performance, presented in figures 5 and 6, presumably will steer the mill location decisions made by paper companies in the future. geographical distance affects economic variables differently, as it is highlighted in figure 7. the figure presents the average variable and transportation costs and sales prices to 73 export countries monthly during 2008. the data has been sorted by the estimated transportation distance (km) from finland to the export countries. the figure shows that geographical distance makes the transportation costs fluctuate heavily. long sea routes do not seem to increase transportation costs as much as could be expected; in very long-distance deliveries, the average transportation unit costs are even slightly lowering. figure 7 shows an interesting finding; a finnish paper mill can partly compensate its disadvantafig. 4. average transportation costs in €/t to export and home customers monthly during 2001–2008. 70 fennia 189: 2 (2011)esa hämäläinen fig. 5. development of the economic efficiency calculated in euro per machine hour during 2001–2008. fig. 6. development of the average sales prices, variable and fixed costs and transport costs during 2001–2008 monthly. geous location from some of the distant markets with slightly higher sales prices. these empirical results partly support krugman’s (1991) and kilkenny and thisse’s (1999) ideas that companies should try to compensate their disadvantageous location with higher sales prices. the results show that the price differences between different countries are large, up to over 30%. figure 7 highlights that the local competition in foreign paper markets is country-specific with highly varying sales prices. in every market, there is a unique pricing situation depending on the supply–demand equilibrium. the exported paper qualities are usually socalled improved qualities, which may have a higher demand in foreign markets due to lower competition. the customers’ geographical posifennia 189: 2 (2011) 71economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper … tion does not significantly increase the average transportation costs to distant customers, because sea transportation freights, even for heavy bulky products, are relatively inexpensive. in 2001, the average oil price was about 20 usd per oil barrel and in 2008, at the highest level, about 150 usd per barrel (in 2007 prices). the effect of oil prices on shipping can be directly translated into increased bunker costs, whereby fuel costs represent as much as 50–60% of the total ship operating costs, depending on the type of ship and services (tsa 2008; wtrg 2008). figure 8 shows the distribution of the exported total tons in relation to average transportation costs to 73 different markets. half of the paper tons (vertical line) from the case mill are delivered fig. 7. prices and transportation costs (2008, €/t) to export countries from the mill (n=73). data was sorted by the estimated distance (km) from finland to export countries and distance rises from the left to the right. fig. 8. distribution of the export transportation costs in €/t to 73 countries and cumulated delivered paper tons during 2008. 72 fennia 189: 2 (2011)esa hämäläinen mainly to 30 export countries, where the average transportation costs rise to over 90 €/paper ton (horizontal line). competing in these markets by lowering obligatory transportation costs is not an easy task, especially due to oil prices, which directly affect freight expenses. the lowering paper demand in europe is a real challenge for the peripherally located mills in the future due to transportation. paper prices should increase, not lower, in the coming years. figure 9 presents all the customer orders delivered to three specific distant countries, namely usa, australia and new zealand (a total of 591 orders during 2001–2008). the research mill transports only 10% of its production to distant overseas countries. the data is sorted by customerbased deliveries in tons, which increase from left to right. the empirical data shows that transport costs have large variation and can rise threefold with the same volume of tons, naturally depending on the number of the intermodal (truck–sea–truck) routes. there does not seem to be a relation between larger volumes in tons and lower transportation costs, which could be expected. the case mill sells about 80% of its production in the european market; therefore, all large and population-rich countries are important for the mill. figure 10 presents the statistical dependency between transportation costs and gross margins in the spanish market. the higher transportation costs (r2= 0.2460, p<0.05) seem to have some statistical dependency with lower gross margins. the high volatility in gross margins probably depends on the paper qualities and sizes of deliveries in paper tons (see e.g. hämäläinen & tapaninen 2010) and on the very different locations of the end customers in relation to the distribution centers. the paper market is, according to risi (2009), under severe competition in europe, and the printing paper market is hardly growing at all. there is a lot of capacity and oversupply in the european market, which is affecting paper pricing. this makes reliable economic planning and estimations very challenging for the mills. the empirical material shows that the paper industry is worth exploring with geographical material, and comparing the different countries can reveal interesting and varying results in the economic variables. this study supports the basic ideas of the economic geographers that there must be empirical studies concerning spatial topics to also present the views of real industrial manufacturing. the results of this study can be crystallized in that the economic performance of the case mill has declined in many areas. location issues are expected fig. 9. relation between transport costs (€/t) and sales tons during 2001–2008. data is sorted by the sales tons and are based on the all delivered customer orders (n=591) to distant countries (usa, australia, new zealand). fennia 189: 2 (2011) 73economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper … to become more central in the coming years due to demand and cost reasons. discussion and conclusions in this paper, the paper industry is examined in a spatial context with empirical economic mill data. the topic of this article was to explore and describe how economic factors – like prices, economic performance per machine hour, transportation and other costs – have developed. the paper industry has been examined somewhat marginally in finland from the viewpoints of both economy and geography together. the data was obtained from the economic system of a large mill, and the longitudinal data covers the years 2001– 2008. the original idea of this paper was particularly to adapt economic geography through empirical mill data, which seemed to give revealing results. krugman (1995) argues that transport costs are a key topic in economic geography. transportation costs, like other costs and paper prices, should be set by the market in the studies, as this examination highlighted. this case study supports what e.g. weber (1909/1929) and later krugman (1995) have argued in their theoretical economics geographical discussions: transportation costs affect economic results. the results show that location and economic geographical characteristics are significant for the paper mills’ results, like arbia (2001) notes. the falling paper prices and rising costs were presented in figure 6, and in relation to this, the risi (2009) has forecasted that this trend in the european paper demand and prices will continue. with the present oversupply situation (see e.g. risi 2009), this may lead to paper companies closing their peripheral mills, simply because paper prices do not cover the high logistics and manufacturing costs. the situation is now more current than in the 1990s, when oil was inexpensive and paper demand and prices were higher. this study brings out interesting findings, which have distinct effects on the existence of the finnish paper mills. these findings are prioritized below as follows: 1. printing paper demand has lowered in the european markets, and this increases oversupply and competition and presses down sales prices. 2. manufacturing costs have increased during past years in the finnish paper mills. 3. in exports, transportation costs are averagely ten times higher than in local deliveries, and these very high export costs give clear advantage to the local european competitors. fig. 10. correlation between transport costs and gross margins based on the monthly data from 2001–2008. data is sorted by the transportation costs euro/paper ton based on the paper deliveries to the spanish market. 74 fennia 189: 2 (2011)esa hämäläinen 4. economic performance in relation to machine hours in the older paper machines has lowered significantly during past years, which is an alarming signal. 5. transportation costs have statistical dependency with gross margins by lowering them. 6. to distant overseas countries, transportation costs do not significantly rise due to relatively inexpensive sea transportation. the finnish mills have obviously lost a lot of their ability to compete in the difficult european export markets and, as managerial implications, it can be considered that: • paper companies should eliminate oversupply from the market to get paper prices up in order to cover the soaring material and transportation costs. • methods to make logistics more cost-efficient should be examined carefully. these ongoing and quite rapid changes in the paper market can be forecasted to bring out severe challenges for the finnish paper producers in the coming years. further paper mill closures can be expected to balance the supply–demand equilibrium. the large global paper companies are obviously already considering relocating bulky and low-profit paper production from the periphery to more affordable places closer to the market in some scale. this study showed that the export-intensive paper industry is worth studying with empirical and geographical mill data to reveal the differences of markets. further research the economic topics on country, customer and grade level are interesting subjects for future examinations. an interesting but challenging subject would be to reveal basic issues affecting delivery and operating profit variations. additionally, the sales and price estimations and actual deliveries and prices should be examined together in more detail in future studies to reveal the accuracy level of the forecasts. this could help in finding out how the finnish mills have succeeded in estimating the demand and prices in different main markets. acknowledgements this research was funded by metsäteho oy. references aiura h & sato y 2009. a model of urban demography. discussion papers in economics and business, 09–18. osaka university, graduate school of economics and osaka school of international public policy (osipp). arbia g 2001. modelling the geography of economic activities on a continuous space. papers of regional science 80, 411–424. arlbjørn js, jonsson p & johansen j 2008. nordic research in logistics and supply chain management: an empirical analysis. international journal of physical distribution & logistics management 6, 452–474. ballou r 2001. unresolved issues in supply chain design. information systems frontiers 3/4, 417−426. baxter ja & chua wf 1998. doing field research: practice and meta-theory in counterpoint. journal of management accounting research 10, 69−83. behrens k, gaigné c & thisse j-f 2009. industry loca-industry location and welfare when transport costs are endogenous. journal of urban economics 65, 195–208. bullock k & cliff d 2004. complexity and emergent behaviour in ict. report commissioned by foresight programme, ost, hewlett packard. diesen m 1998. economics of the pulp and paper industry. gummerus, jyväskylä. dieter m & englert h 2007. competitiveness in the global forest industry sector: an empirical study with special emphasis on germany. european journal of forest research 126, 401−412. eloranta e, ranta j, ollus m & suvanto p 1994. uusi teollinen suomi. wsoy, juva. essletzbichler j & rigby dl 2007. exploring evolutionary economic geographies. journal of economic geography 7, 549−571. flyvbjerg b 2006. five misunderstandings about case-study research. qualitative inquiry 12, 219−245. forestindustries 2009. <http://www.forestindustries. fi/statistics/tilastokuviotvanhat/basics/forms/allitems.aspx> 8.11.2011. forslid r, haaland j, midelfart i & knarvik kh 2002. a u-shaped europe? a simulation study of industrial location. journal of international economics 57, 273−297. gallis c 1997. stochastic computer simulation of forest biomass logistics in greece. ph.d. dissertation, department of forest resource management, university of helsinki. hameri ap & lehtonen j-m 2001. production and supply management strategies in nordic paper mills. scandinavian journal of management 17, 379−396. hetemäki l & nilsson s 2005. conclusions and implications. in hetemäki l & nilsson s (eds). information technology and the forest sector 18, 221−233. iufro world series. hetemäki l & hänninen r 2009. arvio suomen puun jalostuksen tuotannosta ja puunkäytöstä fennia 189: 2 (2011) 75economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper … vuosina 2015 ja 2020. <http://www.metla.fi/julkaisut/workingpapers/2009/mwp122.htm > 10.5.2009. hämäläinen e & tapaninen u 2008. spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s supply chain. fennia 186, 83–93. hämäläinen e & tapaninen u 2010. economics of a nordic paper mill – case study. industrial management & data systems 110, 5−23. hölsä j 2005. metsäteollisuuden kuljetusratkaisut. kymenlaakson kauppakamari, logistiikkapäivät, 30.5.2005. isard w 1956. location and space-economy. the m.i.t. press, cambridge, ma. kilkenny m & thisse j-f 1999. economics of location: a selective survey. computers & operations research 26, 1369−1394. koskinen p 2009. supply chain strategy in a global paper manufacturing company: a case study. industrial management & data systems 109, 34−52. koskinen p & hilmola o-p 2008. supply chain challenges of north-european paper industry. industrial management & data systems 108, 208−227. krugman p 1991. increasing returns and economic geography. journal of political economy 99, 483– 499. krugman p 1995. development, geography, and economic theory returns and economic geography. the m.i.t. press, cambridge, ma. lamberg j-a & ojala j 2006. evolution of competitive strategies in global forestry industries: introduction. in lamberg j-a, näsi j, ojala j & sajasalo p (eds). the evolution of competitive strategies in global forestry industries: comparative perspectives, 1–29. springer, dordrecht. lehtonen j-m 1999. supply chain development in process industry. acta polytechnica scandinavica. industrial management and business administration, series no. 4, espoo. lewis mw 1998. iterative triangulation: a theory development process using existing case studies. journal of operations management 16, 455– 469. lähtinen k 2007. linking resource-based view with business economics of woodworking industry: earlier findings and future insights. silva fennica 41, 149−165. martin r 1999. the new ‘geographical turn’ in economics: some critical reflections. cambridge journal of economics 23, 65–91. mccutcheon dm & meredith jr 1993. conducting case study research in operations management. journal of operations management 11, 239–256. oinonen h 2008. challenging prospects for the finnish paper industry. paper and timber 90, 14−18. o’sullivan d, manson s, messina jp & crawford t 2006. space, place, and complexity science. environmental and planning a 38, 611−617. ottaviano g 2003. regional policy in the global economy: insights from new economic geography. regional studies 37, 665−673. risi 2009. paper cuts – pricing it can only go one way, and that is down. <http://www.risiinfo. com/> 12.5.2009. scott aj 2004. a perspective of economic geography. journal of economic geography 4, 479–499. scott aj 2006. geography and economy. oxford university press, oxford. tappi 2008. upm to shutter kajaani paper mill, tervasaari pulp mill in finland by year’s end. <http://www.tappi.org/s_tappi/doc.asp?cid= 11982&did=561953> 10.5.2009. tsa 2008. <http://www.tsacarriers.org/fs_bunker. html> 8.11.2011. weber a 1909/1929. über den standort der industrien. tübingen. english translation by freidrich cj 1929. alfred weber’s theory of location of industries. university of chicago press, chicago. wtrg 2008. oil price index. <http://www.wtrg. com/index.html> 10.5.2009. yin rk 2003. case study research, design and methods. 3rd ed. sage, london. cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of municipal representatives and firm managers on the bothnian arc project madeleine mattsson and örjan pettersson mattsson, madeleine & örjan pettersson (2005). cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of municipal representatives and firm managers on the bothnian arc project. fennia 183: 2, pp. 97–107. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. today greater responsibilities are being put on regions to shape their own future. thus, different kinds of regional collaboration arenas have emerged and an increasing number of regional collaboration projects are now crossing both county and nation borders. the object of interest in this study is the bothnian arc project. this project involves municipalities on the swedish and the finnish side of the gulf of bothnia. the aim has been to analyse opinions and experiences of swedish actors regarding the bothnian arc as a region-strengthening project. the article is based on interviews with fourteen municipality representatives and a questionnaire answered by approximately 300 firm managers within the bothnian arc area. the bothnian arc is essentially a political project and this study shows that the policy creating institutions have not succeeded in transferring ideas and objectives to firms within the area. in fact, only 30 per cent of the firm managers were familiar with the project. more concrete projects adapted to firm interests were required by a few of the municipality representatives. moreover, the municipalities closest to the finnish border are more active and involved both on municipal and firm level. this tendency is primarily due to already existing traditions of collaboration with finnish actors. madeleine mattsson & örjan pettersson, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, se-901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: orjan.pettersson@geography.umu.se. ms received 23 march 2005. structural changes and self-sufficient regions today significant changes concerning economic, social and demographic structures are taking place in many parts of europe. sweden is no exception. the tendency is a more polarised development pattern. the metropolitan areas and the university cities continue to attract the young, productive part of the population. on the other hand, towns with traditional industries and sparsely populated areas experience low birth rates, a steady net outmigration and an ageing population. rationalisations and closures of small units take place in public services. due to increasing global competition, the industry needs to continuously upgrade their capacity to compete. one obvious strategy is to focus more on knowledge intensive activities and innovative strength. another structural tendency is a growing number of service-producing firms (pettersson 2002; glesbygdsverket 2003, 2004; itps 2004; långtidsutredningen… 2004). simultaneously, the importance of local and regional arenas for collaboration has been emphasised to increase the competitiveness. collaboration across administrative borders is accentuated by eu-policies and planning ideas, such as the european spatial development perspective (esdp), which is supporting the development of functionally integrated regions (european union 2004). by the principle of subsidiarity and a number of support systems within the eu, greater responsibilities are being put on the regions themselves to shape their own future (törnqvist 1998). however, the establishment of regional arenas is still very often a product of politicians and planners (davoudi 2003; meijers & romein 2003). an interesting question is whether economic growth 23240_2_mattsson.indd 97 12.6.2006 11:03:28 98 fennia 183: 2 (2005)madeleine mattsson and örjan pettersson can be stimulated by policymaking and planning or if it is a result of slow development processes, random factors and/or inherited conditions unique for a certain place, which are difficult to imitate. some researchers mean that if visions and objectives only exist on the political level, it is hard to transform the ideas to concrete activities on the grass-root level (malmberg 2002). regional collaboration arenas are currently about keeping territories together based on various types of interactions and transactions, i.e. flows of information, goods and people. a major argument is that enlarged functionally integrated regions make the service production more efficient and thus improve the conditions of individuals, households and firms. these processes are growing out of local contexts, but are also widening into larger territories and an increasing number of regional collaboration projects are now crossing both county and nation borders. this kind of projects is characterised by functional integration processes of different scales, from small and temporary collaboration projects, to more powerful and sustainable processes of region building. an important factor for national and transnational projects within europe is financial support from national authorities and the interreg funding of the european union. the aim, material and structure of the study the object of interest in this study is the bothnian arc project, which consists of a combination of national and transnational collaboration activities. this project involves municipalities on the swedish and the finnish side of the gulf of bothnia. the aim is to analyse opinions and experiences among swedish actors of the bothnian arc as a regionstrengthening project. do local politicians and firm managers on the swedish side regard this as a meaningful project from their perspective? what are the objectives that the municipalities want to achieve? the bothnian arc is essentially a political project and it is not obvious that the policy creating institutions has managed to transfer these ideas and objectives to the firms within the area. böhme (2002), for instance, stress the need for involving other actors at local and regional level in order to fulfil the intentions of the esdp, whereas davoudi (2003) accentuate the importance to strengthen linkages between firms as one key factor to create polycentric regions. nevertheless, matters must be discussed and operated among a number of actors to bring such a project to success. methodically, this article is mainly based on interviews and a questionnaire survey. the interviews were conducted in october 2004, with fourteen key actors at the swedish municipalities, such as municipal commissioners and directors of trade and industry departments1. the answers were compiled from all of the municipalities taking part in the bothnian arc collaboration. the interviews were based on an interview guide, containing questions with open alternatives of answers. the questions dealt with collaboration projects and priorities of the municipalities in general, with the bothnian arc project in particular and finally with the decision-making process and future organisation. the questionnaire, with fixed alternatives of answers, was directed towards managers within the swedish part of the bothnian arc, in december 2003 and january 2004. from a total of about 25,000 firms, a selection of 2000 firms, with five employees or more2, was conducted. after that a branch-stratified selection was made. the branches selected was those considered as the most relevant in perspective of priorities in the bothnian arc project, such as the manufacturing and steel industry, information and communication technology, forestry, health care/welfare and tourism (bothnian arc 2004a). the selection resulted in 517 firms. after one reminder, 302 of the managers had answered the questionnaire, i.e. 58 per cent. most of the questions have an internal dropout rate between 0 and 4 per cent. one should keep in mind that dropouts risk distorting the results, as this is a group of respondents we lack other forms of compensatory information from. the questionnaire focused on topics such as the managers’ knowledge about and actual involvement in the bothnian arc project, and whether actors such as universities and other firms within the bothnian arc area are of interest for future cooperation. other questions dealt with the firm managers’ views on which issues should be prioritized within the project, as well as their opinion about future prospects for their own firm and for the area in general. this introduction is followed by a summary of related theoretical perspectives on polycentric regions, region-building processes and economic growth. thereafter, a brief description of the both23240_2_mattsson.indd 98 12.6.2006 11:03:29 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 99cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of … nian arc is made, followed by a presentation of the results from the interview study and the survey. the article concludes with some summarising remarks. polycentric regions and development corridors to achieve sustainable long-term results, collaboration projects across administrative borders in a subnational and transnational perspective gradually have to develop into more powerful processes of regional integration. however, it must be stressed that there is no unambiguous and clearcut definition of the region concept or region building in processes of shaping regions as alternatives to existing administrative regions. in what way a region is categorised and marked off from its surroundings often depends on the social and/or economic context (wiberg 2002). moreover, taylor (1988) stresses that regions rarely meet at clearcut boundaries, but rather overlap across border zones. over time, both the space and the contents of a region are constantly changing through different phases and processes. in this study the theoretical discussion is based on the concept of the functional region that is tied together by flows and transactions. the polycentric region is one type of functional region, highly focused on in current policymaking within the eu (davoudi 2003). the polycentric idea is about the nodes in form of cities and towns to be involved in different kinds of networks. the thought is for the sub-areas to be useful to each other, either by similarities or by complementary effects regarding for instance labour markets, and to get access to a variety of services and cultural activities (wiberg 2002; pettersson & westerberg 2003). the idea is also to reduce disparities and hierarchic power relations between centre and periphery; between cities of larger and smaller scales and between urban and rural areas (european union 2004). a special kind of polycentric region is the development corridor (jussila et al. 1993). this is not a new phenomenon in sweden and finland. especially in northern sweden this is an apparent geographical pattern and for centuries settlements and economic activities have been concentrated to coasts and river valleys (pettersson 2002). today these “natural” corridors have been strengthened with road and railway infrastructure. the modern kind of development corridors have in fact evolved around major transport links, and within these corridors there are possibilities for households and firms to establish important connections and meeting points. as the need for mobility and accessibility increases, it is assumed that strategic investments in crucial corridors can promote more robust service structures and economic growth in sparsely populated areas. however, proper physical infrastructure is not enough to create regional functionality and attraction. additional factors of significance are the industrial character, knowledge production and labour competence, the built environment in relation to the natural landscape and the possibilities of the housing market to satisfy people with a great variety of income situations, desires and lifestyles (copus 2001; wiberg 2002). regional arenas of collaboration and region building processes the establishment of regional arenas might adopt a variety of forms and structures. nordgreen (1995) discusses three different kinds of linked region structures with varying intermediate networks. a new enlarged region emerges from integration processes between smaller, equivalent functional regions. thus, in this larger region a new functional and hierarchic structure is created. a region system, on the other hand, contains a great number of horizontal links between the smaller regions, but without the merging process into one large region. finally, a region alliance, consisting of horizontal collaboration without the regions necessarily being spatially close to each other, is considered by nordgreen as the most suitable region structure in the knowledge based “new economy”. paasi (1986) describes region building as a process, consisting of different phases of development that step-by-step lead to internal cohesion and external separation. these phases can be related to hettne’s (1997) regionness, suggesting that regions exist in different grades and levels, from the natural shaped region to the historically demarcated region with a clear identity. processes of this kind are rarely as simple and uncomplicated though, as to be clearly marked off in specific phases. aalbu and wiberg (1997) suggest a more dynamic model in which the elements institutional changes, infrastructure investments and joint action, are interre23240_2_mattsson.indd 99 12.6.2006 11:03:29 100 fennia 183: 2 (2005)madeleine mattsson and örjan pettersson lated. these factors interact with each other without any particular order, and backward as well as forward linkages tie the elements together. thus activities within one element automatically affect the others, which in turn stimulate cumulative processes. furthermore, hettne (1997) emphasises that regional integration is not an irreversible process. on the contrary, disintegration and fragmentation could dissolve this process. meijers and romein (2003) highlight the need to build regional organization capacity in order to realize the potential of polycentric regions. in this process, shared visions, regional identity and leadership are important aspects. to sum up, these processes towards establishing new regional arenas are very complicated and even more complex are the transnational projects, with many political, economic, geographical, infrastructural, technical and cultural hinders and barriers to overcome (wiberg 1995, 1996; lindfors 2004; rylander 2004). growth factors and partnerships many theories have been developed regarding different kinds of factors considered to be of importance to economic growth and thus also to local and regional development. the more recent discussions concerning regional development deal with, for example, agglomerations and clusters (see for example marshall 1919; porter 1990; castells 1996; sheppard & barnes 2000; berggren & brulin 2002; malmberg 2002), the creation of innovation systems, knowledge and competence (sheppard & barnes 2000; ljusberg 2001, 2002; bager-sjögren & rosenberg 2004), social capital (putnam 1996; westlund 2004), the entrepreneurial spirit (aronsson & johannisson 2002) and the creative class (florida 2002). these theories influence planners and policy makers at different levels and contribute to planning and decision making processes. furthermore, the growth factors are probably important in partnerships and collaboration strategies of different kinds. one type of partnership that increasingly appears in planning, policy and region-building processes, are those between private and public actors at local and regional levels (jussila et al. 1993; nyström 1999). these partnerships may improve the conditions for development and decision-making by generating more creative and effective processes than at formal and strictly regulated planning. the triple helix model is one theoretical approach describing the collaboration between industry, government and universities. the links between these actors often consist of consultant services and contract research. all parts in the model contribute to continuous processes where innovations, competence and knowledge transfer are created (etzkowitz 2002; higano 2002; lähteenmäkismith & persson 2002). there is often an assumption that universities and research institutes more or less automatically have a positive effect on the local and regional development. however, this is a complex matter and studies are indicating that the existence of r&d institutions alone is not enough to stimulate regional development and economic growth. it must be supported by other important parts of the social structure as well, such as a sufficiently large population, a diversified labour market, well functioning infrastructure and leaders who take active interest in politics and business (olsson & wiberg 2003). furthermore, the ability to adapt to specific local and regional conditions is important for planning and policy-making in general. activities based on high technology and knowledge is often focused today, but it seems over-optimistic to expect all regions to be transformed into high-tech clusters. economic policy and planning must be anchored to the reality to have real impact on regional development processes and in this context the public institutions have an important role to draw up the guidelines (nyström 1999; malmberg 2002). from this point of view the bothnian arc collaboration is an interesting project to study. the bothnian arc the overall aim of the bothnian arc project is to create favourable conditions for economic growth in this part of europe and to design planning and investment proposals to meet the structural and economic challenges connected to the relatively peripheral location (bothnian arc 2004a). the idea is to create networks of long-term and sustainable cross-border collaboration, but also to make the area well known in international contexts. the first phase of the project was implemented between 1998 and 2001. it was financed by the eu programme interreg ii c baltic sea region and also by a number of swedish and finnish stakeholders (bothnian arc 2004a). the key actors are the municipalities, who also work for engaging firms and 23240_2_mattsson.indd 100 12.6.2006 11:03:29 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 101cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of … universities within the region. in this way the bothnian arc project is an umbrella project where the idea is to develop different kinds of networks and partnerships between the actors within the area (bothnian arc 2004a, 2004b). geographically the bothnian arc stretches along the coast from the municipality of skellefteå on the swedish side, to the ylivieska region on the finnish side (fig. 1). road distance from one end to the other is more than 500 kilometres. the municipalities of haparanda, kalix, luleå, piteå, boden, älvsbyn and skellefteå constitute the swedish subregion, which is the focus of this study (fig. 2). approximately 250,000 people live in the swedish part of the bothnian arc (statistics sweden 2004). the industry consists partly of traditional branches, like mining, steel, manufacturing, forestry, energy and food production, and partly of firms within the “new economy”, such as it, music, electronics, telecom and a variety of other high-tech businesses. there are also, of course, a substantial number of firms providing services of different kinds. regarding higher education and research, luleå university of technology is the most apparent actor in the area, but both luleå university of technology and umeå university conduct research and give courses in other municipalities, mainly in skellefteå. there are still many barriers to overcome and links to create in the bothnian arc area. a planned coastal railway (i.e. norrbotniabanan) will probably, from approximately the year 2020 and onwards, strengthen the bothnian arc as a functional development corridor. this railway will link the bothnian arc area to the swedish rapid train system, but also to the finnish and russian railway system (bothnian arc 2004a; norrbotniabanan 2004). it is an important component for the development of the area as it will improve communication and transportation networks, which in turn will support the integration processes and strengthen the nodes. the municipality perspective the interviews with municipality representatives showed that collaboration across municipal borders already exists in the swedish part of the bothnian arc area, such as the municipal square (fyrkanten; i.e. luleå, piteå, boden and älvsbyn) and eastern norrbotten (östra norrbotten; i.e. haparanda, kalix, överkalix and övertorneå). an fig. 1. the geographical area of the bothnian arc. fig. 2. the swedish sub-region with nodes and links. 23240_2_mattsson.indd 101 12.6.2006 11:03:38 102 fennia 183: 2 (2005)madeleine mattsson and örjan pettersson association including the municipalities of västerbotten has also been established, as well as euprojects across municipal borders within the county concerning trade, industry and education. it is clear that trade and industry development, research and education are important areas of collaboration both locally between adjacent municipalities and regionally between counties. at present there are research collaborations between the higher education centres concerning digital archives and also between a music school and a university within the area. the border municipalities haparanda and tornio have been collaborating for a long time and there is a close partnership between a couple of energy companies, owned by swedish and finnish municipalities. the characteristic features of the bothnian arc project are efforts to elaborate collaboration in the fields of knowledge/education/research, tourism, technology, industry and trade. another matter of great importance is a well-functioning infrastructure, including public transport and modern information and communication technology. great hopes are expressed regarding the future norrbotniabanan, which is expected to function as a connecting link for the entire region. other advantages with the bothnian arc are increased opportunities to find creative forms of collaboration within mutual areas of interests, as the familiarity of each other and the knowledge of cultural differences between sweden and finland increases. one of the municipality representatives emphasised the use of collaboration projects like the bothnian arc within eu-contexts, not least when it comes to funding development projects. furthermore, the role of the bothnian arc as a platform for marketing and development of northern sweden, northern finland and the barents region is stressed. according to the municipality representatives, there is a strong interest to increase the collaboration with finland within the tourism industry, where finnish actors are appreciated collaboration partners. other areas of interest for collaboration are research, product development and trade. however, some of the municipalities had not advanced very far in the bothnian arc collaboration. a representative of one of the southern municipalities stated that their involvement in the bothnian arc project was mainly a political initiative, not entirely anchored among civil servants in the municipality administration. the interviews have also revealed a pattern regarding the priority of the bothnian arc project compared to other collaboration projects. except from one civil servant, the respondents of the four northernmost municipalities are giving very high priority to the bothnian arc project, whereas it seems to have lower priority in the other municipalities. during the first phase of the bothnian arc project, 1998–2001, the number of contacts and networking increased in many of the municipalities. the actors in sweden and finland got more acquainted with each other and have developed a better understanding of the cultures of both countries. ”[the municipalities] have a completely different dialogue than before, when it was more or less non-existent between many of the involved municipalities. tornio and haparanda have been collaborating successfully for some time though, and have been urging in this. luleå and uleåborg also have a good dialogue and it is very important for this collaboration.” (politician) some examples of more concrete contributions mentioned in the interviews are for example intensified work on upgrading the standard of the haparanda railway3, bus transports around the northern part of the bothnian arc, mapping of the coastline from skellefteå on the swedish side to brahestad on the finnish side, applications for eufinancing and some recently created tourist projects. moreover, the bothnian arc project has created the foundation for sub-projects aimed to develop the knowledge level and the steel industry in the area. however, there are also critical comments. a couple of the municipality representatives are quite critical about the fact that very little has happened up to now, that the process is too slow and that there are too few concrete achievements. in some cases they blame these problems on differences in the decision-making processes on the swedish and finnish side of the border. ”from the finnish perspective, i imagine that they think things are going slow quite often and that it ought to be more action and less processing in board meetings. i would like it that way as well, that we would get more concrete projects, but it probably will take some time.” (politician) part of the criticism is also the fact that the bothnian arc is still quite unknown for many people, within the area as well as outside. the marketing of the bothnian arc has to be faster and more leg23240_2_mattsson.indd 102 12.6.2006 11:03:38 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 103cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of … ible to be effective. furthermore, one of the municipal representatives stresses that it might not be meaningful for all municipalities to take part in all activities and that it might be better to focus on matters that are useful to the individual municipality. in order to involve the firms in the bothnian arc project, most of the municipal representatives respond that circulars have been sent out to the firms in the area and that firms have been informed at different occasions, at seminars and personal visits. at these occasions, the firms have also had the opportunity to express their requirements and preferences, which in the long run might contribute to more concrete and firm-adjusted projects. yet, several respondents claim that the municipalities have not succeeded very well in engaging and involving the firms to a satisfactory extent. more concrete projects, of interest for trade and industry, are asked for. by contrast, the universities have been involved from the start. for instance, r&d projects are mentioned by several of the municipalities where for example luleå university of technology and its decentralised college of music in piteå are involved. contacts have also been established between the university association/research station eastern norrbotten and finnish r&d centres. however, two of the seven municipalities have not taken any initiatives at all to engage universities. the most concrete plans for the near future are to continue to develop collaborations within knowledge, steel industry and tourism, and to follow up the existing projects. some of the municipalities are also planning to intensify the marketing of the bothnian arc. the northernmost municipality, haparanda, is working on a vision of an international centre in the barents region. during the second phase, 2002–2005, five of the municipalities have the intention to increase the involvement of firms and universities. ”all the time we are looking for ways to engage firms more concretely in different projects. the problem is that many projects are too long-term, which makes it hard to involve firms and to get them to invest money. the individual entrepreneur must be able to see that this will bring something, which can be difficult at times.” (civil servant) an interesting question, from a functional region perspective, is what the municipal representatives reckon about the extensive territory that the bothnian arc actually constitutes. this has been studied from different perspectives. the proximity to russia is one of the aspects, and this is seen as a business related advantage by more or less all of the municipality representatives. other perspectives concern barriers to collaboration due to different languages, cultures, currencies and the relatively great internal distances. in these cases the opinions differ quite a lot, where some respondents see hindrances, other see advantages and opportunities. one of the respondents, for instance, argues that this large geographic area contains many different landscapes, which is then seen as positive for tourism development. it is also emphasised that this territory has similar structures regarding base industries, such as forestry and mining. other strengths mentioned with the bothnian arc area are the high level of competence, modern industry and high-quality technology within r&d. some of the municipal representatives, however, see difficulties with the different languages, cultures, currencies, tax systems and the big distances within the bothnian arc. not least lack of knowledge in finnish language and culture seems to be an obstacle. ”what really consists a problem is the language and the cultural differences. there are different ways to get the job done.” (civil servant) worth noting is that the collaborations existing today have often grown from experiences of earlier collaborative efforts in the swedish part of the area, such as the municipal square and eastern norrbotten, which both seem to be of higher priority than the bothnian arc project. one way to strengthen the collaboration in the bothnian arc would be to constitute a more formal organisation, e.g. a municipal union, with legible agreements on collaboration between the municipalities. today, a municipal union between haparanda and tornio is actually in the process of being established. the process has been long and hard though, as this kind of cross-border unions requires significant legal adaptations in both countries. nevertheless, this union might serve as a model for other municipalities in the area and the collaboration between haparanda and tornio is by several representatives viewed as an interesting pioneering project. in contrast, several of the respondents claim that the current collaboration is quite enough. 23240_2_mattsson.indd 103 12.6.2006 11:03:38 104 fennia 183: 2 (2005)madeleine mattsson and örjan pettersson the firm perspective as economic growth is one important dimension in the bothnian arc project, the second major focus in this article is the firm perspective on the efforts of the project. the questionnaire to firm managers within the bothnian arc showed that only 30 per cent of the managers are familiar with the bothnian arc project. there are also obvious differences between the municipalities and the awareness seems to decrease as the distance from the finnish border increases (fig. 3). firm size also turned out to matter. the managers of big firms are much more often familiar with the bothnian arc project as compared to the managers of small businesses. the bigger firms often have more developed connections and might thus get more information at an early stage about different activities and projects affecting their business, than the smaller firms do. moreover, bigger firms probably have more resources to put into this kind of projects and therefore they might be more open for such information. one of the activities considered important for regional development processes is increased collaboration between firms. this is also one of the aims within the bothnian arc project. according to the survey, the share of managers who have established new contacts with other firms within the bothnian arc area is low. worth noting though, is that newly established contacts with firms on the swedish and finnish side of the bothnian arc is almost the same, even if the actual numbers are low. also regarding to what extent the bothnian arc project has influenced the firm activities, the figures are quite modest and a majority of the managers claim that the influence on their own firm activities has been quite limited. even though actual collaboration has not advanced very much, the interest in various collaborative activities is evident. for instance, there is a significant interest in increased collaboration with firms on the finnish side, especially among managers who are already familiar with the bothnian arc project. there is an even greater interest in collaboration with firms on the swedish side, whereas the interest in collaborating with firms in northwest russia and in other parts of europe is smaller (table 1). this legible interest in firm collaboration was also revealed when the managers were asked to specify which measures ought to be prioritised in the area. networking between firms within the bothnian arc received the greatest interest. as mentioned before, the connection to r&d is a crucial factor for economic growth and development in general. the investigation showed that there is an interest among the managers to collaborate with universities, even if it is slightly less pronounced than the interest to collaborate with other firms. in this case the interest mainly concerns the universities on the swedish side; luleå university of technology and umeå university. finally, the managers’ expectations about the future development in a more long-term perspective show that there is careful optimism. 12 35 4 20 11 56 12 101 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % 80 % 100 % haparanda/kalix luleå/piteå boden/älvsbyn skellefteå familiar with the project not familiar with the project fig. 3. the managers’ awareness of the bothnian arc project in relation to municipality group. note: the figures show the actual numbers of responding managers. table 1. the managers’ interest in cooperation with firms in sweden, finland, russia and europe. cooperation interest in: the swedish part the finnish part northwest russia europe yes, very much 30% 26% 12% 23% yes, to some extent 54% 45% 35% 42% not at all 16% 29% 53% 35% total, percent 100% 100% 100% 100% total number 283 275 255 260 23240_2_mattsson.indd 104 12.6.2006 11:03:38 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 105cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of … concluding remarks this study reveals that the municipalities have not been quite successful in engaging firms in the bothnian arc project. less than one third of the firm managers were familiar with the project. also confirmed is a rather distinct geographical pattern. the three municipalities closest to the finnish border are more active and involved both on municipal and firm level, which primarily seems to depend on already existing traditions of collaboration with finnish actors. in the municipalities further from the border, there is a more pending attitude. the interest among firm managers to participate in the bothnian arc project was however quite big by the time they answered the survey, and thus there seems to be a good opportunity to take further steps towards broader and deeper collaboration. nevertheless, it seems important to find more successful ways to reach the managers in their everyday activities. more concrete projects adapted to the firm interests were also required by some of the respondents. if there is no engagement from the firms, it is quite hard to implement ideas and activities from the top. firm involvement is also desirable to get information about which types of efforts that ought to be made and perhaps also to get financial support. at present, the swedish side of the bothnian arc should be regarded more as an identified functional arena for collaboration – partly with polycentric corridor characteristics – than an actual established polycentric region. there are still many political, economic, geographic, infrastructural, technical and cultural barriers to overcome before that can be fulfilled. another problem that was mentioned by a couple of the municipal representatives is the differences in the swedish and the finnish way to handle administrative matters. according to the respondents, the swedish model is sometimes seen as too slow and complicated from a finnish perspective. böhme (2002) concludes that swedish actors, even in comparison to actors in other nordic countries, are especially devoted to find consensus agreements. furthermore, it seems as if finnish actors, compared to swedish actors, are more on the alert when it comes to esdp, but also more used to collaboration across administrative boundaries and in new regional constellations (for instance various types of federations of municipalities). in sweden, it appears as if participants more often think in traditional ways where boundaries separating municipalities, counties and nations are regarded as real barriers restricting collaboration. from this perspective it seems important to build on experiences from present collaboration such as the municipal square, eastern norrbotten and haparanda– tornio. a couple of the municipality representatives also implied that it might be easier for bigger municipalities to participate in collaboration activities as they have more resources, human as well as economic. furthermore, apprehensions have been expressed regarding the risk of smaller municipalities being run over by the bigger ones. one way to handle this problem could be to establish a more formal organisation, such as a municipal union, but it is clear that most of the respondents were quite pending to this option. many of the municipal representatives stressed that the current organisation is quite enough for now. first and foremost they want to see what happens further on in the border municipalities haparanda and tornio, who seem to have gained the role as a kind of pilot project and a role model for deepened regional collaboration within the bothnian arc. regarding strengths and weaknesses with this vast geographical area, the opinions were quite varying among the municipality representatives. the bothnian arc will of course become a more powerful actor if all the municipalities are deeply involved. for instance, benefits may appear within scale-economics in production, marketing opportunities and chances of getting more financial resources from the eu through this cross-border collaboration. the point is that the two sub-regions have a lot in common regarding industries such as mining, forestry and tourist related activities. there are also substantial differences between the two countries, but these do not necessarily have to be negative to the development. on the contrary, the differences might work as advantages, provided that the problems regarding existing barriers can be handled efficiently. however, the study of the firm perspective revealed that far from all firm managers think of the bothnian arc as the most natural functional regional context (bothnian arc 2004b). this may be interpreted that the concept of the bothnian arc has not yet reached the way people on the grassroot level think. this may also mean that the municipality representatives have to engage in a longterm commitment of building this regional arena of collaboration without expecting any immediate response and support from the firm managers. 23240_2_mattsson.indd 105 12.6.2006 11:03:39 106 fennia 183: 2 (2005)madeleine mattsson and örjan pettersson part of the objectives underlying the bothnian arc project has been to deepen the integration within the area, between the municipalities and across the national border separating sweden and finland, but also to increase the collaboration between public actors, private firms and the universities on both sides of the border. these ambitions can be seen as a first step towards building a new functional region within the area. one major obstacle, however, is the long distances within the bothnian arc area. frequently the examples of polycentric regions in europe are both more densely populated and have shorter distances between large urban centres compared to the relatively vast and outstretched bothnian arc. this can also be an explanation as to why the actors close to the border are generally more engaged and enthusiastic, whereas actors further away from the border are more sceptical towards the project. other obstacles to overcome are differences in language, culture and legislation. at the same time it should be kept in mind that the studied project started as recently as 1998 and that these kinds of region building processes usually takes a lot of time. this also implies that politicians and other actors have to be patient and enduring. although the process has been slow and there are many hindrances, there seems to be a common interest within the area in continuing the integration. acknowledgement the authors would like to thank anu takala for the survey preparations, tomas engdahl for his efforts with the interviews and professor ulf wiberg for comments on earlier drafts of the paper. we are also grateful for the valuable comments from two anonymous referees. notes 1 the organisation of a swedish municipality is based partly on politically elected commissioners who make the overall decisions on local matters, and partly on civil servants handling the assignments that are decided on the political level. compared to many other countries, the swedish municipalities have a rather strong autonomy in relation to the swedish government that determines the comprehensive laws and regulations (nyström 1999; böhme 2002). 2 nevertheless, some of the firms responding the questionnaire answered they had less than five employees at the time of the investigation. 3 the haparanda railway is at present a single-track, non-electrified part of a railway link from boden to haparanda and connecting to the finnish railway system through tornio. references aalbu h & u wiberg (1997). how may institutional regionalization promote regional development? in dellenbrant jå & u wiberg (eds). euro-arctic curtains, 77–101. cerum, umeå. aronsson p & b johannisson (red) (2002). entreprenörskapets dynamik och regionala förankring. 217 p. växjö university press, växjö. bager-sjögren l & m rosenberg (2004). kartläggning av aktörer i det svenska innovationssystemet. itps, rapport a2004:020. 74 p. berggren c & g brulin (2002). klistriga kluster eller globala glidare? den lokala dynamikens paradoxala betydelse i den globaliserade ekonomin. nutek, rapport b 2002:2. 61 p. böhme k (2002). nordic echoes of european spatial planning: discursive integration in practice. nordregio report 2002:8. 367 p. bothnian arc (2004a). bothnian arc. <http://www. bothnianarc.net/slutrapporter/popularvers.pdf>. 27.4.2004. bothnian arc (2004b). bottenviksbågen – funktionellt urbant nätverk. <http://www.bothnianarc.net/ slutrapporter/urbant_sve.pdf>. 27.4.2004. castells m (1996). nätverkssamhällets framväxt. band 1. 543 p. blackwell publishers, oxford. copus ak (2001) from core-periphery to polycentric development: concepts of spatial and aspatial peripherality. european planning studies 9: 4, 539– 552. davoudi s (2003). polycentricity in european spatial planning: from an analytic tool to a normative agenda. european planning studies 11: 8, 979– 999. etzkowitz h (2002). the triple helix of university-industry-government. implications for policy and evaluation. sister, working paper 2002:11. 16 p. european union (2004). esdp. <http://europa.eu. int/scadplus/leg/sv/lvb/g24401.htm>. 1.9.2004. florida f (2002). the rise of the creative class – and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. 434 p. basic books, new york. glesbygdsverket (2003). årsbok 2003. <http://www. glesbygdsverket.se/site/default.aspx?id=3761>. 27.8.2004. glesbygdsverket (2004). årsbok 2004. <http://www. glesbygdsverket.se/site/default.aspx?id=7751>. 27.8.2004. hettne b (1997). europe in a world of regions. in falk r & t szentes (eds). a new europe in the changing global system, 16–44. united nations university press, new york. 23240_2_mattsson.indd 106 12.6.2006 11:03:39 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 107cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of … higano y (2002). the region in the new economy. an international perspective on regional dynamics in the 21st century. 430 p. ashgate, hampshire. itps (2004). effektutvärdering av de geografiska målprogrammen inom eg:s strukturfonder. itps, rapport a2004:009. 136 p. jussila h, lo persson & u wiberg (1993). shifts in systems at the top of europe. 181 p. fora, stockholm. lähteenmäki-smith k & lo persson (eds) (2002). re-restructuring the state – regional impacts. nordregio report 2002:9. 134 p. långtidsutredningen 2003/04 (2004). regional utveckling – utsikter till 2020. sou 2004:34. 158 p. lindfors s (2004). gränsöverskridande näringslivssamarbete – en jämförande studie av andra regioners erfarenheter av gränsöverskridande samarbeten: eventuella fördelar och svårigheter. praktikantrapport. <http://www.northsweden.org/dokument/aktuella/gransoverskridandenaringslivssamarbete.doc>. 15.12.2004. ljusberg m (2001). högre utbildning i glesoch landsbygd – om tillgänglighet och nya vägar till utbildning. 54 p. glesbygdsverket, östersund. ljusberg m (2002). kartläggning av lärcentra i sverige. 76 p. glesbygdsverket, östersund. malmberg a (2002). klusterdynamik och regional näringslivsutveckling – begreppsdiskussion och forskningsöversikt. itps, rapport a2002:008. 35 p. marshall a (1919). industry and trade. 875 p. macmillan, london. meijers e & a romein (2003). realizing potential: building regional organizing capacity in polycentric urban regions. european urban and regional studies 10: 2, 173–186. nordgreen r (1995). regionalt utvecklingsarbete i brytningstid. transnationellt samarbete på regional nivå i de nordiska länderna. norske regionar og internationalt engasjement for naeringsutvikling. nordrefo, working paper 1995:1. norrbotniabanan (2004). pressmeddelande: snabb start av planeringsarbetet för norrbotniabanan. < h t t p : / / w w w. n o r r b o t n i a b a n a n . n u / p d f / pm040406.pdf>. 6.4.2004. nyström j (1999). planeringens grunder. en översikt. 227 p. studentlitteratur ab, lund. olsson b & u wiberg (red) (2003). universitetet och den regionala utmaningen. 207 p. sister, stockholm. paasi a (1986). the institutionalization of regions: a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of regions and the constitution of regional identity. fennia 164: 1, 105–146. pettersson ö (2002). socio-economic dynamics in sparce regional structures. gerum kulturgeografi 2002:2. 47 p. pettersson ö & p westerberg (2003). vägar för samverkan. storumanföretagares inställning till planeringssamarbete över kommungränsen. cerum, working paper 64:2003. 74 p. porter m (1990). the competitive advantage of nations. 855 p. macmillan, basingstoke. putnam rd (1996). den fungerande demokratin – medborgarandans rötter i italien. 286 p. sns förlag, stockholm. rylander d (2004). nätverkan och regional utveckling. om gränsöverskridande samarbete i södra östersjöregionen och nätverkstjänsternas roll i samhällsutvecklingen. meddelanden från göteborgs universitets geografiska institutioner, serie b 106. 375 p. sheppard e & tj barnes (eds) (2000). a companion to economic geography. 536 p. blackwell, oxford. statistics sweden (2004). sveriges statistiska databaser. <http://www.ssd.scb.se>. 15.12.2004.15.12.2004. taylor pj (1988). world-system analysis and regional geography. in agnew j (ed) (1997). political geography: a reader, 17–25. arnold, london. törnqvist g (1998). renässans för regioner. 192 p. sns, stockholm. westlund h (2004). social capital, innovation policy and the emergence of the knowledge society. a comparison of sweden, japan and usa. itps, rapport a2004:017. 110 p. wiberg u (1995). samarbete i barentsregionen. cerum, reprint no. 2. 10 p. wiberg u (1996). the north calotte as an economic region. cerum, reprint no. 13. 43 p. wiberg u (2002). hållbarhet i glesa regionala strukturer – exemplet södra norrlandskusten. cerum, working paper 39:2002. 51 p. 23240_2_mattsson.indd 107 12.6.2006 11:03:39 23240_2_mattsson.indd 108 12.6.2006 11:03:39 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa4895 doi: 10.11143/4895 the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and home visits for prisoners in finland dominique moran and anssi keinänen moran, dominique & anssi keinänen (2012). the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and home visits for prisoners in finland. fennia 190: 2, pp. 62–76. issn 1798-5617. this paper argues that the burgeoning sub-discipline of carceral geography needs to pay particular attention to context when theorising carceral space, and that the specific context of finland offers a new and valuable perspective. much of the work within this new area of human geography originates in or pertains to the highly incarcerative, or ‘hypercarcerative’ contexts of the us, the uk and the russian federation, raising questions over the transferability of theorisations of the carceral to other less carcerative, or actively ‘de-carcerative’ settings. by focussing specifically on one such setting, the low imprisonment context of finland, this paper discusses goffman’s ‘total institution’ thesis with reference to the system of ‘furloughs’ or home visits for prisoners. in this paper we explore the extent to which this practice destabilises the inside/outside binary of the ‘total institution’, through the notion of heterotopia. keywords: carceral geography, prison, furlough, ‘total institution’, finland dominique moran, school of geography, earth and environmental sciences, university of birmingham, edgbaston, birmingham, b15 2tt, uk. e-mail: d.moran@bham.ac.uk anssi keinänen, department of law, university of eastern finland, joensuu campus, p.box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: anssi.keinanen@uef.fi introduction the term ‘carceral geography’ (moran et al. 2012, 2013; philo 2012) describes a new and vibrant sub-discipline of human geography research into practices of incarceration. such work is often informed by and in dialogue with the work of foucault (1979) on the development of the prison, surveillance, and the regulation of space and ‘docility’ of bodies, and of agamben (1998, 2005) on the notion of a space of exception, where sovereign power suspends the law, producing a zone of abandonment. the distinctiveness of its focus on the spaces of incarceration is, however, matched only by its tendency to draw primarily on case study examples from high imprisonment societies, and this paper argues that in theorising carceral space, carceral geography needs to be more attentive to the varied contexts of incarceration. the paper first discusses the tendency within carceral geography to focus on case studies from high imprisonment societies, and suggests, by discussing the specific context of finland, that the interdisciplinary dialogue emerging between carceral geography and criminology could be expanded to consider a more active engagement with comparative criminology. secondly, it critiques goffman’s (1961) ‘total institution’ thesis by considering some aspects of the furlough, or home visiting scheme for prisoners in finland, and by determining the extent to which the furlough is an example of the concept of ‘heterotopia’ (foucault 1998) deployed by baer and ravneberg (2008) to understand the nature of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons. carceral geography in the united states (us), wacquant (2011: 3) has described ‘a brutal swing from the social to the penal management of poverty’. the core of wacfennia 190: 2 (2012) 63the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and … quant’s thesis is the penalization of poverty seen in the us in recent decades. this tendency arguably extends into western europe and elsewhere through the exporting of us penal ideas and management systems (downes 2007: 118, in gottschalk 2009), comprising a ‘punitive revamping’ of public policy by tackling urban marginality through punitive containment. hyperincarceration, having in the united states thrown its ‘carceral mesh’ (wacquant 2011: 13) around the hyperghetto, is argued to have established a ‘single carceral continuum’ between the ghetto and the prison system in a ‘self-perpetuating cycle of social and legal marginality with devastating personal and social consequences’ (wacquant 2000: 384). imprisonment rates in the united states are the highest in the world, but as aebi and kuhn (2000: 66, cited in von hofer 2003: 23) point out, such rates ‘are to a great degree a function of criminal justice and social policies that either encourage or discourage the use of incarceration’ rather than a function of the number of crimes which are committed. carceral geography increasingly spans and synthesizes three main areas of interest; the nature of carceral spaces and experiences within them; spatial or distributional geographies of carceral systems; and the relationship between a notion of the carceral and an increasingly punitive state. drawing upon case studies from south africa and the usa respectively, dirsuweit (1999), and sibley and van hoven contest the foucauldian regulation of prison space and the docility of bodies, describing carceral ‘spaces… produced and reproduced on a daily basis’ (van hoven & sibley 2008: 1016), and the agency of inmates making ‘their own spaces, material and imagined’ (sibley & van hoven 2009: 205). spatial geographies of incarceration have again focussed on the us, with researchers considering the relationship between places of incarceration and the communities which host or surround them (che 2005; glasmeier & farrigan 2007; bonds 2009) extending critiques of the ‘total institution’ (goffman 1961), and suggesting that the ‘carceral’ is something more than merely the spaces in which individuals are confined. such a notion of the ‘carceral’ as a social construction relevant both within and outside physical spaces of incarceration, informs, for example, the work of allspach (2010) on ‘transcarceral’ spaces in canada, and the theorisation of the ‘carceral’ as embodied through the corporeal inscription of released inmates (moran 2012a, 2013) in the russian federation. again in the united states, peck (2003) and peck and theodore (2009) discuss the relationship between prisons and the metropolis in the context of hyperincarceration. much of this work, then, originates in or pertains to, highly incarcerative settings; the usa and russian federation have some of the world’s highest incarceration rates, of 730 and 529/100,000 respectively in 2010 (world prison brief 2012). baer and ravneberg’s work (2008) is an interesting example in this context, since it compares a increasingly incarcerative setting, that of the english prison system, with the very low imprisonment society of norway. baer and ravneberg (2008) problematise the conceptualisation of a binary distinction between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of prisons, instead positing prisons as ‘heterotopic spaces outside of and different from other spaces, but still inside the general social order’ (baer & ravneberg 2008: 214). although the authors note that their two research contexts are different, they stop short of elaborating very far on the marked differences between them, or suggesting that these differences may have implications for their theorisation of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. this paper therefore pursues two issues raised by this work; first, the issue of the carceral context, which they obliquely raise but do not fully resolve, and second goffman’s conceptualisation of the ‘total institution’ (1961) which they directly critique via the notion of ‘heterotopia’. the first of these is discussed next, in relation to the carceral context of finland. finland’s penal culture finland is an interesting case study for a number of reasons. its relatively small prison population and diligent record-keeping enables fine grained statistical research to be carried out, but more importantly, it differs very significantly from the research contexts which have thus far ignited geographers’ interest in incarceration – the united states and western europe. whereas the united states is highly incarcerative (or perhaps hypercarcerative), other countries are by contrast decarcerative, actively deploying different techniques to decrease their prison populations. finland is one of these countries. as lappi-seppälä (2000) has argued, the dramatic decrease in finland’s prison population, from the early 1950s when its imprisonment rate 64 fennia 190: 2 (2012)dominique moran and anssi keinänen of 200/100,000 population was four times higher than other nordic countries, to the situation sixty years later when its imprisonment rate is now the lowest in scandinavia at 52/100,000, was brought about by ‘a conscious, long-term and systematic criminal policy’ (ibid. 37−38). this policy and the philosophies which underpin it are fundamentally different from those which inform criminal justice policy in, for example, the us. the 1960s and 1970s saw in finland the re-evaluation of the theoretical aim and the justification of punishment, with a ‘turn’ towards ‘general prevention’ rather than direct ‘deterrence’, through a ‘humane neoclassical crime policy’. general prevention essentially means the ‘moral-creating and value-shaping effect’ of punishment (von hofer 2003: 28), which differs from deterrence in that individuals are not perceived to obey the law because of the direct fear of punishment, but rather because the disapproval expressed in punishment is perceived to influence the values and moral views of individuals through a process of internalisation of the norms of criminal law. as von hofer (ibid.) puts it, ‘people refrain from illegal behaviour not because such behaviour would be followed by unpleasant punishment, but because the behaviour itself is regarded as morally blameworthy’. this ‘turn’ was enabled and enacted by an exceptionally expertoriented reform team with close professional and personal contacts between politicians, state officials and academic researchers (lappi-seppälä 2002) in the absence of political opposition to reform; by the ‘attitudinal readiness’ of the finnish judiciary to adopt a new sentencing policy (von hofer 2003: 31); and by the ‘fairly sober and reasonable attitude towards issues of criminal policy’ (lappi-seppälä 2000: 37−38) adopted by the finnish media. in a broader context, for much of this period of decarceration, finland was not a destination for significant immigrant movement, and was additionally insulated from international trade in narcotics, two major influences on prison populations (christie 2000). what this essentially means is that finland has for decades been decoupled from the us (and increasingly the european) tendency to politicize criminal justice policy to the extent that criminal justice becomes a political tool rather than a balanced assessment of criminal justice interventions. as lappi-seppälä (2002: 33) observes, in these contexts ‘the higher the level of political authority, the more simplistic the approaches advocated. the results can be seen in slogans that are compressed into two or three words, including “prison works”, “war on drugs” and “zero tolerance”’ which in turn leads politicians to ‘pander to punitive (or presumably punitive) public opinion with harsh tough-on-crime campaigns’. although finland has perhaps reached its lowest possible imprisonment rate, with the result that rates will almost certainly rise, and the finnish media is becoming more active in debating criminal justice policy, the ‘humane neoclassical crime policy’ continues to prevail; prison is not considered to “work” and the solutions to social problems are not ‘sought where they cannot be found – the penal system’ (ibid. 33). in the finnish system, then, it may be argued that prison policy is informed more by an understanding of the likely success of specific interventions for the stated aims of incarceration, than by a political imperative to respond to public opinion, or as gilmore (2002: 16) has argued, to use the prison system as ‘a project of state-building’. the philosophy towards the conditions of imprisonment in finland is displayed in the sentences enforcement act1 which states that punishment is a mere loss of liberty: the enforcement of sentence must be organised so that the sentence is only loss of liberty. other restrictions can be used to the extent that the security of custody and the prison order require. prevention of harm, promoting of placement into society: punishment shall be enforced so that it does not unnecessarily impede but, if possible, promotes a prisoner’s placement in society. harms caused by imprisonment must be prevented, if possible. normality: the circumstances in a penal institution must be organised so that they correspond to those prevailing in the rest of society. justness, respect for human dignity, prohibition of discrimination: prisoners must be treated justly and respecting their human dignity. in essence, this means that the ‘less eligibility’ principle that informs much prison policy in the us and western europe, that prisoners should ‘suffer’ in prison, not only through the loss of freedom but also by virtue of prison conditions, which should be of a worse standard than those available to the poorest free workers, is absent in finland (pratt & eriksson 2011). instead, prison conditions are to correspond as closely as possible to living conditions in society (ministry of justice 1975), with the intention that penalties for offences are fennia 190: 2 (2012) 65the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and … implemented in such a way that they do not unduly interfere with prisoners’ participation in society, but as far as possible, promote it. pursuing the second issue raised by baer and ravneberg’s (2008) work, we next consider critiques of goffman’s conceptualisation of the ‘total institution’ (1961) which they directly critique via the notion of ‘heterotopia’. the ‘total institution’ goffman’s (1961) theorisation of the ‘total institution’ has been an influential piece of work, which since its publication has seen the concept of a ‘total institution’, defined as …a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable length of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life (goffman 1961: 11). the concept has been applied to an extraordinarily diverse range of circumstances and contexts, such as homes for the elderly (e.g. mali 2008), psychiatric units (skorpen et al. 2008), the home (noga 1991), the mass media (altheide 1991), the military and the police (rosenbloom 2011), and sport (cavalier 2011). while the concept has thereby been shown to have considerable utility, its appropriateness as a means of understanding the types of institution in relation to which it was initially developed has been called into question. for the purposes of this paper, it is the applicability of the ‘total institution’ thesis to the institution of the prison which is most salient, and in this context, there are a number of commentaries which point out some disjunctures between the theory and the actuality of imprisonment. perhaps the most thorough treatment was that of farrington (1992: 6), who problematised goffman’s theorisation by arguing compellingly in relation to the us prison system that the ‘total institution’ thesis is ‘in fact, fairly inaccurate as a portrayal of the structure and functioning of the... correctional institution’ in that the modern prison ‘is not as completely or effectively “cut off from wider society” as goffman’s description might lead us to believe’. although farrington (1992) addressed his comments explicitly to this geographical context, and perhaps interpreted goffman rather too literally, many of his observations are generically applicable to prison systems more generally, and they bear some exploration here. the core of farrington’s (1992) commentary is that prison institutions have a relatively stable and ongoing network of transactions, exchanges and relationships which connect and bind them to their immediate host community and to society more generally (ibid. 7). although at the time of writing farrington (1992) observed that relatively little research had explored these connections, such as the relationships between prisons and their host communities, the process of prison siting, and the relationships between criminal offenders and the society from which they have come, in the intervening years these topics have come more clearly into view in academic scholarship, and particularly in the recent development of carceral geography which has considered precisely these issues. the relationship between prisons and wider society has been a particular focus of study (e.g. peck 2003; peck & theodore 2009). rather than rejecting goffman’s thesis, farrington (1992: 7) essentially extends and develops the notion of the prison as a ‘total institution’ by proposing a theoretical conception of ‘a “not-so-total” institution, enclosed within an identifiable-yetpermeable membrane of structures, mechanisms and policies, all of which maintain, at most, a selective and imperfect degree of separation between what exists inside of and what lies beyond prison walls.’ subsequent studies support this notion, with, for example, hartman (2000) discussing the restriction of prisoner access to the internet in the language of ‘walls and firewalls’. although farrington (1992) identifies ‘points of interpenetration’ through which the prison and wider society intrude into and intersect with one another, his critique stops short of that of baer and ravneberg (2008) who problematise the conceptualisation of a binary distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. instead they posit the concept of heterotopia, viewing prisons as ‘heterotopic spaces outside of and different from other spaces, but still inside the general social order’ (baer & ravneberg 2008: 214), which they argue renders problematic the separation of inside from outside. they build on foucault’s work, in which he characterised heterotopias as ‘real places, actual places, places that are designed into the very institution of society’ (1998: 178) but which can seem totally unrelated to one another despite existing side by side. in so doing, they rely particularly on genocchio’s (1995) observation that heterotopias 66 fennia 190: 2 (2012)dominique moran and anssi keinänen are ‘outside’ of and fundamentally different to all other spaces, but also relate to and exist within general social space that distinguishes their meaning as difference. baer and ravneberg (2008) argue that the concept of heterotopia allows for a fuller understanding of the spatial complexities of the prison environment than the total institution thesis which distinguishes between inside and outside with very little room for blurring of this boundary. in their comparison of english and norwegian prisons, they found what they described as ‘incompatible juxtapositions’ (ibid. 212), in which there were ‘multiple, simultaneous distinctions and indistinctions’ between the inside and outside of prisons, rather than a set of neat binaries (i.e. inside/outside). they described that they ‘sensed a lack of delineation between inside and outside at the same time that there was sharp distinction within prison’ (ibid. 213), and that prison seemed ‘to be a compressed mélange of seemingly incompatible juxtapositions’ (ibid.) with ‘tension and fusion between inside and outside’ (ibid. 214) these ‘incompatible juxtapositions’ derive from baer and ravneberg’s personal impressions of entering and leaving english and norwegian prisons, or in farrington’s (1992) terms, their individual ‘interpenetration’ of the penitentiary wall from a position on the ‘outside’. other work within carceral geography (moran 2012b) which challenges the total institution thesis has also considered the crossing of this assumed boundary from outside to inside, with prison visitors entering visiting spaces ‘inside’ the prison walls, and has considered the sense in which prisoners coming to meet them experience something of the ‘outside’ via this contact. in this paper, however, we explore the opposite direction of movement; prisoners from ‘inside’ going ‘outside’ the prison, through the practice of home visits or furloughs, and consider the extent to which this practice destabilises the inside/outside binary through the notion of heterotopia. theorising prison visiting and furlough schemes research into furloughs is part of a wider body of work, largely within criminology, but also prison sociology and more recently carceral geography, which explores prison visitation as a space of interpenetration between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, and which considers the significance of visitation for wider penological concerns such as recidivism, or reoffending after release, and the ‘collateral’ effect of imprisonment for prisoners’ friends and family. research into prison visiting per se has tended to orient itself around two foci – the effects of visitation on prisoners and their subsequent behaviour, especially after release, and the collateral effects of imprisonment on inmates’ family members, mitigated to some extent by visiting as means of maintaining contact. considering first the effects of visitation on prisoners, criminologists studying recidivism find that prison visitation is a significant factor in improving post-release outcomes. holt and miller (1972) showed that parole outcomes were much more positive for visited prisoners, and lower recidivism rates have since been demonstrated across study populations and time periods. however, although the effect is widely observed, the causality is poorly understood. it is presumed that the maintenance of personal relationships and the feeling of ‘connectedness’ to home and community which may arise through visitation smooth reintegration after release, but this process has never been fully explored. the recent work of social theorists and geographers such as gilmore (2007), peck and theodore (2009) and wacquant (2010a, 2010b, 2010c), in the united states, in the context of calls for greater attention to the causes of and solutions to hyperincarceration (wacquant 2010b: 74) and the carceral ‘churn’ (peck & theodore 2009: 251), has been paralleled within criminology by reconsideration of the positive effect of visitation. empirical studies by bales and mears (2008), derkzen et al. (2009), berg and huebner (2010) and mears et al. (2011) still observe a positive effect, but emphasise its complexity. they draw attention to the effects of visitation of different types and in varying amounts, and on various types of recidivism (mears et al. 2011), and stress the need for further empirical work to develop a more nuanced understanding of visitation. bales and mears (2008, also mears et al. 2011) suggest that future studies should use different, more refined measures to engage with effects of specific types of visit (such as by spouses, children, criminal associates), or nature of visits (consistent or inconsistent during a sentence, characterised by calm and supportive conversations, or by argument and recrimination) in order to better understand the dynamics of visitation. before this recent rekindling of interest in visitation, the conclusion that prison inmates visited during imprisonment ‘do better’ on release refennia 190: 2 (2012) 67the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and … mained relatively unchallenged for almost forty years. coupled with an increasing awareness of and concern for prisoner rights and welfare, this relationship formed the basis for policy recommendations encouraging increased numbers and frequency of visits, with greater capacity, longer hours, more programmes to encourage visitors, and to mitigate against the factors discouraging visiting, for example the cost of travel (schafer 1994). given this consensus of opinion, academic attention veered away from prisoners’ responses to visitation, towards the second focus, on the wider effects of incarceration. the work of morris (1965) was precursor to an explosion of interest, particularly in the us, broadly in parallel with the growth of mass imprisonment (garland 2001), in ‘secondary’ or ‘collateral’ effects of imprisonment. these range from those impacting directly on prisoners’ families and children (e.g. casey-acevedo & bakken 2008; comfort 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008; codd 2007, 2008; hong-chui 2010; wildeman & western 2010; comfort et al. 2011; geller et al. 2011; kruttschnitt 2011; shedd 2011), to community effects on labour market participation, civic engagement, and community health (garland 2001; lynch & sabol 2003). rose and clear (1998, 2003, and clear 2007) have written about the stigmatisation of communities with high levels of both imprisonment and subsequent re-entry of released prisoners, with parents raising their children in areas with little social control, ambivalent attitudes to law enforcement and public authority, and in which incarceration becomes a way of life (breen 2010). wacquant (2010a: 611) argues that prisoners in the us do not, in fact, ‘re-enter’ society after release, instead circulating between the two poles of ‘a continuum of forced confinement formed by the prison and... the metropolis’. relatively overlooked in this literature on prison visiting is the ‘home visit’ or ‘furlough’, in which rather than have family and friends enter the prison complex to visit them, prisoners are granted permission to leave the prison and visit relatives and friends outside, for a specified and restricted length of time. scholarship of furloughs is relatively limited, and as baumer et al. (2009) have noted, recent research has tended to focus on primarily descriptive studies which identify categories of prisoner least likely to be granted a furlough, or those who are most likely to return to the prison late or not at all (e.g. cheliotis 2005; cid 2005). some earlier work, followed up by baumer et al. (2009), considered the functionality of furloughs in easing re-entry after a period of incarceration (jeffrey & woolpert 1974), finding that prisoners granted release from prison for vocational or family-related purposes were significantly less likely to be reimprisoned up to four years after the end of their sentence. drawing further upon the example of furloughs in ireland, o’donnell and jewkes (2011: 75) note that decisions about permitting prisoners home leave in the uk and ireland ‘provide insights into divergent penal policies and contrasting socio-cultural attitudes towards prisoners and imprisonment’, and they raise questions about the interplay between penal policy in assessing prisoners’ eligibility for furlough, and public opinion and justice policy as political instrument, particularly in the uk where tabloid press coverage of ‘temporary release’ tends to promote a sense of prisoners as ‘undeserving’ and ‘pampered’ (ibid. 89). although these studies of furloughs provide fascinating insights into the functioning of systems of home leave, rarely are theorisations of furloughs offered, in relation to the significance of the movement of prisoners out of prison, rather than the movement of visitors in. this paper therefore presents empirical material generated in relation to furloughs in finland, considering the extent to which this practice challenges the ‘total institution’ thesis, and the usefulness of the notion of heterotopia in understanding it. these data are analysed and interpreted in relation to two queries; firstly, the extent to which the practice of furlough in finland constitutes an ‘interpenetration’ of the boundary of the ‘total institution’, and secondly, the extent to which the notion of heterotopia assists in understanding the granting and breaching of furlough. using this data we ask whether furloughs could be interpreted as an example of a heterotopic space, simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the prison, just as the prison itself is simultaneously ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the general social order. methodology data presented in this paper were generated by analysis of two datasets collected for the finnish criminal sanctions agency, which operates under the ministry of justice’s criminal policy department, and oversees the probation service and the prison service. data pertain to the granting and breaching of furlough, or home leave, for prisoners in finland. 68 fennia 190: 2 (2012)dominique moran and anssi keinänen the first dataset presented here (table 1) comprises a 100% sample of the applications for furlough in 2008, analysed to determine the factors which contributed to successful applications. data were analysed by logistic regression to produce correlation coefficients with p-values to indicate statistical significance, and odds ratios which can be interpreted as marginal effects. emboldened coefficients indicate a statistically significant result, at a 5% level (p<0.05), or a moderately statistically significant result (where the p-value is in the range of 0.05-0.1). the second dataset (table 2) pertains to furloughs undertaken between october 2006 and january 2009, in terms of the types of breaches of furlough conditions recorded, and the contributory factors identified for these breaches. breach of furlough is defined as late return to prison, or positive test for a banned substance on return. these data were again analysed to produce correlation coefficients, p-values and marginal impacts or relative risks (rr); with bold text again highlighting statistically significant results. in this table, the relative risks represent the factor by which risk of breach of furlough is higher than the average or comparator. in addition to the statistical data, structured interviews were carried out with prison personnel involved in the furlough system, to illuminate the findings of the statistical research. the granting and breaching of furloughs in finland if a prisoner furloughed in finland complies with leave conditions, then the time spent on leave is considered to count towards the sentence served. in granting furlough, then, the finnish prison authorities are effectively selecting prisoners to serve periods of their sentences outside of the prison. prisoners residing in finland’s 26 prisons (12 of which are open prisons) are eligible to apply for furlough once two thirds of their sentence has been served, or after half has been served if this is specified in an individual prisoner’s sentence plan (i.e. the intentions for the prisoner’s rehabilitation), or if home leave is required for a particularly urgent personal reason. furlough can be granted for spells of two hours up to three to four days in every two month period, and the travel costs incurred during furlough can be reimbursed from state funds in certain cases. the movement of prisoners outside of the prison to undertake home visits is a systemic and relatively uncontroversial aspect of imprisonment in finland, and a relative commonplace for many finnish prisoners; in 2008 11,312 furloughs were undertaken, an average of three per prisoner. in the context of the ‘total institution’, it would seem that this prison boundary is particularly porous, that most finnish prisoners are not as ‘cut off’ from the wider society as goffman’s (1961) thesis would seem to suggest, and that accordingly, the inside/outside binary might be a problematic notion in this context. however, even if this challenge to the ‘total institution’ thesis is fairly clearcut, understanding the significance of the granting and breaching of furlough is more complex. finland’s total prison population in 2008 was 3,5262, serving sentences on average of nine months duration. from this prison population there were 15,257 applications for furlough. of these, 3,897 were refused, and 11,336 granted, giving a ‘success rate’ of around 74%, with the possibility both of multiple applications from, and multiple furloughs taken by, individual prisoners. as keinänen et al. (2010) have noted in a report for the criminal sanctions agency, the likelihood of a successful application for furlough depends on a number of different factors, a selection of which are shown in table 1, and these shed some light on the functionality of the furlough in the eyes of those selecting candidates. the ‘marginal effect’ describes by how many percentage points the predicted probability would change if the independent variable changed. in other words, considering, for example, the probability of being granted furlough by age group, regression analysis shows that for prisoners aged 50 and over, in comparison with the 17−21 age group, the probability of being granted furlough was almost eleven percentage points higher. prisoners who had served nine or more previous sentences were three percentage points less likely to be granted furlough than those with no previous sentences, women were five percentage points more likely to be granted furlough than men, and so on. although furlough is relatively common, access to it is strictly controlled, through an application process. the space of furlough could be conceptualised as heterotopic; a simultaneous distinction and indistinction of inside and outside; a space outside the prison which offers freedom from carceral control, but to which access is strictly controlled by the penal authorities. the granting of furlough is case-specific, with individual applications considered in relation to fennia 190: 2 (2012) 69the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and … table 1. prisoner characteristics and the granting of furlough in 2008. characteristic number of applications % of total % granted furlough coefficient p–value marginal effect age group 17–21 249 1.66 69.8 – – – 21–25 1395 9.32 70.4 0.498 0.007 6.5 25–30 2757 18.2 73.0 0.718 0.000 9.24 30–40 5176 34.58 73.4 0.716 0.000 9.95 40–50 3627 24.23 78.9 0.886 0.000 11.42 50+ 1763 11.78 80.1 0.895 0.000 10.65 previous prison sentences 0 5756 37.7 79.7 – – – 1–2 3493 22.9 71.8 –0.126 0.047 –1.91 3–8 4610 30.2 71.9 –0.091 0.153 –1.37 9+ 1398 9.2 67.5 –0.211 0.021 –3.32 gender men 14289 93.7 74.0 – – – women 968 6.3 80.0 0.372 0.009 4.99 nationality finnish national 14163 92.8 74.7 – – – non–finnish national 1095 7.2 70.2 –0.571 0.000 –9.84 marital status married 3662 24.0 77.0 – – – unmarried 7686 50.4 72.1 –0.162 0.006 –2.42 divorced/widowed 3780 24.8 77.0 –0.104 0.120 –1.57 unknown 127 0.8 62.2 –0.359 0.132 –5.95 type of offence thefts 1744 11.5 67.6 –0.393 0.000 –6.43 other property crime 770 5.1 76.9 –0.365 0.010 –6.02 murder, manslaughter (or attempted) 3092 20.4 81.7 0.203 0.084 2.91 other violent crime 2753 18.2 71.6 –0.301 0.005 –4.75 sexual crime 477 3.1 76.3 –0.251 0.132 –4.02 other crime based on the criminal law 1023 6.7 74.7 –0.358 0.006 –5.86 drug crime 3114 20.5 76.2 –0.192 0.078 –2.96 drunk driving 1080 7.1 63.3 –0.614 0.000 –10.69 other crimes 127 0.8 76.2 –0.592 0.030 –10.46 civilian criminal offence 157 1.0 91.7 0.408 0.216 5.33 previous disciplinary offences in prison 0 12189 79.9 77.2 1 1590 10.4 64.8 –0.556 0.000 –9.45 2–4 1351 8.9 62.4 –0.635 0.000 –11.04 5+ 127 0.8 52.0 –0.804 0.000 –14.97 source: keinänen et al. 2010: 46−54, 74. 70 fennia 190: 2 (2012)dominique moran and anssi keinänen prisoners’ sentence plans. factors taken into account include the nature of the offence committed, and the risk of breach of furlough conditions, a judgement based on the number of previous successful or breached furloughs, the perceived risk of recidivism, any records of attempted escapes or unauthorised leave, and any record of participation in (either positive or negative) activities outside prison. according to this data, when granting access to the ‘outside’ of the prison, the penal authorities rewarded prisoners’ ‘docility’, in terms of their compliance with the carceral regime during incarceration. in deciding which prisoners would be allowed to traverse the boundary of the prison ‘proper’, they tended to reward good behaviour in prison, with inmates who had committed five or more disciplinary offences during incarceration being nearly 15 percentage points less likely to be granted furlough, and those having committed only one offence still at a disadvantage of nine percentage points. the data presented in table 1 also reveal a tendency for penal authorities to view older prisoners, first-time inmates, women, finnish nationals, and married prisoners more favourably when granting furlough. although these categories do not map directly onto prisoner behaviour, they suggest that the penal authorities perceived a lower degree of risk of breach of furlough conditions on the part of older prisoners, generally considered to pose less of a security risk (snyder et al. 2009), alongside ‘lower-risk’ offenders such as those serving a sentence for the first time, home nationals rather than foreign immigrants, and those who were married and might therefore be perceived to ‘comply’ with societal ‘norms’. this suggests that in the selection process, penal authorities attempt, in the context of the furlough, to blur the distinction between the inside and the outside of the prison, by selecting candidates who they perceive to be more likely to sustain the good behaviour demonstrated inside the prison, on the outside. in so doing, one could argue that they attempt to hold the outside and inside in tension and fusion with one another, granting access to the outside on the basis of good behaviour, and encouraging the translocation of ‘docility’ demonstrated inside the prison, into the world outside. or in other words, that they attempt to create, through the case-by-case selection of prisoners for furlough, a space that is simultaneously ‘outside’ of the prison, but which when properly observed, exists both ‘within’ the prison (since the prison sentence continues to be served), and within the general social order of the ‘outside’ (after genocchio 1995, in baer & ravneberg 2008). the extremely low rate of breach of furlough conditions in finland (less than five percent across the entire prison population) suggests that this selection procedure is relatively successful, allowing only those prisoners at low risk of breach to engage in home leave. further analysis of the dataset attempted to identify the relative risk of breaches of furlough conditions according to different prisoner characteristics, to see if selection criteria and risk of violation corresponded with one another. some of these findings bear out the judgements of the panels granting furlough, about the likelihood of breach, but some call them into question. older prisoners were more likely to be granted furlough, and table 2 shows that the likelihood of breaching furlough for the over-50s is 0.35 times (or 65% less than) that of 17−21 year olds. likewise, judgements based on disciplinary record in prison are supported by the finding that prisoners who have committed two to four disciplinary offences during imprisonment are 1.5 times more likely to breach furlough than those with a clean record. unmarried prisoners are 1.6 times more likely to violate the rules than married inmates, and recidivists are both less likely to be granted furlough, and more likely to violate it. however, other findings suggest that the selection panels’ judgements on risk of furlough breach are not supported by the evidence of the likelihood of violation. women, for example, are five percentage points more likely than men to be granted furlough, but 1.78 times as likely to breach the conditions of the home visit. although violent criminals are 4.75 percentage points less likely to be granted furlough, they are statistically no more likely to breach its conditions. foreign citizens are almost ten percentage points less likely to be granted leave, but no more likely to breach it than home nationals. prisoner behaviour during furlough seems, therefore, to be rather unpredictable, and the selection process may not entirely account for the low overall rate of furlough violation. another explanatory factor could perhaps be that the systems put in place to monitor furloughs serve to successfully deter prisoners from committing violations, and to maintain the heterotopic nature of these spaces. specific techniques of discipline are deployed, which recall or replicate some of the systems of control used within the prison. these techniques act directly on the body fennia 190: 2 (2012) 71the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and … table 2. prisoner characteristic and the breach of furlough conditions, 2006−2009. characteristic coefficient p–value marginal impact rr age group 21–25 –0.135 0.745 –0.39 0.87 25–30 –0.491 0.229 –1.31 0.61 30–40 –0.533 0.188 –1.52 0.59 40–50 –0.698 0.092 –1.86 0.50 50+ –1.051 0.018 –2.31 0.35 previous prison sentences 1–2 0.276 0.051 0.91 1.32 3–8 0.532 0.000 1.82 1.70 9+ 0.539 0.006 2.05 1.71 gender women 0.576 0.056 2.25 1.78 nationality non–finnish national 0.274 0.227 0.94 1.31 marital status unmarried 0.459 0.001 1.43 1.58 divorced/widow 0.514 0.001 1.78 1.67 no information 0.249 0.699 0.86 1.28 type of offence thefts 0.147 0.479 0.48 1.16 other property crime –0.217 0.471 –0.61 0.8 murder, manslaughter (or attempted) –0.403 0.074 –1.12 0.67 other violent crime –0.089 0.661 –0.26 0.92 sexual crime –0.391 0.330 –1.01 0.68 other crime based on the criminal law –0.148 0.593 –0.43 0.86 drug crime –0.458 0.039 –1.25 0.63 drunk driving 0.741 0.001 3.12 2.1 other crimes –0.076 0.906 –0.23 0.93 lifer 0.055 0.864 0.17 1.06 previous disciplinary offences in prison 1 0.307 0.047 1.06 1.36 2–4 0.426 0.009 1.56 1.53 5+ 0.714 0.152 3.08 2.04 un/supervised furlough with a guard –2.675 0.000 –3.21 0.07 source: keinänen et al. 2010: 46−54, 74. of the prisoner, requiring physical examination to check for substance abuse, and demanding certain actions on the part of the furloughed inmate in order to comply with regulations. in some cases they act to punctuate the prisoner’s passage between inside and outside and back again, highlighting the sharp distinction with the prison. for example, breathalyser and urine tests are administered before prisoners leave the institution, and again when they return, marking their corporeal exit 72 fennia 190: 2 (2012)dominique moran and anssi keinänen from and entry to the prison. however, whilst outside the prison, mobile phones are monitored, with calls from the prison expected to be answered, and requirements to call the prison at set times of day. in some circumstances, furloughed prisoners are also expected to report to local police stations to undergo breath tests. prisoners whose offences relate to child protection are escorted on furlough by prison guards, who themselves embody the disciplinary regime of the prison, beyond the prison walls. in this way the techniques of discipline also serve to blur or obscure the delineation between inside and outside. the furlough thus becomes a heterotopic, quasicarceral space outside of the prison; access to the ‘outside’ is not only strictly controlled by the penal authorities’ selection procedures, but the ‘outside’ is actively surveilled and prisoners on furlough are constantly reminded of their incarcerated status. interviews with prison personnel question the effectiveness of these techniques of discipline for maintaining the juxtaposition of inside and outside during furlough. some did feel that the technical measures had some kind of deterrent effect, but others took the view that these measures only made proving a violation easier, and did not of themselves prevent it from happening. we may argue, therefore, that the low rate of breach of furlough is due to the internalisation of the carceral regime, as inmates operate the self-discipline or self-surveillance described by foucault (1979) as the mechanism through which disciplinary power or biopower produces ‘docile’ bodies within the carceral institution. this internalisation is represented by good behaviour on the part of prisoners, and operates in two ways in relation to furlough. first, this internalisation is rewarded through the selection process; the penal authorities select ‘docile’ prisoners, viewed as pliant and most likely to maintain self-discipline, to ensure that furlough is properly observed as a space that is simultaneously ‘outside’ of the prison, but also ‘within’ the prison for the purposes of discipline and the contiguous serving of sentences. these individuals are least likely to take advantage of the indistinction of furlough, by acting as if they were ‘free’; rather retaining a sense of their incarceration and thereby complying with regulations. second, even in spaces ‘outside’ the prison walls, these furloughed inmates continue to operate the self-regulation learned ‘inside’, complying with furlough conditions and returning to prison sober and on time more than ninety-five percent of the time. conclusion this paper opened with a critique of the relatively narrow empirical focus of carceral geography, drawing attention to its concentration thus far on highly incarcerative contexts, such as the us, uk and russia, and suggesting that much could be gained from considering different types of penal regime, such as the low imprisonment context of finland. it then moved to a summary of critical commentary on goffman’s (1961) total institution thesis, drawing particularly on the work of baer and ravneberg (2008) who questioned the inside/ outside binary of the total institution through a consideration of the notion of heterotopia to describe the multiple simultaneous distinctions and indistinctions, and incompatible juxtapositions between inside and outside. by positing the practice of furloughs or home visits for prisoners in finland as an example of the porosity of the prison boundary, the paper argued that the granting and breaching of furloughs could be interpreted as an example of such a heterotopic space, simultaneously within and outside the prison, just as the prison itself is simultaneously within and outside the general social order. however, we also argue that the context of incarceration is key. although baer and ravneberg (2008) provide a thoughtful and informative theorisation of the inside and outside of prisons which critiques the total institution, and which can be usefully applied to finnish furloughs, in their own work their focus is turned away from their comparative contexts of england and norway. we argue here that the specific carceral context of finland matters very much. as discussed earlier, the finnish prison system is not intentionally punitive – it aims to treat individuals on a case-by-case basis and to develop a ‘moral-creating and valueshaping effect’ (von hofer 2003: 28), based not on punishment or fear of punishment, but by influencing individuals’ values and moral views. importantly, it aims to minimise the differences between living standards in prison and on the outside, by ensuring that loss of liberty is the only ‘punishment’ suffered. the philosophy that underlies this decarcerative penal system, in which more than a quarter of prisoners are held in open prisons, is that even though imprisonment is intended to include the ‘punishment’ of loss of liberty, the harm caused by this loss is also to be mitigated as far as possible, by providing support for prisoner adaptation, in the form of educational fennia 190: 2 (2012) 73the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and … and work programmes, probationary release prior to the end of sentences, parole, and home leave, or furlough. furloughs are provided for in chapter 14 of the finnish penal code, and are specifically intended to support the maintenance of prisoners’ social contacts, and contact with wider society, and thereby to reduce the harm caused by loss of liberty. in this context, where conditions ‘inside’ prison are intended to mirror those ‘outside’ as closely as possible, where considerable efforts are made to maintain prisoners’ social contacts, and where every year the prison boundary is traversed thousands of times by prisoners on home leave, we might expect the ‘total institution’ as commonly characterised, to fit particularly poorly. in finland, furloughs can be described as heterotopic spaces, simultaneously within and outside the prison, perhaps because in finland prison itself occupies a space which whilst necessarily ‘outside’ the general social order, is also intentionally designed to be very firmly ‘within’ it, in relation to the stated intention of the finnish system that imprisonment, should not unduly interfere with prisoners’ participation in society, but should as far as possible promote it. the developing sub-discipline of carceral geography is in active dialogue with more longstanding disciplines engaged with the study of incarceration, and we argue here that comparative criminal justice, the study of ‘what people and institutions in different places do – and should do – about crime problems’ (nelken 2010: 1) could be particularly informative. human geography continually holds in tension the generic and the specific; an imperative to theorise with an awareness of local contingency. comparative criminal justice similarly tries to consider carceral practices in one place in the light of those in another in order to move towards a more holistic understanding of how crime and its control are connected, and to assist in formulating and testing explanatory hypotheses, and generating transcultural knowledge. in expanding its reach beyond hypercarcerative settings, carceral geography could benefit from an interdisciplinary dialogue with comparative criminology. the current focus within carceral geography on highly incarcerative contexts such as the us and russian federation, while offering useful insights into the functioning of these carceral systems and experiences within them, is at risk of encouraging theorisation about carceral systems in general, based on these highly specific settings, and to the exclusion of alternative perspectives and contexts. whilst considering and comparing different carceral contexts is a challenging prospect, particularly given the frequently cited difficulties of access to prisons and criminal justice systems, we argue here that carceral geography need not start ab initio; prison scholarship recognises that punishment and crime have little to do with one another, and has developed persuasive accounts not only of the workings of criminal justice systems in different places, but of the making of sense of these systems, and the role of researchers in constructing discourses about them. with this in mind, we would encourage geographers working in incarceration to pursue actively interdisciplinary engagements with carceral space, and in particular to draw upon these comparative criminological literatures. notes 1 http://www.rikosseuraamus.fi/14994.htm accessed 02/02/2012. 2 average daily prison population in 2008 (criminal sanctions agency 2008: 15). references aebi mf & kuhn a 2000. influences on the prisoner rate: number of entries into prison, length of sentences and crime rate. european journal on criminal policy and research 8, 65−75. http://dx.doi. org/10.1023%2fa%3a1008753330678. agamben g 1998. homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. stanford university press, stanford. agamben g 2005. state of exception. university of chicago press, chicago. allspach a 2010. landscapes of (neo)liberal control: the transcarceral spaces of federally sentenced women in canada. gender, place & culture 17: 6, 705−723. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f09663 69x.2010.517021. altheide dl 1991. the mass media as a total institution. communications 16: 1, 63–72. http://dx.doi. org/10.1515%2fcomm.1991.16.1.63. baer ld & ravneberg b 2008. the outside and inside in norwegian and english prisons. geografiska annaler b 90: 2, 205−216. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111%2fj.1468-0467.2008.00287.x. bales wd & mears dp 2008. inmate social ties and the transition to society: does visitation reduce recidivism? journal of research in crime and delinquency 45: 3, 287−321. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1177%2f0022427808317574. 74 fennia 190: 2 (2012)dominique moran and anssi keinänen baumer ep, o’donnell i & hughes n 2009. the porous prison: a note on the rehabilitative potential of visits home. the prison journal 89: 1, 119−126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0032885508330430. berg mt & huebner bm 2010. reentry and the ties that bind: an examination of social ties, employment and recidivism. justice quarterly 28: 2, 382−410. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f074188 25.2010.498383. bonds a 2009. discipline and devolution: constructions of poverty, race and criminality in the politics of rural prison development. antipode 41: 3, 416−438. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.14678330.2009.00681.x. breen j 2010. secondary effects of imprisonment: the new direction of prison research. irish probation journal 7, 46−64. casey-acevedo k & bakken t 2008. visiting women in prison. journal of offender rehabilitation 34: 3, 67−83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300%2fj076v 34n03_05. cavalier es 2011. men at sport: gay men’s experiences in the sport workplace. journal of homosexuality 58: 5, 626−646. http://dx.doi.org/10.10 80%2f00918369.2011.563662. che d 2005. constructing a prison in the forest: conflicts over nature, paradise and identity. annals of the association of american geographers 95: 4, 809−831. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.14678306.2005.00488.x. cheliotis lk 2005. the prison furlough programme in greece: findings from a research project in the male prison of korydallos. punishment & society 7: 2, 201−215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f1462 474505050443. christie n 2000. crime control as industry: towards gulags, western style. 3rd ed. routledge, london. cid j 2005. the penitentiary system in spain: the use of imprisonment, living conditions and rehabilitation. punishment & society 7: 2, 147−166. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f1462474505050439. clear tr 2007. imprisoning communities: how mass incarceration makes disadvantaged neighborhoods worse. oxford university press, oxford. codd h 2007. prisoners’ families and resettlement: a critical analysis. the howard journal 46: 3, 255−263. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.14682311.2007.00472.x. codd h 2008. in the shadow of prison: families, imprisonment and criminal justice. willan, portland. comfort m 2002. ‘papa’s house’. the prison as domestic and social satellite. ethnography 3: 4, 467−499. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f14661 38102003004017. comfort m 2003. in the tube at san quentin: the “secondary prisonization” of women visiting inmates. journal of contemporary ethnography 32: 1, 77−107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f08912 41602238939. comfort m 2007. punishment beyond the legal offender. annual review of law & social science 3, 271−296. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146%2fannurev. lawsocsci.3.081806.112829. comfort m 2008. doing time together: love and family in the shadow of the prison. university of chicago press, chicago. comfort m, nurse am, mckay t & kramer k 2011. taking children into account: addressing the intergenerational effects of parental incarceration. criminology & public policy 10: 3, 839−850. criminal sanctions agency 2008. the annual report of the criminal sanctions field. the criminal sanctions agency, helsinki. derkzen d, gobeil r & gileno j 2009. visitation and post-release outcome among federally-sentenced offenders. correctional service canada research report no. r-205. dirsuweit t 1999. carceral spaces in south africa: a case study of institutional power, sexuality and transgression in a women’s prison. geoforum 30, 71−83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fs00167185%2898%2900030-x. downes d 2007. visions of penal control in the netherlands. in tonry m (ed). crime, punishment and politics in comparative perspective – crime and justice: a review of research 36, 93−125. university of chicago press, chicago. farrington k 1992. the modern prison as total institution? public perception versus objective reality. crime & delinquency 38: 6, 6−26. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177%2f0011128792038001002. foucault m 1979. discipline and punish. vintage, new york. foucault m [1967] 1998. different spaces. in foucault m (ed). aesthetics, method and epistemology. penguin, london. garland d 2001. introduction: the meaning of mass imprisonment. punishment & society 3: 1, 5−7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f1462474012222 8203. geller a, garfinkel i & western b 2011. paternal in-paternal incarceration and support for children in fragile families. demography 48, 23−47. http://dx.doi.or g/10.1007%2fs13524-010-0009-9. genocchio b 1995. discourse, discontinuity, difference: the question of ‘other’ spaces. in watson s & gibson k (eds). postmodern cities and spaces, 35−46. blackwell, oxford. gilmore rw 2002. fatal couplings of power and difference: notes on racism and geography. the professional geographer 54, 15–24. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111%2f0033-0124.00310. gilmore rw 2007. golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis and opposition in globalizing california. university of california press, berkeley. glasmeier ak & farrigan t 2007. the economic impacts of the prison development boom on persistently poor rural places. international regional science review 30: 3, 274−299. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177%2f0160017607301608. fennia 190: 2 (2012) 75the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of prisons: carceral geography and … goffman e 1961. asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. anchor books, garden city, ny. gottschalk m 2009. the long reach of the carceral state: the politics of crime, mass imprisonment, and penal reform in the united states and abroad. law & social inquiry 34: 2, 439−472. http://dx. doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1747-4469.2009.01152.x. hartman kj 2000. prison walls and firewalls: h.b. 2376 – arizona denies inmate access to the internet. arizona state law journal 32, 1423−1449. holt n & miller d 1972. explorations in inmate-family relationships. california department of corrections report no. 46. hong-chui w 2010. ‘pains of imprisonment’: narratives of the women partners and children of the incarcerated. child & family social work 15, 196−205. jeffery r & woolpert s 1974. work furlough as an alternative to incarceration: an assessment of its effects on recidivism and social cost. journal of criminal law and criminology 65: 3, 405−415. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307%2f1142610. keinänen a, tolvanen m, helminen m & kilpeläinen m 2010. vankien poistumislupakäytännöt ja niiden yhteneväisyys. rikosseuraamuslaitoksen julkaisuja 4/2010. kruttschnitt c 2011. is the devil in the details? crafting policy to mitigate the collateral consequence of parental incarceration. criminology & public policy 10: 3, 829−837. lappi-seppälä t 2000. the fall of the finnish prison population. journal of scandinavian studies in criminology and crime prevention 1: 1, 27−40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f1404385005 0116246. lappi-seppälä t 2002. penal policy and incarceration rates. corrections today, 30−33. lynch jp & sabol wj 2003. assessing the effects of mass incarceration on informal social control in communities. criminology & public policy 267, 267−294. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1745 9133.2004.tb00042.x. mali j 2008. comparison of the characteristics of homes for older people in slovenia with goffman’s concept of the total institution. european journal of social work 11: 4, 431−443. http://dx. doi.org/10.1080%2f13691450802220966. mears dp, cochran jc, siennick se & bales wd 2011. prison visitation and recidivism. justice quarterly, 1−31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f07 418825.2011.583932. ministry of justice 1975. statute on prison administration. ministry of justice, helsinki. moran d 2012a. prisoner reintegration and the stigma of prison time inscribed on the body. punishment & society. moran d 2012b. between outside and inside: prison visiting rooms as liminal carceral spaces. geojournal, forthcoming. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/ s10708-011-9442-6. moran d 2013. leaving behind the ‘total institution’? teeth, transcarceral spaces and the (re)inscription of the formerly incarcerated body. gender, place & culture. moran d, piacentini l & pallot j 2012. disciplined mobility and carceral geography: prisoner transport in russia. transactions of the institute of british geographers 37: 3, 446−460. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00483.x. moran d, gill n & conlon d (eds) 2013. carceral spaces; mobility and agency in imprisonment and migrant detention. ashgate, farnham. morris p 1965. prisoners and their families. george allen & unwin, london. nelken d 2010. comparative criminal justice. sage, london. noga a 1991. battered wives: the home as a total institution. violence and victims 6: 2, 137−149. o’donnell i & jewkes y 2011. going home for christmas: prisoners, a taste of freedom and the press. the howard journal 50: 1, 75−91. peck j 2003. geography and public policy: mapping the penal state. progress in human geography 27, 222−232. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191%2f0309 132503ph424pr. peck j & theodore n 2009. carceral chicago: making the ex-offender employability crisis. international journal of urban and regional research 32: 2, 251−281. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj. 1468-2427.2008.00785.x. philo c 2012. security of geography/geography of security. transactions of the institute of british geographers 37, 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj. 1475-5661.2011.00488.x. pratt j & eriksson a 2011. ‘mr larsson is walking out again’. the origins and development of scandinavian prison systems. australian and new zealand journal of criminology 44: 1, 7−23. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177%2f0004865810393105. rose dr & clear tr 1998. incarceration, social capital and crime: implications for social disorganization theory. criminology 36, 441−479. http://dx. d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1111 % 2 f j . 1 7 4 5 9 1 2 5 . 1 9 9 8 . tb01255.x. rose dr & clear tr 2003. incarceration, re-entry and social capital: social networks in the balance. in travis j & waul m (eds). prisoners once removed: the impact of incarceration and reentry on children, families and communities. urban institute, washington, dc. rosenbloom t 2011. traffic light compliance by civilians, soldiers and military officers. accident analysis and prevention 43: 6, 2010−2014. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.aap.2011.05.019. schafer ne 1994. exploring the link between visits and parole success: a survey of prison visitors. international journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology 38: 1, 17−32. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177%2f0306624x9403800103. 76 fennia 190: 2 (2012)dominique moran and anssi keinänen shedd c 2011. countering the carceral continuum: the legacy of mass incarceration. criminology & public policy 10: 3, 865−871. sibley d & van hoven b 2009. the contamination of personal space: boundary construction in a prison environment. area 41: 2, 198−206. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111%2fj.1475-4762.2008.00855.x. skorpen a, anderssen n, oeye c & bjelland ak 2008. the smoking-room as psychiatric patients’ sanctuary: a place for resistance. journal of psychiatric and mental health nursing 15: 9, 728−736. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.13652850.2008.01298.x. snyder c, van wormer k, chadha j & jaggers j 2009. older adult inmates: the challenge for social work. social work 54: 2, 117−124. http://dx.doi. org/10.1093%2fsw%2f54.2.117. van hoven b & sibley d 2008. ‘just duck’: the role of vision in the production of prison space. environment and planning d: society and space 26, 1001−1017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd5107. von hofer h 2003. prison populations as political constructs: the case of finland, holland and sweden. journal of scandinavian studies in criminology and crime prevention 4, 21−38. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080%2f14043850310009921. wacquant l 2000. the new ‘peculiar institution’: on the prison as surrogate ghetto. theoretical criminology 4, 377–389. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177% 2f1362480600004003007. wacquant l 2010a. prisoner re-entry as myth and ceremony. dialectical anthropology 34, 605−620. wacquant l 2010b. class, race and hyperincarceration in revanchist america. daedelus 140: 3, 74−90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162%2fdaed_a_ 00024. wacquant l 2010c. crafting the neoliberal state: workfare, prisonfare and social insecurity. sociological forum 25: 2, 197−220. wacquant l 2011. the wedding of workfare and prisonfare revisited. social justice 38: 1–2, 1−16. wilderman c & western b 2010. incarceration in fragile families. the future of children 20: 2, 157−177. world prison brief 2012. <http://www.prisonstudies. org/info/worldbrief/index.php> 9.2.2012. palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa71009 doi: 10.11143/fennia.71009 palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era janette habashi habashi, j. (2019) palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era. fennia 197(1) 77–93. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.71009 the constant rendering of palestinian national identity provides crucial insight not only to the current palestinian community’s political status, but also to past and the future experiences. national identity echoes the intersectionality of history and local politics. for the last few decades, palestinian national identity has been evolving with continuous alteration that encompasses local political discourse in the palestinian community. whereas it once embraced unity among different political ideologies, a shift occurred with hamas election victory in 2006, which resulted in the division of the palestinian community, whereby the palestinian authority, under abbas leadership is ruling the west bank, and hamas is governing the gaza strip. this political tension has served to render national identity. palestinian children echoed such politics in the construction of their national identity through their interpretation of personal experiences that are intertwined with current political events. therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show how palestinian children articulated national identity in a post-arafat/abbas era, recognizing that national identity is not static. keywords: palestine, national identity, children, youth janette habashi, department of human relations, the university of oklahoma, 601 elm avenue, norman, ok 73019 usa. e-mail: jhabashi@ou.edu national identity: the palestine case national identity serves to unite communities within nation-states, as it provides a sense of belonging and connection among people, despite never knowing, or meeting each other. this creates an imagined bond among diverse members of society (anderson 2006). national identity is an inherent function in nation-states, especially as society shifted from tribal cultures to a modernity structure that organized societal power and governmental bureaucracy (venn & featherstone 2006). therefore, society engaged in a multi-dimensional identity that encapsulated an ethnicity dimension, but also included a collective narrative involving aspects of history, common rights and duties, mass culture and others. the development of a multi-dimensional national identity is interactive with local political circumstances. in palestine for example, national identity shifted with the local political reality, and emerged alongside the concept of nationalism that spread throughout europe in the 20th century, as anti-semitism fueled zionism and the quest for a jewish homeland (tyler 2011). global politics of the 20th century shaped the colonization of palestine, aiding in the formation of a unique national identity that is embedded in collective and individual accounts of oppression and expulsion. such narratives of colonization did not dissipate but were reconstructed according to different local political realities. © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 78 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper national identity is not static, it evolves with continuous reconstruction. this constant rendering can be observed in palestinian national identity, as it provides insight into local politics throughout different eras, as well as to the reconstruction of national narratives. the formation of national identity is not exclusive to adults; on the contrary, children are active in the construction of national identity through their interpretation of local politics. contemporary politics create nuances in children’s national identity and distinguish it from one generation to another. focusing on a specific political era shows the impact of politics as they relate to children’s construction of national identity. politics have shaped the views of what it means to be palestinian. the purpose of this research is to examine the construction of palestinian children’s national identity, as it relates to their own political experiences under the leadership of mahmoud abbas, supporting the notion that national identity is not static. to understand this interaction, it is crucial to provide an overview of palestinian politics and its impact on children’s formation of national identity. following this discussion, a methodology and data analysis is provided regarding the collection of research on palestinian children’s national identity, transitioning into a thorough examination of two categories that emerge: abbas era self and abbas era other, as well as nuances within each category. the impact of history on national identity palestine as a nation-state is constantly disputed due to its different manifestations throughout history. in 1948, palestinians experienced al-nakba, the forceful displacement of 70% of its population by the zionist army, which resulted in the creation of the israeli state (beinin & hajjar 2014). still, the palestinian atrocities continued; in 1967, palestinians experienced al-naksa, the israeli invasion of the west bank and gaza strip, which resulted in the ongoing israeli military occupation of these territories, leading to the displacement of more than one third of the palestinian population (nassar 1997). throughout both al-nakba and alnaksa, palestinians were forced to settle in various refugee camps in lebanon, jordan, syria, egypt and other arab countries and are still unable to return to their homes today. these two major political events drew the 1967 palestinian borders within the international community, whereby palestine lost 77% of its original land (beinin & hajjar 2014). national identity within the al-nakba era captured experiences of zionist colonization, collective expulsions and international betrayal. more importantly, it centered on pan-arab ideology for the liberation of palestine which consequently failed. this is contrary to the palestinian national identity during the alnaksa era, though it was associated with the same sentiments of oppression and goals for liberation, as the establishment of the palestinian liberation organization (plo) in 1964 emphasized that the liberation of palestine would achieve arab unity, contrary to the initial phase of national identity. upon the formation of the plo, palestinian people explicitly expressed their national identity by aligning with one of its seven political parties. fatah was the most popular political party within the plo, as it engaged with all sectors of society and diaspora. during this time, secularism was a staple of palestinian national identity. another major shift occurred in the late 1980s with the formation of the hamas party, which called for embracing and proclaiming islam as a major aspect of palestinian national identity. within the first intifada era, religion as a part of national identity was profoundly expressed and manifested in local politics, as hamas remained the only political party in palestine that did not join the plo, due partially to ideological differences regarding secularism in palestinian society, and largely to its perception on the existence of an israeli state (tuastad 2013). the integration of religion into local politics contributed to the contemporary expression of palestinian national identity, as well as to the tension in reaching a consensus regarding a political agreement with israel. after the first intifada (1987–1991), the plo’s formal recognition of israel as a state, in congruence with a palestinian statehood (kaufman 2011) marked the first talks of peace between israel and palestine. the oslo accords of 1993 detailed a plan for israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, reverting back to the 1967 borders of palestine, however, this was unsuccessful due to the continuing expansion of israeli settlements within the occupied territories, rather than withdrawal of israeli forces (shafir 2007). hamas at the time rejected the oslo accords and its implication of establishing the palestinian authority (hilal 2010). the second intifada (2000–2005) erupted due to the continuous harsh conditions imposed by israel within the occupied territories. during this time, fennia 197(1) (2019) 79janette habashi hamas engaged in resistance, but also feared that fatah may cost palestinian’s their birthright (tuastad 2013). though the difference between the plo (fatah) and hamas is based on ideology, both continued to strive for the same goal. however, the breaking point came following the death of the palestinian authority (pa) president, fatah leader yasser arafat in 2004. in 2006, the occupied territory (the gaza strip and west bank) held a democratic election, which ultimately led to the split between hamas and fatah. the surprising hamas electoral victory resulted in fatah’s attempt to deprive hamas of governance by utilizing political and military power (dabed 2010), signaling the beginning of an era discussed in this manuscript as the abbas era. for a few months, the disagreement between hamas and fatah resulted in violent confrontations between members of each party (ghanem 2013). the refusal of fatah to allow hamas to rule resulted in the gaza strip falling under hamas control, and the west bank under fatah control, presenting a major division amongst palestinian people, thus complicating the goal of attaining palestinian statehood. the continuous alteration of local political realities impacted palestinian national identity, and contributed to defining palestinian children’s national identity within a specific era. premises of children’s palestinian national identity children’s construction of national identity is greatly impacted by local politics. children are not unaware of local politics, on the contrary, they are active responders, as local politics impact their family, and community (habashi 2013). israeli occupation is expressed throughout the palestinian narrative, as it determines children’s everyday realities of education, health care, free movement, future and wellbeing. therefore, palestinian children’s responses are continuously reshaped, while constructing both the self and other within national identity. the self can be described as “the way a person experiences himself as himself” (gilhotra 1995, 599), while the concept of other stems from ‘difference’, which matters because “it is essential to meaning: without it meaning could not exist” (hall 1997, 234). for palestinians, the concept of ‘self’ is embedded in the perception of what it means to be a palestinian, whereas the ‘other’ tends to be associated with oppression and israel. thus, the concept of both self and other play a crucial role in children’s construction of national identity, as both are contextualized within local politics. palestinian children’s contemporary national identity is founded on the construction of the self and other that is connected to the national experience of colonization and zionism, as discussed in my previous work (habashi 2005), in which palestinian children constructed the self and other within their own interpretations of the historical, collective narrative and political discourse. indeed, the historical narrative has not changed. however, local politics have changed drastically, following the establishment of the palestinian authority under the leadership of abbas, a fatah leader, which has impacted the current generation of palestinian children’s construction of national identity. hopkins and pain (2007) argued that children’s construction of social identity is not only associated with personal experience and intersectionality, but with generational eras that are contextualized by local reality and politics. therefore, this manuscript provides a discussion of palestinian children’s construction of self and other, which are contextualized within abbas era politics, as most participants in this study have solely experienced abbas leadership and the establishment of the palestinian authority. although palestinian politics did not drastically shift following the death of arafat, the two had differing leadership styles. arafat was seen as a strong leader who championed various forms of resistance (kurtzer 2017), while abbas chose to cooperate with the demands of the israeli government, and struggled to rule his own people (jarbawi & pearlman 2007). under abbas’ control, the palestinian authority also began to work more closely with the israeli government on multiple levels, thus, transforming the palestinian collective narrative by means of altering relations with israel in terms of resistance and reactions to occupation. on many occasions, the pa attempted to control local resistance and opposition against israeli occupation and settlement expansion (tartir 2017). the abbas leadership and its interactions with israel has had a continual impact on palestinian’s everyday lives. one example of such political reality that should have been altered twenty years after the oslo agreement is the continuation of dividing the west bank into three areas (a, b and c). area a is under the control of palestinian authority, area b is under the joint control of israel and palestine, 80 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper and area c is under the control of the israeli military. the premise being that these areas will form one cohesive geographic entity known as a palestinian state. however, this division of the west bank did not disappear after the oslo agreement, on the contrary, israel continues its practices of occupation and settlement expansion. furthermore, this division mounted additional separation that corresponds with national id cards and discrimination practices, whereby palestinians living in jerusalem have blue id’s, which provide them with israeli resident rights and allow them to visit the west bank. an orange id is associated with palestinians in the west bank who have limited movement. and a green id is for palestinians living in the gaza strip who have no free movement but are rather living behind walls in an open jail (tawil-souri 2012). these israeli political conditions, in addition to confiscation of land, control of education, health care and freedom are the daily reality of the palestinian community (giacaman et al. 2009). the generations involved in this study are merely experiencing israeli occupation under the auspices of abbas leadership of the palestinian authority. the aftermath of a hamas electoral victory and the pa’s resistance to allow hamas to legitimately govern resulted in the split of the west bank and gaza strip. this split is central within the narratives of the current generation, as it is deeply inherit in local politics and the meaning of national identity. therefore, children’s construction of self and other is framed within a crucial period of local politics that redefine national identity. methodology the present research is based on a data segment of a longitudinal study that took place from 2007 to 2011, with children aged 12–15 years old, from cities, villages, and refugee camps in the west bank, which produced a comprehensive analysis of youth political socialization. all participants attended either middle school or high school in the west bank at the time of data collection. though participants were children when their participation began, some are referred to as youth due to the fact that they aged throughout the duration of the study. this study utilized snowball sampling in order to recruit a total of 15–30 youth participants throughout the duration of the study, with a mixture of females and males. these participants were from cities, villages and refugee camps throughout the west bank and their political activity greatly varied. upon identifying a small initial group of participants, children then encouraged other members of their peer groups and communities to join. additionally, adult community leaders encouraged children’s involvement in the study because it would serve to improve their learning experiences in school and community. the participation of children was without incentive or non-governmental organizations oversight. participation of the children fluctuated, as some made personal decisions to withdraw from the study, and others opted in. the participants were asked to document their everyday lives by journaling about daily routines and local social and political issues, as well as their reactions. children were first asked to write twice a week with guidelines that included questions such as what are your views on what is happening in your current community, and, describe your daily routine and what sort of issues may disrupt this routine. after some time, the participants wanted to write more about what their lives were like, without much emphasis on the guidelines. thus, the participants took ownership over the project and were able to focus on their thoughts on being a member of the palestinian community. this approach provided insight as to how children frame their perspectives without the control of adult perceptions or preconceived notions. the participant ownership of the research challenged the top-down model of children understanding local events (habashi 2017). this is significant in comprehending children’s construction of national identity. to capture children’s perspectives, each journal was translated by a local bilingual translator from arabic to english to maintain the cultural context of the writing. after translation, in order to minimize bias, it was necessary for two researchers to read and code the data independently and validate the interpretation of children’s construction of national identity. cross-referencing served to verify the coding structure and the relationship between the codes, as well as generated patterns of the themes (self and other). grounded theory guided the analysis of the research. the significance of grounded theory lies in making meaning of the themes and relationships embedded throughout the data. the analysis focused on the perspectives of participants, as this provided a spectrum of views on the two themes. each theme produced several dimensions that included fragmentation, whereby insight was fennia 197(1) (2019) 81janette habashi provided regarding how children’s national identity changed over time, though it also maintained some consistency with existing research (habashi 2008). in the present study, palestinian children emphasized seven dimensions of the self and five dimensions of the other, which are framed within abbas era political discourse. theme one: the self the self in national identity is relative to how one perceives and experiences him/herself as a part of a community. within this theme, palestinian children articulated the self in seven dimensions and referenced them within the political era of abbas leadership. the seven dimensions of the self are: (1) abbas era historical refugee self, (2) abbas era ennobled self, (3) abbas era traitor self, (4) abbas era religious self, (5) abbas era resistance self, (6) abbas era geographic self, and (7) abbas era expressive self. abbas era historical refugee self historical devastation is not negated by current politics or political figures, but is continuous throughout the lives of all palestinians. children expressed national identity in this dimension by addressing the history of the palestinian people and their forced displacement in relation to their current political status’ as refugees. their historical narratives centered on alnakba, the 1948 expulsion of more than two thirds of palestinians by zionist militants, and on al-naksa in 1967, when israel invaded the west bank and gaza strip, expelling between 300,000 to 400,000 palestinians (kattan 2005). the experiences of 1967 are still being depicted within some of the participant’s homes, as one female from hebron wrote, “i asked my father about that, he was 18 years old at that time, he said: israeli forces entered our city on 6/6/1967, they expelled many people”. the 1967 war played an important role in this dimension of the self, as many participants are third and fourth generation refugees, thus, it is a dominant part of their daily lives. this dimension is not confined to one generation, as i have found in my previous research, palestinian children from three generations who identified as refugees, acknowledged their current living situation in the west bank, but also recognized they have roots stemming from a specific village prior to the zionist expulsion habashi (2013). one female from nablus stated, they call us displaced people, and sometimes they call us refugees, all this as a result for what happened in 1948 and 1967. unfortunately, we didn’t return, but still we have hope. we will return from lebanon, syria, and jordan. and we will fight and serve our home land. such historical experiences have become part of the participants daily reality, and are reinforced when israeli leadership, such as prime minister benjamin netanyahu, consistently denies the palestinian right of return, which is guaranteed by united nations resolution 194. one female from hebron shared insight by stating, netanyahu's racist speech denies the palestinian legitimate rights to establish a sovereign state. also it denies jerusalem to be the capital of palestine, yet asks the palestinians to recognize a jewish state. it seems he has the right to expel indigenous people living in the borders of 1948 under the pretext of a jewish state. furthermore, he denies the refugees right of return which is guaranteed by the international law and un resolutions. israel’s failure to acknowledge the palestinian right of return is in clear violation of international law, in that it places a burden on neighboring states that must provide refuge for wrongfully expelled people (kattan 2005). throughout the abbas era, the right of return is discussed in relation to palestinians returning to 1967 borders, rather than to specific towns or villages prior to the establishment of israel (schenker 2008). this alternative interpretation of an international law reshapes the future meaning of being a refugee, while undermining the rights of palestinian people. abbas has contributed to denying the palestinian people, as well as coming generations, their right to return, thus creating the abbas era historical refugee self. abbas is the first palestinian leader to reframe the palestinian right of return, meaning that al-nakba descendants will not have the right to 82 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper return to their homes of 1948, but can return to the west bank (tadros 2017). this perspective not only limits palestinian rights, but also the alters the meaning of the future historical self. abbas era ennobled self being proud to be palestinian is one quality found in the self. many participants articulated and expressed aspects of the ennobled self in terms of palestinian culture, traditions, national aspirations and roots of their ancestors. for the participants, one prominent characteristic of national identity is the pride of country, and leadership. during and after his leadership, arafat was seen as an icon of national pride, as one female participant states, today was the fourth anniversary of abu ammar (arafat) martyrdom... all the schools did a ceremony and sang the national anthem. our song was about stop the siege, occupation, judaization, and assassination. downtown was closed because boys were throwing stones on the soldiers, and soldiers threw tear gas and bullets. the radio had national songs the whole day. this day was beautiful and represented how we love palestine. abu ammar was dead because of palestine and we fight for his dream to free palestine. his spirit will remain for the upcoming generations. arafat was perceived as a dedicated palestinian leader, as opposed to abbas who must consistently convince palestinians that he is a legitimate leader rather than someone chosen by the americans to replace arafat (jarbawi & pearlman 2007). although this disconnect did not cause the participants to be less proud of being a palestinian, as they are acutely aware of the role that ever-changing politics play in their everyday lives, as one female from hebron wrote “in my journaling all the subjects are political and national. this is the palestinian child and we will be always like this until our land becomes free, our cause takes our minds and hearts.” farsakh (2011) explains that the palestinian ‘cause’ can be traced to when refugees took matters into their own hands and began fighting for palestinian statehood and return. the participants expressed national pride through various symbols associated with liberation and history, especially the palestinian flag, which was derived from the arab revolt (1916–1918), “signifying the need for an all-arab effort against the zionist cause”, as well as adding “legitimacy to their struggle” (podeh 2011, 435). the flag as a symbol of pride can be observed throughout history, as the palestinian declaration of independence, adopted in algierson november 15, 1988 stated “we call upon our great people to rally to the palestinian flag, to take pride in it and to defend it so that it shall remain forever a symbol of our freedom and dignity in a homeland that shall be forever free”. the flag is mentioned often throughout the participant’s journals, as a male from qalqilya discussed jerusalem and how the flag would represent liberation, nobility, and the right to exist for the palestinian people: it is an arab city and it’s the capital of palestine, soon it will be free, and one of the palestinian girls or boys will raise the palestinian flag on the dome of the rock to announce that jerusalem is for us. it was for us and it is for us until the day of resurrection comes. being a proud palestinian involves the sentiment of fighting for liberation, rights, culture and symbols. however, within the abbas era, pride in palestinian leadership was excluded, as this leadership has not captured the notion of fighting for the palestinian rights. abbas is not perceived as acting on behalf of palestinians interest but rather an agent who is concerned with coordinating security with israel (hamdi 2018). abbas era traitor self traditionally, traitor informatives have been associated with individual acts. i have found this to be the case in my previous work, whereby, palestinian children associated the traitor self to collaborators who served the israeli government and hindered the liberation of palestine (habashi 2005). within the abbas era, children have transformed the meaning of the traitor self, in that it is no longer just an individual act, but is associated with palestinian leadership betrayal. as one female participant discussed their dissatisfaction with abbas, especially regarding the division of jerusalem, fennia 197(1) (2019) 83janette habashi i read a flash news about our president mahmoud abbas, he said that jerusalem will be divided into two parts. this was the agreement between the president and israel, but we refuse this. jerusalem belongs to us. we will not accept this. israel starts to demolish houses, and expels people in jerusalem. where is the president to stop all that, and resolve the split? the frustration with president abbas and the lack of standing up to israel is echoed in another female participant’s journal, “mahmud abbas didn’t do anything for them i hate him”. the discussion of dividing jerusalem was not on the table during the arafat era, as he was strongly against the division of jerusalem (baskin 2001), whereas zelnick (2010) notes that abbas met with former israeli prime minister ehud olmert on 35 occasions to discuss “the division of sovereignty in jerusalem” (ibid., 26). despite the installment of the palestinian authority (pa) in 1994, which was meant to be a stepping stone for achieving a palestinian state, israel has continued its oppressive practices of land confiscation, assassinations, imprisonment of adults and children and expansion of settlements, all of which conflict with the palestinian aspiration of statehood (shafir 2007; fields 2010). these actions supported the notion of perceiving the palestinian leadership as part of the traitor self, as one male participant shared a community experience regarding the pa, “last night the pa entered and arrested some youth from the camp... the reason for the arrest was it is better that the israeli wouldn’t arrest him. the youth were beaten and got hurt... the pa is not even hiding that they are working with israeli government.” zelnick (2010) discusses the security agreement between the pa and israeli government, recognizing that the israeli government and the fatah party shared a common interest to contain hamas, which resulted in “significant cooperation in such matters as intelligence, the apprehension of suspected terrorists, and the training and equipping of palestinian security forces” (ibid., 24). the transition of the traitor self from the association of individual acts to include palestinian leadership reflects the disconnect in the national narrative and the lack of trust between the leadership and the people, which did not exist prior to the abbas era (khouri 2018). abbas era religious self marshall (2013,15) states, “cultural expressions of religion are central to children’s political identities and articulation”. religion in palestinian national identity is no longer only an expression of faith, but can be identified within local politics as it distinguishes between political parties (hamas & fatah). this dimension became more complicated during abbas era, as it evolved amongst a significant political divide in palestine. the politicization of islam is recognized throughout the participant’s journals in relation to israel and the pa. when hamas took control of gaza in 2007, it was declared that islamic rule was there to stay, a strong opposition to its secular counterpart, fatah, which was ruled by abbas (milton-edwards 2008). in the 1980s, the failure of secular political parties to liberate palestine paved the way for the politicization of islam, which manifested in the formation of hamas (tuastad 2013). yet secularism and religion were not at the root of friction within the palestinian political community during arafat leadership (løvlie 2014). it was not until the hamas electoral victory of 2006 and the refusal of the pa to transfer the governance of the west bank and the gaza strip that politicization of islam became a distinct element in palestinian political discourse. the disagreement between the two parties became violent, and in 2007, hamas began forcing loyal fatah security forces in the gaza strip to flee to the fatah dominated west bank, resulting in a hamas takeover of gaza, while the pa, under the leadership of abbas, continued the governance of the west bank (milton-edwards 2008). the politicization of islam within palestinian politics is recognized throughout the children’s journals in relation to israel and the pa. one male participant expressed this sentiment in regards to hamas and fatah by stating, “the parties have effects on people because each person belongs to a different party, they affect the students too. in my opinion the palestinians should go back and stick to the islamic faith.” the friction between hamas and fatah has impacted the unity of the palestinian people, although palestinian people recognized that the problem does not lie in religion as faith, but rather stems from the politicization of religion (løvlie 2014). this was echoed by another male participant: “all people talked about politics because it seems we will have a civil war between the two parties fatah and hamas... in my perspective the civil war is not a solution, harmony is, and islam too, they 84 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper have to compromise with each other.” palestinians recognized the misuse of religion in palestinian politics and the fact that fight between hamas and fatah will not lead to the liberation of palestinian. for palestinian children, religion in a faith based sense serves as a form of cohesion, which allows them to maintain the belief that god is on the side of the palestinian cause. as one female participant points out, “those strong children believe in god’s mercy, they know that they will liberate their land one day”. religion provides strength to continue fighting for the liberation. within religion, the palestinian people find the ability to survive oppression and injustice. this notion was reiterated by a female participant, “to gaza people be patient, god is with you and you will win over this wild enemy who doesn’t know human rights and doesn’t have any feelings”. their faith serves as hope that someone will be more powerful than the oppressor. islam as a religion serves as a pillar of strength for the palestinian children and community (habashi 2013). hence, the split in palestine between the leadership of the gaza strip and the west bank is a breaking point in the history of palestine. though political opponents have always existed, each would strive for the same goal. this division is intensified under the abbas leadership, as it seems religion is a point of friction rather than a tool for achieving unity. abbas era resistance self resistance has been a part of the palestinian narrative for many generations. the abbas era resistance self transformed significantly from the arafat era, whereas “in exchange for western and israeli support to keep political and economic power in its hands, the new abbas leadership agreed to renounce all forms of resistance, both armed and non-violent” (dabed 2010, 81). within this political reality, palestinians had not only to suffer from oppression, injustice and colonization, but also had to redefine the right to resist due to leadership, while israel expands settlements and achieves the goal of creating the greater israel (shlaim 2009).thus, regardless of abbas’ call to restrain from resistance, the israeli government and illegal settlers continue oppressive practices, which young palestinians are responding to with new methods of resistance (elgindy2011; habashi 2017). jewish settlers are an active part of oppression as they are represented and supported by the israeli government, and some even hold “decision-making positions in the civil service and the israeli armed forces” (sasley & sucharov 2011). they are considered israeli citizens despite residing in the palestinian occupied territories. settlers carry weapons and have the power to intervene in palestinian communities within the west bank, often with the support of the israeli army and government. fields (2010) discusses israeli settlements and their impact on preventing the palestinians to move freely across the west bank by building walls and creating checkpoints. palestinians are actively resisting actions of jewish settlers, as a female participant indicated, “yesterday, there was a jewish settlers’ demonstration to enter al-aqsa mosque but the palestinian who live in jerusalem prevented them. we will not allow this to happen... we will not allow them to enter it even if we will have another intifada.” the al-aqsa mosque in jerusalem is a contested holy site for abrahamic religions, and the israeli government continues attempts to control the compound by banning people from entering the mosque (omar 2017). another female participant expressed the reason for resisting israel, “there will be no peace with israel because they took our land, they killed our brothers, they demolished our houses, they displaced our people, they orphaned our children, and practiced all types of violence on us. we don’t want peace with them.” another element that the participants reiterate throughout this dimension is that resistance is a part of who they are as palestinians, as one female participant indicated, “i love my country even if i will die i will not give up. defending the country brings me pride, dignity, and freedom.” palestinian children’s discussion of the resistance self included inherent hindrances embedded within different forms of leadership and the fight between fatah and hamas, as a female participant observed, “israelis attack us because they know we are not one, we are divided, if we are united we can fight and return back to palestine”. in several journal entries, children saw that the fight between these two political parties is an obstacle to resisting israeli oppression as one female participant stated, “many families were killed because of israel and the split between hamas and fatah. i think what happened in gaza is complicated. i wish to reunite between the two parties to expel the occupation”. the split between hamas and fatah has affected the goal of attaining a palestinian statehood throughout the fennia 197(1) (2019) 85janette habashi abbas era, by means of making palestinians “incapable of responding to any initiative to settle the problem of the occupation or the palestinian problem as a whole” (ghanem 2013, 27). palestinian children often discuss unity, despite the split, as a means of achieving liberation. the constraints by abbas in regard to resistance, parallel with the fight between fatah and hamas for governance, offer insight to the lack of ability by the leadership to guide any national resistance. elgindy (2011) argues that palestinians are equally frustrated with the leadership, as well as israel and predicted, “if palestinians mobilize on an even larger scale in the future, they are as likely to direct their anger at their leaders as at israel”(ibid., 109). meanwhile, this did not deter the community from resisting israeli occupation, rather, it galvanised grassroot activists not to rely on leadership for guidance, but to establish other methods such as boycott, divestment, and sanctions (bds) movements against israeli products (høigilt 2015). abbas era geographic self the geographic self is not only associated with roots and land, but also is considered as a political marker. after the hamas victory in the 2006 election and the subsequent denial to govern the west bank and gaza strip, the pa with the help of israel fought hamas, mainly in gaza strip (usher 2006). however, this does not imply that there was no presence of hamas in the west bank. on the contrary, some areas in the west bank are considered to be strongly affiliated with hamas. after 2007, palestinian authority security forces (pasf) began targeting individuals with hamas affiliation that did not endorse the pa political agenda and attempted to criminalize resistance. tartir (2017) provided an ethnographic study of two main refugee camps (jenin and balata), in which the pasc consistently worked to eliminate any resistance to israel and its pa proxity. the association of location with political elements has several dimensions, which is especially apparent in organizing the west bank into ghettos (baumgarten 2005) prior to the abbas era, arafat had overwhelmingly advocated for the withdrawal of israeli forces from the territories seized in 1967 (slater 2001), with the anticipation that it would manifest in the creation of palestinian state. this agreement provided a blueprint to divide the west bank into three areas, known as areas a, b, and c; area a is made up 17% of the west bank and consists mostly of palestinian towns and was to be governed by the palestinian authority; area b consists of many refugee camps and makes up 24% of land in which the palestinian authority is supposed to have civilian control, while israel maintains control of security; and area c, which is 59% of west bank land, is comprised of palestinian civilians, as well as israeli settlements and israeli military bases, and was to remain under israeli civilian and military control until all the three areas came under the sovereignty of a palestinian state (shafir 2007). this division was to span over a fiveyear period and result in the complete withdrawal of israeli forces, the occupation remains today. despite the fragmentation of a geographic location, the participants had a shared understanding that they maintain roots in the west bank, the gaza strip, pre-1948 palestine and diaspora, regardless of border alterations due to colonization and oppression. the israeli government attempts to control the palestinian geographic location in various ways, including enforcing the use of colorized, identification cards meant to distinguish palestinians from israeli citizens, as palestinians living in the west bank do not have the same political status, or ability to travel as palestinians living in jerusalem (tawil-souri 2012). the children’s journal entries indicated that some aspects of contemporary borders restrict their movement and hinder their way of life. for example, the apartheid wall around the west bank is discussed as an attempt to enclose the palestinian community (fields 2010). one female participant shared knowledge regarding the wall, “they walked on an unpaved road because the main roads were closed. many adults were tying ropes to climb the wall, but they couldn’t because israeli soldiers monitor it, and placed barbed wires to defend the wall.” israel attributes the construction of the wall as being necessary for security purposes, however, dolphin and usher (2006) argue that it is being constructed to aid settlers’ political interests, and notes that it is an attempt for israel to gain more land by means of altering the green line borders. aside from the wall, israel is creating other barriers to prohibit palestinians to travel freely within the occupied territories. for example, the old city of hebron in the west bank is divided into two 86 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper sectors, one governed by the pa (h1), and the other by the israeli military (h2). settlers living in h2 have no limitation on expanding their settlements, additionally, there are many security measures in place to protect these settlements, thus restricting the movement of palestinians within h2 (andoni 1997). a female participant discusses her experience in this area, today we went with the summer camp to tomb of the patriarchs (mosque), to the old city of hebron. we walked 3 km to get there we crossed many electronic gates, we saw the settlers walking in the old city as if it is their own city. it is so unfair to us palestinians, they stole our city and our lands, and we crossed electronic gates, while they walk freely in our lands. how come? allowing illegal settlements to redefine palestinian neighborhoods and communities is only one of many strategies implemented by the israeli government to fragment geographic self. one male participant discusses the israeli use of checkpoints as another strategy, checkpoints are all over palestine to represent this occupation... there are checkpoints where people wait hours to pass, if there is no checkpoint it will take a few minutes... these checkpoints should be removed because this is our land and no one has the right to govern. the living conditions of palestinians under israeli occupation during abbas leadership have not resulted in statehood. on the contrary, israel continues to expand settlements and confiscate land and most importantly, reform area c in the west bank, where the majority of water and mineral reserves are located (selby 2013). this practice of portioning out land with the israeli control of roads and resources in the west bank is congruent to abbas’ inability to achieve a palestinian statehood. abbas era expressive self palestinians use many different tools of expression such as poetry, paintings, and other forms of art and media to not only express themselves, but also to express resistance against occupation. marshall (2013) discusses how beauty and aesthetics in relation to nationality and religion are strongly expressed throughout palestinian children’s lives, despite the dominant view of them as mere passive victims of trauma. however, within the ababs era, certain forms of public expression are restricted. shortly after its formation, the pa began to limit media outlets in palestine by means of threatening editors, shutting down newspapers and arresting journalists who criticized them, leading many to question their intentions (jamal 2000). additionally, the pa’s initial support for a popular satirical tv show, watan ala watar, diminished upon the pa becoming fearful of a civilian uprising. the show was banned from the network in 2011, based on a ruling dating back to before occupation which stated the government could take legal action for ‘slander against the authority’ (sienkiewicz 2012). a government’s effort to control the media within their country can be seen as an attempt to manipulate its citizens and control their livelihood and political aspirations (cavatorta & elgie 2010). the abbas era expressive self also involves simple, daily behaviors such as wearing certain clothing pieces, as a female participant wrote, “today we had a celebration of al-nakba anniversary, and we all agreed to wear the palestinian’s hattah and we hold banners which we hung later on the school walls. and we dressed shirts inscribed with the right of return.” children integrated numerous forms of expression into their daily routines, especially in relation to al-nakba, and al-naksa, which are observed annually and involve multiple forms of expression for the palestinian children, including costumes or fashion, poems, and banners, as another female participant wrote, al-nakba celebration was a beautiful day... i participated in the folk costume part, my father took me to a village and took a flaha [embroidered], dress and put rings and wristbands... there were many parts, and the final one was a poem by me, the poem title was (i’m with terrorism) by nizar qabanni, i read it loudly. everyone said that it was an excellent poem. ‘poetry of resistance’ is one method that palestinians use to “address concepts of history,nationalism, and the role of literature in the liberation struggle” (mir 2013, 110). despite abbas’ and the pa’s attempt to control various aspects of expression, palestinians still found a way to articulate the expressive self. the reality of the abbas era expressive self differs for every palestinian, but their creativity is commonly linked by their experiences of struggle. children valued the various facets of fennia 197(1) (2019) 87janette habashi the expressive self, as it allowed them a chance to creatively demonstrate their opposition to occupation and abbas. the sentiment is that abbas is allowing facets of the expressive self, as long it is complying with political discourse. theme two: the other part of national identity encompasses the construction of the other. for palestinians, the other is primarily founded on zionism and israeli occupation, yet, the other is constructed with some dimensions that disrupt the merely oppressive image of the other. hence, during the abbas era, five dimensions of the other emerged as a result of the analysis process: (1) abbas era oppressive other, (2) abbas era scattered other, (3) abbas era religious other, (4) abbas era allying other as well as one new dimension, and (5) abbas era oppressive support other. abbas era oppressive other oppressive practices against palestinians are embedded within zionism, which initiated the fragmentation of the palestinian community. in 1917, the balfour declaration gave the zionist movement the right to establish a jewish homeland in palestine (beinin & hajjar 2014). the participants emphasize such history due to its impact on their contemporary daily lives. children maintain memories associated with oppression and exploitation brought on by historical colonization and political conflict (habashi 2013). oppression is a part of palestinian children’s lives, as they are both witnesses and targets of israeli occupation. the oppressive other within the abbas era is emphasized within the relations of continuous israeli occupation and unjust practices against the palestinian people. this was especially apparent in the participant’s recollections of the israeli army’s invasion of the gaza strip in 2008, where around 1,400 palestinian lives were lost, only a small portion of which were combatants (united nations 2009). in many of the journal entries, the participants documented their views of israel’s oppressive practices and injustices, as well as their own lack of ability to help during the israeli 22 day offensive attack on the gaza strip, in which the israeli army attacked gaza, claiming that an existing ceasefire had been violated. the attack involved massive airstrikes and ground assaults, which targeted civilians including women and children (hussain 2010). a female participant provided insight on the subject in her journal entry: it is the sixth day of the continued holocaust in gaza, the martyrs’ number reached 400 and 2,000 injured this morning, who accepts that? these humanitarian crimes, they wildly kill people... until now the air raids continued because they will stop it when hamas stop launching. there is no comparison between our rockets and their destructive rockets, they damaged even the mosques, whatever they do to us we will survive. another journal entry from a female participant expressed fear regarding the conflict and political involvement or lack thereof on mahmoud abbas’ part to achieve peace, and the violation of human rights for palestinians and its relation to terrorism, stating: this is a war, no this isn’t a war, this is a massacre because the two forces in the war should be balanced, but here its children massacre, and how this could happen? where is the human rights? how come 13 children were killed in two days and most of them under the age of 3 and what is their fault to deserve this? where are the human rights when 120 persons were killed in 3 days and they are women, children, and elderly. and when anyone speaks aloud they said palestinians are terrorists, what about israel? is this is the peace and freedom which condoleezza rice, berez, and abbas are talking about? abbas is always silent against what happened, he sees his people died and say nothing, is this our elected president...how the palestinian children will call for peace while israel is killing their families in front of them. of course they will be terrorists. abbas’ political goal is to strike a peace deal with israel, thus attaining statehood for palestinians. however, both abbas leadership and the oslo accord have failed to achieve this goal. the political situation has not changed, on the contrary, israeli occupation continues and settlements have doubled (shafir 2007). 88 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper abbas era scattered other the scattered other is ingrained in the existence of jewish people from around the world and their impact on the palestinian community, which began in the early 20th century alongside the zionist movement and the creation of israel. in the abbas era, the scattered other is largely associated with israeli settlers in the west bank. prior to 1948, jewish communities were integrated throughout different european countries, such as france and poland, as well as other parts of the world such as russia, and some even within palestine, where arabs and jews coexisted in peace (ben-bassat 2009). palestinian children acknowledged that jewish communities were rejected and persecuted in other countries (habashi 2008). furthermore, they understood the merit of solving the issue of discrimination for jewish communities in europe in relation to immigration to palestine. however, the participants indicated that the scattered other presented a challenge to the palestinian community’s existence, because as jewish communities began to colonize palestine in the early 20th century, their goal of creating an israeli state was conflicting with the palestinian community’s aspiration for a nation-state. although before the creation of israel jewish and palestinian communities existed side by side, the narrative has changed. the expansion of israeli/jewish immigration is associated with oppression and colonization discourse, as one journal entry documented the jewish settlers attacks on her family, “settlers attacked the old city of hebron, tal al-rmedeh, and alshalalah street. they attacked the old houses a few days ago, but this attack was the wildest because they planned for it. they attacked tal al-rmeded where my grandpa lives.” israel has expanded settlements in the west bank in an attempt to alter future borders. settlers are controlling roads natural resources, and expelling palestinian communities (selby 2013). settler aggression is supported by the israeli government not only in military terms, but also in terms of political power, in which settlement blocks have a majority in the israeli parliament (sasley & sucharov 2011). abbas era religious other the children’s narratives demonstrate that they factor in historical aspects of religion when constructing the other. the fact that palestine is a holy place for the three abrahamic religions was recognized and emphasized. indigenous palestinian people never failed to recognize that their own national identity was not based on religion, but rather was pluralistic (khouri 2018). however, when religion became entangled in the politics, change began to occur. the children in their journal entries expressed concern that islam was threatened by the israeli government. cook (2018) argues that the israeli government’s goal is to judaize specific areas of jerusalem by passing laws into effect that prevent palestinians full access to areas of east jerusalem. fields (2010) explains that israel aims to ‘unmake’ palestine by changing the ethno religious character and identity of the land. it has been a work in progress to control the religious narrative in the holy land by changing some religious and cultural sites, and denying access to such sites to muslims and christians, referencing the bible for justification (khouri 2018). for example, within the al-haram alsharif compound in the old city (known as the temple mount to jews), there is the sacred al-aqsa mosque and the dome of the rock, as well as what jews believe to be the second jewish temple (larkin & dumper 2012). the israeli government has been aggressively digging a tunnel from beneath homes in arab east jerusalem neighborhoods and beneath the dome of the rock, under the false premise that it was the same holy site known as the city of david in biblical times, in hopes of building a bible-themed tourist park (buchanan 2011). the digging activities are a concern to palestinians, and are seen as an attempt to weaken the foundation of the al-aqsa mosque and eventually destroy the sacred building, as was conveyed by a male participant, “al-aqsa mosque is first kiblah and the third holiest place in islam... i’m wondering why the israeli’s make digging under al-aqsa mosque,why they want to destroy it, why they want to kill our dreams?” this attack on a significant religious symbol was not necessarily exclusive to muslims or islam, as the palestinian children also recognized the concept of ‘judaizing’ their narrative, while attacking christianity at the same time. as raheb (2002) points out, the israeli government recognizes jewish fennia 197(1) (2019) 89janette habashi holy sites under their 1967 protection of holy sites law, but denies preservation of any christian or muslim religious sites; and their law of return guarantees immediate citizenship to jewish immigrants of any nationality, but denies that right to native christians and muslims forced to flee during alnakba and al-naksa. a female participant expanded on the idea that israel is attempting to oust christianity by sharing a story regarding a local media source, the announcer of the tenth channel of israel has offended jesus by likened him to a vile man. also the announcer flouted jesus and his mother mary. why they flouted the other religions while we respect them. they insulted our religions, we will not allow this offense. no one can stop them, they insult us and we [are] all paralyzed. the politicization of judaism has succeeded in achieving the creation of israel as well as the continuous attempt to expel both the muslim and christian communities, so as to expand the notion of judaizing the region. the progress of such practices entails changing the religious narrative of palestinian people by means of altering religious sites, which have meaning to both muslims and christians, as well as enforcing unfair laws that benefit only jewish people. the dimension of the religious other is reinforced through the oppression of others’ belief systems and controlling the religious narrative. abbas era allying other the complexity of the allying other is found in the deviation from dominant characteristics of the other category, which recognize the rights of the palestinian people. this dimension is defined in terms of mutual respect, whereas the palestinian rights to exist are not neglected. despite israel’s establishment in 1948 as a result of the zionist movement, palestinian children are able to recognize that not all jewish people are zionists. the participants were aware that some jewish individuals stand with the palestinian cause and do not identify with israeli oppressive practices. although, such perspectives were associated with jews residing outside israel, as one female participant stated “jews who are not living here and they’re saying this is not our land. these groups are not settlers, and they are living overseas. they do not mix with the israelis that are killers and terrorists”. not all sects of judaism supported the zionist movement, nor the establishment of israel. one example of such groups are haredi jews, who have always opposed both the secular and religious aspects of zionism (keren-kratz 2017). additionally, roy (2012) mentions the frustration of jewish-americans who are “critical of the israelistes in israel” due to their unethical handling of settlements and practices that violate the “moral obligations of judaism” (ibid., 566). the allying other results from competing discourses that distinguish between judaism as a belief system and the politicization of religion that presents an opportunity for the participants to challenge the contemporary meaning of the other. the significance of the allying other is grounded in the abbas era, the failure of attaining a palestinian state and continuous israeli occupation. abbas era oppressive supporter other israeli oppression is not sustainable without the political and financial support of the united states. politically, the u.s. has shown support in favor of israeli in various ways. one example of this is the fact that the u.s. fails to call israeli settlements illegal, instead only referring to them as illegitimate (siniver 2012). the abbas era oppressive supporter other focuses on u.s. economic aid to israel in terms of military operations that involve billions of dollars in grants each year, which does not include money used to support the israeli military received through foreign military financing (berrigan 2009). one male participant discussed the u.s. involvement, or lack thereof in reference to the israeli invasion of gaza in 2008 stating, “america which calls itself the peacekeeper is silent too. they are with israel.” palestinian children recognize the role that their own president plays in relation to american politics. as was reflected on by a male participant who narrated president bush’s arrival to palestine in conjunction with president abbas’ involvement with the visit, bush arrives to tel aviv, bush is the usa president. he is the killer of iraqi and palestinian children... the mastermind of israel to commit crimes against us. i’m so confused and stressed today, since his three planes are more than bethlehem and it brings soldiers, cars, and guard dogs... he will visit 90 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper our president too, how abbas could welcome him while he is the responsible for all the crimes which happened to us. he will welcome the killer. abbas said this will help our country, how come? there has been seemingly consistent support from the american government to israel regardless of leadership, as various administrations have stuck to strategic plans that place israel’s security above all other considerations (hamdi 2018). the children had hope for the next u.s. president, as they discussed the 2008 united states presidential election, obama and hillary clinton are competing for presidency. the whole world is awaiting this election because the whole world is under america’s control, what happens in america happens to the whole world, politically or economic. it governs the world financially, politically, and all countries just listen to its orders and decisions... we urge the new president to care much about the palestinian case and to have a solution, which has all the palestinians rights. the election of president obama did not yield the desired changes for palestinians, as israel continues its negligence of us-sponsored agreements by “continuation of settlement building and its violation of the sacred muslim shrines in palestine” without any retribution from the united states (hamdi 2018, 252). despite the fact that the u.s. claims to be neutral in the palestinian/israeli conflict and has the potential to be a major asset for peacemaking, their policies have always tended to favor israel (hamdi 2018). the participants are aware that u.s. policies towards israel have the potential to alter oppressive practices. in the abbas era, however, such change has not occurred. conclusion national identity is not static, as is evident in the uniqueness of palestinian children’s construction of national identity that was expressed during the leadership of abbas. it significantly demonstrated the political friction between hamas and the fatah led pa, and the resulting relationship and interactions with israel. this raises the issue of whether these realities will shape the historical interpretation of being a palestinian for coming generations, since the fragmentation is increasing, not only for palestinians prior to 1948, but also now for palestinians within the west bank and gaza strip. by examining the subcategories of the self and other, and the nuances that emerge within them, it becomes clear that national identity is not static, but rather something that evolves as a result of both history and local political factors. children are actively contributing to the formation of national identity, while reflecting on occurrences within their political eras, in this case, the abbas era. the consistent element found in palestinian national identity over time is associated with israeli colonization. though the perception towards it has evolved, it continues to be associated with oppressive practices, with the exception of distinguishing between individuals who support israeli oppression regardless of their religious affiliation, and with individuals who believe in judaism but do not endorse israeli occupation. the inherent association with the self correlates with the geopolitics of history, resistance and pride, excluding the traitor self, in which the participants indicate a lack of trust and commitment to the palestinian cause, as demonstrated by abbas leadership. the inherent association with the other is enforced by the continuous reality of occupation and the lack of abbas to deliver a plausible political solution. children’s ability to construct the other with such details reflects not only their ability to observe and understand global politics, but also the local discourse that conveys the complexity of the other. palestinian children’s national identity demythized the trust of people and leadership under oppression. lack of trust in the leadership was reflected in the construction of the self, as well as the assumption that the common interest of the people might not be in allegiance with the political agenda of the palestinian authority. under the abbas era, the dimensions of national identity demonstrate a lack of progress. although one might assume that the implementation of the palestinian authority would reflect palestinian sovereignty, this is far from reality. indeed, palestinian children’s national identity provided insight to the lack of cohesiveness of abbas leadership, and palestinians’ experiences within relations with israeli oppression and more importantly the division in between hamas and pa and the west bank and gaza strip. hilal (2010) argued that hamas and fatah must truly reconcile in order to resolve fennia 197(1) (2019) 91janette habashi internal conflict and reform legislative institutions. however, both hamas and fatah believe they will lose politically, thus a reconciliation will not be easy. children’s national identity provides a glance into the political future, as this generation must not only resist israeli oppression, but also oppression from their palestinian leadership and its political manifestation. acknowledgements i’d like to thank chelsea d. hammett of the university of oklahoma for her constructive feedback, consistent edits and overall dedication to this manuscript. references anderson, b. (2006) imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. verso books, new york. andoni, l. (1997) redefining oslo: negotiating the hebron protocol. journal of palestine studies 26(3) 17–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/2538153 baskin, g. (2001) the jerusalem problem: the search for solutions. palestine-israel journal of politics, economics, and culture 8(1) 6. baumgarten, h. (2005) the three faces/phases of palestinian nationalism, 1948–2005. journal of palestine studies 34(4) 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2005.34.4.25 beinin, j. & hajjar, l. (2014) palestine, israel and the arab–israeli conflict: a primer. middle east report. https://web.stanford.edu/group/sper/images/palestine-israel_primer_merip.pdf ben-bassat, y. (2009) proto-zionist-arab encounters in late nineteenth-century palestine: socioregional dimensions. journal of palestine studies 38(2) 42–63. https://doi.org/10.1525/ jps.2009.38.2.42 berrigan, f. (2009) made in the u.s.a.: american military aid to israel. journal of palestine studies 38(3) 6–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2009.xxxviii.3.6 buchanan, g. (2011) misunderstandings about jerusalem's temple mount. the washington report on middle east affairs 30(6) 16 64. cavatorta, f. & elgie, r. (2010) the impact of semi-presidentialism on governance in the palestinian authority. parliamentary affairs 63(1) 22–40. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsp028 cook, j. (2018) israel amps up ethnic cleansing in order to further judaize jerusalem. the washington report on middle east affairs 37(1) 14–16. dabed, e. (2010) decrypting the palestinian political crisis: old strategies against new enemies: chile 1970–73, palestine 2006–09. arab studies quarterly 32(2) 73–91. dolphin, r. & usher, g. (2006) the west bank wall: unmaking palestine. pluto press, london. elgindy, k. (2011) palestine goes to the un: understanding the new statehood strategy. foreign affairs 90(5) 102–113. farsakh, l. (2011) the one-state solution and the israeli-palestinian conflict: palestinian challenges and prospects. the middle east journal 65(1) 55–71. https://doi.org/10.3751/65.1.13 fields, g. (2010) landscaping palestine: reflections of enclosure in a historical mirror. international journal of middle east studies 42(1) 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743809990821 ghanem, a. (2013) palestinian nationalism: an overview. israel studies 18(2) 11–29. https://doi. org/10.2979/israelstudies.18.2.11 giacaman, r., khatib, r., shabaneh, l., ramlawi, a., sabri, b. sabatinelli, g., khawaja, m. & laurance, t. (2009) health status and health services in the occupied palestinian territory. the lancet 373(9666) 837–849. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(09)60107-0 gilhotra, j. (1995) the concept of "self". the australian and new zealand journal of psychiatry 29(4) 598–603. https://doi.org/10.3109/00048679509064973 habashi, j. (2005) creating indigenous discourse: history, power, and imperialism in academia, palestinian case. qualitative inquiry 11(5) 771–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405276809 habashi, j. (2008) palestinian children crafting national identity. childhood 15(1) 12–29. https://doi. org/10.1177/0907568207086833 habashi, j. (2013) children's religious agency: conceptualising islamic idioms of resistance. area 45(2) 155–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01126.x habashi, j. (2017) political socialization of youth: a palestinian case study. palgrave macmillan, new york. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47523-7 https://doi.org/10.2307/2538153 https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2005.34.4.25 https://web.stanford.edu/group/sper/images/palestine-israel_primer_merip.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2009.38.2.42 https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2009.38.2.42 https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2009.xxxviii.3.6 https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsp028 https://doi.org/10.3751/65.1.13 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743809990821 https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.18.2.11 https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.18.2.11 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(09)60107-0 https://doi.org/10.3109/00048679509064973 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405276809 https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568207086833 https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568207086833 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01126.x https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47523-7 92 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper halabi, u. (2009) the legal status and rights of the palestinians displaced as a result of the june 1967 war. palestine – israel journal of politics, economics, and culture 15/16(4) 54–64. hall, s. (1997) the spectacle of the 'other'. in hall, s. (ed.) representation: cultural representations and signifying practices, 223–290. the open university, milton keynes. hamdi, o. (2018) american foreign policy toward the arab-israeli conflict: strategic transformations. insight turkey 20(2) 251. https://doi.org/10.25253/99.2018202.12 hilal, j. (2010) the polarization of the palestinian political field. journal of palestine studies 39(3) 24– 39. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2010.xxxix.3.24 høigilt, j. (2015) nonviolent mobilization between a rock and a hard place. journal of peace research 52(5) 636–648. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343315572497 hopkins, p. & pain, r. (2007) geographies of age: thinking relationally. area 39(3) 287–294. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00750.x hussain, n. (2010) israel's gaza invasion geopolitical changes and regional security implications. policy perspectives 7(1) 121–134. jamal, a. (2000) state-formation, the media and the prospects of democracy in palestine. media, culture & society 22(4) 497–505. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344300022004007 jarbawi, a. & pearlman, w. (2007) struggle in a post-charisma transition: rethinking palestinian politics after arafat. journal of palestine studies 36(4) 6–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2007.36.4.6 kattan, v. (2005) the nationality of denationalized palestinians. nordic journal of international law 74(1) 67–102. kaufman, e. (2011) palestinian non-violent action – a strategy to be taken seriously. palestine – israel journal of politics, economics, and culture 17(3/4) 166–169. khouri, r. (2018) palestinians deserve and will get a more serious leadership. the washington report on middle east affairs 37(2) 16–17. kurtzer, d. (2017) transformational leadership and the prospects for peace. palestine – israel journal of politics, economics, and culture 22(2/3) 7–14. larkin, c. & dumper, m. (2012) in defense of al-aqsa: the islamic movement inside israel and the battle for jerusalem. the middle east journal 66(1) 31–52. https://doi.org/10.3751/66.1.12 løvlie, f. (2014) questioning the secular-religious cleavage in palestinian politics: comparing fatah and hamas. politics and religion 7(1) 100–121. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048313000527 marshall, d. j. (2013) ‘all the beautiful things’: trauma, aesthetics and the politics of palestinian childhood. space and polity 17(1) 53–73. http://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780713 milton-edwards, b. (2008) the ascendance of political islam: hamas and consolidation in the gaza strip. third world quarterly 29(8) 1585–1599. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590802528739 mir, s. (2013) palestinian literature: occupation and exile. arab studies quarterly 35(2) 110–129. https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.2.0110 nassar, j. (1997) the culture of resistance: the 1967 war in the context of the palestinian struggle. arab studies quarterly 19(3) 77–98. omar, a. (2017) al-aqsa mosque's incident in july 2017: affirming the policy of deterrence. insight turkey 19(3) 69–82. https://doi.org/10.25253/99.2017193.05 podeh, e. (2011) the symbolism of the arab flag in modern arab states: between commonality and uniqueness. nations and nationalism 17(2) 419–442. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2010.00475.x roy, s. (2012) culturally unconscious. international communication gazette 74(6) 556–570. https://doi. org/10.1177/1748048512454823 sasley, b., & sucharov, m. (2011) resettling the west bank settlers. international journal 66(4) 999– 1017. https://doi.org/10.1177/002070201106600423 schenker, h. (2008) 2009 – a year of new opportunities. palestine – israel journal of politics, economics, and culture 15(3) 3–4. selby, j. (2013) cooperation, domination and colonisation: the israeli-palestinian joint water committee. water alternatives 6(1) 1–24. shafir, g. (2007) israeli-palestinian peacemaking and its discontents. contexts 6(4) 46–51. https://doi. org/10.1525/ctx.2007.6.4.46 shlaim, a. (2009) how israel brought gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. the guardian 06.01.2009 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine>. 19.03.2018. sienkiewicz, m. (2012) out of control: palestinian news satire and government power in the age of social media. popular communication 10(1–2) 106. https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2012.638575 https://doi.org/10.25253/99.2018202.12 https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2010.xxxix.3.24 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343315572497 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00750.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00750.x https://doi.org/10.1177/016344300022004007 https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2007.36.4.6 https://doi.org/10.3751/66.1.12 https://doi.org/10.1017/s1755048313000527 http://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780713 https://doi.org/10.1080/01436590802528739 https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.2.0110 https://doi.org/10.25253/99.2017193.05 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2010.00475.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2010.00475.x https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048512454823 https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048512454823 https://doi.org/10.1177/002070201106600423 https://doi.org/10.1525/ctx.2007.6.4.46 https://doi.org/10.1525/ctx.2007.6.4.46 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2012.638575 fennia 197(1) (2019) 93janette habashi siniver, a. (2012) arbitrating the israeli–palestinian territorial dispute. international politics 49(1) 117– 129. https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2011.30 slater, j. (2001) what went wrong? the collapse of the israeli-palestinian peace process. political science quarterly 116(2) 171–199. https://doi.org/10.2307/798058 tadros, v. (2017) the persistence of the right of return. politics, philosophy & economics 16(4) 375– 399. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594x17736265 tartir, a. (2017) criminalizing resistance: the cases of balata and jenin refugee camps. journal of palestine studies 46(2) 7–22. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.46.2.7 tawil-souri, h. (2012) uneven borders, coloured (im) mobilities: id cards in palestine/israel. geopolitics 17(1) 153. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2011.562944 tuastad, d. (2013) hamasplo relations before and after the arab spring. middle east policy 20(3) 86–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/mepo.12035 tyler, a. (2011) encounters with zionism: a ripened vision for peacemaking? international journal on world peace 28(1) 67–84. united nations (2009) human rights in palestine and other occupied territories. report of the united nations fact-finding mission on the gaza conflict. a/hrc/12/48. <https://www.un.org/ ruleoflaw/files/unffmgc_report.pdf> usher, g. (2006) the democratic resistance: hamas, fatah, and the palestinian election. journal of palestine studies 35(3) 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2006.35.3.20 venn, c. & featherstone, m. (2006) modernity. theory, culture & society 23(2–3) 457–465. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276406064829 zelnick, r. (2010) shifting sands: why peace talks might just work. world affairs 173(4) 23–32. https://doi.org/10.1057/ip.2011.30 https://doi.org/10.2307/798058 https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594x17736265 https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.46.2.7 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2011.562944 https://doi.org/10.1111/mepo.12035 https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/unffmgc_report.pdf https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/files/unffmgc_report.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2006.35.3.20 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406064829 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276406064829 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7348 doi: 10.11143/7348 the role of identity for regional actors and citizens in a splintered region: the case of päijät-häme, finland joni vainikka vainikka, joni (2013). the role of identity for regional actors and citizens in a splintered region: the case of päijät-häme, finland. fennia 191: 1, pp. 25–39. issn 1798-5617. regions are often understood as social and discursive constructs that are perpetually at the heart of the politics of spatial distinctions. although regions transform over time, they are used in collective discourses as ways of structuring space and they can become important elements for individual identity narratives and practices. the proponents of the competitiveness rhetoric increasingly utilize the ideas of social capital and trust positing that regions are knowingly responsible for their affluence and economic growth. in finland, various institutional agents have operationalized provincial spaces as imperative policy instruments. at the same time, their meaning has remained rather ambiguous to their citizens, whose spatial identifications can be eclectic and reflexive. this article focuses on one particular region, päijät-häme in southern finland to uncover why the supposed internal cohesion does not seem to manifest at the provincial level. the paper approaches regional identity from two angles. first, it scrutinizes how regional actors conceptualize the region and how they facilitate regional identity discourses, and second, it analyses how individuals construct their spatial identities and belonging and studies the meaning of the institutionalized region in this process. the empirical material consists of eleven interviews with institutional actors representing regional policy, trade, education and media and four focus group interviews with locallyor universally-orientated social movements representing the general public. in this article, i argue that historical fractures and differently aligned spatial strategies can hinder attempts to reconfigure regional identities, and by implication, development discourses. i also indicate that while the province does not necessarily provide compelling identity materials, the need to belong has not disappeared in the currents of globalization. keywords: päijät-häme, regional identity, focus groups, region-building, regional actors, social movements joni vainikka, department of geography, university of oulu, po box 3000, fi90014 university of oulu, finland, email: joni.vainikka@oulu.fi introduction regions are often understood as social and discursive constructs that are perpetually at the heart of politics of spatial distinctions. their meanings are mediated by time in an evolutionary fashion that is echoed in an observation from henri bergson (1911: 2), ‘we change without ceasing’. regions can become natural and mundane parts of people’s spatial identities. they provide ways to ‘read’ space or act as subconscious reference points for self-esteem, belonging and distinctiveness (de cillia et al. 1999; agnew 2001; savage et al. 2005; donaldson 2006; antonsich 2010). the transformation of collective regional identity discourses is a lingering process. the ways citizens value regionalism, are affected by regional emblems and picture its territory cannot be changed overnight. the residues of past cultural practices and meanings persist as long as people believe in and make claims on them (paasi 2002a). 26 fennia 191: 1 (2013)joni vainikka regions have in recent years become, depending on the viewpoint, either pawns or key players in neoliberal political struggles. regions are the instruments of either devolution or integration policies or commodified images supporting the competitiveness rhetoric (brenner 2004; jones & macleod 2004; moisio 2007; bristow 2010). it has also become more popular to state that regional practices stretch in space so that their representations and influence can be read well outside their territories (allen et al. 1998), or to conceptualize regions as both bounded and porous (morgan 2007), a networked space in itself (prytherch 2010). the growing interconnectedness between the archipelago of economic stepping-stones (petrella 2000) and the mounting relational redefinition and liquidity of spatial identities (bauman 2004; massey 2005) seem to debase the often ‘sedentarist’ identity discourses that could be able to anchor social cohesion (tomaney 2007). it is therefore a challenge to understand and explore, as benno werlen (2009) notes, the many ways places and spatial entities are made meaningful. understanding this everyday ‘geography-making’, where regions are not fixed, pre-existing entities but rather ‘thought-and-practiced’ social constructs of actual people (see also jonas 2012) can legitimate the direction of institutional regionbuilding. my primary contribution is to bring together the role and operationalization of identity in institutional settings and the contextual ways individuals apply regions in their identity narratives. this article contributes to the ongoing discussion that seeks, first, a more definitive conceptualization of how and why regional identities become meaningful to citizens (savage et al. 2005; antonsich 2010; vainikka 2012), and, second, to what extent governance discourses and regional advocates (can) draw from and discursively sustain such identities (lanigan 2001; frisvoll & rye 2009; paasi 2013). using the province of päijät-häme in southern finland as a case study, this article follows the proposals made by anssi paasi (2009a) to ‘combine the political-economic focus with questions of subjectification and identity formation’ and by anjet schlottmann (2008: 827) to explore ‘the elements and hidden logics of symbolic regionalization in detail’. through problematizing the roles of regional identity, this article examines in what ways the region under examination actually ‘exists’ and how antecedent territorial structures and meanings influence on the contemporary institutionalized regional entity (paasi 1986; bialasiewicz 2002; jones & macleod 2004). i approach this outline through following research questions: 1) how do various regional institutional actors conceptualize the region and facilitate regional identity discourses? 2) how do individuals construct their spatial identities and belonging and is the institutional region part of this process? these questions are scrutinized in relation to a contextual spatial vocabulary and regional formation. päijät-häme is characterized by comparably late institutionalization (cf. paasi 1986) but also by migration, proximity to a dominant metropolitan area and a splintered regional structure as the central city of lahti is surrounded by areas where the former county boundaries still matter. the province thus offers a fitting illustration how political struggles and societal change can transform regionality before collective identities and efforts to orchestrate them are shaped around it. following this introduction, the concepts of ‘region’ and ‘regional identity’ and the research materials and methodology are discussed in more detail. the third part contextualizes the case study region and reconstructs the historical traces that can inform regional imaginaries. the fourth part draws on eleven semi-structured interviews with regional actors in order to analyse the meanings associated with the spatial structure of the province, the efforts used in region-building, and the contemporary ways of facilitating regional identity. the fifth part gives voice to four locallyor universally-orientated social movements interviewed in focus groups to unravel the meanings of the province as part of an identity repertoire. in the discussion, i further consider why does the current emphasis on institutional regional identity often diverge from the thought-and-practiced attachments and identifications and what are the possible consequences of this cleavage for regional development practice. conceptualizing regions and regional identities the region, as a ‘floating signifier’, can be conceptualized in multiple ways (thrift 1990) and in different contexts (paasi 2002b). regions do not follow an automatic scalar logic of reproduction as various agencies asynchronously (re)construct fennia 191: 1 (2013) 27the role of identity for regional actors and citizens... them (thrift 1983; paasi 1986). nevertheless, social, political or ethnic discourses can make regions appear as inherited cultural entities, especially if these regions have preceded or played an integral role in state formation (johnson & coleman 2012). the endurance of regional entities is often dependent on the geohistorical circumstances from which they have emerged and on the presence and becoming of their territorial and symbolic shapes and their wider institutionalization to a regional system (paasi 1986). however, the often nationally embedded socio-cultural construction of regions (sayer 1989; macleod & jones 2001) has to some extent given way to more politicoeconomic – new regionalist – approaches (brenner 2004; jonas 2012). the shift in regional politics from spatial keynesianism to a more open policy that leans on relative competitiveness and hands the responsibility of the future over to the regions themselves, has changed the conceptualizations of the region. the neoliberal regional competitiveness rhetoric along with the advancement of global economic integration has reformed cities and regions into key media between the state and the market. this has created a new mosaic of economic performance and transformed the role of the state in strategic planning (keating 2001; brenner 2004; bristow 2010; terlouw 2012). the driving forces of regional competitiveness are reflected in the generative, innovative and dynamic workforce (florida 1995), in economic networks of trust (cooke & morgan 1999), in organized social capital (putnam 1994), and in the place promotion created to convey the vibrancy of regions (syssner 2009; boisen et al. 2011). employing a limited number of successful case regions around the world (silicon valley, baden-württenberg, emilia-romagna, etc.), the development-by-competition ideology has been constructed to harness presumed regional economic agendas without always questioning the presumptions that sustain actually existing regional communities (paasi 2009b), or the roadmaps prepared to achieve such development (sotarauta 2010). gillian bristow (2010) shows that regional actors are tempted into competitiveness talk where identity becomes a brand or a ‘market-orientated identity’ (lanigan 2001). using the region as a unilateral apparatus of political economy or imagining benchmarked policy practices and strategies by reconfiguring spatial structures can alienate regions from their socio-cultural meanings and, indeed, generate regions that conflict with broader historical spatial continuums, in which politicians have a hard time believing, let alone the citizens (antonsich 2010, see also deacon 2004 on southwest england and zimmerbauer 2011 on certain finnish sub-regions). there is, thus, a need for a grounded regional identity politics, where understanding regional actors’ operational prerequisites is the starting point for mobilizing competitive ambitions. regions are not mere rhetoric mediums through which political status or economic competitiveness funnels through, for they possess symbolic, discursive power and can serve as expressive socio-spatial categories. paasi (1986, 2002b) argues for a two-fold constitutive and conditioned understanding of region-related identities. he formulates an ‘identity of a region’ as an expression of power, where distinguishable or imagined features of nature, culture and inhabitants are used in selective discourses of distinction. based on this institutionally operated discourse an ideal, performable and collective ‘regional identity’ can become crystallized as a part of a reflexive and symbolic meaning system. such identity discourses are actively promoted and realigned by the political elite, the media and regional organizations through effectual maps, heritage, regional emblems, imageries and representations (frisvoll & rye 2009; syssner 2009; paasi 2013). they are also performed in everyday life as a means to understand and structure space, as parts of spatial vocabularies and as mediums of belonging (savage et al. 2005; donaldson 2006; vainikka 2012). drawing on the websites of dutch and northwest german regional administrations that concentrate on external audiences, kees terlouw (2012) argues that we are witnessing a time when ‘traditional and historical rooted well-established regional identities’ or ‘thick’ identities of formal regions become ever more blurred in an interrelated and changeable world; the ‘thin’ regional identities based on functional co-operation and competitiveness take over the meaning of regional identity.1 martin jones and gordon macleod (2004: 435) make a parallel distinction between ‘spaces of regionalism’ and ‘regional spaces’ based on how regions are approached either in political and cultural debates or by economic geographers. the former framework of concepts reiterates claims to citizenship and civic identity, political mobilization and the cultural expression of regions. the latter is related to concepts such as ‘institutional thickness’ or ‘regional innovations sys28 fennia 191: 1 (2013)joni vainikka tems’ that enable successful quicksilver recipes for regional co-operation and persuade new functional ensembles. however, the ways in which the affective association with the region shines like a beacon for the political remaking of the competitive region or the connection between the ‘thick’ and the ‘thin’ is often elusive or passed over in silence. the strategic or political regional identities (van houtum & lagendijk 2001; paasi 2013) that rely on economically motivated cartographic representations and perceived future territorial conditions often contradict with both established power structures and inherited social and cultural regional representations (syssner 2009). while new geostrategic constellations can be created and the legitimizing written identities transformed, the social and cultural identities that operate as learned categorization processes are hard to eradicate from public discourses. methodological strategies since regions are cumulative spatial processes holding sediments of past ascendancies and vernacular practices, it is important to interpret the development and transformations of the regional system and the region. following the geohistorical contextualization of the comparably new administrative case region, päijät-häme, the qualitative textual analysis for institutional understandings that discursively operationalizes regional identity is based on individual interviews with key regional actors from regional institutions. the directors of regional administrative, economic and cultural bodies and the editors of the regional papers, for example, play a key role in framing the finnish provinces and in creating regional images and identity discourses.2 of the eleven people interviewed two were women and nine men, their average age was 54, and three participants had worked in their current position for under two years. three of the thirty to sixty-minute interviews were conducted in november 2008 and eight in october 2009.3 it is equally important to get behind the institutional, often promotional talk and scrutinize the meaning of the region for ordinary people. assuming that narratives of regional identities are socially and interpersonally constructed, the method for unravelling their meaning should optimally promote contextual social interaction (cf. bosco & herman 2007). peter hopkins (2007: 529) states that focus groups are effective when studying ‘people’s everyday engagements with their social and spatial worlds’. this method is influential in generating shared knowledge and revealing tacit positions, opinions and feelings (johnson 1996), and it has been used, for example, in comparative studies investigating perceptions of regions among students (antonsich 2010) and to explore semi-public discourses relating to national identities (de cillia et al. 1999). in this study, the spatial and regional identity narratives produced by four social movement groups are analysed. these groups apply different scalar strategies and their focus of activities is typically on local or universal issues. the globally distributed friends of the earth and amnesty international aspire for environmentally sustainable societies and work to protect human rights respectively. two groups operating in the city of lahti were selected to exemplify presumably more universal mindsets. the nationwide youth societies and local heritage associations are spin-offs of the nineteenth century nation-building, advancing local identities, preserving heritage and enlivening folk customs. contrary to the aforementioned, their local groups can, in practice, be found in every municipality. groups based in hollola and sysmä municipalities were selected to represent presumably more particular and local spatial imaginaries. with this selection that included distinct and variegated social categories (cf. gustafson 2001), it is possible to avoid some of the socially and politically biased assumptions of the province that would manifest if scrutinizing only certain cohorts or groups of people. if the province is a part of the lived and practiced spatialities of the members of these groups, it could be so for every other people involved in the spheres of civic life. altogether, twenty-one people, fourteen men and seven women, participated in four focus groups in november 2008. their average age was 54, five of them were under 40, ten between 40 and 63 and six over the official finnish retirement age of 63. in comparison to the general public, specialist occupations are over-represented. the qualitative textual analysis of the two sets of interviews sought to capture the shared visions of identity and the region but also the various discursive meanings (barbour 2005) regional identity holds for actors in regionally based organizations and for different citizens. the analysis that follows is based on my close reading of the transcribed material, preliminary coding and the conceptual fennia 191: 1 (2013) 29the role of identity for regional actors and citizens... categories that i formulated from the recurrent themes and ideas in the material (tuffin & howard 2001; warren & karner 2010). the formation of päijät-häme päijät-häme is a province, maakunta4, and a federation of eleven municipalities formed around the 102,000-inhabitant city of lahti. the name päijät-häme – a compound of a dialectical form of lake päijänne and of the primordial community of häme – is an invention of the 1930s which increased in popularity in the 1950s when the lahti-centred region strengthened as an economic-functional entity. the city, comprising half of the population of the region, however, provides a widely used parallel term ‘lahti region’ (cf. kallio et al. 2010). the legitimation of regional projects and their institutionalization often relies on historiographies that extend the contemporary regional frame longitudinally to find purchase for the current social discourses (paasi 1986; bialasiewicz 2002; jones & macleod 2004). jouko heinonen (1997) reconstructed the initial formation of päijät-häme around the fourteenth century greater hollola hundred and deanery, which, as one-third of häme, had presumably been the last subject of a mediaeval struggle between eastern and western realms and ecclesiastical powers before häme (tavastia) was gradually subjugated under swedish catholic rule and taxation (kerkkonen 1962; taavitsainen 1990). while this historical discourse takes notes from an archived, documented memory (ricœur 2000) and presumes the coherence of the archaic hollola, the current territory is more a palimpsest space where some demarcations are erased and overwritten while others coexist as scripts of different social legacies (cf. schein 1997: 662; vainikka 2012). the current regional frame was part of the tavastia or tavastia-nylandia counties, lääni, until 1748.5 the eastern boundary of the county shifted twice to the west, first, as a ramification of the treaty of åbo and, second, as a search for ‘natural boundaries’, before the russian administrators, in 1831, redrew county boundaries to fit the functionality and the needs of early nineteenth century society. this endowed päijäthäme with an administratively splintered history separated into the counties of tavastehus, nyland and st. michel until the 1990s (see fig. 1). nevertheless, the intensification of regional identity discourses is often related to the outset of nationalism (hobsbawm 1983; paasi 2013). based on earlier academic depictions, nine provinces were canonized in the nineteenth century as the stereotypical and prevailing identity regions. the couriers of this form of provincialism were mass communication, the student nations at helsinki university who vaguely imitated the fourteenth century castle dominions or sixteenth century duchies and earldoms (jutikkala 1949) and the school book boken om wårt land that from 1875 taught pupils national and regional characteristics (topelius 1879). this patriotic regionalist ideology, coupled with the emergence of several social movements striving to enlighten and regionalize cultural life, resulted in the gradual formation of provincial federations, maakuntaliitto, sometimes rearranging irrespective of the established regional entities or the later retitled ‘historical’ provinces from 1927 onwards (häkli 1998). instead of deriving from the restructurings of state spaces, imagined regional or vernacular communities or even civil society institutions, päijät-häme is a child of logistics. the railway routing of the helsinki-st. petersburg line in 1870 through a small hamlet of hollola’s lahti, which was equipped with an inland harbour for steamships that were able to operate throughout the entire päijänne water system, eventually created a new economic centre. the subsequent industrialization and growth compelled city rights to be given to lahti in 1905, without state potentates ever promoting its foundation (heinonen 1997). although proposals for lahticentred regions were made from the 1920s onwards, only after a regional planning authority was appointed to päijät-häme in 1967 (suurhollola 1968) did the province gather more favourable attitudes towards a provincial federation – the last to be established. framed in the restrictive division of three counties, the city of lahti grew at such a pace, spurred on by the post-war resettlement of karelians, that attention had to be focused on the development of the city more than on the cultural distinctiveness of the emerging economic-functional region. the provincial federation as a cultural institution had some impact on the construction of regional symbolism and awareness but as late 30 fennia 191: 1 (2013)joni vainikka as in the 1980s, people had to be ‘educated’ on the existence of päijät-häme (kuikka 1985). the regional development act of 1994 merged the provincial federations and the regional planning authorities into nineteen regional councils, maakunnan liitto. the motivation to reconstitute culturally and functionally meaningful regions developed from finland’s intention to join the european union and from the shift to a program-based regional policy. now the provinces, as local government regions, became accountable for regional development, but contrary to the european tradition, with only indirect democratic control (sotarauta 2010). these reorganizations, along with decreasing the number of counties radically in the 1990s, generated a sea change in regional imaginaries. although the regional media, public services and district organizations, for example, had claimed a provincial presence, heinonen (1999, see also paasi 2013) argues that päijät-häme started making sense only after the constitution of regional councils and the strategic instrumentalization of provinces. jouni häkli (1998: 340) argues that state discourses have historically ‘colonized’ provinces and presented them in a ‘universal mould’, especially as basic services, spatial imaginaries and performances in everyday life are often anchored in the more pervasive municipalities. the transformations of päijät-häme region thus highlight the general problems associated with constructing a sense of territorial permanence and unifying cultural emblems when traces of various regional visions and differentiated but also intermixed cultural practices linger. if we accept that a territory is tightly related to its boundaries, the continuous re-delineation of a region makes it difficult to construct enduring identity discourses and does not allow a regional identity to settle as a vernacular construct (sagan 2004; johnson & coleman 2012). navigating the region, facilitating regional identities: views of regional actors building a region is a political endeavour (brenner 2004). while the interviewed regional actors produced well-rehearsed characterizations of päijäthäme, some of which seem to have rotated for decades (cf. kuikka 1985), the leadership that navigates the province does not always use the same charts. territorial imaginaries the territorial imaginaries may take their reference from different temporalities and conventions. while the representatives of päijät-häme often draw on the historical corpus of the once extensive hollola, the province sits on the imagined cultural faultline of the finnish ethos, influenced by eastern and western traditions and practices. most regional actors shared the view that päijät-häme appears as a divided part of a historical, picturesque häme. whereas one participant ‘lives’ in häme, another urgently refutes its existence. the nineteenth century provincial descriptions are still used as social categorizations and conventions in that ‘damn, people are different’ (regional education actor 3). the belief in a hämean identity is obvious in comments that prefer the hämean lynx symbol over the päijät-hämean water nymph, the hämean anthem over the land of the green eskers and in the reluctance to define new päijäthämean values or a ‘thin’ identity. the regional actors understand that people are proud of their municipalities, coat of arms, parish villages and the traditions in them and of the almost mythical stories of gaining self-administration from hollola. former county lines still exist in regional imaginaries, as the quasi-region east-häme in the northeast and orimattila in the south are regarded as distinct from the rest (see fig. 1). ‘so the identity is a bit lost in contrast with savoanness, karelianness, ostrobothnianness and so forth. it does not clearly exist. […] there must be certain foundations, but this is not the heart of häme and as mentioned, this province is also formed out of savoan and uusimaa’s municipalities.’ (regional trade actor 1) while päijät-häme is culturally splintered in many ways, quite paradoxically its porousness and growth have given it its coherence. the construction of the province would not have been possible without the population and vigour boost or the pulses, first, from the settlement of karelians, and second from migration, mainly from eastern finland in the 1960s, that gave the city of lahti impetus to be the economic regional centre and depart from the traditional state administrative city, hämeenlinna. the result is a primal hollolan ambience mixed with eastern finnish influence that represents itself with what one educational respondent viewed as ‘distinct regional methods and ways’ (cf. kallio et al. 2010: 310), with supposed ability to receive and be tolerant. regardless of the fennia 191: 1 (2013) 31the role of identity for regional actors and citizens... splintered internal nature, no region is an island, although they are sometimes presented as such. in recent years, some more open discourses have emphasized the city-region’s connection with the helsinki metropolitan region as a way of deprovincializing the territoriality of päijät-häme. in many respects, the geographical proximity to helsinki leaves it in the shadow in terms of the scarcity of institutional and governmental structures. the co-operative tapping into the capital region is one way to compensate for the boundaries that some feel are incorrectly drawn. facilitating regional identities there are diverse ways to give the province cultural content and meaning. previously, provincial federations among other associations concentrated on identity building and creating provincial discourses, but in the 1990s, when provinces became responsible for regional development, the work around eu programmes redirected the work of regional councils so that traditional identity building and cultivating was left in the background for the sake of outward marketing. one of these marketing campaigns employs the coat of arms of the province and its vellamo water nymph figure. as a consequence, the local people at least now know what it stands for but it remains highly unrecognisable outside the province. a collective regional identity cannot be modified or retrofied from a brand. it takes time to transform an entrenched collective identity in the wider public (sagan 2004). according to the more critical voices, the current discourse of regional development starts from attracting companies and new affluent residents, often by simply emphasizing connections to helsinki. inclusive policies and considerations of what actually makes people happy are submitted to the politically-orien(ta)ted competitiveness rhetoric and enterprise originating policies (cf. bristow 2010: 133–134). ‘this is a long, risky and overly complicated sequence to achieve the point that people would start to take an interest in collective issues and to feel some provincial spirit.’ (regional policy actor 3) since regions are constantly ‘becoming’ (paasi 1986: 137), a successful region-building should be understood as an incessant and unending process, which optimally fuels itself. there is a belief that the terminological päijät-hämeanness comes about with the recognition of regional institutions, but the regional council, for example, can be seen as a provider of fluent regional collaboration and not that much of an intentional constructor of cultural ‘thick’ identity. this is in line with the observation of sotarauta (2010) that regional develfig. 1. the case region in 2011 and the county and parish names and boundaries as they were in 1650 and 1832. 32 fennia 191: 1 (2013)joni vainikka opers do not have ordering power, but rather a ‘seductive’ one to open up new policies and strategies. there have been attempts to attach content to regional identity discourses, market province-related products, unpack what päijät-häme stands for and to frame its meaning through reports and presentations. nevertheless, their credence is downplayed in some policy circles after one such written attempt ‘failed miserably’ (regional education actor 1) and because of the bittersweet remainder of the ‘business city’ slogan of lahti in the 1980s. the respondents felt such attempts should be sufficiently audacious for people to believe that the economy will follow if there is a strong sense of pride for the regional way of doing things (lanigan 2001). this view is perhaps rather oxymoronic, as the stereotypical, and at certain level, a performed trait of the citizens of the old häme to this day (cf. topelius 1879: 168) seems to be modesty and understating their own efforts, even to the point of self-stigmatizing the region as unidentifiable. this discourse of a dismissive character is a form of ‘formulaic truth’ (giddens 1994: 63–64) and it has its ‘guardians’ as long as people believe in and intuitively perform such a discourse. ‘one of our identity features is the certain moderation and austerity, that ‘let’s not make a show of this’ […], which prevents the kind of strong ‘we’spirit blustering that exists in some other regions’ (regional trade actor 3) one reason why the hämean identity is persistent is the reluctance of the regional media to use the provincial vocabulary. regional imaginaries break into everyday lives through the regional media. following them spatially socializes their readers (hujanen 2000). one regional policy actor maintained that the ‘world just seems different when it is read from other newspapers’. the coverage of two main papers etelä-suomen sanomat and itä-häme, established in 1914 and 1927, respectively, perpetuate the old county boundaries. according to the majority of the respondents, their style and policy have been rather critical of the idea of and the efforts to create päijät-häme without the similar encouraging sentiments for the regional co-operation that exists in some other provinces. between thick and thin there are two influential discourses that organize the way in which identity, as a form of symbolic power, is conceptualized. these are related to professional positions among various interest groups but also to personal preferences (cf. paasi 2013). for some participants it is trust in the region’s own strengths, traditions, longing, the belief in cultural reconciliation around the province and the reliance on regional spearheads in music, sport and cultural events on which regional cultural consciousness is based. it is sometimes viewed rather elusively as a festive, fleeting spectacle manifesting itself on limited occasions. for others, regional identity is more a matter of relative competitiveness, achievements compared with others and making one’s own, regionally labelled formats of success. both the ‘cultural strength’ and ‘relative competitiveness’ readings as internal and external identity strategies are important. the latter, however, is more pervasive and attractive to implement as a policy (cf. terlouw 2012). for some regional actors, revitalizing regional identity discourses is not really ‘a question of investments and contributions’ or agreeing on the territorial terminology. ‘rather they are questions of passion. and these identity issues are in the end the sorts of mysteries like love. that when people feel comfortable, they commit to and work for the benefit of a wider society. that is identity building.’ (regional media 1) moreover, the interviews indicate that the traditional collective identity discourse or ‘thick’ identity (geertz 1973; terlouw 2012) is by no means eroding, even if it is considered ‘light’, but it is shielded under the competitiveness discourse in which regional actors feel obliged to take part. the regional actors maintain that people start to act on behalf of their environment but this does not operate in the name of päijät-häme, rather on the local society. throughout the interviews, the respondents seem to highlight their organization’s ‘working territory’, häme, päijät-häme, east-häme or lahti region, which appears to them as a natural occupational and institutional entity, and understand that provincial consciousness and symbols can be a side issue for the citizens of the province. the porousness of the region can lead to viewing päijät-häme as a fabricated setting with territorial identity claims made first to the municipalities partitioned from mediaeval hollola. some even disclose the readiness to downplay the idea of the province, as it will never become an important source of identity like the historical provinces, and go on to state that ‘päijät-hämeanness could appear as a sort of province that breaks into the future and a statement of a new kind of identity’ (refennia 191: 1 (2013) 33the role of identity for regional actors and citizens... gional media 1) that relies on its functional position in relation to the metropolitan region. narrative claims to the region: social movement views päijät-häme offers a framework to exemplify how slowly personal identities transform to correspond with both transformed regional constellations and new, entitled identity repertoires. in some cases, new spatial identities are never adopted or identities continue to follow life-paths and trajectories originated elsewhere (anderson 2010: 120; vainikka 2012). the importance of local history the involved social movement members from the locallyto the universally-orientated groups reported that the province has remained rather nebulous and distant, despite the fact that participants were surprisingly conscious of regional history.6 they were aware of the splintered character of the province and the ostensible cohesion between certain municipalities based on old congregate and parish allegiances7 within and over the current regional boundaries. participants in lahti and hollola repeated the well-trodden historical understanding of long-established settlement and hollola as a heartland, with its influence reaching the wilderness far to the north. respondents in the northern part of the province regarded their municipality as an innate stronghold and agreed on an informal region of east-häme extending to two other regions, replicating the mediaeval parish of sysmäki, left as a sort of outcast between the old county and the new regional boundary (see fig. 1). the following excerpt from a focus group session with a local heritage association in sysmä is likely to be similar to the collective understandings expressed in hollola. ‘this was the focal parish, or this was the hub and it spread out from here, so that this was the biggest population centre of lake päijänne a thousand years ago.’ (matti, 55)8 ‘sysmä extended all the way up to rautalampi and pertunmaa.’ (kai, 61) ‘behold, you know the same blather.’ (olavi, 62) in contrast, the 107-year-old central city, lahti, is regarded throughout the focus groups as ‘young and impersonal’, ‘hulking’, ‘a place that leaves one cold’ or ‘a city of the migratory’. the province then is regarded as a mix of inherited, fading parish dignity and novel, rootless city-regionalism – a palimpsest space where the residues of former regional constructs meet the contemporary development discourses (cf. riikonen 1995; schein 1997; vainikka 2012). there are positive sentiments towards the city, of its closeness to nature, early modernization, proximity to helsinki and its image in terms of sport and classical music, but the city itself exemplifies the anxiety that is related to the detachment of and breaches in longer lineages, as viipurian and karelian9 contexts and hämean foundations have intermixed. ritva, 63, an amnesty member lamented that ‘there are so many people who themselves do not know where they come from’, whose loose spatial identity influences their well-being. while it may seem that ‘throwntogetherness’ creates new forms of spatial identities (massey 2005: 151), it does not necessarily provide an anchor for individuals, and this is certainly true for the resettled karelians longing for and missing their ‘spiritual connections’ with their ancestral homes (hyytiäinen 2005, see also böök 2004: 40). conceptualizing identity the social movement respondents defined identity as the core of consciousness pearled by one’s cultural roots, life paths and values in a community, as a longitudinal understanding of being a child of one’s epoch and as courage to individualize oneself using a ‘bricolage’ of memberships or ‘a narrative of what is at hand’ (leyshon & bull 2011: 163). apart from this ‘layered socialization’, they agreed that identity is also founded on common labels and the ways society regards various groups (tajfel 1981). identity stands as both an expression of internal sentiments and an attachment to external icons whereupon the process of self-understanding of one’s positionality in a social, cultural and material setting constantly reproduces itself. with all the relational examples of identities becoming multiple and more mobile (massey 2005), there seems to be a pronounced kernel of continuity and materiality, even with the more universally orientated participants, which does not always chime with the administrative spaces. 34 fennia 191: 1 (2013)joni vainikka based on this diverse reading on how space may influence identity, most respondents presented a dual place identity or spatial attachments that are bound to multiple locales and are activated when talking about them (cf. savage et al. 2005). multiple sources of identity are linked to family roots, historical layers, urban or rural landscapes, meaningful places or localities of studying or working life. put another way, places continuously mould our self-understanding and the experiences of them sediment over each other. relating to päijät-häme it is difficult to disentangle the role of the province within the spectrum of spatial identity. one amnesty respondent argued that päijät-häme is too extensive, stating that: ‘when you think of it, on a personal level, isn’t the area so extensive that you don’t feel it your own? it is the neighbourhood where you can travel by bicycle, on foot or by canoe that is your region.’ (ritva, 63) the spatial attachment of this participant could be understood as a form of personal, corporeal reach or the physical ability to access different landscapes. at the same time, it highlights that the term ‘päijät-häme’ is not an established identity factor in everyday life and it is not included in the narrative of one’s self. according to the social movement participants, the city of lahti determines the character of the province so much that it urges people to ask, ‘what would be päijäthämeän?’ (pauliina, 25, youth society). the term is not extensively used and it functions as an obscure concept. nevertheless, the participants had recognized the persistent region-building projects and seen brochures, in which as a youth society member petri, 32, ironically put it ‘the visibility of the ski jumps in every picture seems to be the most important thing’. in the same discussion, johannes, 71 maintained that it became important to mix city-regionalism with the ghosts of provinciality and form a partial häme for functional reasons. he continued that the region-building as a social and cultural endeavour ‘has not really succeeded. such a region’s own identity has not developed here’. politically, functional regionalism has only created a ‘deep ditch’ within the häme electoral district. the current cultural-linguistic landscape of the province is even presented simply as ‘void’ and this situated understanding of not really having a dialect of its own dampens the claims made to a coherent regional identity (jones & fowler 2007). awareness of the historical provinces is well-established as a cultural substrate or as tribal clichés ordering social categories, but the contemporary ‘partial’ provinces do not have an equivalent status. even though the respondents notice cultural differences between finnish regions, they suggest that the contemporary provinces are not that important in everyday life and do not appear as conventions to structure the country. the historical regions, old counties and cardinal directions constitute the core of the vocabulary which people use to make sense of spatial variations within the country (cf. antonsich 2010). reading regional symbolism the iconography and the symbolic power of päijät-häme are also contested. the coat of arms for the province was introduced in 1997, when a noted graphic designer redrew one of jac. ahrenberg’s early twentieth century designs for the coat of arms for lahti. at the time, the romanticism-inspired design was considered too daring and the city selected a more conventional railway wheel for their emblem. when the time came to select a new regional emblem, the vellamo water nymph figure consolidated with a karelian-associated cuckoo bird represented continuity that other choices did not.10 a picture of the coat of arms inspired two kinds of sentiments. some of the respondents saw it as a delicate and positive image. for a local heritage association member, erkki, 67, for instance, it represented ‘calm and comely future’ with a kalevalan mythical spirit. overall, the regional actors were more enthusiastic about the symbol. one policy actor even thought that it is the ‘most emotional and successful among finnish regions’. the response in the focus groups to the emblem was mainly negative; one respondent actually turned the picture upside down after i handed them a copy of it and she thought it was appalling. when the emblem is not understood as part of the imagery of the national epic or antiquity, it appears untrustworthy, distant and a mockery of the city’s design repute. a youth society participant explains how the hollo and martta giants that a myth places as the constructors of the hollola church gained appreciation but the newly introduced emblem did not. ‘päijät-häme was featured in senate square and we also performed there with hollo and martta giants with us and the show gained enormous apfennia 191: 1 (2013) 35the role of identity for regional actors and citizens... preciation from the audience and then we had fantasy girls of this kind and i felt like such a stranger so that this is … the whole picture is so distant.’ (antero, 54) the idea of accessible and inherited municipalities is the ordering concept of spatiality, especially among the local heritage and youth society participants. even when boundaries are maintained to be artificial, the opposition to restructuring the municipal structure is evident in every group. this is a significant issue as a large enough municipal merger, of which there were unsuccessful plans in 2010, might make the regional council, the backbone of the province, redundant. the historically emerged ‘civil society regionalism’ and economic political ‘functional regionalism’ (jones 2004) are both highly visible, while not always in the name of the province. a local heritage group participant, jouko, 61, maintained, ‘if we preserved old emblems and old names, things would be a lot simpler. administration may be whatever it happens to be’. thus, political territoriality may be left as a bystander when the regional symbols or practices become more important. the realization of empathy towards symbolic regionalism separates the locallyand more universally-orientated groups. a friends of the earth member, marko, 32, however, evoked an ideal community and wished that ‘managing shared issues could be more than party politics’. regional identity and globalization regional identity cannot be understood fully without considering the extent of people’s life-worlds and globalization. in the interviews, globalization manifests itself as a technological change that enables both the omnipotent encroachment of homogenizing culture and the branching of cultural literacy. for the friends of the earth and amnesty participants, regionalism is not an answer to more pressing global problems. however, across the interview material, participants were uneasy about the perceived lack of interest in the people’s own local culture and the lack of knowledge of ‘the kind that is just around the corner’ (marko, 32, friends of the earth). the members of the youth society were particularly anxious about being kneedeep in pop-culture at the expense of consciousness about one’s own local cultural traditions. globalization has helped to understand regional identities as social constructs, ‘mentifacts’ and to recognize their relational qualities in that ‘in the end we here and they over there are the same’ (ritva, 63, amnesty). regions are always generated through narratives and performable practices, but there is an apparent paradox in mass communication-influenced national identification. the participants argued that people believe in the national imagined community (anderson 1983) but ‘know their own country rather poorly’ (marjatta, 63, amnesty). they suggested that at times this leads to forgetting one’s own identity or strained categorizations where, as implied by a youth society member johannes, 71, ‘people have to be pigeon-holed as hämeans and ostrobothnians as regional awareness is not that conclusive’. while a plethora of issues from welfare-malaise to inequality and from the cultural disorientation to economic myopia worries the participants, the issue of breakage of society and families is the most disquieting. although the modern world might seem more stretched and comprised of what bauman (2004: 69) might call ‘thin and shallow contacts’ this does not appear to be what people actually want. discussion regional identity has become a buzzword in some strands of political, urban and cultural geography and in regional development practice. yet the dominating instrumental views of governance, competitiveness ideology and place marketing do not often find an affective counterpart in civil society (antonsich 2010: 273, also boisen et al. 2011; häkli 1998). this case study suggests that there are multiple reasons for this cleavage. first, the idea of palimpsest, applicable to basically every region, addresses the need to understand the institutionalization of regions (paasi 1986) as an asynchronous process where different socio-spatial practices and discourses are simultaneously used in everyday life and in media but also in the sometimes closed circuits of professionally positioned regional actors. in the case of päijät-häme, space and landscape are undoubtedly sources of individual and collective identities for the citizens and regional actors alike. yet the competing longitudinal regional discourses can create a sense of uncertainty, leave the region splintered and produce friction in the creation and adoption of new regional frames. this is not unique to finland, where governors and governments have redrawn administrative spaces. contemporary europe, for exam36 fennia 191: 1 (2013)joni vainikka ple, is scored with relics of old boundaries (keating 1998). according to the respondents interviewed in this study, regionalism that is based on historical layers should not be forgotten in contemporary developing-by-competition practices. the relative prestige, however, cannot be an achievement by itself and should not become a burden to development (cf. jones & macleod 2004), especially as the province is so closely tied to the development of the city-region. second, it seems that the political emphasis on regions (keating 2001) precedes both the imaginaries of the citizens and the regional actors. while the focus groups revealed a low level of attachment to the province and ignorance of the provincial concept, the regional actors were rather realistic – some even cynical – about the attraction of the provincial rhetoric. their professional position and acting in multiple functional co-operation networks enforce an image that regions have a voice and that they manifest as near-essential entities, but the various terminologies and spatial configurations of different stakeholders and the idea of a metropolitan node leave a plethora of territorial and relational practices in their wake. this emphasizes the need to understand the region as both porous and bounded (morgan 2007). the lack of direct political participation and the reluctance of the main guardian of regional discourses – the regional press – to routinely frame päijät-häme, leaves the region as a discursively nebulous notion. however, the continuous denial of regional identity as a ‘formulaic truth’ is a form of regional identity in itself. even though the sense of community does not manifest into a definitive symbolic level, it might be more disastrous to rearrange the region and dissipate the region-building work done so far. especially since some regional actors interpret the general depreciation of the region as an act of belonging. third, reformulating content for regional identity narratives, and regions in more general, is a form of practicing authority over collective spatial vocabularies. it requires considerable legitimacy to make such vocabularies effective in regional development work. an important question was asked by one regional policy actor. ‘how is regional development possible if there is no audience or people that want to take part in the region?’ if the region does not share a common acceptance and recognition among its citizens, regional development projects can be hard to justify, as labelling people according to territorial divides is not the same as claiming the territory as an identity factor. weak recognition can turn regions into a yet another way of securing and funnelling development funds without locally engaging, advocating work (cf. paasi 2002b: 138). according to the regional actors in päijät-häme, identity and regional culture are relatively important and should be the starting point of regional policies, or at least be a source of passion reflected in the development of the region. often these discourses do not permeate to everyday language. instead, the now commonplace relational conceptualizations of regions that tap into more affluent regions presage more uneven development (bristow 2010: 123, also moisio 2007). finally, this study shows that among citizens it is easier to find identifications and attachments to a place in a sense of ‘layered’ internal sentiments than a collective loyalty to regions in a sense of attachments to external icons (vainikka 2012). this could be interpreted as a sign of growing individualism, but collective belonging has not disappeared. the results indicate that it is not justifiable to take regional identity only as a form of political rhetoric and to believe that globalization and individualization have killed off regional collective identities (cf. terlouw 2012). on the contrary, owing to regional changes, whether by one’s own mobility or regional transformations, the interviews show that individuals can feel lost with their unaccounted longing for somewhere. thus, there is a clear space for region-building and branding that would resonate with the citizens and their everyday life. the content and audience for it, however, must be designed to be compatible with the existing spatial imaginaries and ideals of the citizens already living in the region. going back to the quotation by henri bergson at the beginning, the notion of ‘we’ is changing all the time and new meanings are merged into it but this change is also enmeshed in the localized spatial knowledge that unceasingly reworks the past to understand the present. thus, as a wider implication, regional identity cannot be a label given to regions by their marketers, but a continuous process involving both the regional actors who create and sustain the understandings of a region and every citizen of the region who read the geohistorical formation of the region and perform the current discourse. taking for granted regional identity based on imperative checklists can be a treacherous practice, as identity is more often a bricolage of sentiments, fennia 191: 1 (2013) 37the role of identity for regional actors and citizens... thoughts and practices, some of which are shared but which are in due course remoulded (leyshon & bull 2011). in the end, if we want to analyze regional identities, we should ask the people themselves. notes 1 on conceptualizing ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ see for example geertz (1973) and sack (1997: 257). 2 the regional actors included representatives from the following institutions: the regional council of päijät-häme (2), the employment and economic development centre for häme, lahti regional development company, entrepreneurs of päijät-häme, häme chamber of commerce, lahti region education consortium, lahti university of applied sciences, lahti city museum, etelä-suomen sanomat and itä-häme. the eed centre and the chamber of commerce also cover the province of kanta-häme. 3 the material dates to the time before the government-led discussion of strong and dynamic municipalities and, though municipal mergers were an issue at the time of the interviews, it provides an invaluable insight into regional identity without it being ‘activated’ by governmental discourse. 4 the official administrative parlance for the most part started to use the word ‘region’ for maakunta when regional councils were created. the term ‘province’ is used here as an analytical concept (cf. häkli 1998), not as a positioned style that commonly denotes ‘provinces’ as non-metropolitan territories. 5 swedish was the official language until 1863, and the paper uses the contemporary swedish administrative names up to that point. 6 the respondents regarded that, for example, lammi and hämeenkoski, sysmä, hartola and pertunmaa, hollola and kärkölä have more in common with each other than with the rest of the region. similarly, iittianness, based on a sixteenth century parish, is regarded as a ‘concept’ in itself. 7 there were subtle differences in the ways the participants scaled their spatial identities. the members of the youth society and especially the local heritage association felt that they were attached slightly more to local spaces, whereas the members of the friends of the earth and amnesty had more pronounced attachments to macro-regional constructs such as europe and the nordic countries. 8 all names are pseudonyms. 9 as a telling anecdote, one participant recalled that mainly resettled karelians organized the five-hundred-year anniversary celebration of the hollola church. the ostentatious and at first catholic stone church was built next to an ancient kapatuosia hillfort, a derivative of cappadocia that is more important to ‘eastern’ cultures. 10 even though the vellamo figure is applied, for example, to a children’s book and to the side of mineral water bottle, the mermaid does not carry the same kind of symbolic meaning as, for example, syrenka in the warsaw coat of arms. see http://www.paijathame.fi/en. acknowledgements the author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and anssi paasi and kaj zimmerbauer for their advice. writing this article was made possible by funding provided through an academy of finland project (grant number #121992). references agnew j 2001. regions in revolt. progress in human geography 25: 1, 103–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1 191%2f030913201673210318. allen j, massey d & cochrane a 1998. rethinking the region. routledge, london. anderson b 1983. imagined communities. verso, london. anderson j 2010. understanding cultural geography. routledge, london. antonsich m 2010. exploring the correspondence between regional forms of governance and regional identity: the case of western europe. european urban and regional studies 17: 3, 261–276. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0969776410365784 barbour rs 2005. making sense of focus groups. medical education 39: 7, 742–750. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111%2fj.1365-2929.2005.02200.x bauman z 2004. identity. polity, cambridge. bergson h 1911. creative evolution. h. holt and company, new york. bialasiewicz l 2002. upper silesia: rebirth of a regional identity in poland. regional and federal studies 12: 2, 111–132. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f714004749. boisen m, terlouw k & van gorp b 2011. the selective nature of place branding and the layering of spatial identities. journal of place management and development 4: 2, 135–147. http://dx.doi.org /10.1108%2f17538331111153151. bosco fj & herman t 2007. focus groups as collaborative research performances. in delyser d, herbert s, aitken s, crang m & mcdowell l (eds). 38 fennia 191: 1 (2013)joni vainikka the sage handbook of qualitative geography, 193–207. sage, london. brenner n 2004. new state spaces. oxford university press, oxford. bristow g 2010. critical reflections on regional competitiveness. routledge, london. böök n 2004. border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon a ceded territory. fennia 182: 1, 33–45. cooke p & morgan k 1999. the associational economy. oxford university press, oxford. de cillia r, reisigl m & wodak r 1999. the discursive construction of national identities. discourse & society 10: 2, 149–173. http://dx.doi.org/10.11 77%2f0957926599010002002. deacon b 2004. under construction: culture and regional formation in south-west england. european urban and regional studies 11: 3, 213–225. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0969776404044018. donaldson a 2006. performing regions: territorial development and cultural politics in a europe of the regions. environment and planning a 38: 11, 2075–2092.http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fa37104. florida r 1995. towards the learning region. futures 27: 5, 527–536. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2f00163287%2895%2900021-n. frisvoll s & rye jf 2009. elite discourses of regional identity in a new regionalism development scheme: the case of the ‘mountain region’ in norway. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 63: 3, 175–190.http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f00291950903238990. geertz c 1973. the interpretation of cultures. basic books, new york. giddens a 1994. living in a post-traditional society. in beck u, giddens a & lash s (eds). reflexive modernization, 56–109. polity press, london. gustafson p 2001. meanings of place: everyday experience and theoretical conceptualizations. journal of environmental psychology 21: 1, 5–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1006%2fjevp.2000.0185. heinonen j 1997. päijät-häme i. päijät-hämeen liitto & lahden kaupunki, lahti. heinonen j 1999. päijät-häme iii. päijät-hämeen liitto & lahden kaupunki, lahti. hobsbawm e 1983. introduction: inventing traditions. in hobsbawm e & ranger t (eds). the invention of tradition, 1–14. cambridge university press, cambridge. hopkins pe 2007. thinking critically and creatively about focus groups. area 39: 4, 528–535. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1475-4762.2007.00766.x. hujanen j 2000. journalismin maakunnallisuus. university of jyväskylä, jyväskylä. hyytiäinen m 2005. vaeltavien sielujen paikka. in huovila m & willman t (eds). karjala lahdessa, 109–126. palmenia kustannus, lahti. häkli j 1998. discourse in the production of political space: decolonizing the symbolism of provinces in finland. political geography 17: 3, 331–363. johnson a 1996. ‘it’s good to talk’: the focus group and the sociological imagination. the sociological review 44: 3, 517–538. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111%2fj.1467-954x.1996.tb00435.x. johnson c & coleman a 2012. the internal other: exploring the dialectical relationship between regional exclusion and the construction of national identity. annals of the association of american geographers 102: 4, 863–880. http://dx.doi.org/1 0.1080%2f00045608.2011.602934. jonas aeg 2012. region and place: regionalism in question. progress in human geography 36: 2, 263–272. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0309132510394118. jones m 2004. social justice and the region: grassroots regional movements and the ‘english question’. space and polity 8: 2, 157–189. http://dx. doi.org/10.1080%2f1356257042000273940. jones m & macleod g 2004. regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the english question. transactions of the institute of british geographers 29: 4, 433–452. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111%2fj.0020-2754.2004.00140.x. jones r & fowler c 2007. where is wales? narrating the territories and borders of the welsh linguistic nation. regional studies 41: 1, 89–101. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f00343400600928343. jutikkala e 1949. suomen maakunnat. kotiseutu 1949: 6–8. järvinen o 1968. maakunnallinen yhdentyminen. suur-hollola 1968: 1, 3. kallio a, harmaakorpi v & pihkala t 2010. absorptive capacity and social capital in regional innovation systems: the case of the lahti region in finland. urban studies 47: 2, 303–319. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0042098009346373. keating m 1998. the new regionalism in western europe. edward elgar, cheltenham. keating m 2001. rethinking the region. culture, institutions and economic development in catalonia and galicia. european urban and regional studies 8: 3, 217–234. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f096977640100800304. kerkkonen m 1962. länsimaisen suomen vanhin raja. historiallinen aikakauskirja 1962: 4. kuikka j 1985. päijät-hämettä vasta-alkajille. päijäthämeen seutukaavaliitto a 21. lanigan c 2001. region-building in the north east. in tomaney j & ward n (eds). a region in transition, 104–119. ashgate, aldershot. leyshon m & bull j 2011. the bricolage of the here: young people’s narratives of identity in the countryside. social & cultural geography 12: 2, 159–180. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f14649365.2011.545141. macleod g & jones m 2001. renewing the geography of regions. environment and planning d 19: 6, 669–695. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd217t. massey d 2005. for space. sage, london. moisio s 2007. valtiomuutoksen tuottaminen suomessa: poliittisen maantieteen näkökulma. politiikka 49: 4, 229–247. morgan k 2007. the polycentric state: new spaces of empowerment and engagement? regional studies fennia 191: 1 (2013) 39the role of identity for regional actors and citizens... 41: 9, 1237–1251. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080% 2f00343400701543363. paasi a 1986. the institutionalization of regions: a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of regions and the constitution of regional identity. fennia 164: 1, 105–146. paasi a 2002a. place and the region: regional worlds and words. progress in human geography 26: 2, 802–811. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191%2f0309132 502ph404pr. paasi a 2002b. bounded spaces in the mobile world: deconstructing ‘regional identity’. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93: 2, 137–148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2f1467-9663.00190. paasi a 2009a. regional geography i. in kitchin r & thrift n (eds). international encyclopedia of human geography, 214–227. elsevier, amsterdam. paasi a 2009b. the resurgence of the ‘region’ and ‘regional identity’: theoretical perspectives and empirical observations on regional dynamics in europe. review of international studies 35: s1, 121–146. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017%2fs0260210509008456. paasi a 2013. regional planning and the mobilization of ‘regional identity’: from bounded spaces to relational complexity. regional studies, in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f00343404.2012.661410. petrella r 2000. the future of regions: why the competitiveness imperative should not prevail over solidarity, sustainability and democracy? geografiska annaler b 82: 2, 67–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2f1468-0467.00074. prytherch dl 2010. ‘vertebrating’ the region as a networked space of flows: learning from the spatial grammar of catalanist territoriality. environment and planning a 42: 7, 1537–1544. http://dx.doi. org/10.1068%2fa42430. putnam r 1994. making democracy work. princeton university press, princeton. ricœur p 2000. la mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. seuil, paris. riikonen h 1995. sukupolvet ja alueellinen muutos. terra 107: 2, 88–100. sack rd 1997. homo geographicus. the johns hopkins university press, baltimore. sagan i 2004. looking for the nature of the contemporary region. progress in human geography 28: 2, 141–144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191%2f03091 32504ph477xx. savage m, bagnall g & longhurst b 2005. globalization and belonging. sage, london. sayer a 1989. the ‘new’ regional geography and problems of narrative. environment and planning d 7: 3, 253–276. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd070253. schein rh 1997. the place of landscape: a conceptual framework for interpreting an american scene. annals of the association of american geographers 87: 4, 660– 680. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2f1467-8306.00072. schlottmann a 2008. closed spaces: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. environment and planning d 26: 5, 823–841. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd0706. sotarauta m 2010. regional development and regional networks: the role of regional development officers in finland. european urban and regional studies 17: 4, 387–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0969776409352581. syssner j 2009. conceptualizations of culture and identity in regional policy. regional and federal studies 19: 3, 437–458. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f13597560902957518. taavitsainen jp 1990. ancient hillforts of finland, problems of analysis chronology and interpretation with special reference to the hillfort of kuhmoinen. suomen muinaismuistoyhdistyksen aikakauskirja 94. tajfel h 1981. human groups and social categories. cambridge university press, cambridge. terlouw k 2012. from thick to thin regional identities? geojournal 77: 5, 707–721. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007%2fs10708-011-9422-x. thrift n 1983. on the determination of social action in space and time. environment and planning d 1: 1, 23–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd010023. thrift n 1990. for a new regional geography 1. progress in human geography 14: 2, 272–279. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f030913259001400205. tomaney j 2007. keeping a beat in the dark: narratives of regional identity in basil bunting’s briggflatts. environment and planning d 25: 2, 355– 375. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd411t. topelius z 1879. boken om wårt land. 3rd ed. g.w. edlund, helsingfors. tuffin k & howard c 2001. demystifying discourse analysis. in mchoul a & rapley m (eds). how to analyse talk in institutional settings, 196–205. continuum, london. vainikka j 2012. narrative claims on regions: prospecting for spatial identities among social movements in finland. social & cultural geography 13: 6, 587–605. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f14649365.2012.710912. van houtum h & lagendijk a 2001. contextualising regional identity and imagination in the construction of polycentric urban regions: the cases of the ruhr area and the basque country. urban studies 38: 4, 747–767. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f00420980120035321. warren cab & karner tx 2010. discovering qualitative methods. oxford university press, oxford. werlen b 2009. regionalisations, everyday. in kitchin r & thrift n (eds). international encyclopedia of human geography, 286–293. elsevier, amsterdam. zimmerbauer k 2011. from image to identity: building regions by place promotion. european planning studies 19: 2, 243–260. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1080%2f09654313.2011.532667. governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa77781 doi: 10.11143/fennia.77781 governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act rhys jones jones, r. (2019) governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act. fennia 197(1) 8–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 recent contributions in geography and beyond have examined historical and more contemporary efforts to govern the future. work in this area has highlighted some important conceptual considerations by drawing attention to the way in which states, regions and other organisations view the future as an object of governance for a variety of reasons: as something that constitutes a threat that needs to be managed; as something that can be predicted, thus leading to an improvement in governance; as something that allows a more hopeful and just society, economy and environment to be expressed (and achieved). in this paper, i use this context as a way of making an argument for the need to: 1) consider more explicitly the many geographies associated with governing the future; and 2) explore how these geographies might impact on the definition and promotion of spatial justice. i illustrate these arguments through an empirical discussion of the development and implementation of wales’ well-being of future generations act, an act that seeks to create a better and more just wales by the year 2050. i conclude by exhorting geographers to take the lead in exploring the impact that geographical themes might have on states’ and regions’ attempts to achieve spatial justice in the present and the future. keywords: futures, governance, spatial justice, well-being of future generations act, wales rhys jones, aberystwyth university, aberystwyth, sy23 3db, united kingdom. e-mail: raj@aber.ac.uk introduction recent contributions in geography and beyond (e.g. anderson 2010; andersson 2012) have reflected on the historical and more contemporary efforts to govern the future.1 work in this area has highlighted some important conceptual considerations by drawing attention to the way in which states, regions and other organisations view the future as an object of governance for a variety of reasons: as something that constitutes a threat that needs to be managed; as something that can be predicted, thus leading to an improvement in governance; as something that allows a more hopeful and just society, economy and environment to be expressed (and achieved). studies of the governance of the future has also been characterised by considerable empirical breadth. detailed work has been conducted, for instance, on the historical geographies of the study of the future and its links to the cold war (andersson & keizer 2014), along with more contemporary concerns surrounding future governance in the context of terrorism and security (massumi 2007), the radicalisation of youth © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 fennia 197(1) (2019) 9rhys jones (saunders & jenkins 2012), infectious diseases and pandemics (hinchcliffe & bingham 2008) and ecological disaster (hulme 2008). this research is to be commended for its detailed and sophisticated conceptualisation and empirical examination of the governance of the future. my aims in this article, however, are to foreground two themes that have, arguably, not been examined in sufficient detail to date. first, i suggest that there needs to be a more explicit examination of the significant geographies that characterise the governance of the future; geographies that have only been addressed in implicit ways in pre-existing studies of the governance of the future. when i refer to significant geographies, i mean that there is a need, for instance, to highlight how the governance of the future occurs differently in different places and emerges as a result of a movement of people, things and ideas from one location to another (cf. baker & mcguirk 2017). there is a need, likewise, to examine how the governance of the future becomes embedded in various ways in particular states, nations and regions (jones & ross 2016). equally, we should develop a more explicit awareness of how the governance of the future is played out across a series of connected geographical scales, ranging from the global to the embodied and everything else in between (diprose et al. 2008). second, i suggest that a focus on these geographies can help us to envision and promote a more hopeful and just version of the future. i maintain that there are, potentially, important connections here between literatures on the governance of the future and recent debates concerning the idea of spatial justice. while the notion of spatial justice has varied meanings (jones et al. 2019), it is, in essence, concerned with understanding the interconnections between space and justice. dabinett (2011, 2391) has argued that we should avoid seeing space as merely being a container for justice. instead, we need to consider how space can influence forms of justice and injustice in various. it is in this context that we need to attend to the impact that geographies of different kinds might have on the governance of more equal and just futures. the remaining sections of this paper are arranged as follows. in the following section, i discuss in more detail the various ways in which the governance of the future has been approached to date. i also elaborate on the value of adopting a more explicitly geographical take on the governance of the future, particularly as a way of furthering more spatially just futures. in the subsequent section, i provide some background detail on the case study i have chosen for this article, namely wales’ wellbeing of future generations act (2015) (hereafter the well-being act). i contend that it is an act that has the notion of justice – understood in relation to the concept of well-being – at its heart. it is also an act that seeks to govern the future of wales in explicit ways. the passing of this act places an onus on all public bodies in wales to consider the impact that their present policies and procedures might have on future generations and, moreover, to ensure that their actions in the present will help to maximise the well-being of wales’ citizens of the future, with the year 2050 acting as a significant end goal (jones & ross 2016). i also discuss in this section the methods and fieldwork that underpin the arguments i make in the article. in the penultimate section, i delve into more empirical detail by examining the way in which the act has sought to govern the future across and between three distinct, yet interconnected scales: the scale of wales as a region, devolved state and nation; the local scale within wales, a scale at which much of the act has been operationalised; the scale of individual and embodied civil servants in wales, who are responsible for making the act work in practice. brief conclusions appear in the final section, in which i reflect more broadly on the significance of geography and scale for the governance of more hopeful futures. governing the future as noted in the introduction, there has been a growth in recent years in academic interest in the various ways in which the future has been, and continues to be, an object of governance for states, regions, cities and other organisations. a number of important themes have been highlighted by academics in relation to this object of governance. first, many academics have commented on the way in which the future has been viewed as a threat or as a risk that needs to be managed and governed (beck 1992). work by andersson (2012; andersson & keizer 2014) has examined what could be termed the historical geographies of these attempts to govern risky futures. andersson and keizer (2014), for instance, trace the beginnings of attempts to 10 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper govern these risky futures to the cold war. it was during this period, for instance, that the science of futurology first emerged, in which various techniques (e.g. delphi method) and technologies (e.g. emerging forms of computer simulation) were developed by key actors, such as the rand organization, in order to manage the risks associated with the cold war; most notably the risks of nuclear annihilation (ibid., 425). it is in this context too that the familiar rostow model of progress and economic development emerged as a more positive account of the futures that would characterize western states; a model that was defined in opposition to the alternative marxist models of progress and development fashioned in the soviet union and its satellite states (andersson 2012). more recent attempts to govern risky futures have been studied in geography by anderson (2010). he has noted how “preemption, precaution and preparedness” have become watchwords in recent years, whether in relation to the need to reduce the threat of: terrorism, especially post 9/11 (massumi 2007); infectious diseases and pandemics, such as sars (hinchcliffe & bingham 2008); ecological disaster, especially one associated with climate change (hulme 2008). what unites these attempts to govern risky futures is the way in which the future becomes a space of governmental calculation but also something that extends beyond scientific calculation into the realms of imagination (anderson 2010, 785): a shift from what will happen to what might happen. and of course, the emphasis on the riskiness of the future – and of the need to govern this effectively – also raises significant questions about the role of affect in the governance of the future. the apocalyptic fears associated with certain forms of pandemic and climate change, in particular, highlight how a consideration of affect needs to take center stage in any engagement with the governance of risky futures (boykoff 2008). this is a theme to which i return below, albeit in more positive and hopeful ways. a second area of enquiry has centered on attempts to think about the future as something that can be predicted, for the purpose of improving societies, economies, as well as ways of governing them. as part of this attempt to think about the future as a time and space to be calculated (anderson 2010, 784), emphasis has been placed on developing models, projections, scenarios and so on to try to predict the future; as a more neutral aid to governance. while such developments have taken place in many different states, it has, arguably been something that has appealed more in some states than others. centralised states, in particular, seem to have placed greater emphasis on predicting and planning for the future. andersson (2012, 1421), for instance, discusses the role of the prognostik movement in the ussr and its efforts to use “predictive social and economic indicators to monitor progress and change”. similarly, the centralising tendencies of the french state led to technocratic models of prediction being incorporated into the french plan (anderson & keizer 2014, 108). a number of interesting issues arise in relation to this attempt to predict the future. some have criticised the tendency of such approaches to fall foul of ‘path dependency’, teleology or what has been termed “chronological imperialism” (galtung in andersson 2006, 281); in other words, a tendency to view the future as something that is pre-ordained by the past or present in the particular geographical setting in question or, even more problematically, by the past and present of other places, regions or states (as in rostow’s model of development or the demographic transition model, where one state is said to follow the path set by other, more ‘advanced’ states). i shall return to these criticisms below but suffice to say that such models and predictions tend for foreclose any sense of openness or potential in the future. another key issue in relation to predicting the future – and one that perhaps contradicts the first point – has revolved around the inherent uncertainty of doing so. for instance, andersson and keizer (2014, 116) note that the wrr, a body responsible for governing the future of the netherlands, “came to the conclusion [in the 1970s] that prediction was a very difficult activity”. the emphasis on prediction with the governance of the future has also possessed some important disciplinary and methodological consequences. the study of the future has always been interdisciplinary but there is some evidence to suggest that early forms of futurology during the 1950s and 1960s tended to emphasize the significance of the hard sciences and economics. these early forms of prediction were heavily dependent on statistics and computer modelling, and were augmented from the 1970s onwards by more open and plural explorations of possible futures. this shift to a broader futures studies (the emphasis on futures in the plural is significant) was associated with a greater emphasis on the conceptual and methodological expertise of disciplines in the social sciences and fennia 197(1) (2019) 11rhys jones arts. an important example of this development was the formation of the swedish futures studies group during the early 1970s. it included a professor of psychology, geography (torsten hägerstrand), mathematics and planning theory, and history (ibid.). futures studies, in this way, rejected futurology “as law-driven science”, maintaining that “the future could not be addressed with established tools of science such as facticity and empirical observation” (andersson 2012, 1426). new and alternative methods were developed in order to imagine alternative futures, including scenario building (including the use of pictures, case studies, narrative accounts and other kinds of more qualitative data). in all this, we witness an attempt to move away from data and methods that foreclose the future to data and methods that open it up to discussion and debate. and, in more philosophical terms, this development reflects an effort to question hegemonic accounts of a singular and predetermined future by highlighting the multiple versions of the future that could be problematized and imagined (cf. rose 1999; dikeç 2007). the above discussion of the emergence of futures studies alludes to a third approach to the governance of the future; namely the way in which the governance of the future has been viewed as something that can express hope and enable a search for social (and spatial) justice. a focus on the potential of the future as a time and space of hope derives in large measure from a dissatisfaction with the closed and limiting kinds of future envisaged within predictive models of the future. this more open account of the future also derives from a belief that the present is complex and, as such, makes the future open and difficult to determine (anderson 2010). the future, when viewed in this way, shifts from being: “as an is: an object of science of which certain predetermined traces could be found…[to]…the future as becoming: an object of the human imagination, creativity and will” (andersson 2012, 1413). there are clear parallels here with work in geography and beyond on the notion of hope and utopia. harvey (2000), in particular, has attempted to map out an academic and political agenda that can allow us to envisage more just and equal alternatives to the political-economic and embodied consequences of living and working in late capitalism. his represents a particular interpretation of what a more just future might look like, of course. but a key attribute of futures studies – as opposed to futurology – is its emphasis on the need to envisage a range of alternative futures. as part of this, the future becomes a “surprise” (anderson 2010, 783) and something, borrowing from mouffe (2013), which is enriched by deliberation, debate and agonism. and if a fear of the uncertainty of the future, as discussed earlier, displays the affective significance of governing the future, so does a focus on the future as a space and time of hope. as saunders and jenkins (2012, 494) note, “‘envision’ is a very hopeful word and ‘to envision’ is an act full of promise. it carries with it very positive…connotations that imply optimism, enthusiasm and confidence”. the above discussion illustrates the richness of the debate concerning the governance of the future; in thematic, conceptual, methodological and empirical contexts. my contention in this article, however, is that there is a need to: 1) develop a more sustained and explicit geographical account of the governance of the future than has happened to date; and 2) use a geographical understanding of the governance of the future as part of an effort to promote more socially and spatially just futures. i outline the case for these two arguments in the remaining paragraphs of this section. first, i maintain that there would be considerable value in developing a more sustained and explicit geographical engagement with the governance of the future. this does not mean that no work has been conducted on such issues. geographers such as anderson (2010) and harvey (2000) have drawn attention, respectively, to some of the key calculative and affective aspects, and some of the important scalar aspects of governing the future. work beyond geography – most notably in the history of science – has also examined, in implicit ways, important geographical aspects in the development of futurology and futures studies (e.g. andersson 2012). and yet, there is room to supplement and extend this work. a number of key themes present themselves as potential avenues of enquiry. there is, evidently, scope to examine some of the important sites, networks and assemblages – or, in other words, “arrangements of humans, materials, technologies, organizations, techniques, procedures, norms, and events” (baker & mcguirk 2017, 428) – that have led to the geographical spread of the governance of the future (delanda 2016). the historical geographies of futures studies has been embedded in specific sites or places, which have become nodes in networks of learning. key individuals 12 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper and objects include eric jantsch writing the report, entitled technological forecasting, for the oecd in 1967 in dialogue with the rand organisation. important networks and conversations have connected american futurologists with european forecasters and modellers. significant events include the third world future research congress in bucharest in 1972, which led to the creation of the unescoaffiliated world futures studies association (andersson 2012). in another context, we need to consider how the governance of the future became enmeshed with geopolitics and the geographies of colonialism. as discussed earlier, conceptualisations of the future, from the outset, were inflected by the realities of the cold war. at the same time, different inflections of futurology and futures studies were to appear within the west (us vs. european) and the east (soviet union vs. satellite states to an extent). the global south too became a playground within which these alternative conceptions of the future could be deployed. the club of rome’s vision of the future, for instance, reinforced fundamental inequalities between the countries of the north and the south (ibid.). and, as i suggested earlier, there is a real sense in which individual states and nations sought to interpret the study and governance of the future in ways that reflected – at least in part – their own national ideals and priorities. the political geographies of states and nations, thus, had a clear impact on the engagement of scientists with the future. the strong tradition of social democracy and a trust in social science expertise in somewhere like sweden, for instance, led to a different approach to the study of the future than that adopted in centralist and technocratic france. in sweden, much more emphasis was placed on developing a democratic and discursive approach to defining alternative futures (andersson & keizer 2014, 108). such issues also begin to illustrate the significance of geographical scale to the governance of the future. the 1960s and 1970s, arguably, reflected a concern with the governance of global futures. the stance adopted by the club of rome, for instance, was that “the world had one common future, and that humanity itself was the central obstacle to that future” (andersson 2012, 1423). at the other extreme, the local has been emphasised as an appropriate scale over which to imagine more just futures (saunders & jenkins 2012). and of course, sustained attempts have been made to govern the future between these two extremes, with states (diprose et al. 2008) and regions (jones et al. 2019) being particularly significant in this respect. my second claim is that there is a need to develop this more explicitly geographical approach as a way of furthering spatial justice; or, in other words, as a way of developing a version of the future that is more hopeful and just. as i noted in the introduction to this article, the notion of spatial justice is predicated on the idea that space – and, indeed, other kinds of geography – might reinforce inequalities and injustices of different kinds and that it might, conversely, allow new and more effective approaches to inequality and injustice to be imagined. in this respect, it is worth noting that there has been a tendency to date to focus spatial justice within cities and at the urban scale. however, no necessary link exists between spatial justice and the urban scale. soja (2010, 20; see also israel & frenkel 2017, 4), for example, maintains that “justice and injustice are infused into the multiscalar geographies in which we live, from the intimacies of the household to the uneven development of the global economy”. moreover, adopting soja’s viewpoint encourages to reflect on the different ways in which spatial injustice and justice manifest themselves in different spaces and across different scales. such an understanding of the interconnection between space, scale and justice also forces us to think carefully about the most appropriate spaces and scales over which spatial justice can be achieved. the literature on spatial justice, in addition, complements many of the key attributes of futures studies. one of the important distinctions between futurology and futures studies, according to andersson and keizer (2014) is the technocratic nature of the former and the potential for the latter to be developed on the basis of a more democratic engagement with a wider range of stakeholders. certainly, the notion of spatial justice tallies well with the more democratic tenor of futures studies. lefebvre (1970), in his study of the right to the city, argued that justice involved the right to take part in urban transformation processes. it was thus associated with an “active participation in the political life, management, and the administration of the city” (dikeç 2001, 1790). care needs to be taken, therefore, to ensure that any attempts to govern the future – as a space and time of hope – are as inclusive and democratic as possible. building on this notion of democratic engagement, emphasis has been placed within the literature on spatial justice on viewing justice, as well as associated terms such as well-being and the ‘good life’, in plural ways (sen 1993). it is in this context that storper (2011, fennia 197(1) (2019) 13rhys jones 19) contends that while “freedom and liberty; the ability to live our lives and be happy; and development of our capabilities” may well be common goals, “different individuals, groups and territories might fill in the detail on these goals in rather different ways”. and, in a related context, one needs to consider the extent to which the geographies of the governance of the future – or, in other words, the spaces and scales over which governmental entities operate – allow for a proliferation of understandings of justice and well-being to emerge? the above discussion illustrates some of the potential ways in which one might be able to highlight the geographies of the governance of the future. attempts to govern the future appear in different places and come about as result of a movement of people, things and ideas from one location to another (prince 2016). likewise, the governance of the future can become embedded in various ways in particular states, nations and regions, and is also played out across a series of connected geographical scales. the above discussion also begins to show some of the significance of such issues for the promotion of more just futures. a more detailed exposition of these ideas, along with their practical limitations, is provided in the next two sections of this article. case study and methods my case study in this article is wales and, in particular, its well-being of future generations act. the choice of case study requires some justification. it is important for the reader to be aware at the outset of this section of the broad changes that have taken place in the governance of wales in recent years. wales experienced an executive devolution of power in 1999, with a national assembly for wales being created; one that would “give the people of wales a real chance to express their views and set their own priorities (a voice for wales, the uk government’s white paper on devolution to wales 1997, 31). since 1999, wales has experimented with different forms of governance as a result of a selective process of “filling in” (jones et al. 2005). it has also been keen to exploit the uk’s acceptance of policy divergence (mackinnon 2015, 50) in order to define its own models of policy delivery, whether in relation to education, health and sustainable development. this latter emphasis on sustainable development is particularly significant, as i shall explain below. in all this, we witness wales’ attempts to define a “welsh way” in relation to public policy delivery (power 2016) or, as was described by the former first minister of wales, to ensure that there was “clear red water” between it and policies in operation across the border in england. wales is also a unit of governance that is concerned with the future in many different contexts; ones that reflect the threefold division of the governance of the future i outlined above. to a certain extent, wales – as is the case with all administrations – seeks to govern risky futures. some of the most significant contexts for this are in relation to mitigating some of the potential consequences of climate change – with particular attention being directed towards the risk of flooding (welsh government 2011) – and the management of the outbreak of a variety of communicable diseases (public health wales 2014). wales’ capacity to govern other future risks is constrained somewhat by the fact that it is a devolved administration that possesses only certain powers; others, such as those relating to justice, are reserved uk powers and responsibilities. the upshot of this situation is that it is the uk’s counterterrorism strategy, contest, which is in operation in wales (home department 2018). taken together, such variation illustrates the complex scalar considerations that inform the governance of risky futures in wales. likewise, the welsh government also seeks to predict the future as an aid to governance. one of the most significant developments in this context in recent years has been the creation of a future trends unit within the welsh government. the logic behind this development is explained as follows: forecasting the future is an extremely difficult task. nevertheless, to make effective decisions now that are good for the long term as well as for our immediate needs, we must use the data we have to attempt to find patterns and trends for the future (welsh government 2017, 3). the most concrete manifestation of the creation of the future trends unit is the publication, annually, of a future trends report, which seeks to provide useful predictions on trends in relation to varied issues such as population, health, economy and infrastructure, climate change, land use and natural 14 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper resources, and society and culture. the data and projections contained in the report are also useful tools that can enable the welsh government to chart its likelihood of reaching some of the challenging goals it has set itself, not least in relation to the environment (wales) act 2016 (where there is a legal target of reducing carbon emissions by a minimum of 80% by 2050) and the well-being of future generations act, which, as i shall explain below, possesses a large number of varied targets and goals in relation to well-being, broadly defined (ibid.). interestingly, too, the future trends unit view themselves – and the report they produce – as important stimulators of a “conversation about wales’ future” (ibid., 15). there is a stated attempt here to change what could be a highly technocratic attempt to predict the future into a broader discussion about the possible future trajectories taken by wales, but evidence concerning the extent of this “conversation” has been limited to date. this leads me on to the third context within which wales is seeking to govern the future; namely its attempt to define a future that can express hope and enable justice. it is this third context for the governance of the future that will provide the basis for the empirical section of this article. it is possible to trace wales’ attempt to govern the future in this way to the emphasis that it has placed on sustainable development as a policy goal. section 121 of the government of wales act 1998, which led to the creation of the national assembly for wales, stated clearly that “[the assembly government will] make a scheme setting out how it proposes, in the exercise of its functions, to promote sustainable development” (government of wales act 1998, section 121). wales’ pursuit of sustainable development as a policy goal has been viewed, at one level, as something that has allowed it to engage with international audiences, most notably the european union and the united nations, in more effective ways (royles 2010). the welsh government’s commitment to sustainable development received a further fillip with the promulgation of a sustainable development bill (subsequently the well-being of future generations act) in 2015. the act has the ambition that sustainable development will become “the central organising principle” for the public sector in wales (nicholl & osmond 2012). as part of the act, a commissioner for the well-being of future generations has been appointed in order to champion wales’ commitment to sustainable development, well-being and justice, and the wales audit office (the body responsible for auditing the work of public bodies in wales) has been charged with monitoring the extent to which public bodies are adhering to the aims of the act. it is this policy context that makes wales such an appropriate location to study the governance of the future. as well as seeking to govern risky futures and predicting futures, it has – arguably more than many other jurisdictions – placed a great emphasis on attempting to envision more hopeful and just futures. the empirical material i discuss in this article is drawn from a mixture of three research projects, which have examined wales’ attempt to define and create more hopeful futures. the first project, national sustainabilities, examined wales’ attempt to define its own interpretation of sustainable development through the concept of well-being and, as such, provides important contextual information for the article. the second project i draw on is an eu horizon 2020 project, entitled imajine (integrative mechanism for addressing spatial justice and territorial inequalities, 2017–2021), which brings together 16 partners from 13 european states to discuss and develop new academic and policy understandings of territorial cohesion and spatial justice. wales is one case study region within this broader network, partly because of its attempt to develop new and imaginative ways of promoting social and spatial justice through the well-being act. i also discuss empirical material from a third project. this is a leverhulme fellowship, which is examining the way in which behavioural insights are being used in wales in order to encourage civil servants to think and act in different and more effective ways. an important driver of this change in ways of thinking and doing is the well-being act. the empirical material i discuss from these projects includes approximately 70 interviews conducted in wales over the course of the past five or so years with a range of civil servants, academics and other stakeholders concerned with sustainable development and the well-being act. i was particularly interested here in the hopes associated with the development of the act, as well as some of the challenges linked to its implementation. i also draw upon documentary research on various strategies, policies and related documents that set out wales’ attempt to define and create a future that is more hopeful and just (for instance, more equitable in terms of life chances and access to services). in terms of analysis, the interview material was transcribed and coded using nvivo using a mixture of codes that were data-generated and others that reflected more conceptual themes (coffey & atkinson fennia 197(1) (2019) 15rhys jones 1996). the documentary material was subject to textual analysis (kuchartz 2014), where common patterns and similarities within and between documents were noted. i use this interview-based and documentary material in a synthetic manner in the empirical discussion that follows. spatial justice and the governance of the future in contemporary wales i proceed in this section to discuss the way in which the well-being act has led to a renewed and sustained attempt in wales to govern the future, and to do so a way of increasing well-being for all of the people of wales. there is, clearly, an attempt in the act to focus public and policy attention on the long-term futures of wales, particularly in relation to its society, economy, culture and environment. the promulgation of the act was preceded by a large-scale consultation exercise, entitled ‘the wales we want’ (jones & ross 2016). the aims of the exercise were numerous. at one level, it helped to embed sustainable development and the notion of well-being within public discourse in wales. at another, it encouraged stakeholders of different kinds to envision a future wales, which would be more sustainable and just. the emphasis on envisioning a ‘better’ wales was reinforced by the welsh government in its own submission to ‘the wales we want’ exercise. it maintained that in 2050, wales will be the best place to live, learn, work and do business…doing things differently is about looking forward so the choices we take secure a safe and prosperous future for us, for our children and for our grandchildren (welsh government 2014, 1). the level of ambition demonstrated in the above statement is remarkable and it signals – above all else – the radical attempt by the welsh government to think proactively about how it might use the well-being act to create a different and better kind of wales. particular emphasis was placed in the consultation exercise on asking stakeholders to define the specific vision of sustainable development, well-being and justice that should be striven for by the year 2050. at face value, therefore, there is a clear attempt here to enable multiple visions of the future to be articulated and for these to help define the future of wales as an object of governance (rose 1999). the deliberations were said to feed directly into the seven well-being goals that came to structure the well-being act. the act would, by 2050, create: a prosperous wales; a resilient wales; a healthier wales; a more equal wales; a wales of cohesive communities; a wales of vibrant culture and thriving welsh language; a globally responsible wales (welsh government 2015, 3). while the notion of justice is most clearly associated with the goal of creating “a more equal wales”, it was also linked to some of the other goals. for instance, the issue of a thriving welsh language has been in recent years been articulated as an issue of linguistic rights (jones & lewis 2019). similarly, when discussing a prosperous wales, there is a need, according to the act, to consider the extent to which such prosperity is shared by the whole of the population of wales. the idea of justice, therefore, permeates much of the ethos of the well-being act. these seven goals were subdivided into 46 national indicators of progress. while some of these would be well-worn and familiar to policy-makers based in other jurisdictions, such as gross value added (gva) per hour worked (relative to uk average) (national indicator 9), others were more unusual and reflected the attempt that had been made within the act to expand understandings of the objectives of government. they included reducing the gender pay difference (national indicator 17), increasing the percentage of people moderately or very satisfied with their jobs (national indicator 20), increasing the percentage of people satisfied with their ability to get to/access the facilities and services they need (national indicator 24) and increasing the percentage of people who could speak welsh (national indicator 37). there is a sense in the above indicators of the welsh government’s efforts to envision a more just future for wales, embedded in notions of well-being and sustainable development. echoing important aspects of the more conceptual literatures concerning the governance of the future and spatial justice, this is a vision that was based on a democratic process of consultation with the public. admittedly, the process whereby this public input was distilled into seven well-being goals is relatively opaque, thus posing questions about the extent of consultation exercise: did all voices count and, if so, did they all count equally? what is not in doubt is the way in which the vision of the future encapsulated in the 16 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper well-being act extends well beyond gdp or gva to encompass plural measures of justice and the ‘good life’. and as a result, this interpretation of well-being and justice is one that is said to be embedded in key aspects of a welsh national culture (jones & ross 2016). in the remaining paragraphs of this section, i want to discuss important geographical – particularly scalar – aspects of the well-being act. i focus on three scales, namely the way in which the act is embedded in a national welsh scale, its operationalisation at a more local scale within wales, and its implications for more embodied ways of working. of course, while i examine each of these scales of governance in isolation, i fully recognise the important connections that exist between them (cf. swyngedouw 2000). in discussing these significant geographies of the well-being act, my other goal is to reflect on the impact of these distinct geographies on the welsh government’s stated aims of achieving well-being and justice. it is in this second context that one can begin to appreciate the extent to which the governance of the future – as reflected in the well-being act – is helping or hindering the welsh government to achieve spatial justice. scaling future governance 1: the national scale the discussion in the above paragraphs points, quite clearly i maintain, to the way in which the wellbeing act reflects an attempt to ground notions of well-being, sustainable development and justice at the scale of wales as a devolved state, region and/or nation. we can identify the attempts to embed understandings of justice at a welsh national scale in many distinct, yet related, contexts. first, it is clear that ever since the beginning of the devolution process there has been an attempt discursively to construct well-being and justice as issues and goals for wales as a nation. one of the most clear-cut examples of this emphasis was the naming of ‘the wales we want’ exercise, described earlier. evidently, the common-sense geographical frame of reference for sustainable development and wellbeing in this case is wales (jones & ross 2016). some of the welsh government’s statements about the significance of sustainable development and well-being – both prior to and following ‘the wales we want’ consultation – reinforce this geographical connection with wales as a nation. the ministerial foreword to the welsh government’s sustainable development scheme, one wales: one planet, for instance, states that “i hope that you will be able to support and join us in this endeavour [the journey to sustainability], so that together we can transform wales into a sustainable nation” (welsh government 2009, 5). even more strident comments were made in the later sustainable development report published by the welsh government. here, it is confidently stated that wales has “its own account of sustainable development”, with an “emphasis on social, economic and environmental wellbeing for people and communities, embodying our values of fairness and social justice” (welsh government 2012, 5). a form of banal nationalism (billig 1995) – or, in other words, a nationalism that is reproduced in subtle and highly banal contexts – is evident in all of these statements, with the use of plural pronouns such as ‘us’, ‘we’ and ‘our’ helping to emphasise that wales as a nation is taking possession of a distinctive approach to sustainable development, well-being and justice. an even more explicit and instrumental attempt discursively to connect sustainable development and well-being to wales, a welsh nation and the welsh national scale appears in the sustainable development narratives for wales document, which was published in november 2013. the document used behavioural insights in order to highlight the specific discourses – in terms of language, idioms and imagery – that could be used to ‘sell’ the idea of sustainable development to a welsh nation (welsh government 2013). the guide drew on ideas from social marketing (pykett et al. 2014), in which marketing insights from the private sector are used in order to promote public goals, to target specific segments of the population with bespoke messages. as noted by sustain wales, the ngo that was responsible for producing the document, the art of social marketing “requires an understanding of specific groups of people – what they value, what they identify with, who they are – and the language that resonates with them” (sustain wales 2012, 1). the key point i want to make at this juncture is that the welsh nation was viewed in these documents as a significant segment for the promotion of sustainable development and that there was, thus, a need to create a bespoke take on sustainable development that would resonate with the welsh nation. fennia 197(1) (2019) 17rhys jones second, the evidence points to an emphasis being placed on wales as a focus for intervention as a result of the national challenges that it has faced and continues to face. this theme was especially apparent in some of the interviews i conducted with workers in sustain wales, the ngo responsible for ‘the wales we want’ consultation. one reflected on how the problematic history of wales should act as a spur for wales to create a new and better wales of the future, as the following quote illustrates: wales was there at the start of the industrial revolution and the production of coal and then the export right across the world…so it’s benefited from it but it’s also been, pardon the pun, at the coalface of it. so it’s seen its landscapes absolutely scarred, it’s got the communities that are now being hit by inertia (interview, sustain wales). the same individual described how the challenges facing wales in the present should be viewed as sources of inspiration for future action; once again at the scale of wales as a region and nation. the respondent explained that “wales has some of the highest rates of obesity in the world, some of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy”. they viewed these statistics as ones that needed to change as wales moved forward (interview, sustain wales). this kind of attitude – about the need to get to grips with some of the entrenched challenges facing wales as a nation – has translated into the priorities that have been set by sophie howe, the commissioner for the well-being of future generations. in her first annual report, she identified two main areas of intervention. the first emphasised the need to create “the right infrastructure for future generations”, including improving the housing stock, energy generation and efficiency as well as transport planning (ofgc 2018, 21). the second centred on “[e]quipping people for the future”, with a focus on improving skills for the future, addressing adverse childhood experiences (aces) and promoting alternative models for improving health and well-being (ibid.). there is a certain logic to the approach that has been adopted by the commissioner. at one level, these are patently fundamental challenges facing wales as a nation and a region. at the same time, it is impossible for the office of the commissioner to give equal attention to each of the seven well-being goals contained in the wellbeing act. and yet, there are important questions that are deserving our attention. to what extent, for instance, are these challenges and priorities equally relevant to all people and all parts of wales? wales, after all, is varied in terms of its social, economic, cultural and environmental makeup. there is room to suggest, in this respect, that the priorities emphasised by the commissioner during her first years in office reflect well-being challenges that are significant for the more urbanised areas of southeast wales, with challenges associated with the more rural areas of wales – isolation, access to services and the welsh language for instance – being marginalised as a result (cf. luukkonen & sirviö forthcoming). as such, there is a danger that emphasising a set of national priorities in relation to wellbeing and justice will, inadvertently perhaps, lead to an implicit focusing of attention, services and funding on certain areas more than others. in effect, one could have a situation in which attempts to address injustice could exacerbate spatial injustice by prioritising certain areas more than others. to what extent, therefore, can just futures be defined at a national or regional scale? such concerns point to the potential value in developing a more localised interpretation of well-being and justice, and i turn to this theme in the next sub-section. scaling future governance 2: operationalising well-being and justice at the local scale another significant aspect of the well-being act is the way in which it has attempted to ground understandings of well-being in localities. the act has led to the creation of a series of public services boards (hereafter psbs) and, with a few small exceptions, these have been centred on local authority areas. the psbs consist of the relevant local authority and representatives from the local health board, the welsh fire and rescue authority, natural resources wales (the body responsible for managing the environment of wales), the relevant chief constable, the relevant police and crime commissioner, and a representation from local voluntary bodies (welsh government 2015, 11). psbs are responsible, furthermore, for consulting with the local population in order to produce assessments of local well-being, encompassing economic, social, environmental and cultural themes. these assessments are then used to develop local well-being plans, which contain “objectives that are designed to maximise the psb’s contribution to locally-defined well-being goals” (ibid.). 18 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper at face value, psbs provide a welcome antidote to the potential homogenising tendencies of the well-being act at the national scale. the first iterations of the local well-being assessments and plans have now been produced. there are references in some of these documents to the issues that have been identified as national priority areas by the commissioner for well-being. for instance, psbs in diverse locations in wales – torfaen and blaenau gwent in post-industrial south wales, and ceredigion, and gwynedd and anglesey in more rural west wales – all reference in slightly different ways to the need to address adverse childhood experiences. and yet, at the same time, there are efforts in these documents to emphasise more localised and distinctive aspects of justice and well-being. torfaen psb (2017) for instance, draws attention to the need to prevent chronic health conditions and to improve local skills, blaenau gwent psb (2017) makes a case for increasing healthy lifestyle chocies, ceredigion psb (2017) notes the need for individual well-being within communities, and gwynedd and anglesey psb (2017) emphasises the need to protect and promote the welsh language, as well as the need to understand demographic changes and ensure that there is a sufficient stock of affordable housing (the latter two priorities are, once again, linked to local debates about the in-migration of english speakers to the area and the lack of availability of affordable housing for welsh-speaking residents). this variation could be viewed as a testament to an attempt to localise well-being, with spatial justice in this sense being more effective and far-reaching if it is defined through a democratic process of engagement taking place at the local scale. and yet, certain concerns can be raised about the effectiveness of this process. while these reflect practical and operational difficulties, at one level, they also testify to more fundamental and conceptual challenges associated with defining well-being and spatial justice at the local scale. first, concerns have been raised about the extent to which psbs have considered fully the spatial aspects of well-being in the production of their local well-being assessments and plans. in a publicly released review report, the commissioner for future generations commented that: the assessments acknowledge the importance of local spaces as assets, acknowledge their roles in people’s well-being and consider how people engage and interact with these places. however, most well-being assessments showed very limited consideration of the significance or cause of spatial differences, including: life expectancy; the distribution and isolation of elderly residents; the differences between rural and urban or inland and coastal communities; biodiversity loss; community safety or the impact of climate change. these were described as relevant problems, but their localised impact on well-being remained unexplored (ofgc 2017,15). the collective feedback provided above by the future generations commissioner to psbs is significant. it encourages psbs, i contend, to think in more creative ways about the significance of space to wellbeing. and it is interesting that this is a spatial perspective that should feed into a range of aspects of social life. second, some within the voluntary sector have bemoaned that their potential to provide input into the work of the psbs, as well as the production of well-being assessments and plans, is limited. echoing familiar and long-running criticisms levelled at the idea of partnership working, it has been suggested that psbs are dominated by the public sector, with concomitant worries about the unevenness of power relationships, which are redolent of forms of metagovernance (jessop 2016) or a ‘shadow state’ (wolch 1990). clearly, there are implications here for spatial justice, particularly in relation to the (in) ability of those working within the voluntary sector in different parts of wales to contribute fully to the definition of future goals. third, it is also possible to question how the subsidiarity associated with the well-being act – as embodied in the notion of psbs, local well-being assessments and plans – is actually serving to undermine some of the act’s essential characteristics; and, by extension, the notion of spatial justice. the significance of this issue can be seen most clearly in relation to the act’s commitment to the welsh language as an important aspect of ‘the wales we want’. a well-placed individual working in sustain wales, the body responsible for promoting sustainable development in wales prior to the passing of the well-being act, explained some of the reasoning behind this emphasis on promoting the welsh language: the kind of wales we would like to see would be in terms of equality, in all things…the language would be key…we’re the only place in the uk trying to develop bilingualism and that is something fennia 197(1) (2019) 19rhys jones we need to be really proud of to show as a nation we’re proud of our heritage and culture (emphasis added). as well as demonstrating the distinctiveness of wales’ interpretation of sustainable development and well-being, the above statement clearly indicates a commitment to the welsh language as something that is significant for the whole of the welsh nation. and yet, the brief description of the priorities of four psbs, provided earlier, demonstrates quite clearly an uneven commitment to the welsh language. it is only in gwynedd and anglesey psb (2017) that there is any overt statement about the significance of the welsh language for understandings of well-being. ceredigion psb (2017, 7) has seen fit to incorporate certain goals that might have some tangential benefits for the welsh language within their local well-being plans. the place of the welsh language within local well-being plans is even more muted, though, when one studies those psbs located in parts of wales possessing lower percentages (though sometimes large absolute numbers) of welsh speakers; places such as torfaen and blaenau gwent. as such, the local well-being assessments and plans that have been produced – and the institutional priorities that they reflect – are, i contend, in danger of reproducing familiar geographies of the welsh language; with the welsh language being viewed as a legitimate well-being goal for those areas of wales possessing higher percentages of welsh speakers while being deemed as an irrelevance for psbs operating in parts of wales possessing lower percentages of welsh speakers (jones & lewis 2019). what are the impacts of such variations on the linguistic aspects of spatial justice? will local well-being plans help to determine access to welsh-medium services in the future and, if so, will it lead to a situation in which the institutional support provided for the welsh language – and for welsh speakers – can legitimately vary from one part of wales to another? there is clearly, here, the potential for the devolved character of the well-being act to lead to a situation in which the welsh language faces additional challenges in certain parts of wales, rather than being supported as one of the act’s seven well-being goals. of course, i can be accused, in this respect, of wanting to have my cake and eat it. in the previous section, i argued that there was a need to be wary of the homogenising tendencies that might be associated with approaching the idea of well-being and spatial justice at the national scale. in this section, i am suggesting that we need to be careful that embedding well-being and spatial justice within localities does not lead to a situation in which access to opportunities and services vary spatially. my defence is that in pursuing these – perhaps conflicting – arguments we witness the challenges associated with seeking to promote well-being and justice. moreover, i seek to demonstrate that the geographies and, particularly in this case, the scales over which this endeavour is operationalised possess consequences for the justice that can be achieved. scaling future governance 3: the body and mind as terrains of governance the third and final scale of future governance i want to discuss relates to the body and mind as key terrains of governance. one of the most significant aspects of the well-being act is the emphasis that it has placed on encouraging five new ways of working, highlighting the need to: think about the long term; prevent problems occurring or getting worse; integrate different well-being objectives and the work of different public bodies; collaborate with any stakeholder that might help a well-being goal to be achieved; involve any individuals and groups who might have an interest in a well-being goal (welsh government 2015, 7). the most significant of these for the present discussion, of course, is the first and it is worth considering the specific wording of this new way of working. it is stated that thinking about the long term reflects “[t]he importance of balancing short-term needs with the needs to safeguard the ability to also meet long-term needs” (ibid.). as such, this different way of working reflects both the overall tenor of the well-being act, namely that there is a need to create a new, different and better kind of wales by the year 2050. it is also a new way of working, at least in an implicit sense, that is borne out of a concern with the short-termism of politics and policy-making in general. as one respondent from the welsh government put it, “part of the problem we have is that civil servants aren’t used to thinking over the long term. they get tied in to the electoral cycle, which emphasizes the need for short-term gain” (interview, welsh government). 20 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper such concerns have resulted in a concerted effort to retrain civil servants, particularly within the welsh government, so that they are better suited to taking on board the requirements of the act. a number of bodies in wales have taken up this challenge. the wales audit office, for instance, has created a good practice exchange in order to help civil servants to think and act differently in relation to the well-being act (and also with regard to the relatively new social services and well-being act, and the environment act). an example of their work includes a recent training course on encouraging public sector workers to take more seriously the outcomes of their work, rather than the current focus on measuring outputs. as jeffs (2018), one of the contributors to the training course, states “the true ‘value’ of public service ultimately lies in improving people’s lives” and, as such, there needs to be a concomitant “different way of seeing and providing public services that starts with people’s lives and what matters to them in their lives”. while this is a laudable goal in its own right, i also suggest that it also reflects – and least implicitly – an attempt to move away from the short-termism of an outputfocused approach to one that takes heed of the longer-term consequences of policy delivery. similar work is undertaken by academi wales, which is linked to the welsh government’s cabinet secretary for local government and public services. the aim of academi wales is to be the centre for excellence in leadership and management for public services in wales, and one of the values it seeks to instil among civil servants is to “work for the long term” (https://academiwales.gov.wales, accessed 10.1.2019). while this is, evidently, a laudable goal and one that tallies with the overall tenor of the well-being act, it seems as if it is much easier to say than it has been to achieve. an analysis of some of the courses and guidance provided by academi wales, for instance, shows that they are aware of the need to address long-term futures but the guidance provided is a little vague. its discussion of a sustainable futures development architecture starts with the need to think over the long term and the need to move away from so-called “short term fixes” but the solution to this issue, seemingly, focuses far more on collaboration and involvement ways of thinking: long term relationships. to solve tough problems, we need everyone who is prepared to help; the recipient or customer has just as much to bring as the field expert. we commit to people to help discover and build on all our strengths and create relationships that increase trust (academi wales 2015, 1). again, there is much to commend in the above statement but it does not, as far as i can see, get to grips with the need to think about the long term. the development of strong collaborative links and trust between policy-makers and the public may be a part of achieving this goal but where is a consideration here of the long-term consequences of policy decisions in the present? how does the above guidance help policy-makers to think creatively about how small-scale decisions and investments in the present might have large-scale positive outcomes in the future, or how one needs to think carefully about the unintended long-term consequences of decisions in the present for ideas of wellbeing and justice? some of the interventions that have been run out of the department of geography and earth sciences at aberystwyth university have attempted to exploit understandings of behavioural insights (jones et al. 2013) and mindfulness as a way of addressing some of the short-comings of policy-makers and policy-making, including the lack of long-term thinking (kahneman 2011; academi wales 2018, 5). one intervention was developed in order to explore whether the experience of practising mindfulness would enable participants to enhance their understanding of the principles that inform contemporary behaviour change policies. fifteen civil servants in the welsh government were trained over the course of eight weeks to reflect on their behaviours and those of the stakeholders that they interact with. while those who attended the course identified many positive aspects (see lilley et al. 2014), some of the more interesting themes arose in relation to the perceived increased capacity of attendees to manage their time, to think more slowly and to reflect on the longer-term consequences of their decision-making, as the following quote shows: i think that it’s really important having the capacity to learn and think rather than just going with the prevailing wind […] if you do that you can start changing how you see, even how you look, at things. if you don’t give yourself space i think that you just get caught-up with the tide (civil servant, welsh government). https://academiwales.gov.wales fennia 197(1) (2019) 21rhys jones again, while it may not be possible to equate being “caught up with the tide” with a short-term attitudes towards policy-making, one can see how there is some potential here for the training course to encourage civil servants to avoid making knee-jerk policy decisions; ones that are more likely to be short term in their outlook. the discussion in this sub-section illustrates how the well-being act is leading to an effort on behalf of various organisations to encourage public servants to think about the long term impact of their decisions and policies. there is, moreover, some evidence to show that behavioural insights are being used as a way of encouraging this different way of working. while these insights seek to help civil servants to reframe their policy decisions in different ways (reflecting the five different ways of working encompassed by the act), there is some doubt as to the extent to which they are successful means of allowing civil servants to make policy decisions that fully take account of the specific need to create a long-term perspective on policy-making. such concerns point to the need for more research on the practical implications of seeking to govern of the long term. conclusions my aims in this article were twofold. i discussed the growing interest in the governance of the future within academia and argued that there was a need to develop a more explicit and sustained engagement with the geographical aspects of this process. i also maintained that developing such a geographical perspective was necessary as a way of ensuring that attempts to govern the future were as spatially just as possible. geography, in this sense, is not merely a backdrop to efforts to promote justice and well-being. it has a significant bearing on the extent to which justice and well-being can be achieved. i illustrated these conceptual claims with a discussion of the development and implementation of the well-being act in wales; an act that explicitly seeks to create a different and better kind of wales by the year 2050. the act promotes a notion of well-being and justice at different scales and each of these possess implications for the way in which well-being and justice can be achieved in practice. the act’s discursive emphasis on the national scale – while being something that can make the notion of sustainable development, well-being and justice something that is embedded in welsh values (jones & ross 2016) – can lead to a situation in which certain issues are prioritized above others; with a potential for unjust outcomes to emerge. the act’s emphasis on the local scale – particularly in relation to the work of psbs – also has the potential to lead to situations in which some of the act’s overall aims are downplayed or ignored. once again, certain interest groups and particular areas may suffer as a result. and the act’s emphasis on the body and minds of civil servants as terrains of governance is also significant. yet, there is still some doubt as to the extent to which the training and interventions that have been trialed to date have been wholly effective in reshaping values and sensibilities; particularly in relation to the need to think and act in ways that promote long-term goals. and even though it was not discussed in the main body of the article, there is some tentative evidence to show that the wellbeing act is having some impact internationally. the well-being commissioner presents regularly to international audiences about wales’ experiment with governing the future and there is a sense that the act has already served to raise wales’ profile internationally. the overall message that comes out of this case study is that whereas there is an appetite for governing the future, and to do so as a means of furthering sustainable development, well-being and justice, the act of operationalising this – at least in relation to geographical themes – is fraught with difficulty. there are no simple means of addressing such challenges. rather than providing simple answers, for now it may enough for geographers – because of their sensitivity to the difference that geographical issues, such as space and scale make, to politics and governance – to take the lead in drawing attention to the significance of the questions that need to be asked when seeking to govern the future. how do the spaces and scales over which more hopeful futures are being articulated influence the extent to which those hopeful futures can be realised? to what extent do these spaces and scales of future governance lead to greater justice for some rather than others? in short, how does this search for future justice play out in spatial contexts? 22 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper and if these kinds of questions are pertinent within the specific context of wales, they are even more significant when one considers spatial justice at broader geographical scales. if one key aspect of spatial justice is that individuals, groups, cities, regions and states can articulate their own vision of what a just future might look like (storper 2011, 19), then surely they must be allowed the same license to define the spaces and scales over which that search for justice occurs. in short, the spaces and scales of future governance might vary from one place to another; some spaces and scales of future governance might work more effectively in some places than others. there is a need, therefore, for a spatial sensitivity to spatial justice and geographers should play a leading role, not just in analysing this spatial variation, but also in enabling the most effective governmental configurations to be developed within specific geographical settings. notes 1 while i refer to attempts to govern the future in this article, it will become apparent throughout that i do not consider the future as something that is singular and predetermined. there are, therefore, many possible futures that might be problematized and imagined as objects of governance (rose 1999; dikeç 2007). therefore, while i use the term ‘governing the future’, the reader should be aware of the many possible interpretations of the future that underlie its use. acknowledgements i am grateful to the audience at the geography days conference for their comments on the oral version of this paper, and for the two referees for their useful and insightful comments on the written version. i would also like to thank bryonny goodwin-hawkins for conducting the interviews for the imajine project. i also would like to acknowledge the financial support of the following organisations: the ahrc for the project on national sustainabilities (grant number ah/k004077/1); the european commission for the imajine project (grant number rep-726950-1); the leverhulme trust for the project on the use of behavioural insights by the welsh government (grant number rf-2017-696). all the errors and omissions are mine. references academi wales (2015) sustainable futures development architecture. academic wales, cardiff. academi wales (2018) decision making: deliberately disciplined leaders make better choices. academi wales, cardiff. anderson, b. (2010) preemption, precaution, preparedness: anticipatory action and future geographies. progress in human geography 34(6) 777–798. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132510362600 andersson, j. (2006) choosing futures: alva myrdal and the construction of swedish futures studies, 1967–1972. international review of social history 51(2) 277–295. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0020859006002458 andersson, j. (2012) the great future debate and the struggle for the world. american historical review 117(5) 1411–1430. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.5.1411 andersson, j. & keizer, a-g. (2014) governing the future: science, policy and public participation in the construction of the long term in the netherlands and sweden. history and technology 30(1–2) 104–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2014.932563 baker, t. & mcguirk, p. (2017) assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for critical policy research. territory, politics, governance 5(4) 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622 671.2016.1231631 beck, u. (1992) the risk society: towards a new modernity. sage, london. billig, m. (1995) banal nationalism. sage, london. blaenau gwent psb (2017) blaenau gwent draft well-being plan. blaenau gwent public services board, ebbw vale. boykoff, m. (2008) the cultural politics of climate change discourse in uk tabloids. political geography 27(5) 549–569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2008.05.002 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510362600 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510362600 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859006002458 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859006002458 https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.5.1411 https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2014.932563 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2016.1231631 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2016.1231631 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2008.05.002 fennia 197(1) (2019) 23rhys jones ceredigion psb (2017) ceredigion draft well-being plan. ceredigion public services board, aberaeron. coffey, a. & atkinson, p. (1996) making sense of qualitative data: complementary research strategies. sage, london. dabinett, g. (2011) promoting territorial cohesion and understandings of spatial justice. paper for the dg regio, regional studies and slovenia government office for local self-government and regional policy conference: what future for cohesion policy? an academic and policy debate. sava hoteli bled, slovenia, 16–18 march 2011. delanda, m. (2016) assemblage theory. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. dikeç, m. (2001) justice and the spatial imagination. environment and planning a 33(10) 1785–1805. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3467 dikeç, m. (2007) space, governmentality, and the geographies of french urban policy. european urban and regional studies 14(4) 277–289. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776407081162 diprose, r., stephenson, n., mills, c., race, k. & hawkins, g. (2008) governing the future: the paradigm of prudence in political technologies of risk management. security dialogue 39(2–3) 267–288. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010608088778 government of wales act (1998) government of wales act (1998). hmso, london. gwynedd and anglesey psb (2017) gwynedd and môn draft well-being plan. gwynedd and môn public services board, caernarfon and llangefni. harvey, d. (2000) spaces of hope. university of california press, berkeley, ca. hinchcliffe, s. & bingham, n. (2008) securing life: the emerging practices of biosecurity. environment and planning a 40(7) 1534–1551. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4054 home department (2018) contest: the united kingdom’s strategy for countering terrorism. uk home department, london. hulme, m. (2008) the conquering of climate: discourses of fear and their dissolution. the geographical journal 174(1) 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00266.x israel, e. & frenkel, a. (2017) social justice and spatial inequality: toward a conceptual framework. progress in human geography 42(5) 647–665. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517702969 jeffs, m. (2018) moving from outputs to outcomes. <https://goodpracticeexchange.wales/2018/05/15/ moving-from-outputs-to-outcomes/> jessop, b. (2016) territory, politics, governance and multispatial metagovernance. territory, politics, governance 4(1) 8–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2015.1123173 jones, r., goodwin, m., jones, m. & pett, k. (2005) “filling in” the state: economic governance and the evolution of devolution in wales. environment and planning c: government and policy 23(3) 337– 360. https://doi.org/10.1068/c39m jones, r., pykett, j. & whitehead, m. (2013) behaviour change policies and psychological governance. policy and politics 41(2) 159–182. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557312x655422 jones, r. & ross, a. (2016) national sustainabilities. political geography 51 53–62. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.12.002 jones, r. & lewis, h. (2019) new geographies of language: language, culture and politics in wales. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42611-6 jones, r., moisio, s., weckroth, m., woods, m., luukkonen, j., meyer, f. & miggelbrink, j. (2019) reconceptualising territorial cohesion through the prism of spatial justice: critical perspectives on academic and policy discourses. in lang, t. & görmar, f. (eds.) regional and local development in times of polarisation: re-thinking space politics in europe, 97–120. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1190-1_5 kahneman, d. (2011) thinking, fast and slow. farrar, straus and giroux, new york, ny. kuchartz, u. (2014) qualitative text analysis: a guide to methods, practice and using software. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446288719 lefebvre, h. (1970) la révolution urbaine. gallimard, paris. lilley, r., whitehead, m., howell, r., jones, r. & pykett, j. (2014) mindfulness, behaviour change, and engagement in public policy: an evaluation. aberystwyth university. luukkonen, j. & sirviö, h. (forthcoming) politics of depoliticization and the constitution of cityregionalism as a dominant spatial-political imaginary in finland. mackinnon, d. (2015) devolution, state restructuring and policy divergence in the uk. the geographical journal 181(1) 47–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12057 massumi, b. (2007) potential politics and the primacy of pre-emption. theory and event 10(2) project muse. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2007.0066 mouffe, c. (2013) agonistics: thinking the world politically. verso, london. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776407081162 https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010608088778 https://doi.org/10.1068/a4054 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00266.x https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517702969 https://goodpracticeexchange.wales/2018/05/15/moving-from-outputs-to-outcomes/ https://goodpracticeexchange.wales/2018/05/15/moving-from-outputs-to-outcomes/ https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2015.1123173 https://doi.org/10.1068/c39m https://doi.org/10.1332/030557312x655422 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.12.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.12.002 https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42611-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1190-1_5 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446288719 https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12057 https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2007.0066 24 fennia 197(1) (2019)research paper nicholl, a. & osmond, j. (2012) (eds.) wales’ central organising principle. institute of welsh affairs and sustain wales, cardiff. ofgc (2017) well-being in wales: planning today for a better tomorrow. learning from well-being assessments 2017. office of the future generations commissioner, cardiff. ofgc (2018) future generations commissioner for wales: annual report 2017–2018. office of the future generations commissioner, cardiff. power, s. (2016) the politics of education and the misrecognition of wales. oxford review of education 42(3) 285–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2016.1184871 prince, r. (2016) the spaces in between: mobile policy and the topographies and topologies of the technocracy. environment and planning d: society and space 34(3) 420–437. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263775815618401 public health wales (2014) the communicable disease outbreak plan for wales. public health wales, cardiff. pykett, j., jones, r., welsh, m. & whitehead, m. (2014) the art of choosing and the politics of social marketing. policy studies 35(2) 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2013.875141 rose, n. (1999) powers of freedom: reframing political thought. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511488856 royles, e. (2010) small, smart, successful: a nation influencing the twenty-first-century world? the emerging welsh paradiplomacy. contemporary wales 23 142–170. saunders, a. & jenkins (2012) ‘absent fear’: re-envisioning a future geography. futures 44(5) 494– 503. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2012.02.002 sen, a. (1993) capability and well-being. in sen, a. & nussbaum, m. (eds.) the quality of life, 30–53. clarendon press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198287976.003.0003 soja, e. (2010) seeking spatial justice. university of minnesota press, minneapolis, mn. https://doi. org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816666676.001.0001 storper, m. (2011) justice, efficiency and economic geography: should places help one another to develop? european urban and regional studies 18(1) 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776410394553 sustain wales (2012) narratives for a sustainable wales: values, language and identity. sustain wales, cardiff. swyngedouw, e. (2000) authoritarian governance, power, and the politics of rescaling. environment and planning d: society and space 18(1) 63–76. https://doi.org/10.1068/d9s torfaen psb (2017) torfaen draft well-being plan. torfaen public services board, pontypool. welsh government (2009) one wales: one planet. the sustainable development scheme of the welsh assembly government. welsh government, cardiff. welsh government (2011) national strategy for flood and coastal erosion risk management in wales. welsh government, cardiff. welsh government (2012) sustainable development annual report of 2011–2012. welsh government, cardiff. welsh government (2013) sustainable development narratives for wales: a framework for communications. welsh government, cardiff. welsh government (2014) written statement the future generations bill. the wales we want by 2050. welsh government, cardiff. <https://gov.wales/about/cabinet/cabinetstatements/previousadministration/2014/futuregenerationsbill/?lang=en> welsh government (2015) well-being of future generations act: the essentials. welsh government, cardiff. welsh government (2017) future trends report 2017. welsh government, cardiff. wolch, j. (1990) the shadow state: government and voluntary sector in transition. foundation center, new york, ny. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2016.1184871 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815618401 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815618401 https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2013.875141 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511488856 https://doi.org/10.1093/0198287976.003.0003 https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816666676.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816666676.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776410394553 https://doi.org/10.1068/d9s https://gov.wales/about/cabinet/cabinetstatements/previous-administration/2014/futuregenerationsbill/?lang=en https://gov.wales/about/cabinet/cabinetstatements/previous-administration/2014/futuregenerationsbill/?lang=en young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds to a rural tourism community urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46308 doi: 10.11143/46308 young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds to a rural tourism community peter möller möller, peter (2016). young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds to a rural tourism community. fennia 194: 1, pp. 32–45. issn 1798-5617. many rural areas, in sweden and worldwide, experience population decline where the young leave for education and work in urban areas. employment has declined in several rural industries, such as agriculture, forestry, and fishing, while growing in other industries are often located in urban areas. politicians and organizations have put much hope in tourism as a tool of rural development, but can tourism help reverse the rural out-migration trend among young adults? this paper explores how tourism affects young inhabitants’ perceptions of and affective bonds to a rural area in sweden, the ski resort of sälen. students from the 1993–1995 elementary school graduating classes were interviewed about their migration history, childhood, and view of and ties to sälen. the respondents experience that tourism contributes to a more vital community incorporating influences from elsewhere, but without eliminating the positive aspects of rural life. the regular flow of people – tourists, seasonal workers, and entrepreneurs – passing through sälen presents opportunities to extend one’s social network that are widely appreciated by respondents. the high in and out mobility constitutes a key part of sälen’s character. contributions from tourism – such as employment, entertainment, leisure, and opportunities to forge new social relationships – are available during the adult transition, the life phase when rural areas are often perceived as least attractive. even though out-migration occurs in sälen, and some respondents still find sälen too small, tourism has clearly increased the available opportunities and contributed significantly to making sälen more attractive to young adults. keywords: young adults, tourism, rural development, out-migration peter möller, school of technology and business studies, dalarna university, 791 88 falun, sweden. e-mail: pmo@du.se introduction regardless of when and where migration is examined, the highest proportion of migration occurs during the transition from youth to adulthood. over the last century, the migration peak has been delayed from early adolescence to the early twenties, due to prolonged education and higher life expectancy (boyle et al. 1998: 111). many rural areas around the world are experiencing decreasing populations, as the young and educated are leaving rurality behind. employment has been declining in many rural industries, such as agriculture, forestry, and fishing, while growing industries are located in urban areas. the impacts of the rural decline have not been evenly distributed geographically, with peripheral areas often experiencing more dramatic declines (hall et al. 2009). politicians and organizations have put much hope in tourism as a tool for rural development. growing global tourism is an effective source of income and employment and in some cases one of few available options, explaining why tourism attracts so much attention in rural politics and planning (sharpley 2002: 12). however, the hope for tourism as a tool for development is not undis© 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 33young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds puted. tourism employment is often seasonal, low in status, and low paid, raising questions about whether it can provide adequate livelihoods (mihalič 2002: 104). other reported obstacles are economic leakages from the tourism area, the uneven distribution of revenues, and the risk of mono-development in one industry (mihalič 2002: 98). extensive research examines the social and economic impacts of tourism on communities. tourism-impact research has also identified several issues significant in the adult transition, primarily related to employment and social opportunities. however, the effects of tourism on the attractiveness of these communities to young adult inhabitants are less examined. altogether these relations are keys to the understanding of population dynamics in rural areas dominated by tourism. möller (2012) examined the conditions for adult transition in the swedish ski resort sälen by interviewing thirteen young adult inhabitants. a key conclusion was that tourism areas may offer a dynamic environment for young adults providing, for example, good opportunities to extend their social network, good opportunities to get a job/start a business, and a generally smooth entry into the labour market. the positive effects were most significant early in the adult transition, while the last step into adulthood was described as difficult. this paper builds on möller’s (2012) findings by extending the analysis to migrants and return migrants in addition to the stayers. the aim of this paper is to examine the influence of tourism in sälen on young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds to sälen. the paper sets out to explore the following questions: 1) how does tourism affect the young inhabitants’ perceptions of the opportunities to remain in or return to sälen? 2) how does tourism affect the young inhabitants’ social relationships in sälen? 3) how does tourism affect the young inhabitants’ relationship to mobility? the research questions have been examined with a special interest in the respondents’ migration history, both the decision to stay, leave or return to sälen, but also different types of migration decisions within these three main categories. the paper is organized as follows. the next section presents previous research relevant to questions addressed in this study. a brief description of sälen, the area of interest in this paper is followed by the research design of the study. in the next three sections, the empirical results are presented. the paper closes with a concluding discussion. young adults in rural tourism communities the out-migration of young adults from rural areas is a global migration trend over the last century. several studies in various disciplines have identified the scarcity of jobs and services as major drivers, but also limited educational opportunities (crockett et al. 2000), poor public transport (e.g. furlong & cooney 1990; wallace & boyle 1993; cloke et al. 1997) and a general lack of opportunities (rye 2006) are some of the most reported shortcomings of these rural areas. a counter-urbanisation trend has been seen in several countries (e.g., champion 1989; mitchell 2004; halfacree 2008), but the impact in sweden is small and mostly present in the countryside close to metropolitan areas (magnusson turner 2013). even though there are also more positive perceptions of the rural life among young people reported – e.g. an appreciation of nature, that everyone cares for each other, solidarity (rye 2006), low crime (francis 1999) – these often concerns the childhood while the countryside seems less attractive for teenagers and young adults (glendinning et al. 2003). however, there is also research that provides a more complex picture in which identity and social relations as well as place attachment/detachment are identified as important for the decisions of young adults to stay or move. stockdale (2002) examined the importance of ties to family or friends when young people make their migration decisions. family and social networks proved to be important when young people out-migrated, often to places where they had relatives, friends, or friends of friends. the importance of these social ties declined with time after the first move, resulting in less frequent visits to the home area. however, that could change in a later stage of life, for example, if their parents become ill or to take their children to visit their grandparents. jamieson (2000: 211) developed the analysis of migration decisions by defining both stayers and migrants as attached to or detached from the place where they went to elementary school. respondents who felt attached to or detached from the place of their schooldays were found among both migrants and stayers. regardless of attachment to a place and migration deci34 fennia 194: 1 (2016)peter möller sion, jamieson (2000: 217–218) concludes that “the levelling of urban/rural difference has not wholly erased the denigration of rural places as traditional backwaters where nothing much happens”; both stayers and migrants averred that “those with finer qualities normally get out, leaving behind those stuck in their narrow mind set”. similar findings have been reported in research in a swedish context (svensson 2006; kåks 2007). tourism is often seen as a vehicle for development in rural areas, first and foremost by contributing with desired jobs, but research has also revealed other both positive impacts – e.g. local business opportunities, investment in services and infrastructure, an increased standard of living, improved quality of life, entertainment and recreational opportunities, opportunities to socialize, and general economic growth – and negative impacts such as higher prices and costs of living, insecure or low-paid employment, and congestion in stores, services, and traffic. communities with large-scale tourism are often characterised by a high degree of mobility, with large flows of tourists, and in some communities with large flows of temporary workers as well. lundmark (2006) showed in her study on temporary labour mobility and permanent migration that the local labour supply was not enough to fill all seasonal vacancies in tourism, and that mostly young people from southern sweden are filling those vacancies in the southern mountain range of sweden. when analysing malung-sälen and åre, two municipalities with large-scale winter tourism resorts, it occurred that a few of the seasonal workers moved to these municipalities permanently, and as few as 6–8% of them still remained there nine years after the inmigration, pointing to the high degree of mobility in those areas. the young adult respondents in möller’s study (2012) described sälen in similar terms, as a place where a lot of people are passing by and where a lot of relations are created, mostly casual but sometimes more longstanding. doreen massey´s analytical approach to space as constituted of flows may be fruitful as a basis for understanding these relations. massey argues (2005: 9) for a perspective on space as the product of interrelations; thus we must recognize space as “constituted through interactions”, which means that space is always under construction, and never finished. even though more people are travelling more frequently and for longer distances, and that communication has increased significantly in recent decades, “different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections” (massey 1994: 149). furthermore, massey emphasizes that space is a sphere of coexisting multiple trajectories. the flows of possibilities in sälen, described by möller (2012), are strongly related to what massey (2005: 111) defined as the chance of space where “otherwise unconnected narratives may be brought into contact, or previously connected ones may be wrenched apart”. massey’s definition of space, as something unfinished, where multiple trajectories are co-existing, is very obvious during high season in sälen; in the flows of tourists focused on getting the most out of their skiing for a weekend or week which they have paid fairly much money for, and the flows of seasonal workers that spend at least a few months in sälen, but still have limited interests in the local community (engström 2011). but even though most of the tourists and seasonal workers are not there to make new friends among the locals or engage in any other way in the local community, they constitute the chance of space (massey 2005). one key finding of möller’s (2012) study of adult transition in the swedish skiing resort area of sälen is the opportunities to make new friends, generate job contacts, or simply to meet new people. to better understand how these co-existing multiple trajectories can contribute to the local community, granovetter’s (1973, 1983) theory of social ties, which emphasizes the importance of weak social ties, is useful. the difference between strong and weak social ties is not well defined by granovetter, but a somewhat vague description of strong ties is that they encompass family and close friends, while weak ties comprise more than ’negligible’ interactions (but not family or close friends). although strong social ties are important, they are limited in that their very nature makes it impossible to sustain a large number of them. to be important for the diffusion of influence, information, mobility opportunities, and community organization, weak social ties must link different groups of close friends. granovetter cites the example of a rumour that spreads between close friends, who will probably hear the rumour two or more times; the same rumour spreading via weak ties will travel between different groups of close friends, and therefore be more widely disseminated. personal relations are more effective than other means of mass communication because people don’t act on information solely from mass-media unless they also receive it through personal ties (granovetter 1973). fennia 194: 1 (2016) 35young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds the sälen area the sälen area is defined as comprising the villages of sälen, lima, and rörbäcksnäs with the surrounding countryside and the sälen mountains (fig. 1). the area is located in dalarna county in sweden, a roughly five-hour car journey from stockholm. six ski resorts are located in the area: four in the sälen mountains, one in the valley between the sälen and lima villages, and one near the norwegian border. taking all these ski resorts together, this ski resort area is one of the biggest in sweden in terms of turnover. the tourism industry originated in the late 1950s and has, except during sweden’s economic crisis in the 1990s, developed substantially and fairly continuously since then. the inhabitants generally describe the area as completely dependent on tourism (möller 2012), and bodén and rosenberg (2004) measured the tourism industry’s share of sälen’s total employment to be 72%. the skiing season runs between december and april, peaking during a few holiday weeks in february and around easter. approximately 1700 permanent inhabitants live in sälen and the surrounding villages (bodén & rosenberg 2004), plus almost 2000 seasonal workers each season and more than an estimated 50,000 tourists per week in peak season (sweco viak ab 2008). research design this study is based on a telephone interview study were all students from the 1993–1995 graduation classes of the elementary school in lima village, which all 15-year-old inhabitants of the sälen area attend, are included. these graduation classes were chosen because most of these respondents were expected to have recently passed their young adult ages and established themselves as adults. due to the comprehensive population register in sweden, as many as 95 of the 116 students were found in the public records. there are three possible reasons to why these 21 ‘missing’ individuals may be absent in the register; 1) they have emigrated, 2) they have got a protected identity, or 3) they are deceased. it is not possible to make a drop-out analysis since they cannot be contacted, but the examined population in this study is in the same age and have at least one location of living in common, sälen in ninth grade, which does not raise any concerns that they would have given considerably different responses. in a structured part of the interview, the respondents answered questions on the choices they had made; where they had lived, the most important reason for migration (if occurred), their parents’ place of origin, if they had friends and family in sälen by the time of the interview, earlier and/or fig. 1. sälen’s location in sweden and the sälen area with surrounding villages and sälen mountains. 36 fennia 194: 1 (2016)peter möller continued relations to tourists or employees within the tourism industry. in a semi-structured part of the interview, questions were relatively open to explore their experiences; their childhood in the area and their past and present relations to people in the tourism industry. the respondents also had the opportunity to comment some of the structured questions. the structured part of the interview allows for an analysis of proportions regarding different phenomena among the respondents. taken together, this provided key information on the respondents’ experiences of sälen and some of the reasons to their migrant decisions. some respondents took the opportunity to elaborate their views and thoughts in these questions, but the limited time and lack of face-to-face communication distinguish these interviews from in-depth interviews. one week before the phone calls were made, an introductory letter was sent to the respondents informing them about the research project. of the 95 former students located, 67 were interviewed, constituting a response rate of approximately 70%. five declined to participate in the study, seven agreed to be interviewed but did not manage to find time for it during the interview period, and 16 did not answer the phone. on average, ten attempts to reach those who were not interviewed were made on different days at various times of day. most interviews were approximately 10–15 minutes in length. the interviews were conducted in swedish, and passages from them quoted in the text were translated into english by the author. the respondents are anonymized when referred to or quoted from the interview notes. three categories of respondents can be identified, based on their migration history (table 1). the categories were based on the respondents' migrant decision to make it possible to examine if this is related to their place perception and attachment to sälen. it is reasonable to expect some differences in the views of and relationships to sälen between individuals who have chosen to stay there, out-migrate and not return, and out-migrate and later return. therefore, these categories have been used when analysing the interviews, and the sub-categories have been used to analyse differences within the main categories. the back-andforth categories (of both migrants and return migrants) are of special interest when relating to the results of möller’s (2012) study of adult transition in sälen. the uncertainty during the adult transition has increased in recent decades where young people in several european countries face difficulties to find jobs. many of the employments they get are fixed-term contracts, part time or irregular work hours (blossfeld et al. 2005). this is a period category  sub‐category  description  stayers  all‐time  have lived in the sälen area all the time  education  have lived in the sälen area all the time, except for 2–3 years of  education elsewhere  migrants  one move  out‐migrated – made one move  several moves  out‐migrated – made several moves but never to the sälen area again  back‐and‐forth  out‐migrated – several moves and at least one  to the sälen area  return  migrants  back‐and‐forth  out‐migrated – have returned to sälen several times and now live in  the sälen area  one return move  out‐migrated – returned (once) to and now live in the sälen area    table 1. the migration categories and sub-categories of the respondents in the study. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 37young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds of insecurity for many young adults, a period when they alternate between dependency and autonomy. biggart and walther (2006) used the term “yoyo transition” to describe this period when young people live youthful and adult lives simultaneously. möller (2012) concluded that young adults experienced relatively secure adult transitions in the sälen context due to the opportunities to return to sälen if they wished, knowing that the area provided easy access to jobs in the high season. one respondent expressed difficulties leaving sälen because “there is always someone calling, wanting you to work for them”. the three graduating classes comprise equal proportions of men and women, the same as among the respondents in this study, so no gender bias existed in the drop-outs. a slight majority of respondents lives in sälen. the respondents’ experience of and affective bonds to sälen have been interpreted by analysing the respondents’ descriptions of their childhoods and of the place, how rooted they are in sälen, and how they describe the tourism industry in sälen. rootedness is here defined by the parents’ origin and whether the respondents still had family and friends living in the area at the time of the interviews. the 67 respondents were almost equally divided between those who lived in the sälen area and those who did not during the interview period. of those who lived in sälen, half had lived there since finishing elementary school – for some, with the exception of two to three years of education elsewhere – and half had out-migrated and later returned to the area (fig. 2). ten of the respondents lived in stockholm at the time of the interview, another ten lived in cities with over 10,000 inhabitants (but not in one of sweden’s three metropolitan areas), and the other 47 lived in smaller cities or in the countryside (e.g. the sälen area). men are relatively evenly distributed in the three main migrant categories, whereas a clear majority of the women are migrants. the female stayers and return migrants are thus about half as many as in the corresponding male categories. the biggest difference between sexes is found in the sub-category migrants – one move, where women account for nearly three quarters. respondent perceptions of and affective bonds to sälen the 67 respondents have described how they experience sälen and the influence from tourism. one open-ended question in the interview, concerning the respondents’ childhood and youth in sälen, generated a wide range of answers. most   stayers – all‐time stayers – education migrants – one  move migrants – several  moves migrants – back‐ and‐forth return migrants – back‐and‐forth return migrants – other the proportions of stayers, migrants, and return  migrants among the respondents fig. 2. migrant categories among the respondents. 38 fennia 194: 1 (2016)peter möller respondents in all three migrant categories expressed predominately positive feelings towards their childhood and youth in sälen. the return migrants’ descriptions were not as positive as those of migrants in the other categories, and they described their childhood and youth in slightly more negative terms than did the stayers, which may indicate a greater ambiguity towards sälen. some of the migrants and return migrants described having a good childhood but a worse adolescence, recalling what has been described as “the rural dull” in previous studies (skelton 2000; berg & lysgård 2001; rye 2006). the period of rural dullness seems to have been the most significant in the years before respondents came of age, at age 18. one migrant described the effects of tourism on sälen, and said that he “experienced what it was like when a small village turned into a city, in just over a month, with all the tourists and the development. there was considerable annoyance over queuing to buy a carton of milk, especially since you can just run in and out doing that in summer. but it was a lot of fun as well, especially with the vibrant nightlife when you turned 18”. the access to a relatively broad range of services and entertainment in the years after 18, the years when most rural youth out-migration occurs, was mentioned by several respondents as something positive which indicates its contribution to alleviating rural dullness in sälen at these ages. another theme mentioned by several respondents is the positive development of sälen in both economic and social terms. the economic perspective concerns job and business opportunities as important effects of tourism, and many respondents emphasized that tourism was the most important reason for sälen’s existence – at least as anything other than a small depopulated village. a return migrant said that “without [tourism] sälen would not exist. there would be no jobs, so [tourism] means a lot. it’s our livelihood”. a migrant discussed what could make him return to sälen, and mentioned “proximity to where things happen, to live in a place with positive thinking, entrepreneurial spirit, and development. there is so much of that in sälen, so i feel increasingly interested in returning”. even though sälen was described as an occasionally vibrant peripheral village because of the tourism, the respondents described many rural features as well, features that have also been reported in previous rural research. an appreciation of nature was expressed by several respondents, often associated with hunting, fishing, and outdoor life in general, or just access to the vast surroundings of forests and mountains. a safe and close-knit community was another theme mentioned by several respondents. a return migrant expressed appreciation of “having grown up near nature. it provides a sense of security, a fixed point. growing up in a nice environment – i liked that. i have spent a lot of time in big cities and there’s nothing there that attracts me. it’s nice for a weekend or so, but then i want to return to sälen”. the close-knit community, where everyone knows each other, was not described only in positive terms, and the difference between the migrant categories regarding this matter is not clear. one migrant described the close-knit community as: “so small, and everyone knows each other. maybe that is a reason i moved, to see something else, some new people”. in contrast, another migrant discussed the same theme but from the opposite perspective: “today, when i live in a big city, i feel that i miss knowing people and saying ‘hi’ to my neighbours. it is very special when everyone knows each other”. the safe close-knit community was described as a good environment specifically for children, and one return migrant described her return as motivated by a desire “to give my children the same childhood opportunities that i had”. another rural feature frequently mentioned by respondents in all three migrant categories is the peaceful and quiet environment of sälen: “it is calm and quiet, but in winter you have proximity to the mountains, which is like a small town [with all the tourists in high season]. then you have huge opportunities for … outdoor life. endless opportunities in the surroundings”. this quotation exemplifies how sälen is described by the respondents: as a rural area with rural features but where tourism adds complementary features. tourism is not said to eliminate the rural features, which are still greatly present. what is described by the respondents could be defined as a mixed landscape where both rural and urban influences are apparent. this mixed landscape is not static but changes with the tourism seasons and differs between precise geographical locations in the sälen area. one dimension of the affective bond to a place is the individual’s history connected to the place and roots in the place. in this study, this has been fennia 194: 1 (2016) 39young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds analysed mainly through three variables: 1) whether respondents’ parents are originally from the sälen area, and whether they still have 2) family or 3) friends living there (table 2). the interviews indicate the crucial role of friends and family as the basis of long-term bonds to the place. unsurprisingly, the affective bonds to sälen are very strong among the stayers and return migrants; even though the affective bonds are not as strong among the migrants, the difference is fairly small (fig. 3). many respondents, in all three migrant categories, have strong affective bonds to sälen. one stayer explained the decision to live in sälen: “i enjoy it very much in sälen. i have my family and my roots here, so it feels natural to stay here. and there are jobs, making it possible to stay”. a backand-forth migrant said that the most important reason for not living in sälen was that she does not enjoy service occupations, but that “friends and family make me visit sälen occasionally”. there is a slightly higher number of women with very strong affective bonds, and slightly lower number of women with loose affective bonds to sälen. personal roots are important for the migration decision but, as indicated by the quotations, strong affective bonds can be sustained even among different types of migrants, who still make different decisions as to whether to stay in or move from sälen. another examined aspect of the respondents’ background is whether or not they lived their first years in sälen, in other words, whether they inmigrated to sälen. those who did not live their first years in sälen are most frequently found among the migrants and slightly more frequently among the return migrants than among the stayers. there are more in-migrants than average in the backand-forth categories, among both migrants and return migrants, possibly because they have affective bonds to other places as well as in sälen, making migration to these places easier. another indication of migrants’ affective bonds to sälen is how often they visit the place. most migrants visit the sälen area four to nine times a year, maintaining their social relationships with family and friends. six migrants visit sälen more than ten times per year, and all but two of them live in the same region as sälen. fourteen migrants visit sälen fewer than four times per year. those, who do not visit sälen at all, no longer have family remaining there. tourism flows and social ties möller’s (2012) study of the adult transition in sälen demonstrated the importance of social relationships during youth and the adult transition. the respondents mentioned the seasonal workers as the most common group in which to make new friends and contacts. although tourists and entrepreneurs were also important, they did not as often become friends but remained work contacts or simply contributed to the vibrant atmosphere in sälen. the seasonal workers were described as most important for the young adult inhabitants a few years after graduating parents originating from sälen  family  friends     none  one  two  in sälen  loose  x  no  no     x  no  yes  medium  x  yes  yes  x  yes  no     x  no  yes  strong  x  yes  yes  x  yes  no     x  no  yes  very strong  x  yes  yes    table 2. indicator of affective bonds to sälen, consisting of the origin of the respondents’ parents, and whether the respondents have family or friends in sälen today. 40 fennia 194: 1 (2016)peter möller from high school, when they were about the same age as most seasonal workers and before they became established as adults with permanent jobs and their own homes and families. in the telephone interviews, the respondents were asked whether they have had social relationships with tourists or people from elsewhere working in tourism in sälen, and whether they still have social relationships with them. a tourism social relationship index was constructed using the responses to those questions and additional respondent comments about these questions. the respondents were divided into three categories depending on their social relationships with either tourists or tourism workers: 1) low importance, including those with few or no social relationships, described as not important, 2) medium importance, including those with social relationships during the childhood, youth, and young adult years, but that mostly have no contact any more, or at least no relationships of significance and 3) high importance, including those with social relationships during the childhood, youth, and young adult years, and that have maintained contact with some of these acquaintances (fig. 4). highly important tourism relationships are most common among both stayers and return migrants, while among migrants the medium importance category is most common. this may at least partly be explained by the fact that it may be easier to maintain relationships made in tourism when still living in a tourism-dominated area (especially if the area is where the relationships began). many inhabitants of sälen work in the tourism industry (some respondents claim all, directly or indirectly), making previous relationships formed in that industry more likely to remain relevant. the education stayers respondents overall have more and higher-importance tourism relationships than do the all-time stayers. all the low-importance tourism relationships can be found in the latter group. in the back-and-forth sub-categories, no respondents have low-importance tourism relationships, supporting the findings of möller (2012) that young adults can return to sälen and get a job in the tourism industry when they quit a job or finish education elsewhere. there are no substantial differences between male and female respondents in this respect. the respondents were asked how tourism affected their childhood and youth, and there was consensus among all respondents – i.e. stayers, migrants, and return migrants – as to the importance of tourism for sälen. the most common answer is that sälen would not exist at all without tourism, and another frequent answer is that there are jobs in sälen thanks to tourism. one stayer said that “if it had not been for tourism, neither my parents nor anyone else would have lived here. mom worked in sälen mountains throughout my childhood, and dad at the power plant. none of them would have had jobs without tourism”. only minor differences are seen between the three migrant fig. 3. analysis of the affective bonds in sälen of the three migrant categories stayers, migrants, and return migrants. the grey shading indicates the author’s interpretation of how the respondents are distributed in the three migrant categories. dark grey indicates the biggest group of respondents in the given category, light grey indicates a smaller but still significant group of respondents in the category, and white indicates no respondents in the migrant category. affective bonds to sälen loose medium strong very strong stayers migrants return migrants   fennia 194: 1 (2016) 41young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds categories in this regard, except for a slightly weaker focus on social contributions (e.g. opportunities to meet new people, tourism “makes things happen” in sälen, and influences from elsewhere) and a somewhat stronger focus on economic contributions (e.g. opportunities to start one’s own business or get a job) among the stayers than in the other two categories. descriptions of social contributions were most frequent among the back-and-forth return migrants. one back-andforth return migrant found the influence of tourism very significant, especially “the social contribution – that you get to meet people you don’t get to know closer. it is like a city in winter”. several respondents emphasized the importance of meeting new and diverse people, some of whom they got to know well, some who became acquaintances, and others whom they never met again. a return migrant described how social relationships with tourists and seasonal workers “constitute a good social network. i don’t know how it is compared with bigger cities, but it has generated quite a few acquaintances, because people pass through sälen, as it is in a tourist area”. the number of people passing through sälen is huge and it is impossible for the inhabitants to get to know all of them. most tourists stay for a few days, often not more than a week, and the seasonal workers for a few months each season. some seasonal workers return the next season but others do not. a migrant reflected on the flow of people passing through sälen and through his life: “i have actually been thinking about it recently, that so many people have passed through my life. many people come and go, so i’ve gotten used to people passing through and not returning. many people move to sälen but move out again. you might keep in touch for a while, but then you lose [contact]”. some respondents have made close friends and others just acquaintances among the people passing through sälen. many of the respondents’ new friends and acquaintances constitute what granovetter (1973: 1364) defines as bridges, i.e. “the only path between two points” in a social network. such bridges are important for the diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunities, and community organization. constant flows of people enable such bridges to be built, especially in the high season. thanks to the wide range of departure locations, these bridges are built to people residing in many places throughout sweden. mobility in sälen sälen is not only rural but also fairly peripheral, located approximately five hours by car from stockholm and half that travel time from falunborlänge, the region’s urban centre. the sparse population in rural areas makes the population base too small for many services to be offered nearby (furuseth 1998; pucher & renne 2005). accordingly, rural residents must generally travel farther and therefore often make fewer trips than do urban residents. the travel time is often not much greater than in urban areas, however, be tourism relationships low importance medium importance high importance stayers migrants return migrants   fig. 4. importance of the tourism relationships of respondents in the three migrant categories stayers, migrants, and return migrants. the grey shading indicates the author’s interpretation of how the respondents are distributed in the three importance categories. dark grey indicates the biggest group of respondents, light grey indicates a smaller but still significant group of respondents, and white indicates no respondents in the respective migrant categories. 42 fennia 194: 1 (2016)peter möller cause of higher travel speeds in rural areas (millward & spinney 2011). several respondents described an everyday life in which they are used to travelling to both malung – almost 70 kilometres from sälen village – and mora – approximately 90 kilometres from sälen village – often several times a month. they are used to travelling great distances, even though these are not appreciated as such, and think that they are naturally linked to rural life. a stayer asked about the negative aspects of living in sälen mentioned “the distance to everything – but that is something you choose if you live here”. another important aspect of youth mobility in sälen is entering high school. although not compulsory in sweden, nearly all students continue on to high school after completing elementary school. the high school nearest the sälen area is located in malung, almost 70 kilometres from sälen village. it is possible to commute there every day, but most respondents have moved to malung for at least some of their high school years. many inhabitants choose high schools even farther from sälen, where daily commuting is impossible. a back-and-forth migrant described the discussions related to out-migration and the choice of high school: “there were discussions of that, of course. out-migrating for high school was an obvious choice. it was a practical solution because commuting 160 kilometres each day is not so fun. and then it was probably natural to move farther away, when you had already moved from sälen. it was as if high school was a stepping stone”. the respondent describes a societal structure in which most young inhabitants of the sälen area live elsewhere during their high school years. for this respondent, this was just one step on the path away from sälen, but even those who had no intentions of out-migrating from sälen loosened their ties to sälen at least somewhat and presumably made some new acquaintances in their high school location. getting a job, making new friends, and meeting a partner are some ways new ties can be created or strengthened, reducing the motivation to return to sälen after high school. the description of high school as the first step farther away from sälen was not predominant among the respondents, but just one of several descriptions. several respondents claimed that girls more than boys strove to leave sälen, which is also apparent in the dominance of females in the migrants – one move category. the boys more often wanted to complete high school and start to work as soon as possible: “the girls most often moved from sälen and some guys as well but not as many, it was mostly the girls. there has never been any shortage of jobs – they have always been available here, if you don’t want any particular kind of job, of course. in forestry and tourism, there are always jobs here, but maybe not office or engineering jobs. then you might have to move”. these boys are described as enjoying their lives in sälen and just wanting to find a decent, reasonably paid job. a stayer said that he was not interested in moving from sälen after high school: “i was more interested in getting started and working as quickly as possible. i’ve never had any of those thoughts. it was important to start working”. they are prepared to commute farther if they have to, but prefer to keep their residence in sälen, and some of them commute on a weekly basis: “if you went away, you did that to take a job. there was no question of moving permanently. most of the ones i hung out with stayed. many of them spend time elsewhere to work even though they still live here. and i have done that myself”, one stayer said. another stayer said that he had lived in lima village his whole life except for the years at high school. later in that interview, when discussing his previous jobs, it came out that he had worked and commuted weekly to stockholm for five years. obviously, these five years of commuting were not important enough to him to warrant mentioning and he considered himself just an ordinary lima resident even during this period of commuting. this accentuates the mobility pattern in sälen described by many respondents. there is a high turnover of people in sälen, with tourists, seasonal workers, and permanent residents all passing through at different velocities, making high mobility a natural part of everyday life. the respondents reflected on their migration decisions and on how they were discussed. some found sälen too small for them and longed for a bigger city. other respondents were satisfied with life in sälen. several migrants had moved from sälen because the type of job they wanted does not exist there. many migrants have friends and old classmates who have returned to sälen, especially when they have children. there were no differences between the sexes in this matter. the general picture from the respondents is simply that some young infennia 194: 1 (2016) 43young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds habitants moved and some stayed. neither group was considered better than the other, unlike as reported by jamieson (2000), svensson (2006), and kåks (2007), who claimed that migrants are considered more successful than stayers in rural areas. several migrants said that they personally favoured returning to sälen, but that their life situation was not currently conducive to such a move. one migrant said that he and his wife would like to move to sälen, but not until “the kids have grown up and can make their own decisions about where to live. we put the kids 100% in first place, and not us adults”. other respondents said that their partners did not want to move to sälen, even though they themselves wanted to. another reason for not returning to sälen was one’s career when the respondent’s occupation could not be practised in sälen. several migrants mentioned that they were open to returning to sälen as retirees. there is no clear connection between how rooted the respondents are in sälen and how attached they feel to the place. some of the in-migrants with parents from elsewhere feel very attached to sälen, while others have a lot of family in sälen, with both parents being from there, but do not feel very attached to sälen. the reasons underlying attachment to sälen were not analysed in depth in this study. social background may be at least partly significant, because many jobs that require an academic education do not exist in sälen. the question is whether other factors are at play as well. the respondents express different approaches to the rurality of the area, some appreciating it very much while others find it too limiting. attachment to place, social background, personal preferences, and childhood experience (e.g. what friends they had and what leisure activities they enjoyed) were all mentioned when discussing the decision to migrate. the interviews indicate that tourism unquestionably affects the minds of the inhabitants of sälen. the flow of people and influences passing through sälen as a result of tourism has clearly increased the inhabitants’ opportunities. conclusions this study has examined the influence of tourism in sälen on young inhabitants’ perceptions of and affective bonds to sälen. students of the 1993– 1995 graduating classes in the sälen area elementary school, including stayers, migrants, and return migrants, were interviewed. the following are the key results of this study. the first research question concerns how tourism affects the young inhabitants’ perceptions of the opportunities to remain in or return to sälen. sälen could usefully be interpreted as a mixed landscape. the rural sälen has not been superseded by the influence of tourism but coexists with it, forming a context containing both rural and urban influences. in this mixed social landscape, tourism adds features – for example, a supply of jobs, services, and opportunities to extend one’s social network – to the rural sälen. the respondents describe their perceptions of sälen as predominantly positive. although youth outmigration does exist in sälen, the out-migrants do not feel a need to leave sälen because it is such a bad place to live. in this study, the respondents did not describe the stayers as less successful than the outmigrants, as opposed to what has often been reported in previous research on rural youth out-migration. the second research question regards how tourism affects the young inhabitants’ social relationships in sälen. there are many opportunities to create weak social ties in sälen, ties reaching throughout sweden. these weak social ties are important for people (especially young people) in sälen, because of their importance in diffusing influences and ideas and for job contacts, which are significant in the adult transition, especially in rural areas. the third research question regards how tourism affects the young inhabitants’ relationship to mobility. high mobility is part of life in sälen. people in sälen, as in many other sparsely populated areas, are used to travelling long distances to access certain amenities, such as specialized shops, services, and entertainment. in addition, a large flow of more or less temporary visitors/inhabitants passes through sälen. this is considered normal by the inhabitants of sälen, as are the inhabitants’ shorter or longer stays elsewhere, or commuting to jobs in distant locations while keeping their residence in the sälen area. the contribution of tourism in sälen is significant in several dimensions. even though the opportunities afforded by the area are not infinite – some inhabitants still find sälen too small and limited – they are extraordinary compared with those of the rural areas often described in previous research (e.g., cloke et al. 1997; rye 2006). both rural youth out-migration and rural dullness have been reported, primarily when the inhabitants are in their late teens. as in other rural areas, 44 fennia 194: 1 (2016)peter möller this life phase is important in forming residents’ perceptions of sälen’s attractiveness. during the adult transition, the life phase when rural areas are often perceived as least attractive, sälen has much to offer. employment, entertainment, leisure, and good opportunities for creating new social relationships, what massey (2005) define as the chance of space where “otherwise unconnected narratives may be brought into contact”, are among the most important features making sälen more attractive than other rural areas among young adults. sälen provides a dynamic environment offering increased opportunities. similar to jamieson’s (2000) findings, the respondents’ attachment to sälen is not simply correlated to their place of residence nor their roots there. it is not only easy to out-migrate from sälen, as in many other rural areas, but also to return. whether the respondents identify themselves as inhabitants in sälen or not seems much related to their attachment to sälen. the diverse range of migrant decisions and histories, and the respondents’ descriptions of high mobility suggest that fixed migrant categories (like stayers and leavers) are of small relevance and that massey’s (2005: 9) perspective on space as “constituted through interactions” and always under construction is better suited to understand places like sälen. a societal structure seems to exist in which many jobs and much education are available in urban but not rural areas, contributing to rural out-migration. tourism suppresses but cannot fully eliminate the societal structure that results in rural youth out-migration. this study clearly demonstrates that tourism has increased the opportunities and contributed significantly to making sälen more attractive among young adults. is it reasonable to assume that tourism may contribute to reverse the rural out-migration trend and have similar effects in other tourism-dominated rural areas? further research is necessary before general conclusions can be drawn. references berg ng & lysgård hk 2001. rural development and policies – the case of post-war norway. in halfacree k, kovach i & woodward r (eds). leadership and local power in european rural development, 256–272. ashgate, london. biggart a & walther a 2006. coping with yo-yo-transitions. young adults’ struggle for support, between family and state in comparative perspective. in ruspini e & leccardi c (eds). a new youth?: young people generations and family life, 41–62. ashgate, aldershot. blossfeld h-p, klijzing e, mills m & kurz k 2005. globalization, uncertainty and youth in society: the losers in a globalizing world. routledge, london. bodén b & rosenberg l 2004. kommersiell turism och lokal samhällsutveckling. edita, västerås. boyle pj, halfacree kh & robinson v 1998. exploring contemporary migration. addison wesley longman, harlow. champion ag 1989. counterurbanization: the changing pace and nature of population deconcentration. edward arnold, london. cloke p, milbourne p & thomas c 1997. living lives in different ways? deprivation, living lives in different marginalization and changing lifestyles in rural england. transactions of the institute of british geographers. new series 22: 2, 210–230. crockett lj, shanahan mj & jackson-newsom j 2000. rural youth: ecological and life course perspectives. in montemayor r (ed). advances in adolescent development: vol. 10. adolescent diversity in ethnic, economic, and cultural contexts, 43–74. sage, thousand oaks, ca. engström c 2011. seasonal tourism work – a temporary phase in life or a step towards migration? master thesis. dalarna university. francis lj 1999. the benefits of growing up in rural england: a study among 13–15-year-old females. educational studies 25: 3, 335–341. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03055699997846. furlong a & cooney g 1990. getting on their bikes: teenagers leaving home in scotland in the 1980s. journal of social policy 19: 4, 535–551. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047279400018286. furuseth o 1998. service provision and social deprivation. in ilbery b (ed). the geography of rural change, 233–256. longman, harlow. glendinning a, nuttall m, hendry lb, kloep m & wood s 2003. rural communities and well-being: a good place to grow up? the sociological review 51: 1, 129–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.00411. granovetter ms 1973. the strength of weak ties. american journal of sociology 78: 6, 1360. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/225469. granovetter ms 1983. the strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited. sociological theory 1, 201–233. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/202051. halfacree k 2008. to revitalise counterurbanisation research? recognising an international and fuller picture. population, space and place 14: 6, 479– 495. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/psp.501. hall cm, muller dk & saarinen j 2009. nordic tourism: issues and cases. channel view publications, buffalo. jamieson l 2000. migration, place and class: youth in a rural area. the sociological review 48: 2, 203–223. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.00212. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 45young adults’ perceptions of and affective bonds kåks h 2007. mellan erfarenhet och förväntan:betydelser av att bli vuxen i ungdomars livsberättelser. linköpings universitet, linköping. lundmark l 2006. mobility, migration and seasonal tourism employment: evidence from swedish mountain municipalities. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 6: 3, 197–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250600866282. magnusson turner l 2013. hunting for hotspots in the countryside of northern sweden. journal of housing and the built environment 28: 2, 237–255. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10901-012-9304-7. massey d 1994. space, place, and gender. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. massey d 2005. for space. sage, london. mihalič t 2002. tourism and economic development issues. in sharpley r & telfer dj (eds). tourism and development: concepts and issues, 81–111. channel view publications, clevendon. millward h & spinney j 2011. time use, travel behavior, and the rural–urban continuum: results from the halifax star project. journal of transport geography 19: 1, 51–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2009.12.005. mitchell c 2004. making sense of counterurbanization. journal of rural studies 20: 1, 15–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0743-0167(03)00031-7. möller p 2012. the young adult transition in a tourism dominated rural area. tourism planning & development 9: 4, 429–440. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2012.726260. pucher j & renne jl 2005. rural mobility and mode choice: evidence from the 2001 national household travel survey. transportation 32: 2, 165–186. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11116-004-5508-3. rye jf 2006. rural youths’ images of the rural. journal of rural studies 22: 4, 409–421. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.01.005. sharpley r 2002. tourism: a vehicle for development? in sharpley r & telfer dj (eds). tourism and development: concepts and issues, 11–34. channel view publications, clevedon. skelton t 2000. “nothing to do, nowhere to go?” teenage girls and “public” space in the rhondda valleys, south wales. in holloway sl & valentine g (eds). childrens geographies: playing, living, learning, 69–85. routledge, abingdon. stockdale a 2002. out-migration from rural scotland: the importance of family and social networks. sociologia ruralis 42: 1, 41–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9523.00201. svensson l 2006. vinna och försvinna? drivkrafter bakom ungdomars utflyttning. linköpings universitet, linköping. sweco viak ab 2008. va-utredning sälenfjällen. sweco viak ab report, falun. wallace c & boyle f 1993. the employment and training of young people in rural south west england. british journal of education & work 6: 3, 25-44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0269000930060302. socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah, sultanate of oman urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46532 doi: 10.11143/46532 socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah, sultanate of oman manuela gutberlet gutberlet, manuela (2016). socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah, sultanate of oman. fennia 194: 1, 46–63. issn 1798-5617. the following paper explores socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise liner tourism on the traditional bazaar (souq) in the district of mutrah. the souq is located opposite the port in the omani capital muscat. large-scale cruise tourism in muscat started only in 2004 and has increased in scale and numbers in the past years. 24 cruise vessels with around 7600 passengers arrived in muscat in 2005. seven years later 135 cruise liners carrying 257,000 tourists docked in muscat. due to this dramatic rise of international cruise ships, the socio-cultural impacts have increased for local residents, shop vendors/owners and tourists alike. to capture those socio-cultural impacts on souq mutrah, a survey of cruise tourists was conducted by a questionnaire. in addition, the researcher used participatory observation, counting, and in-depth interviews with different stakeholders of the local community and different types of tourists during the cruise seasons 2012/13 and 2013/14. moreover, content analysis of statistics and local media publications were used. results indicate that the souq has become “the core of a tourist bubble”, where crowding is a major problem and local residents avoid the place. the social carrying capacity of the souq has been reached. omani vendors are leaving their businesses and renting their shops out to expatriates. since contemporary cruise tourists are low spenders, expatriate shop sellers have become more aggressive. keywords: traditional bazaar, cruise tourism, tourist bubble, socio-cultural impacts, local community, sultanate of oman manuela gutberlet, rwth aachen university, department of geography and german university of technology in oman/gutech. e-mail: m_gutberlet@hotmail.com introduction cruise tourism has been expanding worldwide. according to the world tourism organization (unwto), emerging cruise destinations, like the arabian peninsula, are gaining ground during the winter season and are competing with the canary islands and azores in the atlantic (unwto 2010: 60). especially the emirate dubai is seen as an “emerging cruise hub” (rodrigue & notteboom 2013: 36). “globally the 13 million cruise passengers recorded in 2004 are expected to increase to 25 million by 2015” (unwto 2010: 73). the trend is to raise especially the number of affordable cruises in the so-called ‘contemporary’ and ‘budget’ segment. contemporary cruises are sold as “holiday-at-sea packages” (unwto 2010: 61), which are similar to tourist resorts. research focusing on cruise tourism and its economic, social and environmental impacts is limited (stefanidaki & lekakou 2012: 81) including its impact on local communities (weeden et al. 2011: 28; satta et al. 2014: 54). there is a particular lack of sociological and anthropological studies of cruise tourism (wood 2000: 347) whereas business, management and economics of cruise tourism have been studied more extensively (papathanassis & beckmann 2011). existing sociological research on cruise tourist’s behavior, for example by foster (1989), focuses on the behavior of cruise tourists on © 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 47socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah a small cruise liner in the south pacific while papathanassis (2012) analyzed the guest-to-guest encounter of german-speaking cruise tourists. this paper explores the socio-cultural impacts of contemporary cruise tourism in a little researched, emerging cruise destination, the omani capital muscat. the paper analyses crowding, and the concepts of cruise tourism as an “environmental bubble” or “tourist bubble” and the “social carrying capacity”, i.e. the acceptable social limit of growth (getz 1987). the concept of the “environmental bubble” introduced by cohen (1978) focuses on the social, physical and built environment, separated from the surrounding environment. cohen (1978) mentioned the environmental limits of tourism development. he distinguished four types of factors having an impact on the environment: the intensity of the tourist-site use and the accompanying development of the site, the resilience of the environment, the short-term perspective of the tourism developer and the transformational character of tourism developments (cohen 1978: 220). cohen's concept was further developed by foster (1989) and jaakson (2004) as the “tourist bubble”. foster (1989: 223) explored the social interaction of tourists on board a small cruise liner, described as an “air-conditioned bubble”. jaakson (2004) analyzed the tourist environment beside the port in zihuatanejo (mexico). his concept of the “tourist bubble” emphasizes the physical and psychological environment of the tourist with his motivations, attitudes and belief system. “a cruise ship is an extreme form of a closed bubble” (jaakson 2004: 57), where tourists travel in a safe environment of the ship – a comfortable place like home. a cruise ship has been described as a “floating tourist resort, rather than a means of transport” (unwto 2010: 1). weaver (2005a) conceptualized cruise liners as a space of containment, a destination on its own, where tourists spend all their money and time. he also compared the mass-consumption on board a cruise liner with a mcdonald's restaurant (weaver 2005b). according to the unwto (2010: 1), the concept of resort-like cruise ships has been very successful in the caribbean, but cannot be replicated in other regions. cruise tourists are in almost total isolation on the sea, except when the tourists leave their ship to visit a shore. wood (2000: 365) mentioned that cruises only “touch down” briefly in their port of call, but spend most of their time in non-territorial waters. one of the activities included in the cruise itinerary are on-shore excursions, organized by local tour operators and conducted in sightseeing buses. tourists can also stay on board or explore the destination on their own. when they leave the cruise ship they may enter another “tourist bubble” (jaakson 2004: 57): “within a bubble there are likely to be significant variations in the concentration of tourists, facilities, services, and activities”. according to jaakson the “tourist bubble” can consist of a single peak representing a core and gradually diminishing contours around it. the periphery zone or the contours may be more complex consisting of multiple peaks (jaakson 2004: 57). most cruise liner research has focused on the economic impact of cruise tourism especially in the caribbean. according to wilkinson (1999: 278), cruise tourists in the caribbean purchase little local products. similarly cruise tourists in antarctica (klein 2010: 67), and norway (larsen et al. 2013), stay several hours in the port and spend less money than individual or group tourists who stay longer and spend more money throughout their entire stay. also henthorpe (2000) found out that those tourists who spent the least amount of time in a market place spent little money. according to dwyer and forsyth (1998), the economic impact of cruise tourism can be attributed to the passenger-related expenditure, crew-related expenditure and companyrelated expenditure. they examined the economic impact of cruise tourism in australia where tourist expenditure from local cruise liners is higher compared to international cruises. satta et al. (2014: 72) found out that “there is a positive relationship between word of mouth and the overall satisfaction, and the impact of port-related attributes on the overall satisfaction in italian cruise ports”. for many countries tourism development can be seen as a process and an important tool to build communities that are economically, socially and culturally prosperous (wahab & pigram 1997: 281). thus, countries are developing tourism primarily to create jobs and generate further income (vanhove 1997: 74). however, tourism and particularly enclave tourism is not equally beneficial for all communities. as cohen (1978: 219) argued, “the development of tourism brings a large number of people, accustomed to a relatively high standard of amenities, to a previously secluded natural or cultural environment”. regarding cruise liner tourism klein (2010: 66) mentioned that cruise ship tourism has an impact on culturally sensitive locations such as antarctica, where cruise ship tourism is incompatible with the lifestyle, fa48 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet cilities and services of the community. similarly, in tonga (polynesia) (urbanowicz 1989: 113) and in dubrovnik (croatia) the increase in tourist numbers in the old town has been ascribed to the “invasive nature of cruise tourism” (ljubica & dulcic 2012: 27). this phenomenon of a large number of people spending a limited time in the destination has also been called “shock loading” effect (wilkinson 1999: 277). tourism should have benefits for the local community and negative effects on the quality of life should be limited (krippendorf 1987: 115). the impact of tourism development is defined as “a change in a given state over time as a result of an external stimulus” (hall & lew 2009: 54). to reduce the impacts of tourism, the concept of sustainable tourism has gradually evolved as a social and economic process involving the progressive improvement of conditions and the fulfillment of the potential local community (wall 1997: 34). the social impacts are effects that influence the values of the community, their behavior patterns, the structure of the community, the overall lifestyle and their quality of life (hall & lew 2009: 57), for example as a result of a large number of tourists. the ways in which local communities cope with the increase in tourism activities depend on the level of the touristic development and if they are affected by it negatively or positively (doğan 1989: 225). those who have positive benefits and more satisfying contacts with tourists have also more positive attitudes towards the tourists (ward & berno 2011: 1565). reactions to tourism are formed through different attitudes such as resistance, retreatism, boundary maintenance, revitalization and adoption (doğan 1989: 232). according to doxey's (1976) four-stage irritation index, the host community changes its attitude towards tourism according to the intensity of the tourism development and the number of tourists visiting the place. the perception of socio-cultural impacts can be linked to realistic and symbolic threats involving the competition for limited resources of a community, for example through overcrowding (ward & berno 2011: 1559). an important indicator for the well-being of the local community is the number of tourists. as smith (1989: 14) mentioned, the stressful interactions between hosts and tourists appear to increase proportionately to the larger numbers. according to smith (1989), the critical point in the development of a tourist industry is achieved when tourist facilities are implemented: e.g. special parking for tourist buses, tourist hotels and tourist restaurants. as a consequence, large numbers of tourists can be handled only by industrial methods, for example with standardization and mass production (krippendorf 1987: 42). to compensate for negative impacts, jafari (1987: 158) suggested that tourist generating regions should get financially involved and “pay for some of the impacts of the vacations taken in someone else’s backyard”. he argued that europe, for example, owes much to tunisia and senegal as their preferred and recreative tourist destinations. a concept that measures the social, economic, environmental and physical sustainability of a destination is the carrying capacity, defined as “the maximum use of a place without causing negative effects on the resources – the community, the economy and its culture or reducing the visitor satisfaction” (wahab & pigram 1997: 281). the definitions of the physical carrying capacity include numbers of tourists that an area can absorb without negative impact on the physical environment and its limited natural resources and the quality of the tourist experience (o'reilly 1986; wall 1997), in addition to the values of the community and (changing) perceptions (saarinen 2006: 1126). getz (1987) analyzed six different approaches regarding carrying capacity, one of them was the “social carrying capacity” by using attitudes and tolerance levels of the local community towards tourism development. on the other hand, saveriades (2000) argued that there is no finite carrying capacity in the number of tourists, since the carrying capacity depends on the overall management of the site, the changes within time and the overall volume of tourism. saveriades also mentioned that it is difficult to measure the attitudes of the local community in an objective way and that attitudes may change over time (saveriades 2000: 149), e.g. through adaptation of the host community (doğan 1989). regarding cruise tourism, crowding and congestion were identified as the main social factors influencing the community (karreman 2013: 66). according to schemmann (2012), mediterranean cruise destinations are becoming less attractive as they are often overcrowded in the tourist season. similarly, ports in antarctica suffer “people pollution”, i.e. the number of cruise passengers exceeds the capacity of the town, thus causing overcrowding (klein 2010). in the next sections the rapid development of tourism in oman will be outlined, followed by the history of souq mutrah and an analysis of the refennia 194: 1 (2016) 49socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah search results, including its “tourist bubble”, and of the perceptions of the local community and the german-speaking tourists. the term “local community” is used to refer to shop vendors in souq mutrah, business owners, omani and expatriate customers visiting the souq, local omani and expatriate tour guides, local tour-operators, residents of the area beside the souq and local government officials including the minister of tourism and the wali (governor) of the district of mutrah. the objective of this research is to conceptualize how locals and tourists perceive large-scale cruise tourism and how they deal with this fast changing phenomenon. results indicate that crowding has become a major problem and that the perceived social carrying capacity in souq mutrah has been reached. this study is valuable for tourism scholars and tourism managers in emerging cruise destinations, especially on the arabian peninsula. tourism development in oman the sultanate of oman is an emerging tourist and cruise destination on the arabian peninsula, which has experienced fast economic development since the 1970s. during the 1980s, the country opened its doors for international tourism. according to the statistics of the ministry of tourism (2014) in oman, in 2013 the number of international tourists increased to 2.18 million. this indicates a growth of 5.9% between 2012 and 2013. the direct contribution of travel and tourism to the country’s gdp was 3.0% of the total gdp in 2013 (wttc 2014). the government has been building large-scale tourism infrastructure in order to further increase the number of international tourists to 12 million annually by 2020 (muscat daily 2013), which is in line with the neighboring emirate dubai that aims to attract 15 million visitors annually by 2015 (stephenson & ali-knight 2010). between 2005 and 2012 the number of cruise liners arriving in muscat increased more than 80fold. according to the ministry of tourism (2012), a total of 109 cruise vessels carrying over 170,000 passengers arrived in 2011, which was nearly equivalent to the total population in mutrah, the location of the port. there the total number of inhabitants amounted to 189,785 in 2011, only 25.39% of them being omani. in 2012, the number of cruise tourists increased again by 51% to a total of 257,000 arriving in 135 cruise liners at port sultan qaboos in muscat. in 2013, the number of cruise tourists decreased to 202,159 passengers arriving in muscat (ministry of tourism 2015a). the majority of the mega ships, such as aida and costa, are on a seven-day trip around the arabian peninsula, arriving from dubai and carrying between 2500 (aidablu and aidadiva) and 3780 (costa favolosa) passengers as well as 600–1000 crew members every week in winter. they stay for around nine hours and then continue their journey via bahrain, abu dhabi and back to dubai. the vision is to “promote oman internationally as a quality cruise destination” (times of oman 2015b) in cooperation with abu dhabi and dubai as part of a “cruise arabia alliance”. through this cooperation, it has been projected to attract 1.6 million cruise tourists yearly by 2020 and 2.1 million by 2030 (oman tribune 2015). currently, two or three large cruise liners are in the port at one time. in the coming years the government will transform port sultan qaboos into a cruise liner port, including a marina, a large hotel, a shopping mall and other facilities, in order to accommodate a maximum of 33,000 cruise passengers at one time. all current cargo activities will be shifted to the port in sohar by 2014 (oman daily observer 2013). due to tourism projects, new jobs have been created. a total of 106,731 employees worked in tourism in 2013, most of them in restaurants and coffeeshops. however, only 11.2% of them were omanis (ministry of tourism 2015b). the oman development plan 1996–2020 specified in the vision 2020 “aims at achieving sustainable development through the diversification of the economy, without relying solely on oil as the major source of income” (ministry of environment and climate affairs 2012: 10). the development plan focuses on a transition from an oil-based economy to a knowledge-based economy through on-going human development programs in different sectors, including tourism. this is in line with the vision of the minister of tourism who wishes “to involve omanis as a principal pillar in tourism” and to further promote high-end tourism. “we want quality tourism and not tourism of numbers,” said ahmed bin nasser al mahrzi, minister of tourism, while adding that oman wants to preserve its rich history and culture and offer a unique tourist experience (interview, 18 july 2012). this view reflects the general strategy communicated in the local media. however, this is contrary to the ministry’s recent marketing efforts that openly pro50 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet mote an increase in large-scale cruise tourism together with qatar, abu dhabi and dubai. it appears, therefore, that there is lack of a common tourism strategy at the moment. furthermore, different stakeholders in the government are involved in the decision-making and execution of tourism development in oman. thus, the development of the cruise tourism port and other infrastructure projects such as the airports is overseen by the ministry of transportation and communications. an official of the ministry who chose to remain anonymous said in an interview in july 2014, that the idea is: “to boost sea-tourism in general, including private yachts. the number of private ships has increased and sometimes they have a difficulty in finding a place. there will be a museum connected to the new fish market, where omani handicrafts will be showcased. mutrah will become a nice and safe place to be and to enjoy the sea,” the official said, thus implying a romantic version of a rather small-scale and high-end city port, avoiding large-scale tourism. research setting – the history of mutrah traditionally, souq mutrah (fig. 1) has been divided into two parts – one for retail and one for wholesale where food, household items, textiles and traditional omani clothes are sold. mutrah district has been the main commercial hub of oman since the portuguese occupation in the 16th century (gaube 2012: 4). due to its commercial activities, mutrah had a very multi-ethnic population consisting of arabs, africans from east africa and zanzibar, baluchis from baluchistan (province in pakistan) as well as persians and indians. because most of its inhabitants migrated to oman in the past, the historically multi-ethnic population of mutrah has been very welcoming and open to tourism. since the 1970s and the reign of sultan qaboos bin said al said, the exploration of oil and gas has been followed by the rapid economic development of the country and also the introduction of supermarkets. as a result, mutrah lost its importance as a commercial hub. vendors lost their customers and some businesses moved to other disfig. 1. map of the district of mutrah, including souq mutrah and port sultan qaboos (source: ehrig 2014). fennia 194: 1 (2016) 51socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah tricts. scholz (1990: 298) observed structural changes occurring in souq mutrah during the late 1970s and 1980s when the souq developed from a traditional market predominantly providing textiles, food and household items for locals to a souq that catered more and more to the asian, arab and european expatriate community. nowadays the large majority of the vendors in mutrah are expatriates from asia, mainly from india, pakistan or bangladesh. most of them live and work in mutrah. until today many omanis and expatriate residents living in mutrah buy their groceries in the souq. due to cheaper prices, omanis from the interior of the country also come to shop for household items, local perfumes, textiles and readymade clothes. according to the wali (governor) of mutrah, around 800 shops are located in mutrah and all shops are licensed by muscat municipality (interview, 6 october 2012). research methods the research was conducted in different stages, starting in 2012 with participatory observation and the counting of tourists and locals at the main entrance to the souq on the harbor street (the corniche), from where the majority enter. there the researcher positioned herself in front of one of the local perfume shops and counted in the morning and afternoon hours with two hand-tally counters in each hand – one for the tourists and the other one for the locals entering during a time-span of 15 minutes per each hour. furthermore, in-depth interviews with different stakeholders of the multi-ethnic community were conducted in 2012 and 2013. the interview partners included the local resident community such as shop vendors, business owners, customers, tour guides, tour-operators and government officials including the minister of tourism. they were interviewed in english, arabic and german during 2012 and 2013. the shops were chosen according to prior visits with german-speaking tourists during a walk through the souq. those shops that were visited along with the tourists were chosen for indepth interviews. the shops covered the wholesale and retail sectors, selling different products: local perfumes, halwa (local sweets), handicraft, pharmacy, spices, groceries, kummas (traditional hats for men), pashmina scarves, foodstuffs, and household items. the owner of a local coffee shop and the manager of a restaurant beside the souq were also interviewed. a total of 45 shops were covered. the shops were up to 250 years old. in addition, interviews were conducted with the local shop vendors and owners of different age groups (25–75 years) and different nationalities, including 16 omani, 25 indian, two bangladeshi, one pakistani and one syrian. six omani customers from other districts in muscat were interviewed. 11 omani and expatriate tour guides of germanspeaking tourists and seven omani male and female members of the resident community living beside the souq were interviewed about cruise tourism in mutrah. the interviews were conducted in arabic, english and german and followed a semi-structural guideline. the district was visited on days when one or two mega cruise liners were in the port. since the access for non-residents is restricted, it was very difficult to conduct interviews. due to the close social structure of the multi-ethnic community in mutrah and to allow critical views, the interviews with the local community were taken anonymously and noted down immediately. follow-up interviews with members of the local community, and observation at the main tourist entrance of souq mutrah were conducted at the beginning of 2014, when two contemporary cruise liners (aida cruises and costa cruises) were in the port. to capture the impacts visually, photography was applied. furthermore, the content analysis of local media articles was used and official statistics were analyzed. a large-scale questionnaire survey among german-speaking contemporary cruise tourists travelling with aidablu was conducted at the beginning of 2012. according to a local shipping agency, aida cruises has been transporting around 2500 passengers every week to oman, from november until april. the first large aida cruise liner arrived in muscat in november 2004 and costa cruises followed two years later. the type of tourist carried by aida cruise ships is typically the average german-speaking tourist, the so-called “contemporary segment” (unwto 2010: 91), representing a couple or family of various age groups with an average income. the research sample was limited to german-speaking cruise tourists from germany, switzerland, austria and luxembourg. a total of 830 tourists filled out the survey, representing 79.8% of the surveyed cruise tourist sample. german-speaking tourists represent the majority of cruise tourists visiting oman. since the researcher is german national, the research focuses on german-speaking tourists. moreover, germans are 52 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet leaders in traveling. according to the unwto (2013), germany ranked second in international tourism expenditure in 2012 and first in 2011. since the researcher has studied arabic and has been living in oman since 2004 where she worked as a tour guide for german and french-speaking tourist groups in oman and united arab emirates, as well as a reporter for an english and arabic newspaper and as a pr manager at the german university in muscat, her research is influenced by her experience. her insider perspective also helped her to analyze and interpret the different opinions and to observe the changes that have occurred in souq mutrah within the past years, from an “insider perspective”. results cruise tourists visiting souq mutrah according to local tour operators and a newspaper, souq mutrah is the most popular tourist spot in oman (times of oman 2015a). referring to jaakson's (2004) analysis of the “tourist bubble”, the core area of the “tourist bubble” in mutrah is the waterfront with its harbor street, the walking promenade (the corniche) and souq mutrah. along the corniche road there are ancient trading houses, part of a residential walled district, built around 200 years ago, including a mosque with a blue dome and views to the surrounding mountains (see fig. 2). this urban landscape creates a sense of nostalgia of an untouched, postcard-like image of arabia, different from what tourists see in the other ports of call on the arabian peninsula. as cohen (1978: 218) noted “traditional towns and neighborhoods, untouched by ‘progress’, suddenly become economic assets”. in the past years, the destination oman including its main cruise liner port in muscat has been promoted by the ministry of tourism with the slogan “beauty has an address”. german-speaking crew members of a contemporary cruise liner mentioned that they recommend souq mutrah as a traditional arabian souq and a “shopping destination”. on board of the contemporary cruise liners, small maps are distributed. however, they are not precise, showing only the “tourist bubble” with the harbor street, the souq and old muscat, located in the next bay. it was observed that tourists were not using the maps. many cruise tourists who want to explore the city on their own take a shuttle bus to the gate of the port and walk along the harbor street to the souq. some tourists also visit the local fish, fruit and vegetable market next to the port and some venture towards the commercial business district of muscat and others visit a heritage museum close by the port. however, according to the director of the museum only a few tourists from mega cruise liners pass by the museum. the large majority walks along the harbor street, where tourism retail shops selling souvenirs, small restaurants and coffee shops have opened in recent years, and then enters the souq area. at the harbor street, the main entrance to souq mutrah has a large watch-tower with the words “souq mutrah” inscribed on it. the tower was built around eight years ago with the arrival of large contemporary cruise liners in muscat. the tower has a tourist restaurant on the top floor, thus creating a kind of “hyper-reality”. along the waterfront and in the souq area there are open spaces, an “open tourist bubble”, shared by locals, residents and tourists. however, the walled residential district beside the harbor road is a closed space, with very limited access. the researcher's participant observation revealed that, once a cruise liner is in the port for one day, the morning hours between 11 am and 1 pm are the peak timings in souq mutrah. those tourists who have booked a muscat sightseeing bus tour on board of the cruise liner visit the souq as part of the excursion. according to local tour operators, those tours are the most popular. regardless of the number of tourist buses, the tour always follows the same itinerary including souq mutrah as the last stop before the return to the harbor. for the tourists' convenience, the buses drive along the one lane corniche street and stop in front of the main entrance to the souq. most tourist buses arrive between 11 and 12 noon. as soon as a group of tourists gets in or out of their buses, the road is blocked to traffic entirely. in addition to the large tour buses, smaller buses and 4x4 cars queue for passengers along the street and create further congestion. on a sunday in january 2014, when a costa cruise ship and an aida cruise liner were in the port, carrying more than 4000 passengers and crew, participant observation at the entrance to souq mutrah revealed that eight large 40-seater buses stopped in front of the main entrance to the souq at noon. at the same time, a large crowd of cruise tourists was waiting in the sun to be picked fennia 194: 1 (2016) 53socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah up by the buses. this incident revealed lack of adequate parking for buses. manual counting of tourists, entering through the main entrance at the harbor street every full hour for 15 minutes (fig. 3), showed major crowding at noon, when the number of tourists was three times as many as the number of tourists arriving at 11 am and at 1 pm. in addition, the number of tourists entering the souq exceeded the number of locals by 88%. further manual counting on three sundays in january and february 2012, when two large contemporary cruise liners with a total of more than 4000 tourists were in the port revealed that on average 1371 tourists and 372 locals passed through the main entrance of souq mutrah in the morning, between 10 am and 1 pm, during a 15 minute count each hour. the majority were tourists from contemporary cruise liners. figure 4 illustrates the physical crowding of the space, with cruise tourists walking in both directions along the narrow main street of souq mutrah around noon. perception of the tourists in souq mutrah: “there are more tourists than locals” inside the souq different types of tourists meet in close proximity: cruise tourists, individual and group tourists, as well as different nationalities. whereas contemporary cruise tourists did not socially distinguish themselves from other types of travelers, individual tourists wished to distance themselves, escape from the crowd and venture on fig. 3. the number of tourists and locals entering and leaving souq mutrah during a time-span of 15 minutes per each hour at main entrance, harbor street, 26 february 2012 (own survey 2012). fig. 2. map of souq mutrah, including the residential area (source: ehrig 2014). 54 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet their own beyond “the tourist bubble” to its periphery. they were the type of traveler defined by jaakson (2004: 56) as the so-called explorers or elite and off-beat (smith 1989: 12) that adapt fully or well to the local environment. the reaction of escape and social distinction as a consequence of crowding was observed among most group and independent travelers. for example, an individual tourist, a retired medical doctor in her 60s said that she was shocked to see the large number of tourists inside the souq. “i thought the locals are overwhelmed, it is awful. i really feel sorry for them,” she said referring to the local community and their tolerance level towards the large number of tourists. “oh these italians!” remarked another german-speaking tourist, irritated by a crowd of loudly-chattering italian cruise tourists. a retired lawyer in his 70s, travelling with his wife compared the number of tourists and locals inside the souq: “there are more tourists than locals”. for him the crowding generated a negative experience and the souq became inauthentic and staged. he also complained about cheap souvenirs: “it is like in königswinter”, he said, referring to a popular tourist attraction beside the river rhine in germany. to avoid the crowd, he and his wife along with their tour guide explored the backside of the souq (periphery) where more local shops are located. a few weeks later, the main street of souq mutrah was very crowded, creating a hot, sticky atmosphere: everybody was trying to find their way out. on the edges, some people stopped to look at the souvenir shops. “'i need to get out, this is crazy here”, said an austrian lady, starting to panic in the crowd, being afraid that she would not reach the bus back to the ship. thus, the crowding created lack of safety. this incident confirmed the outcome of the questionnaire survey, where 88% of the german-speaking cruise tourists surveyed experienced the souq as being too crowded (table 1). as a result of crowding, the sanitation facilities were not sufficient for the cruise tourists, who were queuing in front of the few public toilets, located at the entrance to the souq. some tourists were using the facilities of a hotel or coffee shops along the harbor street. “more than 2000 people are using one or two toilets only,” said an expatriate manager of a coffee shop. thus, he has introduced a “toilet fee”, generating an additional income. new tourist infrastructure has been set-up including additional souvenir shops and tourist restaurants with large colorful signboards, artificial grass carpets, wooden chairs and a water fountain, serving international food by expatriate waiters during the tourist season 2013/2014. cohen (1978: 221) argued that “a concentration of tourist facilities increases the scale of staging functions”. through these visual features, the area has befig. 4. the main street in souq mutrah, 26 february 2012, around noon (photo: gutberlet 2012). table 1. attitudes of contemporary german-speaking cruise tourists in muscat (n=721) for a statement (own survey 2012). “there were too many people in the souq” % of the respondents agreed strongly 28.8 agreed 32.0 neutral 27.5 disagreed 9.7 disagreed strongly 1.8 fennia 194: 1 (2016) 55socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah come more and more divided into a “tourist bubble” or a “core area” (jaakson 2004) in the front, close to the port, and a rather local souq in the back and inside the narrow side streets (the periphery). attitude of the local tour guides: “everything has to be fast” unlike group and individual tourists who are usually guided by a tour guide through the souq, cruise tourists are not guided, due to the limited space, time, crowding and increased competition. “with cruise liners everything has to be fast. if i have enough time, i explain the souq in the bus. i only go along with the tourists if it is a small group”, said a german-speaking tour guide. thus, the tour guides remained outside and cruise tourists received limited interpretation of the place. during a city tour cruise tourists have around 30– 45 minutes time for their visit of the souq. most cruise tourists remained along the main street of the souq, fearing getting lost inside the street labyrinth. consequently, they were also not able to locate certain shops, on their own. “because they have no orientation, the tourists sometimes do not find the spices”, said a german-speaking tour guide. therefore, cruise tourists bought from the product range offered in the “tourist bubble”. tour guides mentioned that they were instructed by their employer, not to go along with the group through the souq. “the shopkeepers think we only direct the tourists to certain shops”, said one guide. perception of the local shop keepers: “the tourists are just looking” since the start of large-scale cruise tourism in muscat in 2004, the business community has noticed a sharp increase in tourist numbers. “sometimes about 3000 tourists pass here in this small street”, complained one member of the long-established business community. another asian shop manager said: “there are so many tourists. it is difficult to walk”. the shop owners and sellers in mutrah are disappointed about the tourism development in the souq. “these are not the tourists we were told are coming to oman. we are focusing on numbers rather than on quality. but the number of tourists reduces the quality of tourism”, said an omani. the cruise tourists buy souvenirs along the main street of the souq, they gaze and they take photos: “they just do a tour and then go”, said a local shop owner. other vendors expressed similar disappointment. “we have only had two customers from a cruise liner”, said an omani in the gold souq, located on the backside of the souq, in the periphery of the “tourist bubble”. omani taxi drivers who are located close to the main entrance to souq mutrah complained that the main profit of cruise liner tourism goes to the local tour operators, shipping agents and to the port authority. they mentioned that cruise tourists were not interested in taking a taxi and ventured on their own along the corniche road. nevertheless, the majority of the interviewees of the local business community mentioned being in favor of the planned cruise liner port, but on a much smaller scale: “three large cruise liners per week, not per day”, were suggested. moreover, there is a wish for a common tourism development plan in souq mutrah: “we need a common vision. how will we cope with the influx of tourists in a couple of years when the port will be a tourist port? we are already struggling now with more than 100 tourist ships in the winter season”, said a shop-owner of the long-established indian trader community. due to over-crowding and lack of parking, local omani and expat customers who went shopping in souq mutrah in the past now avoided the souq. “when cruise liners are in muscat, i do not visit the souq anymore”, said an expatriate resident. with the increase in large cruise ships, the shop vendors have observed a change in the tourist spending behavior. “they are tourists, but without money”, said a well-established indian shop owner. an indian vendor from the harbor street complained: “the tourists are just looking, they do not buy anything. only those who come by airplane buy here”, he said. this confirms the results of a low-spending behavior of cruise tourists, discussed by wilkinson (1999), henthorpe (2000), weaver (2005a), klein (2010) and larsen et al. (2013). shops located inside the souq on the periphery of the “tourist bubble”, in the small narrow side streets of the souq, do not benefit as much from cruise tourism. only the “new vendors” from asia, who have started working in the souq recently, since the arrival of large-scale cruises, valued the large number of tourists as “a business opportunity, rather than a loss of culture” (hall & rath 2007: 18). they have adapted their product range to the taste and budget of the cruise customers. 56 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet a pattern of low spending among germanspeaking cruise tourists was confirmed in the questionnaire survey. figure 5 shows that 40% of the cruise tourists who responded did not spend anything in souq mutrah (n=760) and nearly 60% have spent only a small amount. 32.7% spent less than 20 euro, while just 1.7% spent more than 100 euro. thus cruise tourists were not primarily interested in buying local and more expensive souvenirs. this was confirmed in interviews: “we have already bought a lot in istanbul. we will not buy anything here”, said a 30-year-old austrian cruise tourist from costa. a german couple travelling with ms europa luxury cruise liner said that “they do not need anything” and that the shops were selling the same items as in the popular tourist destination spain. “they are selling pashminas in large quantities in spain”, he said. according to the survey, the majority of the german-speaking tourists from the mega cruise liner (n=691) had bought small and less expensive souvenirs, most of them not locally made: 43% had bought pashmina scarves (usually replicated pashminas made in china), followed by omani frankincense (22.3%), postcards (21.8%) and other small items (16.5%) including belly dancing dresses, dates, oil lamps, perfume oils, medicine from the pharmacy, key-chains, magnets, ashtrays and t-shirts (see fig. 6). typical omani products that are also bought by locals, such as a dishdasha and turban (6.5%), gold and silver (7.3%), or khanjars (2.0%) were rarely purchased by the cruise tourists surveyed. this also confirm the results of previous research conducted by larsen et al. (2013) who found that cruise tourists are low spenders compared to other tourists who stay longer in the destination. klein (2010: 67) also stressed that the onshore spending of cruise tourists has declined in the past years. due to the rising demand, the number of shops selling cheap, imported items has increased inside the “tourist bubble”. “'unfortunately they are selling pashminas and elephants from thailand. it has become like a textile souq. we see more t-shirts with ‘i love oman’ or indian saris”, complained an omani tour guide. as a consequence of the tourists’ low spending behavior, the vendor community has changed their selling approach and become more aggressive, which annoys some german-speaking group and individual tourists. “vendors along the main street approached us in a very aggressive way. we were not interested in their items. we just wanted to leave”, said an individual tourist. in january 2014 along the “tourist bubble” young asian vendors who had worked only from inside their shops in recent years started hiring additional sales people who were to hawk their items outside the shop: “madam, look pashmina scarf! frankincense, saffron and perfume”, asian vendors call out in eng40.3 % 5.1 % 10.5 % 17.1 % 9.7 % 5.4 % 5.5 % 4.6 % 1.4 % 0.3 % nothing less than 5 euro 6-10 euro 11-20 euro 21-30 euro 31-40 euro 41-50 euro 51-100 euro 101-150 euro more than 150 euro pe rc en ta ge expenditure of cruise tourists in souq mutrah fig. 5. spending behavior of germanspeaking cruise tourists in muscat (n=760) (own survey 2012). fennia 194: 1 (2016) 57socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah lish, german and italian while holding a scarf along with a perfume bottle (fig. 7) in their hands. in oman it is known that asian businessmen have a rather aggressive selling behavior whereas omanis have a softer selling approach (gutberlet 2008). “if someone is interested in my shop i say welcome, but i don’t pull him inside the shop”, said an omani who owns a shop in the “tourist bubble”. the growth in the number of expatriate vendors has led to ethnic tension and stereotyping: “i do not go in the street to sell, only indians are doing this”, said an omani vendor. some tourists who were guided appreciated the kind approach and hospitality of the local omani vendors: “the locals are very friendly, not so pushy like in turkey. they ask first whether you want to buy anything and then they explain everything”, said an individual traveller in his 50s, who was guided by a local tour guide. as a consequence of the expatriate vendors’ aggressive selling practices, in march 2014 local vendors along the harbor street were officially instructed by the inspectors of muscat municipality to remove their items from outside the shops, otherwise they would be fined (times of oman 2014). as a result it was observed that the expatriate vendors had adopted a more passive approach. silent resistance the remaining well-established omani and expatriate businessmen in mutrah have developed a silent resistance and passive attitude towards tourists and mass tourism products. as a consequence of this resistance, shops that cater for omanis and their product range of groceries, embroidery, halwa (omani sweets), dishdasha (omani male clothing), kummah (male cap) and masar (turban) and other accessories are relocating from the main street to the interior, the periphery of the “tourist bubble”. this phenomenon was observed at the entrance to the main street, where a local shop owner selling perfumes, textiles and embroidery for the local community (fig. 8) for the past 40 years moved to the inside of the souq in 2014 and converted into a tourist shop, selling pashmina scarves, indian textiles, postcards, carpets and belly dancing costumes (fig. 9 ). fig. 6. imported souvenirs, displayed outside a shop at the entrance to souq mutrah (photo: gutberlet 2013). fig. 7. an expatriate vendor approaches a female tourist with a scarf (photo: gutberlet 2014). 58 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet the indian vendor, who has been working in mutrah in the second generation, continues selling items for the local omani market from his shop inside the souq. similarly, in the same year another omani shop on the main street selling khanjars and locally produced items, was converted into a shop selling mainly pashmina scarves. also the omani owner and vendor left his shop and expatriate vendors took over. the change in the social structure has been described as a long-term process: “before 1970 the shop keepers were 100 per cent omani. that has changed, now less than 5 per cent are omanis, the majority is foreigners”, said an omani owner of a traditional halwa shop, who is in his 60s. a 150–200-year-old omani herbal and spice shop in the center of souq mutrah closed in 2013. the shop was very popular among western tourists and locals, due to its authentic interior and a variety of local items. it was renovated at the beginning of 2014 and the shop was offered for rent for banking atm machines. “we have to move on”, said the owner, thus stressing the need to transform the souq into a modern shopping street. two years earlier, however, the same shop-keeper had mentioned in an interview that the shops and their identity in souq mutrah need to be protected. with an increase in the number of tourists visiting an omani souq, a high ranking government official claimed in an interview that: “if foreigners go to the local souq, they will kill it” referring to the loss of local identity. this reflects the fear of being overwhelmed by the large number of tourists and of losing their cultural identity. all these observations are significant. translated in doxey's (1976) irritation index, the business community shows a desire to escape and a degree of irritation. in addition, there is a decrease in the number of shops selling products for the local community, so the “tourist bubble” has been extended. the attitudes of the local established business community who own the shops reflect their views towards getting the greatest financial benefits out of tourism development. on the other hand, such transformation of businesses had already occurred in the past in souq mutrah. scholz (1990: 257, 384) mentioned that local food products and turbans were still sold in mutrah during the early 1970s, but also recorded the rapid economic and social changes that occurred from the 1970s onwards, with the increasing demand for “new imported products”. the attitude of local residents to protect themselves from the large number of tourists walking in front of their houses, some residents have created further physical and social boundaries. the old residential walled district opposite the port, which is featured in many tourism advertisements, with its ancient and beautiful trading houses has a guard sitting beside the entrance gate. the guard refig. 8. shop for the local community at the entrance to the souq (photo: gutberlet january 2013). fig. 9. the same local shop was converted into a tourist shop one year later (photo: gutberlet january 2014). fennia 194: 1 (2016) 59socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah fuses access to those who do not belong to the community. however, the entrance from the backside of the souq has no guard. furthermore, a signboard “residential area” indicates that entry is restricted. during the annual religious month of al muharram, celebrated by the resident muslim shia community, which has taken place during the busy tourist season in the past years, the community has set up a white wall in front of the entrance gate (fig. 10), in order to maintain their privacy and to protect themselves from curious onlookers. this observation of creating boundaries was reinforced whenever the place was entered and the researcher was asked to leave the place: “this is a residential place, shopping over there”, said an omani lady, indicating a clear refusal to have sightseers inside the historic walled district. that was confirmed by omanis who do not belong to the community, who mentioned that they are also unwelcome inside the district. furthermore, the researcher was asked by local male omani residents who work in souq mutrah to cover her hair when entering the walled district, which is not an obligation to female expatriates and tourists in oman. this indicates a conservative attitude and reinforcement of the community’s values. moreover, four signboards have been set up beside the entrance of the mosque, thus preventing non-residents from entering the residential area and nonmuslims for entering the mosque, located on the harbor street, opposite to the port. therefore, the community has clearly defined a distinction and draws additional borders between the residents and the outsiders – non-residents and tourists alike. “the families are more religion-minded and not tourism-minded”, explained a member of the community, indicating that there is no interest in opening the district for outsiders. an official measure against the congestion of the public space in mutrah was the setting up of a large red signboard by muscat municipality in front of the souq, just before the tourist season 2013/2014. the signboard prohibits local vendors and customers from loading and unloading trucks during the peak timings in the morning and in the afternoon, thus restricting the purchase of local customers who buy in large quantities during that time. conclusions although this research is a snapshot taken during a particular time and location, it is important since it reflects the views of both the local community and of tourists at a time of substantial increase in tourist numbers, in particular cruise tourists. this refig. 10. an additional white wall (center) was set up in front of the residential district, the corniche road (photo: gutberlet 2013). 60 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet search has been conducted right before the start of a major large-scale tourism development – the cruise liner port, which will be built opposite the souq, doubling the number of ship berths and raising the overall capacity for passengers enormously. as a consequence, the social and cultural pressure on the local community will increase as well. as a result of this research it has become clear that due to the influx in cruise tourism in the past years, the historic district along the harbor road and souq mutrah have been commodified and become a reflection of the “tourist bubble” (jaakson 2004), a “place to be” for cruise tourists, absorbing and processing a large number of tourists during the cruise season. therefore, the district has lost its “simple charm” and is generally avoided by local residents when a large cruise liner is in the port. it is evident that the souq is divided into a “core tourist bubble” in the front, close to the harbor and along the main street of souq mutrah, and a local souq for the omani and expatriate residents in the back, on the periphery of the “tourist bubble”. the front section of the souq has become a reflection of maccannell’s (1992) “empty meeting grounds” where tourists do not meet locals, but a kind of “show-souq” with cheap, foreign commodified mass products and “new asian vendors”, who represent oman. furthermore, the souq has become overcrowded when two large contemporary cruise liners are in the port, conceptualized as “shock loading effect” (wilkinson 1999). crowding has occurred due to the spatial and temporal distribution of the cruise tourists, the limited urban geography and the limited number of tourist sights close to the port. it seems that the increase in the number of cruise tourists arriving by cruise liners in muscat has been unexpected and surprising for the local community in mutrah and for other tourists, both group and individual, without considerations regarding the social, cultural and physical impacts and the limited space and infrastructure. according to the majority of the community and the tourists surveyed, there is “no more room” for more tourists inside the souq. thus, locals mentioned that the authorities should limit the number of annual visitors, since their accepted level of tolerance and “perceived social carrying capacity” has been reached. as a consequence and translated in doxey's (1976) irritation index, the local population escape, either by withdrawing from the core of the “tourist bubble” or by creating borders to protect themselves from curious onlookers. referring to a transformation into a tourist place, orbasli (2000: 109) mentioned: “citizens may become alienated as the old towns are transformed into tourist attractions with the focus on visitors, ‘outsider’ needs rather than those of residents”. currently, negative impacts such as over-crowding, the sale of cheap mass-products, and an increasing loss of omani identity seem to outweigh the economic and social benefits for the majority of the local community. to avoid crowding and to release the pressure on the local community, a quota for large-scale cruise liners arriving in port sultan qaboos in muscat should be set up and strictly monitored. visits to souq mutrah should be controlled at the entrance and other sightseeing options should be included in sightseeing tours, for example a special tourist souq could be set up inside the port to ease the congestion outside the port. to increase the revenue for the local community, only small, luxury cruise liners, that do not offer all-inclusive holidays on board, should anchor in muscat. moreover, cruises should be encouraged to stay overnight. this would also allow for additional excursions around muscat. in addition, as jafari (1987) suggested the tourists and cruise companies should compensate negative effects on the community and should get financially involved. for example a daily tourism tax for cruise liners could be introduced, e.g. 10 euro per person per day, which could then be reinvested into local community development. a pro-active management plan and regulations need to be implemented, under local control and results continuously updated. “the local people and communities should have the right to choose their way of life and preferences” (saarinen 2011: 155). commercial pressure dominating the development of the souq, including the changing product range on sale, leads to the loss of local heritage, and should therefore be avoided. responsible tourism planning should include the development of tourism with dignity for the local community. this includes controlling the carrying capacity and the development of the local production of goods by supporting independent local businesses. moreover, this could include the re-branding of the souq as a multi-ethnic place including e.g. ethnic supermarkets and book shops (hall & rath 2007). thus, a social, cultural and economic empowerment of the entire multi-ethnic community inclusive of all stakeholders should be set up, through the creation of special committees such as mutrah tourism fennia 194: 1 (2016) 61socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah committee and a “local cruise committee” (hull & milne 2010:187). members of such a committee should include the port authority, the municipality, the ministry of transportation and communication, royal oman police, the ministry of tourism, the public authority for handicraft, shipping agents, tour operators, tour guides, business owners and vendors in mutrah. through open participation such “local cruise committee” could then develop a set of sustainable tourism development indicators (torres-delgado & saarinen 2014). these social indicators should reflect the needs of the local community, including for example the number of cruise tourist arrivals per day, the ratio of tourists and locals, the sale of local products and the employment rate. moreover, to ensure valuable positive results for the community it is necessary to implement and monitor the indicators continuously. this research has certain limitations arising from the research methodology. while a broad range of members of the local community in mutrah were interviewed, in particular the shop vendors and owners, no quantitative survey was conducted among the community. also the number of tourists interviewed can be seen as small and insufficient for generating conclusions. however, despite these limitations, from the survey and the in-depth interviews, interesting issues on large-scale tourism in mutrah have emerged and suggest further research in the field in mutrah, e.g. including more shops along the corniche road and among more female members of the community. due to the fast pace of the tourism development in mutrah, it would be interesting to record the changes through regular, continuous field research and participant observation. this research can be seen as an exemplary case study that can be applied to other tourism developments in oman in the future. a businessman and owner of a group of companies in oman who grew up and lived in mutrah until the 1970s said: “we need more time for local people to become aware that tourists are not going to attack them but admire them”. however, the time is very limited and meanwhile the number of cruise tourists will continue to increase. for the tourist season 2014/2015 a growth of 10–15% is expected in cruise tourism (times of oman 2015b). feb. 2012, 6 pm: the ship’s bell rings, the sun is disappearing over the horizon as the large costa cruise ship moves towards the exit of the port. it is peaceful in the souq. omanis go quietly about their business. the ship is brilliantly lit with lights from every porthole, and flash lights illuminate the darkness around it as the last photos of mutrah are taken by the departing tourists. the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer. the ship leaves the port and turns left towards fujairah and dubai. the cruise tourists will soon proceed to their dinner. along the waterfront expatriate workers take a few photos of the cruise liner with their mobile phones. the ship has left the harbor and the sun has set. the souq belongs to the local community again. acknowledgements i would like to thank jarkko saarinen, the coordinating editor, for encouraging me to submit this paper. furthermore, i would like to acknowledge the advice and support throughout this research of carmella pfaffenbach. i also would like to acknowledge all support of the local community and of the aidablu cruise liner. moreover, i am grateful for the valuable comments of all anonymous reviewers.finally, i would like to thank the german university of technology in oman for their support. references cohen e 1978. the impact of tourism on the physical environment. annals of tourism research 5: 2, 215–237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(78)90221-9. doğan hz 1989. forms of adjustment. sociocultural impacts of tourism. annals of tourism research 16: 2, 216–236. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(89)90069-8. doxey g 1976. when enough's enough: the natives are restless in old niagra. heritage canada 2: 2, 26–37. dwyer l & forsyth p 1998. economic significance of cruise tourism. annals of tourism research 25: 2, 393-415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383 (97)00098-4. foster gm 1989. south seas cruise a case study of a short-lived society. annals of tourism research 13: 2, 215–238. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(86)90038-1. gaube h 2012. mutrah redevelopment master plan. cultural heritage stage 2. conclusions and recommendations. working paper 20. norplan as, norway and middle east. getz d 1987. capacity to absorb tourism – concepts and implications for strategic planning. annals of tourism research 10: 2, 239–261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(78)90221-9. gutberlet m 2008. verhandeln mit geschaeftspartnern in oman. in brenner h (ed). praxishandbuch fuer exportmanager, 1–16. deutscher wirtschaftsdienst, köln. hall m & lew a 2009. understanding and managing tourism impacts: an integrated approach. routledge, london. 62 fennia 194: 1 (2016)manuela gutberlet hall m & rath j 2007. tourism, migration and place advantage in the global cultural economy. in rath j (ed). tourism, ethnic diversity and the city, 1–24. routledge, new york and oxon. henthorpe t 2000. an analysis of expenditures by cruise ship passengers in jamaica. journal of travel research 38: 3, 246–250. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004728750003800306. hull js & milne s 2010. port readiness planning in the arctic: building community support. in lück m, maher pt & stewart ej (eds). cruise tourism in polar regions. promoting environmental and social sustainability?, 181–204. earthscan, london. ehrig, hj 2014. maps of mutrah. rwth aachen university, department of geography, aachen. jaakson r 2004. beyond the tourist bubble? cruiseship passengers in port. annals of tourism research 31: 1, 44–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2003.08.003. jafari j 1987. tourism models: the sociocultural aspects. tourism management 8: 2, 151–159. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0261-5177(87)90023-9. karreman j 2013. cruise tourism development in a small destination. lambert academic publishing, saarbrucken. klein ra 2010. cruises and bruises: safety, security and social issues on polar cruises. in lück, maher pt & stewart ej (eds). cruise tourism in polar regions. promoting environmental and social sustainability?, 57–74. earthscan, london. krippendorf j 1987. the holiday makers. understanding the impact of leisure and travel. heinemann ltd., london. larsen s, wolff k, marnburg e & ogaard t 2013. belly full, purse closed. cruise passenger’s expenditures. tourism management perspectives 6, 142–148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2013.02.002. ljubica j & dulcic z 2012. megaships and developing cultural tourism in dubrovnik. in papathanassis a, lukovic t & vogel m (eds). cruise tourism and society, 17–28. springer verlag, berlin. maccannell d 1992. empty meeting grounds: the tourist papers. routledge, london. ministry of environment and climate affairs 2012. the national report on sustainable development rio – brazil. committee for sustainable development chaired by the undersecretary of the ministry of environment and climate affairs, muscat. ministry of tourism 2012. cruise liner arrivals in muscat. statistics from the directorate general of planning, follow-up & information, ministry of tourism, muscat. ministry of tourism 2014. number of tourists to oman 2011–2013. statistics from the directorate general of planning, follow-up & information, ministry of tourism, muscat. ministry of tourism 2015a. number of cruise tourists arriving in muscat 2013–2015. statistics from the directorate general of planning, follow-up & information, ministry of tourism, muscat. ministry of tourism 2015b. employment in the tourism sector in oman end of 2013. statistics from the directorate general of planning, follow-up & information, ministry of tourism, muscat. muscat daily 2013. oman wants tourism sector to contribute to 3% of gdp by 2020. muscat daily, 26.06.2013. oman daily observer 2013. deadline set for cargo vessels at port. oman daily observer, 07.10.2013. oman tribune 2015. number of cruise tourists rising, to hit 1.6 m in 2020. oman tribune, 18.02.2015. o'reilly am 1986. tourism carrying capacity: concepts and issues. tourism management 7: 4, 254–258. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0261-5177(86)90035-x. orbasli a 2000. tourists in historic towns. urban conservation and heritage management. taylor & francis, new york. papathanassis g & beckmann i 2011. assessing the ‘poverty of cruise theory’ hypothesis. annals of tourism research 38: 1, 153–174. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2010.07.015. papathanassis g 2012. guest-to-guest interaction on board cruise ships: exploring social dynamics and the role of situational factors. tourism management 33: 5, 1148–1158. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2011.11.016. rodrigue j-p & notteboom t 2013. the geography of cruises: itineraries not destinations. applied geography 38, 31–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2012.11.011. saarinen j 2006. traditions of sustainability in tourism studies. annals of tourism research 33: 4, 1121–1140. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2006.06.007. saarinen j 2011. tourism development and local communities: the direct benefits of tourism to ovahimba communities in the kaokoland, northwest namibia. tourism review international 15: 1–2, 149–157. http://dx.doi.org/10.3727/15442721 1x13139345020534. satta g, parola f, penco l & persico l 2014. word of mouth and satisfaction in cruise port destinations. tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 17: 1, 54–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2014.938689. saveriades a 2000. establishing the social tourism carrying capacity for the tourist resorts of the east coast of the republic of cyprus. tourism management 21: 2, 147–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ s0261-5177 (99)00044-8. schemmann b 2012. user-driven innovation concepts and the cruise industry. in papathanassis a, lukovic t & vogel m (eds). cruise tourism and society, 153–172. springer verlag, berlin. scholz f 1990. muscat sultanat oman. geographische skizze einer einmaligen arabischen stadt. das arabische buch, berlin. smith vl 1989. hosts and guests – the anthropology of tourism. the university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 63socio-cultural impacts of large-scale cruise tourism in souq mutrah stefanidaki e & lekakou m 2012. generated economic impact on cruise destinations: the piraeus case. in papathanassis a, lukovic t & vogel m (eds). cruise tourism and society, 69–84. springer verlag, berlin. stephenson m & ali-knight j 2010. dubai's tourism industry and its societal impact: social implications and sustainable challenges. journal of tourism and cultural change 8: 4, 278–292. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14766825.2010.521248. times of oman 2014. souq shops under scanner. times of oman, 02.04.2014. times of oman 2015a. june 1. cruise tours set to grow this season. times of oman, 01.06.2015. times of oman 2015b. 8 most visited tourist places in oman. times of oman, 26.03.2015. torres-delgado a & saarinen j 2014. using indicators to assess sustainable tourism development: a review. tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 16:1, 31–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2013.867530. urbanowicz c 1989. tourism in tonga revisited: continued troubled times? in smith, vl (ed). hosts and guests – the anthropology of tourism, 105–117. the university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. vanhove n 1997. mass tourism – benefits and costs. in wahab s & pigram jj (eds). tourism and sustainability in tourism, sustainability and growth, 50– 77. routledge, london. wahab s & pigram jj 1997. tourism and sustainability – policy considerations. in wahab s & pigram jj (eds). tourism and sustainability in tourism, sustainability and growth, 277–290. routledge, london. wall g 1997. sustainable tourism – unsustainable development. in wahab s & pigram jj (eds). tourism and sustainability in tourism, sustainability and growth, 33–49. routledge, london. ward c & berno t 2011. beyond social exchange theory: attitudes towards tourists. annals of tourism research 38: 4, 1556–1569. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.02.005. weaver a 2005a. spaces of containment and revenue capture: ‘super-sized’ cruise ships as mobile tourism enclaves. tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 7: 2, 165–184. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616680500072398. weaver a 2005b. the mcdonaldization thesis and cruise tourism. annals of tourism research 32: 2, 346–366. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2004.07.005. weeden c, lester j-a & thyne m 2011. cruise tourism: emerging issues and implications for a maturing industry. journal of hospitality and tourism management 18: 1, 26–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1375/jhtm.18.1.26. wilkinson pf 1999. caribbean cruise tourism: delusion? illusion? tourism geographies 1: 3, 261–282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616689908721321. wood r 2000. caribbean cruise tourism: globalization at sea. annals of tourism research 27: 2, 345–370. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(99)00073-0. [wttc] world travel & tourism council 2014. travel & tourism economic impact 2014 oman. world travel & tourism council, london. [unwto] world tourism organization 2010. cruise tourism – current situation and trends. unwto, madrid. [unwto] world tourism organization 2013. world tourism barometer. volume 11, statistical annex 15. unwto, madrid. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7031 doi: 10.11143/7031 the island monastery of valaam in finnish homeland tourism: constructing a “thirdspace” in the russian borderlands maja mikula mikula, maja (2013). the island monastery of valaam in finnish homeland tourism: constructing a “thirdspace” in the russian borderlands. fennia 191: 1, pp. 14–24. issn 1798-5617. the orthodox island monastery of valaam in russian karelia is today a popular destination for finnish tourists visiting russia’s western borderlands. many of these tourists are descendants of the karelians who had evacuated the area following world war ii. the monastery’s institutionally sanctioned genealogies construct it as the civilizing force, which had brought christian enlightenment to the local heathen population. this discursive template is played out in the way the place is presented to visitors, with each highlight telling a carefully constructed story that promotes the monastery’s significance for the russian religious and national identity. yet, drawing on lived experience, as well as on popular culture, family lore and meanings from collective memory, the finnish visitors break the monolithic official discourse and produce a complex “thirdspace” in their own measure. this paper is based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted during a homeland visit to ladogan karelia in june 2010. keywords: homeland tourism, valaam, karelia, finland, russia, borderlands, “thirdspace” maja mikula, faculty of arts and social sciences, university of technology sydney, po box 123, broadway nsw 2007, australia. e-mail: maja.mikula@uts.edu.au. introduction at the northeastern fringes of europe, ladogan karelia is a place where visible traces of a traumatic recent history seem to be strangely at odds with landscapes of extraordinary beauty. the symbolic center of this remote periphery is lake ladoga, the largest european lake, with its rugged shores indented with deep, narrow gulfs and walled in by high granite cliffs. the sheer immensity of this lake has earned it the appellation of an “inland sea” (scott 1908: 167). in the northern part of the lake, an hour away from the town of sortavala when traveling by hydrofoil, one finds the valaam1 archipelago: a group of some fifty islands, with the eponymous orthodox monastery situated on the largest island. a flagship of the budding tourism industry in russian karelia (see, e.g., nilsson 2004), valaam is today a popular destination for finnish tourists visiting russia’s western borderlands. not surprisingly, many of them are descendants of the karelians who had been forced to evacuate the area following world war ii. as will be discussed in more detail below, the institutionally sanctioned genealogies of the monastery construct it as the civilizing force, which had brought christian enlightenment to the local heathen population. this discursive template is emphatically played out in the way the place is presented to visitors, with each highlight of the itinerary contributing to the narrative promoting the monastery’s unique significance for the russian religious and national identity.2 fennia 191: 1 (2013) 15the island monastery of valaam in finnish homeland tourism... data and methods this paper is based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted during a four-day homeland visit (finnish, kotiseutumatka) to ladogan karelia undertaken in june 2010 by members of two extended families, originally deriving from the municipalities of jaakkima, lumivaara and kurkijoki, on the shores of lake ladoga. in ladogan karelia, the ancestors of the two families lived around ten kilometers apart from each other. their secondand third-generation descendants are now dispersed, with some living as far north as finnish lapland, and some as far south as australia. out of the seventeen travelers, interviews were conducted with ten. the participants, four women and six men, included second and third-generation karelians, as well as the travel guide, who was able to provide valuable insights due to his long-standing experience in organizing similar trips.3 consent was obtained beforehand from the tour organizers and all interested participants. the interviews were conducted in convenient public spaces on neutral territory, including hotel lobbies, cafes and the tour bus. in all interview locales, it was possible to ensure that any distractions would be minimal. the interviews were audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed. in most instances, the original finnish language was translated into english.4 the informants' names are not disclosed, in order to protect confidentiality. as this trip was a part of a larger project dealing with the european borderlands, the interviews were loosely structured, leaving enough freedom to the interviewees to describe their experience of borderland travel and reflect on their personal and collective memories and ethnic and national identification. initially unaware of valaam’s significance in the personal and collective memories of my fellow travelers, i had not expected it to become one of the highlights of our trip. “this is the second time we are visiting jaakkima”, explained a woman from my travel party. “we did not visit valamo then, which was a pity. this time we did not want to miss it” (interview 2). it soon became clear that others in the group shared this sentiment. the visit to valaam kept emerging in casual conversations, and became a prominent topic in the interviews. one man admitted that the physical encounter with the place triggered in him a feeling of loss and bitterness, like no other location we visited during the trip, his ancestral home-site included (interview 9). this meant that further questions needed to be asked, both in face-to-face interaction and by email, with that particular focus. additional research also needed to take into account the fact that the tropes of the ceded karelian territory and of valaam itself as a karelian place of memory are firmly established in the finnish popular culture. those popular cultural texts that were mentioned in the interviews or in the follow-up emails were given particular attention, because of their mythopoetic quality, which plays a central role in the formation of collective memory. scanned postcards and other documents were provided by the participants. the historical segments of the paper, which throw light on the temporal dimension of space production, are based solely on secondary sources. the key questions this paper seeks to address are: 1) how is ladogan valaam experienced today by the descendants of the karelians evacuated from the shores of lake ladoga after world war ii? is it experienced as “home”, or as a place of otherness? 2) does the nostalgia for the lost ancestral homeland encompass a place, which had maintained aspects of “russianness” throughout its recorded history, including periods when it belonged to the finnish grand duchy (1809–1917) and to independent finland (1917–1944)? 3) what lessons can be learned from these insights, about space production in the borderlands? in addressing these questions, i first discuss valaam’s patchy genealogy, emphasizing the temporal “gaps” and “discontinuities” that have allowed the co-existence of contradictory “emplacements” within a single physical space. these depend on the selective foregrounding of certain temporal layers, and the accommodation of others into acceptable frameworks. the following section focuses on the popular-cultural texts and artifacts, which have left a particular imprint in the childhood memories of the participants in the case study. these texts are of particular importance, because they partake in the social and cultural dimensions of space production. after this, field notes are used to explain our visit to valaam as a lived experience, in which landscapes, sensorial stimuli, social and temporal dimensions coalesce and interact. to fully understand the nature of our experience, the concept of homeland tourism is also discussed. the paper concludes with a section that explains how this study engages with relevant theory. 16 fennia 191: 1 (2013)maja mikula valaam’s discontinuous genealogy valaam’s foundational narrative, elaborated in the nineteenth century, paints the monastery as the arch-nemesis of the local pagan traditions. according to this narrative, apostle andrew came to valaam in the 1st century a.d. to destroy heathen temples and teach christian faith, predicting its great future as the beacon of holiness in the midst of pagan darkness. apostolic blessing, according to kati parppei, was “yet another way to ‘anchor’ the image of the monastery to the collective cultural memory of the great story of russia and to emphasize the specialty and particularity of valaam in the russian monastic scene” (2010: 133). the origins of the monastery are shrouded in myth, and usually traced somewhere between the 10th and the 14th centuries. the legend of the two founders, the greek monk sergius and his karelian counterpart, herman, is of interest as a foundational narrative that has hybridity – a meeting of the slavic and the finno-ugric worlds – at its core. this hybridity resonates with the stereotypical karelian identity, often constructed as a watershed between east and west. the karelians are often regarded, and regard themselves, both as characteristically finnish, and as fundamentally different from the rest of the national community (cf. häyrynen 2004: 23). the taciturn and generally reserved nature of the finns is commonly said to be in stark contract with the karelians’ warmth and joviality.5 for most of its early history, the monastery had to endure the continuing warfare between sweden and novgorod. at the beginning of the 17th century, violence and bloodshed forced the monks to leave the island and settle permanently in other monasteries. under the swedish rule, which lasted from 1617 to 1721, the monastery was virtually wiped out of existence. eager to construct a farreaching and uninterrupted genealogy of the monastery, the author of the historical sketch on valaam’s official website emphasizes that the future continuity of the place rested symbolically – if somewhat precariously – on the relics of the legendary founders, which had been left behind by the fleeing monks (valaam.ru). it was not before the early 18th century that a group of monks from the kirillo-belozero monastery set out to re-establish valaam. valaam became part of the grand duchy of finland in 1812. in the late nineteenth century, the relationship between the monastery and the finnish administration was far from harmonious, plagued as it was by numerous conflicts over land ownership, fishing rights and fiscal matters (parppei 2010: 191). tensions continued after finland had become independent in the aftermath of world war i, and the orthodox church of finland gained autonomous status.6 since valaam’s ties with russia had been traditionally strong, its cooption into the finnish nation-building processes in the interwar period was not without problems. most notably, the 1924/5 decision by the finnish orthodox church to adopt the gregorian calendar was met with bitter opposition by some of the valaam monks. given the ultimatum to accept the decision or leave, some of the dissenting monks preferred exile to the soviet union, while others found refuge in the orthodox monasteries in the balkans. as part of the overall effort to fennicize the monastery, the monks were now required to apply for finnish citizenship, and fluency in the finnish language became one of the criteria for recruitment (kemppinen 1973: 40). as the finnish orthodox church gradually asserted its independence from the russian hub, valaam itself began to shed aspects of its pre-revolutionary russian identity. as pointed out by geographer petri raivo, the orthodox community of finnish karelia in the inter-war period represented a minority among the mostly lutheran inhabitants of the area, but their “different religion, their ties with russo-byzantine culture and the fact that they lived near the border with the soviet union made them a visible element in the processes of nationalization that took place in the peripheral areas of the young nation” (2002: 14). with its quaint wooden chapels (karelian, tsasouna, from russian часовня, chasovnya) and hermitages dotting the area, the orthodox cultural landscape of the eastern periphery was eagerly embraced as an “essential, if peculiar, part of the nation” (ibid.). at the same time, the perceived difference, or even exoticism of the eastern periphery gave a considerable boost to tourism industry, attracting both local and international pilgrims and tourists. the monastery’s potential to contribute to the economy of the young country, both as a center of pilgrimage tourism and as a uniquely rich fishery, was recognized from the outset. valaam received its first high-level visits from finland’s minister of church and education, mikael soininen in 1919, and from the first president, kaarlo juho ståhlberg in 1920 (kemppinen 1973: fennia 191: 1 (2013) 17the island monastery of valaam in finnish homeland tourism... 39). celebrations and church music festivals organized by the monastery gained considerable media exposure and attracted visitors from across finland, sweden and beyond. in a guide book, published in english by the finnish tourist association, valaam is described as affording “sights of rare beauty for the tourist to admire and enjoy” (1926: 21), and its genius loci is said to emanate a “devout atmosphere which everyone must feel, whatever his [sic] creed or lack of creed” (ibid. 24). an hour-long program about valaam, aired by the finnish radio in 1934, proved so popular that several newspapers followed suit, with feature articles encouraging finns to visit the monastery. according to raivo, travel to valaam “had reached its peak in the 1930s, when the increasing flow of tourists and pilgrims brought tens of thousands of people to the island every year” (2002: 19). while the “oriental exoticism” was being appropriated at the institutional level, contributing to the nationalizing rhetoric of independent finland, for the mostly finno-karelian population living on the shores of lake ladoga the island monastery existed as a natural part of daily life, even more so than it had done before the revolution. following the transfer of the archiepiscopal seat of the finnish orthodox church from vyborg (finnish, viipuri) to sortavala, black-clad monks became a regular sight on the town’s streets. in late summer and early autumn, it was possible to see them doing their daily errands in the town center, selling produce at the marketplace, or buying supplies from the local hardware store (kemppinen 1973: 191). in 1939, the onset of the winter war brought an abrupt end to the prosperity of the holy archipelago. for finland, world war ii involved several distinct struggles: the defensive winter war in response to the soviet invasion (1939–40), the counteroffensive continuation war (1941–4) and the lapland war, fought against germany after the armistice with the soviets had been signed (1944–5). it also entailed a loss of territory and, concomitantly, a major displacement of the finnish population. valaam monks evacuated in 1940, forced by repeated soviet air raids. the entire archipelago was eventually annexed to the soviet union along with the rest of the ceded territories. the evacuated monks continued their monastic practice in the “new valamo” monastery (finnish, uusi valamo), which was founded in the town of heinävesi in eastern finland.7 the deserted old valaam was left to decay, while being periodically put to use, as a navy school (1940), a state farm (1949) and a boarding house for disabled soldiers and the elderly (1952–84) (valaam.ru). with the relaxation of the soviet-era restrictions, the first monks moved to the island in 1989. since then, valaam has been not one but two, with one – the russian valaam – boasting “authenticity” based on physical location, and the other – the finnish new valamo – based on temporal continuity. the relationship between the two monasteries is described by historian kati parppei as “not strained, not overtly warm” (2010: 198), partly dictated by the historical and ideological differences between the russian and the finnish orthodox churches. over the last two decades, the old monastery on lake ladoga has been gradually restored to its former grandeur. as an important part of russia’s cultural heritage, valaam has been the beneficiary of a special assistance program of the federal government, with further funding coming from private sponsors (zimin 2003: 14). the monastery now has its own economic infrastructure, which includes orchards, baking and dairy-production facilities, stables, a fleet and a network of dependent houses or farms in moscow, saint-petersburg, priozersk, sortavala and elsewhere (valaam.ru). clearly, in today’s russian federation, valaam is a thriving institution. promoted as the “athos of the north”, by reference to its counterpart in the aegean sea, the monastery presently counts nearly two hundred permanent residents, as well as growing numbers of visitors (zimin 2003). among the visitors, descendants of karelian evacuees are a prominent group. valaam and the finno-karelian collective memory my memories of valamo: sacred peace and the church bells ringing all the way to heaven. [my visit to valamo] became the most memorable experience of my early youth, an experience that still continues to influence me. there are two things that i still remember clearly. first, the atmosphere. i would describe it as sacred peace that you encounter at every step. it radiated from the monks’ faces. it lived in the deep forests and under the arches of the churches. everywhere… and second, the bells. the famous valamo bells, from the extremely large to the very small ones. when i was watching them with the eyes of a 18 fennia 191: 1 (2013)maja mikula child, i had the warm feeling that they could be heard all the way to heaven. nostalgia for that place, for the peace of the monastery and to the whole orthodox mystique, has taken me already many times to the balkans and its numerous monasteries and churches. and once while i was sitting there on the shore of lake ohrid under the centuries-old trees of the monastery of st naum, my memories of valamo came alive. (runne in kemppinen 1973: 293) the author of the above segment is aili runne (1920–99), the lyricist and composer of several immensely popular nostalgic songs commemorating the ancestral homeland in ceded parts of karelia. herself born in parikkala, a municipality split in half by the 1944 border, runne is best known for the song do you remember monrepos (finnish, muistatko monrepos’n), immortalized in the 1950s by the well-liked finnish singer annikki tähti.8 two of her songs, hermit’s cottage (finnish, erakkomaja) and dreamer in the bell tower (finnish, uneksija kellotornissa) are inspired by her childhood visit to valaam, and reflect the special sensibility to the “orthodox mystique” that she claimed had followed her throughout her later life. runne was instrumental in entrenching the romantic image of valaam into the finno-karelian collective memory. one of my second-generation respondents recalls: we were regular listeners of the listeners’ requests program on the radio. one of the songs most meaningful to me, a 10-year old child of evacuee parents, was on the hills of karelia [finnish, karjalan kunnailla]... another memorable song was i am a child of karelia [finnish, laps olen karjalan]. it was written and composed by aili runne, who also wrote the lyrics for the popular 1967 song the bells of valaam [finnish, valamon kellot]. i remember it very well because it was performed by the finnish “singing cossack”, viktor klimenko. he is quite an interesting character... i still remember how the church bells were ringing in the background (interview 6). valaam’s bells have been particularly expedient as mnemonic signs in the affective geographies of the evacuees and their descendants. in a legend known to several of my respondents, valaam’s main bell of st andrew’s, which was sounded regularly to mark the deaths of the monastery’s monks, is said to have been sounded twelve times before the monks’ evacuation in 1940, as a sign that the monastery itself was now dead. the bells of valaam were thus a particularly evocative synecdoche not only for the monastery, the archipelago and lake ladoga but also for the entire ceded territory. secondand third-generation descendants of karelian evacuees remember stories they were told by their parents and grandparents, about the interactions they had with valaam monks in their daily lives. to quote the historian hannu kilpeläinen, the monastery was not just a “community of the faithful but a broader institution and religious center extending its influence to the surrounding region and inhabitants and providing a home and work for up to hundreds of men, women and children from outside the monastery community” (2000: 462). publications commemorating valaam between the two world wars (e.g. kemppinen 1973) were standard reading among evacuee circles and were coveted particularly by first-generation migrants. these books are remarkable, as they elevate the personal memories of ordinary people – the former finnish soldiers stationed on the island in the 1930s, workers employed by the monastery and casual visitors – to the status of collective memory of the mythical lost homeland that symbolically extends beyond the evacuee population, to the entire finnish national community. in one extended family, souvenir photographs of valaam and its monks had been among the treasured reminders of the old homeland: my earliest memories regarding valamo came from family gatherings where my father brought his photo album to the table and showed us pictures from karelia. he had postcards about valamo, showing monks in their robes, and several monks in a sailboat... he told us that he had seen the monks sailing like that on lake ladoga, where his home was. my father was lutheran but i assume that he had visited valamo on one of the steamships that travelled on the inland sea (interview 5). it is for a good reason that the father’s lutheran faith is emphasized here. along with household items such as woven rugs, wooden barrels and kitchen utensils, images of eastern orthodoxy have become the iconic signifiers of the lost homeland, even though the family is not of orthodox faith. it therefore comes as no surprise that the same visual prompts (see fig. 1 and 2) seem to tell us simultaneously “who the father is” and “who he is not”, thus signifying paradoxically both identity and otherness. the same aporia is at work during fennia 191: 1 (2013) 19the island monastery of valaam in finnish homeland tourism... is a rich resource for the production of narratives, with tourist itineraries signposting the narrative sequence. it is possible, for example, to compare two quite common scenarios for reaching the valaam archipelago: via st. petersburg, usually as part of a more comprehensive cruise which may or may not include other sites, a common one being the island-museum of kizhi in lake onega; or via priozersk (finnish, käkisalmi) or sortavala, often as part of a finnish custom-made heritage trip such as ours. it was in sortavala that many in our group were made manifestly aware of the multiple temour visit, making it possible for the visitors to experience the lived spatiality of the monastery as both “home” and “abroad”. visit to valaam: mobility, landscape and lived experience in order to capture the meanings produced through travel, geographies of tourism need to account for both mobility and stasis (cresswell 2006). mobility fig. 1. a souvenir photo in the possession of one of the participant families. the transfiguration cathedral, built according to legend on the remains of the founders sergius and herman. both images were scanned by interviewee 6. dating is uncertain. fig. 2. monks sailing on lake ladoga. 20 fennia 191: 1 (2013)maja mikula poral layers that coexisted in the ceded territory, in different degrees of visibility or erasure, and different levels of harmony or conflict. here, we could appreciate a rich history of struggles over place, identity and belonging, which are symbolically enacted in sortavala’s architecture, public spaces and urban morphology. in historical travel writing, sortavala was described as emphatically finnish, and in stark contrast with valaam’s russianness (see, e.g., tweedie 1897: 57). this distinction was all but erased when the city was emptied of its finnish population in the 1940s. what remained of the old finnish architecture in the ghost city ceded to the soviets was gradually adapted and repurposed, and the city itself was repopulated and closed off to foreigners for the rest of the soviet era. for almost half a century, both sortavala and valaam were non-places of little significance for either finnish or russian national discourse. since 1989, with the gradual restoration of both places, “traces” of the old opposition have been re-instated in physical symbols. as denis cosgrove has argued, the physical symbols in a human landscape “serve the purpose of reproducing cultural norms and establishing the values of dominant groups across all of a society” (cosgrove 1989: 125). the finnish architectural landscapes of sortavala give way to symbols of russianness as soon as we reach valaam and disembark from the hydrofoil. bearded, longhaired monks dressed in black robes greet the arriving groups of pilgrims. a congregation of women, their heads demurely covered with scarves, circle around a chapel, bowing in turn in front of the icon of the virgin inside it, and chanting in russian: “блаженнa ты, жена” (“woman, you are blessed”). as we follow a tree-lined path and a granite stairway toward the main part of the monastery, we are surrounded by lush vegetation similar to what is found in the rest of karelia on both sides of the border. visual stimuli conveying “home” alternate with those conveying radical difference. yet, it is precisely this mix of “sameness” and “difference” that seems to resonate with images etched in the collective memory of my fellow travelers, and with their sense of self as karelians. the itinerary we follow on the archipelago is standard for most tourist groups. every single highlight on it promotes valaam’s foundational narrative, which pitches the monastery – as an enlightening and civilizing agent – in direct opposition to its non-orthodox surroundings. we begin our tour with a visit to the transfiguration cathedral, built according to a legend on the remains of the founders sergius and herman, both credited with missionary work and conversion of the local pagan population. herman himself, according to one version of the narrative, was a convert to christianity, of local pagan background (parppei 2010: 135). our next stop is the monks’ cemetery, where we visit the grave said to hold the remains of the fourteenth-century swedish king magnus eriksson. as a legend sanctioned by the monastery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would have it, magnus was shipwrecked on his way to sack the island and his entire fleet was sunk. rescued by the monks, the king himself is said to have converted to the orthodox faith, taken vows and then soon thereafter died as a monk of the monastery. finally, the resurrection hermitage, where apostle andrew is said to have erected a stone cross in sign of his victory over “demon-worshipping” heathens. the narrative enshrined by the itinerary, however, represents only one way of producing space on valaam island, albeit the dominant, institutional one. in producing their “third space” on the island during our visit, my fellow travelers re-imagined the period between the two world wars, when both valaam itself and the finnish orthodox church more broadly were in the process of being co-opted into the finnish national discourse, and interactions between the monastery and the local finnish population were intensified. this is the period, which remained in the living memory of their parents and grandparents, which circulated in popular-cultural texts such as aili runne’s songs, and which finally became an idealized topos in the collective memory of the evacuee community. this is how the image of black-robed monks, bountiful apple and cherry orchards and golden onion-shaped domes has come to represent an aspect of the lost “home” in the nostalgic imagination of my respondents, which has nothing to do with their religious affiliation. heritage tourism in the russian borderlands our journey pertains to a category of travel, which burgeoned hand-in-hand with the “memory boom” of the 1970s (huyssen 1995; whitehead 2009). following the waning of the forward-lookfennia 191: 1 (2013) 21the island monastery of valaam in finnish homeland tourism... ing utopian narratives of the post-war period, people found solace and inspiration in their collective pasts (olick et al. 2011). at the same time, the ever-increasing population displacement around the globe meant that, for many, the past was quite literally a foreign country, as searching for roots involved crossing geo-political boundaries. even though the original displacement may have occurred several generations ago, descendants of migrants now flock to their “original homelands”, hoping to experience a sense of belonging through immersion in locales that figure prominently in their personal or family histories. their itineraries are eclectic and often unpredictable. they follow a logic dictated by hybrid family narratives, in which elements of collective and personal memories coexist and feed off each other. they resist easy classification. in the memory of many finns who had evacuated ladogan karelia en masse after world war ii, and of their descendants, this area continues to represent the ideal of ancestral home, a “paradise lost”, which was for decades out of their reach, hidden behind the iron curtain. notwithstanding the relatively smooth assimilation of the evacuated finns into their new environment in different parts of finland itself, the sense of common origin has been passed on to younger generations. since the first sporadic and semi-clandestine trips to the “old homeland” in the mid-1980s, searching for roots has become a form of ritual, a pilgrimage undertaken by many former evacuees from across the areas once ceded to the soviets (paasi 1996; armstrong 2004; alasuutari & alasuutari 2009). in finland, homeland visits to the russian borderlands are often organized as custom-made tours, tailored to include the localities – ancestral farms, homes, churches, historical buildings, battle sites, memorials and other monuments – that hold significance for a specific family or community group. visiting the ancestral home in ceded karelia has been described as a form of pilgrimage to the holy land (paasi 1996: 295; armstrong 2004: 13). several of my respondents also experienced the trip as a rite of passage, a quest for a “grounded” sense of belonging at the intersection of several competing identifications. this kind of quest, however, should not be confused with nostalgic escapism, or with the territorializing impulses usually associated with nationalism and modernity. territory here does not represent something to be symbolically (re)possessed, but rather something to be appreciated through intersubjective bodily practice. this practice in turn serves to enrich the stockpile of collective memory tropes through sensory experience, and to strengthen the bonds within the extended family and the community of origin. heritage tourism operators always promote a particular form of identity, which tends to coincide with the hegemonic template of nationhood in a given context (pretes 2003; palmer 2005). catherine palmer has argued that, as a “mundane takenfor-granted aspect of social life, heritage tourism reminds people of the nation’s core traditions through the stories of nationhood recounted at sites of national significance” (2005: 22). in the case of valaam, this is reflected in the way visitors’ movements are conceived “from above”, in such a way to impel them to identify with, and celebrate a unifying version of russianness presented by the monastery. rather than unproblematically adhering to what is offered, the visitors enter into a process of negotiation, accepting some of the aspects of the hegemonic narrative, while rejecting others. this negotiation has a pronounced temporal dimension: the emotions and meanings attached to the place are seen as belonging to different strata of historical time, and different layers of personal and collective memory. it is precisely this space-time-sociality nexus that allows the visitors to turn the highly regulated conceived space of valaam into a space that signified home and grounded belonging. hybridity, thirdspace and khora: reconciling competing discourses homi bhabha has theorized the notion of “third space”, in which cultural hybridities develop as a result of colonial encounters. rather than postulating binary oppositions between competing identity discourses, he described his “third space” as a “space of enunciation” and a “precondition for the articulation of cultural difference” (1994: 38). for bhabha, hybridity means that it is no longer possible to trace the two “original” discourses from which the third one emerges: “[hybridity] to me is the ‘third space’, which enables other positions to emerge. this third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” (1991: 211). 22 fennia 191: 1 (2013)maja mikula also, this “third space”, according to bhabha, involves a temporal dimension, as we “find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion” (1994: 1). drawing on the work of homi bhabha and others, geographer edward soja has developed a critique of social theory interested primarily in what he calls “firstspace”, or the real, material world; or “secondspace”, or the imagined world of representations of spatiality. his notion of “thirdspace”, as the privileged site of analysis, is the space in which all discursive dichotomies collapse (1996: 56): everything comes together in thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and unconsciousness, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. another useful paradigm is that of khora, theorized most notably by jacques derrida (1995) and julia kristeva (1984). described by derrida as neither “sensible” nor “intelligible”, but rather belonging to a “third genus” and being “both this and that”9 (1995: 89), this paradigm has been fruitfully utilized by anna-kaisa kuusisto-arponen in her studies of the sense of place among secondgeneration descendants of karelian refugees (2009). similarly, the produced spatiality of our visit can be understood as “both this and that”: representative of both “self” and “other”, homely and foreign at the same time. the “subjectivity” of the participants came together with the “objectivity” of historical contingency and the constraints imposed by the social practice of heritage tourism in the borderlands. a “thirdspace” was produced , which did not oppose or contest the competing “official” discourses, but rather took them with empathy and respect. this empathy was clearly expressed in several interviews. by and large, the participants of the second generation were aware that, after the exodus of the finnish population from ladogan karelia in the 1940s, the area was forcefully resettled as part of the official recruiting plans of the soviet regime.10 “the people living here are innocent,” one said. “many [of these people] came from the south, they are totally different people, who lived in totally different circumstances” (interview 1). this “innocence” was clearly something that the current inhabitants of ladogan karelia, the orthodox landscapes that had been all but obliterated under the soviets, and the ancestors of the visitors themselves were seen as having in common. conclusion despite the beauty of its natural landscape, valaam’s genius loci is far from being immune to historical contingency. rather, its “spirit of place” and its “spirit of time” are in a dynamic relationship and feed off one another’s energies.11 the production of space in valaam is deeply contested, characterized by a heterotopic ability to juxtapose “in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (foucault 1986 [1967]: 25). after a hiatus that lasted from 1940 to 1989, during which the archipelago was a kind of “non-place”, a forgotten “heterotopia of crisis” inhabited by disabled soldiers and others from the fringes of society, the post-perestroika authorities set out to inscribe it with meaning. they had to “iron out” the existing temporal discontinuities and build a continuous narrative of valaam as a beacon of civilization and a place of worship throughout the centuries, possessing a spirit of place that guaranteed timeless spirituality. as can be expected in these circumstances, the tourist space on the archipelago is conceived “from above”, leaving as little room as possible for individual meaning-making interventions. yet, drawing on lived experience, as well as on popular culture, family lore and meanings already inscribed in their collective memory, the finnish visitors were able to subvert the monolithic official discourse and produce a “third space” in their own measure. the “thirdspace” they produced was essentially governed by the same aporia that made it possible to read the souvenir photograph from the family photo album as representing simultaneously “identity” and “otherness”. the landscapes of ladogan valaam resonated strongly with the self-image of the participants in this case study. vicariously – by way of popular songs and family photographs – the monastery had already represented “home” in their personal memories. they felt that compounding these memories with lived experience was deeply enriching, and further reinforced their feeling of belonging. fennia 191: 1 (2013) 23the island monastery of valaam in finnish homeland tourism... in conclusion, what lessons can be learned from this experience, about space production in the borderlands? my tentative answer to this question is positive and forward-looking. as a popular social practice in finland, especially among the secondand third-generation descendants of the original karelian evacuees, heritage travel contributes to the shaping of european borderlands as a zone of transition and cultural exchange. rather than being conducive to conflict and cultural animosity, the collective memory at their disposal can be activated as a resource for overcoming past differences. notes 1 in the article, i use the russian toponym, valaam (russian, валаам), in my own text; and the finnish name, valamo, whenever quoting translations of finnish text. 2 in 1992, valaam was declared the national property of russia by the decree of the then president of russian federation, boris yeltsin (nilsson 2004). 3 interviews 1 and 2: female, second generation; interviews 3 and 4: female, third generation; interviews 5, 6, 7 and 8: male, second generation; interview 9: male, third generation; interview 10: travel guide. 4 my husband toivo talikka’s native command of the finnish language was a valuable resource. i would like to thank him for all his hard work and dedication, not only in the interview stage, but also in collecting and translating many of the written sources. i would also like to thank hanna talikka for her interest in the project and her involvement in several of the interviews. finally, my heartfelt thanks go to my informants, who were generous with their time and attention during an event that for each of them had a deep personal significance. 5 this point emerged in several of my interviews. a second-generation woman, for example, emphasized that she was “karelian in spirit”, and therefore found it hard to form friendships in her local environment, among the “more reserved” south-western finns (interview 2). 6 the church was granted autonomous status by the ecumenical patriarchate in constantinople in 1923. the finnish language replaced church slavonic as the official language in the same year. 7 the independent finnish orthodox church, which today counts less than 60,000 members or 1% of the nation’s total population continues to thrive today, mainly in eastern parts of finland. it has some twenty-five parishes, forty-one churches and seventy-seven chapels. in addition to new valamo, there is another functioning monastery in heinävesi, the lintula holy trinity (raivo 2002: 12). 8 when released in 1956, the song sold close to 50,000 copies and received finland’s first gold record award. its centrality in the memory lore of karelian finns was recently underscored again in aki kaurismäki’s acclaimed film, the man without a past (2002). in this film, personal memories are elevated symbolically to a collective level. the same song is sung again by the now aged singer in a nostalgic scene set significantly on midsummer eve, the finnish “flag day”, associated with ritualized expressions of the national sentiment. 9 italics are reproduced from derrida’s text. 10 anthropologist ekaterina melnikova has described the settlers as mostly non-russian speaking young families with children, recruited from ukraine, belarus, the mordovian and chuvash autonomous republics, and the ingrian villages of the leningrad district (2009: 88). 11 see loukaki (2010) for a relevant discussion of the genius loci as historically contingent. references alasuutari p & alasuutari m 2009. narration and ritual formation of diasporic identity: the case of second generation karelian evacuees. identities: global studies in culture and power 16, 321–341. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f10702890902861321. armstrong k 2004. remembering karelia: a family’s story of displacement during and after the finnish wars. berghahn books, new york. bhabha h 1991. the third space: interview with homi k bhabha. in rutherford j (ed). identity: community, culture, difference, 207–21. lawrence & wishart, london. bhabha h 1994. the location of culture. routledge, london and new york. cosgrove d 1989. geography is everywhere: culture and symbolism in human landscapes. in gregory d & walford r (eds). horizons in human geography, 118–35. barnes and noble, totowa, nj. cresswell t 2006. on the move: mobility in the modern world. routledge, new york and london. derrida j 1995. on the name. stanford university press, stanford, ca. finnish tourist association 1926. valamo: a short handbook for travellers. publication 273. helsinki. foucault m 1986 [1967]. of other spaces. trans. by miskowiec j. diacritics 16: 1, spring, 22–27. 24 fennia 191: 1 (2013)maja mikula häyrynen m 2004. a periphery lost: the representation of karelia in finnish national landscape imagery. fennia 182: 1, 23–32. huyssen a 1995. twilight memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia. routledge, new york and london. kaurismäki a 2002. mies vailla menneisyyttä (the man without a past). film co-production by sputnik, yle, bavaria film studios, pandora filmproduktion & pyramide productions. kemppinen i (ed) 1973. valamo: historiaa ja kuvia laatokan luostarisaarilta (valamo: history and pictures of the ladogan monastery). valamo-seura ry, helsinki. kilpeläinen h 2000. valamo karjalaisten luostari? luostarin ja yhteiskunnan interaktio maailmansotien välisenä aikana (valamo monastery of the karelians? interaction between the monastery and society in the period between the two world wars). suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, helsinki. kristeva j 1984. revolution in poetic language. columbia university press, new york. kuusisto-arponen a-k 2009. the mobilities of forced displacement: commemorating karelian evacuation in finland. social & cultural geography 10: 5, 545–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f14649360902974464. loukaki a 2010. whose genius loci? contrasting interpretations of the “sacred rock of the athenian acropolis”. annals of the association of american geographers 87: 2, 306–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2f0004-5608.872055. melnikova e 2009. global postsocialism on a local scale: the soviet migrants at karelia and their past. anthropology of east europe review 27: 2, 85−100. nilsson pa 2004. the white sea extension: possible tourism connections between the botnian arc region and russian karelia. working paper 25. centre for regional and tourism research, nexö. olick jk, vinitzky-seroussi v & levy d (eds) 2011. the collective memory reader. oxford university press, oxford. paasi a 1996. territories, boundaries and consciousness: the changing geographies of the finnishrussian border. j wiley & sons, chichester, uk and new york. palmer c 2005. an ethnography of englishness: experiencing identity through tourism. annals of tourism research 32: 1, 7−27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.annals.2004.04.006. parppei k 2010. saints, legends and forgeries: the formation of the historiographical image of valaam monastery. doctoral dissertation. university of eastern finland, joensuu. pretes m 2003. tourism and nationalism. annals of tourism research 30: 1, 125−42. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016%2fs0160-7383%2802%2900035-x. raivo pj 2002. the peculiar touch of the east: reading the post-war landscapes of the finnish orthodox church. social & cultural geography 3: 11, 11−24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f14649360120114116. scott am 1908. through finland to st petersburg. grant richards, london. soja e 1996. thirdspace: journeys to los angeles and other real-and-imagined places. blackwell publishing, oxford. tweedie eb 1897. through finland in carts. adam and charles black, london. whitehead a 2009. memory. routledge, london and new york. zimin d 2003. economic development of border municipalities: the cases of vyborg and sortavala. conference paper, work in progress. the 43rd congress of the european regional studies association. 27th-30th august. jyväskylä, finland. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa8210 doi: 10.11143/8210 determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object: the case of forest inventory in finland henna etula and harri antikainen etula, henna & harri antikainen (2014). determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object: the case of forest inventory in finland. fennia 192: 1, pp. 23–35. issn 1798-5617. in recent decades, routing based on geographic information systems (gis) has become a major branch of technology, which has been used especially in applications related to transport and logistics. however, in terms of the development of methods, routing in a cross-country environment is more difficult, and hence research into it has been relatively scarce. this is particularly true in the context of complex routing problems involving visits to several locations. a typical example of a problem of this kind is field inventory, which is a data collection procedure used in many application areas, particularly those related to environmental research and the management of natural resources. this study presents a problem in which an efficient inventory route is determined for an areal object, such that the area visible from the route meets a prescribed threshold, while maintaining the shortest possible route. although this problem, referred to here as the areal inventory problem (aip), is closely related to a multitude of routing and location allocation methods known in the context of gis, none of them is very well-suited for solving the aip. this study describes a general solution procedure for the aip, and introduces an implementation of a heuristic algorithm that can be used to solve a real-world aip within a reasonable time frame. the proposed approach is demonstrated with actual data related to field inventory practices carried out by the finnish forest centre. keywords: finland, inventory of forest resources, areal inventory problem, route optimization, location allocation, maximum coverage henna etula, suomen metsäkeskus, myllykatu 15, fi-65100 vaasa, finland. email: henna.etula@metsakeskus.fi harri antikainen, university of oulu, department of geography, po box 3000, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: harri.antikainen@oulu.fi introduction the determination of optimum routes is a line of technology, which has become an essential part of modern society, mostly used in logistics, fleet management, and private transport. besides the commercial or public sector applications, it is equally well established also in scientific research, manifested by the vast amount of studies considering accessibility, traffic simulation and site selection problems, which all involve the search for optimum routes. the general view of routing technology tends to emphasize the recent advances in geographic information systems (gis), positioning technology (mainly global positioning system, gps) and the computational capability of mobile devices, together with the increased availability of digital data products concerning transportation networks, as the main contributors to its broad use today. while the central role of these enabling factors cannot be disputed, it is important to realize that the route search methods and representations used in routing applications date back to at least the 1950s, or even earlier. indeed, modern-day routing applications are strongly founded on the concepts and representations of graph theory, which is a branch of mathematics focused on the notion of 24 fennia 192: 1 (2014)henna etula and harri antikainen a graph (miller & shaw 2001). a graph is essentially a structure used to model pairwise relations between objects, and it is typically denoted as (1) consisting of a set of nodes (or vertices) n and a set of edges (or arcs or links) e. an edge (2) connects nodes i and j, and has an associated cost c ij (diestel 2000). the cost may represent the impedance of travel, such as geographical distance or time, between i and j. an optimum, least-cost path between any two locations within the graph can be calculated using a graph search algorithm, such as the classic algorithm originally proposed by dijkstra (1959). the graph structure lends itself very well to representing the natural topology of transportation networks, allowing optimum transportation routes to be found efficiently. this is because a transportation network is functionally one-dimensional, and therefore it can be directly represented as a graph. however, finding routes through two-dimensional space, such as crosscountry terrain, is more difficult because the twodimensional space with unlimited movement options must first be transformed into a one-dimensional graph structure with a finite set of movement options. in gis, this can be realized by the cost surface approach. a gis-based cost surface is essentially a raster representing continuous two-dimensional space. each cell of the cost surface raster is assigned a “cost”, which depicts the impedance of movement across the cell. the raster is transformed into a graph by treating the center of each cell as a node, and the connections between adjacent nodes as edges, weighted according to the underlying cost values. an optimal path between any two locations (nodes) can be found by determining the sequence of moves constituting the least possible accumulative cost between the locations (bolstad 2002). for this purpose, the same graph search algorithms can be used as in the case of graphs representing transportation networks. the cost surface method has been used in many real-world applications, such as in determining the optimal alignment of linear constructions, like trails (xiang 1996), roads (yu et al. 2003), canals (collischonn & pilar 2000), power transmission lines (bagli et al. 2011), and pipelines (feldman et al. 1995). the method has also been used for modeling the patterns of human movement in archaeological research (howey 2007; anderson 2012), as well as in the management of protected and recreational areas (theobald et al. 2010; tomczyk & ewertowski 2013). likewise, the method has been applied in ecological research to predict the movement and migration of wildlife (lundqvist 2007; parks et al. 2013). these examples depict the versatility of the method: it can be applied in very different domains by simply adjusting the cost parameter used in the method. one of the main limitations of the least-cost path method based on cost surface analysis is that the path can only be calculated from one location to another location (or a set of other locations). hence, it is not possible to use the method to solve more complex routing problems, such as finding a route visiting several locations in an optimal order. certainly, methods for solving problems of this nature exist, and some of them have been implemented in the mainstream gis software packages. these implementations typically assume that a transportation network (or a similar, existing network) is used as a basis for route optimization. using a raster graph for this purpose is impractical due to the large number of nodes with many connections. instead, the leastcost path analysis is sometimes used to first create a graph connecting a predetermined set of locations, and this graph is then used to solve a routing problem involving visits to several locations. for example, balstrøm (2002) has employed cost surface analysis to calculate leastcost paths between all pairs of rain gauges in a study area located in mountainous terrain, and the network composed of these least-cost paths was used to determine the most optimal visiting sequence of the gauges with a routing method. in another study, store and antikainen (2010) adopted a similar approach by calculating least-cost paths based on a cost surface raster between forest stands to be inventoried. however, in this case each forest stand was assigned an importance score, and the task was to use the graph created with the least-cost path analysis to determine the most important stands that could be inventoried within a prescribed amount of time spent in the field. a basic assumption used in the aforementioned studies is that the locations to be visited comprise , , fennia 192: 1 (2014) 25determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object a finite set of discrete locations, which can be represented as a graph. however, in some routing problems, there may not be any predefined discrete locations that could serve as a basis for the graph representation. this study is motivated by a real-world routing problem related to the field inventory of areal objects, which in this case are forest stands. this problem asks for the shortest possible route to be found inside an areal object such that a proximity buffer drawn around the route, representing visibility from the route, covers at least the predefined proportion of the areal object. in the following, the background of the problem and the motivation for the study are described in more detail, and a literature review of related problem types is presented. this is followed by the description of a formal solution procedure for the problem, and the implementation of the solution is presented along with a sample problem and solution examples. field inventories field inventory is an essential but labor-intensive way to gather and produce information in many application areas, especially those pertaining to environmental research and the management of natural resources. a prime example of this are forests, for which there is a worldwide demand for information (tomppo et al. 2008). some of the need for information is related to the questions of biodiversity and ecosystems, while some are obviously related to economic aspects, involving a variety of resource modeling procedures and management plans. the information is typically collected using different methods and is carried out by many organizations. for example, the finnish forest centre, a governmental forestry organization, collects information about privately owned forests throughout finland. the information is collected both by the means of remote sensing (rs), including airborne laser scanning (als) and aerial images, and field inventory (maltamo et al. 2011). while the rs techniques, combined with reference plots examined in the field, allow valid data to be produced for most areas of interest, for a subset of areas (such as seedling stands and temporarily unstocked regeneration areas), traditional field inventory remains the only appropriate option for data collection. there are two types of inventory units used in the field inventory practices of the finnish forest centre: points and polygons. points are associated with the measurement of reference plots, in which the center point of the plot is located with the help of a gps device. the location is used as a focal point around which the trees are measured according to the given data collection instructions. polygons are associated with the so called stand-wise inventory. a forest stand is a basic unit in forestry, defined as an area which is more or less homogeneous with regard to growing stock and forest type. the size of a stand typically ranges from a half hectare to five hectares. the stand-wise inventory is not based on specific measuring points, as in the measurement of reference plots, but rather it is performed by making overall observations and measurements along an inventory route passing through the stand. the accuracy of the inventory may not always be the same for all stands (for example, mature stands are measured more carefully while data from seedling stands is often collected only by visual observations); however the same field inventory procedure is applied for all stands, requiring that an adequate level of information has to be acquired from the stand. the only way to accomplish this is to visit and inventory the stand in the field. the efficiency of field inventory is highly important. for example, the inventories carried out by the finnish forest centre cover about 1.5 million hectares of forestland every year, constituting a major data collection and maintenance effort. while around 75% of data can be obtained by using modern rs techniques, one fourth of the inventory area still requires a stand-wise field inventory. due to the high cost of field inventories, special emphasis must be devoted to the efficiency of the inventory. there are two principal ways of improving field inventory, and thereby keeping the costs within acceptable limits. the more traditional way is the careful planning of the used inventory method and the data to be collected. it is important to gather all required data during a single field visit, without a need to revisit the area later for complementary data collection. it is also useful to concentrate on properties that can be measured easily, and then use them for further calculations to derive other properties. for example, in forest inventory, the volume of the growing stock is difficult to estimate correctly in the forest, but it can be calculated based on the average diameter and height of the trees, which can be measured easily. 26 fennia 192: 1 (2014)henna etula and harri antikainen forestry field inventory methods and practices have been developed and fine-tuned over decades, and the current procedures can be considered to be efficient already, leaving little room for further improvement. therefore, instead of the actual data collection methods, there is growing interest towards seeking improvement by means of route optimization, which constitutes an additional strategy for making field inventory more efficient. the potential advantages of optimizing inventory routes seem obvious, as it provides a way to design routes that avoid unnecessary and inefficient movement in the inventoried area. by this means, a maximum amount of information can be gathered with a minimum effort or cost. this study is specifically concerned with the task of designing the route in such a way that an adequate level of coverage is reached, while the route itself is kept as short as possible. the coverage of the route means the surrounding area that can be observed or otherwise reached from the route without stepping out of the route. in this article, this problem is referred to as the areal inventory problem (aip). related optimization problems in addition to the least-cost path problem, the areal inventory problem (aip) is closely associated with many location allocation problems. perhaps the best-known and most intensively studied location allocation problem is the pmedian problem (hakimi 1964), which seeks to find optimum locations for any number p of facilities such that the sum of distances between each (weighted) demand point and the closest facility is minimized (longley et al. 2005). the solution of a p-median problem is a set of p facilities, such as health centers or schools, located as centrally as possible with regard to the demand points (representing, e.g., population at a certain level of aggregation). while minimizing the overall distance needed to access the facilities may be applicable to most situations, for certain kinds of facilities, such as fire stations and other emergency services, the facilities should cover as much demand as possible within a prescribed time or distance. this kind of problem, which is commonly referred to as the set covering location problem (sclp) (revelle & toregas 1972), seeks to allocate the demand in a particular area to a minimum number of facilities such that the distance between any facility and a demand point allocated to it does not exceed a pre-specified threshold. of course, due to the scarcity of resources, in many real-world applications it is not feasible to attempt to allocate facilities to cover all demand within a certain distance threshold; rather it is more useful to allocate facilities such that as many demand points as possible are located within the distance threshold. this variation of the problem is known as the maximal covering location problem (mclp) (church & revelle 1974). the mclp is typically used to solve commercial allocation problems, such as the location of new retail centers. the aip can be thought of as an instance of the mclp where the “facilities” are the vertices of the route and the distance threshold is the degree of visibility from the vertices. the length of the route can be minimized in the aip by applying methods used to solve the traveling salesman problem (tsp) (applegate et al. 2006). the tsp is a classic problem that seeks to find a shortest possible tour through a set of locations such that the tour visits each location exactly once. the tsp and the mclp can be combined to constitute a specific kind of problem, namely the covering salesman problem (csp) (current & schilling 1989). in the csp, the task is to find the shortest possible tour visiting a certain subset of locations, while making sure that all locations excluded from the tour are within a prescribed distance from the closest location included in the tour. several variations of the csp have been proposed in the literature. in the covering tour problem (ctp) (gendreau et al. 1997), the locations visited by the tour can be predetermined. unless locations are pre-assigned to the tour, the problem is reduced to the general csp. on the other extreme, if all locations must be included into the tour, the problem is equivalent to the basic tsp. in the generalized covering salesman problem (gcsp) (golden et al. 2012), visits to the locations can also be varied: it is possible to “stay overnight” at a location or visit it more than once, if this is necessary to cover the demand. the csp has also been refined by the original authors of the problem in a study where they define two specific kinds of problems: the median tour problem (mtp) and the maximal covering tour problem (mctp) (current & schilfennia 192: 1 (2014) 27determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object ling 1994). in the mtp, the objective is to minimize the total (weighted) distance of locations not on the tour to the nearest location included in the tour. in the mctp, on the other hand, the task is to minimize the total demand associated with the locations which are not within a certain pre-specified maximal distance from a location on the tour. apart from the formulations and solution options of the allocation problems, there has been an increasing interest towards assessing the problems with respect to how the demand is covered in allocation problems. a traditional approach is to assume that the demand is divided into cells of equal size, and for simplicity, each such cell has been discretized into a point located at the centroid of the cell. this zero-dimensional location thus represents all of the demand contained by the cell, such as population or area, for example. if the centroid is covered in the solution of the allocation problem, the entire demand of the cell is considered to be covered. this may give rise to misleading and suboptimal results. obviously, a more realistic approach would be to represent the demand by polygons rather than points. alexandris and giannikos (2010) have assessed coverage gaps by comparing the coverage calculated according to grid cells, and the coverage calculated according to spheres drawn around point locations. in their own experiment, the authors demonstrate that a better coverage can be achieved with the same number of facilities as in the traditional approach. at the same time, a partial coverage is taken into account. this signifies that a majority of the demand contained by the cell may become covered, even if the centroid of the cell is not covered (murray 2005). in that case, the calculation of the coverage is not particularly sensitive to changes in cell size, and it is also less susceptible to the modifiable area unit problem (maup). overall, the aip is related to multiple location allocation and routing problems well known in the literature, the mctp in particular. however, in the aip, the coverage is assessed in terms of areal coverage, instead of the coverage of discrete locations. as a result, it is essential to take account of the suggestions made by alexandris and giannikos (2010) regarding the calculation of the actual coverage when implementing a solution procedure for the aip. solving the areal inventory problem problem formulation the inventory of an areal object (polygon) is carried out by visiting a set of observation points, which are locations where the inventory technician stops to carry out measurements and make observations about the surrounding environment. there is no supply variation, signifying that all observation points are assumed to produce the same amount of information. in addition, there are no preconditions to the location of the observation points, other than that they are supposed to be located inside the inventoried polygon. however, the number of observation points inside the polygon, n, is determined before the inventory, based on the existing knowledge of a similar inventory. the inventory route goes through these points, such that the transfer between two consecutive points takes place along the shortest path between them. as the route should be as efficient as possible, the length of the route must be minimized. the solution algorithm proposed here is thus related to the mctp, signifying that the aim is to produce the shortest possible route that seeks to reach an adequate level of coverage attainable by n points. the observation points are not determined in continuous space, instead the polygon is represented as a finite set of candidate locations among which the n observation points are selected. however, the coverage of the inventory route is determined in continuous space, which is done by defining a buffer around the points where observations are made. since the inventory technician is also expected to make observations along the route when moving from one observation point to the next, the entire route is buffered, instead of the actual observation points only. the width of the buffer, buf, which in this case represents the length of visibility, can be a constant for all stands, or a variable depending on the properties of the forest (e.g., the length or density of growing stock) or the ruggedness of terrain. the visible area outside the boundaries of the inventoried polygon is discarded as irrelevant. the calculated route is valid provided that its coverage c (which is the visible portion of the inventoried polygon divided by the entire surface area of the polygon), is equal to or greater than a predetermined threshold c_enough. again, this parameter can be a constant or a stand-specific variable depending on the growing stock. 28 fennia 192: 1 (2014)henna etula and harri antikainen the definition of the problem is as follows: minimize the length of the inventory route subject to (1) the route goes through n points, (2) the coverage c of the route is equal to or greater than c_enough, where (3) the visible area of the polygon to be inventoried (p) is created by buffering the inventory route and the observation points with the buffer width buf and, resulting in a buffer polygon b, (4) the buffer polygon b is intersected by polygon p, in order to produce the visible area (bi_area) inside the polygon and (5) the coverage c of the route is calculated by dividing bi_area by the surface area of p. solution procedure this section describes an algorithm that can be used to solve the aip. the procedure of the algorithm is presented in the form of pseudocode, but an illustration of the algorithm is also provided as a flowchart (fig. 1). input parameters: p = the areal object to be inventoried (polygon), e = entrance (point), x = exit (point). constants: a = the surface area of p, n = the number of the observation points, buf = a buffer width and c_enough = an adequate coverage for inventory. fig. 1. the procedure for solving the areal inventory problem. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 29determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object variables: r_temp = a temporary variable for the route in process (polyline), l_temp = a length of r_temp, b = a buffer around the route r_temp (polygon) with buffer width buf, bi = b intersected by p (polygon), bi_area = the area of bi and c_temp = coverage associated with route r_temp. output parameters: r = the best route (polyline), l = the length of the best route and c = coverage of the best route, or alternatively c_max = the maximum coverage if the coverage of any route does not reach c_enough r2 = the output route if c_max is used (polyline) and l2 = the length of the route r2. the algorithm: step 1: create a set of candidate points with regular intervals over p. the interval depends on a. an appropriate point interval may be, for example, 20 meters. step 2: set variables: r = null, l = ∞, c = 0, r2 = null, l2 = 0 and c_max = 0. step 3: select points which are inside of p. step 4: for all possible sets of n points do a) set variables: r_temp = null, l_temp = 0, b = null, bi = null, bi_area = 0 and c_temp = 0. b) choose n points. c) produce the shortest possible route between e and x through n points = r_temp. d) calculate the length of r_temp = l_temp. e) buffer the route with buffer width buf = b. f) intersect b by p = bi. g) calculate the area of bi = bi_area. h) calculate the coverage c_temp = bi_area / a. i) if c_temp ≥ c_enough and l_temp < l then r = r_temp l = l_temp c = c_temp else if c_temp > c_max then r2 = r_temp l2 = l_temp c_max = c_temp step 5: print out the output parameters r, l and c. if none of the routes has reached the coverage c_ enough, print out r2, l2 and c_max. sample problem this sample problem illustrates the solving of the aip for a single forest stand with an area of 2.13 hectares. it is assumed here that a model has been constructed to estimate the parameter n for stands of different shape and size, and according to the model, n is six for this particular stand. as the stand is covered by commercial thinning forest of low density, the visibility in the area is estimated to be 30 m. due to the small size of the area, topography is not assumed to have any effect on visibility. it is also determined that the entire area does not have to be observed: instead, a 60% coverage is expected to be adequate for data collection purposes. a set of candidate points at the regular interval of 20 m is created over the stand. the selected interval is a trade-off between accuracy and computation time. 20 m was estimated to be suitable for a medium-sized forest stand, such as the one considered here. the placement of the candidate locations at this interval in the stand results in 54 points. as the inventory route is expected to visit six points, this would amount to = 25 827 165 different combinations of points. four of these combinations, and their associated routes, are illustrated in figure 2. each one of the routes is buffered, resulting in a buffer polygon b, which is then intersected with the boundaries of the stand (resulting in a clipped buffer polygon bi). the variable bi_area is used to denote the observed area of the stand, and c is the coverage score of the route (i.e. the ratio of bi_area to the entire area of the stand). the route length, l, represents the traversed distance between the start and end points of the route. the coverage of the routes presented in figure 2 varies clearly. route 3 does not exceed c_enough because all n points are concentrated in the western part of the stand. in route 4, n points are located near the boundary of the stand. the attained coverage is high but this comes at the cost of route 30 fennia 192: 1 (2014)henna etula and harri antikainen length. in addition, a great deal of b is located outside the boundaries of the stand, which is not an ideal situation. routes 1 and 2 are located in the middle of the stand and the coverage becomes high because b is almost completely located within the stand. route 3 is the shortest but its coverage is below the required threshold. the three other alternative routes have an adequate coverage, among which route 2 is the best because it is the shortest of the presented solutions. it is important to realize, though, that only a small set of alternative solutions are presented for this sample problem, leaving 25 827 161 other solutions without consideration. this signifies that instead of an exhaustive examination of all alternatives, the actual implementation of the algorithm must employ a heuristic strategy in order to keep computation time within reasonable limits. heuristic algorithms are used to quickly find a reasonably good solution to a problem in situations where it is considered too time-consuming to search for the absolutely optimal solution. indeed, due to the np-hardness of many allocations problems (denoting that their computational complexity increases exponentially with the size of the problem), their solution strategies are commonly based on heuristic algorithms (church & sorensen 1994). fig. 2. four alternative inventory routes produced for one forest stand. route 2 is the most efficient because it produces enough observed area with the shortest route length. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 31determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object heuristic solution procedure implementation a software tool was implemented by esri finland to solve the aip, and it was constructed as a geoprocessing model to be run on the arcgis software. the aip tool utilizes the built-in functions of arcgis 10.1, including the network analyst and spatial analyst extensions. instead of the general solution algorithm presented in this study, the tool employs a heuristic strategy to quickly find a good solution to the aip. the main steps of the implementation are illustrated in figure 3. the implemented aip tool consists of two principal stages. in the first stage, a set of candidate points at a regular 20-m interval is created inside a polygon, and then a mesh of straightline paths is constructed between the candidate points. the points, along with the mesh, constitute a discretized representation of the movement options inside the polygon. since forest stands are, by definition, internally homogeneous, a straight line between any two points can be safely assumed to be the shortest path connecting the points. the mesh contains all possible paths between all the candidate points, with the exception that candidate points located less than 10 m from the boundary of the area are excluded, as it is unlikely that they could belong to the optimal inventory route. the other stage of the aip tool produces the inventory route inside the polygon. the tool has six parameters: a point where the inventory route starts (entrance point), a point where the inventory route ends (exit point), a number of the observation points (n), a buffer width (buf), an adequate coverage for inventory (c_enough), and the maximum number of iterations. the entrance and exit points are user-defined locations that can be positioned anywhere on the boundary of the polygon. the route is calculated between these points, visiting any combination of n observation points that provides an adequate level of coverage, defined in c_enough, with the buffer width buf. instead of enumerating all possible route point combinations to find the absolute best solution, the tool employs a heuristic strategy to quickly find a reasonably good route. first, the tool calculates a seed route, which is the shortest possible path between the entrance and exit points. after that, it calculates a centrality score for each candidate point, which is the combined distance of the point from the seed route and from the geographic center of all of the candidate points (fig. 4). the centrality score is used to “guide” the route calculation process to search for routes that are close to the shortest possible path between the entrance and exit points, and, at the same time, centrally located, thereby being potentially good route candidates in terms of coverage. the points are sorted according to the centrality score, placing the best one first. then, the route is sought in an iterative manner. at each iteration, the first n points of the list are included in the route as intermediate points between the fixed entrance and exit points. the shortest route through this combination of points is calculated, by allowing the visiting sequence of the intermediate points to fig. 3. the heuristic procedure for solving the areal inventory problem. 32 fennia 192: 1 (2014)henna etula and harri antikainen vary in order to find the shortest route. as the route is calculated, the tool examines whether the route reached the value c_enough. unless c_enough is reached, the first point in the ordered list is removed and the tool moves into the next iteration; otherwise, the tool will stop. the tool will also terminate if all possible combinations of candidate points have already been examined, or if the maximum allowed number of iterations has been reached. the final result of the tool will be the first of the routes that reaches the threshold. however, if the tool stops due to the maximum iteration condition without reaching c_enough, the result will be the best of the examined routes. if the polygon is very small, that is, if n equals one, the tool will only calculate a route that visits the center point of the polygon. using the software tool a selection of routes calculated with the aip tool are depicted in figure 5. the routes are calculated for a forest stand with different entrance and exit points. the area of the stand is 2.2 ha. the candidate points are located at 20-m intervals, the buffer width is 25 m, the adequate coverage is 60%, and the number of the observation points is five. with these parameter values, the tool runs quickly. the size of the polygon is a significant factor determining for the computational performance of the calculation. figure 6 shows a relatively large forest stand, having a surface area of 8.0 ha. the parameters are the same as above except for the number of the observation points, which in this case is nine. the aip tool was run with 10, 25 and 50 iterations, failing to reach the adequate coverage with any one of these options. it can easily be seen in figure 3 that if the polygon in question is large, containing plenty of candidate points, the number of iterations greatly affects the quality of the resultant route. while better solutions can be achieved by allowing more iterations, this has a negative effect on computation time. for example, in the case of this particular polygon, the overall computation time more than doubles between 10 and 50 iterations. when using the tool it is important to estimate the appropriate parameters and computation time, which are critical when calculating complete inventory routes that visit many forest stands. the computation time can be controlled by adjusting the maximum allowed number of iterations, and by creating a more sparsely spaced set of points for choosing n points. unfortunately, the solution quality will deteriorate as the point set becomes more scattered. on the other hand, a very dense set of points may not help produce a better solution at all; instead, it just increases the solving time considerably. as described above, the number of points can be reduced by ignoring points close to the boundary of the polygon, since it is unlikely that such points can contribute to the extent of the visible area (the buffer outside the polygon will be cut away anyway). although this helps decrease computation time, its positive effect quickly becomes insignificant as the size of the polygon increases. conclusions this study has presented the areal inventory problem (aip), which attempts to find a route for an areal object, such that the area visible from the route meets a prescribed threshold, while maintaining the shortest possible route. although the aip is related to several classic routing and allocation problems, this particular problem has not received attention in the literature so far. in this study, an algorithm that fig. 4. the heuristic procedure begins with creating a seed route and calculating the centrality score. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 33determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object can be used to solve the aip in the gis environment is proposed. this has been demonstrated with a software tool implemented in gis, which has been tested with actual data related to forest field inventory. despite its deceptive simplicity, the aip is a complicated problem. this requires making certain presuppositions that help reduce the complexity of the problem. the presuppositions employed in this study include the appropriate number of observation points (i.e., the fixed number of points visited by the route), and the interval of candidate points used to represent the polygon and to construct the route. even with these simplifying presuppositions in effect, the computation time of the aip increases exponentially with the size of the problem. due to this property, it is only possible to find a valid solution to very small problems without a heuristic strategy. the heuristic method devised for this study is efficiently guided to quickly find good solutions. nevertheless, the number of iterations needed to find a solution that meets the given threshold may be high, and an adequately good solution may not be found at all within the limits of the prescribed number of iterations. although the proposed method for solving the aip is intended to enable the automation of a route finding procedure, and to make it possible to solve routing problems that may be too difficult to solve manually, it is necessary to realize that the use of the method still relies strongly on the gis specialist designing the representation of the aip. the processing of gis-based data elements often involves a considerable computational overhead which makes the calculation of routes, already very complicated by itself, even more challenging. the task of a gis fig. 5. three different inventory routes produced for one forest stand with different entrance and exit points. fig. 6. three different inventory routes produced for one forest stand with different numbers of iterations. 34 fennia 192: 1 (2014)henna etula and harri antikainen specialist is therefore to set up the representation of the problem and define its parameters such that the computational effort of running the aip tool is in a reasonable relation to the potential benefit acquired in the field work. with regard to the representation of the aip in the proposed solution procedure, there are certain limitations related to the way that polygons are represented by discrete points, and how the route is only allowed to visit these points, instead of searching for the route in continuous space. this effectively means that the route is always constrained to the predetermined set of candidate points and the network of connectivity defined between these points. nevertheless, the discretization scheme and the associated sacrifice in the alignment options of the route is necessary in order to devise a reasonable solution algorithm. the aip does, however, take into account continuous space by determining the covered area by means of a buffer zone drawn around the route, instead of allocating discrete candidate points to the vertices of the route. this procedure allows the discovery of better and more accurate solutions compared to the conventional mctp. the aip seeks to solve a routing problem inside a single polygon, which, of course, constitutes only a part of the larger inventory route planning problem. the complete inventory route typically visits a number of targets (forest stands) in a certain order. the implemented aip tool was designed in such a way that it can be integrated as part of a gis workflow used to determine inventory routes. in the case of forest inventory planning, the aip tool will calculate routes inside individual forest stands. when those routes are merged with the optimal routes calculated between forest stands (e.g., using the procedure proposed by store & antikainen 2010), complete routes can be produced for actual forest inventory purposes. this involves accounting for several factors, including topography, vegetation and the traversability of the terrain (etula & antikainen 2012). there are many practical aspects of routing that call for further development of the aip tool. for example, when calculating complete inventory routes (visiting a number of areas), it is possible that the areas to be inventoried are located immediately adjacent to each other. in such a situation, it might be useful to assess the coverage of the route simultaneously for both areas, instead of assessing the coverage separately. particularly in a situation where a small area is located next to a larger area, it is possible that the smaller area will actually be entirely visible from a route calculated for its large neighbor, without a need to calculate a route for the small area at all. in addition, depending on the location and shape of the areas, the most optimal strategy might involve visiting certain areas several times. for example, the shortest route might be accomplished by inventorying part of a certain area first, then moving on to inventory a different area, and then returning to the first area to complete its inventory. the ultimate objective of inventory route optimization is, after all, to minimize the overall length of a complete route, and this requires that the mutual position of the inventory targets is taken into consideration. this aspect also needs to be accounted for when selecting the entrance and exit points of consecutive targets. although the aip algorithm is formulated for the purposes of forest inventory, it is not limited to this particular application, as analogous applications can be seen in other fields as well. the value of the visibility parameter can be determined by using viewshed analysis to make the method suitable for different landscapes, and it is even possible to replace the visibility parameter with any other factor representing distance or accessibility. polygons of any shape and size can be used in the method as well, as the performance of the method can be guaranteed by adjusting the density of the candidate points to match the scale. in addition, there is no need for the polygons to be internally homogeneous, as the method can be extended to calculate the internal network of connectivity using the cost surface technique. this allows the variable traversability conditions typical to larger geographical areas to be taken into account, generating even more application possibilities. references alexandris g & giannikos i 2010. a new model for maximal coverage exploiting gis capabilities. european journal of operational research 202: 2, 3 2 8 – 3 3 8 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 6 / j . ejor.2009.05.037. anderson dg 2012. least cost pathway analysis in archaeological research. in white da & surfaceevans sl (eds). least cost analysis of social landscapes, 239–257. the university of utah press, salt lake city. applegate dl, bixby re, chvatal v & cook wj 2006. the traveling salesman problem. a computational study. princeton university press, princeton. bagli s, geneletti d & orsi f 2011. routeing of power lines through least-cost path analysis and multicriteria evaluation to minimise environmental impacts. environmental impact assessment review 31: 3, 234–239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. eiar.2010.10.003. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 35determining an optimum inventory route for an areal object balstrøm t 2002. on identifying the most time-saving walking route in a trackless mountainous terrain. geografisk tidsskrift 102: 1, 51–58. bolstad p 2002. gis fundamentals. eider press, white bear lake, minnesota. church rl & revelle cs 1974. the maximal covering location problem. papers in regional science 32: 1, 101–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01942293. church rl & sorensen p 1994. integrating normative location models into gis: problems and prospects with the p-median model. national center for geographic information and analysis. technical report 94−5. collischonn w & pilar jv 2000. a direction dependent least-cost-path algorithm for roads and canals. international journal of geographical information science 14: 4, 397–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13658810050024304. current jr & schilling da 1989. the covering salesman problem. transportation science 25: 3, 208–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/trsc.23.3.208. current jr & schilling da 1994. the median tour and maximal covering tour problems: formulations and heuristics. european journal of operational research 73: 1, 114–126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0377-2217(94)90149-x. diestel r 2000. graph theory. 2nd ed. springer, new york. dijkstra ew 1959. a note on two problems in connexion with graphs. numerische mathematik 1: 1, 269–271. etula h & antikainen h 2012. maaston kulkukelpoisuuden mallintaminen metsäsuunnittelijan näkökulmasta reitinoptimointia varten. terra 124: 1, 29–43. feldman sc, pelletier re, walser e, smoot jc & ahl d 1995. a prototype for pipeline routing using remotely sensed data and geographic information system analysis. remote sensing of environment 53: 2, 123–131. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0034-4257(95)00047-5. gendreau m, laporte g & semet f 1997. the covering tour problem. operations research 45: 4, 568–576. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.45.4.568. golden b, naji-azimi z, raghavan s, salari m & toth p 2012. the generalized covering salesman problem. informs journal on computing 24: 4, 534– 553. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.1110.0480. hakimi s 1964. optimum location of switching centers and the absolute centers and medians of a graph. operations research 12: 3, 450–459. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.12.3.450. howey mcl 2007. using multi-criteria cost surface analysis to explore past regional landscapes: a case study of ritual activity and social interaction in michigan, ad 1200–1600. journal of archaeological science 34: 11, 1830–1846. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.jas.2007.01.002. longley pa, goodchild m, maguire dj & rhind dw 2005. geographic information systems and science. 2nd ed. john wiley & sons ltd, chichester. lundqvist h 2007. ecological cost-benefit modelling of herbivore habitat quality degradation due to range fragmentation. transactions in gis 11: 5, 745–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9671.2007.01070.x. maltamo m, packalén p, kallio e, kangas j, uuttera j & heikkilä j 2011. airborne laser scanning based stand level management inventory in finland. proceedings of silvilaser 2011, 11th international conference on lidar applications for assessing forest ecosystems, university of tasmania, australia, 16–20 october 2011, 1–10. miller h & shaw sl 2001. geographic information systems for transportation. oxford university press, new york. murray at 2005. geography in coverage modeling: exploiting spatial structure to address complementary partial service of areas. annals of the association of american geographers 95: 4, 761– 772. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00485.x. parks sa, mckelvey ks & schwartz mk 2013. effects of weighting schemes on the identification of wildlife corridors generated with least-cost methods. conservation biology 27: 1, 145–154. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2012.01929.x. revelle cs & toregas c 1972. optimal location under time or distance constraints. papers of the regional science association 28: 1, 131–143. store r & antikainen h 2010. using gis-based multicriteria evaluation and path optimization for effective forest field inventory. computers, environment and urban systems 34: 2, 153–161. http:// d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 6 / j . c o m p e n v u r b sys.2009.12.003. theobald dm, norman jb & newman p 2010. estimating visitor use of protected areas by modeling accessibility: a case study in rocky mountain national park, colorado. journal of conservation planning 6, 1–20. tomczyk am & ewertowski m 2013. planning of recreational trails in protected areas: application of regression tree analysis and geographic information systems. applied geography 40, 129–139. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.02.004. tomppo e, olsson h, ståhl g, nilsson m, hagner o & katila m 2008. combining national forest inventory field plots and remote sensing data for forest databases. remote sensing of environment 112: 5, 1982–1999. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. rse.2007.03.032. xiang wn 1996. a gis based method for trail alignment planning. landscape and urban planning 35: 1, 11–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/01692046(96)00303-9. yu c, lee j & munro-stasiuk mj 2003. extensions to least-cost path algorithms for roadway planning. international journal of geographical information science 17: 4, 361–376. http://dx.doi.org/10.108 0/1365881031000072645. reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa114596 doi: 10.11143/fennia.114596 reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions hilde refstie refstie, h. (2021) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 in this lecture, i discuss the role of academia in addressing “fast policymaking” on sustainability. i suggest that the co-productive turn, whereby universities are increasingly expected to engage with a diverse set of actors, including citizens, can provide checks and balances to top-heavy bureaucracy, political elites, and market power in sustainability processes. however, if research relevance continues to be defined in neoliberal terms as meeting the needs of the economy and industry, this potential will not be realized. drawing inspiration from the “slow research movement”, the call for more reflexive co-production in sustainability science, decolonial scholarship, and alternative debates on research impact, i propose a critical reconfiguration of research relevance that would respond better to the multiple imperatives of research to be critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable. however, this reconfiguration would be contingent on active scholarly engagement with the politics that condition relevance. drawing on my experiences from participating in a collective named new university norway, i end the lecture by offering some thoughts about the ‘new’ university in coproducing sustainable solutions. keywords: fast policy, urban sustainability, knowledge co-production, action research hilde refstie (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7772-4419), norwegian university of science and technology (ntnu), department of geography, no-7491, trondheim, norway. e-mail: hilde.refstie@ntnu.no © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7772-4419 mailto:hilde.refstie@ntnu.no 160 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper introduction our beautiful earth is becoming inhospitable to us. how should educators, researchers, and knowledge creators respond to this existential threat? by accepting an unpalatable truth: our mainstream approach to learning, education, and research is actively co-producing the very opposite of what we need at this time of unsustainability. (bradbury et al. 2019, 3) we live in a time defined by climate change, biodiversity loss, social and economic inequalities, conflict, and, most recently, a global pandemic, which has accentuated the dire need for sustainable solutions. the topic for the annual meeting of finnish geographers 2021, “searching for solutions: geographers for the environment and people”, for which this lecture was prepared, was therefore timely. we are now two years into the decade of action launched by the united nations with the aim to deliver the global sustainable development goals (sdgs) by 2030, and we as researchers are urgently called upon to do our part (united nations 2019). in this lecture, i revisit what ‘doing our part’ means in a progressive world of fast policymaking. fast policymaking refers to the accelerated rate of experimentation that concentrates on policy shortcuts that can inform effective and visible forms of political action (peck 2002). while there is no doubt that the immediate concerns captured in the 2030 agenda require an intensification of efforts, fast policymaking tends to favor “technocratic strategies pushed by well-resourced multilateral agencies” over more “organically grown, endogenous approaches to policy innovation” (peck & theodore 2015, xxxi, xxxii). this means that while solutions may be produced fast, they may not necessarily be just or sustainable. for example, tahvilzadeh, montin and cullberg (2017) argue that in urban politics sustainability has become a hegemonic concept used to evade scrutiny and attract positive affections for any coalition of actors partaking in city development. in their study of the gothenburg metropolitan area, they illustrate how the urban sustainability discourse functions as a tool to make the city region governable, so that infrastructural development and housing can be continued in line with what they describe as a “market-oriented, economic-growth-first rationale” (tahvilzadeh et al. 2017, 66). more importantly, they show how the language of “co-production”, despite its radical potential, ends up facilitating this kind of fast policymaking. co-production can generally be defined as the idea of involving multiple participants (researchers, policymakers, industry and private sector, civil society, and citizens) together in knowledge production and policymaking to develop new knowledge and new ways of integrating knowledge into decisionmaking and action, and hence new outcomes in the world (miller & wyborn 2020). co-production is seen to “generate new knowledge, capacities, networks, social capital and joint action” and lead to “a more relevant, agile, inclusive, legitimate, impactful and innovative knowledge-action system” (schneider et al. 2021, 128). however, co-production can also function as “washing”, whereby processes are portrayed and marketed as being inclusive while at the same time enabling business as usual to continue (cooke & kothari 2001). the 2030 agenda has been promoted as enabling win-win scenarios in which commercial and public interests align to achieve the sdgs (united nations 2015). this partnership approach has been an overall goal of the sdg framework from the start, but limited attention has been paid to how power dynamics work in the different spaces of co-production promoted through the framework and what policy processes they enable or disable (wilson 2015). with blue becoming “greener than green” (sundar & kellaris 2016, 64), the association with the un flag and the 2030 agenda has given actors opportunities to market themselves as social and environmental entrepreneurs (macellari et al. 2021). this in turn has given rise to debates on “sdg washing” – as flagged by roel nieuwenkamp, the former chair of the oecd working party on responsible business conduct – whereby actors “use the fennia 199(2) (2021) 161hilde refstie sustainable development goals to market their positive contribution to some sdgs while ignoring the negative impact on others” (nieuwenkamp 2017). the appropriation of discourse to mobilize power and alliances along the lines of existing interests and hierarchies are not new in urban development. however, fast policymaking that speaks to the urgency of sustainability challenges and assumes legitimacy from being co-produced is particularly difficult to question. cox and bèland (2013) attribute the potency of sustainability as a marketing concept to its “valence”, defined as the emotional quality of an idea that makes it more, or less, attractive. they argue that policy entrepreneurs make use of ideas with high valence to frame policy issues and generate support for their policy proposals. it is thus relevant to consider how the coupling of sustainability and co-production – both very valent ideas – impact and is impacted by fast policymaking. in this lecture, i draw on secondary literature, my own observations, and 25 interviews1 with researchers and policymakers in norway engaged in different urban sustainability partnerships, to illustrate how sustainability – especially when coupled with ‘co-production’ and ‘citizen participation’ – can serve as a vehicular idea that promotes fast policymaking (mclennan 2004; peck & theodore 2010; temenos & mccann 2012). i argue that the “co-productive turn” in research and policy (bell & pahl 2018) has changed the landscape of fast policymaking and therefore more discussion is needed on the different roles that knowledge-producing actors play in co-productive spaces (temenos & baker 2015; flinders et al. 2016). to start this discussion, i draw inspiration from the “slow research” movement (mountz et al. 2015), the call for more reflexive co-production in sustainability science (wyborn et al. 2019; turnhout et al. 2020), decolonial scholarship (noxolo 2017; sultana 2019), and alternative debates on research impact (pain et al. 2011) to argue for a critical reconfiguration of research relevance that responds better to the multiple imperatives of research to be critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable (refstie 2018). however, this reconfiguration is contingent on active scholarly engagement with “the politics that condition relevance” (staeheli & mitchell 2008). drawing on my experiences from participating in a collective named new university norway i therefore end the lecture by offering some thoughts for the ‘new university’ in co-producing sustainable solutions. co-producing the smart sustainable city sustainability transitions are generally multi-actor processes characterized by a host of “wicked problems”2 (polk 2015). therefore, they require cross-sectoral approaches and collaborations, both to address complexity and to ensure that solutions are accepted by the wider public (frantzeskaki & rok 2018). as a result, co-production has become a cornerstone of research and policymaking on sustainability, commonly highlighted in five broad and interconnected ways: (1) as a tool for advancing new innovative knowledge and design (lund 2018); (2) as a way to increase policy uptake within the general population (wyborn et al. 2019); (3) as a normative goal in terms of governance (ibid.), (4) as an analytical lens through which to gain a better understanding of the ways in which science-policy interactions are always ongoing co-productions (jasanoff 2004); and (5) as a general means to increase research relevance (dilling & lemos 2011). in urban planning and governance, the concepts of sustainability and co-production have received a distinct place. given rapid global urbanization and the concentration of people and activities in cities, the sustainability agenda has been actively taken up by cities across the world. together with the push for more inclusive cities this has resulted in multi-stakeholder collaborations in the form of city forums, participatory planning studios, citizen panels and committees, and urban living labs, to mention some (bulkeley et al. 2019). many of these initiatives have been formed under the heading of ‘smart cities’, as ‘smartness’ has been heavily emphasized in urban policy and research as a tool to achieve sustainability. while smartness is a different and possibly more instrumental concept compared with ‘sustainability’ (ahvenniemi et al. 2017), both concepts form part of what söderström, paasche and klauser (2014) describe as contemporary language games in urban management and development; where experts, marketing specialists, consultants, corporations, and city officials frame how cities are understood, conceptualized, and planned. thus, many of the co-production dynamics explored in smart cities are relevant when discussing urban 162 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper sustainability, especially as several of the actors remain the same and the concepts are being stretched to connect (karvonen et al. 2019). smart city strategies provide market opportunities that attract a wide variety of stakeholders and interests. however, prioritizations of investments – the core of public politics – tend to be framed as a technical matter of promoting market-led solutions and technological upgrades (cardullo & kitchin 2019). therefore, urban smartness in sustainable development discourse has been criticized for constituting yet another tool for capital and profit; a tool enabled by the notion of a value-free, impartial sustainability that can be achieved with the citizens, the state, and the private market working together in various partnerships and constellations (swyngedouw 2007; parr 2009). it follows that it is important to not just explore and analyze what discourses on co-producing smartness and sustainability say, but also to interrogate critically what they do (tahvilzadeh et al. 2017). in their study of smart sustainable city initiatives in three norwegian cities, namely trondheim, bergen and bodø, gohari and colleagues (2020a) argue that it is crucial to consider whose interests are being advanced in collaborations on smartness and sustainability. they contend that identification of different interests and goals are challenging at the local level, where governance systems are more informal. in addition, citizens are often involved more as ‘learners’ and ‘testers’ than as active agents. therefore, the top-down narratives pushed by eu policy objectives and funding frameworks are rarely challenged in smart sustainable city processes (gohari et al. 2020b). instead, citizen engagement remains cosmetic and limited by political and industrial visions of what is profitable for private and municipal actors. cardullo and kitchin (2019, 36) go even further, and describe the use of citizen participation in smart city making as a rebranding to “silence detractors or bring them into the fold while keeping the central mission of capital accumulation and technocratic governance intact”. they argue that while many attempts are made to promote the smart city as “citizen focused […] smart urbanism remains rooted in pragmatic, instrumental and paternalistic discourses and practices rather than those of social rights, political citizenship, and the common good” (cardullo & kitchin 2018, 1). as exemplified above, there is no shortfall in literature pointing out how discourses of both smart and sustainable development are used to further the interests of entrepreneurial actors supported by the state (gunder 2006). however, the critique seldom makes inroads into policymaking processes in which knowledge co-production is used to ensure research relevance and impact on sustainability issues. as stated by tahvilzadeh, montin and cullberg (2017, 80) with reference to their gothenburg study: “while critical voices investigate what sustainability is, could or should be, they are detached from the workshops where the actual investment decisions are being made, and the reports, though published, are politely recognized and conveniently hidden in bookcases”. following this reflection and similar observations of urban sustainability work made over the years, my colleague hilde nymoen rørtveit and i decided to design a research project that explored how researchers in norway reflect on their role in combatting what gunder (2006, 209) describes as “promarket interpretations of sustainable development that water down the concept of sustainability to literally that of business as usual, with, at best, an objective to partially reduce urban-consumer energy consumption and waste outputs while still maximizing the potential for all embracing economic growth with little regard to overall resource depletion.” in our project, we wanted to explore to what extent the discussion raised by gunder (2006) is relevant in the norwegian context; whether researchers can be expected to challenge greenwashing, bluewashing, sdg washing and participation washing in sustainability collaborations, and, if so, how well-placed researchers are within current university incentive and performance structures to do so. in addition to observations at various events and project meetings, we conducted 25 interviews with researchers and municipal workers engaged in different urban sustainability partnerships in norway, with the help of our colleague leika aruga. in the interviews, we asked the participants to reflect on how their projects had been initiated and developed, how partners were brought on-board, what discussions had taken place in the collaborations on potential diverging interests and views on sustainability, and what they considered the role of researchers to be in the different partnerships and projects. the findings were also discussed at a university webinar, with several researchers engaged in sustainability co-production collaborations present. fennia 199(2) (2021) 163hilde refstie balancing multiple imperatives of research in co-producing smart sustainable cities in norway in norway, the popular use of the sdgs is extremely visible and there is high competition between cities in terms of taking up the 2030 agenda (andersen & røe 2016). the capital city, oslo, which has visions of a green city securing a sustainable future for all, was appointed the european green capital for 2019 by the european commission. tromsø in the north is using the slogan of a “sustainable travel destination” to attract tourists. bergen in the southwest hosts an annual national sdg conference, and ålesund, farther north on the southwest coast, has developed a futurelab as part of the un’s implementation program for smart and sustainable societies. trondheim, where i am based, has declared itself as ‘taking the lead’ in promoting sustainable cities in norway through its involvement in the un sdg cities (sdgc) leadership platform, which was created in davos, switzerland, in 2018 (karlsen 2018). the latter includes the establishment of a geneva un charter centre of excellence in trondheim, as well as wider collaboration between cities in norway and globally that puts ‘the sustainable city’ front and center in the urban development discourse. sustainable urban development has in this way become part of the competition between cities to make their marks on national as well as global agendas. the many urban sustainability initiatives with co-productive elements in norway have led to a host of researchers collaborating in different ways with municipalities, industry, and civil society. this forms part of the co-productive turn where universities are increasingly expected to engage with industry, national and local authorities, and citizens, in order to stimulate development and drive societal impact (bell & pahl 2018). for many universities the 2030 agenda has become the umbrella for the co-productive turn, as is visible in university strategies, of which many build actively on the sustainable development goals. projects and strategies therefore refer to and position themselves according to different sdgs. it is difficult to see the inclusion of the sdgs in various collaborations, visions, and strategies as anything other than a positive development. similarly, the partnership approach to sustainable development, together with the emphasis on co-production of knowledge and solutions, may open for a plurality of voices in research, policy, and decision-making. however, development history has shown us that participatory approaches are easily manipulated and can function as a “tyranny” (cooke & kothari 2001). they can mask interest conflicts and force consensus, while receiving legitimacy through the very same processes. the workings of power in co-productive spaces must therefore be continuously interrogated. this interrogation did, however, rarely take place in the collaborations looked at in the study. as put by one of the researchers interviewed “i do not think we are used to talking about power relations […] everyone thinks and behaves like we have the same power, but in reality, it is not so [...] we need to have a conversation about the different roles [of actors in sustainability collaborations]” (interview, researcher 4). this pertains not the least to the role of universities, research institutions, and individual researchers in such partnerships.3 scandinavian universities were long seen as a stronghold for university autonomy, given the historically firm support for government-funded basic research. however, research has become increasingly commercialized and innovation driven (tjora 2019). universities compete with other research institutions for funding, and new partnerships are formed under the heading of coproduction that blur the lines between basic research, applied research, and contract research. new public management has also steadily made its inroad into the sector, and research priorities are increasingly set with reference to national strategies (hjelseth 2019; åmossa 2021). in order to compete for external research funding, research has to respond to a number of preset criteria and tick the right boxes. this has given rise to critical conversations about the diminishing space for universities to fulfill one of their key missions: to challenge prevailing orthodoxies and enlarge the democratic sphere for the benefit of the wider public (giroux 2005).4 the interviewees in our study did not seem too worried about hard state censorship or full privatization of research funding imposing limitations on the space for critical conversation in projects. instead, what emerged in different forms was how formation of partnerships and research was seen to be ‘nudged’ in certain directions. nudging refers to a form of “soft paternalism” that 164 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper steers people in certain directions without taking away their full choice (thaler & sunstein 2008). developed in behavioral economics, the term describes a form of influence through positive reinforcements and indirect suggestions. in the academic context, and in our study, the concept is useful to understand how research priorities are nudged in specific directions through funding incentives, partnership preferences, and performance indicators, put in place by an increasingly topdown and externally governed university sector. the researchers interviewed in our study considered themselves as being relatively free in terms of choosing which collaborations they entered into or were part of, and how they expressed themselves in those collaborations. however, when tracing the origins of their project collaborations, most researchers acknowledged that funding structures and strategic directions coming from funding agencies and university management impacted heavily on what projects and collaborations took place. as stated by one of the interviewees: “the goals set [for a research project] are not based on identified problems. the goals are based on how you can access funding” (interview, researcher 5). this also impacted the framing of sustainable solutions. one researcher reflected on how research priorities were formed in a large collaboration on sustainable energy that involved electricity providers. the researcher pointed out how only certain types of solutions were put on the table and that these were taken for granted throughout the project. in the interview, the researcher reflected “why is the transition about … making more smart homes or making the electricity more flexible and why don’t we just use less? because there is no money in it. so, sustainability is in a way also part of the market in this sense” (interview, researcher 1). for many institutions and organizations, the un’s sustainable development goals framework seems to offer a way out of the tensions between private and public interests in research. however, as the above quote illustrates, there is an inclination towards prioritizing green-growth oriented strategies over, for example, reduction in consumption in for-profit collaborations (luke 2013). the three-legged conceptualization of environmental, social, and economic sustainability in the 2030 agenda is also operationalized in competing sustainable development goals (sdgs) that are open for interpretation and trade-offs (menton et al. 2019). one of the interviewees described sustainability as having become the following: a huge, fuzzy concept and that is the problem with sustainability, it can be mobilized for anything. it’s a very, very, very popular term to label plans with and specific developments as well. because it’s so positive a term and a positive concept, it is largely, mostly misused, as well. so, everything and anything is labeled, like sustainable, or picked out, like one goal here and a subgoal there (interview, researcher 3). the sdgs are framed as something that most people can support, and while the interrelated nature of the goals is stressed, the framework opens for possible cherry picking, thus making it adaptable to a host of agendas (forestier & kim 2020). to safeguard some of the radical potential that lies in connecting environmental and social justice under the heading of sustainable development in coproduced research and policy, it is therefore crucial with ongoing inquiry into who owns and defines the research and policy problem – or on whose behalf solutions are being sought. discussions on co-production is therefore highly interlinked with discussions on how research relevance is sought and for whom (harvey 1974). reconfiguring research relevance in the search for sustainable solutions – care and responsibilities relevance commonly refers to “the quality or state of being closely connected or appropriate” (lexico n.d.). it reflects “the degree to which something is related or useful to what is happening or being talked about” (cambridge dictionary 2021). the term relevance is also closely linked to notions of ‘impact’, of having a “marked effect or influence” on matters at hand (lexico n.d.). as the 2030 agenda represents some of the most pressing issues of our time, it is not surprising that research relevance is increasingly defined as responding to sustainable development challenges. geography as a discipline has largely responded to the call for producing policy-relevant research that engages with fennia 199(2) (2021) 165hilde refstie the ‘real world’, as was much of the debate in the early 2000s (castree 2002; dorling & shaw 2002; ward 2005). however, the discussion on whom our research is to be relevant for is particularly pertinent with reference to the co-productive turn. for example, bakewell (2008) warns against the conflation of ‘policy’ and ‘practical’ research relevance. in his call for more “policy irrelevant” research on forced migration, he makes the following argument: [researchers] tend to take the categories, concepts and priorities of policy makers and practitioners as their initial frame of reference for identifying their areas of study and formulating research questions. this privileges the worldview of the policy makers in constructing the research, constraining the questions asked, the objects of study and the methodologies and analysis adopted. (bakewell 2008, 432) participatory action research (par) has been promoted as one way of ensuring that research moves beyond the interest of policymakers (pain et al. 2011). par outlines an ethics of engagement with people affected by policy. it aims to develop comprehensive knowledge of a situation, but also to support people’s capacity for organized and collective action. envisioned as a bottom-up project, the most emancipatory forms of par represent a decolonizing strategy of particular relevance for communities whose voices have been silenced, excluded, obscured, or otherwise censored in dominant discourses (tuck 2009). at the same time, par has become a stretched concept that covers several different approaches. action-oriented research methodologies have been mainstreamed in co-production efforts and much action research now takes the form of university-public-private partnerships in which priorities are largely set by policymaking actors. this trend is further reinforced by the ways in which research projects are increasingly application-based and co-produced in line with strategies set by different governmental and private funders. a similar trajectory can be observed with citizen science, a strand of participation-oriented research that places specific emphasis on people’s capacity to engage in science (bonney et al. 2009). partnerships range from more conventional scientist-driven research projects that include community engagement, to crowdsourcing through networks focused on data collection, and to research driven by groups of citizens responding to community needs. while citizen science (as indicated by the name) has potential in terms of recentering the public in research, it is riddled with many of the same dilemmas as action research in terms of how societal inequalities continue to shape representation and modes of participation in projects (soleri et al. 2016). as citizen science is mainstreamed, it may thus become submerged in the same co-production dynamics that are present in fast policymaking and where fast research becomes a component. our interviewees did not conclude whether the processes they had been part of, and were still part of, could be considered fast research or fast policymaking. yet their reflections highlighted the importance of analyzing co-productive spaces with a particular eye on discursive and microdynamics of power present both within and outside such spaces. this is of particular importance in participatory spaces, as the very search for consensus-based solutions can make conflicting interests harder to identify and trace (pløger 2018). one of the interviewed municipal officials, when discussing the role of the university in sustainability collaborations, raised the following question: “where is the line between being a research institution and a consulting company? (…) there are many dilemmas. i generally think the level of conflict is too low. there are far too many who get away with too much without being challenged on basic assumptions” (interview, municipal worker 4). in the interview, the official called for a more critical engagement from the academe, referring to university-city-industry collaborations on sustainability. research in the co-productive turn is expected to respond to multiple imperatives of being critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable. it should be able to explain phenomena, lead to impact, be anchored with stakeholders, while at the same time explore, expose, and question hegemony and traditional assumptions about power in the pursuit of social change (refstie 2018). balancing these multiple imperatives for research are challenging at the best of times, but in a system where fast research is incentivized it can be backbreaking. prospects for innovation with impacts that can be identified ahead of research projects have become an important requirement for research funding from governments, private actors, or regional bodies such as the european union. research also operates on an increasingly project-based manner with tight time frames. lastly, the precarious work 166 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper environment for many young scholars can make it difficult to raise critical voices against the very partnerships that secures their temporary employments. together these developments pose significant challenges to realizing the radical potential inherent in co-production of research and policy for sustainable solutions. the question is whether these challenges can be overcome. lewis and hogan (2016, 1) argue that fast research leads to “the over-simplification of policy into easy to implement solutions, which constrains the possibilities for reform, and denies local alternatives to be imagined and practiced.” they conclude that “in spite of the seemingly obvious alignment between fast policies and a fast social world, there are clear policy benefits to be had from ‘making haste slowly’” (lewis & hogan 2016, 15). according to benoit-antoine bacon, former dean of arts and science at bishop’s university in canada, some researchers solve the tension between the fast-paced, metric-oriented university, and the need for slow scholarship by adopting a two-speed research approach: “one safer and more ‘productive’ stream that guarantees renewal of research funding and in parallel, a slower, more thoughtful, quality-focused approach where they can do their best work over long periods of time” (cited in mccabe, 2012). however, as pointed out by shahjahan (2014), this individual response becomes a problem when fast research ends up colonizing the limited research time of scholars. accordingly, mountz and colleagues (2015) explore slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics as an alternative to the fast-moving neoliberal university. they describe the neoliberal university as an institution where logics, techniques, principles, and values from the sphere of commerce – such as competition, privatization, efficiency, and self-reliance – are applied to the university to instill productivity and excellence. the authors suggest that slowing down in the neoliberal university is not about speed per se, but about developing the space to address structures of power and inequality. this is essential in sustainability debates, where depoliticization dynamics in coproduction are being pointed to as reinforcing rather than mitigating unequal power relations, and thereby preventing wider societal change from taking place (turnhout et al. 2019). inspired by lawson’s call for a caring geography as a radical project (lawson 2009), mountz and colleagues argue for a remaking of universities through “ethics of care” and pose the following question: what if we accounted for planning and engagement, for following through rather than moving on? care – full scholarship is also about engaging different publics (not least our own research subjects), refining or even rejecting earlier ideas, engaging in activism and advocacy, and generally amplifying the potential impact of our scholarship rather than moving on to the next product that “counts” to administrators. (mountz et al. 2015, 1245) as they emphasize, slow scholarship is contingent on having space “to stop, reflect, reject, resist, subvert, and collaborate to cultivate different, more reflexive academic cultures” (mountz et al. 2015, 1249). care-full scholarship is therefore crucial to move towards more transformative research that addresses inequalities and root causes over symptoms. however, revealing the causality between the actions of groups of relatively privileged people and the suffering of the majority world and the environment does not necessarily lead to a greater sense of political responsibility (raghuram et al. 2009). researchers therefore need to “critically engage with the production of knowledge for sustainability through more action-oriented transformations research” (bradbury et al. 2019, 4). this includes holding institutions to account. as stated by sultana (2018, 186): if we want emancipatory politics and transformations in development, we need to challenge and improve what is done in the name of sdgs, keeping central the issues of social justice and ethical engagement. this is perhaps the most critical thing geographers can undertake going forward in order to dismantle the master’s current house. even though co-production is one of the most important ideas in the theory and practice of knowledge and governance for global sustainability, systematic engagement with the role of power and politics in shaping processes and outcomes for sustainability has been lacking in the sustainability coproduction literature (turnout et al. 2019; miller & wyborn 2020). here much can be learnt from post and decolonial scholarship where the mainstreaming of collaborative and participatory actionoriented research, together with local and global power asymmetries, have been at the center of debate for decades (roy 2015). a recentering of historical and relational power dynamics can help fennia 199(2) (2021) 167hilde refstie studies and work on sustainability co-production better interrogate how “in a world of staggering, and increasing, inequality, the very words ‘our common future’ can serve as cover for evading responsibility, through business as usual, and by failing to address the maldistribution of wealth and power that got us to the mess we are in” (jasanoff 2018, 12). moreover, it can provide as called for by sultana (2018) a basis for an(other) geographical critique of development and the sdgs, that expands the role of public intellectuals in holding institutions and people to account. a reconfiguration of research relevance, and how research relevance is practiced as described above, requires the carving out of new spaces for scholarly engagement on the role of universities as well as university researchers, in the co-production of knowledge and policy. in a time where competing claims to the university is taking place, this is a many-faceted discussion that requires interrogation of how “complex relationships built upon contract rather than collegiality and aimed at profit generation rather than knowledge for its own sake or public service enfold public universities into the field of commerce” (ball 2012, 24). it also involves discussions on how to create more equitable research partnerships and collaborations across global divisions (noxolo 2017). this includes changes in the practices and systems of research funding, publishing, peer review, and knowledge infrastructures that currently promote global divisions of labor (jazeel 2016). discussions on (re)searching for sustainable solutions can therefore not be divorced from discussions of the systems that guides them. struggles for remaking the university in an environment of economic efficiency and intensifying competition, the space for critical reflexivity and scholarly mobilization is experienced by many as shrinking (berg et al. 2016). this pertains in particular to young scholars who are often at the receiving end of some of the most brutal consequences of the neoliberal university in terms of job insecurity and intense pressure to perform according to narrowly set indicators on research quality (riding et al. 2019). in our study, interviewees who held temporary positions at the university brought their status up as a hindrance for engaging more critically with discussions on the research collaborations their work were situated within. this points to how particular attention must be paid to different positionalities, and how they intersect to influence who can speak up or not, in debates on knowledge co-production and fast policymaking. as written by lorne (2021) in his commentary on researching, mobilizing and critiquing public policy, researching fast policy is …increasingly at odds with the intense pressures of city halls, governmental departments and universities seeking the latest policy solutions yesterday (kuus 2015). and the pressure of time can weigh heavily upon fast policy researchers. it is hard to be future-orientated in your outlook – counter to jessop’s (2011) romantic public irony – if you’ve got three months left on your work contract. (lorne 2021, 6) the above pertains not the least to scholars located outside of the geography discipline’s euroamerican core, who might experience precarious work environments combined with global structural academic marginalization (jazeel 2016; schmidt & neuburger 2017). however, in such pressed situations, new spaces for activism are also carved out. this is noticeable from movements such as the ‘pink tide’ in latin america, the ‘arab spring’, and the ‘umbrella revolution’ in china that included students and staff mobilizing for critical independent academia and the university as a counterforce to authoritarian regimes (roberts 2015). it is also visible with young activist researcher collectives being developed such as scientist rebellion, concerned scientists and many more.5 lastly, it has been prominent in calls in recent years for a “new university” that can provide a counterweight to commodification of education and research across europe (van reekum 2015). the university sector has seen many reforms in past decades, and much has been written about the ways in which marketization, corporatization, commercialization, and financialization have changed the ways research and education are done (slaughter & rhoades 2000; radice 2013). in 2015, some of these discussions gained new momentum in europe when dutch students, for the first time since 1968, kicked open the doors of the historic administrative center, maagdenhuis, at the university of amsterdam. the dissent marked the start of a six-week sit-in protest against the marketization of universities (van reekum 2015). similar protests took place in utrecht, london, 168 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper leeds, toronto, tirana, and helsinki (ratcliffe 2015). in lund, gothenburg, uppsala, and stockholm thousands of students gathered in 2013 under the banner “universities are not for sale” (arbetaren 2013). in roskilde, århus, and copenhagen students blocked the offices of university staff to protest against the government’s higher education policies (monsen 2013; sommer 2015). the attention the protests received led to talk of an “academic spring” across europe, where marketization of universities was put on the agenda by students and staff (risager & thorup 2016). the waves from the protests also reached ntnu (trondheim), where a group of young scholars, including myself, had begun to mobilize against top-down mergers and policies that worked to instill an entrepreneurial and commercial logic in research and education at our university. in formulating our critique, we likened protesting neoliberal reforms in norwegian universities to “fighting fog”, meaning how it was difficult for us as young scholars to navigate a landscape where the problem was more about the questions never posed, the articles never written, and the collaborations never formed than about any absolute restrictions on academic freedom (andresen et al. 2015). to “fight fog” requires a level of reflection that we as scholars seldom have time and space to achieve (riding et al. 2019). because answering questions about what we do, and do not do, as an academic collective requires us, as called for by staeheli and mitchell (2008, 357), to frame the search for research relevance “within explicit discussions of either the politics of relevance or of the social practices that condition relevance” inside and outside of our universities. to do this, i have argued in this lecture, much can be learned from the slow scholarship movement (mountz et al. 2015), the calls for more reflexive co-production in sustainability science (wyborn et al. 2019; turnhout et al. 2020), postcolonial and decolonial research (noxolo 2017; sultana 2019) and alternative thinking on research impacts from engaged scholarship (bradbury et al. 2019). what these have in common are thorough reflections and discussions on ways in which to balance the multiple imperatives of research to be rooted, critical, explanatory, and actionable (refstie 2018). while being far from a straightforward task, and one that i invite commentaries following this lecture to help unpack, more reflexive scholarship can help to mitigate the bias in research that favors the worldview of policymakers and “the ruling classes of the corporate state” (harvey 1974, 23). it can also work to address the “geographies of geography”, which includes “the structural partiality, inequality and euroamericanism of the community mobilized by such phrases as ‘our discipline’” (jazeel 2016, 650). this is necessary to raise a critique that challenges depoliticization dynamics in co-production on sustainability (turnhout et al. 2020) and to facilitate transitions from “assessing sustainability problems to identifying and deploying effective sustainability solutions” (miller & wyborn 2020, 88). nevertheless, and as emphasized by many of the abovementioned scholars, reflexivity is not enough if the goal is to prevent fast policymaking and sustainability fixes. transformation requires scholarly engagements with the structures that guide research in the entrepreneurial university. therefore, scholarly activist spaces become very important for expanding the role of public intellectuals to hold institutions to account. in this work, much can be learnt from connecting different activist spaces, and engaging with the politics governing research relevance from decolonial perspectives. as argued by raghuram, madge and noxolo (2009), learning from, and engaging with, anti-colonialist struggles has the potential to charge scholarly responsibility and care “with emotions such as anger, anticipation and hope that make responsibility not a burden but forward-looking: it contains ‘alternative visions, alternative understandings of how the world could be better’” (gilmartin & berg 2007, 120). in such a way, different forms of “thirdspaces”, as places of resistance and transformation inspiring researcher activist collectives, can be a platform from where to co-produce the world (hooks 1990). conclusions similar to the description provided by dear (1999, 144) over twenty years ago, there are currently several social, economic, and environmental dynamics at play that have created a contemporary “relevance renaissance”. socioeconomic inequalities, the increasing recognition of our planet’s environmental boundaries, polarization of world politics, conflict, and the global covid-19 pandemic have instilled a sense of urgency and put pressure on research to contribute to immediate policy and practical solutions. to achieve this, co-production has been highlighted as crucial, reviving longstanding fennia 199(2) (2021) 169hilde refstie debates on power, participation, and the structure of the knowledge economy. as the landscape for fast policymaking is changing, more discussion is needed on the different roles actors play in coproductive spaces and how power in co-production influence understandings of research relevance. as have been pointed out in this lecture, there are many pitfalls to be observed when co-production is used as a tool to ensure research relevance. one is the risk to accept uncritically the priorities set by decision-makers who operate within political and economic constraints that favor clientelist politics and short-time frames (e.g., election cycles or time-sensitive profit maximation). another pitfall is to adopt existing policy categories and concepts without questioning their underlying assumptions or the purpose for which they have been developed. a third is to contribute to fast policymaking that constructs simplified and definitive solutions, which in turn serve already well-capacitated actors. a fourth is to contribute yet again to the limitations and injustice resulting from centering euro-american thought in academic knowledge co-production. without more critical reflection and renewed discussion on how power works in co-productive spaces, sustainability researchers risk contributing to all four pitfalls, thereby paving the way for continued implementation of unjust sustainability fixes. fast policymaking on sustainability enabled in spaces of co-production is deeply problematic, not only because of its unjust effects, but also because it “stifles the potential for substantive social and environmental change” (gunder 2006, 208). at the same time, co-production holds the potential to challenge fast policymaking, given the right conditions. some of these conditions are outlined in the critical action research literature and in methodological reflections on participation and co-production prevalent in critical, feminist, post-colonial and decolonial studies. as argued by sultana (2019, 25), “asking probing questions, such as who created this knowledge, what assumptions does it rely on, what does deconstructing its façade reveal, who is speaking for whom, and so on is an integral part of fighting social and environmental injustices”. for this reason, i have argued in this lecture for a critical reconfiguration of research relevance, coupled with scholarly activism to enable research to better respond to the multiple imperatives of research to be critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable (refstie 2018). this is not a revolutionary proposition, but one that needs continuous highlighting. otherwise, we risk repeating the failures referred to by francis (2001) when describing the ways in which the world bank embraced participatory methodologies in the late 1990s. he argued that researchers had become colluders “in the manufacture of a collective dream of participation and community, behind the screen of which the levers of business remain quite intact” (francis 2001, 87). that kind of fast researcg and policymaking is, ironically, something we simply do not have time for. notes 1 interviews, observations, and text analysis were conducted as part of the ongoing research project “co-producing smart sustainable cities – the role of knowledge production in fast policymaking” at the norwegian university of science and technology (ntnu). 2 a “wicked problem” is one that results from multiple contingent and conflicting issues and that to a large extent depends on the perspective from which an answer to the question is solicited (polk 2015). 3 it should be noted that universities, research institutions, and individual researchers by no means represent homogenous units. this is particularly relevant to consider in a time with deepening tensions and struggles over ‘the university’ and conflicting claims to it by managers and researchers (pain et al. 2011). 4 see, for example, andresen and colleagues (2015), jones (2017), riding and colleagues (2019), and tjora (2019) for some critical discussions on the neoliberal university in the scandinavian context. 5 scientist rebellion and the norwegian chapter of concerned scientists acknowledgements i would like to thank my colleagues at ntnu’s department of geography who have played a major role in the research and discussions for this paper, especially hilde nymoen rørtveit, leika aruga, and teklehaymanot weldemichel. i would also like to thank the members of the collective new university norway, as well as everyone who has participated in the protest pubs, where many discussions relating https://scientistrebellion.com/ https://cs-n.org/om-oss/ 170 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper to the politics of knowledge production have taken place. thanks are due both to päivi lujala and her team for giving me the opportunity to hold this lecture as a keynote speaker at the annual meeting of finnish geographers 2021, and to the chief editor of fennia for giving me the honor of presenting the lecture as the fennia annual lecture. in addition, i would like to thank the three commentators for their valuable comments on this lecture when it was given, namely jouni häkli, elisa pascucci, and eveliina lyytinen. lastly, thanks to colin lorne and again jouni häkli for critical and constructive engagement through the innovative open review process facilitated by the chief editor of fennia. references ahvenniemi, h., huovila, a., pinto-seppä, i. & airaksinen, m. (2017) what are the differences between sustainable and smart cities? cities 60(a) 234–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.09.009 andersen, b. & røe, p. g. (2016) the social context and politics of large scale urban architecture: investigating the design of barcode, oslo. european urban and regional studies 24(3) 304–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776416643751 andresen, s. a., epremian, l., jakobsen, t. s., jones, m. & refstie, h. (2015) fighting fog – the case of creeping neoliberalism and weakening university democracy in norway. krisis 2. <https://archive. krisis.eu/fighting-fog-the-case-of-creeping-neoliberalism-and-weakening-university-democracy-innorway/> 6.1.2022. arbetaren (2013) hånfulla reaktioner på studentprotester. 22.11.2013 <https://www.arbetaren. se/2013/11/22/hanfulla-reaktioner-pa-studentprotester/> 19.12.2021. bakewell, o. (2008) research beyond the categories: the importance of policy irrelevant research into forced migration. journal of refugee studies 21(4) 432–453. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen042 ball, s. j. (2012) performativity, commodification, and commitment: an i-spy guide to the neoliberal university. british journal of educational studies 60(1) 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2011.650940 bell, d. m. & pahl, k. (2018) co-production: towards a utopian approach. international journal of social research methodology 21(1) 105–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2017.1348581 berg, l., huijbens, e. & larsen, h. g. (2016) producing anxiety in the neoliberal university. the canadian geographer 60(2) 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261 bonney, r., cooper, c. b., dickinson, j., kelling, s., phillips, t. & rosenberg, k. v. (2009) citizen science: a developing tool for expanding science knowledge and scientific literacy. bioscience 59 977–984. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.9 bradbury, h., waddell, s., o’brien, k., apgar, m., teehankee, b. & fazey, i. (2019) editorial: call to action research for transformations: the times demand it. action research 17(1) 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750319829633 bulkeley, h., marvin, s., palgan, y. v., mccormick, k., breitfuss-loidl, m., mai, l., von wirth, t., & frantzeskaki, n. (2019) urban living laboratories: conducting the experimental city? european urban and regional studies 26(4) 317–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776418787222 cambridge dictionary (2021) relevance. <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/relevance> 19.12.2021. cardullo, p. & kitchin, r. (2018) smart urbanism and smart citizenship: the neoliberal logic of citizenfocused smart cities in europe. environment and planning c: politics and space 37(5) 813–830. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x18806508 cardullo, p. & kitchin, r. (2019) being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in dublin, ireland. geojournal 84 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9845-8 castree, n. (2002) border geography. area 34(1) 103–112. http://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4762.00061 cooke, b. & kothari, u. (eds.) (2001) participation: the new tyranny? zed books, london. cox, r. h. & béland, d. (2013) valence, policy ideas, and the rise of sustainability. governance 26 307–328. https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12003 dear, m. (1999) the relevance of postmodernism. scottish geographical journal 115(2) 143–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702549908553823 dilling, l. & lemos, m. c. (2011) creating usable science: opportunities and constraints for climate knowledge use and their implications for science policy. global environmental change 21(2) 680–689. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.11.006 dorling, d. & shaw, m. (2002) geographies of the agenda. progress in human geography 26 629–646. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132502ph390oa flinders, m., wood, m. & cunningham, m. (2016) the politics of co-production: risks, limits and pollution. evidence & policy 12(2) 261–279. https://doi.org/10.1332/174426415x14412037949967 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.09.009 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776416643751 https://archive.krisis.eu/fighting-fog-the-case-of-creeping-neoliberalism-and-weakening-university-democracy-in-norway/ https://archive.krisis.eu/fighting-fog-the-case-of-creeping-neoliberalism-and-weakening-university-democracy-in-norway/ https://archive.krisis.eu/fighting-fog-the-case-of-creeping-neoliberalism-and-weakening-university-democracy-in-norway/ https://www.arbetaren.se/2013/11/22/hanfulla-reaktioner-pa-studentprotester/ https://www.arbetaren.se/2013/11/22/hanfulla-reaktioner-pa-studentprotester/ https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen042 https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2011.650940 https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2017.1348581 https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261 https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.9 https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750319829633 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776418787222 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/relevance https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x18806508 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9845-8 http://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4762.00061 https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12003 https://doi.org/10.1080/14702549908553823 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.11.006 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132502ph390oa https://doi.org/10.1332/174426415x14412037949967 fennia 199(2) (2021) 171hilde refstie forestier, o. & kim, r. e. (2020) cherry-picking the sustainable development goals: goal prioritization by national governments and implications for global governance. sustainable development 28 1269–1278. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2082 francis, p. (2001) participatory development at the world bank: the primacy of process. in cooke, b. & kothari, u. (eds.) participation: the new tyranny?, 72–87. zed books, london. frantzeskaki, n. & rok, a. (2018) co-producing urban sustainability transitions knowledge with community, policy and science. environmental innovation and societal transitions 29 47–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2018.08.001 gilmartin, m. & berg, l. d. (2007) locating postcolonialism. area 39 120–124. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00724.x giroux, h. (2005) cultural studies in dark times: public pedagogy and the challenge of neoliberalism. fast capitalism 1(2) 75–86. https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.2005.02 gohari, s., ahlers, d., nielsen, b. f. & junker, e. (2020a) the governance approach of smart city initiatives: evidence from trondheim, bergen and bodø. infrastructures 5(4) 31. https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures5040031 gohari, s., baer, d., fladvad nielsen, b., gilcher, e. & situmorang, w. z. (2020b) prevailing approaches and practices of citizen participation in smart city projects: lessons from trondheim, norway. infrastructures 5(4) 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures5040036 gunder, m. (2006) sustainability: planning’s saving grace or road to perdition? journal of planning education and research 26 208–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x06289359 harvey, d. (1974) what kind of geography for what kind of public policy? transactions of the institute of british geographers 63 18–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/621527 hjelseth, a. (2019) universitetet, stat og marked: refleksjoner om det autonome universitetet. in tjora, a. (ed.) universitetskamp, 294–312. scandinavian academic press, oslo. hooks, b. (1990) choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. in hooks, b. (ed.) yearning – race gender and cultural politics, 15–30. routledge, taylor and francis group. jasanoff, s. (2018) just transitions: a humble approach to global energy futures. energy research & social science 35 11–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.11.025 jasanoff, s. (ed.) (2004) states of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order. routledge, new york. jazeel, t. (2016) between area and discipline: progress, knowledge production and the geographies of geography. progress in human geography 40(5) 649–667. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515609713 jessop, b. (2011) metagovernance. in bevir, m. (ed.) the sage handbook of governance, 106–123. sage publications ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446200964.n8 jones, m. (2017) can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing – experiences from norway. fennia 195(2) 164–174. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 karlsen, t. (2018) trondheim skal lede verdens byer i bærekraftig utvikling. fn-sambandet 19.12.2018 <https://www.fn.no/nyheter/trondheim-skal-lede-verdens-byer-i-baerekraftig-utvikling> 19.12.2021. karvonen, a., cugurullo, f. & caprotti, f. (eds.) (2019) inside smart cities: place, politics and urban innovation. routledge, abingdon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351166201 kuus, m. (2015) for slow research. international journal of urban and regional research 39(4) 838–840. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12257 lawson, v. (2009) instead of radical geography, how about caring geography? antipode 41(1) 210–213. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00665.x lewis, s. & hogan, a. (2016) reform first and ask questions later? the implications of (fast) schooling policy and ‘silver bullet’ solutions. critical studies in education 60(1) 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1219961 lexico (n.d.) relevance. <https://www.lexico.com/definition/relevance> 19.12.2021. lorne, c. (2021) struggling with the state i am in: researching policy failures and the english national health service. emotion, space and society 38 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100746 luke, t. w. (2013) corporate social responsibility: an uneasy merger of sustainability and development. sustainable development 21(2) 83–91. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1558 lund, d. h. (2018) co-creation in urban governance: from inclusion to innovation. scandinavian journal of public administration 22 3–17. <https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/sjpa/article/view/3741/3478> 21.12.2021. macellari, m., yuriev, a., testa, f. & boiral, o. (2021) exploring bluewashing practices of alleged sustainability leaders through a counter-accounting analysis. environmental impact assessment review 86 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2020.106489 mccabe, d. (2012) the slow science movement. 5.12.2012. <https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/ feature-article/the-slow-science-movement/>. 19.12.2021. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.2082 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2018.08.001 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00724.x https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.2005.02 https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures5040031 https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures5040036 https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x06289359 https://doi.org/10.2307/621527 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.11.025 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515609713 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446200964.n8 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 https://www.fn.no/nyheter/trondheim-skal-lede-verdens-byer-i-baerekraftig-utvikling https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351166201 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12257 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00665.x https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1219961 https://www.lexico.com/definition/relevance https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100746 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1558 https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/sjpa/article/view/3741/3478 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2020.106489 https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/the-slow-science-movement/ https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/the-slow-science-movement/ 172 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper mclennan, g. (2004) travelling with vehicular ideas: the case of the third way. economy and society 33 484–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/0308514042000285251 menton, m., larrea, c., latorre, s., martomez-alier, peck, m., temper, l. & walter, m. (2019) environmental justice and the sdgs: from synergies to gaps and contradictions. sustainability science 15 1621–1636. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00789-8 miller, c. a. & wyborn, c. (2020) co-production in global sustainability: histories and theories. environmental science & policy 113 88–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.01.016 monsen, t. h. (2013) studenter blokkerer universiteter i danmark. universitetsavisa 27.11.2013 <https:// www.universitetsavisa.no/notiser/studenter-blokkerer-universiteter-i-danmark/175139> 19.12.2021. mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j., walton-roberts, m., basu, r., whitson, r., hawkins, r., hamilton, t. & curran, w. (2015) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme 14(4) 1235–1259. <https://www.acmejournal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058>. nieuwenkamp, r. (2017) ever heard of sdg washing? the urgency of sdg due dilligence. blog piece 27.9.2017 <https://oecd-development-matters.org/2017/09/25/ever-heard-of-sdg-washing-the-urgencyof-sdg-due-diligence/> 20.12.2021. noxolo, p. (2017) decolonial theory in a time of the re-colonisation of uk research. transactions of the institute of british geographers 42 342–344. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12202 pain, r., kesby, m. & askins, k. (2011) geographies of impact: ower, participation and potential. area 43(2) 183–188. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2010.00978.x parr, a. (2009) hijacking sustainability. mit press, cambridge. peck, j. (2002) political economies of scale: fast policy, interscalar relations, and neoliberal workfare. economic geography 78(3) 331–360. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00190.x peck, j. & theodore, n. (2010) mobilizing policy: models, methods, and mutations. geoforum 41 169–174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.01.002 peck, j. & theodore, n. (2015) fast policy: experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677306.001.0001 pløger, j. (2018) conflict and agonism. in gunder, m., madanipour, a. & watson, v. (eds). the handbook of planning theory, 264–275. routledge, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315696072-21 polk, m. (ed.) (2015) co-producing knowledge for sustainable cities: joining forces for change. routledge, abingdon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315748030 radice, h. (2013) how we got here: uk higher education under neoliberalism. acme 12(3) 407–418. <https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/969>. raghuram, p., madge, c. & noxolo, p. (2009) rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world. geoforum 40(1) 5 3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.07.007 ratcliffe, r. (2015) university protests around the world: a fight against commercialisation, the guardian 25.3.2015 <https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/mar/25/ university-protests-around-the-world-a-hght-againstcommercialisation>. 11.2.2022. van reekum, r. (2015) the new university. a special issue on the future of the university. krisis 2 3–6. <https://archive.krisis.eu/the-new-university/> 21.12.2021. refstie, h. (2018) action research in critical scholarship: negotiating multiple imperatives. acme 17(1) 201–227. <https://acme-ojs-test.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/1520/1426>. riding, j., kallio, k. p., behroozi, p., berg, l. d., brackebusch, a., derksen, m., ducs, j., henriksen, i. m., huijbens, e. h., sætre jakobsen, t., jones, m., magusin, h., parker, a., peak, a., pyyry, n., refstie, h., smeplass, e., tao, h. & thorshaug, r. ø. (2019) collective editorial on the neoliberal university. fennia 197(2) 171–182. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.88578 risager, b. s. & thorup, m. (2016) protesting the neoliberal university: the danish student movement ‘a different university’. interface: a journal for and about social movements 8(1) 7–33. <http://www. interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/issue-8-1-risager-and-thorup.pdf>. 21.12.2021. roberts, k. (2015) youth mobilisations and political generations: young activists in political change movements during and since the twentieth century. journal of youth studies 18(8) 950–966. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1020937 roy, a. 2015. who’s afraid of postcolonial theory? international journal of urban and regional research 40(1) 200–209. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12274 schmidt, l. & neuburger, m. (2017) trapped between privileges and precariousness: tracing transdisciplinary research in a postcolonial setting. futures 93 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2017.07.005 schneider, f., tribaldos,t., adler, c., biggs, r., de bremond, a., buser, t., krug, c., loutre, m. f., moore, s., norström, a. v., paulavets, k., urbach, d., spehn, e., wülser, g. & zondervan, r. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1080/0308514042000285251 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00789-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.01.016 https://www.universitetsavisa.no/notiser/studenter-blokkerer-universiteter-i-danmark/175139 https://www.universitetsavisa.no/notiser/studenter-blokkerer-universiteter-i-danmark/175139 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058 https://oecd-development-matters.org/2017/09/25/ever-heard-of-sdg-washing-the-urgency-of-sdg-due-diligence/ https://oecd-development-matters.org/2017/09/25/ever-heard-of-sdg-washing-the-urgency-of-sdg-due-diligence/ https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12202 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2010.00978.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00190.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.01.002 https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677306.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315696072-21 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315748030 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/969 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.07.007 https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/mar/25/university-protests-around-the-world-a-hght-againstcommercialisation https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/mar/25/university-protests-around-the-world-a-hght-againstcommercialisation https://archive.krisis.eu/the-new-university/ https://acme-ojs-test.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/1520/1426 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.88578 http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/issue-8-1-risager-and-thorup.pdf http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/issue-8-1-risager-and-thorup.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1020937 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12274 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2017.07.005 fennia 199(2) (2021) 173hilde refstie co-production of knowledge and sustainability transformations: a strategic compass for global research networks. current opinion in environmental sustainability 49 127–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.04.007 shahjahan, r. a. (2014) being ‘lazy’ and slowing down: toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy. educational philosophy and theory 47(5) 488–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2014.880645 slaughter, s. & rhoades, g. (2000) the neo-liberal university. new labor forum 6 73–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40342886 söderström, o., paasche, t. & klauser, f. j. c. (2014) smart cities as corporate storytelling. city 18(3) 307–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2014.906716 soleri, d., long, j. w., ramirez-andreotta, m. d., eitemiller, r. & pandya, r. (2016) finding pathways to more equitable and meaningful public-scientist partnerships. citizen science: theory and practice 1(1) 9. http://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.46 sommer, m. (2015) studerende i blokade på femte døgn: bad ansatte tage deres ting og gå. dr 20.4.2015 <https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/studerende-i-blokade-pa-femte-dogn-bad-ansattetage-deres-ting-og-ga>. 19.12.2021. staeheli, l. a. & mitchell, d. (2008) the complex politics of relevance in geography. annals of the association of american geographers 95(2) 357–372. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00464.x sultana, f. (2018) an(other) geographical critique of development and sdgs. dialogues in human geography 8(2) 186–190. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00464.x sultana, f. (2019) decolonizing development education and the pursuit of social justice. human geography 12(3) 31–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/194277861901200305 sundar, a. & kellaris, j. j. (2016) blue-washing the green halo: how colors color ethical judgments. in batra, r. seifert, c. & brei, d. (eds.) the psychology of design: creating consumer appeal, 63–74. routledge, new york. swyngedouw, e. (2007) impossible ‘sustainability’ and the postpolitical condition. in krueger, r. o. b. & gibbs, d. (eds.) the sustainable development paradox: urban political economy in the united states and europe, 13–40. guilford press, new york. tahvilzadeh, n., montin, s. & cullberg, m. (2017) functions of sustainability: exploring what sustainability discourse “does” in the gothenburg metropolitan area. local environment 22(1) 66–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2017.1320538 temenos, c. & baker, t. (2015) enriching urban policy mobilities research. international journal of urban and regional research 39(4) 841–843. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12258 temenos, c. & mccann, e. (2012) the local politics of policy mobility: learning, persuasion, and the production of a municipal sustainability fix. environment and planning a: economy and space 44(6) 1389–1406. https://doi.org/10.1068/a44314 thaler, r. h. & sunstein, c. (2008) nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. penguin books, new haven. tjora, a. (ed.) (2019) universitetskamp. scandinavian academic press, oslo. tuck, e. (2009) re-visioning action: participatory action research and indigenous theories of change. the urban review 41 47–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0094-x turnhout, e., metze, t., wyborn, c., klenk, n. & louder, e. (2020) the politics of co-production: participation, power, and transformation. current opinion in environmental sustainability 42 15–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.11.009 united nations (2015) transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. <https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=a/res/70/1&lang=e>. 11.2.2022. united nations (2019) decade of action. <https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/decade-ofaction/>. 18.5.2022. ward, k. (2005) geography and public policy: a recent history of ‘policy relevance’. progress in human geography 29(3) 310–319. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph551pr wilson, d. (ed.) (2015) the politics of the urban sustainability concept. common ground research networks, champaign. https://doi.org/10.18848/978-1-61229-800-9/cgp wyborn, c., datta, a., montana, j., ryan, m., leith, o., chaffin, b., miller, c., & van kerkhoff, l. (2019) coproducing sustainability: reordering the governance of science, policy, and practice. annual review of environment and resources 44(1) 319–346. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-101718-033103 åmossa, k. (2021) vart tar pengarna vägen? – om statsmakternas prioriteringar och lärosätenas interna fördelning av basanslag för forskning och utbildning på forskarnivå (del 1) 2021. sveriges universitetslärare och forskare. <https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sulf.se/app/uploads/2021/05/ vart-tar-pengarna-vagen_webb.pdf> 19.12.2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.04.007 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2014.880645 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40342886 https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2014.906716 http://doi.org/10.5334/cstp.46 https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/studerende-i-blokade-pa-femte-dogn-bad-ansatte-tage-deres-ting-og-ga https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/studerende-i-blokade-pa-femte-dogn-bad-ansatte-tage-deres-ting-og-ga https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00464.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00464.x https://doi.org/10.1177/194277861901200305 https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2017.1320538 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12258 https://doi.org/10.1068/a44314 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-008-0094-x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.11.009 https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=a/res/70/1&lang=e https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/decade-of-action/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/decade-of-action/ https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph551pr https://doi.org/10.18848/978-1-61229-800-9/cgp https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-101718-033103 https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sulf.se/app/uploads/2021/05/vart-tar-pengarna-vagen_webb.pdf https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/sulf.se/app/uploads/2021/05/vart-tar-pengarna-vagen_webb.pdf why save a minority language? meänkieli and rationales of language revitalization urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa74047 doi: 10.11143/fennia.74047 why save a minority language? meänkieli and rationales of language revitalization juha ridanpää ridanpää, j. (2018) why save a minority language? meänkieli and rationales of language revitalization. fennia 196(2) 187–203. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.74047 this article examines the rationales for language revitalization and their materialization on a local scale. the starting premise is that, due to specific social, cultural, as well as spatial circumstances, there exists a wide variety of rationalizations for why saving endangered languages is important. the complexity of the matter is discussed with regard to meänkieli, a minority language spoken in northern sweden, which has a long and unique history of marginalization. the article bases on group discussions conducted with meänkieli speaking cultural activists in northern sweden during the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016. the present examination of the group discussions reveals how the rationales of saving the language are inherently interrelated with questions concerning identity formation, educational principles and the sovereignty of minority groups. the analysis also reveals how, due to the complex nature of local history, there is no consensus on whether the recent progress in language revitalization is unanimously a positive change or not. keywords: language revitalization, minority languages, marginalization, narrative, group discussions, identity juha ridanpää, geography research unit, university of oulu, p.o. box 8000, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: juha.ridanpaa@oulu.fi introduction according to various estimates there are over 3,000 languages in the world that are in danger of disappearance, but instead of protecting them, we are, as skutnabb-kangas (2002, 2) formulates it, “killing them as never before”. among the language researchers, from the late 1960s to 1990s, the views towards the possibilities of revitalizing endangered languages have changed from negative to more positive (spolsky 1995). minority languages have been the subject of a vast amount of studies across disciplinary boundaries, and what connects them today is a shared opinion that the work for revitalizing vanishing minority languages is extremely important per se. in current studies, it is often taken for granted that there is a shared urge to save endangered languages from disappearing, yet, in the background, there is a range of different rationales for why saving the languages is important in the first place. these partly interconnected lines of argument pertaining to the relevance of language work stem from different ideological viewpoints, namely, the ideals of cultural activism and educational and socially critical argumentation. this article starts with a theoretical discussion on how the need for language revitalization is rationalized across the disciplinary boundaries. the premise of this study is that, in a specific local setting, the basic rationales of language revitalizing become materialized in much more complicated © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74047 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74047 188 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers manner, due to specific social, cultural, as well as spatial circumstances and histories. by using meänkieli – a minority language spoken in northern sweden – as an example case, the article discusses how different rationales of language revitalization are not only overlapping and interconnected, but geographically and socio-politically conditioned as well. the analysis is based on group discussions conducted with local culture workers. through a narrative inquiry of the conducted discussions it is also illustrated how, within a single minority group, there exist various different, even conflicting rationalizations for language work. the article also discusses the potential reverse of language revitalization activity. rationalizing language revitalization when examining language revitalization efforts, any number of social, economic, and political dynamics must be taken into account, as they determine what is possible. as with any social or political movement, language revitalization efforts are inherently contextualized by the communities in which they occur. these contexts include everything from the day-to-day lived experiences of community members to overarching governmental systems and policies at all levels. (davis 2016, 101) like many other scholars, hinton (2001) starts her analysis of endangered languages with a fundamental question: why being worried about languages diminishing matters? according to hinton (2001, 5), “the world stands to lose an important part of the sum of human knowledge whenever a language stops being used”. respectively, grenoble and whaley (2006, 19–20) introduce three reasons for why languages should be considered worth revitalizing. firstly, languages in themselves are to be considered cultural treasures. secondly, language diversity fosters cultural diversity, and thirdly, revitalizing minority languages both expands and protects minority rights more broadly. for many scholars across disciplinary boundaries, the second argument from the study by grenoble and whaley (2006) – the importance of cultural diversity – represents a pillar of language revitalizing work. in many studies it is either explicitly or implicitly stated how linguistic diversity, as a part of cultural heterogeneity, is valuable in itself (e.g. king 2008). skutnabb-kangas (2002, 2), for instance, argues that “cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature”. this is a perspective, or a statement, in which the disappearance of languages is explained within the context of the process of globalization. in the early 1990s, it was argued that globalization has brought along a so called ‘reversing language shift’ (fishman 1991). this premise is present for instance in studies in which global communication corporations, such as microsoft and facebook, are perceived as a threat to language revitalization (romero 2016). although globalization has done more harm than good to minority languages, some studies have focused on how modern information technologies could be used, or developed, for the benefit of minority language education (e.g. warschauer et al. 1997; hermes & king 2013). language is inherently connected with knowledge and thus, when languages diminish, part of human knowledge is lost with it. the threat of globalization is in connection to a widely employed juxtaposition in which endangered languages are associated with conservatism as they are assumed to be spoken by a soon-passing generation, while younger generations stand for the ideal and values of modernism, liberalism and globalization (e.g. dorian 1994). hence, activating the youth to get interested in linguistic roots is a major challenge for language revitalization work. there is a vast amount of studies that approach the issue of language revitalization from the viewpoint of its educational benefits. in many of these studies, education is perceived as a tool or a solution for language revitalization, but there are also studies in which language revitalizing is perceived as a means for wider educational purposes (e.g. hinton 2011; sumida huaman 2014). in many cases, minority language education is conceived as a tool with which the history of otherness, which is, unfortunately, shared by most minority languages, can be renegotiated (see hornberger 2006). it is regrettable, but relatively common that minority languages are, especially among youth, considered a skill to be ashamed of (mccarty et al. 2009, 300–302). as is widely recognized, this is also one of the key reasons for why several minority languages are vanishing. one major force that can alter and change young people’s attitudes and values towards their language and identity is the fennia 196(2) (2018) 189juha ridanpää school system. an illustrative example of how minority language education can be mobilized can be seen in the work of the maori language nests in aotearoa, new zealand and the creation of a nationwide maori language education system (rata 2007). at the time when the maori language had become seriously endangered, members of the community founded daycare places for children under school age (king, j. 2001); in these ‘kohanga reo’ (‘language nests’), older maori speakers transmitted the language to the children and, to some extent, to their parents as well. today, several minority groups use similar systems of ‘language nests’ for the benefit of keeping their endangered languages alive through education (ridanpää & pasanen 2009; olthuis et al. 2013; pasanen 2015). behind all this work in new zealand, there were a small number of people with an ideological commitment to speaking their native language and continuing the maori cultural heritage (fishman 1991, 230–250). it is thus often emphasized how language revitalization is a fundamentally communal activity, or as rice (2009, 37) puts it, “it takes a community of people to revitalize an indigenous language”. in a similar way, grenoble and whaley (2006) emphasize how revitalizing is first and foremost community-driven activity. linguistic diversity can be considered as a vital part of human condition, but special emphasis has been paid on how language is an essential part of people’s identity. language work is an integral part of how the identity of feeling and especially ‘being indigenous’ is put into practice (cf. king, k. 2001). with regard to this, friedman (2011, 633) has argued that [a] primary task of language revitalization movements is therefore to revalue a subordinate language and grant it prestige through promotion of ideologies such as those representing the language as an emblem of ethnic or cultural identity or establishing it as a medium for valued functions such religious practices, literacy, or ‘high culture’. thus, along with its instrumental and communicative roles, one of the primary functions of language is to maintain a group identity, and consequently, language has a key role in the process of construction of human identities (edwards 2010). it is particularly in the case of ethnic minorities that language is often perceived as being the same as identity; “we are our language”, as the title of meek’s (2010) major work formulates it. other article title from woolard (2003), “we don’t speak catalan because we are marginalized”, crystallizes how ethnic identities are often embedded together with minority languages. in these critical insights, it is underscored how (minority) people are raised into and in their language, into their mother tongue. native american youth, for instance, have in the interviews called the minority language they speak ‘blood language’, thus conveying the integral part of language in the formation of human identity (mccarty et al. 2009, 300; see also albury 2017). correspondingly, for emigrant minority groups, language functions as a performative tool with which identity and sense of belonging can be sustained (sullivan 2012). according to costa and gasquet-cyrus (2013, 213) “languages are social and historical products, the definition of which constitutes an ideological battle in which other social issues are embedded”. being linguistically marginalized is essentially in connection to how linguistic minorities are being socially othered in a wider context. in this respect, linguistic revitalization is ultimately a matter of sovereignty and self-determination. sovereignty is an elemental part of basic human rights, both in cases of individuals and groups. the topic of language loss is usually associated with and studied within the context of indigenous groups. by the same token, the focus is directed at the wider issues of social marginality and the heritage of colonialism (mccarty et al. 2015; ridanpää 2016). according to hinton (2001, 5) “the loss of language is part of the oppression and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples, who are losing their land and traditional livelihood involuntarily as the forces of national or world economy and politics impinge upon them”. the reverse side of this critical and justified approach is that, in minority language research, the study is commonly conducted within the theoretical context of nativeness, thus paying less attention to so called ‘new speakers’ (o’rourke & pujolar 2013). the problematics of language revitalization are also related to the problematics of nationalism. the condition of being linguistically marginalized effectively means a reduced sense of belonging to the state (valentine & skelton 2007). minority languages are ingredients in wider societal discussions about the confrontations between the ideology of nationalism and liberal democracy (may 2012). language emancipation often requires linguistic standardization, which, instead of the needs of 190 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers minority language speakers, often serve, the political interests of nation-states (lane 2011). on the other hand, a more predominant opinion is that language revitalization, first and foremost, can be utilized as a means by which it is possible to tear away from past ideologies of colonialism (wilson 2004; hermes 2012). for national minorities, language revitalization often works as a tool for rediscovering an othered identity and a sense of pride (napurí 2016; ridanpää 2017). in this way, the endeavors to ‘save the language’ may gain a major symbolic value (sallabank 2013). in fact, scholars across the disciplinary boundaries have been criticized for approaching minority languages with an assumption of impending doom, whereas a more fertile perspective to the topic would be to focus on community building and collaboration (hermes 2012). when scrutinizing the connections between shared identity and the social status of a minority language, various aspects studied within the field of human geography are often present. in fact, this ‘geographical eye’ has a more general role in terms of how minority languages are approached. ‘where is the language spoken?’ is often one of the elementary starting points when introducing a specific endangered language. for example, in harrison’s (2008, 2) work when languages die and tsunoda’s (2005, xxiv) comprehensive introduction to the topic, language endangerment and language revitalization, there are illustrations in which the ‘approximate’ locations of studied endangered languages are shown on a map of the world. attaching (linguistic) minorities to certain regions is one of the basic means by which regional stereotypes are constructed. this can be seen, for instance, in how northern regions are associated with marginality, the stereotypes connected to indigenous groups and their ‘extraordinary’ cultural characteristics, such as endangered language, has been in key role over several centuries (ridanpää & pasanen 2009; ridanpää 2016). in this way, the perception of a minority language can turn a region into a marginal one. correspondingly, in studies of aboriginal minorities, it has been emphasized how identity and language are inherently interconnected to ownership of land (gibson 1998; baloy 2011). as important as these issues are, it could also be asked whether this ever increasing desire to revitalize endangered languages is connected to a form of contemporary exoticism towards endangered ethnic minorities. the socio-historical background of meänkieli the creation of modern nation states and their borders has played a key role in the process through which meänkieli, a language spoken in northern sweden, has turned into and been acknowledged as a minority language (pietikäinen et al. 2010). the history of meänkieli as a minority language emerges at the beginning of the 19th century when, in the aftermath of the war of 1808–1809, the territory of finland was separated from sweden and annexed to russia as the autonomous grand duchy of finland. as a result, the new border, a line drawn along the torne river, divided the historically, linguistically, economically and culturally more or less homogeneous region of the torne valley between two states. consequently, the finnish-speaking population on the swedish side of the torne valley region became a linguistic minority, whereas the people living in the territory annexed to russia began to identify with the majority population and assumed the status of the national majority when finland gained independence in 1917. when finland was striving for independence, raising the selfconfidence of the finnish speaking population through education and major changes in legislation – such as the language manifesto of 1863 – played a crucial role (peltonen 2000). from the late 19th century until the middle of the 20th century, the finnish-speaking regional minority on the swedish side of the torne valley was under pressure towards linguistic and cultural integration (e.g. huss 1999; elenius 2002). the condition of being a linguistic minority began to develop into an issue of social ‘othering’ in the late 19th century when the swedish national ‘försvenskningspolitik’ entailed the exercising of powerful political pressure on marginal groups in order to integrate them linguistically and culturally into the modern nation-state. through institutional control, particularly the school system, the marginalization of the swedish torne valley became a concrete, everyday feature of people’s lives in the area. for instance, during the first half of the 20th century, speaking finnish at school was forbidden (júlíusdóttir 2007, 41). for centuries, bilingualism was conceived as ‘halflingualism’, the unsatisfactory proficiency in both languages and something to be ashamed of (hansegård 1990; ahola 2006, 28). fennia 196(2) (2018) 191juha ridanpää in the 1970s, the region’s consciousness of being socially marginalized rose remarkably along with the ethnic renaissance, the rise in social self-esteem and aspirations to preserve one’s own culture and language during the late 20th century (lindgren 2000; winsa 2007). the organization for revitalizing tornedalian culture and language, svenska tornedalingars riksförbund (str-t), was established in 1981. in addition, several individual activists, as the politician ragnar lassinantti (1915–1985) and culture activist/novelist bengt pohjanen have worked in different roles towards language revitalizing. as a symbolic marker for ethnic belonging, the language spoken in the region was not called finnish anymore, but ‘meänkieli’, literally ‘our language’. in finland, meänkieli is usually defined as a dialect of finnish, while in sweden, as a result of identity work, the language has gained officially recognized status as an independent minority language. in 1984 pohjanen published kasaland, the first novel in which meänkieli was used and in 1996 a grammar of meänkieli, meänkielen kramatiikki, thus providing the basis for meänkieli as a literary language (prokkola & ridanpää 2011). regional self-esteem and social rights of meänkieli speaking minority of sweden have been recurring themes in pohjanen’s cultural production (karlsson 2004). similarly, for instance, to the regional language of latgalian in eastern latvia (marten 2012), the status of being a stand-alone language – as is the case with meänkieli – has been a source for controversy over several decades. although the distinct status of meänkieli has often been questioned (piasecki 2014, 13), in 2000, the language was granted official status as a minority language in five municipalities in northern sweden: gällivare, kiruna, haparanda, pajala and övertorneå. currently, meänkieli, a dialectal expression meaning ‘our language’, is defined as a severely endangered language (laakso & sarhimaa 2016) which has, according to ethnologue: languages of the world, approximately 30,000 speakers. although the work conducted by language activists has aroused general interest in meänkieli, the number of speakers is decreasing due to continuous immigration to southern sweden. the exact number of meänkieli speakers is very difficult to estimate since people living in the torne valley are often uncertain whether the language they use can actually be defined as meänkieli. as the origin of the language lies in finnish, meänkieli is often seen, particularly in finland, as a dialect of finnish instead of a separate language of its own. characteristic of meänkieli is lexical borrowing from swedish, certain forms of regression when compared to the development of the variant of finnish spoken in finland during the past 200 years and extensive and regionally variable use of h consonants in final syllables (vaattovaara 2009). according to the eldia (european language diversity for all) media analysis project funded by european commission and conducted between 2010 and 2012, the picture of meänkieli speakers is bipolar. on one hand, there is a perception of the group of meänkieli speakers as passive – as an oppressed and harshly treated by the majority population. on the other hand, there is a picture of meänkieli speakers as a group which is, in spite of oppression, actively involved in several cultural projects that aim to protect their language and identity (laakso & sarhimaa 2016). in practical terms, the bureaucratic and financial opportunities for revitalization work have been strengthened by a new minority rights strategy established by the swedish government in march 2009 and the new act on national minorities and national minority languages that took effect in 1 january 2010 (lipott 2015, 13). however, despite the fact that meänkieli is officially acknowledged as a minority language and used for other (cultural) purposes, the media supply in meänkieli, for instance, is still relatively scarce; there is a local radio channel meänraatio in pajala which broadcasts daily for 3–4 hours, but visibility in publicservice tv is relatively rare and there are no daily newspapers published (laakso & sarhimaa 2016). research material the analysis in this research is implemented using a group discussion method. in minority studies, group discussions have been considered a unique methodological route through which oppressed minorities are offered a possibility to make their voices heard (booth & booth 1996). group discussions are a specific method through which the multiplicity of shared as well as contested narratives can be discovered (price 2010). discussions are analyzed by means of narrative inquiry, a method referring to a subset of qualitative research designs in which the act of ‘hearing stories’ is used as a sensitive tool to examine and describe human action (polkinghorne 1995; prokkola 2014). 192 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers the studied material consists of 8 approximately 1–1.5 hour long tape-recorded group discussions conducted with 32 people of whom 17 were women and 15 men. discussions were held in haparanda, övertorneå, svanstein, korpilombolo, aapua and pajala between september 2015 and february 2016. the participants were selected to represent people who are (inter-)actively working in several types of local associations and organizations operating around the swedish side of the torne valley and are involved – some directly, some less directly – with the revitalization of meänkieli; there were members of village associations and cultural associations, teachers from different levels of education, local radio reporters and musicians. members for the groups were selected so that the participants were already familiar with each other, signifying a certain level of trust, and had a shared social bond related to the research topic. the discussions were informal and spontaneous, and my purpose as a researcher was to take as passive a role as possible. for each discussion, a separate thematic framework was prepared, which contained questions relating to the specific activities of the interviewed group (music, radio broadcasting, teaching, religion, and so). in addition, there were some highly general questions that were directed to all interviewed groups concerning the local languages and identity. the key questions of this kind were: (1.) how do you see the work on meänkieli language revitalization, and (2.) how does the issue of minority language come up or need to be acknowledged in your work? all discussions were conducted in meänkieli, although there were natural alterations in language use depending on the backgrounds of different discussants. some discussants conceived the language they used to be finnish instead of meänkieli, while for others the use of swedish would have been more comfortable during the discussions. in fact, switching languages from meänkieli/finnish to swedish and back again even during a single sentence, is typical for meänkieli speakers and can be considered a specific characteristic of the language. why saving meänkieli is important? for identity in the case of meänkieli, ‘our language’, the name in itself implies how language can be an inseparable part of shared identity, which makes the revitalization work an end in itself. as has been argued across disciplinary boundaries, language is the very core of what we are, an essential part in everyday practices. it has been argued, that, on a general level, ethnic identities are constructed through language and everyday actions (clayton 2009). as one male participant from group 4 in a discussion humorously rephrased this, “it becomes a lousier meat, if you eat it in swedish”. in the discussions, meänkieli speaking was often associated with coziness, with the feelings of ‘being at home’ (cf. antonsich 2010). in one group, it was discussed how homely and cozy it felt when a church service was held in meänkieli, although the event was also considered being highly unusual, exceptional and even somehow peculiar: woman 1: all events were told in meänkieli. i must say that the more i have been involved with such things, the nicer has it been. it feels like it comes close to you when you hear it in your own dialect, when even the priest speaks in same manner as we do. and we sang those familiar hymns in meänkieli. (group 7) in a similar way as in (banal) everyday actions, the bond between language and identity is present visually, for example in local place name signages on a street. as reminders of local history, there are numerous places with finnish names in the swedish side of torne valley. many of these can be traced back to the days when finland was part of sweden, but there are also several names from recent past, a particular type of nicknames being the most widespread, which are used in everyday interactions and which cannot be found on official maps. new names for places are constantly being ‘invented’ in real life situations, and in context of unique stories in which the identity and landscape fuses together: fennia 196(2) (2018) 193juha ridanpää woman 1 (20:30): in my opinion it is richness to know these names. it gives this love for home district. (…) woman 2: i feel too that it’s important. that it gives like… woman 1: …roots. woman 2: yes, those roots are planted in those place names and places. man 1: this fall we gave a new name to one bog. it did not have a name before. it is now called ‘backspegeljänkhä’ (rear-view mirror bog). we saw from our rear-mirror how an elk was crossing the road, so we started to call it ‘backspegeljänkhä’. (group 4) place names demonstrate how local history and the emotional bondage between language and identity is part of everyday activity. however, for meänkieli speakers this emotional bondage is not only complex, but also politically charged in several ways. as yuval-davis (2006) has emphasized, identity needs to be studied on the levels of emotional attachments, social locations, and ethical and political values. the case of meänkieli illustrates how ‘we-feelings’, as spatially embedded emotions, are not only about the feelings of belonging, but also about the feelings of being different (richter 2015). one generation skipped learning the language because their parents were ashamed of their historical background. in trans-national families different languages are used for different purposes (soler & zabrodskaja 2017), but in case of finnish (or meänkieli), avoiding speaking the language to your children was axiomatic, in-built norm: speaking finnish was not an option. this is what the concept of hegemony means at its purest. everything associated with finnishness was regarded as lower in status. as a socio-culturally forced form of diglossia, home language was a signifier of social status and automatically hidden for the sake of appearing civilized. what has been somewhat surprising is that, along the revitalization movement, the attitudes among youth have changed. in the discussions, it was often formulated that the children of the generation to whom meänkieli was not been taught at home is now feeling that some part of who ‘they are’ has been stolen from them. in one group, this was discussed with a reference to bengt pohjanen’s personal experiences: man 1: bengt pohjanen, i think he had a good example. he says that when he in the 60s went to täräntö, to give some sort of a speech to school kids, he had asked how many of you can be speak meänkieli, or finnish. everyone raised their hands. around thirty in that room. and he did that same thing in the 80s, 1985 or 1986, and asked who can speak meänkieli. there were two who raised their hands. that sort of a change during twenty years. two out of thirty could speak. man 2: in regrettable manner all those who speak and have roots here say that ‘dear me, for why we did not teach our children’. man 1: yes, that’s the way how it is and so say the children too, blame their parents. man 3: yes, i’ve heard hundreds and hundreds who say so. (group 3) avoiding speaking meänkieli at home, for the sake of shame, has been later condemned by younger generation as an act of ‘identity robbery’. in this manner, language revitalization work functions as an act to paying back, although it is worth asking to whom this compensation is actually directed. what this also implies and exemplifies is how identity narratives are rarely coherent and how, within one apparently coherent group, such as meänkieli speakers, there can be competing narratives about the nature of identity. among the identity studies conducted during the past two decades, more emphasis is put on the ambiguous nature of identity (brubaker & cooper 2000). as mentioned, the connection of minority language and identity is geographically embedded issue in many ways (see further discussion, gilmartin & migge 2015; tomaney 2015; ridanpää 2017). although it is commonly shared opinion that meänkieli is part of regional, tornedalian identity, it is also constantly emphasized, how in different places the language is used in different ways. similar diatopic variations can be found for example from spain in where sociopolitical circumstances have diverted the phonetic and lexical diversity and spatiality of galician dialects (lorenzo 2012). in case of meänkieli, diatopic variety sometimes leads to a (relatively absurd) debate about where the ‘real’ meänkieli is spoken: man 1: then there is this question about where the real meänkieli is spoken. bengt pohjanen said about twenty years ago, that real meänkieli is spoken in pajala municipality, in täräntö. but all the people don’t like that. 194 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers man 2: but here (in pajala) it has survived for quite a long time. man 1: this is like a cradle of meänkieli. (group 3) woman 1: it is so different in different villages, so what it is this real meänkieli? there are so many versions of it. woman 2: i believe that, as you said (earlier), that where ever village you go, there is the real meänkieli. woman 1: i know that upward – muodoslombolo, kitkajärvi – there they speak more like finnish finnish and here they speak more swedish words, adding letter ‘i’ into the end. (group 5) the concept of ‘linguistic differentiation’ refers to how languages are inherently discrete, bounded entities, embedded in the politics of a region and its observers (irvine & gal 2000). there is a dominant conception that meänkieli is a language spoken only in the torne valley, while the torne valley is usually defined as a river basin of torne river. this is also in connection to a sociolinguistic concept of ‘language authentication’, the idea that some instances of a language are more authentic than others (mcintosh 2005, 1929). this causes conflicting opinions about who should be entitled as meänkieli speakers, and who should not. as one woman in group 8 exemplified this with her comment: “these people from ore mining fields, they think that they are from the torne valley”. according to topographical definitions, the ore mining fields of northern sweden are not a part of the torne valley and, despite the fact that the historical background of the people living there is connected to finland, in terms of language politics, they are considered ‘outsiders’. some discussants considered this ‘rivalry of belonging’ a substantially annoying feature of meänkieli language preservation: woman 1: what has bothered me a bit is that people are terribly restricted. like if you belong to this group, you cannot belong to that group, because you are for example from finland. woman 2: exactly. woman 1: it shouldn’t matter. the main thing is that we speak something. it’s not relevant whether we speak more finnish words or more swedish words. woman 2: there are pedants everywhere. (group 7) the geographical definition of the torne valley is inseparably attached to the definition of meänkieli and how the connection between the language and identity is understood. one intriguing detail touching this issue can be found from the english version of wikipedia, where the swedish word ‘tornedalen’ is translated, instead of the torne valley, as meänmaa (in eng. ‘our country’), a concept invented by bengt pohjanen. by meänmaa pohjanen refers to a fluid region spreading across both sides of the border river, using language and culture as its determining attributes (prokkola & ridanpää 2011). during the group discussions, it was frequently brought forth that meänmaa, as a regional term, feels an artificial and unnecessary invention. from this perspective, the matter of introducing torne valley globally as meänmaa, who ever has created this wikipedia page, is a political act that promotes the recognition of meänkieli as an independent language. for education it is axiomatic that the best medium for teaching a child is his mother tongue. psychologically, it is the system of meaningful signs that in his mind works automatically for expression and understanding. sociologically, it is a means of identification among the members of the community to which he belongs. educationally, he learns more quickly through it than through an unfamiliar linguistic medium. (unesco 1953, 11) as has been the case in several other language revitalization programs, the importance of importing the language into the school environment has been acknowledged in the torne valley as well. the right to use one’s mother language, as one wishes to use it, is considered a part of general moral values of education. if we reflect the recent, positive development against the historical background of swedification, certain intriguing nuances can be found. when discussing the societal history of meänkieli, the marginalized position of language is (naturally) continuously emphasized by fennia 196(2) (2018) 195juha ridanpää exemplifying how speaking meänkieli in schools was forbidden in the early 20th century. in several groups there were elder discussants who had personal experiences from the days when speaking finnish in school was not formally forbidden anymore but still strongly disapproved. against this background, the endeavors to bring meänkieli into the school environment carry a significant symbolic value, although it is also likely that most of the younger generations are not highly aware of the local history of marginalization. among minority language studies, there has been abundant discussion about how various methods and techniques should be applied in education. interestingly, in the interviews, the special role of ‘having fun’ as a pedagogical tool was recognized as important. in multi-disciplinary studies of humor, the educational value has often been underscored (pollak & freda 1997; van wyk 2011). similarly, teachers in tornedalian schools maintain that ‘having fun’ should be utilized as a teaching method: woman 1: when you’re working with meänkieli it is important that you give a positive image of it, like it’s fun and whatever you do with meänkieli, should somehow be fun so that you get a feeling like: “wow, i wanna learn that too”. a kind of interest and fascination rises, which helps the language survive and children are seriously willing to learn it and try to find those friends whom with it is possible to speak the language. so, for the sake of revitalization it is extremely important that it is made somehow interesting. and whatever you do with meänkieli, it must be fun. (group 6) humor has played major role in the revitalization of meänkieli (ridanpää 2017). especially after niemi’s (2010) popularmusik från vittula (popular music from vittula), a humorous novel focusing on ironic features in the marginalization of meänkieli, became a best-seller in scandinavia, the general consciousness about the meänkieli speakers roused all around scandinavia (ridanpää 2014). interviewees also revealed that humor has played crucial role when bengt pohjanen’s grammar education was broadcasted in local radio: man 1: like that language education what bengt pohjanen had then. it was this humor that got people interested. man 2: yes, it was made so that it was pure humor whole thing, that five minutes, and then that grammatical part five minutes. (group 3) in addition to humor, it was also discussed how modern communication technologies can be used for the purpose of language work. while romero (2016), among others, perceives modern communication technologies as a threat to language revitalization, in the group discussions, the case appeared to be that, via facebook discussion forums, meänkieli speakers all around sweden have been able to sustain and rediscover their identity and shared feeling of belonging. meänkieli is a regional language, but it is spoken in a marginal region, where the number of inhabitants is continuously decreasing. in order to keep meänkieli speakers interested in their cultural heritage, the active maintenance of virtual communities, through modern information technologies, was considered highly important. education is a focal practical tool with which the minority languages can be kept alive, but educating a local language, as a part of swedish school system, is also in connection to several other social and political processes. the revitalization of meänkieli language and culture can be seen as part of a wider discussion concerning the rise of multiculturalism and polynationalism in swedish society, as is also evidenced in the antagonistic responses from political groups against this development (heith 2013, 86). yet, the revitalization of meänkieli is not only a part of a wider global linguistic movement and ethnic revival, but also connected to the recent global migration politics. in one group it was discussed whether this sociopolitical development is actually a hindrance to language work: man 1: i have thought that those who come here, those new ones, they go immediately before meänkieli teaching. those who come from all sort of countries. it was said on radio that they should get their education in their own language here. woman 1: at the same i think it has been a little bit like a rescue for us, that legislation has changed. when they’ve had so much to ponder on them, at the same time it has turned better for us. woman 2: i think also that it’s up to us whether they go before us or not. if we stick out for and want that meänkieli, we can get it in same manner as they insist that people must have their own language. (group 4) 196 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers bringing meänkieli to school is a complicated process in which the notions of ‘them’ and ‘us’ are constantly juxtaposed on several different ways. as we know from the history, the use of meänkieli is usually reflected against the majority language, swedish, but as has been illustrated here, globalization is making the situation increasingly complicated. meänkieli is a local language, but on the facebook forums, it attains features that reflect global features of language use. this raises a question, whether meänkieli could actually be approached as ‘a glocal’ language, a viewpoint often applied to bilingual speakers (cf. hornberger 2000; lee & barton 2011). for sovereignty from a socially critical point of view, language revitalization represents action in which minority groups are attaining sovereignty and their self-determination in a wider sense. the right to use one’s home language is an important part of everyday life, but there are also major symbolic meanings involved when minority languages become acknowledged and respected. this was especially topical when meänkieli attained its official status as a minority language in 2000. meänkieli is a language that is used in daily conversation, and in fact, there exists no tradition of reading or writing in meänkieli. however, as discussed in one group, seeing meänkieli printed has a major symbolic value: woman 1: nobody demands anything in meänkieli because meänkieli speakers cannot necessarily read meänkieli. all the meänkieli speakers can read swedish, so there hasn’t been any need for it. only so, as we have spoken, that in symbolic manner it is nice that we can see meänkieli, like for example in municipality webpages there can be something in meänkieli. so it’s important that it’s visible, but there has never been a situation in which someone insisted that things must be written also in meänkieli. (group 6) although local inhabitants do not necessarily need or even want to see meänkieli in printed form, it symbolizes the attainment of sovereignty, keeps the language existent in a concrete manner and removes it further away from the stigma of ‘halflingualism’. as has been the case with several subalterned languages, no matter how the feelings of (regional) pride have started to flourish, the feelings of shame nevertheless remain embedded in the self-perception of the speakers of such languages. in the case of meänkieli, the question of linguistic sovereignty is inherently connected to the bitterness directed at the denial of finnish roots. thus, the process of attaining sovereignty through language work involves this kind of resentment, and it is manifest in several ways in many of the group discussions. one of the male participants, for instance, told a story about how the election of a new county governor was notified in controversial manner in local news: man 1: when this kari marklund became a county governor, as it had been decided by the government, it was then announced in local swedish television, norrbotten tv. they could not say his name as ‘kari’, so it was changed as ‘karin marklund’. that was the county governor in norrbotten. woman 1: and this was in the 90s. man 1: it was in the 90s. karin marklund, a man with such a name had become a county governor. so yes, it has been bloody effective politics, oppressing people and at the same time sweden represented the global self-esteem in many issues. (group 8) as karin is a swedish female name, this (probably accidently announced) wrong name is turned into a bitter-sweet humorous story in which the internal colonialism imposed by swedish society becomes criticized. similarly, it illustrates how ethnic minorities are capable of turning their marginal position into a source of pride and even of laughing at themselves (ridanpää 2017, 67–68). in that same group discussion, the societal status of meänkieli was also defended by re-narrating the history of finnish language: man 1: it has been acknowledged that, ever since the torne valley has been populated, say back to the 10th -11th century, the language spoken here was meänkieli. (…) finnish, the national language of finland, it was not before 16th century when mikael agricola started mucking around with it. it was not until the middle of 19th century when finnish became a public, national language. it is so that if you take a more in-depth look, the national language of finland is a dialect of meänkieli, if fennia 196(2) (2018) 197juha ridanpää you may, not other way around. man 2: yes, invented language. (group 8) whether the discussant in the example above is being serious or merely speaking in jest is irrelevant here. according to discussants, meänkieli contains something pure and original that other, officially acknowledged languages do not have. the feeling of being othered is constantly embedded when discussing the societal position of meänkieli and, interestingly, this bitterness is directed both at the history of swedification as well as at the history of finnish society. on the other hand… it has been highlighted in this article that the revitalization of meänkieli has been in a key role in the revitalization of the regional identity. similarly, meänkieli has been in a key role when local people have mobilized themselves to work for the benefit of local culture on a more general level. however, some discussants, particularly those who are not directly working in language revitalization programs, feel that revitalization work has perhaps gone too far, that there is simply ‘too much’ meänkieli everywhere: woman 1: some say that it’s too much, like in all occasions it is meänkieli, meänkieli. (group 5) woman 1: i am not sure whether i’m a right person to say, since i’m a little bit like a finn and i speak finnish and try to teach finnish. sometimes it feels like it has turned into a kind of myth, that municipalities must have meänkieli and it must be used. (…) woman 2: it somehow feels like the language shouldn’t be (used) against one’s own will. if there is no use for language, it will die anyway. (group 2) minority identity and language as one element of it, are not stable and coherent discourses, but there are various, sometimes conflicting narratives of who ‘we’ are and where ‘we’ come from. according to one interviewee, meänkieli speaking has turned, on regional level, into a hegemonic discourse, which is not necessarily only positive: man 1: linguistically, it seems like that meänkieli, as a name, has gained a kind of monopoly here in swedish side, on the western side of the border. nobody speaks about finnish. (…) as a name, meänkieli has then overtook (…) that what language is spoken here, at this side of the border. haparanda is actually that island, in where we still say, that we speak finnish, but in other municipalities up north, the title is meänkieli. (…) it is something that enables to deny own roots, when being meänkieli speakers. on no account being finnish. not even from our roots. it is same thing there in finnmark, norway. it is only talked about kven people, (…) not anymore about finnmark people or the finns. they are kvens nowadays. no matter whether they wanted it or not. (group 1) although the revitalization of meänkieli has been recognized as a matter of regional pride, a cornerstone of shared identity, here meänkieli is conceived rather as a symbolic signpost with which, not only the history of otherness, but also the historical origins of local identity, the finnish language and finnish roots, can be denied and forgotten. in case of meänkieli, the language revitalization work obviously serves to benefit identity work, but as an interviewee conceives here, in a slightly contradicting manner, with the cost of the decreasing appreciation of finnish identity and roots. calling ‘tornedalian finska’ as meänkieli has been a strategic move and it is understandable that for some, even those being actively involved with revitalization work, the artificiality may feel irritating: woman 1: i have always said that i speak finnish, but it was before that meänkieli was invented. (group 2) man 1: what i find really sad is this denial of finnishness so that even names are changed. many men here have taken their wives’ surname after cross-marrying, taken wife’s surname, because it 198 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers is swedish. then changed the first name a little bit, like sounding more swedish. then many invented own dialect and denies then the finnish background of it. it’s like i think that one must know where one comes from, where the roots are, but these deny it completely, that finnishness. i don’t understand what it is this shame that it has caused to them. (group 1) as has been mentioned in this article, bengt pohjanen has been a key person in the mobilization of language revitalization and his dedication to work for this goal has been widely appreciated. establishing the grammar for meänkieli is perceived as a crucial symbolic signpost for language revitalization. yet, although pohjanen’s work – particularly on grammar – legitimizes the position of meänkieli as an independent minority language, it is also perceived that standardizing everyday language may actually hinder its survival: man 1: when that grammar came, when they started working with that book, (…), i have sometimes pondered it like by that means it is made more difficult than it actually is. when you start phrasing like, “this must be in that form, this is correct, this is wrong”, then you prevent the language from developing, i think. woman 1: yes, then the interest stops. (…) man 1: i believe that if language must survive, it must be… man 2: free man 1: yes, free. and it isn’t that serious if something is said wrong. (group 6) as seen, although all the discussants share the opinion that the survival of meänkieli is important in general, some discussants believe that certain aspects of language revitalization may actually work against their own purpose. it is presumable that the speaker in the previous example does not think that ‘let it be’ is the best method to save the language, but what it illustrates is that there are varying opinions about how seriously the language work should be put into action. discussants in the previous example imply that the existence of meänkieli is dependent on that it is used as a colloquial language in daily conversation and, therefore, establishing a grammar for it hinders the natural way of using it. this demonstrates how diverging and also confronting rationales for language revitalization work there exist. discussion the simple conclusion from the discussion is that, on a local level, the variety of rationales for language revitalization is vast. as costa and gasquet-cyrus (2013, 223) argue, “no revitalization movement can ever be homogenous”, and that “such movements are born of the creation of charter myths and are based subsequently on interpretations that serve various (and often conflicting) interests”. among the people actively working with or for the survival of meänkieli, there exist varying opinions about why saving language is important. in addition, the opinions about how to operationalize the revitalization process are diverse. ultimately, the most important finding is that language revitalizing is not a path of action that was carried without questioning its logics. the language is recognized as a part of people’s identity, so although all the discussants were somehow involved with language revitalization work, for some the negative connotations attached to meänkieli were too intimate. in addition, as has been highlighted at the end, some discussants suggested that language revitalization work has become too dominant a mode of cultural activity. language revitalization has been a process of renarrating the local history (ridanpää 2014), but for some discussants it represents, rather surprisingly, a new way to re-hide the shameful past. in the torne valley, language revitalization work has been carried out along with other cultural projects funded by the european union, and similarly, the received funding has mobilized new cultural projects. in fact, there exists also a viewpoint according to which the urge for meänkieli language revitalization functions solely for the benefit of achieving more funding from the european union for other cultural activities and projects. against this background, it was an interesting and relatively surprising finding that the protection of meänkieli was not rationalized by the relevance of cultural fennia 196(2) (2018) 199juha ridanpää diversity. instead, the language revitalization efforts can be approached as a form of meta-culture. the notion of meta-culture refers to “cultural forms or practices that comment on other cultural forms or practices, and in so doing, impact their circulation” and “metapragmatic discourses explicitly attempting to change language structure, function, and social usage or undo previous changes” (mcewan-fujita 2011, 48). for cultural activists and people who are involved with language revitalization via some cultural activity, the intrinsic value of cultural diversity is axiomatic and not explicitly mentioned or even implicitly referred to. it has been criticized that, when discussing about saving the language through recording and documentation, many language experts use metaphorical framing such as ‘death’, ‘endangerment’ and ‘extinction’, which may have a negative impact on those community members who are actively revitalizing and reclaiming languages (perley 2012). arguments such as “more hard we work, more endangered it is” or “this language is dying anyway” were voiced in the group discussions. this illustrates clearly how trust in a bright future is often wavering and the metaphoric frames of ‘death’, ‘endangerment’ and ‘extinction’ are actively in use in conversations among the language activists as well – or should we say, especially among them. it seems that more signs of threat need to appear in order to make people realize the gravity of the current situation concerning the decline of minority languages, no matter for what rationale saving endangered languages is conceived important. acknowledgements research was financially supported by kone foundation. references ahola, l. (2006) asenteellista menoa – tornionlaaksolaiset nuoret ja vähemmistökieli. in haurinen, o. & sulkala, h. (eds.) tutkielmia vähemmistökielistä jäämereltä liivinrantaan: vähemmistökielten tutkimusja koulutusverkoston raportti v, 15–29. oulu university press, oulu. albury, n. j. (2017) mother tongues and languaging in malaysia: critical linguistics under critical examination. language in society 46(4) 567–589. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404517000239 antonsich, m. (2010) searching for belonging – an analytical framework. geography compass 4(6) 644–659. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00317.x baloy, n. (2011) “we can't feel our language”: making places in the city for aboriginal language revitalization. the american indian quarterly 35(4) 515–548. https://doi.org/10.5250/ amerindiquar.35.4.0515 booth, t. & booth, w. (1996) sounds of silence: narrative research with inarticulate subjects. disability & society 11(1) 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599650023326 brubaker, r. & cooper, f. (2000) beyond “identity”. theory and society 29(1) 1–47. https://doi. org/10.1023/a:1007068714468 clayton, j. (2009) thinking spatially: towards an everyday understanding of inter-ethnic relations. social and cultural geography 10(4) 481–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360902853288 costa, j. & gasquet-cyrus, m. (2013) what is language revitalization really about? competing language revitalization movements in provence. in jones, m. j. & ogilvie, s. (eds.) keeping languages alive: documentation, pedagogy and revitalization, 212–224. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139245890.020 davis, j. l. (2016) language affiliation and ethnolinguistic identity in chickasaw language revitalization. language & communication 47 100–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.04.005 dorian, n. c. (1994) purism vs. compromise in language revitalization and language revival. language in society 23(4) 479–494. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500018169 edwards, j. (2010) minority languages and group identity. john benjamins b.v., amsterdam. https:// doi.org/10.1075/impact.27 elenius, l. (2002) a place in the memory of nation. minority policy towards the finnish speakers in sweden and norway. acta borealia 19 103–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/080038302321117542 fishman, j. a. (1991) reversing language shift: theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. multilingual matters, clevendon. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404517000239 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00317.x https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.35.4.0515 https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.35.4.0515 https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599650023326 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007068714468 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007068714468 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360902853288 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139245890.020 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.04.005 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500018169 https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.27 https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.27 https://doi.org/10.1080/080038302321117542 200 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers friedman, d. a. (2011) language socialization and language revitalization. in duranti, a., ochs, e. & schieffelin, b. b. (eds.) the handbook of language socialization, 631–647. wiley-blackwell, west sussex. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444342901.ch27 gibson, c. (1998) “we sing our home, we dance our land”: indigenous self-determination and contemporary geopolitics in australian popular music. environment and planning d: society and space 16 163–184. https://doi.org/10.1068/d160163 gilmartin, m. & migge, b. (2015) home stories: immigrant narratives of place and identity in contemporary ireland. journal of cultural geography 32(1) 83–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873 631.2014.1000576 grenoble, l. a. & whaley, l. j. (2006) saving languages: an introduction to language revitalization. cambridge university press, cambridge. hansegård, n. (1990) den norrbottensfinska språkfrågan: en återblick på halvspråkighetsdebatten. centre for multiethnic research, uppsala. harrison, k. d. (2008) when languages die: the extinction of the world's languages and the erosion of human knowledge. oxford university press, oxford. heith, a. (2013) challenging and negotiating national borders: sámi and tornedalian alternative literary history. in viljoen, h. (ed.) crossing borders, dissolving boundaries, 75–91. rodopi, amsterdam. hermes, m. (2012) indigenous language revitalization and documentation in the united states: collaboration despite colonialism. language and linguistics compass 6(3) 131–142. https://doi. org/10.1002/lnc3.327 hermes, m. & king, k. (2013) ojibwe language revitalization, multimedia technology, and family language learning. language learning & technology 17(1) 125–144. <http://hdl.handle. net/10125/24513> hinton, l. (2001) language revitalization: an overview. in hinton, l. & hale, k. (eds.) the green book of language revitalization in practice, 3–18. academic press, san diego. https://doi. org/10.1163/9789004261723_002 hinton, l. (2011) language revitalization and language pedagogy: new teaching and learning strategies. language and education 25(4) 307–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.577220 hornberger, n. h. (2000) bilingual education policy and practice in the andes: ideological paradox and intercultural possibility. anthropology & education quarterly 31(2) 173–201. https://doi. org/10.1525/aeq.2000.31.2.173 hornberger, n. h. (2006) voice and biliteracy in indigenous language revitalization: contentious educational practices in quechua, guarani, and māori contexts. journal of language, identity, and education 5(4) 277–292. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0504_2 huss, l. m. (1999) reversing language shift in the far north: linguistic revitalization in northern scandinavia and finland. acta universitatis upsaliensis, uppsala. irvine, j. t. & gal, s. (2000) language ideology and linguistic differentiation. in kroskrity, p. v. (ed.) regimes of language, 35–83. school of american research press, santa fe. júlíusdóttir, m. (2007) culture, cultural economy and gender in processes of place reinvention. in nyseth, t. & granås, b. (eds.) place reinvention in the north – dynamics and governance perspectives, 39–53. nordregio, stockholm. karlsson, b. (ed.) (2004) bengt pohjanen meän vanhiin. barents publisher, överkalix. king, j. (2001) te kohanga reo: maori language revitalization. in hinton, l. & hale, k. (eds.) the green book of language revitalization in practice, 119–128. academic press, san diego. king, k. a. (2001) language revitalization processes and prospects: quichua in the ecuadorian andes. multilingual matters, clevedon. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853597077 king, k. a. (ed.) (2008) sustaining linguistic diversity: endangered and minority languages and language varieties. georgetown university press, georgetown. laakso, j. & sarhimaa, a. (2016) towards openly multilingual policies and practices: assessing minority language maintenance across europe. multilingual matters, bristol. lane, p. (2011) the birth of the kven language in norway: emancipation through state recognition. international journal of the sociology of language 2011(209) 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1515/ ijsl.2011.021 lee, c. k. m. & barton, d. (2011) constructing glocal identities through multilingual writing practices on flickr.com®. international multilingual research journal 5(1) 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/193 13152.2011.541331 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444342901.ch27 https://doi.org/10.1068/d160163 https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2014.1000576 https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2014.1000576 https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.327 https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.327 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24513 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24513 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004261723_002 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004261723_002 https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.577220 https://doi.org/10.1525/aeq.2000.31.2.173 https://doi.org/10.1525/aeq.2000.31.2.173 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0504_2 https://doi.org/10.21832/9781853597077 https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.2011.021 https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.2011.021 https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2011.541331 https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2011.541331 fennia 196(2) (2018) 201juha ridanpää lindgren, a. r. (2000) language emancipation: the finnish case. in phillipson, r. (ed.) rights to language: equity, power and education, 40–45. laurence erlbaum associates, mahwah. lipott, s. (2015) the tornedalian minority in sweden. from assimilation to recognition: a ‘forgotten’ ethnic and linguistic minority, 1870–2000. immigrants & minorities 33(1) 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1 080/02619288.2014.896539 lorenzo, d. r. (2012) the diatopic development of aspects of twentieth-century galician. a contrastive analysis of linguistic geography data. dialectologia: revista electronica 2012 143–156. marten, h. f. (2012) ‘latgalian is not a language’: linguistic landscapes in eastern latvia and how they reflect centralist attitudes. in gorter, d., marten, h. f. & van mensel, l. (eds.) minority languages in the linguistic landscape, 19–35. palgrave macmillan, uk. may, s. (2012) language and minority rights: ethnicity, nationalism and the politics of language. routledge, new york. mccarty, t. l., nicholas, s. e. & wyman, l. t. (2015) 50(0) years out and counting: native american language education and the four rs. international multilingual research journal 9(4) 227–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2015.1091267 mccarty, t. l., romero-little, m. e., warhol, l. & zepeda, c. (2009) indigenous youth as language policy makers. journal of language, identity, and education 8(5) 291–306. https://doi. org/10.1080/15348450903305098 mcewan-fujita, e. (2011) language revitalization discourses as metaculture: gaelic in scotland from the 18th to 20th centuries. language & communication 31(1) 48–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. langcom.2010.12.001 mcintosh, j. (2005) language essentialism and social hierarchies among giriama and swahili. journal of pragmatics 37(12) 1919–1944. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.01.010 meek, b. a. (2010) we are our language: an ethnography of language revitalization in a northern athabaskan community. university of arizona press, tucson. napurí, a. (2016) revitalization of the bora language. in pericles, p. (ed.) springer international handbooks of education: handbook of research and practice in heritage language education, 1–13. themistoklis aravossitas springer, trifonas. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38893-9_24-1 niemi, m. (2000) popularmusik från vittula. norstedt, stockholm. o’rourke, b. & pujolar, j. (2013) from native speakers to “new speakers” – problematizing nativeness in language revitalization contexts. histoire épistémologie langage 35(2) 47–67. https://www. persee.fr/doc/hel_0750-8069_2013_num_35_2_3457 olthuis, m., kivelä, s. & skutnabb-kangas, t. (2013) revitalising indigenous languages: how to recreate a lost generation. multilingual matters, bristol. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847698896 pasanen, a. (2015) kuávsui já peeivičuovâ.'sarastus ja päivänvalo': inarinsaamen kielen revitalisaatio. uralica helsingiensia, helsinki. peltonen, m. (2000) between landscape and language: the finnish national self-image in transition. scandinavian journal of history 25(4) 265–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/034687500750046924 perley, b. c. (2012) zombie linguistics: experts, endangered languages and the curse of undead voices. anthropological forum: a journal of social anthropology and comparative sociology 22(2) 133–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2012.694170 piasecki, k. (2014) the birth of new ethnoses: examples from northern europe. our europe. ethnography – ethnology – anthropology of culture 3/2014 7–20. <http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/ element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-a1a9b84d-5474-4e41-84b5-02870ec54088> 26.11.2018. pietikäinen, s., huss, l., laihiala-kankainen, s., aikio-puoskari, u. & lane, p. (2010) regulating multilingualism in the north calotte: the case of kven, meänkieli and sámi languages. acta borealia 27(1) 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/08003831.2010.486923 polkinghorne, d. e. (1995) narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. international journal of qualitative studies in education 8(1) 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839950080103 pollak, j. p. & freda, p. d. (1997) humor, learning, and socialization in middle level classrooms. the clearing house: a journal of educational strategies, issues and ideas 70(4) 176–178. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/00098655.1997.10544190 price, p. l. (2010) cultural geography and the stories we tell ourselves. cultural geographies 17(2) 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474010363851 prokkola, e-k. (2014) using narrativity as a methodological tool. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 13(3) 442–449. <https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/ view/1018> https://doi.org/10.1080/02619288.2014.896539 https://doi.org/10.1080/02619288.2014.896539 https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2015.1091267 https://doi.org/10.1080/15348450903305098 https://doi.org/10.1080/15348450903305098 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2010.12.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2010.12.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.01.010 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38893-9_24-1 https://www.persee.fr/doc/hel_0750-8069_2013_num_35_2_3457 https://www.persee.fr/doc/hel_0750-8069_2013_num_35_2_3457 https://doi.org/10.21832/9781847698896 https://doi.org/10.1080/034687500750046924 https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2012.694170 http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-a1a9b84d-5474-4e41-84b5-02870ec54088 http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-a1a9b84d-5474-4e41-84b5-02870ec54088 https://doi.org/10.1080/08003831.2010.486923 https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839950080103 https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.1997.10544190 https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.1997.10544190 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474010363851 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1018 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1018 202 fennia 196(2) (2018)research papers prokkola, e-k. & ridanpää, j. (2011) following the plot of bengt pohjanen's meänmaa: narrativization as a process of creating regional identity. social & cultural geography 12(7) 775–791. https://doi.or g/10.1080/14649365.2011.615666 rata, e. (2007) maori language survival and new zealand education. in schuster, k. & witkosky, d. (eds.) language of the land. policy, politics, identity, 79–98. information age, charlotte (n.c.). rice, k. (2009) must there be two solitudes? language activists and linguists working together. in reyhner, j. & lockard, l. (eds.) indigenous language revitalization: encouragement, courage and lessons learned, 37–59. northern arizona university, flagstaff, az. richter, m. (2015) can you feel the difference? emotions as an analytical lens. geographica helvetica 70(2) 141–148. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-70-141-2015 ridanpää, j. (2014) politics of literary humour and contested narrative identity (of a region with no identity). cultural geographies 21(4) 711–726. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014525054 ridanpää, j. (2016) singing acts from the deep north: critical perspectives on northern exotics, contemporary ethnic music and language preservation in sámi communities. journal for cultural research 20(1) 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2015.1134057 ridanpää, j. (2017) narrativizing (and laughing) spatial identities together in meänkieli-speaking minorities. geoforum 83 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.05.003 ridanpää, j. & pasanen, a. (2009) from the bronx to the wilderness: inari-sami rap, language revitalisation and contested ethnic stereotypes. studies in ethnicity and nationalism 9(2) 213–230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-9469.2009.01051.x romero, s. (2016) bill gates speaks k'ichee'! the corporatization of linguistic revitalization in guatemala. language & communication 47 154–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.08.001 sallabank, j. (2013) attitudes to endangered languages: identities and policies. cambridge university press, new york. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139344166 skutnabb-kangas, t. (2002) language policies and education: the role of education in destroying or supporting the world’s linguistic diversity. in world congress on language policies, barcelona. soler, j. & zabrodskaja, a. (2017) new spaces of new speaker profiles: exploring language ideologies in transnational multilingual families. language in society 46(4) 547–566. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0047404517000367 spolsky, b. (1995) conditions for language revitalization: a comparison of the cases of hebrew and maori. current issues in language & society 2(3) 177–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/13520529509615444 sullivan, t. (2012) ‘i want to be all i can irish’: the role of performance and performativity in the construction of ethnicity. social & cultural geography 13(5) 429–443. https://doi.org/10.1080/146 49365.2012.698746 sumida huaman, e. (2014) “you're trying hard, but it's still going to die”: indigenous youth and language tensions in peru and the united states. anthropology & education quarterly 45(1) 71–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12048 tomaney, j. (2015) region and place ii: belonging. progress in human geography 39(4) 507–516. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0309132514539210 tsunoda, t. (2005) language endangerment and language revitalization: an introduction. de gruyter mouton, berlin. unesco (1953) the use of vernacular languages in education. unesco, paris. vaattovaara, j. (2009) meän tapa puhua: tornionlaakso pellolaisnuorten subjektiivisena paikkana ja murrealueena. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, helsinki. valentine, g. & skelton, t. (2007) the right to be heard: citizenship and language. political geography 26(2) 121–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.09.003 van wyk, m. m. (2011) the use of cartoons as a teaching tool to enhance student learning in economics education. journal of social science 26(2) 117–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/09718923.2 011.11892888 warschauer, m., donaghy, k. & kuamoÿo, h. (1997) leokī: a powerful voice of hawaiian language revitalization. computer assisted language learning 10(4) 349–362. https://doi. org/10.1080/0958822970100405 wilson, a. c. (2004) reclaiming our humanity: decolonizing and recovery of indigenous knowledge. in mihesuah, d. a. & wilson, a. c. (eds.) indigenizing the academy: transforming scholarship and empowering communities, 69–87. university of nebraska press, lincoln. winsa, b. (2007) social capital of indigenous and autochthonous ethnicities. in dana, l. p. & anderson, r. b. (eds.) international handbook of research of international entrepreneurship, 257–286. edward elgar publishing, chelterham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781781952641.00031 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.615666 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.615666 https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-70-141-2015 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014525054 https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2015.1134057 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.05.003 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1754-9469.2009.01051.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.08.001 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139344166 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404517000367 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404517000367 https://doi.org/10.1080/13520529509615444 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2012.698746 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2012.698746 https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12048 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514539210 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514539210 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.09.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/09718923.2011.11892888 https://doi.org/10.1080/09718923.2011.11892888 https://doi.org/10.1080/0958822970100405 https://doi.org/10.1080/0958822970100405 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781781952641.00031 fennia 196(2) (2018) 203juha ridanpää woolard, k. a. (2003) we don’t speak catalan because we are marginalized. ethnic and class connotations of language in barcelona. in blot, r. k. (ed.) language and social identity, 85–103. praeger, westport, cp. yuval-davis, n. (2006) belonging and the politics of belonging. patterns of prejudice 40(3) 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220600769331 https://doi.org/10.1080/00313220600769331 untitled globalisation and the finnish forest sector: on the internationalisation of forest-industrial operations ari aukusti lehtinen lehtinen, ari aukusti (2002). globalisation and the finnish forest sector: on the internationalisation of forest-industrial operations. fennia 180: 1– 2, pp. 237–250. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this article focuses on the most recent internationalisation of finnish forest companies. the profiles of the major companies are analysed. a ‘world map’ is drawn to illustrate the gradual formation of forest-industrial spaces in three scales: the articulation of finnish (national) forest interest is related to the strategic openings of the finnish forest companies within european (continental) and global (transcontinental) contexts. the suggested world map covers both the active exporting of the ‘finnish model’ and the subsequent new location of finland in the international networks. both material and symbolic dimensions of the process are highlighted. the slow dynamics of the paper production is set against the current fluidity of societal demands that are fed by intensifying competition between the leading companies, profit maximation among the shareholders, and keen steering by globally aware environmentalists and consumers. finally, the eco-social consequences of the contested globalisation process are addressed by examining the most controversial signs and signals. these include size ranking of the companies, profit hunting, image and identity politics, and product certifications. the theoretical framework is based on the political-ecology literature inspired by actorand context-specific approaches. hence, the aim is a simultaneous analysis of both material and symbolic changes in forest-industrial practices. ari aukusti lehtinen, department of geography, university of joensuu, p. o. box 111, fin-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: ari.lehtinen@joensuu.fi material and symbolic forests the intensive internationalisation of the forest industry is currently rearranging the interrelations between the leading companies and their suppliers and customers. the governance of the companies is also under redefinition: shareholder interest increasingly conditions the managers’ decision-making. the entire societal setting of the forest industry has therefore changed, both at the level of material production and in terms of financial performance and image profilation. accordingly, this article outlines the basic forest-industrial restructuring in connection to the rise of symbolic and speculative values in paper production (see, e.g., collins 1998; sandberg & sörlin 1998; saether 1998; kortelainen 1999a). the specific goal is to analyse the eco-social interdependencies and consequences of the globalisation of the forest industry and trade. on the one hand, these are related to the growing demands of profit maximation and, on the other hand, to widening sustainability demands and concerns of justice. theoretically at stake is the contested rearticulation of local–global interfaces and nature–society relations. both are informed by a conceptual refocus on the interrelations between the material and symbolic spheres of our socio-spatial existence (e.g., peet & watts 1996; mcafee 1999; murdoch et al. 2000; zimmerer 2000). the empirical material is limited to the finnish forest-industrial companies that are currently re-working their historical embeddednes in finnishness and finnish forest resources. the analysis focuses on the years 1990–2000. 238 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)ari aukusti lehtinen the article’s starting point underlines the seriousness of the current eco-social problems. the challenges of globalisation are real and acute, and demand collective and effective reforms in societal practices. these challenges can no longer be overlooked and labelled as ‘trendy’ constructions of eco-alarmism. this does not, however, change the fact that ecological and social imperatives are human derivations and therefore loaded with a myriad of motives. there is no way back to the modern(ist) worldview based on solid divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’, or the human and non-human realms (conley 1995; whatmore & thorne 1998; lehtinen 2000, 2001a). environmental problems, violations of human rights, and other dark sides of modernisation can no longer be excluded from global and local practices (see brown & flavin 1999). this is the first and the most fundamental frame view of this article: it is here, in between and across the dominating ways of knowing, that new openings and radical inclusions are needed. but difficult practical challenges follow immediately: how to make the inclusions deemed necessary? on what basis should the necessities be ranked? how to cope with the consequences of these inclusions? how to evaluate the relevance of the myriad of already existing critical eco-social signals? the task seems paradoxical. the critical voices emerge from experiences of alarming material shortcomings, but they turn into qualitative attributes when integrated into trade routines as expenses or guiding rules. sustainability, green certificates, organic farming, just forestry, etc., are ideal models that aim at changes in human behaviour. but they are also signals in the market because they seek to measure the viability of the production process and the value of the end product. this leads to the second frame view of the article: the forest-industrial actors (as economic actors in general) are now more frequently forced to integrate qualitative aspects into their production and trading profiles. the direction of this change is currently under heated contestation. the (research) questions hence are: how to secure the validity of information concerning the basic critical material conditions in our local–global world? especially, how to secure the validity of the transition from material to qualitative criteria? how to identify and evaluate the signals of the actors and target groups? how to confirm that even the most marginal(ised) but concerned voices will be heard? the ‘qualitative turn’ within the forest trade is taking place in the negotiations concerning the central criteria of credibility and indicators of sustainability. concretely, the macro-level merger logic follows size and credibility rankings of the key actors. the stock markets are sensitive to the behaviour of the companies, and the markets ‘read’ the credibility labels of the suppliers. new and contested measures of forest certification have been introduced and publishers and media houses are now willing to confirm the sound background of the paper they use (fürstner 1996). finally, the disputed guarantees confuse the consumers. the third frame view of the article thus argues that the main forest-industrial actors are increasingly conditioned by the (more or less public) negotiations of credibility. these negotiations, while surfacing as economically significant, turn into forums of hegemonic competition. this competition is about the formulation of the primary form and content of the negotiations, including the subsequent optional distribution of loads and benefits defined in the reached agreements. in known examples, the initial eco-social worries have turned into a ‘game’ of relational positions and benefits and have resulted in an illusion of strengthening eco-social viability (see, e.g., mcafee 1999; tirkkonen 2000). again, difficult questions emerge: how to learn to identify the continuously changing conditions and rules of this ‘game’? on what basis should the concerns with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ motives be distinguished? how to avoid processes where the judges judge their own cases? how to make an ethical argument economically convincing? the operations and negotiations are documented in this study with the help of geographical scaling. the ‘finnish model’ of forest-industrial modernisation is briefly described as a historical context whereupon europeanisation (since the mid1980s) and globalisation (since the mid-1990s) have developed as new phases of activity for finnish companies. all these phases, however, are integrally characterised by strong interdependencies across these dominating spatio-temporal scalings and marked by rapidly evolving discursive contents. this is the fourth and final frame view of the article: the forest-industrial actors and activities seem to become evaluated in connection to the spatio-temporal scales they are primarily identified with. european companies differ from global companies and this makes a difference, e.g., in merger negotiations. this tends to confirm and fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 239globalisation and the finnish forest sector legitimate the hegemonic historico-spatial practices and, moreover, the direction of reach: globalisation becomes the primary goal and even the guiding ideological discourse. the scaling appears as a construction of reference fields (for the competing actors) and it proceeds through merit and status assessments. ‘europe’ (or ‘finland’), for example, varies according to each discursive field: ‘cultural europe’ differs from ‘fort europe’ that refers to political boundaries, and nokialand can hardly shadow its finno-ugric roots (although this may be easier for individual companies). a continuous ideological competition rages between, and within, the dominant spatio-temporal scalings. the ‘finnish model’ illustrates the role of this inter-scaling in forest-industrial practices. the successful export of this model during the early years of current globalisation seemed to essentially change the model itself. finland the forest state turned into an integral part of the greenbelt of northern europe (lehtinen & rytteri 1998). similarly, the european union looked significantly different in the new context – more bureaucratic and regulative – from inside than from outside, as casimir ehrnrooth (1995), the then leading spokesman for finnish forest industries, strongly argued. in addition, the global reach of the forest industry suddenly turned into concerns about local sensitivity. the companies grew big with their transcontinental operations, but were confused by regional cultural variations and local specificities (hornborg 1998; ovaskainen et al. 1999; miettinen & selin 1999). in the following, finnish forest-industrial firms are analysed within the described framework. the phases of internationalisation (export phase, europeanisation, globalisation) are mapped and evaluated as challenges to both finland and the companies, as well as to the new actors and arenas of the evolving ‘game’ scene. exporting finland during the twentieth century, finland became integrated in the globalising economy as an exporter of forest-industrial products. the process intensified between the world wars and was not challenged until the rapid rise of information technology industries in the end of the century. the share of forest products in total exports fell from 37.6 percent in 1990 to 28.9 percent in 1997 and to 29.4 percent in 1999. the finnish export profile nevertheless still continues to be exceptionally forest-dominated. in other boreal countries with parallel forest-industrial histories the level of ‘forest dependency’ has stayed below 20 percent of the exports. the respective numbers were 14.9 percent in sweden and 16.7 percent in canada in 1996 (avain... 1998). most of the world’s forest-industrial production is limited to domestic markets, but finland has oriented towards export trade. the focus is on the core countries of the european union: france, germany, and great britain. in 1999, circa 90 percent of the paper produced in finland was exported. only sweden achieved almost the same export level (84%). in canada, the export share reached 75 percent, while in other paper-producing countries it stayed much lower: slightly below 50 percent in france and germany and below 10 percent in the usa and japan. south korea reached the export level of 32 percent in 1999 (forest industry… 2001a). the finnish emphasis on export is increasingly a matter of scaling. in the framework of the european union, export and import activities between the eu countries are part of the internal trade. the broader spatial view brings up new issues of trade, modifying the coding of forest statistics. it also makes comparisons with federal canada easier. consequently, the eu scaling brings along several important changes in forest strategy formulations. for example in 1995, when sweden, austria, and finland entered the eu, the union became a net exporter of forest products and the status of forest-industrial policy rose within the union. moreover, finnish forest experts have developed pan-european forest certification (pefc) criteria for forest management. this has also strengthened the ‘continental scaling’ of forestbased trade (hazley 2000). during the past few decades, the finnish forest industry has been internationalised by expanding its production and ownership abroad, especially in western europe, but also transcontinentally. in 2000, 43 percent of the paper and board production capacity of the finnish companies was still located in finland, whereas 44 percent was based elsewhere in europe and 9 percent in the usa (forest industry… 2001a). in comparison, the production capacity abroad was circa 10 percent in 1980 (lammi 2000: 33). the rapid internationalisation is due to an industrial restructuring which has ranked three finnish forest industry compa240 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)ari aukusti lehtinen nies to the top-twelve list of largest forest industry companies in the world (stora enso, upmkymmene, and metsäliitto/m-real) (fig. 1). the rapid expansion and top ranking of the major finnish companies owes a lot to the national subsidies prior to the eu membership. the success was made possible by a combination of numerous collaborative linkages and risk-sharing mechanisms within the national context that strengthened the competitiveness of the companies. the companies themselves simultaneously created a successful outward-looking path by broadening their scope from pulp and newsprint towards coated papers, liquid packaging board, and speciality papers. this unique state–company combination – the ‘finnish model’ – was the background recipe for the global launch during the late 1990s (näsi et al. 1998; koskinen 1999; donner-amnell 2000; moen & lilja 2001). simultaneously, the structures of company ownership went through a major transformation as part of the expansion. global investors, seeking maximal profit, emerged as influential actors of forest trade. the shareholders followed the company investments keenly, bringing a new layer of sensitivity to the decision-making. during the past few years, the companies have faced a stronger signal to slow down the speed of capital allocation. behind this pressure have been international investors who react quickly against risky moves of the firms by selling their shares and thus lowering the stock prices. the setting is crucial to a capital-intensive industry where over-investment has been a repeated problem. periods of overcapacity become reflected as fluctuations in price levels and profitability that worry the investors. this is contrary to the earlier finnish national context characterised by less critically supported expansive investment strategies (moen & lilja 2001). the current competitive internationalisation is in a state of discordance. the large companies are searching for firm (long-term) market positions and even leadership in selected product groups through mergers and by investing in the renewal of capacity. the investors evaluate every move as a possible signs of eroding (short-term) profitability. hence, the companies need to address both the material and symbolic dimensions of papermaking. they need to take risks in order to maintain or enhance their status in the markets, but, simultaneously, they have to appear as attractive global corporations with market power. the risks of rapid fall in the market are numerous. they emerge increasingly often from the speculative side of trading, as is typical of the current age. the international sphere of speculation is a significant element behind the current finnish forest-industrial policy and an integral part of the company dynamics as an outcome and a price of speeded outward orientation. in the spring of 2000, the share of foreign (that is, non-finnish) ownership in the three principal finland-based (‘finnish’) companies ranged from stora enso’s 70 percent to upm-kymmene’s 59 percent and metsä-serla/m-real’s 35 percent. it is evident that the american-style ‘shareholder ideology’ has arrived fig. 1. the world’s largest paper and board producers in the fall of 2000; per capacity (forest industry… 2001a; lilius & rantanen 2000). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 241globalisation and the finnish forest sector in european economies, putting considerable pressure on the companies to improve their financial attractiveness and short-term profitability (saastamoinen 1999; lammi 2000; moen & lilja 2001). finnish companies in europe the major finnish forest companies and the state clearly sought international competitive positions actively. the societal support was considered necessary among those involved in national forestsector politics. consequently, the companies integrated in the eu ahead of the state of finland. the initial connection was, of course, the finnish export orientation, but the actual contextual change took place during the 1980s in the form of expansive continental ownership of production capacity. the europeanisation was not an easy process for the finnish companies. the northern newcomers were considered outsiders which played with unfair rules, e.g., gained benefits from devaluations of the finnish currency (markka) and kept the domestic production costs (i.e., timber and energy prices and employer expenses) at an artificially low level. the most heated debate, however, was related to overcapacity. the supply of fine paper, magazine papers, and sawn timber had exceeded the demand for several years during the early 1990s, resulting in serious reductions in price levels and in unused capacity of the mills. in france, especially, the paper producers and sawmill managers felt that their economic space was eroded unjustly, and the finnish ‘invaders’ faced protectionist governmental reactions. the main finnish forest exporters were therefore invited to negotiate with the eu in 1994 in order to solve the serious structural overcapacity problem (laitinen & jokelin 1994). the setting changed in 1995, when finland entered the eu together with sweden and austria. the era of domestic devaluations of the finnish markka was over and the eu became a self-sufficient exporter of paper. soon afterwards, the eu founded a central office for the coordination of the forest-industrial benefits. it also specified the role of forest-based industries as one of the trading policy emphases that could benefit from structural funds and internal research programmes (hazley 2000). the leading finnish forest companies achieved a firm hold in the continental market. for a while it seemed that the finnish forest map was to become exclusively western european, with strong regional concentrations in germany, great britain, and france (cd-fig. 1). this was especially true till 1997. in europe, outside finland, upm-kymmene (united paper mills-kymmene inc.) has become an important producer of coated magazine paper in wales and scotland, whereas its operations in northern germany are based on fine paper production. in addition, the company is an important producer in france, where it concentrates on pulp, newsprint, and fine paper grades. upmkymmene’s ‘french strategy’ has faced serious drawbacks, however, partially as a consequence of the above-mentioned trade confrontation between finland and france. a withdrawal from magazine paper production near rouen in 1997 lessened the company’s visibility in the country. enso (enso gutzeit inc.) merged with the swedish stora (stora kopparberg inc.) in 1999. the new company immediately won a place among the three leading paper and board producers in the world. both companies were among the world’s top ten forest companies already before the merger. in europe, stora enso has a strong position in finland, sweden, and germany. during the 1990s, before the merger, enso had actively invested in germany. it opened a newsprint unit, supplied by recycled fibre, in eastern germany in 1994 and bought a newsprint and magazine paper unit near karlsruhe a few years later. stora enso also owns a sizeable fine-paper unit in the netherlands. sawing, traditionally a central element in enso’s domestic strategies, now has another base in austria. stora enso has activities also in the baltic countries and russia. a branch unit pakenso has invested in cellular board production in tallinn, riga, and palapanovo, south of moscow. stora enso has joint operations with its partners in the karelian republic. there, ladenso is an important purchaser of timber for the pulp and paper plants in eastern finland. stora enso also inherited stora’s earlier european operations, including eight major paper or board plants in sweden and five large pulp, paper, or board units in germany, belgium, and france. in addition, the pulp production at stora celbi in portugal is strategically important for the company. the supply of wood for stora celbi is based on eucalyptus plantations (stora… 1998). metsä-serla/m-real is another important finepaper producer in europe. after the purchase of 242 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)ari aukusti lehtinen swedish modo paper in 2000, it became a continental market leader in this grade (modo paperin osto… 2000). modo paper has large fine paper units in sweden, germany, france, and austria. the merger was originally accompanied with the plan to sell the production of tissue papers to the swedish sca (svenska cellulosa aktiebolag), but the eu commission prevented this: the sca’s market share in tissue papers would have grown too large. the setback caused serious liquidation problems for metsä-serla/m-real and it seems to have forced the company to withdraw form magazine paper production in southern germany. during the latter half of 1990s, metsä-serla achieved a visible role in the production of coated magazine papers in germany, thanks to the cooperation with myllykoski paper. this alliance is now under reconsideration (iivonen 2001). myllykoski paper, a family-owned company from southern finland, has succeeded in keeping the ownership in the hands of the björnberg family. this has secured some entrepreneurial freedom and elasticity: decisions are made according to managerial aims, not for attracting broader ranks of shareholders (rantanen 2000; iivonen 2000a). in comparison, metsä-serla/m-real is very dependent on the cooperative organization of finnish forest owners (metsäliitto) that aims at keeping the major shareholder’s voice heard in the company (seppänen 2000). ahlstrom industries has a highly specialised production profile and a well-established transcontinental production network that deviates strikingly from the volume-based strategies of the other companies. ahlstrom’s notable paper units in germany and northern italy produce industrial filter papers, package covers, and some other special paper grades (ollikainen 2000). the europeanisation was generally a natural and necessary step for the finnish companies. new limits and risks soon emerged, however. this was primarily due to the emerging stronger regulative interests of the eu. in the eyes of the forest industry, the union had become a bureaucratic unit that did not develop enough its competitive advantages within the global spatial division of labour (ehrnrooth 1995). the last years of the twentieth century consequently witnessed a new emphasis on transcontinental relations and operations. transcontinental operations the active globalisation of the finnish companies is a novel phenomenon, but it was not launched without earlier contacts and experiments in transcontinental production. past experiences evidently had a significant influence on the new strategies that varied from one company to another. the overseas success of ahlstrom industries was due to a strict concentration on special papers, mainly industrial filters. the strategy was based on flexible customer orientation. this recipe has proved useful in europe, brazil, south korea, and the usa. among the other finnish companies, only myllykoski has long-term overseas experience. in 1980, myllykoski bought a paper mill (madison paper) in maine, usa, following a customer’s demand: the new york times, after accidentally discovering the special quality of myllykoski’s magazine paper, sought closer cooperation. myllykoski is still the local supplier to the journal’s special sunday issues. after two decades of low profile in the usa, myllykoski announced a new move in 2000: madison paper bought an old (recycled fibre -based), bankrupt newsprint unit in chicago. as in maine, the aim is to replace the old machinery and invest in the production of coated magazine papers (iivonen 2000b). initially, however, enso was the first finnish forest company to start transatlantic cooperation in wood processing. the project, begun already during the 1960s, gradually turned into enso’s major ownership of eurocan pulp & paper in british columbia, canada. the company concentrated on saw milling and kraft paper production. after economic and political setbacks, enso withdrew from british columbia in the early 1990s. the difficulties were partly related to the growing local environmental concerns regarding the company’s clear fellings (brax 1991). the merger with stora in 1999 nevertheless brought enso back to transatlantic paper processing: stora had long experience in eastern canada (hornborg 1998). the new stora enso soon expanded over to the us markets by purchasing consolidated paper (in 2000), an influential actor in the great lakes area. at the time of the merger, the combined enterprise was announced to be the world’s largest producer of paper and board by capacity, reaching 15 million tons per year of mainly magazine papers (lindberg 2000). stora enso’s inheritance from its constituent companies included stora’s footholds in canada, fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 243globalisation and the finnish forest sector brazil, and china, and enso’s orientation towards indonesia. in borneo, enso has a 20-year project of tree plantations (mainly acasia) that utilises the logged areas of rain forests. the cooperation is organised as a joint venture called pt finnatara intiga. its owners are inhutani iii, the state company of indonesia (40% of the shares), gudang garamin, with a chinese background (30%), and enso (30%). their aim is to establish a pulp plant on the island in the near future. stora enso also owns 20 percent of the shares of advanced argo which processes eucalyptus plantations into pulp in thailand. in addition, stora enso controls half of the shares of a large pulp plant in aracruz, brazil, which is planned to be expanded in the near future. this cooperation is a signal of the rising global importance of pulp production in south america (nousiainen 1996; kuvaja et al. 1998; forest industry… 2001b). during the last few years of globalisation, the most active and visible of the finnish forest companies has been upm-kymmene that had practically no overseas experience before 1997. perhaps due to the limited experience, its leaps over to southeast asia and the usa have resulted in partial drawbacks, and the real transcontinental breakthrough had not taken place by the spring of 2001. the north american strategy was initiated by purchasing a paper mill (blandin paper) in minnesota in 1997. this move strengthened the company’s leading global ranking in the production of coated paper for magazines, although the purchase was expensive and loaded with risks due to old machinery, low profitability, and supply problems. the purchase, however, made upmkymmene an internal actor in the us markets (miettinen 1997). the landing of upm-kymmene in the usa was soon planned to be followed by a merger with champion international, a company not much smaller than the finnish partner. the two companies’ boards had already agreed to the merger, but it became seriously contested by international paper, the world’s largest forest industry enterprise. even more seriously, the shareholders and the mill communities expressed their worries over the merger with a european company. after a few dramatic weeks in the spring of 2000, international paper made a better offer, leading the shareholders of champion international repeal the earlier agreement. the widely publicized merger plan that included a symbolically significant name change (upm-kymmene was to become champion international) hence turned into a serious backlash for the finnish company (lilius 2000a, 2000b; meadows 2000). this backlash forced upm-kymmene to reconsider its transatlantic strategy. it is therefore likely that the future steps become smaller and better prepared. the aim will be the same, however: to win a secure position in north america. this was in fact confirmed in the early fall of 2000 when upm-kymmene announced a purchase of repap in new brunswick, canada. repap was a deeply indebted company that had been for sale for years, but its main product, magazine paper, suits well the purchaser’s profile. upm-kymmene initiated its southeast asian operations also in 1997. the company announced a cooperation plan with asia pacific resources international (april) in fine paper production and marketing. the initial plan included a joint foundation of a paper unit close to a pulp mill in riau in sumatra, indonesia. it was rejected, however, due to the economic recession in southeast asia during the last years of the century. the plan was also severely criticised by a network of local and global rainforest conservationists (kuvaja et al. 1997; miettinen & selin 1998), possibly affecting the withdrawal. the april cooperation, however, resulted in upm-kymmene’s ownership in a fine paper mill near shanghai, china. its future success is highly dependent on china’s political stability. the southeast asian project has tied upmkymmene into economic cultures and resource policies that differ from the western ones. this makes the company vulnerable to risks that arise from the culture gap. the most worrying issues are related to undemocratic political practices, human rights, and the continuing exploitative devastation of rain forests. for a western company this means entrepreneurial risks, but also new marketing problems due to the rising global awareness of the consumers. the most transcontinental of the finnish forest companies is jaakko pöyry that has specialised in forest-industrial consulting. in the late 1990s, the company had offices in over 20 countries, with regional clusters of consultation in south america, europe, southeast asia, and the usa. jaakko pöyry concentrates on countryor area-specific “forest sector master plans” that cover consultancy from forestry practices, wood processing, and logistics to market and management development with an aim at expansive pulp and paper produc244 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)ari aukusti lehtinen tion. the master plans are programmes for intensifying wood mobilisation and paper production in the client countries. recent clients include brazil, nepal, russia, and many of the southeast asian countries. the programmes have functioned as tools for introducing finnish expertise to the clients. in many cases, the finnish companies specialised in different branches of forest expertise (from reforestation and tree plantations to the whole chain of forest industrial machinery, such as forest tractors, entire plant units, and integrates) have initially arrived in the target countries as subcontractors of the master plans. both the united nations development programme (undp) and the finnish development cooperation agency finnida have supported this cooperation financially (ulvila 1997; lehtinen 1999). local and global finland the gradual globalisation of the forest sector is loaded with risks and drama – at least if observed from finland, a country with a strong historical dependency on forests. the finnish know-how spreads in different parts of the world and the ‘finnish model’ is applied to joint projects. the overseas success and visibility of finnish forest companies is undoubtedly one central element of the finnish globalisation. the world map of forestry is made partly by finnish expertise. the forest-based globalisation has a dark side, however. the leading companies can no longer integrate any local or national premises into their strategies, as they did earlier (koskinen 1999; kortelainen 1999b; rytteri 2000). this would now cost too much for their competitiveness. similarly, finland’s position has changed during the ongoing transnational networking of paper production and company ownership. in the new spatial division of labour, finland might keep its role as a home base for some key companies. it might also remain an important supply and production area for these companies. finland will evidently exist on the world map of the companies as a resource base and an area of mass production, a supplier of virginal fibre and selected paper grades. the setting is framed by finland’s geographical location in the boreal coniferous zone, providing the market with long-fibred pulp. finland is also part of the eu’s northern wilderness and a bridge to the forest resources of north-western russia. the wilderness role of finland within the eu has added a new dimension to the setting. the eu’s environmental regulation that emerges, e.g., in the form of natura programmes and greenbelt visions (cd-fig. 2), functions as a risk signal to the companies. they therefore invest abroad, beyond europe. this brings along the risk of slower modernisation rates in domestic production technology. the problem of stagnation in wood processing design therefore arises. the companies still hold a key position in national forest economic policy, however. this tends to keep finnish forest-industrial activities deeply integrated in the international division of paper production. the export orientation is thus structurally determined, and especially the country’s leading forestry provinces remain vulnerable to fluctuations in pulp and paper markets. this translocalisation process is not only a matter of changing roles within a broader spatial division of labour. it is also loaded with symbolism. for example: precise identification of the largest forest companies has become difficult. during the era of globalisation, it is misleading to talk about ‘finnish’ companies when referring to those companies from finland that are largely owned by us american investors and whose central production capacity is located abroad. this confusion is obvious in the names of the companies and the contested renaming during mergers and acquisitions. often the purchaser ‘swallows’ the one purchased and its name or trademark simply disappears off the market. some names, however, are combinations or compromises of names that incorporate the past of the merged companies. stora enso has a swedish-finnish background and even some specific localities can be distinguished behind the names: stora kopperberget originates from a mining locality in central sweden (axelsson et al. 1980), whereas enso is an industrial town in the territory ceded to the soviet union after world war ii and now called svetogorsk (kortelainen & kotilainen 2000). of course, the naming is (only) a matter of symbolic significance and easily ignored when set against hard economic benefits. during the merger negotiations in north america in the spring of 2000, upm-kymmene was ready to take the name of champion international. ‘kymmene’, however, relates the company to its finnish roots: the valley of the kymi river (in swedish, kymmene) is a central part of finland’s forest-industrial history. the use of the swedish name reminds of the orifennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 245globalisation and the finnish forest sector gins of the company’s initial capital that came from finland’s swedish-speaking entrepreneurs. this capital was unified with the majority population’s forest capital in 1995, when upmkymmene was established. the historical merger wiped away the deep-rooted confrontations between the two leading private forest industry groups in finland (näsi et al. 1998). the other finnish global forest actors also carry similar pasts in their names: ahlstrom is a name of a family, jaakko pöyry refers to an individual, and myllykoski is also related to family ownership. metsä-serla/m-real has roots partly in serlachius, a family company integrated in the operations of the finnish forest owners’ metsäliitto in 1986. in the winter of 2001, soon after metsä-serla’s reorientation towards fine paper production, the company announced its new name, m-real, which can be seen a symbolical disengagement from the past. for the consumers, serla stands for tissue papers and washroom convenience, whereas the new mreal is a key actor in fine paper in europe. in addition, the finnish word metsä (forest) connects finland generally to its eastern finno-ugric past. the importance of the companies’ initial localities and ‘founding fathers’ underlines the value of symbolism and cultural continuity within forest-industrial restructuring. most of the symbolic connections have disappeared during the mergers, however. only few of the localities are still represented. this is a striking contrast to the era of national forest sector, when the company names were closely related to their main operational bases or the companies were named after the towns: oulu had oulu inc. and kajaani had kajaani inc. even nokia inc., a global actor in telecommunications business, has its roots in a small forest company in the mill town of nokia near tampere. the local and family pasts of the companies are also loaded with memories not so willingly recalled. towns with only one significant industrial employer were often paternalistic communities, where the companies, local elites, and townspeople behaved single-mindedly (e.g., solecki 1995; kortelainen 1999b). public disagreement was sometimes unthinkable. in this respect, the north american experience of upm-kymmene was important: the patrimonial tradition was broken, when the shareholders’ interest overcame that of the top managers. recently, the rules of global financial speculation have emphasised the role of shareholders at the cost of leading managers, affecting the company identification. today, the owners keenly steer the managers and changing strategies cause rapid shifts in the stock markets. often the owners seek the best short-term options, which can run counter to the long-term benefits of the company. from another perspective, this shift may be regarded as an opening towards more participatory decision-making in the forest-industrial policy. even the minor owners have a vote in the meetings and critical issues can thus be brought to the agenda. all this can be considered positive, at least if set against the old patrimonial model of decision-making in company towns. depending on the shareholder interest, the current reshaping of the forest companies can take radically different paths. the practices may become more accountable and polyphonic or, more likely, they may move towards increasingly aggressive private profit maximation. as the past decades show, however, the former alternative can only surface with the help of non-governmental organizations (ngos) and intergovernmental regulations (see jamison 1996). the ethical dimension needs to be publicized and made a routine measure of forest trade via negotiation processes. some preliminary steps towards this direction have been taken already in the shareholder meetings of upm-kymmene, where environmental activists have raised their voices as minor owners of the company, directing the debate towards ethical and eco-social challenges of the company profilation (e.g., lilius 2000a) (fig. 2). forest trade and green images globalisation has made environmental values integral elements of forest trade. in order to secure their market share, the companies need to address their environmental performance and profile. this is also true for the finnish companies. they have become cautious of the political risks of loggings in the old-growth forests, because today’s consumers want to know the origin of timber. the value preferences become concrete for the forest companies via such customers as the leading newspapers, journals, producers, and media houses. in the name of their interest in circulation and profit, they wish to minimise the new environmental (and economic) risk. hence, reader responses and even boycott risks increasingly condition forest-industrial strategies (fürstner 1996; lehtinen 1996). 246 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)ari aukusti lehtinen the transnational companies have not been able to free themselves from the intensifying competition while becoming bigger than ever. they are subjected to changes in their operational contexts and networks. this makes the companies vulnerable to varying contextual shifts – and also to their own strategies. wrong moves in global competition turn easily into falling profit options and losses in the stock markets and even difficulties within the markets of the end products. the global economy thus seems to become more fragile over time. in the 1990s, the fate of the remaining oldgrowth forests emerged as an aching issue in finland’s forestry (lehtinen & rytteri 1998). as seen from central europe, these forests are among the last remaining natural areas of the entire continent. the consumers of finnish paper are aware of this and the most marginal lands of the north have occasionally emerged as ‘hot spots’ of consumer politics. similarly, broader social and ethical issues concerning the legitimation and justice dimensions of paper production have been introduced to the companies as critical aspects of globalisation. the problems of uneven and unjust development have emerged both in finnish domestic settings and overseas, and now at stake is not only the green image of the companies. instead, the role of the whole of finland and its national credibility are weighed in the global division of labour. the problem of credibility is entangled in the issue of forest certifications. originally, they were introduced as a means to guarantee the respect of sustainability and biodiversity concerns in economic forests and that certain areas of old-growth forests would be left untouched. later, however, it has been debated whether the certifications should also cover such social criteria as the wealth of logging communities and forest workfig. 2. a nature activist sat on a bench of top councellors at the upm-kymmene company meeting and was proposed by another shareholder-activist an alternative candidate to martti ahtisaari, the former president of finland, to be elected to the company’s board. the activist thomas wallgren lost the election (0.25% of the voters supported and 99.75% opposed him), but the event redirected the discussion towards the risky features of vested state–company interests during the era of globalisation. consequently, the practical mode and ethics of exporting the ‘finnish model’ was widely debated in the media after the meeting. from left to right: martin granholm, juha niemelä, gustaf serlachius, iiro viinanen, tauno matomäki, and thomas wallgren. (published in helsingin sanomat 22 march 2000, front news page a3. reprinted by the permission of lehtikuva oy.) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 247globalisation and the finnish forest sector ers and the general eco-social viability of the entire chain of forest-based production and consumption. this is indeed a contested process which has brought several difficult and yet unresolved dilemmas into the global forest map (e.g., beckley 1996; rees 1999; barnes et al. 1999) in northern europe, there are two competing systems of forest certification. the pan-european forest certification (pefc) is an intergovernmental forest certification process guided by finnish expertise. the model concentrates on forest management and aims at guaranteeing the sound origin of timber. changes in forest cover and health, lumber production, non-timber values, diversity and conservation issues, and the socio-economic aspects of forest management are highlighted. forest stewardship council (fsc) certification is supported by several international environmental organisations. the council has included several social factors into its certification procedure and the participatory dimension of forest planning and wood processing is underlined in particular. the long-term socio-economic well-being of forest workers and forestry-dependent communities must be confirmed via negotiations and consultations with people and groups directly involved in, and affected by, the operations. in the case of loss or damage that affects the legal or customary rights of local people, a fair compensation mechanism is demanded (ahas et al. 1999; lloyd 2001). fsc is the more proactive one of the two systems, whereas pefc proceeds more reactively, emphasising the certification as a means of marketing (salmela 2000). in general, it seems that the ecological concern has become widely accepted as a conditioner of the forest trade while the broader eco-social dimension still causes confusion. the ongoing debate is intensive, even though the result seems largely clear already: the broader eco-social criteria are to be implemented into the assessments of the sustainability of wood processing and refining. as a telling signal of the setting, wwf europe and several other environmental civic organisations published a series of claims addressed to pefc in april of 2000. firstly, the civic organisations demand pefc to show that it actually leads towards better forest management and not only to a confirmation – i.e., greenwashing – of the differing national and local practices already in use. secondly, pefc has to follow the local agenda 21 directions, agreed by the meeting of the united nations’ conference on environment and development (earth summit) in rio de janeiro in 1992 and include the demands of broader participation in the criteria. this claim is related to the accused dominance of industrial and private forest owners’ interests in pefc-based cooperation. thirdly, pefc has to look beyond europe and include global forest issues in its views. the european scope, as pefc’s critics say, should necessarily be linked to eurasian and transatlantic issues, as well as to global north–south relations (asunta 2000). the certification debate has emerged as a central element in the current restructuring of the forest trade. the forest practices and production processes are followed keenly and demands of accountability and broader participation have become difficult to ignore. for the forest companies this means adjustment to the changing rules of the global game: the previously excluded costs of production are now becoming part of the business. this might appear as a major threat for some companies, but it can also be regarded as a means to conquer new markets. to conclude the analysis underlines the necessity to include the previously ignored eco-social costs of economic restructuring in the calculations of actorand product-specific credibility. the forest industry is part of this reorientation, as the heated negotiations for the criteria and certificates of sustainability suggest. the main forest companies – as the key actors of change – have become embedded in a global ranking competition that tends to keep the new eco-social openings in the margins. we are therefore left with some critical dilemmas. volume-based expansion through mergers has become the guiding principle for the forestindustrial globalisation, but not without obvious exceptions. there still is life behind the main actors of the global stock markets, including some entrepreneurial creativity, as the profiles of ahlstrom and myllykoski indicate. but how to secure the variety in the future, if the large companies keep eating the small ones with some financial attractiveness? the question is also important to peripheral forest resource communities, such as the provinces of the so-called forest finland: what is left of the regional (horizontal) dynamics when 248 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)ari aukusti lehtinen these provinces become thoroughly integrated in the companies with global vertical power and, accordingly, are located in the new wood order as producers of pulp and bulk? on the other hand, the growing shareholder interest in forest-industrial operations can also provide an alternative to the older managerial model of decision-making, as the upm-kymmene–champion international case in the spring of 2000 demonstrated. this episode was an important lesson for the finnish partners and it underlined the practical power of shareholders. inevitably, it made the managers of the finland-based companies more sensitive to the voices of the ‘external’ owners. the lesson can hence be taken as a sign of emerging socio-cultural pluralism – shareholder democracy – in the forest-industrial goal formulation. the floor is at least open to broader representativeness, including socio-ecological views, as upm-kymmene has witnessed during the past few years. clearly, the managers of the finnish forest industry – as those of the forest sector in general – have much to learn from the experiences gathered during the first years of intensive globalisation. the ‘finnish model’, however, undoubtedly contains much that is also worth exporting. the long history of society–company negotiations and environmental pressures have left their mark on the domestic forest know-how. these experiences should decidedly be integrated in the current global learning process. it is already evident that, along the globalisation, the finnish model – or the nordic model in general (see lehtinen 2001b) – is increasingly challenged by the north american and tropical counterparts which differ considerably from their regulative norms and measures typical of the nordic countries. little debate has emerged about the comparative pros and cons between the models, however. there is no clear idea to what degree the finnish companies are exporting their model and to what degree they are adopting the models and cultures of the target countries. not much is known about the actual compromises of the competing approaches. the intensive globalisation of the finnish forest companies nevertheless forces us to face the transcontinental comparative settings. the process simultaneously expands and shrinks the world and demands its residents to take a stance on the local–global dynamics and eco-social transformations. from a geographical point of view this is indeed a challenging horizon. references ahas r, t puura, a janssen & e peters (eds) (1999). boreal forests of the world iv: integrating cultural values into local and global forest protection. proceedings of the 4th biannual conference of the taiga rescue network, october 5–10, 1998, tartu, estonia. estonian green movement, tartu. asunta a (2000). ympäristöjärjestöt eivät pidä pefc-sertifiointijärjestelmää uskottavana. wwf metsätiedote 1–2, 4. avain suomen metsäteollisuuteen (1998). metsäteollisuus ry, helsinki. axelsson b, s berger & j hogdal (1980). vikmanshyttan: lära för framtida bruk. en bok om studiearbete, frigörelser och stora koppparberg. verdandi, uppsala. barnes t, r hayter & e hay (1999). “too young to retire, too bloody old to work”: forest industry restructuring and community response in port alberni, british columbia. the forestry chronicle 75, 781–787. beckley t (1996). pluralism by default: community power in a paper mill town. forest science 42, 35–45. brax a (1991). enso-gutzeit haluaisi hakata intiaanien pyhän erämaan. vihreä lanka 25, 4 (20 june 1991). brown l & c flavin (1999). uusi vuosisata – uusi talousmalli. in starke l (ed). maailman tila 1999, 13–32. gaudeamus, helsinki. collins l (1998). environmentalism and restructuring of the global pulp and paper industry. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 89, 401–415. conley v (1995). ecopolitics. the environment in poststructuralist thought. routledge, london. donner-amnell j (2000). suomi ja metsäteollisuuden muodonmuutos. kansainvälistymisen vaikutukset yhteiskunnan ja metsäyhtiöiden valintoihin. alue & ympäristö 29: 2, 4–22. ehrnrooth c (1995). euroopassa tarvitaan täysin uusia kasvun ja työllisyyden strategioita. työttömyyden perussyy on liian heikko kilpailukyky. helsingin sanomat 5 february 1995, b9. forest industry statistics (2001a). forest industries finland. 15 january 2001. <http://forestindustries.fi/tilastot> forest industry statistics (2001b). forest industries sweden. 15 january 2001. <http://forestindustries.se/eng/fakta> fürstner w (1996). the publishers’ view on ecocertification. a paper presented at the annual conference of the finnish forestry association, helsinki, 26 march 1996. mimeo. hazley c (2000). forest-based and related industries of the european union – industrial districts, clusters and agglomerations. the research institute of the finnish economy (etla), helsinki. hornborg a (1998). mi’kmaq environmentalism: fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 249globalisation and the finnish forest sector local incentives and global projections. in sandberg a & s sörlin (eds). sustainability the challenge. people, power and the environment, 202– 212. black rose books, montréal. iivonen j (2000a). myllykoski maksaa vanhasta tehtaasta usa:ssa 268 miljoonaa. helsingin sanomat 14 april 2000, d6. iivonen j (2000b). myllykoski rakentaa saksaan uuden sanomalehtipaperikoneen. helsingin sanomat 23 december 2000, d3. iivonen j (2001). metsänomistajien on myytävä omaisuuttaan myllykoskelle. helsingin sanomat 5 may 2001, d1. jamison a (1996). the shaping of the global environmental agenda: the role of non-governmental organizations. in lash s, b szerszynski & b wynne (eds). risk, environment & modernity, 224–245. sage, london. kortelainen j (1999a). the river as an actor-network: the finnish forest industry utilization of lake and river systems. geoforum 30, 235–247. kortelainen j (1999b). forest industry communities – in the light or shadow of the mill? in reunala a, i tikkanen & e åsvik (eds). the green kingdom. finland’s forest cluster, 208– 213. otava & metsämiesten säätiö foundation, helsinki. kortelainen j & j kotilainen (2000). svetogorsk revisited: on the impacts of the border on a russian forest industrial locality. a paper presented at the 2nd workshop of border research network in aabenraa, denmark, 25–27 may. <www.crossborder.ifg.dk/workshop2000> koskinen t (1999). the forest cluster: economic order and societal integration in finland. in reunala a, i tikkanen & e åsvik (eds). the green kingdom. finland’s forest cluster, 202–207. otava & metsämiesten säätiö foundation, helsinki. kuvaja s, m ulvila & t wallgren (eds) (1998). tropiikin vihreä kulta. like, helsinki. laitinen p & r jokelin (1994). paperisota lähestyy pakkosopua. helsingin sanomat 25 january 1994, d1. lammi m (2000). metsäklusteri suomen taloudessa. the research institute of the finnish economy (etla), helsinki. lehtinen a (1996). tales from the northern backwoods: fairy tales and conspirators in finnish forest politics. in hjort af ornäs a (ed). approaching nature from local communities. security perceived and achieved, 37–57. research programme on environmental policy and society (epos), linköping. lehtinen a (1999). metsäsektori ja maailmantalous. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 156–159. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. lehtinen a (2000). mires as mirrors. peatlands – hybrid landscapes of the north. fennia 178, 125–137. lehtinen a (2001a). modernization and the concept of nature. on the reproduction of environmental stereotypes. in myllyntaus t & m saikku (eds). encountering the past in nature. essays in environmental history, 29–48. ohio university press, athens. lehtinen a (2001b). nordic forest communities, vulnerability and the question of environmental justice. a view from geography. in hytönen m (ed). socio-economic sustainablity of forestry, 315–332. nordic council of ministers, copenhagen. lehtinen a & t rytteri (1998). backwoods’ provincialism: the case of kuusamo forest common. nordia 27, 27–37. lilius a (2000a). voittajaksi valmistautumassa. talouselämä 12, 36. lilius a (2000b). upm-kymmenen pakko maksaa lisää. talouselämä 16, 8. lilius a & e rantanen (2000). forest industry. forests still enticing investors. talouselämä, a special issue in english, 22 august 2000, 18–19. lindberg l (2000). finnish forest cluster links global markets. paper and timber 82, 146–148. lloyd s (2001). the emerging socio-economic and ecological forest landscape in sweden. in hytönen m (ed). socio-economic sustainability of forestry, 277–294. nordic council of ministers, copenhagen. mather a (1990). global forest resources. belhaven, london. mcafee k (1999). selling nature to save it? biodiversity and green developmentalism. environment and planning d: society and space 17, 133–154. meadows d (2000). a rational decision. tappi journal 83: 7, 3. miettinen a (1997). upm maksaa kovan hinnan usa:n tehtaasta. helsingin sanomat 1 october 1997, b7. miettinen o & t selin (1999). harkittu riski. upmkymmene indonesian sademetsissä. vihreä sivistysliitto, helsinki. modo paperin osto on loikka eteenpäin (2000). metsäliiton viesti 2, 2–5. moen e & k lilja (2001). constructing global corporations: contrasting national legacies in the nordic forest industry. in morgan g, ph kristensen & r whitley (eds). organizing internationally: restructuring firms and markets in the global economy, 145–168. oxford university press, oxford. murdoch j, t marsden & j banks (2000). quality, nature, and embeddedness: some theoretical considerations in the context of the food sector. economic geography 76, 107–125. nousiainen a (1996). enso haluaa borneoon sellutehtaan. helsingin sanomat 29 september 1996, b14. näsi j, p ranta & p sajasalo (1998). metsäteollisuuden megamuutos. pelinäkökulmainen analyysi 250 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)ari aukusti lehtinen suomalaisen metsäteollisuuden kehkeytymisprosesseista vuosina 1985–1996. jyväskylän yliopiston taloustieteellinen osasto, julkaisuja 114. ollikainen h (2000). täältä tullaan, markkinat. talouselämä 14, 49. ovaskainen o, m pappila & j pötry (1999). the finnish forest industry in russia. on the thorny paths towards ecological and social responsibility. the finnish nature league, helsinki. peet r & m watts (1996). liberation ecology. development, sustainability, and environment in an age of market triumphalism. in peet r & m watts (eds). liberation ecologies. environment, development, social movements, 1–45. routledge, london. rantanen e (2000). metsä-serlan oli pakko ostaa. talouselämä 21, 9. rees m (1999). “jobs talk”: retreating from the social sustainability of forestry communities. the forestry chronicle 75, 755–763. rytteri t (2000). metsäteollisuuden yhteiskunnallinen vastuu. alue & ympäristö 29: 1, 5–17 saastamoinen o (1999). strategies of the scandinavian forest industries. in saastamoinen o, a chuinsky & i torniainen (eds). economic problems of the forest complex of northwest russia during a transition period. proceedings of the workshop in st. petersburg forest technical academy, february 11–13, 5–15. forest technical academy, st. petersburg. saether b (1998). environmental improvements in the norwegian pulp and paper industry – from place and government to space and market. norsk geografisk tidsskrift, 52, 181–194. salmela s (2000). sertifiointi tekee metsästä merkkituotteen, jota on lupa kuluttaa. karjalainen 20 march 2000, 10. sandberg a & s sörlin (1998). rearticulating the environment: towards a pluralist vision of natural resource use. in sanberg a & s sörlin (eds). sustainability the challenge. people, power and the environment, 1–16. black rose books, montréal. seppänen p (2000). strategia on, toteutus ontuu. talouselämä 13, 42. solecki w (1996). paternalism, pollution and protest in a company town. political geography 15, 5–20. stora environmental report 1997 (1998). stora kopparberg’s bergslags aktiebolag, falun. tirkkonen j (2000). ilmastopolitiikka ja ekologinen modernisaatio. diskursiivinen tarkastelu suomalaisesta ilmastopolitiikasta ja sen yhteydestä metsäsektorin muutokseen. acta universitatis tamperensis 781. tikkanen o (1997). karjalan vihreä vyöhyke. alue & ympäristö 26: 1, 60–67. ulvila m (1997). indonesiasta löytyy halpaa kuitua ja joustava lainsäädäntö. upm-kymmene sijoittaa sademetsien hävitykseen. ydin 7, 5–8. whatmore s & l thorne (1998). wild(er)ness: reconfiguring the geographies of wildlife. transactions, institute of british geographers 23, 435– 454. zimmerer k (2000). the reworking of conservation geographies: nonequilibrium landscapes and nature-society hybrids. annals of the association of american geographers 90, 356–369. construction of the ukrainian identity in a neighbourhood: the role of the host society. example of the parc de l’ukraine in rosemont, montreal. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa116597 doi: 10.11143/fennia.116597 construction of the ukrainian identity in a neighbourhood: the role of the host society. example of the parc de l’ukraine in rosemont, montreal. kim pawliw and étienne berthold pawliw, k. & berthold, e. (2022) construction of the ukrainian identity in a neighbourhood: the role of the host society. example of the parc de l’ukraine in rosemont, montreal. fennia 200(1) 24–40. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116597 the parc de l’ukraine (ukraine park) located in the neighbourhood of rosemont, montreal, acquired its ukrainian toponym in 1981 and began its replanning in 2017 which consisted of the upgrading of equipment and of the addition of ukrainian symbols. these symbols were chosen to bring out the ukrainian identity of the park and of the neighbourhood. during the replanning, relations were established between the ukrainian community of montreal and municipal governing bodies. based on discourse analysis and using the ukrainian community of montreal as an example, this article will focus on the role of the host society at a municipal scale, meaning municipal governing bodies, in immigrant identity construction processes. it will look at the interrelationships between ethnic associations and the representatives and professionals of a city during the replanning of an urban park. this article will demonstrate that the host society, enacted by municipal governing bodies, can instrumentalize immigrant communities to promote a specific identity of the city that varies according to various historical contexts. specifically, we argue that the neighbourhood of rosemont has been at the centre of construction processes through which it has acquired a symbolic value as the ukrainian neighbourhood of montreal. such processes have relied on the one hand on ukrainian associations and on the other hand on montreal’s governing bodies. keywords: identity, discourses, ukrainian community of montreal, municipal governing bodies, ukrainian neighbourhood of rosemont, parc de l’ukraine kim pawliw (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7962-4339) & étienne berthold (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6524-8125), geography dept université laval, québec (québec) g1v 0a6, canada. e-mail: kim.pawliw.1@ulaval.ca & etienne.berthold@ggr.ulaval.ca © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction the study of migratory phenomena represents a major field of research, particularly regarding questions of identity. many authors have focused on the identity construction of immigrants and ethnocultural communities according to several variables including time spent since migration, reasons of migration, feeling of well-being, religious affiliation, native language proficiency, cultural bias, economic participation, https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116597 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7962-4339 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6524-8125 mailto:kim.pawliw.1@ulaval.ca mailto:etienne.berthold@ggr.ulaval.ca fennia 200(1) (2022) 25kim pawliw & étienne berthold social relations, perceived discrimination, and ethnic associations (schrover & vermeulen 2005; grant 2007; valenta 2009; caselli 2009; hardwick 2010; de vroome et al. 2011; huot et al. 2013; jurkova 2014; amit & bar-lev 2015). in the urban context, immigrants’ identity construction processes have also been linked with identification to a specific place, such as a city district/borough, a neighbourhood or an urban park (altman & low 1992; rishbeth 2001; ehrkamp 2005; ufkes et al. 2012; main 2013; waerniers 2017). the present article relates to the latter perspective. it looks at how the renaming and the replanning of an urban park, the parc de l'ukraine (ukraine park), contributed to the identity construction processes of a specific immigrant community: the ukrainian community of montreal1. by examining how the park changed its name and how it was replanned, the article describes the interrelationships between ethnic associations and the representatives and professionals of a city. these interrelationships in turn will shed light on the host society’s role, at the municipal scale, in immigrants’ identity construction processes, a factor which is little explored in the existent body of literature. regarding specifically urban parks, few authors have focused on immigrants’ and ethnocultural communities’ identity construction processes at this scale. main (2013) looked at various meanings that urban parks could bear for immigrants. she highlighted that positive and negative meanings can be associated with them; while a sense of community, belonging and identity can be developed in a park, some may feel a sense of isolation and loneliness. in the same vein, stodolska and colleagues (2011) demonstrated that parks can help increase a sense of community due to the possibility of fostering social relations. low and others (2002), for their part, underscored that planning and design practices can damage immigrants’ identification to a park, if they do not feel culturally represented for instance, and can also foster a feeling of exclusion. as the authors mentioned “urban parks provide social and environmental mnemonics that communicate who should be there, and historical buildings and places, markers, and monuments [that] set the stage for human behavior” (low et al. 2002, 296). additionally, in creating a new typology of public spaces, carmona (2010) found that urban parks are formed through power relationships and can be characterized by their diversity (both social and cultural). applied specifically to the city of montreal, germain and colleagues (2006) looked at the construction of the ethnocultural character of the parc du portugal (portugal park). this park acquired its toponym in 1975 to commemorate the presence of the large portuguese community in its surroundings. later, in 1987, this community requested to replan the park to bring out its culture and to better meet its needs. however, not everyone was pleased with the new replanning. because of the potential tensions created by this type of replanning in the 1990s (e.g., the difficulty in pleasing everyone), the city of montreal limited the creation of ethnic parks. for several years, neutral spaces were prioritized over ethnocultural ones and ethnocultural manifestations were relayed to the periphery. for example, in 2005, the city encouraged the holding of ethnocultural festivals at the parc jean drapeau instead of their usual local parks. hence, in the literature, several elements were underscored regarding the ethnocultural character of urban parks: their significance in fostering either a sense of belonging or exclusion for immigrants, the importance of power relationships in their replanning, and the tensions they can foster (such as in the parc du portugal). using the parc de l'ukraine as an example, the purpose of this article is to render the observations gained regarding immigrants’ identity construction processes by looking into the interrelationships between ethnic associations and the representatives and professionals of a city. based on discourse analysis, this article demonstrates that, first, in general, a host society, enacted by municipal representatives and professionals can instrumentalize immigrant communities to promote a specific identity of the city that varies according to diverse historical contexts. secondly, in particular, the neighbourhood of rosemont encompassing the parc de l'ukraine has been at the centre of construction processes through which it has acquired a symbolic value as the ukrainian neighbourhood of montreal. such processes have relied, on the one hand, on ukrainian associations, and on the other hand, on montreal’s representatives and professionals. the article is divided into five sections. first, we briefly present the neighbourhood of rosemont as well as the arrival of its ukrainian population. second, we discuss our methodological approach that relies on discourse analysis. third, we trace the historical development of ukrainian identity as it relates to the parc de l'ukraine by examining its change of toponym, from the 1960s to the 1980s. 26 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper fourth, we focus on the replanning of the parc de l'ukraine (2017–2022) and on the various discourses that were used by the actors involved in this project. fifth, we discuss our results and compare the city’s discourses to those of the ukrainian community. the parc de l’ukraine: geographical and historical contexts the parc de l’ukraine is located in the eastern part of montreal in the borough of rosemont-la petitepatrie. more specifically, it is encompassed in the sociological neighbourhood (quartier) of rosemont, which is a subjective division of the city recognized as such by its local population. unlike the boroughs (arrondissements), it is not an official administrative division (city of montreal 2021). nowadays, the borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie is relatively homogenous compared to other areas of montreal. in 2016, its residents were mainly french-speaking and two-third of them were born in canada. however, 40% of the residents of rosemont-la petite-patrie declared having a migration background, meaning that either themselves, their mother or their father were born in another country. this percentage is lower than for the whole city of montreal, where 59% of its total population has a migration background. the neighbourhood was first populated by french canadians, scots, and italians (brisebois & delagrave 2017; city of montreal 2018a, 2018b). historically, ukrainians arrived in montreal at the end of the 19th century. in the literature, authors underscored the development of this community according to four migratory waves: 1) prior to world war i which coincides with the colonization of the canadian prairies, 2) during the interwar period, 3) after world war ii, and 4) following the collapse of the soviet union (kelebay 1975, 1980, 1994; isajiw & makush 1994; mokrushyna 2013). the current war in ukraine that began on february 24th, 2022, could perhaps cause a fifth migratory wave. according to kelebay (1994), the first ukrainians who settled in montreal lived near their workplace, and their settlement attracted other ukrainian immigrants in these areas. this created several small localities throughout montreal such as downtown, pointe-saintcharles, lachine, ville émard and eventually rosemont. in the 1930s, the number of ukrainians living in rosemont was estimated being between 144 (1931) and 600 (1939), at a time when there were between 3,500 (1931) and 8,050–10,200 (1939) ukrainians living in montreal and its surroundings. rosemont became more populated by ukrainians in the 1960s (estimated at several thousand) and it became the dynamic center for this community in those years (bailey 1939; kelebay 1992; lazar & douglas 1992; mcnicoll 1993; nadeau 2020). more recently, in 2016, there were 18,005 ukrainians living in montreal. of this number, 1,590 ukrainians were living in rosemont-la petite-patrie which represents 8.8% of the total ukrainian population of the metropolis (mifi 2019). since their arrival in montreal, ukrainians formed several associations, each with a specific purpose: religious associations both catholic and orthodox (e.g., saint-basil the great ukrainian catholic church in lachine, saint-michael ukrainian catholic church near downtown, saint-sophie ukrainian orthodox cathedral in rosemont), youth associations which promote ukrainian patriotism (e.g., sum, plast), educational associations where children and teenagers can learn the ukrainian language (e.g., ukrainian school of metropolitan andrei sheptytsky, metropolitan ilarion ukrainian school), and socioeconomic associations (e.g., caisse populaire desjardins ukrainienne de montréal), to only name a few. most of the ukrainian associations are members of the ukrainian canadian congress (ucc), a ukrainian umbrella association with local, provincial, and national branches that aims at representing the interests of the ukrainian community across canada (ucc 2022)2. even if these associations are scattered throughout montreal, there is a concentration of them in rosemont which provides this neighbourhood with a ukrainian character. it encompasses three ukrainian churches, a ukrainian credit union, two ukrainian senior residences, two youth associations that have their own building, and some ukrainian stores. methodological foundation: discourse analysis this research uses the qualitative method of discourse analysis as a data processing method. basically, foucault (1969) defined a discourse as consisting of various statements pertaining to a same subject, and that is developed in a specific context. additionally, lessa (2006, 285) described a discourse as a “system of thought composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of actions, beliefs and practices.” it is formed, fennia 200(1) (2022) 27kim pawliw & étienne berthold as garland (2014) explained, during a specific historical period through the system of thought and the power relations that then existed. also, as noted by seignour (2011), a discourse is constituted of the subjective representations that speakers have of a subject, which they may inculcate to their audience. and as such, to hold a specific discourse constitutes an act of influence. the subjective representations, as van dijk (1985) pointed out depend on the speaker’s aims, knowledge, interests, and attitudes. consequently, in the current research, a discourse is understood as statements expressing the beliefs, representations, interests and system of thought that a person, or a group of persons, holds at a certain point in time and that they might want to influence their audience with. one such type of discourse that we will examine is the ‘inclusivity discourse’ (a discourse about ukrainians being included in the replanning of the parc de l'ukraine) promoted by municipal representatives. it will be opposed to the ‘non-inclusivity discourse’ (a discourse about ukrainians not being included enough in the replanning) promoted by the ukrainian community. overall, as mentioned by gumuchian and marois (2000), a methodological approach such as discourse analysis allows to interpret a variety of subjective social phenomena, instead of explaining them according to objective facts. in this vein, dittmer (2010, 284) added that this method “does not provide a satisfying ‘truth’ at the end of the research, but rather a situated reading of life’s phenomena”, which in the present case concerns the impact that the city of montreal may have on the identity construction of its ukrainian community. it does so by allowing the identification of the beliefs, representations, interests, and systems of thought of various actors involved in the formation of a discourse. therefore, by using discourse analysis, we will delve into the representations of both the ukrainian community and the city of montreal, from the 1960s to 2022. to collect discourses related to the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, 43 semi-structured individual interviews of an average duration of one hour each were conducted with city’s representatives and professionals as well as members of the ukrainian community of montreal, including representatives from various ukrainian associations, ukrainians involved in their community and ukrainians residing in rosemont. interviews were carried out until reaching a point of saturation, when additional interviews generated little or no additional information (morses 1995; guest et al. 2006). questions asked touched upon several topics, like the history of the relations between the ukrainian community and the city of montreal, and the ukrainian’s/city’s perception of several projects that affected the ukrainian community. in addition to interviews, official documents regarding the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine were collected, such as press releases, publications on the borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie facebook page, executive summaries, archive documents and montreal’s various official documents (e.g., charters and action plans). the renaming of the parc de l’ukraine (1961–1981) the park now known as the parc de l’ukraine was first inaugurated in 1937, under the name of parc campbell-nord (on bellechasse street). charles sandwith campbell, a wealthy lawyer and philanthropist bequeathed a part of his fortune to the city of montreal to plan parks and children’s playgrounds, hence explaining the name of this park. throughout the 1960s and in the late 1970s, steps were taken by the ukrainian community and the city of montreal, represented by the mayor jean drapeau, to change the parc campbell-nord toponym to a ukrainian toponym (robillard 1948; city of montreal 1995). on december 18th, 1961, nick hrab, president of the montreal branch of the ukrainian canadian committee (now known as the ukrainian canadian congress), requested in a letter addressed to the mayor jean drapeau that a park in the neighbourhood of rosemont be named after taras shevchenko, a famous ukrainian poet. drapeau seemed interested in collaborating with the ukrainian community to change the name of a park as shown in a letter dedicated in 1962 to his winnipeg counterpart of ukrainian origin, stephen juba. in his correspondence, drapeau mentioned that he intended to name a park after shevchenko while highlighting the contributions of ukrainians to canada such as their hard work, their devotion to their host country and the richness of their culture (la presse 1962a). in the context of the 44th anniversary of ukraine’s first independence, drapeau mentioned that “canada is proud to have welcomed the sons of ukraine; the country was enriched by their traditions and their industry. in return, these new canadians joined loyally with their compatriots of other 28 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper origins to build in north america a great, free, and democratic country” (la presse 1962b). however, despite these speeches, no park was named in honour of shevchenko3. two years later, in 1964, the city councillor paul-émile sauvageau, on behalf of mayor drapeau, announced during a ucc banquet that a park in montreal will bear the name of ukraine (instead of shevchenko) (la presse 1964). after a follow-up made by luka tomaschuk, vice-president of ucc – montreal branch, in 1965, the municipal authorities tried to find a park that could be named parc de l’ukraine. at this point in time, this project was not completed4. over a decade later, efforts had resumed to change the name of a park to honour the ukrainian community of montreal. in the 1970s, renée la rochelle-chumak, a french-canadian woman married to bohdan chumak, a man of ukrainian origin, became more involved within the ukrainian community of montreal and in the changing of the park’s toponym (valerio 2017). during an interview with the ukrainian radio broadcast ukrainian time, she mentioned that “i always passed in front of the parc campbell […]. so, i said, why don’t we change the name for parc de l’ukraine” (ukrainian time 2018). however, this name was not consensual within the ukrainian community; some wanted the park to bear another name than parc de l’ukraine such as parc mazepa, to commemorate hetman ivan mazepa (ukrainian cossack military leader). the municipal authorities also seemed to have some reluctance regarding the changing of the name of the park. in 1980, mayor drapeau said he would prefer the park to bear the name of a famous ukrainian personality instead of a country, by fear of creating a precedent among other ethnocultural communities in montreal (rudnyckyj 1992; ukrainian time 2018). after negotiations, jean drapeau finally gave his support to renée la rochelle-chumak’s project5. in september 1981, after an arrangement between representatives of the city of montreal and of the ukrainian community, it was agreed that the parc campbell-nord would be renamed parc de l’ukraine. a draft by-law was written and approved by the municipal council on november 9th (city of montreal 1981). during the interviews, it was mentioned by ukrainian interviewees that the parc de l’ukraine toponym now contributes to identifying rosemont as being ukrainian. as petro6, a ukrainian resident of montreal underscored, “it’s like little italy. […] you identify a neighbourhood.” furthermore, renée la rochelle-chumak stated in an interview with radio trembita in 2017 that “this park is part of the heart and soul of the ukrainian community” (valerio 2017). by analyzing the discourses expressed during a period spanning some twenty years, we observe that the urban space now named parc de l'ukraine has come to be seen as a centre of the ukrainian community of montreal and as one of its identifying elements which underlines its ukrainian identity. the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine (2017–2022) context and technical description of the replanning work the parc de l’ukraine was replanned in 2017–2018. interviews with representatives from the city of montreal and official documents revealed several reasons justifying a do-over: the state of disuse of the park and of the park’s chalet, a subsidy obtained to replace the paddling pool by water games, and the popularity of the park due to the presence of schools and daycares nearby (city of montreal 2017a). many adjustments were brought during the replanning of the park. the playground was changed, the paddling pool was replaced by water games, and other equipment was added such as a ping-pong table, a sandbox for children and a multigenerational swing. in addition to these changes, some ukrainian symbols were added to recall the presence of the ukrainian community in this area, namely the crossing paths in the park that form the ukrainian tryzub (trident on the ukrainian coat of arms), the printed ukrainian tryzubs on concrete benches near the water games, and a vegetated metal arch that represents the ukrainian tunnel of love – a tree tunnel found around a railway near the town of klevan located in western ukraine. the plants that composed this arch were chosen to remind the essences and smells of ukraine (fig. 1, 2). the renovation of the park was completed by the addition of an artwork representing a giant pysanka (ukrainian easter egg) on may 6th, 2022. parallel to the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, there was a project to modernize the park’s chalet to better meet the needs of users and to facilitate the holding of annual events, including the fennia 200(1) (2022) 29kim pawliw & étienne berthold montreal ukrainian festival organized by the saint-volodymyr cultural association. the chalet was first built in 1940 and bequeathed by the campbell estate to the city of montreal on december 31st. modernization work began on april 3rd, 2017, under the responsibility of the architectural technician sophie deslisle, and was finished a year later. it consisted mainly of upgrading electricity and plumbing facilities and adding a new universally accessible and unisex bathroom. in the new bathroom, a reminder of the ukrainian flag has been put by borough professionals, namely a blue and yellow ceramic line on the wall (deslisle 2016; city of montreal 2017a, 2017b; borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie 2017a, 2018). fig. 1. parc de l'ukraine after the replanning. fig. 2. ukrainian tunnel of love (ukrainian symbol) in the parc de l’ukraine. 30 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper the three-year capital expenditure program for 2016–2018 outlined that the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine will officially begin in 2017. the landscape architect jean cadieux of the borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie designed the plans and was put in charge of the project. some consultations were held with the ukrainian community – representatives from the ucc and the saint-volodymyr cultural association – mainly to present what the replanning would consist of, including the ukrainian symbols, and to help relocating the montreal ukrainian festival during the construction phase. the replanning began on june 19th, 2017 and took almost a year (borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie 2017a, 2017b; city of montreal 2017b; delacour 2018). regarding particularly the artwork, the selection of the piece was done by holding a contest organized by the public art bureau of the city of montreal between three selected artists. prior to the contest, a meeting that brought together the artists, the borough professionals and members of the ukrainian community had been held. the objective was for the latter to showcase some elements of their culture that could be included in the artwork. the winning artwork, giorgia volpe’s entrelacs representing a giant ukrainian pysanka made of ribbons with ukrainian symbols engraved in them was announced on april 30th, 2021 (public art bureau 2021). to celebrate the replanned park, an opening ceremony was held on july 5th, 2018. it was attended by representatives of the borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie and representatives from the ukrainian community of montreal. the ceremony consisted of speeches and of the blessing of the park by both a ukrainian catholic priest and a ukrainian orthodox priest (city of montreal 2018c, 2018d). about four years later, on may 6th, 2022, a ceremony was held to celebrate the inauguration of the artwork entrelacs. again, it was attended by representatives of the borough and of the ukrainian community. speeches were given on this occasion, for instance, by renée la rochelle-chumak, gregory bedik (president of the saint-volodymyr cultural association), eugene czolij (honorary consul of ukraine in montreal), valérie plante (current mayor of montreal), françois limoges (current borough mayor), and giorgia volpe7. after the speeches, the artwork was blessed by a ukrainian catholic priest and a ukrainian orthodox priest (lacerte-gauthier 2022). city discourses regarding the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine several official documents, such as press releases and publications on the borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie facebook page, put emphasis on ukrainian symbols added in the parc de l’ukraine that contribute to its ukrainian identity. during interviews, city representatives and professionals also underlined the importance of commemorating the ukrainian community in the park. both documents and interviews revealed that two main discourses were used regarding this commemoration: the recognition of rosemont as an important neighbourhood for the ukrainian community of montreal, which we analyze as the ‘ukrainian neighbourhood discourse’, and the inclusion of ukrainians in the replanning, named ‘inclusivity discourse’ in our study. regarding the ukrainian neighbourhood discourse, city representatives and professionals underscored that rosemont is a truly important neighbourhood for the ukrainian community of montreal. two main elements were mentioned regarding the significance of the neighbourhood of rosemont for ukrainians: the ukrainian population in the area, both past and present, as well as the institutional landscape, meaning that visually, rosemont looks like a ukrainian neighbourhood. regarding the first element, official documents concerning this replanning acknowledged that there is a current ukrainian population nearby and that there was a historical ukrainian population who contributed to the development of the neighbourhood of rosemont. as mentioned in the invitation to the opening ceremony of the replanned park “the new configuration of the park encompasses […] visual elements that testify of the presence of the ukrainian community in this neighbourhood”, which highlighted that there are still ukrainians who reside in rosemont. for his part, the former borough mayor, françois william croteau, underscored during the ceremony that “we wanted to honour the very strong ukrainian community who contributed to the development of this neighbourhood” thus recognizing the historical significance of rosemont for the ukrainian community (city of montreal 2018d). during the interviews, the importance of the ukrainian population in this area, both past and present, was also mentioned. while paul talked about the fact that “we found a large number of fennia 200(1) (2022) 31kim pawliw & étienne berthold ukrainians [in rosemont]”, jean-luc, for his part, emphasized the history of the neighbourhood. he, as well as other interviewees, acknowledged that even if there are still ukrainians who reside in rosemont nowadays, their number decreased over time, thus becoming more a historical ukrainian neighbourhood. however, according to these interviewees, it doesn’t make the neighbourhood less ukrainian; especially when compared to other ethnic neighbourhoods that seemed to follow the same pattern, meaning that immigrants tend to be more clustered in a neighbourhood upon their arrival to become scattered across the city over time. in this vein, jean-luc indicated that even if the ethnocultural population declines as is the case with ukrainians in rosemont, the neighbourhood remains significant for them, because of its historical importance: for me, saying that rosemont is a ukrainian neighbourhood, i am like, yeah, it’s true. there is history behind it… the borough [rosemont-la petite-patrie] united two neighbourhoods. so, you had la petite-patrie on one side, west of iberville, and rosemont, east of iberville where there is the parc de l’ukraine, and la petite-patrie, where there is little italy. however, in little italy, there are fewer italians who currently live there. […] but we continue to call it little italy, because there is a story behind it. you know, the neighbourhood life was developed around this. it’s the same for the ukrainian neighbourhood. […] rosemont-la petite-patrie, it’s the heart of ukrainians in quebec. putting emphasis on the ukrainian population in this neighbourhood, both past and present, exposes that there is indeed a ukrainian neighbourhood discourse expressed by municipal representatives. a second element uncovering the ukrainian neighbourhood discourse is the institutional landscape. some interviewees mentioned that rosemont is important for ukrainians because of its visual aspect. the saint-sophie ukrainian orthodox cathedral, the montreal ukrainian festival, and the parc de l’ukraine toponym were mentioned as representing the ukrainian presence in the neighbourhood. as stated by marie-anne “the ukrainian presence is felt mostly by… one of the architectural gems of rosemont, the church […] saint-sophie”. this visual aspect has also been improved by the ukrainian symbols added in the replanned parc de l’ukraine. the inclusivity discourse, for its part, concerned the inclusion of the ukrainian community by city representatives and professionals in the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine. this discourse was conveyed by the ukrainian symbolic added in the park, by the consultations with the ukrainian community during the replanning process and by the accommodation of the montreal ukrainian festival, a three-day annual event that traditionally took place at the parc de l’ukraine. regarding the ukrainian symbolic, as previously mentioned, some ukrainian symbols were added in the park, one of which is the crossing paths that represent the ukrainian tryzub. even if this symbol is better seen from a bird’s-eye view, its significance comes from the fact that the entire replanning of the park, meaning all the spatial organization, was based on it. it was central in the development of the plans of the proposed park, therefore positioning the ukrainian community as central in the replanning work. for example, on the borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie official facebook page, after the inauguration of the park, it was written that “the new configuration of the park, conceived entirely by borough professionals is based on the symbolic representation of the ‘trident’, ukrainian emblem, represented by the central axis and the curvatures of the paths…” (borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie 2018). paul, for his part, added that “the trident formed the organization of the paths […]. everything goes from there”, which put the emphasis on the significance of this symbol. the other symbols, meaning the vegetated metal arch that remind the ukrainian tunnel of love (a tree tunnel found around a railway in western ukraine) and the reminder of the ukrainian flag in the bathroom of the park’s chalet were also mentioned as elements involved in the inclusion of the ukrainian community, thus, in the inclusivity discourse. however, this inclusivity discourse is not only related to the added ukrainian symbols in the park, but also to the replanning process itself, meaning that ukrainians were consulted, and that the montreal ukrainian festival was accommodated throughout all these changes. regarding these consultations, the interviewees stated that the ukrainian community was consulted during the replanning of the park. they mostly mentioned that the project was presented to ukrainians and that they were pleased with it. paul specified that even if the replanning was not a collaborative process per se, there were indeed meetings with ukrainians, and they were happy with the proposed plans. other than the replanning of the park in 2017, during the related project of the entrelacs artwork, a collaborative process between the ukrainian community and the artist had been underlined in a press release from the public art 32 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper bureau. it stated that “the sculptural work will be produced following a collaboration with members of the ukrainian community of the borough which will begin this spring [2021]” (public art bureau 2021). these examples show that, according to city representatives and professionals, there have been varying degrees of consultation with the ukrainian community concerning the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, ranging from some meetings to a collaborative process, which convey the inclusivity discourse. regarding another element that relates to the inclusivity discourse, the interviewees mentioned that everything was done to maintain the montreal ukrainian festival in the parc de l’ukraine; picnic tables had been added, new locations for the outdoor stages and bars had been found, and the needs of the organizers were considered in the replanning of the park’s chalet. also, it was stated that help was provided to relocate the festival to the nearby parc beaubien while the parc de l’ukraine was under construction and became temporarily unavailable for holding events. as jean-luc mentioned, “you know, we thought of them [ukrainians] when we did the replanning [of the park]. we also thought of their festival, which became bigger throughout the years. […] when we replanned the park, we had planned some amenities and equipment for them.” thus, city representatives and professionals understood the significance of the parc de l’ukraine for the montreal ukrainian festival, and they tried to accommodate the event. however, despite these accommodations, the festival finally stayed in the parc beaubien8. ukrainian community discourses regarding the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine during the interviews, discourses expressed by the ukrainian community were more diverse than the ones that were conveyed by the city of montreal. one was shared with city representatives and professionals, while another was divergent. for the shared discourse, both the city and the ukrainian community acknowledged that rosemont is an important neighbourhood for ukrainians in montreal, following the ‘ukrainian neighbourhood discourse’, thus explaining the need of commemorating this community in the replanned parc de l’ukraine and of honouring its ukrainian identity. however, the inclusivity discourse promoted by the city, was contradicted by the ukrainian discourse of not being included enough in the replanning of the park, which we identify as ‘non-inclusivity discourse’. regarding the shared discourse, for most of the ukrainian interviewees, rosemont can be considered as a ukrainian neighbourhood for three main reasons. firstly, it is the area with a ukrainian institutional landscape, meaning that there are many visible ukrainian institutions clustered in one single area, such as three ukrainian churches (saint-sophie ukrainian orthodox cathedral, assumption-of-the-blessed-virgin-mary ukrainian catholic church, saint-mary-the-protectress ukrainian orthodox church), a ukrainian credit union (caisse populaire desjardins ukrainienne de montréal), two ukrainian senior residences (résidence ukrainienne, villa ukrainienne), two youth associations which have their own building (sum, plast), and some ukrainian stores. other than these institutions, there are also ukrainian toponyms in the area, namely rue de l’ukraine and parc de l’ukraine. so, as mentioned by yuri “visually, [rosemont] is still recognized as the neighbourhood that has the most ukrainian colour to it.” in the same vein, for viktor, “[rosemont] it’s the biggest [ukrainian] place, because there are institutions. […] everyone needs a neighbourhood, right? so, to say that it is there [in rosemont], i am ok with that.” secondly, there are many ukrainian activities that take place in the neighbourhood of rosemont, for example, concerts, divine liturgies, ukrainian saturday schools, as well as the annual montreal ukrainian festival. they represent opportunities for ukrainians to gather and to talk in their language. thirdly, the area began to be heavily populated by ukrainians in the 1960s–1970s. even if the ukrainian population decreased over time and is more dispersed throughout montreal, some still reside there nowadays. in opposition to the shared discourse promoting rosemont as an important neighbourhood for ukrainians, regarding the inclusive nature of the replanning, the discourses between the city of montreal and the ukrainian community diverged. contrary to the vision of the city of montreal that highlighted the inclusion of the ukrainian community through the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine to promote its ukrainian identity, ukrainians, for their part, felt they were not included enough in this process due to three main reasons: 1) the replanning does not reflect the ukrainian character of the neighbourhood, 2) the consultations between the city professionals and the ukrainian community fennia 200(1) (2022) 33kim pawliw & étienne berthold were considered insufficient, and 3) the annual montreal ukrainian festival had to change its location from parc de l’ukraine to parc beaubien. as mentioned above, ukrainian symbols were added in the park. most of the ukrainian interviewees who were aware of this project do not think the park looks like a ukrainian park, and they don’t feel represented in the chosen symbolic. for instance, vira mentioned that “they [the changes] don’t have a ukrainian flavour if that’s what it was meant to have” while viktor highlighted that “it is named parc de l’ukraine, but… it doesn’t look like a ukrainian park.” for her part, oxana specified that it would be important for the park to look ukrainian because of its central location for the ukrainian community and because its toponym reflects its ukrainian identity: “i guess the fact that it’s named parc de l’ukraine kind of… it’s not reflected in the appearance of the park. […] uh, i guess it would be nice for there to be something that, to reflect the name and the fact that it’s sort of the central area of the ukrainian community at this point.” some ukrainian interviewees mentioned that the chosen symbols are too subtle for people to notice that they are ukrainian. they considered that there are not a lot of individuals who are aware that the tunnel of love is in ukraine whereas the tryzub can only be seen if one flew above the park. in addition to the ukrainian interviewees that thought that the ukrainian presence is not sufficiently reflected in the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, others felt they were not included enough because of a lack of consultation during this process. some of them felt that the ukrainian community was not consulted at all, while others said they were consulted, but only in the later stages of the replanning. they believe they should have been involved throughout this process. therefore, according to them, there was not a real consultation effort on the part of the city of montreal. as oxana mentioned: there was a plan i guess that the city instituted and then uh… asked us if we wanted to add anything that was kind of ukrainian. but it wasn’t kind of a concerted uh, effort that they… […] …you know, at the planning stages, uh, i don’t feel that uh, the ukrainian community was consulted. it was only after everything had been planned out uh, i think the ukrainian community was then asked if we wanted to put something in, uh… maybe like a token, object, or something to uh, i guess to, to be able to say that it’s still parc de l’ukraine. in the same vein, maxim felt that the city only presented the plans, and then asked if the ukrainian community wanted to add anything else, rather than having a real dialogue with them from the beginning of the replanning: “but you know, [the city] didn’t consult us, eh. we had a meeting, but it was already too late, too late, you know. […] they didn’t ask for our opinion.” according to maryia, this lack of consultation does not only apply to the replanning itself, but also to the contest organized by the public art bureau for the choice of an artwork to be installed in the park. in her opinion, the meeting between the borough professionals, the artists, and the ukrainian community was insufficient. ukrainians only showcased some elements from their culture rather than being actively involved in the choice of the artwork. she stated that “there wasn’t enough consultations. […] because it’s due to this, this lack of, in my opinion, integration from the start. it always comes top-down. it always comes from the political gesture rather than from the community.” finally, the non-inclusivity discourse expressed the fact that the parc de l’ukraine represents ukrainian identity and is important for the ukrainian community not just because of its toponym, but because it was the traditional location of the annual montreal ukrainian festival (before the replanning), which was insufficiently accommodated during this process. some ukrainian interviewees mentioned that they were disappointed that the montreal ukrainian festival had to change its location from parc de l’ukraine to parc beaubien. of course, the festival had to be relocated when the park was under construction in 2017, but it continued to be held in parc beaubien afterward. some ukrainian interviewees thought that the relocation of the montreal ukrainian festival was directly related to the replanning of the park. this perception can indeed lead to the impression that ukrainians were being thrown out of their own park and supports the feeling of a lack of inclusion. for instance, alexeï stated that “it’s kinda weird, right, they call it parc de l’ukraine, then they made all these changes and, and the festival, you know, the festival is not there anymore.” other ukrainian interviewees thought that the parc de l’ukraine was simply too small to keep holding such a big event, so it had to be moved to parc beaubien. their perception is less related to the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, and thus, they did not mention a lack of inclusion. 34 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper discussion since the 1960s, there were efforts to commemorate the ukrainian presence in rosemont, and in the 1980s, specifically in the parc de l’ukraine. since that latter decade, its ukrainian identity was highlighted, be it by its ukrainian toponym (1981) or by the replanning that added ukrainian symbols in the park (2017–2022). indeed, as mentioned respectively by main (2013), low and others (2002), the designation of a park with an ethnocultural name as well as planning practices can reinforce the identification of an ethnocultural community to such a place, if it feels represented enough. carmona (2010) added that power relationships between various actors are significant in the creation and development of these places, which, in the present case were between the ukrainian community of montreal and the city of montreal. during the change of the park’s toponym, they were at the beginning mostly between ukrainian representatives from the ucc and jean drapeau (in the 1960s), to finally become largely between renée la rochelle-chumak and mayor drapeau (late 1970s–early 1980s). while for the replanning of the park, even if this project was decided under denis coderre’s term in office (2013– 2017), it was mainly accomplished during valérie plante’s terms in office (2017–in progress). therefore, the relations regarding this project were mainly between various representatives from the ukrainian community (ucc, saint-volodymyr cultural association) as well as representatives and professionals under plante’s mandate. it is in this context of municipal policies that discourses were formed. regarding the city’s discourses, they concerned two main elements: the recognition of rosemont as an important neighbourhood for ukrainians in montreal (ukrainian neighbourhood discourse) and their inclusion in the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine (inclusivity discourse). this inclusion concerns three main elements: 1) the added ukrainians symbols, 2) the consultations with the ukrainian community, and 3) the accommodation of the montreal ukrainian festival during the replanning process. this inclusivity discourse goes in line with various documents issued by the city that highlighted the inclusive nature of montreal. for example, in 2004 and 2005 were adopted respectively the montreal declaration on cultural diversity and inclusion and the montreal charter of rights and responsibilities. these two documents mentioned some values that must be respected by every citizen in montreal, such as dignity, respect for human life and equity. both also emphasized the importance of the inclusivity discourse. the former asserted the promotion of practices that valued cultural diversity and inclusion while the latter stated that montreal’s status as an inclusive city must be strengthened. article no.12 of the 2005 charter is particularly eloquent regarding the inclusivity discourse when it stated that “montreal’s cosmopolitan character represents a valuable resource that is further enhanced by promoting inclusion and harmonious relations between its communities and persons of all origins” (city of montreal 2005, 9). however, in this charter, inclusivity is not limited to ethnic origin, but encompasses many other attributes such as age, gender, sexual orientation, and social condition (city of montreal 2004, 2005). more recently, in 2017 the policy on social development was issued whose objective was to create a movement that favours social cohesion and inclusion. as in the previously mentioned documents, the inclusivity discourse was also present in this policy as can be seen when it states that “montreal is a supportive and inclusive metropolis made up of sustainable neighbourhoods that are excellent places in which to live and thrive […]” (city of montreal 2017c, 13). this document was based on four areas of intervention, some of which highlighted the inclusivity discourse. the first area of intervention – to develop a city and neighbourhoods on a human scale – mentioned the need to advocate mixed and inclusive neighbourhoods, while the second – to foster social cohesion and living together – underpinned the creation of inclusive living environments that favours social cohesion (city of montreal 2017c). once again, inclusivity was not only related to the ethnic origin but to all other attributes that a person may have (e.g., gender, social condition, health condition). the following year, in 2018, valérie plante unveiled montreal’s first immigration action plan named inclusive montreal that, as stated by its name, also promoted the inclusivity discourse. the objective of this plan was to demonstrate montreal’s leadership as a proximity government mainly regarding the inclusion and integration of immigrants. the plan proposed four strategic axes, one of which directly concerns montreal’s inclusivity (inclusive city). this axis had three main objectives: to value montreal’s diversity and the multiple trajectories of immigration, to involve montrealers in the fennia 200(1) (2022) 35kim pawliw & étienne berthold integration process of immigrants and to reduce all kinds of discrimination (city of montreal 2018e). the four documents mentioned above show that montreal’s inclusivity discourse was developed in the 2000s and was highlighted under valérie plante’s terms in office, mainly applying to immigration and ethnocultural communities. as previously seen, this discourse was promoted again during the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine regarding both the added ukrainian symbols and the consultations during the replanning process. so, montreal representatives and professionals seem to use the replanning of the parc de l'ukraine to reassert the fact that montreal is an inclusive city, even if this perception is not shared with the ukrainian community. thus, in this case, the city is perceived as instrumentalizing ukrainians to promote its own identity. regarding the ukrainian community’s discourses, one is shared with the city of montreal’s discourses, that is the ukrainian neighbourhood discourse, while another discourse is divergent, that is the inclusivity discourse (fig. 3, 4). even if the city of montreal promotes an inclusivity discourse in the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, ukrainians felt they were not included enough for three reasons: 1) they thought that the added ukrainian symbols did not reflect the ukrainian character of the neighbourhood, 2) there were not enough consultations with their community during the replanning process, and 3) the montreal ukrainian festival was impacted by the replanning. these elements could damage the identification of ukrainians to this park. as mentioned by low and others (2002), planning and design practices can indeed have a negative impact on immigrants’ and ethnocultural communities’ identification to a park if they do not feel represented enough, which may have happened during the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine. germain and colleagues (2006) added that immigrants will feel more represented in an urban space if consultations are held with the city in the replanning process, which were considered insufficient in the present case. the holding of an ethnocultural festival in a park was also listed in the literature as strengthening the identification of an ethnocultural community to such a place (germain et al. 2006; main 2013). thus, if a festival is not longer held in a park, as is the case of the montreal ukrainian festival in the parc de l’ukraine, the identification to it might be impacted. despite these elements, during the interviews, viktor mentioned that his association planned to talk to the city to see if something could be done in order to make the park more ukrainian. therefore, the ukrainian community wants to be included in the process of replanning the park and wants to strengthen its ukrainian identity. conclusion the purpose of this article was to provide a keener insight of the identity construction processes of immigrants by examining the interrelationships between ethnic associations as well as municipal representatives and professionals within a specific context; that is the replanning of the parc de fig. 3. shared discourse between the city of montreal and the ukrainian community of montreal. 36 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper l’ukraine in the neighbourhood of rosemont, montreal. using discourse analysis as our methodological approach, we first demonstrated that the city of montreal can instrumentalize immigrant communities to promote its specific identity. secondly, we revealed that the neighbourhood of rosemont has been at the centre of construction processes through which it became recognized as the ukrainian neighbourhood of montreal. such processes have relied both on ukrainian associations and on montreal representatives and professionals. this demonstration was made possible by focusing on the discourses that were expressed during the change of toponym of the parc de l’ukraine (1981) and during the replanning that added ukrainian symbols in the park (2017–2022). after comparing the discourses used by the city of montreal and the ukrainian community during the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine and retracing the inclusivity discourse since the 2000s, we draw two main conclusions. first, we found that the city instrumentalized the ukrainian community to promote its identity and its objective of becoming a truly inclusive city. the inclusion of ukrainians during the replanning of the park was perceived being primordial as shown by the significance of the added symbols, by the consultations with the ukrainian community and by the accommodation of the montreal ukrainian festival. however, by comparing this discourse to that of the ukrainian community discourse, which stated that they did not feel included enough throughout the replanning, we can see that this inclusivity could be better implemented concerning specific projects. hence, there seemed to be a certain divergence between discourses that stated that montreal is an inclusive city and actions. thus, it seems that the city used ukrainians to promote its own identity in the context of a specific replanning project. second, by looking at the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, we found that rosemont was indeed at the centre of a construction process through which it has acquired a symbolic value as the ukrainian neighbourhood of montreal, which was developed, as shown by the study of the parc de l’ukraine, by ukrainian associations that tried to be more involved in the park, and by montreal’s representatives and professionals that added ukrainian symbols in it and that pronounced speeches recognizing the significance of rosemont for ukrainians living in montreal. therefore, in montreal, ukrainian identity seems to be linked to the parc de l’ukraine and to the neighbourhood where it stands, meaning rosemont. further research perspectives could be developed based on these findings: 1) a study to identify which elements the ukrainian community deems worthy of commemoration (according to the various conceptions of its identity); and 2) a study to determine how these elements impact public commemoration projects. fig. 4. divergent discourses between the city of montreal and the ukrainian community of montreal fennia 200(1) (2022) 37kim pawliw & étienne berthold notes 1 in this article “ukrainian” refers to anyone who identifies as ukrainian, regardless of their country of origin. 2 the aim here is not to provide a complete list of all the ukrainian associations in montreal (as well as their characteristics), but to give an example of some of these associations. once, there also was an important communist association (that was not a member of the ucc): the association of united ukrainian canadians (auuc). however, in the province of quebec due to the adoption of the padlock law (1937–1957) under maurice duplessis, communist activities were deter. this association therefore quickly lost its influence in the province (hinther 2011). 3 correspondance from nick hrab to jean drapeau, december 18th, 1961, collection of thematic files, parks and playground, vm166-d01900-a-5. montreal archives, montreal, quebec, canada. 4 correspondance from luka tomaschuk to paul-émile sauvageau, march 1st, 1965, collection of thematic files, parks and playground, vm166-d01900-a-5. montreal archives, montreal, quebec, canada; correspondance from paul-émile sauvageau to jean dupire, march 5th, 1965, collection of thematic files, parks and playground, vm166-d01900-a-5. montreal archives, montreal, quebec, canada. 5 correspondance from jean-louis sauvé to jean péloquin, october 24th, 1979, collection of thematic files 7253, vm001-5-2-8107253. montreal archives, montreal, quebec, canada; correspondance from jean péloquin to the president and members of the executive committee of the city of montreal, november 16th, 1979, collection of thematic files 7253, vm001-5-2-8107253. montreal archives, montreal, quebec, canada. 6 all the names of the interviewees are fictional. 7 non-participant observation. 8 after the replanning of the parc de l’ukraine, the montreal ukrainian festival became held in the parc beaubien until the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic (when the 2020 edition of the festival was held online, and the 2021 edition was cancelled). in 2022, the festival was held in parc maisonneuve (in rosemont-la petite-patrie). acknowledgements we would like to thank the fonds de recherche du québec – société et culture (frqsc) for its financial support for kim pawliw’s phd research (that will include this article). file number: 267257. references altman, i. & low, s. m. (1992) place attachment. plenum, new york. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4 amit, k. & bar-lev, s. (2015) immigrants’ sense of belonging to the host country: the role of life satisfaction, language proficiency, and religious motives. social indicators research 124 947–961. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0823-3 bailey, c. m. (1939) the social structure of the italian and ukrainian immigrant communities, montréal, 1935–1937. phd thesis. mcgill university, montreal. borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie (2017a) procès-verbal de la séance ordinaire du conseil d’arrondissement tenue le lundi 13 mars 2017 à 19h. ca17260064 13.03.2017 <https://ville.montreal. qc.ca/documents/adi_public/ca_rpp/ca_rpp_pv_ordi_2017-03-13_19h00_fr.pdf>. 20.2.2022. borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie (2017b) procès-verbal de la séance ordinaire du conseil d’arrondissement tenue le lundi 5 juin 2017 à 19h. ca17260182 05.06.2017 <https://ville.montreal. qc.ca/documents/adi_public/ca_rpp/ca_rpp_pv_ordi_2017-06-05_19h00_fr.pdf>. 22.2.2022. borough of rosemont-la petite-patrie (2018) facebook 10.07.2018 <https://www.facebook.com/ permalink.php?story_fbid=1781448715265706&id=115676515176276>. 26.11.2021. brisebois, m. & delagrave, l. (2017) rosemont-la petite-patrie. il y a longtemps que je t’aime… histoire québec, montreal. carmona, m. (2010) contemporary public space, part two: classification. journal of urban design 15(2) 157–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574801003638111 caselli, m. (2009) integration, participation, identity: immigrant associations in the province of milan. international migration 48(2) 58–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00530.x https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-014-0823-3 https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/documents/adi_public/ca_rpp/ca_rpp_pv_ordi_2017-03-13_19h00_fr.pdf https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/documents/adi_public/ca_rpp/ca_rpp_pv_ordi_2017-03-13_19h00_fr.pdf https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/documents/adi_public/ca_rpp/ca_rpp_pv_ordi_2017-06-05_19h00_fr.pdf https://ville.montreal.qc.ca/documents/adi_public/ca_rpp/ca_rpp_pv_ordi_2017-06-05_19h00_fr.pdf https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1781448715265706&id=115676515176276 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1781448715265706&id=115676515176276 https://doi.org/10.1080/13574801003638111 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00530.x 38 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper city of montreal (1981) by-law 5786. by-law to change the name of the park located at the corner of bellechasse street and 13th avenue. city of montreal, montreal. city of montreal (1995) les rues de montréal. répertoire historique. méridien, montreal. city of montreal (2004) déclaration de montréal pour la diversité culturelle et l’inclusion 22.3.2004 < h t t p : / / v i l l e . m o n t r e a l . q c . c a / p l s / p o r t a l / d o c s / p a g e / p e s _ p u b l i c a t i o n s _ f r / p u b l i c a t i o n s / declaration_diversite.pdf#:~:text=par%20la%20pr%c3%a9sente%20d%c3%a9claration%20 de,en%20assurent%20l'application%20effective.&text=quartiers%20et%20des%20milieux%20de%20 vie>. 8.3.2022. city of montreal (2005) charte montréalaise des droits et des responsabilités 20.6.2005 <https:// portail-m4s.s3.montreal.ca/pdf/charte_montrealaise_en_francais_.pdf>. 10.3.2022. city of montreal (2017a) système de gestion des décisions des instances. sommaire décisionnel. no.1170963038 18.05.2017 <http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_rpp_fr/ media/documents/sommaires%20d%c9cisionnels%20-%20s%c9ance%20du%20conseil%20 du%205%20juin%202017.pdf>. 2.2.2022. city of montreal (2017b) système de gestion des décisions des instances. sommaire décisionnel. no.1176417001 15.2.2017 <http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_rpp_fr/media/ documents/170310_ca%202017%2003%2010%20dossiers%20d%c9cisionnels.pdf>. 5.2.2022. city of montreal (2017c) politique de développement social. montréal de tous les possibles ! 12.6.2017 <https://observatoirevivreensemble.org/sites/observatoirevivreensemble.org/files/politique_de_ developpement_social_lr.pdf>. 11.2.2022. city of montreal (2018a) profil sociodémographique, recensement 2016. agglomération de montréal. 1.5.2018 <http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/mtl_stats_fr/media/documents/profil_ sociod%c9mo_agglom%c9ration%202016.pdf>. 26.5.2022. city of montreal (2018b) profil sociodémographique, recensement 2016. arrondissement de rosemont-la petite-patrie. 1.5.2018 <http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/mtl_stats_fr/ media/documents/profil_sociod%c9mo_rosemont%20la%20petite-patrie%202016.pdf>. 26.5.2022. city of montreal (2018c) invitation aux médias – inauguration du parc de l’ukraine complètement réaménagé 13.06.2018 <https://www.lelezard.com/communique-17270862.html>. 2.2.2022. city of montreal (2018d) la communauté ukrainienne mise en valeur dans le réaménagement du parc de l’ukraine 5.7.2018 <http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=5798,42657625&_dad=portal&_ schema=portal&id=30382>. 10.3.2022. city of montreal (2018e) plan d’action 2018–2021. montréal inclusive 1.10.2018 <https:// observatoirevivreensemble.org/sites/observatoirevivreensemble.org/files/montreal_inclusive.pdf>. 10.3.2022. city of montreal (2021) quartiers sociologiques 1.12.2021 <https://donnees.montreal.ca/ville-demontreal/quartiers-sociologiques>. 28.1.2021. delacour, e. (2018) des retards dans les travaux au parc de l’ukraine. journal métro 16.4.2018 <https:// journalmetro.com/local/rosemont-la-petite-patrie/1514305/des-retards-dans-les-travaux-au-parc-delukraine/>. 10.7.2018. deslisle, s. (2016) programme fonctionnel et technique. réaménagement intérieur et travaux divers – chalet du parc de l’ukraine (#0189). direction of the relations with citizens, of administrative services and of registry, montreal. de vroome, t., coenders, m., van tubergen, f. & verkuyten, m. (2011) economic participation and national self-identification of refugees in the netherlands. international migration review 45(3) 615–638. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00860.x dittmer, j. (2010) textual and discourse analysis. in delyser, d., herbert, s., aitken, s. crang, m. & mcdowell, l. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative geography, 274–286. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857021090.n17 ehrkamp, p. (2005) placing identities: transnational practices and local attachments of turkish immigrants in germany. journal of ethnic & migration studies 31(2) 345–364. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183042000339963 foucault, m. (1969) the archaeology of knowledge. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203604168 garland, d. (2014) what is a “history of the present”? on foucault’s genealogies and their critical preconditions. punishment & society 16(4) 365–384. https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474514541711 germain, a., contin, m., liégeois, l. & radice, m. (2006) à propos du patrimoine urbain des communautés culturelles : nouveaux regards sur l’espace public. in jébrak, y. & julien, b. (eds.) le temps de l’espace public urbain : construction, transformation et utilisation, 123–143. multimonde, montreal. grant, p. (2007) sustaining a strong cultural and national identity: the acculturation of immigrants and second-generation canadians of asian and african descent. international migration & integration 8 89–116. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-007-0003-2 http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/pes_publications_fr/publications/declaration_diversite.pdf# http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/pes_publications_fr/publications/declaration_diversite.pdf# https://portail-m4s.s3.montreal.ca/pdf/charte_montrealaise_en_francais_.pdf https://portail-m4s.s3.montreal.ca/pdf/charte_montrealaise_en_francais_.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_rpp_fr/media/documents/sommaires%20d%c9cisionnels%20-%20s%c9ance%20du%20conseil%20du%205%20juin%202017.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_rpp_fr/media/documents/sommaires%20d%c9cisionnels%20-%20s%c9ance%20du%20conseil%20du%205%20juin%202017.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_rpp_fr/media/documents/sommaires%20d%c9cisionnels%20-%20s%c9ance%20du%20conseil%20du%205%20juin%202017.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_rpp_fr/media/documents/170310_ca%202017%2003%2010%20dossiers%20d%c9cisionnels.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/arrond_rpp_fr/media/documents/170310_ca%202017%2003%2010%20dossiers%20d%c9cisionnels.pdf https://observatoirevivreensemble.org/sites/observatoirevivreensemble.org/files/politique_de_developpement_social_lr.pdf https://observatoirevivreensemble.org/sites/observatoirevivreensemble.org/files/politique_de_developpement_social_lr.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/mtl_stats_fr/media/documents/profil_sociod%c9mo_agglom%c9ration%202016.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/mtl_stats_fr/media/documents/profil_sociod%c9mo_agglom%c9ration%202016.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/mtl_stats_fr/media/documents/profil_sociod%c9mo_rosemont%20la%20petite-patrie%202016.pdf http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/pls/portal/docs/page/mtl_stats_fr/media/documents/profil_sociod%c9mo_rosemont%20la%20petite-patrie%202016.pdf https://www.lelezard.com/communique-17270862.html http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=5798,42657625&_dad=portal&_schema=portal&id=30382 http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_pageid=5798,42657625&_dad=portal&_schema=portal&id=30382 https://observatoirevivreensemble.org/sites/observatoirevivreensemble.org/files/montreal_inclusive.pdf https://observatoirevivreensemble.org/sites/observatoirevivreensemble.org/files/montreal_inclusive.pdf https://donnees.montreal.ca/ville-de-montreal/quartiers-sociologiques https://donnees.montreal.ca/ville-de-montreal/quartiers-sociologiques https://journalmetro.com/local/rosemont-la-petite-patrie/1514305/des-retards-dans-les-travaux-au-parc-de-lukraine/ https://journalmetro.com/local/rosemont-la-petite-patrie/1514305/des-retards-dans-les-travaux-au-parc-de-lukraine/ https://journalmetro.com/local/rosemont-la-petite-patrie/1514305/des-retards-dans-les-travaux-au-parc-de-lukraine/ https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2011.00860.x https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857021090.n17 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183042000339963 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203604168 https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474514541711 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-007-0003-2 fennia 200(1) (2022) 39kim pawliw & étienne berthold guest, g., bunce, a. & johnson, l. (2006) how many interviews are enough? an experiment with data saturation and variability. field methods 18(1) 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x05279903 gumuchian, h. & marois c. (2000) initiation à la recherche en géographie, aménagement, développement territorial, environnement. university of montreal, montreal. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pum.14790 hardwick, s. w. (2010) fuzzy transnationals? american settlement, identity, and belonging in canada. american review of canadian studies 40(1) 86–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/02722010903536953 hinther, r. (2011) generation gap: canada’s postwar ukrainian left. in hinther r. & mochoruk j. (eds.) re-imagining ukrainian canadians. history, politics and identity, 23–53. university of toronto, toronto. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442686861-003 huot, s., laliberte rudman d., dodson b. & magalhaes, l. (2013) expanding policy-based conceptualizations of ‘successful integration’: negotiating integration through occupation following international migration. journal of occupational science 20(1) 6–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2012.717497 isajiw, w. & makuch, a. (1994) ukrainians in canada. in lencyk pawliczko a. (ed.) ukraine and ukrainians throughout the world, 328–355. utp, toronto. jurkova, s. (2014) the role of ethno-cultural organizations in immigrant integration: a case study of the bulgarian society in western canada. canadian ethnic studies 46(1) 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1353/ces.2014.0005 kelebay, y. g. (1975) the ukrainian community in montreal. ma thesis, concordia university, montreal. kelebay, y. g. (1980) three fragments of the ukrainian community in montreal, 1899–1970: a hartzian approach. canadian ethnic studies 12(2) 74–87. kelebay, y. g. (1992) the ideological baggage of three fragments of ukrainian immigrants: a contribution to the history of ukrainians in quebec (1910–1960). phd thesis, concordia university, montreal. kelebay, y. g. (1994) les trois solitudes : l’histoire des ukrainiens au québec entre 1910 et 1960. in biega a. & m. diakowsky (eds.) la vie des ukrainiens du québec, 1–23. basiliens, toronto. la presse (1962a) hommage de la ville aux ‘néos’. à un parc de montréal, le nom d’un poète ukrainien 10.7.1962. la presse (1962b) 44e anniversaire de l’indépendance. les ukrainiens restent fidèles à leur liberté 20.1.1962. la presse (1964) en hommage aux ukrainiens. un parc de montréal portera le nom de leur belle patrie 29.1.1964. lazar, b. & douglas, t. (1992) guide to ethnic montreal. véhicule, montreal. lessa, i. (2006) discursive struggles within social welfare: restaging teen motherhood. british journal of social work 36 283–298. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bch256 low, s. m., taplin, d. & scheld, s. (2002) recapturing erased histories: ethnicity, design and cultural representation – a case study of independence national historical park. journal of architectural & planning research 19(4) 282–299. main, k. (2013) planting roots in foreign soil? – immigrant place meaning in an urban park. journal of environmental psychology 36 29–304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.08.003 mcnicoll, c. (1993) montréal. une société multiculturelle. bélin, paris. mifi (ministry of immigration, francization and integration) (2019) portrait statistique. population d’origine ukrainienne au québec en 2016 1.6.2019 <http://www.quebecinterculturel.gouv.qc.ca/ publications/fr/diversite-ethnoculturelle/2016/sta_ukrainienne_portrait2016.pdf>. 24.5.2011. mokrushyna, h. (2013) is the classic diaspora transnational and hybrid? the case of the ukrainian canadian congress. nations & nationalism 19(4) 799–818. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12032 morses, j. m. (1995) the significance of saturation. qualitative health research 5(2) 147–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/104973239500500201 nadeau, g. (2020) angus. du grand capital à l’économie sociale – 1904–1992. fides, montreal. public art bureau (2021) giorgia volpe réalisera l’œuvre pour le parc de l’ukraine 30.4.2021 <https:// artpublic.ville.montreal.qc.ca/2021/04/giorgia-volpe-realisera-loeuvre-pour-le-parc-de-lukraine/>. 12.2.2022. rishbeth, c. (2001) ethnic minority groups and the design of public open space: an inclusive landscape? landscape research 24(4) 351–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426390120090148 robillard, l. (1948) plus d’un demi-million en cadeau au peuple montréalais. le devoir 2.8.1948. rudnyckyj, j. (1992) l’odonymie ukrainienne de montréal. association de la langue ukrainienne, montreal. schrover, m. & vermeulen, f. (2005) immigrant organisations. journal of ethnics & migration studies 31(5) 823–832. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830500177792 seignour, a. (2011) méthode d’analyse des discours. l’exemple de l’allocution d’un dirigeant d’entreprise publique. revue française de gestion 2(211) 29–45. https://doi.org/10.3166/rfg.211.29-45 https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822x05279903 https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pum.14790 https://doi.org/10.1080/02722010903536953 https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442686861-003 https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2012.717497 https://doi.org/10.1353/ces.2014.0005 https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bch256 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.08.003 http://www.quebecinterculturel.gouv.qc.ca/publications/fr/diversite-ethnoculturelle/2016/sta_ukrainienne_portrait2016.pdf http://www.quebecinterculturel.gouv.qc.ca/publications/fr/diversite-ethnoculturelle/2016/sta_ukrainienne_portrait2016.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12032 https://doi.org/10.1177/104973239500500201 https://artpublic.ville.montreal.qc.ca/2021/04/giorgia-volpe-realisera-loeuvre-pour-le-parc-de-lukraine/ https://artpublic.ville.montreal.qc.ca/2021/04/giorgia-volpe-realisera-loeuvre-pour-le-parc-de-lukraine/ https://doi.org/10.1080/01426390120090148 https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830500177792 https://doi.org/10.3166/rfg.211.29-45 40 fennia 200(1) (2022)research paper stodolska, m., shinew, k. j., acevedo, j. c. & izenstark, d. (2011) perceptions of urban parks as havens and contested terrains by mexican-americans in chicago neighbourhoods. leisure sciences 33(2) 103–126. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2011.550220 ucc (ukrainian canadian congress) (2022) about 1.5.2022 <https://uccmontreal.ca/ucc-structure/>. 23.5.2022. ufkes, e. g. otten, s., van der zee, k. i., giebels, e. & dovidio j. f. (2012) urban district identity as a common ingroup identity: the different role of ingroup prototypicality for minority and majority groups. european journal of social psychology 42 706–716. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1888 ukrainian time (2018) youtube 30.6.2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vufghjuwhs&t=1806s>. 31.5.2021. valenta, m. (2009) selective networking as identity project: the social integration of first generation immigrants in norway. international migration & integration 10 177–195. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12134-009-0100-5 valerio, o. (2017) french-canadian angel in ukrainian community of montreal. radio trembita 14.7.2017 <http://radiotrembita.ca/french-canadian-angel-in-ukrainian-community-of-montreal/>. 18.4.2022. van dijk, t. a. (1985) introduction: levels and dimensions of discourse analysis. in van dijk, t. a. (ed.) handbook of discourse analysis, volume 2, dimensions of discourse, 1–11 academic press, london. waerniers, r. (2007) neighborhood and identity: an explorative study of the local and ethnic identities of young ethnic minorities in belgium. city & community 16(4) 380–398. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12269 https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2011.550220 https://uccmontreal.ca/ucc-structure/ https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1888 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vufghjuwhs&t=1806s https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-009-0100-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-009-0100-5 http://radiotrembita.ca/french-canadian-angel-in-ukrainian-community-of-montreal/ https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12269 ’alternative’ journal publishing and the economy of academic prestige urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70469 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70469 ’alternative’ journal publishing and the economy of academic prestige we are all familiar with the dire predicament that anyone aiming at pursuing an academic career currently finds oneself in, succinctly described by lawrence berg as apparatuses of anxiety-production in the neoliberal university (berg et al. 2016). within this regime of research governance, which in most places is dominated by crude quantifications of the quality of scholarly output (jones 2017), the ”gold standard” for accumulating scholarly prestige is constituted by ”a small number of entirely anglophone journals produced by the world’s largest academic publishing houses” (batterbury 2017, 176), dominated by the for-profit ‘big five’ academic publishing corporations. as a consequence, there is overwhelming pressure on early career scholars to publish in highly-ranked journals, which – as noted by the editorial team of human geography (finn et al. 2017) – with few exceptions constitute the proprietary products of an oligopoly of large, capitalistic academic publishers. however, even when recognizing and opposing the immensely problematic effects of current conventions of evaluating scholarly quality, it is nonetheless important to read the present predicament not only in relation to some abstract ideal state, but also in the context of a previous history. and – to be frank – academia has always been governed by an economy of prestige. as noted by fyfe and colleagues (2017) in a recent paper on the relationship between academic prestige and scientific publishing: “…[i]n britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scholarly reputation was still closely correlated with social standing. a good scholarly reputation could be gained through membership in the appropriate societies, through meeting the right people over dinner, and by demonstrating one’s knowledge through conversation or the ownership of an impressive collection of specimens or artefacts. the authorship of essays or books could feed into these social structures for generating prestige, but there are good reasons why scholarly culture in this period has been called ‘gentlemanly’, in reference to gender and class, as well as to the behavioural norms and social activities which were valued.” (fyfe et al. 2017, 6) the authors further note that it is in the mid-1800s that the idea that authorship is a good way of evaluating intellectual merit begins to take root, whereby scientific learned societies increasingly came to care more about “demonstrable scholarly activity than family background” and further also began to recognize “a list of publications as a suitable entry requirement” (ibid.). by the end of the century, the publication record had become something of the standard means of demonstrating ability in competition for professorships, whereby “young researches could hope that the intangible prestige granted by the recognition of their work from others in their field might translate into an academic position“ (ibid.). the sobering insight provided by this type of historical-institutional analysis is that long before the neoliberal era, prestige was the hard currency of the academy, and the accumulation of personal prestige has to a large extent always constituted the make or break of fledgling academic careers. however, what has changed between different times and places – and in recent decades, radically so – has been the conventions upon which such prestige has been established, and the mechanisms whereby it has been accumulated. what perhaps particularly distinguishes the current moment is the wholesale capitalization of this economy of academic prestige, which has been facilitated through various forms of quantification that all contribute to translating the symbolic prestige of academic publishing into concrete cash-in-hand for individual academics (new positions, publication bonuses, etc.), universities (research evaluation frameworks, grants), and the whole billion-dollar global academic publishing industry dominated by a small number of for-profit enterprises, generally producing perverse profit margins. based on the current discussion regarding the ails of the academic publishing apparatus, conducted in this journal and in many other places, the editorial team of fennia is working hard to continuously develop the journal into a resource for the mounting scholarly opposition to this regime by practically embodying a concrete alternative. however, we also recognize that the attractiveness of such an © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 2 fennia 196(1) (2018)editorials alternative is weak if it is only based on an appeal to moral sentiments. an ethical publication practice, we suggest, must also proceed from an understanding of the existing, very real and concrete academic prestige economy that any researcher, and particularly those in the early stages of their career, must painstakingly navigate. the established routes through which early career researchers can accumulate academic prestige in the neoliberal university world are well-known: publish in highly ranked journals, pull in large grants, deliver keynote speeches at big conferences, be part of prestigious editorial boards, et cetera. the editorial collective of fennia has neither the capacity, nor a wish to, cater to the above-mentioned established practices of prestige accumulation. but there are also more subtle ways of accumulating prestige, that do not as thoroughly contribute to feeding and reproducing the neoliberal turn of higher education. we will propose a few. one fundamental element of generating scholarly prestige is simply to have your work read by established authorities in a research field, and to have it taken seriously as the work of an interesting up-and-coming colleague, which deserves to be noticed and commented upon. here, journals like fennia can have an interesting role to play as venues for generating such encounters and providing this type of prestige, as an added value for early career researchers in their consideration of where to submit their work (for detailed introduction of the following publications, see the editorial by riding & kallio 2018). currently, the journal is developing this critical feature by means of open-open review practice. where ethically adequate, we encourage the authors and the reviewers to engage in open conversations during the review process, facilitated by the editors. this allows, among other things, formulating revision suggestions dialogically between editors, authors and reviewers. after acceptance – the decision obviously being by the editors only – the reviewers are provided the opportunity to write a commentary, to be published alongside with the paper in fennia. in this issue, william walton’s (2018) article with commentaries by andy inch (2018) and vesa kanninen (2018) in our reflections section is an example of this practice. another dialogical publication format that we are currently experimenting is the fennia lecture with commentaries. it works as a venue for bringing into conversation younger and older scholars, including the lecturer, participants from the finnish geography days, and invited commentators from the research field in question. we began the tradition last year with henk van houtum’s lecture (van houtum & bueno lacy 2017) with three commentaries (hannonen 2017; riding 2017; scott 2017). this issue continues the annual practice with nick gill’s (2018) essay based on the 2017 fennia lecture, accompanied by five commentaries by jen bagelman (2018), roger norum (2018), vilhelmiina vainikka and joni vainikka (2018), jani vuolteenaho and eveliina lyytinen (2018), and matthew sparke (forthcoming). the third current dialogical endeavor of the journal is the versus forum, established in collaboration with three finnish scientific societies (society for regional and environmental studies, geographical society of finland, and finnish society for environmental social science), and two other journals published by them (alue & ympäristö, terra). it offers the opportunity to fennia authors to publish popularized versions of their research articles with invited commentaries from other scholars, professionals, practitioners, research participants, journalists, students, politicians, or representatives of any key audience of their research. with these research debates, the forum seeks to make scholarly work better accessible and known among scholars and people at large, thus we seek to identify target audiences for each piece of research to enhance academic and practical impact. first debates based on research published in fennia will come out later this year, to be linked with the original publications, and introduced and broadly circulated by the journal. with this editorial, we encourage scholars to invent critical forms of generating scholarly prestige, such that reach beyond the conventional practices based on unjust competition and individualizing academic culture, benefitting largely the corporate publication industry and scholars already in good positions. what can we do, from our different positions in our various scientific communities, to even up inequalities and to give value to alternative attempts in academic publishing? http://versuslehti.fi/english fennia 196(1) (2018) 3jonathan metzger & kirsi pauliina kallio jonathan metzger fennia editorial board member kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief references bagelman, j. (2018) who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 108–110. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 batterbury, s. (2017) socially just publishing: implications for geographers and their journals. fennia 195(2) 175–181. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66910 berg, l. d., huijbens, e. h. & larsen, h. g. (2016) producing anxiety in the neoliberal university. the canadian geographer/le géographe canadien 60(2) 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261 finn, j., peet, r., mollett, s. & lauermann, j. (2017) reclaiming value from academic labor: commentary by the editors of human geography. fennia 195(2) 182–184. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 fyfe, a., coate, k., curry, s., lawson, s., moxham, n. & rostvik, c. m. (2017) untangling academic publishing: a history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research. zenodo [online may 25 2017] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.546100 gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 hannonen, o. (2017) bordering the “other”: the case of the finnish-russian border. fennia 195(1) 113117. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63674 van houtum, h. & bueno lacy, r. (2017) the political extreme as the new normal: the cases of brexit, the french state of emergency and dutch islamophobia. fennia 195(1) 85-101. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64568 inch, a. (2018) the timely return of the repressed – commentary to walton. fennia 196(1) 99–102. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69822 jones, m. (2017) can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing experiences from norway. fennia 195(2) 164–174. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 kanninen, v. (2018) postpolitics of (scottish) planning: gatekeepers, gatechecks and gatecrashers? – commentary to walton. fennia 196(1) 103–107. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 norum, r. (2018) from welcome to well ... come: the mobilities, temporalities and geopolitics of contemporary hospitality – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 111–117. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 riding, j. (2017) extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semi-periphery of the postneoliberal europe. fennia 195(1) 106–112. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.59633 riding, j. & kallio, k. (2018) dialogical peer-review and non-profit open-access journal publishing: welcome to fennia. fennia 196(1) 4–8. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 scott, j. (2017) extreme and extremist geographies: commentary on the revanchist impulse and its consequences for everyday bordering. fennia 195(1) 102–105. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63677 sparke, m. welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill. fennia [online jun 17 2018] https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 vainikka, v. & vainikka, j. (2018) welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 124–130. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 vuolteenaho, j. & lyytinen, e. (2018) reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 walton, w. (2018) deregulated free-for-all planning, new settlements and the spectre of abandoned building sites in scotland’s crisis-hit oil economy. fennia 196(1) 58–76. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66910 https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66683 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.546100 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63674 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.64568 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69822 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.59633 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63677 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46224 doi: 10.11143/46224 replacing the nation in the age of migration: negotiating south asian identities in toronto ishan ashutosh ashutosh, ishan. (2015). replacing the nation in the age of migration: negotiating south asian identities in toronto. fennia 193: 2, 212–226. issn 1798-5617. this essay examines the role of the national in shaping the geo-political divides and connections of the south asian diaspora in toronto. south asian diaspora identities are explored through two contrasting political projects that reveal the ambivalent role of the nation in producing diasporic subjectivities and their shifting borders. first, by discussing the perceptions of south asians in toronto, it is contended that national and religious divides are reproduced in the diaspora as a means of national belonging to the society of settlement. diasporic geo-political divides are not merely transposed from societies of origin to settlement, but rather lie at the intersection of transnational and multicultural politics that encompass societies of origin and settlement. the reproduction of national divides in the south asian diaspora is situated in the neighbourhoods of immigrant settlement that are positioned as the objects of multicultural efficacy. the second political project reconstitutes the national through cross-national solidarities. through a discussion of south asian organizations and political initiatives in toronto and other cities in north america, this section illuminates diasporic politics predicated on new understandings of history and connection that rejuvenate and politicize multicultural politics. the argument presented finds that national boundaries are re-inscribed in the diaspora at the intersection of the multiple claims of membership. simultaneously, experiences and interactions in the diaspora provide the grounds for transforming and questioning the limits of national belonging. keywords: toronto, south asian diaspora, multiculturalism, transnationalism, ethnography, migration ishan ashutosh, indiana university, department of geography, student building 120, 701 e. kirkwood ave., bloomington, in 47405, u.s.a. e-mail: iashutos@ indiana.edu introduction this essay examines how overlapping national ideologies inform the various subjectivities of toronto’s south asian diaspora. in many respects, the very term “south asian” alludes to the multiple positioning of the national. the term consists of a state category that reduces national, linguistic, and religious differences (ghosh 2013). yet the term also signifies the historical and contemporary cross-national and anti-racist activism of people of bangladeshi, indian, pakistani, and sri lankan origins in canada. their activities illustrate a diasporic politics capable of transforming the inclusions and exclusions that underwrite national membership (ashutosh 2014). diasporic identities are of particular significance to debates over national integration in canada, given that twenty per cent of the country’s population is foreign-born, and the country’s multi-national character has been a central element of government policy and nationalist discourse since at least prime minister pierre trudeau’s introduction of a multicultural policy within a bilingual framework in 1971. with a population of 1.56 million people, south asians have been canada’s largest “visible minority group” since 2006 fennia 193: 2 (2015) 213replacing the nation in the age of migration with just over half of all south asians in canada residing in toronto (statistics canada 2011). the south asian diaspora is composed of overlapping identities that span societies of origin and settlement. these identities are situated in the city and reveal the extent to which the global is routed through the national. as a “visible minority” group in canada, south asians are equated with the success and failures of multiculturalism and national integration. for societies of origin, the south asian diaspora’s transnational activity resists or enhances the post-colonial nationalisms of south asia. for instance, the call for the homeland of tamil eelam championed by many sri lankan tamils is violently resisted by the sri lankan state, while much of the indian diaspora, once a marginal and at times threatening figure for the post-colonial state, is today reconnected to the homeland through the figure of the “global indian” (dickinson & bailey 2007; varadarajan 2010). toronto is today a central node in this dispersed and intricate diaspora that spans over one hundred countries (maharaj 2003). moreover, toronto’s south asians encompass the various typologies of diaspora that include refugees, labour, and trade (cohen 1997). the complexities that constitute the south asian diaspora in toronto, therefore, enable an interrogation of the fraught status of the nation in its everyday manifestations in the city. the intersection of multiple national ideologies that shape the politics of the south asian diaspora in toronto prompt the need for an analysis attuned to the processes of cohesion and division produced by the multiple intersections of nationalism. i argue that the national contains a dual role in shaping the politics of belonging of the south asian diaspora. on the one hand, the national reinforces geopolitical divides when nationalism is directed towards incorporation in the host society. on the other, the national is remade through south asian cross-national solidarities in the diaspora. the focus on the south asian diaspora more broadly exposes the moments of harmonious as well as dissonant articulations of belonging to multiple communities that frame diasporic identities and political projects. following baumann’s (1996) deconstruction of the perceived isomorphism between community and culture, my fieldwork focused on the overlapping claims of belonging and affiliations that stretched across the bounded notions of community. rather than confining my research to the study of a particular national or regional group that would advance a hermetically sealed conception of culture, i have placed difference at the centre of my study. the narratives that frame this article represent a subset of a total of 55 in-depth, individual, and focus group interviews conducted in toronto from 2007 to 2009 that focused on the complexities of diasporic identity in the city. participants were affiliated with multiple nations including india, sri lanka, tamil eelam, pakistan, bangladesh, nepal, afghanistan, as well as “twice migrants” (bhachu 1985) and the descendants of indentured and kangani labourers that have made their way to canada from other sites in the south asian diaspora. as i discovered during fieldwork, more significant than locating national or regional primary identities was to trace the various transnational routes and cross-national affiliations engendered through migrancy. this strategy allows for both the uniqueness and shared patterns of migration experiences to be highlighted. i also sought to examine the multigenerational aspect of south asian diasporic identity formation by interviewing recent migrants, those that migrated decades ago with the liberalization of canada’s immigration policies in the mid-1960s, to the 1.5 generation and those born in canada. respondents active in the representation of diaspora, such as settlement workers, activists, students, artists, were identified through my participant-observation in a number of south asian events in the city that included multicultural celebrations, protests, town hall meetings, plays, and concerts. from there, i relied on snowball sampling for additional contacts. equally important, however, were the participants that came to centrally shape my research through the prosaic encounters in the city that yielded brief conversations and follow up interviews. the serendipitous encounters and everyday experiences made possible by long-term ethnographic fieldwork enabled me to move beyond stakeholder interviews and to place the diversity and difference of toronto’s south asian communities at the centre of my research. the insistence on the diversity of respondents was by design, for the questioning of the nation is best achieved by looking beyond the categories that are purported to represent and contain the practices and agency of people. although this essay analyses the ambivalence of multiple nations in shaping diasporic experiences, it disrupts the embedded epistemological framework of “methodological nationalism” in the social sciences (wimmer & schiller 2002) that reify the national 214 fennia 193: 2 (2015)ishan ashutosh by viewing it as a priori and natural container for society. so long as the nation is assessed as a cohesive entity that envelops all social phenomena, scholars are bound to write nationalistic narratives, a point made abundantly clear in the title of prasenjit duara’s (1995) rescuing history from the nation. methodological nationalism has occluded from analysis both an adequate explanation for the reproduction of nationalism and the new affiliations that have emerged in diaspora. in the sections that follow, i investigate the nexus and disarticulations between the nation, state, and migration in the formation of the identities, borders, and solidarities of the south asian diaspora. i begin by engaging with how the concept of the nation has been scrutinized in scholarship on transnational migration and diaspora. i then turn to the ways in which national inclusions/exclusions are created in the south asian diaspora through discourses of integration that are informed by a transnational conception of belonging. the final section engages with political actions in toronto and new york city to illuminate a progressive and inclusive form of cross-national solidarities that, in turn, remake the nation across distinct national contexts. diasporic gatherings and the national imaginary the duality of the nation-migration dialectic most expressly reveals tom nairn’s (1975) characterization of the national as “janus faced”. from one perspective, nationalism is filled with the potential to be “a morally and politically positive force” (nairn 1975: 5) as evinced by anti-colonial nationalisms and contemporary social movements. as a progressive force, appeals to the national fight against the confines of the existing limits of membership as witnessed in the 2006 immigration reform protests in the united states (butler & spivak 2007). from the other perspective, the nation divides, excludes, and kills with a ferocity that led benedict anderson (1991) to conjure death as the more likely realization of the nation. given that diaspora politics embody this dual character of the nation, our task remains on the very terrain laid out by nairn that demands a confrontation with both aspects of nationalism. since the national has not succumbed to globalization and transnational connectivity as provocatively claimed in the final decade of the twentieth century, we now must place at the centre of our analysis the intersection of multiple nationalisms and the competing pressures of integration that span multiple nation-states. the frequent pairing of the terms diaspora and transnationalism stems from scholarship that critically examined the limits of the nation and the emergence of new forms of political, social, and economic connectivity (rouse 1991; gilroy 1993; appadurai 1996; sassen 1996). membership, belonging, and citizenship were extended through supranational entities (soysal 1994) and in the context of post-colonial nation-states as the regimes of differentiated rights (ong 1999). nevertheless, there is a tacit tension between diaspora as a formation through spatial dispersal outside the homeland and transnationalism as a new unity and connection between societies of origin and settlement (tololyan 1991; clifford 1994). unlike transnationalism in which the migrant is reincorporated into the nation, the multi-dimensional relation between the nation and diaspora includes the desire and impossibility of return, projects and actions towards transforming the homeland to a nation-state, and the reproduction of the homeland outside its origins. the diasporic reimagining of the nation has been well captured by salman rushdie’s (1991) argument that the diasporean desire to reclaim is bound to transform national fictions and myths. rushdie’s emphasis on the activity and agency in reimagining the politics of belonging instigated homi bhabha (1994: 170) to write “it is to the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation”. this essay places such sentiments under critical scrutiny by examining the representation of migrants and articulations of belonging by south asian migrants in the city, the stage upon which for bhabha (1994: 170) the “emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out”. across toronto’s neighborhoods, in the spectacular and banal experiences of migrants, the national is reproduced, contested, and remade. in the very act of movement beyond the territory of the nation-state, international migration exposes the limits of national imaginaries, and entails a reconstitution and reworking of identities (waltonroberts & pratt 2005). yet, desires for return and demands for incorporation that encompass both sending and receiving societies place migrants as objects central to the delineation of the contours of the nation. in the context of receiving society, the south asian diaspora serve as objects for narratives fennia 193: 2 (2015) 215replacing the nation in the age of migration of the just, equal, and inclusive nation. for sending societies, diasporic long-distance nationalisms that operate beyond national territory are evaluated as both an incorporative strategy that span sending and receiving societies (schiller & fouron 2001) or as a “politics without responsibility or accountability” (anderson 1992: 11). diasporic nationalisms challenge the post-colonial state’s exclusions, while eliciting a cohesive diasporic identity and form of belonging, as with sri lankan tamils (fuglerud 1999). in other cases, long-distance nationalism acts in collusion with the post-colonial state, as seen in the indian government’s establishment of new citizenship regimes and institutions aimed at reincorporating the elite segments of its diaspora (varadarajan 2010). despite the rise of diasporean and transnational discourses that illuminated the multi-stranded economic, political, and social connections operating across national territories, the national continued to shape notions of belonging through its de-territorialization beyond state territory, and reterritorialization in the diasporic context (basch et al. 1994). the relation between the nation and migration has been characterized as ‘ambiguous’ (van der veer 1995) and ‘ambivalent,’ which led to the examinations of new hybrid social identities and national re-imaginings. paul gilroy’s (1993: 2) provocations to imagine beyond the nation repositions hermetically sealed understanding of community with the “more difficult option” of the transverse dynamics of community and identity that, akin to bhabha (1994), lend themselves to “creolization, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity”. yet hybridity as reflective of diasporic identity (bhabha 1994) is all too often removed from the everyday realities and regimenting forces of the nation-state and capital, which, as we will see in the following section, suggests that diaspora is not a ready source of progressive politics (mitchell 1997). moreover, hybridity potentially elides the ways that diaspora identity coheres with consumerist multiculturalism in which ethnicity is promoted as a tradable commodity (walton-roberts 2011). claire dwyer (2002) makes an important contribution by providing a situated and grounded analysis of the hybrid identities of british muslim women who reconstruct the contours of the national by refusing to ‘fix’ their identities in place. on the other hand, sean carter (2005) has examined the contexts in which diaspora reproduces the essentialized notions of community along ethnic and national lines. these competing views on the national in relation to migration and diaspora reveal a number of salient features of the fraught relations between the nation, state, and migration. at its most fundamental, extant scholarship has shown that the national form and constructions of community are activated through multiple movements, be it across spaces, domains, state inclusions/exclusions, and the subject/object positions of national narratives. to put it another way, the national emerges through various mobilities that enable an analysis of the multiple and conflicted spaces and scales of nationalism. the following sections provide a situated analysis of the tension of diaspora between the reproduction of the national and the moments of cross-national solidarities that reconfigure the national. in the next section, such understandings of multiple identities are formulated through appeals to culture and the state that rest on the violent exclusion of others that shape one virulent aspect of the contemporary nation in relation to migration. bordering the national in urban space this section is framed around the spatialization of south asian national divides that are reconstituted in the diaspora through the intersection of multicultural and transnational politics. canadian nationalism in the form of multiculturalism establishes the hierarchies of incorporation that perpetuate the antagonisms not only between racialized immigrants and settler descendent canadians, but also amongst toronto’s south asians. the re-bordering of the nation in the south asian diaspora is not merely the outcome of post-colonial nationalisms that have traveled with diaspora. rather, they point to the intersection of multiple nationalisms that enable elite migrants and diasporic subjects to affirm their incorporation and belonging to canada. although it has been noted that multiculturalism as a promotion of integration can generate antagonisms and suspicion due to competition over government funds (buchignani 1980), in the banal reproduction of geopolitical divides the state and the discrimination of the host society are frequently absolved. the findings in this essay parallel sarah mahler’s (1995: 3) research on salvadorian migrants in long island who resent one another while “exonerating the greater society” as an outcome of the imperatives of incorporation. at times, immigrant integration relies on the enactment of what bonnie honig (2001: 96) has 216 fennia 193: 2 (2015)ishan ashutosh called, the “supercitizen immigrant”. this typology of the immigrant refers to the ways in which migrants embody the national through the promotion of the ethical values associated with the nation, particularly lockean liberalism and a protestant work ethic that reinvigorates a consensual democracy. the immigrant as supercitizen has been a characteristic discursive component in south asian representation in the united states and canada since the mid-1960s. the success of this stereotype casts asians as model minorities to be used against other racialized groups (prashad 2000; thobani 2007). in a 1992 article proclaiming toronto’s cosmopolitanism, journalist haroon siddiqui extoled this super-citizen vision of south asians in canada. “south asians believe that education is the key to success. it is an ethos that lives in just about every home. at night, when most other toronto kids are playing the yard, these kids are sitting at the kitchen table doing their math or practicing on the piano. they do this because they are not spoiled. they have a value system that puts great emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge and of excellence”. (toronto star 1992) as will be discussed below, there are contradictory elements embedded within such model minority discourses, particularly in diasporic forms of belonging that brian keith axel (2001) has perceptively shown shift between a national threat and opportunity. multicultural national belonging is predicated on claims for recognition and representation made by different groups in which, in theory, multiple national affiliations can overlap. indeed, philosopher charles taylor (1994: 63) argued that multiculturalism is the inevitable future of the national as societies become increasingly ‘porous’ and inhabited by members who “live the life of diaspora, whose center is elsewhere”. will kymlicka (1995), however, suggested that multiculturalism can be used as an integrative ethic and distinguished the claims of national minorities, such as the quebecois, and those of immigrant groups. while the claims of the former may lead to calls for a parallel society, the latter wish to retain their “ethnic particularity” in voluntary organizations and in their family lives. immigrant demands for recognition, therefore, do not run counter to national citizenship and indeed, act as the basis for inclusion. but how do the calls for recognition as the basis for inclusion elicit new rigidities along national lines that are more pronounced and enforced in the diaspora rather than ‘elsewhere’? in the daily lives of south asian diasporic subjects, the national becomes the critical dividing line amongst south asians in toronto and generates a new animus in which some immigrants are convivially placed in relation to the nation at the expense of others. multiple national allegiances and how they can be used as symbolic capital towards integration become the basis for differentiating between the socalled ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants. state border crossings symbolize both the traditional borders of the nation-state and the other scales at which borders operate, generating north america’s version of what etienne balibar (2004: 1), writing in the context of the european union, has described as new borders, dispersed “a little everywhere”. for an on duty canadian border service agent at lewiston, new york and queenston, ontario, toronto’s ethno-cultural mosaic as enshrined in the city’s official motto “diversity: our strength” was composed instead of the rescaling of national divides to urban space. while i was being questioned about my research during one of my many crossings while conducting fieldwork, the border official listed a number of immigrant groups living in toronto: “the chinese, italians, pakistanis, indians, portuguese, and somalis”. in a foreboding tone, the guard then ended his assessment of toronto’s borders with, “it’s like beirut!”. this view renders the greater toronto area (gta) as composed of antagonistic tribalisms clearly demarcated in city space. the guard’s view of the gta as the locus of unknown threats emanating from immigrant neighborhoods recalls the tropes of balkanization in which suspicion, violence, and segregation are presented as the likely future of the nation (ellis and wright 1998). while canada is often celebrated for what cole harris (2001) has called postmodern patriotism in which canadian nationalism is predicated on difference between at least the english, french and first nations people, it has also been shown that this discourse of canada’s lack of nationness in fact occludes domination and oppression through multiculturalism (teelucksingh 2006). positioning the suburbs as antagonistic spaces that portend the city’s future have also constituted a key strategy in the city’s electoral politics that depict toronto’s immigrant neighborhoods as multicultural testing grounds, as spaces that contain the objects to be incorporated. the city is at once an exceptional and an exemplary site in relation to the nation. toronto is distinct in terms of its racial diversity and foreign-born population, but fennia 193: 2 (2015) 217replacing the nation in the age of migration also the city is the exemplary site for canadian nationalism in the form of multiculturalism. in the narratives below, the nation serves as a central form of belonging, but also creates divides in the form of interand intra-group hostilities amongst south asians. diasporic subjects that are able to convert both symbolic and financial capital in canada use multiple national allegiances to exclude south asians in the name of their own incorporation in canada. as a result, national distinctions amongst south asians in toronto are the outcome of the forces and desire for canadian integration as much as a desire to cling to the increasingly distant homeland. for the first few months after migrating to toronto in the summer of 2000, viresh felt that “there was something very strange about this place”. on a casual late-morning walk down gerrard street later that fall he was reminded of the “old smells and organized chaos of india”. at that moment, viresh’s settlement in toronto was transformed to a feeling of belonging. “it struck me that fine morning when i saw toronto as an indian city with lots of foreigners, non-indians. i had lived in the u.s. for six years, but in toronto i never felt homesick”. toronto’s familiarity owed itself more to gerrard street, whose few blocks of gerrard “india bazaar” have since given way to expansive south asian businesses in the suburbs. viresh’s previous migrations before moving to toronto, to london and then dearborn, michigan, were accompanied by a search for home, but in toronto, viresh claims, he has found home, in no small part because of the way in which the familiar and banal signs of the nation were reproduced. viresh gestured at a real estate advertisement with south asian agents that monopolize mississauga, brampton and scarborough. for elite indian immigrants it is no longer about location, but as viresh explains “is now about size. people are settling further and further away from the city”, beyond peel and to the halton region in the west and pickering in the east. these migration trends reflect what robert murdie (2008: 9) has described as an overall pattern of immigrant settlement that has moved from the city’s downtown to the suburbs, encompassing both lower income immigrant newcomers and indian and chinese migrants who “generally can afford homeownership in toronto’s newer suburbs”. immigrant settlements in toronto’s suburbs have transformed these once hinterlands of toronto to what mohammad qadeer (2003: 11) has characterized as toronto’s ethnoburbs, spawned by immigration policies and “tied together by bonds of national origin, culture, language, and religion”. within the municipality of toronto, the neighborhoods of south asian settlement lie on the fringes of the downtown core in the post-world war ii suburbs while the edge cities brampton, mississauga, and markham are home to the majority of the gta’s south asian population (hiebert 2005; siemiatycki 2012). the longitudinal studies of ethnic enclaves in metropolitan toronto have found south asian ethnic enclave concentrations primarily in the eastern neighborhood of scarborough and in the west that today link previously isolated enclaves from rexdale to brampton (qadeer et al. 2010). among those born in south asia, those born in india constitute over fifty percent of all south asians in toronto, followed by twenty percent for those born in pakistan and sri lanka, with five percent born in bangladesh (statistics canada 2011). hiebert (2005) finds that in the three metropolitan areas of montreal, toronto, and vancouver, south asians display high levels of residential concentration compared to the average concentration patterns for visible minority groups. according to myles and hou (2004), spatial concentration may only be temporary, as south asians follow models of spatial assimilation in which they initially move into an immigrant enclave and then move out of those neighborhoods as they socially and economically integrate. although most south asians reside in the gta’s middle-class suburbs, eric fong (2006: 63) notes that they tend to live in the economically deprived areas within these sites. across these locales, south asian settlement is differentiated along the intersections of nation, language, and religion. the all too popular mapping of the city’s ‘ethnoburbs’ (li 2009) from brampton’s ‘singhdale’ (springdale) to scarborough as ‘scarlanka’ name the social difference and distance of south asian neighborhoods from canadian norms. immigrant neighborhoods are represented as the litmus for national integration and constitute the multicultural version of what timothy mitchell (1988: 13) has described as “the world as exhibition” in which the world is “conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition”. to treat the world as exhibition means that social difference is reduced into an objectified spectacle. contemporary cities are frequently depicted through their containing the world within its borders and are, therefore, reflective of the world as exhibition. 218 fennia 193: 2 (2015)ishan ashutosh from this perspective, the city is not depicted as the site of new collectivities that challenge the exclusions of the nation. rather the city is carved into neighborhoods and communities along national lines that are in turn hierarchically placed in relation to national incorporations. writing in the aftermath of the 1992 yonge street riot, bhausaheb ubale, the first race relations commissioner of ontario and author of a 1977 report that documented racism against south asians in toronto, decried precisely this exoticism of multiculturalism in practice. ubale (1992: 220) lamented that “multiculturalism has further divided ethnocultural communities from the mainstream as well as from each other”. canadian nationalism, while often assessed as inclusive of difference (harris 2001), insists on the displays of tolerance that objectify immigrants and minorities as potential challenges. in conflicts over urban space, from the “monster house” controversy in vancouver (ley 2010) to suburban toronto’s “asian theme malls” (preston & lo 2000), immigrants and the spaces where they reside are discursively constructed as foreign objects that constitute a threat to the norms of canadian nationalism. in toronto, national differences are spatialized through representations of neighborhoods of south asian settlement in a pattern akin to kay anderson’s (1995) influential analysis of vancouver’s chinatown. anderson argued that chinatown existed as a spatial form of orientalism based on an irreconcilably different and inferior chineseness and a civilized english canadian national identity. the media coverage of south asians in toronto has repeatedly depicted migrants as trapped by tradition and whose transnational ties to the homeland imperil national cohesion. these threats emerge from the suburbs that threaten the metropolitan center. john barber and tenille bonoguore of the globe and mail encapsulated this view of the migrant as an object for integration in a 2007 op-ed: “as the 2006 census data showed this week, toronto is a multitude of mini-states where the word ‘minority’ will one day have no meaning. as the suburbs of paris blaze and londonistan spreads fear across the globe, will toronto start seeing a budding terrorist threat in every immigrant?... no, our centre of tolerance will hold”. (barber & bonoguore 2007: m1) this statement advances the notions of canadian tolerance as being a binding force that brings people together, indeed, even transforming the supposed “budding terrorist threat”. other examples from popular media execrate south asians as threats to the nation. the 2007 murder of mississauga teenager aqsa parvez was transformed into debates over “honour killings” and the failures of multicultural integration (haque 2010). the references to honor killings that emerged in the wake of parvez’s murder in particular resuscitated debates over using sharia for family arbitration disputes (razack 2007), and the 2006 arrest of the “toronto 18”, in which the dominant media led the outcry over the perceived radicalization of muslims in canada (miller & sack 2010). another representation that portrays south asians for their multiple allegiances has been on the support and presence of the liberation tigers of tamil eelam in toronto (human rights watch 2006). in the range of these examples of what becomes clear is that south asians are frequently depicted and tested through the notions of loyalty and canadian norms with reference to the projections of social disintegration and national fragmentation that position the immigrant against the nation (ellis & wright 1998). national incorporations and divides in many interviews with south asians in toronto, multiculturalism would often be positively evaluated for providing a sense of belonging and in reference to the ethno-cultural diversity of toronto. yet elite south asians frequently saw both immigration and multicultural policies in terms of the fracturing of society and undermining the authority of the state in what has been described as the “multicultural backlash” (joppke 2004; vertovec & wessendorf 2010). in the desire to distinguish themselves from immigrants who have been depicted for their inability to integrate as discussed in the previous section, the new divides of nation and religion intersected with class to produce new antagonisms amongst toronto’s south asians. popular nationalistic discourses shape the contours of belonging that reveal the ways in which the nation integrates and divides people in everyday life (edensor 2002). swati, an engineer who lives and works in a western suburb of toronto argued that her indian heritage enabled her to belong to canada. after her parents migrated from gujarat in 1974, swati grew up in oakville, ontario and extoled the benefits of multiculturalism through references to a particular kind of diversity fennia 193: 2 (2015) 219replacing the nation in the age of migration associated with the rise of mandirs in the gta suburbs, the one closest to her own home also the site where her 10-year-old son had enrolled in gujarati classes. this transformation of urban space provides a sense of belonging for swati and her family that is simultaneously indian and canadian. echoing popular discourse, however, swati feels that multiculturalism now threatens to undermine the national community by a naïve promotion of heritage that in fact produces division. swati refers to the adjacent former municipality of scarborough as a space that has led to ghettos that, she stressed, are “far worse than in the united states”. despite the number of studies have shown that levels of segregation in canada are lower than those in the united states (ley & smith 1997; white et al. 2003), swati was hardly alone in making this statement. such positions reflect the intersection of nation, religion, and class that divide in the south asians as they seek to distinguish themselves in order to incorporate and embody the ideals of the multicultural nation. particularly in the suburbs of toronto, elite members of the indian diaspora would invoke discourses of islamophobia that shape contemporary canadian and american nationalisms. statements that ranged from the fears of growing radicalization or “home grown” terrorism, however, were informed by nationalistic discourses that also operate in india and therefore, reveal a correspondence of otherwise autochthonous nationalisms that encompassed multiple nation-states and with it, multiple sites of belonging predicated on exclusions (grewal 2005). national divides, and the accompanying categories of race, religion, and language, are not merely transplanted from societies of origin and settlement, but are utilized in order to make claims towards incorporation. the national, to put it another way, mediates how transnational affiliations are translated into multicultural incorporations. a settlement worker living and working in brampton, who grew up in amritsar and migrated to toronto from dubai echoed a remark by canadian prime minister mackenzie king from over sixty years earlier that was used to exclude indian migrations, in which immigration to canada should not alter the national ‘character’. such sentiments need to be placed within the context of the termination of federal government funding for many immigrant settlement services in the gta, prompting the closure of the south asian women’s centre in 2011. the burden of belonging is in the hands of the migrant and should not guide state policies and programs, she felt. in such statements about multiculturalism, immigrant success depends on where they place themselves vis-à-vis other immigrants. the settlement worker’s remarks resonate with sharmila rudrappa’s (2004) findings on chicago’s indo-american center, a settlement agency which promotes immigrant incorporation that reinforces divides between immigrants and americans. moreover, as rudrappa claims, if “ethnic roots allow us to become american” (rudrappa 2004: 146), the critiques of ethnic concentration and difference aid in the integration of select ‘others’ into the norms of canadian society (thobani 2007). incorporation and national belonging is performed through the repetition of claims that express not only adherence to multiculturalism, but rather, a concern for the future of the national community. gopal grew up in toronto and supplies audio and video equipment for indian events. similar to swati’s assessment of immigrants and the imperatives of the state, gopal argues that immigrant segregation occurs throughout the city and in particular in the city’s inner and outer suburbs that are symbols of ethno-cultural diversity: “i am not a big proponent of multiculturalism anymore… because it fosters an exclusive mentality. in trying to preserve different systems, we are inevitably fostering segregated communities. some of these indian centers, in parts of brampton, people don’t speak english. i am not talking about the elderly, i am talking about the young! that is unacceptable. we are not contributing to the country as a whole when we do that. at the same time, we demand more resources and rights to protect these cultures. it doesn’t make any sense. you are coming into a new country; you are supposed to integrate into the system”. (personal interview with author) gopal evaluates multiculturalism as a practice of preservation and not, as kymlicka (1995) argued, as a means to integration. the immigrant second generation is made to represent the future of multiculturalism and the anxieties of fading connections to the diasporic elsewhere. as the baseball fields in toronto’s parks are repurposed as cricket pitches, the immigrant second generation are evaluated in terms of what one respondent who migrated from punjab as a child sarcastically called “molson canadian” norms of national identity. like the commercials that depict a hockey-loving, beer-guzzling white canadian, these norms of national identity fix the 220 fennia 193: 2 (2015)ishan ashutosh nation-space of canada to a settler society and constitute the grounds of participation and belonging. in a 2007 globe and mail article, marina jimenez placed the suburbs and the immigrant second generation through the prism of angloconformity. “multiculturalism isn’t working that well for visible minorities. [. . .] they are less likely to identify as ‘canadian’ and report more incidents of discrimination. lovedeep padda, who works with his father in the indian punjabi bazaar at brampton’s plaza mclaughlin village, says he never experienced discrimination for the simple reason that he has grown up surrounded almost exclusively by other sikh canadians. the canadianborn son of sikh immigrants, he has also never been to summer camp, taken in a blue jays or maple leafs game or a rock concert”. (jimenez 2007: a8). the hegemonic constructions of integration are predicated on the ability of immigrants and their children to “converge to the average performance of native-born canadians and their normative and behavioural standards” (li 2003: 315). as amita handa (2003) has shown, the canadian-born children of south asian immigrants are cast as symbols of tradition and modernity, and inhabit a liminal space between two seemingly irreconcilable cultures. popular slang used across national contexts – the abcd or american-born confused desi, replaced by the ‘coconut’ in canada and britain – typecast the diasporic experience of the “immigrant second generation” through conflicted racial identities and national loyalties. sunaina maira (2002) has argued that the anxieties and ambivalences of belonging by the immigrant first generation are transferred onto their children who then ‘remix’ culture in the quintessential position of diaspora, third space. while i turn to the ways in which the depictions of confusion and loss have been actively resisted by the second generation by placing new claims and demands on the national in the next section, opinions that stressed the failures of integration and of multicultural segregation were repeatedly expressed. rajiv expressed a hostility and antagonism among “south asians”. he contrasted his politics of belonging with what he described as his parents’ “essentialist need” to associate with indians. he noted that though his parents are not religious, they began religiously attending temple events to meet with friends. by contrast, in rajiv’s experience, association with other south asians gave way to hostility as recognition served as a reminder of difference and the distance from incorporation. “there is a common anti-brown thing that would happen. if i was walking down the street and i saw another south asian guy across the road and i would be with my group of friends who would be predominantly chinese, or white, and he would be with his friends. we would look at each other across the street as dogs look at each other”. (personal interview with author). the state or gaze that rajiv described speaks to an antagonism that is borne out of the politics of incorporation. the narratives above do not necessarily eschew a commitment to multiculturalism, but as mary thomas (2011) has shown in her analysis of interethnic and cross-racial interactions in a los angeles high school, they instead reflect a banal multiculturalism that touts a simplistic respect for the difference blocks meaningful engagement and working with difference. david ley (2007: 14) has argued that discourses that critique multiculturalism are often the result of imputed meanings of multiculturalism, rather than recognition of its diverse practices and aims over almost forty years as canadian national discourse. in particular, in the tenuous links made between segregation and multiculturalism, ley contends, “multiculturalism is inflated to a size where it becomes the only target that is visible”. the veracity of their claims regarding the levels of segregation in canada is not the issue. with each repetition, such statements cannot be readily dismissed. the creation and enforcement of geopolitical divisions block the formation of south asian solidarities that have the potential to reimagine the contours of belonging within, across, and beyond the national. long-distance nationalism, advanced by select diasporic subjects adhere to the scripts of national incorporation that foment new divisions in the diaspora. during interviews and conversations i conducted, desires to transform and alter the national instead more frequently expressed a desire for its preservation, and in which the role of the migrant and the diasporic is to act as national gatekeepers using their cultural capital and experiences gathered through their unique mobility and transnational ties. their role was one of instructing the nation when its imaginings for inclusivity threaten to undermine the notion of community. the narratives above reflect an internalization of fennia 193: 2 (2015) 221replacing the nation in the age of migration the exclusions of nationalism. the distinctions made by diasporic subjects in relation to national belonging and the norms of integration are an articulation of the fact that whiteness provides the “point of departure for multiculture” (bannerji 2000: 110). immigrants are assessed in terms of their contributions and liabilities, always having to prove their worth to the nation (dunn & mahtani 2001). the battle lines of multiculturalism are drawn around the immigrant neighbourhoods that in popular discourse separate national communities and the central national community from each other. though the narratives above are filled with factual inaccuracies, and (trans-)nationalistic elitism, they reflect a geo-political discourse that revolves around the constructions of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ in which immigrants position themselves against other immigrants in the name of incorporation. such processes expose how the national interpellates migrants as national subjects. replacing the nation with cross national solidarities in contrast to the attitudes expressed above, multiculturalism and national belonging were imagined in more productive, inclusive, and creative ways with other participants. multiculturalism and the national remained a powerful idea in describing people’s everyday lives and interactions in toronto. though canada’s national narrative, multiculturalism was taken down other paths and linked to other national histories and experiences that echo yasmeen abu-laban’s (2002) emphasis on the deessentialization of multiculturalism that neither fixes the nation or cultural identities. from this perspective, the national enables the interaction and engagement in new social and political movements and diasporic identities. in this section, i provide a tracing of south asian solidarities and diasporic identities through the mundane interactions that take place in across city spaces consisting of business districts, school, and residential neighbourhoods. in these everyday encounters the dissonant utterances of national membership and belonging provide the terrains for new imaginaries that deploy the language of the national community, but in which the boundaries of national membership are transgressed and reconstituted. the very neighbourhoods and business districts, which are represented as the litmus tests for multiculturalism, also reflect a diversity of the south asian diaspora whose history and complex patterns of migration, settlement, and interaction have only recently become the subject of scholarly attention (bald 2013). in the discussion on south asian cross-national solidarities, i turn to practices in toronto and new york city. by engaging with these two cities i suggest that transformations of the national and the formation of new diasporic identities have been occurring across national contexts. second generation south asians have generated diasporic collectivities that stressed the multiple and shifting identities that moved across nations and thereby further pluralized the content of the national community (das gupta 1997). south asian cultural and art festivals, such as toronto’s now defunct desh pardesh (home away from home), new york’s diasporadics and transnational festivals such as engendered, and regular bollywood and bhangra themed dance events overtly espouse a plural and heterogeneous understanding of community. these renderings simultaneously locate south asians within the histories of migration and diversity in the united states and canada as well as a critical placement of south asia as a region and identity (mani 2012). the expression of south asian identities and solidarities found their initial articulations in the anti-racist work in the late-1970s. today, these solidarities are expressed through organizations such as the council of agencies serving south asians, though relegating the cross-national emergence of diasporic identities to organizations obfuscates the everyday projects that transform the history of the nation. for instance, the resuscitation of histories of the 1914 journey of the komagata maru, the ship carrying over 300 passengers from india that was barred from docking at vancouver’s port, has become an important lineage for the contemporary relation between the south asian diaspora and canada, but as a means for creating new solidarities, as made clear in the website for the brown canada project. “as we reflect and remember, we must resist the urge to only look back in sorrow. marginalized communities, including south asian communities, have resisted and mobilized in astounding and inspiring ways. they did so in 1914, they continue to do so”. (brown canada) such discourses and practices do not merely undo the national, but rather seek to illuminate the lineages of contemporary experiences of belong222 fennia 193: 2 (2015)ishan ashutosh ing, exclusion, and the occluded circuits of previous waves of transnational solidarities. in the aftermath of 11 september, longstanding forms of immigrant, racial, and ethnic exclusion became the contours of nationalism in both the united states and canada. for their prominent differences in nationalistic discourses that have been traditionally and popularly located in the distinctions between an official multicultural nationalism of canada and an assimilationist united states, the parallels, both before and after-september 11th were often in lockstep. south asian immigrants became the targets of anti-immigrant discourse that became the grounds of national cohesion. post9/11 exclusions in the united states and canada were not unique. indeed, its lineages could be found in the previous waves of anti-immigrant discourse and state policies that go back to the very founding of the united states, such as the alien and sedition acts of 1798 that allowed for the deportation and imprisonment of aliens, to the “hindu menace” and continuous journey stipulation of the early 20th centuries. anti-asian racism in both the united states and canada led to the exclusion of asian migrations through unique policies that employed the geographical mappings of race and national origins to exclude the migration of asians that would not be reversed until the liberalization of immigration policies in both countries in the mid-1960s. the work of south asian community activist groups in new york city, chicago, toronto, and other major population centres across north america placed their contemporary struggles and exclusions within the context of this until then marginalized history and as a result, transformed not only the imaginings of the nation, but shed light on the exclusionary policies of the state as well. furthermore, the aftermath of 11 september projected the securitized immigration regime that had become a cornerstone of american immigration policy particularly since operation gatekeeper in 1994 onto south asians and arabs. post-9/11 nationalism most clearly highlighted the ease in which the violence that shifts immigrants from that of exalted status to a threatening outsider is predicated on an originary otherness in the first instance. as news of deportations, detention, and the special registration of non-immigrant visa holders from select countries swept across cities in the united states and canada, new forms of political identity that negotiated the differences and diversity of south asian identities emerged (ashutosh 2008). writing in the aftermath of september 11th, jasbir puar and amit rai (2004: 87) searched for new ways of understanding transnational solidarities and social movements across racialized groups when they asked: “how do we make sense of these moments of a solidarity blocked or, better, a solidarity haunted, inhabited, exceeded by non-synthesizable singularities?”. embedded within this question is the importance of recognizing the contingencies of cross-class and cross-cultural solidarities that, as has been shown, have emerged in a transnational field and therefore, challenged national exclusions and essentialized notions of identity and community in both ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies. prior to september 11th, a number of organizations in both new york city and toronto combated racism, gender and sexual violence, and immigrant exclusions through cross-national coalitions. in toronto, the association for south asian aids prevention was formed in 1989 through the activities of the queer south asian organization, khush. a decade later, the south asian legal clinic was established to provide legal services to low income south asians in toronto. similar coalitions that adopted a diasporic optic of cross-national solidarities also emerged in new york, with the new york taxi workers alliance that built a coalition across national, religious, racial, and linguistic divides that was powerfully expressed during the may 1998 strike initiated by taxi drivers against the severe measures initiated by the new york taxi and limousine commission (mathew 2005). south asian labor, queer, and women organizations also drew their strength by negotiating national differences in what monisha das gupta (2006) has termed “the transnational complex of rights” in which rights claims struggle with the exclusionary policies of the state and limits of membership of the nation. in toronto, south asian community organizing in the 1970s responded to racism that led to the development of anti-racist organizations that work alongside and with difference. activist and researcher uzma shakir (2011: 185) called for open and broad conversations amongst canada’s diverse ethno-racial communities. it is the process of working and building new communities that shakir described as “the most enlightening elements of my experience in canada: building a sense of solidarity with people i might not have met or worked with otherwise. that is the most wonderful and unexpected benefit of being in canada”. in the creation of cross-national organizations, inclusive political solidarities challenge the national divides that dominated the narratives in the previous fennia 193: 2 (2015) 223replacing the nation in the age of migration sections. these institutions disrupt the agonistic relations within south asian communities and across ethnic and racial groups in which the nation and its constitutive elements of race and religion continue to provide the national as a site of division and exclusion, as discussed in the previous section. the political actions and solidarities of the south asian diasporas in the united states and canada remain the most successful when they appeal to national membership and affiliation. it would be a mistake, however, to readily equate the placement of the national in immigrant politics and even independence day parades or cultural festivals as nationalist. as sandhya shukla has shown in her analysis of indian festivals in london and new york city, nationalism “is not the primary consequence of complex forms of identification” (shukla 2003: 13). instead, these moments are the very grounds for a questioning, interrogation, and reconstitution of the national. for instance, protests led by the sri lankan tamil community in toronto against the civil war in sri lanka made claims for the national recognition of tamil eelam, but also grounded these claims through appeals to multiculturalism and the canadian charter of rights and freedoms. these protests, which included participation beyond that of one national group, also criticized the limits of contemporary national membership and state exclusions. the protests, moreover, attempted to disentangle national recognition and community from the violence of the state and are an instance in which new understandings and a re-signification of the national becomes possible. conclusions the nation continues to play a vexed and contradictory role in shaping migrant processes, and immigrants occupy a paradoxical status in relation to the nation. as the objects of the nation, they ensure national unity and the grounds of belonging as a contrasting figure. diasporic appeals to the nation are responsible for incorporations that raise increasingly insuperable barriers amongst migrants and racialized minorities and between select immigrants and natives. however, the national is transformed from within through political practices that seek to forge new collectives in which the national may be a transitory basis of community and interaction on the way towards a critical cross-national and cross-class solidarity. i focused on how national membership and belonging and its limits are lived and challenged by migrancy. the nation, therefore, divides as it incorporates, and the diverse practices that fall under its name reflect both a consonance and dissonance towards its narratives. more broadly, the analysis provided here asks to what extent should scholarship invest in the national as an analytic for understanding, and indeed re-inscribing, difference? the precise way in which the nation is reimagined remains an open question. it, of course, involves political action. however, it also depends on the development of epistemologies that hinge on a multi-scalar approach to the national. how the global, national, and local are imbricated in the constitution of subjects, and how do these subjects, in turn, make and remake these structures? what is certain, however, is that globalization discourses that once proclaimed the end of the nation-state were premature. the rise of transnational capital and the new international division of labour that structures global migrations have not led to the wholesale withering away from the nation-state. similar to the analyses on the rescaling of the state (brenner 2004), i have, in this paper, called for a reenergized focus on the rescaling and diverse uses of the nation through grounded, empirical work in cities. this renewed emphasis on the national avoids the methodological nationalism by focusing instead on the slippage of categories produced in the ever-shifting grounds of the nation’s people. rather than placing the relation between the national belonging/global migrations as a categorical proposition, this paper has engaged with the myriad of ways in which the nation is reproduced and engenders overlapping forms of belonging. references abu-laban y 2002. liberalism, multiculturalism and the problem of essentialism 1. citizenship studies 6: 4, 459–482. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1362102022000041268. anderson b 1991. imagined communities. verso, london. anderson b 1992. long-distance nationalism. centre for asian studies, amsterdam. anderson k 1995. vancouver’s chinatown: racial discourse in canada, 1875–1980. mcgill-queens, montreal and kingston. appadurai a 1996. modernity at large: the cultural dimensions of globalization. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. 224 fennia 193: 2 (2015)ishan ashutosh ashutosh i 2008. (re-)creating the community: south asian transnationalism on chicago’s devon avenue. urban geography 29: 3, 224–245. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.29.3.224. ashutosh i 2014. from the census to the city: representing south asians in canada and toronto. diaspora 17: 2, 130–148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2014.0001. axel bk 2001. the nation’s tortured body. duke university press, raleigh and durham. bald v 2013. bengali harlem and the lost histories of south asia america. harvard university press, cambridge. balibar e 2004. we, the people of europe: reflections on transnational citizenship. princeton university, princeton and oxford. bannerji h 2000. dark side of the nation: essays on multiculturalism, nationalism and gender. scholars press, toronto. barber j & bonoguore t 2007. where do we go from here? globe and mail, 8 december, p. m1. basch l, schiller ng & blanc cs 1994. nations unbound: transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states. gordon and breach science publishers, amsterdam. baumann g 1996. contesting culture: discourses of identity in multi-ethnic london. cambridge university press, cambridge. bhabha h 1994. the location of culture. routledge, new york. bhachu p 1985. twice migrants: east african sikh settlers in britain. tavistock, london. brenner n 2004. new state spaces. oxford university press, new york. brown canada. komagata maru. <http://km.browncanada.com/komagatamaru.php> 15.10.2014. buchignani n 1980. accommodation, adaptation, and policy: dimensions of the south asian experience in canada. in ujimoto kv & hirabayashi g (eds). visible minorities and multiculturalism: asians in canada, 121–150. butterworths,scarborough, on. butler j & spivak s 2007. who sings the nationstate? language, politics, belonging. seagull books, oxford. carter s 2005. geopolitics of diaspora. area 37: 1, 54–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2005.00601.x. clifford j 1994. diasporas. cultural anthropology 9: 3, 302–338. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00040. cohen r 1997. global diasporas. routledge, london. das gupta m 1997. ‘what is indian about you?’ a gendered, transnational approach to ethnicity. gender and society 11: 5, 576–596. http://doi.org/10.1177/089124397011005004. das gupta m 2006. unruly immigrants. duke university press, durham. dickinson j & bailey a 2007. remembering diaspora: uneven geographies of citizenship. political geography 26: 7, 757–774. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.03.007. dunn k & mahtani m 2001. “adjusting the color bars”: media representations of ethnic minorities under australian and canadian multiculturalisms. working paper series 01-06. research on immigration and integration in the metropolis, the vancouver centre. duara p 1995. rescuing history from the nation. university of chicago press, chicago. dwyer c 2002. where are you from? young british muslim women and the making of ‘home.’ in blunt a & mcewan c (eds). postcolonial geographies, 184–199. continuum, new york. edensor t 2002. national identity, popular culture and everyday life. berg, oxford. ellis m & wright r 1998. the balkanization metaphor in the analysis of us immigration. annals of the association of american geographers 88: 4, 686– 698. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00118. fong e 2006. residential segregation of visible minority groups in toronto. in fong e (ed). inside the mosaic, 51–75. university of toronto press, toronto. fuglerud o 1999. life on the outside: the tamil diaspora and long-distance nationalism. pluto press, london. ghosh s 2013. ‘am i south asian, really?’ constructing south asianness in canada and being south asian in toronto.” south asian diaspora 5:1, 35–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2013.724913. gilroy p 1993. the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. harvard university press, cambridge. grewal i 2005. transnational america. duke university press, durham. haque e 2010. homegrown, muslim and other: tolerance, secularism and the limits of multiculturalism. social identities: journal for the study of race, nation and culture 16:1, 79–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630903465902. handa a 2003. of silk saris and mini skirts: south asian girls walk the tightrope of culture. women’s press, toronto. harris c 2001. postmodern patriotism: canadian reflections. the canadian geographer / le géographe canadien 45: 2, 193–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2001.tb01185.x. hiebert d 2005. migration and the demographic transformation of canadian cities: the social geography of canada’s major metropolitan centres in 2017. working paper series 05-14. research on immigration and integration in the metropolis, the vancouver centre. honig b 2001. democracy and the foreigner. princeton university press, princeton. human rights watch 2006. funding the “final war”: ltte intimidation and extortion in the tamil diaspora. hrw report 18 (1). human rights watch, new york and london. jimenez m 2007. do ethnic enclaves impede integration? globe and mail, 8 february, p. a8. joppke c 2004. the retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state: theory and policy. the british journal of sociology 55: 2, 237–257. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2004.00017.x. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 225replacing the nation in the age of migration kymlicka w 1995. multicultural citizenship. clarendon press, oxford. ley d 2007. multiculturalism: a canadian defence. working paper series 07-04. research on immigration and integration in the metropolis, the vancouver centre. ley d 2010. millionaire migrants: trans-pacific life lines. wiley, malden. ley d & smith ha 1997. immigration and poverty in canadian cities, 1971–1991. canadian journal of regional science 20: 1–2, 29–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0042098002285. li p 2003. deconstructing canada’s discourse of immigrant integration. journal of international migration and integration / revue de l'integration et de la migration international 4: 3, 315–333. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12134-003-1024-0. li w 2009. ethnoburb: the new ethnic community in urban america. university of hawaii press, honolulu. maharaj b 2003. comparative reflections on the indian diaspora: historical and recent perspectives. in varma s & seshan r (eds). fractured identity: the indian diaspora in canada, 48-65. rawat, jaipur. mahler s 1995. american dreaming: immigrant life on the margins. princeton university press, princeton. maira s 2002. desis in the house: indian american youth culture in new york city. temple university press, philadelphia. mani b 2012. aspiring to home: south asians in america. stanford university press, stanford. mathew b 2005. taxi. the new press, new york. miller j & sack c 2010. the toronto 18 terror case; trial by media? how newspaper opinion framed canada’s biggest terrorism case. the international journal of diversity in organisations, communities and nations 10: 1, 279–296. mitchell k 1997. different diasporas and the hype of hybridity. environment and planning d: society and space 15: 5, 533–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d150533. mitchell t 1988. colonizing egypt. university of california press, berkeley and los angeles. murdie ra 2008. diversity and concentration in canadian immigration: trends in toronto, montréal and vancouver, 1971–2006. research bulletin 42. centre for urban and community studies (cities centre),toronto. myles j & hou f 2004. changing colours: spatial assimilation and new racial minority immigrants. the canadian journal of sociology 29: 1, 29–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cjs.2004.0011. nairn t 1975. the modern janus. new left review i/94, 3–29. ong a 1999. flexible citizenship: the cultural logics of transnationality. duke university press, durham and london. prashad v 2000. the karma of brown folk. university of minnesota press, minneapolis, mn. preston v & lo l 2000. “asian theme malls in suburban toronto: land use conflict in richmond hill.” the canadian geographer 44: 2, 86–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2000.tb00701.x. puar j & rai a 2004. the remaking of a model minority: perverse projectiles under the specter of (counter)terrorism. social text 22: 3_80, 75–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-3_80-75. qadeer m 2003. ethnic segregation in a multicultural city: the case of toronto, canada. working paper 28. joint centre of excellence for research on immigration and settlement, toronto. qadeer m, agrawal sk & lovell a 2010. evolution of ethnic enclaves in the metropolitan toronto area, 2001–2006. international migration and integration 11: 3, 315–339. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12134-010-0142-8. razack s 2007. the ‘sharia law debate’ in ontario: the modernity/premodernity distinction in legal efforts to protect women from culture. feminist legal studies 15: 1, 3–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10691-006-9050-x. rouse r 1991. mexican migration and the social space of postmodernism. diaspora 1: 1, 8–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dsp.1991.0011. rudrappa s 2004. ethnic routes to becoming american: indian immigrants and the culture of citizenship. rutgers university press, new brunswick. rushdie s 1991. imaginary homelands: essays and criticism 1981–1991. penguin books, london. sassen s 1996. losing control? sovereignty in an age of globalization. columbia university press, new york. shakir u 2011. the colour of poverty. in chazan m, helps l, stanley a & thakkar s (eds). home and native land, 184–191. between the lines, toronto. schiller ng & fouron g 2001. georges woke up laughing: long-distance nationalism and the search for home. duke university press, raleigh. shukla s 2003. india abroad. princeton university press, princeton. siemiatycki m 2012. “toronto: integration in a city of immigrants.” in andrew c, biles j, burstein m, esses v & tolley e (eds). immigration, integration, and inclusion in ontario cities, 23–48. mcgill-queen's university press, montréal and kingston. soysal yn 1994. limits of citizenship. university of chicago press, chicago. statistics canada 2011. immigration and ethnocultural diversity in canada. <http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-010-x/99-010x2011001-eng.cfm> 15.10.2014. taylor c 1994. the politics of recognition. in gutmann a (ed). multiculturalism and the ‘politics of recognition’, 25–73. princeton university press, princeton. teelucksingh c 2006. toward claiming space. in teelucksingh c (ed). claiming space, 1–17. wilfrid laurier press, waterloo. thobani s 2007. exalted subjects: studies in the making of race and nation in canada. university of toronto press, toronto. thomas m 2011. multicultural girlhood. temple university press, philadelphia. 226 fennia 193: 2 (2015)ishan ashutosh tololyan k 1991. the nation-state and its others. diaspora 1: 1, 3–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dsp.1991.0008 toronto star 1992. ‘toronto has become an exciting, cosmopolitan city, thanks in part to the influx of people from many lands. much of this tide of human gold has flowed from the world’s biggest continent ... asia’. toronto star, the (ontario, canada), 15.10.2014, p. e1. ubale b 1992. politics of exclusion. ampri press, north york. van der veer p 1995. the diasporic imagination. in van der veer p (ed). nation and migration, 1–16. university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. varadarajan l 2010. the domestic abroad: diasporas in international relations. oxford university press, oxford. vertovec s & wessendorf s 2010. introduction: assessing the backlash against multiculturalism in europe. in vertovec s & wessendorf s (eds). the multicultural backlash, 1–31. routledge, new york. walton-roberts m 2011. immigration, trade and 'ethnic surplus value': a critique of indo-canadian transnational networks. global networks 11: 2, 203–221. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2011.00318.x. walton-roberts m & pratt g 2005. mobile modernities: a south asian family negotiates immigration, gender and class in canada. gender, place and culture 12: 2, 173–195. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09663690500094823. white mj, fong e & cai q 2003. the segregation of asian-origin groups in the united states and canada. social science research 32: 148–167. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0049-089x(02)00023-6. wimmer a & glick-schiller n 2002. methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. global networks 2: 4, 301–334. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00043. postpolitics of (scottish) planning: gatekeepers, gatechecks and gatecrashers? – commentary to walton urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa69905 doi: 10.11143/fennia.69905 reflections post-politics of (scottish) planning: gatekeepers, gatechecks and gatecrashers? – commentary to walton vesa kanninen kanninen, v. (2018) post-politics of (scottish) planning: gatekeepers, gatecheck and gatecrashers? – commentary to walton. fennia 196(1) 103– 107. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 reflecting upon william walton’s work in this issue of fennia, this commentary elaborates on the ideas of post-politics evoked by walton’s careful examination of scottish planning. applying viewpoints of depoliticization and post-politics may not provide pragmatic guidance for planning practice, yet it may sensitize to and enable revelations of situational, processual and structural workings of power. with new orchestrations of planning narrowing the spaces for local resistance politicisations, depoliticisation may be taken to mean less politics. however, the complicit politicisations brought about by applying governmental technologies may also be seen as a different kind of statecraft, resulting in all too visible politics of planning presented as technicalities. this calls for local action. ‘gatecrashing’ the planning system for a disruptive re-introduction of more inclusive and empowering planning practices could mean attaining ‘agonistic spaces’ that could enable dialectical approaches under uneven power relations. keywords: post-politics, agonism, scotland, spatial planning, depoliticisation vesa kanninen, department of built environment, aalto university, po. box 14400, 00076 aalto, 02150 espoo, finland. e-mail: vesa.kanninen@aalto.fii the main thrust of this commentary emerges from william walton’s (2018) research paper. the article is deeply rooted in the details of planning practice, and it raises important and vital contemporary concerns that are necessary to engage with for spatial planners in the nordic region. while scottish concerns can seem structurally distant and culturally different to those in the north east european social-democratic inspired systems we are familiar with, the issues walton brings up touch upon timely universal issues that are well applicable to the nordic context. it is precisely for this reason that the case of the scottish planning landscape is an interesting one to consider here in fennia. the article examined can be seen as a universal reminder of the systemic and situational challenges that rollback planning presents for all actors. william walton, whose long-running research focuses upon planning and environmental law, has provided much food for thought with his insightful approach. having previously studied the british planning system (bäcklund & kanninen 2015; kanninen & akkila 2015), i draw upon this knowledge to expand upon walton’s arguments. walton’ detailed account leaves one astounded as to the depth to which differences can be traced between the scottish planning landscape and its finnish counterpart. yet, in spite of glaring initial differences, the post-political lens through which walton examines the aberdeenshire case, a region in eastern © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 104 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections scotland, reveals much in common. walton’s article adeptly engages the reader and announces postpolitical ‘optics’ of a neoliberal system of governance and planning. indeed, given the growing grip of neoliberal ethos over europe’s far north, i was inspired to further explore aspects of the post-politics walton raises. in my commentary, i seek to offer not an alternative but a complementary analysis of the postpolitical condition, dwelling in the empirically and theoretically grounded interpretation of planning practice that walton’s work identifies. walton’s article contains the full spectrum of post-politics played out within a single, long running, city-regional planning case. what caught my eye in the first place was the issue in itself. the perpetual questions of housing delivery, affordability, and a skirmish over locations for future development, have all the makings of a ‘wicked’ problem (rittel & webber 1973) or, as often preferred nowadays, ‘complexity’ that cannot be simply dealt with by applying any existing solutions. in the end, dealing with it simply is what walton suggests, and i think quite rightly so. yet, to walk the intellectual path of post-politics is by no means a meager undertaking. should one take mouffe’s and laclau’s hand, one ends up in the land of ranciere and žižek, pondering the pervasiveness of the political, the rarity of the truly political, the impossibility of politics within managerialistic (state) practices, and the constitutiveness of ‘the other’ of the political (cf. kanninen 2017). while these political theorists are correct to point out that the political exists as a possibility in everything, and that the post-political situation does not mean that consensus has replaced conflict, the rather hopeless place they have reached arguably does not give much hope nor power to a citizen attempting to appeal a planning case. one could point out that, in the act of carrying out legal reforms, there can always be unintended consequences, as well as ‘hidden’ consequences that may or may not be planned. yet, according to the tenets of post-politics, these are nevertheless somehow ‘orchestrated’, as allmendinger and haughton (2012) phrase in their notion of how various ‘governmental technologies’ are being utilised for realising neo-liberal politics. there are numerous viable theoretical accounts of power, many of which could be instrumental in analysing cases such as the one walton identifies. in this instance, i find hay’s (2014, 299) critique of wood and flinders’ (2014) three-fold typology of depoliticisation useful. hay instead refers to lukes’ (1974) three-dimensional view of power, in parallel with flinders and buller’s (2006, 314) earlier reading of lukes’ work. in lukes’ view, the first dimension concerns decision-making out in the open, reflecting the situational and actor-specific institutionalised power relations that may and do play out in conflict situations. the second dimension concerns agenda-setting power, that there is an inclination to foreground some conflicts while backgrounding others, as schattschneider (1960, 71) famously phrased it, “organisation is the mobilisation of bias”. lukes’ third dimension, in turn, shows that not all power use is active decision-making nor actively framing such situations, but rather indirect, invisible and inaudible manipulation and persuasion without noticeable conflict. in this view, the lack of conflict cannot be interpreted as consensus, as this kind of ‘preference shaping’ aims at naturalising the hegemonic discourse. at the strategic development plan level, the scottish planning policy and practice exhibits the characteristics of depoliticisation in all three lukesian dimensions of power. the post-politics of the aberdeenshire case evokes the approach of foster, kerr and byrne (2014), in which they see depoliticisation as the return of the state, not as a “rolling back” of the state, as many authors insist. for foster and colleagues, depoliticisation means not less, but different kind of politics. to borrow their foucauldian vocabulary, the ‘resistance politicisations’ of the citizens are not really rendered useless in the face of technicalisation of issues and knowledge. they are, instead, engulfed in an all-encompassing depoliticisation together with governmental ‘complicit politicisations’ that serve neo-liberal government rationalities. the view of foster and colleagues seems rather pessimistic of any real possibility of resistance, as the resistance politicisations they envision function as performances necessary for neo-liberal roll forward. it is this kind of governmentality through which post-politics are arrived at. in the case of aberdeenshire, this is all too visible and audible. the local representatives and village residents complain to walton as they have complained within the planning process and elsewhere, presumably in vain. foucault sees this inability to pierce the neo-liberal armour of tech-talk as inevitable. yet, the effort is necessary, as thiele (1990, 916) describes, stating foucault’s socratic phrase “the uncontested life is deemed not worth living”. fennia 196(1) (2018) 105vesa kanninen meanwhile, the technicised process advances state interests through several layers. this roll forward perhaps reaches its maximum with state guidance and policies for the reporter of a planning case. that is what the reporter takes into account when considering a case such as the long-running, city-regional planning one considered in walton’s article. however, consider the process in which a charrette, which aims at bringing forth new ideas and centres on co-creation, is subsequently labelled as a venue for politicisation. it is then argued by the reporter that this design setting, now in the past, was the time when the concerns of locals had to be voiced and registered. surely, such a notion by the authoritative government official makes one wonder whether one has mistaken the role of the charrette. this portrays how easily framings can be altered to suit upholding and advancing the hegemonic view. yet, we feel sympathetic towards the reporter. the guidance and policies for the case reporter, together with some unwritten or well-hidden advice, scale, scope and frame the reporter’s remit in ways quite unimaginable to the public. there is, for example, a self-regulatory aspect to the reporter’s work. as an expert, the reporter is both part of, and affected by the government technologies that provide a web of politicisations no one can escape. there are seemingly obvious institutional, professional and ethical limitations to utilizing the full remit, empathetic as the reporter might be to varying views. in addition, being flanked by a senior state official in public brings about institutional pressure, hence self-regulation. we have now come to realise the ambiguity of the agency of the reporter, within the post-politics framework that walton so adeptly describes. indeed, this seems to hint that there are possibilities for making changes, as the armour of this pivotal gatekeeper seems not impenetrable, after all. in my view, this refers to the inherently incomplete nature of any depoliticisation attempt, as pointed out by political theorists mentioned previously. but who actually are orchestrating, who are the orchestrated, and where are all parties drawing the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’? if we took walton’s meta-narrative of statecraft seriously, we would probably consider the local residents, councilors, sometimes even the local planners as the antagonistic ‘other’ of the post-politics regime. once this ‘other’ becomes aware of its common interests, as it might through such accounts as walton’s, there is a possibility of genuine resistance. as žižek (1997) puts it, the condition of impossibility is also a condition of possibility. truly hegemonic power is unattainable since all power relations are contingent, and the conditions that enable them are equally contingent. there are always possibilities for altering the conditions, hence also the power relations (cf. laclau 1990). the theoretical consolation this offers to those struggling to get heard in a planning case might not be that great. yet, as a consequence, we need not paint a purely grim picture. as walton’s account shows, the cracks and leaks of the supposedly hegemonic practice are, in reality, well visible and often also within reach. mouffe (2013) reminds us that if agonistic, respectful conflicts are not possible, politics will burst out in antagonistic, even violent ways. in his article, however, walton is discussing a long-running planning case peacefully, and conversing with the other ‘others’ without much in way of antagonistic rebellion. i take this relative gentleness to mean that for walton, as well as for others, there are still agonistic avenues open for exploration. these avenues, however, might become far narrower if the newest neoliberal reforms are carried out. as walton notes with a degree of suspicion, the notion of a “gatecheck” has been suggested. this would allow early scrutiny over a development plan evidence base. the word ‘gatechecking’ is appropriate and telling. the stakeholders, identified in advance, approve the evidence base for the plan before further work may commence. this would allegedly be an instrument of speeding up housing delivery, of creating efficiencies and of enabling an even lighter-touch examination process. these are laudable objectives in themselves, and a robust evidence base is certainly a pivotal asset in any planning process. however, what gatechecks may well come to mean is pre-determination of access to the planning process. the focus on evidence should not be at the expense of democracy, therefore not at the expense of meticulously upholding the openness for community dispute and politicisation. what about evidence that comes up during the planning process? what about those parties/actors/citizens who haven’t been signatories? is there any place for voicing concerns in a way that produces a dialogue? what if something changes in the demand, much as walton’s present case 106 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections portrays? with gatechecking, does it become even more difficult to flexibly reformulate strategies, reposition development, and realign policies? as walton frames the case with an approach that combines post-politics with the idea of (legal) checks and balances, he points exactly at the conjuncture of lukesian power dimensions. while there are depoliticising forces at work, some out in the open, some hidden or “elsewhere”, exercising power, framing, and shaping the possibilities of resistance to unwanted development, there are also technologies which may be utilised to exercise democratic power for and by communities. as walton explains, while there are obvious problems ahead when the ‘red light’ legal conjunctures are taken too far, it is equally clear that an unchecked ‘green light’ approach has severe repercussions, too. therefore, the ‘amber light’ approach has both practical appeal and political foothold. in finland, we remain part of a ‘red light zone’ system of spatial planning, but already the scarce ‘amber lights’ are being dimmed in favour of ‘green’. yet, we talk about improving inclusion, adding participation, and enhancing democracy. surely, the ideas of inclusion, participation and democratic control are not to be merely practiced as going through the motions of what is legally obligated. for anyone in a planning process, being able to exercise power does not negate moral responsibility for acting in the interests of those who planning is ultimately for, citizens. as inch (2015) argues, it is one thing to raise ‘good citizens’ for deliberating within planning practices, and quite another to allow for an agonistic planning citizenship that may respectfully confront whatever is deemed inappropriate or detrimental. as rancière (2006) notes, there is no such thing as a democratic state, and hence no such institutional solution that could truly govern democracy. therefore, it is the citizens who should take on this sort of ‘gatecrashing’ attitude, respectful yet determined, in planning processes. it should be a real possibility for stakeholders and citizens at large to engage, become ‘ignited’ (inch 2015) if you will. a back-and-forth of genuine dialogue addresses not only rational arguments but also the subjective, positional and situational viewpoints that are becoming more central in our relational world. gramsci (1971), lukes (1974) and for example flinders and buller (2006) provide the fundaments for gatecrashing: to go against preference-shaping depoliticisation, one should dissect whatever is considered ‘natural’; to expose rule-based depoliticisation, one should question the framings of practice and process; and to kick back at institutional depoliticisation, one should enable the making of aternative decisions. it might be that for this to happen, we need new spaces that emanate from local need through local action, spaces of the kind bond (2011, 176) calls “agonistic space”. such actual spaces would provide real alternatives and possibilities to recast those alternatives towards genuinely democratic ends. in agonistic spaces, hegemonic traits could be exposed. pratt (1991, 34) introduced a similar notion of a “contact zone” that could engender a space for voicing views under and about uneven power relations, under conditions bakhtin (1981, 296) calls “heteroglossia”, the simultaneous existence of various viewpoints. this seems not an easy concept nor one easy to operationalise, yet this is just what walton suggests. in my opinion, to (re)introduce spaces that enable agonism is indeed a simple and workable solution to a complex problem. however, the real, radical message is this: let’s talk, debate and brawl more, not less. apart from this being a timely and valuable democratic statement, the actual practice would be an antidote for much of what seems to be going wrong with current planning systems, with their gatekeeping and gatechecking. however, to get the message through and the practice reinstated, the cracks, leaks and poorly guarded backdoors need to be utilized. the systems need to be gatecrashed! acknowledgements the work on this comment has been funded by the academy of finland, grant 303538. references a llmendinger, p. & haughton, g. (2012) pos t-political spatial planning in england: a crisis of consensus? transac tions of the institute of british geographers 37(1) 89 –103. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x fennia 196(1) (2018) 107vesa kanninen bakhtin, m. (1981) the dialogic imagination. university of texas press, austin. bond, s. (2011) negotiating a 'democratic ethos': moving beyond the agonistic – communicative divide. planning theory 10(2) 161–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210383081 bäcklund, p. & kanninen, v. (2015) valtaistetut asukkaat: neighbourhood planning ja asuinalueperustaisen osallistumisen rajaamisen taktiikat. alue ja ympäristö 44(1) 4–16. <https://aluejaymparisto.journal.fi/article/view/64830/26059> flinders, m. & buller, j. (2006) depoliticisation: principles, tactics and tools. british politics 1(1) 293– 318. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.bp.4200016 foster, e., kerr, p. & byrne, c. (2014) rolling back to roll forward: depoliticisation and the extension of government. policy & politics 42(2) 225–241. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557312x655945 gramsci, a. (1971) selections from the prison notebooks. lawrence & wishart, london. hay, c. (2014) depoliticisation as process, governance as prac tice: what did the f irst wave get wrong and do we need a ‘second wave’ to put it right? polic y & politics 42(2) 293–311. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557314x13959960668217 inch, a. (2015) ordinary citizens and the political cultures of planning: in search of the subject of a new democratic ethos. planning theory 14(4) 404–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095214536172 kanninen, v. (2017) strateginen kaupunkiseutu – spatiaalinen suunnittelu radikaalina yhteensovittamisena [the strategic city region – spatial plannig as radical coordination]. aalto university doctoral dissertations 227/2017. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-60-7728-4 kanninen, v. & akkila, i. (2015) kaupunkiseutujen strateginen suunnittelu. ympäristöministeriön raportteja 24/2015. ympäristöministeriö, helsinki. http://hdl.handle.net/10138/156626 laclau, e. (1990) new reflections on the revolution of our time. verso, london. lukes, s. (1974) power: a radical view. macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02248-9 mouffe, c. (2005) on the political. routledge, abington. mouffe, c. (2013) agonistics: thinking the world politically. verso, new york. pratt, m. l. (1991) arts of the contact zone. profession 91 33–40. rancière, j. (2006) democracy, republic, representation. constellations 13(3) 297–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2006.00402.x rittel, h. & webber, m. (1973) dilemmas in a general theory of planning. policy sciences 4(2) 155–169. https://doi-org.libproxy.ncl.ac.uk/10.1007/bf01405730 schattschneider, e. e. (1960) the semisovereign people: a realist's view of democracy in america. holt, rinehart and winston, chicago. thiele, l. (1990) the agony of politics: the nietzschean roots of foucault’s thought. the american political science review 84(3) 907–925. https://doi.org/10.2307/1962772 walton, w. (2018) deregulated free -for-all planning , new set tlement s and the spec tre of abandoned building sites in scotland ’s crisis-hit oil economy. fennia 196 (1) 58 –76. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 wood, m. & flinders, m. (2014) rethinking depoliticisation: beyond the governmental. policy & politics 42(2) 151–170. https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447326601.003.0002 žižek, s. (1997) the abyss of fear. university of michigan press, ann arbor. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210383081 https://aluejaymparisto.journal.fi/article/view/64830/26059 https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.bp.4200016 https://doi.org/10.1332/030557312x655945 https://doi.org/10.1332/030557314x13959960668217 https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095214536172 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-60-7728-4 http://hdl.handle.net/10138/156626 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02248-9 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8675.2006.00402.x https://doi-org.libproxy.ncl.ac.uk/10.1007/bf01405730 https://doi.org/10.2307/1962772 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447326601.003.0002 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa48128 doi: 10.11143/48128 ethno-cultural diversity and contemporary national societies a glance at demographic data for european countries reveals that every year international migration contributes to population growth more than natural change (european commission 2010). on 1 january 2013, foreign-born individuals accounted for 6.7% of the total population legally residing in the eu-27 countries (eurostat 2014). according to a demographic projection (lanzieri 2010), by 2060, persons of all nationalities with at least one foreign-born parent are expected to account for about 33% of the eu-27 population. as national societies, within europe and elsewhere, are deemed to become increasingly diverse in ethnocultural, religious, and racial terms, the question which comes to the fore is how people can live together in/with/through diversity. although academic scholarship has offered important insights into the ways that migrants negotiate their everyday lives within receiving societies (bailey 2000; fortier 2000; kastoryano 2002; kumsa 2005; ho 2006; brah 2007; skrbiš et al. 2007; cagliotti 2008; getrich 2008; mavroudi 2008; nagel & staeheli 2008; nelson & hiemstra 2008; zevallos 2008), the general tendency has been to eschew the national dimension in favour of cosmopolitan (archibugi et al. 1998; cheah & robbins 1998; beck 2000; featherstone 2002; nava 2002; vertovec & cohen 2002), transnational (basch et al. 1994; hannerz 1996; portes 1996; glick schiller 1997; robinson 1998; vertovec 1999; kivisto 2001; international migration review 2003), or ‘local’ (amin 2002; valentine 2008; matejskova & leitner 2011; leitner 2012; closs stephens 2013) perspectives. implicit in many of these accounts is a treatment of the nation as a site of exclusion, marginalization, and oppression of diversity, broadly understood (antonsich 2009; mavroudi 2010). thus, the alternative scales of socio-spatial life (cosmopolis, transnational networks, micro-publics of everyday life, the city, etc.) have been both investigated and celebrated as spaces where diversity can be more fully expressed, performed, and lived. this treatment, though, seems to ignore two points: first, there is nothing ipso facto progressive about these spaces, which in fact might equally be populated by the discourses and practices of marginalization and discrimination (castree 2004); second, the nation in practice is not necessarily a homogenizing singular, stable, coherent identity (agnew 1994). on the contrary, the nation as a concept and practice has continuously re-invented itself to meet the mutated socio-economic conditions of collective life (baumann 2004). accordingly, some influential scholars have reaffirmed the importance of the nation even in the age of migration (brubaker 2004, 2010; calhoun 2007, 2008; hedetoft 2011). yet, these and other accounts have only rarely been accompanied by an investigation into whether and how the institutional and social imaginary of the nation has been re-written to face the new international mobility and increased ethno-cultural pluralism of its populace. we would argue that it is important to examine the nation as an unstable, plural construct, which has the capacity to exclude, include, and change. as a dynamic notion, it can therefore be further interrogated, in order to examine in detail the ways in which it is being appropriated, contested and made meaningful in embodied, material and symbolic ways. above all, if one agrees on the need for nations to be inclusive (mavroudi 2010), it is necessary to closely explore the complex ways in which the nation intersects with everyday life and, in particular, the ways in which the nation can be both exclusive and inclusive. it is the purpose of this special issue to reflect on how the nation is re-signified in order to deal with the ethno-cultural transformation of contemporary societies. we stress the importance of paying attention to the scale of the nation without making assumptions about its oppressive or homogenising tendencies. instead, there is a need to deconstruct and dissect the nation, both as a notion and practice, exactly at a time when it faces enduring mistrust in scholarly work dealing with diversity and change (antonsich 2009). we contend that the national scale is an important one to hold onto even as it interacts with other scales; it is a necessary scale, which still permeates and affects people's lives and identities in myriad ways, and the specific practices, negotiations and processes that occur as a result need to be examined. the articles gathered here originate from two sessions, convened respectively in london (the remaking of the national in the age of migration, anfennia 193: 2 (2015) 161ethno-cultural diversity and contemporary national societies nual meeting of the royal geography society with the institute of british geographers, 28 august 2013) and in rome (ethno-cultural diversity and the question of the national, iv eugeo congress, 7 september 2014). overall we believe that the five articles nicely address the question of the national in the context of increasing ethno-cultural diversity from a variety of geographical contexts and thematic lines, thus offering a rich empirical field from which to scrutinize the ways in which the national continues to play a major role in shaping societal life and encounters among diverse people. the first article, by tania rossetto, critically discusses the narrative of the city/nation divide. as mentioned above, this divide is indeed central to many scholarly investigations into ethno-cultural diversity. in the words of rossetto, while the city is conceptualized as dynamic, lived, and open, the nation is portrayed as fixed, abstract, and constraining. by focusing on a photographic performance project in padua, italy, which involved young migrants as active participants, rossetto rebuffs this divide which she calls the “tale of two scales". the kind of nation she is putting forward, through the lived performances of migrants, is one which is agency-centred, pragmatic, non-discursive, progressive, emplaced, dynamic and experiential. it is a nation which challenges the cultural singularity of nationalistic accounts, often dismissed by scholars as abstract and ideological. this is a key move which allows us to see the interplay of local and national rather than their juxtaposition. accordingly, rossetto argues for a transcalar study of the migratory experience, one which simultaneously takes into consideration the coexistence and interpenetration of a plurality of scales. drawing on amin (2012), she then suggests that the “urban unconscious”, or the sense of being together in the urban frame, can equally be translated into a “national unconscious”, or the sense of being together in the national frame. this being together, according to rossetto, can be conceptualized along the lines suggested for the city by coward (2012), as a space “between us”. the nation then, for rossetto, might be best conceptualized as a frame for shared existence rather than an identity bond – a terrain of communality post-identity as also suggested by other authors (antonsich 2009). the second article, by joseph downing, is closely related to the intervention by rossetto. in fact, it also engages closely with the local/national divide. however, it adopts a different entry point, both disciplinary and methodologically. being rooted in nationalism studies, the article privileges an institutional perspective. the focus here is on the local policies which both lyon and marseille have adopted to cater for the diversity of their population. moving away from the french republican tradition, blind to any difference of its citizens, lyon and even more so marseille have put in place a series of measures, co-opting local organisations as well, which aim to recognize and include postmigration minority groups living in these two cities. echoing the works of confino and skaria (2002) and jones and fowler (2007), among others, downing reasserts the key point that the nation does not live only at the national scale, but can be found at the local scale as well. as downing observes, the local appropriates the nation in such a way that this latter has various local meanings and, in turn, local processes play a major role in both representing and reproducing the nation. through a rich and diversified account of difference-orientated policies and initiatives in lyon and marseille, downing makes the interesting point that a shift in the ways the national deals with diversity might not necessarily come from a coherent directive of the central government. rather, it is the local and its actors which might re-work the national and open it up to a more plural understanding about the diversity which composes it. this stresses the importance of bottom up nationalism and the agency involved in constructing the nation, as a flexible and dynamic process. the third article, by anna gawlewicz, also addresses a case study in which, like in rossetto for italy, the encounter with diversity is a relatively recent experience. gawlewicz focuses on the perceptions of diversity held by polish migrants living in the uk, reflecting on how these perceptions impact on the migrants’ notion of polishness. like rossetto, gawlewicz also adopts a geographical disciplinary perspective. relying on individual interviews conducted in a northern english city, leeds, gawlewicz explores the multifarious ways in which polish migrants talk of/about their lived experience of difference in terms of ethnicity, religion, class, age, gender, sexuality and disability. the picture which emerges is one which she labels, after kurczewska (2003) and marciniak (2009), the “inferiority-superiority” complex. in other words, when it comes to comparing how difference is lived in britain and in poland, the latter is constructed as inferior. yet, when it comes to family values, poland emerges as superior to brit162 fennia 193: 2 (2015)marco antonsich and elizabeth mavroudi ain. in this sense, the article suggests how nationness, far from a fixed and stable category, is a very malleable notion, which can be activated differently in different discursive contexts. the two remaining articles take us across the atlantic, to north america and chile respectively. they both rely on anthropologically-informed ethnographical research. the article by ashutosh examines the role of nations and nationalism amongst south asian migrants in toronto and new york. ashutosh’s argument is that, in the age of migration, the nation is caught between two opposite logics: on the one hand, the nation is reasserted in its exclusive features via the state projects of managing diversity and discourses on immigration; on the other hand, this very idea of a clearly and permanently delineated nation is challenged by migrants’ complex transnational practices. everyday interactions and experiences of south asian migrants living in toronto transform the meaning of the nation, by constantly transgressing its borders. in this sense, ashutosh, echoing walton-roberts and pratt (1995), suggests that international migration exposes the limits of national imaginaries and entails a reconstitution and reworking of identities. this process, though, is also surrounded by noticeable ambiguity. migrant practices, in fact, ranging from the prosaic to the spectacular, challenge as well as reinforce the contours of national belonging and community. thus, the analytic work that has to be done is to attend to the multiple and conflicting spaces and scales through which nationess manifests itself. the focus of the final article by imilan is also closely related to this understanding about nationess as variously performed by migrants. grounded in ethnographic work conducted among peruvian migrants working and living in santiago de chile, the article shows how a sense of nationness can be mobilized through the very mundane practice of food production and consumption. peruvian cuisine is becoming very popular world-wide. peruvian migrants living in chile have capitalized on this development, which offers them a unique way of integrating socially and economically within chilean society by emphasising their national origin as a positive and distinguishing feature. imilan’s article thus explores the performativity of peruvianness through gastronomic practices, which then become spaces of communication and recognition of diversity. these culinary practices point to the intersection of local, national and transnational scales, as well as to a form of popular, non-hegemonic globalization (lins ribeiro 2009), providing a successful way for migrants to negotiate their national belonging. taken together, these case studies demonstrate how the nation is being deconstructed and (re)articulated through everyday practices and people's agency. as a plural notion, it has the capacity to transform, and to include those once deemed to be too different. yet, challenges remain in terms of the ways in which the nation continues to exclude and oppress. at the same time, continued research is needed on the ways the nation can be made more inclusive, in both top-down and bottom-up ways, as it deals with demographic change. marco antonsich, loughborough university, united kingdom. e-mail: m.antonsich@lboro.ac.uk elizabeth mavroudi, loughborough university, united kingdom. e-mail: e.mavroudi@lboro.ac.uk references agnew j 1994. the territorial trap: the geographical assumptions of international relations theory. review of international political economy 1: 1, 53–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692299408434268. amin a 2002. ethnicity and the multicultural city: living with diversity. environment and planning a 34: 6, 959–980. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a3537. amin a 2012. land of strangers. polity press, cambridge-malden, ma. antonsich m 2009. on territory, the nation-state and the crisis of the hyphen. progress in human geography 33: 6, 789–806. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132508104996. archibugi d, held d & köhler m (eds). 1998. reimagining political community: studies in cosmopolitan democracy. stanford university press, stanford, ca. bailey b 2000. language and negotiation of ethnic/ racial identity among dominican americans. language in society 29:4, 555–582. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500004036. basch l, glick schiller n & szanton blanc c (eds). 1994. nations unbound: transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments, and deterritorialized nation-states. gordon & breach, new york. baumann g 2004. introduction: nation-states, schools and civil enculturation. in schiffauer w, baumann g, kastoryano r & vertovec s (eds). civil enculturation, 1–20. berghahn books, new york. beck u 2000. the cosmopolitan perspective: sociology of the second age of modernity. british journal of sociology 51: 1, 79–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2000.00079.x. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 163ethno-cultural diversity and contemporary national societies brah a 2007. travels in negotiations: difference, identity, politics. journal of creative communications 2: 1&2, 245–256. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/097325860700200212. brubaker r 2004. in the name of the nation: reflections on nationalism and patriotism. citizenship studies 8: 2, 115–127. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1362102042000214705. brubaker r 2010. migration, membership, and the modern nation-state: internal and external dimensions of the politics of belonging. journal of interdisciplinary history 41: 1, 61–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jinh.2010.41.1.61. cagliotti dl 2008. elite migrations in modern italy: patterns of settlement, integration and identity negotiation. journal of modern italian studies 13: 2, 141–151. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545710802010917. calhoun c 2007. nations matter: citizenship, solidarity and the cosmopolitan dream. routledge, london. calhoun c 2008. cosmopolitanism and nationalism. nations and nationalism 14: 3, 427–448. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2008.00359.x. castree n 2004. differential geographies: place, indigenous rights and 'local' resources. political geography 23: 2, 133–167. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2003.09.010. cheah p & robbins b (eds). 1998. cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond the nation. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. closs stephens a 2013. the persistence of nationalism. from imagined communities to urban encounters. routledge, london. confino a & skaria a 2002. the local life of nationhood. national identities 4:1, 7–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608940120115657. coward m 2012. between us in the city: materiality, subjectivity, and community in the era of global urbanization. environment and planning d: society and space 30: 3, 468–481. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d21010. european commission 2010. demographic report. directorate-general for employment, social affairs and inclusion and eurostat. the statistical office of the european union, bruxelles. eurostat 2014. migration and migrant population statistics. bruxelles, eurostat. <http://epp.eurostat. ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/migration_and_migrant_population_statistics> featherstone m 2002. cosmopolis: an introduction. theory, culture & society 19: 1–2, 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/026327640201900112 fortier a-m 2000. migrant belongings. memory, space, identity. berg, oxford. getrich cm 2008. negotiating boundaries of social belonging. second-generation mexican youth and the immigrant rights protests of 2006. american behavioral scientist 52: 4, 533–556. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0002764208324605. glick schiller n 1997. the situation of transnational studies. identities 4: 2, 155–166. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.1997.9962587. hannerz u 1996. transnational connections: culture, people, places. routledge, london. hedetoft u 2011. is nationalism and anachronism? notes on the mutations of national idealism in a global age. in barrett m, flood c & eade j (eds). nationalism, ethnicity, citizenship: multidisciplinary perspectives, 13–34. cambridge scholars publishing, newcastle upon tyne. ho el 2006. negotiating belonging and perceptions of citizenship in a transnational world: singapore, a cosmopolis? social & cultural geography 7: 3, 385–401. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360600715086. international migration review 2003. special issue on transnational migration. international migration review 37: 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2003.tb00150.x. jones r & fowler c 2007. placing and scaling the nation. environment and planning d 25:2, 332– 354. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d68j. kastoryano r 2002. negotiating identities: states and immigrants in france and germany. princeton university press, princeton. kivisto p 2001. theorizing transnational immigration: a critical review of current efforts. ethnic and racial studies 24: 4, 549–577. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870120049789. kumsa mk 2005. between home & exile: dynamics of negotiating be-longing among young oromos living in toronto. in tettey w & puplampu kp (eds). the african diaspora in canada: negotiating identity & belonging, 175–203. calgary university press, calgary. kurczewska j 2003. what is likely to happen to polish collective consciousness after accession to the european union? polish sociological review 1, 83–92. lanzieri g 2010. fewer, older and multicultural? a projection of the populations of the european union member states by foreign/national background. european population conference, vienna, 1–4 september. leitner h 2012. spaces of encounters: immigration, race, class, and the politics of belonging in small-town america. annals of the association of american geographers 102: 4, 828–846. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.601204. lins ribeiro g 2009. la globalización popular y el sistema mundial no-hegemónico. nueva sociedad 241, 36–62. marciniak k 2009. post-socialist hybrids. european journal of cultural studies 12: 2, 173–190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549409102424. matejskova t & leitner h 2011. urban encounters with difference: the contact hypothesis and immigrant integration projects in eastern berlin. social & cultural geography 12: 7, 717–741. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.610234. mavroudi e 2008. palestinians and pragmatic citizenship: negotiating relationships between citizenship and national identity in diaspora. geoforum 39: 1, 307–318. 164 fennia 193: 2 (2015)marco antonsich and elizabeth mavroudi http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.07.001. mavroudi e 2010. nationalism, the nation and migration: searching for purity and diversity. space and polity 14: 3, 219–233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2010.532951. nagel c & staeheli la 2008. integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of british arab activists. social & cultural geography 9: 4, 415–430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802069019. nava m 2002. cosmopolitan modernity: everyday imaginaries and the register of difference. theory, culture & society 19: 1–2, 81–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/026327640201900104. nelson l & hiemstra n 2008. latino immigrants and the renegotiation of place and belonging in small town america. social & cultural geography 9: 3, 319–342. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360801990538 . portes a 1996. global villagers: the rise of transnational communities. american prospect 25, 74–77. robinson wi 1998. beyond nation-state paradigms: globalization, sociology, and the challenge of transnational studies. sociological forum 13: 4, 561–594. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1022806016167. skrbiš z, baldassar l & poynting s 2007. introduction negotiating belonging: migrations and generations. journal of intercultural studies 28: 3, 261–269. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07256860701429691. vertovec s 1999. conceiving and researching transnationalism. ethnic and racial studies 22: 2, 447– 462. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/014198799329558. vertovec s & cohen r (eds). 2002. conceiving cosmopolitanism: theory, context, and practice. oxford university press, oxford. valentine g 2008. living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter. progress in human geography 32: 3, 323–337. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309133308089372. walton-roberts m & pratt g 1995. mobile modernities: a south asian family negotiates immigration, gender and class in canada. gender, place and culture 12: 2, 173–195. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09663690500094823. zevallos z 2008. 'you have to be anglo and not look like me': identity and belonging among young women of turkish and latin american backgrounds in melbourne, australia. australian geographer 39: 1, 21–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049180701877410. geographies of welcome urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa76817 doi: 10.11143/fennia.76817 geographies of welcome the fear of otherness gets ahold of us militant passion what will become of us then? european values that terrorists are said to attack liberty equality and fraternity? where can they be found? income distribution? where a percentage builds its property borders are open to greed only what if the bombs hit at the deepest? (jani nieminen, bigini, 2016, 110)1 forced migration is not a new phenomenon. we can barely imagine a society where some people would not feel accepted as themselves or find their lives threatened. indeed, as long as there have been societies fleeing their territory has existed as an opportunity to avoid subordination and death when other attempts fail. the causes of forced migration vary over time and space, yet diminished opportunities to provide for oneself and loved ones, differing ideas and opinions about communal life, uneven distribution of resources and division of labour, and disaccord with societal norms and moralities, are enduring reasons for people to flee. while such push factors play a crucial role, migration is rarely driven by them alone, as even when faced with conflict people do not usually leave the place they call home and travel elsewhere without active agency. the characterisation of migration as ‘forced’ hence already includes a core humanitarian idea: people do not need to put up with everything, there are limits to what is fair and bearable in human life, and these limits can be indicated by leaving behind intolerable circumstances, by means of seeking shelter and better life opportunities elsewhere. volume 196 of fennia takes up a particularly topical approach to forced migration at present, with a focus on the geographies of welcome in the wake of what has been described in popular media and european policy rhetoric as ‘the refugee crisis’. inspired by the finnish geography days 2017 – thematised welcome to finland? – and nick gill’s fennia lecture at the event – titled welcome: concept, culture and consequences – we are publishing here a critical discussion where geographers are invited to present different perspectives on the idea of welcome, in relation to how it emerged in 2015 and after in europe, in the context of refuge and asylum seeking. what does welcome mean, in different places and societies? what should it mean, for different quarters and processes? what may it lead to, at different scales and timeframes? the discussion includes nine commentaries on gill’s (2018) lecture that was expanded and reformulated in our open review process and published as an essay, titled the suppression of welcome (for the fennia open review process, see kallio & riding 2018). the essay begins by thinking about the tension between official and grassroots responses to the so called ‘european refugee crisis’, in order to interpret the organisation of ‘refugee welcome’ in europe. it aims to initiate a discussion about the nature, practicalities and possible futures of welcome. the text asks the commentators a series of questions which probe what welcoming is, especially when employed in civic discourse by multiple actors as a term associated with the arrival of refugees. four responses were published and introduced in our first issue of the year (bagelman 2018; norum 2018; vainikka & vainikka 2018; vuolteenaho & lyytinen 2018) and the other five are included in this issue. matthew sparke (2018) joins in the conversation by highlighting how geographies of welcome complicate simple binary oppositions between fully enfranchised citizenship and what is often theorized after agamben as the ‘bare life’ of refugee rejection in ‘spaces of exception’ – ranging from sanctuary cities and squats to clinics, classrooms, kitchens and gardens. spaces of welcome instead offer islands of limited enfranchisement, agency and hope amidst seas of sub-citizenship, subjugation © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 132 fennia 196(2) (2018)editorial and fear. in response to gill’s (2018) call, sparke reminds us that in-between spaces may be linked up with the liberal humanitarian management of welcome to offer sanctuary amidst sub-citizenship. he illustrates ongoing opportunities for such agency in the face of suppression, and suggests that we need to abandon or at least supplement abstract critiques of liberal humanitarianism, which assume exceptionalism and rejectionism are always and everywhere inevitable. jonathan darling (2018) continues the debate drawing upon a decade of fieldwork in a drop-in centre for asylum seekers and refugees in the city of sheffield, uk. he takes gill’s (2018) essay as a starting point for reflection on how ‘cultures of welcome’ are produced. in considering the implications of the ‘suppression of welcome’, darling argues for a focus on welcoming as a negotiated process that involves varying durations, demands and levels of commitment. it is this question of an appropriate response, ethical responsibility, to which he returns to in conclusion. drawing upon derrida, darling concedes welcoming cannot be fully organised and known in advance, rather it represents a disposition towards others that is drawn upon in a moment, an ethics that is embodied and felt. it is this thread of responsiveness, of expressing welcome as a form of social justice that runs through the varied modes of welcoming. while not always successful, the labour of keeping such signs visible and friendships alive maintains a ‘culture of welcoming’. john morrissey (2018) reflects on attendant questions of security and responsibility in seeking to conceptualise a more human-centred vision of populations and population management in our current moment of refugee crisis in europe. he charts how we might productively conceptualize and enact a ‘human security’ vision, how such a vision requires us to think differently and cooperatively about security, and ultimately how this compels us to supplant a prevailing narrative of external threat and risk with a story of shared precarity, human empathy and collective responsibility. this reflection on gill’s (2018) essay is concerned with the reluctance to call for the state and its various administrative structures and legal armatures to support and enact welcome. morrissey argues that there may be more to be said in terms of state responsibilities, and the responsibilities of transnational, collectivestate organisations such as the european union, towards human security and the protection of human rights for refugees and asylum seekers. to this end, he reflects on a ‘human security’ vision of population management in a transnational context, which behoves us to think anew ‘security’, and, crucially, to vigorously contest how its parameters are discursively defined and framed. jussi laine (2018) continues this line of thought, emphasising the complexity and multifacetedness of welcome. he highlights the significance of the processes of identitary bordering and the psychological need for ontological security in seeking to address gill’s (2018) inquiry into what extent should states be engaged in efforts to organise welcome, given their place in the international state system that underpins exclusionary and subjugating border control in the first place. he underlines efforts to debunk tenacious false narratives about migration and to provoke debate in a fashion that will lead to a nuanced understanding of the root causes and motivating factors behind the migrant flows. laine seeks to break away from the dominant migration-security nexus by pointing towards the opportunities welcoming migrants can bring and elucidating them as valuable resources, rather than a burden, or ‘ills’ affecting the body of ‘national’ societies. he argues that simply depicting the governmental perspective in opposition to that of the people is reductive, and that it is this mounting polarization rather than refugees and asylum seekers, which are putting europe’s democracies, social model, and cooperation as values to the test. to conclude this discussion over two issues of fennia, elisa pascucci (2018) moves the debate elsewhere, and draws on recent research with aid workers in jordan and lebanon – as well as on examples from greece and italy – proposing the notion of refugee welcome as care work as a possible way to achieve grounded critical understanding. framing the issue in such a way enables her to ask not only, as gill (2018) poignantly does, what is welcome, but also where is welcome actually located and, most importantly, who welcomes. pascucci illustrates the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relation between bureaucratic control and the affective, embodied, spontaneous and caring character of “alternative” forms of welcome. importantly, the response offers a number of insights that challenge eurocentric humanitarian conceptions of welcoming refugees, like the centrality of emotional labour and the emerging south-south geographies of hospitality and aid. in so doing, she illuminates the many overlooked forms of labour without which state-centred, institutional, and fennia 196(2) (2018) 133kirsi pauliina kallio & james riding internationally-organized aid and welcome would not be possible – labour which is often feminized, racialized, and precarious. considering refugee assistance as care work, and the aid and charity sectors as employers, allows pascucci to expose the gendered and racialized labour relations that obscure such practical and embodied knowledges. she asks an important question in the final piece of our ongoing debate regarding refuge, welcoming, and asylum seeking in the contemporary world: how can geography assist us in such endeavor, and why is it relevant? we are prepared to continue publishing the discussion in our next volume should scholars, activists, and care workers wish to state additional perspectives, in order to expand this debate, taking it in new directions, or introducing insights from other geographical contexts. so, as you read, please note any emerging thoughts and let us know about them in the form of a comment, a reflections piece, or a longer paper (for a description of the aims of reflections, see kallio 2017). in this vein, we include a final vignette here for you to ponder whilst reading, a comment by joshua mullenite, who responded to our question posed to critical geographers regarding concerns on refuge and asylum seeking in the contemporary populist world (posted on crit-geog-forum on november 20 2018). my concerns with refuge and asylum seeking center largely around the compression of the world’s most marginalized communities with the rapidly increasing onset of global climate change. o’brien and leichenko’s (2000) coining of the term ‘double exposure’ to describe the ways in which individuals and communities most likely to experience the negative effects of climate change and economic globalization continues to be apt here even if the political processes and motivations have changed. as they and others have continued to point out, it is the impoverished populations who will experience the first and worst impacts of the coming climatological storm. this is not only because they largely continue to live on the most marginal lands, but also because they lack the resources to adapt or escape. the growth of populist governments has and likely will continue to lead to the hardening of international borders and an increased difficulty for these populations to seek refuge. this squeeze could cost millions of lives over the next several decades. the proposed responses to these dual challenges seem almost utopian in nature and – i fear – continue to place the burden of risk (of leaving, of traveling, and of arriving) on these marginalized people. being a smiling face after that grueling and life threatening journey is not enough. that academics who often voice so many critical and radical opinions on such matters continue to espouse – in the lunchrooms and lecture halls of our campuses as well as in the pages of our journals – a sympathetic but also largely policyor state-oriented approach to addressing (un) welcoming behaviors is troubling to me, even if it is unsurprising. what kind of timelines do state responses require? how do those of us in the imperial world ensure that our recommendations are not simply providing new spaces for imperialism to enter into marginalized people’s daily lives? what gets lost in the inevitable negotiating responses? in this case, nick gill’s highlighting of the autonomous forms of welcome is a much needed contribution. but as academics, who even among our more precarious are afforded a number of privileges, we should be ready to go much further. this is especially true for those fortunate enough to have positions in countries that are more likely to be receivers of asylum seekers rather than producers of them. rather than just being voices of moral reason, policy advocates, or highlighters of dissent, i’d like to see academics become (better) accomplices with the world’s marginalized. what direct actions can we take to improve the material conditions of actual and would-be refugees here and now? how can we make their journey’s safer and in general reduce the risks they face on a timeline that will not result in further deaths? when they arrive in our countries and at our borders, what kinds of spaces, opportunities, and material support can we provide? as part of their courses my first year students work with refugees in a variety of capacities throughout the semester. they learn about their lives and their humanity. part of this involves spending times in the ghettoes in which refugee populations are placed, much to the consternation of some of my colleagues who feel it is unsafe to send students into these neighborhoods alone. the student response has been markedly different. they are aware that the neighborhood experiences higher levels of crime than the surrounding areas, but rather than asking why there isn’t a greater police presence, or more state-funding for these communities, or even why these ghettoes are the homes of refugees, they asked why ghettoes exist at all. the very idea that such spaces can be socially constructed to isolate and demarcate communities was absurd to a group of 17–19 year olds and it should be equally absurd to us. what can we do to dismantle them and the socioeconomic conditions that uphold them? smiling faces and more welcoming behaviors cannot be the totality of that answer, even if they are important components. the recent ipcc reports noting the incredibly short timelines for irreversible global catastrophe 134 fennia 196(2) (2018)editorial make it clearer than ever that we can no longer sit on our hands. at the same time, it is the global (potential) refugee and asylee populations that are already experiencing the worst of these impacts. thus my ultimate concern is, on the timelines we have, how do we ensure that we aren’t simply creating global refugee ghettoes as people face the coming squeeze? this issue of fennia includes four original research papers, one shorter paper in the reviews and essays section, and five reflections texts. we begin with two articles discussing local governance in two finnish borderland contexts. the first article, by fredriika jakola (2018), local responses to state-led municipal reform in the finnish-swedish border region: conflicting development discourses, culture and institutions, analyses development discourses in the kemi-tornio region, at the north west borderland of finland. focusing on the views of municipal actors, the paper looks into the mobilization and strategic usage of the local institutional environment, and the border location in particular, as they appear in policy documents and interviews with key municipal actors in the region. the analysis reveals, among other things, distinct relations to state-led and eu discourses, and unbalanced power relations between municipalities. based on her findings, jakola suggests that state-led municipal reforms would be better accomplished if municipalities were considered equal partners, instead of implementers of the state’s will. the second article, the commons and emergent land in kvarken archipelago, finland: governing an expanding recreational resource by kristina svels and ulrika åkerlund (2018), presents results from a study focusing on the governance structures at the kvarken archipelago landscape in south west finland. in question is a geographically particular area – and a designated unesco world heritage site – where continuous and relatively fast land rise creates shore displacement and produces new land. the place is increasingly populated by second-home owners and users, which in the finnish context does mean elites but mostly middle-class people who organize their lives between urban housing and rural ‘cottaging’ (see also kietäväinen et al. 2016). svels and åkerlund’s study targeted specifically the overlapping use rights between private and collective actors, related to the recreational resource system, from local actors’ perspectives including professionals, authorities, and lay people as individuals and collectives. the results indicate that, in contexts where natural resource systems are complex, values mixed, and different quarters draw from the same resource units, a multidimensional approach is required for understanding the decision making procedures tensed by various power relations. the third article of this issue, perfect food: perspectives on consumer perceptions of fresh produce quality, shifts the focus to the us context, specifically fredericksburg in virginia, and to the topic of sustainable food production and consumption. in her paper caitlin finlayson (2018) discusses consumer approaches to fresh produce quality, and how the (changing) consumer behaviour may impact on the practices of retailers and food waste at the supply chain. drawing from interviews with local food vendors – some with rather traditional concepts and others emphasising alternative forms of food production – she has found consumers in this empirical context to have mostly anticipated expectations of how fresh products should look like, what finlayson calls ‘perfection’. however, it seems that people’s awareness may grow, and attitudes and practices change, if they come to build relationships with food producers. based on the discussions with farmers, produce stand vendors, and supervisors, finlayson suggests in conclusion that learning more about growing processes and difference between organic and conventional farming methods may initiate change in terms of sustainable food production. our fourth original research article by juha ridanpää (2018) focuses on minority languages from the perspective of language revitalisation. the paper is titled why save a minority language? meänkieli and rationales of language revitalization, and its empirical context is east north sweden, torne valley, where meänkieli exists as a diminishing minority language. discussing the current situation and the future prospects of the language with cultural activist who contribute to its revitalisation, ridanpää has located a contradictory landscape. while varying motivations for saving the language as well as how to operationalise the process exist, it seems evident that such processes ought to take seriously the distinct identities that people carry, which may involve multiple layers of attachment and estrangement. in the case of meänkieli, reflection with the long history of marginalisation and fennia 196(2) (2018) 135kirsi pauliina kallio & james riding people’s personal relations within this history cannot be ignored in efforts to maintain the language as a living practice. in addition to original articles, included in this issue is a short paper by william conroy (2018) that provides an overview of the critical study of brownfields, taking up three theoretical perspectives. the paper titled studying brownfields: governmentality, the post-political, or non-essential materialism? draws from his own study of the brownfield (re)development in the fairfield county and the city of bridgeport, connecticut, us. the article assess the analytical opportunities offered by three theoretical approaches to this specific case study, which he terms ‘governmentality’, ‘post-political’ and ‘nonessentialist materialism’. finding each of the approaches deficient with regard to their conceptions of the subject and political agency, conroy proposes in conclusion a ‘world-ecology approach’ as a more nuanced theoretical ground for studying what he sees as the neoliberal brownfield redevelopment. with these five articles and five discussion pieces, we wish you all a good end of the semester, and hope that the issue will lead to further debates in geography and beyond. kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief james riding fennia reflections section editor notes 1 translation by k. p. kallio. references bagelman, j. (2018) who hosts a politics of welcome? – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 108–110. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 conroy, w. (2018) studying brownfields: governmentality, the post-political, or non-essential materialism? fennia 196(2) 204–214. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70295 darling, j. (2018) the fragility of welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 220–224. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.75756 finlayson, c. (2018) perfect food: perspectives on consumer perceptions of fresh produce quality. fennia 196(2) 168–186. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65645 gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 jakola, f. (2018) local responses to state-led municipal reform in the finnish-swedish border region: conflicting development discourses, culture and institutions. fennia 196(2) 137–153. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.69890 kallio, k. (2017) subtle radical moves in scientific publishing. fennia 195(1) 1–4. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.63678 kallio, k., & riding, j. (2018) dialogical peer-review and non-profit open-access journal publishing: welcome to fennia. fennia 196(1) 4–8. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 kietäväinen, a., rinne, j., paloniemi, r., & tuulentie, s. (2016) participation of second home owners and permanent residents in local decision making: the case of a rural village in finland. fennia 194(2) 152–167. https://doi.org/10.11143/55485 laine, j. (2018) conditional welcome and the ambivalent self – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 230– 235. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76101 morrissey, j. (2018) envisioning human security – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 225–229. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.76029 nieminen, j. (2016) bigini. like, helsinki. norum, r. (2018) from welcome to well ... come: the mobilities, temporalities and geopolitics of contemporary hospitality – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 111–117. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70403 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70294 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70295 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.75756 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.75756 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65645 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69890 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69890 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63678 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70470 https://doi.org/10.11143/55485 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76101 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76029 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76029 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70403 136 fennia 196(2) (2018)editorial o’brien, k.l. & leichenko, r. (2000) double exposure: assessing the impacts of climate change within the context of economic globalization. global environmental change 10(3) 221–232. https://doi. org/10.1016/s0959-3780(00)00021-2 pascucci, e. (2018) who welcomes? the geographies of refugee aid as care work – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 236–238. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.76588 ridanpää, j. (2018) why save a minority language? meänkieli and rationales of language revitalization. fennia 196(2) 187–203. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74047 sparke, m. (2018) welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 215–219. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 svels, k. & åkerlund, u. (2018) the commons and emergent land in kvarken archipelago, finland: governing an expanding recreational resource. fennia 196(1) 154–167. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.69022 vainikka, v. & vainikka, j. (2018) welcoming the masses, entitling the stranger – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 124–130. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 vuolteenaho, j. & lyytinen, e. (2018) reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0959-3780(00)00021-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0959-3780(00)00021-2 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69905 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74047 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69022 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69022 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70227 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa70290 doi: 10.11143/fennia.70290 reflections reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill jani vuolteenaho and eveliina lyytinen vuolteenaho, j. & lyytinen, e. (2018) reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 in this reflection, we seek to develop some of professor gill’s inspiring ideas on the notion of (un)welcome further. we do this, in particular, by problematizing his largely dualistic conception of the emotionallyinvested, inter-personal forms of welcome contra a bureaucratic tendency to abstract welcome, to hollow it out emotionally. we argue that if applied too rigidly, this dichotomy can be unwieldy for making sense of the actual socio-spatial and emotional dynamics of (un)welcome. to elaborate this criticism, we expand on the notion of welcome from three interrelated perspectives. first, we argue that besides the opposite poles of people who welcome refugees, and forces that attempt to exclude them, great many actors convey more ambiguous and contextually varying attitudes to (un)welcoming immigrants. in the light of lefebvre’s conceptual triad of social space, we next point out that gill’s conceptualization pays inadequate heed to the practiced and societally recompensing aspects of everyday spatiality and welcoming. finally, we take a cue from gill’s suggestion to analyze welcome from the emotional geographies perspective, and reflect on exclusionary and inclusionary socio-spatial processes related to refugees’ emotions (lived space) and coping tactics (practiced space). keywords: variations of welcome, lived space, practiced space, emotional geographies, refugees jani vuolteenaho, department of geography and geology, university of turku, fi-20014, turku, finland. e-mail: jani.vuolteenaho@utu.fi eveliina lyytinen, the migration institute of finland, eerikinkatu 34, 20100 turku, finland. e-mail: evlyyt@utu.fi introduction in the contemporary european context of the so-called refugee crisis, who is being welcomed by whom, and how are these acts of welcome increasingly suppressed? more generally, what conceptual, practical and emotional processes characterise the acts of welcoming in our societies? these conceptually challenging, ethically significant, and societally acute issues were brought into relief by professor nick gill’s keynote lecture at the annual geography days in turku in october 2017. across europe and beyond, as gill notes (2018, 93), not only the operation of terrorists to unsettle people’s sentiments of trust and solidarity, but also a broader “set of circumstances and © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 fennia 196(1) (2018) 119jani vuolteenaho & eveliina lyytinen governmentalities have created the conditions for the suppression of welcome as an inter-personal ethic” in recent years. all this has occurred despite a spate of grassroots organizations and activists who, while fighting intolerant attitudes, are delivering material and social support to the displaced people newly entered or attempting to enter europe. we find key interpretations by gill on these tension-filled processes as sobering, and also agree that researching the complexities of (un)welcome in the context of european refugee situation warrants the use of emotion-sensitive, ethically sound (usually qualitative) methodologies. further, we strongly sympathize with his propositions on what could be done better in sustaining welcome particularly in circumstances where both calculated bureaucratic responses and xenophobic hate speech by right-wing extremists are increasingly questioning welcoming attitudes as idealistic. notwithstanding these and other merits in gill’s brief intervention, in our commentary we wish to highlight certain difficulties in his conceptualizations that in our view emanate from an excessively bipolarized conception of the emotionally-invested, inter-personal forms of welcome as a domain of spontaneity and genuineness contra a bureaucratic tendency to abstract welcome, to hollow it out emotionally. in particular, we point out that this type of dichotomizing can be unwieldy for making sense of the actual socio-spatial and emotional dynamics of (un)welcome. to elaborate this criticism, we expand on the notion of welcome from three interrelated perspectives in this paper. first, we point out certain empirical exceptions and theoretical limitations to the picture of “people welcome, regimes do not” that is canvassed in a somewhat too rigid fashion in gill’s paper. second, we draw from the concept of spatial practice by lefebvre (1974 [1991]) to posit that the routinized and largely taken-for-granted but simultaneously societally recompensing aspects of everyday spatiality are mainly side-lined in gill’s conceptualization of emotions and (un)welcoming. finally, we combine the lefebvrian framework with gill’s ideas on the emotionally and geographically co-constituted nature of welcome by discussing the actual lived and practiced spaces where refugees’ emotional repertoire is manifested. decentring the dichotomy, or notes on the wavering majority as justifiably underscored by gill, recent years in europe have witnessed a considerably increased number of activists struggling for refugees’ material sustenance and social inclusion. at the other extreme, there is the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments and movements with their populist right-wing rhetoric of vilifying the victims (a worrying global trend also touched upon in gill 2018). to be sure, these welcoming and unwelcoming camps have lately become very vociferous players in political and media rows over how (in)tolerantly newcomers are or ought to be treated. while the opposite poles in focus have undoubtedly gained in popularity, it nonetheless seems justified to remark that neither adamantly antinor pro-refugee stances have grown hegemonic among native populations in the majority of european societies. while more research on the topic is needed, we surmise that most “ordinary” people (and even many politicians insofar as their unofficial personal mindsets are concerned) are actually “wobbling” when it comes to their opinions about (un)welcoming marginalized immigrants (cf. a study on the finnish youth at the turn of the millenium: suurpää 2002) – all this despite (or perhaps because of) bipolarized discussions and “alternative truths” excessively circulated in social and mass media discourses. at least in finland, it seems likely that such attitudinal hesitancy or ambiguity reflects people’s cautious tactics of selfand other positioning in varying interactional contexts of their everyday lives. given the above complexity, a poststructuralism-inspired critique would surely hold gill’s keynote complicit in drawing a simplifying binary between the genuinely humane acts of welcome, and the calculated abstractions of bureaucratic machineries devoid of compassion for human suffering. to dismantle this dichotomy, one might apply foucault (1990, 96) and posit that the discourses of welcome and unwelcome “traverse social stratifications and individual unities” and alter contingent upon the constellations of power and social positionalities in particular discursive situations. an intriguing case in point is the sitting finnish prime minister (pm) sipilä, who during the heat of the socalled refugee crisis in september 2015 publically announced that asylum seekers could reside at his home in kempele, north-western finland. in this unusually spontaneous and personally engaged 120 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections attempt of welcome by a nationally outstanding politician, sipilä also appealed his compatriots that “the asylum seekers deserve a human treatment and genuine welcome greeting from us finns” (the washington post 2015). as one might expect, the pm’s generous offer hit news headlines internationally (reuters 2015). it was subsequently interpreted by some asylum seekers as a literal signal that finland, as a country, was a welcoming destination. in due course, however, sipilä had to retreat from his welcoming gesture; arguably due to security reasons his home was not opened to asylum seekers. this signalled a drastic turn from sipilä’s personal welcome address, to the institutional actions and discourse of unwelcome in months and years to come. as a matter of fact, sipilä’s cabinet, including a right-wing populist party, soon commenced a series of legal amendments and policy restrictions regarding international protection in finland. as soon as by the end of 2015, the government action plan on asylum policy (finnish government 2015) stated that the finnish government, led by pm sipilä, aims to make finland a less attractive destination country for asylum seekers.1 despite the exceptionality of sipilä’s welcome, it highlights ambiguities and context-dependencies of stance-taking towards refugees across affluent european populations and many policy-makers alike. in our view, such ambiguities should be taken into account when conceptualizing and analyzing the spatialities of the discourses, practices and emotions invested in (un)welcoming. at the same time, however, we contend that a fully poststructuralist approach (insisting on theoretical grounds in the indeterminacy of identity positions) would risk profound ethical problems in study contexts concerning the (un)welcoming of asylum seekers and other displaced people. in lieu of anti-humanist poststucturalist approaches to welcome, there fortunately exists fecund critical theorizations more akin to the ethos of gill’s intervention, one of which is outlined by lefebvre, a theorist to whom also gill himself refers. further spatialities of (un)welcome à la henri lefebvre according to gill (2018), both the genuine acts of welcome and bureaucratic procedures of suppressing them are inherently spatial. more specifically, gill argues that the spaces of welcome are both lived and abstract referring the french social theorist and critical urban thinker lefebvre’s (1974 [1991]) analysis of the production of space. similarly drawing from lefebvre’s classic triad of socio-spatial theory, our second reflection is that in order to understand welcome, we need to deliberate its discursively “conceived” (in the lefebvrian-foucauldian sense), “lived” and “perceived” (practiced) spatial aspects. as for the theoretically or technocratically conceived space (synonymous in lefebvre’s terminology with representations of space that tend to abstract features and relations acted out in concrete spaces), gill (2018, 92) rightly notes that abstract ways of conceiving socio-spatial realities carry with them a risk that “the representations are used to dominate and dictate reality”. needless to stress, this smacks of an all too truthful depiction of multiple european settings where the concrete acts of welcoming refugees, asylum seekers and above all deportees have been increasingly restricted and even criminalized. by contrast, according to lefebvre (1974 [1991]) another distinct dimension of social space is space “fully lived” through emotional experiences, memories, symbols and feelings of belonging and nonbelonging, fears and fantasies, hopes for justice and utopian wishes for a better life (e.g. shields 1999). as many critical geographers have accentuated, lived space is often enacted “as resistance to representations of abstract space” (mcdowell & sharp 1999, 33), or through “counter-discourses that have either escaped the purview of bureaucratic power or manifest a refusal to acknowledge its authority” (butler 2012, 5). also this lefebvre-inspired understanding is centrally present in gill’s conceptualization of the emotion-charged spatiality of welcome and its rationalistic-bureaucratic counter-forces, and rightly so in our opinion. adding the sociological and indeed geographical insightfulness of his conceptual triad, lefebvre (1974 [1991]) further conceptualizes spatial practice (perceived or commonsensical space) as the societally recompensing ways of operating (through employment, volunteering, consuming etc.) available for people a given society. practically perceived via a lens of everyday tasks and more or less routinized roles that individuals perform in their distinct ways, the socio-culturally learned spatial practices not only secure the normalized functioning of the society, but also afford each society fennia 196(1) (2018) 121jani vuolteenaho & eveliina lyytinen member with varying degrees of what lefebvre (1974 [1991], 38, 288–289) dubs as “spatial competence” (see also vuolteenaho 2001, 2010; merrifield 2006, 110–111). it seems to us that these routinely practiced aspects of social spatiality are largely missing from gill’s analytical apparatus, with the exception of his notions on hospitality as an institutionalized sphere associated with externally imposed duties and rights rather than with genuinely inner emotions (cf. a classic book on emotional labour and commercialized forms of welcome: russell hochschild 1983). be it as it may, it is important for the emotionally-focused scholarship on refugees and forced migrants to not to ignore the practiced aspects of spatiality in the lefebvrian sense. to what extent are refugees aloof from the local functioning of the mainstream society, and how this affects their emotions (see e.g. marshall et al. 2016)? for refugee scholars keen on the emotional geographies perspective (davidson et al. 2005), refugees’ spatial coping tactics, and how their integration may happen through spatially enacted and societally sanctioned positions and roles, open a whole array of burning research directions. aliens in an alien country? on refugees’ lived and practiced emotional geographies in refugee studies, emotions are often discussed with regard to the emotional repertoire of refugees during their diverse and deeply spatial experiences of fleeing and living in exile. this is significant for “narratives of migration are emotional stories of complex entanglements of feelings, experiences and imaginations” (christou 2011, 252). migration invariably affects emotions (boccagni & baldassar 2015, 75), perhaps even more so for forced migrants (e.g. asylum seekers and refugees). munt (2012, 556) vividly evokes the powerfully emotional experience of becoming a refugee as follows: “imagine a person who has suffered enforced migration, abruptly escaping from situations of terror – war, persecution, famine – as she arrives as an alien in an alienating country, stripped out of support (emotional, physical, legal and financial), and denuded of a coherent future. disoriented in space and time, this person embodies a most severe emotional geography.” thus, not only is the process of becoming a refugee an emotional experience manifested spatially and temporally, but so are the reception and integration processes (both centered on the idea of welcome) – not to speak of the potentially perennial feelings of alienation by unwelcomed individuals in their countries of asylum or resettlement. while refugees are objectified as the targets of abstract mappings and policy measures, what types of lived and practiced spaces are available for these displaced noncitizens in terms of their day-to-day emotional geography? often, but not necessarily, asylum seekers and refugees pose a marginalized role in a receiving society particularly upon their arrival. accordingly, many experience their lived space through largely negative emotions, which may lead to enclaved or secluded social existence and social or institutional mistrust (lyytinen 2017). as regards the practiced everyday space, beginning to live as an unprivileged non-citizen in an unfamiliar society cannot but entail frequent reminders of one’s outsiderness. apart from such bleak but often all-too-real prospects, we would like to suggest that both lived and practiced aspects of spatiality can play a key role not only in refugees’ exclusion, but also in their integration (munt 2012, 556). the essential question related to refugees’ reception and integration is how they can turn their precarious local existence into something positive, enhancing trust as the prerequisite for the processes of integration. given that a society’s “full members” hardly anywhere merely consist of bigoted cultural protectionists, but also include attitudinally mixed or wavering people as well as those who altruistically invest their time and emotions on refugees (see above), in fortunate circumstances, the accumulation of encouraging experiences can pave the way for refugees’ increased competence and practical involvement in the society’s spatial operating (cf. lefebvre 1974 [1991]). hence, we argue that it is largely through meaningful encounters in concrete places of emotional welcome by which the insecure and negative spaces can be transformed into “protection spaces” (lyytinen 2013). in such potentially empowering places, the fundamentally relational socio-spatial nature of welcome is evident: both the acts and feelings of welcoming and being welcomed can serve to strengthen sense of belonging and integration. despite living in exile, asylum seekers and refugees can for their part welcome the locals into meaningful dialogues and emotionally engaging relationships, particularly through sharing their bodily lived spatial narratives and biographical memories of cultural 122 fennia 196(1) (2018)reflections encounters. in our inevitably globalizing and multiculturalizing societies, the mutual sites of emotional welcome can in these ways gain in significance as the hubs of cultural mixing, creativity and job creation, or otherwise develop into active agents in local place-making, and in turn contribute to the progressive transformation of societies and people’s attitudes towards tolerance. as regards researchers’ roles in all this, we strongly agree with nick gill in that it is paramount that we, as researchers, are among voices that seek to contribute to making our societies more welcoming for people seeking safe spaces with new beginnings. resistance to unwelcome is a key to change. notes 1 this policy change, and the consequent political pressure, has had substantial impacts on the asylum decisions in finland ever since. in 2015, 86% of young iraqi asylum seekers received positive decisions on their asylum applications, whereas in 2017 79% of them received negative decisions (saarikkomäki et al. 2018). this dramatic proportional decrease cannot be solely explained by the amendments in the finnish aliens act. other institutional factors behind the negative asylum decisions include political pressure from the government and attempts to harmonise the national procedures of granting international protection with other nordic countries. thus, the shift from welcome to unwelcome has not only occurred in sipilä’s public statements and the implemented immigration policy in finland, but also on the transnational scale. references boccagni, p. & baldassar, l. (2015) emotions on the move: mapping the emergent field of emotions and migration. emotions, space and society 16 73–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.009 butler, c. (2012) henri lefebvre: spatial politics, everyday life and the right to the city. nomikoi: critical legal thinkers. routledge, abington. christou, a. (2011) narrating lives in (e)motion: embodied, belongingness and displacement in diasporic spaces of home and return. emotion, space and society 4 249–257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.06.007 davidson, j., bondi, l. & smith, m. (2005) emotional geographies. routledge, abington. finnish government (2015) the government action plan on asylum policy, 8.12.2015. finnish government, helsinki. <http://valtioneuvosto.fi/documents/10184/1058456/hallituksen_ t ur va p a ik ka p o lii t t in en _ to im en p i d eo hjelm a _ 0 812 2015+en . p d f/ 3e555cc4 a b 014 6 a f-9 cd 4 138b2ac5bad0/hallituksen_turvapaikkapoliittinen_toimenpideohjelma_08122015+en.pdf.pdf> foucault, m. (1990) the history of sexuality. volume 1. an introduction. translated by r. hurley. penguin books, london. gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.70040 lefebvre, h. (1974 [1991]) production de l'cspace [the production of space]. translated by d. nicholsonsmith. blackwell publishing, oxford. lyytinen, e. (2013) spaces of trust and mistrust: congolese refugees, institutions and protection in kampala, uganda. unpublished dphil thesis. school of geography, university of oxford, uk. ly y tinen, e. (2017) refugees’ journeys of trust: creating an analy tical framework to examine refugees exilic journeys with a focus on trust. journal of refugee studies 30(4) 489–501. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/few035 marshall, e., pinkowska, p. & gill, n. (2016) virtual presence as a challenge to immobility: examining the potential of an online anti-detention campaign. in turner, j. & peters, k. (eds.) carceral mobilities, 133–146. routledge, abingdon. mcdowell, l. & sharp, j.p. (1999) a feminist glossary of human geography. arnold, new york. merrifield, a. (2006) henri lefebvre: a critical introduction. routledge, abington. munt , s. r . (2012) journeys of resilience: the emotional geographies of refugee women. gender, place & culture: a journal of feminist geography 19 (5) 555 –577. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2011.610098 reuters (2015) finland's millionaire prime minister offers his home to refugees 6.9.2015 <https:// www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-finland-pm/finlands-millionaire-prime-minister-offershis-home-to-refugees-iduskcn0r507e20150906>. 27.04.2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.06.007 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/few035 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2011.610098 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-finland-pm/finlands-millionaireprime-minister-offers-his-home-to-refugees-iduskcn0r507e20150906 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-finland-pm/finlands-millionaireprime-minister-offers-his-home-to-refugees-iduskcn0r507e20150906 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-finland-pm/finlands-millionaireprime-minister-offers-his-home-to-refugees-iduskcn0r507e20150906 fennia 196(1) (2018) 123jani vuolteenaho & eveliina lyytinen russell hochschild, a. (1983) the managed heart: commercialization of human feeling. university of california press, berkeley. saarikkomäki, e., oljakka, n., vanto, j., pirjatanniemi, e., lavapuro, j., alvesalo-kuusi, a. (2018) kansainvälistä suojelua koskevat päätökset maahanmuuttovirastossa 2015–2017. oikeustieteellisen tiedekunnan tutkimusraportteja ja katsauksia 1/2018. turun yliopisto, turku. <http://www.utu.fi/ f i / y k siko t / la w/ tu t k imu s / ka t sa uk sia ja tu t k imu sra por t teja / d o cument s / ka nsa in va lis ta%20 suojelua%20koskevat%20paatokset%20maahanmuuttovirastossa%2022.3.2018.pdf> 26.04.2018. shields, r. (1999) lefebvre, love and struggle. routledge, london. suurpää, l. (2002) erilaisuuden hierarkiat: suomalaisia käsityksiä maahanmuuttajista, suvaitsevaisuudesta ja rasismista. nuorisotutkimusverkosto, helsinki. the washington post (2015) finland’s prime minister is offering his home to refugees 9.9.2015 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/09/09/finlands-prime-minister-isoffering-his-home-to-refugees/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.140ee78daa11>. 27.04.2018. vuolteenaho, j. (2001) työn lopun kaupunki. nordia geographical publications 30(3). vuolteenaho, j. (2010) uusliberalisaatio ja kaupunkityöttömyyden arki suomessa. alue ja ympäristö 39(2) 69–78. https://aluejaymparisto.journal.fi/article/view/64483 http://www.utu.fi/fi/yksikot/law/tutkimus/katsauksia-ja-tutkimusraportteja/documents/kansainvalista%20suojelua%20koskevat%20paatokset%20maahanmuuttovirastossa%2022.3.2018.pdf http://www.utu.fi/fi/yksikot/law/tutkimus/katsauksia-ja-tutkimusraportteja/documents/kansainvalista%20suojelua%20koskevat%20paatokset%20maahanmuuttovirastossa%2022.3.2018.pdf http://www.utu.fi/fi/yksikot/law/tutkimus/katsauksia-ja-tutkimusraportteja/documents/kansainvalista%20suojelua%20koskevat%20paatokset%20maahanmuuttovirastossa%2022.3.2018.pdf https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/09/09/finlands-prime-minister-is-offering-his-home-to-refugees/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.140ee78daa11 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/09/09/finlands-prime-minister-is-offering-his-home-to-refugees/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.140ee78daa11 https://aluejaymparisto.journal.fi/article/view/64483 28571_1_editorial.pdf our world is unarguably undergoing rapid changes. modifications are taking place in nature as well as in human societies at a rate perhaps faster than ever before in human history. climate change and globalisation are in the forefront of these transitions, and humankind is attempting to manage them using the mechanisms at its disposal (witness the recent cop-15 climate negotiations in copenhagen). in recent years, academia has also been involved in dramatic changes governed by both external and internal forces. global competition between academic institutions, scientific publishers, and to some extent even individual scientists is a strong contemporary tendency. however, many find it rather difficult to imagine that universities in one country would in real terms be competing with universities elsewhere. the idea of competition has been introduced by (largely domestic) funding agencies, who carefully follow various recently established ranking lists of universities and thereby give a monetary push or pull to the institutions depending on their ranking. current thinking widely nurses the idea of improving competitiveness by marrying academic research with business. in practice, science nowadays seems to be on a leash held by those who seem to be in thrall to economic forces at the exclusion of all else. we may, of course, consider that competition is a positive phenomenon making us work harder and better. although this may be the case, competition also brings about negative elements of looking for loopholes and – at worst – bending the rules. academia should be well above these matters or at least aspire to honesty and a critical perspective on society. echoes of this great academic transformation eventually reach faculties and individual disciplines, geography included. in many countries and universities, rather small departments of geography have been merged with other disciplines and/ or split between human and physical geography. this is again a controversial tendency. on the one hand, one may argue that we should not take any discipline for granted as being untouchable, but be open for innovations and new perspectives. therefore, should geography prove to be surplus to editorial: the last printed issue needs then let it go. on the other hand, academic disciplines do have generations-long traditions, which should not be sacrificed lightly at the mercy of short-sighted expediency, for example to effect cost savings in an economic recession. another controversial trend is the move towards interdisciplinary research practices, which geographers appear to be particularly well-equipped to tackle, as they have for long been working tightly together with other disciplines, while geography itself is also multidisciplinary across natural science, social science and the humanities. here geography, whatever the type of formal organisation into departments, schools and faculties, might prove more valuable than ever given its approach of attempting to understand complex spatial systems on various scales. indeed, geography is currently being re-invented in many different fora, for example in climate change studies, where human societies and natural environment are studied together. the key issue in the survival game of disciplines is that geographers succeed in demonstrating their importance and position in the field of learning. this we can only accomplish by highquality and relevant research and by researchbased teaching and supervision of students. the fact that geography still has a strong position in many countries’ school system is also backing up our educational role. as part of the academic transformation, scientific publishing is also witnessing vast changes. new, often trans-disciplinary or applied journals have emerged, published by large, professional publishing houses. citation indices are being used ever more widely in the assessment of research. small independent journals struggle for survival. indisputably, fennia, too, has been in turmoil in this respect, and we have had to look for alternative options of how to avoid extinction. we believe that we have found a successful strategy: this issue will be the last printed one, as from now on, fennia will only be issued digitally in an open access (oa) environment. hence, from now on, fennia can be found at http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/fennia/ index. although this final step may look like a sudden leap, the transformation from a standard printed journal to a digital one has been carefully considered over a few years’ time by the publisher, the finnish geographical society. fennia has been published since 1890 – a proud 120-year heritage that would be churlish not to acknowledge and applaud. but legacy alone does not legitimise the existence of a scientific journal. it has to be read widely and must attract high-quality, interesting manuscripts; in the long run, the two go naturally hand in hand. importantly, we should remember to label and justify our piece of research as geography in the publications we prepare, and continue to publish in geographical journals. another driving force towards oa has been the growing argument that scientific publishing should become less commercially-orientated and more readily accessible to a wider audience, for example, researchers in developing countries. turning to oa is an efficient way of improving visibility and granting free access to scientific results, and cutting down printing and mailing costs. in the contrary, however, by turning to oa the society will lose its former source of income from subscription fees. financial balance has now been achieved by a restructuration and marginal rise of the society’s membership fee. for an open access publication, there has to be a platform where the journal will be managed and published. in finland, a platform for oa journals has been established by the federation of finnish learned societies. the platform is based on a canadian freeware, open journals system (ojs), and currently there are some dozen journals on the system. there are many benefits of oa, for example, online submission of manuscripts. it would be wonderful if we could transform all printed issues since 1890 into digital form and make them available online. this would require a serious scanning exercise, but we shall definitely investigate this possibility in the future. another major change in fennia has taken place this year: the editorial board has been rejuvenated. the old board had been serving for many years and it was time to release the members from the duty and thank them for their services over the years. the new board consists of eight members covering a wide range of disciplinary expertise, who serve for a fixed three-year period, 2009– 2011. tom allen is a geographer specializing in coastal environmental analysis, gis, and remote sensing. his diverse research interests include coastal and estuarine landscape change, environmental hazards and geovisualization, medical geography, and remote sensing of the environment. previously, tom has worked extensively in montane and alpine environments and has enjoyed international collaborations with finland (fulbright scholar to university of turku) and working with new adopters of gis, ranging from environmental planners, coastal conservationists, public health and mosquito control technicians, and emergency managers. he is associate professor of geography and director of the renaissance center for coastal systems informatics and modeling at east carolina university, usa. jørgen ole bærenholdt is professor in human geography in the department of environmental, social and spatial change, (enspac), roskilde university, denmark. formerly, he served as professor at the department of planning and community studies, university of tromsø, norway. jørgen ole belongs to the cross-disciplinary research unit ‘space, place, mobility and urban studies’ (mospus) at roskilde university. research interests include culture, tourism, mobility, regional development and design research. among his 11 books are performing tourist places (2004 with haldrup, larsen and urry), coping with distances (2007, habil.) and mobility and place (2008, co-edited with granås). michael bradshaw is professor of human geography at the university of leicester, uk. his research is currently organised around two major themes: the territorial cohesion of the russian federation, and global energy dilemmas. these themes involve the interrelationships of issues such as energy security, globalization, economic transformation, regional change, sustainable development and climate change. michael has co-edited several books and is editor-in-chief (human geography) of geography compass and contributing editor of eurasian geography and economics. timothy carter is a research professor at the finnish environment institute (syke), helsinki with 30 years of research experience in the field of climate change impacts and adaptation. a geographer, he obtained a b.sc. from the university of london and ph.d. from the university of birmingham, uk. he has worked on climate change and agriculture, methods of impact and adaptation assessment, including scenario development, and climate change adaptation. he was a co-ordinating lead author in the intergovernmental panel on climate change second, third and fourth assessment reports, and currently serves as an editor of wires climate change and a review editor of climate research. bruce forbes is research professor at the arctic centre, university of lapland, in rovaniemi, finland. bruce has a background in applied ecology and geography in permafrost environments, with a phd in biogeography from mcgill university, canada. his research encompasses both the natural and social sciences. his experience over the past 25 years is circumpolar having conducted field studies of human impacts on vegetation and soils, with special emphasis on the consequences of petroleum development, in the boreal forest and arctic ecosystems of alaska, canada, western and eastern siberia, and fennoscandia. recent research has focused on management of arctic ungulates and linked social-ecological systems employing both western and local or practitioners’ knowledge in cooperation with nenets and sámi reindeer herders. hill kulu was trained in geography and demography and received his phd from the university of helsinki, finland, in 1997. since then hill kulu has occupied academic positions in estonia, usa and germany. since 2008, hill kulu is senior lecturer in population studies at the university of liverpool. hill’s major research areas are family, fertility and migration studies; he has applied multilevel and multiprocess event history models in demographic research. his current research focuses on the spatial aspects of family and fertility dynamics in various european countries, particularly in northern europe. he is co-editor of european journal of population. helle skånes is assistant professor in ecological geography at the department of physical geography and quaternary geology, stockholm university, sweden. she has a phd in geography, especially physical geography, from stockholm university. her research experience covers the dynamical interface between physical geography, human geography and ecology using remote sensing techniques, gis and cartography. the main focus of her research is on spatio-temporal changes in the rural landscape and their implications for biodiversity on a landscape level. anssi paasi has been professor of geography at the university of oulu in northern finland since 1989. he serves currently as an academy professor in the academy of finland (2008–12). his theoretical and empirical research has dealt with political boundaries, territoriality, regionalism, region-building processes, and spatial identities. he has published on these topics extensively in international geographical and political science journals and edited book collections. he has been the editor of the political geography section in the international encyclopaedia of human geography, and is co-editor of progress in human geography. this team of board members has already proved to be proactive and effective, and it is with excitement and great expectations that we now close the era of printed versions for fennia and step into the digital world with open access to the publication. we hope to see you there! jukka käyhkö editor urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa49319 doi: 10.11143/49319 the russian far north – a landscape in transition the russian far north is constantly changing with respect to natural as well as socio-economic conditions. larger temperature and precipitation changes than elsewhere in the world are predicted for this region (ipcc 2013). it includes most of the northern eurasian tundra biome with its abundance of small lakes and extents into the taiga forest transition zone. a large proportion is underlain by permanently frozen ground causing specific geomorphological processes at the surface. the russian far north is also rich in natural resources, especially oil, gas and ores. their extraction requires the development of infrastructure and movement of workers over long distances. local and distant but connected communities have been confronted with these changes for several decades, what lead inevitably to transitions. current geographical research deals with these changes and their local impact as well as connections within russia and globally. especially the yamal peninsula has been studied for several decades. industrial development has led here to land cover changes as revealed by satellite data (kumpula et al. 2011, 2012). the development of a crater-like hole drew worldwide media attention to this region in summer 2014. leibman et al. (2014) argue that this feature is a result of increasing temperatures and especially the recent occurrence of comparably warm years. this special issue of fennia brings together the research results of natural as well as socioeconomic changes in the russian far north. these developments are tightly connected with the rest of the world and are thus of high interest beyond this specific research community. this special issue has evolved from a workshop organized as part of the austrian-russian joint project cold yamal financed by the austrian science fund and the russian foundation for basic research (i 1401-n29 and 13-05-91001ah8 a) which aims to advance our knowledge on landscape dynamics in permafrost regions with focus on yamal. its concept has been further developed within the framework of the recently founded austrian polar research institute which fosters the interdisciplinary activities and international cooperation of austrian researchers in polar regions. two papers of this volume discuss the impact of natural resources and their exploitation on communities. four papers deal with permanently frozen ground on the yamal peninsula and related geomorphological processes at the surface. leibman et al. review 25 years of geomorphological research of the russian academy of science and the tyumen state oil and gas university on yamal. a framework for long term measurements has been established already in the 1980s. data gathered contribute to the global terrestrial network of permafrost. “vaskiny datchi” is one of 200 calm (circumpolar active layer monitoring) sites and more than 800 thermal state measurement locations around the world. it however stands out due to its long records within the russian far north. measurements on active layer depth are available for already more than 20 years. the data show a depth increase during this period. recent analyses have also included measurements available from satellites. cryogenic landsliding is a widespread phenomenon on the central yamal peninsula. it has been shown to be related to subsurface properties such as temperature and moisture content. three papers provide further insight and present new research results. khitun et al. bring together expertise in botany and geomorphology in order to shed light on the process of cryogenic landsliding and its impact on landscape development as well as the ground thermal regime. so far unknown spatial and temporal patterns can be revealed with this method. dvornikov et al. investigate the relationship between snow cover and the ground thermal regime. the role of vegetation is quantified using a combination of field survey and gis (geographic information system) analyses. results undermine the need of precise digital elevation models (dems) for permafrost modelling. such data are however only available from ground surveys with sufficient detail although dems can be derived from satellite data over larger regions. the suitability of such datasets for the study of land surface hydrology is assessed by trofaier et al. the drainage network is analyzed for central yamal and discussed with respect to the abundant seasonally inundated areas. it is suggested that further research is needed in this context with respect to the landsliding in this region. 2 fennia 193: 1 (2015)annett bartsch the role of natural resources for communities in the russian north is discussed by saxinger as well as suutarinen. saxinger exemplifies the way people are enmeshed with oil and gas resources and the extractive industry. the focus is on commuters coming to the north from as far as the black sea coast region. these workers from the south have incorporated the north into their social space. suutarinen studies the development on the kola peninsula in the context of natural resource extraction. mining, specifically iron ore processing is of high importance in this region. he seeks to explain how the current use of natural resources restrains the sustainable socio-economic development of resource communities. this special issue highlights the aspects of both human as well as physical geography in a region of rapid change and global importance although generally considered as remote. annett bartsch, austrian polar research institute and central institute for meteorology and geodynamics, vienna, austria. e-mail: annett.bartsch@ polarresearch.at references ipcc 2013. climate change 2013: the physical science basis. contribution of working group i to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. cambridge university press, cambridge and new york, ny. kumpula t, forbes bc, stammler f & meschtyb n 2012. dynamics of a coupled system: multi-resolution remote sensing in assessing social-ecological responses during 25 years of gas field development in arctic russia. remote sensing 4:4, 1046– 1068. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rs4041046. kumpula t, pajunen a, kaarlejärvi e, forbes bc, stammler f 2011. land use and land cover change in arctic russia: ecological and social implications of industrial development. global environmental change 21: 2, 550–562. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.12.010. leibman mo, kizyakov ai, plekhanov av & streletskaya id 2014. new permafrost feature – deep crater in central yamal, west siberia, russia, as a response to local climate fluctuations. geography, environment, sustainability 7: 4, 68–80. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa40867 doi: 10.11143/40867 communicating climate change – learning from business: challenging values, changing economic thinking, innovating the low carbon economy katharina kaesehage, michael leyshon and chris caseldine kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon & chris caseldine (2014). communicating climate change – learning from business: challenging values, changing economic thinking, innovating the low carbon economy. fennia 192: 2, pp. 81–99. issn 1798-5617. the risks and opportunities presented by climate change for small and medium sized enterprises (smes) have been largely overlooked by previous research. the subsequent lack of knowledge in this field makes it difficult for smes to engage with climate change in a meaningful, profitable, and sustainable way. further, current research cannot explain why smes rarely engage with climate change. we examine critically 30 smes, which engage with climate change knowledges and 5 innovation-support-organizations (isos) that communicate climate change knowledges. over a three-year period we explore why and how these businesses approach the knowledge gap between climate change science and business practice, drawing on a variety of ethnographic research methods: (1) in-depth semi-structured and open interviews; (2) participant observations; and (3) practitioners’ workshops. the results demonstrate that business’ mitigation and adaptation strategies are lay-knowledge-dependent, derived from personal values, space, and place identity. to enhance the number of smes engaging with climate change, maximize the potential value of climate change for the economy and establish a low carbon economy, climate change communication needs to target personal values of business leaders. the message should highlight local impacts of climate change, the benefits of engagement to (the local) society and economy, and possible financial benefits for the business. climate change communication therefore needs to go beyond thinking about potential financial benefits and scientific evidence and challenge values, cultures, and beliefs to stimulate economic, political, and social frameworks that promote values-based decision-making. keywords: united kingdom, climate change, communication of science, business values, low carbon economy, ethnographic research katharina kaesehage, michael leyshon & chris caseldine, college of life and environmental sciences, university of exeter, treliever road, penryn tr10 9ez, united kingdom. e-mail: k.kaesehage@exeter.ac.uk purpose: learning from businesses the risks and opportunities presented by climate change for small and medium sized enterprises (smes)1 have largely been overlooked by previous research. questions of how to communicate climate knowledge to smes have remained unanswered and consequently make it difficult for smes to engage with climate science in a meaningful, profitable, and sustainable way (cf. goodall 2008). contemporary research exploring the relationship between smes and climate change is very limited and does not adequately explain how businesses understand and interpret climate issues (cf. hoffman 2004, 2006; hart 2007, williams & schaefer 2013). the purpose of this paper therefore is to redress this imbalance by studying how business leaders of smes understand climate change and make climate change relevant to their individual decision-making. although it is difficult 82 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine to draw a definite distinction between intended and actual engagement as well as between climate change and broader environmental issues, we investigate the intentional engagement of business leaders with climate change only (cf. corner et al. 2014). the study therefore investigates smes across sectors that are prepared to engage with the risks and potentials of climate change. this is an important approach because a lack of innovation is often a result of looking too much to organizations that are wedded to current systems instead of looking to organizations that do things differently (christensen et al. 2006). engagement with climate change refers to any behaviour a business associates with climate change and does not distinguish between mitigation and/ or adaptation, as ”both synergies and trade-offs exist between adaptation and mitigation options” but neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can prevent climate change related impacts (ipcc 2007: 61). importantly, this investigation does not seek to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of mitigation and/or adaption actions that individual businesses adopt. instead, the sole focus is to understand the ways in which business leaders of smes make-sense of, and engage with, climate change within their business. to unpick this diverse and individual engagement it is the sense-making of climate change, which shapes and is shaped by the actual engagement (geoghegan & brace 2011), on which this study focuses. we only pay attention to (for-profit) smes because they are crucial to mitigate and adapt to climate change and initiate behaviour change among society: 99.9% of united kingdom’s (uk) 4.9 million private sector businesses are smes employing 59% of the employed population (bis 2013). businesses are said to be substantially linked to the uk’s total greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions; estimates link up to 50% of the uk’s ghg emissions to businesses (rajgor & malachowsk 2005). the purpose of this study is to: (1) explore how business leaders of smes across sectors conceptualize climate change to bring it within the decision-making process. (2) discover the factors that trigger business leaders to engage with climate change. (3) investigate how these motivations suit the current socio-economic system(s) and influence subsequent decision-making. we will now outline the climate change and business challenge in respect to the extant literature and then explain the variety of ethnographic research tools we used to explore why and how smes approach the knowledge gap between climate change science and business practice. the findings are structured in three sub-sections: firstly, we will demonstrate that climate change is a future issue, which the majority of ‘engaged smes’ have not yet materially been impacted by, making it difficult for business leaders to construct a link between possible future impacts of climate change and current economic activities; secondly, we will show that personal values of participating business leaders trigger engagement with climate change on behalf of their businesses; and thirdly, we will show that climate change is an ethical debate over values and culture (cf. hoffman 2012), which does not easily fit with current socio-economic and geopolitical systems. we conclude that to enhance the number of smes engaging with climate change, maximize the potential value of climate change for the economy and establish a low carbon economy, climate change communication needs to target personal values of business leaders. the message should highlight local impacts of climate change, the benefits of engagement to (the local) society and economy, and possible financial benefits for the business. climate change communication therefore needs to go beyond thinking about potential financial benefits and scientific evidence and challenge values, cultures, and beliefs to stimulate economic, political, and social frameworks that promote values-based decision-making. committed business leaders provide a valuable way to address such issues. the climate change and business challenge even though climate change is primarily a physical phenomenon, most recently defined as ”a change in the state of the climate that can be identified … by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period …. … due to natural internal processes or external forcings” (ipcc 2013: 1450), it is a highly politicised issue that potentially has significant ramifications for the future lives of individuals (boykoff et al. 2009). individuals ”can’t directly sense” climate change (sarewitz & pielke 2000: 56) as it is a fennia 192: 2 (2014) 83communicating climate change – learning from business... scientific episteme to express a wide variety of physical processes. the effects of climate change though will have material consequences for human systems (ipcc 2013). stern (2006: vi) estimates that, based on a variety of formal economic models, “the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5%” and up to 20% “of global gdp each year”. the potential impact of climate change on the economy is considered by porter and reinhardt (2001: 3) who state: ”periodically, major new forces dramatically reshape the business world – as globalization and the information technology revolution have been doing for the past several decades. climate change, in its complexity and potential impact, may rival them both.” hoffman (2004) suggests these developments will force companies to reassess their overall strategy from capital resources to business culture so that they are in a position to mitigate climate-related costs and risks of ”shifting temperature and weather patterns, and … regulations that increase the cost of emissions” (porter & reinhardt 2007: 3). the social nature of businesses combined with their fiscal resources means they are often better positioned than governments or societies to mitigate and adapt to climate change (hart 2007). the risks and opportunities posed by climate change to businesses, as well as their responsibilities as major greenhouse gas emitters and potential changemakers, have been a focus of recent research (cf. reinhardt & o’neill packard 2001; hoffman 2004; hart 2007; porter & reinhardt 2007; patenaude 2011; koomey 2012). however, businesses rarely concern themselves with these issues (hart 2007; goodall 2008; global compact 2010; patenaude 2011). for example, more than 70% of global executives do not have emission targets (enkvist & vanthournout 2008) yet a survey by axa showed that 50% of businesses view a move towards a low carbon economy as important (carbon neutral 2013). these businesses however often fail to take action (rajgor & malachowski 2005). smes are estimated to have a greater carbon saving potential than larger businesses, and could collectively save up to 2.5 million tons of co2 per year in the uk (eco-monitor 2013). yet many smes do not recognize this potential (carbon neutral 2013). research on business engagement has demonstrated how companies find it difficult to engage with environmental issues (cf. tilley 1999; vernon et al. 2003; jenkins 2006; revell & blackburn 2007; battisti & perry 2011; cassells & lewis 2011). tilley (1999) for example identified poor eco-literacy and environmental awareness as major obstacles to pro-environmental practices. parker et al. (2009) as well as cassells and lewis (2011) suggest that smes are unable to engage with long-term environmental concerns because they have to be present-oriented. hillary (2004) identified internal barriers, such as resources, understanding, and company culture, as well as external barriers, such as lack of support and guidance, as factors that hinder engagement with environmental issues. a study conducted by vernon et al. (2003) on the tourism industry in cornwall showed that small businesses feel that their environmental impact is negligible due to their size (cf. also cassells & lewis 2011; wilson et al. 2012), indeed smes are largely unaffected by environmental regulation (cf. carter 2007; visser & adey 2007). additionally, owner-managers of smes often pass their environmental responsibility on to the government (cassells & lewis 2011). revell and blackburn (2007) and tilley (1999) describe this as a value-action-gap in which owner-managers of smes believe that the environment is important, but choose not to act. actions around wider corporate social responsibility (csr) are often associated with individual executives, and their personal values, beliefs, and attitudes (aragón-correa et al. 2004; kerr 2006; visser & crane 2010). these findings are not particularly surprising as shareholder, management, and ownership are closely related in smes, and business operations can therefore reflect the characteristics of the owner-manager (vives 2006). williams & schaefer (2013) most recently showed that managers of smes are driven by personal values and beliefs to engage with environmental and climate change related issues. although smes struggle to engage with environmental issues, it is however important to note that it is widely accepted that businesses are dependent on a healthy society, while society is dependent on well-functioning businesses to contribute to a prosperous economy through identifying ”the particular set of societal problems that it is best equipped to help resolve and from which it can gain the greatest competitive benefit” (porter & kramer 2006: 14). 84 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine although the precise reasons for the lack of business engagement with climate change are currently poorly understood, we can infer three general trends in the climate change literature that point to a value-(in)action-gap. first, climate change is a difficult concept to understand, indeed scientific interpretations and terminology are perceived as complex. climate change knowledges produce time-space temporalities that position the issue as a problem of somewhere else (geoghegan & brace 2011). second, climate change knowledge is perceived as a political project rather than a scientific discourse and thereby lacks credibility (hoffman 2012). finally, business scholars are unaware of the nature and extent of potential climate change (reinhardt & o’neill packard 2001; goodall 2008; patenaude 2011). these broader issues influence business leaders’ perceptions of climate change. conceptualisations of climate change appear to instil an intellectual doubt about the purpose of individual action (patenaude 2011: 267), as timescales of climate change projections are too distant for people to perceive it as an issue of individual importance (houghton 2009; geoghegan & brace 2011). the void between the impact of an individual’s actions and the issue of climate change can invoke feelings of being overwhelmed and helpless (norgaard 2003). to resolve this, curtis and schneider (2001) suggest that spatially specific information is needed on the vulnerability of specific population groups to allow them to think more specifically about climate change. yet as hoffman (2012: 37) explains, even though a scientific consensus may exist – for example on the health risks associated with smoking – it is ”through a process of political, economic, social, and legal debate over values and beliefs, a social consensus” will arise. knowledge of an issue alone does not lead to behaviour change (cf. hulme 2009). instead climate change understanding is shaped by lay knowledge, ”by the associations of the climate in everyday lives …” and are ”circulated – modified by a perhaps tangential, infrequent, incomplete, partial encounter with ‘science’” (geoghegan & brace 2011: 294). geoghegan and brace (2011: 295−96) call for a more open understanding of climate change, to set ”aside the relatively deterministic understandings of climate and the ways it might change offered by the natural sciences” allowing an understanding of ”how it might be grounded and localized through the concept of familiar – embodied, practised and lived”. as individuals ”do not have a set of socially accepted beliefs on climate change” (hoffman 2012: 32), any attempt to understand and interpret climate change knowledge requires a thorough ”political, economic, social, and legal debate over values and beliefs” through which social consensus emerges (hoffman 2012: 37). social consensus is contingent upon shared mutually constituted understandings around an event or series of issues. hoffman (ibid.) suggests that individuals are rationally bounded through their own personal experiential ideology, which is formed by their personal belief systems. debates surrounding climate change are therefore not based solely on the reception, interpretation, and understanding of scientific evidence, but also on the production of personal values, ideologies, and culture. values are often considered a ”guiding principle in the life of a person” or presenting an ”abstract set of moral principles” to only show some of the “multiple conceptions of human values that exist across these multiple literatures” (corner et al. 2014: 412-413). corner et al. (2014: 418) conclude that clusters of values around self-transcendent and altruistic ideas ”are strongly predictive of positive engagement with climate change”. hoffman and jennings (2012) state that such ‘ideological filters’ are being ignored in climate change debates, and hoffman (2010) further suggests that climate change-related policies should target the way business leaders think and how their values could be changed. he thinks that there needs to be a shift in the values that guide our decision-making more widely in society and not just in businesses. critiques of personal value systems are evident in the work of both rorty (1989) and glass (1993). hekman’s (1999: 19) interpretation of rorty’s contingency, irony and solidarity suggests that ”embracing a non-essentialist position need not cause any problems for the coherency of individual actions”. more specifically, rorty (1989) argues that beliefs – referents of an individual’s ideological position – are the organising foundations of regulatory regimes that determine actions, “even if those who hold them are aware that they are caused by nothing deeper than contingent circumstances” (hekman 1999: 19). individuals therefore formulate belief systems they believe to be stable, solid, and truthful to themselves, which can be affirmed by everyday actions and not necessarily founded on contingent scientific interpretations of future climate scenarios. individuals act on the basis that they know a deep self, which in turn is fennia 192: 2 (2014) 85communicating climate change – learning from business... predicated on firm and believable interpretations of the world around them. it is for some of these reasons, where underlying “culturally embedded assumptions, imaginations, and practices” occur, that climate change communication can never be ”effective communication per se” but only offer an opportunity for someone’s “own logic of participation” (nerlich et al. 2010: 106−107). patenaude (2011) and goodall (2008) suggest that the business community is not treated as an audience of interest, while climate change equally is neglected by business schools. patenaude (2011) found that climate change issues are not addressed in business schools, which create future business leaders who are climate illiterate. goodall (2008) discovered that leading business journals fail to address climate change in their articles: only three out of the top-30 management journals listed in isi web of knowledge addressed climate change or global warming in article titles during the 1992– 2008 period inclusively. businesses replace climate change with environmental issues that are directly experienced and, consequently, perceived as more important (reinhardt & o’neill packard 2001: 3; goodall 2008; patenaude 2011; wolf & moser 2011): ”while many companies may still think of global warming as a corporate social responsibility issue, business leaders need to approach it in the same hard-headed manner as any other strategic threat or opportunity.” instead, engagement with climate change is considered by many businesses as a matter of csr. the idea of csr is to enable businesses to meet the expectations and needs of a society whilst making a profit (carroll 1991; loew et al. 2004). however, porter and reinhardt (2001: 1-2) point out that climate change is too ”tangible and certain” to be addressed by such a philanthropic approach. they suggest a strategic approach, allowing mitigating climate change-related costs and reducing vulnerability to the effects of climate change, is needed. method this study examines critically over a 3-year time period 30 smes across sectors in cornwall, uk, which engage with climate change knowledge and 5 innovation-support-organizations (isos)2 which communicate climate change knowledge. cornwall, a county in the south west of the uk (fig. 1) with a population of about 537,400 (sqw 2012), was together with the isles of scilly classified as an ‘objective one’ region by the european union (eu) in 2000 (cornwall council 2013). cornwall therefore received significant support through eu convergence funding until 2013, which led to the current 2014 eu growth programme. 25,495 of the 25,540 value-added tax (vat) and/or pay as you earn (paye) based enterprises in cornwall were classified as smes in 2012, of which 84% had four or less employees3 (office of national statistics 2012). the majority of cornish businesses are active in agriculture, forestry and fishing, retail, construction as well as accommodation and food services, sectors, which are closely linked to the natural environment. this can be explained by the county’s natural resources and attractions: cornwall has a coastline of 697 km and the majority of its landscape is classified as an ”area of outstanding natural beauty” (aonb) (cornwall council 2011). cornwall is expected to experience an increased frequency of changes in temperature and precipitation (murphy et al. 2009). under a medium emissions scenario, the central estimate of increase in winter mean temperature in the south west by 2050 is 2.1 °c; it is very unlikely to be less than 1.1 °c and is very unlikely to be more than 3.2 °c (ibid.). under the same scenario, the central estimate of increase in summer mean temperature in the south west by 2050 is 2.7 °c; it is very unlikely to be less than 1.3 °c and is very unlikely to be more than 4.6 °c. relative sea-level at newlyn (cornwall) is expected to increase with respect to 1990 by 24.5 cm by 2050 according to the medium emissions scenario (ukcp 2009). to identify smes in cornwall that engage with climate change, an actor-network approach was taken. the researchers therefore took part in a variety of formal and informal business networks and climate change related business events. we also conducted open interviews with key informants on the general business infrastructure and climate change activities of businesses and isos in cornwall. this actor-network approach served as a tool to gather an overview of the local climate change and business community identifying key issues and knowledge, therefore establishing ”a preliminary research net” (crang & cook 2007: 17). knowing to whom we would gain access was therefore unpredictable and scheduling the data collection in advance was very difficult. this ”controlled opportunism” allowed evolving research where research is non-linear and data collection and 86 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine theory are not separate (eisenhardt 1989: 539). a few selected smes were also contacted directly due to their known reputation to be engaging with climate change. the participating smes are therefore from across sectors and vary in size, from one-person micro businesses to businesses with up to 250 employees. 30 business leaders and 29 representatives from government and isos participated in the study. this allowed us to: (1) explore climate change knowledge from the communication and business side alike; and (2) uncover the complex construct around climate change formed by individual experiences and social processes (see also eisenhardt 1989; winchester & rofe 2010; hulme 2011; hoffman 2012). this approach revealed norms, power structures, and expectations in this societal context (dowling 2010), and emphasized the relational reality of business decision-making in smes through looking at the ”own logic of participation” of businesses (nerlich et al. 2010: 107). to answer the research questions we draw on empirical evidence derived through qualitative research methods of: (1) in-depth semi-structured and open interviews; (2) participant observations; and (3) practitioners’ workshops. this paper mainly draws on the qualitative research data derived from the semi-structured interviews and open interviews. we explore why and how smes approach the gap that exists between climate change science and business engagement grounded in the diverse literature of climate change science communication and business studies. the semi-structured and open interviews focused on: (1) the understanding of business leaders of climate change knowledge; (2) sense-making of this knowledge to allow decision-making; and (3) the reasons for the engagement with climate change. we used open fig. 1. location of cornwall. fennia 192: 2 (2014) 87communicating climate change – learning from business... questions to allow participants to speak about issues not necessarily addressed by the interview questions and to emphasize issues that they perceived as important. the semi-structured interviews therefore allowed us to understand the reality of climate change and business as perceived by the participants. transcripts and field notes were initially sorted into different themes according not only to the research questions but also according to themes the participants and observations had identified. the themes were then analysed in respect to the business characteristics and the business environment. after the data were coded within their respective themes, we used content analysis to look into the research questions in more detail. after having received a first impression of the data through mapping the answers into different themes and subthemes in excel, we established a detailed content analysis. climate change as a future issue our qualitative research undertaken identified that the physical impacts of climate change are a future concern for smes. the majority of ‘engaged smes’ have not yet materially/physically been impacted by climate change; however, the business leaders construct a current link between possible future impacts of climate change, economic activities and well-being. only two from 30 interviewed smes state that their businesses have experienced physical climate change impacts. one of the business leaders of these two businesses explains that her hotel is located at the edge of a beach on the north coast of cornwall, and experienced severe flooding to one of their main buildings during a storm event. she explains: " … because of where we are on this beach we are completely at the mercy of the weather. it impacts us so much that we can’t escape climate change. …. our … restaurant on the beach got washed away a few years ago in a massive storm. we had just finished refurbishing it and then had a really big storm with a really high tide and it took it out completely. it was devastating. we lost that and a big chunk of our business and then had to rebuild it. obviously the insurance for that is now very different to what it was. if that would happen again we couldn't afford to rebuild it.” (ay.h., business leader, interviewed in 2012) this business leader makes sense out of climate change through interpreting what she believes climate change could be whether or not it might just be natural climate variability. extreme storm events are attributed to climate change and enable the business leader to develop an understanding of what this climate change would mean for their future business activities. what this business leader describes here as engaging with climate change is often understood as being able to cope with e.g. environmental external stresses and thus becoming resilient to future stresses (gallopín 2006). the quote also displays that the sme experienced financial costs such as the expense of rebuilding flooded property or having to pay higher insurance premiums, but also experience the ‘un-situated’ climate change risks (hulme et al. 2009: 201) in a very specific, local, and individual shape. physical climate change impacts give smes a specific way of knowing this “messy, non-linear and diffuse” (boykoff et al. 2009: 1) issue and at the same time triggering specific future fears. a storm event gives business leaders an idea of how this “critical yet unexamined” (geoghegan & brace 2011: 291) future might look as not only policies, intermediaries or scientists ”beat a path through events still to come” (fish 2009: 2−3). although the other 28 interviewed smes indicate that they had not materially experienced climate change, they explain that they can see climate change as being relevant to them in the future through impacting socio-economic systems: ”climate change may affect us where the wheat crops are growing because we need it for our process. if we can’t get it, that will affect us. our head brewer definitely looks at these things. prices get affected. they have to buy years ahead.” (rn.f., business leader, interviewed in 2012) most participants go on to explain the links they can see between their business and the natural environment. this business leader for example understands climate change through his business practices and how these are placed in the environment: ”our business is very aware of climate change and the impact it can have on our local environment and on the things that so many of our customers come to visit us; the beaches, the green grass for walking, enjoying the area around. there was an article on bbc today that people love being by the seaside and that it improves wellbeing. that's one of the reasons people come to us; be88 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine cause we can give this experience. if we don't take care of our environments then people won’t come back for it. it keeps us a business and we are very linked with our environments, our surroundings and the impacts of climate change whether it’s drought or rise in sea level.” (ce.b., business leader, interviewed in 2012) it is clear that even businesses that have not materially experienced climate change can still make the link between possible impacts of climate change and business continuity. whether or not a storm event or change in crop growth is actually connected to climate change is irrelevant for these decision makers. business leaders create their own understanding of what climate change is and could be, where the exact definition of this largely physical phenomenon does not play much of a role. the actual sense-making processes create a form of life for climate change. this is a description that stems from wittgenstein (1958), who explains that words find their meanings through use within a societal setting and are not in need of a precise definition. these businesses reassess their business operations regardless of specific known impacts and instead treat climate change similar to an innovation that is important to take without knowing specific outcomes, an ability many businesses lack, as hoffman (2004) suggests. these findings also show that for these smes mitigation and adaptation strategies on climate change shape and are shaped by lay knowledge, which go ”beyond science as a community of practice and scientists as the producers and arbiters of a particular kind of knowledge” (geoghegan & brace 2011: 293), and that the actual encounters with climate change are very context-dependent, complex, and diverse. it also confirms geoghegan and brace ’s (2011: 297) assumption that climate change is ”a relational phenomenon that needs to be understood on a local level, attending to its distinctive spatialities and temporalities” (geoghegan & brace 2011: 297). our findings suggest that knowing climate change goes beyond knowing scientific facts and is instead ”constructed through memory, observation and conversation” (leyson & geoghegan 2012: 64). most businesses view climate change more as an opportunity to prepare for the unknown than a risk, while placing climate change in the wider complexity of socio-economic system(s). the data also suggest that especially businesses that do not fear the direct material force of climate change have more opportunistic and positive associations with climate change. businesses in our study view climate change as a futurity that might impact the business indirectly through growing energy prices, changing supply, and demand conditions. the participants refer to how they have adapted their business models to the possible future implications of climate change. this business leader explains how he envisions the future: ”when we made this place, we designed it to be used in a number of ways. we might have refugees and not tourists in the future.” (cs.j., business leader, interviewed in 2012) he also explained how he deals with these ”distant futures” (geoghegan & brace 2011: 292): “there is a massive gap between understanding the world for what it is and what you would like it to be. we don't have a crystal ball. the things that we would really like to know, nobody can ever tell us. when will we have a good summer, or from where can we import things in the future? so it’s more about enforcing the things that we know about – reduced availability of resources and working around that. that should make you more resilient to impacts of climate change.” (cs.j., business leader 2012) we can see here that businesses confront climate change and make it their ‘own’ to fit decision-making processes, business strategies, and worldviews. climate change engagement it about how making the change in the climate relevant to someone’s everyday decisions. lewontin (1992: 86) describes such approaches as having a “constructionist view of life”; business leaders and their organizations “construct their environment out of bits and pieces” (ibid.) as organisms do in order to be able to cope with the complex, ever-changing, and uncertain nature of climate change. business leaders act similarly to this to be able to adapt to the changing environment through imagining futures while accepting that the science is incomplete. another business leader explicitly expresses that even though they have not been materially impacted by climate change he still engages with it. ”climate change hasn't impacted us. …. scientists can measure it but as normal human beings we would have to experience climate change. it requires a certain leap of faith and insight to actually be able to say that this is how the world is going to be in 50 years time. but it’s difficult for us. the simple thing for us to understand is that if you keep using stuff, it will run out.” (sn.t., business leader & government worker, interviewed in 2012) fennia 192: 2 (2014) 89communicating climate change – learning from business... he continues to express what some other business leaders have expressed in the interviews: business leaders whose businesses are not directly dependent on the natural environment believe that often the market with its customers does not yet demand a business to mitigate, and/or adapt to, climate change, but should do and soon will do. “customers do not demand the green agenda in tourism. it doesn't really make a difference to customers. …. we think we should and put resources into it. there is no demand now, but we think it is an investment in the future. after customers have been to one of our houses they might be more aware next time. …. then there is a commercial driver in the future.” (sn.t., business leader & government worker, interviewed in 2012) this shows that even though climate change has not “manifested itself physically yet” (leyson & geoghegan 2012: 57) for most business leaders climate change can encompass high current relevance. the above data show business leaders connect diverse issues with climate change not commonly understood as climate change related: crop growth, insurance premiums, electricity costs, environmental assets. they link these to (risk) planning, profitability, and economic costs but perceive climate change as a future issue, less of a current concern, more as an opportunity than a threat. these results contradict norgaard’s (2006) findings, which suggest that people avoid thinking about climate change as it makes them feel helpless, guilty, and threatened. wilson (1997) links information behaviour to social cognitive theory, where selfefficacy determines behaviour, derived from the field of psychology. he refers to bandura (1977: 193) who states that ”the strength of people's convictions in their own effectiveness is likely to affect whether they will even try to cope with given situations”. he therefore hypothesizes “that one of the motives for information-seeking is to gain information to improve one's self-efficacy in coping with problems of whatever kind”. the businesses examined in the study might feel that they have enough self-efficacy to engage with climate change. placing this in relation to their personal values on climate change means then that their situation and identity do not negatively relate to their ”standard of living. …. to recognize greenhouse gases as a problem requires us to change a great deal about how we view the world and ourselves within it” (hoffman 2012: 33). it also shows that they create lay knowledge on climate change through their imagination of how reality ought to be. the findings emphasise that having the capability to mitigate and/or adapt to climate change, in this case through the engagement of the businesses, creates a positive and opportunistic outlook on climate change. this confirms rogan et al.’s (2005) findings that people feel satisfied, encouraged, and experience positive self-esteem about themselves and climate change when having been involved in environmental conservation or restoration experiences. climate change is primarily a future issue, the importance of which can already be understood and lead to engagement in the present. engagement due to personal values 97% of the participating business leaders indicate that their initial trigger to make climate change relevant to the business is related to their personal values. the following business leader explains why he started engaging with climate change: ”i guess it was personal interest and personal conviction which kind of span out to have business benefits as well. …. initially it was my personal interest but the more you get into it the more you see the business benefit.” (mk.p., business leader, interviewed in 2012) his personal interest in climate change triggered his initial engagement and then created a business benefit. most other business leaders show very similar links between their initial engagement and their personal values. these findings show that personal values determine decision-making in smes and that engaged business leaders fulfil their role as leaders, which dunphy et al. (2007: 322) describe as being a “…source of influence in a complex changing reality. nevertheless let us not underestimate the potential; transformative power that we represent”. this supports recent research that too often business literature and current climate change communication assume self-interested, profit-maximizing individuals lead businesses (cf. hoffmann & jennings 2012; corner 2014). instead, decision making on climate change is strongly linked to individuals. the following business leader explains the closeness between personal values and decision-making in smes: 90 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine “there are more and more personal convictions (driving business decisions). smaller businesses have that flexibility. a director of a small business can take that business with him, whereas a bigger business finds that difficult.” (ty.s., representative from an iso, interviewed in 2012) these findings provide evidence that some people invest in supporting pre-existing beliefs (hoffman 2012) when engaging with climate change. however, personal convictions of participating businesses leaders are only the initial trigger and financial aspects do play a role. one of the business leaders explains this. he believes that engaging with climate change requires a business leader to be opportunistic and can only be driven by personal values: ”i think it’s one of those issues that, to make it part of your core business, you have to be very passionate about it. unless people find that passion they won’t see the relevance. it is really down to personal passion for such an issue. making that bolt move to have it part of your business…can be quite difficult. people don't see the relevance and care for it. …. i think it’s personal interest and financial sense. .... we would not have built our hotel in the way it is if sustainability had not been a key passion for the directors and a vision to future proof ourselves.” (ay.h., business leader, interviewed in 2012) another business leader explains that often engagement with climate change does not immediately create benefits for the business, but that through his engagement driven by his personal interest business benefits were created: “in terms of how that works with our business is that, in some respects, it doesn't. it’s something that i was just really interested in – looking at how we can become more sustainable as a company. but from that, it actually created business opportunities for us. …. it was something that we wanted to do because we felt like we should be doing it. it’s given us business benefits at the same time. so to begin with it was my own conviction, …. i guess it was personal interest and personal conviction which kind of span out to have business benefits as well.” (mk.p., business leader, interviewed in 2012) personal convictions allow business leaders to be opportunistic/innovate beyond what they would normally practise. only later does this behaviour yield financial benefits. kotter (2001) however suggests leaders often fail to cope with change because they feel powerless. norgaard (2006) similarly suggests that people avoid thinking about climate change as it makes them feel helpless, guilty, and threaten their individual and collective sense of identity. the helplessness expressed in our study is less related to the personal level, but more to problems of understanding climate change science, accessing, and translating information. there is here no evidence for a value-action-gap between engagement of smes and the values of business leaders. one of the few studies on the motivations of sme leaders to engage with climate change has also shown that the decision to engage with climate change through business practices is due to personal values (williams & schaefer 2013). business leaders often derive their personal interest in climate change related issues through personal experiences. this business leader explains: ”when i grew up, there were hardly any trees around here. it really would not grow. it was so windy, and so much salt in the air. the climate has certainly changed. the predominant winds are no longer so much from the south west. they are much more variable and it is amazing for me to see what is growing around here where there wasn't very much at all. i think that is quite noticeable. we all know that we are getting much more weather extremes as well. some of the rainstorms. you get so much rain.” (in.d., business leader, interviewed in 2012) in the family-run smes of our study the business leaders are able to ‘experience’ climate change, which ”is difficult to grasp” due to “… an accumulation of data over a timeframe that is perhaps a generation in length” (geoghegan & brace 2011: 291). this is due to the fact that through running a business over several generations business leaders are able to ‘experience’ climate variability as it has perhaps impacted the business in the past. experiences and knowledge passed down through generations, enable businesses to overcome the immediate timescales of human behaviour to grasp climate change as an issue of individual importance (cf. hulme et al. 2009; geoghegan & brace 2011). the business leader continues: ”i guess i’ve been interested in energy, insulation, and climate change since i was a student. my dad started this business, now i run it and even my son works here.” (in.d., business leader, interviewed in 2012) fennia 192: 2 (2014) 91communicating climate change – learning from business... this business leader describes here what leyshon and geoghegan (2012: 58) term a ”familiarity with place” that results from ”a daily encounter with” climate change. to construct climate change through remembering and imagining the past in relation to a particular place is similar to rogan et al.’s (2005) findings that people use places as reference points to the past to understand the environment. business leaders from family-run smes feel very attached to the business and their local community. it is part of their identity to take care of the environment and society around them. these smes have the ability/advantage to conceptualize climate change as a potential threat to their business activities, self and space overcoming the disproportion of ”scale between climate change and individual actions” (patenaude 2011: 267) and the much discussed feeling of helplessness. for these ‘engaged smes’ imagining the future poses less of a problem as they are able to overcome the ”inability to conceptualize time beyond the periodic frame of our own lifetimes, or even a generation, and to imagine distant futures in which the climate might be altered” (geoghegan & brace 2011: 292) via imagining an infinite lifetime for the business. these suggestions are confirmed by similar statements from other business leaders: ”i fell into it because i was a corporate finance lawyer and one client was one of these climate change businesses. suddenly it clicked. i was always fairly aware. ….. but then i had small children and suddenly i was doing something for which i could use my discipline and expertise and actually believe in it. it made more sense. …. i have a more generic interest in sustainability that comes from me living down here for 30 years, amongst a community where i bring up the next generation of two daughters who might want to do the same job.” (ke.a., business leader, interviewed in 2012) some other business leaders draw a link between business engagement, education and intergenerationality. this business leader for example describes how his peer-businesses are driven by the personal values and education of individuals: ”… it's the responsibility of the owner of the business. it comes down to if the owner believes climate change is an important part. i think in cornwall there are many of those because they see it. somebody like tom for example has a strong belief in being involved in lots of different things. he enters it at the strategic level and then tells his staff. so rather than taking his staff of the core business he’ll do it and then rely on his core business to be run by staff. if tom is concerned about climate change, then how does he influence change? …. personal choice and personal decision play a major part! if you change the structure of a business then education is probably as important. how important is climate change? that’s based on education.” (aw.w., business leader, interviewed in 2012) the business leader explains that engagement with climate change is linked to individual businesses leaders and their values. additionally, their personal interest is linked to previous education on climate change. for another business leader it is however the changes in the environment that he perceives and experiencing with those changes that allow engagement: ”i see the changes and i respond to them on a small level but also through my own experience. trying plants in certain areas. in a way i’m doing my own primary research. i’m an environmental business.” (me.w., business leader, interviewed in 2012) our findings therefore support hulme et al.’s (2009: 197) belief that climate change finds its form through experiences, social learning, and cultural interpretation, and emphasises that its actual meaning is ”informed by emotion, memory and a sense of place that comes in part from familial ties” (leyson & geoghegan 2012). such business leaders have lay knowledge on climate change accumulated over generations and enabling development of a personal and individual understanding of climate change, not just in terms of time but also local space. this allows business leaders to imagine this social, unexperiencable construct of climate change over ”past, present and future” (leyson & geoghegan 2012: 59). the data show that personal values and experiences are important to understand climate change while also constructing determinants on whether or not to let climate change play a role in decision-making processes. interestingly, several studies have previously shown that people struggle to follow up personal values on climate change (cf. kollmuss & agyeman 2002; whitmarsh et al. 2011). tilley (1999) demonstrates that owner-managers of small firms struggle to follow up environmental attitudes with environmental practices. she suggests that it is difficult for businesses to associate business practice with environmental damage, but that more importantly a conflicting message on envi92 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine ronmental solutions causes this gap. for our research however participant’s values lead to action. our continuous interaction with the business leaders over a three-year period showed that the majority of business leaders demonstrate true commitment to, and action on, these values. the business leaders regularly take part in climate change related business meetings, attend climate change related events by isos, and actively develop mitigation and adaptation actions within their businesses. of the 30 participating businesses, 86% mitigate climate change through, for example, using renewable energies, waste management, and/ or giving employees incentives to reduce their work related carbon footprint. 97% of the businesses adapt to climate change by adjusting, and/ or developing new products and services, and 90% of the businesses also communicate the need for mitigation and adaptation strategies to the local communities, other businesses and their employees. this importance of personal values for climate change engagement is emphasized by the intergovernmental panel on climate change’s (ipcc) latest integration of philosophers within its panel. the philosopher broome (bbc 2013; see broome 2012) stated recently in a bbc radio 4 interview that integrating values in the climate change debate challenges the basis on which to argue as it raises moral questions. for some smes the choice between profit and climate change starts with a moral one. why do some smes decide to ignore climate change? one could suggest that they simply have the wrong values, because values, according to broome, see that there might be a disadvantage to someone or something else through e.g. emitting carbon (cf. bbc 2013). personal values and experiences in respect to the communication and engagement of climate change have rarely been considered in studies of business engagement with climate change. hoffmann and jennings (2012) point out that the main route to engage businesses with climate change is through pricing carbon, based on the principle of ‘homo economicus’ ignoring issues on decision-making or values. our findings presented here criticize this type of climate change communication, which traditionally presents climate change on premises that: first, smes understand climate change in absolute terms instead of through individual and very personal narratives; second, smes are institutions mainly driven by pure profit maximization; and third, lessons learned from other disciplines on behaviour change or climate change communication are irrelevant. the findings further confirm existing criticism that ideas on business engagement with climate change are too scientific (hoffman 2004; goodall 2008). we suggest that climate change must be brought to businesses through creative ideas and addressing values and beliefs. the background of the business leader can therefore explain this personal conviction as many of the interviewed business leaders show the following characteristics: (1) a strong feeling of identity to a specific location/region; (2) being educated about and aware of the relevance of climate change; (3) the ability to experience and conceptualize climate change beyond our own lifetime through the lifespan of the business. business engagement with climate change within current socio-economic systems while the above findings show that personal values of businesses leaders can trigger engagement with climate change on behalf of businesses, business leaders struggle to manifest those values within the current socio-economic system(s). more than half of the interviewed business leaders discuss greater societal concerns when being questioned on climate change engagement. this business leader explains that his company aims to create a better world: “my business has a very strong social objective and that is to make the world a better place. … and the environment is a very important part of that. … it’s not just about dealing with the issue as a global warming issue, it’s about looking at things like the motivations in people’s lives.” (rt.w., business leader, interviewed in 2012) climate change is seen as connected to other societal and economic choices people make. the business leader explains that he views climate change as an issue interconnected to how he sees himself and his interests: ”i’ve been interested in climate change for years; actually about 10 years. i’m very interested in w. f. schumacher. so that got me thinking many years ago about choosing more for less and that we are living on an unsustainable path. i’m very interested in environmental issues. i tend to see it as a social issue.” (rt.w., business leader, interviewed in 2012) fennia 192: 2 (2014) 93communicating climate change – learning from business... most of the other business leaders also stress their awareness of the link between business success, society, and the environment. another business leader explains that he aims to create social change through his climate change engagement. he tries to stimulate adaptation and mitigation activities in the wider business community and society (cf. hoffman 2012). ”the main idea with our company is our passive activism. the way we engage with climate change allows our clients to open their eyes a bit more to the idea that they could make a difference. …. we talk about climate change but actually it’s about social change as well. understanding what you are part of.” (mt.h., business leader, interviewed in 2012) these two business leaders emphasised an understanding of the embeddedness of businesses within both society and the natural environment. this fits with the growing belief that businesses are responsible for, and dependent on, a healthy society. participating smes show that they want to create physical, social, as well as mental well-being (sangmeister 2009), while aiming to create profits that simultaneously raise the quality of life (brundtland 1987; hart 2007). the quotes also express the desire of the business leaders to be responsible citizens. engagement with climate change allows them to do so and endorse their personal identity. most of the participating business leaders express a need for change in the uk’s culture on consumption and tackling climate change. this participant expresses: ”i think we are uneducated. we don't seem to approach things. i had quite a lot to do with germany – friends, skiing, etc.. i did pick up a feel for the way younger people were thinking about climate change. it’s sad that our society is not at all interested in this.” (in.d., business leader, interviewed in 2012) the data indicate that business leaders believe climate change is not accepted/integrated in the current political and economic system(s) due to the uk’s culture and society. this business leader sees an important responsibility for changing political and economic system(s) coming from society through changing values: ”i think, it’s culture. …. we want more and buy more and actually the way our society functions is fuelled by credit. … we’ve got this culture to work really hard for reward and then we spend all of it; play hard. that is not sustainable. it’s not the key to happiness. the key to happiness is probably to be more resourceful. …. but we don't get that in our country. …. what needs to happen is for communities and businesses driving it forward. …. we are talking about businesses and communities. everyone. …. climate change is exactly the same.” (rt.w., business leader, interviewed in 2012) while he explains that society has an important framing role for political and economic framework(s), some business leaders go on to request a shift in the country’s culture. this business leader explains the urgent need for a culture change which should be driven by businesses and governments alike: ”i think there are a lot of small businesses who want to be more responsible and when those companies grow that will bring a culture change. we have to change how we are doing business. it will be ripples from bottom to top, top to bottom, until it’s all mainstream.” (ce.r., business leader, interviewed in 2012) the above show that engagement with climate change is difficult for smes due to the current way businesses are thought to behave and the political and economic system(s) in which they are embedded, despite their desire to protect the economy and society. for these business leaders climate change has entered their belief system, something hoffman (2012) raises in his article ‘climate science as culture war’, where he (ibid.: 33) points out that climate change really is a debate over “values, worldviews, and ideology” and suggests (ibid.: 32) that people adopt a view on issues, that ”reflect their identity, worldview, and belief systems” to reinforce the connection with their referent groups and to strengthen their definition of self. the evidence from our interviews presented here suggests that the wider belief system of individual business leaders reinforces the engagement with climate change. in the case of cornwall where economic actors emphasise the importance of personal relationships and where, according to this business leader, “a sense of place …” exists and, “… businesses go into things naturally”, the informal and formal networks of personal relationships encourage such a climate change belief system. these ‘engaged smes’ have managed to establish “a set of socially accepted beliefs on climate change; beliefs that emerge, not from individual preferences, but from societal norms” (hoffman 2012: 32) around them. climate change en94 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine gagement and the associated communication should be connected with a sense of place and the wider (business) community. rogan et al. (2005) support this claim through their study on the relationship between sense of place and a changing natural environment. they found that there is a growing sense of responsibility towards the local environment especially when people can link the place to family experiences. this sense of belonging brings a sense of responsibility leading to engagement with the environment, which then fulfils people’s own goals (rogan et al. 2005). our findings deliver new insights that climate change is an ethical debate over values and culture, something that must be learned, not only for the communication of climate change, but also the modelling of climate scenarios and scientific debates about geoengineering. this shows signs of a long needed change to realize more long-term and meaningful mitigation and adaptation to climate change, something jackson (2009) describes as ”prosperity without growth”, criticizing the current model of economic success based on ”relentless consumption growth” (jackson 2009: 489) making combating climate change impossible, while calling for a more “sophisticated form of capitalism” (porter & kramer 2011: 12). business leaders that engage with climate change have a high responsibility for the environment and society due to being in a leadership position wanting to “do business while doing good”. conclusion and recommendations this paper has addressed the lacuna of work on how business leaders of smes conceptualize climate change and how their understanding of climate science influences their decision-making and business practice. this research approached the topic from the perspectives of smes and in particular focused on how they understand and make sense of climate change. methodologically this enabled us to gather context-dependent insights into why some businesses manage to engage with climate change. through this we examined critically geoghegan and brace's (2011: 297) request for a more relational approach towards climate change “that needs to be understood on a local level, attending to its distinctive spatialities and temporalities”. the study illustrates that business leaders’ mitigation and adaptation strategies are shaped through their personal lay knowledge on climate change and do not appear to be formulated through interpreting specific scientific knowledge and/or business reasoning. this occurs for two main reasons, first, climate change decision-making is often predicated upon an individual’s identity and value systems (these are often elided in the business studies literature), and second, decision-making is focused on wealth creation for the business. in this paper we have demonstrated that climate change is a(n) (un)known futurity for smes. business leaders conceptualize climate change through both imaginative and experiential lenses positioning their businesses in relation to past and future existence(s) (geoghegan & brace 2011). those business leaders who believed they had the capability to make a difference to climate change had a more positive and opportunistic outlook towards adapting to potential change. in this way, climate change is a very individual, sense-making process for businesses. business leaders understand and situate climate change within personal values and belief systems to produce their own personal lay knowledge of climate change, which in turn influence their decision-making. glass (1993) provides perhaps the single most important critique of the way value systems are constructed. he argues that they are not fragmented, ruptured, fluid or forever in the process of becoming, as this is predicated on disorientation, disembeddedness, rootlessness, and sense of being incomplete. instead, glass makes a strong case for the unity of self-knowledge as a necessary requirement for leading any version of a good and satisfying life. a stable value system for glass (1993: 48) is necessary because it enables individuals to locate themselves in the world: ”it defines emotional and interpersonal knowledge; it frames the self in a historical and situational context”. glass’s research usefully draws attention to the idea that individuals must necessarily experience themselves as a coherent entity, historically located, and contingent, but enduring through time. this coherent self allows them to place themselves in context, to cope with the contingencies of existence, such as climate change. importantly, we argue that the production of climate change knowledge is in itself not radically contingent, but rather a referential frame within a contingent world. this understanding of how climate change science is understood by business leaders is fundamentally at odds with deficit models of knowledge exchange, i.e. without changing individuals’ value systems we should not expect climate knowledge to be absorbed and enacted upon. hence causal reasons for fennia 192: 2 (2014) 95communicating climate change – learning from business... business engagement with climate change are lay knowledge dependent and these knowledges are derived from personal values, space, and place identity. we introduced the concept of an ‘engaged sme’ to represent those organisations which voluntarily foster and encourage further engagement with climate change issues. our findings suggest that business engagement with climate change is primarily a function of company directors pursuing their own personal value systems rather than a response to climate change science per se. smes do not need to consistently hear about the latest climate change science. to enhance the number of smes engaging with climate change, to maximize the potential value of climate change for the economy and establish a low carbon economy, climate change communication instead needs to target the personal values of individuals. business leaders in our study suggest that this can be achieved in four interrelated ways: first, by focusing attention on climate change impacts at a regional level, second, drawing attention to potential “feel good factors”, meaning the benefits to (the local) society and economy, third, raising awareness of the potential financial benefits that might accrue to the business if they mitigate or adapt to climate change, and finally, improving the facilitation of knowledge sharing activities amongst smes. it could be argued that the relatively small research sample of 30 business leaders limits the wider relevance of these research findings, but due to the lack of literature on business decision-making and climate the study does deliver interesting and important insights into this unexplored field. the use of a qualitative research approach may involve researcher subjectivity; this was addressed through a continuous interaction with the business leaders by monitoring business meetings, conducting interviews with communicators that work with the participating businesses, and by triangulating various different research tools. this has allowed a much deeper engagement with individuals actively involved in the business community. the lack of prior studies in this research field means that direct comparison to previous findings is absent and hence there is a possibility that the specific conditions that apply to cornwall preclude wider applicability of the findings. however, there appear to be no obvious reasons why similar businesses elsewhere in the uk or indeed europe should have radically different characteristics. by concentrating on engaged businesses it has been possible to establish just what it is that drives these businesses to take an active interest in climate change, and by doing so we have shown that attempts to involve a wider range of businesses is very unlikely to be successful by concentrating on trying to communicate the science per se, or improving the ‘quality’ of the science that is available. the research reported here demonstrates that business understanding of climate change emerges around transient understandings and knowledge exchanges. climate change scientists as well as climate change intermediaries do not need to communicate climate change science to smes but instead need to comprehend the value-driven audience of smes. in our study, sme business leaders interviewed here pursue strategies to safeguard economic, ethical, and philanthropic expectations of themselves and their organisations, something largely unrecognized and consequently ignored despite reflecting the true cultural characteristics of this business audience. climate change communication therefore needs to go beyond thinking about potential financial benefits for smes and pursue hoffman’s (2012: 32) sense that ”we must acknowledge that the debate over climate change, like almost all environmental issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews, and ideology”. to create formal and informal knowledge making by smes requires a shift in emphasis in scientific communication strategies by marrying ”governmental topdown frameworks and goals” ”with local geographies and ‘bottom-up’ local desires and aspirations” (moir & leyshon 2013: 1020). climate change communication needs to be more aware of individual audiences (cf. o’neill & hulme 2009) and acknowledge that climate change science is as much a discussion about values, cultures, and beliefs as it is about modelling climate variability. to inculcate climate change communication into popular culture and belief systems requires, hoffman (2012: 6) argues, “a violent debate among cultural communities on one side who perceive their values to be threatened by change, and cultural communities on the other side who perceive their values to be threatened by the status quo”. too often climate change is still seen purely as a scientific debate, where climate science is being misappropriated as an economic and political instrument (cook et al. 2013). instead a progressive space for discussion and dialogue on climate change needs to be opened up in which socially informed and value96 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine laden knowledge can be exchanged, because ultimately political regulation does not depend on governments alone but rather on consensual agreement (hulme 2009). the examination of sme business leaders carried out here demonstrates that this is possible and that such leaders could have an important role to play over the next few years. notes 1smes are defined as “enterprises which employ fewer than 250 persons and which have an annual turnover not exceeding eur 50 million, and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding eur 43 million”’ (eu commission 2003: 39). 2 ‘innovation-support-organizations’ are seen as intermediaries who are crucial for the development and innovation of businesses and can be especially designed to communicate climate change knowledge “or organizations which perform this function in addition to other activities” (kaufmann & tödtling 2001: 801). 3 according to the eu commission (2003: 39) ”an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 persons and whose annual turnover and/or annual balance sheet total does not exceed eur 2 million” is defined as a microenterprise. acknowledgements this work was supported by the european union through the european social fund. we acknowledge with thanks the participating cornish businesses and all other study participants, especially business leaders for low carbon, cornwall council, and cornwall sustainable tourism project. the authors would also like to thank professor catherine leyshon, dr. kirsten abernethy, and philipp grunewald for early discussions leading to the publication of this manuscript. references aragón-correa ja, matias-reche f & senise-barrio me 2004. managerial discretion and corporate commitment to the natural environment. journal of business research 57: 9, 964–975. http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/s0148-2963(02)00500-3 . bandura a 1977. self efficacy: towards a unifying theory of behavioural change. psychological review 84: 2, 191−215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037//0033-295x.84.2.191. battisti m & perry m 2011. walking the talk? environmental responsibility from the perspective of small-business owners. corporate social responsibility and environmental management 18: 3, 172−85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/csr.266. bbc 2013. pm. coverage and analysis of the day's news. bbc radio 4. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039q5fc> 13.09.2013. bis (department for business, innovation and skills) 2013. statistical release. business population estimates for the uk and regions 2013. bis, london. boykoff m, goodman m & curtis i 2009. cultural politics of climate change: interactions in the spaces of the everyday, environment, politics and development. working paper series. department of geography, king’s college, london. broome j 2012. climate matters: ethics in a warming world. w.w. norton & company, london. brundtland gh 1987. our common future. report of the world commission on environment and development. to the general assembly as an annex to document a/42/427, development and international co-operation, environment. united nations, new york. carbon neutral 2013. smes can quickly achieve business benefits from carbon management, the carbonneutral company. <http://www.carbonneutral.com/knowledge-centre/company-blog/ smes-can-quickly-achieve-business-benefits-fromcarbon management/> 22.09.2013. carroll ab 1991. the pyramid of corporate social responsibility: toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders. business horizons 34: 4, 39−48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0007-6813(91)90005-g. carter n 2007. the politics of the environment: ideas, activism, policy. cambridge university press, cambridge. cassells s & lewis k 2011. smes and environmental responsibility: do actions reflect attitudes? corp. soc. responsible and environmental management 18: 3, 186−199. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ csr.269. christensen cm, baumann h, ruggles r & sadtler tm 2006. disruptive innovation for social change. harvard business review 84: 12, 94-101. cook j, nuccitelli d, green sa, richardson m, winkler b, painting r, way r, jacobs p & skuce a 2013. quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. environmental research letters 8: 2, 1–7. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024. corner a, markowitz e & pidgeon n 2014. public engagement with climate change: the role of human values. wires climate change 5: 3, 411422. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wcc.269. cornwall council 2011. connecting cornwall: 2030. moving towards a green peninsula. evidence base. cornwall council, truro. cornwall council 2013. cornwall and isles of scilly lep looks forward to next round of european funding. cornwall council. <http://www.cornwall.gov. uk/default.aspx?page=34230> 15.02.2014. fennia 192: 2 (2014) 97communicating climate change – learning from business... crang ma & cook i 2009. doing ethnographies. sage, london. curtis k & schneider a 2001. understanding the demographic implications of climate change, estimates of localized population predictions under future scenarios of sea-level rise. population and environment 33: 1, 28-54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11111-011-0136-2. dowling r 2010. power, subjectivity, and ethics in qualitative research. in hay i (ed). qualitative research methods in human geography, 26−39. oxford university press, oxford. dunphy dc, griffiths ab & benn sh 2007. organizational change for corporate sustainability. routledge, london. eco-monitor 2013. uk smes can save £400 million a year through carbon footprint reduction and certification. eco-monitor. <http://www.ecomonitor. com/uk-smes-can-save-400-million-a-yearthrough-carbon-footprint-reduction-and-certification/> 17.02.2014. eisenhardt km 1989. building theories from case study research. academy of management review 14: 4, 532−550. enkvist pa & vanthournout h 2008. how companies think about climate change. mckinsey quarterly 2: 46−51. eu commission 2003. commission recommendation 2003/361/ec of 6 may 2003 concerning the definition of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. official journal l 124 of 20.05.2003. fish r 2009. minimal futures: narrating space-time determinacy in the public policy domain. working paper. omni consulting, davis, ca. gallopín gc 2006. linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity. global environmental change 16: 3, 293–303. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.02.004. brace c & geoghegan h 2011. on climate change and cultural geography: farming on the lizard peninsula, cornwall, uk. climatic change 113: 1, 55−66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-0120417-5. glass jm 1993. shattered selves: multiple personality in a postmodern world. cornell university press, ithaca. global compact 2010. global compact – international yearbook 2010. macondo media group, muenster. goodall ah 2008. why have the leading journals in management (and other social sciences) failed to respond to climate change? journal of management inquiry 17: 4, 408-420. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1056492607311930. hart s 2007. capitalism at the crossroads. aligning business, earth, and humanity. pearson education, new jersey. hekman s 1999. feminism, identity and difference. frank cass publishers, ilford. hillary (ed.) r 2004. environmental management systems and the smaller enterprise. journal of cleaner production 12: 6, 561−569. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2003.08.006. hoffman a 2004. climate change strategy, the business logic behind voluntary greenhouse gas reductions. working paper no. 905. university of michigan, michigan. hoffman a 2006. getting ahead of the curve: corporate strategies that address climate change. the pew centre on global climate change, arlington. hoffman a 2010. climate change as a cultural and behavioural issue: addressing barriers and implementing solutions. organizational dynamics 39: 4, 295−305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2010.07.005. hoffman a 2012. climate science as culture war. stanford social innovation review 10: 4, 30−37. hoffman a & jennings p 2012. the social and psychological foundations of climate change. solutions 4: 3, 58−65. http://www.thesolutionsjournal. com/node/1130. houghton j 2009. global warming. the complete briefing. cambridge university press, cambridge. hulme m 2009. why we disagree about climate change. understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity. cambridge university press, cambridge. hulme m 2011. meet the humanities. nature climate change 1: 4, 177−179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ nclimate1150. hulme m, dessai s, lorenzoni i & nelson dr 2009. unstable climates: exploring the statistical and social constructions of normal science. geoforum 40: 2, 197−206. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.010. ipcc 2007. climate change 2007: synthesis report. cambridge university press, cambridge, united kingdom and new york, ny, usa. ipcc 2013. climate change 2013: the physical science basis. contribution of working group i to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. cambridge university press, cambridge, united kingdom and new york, ny, usa. jackson t 2009. industrial ecology in europe beyond the growth economy. journal of industrial ecology 13: 4, 487–490. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2009.00151.x. jenkins h 2006. small business champions for corporate social responsibility. journal of business ethics 67: 3, 241−256. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551006-9182-6. kaufmann a & tödtling f 2001. science-industry interaction in the process of innovation: the importance of boundary-crossing between systems. research policy 30: 5, 791−804. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0048-7333(00)00118-9. 98 fennia 192: 2 (2014)kaesehage, katharina, michael leyshon and chris caseldine kerr ir 2006. leadership strategies for sustainable sme operation. business strategy and the environment 15: 1, 30−39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bse.451. kollmuss a & agyeman j 2002. mind the gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior? environmental education research 8: 3, 239−260. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504620220145401. koomey jg 2012. cold cash, cool climate: sciencebased advice for ecological entrepreneurs. analytics press, burlingame, ca. kotter jp 2001. what leaders really do. harvard business review 79: 11, 85-96. lewontin rc 1992. biology as ideology: the doctrine of dna. harperperennial, new york. leyson c & geoghegan h 2012. human geographies of climate change, landscape, temporality, and lay knowledges. progress in human geography 35: 3, 284−302. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132510376259. loew t, ankele k, braun s & clausen c 2004. significance of the csr debate for sustainability and the requirements for companies. institute for ecological economy research hmbh iow, berlin. moir e & leyshon m 2013. the design of decisionmaking: participatory budgeting and the production of localism. local environment 18: 9, 1002−1023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839 .2012.752798. murphy jm, sexton dmh, jenkins gj, booth bbb, brown cc, clark rt, collins m, harris gr, kendon ej, betts ra, brown sj, humphrey ka, mccarthy mp, mcdonald re, stephens a, wallace c, warren r, wilby r & wood ra 2009. uk climate projections science report: climate change projections. met office hadley centre, exeter. nerlich b, koteyko n & brown b 2010. theory and language of climate change communication. wires climate change 1: 1, 97–110. http://dx. doi.org/10.1002/wcc.2. norgaard km 2006. we don’t really want to know; environmental justice and socially organized denial of global warming in norway. organization and environment 19: 3, 347−370. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1086026606292571. norgaard km 2003. denial, privilege and global environmental justice, the case of climate change. centre for development and the environment, oslo. o’neill sj & hulme m 2009. an iconic approach for representing climate change. global environmental change 19: 4, 402−410. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.07.004. office of national statistics 2012. regional statistics. office of national statistics (2012). <http:// www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/regional-statistics/ index.html> 02.02.2013. reinhardt f & o’neill packard ko 2001. a business managers’ approach to climate change. in claussen e, cochran va & davis dp (eds). climate change, science, strategies, and solutions, 269−279. brill academic publishers, leiden. parker cm, redmond j & simpson m 2009. a review of interventions to encourage smes to make environmental improvements. environment and planning c 27: 2, 279−301. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1068/c0859b. patenaude g 2011. climate change diffusion: while the world tips, business schools lag. global environmental change 21: 1, 259−271. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 6 / j . g l o e n v cha.2010.07.010. porter me & kramer mr 2006. strategy and society. the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility. harvard business review 84: 12, 78−92. porter me & kramer mr 2011. the big idea. creating shared value. how to reinvent capitalism − and unleash a wave of innovation and growth. harvard business review 89, 1, 1−17. porter me & reinhardt fl 2007. grist: a strategic approach to climate. forethought. harvard business review 85: 10, 22–26. rajgor g & malachowsk l 2005. climate change. how uk businesses can benefit by reducing carbon emissions. director publications ltd, london. revell a & blackburn r 2007. the business case for sustainability? an examination of small firms in the uks construction and restaurant sectors. business strategy and the environment 16: 6, 404−420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bse.499. rogan r, o’connor m & horwitz p 2005. nowhere to hide: awareness and perceptions of environmental change, and their influence on relationships with place. journal of environmental psychology 25: 2, 147−158. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2005.03.001. rorty r 1989. contingency, irony and solidarity. cambridge university press, cambridge. sangmeister h 2009. entwicklungszusammenarbeit im 21. jahrhundert. ein überblick (in german). nomos, baden-baden. sarewitz d & pielke ra jr 2000. breaking the global warming gridlock. [electronic version]. the atlantic monthly, july, 54−64. stern n 2006. the economics of climate change: the stern review. cambridge university press, cambridge. sqw 2012. cornwall and isles of scilly lep: strategy and business plan evidence base papers: 1 – headline economic indicators. sqw, london. tilley f 1999. the gap between the environmental attitudes and the environmental behaviour of small firms. business strategy and the environment 8: 4 238−248. ukcp 2009. uk climate projections user interface. ukcp09. <http://ukclimateprojections-ui.metoffice. gov.uk/ui/admin/login.php> 18.02.2014. vernon j, essex s, pinder d & curry k 2003. the greening of tourism micro-businesses: outcomes of focus group investigations in south east cornfennia 192: 2 (2014) 99communicating climate change – learning from business... wall. business strategy and the environment 12: 1, 49−69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bse.348. visser w & adey m 2007. policy dialogue on sustainability: a new model – the case of the corporate leaders group on climate change. cambridge programme for sustainability leadership paper series 3. cambridge university, cambridge. visser w & crane a 2010. corporate sustainability and the individual: understanding what drives sustainability professionals as change agents. < h t t p : / / s s r n . c o m / a b s t r a c t = 1 5 5 9 0 8 7 > 17.02.2014. vives a 2006. social and environmental responsibility in small and medium enterprises in latin america. the journal of corporate citizenship 2006: 21, 39−50. http://dx.doi.org/10.9774/gleaf.4700.2006.sp.00006. williams s & schaefer a 2013. small and medium sized enterprises and sustainability: managers’ values and engagement with environmental and climate change issues. business strategy and the environment 22: 3, 173–186. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ bse.1740. wilson cdh, williams id & kemp s 2012. an evaluation of the impact and effectiveness of environmental legislation in small and medium-sized enterprises: experiences from the uk. business strategy and the environment 21: 3 141−156. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1002/bse.720. wilson td 1997. information behaviour: an interdisciplinary perspective. information processing & management 33: 4, 551−572. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0306-4573(97)00028-9. winchester hpm & rofe mw 2010. qualitative research and its place in human geography. in hay i (ed). qualitative research methods in human geography, 1−25. oxford university press, oxford. wittgenstein l 1958. philosophical investigations. basil blackwell, oxford. whitmarsh l, seyfang g & o'neill s 2011. public engagement with carbon and climate change: to what extent is the public 'carbon capable'? global environmental change 21: 1, 56−65. http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.07.011. wolf j & moser sc 2011. individual understandings, perceptions, and engagement with climate change: insights from in‐depth studies across the world. wiley interdisciplinary reviews – climate change 2: 4, 547-569. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ wcc.120. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa41327 doi: 10.11143/41327 growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports olli-pekka hilmola hilmola, olli-pekka (2014). growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports. fennia 192: 2, pp. 100–119. issn 1798-5617. nearly the entire european trade of finland is being executed through short sea shipping connections to estonia, sweden and germany. earlier the most important connections were to sweden and germany, but during estonia’s new independence era, volumes to this alternative direction have increased considerably, and are continuously growing (time alone is good proxy for growth). this cannot be said for transport flows to sweden, and germany also holds high uncertainty. based on the findings of this research, it is argued that estonian connection growth was caused by different factors. one important factor was european union membership in the year 2004. it should be emphasized that this was stepwise and was realized a decade ago. the main influence is that of the development of bulky trade. as measured in weight, both export and import of finland with estonia was found to be significant. however, in monetary terms only finnish imports from estonia was statistically significant. finnish exports in turn to estonia in value terms have contributed a negative effect (or even being insignificant). as the regression model was expanded, taking into account all three baltic states and poland, reliable additional findings couldn’t be drawn. completed regression analysis shows that the explanation power of gdp based models became much lower after the years 2005–2006. keywords: short sea shipping, estonia, finland, growth, regression olli-pekka hilmola, lappeenranta university of technology, kouvola unit, prikaatintie 9, fin-45100 kouvola, finland. e-mail: olli-pekka.hilmola@lut.fi introduction in the european union truck based transportation chains are still dominating (woxenius & bergqvist 2011; morales-fusco et al. 2012), and market shares as well as volumes have increased in the emerging east european markets (baltic states, see buchhofer 1995; kovacs & spens 2006; hilmola 2011). this has hardly changed after the economic crisis of 2008-2009 (hilmola 2011). railways have captured some share from e.g. container markets with dry port configurations (roso et al. 2009; rodrigue & notteboom 2012), but the competitiveness of rail services are still lacking behind trucks in the general cargo segment. this is mostly explained with the total lead time of transportation service, but railways are also having cost competitiveness problems over shorter distances (reis 2014). furthermore, railways lack the required flexibility as demand changes within short windows of time. short sea shipping connection is important for bulky low value exports to ensure that near-by countries could be reached within a short lead time and appropriate transportation cost level. however, even from a relatively short distance the cost disadvantage is often significant. recent research results report that end product distribution costs from finnish paper mills are tenfold compared to central europe and their locally producing paper mills (hämäläinen 2011). due to globalization and competition arising from low cost countries, manufacturing in europe has been hurt and therefore transportation logistics has emerged as one of the key components of the remaining and established factories (e.g. asian transplants, nieuwenhuis et al. 2012), but also as a vital part of the distribution and packaging operations of imported items (baker 2007). it is interesting to note that e.g. between england and france freight volume forecasts made before the inauguration of the channel railway tunnel in the fennia 192: 2 (2014) 101growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports mid 1990s were the only ones, which were somewhat reliable over the following decades (anguera 2006). passenger transport forecasts did not hold true due to a number of reasons (e.g. end of duty free sales). currently between england and france the channel tunnel and ro-ro/ro-pax operations of sea vessels simultaneously exist, and actually some cross ownership could be identified between the channel tunnel and short sea shipping (groupe eurotunnel 2013). the situation is similar in the development of the research environment of this study, short sea shipping between finland and estonia (without a tunnel). times have changed, and numerous industries have been offshored from the region, but general cargo transports by short sea shipping still continue to exist and grow. of course short sea shipping between countries within the european union does not only serve these respective two countries, but a larger hinterland area behind the sea port. in the case of finland and estonia, one third of trucks with semi-trailers have a cargo destination or origin outside of these two countries (studies made by interviewing truck drivers in 2005 and 2012; tapaninen & räty 2012). during the year 2012, the baltic states and poland together accounted 90% from overall volume, which was a slight improvement from the year 2005 and an 87.6% share. some minor volumes are detected to czech republic, slovakia, hungary, ukraine, bulgaria and even turkey. prior research concerning forecasting the future demand of sea ports, or forecasting drivers of development taken place, have typically been completed with statistical regression models. these models range from fairly simple to complex. typically on a national level (e.g. number of sea ports or one large-scale sea port) models use gross domestic product (gdp) tied regression models (lehto et al. 2006; united nations 2007) or historical demand time series and linear regression or smoothing techniques (fung 2002; maloni & jackson 2005; yap & lam 2013). however, some studies exist, which have used trade level data from import and export (seabrooke et al. 2002; lättilä & hilmola 2012), and also incorporating economic forecasts of important destination or origin countries using the sea port services (lättilä & hilmola 2012). a new and additional feature in demand forecasts is the use of a simulation taking into account transportation system capacity, costs and infrastructure enlargement plans to forecast e.g. railway or road transportation use at a sea port or the capability of a system itself to deliver (kia et al. 2002; parola & sciomachen 2005; jula et al. 2006; sanders et al. 2007; reis 2014). the purpose of this research is to examine the drivers of general cargo growth of short sea shipping between finland and estonia. interaction has always existed between these two countries, but after the baltic states became independent again during late 1991 and members of the european union (and also in the same year the military alliance, nato) 13 years later, it is evident that the platform for growth has existed (buchhofer 1995; ojala et al. 2005; kovacs & spens 2006; hilmola 2011). this development coupled together with a relatively cost competitive labour market, having needed flexibility, has further fostered trade growth. also in the most recent decade imports prospered in the baltic states as its real estate market, both private and retail sector based, experienced a boom due to massive and inexpensive capital inflows, but it ended in a severe recession during 2009 (see bobinaite et al. 2011; sakiene 2011; hilmola 2013). motivation in this research is to study the changes occurred and possible growth factors with longitudinal data in general cargo transports. by combining two different data sources for research purposes, 16 years of general cargo data was available, starting from the year 1998 and ending in 2013 (eurostat 2013; finnish transport agency 2014). due to limitations in explaining some factor’s data (like import and export weight data), this research is analyzing with a regression analysis both for the longer time period of 1998–2013, but also the shorter time window of 2002–2013 (finnish customs 2014). as gdp has been an important factor in previous studies, it is included in the following regression models as one alternative driver of growth. gdp data was available from the entire longer time period (statistics finland 2014; statistics estonia 2014; central statistical bureau of latvia 2014; statistics lithuania 2014; central statistical office of poland 2014). objective of this study is to reveal possible long-term growth factors on general cargo transports between finland and estonia. however, caution should be made in the following analysis that they are in part from a relatively short time period (especially 2002–2013), and are based on an assumption that major changes will not take place in the future. major discontinuities in transportation logistics markets and flows are always possible, and the following analysis is limited to detect these changes as it is backward looking and based on historic data. 102 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola this research is structured as follows: in section 2 the logistics sector development in estonia is being analyzed and introduced. estonia has always been at the cross-roads of east-west and northsouth material flows, even if in the recent two decades the time period of most of the volumes have merely existed in tons within the east-west direction, and on raw material handling. however, truck based transports on the north-south axel are not insignificant, but much smaller as measured in tons. in sections 3 and 4 general cargo volumes and trade account development from a finnish perspective are being introduced regarding the main european union countries and directions. this is for the reason that most of the long-distance trucking volumes on the north-south axel are originating from short sea shipping operations between finland and estonia, and are having a significant finnish involvement (export of industries or import of retail and industrial items). empirical data analysis with regression models follows in section 5. research is concluded in section 6 and further avenues are being proposed. characteristics of the estonian logistics sector after the early 1990s, estonia within a short period of time developed as an important transit route for east originating raw materials. primarily handled product was russian oil as this country had an immediate need to deliver for growing european markets crude oil and it lacked its own sea port infrastructure. until 2004–2005 there was clearly a growing trend in transit oil handling, and in the best year (2004) volumes were approx. 30 million tons. afterwards russia was able to build up their own capacity (koskinen & hilmola 2005; henttu & karamysheva 2013) and enlarge it in a rather short period of time (sea port primorsk starting in 2001 and ust’luga in oil handling during 2011). currently transit oil handled through estonia is around one third lower from peak year volumes (see fig. 1). from raw materials other than oil, only fertilizers and coal have had significant importance durfig. 1. volumes of the three most important transit items of oil, coal and fertilizers in estonian sea ports during the time period of 2000–2013 (’000 tons). source (data): statistics estonia (2014), port of tallinn (2014). fennia 192: 2 (2014) 103growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports ing the years (in tons). however, coal has declined very significantly from its peak of 2006 – more than 7 million tons of material handling has thereafter disappeared (99.1% slump to the year 2013). on the positive side, fertilizers have sustained their volumes, and volumes of the years 2012– 2013 match those of the earlier peak in 2004– 2005. there are a multitude of different reasons why oil and coal transit have both declined in the recent eight to nine years so much. one reason, and the main one, is the construction of russia’s own sea ports in the gulf of finland. these have grown in raw material handling significantly (see e.g. st. petersburg sea port 2014), primorsk in oil (approx. 75+ million tons) and ust’luga both in oil (year 2013: approx. 40 mill. tons) and coal (year 2013: approx. 18 mill. tons). secondly, other baltic states have gained some estonian volumes – like latvia in coal (actually from the year 2006 the increase in latvia’s transit coal handling matches the volumes lost in estonian sea ports; central statistical bureau of latvia 2014). of course the political situafig. 2. passenger transport volumes (persons) through the sea ports of estonia and the finnish share of it during the time period of 1993–2013, and a projection of ten years ahead with linear regression. source (data): statistics estonia (2014). tion (e.g. tensions with russia after the bronze soldier crisis, which took place in april 2007), and the global credit crunch in the years 2008–2009 have played their role in the estonian volume decline. it could be concluded that despite of declining volumes, the transit of raw materials remains an important product group for the estonian logistics sector. however, today half of the material handling at sea ports is still caused by it, and most of the railway sector freight volumes are a source of it. however, estonia cannot build up a future growth opportunity in the raw material transit, and it is a rather mature industry, but with a significant presence. transit also enables quite many things on the infrastructure side as sea ports and railways are able to maintain certain sections from funds arising from it. even if transit transports has been a declining market in recent years, european union general cargo transports (trucks and semi-trailers), container transports, private cars handled at sea ports and the amount of passengers traveling through the sea ports have all increased substantially in estonia 104 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola during the recent years. as ships are carrying passengers and their private cars as well as freight units simultaneously (ropax concept), it is justified to illustrate the development of passenger transport volumes (fig. 2). as could be noted, the total visiting passengers in estonian sea ports is currently at a level of 10 million. finnish direction of short sea ropax ships is holding a clearly dominant role – in the year 2013 travel amounts were nearly 8 million passengers in this direction. finnish route is still clearly following the long-term growth track and linear trend, but the trajectory to total visits is lower, and the market share is constantly falling little-by-little (currently just above 82%). similar high growth could be detected from the private cars handled in the sea ports, as in the nine year period of 2005–2013 the handling amount had doubled to 1.3 million cars. for trucks and semi-trailers the development has also been upwards, not necessarily as aggressively, but still recording in the same period 59% growth, as in the year 2013 nearly 386 thousand units were handled. finnish route market share in both of these is substantial and dominant (similar to passenger transports). the situation with container handling is similar to earlier positive change sections of ropax shipping (but is separate from these, served with container ships). container volumes have grown steadily, only with the exception of downwards correction during the global crisis of 2008–2009. however, the old trajectory in growth has already been reached, and during the previous decade (2004–2013) container handling volumes have more than doubled, and in the year 2013 handling amounts were above 250 thousand twenty foot equivalent units (teu). key for growth has been container block-train service developed to connect estonia with moscow, russia and other distant hinterland destinations in emerging markets of the east (evr cargo 2014). finnish general cargo volumes to three main directions most of the finnish general cargo transports originating or ending in europe is being shared between three destinations: estonia, sweden and germany. this is especially the case for trucks and semi-trailers, where these three countries and their respective roro/ropax connections account for around 90% of annual handling volume. however, these markets have developed since the year 1998 rather differently (see fig. 3). in the base period the volume of estonian transport was really low, and germany and sweden dominated the general cargo market. this has drastically changed during the recent years. sweden has been showing no or very mild growth for the entire observation period. the situation of germany is similar, but somewhat better. only linear and continuous growth has taken place with estonian transport volumes, which have constantly and predictably improved over time (with the exception of the year 2009, and slight decline in the year 1999). it would not be such a big surprise, if the general cargo volumes of the estonian connection would match those of sweden in the very near future (couple of years). in previous research works it has been indicated that such a change would already be on the way due to sulphur regulation becoming effective in the year 2015 (sundberg et al. 2011; tapaninen & räty 2012). statistical linear regression analysis was completed from figure 3 projections, and these could be accessed from appendix a. they reveal that estonian growth has an extremely high statistical significance, and variance within 95% confidence limits is low. on the average these general cargo transports will increase 175.22 thousand tons p.a., and the lower limit is just above 155 thousand tons, while the upper limit is just below 195 thousand tons. r2 value of time based model is high (96.45%) and standard error in turn at least appropriate (165.6 thousand tons). swedish and german regression models do not achieve any neighborhood of the level of estonian model explanation power and have high standard errors. actually the swedish model is just above 0.05 level (coefficients of intercept, and annual cargo handling growth), and it is uncertain whether swedish volumes are on the growth path in the future at all. it could be so that they have achieved some level and fluctuate around it. german general cargo is on the linear growth track as measured with statistical significance (below threshold of 0.05), but variation of annual growth is wide. on average transports ought to increase 219.71 thousand tons, but the lower limit is just above 39 thousand tons, and upper in turn slightly above 400 thousand tons. therefore, german growth includes a high risk component involved and cannot be predicted with such high accuracy as is the case with estonia. fennia 192: 2 (2014) 105growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports one component, which has been taken as a part of general cargo transports statistics (in fig. 3), has been railway wagons carried by railships, and these have mostly served the markets of sweden and germany. however, both ended during the observation period, and have been one reason for uncertainty and low performance. for example, in the base year of 1998, german transports consisted of railway wagon traffic of approx. 771 thousand tons, and sweden in turn 350.5 thousand tons. during the years volumes developed so that in the last two observation points (2012–2013) volumes approached zero. transportation of railway wagons on a large-scale officially ended with the announcement of finnish railway incumbent vr in the year 2012 (vr group 2011). the reason was the high losses produced and foreseen difficulties in the business environment in the future. volumes have disappeared partly to bulk ships, containers and semi-trailers. some traffic has also disappeared as the crisis of 2008–2009 changed structural demand a great deal in raw materials, and fig. 3. general cargo volumes (‘000 tons) to and from europe (years 1998–2013) in three main shipping routes of finland and projection of development with linear regression model up to the year 2030. sources (data): eurostat (2013) and finnish transport agency (2014). declining demand of e.g. paper products just continued their development after the crisis demand slump in west europe. the last serving railship (between finland and sweden) is now modified as serving only trucks and semi-trailers, and it operates again on the same route (turun sanomat 2013), between turku and stockholm. these three different routes share similarities, but also have differences. from unitized cargo (containers, trucks and semi-trailers) trucks and semi-trailers dominate estonian and swedish flows (fig. 4). actually as these two road options are added together, then both the estonian and swedish connections have nearly all of the transport volume on wheels (96.2% for estonian and 98.4% for swedish). german connection is more heterogeneous, and trucking share is just below 40%. it should be noted that the german and estonian routes contain numerous empty containers (returning from the north as empty), and these improve somewhat the market share of trucking as measured in tons (case of estonia). 106 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola although sweden and estonia share similarities in truck and semi-trailer dominance, unit weights are different on these routes. in the swedish direction transportation units weigh 30–40% more. difference is the same for germany and semi-trailers transported – again weight is approx. 40% higher. this is of course caused by different factors, like fill-rates of transportation units, transportation volume balance in both directions, but also due to the fact that in the baltic states restrictions for total weight on the roads are more severe as compared to sweden (european commission 2013). foreign trade of finland to three main directions european union countries, and particularly those located on the periphery, have recovered in terms of trade after the major slump of the year 2009 in a rather fragile manner. this has been the case of finland too – trade surplus was the norm before the crisis, but after the crisis initiated, in the following years’ enormous trade deficits have develfig. 4. european general cargo to and from finland on the three main shipping routes during the year 2013 (fin-est denotes estonia, fin-swe denotes sweden and fin-ger in turn germany). source (data): finnish transport agency (2014). oped. this has not been caused by the great spending wave and followed imports, but merely due to a decline of exports and very small recovery of them afterwards. in the year 2013 finnish export was still in eur terms nearly 15% behind the level of the year 2008. import in turn was 6.8% lower than in the year 2008. similar general malaise is present in the trade accounts of finland with germany and sweden, and particularly with the first mentioned (see fig. 5). in the last observation period both of these two were producing deficits for finland – of course the situation with germany is really worrisome, and if the finnish economy shall experience problems, it could be assumed that imports from germany shall be hurt. this is simply for the reason that the deficit has been around 2 billion eur for six consecutive years, and the total amount of the cumulative deficit after the year 2003 is more than 15.6 billion eur. if such corrective action shall occur for imports, then it means that general cargo transports will be severely hurt. trade of finland with the baltic states and poland has on the contrary been on a good development path – this even after the recent economic crisis. imports to finland from these four countries fennia 192: 2 (2014) 107growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports have increased almost continuously, and the year 2009 is just “normal” fluctuation around a positive development path. finnish exports to these countries has been hurt, but has recovered, and the trade account overall is still showing a surplus. overall trade growth (exports plus imports) has been strongest in figure 5 within the baltic states and poland: from the year 1998 to 2013 it has grown nearly 130%. swedish growth is following this development with distance as growth has been in the same period roughly 60%. germany follows these two, and its trade growth is slightly over 40%. it is understandable that trade growth in the emerging east european countries has been strong, but what is important, is that it still continues. the following years are important steps to be taken as trade already has substantial absolute value, and additional years of growth will correspond to very significant amounts of transportation between these countries. in the following empirical part analysis we have used this trade data from a finnish perspective to evaluate the growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports. fig. 5. foreign trade of finland with the baltic states and poland, germany, and sweden during the period of 1998–2013. source: finnish customs (2014). empirical data analysis: regression models explaining growth smaller and larger gdp models interestingly in both of the following analyzed gdp regression models, eu membership was not found to be significant and did not have any relation to cargo growth (see appendix b). in general the gdp model was facing difficulties to find relevant gdp series to serve a forecast of freight traffic growth between finland and estonia as gdps in the region have developed so differently. for example, as measured in polish zlotys, gdp of poland has consistently grown during the entire observation period, even in the global recession periods of 2001–2002 and 2008–2009. as an opposite to this, finland grew consistently until 2009, and thereafter gdp has experienced severe growth problems. in the year 2013, finnish gdp in absolute terms was still below the year 108 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola 2008 peak level. the baltic states experienced high growth before the year 2009, and recorded a great slump in this global recession year, while showing a stronger recovery with a two year delay. as noted earlier, in the smaller finnish-estonian gdp model, eu membership together with finnish gdp development, were both excluded from the final regression model. also intercept was not significant, and it was forced to be set as zero. therefore, the only significant growth driver was estonian gdp. this tiny regression model was able to explain freight growth in extremely good fashion (r2 value of 99.3), however, standard error of forecast was higher as compared to plain time based (section 3 and appendix a) regression model (196.1 thousand tons). as illustrated in figure 6, regression model works well until the year 2005, but thereafter overestimates general cargo demand development, and in turn after the year 2010 underestimates. fig. 6. forecast using estonian gdp regression model on freight volumes and annual real data concerning these volumes. enlarging the gdp model to consider all gdps (finland, baltic states and poland) and eu accession does not bring any better results to the earlier small gdp model. again, gdp of finland, latvia and poland is not statistically significant, and so is the case of eu membership as well. in the model, intercept is significant (and negative) as is the gdp of lithuania. actually explanation power of the model is lower than before (r2 is 94.8%), and standard error is slightly higher (207.8 thousand tons). explanation of a high level of standard error lies in the same level as in the earlier gdp model, and after 2006 extremely good fit changed as overestimating and later underestimating freight demand. only estonian trade factors considered as data availability was a challenge for a longer period of general cargo data (years 1998–2013), both longer (1998–2013) and shorter (2002–2013) data periods were analyzed. in the longer period eu fennia 192: 2 (2014) 109growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports membership was used as a binary factor (before 2004 and after) and finnish export and import to estonia in euros as absolute scale factor. in the shorter period we included the weight of exports and imports in the model as well. result of longer data model regression analysis is shown first in appendix c. for the long-term regression model we were able to find a statistically significant model, where import to finland (euros) was significant together with eu membership. intercept co-efficient was forced to be set to zero in this model. the model itself is interesting in a way that it argues that eu membership brought a fixed amount of 767.6 thousand tons annually to the finnish-estonian general cargo route. however, what is also interesting, is the fact that general cargo volumes seem to be linked more on finnish imports (other words, estonian exports) rather than finnish exports. it is actually difficult to link finnish export to estonia (in euros) to the general cargo volume growth. an export anomaly has also been detected in trade data analysis in previously published research works (sundberg et al. 2011). even if r2 value is extremely high (97.9%) in this regression model, it should be reminded that standard error is also high (345 thousand tons). therefore, on the average model predicts in good fashion, but underand over-estimates develop in the observation period. in comparison to plain time based model (introduced in section 3 and appendix a), r2 value is a bit higher, but standard error of model is roughly double. consequently, improvement to plain time regression model is albeit very small, if built model has any benefit at all. even if eu membership was modeled in the regression model as binary, membership effects are not necessarily so simple. this is illustrated further in figure 7. longer data regression model overemphasizes eu membership clearly in the years 2004–2005, but again the period of 2006–2009 matches in extremely good fashion. however, in recent years (2010–2013) the regression model underemphasizes the real cargo handling development. maybe eu membership has had some complex endogenous and systemic changes take place in trade and/or relevance of other countries has increased in this cargo route. the global credit crunch might also have changed production and supply chain structures so drastically that more volume has appeared on route. in the shorter data period model (appendix c, second regression report) we were able to include import and export weight on the regression model – intercept was also having co-efficient. model is having high r2 value (98.3%) and low standard error (120 thousand tons). for the longer data period model and earlier section 3 plain time regression model, this is significantly better performance. this analysis somewhat also confirmed the finding of the longer data trade model. surprisingly, finnish export to estonia (in euros) is at a significance level, but has a negative co-efficient. regarding other factors, they have a positive co-efficient. therefore, finnish exports have become bulkier, where value does not increase, but volumes do and are having a positive relation to general cargo growth. interestingly, weight factor for finnish exports to estonia in kilogrammes is higher than the other way around. in the model, eu membership is on the same level as earlier, approx. 711 thousand tons more general cargo was being added on the route, since membership started in the year 2004. as the observation period was shorter and a higher number explaining the factors of finnishestonian trade were considered, the situation of eu membership over-emphasis right after membership started (year 2004) and correspondingly under-emphasis later on disappeared. regression model fits extremely well to real data as shown in figure 8. it is possibly so that eu membership affected bulky trade items significantly and their movement across the two borders, instead of the trade of valuable goods. this also partly answers questions raised in figure 7 – bulky trade and its transports are the reason for the mismatch in earlier trade analysis. larger model, where trade of the baltic states and poland are considered as the regression model is enlarged to other countries in the finnish-estonian transportation flow influence area, interpretation of results does not become easier. on the contrary numerous countries and four different measures applied make it an even greater challenge as explaining factors can cover each other in the regression model and show extremely high explanation values. this was the case with regression models built from the baltic states and poland (appendix d). only trustworthy and in line of previous plain estonian models, was the import and export value model with longer data period (1998–2013), where estonian imports to finland together with lithuanian import and export as well as eu membership explains 99.7% from the general cargo transports. standard error of this model is low (127.4 thousand tons). 110 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola fig. 7. forecast using longer data regression trade model on freight volumes (finest 1998–2013) and annual real data concerning these volumes. fig. 8. forecast using shorter data regression model on freight volumes (finest 2002–2013) and annual real data concerning these volumes. fennia 192: 2 (2014) 111growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports shorter data period models were highly controversial. in the import-export value models, out of nowhere finnish exports to estonia became significant together with lithuanian imports to finland and eu membership. maybe due to the shorter observation period and just a random occurrence of lithuanian imports made estonian exports from finland fit the model. the situation is similar with the weights (kg) of import and export trade. numerous factors were having a negative co-efficient, like estonian and lithuanian imports from finland, as well as the exports from finland to poland. three other factors of import-export trade were having a positive co-efficient towards general cargo transports. we may conclude that either one of these shorter period models is valid or support earlier model findings. the only valid finding is gained from the observation that eu membership is significant even here (in one model out of two), and it gains the overall support of positively affecting transportation flows. concluding discussion in the european union area it is hard to find a similar growth area of transportation logistics, which the finnish-estonian short sea shipping of the general cargo group has shown over two decades. except for the most recent economic crisis which has taken place during the years 2008–2009, and followed a transportation volume decline of 16.6%, this connection has consistently grown over the years and many times by more than 10% p.a. together with the year 2009, only the year 1999 has been slightly negative. using just time to explain freight growth gave reasonable results in the regression analysis (appendix a). it is even much better than conventionally used gdp based forecasting models (appendix b). actually from the two gdp models used in this study, estonian gdp was shown to be a better interpreter of transportation volume growth in the studied context. however, based on the year 2014 information, estonian gdp growth is very low in early 2014 (q1) or slightly negative (in nominal terms somewhat growing, but constant wise on a small decline; laarmaa 2014). even in this situation, finnish-estonian transportation still continues to grow, and has even done so during the early months of 2014 (e.g. major ropax sea vessel operator tallink has reported 20% growth in the amount of freight trucks during the first five months of 2014 as compared to 2013; tallink 2014). as one result of this study is the finding that gdp alone is not an appropriate measure to forecast volume growth in this short sea shipping route, or it undervalues the trade in times of economic hardship (which finland and the baltic states have experienced after 2008–2009). trade parameters and their respective development seem to yield much better forecasting results in this environment. based on this research work, it is clear that growth has benefitted from eu membership (year 2004 onwards) as all trade models found this to be significant. this did not only help trade between finland and estonia, but opened up better possibilities to integrate the whole baltic states and poland to the transportation and supply chains, as border formalities and custom procedures were removed from these countries. therefore, fewer inventory points and country level operations were needed and real market integration started. this has been argued in priori membership case studies (ojala & naula 2002) as well as afterwards in surveys (hilmola 2012). based on this study, general cargo transports between finland and estonia benefitted from step-wise growth of 200 up to 700 thousand tons. however, the eu membership effect is not the main finding of this study. it is the change of transported items between finland and estonia – towards bulky and lower value goods, especially in finnish exports, and trade’s ability to explain freight volume development. regarding other factors, it is hard to argue consistently against that other than finnish-estonian trade issues have really contributed to the growth. it is certain that estonian imports to finland have improved and contributed to the growth over the years. this has taken place in both value and weight. however, finnish exports to estonia could have been fostering transport growth, but only by weight, not in value measured terms (euros). actually in the regression model the finnish export value co-efficient was negative. thus, in this trade pair the effect of weight is much more important than value overall. from outside of this two country pair, it could have been so, that lithuanian and finnish trade has been a contributing factor on general cargo volume growth. furthermore in one multi-country model latvia as well as poland were both present, but co-efficient values were hugely controversial, and this cannot be taken as a valid finding. the situation with gdp based forecasting is controversial for finnish-estonian freight volumes as after the year 2006 its ability to forecast 112 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola has been questionable and overand understating the real demand. findings of this research work do not differ that much from interview studies that have taken place for truck drivers regarding cargo destination and origin in the sea ports of helsinki and tallinn during the years 2005 and 2012 (tapaninen & räty 2012). the only major difference for this interview study is the significance of eu membership, which this study clearly showed. tapaninen & räty (2012) interview study also indicated that the hinterland area has increased and currently the second largest served country is poland. we cannot argue against any of these findings, and trade accounts and data sets values could incorporate major raw materials, which mask the importance of general cargo based trade (e.g. export of polish coal to finland in the 1990’s and early 2000). it would require further research to incorporate only export and import product groups, which are suitable for long-distance truck transports, and not raw material transport chains based on trains and bulk ships. as a further research it would be interesting to continue with this topic, and complete a study concerning the future growth factors of this general cargo route. in the short-term growth is in place as stiff environmental legislation is implemented at the baltic sea (e.g. sulphur, co 2 , and nitrogen legislation), and this will make shipping and especially long-distance shipping, expensive (see notteboom 2011). development ought to benefit “very short” distance shipping and hinterland based transportation chains. the second natural development path is the move of factory locations within the european union towards the east. this has taken place already for more than a decade, but based on recent observations, is a continuing trend in the future as well. a third factor possibly contributing to the future growth, is the inauguration of transportation chains, which start from the mediterranean area and continue with the hinterlands to northern europe (instead of going through hubs located in the netherlands, belgium or germany). all these would require a proper further research effort to clarify future growth opportunities. references anguera r 2006. the channel tunnel – an ex post economic evaluation. transportation research part a 40: 4, 291–315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. tra.2005.08.009. baker p 2007. an exploratory framework of the role of inventory and warehousing in international supply chains. international journal of logistics management 18: 1, 64–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09574090710748171. bobinaite v, juozapaviciene a & konstantinaviciute i 2011. regression analysis of gross domestic product and its factors in lithuania. international scientific conference on economics and management (brno, czech republic). journal of economics and management 16, 116–126. buchhofer e 1995. transport infrastructure in the baltic states during the transformation to market economies. journal of transport geography 3: 1, 69–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0966-6923(94)00001-6. central statistical bureau of latvia 2014. transport – database of latvia. <http://data.csb.gov.lv/menu. a s p x ? p x _ l a n g u a g e = e n & p x _ db=transp&rxid=cdcb978c-22b0-416a-aaccaa650d3e2ce0> 3/2014. central statistical office of poland 2014. poland macroeconomic indicators (pkd 2007). <http://stat. gov.pl/en/poland-macroeconomic-indicators/> 5/2014. european commission 2013. eu transport in figures – statistical pocketbook. european commission, belgium. eurostat 2013. transport statistics (maritime). <http:// epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/ transport/data/database> 9/2013. evr cargo 2014. scheduled trains. eesti raudtee (evr cargo). tallinn, estonia. <http://www.evrcargo.ee/ regulaarrongid/?lang=en> 3/2014. finnish customs 2014. uljas database. helsinki, finland. <http://uljas.tulli.fi/> march.2014. finnish transport agency 2014. personal communication with database specialist (sea transports). february-march, 2014. helsinki and lappeenranta, finland. fung mk 2002. forecasting hong kong’s container throughput: an error-correction model. international journal of forecasting 21: 1, 69–80. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1002/for.818. groupe eurotunnel 2013. annual review and corporate social responsibility report. groupe eurotunnel, paris. henttu v & karamysheva m (2013). trends of freight transportation in north-west russia in 2010s. international journal of procurement management 6: 6, 666–683. http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/ijpm.2013.056761. hilmola o-p 2011. rail baltica influence area: state of operating environment. lappeenranta university of technology, department of industrial fennia 192: 2 (2014) 113growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports management, research report 236. lappeenranta, finland. hilmola o-p 2012. warehousing in finnish and swedish companies: state of operating environment during period of 2006–2012. journal of transport and telecommunication 13: 4, 261– 270. hilmola o-p 2013. from bubble to sustainable economy in baltic states. journal of transport and telecommunication 14: 3, 237–249. hämäläinen e 2011. economic geographic characteristics in the finnish paper industry − a case study. fennia 189: 2, 63–75. jula h, chassiakos a and ioannou p 2006. port dynamic empty container reuse. transportation research part e 42: 1, 43–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2004.08.007. kia m, shayan e & ghotb f 2002. investigation of port capacity under a new approach by computer simulation. computers & industrial engineering 42: 2–4, 533–540. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 6 / s 0 3 6 0 8352(02)00051-7. koskinen m-m & hilmola o-p 2005. investment cycles in newbuilding market of ice-strengthened oil tankers. maritime economics and logistics 7: 2, 173–188. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 5 7 / p a l g r a v e . mel.9100128. kovacs g & spens k m 2006. transport infrastructure in the baltic states post-eu succession. journal of transport geography 14: 6, 426–336. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 6 / j . jtrangeo.2006.01.003. laarmaa a 2014. economy decreased in the 1st quarter. statistics estonia, tallinn. <http://www. stat.ee/72497> 6/2014. lehto h, vepsäläinen p & hietala k 2006. growth outlook of seaborne transport between finland and foreign countries up to 2030 (in finnish). finnish maritime administration publications 10/2006, helsinki. lättilä l & hilmola o-p 2012. forecasting long-term demand of largest finnish sea ports. international journal of applied management science 4: 1, 52– 79.http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/ijams.2012.044871. maloni m & jackson ec 2005. north american container port capacity: an exploratory analysis. transportation journal 44: 3, 1–22. morales-fusco p, sauri s & lago a 2012. potential freight distribution investments using motorways of the sea. journal of transport geography 24, 1–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2012.05.007. nieuwenhuis p, beresford a & choi ak-y 2012. shipping of local production? co2 impact on a strategic decision: an automotive industry case study. international journal of production economics 140: 1, 138–148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2012.01.034. notteboom t 2011. the impact of low sulphur fuel requirements in shipping on the competitiveness of roro shipping in northern europe. wmu journal of maritime affairs 10: 1, 63–95. http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s13437-010-0001-7. ojala l & naula t 2002. advanced logistics services in the baltic states (ad log). tedim report, turku. ojala l, naula t & queiroz c 2005. transport sector restructuring in the baltic status as members of the european union. proceedings of the 3rd seminar, vilnius, turku school of economics publications. parola f & sciomachen a 2005. intermodal container flows in a port system network: analysis of possible growths via simulation models. international journal of production economics 97: 1, 75–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2004.06.051. port of tallinn 2014. cargo statistics webpage. <http:// www.portoftallinn.com/key-figures> 3/2014. reis v 2014. analysis of mode choice variables in short-distance intermodal freight transport using agent-based model. transportation research: part a 61, 100–120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2014.01.002. rodrigue j-p & notteboom t 2012. dry ports in european and north american intermodal rail systems: two of a kind? research in transportation economics 27: 1, 19–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rtbm.2012.10.003. roso v, woxenius j & lumsden k 2009. the dry port concept: connecting container sea ports with the hinterland. journal of transport geography 17: 5, 338–345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2008.10.008. sakiene h 2011. regional unemployment regulation during economic slowdown in lithuania. international scientific conference on economics and management (brno, czech republic). journal of economics and management 16, 309–315. sanders f, verhaeghe rj & dekker s 2007. investment dynamics for a congested transport network with competition: application to port planning. proceedings of the 23th international conference of the system dynamics society, boston. seabrooke w, hui ecm, lam whk & wong gkc 2003. forecasting cargo growth and regional role of the port of hong kong. cities 20: 1, 51–64. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/s0264-2751(02)00097-5. statistics estonia 2014. transport statistics database. <http://www.stat.ee/transportation> 3/2014. statistics lithuania 2014. economy and finance (macroeconomics).<http://osp.stat.gov.lt/en/ statistiniu-rodikliu-analize1> 5/2014. st. petersburg sea port 2014. sea port throughputs. big port st. petersburg, st. petersburg, russia. <http://www.pasp.ru/dannye_po_gruzooborotu> 3/2014. sundberg p, posti a & tapaninen u 2011. cargo traffic on the helsinki-tallinn route. publications from the centre for maritime studies, university of turku a56, turku. 114 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola tallink 2014. tallinn stock exchange press release database, tallink. <http://www.nasdaqomxbaltic. com/market/?instrument=ee3100004466&list=2 &date=2012-08-12&pg=details&tab=news> 6/2014. tapaninen u & räty p 2012. vehicles carrying cargo in ports of helsinki and tallinn. in tapaninen u (ed). helsinki and tallinn on the move, 49–59. httransplan, helsinki. turun sanomat 2013. junalautta seawind palaa liikenteeseen rekkalauttana (free translation in english: ”railship seawind returns as truck ship”). <http://www.ts.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/566222/junala utta+seawind+palaa+liikenteeseen+rekkalautta na> 3/2014. united nations 2007. regional shipping and port development, container traffic forecast, 2007 update. unescap publications st/escap/2484. vr group 2011. junalauttaliikenne turun ja tukholman välillä loppuu (free translation in english: ”railship traffic between turku and stockholm ends”). press release, 7 october. <http://www.vrgroup.fi/fi/vrgroup/uutishuone/ uutiset-ja-tiedotteet/junalauttaliikenne-turun-jatukholman-valilla-loppuu-071020110808/> 3/2014. woxenius j & berqvist r 2011. comparing maritime containers and semi-trailers in the context of hinterland transport by rail. journal of transport geography 19: 4, 680–688. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2010.08.009. yap wy & lam jsl 2013. 80 million-twenty-footequivalent-unit container port? sustainability issues in port and coastal development. ocean & coastal management 71, 13–25. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2012.10.011. fennia 192: 2 (2014) 115growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports summary output fin-estonia (general cargo) regression statistics multiple r 0.982 r square 0.965 adjusted r square 0.962 standard error 165.569 observations 16 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 1 10439262.950 10439262.950 380.815 1.50009e-11 residual 14 383781.492 27412.964 total 15 10823044.442 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept -349369.497 18007.870 -19.401 1.62e-11 -387992.537 -310746.457 year 175.225 8.979 19.514 1.5e-11 155.966 194.483 summary output fin-sweden (general cargo) regression statistics multiple r 0.488 r square 0.238 adjusted r square 0.184 standard error 807.849 observations 16 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 1 2857671.468 2857671.468 4.379 0.055 residual 14 9136679.084 652619.935 total 15 11994350.552 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept -178563.554 87864.719 -2.032 0.062 -367014.633 9887.525 year 91.678 43.812 2.093 0.055 -2.289 185.645 appendix a. regression analysis results from general cargo handling volumes development over time. finest finswe 116 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola summary output fin-germany (general cargo) regression statistics multiple r 0.572 r square 0.328 adjusted r square 0.280 standard error 1550.868 observations 16 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 1 16412203.639 16412203.639 6.824 0.020 residual 14 33672692.564 2405192.326 total 15 50084896.202 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept -430138.259 168678.317 -2.550 0.023 -791917.268 -68359.249 year 219.707 84.108 2.612 0.020 39.314 400.100 finger appendix b. regression model forecasting finest general cargo volumes with gdp (do note that gdp of estonia in euros and lithuania in litas). summary output gdp of finland and estonia (data 1998-2013) regression statistics multiple r 0.996 r square 0.993 adjusted r square 0.926 standard error 196.116 observations 16 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 1 7.708e+07 7.708e+07 2.004e+03 1.625e-16 residual 15 5.769e+05 3.846e+04 total 16 7.765e+07 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept 0 gdp of estonia 0.175 0.004 44.766 0.000 0.167 0.184 fennia 192: 2 (2014) 117growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports summary output gdp of finland, baltic states and poland (data 1998-2013) regression statistics multiple r 0.974 r square 0.948 adjusted r square 0.940 standard error 207.888 observations 16 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 2 1.026e+07 5.131e+06 1.187e+02 4.458e-09 residual 13 5.618e+05 4.322e+04 total 15 1.082e+07 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept -113.043 196.164 -0.576 0.574 -536.829 310.743 gdp of estonia 0.136 0.089 1.532 0.149 -0.056 0.329 gdp of lithuania 0.007 0.015 0.484 0.637 -0.025 0.039 appendix c. regression model forecasting finest general cargo volumes with only estonian trade factors. summary output estonian factors (data 1998-2013) regression statistics multiple r 0.989 r square 0.979 adjusted r square 0.906 standard error 345.027 observations 16 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 2 75986941.317 37993470.659 319.156 0.000 residual 14 1666609.588 119043.542 total 16 77653550.905 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept 0 eu membership 767.649 226.359 3.391 0.004 282.156 1253.142 estoniaimport 1.343e-06 1.477e-07 9.096 2.979e-07 1.026e-06 1.660e-06 118 fennia 192: 2 (2014)olli-pekka hilmola summary output estonian factors (data 2002-2013) regression statistics multiple r 0.991 r square 0.983 adjusted r square 0.969 standard error 120.040 observations 12 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 5 4974033.04 994806.61 69.04 3.20992e-05 residual 6 86457.11 14409.52 total 11 5060490.16 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept -935.11 257.68 -3.63 0.011 -1565.6 -304.6 eu membership 711.18 129.53 5.49 0.002 394.2 1028.1 estoniaexport -5.069e-07 1.780e-07 -2.85 0.029 -9.425e-07 -7.125e-08 estoniaimport 9.366e-07 2.664e-07 3.52 0.013 2.847e-07 1.589e-06 estoniaexports (kg) 9.844e-07 1.543e-07 6.38 0.001 6.068e-07 1.362e-06 estoniaimports (kg) 6.254e-07 1.696e-07 3.69 0.010 2.103e-07 1.040e-06 appendix d. regression model forecasting finest general cargo volumes with trade factors of baltic states and poland. summary output baltic states and poland (data 1998-2013) regression statistics multiple r 0.999 r square 0.997 adjusted r square 0.914 standard error 127.387 observations 16 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 4 77458822.813 19364705.703 1193.338 1.99848e-14 residual 12 194728.092 16227.341 total 16 77653550.905 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept 0 eu membership 244.849 100.394 2.439 0.031 26.110 463.589 estoniaimport 4.83098e-07 1.71172e-07 2.822 0.015 1.10147e-07 8.56049e-07 lithuaniaexport 2.0477e-06 6.25454e-07 3.274 0.007 6.84952e-07 3.41045e-06 lithuaniaimport 5.37595e-06 5.64775e-07 9.519 6.09e-07 4.14541e-06 6.60649e-06 fennia 192: 2 (2014) 119growth drivers of finnish-estonian general cargo transports summary output baltic states and poland (data 2002-2013) regression statistics multiple r 0.999 r square 0.999 adjusted r square 0.887 standard error 107.311 observations 12 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 3 73368743.267 24456247.756 2123.753 6.084e-12 residual 9 103640.205 11515.578 total 12 73472383.472 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept 0 eu membership 220.264 100.705 2.187 0.057 -7.547 448.075 estoniaexport 8.063e-07 5.976e-08 13.493 2.819e-07 6.711e-07 9.415e-07 lithuaniaimport 6.182e-06 3.969e-07 15.576 8.129e-08 5.284e-06 7.080e-06 summary output baltic states and poland (data 2002-2013) regression statistics multiple r 0.998 r square 0.996 adjusted r square 0.993 standard error 54.757 observations 12 anova df ss ms f significance f regression 5 5.043e+06 1.009e+06 3.364e+02 2.937e-07 residual 6 1.799e+04 2.998e+03 total 11 5.060e+06 coefficients standard error t stat p-value lower 95% upper 95% intercept 2577.426 193.140 13.345 0.000 2104.830 3050.022 polandexports (kg) -3.876e-07 6.034e-08 -6.424 0.001 -5.353e-07 -2.400e-07 lithuaniaexports (kg) 1.107e-05 5.523e-07 20.053 9.986e-07 9.723e-06 1.243e-05 lithuaniaimports (kg) -3.138e-06 2.882e-07 -10.886 3.563e-05 -3.843e-06 -2.432e-06 latviaimports (kg) 3.341e-07 6.024e-08 5.546 0.001 1.867e-07 4.815e-07 estoniaimports (kg) -6.795e-07 9.582e-08 -7.091 0.000 -9.140e-07 -4.450e-07 changes in river runoff in latvia at the end of the 21st century elga apsīte, anda bakute, līga kurpniece and inese pallo apsı̄te, elga, anda bakute, lı̄ga kurpniece & inese pallo (2010). changes in river runoff in latvia at the end of the 21st century. fennia 188: 1, pp. 50–60. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this study deals with future climate change impacts on the runoff of five latvian river basins at the end of this century. climate data series have been provided by the faculty of physics and mathematics of the university of latvia where the regional climate model rossby centre atmosphere ocean was selected for further statistical downscaling. changes in hydrometeorological data have been analysed based upon one control run (period 1961−1990) and two future scenario a2 and b2 runs (2071−2100). the conceptual rainfall-runoff model, the latest version of metq2007bdopt, was used for simulation of hydrological processes in particular river basins. simulation results revealed that in comparison to the control period, major differences in hydrometeorological parameters in future were observed according to a2 scenario, where long-term mean air temperature will grow by 4 degrees and precipitation by 12%, while mean annual river flow will decrease by 19%. both scenarios demonstrate changes in seasonal runoff patterns where the major part of river runoff will be generated in winter, followed by spring, autumn and summer. the river hydrograph is going to take a different shape, where the maximum river discharges will occur in winter instead of spring. keywords: river runoff, climate change, scenario, rainfall-runoff model, latvia elga apsite, faculty of geography and earth sciences, university of latvia, raiņa bulv. 19, rı̄ga lv-1586, latvia. e-mail: elga.apsite@lu.lv. introduction over the last decades, numerous studies about climate change and its impact on freshwater resources have been published (e.g. vörösmarty et al. 2000; oki & kanael 2006; bates at al. 2008). it can be explained by the increased knowledge of modern society about the hydrosphere, its interaction with other geospheres and natural processes, improved research methods and data basis. at the same time, the growth of population, rapid development of global economy and increased water consumption, as well as the world’s changing climate have drawn more attention to the global, regional and local studies about the existing water resources, their sustainable conservation and prediction in the future. most often such studies deal with river hydrology, including those in europe. there are many publications describing studies about trends in river discharge, covering the study periods dating back to the nineteenth century and up to today, for instance, in the nordic countries by hisdal et al. (2003), and in the baltic countries by reihan et al. (2007). recently the emphasis has shifted to studies about prediction of climate change impact on water resources, its quantifying and extreme events in the 21st century, using combinations of various global and regional climate models, emission scenarios and hydrological models, for instance, bergström et al. (2001), hisdal et al. (2006), stein et al. (2007), dankers et al. (2007), bolle et al. (2008), kjellström & lind (2009), ect. many studies predict that the future climate in europe will be warmer, the southern areas will get drier and the northern parts will become wetter. precipitation variability is predicted to increase in most parts of europe, with extreme precipitation events becomurn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2844 fennia 188: 1 (2010) 51art changes in river runoff in latvia at the end of the 21st … ing more frequent and more intense. these climatic changes will determine river runoff patterns: decrease in annual river runoff in the south and increase in the north, and more extreme events like floods or draughts are expected in the stream flow in europe. latvia is located in the eastern europe, southeast of the baltic sea. the uneven relief, humid climate and geological development have formed a dense network of rivers where the mean value is 0.59 km/km2 in latvia. total number of rivers is about 12 500. in average, the mean annual runoff is 35 km3, from which only 16 km3 are formed within the territory of latvia. rivers have mixed water feeding: rain, snowmelt water and groundwater. it is typical that the major part of the total annual river runoff is generated in spring season and is followed by winter, autumn and summer. mean annual precipitation varies from 550 to 850 mm. the mean annual air temperature varies from –3 oc to –7 oc in january and from +17 oc to +18 oc in july. the resent studies, for instance by klavins et al. (2006), reihan et al. (2007) and apsı̄te et al. (2009) show that at the turn of the century the climate has changed and modified the latvian rivers hydrological regime similar to other regions of europe. the major change in river runoff was observed between winter and spring seasons due to warmer winters in last twenty years. some early simulation results of climate change impacts on river runoff in this century was done by butina et al. (1998) and rogozova (2006), whose results are briefly presented in section results and discussions. unfortunately, the latest studies dealing with test results on climate change impacts on latvian river runoff in the future are missing. therefore, the aim of our study is to asses the climate change impact on the latvian river runoff at the end of the 21st century under different climate scenarios. materials and methods in our study the climate change impact on the river runoff under the past and future climate conditions was analyzed for five pilot river basins: the bērze, the iecava, the imula, the salaca and the vienziemı̄te. the location and characteristics of studied river basins are presented in fig. 1 and table 1. the river basins differ in size, natural conditions and anthropogenic impact. the bērze river basin is located in the central part of latvia, where climatic conditions and fertile soils are very suitable for the most intensive agricultural production in the country. totally, agricultural lands cover 66% of the bērze river basin and up to 45% of it is arable land. upstream of the hydrological station biksti the numbers are 50% and 20% respectively. the basin lies very close to the driest area, the zemgale lowland where precipitation amounts to 550 mm per year. the imula and iecava river basins have similar climatic conditions. the upper reach of the iecava river basin (566 km3), located on the sandy and wooded area, is included in this study. the salaca river basin is the largest studied basin and it is a part of the north vidzeme biosphere reserve. thus, human activities are limited there. its total drainage area is 3220 km2, 62% of which are covered by the catchment of the lake burtnieks. the percentage of forests is quite high 45% and particularly bogs up to 13%. the vienziemı̄te is the smallest river basin. it is located in the vidzeme upland, 176 m above the sea level. there are periods of lower air temperature and higher amount of precipitation over the year. although agricultural land forms 66% of this drainage basin, human impact is comparatively low. the hydrological model metq was applied to each of the five river basins with a daily time step. it was used to simulate hydrological behaviour of the river runoff particularly under past and changed future climate conditions. it should be mentioned, that in latvia several versions of mathematical models have been developed: metul (krams & zı̄verts 1993), metq96 (zı̄verts & jauja 1996), metq98 (zı̄verts & jauja 1999), metq2005 and metq2006, and the latest version of the metq2007bdopt with semi-automatic calibration performance (apsı̄te et al. 2008). the metq is a conceptual rainfall-runoff model of catchment’s hydrology, originally developed using latvian catchments. the latest version of the metq2007bdopt has 23 parameters and most of them can be kept constant for different river catchments. the model consists of different routines, including the runoff and hydraulic (if there is a lake or reservoir in the river basin which considerably influences the hydrological regime of the river). the total runoff consists of three runoff components (fig. 2): q 1 is the surface runoff, q 2 is the subsurface runoff (runoff from the groundwater upper zone) and q 3 is the base flow (runoff from the groundwater lower zone). a statistical criterion r2 (nash & sutcliffe 1970), a correlation coeffi52 fennia 188: 1 (2010)apsı̄te, elga, anda bakute, lı̄ga kurpniece and inese pallo fig. 1. location of river basins and hydrological and meteorological stations used in the study. table 1. characteristics of studied river basins. river basin and hydrological station total drainage area, km2 studied drainage area, km2 long-term mean discharge, m3/s long-term average precipitation, mm long-term average air temperature, oc land-use, % january july agricultural fields / arable land forests bogs water bodies bērze-biksti 904 275 2.65 650 –4.9 16.4 50 / 20 46 3 1.5 iecava-dupši 1166 566 3.64 675 –5.8 16.6 35 / 15 62 3 0.5 imula-pilskalni 263 232 1.73 670 –4.8 16.0 57 / 26 42 1 0.5 salaca-lagaste 3420 3220 30.5 750 –4.8 16.1 35 / 21 45 13 6.7 vienziem̄ıtevienziem̄ıte 5.92 5.92 0.06 730 –7.1 15.9 66 / 1.2 13 – – cient r, mean values and a graphical representation were used in the analysis of the model calibration results. in general, the structure and simulation of hydrological processes of the metq model are similar to the hbv (bergström 1976) model developed in sweden. the main difference between the metq and hbv models is that the degree-day ratio does not have a constant value for the snow melting in metq, but it is rather a temporary difference, depending on the daily potential insolation of each particular day. a more detailed defennia 188: 1 (2010) 53art changes in river runoff in latvia at the end of the 21st … scription of the model metq is presented in other sources (zı̄verts & jauja 1999). the input data for the metq2007bdopt model calibration, daily measurements of air temperature (oc), precipitation (mm) and vapour pressure deficit (hpa) at eleven meteorological stations and daily river discharge (m3/s) of five hydrological stations were used. the location of the utilised meteorological and hydrological stations is shown in fig. 1. in this study, the selected calibration period was from 1961 to 1990 (30 years as the control period) with the aim to simulate the future climate scenarios from 2071 to 2100, and validation period – next ten years from 1991 to 2000. for the simulation of river runoff according to past and future climate conditions we have used climate data series (daily mean air temperature, precipitation and vapour pressure deficit) provided by the laboratory for mathematical modelling of environmental and technological processes, faculty of physics and mathematics of university of latvia. the regional climate model (rcm) rossby centre atmosphere ocean (rcao) run by the swedish meteorological and hydrological institute (driving boundary conditions from the global climate model hadam3h) was selected as it is most suitable for the area of our interests, i.e. latvian conditions. the proposed approach of the regional climate model data modification allows to change the modelled temperature and precipitation time series for the control period in such a way that they preserve the characteristics on a small time-scale, and at the same time also possess the statistical properties of the observed data. the climate data series for the future climate scenarios were obtained by assuming that the histogram modification algorithm is the same for both the past and future climate. full description of the applied downscaling methodology can be found in seņņikovs & bethers (2009). the calculated data series denoted the following: ctl represents the control period 1961–1990 and characterises past climate conditions, while a2 and b2 represent the period of future scenarios 2071–2100 and forecast future climate conditions. all data series were extrapolated from the grid cross points to the meteorological stations involved in our study. results and discussion calibration and validation of the hydrological model nowadays hydrological model is a widely used tool for the purposes of water resource assessment, flood forecasting, impact assessment of pollution sources on water quality, and many others, including simulation of hydrological processes under different climate scenarios for predicting water resources in the future. various kinds of models have been developed, but the conceptual rainfall-runoff model is one, which is used more broadly. these models usually are simple and relatively easy to use for the simulation of different hydrological processes (bergström 1991; merz & blöschl 2004), contrary to more complex, physically-based, distributed models, for example the she model (abbott et al. 1986). the required input data are readily available for most applications. in this study we have used a model of this type, the metq, which has been successfully applied to small and relatively large catchments in latvia, the brook vienziemı̄te (drainage area 5.92 km2) and the daugava river (drainage area 81.000 km2) respectively (zı̄verts & jauja 1999) in earlier studies. furthermore, the metq model has been used for different hydrological tasks, e.g. to evaluate the model performance before and after drainage config. 2. general structure of the hydrological model metq (zı̄verts & jauja 1999). p – precipitation; es – evaporation from snow; ea – evapotranspiration from root zone; rs – rain and snowmelting water; rch – recharge to groundwater; cap – capillary flow; q 1 – the surface runoff; q 2 – the subsurface runoff and q 3 – the base flow. p es snow rs ea soil moisture q1 rch cap runoff upper zone q2 lower zone groundwater q3 54 fennia 188: 1 (2010)apsı̄te, elga, anda bakute, lı̄ga kurpniece and inese pallo struction and to estimate the eventual maximum flood (zı̄verts & jauja 1999), to study eutrophication and hydrotechnical problems of lakes, including climate change effects (bilaletdin et al. 2004), to attempt to model parameter sets for ungauged catchments from measurable variables and to simulate nutrient runoffs in agricultural basins (jansons et al. 2002). the latest version metq2007bdopt model was calibrated and validated for five river basins. the results of calibration showed a good coincidence between the observed and simulated daily discharges from 1961 to 1990: the nach-sutcliffe efficiency r2 varies from 0.86 to 0.66 and correlation coefficient r from 0.93 to 0.77 (table 2). the best coincidence was obtained for the brook vienziemı̄te where r2 was 0.86 and r was 0.91. on one hand, it could be explained by the fact that the catchment area is small and used meteorological data fit very well to this drainage area for the description of the simulation of hydrological processes. on the other hand, we obtained rather good calibration results also for a large river basin as the river salaca at lagaste: r2 was 0.80 and r was 0.93 (fig. 3). the lowest statistical criteria were found for the rivers bērze, iecava and imula. the validation of the model was done from 1991 to 2000, except for the river gauging stations imula-pilskalni and iecava-dupši, which were closed in 1995. in general, we obtained lower statistical criteria compared to calibration period: the statistical efficiency r2 varies from 0.77 to 0.53 and correlation coefficient r varies from 0.87 to 0.70. one of the main reasons for the difference between the simulated and observed runoff values is the quality of precipitation and vapour pressure deficit input data, and location of the available meteorological stations characterising the spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation in the studied drainage area. for instance, in the cases of the river basins imula and iecava we had to use data series of meteorological stations located outside the river basins (fig. 1) and obtained lower calibration results (table 1). as we know, precipitation has typically occasional character of distribution in the area and the conceptual rainfall-runoff models are sensitive to the input data, such as precipitation. conditions for the calibration models are better, if at least one rainfall gauging station is located within the basin of the studied river. this is proved by the salaca calibration results, which is the biggest river basin in this study according to its territory, where only one of the five used gauging stations was located outside the river basin. changes of river runoff under different future climate scenarios the results of the long-term annual and seasonal analysis of metrological and hydrological data in the studied river basins are presented in table 3 and fig. 4. for the purpose of describing the character of changes in the river runoff, we will first look at the future changes of climatic parameters and determine, based upon which emission scenario most changes can be expected. compared to the control period, major differences in meteorological and hydrological parameters in the future are forecasted according to a2 scenario, where long-term mean air temperature will grow by 4 degrees and precipitation by 12% and there will be increase of evapotranspiration, while the mean annual river flow will decrease by 19%. for both scenarios the air temperature will increase in all seasons, but the most considerable air temperature increase is forecasted for the winter and autumn seasons: 4.1−4.9 oc according to a2 and 3.0−3.4 oc according to b2. increase in precipitatable 2. the obtained statistical criteria for five river basins. hydrological station calibration period (1961−1990) validation period (1991−2000) r2 r r2 r bērze – biksti 0.67 0.83 0.56 0.76 iecava – dupši1) 0.66 0.82 0.54 0.79 imula – pilskalni1) 0.66 0.77 0.53 0.70 salaca – lagaste 0.80 0.93 0.77 0.87 vienziem̄ıte – vienziem̄ıte 0.86 0.91 0.73 0.84 1) – closed since 1995 fennia 188: 1 (2010) 55art changes in river runoff in latvia at the end of the 21st … tion is forecasted in winter season by 7−9% according to a2 and 4−5% according to b2, while the decrease is forecasted over the second half of the year, especially in autumn, by 4−5% according to a2 and 2−3.5% according to b2. the simulations results of the studied rivers show the increase of runoff in winter season by 7−18% according to a2 and 4−12% according to b2 and mostly decrease of runoff in spring season by 1−9% according to both scenarios. at the second half-year period, under the conditions of the decreased precipitation and increased air temperature and evapotranspiration, river runoff is forecasted to decrease, particularly in the autumn season, by 3−10% according to a2 and 1−8% according to b2. fig. 4 shows the forecasted changes in seasonality by a monthly step of the total river runoff distribution and a shape of hydrograph for the studied rivers at the end of the 21st century. in the control period from 1961 to 1990 latvian rivers are characterized by a typical hydrograph of the 20th century: two main discharge peaks during the spring snowmelt and in late autumn during the intense rainfall, and low river discharge in winter and summer. it was typical that the major portion of the total annual river runoff of 32−41% occurs in the spring season, and then followed by 25−33% in winter, 16−25% in autumn and 10−15% in summer. the results of simulation under future climate scenarios a2 and b2 show that the major part of the total annual river runoff will be generated in salaca-lagaste 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 1 1 6 3 1 4 6 6 1 7 6 9 1 1 0 6 1 2 1 1 3 6 1 5 1 1 6 6 1 8 1 1 9 6 2 1 1 2 2 6 2 4 1 2 5 6 2 7 1 2 8 6 3 0 1 3 1 6 3 3 1 3 4 6 3 6 1 q , m 3 /s fig. 3. observed and simulated long-term mean daily discharge at the hydrological stations salaca-lagaste (r2 – 0.80 and r – 0.93) and imulapilskalni (r2 – 0.66 and r – 0.77) from 1961 to 1990. imula-pilskalni 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 1 6 3 1 4 6 6 1 7 6 9 1 1 0 6 1 2 1 1 3 6 1 5 1 1 6 6 1 8 1 1 9 6 2 1 1 2 2 6 2 4 1 2 5 6 2 7 1 2 8 6 3 0 1 3 1 6 3 3 1 3 4 6 3 6 1 q , m 3 /s observed simulated 56 fennia 188: 1 (2010)apsı̄te, elga, anda bakute, lı̄ga kurpniece and inese pallo table 3. changes in long-term mean annual and seasonal air temperature, precipitation and river runoff between a2 or b2 scenario (2071−2100) and ctl control period (1961−1990). climate parameter/ scenario river basin imula bērze iecava vienziem̄ıte salaca air temperature, change in 0c annual / a2 3.9 3.9 4.0 4.1 4.0 annual / b2 2.5 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.6 winter / a2 4.4 4.5 4.8 4.9 4.9 winter / b2 3.1 3.1 3.1 3.3 3.4 spring / a2 3.7 3.8 3.9 4.1 4.1 spring / b2 2.3 2.4 2.9 2.9 2.9 summer / a2 3.1 3.1 3.1 3.1 3.0 summer / b2 1.4 1.4 1.5 1.5 1.3 autumn / a2 4.1 4.1 4.2 4.2 4.1 autumn / b2 3.2 3.3 3.0 3.0 3.0 precipitation, change in % annual / a2 11 11 10 12 12 annual / b2 8 8 6 9 9 winter / a2 9 9 8 7 7 winter / b2 5 5 4 4 4 spring / a2 0.6 0.6 0.8 1 –0.2 spring / b2 0 –0.2 0.3 0.2 –0.3 summer / a2 –6 –6 –4 –3 –2 summer / b2 –3 –2 –2 –2 0 autumn / a2 –4 –4 –5 –5 –4 autumn / b2 –2 –2.5 –3 –3 –3.5 runoff, change in % annual / a2 –14 –13 –12 –18 –19 annual / b2 –5 –5 –4 –11 –3 winter / a2 16 15 11 18 7 winter / b2 12 10 9 12 4 spring / a2 –3 –9 –7 –7 3 spring / b2 –3 –8 –6 –4 –1 summer / a2 –1 –1 –1 –2 –2 summer / b2 –2 1 0 –1 2 autumn / a2 –10 –6 –3 –10 –8 autumn / b2 –8 –1 –2 –7 –4 winter season (39−49% according to a2, 35−45% according to b2) and then it will be followed by spring (28−37% and 27−33%, respectively), autumn (9−13% and 9−16%) and summer (11−16% and 13−19%). the river hydrograph is going to take a different shape for the late 21st century compared to the control period. in most cases, according to a2 scenario, the spring flood will decrease and the hydrograph peak will shift to an earlier month, i.e. from april to february. more considerable decrease in runoff is forecasted for autumn, compared to the spring season. according to b2 scenario, the river hydrograph is smoother and does not have a typical peak discharge. however, the river maximum discharges at the end of this century will occur in winter instead of spring. considerable decrease in runoff is also forecasted for fennia 188: 1 (2010) 57art changes in river runoff in latvia at the end of the 21st … imula-pilskalni 0 5 10 15 20 25 o n d j f m a m j j a s r iv e r ru n o ff , % bērze-biksti 0 5 10 15 20 o n d j f m a m j j a s r iv er r un of f, % iecava-dupši 0 5 10 15 20 o n d j f m a m j j a s r iv e r ru n o ff , % vienziemīte-vienziemīte 0 5 10 15 20 o n d j f m a m j j a s r iv er r un of f, % salaca-lagaste 0 5 10 15 20 o n d j f m a m j j a s r iv e r ru n o ff , % ctl 1961-1990 a2 2071-2100 b2 2071-2100 fig. 4. river hydrograph of a hydrological year from october to september and distribution of the total annual river runoff (in percentages) in five studied river basins by study periods: control period ctl (1961−1990) and future climate scenarios a2 and b2 (2071−2100). spring and autumn, but it is less pronounced compared to the a2 scenario. the analysis of simulation results shows that the most considerable annual river runoff decrease is forecasted for the northern river basins vienziemı̄te (18%) and salaca (19%) according to b2 scenario, and for the vienziemı̄te (11%) according to b2 scenario. according to both scenarios in the seasonal analysis higher increase of the river runoff in winter and decrease in autumn can be expected for two upland basins the vienziemı̄te and imula, and higher decrease of runoff in spring can be forecasted for the bērze, iecava and vienziemı̄te. comparison to other studies in forecasting river runoff changes we have been searching with high interest for similar studies dealing with forecasted river runoff changes within this century to compare the results in the baltic sea region, and especially, in the baltic countries. in earlier studies by jaagus et al. (1998) in estonia, butina et al. (1998) in latvia and by kilkus et al. (2006) in lithuania climate data series from general circulation models (gcm) with different emission scenarios were used for simulation of river runoff. in estonia and lithuania the forecasted increase of annual river 58 fennia 188: 1 (2010)apsı̄te, elga, anda bakute, lı̄ga kurpniece and inese pallo runoff is 20−40% and up to 29% on average. in study by butina et al. (1998) for the lielupe river basin it was found out that the river flow was going to increase by 11%−83% on average depending on the scenario. later rogozova (2006) studied two latvian river basins, the gauja and the irbe, and identified both increase and decrease trends (ranging from –7% to 17%). however, she came to the conclusion that forecasting of the annual river runoff increase or decrease may depend of the chosen gcm and emission scenario in rcm rcao. the latest study in lithuania was carried out by kriauvciūnien ·e et al. (2008) for the nemuna river. they used new climate scenarios presented in the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change which gives an opportunity to evaluate the river runoff changes more precisely. the results of simulation show that the runoff will increase in winter and decrease in spring according to all emission scenarios. both increasing and decreasing tendencies of runoff were found for summer and autumn. the annual runoff of the nemuna river was forecasted to decrease in the 21st century. in the assessment of climate change for the baltic sea basin (bolle et al. 2008) about 20 scenarios of rcms were analysed. regional distinctions in hydro-climate patters in the future forecasts were identified. the annual river runoff is forecasted to increase in the north, and to decrease in the south. latvia is situated in the middle of both regions; however, the main tendency in the future climate and river runoff change is shifted rather towards the southern region. in contrary to the south forecast and according to our study results, autumns in latvia will become much drier followed by streamflow decrease in the autumn season more precisely compared to summer. in both early and later studies in the baltic countries it was predicted that the increase of river runoff will be remarkable during winter seasons due to the shortening of the period with snow and ice cover, while the spring runoff maximum will mostly decrease and shift to earlier periods. however, there are different forecasts concerning the total annual river runoff, where the decrease of runoff is forecasted in last studies, and there results comply with the results of our study. conclusions in this study the changes in river runoff prediction in latvia at the end of the 21st century are based on one control run (1961−1990) and two future climate scenarios a2 and b2 runs (2071−2100) from rcm rcao. the conceptual rainfall-runoff model, the latest version of metq2007bdopt, was used for simulation of hydrological processes in five studied river basins. our study demonstrates that climate will change in the end of this century, subsequently modifying the hydrological regime of latvian rivers. major differences in hydrometeorological data were observed according to a2 scenario in both annual and seasonal analysis. simulation results show that compared to the control period both future climate scenarios a2 and b2 forecast that annual river runoff will decrease under climate conditions, when air temperature, precipitation and evapotranspiration increase. concerning seasonality the major differences in hydrometeorological parameters are predicted for winter and autumn. we can conclude that september and october are going to be among the driest months. the major part of river runoff will be generated in winter due to warmer climate, followed by spring, autumn and summer. in the future the river hydrograph is going to take a different shape, where the river maximum discharges will occur in winter instead of spring. the river hydrograph will have two main periods: a high flow period from november to april, and a low flow period from may to october. our obtained results of projections of climate change impacts on hydrological processes in latvian rivers generally correspond to the latest studies in the baltic region. acknowledgements this study was supported by the national research program climate change impact on water environment in latvia and data were provided by the latvian environment, geology and meteorology center and sia meliorprojekts. authors would like to thank professor a. zı̄verts for generously provided consultations and knowledge about modeling basics in hydrology. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 59art changes in river runoff in latvia at the end of the 21st … references abbott mb, barthurst jc, cunge ja, o’connell pe & rasmussen j 1986. an introduction to the european hydrologic system – système hydrologique européen “she” 2: structure of physically based, distributed modelling system. journal of hydrology 87: 1/2, 61–77. apsı̄te e, bakute a & rudlapa i 2009. changes of total annual runoff distribution, high and low discharges in latvian rivers. proceedings of the latvian academy of sciences b 63: 6 (665), 279−286. apsı̄te e, zı̄verts a & bakute a 2008. application of conceptual rainfall-runoff model metq for simulation of daily runoff and water level: the case of the lake burtnieks watershed. proceedings of the latvian academy of sciences b 62: 1/2, 47–54. bates bc, kundzewicz zw, wu s & palutikof jp (eds) 2008. climate change and water. technical paper of the intergovernmental panel on climate change 210. ipcc secretariat, geneva. bergström s 1976. development and application of a conceptual runoff model for scandinavian catchments. smhi report 7, norrköping. bergström s 1991. principles and confidence in hydrological modelling. nordic hydrology 22, 123– 136. bergström s, carlsson b, gardelin m, lindstrom g, pettersson a & rummukainen m 2001. climate change impacts on runoff in sweden – assessments by global climate models, dynamical downscaling and hydrological modelling. climate research 16, 101–112. bilaletdin ä, frisk t, kaipainen h, paananen a, perttula h, klavins m, apsite e & ziverts a 2004. water protection project of lake burtnieks. the finnish environment 670. bolle hj, menenti m & rasool i (eds) 2008. assessment of climate change for the baltic sea basin. regional climate studies. springer-verlag, berlin, heidelberg. butina m, melnikova g & stikute i 1998. potentional impact of climate change on the hydrological regime in latvia. in lemmelä r & helenius n (eds). proceedings of the second international conference on climate and water 3, 1610−1617. espoo. dankers r, feyen l, christensen ob & roo a 2007. future changes in flood and drought hazards in europe. in heinonen m (ed). 3rd international conference on climate and water, 115–120. finnish environment institute, helsinki. hisdal h, holmqvist ee, hyvärinen v, jónsson p, kuusisto e, larsen se, lindström g, ovesen nb & roald al 2003. long time series – a review of nordic studies. climate, water and energy projects, report 2. reykjavik. hisdal h, roald la & beldring s 2006. past and future changes in flood and drought in the nordic countries. in demuth s (ed). climate variability and change – hydrological impacts 308, 502– 507. iahs press, wallingford. jaagus j, jarvet a & roosaare j 1998. modelling the climate change impact on river runoff in estonia. in kallaste t & kuldna p (eds). climate change studies in estonia, 117−126. tallinn. jansons v, vagstad n, sudars r, deelstra j, dzalbe i & kirsteina d 2002. nutrient losses from point and diffuse agricultural sources in latvia. landbauforschung völkenrode 1: 52, 9–17. kilkus k, štaras a, rimkus e & valiuškevivcius g 2006. changes in water balance structure of lithuanian rivers under different climate change scenarios. environmental research, engineering and management 2: 36, 3−10. kjellström e & lind p 2009. changes in the water budget in the baltic sea drainage basin in future warmer climates as simulated by the regional climate model rca3. boreal environment research 14, 114–124. klavins m, briede a, rodinovs v & frisk t 2006. ice regime of rivers in latvia in relation to climatic variability. verh internat verein limnol 29: 4, 1825–1828. krams m & zı̄verts a 1993. experiments of conceptual mathematical groundwater dynamics and runoff modelling in latvia. nordic hydrology 24, 243–262. kriauvciūnien ·e j, meilutyt ·e-barauskien ·e d, rimkus e, kažys j & vincevivcius a 2008. climate change impact on hydrological processes in lithuanian nemunas river basin. baltica 21: 1−2, 51–61. merz r & blöschl g 2004. regionalisation of catchment model parameters. journal of hydrology 287: 1/4, 95–123. nash je & sutcliffe jv 1970. river flow forecasting through conceptual models. part i-a discussion of principles. journal of hydrology 10, 282−290. oki t & kanael s 2006. global hydrological cycles and world water resources. journal science 313: 5790, 1068–1072. reihan a, koltsova t, kriauciuniene j, lizuma l & meilutyte-barauskiene d 2007. changes in water discharges of the baltic states rivers in the 20th century and its relation to climate change. nordic hydrology 38: 4/5, 401–412. rogozova s 2006. climate change impacts on hydrological regime in latvian basins. european conference on impacts of climate changes on renewable energy sources, 137–140. vörösmarty. seņņikovs j & bethers u 2009. statistical downscaling method of regional climate model results for hydrological modelling. proceedings of the 18th world imacs / modsim congress, 3962–3968. cairns. stein b, andersson j, bergström s, engen-skaugen t, forland e, grahem lp, jónsdóttir jf, lappegard g, roald la, rogozova s, rosberg j, suomalainen m, vehviläinen b & veijalainen n 2007. impacts of climate change on hydrological processes in the nordic region. in heinonen m (ed). proceedings of 3rd international conference on climate and water, 44–49. helsinki. 60 fennia 188: 1 (2010)apsı̄te, elga, anda bakute, lı̄ga kurpniece and inese pallo vörösmarty cj, green p, salisbury j & lammers rb 2000. global water resources: vulnerability from climate change and population growth. journal science 289: 5477, 284–288. zı̄verts a & jauja i 1996. konceptuālais matemātiskais modelis metq96 ikdienas caurplūdumu aprēķināšanai izmantojot meteorolo¯giskos novērojumus (conceptual mathematical model metq96 for the calculation of daily discharge using meteorological observations). latvijas lauksaimniecı̄bas universitātes raksti 6, 126−133. zı̄verts a & jauja i 1999. mathematical model of hydrological processes metq98 and its applications. nordic hydrology 30, 109−128. the academy of finland recently published the yearly review “the state of scientific research in finland 2012”. in the section related to geography, the geographical society of finland was mentioned twice. the review stated that the society does not dynamically support the development of geography in finland, and that the finnish geographical journals, published by the society, are not indexed in the web of science. geography is a traditional field of science both internationally and in finland. the society and its journals, fennia and terra, as well as the national atlas of finland, have more than a century long history in disseminating and communicating geographical knowledge and expertise. the role of scientific societies has varied through times and is currently quite marginal. as the president of the geographical society of finland, i have been able to collect different views and wishes from geographers working in finland. there seems to be a genuine need to strengthen the role of the society as a collective voice of geographers promoting geographical research and education in finland, and making geographical expertise visible in the society. two main processes where the society could take a stronger role to promote geography are the structural reform of universities and the scientific competition and ranking. the current phrasing of questions related to the multitude of global to local challenges asks for an integrated and multidimensional approach recognising scales and interactions between scales. the current academic research and education seem not to meet these societal needs and are thus urged to change. in this currently on-going reform, each university needs to define distinctive research profiles with a few sharp research fronts. in education thematically wider lower degrees are favoured and interdisciplinary understanding is promoted. universities are given more flexibility to reorganize and mix traditional scientific fields to fulfil these aims. in many occasions, it seems that geography is invented again in the mushrooming of multidisciplinary study modules and research projects. at the same time, there are geography without a prefix pressures to reduce geography into geo-, social or administrative sciences, in which case intrinsic components of the potential of our discipline are at risk. along with the structural modernisation, the academic world is internalising the ideal of competitiveness. competition as such may bring out new innovations and ideas and rationalise the work done in scientific institutions. however, competition can be harmful if favouring economies of scale over viable and dynamic development of science and compromising academic freedom and integrity. in the scientific community, competition is culminated in the ranking of journals, articles and scientists mainly mastered by the thompson reuters isi web of knowledge. in finland, we also have a national ranking system, the publication forum project established by the federation of finnish learned societies. finnish geographical journals have struggled in this competition in spite of their established status in geographical publishing. to be indexed in the web of knowledge or to get into a higher level in the publication forum, journals need to publish top-quality research papers with high number of citations. to scientists and their institutions, it is more beneficial to publish papers in leading journals. therefore, it is challenging to draw submissions to journals with lower ranking. the situation with fennia and terra resembles a classic egg-hen cycle which may have either negative or positive trend. our journals need more submissions to feed a positive spiral: increased number of submissions – top-quality articles – more readers and citations – higher ranking. the editors and publisher are actively seeking for potential solutions to ensure the positive development. several possibilities were explored in the finnish geography days in october 2012: joining an international commercial or oaj publisher, tightening nordic collaboration, merging of the two finnish journals, or changing or clarifying the scope and roles of the journals. this multi-voiced discussion is continuing. to change the two trends – disintegration or even disappearance of geography as a discipline, urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7374 doi: 10.11143/7374 and impoverishment of the geographical publishing, we need to join together to define common goals and to work in cooperation to achieve that goal. the society is us, and the direction of the change needs to be decided collectively. the actions call for dialogue, ownership, commitment and collaboration. more information about the visions for the future communication and publishing strategy of the geographical society of finland at www.geography.fi. sanna mäki, president of the geographical society of finland geography lecturer, department of geography and geology, university of turku the stories that documents tell urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa115188 doi: 10.11143/fennia.115188 reflections: book review the stories that documents tell robert beauregard beauregard, r. (2021) the stories that documents tell. fennia 199(2) 281–284. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115188 in this essay, i extend lieven ameel’s narrative approach to planning by adding a material perspective that treats planning documents as actors in planning practice. as actors, documents have consequences for planning beyond the stories that they convey. among others, these consequences include providing the transparency essential for democratic planning, allowing planners to act at a distance, and strengthening institutional memory. i also reflect on the private stories that the public does not hear or read about and which are as important as the stories that ameel deftly analyzes. keywords: documents, planning, stories, materiality robert beauregard (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8821-7471), professor emeritus, graduate school of architecture, planning and preservation, columbia university, usa. e-mail: rab48@columbia.edu before planners tell public stories, they first produce documents. what the public hears and reads is the result of prior consultations and negotiations that have occurred among a variety of actors that included not only planners but elected officials and staff from other agencies. when these deliberations are resolved, the government – utilizing printed plans and reports, press releases, visual displays, and website content – announces what it wants the public to know. behind the public stories that planners tell is a cloistered world that neither public speech nor planning documents fully acknowledge.1 lieven ameel agrees on the importance of documents – up to a point. as he writes in the narrative turn in urban planning (2021, 38), his thoughtful reflection on recent planning projects in helsinki, “[p] lanning is understood here as a form of storytelling and as a rhetorical activity which is performed in the form of texts (such as planning documents) and processes (such as consultations or community meetings).”2 ameel’s scholarly world, though, is that of literature and his acknowledgment of documents is quickly replaced by the narratives that these documents contain. his interest is the extent to which “methodological concepts from literary and narrative studies … can be applied to planning texts and practices” (ibid., 3). his goal is to clarify the terminological inconsistencies in planning stories and show how “narrative and the material world are part of a firmly intertwined and © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115188 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8821-7471 mailto:rab48@columbia.edu 282 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: book review interactive network of meaning and experience” (ibid., 2). to this end, he asks: what storylines do helsinki’s planners develop? what metaphors do they deploy? how do stories outside of planning – stories, for example, that journalists might write and residents share amongst themselves – influence planning narratives? for ameel, what matters is the ideas, not the documents. ameel deserves to be praised for his impressive effort to give planners the tools they need to be more disciplined storytellers. clearly, he wants planners to be better writers and, by implication, those who peruse planning documents to be better readers. to achieve these ends, his advice focuses mainly on content; that is the themes that planners choose to emphasize. yet, he does not ignore stylistic issues. consider a few examples. one is the pervasive use of the passive voice and the absence of protagonists. this is a sign of the inherent tentativeness of plans. plans exist prior to commitments by actors with the resources and authority to realize them. at this moment, the active voice seems inappropriate. another stylistic trait is the rarity of individual stories, a quality pointing to planners’ embrace of an evidence-based rationality and avoidance of what is often termed subjectivity. what matters to planners are categories of people: the creative class, households, shoppers, business owners. that the helsinki city planning department commissioned hannu mäkelä to write a literary novel (hyvä jätkä) that could be distributed to residents of the new jätkäsaari neighborhood could not be a clearer statement regarding planners’ aversion to engage with individual lives. traditional planning documents are not meant to acknowledge personal stories. as a last example, planning texts, like almost all bureaucratic documents, are highly stylized. standardized and generic, to use ameel’s (2021, 72, endnote 4) terms, they leave little room for creativity. a critical reader might speculate on whether this stifles innovation not just in how planning stories are written and told, but also in the thinking that precedes them. much more could be said about the style of planning texts: their avoidance of ambiguity and conflict, their stealth retreat from evidence as they make promises about the future, and the need for closure in the face of unrelenting change come readily to mind. my interest, though, is the extent to which planning stories and planning itself depend on the material presence of documents. planning practice has a materiality that cannot be ignored: planners do not act alone or only with other people. they also act with things from laptop computers to telephones to conference tables (beauregard 2015). “[m]aps, photographs, diagrams, charts, paperwork, templates, lists, cards, and books … [are] … ubiquitous instrument[s] of building, planning, and urban governance practices” (lee & weiss 2020, 240). the documents with which planners work do more than serve as media for conveying stories; they are vibrant matter with consequences independent of their message (bennett 2010). as physical objects, document, moreover, have non-narrative implications. in considering these extra-narrative effects, it is useful to think of documents as immutable mobiles, a term associated with both actor-network theory and science and technology studies (schmidgen 2015, 91–92; pontille 2020). immutable mobiles are reports, graphs, images, statistical tables, and other inscriptions that circulate from one person to another and one place to another without their content being changed. for example, when scholars circulate a draft paper to colleagues for review, whether in physical or electronic form, all of them read the same text. the paper moves around and the content remains fixed. planning documents are similarly immutable as regards content and mobile as regards materiality. these qualities are central to a document’s non-narrative effects. four such consequences deserve brief mention: the transparency essential for democratic planning, the legitimacy afforded planners, the political support for planning proposals, and institutional memory, all of which enhance the ability of planners to do their work.3 first, consider transparency. simply by stabilizing their ideas in documents that circulate, planners ensure that planning not only is done, but is seen to be done. what is being proposed is fixed and knowable. this allows the public to gauge whether the planners are behaving properly or whether they need to be held accountable. transparency re-balances “the natural asymmetry of information between those who govern and those whom they are supposed to serve” (stiglitz 2002, 27). such widely-shared knowledge is critical to a democratic planning. without documents that anchor planning stories, accountability is diminished. second, documents publicly attest to the expertise and the insightfulness of planners. they portray an image of reasonable, government employees who think about the health of the city and the welfare fennia 199(2) (2021) 283robert beauregard of its inhabitants. documents enable planners to be seen as legitimate commentators on important urban issues and as experts whose advice deserves serious consideration. they are also a sign of planners’ professionalism. in their absence, planners would be just people with opinions. the circulation of documents is important for gathering and solidifying support for planning initiatives. making planning documents immutable does not alone make planners more powerful (contra pontille 2020, 103) – the documents also have to circulate. being passed from hand to hand increases the potential for planners to be effective and influential. one of the ways this happens is by enabling planners to act at a distance. planners cannot be everywhere in person, but, by using written reports and websites, they can project their ideas over time and space and to different groups of people. embodied in documents, their thoughts and proposals are present even when they are absent. another way that documents extend planners’ influence is when they are read by people who discover a correspondence between their interests and those of the planners. a connection is made and now planners have expanded their network of supporters. of course, planners cannot control how people react to their stories or to the documents that circulate. documents can engender protest and resistance as well as support and praise. the circulation of planning documents, third, raises an issue on which ameel is relatively silent. who hears these planning stories? who reads these documents? who is the actual – rather than the intended – audience? planning stories are important only to the extent that people learn about them. a planning story is not only to be told, it also needs to be widely heard and read by the appropriate individuals and publics. however, we know very little about how far these stories are disseminated. additionally, stories are likely to be experienced differently depending on the media being used and the settings in which they are promulgated. as regards the former, it matters whether the stories are on a web site or visually displayed in a public space. as regards the latter, context matters. in new york city, the government has a formal and extensive public review process for public projects (e.g., the re-design of a park) and for private sector developments that do not conform to current zoning. concerned residents not only have these projects explained to them at public meetings, they can also access the supporting documents (such as environmental impact assessments) on the department of city planning’s web site. moreover, the city has a vast array of neighborhood associations and advocacy groups actively involved in holding the department of city planning accountable (beauregard 2022, forthcoming). helsinki is a much dissimilar political environment and this suggests that who learns about these stories and the responses that are engendered will be different from what might have occurred in new york city. lastly, documents contribute to institutional memory. when planners consider an issue, they rarely do so de novo. rather, like many professionals, planners draw on past experience and the ‘best practices’ that circulate through the planning world. having documentation enables them to remember how previous proposals had fared and allows new personnel to become familiar with what has been done and how the planning department thinks. planning documents provide continuity. moreover, ideas that were earlier rejected might, under changed political circumstances and new developmental conditions, attract sufficient support to be adopted and implemented. in this and other ways, documents perform functions beyond simply telling planning stories. in conclusion, i want to return to an issue i raised at the start. it is not just that before planners tell public stories, they produce documents. rather, before they produce documents they engage in storytelling to which the public is not invited. unlike the stories that become public, these stories are told in seclusion and are more likely to be tentative, exploratory, and tangled as well as thematically richer with more possibilities in play. planners are speaking freely in order to work their way to an understanding of the project. additionally, ideas are likely to be more attributable than they are in public stories. without advocates, ideas die. consequently, people and groups are actively taking positions so that their interests are recognized and hopefully adopted. once a single story is agreedupon, once all of these private stories are reconciled, the sources of those ideas are erased and human actors disappear. it is important that planners be able to tell these stories beyond the gaze of the public; they need safe spaces to think and negotiate. but, should not these stories also be subject to reflection and analysis? such stories precede those that ameel finds so enticing; they are the material out of which public planning stories are crafted. 284 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: book review ameel has written a book that makes a strong case for paying greater attention to the stories that planners tell in public. in addition, he provides a useful framework for understanding how such stories work and how they should be read. however, these are not the only stories in which planners are involved. behind what the public is told is an even richer narrative world. as importantly, public stories only exist in the form they do because of the documents that preceded them. notes 1 a theoretical concern with the documents of planning, though uncommon, is not new. for an introduction, see hull (2012) and beauregard (2022). an important source for this approach is latour and woolgar’s (1986 [1976]) laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. for a popular perspective by a book historian that distinguishes between the text (content) and the medium (the physical book), see price (2019). 2 ameel, here, seems to equate texts and documents. contrarily, i treat texts as content and documents as the media that disseminate text. in english, the word ‘textbook’ nicely captures this distinction. 3 in doing so, i do not distinguish among the effects of different types of documents. ameel proceeds in a similar fashion. like most writers of case studies, he treats all of his documentary sources as having equal value and effects (ameel 2021, 13). references ameel, l. (2021) the narrative turn in urban planning: plotting the helsinki waterfront. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 beauregard, r. (forthcoming) public land as a social relation: the case of east river park in new york city. in hyötyläinen, m. & beauregard, r. (eds.) the political economy of land. routledge, london. beauregard, r. (2022) the documents of re-zoning: planning aspirations in new york city. in rydin, y., beauregard, r., cremaschi, m. & lieto, l. (eds.) regulation and planning, 15–26. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003095828-3 beauregard, r. (2015) planning matter: acting with things. university of chicago press, chicago, il. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226297422.001.0001 bennett, j. (2010) vibrant matter: the political ecology of things. duke university press, durham, nc. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jh6w hull, m. s. (2012) government of paper: the materiality of bureaucracy in pakistan. university of california press, berkeley, ca. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520951884 latour, b. & woolgar, s. (1986 [1976]) laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. princeton university press, princeton, nj. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400820412 lee, m. k. & weiss, s. (2020) cities on paper: on the materiality of paper in urban planning. journal of urban history 46(2) 239–247. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144219876603 pontille, j. d. (2020) what did we forget about ant’s roots in anthropology of writing? in blok, a., farias, i. & roberts c. (eds.) routledge companion to actor-network theory, 101–111. taylor and francis, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315111667-12 price, l. (2019) what we talk about when we talk about books. basic books, new york. schmidgen, h. (2015) bruno latour in pieces: an intellectual biography. fordham university press, new york. https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823263691.001.0001 stiglitz, j. (2002) transparency and government. in world development studies, the right to tell: the role of mass media in economic development, 27–44. the world bank, washington, dc. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003095828-3 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226297422.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jh6w https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520951884 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400820412 https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144219876603 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315111667-12 https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823263691.001.0001 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa3849 spatial divergence in living standards during an economic growth phase in the periphery: a case study of north karelia olli lehtonen & markku tykkyläinen lehtonen, olli & markku tykkyläinen (2011). spatial divergence in living standards during an economic growth phase in the periphery: a case study of north karelia. fennia 189: 2, pp. 47−62. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the advisability of an urban-centred growth strategy in sparsely populated parts of europe has not been much analysed at micro-levels such as that of the postcode area. this paper investigates how regional disparities in living standards continued to increase during the technology-driven growth phase of 1993−2003, as exemplified by the case of north karelia in finland. urban sprawl conveyed the spread effects of the rise in incomes, and the upsurge of living standards was concentrated in the neighbourhood of the provincial centre, joensuu. living standards faced a process of double divergence: between the central district of joensuu and its commuter belt, and between the provincial core area and its hinterland, the latter consisting of rural areas and small towns dependent largely on natural resources. the spatial outcome of this socio-economic reorganization is a three-zone core-periphery pattern. as the economy grew, geographical shifts in wealth were consequences of the growth and mobility of certain social groups and strata. a wave of high living standards towards the outskirts of the provincial centre was generated by an expansion in commuting. the relative decline in living standards in the periphery was due to long-term rural decline and involved spatial restructuring. keywords: living standards, spread effects, core-periphery olli lehtonen & markku tykkyläinen, department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, yliopistokatu 7, 80130 joensuu, finland. e-mail: olli.lehtonen@uef.fi, markku.tykkylainen@uef.fi introduction economic development tends to constitute a series of cumulative, spatially centripetal processes gene rated by economies of scale and changes in transportation costs, which result in chains of path-dependent development. these reconstitutions take place through changes in place-bound initial advantages, such as natural resources, hub location and knowledge (krugman 1991, 1993, 1998; fujita & krugman 2004: 145, 147). according to krugman (1993), there is a strong accidental component in the upsurge of development. some of the initial advantages, such as the concentration of human capital, are increasingly accentuated by policy measures and named as constructed advantages (cooke & leydesdorff 2006). the impact of distance is implicit in spatial development, since spatially uneven industrial growth would not persist if distance had no impact. the impact of distance has traditionally been explained in ge ographical models by an inverse relationship between spatial interaction and distance: the greater the absolute or relative distance between two areas is, the smaller will be the movement of people, goods or ideas (bell et al. 2002; martinez-zarzoso 2003; partridge et al. 2007; coccia 2008; partridge & rickman 2008). the pecuniary variant of this principle has been adopted to explain the spatial concentration of economic activities. to put it simply, the farther away an enterprise is located, the higher are the interaction costs (westin 1999), and hence the lower are the compensations for capital, land and labour, an effect that will finally pull down living standards. the spatial pattern of socioeconomics is not easy to anticipate, however, as 48 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen local and regional economies are very open. many enterprises are now located in global production chains and networks, and hence location and the resulting costs must be interpreted relative to such networks (garretsen & martin 2010). moreover, growth in advanced economies takes place outside the traditional primary manufacturing sectors and an increasing proportion of the value added is generated by the service sector and the production of information. in many regions the economy is evolving in spatially uneven ways, which points to changing revenues and cost structures in local industries, with eventual impacts on local living conditions. although much has been written about regional disparities, restructuring and growth, less attention has been paid to the impact of an economic growth phase on the geography of living standards in peripheries at a micro-level. the purpose of this paper is to show how the spatial development in living standards took place in 1993−2003, a time when rapid economic growth prevailed in finland (rouvinen & ylä-anttila 2003). we discuss changes in living standards in a remote uni-nodal peripheral region, north karelia, as an example of a sparselypopulated nordic pattern of development (gløersen et al. 2005). finland’s gdp increased every year during the period concerned, but north karelia lagged behind both in absolute terms and per capita (statistics finland 2010a). north karelia is located 400 km northeast of helsinki and is one of the most problematic regions in finland, as it has been plagued by low incomes, out-migration, decades of high unemployment and an ageing population. it is a sparsely-populated, largely forested nuts 3 region with a provincial centre, joensuu, that had 73,000 inhabitants in 2011. growth processes in a geographical space knowledge is the key production factor in a technology-driven economy, in that it can improve labour productivity and leads to the invention of new products, thus improving the standard of living. this innovation-oriented paradigm of regional policy has predominated in finland since the early 1990s (vartiainen & viiri 2002; arbo & eskelinen 2003), and was considered a central paradigm for survival in the depression of 1990−1993. the main focus was on national and regional innovation systems (nis and ris), which offered financial inputs and guidance on how to increase regional competitiveness and foster innovations. such a policy presupposes that strong growth centres will spread their success to their surrounding areas. in order to achieve this success, the policy aims at creating a positive relationship between the quality of human capital and local economic growth, as has been observed empirically in many studies. raspe and van oort (2006), for instance, observed that growth in both employment and productivity in municipalities is dependent on the intensity of the knowledge work environment and the emergence of innovations. consequently, individual city size growth rates run parallel with individual local human capital growth rates as measured by educational attainment (black & henderson 1999: 269−271). glaeser (2000) and lever (2001) provide empirical evidence of a positive correlation between human capital and regional economic growth. innovations could provide new production possibilities for keeping people in rural areas, but human capital has not developed much there. so far, the results of growth policy have been meagre in the nordic peripheries (gløersen et al. 2005; suorsa 2007). growth concentrated in a city usually diffuses into new suburbs and exurbs only in the surroundings of that city (berube et al. 2006). another important factor causing the increased spatial concentration of production is agglomeration economies, originating from the fact that larger centres provide a greater range of traded and untraded interdependences and often at lower prices than the periphery. together with the increasing importance of knowledge, these agglomerative factors lead to the reallocation of living standards at the regional level. research findings support this, as van oort et al. (2009) found that the density of knowledge workers and innovativeness has a significant positive impact on employment growth, and that this impact is the stronger the larger an urban agglomeration is. one reason for this is that larger agglomerated areas offer more specialized services and a thicker, more specialized labour market. other sources of agglomeration economies can occur through knowledge spill overs between firms, research institutions, universities and actors in the labour market. one spatial aspect of spillovers is that the size of the centre correlates with the intensity of the spread effects diffused to nearby rural areas (schmitt & henry 2000). in vast, sparsely populated areas there are few cities and their sizes are small, which fennia 189: 2 (2011) 49spatial divergence in living standards during an economic … means that there are intermediary areas which do not reap the benefits of urban-driven growth. similarly, smaller centres may not be able to create any effects on peripheries (tervo 2009). thus, agglomeration-driven growth does not generate much economic growth in sparsely populated peripheries. the geographical reach of scale economies and the other spread effects mentioned above have occasionally been demonstrated empirically. rosenthal and strange (2001) showed that knowledge externalities may attenuate quickly because of their reliance on personal interactions, but the benefits of labour market pooling and shared inputs may extend over wider areas, such as whole states in the us. partridge et al. (2007: 147) found that agglomeration spillovers and labour market spread effects (through commuting) were more limited, as they extended about 175 km out from the urban centres with a core of at least 10,000 inhabitants in canada (2007: 134). similarly, polèse and shearmur (2004) reported that distance and city size remain good predictors of location patterns for most industrial classes in canada, and concluded that the one-hour threshold (100 to 150 km from a major metropolis) has remained a robust predictor of the borders of the spatial concentration of manufacturing activity. in finland, tervo (2009) observed both spread and backwash effects from provincial centres, as measured by population changes in the finnish regions over the period 1970−2004, and north karelia was the region where spread effects dominated, due to a relatively weak pull effect of its smallish provincial centre. answering research questions concerning spatial divergence the hypothesis, explorative setting and analytical methods tervo (2009) found more evidence for backwash effects than for spread effects in the regions of finland. in particular, if a provincial centre had grown rapidly or if it was a large centre, it generally had negative effects on its hinterland. the time interval 1970−2004 which he examined nevertheless consisted of the industrialization period in the peripheral areas in the 1970s and deindustrialization in the 1980s, and thus it may not effectively reveal the impacts of technology-driven growth in the recent past on living standards. our focus is on the robust post-1993 economic growth phase, and we shall attempt to unravel the spatio-economic processes at the micro-level using postcode areas as areal units (fig. 1). the study of karvonen and rintala (2005) provides evidence that technologydriven growth favoured urban-adjacent areas and spatial shifts were seen in high living standards along with urban sprawl, even though the central districts were still superior in 2000. taking into account the findings of the abovementioned studies, we hypothesized that a tendency for spatial divergence in living standards would be seen to have taken place in the north karelian economy during the post-1993 growth phase, largely because the initial advantage for generating growth was highly concentrated in the largest population centre. the initial advantage was actually created by new industrial and regional policies that were based on boosting innovations and expertise (vartiainen 1998; vartiainen & viiri 2002). the idea was that metropolises and provincial centres had better conditions for growth than other areas, as they had a higher intensity of knowledge supported by nis and ris and better agglomeration economies. we assume that divergence in living standards happens because the aforementioned factors are tied to the geographical reach, which reflects spatially unequal conditions for growth. this divergence ought to be driven by structural shifts in the economy and agglomeration economies, as argued in theory (krugman 1991). we assume that a divergence in living standards has taken place between the core and periphery on a regional scale. if so, diverging development has probably created new spatial patterns of living standards, the geographical reach of which we will attempt to unveil. we set out to examine this hypothesis by means of non-parametric regression analysis, where the standardized, weighted composite variable representing the variables mirroring living standards is explained by the distance by road from joensuu market square. such a method is suitable for analysing the impact of urban distance on living standards (partridge et al. 2007). the changes between 1993 and 2003 were assessed by means of empirical models constructed using the same kernel function and bandwidth for the two years. the postcode areas were weighted by population in order to capture changes in living standards, in the sense that each inhabitant has the same weight in the model. the trend in living standards on the core-periphery dimension was investigated using 50 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen the nadaraya-watson estimator, which is defined as (faraway 2006): ∑ ∑ = == n j j n j jj w yw xf 1 1 )(λ (1), where λ λ /      − = j j xx kw . (2). k is a kernel where k = 1. kernel functions may be of various shapes: parabolic, uniform, normal etc., but we use a normal kernel in our analysis. λ is the bandwidth which controls the smoothness of the fitted curve and therefore determines how far away observations are allowed to be from the postcode area and still contribute to the estimated living standard (f̂λ(x)) the nadaraya-watson estimator simply modifies the moving average estimator so that it is a true weighted average where the weights for each y will sum to one (faraway 2006). this estimation method was selected because of the sparseness of the data. the spatial changes in living standards are generated with a simple permutation-based simulation model in which the simulated change in living standards is related to the distance by road from the provincial centre. the aim of the simulation was to imitate three theoretical development processes: random, centrifugal and centripetal development. by comparing the theoretical outcomes with the observed development, we were able to test the tendency for spatial divergence in living standard and assess its nature. the random development process is based on random simulation of the differences in pca scores without replacement fig. 1. the 161 postcode areas of north karelia in 2008. the arrows point to the centres of municipalities. fennia 189: 2 (2011) 51spatial divergence in living standards during an economic … with equal probabilities for all postcode areas, while the latter two simulations are based on probability sampling without replacement. the probabilities for sampling are p i = r i /134, where r i is the rank of the postcode area i dependent on its location in relation to joensuu market square. in the centrifugal simulation the ranks were highest in the distant areas and descended towards the core, while in the centripetal simulation the ranking was reversed. probabilities are used in the simulations to sample the group of sorted values for the estimated change in living standards { )()2( 2 )1( 1 ˆ,...,ˆ,ˆ m nyyy }, where the index n denotes the number of the postcode areas and m the rank in terms of living standards. the permuted sampling was repeated 1000 times and after each permutation a non-parametric regression model was constructed with the same bandwidth (equation 2). after the simulations the average and standard error of the estimates were calculated as ∑ = = k i ki yy 1 ˆ 1000 1 and s̄ē( ȳ i ) = s i /√n̄, where s i is the standard deviation of the individual observations in postcode area i. the confidence intervals for the simulations were calculated as [ )(( )1()1( iiii yeszyyeszy αα −− +− ), )(( )1()1( iiii yeszyyeszy αα −− +− ) ], where z (1–a) is the standard normal percentile and z(1–0.025) = 1.96. in order to understand the results of our test of the hypothesis on the divergence of living standards more thoroughly, we posed four questions regarding the impacts of commuting and the properties of residential areas on changes in living standards and analysed what factors explain these changes in living standards and how they are located relative to the regional core. we used the following as independent variables in our explorative setting: the importance of the commuting distance, changes in the commuting distance, the population change 1993−2003 and the construction of housing after 1991, in order to assess living standards in the different locations. our analysis will reveal how these variables generated changes in living standards at different distances, and since there is no reasonable a priori expectation and thus no reasonable hypothesis regarding the nature of such relations, we approached the issue exploratively. to test these questions related to our hypothesis, we used the nadaraya-watson estimator for multivariate predictors to identify the dependence of living standards on these attributes of a postcode area combined with the distance from joensuu by road. the multivariate model can be written as (faraway 2006): f ∑ ∑ = = − − = n j j jj n j xxk yxxk x 1 1 )/( )/( )( λ λ λ . (3). the quality of a kernel estimate depends less on the shape of k than on the value of its bandwidth λ. as λ increases, the variance of an estimate decreases because a large number of points are used in the estimation of density, but large values of λ can lead to an over-smoothed surface with increased bias. since the smoothing is mostly based on the values of the bandwidth, we used the crossvalidation (cv) method to select the smoothing parameter λ. the guiding principle was to choose λ such that the integrated mean square error of the estimated density was minimized (bowman & azzalini 1997): cv ∑ = −= n j jjj xfyn 1 2 )( ( ˆ( 1 )( λλ�� )) , (4), where the estimate ∑ = −= n j jjj xfyn 1 2 )( ( ˆ( 1 )( λλ�� ))( j) is calculated from the data with the point j left out and the main idea is to predict the dependent variable y j with the remaining data. the non-parametric regression models were created with the r software and its sm library, as described in more detail by bowman and azzalini (1997). the distance was measured as the mean distance of people’s homes from the market square of the provincial centre by road, and was calculated using the network analyst tool in arcmap. building the living standards variable by pca our chain of reasoning was that spatially unequal economic growth has an impact on income formation, migration and material well-being in a geographical space. personal incomes are a central constituent of living standards, but we added others that were related to the social environment and human capital and have been used as components of living standards in studies of well-being in finland (siirilä et al. 1990; vaattovaara 1998; kainulainen et al. 2001; karvonen & rintala 2007). a 52 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen composite variable for measuring living standards by postcode areas was created for this purpose by principal components analysis (pca), which converts the properties of the original variables into a very few components according to the best possible fit. the main advantage of this method over those based on income and consumer expenditure is that it captures a broader dimension of well-being than one variable (kainulainen et al. 2001; vyas & kumaranayke 2006). the debate over the use of pca reflects the fact that principal components are artificially constructed indices and difficult to interpret. pca falls into the category of factorial ecology within geography (pacione 2005). our analysis consists of 7 variables that measure standards of education and material well-being by postcode area: the median income of individuals (€), the proportion of persons in the lowest income bracket (%), the proportion of high-income households (%), mean household net assets (1000 €), the proportion of indebted households (%), unemployment rate (%) and the proportion of persons with a university degree (%) (for exact definitions of the variables, see statistics finland 1996, 2006). the selection of these variables was limited by the availability of data, but they are similar to those used in many previous analyses of well-being in finland. we use postcode areas because each municipality is rather heterogeneous in terms of socio-economic attributes. thus, we use a smaller, internally more homogeneous areal unit in order to observe spatial patterns within a municipality and their underlying processes. close correlations exist between all of the variables except for household net assets, and the loadings in the years 1993 and 2003 are almost identical. only the loading on unemployment rate (%) for 1993 is notably lower than the respective figure for 2003 (table 1). the obvious reason for this was the severe economic recession in the early 1990s, when layoffs caused unemployment even in the wealthier areas. the variance explained by the first component increased up to the end of the period, indicating greater homogeneity amongst the distributions of the variables in this component in 2003. the sum variable for measuring living standards was created from the first principal component (pc1) using the loadings on the selected variables as weights. two criteria were adopted. first, a variable was chosen if its loading on pc1 was higher than the traditional threshold value of 0.30 (dillon & goldstein 1984). second, a reliability analysis was conducted with cronbach’s alpha, which gave acceptable values of 0.879 in 2003 and 0.829 in 1993 with the five variables highlighted in table 1. the higher the median income, the higher were the proportions of persons with a university degree and of high-income households (table 1), while the unemployment rate and persons in the lowest income bracket were variables that had the reverse characteristics. the principal component analysis was performed with r software and its stats library. the north karelia region north karelia, an area equivalent in size to 7/10 of belgium, was earlier highly dependent economically on agriculture, the forest sector and mining table 1. factor loadings on the two principal components for 1993 and 2003. the loadings of the variables which are included in the sum variable appear in bold. variable 2003 1993 pc1 pc2 pc1 pc2 median income of individuals (€) 0.96 –0.12 0.96 –0.01 unemployment rate (%) –0.58 –0.58 –0.30 –0.76 mean household net assets (1000 €) * –0.16 0.91 –0.19 –0.83 persons with a university degree (%) 0.79 –0.02 0.79 0.09 persons in the lowest income bracket 8 107 € (%) * –0.86 0.25 –0.89 0.17 high-income households, 47 000 € p.a. (%) * 0.84 0.30 0.78 0.10 indebted households (%) * 0.69 0.30 0.56 0.31 total variance explained (%) 55.2 19.9 48.6 19.8 *) variable from 2004. source: statistics finland (1996, 2006). fennia 189: 2 (2011) 53spatial divergence in living standards during an economic … (tykkyläinen 1988). it is an example of a natural resource-based nuts 3 region the development of which is now being boosted by state-led innovation policy and various regional policy projects. although this analysis is an empirical case study, its results reflect general problems and processes which many areas face as the rationalization of production reduces their labour force and leads to a vicious circle of depopulation (oecd 2006: 32). we concentrate here on north karelia for practical reasons, but similar processes are in evidence in natural resource-based northern hinterlands in europe and america in general (partridge et al. 2007; partridge et al. 2008; gløersen 2009). economic growth and development is increasingly becoming concentrated in the provincial centre of joensuu and its commuter belt. suburbanization has continued since it emerged with economic boom and industrialization in the mid1970s (paasi & vartiainen 1981). while the population of the city region has grown, the distant industrial communities and scattered settlements have lagged behind, and other municipal centres that previously had expanding populations have begun to decline. consequently new workplaces in the service sector have tended to be located in the provincial centre and its growing neighbourhoods, indicating the geographical concentration of economic activity on a regional scale. the rural restructuring that occurred after finland joined the eu in 1995 is still going on, as shown by declining employment in the primary industries and a worsening age structure followed by depopulation. the growth of the regional core area is bound up with its success in generating and attracting enterprises, the success of education and research and development (r&d) and globalization impulses felt in its industries. the rapid growth of the ict industries in the late 1990s created many new jobs in the manufacturing of plastics and metal products, but the largest local factories in this field have recently been closed down. many people continue to be employed in the manufacturing of forest machinery by john deere, which, like the ict branch, was boosted by regional policy and since 1998 by the north karelia centre of expertise programme. the university and polytechnics have expanded, and a science park and related industrial activities have played a part in nurturing new businesses in the core area, which thus has the best regional assets and competitiveness in the regional economy (vartiainen & viiri 2002; arbo & eskelinen 2003). the allocation of r&d investment and the distribution of employed persons in north karelia are concentrated in a uni-nodal manner. on an average 82.7% of the r&d investments at the nuts 4 level, now termed the lau 1 level, in the period 1995−1999 were allocated to the joensuu sub-region, and the average since 2000 has been 85.0% (statistics finland 2010b). these figures reveal that access to the possibilities offered by a technologydriven economy is poor everywhere other than in the vicinity of joensuu. this gives us reason to assume that economic growth, although not directly r&d-driven in all cases, has become spatially concentrated, leading to similar uneven impacts on living standards within the region. a zonal pattern in the spatial divergence of living standards living standards and the formation of zones supporting our hypothesis, but in a complicated way, the changes in living standards over the period 1993−2003 manifested themselves in three zones (fig. 2, bottom right). surprisingly, the most intensive relative reduction took place in the inner zone constituting the city centre of joensuu, although a relative decline prevailed everywhere in the outermost zone, i.e. beyond a ½-hour commuting road journey from the centre. living standards declined markedly in relative terms in the rural areas and in local centres such as outokumpu, rääkkylä and uimaharju, at distances of 40−60 km by road, kitee, juuka, lieksa and pankakoski at distances of 70−105 km and nurmes at a distance of 125 km, as anticipated in our hypothesis. the downward transitions in these local centres indicate unfavourable industrial structures and a decline in competitiveness compared with the joensuu commuter belt (fig. 2, bottom right). the north karelian results are congruent with the findings of spatially narrow diffusion effects of economic growth in nordic sparsely-populated areas (gløersen 2009: 41−43). the inner zone the population of the inner zone increased by 3,576 in 1993−2003 (table 2), whereas that of the outermost zone decreased, providing evidence of a backwash effect in that some of the migrants coming to the regional core originated from the 54 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen depopulating outermost zone. the numbers of pensioners and students increased in the inner zone and the foreign-speaking population grew substantially. this population growth of 6.4% correlates closely with the increase of 8.5% in the number of jobs in the inner zone, which in turn suggests that the business environment is most appealing there (table 2). the results are consistent with the findings of raspe and van oort (2006), who show that growth in employment is dependent on the knowledge work environment. so far, the inner zone has had the highest index of persons with a university degree. regardless of the presence of thriving businesses, as revealed by an increasing number of jobs, these do not always lead to an increase in living standards in the same area, as demonstrated by the trend in living standards in the inner zone. the relative decline in living standards in the inner zone is a result of the increase in certain individual groups, the largest of which are resident students and pensioners (table 2). the estimates for living standards in the centre have probably been slightly downgraded by an act of parliament fig. 2. non-parametric kernel fits for the regression of the change in living standards on road distance from joensuu market square in 1993 and 2003. bandwidth λ=6 km. living standards are measured in terms of pca scores. the division into three zones is marked by vertical broken lines. table 2. indices of spatial divergence in three distance zones. the spatial indices are calculated by weighting them by the population figures of the postcode areas. regional average = 100. the largest changes appear in bold. numbers of inhabitants, pensioners, students and jobs are indicated at the bottom. spatial indices and variables inner zone, 0 km – 9 km by road (n=13) intermediate zone, 9.1 km –33 km by road (n=25) outermost zone, 33.1 km and over by road (n=98) 1993 2003 ∆ % 1993 2003 ∆ % 1993 2003 ∆ % median income (€) 118.1 113.1 –4.2 101.6 110.6 8.9 89.2 84.5 –5.3 unemployment rate (%) 93.5 86.7 –7.3 87.7 80.1 –8.7 106.5 114.7 7.7 persons with a university degree (%) 176.8 159.8 –9.6 84.5 100.6 19.1 59.3 57.7 –2.7 persons in the lowest income bracket 8 107 € (%) * 82.2 91.7 11.6 102.3 92.1 –10.0 109.7 108.0 –1.5 high income households > 47 000 € p.a., (%) * 129.1 110.8 14.2 102.5 130.1 26.9 82.7 84.2 1.8 population ** 55 648 59 224 6.4 21 601 22 624 4.7 96 645 84 013 –13.1 pensioners 10 252 11 435 10.3 4 750 5 055 6.0 26 177 26 018 –0.6 students *** 6 118 6 990 12.5 2 034 1 770 –14.9 7 269 6 225 –16.8 jobs 22 100 23 980 8.5 6 159 6 381 3.5 26 676 25 525 –4.5 core km2 % km2 % periphery km2 % total area km2 257 1.2 3175 14.7 18153 84.1 *) variable from 2004. **) variables from 1995 and 2005. source: statistics finland (1996, 2006). ***) when the municipality of residence act came into force in1994 the number of students in resident in cities somewhat increased. for comparison, the number of the students at the university of joensuu increased by 29.3% from 1993 to 2003 and the number of degrees awarded by 23.1%. source: kota online (2010). fennia 189: 2 (2011) 55spatial divergence in living standards during an economic … that allowed students to register more freely as residents of the locality where they are studying as from 1994 (see table 2 and notes). the inner zone lost much of its competitiveness in terms of attracting high-income households and persons with a university degree, as the spatial indices for these deteriorated most here. the well-educated, betteroff income earners migrated to the suburbs and exurbs, and it was the poorer people who came to the city. in spite of these regressive changes over time, however, the spatial indices for incomes and persons with a university degree were still higher than in the other two zones in 2003, 113.1 and 159.8 points respectively. high incomes and viable human capital are still conspicuously present as factors for economic growth in the central district of the city. the intermediate zone the commuter belt was better off in relative terms in 2003 than it had been a decade earlier, but the best-off locations had shifted about 15 km outwards from the core of the city in the course of 10 years, as the highest living standards were recorded in the city centre in 1993 and in the 15-km ring in 2003 (fig. 2). the intermediate zone attracted 1,023 new inhabitants during the period, giving a 4.7% rise in population relative to 1993 and indicating spread effects from the inner zone and an expansion of urban sprawl. once again the growth in population correlates with an increase in the number of jobs. as the total population of north karelia was distributed among the zones in the ratio 36:14:51 in an outward direction in 2003, the improved living standards in the intermediate zone may be said to have influenced a relative minor segment of the total population of the region. the post-1993 spatial restructuring created vital but not very populous settlements in the surroundings of the provincial centre, which attracted population in general and especially high-income households from the city. unemployment decreased most in the intermediate zone, even falling below the regional average, to 80.1 points on the spatial index (table 2), while the proportion of high-income households increased substantially, raising the spatial index from 102.5 to 130.1 points, and at the same time median incomes rose from 101.6 to 110.6 points, reflecting a gain in personal incomes and even better success in attracting high income households (table 2). the importance of city income growth for suburban wealth was shown by voith (1998), but our smallcity case shows more clearly the shift of wealth from the inner zone to suburbs and exurbs and the growth of jobs in the inner zone. the outermost zone in the outermost zone, located beyond 33 km from the centre of joensuu, the postcode areas with the lowest living standards were to be found at the distances of 50−70 km and over 130 km by road from the centre of joensuu (fig. 2). the steep decrease in living standards from a standardized score of about 1.5 to near 0 between 15 and 40 km indicates that the diffusion effects generated by the boom in joensuu weakened strongly and came to a halt at the edge of the ½ hour commuting zone. the spatial indices for the original variables in the outermost zone, except for the proportion of persons in the lowest income bracket and the proportion of high-income households, indicate a relative socio-economic decline (table 2). the diverging indices reflect significant rural socioeconomic restructuring, as the outermost zone lost 4.5% of its total number of jobs and 13.1% of its total population within 10 years (table 2). the population loss reduced the potential for reproduction of labour, as the younger population declined and the proportion of pensioners grew from 27.1% to 31.0% of the total. ageing and the population decline reduce the potential labour force available to industries in the future. in addition to losses in quantity, a brain drain occurred, as revealed by the spatial index of the proportion of graduates, which declined from 59.3 to 57.7 points in 1993−2003. as stated earlier, such empirical results predict low growth or decline (glaeser 2000; lever 2001; raspe & van oort 2006), as a scarcity of suitable labour and a lack of people with a higher education makes future development more dependent on external impulses and weakens the potential for creating favourable conditions for economic growth in the outermost zone. the outermost zone constitutes 84% of the total area of north karelia. the peripheral municipal centres with industrial estates and separate industrial communities, of which many arose initially because of their advantageous locational factors related to natural resources and were then boosted by regional subsidies and later by economies of scale, especially in the forest industries, are not attractive environments for growing industries in a 56 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen knowledge economy. the lack of any relative improvement in living standards in the scattered settlements and local centres had been expected, but not, perhaps, in such a uniform manner. the decline observable in the outermost zone gives a signal that beyond their core areas, regions of the type and size of north karelia are too extensive and uncompetitive to benefit widely from the impacts of regional development measures based on a single node. nevertheless, the growth of joensuu has strengthened its potential for providing services in the outermost zone, and the centre has been the area to which students and persons looking for services and jobs have migrated. north karelia would certainly have been worse off developmentally without the growth of its provincial core region. towards a uni-nodal spatial structure: evidence from simulations a strong tendency towards socio-spatial segregation prevailed in the region. living standards improved in relative terms only in the intermediate zone located 9.1−33 km from joensuu market square, but this does not negate the fact that the regional structure of north karelia became more markedly uni-nodal as the other towns and municipal centres lost part of their population and some of their relative status as measured by living standards. this became evident from the simulation results, that represented a tendency towards uni-nodalization in the form of a simple model. as described earlier, simulations are based on the sorting of values for estimated changes in living standards, as measured by pca score differences, in three alternative ways. to begin with, we performed a simulation where changes in living standards varied randomly and independently of distance (fig. 3, top left). as expected, the spatially even results showed that the inner and outermost zones performed worse in the real world than they would do by chance, while the areas in the intermediate zone succeeded better than with a random pattern of development, and confidence levels remained narrow (fig. 3, top left). hence, distance matters significantly as a proxy for centripetal and centrifugal forces. in addition to the random simulation of distance, two other simulations were performed assuming that changes in living standards prevailed over the period 1993−2003 but in either a descending or ascending order as a function of distance. an “emphasis on nearby areas” simulation was constructed assuming that the highest observed improvement of living standards would be located at joensuu market square, with a decline towards the periphery (fig. 3, top right). the highest increase in living standards was then shown to have happened in the city centre, with the other changes leading to progressively poorer conditions with increasing distance. by contrast, the “emphasis on distant areas” simulation assumed that living standards would develop in the reverse manner, so that the highest living standards occurred in the periphery, with a decline towards the centre, according to a centrifugal pattern (fig. 3, bottom left). the “emphasis on nearby areas” simulation revealed that in this situation the areas in the inner zone and at distances of 28−90 km from joensuu market square fared worse than they should have done according to the centripetal simulation results. this experiment demonstrates the relative fig. 3. estimated relative changes in living standards (solid line) and simulated changes (broken line) as a function of road distance (with 95 percent confidence intervals) in three theoretical simulations, and the cumulative distribution function (cdf) of change. bandwidth λ=6 km. the changes in living standards from 1993 to 2003 are represented by differences in pca scores. the division into three zones is marked by vertical broken lines. fennia 189: 2 (2011) 57spatial divergence in living standards during an economic … social decline that occurred in the central district, but also shows that the real decrease of living standards did not accelerate towards the periphery as it would have done in a purely centripetal system. in practice, the decline in living standards in the inner zone was partly due to a shortage of superior housing and a demand for building sites that channelled development to the intermediate zone, and partly due to low-income groups moving into the inner zone. the diffusion of the rise ends at the point in the intermediate zone where commuting ceases. in straightforward terms, the spatial manifestation of development was directed by the supply of urban housing. the results of our centrifugal simulation, where the highest living standards were assumed to be found in the periphery, with a decline towards the centre, reveal the scale and force of the agglomeration tendencies and urban sprawl in the real world (fig. 3, bottom left). theoretically, a relative rise in wealth above the average could have emerged all over the outermost zone if demand and competitiveness had decreased step by step inwards from the periphery. in practise, a relative decline in living standards is now taking place in the small industrial towns and rural areas. earlier, and especially in the 1970s, the countryside supplied labour for manufacturing industries in lieksa, nurmes, outokumpu and kitee in addition to joensuu, reflecting competitive local economies, whereas the current development is heading towards a situation in which these former manufacturing towns are becoming suppliers of labour to the provincial core area and a few large, growing agglomerations in the south of finland. this has happened due to the relative poor competitiveness of these areas for emerging new forms of production, which is characterized by r&d environments, service-orientation and global outsourcing rather than being in the nature of traditional branch-plant manufacturing. in the converse experiment, the centripetal simulation assumed that the worst effects were felt farthest away. in such a case, a relative decline in living standards could have engulfed large peripheral areas more than 100 km from the core, reducing their actual development (fig. 3, top right). the counterfactual simulations show that a different pattern of spatial reorganization of wealth creation could have had substantial impacts on living standards. impacts of commuting and the properties of residential areas on changes in living standards commuting distance and their changes to understand the impact of the changes in commuting patterns associated with our hypothesis, we analysed the importance of commuting distance for living standards in the postcode areas, in order to demonstrate the dynamics and pattern of observed commuting and the consequent change in living standards. based on the same data for 1993−2003, the 10-year change in living standards shows that the localities with long distances to workplaces have benefited most from the improvement in living standards (fig. 4, top left). a few places have such strong impacts that the highest increase is noted within a distance of 18−32 km by road from the population’s workplaces. due to the limited supply of appealing building sites, commuting has expanded to new areas in the intermediate zone and towards the periphery, although the increase in living standards drops rapidly beyond the outer fringe of the commuter belt. the commuting distances do not have much explanatory power in the inner zone, where they are in any case mostly short. in the outermost zone, the effects of growth are to be observed in the fringe area proximal to the core, combined with commuting distances of more than 20 km, while the negative contours farther away denote that living standards in the subregional centres and distant rural areas (>70 km) combined with journeys to work of 10−20 km declined most in relative terms. in general, living standards grew in relative terms in a few areas in the intermediate zone and beyond when combined with long distances to work and in some places in the intermediate and outermost zones which had very local labour markets, as in farming areas. the impacts of the changes in commuting distance were bifurcated, in that both an increase and a decrease in commuting distance increased living standards in relative terms (fig. 4, top right). the influx of new commuters disappeared beyond the intermediate zone, and hence the relative increase in living standards dropped rapidly and became negative beyond the outer fringe of the commuter belt. likewise, living standards declined in areas where the change in commuting distance was negligible, wherever these were located. in the inner 58 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen zone the commuting distance actually decreased in many postcode areas, indicating a social change, while in the outermost zone the spread effects of growth were to be observed in the fringe area proximal to the core and up to 50 km, combined with an increase in commuting distance. the decline in commuting distance in a minority of small areas in the intermediate and outermost zones correlates with an increase in living standards. there may be several explanations for this, such as reductions in the number of longer commuting distances for reasons of demography and migration. population change and new residential building to understand the socio-spatial processes associated with the hypothesis further, we analysed the importance of population growth and housing construction for the changes in living standards in the postcode areas, in order to demonstrate the role of newcomers in diverging living standards. the impacts of the 10-year change in population on the 10-year differences in living standards reveal that living standards improved in relative terms in the areas where the population grew, namely in the intermediate zone, and declined most in the central district (fig. 4, bottom left). the most severe estimated downward impact, a standardized score of –0.6, was recorded in the postcode areas of the city, where zero population growth prevailed, while growth impacts peaked in the areas located in the intermediate zone proximal to the outer zone, where the population increased by 30%, having the highest impact on the relative improvement in living standards. more affluent migrants from the city raised standards in the suburbs and exurbs, while out-migration created a backwash effect in the inner zone. affluence was clearly diffusing outwards across the border of the outermost zone, where the population grew most. the relative increase in living standards was solely contingent upon in-migration. distance penalties pushed living standards down in relative terms in all the areas beyond 55 km from the centre of joensuu regardless of their population change, but a similar decline in living standards was also noted in the central district (fig. 4, bottom left). the relative decline in living stan dards combined with depopulation in the more remote areas levels off in the places where depopulation is worst (fig. 4, bottom left). these most marginalized areas were not especially viable at the beginning of the period and had already reached a low ebb at which incomes were dominated by low wages and salaries, pensions and welfare payments. in a core-periphery setting, as studied here, a decline of population proves to be a sign of relative deterioration in living standards everywhere, while population growth in suburbs and exurbs usually means a rise in wealth due to an influx of better-off migrants. in this case, however, the central district lost its relative living standard independently of population growth. the main analysis of population change is indicative of the importance of the underlying mechanisms related to migration, with residential preferences and demography acting as stimuli for changes in living standards. all these factors are sensitive to distance. the newest residential areas are located in the intermediate zone, and growing living standards are focused on those neighbourhoods where more than 15% of the housing had been constructed affig. 4. non-parametric regression for changes in living standards by postcode area, 1993−2003. standardized pca scores for change are simultaneously explained by road distance from joensuu market place and distance from one’s workplace, changes in commuting distance from 1993 to 2003, changes in the numbers of inhabitants from 1993 to 2003 and proportions of housing built after 1991. λ=15 km. fennia 189: 2 (2011) 59spatial divergence in living standards during an economic … ter 1991 (fig. 4, bottom right). these relatively new areas contained mostly families of wage and salary earners with high enough incomes to buy or build a detached house in a suburban and exurban environment and commute to work. in general, the newer the houses are the better the standards of living. an exception to this was provided by one of the newest areas located in the central district, which had no such experience of growth, pointing to a more equalizing form of town planning in this case. as the proportion of houses built after 1991 in the outermost zone varied from a few to as many as 10% or more, some replacement and rebuilding had evidently taken place there. as expected, new houses are a relatively good indicator of changing living standards, in this case depicting urban sprawl and the restructuring of rural settlements. conclusions from the analyses our hypothesis stated that a divergence in living standard happens because new, mostly technology-driven, constructed advantages are tied to geographical proximity. this statement did not prove to be literally true when we compared changes in living standards between the central district and the extreme peripheries, however. these two area classes have converged, but the comparison of development between the commuter belt and the hinterland is in accordance with our hypothesis. hence, urban sprawl had to be taken into account if one is attempting to interpret diverging living standards in the context of krugmanian economics. the hinterland of north karelia was inferior to the provincial core region in terms of most development indices. on a sub-regional scale, the strongest divergence has taken place between the central district and the commuter belt, as a result of short-distance migration. as predicted by our hypothesis, the remote industrial towns and municipal centres lost ground relative to the suburbs and exurbs of the provincial centre and its commuter belt. in order to consider the results more profoundly we analysed changes in the living standards in terms of four variables. to begin with, we raised the question of the importance of commuting and its development for living standards in different locations. commuters were better-off than the people working locally, and the effect was most pronounced in the commuter belt as commuting expanded to new areas in the intermediate zone, and it was here that the spatial pattern of living standards changed radically. outside the joensuu commuter belt there was a decline in standards of living among people who had a middle-range commuting distance. the change in commuting distance was bifurcated, however, as both an increase and a decrease increased to a rise in living stan dards. such developments must have an impact on the settlement pattern in the long run, as they mean that middle-range commuters decline in numbers. we next addressed the question of the importance of newcomers for living standards in various locations. the most severe estimated downward trend was recorded in the central district, where zero population growth prevailed, while growth impacts peaked in the parts of the intermediate zone proximal to the outer zone, where the population increased by 30%, having the highest impact on the relative improvement in living standards. the more affluent migrants from the city raised standards of living in the suburbs and exurbs, while out-migration created a backwash effect in the central district. the growth and mobility of certain social groups and strata proved to be important for the geographical shifts in wealth that stimulated the changes in living standards. affluence was diffusing outwards with newcomers, passing across the border of the outermost zone, which was where the population grew most. as expected, the newer the houses were, the better the standards of living developed to a certain extent. an exception arose, however, since some of the newest housing areas had a mixed population structure, including social housing, and the increase remained small. to sum up, commuting and housing decisions were of greatest importance in the commuter belt around the provincial centre, where they had a decisive impact on the spatial manifestation of changes of living standards, whereas in the periphery such changes were more closely linked to long-term rural decline. discussion of the results, theory and potential implications the robust post-1993 economic growth in the region studied here brought about three clearly discernible and well differentiated zones, implying a tendency towards a wider, segregated provincial centre as an outcome of the transformation. this is 60 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen not a new phenomenon, as this urban sprawl is a continuation of the development which started when joensuu began to grow in response to industrialization and regional development policy measures. rural decline has been a part of this regional restructuring since the late 1960s. on the other hand, the plunge in living standards in the central district, in so far as it really happened, was contrary to what might have been expected and what the city council was striving at. the findings with regard to the post-1993 regional divergence of wealth are clearly a result of the uni-nodal pattern which seems to be typical of the stage of technology-driven growth in a region such as north karelia. this is in contrast to the more spatially even, multi-nodal industrialization which took place in the 1970s. consequently, our findings support the results of partridge et al. (2008), who argue that recent technological advances make access to agglomeration economies even more important than in earlier periods of regional development. the relative decline in living standards in hinterlands indicates that remote local economies are searching for a socioeconomic balance. this relative decline may not necessarily be a persistent tendency within regional development in our current peripheries, however, as krugman’s approach envisages (krugman 1993; combes et al. 2008: 130−152). any parameter can change in the course of time, leading to new tipping points and radical developments. a spatially limited urban sprawl and rural decline indicate that, in an environment such as north karelia, affluence created in a smallish provincial centre will spread efficiently only to neighbourhoods located at relatively short distances from the central district. improvements in living standards will be closely related to commuting to the central and industrial districts of the provincial centre. small centres combined with a low regional population density bring about a very fragmented settlement structure where diffusion remains sporadic and geographically lacking in coverage (gløersen et al. 2005: 35). hence, such characteristics in a remote region inevitably create a regional structure where agglomeration spillovers are limited, contrary to the structure of a densely populated environment. in addition to this, the peripheral areas with their scattered settlements and small towns have remained at a standstill, as demand has been low in the traditional economic sectors. spatial diffusion as measured by living standards was actually less marked than could have been expected in light of the results from canada (partridge at al. 2007). since joensuu is a small provincial centre, it remains to be seen whether such a node in the national innovation system can construct an initial advantage for itself that will lead to path-dependent growth, and if so, for what period. results do provide evidence, however, that the geographically limited regional policy was one factor that occasioned spatially selective growth in living standards within the region, even though it led to net benefits in terms of welfare in the region as a whole. as the spatial indices revealed, the economic development that took place in 1993−2003 generated higher incomes and net migration and enforced spatially divergent socioeconomics which manifested themselves as differences in living standards between the central districts and the commuter belt and in a vicious circle of decline in the more remote areas due to population loss and disintegration of the economic structure. this detracted from the regional competitiveness of the remote areas and limited their potential for absorbing growth impulses. the non-working population of these areas grew in relative terms and required support in the form of welfare payments. such backing makes migration less appealing (lundholm 2007), but it doesn’t generate new jobs or improve skills. we have not yet observed any signs of a reversal of these centripetal tendencies on a regional scale. as an urban-rural development, the migration of wealthier people to the commuter belt was the result of seeking a better residential environment for established households of persons employed by the industries of the core area. this may be regarded as a manifestation of the pulse of urban sprawl and expansion of housing to vacant suburban and urban-adjacent rural environments typical of a phase of economic growth that has been observed nationwide (lehtonen & tykkyläinen 2009). acknowledgements this research was carried out at the university of eastern finland and the international institute for ap-international institute for applied systems analysis and supported in part by grants from the academy of finland (grant number 117817) administrated by the university of eastern finland/joensuu and from the finnish funding agency for technology and innovation (grant number fennia 189: 2 (2011) 61spatial divergence in living standards during an economic … 401282/10) administrated by the research institute of the finnish economy (etla). references arbo p & eskelinen h 2003. the role of small com-the role of small comprehensive universities in regional economic development: experiences from two nordic cases. a paper presented in 43rd ersa congress, jyväskylä august 27−30. bell m, blake m, boyle p, duke-williams o, rees p, stillwell j & hugo g 2002. cross-national comparison of internal migration: issues and measures. journal of royal statistical society 165: 3, 435−464. berube a, singer a, wilson j & frey w 2006. finding exurbia: america’s fast-growing communities at the metropolitan fringe. living cities census series october 2006, the brookings institution, washington, dc. black d & henderson v 1999. a theory of urban growth. journal of political economy 107: 2, 252– 284. bowman a & azzalini a 1997. applied smoothing techniques for data analysis: the kernel approach with s-plus illustrations. oxford university press, oxford. coccia m 2008. spatial mobility of knowledge transfer and absorptive capacity: analysis and measurement of the impact within the geoeconomic space. journal of technology transfer 22, 105−122. combes p-p, thierry m & thisse j-f 2008. economic geography. princeton university press, princeton. cooke p & leydesdorff l 2006. regional development in the knowledge-based economy: the construction of advantage. journal of technology transfer 3: 5−15. dillon w & goldstein m 1984. multivariate analysis. john wiley & sons, new york. faraway j 2006. extending the linear model with r. generalized linear, mixed effects and nonparametric regression models. chapman and hall/ crc, new york. fujita m & krugman p 2004. the new economic geography: past, present and future. papers of regional science 83: 1, 139−164. garretsen h & martin r 2010. rethinking (new) economic geography models: taking geography and history more seriously. spatial economic analysis 5: 2, 127−160. glaeser e 2000. the new economics of urban and regional growth. in gordon c, meric g & feldman m (ed). the oxford handbook of economic geography, 83−98. oxford university press, oxford. gløersen e 2009. strong, specific and promising. towards a vision for the northern sparsely populated area in 2020. nordregio working paper 2009: 4. nordregio, stockholm. gløersen e, dubois a, copus a & schürmann c 2005. northern peripheral, sparsely populated regions in the european north. nordregio report 2005: 4. nordregio, stockholm. kainulainen s, rintala t & heikkilä m 2001. hyvinvoinnin alueellinen erilaistuminen 1990-luvun suo messa. tutkimuksia 114. stakes, helsinki. karvonen s & rintala t 2005. suomi pirstaleina? hyvinvoinnin alueelliset erot 2000-luvulla. maaseudun uusi aika 13: 2, 4−20. karvonen s & rintala t 2007. maakuntien sisäiset hyvinvointierot. yhteiskuntapolitiikka 72: 4, 410−416. kota online 2010. database. ministry of education, helsinki. krugman p 1991. increasing returns and economic geography. the journal of political economy 99: 3, 473–499. krugman p 1993. geography and trade. the mit press, cambridge, ma. krugman p 1998. what’s new about the new economic geography? oxford review of economic policy 14: 2, 7–17. lehtonen o & tykkyläinen m 2009. muuttoliikkeen alueelliset muodostumat ja pulssi suomessa 1980–2006. terra 121: 2, 119−137. lever w 2001. correlating the knowledge-base of cities with economic growth. urban studies 39: 5−6, 859−870. lundholm e 2007. new motives for migration? on interregional mobility in the nordic countries. gerum 2007: 2. martinez-zarzoso i 2003. gravity model: an application to trade between regional blocs. atlantic economic journal 31: 2, 174−187. oecd 2006. the new rural paradigm. oecd, paris. paasi a & vartiainen p 1981. keskuksen ja ympäristön välinen muuttoliike: tapaustutkimus joensuusta. terra 83: 2, 57−72. pacione m 2005. urban geography, a global perspective. routledge, new york. partridge m, bollman r, olfert m & alesia a 2007. riding the wave of urban growth in the countrycountryside: spread, backwash, or stagnation? land economics 83: 2, 128–152. partridge m & rickman d 2008. distance from urban agglomeration economies and rural poverty. journal of regional science 48: 2, 285−310. partridge m, rickman d, ali k & olfert m 2008. lost in space: population growth in the american hinterlands and small cities. journal of economic geography 8: 6, 727–757. polèse m & shearmur r 2004. is distance really dead? comparing industrial location patterns over time in canada. international regional science review 27: 4, 431–457. raspe o & van oort f 2006. the knowledge economy and urban economic growth. european planning studies 14: 9, 1209−1234. 62 fennia 189: 2 (2011)olli lehtonen and markku tykkyläinen rosenthal s & strange w 2001. the determinants of agglomeration. journal of urban economics 50: 2, 191−229. rouvinen p & ylä-anttila p 2003. case study: little finland’s transformation to a wireless giant. in dutta s, lanvin b & paua f (ed). the global information technology report 2003−2004, 87−107. oxford university press, new york. schmitt b & henry m 2000. size and growth of urban centers in french labor market areas: consequences for rural population and employment. regional science and urban economics 30: 1, 1−21. siirilä s, hautamäki l, kuitunen j & keski-petäjä t 1990. regional well-being variations in finland. fennia 168: 2, 179–200. statistics finland 1996. suomi cd. statistics finland, helsinki. statistics finland 2006. suomi cd. statistics finland. helsinki. statistics finland 2010a. regional account, database. statistics finland, helsinki. statistics finland 2010b. research and development, database. statistics finland, helsinki. suorsa k 2007. regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, sweden and nornorway. fennia 185: 1, 15–29. tervo h 2009. centres and peripheries in finland: granger causality tests using panel data. spatial economic analysis 4: 4, 377 –390. tykkyläinen m 1988. periphery syndrome − a reinterpretation of regional development theory in a resource periphery. fennia 166: 2, 295−411. vaattovaara m 1998. pääkaupunkiseudun sosiaalinen erilaistuminen: ympäristö ja alueellisuus. city of helsinki urban facts research series 1998: 7. van oort f, oud j & raspe o 2009. the urban knowledge economy and employment growth: a spatial structural equation modeling approach. annals of regional science 43: 4, 857–877. vartiainen p 1998. suomalaisen aluepolitiikan kehitysvaiheita. aluekehitysosaston julkaisuja 6/1998. sisäasiainministeriö, helsinki. vartiainen p & viiri a 2002. universities and their local partners. industry and higher education 16: 2, 83 –89. voith r 1998. do suburbs need cities? journal of regional science 38: 3, 445−464. vyas s & kumaranayke l 2006. constructing socioeconomic status indices: how to use principal components analysis. health policy and planning 21: 6, 459–468. westin h 1999. an interaction-cots perspective on networks and territory. annals of regional science 22: 1, 93−121. untitled bad reputation – bad reality? the intertwining and contested images of a place sirpa tani tani, sirpa (2001). bad reputation – bad reality? the intertwining and contested images of a place. fennia 179:2, pp. 143–157. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in the early 1990s, prostitution became a visible element in helsinki and caused a big stir in the finnish media. street prostitution became concentrated in a densely-built-up residential area north of the city centre. the prostitution debate stigmatised the area effectively. this article explores the area by interpreting its images in cultural artefacts and in people’s minds. the history of the area will be described in order to make the present images understandable. three types of images will be analysed: images of the place for ordinary people, images of the dangerous neighbourhood and images of bohemian romanticism, which are all associated with the history of the area and reproduced in the prostitution debate. sirpa tani, department of teacher education, p.o. box 38, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. ms received 29th march, 2001 (revised 4th april, 2001). introduction the aim of this article is to interpret an area by exploring its images in cultural artefacts and in people’s minds. the area concerned became known as a district of street prostitutes and kerbcrawlers during the 1990s. the prostitution debate in the media stigmatised the area effectively, the fact which is the point of departure for this study. i will ask why some areas are more vulnerable to get a bad reputation than others and how the prostitution debate used and reconstructed place images. i will also ask what dimensions are apparent in the present reputation of the place. to answer these questions i will describe the history of the area in order to make the present images understandable. i will trace the changes in the images in time and analyse their contents by using examples of various cultural products and opinions of local residents. the article is based on two studies of street prostitution in helsinki. the first one is my personal research project based on qualitative data gathered between the years 1993 and 1999, when i lived in the research area and observed the changes in the neighbourhood on a daily basis. the main purpose was to interpret the street prostitution debate and to compare the mediated images with the experiences of local residents (tani 2001, 2002). the second one is a research project, the main purpose of which was to analyse the effects of street prostitution on women’s everyday lives in helsinki. the study was made in the form of a mailed questionnaire to women in two areas; the research area consisted of ten blocks of the street prostitution area, while the control area was the rest of inner helsinki. the material was collected in may–june 1999. a total of 1,714 women answered the questionnaire, 888 of whom lived in the research area and 826 in the control area (koskela et al. 2000). many interesting aspects of place images emerged in both projects but, for practical reasons, they took a minor role in the previous publications. it seemed important to write this article by concentrating on the relations between the place and its images. first, i will give an overview of some central concepts informing my research. secondly, i will explain the difficulties of defining the borders of the area studied and note the variation in its naming. thirdly, i will explore the street prostitution debate as a creator of some new images of the area, and fourthly, i will interpret other existing images by concentrating on three dimensions; the area seen as a place with a nostalgic past, as a dangerous neighbourhood and a stage for bohe144 fennia 179: 2 (2001)sirpa tani mian romanticism. finally, i will consider some contemporary place promotion activities and raise questions about the meanings of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in place images. the intertwining and palimpsest character of the images and the lived experiences will be highlighted. images and reputation of place ‘image’ is a widely used concept with various meanings, depending on the discipline and the context. its all-inclusive definition is clearly not a task for this article. rather, i will survey some aspects relevant in the context of this research. the conceptual basis of the article contains elements of an older behavioural geography, dealing with mental maps and environmental perceptions, as well as viewpoints of humanistic geography, especially elements concerning people’s senses of place. at the same time, recent work in cultural geography – the connections between places and the constitution of identities, subjectivities and imaginings – will be reflected. the origin of the concept of image can be traced to the 1950s business language in the united states. it has since become popular, especially in marketing, but also in political science and media studies (karvonen 1999: 37; äikäs 1999: 62). ‘image’ was one of the central concepts of behavioural geography of the 1960s and 1970s, when interest was centred on behaviour patterns and environmental perceptions (gould 1969; pocock & hudson 1978; gold 1980; walmsley & lewis 1993). perception was used as a synonym for personal images of the phenomenal environment (porteous 1977), and the products of the process of perception were called mental or cognitive maps, images, cognitive representations or schemata. often the concept of image was connected to visual perception, as kevin lynch defined the term in his book ‘the image of the city’ (lynch 1960; see also lynch 1984). ‘image’ was defined as a representation of reality, a metaphorical description of verbal pictures, for example (burgess 1978), a perception in the absence of an external stimulus (tuan 1975; gold 1980), or as constructed from first-hand experience (burgess & gold 1985). since the behavioural approaches, images have been an important subject of study in humanistic geography as well as in studies of the media and popular culture. in the humanities and social sciences there has been a growing interest in the meanings of spatiality, which has been called a ‘spatial turn’. in geography, at the same time, ‘culture’, along with ‘space’, has become one of the key concepts. the meaning of ‘culture’ and the content of the new approach (the cultural turn) have aroused vivid debates (e.g. philo 1991; cosgrove 1993; duncan 1993; jackson 1993; price & lewis 1993; mcdowell 1994; mitchell 1995; johnston 1997; barnett 1998; cook et al. 2000). the ‘cultural turn’ has guided geographers to find new approaches to geographical issues and brought them closer to discourses in other culturally and/or socially oriented disciplines. it has occasioned a broader alertness to how people – understood as highly differentiated and multiply positioned but always distinctly social beings – build up shared repertoires of cultural meaning, often embracing place images which may be quite stereotypical in content. these images are negotiated in a more collective terrain of discourse, performance and gesture. since the ‘cultural turn’ in geography, images have been interpreted mainly in relation to socially produced space. the social practices of place and landscape construction and representations of images have been popular subjects of study (e.g. burgess & gold 1985; agnew & duncan 1989; zonn 1990; shields 1991; anderson & gale 1992; barnes & duncan 1992; keith & pile 1993; aitken & zonn 1994; gold & ward 1994; banks 1998). place images are understood as historically produced and actively culturally contested. language is seen to be important ‘as a medium and mediator by which intersubjective meanings are shared’ (shields 1991), and the question of representation has become central. sometimes it is useful to distinguish between a public image and a mental image, as äikäs (1999, 2001) has stated. ‘public image’ refers to an intentionally produced impression, while ‘mental image’ means a mental representation of something, not by direct perception, but by memory and imagination (oed online 2001; cf. äikäs 1999: 59). sometimes, however, the split between the concepts seems to be too violent. the relation between public and mental images is more like a continuum in a process of making and interpreting meanings to the world. in every mental image, there is always something shared and produced, as there is always the level of subjective interpretation in public images. fennia 179: 2 (2001) 145bad reputation – bad reality? in addition to ‘image’, ‘reputation’ is also used in the studies of places and their representations. the reputation of a place can be defined as a combination of the shared images, stereotyped meanings and mythical generalisations of elements that people attach to a certain place in their minds. reputation is not necessarily comparable to the reality of place. when the characteristics of a place change radically, place images and the reputation of that place sometimes stay as they have always been. it can be said that the place has been stigmatised, and these stigmas usually outlive a particular image. shields (1991: 256) argues that the changes “necessitate not just an adjustment of the myth, ‘cleaning out’ the old images and installing new ones, but a restructuring of the entire mythology and the development of new metaphors by which ideology is presented”. this is an interesting point of view in considering changes in place images and the reputation of a place. the reputation of place can be seen as a product of public opinion, while the images may represent subjective experiences of place. reputation is more stable and often a product of repeated ways to represent the place. the formation of a reputation takes more time, while the images can be more personal and can be more easily changed. rob shields (1991) defines place images by using the concept of stereotype. place images “are the various discrete meanings associated with real places or regions regardless of their character in reality. images, being partial and often either exaggerated or understated, may be accurate or inaccurate. they result from stereotyping, which over-simplifies groups of places within a region, or from prejudices towards places or their inhabitants” (shields 1991: 60). shields defines place images as meanings attached to a real place, but images can also be created without any relation to a real environment. we have many place images which may refer to wholly imagined places – they may be the products of our own imagination, or perhaps reinterpretations of imagined places in films, literature, and other art forms. in this article, image and reputation of place are interpreted side by side, since i think it is artificial to make any strict separation between these two terms. next, i will introduce the area researched by defining its borders. this may sound simple, but in this case, it reveals more than the geographical location of the area. the area will be contextualised both spatially and socially in relation to its surrounding areas. blurred identity of place: defining the borders usually, identification of an area is quite simple: it can be named, and defining its borders makes the distinction between it and the surrounding areas obvious. although the definitions may just be mental constructions built by the researcher, they are usually generally recognised and easily taken for granted. in this particular case, the situation is more complicated and needs to be explained more carefully. in the 1990s, prostitution became concentrated in a densely-built-up residential area north of the city centre. in order to explore the phenomenon from the viewpoint of the residents, i conducted in-depth interviews among them and among some social workers in the area. when i asked them what they called the area, i got answers like these: i usually say kallio… apparently, it is alppila, or somehow… but nobody knows where alppila is. i would say this is more sörkkä than kallio. if i have to choose, i live in the district of harju. yes, it is a matter of taste. the name of the area often becomes established as a symbol for a particular space. images and the reputation of place are closely linked with the identity of place, and place images and spatial identities can be seen in the context of the institutionalization of regions in the way paasi (1986, 1991a) defines the term. he sees four stages in the process of the spatial institutionalisation, which may be entirely or partly simultaneous: the constitution of territorial shape, symbolic shape, and institutions and, finally, establishment in the regional system and regional consciousness of the society concerned. in the context of this research the constitution of symbolic shape is particularly relevant. paasi (1991a: 245) defines it as follows: “the increasing number and use of territorial symbols is crucial for creating the symbolic significance of a region. one essential symbol is the name of the region, which connects its image with the regional consciousness.” in this case, the area has a name which is used 146 fennia 179: 2 (2001)sirpa tani in official contexts, but in public speech – for example in the media – it is named differently. there is no consensus on its name even among the residents, as can be seen in the quotations above. although the interviewees talked about their own neighbourhood, not many of them seemed to be sure which was the appropriate name for it. some of them were convinced that they lived in kallio, some others called the same area harju, sörnäinen (sörkkä) or alppila. i find it interesting to ask why this particular area has no clearly established name, and whether this has something to do with the images associated with it. places, regions and areas can also exist after their possible deinstitutionalization as documented in written texts and as recalled by local people, as some other studies have stated (e.g. paasi 1991a, 1991b; riikonen 1995, 1997). the residents of one region can ‘actually live in the worlds of different kinds’, and ‘may have very different images in their minds about spatial reality and its regional identity’ (riikonen 1995: 100). paasi and riikonen (ibid.) have used ‘generation’ to explain these differences. in my study on the street prostitution area, the situation seemed to be quite different. at the beginning of the 20th century, the pitkäsilta bridge separated the prestigious areas of the city centre from the northern working-class areas, and acted as a powerful symbol separating these two social worlds. in the early days of the area, there was a strong sense of place among the residents, which could be seen in the naming of the smaller areas north of the bridge. there were also violent street fights between the gangs of the neighbouring areas. even when the local residents made a clear distinction between these areas, the outsiders saw them as one working-class district, which was usually called sörnäinen after the neighbouring industrial area and harbour. although the naming practices have changed during the history of the area, it is impossible to define any generation-bound names any longer. in my interviews, there was no connection between the residents’ age and their ways of naming the neighbourhood. the name of the area can be defined by comparing its ‘official’ name with the actual naming practices. the area is located in the administrative district of alppiharju, which can be divided into two sub-districts, alppila and harju. the area is colloquially called kallio after its neighbouring district (fig. 1). the way the names are attached to a certain area varies, however. an example of this is the housing notices in the newspapers, which use various names. compared to the neighbouring areas, the confusion is very obvious. the neighbouring areas have a strong place identity, but the research area seems to differ markedly. it seems to be an area that is located on the fringe of other regions. another way to approach the question of the name is to explore the area by using lynch’s (1960) way of defining districts and edges. officially, although helsinginkatu is the border between kallio and harju, it does not really separate these two areas either visually or functionally, but rather forms a connecting link between them. it is one of the most important shopping streets in the area and is also an excellent transport link. kallio is widely known as the area located on the north side of pitkäsilta, but harju as a name is not established in colloquial speech. kallio has a well-established reputation as an old workingclass area, and both positive and negative images have been associated with it during its history. although the two areas have a similar history, the identity of harju seems less certain. for example, thirty-five geography students wrote to me about the images that kallio and alppiharju evoke in their minds. most of them did not even mention alppiharju in their texts, and those few who did said that they did not have any particular image of the place. alppiharju was said to be an unfamiliar name for a region, and was found difficult to define. most of them had quite strong images of kallio, however, and it was often “stretched” to the neighbouring areas. this explains why i will call it kallio even though it is the administrative district of alppiharju or harju. sudden changes: prostitution in the neighbourhood when street prostitution appeared on the streets of harju, it caused a big stir both in the media and among some locals, who were upset by kerbcrawling. as described elsewhere (koskela et al. 2000; tani 2002), prostitution had an effect on the ways female residents use public space in their neighbourhood, but also affected public images of the area. i have analysed the changes in the debate in detail elsewhere (tani 2002). here, i will concentrate on the images which the media produced of the area. fennia 179: 2 (2001) 147bad reputation – bad reality? in the newspaper articles on street prostitution, there were stories about firms that were thinking of moving away because of the disturbance suffered by their employees, and also for fear of the bad reputation of the area. the tabloid ilta-sanomat (8th december 1995) reported how some newspapers had published articles on prostitution and provided pictures of female office-workers on their way home. these connections caused confusion among the female employees. another article described the difficulties that a housing company formed by the apartment owners had because of the falling price of offices in the area. the owners were worried that prostitution and kerb-crawling could cause the neighbourhood to decline by strengthening the negative image of the area (helsingin sanomat 21st december 1995). the local newspapers were especially concerned about the effect that prostitution might have on the reputation of the area. they quoted the report of the city planning committee on prostitution (kallio ja ympäristö 7th december 1997), which argued that prostitution made the reputation of place even worse in the areas of poorer people as they called the area north of pitkäsilta. in its leading article (kallio ja ympäristö 27th october 1996) the local newspaper accused the media of defaming kallio and its environment. it was argued that because of the effective ‘advertising’ of the area as a centre of street prostitution, the local residents had to suffer from heavy traffic caused by curious outsiders and the subsefig. 1. the location of the area studied in helsinki, finland: harju and its surroundings. 148 fennia 179: 2 (2001)sirpa tani quent traffic prohibitions. the paper suggested that the media debate should be stopped or made more impartial in relation to such residential areas. the nation-wide media did not pay much attention to the issues concerning the reputation of place when it reported on the street prostitution in kallio. the problems of prostitution were represented by and large as local. when the prostitution spread into the streets of the city centre, however, the concern about place image became acute. the tabloid ilta-sanomat (9th september 1997) interviewed some female politicians who felt that the prostitution in main city streets could be harmful to the image of the city. nobody expressed concern over the bad reputation of the kallio area. this is an interesting example of the fact that there seems to be some kind of ‘official’ helsinki, the image of which it is important to protect. the areas with a bad reputation are imprinted in people’s minds so strongly that defaming them seems to bother nobody outside the area. during the winter 1996–1997, the media seemed to start to ‘forget’ the issue of street prostitution. there were only some occasional articles about the situation in kallio, one of which approached the subject from a wholly new point of view. ilta-sanomat headlined the article “3,400 bank employees are hidden in the dilapidated ‘flesh valley’: teollisuuskatu is nowadays the wall street of the vallila area” (ilta-sanomat 9th january 1997). the point of the article was to describe the two different worlds in the same urban milieu. it was argued that the finnish version of wall street was situated in the same area as the street prostitution had concentrated in helsinki. the tabloid described the neighbourhood thus: skyscrapers with glass walls line wall street in manhattan. there are service stations and heavy traffic in teollisuuskatu in the vallila district. in both places there are people doing the same job in their exchange trading halls wearing white shirts and silk ties. in the neighbourhood there are cars parked in vacant sites, undistinguished industrial premises, and residential buildings blackened by exhaust fumes. the only beautiful building is the former mortuary. if you see someone, it is highly likely that he or she will be wearing a wind-cheater or quilted jacket. (ilta-sanomat 9th january 1997) the article continues with a description of the concentration of exchange trading by several banks in the area and shows two pictures from the street prostitution area, one taken in the afternoon and another one just before midnight. the legends of the pictures make a clear distinction between the daytime and nighttime reality: “in the daytime it is peaceful in the wall street of vallila”, but “at night prostitutes swarm around the merita bank buildings” (ilta-sanomat 9th january 1997). in the first picture, there are some cars parked along the street, which two men are crossing – one in the foreground, the other in the background. there is snow on the ground. in the second picture, the angle is almost the same: the same two buildings are portrayed, but now, there are five people – probably women – standing on the street corner in the light of street lamps, two of them holding umbrellas. the difference of these pictures is not so much in their content, but their context. legends tell us what we should see in the pictures, and the text tells us what we should think about these two worlds, one of the wealthy bank employees, the other of the not-so-wealthy local residents and ‘swarming’ prostitutes. in order to analyse the images people have attached to this area, i will describe its history briefly. i will then concentrate on three types of image: images of the place for ordinary people, images of the dangerous neighbourhood and images of bohemian romanticism, which are all associated with the history of the area, as i will show. the prostitution debate will be analysed by interpreting examples of the reconstructed images within the debate. history of a working-class quarter harju and its neighbouring area, kallio, both have histories that go back to the end of the 19th century. helsinki was growing very fast because of rapid industrialisation. new housing areas were needed for people who came to helsinki looking for jobs in the factories. there were some farms to the north of city centre, one of which was called kallio and the other harju. there were also some restaurants in the area outside the city centre before the residential areas were built, some catering to peasants visiting helsinki and some to upper-class people who travelled there from the city centre. houses for the workers were built in the area of the farms. they were two-storey buildings, the first storey of stone and the second of wood. the area was incorporated into the town plan in 1901. these working-class areas were densely populated: over four persons per room on fennia 179: 2 (2001) 149bad reputation – bad reality? average. population density was the highest there, and living conditions were extremely poor. because of the poor accommodation and the poverty of the inhabitants, all kinds of social problems became a part of everyday life in harju and kallio from the beginning of their history. at the beginning of the 20th century the distribution of liquor was concentrated in a relatively small area in the city centre, and in harju and kallio selling or serving alcohol was not allowed (helsingin kaupungin historia 1956: 282). these restrictions acted against themselves, boosting the illegal liquor trade. during prohibition (from 1919), bootlegging was the norm in these areas, and even after repeal of the law in 1932, it was widely known that the illicit liquor trade still existed there. vaasankatu in particular became famous for bootlegging. beside bootlegging, prostitution also characterized these densely populated working-class areas. many brothels were situated near the city centre, especially in the punavuori area. they were obliged to go out of business in 1884 when it was decreed that only two prostitutes could live together. brothels were officially closed, and many of the prostitutes went back to sweden or moved to viborg. many, however, stayed in helsinki and continued their business by themselves. even though the brothels have been forbidden by law since then, there have been times when they have appeared again and been allowed to continue their activities. during the 1930s, the brothels were operating quite openly in the centre of helsinki. (häkkinen 1995). while the brothels were for upper-class men, street prostitution was for working-class men and soldiers. streets near the restaurants were the most popular places for prostitutes to find their clients. the number of street prostitutes was at its greatest at the beginning of the twentieth century and during the first world war when there were hundreds of female prostitutes working in the streets of helsinki (häkkinen 1995). working-class districts like kallio became places for street prostitutes. poor living conditions in the kallio area and the social problems described above were powerful factors in creating the negative image of the area. however, the reality changed during the rapid industrialisation after the second world war. the massive migration from rural areas to helsinki began in the 1950s, and the reputation of the area began to change. the average standard of living improved in finland, and people were able to choose better living conditions in the newly-built areas of the city fringes. kallio and harju, because of their location near the city centre and their excellent traffic routes, became popular among young childless couples and singles. many of them were students. even today the area is very densely populated. the mean size of the dwellings is the smallest in helsinki (38 m2) and so is the mean size of households (1.3 persons). in harju there are about 7,500 inhabitants living in an area of 0.27 km2. the proportions of young adults and old people are great and, because of the smallness of the flats, the proportion of children is the smallest in helsinki. the area is more homogenous in relation to the native language (93% finnish) and to the nationality of its inhabitants (only 3.4% foreigners) than the average for helsinki (helsinki alueittain 2000). the old images of kallio and its environment are still imprinted in many people’s minds, and the working-class history is often mentioned when people are asked about the image of the area. the meaning of the image has changed its content, however, over the years. next, i will describe popular images of kallio by concentrating on three dimensions; the first emphasises the long working-class tradition, the second one stresses the negative aspects of this image, while the third adds some romantic gloss to the old images. the analysis is based on my in-depth interviews, letters from former and present residents, the writings of some geography students and the interviews with local shopkeepers, which were published on the internet. in addition to these materials, i will also use some cultural products in my analysis. place and its nostalgic past the texts concerning kallio and its surroundings often mention the working-class history of the area and highlight the importance of the past. kallio evoked strong images in the minds of the students whom i asked to describe their images of certain areas. many defined them by describing the physical environment. the location was usually seen as excellent, but the buildings were not seen so positively; many mentioned the greyness of the area, and wrote about non-aesthetic images. the history of the area was perceived as 150 fennia 179: 2 (2001)sirpa tani strong, the present day often associated with social problems, and the spirit of the place in the future was thought to remain despite the changes that may occur. many of them described kallio by mentioning its reputation as a working-class area. workers’ areas are often associated with the thoughts of ordinary, decent, unpretending, real people, to make a clear distinction from ‘others’. as compared to the students’ images, many shopkeepers, whose interviews were published on the website of the area (pitkänsillan väärällä puolella 2000), emphasised the long traditions in their neighbourhood. many of them mentioned how their customers were part of the nice and decent folk that has lived in the area. they talked about the area from the viewpoint of small-scale entrepreneurs and often compared the profits they made with the earlier, better days. many saw the underground as a major reason for their business problems; nowadays it was easier for people to go straight to the city centre or to the shopping malls and ‘forget’ their local shops. although the daily reality in the workers’ areas of the past is often described by emphasising its negative sides, it is sometimes portrayed differently, as the following extract from a former resident’s letter indicates: most of the people who lived in the neighbourhood were decent folk, ordinary workers. there were always some youngsters who were hanging around the tough guys, imitating them and admiring them, but they were not really tough themselves. some of them were real cowards. many of them never got into fights nor perpetrated any offences. the reputation of kallio as a place for ordinary people has also been repeated in the media. for example, in an article published by the kotiliesi magazine (12th july 1996) life in kallio was described thus: people who live in kallio are used to living and being with other people. life is visible on the streets there. people are straightforwardly what they really are. what happens within four walls elsewhere happens on the streets in kallio. a female resident who had been living in the research area described her neighbourhood by saying that its reputation seemed to be worse than the reality. she emphasised the residents’ strong attachment to their environment, although many of them have had problems and sorrows in their life – the biggest problem in her opinion was alcohol. she defined the ambiguous character of the area as follows: the streetscape may scare people with its staggering boozers, but here you can also find humanity, community spirit and care for neighbours. you must have a certain kind of character to be happy here. there were some things in the daily reality of the area that were sometimes interpreted as traces of the old community spirit: some permanent residents sometimes had barbecues and drank beer together in the courtyard of our block. i thought there was a kind of old-time spirit there, like in the good old days, when the residents maybe had closer contacts with each other. this kind of ‘community spirit’ refers to the ideas of shared values in a neighbourhood. as i have described elsewhere (tani 2002), the residents who protested against street prostitution and kerbcrawling often justified their actions by arguing that ‘the neighbourhood was their space, and they had every right to fight for it. they created an idea of shared values in the area by highlighting the view that when they were acting against prostitution, they were acting for the whole community’. by stressing the differences between themselves and the prostitutes, they placed the prostitutes in a marginal position in the area both socially and spatially. in the public debate, the residents’ viewpoints were portrayed as questions of moral values. the constructed ‘otherness’ of prostitutes and kerb-crawlers turned into social exclusion on the streets (cf. shields 1991; goodall 1995; sibley 1995; duncan 1996; hubbard 1998, 1999b). although life in the workers’ area must have been hard, its image has changed in the course of time. nostalgic elements of the past are often highlighted both in cultural products and in people’s memories. working-class people of the past are represented as honest and decent folk, and their ways of spending their leisure time are also portrayed from an understanding viewpoint. this positive colouring of the past occurs frequently; memory always simplifies, forgets and highlights certain elements, and by doing so, ‘greater coherence may be created than was actually present’ (pocock 1982; lowenthal 1975, 1985). life in the dangerous neighbourhood because of the history of poor living conditions, there are many negative images that people have fennia 179: 2 (2001) 151bad reputation – bad reality? of kallio: for many, it is known as the area of poor people, crime, violence, and bootlegging. the reality of the beginning of the 20th century with bootleggers on the streets has been imprinted on people’s minds even if they never have experienced those times themselves. in fact, the bootlegging continued in the area for decades, but during the 1990s the phenomenon was not so common because the restaurants were allowed to stay open later. the people who experienced the bootlegging and the street fights in the area in their childhood or youth still associate them with the images of the area. some residents still mention the violent history when asked about the images of the area. cultural products have kept the old images alive. kallio has been a particularly popular subject in literature and songs. many films have also been shot there. because of these produced images, the area’s reputation precedes it, even among outsiders. both local residents and others use these images in their speech. the images of violence in the area do relate to everyday reality. the quarter around the sörnäinen metro station is observed to be one of the most violent areas in the city (tuominen 1999). although the violent attacks have been concentrated in this small area, the violence is often thought to exist in the whole district. the kallio area is often described in terms of fear (cf. koskela & tuominen 1995). beside the crime and the violence, drunkenness has often been part of the image of kallio. of the thirty-five geography students who wrote about their images, fourteen mentioned alcoholics in their answers. it is impossible to show that there are more alcoholics in kallio than in other parts of the city, but if the images are to be believed, that seems to be the case. since the beginning of the street prostitution debate, the research area has been portrayed as a space of struggles over the control of public space, or as a landscape of sexual harassment, violence and fear (koskela et al. 2000; tani 2002). the fear has been connected not only to harassment on the streets but also to the ideas of prostitution as a threat to the homogeneity of the community. in other words, by representing the prostitutes and kerb-crawlers as outsiders in the neighbourhood, the protesters and the media created an imagined divide between ‘us’ (residents/protesters/decent people) and ‘them’ (prostitutes/ kerb-crawlers). the fact that the majority of the street prostitutes were foreigners made this kind of ‘othering’ even easier. prostitution was related to other social problems in the area both in the media and in the opinions of local residents; it was argued that prostitution, crime and drugs are intertwined and, because of these ‘side-effects’ of prostitution, stricter control strategies should be imposed. such associations between ‘asocial’ or ‘immoral’ lifestyles and prostitution are often represented as initiating neighbourhood decline (cf. hope & shaw 1988; herbert 1993; hubbard 1999b; weitzer 2000). in the survey concerning the effects of street prostitution in women’s daily life in helsinki (koskela et al. 2000), the kallio area was seen problematic for many reasons. many respondents were concerned about the reputation of the place. only 9% of them thought that their area had a good reputation, whereas 76% of those living in the control area (other parts of inner helsinki) did. only 27% of respondents living in harju felt very comfortable in their neighbourhood, versus 67% in the control area. street prostitution and kerbcrawling had negative effects on the images, but there were also many other reasons for the discontent of the residents. many mentioned insecurity and unrest on the streets, the weak sense of community among the people, drug addicts, crime and recurrent disturbances. identification with one’s own neighbourhood was much lower than in the rest of inner helsinki. although it is difficult to estimate how much these factors arose from the everyday reality in the neighbourhood, it is obvious that they had a powerful effect on the images, and thus also affected the experiences of the residents in their daily lives. prostitution was easily linked to other problems in the area, and was often seen as an indication of the neighbourhood decline. some respondents felt that there were too many social problems concentrated in their neighbourhood. in their opinion, the daily reality seemed to be depressing and too hard: the few parks in the area are completely taken over by drunks and junkies. you can’t even take your children to the playground, because it is full of broken glass and used syringes. my doorstep is the kitchen, bedroom, toilet, ashtray and basin for the vomit of the professional drinkers. and nobody even tries to do anything about it. we can’t even talk about wellbeing of the residents; it is fruitless to even think of security; you have to be afraid on behalf of your chil152 fennia 179: 2 (2001)sirpa tani dren all the time, and the prices of the apartments come down… although the images of danger and nostalgy can easily be regarded as opposites, they can also be considered to work together in the process of creating reputation of place. representations of a ‘golden’ past of the neighbourhood emphasise thoughts of community spirit, neighbourliness and decency, but these representations are also used for constructing notions of ‘right and wrong’, for allowing justifications for insiders (the ‘decent’ local community) closing ranks against outsiders (the ‘non-decent’ others). they serve in the discourses of many as a counterpoint to the degeneration of the current situation. in other words, a temporal discourse of decline, of loss over the years, is adding another layer to the ‘othering’ of drunks, junkies, prostitutes and kerb-crawlers in kallio. bohemian romanticism although the area is still defined in relation to its background as a working-class district, the reality there has changed in recent decades. in the 1980s it became popular among young, highlyeducated people who appreciated the location near the city centre. the housing prices there were not as high as in other places near the centre, so that many young singles and childless couples found the small apartments in the area attractive. kallio was also appreciated because of its history, which was thought to create charm and a certain bohemian romanticism to the area. housing prices rose and middle-class people moved in. in the economic boom of the late 1980s the area was clearly gentrified (mäenpää 1991; tuominen 1997). the images of the bohemian lifestyle are quite common in public opinion and in the cultural products relating to kallio. it is said that many artists live in the area and the number of the students there is great. kallio has been a popular subject for authors, film producers and musicians. some of the authors have described the life in the past when the area was still a working-class neighbourhood (ruuth 1969; saisio 1975; mutka 1996, to name but a few), while others have concentrated more on the contemporary stories based on the area (kauranen 1981; melleri 1997). in films kallio and its neighbouring areas have been represented either as the background for the role characters in their everyday life or as the major cause of their troubles (for cinematic representations of helsinki, see tani 1995). in rock lyrics the most popular images of kallio have been the ones of working-class romantics, lonely people and depression (see tani & kopomaa 1995). some people reflected these romantic images when they wrote about their own relationship to the area: the old working-class image is alive and well in many people’s minds and without doubt it feeds a kind of romantic feeling, especially in the consciousness of the people – like myself – who have a working-class background however, we have broken with our background because of our education so that this kind of longing for a real working-class community is just like a nostalgic pathos for estranged people. a female resident (herself an artist) reflected critically on the images of her neighbourhood: in some kind of ‘bohemian’ or ‘artistic’ circles kallio has a good reputation; there is ‘life’ and the ‘taste for life’ here. that might refer to the street prostitutes and outcasts at the pubs and bars; there is ‘colour’ personally, i don’t think of the gutter as a representation of life. some residents said that they see prostitution as a profession (often mentioned as the oldest profession in the world) like any other job. prostitutes should have the same right to do their work in peace as any other professionals in society. some saw them as providing ‘essential services for the sick, the deformed, the invalid, the ugly, etc.’ (goodall 1995: 129; see also roberts 1992). toleration and understanding differences were also linked to the ideas of the urban way of life: some emphasised that since the kallio area is the most urbanised area in helsinki, people should understand social and cultural diversity in their neighbourhood. in the media the diversity of social groups was sometimes highlighted – these include lesbians and gays, the elderly, students, artists, working professionals, the unemployed and many others (lahtinen 1995). therefore, it was argued, the prostitutes should also have their place in the area: in my opinion this neighbourhood is suitable for [street prostitution]; most of the people here are workers and more or less shabby, or the rabble. this is an undeniable fact and the red-light districts have been located in such neighbourhoods in foreign countries. we can forget the hypocrisy; i think helfennia 179: 2 (2001) 153bad reputation – bad reality? sinki needs its own reperbahn or pigalle, too, and this area suits that purpose well. the nostalgic image of a working-class past also figures in this discourse of romanticism. the cultural-artistic residents strive to recreate a new form of community, only in this case an inclusionary community tolerant of others rather than an exclusionary community wishing to shut its borders against anyone departing from commonly accepted norms. in such a view, prostitutes in particular cease to be seen in the more typical negative and prejudical fashion. in this ‘bohemian discourse’ there is the idea that prostitutes should also have their place in the neighbourhood, among other people. this discourse emphasises the diversity of sub-cultures within the area, and questions the implicit assumptions of prostitution as a totally negative phenomenon in the society. place promotion at the local level? place promotion, which can be defined as a ‘conscious use of publicity and marketing to communicate selective images of specific geographical localities or areas to a target audience’, has become increasingly popular since the mid-1980s worldwide (ward & gold 1994; hall 1998). promoted images have become more important in the post-industrial economy where traditional location requirements are no longer as important as they used to be in the industrial economies. cities and regions need to establish new advantages for themselves. the images have been integral parts of urban regeneration programmes, but they have also been used when cities have competed to host mega-events such as the olympic games or to get nomination as a european city of culture (ward 1998; holcomb 1999). what has not been explored so much is the interaction between the images produced and the everyday lives of people who live in the place. in the case of helsinki, the place promotion efforts have usually concerned the city centre, which has been the area most frequently visited by the tourists. during the year 2000, when helsinki was a european city of culture, the significance of residential areas and their images was also recognised. in kallio a tendency to create positive images of the area has been strengthened in recent years. in some newspaper articles, kallio has been described as a ‘trendy’ (metro 17th december 1999), ‘fascinating’ area with a ‘strange kind of charm’ (helsingin sanomat 21st february 2000). these new images have often been linked with trendy bars and pubs, and with fashionable specialized shops. the media have stressed both the long traditions of the neighbourhood and its cultural and social diversity. residents and some local associations have organized gatherings at which they have explicitly tried to find positive ways to improve the image (and the reality) of their neighbourhood. one example is the campaign during which local residents planted out flowers in a park with the help of the police and the public works department. although their main purpose was to ‘expel’ the drunks and vandals from the park, they decided to do it in a positive way. the press reported how the residents had every right to promote social interaction in the park, and if their own means were not effective enough, they could ask for help from the police (helsingin sanomat 4th june 1997). there have been many signs of increasing cultural activity in the area in recent years. for example, a cultural network (kallion kulttuuriverkosto) was founded in 1997 to encourage collaboration between local artists and other culture-oriented people. since then, the network has taken part in organizing cultural happenings every autumn and spring in the area. in 1998 the kallio theatre was founded to make ‘drama of familiar topics for the ordinary people’ (helsingin sanomat 17th december 1998). the themes were found in the neighbourhood; there were productions on the prostitute’s life, on the images of kallio and on the daily life of lonely people, for example. push firma beige is another example of strengthening the links between the local environment and art, an art gallery which enables ‘direct social interaction’ with its environment and acts as an intermediary between art and local communities. another example was a new culture club, which was launched in 1996 at the street corner café situated in the place with the worst reputation within the area. the contrast between the planned cultural activities and the surrounding reality was described in the following way (helsingin sanomat 29th november 1996): theatre without any ticket reservations, music without any stress for the musicians, poetry, magic, art 154 fennia 179: 2 (2001)sirpa tani for free. there has been a lack of a public space, which would be more interesting than pubs where customers go in for arm wrestling. the atmosphere inside the melba café is tailor-made for the culture club. outside, however… three glass walls separate the ground floor café from the wildest corners of helsinki… such activities created new images of the area; many of the active cultural agents wanted to stress the sense of positive action in order to counter the older negative images. some residents stressed positive action in relation to prostitution by mentioning the importance of taking care of the physical environment, or by encouraging the residents to take possession of public space in their neighbourhood. conclusions industrial cities and working-class areas have been seen in terms of the hard-working people, who have rough jobs and rough ways to spend their leisure time (cf. shields 1991: 229; taylor et al. 1996; ward 1998: 216). the images of these areas have been ambiguous; they have been portrayed both as areas of harsh living conditions and multiple problems and as areas of a nostalgic past and bohemian romanticism. in the case of the kallio area, these two are easy to recognise. the boom in gentrification of the 1980s in kallio did not last long. the recession in the early 1990s broke the trend: housing prices fell, and pubs invaded many empty former corner shops. tuominen (1997) has argued that the area returned to its working-class roots, which could be perceived as a certain urban roughness. unemployment rates rose and social problems became more usual. the old images of the area revived: images of poverty, unemployment, crime and violence were apparent once again, but some new elements, drugs and prostitution, emerged as well. fear of the ‘other’ and the possible neighbourhood decline also formed part of the images. the debate can be viewed as a reconstructive force in relation to the existing images. those who saw prostitution as a threat to the community represented the issue by emphasising the negative aspect of the image; for them the area was a neighbourhood characterized by crime, immoral ways of life, and fear. they thought that prostitution was linked with other problems in the area. those who thought that prostitution was part of urban life did not want to blame on the prostitutes or kerb-crawlers, but highlighted the positive sides of the diversity of the local culture. for them, the old images of bohemian romanticism were more accurate than the negative ones. they saw kallio as a suitable place for prostitution, because of the long traditions of tolerance of difference in the neighbourhood. the third type of image was linked with the working-class past of the area. some people – and every now and then the media – described the neighbourhood as a place for ordinary, decent people. the community protesters used this kind of thinking in their actions as well. they stressed that the area was their place, and they had every right to define the appropriate way of living there. for them, prostitution was a threat to the simplicity of the imagined past. prostitution in public space raised such a stir in finland partly because there were no established ways of dealing with the questions of marginal groups. since finnish identity and culture has been based on the rural environment and traditional shared values, people have not been capable of tolerating cultural or social differences in their neighbourhood (tani 2002; cf. åström 2000). finland’s role as one of the scandinavian welfare societies changed quite quickly during the economic recession of the 1990s (cf. kattelus 1996). massive unemployment and problems like prostitution, homelessness and drug abuse, which had been marginal, became more widespread. at the same time, finland took in more immigrants than before. from the viewpoint of public opinion, foreigners were easy scapegoats for the economic and social ills of society and all the more so in the case of prostitution because of the visibility of foreign prostitutes on the streets. the change was so sudden that no political or cultural practices for dealing with these issues were established. in this article i have represented the finnish street prostitution debate from the viewpoint of image construction. street prostitution raised many emotional, practical and moral opinions, and by doing so it affected the subjective and intersubjective images of the area. the area was stigmatised as a neighbourhood that was different from its surroundings. in december 1999, a new municipal ordinance came into force in helsinki. it prohibited prostitution in public places and caused a temporary displacement of the prostitutes and the kerbfennia 179: 2 (2001) 155bad reputation – bad reality? crawlers to the neighbouring city of vantaa, which also then prohibited visible prostitution. despite these changes, the reputation of the kallio area as a place for prostitution and kerb-crawling was imprinted in people’s minds. only time will tell how long the neighbourhood will be remembered for prostitution. whatever the case, the bad reputation will affect the everyday reality in the neighbourhood for a long time, because there is always interaction between the lived and the imagined. the images are intertwined with the reality. acknowledgements this paper is part of my research project funded by the academy of finland (project number 163997). manchester institute for popular culture (manchester metropolitan university) and department of geography (university of helsinki) offered me good working opportunities during the project, and i am sincerely grateful to both. i am also grateful to the anonymous referees for their comments. responsibility for the final version remains mine. references agnew j & js duncan (eds) (1989). the power of place: bringing together geographical and sociological imaginations. unwin hyman, london. aitken sc & le zonn (1994). re-presenting the place pastiche. in aitken sc & le zonn (eds). place, power, situation, and spectacle: a geography of film, 3–25. rowman & littlefield, lanham. anderson kj & f gale (eds) (1992). inventing places: studies in cultural geography. longman, melbourne. banks m (1998). representing regional life: the place discourses of granada tonight. the north west geographer 2, 2–10. barnes t & j duncan (eds) (1992). writing worlds: discourse, text and metaphor in the representation of landscape. routledge, london. barnett c (1998). the cultural turn: fashion or progress in human geography? antipode 30, 379– 394. burgess ja (1978). image and identity: a study of urban and regional perception with particular reference to kingston upon hull. university of hull, occasional papers in geography 23. burgess j & jr gold (1985a). place, the media and popular culture. in burgess j & jr gold (eds). geography, the media & popular culture, 1–32. croom helm, london. burgess j & jr gold (eds) (1985b). geography, the media & popular culture. croom helm, london. cook i, d crouch, s naylor & jr ryan (eds) (2000). cultural turns/geographical turns: perspectives on cultural geography. pearson education, harlow. cosgrove d (1993). on “the reinvention of cultural geography”, by price and lewis. annals of the association of american geographers 83, 515– 517. duncan js (1993). commentary. annals of the association of american geographers 83, 517–519. duncan n (1996). renegotiating gender and sexuality in public and private spaces. in n duncan (ed). bodyspace: destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality, 127–145. routledge, london. gold jr (1980). an introduction to behavioural geography. oxford university press, oxford. gold jr & sv ward (eds) (1994). place promotion: the use of publicity and marketing to sell towns and regions. john wiley & sons, chichester. goodall r (1995). the comfort of sin: prostitutes & prostitution in the 1990s. renaissance books, folkestone. gould p (1969). methodological developments since the fifties. progress in geography 1, 1–49. hall t (1998). urban geography. routledge, london. helsingin kaupungin historia (1956). iv osa, jälkimmäinen nide. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden kirjapaino, helsinki. helsinki alueittain (2000). helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, helsinki. helsingin sanomat (21st december 1995). taloyhtiö ahtaalla arsenalin ja ilotyttörallin takia. aleksis kiven katu 20 joutuu ottamaan ison velan markkina-arvonsa menettäneen liikehuoneiston takia. (riitta astikainen). helsingin sanomat (29th november 1996). kurvissa on matala lava. (kaisa hakkarainen). helsingin sanomat (4th june 1997). kalliolaiset istuttivat kukkia karhupuistoon. (anna-leena pyykkönen). helsingin sanomat (21st february 2000). kallion outo imu. kivinen ja kirjava kaupunginosa kiehtoo. (marko jokela). herbert d (1993). neighbourhood incivilities and the study of crime in place. area 28, 37–46. holcomb b (1999). marketing cities for tourism. in judd dr & ss fainstein (eds). the tourist city, 54– 70. yale university press, new haven & london. hope t & m shaw (eds) (1988). communities and crime reduction. hmso, london. hubbard p (1998). sexuality, immorality and the city: red-light districts and the marginalisation of female street prostitutes. gender, place and culture 5: 1, 55–72. hubbard p (1999a). sex and the city: geographies of prostitution in the urban west. ashgate, aldershot. hubbard p (1999b). whose city? sexuality, citizenship and struggles for public space. paper delivered to iasscs sexual diversity and human rights conference, 22nd july 1999. 156 fennia 179: 2 (2001)sirpa tani häkkinen a (1995). rahasta – vaan ei rakkaudesta. prostituutio helsingissä 1867–1939. otava, helsinki. ilta-sanomat (8th december 1995). ilotyttöralli pakottaa firman muuttamaan. iltavuorosta lähteneitä naistyöntekijöitä häiritty. (tiina vahtera). ilta-sanomat (9th january 1997). 3 400 pankkilaista piiloutuu rähjäiseen ”lihalaaksoon”: teollisuuskatu on nyt vallilan wall street. (riika kuuskoski). ilta-sanomat (9th september 1997). ilotyttökauppa rehottaa nyt ydinkeskustassa. helsingin päättäjänaiset vaativat seksin ostajia tuomiolle. (ulla veirto). jackson p (1993). berkeley and beyond: broadening the horizons of cultural geography. annals of the association of american geographers 83, 519– 520. johnston rj (1997). geography and geographers: anglo-american human geography since 1945 (fifth edition). arnold, london. kallio ja ympäristö (27th october 1996). aiheetonta mustamaalausta. kallio ja ympäristö (7th december 1997). katuprostituutiota yritetään kahlita järjestyssäännöillä. karvonen e (1999). elämää mielikuvayhteiskunnassa. imago ja maine menestystekijöinä myöhäismodernissa maailmassa. gaudeamus, helsinki. kattelus k (1996). helsinki – a city of work and unemployment. helsinki quarterly 3b, 24–27. kauranen a (1981). sonja o. kävi täällä. wsoy, porvoo. keith m & s pile (eds) (1993). place and the politics of identity. routledge, london. koskela h & m tuominen (1995). yökaupunki – pelon kaupunki? in j lähteenmaa & l mäkelä (ed). helsingin yö, 66–89. helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, helsinki. koskela h, s tani & m tuominen (2000). “sen näkönen tyttö”: tutkimus katuprostituution vaikutuksista helsinkiläisten naisten arkielämään. helsingin kaupungin tietokeskuksen tutkimuksia 2000: 5. kotiliesi (12th july 1996). viimeinen aito stadi. yhä kalliossa kaikuu kuin vähän karhealla äänellä laulettu laulu. (inkeri apila-salo). lahtinen k-v (1995). kallio: onko kivisydämessä pervotahdistin? z setalehti 3–4, 18–24. lowenthal d (1975). past time, present place: landscape and memory. the geographical review lxv: 1, 1–36. lowenthal d (1985). the past is a foreign country. cambridge university press, cambridge. lynch k (1960). the image of the city. mit press, cambridge, ma. lynch k (1984). reconsidering the image of the city. in rodwin l & rm hollister (eds). cities of the mind. images and themes of the city in the social sciences, 151–161. plenum press, new york. mcdowell l (1994). the transformation of cultural geography. in gregory d, r martin & g smith (eds). human geography: society, space and social science, 146–73. macmillan, london. melleri a (1997). puukkobulevardi. otava, helsinki. metro (17th december 1999). kalliosta tuli trendikäs. urbaani kulttuuri hakee jälleen uutta potkua. (marjut tervola). mitchell d (1995). there’s no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture in geography. transactions of the institute of british geographies, new series 20, 102–16. mutka a (1996). tsuppari. kallion kundin kesä. tammi, helsinki. mäenpää p (1991). kallion keskiluokkaistuminen 1980-luvulla. työläisyhteiskunnan tuho? helsingin kaupunkisuunnitteluviraston julkaisuja 7. oed online (2001). the oxford english dictionary. oxford university press, oxford. 13 february 2001. <http://dictionary.oed.com>. paasi a (1986). the institutionalization of regions. theory and comparative case studies. joensuun yliopiston yhteiskuntatieteellisiä julkaisuja 9. paasi a (1991a). deconstructing regions: notes on the scales of spatial life. environment and planning a 23: 239–256. paasi a (1991b). ympäristötutkimuksen kielestä ja sen metodologisista implikaatioista: teoriaa ja empiirisiä esimerkkejä. terra 103: 3, 226–241. philo c (comp. 1991). new words, new worlds: reconceptualising social and cultural geography. social and cultural geography study group, st. david’s university college, lampeter. pitkänsillan väärällä puolella (2000). kallion kotiseutualbumi. 16th june 2000. <http://www.pitkasilta. hai.fi>. pocock dcd (1982). valued landscape in memory: the view from prebends’ bridge. transactions of the institute of british geographers, new series 7: 3, 354–364. pocock d & r hudson (1978). images of the urban environment. macmillan, london & basingstoke. porteous jd (1977). environment & behavior: planning and everyday urban life. addison-wesley, reading, ma. price m & m lewis (1993). the reinvention of cultural geography. annals of the association of american geographers 83, 1–17. riikonen h (1995). sukupolvet ja alueellinen muutos. terra 107: 2, 88–100. riikonen h (1997). aluetietoisuuden sisältö paikallisyhteisössä: sukupolvet ja muistinvaraiset alueet. in haarni t, m karvinen, h koskela & s tani (eds). tila, paikka ja maisema. tutkimusretkiä uuteen maantieteeseen, 179–189. vastapaino, tampere. roberts n (1992). whores in history: prostitution in western society. harper collins, london. ruuth a (1969). kämppä. tammi, helsinki. saisio p (1975). elämän meno. kirjayhtymä, helsinki. shields r (1991). places on the margin. alternative geographies of modernity. routledge, london. sibley d (1995). geographies of exclusion: society and difference in the west. routledge, london. fennia 179: 2 (2001) 157bad reputation – bad reality? tani s (1995). kaupunki taikapeilissä. helsinkielokuvien mielenmaisemat – maantieteellisiä tulkintoja. helsingin kaupungin tietokeskuksen tutkimuksia 1995: 14. tani s (2001). ‘that kind of girl in this kind of neighbourhood…’ the potential and problems of street prostitution research. city: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action (forthcoming). tani s (2002). whose place is this space? life in the street prostitution area in helsinki, finland. international journal of urban and regional research 5: 3, 311–324. tani s & t kopomaa (1995). kolmannelta linjalta kontulaan: tulkintaa popja rocklyriikan helsinki-kuvista. in schulman h & v kanninen (eds). kaupunki kohtauspaikkana. näkökulmia kulttuuriseen kaupunkitutkimukseen. yhdyskuntasuunnittelun täydennyskoulutuskeskus c 33, 143–158. taylor i, k evans & p fraser (1996). a tale of two cities: global change, local feeling and everyday life in the north of england. a study in manchester and sheffield. routledge, london. tuan y-f (1975). images and mental maps. annals of the association of american geographers 65: 2, 203–213. tuominen m (1997). broken windows – the case of helsinki. helsinki quarterly 3, 12–17. tuominen m (1999). turvallinen helsinki. pahoinpitelyrikollisuus helsingissä. helsingin kaupungin tietokeskuksen tutkimuksia 1999: 10. walmsley dj & gj lewis (1993). people and environment: behavioural approaches in human geography (second edition). longman, harlow. ward sv & jr gold (1994). introduction. in gold jr & sv ward (eds). place promotion. the use of publicity and marketing to sell towns and regions, 1–17. john wiley & sons, chichester. ward sv (1998). selling places: the marketing and promotion of towns and cities 1850–2000. routledge, london. weitzer r (2000). the politics of prostitution in america. in r weitzer (ed). sex for sale: prostitution, pornography, and the sex industry, 159–180. routledge, london. zonn l (ed) (1990). place images in media. portrayal, experience, and meaning. rowman & littlefield, savage. åström a-m (2000). the spirit of helsinki: the capital as a symbol of the country and its meaning for the inhabitants. helsinki quarterly 2, 33–39. äikäs ta (1999). image as icon: historicity, image management and urban landscape. ngp yearbook 1999, nordia geographical publications 28: 2, 59–67. äikäs ta (2001). imagosta maisemaan. esimerkkeinä turun ja oulun kaupunki-imagojen rakentaminen. nordia geographical publications 30: 2. in memoriam: roser majoral roser majoral moliné, a long-standing member of fennia editorial advisory board and professor with análisis geográfico regional de la universidad de barcelona, passed away on 7 november 2005 in barcelona, having to finally give up the battle with a deadly cancer. with the death of roser, geography worldwide, and above all within the catalan and spanish community, lost a dominating scholar, an enthusiastic teacher and a great colleague. roser majoral received the master’s degree in geography and history at the university of barcelona in 1971. on the same year, she obtained an assistant lectureship with the recently established department of geography. her doctoral thesis from 1977 was methodologically and thematically a pioneering work that turned on the evolution of agricultural land use in catalonia. she obtained a full tenure in 1984, and was appointed professor in 1989. roser published numerous studies, articles and books related to rural and upland environments, and she also broadened her interest to agrarian geography, marginal lands and development issues. the latter ones formed an important sector of her teaching, which was strongly inspired by her close connections to the indian subcontinent. in addition to her outstanding research and innovative teaching activities, roser dedicated much of her time in management and administration. she was the head of the department of physical geography and regional geography between 1990 and 1994, and her role was invaluable in promoting and co-ordinating the research group of territorial analysis and regional development serving the catalan government from 1998 onwards. the contribution and work of roser in numerous posts with the international geographical union were highly appreciated. from 1984 to 1988 she was a full member of the igu working group on development in highlands and highlatitude zones. between 1988 and 1992 she was a full member of the commission dedicated to research on the dynamics of rural systems, and 1992–96 she was the president of the working group on development issues in marginal regions, to mention a few. roser’s enthusiasm and desire to learn more about our world never ceded. she continued to lead as normal life as possible and work despite the advancing illness, and she visited her department frequently making plans of future endeavours. her services for the finnish geographical society and its journal fennia are highly appreciated, and her commitment and strength will always remain in our memories. jukka käyhkö exploring environmental knowledge: the construction and conservation of agricultural biodiversity in ghana sirkku juhola juhola, sirkku (2009). exploring environmental knowledge: the construction and conservation of agricultural biodiversity in ghana. fennia 187: 1, pp. 31– 41. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper explores the idea of environmental knowledge by focusing on the social construction of agricultural biodiversity. the fieldwork was conducted in 2003–2004 in ghana. the research methodology consisted of interviewing and focus group discussions. the respondents varied from researchers and government officials to members of women’s farming groups who cultivate rice. this paper argues that by understanding how agricultural biodiversity is constructed it is possible to highlight different ways of understanding the environment by different actors. the paper begins with an overview of the emergence of agricultural biodiversity as a global environmental issue. with this background in mind, this paper examines the different ways of construction and conservation of oryza glaberrima, the indigenous rice variety of ghana. three different discursive positions, ranging from scientific to local knowledge, are identified. the agric, diversity and local discourse frame and categorise rice and other crop varieties in a different manner. the categories identified reflect the visible characteristics of the varieties and their social meanings, related to their use or function in the wider social context. these different categories are corresponding and conflicting, as well as inclusive and exclusive, and have become institutionalised into social rules, norms and practices, which further establish the efforts to conserve o. glaberrima. sirkku juhola, department of social sciences and philosophy, po box 35 (mab), fi-40014 university of jyväskylä, finland. e-mail: sirkkujuhola@gmail.com. global environmental change last three decades of the 20th century witnessed the rise in awareness of the global environment and the impacts of human actions. from transboundary pollution and the depletion of the ozone layer, the debate on global environmental change (gec) has seen issues such as desertification, climate change and loss of biodiversity emerge in the international level. these issues did not originate from public experience but as a result of scientific concern (rayner 2006). agricultural biodiversity as an environmental concept is a part of these global developments, emerging into the global arena at the 1990s. agricultural biodiversity interestingly combines the conservation of biological resources with agriculture which in turn is seen as the major cause of the destruction of wild biodiversity (wood & lenné 2005). however, not all have accepted the emergence of environmental problems and the recommended solutions and treaties without scepticism. increasingly, the definitions and meanings of these environmental issues have been contested and challenged in literature. it is now acceptable to challenge “received wisdom” (leach & mearns 1996), “narratives” (roe 1999) and environmental discourses (hajer 1995; hajer & versteeg 2005). the appeal of discursive analysis lies in their ability to reveal aspects about the use of language that other forms of analyses are unable to do. the role of language and the embeddedness of language in practice make it possible to scrutinise how the use of language by actors affects the process of problem framing and definition. discursive analyses are more interested in understanding why some definitions or understandings of the environment are more prominent and how that relates to the solving of these issues. 32 fennia 187: 1 (2009)sirkku juhola this paper examines the different ways of construction and conservation of oryza glaberrima, the indigenous rice variety of africa, in the upper east region of ghana. three different discursive positions, ranging from scientific to local knowledge, are identified, which frame and categorise rice and other crop varieties in a different manner. these do not only reflect the visible characteristics of the varieties but also their social meanings, related to their use or function in the wider social context. this paper firstly focuses on agricultural biodiversity as an environmental issue. secondly, the methodological issues are briefly discussed and scope and scale are presented as tools for analysing different discursive positions. thirdly, this paper outlines the three discourses and analyses the framing of diversity in their discourses. in the discussion section these are then compared and it becomes clear how the understanding of rice cultivated in the case study location varies depending on the discourse in question. this naturally has implications for the conservation of these varieties. understanding agricultural biodiversity the emergence of post-modern and post-structural literature has affected the way social sciences approach the concept of environment. the realist approach of the environment being something objectively verifiable through observation and hypotheses testing is questioned. instead, it is argued that the environment is constructed and reconstructed materially and semiotically (castree & braun 1998). post-structural approaches in environmental politics focus on the role of discourse and the creation of global discourses of environmental change (keeley & scoones 2003). identification of over-arching discourses at the global level sheds light on the different ways these global discourses approach environmental issues (dryzek 1997). more detailed analyses of specific environmental discourses have emerged, such as ozone depletion (liftin 1994) and acid rain (hajer 1995). hajer’s contribution is of specific interest here as it introduces a discursive analysis with a clear institutional dimension. according to hajer, discourses are internally related to the social practices, thus institutions, in which they are produced. in this way, both the text and the context in which the text is represented require analysing in order to recognise why some understandings of environmental change occur and others do not. the word biodiversity is a very recent one, only found in dictionaries after the mid-eighties (blaikie & jeanrenaud 1996: 2). natural scientists as early as the mid-19th century wrote about the diversity of species (barbier et al. 1994). these ideas were most prominently featured in the publication edited by e. o. wilson (wilson 1988). the most common definition of biodiversity that one encounters in the literature is the variability of life in three different levels: at the genetic, species and ecosystem level. this general definition of biodiversity has become: “[r]ather like an optical illusion. the more it is looked at, the less clearly defined it appears to be and viewing it from different angles can lead to different perceptions of what is involved” (quoted in barbier et al. 1994: 7). the definition enables different instances to interpret and mould it to their liking. thus, it is broad enough to mean something for everyone and similarities can be drawn to concepts like ‘sustainable development’ (cline-cole 1996), which can be defined in several different ways with several different meanings. this paper demonstrates this to be true for agricultural biodiversity also. agricultural biodiversity was acknowledged as a thematic issue in the convention on biological diversity (cbd) in 1996. the emergence of agricultural biodiversity in the global biodiversity agenda is an example of where two very different issues appear to come together as a single issue in the gec debate (wood & lenné 1997, 1999, 2005, 2006; bardsley 2006). agricultural biodiversity has been defined in various different ways in the literature (juhola 2006). these have ranged from plant genetic diversity to agricultural diversity and diversity in farming practices. the cbd defines agricultural biodiversity consisting of three dimensions. first of these is the plant genetic resources, the second animal genetic resources and finally the microbial and fungal genetic resources. according to the cbd, this also includes the socio-cultural, economic and environmental elements of agrobiodiversity (convention on biological diversity 2008). methodology the local research was conducted in the upper eastern part of the country in bawku municipality. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 33exploring environmental knowledge: the construction and … population density in the area is one of the highest in the country and it is amongst the poorest regions of ghana. the area can be characterised as sudan-savanna with uni-modal, relatively poor rainfall (900 mm annually). the climate permits the cultivation of rain-fed rice crop during the rainy season from may until september. despite several rural development projects, including introduction of new varieties in the area (russell 1989), farmed crops and techniques have remained largely the same since 1975 (whitehead 2002). despite this, diversity and deliberate, managed change in these smallholdings by innovative farmers can be emphasised in the west african context (richards 1985) and in ghana specifically (russell 1989). in order to examine a concept like agricultural biodiversity, a case study approach was deemed most suitable (yin 2003) and this was conducted during an 11 month fieldwork period in ghana during 2003–2004. the choice of ghana as the case study location is based on its involvement in the people, land management and environmental change project (plec), the first global initiative in the field of land management, agriculture, biodiversity and environmental change. this paper is based on 87 semi-structured single informant interviews and three focus group discussions undertaken in the case study localities and the national level in ghana. interviewees at the national level varied from the minister of agriculture to agricultural scientists and extension workers. in the case study villages interviews with the farmers farming rice were conducted with the help of a translator. interviews were transcribed and these were then analysed discursively. discourse analysis has originally been developed in the disciplines of linguistics and sociolinguistics (sarangi & coulthard 2000). the discursive analysis in this paper focuses on the issue of framing (gasper & apthorpe 1996). in this process, aspects of the problem are included and excluded whilst meaning is given to it and these depend on who frames the problem. by excluding aspects from its scope, framing then determines what can and cannot be said. the concept of positionality has been discussed in studies on gender and development as well as strands of critical geography since the late 1980s and is important in empirical studies that adopt a post structural epistemological stance (bell et al. 1993; bhavnani 1993; moss 1995; wolf 1996; kapoor 2004). the issue of positionality and identity and how it affected the data with regards to this research is further discussed elsewhere (juhola 2005). framing agricultural biodiversity in the ghanaian context terminology, concepts and meanings are crucial in this paper. thus, the focus is to understand how the concept of agricultural biodiversity is framed by different institutions in the case study. two concepts, scope and scale, help us to tease out the different discursive positions that the institutions adopt and highlight the social construction of agricultural biodiversity. three institutions were identified in the case study and are introduced here now. all the institutions focus on the cultivation and conservation of the indigenous african rice, o. glaberrima in the northern ghana. the discourse of the local institution narrates a story of unpredictable rainfall and of land shortages as the ultimate reasoning behind land management decisions. the discourse of the national agricultural system, the agric institution, also interprets the farmers as being constrained, but mainly attributes this to lack of support to the failings of the market and the unfavourable policy climate. the third institution, named here as the diversity institution, however, takes a distinct approach to these two mentioned above and its discourse claims that small farmers are in fact managing their diverse environment and the farming systems with success and that this is an inherent part of small-scale farming in the rural areas of the world. exploring agricultural biodiversity through different scales of analysis the concept of scale is more frequently used in the natural sciences whilst in the social sciences the usage has been less common. in addition, in social sciences it has been used in somewhat confusing ways with its definition changing depending on discipline or even individual study (evans et al. 2002). in exploring the multiple uses of the concept of scale, gibson et al. (2000) refer to the use scale in biology and taxonomy. here, scale of agricultural biodiversity, comes closest to examining the definitions given of agricultural biodiversity and focuses on how discourses frame the objects of conservation, i.e. what it consists of. scale of 34 fennia 187: 1 (2009)sirkku juhola diversity in this instance refers to examining the range, or extent or the depth of detail in defining diversity. foucault shows how various methods of classification of that time were based on the same epistemological base, hence ‘a knowledge of empirical individuals can be acquired only from continuous, ordered, and universal tabulation of all possible differences’ (foucault 1970: 157). however, there are those who disagree and argue that there are indeed patterns in nature that can be observed and recorded. the idea of a hierarchically ordered nature as perceived by the human eye is also put forward by some of those who have studied the classification systems of indigenous populations. in one of the most comprehensive of theories in ethnobiology it is argued that despite the great variety in human societies, there are certain widely shared principles (berlin 1992). these general ideas of taxonomy, nonetheless, are mostly ignored when it comes to cultivated plants. the classification of cultivated plants has been a topic that has not interested many partly because many crops and pasture species have been described as ‘taxonomic nightmares’ (quoted in cox & wood 1999: 36). this was also discussed by harlan who claimed that the purpose for classification is essentially to reduce the number of plant types to manageable proportions (harlan 1975). it is argued that classification and naming are an important process in dealing with the complexity of cultivated plants in a rational manner. hence, ‘taxonomy is, pragmatically, a science of convenience’ (harlan 1975: 108) and at the heart of this problem is the question: what are the most useful traits or characters used for the separation of different groups? the differences between taxonomy of naturally occurring and cultivated plants was made and it was suggested that ‘the people who deal with cultivated plants the most, geneticists, agronomists, horticulturalists, and foresters, have developed their own informal and intuitive classifications, based on experience, as to what constitutes useful groupings’ (harlan 1975: 109). scales of agricultural biodiversity in the case study in order to examine the scale of diversity in the discourses the focus was placed on how rice varieties are defined and classified. crop identification and language play a crucial role in this. for the local discourse two categories emerged but the two categories are very fluid. the agric discourse recognises two categories but also acknowledges the fact that no one really knows what the rice cultivated is. the diversity discourse, contrary to the other two, presses the fact the rice cultivated and the object of conservation is indigenous african o. glaberrima. for the local discourse, there are two categories for classifying rice in kusaal, the local language. firstly, for improved varieties of rice, there is the agric bunbuudi, i.e. seed from agric station. another word can also be used which denotes directly that it is improved rice. agric mui literally means rice from agric station, mui being the kusaal word for rice. the second category consists of those rice varieties that are considered local. the word that is used for local varieties in general is bunbuud kudda which when, literally translated, means “varieties that farmers were using a long ago” [rice farmer, female]. also, to specifically indicate local varieties of rice, a term muikudda can be used. this refers to rice that has been farmed in the area for a long time. the markers for distinguishing rice varieties are crucial in understanding local framing. the most common ways to define were colour and size of the seed, plant height and the time it took to mature on the field. colour of the seed appeared to be the most popular way of distinguishing different rice varieties from each other. however, it is surprising and noteworthy that only three people out of 37 said that they distinguish between rice varieties by name. thus, the names of varieties were not important in identifying different varieties of rice. the origin of rice varieties cultivated in northern ghana features prominently in the discourse of the agric institution. firstly, in purchasing the seed from the market or exchanging it with other farmers, farmers receive seeds of which origin is unknown. hence, the farmers get the seeds from the market “[a]nd they go and grow it for some time and then they say it is an old variety, that is an indigenous and they give it a name” [agricultural technician]. a similar situation occurs if the seed source is a research station. “or maybe if i pick a sample of rice here, go to the house and plant. somebody goes to my field and sees it is growing nice. that person wouldn’t know it has come from [an agricultural station]. so, the person fennia 187: 1 (2009) 35exploring environmental knowledge: the construction and … would name the variety after my name” [rice farmer, male]. essentially then, the outcome is that farmers do not really know what varieties they are cultivating but it is argued that it is very likely that they are not indigenous varieties i.e. o. glaberrima but instead are of oryza sativa origin, thus asian rice. hence, it is stated that “[i]n northern ghana, most of the varieties that farmers grow are improved. it is the only difference that some of the varieties have been introduced 40–50 years ago” [agronomist]. the scale of diversity in the third discourse has a relatively similar starting point to the previous discourse in that the initial scale is at the variety level. it does, nevertheless, differ in the way that categories are defined and what they signify. according to the diversity discourse, farmers are reluctant to adopt modern, improved varieties but rather to continue to cultivate indigenous varieties that are better adapted to their local conditions. thus, the main notion here is the classification of crops into two categories. a division is made between the indigenous and the “traditional” varieties and the wild biodiversity that the farmers conserve actively and the “modern”, improved, high yielding material and crop varieties that are increasingly replacing the material that farmers are using. the varieties that the farmers are growing are classified as o. glaberrima and researchers have spent time in analysing their characteristics in cooperation with the farmers (tanzubil & dittoh, 2000). however, it is also accepted that not all is known about these indigenous varieties and that farmers are the custodians of this knowledge and that co-operation is necessary between the two groups. hence, ‘[i]t is hoped that as more and more indigenous varieties are discovered, conserved and characterised, certain important traits of the varieties will be discovered and developed’ (anane-sakyi & dittoh 2001: 1). table 1 below summarises the different categories that the discourses classify varieties of rice grown in the case study area. scoping diversity: a product or a process of farmer actions? the purpose of exploring the scope of agricultural biodiversity is to understand what constitutes it in different discourses, how it is framed and what is excluded and included in that framing. the focus is on the dynamics of agriculture and the role of farmers in it. a central question is whether there are forms of agriculture and cultivation that inherently reduce agricultural biodiversity or alternatively create, foster and even increase it? at the heart of this question is the dilemma between farmer intentionality and unintentionality with regards to “creating” agricultural biodiversity. the dichotomy between modern and traditional agriculture provides a starting point for understanding the framing of scope. frames here encompass aspects relating to the knowledge behind farmer management decisions and practices. one the one hand, agricultural biodiversity can be defined at the genome or variety or species level in crop species cultivated on farmers’ fields or lines on plant breeders’ nurseries. in this way, diversity is seen as a product, very much like the improved seed that is given to farmers. on the other hand, however, the scope of diversity covers a wider range of agriculture. it is seen as a process that evolves as farmers adapt to changing social, economic and environmental conditions. interesting as this divide is on its own, there is a further reason why it is important here. depending on how the scope of agricultural biodiversity is drawn, this affects how discourses design methods to preserve and conserve it. an exhaustive study of the developments in politics of plant breeding and conservation highlights how both strategies emerged out of different concerns of scientists and how they consequently have been institutionalised into practices (pistorius table 1. scales of diversity in discourses. local discourse agric discourse diversity discourse categories of rice varieties muikudda, agric mui improved varieties (o. sativa, o. glaberrima) / local varieties (origin unknown) improved varieties (o. sativa), indigenous varieties (o. glaberrima) 36 fennia 187: 1 (2009)sirkku juhola 1997). according to pistorius, the differences in advocating either ex situ or in situ methods derived from scientists’ understanding of evolutionary theories as well as from objectives of conservation. one of those who favoured this form of conservation, otto frankel, argued that genetic material ‘should not be left in the field exposed to continuously changing agricultural practices’, thus making ex situ facilities ‘a safe niche amid “a hurricane of change”’ (quoted in pistorius 1997: 26). on the other hand, it was argued by erna bennet, a fervent supporter of in situ conservation that “i see no special advantage in conservation in the form of seed apart from the very eminent one of convenience, and i think that attempts to find other merits in the ‘steady state’ which seed storage represents, seem to come dangerously near to adopting museum concepts. the purpose of conservation is not to capture the present moment of evolutionary time, in which there is no special virtue, but to conserve material so that it will continue to evolve…” (quoted in pistorius 1997: 27). these two quotes explicitly demonstrate the two end points on the continuum of the scope of agricultural biodiversity. they are also a brilliant example of the use of tropes in discourses. “hurricane of change” and a “safe niche” as well as “museum concepts” evoke powerful and persuasive images in narratives. some have argued that in the recent decades, there has been a paradigm shift towards the appreciation of in situ methods in the conservation of these resources (hammer 2003). framing scope in the case study in order to examine the scope in the case study, the rationale in behind the farmer management decisions was focused on and these were researched by using farmer interviews and observation of farming techniques. in the local discourse, the diverse farm is created unintentionally in order to secure some harvest. the agric discourse views the diversity as a negative outcome of farmer management whilst the diversity discourse considers the agricultural biodiversity present as a conscious action on behalf of the farmers. in the case study area, intercropping and mixed cropping are common practices in the fields. in the local discourse, getting two crops from one piece of land, shortage of land and the fact that one of the crops planted is a creeping crop are the reasons for engaging in this kind of farming. this is related to the idea of land scarcity and the notion that it is necessary to utilise all the land as much as possible in order to secure enough food for the lean season. the aspect of food insecurity surfaces as a reason behind management decisions taken. hence, intercropping and mixed cropping are considered to be strategies that are utilised in order to secure some harvest and that some loss is accepted because of that strategy. in the agric discourse, the key idea here is that agricultural biodiversity is an end-product created unintentionally by farmers. one of the reasons why rice industry is performing poorly is the fact that farmers are still cultivating traditional varieties despite the fact that there have been consistent introductions of new varieties into the country. it is acknowledged that ‘[m]ost farmers do not have access to improved or pure seed. cultivar mixtures are common and considered a major problem’ (dogbe & djagbletey 2001: 1). others within this institution agree, claiming that ‘[o]ne of the main reasons for poor yields of the traditional varieties is that they are often mixtures of more than two varieties with different growth characteristics’ (otoo 1998). furthermore, it suggested that with regards to small-scale farmers, “[m]ost of them still use the local varieties… they are continuously cropping on those mixed varieties for almost 20, 30 or even 50 years…” [agricultural extension worker]. the diversity discourse views agricultural biodiversity as a process and includes the management level within its scope. the main thesis of this discourse is that farmers intentionally create diversity to meet and counter the outside pressures that they are facing and that they have been doing so for centuries. another aspect of this discourse is the realisation that management practices of farmers are important, as they have evolved over time. farmers have adapted to their changing environment and continue to perform despite the external constraints. the ingenuity of the small farmer is demonstrated in the diverse way in which the fields are managed. in recognising the highly uncertain climatic conditions it is argued that “the rationale for the traditional farming systems is clear… [they] include practices such as mixed cropping, to ensure mechanical protection against erosion... planting of groundnuts is also an agronomic measure providing surface cover against erosion. soil fertility is traditionally maintained by practices such as intercropping of cereals with legumes and use of fennia 187: 1 (2009) 37exploring environmental knowledge: the construction and … manure and households wastes and land fallowing” (kranjac-berisavljevic 2000: 2). all these activities form the basis for a system that can also benefit from indigenous crop varieties that are adapted to the local situation. it is maintained that more should be known about ‘the knowledge and beliefs of traditional people that constitute the basis of their high level of awareness in conservation of biodiversity’ (laing & ameyawakumfi 1992). thus, all discourses do recognise the agricultural diversity that is present in the case study area. what they do, nevertheless, is disagree on the source and purpose of it, see table 2. the cultivation and conservation of what varieties? the previous sections have detailed the way the discourses frame agricultural biodiversity. it is now worth spending time in comparing these framings in order to discover the discursive differences and the implications to conservation that consequently follow from that. it is clear that the diversity discourse advocates in situ conservation whereas the two other see no special reason for conservation albeit be it for different reasons. in the local discourse, the category of improved rice is fairly straightforward. rice is considered to be agric mui when farmers have received it directly from a research institution as certified seed. however, the lack of formal seed supply creates a situation where the second category of local rice becomes very dynamic. at the heart of the local discourse’s construction of categories is the custom of naming varieties. due to this, the category of muikudda is locally specific with high variability even within localities. this classification system is very much based on individual ability of oneself to identify varieties and the ability to separate them by looking at visible characteristics, i.e. the colour seed or the plant or the maturation period. names of varieties are not considered an important method of identification or classification as more emphasis is placed on tangible ways of identifying varieties. the classification of categories in the diversity discourse is heavily based on the accepted scientific classification of the genus oryza. the indigenous rice category here refers to o. glaberrima that was domesticated in west africa and throughout the institution’s narrative, indigenous varieties are referred to as o. glaberrima and that they are worth conserving because of their indigenous status. in contrast, indigenous rice is seen to be locally adapted and outperforming or at least matching the improved ones in difficult conditions where there are no external inputs and unpredictable weather conditions (anane-sakyi & dittoh 2000). in doing empirical research, the actors of this institution rely almost exclusively on language and names of varieties in its identification of local varieties. more importantly, this approach relies heavily on the recognition of the knowledge that farmers posses and consequently farmer identification takes centre stage. in this process, through participatory research techniques the diversity discourse accepts the classification of the local discourse and makes the assumption that muikudda i.e. local rice and indigenous rice categories mean the same thing. keeping all this in mind, it is interesting to compare the definition of local rice category in the agric discourse. the agric discourse’s narrative recognises the inability of the current seed system of which it is part, to function properly, but still argues that up to 90 percent of the rice farmed in the three northern regions is improved material and not indigenous that denotes o. glaberrima origin, table 2. scope of agricultural biodiversity in discourses. local discourse agric discourse diversity discourse reasoning behind farmer actions resulting in agricultural biodiversity land scarcity and fear of crop failure reasons behind intercropping no access to improved inputs and therefore cultivar mixtures grown management practices, such as mixed cropping and intercropping adopted because they benefit the crops agricultural biodiversity an unintentional outcome of actions a negative outcome of farmer actions an intentional process of farmers who diversify as a strategy 38 fennia 187: 1 (2009)sirkku juhola or that it rather was at some time in the past when it was released by the agric institution. it is further clarified that “local rice is not glaberrima, in the parlance of this country; local rice is not the glaberrima. local rice is rice, which has been planted in this country” [rice breeder]. hence, according to the agric discourse, there is no significant difference between the indigenous, farmers and local rice but it is all taken to mean varieties that are impure and of poor quality compared to the improved varieties obtainable from research stations. essentially, three categories are constructed and are overlapping and sometimes contradictory. rice cultivated by the farmers is defined and classified differently by all the three different discourses. see table 3 for details of individual rice varieties and into which categories the three institutions classify them. this highlights the way that these constructs are based on language. table 4 further exemplifies the overlapping of categories. here it can be seen how categories on the left side column do not always correspond to the definitions given by each discourse. the classification and categories of rice varieties is a perfect example of a discursive tool or a concept that is utilised. these concepts, such as indigenous variety and o. glaberrima in the diversity discourse and local and agric in the local table 3. individual rice varieties and their classification. rice variety local discourse diversity discourse agric discourse agona mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa aboyang mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa agonbela mui kudda indigenous variety oryz aglaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa abong mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa adenbemah mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa agondiga mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa musabeliga mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima indigenous variety oryza glaberrima agongima mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa agonsanga mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa samolgu mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa awarigawariga mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima indigenous variety oryza glaberrima asakeda mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa satia mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa agric mui agric mui oryza sativa improved variety mendi mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa mr moore mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa peter mui kudda indigenous variety oryza glaberrima local (introduced) oryza sativa fennia 187: 1 (2009) 39exploring environmental knowledge: the construction and … discourse are examples of categories that are used to denote the importance of one particular category of rice varieties over another in the discourse’s narrative. this is especially true to the diversity discourse as the conservation of an indigenous african rice variety, typed using its scientific name in italics is likely to command some form of authority (juhola 2006). these different categorisations also affect the need to conserve this diversity, see table 5. the diversity discourse advocates in situ conservation because they view diversity as an essential source of livelihood security and farm management. furthermore, it is stressed that ex situ conservation strategies are not a viable option on their own because they ignore the knowledge that the farmers have of these crop varieties. alternatively, the agric discourse does not value diversity in planting material and advocates ex situ conservation for the sake of guaranteeing germplasm for breeding purposes and would rather have farmers plant pure, uniform varieties across the country. finally, the local discourse does not consider their farming activities and the choice of seed in terms of conservation, and farmers are willing to try new seeds if they are available. conclusion the importance of discursive analyses, according to hajer and versteeg is that the discourses, by defining what can and cannot be said, act as precursors to policy outcomes (hajer & versteeg 2005). this paper demonstrates this to be the case for agricultural biodiversity. the policy debates that are the most relevant to agricultural biodiversity relate to its conservation. this research demonstrates how the concept of scope and scale affect the decisions to adopt conservation strategies. recent analyses have also highlighted the contribution that discursive analyses can make to different areas of policy. for example, a recent analysis shows how food security can be conceptualised in a postmodern fashion (carr 2006). in fact, there are specific contributions that discursive analyses have made that have pushed our understanding of the environment-society linkages further (hajer & versteeg 2005) and contribute to the understanding of policy processes (rydin 2005). however, it is argued that understanding the coining of concepts and the acknowledgement of knowledge as a construction is not enough in itself. this ‘is because the policy process itself is constituted of certain discursive formations that lead to path dependency and can embed inequalities of power’ (rydin 2005: 76). here, the emergence of concepts like agrobiodiversity at the global level directly influences the policy process all the way down to the local level. thus, these new terms and terminology eventually lead to policy changes as these discourses become institutionalised into social rules, norms and practices. table 4. categories of rice varieties. categories local discourse diversity discourse agric discourse local rice muikudda o. glaberrima introduced variety (o. sativa or o. glaberrima) improved rice agric mui o. sativa o. sativa, o. glaberrima or nerica (o. sativa x o. glaberrima) o. glaberrima – indigenous variety indigenous variety o. sativa – improved variety improve variety, elite material table 5. need for conservation. local discourse agric discourse diversity discourse need for conservation no acknowledgement of rice varieties that need to be conserved no need to conserve rice varieties; rather need for uniform varieties need to conserve the indigenous varieties farmed in the area 40 fennia 187: 1 (2009)sirkku juhola acknowledgements the author would like to thank abidemi coker and suvi huttunen for comments on this paper. references anane-sakyi c & js dittoh (2000). agrobiodiversity conservation: in situ conservation and management of indigenous rice varieties in the interior savanna of zone of ghana. northern ghana principal reports. 9 p. savanna agricultural research institute, tamale. anane-sakyi c & js dittoh (2001). agro-biodiversity conservation: preliminary work on in situ conservation and management of indigenous rice varieties in the interior savanna zone of ghana. plec news and views 17: 31–33. barbier eb, jc burgess & c folke (1994). paradise lost? the ecological economics of biodiversity. 267 p. earthscan, london. bardsley d (2006). valuing diversity for sustainable futures: a response to wood and lenné. land use policy 23: 4, 643–644. bell d, p caplan & wj karim (1993). gendered fields. women, men & ethnography. 267 p. routledge, london. berlin b (1992). ethnobiological classification. principles of categorization of plants and animals in traditional societies. 335 p. princeton university press, princeton. bhavnani k-k (1993). tracing the contours. feminist research and feminist objectivity. women’s studies international forum 16: 2, 95–104. blaikie p & s jeanrenaud (1996). biodiversity and human welfare. unrisd discussion paper 72. 85 p. unrisd, new york. carr er (2006). postmodern conceptualisations, modernist applications: rethinking the role of society in food security. food policy 31: 1, 14–29. castree n & b braun (1998). the construction of nature and the nature of construction: analytical and political tools for building survivable futures. in braun b & n castree (eds). remaking realities: nature at the millennium, 2–42. routledge, london. cline-cole r (1996). african and africanist biodiversity research in neo-liberal context. africa 66: 1, 145–159. convention on biological diversity (2008). the convention of biological diversity website. <http:// www.biodiv.org>. 21.02.2008. cox ts & d wood (1999). the nature and role of crop biodiversity. in wood d & jm lenné (eds). agrobiodiversity. characterisation, utilisation and management, 35–57. cabi publishing, wallingford. dogbe w & d djagbletey (2001). briefs on the rice research programme. research brief for the director. 10 p. savanna agricultural research institute, tamale. dryzek js (1997). the politics of the earth. environmental discourses. 276 p. oxford university press, oxford. evans tp, e ostrom & c gibson (2002). scaling issues with social data in integrated assessment modeling. integrated assessment 3: 2–3, 135–150. foucault m (1970). the order of things. an archaelogy of the human sciences. 416 p. tavistock/ routledge, london. gasper d & r apthorpe (1996). introduction: discourse analysis and policy discourse. in apthorpe r & d gasper (eds). arguing development policy: frames and discourses, 1–15. frank cass, london. gibson cc, e ostrom & tk ahn (2000). the concept of scale and the human dimensions of global change: a survey. ecological economics 32: 2, 217–239. hajer m (1995). the politics of environmental discourse: ecological modernisation and the policy process. 349 p. oxford university press, oxford. hajer m & w versteeg (2005). a decade of discourse analysis of environmental politics: achievements, challenges, perspectives. journal of environmental policy & planning 7: 3, 175–184. hammer k (2003). a paradigm shift in the discipline of plant genetic resources. genetic resources and crop evolution 50: 1, 3–10. harlan jr (1975). crops and man. 259 p. american society of agronomy, madison, wisconsin. juhola s (2005). continuous negotiations of identity in development research: understanding the multiple positions of the participants. paper presented at the 6th annual researching africa day workshop, st antony’s college, oxford, 10th june 2005. juhola s (2006). reconceptualising institutional interplay: a discursive analysis of agricultural biodiversity. 320 p. unpublished phd thesis. university of east anglia, norwich. kapoor i (2004). hyper-self-reflexive development? spivak on representing the third world ‘other’. third world quarterly 25: 4, 627–647. keeley j & i scoones (2003). understanding environmental policy processes: cases from africa. 200 p. earthscan, london. kranjac-berisavljevic g (2000). biodiversity and agrodiversity inventory (with a review of causes of land degradation) in northern ghana. northern ghana principal reports. 14 p. savanna agricultural research institute, tamale. laing e & c ameyaw-akumfi (1992). proceedings of the workshop on biodiversity. 30 p. the botany department, university of ghana, legon and gtz, legon, accra. leach m & r mearns (eds) (1996). the lie of the land: challenging received wisdom on the african environment. 240 p. james currey ltd., oxford. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 41exploring environmental knowledge: the construction and … liftin k (1994). ozone discourses: science and politics in global environmental cooperation. 257 p. columbia university press, chichester. moss p (1995). embeddness in practice, numbers in context: the politics of knowing and doing. professional geographer 47: 4, 442–449. otoo e (1998). rice research proposals. agssip narp rice programme. 6 p. crops research institute, csir, kumasi. pistorius r (1997). scientists, plants and politics. a history of the plant genetic resources movement. 134 p. international plant genetic resources institute, rome. rayner s (2006). what drives environmental policy? global environmental change 16: 1, 4–6. richards p (1985). indigenous agricultural revolution. ecology and food production in west africa. 192 p. unwin hyman, london. roe e (1999). except-africa: remaking development, rethinking power. 192 p. transaction publishers, london. russell nc (1989). ghana’s tradition makers: changing patterns in food crops research, extension and production. cimmyt today. 29 p. international maize and wheat improvement center, mexico df. rydin y (2005). geographical knowledge and policy: the positive contribution of discourse studies. area 37: 1, 73–78. sarangi s & m coulthard (2000). discourse as topic, resource and social practice: an introduction. in sarangi s & m coulthard (eds). discourse and social life, x-xli. pearson education limited, harlow. tanzubil b & js dittoh (2000). in-situ conservation of indigenous rice varieties at bawku-manga in the sudan savanna zone of ghana. northern ghana principal reports. 8 p. savanna agricultural research institute, tamale. whitehead a (2002). tracking livelihood change: theoretical, methodological and empirical perspectives from north-east ghana. journal of southern african studies 28: 3, 575–598. wilson eo (1988). biodiversity. 583 p. national academy press, washington dc. wolf dl (ed) (1996). feminist dilemmas in fieldwork. 246 p. westview press, oxford. wood d & jm lenné (1997). the conservation of agrobiodiversity on-farm: questioning the emerging paradigm. biodiversity and conservation 6: 1, 109–129. wood d & jm lenné (eds) (1999). agrobiodiversity. characterisation, utilisation and management. 490 p. cabi publishing, wallingford. wood d & jm lenné (2005). received wisdom in agricultural land use policy: 10 years on from rio. land use policy 22: 2, 75–93. wood d & jm lenné (2006). the value of agrobiodiversity in marginal agriculture: a reply to bardsley. land use policy 23: 4, 645–646. yin rk (2003). case study research: design and methods. 200 p. sage, london. dissonance: scientific paradigms underpinning the study of sound in geography urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa69068 doi: 10.11143/fennia.69068 dissonance: scientific paradigms underpinning the study of sound in geography daniel paiva paiva, d. (2018) dissonance: scientific paradigms underpinning the study of sound in geography. fennia 196(1) 77–87. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69068 the objective of this article is to approach the different conceptions of sound – and its relations to the underlying scientific paradigms – that emerged throughout the history of geography. there has been a growing interest among geographers in understanding the spatialities of sound, and geographies of sound have become an emerging subfield of the discipline. for this reason, it is the right time to address how the discipline has approached sound throughout its history. several theoretical perspectives influenced geography in the twentieth century, changing its methodologies and how its subjects were conceived. sound, like other subjects, has been conceived very differently by geographers of competing paradigms. concepts such as noise, soundscape, or sound as affect, among others, have dominated geographies of sound at specific periods. due to the marginality of the subject in the discipline, assessments of these conceptual shifts are rare. i tackle this issue in this article as i provide a first attempt of writing a history of sound in geography. the article reviews debates regarding the name of the subfield, and the conceptions of sound in the successive and competing scientific paradigms in geography. keywords: sonic geography, geographic perspectives, noise, soundscape, listening, performance daniel paiva, centre for geographical studies, institute of geography and spatial planning, universidade de lisboa, rua branca edmée marques, 1600276 lisbon, portugal. e-mail: daniel.paiva@campus.ul.pt introduction more than 20 years ago, rodaway (1994) adverted geographers to the fact that, despite a growing body of studies, there was little agreement over what a geography of sounds would be called. he distinguished between aural geography, which would be “a sensuous geography derived from the ears” (rodaway 1994, 84); and sonic geography, which “would refer to the spatial organization of sounds and characteristics of places in terms of sound” (ibid., 84). he also proposed “auditory geographies”, which would address “the sensuous experience of sounds in the environment and the acoustic properties of that environment through the employment of the auditory perceptual system” (rodaway 1994, 84), encompassing both hearing and listening. he did not consider the term acoustic, which has been used by geographers (gandy & nilsen 2014; revill 2014) and others (labelle 2010), generally in a similar manner to what rodaway called ‘sonic geography’. in french geography, the term ‘bruit’, which can be translated both as sounding or noise, has been employed, along with the term ‘geographie des milieux sonores’ (geography of sonic milieux or geography of sonic places; for both © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.69068 78 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays uses, see roulier 1999). in other communities, ‘geography of sounds’ has also been used (alves 2016), roughly meaning the same as sonic geography. since rodaway’s discussion, the term ‘sonic geography’ seems to have become more common in the anglophone community (e.g. matless 2005; boland 2010; boyd & duffy 2012; gallagher & prior 2014), but the term ‘listening geographies’ also emerged (gallagher et al. 2017), meaning roughly the same as what rodaway meant by aural geographies. the choice of the term must not be taken lightly. while ‘sonic’ refers to sounds themselves – and in consequence their temporality, spatiality, and sociality –, the term ‘acoustic’ also refers to the physical properties of spaces that affect how sounds are made and propagate (e.g. in terms of echo or resonance), which is important if geographers wish to grasp how spaces shape and change sounds, and how this affects natural ecologies, landscape experience, social relations, political structures, cultural communities, economic spatialities, among others. both terms may encompass the experience of sounds, so aural, auditory, or listening geographies would be a subfield of sonic or acoustic geographies. on the other hand, other possible terms seem to have been left out, such as noise geographies, or geographies of resonance. the little agreement over what the field of the study of sound in geography should be called is both a consequence and a reminder that sound has not been a major concern of geographers until recent years. for this reason, while there have been significant theorisations of sound in geography in the last years (gallagher & prior 2014; doughty et al. 2016; revill 2016; gallagher et al. 2017), there is still no significant discussion to how sound has been conceived throughout the discipline’s history. in order to tackle this issue, in this article, i approach the different conceptions of sound – and its relations to the underlying scientific paradigms – that emerged through the history of geography. in doing so, i attempt to reunite and compare the conceptions of sound from different times and spaces, as geographical studies on sound are scattered historically and geographically. in the next section, i will address the paradigms that have underpinned geographical research on sound. after this, i briefly discuss the dissonance in the conceptions of sound in geography. paradigms underpinning geographical research on sound it has often been noticed that the visual has been a hegemonic sense in geography, and that this is the reason why sound has been a poorly studied subject over the course of the discipline (tuan 1979; porteous 1982; pocock 1989; smith 1997). despite its marginality in the discipline, sound has been explored by geographers as a spatial, social, cultural and political phenomenon for some time, although this history is often not acknowledged in the reviews of the subject. in this section, i will present three historical moments for the study of sound in geography. first, i will approach the first approaches to sound within regional geography and theoretical geography, which had very different conceptions of sound. secondly, i will present behaviourist and humanistic approaches to sound that have focused on the perception of sound by humans. thirdly, i will approach performative approaches to sound including structuralism\poststructuralism and postphenomenology. geography starts to listen sound has been present since the birth of modern geography. von humboldt (1850), in his descriptions of natural geographic processes, sporadically made reference to the sounds of places, as malanski (2017) notes. however, the first geographer to have published a study of sound in geography seems to be granö (1929), with a cartographic study on the sounds of the island of valosaari in finland, as pocock (1989) and revill (2016) refer. beyond this contribution, the studies of the paradigm of regional geography have privileged the visual study of landscape. while it has often been argued that the hegemony of the visual is the reason for regional geography to have overlooked sound, it should also be acknowledged that sociological (e.g. simmel 1981 [1912]) and ethnographical (see howes 2003; pink 2009) studies were already approaching the senses and music at the time, so geographers might have taken sound to be outside of the discipline’s framework. over the course of the twentieth century, the several new paradigms that emerged in geography provided new perspectives on sound. theoretical or quantitative geography never really grasped the fennia 196(1) (2018) 79daniel paiva issue of sound in a general manner. the few geographical studies under this paradigm occurred late in the discipline and focused mainly on the issue of noise. there are a number of works that were published across europe during the 1970s. labasse (1972) studied the geographies of airports and the issues of aircraft noise in european cities. barceló pons (1975) attempted to undertake a social geography of noise, as he studied the effects of air traffic noise from three european airports on human health and property values, departing from the studies of noise by acoustic engineers and studies on the effect of noise on real estate by economists. ohlson (1976), on the other hand, focused on rural landscapes and studied the effects of climatic and topographic elements on the dispersion and level of different sounds. his main concern was however also traffic noise, in this case originating from boats, ferries and snowmobiles. the conception of sound in these studies is often poorly developed. sound is reduced to noise, which is defined as a nuisance that can be perceived quantitatively. sound, therefore, is taken as an abstract entity often reduced to numbers, and understood as objective and homogeneous. that is, this notion of noise cannot conceive different responses to the same sounds, or even differences in sound beyond volume or signal, such as timbre or rhythm. geographers have since then seldom produced studies on noise, usually traffic-related (e.g. birnie & hall 1981; kariel 1990; tadeu et al. 1995; bennett 1997; muscar benasayag 2000; lam et al. 2010; szeremeta & zannin 2015; dobryakova & kolesov 2016). once again, a possible explanation for this is the significant development of quantitative approaches to sound and noise in other scientific disciplines, in this case engineering (ingerslev 1952, 1972; schultz 1978), architecture (maekawa & lord 1993), and psychology (kryter 1970). the production on noise or quantitative approaches to sound continues to be dominated by engineers, architects and psychologists to this day (kang 2007). geography listens with people in the 1970s, with the advent of behaviourist geography, humanistic geography, and time-geography, geographers were increasingly attentive to the spatial perspective of humans in their everyday life. during this period, a behaviourist approach to sound received some attention in geography, focusing mainly in urban environments. a first seminal study was that of southworth (1969) in urban planning, who conducted a field study on the perceived variety and character of city sounds and its influence on the perception of the visible city, which provided a starting point for behaviourist geographers. southworth (1969) based his perspective on environmental psychology, thus establishing a behaviourist approach which was scarcely reproduced over time in geography. works that followed this perspective mostly focused on the relation between the perception of sounds and the behaviour of individuals, using quantitative surveys to establish determinist causal relations between certain sonic stimuli and the behaviour of individuals. some studies have approached how individuals perceive the sonic environment, such as kariel’s (1980) study on the difference in the perception of sounds by mountaineers and the general public, and lópez barrio’s (2001; lópez barrio & carles 1997) studies on the sonic environment as a symbolic or signifying medium that influences human behaviour. others have focused on how the perception of sounds alters individual or collective behaviour. for instance, hall and colleagues (1981) explored community responses to road traffic and aircraft noise; lam, chau and marafa (2007) researched individual responses to noise in natural spaces; and boubezari (2003) classified the strategies and techniques that individuals employ in order to seek for sonic comfort. this approach seems to have been abandoned in recent years. it was with the advent of humanistic geography, which focused on the experience of places, that sound gained a more central role in geographic thought. tuan’s (1974) seminal book on environmental perception, attitudes, and values focused on the senses as the fundamentals of perception, and as such approached hearing. despite this, tuan’s take on the links between environment, culture, and personal perception and ethics remained primarily focused on visual cues such as landscape, architecture, colour, and symbols. buttimer (1976, 291) also argued that geography needed a “sensitivity to nature, sound, smell, and touch” to grasp the dynamism of the lifeworld, and seamon (1979) argued that the sound of the rhythms of place, which he called ‘place ballets’, could invite (or pull away) individuals to participate in social life. 80 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays this interest in sound was certainly not unrelated to the work being done in the emerging field of acoustic ecology at the time. during the 1960s and 1970s, at the simon fraser university in vancouver, a number of scholars, led by r. m. schafer, created the world soundscape project, an educational and research group. the group was concerned with the rapid changes in urban soundscapes, mainly with the increase in noise pollution. their approach, however, partially differed from the studies on noise by engineers and architects, as they were primarily interested in understanding sound as a quality and not as a mere nuisance. besides collecting and publishing the recordings of environmental sounds (e.g. world soundscape project 1973), schafer (1977) was dedicated to create and develop a series of concepts to address sound qualitatively, most notably the concept of soundscape (originally presented by southworth 1969) which refers to the set of sounds hearable at a certain location. for schafer, soundscapes, like musical works, have a dominant keynote that gives them a sense of place, as well as recognizable soundmarks, which are the sonic version of landmarks. besides this, soundscapes also contain a series of signals which provide environmental information. this issue was further developed by truax (1978, 1984). the prime method of research developed by the acoustic ecology school was the soundwalk, which are excursions with the purpose of actively listening to the environment (westerkamp 1974). schafer’s perspective was not only inspirational for geographers, but issues of space and geography were also central to schafer’s perspective on sound (see schafer 1985). the first geographer to have engaged with the acoustic ecology school was lowenthal (1975, 1976) on his works on landscape and memory where he questioned the possibilities of recapturing soundscapes from the past. after the calls of humanistic geographers, a number of geographers engaged in the study of sound as experience, but these also resorted to the concepts and language of schafer’s soundscape studies. the most significant approaches are those by porteous and mastin (1985), and pocock (1989) in english, and by nogué i font (1983, 1985) in catalan. porteous and mastin (1985) and nogué i font (1983, 1985) reflected upon soundscape and related concepts, and about how these could be used to expand landscape studies. on the other hand, pocock (1989) provided a more significant discussion about the study of sound in geography from the point-of-view of experience. pocock reflected upon different aspects of sounds: its physical and cultural properties, its experience and the role that sound plays in environmental sensitivity, and the difficulties inherent to the description of environmental sound as a non-verbal phenomenon. these insights underpinned studies on sound as an aesthetic property of spaces linked to experience, contemplation, emotion, but also a sense of history (johnston 1986; pocock 1987, 1988). soundscape was understood as the sonic equivalent of landscape, which would be a visual phenomenon. this relation was not criticized during this period, and a multisensorial understanding of landscape (such as the one that can be found in prior 2017) was absent from these works. later, smith (1994) also approached the concept, arguing for a broader attention to sound in space, but with little dialogue with schafer’s arguments. during the 1980s and 1990s, french geographers, working together with architects and urban sociologists, also engaged with the concepts of soundscape (cahen salvador et al. 1980; augoyard & torgue 1995). these works were however more closely related to issues of identity. amphoux (1993, 2003) worked on the sonic identity of european cities, and montès (2003) worked on the weaving of sound and collective identity. amphoux also worked on the application of the concept of soundscape (translated into french as paysage sonore) in urban areas (amphoux 1997). more recently, in germany, wissmann (2014) focused on classifying and mapping types of sounds in urban spaces. the concepts of keynote, signal and soundmark also remain relevant for geographers today when the focus is on aural representations (wissmann 2008; wissmann & zimmermann 2010; hones 2015). geography listens to everything during the 1990s, as geography turned to poststructuralism, attention has turned to the performativity of sound. rodaway’s (1994) reflection on auditory geographies was an important mark insofar as he discussed the concepts of the acoustic ecology school and highlighted its limitations. rodaway (1994) pointed out that the concept of soundscape is anthropocentric as it focuses on sound from the viewpoint of the human listener. he also criticized the language of acoustic ecology for its proximity to fennia 196(1) (2018) 81daniel paiva visual phenomena; for example it substitutes landscape with soundscape, or landmark for soundmark. rodaway (1994) argued that it is not accurate to use a visual terminology to address sounds because while visual phenomena tend to be objects for contemplation, the sound experience is more of a “process of engagement with the environment”, for three reasons. first, sounds change as individuals move through space. secondly, sounds may change in the same space over time. thirdly, the presence of the individual’s body always participates in the production of sounds in a given environment. although he does not propose alternative concepts, rodaway’s criticism of soundscape and related concepts is a significant act during a period in which the focus of social and cultural geographers switches from representation to performance. after rodaway’s work, smith (1997, 2000) was one of the main contributors to think about sound in geography as performance. although smith (1997, 2000) focused on music, her discussion of performativity in musical acts was an important starting point to think about the performativity of sound in general. in her study on renaissance venice, smith (2000) argued that performance matters in the study of music, and addressed musical acts in everyday life and ceremonies, and the political, economic and emotional implications of these events. duffy (2000, 2003, 2005) was likewise interested in the performativity of music, and studied participation in music festivals as a practice of identity and community. within this framework of performance, geographical studies start to focus on sounds beyond music, and eventually turned to the nonrepresentational affects of everyday sounds (anderson 2005; anderson et al. 2005). with this, post-phenomenology became the most recent theoretical approach underpinning geographical studies of sound. post-phenomenology gathered a fair amount of attention by geographers in the last decade (ash & simpson 2016), especially due to the interest in exploring the significance of non-representational phenomena for explaining everyday life practices (thrift 2011). as the geographical studies of sound started to explore the performativity of sounds, moving away from the study of sound as representation and identity, post-phenomenology became one of the dominant perspectives. the works of philosophers nancy (2007) and ihde (2007) on the phenomenology of sound are the most relevant references. nancy (2007) was concerned with the differentiation of the act of listening from the act of seeing, arguing that while visual forms are objective, persistent and mimetic, the practice of listening is always subjective, resonant, and methexic. furthermore, he distinguishes between the act of hearing and listening as passive and active forms of the sense. nancy inverts the common understanding of listening as a distracted form of the sense and hearing as an attentive mode. he argues that hearing, even if in an attentive stance, is the passive mode of the sense, while listening (in french, écouter, which can also mean to eavesdrop, or to spy) is the active mode, when it is attentive to what he calls the ‘beyond-meaning’ of sound, which is to say the affective and more-than-representational aspects of sound. while nancy is more concerned with the affectivity of sound, ihde (2007) worked on the temporality and spatiality of sound. he argues that while sound has been understood by scholars as primarily temporal, it is significant to look at how sound is a product of space, as it emerges from shapes, surfaces, and fields. he approaches the experience of sound as a polyphony which resonates within the subject and shapes the representation of the world in what he calls the ‘auditory imagination’. simpson (2009) debated the significance of nancy’s perspective to investigate presence and being-with, arguing that thinking about sound leads us to a decentralised subject that is “the relation with others itself”. revill has approached ihde’s thoughts on the auditory imagination, along with schafer’s (1994) and nancy’s (2007) idea of sound as a ‘touch at a distance’ to argue that sound plays a role in the mediation of social life, as “multiple registers which situate and shape existence and experience [which] can simultaneously help open up the black boxes of both affective and representational political processes” (revill 2016, 253). to put it simply, postphenomenological perspectives on sound have pointed out that the cognitive-affective state of each individual bodymind is a product of the multiple relations he or she maintains with the environment. in this regard, sound mediates the relation between each individual body-mind and the surrounding environment by transmitting information, meanings, and affects across bodies and spaces. sonic affects, or sound as affect, becomes a central concept (duffy & waitt 2011; boyd & duffy 2012). it has been pointed out that this means that sound has important social (boland 2010; kanngieser 2012) and political (barns 2014; waitt et al. 2014) significance, besides its aesthetic role. within this perspective, 82 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays gallagher, kanngieser and prior (2017) proposed the concept of ‘expanded listening’ to grasp the multiple effects of sound in the spatio-temporality of social life. expanded listening “refers to the varied ways in which bodies of all kinds – human and more-than-human – respond to sound”, and the purpose of this is to look “outwards from the dominant anthropocentric understanding of listening, beginning by deepening and expanding human listening (in relation to landscape), then considering how sound moves bodies beyond cochlear listening and human consciousness (as affects and atmospheres), and finally exploring forms of listening in which human bodies are marginal (vibrations in earth materials and machines)” (gallagher et al. 2017, 618). this concept has become popular to address the generative role that sounds plays in social interaction and micro-politics, by focusing not only on sound itself, but in how it relates individuals, objects, spaces, and events (macpherson et al. 2016; mills 2017; wilkinson 2017; kerr et al. 2018; peters 2018). the intention of going beyond a dominant anthropocentric understanding of listening, however, seems poorly achieved in these studies. some authors have employed other perspectives to address sound and listening as performative acts. the works of waitt with other authors (duffy et al. 2010; waitt et al. 2014, 2017) have applied the feminist concept of visceral politics to sound experience. affect theory (e.g. massumi 2002; clough 2007; gregg & seigworth 2010) has also been significant for conceptual advances focused on the atmospheric and affective nuances of sonic environments such as kanngieser’s (2012) and revill’s (2016). a structuralist/post structuralist approach to sound has also been present in studies that seek to understand the significance of sound for political processes, events, and beliefs. a common philosophical starting point has been the post-structuralist writings of rancière (2004) on the sensible, and the structuralist/phenomenological writings of lefebvre (2004) on rhythms. to put it simply, rancière (2004) advanced the concept of distribution of the sensible which refers to the system of perception and senses that reveals something in common and defines the structure of the parts and positions of what is common, distributing them through spaces, times and activities. for rancière (2004), the distribution of the sensible creates a regime of identification, that is, it delimits what is visible and invisible, hearable and unhearable, in a common space. he argues that some practices, such as artistic practices, can have a political effect even if they have no explicit political content, because they act on this distribution of the sensible (rancière 2004, 2011). revill (2016), for instance, has applied this concept to the geographies of sound. on the other hand, lefebvre (2004) advanced the notion of rhythmanalysis, that is, the study of bodily and spatial rhythms with the purpose of unveiling how power structures are reproduced in everyday life. he distinguished between cyclical natural rhythms and linear capitalist rhythms, arguing that the former have been progressively substituted by the latter with the aid of modern technologies. his views on the relation between rhythm and social structures have been criticized for its rigidity (simpson 2008), yet some authors still found his insights on the relation between body, rhythm, and power valid (edensor 2010; tiwari 2010; reid-musson 2017). while lefebvre’s writings seem to have had a considerable impact on geographies of sound shortly after his work was translated into english (e.g. simpson 2008; wunderlich 2010, 2013; duffy & waitt 2011; boyd & duffy 2012; lehtovuori & koskela 2013; revill 2013), in more recent years his influence seems to have faded. however, in south american geographies, we can observe a growing number of works that mix structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives in the study of inequalities and social divisions regarding sound and sonic spaces (alves 2013, 2016; creuz 2014). these two lines of works – postphenomenological and structuralist/poststructuralist – have been influenced by a number of works in the multidisciplinary field of sound studies that have addressed issues of space and sound (e.g. carlyle 2007; goodman 2010; labelle 2010; born 2013; belgiojoso 2014). gender and postcolonial perspectives have mostly been absent from the geographies of sound, unlike in the multidisciplinary field of sound studies. a notable exception in gender is waitt, harada and duffy’s (2017) recent study on car mobility, where they investigate the feelings of men and women for cars and the motivations for driving them. saldanha’s (2007, 2014) long work on musical communities in india is the notable exception regarding postcolonialism. fennia 196(1) (2018) 83daniel paiva conclusion this short overview is a first attempt of writing a history of sound in geography. while it is by no means an exhaustive work, it amplifies for the first time the different perspectives that geography had over sound, a work that had not been done yet. we have seen that throughout the history of geographical research on sound, there have been significant changes in how sound is conceived in the discipline. in quantitative geography, sound was only thought of as noise – a nuisance that could be reduced to an abstract and quantitative measurement. but in the 1970s, the immense diversity of human responses to sound was approached by geographers through different perspectives. while behaviourist studies privileged the quantitative analysis of perception and behaviour change regarding sound, humanistic geographers were concerned with the overlapping of soundscape and landscape and the experience of both. the marginality of the theme in the discipline meant that the main concepts were being produced by other scholars, and often not thoroughly criticised. this took place only in the 1990s, as the discipline became more interested in performativity, following the emergence of poststructuralism in geography. since then, the concept of soundscape has been augmented by central european and south american geographers, while anglophone geography has turned to a notion of sound as affect and expanded listening. probably due to the marginality of the theme in the discipline, the dominant concepts were rarely critically assessed by more recent perspectives (with the exceptions of rodaway 1994; and smith 1997), up until recently (boyd & duffy 2012; bennett et al. 2015; gallagher et al. 2017; revill 2016; prior 2017). for this reason, the conceptual vocabulary of sonic geographies remains scattered and at times unclear. the relations between concepts such as soundscape, acoustics, aurality, noise, silence, and listening must be addressed in further detail if the recently established field of sonic geographies is to have a common language. acknowledgements i would like to thank professor herculano cachinho for the scientific supervision, and renato frias for his help with brazilian literature. this research was funded by the fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia under grant sfrh/bd/108907/2015. references alves, c. (2013) território, música e difusão de informações: o circuito sonoro em campinas-sp. geousp – espaço e tempo 34 294–310. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2179-0892.geousp.2013.74950 a l v e s , c . ( 2 016 ) g e o g r a f i a d o s s o n s n ã o e s q u i zo f ô n i co s n a r e g i ã o d o r e c i f e: c u l t u r a p o p u l a r e co t i d i a n o u r b a n o. b o l e t i m g o i a n o d e g e o g ra f i a 3 6 (1) 141–15 6 . https://doi.org/10.5216/bgg.v36i1.40377 amphoux, p. (1993) l’ídentité sonore des villes européennes. cresson, grenoble. amphoux, p. (1997) paysage sonore urbain: introduction aux écoutes de la ville [cd with text]. amphoux, p. (2003) l'identité sonore urbaine: une approche méthodologique croisée. in g. moser & k. weiss (eds.) espaces de vie: aspects de la relation hommeenvironnement, 85–112. armand colin, paris. anderson, b. (2005) practices of judgement and domestic geographies of affect. social & cultural geography 6(5) 645–659. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500298308 anderson, b., morton, f., & revill, g. (2005) practices of music and sound. social & cultural geography 6(5) 639–644. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500298282 ash, j. & simpson, p. (2016) geography and post-phenomenology. progress in human geography 40(1) 48–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514544806 augoyard, j. f. & torgue, h. (1995) a l’écoute de l’environement. parenthèses, marseille. barns, s. (2014) sounds different: listening to the proliferating spaces of technological modernity in the city. space and culture 17(1) 4–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331213494733 barceló pons, b. (1975) aproximación a una geografia del ruído. boletín de la câmara oficial de comercio, industria y nevegación de palma de mallorca 686–689 57–74. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2179-0892.geousp.2013.74950 https://doi.org/10.5216/bgg.v36i1.40377 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500298308 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500298282 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514544806 https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331213494733 84 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays belgiojoso, r. (2014) constructing urban space with sounds and music. ashgate, london. bennett, j. (1997) the application of geographic spatial analysis in modeling traf fic noise propagation away from a freeway. the journal of the acoustical society of america 102(5). https://doi.org/ 10.1121/1.420736.3 bennett, k., cochrane, a., mohan, g., & neal, s. (2015). listening. emotion, space and society 17 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.10.002 birnie, s., hall, f. (1981) indoor noise level limits for residential areas affected by transportation noise. the journal of the acoustical society of america 69(s1). https://doi.org/10.1121/1.386257 boland, p. (2010) sonic geography, place and race in the formation of local identit y: liverpool and scousers. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 92(1) 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2010.00330.x born, g. (2013) music, sound and space: transformations of public and private experience. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511675850 boubezari, m. (2003) au-delà du confor t sonore; l’usager dans la maîtrise du confor t sonore et dans le protocole de mesurage acoustique. espaces et sociétés 115 43–60. https://doi.org/10.3917/esp.g2003.115.0043 boyd, c. & duffy, m. (2012) sonic geographies of shifting bodies. interference. a journal of audio culture [online 2012] <http://www.interferencejournal.org/sonic-geographies-of-shifting-bodies> buttimer, a. (1976) grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. annals of the association of american geographers 66(2) 277–292. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1976.tb01090.x cahen salvador, j., antonioz, b., & volfin, m. c. (1980) paysage sonore urbain. plan-construction, paris. carlyle, a. (2007) autumn leaves. sound and the environment in artistic practice. double entendre, paris. clough, p. (2007) the affective turn: theorizing the social. duke universit y press, durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389606 creuz, v. (2014) de las voces pasivas al sonido activo: actividades musicales en el circuito superior marginal e inferior en las ciudades brasileñas de san pablo, rio de janeiro, puerto alegre, goiânia y recife. estudios socioterritoriales. revista de geografía 15 107–132. dobryakova, v. a. & kolesov, a. a. (2016) исследование шумового загрязнения г. тюмени с применением гис [a study of noise pollution in tyumen using gis]. interkarto/intergis 22(2) 268–273. doughty, k., duffy, m. & harada, t. (2016) practices of emotional and affective geographies of sound. emotion, space and society 20 39–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.06.007 duffy, m. (2000) lines of drift: festival participation and performing a sense of place. popular music 19(1) 51–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000000027 duffy, m. (2003) ‘we find ourselves again': (re)creating identity through performance in the community music festival. australasian music research 7 103–112. duffy, m. (2005) performing identity within a multicultural framework. social and cultural geography 6(5) 677–692. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500258153 duffy, m. & waitt, g. (2011) sound diaries: a method for listening to place. the journal of media geography vii 119–136. duf f y, m., wait t, g., gorman-murray, a . & gibson, c. (2010) bodily rhy thms: corporeal capacities to engage with festival spaces. emotion, space and societ y 4 (1) 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.03.004 edensor, t. (2010) geographies of rhythm: nature, place, mobilities and bodies. ashgate, london. gallagher, m. & prior, j. (2014) sonic geographies. exploring phonographic methods. progress in human geography 38(2) 267–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513481014 g a l l a g h e r, m . , k a n n g i e s e r, a . , & p r i o r, j . ( 2 017 ) l i s t e n i n g ge o g r a p h i e s : l a n d s c a p e , a f f e c t a n d ge o t e c h n o l o g i e s . pro g re s s i n h u m a n g e o g ra p h y 41( 5 ) 618 – 6 3 7. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516652952 gandy, m. & nilsen, b. (2014) the acoustic city. jovis, berlin. goodman, s. (2010). sonic warfare. sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. mit press, cambridge. granö, j. g. (1929) reine geographie. acta geographica 2 1–202. gregg, m. & seigworth, g. (2010) the affect theory reader. duke university press, durham. hall, f., birnie, s., taylor, s., & palmer, j. (1981) direct comparison of community response to road traffic noise and to aircraft noise. the journal of the acoustical society of america 70(6) 1690-1698. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.387234 https://doi.org/ 10.1121/1.420736.3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.10.002 https://doi.org/ 10.1121/1.386257 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2010.00330.x https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511675850 https://doi.org/10.3917/esp.g2003.115.0043 http://www.interferencejournal.org/sonic-geographies-of-shifting-bodies https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1976.tb01090.x https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389606 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.06.007 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000000027 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500258153 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.03.004 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513481014 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516652952 https://doi.org/10.1121/1.387234 fennia 196(1) (2018) 85daniel paiva hones, s. (2015) amplifying the aural in literary geography. literary geographies 1(1) 79–94. howes, d. (2003) sensual relations: engaging the senses in culture and social theory. the university of michigan press, ann arbor. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11852 humboldt, a. (1850) views of nature: or contemplation on the sublime phenomena of creation. harrison and son, london. ihde, d. (2007) listening and voice: a phenomenology of sound (first edition 1976). ohio university press, athens. ingerslev, f. (1952) acoustics in modern building practice. architectural press, london. ingerslev, f. (1972) noise and the sound insulation of buildings. philosophical transactions of the royal society of london. series a, mathematical and physical sciences 272(1129) 595–602. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1972.0066 johnston, r. (1986) bell-ringing: the english art of change-ringing. viking, new york. kang, j. (2007) urban sound environment. taylor and francis, london. kanngieser, a. (2012) a sonic geography of voice: towards an affective politics. progress in human geography 36(3) 336–353. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511423969 kariel, h. (1980) mountaineers and the general public: a comparison of their evaluation of sounds in the recreational environment. leisure studies 3(2) 155–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490408009512932 kariel, h. (1990) factors affecting response to noise in the outdoor recreational environment. canadian geographer 34(2) 142–149. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1990.tb01259.x kerr, s.-m., gibson, c., & klocker n (2018) parenting and neighbouring in the consolidating city: the emotional geographies of sound in apartments. emotion, space and society 26 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2017.11.002 kryter, k. d. (1970) the effects of noise on man. academic press, new york. labasse, j. (1972) l'aéroport et la géographie volontaire des villes. annales de géographie 81(445) 278–297. https://doi.org/10.3406/geo.1972.18718 labelle, b. (2010) acoustic territories. sound culture and everyday life. bloomsbury, london. lam, k.-c., brown, a., & marafa, l. (2010) deconstructing the spatial-temporal variation of soundscapes in natural areas. the journal of the acoustical society of america 128(4) 2369. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3508415 lam, k., chau, k.-c., marafa, l. (2007) characterizing natural soundscapes and understanding human response to human-caused noise in a hong kong country park. the journal of the acoustical society of america 121(5) 3161. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4782229 lefebvre, h. (2004) rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. continuum, london. lehtovuori, p. & koskela, h. (2013) from momentary to historic: rhythms in the social production of urban space, the case of calçada de sant’ana, lisbon. the sociological review 61(s1) 124–143. lópez barrio, i. (2001) el significado del medio ambiente sonoro en el entorno urbano. estudios geográficos lxii(244) 447–466. https://doi.org/10.3989/egeogr.2001.i244.277 lópez barrio, i. & carles, j. l. (1997) la calidad sonora de valencia. espacios sonoros representativos. fundación bancaja, valencia. lowenthal, d. (1975) the audible past. in international music council (ed.) the canada music book 11/12. proceedings of the sixteenth general assembly, 209–217. canadian music council, montreal. lowenthal, d. (1976) turning into the past: can we recapture the soundscapes of bygone days? unesco courier 29 13–21. macpherson, h., fox, a., street, s., cull, j., jenner, t., lake, d., lake, m., & hart, s. (2016) listening space: lessons from artists with and without learning disabilities. environment and planning d: society and space 34(2) 371–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815613093 maekawa, z. & lord, p. (1993) environmental and architectural acoustics. e & fn spon, london. malanski, l. m. (2017) o interesse dos geógrafos pelos sons: alinhamento teóricos e metodológico para estudos das paisagens sonoras. ra'e ga o espaço geográfico em análise 40 145–162. https://doi.org/10.5380/raega.v40i0.46154 massumi, b. (2002) parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. duke university press, london. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822383574 matless, d. (2005) sonic geography in a nature region. social & cultural geography 6(5) 745–766. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500258245 mills, s. (2017) voice: sonic geographies of childhood. children's geographies 15(6) 664–677. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2017.1287879 montès, c. (2003) la ville, le bruit et le son, entre mesure policière et identités urbaines. geocarrefour 78(2) 91–94. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11852 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.1972.0066 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511423969 https://doi.org/10.1080/01490408009512932 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1990.tb01259.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2017.11.002 https://doi.org/10.3406/geo.1972.18718 https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3508415 https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4782229 https://doi.org/10.3989/egeogr.2001.i244.277 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815613093 https://doi.org/10.5380/raega.v40i0.46154 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822383574 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500258245 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2017.1287879 86 fennia 196(1) (2018)reviews and essays muscar benasayag, e. (2000) el ruido nos mata en silencio. anales de geografía de la universidad complutense 20 149–161. nancy, j.-l. (2007) listening. fordham university press, new york. nogué i font, j. (1983) el paisatge sonor. per un concepte de paisatge mês ampii. gra de fajol 6 4–6. nogué i font, j. (1985) el paisatge sonor de la garrotxa. revista de girona 111 96–102. ohlson, b. (1976) sound fields and sonic landscapes in rural environments. fennia 148(1) 33–45. peters, k. (2018) sound, space, and society. rebel radio. palgrave macmillan, new york. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57676-7 pink, s. (2009) doing sensory ethnography. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249383 porteous, j. d. (1982) approaches to environmental aesthetics. journal of environmental psychology 2(1) 53–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0272-4944(82)80005-4 porteous, j. d. & mastin, j. f. (1985) soundscape. journal of architectural planning research 2 169–186. pocock, d. (1987) a sound portrait of a cathedral city [cd]. department of geography, university of durham, durham. pocock, d. (1988) ‘the music of geography’, in pocock, d. (ed.) humanistic approaches to geography, 62–71. department of geography, university of durham, durham. pocock, d. (1989) sound and the geographer. geography 74(3) 193–200. prior, j. (2017) sonic environmental aesthetics and landscape research. landscape research 42(1) 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2016.1243235 rancière, j. (2004) the politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. continuum, london. rancière, j. (2011) dissensus: on politics and aesthetics. bloomsbury, london. reid-musson, e. (2017) intersectional rhythmanalysis: power, rhythm, and everyday life. progress in human geography [online aug 29 2017] https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517725069 revill, g. (2013) points of departure: listening to rhythm in the sonoric spaces of the railway station. the sociological review 61(s1) 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12053 revill, g. (2014) el tren fantasma: arcs of sound and the acoustic spaces of landscape. transactions of the institute of british geographers 39(3) 333–344. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12034 revill, g. (2016) how is space made in sound? spatial mediation, critical phenomenolog y and the political agency of sound. progress in human geography 40(2) 250–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515572271 rodaway, p. (199 4) sensuous geographies . body, sense and place. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203306864 roulier, f. (1999) pour une géographie des milieux sonores. cybergeo: european journal of geography 71 [online jan 21 1999] http://cybergeo.revues.org/5034 saldanha, a. (2007) psychedelic white: goa trance and the viscosity of race. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. saldanha, a. (2014) dancing outside the city: factions of bodies in goa. in gandy, m. & nilsen, b. (eds.) the acoustic city, 108–113. jovis, berlin. schafer, r. m. (1977) the tuning of the world. random house, new york. schafer, r. m. (1985) acoustic space. in seamon, d. & mugeraeur, r. (eds.) dwelling, place and environment, 87–98. martinus nijhoff, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_6 schafer, r. m. (1994) the soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. destiny books, rochester. schultz, t. j. (1978) synthesis of social surveys on noise annoyance. journal of the acoustical society of america 64 377–405. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.382013 seamon, d. (1979) a geography of the lifeworld. croom helm, london. simmel, g. (1981 [1912]) essai sur la sociologie des sens. in sociologie et épistémologie. puf, paris. simpson, p. (2008) chronic everyday life: rhythmanalysing street performance. social & cultural geography 9(7) 807–829. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360802382578 simpson, p. (2009) `falling on deaf ears': a postphenomenology of sonorous presence. environment and planning a 41(11) 2556–2575. https://doi.org/10.1068/a41247 smith, s. j. (1994) soundscape. area 26(3) 232–240. smith, s. j. (1997) beyond geography’s visible worlds: a cultural politics of music. progress in human geography 21(4) 502–529. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297675594415 smith, s. j. (2000) performing the (sound)world. environment and planning d: society and space 18(5) 615–637. https://doi.org/10.1068/d225t southwor th, m. (1969) the sonic environment of cities. environment and behavior 1(1) 49–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/001391656900100104 https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57676-7 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446249383 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0272-4944(82)80005-4 https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2016.1243235 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517725069 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12053 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12034 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515572271 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203306864 http://cybergeo.revues.org/5034 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9251-7_6 https://doi.org/10.1121/1.382013 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360802382578 https://doi.org/10.1068/a41247 https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297675594415 https://doi.org/10.1177/001391656900100104 fennia 196(1) (2018) 87daniel paiva szeremeta, b. & zannin, p.h. (2015) a percepção dos praticantes de atividade física sobre a qualidade ambiental sonora dos parques públicos de curitiba-paraná. ra'e ga o espaço geográfico em análise 33 7–43. https://doi.org/10.5380/raega.v33i0.30969 tadeu, a., pereira, a., lima, j., & mateus, d. (1995) ruído de tráfego rodoviário no paúl de arzila. cadernos de geografia 14 105–114. https://doi.org/10.14195/0871-1623_14_6 thrif t, n. (2011) lifeworld inc. environment and planning d: society and space 29(1) 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1068/d0310 tiwari, r. (2010) space-body-ritual. performativity in the city. lexington books, plymouth. truax, b. (1978) handbook for acoustic ecology. simon fraser university and arc publications, vancouver. truax, b. (1984) acoustic communication. ablex, new jersey. tuan, y.-f. (1974) topophilia. a study of environmental perceptions, attitudes, and values. columbia university press, new york. tuan, y.-f. (1979) sight and pictures. geographical review 69(4) 413–422. https://doi.org/10.2307/214804 waitt, g., harada, t. & duffy, m. (2017) ‘let’s have some music’: sound, gender and car mobility. mobilities 12(3) 324–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2015.1076628 waitt, g., ryan, e. & farbotko, c. (2014) a visceral politics of sound. antipode 46(1) 283–300. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12032 westerkamp, h. (1974) soundwalking. sound heritage iii(4) 18–27. wilkinson, c. (2017) on the same wavelength? hyperdiverse young people at a community radio station. social & cultural geography [online jul 28 2017] https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1358822 wissmann, t. (2008) the network is us. podcasting as a chance to connect a scientific discipline. european geographer 3 41–43. wissmann, t. (2014) geographies of urban sound. ashgate, london. wissmann, t. & zimmermann, s. (2010) from hear to there. sound and the cognitive construction of world in popular audioplays. erdkunde 64(4) 371–383. https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2010.04.06 world soundscape project (1973) the vancouver soundscape 1973 [cd-audio]. simon fraser university, vancouver. wunderlich, f. (2010) the aesthetics of place-temporality in everyday urban space: the case of fitzroy square. in edensor, t. (ed.) geographies of rhythm: nature, place, mobilities and bodies, 45–57. ashgate, london. wunderlich, f. (2013) place -temporalit y and urban place -rhy thms in urban analysis and design: an aes thetic akin to music. journal of urban design 18 (3) 383 – 4 08. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2013.772882 https://doi.org/10.5380/raega.v33i0.30969 https://doi.org/10.14195/0871-1623_14_6 https://doi.org/10.1068/d0310 https://doi.org/10.2307/214804 https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2015.1076628 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12032 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1358822 https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2010.04.06 https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2013.772882 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa4405 from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi ‘geographs’ and the promise of concentric geographies ari aukusti lehtinen lehtinen, ari aukusti (2011). from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi ‘geographs’ and the promise of concentric geographies. fennia 189: 2, pp. 14–30. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this article critically examines the currently popular renewal in human geography inspired by relational thinking. particular emphasis is directed to formulations informed by the philosophies of immanence. it is argued that this tendency carries the risk of being narrowed into cursory excursions on the immediate geographies of what happens. the article is consequently concerned about the resulting scholarly indifference when it comes to socio-spatial discontinuities and circles of particularity. it is also shown in what type of settings the ‘immanent relationalism’ becomes a too general view to explain satisfactorily the earthly co-being of humans and non-humans, and presents alternative ‘lines of flight’. the case study focusing on the indigenous sámi in the european north exemplifies the nuances of cultural domination versus decline in a multilingual milieu whereupon some criteria for identifying particular place-making under the general pressures of all-inclusion are formulated. keywords: sámi homeland, geographies of difference, comparative reading, ‘geographs’, polyglot interfaces, relational and concentric spaces ari aukusti lehtinen, department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, p.o. box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: ari. lehtinen@uef.fi introduction: geographies of withdrawal ä´kkel sámi, one of the eastern sámi languages spoken on the kola peninsula, crossed the threshold of extinction in december 29, 2003 when the last native speaker, marya sergina, passed away (rantala 2011: 188). the drama of the event occurred without much public attention. northernmost europe will experience similar tragedies in the near future, too, as several of the neighbouring sámi languages are currently only spoken by a few elderly persons. in time, perhaps, only the northern sámi will survive, the language spoken by the most numerous of the sámi communities, much concentrating in northern norway. this process is not only a particular phenomenon characterising the extreme north of europe but is common globally (howitt 2001; maybury-lewis 2003; heikkilä 2008; saugestad 2009). these losses cannot be regarded as natural and unavoidable but rather as consequences of social and environmental changes put forward and accepted by the surrounding society. they are thus, undeniably, supported by our silent acceptance, if not ignorance or indifference. by losing minor language communities we also lose affordances for learning from those cosmologies that deviate from the currently vital ones. their particular geographies are lost. what is also at stake is the gradual erosion of our multilingual affluence, both in general, at the level of humanity, and within specific marginal culture milieus, such as the sámi homeland in northern europe, where communication has by necessity, due to lingual fragmentation and heterogeneity, been grounded on polyglot skills. the polyglot communities mirror the geopolitical changes of the past. the surrounding regimes that have come for taxes, natural resources and military strongholds, for example, have brought along their lingual premises. human co-being is often characterised at these fennia 189: 2 (2011) 15from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … type of cultural interfaces by continuous multilingual border-crossing. vocabularies and modes of expression are enriched by shared inspiration, which can be witnessed, for example, in the high number of loaned words (see e.g. häkkinen 2004). this co-being also, inevitably, proceeds through frustration: renewed spaces of lingual competence tend to marginalise certain more traditional sections of communities (bladh 1995; andersen 2004; herman 2008; fryer 2009). in addition, communication often becomes incomplete while, for example, translations only partially catch what is initially intended (keisteri 1990: 32−47; haila 1997: 130−133; häkli 2003; rautio-helander 2004; sidaway et al. 2004; setten 2006). the occasional comfort achieved through guidance from neighbouring languages is thus often in multilingual cooperation accompanied by regret about losing something important when using loaned words. debate about mistakes and biases in translations frequently arises in literature and toponymic research, for example (see andersen 2004; baschmakoff 2007: 12−13; myers 2009). these types of concerns bear witness to nuances of expression that are at risk of being lost when moving from one lingual domain to another. sometimes, while translating, pleasing conceptual equivalents are almost, if not completely, impossible to find. moreover, at times dictionaries seem to mislead us in the search for precise correspondence. particular geographs, that is: customary descriptions of our surroundings (dalby 1993, 2002; häkli 1998; see also tanner’s 1929a ‘geographical concepts’) simply cannot always be exported. geographical lexicons and nomenclatures, including the logics of naming and mapping, vary between lingual groups, as does the sense of seeing changes in the environment (schanche 2002; ruotsala 2004: 42). finally, in certain moments of interlingual border-crossing, one might sense a meeting of epistemic orientations that do not resonate (tanner 1929b; susiluoto 2000: 16; heikkilä 2008: 58−85). the dialogue between inspiration and frustration is thus a perpetual part of daily communication along polyglot interfaces. both affections serve as a reminder of discontinuities, or the existence of non-communication (bateson & bateson 1987; ketola et al. 2002), in human co-being. thus, lingual skills, perhaps the most relational of all human modes of co-being, stand, paradoxically, as proof of radical discontinuities. this remark has, or at least should have, implications in geographical research design. by focusing on these non-linkages we can, for example, highlight events of confusion grounded on a sense of loss due to (partial) non-resonance in multilingual milieus. we then become sensitive to geographies of incoherence, impairment and withdrawal. this is, as is argued in this article, not easy in contemporary human geography where dissociations tend to be shadowed by those approaches that are attracted by continuous evolution of linkages and relations. in general, and this is what i want to highlight first and problematise below, the broadly shared and celebrated immanent-relational ontology has systematically ignored discontinuities and withdrawal, if not treated them as anomalies, or remnants from the past, not deserving any proper examination. therefore, i intend to show where and in what type of settings the relational extensiveness turns too broad and panoramic a view to satisfactorily explain human co-being on earth. in addition, i will sketch out the contours for an approach that pays attention to those concentric aspects of human co-being that, as i will demonstrate, need to be recognised in order to be able to identify and examine the events of non-communication, annihilation and withdrawal. consequently, i argue below for more scholarly appreciation when it comes to the corners of particularity; that is: particularities that do not follow the more general processes which evoke them. events of non-resonance, traces of withdrawal british sociologist rowland atkinson (2009) is concerned about the ignoring of spaces of rest, decline, despair and loneliness that lie all around us, but which are partially invisible by virtue of their separateness. he discusses how much of sociospatial studies, while favouring assumptions about the extensions of connectivity, tend to amplify the marginalisation of those outside these connections. he then, after exemplary illustrations of human isolations, such as secret cities of russia, use of human disappearances in latin america as a tool of political terror, missing millions of the 1991 uk census and home withdrawals of teenagers in japan, concludes by worrying that “there is a danger that the new limits to the world have been defined within corporate frames and information technologies” which indicates “social inequalities and an unevenness of distribution which rides past the relevance and presence of those social groups 16 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen and fractions for whom such changes are only perhaps relevant in terms of their potential to exclude. his key question is simply, “[h]ow can we begin to conceptualize non-linkages, absent ties, broken networks and unwired ‘dead’ spaces” (2009: 308−309)? the specific history of geographical thinking explains much of the current omission of socio-spatial separation and non-linkages in human geography. gradually, while observing the troubles of spatial fetishisms of the past generations of geographers, arguments for the non-existence of any enclosures or outsides (see massey 2005: 163−176) have gained increasing popularity. critical reflection of this type of general all-inclusive relationalism is rare and, when it emerges, it almost in concert supports all the central assumptions and premises of relational orientation (see castree 2004; sparke 2007; braun 2008; gonzales 2009 jones 2009). the inspiration shared by many relationalists is not always explicit, but it can in many cases be traced down to the philosophies of immanence, especially those set forward by baruch spinoza, arne næss and gilles deleuze. at the bottom of all this is the commonly held belief that there is no outside. immanence thinking is an alluring alternative to all those geographers who feel annoyed with the exceptionalist excursions of the disciplinary past, ranging from the development of various types of abstraction, both spatial and social, to studies of regions and scales as such. a clear parting from the disciplinary past, clothed in the promise of profound renewal, is at stake and it is now done through conceptual loans from the philosophers of immanence (see e.g. hipwell 2004; braun 2006; thrift 2008; jansson 2009). this latest philosophical reflection in geography is challenging, as most renewals are, due to the need for thorough reflection about the associative elements that are brought along with the promises attached to imported concepts. kirsten simonsen (2004), a danish geographer, brought up the question of incompatibility while worrying about the renewal in spatial thinking in geography based on a conviction that the fibrous, wiry and capillary-like character of contemporary society cannot be captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, structures and systems. current fascination for such spatial concepts as flows and fluids, when raised to the status of ’ontology’, ‘paradigm’, or characteristics of society, tend to “reimagine spatial form as self-referential and indifferent to social content” (simonsen 2004: 1337). the new vocabulary has, she admits, added much to the understanding of contemporary society by “[p]ointing out the significance of process at the expense of structure, mobility at the expense of embeddedness, and connectivity at the expense of enclosure” (2004: 1335). there is much that is good and supportable here, she argues, but continues with concerns about the nonreflective use of these concepts. according to her, these conceptual loans bring along a naturalisation of spatial processes, underlined, for example, in metaphorical associations with phenomena such as ice flows, waves of water and so forth. this concern, in other words, focuses on discontinuities and incompatibilities between textual communities, including paradigmatic communities of research: we should not leave them unexamined, simonsen seems to argue, no matter how passionately we head toward progress and the potentials of disciplinary renewal. the new spatial vocabulary, when applied without proper reflection regarding its theoretical and political implications, carries according to simonsen the risk of guiding geographers toward non-social thinking. some geographers have warned about the return of flat earth ontology in a similar vein (see e.g. smith 2005a; domosh 2010). the reasons for the popularity of non-social thinking are manifold, but one cannot ignore the spinozist inspiration, leading geographers toward studies of continuous emergence and mobility within one single world of plenitude. today, to continue simonsen’s list of neologisms, geographers identify assemblages (braun 2002, 2008; hipwell 2004; mcfarlane 2009; rocheleau & roth 2007; thrift 2008; dalby 2010) or assemblagescapes (hadi curti 2009), planes of immanence (mchugh 2009), forces of affect (thrift 2008: 220−254), event sites or events of places (massey 2005: 140), emergent cartographies (kitchin & dodge 2007), lines of flight (doel 1996), mobile associations (urry 2000; bæhrenholdt 2007), interworlds and immanent spaces (dewsbury & thrift 2005), as well as forms of deterritorialisation (hipwell 2004) and earthly immanencies (jansson 2009) with high enthusiasm. geographers are, consequently, increasingly quick to criticise any conceptualisations of social forces behind the flows of the constantly emerging. simonsen is thus worried about the non-reflection of incoherence inherent in conceptual imports. she formulates a problem that is common to fennia 189: 2 (2011) 17from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … her in multilingual research settings while linking and comparing scandinavian, continental european and anglophone prosodias of communication: particular metaphorical associations cannot fully be acknowledged while leaping across the boundaries of textual and paradigmatic communities. conceptual loans are often inspirational, as was agreed above, but they can also appear as examples of risky enterprises due to ignored incompatibilities. for example, research grounded on analogical explanations, which is a manoeuvre imported from modelling approaches influenced by system-type of thinking (see haila & dyke 2006), is often problematic as it pushes towards identifying similarities at the cost of differences. when conducted without proper conceptual and political reflection, leaps between particular approaches and lexicons of paradigmatic communities run the risk of becoming indifferent to social content, as simonsen fears, and, consequently, too general for the purpose of studying the pros and cons of contemporary changes in society. the concern about the return of spatial abstractions, now clothed in conceptual renewals linked to immanent thinking, is further examined below. this is a place to rethink the role of spatial vocabulary we have grounded our thinking in human geography. to begin, some key promises and constraints of the spinozist geography of immanence relevant in this setting need to be introduced. how has this conceptualisation of one single world of plenitude taken place in human geography? what types of metaphoric associations are brought along while learning to use the new vocabulary? can this type of geographical rethinking avoid the traps of exclusiveness in its programmatic efforts to favour and celebrate any signs of all-inclusiveness? what are the constitutive strands of geography that emerge from within a systematic, and thus exclusive, ignoring of radical difference? immanence and its limits in geography immanent thinking in geography is part of the diversifying debate about the overall changes in life and working conditions due to increasing translocal interdependencies characterised by high rates of mobility and unpredictability. humans, both as embodied individuals and a population in general, have according to this approach become units of immediate social change. proper geographical categories, such as environment, region or scale, are seen as outdated as they cannot help in clarifying the general embodied change, including us all, now and everywhere, in the realm of population (hänninen & vähämäki 2000; braun 2006; sparke 2008: 427). nigel thrift (2008: 2−5), a british geographer, calls this focusing on the geography of what happens: human life is now seen as based on and in movement, and emerging in the ‘onflow’ of daily life. he also asks, “what it means to be human if human is understood now as process of situated flow within which human bodies are just one of the sets of actors” (2008: 226). thrift speculates with the discarding of the notion of the social (2008: 252) and instead formulates a certain attitude to life as potential, exemplified by his “overall goal: to produce a politics of opening the event to more; more action, more imagination, more light, more fun, even” (2008: 20). the emphasis of the potentials of unfolding in everyday life is central in immanent thinking, but it is also concerned with the spreading of the culture of endless contests and comparisons leading toward social uneasiness (virtanen 2006; atkinson 2009; gonzales 2009; jansson 2009). individuals are, for example, increasingly at risk of being randomly replaced in their work places. life paths become potentially adventurous, but also insecure. individual humans find themselves incapable of escaping from the threat of continuous unruly displacement. unpredictability is made a standard which offers you both excitement and uneasiness. this drama is seen by immanent thinkers as uniting humans into one universal population which is disorganised in its endless diversity (koivusalo 2000; hipwell 2004). this diversification results in heterogeneity where no continuity of particular human associations exists. human co-being is then characteristically universal and it does not emerge in the form of territorial formations such as ethnic neighbourhoods, industrial towns or nation states and it takes neither the shape of social movements nor civic campaigns. accordingly, the controlling of population is regarded as impossible in territorial terms but it is instead furthered via the flows of the mass media reaching the ‘onflow’ of daily life, stimulating individual human minds and bodies all together (vähämäki 2000; thrift 2008). immanent thinkers see, as shown above, distinct modernist conceptions, such as territory, but also society, environment and nature, as misleading since they lean on abstractions maintaining dualistic ontology. instead, such conceptions as 18 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen bodies, quasi-objects, non-humans, assemblages, actants, as well as performance, emergence volatility and inventiveness are, according to bruce braun (2008), a north american geographer, favoured because they point out dramatically different post-dualistic ways of conceiving the world. he also underlines that “[f]or a number of geographers it is precisely the conjunction of radical uncertainty in complex systems and the capacity of bodies for affect” that must inform our coping with contemporary environmental challenges (2008: 676). braun further specifies that our politics of nature must invariably take a form of active experimentation due to our unawareness regarding what is about to happen. this type of geography of what happens concentrates on the immediateness of emerging potentials. immanence thinking aims at identifying the meeting of homogenising and heterogenising currents in all their complexity but does this by excluding any signs of radical dissonance. discontinuities and non-linkages are simply overlooked. separateness does not exist. in explicit spinozist framework, difference appears as “the wisdom of the body” in a continuum of an unbounded ‘whole’ (see hipwell 2004: 359−360). bruce braun’s intemperate rainforest (2002), which concentrates on the forest conflict in clayoquot sound, british columbia, provides an example of the overlooking of the central epistemic differences attached to the conflict which is, explicitly, due to a stringent leaning on immanent-relational ontology. the book starts by an introduction to the studied setting by paying attention to disparities and divergent interests emerging as part of the conflict. braun is concerned about what is left out while “multiple voices are made to speak in the name of the one” (braun 2002: 5). he also remarks how the state’s land use planning has not taken into account the spatial, environmental and economic practices of the indigenous groups living in the region. he is also convinced that particular concepts of nature, culture, indigeneity, modernity, and progress implicated in state practices have contributed to a series of failures and discursive displacements, that is: epistemic erasures, which have made it difficult to recognise the political presence and environmental practices of the indigenous peoples (2002: 7−8). however, soon thereafter, braun leaves the question of disconnections aside and concentrates on the colonial rhetoric of industrial developers and wilderness preservationists. historical marginalisation of indigenous groups is discussed within the framework of expansive geological surveys, forest-industrial development and wilderness tourism. furthermore, details of indigenous modernity are brought up without any serious attempts of discussing about the sensitive setting at the interface between diverging epistemologies. they remain unexamined. this is, strikingly, not far from the omissions of the official planning braun is criticising. the reason for ignoring the indigenous voices in braun’s analysis can be derived from his explicit approach. he leans on immanence thinking while arguing, for example, how metaphors such as “networks”, “assemblages”, “flows” and “intensities” are helpful precisely because they force us to think in terms of a web of relations and, moreover, they force us to pay more attention to temporal and spatial connections (2002: 13−20, 263−269). non-linkages are not discussed here which becomes disturbing when, for example, comparing it to karen heikkilä’s (2008) critical analysis of indigenous toponymy in bc under colonisation and re-colonisation. contrary to braun, she is able to find disconnections and withdrawal, but also potentials of seeing, and making things radically differently, from within the indigenous peoples’ everyday settings under the totalising gaze of the (re-)colonists. in general, as was exemplified above, discontinuities are frequently left unexamined while conceiving the world through attributes informed by immanent thinking. zones of withdrawal remain broadly unrecognised. concentrating on problems of fading away is then difficult, as is focusing on discursive displacements that have become fatal to some lingual communities or pushed them to the edge of extinction. we are unable to pay attention to the fact that lingual exterminations are not natural events in human co-being, instead, they result from our ignorance or indifference. within the framework of immanent geography communities with unique locations and territorial particularities cannot be distinguished. there are no tools to identify distinct forums or actors that are linked, but not reducible to the streams of extra-territorial connectivity. immanence thinking and critical geography immanent thinking is not only a trend among spinozist geographers. similar tendencies can be fennia 189: 2 (2011) 19from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … notified in critical leftist tradition in geography. claiming rights to ‘differential geographies’ is often seen as synonymous to acts of apartheid, as noel castree (2004), a uk geographer, demonstrates in his review essay. as part of his sympathetic critique of relational approaches, he examines formulations favoured by a few key figures in anglophone critical geography such as michael watts, david harvey and doreen massey. the essay grows into a thought-provoking listing of caricature expressions of localist dead ends celebrating “mythical internal roots” and “internally generated authenticities” (2004: 144−145), “volkisch myth of cultural purity” (2004: 152), “closed societies” and “parochial place-projects” (2004: 158), “atavistic autarchy” (2004: 161) and “xenophobic particularism” (2004: 163). the list paints in front of us a wilderness of extremists who are at odds with the premises of open and inclusive society. castree summarises, however, that “defensive localisations”, or “erecting ‘strong’ boundaries around places”, should not necessarily be seen as regressive, or deemed acts of geographical folly. on the contrary, he continues in a compromising manner that “it is perfectly possible for inward-looking localisms to be founded on an explicit engagement with extra-local forces” (2004: 163). this type of manichean listing of localist puzzles might support the construction of reasonable compromises bridging the two extremes but does a major disservice to any particular acts of concentric argumentation. his ‘differential geographies’ is simply indifferent to geographies of dissonance and withdrawal. consequently, his indigenous panorama of “some 300 million people worldwide” (2004: 154) seems to treat the indigenous concerns as a means of further canonising geographical avant-garde grounded on relational all-inclusion. tellingly, moreover, castree et al. (2008), while presenting their relational interpretation of sociospatial difference, concentrate on crossing and bridging difference, even harmonising it (2008: 306). a ‘politics of propinquity’ can only be undertaken in relation to a ‘politics of connectivity, as they summarise (2008: 310), which claim fully shows their unwillingness to take into consideration any aspects of radical difference. these types of academic commentaries, while only producing hegemonic, and blindly concentric generalisations, seem to have no link to the ongoing struggles of survival under the shadows of all-inclusion. they themselves are, in fact, proof of radical noncommunication. on the other hand, matthew sparke (1998, see also 2005: 1−52), a us-based british geographer, while attempting to appropriate deconstructive arguments into a critical reflection of earth-writing, aims at becoming sensitive to ‘other histories’ beyond the hegemonic metropolitan ones. his contrapuntal cartographies search for the potentials of counter-hegemonic cartography and he also, while articulating geographical responsibility, understands that, for example, the first nations resistance can be taken as an example of how to progress in geographical renewal. sparke’s attempt is brave but in practice it only brings the indigenous issue into the (re)colonial court rooms. the difficulties of translating indigenous means of oral communication into more legitimate mapping techniques are brought up but without any serious cross-epistemic reflection. the reflection is, instead, saved for the purposes of decolonising the political geography of mapping. sparke thus simply uses the indigenous issue as a case, or a tool, by which to push forward critical renewal of political geography. the instrumental installation surfaces most clearly in sparke’s concerns about the colonial conquest that, by manoeuvres of aesthetic enframing, served “to empty the landscape” (sparke 1998: 477). the exporting of landscapes into (lingual) communities which are perhaps unaware of any measures of landscaping is a purely colonial act which geographers, over generations, have learned not to question. landscapes are thought of as something eternal which can be identified everywhere. hence, as is apparent, sparke’s is the world of cutting-edge geographers, and their near colleagues, who actively participate in transforming particular interface cultures into geographic monoplanes and who pick up interesting cases to serve as mediums in an academic contest. no serious attempt to understand radical difference, or the degree of noncommunication between different histories, is carried out. later sparke (2008) formulates his relational-immanent ontology by arguing for “critical responsibility to resist the pathologization of place” by “exploring the territorial particularities in terms of extra-territorial globality” (sparke 2008: 434). he is, of course, therefore, primarily concerned about the risks of romanticizing heroic resistance and autonomous communities − which stigmatisation, while resembling castree’s list of spatial closures and doreen massey’s tendency to see all signs of non-throwntogetherness as romance with bounded places 20 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen (massey 2005: 161−176), makes him oblivious to signs of dissonance and withdrawal. doreen massey, a british geographer, has in the 2000s enriched her critical relationalism with aspects of immanent thinking (see massey 2005: 20−30). this emphasis is, again, problematic from any particularist or concentric points of view. if we rely on the all-inclusiveness of relational approaches and regard, “space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far” and “places as collections of these stories”, as massey (2005: 129) does while arguing for positive heterogeneity over negative difference (2005: 12−13), and if we favour coeval coexistence at the cost of internal fragmentation (2005: 52), we run the risk of ignoring the contemporary drama of cultural domination versus withdrawal. while celebrating the “coevalness of multiplicity of trajectories” (2005: 154) we simultaneously disregard signs of radical difference that could provide alternatives to the all-inclusiveness under the umbrella of positive co-existence (see massey 2007: 405). in other words, by enthusiastically tracing signs of corresponding co-existence, that is, by systematically ignoring the lost and withdrawing aspects of human co-being, we tend to continue the colonial indifference to contemporary signs of difference. by hiding our uneasiness with unevenness and biases of communication, and by focusing on matters that serve our aims to imagine idylls of co-resonance, we contribute to the taming of dissociations. what is at stake then is what we see as shared and overlapping, which echoes in the communicative repertoire we have learned to appreciate. we are then at risk of disregarding the retreating aspects in our surroundings and, furthermore, we even tend to disregard our own disregarding. interestingly, sara gonzales (2009), while studying the official marketing of milan, italy, from within a relational perspective, summarises that the relational script alone leaves little room for alternatives (gonzales 2009: 40). she concludes that an excessive emphasis by the local authorities on global connectivity risks losing sight of the particularities and uniqueness of places. according to her, paradoxically, most milanese seem to become disconnected from the thoroughly connective governing of their city. gonzales, a basque geographer from uk, thus bravely raises the question of concentric co-being, including its radical noncommunication with relational spatialities. she also guides the reader to think about the similarities between the positive all-inclusiveness of relational geographies and the programmatic openness of neoliberal politics of trade. the similarities are striking, if also under-examined by human geographers (see massey 1999: 15; castree 2004: 144). toward concentric geographies contrary to immanent-relational geographical thinking, detailed studies of non-communication and withdrawal in multilingual milieus can equip us with tools to compete against tendencies of cultural standardisation. reflection of the consequences of our decisions within specific zones of intercultural change can deepen our understanding of the complex dependencies between domination and withdrawal, which then might help us to formulate tactics of everyday resistance. the multilingual sensitivity favoured here aims at recognising, but not crossing or harmonising, both general dependencies and (local) particularities of social change. this view emphasises the contested nature of human co-being resulting in social mixtures of extensive interconnectedness and radical difference. these mixtures are, as will be shown below, forged by general relational pressure of continuous displacement and particular acts of community emplacement (casey 1997: 16), or implacement (heikkilä 2008: 7−11), according to inherited and adopted patterns. consequently, human communities are seen in this view as developing along two complementary, if partially non-communicative, routes. first, while following the premises of immanent thinking, human co-being can be seen as evolving along the impulses from within general changes in society. accordingly, in research, it is central to identify the continuous emergence of potentials and risks in everyday settings. we can call this relational displacement. human co-being, in the form of more or less temporary associations and communities, is simply seen as adapted to, but also adapting, the pulses of the surrounding society. forms of human co-being, such as associations and communities, develop according to their own re-actions to the strain and forces of more general origin. similarly, places become understood as “the general conditions of our being together” (massey 2005: 154), they appear as intersections or events of wider trajectories of broader linkages, or they become re-conceptualised, for example, as moments of mobile locations, multifennia 189: 2 (2011) 21from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … ple nodes, nomadic associations or translocal assemblages (bæhrenholdt 2007; blunt 2007; rocheleau & roth 2007; mcfarlane 2009). second, human associations and communities can be identified as evolving through the gradual alteration of shared memories and practices grounded on the experience of belongingness. now the concentric aspects of social change become central (jürgenson 2004; knuuttila 2005; schwartz 2006; baschmakoff 2007; kurki 2007; gonzales 2009). social and spatial differentiation emerges in the diverging acts of participation and dissent which gradually transform the particular conditions of human co-being and communication (kymäläinen & lehtinen 2010). this differentiation can be documented, for example, by historical inter-lingual comparisons, as well as by examining the cultural confusions at the zones of resistance and withdrawal, attached to conceptual renewals and acts of re-naming in our everyday settings. in the concentric view, social and spatial differentiation affects and is affected by changes in the communicative routines of communities (see tanner 1929b; heikkilä 2006: 88−141, 2008: 110−111). renewal of community lexicons is seen as indelibly bound to the transformations in collective imaginary orientations which take shape, for example, via alterations of the central geographs that communities more or less purposefully lean on in their daily practices (häkli 1998: 131−132; mustonen 2009: 15−74). lingual renewal is now regarded as either purposeful, when it is based, for example, on imported neologisms, or semi-conscious, when it evolves in rituals or by routine-type adaptation of conceptual and syntactic reforms (connerton 1989). sensitivity to this type of renewal pushes researchers toward comparative geographic studies that aim at identifying both the relational and concentric aspects of differentiation in human co-being. relational and concentric aspects of change are thus treated here as complementary and only partially resonating social and spatial categories, or developmental paths, both of which need to be followed if one wishes to understand the zones of resistance and withdrawal at polyglot interfaces. then, overall stigmatisation of localists as promoters of geographical apartheid is simply unfeasible. the relational approach, when considering communities as moments of general plenitude, runs the risk of ignoring much of the potential co-enrichment in human co-being while becoming indifferent to radical difference. bypassing the concentric side of human co-being quickly leads to blindness towards solutions which deviate from the generally agreed upon framework. the innate dynamics of communicative and imaginary interaction are then simply ignored, or deemed uninteresting, since the questions binding them have no general bearing. approaches that favour general all-inclusiveness are therefore seen here as simply too panoramic to be applied in studies of the pros and cons of human co-being. this article thus argues that the pitfalls of reflattening our ontological assumptions due to nonsocial simplifications and crude reduction (bound to the ridiculing of particularisms) can be avoided by approaches which are sensitive not only to resonating aspects of human co-being but also, and especially, dissociations between concentric and relational spaces in concrete polyglot settings. signs of concentric unfolding, emerging from within the zones of radical dissonance, can then be treated as the founding events of social renewal. communities are thus not only regarded as attachments or products of extra-terrestrial impulses but, instead, are seen as actors that are influenced by chains of memories and customs that respect the shared past. signs of radical dissonance are examined below within the context of sámi politics and research. particular attention is paid to concentric aspects of co-being. difficulties of translation, both lingual and geographic, are underlined in order to clarify the dissociating and non-communicative elements at the specific epistemic interface in the european north. identifying dissonance: breaks between particular geographs one way to value the necessity of attending to concentric spatialities is to analyse the (mis)matching of some central parallel geographs that form the shared and divided ground of spatial imagination among polyglot communities. this is done below by comparing some geographs of sámi earthviewing to collateral concepts in western geographic orientation. the aim is also to show specific problems and potentials of the sámi as indigenous non-indo-europeans in contemporary europe. the analysis of the sámi concepts is by necessity constrained to the language of northern sámi which is the most widely-dispersed of the 22 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen sámi languages, having approximately 20 000 speakers in the nordic countries, mostly in northern norway. the first two comparisons of geographs serve as examples of cultural withdrawal under the influence of contemporary geographic colonialism and the second two illustrate the potential of sámi geographs in questioning the scholarly canonisations of monoplane human geography. nomadic landscapes the history of identifying and founding landscapes is long in the nordic countries, and the convention has fuelled nation-building in each country, also dividing and assimilating the sámi homelands (jones & olwig 2008). however, no simple equivalent to landscape or scandinavian landskap exists in the northern sámi lexicon. one possible translation is guovlu which refers to a region under watch or sight, but which also points to collective land holdings attached to specific identifications of kin and land, emerging, for example, in familybound regional articulations (helander-renvall 2009). moreover, the concept of siida, which in general refers to the historical sámi villages seasonally moving between summer and winter areas, and which today refers to local reindeer herding units, partially parallels with the swedish landskap which is, for example, a territorial administrative unit. siida however, while developed as part of seasonal mobility and adjusted to shifting conditions of nature, differs significantly from the landskaps harmonised under state governance (helander 1999: 19; heikkilä 2006: 267−287). the scandinavian landskap is also sometimes regarded as more or less synonymous to eatnam which is the concrete earthly setting, or the eventual subject of co-being, where the relations between humans and nature evolve, often encircling around rivers, fells or inland lakes. it is also a conveyor of local kin histories manifested in customs, cultural memorials, oral traditions and place names. in fact, the spiritual sensitivity, together with the intimate relations between humans and nature, makes the eatnam in sámi geographic thinking the prior subject of land and life (jernsletten 2002; helander-renvall 2009). one can thus notice a profound contradiction between the institutions of landscaping and the institutions rooted to indigenous earthviewing and socio-spatial orientation in the nordic north. inaccuracies of translation exemplify the confusion among the sámi while adjusting to the premises of landscapes. adjustment is, however, accelerated by expectations of benefits in the form of official recognition which is often accompanied by a confirmation of some sort of cultural continuity (see for example ingold 1976). this learning, accompanied by an unlearning of the customary manners of signification and intent, gradually radically renews the local routines of land and life. the particular articulations of guovlu, siida and eatnam adapt to the more generally applicable decrees of landscaping: they become displaced, and some older layers of earthviewing and earthly co-being gradually fade away. zones of wilderness, zones of withdrawal the establishment of the wilderness parks in upper lapland, the northernmost finland, in the early 1990s brought along environmental conceptions that were originally created as part of the anglophone lexicons of wilderness planning. accordingly, the outer extensions of the siidas under seasonal hunting, gathering and herding customs, that is meahcci in sámi, were divided into areas of wilderness and commercial forests (erämaakomitea 1988; lehtinen 2006: 231−232; raitio 2008: 216−222). meahcci refers to backwoods and wilderness in northern sámi. it denotes uninhabited terrains and areas of resources, but it also includes lands away from home that are under regular extensive use. the extension and meaning of meahcci varies according to what you are after. ptarmigan lands differ from those preferred for gathering fuel wood, for example. it may, as elina helander-renvall, a sámi scholar from upper lapland, argues, serve as a “stretching of one’s living room, a stronghold of identity maintenance” (vadén & tuusvuori 2007: 9). the gradual transformation of meahcci into western-type wilderness has become, due to the above-documented geographic differences, a cause of confusion in upper lapland. the strict territorial definition of official wilderness parks, constituted by specific ecological zones of vulnerability and including facilities for tourists, has overlooked the vulnerability of reindeer to increased pressure by humans and artificial infrastructure (heikkilä 2006: 287−325). in addition, logging both inside and outside the wilderness parks has significantly weakened the value of central winter pastures for reindeer (raitio 2008: fennia 189: 2 (2011) 23from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … 211−216; riipinen 2008: 142−146). the tension between strict territorial governing and specific mobile needs of reindeer units is also exemplified in the difficulties to reach agreements about hunting regulations, concerning wolves and bears in particular, between the european union and its northernmost provinces. viewing nature at a distance is difficult for those to whom nature outside humanity is meaningless. securing indigenous rights to land, which means guarantees that their concerns are not ignored by the cartographers of all-inclusiveness, is a central concern to the sámi in the wilderness lapland, and this cannot be separated from their claim for at least some degree of local autonomy, and thus honouring the particularities of báiki. horizontal placing the sámi báiki is the place that is recognised as one’s home, farm, field or camp. it is a particular place for being safely together. it is an inhabited place that is one’s home. it is also a familiar place where your ancestors have lived before you. báiki is a territorial and temporal conception developed via kin relations and it contains elements of the familial past (helander 1999: 11−12; schanche 2004: 8). báiki, on the other hand, differs from sadji which refers to a site, location or spot in general, without necessary denotations of dwelling or home-being. sadji is also a place to sit or lie down and sleep (helander 1999: 12). báiki and sadji correspond to the differentiation between particular home place and placing in general but they also serve as geographs of the horizontal earthviewing among the sámi. the horizontal understanding of land and resources in sápmi, the sámi homeland, is grounded on certain rules of hunting and fishing, or practices of bivdit, that have developed symmetrical and reciprocal ties between humans and their surroundings. baiki refers to a concentric understanding of one’s particular location. of course, location is relational, as taking place in respect to others. the daily báiki is thoroughly linked to the surrounding world. these linkages are, according to audhild schanche, the director of the sámi institute in northern norway, horizontal by character and distinct from the vertical divisions of the western imagination which lean on “asymmetry, hierarchy, unequal power relation, domination/subordination and supremacy/inferiority” (schanche 2004: 1−2). similar type of contrasting remarks of dissociation are made by tero mustonen (2009), a finnish geographer and advocate of the arctic subsistence communities who, in spite of applying doreen massey’s relational terminology, identifies industrial one-company locations of isolation in the tundra. these locations have developed into enclaves of vertical interdependence which are, moreover, at risk of becoming dead spaces of industrial pollution. therefore, mustonen (2009: 5) concludes, massey’s approach “falls short of conveying the essentials of localities that are situated far away from power centres”. he identifies the radical dissonance between western post-urban formulations of all-inclusiveness and the “amorphous spatial understanding” (2009: 5) in particular communities of the extreme north. the dilemma of dead space sámi dilli, as a translation of space, carries connotations to wide and open space but it emphasises the qualitative and potential aspects of human cobeing. it emerges in such expressions as til’la, meaning state of health or mood, and dilálašvuohta, referring to pursuit and potential but also to an inspirational setting suddenly taking shape. it can also be translated as an event, then denoting special meetings or celebrations. primarily, however, til’la refers to the state of affairs (sammallahti 1989, 1993). in general, expressions and modifications of dilli cover a plenitude of meanings that refer to both distances and qualitative features of things, locations and events. dilli and til’la are old german imports that originate from ziel, which means aim or goal in contemporary german (hirvensalo 1975: 284; häkkinen 2004: 1313). the fact that dilli is a german loan word which has, over time and space, developed into its current form exemplifies well the general relational interarticulation of lingual trajectories. the layers of conceptual loans in our daily vocabulary serve as proof of the complexity of the linkages behind our ethno-lingual identification (häkkinen 2004: 6−16; saarikivi 2002; seierstad 2008: 102). continuous processes of import, and the resulting lingual hybrids, become concrete, for example, in intergenerational relations when, at times, communication across generations becomes challenging due to diversified adjustments and modifications of our everyday vocabularies (lehtinen 1993: 24−27; anthias 2009; semi 2010 143−145). experiences of this type of difficulties stand as proof of 24 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen lingual dynamics and potentials, but they also expose something about the continuous loss of the more marginal layers of signification. and, of course, they tell us about the dominant directions of conceptual export and import in society. consequently, to argue for space that is not dead (massey 2005: 13) is puzzling in the context of sámi earthviewing. dilli self-evidently carries promises of renewal, emerging in the qualitative impressions of dilli and from within notions of til´la or dilálasvuohta, leading us to think about spaces as events as well as potentialities. translation problems such as these serve as reminders of cross-cultural discontinuity and they can be seen as moments of confusion in the zones of conflict in polyglot settings. tracing participation and withdrawal: three conclusions the preceding excursion through a few central geographs of the sámi associates this article with particular troubles along the polyglot interface in the nordic north, but it also serves as an example of both the threats of lingual standardisation and the potentials of co-learning across epistemic divides. my first conclusion is simple, but also demanding: geographers, if intending to avoid the re-flattening of their ontology, cannot afford being, or becoming, monolingual − neither individually nor within scholarly associations. instead, continuous re-examination of the changes and variations of geographs in those lingual communities with which we are interconnected should be seen an integral part of making postcolonial geographies. ignoring and ridiculing them is not far from parochial sectionalism that is considered by the relationalists as non-existing or at least out-dated. ignoring and ridiculing them can also be interpreted as an expression of indifference toward those communities and cultures that live today at the edge of existence. parallelly, disregarding discontinuities and non-communicative aspects in our geographic communication and considering particularities simply as moments of the general plenitude carries signs of determinism that are programmatically fortified against recognising any nuances of radical difference. i cannot distinguish this from the colonial manoeuvres of the past regimes of the west. the above conclusion includes the concern that western, and today: increasingly anglophone, geographies carry traces of provincialism in their inwardlooking canonisation of the cutting-edge curriculum (about provincialism, see entrikin 1991: 3−78; häkli 1998: 132). the nomenclature developed accordingly is not entirely dissimilar from audhild schanche’s (2004) sketching of the contours of western geographic imagination, referred to above, which tend to lean on epistemological rankings that, despite ontological emphases on flows and fluidities, produce hierarchy, asymmetry, unequal power relation, domination/subordination and supremacy/inferiority. schanche’s critique can be read as an expression of the concern that much geographically important information becomes articulated without being recognised by the leading forums and that there is a systematic bias in this respect. this state of affairs was confirmed in the preceding excursion using sámi words and concepts. what was also shown, i suppose, is that this type of asymmetrical production of scholarly leadership and hierarchy could easily be changed. the margins that are fading away could be included in the disciplinary renewal by simply emphasising those concerns and formulations in particular minor forums that share a willingness to contribute to the development of geographical curriculum. in any case, we do a major disservice to geographical advancement by ridiculing or regarding the conceptions and arguments that are at odds with the cutting edges of geography as uninteresting because of their differing rationales. instead, radical differences could be seen as a potential inspiration for epistemological co-renewal. language barriers, of course, limit our endeavours but, as was shown above, much of the marginal research on particular geographs is published in english, too, if only occasionally in the most distinguished journals. especially, signs of discontinuities in polyglot communication can be seen as a central challenge, and direction, of co-studying. why not aim at learning to learn from those under the threat of extermination, and to participate on this ground in collective efforts to slow down the acceleration of lingual extinctions? this type of reorientation in human geography would significantly enrich our scholarly work and it would also show the areas of non-communication in geographical renewal. as was witnessed in this article, landscapes should not be treated as universally applicable means of regional coping. the sámi meahcci is not imprisoned by the type of dualisms inherent in wilderness programmes − which only lately have been questioned by hybrid fennia 189: 2 (2011) 25from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … geographers. the horizontal constitution of báiki favours concentric thinking that is, as underlined by many leading human geographers referred to in this article, discordant with relational approaches. finally, the sámi did not need to spend decades in symposia of critical rethinking to find that space, as dilli, is not dead. if, as was concluded above, some inward-looking features of western-anglophone geography bear resemblance to provincial defence against multilingual challenges, the same phenomenon, if only in particular contrasting forms, is widely-cultivated in the margins. my second conclusion deals with provincialism in the nordic north which is, as the case studies showed, developed into a means of supporting the dominating or expansive regime. in fact, this type of regime confirmation comes close to the latin root of provincialism that is etymologically linked to submissive and conceding aspects of conquered territories, derived from the latin pro vincere (gordon 1980: 69). the case studies in this article showed how wilderness conservation by finnish environmental authorities promoted anglophone solutions of wilderness planning in sápmi. the ‘western model’ was a powerful means to overcome the alternative formulations favouring culturally sensitive environmentalism (see lehtinen 1991: 135−142). in addition, as illustrated above, seeing some sámi geographs as ’relatives’ of landscapes was confusing, but also alluring for those at the interface between the sámi and the ‘southerners’ as it helped to become recognised in the forums of the leading regime. this finding gains support from similar discoveries by a few critical scholars of the nordic north. according to tim ingold, an anthropologist from the uk, the scolt lappish leadership was partially questioned by locals due to its too intimate cooperation with the finnish statecraft (see ingold 1976: 213−221). thomas mathiesen (1982: 83), a sociologist of law and rights from norway, examined the potentials of the scandinavian concept of vanmakt, roughly translated as obedience or mentality of escape, when analysing the background of the conflict between sámi and the dominating regime in the hydroelectric development in alta, northern norway (see also pehkonen 1999; howitt 2001: 280−299). provincial opportunism is, as i would argue, a central constituent in the particular realisation of domination and withdrawal in the nordic north. emphasising provincialism of the margins means focusing on the prevalence of particular opportunistic or phlegmatic, if not cynical, attitudes that tend to support the established relations of domination. changes in the margins cannot be explained by general interdependencies alone. they can, instead, be considered as outcomes of tactics favoured by the provincial actors themselves. particular features of adjustment, i dare to summarise, explain much of the speed and direction of general standardisation in contemporary colonies. this conclusion, which critically studies the features of opportunism among the provincial actors, offers us tools for deepening our understanding of participation and withdrawal in the margins. provincial attitude, in the form set out here, tends to confirm linkages that strengthen translocally articulated interdependencies. provincialism favours standard solutions (see lehtinen 2006: 200−208), which is manifested in the nordic north in lingual development, but also in landscape design and resource extraction, as was shown above. the standard north is, if following mustonen’s (2009) argumentation, made of ‘dead spaces’ of industrial enclaves, and it also emerges in wilderness parks and municipal centres where multiculturalism has turned into ethnic decoration. the provincial standardisation is made concrete by folklorising or completely denying the particular pasts and by uncritically welcoming the demands of the dominating regime. from a provincial perspective, when facing the intense pressures of unruly displacement, the particular routines of polyglot communities look like remnants form the prehistoric past. my third and final conclusion is inspired by the geographic potentials of particular geographs. by claiming that cultural withdrawal is a central geographical matter and that, due to radical differences between cultural geographs and cosmologies, discontinuities are unavoidable in human communication and earthly co-being, we can begin developing post-provincial geographies of multilingual milieus. these claims can help us to look forward to contribute to the opening of the creative potentials of relational and concentric cobeing. place can, for example, be regarded without pejorative connotations as a place of one’s own, báiki. moreover, especially in the previously mentioned concerns of familial well-being, it also extends toward such denotations as ‘moments of denial’ and ‘critical participation’ while purposefully avoiding progressions of (self-made) vulnerability. the horizontal character of báiki promotes initiatives of co-learning and it simultaneously 26 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen serves as a buffer against the impulses of unruly displacement. place can therefore grow into a location of political campaigns, as the metonymic use of alta in sámi lexicon shows (see howitt 2001: 280−299), and it can accordingly turn into a context of standardisation critique. then it takes on the shape of a critique of continuous colonial domination, but it also self-critically assesses any signs of provincial vanmakt. placing is now horizontally connected to the potentialities of space as dilli, including both general and particular qualities. places are seen as collections of translocal trajectories and events of throwntogetherness, but they are also understood as distinct locations, or settings, that function as emergent entities of their own, not reducible to the general processes contributing to their existence. the simultaneous and only partially resonating coformation of relational and concentric spatialities is now identified as the founding moment of societal renewal. the differentiation between the two spaces is epistemological by nature. this means, concentric placing includes options for radical critique and alternatives. it is a forum of seeing and doing things differently. the politics of place emerge, accordingly, wherever the concern about the conditions of communication and non-communication is present. it addresses the place of one’s own that bears continuities through its potential to add differentiation. geographical views sensitive to concentric cobeing pay attention to the activity and passivity of individuals and their communities amidst general pressures of standardisation. the transformations of our daily routines are thus not regarded as direct outcomes of broader re-articulations reaching us as necessities, but as acts and events modified by choices in the concentric spheres of the communities themselves. this article has argued that the geographical overplaying with neologisms imported from the spinozist philosophies of immanence and increasingly also followed by critical leftist geographers, partially resulting in ‘flat earth’ descriptions, has limited our ability to identify and respect the shared concerns of land and life taking shape in the routines of general-particular change. this overplaying, if continued, will definitely constrain the development of scholarly co-learning in dialogue with the particular geographs and geographers of the margins. by systematically ignoring the voices that take place beyond the leading arenas of geographical renewal and by selectively focusing on immediate appearances of ‘geographies of what happens’, as the geographers of immanence recommend, we run the risk of contributing to the degradation of the critical scope and social credibility of geography. all features of human community-building, including the variations of resistance against standardisation, are then simply drawn under the vision of all-inclusiveness. this type of rhetorical generalisation certainly does not resonate with the questions of participation and withdrawal the communities at the edge of extinction face in their daily routines. signs of radical difference and resistance are therefore mostly ignored by geographers of immanence, if not treated as fascinating cases for paradigmatic canonisation. it seems the perspectives of domination are lost due to an anxiety of dualisms of any kind. instead, idylls of coevals, openings of events and overall inventiveness are celebrated, as if guidelines for exclusively positive picturing of human and non-human cobeing on earth. while surrounded by a myriad of signs of social and ecological crises, both local and global, the geographers of immanent relationalism seem to remain thrilled of their search for “more action, more imagination, more light, more fun, even”, as thrift formulated above. emergence is, of course, “inventive through and through”, thus “[it] must be understood as a property of the whole that is not shared by, or reducible, to its constituent parts”, as braun (2008: 669) argues, and underlines this by repeating it word for word a few pages later (braun 2008: 675). this type of rhetoric, much echoing spinoza’s (1982: 244−245) views on the whole of nature and its parts, is however strained by the risks of mechanical simplification grounded on analogical thinking, leading us to ignore those features of social change that grow from within the emerging potentials of the constituent parts that are not reducible to the broader emergence to which they are interlinked. the relational renewal remains, to summarise my focal point, elitist in geography if not co-developed in close contact with the drama and the dynamics of individual human communities in their daily settings. instead of painting portraits of wishful optimism, we need to learn to recognise the differing tactics of participation and denial; dissensions in coping with resource exploitation and climate change in the margins (see e.g. habeck 2002; howitt & suchet-pearson 2006; kjosavik & shanmugaratnam 2007; mustonen 2009), contestfennia 189: 2 (2011) 27from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … ed wisdoms of customary ‘animal geographies’ (see ingold & kurttila 2000; konstantinov 2005; fryer 2009), differing ‘social natures’ of domestication and exploitation (see seppänen 1986: 75−102; lehtinen 1991: 70−71) and dissociations in ‘bioprospecting’ (nygren 1998). this conclusion is a request to all those who have found relational renewal inspiring to once more re-examine the polyhedral invitation inherent in the preliminary sketching of ‘lines of flight’ (deleuze 1992: 23) and take distance from those academic contests motivated by cutting edge rankings and turn toward more participatory studies of particular geographies of dependencies, denials, non-linkages and withdrawals. finally, it is worth noticing that mustonen (2009), while emphasising the constant merging of time and space among arctic subsistence communities, comes close to norwegian philosopher arne naess’ spinozist elaboration of ‘mixed communities’ created in the practical day-to-day bonding of humans and non-humans. this type of ‘ethics of place’ (see smith 2001, 2005b) is marked by routines performing due respect and care to all its members, both animate and inanimate. the cooperation in naess’ community is not regulated by codified rules or norms but, instead, it takes shape in the daily events and occasions that bring into being what is regarded as ethically right (naess 1979, 1998). in this way particular placing becomes the potentia of horizontal co-enrichment, thoroughly linked to the particular understanding of space among the sámi. the spinozist renewal in human geography can, and could, thus take shape and re-emerge in various forms and with several differing emphases. it is, however, as witnessed above, crucially dependent on the discipline and creativity of the scholars leaning on the original inspiration. how well do we know, honestly, the ethics we are promoting? to what degree we are aware of the several geographically inspiring spinozist traditions with radically differing emphases? references andersen s 2004. saami place names and placemaking in a minority-majority context. died̄ut 3, 122−134. anthias f 2009. translocational belonging, identity and generation. finnish journal of ethnicity and migration 4: 1, 6−15. atkinson r 2009. the politics of isolation. geografiska annaler b 91: 4, 299−310. bærenholdt jo 2007. coping with distances. berghahn books, oxford. baschmakoff n 2007. cultural text, communality and the margin. in baschmakoff n, fryer p & ristolainen m (eds). texts and communities, 9−24. aleksanteri institute, helsinki. bateson g & bateson m c 1987. angel fears: an investigation into the nature of meaning of the sacred. rider, new york. bladh g 1995. finskogens landskap och människor under fyra sekler. en studie av samhälle och natur i förändring. forskningsrapport 95: 11. högskolan i karlstad, karlstad. blunt a 2007. cultural geographies of migration: mobility, transnationality and diaspora. progress in human geography 31: 5, 684−694. braun b 2002. the intemperate rainforest. nature, culture and power on canada’s west coast. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. braun b 2006. global natures in the space of assemblage. progress in human geography 30: 5, 644−654. braun b 2008 environmental issues: incentive life. progress in human geography 32: 5, 667−679. casey e 1997. the fate of place. university of california press, berkeley. castree n 2004. differential geographies: place, indigenous rights and ‘local’ resources. political geography 23: 2, 133−167. castree n, featherstone d & herod a 2008. contrapuntal geographies: the politics of organising across sociospatial difference. in cox kr, low m & robinson j (eds). the sage handbook of political geography, 305−321. sage, london. connerton p 1989. how societies remember? cambridge university press, cambridge. dalby s 1993. the ‘kiwi disease’: geopolitical discourse in aotaeroa/new zealand and the south pacific. political geography 12: 5, 437−456. dalby s 2002. environmental security. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. dalby s 2010. recontextualising violence, power and nature: the next twenty years of critical geopolitics. political geography 29: 5, 280−288. deleuze g 1992. autiomaa. gaudeamus, helsinki. dewsbury jd & thrift n 2005. ‘genesis eternal’: after paul klee. in buchanan i & lambert g (eds). deleuze and space, 89−108. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. doel m 1996. a hundred thousand lines of flight: a machinic introduction to the nomad and scrumbled geography of gilles deleuze and félix guattari. society and space 14: 4, 421−439. domosh m 2010. the world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire. progress in human geography 34: 4, 419−435. entrikin n 1991. the betweenness of place. the johns hopkins university press, baltimore. 28 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen erämaakomitea 1988. erämaakomitean mietintö. komiteanmietintöjä 39. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. fryer p 2009. urfolks rättigheter och rättvisa på kolahalvöns landsbygd. in elenius l & ericsson l (eds). är vi inte alla minoriteter i världen?, 183−198. ordfront, stockholm. gonzales s 2009. (dis)connecting milan(ese): deterritorialised urbanism and disempowering politics in globalising cities. environment and planning a 41: 1, 31−47. gordon c (ed) 1980. power and knowledge. selected interviews and other writings by michel foucault, 1971−1977. pantheon, new york. habeck jo 2002. how to turn a reindeer pasture into an oil well, and vice versa: transfer of land, compensation and reclamation in the komi republic. in kasten e (ed). people and the land. pathways to reform in post-soviet siberia, 125−147. dietrich reimer verlag, berlin. hadi curti g 2009. beating words to life: subtitles, assemblage(s)capes, expression. geojournal 74: 3, 201−208. haila y 1997. ’wilderness’ and the multiple layers of environmental thought. environmental history 3: 2, 129−148. haila y & dyke c 2006. what to say about nature’s speech. in haila y & dyke c (eds). how nature speaks: the dynamics of the human ecological condition, 1−48. duke university press, durham. heikkilä l 2006. reindeer talk. acta universitatis lapponiensis 110, rovaniemi. heikkilä k 2008. teaching through toponymy. vdm verlag, saarbrücken. helander e 1999. sámi subsistence activities – spatial aspects and structuration. acta borealia 16: 2, 7−25. helander-renvall e 2009. personal information, may 22 [mimeo]. herman d 2008. the aloha state: place names and the anti-conquest of hawai´i. in berg l & vuolteenaho j (eds). critical toponymies: the contested politics of place-naming, 101−135. ashgate, farnham. hipwell wt 2004. a deleuzian critique of resourceuse management politics in industria. the canadian geographer 48: 3, 356−377. hirvensalo l 1975. suomi-saksa-suomi. wsoy, helsinki. howitt r 2001. rethinking resource management. justice, sustainability and indigenous peoples. routledge, london. howitt r & suchet-pearson s 2006. rethinking the building block: ontological pluralism and the idea of ‘management’. geografiska annaler b 88: 3, 323−335. häkkinen k 2004. nykysuomen etymologinen sanakirja. wsoy, helsinki. häkli j 1998. manufacturing provinces. in tuathail g & dalby s (eds). rethinking geopolitics, 131−151. routledge, london. häkli j 2003. to discipline or not to discipline, is that the question? political geography 22: 6, 657−661. hänninen s & vähämäki j (eds) 2000. displacement of politics. sophi, jyväskylä. ingold t 1976. the scolt lapps today. cambridge university press, london. ingold t & kurttila t 2000. perceiving the environment in finnish lapland. body & society 6: 3−4, 183−196. jansson k 2009. tillsammans. bidrag till den etniska boendesegregationens geofilosofi. geografiska regionstudier 81. uppsala university, department of social and economic geography, uppsala. jernsletten j 2002. sørsamisk landskapsforståelse i et religionsvitenskapelig perspektiv. died̄ut 1, 107−114. jones m 2009. phase space: geography, relational thinking, and beyond. progress in human geography 33: 4, 487−506. jones m & olwig k (eds) 2008. nordic landscapes. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. jürgenson a 2004. on the formation of the estonians’ concepts of homeland and home place. pro ethnologia 18: 1, 97−114. keisteri t 1990. the study of changes in cultural landscape. fennia 168: 1, 31−115. ketola k, knuuttila s, mattila a & vesala km 2002. puuttuvat viestit. gaudeamus, helsinki. kitchin r & dodge m 2007. rethinking maps. progress in human geography 31: 3, 331−344. kjosavik d & shanmugaratnam n 2007. property rights dynamics and indigenous communities in highland kerala, south india. modern asian studies 41: 6, 1183−1260. knuuttila s 2005. samankeskinen paikallisuus. in häyrynen s (ed). kulttuurin arviointi ja vaikutusten väylät, 51−65. kulttuuripoliittisen tutkimuksen edistämissäätiö (cupore) 12, helsinki. koivusalo m 2000. biopolitical displacement and antinomies of biopolitical reason. in hänninen s & vähämäki j (eds). displacement of politics, 116−159. sophi, jyväskylä. konstnatinov y 2005. from ‘traditional’ to collectivized reindeer herding on the kola peninsula: continuity or disruption? acta borealia 22: 2, 170−188. kurki t 2007. historical prose and emergent community in soviet karelia. in baschmakoff n, fryer p & ristolainen m (eds). texts and communities, 39−48. aleksanteri institute, helsinki. kymäläinen p & lehtinen aa 2010. chora in current geographical thought. geografiska annaler b 92: 3, 251−261. lehtinen aa 1991. northern natures. fennia 169: 1, 57−169. lehtinen aa 1993. the fall of the forest villages. environmental policy and society 1. uppsala university, uppsala. lehtinen aa 2006. postcolonialism, multitude, and the politics of nature. university press of america, lanham. fennia 189: 2 (2011) 29from relations to dissociations in spatial thinking: sámi … massey d 1999. power-geometries and the politics of space-time. university of heidelberg, heidelberg. massey d 2005. for space. sage, london. mathiesen t 1982. makt och motmakt. korpen, gothenburg. maybury-lewis d (ed) 2003. the politics of ethnicity. indigenous peoples in latin american states. harvard university press, cambridge, ma. mcfarlane c 2009. translocal assemblages: space, power and social movements. geoforum 40: 4, 561−567. mchugh k 2009. movement, memory, landscape: an excursion in non-representational thought. geojournal 74: 3, 209−218. mustonen t 2009. karhun väen ajast-aikojen avartuva avara. tutkimus kolmen euraasialaisen luontaistalousyhteisön paikallisesta tiedosta pohjoisen ilmastonmuutoksen kehyksessä. publications in social sciences 92. university of joensuu, joensuu. myers ga 2009. naming and placing the other: power and the urban landscape in zanzibar. in berg l & vuolteenaho j (eds). critical toponymies, 85−100. ashgate, aldershot. naess a 1979. self-realization in mixed communities of humans, bears, sheep, and wolves. inquiry 22: 1−4, 231−241. naess a 1998. livsfilosofi. universitetsforlaget, oslo. nygren a 1998. environmental discourse: searching for sustainable development in costa rica. environmental values 7: 2, 201−222. pehkonen s 1999. “tänne, muttei pidemmälle!” altakamppailu ja pohjois-norjan monikulttuurinen maisema. rauhanja konfliktintutkimuskeskuksen tutkimuksia 88, tampere. raitio k 2008. ”you can’t please everyone”. conflict management practices, frames and institutions in finnish state forests. publications in social sciences 86. university of joensuu, joensuu. rantala l 2011. story of the ä´kkel (akkala) sámi. in mustonen t and mustonen k (eds). eastern sámi atlas, 188−191. snowchange, kontiolahti. rautio-helander k 2004. treatment of sámi settlement names in finnmark in official norwegian place name policy. died̄ut 3, 102−121. riipinen m 2008. sosiaalisen pääoman skaalaus. nordia geographical publications, oulu. rochelau d & roth r 2007. rooted networks, relational webs and power connection: rethinking human and political economies. geoforum 38: 3, 433−437. ruotsala h 2004. in the reindeer forest and the tundra. pro ethnologia 18: 1, 23−48. saarikivi j 2002. kieli suojelee luontoa. vihreä lanka 7, 10. sammallahti p 1989. sámi-suoma sáthegirji. jorgaleaddjiu, ohcejohka. sammallahti p 1993. saamelaissuomalainen sanakirja: sámi-suoma-sámi. jorgaleaddjiu, ohcejohka. saugestad s 2009. besvärliga urfolksrättigheter i afrika – fallet kalahari. in elenius l & ericsson l (eds). är vi inte alla minoriteter i världen?, 168−182. ordfront, stockholm. schanche a 2002. meahcci – den samiske utmarka. died̄ut 1, 156−172. schanche a 2004. horizontal and vertical perceptions of saami landscapes. died̄ut 3, 1−10. schwartz k 2006. nature and national identity after communism. university of pittsburgh press, pittsburgh. seierstad å 2008. groznyin enkelit. wsoy, helsinki. semi j 2010. sisäiset sijainnit. tutkimus sukupolvien paikkakokemuksista. dissertations in social sci-sertations in social sciences and business studies 2. university of eas-university of eastern finland, joensuu. seppänen m 1986. mikä luonnoista luonnollisin? ihmisen ”kolme luontoa” keski-andeilla keramiikan keksimisestä conquistadoreihin. kehitysmaantieteen yhdistyksen toimitteita 16. helsingin yliopisto, helsinki. setten g 2006. fusion or exclusion? reflections on conceptual practices of landscape and place in human geography. norsk geografisk tidskrift 60: 1, 32−45. sidaway jd, bunnel t, grundy-warr c, mohammed r, park bg & saito a 2004. translating political geographies. political geography 23: 8, 1037−1049. simonsen k 2004. networks, flows, and fluids – reimagining spatial analysis? environment and planning a 36: 8, 1333−1340. smith n 2005a. neo-critical geography, or, the flat pluralist world of business class. antipode 37: 5, 887−899. smith m 2005b. citizens, denizens and the res publica: environmental ethics, structures of feeling and political expression. environmental values 14: 2, 145−162. sparke m 1998. a map that roared and an original atlas: canada, cartography, and the narration of nation. annals of the association of american geographers 88: 3, 463−595. sparke m 2005. in the space of theory: postfoundational geographies of the nation-state. university of the minnesota press, minneapolis. sparke m 2007. acknowledging responsibility for space. progress in human geography 31: 3, 395−402. sparke m 2008. political geography – political geographies of globalization iii: resistance. progress in human geography 32: 3, 423−440. spinoza b 1982. to the most honourable and learned henry oldenburg from benedict de spinoza, letter 32, in part (written in november 20, 1665). in feldman s (ed). the ethics and selected letters, 244−246. hackett publishing company, indianapolis. susiluoto p 2000. suomen ajan ihmismaantiedettä petsamosta. in susiluoto p (ed). väinö tanner. ihmismaantieteellisiä tutkimuksia petsamon seudulta, 3−17. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, helsinki. 30 fennia 189: 2 (2011)ari aukusti lehtinen tanner v 1929a. petsamon alueen paikannimiä (résumé: les noms de lieux du territoire de petsamo). fennia 49: 3, 1−36. tanner v 1929b. antropogeografiska studier inom petsamo-området i. skolt-lapparna. fennia 49: 4, 1−416. thrift n 2008. non-representational theory. routledge, london. urry j 2000. sociology beyond societies. routledge, london. vaden t & tuusvuori js 2007. lappi paljastaa suomen. niin & näin 14: 4, 7−10. virtanen a 2006. taloudellinen elämä. in jakonen m, peltokoski j & virtanen a (eds). uuden työn sanakirja, 125−129. tutkijaliitto, helsinki. vähämäki j 2000. displacing the means of political control. in hänninen s & vähämäki j (eds). displacement of politics, 46−64. sophi, jyväskylä. the effect of severe ground frost on scots pine (pinus sylvestris) trees in northern finland and implications for palaeoclimate reconstruction mervi tuovinen, risto jalkanen and danny mccarroll tuovinen, mervi, risto jalkanen & danny mccarroll (2005). the effect of severe ground frost on scots pine (pinus sylvestris) trees in northern finland and implications for palaeoclimate reconstruction. fennia 183: 2, pp. 109–117. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. a severe frost event in the winter of 1986/1987 that resulted in widespread defoliation in northern finland was used to test the influence of such growth disturbances on tree ring parameters commonly used for palaeoclimate reconstruction. in mature pine trees there was no effect on ring widths, latewood densities or on stable carbon isotope ratios. in young trees, however, the effect was immediate and prolonged, with a measurable increase in water stress for two years and a suppression of ring widths lasting for 6 to 7 years. there was no effect on latewood density. where pine tree ring chronologies are used to reconstruct summer temperatures, the common practice of ignoring the juvenile years should ensure that severe frost events do not bias the reconstructions. however, extreme events may be important for understanding changes in forest dynamics, and changes in the magnitude, and frequency of such events may be important signals of human impact. the sensitivity of young pines makes them a potential archive for reconstructing past changes in growth disturbance events such as severe ground frosts. mervi tuovinen, department of geography, po box 3000, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: mervi.tuovinen@oulu.fi. risto jalkanen, finnish forest research institute, rovaniemi research unit, po box 16, fi-96301 rovaniemi, finland. e-mail: risto.jalkanen@metla.fi. danny mccarroll, department of geography, university of wales swansea, sa2 8pp, wales, uk. e-mail: d.mccarroll@swansea.ac.uk. ms received 15 december 2005. introduction trees provide one of the best natural archives of information on past fluctuations in climate and they have been relied upon heavily in quantifying the magnitude of anthropogenic climate change (mann et al. 1999; houghton et al. 2001). in the northern boreal zone, summer temperature is the most important factor influencing tree growth (hustich 1948; mikola 1950; briffa et al. 1990; briffa 1994; lindholm 1996; lindholm et al. 1999; jalkanen & tuovinen 2001; mccarroll et al. 2003; helama et al. 2004; tuovinen 2005), so that periods of low growth in the past are generally interpreted as having had cool summers. however, in addition to the importance of temperature, many other environmental factors affect tree growth, mainly through three primary physiological processes: photosynthesis, transpiration, and the uptake of nutrients and water. low stemwood production per unit of foliage has, for example, been associated with the inability of trees to accumulate reserves or to produce defensive compounds (waring 1987; kaufmann 1990). these abiotic or biotic factors may weaken the tree, decreasing growth in the following growing season(s) so that it becomes visible in the tree-ring chronology as a short-term decline. these declines in the tree-ring chronology are easily misinterpreted. environmental factors affect, directly or indirectly, not only the aboveground parts of trees but 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 109 12.6.2006 11:04:03 110 fennia 183: 2 (2005)mervi tuovinen, risto jalkanen and danny mccarroll also the roots and the entire rhizosphere. if the root system is disturbed, it may damage not only the health of the tree but also its growth. even in cold climates the hardening of roots is weaker than that of needles and shoots, so that temperatures of –10 to –20°c may cause root injuries in scots pine seedlings (lindström & nyström 1987; sutinen et al. 1996). according to korotaev (1994), scots pine roots can resist temperatures down to –28°c, whereas needle and shoots are hardy to between –50 and –70°c in winter (sakai & okada 1971). ground temperatures below –28°c can easily be reached when the soil is not insulated by snow, so root damage due to severe ground frost, which causes defoliation, is a potential source of confusion in interpreting tree ring chronologies from boreal forests. the impact of frost-induced root decline, and ensuing defoliation, on commonly measured tree ring parameters can be tested by examining the impact of a well known severe event that occurred in the winter of 1986/1987. an unusually warm autumn melted the protective cover of snow so that the extreme cold of winter was able to penetrate the soil, damaging the fine root network (kullman 1989, 1991; josefsson 1990; ritari 1990; jalkanen et al. 1995). in the following summer (1987) defoliation was evident in northern finland and sweden both on spruce (picea abies (l.) h. karst.) and pine (pinus sylvestris l.) (jalkanen 1988; kullman 1991, 1997). pines lost an average of 2.5 and a maximum of five sets of their oldest needles (jalkanen 1998). the needle loss was most severe on dry pine heaths, though even there only a few trees died due to the phenomenon (kullman & högberg 1989; jalkanen 1993). differences between the canopy reactions of young and old trees occurred (jalkanen et al. 1995). the aims of this study are: (1) to test whether the extreme growth disturbance event imparts a strong signal in the proxies commonly used to reconstruct summer temperatures, including ring widths, latewood densities and stable carbon isotope ratios. and (2) to determine whether any of the proxies might provide an archive of the past frequency and intensity of extreme growth disturbance events like ground frosts. we determine the ground frost severe, when low temperature damages tree roots and affects the tree growth. since it is known that there were differences in the canopy reaction of young (45 years in average) and mature (130 years in average) pine trees (jalkanen et al. 1995), they are considered separately. materials and methods site description two sets of ten healthy looking scots pine trees, 45 and 130 years in average age, were selected from two adjacent sites among the dominant trees at an altitude of 150 m above sea level, in the kivalo research area of the finnish forest research institute at vanttauskoski (66°22’n, 26°43’e), near the arctic circle. it is known that the defoliation occurred on this area (jalkanen et al. 1995) but no records on the actual defoliation exactly on these pine trees are available. the site lies in the transition zone between the middle and northern boreal vegetation zones, between ostrobothnia and forest lapland (fig. 1). the climate is semi-continental, and the fine-textured sandy soils support a dry pine-heath forest (hämet-ahti 1988) dominated by scots pine. average annual mean temperature, based on the models by ojansuu and henttonen (1983), is –0.1°c. mean july temperature is 14.6°c (1961–1996) and annual precipitation 540 mm. the effective temperature sum (1962–1999; thresh100 km n27° 68° 67° 68° 67° for est line rovaniem i finland fig. 1. location of the rovaniemi sampling site. 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 110 12.6.2006 11:04:04 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 111the effect of severe ground frost on scots pine (pinus sylvestris) … ground frost, open stand 76 /j an n ov d ec 77 /j an n ov d ec 78 /j an n ov d ec 79 /j an n ov d ec 80 /j an n ov d ec 81 /j an n ov d ec 82 /j an n ov d ec 83 /j an n ov d ec 84 /j an n ov d ec 85 /j an n ov d ec 86 /j an n ov d ec 87 /j an 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 cm year/ month snow depth -90 -80 -70 -60 -50 -40 -30 -20 -10 0 gound frost, open stand ground frost, mire cm 76 /j an n ov d ec 77 /j an n ov d ec 78 /j an n ov d ec 79 /j an n ov d ec 80 /j an n ov d ec 81 /j an n ov d ec 82 /j an n ov d ec 83 /j an n ov d ec 84 /j an n ov d ec 85 /j an n ov d ec 86 /j an n ov d ec 87 /j an 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 cm year/ month snow depth -90 -80 -70 -60 -50 -40 -30 -20 -10 0 gound frost, open stand ground frost, mire cm ground frost, open stand ground frost, mire fig. 2. the depth of snow and ground frost in january, november and december in rovaniemi 1976–1987. old value +5°c) is 867 degree days (ojansuu & henttonen 1983). in this area, snow cover typically builds up in early november and persists until mid may (solantie et al. 1996), effectively insulating the ground from the effects of extreme winter temperatures. however, during late november and early december of 1986, conditions were exceptionally warm and the protective cover of snow melted completely (fig. 2). this was followed by a cold period with minimum temperatures in nearby rovaniemi of –31.5°c in december and –39.2°c in january 1987. this combination of very low temperatures and an absence of snow cover is exceedingly rare, with a recurrence interval of perhaps once in hundred years (solantie et al. 1996), and it resulted in rapid cooling of the soil (jalkanen et al. 1995). in northern finland the soil thermal capacity is so low that, in the absence of an insulating layer, minimum temperatures have a significant effect on the depth of freezing (solantie et al. 1996). extremely low temperatures, with a late or very thin snow cover, can lower the temperature in the upper part of coarse-textured soils down to –30°c (jansson 1991). in 1987 the forest soils around rovaniemi remained frozen until july (ritari 1990), even though may and june precipitation totals were above average. materials each tree was felled, and a disk at breast height was taken for tree-ring analysis. radial growth was measured from four radii per disk. earlyand latewood densities and widths were measured from one radius per tree using standard x-ray techniques (schweingruber 1989). stable carbon isotope ratios of the latewood cellulose of ten young trees and six older trees were measured using the methods described by mccarroll and pawellek (1998, 2001). meteorological data measured at apukka, rovaniemi (66°35’n, 26°01’e, 106 m a.s.l.), 35 km from the field site, were supplied by the finnish meteorological institute. methods the width and density chronologies (early and latewood as well as whole ring) were cross-dated and standardised using a 67% spline together with arma modelling to reduce autocorrelation and to pre-whiten the standardised series (box & jenkins 1976; cook 1985; guiot 1986). the program arstan (holmes et al. 1986) was employed. chronology statistics are presented in table 1. the stable carbon isotope series were detrended and normalised, to equalise the mean 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 111 12.6.2006 11:04:05 112 fennia 183: 2 (2005)mervi tuovinen, risto jalkanen and danny mccarroll and variance of the results from the young and old trees. this is necessary to remove the influence of the juvenile effect, which imparts a rising trend in the results from young trees (mccarroll & loader 2004). results mature trees the effects of the winter frost were very obvious in the summer of 1988, with widespread defoliation of pine trees of all age classes, so it is remarkable that there is almost no effect on the measured tree ring parameters from the mature trees. ring widths were unaffected, with both annual and widths recording higher values than before the frost event. the rise and fall of the ring width curve between 1987 and 1990 mirrors the fluctuations in mean july temperatures, and there is no evidence of any aberrant behaviour. the stable carbon isotope ratios similarly show no effect. at this site, the stable carbon isotope ratios are controlled mainly by moisture regime (mccarroll & pawellek 2001), with summer humidity (mean of june and july) and antecedent rainfall (february to july) explaining more than 47% of the variance in δ13c. the relationship between summer temperature and δ13c is very weak and not statistically significant (r = 0.2, p > 0.05). the stable isotope ratios from the mature trees in the years 1987 to 1990 lie very close to the values that would have been expected given the relative humidity and antecedent moisture conditions. they do not form residuals in the regression model and there is no indication of any increase in moisture stress. the only identifiable response in the mature trees is an increase in earlywood density in the event year, which persisted until 1990. however, the expressed population signal for the earlywood density results (0.76) falls well below that normally required for any palaeoclimate reconstruction, so these results must be treated with caution. latewood density values show no response. young trees in marked contrast to the mature trees, the young trees show a clear and persistent response to the severe frost event. the first evidence of unusual behaviour occurs in the stable carbon isotope ratios in the two years immediately after the harsh winter. in comparison with the rest of the series, the isotope values for these years are not anomalously high, but when compared with the results obtained from the mature trees they stand out as clear positive residuals, indicating higher than expected moisture stress. this is consistent with damage to the fine root network. by 1989 the isotope ratios had recovered and thereafter they mirror those obtained from the mature trees. table 1. chronology statistics of tree ring, earlywood and latewood widths and densities. eps = expressed population signal. trees width mm mean standard autocorrel. eps n density g/c3 sensitivity deviation ord 1 young trees tree ring width 10 1.84 0.12 0.20 0.63 0.89 earlywood width 10 1.13 0.11 0.15 0.51 0.87 latewood width 10 0.30 0.18 0.20 0.37 0.90 earlywood density 10 0.22 0.12 0.16 0.51 0.82 latewood density 10 0.62 0.48 0.43 0.20 0.90 old trees tree ring width 10 0.99 0.20 0.18 0.65 0.88 earlywood width 6 0.61 0.15 0.21 0.59 0.85 latewood width 6 0.28 0.22 0.26 0.43 0.86 earlywood density 6 0.29 0.16 0.15 0.17 0.76 latewood density 6 0.72 0.59 0.51 0.10 0.91 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 112 12.6.2006 11:04:05 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 113the effect of severe ground frost on scots pine (pinus sylvestris) … fig. 3. comparison of tree ring parameters from young (thin line) and mature (thick line) pine trees. the mean and variance have been equalised for ease of comparison. the most marked response occurs in the ring widths. before the frost event the average indexed radial growth of young and mature scots pine (fig. 3) fluctuates in parallel (r = 0.67, p = 0.45). after 1987, however, the radial growth of the mature trees continued at a high level, whereas that of the young trees declined immediately and rapidly. the minimum radial growth index was reached in 1990 and the decline and the following recovery took six to seven years (fig. 3). the maximum response may have been delayed because stored carbohydrates were available in the summer following the disturbance, and this was complemented by the withdrawal of energy and nutrients from the older needles, before they died (jalkanen 1998). at the turn of the decade, reserves were depleted, leading to the worst decline in radial growth, until growth recovered in the early 1990s. the decline in radial growth is apparent in both earlywood and latewood widths, with minimum values reached in 1989 and 1991, respectively. latewood width recovered more rapidly than earlywood width, reflecting the greater importance of reserves in contributing to earlywood formation. the variance in the first eigenvector on young trees was higher after the harsh winter event than before it (table 2), indicating that the response of the radial growth to the severe ground frost was more similar in young than in mature trees. it is interesting to note that despite the clear influence of the frost event on both stable carbon isotope ratios and ring widths of the young trees, the maximum latewood density results show virtually no response. this is important because, of all of the proxies measured in this study, this parameter yields the highest expressed population signal 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 113 12.6.2006 11:04:06 114 fennia 183: 2 (2005)mervi tuovinen, risto jalkanen and danny mccarroll and also the strongest correlation with summer temperature. there is an increase in earlywood density after 1987 but, as for the mature trees, this parameter yields a very low eps and so the results must be interpreted very cautiously. discussion in terms of the use of tree ring parameters to reconstruct summer temperatures in the boreal forests, the results of this study are comforting. both ring widths and latewood densities of mature pine trees showed no discernable response to the severe frost event that occurred in the winter of 1986/1987, even though this resulted in widespread defoliation. nor has nöjd (1992) found any significant decline in older trees in southern lapland in the late 1980s. even the stable carbon isotope ratios, which at this site are sensitive to the moisture regime, showed no signs of increased moisture stress in mature trees. it would seem that tree ring width and density chronologies based on mature pine trees are likely to provide a reliable proxy for summer temperature even where severe winter ground frosts have resulted in widespread loss of older needle sets. these results confirm the wisdom of removing the juvenile portion of tree ring chronologies prior to palaeoclimate reconstruction. however, an alternative interpretation is that the tree ring parameters measured on mature pine trees are effectively masking growth-disturbance events such as extreme ground frosts that are, nevertheless, important for understanding long-term changes in the vitality and growth dynamics of the forest as a whole. on this sampling site only the young trees record such events because they are more vulnerable and therefore more sensitive. the root system of mature trees covers a wider area than that of young trees (aaltonen 1920) and the most vulnerable fine roots, less than 1 mm in diameter, are deeper in the soil in older than younger trees (kalela 1950). ground vegetation competes with trees by taking nutrients and water from the uppermost soil layers (kalela 1950), so following root decline the young trees are at a competitive disadvantage. older trees also have thicker roots, so they have larger carbon storages from which to replenish the network of fine roots. tree growth of the tree starts with the reserves left from the previous years, which might explain why the earlywood width decreased on young trees whereas the mature trees did not show any evidence of the event. even though severe frost events may have little lasting effect on mature pine trees in the boreal forests, their clear and persistent influence on the growth of young trees on this sampling site suggest table 2. mean tree ring parameters and variance in first eigenvector (%pc1) of young (average age 45 years) and old (average age 130 years) scots pines in 6-year periods prior and post the root decline in winter 1986/1987 at vanttauskoski, rovaniemi. the percentage indicates change in growth after the event. growth growth % pc1 width mm, density g/cc indexed 1981–1986 1987–1992 % 1981–1986 1987–1992 % 1977–1986 1987–1996 young trees tree ring width 2.02 1.05 52.0 1.06 0.74 69.6 30.3 82.0 earlywood width 1.15 0.65 55.9 1.05 0.79 75.3 41.8 77.7 latewood width 0.36 0.21 58.6 1.11 0.78 70.7 42.4 71.6 earlywood density 2.14 2.31 108.1 0.70 1.06 109.4 41.9 45.9 latewood density 6.21 6.62 106.5 0.84 0.94 112.2 71.3 75.0 old trees tree ring width 0.80 0.96 121.0 0.88 1.07 122.0 48.1 30.4 earlywood width 0.50 0.56 117.8 0.85 1.05 123.0 47.0 42.0 latewood width 0.30 0.28 90.9 0.97 0.99 101.6 50.9 44.9 earlywood density 2.74 2.79 101.5 0.99 1.08 109.7 46.5 47.3 latewood density 7.35 7.36 100.1 0.98 0.99 100.5 82.0 61.2 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 114 12.6.2006 11:04:06 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 115the effect of severe ground frost on scots pine (pinus sylvestris) … that they may be very important in understanding changes in the forest as a whole. changes in the frequency of such extreme events would have a large impact on seedling survival, for example, and could help to explain large changes in recruitment during cold intervals such as the little ice age. even the position of the tree limit might be partly controlled by such extremes. kullman (1990), for example, has suggested that permafrost or recurring ground freezing partly controls the northern limit of spruce trees. a reliable record of past growth-disturbance events due to severe ground freezing might also illuminate any increase in frequency that may have resulted either from anthropogenic climate change or from changes in land use practice. if global warming leads to warmer autumns in fennoscandia, associated with cold winters, then the frequency of years when low temperatures are able to penetrate a thin or absent snow cover is likely to increase. it would be particularly interesting to investigate whether changes in forest management over the last few decades, and in particular increased pressure from reindeer herding, have resulted in an increase in the severity of frost-induced growth disturbance events in the absence of any change in winter climate. rather than taking the herds to summer pastures beyond the forest limit, reindeer are now allowed to graze in much of the northern forests all year. the result is that the thick lichen layer that previously existed is now largely absent from areas that are not actively protected. this thick layer acted to insulate the soil from extremes of temperature. removing it also disturbs the symbiosis between trees and mycorrhizal fungi, thus influencing their vitality and perhaps resistance to extremes. the results presented here suggest that it may be feasible to record changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme growth-disturbance events such as deep ground frosts by examining the difference in response of young and mature pine trees. acknowledgements the work is a part of the eu-funded forest (env4ct95-0063) and pine (evk2-ct-2002-00136) projects and was in part funded by the academy of finland (no. 34203) and societas annales botanici fennici. density samples were prepared and analysed at the finnish forest research institute, vantaa, wsl in birmensdorf and at the university of marseilles. we thank mr. kari sauvala, mr. tapio järvinen and dr. jean-louis edouard for technical assistance and msc mari sonninen and msc mauri timonen for their advice. we thank prof. olavi heikkinen for thoughtful comments of this manuscript. references aaltonen vt (1920). über die ausbreitung und den reichtum der baumwurzel in den heidewälden lapplands. acta forestalia fennica 14. box gep & gm jenkins (1976). time series analysis: forecasting and control. 575 p. holden-day, oakland, california. briffa k (1994). mid and late holocene climate change: evidence from tree growth in northern fennoscandia. in funnell bm & rlf kay (eds). paleoclimate of the last glacial/interglacial cycle. earth sciences directorate, special publication 94/2, 61–65. briffa k, t bartholin, d eckstein, pd jones, w karlén, fh schweingruber & p zetterberg (1990). a 1,400year tree-ring record of summer temperatures in fennoscandia. nature 346, 434–439. cook er (1985). a time series analysis approach to tree-ring standardization. 171 p. lamont-doherty geological observatory, new york. guiot j (1986). arma techniques for modelling treering response to climate and for reconstructing variation of paleoclimates. ecological modelling 33, 149–171. hämet-ahti l (1988). suomen kasvillisuuden pääpiirteet, metsäkasvillisuus. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 141: vegetation and flora, 1–2. national board of survey and geographical society of finland, helsinki. helama s, j holopainen, m timonen, mg ogurtsov, m lindholm, j meriläinen & m eronen (2004). comparison of living-tree and subfossil ringwidths with summer temperatures from 18th, 19th and 20th centuries in northern finland. dendrochronologia 21: 3, 147–154. holmes rl, rk adams & hc fritts (1986). tree-ring chronologies of western north america: california, eastern oregon and great basin, with procedures used in the chronology development work, including user manuals for computer programs cofecha and arstan. laboratory of tree-ring research, university of arizona, tucson. chronology series vi, 50–56. houghton jt, y ding, dj griggs, m noguer, pj van der linden, x dai, k maskell & ca johnson (eds) (2001). climate change 2001. the scientific basis. 881 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. hustich i (1948). the scots pine in northernmost finland and its dependence on the climate in last decades. acta botanica fennica 42. 75 p.75 p. jalkanen r (1988). faller även de sista barren av trä23240_3_tuovinen.indd 115 12.6.2006 11:04:06 116 fennia 183: 2 (2005)mervi tuovinen, risto jalkanen and danny mccarroll den i norra finland? norra finlands hårt provade träd. skogsaktuellt 1/1988, 8–11. jalkanen r (1993). defoliation of pines caused by injury to roots resulting from low temperatures. in jalkanen r, t aalto & ml lahti (eds). forest pathological research in northern forests with a special reference to abiotic stress factors. extended sns meeting in forest pathology in lapland, finland, 3–7 august, 1992. metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 451, 77–88. jalkanen r (1998). fluctuation in the number of needle sets and needle shed in pinus sylvestris. scandinavian journal of forest research 13, 284–291. jalkanen r, t aalto, k derome, k niska & a ritari (1995). lapin neulaskato. männyn neulaskatoon 1987 johtaneet tekijät pohjois-suomessa. lop-loppuraportti (summary: needle loss in lapland. factors leading to needle loss of scots pine in 1987 in northern finland). metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 544. 75 p.75 p. jalkanen r & m tuovinen (2001). annual needle production and height growth: better climate predictors than radial growth at treeline? dendrochronologia 19: 1, 39–44. jansson pe (1991). simulation model for soil water and heat conditions. description of the soil mo-at conditions. description of the soil mo-description of the soil model. sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, institutionen för markvetenskap, avdelningen för lantbrukets hydroteknik, rapport 165. 72 p.72 p. josefsson m (1990). ground temperature variations inground temperature variations in subarctic mountain valley, abisko, northern sweden. geografiska annaler 73a, 179–190. kalela ek (1950). männiköiden ja kuusikoiden juurisuhteista 1 (summary: on the horizontal roots in pine and spruce stand). acta forestalia fennica 57. 79 p. kaufmann mr (1990). ecophysiological processes affecting tree growth: water relationships. in dixon rk, rs meldahl, ga ruark & wg warren (eds). process modeling of forest growth responses to environmental stress, 64–78. timber press, portland. korotaev aa (1994). untersuchungen zur frostresistenz von baumwurzeln. forstarchiv 65, 93–95. kullman l (1989). geoecological aspects of episodic permafrost expansion in north sweden. geografiska annaler 71a, 255–262.71a, 255–262. kullman l (1990). dynamics of altitudinal tree-limits in sweden: a review. norsk geografisk tidskrift 44, 103–116. kullman l (1991). ground frost restriction of subarctic picea abies forest in northern sweden, a dendroecological analysis. geografiska annaler 73a, 167–178. kullman l (1997). tree-limit stress and disturbance. a 25-year survey of geoecological change in the scandes mountains of sweden. geografiska annaler 79a, 139–165. kullman l & n högberg (1989). rapid natural decline of upper montane forests in the swedish scandes. arctic 42, 217–226. lindholm m (1996). reconstructions of past climate from ring-width chronologies of scots pine (pinus sylvestris l.) at the northern forest limit in fennoscandia. university of joensuu, publications in sciences 40. 169 p. lindholm m, m eronen, m timonen & j meriläinen (1999). a ring width chronology of scots pinea ring width chronology of scots pine from northern lapland covering the last two millennia. annales botanici fennici 36, 119–126. lindström a & c nyström (1987). seasonal variation in root hardiness of container-grown scots pine, norway spruce, and lodgepole pine seedlings. canadian journal of forest research 17, 787– 793. mann me, rs bradely & mk hughes (1999). northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties and limitations. geophysical research letters 26, 759–762. mccarroll d, r jalkanen, s hicks, m tuovinen, m gagen, f pawellek, d eckstein, u schmitt, j autio & o heikkinen (2003). multi-proxy dendroclimatology: a pilot study in northern finland. the holocene 13: 6, 829–838. mccarroll d & nj loader (2004). stable isotopes in tree rings. quaternary science reviews 23, 771– 801. mccarroll d & f pawellek (1998). stable carbon isotope ratios of latewood cellulose in pinus sylvestris from northern finland: variability and signal strength. the holocene 8: 6, 675–684. mccarroll d & f pawellek (2001). stable carbon isotope ratios of pinus sylvestris from northern finland and the potential for extracting a climate signal from long fennoscandian chronologies. the holocene 11: 5, 517–526. mikola p (1950). puiden kasvun vaihteluista ja niiden merkityksestä kasvututkimuksissa (summary: on variations in tree growth an their significance to growth studies). communicationes instituti forestalis fenniae 38: 5. 131 p. nöjd p (1992). männyn kasvunvaihtelu itä-lapin metsävaurioprojektin eteläisillä koealalinjoilla – alustavia tuloksia (abstract: variation in scots pine growth in lapland – a gradient study). in kauhanen h & m varmola (eds). itä-lapin metsävaurio-itä-lapin metsävaurioprojektin väliraportti (summary: the lapland forest damage project: interim report). metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 413, 206–214. ojansuu r & h henttonen (1983). kuukauden keskilämpötilan, lämpösumman ja sademäärän paikallisten arvojen johtaminen ilmatieteen laitoksen mittaustiedoista (summary: estimation of local(summary: estimation of local values of monthly mean temperature, effective temperature sum and precipitation sum from the measurements made by the finnish meteorological office). silva fennica 17: 2, 143–160. ritari a (1990). temperature, snow and soil frost conditions in northern finland during winter 1986– 1987, viewed against a longer recording period. in kinnunen k & m varmola (eds). effects of air pollutants and acidification in combination with 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 116 12.6.2006 11:04:07 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 117the effect of severe ground frost on scots pine (pinus sylvestris) … climatic factors on forests, soils, and waters in northern fennoscandia. report from a workshop held in rovaniemi, finland. 17–19 october 1988. nord, miljörapport 2/1990, 44–52. sakai a & s okada (1971). freezing resistance of conifers. silvae genetica 20, 91–97. schweingruber fh (1989). tree rings. basic applications of dendrochronology. 276 p. kluwer, dor-276 p. kluwer, dordrecht. solantie r, a drebs, e hellsten & p saurio (1996). lumipeitteen tulo-, lähtöja kestoajoista suomessa talvina 1960/1961–1992/1993. meteorological publications 34. 159 p. sutinen ml, k mäkitalo & r sutinen (1996). freezingfreezing dehydration damages roots of containerized scots pine (pinus sylvestris) seedlings overwintering under subarctic conditions. canadian journal of forest research 26, 1602–1609. tuovinen m (2005). response of tree-ring width and density of pinus sylvestris to climate beyond the continuous northern forest line in finland. dendrochronologia 22, 83–91. waring rh (1987). characteristics of trees predisposed to die. bioscience 37, 569–574. 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 117 12.6.2006 11:04:07 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 118 12.6.2006 11:04:07 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 119 12.6.2006 11:04:07 23240_3_tuovinen.indd 120 12.6.2006 11:04:07 28571_4_vasanen.pdf deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population distribution in the turku urban region, 1980–2005 antti vasanen vasanen, antti (2009). deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population distribution in the turku urban region, 1980–2005. fennia 187: 2, pp. 115–127. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. many urban regions in developed countries have experienced major changes during the past few decades. the deconcentration trend of urban regions has been accompanied with new processes where traditional monocentric cities have been replaced by increasingly polycentric urban constellations. this study seeks to present evidence on how finnish urban regions have developed in recent decades using the turku urban region as an example. the results show that the turku urban region has indeed become more polycentric when population distribution is considered. global socio-demographic trends, the housing careers of young families and municipal planning policies were found to affect the changing population distribution. the paper is concluded by highlighting the importance of scale in the development of finnish urban regions. the fundamental factor in urban regional dynamics seems to be a conflict in scale, in which demographic processes influence the urban spatial structure on the regional scale whereas planning practices have predominantly effects on the municipal scale. antti vasanen, department of geography, fi-20014 university of turku, finland. e-mail: antti.vasanen@utu.fi. ms received 24.02.2009. introduction during recent decades, urban regions across developed countries have experienced considerable changes. the outward shift of population and overall deconcentration of urban regions have characterised most cities; a trend initiated by the development of public transportation systems and accelerated by private car ownership (millward & bunting 2008). more recently, globalisation, expanding knowledge and information based economy and changing demographic composition have dramatically changed the structure of urban regions as traditional monocentric cities have given way to more polycentric urban constellations (hall 1993; musterd et al. 2006). the trend towards increasing polycentricity was first discovered in the united states, where new economic nodes, or edge cities as they were named by garreau (1991), were observed in the peripheral outskirts of metropolitan regions. in europe, the dense settlement system and high population density created distinct polycentric urban development, which became visible through the transition from traditional hierarchical relations between urban subcentres to polycentric urban constellations where also complementary relations between the nodes existed (dieleman & faludi 1998; kloosterman & musterd 2001; parr 2004; hall & pain 2006). however, as beauregard and haila (1997: 328) emphasise, despite the emergence of subcentres, central cities in europe still function as dominant cores for their regions and american cities continue to have downtowns. the new processes shaping urban areas have never replaced the old ones completely, which has lead to a complex pattern of old and new urban structures. urban regions in finland have also gone through considerable changes. the urbanisation in finland took place fairly recently, with the most rapid urban population growth occurring in the 1960s and 116 fennia 187: 2 (2009)antti vasanen 1970s. this resulted in rather peculiar urban development, where the process of urbanisation mostly took place in the form of suburbanisation. in finland, the major trends in urban development since the end of the second world war have been the continuous concentration of population to urban regions with simultaneous suburbanisation. vartiainen (1991) has described this process with the term regionalisation, which is typified by both nationwide population concentration and the regional dispersion of population. the regional aspect has grown increasingly important in the finnish context during the past decade as urban population growth has increasingly taken place in the remoter parts of urban areas. although a lot of research has been conducted on urban issues in finland, the regional aspect of urban development has recently been a rather scarcely researched subject. this paper aims at providing understanding on the complex dynamics behind changing urban structure during the period of 1980–2005 using the turku urban region as a case study. the purpose of this paper is not simply to make deterministic generalisations of the dynamics of the urban structure in turku but to provide a broader view on the changes visible in finnish urban regions. the paper begins by discussing recent theoretical and empirical research regarding changes in urban population distribution and urban dynamics in general. the theoretical section is followed by a description of the research data and used methods as well as a brief introduction to the study area. in the succeeding section, the empirical results of the paper are presented followed then by discussion and conclusions where the results are reflected against the wider societal and theoretical context. recent trends in urban population distribution two major trends have become evident when considering recent changes in urban spatial structure. first, a large number of studies have examined different forms of decentralisation or deconcentration processes all around the developed world. the terminology linked to the deconcentration of human activities within urban regions has ranged from counterurbanisation to urban sprawl (berry 1976a; fielding 1982; van den berg et al. 1982; champion 1989; geyer & kontuly 1993; bruegmann 2005; eea 2006). secondly, the emergence of new urban centres within urban regions has been noted by many scholars particularly in northern america and in western europe (garreau 1991; anas et al. 1998; dieleman & faludi 1998; kloosterman & musterd 2001; parr 2004; hall & pain 2006). this trend of evolving multinodality in urban regions was largely recognised in the early 1990s and it has since been an inseparable part of the way urban regions are understood. although the processes leading to the decentralisation of urban population have been well recognised in several cities in europe and north america, the predominant trend in population change has been growing metropolitan areas and declining peripheries. the turnaround in this trend was first documented in the united states where the population shift from metropolitan to non-metropolitan regions was documented in the 1970s (beale 1975; berry 1976a; beale 1977). this turnaround, or counterurbanisation as it was named by berry (1976a), is an ambiguous concept. in his seminal article, berry (1976b: 17) defines counterurbanisation simply as “a process of population deconcentration”. the imprecision of the concept’s definition led, according to mitchell (2004: 27), to a myriad of different interpretations of the deconcentration process. mitchell (2004) categorises different viewpoints on counterurbanisation according to whether counterurban population growth occurs in adjacent areas to metropolitan regions, in peripheral locations, or down the settlement hierarchy. common to these definitions, however, is that in every category population growth takes place in areas beyond the suburban or metropolitan region. as a theoretical concept counterurbanisation was questioned relatively soon after its emergence. in britain, champion (1987) demonstrated that rural population growth and metropolitan decline peaked in the early 1970s only to stabilise again in the following decade into much smaller population growth differences between rural and urban regions. similar results were reported by richter (1985) and long and deare (1988) concerning the population trends in the united states. furthermore, long and nucci (1997) demonstrated that although metropolitan population growth in the us surpassed non-metropolitan growth in the 1980s, features of population deconcentration were again visible in the 1990s. vartiainen (1989: 223) stated that the conceptual framework of counterurbanisation together with such concepts as reurbanisation and gentrification are “losing fennia 187: 2 (2009) 117deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population … sight of a more flexible socio-spatial organisation, where deconcentration may evolve together with concentration”. vartiainen (1989) calls this process regionalisation after the swedish scholars ventura and wärneryd (1983). based on an empirical example from finland, antikainen and vartiainen (2002) define regionalisation as the growth of large urban regions where population growth branches out to surrounding rural areas whereas the growth of economic activities are increasingly concentrated in the urban centre. geyer and kontuly (1993) expanded the discussion on counterurbanisation to also include developing countries by introducing the concept of differential urbanisation. the theoretical model of differential urbanisation principally outlines the development of national urban systems, but also addresses urban development on a metropolitan scale. in the model, counterurbanisation is seen as an advanced stage of urban system, in which population shifts take place from the large cities towards small urban centres. this phase of urban development is preceded by the stages of rapid urbanisation of primate cities and their gradual maturing characterised by the shift of population growth from the central areas to suburban locations (geyer & kontuly 1993; geyer 1996). on the subnational scale, the model of differential urbanisation closely resembles the model of urban development introduced first by dutch scholars in the early 1980s (klaassen & scimemi 1981; van den berg et al. 1982). the first stage of the model is urbanisation characterised by the fast growth of cities at the cost of their surrounding countryside. urbanisation is followed by suburbanisation as cities grow and sprawl into their surrounding area. the third stage of the model is counterurbanisation succeeded finally by the fourth stage, reurbanisation, which refers to the revival of old urban centres. extensive empirical illustrations testing the theory of differential urbanisation were published in the special issue of tijdscrift voor economische en sociale geografie in the early 2000s (kontuly & geyer 2003a). using evidence based on cases from nine different countries, kontuly and geyer (2003b) concluded that the differential urbanisation model is consistent with reality. in more than half of the studied countries, urban development followed the sequence of stages proposed by the model and in the rest of the cases the anomalies could have be explained through policy interventions. according to kontuly and geyer (2003b), finland went through all the stages of differential urbanisation and was the only country to progress thorough the whole cycle and then moving again into the phase of urbanisation. in finland, the first urbanisation stage took place in the 1940s when the population of helsinki grew rapidly (heikkilä 2003). during the 1960s, the population of the largest cities began to deconcentrate leading the country to enter into the counterurbanisation phase. according to heikkilä (2003), the second cycle of differential urbanisation started in the 1990s when population in the largest cities of finland again started to grow. from the 1990s onwards, the identification of new patterns of urban structure has proceeded rapidly (champion & hugo 2004). according to anas et al. (1998: 1426) urban regions have been spreading out for a long time but only recently has the “process of decentralization taken a more polycentric form”, which has been characterised by the fragmentation of urban spatial structure and the emergence of new business districts in the urban periphery. perhaps the most renowned concept describing the new urban form is joel garreau’s (1991) edge city, which refers to a large concentration of office and retail space that was “nothing like city just a few decades ago” (garreau 1991: 6–7). although edge cities are mainly associated with the urban form of, for example, los angeles, similar, but not identical, patterns of urban development have also been observed in europe (e.g. hitz et al. 1994; phelps & parson 2003; bontje & burdack 2005). in european research literature, polycentric urban development refers rather to a multinodal settlement structure than to a rise of economic subcentres. the term polycentric urban region has emerged in various contexts describing mainly urban development in north-western europe (e.g. dieleman & faludi 1998; kloosterman & musterd 2001). according to dieleman and faludi (1998: 366), a polycentric urban region is a large urban region that does not contain a single primary city. the term, therefore, refers rather to inter-metropolitan than intra-metropolitan polycentric patterns, of which the most often used examples include the dutch randstad, the belgian flemish diamond and the german rhine-ruhr area. the term polycentricity has occasionally been used more broadly to describe national urban networks (e.g. antikainen & vartiainen 2005; meijers et al. 2005) instead of functional cohesive entities. this broad definition, however, differs largely from the characteris118 fennia 187: 2 (2009)antti vasanen tics of polycentric urban regions, which according to kloosterman and musterd (2001) require sufficient proximity to enable commuting between the urban nuclei. the concept of polycentric urban region has gained largely purpose-oriented connotations as it has been adopted by planners and politicians. furthermore, many scholars have questioned the actual existence of polycentricity within urban regions in practice. musterd and van zelm (2001: 694) argue that in functional terms, such as cross commuting, the randstad polycentric urban region does not exist. instead they recognise several smaller functional entities within the region. parr (2004: 239) questions the validity of the concept of polycentric urban regions and argues that it should not be treated as an established theoretical concept “but rather as a hypothesis in need of testing”. furthermore, hall et al. (2006: 87) reason that “some of europe’s major metropolitan areas are intrinsically more polycentric than others.” as musterd and van zelm (2001) demonstrate in the dutch context, relatively small daily urban systems can be regarded as polycentric functional units. they argue that polycentrism is reality at the intra-metropolitan rather than the inter-metropolitan level, which is undoubtedly true in the wider european context as well (musterd & van zelm 2001; cf. kloosterman & musterd 2001). in their further analysis of the amsterdam metropolitan region, musterd et al. (2006) underline that although the historic city centre has not lost its position in the urban system, amsterdam is clearly a polycentric urban region and both population and economic tendencies point towards increasing intrametropolitan polycentricity (musterd et al. 2006). research setting study area the urban region as a study area is not a straightforward concept at least in the finnish context. recent research addressing urban regions has been policy-driven and the basis for determining the urban region has formed twofold. at first, the need for describing the nationwide urban network in finland led to a series of studies on urban regions carried out mainly by the ministry of the interior (antikainen 2001; antikainen & vartiainen 2005). in these studies, urban regions were defined merely as nuts-4 regions, which are mainly used as units of statistical classification and have very few administrative functions. although these regions coincide with functional urban regions in most cases somewhat adequately, they are mainly usable in large scale regional comparisons. a second approach to urban regions has addressed the rapidly changing internal structure of urban regions and has been initiated by the ministry of the environment (e.g. ristimäki et al. 2003; helminen & ristimäki 2007). this approach has been more analytical defining the extent of the urban region according to the spatial distribution of population and workplaces. however, the definitions of region have emphasised more physical than functional features of urban regions. in this study, urban region is defined by adopting john parr’s (2007) four different spatial definitions of the city. first, parr describes the built city (bc), which is composed of the continuous builtup area of housing, manufacturing, transport etc. and of which population exceeds a certain level. the second approach to defining the urban region is the consumption city, which involves the bc and all the localities dependent of the goods and services offered by the bc. parr’s third definition of the city, the employment city, includes the bc as well as the localities where at least every other employee commutes to the bc. as commuters also support employment opportunities in their resident localities, and thus increase the dependence of the given locality on the bc, the actual share of the commuters of the localities included in the employment city is notably smaller than 50 per cent. the fourth definition of the city, the workforce city, represents the area from which a certain number of the workforce of the bc is drawn. the workforce city is based on a series of isolines starting from the boundary of the bc and continuing until the given majority of the bc’s workforce is reached. the challenge with this approach is to define the particular given percentage of the outer extent of the workforce city. since a small number of the bc’s workforce resides very far from the city, the hundred per cent isoline would not define the city appropriately and some other, rather arbitrary percentage needs to be chosen. in this study, the employment city incorporating the densely built up area with its commuting region forms the most usable approach to the study area. the outer extent of the workforce city is difficult to define and reliable data for defining the consumption city are unavailable at least on the required scale. the built city in the turku urban fennia 187: 2 (2009) 119deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population … region includes the central areas of turku and three of its neighbouring municipalities: raisio, kaarina and naantali (fig. 1). since municipalities are used as spatial units defining the extent of the study area, these four cities together form a core urban area. however, because of its elongated shape, turku includes also some predominately rural areas in the northern parts of the city. thus, the commuting centre is defined as the densely built-up area of the core urban area (bc) and not as the outer extent of four municipalities. furthermore, the municipal borders are defined in this study as they were in 2008 and the numerous municipal mergers that took place in finland in 2009 are ignored. the commuting region is divided into two categories. the inner commuting region includes the municipalities, where at least half of the employed workforce commutes to the core area. as parr (2007) points out, the dependence of the commuting locality on the central city emerges at commuting levels of less than 50 per cent and thus, the outer commuting region was included in the study area, from which at least a quarter of the workforce commutes to the central area of the turku urban region. although the division between the inner and outer commuting region seems random and purely statistical, the municipalities belonging to these two categories represent some significant differences. the municipalities in the inner commuting region are mainly small formerly rural communities, which nowadays are increasingly dependent on the jobs and services of the core city, whereas the outer commuting region includes mainly larger towns with better service infrastructure and job self-sufficiency. data the empirical data used in this study are obtained from the urban structure monitoring system maintained by the finnish environment institute. the monitoring system consists of a large amount of longitudinal data aggregated from different registers of statistics finland and the finnish population register centre. the basic spatial unit of the data is a 250–250 metre grid cell and the data are available in five-year intervals between 1980 and 2005. only the cells that were inhabited at least in one year of six different time periods were includfig. 1. turku urban region. the municipal borders are defined in line with the situation in 2008. source of the base map: national land survey of finland. 120 fennia 187: 2 (2009)antti vasanen ed in the study, amounting to a the total of 12,924 grid cells for the analysis. in order to examine the dynamics of population distribution in the turku urban region, altogether seven variables were included in the study on the grounds of pre-existing studies (table 1). champion (2001) links changes in urban population with recent demographic trends. these trends, which van de kaa (1987) named the second demographic transition, are characterised by decreasing household sizes, the increasing number of the elderly and the increasing number of small childless households (van de kaa 1987; champion 1992). five variables describing socio-demographic changes were included in the study. another, and in finnish context a very important approach to intra-metropolitan population change, is urban planning. although several actors have an impact on land use planning, the influence of land use planning on urban structure is inevitable as all major housing construction in finland require a thorough planning procedure (jauhiainen & niemenmaa 2006). as longitudinal data describing planning activities are not available, the impact of land use planning is quantified indirectly using data on residential buildings. the increasing number of a certain type of residential building indicates in the urban context more or less inevitably that such dwellings have been planned in the given area. the spatial and temporal resolution set limitations to the data available for the purposes of this study. according to kim et al. (2005), intra-metropolitan population change is largely the outcome of residential mobility and residential location choice. however, since variables related to residential location choice or preferences are highly subjective in nature, it is rather impossible to obtain such data alongside with other longitudinal grid data. also several other potentially interesting variables were impossible to quantify as grid data. as a result, issues addressing, for example, the increasing number of immigrants residing in urban regions and spatial variation in housing prices remain subjects for further research. the problem that derives from using the grid data is the amount of data missing coordinate reference. within the study area, the proportion of unlocated data is in most cases less than 2 per cent and often close to zero. as a basic rule, data from 1980 and 1985 are the most biased, although these records have been revised by the environmental institute using secondary data (ristimäki 1999). in some cases the proportion of uncoordinated data is high enough to cause potential problems in the interpretation of the results. the most obvious case is the variable of over 75 year old population, which is influenced by relatively large numbers of institutionalised people. in order to diminish the possibility of misinterpretations, this variable is aggregated with the age group of 65–74. another problem that might arise when using high resolution datasets is the need for privacy protection in cases of personal information such as income or education level. in this study, however, the need for such protection is not relevant as highly personal data are not illustrated on the map in a way that an individual person might be recognised. methods in order to analyse the changes in urban structure, two indices were calculated. the first index is a modification of duncan and duncan’s (1955) dissimilarity index d, which is used to measure the rate of spatial segregation between two population subgroups and is defined as: where x i and y i are the population counts of two subgroups in the given areal unit i in proportion to the total population count in the whole study area. the index ranges from 0 to 1, the larger index value suggesting a greater level of spatial segregation (o’sullivan & wong 2007: 149). the modified concentration index, also called the hoover index, measures the concentration of single phenometable 1. variables used in the study and related descriptive statistics on the study area. 1980 2005 proportion of people aged over 65 18.5 % 18.6 % floorspace (m2) per person ratio 40.8 64.2 mean household size (persons) 2.82 2.51 proportion of families with children 37.7 % 32.3 % proportion of 1 person households 18.6 % 24.0 % number of residential buildings block of flats 2 906 3 267 detached or terraced houses 32 397 50 536 fennia 187: 2 (2009) 121deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population … non, such as population, in the study area. the formulation of the concentration index follows the formula 1, where x i is the population count and y i is the area of the given areal unit i in proportion to the total values of the study area (duncan et al. 1961: 82–83; for a more recent approach, see tsai 2005: 146 and horner & marion 2009). likewise to the dissimilarity index, the concentration index ranges from 0 to 1, where the value 0 suggests equal concentration of population in the whole study area, whereas the value 1 suggests complete concentration into a single areal unit. in order to visualise the concentration index on the map, the local concentration index was developed. the local version of the index follows the formula 1 closely where the |x i – y i | value is calculated for each inhabited grid cell. whereas the concentration index measures the distribution of a phenomenon in the whole area, the second index used in the study, the moran’s i statistic of spatial autocorrelation, detects the nonrandomness of events in the studied area (wang 2006: 167). the i statistic by moran (1950) is one of the oldest measures of spatial autocorrelation (or spatial clustering) and its methodological foundation is presented elsewhere (e.g. cliff & ord 1973). the moran’s i statistic ranges from –1 to 1, where negative values indicate that dissimilar and positive values that similar values are clustered while values near zero indicate a random pattern of observations (wang 2006: 173). moran’s i is a global statistic giving a single value of spatial association for the whole study area. in order to interpret the patterns of spatial clusters within the study area, a class of local indicators of spatial association was used, which allowed the decomposition of global moran’s i into the contribution of each individual observation (anselin 1995: 94). several different local indicators for local clustering exist, of which a local version of moran’s i described by anselin (1996) is used here. the strength of the local moran’s i lies in its ability to classify spatial clusters into four distinctive categories, of which the category implying positive spatial autocorrelation of high values is particularly useful in the analysis of the spatial dynamics of population distribution (messner & anselin 2004). the calculation of the local moran’s i requires information of the neighbouring values of a given grid cell. this neighbourhood relation or spatial weight can be calculated in several ways. in this study, all cells within 500 metre radius are regarded as the neighbours of the given grid cell. this radius can be seen as justified, since the typical diameter of a single neighbourhood in the study area is roughly about one kilometre. in order to make the interpretation of the local concentration index compatible with the local moran’s i, the concentration index is generalised by calculating the average values of the index to the grid cell and its neighbouring cells within a 500 metre radius. the analyses were performed using arcgis, spss and geoda software. changing population distribution in the turku urban region the total population of the turku urban region has increased notably in the studied period of 1980–2005. the population was 265,000 in 1980 and it increased by fifty thousand inhabitants to 315,000 in 2005. the internal composition of the population growth, however, has varied significantly. in absolute terms, the population grew in all three sub-regions during the 1980s more or less at the same rate (fig. 2). in the early 1990s, the growth rate of the core area increased rapidly while the rate of inner commuting region remained constant and the population growth of the outer commuting region stagnated. altogether, more than half of the total population growth occurred in the core area. the picture is very different when the population change is considered in relative terms. the relative population growth of the inner commuting region has been very intense as the population has increased with more than 50 per cent, while the population in the core area and in the outer commuting region has grown only about 15 per cent. the overall picture of the population change in the urban region is therefore twofold. the fastest population increase has occurred in the inner ring of municipalities around the core urban area but the best part of the population growth in absolute terms has still taken place in the densely built urban core. to get a better view of the changes in the spatial pattern of population distribution, two indexes describing the level of population concentration were constructed. the first one, the concentration index, measures the overall level of population concentration in the whole study area and shows that the population pattern has become more dispersed as the index decreased by 5.2 per cent between 1980 and 2005 (table 2). the second index, moran’s i statistics, which measures the level of 122 fennia 187: 2 (2009)antti vasanen spatial autocorrelation and thereby the level of spatial population clustering displays an opposite trend. the i statistic shows notable non-randomness in the population pattern and the value of the statistic rose over 10 per cent during the study period suggesting increasing population clustering. the high level of spatial autocorrelation, however, indicates a population pattern where both high and low population densities are clustered implying that also the areas with low population density have expanded. the interpretation of these basically opposing findings is that the population is getting increasingly clustered in certain areas whereas the population of the formerly most densely inhabited areas has decreased. in fig. 3, the changes in the population pattern between 1980 and 2005 are visualised on the map using the local versions of the concentration index and moran’s i statistic. the reason for the decreasing concentration index is clearly visible in fig. 3a. the population distribution has become less concentrated in the central areas of the urban region whereas at the edges of the central area the population distribution has become more concentrated. in the more peripheral areas, the pattern of concentration dynamics is somewhat fragmented suggesting that the main factor in decreasing concentration overall has been the diminishing importance of the central city as a concentration point of population. the local clustering pattern emphasises the same kind of population trend as the concentration index (fig. 3b). in the spatial cluster approach, the core city was the main population cluster in the region both in 1980 and 2005 complimented by few smaller clusters, consisting of the centres of the small towns of lieto, paimio and parainen, which are mainly located in the outer commuting region. in 2005, however, new population clusters have formed both at the edges of the core area and fig. 2. cumulative population change in absolute and relative terms in the turku urban region. data source: statistics finland. table 2. changes in population concentration. 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 change 1980–2005 concentration index 0.721 0.714 0.705 0.698 0.692 0.683 -5.2 % moran's i statistica 0.500 0.510 0.518 0.532 0.550 0.556 11.2 % a all values are significant at 0.001 level. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 123deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population … more notably in the inner commuting region1. a few areas classified as a cluster in 1980 but not in 2005 are mainly located at the edges of older residential areas where population decline has occurred. altogether, the spatial pattern of population concentration demonstrates a trend where spatial clusters of high population density are spreading more evenly around the urban region, thus forming a more polycentric intra-metropolitan population pattern. both, changes in population concentration and the emergence of new spatial population clusters have a strong effect on the intra-metropolitan population distribution. in order to understand the processes behind these changes, the socio-demographic characteristics and the changes in the built environment are examined. the overall socio-demographic trend in the whole study area during the period of 1980–2005 has been decreasing household size and the proportion of families with children together with the increasing proportions of small households and per capita housing space (table 3). this result is expectable and congruent with numerous other studies (e.g. van de kaa 1987; champion 1992; musterd & van zelm 2001). the interpretation changes completely when areas of population growth and loss are examined separately. in the areas where the population grew during the 25-year period, the number of people per household was increasing as well as proportion of families with children. conversely, the share of one person households and aged people decreased notably. the only socio-demographic variable that shows similar trends in the population growth areas and in the whole study area is floorspace per person ration. however, the growth of housing space was rather modest in comparison with the overall development in the whole study area. in the population loss areas, the socio-demographic trends are parallel with the overall development but the changes were much more extreme. the socio-demographic trends in the areas of increased population are rather clearly in line with housing career type explanations (e.g. feijten 2005) as population growth seems to be linked to parents seeking housing for their growing families. population decline, on the other hand, seems to be an outcome of the current socio-demographic trends of people getting wealthier at the same time as the proportion small households is growing, both increasing the per capita housing space (cf. champion 1992: 467). whereas the socio-demographic variables revealed a housing career aspect in the changes of fig. 3. changes in population distribution from 1980 to 2005. base map source: national land survey of finland. data source: syke, urban structure monitoring system. 124 fennia 187: 2 (2009)antti vasanen intra-metropolitan population distribution, the changes in the number of the residential buildings show an obvious relation between population growth and housing construction. in the 25-year study period, the number of residential buildings more than doubled in the areas where population growth occurred whereas, in the population decline areas, the number of residential buildings remained the same or their use was changed into non-residential, which explains the decreasing number of the block of flats. these interpretations are highly intelligible since new houses rarely remain uninhabited thus creating population growth in the given locality. the interesting result is, however, that population growth is furthered by both the construction of blocks of flats and detached houses, which shows that population growth is not only supported by the sprawl of low density housing but also by intensification of central areas by the construction of residential blocks of flats. discussion and conclusions the population structure in the turku urban region has evolved in two ways. on the one hand, the population seems to be more and more evenly distributed in the urban region. on the other hand, the spatial form of the region appears to be increasingly spatially clustered. fig. 3 showed that these simultaneous and basically opposing phenomena can be explained by the diminishing importance of the old urban centre as a single monocentric population concentration point in the region and by the emergence of new spatial population clusters in the outer parts of the urban region. thereby the trend in population distribution in the turku urban region appears to be the decentralisation of population clusters, which has lead to an increasingly polycentric urban form in intra-metropolitan terms. the population deconcentration process in finnish urban regions has been explained through the concept of regionalisation, which according to antikainen and vartiainen (2002) is characterised by the population growth in large areas with simultaneous intra-regional population deconcentration. although these processes are clearly visible in the empirical results of this study, the concept of regionalisation needs fine-tuning. the widely recognised tendencies of the increasing multinodality of urban systems (e.g. anas et al. 1998; kloosterman & musterd 2001; musterd et al. 2006) appears to be reality also in finnish urban regions. thereby, the ongoing trend of urban population deconcentration needs to be understood above all as increasing metropolitan polycentricity rather than as the sprawl of residential areas from the central city to the surrounding areas. in order to shed light on the societal changes behind polycentric urban development, the population growth and loss areas were examined respectively. in the areas where population loss took place during the period of 1980–2005, a clear increase in the proportion of small households and per capita housing space was observed. these changes are linked to a broader societal trend known as the second demographic transition, which is characterised by decreasing household 1980 2005 change 1980 2005 change 1980 2005 change mean household size 2.8 2.5 -11 % 2.5 3.0 17 % 3.3 1.9 -41 % floorspace per person ratio 40.8 64.2 57 % 47.7 56.4 18 % 35.2 77.1 119 % proportion of families with children 37.7 32.3 -14 % 33.8 43.7 29 % 41.8 16.8 -60 % proportion of 1 person households 18.6 24.0 30 % 22.6 17.9 -21 % 15.5 33.9 118 % proportion of people aged 65+ 18.5 18.6 1 % 19.9 12.2 -39 % 17.1 27.7 62 % number of residential buildings block of flats 2 906 3 267 12 % 547 1 240 127 % 2 333 2 018 -14 % detached or terraced houses 32 397 50 536 56 % 13 535 30 520 125 % 17 188 17 155 0 % number of cases all areas population growth population loss 11 612 6 460 5 152 table 3. characteristics of areas where population increased or decreased during the period of 1980–2005. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 125deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population … sizes and the increasing number of small childless households (cf. van de kaa 1987; champion 1992). the second demographic transition has evidently influenced the process of population deconcentration since declining household size will inevitably lead to population decrease in a given locality if new housing is not constructed. thereby, the population decrease in the older and more central parts of the built-up area can be seen as a natural outcome of the trend where smaller families tend to live more spaciously. the areas where population grew from the 1980s onwards displayed an opposite socio-demographic trend to the areas of population decline. in these areas, mean household size grew together with the proportion of families with children, which is a trend closely related to housing careers. with the general trend being the increasing number of small households, the opposite trend evidently points towards young parents seeking homes for their growing families. the factors behind population growth caused by families, however, are twofold. natural population growth is an obvious factor resulting in population growth, but the migration of families to new locations is likely to cause population growth in the area as well. although there were no data available to distinguish these two factors, it is obvious that population increase in the given area is not simply an outcome of natural population growth; particularly since the essential role of migration in intra-metropolitan population changes has been underpinned in several studies (e.g. heikkilä 2003; bontje & latten 2005; broberg 2008). furthermore, migration is inevitably involved with subjective and economic factors, such as residential preferences and housing markets. low density housing, which is often preferred by families with children, is much more affordable in the commuting region than in the central city, and therefore many young families seeking for new dwelling choose to move to the newly built residential areas in the municipalities surrounding the core urban area. however, since there are no data available on these processes for the purposes of this study, the influence of residential preferences and housing markets remains a subject for further research. the descriptive analysis also revealed a strong impact of housing construction on population growth. although this result is rather trivial as such, it highlights the importance of urban planning on the changes in population distribution within the urban region. since the overall demographic trend is decreasing household sizes, population growth on the metropolitan scale, evident from the fig. 2, is impossible without new housing made available. the eventual outcome of the interaction between demographic trends and housing construction is a more evenly distributed population structure in the region, since the pressure for population decline is the greatest in the most densely built central areas and housing construction is more likely to take place in the outskirts of the region as undeveloped sites are scarcer and more expensive in the inner city. a notable aspect of the above processes is the scale on which they affect urban spatial structure respectively. demographic trends, as champion (1992) points out, have changed markedly throughout the developed world, which makes the second demographic transition a significant process, if not truly global, at least well beyond the national scale. the consequences of demographic trends, on the other hand, are mainly visible on the regional scale by evening out population distribution within urban regions. the consequences of planning and housing construction on urban spatial structure, however, take shape to a great extent on the sub-regional scale. in finland, municipalities have strong self-governance, which actualises in municipal taxing power and planning monopoly but also in obligations to provide a wide range of welfare services, which has lead the municipalities to compete for good tax payers. the recently reformed finnish land use legislation underpinned the role of regional planning but at the same time strengthened the municipal planning monopoly. the reinforcement of the municipalities’ potential to influence their land use has resulted in a situation where planning has become one of the key instruments for inter-municipal competition within urban regions. as a consequence, a large number of single family housing has been made available, supported especially by the planning policy of the municipalities around the core urban region. following this line of reasoning, the increasingly polycentric urban pattern is by large an outcome of the fragmented municipal structure in the urban region together with the competitive municipal planning practices. the conflict between these scalar components, sociodemographic processes on the regional scale and planning on the municipal scale, can thereby be seen as one of the corner stones influencing recent population dynamics in finnish urban regions. 126 fennia 187: 2 (2009)antti vasanen acknowledgements the author would like to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the earlier version of this paper. the author wishes also to acknowledge the regional council of southwest finland for making the datasets of the urban structure monitoring system available for the purposes of this study. notes 1 although some of the new population clusters have formed within the municipal borders of turku, they are functionally more similar to the clusters of the inner commuting region than to the core urban area. references anas a, r arnott & ka small (1998). urban spatial structure. journal of economic literature 36, 1426–1464. anselin l (1995). local indicators of spatial analysis – lisa. geographical analysis 27: 2, 93–115. anselin l (1996). the moran scatterplot as an esda tool to assess local instability in spatial association. in masser i & f salgé (eds). spatial analytical perspectives on gis, 111–125. taylor & francis, london. antikainen j (2001). functional regions of the future – the finnish urban network study. journal of nordregio 3/2001, 20–23. antikainen j & p vartiainen (2002). finnish districts and regional differentiation. fennia 180: 1–2, 183–190. antikainen j & p vartiainen (2005). polycentricity in finland: from structure to strategy. built environment 31: 2, 143–152. beale cl (1975). the revival of population growth in nonmetropolitan america. 16 p. economic research service, united states department of agriculture, washington d.c. beale cl (1977). the recent shift of united states population to nonmetropolitan areas, 1970–75. international regional science review 2: 2, 113–122. beauregard ra & a haila (1997). the unavoidable incompleteness of the city. american behavioural scientist 43: 3, 327–341. van den berg l, r drewett, lh klaassen, a rossi & cht vijverberg (1982). urban europe: a study of growth and decline. 162 p. pergamon press, oxford. berry bjl (ed) (1976a). urbanization and counterurbanization. urban affairs annual reviews 11. 334 p. berry bjl (1976b). the counterurbanization process: urban america since 1970. in berry bjl (ed). urbanization and counterurbanization. urban affairs annual reviews 11, 17–30. bontje m & j burdack (2005). edge cities, europeanstyle: examples from paris and randstad. cities 22: 4, 317–330. bontje m & j latten (2005). stable size, changing composition: recent migration dynamics of the dutch large cities. tijdscrift voor economische en sociale geografie 96: 4, 444–451. broberg a (2008). valikoiva muuttoliike uudellamaalla (abstract: selective migration in helsinki region). uudenmaan liiton julkaisuja e 97. 104 p. bruegmann r (2005). sprawl: a compact history. 301 p. the university of chicago press, chicago. champion ag (1987). recent changes in the pace of population deconcentration in britain. geoforum 18: 4, 379–401. champion ag (ed) (1989). counterurbanization: the changing pace and nature of population deconcentration. 266 p. edward arnold, london. champion ag (1992). urban and regional demographic trends in the developed world. urban studies 29: 3/4, 461–482. champion ag (2001). a changing demographic regime and evolving polycentric urban regions: consequences for the size, composition and distribution of city populations. urban studies 38: 4, 657–677. champion t & g hugo (2004). moving beyond the urban-rural dichotomy. in champion t & g hugo (eds). new forms of urbanization: beyond the urban-rural dichotomy, 3–24. ashgate, aldershot. cliff ad & jk ord (1973). spatial autocorrelation. 178 p. pion, london. dieleman fm & a faludi (1998). polynucleated metropolitan regions in northwest europe: theme of the special issue. european planning studies 6: 4, 365–377. duncan od & b duncan (1955). a methodological analysis of segregation indexes. american sociological review 20, 210–217. duncan od, rp cuzzort & b duncan (1961). statistical geography: problems in analyzing areal data. 191 p. the free press, glencoe, il. eea (2006). urban sprawl in europe: the ignored challenge. 56 p. european environment agency, copenhagen. feijten p (2005). life events and the housing career: a retrospective analysis of timed effects. 152 p. eburon publishers, delft. fielding aj (1982). counterurbanisation in western europe. progress in planning 17, 1–52. garreau j (1991). edge city: life on the new frontier. 548 p. doubleday, new york. geyer hs (1996). expanding the theoretical foundation of differential urbanization. tijdscrift voor economische en sociale geografie 87: 1, 44–59. geyer hs & t kontuly (1993). a theoretical foundation for the concept of differential urbanization. international regional science review 15: 2, 157–177. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 127deconcentration versus spatial clustering: changing population … hall p (1993). forces shaping urban europe. urban studies 30: 6, 883–898. hall p & k pain (eds) (2006). the polycentric metropolis: learning from mega-city regions in europe. 256 p. earthscan, london. hall p, k pain & n green (2006). the informational geography of europolis: mapping the flow of information. in hall p & k pain (eds). the polycentric metropolis: learning from mega-city regions in europe, 70–87. earthscan, london. heikkilä e (2003). differential urbanisation in finland. tijdscrift voor economische en sociale geografie 94: 1, 49–63. helminen v & m ristimäki (2007). kaupunkiseutujen haja-asutusalueen väestömuutokset 1980–2005 (abstract: population changes in sparsely populated areas surrounding urban regions in finland 1980–2005). suomen ympäristö 9/2007. 72 p. hitz h, c schmid & r wolff (1994). urbanization in zurich: headquarter economy and city-belt. environment and planning d 12: 2, 167–185. horner mw & bm marion (2009). a spatial dissimilarity-based index of the jobs–housing balance: conceptual framework and empirical tests. urban studies 46: 3, 499–517. jauhiainen js & v niemenmaa (2006). alueellinen suunnittelu. 292 p. vastapaino, tampere. kim jh, f pagliara & j preston (2005). the intention to move and residential location choice behaviour. urban studies 42: 9, 1621–1636. klaassen lh & g scimemi (1981). theoretical issues in urban dynamics. in klaassen lh, wtm molle & jhp paelinck (eds). the dynamics of urban development, 8–28. st. martin’s press, new york. kloosterman rc & s musterd (2001). the polycentric urban region: towards a research agenda. urban studies 38: 4, 623–633. kontuly t & hs geyer (2003a). introduction to special issue: testing the differential urbanisation model in developed and less developed countries. tijdscrift voor economische en sociale geografie 94: 1, 3–10. kontuly t & hs geyer (2003b). lessons learned from testing the differential urbanisation model. tijdscrift voor economische en sociale geografie 94: 1, 124–128. long l & d deare (1988). us population redistribution: a perspective on the nonmetropolitan turnaround. population and development review 14: 3, 432–450. long l & a nucci (1997). the ‘clean break’ revisited: is us population again deconcentrating? environment and planning a 29, 1355–1366. meijers e, b waterhout & w zonneweld (2005). polycentric development policies in european countries: an introduction. built environment 31: 2, 97–102. messner sf & l anselin (2004). spatial analyses of homicide with areal data. in goodchild mf & dg janelle (eds). spatially integrated social science, 127–144. oxford university press, oxford. millward h & t bunting (2008). patterning population densities: a spatiotemporal model compared with toronto 1971–2001. environment and planning a 40, 283–302. mitchell cja (2004). making sense of counterurbanization. journal of rural studies 20, 15–34. moran pap (1950). notes on continuous stochastic phenomena. biometrica 37, 17–23. musterd s & i van zelm (2001). polycentricity, households and the identity of places. urban studies 38: 4, 679–696. musterd s, m bontje & w ostendorf (2006). the changing role of old and new urban centres: the case of the amsterdam region. urban geography 27: 4, 360–387. o’sullivan d & dws wong (2007). a surface-based approach to measuring spatial segregation. geographical analysis 39, 147–168. parr jb (2004). the polycentric urban region: a closer inspection. regional studies 38: 3, 231–240. parr jb (2007). spatial definitions of the city: four perspectives. urban studies 44: 2, 381–392. phelps na & n parsons (2003). edge urban geographies: notes from the margins of europe’s capital cities. urban studies 40: 9, 1725–1749. richter k (1985). nonmetropolitan growth in the late 1970s: the end of the turnaround. demography 22: 2, 245–263. ristimäki m (1999). yhdyskuntarakenteen seurantajärjestelmä – ehdotus yhdyskuntarakenteen seurannan järjestämiseksi ja kehittämiseksi (abstract: urban structure monitoring system – a proposal for organization and development of urban structure monitoring). suomen ympäristö 344. 74 p. ristimäki m, k oinonen, h pitkäranta & k harju (2003). kaupunkiseutujen väestömuutos ja alueellinen kasvu (abstract: population changes in urban regions and urban growth). suomen ympäristö 657. 196 p. tsai y (2005). quantifying urban form: compactness versus ‘sprawl’. urban studies 42: 1, 141–161. van de kaa dj (1987). europe’s second demographic transition. population bulletin 42: 1, 1–57. vartiainen p (1989). counterurbanisation: a challenge for socio-theoretical geography. journal of rural studies 5: 3, 217–225. vartiainen p (1991). seutuistuminen yhdyskuntasuunnittelun haasteena (abstract: the city-regionbased development of the settlement system: a challenge to local planning). terra 103: 2, 75–86. ventura f & o wärneryd (1983). differentiation of settlement systems on the basis of population densities and level of development. ‘regionalization’ now and in the future. geographia polonica 47, 29–37. wang f (2006). quantitative methods and applications in gis. 265 p. taylor & francis, boca raton. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46369 doi: 10.11143/46369 performing national identity through peruvian food migration in santiago de chile walter a. imilan imilan, walter a. (2015). performing national identity through peruvian food migration in santiago de chile. fennia 193: 2, 227–241. issn 1798-5617. the article explores the processes of re-production of national identity based on food-related practices and discourses of peruvian migrants living in santiago de chile. the meeting point of these three fields – migration, national identity and food – is most evidently performed in the celebration of the peruvian national holidays in santiago. the article finds evidence that the performance in this national festivity reinforces a sense of peruvianness, thus contributing to the study of contemporary processes of renewal of national identities in transnational contexts. the case study also demonstrates that the ascription of national identity by peruvian in santiago is strategic, and it operates as an assemblage of various and locally situated elements. keywords: migration, national identity, food migration, performance, santiago de chile walter a. imilan, instituto de la vivienda, facultad de arquitectura y urbanismo, portugal 85, santiago, universidad de chile, chile, e-mail: wa.imilan@gmail.com introduction the presence of peruvian migrants in the city of santiago de chile has become increasingly visible thanks to a booming of food-related businesses such as restaurants and convenience stores. these businesses advertise themselves with a peruvian image through the display of national symbols like flags, photographs and logos that certify the national origin of their products. through these references, they have shaped an unprecedented migrant landscape in santiago (imilan 2014). food businesses have become a successful integration strategy for an important sector of the migrant community who rely on displaying a recognizable link to their national origin. this article explores the ways in which migration, food and national identity intersect in the case of peruvian migrants in santiago. food and the activities surrounding it are not only a resource for economic integration, but also act as a mediating factor in the re-creation of a peruvian national identity. peruvian migrants in santiago indeed use food as a way of performing their national distinctiveness from the host society. in this sense, they clearly reenact the kind of identity process theorized by goffman (2009) and bruner (1986), which stress the importance of communication to achieve recognition from ‘others’, in this case, the host society. this performativity of national identity finds a precise time and space for its execution in the case of peruvian migrants in santiago. since 2012, a series of massive celebrations have taken place in central parts of the city during the peruvian national holiday. these weekend festivals follow the concept of culinary festivals, which have become increasingly popular in peru, mixed with elements taken from chilean national holidays. among all the peruvian communities abroad, it is only in santiago that peruvian migrants have attempted to recreate a sense of national identity by at the same time seeking recognition from the host society. food is undoubtedly an important resource in the construction of individual and collective identities (goody 1982). in contexts of globalization and transnational migrations, food migration – understood as the movement of foodstuffs and culinary practices during human migration – opens up a field where multiple geographies intersect; references to what is local, national and global 228 fennia 193: 2 (2015)walter a. imilan are reorganized based on the everyday experience of migrants. peruvian migration to chile has rapidly increased in the last decade. in 2011, over thirty thousand temporary residency visas were granted to peruvian citizens, thus becoming the largest migrant group, which currently makes up 37% of chile's foreign population and close to 2.5% of the total national population (dem 2013). research on migration to chile is relatively recent and it focuses on a few specific subjects: feminization processes (mora 2008; stefoni & fernandez 2011; tijoux 2013); transnational maternity and care (acosta 2013; gonzálvez 2014); use and construction of public and private space (garcés 2014; márquez 2014; imilan 2014); border relations (lube & garcés 2012; tapia-ladino 2012); and aspects related to migration and citizenship (stefoni 2011; thayer 2013). the food migration field has only been marginally investigated, mainly as economic integration strategies and not as a source for identity construction processes. the presence of peruvian migrants in chile is particularly relevant when one considers that chile’s national identity was founded on a relation based on opposition to the elements of peruvian culture. the war of the pacific (1879–1883) played a fundamental role in configuring both national imaginaries – especially in the consolidation of chilean national identity – bringing about contrasts and differentiations which still persist today (gonzález & parodi 2014). the war resulted in the defeat of the allied army of bolivia and peru, and the loss of a significant portion of their national territories. additionally, the chilean army took possession of peru’s capital city, lima, for two years (1881–1883). chileans have constructed their image as a white, – allegedly european – modern and wealthy society exactly in contrast to peruvians, who have been regarded in the chilean imaginary as poor, backwards and indigenous. this outlook still informs all sorts of discriminatory actions and heated nationalist debates in relation to the large presence of peruvian population in santiago (garcés 2014). however, instead of attempting to “blend in” as a means of protection, the peruvian migrants make themselves visible in the public spaces of santiago. this is particularly true for activities related to gastronomy. especially in santiago's case one can speak of a peruvian food migration. peruvian food shops, restaurants and street food vendors have transformed the urban space, giving shape to an unprecedented migration landscape (stefoni 2008; imilan 2014). certainly, the concept of national cuisine has played a significant role in the construction of imaginaries of national communities since the rise of national states in the nineteenth century (barlösius 2011). in peru, in recent years, these culinary practices have influenced the way in which peruvianness is narrated and performed. at the same time, they have driven a very successful gastronomic industry. thus, nowadays peruvian cuisine has become both a marker of national identity and a source of economic development. the government agencies and private associations of gastronomic entrepreneurs, who act as official promoters, have worked together in the formulation and execution of policies aimed at promoting food-related businesses and activities. thus, they have contributed to the strengthening of a dominant narrative around peruvian culinary knowledge. entrepreneurship, sustainable food industry, heritage of food products and local producers have joined forces, achieving international recognition and a prestige status (lauer & lauer 2006). as a result, there has been a significant improvement in the labor perspectives of peruvians working in this sector both at home and abroad. the emergence of this renewed national narrative has had a deep impact on an important occurrence in peru's recent history: in the course of the last two decades over 10% of the country's population has migrated abroad (sánchez 2012). a strengthened notion of national cuisine now supports the renewal of symbolic and emotional links of the millions of migrants with their country and communities of origin. this article focuses on the public performance of national identity in relation to food practices. its main argument is that peruvian migrants in santiago construct their national identity by appropriating the official narrative surrounding peruvian food and cuisine. the migrants take advantage of this narrative as an effective strategy in the negotiation of their multi-sited emplacements resulting from their transnational experiences. the present article illustrates the mechanisms of performing national identity as an assemblage of narratives and practices that are produced in different spaces – national and transnational – and performed in santiago. based on an ethnographic account of the celebration of the peruvian national holiday in santiago, the paper reflects on how food plays a major role in understanding the forms of self-representation and recognition of the peruvian migrant community fennia 193: 2 (2015) 229performing national identity through peruvian food migration abroad. furthermore, it explores the re-construction of a national identity as a local process within the context of transnational migrations. food and identities the relationship between food and processes of identity formation might seem obvious. the statement “we are what we eat” is adequately conceptualized in the idea of ‘foodways’, which describes the feeding practices that interlock with the culture, tradition and history of different communities. classical anthropologists such as malinowski (1985) or boas (1987) approached food practices as central elements in the understanding of group solidarity. harris (1984) focused on the ways in which societies generate their nourishment standards based on their relationship with the environment (natural resources, climate, etc.). according to douglas (2002) the religious distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ hid behind everyday food practices. lévi-strauss (1997) went somewhat beyond by stating that food is not just “good for thinking” but also “good for eating”. he endeavored to clear up such an inquiry by observing the way cultures work. in fact, the relationship between identity and food is discussed in many research studies, making its multiple roles within culture evident. beyond the concerns of anthropology about food, a field of inquiry has recently developed with a strong focus on the commodification of food and cuisines. classic works on the subject include the biography of sugar by mintz (1986) which narrates the various episodes that paved the way to the globalization of sugar production in the caribbean islands. as sugar becomes “good for eating”, it builds imaginaries, new relationships, tastes and distinctions, but also commercial, diplomatic and armed conflicts. the study of food and cuisines is thriving and in recent years it has given birth to an interdisciplinary research field concerned with the relationship between food, globalization and identities (see watson & caldwell 2005; nützenadel & trentmann 2008). these “food biographies” are ways of explaining local–global connections and the different overlapping agents and actors. the acknowledgment of food as part of an identity repertoire makes room for the conflicts between ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ in times of economic globalization (watson & cadwell 2005). food, as a source of construction of national identities, has been one of the main narratives in the making of imagined communities (anderson 1993), as described by elias (2010) in terms of the civilizing power of what and how to eat. in global contexts, the national is redefined as a contest between diverse geographies. for instance, wilk (1999) indicates that belize’s cuisine is defined only after contrasting this country with its previous colonial rule, its neighbors and its communities in diaspora. the negotiation between these geographies was furthered by tourism in the young independent state, which demanded a national specificity to its culinary culture. one of the characteristics of a narrative linked to food is that it is embodied. in other words, it becomes part of an individual through the body and the sensitive mediations that consolidate memories (sutton 2001). in this sense, food and the construction of a notion of ‘home’ are, in many cases, inseparable (cieraad 2006). food has an unconscious force, in the non-discursive sense, as the construction of identity implies high levels of subjective appropriation for its sensitive internalization. at the same time, food is ‘designed’ to be shared, to communicate difference. this is how its performative strength is generated. this is also what commonly takes place with migrant populations that arrange their culinary practices as spaces of communication and recognition. in this sense, the so-called “ethnic restaurants” (möhring 2012) are spaces where local clients are taken on a sensory voyage to a foreign place. they present themselves as a ‘fragment’ of the foreign culture that co-inhabits in the city and enriches its consumers by broadening their sensitive repertoires. although the dishes offered in these types of restaurants are often adapted to local tastes, the issue here is not whether a particular dish is genuine or not, but to understand the whole process as a form of communication, of setting the stage for difference. gastronomy is, in this sense, a source of cultural performance. peruvian national identity, national food narrative peru is currently experiencing a gastronomical boom. this process was consolidated during the mid-1990s, encouraged by major transformations in the culinary production derived from its interna230 fennia 193: 2 (2015)walter a. imilan tionalization. mirko and vera lauer (2006) call it a “gastronomic revolution” and characterize it as a series of changes which took place both within peru and abroad: changes in the “techniques, tastes, ingredients, business attitudes, professional cultures, consumers' participation, local and international recognition, academic research, the recovery of historical and regional heritage, editorial impulse and presence on the public space” (lauer & lauer 2006: 15). for these authors, these changes were made possible by the revaluation of the existing cuisine and the discovery of the ancient one. this took place simultaneously with the emergence of young chefs of the haute cuisine coming from the upper class families of lima. the 1990s was the decade in which peru opened up to the world, as a result of neoliberal policies, while at the same time it marked the beginning of the peruvian diaspora. in this context, peruvian cuisine became a link between migrants and their communities of origin (altamirano 2000). a sense of nostalgia led to the popularization of certain basic products of the peruvian diet. nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, for most of these migrants, food remains a private affair. the peruvian cuisine boom mainly refers to a haute cuisine segment. its main characteristic is the appropriation of andean and amazonian food products that are considered to be ‘traditional’ and ‘native’. these mostly indigenous foodstuffs, strongly linked to their regional consumption, gained status after going “through the hands of cooks with privileged personal stories, who had the possibility of studying in europe and the united states of america” (matta 2011: 201). thus, traditional culinary practices were revalued by these cosmopolitan segments of peruvian society. there is a marked social class connotation behind the modern construction of the profession and image of the chef as an artist and entrepreneur. his individual talent is a source of social prestige, prestige that is closely linked to his upper class origin. however, this process has trickled down from the higher urban classes down to the popular classes. matta (2011: 39) confirms that “the experimental and playful impulse or the revaluation of local ingredients are two contributions that come from above and that are subsequently adopted by lower class businesses”. this appropriation by the lower classes is the reason why authors have called this a multiregional and multiclass revolution. this call to identity has dug deep in the collective imagination by connecting foods with their cultures of origin and turning them into a reason for pride. external valuation and the appeal of peruvian cuisine in a more cosmopolitan and globalized context has been fundamental in this process. matta (2012: 23) observes that “the introduction of peruvian gastronomy in this cosmopolitan field has expressed itself since the nineties, with the fortunate encounter of a certain amount of native ingredients with international culinary techniques inspired by french nouvelle cuisine. the first results set the foundation for a wave that has been called novoandina (neo-andean), a term coined by chefs bernardo roca rey and luis cucho la rosa in the eighties”. rodriguez, peruvian anthropologist, ironically states that this generation of chefs had to use the prefix neo, “...simply because the term andean had not appealed to the elites of lima”.1 another element that was central in this development was the role played by the expansion of the tourism industry, which transformed peru, especially with the success of machu picchu as a tourist attraction, into a global destination. in fact, gastronomy and tourism have been related to the so-called ‘boom’ from the beginning. today tourists attempt to get a taste of local cuisine, but find an offer of international restaurants. tourism contributed to the development of a high-standard local food offer, encouraging the sophistication of traditional recipes. the gastronomical boom and its association with a narrative of national identity building can be said to be the product of an assemblage of actors and institutions of the public and private sectors that carry out development projects and proposals on a local, regional and international scale. the initiatives are directed, as stated by matta (2011: 50), towards “exporting peruvian cuisine – or a sophisticated version of it – through the opening of peruvian restaurants abroad and the systematization of certain types of local or ‘native’ agricultural production with the objective of guaranteeing the sustainability of a peruvian culinary-gastronomic system and acknowledging the contribution of rural andean and amazonian knowledge and culinary traditions, or attaining unesco's recognition as an intangible cultural heritage”. among the private actors, apega (asociación peruana de gastronomía, in spanish) is undoubtedly the most relevant. it has achieved agreements with ministries, government agencies and universities, and links to agriculture and livestock producers. the association promotes peruvian gastronomy in all areas of commercial development fennia 193: 2 (2015) 231performing national identity through peruvian food migration together with other objectives not limited to revenue production, such as campaigning for healthier nutrition or the promotion of agricultural, livestock and hydrobiological resources in an inclusive manner (apega/ceplan 2012). their marketing activities reach their highest point each year in mistura, lima, the culinary fair that has become well known and grown in importance in recent years, with over half a million visitors in september 2013.2 additionally, during other months they organize a series of regional fairs in which development projects with local farming producers are launched. apega has carried out the alianza project since 2009, linking cooks and farmers in order to support the articulation of small producers in culinary markets. they have also headed a series of initiatives oriented towards reassessing culinary heritage and launching lima as a culinary capital within the continent. a main component of this process has been the education of new cooks through the publication of books and other materials and, most importantly, by directly supporting the development of cooking schools, as in the case of the pachacútec cooking institute. this school aims at reducing the social gap among young cookery students. educational institutions are expensive and are mostly attended by the middle and higher classes. the institute was established in ventanilla, a poverty stricken district of lima. not only is the tuition relatively low, but they also benefit the students through links to other international institutes and chefs. their best ones have access to internships and workshops, for example in european countries like spain and italy. a similar case is the pisco cooking school in the city of pisco. these educational initiatives portray an image of peruvian gastronomy as a space of professional development that enables social mobility for young men and women from disadvantaged classes. apega's intention, judging from the quantity of projects it supports and their broad spectrum, is undoubtedly to transform peruvian gastronomy to a national industry that integrates different elements into a holistic whole: from the work of agricultural producers in the isolated regions of the country to the exportation of culinary knowledge and practices to more sophisticated global markets. among the most important state actors is promperú (comisión de promoción del perú para la exportación y el turismo, in spanish), a ministerial office in charge of developing a branding strategy, known in spanish as marca país, to attract tourism. as part of their job, a series of international promotional videos where peruvian cuisine plays a major role was created. for example, the first advertisement was named “peru, nebraska”3, in reference to a small town named peru located in nebraska, usa. the spot begins with a bus bearing the colors of the marca perú in which peruvian celebrities arrive at the midwestern town: actors, actresses and well known chefs from lima followed by musicians, singers and others. among the chefs, there are some who have recently been raised to celebrity status. the group is dressed in uniform and headed by gastón acurio – an icon of the gastronomic boom, who, not coincidentally, drives the bus. in the spot, the peruvian guests teach the town inhabitants about their rights as ‘peruvians’. the first right is shouted by one of the chefs: “you live in peru and have the right to eat delicious food”, as the rest of the group displays a variety of peruvian dishes. in 2012 a documentary called peru sabe: la cocina, arma social (peru knows/tastes: cuisine as a social weapon) was produced. it covers a visit to peru by the catalan chef ferrán adriá, famous for revolutionizing the profession through molecular cuisine. according to the script, adriá is invited to peru by gastón acurio. the whole story seems engineered, more a marketing strategy than a true documentary. the popular peruvian chef accompanies adriá as a guide through the country's regions, showing the catalan chef the diversity of foodstuffs and the wisdom of peruvian gastronomy. the documentary seems to show how adriá, from europe, old world and cradle of haute cuisine, discovers or re-discovers the wealth of peru in a metonymical way. the visit ends in the pachacútec cooking institute, where peru's culinary potential is revealed as a social revolution by enabling social mobility for disadvantaged peruvian youths. thus the gastronomic industry is revealed as a complex and integrated strategy for the country's development. in recent years the alliance between apega and state agencies has put forward a series of culinary holidays, such as “día del pollo a la brasa” (grilled chicken day, 2010), “día del pisco sour” (pisco sour day, 2004) “día nacional del ceviche” (national ceviche day, 2008), “año nacional de la papa” (national year of potatoes, 2008) and “año nacional de la quinoa” (national year of quinoa, 2013). it is important to point out that the relationship between state and food practices is not new in 232 fennia 193: 2 (2015)walter a. imilan peru. in the 1920s, the peruvian state promoted the development of so-called restaurantes populares (working class restaurants), meant to offer the emerging working class a diet in accordance with an urban and modern lifestyle. drinot (2011) researched this institution in the context of modernization and industrialization policies. he observed that the fundamental objective of the project was to promote a society which adapts its cultural program to an idea of modernization, which saw in indigenous cultures its main hindrance. in this way, the restaurantes populares should replace the feeding practices of the indigenous population, but at the same time they were meant to distance the urban population from the growing influence of chinese restaurants, which already developed as a mass offer for the lower segments of society at that time.4 the racist conception of this policy, oriented toward annulling the indigenous and asian influences on the growing peruvian urban working class through eating habits, had little impact, according to drinot. the restaurantes populares never attained the expected popularity and the government did not persevere enough with the project to counteract the dynamics of culture. this first attempt by the state at policing food was developed as part of an explicit project of the construction of the nation. many research authors (aragón 2014; degregori 2014a) have pointed out that the construction of a peruvian national identity, conducted by ‘white’ urban elite, persistently denied the country's indigenous societies during the twentieth century. to be an ‘indio’ (of indigenous origin) was a stigmatized category, to the point that even the indigenous communities have denied this ascription themselves, replacing it, for example with the concept of ‘cholo’, a person of racially mixed origin with a distant indigenous past (bruce 2007). this sustained process of invisibilization of indigenous cultures in peru explains the lack of a national political project originating from indigenous communities, as has been the case in the last two decades of the twentieth century in neighboring countries like ecuador or bolivia (degregori 2014b). although the state has stood behind the implementation of the restaurantes populares and the enactment of the current food policies, there is a fundamental difference in the concept of national identity in both cases. in the 1920s food was meant to play a role in the formation of a modern identity, through the invalidation and replacement of indigenous identities and other cultural influences, chinese, for example, regarded as threats to this process. currently, the food campaigns are based on the acknowledgment of peru's diverse identities, integrating anything from ancestral food preparations (from pre-incan and incan times) to the current trends, also mixing the culinary practices of a diversity of cultural influences: indigenous, mestizo, european, asian. regional diversity is synthesized as well: products and preparations of distant ecological spaces such as the andes, the coast and the amazon jungle become unified. in fact, the discourse on national identity has changed radically, although the elite in power, consequently responsible for articulating these polices, belongs to the same social groups then and now. in this sense, this new narrative is presented as an apparent ‘discovery’ of popular food practices by the traditional elites, and the recognition of their economic value in a global context. a discourse is thus constructed around national cuisine that recognizes, values and integrates diversity as a perfect metaphor of contemporary national identity. in terms of the present research, it is fundamental to point out that peru's current food campaigns not only strengthen the national identity of peruvians living in peru, but also of those living abroad. thus, gastronomy becomes a key identity reference for peruvian transnational communities. in this sense, the tv spots of the marca perú end with a message to all peruvians: “peru is an open brand, we are all called to be its ambassadors”. this is a clear invitation to the peruvian communities abroad. here is the place where advertising policies related to peruvian gastronomy intersect with the stories and experiences of migrants in santiago. peruvian migrants not only appropriate these strategies, they also endow them with new meanings, an activity now conceived on a global scale. it is, therefore, not surprising that some authors (altamirano 2000; lauer 2012) claim that peruvian cuisine has become a “cultural icon” for migrant communities, a point of reference for the collective construction of national identities. this is particularly true in santiago. peruvian food marking santiago peruvian migration to santiago, especially during the last 15 years, has transformed the urban landscape (imilan 2014). currently over eighty thousand peruvians live in chile's capital (dem 2013). most of them come from the cities and regions of fennia 193: 2 (2015) 233performing national identity through peruvian food migration the northern peruvian coast, such as chimbote, trujillo and chiclayo, and to a lesser degree, from lima and its surroundings. there is very little research on migrants originating from the andean regions of peru. despite the lack of official records, we know from other research (torres & hidalgo 2009; correa et al. 2013) that a large segment earn their livelihood either in construction, in the case of men; or housekeeping jobs, especially among women; or they work as salespeople and in various businesses. there also are some who have a technical and professional education and have had relative success finding work within the healthcare system or private businesses, but little is known about this last group as research tends to concentrate on the more vulnerable populations. a considerable number of people in this migrant community have become gastronomic entrepreneurs and businesspeople, especially within the framework of so-called “nostalgia economies” (duany 2011) which mark public space. this includes convenience stores offering national products, call centers and, most importantly, restaurants of national peruvian cuisine. figure 1 shows the localization of peruvian restaurants in santiago. in the early 1990s, according to restaurant owners interviewed as part of our research, there were only two peruvian restaurants in santiago. the next restaurants to open were located in the central sectors of the city. these central districts underwent a serious decay process during the seventies and eighties, a time in which the middle and higher classes migrated to the periphery. the deteriorated city center became available for low cost housing, frequently through informal access. this made room for migrants to settle in these areas, mainly the historic center and the recoleta and independencia districts, espefig. 1. the localization of peruvian restaurants in santiago de chile (march 2013). 234 fennia 193: 2 (2015)walter a. imilan cially after the late 1990s. for many migrants this is the first stop when they arrive in the city. in these districts the peruvian culinary offer is first oriented towards the peruvian community itself and then secondly to chileans. we found that in a second growth stage, during the first decade of the 2000s, the trend was to open new businesses towards the eastern side of the city, where commercial, financial and residential districts with a high rate of consumption of global cuisine are located. during the months of january and february 2013, an enumeration of santiago's restaurants was carried out as part of the present research. a team of research assistants5 searched different directories and the city’s main streets to identify restaurants and pinpoint their locations. in the second stage, the research team focused on the santiago central area and carried out a detailed search on all streets to further identify peruvian restaurants and carry out a brief survey in each one of them. we were thus able to put together an approximate map of food businesses existing as of march 2013. over 300 restaurants were registered during the time of this study. this study gives a very specific image, within a very specific time frame. this is constantly changing, as observed during and after our research. some months after its completion, a series of new restaurants in the peripheral sectors of the city, where the middle classes reside, were identified. during the 1990s, chile was a recovering democracy and started opening its society to a globalized consumer market. in a way, the rise of peruvian cuisine went hand in hand with the expansion of more complex leisure offerings in general, with food being one of them. this increase in peruvian restaurants managed by migrants seems to be unique when compared with similar cases in other cities, such as in europe or the united states of america, where employment strategies are usually linked to jobs in the service and agricultural sectors (altamirano 2000). in these host countries, the food experience remains within the private sphere of family and friends. isolated entrepreneurial attempts depend on a large initial investment and on expensive publicity campaigns, and are usually destined to open trendy restaurants in exclusive neighborhoods of big cities such as new york or london.6 in fact, peruvian cuisine, in all possible price segments, seems to have found in santiago its most successful address of all the current destinations of peruvian migration. usually the study of food migration focuses on the so-called ethnic economies. even though their empirical expression is a matter of great debate, they can generally be defined as economic activities with access restricted to the ascription of a common ethnic origin of its participants. in this manner, migrant cuisines are usually linked to an exclusive economic dimension (solé & parella 2005; arjona garrido & checa 2007). the most thoroughly studied peruvian migration movements are those of people from andean regions to lima, within peru itself (golte & adams 1991; sandoval 2009). through strong and flexible social bonds based on extended family, these migrants develop collective strategies in which they re-create an “andean rationality” characterized by internal solidarity and a tendency to establish their own businesses (golte 2001). santiago presents a different case, beginning with the origins of the migrants who have settled there, as explained above. the networks established by them have been of great importance for the development of this gastronomic industry. in santiago, we find open, flexible and dynamic networks that are not always based on the structure of the extended family; chileans and migrants from other latin american nationalities are often included in these networks (imilan 2014). performing the national through celebration the independence day celebration in peru does not have a massive festival character; it is mainly an official celebration of state authorities. some events of popular character are rare exceptions, such as a parade sponsored by mr wong, a supermarket chain, in lima which takes place a week before the holiday's date (ortemberg 2006). however, it has gained a particular meaning for peruvian migrant communities. in the united states, for example, which hosts the largest peruvian migrant community, this holiday is celebrated with parades in some big cities. the peruvian parade follows the form of other ethnic parades in the usa, based on the puerto rican day parade, to which it makes a direct reference, or the saint patrick's day parade of the irish community, which is the oldest of this type of events in this country (berg 2005). on the other hand, in japan, where a large peruvian community resides, the national holiday is celebrated in salsa fennia 193: 2 (2015) 235performing national identity through peruvian food migration music bars catering to the latin american population. in the cities where the peruvians gather to celebrate together, tokyo and osaka, there is no public expression of this festivity (rossi 2014). alternatively, in santiago the celebration has become a culinary festival, which lasts three days – a sort of carnival, in which food plays a central role both in public and private events. the chilean national holidays are a carnivalesque festivity. during the three or more days of celebration, food and music have an important presence. the peruvian celebration in santiago seems to mimic the elements of its chilean counterpart. on july 2013, peru’s independence day was celebrated with two large events in central areas of the city, where music and food abounded. the differences between these two events are many. traditionally, they are organized yearly by event producers linked to the peruvian community and to the so-called “nostalgia industry” (product importation, telephone services, etc.). the more traditional of the two events maintains the character of a folk festival, while the second, which is younger, is a broader festival of latin american migration in santiago. these events should be interpreted as social performances, as cultural acts or representations of cultural processes in specific contexts, and also as cultural agencies (conquergood 1989). from this perspective, they are not just reproductions of a social and cultural universe that has been frozen in the time-space of origin. they are creative processes as well, active in the configuration of identities based on the new contexts and their need to communicate a social and cultural difference to “the other”. social performances are creative acts in which participants play with values and meanings, re-presenting them; they are spaces to ‘think‘ through identity relations (bruner 1986; geertz 1986). in fact, the idea of theatricality that accompanies the concept of performance does not imply that the participants follow a pre-established script, simply carrying out a pre-formulated narrative. it is the actors themselves who determine the internal organization of the event. in the more traditional event – which first started in 2003 – santiago's mayor and peru's ambassador are usually present to salute the visitors. it takes place on sunday, in a central park of the city and is visited each year by an increasing number of chileans. approximately one hundred food stands offer the traditional fare of peruvian gastronomy. in 2012 it was visited by forty thousand people according to the organizers. the stands are harmoniously integrated into the park's vegetation, creating open spaces that the visitors use to gather together with their family and friends (fig. 2). on one side, there is a huge stage, equipped with state-of-the-art concert technology. in general the event is very well organized; all the details seem to have been considered in the context of such a large event. fig. 2. event “peruvian national holiday” in quinta normal park in santiago de chile. 236 fennia 193: 2 (2015)walter a. imilan each of the stands is a small restaurant, equipped with grills and deep fryers. most of the dishes are prepared beforehand, they only need to be grilled or fried during the festival. the assigned space becomes small between pots, grills, plastic containers full of seasoned foods and the team of kitchen assistants. at noon, the visitors come in and slowly spread around the festival's area, looking for where to have lunch. around 5 p.m. the space is packed. long queues of visitors crowd around the stands. one of these stands is managed by trinidad, who arrived from lima 15 years ago. during six years, she worked as a housemaid. later she opened a small food business in the city center. in her ‘cookery’ she sells lunch and offers other services such as shipping services from santiago to lima; either she or her husband travel themselves to deliver the packages. she has been preparing the whole week for the sales of this one day, with the assistance of five family members who fry, bake and sell different dishes. the majority of the stand owners are small culinary businessmen and businesswomen, who usually manage small cafeterias or sell food on the weekends on street markets, in their own homes or during special events. for example, beatriz, a woman from trujillo, has specialized in homemade dishes that are usually served on special occasions and are not available at restaurants. she works as a caregiver for elderly people during the week and on the weekends she offers her catering services. she wishes to consolidate a catering business that specializes in traditional dishes that are hard to find. during the day of the event, families play a central role in the management of each of the stands. cooks, salespeople and helpers are all part of the family. trinidad receives the support of seven families while beatriz is helped by five. the festival, simply called “national peru day celebration”, has maintained an evident and unequivocal ascription with the peruvian community and is focused on the cuisine and music of the peruvian community's popular culture. the food stands are represented by small businesspeople and their families. most of the bands playing early are non-professional groups of music and dance that are active in chile; the late evening is reserved for the stars of peruvian popular and folk music. without a doubt this event can be considered to be purely peruvian. the attendance of chileans to this event has increased over the years according to the participants themselves. in 2013, chileans seemed to make up a majority of the visitors, identifiable by their pronunciation and by some elements in their way of dressing. the festivity has transformed a space for the migrant community into an event meant to reach out to the host society. a good deal of information is presented in a very didactic way: the food stands offer their products under the assumption that the clients have absolutely no knowledge of the greatness of peruvian cuisine. whether this is so or not, this way of presenting the dishes heightens the performative character of the event. the lists of ingredients are written clearly in large letters, the origin of some of them is explained, and cooks and helpers are available at all times to give detailed explanations. while accompanying some of our informants in their stands, we observed that chileans request the dishes that are more common in santiago's restaurants, while the peruvian customers consume special recipes that are not available in this market. on this subject, beatriz, one of our informants, comments: “the carapulcra [a stew composed of many different meats] takes a long time to prepare, that is why peruvians come here [to the festival]. you will not find it elsewhere, and i am very good at preparing it”. each stand's cooking capacity is impressive. trinidad, for example, has purchased over 40 chickens, which allows her to sell at least 140 portions. furthermore, she offers sweet fried cakes (picarones), grilled meat and beverages. there is no rest amidst the stands, the grilling and frying fires are kept at full intensity throughout the day. at the center of the field there is a stand selling the shirts of the men's national football team and the women's national volleyball team. groups of young people buy shirts and then photograph themselves dressed up in them. businesses linked to transnational migration are also represented with stands. some examples are pre-paid telephone cards, money transfer and bus transport enterprises. even one of the buses that travel the santiago-lima route (54 hours) is on exhibition right there in the middle of the park. in the course of the afternoon a diversity of shows is presented on stage, for families and a broad audience. as the evening nears, famous peruvian performers begin to take to the stage, such as anita santibáñez who appears in andean costumes and is backed up by high-end show production. she sings ballads that narrate stories with which the migrant community can identify: the fennia 193: 2 (2015) 237performing national identity through peruvian food migration feelings of nostalgia for the town left behind, sadness at the thought of family, women who miss their children, and other themes. throughout the presentation she greets the people from different towns and cities in peru. to conclude, the audience sings along with great emotion to the big ballad hits of the evening. the second and younger event, which takes place in the recoleta district, is only a thirty minute walk away. in 2013, it was its first edition and it lasted three days with a very well equipped musical program, including well-known artists from peru as well as from colombia and ecuador (representing other two important migrant communities in chile). around forty stands were organized in line, on both sides of the soccer field of the recoleta stadium, located in one of santiago's districts with the highest rate of migrant residents. there was a vip area near the entrance where restaurants from lima set up representational stands, offering their dishes together with a special selection of elegant restaurants that are located in santiago. the event's name, perú, mil sabores (peru, a thousand flavors), reflects the land's culinary wealth. the showcased restaurants belong to culinary professionals, nevertheless, the massive character of this event is best represented by the musical program (fig. 3). on the closing day, more than twenty thousand people celebrated in front of a stage of large dimensions. musical performances began in the afternoon and they extended until late in the evenings. the bands are usually a selection of commercially successful artists coming from different corners of the continent. this transforms the event into a latin american celebration and not just a peruvian one: a celebration of migrants in santiago. each artist salutes his or her people, followed by the rest of the audience. the famous ballad singer segundo rosero, from ecuador, calls out to those coming from cities, such as quito, guayaquil and cuenca, to raise their hands and sing along. he speaks about love and the nostalgia felt by “all those who are far away from home, their family and friends”. this latin american spirit is present in each one of the presentations and in the event's décor, through the use of flags of many countries of latin america and the presence of a few food stands from colombia, ecuador and the dominican republic. there are stands that specialize in the sale of pisco sour, a cocktail that has gained great popularity in the city. its main customers are of chilean origin. meanwhile, peruvians quench their thirst with beer. the managers of these stands have come from peru exclusively for this festival. they are not the only ones, 22 stands share this same situation, mostly representing peruvian restaurants. the most successful ones serve grilled meat using techniques unknown to chileans. in this case, the hungry clients stand in line for up to an hour before being served a portion. food and drink are relatively expensive, nevertheless, the stands are crowded and fig. 3. event perú mil sabores at the recoleta stadium, 2013, santiago de chile. 238 fennia 193: 2 (2015)walter a. imilan the visitors eagerly consume the different dishes. even before the musical program reaches its high point, there is no more food to buy. the event's organization is similar to that of the older festival. the decoration, the way the food is presented and the services follow the same pattern. some days after the events we interviewed some of the stand owners of both festivals. in general, they all hoped to earn more money, their sales were not as good as expected. additionally, the stand fees are high. consequently they all expressed an interest in trying out the other festival next year. beyond the differences between both events, they can be seen as cultural performances. peruvianness is staged as an identity that expresses itself through gastronomy, and gastronomy as an exclusive knowledge of a national community. peruvian gastronomy has been recognized on a global scale due to its quality, particularity and sophistication. the production and consumption of food develops into an event in which an identity experience is performed. the differences between regional attributes of great importance within peru are blended together in these events. the stands barely make any reference to them: a national conception, unifying and integrating, governs at all times. it is undeniable that this process of identity recreation is supported by an entrepreneurial and commercial project. although there are different types of businesspeople involved, it must be emphasized that it is the job of amateurs – among the migrant population – and not of professionals to put such decorative cultural events together. the migrant population adopts sophisticated aesthetics to present their stands and dishes. they serve, wear uniforms and explain the dishes as if they were professionals from high-end restaurants. these aesthetics and manners comply with a high global culinary standard, such as the one constructed by the official peruvian discourse. this is a clear example of ordinary people appropriating globalized symbols such as those linked to peruvian gastronomy. in fact, a great part of the global dynamics generated around peruvian cuisine has been produced with the aim of supporting a sophisticated concept of entrepreneurship, on a high scale structure of investments. the hundreds of stand owners who participate in these events do not belong to this segment. nevertheless, they make themselves part of this imaginary of the peruvian gastronomic world. what the participants do is appropriate the globalized semantics of peruvian cuisine. in these terms, the makers of these celebrations articulate a sort of popular globalization. lins ribeiro (2009) uses the concept of popular and non-hegemonic globalization to refer to the tactics developed by subaltern groups in order to obtain benefits from the dynamics of global capitalism, especially linked to consumption, which have actually been designed at the core of great economic groups and transnational interests. similarly, we might say that in these celebrations of peruvianness the small impresarios make the globalization of peruvian cuisine as haute cuisine ‘popular’. in this sense, migrants find in the appropriation of this image an opportunity to successfully develop their own migratory projects. conclusions the success of a migrant culinary culture is usually regarded as the success of ethnic economies. within migration studies, the proliferation of restaurants and activities linked to gastronomy are usually observed as an indicator, an expression of social networks based on the origin of the migrants that encourages business activities as incorporation strategies of the migrant population. nevertheless, the success of peruvian gastronomy in chile is not only due to the development of an economic strategy of migrant incorporation and migrant business culture. it is also due to the fact that, as we have seen in detail, food plays a central role in this re-configuration of migrant identity via the strategic deployment of national markers. in this sense, the text has approached three fields that meet in a particular manner in the case of the peruvian migrant community in santiago: migration, food and national identity. the idea elaborated in this article is that gastronomy becomes a mediator that assembles various processes. on the one hand, there is private and governmental support for peruvian cuisine as a globalized product oriented towards a market of consumption of haute cuisine, whose innovative potential is globally sustained by relying on a particular national tradition. on the other hand, there are peruvian migrants who, following rigorous work and business ethics, offer a local product that cannot only be considered exotic or be associated with the “nostalgia consumption” of the migrant community. they develop a cuisine oriented towards the host society as a commercial strategy and as a mechanism of recognition that attempts to transcend the historic relationship of discrimination of chileans against peruvians. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 239performing national identity through peruvian food migration the relationship between gastronomy and national identity is staged and performed, especially during peru's national holidays. in this context, peruvianness is both communicated in and through a gastronomic performance which is also a creative process, as identity is being re-thought through culinary practices. by performing and staging peruvianness in gastronomic ways, peruvian migrants in santiago clearly capitalize on their national origin, thus defying the ‘invisibility’ which often characterizes migrants in hostile societies. the state's role, together with a group of private businesses, in the construction of a narrative of national identity linked to food possesses special characteristics that enable us to reflect about the importance of national states in the construction of these narratives in globalized contexts. first, these narratives originate from a commercial interest, adopt the semantics of patrimonial policies and are aimed at creating a new market. secondly, they make room for a transnational policy of identity construction, which concerns itself with the territorialization practices of peruvian communities abroad. this article shows how the public production of food migration, anchored in a conception of national identity, results in a phenomenon of various dimensions: from the economic integration and transformation of urban landscapes to the influence on recognition strategies and, above all, the renewal of a narrative of national identity that is now being re-signified and re-appropriated through the experience of transnational migration. notes 1 personal communication with humberto rodríguez, professor at the department of anthropology in universidad nacional mayor san marcos, lima – september 15th 2013. 2 in http://www.apega.pe/contenidoc/noticiasc4.html. 3 official video: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8joxlwkmkrk. 4 on chinese migration and food practices in peru, see rodríguez (2006). 5 the team was formed by anthropology students of the alberto hurtado university, santiago de chile, under the direction of the author of the present article. 6 entrepreneur gastón acurio has recently opened some restaurants in big cities in the united states of america, supported by important investments and marketing campaigns. also, martín morales has attracted the attention of lifestyle media to his relatively new restaurant in the soho neighborhood of london. meanwhile, in berlin, enrique serván works towards establishing peruvian cuisine within the city's culinary map. acknowledgements this research was supported by fondecyt n° 11121539 “la experiencia con la comida peruana en santiago de chile. prácticas de identidad y espacio de la migración transnacional peruana” (conicytchile). references acosta e 2013. mujeres migrantes cuidadoras en flujos migratorios sur-sur y sur-norte: expectativas, experiencias y valoraciones. polis. revista latinoamericana 12: 35, 35–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0718-65682013000200003. altamirano t 2000. liderazgo y organizaciones de peruanos en el exterior: culturas transnacionales e imaginarios sobre el desarrollo. fondo editorial pucp, lima. anderson b 1993. comunidades imaginadas: reflexiones sobre el origen y la difusión del nacionalismo. fondo de cultura económica, méxico. apega/ceplan 2012. gastronomía peruana al 2021. lineamientos para un programa de desarrollo de la gastronomía peruana en el marco del plan bicentenario. centro nacional de planeamiento estratégico, lima. aragón j 2014. los estudios políticos en el instituto de estudios peruanos: cambios, continuidades y posibilidades. in tanaka m (ed). 50 años pensando el perú: una reflexión crítica, 239–272. iep, lima. arjona garrido á & checa j c 2007. ethnic economy. theories, concepts and new advances. revista internacional de sociología 64: 45, 117–143. barlösius e 2011. soziologie des essens: eine sozial und kulturwissenschaftliche einführung in die ernährungsforschung. beltz juventa, frankfurt. berg u 2005. ¿enmarcando la «peruanidad»? la poética y pragmática de un espectáculo público entre los migrantes peruanos de nueva jersey. in berg u & paerregaard k (eds). el quinto suyo. transnacionalidad y formaciones diaspóricas en la migración peruana, 37–68. iep, lima. boas f 1987. anthropology and modern life. dover publications, new york. bruce j 2007. nos habíamos choleado tanto. psicoanálisis y racismo. fondo editorial de la universidad san martín de porres, lima. bruner e m 1986. experience and its expressions. in turner v (ed). the anthropology of experience, 3–30. university of illinois press, chicago. cieraad i 2006. at home: an anthropology of domestic space. syracuse university press, new york. 240 fennia 193: 2 (2015)walter a. imilan conquergood d 1989. poetics, play, process, and power: the performative turn in anthropology. text and performative quartely 1:1, 82–95. correa v, bortolotto i & musset a (eds). 2013. geografías de la espera. migrar, habitar y trabajar en la ciudad de santiago. 1990–2012. uqbar, santiago. degregori ci 2014a. el estudio del «otro». cambios en los análisis de etnicidad en el perú. in degregori ci (ed). el aprendiz de brujo y el curandero chino, 103–126. iep, lima. degregori ci 2014b. estados nacionales, etnicidad y democracia en américa latina. in degregori ci (ed). el aprendiz de brujo y el curandero chino, 207–212. iep, lima. dem departamento de extranjería y migración 2013. ministerio del interior y seguridad pública, chile. <http://www.extranjeria.gob.cl/quienes-somos/ estadisticas-migratorias/>. 22.09.2014. drinot p 2011. the allure of labor. workers, race and the making of the peruvian state. duke university press, durham. douglas m 2002. purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. taylor, new york. duany j 2011. blurred borders: transnational migration between the hispanic caribbean and the united states. the university of north carolina press, chapel hill. elias n 2010. über den prozess der zivilisation: soziogenetische und psychogenetische untersuchungen. zweiter band: wandlungen der gesellschaft: entwurf zu einer theorie der zivilisation. suhrkamp verlag, frankfurt. garcés a 2014. comercio ambulante, agencia estatal y migración: crónica de un conflicto en santiago de chile. in imilan w, garcés a & margarit d (eds). poblaciones en movimiento. etnificación de la ciudad, redes e integración, 147–167. ediciones alberto hurtado, santiago de chile. geertz c 1986. making experiences, authoring selves. in turner v & bruner e (eds). the anthropology of experience, 373–380. university of illinois press, chicago. goffman e 2009. la presentación de la persona en la vida cotidiana. amorrortu editores, buenos aires. golte j 2001. cultura, racionalidad y migración andina. iep, lima. golte j & adams n 1991. el caballo de troya de los invasores. estrategias campesinas en la conquista de la gran lima. iep, lima. gonzález s & parodi d 2014. introducción. in gonzález s & parodi d (eds). las historias que nos unen. episodios positivos en las relaciones peruana-chilenas, siglos xix y xx, 3–25. ril editores, santiago. gonzálvez h 2014. repensar la sexualidad desde el campo migratorio: una etnografía multisituada sobre parejas heterosexuales migrantes colombianas. revista estudios sociales 49, 101–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.7440/res49.2014.08. goody j 1982. cooking, cuisine and class: a study in comparative sociology. cambridge university press, uk. harris m 1984. vacas, cerdos, guerras y brujas. alianza editorial, madrid. imilan wa 2014. restaurantes peruanos en santiago de chile: construcción de un paisaje de la migración. revista de estudios sociales 48, 15–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.7440/res48.2014.02. lauer m 2012. la olla de cristal. mirando el futuro de la cocina peruana. universidad san martín de porres, lima. lauer m & lauer v 2006. la revolución gastronómica peruana. universidad de san martin de porres, lima. lévi-strauss c 1997. the culinary triangle. in counihan c & esterik p v (eds). food and culture: a reader, 28–35. routledge, nyc. lins ribeiro g 2009. la globalización popular y el sistema mundial no-hegemónico. nueva sociedad 241, 36–62. lube m & garcés ha 2012. mujeres peruanas en las regiones del norte de chile: apuntes preliminares para la investigación. estudios atacameños 44, 5–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0718-10432012000200002. malinowski b 1985. crime and custom in savage society. rowman & littlefield publishers, totowa, nj. márquez f 2014. inmigrantes en territorios de frontera: la ciudad de los otros. santiago de chile. eure (santiago) 40: 120, 49–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0250-71612014000200003. matta r 2011. posibilidades y límites del desarrollo en el patrimonio inmaterial. el caso de la cocina peruana. apuntes 24: 2, 196–207. matta r 2012. cocinando una nación de consumidores: el perú como marca global. revista consensus 17: 1, 49–60. mintz sw 1986. sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. penguin books, new york. mora c 2008. globalización, género y migraciones. polis (santiago) 7: 20, 285–297. möhring m 2012. fremdes essen: die geschichte der ausländischen gastronomie in der bundesrepublik deutschland. oldenbourg wissenschaftsverlag, oldenbourg. nützenadel a & trentmann f (eds). 2008. food and globalization. consumption, markets and politics in the modern world. berg publishers, london. ortemberg p 2006. el caleidoscopio de la efeméride patria y sus proyecciones en la esfera pública: «bienvenido sr wong». in cánepa g & ulfe m (eds). mirando la esfera pública desde la cultura en el perú, 51–77. concytec, lima. rodríguez h 2006. la pasión por el chifa. nueva sociedad 203, 79–88. rossi e 2014. noche de baile / a dancing night: immigrants, transnationalism, and music in japan. in irazábal c (ed). transbordering latin americas: liminal places, cultures, and powers (t)here, 258– 277. routledge and taylor & francis group, new york. sánchez a 2012. perfil migratorio del perú 2012. organización internacional de las migraciones, lima. sandoval p 2009. los rostros cambiantes de la ciudad: cultura urbana y antropología urbana en el fennia 193: 2 (2015) 241performing national identity through peruvian food migration perú. in degregori ci (ed). no hay país más diverso. compendio de antropología peruana, 278– 330. red para el desarrollo de las ciencias sociales en el perú, lima. solé c & parella s 2005. negocios étnicos: los comercios de los inmigrantes no comunitarios en cataluña. cidob, barcelona. stefoni c 2008. gastronomía peruana en las calles de santiago y la construcción de espacios transnacionales y territorios. in novick s, stefoni c & hinojosa a (eds). migraciones en américa latina, 211–227. catálogos, buenos aires. stefoni c 2011. migración, remesas y desarrollo. estado del arte de la discusión y perspectivas. polis 30, 495–521. stefoni c & fernández r 2011. mujeres inmigrantes en el trabajo doméstico: entre el servilismo y los derechos. in stefoni c (ed). mujeres inmigrantes en chile – mano de obra o trabajadoras con derecho?, 43–72. ediciones alberto hurtado, santiago. sutton de 2001. remembrance of repasts: an anthropology of food and memory. bloomsbury academic, oxford-new york. tapia-ladino m 2012. frontera y migración en el norte de a partir del análisis de los censos población: siglos xix–xxi. revista de geografía norte grande 53, 177–198. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0718-34022012000300011. thayer le 2013. expectativas de reconocimiento y estrategias de incorporación: la construcción de trayectorias degradadas en migrantes latinoamericanos residentes en la región metropolitana de santiago. polis (santiago) 12: 35, 259–285. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0718-65682013000200012. tijoux me 2013. niños(as) marcados por la inmigración peruana: estigma, sufrimientos, resistencias. convergencia revista de ciencias sociales 20: 61, 83–104. torres a & hidalgo r 2009. los peruanos en santiago de chile: transformaciones urbanas y percepción de los inmigrantes. polis (santiago) 8: 22, 307–326. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/s0718-65682009000100018. watson jl & caldwell ml 2005. the cultural politics of food and eating. blackwell, malden. wilk r 1999. real belizean food: building local identity in the transnational caribbean. american anthropologist 101: 2, 244–255. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7965 doi: 10.11143/7965 on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance katarina haugen and urban lindgren haugen, katarina & urban lindgren (2013). on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance. fennia 191: 2, pp. 122–142. issn 1798-5617. business start-ups are on the increase, a development which is accompanied by hopes that these new firms will generate a potential for, e.g., local and regional development and a strengthening of local labour markets as well as the national economy. however, the long-term performance and viability of new firms are often rather poor. this research aims to analyse the importance of access to assets in the form of forest holdings for the performance of swedish micro-firms. the analyses are based on official register data and fixed-effects panel regression modelling. a hypothesis is that a firm whose owner also possesses forest holdings is more viable thanks to the different resources (in the form of capital from logging or mortgaging, or non-pecuniary other values) the forest holdings may provide, and which possibly contribute to the firm’s economic stability and resilience to economic fluctuations. from a general point of view, we find support for the hypothesis that forest assets positively and significantly influence firm performance in terms of earnings before interest and taxes (ebit), but not in terms of value added. access to forest assets is never detrimental to firm performance, although it does not have a significant positive effect in all sub-categories of entrepreneurs based on different combinations of age, gender and firm type. particularly, the economic performance of private firms run by older men benefits from resources stemming from their forest holdings. no significant effects were found for female entrepreneurs or for limited companies. as regards regional variations, firms located outside the metropolitan regions – as compared to those at the top of the urban hierarchy – are likely to perform better, thus indicating that local development may benefit from resource transfers from the forest sector to micro-firms engaged in non-primary activities. keywords: micro-firms, firm performance, entrepreneurship, local development, forest ownership, panel regression, sweden katarina haugen & urban lindgren, department of geography and economic history, umeå university, se-901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mails: katarina.haugen@ geography.umu.se, urban.lindgren@geography.umu.se introduction entrepreneurship and new business creation are on the increase. more than 60,000 new firms1 are started in sweden each year, and the number of annual start-ups has increased since the mid1990s (fig. 1). entrepreneurship is frequently expected to strengthen local labour markets and provide employment as well as local and regional economic development (e.g. brüderl et al. 1992; storey 1994; henderson 2002; van praag 2003; reijonen 2008; holmes et al. 2010), not least in rural areas going through processes of economic, demographic and social change (labrianidis 2006). hopes are high that entrepreneurship may constitute a key component of livelihood strategies as well as broaden the scope of the rural economy and strengthen local and regional development (alsos et al. 2003; alsos & carter 2006; wilson 2010). however, the flipside of entrepreneurship is that many small businesses fail to ‘survive’ in the longer term (holmes et al. 2010; grande et al. 2011; brouder & eriksson 2012). although the degree of firm survival has increased compared to the late 1990s, nearly a third (32%) of the fennia 191: 2 (2013) 123on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance new firms started in sweden in 2005 had discontinued their activities after a few (3) years (fig. 2). moreover, for those firms which do survive the critical first few years, their turnover is often insufficient to even provide a livelihood for the owner2 (swedish agency for growth analysis 2010). thus, while ‘entry to markets is relatively easy...survival is not’ (esteve-pérez & mañez-castillejo 2008: 231), and accordingly there is a substantial body of research literature which attempts to identify factors which may influence the performance and survival of firms, and to which the present paper aspires to contribute. this research is underpinned by the idea that a firm’s development, and by extension its survival, may be beneficially affected if its owner is also the owner of forest property, because the forest holdings provide access to various resources that can potentially be used within the firm. the aim of this study is to explore the importance of forest assets for the economic performance of micro-firms throughout sweden. the analyses are focused on micro-firms, defined as companies having up to ten employees. the following research questions are analysed: i) does the value of the forest assets owned by micro-firm owners boost the performance of their firms?; and ii) how does the importance of forest assets for micro-firm development vary depending on the properties of the firm owners (e.g. sex and age) and of the firms and their context (e.g. firm type, line of business and geographical characteristics)? forest ownership may entail several potential benefits3. the first and presumably most essential aspect is that it may provide economic values in the form of income from logging or capital from mortgaging which may be used to, e.g., finance investments in the firm. one of the economic objectives of small-scale forest owners is to attain liquidity reserves via their forest holdfig. 1. total number of firm start-ups and number of firm start-ups per 1,000 inhabitants in sweden 1995–2010. source: swedish agency for growth analysis (2012). fig. 2. share of ‘surviving’ firms three years after start-up by year of start-up (1997–2008). source: swedish agency for growth analysis (2013). 124 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren ings (hugosson & ingemarson 2003), and investing in one’s micro-firm could be one possible way of putting such funds to use. compared to, for instance, entrepreneurs who rely on private housing mortgages as a means to acquire necessary capital (storey 1994; shane 2003) to selffinance business ventures – which incidentally is the most common financial strategy of entrepreneurs (shane 2003), presumably particularly in the case of the smallest firms, which rarely rely on external funding (holmes et al. 2010) – forest owners have additional assets that may be used to this end. it is also possible that particularly young firms in the sensitive initial phase after market entry may benefit from the additional financial security forest ownership may generate, potentially giving them a longer life expectancy rather than a short ‘mayfly’ existence. a more indirect possible benefit of forest ownership is that the income and thus economic security the owners derive from their forest may make them more willing and daring to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions. second, forest holdings may provide other – at least partially non-pecuniary – values, as well as access to various types of resources which may support the activities of the firm. these assets may include, e.g., access to land for storing equipment; out-buildings which can be used or let; natural environments; hunting and fishing grounds; leaseholds; building plots; and various natural resources. it is also noteworthy that forest values in a more general sense are multidimensional (xu & bengston 1997), encompassing both instrumental values (including economic and/or utilitarian types of values) and non-instrumental values (e.g. aesthetic values, which may be important in, e.g., tourism business ventures). therefore, even in cases in which the timber production from private forest holdings may not necessarily generate a substantial income for the owners (törnqvist 1995), it may nevertheless be the case that forest ownership might provide them with other resources. an additional possibility is that forest ownership is associated with aspects of human capital (e.g. knowledge; experience; access to information) and networks of contacts, which may also be valuable for non-forest-related entrepreneurial activities. in sum, the hypothesis which serves as the point of departure in this research is that different types of assets stemming from forest holdings may provide forest-owning entrepreneurs with a certain financial stability and therefore resilience to economic fluctuations compared to entrepreneurs who cannot rely on these potential additional resources, as well as other nonpecuniary assets of potential value in the running of their firm. the current research contributes to the knowledge bases of rural development as well as entrepreneurship in several ways. on a broad level it addresses the question of how a key rural resource – the forest – can make a difference for local trade and industry and thereby form an integrated part of feasible endogenous development paths in times of demographic and socioeconomic change in rural areas. these issues are internationally relevant, and the results of the present study have the potential to inform debates and research on entrepreneurship and rural development beyond the swedish borders. more specifically, it is scrutinized whether, and in which situations and contexts, forest resources can function as a constituent of firms’ resource bases and boost firm performance. also, the present paper emphasizes resource transfers from rural to non-rural sectors rather than transfers between related rural (sub-)sectors. this provides novel perspectives on the entrepreneurial activities of forest owners as well as new insights into the importance of a rural resource for nonprimary economic activities. finally, the paper contributes to the rather scarce research on entrepreneurship and firm performance using longitudinal methodological approaches (korunka et al. 2010). the outline of the remainder of the paper is as follows. the introductory section is followed by a review of previous research related to the potential for forest owners to use rural resources in business ventures as a rural livelihood strategy; as well as research on the determinants of entrepreneurship, firm performance and firm survival. the literature review serves to contextualize the present empirical study with regard to rural development as well as to provide theoretical anchorage in the literature on entrepreneurship and firm development. next, the empirical data and methods are described in detail, followed by a section where the results are presented. finally, the findings are discussed with regard to previous research and potential implications, and conclusions are drawn. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 125on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance forest owners, entrepreneurship and rural development entrepreneurship in rural areas is frequently considered as a strategy emerging from the need to grapple with negative trends (alsos & carter 2006) of demographic and socioeconomic development. it may be a central constituent of adaptation strategies and policies aiming towards multifunctionality and pluriactivity as means for dealing with declining opportunities (alsos et al. 2003; alsos & carter 2006; wilson 2010) and for generating endogenous development based on non-primary economic activities and new forms of rural livelihoods, sometimes argued to reflect a ‘post-production’ transition (mather 2001; elands & praestholm 2008). in line with the premises of these policies, entrepreneurship has been found to be mostly positively associated with beneficial local development, as indicated by business tax revenues and the share of social welfare cases in rural communities (baumgartner et al. 2013). in the case of forest owners, their decision to start a firm may be spurred by, e.g., a wish to make use of their resources – land, buildings, game, road infrastructure etc. – and to contribute to their livelihoods as a way to compensate for a drop in agricultural income and occupation (lunnan et al. 2006) in the wake of discouraging demographic and socioeconomic trends. agricultural resources such as areal resources in the form of forest ownership may primarily be expected to be of importance for the performance of firms whose activities are of similar, i.e. rural, character (grande et al. 2011); i.e., that farmers transfer resources between their different rural activities. a study of multiple business ownership among norwegian farmers showed that resource transfers, including knowledge and organizational and physical resources, took place between farm businesses and other business ventures, and this was particularly common when the business on the receiving end was also related to farming. for those firms, transfers stemming from rural resources made a substantial difference for firm performance (alsos & carter 2006). it is perhaps less obvious whether values originating in areal resources such as forest holdings would also be transferred and used to the benefit of firms in different lines of business, i.e. unrelated to the farm sector. when it comes to forest owners, the literature specifically focusing on self-employed or entrepreneur forest owners is rather scarce, and unsurprisingly mainly focuses on forest-related activities (e.g. lindroos et al. 2005; dhubháin et al. 2007). however, this group does not necessarily direct their entrepreneurship efforts towards activities of primary character. another norwegian study found that among forest owners who had started firms, the most common business activities were either ‘commercialization of hunting and fishing’ (23%) or renting out accommodation (cabins), i.e., tourism (20%) (lunnan et al. 2006: 686, cf. eikeland & lie 1999). hence, forest owners’ business ventures may also include a substantial share of other activities such as various service activities, and therefore it is of interest to explore the possibility that resource transfers may also take place to other business ventures than primary production. forest owners constitute a heterogeneous group and differ in important ways, as shown in numerous typologies (e.g. wiersum et al. 2005; ingemarson et al. 2006; dhubháin et al. 2007). for instance, their objectives for forest ownership may have different rationales related to goals of production, consumption or recreational values (dhubháin et al. 2007). such differences in attitudes and approaches can also be expected to be present among the subgroup of forest owners who are also entrepreneurs, and to potentially affect their chosen courses of action. moreover, not all forest owners are rural dwellers, and the share of non-resident forest owners – i.e. people who live at a distance from their forest holdings, usually in cities – is increasing (lindroos et al. 2005, cf. ziegenspeck et al. 2004; schraml 2006). the geographical relationship between forest owners and their property – whether they are resident or non-resident owners – tends to be associated with different strategies as regards the use of the forest (nordlund & westin 2011). for instance, non-resident owners more often generate outflows of forest revenue away from the local rural context (karlsson 2007). this geographical perspective also implies that the importance of forest holdings, which constitute a rural resource locationwise, is not restricted to people who themselves live in rural areas or to firms operating in these parts of the country. 126 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren entrepreneurship and the performance and survival of micro-firms given the focus of the present empirical study on the importance of areal resources for micro-firm development, a review of the literature on entrepreneurship and firm development is called for. in sweden as well as more generally (bartelsman et al. 2005; cressy 2006; reijonen & komppula 2007), small firms dominate in terms of number of firms, although they are much less important in terms of employment numbers. in 2011, microfirms represented 96% of the total number of swedish firms, but only accounted for 15% of the total number of firm employees (statistics sweden 2012). development and survival in small firms are often problematic. a general pattern in most markets is that many firms enter and many firms exit each year5, and most firms that enter or exit are small (bartelsman et al. 2005). new firms often exit within the first few years following entry (cefis & marsili 2005; cressy 2006). a cross-country comparison comprising ten oecd countries6 found that 20–40% of new firms failed within the first two years after entry as a result of market selection. after the first seven years, 40–50% were still in business (bartelsman et al. 2005). while there is no consensus as regards the specific factors associated with the success (or failure) of firms, due to the complexity of the issue (simpson et al. 2012), certain broad types of factors can nevertheless be outlined. these can be attributed to realms pertaining to the individual entrepreneur, the firm structure, and the environmental/ contextual conditions (brüderl 1992; box 2008). the individual realm: characteristics of the entrepreneur the characteristics of the individual entrepreneur may be expected to be particularly important in small firms due to the ‘omnipresence of the entrepreneur’ in all business activities (reijonen & komppula 2007: 692, cf. gray 2002). their human capital includes both general and specific traits such as age, sex, education, previous work and/or entrepreneurial experience, ethnicity, family (business) background, and marital status (brüderl et al. 1992; alsos & carter 2006; ucbasaran et al. 2007; fairlie & robb 2009; shaw et al. 2009; swedish agency for growth analysis 2010). most entrepreneurs tend to be relatively young adults or in early middle age (storey 1994). therefore, they have often accumulated more financial and human capital compared to a younger person (farrell et al. 2003), but entrepreneurial motivation may also decline with increasing age (lévesque & minniti 2006). sex has been found to interplay both with the propensity of becoming an entrepreneur (e.g. berglann et al. 2011, who found a lower likelihood of entrepreneurship among women compared to men) and with business outcomes. the common observation that female-owned firms tend to ‘underperform’ in comparison to maleowned firms (e.g. fairlie & robb 2009; swedish agency for growth analysis 2010) may be at least partially explained, e.g., by different access to resources (fairlie & robb 2009; shaw et al. 2009) or by comparisons being based on measures of success which disproportionally favour male-owned firms (robb & watson 2012). having a spouse may be beneficial to business development by offering access to financial or other forms of support, labour input (fairlie & robb 2009) and risk sharing (krasniqi 2009), thus suggesting that the immediate social (household) context of the entrepreneur matters (e.g. jayawarna et al. 2011). mixed findings have been reported concerning education. for instance, berglann et al. (2011) found variation across educational lengths and types, although the relationship between educational length and entrepreneurship was not linear. fairlie and robb (2009), on the other hand, found that business success increased with higher educational levels. however, the highly educated tend to have access to attractive labour market opportunities and may therefore be less prone to start their own business (krasniqi 2009). micro-firm survival has been found to be related to the entrepreneur’s experience of work in related lines of business and to having local experience (brouder & eriksson 2012, cf. fairlie & robb 2009), whereas alsos and carter (2006) found previous entrepreneurial experience to be associated with assets as well as liabilities. other relevant personal ‘traits, motivation and capacity’ (box 2008: 379) include, e.g., the individual’s degree of entrepreneurial orientation in terms of ‘proactiveness, innovativeness, and risk taking’ (wiklund & shepherd 2005: 85, cf. e.g. lévesque & minniti 2006; lunnan et al. 2006). entrepreneurial attitudes, e.g. the ability to recognize potential business opportunities and readiness to take risks, have been found to be associated with fennia 191: 2 (2013) 127on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance the probability of becoming an entrepreneur (lunnan et al. 2006, cf. zhao et al. 2010). personality dimensions (conscientiousness, openness to experience, emotional stability, and extraversion) positively influence the intention and decision to become an entrepreneur as well as firm performance (zhao et al. 2010). entrepreneurs’ social skills can also influence firm performance, e.g., through access to information and resources (baron & tang 2009). the structural realm: characteristics of the firm a second group of factors refers to ‘structural’ characteristics of the firm, including age, size (current and/or initial) and line of business (box 2008). firm age and size are generally positively associated with survival (bartelsman et al. 2005; esteve-pérez & mañez-castillejo 2008, cf. shane 2003), and there are risks associated with newness as well as being a small-size firm7 (box 2008). in terms of employee numbers or financial assets (brüderl et al. 1992) small firms ‘exist close to the edge’ and are more vulnerable to sudden shocks compared to larger firms (e.g. hannan et al. 1998: 283, cf. storey 1994). ‘adolescent’ and ‘senescent’ firms may also be exposed to higher risks compared to mature (but not too old) firms which have attained an established market position. the reasons larger firms tend to have better survival prospects than their smaller equivalents include, e.g., a higher likelihood of substantial scale and diversity of business activities (which reduces the firm’s vulnerability to market changes) and a higher efficiency and ability to attract financial and human resources (estevepérez & mañez-castillejo 2008). other factors which may be beneficial to firm performance and survival include innovativeness; post-entry growth rate; belonging to a high-technology line of business (cefis & marsili 2005, cf. georgellis et al. 2000); targeting a specific market niche as opposed to adopting a more generalist strategy; forming strategic alliances with firms already on the market (shane 2003); and the application of advertising and r&d (research and development) strategies in order to ‘develop firm specific assets’ (esteve-pérez & mañez-castillejo 2008: 244). access to resources and its importance for firm development is a key issue in the present paper, as well as in the entrepreneurship literature. according to the ‘resource-based perspective’ (alsos et al. 2003; alsos & carter 2006), firms may develop a competitive advantage through the possession of unique combinations of different resources (esteve-pérez & mañezcastillejo 2008; chen et al. 2009; grande et al. 2011), encompassing both tangible physical resources (e.g., natural resources and financial assets) and intangible human resources (e.g., competence and information networks) (cefis & marsili 2005; grande et al. 2011). access to financial assets is crucial for both firm entry as well as performance and survival in the short and long term (binks & ennew 1996; headd 2003; musso & schiavo 2008; krasniqi 2009): ‘the more own capital is available, the more successful will the small business owner be’ (van praag 2003: 6; cf. wiklund & shepherd 2005; fairlie & robb 2009) since it provides a protecting buffer and improves the prerequisites for survival, growth and profitability (shane 2003). according to korunka et al. (2010), access to financial capital at startup is the most important determinant of longterm business survival. firms of small entry size tend to have limited access to resources for coping with initial challenges, and a shortage of resources is a common disadvantage faced by small firms more generally (malecki 1993). similarly, young firms are often exposed to risk due to a lack of resources and the absence of an established position (box 2008). moreover, access to private financial assets may enable entrepreneurs to avoid relying on mortgages (åstebro & bernhardt 2003). previous research has shown that becoming an entrepreneur was positively associated with family wealth (berglann et al. 2011), and that firm survival and growth were positively related to the firm owner having received an inheritance (holtz-eakin et al. 1994). the environmental realm: characteristics of the broader context the contextual or environmental factors largely refer to aspects of the ‘economic, political and cultural context’ (shane 2003: 145) such as macro-economic conditions and fluctuations, as well as other prerequisites stemming from the institutional framework. environmental econom128 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren ic conditions at the time of firm founding have been found to continue to influence firm development through lasting cohort effects (box 2008), which may produce enduring heightened or lowered levels of risk throughout the ‘lives’ of businesses started during a particular period (box 2008; holmes et al. 2010) as well as interact with the importance of firm age and size (wagner 1994). other contextual factors include changing market conditions due to, e.g., the entry of new firms which alter the competitive structure (esteve-pérez & mañez-castillejo 2008). geographical characteristics of the firm location may also be considered to be part of the contextual realm of factors. for instance, it may be the case that different types of places along an urban-rural continuum are favourable in different phases of firm development processes, e.g., start-up, growth and long-term survival (renski 2009), or in terms of different aspects of business development (fairlie & robb 2009). as regards rural locations more specifically the disadvantages may include, e.g., constraints in terms of limited local demand, isolation from markets, or a lack of infrastructure and services (renski 2009) or of skilled, specialized labour (dinis 2006; baumgartner et al. 2013). the advantages may include lower costs (renski 2009), for instance, and because firms in rural locations are more likely than urban firms to own their premises they often have better prerequisites with regard to financing (keeble et al. 1992; blackburn & curran 1993). rural areas may also have specific properties which have the potential to serve as resources for small-scale entrepreneurs. rural qualities such as ‘natural resources’, ’tradition and cultural heritage’ and ‘environment and amenity resources’ (lane & yoshinaga 1994) may be valuable in the marketing of certain types of products or services, thus providing additional advantages for rural firms (patterson & anderson 2003), e.g., within tourism ventures (lunnan et al. 2006; daugstad 2008). in sum, this literature review has served to contextualize the present study in the fields of rural development research as well as entrepreneurship and firm development research. additionally, it provides theoretical justifications which guide the design of the empirical study in terms of the selection of relevant variables. empirical analyses data the data used for the analyses were collected from various registers at statistics sweden. individuallevel register data make it possible to combine demographic and socioeconomic attributes as well as information about ownership of firms and forest properties. the astrid database, hosted by umeå university, is a compilation of these registers and possesses longitudinal micro-level attributes linking forests and firms to individuals. the creation of the dataset started with a selection of firms having between one and ten employees. this category of firms closely resembles the definition of micro-firms by the european commission (storey 1994; european commission 2005). we decided to exclude larger firms because the forest revenue to firm turnover ratio is likely to be very small among this group of forest and firm owners. of sweden’s 330,000 forest owners (swedish forest agency 2012), the average size of forest property is approximately 35 hectares (federation of swedish farmers 2009), which implies that the average annual yield is just about equivalent to a household’s gross monthly income. thus, for micro-firms, forestry income may make a difference in their operations as a means for investments and other types of resource transfer. we are particularly interested in the ways economic exchange between forestry and micro-firms takes place from a general point of view. it is known from previous research that there are close connections between firms sprung from diversification strategies at the farm and traditional forestry, although the different economic activities run as separate businesses (e.g. eikeland & lie 1999). this category of forestry and micro-firm interaction may certainly be of interest, but it is likely biased towards rural-based firms producing products and services close to core activities of farming. statistics from our dataset confirm that this is a common symbiosis. as mentioned, it may not come as a surprise that farmers use forest revenues for their broader economic activities, but is it the case that forest assets contributes to micro-firm performance more generally? in order to shed some light on this issue we choose to focus on micro-firms outside the primary sector, deselecting firms registered as involved in forestry, agriculture and fishing activities. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 129on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance another relevant distinction between microfirms is related to the owners’ choice of type of company; they may choose different administrative setups for their business organizations. two dominating types are the private firm and the limited company. in the private firm the owner is personally responsible for potential debts accumulated in the business, and the surplus and deficit of the business activity have to be accounted for in the owner’s personal income-tax return. firm money can be used for private needs, as long as the transactions are accounted for in the books as private loans. conversely, in the limited company, the owner has no personal responsibility for commitments made by the company. at worst, the owner may lose the share capital (least possible amount 50,000 sek), but personal assets like the family house, bank balance, market portfolio etc. are protected in cases of bankruptcy. moreover, this implies that the owner has to make a clear distinction between assets belonging to the company and his/her private finances as it is illegal to use company money for private needs. based on this discussion, the importance of forest holdings for micro-firm performance may be connected to the registration of the micro-firm: whether it is registered as a private firm or a limited company. from this point of departure, we sampled microfirms having one to ten employees in 2003 (approximately 153,000 companies). the database includes links between firms and people, which makes it possible to identify who works in which firm. in the next step, characteristics of the employees were collected. based on this information, firm ownership was established and a number of necessary attributes of the owner were collected for further data extraction. the identification of ownership was not successful in all cases, causing the sample of firms to be reduced to 71,000. another prerequisite for inclusion in the sample was that the firm be observable in the dataset during the years after the data extraction base year of 2003; some firms may vanish from the dataset because of acquisitions, mergers and spin-offs. in order to take into account such organizational changes we used statistics sweden’s ‘fad’ (firm and workplace dynamics) register, which made it possible to keep track of firm identity over time (i.e., the organizational identity number in the database refers to the same firm from one year to another). after firms with an unclear ‘pedigree’ were removed, 29,800 firms remained in the sample. the panel covers the years 2003 to 2008. some of the firms ceased to exist during this period, which means that we have an unbalanced panel. after having identified the micro-firms and firm owners, we continued to link additional information from the database to the firms and individuals. in regard to firms, there are data on value added and earnings, and for the firm owners there are various demographic and socioeconomic data. in addition, information about forest properties owned by individuals is also available. this part of the dataset contains variables such as number of hectares of forest land, arable land, marshland etc., and assessed value of these different categories of land. among these variables, forest land is likely to be the most important factor for determining pecuniary assets because logging generates cash flow that can potentially be used in other economic activities. this is why we use assessed forest value as a key research variable in the analyses. all in all, the generated panel dataset contains information on firms and their performance indicators together with variables describing firm owners’ demographic, socioeconomic and forest property-related characteristics. many of these variables correspond closely to those mentioned in the firm development literature. econometric model for the analysis of the effects of the value of forest assets on micro-firm performance, we have estimated a number of fixed-effects models that account for endogeneity driven by unobserved heterogeneity and self-selection (eq. 1). the reason for using fixed-effects panel regressions is that we want to use the estimation results for causal interpretation of the relationship between forest holdings and firm performance. when estimation techniques that operate on cross-sectional data (e.g. ols) are applied, the obtained results might be biased as a consequence of self-selection. for example, positive estimates of the value of forest assets on performance generated by the ols model could be the result of a self-selection of successful firm owners with accumulated capital buying forest land as an investment or for taxation reasons. thus, it would not be possible to interpret the estimation results of the ols as a causal effect whereby forest assets boost micro-firm performance. however, the fixed-effects model does not solve all problems related to cause-and-effect interpretation. as long as the individual-specific error (v i ) 130 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren does not change over time, implying that unobserved characteristics stay the same (e.g. ability, values, routines etc.), the model is not biased by endogeneity. moreover, the fixed-effects model also rests on the assumption that there is no correlation between x it and . if this is not the case, the fixed-effects model will be biased and other modelling approaches could be considered (e.g. structural equation modelling). however, it can be assumed that most non-observable characteristics of the individual do not change over time, or if they do, that the processes of change are operating at a slow pace (stern et al. 1999). [eq. 1] in the fixed-effects model x it is a matrix of covariates, is a vector of estimates, v i is the individual-specific error, and is the idiosyncratic error that varies over time and across individuals.8 dependent and independent variables two different groups of models were estimated with two different dependent variables. the performance of micro-firms can be measured in many different ways. one straightforward measure of economic output is value added (rigby & essletzbichler 2002), which is a function of labour costs, earnings before interest and taxes (ebit) and depreciation. value added is the firm’s contribution to the gross domestic product (gdp), and can be viewed as a general input to the national economy and employment. the second dependent variable of performance used in this study, ebit, is more focused on the firm’s ability to make profits and generate earning power. large and increasing ebit is a strong indication of profitable and successful companies. both value added and ebit are available for all firms in the dataset, which makes it possible to assess the importance of the value of forest assets on micro-firm performance throughout the entire country. the principal independent variable is an indicator of forest value. by using the tax value of productive forest land, which is correlated with the amount of m3 standing volume, we get an assessment of available assets that the forest owner has at his/her disposal.9 it should be kept in mind that m3 standing volume says nothing about the age distribution of the stands of the property, which means that felling must presumably be carried out over a longer period of time, making it virtually impossible to withdraw all assets instantly. this indicator is nevertheless a better proxy for available assets than factors like number of hectares or other types of land use associated with the property. aside from the forest assets, a set of additional independent variables is also included in the analyses. these were chosen in order to, based on the information available in the register data, represent to the highest degree possible the three domains of factors previously found to be of importance for firm performance: individual, structural and environmental, as discussed in the literature review. concerning the characteristics of the individual entrepreneur, a number of indicators are included in the analyses: age, sex, country of birth, marital status, family composition, level of education, main occupation, income and entrepreneurial experience. aside from being standard demographical variables, age and sex have also been found in previous studies to interplay with entrepreneurial/firm performance, and may thus be expected to be of importance in themselves or in interaction with other variables. the entrepreneur’s level of education is used as an indicator of the human capital of the firm owner. level of education is categorized as low (compulsory school), mid (secondary school) or high (tertiary). main occupation and country of birth are both background variables represented by dummy variables (work/other and sweden/other, respectively). marital status (dummy variable for married/other) and household composition, in terms of the number of children aged 18 or older in the household, are included as indicators of the family situation and the close social context of the entrepreneur, and of their possibilities to rely on close relations for, e.g., helping out with firm activities or providing support in other ways. entrepreneurial experience is indicated by the sum of business income from 1990 and onwards. it should also be noted that certain hard-tomeasure qualities pertaining to the individual entrepreneur which have been frequently studied in previous research, for instance entrepreneurial orientation and other personality traits, are also implicitly included in the analyses since the chosen method of analysis takes into account such (otherwise omitted) variables, as mentioned earlier.   yit  1 xit  vi it fennia 191: 2 (2013) 131on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance the structural characteristics of the firm are primarily represented by the line of business in which it is active, according to an official classification. forest-related lines of business are excluded as a consequence of the above-mentioned sampling criteria. the level of access to financial resources is indicated by the firm owner’s income as well as that of the owner’s partner, which according to previous research may also benefit business development. type of firm (private firm or limited company) is also included as a variable. chief among the indicators of the environment or context in which the firms operate is a classification by the swedish association of local authorities and regions (salar 2010) of the swedish municipalities into different types based on, e.g., economic and demographic conditions. previous studies have suggested that different geographical environments may interplay with firm development. another contextual issue, the possible existence of cohortor generation-related issues pertaining to the firm (e.g. the general economic conditions at the time of firm entry), is accounted for through the method in itself and the inclusion of a time variable (year). finally, a quota for the extent to which forest estates are located at the owner’s residential location or elsewhere is included to account for the possible importance of the location of forest property visà-vis residential location. descriptive statistics for most variables, meta means are used to summarize the results over the entire study period. these are mean values calculated as indices of the mean values of the different indicators for each respective year in the time series 2000– 2008. the distinction between forest-owning and non-forest-owning firm owners is based on a definition of forest owners as persons who own forest land with an assessed value of >0. hence, a dummy variable is used for descriptive purposes, as opposed to the continuous variable which is used in the subsequent analyses. unless stated otherwise, the results reported below are statistically significant at least at the p<0.05 level (chisquare and anova tests) for all years in the panel.10 forest owners constitute a relatively small minority (meta mean 7.6%) of the sample. the meta mean for the average assessed value of the forest holdings is 876,000 sek (roughly €100,000), 48 hectares for the average areal size of the properties. the value of both variables increases over time. most of the forest owners are resident on their forest property (meta mean 88% local ownership in terms of both value and area). concerning the characteristics (table 1) of the firm owners, those who are also forest owners are somewhat older than their non-forest-owning counterparts, and also have a higher average number of adult children. men and native swedes dominate the sample, particularly among the forest owners. two-thirds of the firm owners are married (non-significant differences across the groups). level of education is lower among the forest owners, and work is the dominating type of occupation in both groups. the non-forest owners have higher levels of wage income and overall work-related income. there were no significant differences in entrepreneurial experience in terms of the sum of their business income from 1990 and onwards. forest owners have substantially higher average capital income, presumably stemming from forest income, and hence also higher disposable income.11 the forest owners are more oriented towards rural residential environments in their residential characteristics compared to the nonforest owners, who live in urban environments to a greater extent. as regards the characteristics of the microfirms (table 2), there are both similarities and differences in the types of business activities they are engaged in. commonplace lines of business for firms owned by forest owners and non-forest owners alike are manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail, transport and communications, and real estate. however, construction and transport activities, for example, are more common among the forest owners’ firms, and non-forest owners’ firms are more often involved in, e.g., real estate, wholesale and retail, and services. private firms are by far the most common firm type for forest owners and non-forest owners alike (non-significant differences across the groups). concerning the performance of the firms, forest owners’ firms clearly perform better on several indicators, including net turnover and the dependent variables value added and ebit. thus, there are grounds for further exploring the hypothesis concerning the relationship between forest ownership and the economic performance of micro-firms. 132 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren results the results of the statistical analyses are presented in this section. table 3 shows estimation results from the models on value added and earnings (ebit) using the full sample of firms. on the basis of previous discussions, there is reason to assume that the importance of the value of forest holdings for firm performance may vary between different types of firms and different owner categories. in order to further explore these potential differences, the model specification exhibited in table 3 was rerun on a number of sub-samples. due to space restrictions we focus on the presentation of forest value, which is the principal independent variable of the analysis. in table 4 the estimates of forest value are displayed for 36 additional models scrutinizing the importance of type of company, sex of the owner and age of the owner for the two chosen firm performance indicators. going back to table 3, it can be concluded that forest value has a positive effect on firm performance only when operationalized as earnings (ebit). apparently, the value of forest holdings table 1. characteristics of firm owners by forest ownership status. meta mean values for the 2000–2008 period and mean age for 2003. source: astrid database. micro-firm owners according to forest ownership status variable variable levels (where applicable) forest owners non-forest owners mean age in 2003 52.1 50.4 m e t a m e a n s 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 8 sex male 91.8% 81.9% female 7.1% 17.5% no data 1.1% 0.6% marital status married 65.3% 65.9% other 34.7% 34.1% no. children >age 18 1.5 1.3 level of education low (primary) 36.6% 27.7% mid (secondary) 46.1% 48.8% high (tertiary) 16.5% 22.9% unspecified 0.8% 0.6% main occupation work 95.7% 96.1% other 4.3% 3.9% sum. income 1990(sek) 644,270 624,912 country of birth sweden 99.0% 92.4% other 1% 7.6% residential characteristics metropolitan 2.5% 12.3% suburban metropolitan 7.9% 20.8% major cities 23.0% 26.5% suburbs of major cities 2.4% 3.2% commuter municipalities 10.7% 8.1% tourism municipalities 7.7% 4.0% manufacturing municipalities 18.5% 9.5% sparsely populated municipalities 6.8% 1.7% municipalities in densely populated regions 12.9% 10.2% municipalities in sparsely populated regions 7.7% 3.6% income (sek) disposable income (individual) 324,517 266,231 disposable income (individual + partner) 497,504 447,388 work-related income 251,783 271,695 wage income 197,989 226,286 business income 40,924 39,376 capital income 129,838 42,910 unemployment benefit 308 311 early retirement benefit 2,079 1,998 income support 4,284 3,998 fennia 191: 2 (2013) 133on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance does not boost the firms’ value added or, indirectly, gdp. however, when performance is defined in terms of a profitability measure (ebit) it seems that the value of forest holdings may play an important role in the evolution of the firm. in line with the hypothesis, a likely interpretation of the estimation result is that firm owners who own forest estates make use of forest revenues in their micro-firms. the analyses do not reveal the exact ways this resource transfer is done, i.e. whether it is channelled via money transfers from cutting or via other non-pecuniary forest-property benefits.12 in regard to the other person-specific covariates13, it can be concluded that age of the owner (age), number of adult children (no. children > 18), experience of running businesses in the past (sum. income 1990–), and education level (education) are those factors that show significant effects on firm performance in terms of either value added or earnings (ebit). highly educated firm owners perform better, as do more seasoned firm owners, as measured in age and experience of running firms in the past. having adult children may also add to firm performance, potentially as a result of family-driven contributions in firm operations. concerning line of business, we find no significant differences in firm performance. however, there seem to be clear regional variations between the metropolitan regions and other parts of the country. both performance indicators show similar patterns by which micro-firms tend to do better outside metropolitan regions. the year dummies mostly exhibit significant estimates, indicating time-specific fluctuations (e.g., changes in the economic situation) that the panel regression can account for. in table 4 we turn back to the principal independent variable, forest value, and look more closely at its importance for firm performance. after subdividing the micro-firms according to type of company, we ran two models estimating effects on value added and earnings, respectively. the analyses reveal a distinct difference between businesses registered as private firms and as limited companies. it is only in private firms that forest value has a positive effect on firm performance. the estimates are highly significant (p<0.01) for this group, whereas the corresponding estimates for limited companies indicate p-values far from significant effects. table 2. characteristics of micro-firms by the owners’ forest ownership status. meta mean values for the 2000–2008 period. source: astrid database. micro-firms according to owners’ forest ownership status variable forest owners non-forest owners m e t a m e a n s 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 8 firm type private firm 28.0% 27.9% limited company 72.0% 72.1% line of business mining 0.6% 0.1% manufacturing 13.5% 12.8% electricity & water suppl. 0.1% 0.0% construction 25.8% 18.6% wholesale & retail 21.7% 25.3% hotel & restaurants 0.5% 1.7% transport & communications 14.6% 9.7% financial intermediation 0.4% 0.5% real estate 14.7% 20.9% public administration 0.1% 0.1% education 0.4% 0.8% health & social work 2.5% 4.5% other services 2.2% 4.5% primary sector 2.6% 0.2% no data 0.2% 0.2% economic performance (sek) earnings before interest and taxes (ebit) 37,257 27,255 value added 154,584 136,354 net turnover 467,027 403,049 other running revenue 9,241 5,797 wage cost 68,306 68,414 labour cost 29,201 29,618 134 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren table 3. fixed-effects estimations of firm performance defined as value added and earnings before interest and taxes (ebit). cluster-robust standard errors were used. source: astrid database. performance indicator value added ebit coef. p>t ss coef. p>t ss forest value 0.068 0.118 0.043 **0.081 0.019 0.034 age -22.536 0.402 26.874 *-17.076 0.092 10.085 married 36.751 0.704 96.580 -3.996 0.909 34.862 no. children > 18 **90.745 0.031 41.941 17.225 0.272 15.641 sum. income 1990***0.050 0.001 0.015 ***0.014 0.002 0.004 partner’s income -0.000 0.754 0.000 -0.000 0.358 0.000 local forest ownership -35.348 0.790 132.661 -4.635 0.956 83.468 education primary educ. 59.067 0.760 192.899 283.429 0.156 199.005 upper secondary educ. 294.270 0.466 402.740 ***216.173 0.003 73.229 university educ. -186.868 0.684 458.477 ***229.189 0.002 72.800 unspecified educ. (ref.) line of business mining 1,810.736 0.280 1,674.055 188.175 0.315 186.941 manufacturing -151.509 0.412 184.471 -12.041 0.879 79.312 electricity & water suppl. 312.413 0.745 959.896 174.015 0.705 458.967 construction -166.097 0.221 135.307 -20.125 0.629 41.636 wholesale & retail -143.981 0.531 229.706 11.406 0.888 81.111 hotel & restaurants 621.050 0.386 715.924 276.280 0.150 191.580 transport & communic. 189.897 0.527 299.868 1.264 0.990 103.598 financial intermediation -830.445 0.117 528.143 -224.017 0.361 244.929 real estate -1,737.977 0.215 1,398.773 -363.012 0.343 382.412 public administration -5.155 0.988 343.940 94.362 0.414 115.293 education -510.918 0.241 286.783 -146.083 0.277 134.014 health & social work 322.239 0.262 286.783 107.315 0.319 107.542 other services 3,414.919 0.312 3,372.658 995.545 0.270 900.901 primary sector (ref) municipality type major cities **-703.084 0.029 320.115 ***-992.485 0.000 115.842 suburbs of major cities ***-1,060.291 0.000 298.126 ***-1,036.146 0.000 105.350 commuter municipalities ***-1,952.051 0.000 278.259 ***-1,631.650 0.000 110.774 tourism municipalities omitted omitted manufacturing municip. ***2,729.431 0.000 167.675 **544.649 0.000 131.663 sparsely pop. municip. ***1,953.245 0.000 139.791 100.597 0.362 110.279 municip. densely pop. reg. ***2,458.913 0.000 175.265 ***373.720 0.005 131.737 municip. sparsely pop. reg. ***1,907.387 0.000 192.555 ***1,113.818 0.000 154.955 metropolitan regions (ref) year 2001 **-32.441 0.090 19.066 -2.215 0.856 12.19 2002 missing data 2003 23.942 0.656 53.695 **-42.510 0.018 17.899 2004 ***-187.713 0.001 54.705 **-49.082 0.020 20.990 2005 ***-191.401 0.001 56.347 **-54.374 0.038 26.093 2006 ***-187.373 0.001 55.189 -32.082 0.144 21.894 2007 11.823 0.677 28.374 **53.683 0.021 23.090 2008 (ref) constant 914.418 0.447 1,201.790 880.205 0.042 430.060 observations 11,771 11,771 r-squared 0.076 0.039 rho 0.766 0.769 *** p<0.01 ** p<0.05 * p<0.1 fennia 191: 2 (2013) 135on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance this result is in line with what may be anticipated, considering the different regulations affecting the different types of companies. the owner of a private firm cannot make a clear distinction between private money and firm money – everything is intertwined, and the owner is personally responsible for all firm transactions and liabilities. if the private firm gets into financial problems and insolvency, owner assets including forest holdings are at stake. as a consequence, there are potential incentives for the firm owner to use forest revenues in the operation of the private firm. in regard to micro-firms registered as limited companies, however, there are no such incentives since bankruptcy of the limited company does not affect the owner’s private economy. another factor of importance might be that limited companies sometimes have more than one owner. the use of forest revenues in multi-ownership settings may be complicated and disadvantageous for the firm owner in possession of forest holdings. private firms, on the other hand, are by definition one-owner firms. in cases in which two or more persons want to start up a business in accordance with the regulations of a private firm, it is registered as a limited liability partnership, another category in the data. in the next step we made yet another subdivision of the micro-firms, carrying out analyses separately for men and for women. according to the literature (see above), women are less likely than men to become entrepreneurs and are also likely to be less successful in these endeavours. there are also gender differences regarding forest management perspectives (lidestav & ekström 2000; nordlund & westin 2011). women appear to have a slightly different view of forest ownership whereby other values than cutting revenues are put at the forefront. this means that women are possibly less likely to employ conventional production management routines, and therefore have less money transferable to their micro-firms. the results of the analyses confirm this line of argument, table 4. fixed-effects estimations of firm performance defined as value added and earnings before interest and taxes (ebit) for theoretically justified sub-groups. same set of covariates as in table 3, but due to space restrictions only the forest value variable is presented. cluster-robust standard errors were used. source: astrid database. value added ebit coef. p>t ss coef. p>t ss forest value all cases 0.068 0.118 0.043 **0.081 0.019 0.034 private firm (pf) ***0.149 0.001 0.044 ***0.135 0.001 0.039 limited company (ltd) -0.030 0.489 0.044 -0.171 0.513 0.026 pf; men ***0.149 0.001 0.045 ***0.136 0.001 0.039 pf; women 0.023 0.895 0.177 0.049 0.621 0.099 ltd; men -0.036 0.424 0.044 -0.019 0.470 0.027 ltd; women 0.023 0.895 0.177 0.199 0.151 0.137 pf; men; aged < 35 0.318 0.366 0.349 -0.015 0.930 0.168 pf; men; aged 35-49 *0.515 0.057 0.269 0.412 0.128 0.270 pf; men; aged  50 ***0.110 0.001 0.032 ***0.108 0.000 0.028 pf; women; aged <35 -0.866 0.600 1.564 -2.943 0.759 0.917 pf; women; aged 35-49 -0.067 0.741 0.202 0.127 0.298 0.120 pf; women; aged  50 0.064 0.802 0.256 -0.069 0.566 0.120 ltd; men; aged < 35 *0.823 0.060 0.429 **0.420 0.025 0.183 ltd; men; aged 35-49 -0.049 0.533 0.078 -0.074 0.172 0.054 ltd; men; aged -0.039 0.492 0.057 -0.007 0.846 0.038 ltd; women; aged <35 omitted omitted ltd; women; aged 35-49 -0.183 0.684 0.445 -0.124 0.769 0.421 ltd; women; aged  50 0.188 0.398 0.221 0.098 0.484 0.139 *** p<0.01 ** p<0.05 * p<0.1 136 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren since we find no significant positive effects of forest ownership on the performance of firms run by women. this result holds for private firms as well as limited companies. in regard to men who run private firms, however, forest value seems to be beneficial to both value added and earnings, which hints at systematic variations related to gender and type of firm. in the last step of the analysis we also investigated potential differences across combinations of age, sex and type of company. it can be concluded that for women it makes no difference whether they run private firms or limited companies, or whether they are young, middleaged or old, concerning the connection between forest value and performance. for these groups of firm owners, forest value makes no difference for either earnings (ebit) or value added, which indicates restricted or non-existent transfer flows of resources between forest holdings and micro-firms. however, for men the patterns are somewhat different and more complicated. in brief, the analyses show positive effects of forest value on firm performance for older men who run private firms and for younger men who run limited companies. the reasons why forest value is important for these groups are probably manifold, but it could be speculated that young firm owners have a greater need of capital than do their older colleagues, who have had more time to accumulate resources. even though there are certain disadvantages to inserting private money into the limited company, this might be their only option to raise money for investments. banks sometimes have a tendency to be restrictive in their lending policies towards companies, and this is particularly the case for small and young firms with a non-proven business concept. nevertheless, forest value also seems to have a positive effect on performance for older men running private firms. it is known from the literature that older men are more prone to take on production-oriented management. this implies that this group is likely to have converted their forest value into liquid assets, which may be easily available for use in their micro-firms. to conclude, it can also be added that the results clearly show that possessing assets in the form of forest holdings never seems to be a burden for micro-firm owners; there are no significant negative effects in any combination of owners. concluding discussion this research set out to explore the importance of the value of forest holdings owned by entrepreneurs for the economic performance of microfirms, with a hypothesis that assets stemming from forest ownership benefit firms and provide them with financial stability and resilience to economic fluctuations. the empirical study is based on official register panel data for the period 2002–2008 comprising all swedish micro-firms operating in non-forestry-related lines of business. in response to the first research question, the fixed-effects panel regression analyses reveal that there are differences in economic performance between firms depending on the value of the forest holdings owned by the entrepreneur. the value of the forest assets is positively associated with firm earnings, thus supporting the hypothesis and suggesting that there are resource transfers – presumably principally in the form of monetary transfers, but possibly also through other types of non-pecuniary resources – between the entrepreneurs’ forest holdings and their firms which can then be used for investing in and boosting the performance of the firms. concerning the second research question, we find that the impact of the value of forest assets on the economic performance of micro-firms varies across different categories of entrepreneurs with regard to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, as well as the properties of the firms. from a somewhat generalized point of view, forest assets are primarily beneficial to private firms run by older men. the connection with firm type can most likely be explained by the strength of the economic connections between private firms and their owners. while no significant effects of forest assets were found for female-headed firms, maleheaded firms do benefit from these areal resources. this is possibly related to gender differences in forest valuations and forest management strategies; male forest owners have previously been found to have production-oriented views and strategies and thus to extract more capital from their forest holdings (lidestav & ekström 2000; nordlund & westin 2011). the results suggest the possibility that these differences are present not only among female forest owners in general, but also among the sub-group who are entrepreneurs as well. these women could be expected to place more emphasis on economic outcomes compared to their non-entrepreneur peers. it may also be the fennia 191: 2 (2013) 137on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance case that the gendered views of the forest come forth not only regarding forest management but also in women’s entrepreneurial endeavours, which may as a consequence be at higher risk of ‘underperformance’ (e.g. fairlie & robb 2009; swedish agency for growth analysis 2010) and exit compared to firms owned by male forest owners. another possibility is that the gender divergence stems from differences in terms of processes of acquisition of forest property, ownership structure and social expectations (lidestav 2010). firm performance also benefits from increasing maturity in terms of age or previous experience of running a business on the part of the entrepreneur, and from human capital in the form of high education. the entrepreneur’s social/family context also matters, indicating the possibility that support mechanisms based on family ties are in place. these findings are largely in line with previous research reported in the literature concerning, e.g., the importance of the entrepreneur’s human and social capital. concerning geographical differences across firms in different types of municipalities, micro-firms located outside the metropolitan regions tended to perform better. this is relevant from a local and regional development perspective, not least since entrepreneurship may be an important constituent of rural livelihood strategies based on ‘multifunctional’ approaches which in turn can be one way of strengthening local labour markets and providing employment and economic development in otherwise weak labour markets (e.g. alsos & carter 2006; wilson 2010). the results suggest that forest holdings, by definition a rural resource location-wise, matter most for firm development outside the regions at the top of the urban hierarchy, although not only in sparsely populated areas. not least considering the increasing share of non-resident forest owners living in cities (e.g. lindroos et al. 2005, cf. ziegenspeck et al. 2004; schraml 2006), it is clear that the importance of the forest – a key rural resource – is not restricted to those who live or operate in the countryside, and there is potentially some risk that resource transfers from the forest to firms engaged in other activities may potentially cause a drainage of resources from rural areas (cf. karlsson 2007). however, since most forest owners still live in places closer to the rural end of the urban–rural continuum, and presumably also locate their firms in these places to a large extent, there are nevertheless grounds to be more optimistic about the use of forest-related resources for the benefit of rural entrepreneurship and endogenous development. to summarize, we find substantial support for the hypothesis that resources stemming from forest holdings contribute to the economic performance and development of micro-firms in non-forestry lines of business, thus adding to their chances of long-term survival. the vulnerability of micro-firms is well-established in the research literature, and resources stemming from forest holdings can make an important difference for small-scale entrepreneurs struggling to keep their firms afloat in the challenging context of competition and economic fluctuation. while this is clearly beneficial to the individual firm and entrepreneur, its relevance stretches beyond this scale. from a wider perspective, it improves the prospects for endogenous local and regional development, for instance in rural areas where labour market opportunities may be few and far between. this is also relevant at the macro-economic level, not least since entrepreneurship is frequently identified as an important means of economic development and employment. this study shows that the importance of forest, which as a natural resource is of key importance for the national economy in sweden, lies not only in its direct forms (i.e. forestry and related activities) but also indirectly in that it provides a way of supporting micro-firms in other lines of business, particularly outside the metropolitan regions. thus, this study has revealed important connections between areal resources in the form of forest holdings and non-forestry small-scale entrepreneurship in ways which have not previously been explored in empirical research, and which may inform both research and policy in the fields of entrepreneurship and economic development as well as forestry. moreover, it seems likely that the findings presented here are relevant and applicable beyond the swedish context, for instance in the other scandinavian countries and elsewhere where forest land is to a substantial extent owned by small-scale private forest owners and where challenges are posed by the current rural development trends. a potential path for future research that arises, departing from questions based on the findings that micro-firms benefit from resources stemming from the forest, concerns the forest and perhaps local rural development more generally. what are the potential effects if the forest is used as a ‘cash cow’ for non-forestry and non-rural business activities, and how does this correspond to the aims 138 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren of socially, economically and ecologically sustainable forest management in the long term? the possible scenarios for the possible courses of action of forest owners may include, for instance, a lack of re-investment in the forest when the revenue is used for other purposes, or perhaps an augmented interest and improved management of the forest stemming from the insight that its value can be converted into other types of activities. also, as to the precise ways the resource transfers between forest holdings and micro-firms take place, this could be explored more in-depth in, e.g., interview studies or survey research whereby the entrepreneurs can be asked directly about their strategies and courses of action. notes 1 in the official statistics, a ‘new’ firm is defined as either a newly established firm or a firm which has resumed activity after being non–practicing for a period of at least two years (swedish agency for growth analysis 2011). 2 this issue is somewhat related to ‘lifestyle entrepreneurs’, a concept which refers to entrepreneurs whose aim through their firms is, inter alia, to gain personal independence (cf. gray 2002) and ‘support a desired lifestyle’. such firms also tend to be small in terms of employees – as opposed to firms owned by ‘high–growth entrepreneurs’ (henderson 2002: 49). thus, entrepreneurs need not necessarily prioritize or strive for firm growth (greenbank 2001) but rather to sustain a livelihood by way of their business (reijonen & komppula 2007). 3 the present paper investigates the possibility that forest ownership may be advantageous for the performance of firms run by the forest owner. however, it is appropriate to acknowledge that resource transfers between businesses may also be detrimental under certain circumstances (alsos & carter 2006), e.g. impairing the firm’s ability to recognize business opportunities because of, inter alia, ‘core rigidities’ and ‘reduced experimentation’ (mosakowski 2002). 4 however, the effect of entrepreneurship is not necessarily on a par with the level of expectations. in a study by baumgartner et al. (2013), the effect of local entrepreneurship potential on local development was found to be largely positive but modest. also, in the short and medium term, structural differences between rural communities were found to exert a more substantial influence. 5 while firm closures need not necessarily be regarded as wholly negative from a macro point of view, but rather as part of the function of a dynamic economy, such occurrences are of course usually interpreted negatively from a micro point of view, i.e. for the individual entrepreneur (bartelsman et al. 2005; blackburn & kovalainen 2009). however, the exit of a firm may also be due to either voluntary or involuntary causes (headd 2003; van praag 2003; cressy 2006), either ‘death’ or other types of exit such as mergers and acquisitions by other companies (cefis & marsili 2005, cf. storey 1994), the owner’s accepting employment elsewhere, retirement or cases in which exiting is part of a conscious strategy. thus, a substantial part of what may be deemed business failures may in fact be more correctly interpreted as ‘positive exits’ (headd 2003). 6 sweden was not among these countries. 7 however, the role of, e.g., size does not necessarily adhere to the straightforwardness of the general pattern. for instance, holmes et al. (2010) found that while initial size had a positive effect on the survival of smalland medium-sized firms, the effect was the opposite for the smallest micro-firms. 8 two types of models can be used for estimating panel data: the fixed-effects estimator and the randomeffects estimator (wooldridge 2003). the underlying assumptions of the random-effects model are that vi is a random variable and that cov(xit , vi) = 0. if there is correlation between the covariates and the individual-specific error, random-effects estimates will be biased. we used the hausmann test to check for differences between the two models. the statistics indicated that the use of random effects is inconsistent, so we decided to use fixed-effects models. 9 for the year 2002, data on the tax value of forest property are unavailable. 10 since significance tests are performed for each year of the panel, separate significance levels are not provided for each variable each year as this would clutter the presentation of results. 11 the capital income variable is statistically significant for all years in the time series except 2002 and 2008. the disposable income of the individual variable is statistically significant for the years 2001 and 2004–2007. the disposable income of the individual’s household variable is statistically significant for the years 2004–2008. 12 concerning the explanatory power of the models, low levels of explanatory power are to be expected since micro data opens up for full individual heterogeneity. people can be extremely different compared to one another, something which is effectively hidden in aggregated data where categories are represented by mean values. therefore, regression models using aggregated data usually show higher levels of explanatory power. low explanatory power is not a problem as long as the model is not used for projections. in this case we are only interested in the partial effects of covariates, whose reliability is much more related to the significance level of the point estimates. 13 in table 3, the gender variable is absent as a result of the specific properties of the fixed effects model. the model cannot estimate time-constant variables simply due to the fact that since these variables do not change over time there is no variation, and since most people remain members of the same sex, gender estimations are impossible. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 139on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance acknowledgements this research was funded by the swedish research council formas (plural, planning living urban rural). the authors wish to thank the anonymous referees for valuable comments on a previous version of this paper. references alsos ga & carter s 2006. multiple business ownership in the norwegian farm sector: resource transfer and performance consequences. journal of rural studies 22: 3, 313–322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2005.09.003. alsos ga, ljunggren e & pettersen l t 2003. farmbased entrepreneurs: what triggers the start-up of new business activities? journal of small business and enterprise development 10: 4, 435–443. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14626000310504747. baron ra & tang j 2009. entrepreneurs’ social skills and new venture performance: mediating mechanisms and cultural generality. journal of management 35: 2, 282–306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0149206307312513. bartelsman e, scarpetta s & schivardi f 2005. comparative analysis of firm demographics and survival: evidence from micro-level sources in oecd countries. industrial and corporate change 14: 3, 365–391. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icc/dth057. baumgartner d, schulz t & seidl i 2013. quantifying entrepreneurship and its impact on local economic performance: a spatial assessment in rural switzerland. entrepreneurship & regional development 25: 3–4, 222–250. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080 /08985626.2012.710266. berglann h, moen er, røed k & skogstrøm jf 2011. entrepreneurship: origins and returns. labour economics 18: 2, 180–193. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2010.10.002. binks mr & ennew ct 1996. growing firms and the credit constraint. small business economics 8: 1, 17–25. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf00391972. blackburn r & curran j 1993. in search of spatial differences: evidence from a study of small service sector enterprises. in curran j & storey d (eds). small firms in urban and rural locations, 164–193. routledge, london. blackburn r & kovalainen a 2009. researching small firms and entrepreneurship: past, present and future. international journal of management reviews 11: 2, 127–148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2370.2008.00254.x. box m 2008. the death of firms: exploring the effects of environment and birth cohort of firm survival in sweden. small business economics 31: 4, 379–393.http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s11187-007-9061-2. brouder p & eriksson rh 2012. staying power: what influences micro-firm survival in tourism? tourism geographies 15: 1, 125–144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/146166 88.2011.647326. brüderl j, preisendörfer p & ziegler r 1992. survival chances of newly founded business organizations. american sociological review 57: 2, 227– 242. cefis e & marsili o 2005. a matter of life and death: innovation and firm survival. industrial and corporate change 14: 6, 1167–1192. http://dx.doi. org/10.1093/icc/dth081. chen x, zou h & wang dt 2009. how do new ventures grow? firm capabilities, growth strategies and performance. international journal of research in marketing 26: 4, 294–303. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2009.08.004. cressy r 2006. determinants of small firm survival and growth. in casson m, yeung b, basu a & wadeson n (eds). the oxford handbook of entrepreneurship, 161–193. oxford university press, oxford. daugstad k 2008. negotiating landscape in rural tourism. annals of tourism research 35: 2, 402– 4 2 6 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 6 / j . a n nals.2007.10.001. dhubháin án, cobanova r, karppinen h, mizaraite d, ritter e, slee b & wall s 2007. the values and objectives of private forest owners and their influence on forestry behaviour: the implications for entrepreneurship. small-scale forestry 6: 4, 347– 357.http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11842-007-9030-2. dinis a 2006. marketing and innovation: useful tools for competitiveness in rural and peripheral areas. european planning studies 14: 1, 9–22. http://dx. doi.org/10.1080/09654310500339083. eikeland s & lie i 1999. pluriactivity in rural norway. journal of rural studies 15: 4, 405–415. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0743-0167(99)00010-8. elands bhm & praestholm s 2008. landowners’ perspectives on the rural future and the role of forests across europe. journal of rural studies 24: 1, 72– 85.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2007.02.002. esteve-pérez s & mañez-castillejo ja 2008. the resource-based theory of the firm and firm survival. small business economics 30: 3, 231–249. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11187-006-9011-4. european commission 2005. the new sme definition. user guide and model declaration. enterprise and industry publications, european commission. fairlie rw & robb am 2009. gender differences in business performance: evidence from the characteristics of business owners survey. small business economics 33: 4, 375–395. http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s11187-009-9207-5. farrell l, brown s & harris mn 2003. who are the self-employed? a new approach. department of econometrics and business statistics. monash university, melbourne. federation of swedish farmers 2009. skogsgården nuläge och framtidsmöjligheter. basfakta och utgångsläge för projektet skogsgårdens potentialer (in swedish). <http://www.lrf.se/pagefiles/14425/pm%20 skogsgården.pdf> 20.02.2013. 140 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren georgellis y, joyce p & woods a 2000. entrepreneurial action, innovation and business performance: the small independent business. journal of small businesses and enterprise development 7: 1, 7–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/eum0000000006801. grande j, lier madsen e & borch oj 2011. the relationship between resources, entrepreneurial orientation and performance in farm-based ventures. entrepreneurship and regional development 23: 3–4, 89–111. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/08985620903183710. gray c 2002. entrepreneurship, resistance to change and growth in small firms. journal of small business and enterprise development 9: 1, 61–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14626000210419491. greenbank p 2001. objective setting in the microbusiness. international journal of entrepreneurial behaviour & research 7: 3, 108–127. http://dx. doi.org/10.1108/eum0000000005531. hannan mt, carroll gr, dobrev sd & han j 1998. organizational mortality in european and american automobile industries part i: revisiting the effects of age and size. european sociological review 14: 3, 279–302. headd b 2003. redefining business success: distinguishing between closure and failure. small business economics 21: 1, 51–61. http://dx.doi. org/10.1023/a:1024433630958. henderson j 2002. building the rural economy with high-growth entrepreneurs. federal reserve bank of kansas city economic review 87: 3, 45–70. holmes p, hunt a & stone i 2010. an analysis of new firm survival using a hazard function. applied economics 42: 2, 185–195. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00036840701579234. holtz-eakin d, joulfaian d & rosen h 1994. sticking it out: entrepreneurial survival and liquidity constraints. journal of political economy 102: 1, 53–75. hugosson m & ingemarson f 2003. depicting management ideas of private forest owners: an assessment of general trends in sweden based on new theoretical ideas. department of forest products and markets, swedish university of agricultural sciences, uppsala. ingemarson f, lindhagen a & eriksson l 2006. a typology of small-scale private forest owners in sweden. scandinavian journal of forest research 21: 3, 249–259. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02827580600662256. jayawarna d, rouse j & kitching j 2011. entrepreneur motivations and life course. international small business journal 31: 1, 34–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0266242611401444. karlsson s 2007. ruling spaces. an investigation of forest ownership and local development in three parishes in värmland (in swedish). karlstad university studies 2007: 21, karlstad. keeble d 1993. small firm creation, innovation and growth and the urban-rural shift. in curran j & storey d (eds). small firms in urban and rural locations, 54–78. routledge, london. korunka c, kessler a, hermann f & lueger m 2010. personal characteristics, resources, and environment as predictors of business survival. journal of occupational and organizational psychology 83: 4, 1025–1051. http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/096317909x485135. krasniqi ba 2009. personal household and business environmental determinants of entrepreneurship. journal of small business and enterprise development 16: 1, 146–166. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14626000910932935. labrianidis l 2006. fostering entrepreneurship as a means to overcome barriers to development of rural peripheral areas in europe. european planning studies 14: 1, 3–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654310500339067. lane b & yoshinaga k 1994. niche markets for the rural world. the oecd observer 190, 14–18. lévesque m & minniti m 2006. the effect of aging on entrepreneurial behavior. journal of business venturing 21: 2, 177–194. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. jbusvent.2005.04.003. lidestav g 2010. in competition with a brother: women’s inheritance positions in contemporary swedish family forestry. scandinavian journal of forest research 25: s9, 14–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2010.506 781. lidestav g & ekström m 2000. introducing gender in studies on management behaviour among non-industrial private forest owners. scandinavian journal of forest research 15: 3, 378–386. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/028275800448011. lindroos o, lidestav g & nordfjell t 2005. swedish non-industrial forest owners: a survey of self-employment and equipment investments. small-scale forest economics, management and policy 4: 4, 409–426. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11842-005-0025-6. lunnan a, nybakk e & vennesland b 2006. entrepreneurial attitudes and probability for startups an investigation of norwegian non-industrial private forest owners. forest policy and economics 8: 7, 683–690. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2005.06.016. malecki ej 1993. entrepreneurship in regional and local development. international regional science review 16: 1&2, 119–153. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/016001769401600107. mather as 2001. forests of consumption: postproductivism, postmaterialism, and the postindustrial forest. environment and planning c: government and policy 19: 2, 249–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/c9914j. mosakowski e 2002. overcoming resource disadvantages in entrepreneurial firms: when less is more. in hitt ma, ireland rd, camp sm & sexton dl (eds). strategic entrepreneurship – creating a new mindset, 106–126. blackwell, oxford. musso p & schiavo s 2008. the impact of financial constraints on firm survival and growth. journal fennia 191: 2 (2013) 141on the importance of forest assets for micro-firm performance of evolutionary economics 18: 2, 135–149. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00191-007-0087-z. nordlund a & westin k 2011. forest values and forest management attitudes among private forest owners in sweden. forests 2: 1, 30–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/f2010030. patterson h & anderson d 2003. what is really different about rural and urban firms? some evidence from northern ireland. journal of rural studies 19: 4, 477–490. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/s0743-0167(03)00027-5. reijonen h 2008. understanding the small business owner: what they really aim at and how this relates to firm performance. management research news 31: 8, 616–629. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/01409170810892172. reijonen h & komppula r 2007. perception of success and its effect on small firm performance. journal of small business and enterprise development 14: 4, 689–701. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14626000710832776. renski h 2009. new firm entry, survival, and growth in the united states. journal of the american planning association 75: 1, 60–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944360802558424. rigby dl & essletzbichler j 2002. agglomeration economies and productivity differences in us cities. journal of economic geography 2: 4, 4 0 7 – 4 3 2 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 9 3 / jeg/2.4.407. robb am & watson j 2012. gender differences in firm performance: evidence from new ventures in the united states. journal of business venturing 27: 5, 544–558. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. jbusvent.2011.10.002. salar 2010. kommungruppsindelning 2011 – definitioner (in swedish). economy and governance division, section for statistics, swedish association of local authorities and regions (salar). schraml u 2006. the nameless counterpart: a reconstruction of the experiences of private forestry extension officers with their clients. european journal of forest research 125: 1, 79–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10342-005-0101-7. shane s 2003. a general theory of entrepreneurship. the individual-opportunity nexus. new horizons in entrepreneurship. edward elgar, cheltenham. shaw e, marlow s, lam w & carter s 2009. gender and entrepreneurial capital: implications for firm performance. international journal of gender and entrepreneurship 1: 1, 25–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/17566260910942327. simpson m, padmore j & newman n 2012. towards a new model of success and performance in smes. international journal of entrepreneurial behaviour & research 18: 3, 264–285. http://dx.doi. org/10.1108/13552551211227675. statistics sweden 2012. the firm data base (företagsdatabasen). online official statistics database (in swedish).<http://www.scb.se/pages/producttables____299127.aspx> 05.06.2012. stern pc, dietz t, abel t, guagnano g & kalof l 1999. a value-belief-norm theory of support for social movements: the case of environmentalism. human ecology review 6: 2, 81–97. storey dj 1994. understanding the small business sector. international thomson business press, london. swedish agency for growth analysis 2010. followup on the newly established enterprises in 2005– three years after the start (in swedish). statistik 2010: 02. swedish agency for growth analysis, östersund. swedish agency for growth analysis 2011. newlystarted enterprises in sweden 2010 (in swedish). statistik 2011: 04. swedish agency for growth analysis, östersund. swedish agency for growth analysis 2012. statistikportalen. online official statistics database (in swedish).<http://statistikportalen.tillvaxtanalys. se> 31.05.2012. swedish agency for growth analysis 2013. followup on the newly established enterprises in 2008 – three years after the start (in swedish). statistik 2013: 01. swedish agency for growth analysis, östersund. swedish forest agency 2012. swedish statistical yearbook of forestry 2012 (in swedish). swedish forest agency, jönköping. törnqvist t 1995. skogsrikets arvingar: en sociologisk studie av skogsägarskapet inom privat, enskilt skogsbruk (in swedish). department of forest-industry-market studies, swedish university of agricultural sciences, uppsala. ucbasaran d, westhead p & wright m 2007. opportunity identification and pursuit: does an entrepreneur’s human capital matter? small business economics 30: 2, 153–173. http://dx. doi.org/10.1007/s11187-006-9020-3. van praag cm 2003. business survival and success of young small business owners. small business economics 21: 1, 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1024453200297. wagner j 1994. the post-entry performance of new small firms in german manufacturing industries. the journal of industrial economics 42: 2, 141–154. wiersum kf, elands bhm & hoogstra ma 2005. small-scale forest ownership across europe: characteristics and future potential. small-scale forest economics, management and policy 4: 1, 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11842-005-0001-1. wiklund j & shepherd d 2005. entrepreneurial orientation and small business performance: a configurational approach. journal of business venturing 20: 1, 7–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2004.01.001. wilson g 2010. multifunctional ‘quality’ and rural community resilience. transactions of the institute 142 fennia 191: 2 (2013)katarina haugen and urban lindgren of british geographers 35: 3, 364–381. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00391.x. wooldridge jm 2003. introductory econometrics: a modern approach. thomson south-western, mason, ohio. xu z & bengston d 1997. trends in national forest values among forestry professionals, environmentalists, and the news media, 1982–1993. society & natural resources: an international journal 10: 1, 43–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08941929709381008. zhao h, seibert se & lumpkin gt 2010. the relationship of personality to entrepreneurial intentions and performance: a meta-analytic review. journal of management 36: 2, 381–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0149206309335187. ziegenspeck s, härdter u & schraml u 2004. lifestyles of private forest owners as an indication of social change. forest policy and economics 6: 5, 447–458. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2004.01.004. åstebro å & bernhardt i 2003. start-up financing, owner characteristic, and survival. journal of economics and business 55: 4, 303–319. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0148-6195(03)00029-8. increasing role of tourism in finnish national parks riikka puhakka puhakka, riikka (2008). increasing role of tourism in finnish national parks. fennia 186: 1, pp. 47–58. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. while the role of traditional livelihoods has decreased, tourism has become an important tool for regional development in northern peripheral areas, and the economic and political expectations have increased. national parks have become attractive tourist destinations also in finland. this article analyses how the central stakeholders – park authorities, tourists and tourism entrepreneurs – perceive the role of tourism in finnish national parks. parks are understood as spaces constructed by historical and social practices; the role of tourism is thus neither historically nor culturally unchanging or indisputable. by analysing planning documents and interviews, the study identifies four discourses that define the interaction between nature conservation and tourism in finnish parks: 1) national parks as conservation areas, 2) national parks as tourist destinations, 3) national parks as destinations of sustainable nature-based tourism, and 4) national parks as resources for local people. the study indicates that the role of tourism has increased in national parks in finland. nowadays the aim is to integrate the ecological goals of nature conservation and the economic goals of nature-based tourism by implementing the principles of sustainability. the possible effects of the recent discursive shift on the future development of protected areas are also discussed in the article. riikka puhakka, department of geography, university of joensuu & thule institute, po box 7300, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: riikka.puhakka@oulu.fi. introduction as a result of the growth of nature-based tourism (see fennell 1999; hall & page 1999), national parks have become important tourist attractions in finland. the visitor numbers have increased fast in parks since the 1990s, and many tourist destinations are situated close to national parks particularly in the northern part of the country. while the role of primary production has decreased, naturebased tourism has become an important tool for regional development in northern peripheral areas (saarinen 2003, 2005). since the first national parks were designated, they have been given a double role both as the destinations of nature conservation and recreation and tourism (e.g. runte 1997; mels 1999; boyd & butler 2000; rytteri & puhakka 2009). in the protected area management categories adopted by the world conservation union, a national park (category ii) is defined as a “protected area managed mainly for ecosystem protection and recreation” (iucn & unep 2003: 12). the finnish nature conservation act (1096/1996) defines that a national park ”should hold general interest as a natural attraction, or with respect to raising general awareness of or interest in nature”. conservation is, however, stated to be a more important function than outdoor recreation, environmental education or scientific research (metsähallitus 2000: 9–10; see heinonen 2007). tourism and other economic activities are restricted on these state-owned lands; there are not usually, for example, hotels, skiing slopes or motorized activities inside national parks in finland. the interaction between conservation and tourism is often seen as symbiotic, but it can also cause conflicts (budowski 1976). while the economic and political expectations are increasing, it is interesting to study the role of tourism in national parks. this article, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation of cultural geog48 fennia 186: 1 (2008)riikka puhakka raphy (puhakka 2007), analyses how the central stakeholders of finnish parks – park authorities, tourists and tourism entrepreneurs – perceive the role of tourism as part of the grounds of nature conservation and the use of national parks. in this text, the concept of tourism refers to the all use of parks for recreational purposes. after presenting the theoretical background, the article introduces shortly the common finnish history of nature conservation and tourism. furthermore, the chapter analyses the recent structural changes in conservation and tourism, which have resulted in the increasing role of tourism in parks. on the basis of the historical review and research materials – planning documents and interviews – the study identifies four discourses that define the interaction between nature conservation and tourism in national parks in finland. to sum up, the various effects of the recent discursive shift on the future development of protected areas are discussed. socially constructed national parks in this article, the questions of tourism in national parks are connected to the theoretical discussion of human-nature interaction, which increased in cultural geography in the 1990s (see castree 2005). national parks are not understood as articulations of untouched wilderness but rather as spaces constructed by historical and social practices (mels 1999). according to geographer kenneth olwig (1995), parks are as much about the national identity as about physical nature since nature is also a realm of cultural ideas and norms. nature conservation is a political and societal activity; it is a contested idea which accommodates new meanings and values. the objects, aims and means of conservation change with time and place, and they direct the management and land use of national parks. above all, nature conservation “entails judgments as to what indeed is nature” (macnaghten & urry 1998: 23). nature is culturally defined as worth protecting, and national parks are managed and used according to socially defined principles. even in a rather short period of time, there have been clear changes in the basis of conservation (e.g. runte 1997; nieminen & saaristo 1998). although national parks have had recreational and touristic goals since the early stage of the park movement, the role of tourism in parks is neither historically nor culturally unchanging or indisputable. therefore, it is not irrelevant what kind of meanings different stakeholders attribute to national parks and to their goals; the hegemonic principles and practices may change over time. the various ideas of the interaction between nature conservation and tourism can be understood as discourses. they are ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic; they make it possible to understand a topic in a certain way and restrict other possibilities for presenting it. discourses are constructed in a certain sociocultural context, and at the same time they construct and change the present social reality. despite several competing discourses, there exists one way of speech and thought that is more dominant than the others at a certain period of time. discourses are not only words and meanings, but they affect the physical environment through practices (e.g. hajer 1995; hall 1997). knowledge, truth and power are intertwined in discourses (rabinow 1986). power relations between discourses change over time; in this hegemonic struggle, some meanings and images succeed in defining ‘the truth’ about national parks, for example, better than the others. discourse institutionalization means that a discourse is translated into institutional arrangements and concrete policies (hajer 1995: 61). the dominant, institutionalized discourse defining the interaction between conservation and tourism directs the management and land use of national parks. common history of nature conservation and tourism the discussion about the recreational role of protected areas started long before the first national parks and strict nature reserves were officially founded in finland in 1938. three phases can be identified on the basis of the finnish discussion about the interaction between conservation and tourism from the latter part of the 1800s until the present (sorsa 2004; puhakka 2007). in the first phase, which lasted from the latter part of the 1800s until the end of the 1960s, conservation and tourism were seen to support and benefit each other. already in the 1800s, some nature-based attractions were preserved for aesthetic and touristic reasons in finland. nature conservation and domestic tourism were connected with the formation of national identity (see also runte 1997; mels 1999). the first national parks fennia 186: 1 (2008) 49increasing role of tourism in finnish national parks were sights for all citizens, and they were mainly established in scenic areas which already had some tourism infrastructure. nevertheless, the arguments of tourism achieved less attention in finland than in some other countries due to the strong natural scientific perspective. for example, in the united states acceptance for the park idea was sought by promoting tourism intensively in national parks; the aim was to benefit from these otherwise worthless lands by means of tourism (boyd & butler 2000). although the touristic role of national parks was acknowledged in finland, tourism’s negative environmental impacts were noticed, and the restrictions of recreational use became comparatively strict in parks (sorsa 2004; puhakka 2007; rytteri & puhakka 2009; see metsähallitus 2000). since the end of the 1960s, the relation between nature conservation and tourism weakened for a couple of decades in finland. on the one hand, growing tourism was seen to cause harmful impacts in protected areas. during the environmental awakening, the values of nature and the goals of conservation changed, and the knowledge of natural processes and their threats increased. consequently, tourism and other human activities were evaluated from a new perspective in protected areas (see runte 1997). this led to contradictions between conservation and tourism although they were often seen as ‘allies’ against forestry. in nature conservation, the focus was on the protection of threatened and rare species and their habitats, and the meaning of aesthetic aspects and economic and social benefits (e.g. tourism and recreation) decreased. on the other hand, the establishment of protected areas was seen to restrict the possibilities to develop tourism in those areas due to construction and other restrictions. the visitor numbers were still rather low in finnish national parks – they varied from some hundreds to tens of thousands – and the economic benefits of tourism in parks were not usually considered significant (sorsa 2004; puhakka 2007). the interaction between nature conservation and tourism became closer in the 1990s in finland; the touristic role of national parks increased as a result of the changes in conservation and tourism (sorsa 2004; puhakka 2007). the first aim of the new nature conservation act (1096/1996) is to maintain biological diversity. meanwhile, conservation goals have widened beyond specific natural areas, and protected areas – previously separated from their economic and social environments – have become more closely connected to human activities (nieminen & saaristo 1998). the principles of participatory planning have increased local residents’ formal possibilities to get involved in the decision-making of nature conservation (see raitio 2008). in addition, the structural changes related to the demand for and supply of tourism have influenced the growth of nature-based tourism (see fennell 1999; hall & page 1999). socalled ‘new tourism’ (poon 1993) includes more flexible, individual and consumer-driven demand of tourism and the stressing of environmental values (see urry 1990; saarinen 2005). the growth of nature-based tourism is still expected to continue in finland. the working group for nature recreation and nature-based tourism – set up by the ministry of the environment – has estimated that nature-based tourism will grow much faster than tourism on average: with the help of the promoting steps, the annual growth will be 8%, and the number of related jobs will double by 2010 (ympäristöministeriö 2002). one step of this programme is to improve the conditions for sustainable tourism and recreation in conservation areas. a large part of nature-based tourism in finland is focused on 35 national parks, including 8850 km2 of land at the beginning of 2007, and their surroundings. in the 1990s, the average number of park visits doubled and in the 2000s, the growth has continued (table 1). in 2007, the numbers varied from kauhaneva-pohjankangas and perämeri parks’ 6000 visits to pallas-yllästunturi park’s 312,000 visits (metsähallitus 2008). the growth has thus not been equally distributed among the areas; it has been more visible in northern finland – particularly close to the major tourist destinations and routes – than in the other parts of the country (see heinonen 2007: 305; puhakka 2007: 136–140). high visitor numbers are also connected to the abundant supply of services inside national parks and in their surroundings (puustinen et al. 2007). consequently, the economic and political significance of nature-based tourism has increased in finland. due to the weakening role of primary production, such as forestry and agriculture, peripheral areas have been forced to develop a wider selection of livelihood and new ways to use nature. nature-based tourism has become an important tool for regional development especially in northern finland (saarinen 2003, 2005, 2007). the growing economic role of tourism is also connected to the weakening of the welfare state; while the role of the state has changed, municipalities 50 fennia 186: 1 (2008)riikka puhakka year national parks total number of visits visits/ national park 1992 24* 358 000 15 000 1993 26* 388 000 15 000 1994 27* 495 000 18 000 1995 27* 668 000 25 000 1996 28* 714 000 26 000 1997 28* 748 500 27 000 1998 29* 771 000 27 000 1999 29* 797 000 27 000 2000 30* 833 000 28 000 2001 30* 849 800 28 000 2002 32** 1 010 000 32 000 2003 35 1 223 000 35 000 2004 35 1 263 900 36 000 2005 35 1 520 000 43 000 2006 35 1 603 500 46 000 2007 35 1 696 700 48 000 * excluding koli, pallas-ounastunturi and pyhätunturi national parks whose data are missing ** excluding koli national park whose data are missing table 1. total and average numbers of visits in finnish national parks in 1992–2007. sources: metsähallitus and the finnish forest research institute. and provinces have been given a wider responsibility of regional development. although recreation in national parks is free for citizens, it often produces great benefits for local and regional economy (e.g. huhtala 2006). the growth of nature-based tourism has changed the attitude towards national parks in finland. in the 1970–80s, the large-scale plan of the parliamentary national park committee, published in 1976, to establish 42 national parks and 16 strict nature reserves was strongly opposed on the local level. according to the opponents – private landowners, forest industry, local governments and local people – the opinions of locals had been ignored, and the protection of forests would produce large economic losses and social problems (rytteri & puhakka 2009). meanwhile, the sharp division between nature conservation and economy was strengthened in finland. nowadays local and regional stakeholders usually support the establishment of national parks owing to the expected socio-economic benefits, which is illustrated, for example, by the discussion of new parks in the finnish parliament (rytteri & puhakka 2009). parks are considered to have a positive impact on the tourism industry and even on the entire population in the area; the status of a national park is often seen to increase the appreciation of the area and promote tourism development (see fredman et al. 2007). thus, there have been local initiatives to designate new parks, and in some cases, the local support and the meaning of the park for tourism development have been central motives for the establishment of a national park. for example, in the beginning of the 2000s, the municipality and other local stakeholders supported strongly the establishment of leivonmäki national park in central finland for economic and employment reasons – in the 1970s, they had opposed the park proposal with similar arguments. nevertheless, the newest national parks have been established in areas which were already protected in some way, e.g. by the natura 2000 -programme, which may also decrease the critical attitude towards parks in the rural areas of finland (sorsa 2004; puhakka 2007). materials and methods the historical review of the interaction between conservation and tourism forms a background for the analysis of various stakeholders’ ideas of the role of tourism in finnish national parks. the study is based on several qualitative materials. firstly, the policies of park authorities were examined by analysing parks’ official planning documents: 32 management and land use plans, 3 strategies of tourism, the principles of protected area management in finland -guidebook, the development plan to improve the conditions for recreation and tourism in metsähallitus’ conservation areas (metsähallituksen luonnonsuojelualueiden virkistysja luontomatkailukäytön edellytysten parantaminen – kehittämissuunnitelma ympäristöministeriölle), and the report defining the goals of public use in metsähallitus’ areas (alueiden yleisökäytön tavoitetila 2010) (puhakka 2007: 292–293). since the analysed plans were written from 1984–2007, it was possible to compare them over time. the plans of koli national park are drawn up by the finnish forest research institute and all the other plans by metsähallitus. koli was administered by the research institute until the end of 2007. metsähallitus is a state-owned enterprise (or ‘semiprivate business’) that administers the land and water areas of the state; the management of protected areas is one of its public administration duties (see heinonen 2007). fennia 186: 1 (2008) 51increasing role of tourism in finnish national parks secondly, the research material includes face to face interviews of tourists and tourism entrepreneurs in koli national park in eastern finland. koli is known as a national landscape, and with 110,000 annual visits, it is one of the most popular parks of the country. a total of 33 tourists, from short-time visitors to hikers, were interviewed in the heritage centre ukko and in the campfire site of ikolanaho in july 2004. in addition, the material includes 7 interviews of entrepreneurs who operate inside the park conducted in 2001 and 2005. two enterprises are located in koli national park – a hotel and a recreation service enterprise – and some others have a permission of the park authorities to provide recreation services in the park. these thematic interviews lasted from 15 to 60 minutes, and they dealt with, for example, tourism’s interaction with conservation, tourism activities, facilities and services suitable in national parks, tourism’s positive and negative impacts, and stakeholders’ responsibility to prevent harmful impacts (puhakka 2007: 302–305). to facilitate comparison, all the documents and interviews were analysed from three common perspectives (which included more detailed questions): 1) the idea of (protected) nature and nature conservation, 2) the idea of the management and land use of national parks, and 3) the idea of the role of tourism and recreation in national parks (puhakka 2007: 62–63). the materials were examined with the methods of discourse analysis; the analysis did not primarily focus on single words, sentences and their structures but rather on the whole text and its meanings, discourses and their mutual relations. the main attention was paid to the content of the materials (what are the meanings?), but the form of the materials (how are the meanings produced?) was also analysed to some extent (see silverman 2001: 97–98). on the basis of the empirical materials and the historical review, the study identified four discourses that define the interaction between nature conservation and tourism in finnish parks: national parks as conservation areas, national parks as tourist destinations, national parks as destinations of sustainable nature-based tourism, and national parks as resources for local people. moreover, the study analysed what kind of concepts of nature these discourses are based on. the discourses may conflict with each other, but they may also be common to different stakeholders. the discourses are sort of generalizations and not completely uniform with stakeholders’ speech; people might use more than one discourse in their speech. all the four discourses arise in the present park discussion in finland, but their mutual relations have changed historically. none of these socially constructed ways of thinking is indisputably and objectively the one that should direct the management and land use of national parks. the aim of this article is not to value the discourses or to provide management implications but to identify the various meanings of parks and to make it possible to understand the disagreements over the use of parks. discourses defining the interaction between conservation and tourism national parks as conservation areas according to the first discourse, the main purpose of national parks is to protect nature, not to satisfy humans’ recreational or other needs. nature conservation is primarily justified with natural scientific criteria and ecological variables, and parks are understood as areas outside economic activities. the discourse represents nature as ‘the other’; it is based on the modern western and mainly anglo-american idea which separates nature from society (see glacken 1967; nash 1982). nature is seen as an abstract space, and it is removed from its societal context (see mels 1999). because large-scale tourism or other activities utilizing nature may be harmful for conservation goals, they are not considered suitable inside protected areas. accordingly, the interaction between nature conservation and tourism is mainly perceived as a conflict in this discourse (see budowski 1976). due to negative ecological and socio-cultural impacts, tourism and preservation cannot be combined in the same area without problems. the main focus is thus on tourism’s effects on nature and culture. people can, however, hike in national parks within the limits of set rules and regulations; in this discourse a small-scale and restricted recreational use is allowed in parks. the aspects of nature conservation have been brought up in finland since the beginning of the park discussion at the end of the 19th century. although patriotism and aesthetic aspects were important motives for the early conservation, natural scientific arguments were also used in the discussion. mostly natural scientists and foresters started to plan protected areas, and nature conservation was an interest of a small group of experts for a 52 fennia 186: 1 (2008)riikka puhakka long time (rytteri & puhakka 2009). in fact, only few citizens had the possibility to travel to parks. conservation was based on the idea of pristine nature that is maintained outside human influence (e.g. large-scale tourism) by establishing separate conservation areas (nieminen & saaristo 1998). the discourse was at its strongest in the second phase of the interaction between conservation and tourism, in the 1970–80s. due to the extensive change of the finnish society after the war-time, industrialization and other economic activities started to threaten nature more intensively. new perspectives offered by modern science were connected to the conservation ideology, and the motives for protecting natural areas became less anthropocentric (puhakka 2007). nowadays the institutional nature conservation is primarily based on scientific expertise and biological ideas of nature (nieminen & saaristo 1998; berglund 2001; see saarinen 2005: 39–40). the analysis of the planning documents indicates that the management and land use of finnish national parks was mainly based on this discourse in the 1980–90s. outdoor recreation was defined as a legitimate goal of parks, but the attitude towards tourism as an economic and business activity was more critical. tourism was seen as independent of conservation goals – one of the ways to utilize nature. the discourse has often conflicted with the interests of the tourism sector or local people, which is illustrated by the strong opposition towards protected areas in the finnish countryside in the 1970–80s (rytteri & puhakka 2009). national parks as tourist destinations the second discourse is more anthropocentric, and it conflicts partly with the first one. it is based on the idea that national parks provide citizens with places to see and experience nature, and parks are thus established to satisfy humans’ needs. this does not, however, mean that nature conservation is not taken into account. in this discourse, the primary arguments of protection are not ecological but aesthetic; beautiful landscapes and other marvels of nature are preserved as natural sights and recreation areas. nature conservation is mostly understood as maintaining the visual characteristics of nature, and economic use does not necessarily conflict with this goal. the discourse considers humans as visitors who do not remain in nature, and it places thus nature outside society and culture (see saarinen 2005: 40–41). due to the aesthetic perspective, conservation goals are closely connected to the interests of tourism in this discourse. the interaction between nature conservation and tourism is seen as a symbiosis (see budowski 1976). the main focus is on the positive impacts of tourism, which are not only economic, but aesthetic, recreational or educational as well. according to the discourse, national parks need to have different kinds of facilities and services to create possibilities for citizens to go hiking and get to know natural areas as easily as possible. some restrictions are, however, placed on tourism and recreation in parks. they are not primarily based on ecological criteria but on maintaining tourists’ experiences and ideas of nature. for example, motor vehicles are not necessarily consistent with the ideal image of untouched wilderness. the double role of national parks is based on the idea that the goals of conservation and recreation can be integrated; nature is preserved outside other human activities in parks. since the first parks were designated, their double role has, however, caused disagreements (e.g. runte 1997). in finland, the discourse emphasizing tourism in national parks has never dominated since development has been rather tightly restricted in parks (see metsähallitus 2000). the discourse was at its strongest in the first phase of the interaction between conservation and tourism when some natural sights were preserved for scenic and touristic reasons – with the aim to strengthen the national identity. later the arguments became more scientific, but aesthetic and recreational aspects have remained motives for establishing national parks (sorsa 2004; puhakka 2007). national parks as destinations of sustainable nature-based tourism the third discourse has become hegemonic in the finnish discussion, and it has started to direct the management and land use planning of national parks in this decade. it combines elements from the previous discourses; the conservation goals of parks are primarily defined with natural scientific criteria, but parks also strive for developing sustainable tourism. accordingly, the aim is to integrate the ecological goals of nature conservation and the economic goals of nature-based tourism in national parks. the protection and use of nature are not considered to totally exclude each other. nevertheless, this new kind of discourse does not fennia 186: 1 (2008) 53increasing role of tourism in finnish national parks mean that the two previous discourses will disappear from the park discussion. this discourse pays attention to the environmental impacts of tourism and aims to solve the problems by implementing the principles of sustainability. the concept of sustainable naturebased tourism refers to the term currently used by metsähallitus who has drafted principles of sustainable nature tourism in protected areas (heinonen 2007: 306) and developed indicators to measure sustainability by using the limits of accebtable change (lac) -method (kajala et al. 2004). with the help of the new concepts referring to nature and sustainability, tourism as an economic activity has become more accepted in finnish national parks. nowadays park authorities write partnership agreements with tourism entrepreneurs, and their role is more focused on providing opportunities for companies in parks. accordingly, the policy of denials and restrictions has been replaced by co-operation and the management of tourism within the limits of acceptable criteria. according to the discourse, national parks have a role as fulfilling the ecological, socio-cultural and economic goals of sustainability, and naturebased tourism is thus justified with regional development. the aim to increase socio-economic benefits connects parks more closely to the surrounding society and decreases the juxtaposition of nature and culture. the interaction between conservation and tourism is understood as symbiotic; they are seen to benefit each other (see budowski 1976). by stressing economic and socio-cultural dimensions, the discourse also aims at gaining wider support for nature conservation. as a result of the growth of nature-based tourism and the transformation of conservation thinking, this discourse has had a central role in the finnish park discussion since the 1990s. the discourse has institutionalized (see hajer 1995) and started to direct the management and land use planning of national parks in this decade. the analysis of the planning documents indicates that this discursive shift has implied three kinds of changes for management and policy in parks: the role of tourism has increased, tourism is increasingly justified with regional development, and this goal of socio-economic development is finally legitimated with the dimensions of sustainability. in the newest documents, parks are defined not only as conservation areas but also as tourist destinations, and visitors and hikers have become tourists and clients. meanwhile, park authorities have started to set goals for tourism development in national parks; the aim of metsähallitus is to increase the total number of park visits 5 percent annually by 2010 (see table 1). at present the park plans are largely a compromise of ecological, socio-cultural and economic goals, and the implementation of participatory planning has expanded the idea of expertise beyond scientific knowledge. nevertheless, nature conservation is still defined as the most important goal of national parks. national parks as resources for local people these three strong discourses are challenged by the fourth one which emphasizes the socio-cultural and economic perspectives. it does not primarily define the interaction between nature conservation and tourism, but it gives alternative meanings for national parks and other natural areas. according to this discourse, parks are concrete and historical places which have a lot of cultural value and meanings (see mels 1999). the discourse stresses – instead of protection or tourism – the local usage of parks as economic resources, and it does not aim at separating nature and society (see saarinen 2005: 38–39). nature is mainly observed from the local perspective, and the meanings given for it diverge from the previous discourses. in this discourse, the goals and means of protection are defined in a different way than in the institutional nature conservation. the establishment of separate and tightly restricted conservation areas is not supported, but all human activities should be in harmony with nature. therefore, the way of thinking is rather conservationist than preservationist (nash 1982: 129–130). the protection and use of nature are not understood as conflicting; local use is not considered to ruin nature. instead of scientific expertise, the discourse emphasizes knowledge based on local residents’ everyday experiences of living with nature. arguments for nature protection are primarily cultural, which means maintaining people’s way of life in a certain area and protecting it from external disturbances. accordingly, the discourse aims to increase local residents’ rights and possibilities to use their surrounding natural areas in subsistence activities and in outdoor recreation. tourism and especially conservation do not necessarily benefit local people most because they may decrease possibilities to utilize natural resources by other stakeholders. 54 fennia 186: 1 (2008)riikka puhakka on the other hand, the economic importance of tourism for locals has increased as a result of the growth of nature-based tourism (e.g. huhtala 2006). the rights of local people have been taken into account in the establishment of national parks; local residents in northern finland and in the archipelago have been granted some special rights relating to the practicing of traditional livelihoods (e.g. fishing, hunting and reindeer herding) within protected areas (see metsähallitus 2000). this discourse, however, has never been the dominant one that directs the implementation of nature conservation in finland. broad local rights to use nature are not accepted either in the iucn protected area management category ii of national parks (iucn & unep 2003: 12) – which all finnish national parks qualify for at present. the discourse was at its strongest in the second phase of the interaction between conservation and tourism when the societal significance of conservation increased, and protected areas were strongly opposed on the local level in finland. nowadays the discourse is represented, for example, by the statements of park plans in which local stakeholders demand more comprehensive local rights to use nature. generally, the conservation ideology based on the western idea of the juxtaposition of nature and culture has often been in conflict with local perspectives (e.g. ghimire & pimbert 1997). conclusion this study indicates that the role of tourism has increased in finnish national parks as a result of the growth of nature-based tourism and the transformation of conservation thinking. the discourse national parks as destinations of sustainable nature-based tourism has started to direct the park management in the 2000s: it aims to integrate the ecological goals of nature conservation and the economic goals of nature-based tourism by implementing the principles of sustainability (see table 2). nowadays table 2. four discourses that define the interaction between nature conservation and tourism in national parks in finland. national parks as conservation areas national parks as tourist destinations national parks as destinations of sustainable nature-based tourism national parks as resources for local people frame parks are established to preserve nature parks provide citizens with places to see and experience nature parks fulfill the goals of nature conservation and tourism parks should be used in local traditional livelihoods and in recreation most important values ecological socio-cultural, economic ecological, socio-cultural, economic socio-cultural, economic perspective motives for conservation translocal ecological translocal (local) aesthetic translocal, local ecological local cultural idea of conservation vs. tourism conflict symbiosis symbiosis irrelevant question idea of nature outside society (humans are only visitors) ecological reserve outside society (humans are only visitors) aesthetic experience, source of livelihood outside society (humans are only visitors) object of protection, experience, source of sustainable livelihood not separate from society resource which also has cultural meanings example from the research materials in case the economic utilization of protected areas is permitted in some areas, it may not endanger the achievement of abovementioned [conservation] aims (metsähallitus 1993: 9).* there are two philosophies; national parks are for people or for research, and the area for research should be protected of course, but part of the park should be for people. and to make it easily accessible for them, infrastructure must be built in the park (interviewed tourism entrepreneur).* the development of nature-based tourism [in the national park] promotes the goal of social and economic sustainability by creating possibilities for local people to engage in tourism business (metsähallitus 2006: 22).* if it has been noticed that species are becoming extinct, i guess it [hunting in national parks] has to be restricted, but if there is enough bears, just go on... because they have been hunted in these areas previously, so why not now (interviewed tourist).* *translated from finnish to english by the author. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 55increasing role of tourism in finnish national parks tourism is justified not only with recreational and educational arguments – like previously in finland – but the aim of regional development is increasingly brought up in park plans. the idea of parks’ economic role and close relation to the surrounding society has arisen; national parks are integrated more deeply into the regional (tourism) economy (see saarinen 2007). nevertheless, alongside the current policies, there are both more favourable and critical perceptions of tourism development in finnish parks. all four discourses are represented in interviewed tourists’ speech where as tourism entrepreneurs mainly use the second and third discourses which emphasize the aspects of tourism. by setting the goal of regional development, the interests of local people are taken into account more widely than previously in finnish national parks. the various discourses defining the interaction between conservation and tourism have thus shifted closer to each other. the importance of traditional livelihoods is still estimated to decrease in peripheral areas (see saarinen 2005), and therefore, the interests of the fourth discourse will probably meet the goals related to tourism development more often in the future. national parks are increasingly functioning as intermediaries between local and national or international interests in both nature conservation and regional development issues (saarinen 2007). by defining the goals of visitor numbers and the economic impacts of naturebased tourism, metsähallitus aims to fulfil the objectives set by the finnish parliament and the ministry of the environment (e.g. ympäristöministeriö 2002). the conservation goals are consistent with the eu regulations and other international agreements. the aim to integrate various goals reflects the international development although in many other countries tourism has already had a more important role in national parks than in finland (see eagles 2002). finnish parks are undergoing similar change than in other european countries where co-ordinating conservation and the utilization of nature is increasingly seen as advantageous for both conservation and regional development (hammer et al. 2007; see fennell & weaver 2005; shultis & way 2006; fredman et al. 2007). national parks have become more dynamic and innovative; they are rather understood as social and cultural institutions than as static ‘museums’ or biological reserves (kaltenborn et al. 2002). meanwhile, parks have growing pressures to produce tourism income and to show their economic efficiency; park authorities will increasingly have to approach parks as a business if they are to receive public funding (eagles & mccool 2002: 46–47). tourism development is also generating financing for the management of protected areas and helping communities cope with economic restructuring (mccool & patterson 2000; bushell & mccool 2007). this discursive shift reflects the rise of neoliberalist politics; nature conservation has become more instrumental and market-oriented (see mcafee 1999; mccarthy & prudham 2004). the recent changes may influence in various ways the future development of protected areas, which provides topical subjects for further research. the increasing role of tourism in national parks may improve conditions for nature conservation; socio-economic benefits will probably increase the positive attitude towards the establishment of protected areas on the local and regional level. the growth of nature-based tourism will create new economic and employment opportunities for local people (e.g. huhtala 2006) although tourism’s impacts on local living conditions and identity are not only positive. by respecting local residents and incorporating their needs, their commitment to the implementation of conservation may be improved (see fennell & weaver 2005; bushell & mccool 2007). more instrumental and market-oriented motives for nature protection will mean new challenges for the management and land use planning of national parks. while local and regional stakeholders start to support the establishment of protected areas for touristic reasons, the economic and political expectations of tourism will increase in parks. so far construction and other restrictions have been rather tight in finnish parks, but management principles and practices can change over time. the increasing role of tourism is justified by defining national parks as tourist destinations. this raises critical questions about the maximum limits of tourism development in parks even though the visitor numbers are still rather low in finland compared to some other countries (see eagles 2002). new challenges are caused, for example, by new recreational activities and the increasing use of snowmobiles and other motor vehicles especially in northern finland. tourism may conflict with the ecological goals and increase disagreements over the use of parks. moreover, the interests of the tourism sector might be contradictory to the regional development objectives adopted in specific places (saarinen 2005). 56 fennia 186: 1 (2008)riikka puhakka support and political pressure for the creation of protected areas may grow while more and more people visit national parks and start to appreciate them (eagles & mccool 2002: 23–24). meanwhile, tourists’ expectations and demands might grow, which will increase pressures to allow new recreational activities and to develop different kinds of services and facilities in parks. the ecological goals of conservation and aesthetic aspects valued by tourists are partly contradictory. the interviews indicate that some tourists understand nature conservation rather as maintaining visual characteristics of nature (e.g. beautiful landscapes) than as protecting biodiversity or endangered species. for example, when former economic forests are restored in national parks by using excavators and chain saws, these areas do not (immediately) confirm tourists’ idea of untouched wilderness. on the other hand, tourists’ expectations and wishes may restrict tourism development in protected areas. a national park with abundant facilities and services is not necessarily consistent with tourists’ ideas of protected, pristine nature and with their motives for travelling to parks. metsähallitus aims to direct the growth of nature-based tourism at the most visited areas, such as national parks (heinonen 2007: 110), and inside parks visitors are channeled to recreational zones. ecological sustainability may be improved, but tourists’ ideas of tranquil and isolated parks might be threatened. according to the interviews, the high visitor numbers during seasons have already started to disturb tourists’ nature experiences in finnish national parks. probably the role of tourism will not decrease in the near future, but socio-economic goals and touristic arguments will still gain strength in national parks in finland (see heinonen 2007: 241–244). following foreign examples, finnish parks may start to operate more like corporations within government and respond to visitors’ needs and wants (see eagles 2002). in the future, problems might be caused by the insufficient funding of service provision and tourism management in parks, and entrance or use fees may become under discussion also in finland. nonetheless, everyman’s right has an important role in finland (kaltenborn et al. 2001), and the idea of paying for outdoor recreation would probably be found strange by citizens. the aim to combine various goals is challenging for the management and land use planning of national parks since ecological, socio-cultural and economic criteria cannot be valued commensurably. while interests have diversified, the integration of multiple goals has become a more important part of the planning and decision-making processes of nature conservation (mccool & patterson 2000). although the discourses defining the interaction between conservation and tourism have shifted closer to each other, the goals of national parks will still raise lively discussion in the future, and the role of tourism will be defined in discursive struggles. acknowledgements i acknowledge the finnish cultural foundation and the academy of finland (project 201536, provinces, communities, biopolitics) for funding this phd study. references berglund e (2001). facts, beliefs and biases: perspectives on forest conservation in finland. environmental planning and management 44: 6, 833–849. boyd sw & rw butler (2000). tourism and national parks: the origin of the concept. in butler rw & sw boyd (eds). tourism and national parks. issues and implications, 13–27. john wiley & sons, chichester. budowski g (1976). tourism and environmental conservation: conflict, coexistence, or symbiosis? environmental conservation 3: 1, 27–31. bushell r & sf mccool (2007). tourism as a tool for conservation and support of protected areas: setting the agenda. in bushell r & p eagles (eds). tourism and protected areas: benefits beyond boundaries, 12–26. cab international, wallingford. castree n (2005). nature. 281 p. routledge, london. eagles pfj (2002). trends in park tourism: economics, finance and management. journal of sustainable tourism 10: 2, 132–153. eagles pfj & sf mccool (2002). tourism in national parks and protected areas. planning and management. 320 p. cabi publishing, wallingford. fennell d (1999). ecotourism: an introduction. 315 p. routledge, london. fennell d & d weaver (2005). the ecotourium concept and tourism-conservation symbiosis. journal of sustainable tourism 13: 4, 373–390. fredman p, l hörnsten friberg & l emmelin (2007). increased visitation from national park designation. current issues in tourism 10: 1, 87–95. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 57increasing role of tourism in finnish national parks ghimire kb & mp pimbert (eds) (1997). social change and conservation. environmental politics and impacts of national parks and protected areas. 342 p. earthscan publications, london. glacken cj (1967). traces on the rhodian shore. nature and culture in western thought from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century. 763 p. university of california press, berkeley. hajer ma (1995). the politics of environmental discourse. ecological modernization and the policy process. 332 p. clarendon press, oxford. hall cm & sj page (1999). the geography of tourism and recreation. environment, place and space. 309 p. routledge, london. hall s (1997). the work of representation. in hall s (ed). representation. cultural representations and signifying practices, 13–64. sage, london. hammer t, i mose, d siegrist & n weixlbaumer (2007). protected areas and regional development in europe: towards a new model for the 21st century. in mose i (ed). protected areas and regional development in europe. towards a new model for the 21st century, 233–246. ashgate, aldershot. heinonen m (ed) (2007). state of the parks in finland. finnish protected areas and their management from 2000 to 2005. nature protection publications of metsähallitus a 170. 313 p. <www. metsa.fi/sop>. 10.10.2008. huhtala m (2006). pallas-ounastunturin kansallispuiston kävijöiden rahankäyttö ja sen paikallistaloudelliset vaikutukset. working papers of the finnish forest research institute 35. 75 p. <http:// www.metla.fi/julkaisut/workingpapers/2006/ mwp035.htm>. 10.10.2008 iucn & unep (2003). united nations list of protected areas. compiled by chape s, s blyth, l fish, p fox & m spalding. 44 p. the world conservation union and world conservation monitoring centre. kajala l, j erkkonen & m perttula (2004). measures for developing sustainability of nature tourism in protected areas. in sievänen t, j erkkonen, j jokimäki, j saarinen, s tuulentie & e virtanen (eds). policies, methods and tools for visitor management – proceedings of the second international conference on monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas, june 16–20, 2004, rovaniemi, finland. working papers of the finnish forest research institute 2, 236–241. <http://www.metla.fi/julkaisut/workingpapers/2004/mwp002.htm>. 10.10.2008. kaltenborn bp, h haaland & k sandell (2001). the public right of access – some challenges to sustainable tourism development in scandinavia. journal of sustainable tourism 9: 5, 417–433. kaltenborn bp, oi vistad & s stanaitis (2002). national parks in lithuania: old environment in a new democracy. norsk geografisk tidsskrift – norwegian journal of geography 56: 1, 32–40. macnaghten p & j urry (1998). contested natures. 307 p. sage, london. mcafee k (1999). selling nature to save it? biodiversity and green developmentalism. environment and planning d: society and space 17: 2, 133–154. mccarthy j & s prudham (2004). neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism. geoforum 35: 3, 275–283. mccool sf & me patterson (2000). trends in recreation, tourism and protected area planning. in gartner wc & dw lime (eds). trends in outdoor recreation, leisure and tourism, 111–119. cab international, wallingford. mels t (1999). wild landscapes. the cultural nature of swedish national parks. 257 p. lund university press, lund. metsähallitus (1993). luonnonsuojelualueiden hoidon periaatteet. valtion omistamien luonnonsuojelualueiden tavoitteet, tehtävät ja hoidon yleislinjat. metsähallituksen luonnonsuojelujulkaisuja b 1. 55 p. metsähallitus (2000). the principles of protected area management in finland. guidelines on the aims, function and management of state-owned protected areas. nature protection publications of the finnish forest and park service b 54. 49 p. <http:// julkaisut.metsa.fi/julkaisut/pdf/luo/b054.pdf>. 10.10.2008. metsähallitus (2006). syötteen kansallispuiston hoitoja käyttösuunnitelma. metsähallituksen luonnonsuojelujulkaisuja c 2. 61 p. <http://julkaisut. metsa.fi/julkaisut/pdf/luo/c002.pdf>. 10.10.2008. metsähallitus (2008). käyntimäärät kansallispuistoittain 2007. <http://www.metsa.fi/page.asp?section =2842>. 10.10.2008. nash r (1982). wilderness and the american mind. 3rd ed. 425 p. yale university press, new haven. nieminen m & k saaristo (1998). suomalaisen luonnon lait. alue ja ympäristö 27: 2, 72–89. olwig kr (1995). reinventing common nature: yosemite and mount rushmore – a meandering tale of a double nature. in cronon w (ed). uncommon ground. toward reinventing nature, 379–408. w.w. norton, new york. poon a (1993). tourism, technology and competitive strategies. 370 p. cab international, wallingford. puhakka r (2007). kansallispuistot murroksessa. tut-kimus luonnonsuojelun ja matkailun tavoitteiden kohtaamisesta (english abstract: national parks in transition. a study of the interaction between na-ture conservation and tourism). university of joensuu, publications in social sciences 81. 305 p. <http://joypub.joensuu.fi/publications/dissertations/puhakka_kansallispuistot/puhakka.pdf>. 10.10.2008. puustinen j, e pouta, m neuvonen & t sievänen (2007). kansallispuistojen kävijämäärää selittävät tekijät (english abstract: the factors explaining the number of visits to national parks). in tyrväinen l & s tuulentie (eds). luontomatkailu, metsät ja hyvinvointi. working papers of the finnish forest research institute 52, 161–173. <http://www. 58 fennia 186: 1 (2008)riikka puhakka metla.fi/julkaisut/workingpapers/2007/mwp052. htm>. 10.10.2008. rabinow p (ed) (1986). the foucault reader. an introduction to foucault’s thought, with major new unpublished material. 390 p. penguin books, harmondsworth. raitio k (2008). “you can’t please everyone” – conflict management practices, frames and institutions in finnish state forests. university of joensuu, publications in social sciences 86. 271 p. <http:// joypub.joensuu.fi/publications/dissertations/raitio_conflict/raitio.pdf>. 10.10.2008. runte a (1997). national parks. the american experience. 3rd ed. 335 p. university of nebraska press, lincoln. rytteri t & r puhakka (2009). formation of finland’s national parks as a political issue. ethics, place and environment 12:1 (in press). saarinen j (2003). the regional economics of tourism in northern finland: the socio-economic implications of recent tourism development and future possibilities for regional development. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 3: 2, 91–113. saarinen j (2005). tourism in the northern wildernesses: wilderness discourses and the development of nature-based tourism in northern finland. in hall cm & s boyd (eds). nature-based tourism in peripheral areas. development or disaster, 36–49. channel view publications, clevedon. saarinen j (2007). protected areas and regional development issues in northern peripheries: nature protection, traditional economies and tourism in the urho kekkonen national park, finland. in mose i (ed). protected areas and regional development in europe. towards a new model for the 21st century, 199–211. ashgate, aldershot. shultis jd & pa way (2006). changing conceptions of protected areas and conservation: linking conservation, ecological integrity and tourism management. journal of sustainable tourism 14: 3, 223–237. silverman d (2001). interpreting qualitative data. methods for analysing talk, text and interaction. 2nd ed. 325 p. sage, london. sorsa r (2004). the role of tourism in finnish nature conservation from the nineteenth century to the present. in saarinen j & cm hall (eds). naturebased tourism research in finland: local contexts, global issues. finnish forest research institute, research papers 916, 33–46. urry j (1990). the tourist gaze. leisure and travel in contemporary societies. 176 p. sage, london. ympäristöministeriö (2002). ohjelma luonnon virkistyskäytön ja luontomatkailun kehittämiseksi. suomen ympäristö 535. 47 p. covid-19: magnifying pre-existing urban problems. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa111616 doi: 10.11143/fennia.111616 covid-19: magnifying pre-existing urban problems paria valizadeh and aminreza iranmanesh valizadeh, p. & iranmanesh, a. (2021) covid-19: magnifying pre-existing urban problems. fennia 199(2) 260–272. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.111616 the effects of the transformations that have been experienced during the covid-19 global crisis have the potential to endure beyond the frame of the pandemic. this could become a time when a new world order, which emerges out of this crisis, oscillates between socialism and authoritarianism. meanwhile, cities are the first ground where transformations caused by a crisis find places to manifest. pandemics, economic recessions, terrorist attacks, and other crises, all leave their traces on the socio-spatial organization of cities and related urban experiences. in this context, this study conducts a critical review of existing conflicting possibilities, where each has the potential to produce changes in urban space and to affect the ways urban space is experienced. the article critically reviews these concepts via the two major interlinked types of non-pharmaceutical mitigation strategies against the pandemic within urban contexts: first, those that restrict movement and interaction, and second, those that concern digital space. the review shows the potential for two alternatives, oscillating between new forms of authoritarianism and social solidarity around the world. keywords: post-pandemic transformations, emerging socio-spatial organizations, urban experience, alternative society paria valizadeh (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0181-413x), faculty of engineering and architecture, maslak mahalesi, taşyoncası sokak, no: 1v, nişantaşı university, istanbul, turkey. e-mail: paria.valizadeh@nisantasi.edu.tr aminreza iranmanesh (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9438-9261), faculty of architecture and fine arts, beşparmaklar avenue, no: 6, final international university, girne, trnc, turkey. e-mail: aminreza.iranmanesh@final.edu.tr © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction following a crisis, measures addressing the state of emergency may last beyond the temporary circumstances that made them necessary (finn & kobayashi 2020). the emerging realities, following the state of emergency, could supersede or influence the previous norms. this is not necessarily negative in itself, but the extent to which the governing bodies expand or maintain these newly gained powers is a cause for concern (haffajee et al. 2014; kreuder-sonnen & white 2021). during a pandemic, cities may become the focal points of transformation since they are defined intrinsically by qualities https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.111616 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0181-413x mailto:paria.valizadeh@nisantasi.edu.tr https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9438-9261 mailto:aminreza.iranmanesh@final.edu.tr fennia 199(2) (2021) 261paria valizadeh & aminreza iranmanesh of cohabitation, proximity, and exchange; therefore, they faced rapid change. the new measures potentially have impacts on the socio-spatial organization of cities and their long-term planning, design, and policymaking (iranmanesh & atun 2020; sharifi & khavarian-garmsir 2020). harvey (2010, 46) described the city as “a complex dynamic system in which spatial form and social process are in continuous interaction with each other.” social and spatial dimensions of urban forms are interconnected; spatial forms contain social processes and society has spatial manifestations (soja 2009). accordingly, when a change in the social process occurs, its manifestations can be seen in the spatial dimension and vice versa. covid 19 mitigation strategies altered social, economic, and political landscapes (kallio et al. 2020). the representations of these alterations can be directly observed in the urban spatial structure. furthermore, interventions aimed at slowing down the spread of a pandemic transmitted via physical contact are fundamentally spatial and consequently urban related. social distancing, restrictions on mobility, contact tracing, and digitalization have significant urban dimensions (mishra et al. 2020). the changes that coevolved with the control measures for the pandemic have the potential to lead to restructuring of city life (sharifi & khavarian-garmsir 2020). such measures may be top-down or macro-political in nature, but their impact on the relationship between society and space manifests in the everyday life of cities (canoy et al. 2022). as friedman (2009, 7) believed, “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” changes produced during a time of crisis can be employed, developed, and introduced as alternatives to the former situation. a period of crisis, then, can be an opportunity to construct alternatives that may turn out to be beneficial or deconstructive for different social classes. it is difficult to comprehend which mitigation practices, that have been exercised as the new norm, will endure, becoming intrinsic parts of everyday life. a crisis can create social solidarity via grassroots movements. on the other hand, governing bodies with authoritarian tendencies could take advantage in the aftermath and normalize the surveillance, repression, self-isolation, division, and nationalist fragmentation that was initially accepted to control the pandemic during the time of crisis. thus, in a time that embodies opportunity and threat together, the task is to exit the crisis with alternatives that construct a better society. the current review paper examines the different urban dimensions of socialist imagination and authoritarianism that emerged out of the pandemic and are evident in the literature. it builds a theoretical framework by cross-examining the seminal literature regarding society and space (namely: smith 1984; lefebvre 1996; taylor 2004; harvey 2001, 2010; van dijk 2012; jasanoff & kim 2015). we explore these concepts through the lens of major pandemic mitigation strategies and show how they have influenced work, privacy, and the right to the city. ultimately, we render possibilities that oscillate between socialist imagination and authoritarianism tendencies. glimpses of new social imaginaries throughout history, periods of crisis have produced change. based on those changes, it was feasible to construct new alternative societies. through those alternatives, visions of utopian or dystopian futures could be attained. more so than the consciousness of socialism and its ideals, difficulties experienced in everyday life during crises can provoke movements that imagine and create socialist alternatives. jasanoff and kim (2015, 19) articulated social imaginaries as “collectively held and performed visions of desirable features (or of resistance against the undesirable).” in this way, an imaginary can be considered a shared conception of an ideal society. for better or worse, it is evident that various visions of a new imaginary, albeit contextual, societies had been glimpsed during the covid-19 pandemic (kallio et al. 2020). social imaginaries are collective and their advantage resides in their performative dimension that has the potential to turn plans into actions (jasanoff & kim 2015). the rise of new wisdom amid the covid-19 pandemic encourages collective action for producing more egalitarian everyday life experiences. lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, as a collective right, also argued that socialist transformation could be brought about by possessing the right to co-organize the means of collective consumption in the city. imaginaries, in this case, can be considered transformative forces 262 fennia 199(2) (2021)reviews and essays – motivated by social values and norms – that influence the manifestation of political and physical settings (certomà 2021, 67). taylor (2004) indicated that social imaginaries are deeper and more complex than the individual’s conception of the future. rather, they are collective conceptions of interconnectedness and social existence; these imaginaries feature societal expectations for the future. social imaginary, in taylor’s (2004, 23) analysis, is a “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.” therefore, considering that overcoming a crisis has often been possible by a collective response; the emerging new imaginary can manifest transformations in the physical setting of the everyday life of cities. for instance, following london’s cholera pandemic of 1854, sanitary sewage facilities and ventilation were provided for all parts of the cities since it was not feasible to save the elite without protecting the less privileged (brody et al. 2000; halliday 2001). the covid-19 pandemic brought the issue of overcoming a crisis through collective response to the fore again. in the coronavirus crisis, the most vulnerable people were not necessarily being helped by the ruling powers but by other people (barata et al. 2020; kallio et al. 2020; ortega & orsini 2020; wilkinson 2020; white et al. 2021). the emerging literature reveals numerous instances of this phenomenon. ortega and orsini (2020) showed that, in brazil, the lack of coherent governmental action regarding the pandemic created solidarity among the lower socio-economic classes, forming effective bottom-up actions (also see favilla & pita 2020; kallio et al. 2020). córdoba, peredo and chaves (2021) showed how grassroots movements in the andes softened the impact of very strict national lockdowns for the local population. regarding south africa, jamieson and van blerk (2021) showed the strengthening of social solidarity through civil society organizations and local community culture. as observed in latin america, leetoy and gravante (2021) found that social capital generated via grassroots movements during the pandemic that have the potential to improve city and community resiliency. moreover, lorini and marx gómez (2021) related how local social approaches quickly adapted new technologies to their advantage in fighting the pandemic in the most socioeconomically divided neighbourhoods of cape town. for example, the nature of social distancing – physical separation or minimization of human interactions – seems contradictory to social solidarity but may emerge as a form of collective consciousness when communities employ it as a technology for reaching their common goal (mishra & rath 2020). in many cases, the pandemic created reforms in anti-authoritarian social movements. ho, fong and wan (2020) reflected on the successful application of the bottom-up and self-disciplinary actions of citizens during the hong kong protests despite the strict top-down covid-19 restrictions that targeted the protesters. such bottom-up movements might look insignificant from the broadest perspective of the pandemic, but they motivated change in the nature of the anti-authoritarian social movement (mendes 2020). as harvey (2001, 188) wrote long before the pandemic: in some instances and places, loss of confidence in the state apparatus and political parties has resulted in the coalescence of political thinking around ideals of local and people-based action as the main means to humanize, ameliorate, transform or in some instances even to revolutionize the qualities of urban life. it is undeniable that the spatial distribution of the pandemic has been focused on economically disadvantaged, minority, and segregated communities (gozzi et al. 2021; khanijahani & tomassoni 2021; torrats-espinosa 2021; yu et al. 2021). nevertheless, the rise of a new wisdom that encourages collective action and produces more egalitarian everyday life experiences is conceivable. accordingly, bottom-up community actions – as reflections of an intrinsic socialist agenda – have been shown to be significant contributors to mitigating the spread of the pandemic (lasry et al. 2020; lakew et al. 2021; liu et al. 2021). with a bottom-up perspective, problems are recognized along with possibilities. it could be argued that a social movement may have a transformative role in resolving problems by considering local strengths, manifesting improvements in the built environment, and thus improving quality of life. in a pandemic with spatial restrictions, quality of life depends on locational advantages and the characteristics of one’s house, while livelihood depends on the options for maintaining a source of income despite restrictions. the pandemic served as a magnifying glass, allowing close review of preexisting heterogeneities built into human settlements. fennia 199(2) (2021) 263paria valizadeh & aminreza iranmanesh emergence of new normalized authoritarianism crisis periods are pivotal moments since the measures and practices that emerge during the state of emergency can be normalised and start constituting everyday life. such emergency powers have emerged during wars, natural disasters, pestilence, and more recently, terrorist attacks, with some measures and practices extending beyond the crisis itself (kemp 2021). the outcomes of the september 11, 2001, attacks exemplify this. various measures that arose in initial responses to those attacks continue to be employed and their application has spread around the world to prevent similar attacks; these leave their traces, particularly in public domains and related spatial experiences. similarly, responses to vehicular terrorist attacks have left long-lasting marks on urban public spaces around the world with definition of borders and managed access (jasiński 2018). some consider that the covid-19 pandemic may lead to a period of over adjustment regarding what regulations are considered appropriate during an emergency and what regulations should be maintained for the greater good in the future (wiley 2020). such applications and extensions have occurred in not only authoritarian states but also in democratic states that can shift toward authoritarianism during the state of emergency; the extent to which the latter will happen is uncertain (parry et al. 2021). thomson and ip (2020, 32) argued that the extent to which emergency measures have been practised around the world is alarming, showing tendencies toward “authoritarianization in both democracies and nondemocracies – a constitutional pandemic of devastating magnitude in its own right.” government overreach used covid-19 as a reason to encroach on civic space, and freedom of assembly became a concern early in the pandemic (bethke & wolff 2020). zajak stjepandić and steinhilper (2021) argued that the suspension of the right of assembly was one of the first and most significant consequences of covid-19 related regulations in germany. joaquin and biana (2021) asserted that covid-19 related legislation in the philippines may have been targeting the freedom of assembly and free speech in disguise. for australia, mazerolle and ransley (2021) expressed concerns about how the improper enforcement of these restrictions could infringe on civic rights and become institutional corruption. in some cases, lack of attention to covid-19 mitigation measures was used as a control measure against ongoing civil protest. in iran, some governments took anti-governmental protests prior to the pandemic (november 2019) as excuses to push for more curfews and anti-assembly regulations during the pandemic, while also holding back information about the pandemic from the public (dubowitz & ghasseminejad 2020). san, bastug and basli (2021) contended that existing distrust between the people and the government made the implementation of covid-19 mitigation measures less effective in iran. as kallio and colleagues (2020) noted, the normalisation of control measures on two scales, both selfand state-control, are being adopted randomly and may diminish or bar against our capacity for resistance. increasing surveillance, which led to self-isolation and reinforced nationalist fragmentation, has been exercised commonly during the coronavirus crisis and can help ruling powers legitimise utilization of this measure. notably, all these examples were arising in a world that already was facilitating individuality and isolation (putnam 2000; wellman 2002). transformations of labour and city cities consist of a complex network of trades, exchanges, and services – in other words, non-farming labour. accordingly, one of the major divisions in urban space is the labour sector. the pandemic divided the job market based on the possibility of remote work (cetrulo et al. 2020). those whose circumstances allowed them to continue to work from home via digital mediums were considered privileged (blustein et al. 2020; wang 2021). the practice of measures, such as social distancing and quarantine, most benefits those who can afford it. indeed, the possibility of remote working for the middle-class is dependent on the physical presence of the working classes at their workplaces. for low-income workers, the more physical presence was required meant more exposure to potential harm; this becomes even more divisive for informal workers and minorities who might not receive equal access to healthcare (câmara & silva 2020). therefore, the practice of quarantine and the risk of infection are not equal for all social classes (kantamneni 2020). the perceived liberty of not being 264 fennia 199(2) (2021)reviews and essays spatially confined by one’s work can become a desirable social imaginary, influencing many urban dimensions from the centralization or decentralization of office space and limits on public transportation to the routines of everyday life. such crises are, in fact, the moments when extant class conflict is experienced more intensively. digital space requires capital and specialization of labour. just like the city itself, digital space can cause segregation; those who have the means to be productive digital actors will have better chances of utilizing it to their advantage (zheng & walsham 2021). different degrees of access to the digital web and to proper tools and education have the potential to widen the gaps between different social strata (robinson et al. 2021). even though everyday life for many classes in cities has been slowly subsidized with digital mediums over the past two decades, gaps were more apparent when mobility restrictions were applied during the pandemic. the global pandemic has inflated digital space allowing many activities to change form and become remote (iranmanesh & atun 2020). those with access to digital means of production can take part in the economy without being physically present (koloğlugil 2015). it can be argued that the continuation of remote work can affect, in the long term, the monopolisation of high-profit districts of cities. a significant portion of the hierarchies intrinsic to urban form is caused by locational advantages that are the result of competition for capital. widespread remote work has the tendency to desensitise the critical role of location. smith (1984, 148) stated, “the mobility of capital brings about the development of areas with a high rate of profit and the underdevelopment of those areas where a low rate of profit pertains.” due to the mobility of capital towards high rates of profit, over-accumulation of capital can be observed in the business districts of cities. as long as the mobility of capital is the driving force that determines the course of development, uneven urban development will be reproduced. this uneven urban development can limit the spatial accessibility of city dwellers based on income levels; money facilitates mobility via means of transportation or locational advantage. this, in a feedback loop, makes it possible to generate more income. the more concentrated that capital is in urban business districts, the less likely it becomes for those urban spaces to be accessed by different social classes. consequently, over-accumulation of capital in a specific urban space can be considered a mechanism that restricts city dwellers’ freedom of access to the city, thus intensifying urban fragmentation, and leading to uneven development patterns. scholar (2006, 98) wrote, “unregulated free-market capitalism widens class divisions, exacerbates social inequality, and ensures that rich regions grow richer while the rest plunge deeper and deeper into the mire of poverty.” consequently, it can be argued that one of the potential outcomes of the emerging trend of remote work, which was accelerated by the pandemic, is the lessening of location as a defining factor in seeking opportunities in cities. the proliferation of remote work has the potential of encouraging localised activities (zenkteler et al. 2019). conversely, it should be noted that integrating a specific space defined as a workplace into the home can bring about its own set of problems; the current practice of remote work needs adjustments in terms of particular psychological approaches or spatial organisation (valizadeh & iranmanesh 2021). not every household has the luxury of sufficient indoor space to accommodate these emerging activities (mestrum & menon 2021). even when remote work is possible, the mixture of household activities and work might create inequality on the basis of gender as barbosa (2020) revealed. nevertheless, the rapid integration of remote work has presented some professions with novel opportunities (nascimento & lopes 2020). each new social imaginary arises with good and bad qualities, and one of the benefits of remote work is its potential to construct elements of a new society by changing the direction of flow of capital; the transposition of capital intrinsically constitutes heterogeneous access to sufficient means of production. smith (1984, 149) argued that the imbalance “is nowhere clearer than in the geographical contradiction between development and underdevelopment where the over-accumulation of capital at one pole is matched by the over-accumulation of labour at the other.” by lessening the importance of urban business districts, diversion of capital flow away from these areas can be accomplished, and a shift in the disequilibrium can begin by diluting concentrations of capital or labour in disparate parts of the city and its periphery. valizadeh (2020, 331) contended that transformation of everyday life during the pandemic could lead to the transformation of the socio-spatial structures of cities. here, the social imaginary is the hope of producing means for socio-spatial equilibrium or the aim of fennia 199(2) (2021) 265paria valizadeh & aminreza iranmanesh constructing a society that provides more humanised urban life experiences. according to smith (1984, 159), “it is not that our goal is some rigidly conceived ‘even development’. this would make little sense. rather, the goal is to create socially determined patterns of differentiation and equalization which are driven not by the logic of capital but by genuine social choice.” digital freedom/unfreedom: the rise of the surveillance state increased surveillance is one of the most significant actions that both capitalist and authoritarian states could take advantage of during the current pandemic, particularly digital tracking of citizens’ behaviours in urban space. contemporary society is becoming more and more dependent on the structure of the digital web. states use digital information for control and private companies trade information about people’s choices as commodities. the current pandemic provided a preview of how extreme these practices could become. as urban space becomes intertwined with the digital web, the fight for the right to public space and public space’s emerging identity must be addressed. new authoritarianism is no longer only a matter of the relationship between the state and the people; it is also a function of corporate or consumer control over the flow of capital (information) through the digital web. the internet provides a platform for digital means of production. the internet has become an omnipresent entity in the practice of everyday life, and keeps a long-lasting record of the information produced by users. the era of web2.0 and digital mobile communication has created a new flow of information where people record and share traces of their everyday activities (seeburger et al. 2012; kitchin 2014). the ever-presence of digital media in the everyday life of cities has caused a shift that transforms the role of citizens from mere consumers of information to co-producers of it (foth et al. 2015). the covid-19 pandemic revealed the rights to interconnected semi-digital space. although this data can be used to expand our understanding of cities (arribas-bel 2014; roberts et al. 2018) and it has been effective in developing situational strategies for addressing the pandemic (li et al. 2020), it also can be misused to create new modes of control over everyday life or to affect the liberty and privacy of citizens (strauß 2011; smith et al. 2012). the use or misuse of digital information is not always performed by the state. in many cases, sharing of digital information is merely a volunteer process for self-protection and care (menni et al. 2020). additionally, concerns over privacy have been one of the reasons that contact-tracing applications were unpopular with the general population during the pandemic (fox et al. 2021). these measures of control for urban pandemics came in two major forms: the informal selfgoverned social distancing and the institutionally enforced state restrictions and surveillance. as harari (2020, 4) stated, “in this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. the first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. the second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.” there have been successes in mitigating the spread of covid-19 by utilising citizens’ digital footprints (hovestadt et al. 2021). in taiwan, the digital tracking of high-risk individuals using traceable id cards showed unprecedented results (chen et al. 2021; wang et al. 2020). similar contact-tracing approaches were implemented in south korea (lee & lee 2020), the united kingdom (drew et al. 2020), new zealand (cousins 2020), iceland and many other countries with significant success (daret al. 2021). the successful implementation of digital tools in these cases could increase the acceptance of such data collection measures as a new normal (ting et al. 2020). the new normal could be prone to abuse if the legitimacy of having access to geotagged mobile data by the state is observed as reasonable by the public. such actions could potentially be used to increase the legitimacy of totalitarian surveillance as defence against upcoming waves of covid-19 spread or future similar circumstances (harari 2020). the critical importance of data privacy has become central to the discourse regarding the post-covid-19 world (cho et al. 2020; dar et al. 2021; park et al. 2020). accordingly, two main types of tracking have been observed: volunteer participation and involuntary remote surveillance by the state. in most cases, the state cannot mandate the use of these media at the individual level, but access to public facilities might be available only to those who declare their digital signature (cho et al. 2020). if involuntary state surveillance extends beyond the emergency, it could be 266 fennia 199(2) (2021)reviews and essays considered a hidden form of totalitarianism under the guise of care and compassion. the dilemma over surveillance presents itself as both a survival measure and a threat to the freedom of citizens (lapolla & lee 2020; rowe 2020). the limitations to urban spatial presence became opportunities for urban interactions to be subsidized by digital mediums. the utilisation of this transition, by the state or by private institutions, could affect the privacy of citizens; problems could also arise from the increasing value of digital footprints. citizens’ information, which is often shared voluntarily, has become a commodity that can be utilised for furthering economic or political agendas. hence, the situation calls for a revised discourse regarding the right to the city. the right to the (digital) city the notion of the right to the city is a right to democratise urban space – a collective right to produce and transform the city in the face of dominating attempts to privatise or monopolise it. it is also an inclusive right that facilitates unity against exclusive or individualised rights. on the surface, digital space seems like a social utopia with endless possibilities and inherent rights, but the intrinsic structure of digital space might become a tool for authoritarianism or a new capitalist agenda that sees the citizens, once again, as the users, consumers, or subjects of the space. these agendas could threaten the right to the evolving future city. it can be argued that the right to the digital city reaches beyond freedom of access to information; it must include the rights to the structure of the system, including emerging forms of civic participation. the right to the city is not solely a present issue; rather, it is the collection of the past, present, and future rights of urban dwellers (lefebvre 1996). as the past has shaped the right to the contemporary city, the current approach will shape the right to the future city. the contemporary everyday life of the city is interconnected with the digital web (halegoua 2020). the agglomeration of digital space and physical space forms the emerging space that is the new venue for everyday urban practice. the structure of this semi-digital space is a defining factor in what van dijk (2012) called the networked society. the extent to which this space affects everyday life is still being established by ongoing events. in digital space, the actions that constitute right or wrong are decided by the people who have unprecedented access to the global digital network via a device in their pockets. the covid 19 pandemic is part of this interconnected digital space and the life of the city. the revolt against face-identification technology during the hong kong protests challenged the omnipresence of government, the critical role of online interactions during the arab spring (alsayyad & guvenc 2013), and citizens’ recordings of police misconduct, are all instances of effective social and political conversations in the digital city. increasing surveillance via the digital city to control the covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that trust is a critical issue in state-citizen relations. the struggle between surveillance and privacy is dually problematic, simultaneously creating a new discourse about citizen empowerment and institutional control over everyday life. digital space surveillance not only constitutes a form of control by the state; it also becomes a form of control by social peers. conclusion crisis often leads to change, including changes to cities and space. the impact of these changes is such that if they extend into post-crisis days, restructuring of some of the existing socio-spatial organisations should be expected in the long term. the dynamism of a capitalist society is derived from the logic of capital, but it can be refashioned by some of the measures that emerged from the crisis. while, this shift in the logic of capital can herald a kind of radical openness in the future, the current capitalist system, which rests upon authoritarianism, can also adapt to this change and raise a new authoritarianism (fig. 1). the current review has tried to critically examine the emerging literature regarding covid-19 and urban form from the perspective of the rising new imaginary and authoritarianism. moreover, it has taken an explicitly anti-authoritarian stance against non-pharmaceutical mitigation strategies such as socio-spatial restrictions and more surveillance, in particular. these actions are executed by authorities fennia 199(2) (2021) 267paria valizadeh & aminreza iranmanesh calling for an alternative system in the face of the uncertainties that came along with the pandemic. it cannot be denied that the pandemic has magnified many perennial urban issues. on one hand, the top-down mitigation approaches that have been employed during the state of emergency are effectively short-term solutions with potential long-term impacts on social liberties and the right to the city. on the other hand, there seems to be a strong precedent for bottom-up social movements that strengthen solidarity, resilience, and social cohesion. it could be argued that the new imaginaries that manifested in these processes could begin to define potential future directions for urban life. overall, the changes emerging from the pandemic should be used to make demands that lead to the democratization of urban space. as the pandemic unfolded, it has exposed socio-spatial injustices between the capitalist system and the working classes. there is the possibility of constructing a socialist democratic society upon the remnants of global capitalism, but it requires a collective whole not an agglomeration of fragmented individuals. constructing a more humanized urbanism calls for a common consciousness that has already been acquired during the current pandemic. there remains an opportunity for reorganising existing socio-spatial structures. as such, the reconstruction of extant market relations, a return to use-value, collective forms of consumption, and communal ownership of resources can all bring about their utopias. a part of these changes is manifested through the digital web. the flow of information creates new forms of capital constituting peoples’ whereabouts and interests. in this perspective, once again, citizens are considered the consumers of the capital (information) though this is not the reality of everyday life. urban dwellers are now co-producers of the digital space that is so intertwined with the spatial structure that it is no longer possible to imagine one without the other (crang 2000). the rapid pace of digitalisation in urban space forms the structure on which the future right to the city and public space are being constructed. the covid-19 pandemic, as a significant global moment, will have lasting effects on the relationship between the public and the state. the alternative fig.1. the framework of the review. 268 fennia 199(2) (2021)reviews and essays interpretation of the nexus between freedom and necessary control also can transform the very meaning of urban life. undermining individuality and people’s privacy, even for the greater good, could become a hidden authoritarian agenda, whereas self-governed social measures empower a more democratic approach. in either case, it should be considered how the period of crisis embodies opportunities and threats together. the emerging post-pandemic world is uncertain and open to diverse alternatives that give rise to changes in systems. this uncertainty and transformative changes can be used for gradual transition to democracies that are more humane rather than toward new versions of authoritarianism. the practices of self-isolation, socio-spatial distancing, restricted access to public spaces, and restricted movement of people increased surveillance and repression. normalising the exercise of these practices during the time of crisis can legitimise their continued utilisation in the period following the state of emergency. then surveillance capitalism and new normalised authoritarianism can form and become established as the coronavirus crisis resolves. throughout history, democracy and human rights have been abused during times of crisis and those abuses led to authoritarian surges. nowadays, there is evidence of leaders around the world exploiting coronavirus conditions to consolidate their political power and secure their rule (smith & cheeseman 2020). this authoritarian agenda is a threat but is not inevitable; it requires democratic resistance. change occurs, not by those who hold power, but by those resisting and pressuring from the bottom up. the unfolding pandemic has presented the opportunity to rise from the crisis as an alternative society with a more humane, democratic, and egalitarian outlook. the other alternative destines society for a dystopian future. acknowledgements we would like to extend our gratitude to all frontline healthcare workers, without their efforts, many of these scholarly activities would not have been possible during the pandemic. we would also like to thank güven arif sargın, chiara certoma, and chief editor kirsi pauliina kallio for their constructive and critical comments on this review. references alsayyad, n. & guvenc, m. (2013) virtual uprisings: on the interaction of new social media, traditional media coverage and urban space during the ‘arab spring’. urban studies 52(11) 2018–2034. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013505881 arribas-bel, d. (2014) accidental, open and everywhere: emerging data sources for the understanding of cities. applied geography 49 45–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.09.012 barata, c., coutinho mendes, m. l., manfredi, f. & schamarella, m. (2020) doctoral research work and work of care: reflections in times of a pandemic. fennia 198(1–2) 247–251. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99192 barbosa, r. b. (2020) covid-19 and doctoral research in brazil and portugal: who pays the bill for confinement and remote work in research? fennia 198(1–2) 239–242. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99208 bethke, f. s. & wolff, j. (2020) covid-19 and shrinking civic spaces: patterns and consequences. zeitschrift für friedensund konfliktforschung 9(2) 363–374. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42597-020-00038-w blustein, d. l., duffy, r., ferreira, j. a., cohen-scali, v., cinamon, r. g. & allan, b. a. (2020) unemployment in the time of covid-19: a research agenda. journal of vocational behavior 119 103436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103436 brody, h., rip, m. r., vinten-johansen, p. v., paneth, n. & rachman, s. (2000) map-making and myth-making in broad street: the london cholera epidemic, 1854. the lancet 356(9223) 64–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(00)02442-9 câmara, r. & silva, m. (2020) the challenges of anthropological research among sex workers and victims of domestic violence in times of the covid-19 pandemic. fennia 198(1–2) 252–255. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99336 canoy, n. a., robles, a. m. q. & roxas, g. k. t. (2022) bodies-in-waiting as infrastructure: assembling the philippine government’s disciplinary quarantine response to covid-19. social science & medicine 294 114695. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114695 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013505881 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.09.012 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99192 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99208 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42597-020-00038-w https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103436 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(00)02442-9 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99336 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114695 fennia 199(2) (2021) 269paria valizadeh & aminreza iranmanesh certomà, c. (2021) digital social innovation in the city: in search of a critical perspective. in certomà, c. (ed.) digital social innovation: spatial imaginaries and technological resistances in urban governance, 33–64. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80451-0 cetrulo, a., guarascio, d. & virgillito, m. e. (2020) the privilege of working from home at the time of social distancing. inter economics 55(3) 142–147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10272-020-0891-3 chen, f-m., feng, m-c., chen, t-c., hsieh, m-h., kuo, s-h., chang, h-l., yang, c-j. & chen, y-h. (2021) big data integration and analytics to prevent a potential hospital outbreak of covid-19 in taiwan. journal of microbiology, immunology and infection 54(1) 129–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmii.2020.04.010 cho, h., ippolito, d. & yu, y. w. (2020) contact tracing mobile apps for covid-19: privacy considerations and related trade-offs. arxiv:2003.11511. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2003.11511 córdoba, d., peredo, a. m. & chaves, p. (2021) shaping alternatives to development: solidarity and reciprocity in the andes during covid-19. world development 139 105323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105323 cousins, s. (2020) new zealand eliminates covid-19. the lancet 395(10235) 1474. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(20)31097-7 crang, m. (2000) public space, urban space and electronic space: would the real city please stand up? urban studies 37(2) 301–317. https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098002203 dar, a. b., lone, a. h., zahoor, s., khan, a. a. & naaz, r. (2020) applicability of mobile contact tracing in fighting pandemic (covid-19): issues, challenges and solutions. computer science review 38 100307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosrev.2020.100307 van dijk, j. (2012) the network society. sage publications, london. drew, d. a., nguyen, l. h., steves, c. j., menni, c., freydin, m., varsavsky, t., sudre, c. h., cardoso, m. j., ourselin, s., wolf, j., spector, t. d. & chan, a. t. (2020) rapid implementation of mobile technology for real-time epidemiology of covid-19. science eabc0473. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abc0473 dubowitz, m. & ghasseminejad, s. (2020) iran’s covid-19 disinformation campaign. ctcsentinel 13(6) 40–48. favilla, k. & pita, t. (2020) “when will fieldwork open up again?” beginning a project in pandemic times. fennia 198(1–2) 230–233. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99203 finn, b. m. & kobayashi, l. c. (2020) structural inequality in the time of covid-19: urbanization, segregation, and pandemic control in sub-saharan africa. dialogues in human geography 10(2) 217–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934310 foth, m., brynskov, m. & ojala, t. (2015) citizen’s right to the digital city. springer, berlin. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-919-6 fox, g., clohessy, t., van der werff, l., rosati, p. & lynn, t. (2021) exploring the competing influences of privacy concerns and positive beliefs on citizen acceptance of contact tracing mobile applications. computers in human behavior 121 106806. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106806 friedman, m. (2009) capitalism and freedom. university of chicago press, chicago. gozzi, n., tizzoni, m., chinazzi, m., ferres, l., vespignani, a. & perra, n. (2021) estimating the effect of social inequalities on the mitigation of covid-19 across communities in santiago de chile. nature communications 12(1) 2429. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22601-6 haffajee, r., parmet, w. e. & mello, m. m. (2014) what is a public health “emergency”? new england journal of medicine 371(11) 986–988. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1406167 halegoua, g. r. (2020) the digital city: media and the social production of place. nyu press, new york. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479839216.001.0001 halliday, s. (2001) death and miasma in victorian london: an obstinate belief. bmj 323(7327) 1469–1471. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7327.1469 harari, y. n. (2020) the world after coronavirus. financial times 20.3.2020 <https://www.ft.com/ content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75>. 10.1.2022. harvey, d. (2001) spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. routledge, london harvey, d. (2010) social justice and the city. university of georgia press, athens. ho, l. k-k., fong, c-s. & wan, t. t. w. (2020) high level of (passive) compliance in a low-trust society: hong kong citizens’ response towards the covid-19 lockdown. policing: a journal of policy and practice 15(2) 1046–1061. https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paaa090 hovestadt, c., richter, j. & werder, k. (2021) digital responses to covid-19: digital innovation, transformation, and entrepreneurship during pandemic outbreaks. springer nature, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66611-8 iranmanesh, a. & atun, r. (2020) restricted spatiality and the inflation of digital space, an urban perspective. space and culture 23(3) 320–328. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331220938634 iranmanesh, a. & atun, r. (2020) reading the changing dynamic of urban social distances during the covid-19 pandemic via twitter. european societies 23(sup1) s872–s886. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1846066 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80451-0 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10272-020-0891-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmii.2020.04.010 https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2003.11511 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105323 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(20)31097-7 https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098002203 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosrev.2020.100307 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abc0473 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99203 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934310 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-919-6 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106806 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22601-6 https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1406167 https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479839216.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7327.1469 https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75 https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75 https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paaa090 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66611-8 https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331220938634 https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1846066 270 fennia 199(2) (2021)reviews and essays jamieson, l. & van blerk, l. (2021) responding to covid-19 in south africa – social solidarity and social assistance. children's geographies 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.1924359 jasanoff, s. & kim, s-h. (2015) dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. university of chicago press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001 jasiński, a. (2018) protecting public spaces against vehicular terrorist attacks. czasopismo techniczne (2) 47–56. joaquin, j. j. b. & biana, h. t. (2021) philippine crimes of dissent: free speech in the time of covid-19. crime, media, culture 17(1) 37–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659020946181 kallio, k. p., de souza, m. l., mitchell, k., häkli, j., tulumello, s., meier, i., carastathis, a., tsilimpounidi, m., spathopoulou, a. & bird, g. (2020) covid-19 discloses unequal geographies. fennia 198(1–2) 1–16. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99514 kantamneni, n. (2020) the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on marginalized populations in the united states: a research agenda. journal of vocational behavior 119 103439. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103439 kemp, l. (2021) the 'stomp reflex': when governments abuse emergency powers. bbc 28.4.2021 <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210427-the-stomp-reflex-when-governments-abuseemergency-powers>. 12.4.2022. khanijahani, a. & tomassoni, l. (2021) socioeconomic and racial segregation and covid-19: concentrated disadvantage and black concentration in association with covid-19 deaths in the usa. journal of racial and ethnic health disparities 9 367–375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-021-00965-1 kitchin, r. (2014) the real-time city? big data and smart urbanism. geojournal 79(1) 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8 koloğlugil, s. (2015) digitizing karl marx: the new political economy of general intellect and immaterial labor. rethinking marxism 27(1) 123–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2014.980678 kreuder-sonnen, c. & white, j. (2021) europe and the transnational politics of emergency. journal of european public policy 29(6) 953–965. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1916059 lakew, s., gilano, g. & feleke, t. (2021) covid-19 community mitigation status at selected districts of southwest ethiopia: a mixed design survey. risk management and healthcare policy 14 1763–1775. https://doi.org/10.2147/rmhp.s292835 lapolla, p. & lee, r. (2020) privacy versus safety in contact-tracing apps for coronavirus disease 2019. digital health 6 2055207620941673. https://doi.org/10.1177/2055207620941673 lasry, a., kidder, d., hast, m., poovey, j., sunshine, g., winglee, k., zviedrite, n., ahmed, f., ethier, k. a., program, cdc public health law program, new york city department of health and mental hygiene, louisiana department of health, public health – seattle & king county, san francisco covid-19 response team, alameda county public health department, san mateo county health department & marin county division of public health (2020) timing of community mitigation and changes in reported covid-19 and community mobility – four u.s. metropolitan areas, february 26 – april 1, 2020. morbidity and mortality weekly report (mmwr) 69(15) 451–457. http://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6915e2 lee, d. & lee, j. (2020) testing on the move: south korea’s rapid response to the covid-19 pandemic. transportation research interdisciplinary perspectives 5 100111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2020.100111 leetoy, s. & gravante, t. (2021) feeding, solidarity, and care: the grassroots experiences of latin american soup kitchens in a global pandemic. in montoya, m. a., krstikj, a., rehner, j. & lemusdelgado, d. (eds.) covid-19 and cities: experiences, responses, and uncertainties, 147–160. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84134-8_9 lefebvre, h. (1996) writings on cities. edited by e. kofman & e. lebas. blackwell publishers, oxford. li, l., zhang, q., wang, x., zhang, j., wang, t., gao, t., duan, w., tsoi, k. k., & wang, f. (2020) characterizing the propagation of situational information in social media during covid-19 epidemic: a case study on weibo. ieee transactions on computational social systems 7(2) 556–562. https://doi.org/10.1109/tcss.2020.2980007 liu, z., lin, s., shen, y. & lu, t. (2021) collaborative neighborhood governance and its effectiveness in community mitigation to covid-19 pandemic: from the perspective of community workers in six chinese cities. cities 116 103274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103274 lorini, m. r. & marx gómez, j. (2021) a resilient approach to social solidarity during covid-19. evidence from smart communities in south african cities. in halberstadt, j., marx gómez, j., greyling, j., mufeti, t. k. & faasch, h. (eds.) resilience, entrepreneurship and ict: latest research from germany, south africa, mozambique and namibia, 185–203. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78941-1_9 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.1924359 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659020946181 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99514 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103439 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210427-the-stomp-reflex-when-governments-abuse-emergency-powers https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210427-the-stomp-reflex-when-governments-abuse-emergency-powers https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-021-00965-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9516-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2014.980678 https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1916059 https://doi.org/10.2147/rmhp.s292835 https://doi.org/10.1177/2055207620941673 http://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6915e2 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2020.100111 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84134-8_9 https://doi.org/10.1109/tcss.2020.2980007 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103274 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78941-1_9 fennia 199(2) (2021) 271paria valizadeh & aminreza iranmanesh mazerolle, l. & ransley, j. (2021) policing health regulations in democratic societies: a focus on covid-19 challenges and opportunities in australia. international journal of comparative and applied criminal justice 45(3) 315–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2021.1907605 mendes, l. (2020) how can we quarantine without a home? responses of activism and urban social movements in times of covid-19 pandemic crisis in lisbon. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 111(3) 318–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12450 menni, c., valdes, a. m., freidin, m. b., sudre, c. h., nguyen, l. h., drew, d. a., ganesh, s., varsavsky, t., cardoso, m. j., el-sayed moustafa, j. s., visconti, a., hysi, p., bowyer, r. c. e., mangino, m., falchi, m., wolf, j., ourselin, s., chan, a. t., steves, c. j. & spector, t. d. (2020) real-time tracking of self-reported symptoms to predict potential covid-19. nature medicine 26 1037–1040. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0916-2 mestrum, f. & menon, m. (2021) the right to the city and the right to housing. in mestrum, f. & menon, m. (eds.) redefining the agenda for social justice: voices from europe and asia. springer singapore, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1 mishra, c. & rath, n. (2020) social solidarity during a pandemic: through and beyond durkheimian lens. social sciences & humanities open 2(1) 100079. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100079 mishra, s. v., gayen, a. & haque, s. m. (2020) covid-19 and urban vulnerability in india. habitat international 103 102230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2020.102230 nascimento, a. m. & lopes, h. f. (2020) how we have been productive when coronavirus locked us out of university. fennia 198(1–2) 243–246. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99190 ortega, f. & orsini, m. (2020) governing covid-19 without government in brazil: ignorance, neoliberal authoritarianism, and the collapse of public health leadership. global public health 15(9) 1257–1277. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2020.1795223 park, s., choi, g. j. & ko, h. (2020) information technology-based tracing strategy in response to covid-19 in south korea – privacy controversies. jama 323(21) 2129–2130. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6602 parry, l. j., asenbaum, h. & ercan, s. a. (2021) democracy in flux: a systemic view on the impact of covid-19. transforming government: people, process and policy 15(2) 197–205. https://doi.org/10.1108/tg-09-2020-0269 putnam, r. d. (2000) bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. simon and schuster, new york. https://doi.org/10.1145/358916.361990 roberts, h., sadler, j. & chapman, l. (2018) the value of twitter data for determining the emotional responses of people to urban green spaces: a case study and critical evaluation. urban studies 56(4) 818–835. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017748544 robinson, l., schulz, j., ragnedda, m., pait, h., kwon, h. & khilnani, a. (2021) an unequal pandemic: vulnerability and covid-19. american behavioral scientist 65(12) 1603–1607. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211003141 rowe, f. (2020) contact tracing apps and values dilemmas: a privacy paradox in a neo-liberal world. international journal of information management 55 102178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102178 san, s., bastug, m. f. & basli, h. (2021) crisis management in authoritarian regimes: a comparative study of covid-19 responses in turkey and iran. global public health 16(4) 485–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2020.1867880 scholar, r. (2006) divided cities: the oxford amnesty lectures 2003. oxford university press on demand, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192807083.001.0001 seeburger, j., foth, m. & tjondronegoro, d. (2012) designing and evaluating mobile multimedia user experiences in public urban places: making sense of the field. in tjondronegoro, d. (ed.) mobile multimedia – user and technology perspectives, 117–132. intechopen, london. https://doi.org/10.5772/39050 sharifi, a. & khavarian-garmsir, a. r. (2020) the covid-19 pandemic: impacts on cities and major lessons for urban planning, design, and management. science of the total environment 749 142391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.142391 smith, j. & cheeseman, n. (2020) authoritarians are exploiting the coronavirus. democracies must not follow suit. foreign policy 28. smith, m., szongott, c., henne, b. & voigt, g. v. (2012) big data privacy issues in public social media. 6th ieee international conference on digital ecosystems and technologies (dest) 2012 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1109/dest.2012.6227909 smith, n. (1984) uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. university of georgia press, athens. soja, e. (2009) the city and spatial justice. justice spatiale/spatial justice 1(1) 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2021.1907605 https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12450 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0916-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6571-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100079 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2020.102230 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99190 https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2020.1795223 https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6602 https://doi.org/10.1108/tg-09-2020-0269 https://doi.org/10.1145/358916.361990 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017748544 https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642211003141 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2020.102178 https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2020.1867880 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192807083.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.5772/39050 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.142391 https://doi.org/10.1109/dest.2012.6227909 272 fennia 199(2) (2021)reviews and essays strauß, s. (2011) the limits of control – (governmental) identity management from a privacy perspective. in fischer-hübner, s., duquenoy, p., hansen, m., leenes, r. & zhang, g. (eds.) privacy and identity management for life. privacy and identity 2010. ifip advances in information and communication technology vol 352, 206–218. springer, berlin and heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20769-3_17 taylor, c. (2004) modern social imaginaries. duke university press, durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385806 thomson, s. & ip, e. c. (2020) covid-19 emergency measures and the impending authoritarian pandemic. journal of law and the biosciences 7(1) lsaa064. https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsaa064 ting, d. s. w., carin, l., dzau, v. & wong, t. y. (2020) digital technology and covid-19. nature medicine 26(4) 459–461. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0824-5 torrats-espinosa, g. (2021) using machine learning to estimate the effect of racial segregation on covid-19 mortality in the united states. proceedings of the national academy of sciences 118(7) e2015577118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2015577118 valizadeh, p. (2020) quarantine: contradictory spatial practice between abstract and concrete. space and culture 23(3) 329–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331220938637 valizadeh, p. & iranmanesh, a. (2021) inside out, exploring residential spaces during covid-19 lockdown from the perspective of architecture students. european planning studies 30(2) 211–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1939271 wang, c. j., ng, c. y. & brook, r. h. (2020) response to covid-19 in taiwan: big data analytics, new technology, and proactive testing. jama 323(14) 1341–1342. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.3151 wang, r. y. (2021) is remote working a privilege? a spatial durbin approach of digital infrastructure and workplace mobility change during the covid-19 pandemic in the us. ssrn. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3898272 wellman, b. (2002) little boxes, glocalization, and networked individualism. in tanabe, m., van den besselaar, p. & ishida, t. (eds.) digital cities ii: computational and sociological approaches, 10–25. springer, berlin and heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45636-8_2 white, a., hao, l., yu, x. & thorpe, r. j. (2021) residential racial segregation and social distancing in the united states during covid-19. eclinicalmedicine 35 100840. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100840 wiley, l. f. (2020) public health law and science in the community mitigation strategy for covid-19. journal of law and the biosciences 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsaa019 wilkinson, a. (2020) local response in health emergencies: key considerations for addressing the covid-19 pandemic in informal urban settlements. environment and urbanization 32(2) 503–522. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247820922843 yu, q., salvador, c. e., melani, i., berg, m. k., neblett, e. w. & kitayama, s. (2021) racial residential segregation and economic disparity jointly exacerbate covid-19 fatality in large american cities. annals of the new york academy of sciences 1494(1) 18–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14567 zajak, s., stjepandić, k. & steinhilper, e. (2021) pro-migrant protest in times of covid-19: intersectional boundary spanning and hybrid protest practices. european societies 23(sup1) s172-s183. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1821076 zenkteler, m., darchen, s., mateo-babiano, i. & baffour, b. (2019) home-based work in cities: in search of an appropriate urban planning response. futures 135 102494. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102494 zheng, y. & walsham, g. (2021) inequality of what? an intersectional approach to digital inequality under covid-19. information and organization 31(1) 100341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100341 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20769-3_17 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385806 https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsaa064 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-020-0824-5 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2015577118 https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331220938637 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1939271 https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.3151 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3898272 https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45636-8_2 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100840 https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsaa019 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247820922843 https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14567 https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2020.1821076 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2019.102494 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100341 ‘it’s the right thing to do’: specificities of the polish response to the ukrainian crisis ‘it’s the right thing to do’: specificities of the polish response to the ukrainian crisis this is a particular moment in which, by looking at the russian invasion of ukraine, we can glimpse the intersection of historical trauma, humanitarian aid, border management, civil society, european and international migration management, and refugee studies. there is hence much to consider, research and debate related to the challenges of humanitarian bordering practices at the present moment. in this editorial, i focus on the specificities of the polish response to the ukrainian crisis. in poland, there has been a collective national atmosphere that supporting ukrainians fleeing russian aggression and large-scale destruction on ukrainian soil is the primary moral option. ‘it is the right thing to do’ is a common refrain i hear from my polish family and friends living in poland. the research data and analytics technology group yougov found that, in march 2022, 67% of poles felt poland had a moral obligation to offer asylum to ukrainian refugees (smith 2022). by july 2022, this has fallen to 50%. poland is bearing the brunt of refugee resettlement compared to other member states of the european union. this can be seen by the sheer numbers of women and children on the move. specifically, 1.5 million ukrainian refugees arrived in poland in the first two weeks after the 24 february overwhelmingly, the polish response to the 24 february 2022 russian invasion of ukraine has been based on the moral imperative of ‘it is the right thing to do’. within three months, poland was hosting 3.3 million ukrainian refugees. this is equivalent to 8.7% of poland’s population of 38 million. the numbers are difficult to grasp. i have identified four specificities in the polish response. firstly, a collective intergenerational trauma and fear that russia may not stop at ukraine. secondly, the attitude of the polish state towards refugees is generally restrictive and hostile with the exception of ukrainians. thirdly, there were pre-existing polish-ukrainian relationships upon which polish society’s response has been layered upon. lastly, there has been sustained collective and grassroots response for over nine months. for how much longer can the humanitarian response be driven by local authorities, local organisations and civil society ‘to do the right thing’? keywords: poland, ukraine, refugees, intergenerational trauma, grassroots response, civil society urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa125368 doi: 10.11143/fennia.125368 © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 2 fennia 200(1) (2022)editorial 2022 invasion. on the 11 march, the mayor of warsaw, rafał trzaskowski (2022) tweeted that, in warsaw alone, 300,000 people had arrived during this period. within one month the migration into poland skyrocketed to 2.3 million. this is the greatest movement of displaced people on european soil since world war 2 (ww2). within three months, poland was hosting 3.3 million ukrainian refugees. this is equivalent to 8.7% of poland’s population of 38 million. the numbers are difficult to grasp. there is no other country in europe – not even turkey – hosting such a sheer number of refugees, and most importantly, within days and weeks of the mass exodus. how do we consider the absorption capacity of a nation to host millions of unexpected residents, with all of their needs including emotional, educational, housing and livelihood? i have identified four specificities to the polish response: collective intergenerational trauma and fear of russia, attitude of the polish state, pre-existing polish-ukrainian relationships, and a sustained collective and grassroots response. firstly, russian aggression on ukrainian soil triggers anxiety and palatable distress in poles. there is a collective, intergenerational trauma and fear. russia’s aggressions towards its geopolitical neighbours and their residents motivated poles on the 24th of february 2022 to immediately respond to ukrainians fleeing. support may be pragmatic, related to the securitization of poland’s borders and in particular fears that putin may well not stop at ukraine. there was also a concern that the eu and ‘the west’ would allow ukraine to be absorbed within the russian fold, and if so, would poland be next? flashbacks to ww2 and its aftermath are felt below the emotional collective surface of poles. secondly, the polish state’s (and some residents’) attitude towards refugees is generally restrictive and hostile. in november 2021, the polish border police forcibly stopped syrian, afghani, and iraqi migrants from entering the country at the belarusian border (fox and upright 2021). through the winter of 2021, the situation did not improve (human rights watch 2022). the state is keen to build a physical wall to keep migrants, asylum seekers and refugees out of poland. it is worth noting that in august 2021, in a poll for polsat news, almost 55% of poles were opposed to accepting refugees and 47% wanted a border wall with belarussia (tilles 2021). however, 16 days after the russian invasion of ukraine started, poland passed a ‘special act’; on assistance to ukrainian refugees, but notably, not for stateless persons and third-party nationals and their families fleeing ukraine (european commission 2022). this allowed ukrainians to stay in poland for 18 months (with the possibility to extend for another 18 months), the right to employment, access to health care, benefits and other assistance, access to education and tax incentives. thirdly, there were pre-existing social and economic relationships between poles and ukrainians upon which these particular responses are layered onto. polish people have longstanding links with ukrainians, they are friends or work colleagues. in the form of circular migration, up to 2 million ukrainians worked in poland before 2022 (perzyna 2022). the people currently on the move are hence not viewed as ‘refugees’ within poland but rather as ‘guests’, and poles call themselves ‘hosts’. this language signifies a familiarity rather than an ‘othering’ (see gill et al. 2022). fourthly, the sustained polish response has been grassroots driven. the polish central government has pushed the responsibility for the response to regional and local authorities, and to the civil society. the central government did not want to lead the efforts. neither has the international humanitarian sector led them in poland. foreign aid was very quick to arrive and was gratefully received, however it was overshadowed by the generosity of mutual aid and solidarity initiatives arising from the poles themselves. the collective response has included the ukrainian diaspora in poland, collaborating with polish civil society, the roman catholic churches, businesses, and countless informal and individual response efforts. that is, ordinary people and local organisations doing the right thing, showing care and compassion. in closing, the four specificities of the polish response to the ukrainian crisis give rise to questions for the immediate future. for how much longer can the humanitarian response be driven by local authorities, local organisations, and civil society ‘to do the right thing’? for how much longer can people – who have given time, money and energy – keep up the sustained support when, now, it is close to a year since the invasion of a sovereign nation began? will the attitude of poles, who believe it is their moral obligation to support ukrainians, continue its recent downward trajectory? at what point will the polish central government provide leadership in the refugee response efforts? the next fennia 200(1) (2022) 3hanna a. ruszczyk & kirsi pauliina kallio & james riding months, year and two will be important to the specificities of the polish response to the evolving crises. how similar will the polish response become over time to other (european) contexts, such as turkey and greece, remains to be seen. acknowledgements hanna ruszczyk's work was supported by the glitch project (https://www.glitchspaces.org) funded by the united kingdom's economic and social research council grant es/s016643/1. hanna a. ruszczyk (https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000) durham university content of the issue this is issue of fennia includes two research papers, two articles in the review and essays section, and six contributions to the reflections section of which one is based on a lectio praecursoria and the others are commentaries to fennia articles published in our previous issue (199(2)). the first original article is by kim pawliw and étienne berthold, whose research in canada concerns ukrainian identity politics in the context of urban development. the paper construction of the ukrainian identity in a neighbourhood: the role of the host society – example of the parc de l’ukraine in rosemont, montreal offers a discourse analysis on the role of the host society in immigrant identity construction processes. focusing empirically on the ukrainian community of montreal, they reveal different perspectives to a process where an open urban space – a green area known as parc de l’ukraine since the early 1980s – went through a complete renewal in 2017, including both urban governance perspectives and those of the ukrainian community. the critical analysis reveals that the views of municipal representatives and professionals, and the ethnic associations differed to a large extent, especially regarding the inclusivity of the planning and the following renovation process. based on their findings pawliw and berthold (2022) argue that in these kinds of urban projects, the risk of instrumentalization of the immigrant communities is apparent, which may have significant impact on their experiences of belonging in the new home country in relation to their experienced ethnic identities. the topic thus connects with issue brought up by hanna ruszczyk in the above guest editorial, that is, how the ukrainian people (and other refugees) who settle in host societies are included in societal decision-making and the related administrative and professional practices. the second article in the research papers section comes from a research project in finland, concentrating on equalities related to suburban ice skating environments, which children and young people may enjoy during their leisure time. ice skating is one of the activities that even young children can practice in urban space rather easily, in finland, as they gain basic skills at school (part of the national physical education program) and ice skates are a rather affordable sports equipment. assessing travel time-based accessibility to outdoor ice skating fields for children in helsinki during the covid-19 pandemic, co-authored by charlotte van der lijn, marisofia nurmi, elina hasanen, janne pyykönen, lotta salmi, anna-katriina salmikangas, kirsi vehkakoski, ilkka virmasalo, tuuli toivonen and petteri muukkonen, introduces empirical research results based on a quantitative travel time analysis. with focus on 7 to 19 year-olds in helsinki, they measured the accessibility of outdoor iceskating fields in the time of climate change and during the covid-19 pandemic, including both natural and mechanically frozen fields. the analysis focuses on children and young people’s (un)equal opportunities to use these leisure areas independently, by walking or by public transport. the results show that, as natural ice skating fields are becoming rare due to climate change, also inequalities isnaccessing this leisure activity especially by foot are increasing (van der lijn et al. 2022). https://www.glitchspaces.org https://orcid.org/0000-0000-0000-0000 4 fennia 200(1) (2022)editorial in the reviews and essays section, the first article in this issue of fennia focuses on the production of urban poverty, from a lefebvrian perspective. continuing the previous articles’ theme of inequalities in urban space, sònia vives-miró’s paper the urbanization of poverty: rethinking the production of unjust geographies is a thorough introduction of a critical framework for approaching the uneven distribution of resources in the city. with specific focus on the spatial roots of urban inequalities, vives-miró (2022) considers the production of spaces of poverty not as consequence, but a cause, of social injustices. the concepts ‘spatial justice’ and ‘unjust geographies’ are first discussed drawing from pertinent critical literature, which is followed by deep engagement with the idea of ‘urbanization of poverty’ as a form through which unjust and unequal urban spaces are produced. the final long paper takes us from the urban context to a regional studies perspective. ejike okonkwo’s review article an overview of the nordic battery belt: an emerging network for cooperation within the nordic battery cluster traces transport connectivity in an emerging battery cluster, taking notice both on the challenges faced by this co-operation and the solutions identified in regional networking. with empirical focus on nordland in norway, ostrobothnia in finland and and västerbotten in sweden, okonkwo (2022) has carried out a documentary analysis based on openly available information about the nordic battery belt, a regional institution established to encourage the development of the supply value chain in the battery cluster. the paper offers fruitful starting points for exploring further this industry so significant to the green transition yet involving also serious environmental concerns related to mining, but also sustainable transportation. the reflections section begins with laura lo presti’s commentary to the review article by gertrude saxinger, alexis sancho reinoso, sigrid irene wentzel (2021), titled cartographic storytelling: reflecting on maps through an ethnographic application in siberia. her reflection, stemming from the open review process, begins with the question of leaving or rescuing the (story) map? the essay that follows draws on multiple cartographic literatures and highlights growing theoretical perspectives on the humanistic potential of maps and connections between cartographic storytelling and ethnographic mapping (lo presti 2022). the second contribution is a lectio praecursoria, an introduction of a phd thesis by hossam raafat hewidy who defended his thesis at the school of arts, design and architecture in aalto university, finland, on august 21, 2022. the hidden city of immigrants in helsinki's urban leftovers: the homogenization of the city and the lost diversity is a study of ethnic retail, an emerging phenomenon in helsinki that has rapidly brought many vacant premises into life. hewidy’s (2022) study reveals how municipal planning has ignored the potential of immigrant amenities in creating a diverse cityscape, and its role in the livelihood of an immigrant community contributing to the recovery of urban street life. the final four pieces in the reflections section are commentaries to the fennia lecture 2021 by hilde refstie (2021), titled reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. the first, by jouni häkli (2022) pays attention to the key problems in co-creative research in our fast-paced academia coupled with the notoriously fuzzy concept of sustainability. the second, by eveliina lyytinen (2022) addresses “what doing our part means in a progressive world of fast policymaking” from the perspective of forcedmigration studies, contemplating solutions for designing and implementing action oriented research for and with refugees. the third, by diana vela-almeida (2022) aims to expand refstie’s critique on the role of an ethics of care in dismantling the neoliberal university, highlighting the need to build transformative practices and inclusive spaces of care. the fourth, by colin lorne (2022) addresses refstie’s paper on co-production and the role of academia in the search for sustainability in times of fast policymaking and keeps the conversation going, reflecting on the open-review processes at fennia by asking, what if we start from a more careful – if no less critical – position of listening and learning, rather than necessarily rushing to critique? kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) fennia editor-in-chief james riding (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819) fennia reflections section editor https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819 fennia 200(1) (2022) 5hanna a. ruszczyk & kirsi pauliina kallio & james riding references european commission (2022) polish parliament passed a law on assistance to ukrainians, european website on integration, 18.3.2022. <https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/news/polandparliament-adopts-law-assistance-ukrainian-refugees_en>. 22.11.2022. fox, k. & upright, e. (2021) belarus-poland border crisis deepens, with thousands trapped in dire conditions, cnn world, 11.11.2021. <https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/belarus-polandborder-11-11-21/index.html>. 22.11.2022. gill, n., riding, j., kallio k. p. & bagelman, j. (2022) geographies of welcome: engagements with ‘ordinary’ hospitality. hospitality & society 12(2) 123–143. https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp_00053_2 hewidy, h. r. (2022) the hidden city of immigrants in helsinki's urban leftovers – the homogenization of the city and the lost diversity. fennia 200(1) 86–90. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121457 human rights watch (2022) violence and pushbacks at poland-belarus border, 7.7.2022. <https:// www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/07/violence-and-pushbacks-poland-belarus-border>. 22.11.2022. häkli, j. (2022) towards washing the baby in the bathwater? – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 72–73. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 van der lijn, c., nurmi, m., hasanen, e., pyykönen, j., salmi, l., salmikangas a.-k., vehkakoski, k., virmasalo, i., toivonen, t., & muukkonen, p. (2022) assessing travel time-based accessibility to outdoor ice skating fields for children in helsinki during the covid-19 pandemic. fennia 200(1) 6–23. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114590 lo presti, l. (2022) leaving or rescuing the (story) map? – commentary to saxinger, sancho reinoso and wentzel. fennia 200(1) 68–71. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120599 lorne, c. (2022) moving policy out of time – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 81–85. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 lyytinen, e. (2022) revisiting the ‘dual imperative’ of forced-migration studies – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 74–77. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 okonkwo, e. (2022) an overview of the nordic battery belt: an emerging network for cooperation within the nordic battery cluster. fennia 200(1) 52–67. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120695 pawliw, k. & berthold, e. (2022) construction of the ukrainian identity in a neighbourhood: the role of the host society. example of the parc de l’ukraine in rosemont, montreal. fennia 200(1) 24–40. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116597 perzyna, m. (2022) reflections at the 24 march 2022 cerc sustainable policy for the ukrainian crisis seminar. <https://www.torontomu.ca/cerc-migration/events/2022/03/sustainable-policy-ukrainian/>. 29.11.2022. refstie, h. (2022) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 saxinger, g., sancho reinoso, a., & wentzel, s. i. (2022) cartographic storytelling: reflecting on maps through an ethnographic application in siberia. fennia 199(2) 242–259. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.110918 smith, m. (2022) the war in ukraine: the view from poland, yougov poll, 8.8.2022. <https://yougov. co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2022/08/08/war-ukraine-view-poland>. 29.11.2022. tilles, d. (2021) most poles opposed to accepting refugees and half want border wall: poll, notes from poland, 26.8.2021. <https://notesfrompoland.com/2021/08/26/most-poles-opposed-to-acceptingrefugees-and-half-want-border-wall-poll/>. 29.11.2022. trzaskowski, r. (2022) 300,000 refugees have arrived, twitter tweet, 11.3.2022. <https://twitter.com/ trzaskowski_/status/1502301504769867777>. 22.11.2022. vela-almeida, d. (2022) cherishing the reproductive work within academia for securing emancipatory work outside academia – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 78–80. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 vives-miró, s. (2022) the urbanization of poverty: rethinking the production of unjust geographies. fennia 200(1) 41–51. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.103192 https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/news/poland-parliament-adopts-law-assistance-ukrainian-refugees_en https://ec.europa.eu/migrant-integration/news/poland-parliament-adopts-law-assistance-ukrainian-refugees_en https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/belarus-poland-border-11-11-21/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/belarus-poland-border-11-11-21/index.html https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp_00053_2 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121457 https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/07/violence-and-pushbacks-poland-belarus-border https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/07/violence-and-pushbacks-poland-belarus-border https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114590 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120599 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120695 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116597 https://www.torontomu.ca/cerc-migration/events/2022/03/sustainable-policy-ukrainian/ https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.110918 https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2022/08/08/war-ukraine-view-poland https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2022/08/08/war-ukraine-view-poland https://notesfrompoland.com/2021/08/26/most-poles-opposed-to-accepting-refugees-and-half-want-border-wall-poll/ https://notesfrompoland.com/2021/08/26/most-poles-opposed-to-accepting-refugees-and-half-want-border-wall-poll/ https://twitter.com/trzaskowski_/status/1502301504769867777 https://twitter.com/trzaskowski_/status/1502301504769867777 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.103192 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa7787 doi: 10.11143/7787 fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal under conditions of academic capitalism anssi paasi paasi, anssi (2013). fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal under conditions of academic capitalism. fennia 191: 1, pp. 1-13. issn 17985617. universities and academic publishing cultures are transforming in developed societies around the world. this is related to the changing relations between the state and universities and to the increasingly common approval of neoliberal new public management doctrines. this has led to the adoption of diverse evaluation and ranking systems in science policies that in the last resort have an impact on how resources are delivered to universities, faculties and individual departments. new imperatives that researchers have faced seem to emphasize articles written in the english language that are published in so-called international quality journals. this paper scrutinizes at first the changing institutional basis and pressures that characterize current international academic publishing cultures; secondly, how such tendencies reflect the rise of academic capitalism; and thirdly, the shifting position of the well-established finnish geographical journal fennia in the international publishing space. a major dividing line between contemporary journals seems to exist between those that are included in the web of science/isi-system of thomson reuters and those that are not. this paper shows by using the isi data that fennia has been, despite the fact that it is not an isi-listed journal, a widely used and circulated forum for a long time. a major challenge for the future reputation of the journal will be attracting more high-quality international submissions and articles, regardless of whether the journal will be included in the isi system. keywords: geography, academic publishing cultures, web of science, academic capitalism anssi paasi, department of geography, linnanmaa, 90014 university of oulu, finland, e-mail: anssi.paasi@oulu.fi introduction academic researchers have been facing substantial pressures during the last 10–15 years or so. increasing claims for better research performance or for winning more national or international research awards seem to be the order of the day around the world. it is also more and more common in the science policies of practically all developed countries to stress the importance of ‘internationalization’ – whatever this shibboleth means in practice in different national academic contexts. scientific communication across borders and geographical distances is a phenomenon that is as old as the scientific enterprise itself (hakala 2002), but present claims indicate altered premises. universities, “the bright satanic mills of the emerging global knowledge economy” (harding et al. 2007: 3), have all around the world adopted a new language of performativity including such expressions as ‘world class’, ‘excellence’, ‘top’ and ‘international’. the self-promotion of universities has vastly enlarged and through branding exercises they “parade their ostensible strengths and draw a discrete veil over any weaknesses”, write harding et al. (2007: 2). the recent changes have been closely associated with a variety of university, national, and international level ranking exercises based on comparable sets of performance metrics. 2 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi for academic scholars such external pressures often mean increasing demands to publish their research ‘more internationally’ in ‘better forums’. this has very likely led to a growing calculation, probably more often externally forced than voluntary, in which researches have to weigh the pros and cons of miscellaneous publication forums. should she or he write a monograph, an article for an edited collection, or a journal article? and if to write a journal article, the most conspicuous claim today, where to submit it, since the range of publication forums is also expanding. the current ethos of ranking individual scholars, academic departments, universities and even ‘nations’ on the basis of research performance, and the often one-sidedly mechanical measurement of research output and citations, are major features of contemporary, increasingly competition-oriented academia (cf. agnew 2009). citation counts are seen, as fuller (2002: 207) writes, “as votes cast in an ongoing election over whose work matters.” increasing claims for competitiveness and the actions taken to promote this condition in higher education – ‘market-like behaviour’ – have been labelled critically as academic capitalism (slaughter & leslie 1999). i will scrutinize three things in this article. at first i will look at the changing institutional basis of publishing cultures and the related pressures that characterize contemporary academia, and secondly, how such new tendencies relate to academic capitalism. thirdly, as an empirical example i will scrutinize the changing position of the by long established finnish geographical journal fennia. i will do this by locating the journal in a wider, perpetually transforming international publishing space that increasingly crosses national borders but is simultaneously uneven in many ways (paasi 2005a). this unevenness is related to (hegemonic) languages, national academic cultures and contexts, to the power of publishing houses in marketing and promoting journals, editorial policies and gatekeeping, and to the power of indexing and ranking such journals into various data sets (like scopus and/or web of science). the geographical society of finland labels fennia as an international journal of geography. it is hence interesting and important to examine briefly what the ongoing internationalization of publishing cultures means in practical terms for this journal, how international tendencies, ideologies and institutions in general shape how international publishing is understood and, finally, how these tendencies perhaps challenge and reposition fennia, by tradition a notable journal in the international publishing space. changing publishing cultures and contexts publishing cultures around the world seem to be in a state of rapid change. this is related to the changing relations between the state and universities, and to the increasingly common adoption of new, neoliberal public management policies. the state, academic institutions and individual scholars have always formed a complex network of power relations (granö 1981; paasi 2005b). however, new public management policies have led to the adoption of diverse evaluation and ranking systems in science policies that ultimately have an impact on how resources are consigned to universities, faculties and individual departments. new demands that researchers face in many states emphasize articles written in the english language published in so-called international quality journals. the latter, for their part, at present seem primarily to be journals that have been accepted into the web of science/isi database which has been developed and maintained by the multinational corporation thomson reuters. in spite of the recent efforts of geographers to seriously consider possibilities for specifically european publishing outlets as a counterweight to anglophone journals (gregson et al. 2003; aalbers & rossi 2006), the harsh fact is that inclusion in the isi database, a feature characteristic of most well-known anglophone human geographic journals, is more often than not acknowledged around the world as a synonym for ‘quality’. the academic reputation of a specific classified journal reinforces the power of this database and also modifies the prevailing understanding of what counts as relevant, high calibre science and what is not. neoliberal competitive pressures related to publishing in high impact factor journals (if) and money allocated on the basis of isi-classified articles also tend to transform academic publishing into power struggles over prestige between and within academic disciplines. it goes without saying that the use of the isi apparatus in evaluation is appreciated especially by the representatives of academic fields that gain some advantage (prestige, research money) of the use of such instruments and is opposed by fields fennia 191: 1 (2013) 3fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... that stand to lose. fields that gain advantage from the system are very likely to be characterized by large research groups or networks, as well as a deep departmental, national and international division of labour. such instruments are typically resisted by social scientists and humanists, especially outside of the anglophone world, who may still prefer monographs over brief articles and tend to publish in their national languages rather than in english. it seems that in both physical and human geography the isi system now has a worldwide presence, and publishers, for example, use the isi status and its impact factors in their advertising. impact factors are presented by thomson reuters annually on the basis of a journal’s citations during the two previous years. in spite of its apparent ‘objectivity’, the calculation of impact factors is complicated and relates to issues such as what items are ultimately calculated in the sum of citations and which articles are used in dividing the total number of citations – the procedure that ultimately defines the impact factor. calls to publish journal articles, rather than monographs, have thus emerged around the world. this tendency has also raised a critical debate amongst geographers. some scholars have suggested that such claims may lead to a situation where academic researchers deliberately begin to avoid substantial, complicated and time-consuming research themes and instead concentrate on relatively small, focused, ‘sexy’ topics that attract the interest of researchers around the world for some time and are then soon replaced by new sexy topics (castree et al. 2006; harvey 2006; amin & thrift 2007; ward et al. 2009). ‘fashion’ is the term that some scholars have recently used to criticize such ‘fast-food’ research tendencies (agnew 2012). in the worst case such approaches may lead to imitation and to the fast circulation of unvarying ideas around the world. this would present a problem since the social sciences deal with open systems, which argues for both contextual and conceptual sensitivity on the part of researchers, not moving ‘ready-made’ conceptual frameworks from one place to another. since the practice of academic research consists of, besides ‘hard work’, a very complicated constellation of power relations, practices and discourses related to grant systems, publications, review work, evaluation and rankings, it is no exaggeration to suggest that language plays a crucial role in this enterprise (bauder et al. 2010). another wide-ranging debate, closely related to the previous issue, emerged at the turn of the millennium. it was related to the ever more powerful, even hegemonic position of the english language as the new lingua franca of academic publishing (minca 2000; gutiérrez & lópez-nieva 2001; garcia-ramon 2003; gregson et al. 2003; kitchin 2005; best 2009). a major question in this debate has been how one specific language, english, has become a global synonym for ‘international’, even though the ideas about what international actually means might themselves be deeply contested and contextual. while the hegemony of the english language was questioned, some authors also proposed that the use of english in fact makes the communication between academic scholars across borders easier (rodríguez-pose 2004). as far as global communication between scholars is concerned, there does not seem to be many alternatives to the hegemony of english as a language, especially for small linguistic communities like finnish, but many journals have taken proactive steps towards a more equal position. the online journal acme, for example, publishes articles not only in english but also in french, italian, german and spanish. a further step taken by this journal is that articles written in other languages may be accepted for review after consultation with the editors. some other journals (like geoforum) have helped non-english speakers with language problems. the contested nature of the ‘international publishing space’ many researchers have now challenged an idea that is today often taken for granted in the academic world, namely that it is english language publications, preferably produced in the us and uk, that are ‘international’, while publications in other languages are ‘national’ or ‘parochial’ (cf. minca 2000; simonsen 2004). the international community of social scientists in particular has become much more sensitive not only to the fact that language and context are decisively related in the construction of scientific accounts, but also to the forms of power (or ‘geopolitics’) that are involved in such relations. not only geographers but also post-colonial scholars and the representatives of marketing science and international relations studies, for example, have participated in the debate (canagarajah 2002; tietze & dick 2009). 4 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi in geography, scholars operating outside of the anglophone world (especially in many european states such as germany, denmark, hungary, italy and spain), along with some in north america, the united kingdom, and the formerly colonized ‘peripheries’, have commented on the monopolization of the idea of ‘international publishing’ by a group of journals published in english in the uk or the us. this was part of a wider critique of the views of geography practised in the us and uk as the product of a global ‘core’ and that practised in other areas as a product of the ‘periphery’ (berg & kearns 1998; gutiérrez & lópez-nieva 2001; olds 2001; garcia-ramon 2003; gregson et al. 2003; berg 2004). johnston and sidaway (2004, cf. rodríguez-pose 2004) challenged the idea of a unified anglo-american geography by showing that, in spite of common roots, there are major differences between british and us-based studies. ulrich best (2009) has recently usefully summarized these wide debates on the anglophone hegemony and provided some theoretical interpretations of what centres and peripheries in practice mean. timár (2004), for her part, has reminded that from the perspective of the former eastern european countries, it is better to speak about a ‘western hegemony’ than merely about an ‘angloamerican’ one. in spite of these wide critiques the role of the english language as the language of science is nowadays powerfully supported by many national ministries of science outside of the english-speaking world, e.g. in scandinavia and in many continental european states (paasi 2013). these rather intense deliberations within geography as well as the empirical research motivated by such debates (paasi 2005a) have revealed that most of the ostensibly ‘internationally significant’ journals, particularly those classified by thomson reuters in isi data, were published by major publishing houses in the uk and us. the fact remains that even today, even though progressively more non-anglophone geographical journals have been accepted into the isi database during the last 5–7 years or so, almost 90% of authors publishing in anglophone journals represent the english-speaking world (banski & ferenc 2013). human geography journals were for a long time very poorly represented in the isi data, but during the last few years new geographic journals have been accepted into the isi system. surprisingly enough, many of these journals are published outside of the anglophone world, and also in other languages than english, for example, in german, french, spanish and even in minor languages such as czech and slovenian. this implies that thomson reuters has altered its policy in accepting journals into the database and that some sort of linguistic and national representativeness has come into play. this may be related to the earlier observations and critical comments on the poor international representativeness of the listed journals, especially with respect to the wider non-anglophone world (paasi 2005a). it may also be an expression of a tendency to widen the ‘market logic’ inside the database: the journals in each field are, at any rate, ‘automatically’ classified according to their impact factors and in practice ‘quality’ is still related to the journal’s position in this hierarchy. many colleagues, especially those based in the uk, have told how their head of department or dean often clearly specifies which journals they should publish in. these journals typically represent the top of the isi hierarchy. according to recent comments, this kind of coercive accountability has produced much anxiety and discontent and has instilled a destructive competitive spirit in the university system (acme 2007). putting previous tendencies in a context: the rise of academic capitalism the current claims regarding the internationalization of contemporary academia are one imperative element in the neoliberal globalization of academic life. the processes related to globalization are being shaped in complex ways in and by transformations of the world economy and geopolitics, and involve many core forces of social life such as transformations in capitalist production, technological innovation in communications, the spread of rationalism as a dominant knowledge framework and various forms of governance enabling the establishment of new regulatory frameworks (scholte 2000; paasi 2005a; harding et al. 2007). more often than not, a competitive market orientation has entered into higher education, often following the policies outlined in national ministries, and a whole new vocabulary has been created to depict the links between science, universities and society (e.g. mcuniversity, triple helix, for-profit higher education, mode 1 and 2). teichler (2004) has analysed the definitions of internationalization and makes an analytical distinction between interfennia 191: 1 (2013) 5fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... nationalization and globalization of science. he argues that the former typically refers to physical mobility, academic co-operation, academic knowledge transfer and international education. the latter, for its part, is often associated with competition and market steering, transnational education and commercial knowledge transfer. respectively, as some scholars have recognized, the ongoing changes in publishing cultures and the related, somewhat heated debates are not mere random events but have been part of wider tendencies taking place in academia around the world. one of the most obvious manifestations of neoliberalism is the rise of evaluation cultures and procedures where the science organizations of various countries both draw on and imitate one another (paasi 2005a, 2013; castree et al. 2006). these have been paralleled and also nourished by various kinds of university ranking systems that partly draw on isi data (jöns & hoyler 2013). the best known rankings are the academic ranking of world universities (arwu) made by shanghai jiao tong university and the times higher education world university rankings, which both have become increasingly powerful since the millennium. these rankings are now enthusiastically followed by political elites, ministries and university leaders, the key issue typically being where one’s ‘own’ university (or ‘nation’) is positioned in relation to other national or international ‘competitors’. the lists have considerable power in shaping social reality and social practices related to academic life. kauppi and erkkilä (2011) are ready to argue that “the global higher education map is different today than prior to the creation of the 2003 shanghai ranking of world universities. it has become more structured, and ranking lists have turned into established policy instruments for global governance of higher education, reinforcing the value of certain resources at the expense of others.” these tendencies clearly display a neoliberal ideology of competition that is penetrating pretty much everywhere. one background for these developments is the fact that the traditionally rather modest marketing of universities to attract students has been dramatically transformed into a fierce struggle over prestige, research money and students. this has created not only new marketing strategies but also an ‘evaluation industry’ in many countries and has resulted in a symbolic struggle that draws on assessments, rankings and material and symbolic distinctions (harding et al. 2007; paasi 2013). recent developments in higher education have strengthened the power and resources of new professional groups such as university managers and evaluators of research and teaching performance (kauppi & erkkilä 2011: 315). on the other hand, these processes are also fitting examples of policy transfer (dolowitz & marsh 1996) where certain policy practices and ideas travel from one societal context to another across national borders and then begin to shape the dominant ways of thought and material practices in these new contexts also. some researchers have interpreted these tendencies as expressions of the globalization of higher education, and more specifically, of the rise of academic capitalism (slaughter & leslie 1997; paasi 2005a, 2013; castree et al. 2006). one of the key international advisory institutions behind such tendencies towards increasing competiveness is the oecd, the organization that originally brought science indicators into international debate. the oecd is often regarded as an ‘objective knowledge producer’ and it carries out international comparisons of publication activities and citations between the ‘nations’, using the isi data as a gauge, hence upholding an attitude of ‘competition’ that is buttressed and coordinated by national higher education systems and individual universities. correspondingly national ministries and governments use the oecd reports to steer their science policies, and in many cases actually commission such reports from the oecd to support their decisions (kallo 2009). states around the world have adopted increasingly similar views of science policy and its instruments and forms of management (kauppi & erkkilä 2011). this has been part of the wider adoption of the new public management doctrine. the management of globalizing science around the world appears to be occurring through the standardization of scientific practice and the certification of ‘quality’. it is even possible to speak of a sort of science nationalism that is developing in the sense that in the new landscape of economic competition investments in science and its results are compared by states in firmly national frameworks, often following models created by the oecd (paasi 2013). these developments thus seem to fit under the ideological umbrella of neoliberalism that covers a number of areas in contemporary social life and human experience – even if this evasive word is itself difficult to define. this argument quite obviously requires some further evidence. there are 6 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi many current processes and events occurring at various spatial scales that can be noted here. think, for example, how the nature of academic publishing and the diverging publications themselves have become a crucial element in defining various forms of symbolic capital and prestige that characterize the supposed competition between contemporary universities. this competition is not related merely to symbolic capital but to an increasing degree also to concrete material resources: money. one of the most common present-day assumptions implied by the global university rankings is that academic departments, faculties and universities should compete with each other in global space over resources and symbolic capital. prevailing tendencies may manifest themselves in different ways in different national contexts. in finland, for example, universities are just now facing the new nationwide publication forum project, the jufo forum, a classification and ranking of selected journals into three quality categories, 1 (lowest), 2 and 3 (highest), and book publishers into two categories, 1 and 2. the models for this classification have been adopted primarily from norway and denmark. publishing in forums classified into these three categories will ultimately lead to certain sums of money being delivered to universities according to their ‘research output’. the aim of the jufo project has been to create a system in which scientific publication activity can be evaluated on the basis of ‘quality, not only quantity’. most publications in higher jufo categories represent english language, often isi-classified journals and are published by major international publishing houses. the isi classification thus leads to a certain path-dependency, i.e. it helps the journals to succeed in other rankings as well. the jufo project is a fitting example of the instrumentalization of scientific research and how the form of ‘productivity’, both from the angle of an individual researcher and the universities, has been determined externally (korvela 2013). the first proposal for a jufo classification raised strong resistance among social scientists and humanists, and altogether 60 scientific societies representing various fields claimed in a petition that journals published in the finnish language should be better recognized, proposing that they should be raised from the first level to the second in the jufo classification. heavy lobbying on behalf of certain finnish-language journals was undoubtedly carried out by representatives of the social science and humanities fields to categorize their journals at higher levels in order to create a more equal position for finnish and non-finnish journals, but surely also because of the explicit link between this classification and financial rewards. this resistance thus suggested that the quality of publications should not be related to the publishing language, that is, english. the protest was accepted and a number of finnish-language journals were upgraded to level 2. eventually this episode led to a rather odd situation where many new, high calibre international journals were actually placed on a lower level than some national journals published only in finnish. on the other hand, at least some finnish universities seem to be eschewing this tendency towards linguistic equity when applying for jufo classification in such ways that international journals, regardless of jufo level, are still regarded as more prestigious forums than finnish ones, for instance in the evaluation of successful tenure tracks. both finnish geographical journals, that is, fennia and terra, are classified as jufo level 1 even though they have a considerably longer history than many finnish journals accepted as level 2. another central feature in the contemporary neoliberal academia is the tendency to manage and modify the intentions and activities of individual scholars. one of jufo’s aims is to ‘educate’ scholars so that they know which publication forums in each field are of ‘high level’. the activities of scholars are controlled by various institutions today so much that it is even possible to imagine a brave new ‘neoliberal academic’ who is expected to arise from competition, internationalization and from the increasing management and control. such an actor is expected to follow a sort of utility calculation in her activities, to internalize the ethos of continual competition, to adapt to contemporary ranking systems and evaluations, be effective and rational in her personal choices yet flexible enough to co-operate with larger teams across the borders of academic fields, and, finally, to recognize that all this is for her ‘personal best’. in a word, these tendencies are part of a new neoliberal governmentality (acme 2007; moisio 2012). according to the principles of the new public management ethos, scholars should be competing as individuals with others, their departments are competing with other departments, universities are competing with each other, and nation-states are similarly competing in their national-scale perforfennia 191: 1 (2013) 7fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... mance in science. since the turn of the millennium we have even witnessed how the european union is, following the lisbon strategy, competing with other macro-geographic regional institutions, and indeed, how the eu should become the most ‘competitive entity’ in this international survival game between rescaled social spaces (cf. kauppi & erkkilä 2011). also the command order should be clear in this game. at the departmental level, the heads of departments are responsible for running this competition, at the faculty level deans should do the same, and at the level of the university the principals have the responsibility to overlook how their knowledge factories are being run. perhaps the respective ministers and civil servants in ministries are not responsible to anybody – they can just enjoy the international achievements and comparisons so long as the national ‘science mill’ is more productive than in other countries. if it fails to be, new activities and sticks and carrots are doubtless needed and developed to make the system more competitive. empirical illustration: fennia in the current international publishing space contemporary academic capitalism is thus characterized by incessant evaluations, classifications and rankings. we saw above the crucial significance of web of science/isi classifications for evaluation cultures. fennia is not listed among the isi journals. we may therefore raise a question, is it useful for a journal to be accepted to the seemingly prestigious family of the isi classified forums? and if so, under what circumstances? some new journals initiated by major anglophone publishing houses, and the journal of economic geography in particular, display one extreme: rapid success. this journal was almost immediately accepted to the isi system and it now has a very strong position among the listed journals, having one of the highest impact factors, which is based on its high citation numbers among scholars representing the field and intercitations by the representatives of other fields such as economics and marketing. in general, specialist topical journals in economic geography seem to dominate the ranking list, perhaps displaying the strength of this field but also a certain tribalism around certain key categories and themes that are conceived and circulated at an increasing pace. the community of economic geographers has been expanding, which can be seen from the establishment of new journals in this field. certain subfields of human geography, such as historical geography, display a different trajectory and citation patterns. the articles normally require timeconsuming archive work and rarely become widely cited. on the other hand, while the isi status seems to be increasingly important for the ranking of departments, universities and even nations, this status may also be a risky business for journals that are not part of the core of the wider anglophone publishing market, especially if journals are published in other languages than english. namely, it appears that in many cases new journals exist simply to swell the ’bottom’ of the if hierarchy of isi journals, and that their existence on the bottom is actually meant to underscore even more clearly the excellence of the very established, high impact factor journals coming from the solid core of anglophone publishing businesses. year after year a select few journals, such as annals of the association of american geographers, transactions of the institute of british geographers, progress in human geography and journal of economic geography, published in the uk and us dominate the if ranking list. at the bottom of the list of the 73 currently classified isi human geography journals are spanish, french, austrian and chilean journals, for example, which all have low impact factor values. the current if of the german geographische zeitschrift and the french sud-ouest européen is a flat 0.000. articles published in these journals have thus not been cited at all in isi journals during the period 2009–2010, when the 2011 impact factors were calculated. indeed, the articles in the latter, soe, have been cited only three times during the period 2006–2010. contrary to this, the czech geographic community’s geografie-prague has been able to achieve an if that is more than 1. an analysis of citation patterns and connections shows that the if derives largely from the citations of the czech community itself. the articles published in this journal have become important references for czech scholars and they are widely cited by this community in their articles both in this journal and other isi journals. what about fennia, then? how it is positioned in this wider hierarchical and transforming publication space and what is its role as an international journal as it is advertised by the society? i will lean in this section on the data provided by thom8 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi son reuter’s web of science, which seems to have become the standard data in most contemporary scientific evaluations. this data can also be used to analyse the internationalization of journals, but this seems to be much rarer than its typical use as an instrument of straightforward metrics. i will therefore scrutinize a few elements from this data that illustrate fennia’s international profile and its ‘interaction’ with the wider academic community. as a background it is pertinent to recognize that fennia has an exceptionally long, more than 120-years-long history among academic geographical periodicals: it has been published by the geographical society of finland since 1889. a few years ago this journal was changed into an online journal that is published twice a year. this decreased the ‘physical visibility’ of the journal, but this is not a unique development and perhaps not a major problem for the journal’s visibility, since scholars more and more often access individual articles from the internet rather than deal with paper copies of journal issues. online journals are becoming at the same time more and more common also in geography. the spanish scripta nova, recently accepted to the isi list, is an online journal and there are also some other, well-established online forums in geography, such as social geography, acme and geography compass. the editors of acme, for example, have made a deliberate political decision to refuse ranking and respectively have refused invitations to join the isi system (acme 2007). fennia has been for a long time a particularly significant publication forum for finnish physical geographers and other geoscientists. as human geography gradually became stronger in the finnish universities after world war ii, the studies carried out by human geographers, intended for international audiences, were also increasingly published in this journal. while the number of articles published by foreign scholars has been small, the international profile of the journal is evident in the fact that the articles (and until the late 1980s also sometimes larger monographs) published in fennia have been widely cited by foreign scholars. wos cited reference index (5/2/2013) includes altogether 776 papers published in fennia. they have been cited in total 2,180 times in isi journals over the years. most fennia papers have been cited only a few times, but there are three articles, related to dendrochronology (published in 1971; 145 citations), geology (1975; 110 citations) and regional theory (1986; 102 citations), that have been referred to more than one hundred times as well as three others (representing geology and botany) that have been cited more than 50 times. one hundred citations is a high figure for any academic geography journal but especially for social science journals. in general, the isi data shows that the papers have been most often quoted by geologists, physical geographers and environmental scientists and ecologists. fennia has also been a major publication forum for finnish – and to smaller extent foreign – human geographers, but according to the data, with few exceptions, human geographic papers have not been widely recognized or cited by foreign scholars. this probably implies the contextual and empirical character of human geographic themes that have traditionally dominated finnish geography. contrary to this, more theoretical human geographic articles in fennia have been better recognized. while the citations of fennia papers tend to be ‘concentrated’ in some core countries, its wide international profile is itself manifested in the fact that articles have been quoted by scholars from almost 60 countries. the following list of 12 leading countries displays that fennia has been predominantly a finnish journal but also that it has been important for anglophone and scandinavian scholars as well. country citations of fennia articles in isi journals by the country of authors finland 855 sweden 274 usa 227 england 208 canada 190 norway 158 germany 89 russia 86 estonia 69 switzerland 59 poland 45 netherlands 43 having such a home-base is certainly no exceptional feature and is common also for major anglophonic journals, such as annals of the association of american geographers and transactions of the institute of british geographers (cf. banski & ferenc 2013). wide international circulation of fennia has of course been possible due to english being the language of publication. many current geographical journals with isi status, published in non-anglophone languages, actually cannot disfennia 191: 1 (2013) 9fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... play such wide circulation. bajerski (2011), for example, has recently shown that articles written in german, french and spanish rarely find readers outside of the country or wider language area where the journals have been published. he also cites whitehand and edmondson (1977) who have shown that between 1954–74 there was, on the one hand, a significant drop in the percentage of works of french and german geographers among the works cited by researchers from the us, uk and canada, and on the other hand, a marked growth in citations of works of uk, us and canadian geographers by french and german researchers. thus internationalization that was occurring was not reciprocal. this shift occurring in the background helps explain why continental european geographers at the turn of the millennium raised their voices and commented on the hegemony of english in a number of papers. the list of 12 authors who have most often quoted papers published in fennia in their isi articles is dominated by geoscientists and physical geographers, and about half of these scholars are finnish geographers and geologists. fennia articles have thus doubtless provided an important window into the physical geographic research in scandinavia in particular. author times the author has referred to fennia articles seppä h 42 stoffel m 33 birks hjb 32 kullman l 30 korhola a 30 luoto m 28 seppälä m 28 macdonald gm 19 eronen m 18 hicks s 18 payette s 17 bollschweiler m 14 finnish human geographers did not publish very much in english between the 1970s and early 1990s, and it was exceptional to see an article that was published outside of finland. one explanation for this observation is that this period witnessed the establishment of applied and planning geography in finland and more often than not the publications related to these fields were published in finnish in policy reports, in departmental (‘grey’) series, in aluesuunnittelu, the journal of the association of planning geographers, or in terra, the geographical society’s secondary journal which publishes articles written in finnish or swedish. during the 1990s and especially since the millennium, new generations of researchers have been much more active in international publishing. this has doubtless both institutional and ideological backgrounds (paasi 2005b). since the 1990s internationalization has been a major priority in the policies of institutions such as the academy of finland and the ministry of education. in ideological terms this fact is related to the neoliberalization of finnish science policy in which international activities and publications have simply gained more importance and, indeed, have become a major prerequisite for attaining academic jobs and research money. the location of most finnish geography departments in the faculties of science has accentuated this fact since these faculties represent nowadays particularly competitive epistemic cultures (paasi 2005b). correspondingly, finnish physical geographers and to an increasing degree also human geographers have sought to publish their papers in isi classified journals since the 1990s. while the model of human geographers still favours publishing single-authored papers, physical geographers increasingly publish in teams. international publishing was perhaps at first related to the prestige that was in general associated with such journals but this quickly turned into an asset in the rivalry over academic jobs, research money and departmental success – features that were critically evaluated above. journal publishing among young scholars has been boosted by the fact that a finnish doctoral thesis nowadays typically consists of four international articles and a synopsis. this change in phd work culture has rapidly increased the pressure on young researchers to ‘publish international’. these tendencies have at the same time led to an increasing international visibility of finnish geography. indeed, it is now difficult to name any major international journal in geography where at least one finnish geographer has not published an article since the 1990s. internationalization has proceeded also in other forms. finnish geographers have edited major international journals and sat on the editorial boards of several key journals since the 1990s. 10 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi the future? as a result of the tendencies and competitive pressures depicted above, fennia has likely lost some of its earlier prestige as an international window into finnish geography and has perhaps also lost potential submissions of articles from scholars outside of finland, which in the end define a genuine and dynamic international publication forum. a clear future problem for this journal is that the prestige of academic journals, geography journals included, is today increasingly linked with the isi apparatus. whether we like its hegemony or not, this effect will only increase because isi classifications are used as a background measure in many other classifications systems that are today used in finland (like jufo) and elsewhere. a few other nordic journals, geografiska annaler a and b, norsk geografisk tidskrift, and the danish journal of geography, currently published by international (=anglophone) publishing houses have been admitted isi status by thomson reuters. the long history of each of these journals has definitely helped in achieving this status. 44 58 53 70 62 79 67 81 91 86 99 82 89 92 112 98 117 113 88 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 the same lists of course have ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, as the neoliberal market logic seems to require: my discussions with scholars in many countries (especially in the uk) make clear that even among the isi-listed journals there are forums that departments, universities, and science financers claim to avoid because of their low impact factors. this is a status that the publishers of isi-classified journals also boldly use in their promotion policies and seems to be an especially important factor for journals that dominate the lists that have been constructed on the basis of impact factors. fennia has a long history and in spite of the lack of isi status the journal has a solid reputation among geographers and other scholars. its articles are also widely cited in isi journals. as figure 1 shows, the number of such citations has been gradually increasing since the mid-1990s. the editors of the journal have also recently taken long steps towards driving its editorial policy more actively and the international editorial board of the journal is now much more internationally represented than before. further, its current editorial board members are all active dynamic researchers from various countries. this is highly important fig. 1. number of citations to articles published in fennia (in journals classified in isi database). fennia 191: 1 (2013) 11fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... come to its end and excessive ranking of pretty much everything – journals, departments and universities – will be passé. at the moment this looks unlikely since universities around the world seem to be under the spell of evaluations that are done in the name of accountability and competitiveness. meanwhile we can only hope that a pluralistic attitude can be preserved in academia. to take but one example from human geography, some debate has already emerged on the future of monographs vs. articles in journals, and this issue seems to be topical both in europe, asia and in the english-speaking world (ward et al. 2009). opinions as to what are or are not relevant publications are of course crucially related to power-knowledge relations, and one-sided, externally dictated views on this issue have to be resisted in the name of both pluralism and academic freedom. papers in journals, monographs and edited thematic collections must all have their place also in the future. acknowledgement this paper was originally presented at the annual meeting of the geographical society of finland in helsinki (october 2012) in a panel on the future of finnish geographical journals and publishing. i wrote the paper when i served as an academy professor in the academy of finland (research grant 218198/210442). i wish to thank the academy for support and the panelists and audience for lively discussions that helped to modify the final text. i am grateful to professor sami moisio and two anonymous referees for very useful comments. i dedicate this article to the memory of academician olavi granö (1925–2013), a mentor, a coeditor and a collegial friend since 1982, with whom i had the privilege to have long, thorough and critical conversations on geography and science policy until the last. references aalbers mb & rossi u 2006. beyond the angloamerican hegemony in human geography: a european view. geojournal 67, 137−138. http://dx. doi.org/10.1007%2fs10708-007-9041-8. acme editorial collective 2007. the politics of indexing and ranking academic journals. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 6, 131−134. since the board members are ambassadors that effectively distribute information about the journal and strengthen its reputation in the field of geography. would isi status then help to promote the attractiveness of the journal? this is a double-edged sword. on the one hand, such increasing appeal seems an obvious benefit. this has occurred with other nordic journals, where foreign scholars nowadays publish frequently. since fennia is a general geographical journal, isi status would doubtless attract more finnish and international human and physical geographers to submit their articles to the journal. the current lack of isi status clearly prohibits submissions from physical geographers and presents a serious conundrum. should the journal be even more explicitly developed as a human geographic forum? on the other hand, it is also possible that a new journal coming from outside of the anglophone core would remain on the ‘outer orbit’ of the international publishing space of the wos/isi database and be forever characterized by a low impact factor, as seems to have become the case with almost all non-anglophonic human geographic journals. such a position could lead to a stigma and the journal being regarded as one of the ‘also-rans’ among the isi-classified journals. such a stigma is not pleasant for any journal but is inevitable requisite given the underlying logic of a journal-ranking culture that simply aims to create a rank-order between journals in order to distinguish between various layers of ‘quality’. coda academic publishing is facing major challenges. on the one end, the university departments and libraries have to cope with the rising costs of journal subscriptions and book prices and develop a policy for the proliferation of online publishing. on the other end is the increasingly competitive university that tries to cope with restructuring and the cutting of resources and at the same time manage their personnel. the increase in the number of precarious, temporary academic jobs is related to both publication activities and to the composition and motivation of the research personnel. most of these tendencies are problematic from the viewpoint of academic freedom, creativity and motivation. it might be the case that someday, hopefully in not so distant future, the neoliberal era will 12 fennia 191: 1 (2013)anssi paasi agnew j 2009. the impact factors. aag newsletter 44, 3. agnew j 2012. of canons and fanons. dialogues in human geography 2, 321−323. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1177%2f2043820612468547. amin a & thrift n 2007. on being political. transactions of the institute of british geographers 32, 112−115. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.14755661.2007.00237.x. bajerski a 2011. the role of french, german and spanish journals in scientific communication in international geography. area 43, 305−313. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111%2fj.1475-4762.2010.00989.x. banski j & ferenc m 2013. “international” or “angloamerican” journals of geography. geoforum 45, 285−295. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.11.016. bauder h, bernd b, butz d, gedalof z, lagendijk a, mudu p, paasi a, schuurman n & wilson d 2010. critical practice of grant application and administration: an intervention. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 9, 102−112. berg ld 2004. scaling knowledge: towards a critical geography of critical geographies. geoforum 35, 553−558. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.geoforum.2004.01.005. berg l & kearns r 1998. america unlimited. environment and planning d: society and space 16,128−132. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d160128. best u 2009. the invented periphery: constructing europe in debates about “anglo hegemony” in geography. social geography 4, 83−91. http://dx. doi.org/10.5194%2fsg-4-83-2009. canagarajah as 2002. a geopolitics of academic writing. university of pittsburgh press, pittsburgh, pa. castree n, aspinall r, berg ld, bohle hg, hoggart k, kitchin r, kleine d, kulke e, munton r, pawson e, powell j, sheppard e & van weesep j 2006. research assessment and the production of geographical knowledge. progress in human geography 30, 747−782. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0309132506071518. dolowitz d & marsh d 1996. who learns what from whom: a review of the policy transfer literature. political studies 44, 343–357. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1467-9248.1996. tb00334.x. fuller s 2002. knowledge management foundations. butterworth heinemann, oxford. garcia-ramon md 2003. globalization and international geography: the questions of languages and scholarly traditions. progress in human geography 27, 1−5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191%2f03091 32503ph409xx. granö o 1981. external influence and internal change in the development of geography. in stoddart dr (ed). geography, ideology and social concern, 17−36. basil blackwell, oxford. gregson n, simonson k & vaiou d 2003. writing (across) europe: on writing spaces and writing practices. european urban and regional studies 10, 5–22. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0969776403010001521. gutiérrez j & lópez-nieva p 2001. are international journals of human geography really international? progress in human geography 25, 53−69. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1191%2f030913201666823316. hakala j 2002. internationalisation of research – necessity, duty or waste of time? academic cultures and profiles of internationalization. vest 15, 7−32. harding a, scott a, laske s & burtscher c 2007. bright satanic mills: universities, regional development and the knowledge economy. ashgate, aldershot. harvey d 2006. editorial: the geographies of critical geography. transactions of the institute of british geographers 31, 409–412. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 1 1 % 2 f j . 1 4 7 5 5661.2006.00219.x. johnston rj & sidaway j 2004. the trans-atlantic connection: `anglo-american' geography reconsidered. geojournal 59, 15−22. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1023%2fb%3agejo.0000015434.52331.72. jöns h & hoyler m 2013. global geographies of higher education. the perspective of world university rankings. geoforum 46, 45−59. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.12.014. kallo j 2009. oecd education policy. a comparative and historical study focusing on the thematic reviews of tertiary education. finnish educational research association, research in educational sciences 45. jyväskylä. kauppi n & erkkilä t 2011. the struggle over global higher education: actors, institutions, and practices. international political sociology 5, 314−326. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 1 1 % 2 f j . 1 7 4 9 5687.2011.00136.x. kitchin r 2005. disrupting and destablizing angloamerican and english-language hegemony in geography. social and cultural geography 6, 1−15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/146493605200033593 7. korvela p-e 2013. meluton sopusointu: yliopisto, clausewitz, ja strategian politiikka. in ahonen p, korvela p-e & palonen k (eds). uusi yliopisto – yritys, puolue vai oppineiden tasavalta?, 79−105. sophi, jyväskylä. minca c 2000. venetian geographical praxis. environment and planning d: society and space 18, 285–289. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd1803ed. moisio s 2012. yliopistot hallintavallan ilmentyminä. in lundström n & virkkala s (eds). maaseutu, yliopisto ja yhteiskunta. acta wasaensia no. 264. olds k 2001. guest editorial: practices for ̀ process geographies': a view from within and outside the periphery. environment and planning d: society and space 19, 127−136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068%2fd1902ed. paasi a 2005a. globalization, academic capitalism and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces. environment and planning a 37, 769−789. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a3769. fennia 191: 1 (2013) 13fennia: positioning a ‘peripheral’ but international journal... paasi a 2005b. between national and international pressures: contextualizing the progress of finnish social and cultural geography. social and cultural geography 6, 607−629. http://dx.doi.org/10.108 0%2f14649360500200361. paasi a 2013. “hot spots, dark side dots, tin-pots”? the uneven internationalism in the global academic market. in meusburger p (ed). power and knowledge. springer, berlin (forthcoming). rodríguez-pose a 2004. on english as a vehicle to preserve geographical diversity. progress in human geography 28, 1−4. http://dx.doi.org/10.119 1%2f0309132504ph467xx. scholte ja 2000. globalization. palgrave, new york. simonsen k 2004. differential spaces of critical geography. geoforum 35, 525−528. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016%2fj.geoforum.2004.01.008. slaughter s & leslie ll 1999. academic capitalism: politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. hopkins university press, baltimore. teichler u 2004. the changing debate on internationalization of higher education. higher education 48, 5−26. tietze s & dick p 2009. hegemonic practices and knowledge production in the management academy: an english language perspective. scandinavian journal of management 25, 119−123. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016%2fj.scaman.2008.11.010. timár j 2004. more than ‘anglo-american’, it is ‘western’: hegemony in geography from a hungarian perspective. geoforum 35, 533−538. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 0 1 6 % 2 f j . g e o f o rum.2004.01.010. ward k, johnston r, richards k, gandy m, taylor z, paasi a, fox r, serje m, yeung hwc, barnes t, blunt a & mcdowell l 2009. the future of research monographs: an international set of perspectives. progress in human geography 33: 1, 101−126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2f0309132508100966. whitehand jwr & edmondson pm 1977. europe and america. the reorientation in geographical communication in the post-war period. professional geographer 29, 278−282. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2fj.00330124.1977.00278.x. lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments and discursive regulation ari aukusti lehtinen lehtinen, ari aukusti (2008). lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments and discursive regulation. fennia 186: 2, pp. 69–82. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. globalisation in the forest industry has its own particular characteristics which are due to a high degree of capital intensity and limits in raw material supply. investments in new capacities are expensive and the rate of forest regeneration is slow in the traditional resource areas in the conifer-dominated forests of the global north. the supply problem has lead forest companies to establish tree plantations and pulp mills in the temperate and tropical zones. this has largely modified global forest-industrial relations. i examine here how and why the establishment of the fray bentos pulp mill in uruguay by a finnish company, metsä-botnia, turned into an international conflict. i also show how the political reactions to the mill planning in fact relied on and further developed the international mechanisms of forest-industrial regulation. the partners of the mill project were forced to prove that the fears expressed by critical parties would not come true. the article ends with some suggestions to improve social sensitivity of forest-industrial projects by studying more systematically the dependencies between the forest industry and the environing society. ari aukusti lehtinen, department of geography, university of joensuu, p.o. box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: ari.lehtinen@joensuu.fi. ms received 30.08.2008. discursive regulation in forest industry the construction of metsä-botnia’s giant pulp mill in fray bentos, uruguay, was completed in september 2007 and pulp processing began two months later. the start was delayed by the officials of the country and it finally took place without much ceremony. the reason for this was a lengthy conflict between uruguay and argentina about the location of the mill. fray bentos, seated along the river uruguay, is a border town between the two countries and concerns of cross-border pollution widely alarmed the argentinians. the building of the mill was shadowed by relentless tensions between the two countries which were initially forged by strategic omissions of cross-border diplomacy in the mill planning but became fully inflamed by the delicate economic and political setting in argentina. the conflict was originated in 2002 when the government of uruguay gave permission to spanish ence and finnish metsä-botnia to build two pulp mills at fray bentos without properly consulting the argentinian point of view. local protests in argentina, co-ordinated by a civic alliance in gualeguaychu (asamblea ciudadana ambiental gualeguaychu), in 2006–2007 turned into massive demonstrations and blockades at the bridges across the river uruguay. the argentinian non-governmental cedha (centro de derechos humanos y ambiente) and world rainforest movement, headquartered in montevideo, uruguay, also actively participated in the critique (kröger 2007; lang 2007; cedha 2007; pakkasvirta 2008). this article analyses the facets of the conflict as an example of the unruly dynamics around individual moves of globally active forest companies. the conditions of pressure-building in fray bentos are identified and related to the more general changes in the ongoing global reorganisation of forest-industrial operations. the conflict of fray bentos is a marked example of the social manufacturing of politico-economic risks in the current forest industrial contest over 70 fennia 186: 2 (2008)ari aukusti lehtinen global resources and markets. the fray bentos debate offers a view of the contingent side of globalisation by revealing some of the background processes that, while meeting in a particular multicultural setting, result in a chain of unruly events. the difficulties of metsä-botnia’s uruguayan project also help us to identify the social dynamics inherent in the expansive network relations between key companies and their suppliers and customers. in the ongoing globalisation, the leading forest companies have grown into vertically integrated networks of production units, management divisions, business operators and research centres that function as industrial regimes with global power over state regulation and international trading organisations. the establishment of large corporations with a web of subsidiaries has also resulted in a distancing of the phases and places of production. the new corporations have become connected to mills and communities in remote places of which they have only limited knowledge. locally, the emergence of absentee ownership has in turn brought pressures to change the established routines of dealing with employees, unions, local communities and the environment. consequently, the contest of flexibility toward company-favouring compromises posits the neighbouring supply areas against one another. local losses in this contest easily turn into economic success in neighbouring areas (beckley 1996; mather 1997; krogman and beckley 2002). this type of global competition advances through local enclaves of development which supply raw material and semi-processed goods to be further refined in the international chain of product upgrading. in the forest industry, extraction of timber and wood processing have created onecompany locations which are linked to markets as isolated branches of non-locally controlled production. the contract between the elites of the enclaves and the representatives of the corporations make up the local power regime (beckley 1996; solecki 1996). overseas dependencies in the forest industry were initially forged in the era of colonial expansion when european merchant capital largely monopolised the production processes in the supply areas. the early enclaves were not merely passive instruments of resource extraction but they often behaved pro-actively, by inviting and supporting the key companies. in fact, according to sandberg (1992: 2), these enclaves, as partners, hosts or clients of the companies, “have been, and continue to be, presented with opportunities to move in a variety of directions, but remain financially dependent on, and ideologically committed to a few large monopoly capitalist firms.” according to hayter et al. (2003), industrialisation of resource peripheries, characterised by high levels of external control and standardised exports, often become areas of instability and crisis, as the leading companies prefer to exploit only the most accessible supplies. the costs of production tend to rise in time, resulting either in production limits or substitution of capital for labour. both moves increase local vulnerability and a sense of powerlessness. moreover, tensions between industrial, environmental and cultural concerns often deepen the crisis, adding pressure to reorganise the local production enclaves by shutting them down or by securing production by special contracts with the local elites. the threat of abandonment is a central determinant of the negotiations, and it is also the means of keeping the monopoly (beckley 1996; hayter et al. 2003). the global contest of raw materials and market shares in the forest industry has broadly followed the stages identified by the analysts of neoliberal resource extraction and environmental governance (see walker et al. 2000; jepson 2002; mansfield 2007a). the particular features of the forest sector, due to a high degree of capital intensity and slow rates of forest regeneration, have however left some rudimentary marks on forest-industrial development. the sector is in general slow in its moves and deeply path-dependent, as investments in new capacity are expensive and always bring along severe impacts on market relations (collins 1998; saether 1998; lehtinen et al. 2004). on the other hand, the slow rate of wood increment in the traditional supply areas, mostly located in the coniferous-dominated forests of the northern hemisphere, has tied the industrial actors to long-term planning. initial colonial routines of over-exploitation have largely been replaced by practices of sustained-yield forestry. this has emphasised the relations of annual wood increment and cut in forest management and it has also broadly standardised the forestry practices. the scientific authority, folded in the measures and guarantees of sustained-yield, has also effectively strengthened the overseas control of forest use (lowood 1990; demeritt 2001; correia 2007; wong et al. 2007). the neoliberal governance of forest resources in both the northern and southern hemispheres stems from the colonial motives to draw common-propfennia 186: 2 (2008) 71lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments … erty forests under private control, and transform them into commercial assets of prioritised wood production (mather 1997). privatisation, taking place either through expanding private ownership or in the form of concessions, has increasingly led some people to consider forests as instruments of profit-making, instead of areas to live in and off. some remnants of early colonial thinking from the period before the sustained-yield measures can, for example, be traced in the neoliberal uneasiness rating forests as temporary investments, instead of resources to manage with long-term care. new technologies of immaterial upgrading, including for example the newly-risen attention to forest and ecosystem services, have moreover sped up the development (nygren 1998; tsouvalis 2000; schwartz 2006: 166–197). finally, this development has questioned the dominance of pulp and paper demand in forest management, and forced companies to strengthen contacts with tree plantations to secure their fibre supply (marchak 1995; collins 1998). the fast-growing tree plantations in the temperate and tropical zones have accordingly become mixtures of colonial and neoliberal governing. they function as enclaves of bulk fibre production and as financial assets under private control, but they are also used as assets of ‘greenwashing’. in the era of human-induced climate change, establishing plantations is synonymous to creating carbon sinks, which is a strong means of overcoming local oppositions concerned, for example, about the disappearance of water reservoirs close to plantations (mather 1997; sonnenfeld 1999; lohmann 2003). the gradual weakening of the state’s regulatory role in forest-industrial governance is in general linked to the internationalisation of the companies. both the threat of running down production of the old mills and the intensified contest over new contracts between the potential clients have thoroughly transformed the forest-political relations. however, the companies have continuously needed support for their expansive strategies both from the client countries and multilateral institutions. this co-dependence, in the form of loans, credit guarantees, promises of risk sharing and tax exemptions, has secured some regulatory role for international and state agencies. some agencies that provide long-term risk capital for private industry demand environmental impact assessments (eia) of any larger projects they become involved in. this was also the case in metsä-botnia’s project in fray bentos (faroppa and annala 2004). the clients also have some degree of power due to their specific legislation and socio-political circumstances even though this type of elasticity, as was briefly discussed above, is rather limited. despite the intensified race between partner candidates, and the resulting strengthening of companies’ power, no clear trend of deregulation can however be witnessed in forest-industrial development. instead, the somewhat decreased importance of state regulation has been compensated by re-regulation in the international context. as the case study below shows, the forest industry is today increasingly counselled and constrained by international politico-economic and socio-environmental assessments. the companies have not only been drawn under the guidance of multilateral financiers, but a whole range of international stakeholders has emerged, partially forwarding and forwarded by neoliberal forms of governance but, also, partially applying non-tradable principles derived from ethical socio-environmental concerns. in the current form of globalisation companies are thus not offered an unlimited economic space to run their operations. while gradually freeing themselves from the regulatory measures of their home states of production, forest companies have grown increasingly dependent on the new translocal networks of which they are a part. the governance of the corporations has, for example, changed greatly as shareholder motives increasingly influence the decision-making of the company managers in charge (saether 2004). the network dependency is also reflected in the growing pressure of environmental and trade demands argued for by non-governmental and intergovernmental organisations. as part of this type of regulatory turn toward discursive regulation (donner-amnell et al. 2004; see also walker et al. 2000; mansfield 2007b), forest companies have faced various critical alliances of local activists, environmental and indigenous protesters as well as consumer groups (sandberg 2004; reed, 2007; kortelainen, 2008). the critics have demanded the broadening of the participatory sphere in decision-making within the supply areas and mill communities, and they have also asked for concrete moves toward social and environmental certification of the whole chain of production. the overall social embeddedness of the companies has in this way significantly changed (see oinas 1997, 1999). on the other hand, the new setting has laid much responsibility on the ac72 fennia 186: 2 (2008)ari aukusti lehtinen tors of the networks and, especially, on the consumers of the end products. today, how the companies behave within the new arenas of multilayered co-operation and, in particular, how they integrate the old and new partners within their strategies increasingly depends on the strength of the background pressure (donner-amnell et al. 2004). to summarise, discursive regulation refers to the renewing international regulatory milieu where the main forest actors are increasingly forced to integrate and balance the diversifying demands from inside and outside the forest-industrial sector. in the new regulatory environment, shareholders and stock market analysts expect profitability and increased stock value, governments stress tax revenue and domestic investments, forest owners ask for higher timber prices, employees look for salary increases and permanent employment, while environmentalists underline ecological values and stricter forest certification. finally, a widening spectrum of other actors, both of aboriginal and immigrant origin, and also the trans-local consumers of paper, publishers and media houses, and tourists, are fighting for a legitimate role for themselves in the decision-making process. this is the web of dependencies through which requirements for broader responsibility and participation in forest-industrial co-operation takes shape in globalisation. within the framework of discursive regulation, this article analyses the conflict of fray bentos in and through three interrelated spheres of co-negotiation, namely the spheres of company-client relations, cross-border dependencies and ideological confrontations. the three spheres were constructed as a result of the analysis that first identified the key phases of the conflict and thereafter examined their connections to the general changes in forest-industrial relations (explicated in this chapter). the particular method of the conflict analysis is explicated below, after a brief historical introduction of botnia fray bentos. in general, by the three-partite analytic division it will be shown how the discursive regulation approach helps in assessing specific local-global arrangements (e.g., overseas partnerships) in the fluidity of politico-economic and ideological controversies. the neoliberal vision of free trade is finally questioned by showing the actual processes and also the regulatory signals attached to the promotion of forest-industrial investments. the analysis ends with a summary that sketches some outlines for inter-culturally sensitive preparation of new forest-industrial projects. a brief historical overlook of the fray bentos conflict will first introduce the mill as part of an ongoing reorganisation of forest-industry. how did the political risk turn into a cross-border conflict? the history of botnia fray bentos reaches back to the early 1990s when kymmene, a finnish forest company, and the multinational oil company shell started co-operation in eucalyptus farming in uruguay. the joint enterprise, compania forestal oriental (fosa) started with planting experiments in 1991 in order to gain knowledge about the feasibility of commercial plantation. soon the experiments with the fast-growing eucalyptus expanded into industrial management and harvesting, and the shipping of the fibre to kymmene’s mills in europe began. the decision to build the fray bentos mill modified the setting in the early 2000s, and shell soon withdrew from the project by selling its share of fosa to the finns (aukia and pitkänen 2005). in 2006, moreover, fosa merged with tile forestal, another central actor in eucalyptus farming in uruguay, and the plantation area of the new company, forestal oriental, increased to close to 100 000 hectares, an area now large enough to cover approximately 70 per cent of the annual fibre consumption (totalling 3.5 million m3) of the fray bentos mill (botnia 2007a). the launch of the eucalyptus co-operation was received in uruguay with an ecological critique which was supported by overseas concerns. the eucalyptus plantations were seen as harmful to local ecosystem functions, especially soil and ground water conditions, but they were also considered as a competitor and risk to agricultural and dairy practices. in addition, the shipping of eucalyptus to europe was criticised as offering only a minimal local economic return to the supply areas (lang 2007). despite the critique, forestal oriental gradually became a central actor in uruguay, harvesting its own eucalyptus fields and also purchasing timber from local land owners (faroppa and annala 2004; botnia 2007a). botnia fray bentos is a subsidiary of finnish metsä-botnia, a joint enterprise of upm-kymmene and metsä-liitto group.1 in 2000 metsä-botnia founded a joint branch unit, baltic pulp, in latvia with södra, a swedish forest company, and the latvian state. the plan was to build a large unit by fennia 186: 2 (2008) 73lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments … the river dvina, but local support was lost due to environmental reasons. the river dvina is the fresh water supply to riga, the capital city of latvia, and concerns of the water quality affected the general attitude. södra and the state withdrew from the project in 2003, and baltic pulp was finally shelved in february 2005. soon thereafter, metsä-botnia made the final decision to invest in uruguay, now aiming at a mill almost double the size of the planned baltic mill, reaching the capacity of a million tons of pulp per year (botnia 2007a). the expansion of pulp production was supposed to become an important source of income to both principal partners of botnia fray bentos, and expectations were high among the companies and their owners. during the 2000s, international expansion turned into expensive setbacks to both upm and metsä-liitto, including its main industrial unit, m-real (ojala and lamberg 2006). the setbacks were caused by bad timings of investments, over-capacity problems and lowering prices of most paper grades, and any good news was then needed to compensate the economic losses and strengthen the companies’ profile in the eyes of the shareholders. to succeed in the global forest-industrial contest today means constant efforts to lower the prices of raw material and production. this can be most securely done by investing in regions with even flows of cheap fibre, by concentrating production in automated mega-units and by making contracts with new clients that are willing to minimise the investment risks of the companies. this combination of demands is leading toward free trade zones and distantly-owned plantations, witnessed also in uruguay. the new contracts are, however, intensely evaluated by the surrounding society and signs of rising social or environmental strain are often criticised (marchak 1995; sonnenfeld 2002; wong et al. 2007). tellingly, for example, metsä-botnia’s jump across the atlantic, from latvia to uruguay, did not help in freeing it from local critique – quite the opposite. today, as has become clear for all the parties, companies cannot easily avoid becoming targets of diverse social and environmental critique when starting large projects in an international context, and coping with them requires particular management skills. the finnish-uruguayan partners had more than a decade, since the first experiments of eucalyptus farming until the final decision of the pulp plant, to prepare themselves and the surrounding society for the mill project. that decade was not enough for the partners to clear the political risks to such an extent that the support from argentina for the location of the plant could be confirmed. consequently, in 2006–2007, the fray bentos mill became a hot spot between the two countries, and for a while it also seemed to forge some troubles in continental economic and political co-operation, especially in the context of the south-american trade agreement, mercosur. the political price of the plant soared. fray bentos thus turned into an important lesson in forest-industrial globalisation. it became an example of how not to proceed if aiming to avoid fierce international confrontation. botnia fray bentos therefore offers a window on the production of risks in pulp and paper production. it also guides us to rethink the governance of mill planning: how to discover beforehand and prevent confrontational dynamics? a thorough preparation benefits all the partners and these types of social and environmental impact assessments are often also officially demanded, especially in cases of large development projects (burdge 1998). still, something went wrong in fray bentos. this is the something analysed below. alliances and oppositions: a drama in three acts the conflict will be examined here by concentrating on the major economic and political successions, and the drama of their co-entanglement, in and around the mill planning and construction. fray bentos is seen as a socio-spatial process coforged within the wider setting of changing company-client relations, cross-border tensions and ideological confrontations. fray bentos is thus regarded as a local-global conflict that brought into surface some of the elementary pressures bound to the histories of overseas activities (see massey 2005; bærenholdt and grånas 2008). these pressures, and the aggregate outcomes of their meetings, are identified below by concentrating on the most tense episodes, or layers, of the conflict and assessing them as part of the more general forest-industrial change. the study singles out phases of the project and traces the actual promises and doubts that fuelled the grouping of alliances and oppositions. the individual events are compressed into three schemes, or zones of contact, that condition the local-global dynamics of discursive regulation. 74 fennia 186: 2 (2008)ari aukusti lehtinen concretely, the study was carried out by identifying from the conflict debate the articulations that address and further re-shape the most critical linkages to the general reorganisation of forest industry (discussed in the introduction of this article). particular attention was paid to signals of change. the chosen method is an application of ‘postcolonial reading’ where the researcher documents the weak and often undervalued formulations in the studied material that upon closer examination appear as pivotal articulations about the central movement in the broader (colonial) context of social change (said 1993: 106; barry 2002: 194–202; kuortti 2007: 155). this type of critical reading is performed in two phases in this article. first, the weak but pivotal signals are simply identified as part of the deepening confrontation. it is shown how initial undervaluing, that is, an unresponsive way of facing the question, has centrally fuelled the combat. this part of the research is pure documentation of evolving alliances and disagreements. at least one illustration of such convolution is exemplified in each of the three spheres of conegotiation, or zones of contact, that are analysed below under respective subtitles. second, the risky elements which are clearly present in the studied debate but which have not yet turned into public disagreement will be gathered from the study material. this is done by focusing on those undervalued features of the botnia fray bentos debate that have not been fully recognised as risks in contemporary forest-based globalisation. this part of critical reading is summarised in the conclusive part of the article in the form of strategic suggestions for overseas actors in the forest industry. the risks of the client: republica oriental de botnia fray bentos is an enormous project both for uruguay and metsä-botnia. it is thus far the biggest foreign direct investment in uruguay’s history and it is also the biggest investment abroad by finnish companies. it will, for example, add almost one third to the annual turnover rate of metsä-botnia, which reached the level of 1 300 million euros in 2006 (botnia 2007a). the mill is expected to employ up to 8000 individuals, of whom 300–350 at the mill, and it is estimated to have a 1.6 per cent influence on the gross national product of uruguay (hcge 2004: botnia 2007b). these prospects and promises put much responsibility on metsä-botnia. the project links uruguay, a small country of 3.4 million inhabitants, to forest-industrial globalisation. uruguay has actively searched for forest-industrial contracts, and the country has also agreed with ence, a spanish company,2 to co-operate in pulp-processing. ence has decided to build a pulp mill south from fray bentos, not too close to the border of argentina. in addition to these two contracts, in 2006 uruguay published a plan to support building three more pulp plants in the country (kröger 2007). founding pulp mills in uruguay is tempting as the fast-growing eucalyptus offers a competitive alternative to pulp production in the traditional forest-industrial centres of the global north adjusted to long rotation times of coniferdominated forests. pulp processing provides, however, only raw material for paper mills located closer to the global consumption centres. economic return from pulp production is heavily dependent on supply and demand relations and related fluctuations in market prices. since their foundation, the finnish plantation projects in uruguay have been shadowed by local environmental criticism to expansive land-use and fresh water consumption. the plantations became, however, certified in the early 2000s by the forest stewardship council (fsc). this resulted in concerns of “greenwashing” that would weaken local opposition and erode the international credibility of the fsc (carrere 2006; wrm 2006). the confrontation with argentina also silenced the domestic disagreement, as it appeared necessary for the small country to fully defend itself against the pressure of the big neighbour. critical agricultural and environmental concerns were in particular pushed to the margins (lang 2007). however, the ecological and cultural disadvantages have not been solved in the plantations and their surroundings, as has been witnessed for example in brazil where veracel pulp mill, jointly owned by brazilian-norwegian aracruz celulose and finnish-swedish stora enso, has faced severe criticism from environmentalists, smallholders and landless people (de´nadai et al. 2005). in general, the tree plantations in south america compete against agro-industrial land uses, and they are often thoroughly mixed up with the unsolved questions of land ownership. trans-atlantic co-operation in pulp and paper production in uruguay has also met the concerns of agro-industrial entrepreneurship and, for example, forestal oriental’s eucalyptus plantations are locally treated as one competing factor in ‘agribusiness’ (kröger 2007). fennia 186: 2 (2008) 75lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments … the tree plantations are regarded as part of agriculture and this greatly confuses the forest-industrial premises of the overseas developers. it has been difficult for finnish forest professionals to take into account the strong agricultural concerns in south america. the long preparatory stage of eucalyptus farming secured, however, a strong hold on local fibre supply to botnia fray bentos. the unfolding of the uruguayan front (against the argentinian campaign) will most likely take place as the cross-border tensions gradually calm down. this brings along critical rethinking of the past and present of the client. the visibility of the fray bentos mill and its plantations will remind people of the fears and promises expressed during the heated years of the conflict. livestock producers and farmers, including the processors of their products, are curious to see how the free trade zone and its suppliers affect, and become integrated within, agro-industrial practices. environmentalists will undoubtedly assess the ecological effects of the plantations and mill operations whereas the authorities of the country will carefully watch the employment rates and gross economic returns. the fray bentos mill is built on a specially created tax free zone where exemption from income tax is granted for 25 years. the free trade zone does not need to follow the mercosur rules either, which prioritise subcontracts within the trade union. the uruguayan government has also widely supported the establishment of tree plantations and highway routes necessary for intense timber transportation between the plantations and the mill. in addition, the government has promised to pay compensation for any losses caused by, for example, social protest against the mill (mti 2006). this has resulted in unhealthy competition between industrial developers in general and especially in regard to the agro-industrial sector. the affects of subsidies to rural communities and their means of livelihood as a whole are also matters that have caused political tensions (wrm 2006). the discursive pressure around metsä-botnia’s project in uruguay grows from the fact that the client country had promised much to become an attractive target for overseas investments in the forest sector. the generous offers have brought along a multitude of expectations as local and national developers, farmers, entrepreneurs and environmentalists have all constructed their own views about the costs and benefits of the project. the confrontations can be managed by increasingly protecting the prior chain of production, which is the traditional colonial model of dealing with the problem (see sandberg 1992; beckley 1996), or by measures of co-management aiming at multiplying the interactions between the company and the surrounding society (howitt 2000; howitt and suchet-pearson 2006). these alternatives will be further discussed in the conclusion of this article. cross-border learning: from a mistake to a model the fray bentos project brought out metsä-botnia’s inability to take into account the concerns of argentina. the vicinity of the neighbour was never fully realised in the mill planning. the finnish partners of the project have learned from their own history how to live close to a ‘big neighbour’, and co-operation between finland and russia has been particularly intense within the forest sector (ovaskainen et al. 1999). the long cross-border learning was, however, not made use of by rio uruguay. a closer reading of the planning documents of the botnia mill in uruguay offers an explanation to this omission. the detailed summaries of the environmental impact assessment (faroppa and annala 2004) and socio-economic study (hcge 2004) offer proof of a narrow technical orientation of the mill planning, characterised by a systematic ignoring of argentina. when, for example, assessing the effects of sulphur and nitrogen emissions on air quality, and the dominant wind directions, crossborder questions remain unexamined. the eia report, however, confirms that in specific conditions, such as during periods of temporary shut-downs and start-ups, the detection threshold for the odour pollution will be occasionally surpassed on both sides of the border river (faroppa and annala 2004). on the other hand, the socio-economic study concentrates narrowly on the positive demographic and economic effects of the mill and plantations in uruguay. argentina and cross-border relations are only mentioned when identifying potential suppliers of imported wood. the limits of data availability serve as the reason for this neglect (hcge 2004). the criticism from argentina was a surprise to the company and, despite its massive strength, extending from the border city of gualeguaychú up to the political elite of the country, it did not turn into a withdrawal from the border location. the mill became a symbol of failed cross-river diplo76 fennia 186: 2 (2008)ari aukusti lehtinen macy and it will undoubtedly serve as a reminder of the debacle for a long time. however, the mill can in time also become an example of socially and environmentally responsible development while taking full care of the concerns of the critics. the pressure from the surrounding society has forced the mill planners to pay the utmost attention to minimise the environmental strain of the plant and this has already resulted in innovative technological applications in pulp processing. the mill clearly cannot afford the degree of atmospheric emissions, especially odours, that are, for example, part of the daily life in many of the mill localities in finland (lehtinen 1991: 108–109; jauhiainen 2003). the fray bentos mill can thus turn into a model plant, become famous for its technical capacity to minimise the physical environmental strain by limiting all emissions in the air and river, and by fully circulating processed waters and chemicals. on the other hand, the mill can also maximise local support by burning solid wastes to produce cheap electricity for public consumption and by processing local liquid wastes in its sewage plant. promises of these types of measures were already listed in the planning documents (faroppa and annala 2004) but, finally, only the daily running of the mill will prove the ecological efficiency of the mill to the surrounding communities. the mill critique from the argentinian side originally arose from the fear of pollution. it was argued that pulp processing is gradually being removed from europe due to its environmental strain (cedha 2007). this was proven to be completely untrue by the representatives of metsä-botnia (botnia 2007b) but what was then left untold was the fact that the company’s withdrawal from latvia just before the final decision to invest in uruguay was strongly linked to the rise of local environmental concerns in riga. fears of ‘toxic colonialism’ (harvey 1996) have grown in general from the histories of overseas exploitation and by not openly discussing the reasons for metsä-botnia’s jump across the atlantic the company only fuelled the worries. clearly, undervaluing argentinian concerns strengthened the worries about simple colonial trade motives in fray bentos co-operation. traces and memories of the latest phases of colonialism also largely explain the argentinian reactions. concerns about the fray bentos mill are bound to the humiliation under the neoliberal experiments of economic globalisation in argentina. a wealthy country was thrown into a recession in the 1980s, due in large part to weaknesses in domestic governance and mistakes in international trade policy, and the course was to be corrected during carlos menem’s presidency under the guidance of the international monetary fund. the imfcontrolled corrections resulted in strict structural adjustment favouring privatisation and prioritising foreign investments in the country (imf 2003; saxton 2003; armony and armony 2005). high rates of currency flight, inflation and unemployment drove argentina in the early 2000s into deep political instability and any articulation about concrete threats from outside the country’s borders helped to heal the domestic disagreement. the gradually clustering signs of economic upward tendency went hand in hand with the rising popularity of president néstor kirchner and, of course, any signs of giving up in a conflict that had become an international ‘hot spot’, were regarded as risky to the kirchner regime. christina fernández, kirchners wife, won the presidential elections in october 2007, and the continuation of the regime was confirmed. two weeks after the elections in argentina, botnia fray bentos received the final licence from the uruguayan officials to start pulp production. a representative of spain had been acting as a mediator between the two countries in the fray bentos conflict and now the decision to start the mill, in the middle of spanish-led ‘peacemaking’, was received with broad international annoyance. to summarise, assessments of international dependencies and changes were principally ignored in the planning of the fray bentos mill. politically immature and exclusively technical orientation resulted in a chain of unruly events. the conflict showed how important it is to include detailed assessments of ongoing political and economic changes in the planning routines. model mills are definitely needed in forest-industrial progression but, in light of fray bentos, so are new models of coping with the fears and prospects of the surrounding society. ideologies of trade and technology during the preparation of the mill, botnia had signed external loans from the world bank, nordic investment bank and finnvera, finland’s official export credit agency. the loans together covered 40 per cent of the capital needed for the project. the rest of the capital was invested by the owners of botnia fray bentos (botnia 2007b). esfennia 186: 2 (2008) 77lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments … pecially, the world bank loan, signed in november 2006, inflamed the critical debate in argentina, as the bank’s support was regarded as a strong voice against the mill critique. the neoliberal programme guided by the imf had failed in argentina, and this experience had left deep suspicions towards the leading institutions of national and global economic governance (klein and lewis 2004; armony and armony 2005). this distrust formed the ideological background of the fray bentos conflict. uruguay was seen as a partner in northern-led neoliberalisation and it was feared that this contract would harm the development of the river valley between the two countries. it was also feared that individual overseas solos would weaken the construction of a strong south american economic coalition to balance the northern influence. the argentinian experience of neoliberalisation grows from within the unruly consequences of contracts with global financial organisations (teichman 2004). the guidance from the north was seen as offering only standard solutions that turn unique regions into subsidiaries of global markets. the contest between uruguay and argentina is also a contest about the future of mercosur. the trade alliance has aimed at unifying the interests of south american countries by increasing co-ordination of economic strategies, but the recent recessions in argentina and brazil have significantly weakened the bloc. on the other hand, the gradual strengthening of left-wing governments in south america in the 2000s, together with the rising critique against the united states’ domination in global financial institutions, has underlined the importance of mercosur. the politicisation of the bloc against the united states supremacy has gained support, for example, from venezuela as well as from argentina and brazil (teichman 2004; armony and armony 2005; kröger 2007). uruguay has been committed to the continental integration within the framework of mercosur albeit cautiously. international arrogance and unpredictability shown by some of the bloc countries is regarded as a threat to a small country aiming at renovating its economic assets in overseas trade. the country is increasingly linked to northern economic interests through its pragmatic strategy led by the president tabaré vázquez, elected in 2005 (eu 2006). this is the chief ideological tension shadowing the fray bentos conflict. uruguay has become active in its own way, the country is aiming at freeing itself from the small niche between two big neighbours with strong voices in mercosur. the free trade contract between metsäbotnia and uruguay is a threat to the visions of deepening continental co-operation. the european union has an important role in the trans-atlantic relations, and spain’s active mediation in fray bentos needs to be seen in this context. on the other hand, however, the low profile of finland in the conflict has to be noted. since it has gained an important position in forest-industrial globalisation (reunala et al. 1999; donner-amnell 2004) it could also have taken a leading role in the conflict resolution. this would also have become an important step forward in consolidating the forest-political co-operation between the european union and south america. this type of profiling would have brought along an emphasis on political issues, aside from the technical ones, in forest-based co-operation. finnish forest expertise has, however, gained positive international recognition almost solely at the level of engineering (see sonnenfeld 1999; petersson 2001, 2004). it is no exaggeration to say that the weakness of finnish partners in dealing with political and socio-environmental matters might gradually turn into a question of credibility to finland and its overseas operations in the forest industry. focusing on logistical operational matters is also an ideological choice. technical orientation suits well to those overseas programmes that forward neoliberal trade premises. not much attention is then paid to the project’s resonance with the client’s political culture. securing privileges, such as free trade enclaves with special support, can only take place with the help of strong state governance and international organisations. this paradox, or compromise, has not really bothered the ideologists or engineers of neoliberalisation (harvey 2005). the fray bentos case shows well how the uruguayan compromise is confirmed by the exclusively technical orientation of the finnish partners. sensitivity to political and ideological issues would have brought along sensitivity to historical dependencies, and contested memories of them, differentiating the parties of the project. the fray bentos reports on social and environmental impacts primarily served as documents to meet the criteria of the external investors to permit loans, whereas the loan agreements in turn functioned as critical justifying elements of the project. this was a full ideological circle that favoured the neoliberal compromise. 78 fennia 186: 2 (2008)ari aukusti lehtinen conclusions the conflict of fray bentos was analysed here as a process with three complementary spheres of confrontations and negotiations, first by specifying the client-company relations, then by focusing on the cross-border relations, and finally by shaping the ideological side of the conflict. the question was, how and why the risks of building a large pulp mill along the rio uruguay were left to develop into a broad-scale international conflict. four complementary answers were formulated: undervaluing of the agricultural context of eucalyptus farming, ignoring argentinian concerns, indifference to the worries about toxic colonialism and, in general, narrow technical orientation. these omissions were identified in this article as the primary causes for the deepening confrontation, as they prevented forecasting the political dependencies and consequences of the mill project. the failures in the mill planning cast much pressure on further developing the methods of assessing impacts, both environmental and social, in these type of large industrial projects. border relations, including border river questions, are a wellresearched area in geography and related disciplines (see e.g. paasi 1996; eskelinen et al. 1999; mclaughlin mitchell 2006) and mobilising this learning could have been easily arranged in fray bentos by broadening the recruiting strategies of consulting services. the strengthening of the links between research and planning can, for example, result in concrete suggestions of how to broaden the participatory framework and social justification of overseas projects. this article shows how the discursive regulation approach, which was carried out by critically analysing the key phases of the conflict, helps in identifying the political risks of pulp mill construction in a cultural milieu that differs greatly from the home area of the company. in addition to the specific learning in connection to botnia fray bentos, the case study brought out three general aspects for accomplishing successful overseas investments. these aspects link the particular remarks from fray bentos to the broader background processes of forest-industrial globalisation which are below summarised as ‘foreground matters’ (see barry 2002: 194–202) by briefly sketching the critical (post)colonial challenges of overseas investments in the forest industry. first, the case study underlined the necessity to critically reflect upon the historical colonial load of overseas activities. producing pulp in uruguay for the paper mills in europe and china does not leave much economic return to the primary end of the production chain. instead, concerns of negative social and environmental changes fuel and unite the local critical parties. this problem cannot be solved by information campaigns based on technical consulting reports and by ignoring the specific concerns about toxic colonialism. reducing the colonial load in a company’s performance starts by reassessing the corporate labour division and routines of resource extraction. protected lineages and zones of bulk production minimise local interaction and accumulate power at the top end of corporate hierarchy. however, successful international co-operation can also be founded on participatory measures initiated by the company in charge of the project. some exemplary processes of socio-spatially sensitive forest-industrial entrepreneurship have been studied, for example, in cross-border circumstances (tysiachniouk and reisman 2004; lehtinen 2006; kortelainen 2008) and as part of the promotion of corporate responsibility (rytteri 2002; lawrence 2007; pakkasvirta 2008; sivonen 2008). these studies clearly show how important it is to run projects by keeping all company units horizontally open to changes in the immediate surroundings. second, complicated relations of ownership behind the subsidiaries should not be allowed to lead into absentee decision-making at the operational level. upm and metsäliitto, the principal owners of botnia fray bentos, carry along significantly differing institutional histories. reaching agreements in company governance is therefore often difficult and can result in quick and poorly prepared strategic moves. for example, the jump from latvia to uruguay clearly favoured upm’s motives, connected to the long involvement in eucalyptus plantations. the overseas jump also strengthened upm’s position as the practical leader of metsäbotnia’s internationalisation. the jump significantly increased the tempo of fray bentos development which in turn tightened the schedule of the planning process. moreover, the owners of botnia fray bentos have their own owners who intensely look after their returns as shareholders. the sensitive bond between managerial decision-making and shareholders’ motives, which varies greatly between upm and metsäliitto, causes strategic and operational unpredictability in the companies’ joint efforts. the latter, owned by 131 000 forest owners fennia 186: 2 (2008) 79lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments … of finland, have found it difficult to become fully adjusted to neoliberal changes in the forest industry whereas the former has actively searched for shareholder attraction in stock markets. all this limits much of the horizontal flexibility of such industrial subsidiaries as botnia fray bentos. arguments for local sensitivity and corporate responsibility are shadowed by continuous negotiations about methods of increasing the efficiency of production in the context of quarterly reporting. the alternative horizontal moves that can bear fruit only in the long run, for example, through favourable changes in political circumstances, need to be formulated in this particular context in such a way that all the partners can recognise the value of such actions. researchers can help in identifying the options hidden in alternative moves, as has been shown in some related studies (rytteri 2002; saether 2002, 2004; lamberg et al. 2006). third, as became obvious in the analysis, a high number of parties outside the forest-industrial sector were affected by the construction of the fray bentos mill. many of them also had to be included in the mill project, either during planning or later in the form of claims and appeals in the media, public demonstrations, or in court. the members of the surrounding society, especially farmers and environmentalists, and all those along the western bank of the river uruguay, were initially offered no clear role in planning. the positive reports of the consultants apparently confirmed the company and the client about a broad contentment shared among the external parties. after the international conflict unfolded, local disagreements inside uruguay were pushed into the background and, instead, international and overseas relations came to the forefront. after the failure of direct negotiations between uruguay and argentina, spain offered to help. ence, the spanish company, withdrew from fray bentos while botnia continued and finland remained silent. finally, mercosur and the international court in hague became arenas of running the conflict. studies on similar types of local-global confrontations have been completed (marchak 1995; nygren 1995; dauvergne 1997; lawrence 2007), but no signs of utilising this type of scholarship could be identified in the pulp mill planning in fray bentos. to summarise, in large overseas investments, where cross-cultural links and divisions are to be met and modified, early integration of parties in the planning process is critical. in addition, broader utilisation of scientific research would greatly help to foresee the chains of dependencies and consequences. historical awareness and sociospatial skills of the project initiators are crucial, as are the skills of those preparing social and environmental assessment reports. fray bentos turned into a warning, as the project was narrowly focused on the logistics of pulp production. the risks of similar failure can only be avoided by including elements of political and cultural sensitivity and co-respect in overseas activities. notes 1 kymmene and united paper mills merged in 1995 to become upm-kymmene and later shortly upm, which is the prior owner of botnia fray bentos. the metsäliitto group, which is a lobby organisation for the family forest owners in finland, owns directly and via its industrial branch, m-real, a 49 per cent share of botnia fray bentos. metsäliitto and upm had already in the mid-1970s founded a joint pulp producer, metsä-botnia, that has gradually become an important international actor. metsäliitto is the principal owner of metsä-botnia but upm governs botnia fray bentos with its direct share of 12.4 per cent and indirect 47 per cent share of metsä-botnia. metsä-botnia owns 82.1 per cent of botnia fray bentos (aukia and pitkänen 2005; botnia 2007a). 2 ence, or grupo empresarial ence, concentrates on forestry and tree plantations, sawn timber, plywood, pulp and sanitary papers in spain, portugal and uruguay. annual turnover exceeded 620 million euros in 2006. the spanish company, founded by national capital in 1968, became fully privatised in 2001. it has experienced a thorough restructuring of ownership during the 2000s (ence 2007). references armony a & v armony (2005). indictments, myths, and citizen mobilization in argentina: a discourse analysis. latin american politics & society 47: 4, 27–54. aukia j & r pitkänen (2005). rivakasti uudelle mantereelle. me botnialaiset 2, 4–6. bærenholdt j & b granås (eds) (2008). mobility and place. enacting northern european peripheries. ashgate, aldershot. barry, p (2002). beginning theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory. manchester university press, manchester. beckley t (1996). pluralism by default: community power in a paper mill town. forest science 42: 1, 35–45. botnia (2007a). annual report 2006. metsä-botnia, espoo. 80 fennia 186: 2 (2008)ari aukusti lehtinen botnia (2007b). project overview. botnia’s new pulp mill constructed among eucalyptus trees. <http:// metsabotnia.com/en>. 15.08.2008. burdge r (1998). a conceptual approach to social impact assessment. social ecology press, middleton. carrere r (2006). greenwash. critical analysis of fsc certification of industrial tree monocultures in uruguay. world rainforest movement, montevideo. cedha (2007). botnia pulp mill conflict: sustained international roadblock against pulp mill in uruguay hits record 4 months! centro de derechos humanos y ambiente, cordoba. <http://www. cedha.org.ar/en>. 15.08.2008 collins l (1998). environmentalism and restructuring of the global pulp and paper industry. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 89: 4, 401–415. correia d (2007). the sustained yield forest management act and the roots of environmental conflict in northern new mexico. geoforum 38: 5, 1040– 1051. dauvergne p (1997). shadows in the forest. japan and the politics of timber in south-east asia. the mit press, cambridge, ma. demeritt d (2001). scientific forest conservation and the statistical picturing of nature’s limits in the progressive-era united states. environment and planning d society and space 19: 4, 431–456. de’nadai a, w overbeek & l soares (2005). promises of jobs and destruction of work. the case of aracruz celulose in brazil. world rainforest movement. montevideo. donner-amnell j (2004). to be or not to be nordic? how internationalization has affected the character of the forest industry and forest utilization in the nordic countries. in lehtinen a, j donneramnell & b saether (eds). politics of forests. northern forest-industrial regimes in the age of globalization, 179–204. ashgate, aldershot. donner-amnell j, a lehtinen & b saether (2004). comparing the forest regimes in the conifer north. in lehtinen a, j donner-amnell & b saether (eds). politics of forests. northern forest-industrial regimes in the age of globalization, 233–251. ashgate, aldershot. ence (2007). annual report 2006. grupo empresarial ence, madrid. eu 2006. the eu’s relations with mercosur. european union. <http://ec.europa.eu>. 15.08.2008. eskelinen h, i liikanen & j oksa (eds) (1999). curtains of iron and gold. reconstructing borders and scales of integration. ashgate, aldershot. faroppa c & k annala (2004). eia summary. botnia, montevideo. harvey d (1996). justice, nature and the geography of difference. blackwell, oxford. harvey d (2005). a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford university press, oxford. hayter r, t barnes & m bradshaw (2003). relocating resource peripheries to the core of economic geography’s theorizing: rationale and agenda. area 15:1, 15–23. hcge (2004). socio-economic study of the impacts of botnia s.a. pulp mill project in uruguay, executive summary. hcg environment, helsinki. howitt r (2001). rethinking resource management. justice, sustainability and indigenous peoples. routledge, london. howitt r & s suchet-pearson (2006). rethinking the building blocks: ontological pluralism and the idea of management. geografiska annaler 88b: 3, 323–335. imf (2003). lessons from the crisis in argentina. international monetary fund. <http://www.imf.org>. 15.08.2008. jauhiainen j (2003). ympäristön pilaantumisen arvioiminen: tapauksena stora enson oulun tehtaat. yhdyskuntasuunnittelu 41: 4, 54–73. jepson w (2002). globalization and brazilian biosafety: the politics of scale over biotechnology governance. political geography 21, 905–925. klein n & a lewis (2004). the take. occupy, resist, produce. barna-alper productions, vancouver. kortelainen j (2008). performing the green market – creating space: emergence of the green consumer in the russian woodlands. environment and planning a 40, 1294–1311. krogman n & t beckley (2002). corporate “bail-outs” and local “buyouts”: pathways to community forestry? society and natural resources 15, 109– 127. kröger m (2007). uruguayn ja argentiinan sellutehdaskonflikti latinalaisamerikkalaisena maaja metsäkiistana. kosmopolis 37: 2, 23–42. kuortti j (2007). jälkikoloniaalisen teorian mahdollisuuksista. in vainikkala e & h mikkola (eds). nykyaika kulttuurintutkimuksessa. nykykulttuurin tutkimuskeskuksen julkaisuja 86, 145–175. jyväskylän yliopisto, jyväskylä. lamberg j, j näsi, j ojala & p sajasalo (eds) (2006). the evolution of competitive strategies in global forestry industries. comparative perspectives. springer, dordrecht. lang c (2007). subsidies and the botnia pulp mill. <http://chrislang.org>. 15.08.2008. lawrence r (2007). corporate social responsibility, supply chains and saami claims: tracing the political in the finnish forestry industry. geographical research 45: 2, 167–176. lehtinen a a (1991). northern natures. a study of the forest question emerging within the timber-line conflict in finland. fennia 169: 1, 57–169. lehtinen a a (2006). postcolonialism, multitude, and the politics of nature. on the changing geographies of the european north. university press of america, lanham. lehtinen a a, j donner-amnell & b saether (eds) (2004). politics of forests. northern forest-industrial regimes in the age of globalization. ashgate, aldershot. fennia 186: 2 (2008) 81lessons from fray bentos: forest industry, overseas investments … lohmann l (2003). certifying the uncertifiable. fsc certification of tree plantations in thailand and brazil. world rainforest movement, montevideo. lowood h (1990). the calculating forester: quantification, cameral science, and the emergence of scientific forestry management in germany. in frängsmyr t, j heslbron & r rider (eds). the quantifying spirit in the 18th century, 315–342. university of uppsala, uppsala studies in history of science 7, uppsala. mansfield b (2007a). privatization: property and the remaking of nature-society relations. antipode 39: 3, 393–405. mansfield b (2007b). articulation between neoliberal and state-oriented environmental regulation: fisheries privatization and endangered species protection. environment and planning a 39, 1926– 1942. marchak p (1995). logging the globe. mcgill-queen’s university press, quebec city. massey d (2005). for space. sage, london. mather a (1997). south-north challenges in global forestry. world institute for development economics research, helsinki. mclaughlin mitchell s (2006). introduction to special issue: conflict and cooperation over international rivers. political geography 25: 4, 357–360 mti (2006). finland’s national contact point’s statement on the specific instance submitted by cedha, an argentinian non-governmental organisation, regarding botnia s.a./metsä-botnia oy’s pulp mill project in uruguay. ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. nygren a (1995). forest, power and development. costa rican peasants in the changing environment. transactions of the finnish anthropological society 37, helsinki. oinas p (1997). on the socio-spatial embeddedness of business firms. erdkunde 51, 23–32. oinas p (1999). the embedded firm? prelude for a revived geography of enterprise. acta universitatis oeconomicae helsingiensis a-143, helsinki. ojala j & j lamberg (2006). the challengers: kym mene, united paper mills, and metsäliitto. in lamberg j, j näsi, j ojala & p sajasalo (eds). the evolution of competitive strategies in global forestry industries. comparative perspectives, 107–139. springer, dordrecht. ovaskainen o, m pappila & j pötry (1999). the finnish forest industry in russia. the finnish nature league and taiga rescue network, helsinki. paasi a (1996). territories, boundaries and consciousness. the changing geographies of the finnishrussian border. wiley, chichester. pakkasvirta j (2008). pulp & fiction. tarinoita globalisaatiosta ja sellutehtaasta. gaudeamus, helsinki. peterson c (2001). finnish engineering and swedish imperialism. scandinavian economic history review 49: 1, 23–40. peterson c (2004). the emergence of two national concepts and their convergence toward a common nordic regime in the global forest industry. in lehtinen a, j donner-amnell & b saether (eds). politics of forests. northern forest-industrial regimes in the age of globalization, 205–232. ashgate, aldershot. reed m (2007). uneven environmental management: a canadian comparative political ecology. environment and planning d society and space 39, 320–338. reunala a, i tikkanen & e åsvik (1999). the green kingdom. finland’s forest cluster. otava and metsämiesten säätiö foundation, helsinki. rytteri t (2002). metsäteollisuusyrityksen luonto. tutkimus enso-gutzeitin ympäristöja yhteiskuntavastuun muotoutumisesta. university of joensuu, department of geography publications 10, joensuu. saether b (1998). environmental improvements in the norwegian pulp and paper industry – from place and government to space and market. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 52, 181–193. saether b (2002). continuity and convergence: reduction of water pollution in the norwegian paper industry. business strategy and the environment 9, 390–400. saether b (2004). from national to global agenda: the expansion of norske skog 1962–2003. in lehtinen a, j donner-amnell & b saether (eds). politics of forests. northern forest-industrial regimes in the age of globalization. ashgate, 233–251. ashgate, aldershot. said e (1993). culture and imperialism. chatto & windus, london. sandberg a (1992). introduction: dependent development and client states. in sandberg a (ed). trouble in the woods: forest policy and social conflict in nova scotia and new brunswick, 1–21. acadiensis press, fredericton. sandberg a (2004). beyond l’erreur boréale: the forest industry, environmentalism and image production in québec, canada. in lehtinen a, j donneramnell & b saether (eds). politics of forests. northern forest-industrial regimes in the age of globalization, 63–83. ashgate, aldershot. saxton j (2003). argentina’s economic crisis: causes and cures. joint economic committee, washington. schwartz k (2006). nature and national identity after communism: globalizing the ethnoscape. university of pittsburgh press, pittsburgh. sivonen s (2008). rhetoric or reality? corporate social responsibility reporting in globalizing forest industry companies: a case study. european forest institute, joensuu. solecki w (1996). paternalism, pollution and protest in a company town. political geography 15: 1, 5–20. sonnenfeld d (1999). vikings and tigers: finland, sweden, and adoption of environmental technol82 fennia 186: 2 (2008)ari aukusti lehtinen ogies in southeast asia’s pulp and paper industries. journal of world-systems research 5: 1, 26–47. sonnenfeld d (2002). social movements and ecological modernization: the transformation of pulp and paper manufacturing. development and change 33: 1, 1–27. teichman j (2004). the world bank and policy reform in mexico and argentina. latin american politics & society 46: 1, 39–74. tsouvalis j (2000). a critical geography of britain’s state forests. oxford university press, oxford. tysiachniouk m & j reisman, (2004). co-managing the taiga: russian forests and the challenge of international environmentalism. in lehtinen a, j donner-amnell & b saether (eds). politics of forests. northern forest-industrial regimes in the age of globalization, 157–175. ashgate, aldershot. walker l, c cocklin & r le heron (2000). regulating for environmental improvement in the new zealand forestry sector. geoforum 31, 281–297. wong t, c delang & d schmidt-vogt (2007). what is a forest? competing meanings and the politics of forest classification in thung yai naresuan wildlife sanctuary, thailand. geoforum 38, 643–654. wrm (2006). uruguay: the botnia pulp mill project intends to profit climate change. world rainforest movement bulletin 109, montevideo. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46322 doi: 10.11143/46322 beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference and reimagining the national anna gawlewicz gawlewicz, anna (2015). beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference and reimagining the national, fennia 193: 2, 198–211. issn 1798-5617. in an era of accelerated international mobility, individuals have increased opportunities to confront values, practices and discourses linked to their national belonging with the lifestyles, cultural scripts and social norms of receiving societies. this paper discusses how migrants, who move between a relatively homogeneous society (poland) and a superdiverse one (the uk), negotiate “the national” and “the foreign” in orientalist binary oppositions. it explores how polish migrants’ lived experience of difference in the uk context impacts on the construction of poland. as such, it focuses on essentialist discourses of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ (of the uk to poland and vice versa) that are mobilised while migrants negotiate what they believe are british values (i.e. tolerance and diversity) and polish values (i.e. family). the article draws upon multiple interviews and audio-diaries from a wider study that explores polish migrants’ encounters with difference and the circulation of values and attitudes between poland and the uk. keywords: polish migrants in uk, nationalism, encounters, diversity, family values, multiple interviews, audio-diaries anna gawlewicz, school of social and political sciences, university of glasgow, glasgow g12 8rt, united kingdom, e-mail: anna.gawlewicz@glasgow.ac.uk introduction international mobility is a profound experience that influences most aspects of everyday life (o'reilly & benson 2009). by moving across national borders, migrants are frequently exposed to distinctive normativities, competing values, different lifestyles and unfamiliar cultural scripts. the moral framework they were socialised to live with in their home societies alongside the cultural baggage they bear are therefore particularly prone to be contested, reshaped or enhanced. against this backdrop, in this paper i discuss how migrants from poland (a country perceived as relatively homogeneous with regard to ethnicity, nationality and religion, podemski 2012) who move to the uk (a society representative of ‘superdiversity’, vertovec 2007) negotiate “the national” and “the foreign” in orientalist binary oppositions. i explore how lived experience of difference in the uk context affects polish migrants’ (re-)construction of their country. in doing so, i focus on essentialist discourses of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ (of the uk to poland and vice versa) that are mobilised while migrants negotiate what they believe constitutes british and polish values. i use the example of tolerance and diversity to reflect on migrant discussions about the supposed inferiority of polish society to the uk. then, by looking at family values, i investigate a reverse discourse of the alleged superiority of polishness over britishness. the choice of tolerance/diversity and family values to study the relation between “the national” and “the foreign” stems from the tendency among my informants to associate the former with core british values and the latter with core polish values. the paper draws upon data collected for a wider study that explores polish migrants’ encounters with difference and transnational circulation of values and attitudes between poland and the uk (gawlewicz 2014b). since 2004, when poland entered the european union, there has been an unprecedented influx of polish people to the uk. it is estimated that there are currently over half a milfennia 193: 2 (2015) 199beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference lion poles in britain (ons 2011), which makes the polish community one of the most prominent new national minorities in the uk. whereas the uk has had an uninterrupted history of immigration in the second half of 20th and early 21st century (vertovec 2007), the situation in poland developed quite differently. because of the communist regime, poland was largely ‘isolated’ from ethnic, national, cultural and religious diversity until late 1980s (borowik & szarota 2004). for this reason, polish society is still considered relatively homogeneous (podemski 2012). in this context, it has been argued that for many polish migrants moving to such heterogeneous societies as the uk is accompanied by the first meaningful encounter with increased cultural diversity (jordan 2006). importantly, the majority of the post-2004 polish migrants to the uk were reported to be in their 20s at the time of entering britain (fihel & kaczmarczyk 2009). it is precisely now – a decade later – that they have often started their families and are having children. the numbers of childbearing polish women in the uk have indeed been increasing rapidly and are now opening the rank of non-ukborn women giving birth in the uk (ons 2012). polish is also the second most spoken language after english in england and wales (ons 2013). against this backdrop, the study of how polish migrants negotiate “the national” in terms of social norms, daily routines, attitudes towards difference, religion, family values and parenting strategies is of great academic and social importance. there has been, nonetheless, relatively little scholarly interest into these issues so far, with several notable exceptions that focus on the expressions of diasporic belonging (e.g. burrell 2006, 2008; temple 2010; brown 2011; bielewska 2012) and family migration (e.g. lopez rodriguez 2010; heath et al. 2011; white 2011). this paper therefore contributes to and extends the discussion about how recent polish mobility shapes the understanding of home society and how discourses of tolerance and diversity on the one hand and family values on the other hand intertwine with these debates. in doing so, it adds to broader literatures on international mobility, transnationalism and belonging by problematizing how “the national” is re-imagined, remade or re-defined in the age of migration. i begin with briefly reflecting on the question of “the national” in times of mobility followed by a short introduction into the research context and methodologies employed. then, i explore how the notion of polishness (and implicitly britishness) is shaped in migrant discourses of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’. in doing so, i firstly look at values such as tolerance and diversity associated by research participants with the uk. secondly, i explore the understandings of family constructed by participants (and in a popular nationalistic discourse more broadly) as the core polish value. the question of “the national” in the age of migration the experience of international mobility opens up possibilities to disrupt and negotiate various aspects of national identity and belonging (silvey 2004). it has been argued to be “undoubtedly a massive upheaval, bringing about many transformations in the migrants’ lives” (o'reilly & benson 2009: 7). there is a well-established tradition in researching the link between the issue of “the national” and migration through the studies of diasporic identities and transnationalism (e.g. glick schiller et al. 1992; anthias 1998, 2001; portes et al. 1999; faist 2000; çaglar 2001; ehrkamp 2005; kofman 2005; nagel & staeheli 2008; kennedy 2009; vertovec 2009). glick schiller et al. (1992: 1) have famously defined transnationalism as “the process by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement”. as such, it acknowledges that while transnational migrants move across national borders, ‘here’ and ‘there’ remain for them the elements of the same social field. effectively, they develop complex loyalties and maintain social and economic ties with two or more countries. even though transnational behaviour is not solely the feature of contemporary times (portes et al. 1999), it has significantly escalated by the widespread availability of inexpensive and fast transportation and communications. these new technological capabilities have been increasingly argued to transform the lives of migrants by creating new social and political geographies as well as multiple (hybrid and/or overlapping) spaces of belonging (vertovec 2009; nedelcu 2012). despite the scope of transnational practice and complex allegiances mobile people may express, some studies evidence that “the national” or the strong sense of belonging to the imagined national community (anderson 1991) does not lose the capacity to shape everyday lives as well as values and attitudes of contemporary migrants (e.g. glick 200 fennia 193: 2 (2015)anna gawlewicz schiller & fouron 2001; pratt & yeoh 2003; burrell 2008; brown 2011; skey 2011; bielewska 2012). this could be paired with anderson’s (1992) concept of long-distance nationalism. although it was originally used to describe political activities involving a country or a place where one no longer lives (or never lived at all), in the context of accelerated and diversified global mobility it has instead been employed to explore migrant forms of nostalgia, loyalty and emotional attachment to their home societies (skrbis 1999; glick schiller & fouron 2001; wise 2004; jaffrelot & therwath 2007). as such, it seems to partly mirror the ongoing debates on banal nationalism “embedded in routines of social life” (billig 1995: 175) that primarily regarded static populations (e.g. paasi 1999; palmer 1998; edensor 2006; antonsich 2009). here, edensor (2006: 539), for example, argues that even though people find themselves in increasingly globalised circumstances, nationalisms remain “grounded in the everyday routines and practices surrounding work, family, consumption, leisure, socialising and cultural activities”. this has been recently extended by skey (2011: 233) who, by investigating english people's narratives of travel, has noted that “individuals are often made aware of their own national identity and allegiances, when negotiating encounters with other people and cultural forms”. while national attachment does not always seem to decrease among mobile people (antonsich 2009), the nature of migrant relationships with “the national” may get contested, challenged and/or altered (pratt & yeoh 2003). it has been acknowledged that “the changing relationship between migrants and their ‘homes’ is held to be an almost quintessential characteristic of transnational migration” (al-ali & koser 2002: 1). although the home al-ali and koser refer to may, in fact, relate to various concepts beyond the nationality and nation (e.g. space, place, identity), the sending society remains for many migrants an embodiment of home (armbruster 2002). the recognition of the ever flexible migrant relationship with their ‘homes’ raises a few significant questions which despite a substantial body of work on migration, diaspora, transnationalism and the constructions of the homeland (cf. christou & king 2010; mavroudi 2010; christou 2011) have been less addressed. how and to what extent does migration from a relatively homogeneous to a diverse society impact on the perception of “the national” and “the foreign” with regard to social diversity? how, in this context, does migration contribute to the romanticisation, essentialisation or orientalisation of home and host societies? finally, which aspects of migrant life within/among diversity are likely to be influenced by the national, how and why? in this paper, i intend to address these issues by investigating the narratives of recent polish migrants to the uk. research project and methodologies this paper draws upon the empirical material from a wider study into polish migrants’ encounters with difference and transnational circulation of values and attitudes (gawlewicz 2014b). while this study involved research participants in both the uk and poland, in this paper i focus on data collected from migrants to the uk only. in recruiting these participants, i was seeking to diversify the sample in terms of age, gender, sexuality, family/marital status, class, education, occupation, religion/belief, personal views and length of stay in the uk. given the small size of the sample (14 migrants in total), i prioritized gender, age and length of stay in the uk. the participants included nine women and five men aged 21–51 (being representative of polish arrivals to the uk post 2004, fihel & kaczmarczyk 2009) who moved to the uk between 2004 and 2011. i conducted multiple interviews (at least two) with these participants between june 2011 and may 2012. the interviews explored each participant’s life in poland pre-migration, the experience of migration itself, the first impressions of the british society and aspects of life in the uk post-migration. in addition, i asked the migrants to record audio-diaries (worth 2009) for a period of one ‘typical’ week – a time which they would expect to be illustrative of their life in the uk. in the audiodiaries they talked about their impressions, feelings and emotions related to day-to-day encounters with difference. this enhanced the data i collected through the interviews by providing spontaneous, uncontrolled and uninterrupted flows of oral narration (cf. worth 2009). importantly, i explored migration experience in the context of the northern english city of leeds, one of the major (and diverse) cities in the uk. my unique position of a polish migrant researcher studying my own migrant co-nationals was written into the research process (gawlewicz 2014a; see also kim 2012). as the body of data i collected was fennia 193: 2 (2015) 201beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference entirely in polish, i carefully translated it into english. this required maintaining conceptual equivalence, i.e. the comparability of meanings between the original utterance and the translated piece (temple 1997; birbili 2000; gawlewicz 2014a). then, i employed narrative analysis to explore linkages, relationships and socially constructed explanations that naturally occur within oral accounts (kvale & brinkmann 2009). this approach enabled me to analyse “varieties of individual selfhood and agency ‘from below’ and in practice, as constructed in peoples articulated self-understandings” (maynes et al. 2008: 1). all the quotations i include in this paper come from my translated transcriptions of the interviews. three ellipsis dots in brackets are used to indicate that a small section of text has been removed to facilitate the readability of quotations. clarifying pieces of information are introduced in square brackets. all names i use in the paper are pseudonyms to ensure participants’ anonymity. (re)shaping perceptions of home society post-migration in an upcoming discussion about responses to diversity in postsocialist poland, mayblin et al. (2014: 13) note that “the orientalist perspective which casts poland as traditional and behind the west” still resonates in many polish narratives as well as in popular discourses. they explain that during the 1990s transition period from the communist rule to a liberal democratic political system, poles were encouraged by the emerging neoliberal politics to internalize the orientalist gaze which depicted poland as ‘backward’ and/or ‘lagging behind’ western europe. the rhetoric of poland needing to “catch up with the west” or “return to europe” was further reinforced against the backdrop of poland’s accession to the nato and the eu (1999 and 2004, respectively) (kuus 2004). the discursive practices of re-inscribing truly colonial relations between the west and the east of europe, and situating poland in an obscure position in-between, resulted in what some scholars call “inferiority-superiority complex” (kurczewska 2003; zarycki 2004). on the one hand, the polish society seems to feel insufficiently modern in comparison to the iconic west, and on the other hand, it appears to express high levels of national pride and a sense of exceptionality (marciniak 2009). the production of polish society as inferior towards the iconic west has been broadly investigated by a range of researchers across various disciplines including geography (e.g. verdery 1996; kuus 2004; stenning 2005; chari & verdery 2009; marciniak 2009; owczarzak 2009; burrell 2011; horolets & kozłowska 2012; mayblin et al. 2014). by exploring the polish migrant narratives of childhood in late socialist poland, burrell (2011: 143) has, for example, looked into “why west was often considered best”. in doing so, she has noted a tendency to self-orientalise and self-occidentalise among polish children and migrants to the uk, respectively. while referring to how migrants recall their past material encounters with ‘western’ things (e.g. toys, sweets or clothes), she has drawn attention to “a binary divide between colourful, fashionable and good-smelling west and a grey, overtly standardised east” (burrell 2011: 153). the persistence of such binarism with regard to polish and other western european societies could be linked with the construction of normality and abnormality (for a discussion about the concept of normality see goffman 1974; giddens 1987; misztal 2001). galasińska and kozłowska (2009) and galasińska (2010), for example, explore how post-accession polish migrants in the uk construct the experience of everyday life and work in britain as ‘normal’ in contrast to the supposedly ‘abnormal’ state of affairs in the contemporary poland. this is even more evident in horolets and kozłowska’s (2012) recent study. by investigating representations of the uk as a receiving society, the authors establish that many polish migrants associate the uk with high culture, excellence, aristocracy and civilizational development. in this article, i extend these debates by evidencing how in everyday narratives polish migrants to the uk reproduce the orientalist binary relation (said 2003 [1978]) between poland and the uk. i explore the discourses of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ research participants engaged with following their encounters with difference in the uk context. discourses of ‘inferiority’ are investigated with regard to tolerance and diversity understood by the majority of participants as the core elements of essentialised britishness. discourses of ‘superiority’, on the other hand, are analysed with reference to family values conceptualised by the migrants in this study as core polish values. 202 fennia 193: 2 (2015)anna gawlewicz discourses of ‘inferiority’ the discursive construction of home and host societies in binary oppositions was striking across my fieldwork with polish migrants in leeds. interestingly, this seemed to be the case regardless of the extent of the study participants’ encounters with difference in terms of ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality, gender, age and disability in the uk. in comparison to the experience (if fleeting or superficial) of diversity in the british context, many of my respondents constructed poland as by assumption homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, nationality and religion. furthermore, while difference in the british context was articulated as ‘obvious’ and/or ‘normal’ by many of my informants, it was simultaneously ‘unimaginable’ in poland. this is reflected in the quote below where one of my female participants, natalia, says: “there [in the uk] is this mixture of nationalities, religions. you see a catholic church, a sikh temple nearby, an orthodox church and a buddhist temple. such a mixture. i cannot imagine this in poland. (…) they’re building this mosque in warsaw – it’s such a controversy. there were protests. and here [in the uk] it’s no problem.” natalia (female, aged 21, moved to the uk in 2009) in a similar vein, another informant, lena, speculates in her audio-diaries whether such a superdiverse city as london (vertovec 2007) could possibly exist in the polish context. “i think sometimes if it would be possible – city like london – if it would be possible for such a city to exist in poland. so many nationalities… and, if it would be possible that everybody lives together. i think it would be hard. people in poland wouldn’t be as open and tolerant. and, it wouldn’t work, (…) especially small towns where people who have a different skin colour or a nationality are not really seen.” lena (female, aged 29, moved to the uk in 2005) evidently, lena implies that the main reason for the ‘impossibility’ of diversity in the polish context is the supposed intolerance of polish society. in one of the interviews, she went so far as to claim that polish people were ‘narrow-minded’ in terms of acceptance of difference. most curiously, a similar view was uncritically expressed by many other informants who repeatedly constructed the essentialist image of polish society as ‘backward/parochial’ or ‘closed’. in doing so, they not only mobilized the popular postsocialist discourse of “lagging behind the west” (kuus 2004; owczarzak 2009; mayblin et al. 2014), but also extended this orientalist perspective onto the capacity of the polish society to be tolerant and/or welcoming to difference. “i think that we [polish people] are backward in terms of tolerance. (…) as a society, we try hard not to let any outsider in.” marek (male, aged 32, moved to the uk in 2007) “poland is a more closed country [than the uk]. there’s less diversity. and here [in the uk] – you have lots of various nations… and, i don’t know, cultures… and in poland – the majority is white, right? heterosexual. (…) everybody tries to be the same. and difference is noticed.” tomek (male, aged 26, moved to the uk in 2007) the supposed intolerance of polish society some of my informants elaborated on was, furthermore, often discussed in the context of presence and/or visibility of muslim people in public spaces. despite the long-lasting existence of a small indigenous muslim-tatar community in poland (see górak-sosnowska 2011), muslim people evoke largely unfavourable attitudes (pędziwiatr 2010). for some of my research participants, who admitted having increased contact with muslims in the uk, this figure of religious other has become a litmus test for social attitudes towards difference. this may be one of the reasons why one of my respondents, ela, linked the supposed ‘backwardness/parochialism’ of the polish society with the alleged social incapacity to be welcoming towards muslims. it is crucial to mention here that the polish adjective she used to describe the society (zaściankowe) does not have a literal english equivalent. it has neither the negative undertone as the english term ‘backward’ nor the neutral one of ‘parochial’. thus, i use both in the quote below: “it’s [polish society] backward/parochial. (…) this strives for polishness. it would be very difficult for muslims to settle down. people would just oppress them and, and squeeze them.” ela (female, aged 31, moved to the uk in 2005) the tendency to contrast the alleged homogeneity/closeness of polish society with the assumed diversity/tolerance of british society is particularly intriguing and requires a closer look here. it is necessary to explain that alongside the construction of poland as non-diverse and ‘backward’, i noted a similar process regarding encounters with difference in the polish context. namely, despite being fennia 193: 2 (2015) 203beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference reminded that difference is a broad term including social status, class, age, gender, sexuality and disability, the majority of my research participants assumed that poland was a place of scarce encounters with difference. oddly enough, many of the very same respondents admitted later in the interview(s) that they did, in fact, have a repeated contact with difference. what is more, numerous informants spoke of encounters in poland that deeply influenced their personal pre-migration values and attitudes. the analysis of these inconsistencies in migrant stories has led me to argue that the construction of poland as a homogeneous space of little contact with otherness is merely a discursive practice, rather than a reflection of actual social relations. this, in turn, suggests that the post-migratory production of poland as non-diverse/backward and the uk as diverse/tolerant is also a discursive tendency reflecting the process of othering (and stereotypisation), rather than the expression of judgment based on actual experiences. indeed, although research participants constructed the home and host societies in binary terms, some of them spoke of experiences that contradicted this simplistic relation (e.g. discrimination or prejudice they experienced in the uk). in this respect, their narratives were often ‘messy’ and reflected inconsistencies between the discursive production of poland or the uk and the stories of actual experiences in these societies. while in this article i primarily focus on discursive constructions, i do acknowledge that this perspective has its limitations regarding how the national and the foreign may be experienced or ‘lived’ by migrants. nonetheless, i believe it is significant in a discussion of the national in the age of migration as it reflects the changing migrant relationship with the sending society (al-ali & koser 2002) and the process of constant (re)production of home and host countries. importantly, the assumed intolerance of polish society was argued in my study to be one of the major reasons why some participants dis-identified with their home society post-migration. quite intriguing in this respect is particularly tomek’s account in which he speaks of how easier and more comfortable it is for him to express personal views about difference in britain. in the interview, tomek, quoted earlier in this paper, admitted that while living in poland he was afraid to openly express his opinions about religion, sexuality or politics even to acquaintances or friends. apparently, he feared for being stigmatized and ridiculed or as he put it: “having everybody against you”. this has, however, changed after he moved to the uk where he has not only gained confidence about his views on many social issues, but – as he argued – realized many people in his environment shared his attitudes towards difference: “it’s just easier here, in the uk. (…) i don’t know whether, if i lived in poland, i’d openly say that i’m pro-gay, pro-whatever and an atheist. i guess, it would be more difficult. (…) when i lived there and met with people the majority would have similar views and it was difficult for me to say anything, because if there are ten people against one person, it’s difficult to make statements, right? (…) i consider myself very tolerant [now]. and, i guess this is due to the fact that i can [be tolerant], i can talk about stuff [in the uk]. i think i wouldn’t be as tolerant in poland if i was sticking to some groups. (…) my acquaintances from elementary and secondary school... they are less educated, some of them didn’t study. (…) and here [in the uk] – i could be tolerant here, so it has encouraged me, it motivated me.” tomek (male, aged 26, moved to the uk in 2007) in the eyes of this informant, the social pressure in poland is limiting people’s willingness to be openly ‘tolerant’ regardless of one’s willingness to be so. britain, on the other hand, seems to offer tomek more freedom of opinion and speech. indeed, he constructs the uk as a place where one “can be tolerant”. it appears that tomek distances himself from his home society, and his groups of polish acquaintances in particular, as – in his view – it is impossible to express less popular views in poland. the striking tendency of research participants to discursively construct poland and the uk in binary oppositions suggests that the encounter with diversity in the uk context strongly affects the migrant perceptions of polish society and reinforces the orientalist gaze (verdery 1996; kuus 2004; chari & verdery 2009; burrell 2011; horolets & kozłowska 2012; mayblin et al. 2014). in migrant stories, poland and the polish society are, indeed, assumed to be in my informants’ words ‘backward’, ‘homogeneous’ and ‘intolerant’, while the uk by implication ‘developed’, ‘diverse’ and ‘tolerant’. although sometimes challenged by the narratives of actual experiences, this essentialist binary relation has a capacity to influence the extent to which some polish migrants (dis-)identify with their home country. given the necessity to reflect on this issue, the discussion here aids a greater understanding about the influence of migration as well as the consequence of a major shift from a relatively homogeneous to a diverse social space. 204 fennia 193: 2 (2015)anna gawlewicz crucially, the changing relationships with home society are discussed here with regard to tolerance and diversity. these values, as i have mentioned earlier in the article, were perceived by the study participants as the elements of essentialised britishness (despite the fact that experiences of some migrants seemed to challenge this assumption). given this understanding, it is crucial to consider how values particularly associated with polishness are understood in relation to britishness. discourses of ‘superiority’ alongside the discursive construction of poland as non-diverse and intolerant, numerous attempts to compare and morally evaluate polishness and britishness were quite salient in my study. in these migrant negotiations, family values – including the nature of human relationships, gender roles, lifestyle and mundane practices – were most frequently mentioned. this is unsurprising given the significance of family for many polish people. indeed, family is believed to be, in the polish national(istic) imaginary, one of the core elements of polishness (cieniuch 2007; jasińska-kania 2012). the significance of family is above all reflected in public opinion polls in poland. according to the recent survey of a representative sample of adult poles, 78% of polish people consider happy family life as the most significant value in their lives (cbos 2013). importantly, in a similar representative survey five years ago exactly the same percentage viewed family as the core value (cbos 2013). furthermore, the vast majority (85%) of the 2013 survey respondents believe family is a source of personal happiness and only 12% think that a person can be happy without a family life. the survey also reveals that 55% of adult poles consider a nuclear family (i.e. a married couple with children) the most appealing family model. in fact, practically all adult participants state they would like to have children. nonetheless, although a certain family model seems to exist in the polish collective consciousness, very diverse family arrangements exist in practice (mizielińska 2010). it then appears that on a discursive level one family model – i.e. nuclear and/or traditional family – remains hegemonic and powerful whereas on a social practice level family models are quite diverse (ibid.). it is crucial to mention here that what is broadly understood as ‘family’ is to a significant degree imagined (gillis 1996; smith 2011; valentine et al. 2012). gillis (1996) has argued about living in two families: the idealised vision of family (the family we live by) which constitutes a normative framework people aspire to, and the family we actually live with which embraces the ‘messiness’ of everyday life (valentine et al. 2012). in this article, i focus largely on the migrant narratives of the imagined family we live by. in doing so, i look into how what is constructed by my respondents as polish family values is conceptualised against british. although the narratives of a few informants revealed disharmonies between how family was imagined and lived, it was pinpointed by the majority of participants as a core polish value. often idealized, it was discursively constructed as a ‘warm’ community of strongly tied people. according to my informants’ narratives, the dominant family model in poland – a “typical polish family” as some study participants would put it is a heterosexual family often extended to grandparents and further relatives. in addition, in these narratives respect towards older people or older generations is frequently stressed as one of the most significant values intentionally passed onto children. family seems furthermore associated with certain normativity involving the celebration of home, religious practice and tradition. this is reflected in the account of maja below who describes how the concept of family inevitably intersects with the notion of home, catholicism and behavioural normativity: “family’s very important – family and home. (…) i guess, in poland everybody attaches greater importance to home – it’s something most significant. if you live in one place it’s usually for life. (…) in my village [in poland] it’s very important to have a garden in front of a house which would be neat and tidy and look nice. on the other hand, this might be a little hypocritical… because everything seems so nice from the outside, but it’s not necessarily so inside. (…) [religion] has been transforming into a sort of set of traditions – rather than being faith. it’s about celebrating holidays or such things. (…) but still – in my tiny place you can still see that during holidays people dress up nicely, for example they put on their sunday best and go to church every day [during few-day holiday like e.g. christmas].” maja (female, aged 21, moved to the uk in 2011) while migration seems, for many of my participants, to reinforce the essentialist construction of home society as inferior towards the western world, it also appears to cement a reverse tendency to view what is considered polish values as morally superior to the western ones. indeed, “a fennia 193: 2 (2015) 205beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference polish family”, as my participants would often put it, was repetitively assumed to be more authentic and preferable to what has been termed “a british” or “an english family”. ela, for instance, quoted earlier for her perception of the polish society as intolerant, argued that family values are more significant for polish people who strive to structure their lives around the routines of home-making such as cooking and eating together: “i think family’s more important for poles than for english people. english people are shallower in this respect. yes, they do love their wives, mothers and fathers but this is different (…). they just do what they have to do. (…) on the one hand, they are more relaxed and there are less tensions in their families, but… the simple fact – they don’t eat at home, they don’t cook. that’s different. we [her family] have dinner together every day. (…) this single meal makes a difference. we eat in the kitchen, no tv, and we simply talk. english people go out very often. and, if adultery happens – this is more [socially] accepted than in poland. in poland adultery is more stigmatized. i think that englishmen respect their girlfriends less. sure – not everybody.” ela (female, aged 31, moved to the uk in 2005) interestingly, although ela never says it in an explicit way, she seems to imply that as far as family values are concerned, british people live with lower moral standards than their polish counterparts. that said, there appears to be a strong moral judgement in ela’s narrative. in somewhat similar vein, a younger respondent natalia, also cited earlier, elaborates on the supposedly different approach to getting married in poland and in the uk (implicitly also about religious belief): “family values are definitely more present and cultivated there [in poland] than here [in the uk]. in poland people still – when they decide to get married, they don’t usually get married with this assumption that they can always get a divorce; they don’t have this option in mind. if they get married they really think it’s for life. if, later on, something just doesn’t work, they, well they actually get a divorce. but, it’s not like here [in the uk]. people get married here, it’s often in a rush. people just assume, that well – that a divorce can occur in the future.” natalia (female, aged 21, moved to the uk in 2009) again, natalia’s narrative appears to include a moral judgement. the respondent seems to portray british people as somewhat opportunistic and lacking what natalia recognises as family values. indeed, in her story they seem more hedonistic, less willing to care, not to say self-centred. many other informants in the study would similarly compare and contrast what they viewed as ‘polish’ and “english family life”. curiously, despite being on many occasions reflexive about the senselessness of such comparisons (e.g. through reporting examples that challenged this simplistic binary), they would still construct british/english family values as morally inferior to what they believed were polish values. significantly, in the stories of migrant participants, the “polish family” embraced not only a set of family, but also religious values. these values, including catholic practices, traditions and beliefs, were then in some cases argued to be consciously reproduced in the british context. in addition, the decision to have and raise a child in the uk became a fateful moment (giddens 1991) for several of my respondents as it forced them to rethink their own life stances and in particular reconsider what values they would like to pass onto their children in the future and how. for artur, this situation became a source of a huge dilemma. he moved to the uk together with his wife several years ago and they have a 3-year-old son now. for a while now, he has been thinking of making his home situation more stable in terms of everyday life. this, similarly to many migrant stories noted elsewhere (see e.g. ehrkamp 2005), requires buying a house. yet, artur and his wife cannot make a decision whether to buy a house in the uk, stay there and raise his son in the british society or move back to poland. artur is particularly worried that raising children in the british context may have – as he told me – a negative influence on them. although much of artur’s narrative reveals his admiration for the capacity of british society to encourage people of various ethnicities, religions and sexualities who work together as a team, he remains critical of the way some values (such as religion) may be socially constructed in britain. “in poland people live more traditionally. (…) the majority of people i know, go to church. and here – it’s quite the opposite. (…) we try to raise our son the way we were raised. we just feel such a need. we feel a need to go to church or the catholic centre in [name of city]. we feel the need to have christmases the way they should be. there’s this holiday called assumption of mary. when i was younger, i didn’t feel a need to make a garland and now i do. i’d love to go out with my kid, pick up some flowers and make a garland. (…) i pay more attention to such things now. when i was in poland – sure, i noticed that – but, i didn’t 206 fennia 193: 2 (2015)anna gawlewicz feel the need to do anything. (…) this polishness. it might be related to the fact that i’m living abroad. i kind of started to emphasize my values.” artur (male, aged 34, moved to the uk in 2005) this quote is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that certain elements of polishness become much more significant for polish migrants after they migrate to the uk. catholicism is particularly prone to be such an element as it is believed to symbolize home and national culture (trzebiatowska 2010). a desire to emphasize one’s origins or ethnic as well as religious belonging is a recognized issue in migration studies (peek 2005; christou & king 2010; mavroudi 2010; christou 2011). a turn to religion or increased religious practices in the post-migration period are argued to be the means of making home from home and assuring a sense of security in an unfamiliar new society (kinnvall 2004; connor 2008). this increased religiosity may also be viewed as a way of mitigating the sense of feeling different and, needless to say, excluded from the mainstream or local society (ehrkamp 2005). foner and alba (2008: 373), for example, argue that for many muslim migrants a turn to islam is “seen as providing a way to claim dignity in the face of the bitterness of exclusion”. whilst artur does not seem to feel excluded from the british society, in the interviews he admitted feeling lost and confused with certain normativities he encountered in the uk context. his increased religiosity and a desire to pass strong catholic values onto his son are a consequence of this normative confusion on the one hand and a conviction of the superiority of polish moral values on the other hand. although the respondents in my study largely approved of the “polish family” model and often distanced themselves from what they considered british or english family values, some have nonetheless started to openly challenge these concepts and negotiate a family life that would contain the elements of both polishness and britishness. marek, for example, noticed that family dynamics and power relations differ in poland and the uk. whereas polish people tend, in his opinion, to develop their relationships with children based on parental authority and the assumption of child’s obedience, british parents are apparently more relaxed and partnership-focused. they also seem, as marek continues, to pay much more attention to such values as diversity and tolerance, but fail to pass on a sense of respect towards older generations. “i don’t like the way family works [in the uk]. but, there are some nice solutions here which i’m sure i’ll adopt. (…) this sense of partnership [between a parent and a child]. (…) this openness towards various people for sure. so, that he or she [his kid] doesn’t feel shocked or becomes prejudiced when he or she sees a person of a different skin colour for example. and doesn’t have [these associations] that a [skin] colour indicates something bad. here, you live among other people and it all becomes natural for a child. (…) [thinking of] poland – definitely various traditions and upbringing – this respect for people first of all, good behaviour, being polite and kind. i’m sure i’ll inculcate such things into my child. (…) what’s bad about raising children here is the fact that they are not taught to respect older people – that’s very bad.” marek (male, aged 32, moved to the uk in 2007) various studies demonstrate that parenting strategies are prone to be shaped by the experience of migration (sims & omaji 1999; lopez rodriguez 2010; ryan 2010; de haan 2011; renzaho et al. 2011; kilkey et al. 2014). while there is evidence that some parents may, like artur above, turn to what they understand as “home culture” infused child rearing (cf. renzaho et al. 2011), de haan (2011) argues that parenting styles may become very complex when various cultural traditions come into contact with each other. despite his general scepticism towards the british/ english family life, marek is convinced that certain values being recognised in the uk context could improve the way he will raise his child. at the same time, he feels that some elements of what is regarded as polish upbringing would be very beneficial too. unlike artur’s, his parenting style appears to be hybrid and include whatever marek claims to be the best of both cultures. this case is particularly significant as it demonstrates that while many migrants engage with discourses of ‘superiority’ with regard to family values (and reproduce the binary relation between poland and the uk), some start to negotiate polishness and britishness and challenge the binary understanding about “the national” and “the foreign”. in doing so, they seem to recognise that when it comes to personal experience or choices they remain under the influence of both the home and host normativities. the data collected in the course of this research suggest that, against the backdrop of mobility between a relatively homogeneous (poland) and a diverse society (the uk), migrants are likely to make (at least discursively) moral judgements fennia 193: 2 (2015) 207beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference about the home and host normativities. in doing so, they particularly focus on what is socially constructed as ‘inherently’ national (i.e. family values in the context of polishness). evidently, the polish migrants in my study engage with the process of othering and construct what they assume to be “a polish family” as morally superior to what they view as the british/english family model. as a consequence, family life is frequently characterised by long distance nationalism (anderson 1992) and is involved in the re-making of the national outside the home society. alongside the unchallenged reproduction of polishness, however, some migrants appear to combine both polish and british/english normativities and develop hybrid transnational practices. this is reflected in, for instance, parenting styles. conclusions in this article, i have looked at the complicated links between migration, nationalism and national identity. i have specifically focused on polish migrants to the uk, a group that has been argued to experience a major shift from a relatively homogeneous (poland) to a diverse society (the uk) (jordan 2006). as the polish minority has been increasingly involved in shaping the social life in the british context, the case of polish migrants is illustrative of what challenges there are for living together in diversity, peace and respect. notwithstanding the ubiquity of the notion of home in disciplinary literatures on migration, diaspora and transnationalism, the changing migrant relationship with “the national” and “the host” remains less explored. in this article, i have addressed this issue by investigating how polish migrants’ encounters with superdiversity in the british context (vertovec 2007) (re)shape their ideas of poland and the uk, and by exploring the aspects of polishness that are prone to be re-imagined post-migration. in particular, i have looked into how migrants discursively construct “the national” and “the foreign”, polishness and britishness, in binary oppositions. in doing so, i have used the example of tolerance/diversity and family associated by research participants with britishness and polishness, respectively. with regard to tolerance and diversity, i have evidenced that many of research participants uncritically (and often contradictory to their own personal experience) produced poland as socially homogeneous and intolerant, and the uk as diverse and welcoming of difference. in doing so, they mobilised discourses of ‘inferiority’ of essentialised polishness in comparison to essentialised britishness. as long as family values are considered, i have noted a reverse tendency. here, despite appreciating some aspects of living in the receiving society, research participants inevitably constructed polishness as more valuable and ‘superior’. the orientalist relation (said 2003 [1978]), that the participants of this study drew upon, seems to stem from broader essentialist understandings of the iconic west and poland. discourses of ‘inferiority’ and a necessity to “catch up” with the western world have been suggested to dominate the public opinion in poland during the transition period of 1990s (e.g. kuus 2004; mayblin et al. 2014). these discourses seem to echo in the narratives of research participants comparing and contrasting the alleged polish homogeneity/intolerance with the supposed british diversity/tolerance. interestingly, they are frequently coupled with counter-discourses assuming the superiority of what are perceived as core polish values. while noted elsewhere (burrell 2011; horolets & kozłowska 2012), the tendency among my informants to construct the home and host societies in simplistic terms was strong enough to affect their (dis-)identification with the set of values and attitudes each society was believed to convey. this suggests that migration and migrant encounters with difference in particular engage negotiations of “the national” and “the foreign”, and have a capacity to re-define the former. significantly, the tendency to mobilise both the discourses of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ suggests that rather than producing “the national” and “the host” as hegemonic (and fixed) binaries, research participants construct various aspects of the sending and the receiving society in an intricate relation of inferiority and superiority. this strongly resonates with the “inferiority-superiority complex” i mentioned earlier in this article (kurczewska 2003; marciniak 2009) and implies that the culture-specific understanding of such concepts as the nation or national identity (e.g. polishness, britishness) is brought to migrant encounters with difference and diverse societies. importantly, it needs to be reiterated that the production of poland and the uk as binaries refers to a discursive practice. the narratives of actual social experience produced by research participants 208 fennia 193: 2 (2015)anna gawlewicz in the course of this study did not always fit this simplistic construction. this is reflected in my discussion of the parenting strategies as well as stories of discrimination and prejudice in the uk context which, while not explored in this article, appeared in the interviews with research participants. as such, this calls for further insights into how “the national” may possibly be re-defined, reproduced, negotiated and challenged not only on a discursive level, but also in everyday practices. against the backdrop of recent east-west mobility, the capacity of migrants to live with and among difference becomes a key issue for contemporary europe. arguably, these large-scale migrations have been followed by broadly understood encounters with “the foreign” or “the unfamiliar” and impacted not only on the everyday lives of migrants, but also their understandings of “the national” and “the familiar”. the main evidence of this article is that migrants are likely to alter their perception of their home society in their post-migration experience as well as re-define or re-make “the national” facing their encounters with “the foreign”. this has implications for how they live their everyday lives, how they refer to diversity or what meaningful decisions they make (e.g. what parenting strategies they adopt). in sum, how migrants understand home and host societies is likely to impact on how they and their significant others live (and will live) with and among difference. acknowledgements i would like to thank all research participants who shared their stories with me in the course of this project. i am also grateful to marco antonsich, elizabeth mavroudi, gill valentine, nichola wood and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on previous versions of this paper. as part of the research programme “living with difference in europe: making communities out of strangers in an era of super mobility and super diversity” (livedifference), this work was funded by the european research council through an advanced investigator award to gill valentine (grant agreement no. 249658). references al-ali n & koser k 2002. transnationalism, international migration and home. in al-ali n & koser k (eds). new approaches to migration? transnational communities and the transformation of home, 1–14. routledge, london. anderson b 1991. imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. verso, london. anderson b 1992. long-distance nationalism: world capitalism and the rise of identity politics. centre for asian studies, amsterdam. anthias f 1998. evaluating ‘diaspora’: beyond ethnicity? sociology 32: 3, 557–580. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038038598032003009. anthias f 2001. new hybridities, old concepts: the limits of ‘culture’. ethnic and racial studies 24: 4, 619–641. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870120049815. antonsich m 2009. national identities in the age of globalisation: the case of western europe. national identities 11: 3, 281–299. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608940903081085. armbruster h 2002. homes in crisis: syrian orthodox christians in turkey and germany. in al-ali n & koser k (eds). approaches to migration? transnational communities and the transformation of home, 17–33. routledge, london and new york. bielewska a 2012. national identities of poles in manchester: modern and postmodern geographies. ethnicities 12: 1, 86–105. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1468796811427086. billig m 1995. banal nationalism. sage, los angles and london. birbili m 2000. translating from one language to another. social research update 31. university of surrey. <http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru31.html> borowik a & szarota p 2004. tolerancja i wielokulturowość. wyzwania xxi wieku [tolerance and multiculturalism. the challenges of 21st century]. academica, warszawa. brown j 2011. expressions of diasporic belonging: the divergent emotional geographies of britain’s polish communities. emotion, space and society 4: 4, 229–237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.01.004. burrell k 2006. moving lives. narratives of nation and migration among europeans in post-war britain. ashgate, aldershot. burrell k 2008. male and female polishness in post-war leicester: gender and its intersections in a refugee community. in ryan l & webster w (eds). gendering migration: masculinity, femininity and ethnicity in post-war britain, 71–88. ashgate, aldershot. burrell k 2011. the enchantment of western things: children’s material encounters in late socialist poland. transactions of the institute of british geographers 36: 1, 143–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00408.x. çaglar as 2001. constraining metaphors and the transnationalisation of spaces in berlin. journal of ethnic and migration studies 27: 4, 601–613. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691830120090403. cbos (centrum badania opinii społecznej [centre for public opinion research]) 2013. rodzina – jej współczesne znaczenie i rozumienie (family – its contemporary significance and understanding). <http://www.cbos.pl> 30.04.2013. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 209beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference chari s & verdery k 2009. thinking between the posts: postcolonialism, postsocialism, and ethnography after the cold war. comparative studies in society and history 51: 1, 6–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417509000024. christou a 2011. narrating lives in (e)motion: embodiment, belongingness and displacement in diasporic spaces of home and return. emotion, space and society 4: 4, 249–257. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.06.007. christou a & king r 2010. imagining ‘home’: diasporic landscapes of the greek-german second generation. geoforum 41: 4, 638–646. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.03.001. cieniuch j 2007. family – fatherland – god in the value system of polish adolescents. polish psychological bulletin 38: 4, 181–188. connor p 2008. increase or decrease? the impact of the international migratory event on immigrant religious participation. journal for the scientific study of religion 47: 2, 243–257. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2008.00405.x. de haan m 2011. the reconstruction of parenting after migration: a perspective from cultural translation. human development 54: 6, 376–399. http://dx.doi.org/10.1159/000334119. edensor t 2006. reconsidering national temporalities: institutional times, everyday routines, serial spaces and synchronicities. european journal of social theory 9: 4, 525–545. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368431006071996. ehrkamp p 2005. placing identities: transnational practices and local attachments of turkish immigrants in germany. journal of ethnic and migration studies 31: 2, 345–364. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183042000339963. faist t 2000. transnationalization in international migration: implications for the study of citizenship and culture. ethnic and racial studies 23: 2, 189– 222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/014198700329024. fihel a & kaczmarczyk p 2009. migration: a threat or a chance? recent migration of poles and its impact on the polish labour market. in burrell k (ed). polish migration to the uk in the 'new' european union: after 2004, 23–48. ashgate, farnham. foner n & alba r 2008. immigrant religion in the u.s. and western europe: bridge or barrier to inclusion? international migration review 42: 2, 360–392. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2008.00128.x. galasińska a 2010. leavers and stayers discuss returning home: internet discourses on migration in the context of the post-communist transformation. social identities: journal for the study of race, nation and culture 16: 3, 309–324. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2010.482416. galasińska a & kozłowska o 2009. discourses of a ‘normal life’ among post-accession migrants from poland to britain. in burrell k (ed). polish migration to the uk in the ‘new’ european union: after 2004, 87–105. ashgate, farnham. gawlewicz a 2014a. language and translation strategies in researching migrant experience of difference from the position of migrant researcher. qualitative research (online). http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794114557992. gawlewicz a 2014b. mobility and encounters with difference: the impact of migrant experience on the circulation of values and attitudes. phd thesis. university of sheffield, sheffield. giddens a 1987. social theory and modern sociology. polity in association with blackwell, cambridge. giddens a 1991. modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. stanford university press, stanford. gillis jr 1996. a world of their own making: myth, ritual, and the quest for family values. basic books, new york. glick schiller n & fouron g 2001. georges woke up laughing: long-distance nationalism and the search for home. duke university press, durham. glick schiller n, basch l & szanton blanc c 1992. towards a definition of transnationalism: introductory remarks and research questions. in glick schiller n, basch l & szanton blanc c (eds). toward a transnational perspective on migration, ix–xiv. new york academy of sciences, new york. goffman e 1974. frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. harper & row, new york. górak-sosnowska k 2011. from polish muslims to muslims in poland: there and back. in yılmaz h & aykaç ç (eds). perceptions of islam in europe: culture, identity and the muslim ‘other’, 107–124. i.b. tauris, new york. heath s, mcghee d & trevena p 2011. lost in transnationalism: unraveling the conceptualisation of families and personal life through a transnational gaze. sociological research online 16: 4, 12. http://dx.doi.org/10.5153/sro.2534. horolets a & kozłowska o 2012. provincializing europe, orientalizing occident or reproducing power imbalance? representations of the uk in post-2004 polish migrants' narratives. word and text: a journal of literary studies and linguistics 2: 1, 48–70. jaffrelot c & therwath i 2007. the sangh parivar and the hindu diaspora in the west: what kind of “long-distance nationalism”? international political sociology 1: 3, 278–295. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2007.00018.x. jasińska-kania a 2012. zmiany wartości polaków a procesy transformacji, europeizacji i globalizacji (changes in values of polish people and transformation, europeanisation and globalisation). in jasińska-kania a (ed). wartości i zmiany: przemiany postaw polaków w jednoczącej się europie (values and changes: attitudes of poles in unifying europe), 318–341. scholar, warszawa. jordan b 2006. foreword. in triandafyllidou a (ed). contemporary polish migration in europe: complex patterns of movement and settlement, ix–xiii. the edwin mellen press, lewiston. 210 fennia 193: 2 (2015)anna gawlewicz kennedy p 2009. the middle class cosmopolitan journey: the life trajectories and transnational affiliations of skilled eu migrants in manchester. in nowicka m & rovisco m (eds). cosmopolitanism in practice, 19–36. ashgate, aldershot. kilkey m, plomien a & perrons d 2014. migrant men's fathering narratives, practices and projects in national and transnational spaces: recent polish male migrants to london. international migration 52: 1, 178–191. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/imig.12046. kim yj 2012. ethnographer location and the politics of translation: researching one’s own group in a host country. qualitative research 12: 2, 131–146. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794111422032. kinnvall c 2004. globalization and religious nationalism: self, identity, and the search for ontological security. political psychology 25 : 5, 741–767. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00396.x. kofman e 2005. citizenship, migration and the reassertion of national identity. citizenship studies 9: 5, 453–467. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621020500301221. kurczewska j 2003. what is likely to happen to polish collective consciousness after accession to the european union? polish sociological review 141, 83–92. kuus m 2004. europe's eastern expansion and the reinscription of otherness in east-central europe. progress in human geography 28: 4, 472–489. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph498oa. kvale s & brinkmann s 2009. interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. sage publications, thousand oaks and london. lopez rodriguez m 2010. migration and a quest for ‘normalcy’. polish migrant mothers and the capitalization of meritocratic opportunities in the uk. social identities: journal for the study of race, nation and culture 16: 3, 339–358. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2010.482422. marciniak k 2009. post-socialist hybrids. european journal of cultural studies 12: 2, 173–190. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549409102424. mavroudi e 2010. nationalism, the nation and migration: searching for purity and diversity. space and polity 14: 3, 219–233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2010.532951. mayblin l, piekut a & valentine g 2014. ‘other’ posts in ‘other’ places: poland through postcolonial lens? (available from authors). maynes mj, pierce jl & laslett b 2008. telling stories: the use of personal narratives in the social sciences and history. cornell university press, ithaca and london. misztal b 2001. normality and trust in goffman's theory of interaction order. sociological theory 19, 312–324. mizielińska j 2010. between silencing and ignorance: families of choice in poland. dialogue and universalism 20: 5/6, 77-88. nagel cr & staeheli la 2008. integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of british arab activists. social & cultural geography 9: 4, 415–430. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802069019. nedelcu m 2012. migrants' new transnational habitus: rethinking migration through a cosmopolitan lens in the digital age. journal of ethnic and migration studies 38: 9, 1339–1356. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2012.698203. o'reilly k & benson m 2009. lifestyle migration: escaping to the good life? in o'reilly k & benson m (eds). lifestyle migration: expectations, aspirations and experiences, 1–13. ashgate, farnham. ons (office for national statistics) 2011. polish people in the uk – half a million polish residents. <http://www.ons.gov.uk> 10.01.2013. ons (office for national statistics) 2012. births in england and wales by parents’ country of birth, 2011. <http://www.ons.gov.uk> 10.01.2013. ons (office for national statistics) 2013. language in england and wales, 2011. <http://www.ons. gov.uk> 01.03.2014. owczarzak j 2009. introduction: postcolonial studies and postsocialism in eastern europe. focaal 53, 3–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2009.530101. paasi a 1999. nationalizing everyday life: individual and collective identities aspractice and discourse. geography research forum 19, 4–21. palmer c 1998. from theory to practice: experiencing the nation in everyday life. journal of material culture 3: 2, 175–199. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/135918359800300203. pędziwiatr k 2010. muslims in the polish media – the new folk devil? arches quarterly 4: 7, 89–95. peek l 2005. becoming muslim: the development of a religious identity. sociology of religion 66: 3, 215–242. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/4153097. podemski k 2012. doświadczanie świata. kontakty międzykulturowe polaków (experiencing the world. intercultural encounters of polish people). in frysztacki k & sztompka p (eds). polska początku xxi wieku: przemiany kulturowe i cywilizacyjne (cultural and civilisational changes in early xxi-century poland), 197–221. wydawnictwo pan, warszawa. portes a, guarnizo le & landolt p 1999. the study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field. ethnic and racial studies 22: 2, 217–237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/014198799329468. pratt g & yeoh b 2003. transnational (counter) topographies. gender, place & culture 10: 2, 159–166. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369032000079541. renzaho amn, green j, mellor d & swinburn b 2011. parenting, family functioning and lifestyle in a new culture: the case of african migrants in melbourne, victoria, australia. child & family social work 16: 2, 228–240. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2206.2010.00736.x. ryan l 2010. transnational relations: family migration among recent polish migrants in london. international migration, 49: 2, 80–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00618.x said ew 2003 [1978]. orientalism. penguin books, london. fennia 193: 2 (2015) 211beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’: migrant encounters with difference silvey r 2004. power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration studies. progress in human geography 28: 4, 490–506. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph490oa. sims mr & omaji ak 1999. migration and parenting: a pilot study. journal of family studies 5: 1, 84–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.5172/jfs.5.1.84. skey m 2011. ‘thank god, i'm back!’: (re)defining the nation as a homely place in relation to journeys abroad. journal of cultural geography 28: 2, 233–252. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2011.583437. skrbis z 1999. long-distance nationalism: diasporas, homelands and identities. ashgate, aldershot. smith dp 2011. geographies of long-distance family migration: moving to a ‘spatial turn’. progress in human geography 35: 5, 652–668. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132510394011. stenning a 2005. post-socialism and the changing geographies of the everyday in poland. transactions of the institute of british geographers 30: 1, 113–127. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00155.x. temple b 1997. watch your tongue: issues in translation and cross-cultural research. sociology 31: 3, 607–618. temple b 2010. feeling special: language in the lives of polish people. the sociological review 58: 2, 286–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2010.01904.x. trzebiatowska m 2010. the advent of the ‘easyjet priest’: dilemmas of polish catholic integration in the uk. sociology 44: 6, 1055–1072. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038038510381618. valentine g, jayne m & gould m 2012. do as i say, not as i do: the affective space of family life and the generational transmission of drinking cultures. environment and planning a 44: 4, 776–792. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a4446. verdery k 1996. nationalism, postsocialism, and space in eastern europe. social research 63, 77–95. vertovec s 2007. super-diversity and its implications. ethnic and racial studies 30: 6, 1024–1054. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870701599465. vertovec s 2009. transnationalism. routledge, abingdon. white a 2011. polish families and migration since eu accession. policy press, bristol. wise a 2004. nation, transnation, diaspora: locating east timorese long-distance nationalism. sojourn: journal of social issues in southeast asia 19: 2, 151–180. worth n 2009. making use of audio diaries in research with young people: examining narrative, participation and audience. sociological research online 14: 4, 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.5153/sro.1967. zarycki t 2004. uses of russia: the role of russia in the modern polish national identity. east european politics & societies 18: 4, 595–627. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325404269758. revisiting the ‘dual imperative’ of forced-migration studies – commentary to refstie urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa123036 doi: 10.11143/fennia.123036 reflections revisiting the ‘dual imperative’ of forced-migration studies – commentary to refstie eveliina lyytinen lyytinen, e. (2022) revisiting the ‘dual imperative’ of forced migration studies – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 74–77. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 from the perspective of forced-migration studies, the reflections article elaborates on the question hilde refstie posed in her keynote speech at geography days in 2021 – “what doing our part means in a progressive world of fast policymaking”. discussing the nature of forced-migration studies as a both policy-relevant and policy-critical field, then deliberating the issue of what ‘action’ may look like in action-oriented refugee research, this presentation of self-critical reflection on these issues is grounded in the academy-of-finland-funded research project actionoriented research on asylum seekers’ deportability (arade, 2018–2022). the author concludes that, while research should be conducted in solidarity with refugees and those collaborating with them, such as activists, scholars must maintain reflexive criticism considering which actions and approaches are suitable and desired in particular contexts. there are no simple solutions for designing and implementing actionoriented research for and with refugees. keywords: policy relevance, action research, self-reflection, forced migration, asylum seekers, deportation eveliina lyytinen (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6592-6280), migration institute of finland, turku, finland. e-mail: eveliina.lyytinen@migrationinstitute.fi in this reflections article, i elaborate on the concise but quite difficult question that hilde refstie (2022) posed in her keynote speech at 2021’s geography days: ”what doing our part means in a progressive world of fast policymaking”. i reflect on this from the perspective of forced-migration studies, the field of research in which i and dr refstie are engaged. my argument is structured around two main points. firstly, the study of forced migration is by nature both policy-relevant and policy-critical field. the second point emerges from my deliberation of the issue of what ‘action’ might look like in forced-migration research. here, i aim to present selfcritical reflection on these issues against the backdrop of experiences from my recently completed academy-of-finland-funded research project with the migration institute of finland, titled ‘actionoriented research on asylum seekers’ deportability’ (arade, 2018–2022). © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6592-6280 fennia 200(1) (2022) 75eveliina lyytinen the twofold nature of forced-migration studies let me begin with a few words about the nature of forced-migration studies as a simultaneously policy-relevant and policy-critical field. ever since the emergence of the academic field of refugee studies – or forced-migration studies (i use the two terms interchangeably in this piece despite acknowledging differences that are important in other contexts) – there has been on-going discussion of the need for its research to be, as jacobsen and landau (2003, 185) put it in their seminal paper on the ‘dual imperative’, at the same time “both academically sound and policy relevant”. however, i would like to suggest that we need to discern another ‘dual imperative’, that of forced-migration research having to be simultaneously policy-relevant and, perhaps even more importantly, policy-critical. this proposition is very much in line with the argument in bakewell’s (2008, 432) ground-breaking article on the need to push refugee research ”beyond the categories” and highlighting ”the importance of policy irrelevant research into forced migration”. with this short reflective piece, then, i would like to turn my attention to this dual imperative in conjunction with openly exploring the kinds of challenges i have faced whilst aiming to conduct refugee research that is at the same time relevant for policy and policy critical. it is crucial that, even though we collaborate with policyand law-makers, we do not necessarily take their concepts and categories for granted (in the context of deportations, see pirkkalainen et al. forthcoming). this is exactly the vital point that bakewell (2008, 432) made many years ago already: [t]he search for policy relevance has encouraged researchers to take the categories, concepts and priorities of policy makers and practitioners as their initial frame of reference for identifying their areas of study and formulating research questions. this privileges the worldview of the policy makers in constructing the research, constraining the questions asked, the objects of study and the methodologies and analysis adopted. in particular, it leaves large groups of forced migrants invisible in both research and policy. hence, the essential task of critical scholarship examining (forced) migration is to precisely question and problematise these policy categories and modes of governing. yet our funding bodies or collaborators may not agree on this point, and then it becomes also an ethics issue related to the terms on which we are conducting our research, and for whom. in one of our seminars, our excellent keynote speaker anna lundberg reminded of this with the ethics checklist that she had developed in the context of refugee research, upon which we expanded in a blog piece on research ethics (leinonen et al. 2020). in that entry, we argued that it is important to reflect on the following issues, among others: who defined your research problem? what motivated you to conduct this research? for whom is your study worthy and relevant, and who says so? how do you plan your project so that it promotes the maximum benefits for the participants? furthermore, in that piece on research ethics in forced-migration studies, we posed the question of accountability: to whom do we answer? i would argue that, as refugees and other forced migrants often live in precarious situations and may be vulnerable, it is essential that we not just conduct research about them but also aim to make sure our findings can contribute to more humane policy approaches in order to enhance refugees’ protection. therefore, i strongly align myself with the key principle of not conducting academic research on refugees unless it is inherently for and, when they desire this, also with refugees. that said, participatory approaches involving refugees are not suited to all research contexts or topics, so their use should always include caution and critical self-reflection. i return to this point at the end of the article. what action can look like: examples from a research project on asylum seekers’ deportability moving on, i would like to ponder what ‘action’ in an action-oriented research approach may look like – another issue dr refstie reflected on in her excellently critical keynote address. i will briefly look at three examples of challenges and possible solutions that i faced in my recently completed research project: 1) the attempt to collaborate with authorities, 2) the challenge of trying to pursue participatory 76 fennia 200(1) (2022)reflections research in the midst of the sars-cov-2 pandemic, and 3) considerations related to how i have been rethinking research impact. i frame this critical self-reflection thus: i find that, if one is to learn and develop as a researcher, these are precisely the moments and issues we ought to discuss more openly. firstly, one attempt to collaborate with authorities during this project had to do with our institute organising a public lecture series on voluntary return migration to afghanistan, iraq, and somalia jointly with the finnish immigration service (migri) and the finnish unit of the international organization for migration (iom). while i was in charge of chairing the seminar on return to afghanistan, the authorities told me, in essence, not to speak about forced deportations, only about voluntary return – a phenomenon that was not and still is not taking place from finland. rather, in autumn 2019, finland was continuing to send people back to afghanistan, mostly via charter flights. i ended up ignoring the authorities’ instructions, for precisely that reason: in 2019, we had only forced removals from finland to afghanistan; no one was returning to a conflict-stricken state on a voluntary basis. i, my colleagues and our international keynote speakers, and the afghan and finnish activists in the audience strongly agreed that we must be able to address the issue of forced deportation. we attempted to negotiate this approach several times, from the very beginning of these events’ planning and the choosing of international keynote speakers. we based our arguments on both research findings and the actual on-going situation in afghanistan. all in all, whereas this collaboration allowed me to engage with the authorities in the attempt to address policy-relevant issues, it was also an absurd experience. this was particularly striking when the audience asked the authorities several questions regarding forced deportations and not one of them, except the iom representative, were ready to answer. instead the audience, both in the lecture hall and online, were advised to email their questions to migri after the event. it became clear that we did not share similar understandings of what the focus of this event should have been and what terminology should have been used for discussing return to afghanistan from finland. to my surprise, on the very next day after the streamed event, i received a phone call from a politically active afghan man living in finland, previously unknown to me, who wanted to thank me for speaking about the situation with the right terms – a reassurance that i very much appreciated. i should conclude my related reflections, however, by recognising my stand-out collaboration with migri in other situations. earlier in 2019, i had the absolute pleasure of the former head of the organisation acting as a commentator in a book launch, and she showed exemplary willingness to answer a keen audience’s questions. moreover, i engaged with migri with regard to my data collection, and i am truly thankful for their time and willingness to explain to me how they run detention centres in finland. the second example is illustrated by the participatory art and creative-writing workshops that i was supposed to organise in spring 2020 as part of my research project with poet-journalist ahmed zaidan and photographer rewan kakil, excellent collaborators both originally from iraq. as we were planning these workshops, which would have engaged both people with a forced-migration background and activists, the pandemic hit finland. for me, cancelling them was first and foremost an ethics decision related to the ‘do no harm’ principle: i did not want to risk participants’ (or our teams’) health for the sake of obtaining interesting data and pursuing the original research plan. early in the pandemic’s spread especially, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants had straightforward access to neither health care related to the pandemic nor preventive equipment, and the power imbalance connected with access to health care influenced my decision not to hold these workshops. it is truly disappointing that we did not manage to arrange them, but we were able to conduct a smaller project, and ahmed’s deportation-related poems and rewan’s photographs are going to feature in an anthology that my colleagues and i have edited (pirkkalainen et al. forthcoming). lastly, what ‘action’ has meant for me in this action-oriented project has been the freedom to engage in assisting asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in their legal struggles to gain residence permits. i have been able to assist some of them in finding reliable lawyers, aid in the preparation of their new asylum applications, and support a few of them in their asylum interviews. as my actions have focused primarily on a handful of people, not on larger political campaigns, it is necessary that we also reconsider what impact means with regard to this kind of research. i had the pleasure of taking part in a meeting called in 2019 by my funding body, the academy of finland, where we discussed the research’s relevance and impact. during this meeting, i ultimately argued that in fennia 200(1) (2022) 77eveliina lyytinen action research into asylum seekers’ deportability, we should rethink societal impact and revisit whether in this context it may also include issues such as these: did we manage to put legal force behind someone’s right to stay in finland? did we enable stopping an illegal deportation? have we fought for access to services that people might otherwise not have received? the funding body’s representative responded well to this proposition of rethinking societal impact, and i hope to continue the discussions to push the boundaries between academia and activism, which need not always be clearly separated. after all, they cannot and perhaps even should not be (marucco 2021). conclusions as i conclude this reflection, i wish to reiterate my main message here: refugee research should be conducted in solidarity with refugees and people who collaborate with them (activists and others), but as scholars, or scholar-activists, we need to be self-critical, looking at which actions and approaches are suitable and desired in particular contexts. accordingly, there are no simple solutions in designing and implementing action-oriented research for and with refugees. as dr refstie warned in her insightful address, our self-critical approach must extend to how we conduct action or participatory research. i would like to finish, therefore, with a rather thought-provoking quote from a peer-group interview among activists that i conducted as part of my project. one activist with a forced-migration background raised a critical point in mentioning how some activists or volunteers engaged in politics – and this could be equally true in the research domain – have misused collaboration with refugees for their own agendas and purposes. i quote this activist: we have been speaking about how some lawyers have been using this [refugee] situation for their own benefit. but i have seen also that there are others. in their title there may be the word ‘volunteer’. it can be with a good purpose, but then they may use the immigration agenda in a selfish way for their own purposes. they will say what they’ve done to help immigrants, and they bring this to [campaigning for] elections. some just use the term ‘immigrant’ for their own purposes. i have seen people who use volunteering for their own agenda. of course, it is good that you can use your expertise for others’ good, but those who have experience of forced migration and the processes should be involved too and speak for themselves. (‘heimo’ in a peer-group interview on 16.10.2019, translation by the author) with my arade project having now come to an end, it is time to reflect self-critically on what has worked well and what has not. this is essential for researcher-activists like me, who strive to improve their ways of conducting collaborative research in line with ethically sound methods and to critically engage with policy-makers for better, more human asylum policies. references bakewell, o. (2008) research beyond the categories: the importance of policy irrelevant research into forced migration. journal of refugee studies 21(4) 432–453. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen042 jacobsen, k. & landau, l. (2003) the dual imperative in refugee research: some methodological and ethical considerations in social science research on forced migration. disasters 27(3) 185–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7717.00228 leinonen, j., lyytinen, e., tiilikainen, m. & kmak, m. (2020) ethics of studying forced migration: critical questions to consider. liikkeessä yli rajojen 21.12.2020. <https://liikkeessaylirajojen.fi/ethics-ofstudying-forced-migration-critical-questions-to-consider/> 15.11.2022. marucco, c. (2021) tutkijuus ja yhteiskunnallinen vaikuttavuus vaativat tilaa ihmisyydelle. versus 16.12.2021 <https://www.versuslehti.fi/tiededebatti/kriisitutkimus-muutosvoimana/> 15.11.2022. pirkkalainen, p., lyytinen, e. & pellander, s. (forthcoming) johdanto. in pirkkalainen, p., lyytinen, e. & pellander, s. (eds.) suomesta poistetut – näkökulmia karkotuksiin ja käännytyksiin, 7–26. vastapaino, tampere. refstie, h. (2022) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fen042 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-7717.00228 https://liikkeessaylirajojen.fi/ethics-of-studying-forced-migration-critical-questions-to-consider/ https://liikkeessaylirajojen.fi/ethics-of-studying-forced-migration-critical-questions-to-consider/ https://www.versuslehti.fi/tiededebatti/kriisitutkimus-muutosvoimana/ https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa45209 doi: 10.11143/45209 “to you, to us, to oil and gas” – the symbolic and socio-economic attachment of the workforce to oil, gas and its spaces of extraction in the yamal-nenets and khanty-mansi autonomous districts in russia gertrude saxinger saxinger, gertrude (2015). “to you, to us, to oil and gas” – the symbolic and socio-economic attachment of the workforce to oil, gas and its spaces of extraction in the yamal-nenets and khanty-mansi autonomous districts in russia. fennia 193: 1, pp. 83–98. issn 1798-5617. this article examines ways in which workers and the people around them become enmeshed with oil and gas resources, the extractive industry and the social and geographical space of the russian far north: in particular, the yamalnenets and the khanty-mansi autonomous districts (ynao and kmao). it highlights how both the local workforce and the long-distance commuters who travel back and forth from all over russia develop strong attachments to the social and economic meaning and symbolism of oil and gas. new labour conditions and a new configuration of the labour market have emerged in the context of privatization and out-sourcing in the last two decades. these changes have created new certainties and uncertainties for the future in a region that until now has been conceived as harsh, but stable, and as conferring both prosperity and privilege on those who can cope with the extreme conditions. this study is based on ethnographic long-term fieldwork in ynao and kmao. keywords: extractive industry, mobility, long-distance commute work (fifo), place attachment, actor-network theory, circumpolar north gertrude saxinger, department for social and cultural anthropology, university of vienna, austrian polar research institute (apri), universitaetsstrasse 7/c412, a-1010 vienna, austria, e-mail: gertrude.eilmsteiner-saxinger@univie.ac.at introduction it is rare to find occasions when vodka is drunk without an accompanying toast “to oil and gas”. this toast is heard throughout those regions of northern russia with links to the petroleum industry. people live directly or indirectly with oil and gas as workers, engineers, managers or ceos and as the inhabitants of mono-industrial towns in the russian north – such as the yamal-nenets and the khanty-mansi autonomous districts (ynao and kmao) – or as long-distance commute (ldc) workers coming to the north1 from all over russia. “oil is feeding us and russia”, they say, and the advertisements of companies and city administrations show how gas makes “lives sunnier and brighter”. the geographic location of the resources and the adjacent industry towns in the tundra or taiga of western siberia means working and living under severe climatic conditions and in remote areas. to compensate for this, workers typically receive higher salaries, along with supplementary payments according to a legally defined “northern coefficient” (kozlinskaya 2009). this prospering sector demands a highly qualified workforce. the large companies in the mono-industrial cities, many of them the direct or indirect successors to former state enterprises and most still fully or partly state owned, provide their employees with satisfactory working conditions, extra social benefits, and (compared to sub-contracting companies) sustainable employment. furthermore, through corporate social responsibility programs, these companies are active in the towns’ social and cultural life. subsequently, the inhabitants have a high level of loyalty and commitment to “our oil and gas companies” which have come to symbolise the cities and their prosperity. 84 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger at the same time, employment in the petroleum industry is becoming increasingly unpredictable due to the rise in the number of short-term contracts in the north, particularly in the construction sector. – this is a significant development compared to the soviet period up until the early 2000s. a further degradation in employment conditions stems from the increase in outsourced work from major to sub-contracting and sub-sub-contracting companies, leading to decreasing social benefits, lower salaries and, longer shift-rosters. these conditions particularly impact young, low qualified workers who are about to start their careers, resulting in lower social mobility, financial dependence on parents, and in many cases the necessity of actually living at their parents’ place with their own young family. nevertheless, they are fortunate in being employed; a much more favourable situation compared to other remote regions of central russia, where socio-economic development still lags behind even two and a half decades after the dissolution of the soviet union. despite these changes, the rich hydrocarbon resources of north-western siberia, which are the focus of this article, are still symbolically and socio-economically meaningful to the labourers, the industry and the state. the purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways people relate to oil and gas and the spaces of extraction. the following questions will be addressed: in which ways do long-distance commuting petroleum workers from central russian regions and those who are residents in the ynao and kmao build up symbolic and socio-economic relationships to oil and gas? what are the factors that cause people from central russian regions to work as long-distance commuters or to stay as permanent workers living in the north? these questions are analysed through the theoretical prism of actor-network-theory (law 1992; latour 1993), and ingold’s (2011) theory of meshworks of people and their material environment as well as experiences. furthermore, an examination of the perception of the materiality of resources and their symbolic meanings on the ground must also look at entanglements with the political economy (nash 1979; wolf 1982; ferguson 2005, 2006) and broader socio-economic and political processes (burawoy 1998). the interpretation of spatial relations to the resource rich north is inspired by the works of löw (2001, 2008) and the geographers massey (2005) and cresswell (2004) in terms of understanding how people experience this northern space – exemplified by ynao and kmao in this article – as both ‘extreme’ and ‘normal’ at the same time (eilmsteiner-saxinger 2013a, 2013b). this paper is based on my anthropological-geographical research – eleven months in total, beginning in 2007 – in several mono-industrial towns of ynao and kmao, with a special focus on the city of novy urengoy in ynao as well as on small and large shift-workers’ camps in this region. furthermore, i visited workers and their families in the central russian republics of bashkortostan, chuvashia and tatarstan. the findings also result from my mobile fieldwork on long-distance commuter trains between moscow and novy urengoy, on which i travelled several times back and forth (25,000 kilometres in total; one way is three and a half days on the train). this allowed not only indepth participant observation but also a wide range of informal talks with oil and gas workers about their life, their work and the meaning of oil and gas to them. the attraction of oil and gas if i turn on the gas stove in my viennese kitchen, i am directly connected to my fieldwork region. it takes a week for natural gas to travel from novy urengoy – which its inhabitants affectionately call the “russian gas capital” – through the so-called “friendship pipeline” that travels via the ukraine to the baumgarten gas distribution hub, to the east of vienna/austria (zirm 2007). in particular the urengoy gas field at the arctic circle is the russian source of the natural gas supply for europe. industry, the russian state, and the people working in the petroleum industry are embedded in the symbolic, social and socio-economic conditions of the north as a physical and social space. both the buyers and sellers of oil and gas are tightly connected with these rich resource spaces: for instance, the eu commission estimates that 60% of all gas imports come from russia up until 2013 (euractiv 2010). in 2009, 36% of the european union’s natural gas imports, as well as 31% of its crude oil imports, came from russia (directorate-general for energy and market observatory for energy 2011; eurostat 2011). between 2000 and 2008, imports of crude oil from russia to the eu rose by 59% (eurostat 2011). russia is in turn dependent on steady markets like those in the eu, as well as on stable crude oil prices. 70% of russian natural gas exports and 80% of crude oil exports go to fennia 193: 1 (2015) 85“to you, to us, to oil and gas” the european union (eu commission 2011). despite political discussion in russia about the need for urgent modernization and re-orientation towards new technologies and the development of other branches of industry and the economy, natural resources and the energy sector remain the main drivers of the russian economy, and the main source of income in the national budget. in 2011, 52% of the income from all exports came from oil and an additional 12% from gas. the fiscal revenue from oil and gas rose between 2001 and 2011 from 20% to 49% of the entire national revenue of russia (gustafson 2012: 4–5; cf. moe & wilson rowe 2009; moe & kryukov 2010). oil and gas are also amongst the most socially meaningful natural resources and subjects to wide global fluctuation related to price, availability, extraction and processing technologies, as well as geo-political interests. due to the wide range of usages of fossil fuels, oil and gas rank among the most precious materials that humans use. the north, so rich in natural resources, and the petroleum industry built around had allowed the russian state to avoid necessary economic reforms relating to economic diversification. the existing deposits in russia will remain a geopolitically relevant player in the long term (cf. stern 2005; gustafson 2012). the development areas of oil and gas in russia continuously shift towards the north, beyond the arctic circle and into the peripheries of siberia (saposhnikov & chudnovskiy 1988; gerasimchuk 2012). due to the increasing distance of the extraction sites from urban areas and from the densely populated european part of the country, long-distance commuting has become an increasingly popular response. the people making a living migrate along with the moving oil and gas development areas and companies. the life cycle of many extraction sites has already come to an end, but as they diminish, new ones open elsewhere. however, the petroleum industry is not only spatially, but also temporally dynamic. the extraction of oil and gas is either reduced or boosted depending on their fluctuating prices. workers are considered as depersonalized “human resources”, and like the fossil resources they are also subject to the laws of pricing according to accessibility and availability. a boom period makes the industry more dependent on qualified professionals while a period of bust reverses this dependency. beyond that, a decline makes the development of new deposits and thus of new employment more difficult, because investments in exploration and development are tending to decrease (cf. moe & kryukov 2010). depending on the geographical position, the geological conditions, the available technology and infrastructure, prospected fields are sooner or later transferred into the exploitation process. this also depends on the nature of the workforce currently available. these macro-economic and institutional conditions signal to the workers that they are directly bound up with the dynamics constituting the value of this natural resource, i.e. the oil and gas prices. furthermore, the phenomenon of the mobile workforce forms a part of state discussions about demographic issues. these discussions turn on whether northern towns should increase in order to meet the demand for workforce, or if they should consequently shrink through resettlement of pensioners and the unemployed while increasing the number of long-distance commuters (hill & gaddy 2003; heleniak 2008, 2009; nuykina 2011). long-distance commuters as well as local oil and gas workers are as closely connected to oil and gas and their socio-economic value, as are the industry and the state. these natural resources are emotionally and symbolically a part of everyday social life, not only for workers in the industry but for the entire region. the widely used drinking toast – “to you, to us, to oil and gas” – reveals the strong emotional connection to these natural resources “for russia” (fig. 1), that “feed russia” and fig. 1. advert i s e m e n t : “the energy from natural resources for russia”. 86 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger that “are serving the people” (fig. 2); this is shown excessively in the advertisements in towns and along the roads in the tundra and taiga. the immediate social and emotional connection of the industry to oil and gas goes also beyond the economic dimension, and can be best understood through the prism of its advertisement and pr strategies. the advertisement images establish an emotional connection to the area and the ground. the motifs have remained almost the same for decades and across generations. the ideologically charged video of the gazprom company hymn very powerfully illustrates this: the “sun beneath the earth […] stores the energy for the nation” and “heats our offices and houses”. it “warms us from within the earth”. the chorus calls people to toast “to you, to us, and the all-russian gas” (tumayev 2009). these motifs have been selected because they evoke particular positive feelings and people identify with them so readily. this is not only true for those who live in the northern mono-industrial towns, but also for those who commute there from a long-distance. people reiterate these images that date back over decades: many old songs abound about the resource, the hard work necessary to extract it and the experiences of life and work in the extreme cold. gas workers, oil workers and engineers are proud of their professions and their efforts in extracting the wealth for the nation, and of course for themselves. festivities for the various professions with patriotic ideologically laden speeches are regular events in the course of the year. the gas flares emitting from the refineries, visible from afar, are symbols of the on-going production day and night. the sight makes people feel confident that all is right with the world. several times, people pointed out to me these flare stacks as the symbols of which they are fiercely proud. my focal impression is that the experience of the physical aspect of oil and gas not only exists as an economically relevant material, but as an emotionally evocative one that causes people to feel enmeshed with (ingold 2011) based on its value, and by which they establish an emotional, lived relationship. thus, the natural resource – oil, gas, gas condensate – becomes an actant, because it forms a network with people, spaces and institutions (law 1992; latour 1993). the ascription of meaning to experienced spaces takes place within an amalgam of local and national practices, of agents and the global political economy. people travel half of a week to novy urengoy and gas travels one week to the european gas distribution hub baumgarten in europe (zirm fig. 2. advertisement: “the energy from natural resources for the people. the great mission: welfare”. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 87“to you, to us, to oil and gas” 2007): fossil resources to the south-west, human resources to the north-east. both categories – material and social – are on the move. they are interwoven mainly by people who become dynamic objects as human resources, such as the long-distance commuters. thus the fossil-fuel resources are, for those who earn their living and draw yields from them, highly significant in a social sense. they are no less significant and socially constructed for the russian state. for both the sellers and the buyers, they are of geo-political interest. they are significant – consciously or unconsciously – also for the users of oil and gas to a certain extent. like other natural resources, oil and gas, along with the areas in which they are extracted, not only have a material dimension but also a significant social, economic and symbolic dimension. these dimensions relate to dynamic pricing as well as to the limited amount of these natural resources. this finite nature produces an immediate dependency on its availability, and a global competition for it. this is accompanied by the above mentioned fluctuating economic value for the energy carriers and the meaning of its supply for the local community immediately affected by it, as well as for global society. oil and gas and their production sites are dynamic, and so the people delivering these natural resources are mobile and socially organized in a dynamic way. as has been said, there is a social, economic and symbolic entanglement of oil and gas, the north, and the long-distance commuters in russia. there is therefore a tight connection between the workers’ emotions and experiences and the materiality of oil and gas and their space of extraction. attracted by the north this section discusses northern residents who are either working locally or who are intra-regional long-distance commuters to the extraction sites in greater distance to the northern cities. since the 1970s people from the broad swaths of the soviet union were recruited in order to cover the workforce demands of both the fossil-fuel deposits to be developed and the construction of mono-industrial cities in north-west siberia – a planning paradigm that was dominant up to the beginning of the 1980s. although indigenous inhabitants of the north are working today in the petroleum industry (dudeck 2010; rouillard 2013), they were not explicitly considered as a part of the workforce when the exploitation of natural resources in the western siberian basin began. the reason underlying was that they were regarded as physiologically and culturally unsuited to jobs in this sector2. the huge deposits in north-western siberia, which had already been explored in the 1930s, were only continuously developed from the 1960s onward. in the course of this development, the mono-industrial cities were built to house workers. although it was considered, the soviet regime did not decide on the system of long-distance commuting (eilmsteiner-saxinger & aleshkevich 2008; aleshkevich 2010) as it was already implemented in, for example, the arctic canada and in alaska, but instead elected for the erection of permanent settlements and large cities. the long-distance commute workforce lives and work at the extraction sites far from home for shifts ranging from two weeks to two months, alternating with an equivalent rest periods at home. this is the predominant mode of labour organisation in remote areas today. soviet bureaucrats contended that mobile people might more easily evade state control than sedentary ones (cf. fillipov 1982), and furthermore, the sedentary paradigm should be seen in the context of a state-run process of domestic colonization, as well as within the paradigm of the submission of nature by technology for the industrial and social development of the socialist state. in the latter half of the 20th century, the soviet union entered into a second phase of urbanization and industrialization of the northern peripheries. in this phase, a high economic price was paid for the construction of a complete social, cultural and technical infrastructure for these mono-industrial cities. the living costs per inhabitant of the cities in the permafrost areas of taiga and tundra are estimated to be three to four times higher (hill & gaddy 2003: 125; martynov & moskalenko 2008; andreyev et al. 2009: 104) than in comparable cities of the densely populated central regions. this fact was already prompting criticism by the economists at the beginning of the 1980s when the significance of long-distance commuting was first discussed (bogudinova 1981). only in the 1980s did the soviet union, like other circumpolar countries before it, turn towards the system of long-distance commuting (pashin 2004; eilmsteiner-saxinger & aleshkevich 2008; aleshkevich 2010). although the local workforce is still being recruited from the mono-industrial cities of the north, today 88 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger long-distance commuting from all over russia is an established system for delivering workers to the russian natural resources industries. the second industrialization period of the north did not claim as many human lives as the stalinist industrialization by forced labourers in the gulag system (cf. stettner 1996; stark 2003). the mobile lifestyle is not a new experience for many of the northern workers. mobility and migration became a part of the identity of families due to their earlier voluntary or forced resettlement. in particular, my interlocutors from the caucasus republics, who were recruited as a qualified workforce from the traditional petroleum regions to work in the industry of the north, recount the waves of migration in the course of the last two or three generations. people from chechnya in particular can recount another history of collective mobility besides the deportations that occurred towards the end of world war ii, and their resettlement in the 1950s; the massexodus in the turmoil of the first and second chechen war in the 1990s and 2000s. today the north, consisting of resident workers and those who long-distance commute in and out, is a melting pot of numerous nationalities, ethnic groups and languages. besides the indigenous population of the north, there are inhabitants who have migrated from all parts of the former soviet union and russia. some of them stay for a few years, others until their pension or their death. as is often said, both long-distance commuting and the north of russia are perceived by the workers and their families as both extreme and normal at the same time (eilmsteiner-saxinger 2013a, 2013b). an important caveat, however, is that the extreme in this sense not only connotes something arduous or negative, but also something positive. the extremity of this place is a source of identity that is defined by participating in something special; for the long-distance commuters as for the northern residents. for those who came under the ideological conditions of the development of the north, it was a participation in a project of civilization (tsivilizatsiya) and of exploitation (osvoenie) for the prosperity of the motherland (rodina) and the socialist nation. for many it was also romanticism and adventure that drew them to the north, and, besides the opportunities to make money, these are still the main reasons why people may decide on a life as long-distance commuters going back and forth between the southern regions and the north, in particular to ynao and kmao. “i came here for romantic reasons, like so many of us. it was fascinating. we were young and many of us weren’t married yet. young people met here and found a partner for life. we lived an adventurous life in an utterly unknown region we knew nothing about, and where there was nothing. back home there were adverts everywhere which promised good jobs in the north. we were young and wanted to experience something and see the country.” (marina filipovna)3 for many employees the migration or long-distance commuting to the north was often the only possibility to move within the soviet state, or to move away from home. the central significance of the north for people, state and industry lies in the ascription of attributes such as ‘hostile’ and “climatically harsh”, which became clearer in my investigation. the north, with its unimaginable, fascinating but also dull vastness is not a normal, but rather an unfavourable living space that requires a large amount of effort to adjust to (adaptatsiya) and turn it into normality. these terms can be found today in the literature of many scientific fields about the north of russia (cf. rouillard 2013). at the same time, precisely these ascriptions are the positive moment of many identity constructions. without the hardship of this extreme place, the identity-defining attribute of accomplishing something special, which is especially honoured by the family, cannot be achieved (eilmsteiner-saxinger 2013a, 2013b). according to the view of the non-indigenous population, the north has to be made into a place for living and working through industrialization: “when we got here there was practically nothing. i had no idea what this north was. although i knew that it was going to be cold, the clothes i had brought were totally inadequate. we built a city and a civilization here under the most adventurous conditions.” (marina filipovna) awareness among both the residents and the long-distance commuters that the north has been a living and working place for the indigenous population for millennia is not considered a relevant factor in the discourse of the development of the north as a civilized place (stammler & wilson 2006; stammler 2011). in this way, a clear boundary is drawn between the indigenous and the industry-related population. the perspective of imperial colonization imposes a severe limitation onto the traditional ways of life, e.g., that of the reindeer-herding nomads. on the other hand, the fennia 193: 1 (2015) 89“to you, to us, to oil and gas” view that defends folklore is protectionist. the colonial view sees itself as bringing the civilization and this is understood as a legitimate reason to acquire natural resources for the good of the nation. the workers thus perceive the north as a place which was built with their own hands under extreme conditions and with the spirit of ‘pioneers’; again this is true for the older long-distance commuters as well. my research, and that of bolotova and stammler (2010) (cf. stammler & eilmsteinersaxinger 2010), demonstrate this. this generation still calls themselves ‘pioneers’ (pioneri), and in many cities of the north street names such as the “street of enthusiasts” (ulitsa entuziastov) bear witness to this self-assessment. medals like the one for the “hero of labor” (geroy truda), or awards within the “stakhanov movement” signify individual prestige and measures taken by the state to enhance careers (ljapin 1952). the history of this period is honoured in the museum of the gazprom dobycha yamburg company (this operates with long-distance commuters only) in the camp of the yamburg gas field with a permanent and thematically specific exhibition. the museum exhibits both the uniforms of the ‘stakhanov’ groups and the medals and numerous photos of the “people who first moved there” (pervoprokhodtsy)4, those who travelled the 200 kilometres from novy urengoy to yamburg in ten days with heavy-duty vehicles (today it takes four hours by car): “the atmosphere was fantastic and the people in the collective were close friends. this was necessary for survival because we lived together in an extremely confined space. it is different today. the successive generations of workers came here when everything was already built, and the young ones can no longer imagine how we had to build everything from scratch. today yamburg is an excellent [commuter] city with all the most up-to-date features. there is even a church.” (eduard stepanovich)3 but it was not only these ideological factors that led people to the northern centres including ynao and kmao. a patriotic attitude was also necessary in order to be selected by the recruiting procedures (komsomolskaya putevka) of the youth organization of the communist party (the komsomol) for employment in the north. “perhaps i am still a communist. (laughs). but i was ready at all times. after my studies at the technical university i went to mongolia, then i married and our first daughter was born. i remember when her mother stepped out of the helicopter with her still in the basket. we still lived in nadym, the first city here at the medvedze gas field. at first we were staying in the large tents, but when my family followed we were given a balka [a small wooden house] and when they were built we moved to the derevyaska [a two-storey wooden barracks with small flats and one common kitchen on each floor]. the city developed and life became more civilized. our second daughter was born in 1986, when we were in the north. we already had a hospital. everything was already normal. in the 1980s careers could be made in the north, and i wanted to work my way up. i went where the [communist] party sent me. [...] in 1986 i came to chernobyl as a likvidator. just as we did not know what to expect in the north, so we either did not know what to expect in chernobyl. but there was no question that i would go for my motherland.” (vyacheslav antonovich)3 with the inconvenience and difficulties of the sub-arctic climate of the tundra and taiga, and of the construction of a feasible living environment, comes a feeling of legitimately gaining substantial privileges that are the social and financial reward for the hardships endured in the special and extreme conditions (ekstremalnye usloviya) of the north. these privileges were developed in the soviet union and include both the privileged access to general consumer goods, which were made accessible in the north, and the car for which one did not have to wait ten years, even though the streets only stretched a few kilometres in the island cities of the tundra, as i was humorously told in a conversation. take on work in the north meant, both then and today, a guaranteed career. the state companies provided housing for their employees in the central regions as second homes with the intent to lure people back south after retirement. earlier, there generally were – and in some companies still exist, although adapted to contemporary needs – special non-financial benefits (sotspaket), such as free access to holiday camps or sanatoriums at the black sea, as well as access to living space and goods that in the “economy of scarcity” were not normally available, or could only be gained via informal connections. there were also special shops at the first long-distance commuter camps, as my companion in yamburg recounted during a walk through what is still the largest long-distance commuter camp in russia (and the soviet union): “the shops were packed here. we were able to buy perfume, radios, electronic goods, clothes and many other things. there were all sorts of sausage and cheese. it was of course expensive but we earned well. when shopping, we bought as much as we could carry home to the south. in the 1990s, 90 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger when the economy went down and money was not worth much anymore, we also used these things to barter with. that was of course a problem at some point. then, before boarding a flight back to the south your bags were inspected, because the luggage was much too heavy and it was absurd that all these things were transported to the north and then people flew it back again. that food was meant for living well here and not for feeding all the relatives back home.” (tamara dmitrovna)3 thus, there was primarily a personal socio-economic motivation for people moving to the north. the population living in the north still has the right to an additional pension as well as additional salary of up to 80% of the standard wage depending on the regional latitude. similarly, the inter-regional long-distance commuters can claim a higher pension, calculated according to an equated coefficient that depends on the worker’s number of earning years, and the additional salary as mentioned above. however, for them this counts only for the duration of the shift while they are actually located in the north (kozlinskaya 2009). as a result, the systems that make working life in the north appealing have remained pretty much the same since the time of the soviet union. as the findings of my research show, there are strong similarities between the reasons embedded in the current free market economy to work in the north (primarily but not exclusively economic factors) and those of the soviet times. however, back then the reasons could not only be attributed to the ideological enthusiasm of the young komsomol members, but also included the privileges and financial rewards to be expected, which were part of a general socialist work ideology whose aim was to boost productivity by competition between the workers (ljapin 1952). as mentioned above, for many the motivation for remaining in the north is the notion of belonging to the group of the so-called pioneers and being strongly rooted there. this first generation of immigrants has built its social networks in the north and raised its children there, who now also work for the companies of the city or as intra-regional long-distance commuters. many of the second generation studied in the central region, lived in the apartments mentioned above which were built by the employing companies, and came back to the north in order to build a career and start a family. the social benefits available to the employees of companies close to the state include an annual free flight to the central region for them and their families, which enables interaction between the residents of the north and their second home in the central region. the mono-industrial cities in the petroleum regions of the north today offer a consistently high quality of life for all generations with a well-functioning cultural and social infrastructure. compared to those of the central regions the wages are high. they can be compared to the average wage of moscow and saint petersburg. for well-trained people there is an employment market that is searching for highly qualified professionals. the high wages – compared with those in jobs in the public or service sector – are not only a result of the highly paid petroleum sector, but also of the extra wages and pensions mentioned above, earned in the course of a professional life in regions which are legally qualified as the “far north” or “equivalent to the far north”. although i met many people who left the north immediately after becoming pensioners, and who want to move back to their apartments or houses in the central regions, there is also a discourse which favours staying behind. it is not uncommon for those who have lived many years or decades in the north and who have adapted to the climate to die of a heart attack a few years after returning to the central region. at this point however, it is difficult to prove if early death – in this context it is mainly men – is connected to the return to the mild climate or to the general low life expectancy of russian men, which is approximately 60 years. the connection with the return to the central region is not medically proven, but this fear nevertheless exists (cf. rouillard 2013). the employees located in the north benefit from the contracts negotiated between the enterprises and the regional government (eilmsteinersaxinger 2011), which in cases of equal qualification provides for a preferential recruiting of the local population5. the cities of the north that are connected to the petroleum sector have a young demographic and almost total employment. last but not least, the successful adjustment to the climate of the tundra and taiga is the main reason for wanting to permanently live in the north such as in ynao and kmao. there are numerous mixed forms of mobile life of long-distance commuters and their families. some start their careers in a northern city and switch over to inter-regional long-distance commuting; alternatively, inter-regional longdistance commuters may settle in the cities of the fennia 193: 1 (2015) 91“to you, to us, to oil and gas” north and work locally, or commute long-distance intra-regionally. commuting from the central regions and the enlarged mental map inter-regional long-distance commuters mostly, although not exclusively, come from traditional petroleum regions. they come from places like the border city belgorod, the hub leading into ukraine, from moscow, samara, yoshkar ola, cheboksari, kazan, omsk, tomsk, tobolsk, kurgan, perm and many others (fig. 3). the socio-economic significance of this can be demonstrated by the example of the volga region where, according to the viceprime minister balabanov of the bashkotorstan republic, about 100,000 people (out of a population of four million) work as long-distance commuters (regnum 2011). as in most russian regions outside of moscow and saint petersburg, the volga region, to which the republic of bashkortostan belongs, has still massive social and economic problems, such as low wages and a high unemployment rate, twenty years after the disintegration of the soviet union. in the volga region, the average monthly income is 21,788 rubles (€438), while in kmao and in ynao – the russian centres of oil and gas production – the average monthly income is 50,575 rubles (€1,016) and 67,194 rubles (€1,350), respectively (rosstat 2014). in this way, employment in the petroleum industry of the north has become an important factor in the local and regional economies of the long-distance commuters’ regions of origin. compared with the working population in the local labour market, the families of long-distance commuters have an above average household income. this in turn has a positive effect on the local markets in areas with a weak economy. in russia, the labour market in the natural resources areas of the north is of considerable significance for the population of the peripheries – i.e., regions outside of the prospering centres of saint petersburg or moscow, and in particular for small cities and rural areas. in addition, both the centres and the capitals of these regions benefit enormously from the incomes of the north through the increased consumption of this stronger economic group, as well as by the influx of people from the villages and small cities into the regional centres. in many cases, this influx is caused by the increased education available for fig. 3. main travel routes of the long-distance commuters. 92 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger children and better chances in the labour market for the non-long-distance commuting family members. furthermore, travel from the regional centres to and from a work place in ynao and kmao is easier. let us take as an example one of russia’s, and indeed the world’s, best paid jobs in this sector for blue-collar workers: the welders. this is a profession that is primarily performed by men and that often comes up in my research. it does not refer to automotive or domestic welding, but that performed in industrial complexes with tasks whose quality requirements demand practice and certification of several years. these workers are highly paid, for example up to 35,000 and 40,000 rubles (€800) per month in the central russian republic of bashkortostan for the most highly qualified class. in ynao and kmao, they can earn up to triple the amount for this job. for those who fly to the far east or to sakhalin tickets cost up to €800, whereas train tickets to workplaces in north-west siberia cost about €80 to €100. tickets are partly paid by the companies, and partly not. given these circumstances, inter-regional long-distance commuting is still profitable. in the social group discussed here, cars and living space are mainly procured via loans and mortgages, with interest rates in the republic of bashkortostan being, for example, approximately 12% for accommodation and between 25% and 30% for consumer goods (ufafinans.ru 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). older employees carry the education costs for children, which have been rising for the last ten years, especially at universities and technical high schools. when a mother stays at home to look after her infant, her second income to support the young family is missing. it has become apparent that this is frequently the case: “i am at home with the small children and cannot earn anything. i get 2,800 rubles from the state6. furthermore, we are both on our second marriage, and for this reason my husband has to pay alimony for his child from the first marriage. this is not possible without the income [of the longdistance commuting partner].” (olesya vladimirovna)3 there are fundamental financial reasons why people decide, at moments where the need for a higher income is the greatest, to take up work that requires long-distance commuting into the harsh climate of the resource peripheries. in the so called long-distance commuting dynasties, these decisions are made early and are determined on the one hand by education, which is already directed towards the petroleum industry, and on the other by the fact that long-distance commuting is a familiar form of working life for these families (saxinger et al. 2014). both the possible problems and the considerable advantages are well known to the children of long-distance commuting families and their communities. this makes their decision easier, as ethnographic data show. it may involve a deliberate refusal to take up long-distance commuting or encourage a conscious decision of pursuing a longterm mobile career in the petroleum industry. due to the comparably high wages and the well-known fact that the oil and gas industry is one of the most stable in russia, increasing numbers of people are choosing to study at technical universities and take special courses in the numerous professions the petroleum industry has to offer. two tendencies in regard to long-distance commuting can be discerned; parents with stable jobs help their children and relatives to acquire jobs in their companies, while others try to give their children an education which will not lead inexorably into the petroleum industry, so their children can have a life different to theirs. as gennadiy viktorovich, an older engineer, says, “my children study law and economics. in this way, life in the south is open to them”. the extent of readiness for longdistance commuting is different in many families. although in some families all or one or two members work in the north, other members of the family categorically refuse to do likewise, mainly because of health concerns, as a daughter in a longdistance commuting family told me. besides the economic connection of the north and the central regions, they are also socio-spatially integrated through long-distance commuting. in qualitative interviews, my correspondents recounted that they have close connections to the north through relatives and acquaintances who permanently moved there – for example to the north-west siberian industrial cities like surgut, nishnevartovsk, raduzhnyy, kogalym, nefteyugansk, novy urengoy, gubkiskiy, noyabrsk and many more. inter-regional workers are not only connected through relatives and friends whom they visit while they are on duty in the north, but also establish a strong relation to the region, oil and gas that gives them work and causes them to live part-time in the north. many told me that it became a second home, a place of individual freedom and an adventure, as well as a time-off from family responsibilities. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 93“to you, to us, to oil and gas” although the topos of the north as a metaphorical gold mine predominates, it is evident that this is not the only contributory factor driving longdistance commuting today. two other things are important, just as they were in the soviet period: the employees have to agree to the life-style in the long term and identify with a life of mobility lived multi-locally (weichhart 2009). there are various motivations for choosing this mobile lifestyle. today, as in the soviet union, the high salaries and other honorariums gained by long-distance commuting facilitate social progress. however, there is also a motivation of travel as such, a desire to see the country, an interest in the region of the north, and, for some, an adventurous spirit. as argued above, those who have been long-distance commuting for many years have put down roots in the north. this is a relevant coping strategy for integrating the sphere of home and the sphere of living in camps into a meaningful life as a whole. many report that they can commune with nature while they are in the north; walk in the tundra and taiga, pick mushrooms and berries as a leisure activity. others engage with the native population and buy fish and reindeer meat from them. and others might again have a lover or a second family in the north. many variations of interaction with the northern space occur and cause the north to be incorporated as a meaningful part of life, to become a part of the long-distance commuters’ mental map. the north integrates in this way with the central russian and southern regions in an emotional, symbolic and of course in a socio-economic way and expands the mental map of people. the symbolism and meaning of the north and the petroleum industry the north of russia – as well as siberia – has been ascribed a number of formal and politically institutionalized as well as informal features during its history. this spans from the time of the cossack colonization of czarist russia – where it was also a matter of generating resources (e.g. the fur trade) – to the czarist ethnic-russian settlements into areas with an indigenous population, including the period of colonization in the sense of the institutionalized conquest of the areas of siberia and the far east. this movement also included settlement by banishment and convict colonies, which continued within the framework of the gulag network of the stalinist period. the geopolitical and territorial solidification of the incorporation of the sub-arctic, siberian and far eastern areas into the state occurred parallel with the exploitation of natural resources and the industrialization of these resource frontiers. there have been numerous political agendas behind the exploitation of natural resources in the north (osvoenie severa) that go hand in hand with concrete demographic strategies and settlement plans. these have originated from the period since the 1960s, when the petroleum industry rapidly expanded in the western siberian lower basin and the western siberian north, as well as from the 1980s onward when long-distance commuting became institutionalized. thus the north has a deep social significance that comes from an era that long predates the period of the exploitation of natural fossil fuels or the history of czarist banishment and stalinist deportations. in this history of the significance of the north, both the potential wealth and the extreme and threatening life conditions are inseparable from a colonial point of view. for the employees in the petroleum industry, the north – in particular ynao and kmao – has the meaning of affluence and social mobility. the north attracts people and encourages them to put down roots there. as shown above, even the inter-regional long-distance commuters put down roots. an interlacing of the central regions and the regions of the north, rich in resources, takes place at the level of the employees in both a socio-economic and a more symbolic sociospatial sense. the practice of integrating the north into a part of one’s personal life is not only significant for the individual who works in the petroleum industry in such a climatically, geographically and symbolically extreme region, but also conveys to the worker’s home region the realities of life as a long-distance commuter. this is of central significance in explaining the readiness of people from the central regions to commute long-distance to the north. the north, which is commonly seen in russia as an unknown region, becomes, via the long-distance commuters, a living reality for those central russian communities who share this experience. the economically stagnating central regions grow together with the north, rich in the sense of the value of its natural resources, and the work places in the north become incorporated into the lives of individuals and society at large. thus this 94 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger integrated social space is characterized by its material and socio-economic conditions and by people positioning and institutionalizing themselves in relation to goods – in this case the valuable resources oil and gas. this is also true for state institutions and industry, which institutionalize the relational dependency on the northern natural resource areas. those who entered the petroleum industry only a few years ago – increasingly inter-regional long-distance commuters from the central regions – do not have a socialist soviet memory of the petroleum industry. hence, for them the north is still the place where good money can be made, while the older workers complain about degrading working conditions. however, the reality and normality of the industry for those too young to remember the socialist era is current neoliberal practice, with its sub-contracting companies and privatizations. it is only when working conditions are against the law, and when a weak and inherently corrupt judiciary does not offer help, that modern business practice gains a new and extreme significance. as a result, it is not precise to speak of post-socialist conditions. rather the term “re-socialist-neoliberal petroleum industry” would be more accurate. the term also indicates that in the sense of the vertical-power politics of president vladimir putin, re-socialist stands for re-nationalization tendencies and the state protection of resources and profits, whereas neoliberal stands for the conditions under which the employees, both stationary and long-distance commuters, are working today. as a consequence, employees as human resources are less significant in the eyes of the state than the natural resources. conclusion this paper highlights the strong ties between people, the socio-economic potential of oil and gas and the extractive industry, which together form a network (law 1992; latour 1993) or define a meshwork in ingold’s (2011) sense. oil and gas are associated with socio-economic well-being, stable work life and a life lived under extreme conditions. however, this symbolic and practical meaning is increasingly challenged by new conditions brought about by the industry and its continuous restructuring. furthermore, the large companies that are running the mono-industrial towns are symbolically equated with the state through their soviet legacy. in this sense, people are not only loyal to their companies but also to the state. this loyalty, however, is being eroded due to a diversified job market operating under neoliberal labour conditions, which especially disadvantages lower qualified people and increases job instability. nevertheless, the general prosperity of the petroleum industry located in the remote north, such as in the resource rich districts ynao and kmao and their economic potential, still engender a strong attachment to these places and to oil and gas in general. people expect to earn a stable livelihood, be it as resident or as mobile workers. therefore, the hydrocarbon industry of ynao and kmao still attracts people to move or long-distance commute there, especially from regions that were hit by the global economic crisis, which started in 2008. the significance of the rich, but climatically, physically and psychologically challenging geographical zones has led me to focus on the theoretical conception of space in this paper. this focus is also a result of the numerous locations that characterize the life of the long-distance commuters: the home and the camps on site. mobility does not only take place between geographically and temporally distant physical places. it occurs in places with specific material, ideal, economic and socio-temporal characteristics, which are constituted by relations between living beings and goods (cf. law 1992; latour 1993; löw 2001, 2008; massey 2005). this relational setting constitutes the human world and at the same time takes place within it – a world where social agency and social structures are of equal relevance. this aspect is significant when thinking about the integration of the regions of the north that are rich in natural resources with the structurally weak central regions that the long-distance commuters come from, both on a micro-level and on a macro-state level, which are then in turn embedded within a global structure. how are people enmeshed with the natural resources, the extractive industry and this social and geographical space? a key sign of this relationship is the advertising of companies and the city administrations that shape the identity of the strong and reliable gas workers (gazoviki) and oil workers (neftyaniki). people directly correspond with these advertisements and messages, insisting to me that “what we do is important for us, for the industry and for the state”. it part-constitutes their identity. furthermore, the ‘extreme’ aspect of a fennia 193: 1 (2015) 95“to you, to us, to oil and gas” society dwelling in the north and exploiting its valuable resource-commodities shapes workers’ attachment to the place and creates a specific spatial atmosphere (löw 2001, 2008). identification with this place keeps alive the idea that people are a part of a worthwhile endeavour under extreme conditions. this extreme constitutes also a masculine identity that involves the individual´s confidence of being capable feeding the family (in a patriarchal sense). they move back and forth according to their ideas regarding a successful life and they do it for their families. this life in the extreme has become normal for the people who devote themselves to it long-term (eilmsteinersaxinger 2013a, 2013b). the relation to oil and gas in the sense of a meshwork (ingold 2011) or network (law 1992; latour 1993) is shaped by the significance of this material for economic prosperity and social mobility. the materiality of oil and gas must be looked at from the perspective of its social life (appadurai 1988) as a commodity, meaning that the value of natural resources is dynamic. it is dependent on world market prices and delivery contracts made in the context of geo-political relations. the prosperity and stability of the industry depends on these factors and subsequently the people’s stable employment. once prices fall, investment into new fields and therefore into new jobs is scrapped. furthermore, economic crises such as that of 2008 are often just an excuse to reduce salaries, and workers complain vociferously about this fact. on the other hand, the discovery and prospecting of new fields, as is presently the case, parallelly fosters also a spirit of optimism and a high level of trust in the industry and the state. an awareness of the limited nature of resources is not evident in everyday and political discourse. oil and gas are essential material and symbolic parts of lives of the long-distance commuters and the residents in the resource rich regions of ynao and kmao. they say that these materials are “feeding them” and therefore foster social and economic prosperity for individuals and their families. among people from the southern and central regions of russia, a feeling of “blue and black gold-rush” is apparent. the north is promising in both socio-economic and subsequently in symbolic terms; to put it in cresswell´s (2004) terms, the north is constructed as a meaningful place – in this case constructed by the people, the state and the industry. especially in remote regions such as villages and small towns in central and southern russia, the economy is lagging behind, jobs and especially well-paid jobs are rare, making people desperate to go to the climatically harsh north. many of them have never been there before. on the other hand, long-distance commuter networks have been established over time and established workers act as gate-keepers for jobs in the north. the economic motivation is at the forefront and along with that resources like oil and gas become symbolically meaningful. working in the remote north also allows people to experience freedom, adventure and in many cases a life with a second partner besides the official spouse; these support putting down the roots. therefore, they have incorporated the north into their social space that no longer consists of the home region in the south alone. people from the northern mono-industrial cities who came there as pioneers (as did the inter-regional long-distance commuting pioneers) expect the continuity of a secure job that is well paid and contains special social benefits. today however, the restructuring of the industry is bringing about unpredictability concerning sustainable jobs, and salaries are no longer as generous as they once were. people feel betrayed after what they have done for their motherland over recent decades, and the patriotism that was once strong is diminishing. in particular, low qualified workers or those who do not want to enter the extractive industry, of whom many are women, struggle with very low salaries, particularly in the service sector and in the state bureaucracy. today it seems that the state is trying to regain control over natural resources and state-shares in corporations are increasing. while state control over the resources is prevailing, strong efforts to protect labour conditions and the well-being of workers and citizens in the north does not seem to be on the state’s political agenda. this is what i call a “re-socialist-neoliberal petroleum industry” (eilmsteiner-saxinger 2013b). for the employees and their families, however, oil and gas still symbolise guaranteed prosperity and individual social mobility. this fact exists alongside the feeling that people have been neglected by the state in terms of sustaining privileges that have been until recently provided to a much larger extent than today for the northern as well as the southern and central russian long-distance commute workers. nevertheless, the still high income in this sector means that even the southern and central russian workers have part-time roots in the north and feel that they 96 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger owe their socio-economic mobility to the extraction of oil and gas – some of the most precious and symbolically laden natural resources. notes 1 the classification of the russian north comprises two spatial categories: far north and regions equivalent to the russian far north. this is based on legal, socio-economical, political, demographical and socio-cultural aspects (slavin 1982; blakkisrud & hønneland 2006; stammler-gossmann 2007) that refer to the territories of northern latitude with harsh climate and environment, production costs and maintenance of the northern towns above the russian average (nuykina 2011). henceforth the term north will be used in this article and comprises both zones. 2 interview with expert gennadiy bondarenko, professor of philosophy, state technical petroleum university ufa (ugntu), interview in ufa, conducted by the author, 2009. 3 quoted interview partners are anonymized. if not indicated otherwise, they are either intra-regional or inter-regional long-distance commuters. while the first are dwellers of the north, the second are living in central russian regions. interviews are taken in northern and central russia by the author between 2007 and 2010. 4 a street in novy urengoy is named after the first people who moved there: “ulitsa pervoprokhodtsev”. 5 interview with expert vladimir nuykin, vice mayor of novy urengoy, interview conducted by the author and elena aleshkevich (project lives on the move), 2010. 6 on the current laws surrounding child support in russia, see ilo (2013) and zanprim.regiontrud.ru (2013). acknowledgements this study is funded by the austrian science foundation (fwf) [p 22066-g17] in the framework of the research project “lives on the move” (project leader prof. heinz fassmann, duration 2010–2015) at the department for geography and regional research, university of vienna, and at the institute for urban and regional research (isr) at the austrian academy of sciences: raumforschung.univie.ac.at/forschungsprojekte/lives-on-the-move. funding is also provided by university of vienna, austrian research association (oefg) and the austrian academy of sciences (oeaw). furthermore, this research is related to the esf funded project boeas-move innocom at the arctic center in rovaniemi, finland. special thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to prof. peter schweitzer, prof. heinz fassmann, prof. florian stammler, elisabeth oefner and dr. elena nuykina. references aleshkevich es 2010. implementation of policy decisions to develop the far north: history of the longdistance commute work. in stammler f & eilmsteiner-saxinger g (eds). biography, shift-labour and socialisation in a northern industrial city – the far north: particularities of labour and human socialisation, 109–115. arctic centre, university of lapland, finland. department of geography and regional research, university of vienna, austria. <https:// raumforschung.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/ inst_geograph/book_biography-shiftlabour-socialisation-russian_north.pdf> 15.04.2014. andreyev op, arabskiy ak, kramar vs & silin an 2009. sistema menedzhmenta vakhtovogo metoda raboty predpriyatiya v usloviyakh kraynego severa. nedra, moskva (in russian). appadurai a 1988. the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. university press, cambridge. blakkisrud h & hønneland g (eds) 2006. tackling space. federal politics and the russian north. university press of america, lanham. bogudinova vn 1981. teo ispol’zovaniya vakhtovykh metodov organisatsii truda na severe. gazovaya promyshlennost’ 8: 7, 19–19. (in russian). bolotova a & stammler f 2010. how the north became home. attachment to place among industrial migrants in murmansk region. in lee h & southcott c (eds). migration in the circumpolar north: issues and contexts, 193–220. canadian circumpolar institute press, edmonton. burawoy m 1998. the extended case method. sociological theory 16: 1, 4–33. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/0735-2751.00040. directorate-general for energy and market observatory for energy 2011. energy keyfigures. <http:// ec.europa.eu/energy/observatory/countries/doc/ key_figures.pdf> 15.04.2014. cresswell t 2004. place: a short introduction. blackwell, malden. dudeck s 2010. indigenous oil workers between the oil ttwn of kogalym and reindeer herder’s camps in the surrounding area. in stammler f & eilmsteiner-saxinger g (eds). biography, shift-labour and socialisation in a northern industrial city – the far north: particularities of labour and human socialisation, 141–144. arctic centre, university of lapland, finland. department of geography and regional research, university of vienna, austria. <https://raumforschung.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/inst_geograph/book_biography-shiftlabour-socialisation-russian_north.pdf> 15.04.2014. eilmsteiner-saxinger g & aleshkevich es 2008. state and shift labor in western siberia. conference paper: icass vi, nuuk, greenland. 26.08.2008. eilmsteiner-saxinger g 2011. “we feed the nation”: benefits and challenges of simultaneous use of fennia 193: 1 (2015) 97“to you, to us, to oil and gas” resident and long-distance commuting labour in russia’s northern hydrocarbon industry. journal of contemporary issues in business & government 17: 1, 53–67. eilmsteiner-saxinger g 2013a. bodenschätze und menschenschätze – zur sozialen und materialen dimension der fossilen rohstoffe in nordwest-sibirien im kontext des fernpendelns. in donecker s, eberhard i & hirnsperger m (eds). wege zum norden. wiener forschungen zu arktis und subarktis, 23-43. lit, vienna (in german). eilmsteiner-saxinger g 2013b. mobiles leben der fernpendlerinnen in der erdgasund erdölindustrie im norden russlands. unpublished dissertation. university of vienna, vienna (in german). eu commission 2011. eu-russia energy relations. <http://ec.europa.eu/energy/international/russia/russia_en.htm> 15.04.2014. euractiv 2010. geopolitische aspekte der eu-energieversorgung. <http://www.euractiv.com/de/energie/geopolitische-aspekte-eu-energieversorgung/ article-142798> 15.04.2014. (in german). eurostat 2011. energy, transport and environment indicators. european commission, luxembourg. ferguson j 2005. seeing like an oil company: space, security, and global capital in neoliberal africa. american anthropologist 107: 3, 377–382. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.3.377. ferguson j 2006. global shadows: africa in the neoliberal world order. duke university press, durham, nc. fillipov dn 1982. vsesoyusnyye udarnyye komsomol’skiye. newspaper article in ekonomicheskaya gazeta, 02.05.1982. (in russian). gerasimchuk i 2012. fossil fuels – at what cost? government support for upstream oil and gas activities in russia. wwf-russia & iisd, moscow – geneva. <http://www.iisd.org/gsi/sites/default/files/ffs_ awc_russia_eng.pdf> 15.04.2014. (in russian). gustafson t 2012. wheel of fortune: the battle for oil and power in russia. belknap of harvard up, cambridge, london. heleniak t 2008. changing settlement patterns across the russian north at the turn of the millennium. in rautio v & tykkyläinen m (eds). russia’s northern regions on the edge: communities, industries, and populations from murmansk to magadan, 25–52. aleksanteri institute, helsinki. heleniak te 2009. growth poles and ghost towns in the russian far north. in wilson rowe e (ed). russia and the north, 129–163. university of ottawa press, ottawa. hill f & gaddy c 2003. the siberian curse: how communist planners left russia out in the cold. brookings institution press, washington dc. ilo 2013. natlex russia. <https://www.ilo.org/ dyn/natlex/natlex_browse.details?p_lang=en&p_ c o u n t r y = r u s & p _ c l a s s i f i c a t i o n = 1 6 & p _ origin=country&p_sortby=sortby_country> 07.07.2014. ingold t 2011. being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. routledge, london. kozlinskaya nm 2009. osobennosti regulirovaniya truda lits, rabotaushchikh v rayonakh kraynego severa i priravnennikh k nim mestnostyakh. unpublished dissertation. rossiyskaya akademiya pravosudiya, moskva. <http://www.dissercat. com/content/osobennosti-regulirovaniya-trudalits-rabotayushchikh-v-raionakh-krainego-severa-ipriravnen> 15.04.2014. (in russian). latour b 1993. we have never been modern. harvester wheatsheaf, new york. law j 1992. notes on the theory of the actor-network: ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. systems practice and action research 5: 4, 379–393. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf01059830. ljapin a 1952. die arbeit im sozialismus. tribüne, berlin (in german). löw m 2001. raumsoziologie. suhrkamp, frankfurt am main (in german). löw m 2008. the constitution of space: the structuration of spaces through the simultaneity of effect and perception. european journal of social theory 11: 1, 25– 49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1368431007085286. martynov vg & moskalenko aa 2008. kadrovaya politika kak instrument v sisteme sotsial’noy otvetstvennosti biznesa. maks press, moskva (in russian). massey db 2005. for space. sage, london. moe a & kryukov v 2010. oil exploration in russia: prospects for reforming a crucial sector. eurasian geography and economics 51: 3, 312–329. http:// dx.doi.org/10.2747/1539-7216.51.3.312. moe a & wilson rowe e 2009. northern offshore oil and gas resources. in wilson rowe e (ed). russia and the north, 107–128. university of ottawa press, ottawa. nash jc 1979. we eat the mines and the miners eat us: dependence and exploitation in bolivian tin mines. columbia university press, new york. nuykina e 2011. resettlement from the russian north: an analysis of state-induced relocation policy. arctic center report 99. university of lapland, rovaniemi. <https://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/72513/akreport55_electronic110808.pdf?sequence=1> 03.11.2014. pashin st 2004. my znali – yamburg budet: 20 let 000 ‘yamburggazdobycha’. in belov a, boris k & bashuk v (eds). gazovyye okeany yamburga, 62– 66. ooo kniga-penta, moskva (in russian). rouillard r 2013. nomads in a petro-empire: nenets reindeer herders and russian oil workers in an era of flexible capitalism. unpublished dissertation. mcgill university, montreal. regnum i 2011. bashkiriya namerena privlech’ v respublikanskiy byudzhet nalogi ‘vakhtovikov’. < w w w. r e g n u m . r u / n e w s / 1 3 8 0 2 6 7 . h t m l > 15.04.2014. (in russian). rosstat 2014. srednemesyachnaya nominal’naya nachislenennaya zarabotnaya plata rabotnikov v celom po ekonomike po sub’ektam rossiyskoy federacii v 2013–2014 gody. <http://www.gks.ru/ free_doc/new_site/population/trud/sr-zarplata/ t1.doc> 15.04.2014. (in russian). 98 fennia 193: 1 (2015)gertrude saxinger sapozhnikov ps & chudnovskiy ad 1988. vakhtovyy metod osvoyeniya prirodnykh resursov severa. nedra, moskva (in russian). saxinger g, öfner e, shakirova e, yakovlev m, ivanova m & gareev e 2014. ich bin bereit – die nächste generation mobiler fachkräfte in der russischen erdgasund erdölindustrie. austrian studies in social anthropology 2, 1–24. (in german) slavin sv 1982. osvoyeniye severa sovetskogo soyuza. nauka, moskva (in russian). stammler f 2011. oil without conflict? the anthropology of industrialisation in northern russia. in behrends a, reyna sp & schlee g (eds). crude domination: an anthropology of oil, 243–269. berghahn books, oxford. stammler f & eilmsteiner-saxinger g 2010. introduction: the northern industrial city as a place of life and of research. in stammler f & eilmsteiner-saxinger g (eds). biography, shift-labour and socialisation in a northern industrial city – the far north: particularities of labour and human socialisation, 9¬–16. arctic centre, university of lapland, finland. department of geography and regional research, university of vienna, austria. <https://raumforschung.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/ user_upload/inst_geograph/book_biographyshiftlabour-socialisation-russian_north.pdf> 14.04.2014. stammler-gossmann a 2007. reshaping the north of russia: towards a conception of space. arctic and antarctic journal of circumpolar sociocultural issues 1: 1, 53–97. stammler f & wilson e 2006. dialogue for development: an exploration of relations between oil and gas companies, communities, and the state. sibirica 5: 2, 1–42. stark m 2003. frauen im gulag. alltag und überleben: 1936 bis 1956. hanser, münchen and wien (in german). stern jp 2005. the future of russian gas and gazprom. oxford institute of energy studies, oxford. stettner r 1996. archipel gulag’. stalins zwangslager – terrorinstrument und wirtschaftsgigant: entstehung, organisation und funktion des sowjetischen lagersystems 1928–1956. schöningh, paderborn and wien (in german). tumayev v 2009. the gazprom song. <http://www. offshore.no/sak/34274_synger_for_gazprom> 15.04.2014. ufafinans.ru 2013a. avtokredity v ufe, avto kredit v ufe. <http://ufafinans.ru/index.php/2010-02-2605-23-15?catid=3> 15.04.2014. (in russian). ufafinans.ru 2013b. ipoteka v ufe, banky ufy ipoteka. <http://ufafinans.ru/index.php/2010-02-2605-23-15?catid=6> 15.04.2014. (in russian). ufafinans.ru 2013c. potrebitel’skiye kredit v ufe. <http://ufafinans.ru/index.php/2010-02-26-0523-15?catid=5> 15.04.2014. (in russian). weichhart p 2009. multilokalität – konzepte, theoriebezüge und forschungsfragen. informationen zur raumentwicklung 1: 2, 1–14. (in german). wolf er 1982. europe and the people without history. university of california press, berkeley, ca. zanprim.regiontrud.ru 2013. informatsiya ob indeksatsii gosudarstvennykh posobiy grazhdanam, imeyushchim detey s 1 yanvarya 2013 g. <http:// zanprim.regiontrud.ru/app_shared/webparts/ d a t a v i e w e r s / p o p u p d o c u m e n t . a s p x ? d o c i d = 4 4 3 5 c 4 3 9 a 4 5 d 4 d a 7 9 a 0 3 1ddb458509b9> 15.04.2014. (in russian). zirm j 2007. leben und arbeiten in ‘gazpromland’. newspaper article in die presse, 01.12.2007. <http://diepresse.com/home/wirtschaft/economist/346813/leben-und-arbeiten-in-gazpromland> 15.04.2014. (in german). urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa47222 doi: 10.11143/47222 the scalar logics of universities as part of statehood transformation in finland, 1970–1990 mikko kohvakka kohvakka, mikko (2015). the scalar logics of universities as part of statehood transformation in finland, 1970–1990. fennia 193: 1, pp. 117–133. issn 17985617. in finland, gradual state restructuring from a nordic welfare state towards a more international competition state began in the mid-1980s. this transformation affected discourses and spatial ways of thinking about the primary scales of social action. as the strategies of the welfare-state regime emphasised major public investments for the development of infrastructure and equal opportunities across the country, the emerging competition state strategies put less stress on territorial and social equalisation processes and focused, instead, on economic growth through privatisation, specialisation and national and regional competitiveness. universities took part in this process by instituting socio-political and political-economic practices that were differentially scaled. this article aims to investigate the evolution of two finnish universities, the university of joensuu and the lappeenranta university of technology, and the role of these institutions in the state’s transformation and scale reconstruction in the 1970s and 1980s. the present analysis is based on the official statements and action plans of the examined universities, as well as individual interviews with their key administrators. the article concludes that the embedded scalar logics of both universities either fostered or hindered their respective abilities to adapt to the prevailing form of state space. it also suggests that the aforementioned universities were more than mere pawns in the transformation process. indeed, these universities chose divergent symbolic and self-seeking strategies for promoting the scalar relations and state formation each preferred. in regards to these universities, then, the present article seeks to assess the tensions that arose between the processes connected to regional spaces and more deterritorialised practices. keywords: universities, history, scale, scalar logics, state-building, qualitative textual analysis mikko kohvakka, department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland/south karelian institute, lappeenranta university of technology, po box 20, fi-53851 lappeenranta, finland, email: mikko.kohvakka@lut.fi introduction universities are resilient and flexible organisations that mediate different scalar and politicaleconomic interests but can also transform such interests (delanty 2001: 150–151). in a geographical sense, universities operate within a framework of “multiple spatialities” – which is to say they can employ various, yet sometimes overlapping, socio-spatial strategies. this means university activities have national, as well as local, regional and global, dimensions (cf. mansfield 2005: 459). and yet, it is also possible to find hierarchies amongst these scales (smith 1993; jonas 1994; swyngedouw 1997; brenner 2001; paasi 2004). at particular times, certain universities have been more involved in the production of ‘national’ or territorialised space, while at other times, deterritorialised practices have prevailed amongst certain universities. 118 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka finland is known for higher-education policy decisions emphasising the intensive regionalisation of its universities. from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, six multidisciplinary universities, two technology universities and one business school were established alongside finland’s eight existing institutions as part of the country’s creating a centrally led, but regionally decentralised, “nordic welfare state” (jalava 2012; moisio 2012). despite national peculiarities, the extension of the university network followed pan-european policy choices of the period; throughout western and northern europe, centre-left governments were implementing a keynesian, welfare-state ideology and, thus, incorporating nation-states into transnational processes (kettunen 2001; brenner 2004a). the major social factor leading to this policy change was that post-war cohorts and a large number of individuals from subsequent generations began coming of age around the time when the new universities were established. the new universities were seen as crucial tools in the process of bridging potential conflicts and replacing the ‘academic-traditionalist’ oversight system with a state-led higher-education policy (trow 2007; rüegg 2011; jalava 2012). the reform was part of a broader political ideology that emphasised social and regional equality as a means of seizing the state space and its inhabitants (brenner 2004a; moisio & leppänen 2007; ahlqvist & moisio 2014). european governments at the time created nationally standardised frameworks for science and higher education in order to establish balanced social and regional development throughout their national territories. socially entrenched liberalism, as a manifestation of a keynesian, welfare-state ideology, entered a crisis period in western europe in the early 1970s. the dual crises of ‘stagflation’ and mass unemployment forced european governments to raise taxes to cover growing social-entitlement costs. during these crises, the prevailing brand of state-led regulation was challenged by a new way of thinking that called for labour-market liberalisation and new public-management methods (brenner 2004a; harvey 2005). political sociologists and geographers have claimed the gradual shift from a nordic welfare state, or state-centred cartel polity, to a “schumpeterian competition state”, or corporate polity, began in finland in the mid-1980s (heiskala & hämäläinen 2007; moisio 2008; ahlqvist & moisio 2014). the resulting adoption of new market-driven and decentralised-governance and -administration systems as part of standard political practises was also reflected in the policies pursued in higher education. in finland, as elsewhere in western and northern europe, it became more common to discuss the need to increase universities’ quality assurance and accountability to society (neave 1988; hölttä & nuotio 1995; kogan et al. 2000). this emphasis on private benefit over public enrichment entailed a redefinition of the social contract, and abstract principles of egalitarian rationality, stability (or prudence) and procedural legitimacy were challenged by discourses valuing economic rationality, competitiveness (or efficiency) and legitimacy by results (neave & van vught 1991; meyer & hammerschmid 2006; benneworth & jongbloed 2010). this article’s primary aim is to participate in the aforementioned discussion on the transformation of the finnish state space and finland’s highereducation system from the 1970s to the early 1990s. to be more precise, the present article will analyse the interaction between universities and the finnish state space, arguing that it is the ways universities produce “scale effects” (kaiser & nikiforova 2008) or craft scalar practices (fraser 2010; mackinnon 2011: 22) in formulating their scalar logics that is an essential point of contention between them and their stakeholders. using the university of joensuu (ujo) and the lappeenranta university of technology (lut) as case studies, this article applies the thinking of neil brenner (2004b) and sami moisio (2012) by arguing that universities are strategic actors that attempt to shape the geographies of socio-economic development, material and immaterial investments and political discourses into a certain state form and mode of polity. hence, the following research questions are posed: 1) how did the studied universities conceptualise the meaning of various scales and construct their scalar logics, and were there any hierarchy changes amongst scalar logics during the chosen time period?; and 2) to what extent did the evolution of the studied universities and changes in their scalar logics reflect changes in discourses on state space more broadly? by answering these questions, this article seeks to determine whether the scalar logics and scalar strategies of the studied universities were inwardlooking (stressing national and regional scales) or outward-looking (tending towards an international scale). furthermore, the results seek to illustrate whether the studied universities supported fennia 193: 1 (2015) 119the scalar logics of universities territorial cohesion or more deterritorialised forms of space (cf. moisio & leppänen 2007: 66). this article, then, proceeds as follows: in the next two sections, scale and the performativity of scalar logics, as well as empirical material, methodologies and an explanation for choosing the time period, will be introduced more thoroughly; next, the proceeding empirical sections will analyse the meanings the studied universities gave to the various scales, scalar logics and spatial structures of state space and the strategic efforts they implemented in various scale performances during the 1970s and 1980s. finally, the concluding section will examine whether the universities were relevant agents capable of reconfiguring sociospatial order or were more passive, constrained by materiality and structural properties that operated “behind their backs”. it will also discuss whether it is fruitful to discuss universities generally and take them as pre-existing categories or if it is more appropriate to see them as unique entities representing various disciplines, scalar logics and strategies. conceptualising scale and the performativity of scalar logics the viewpoint on scale presented in this article combines both post-structuralist and politicaleconomy approaches (mackinnon 2011). as per post-structuralism (brubaker & cooper 2000; mansfield 2005; kaiser & nikiforova 2008; moore 2008), one might see scale as a category of meaningful practice that illustrates how university activities constitute scales, scalar logics and other socio-spatial phenomena. on the other hand, one might rely on a political-economic approach that says universities can seek to harness, manipulate, transform and organise hierarchically scalar relations (smith 1993; jonas 1994; swyngedouw 1997; brenner 2001; harrison 2008) in order to shape the surrounding social environment into a certain “spatio-temporal fix” (jessop 2000). this refers to the build-up of spatial and temporal boundaries around a particular state form or mode of polity (ahlqvist & moisio 2014) that favours some interests, spaces, territories and places but often excludes, or at least undermines, others (jessop 2008; see also harrison 2008: 936). in effect, the present paper follows mansfield’s thinking (2005: 468; see also vainikka 2014) in arguing that university practices have scalar dimensions and repercussions that are simultaneously global, national, regional, local and even bodily. however, somewhat contrary to mansfield’s assertions, this paper posits that, within this multidimensionality, it is still possible to find hierarchies amongst scalar relations without arriving at an unproductive either-or situation. this article uses the term “scalar logic” to describe how the examined universities respectively defined and experienced scaled processes and associated logics like academic profession, state, market, community and region. scalar logics are, to apply thornton and ocasio’s (1999: 804) definition of institutional logics, socially constructed historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs and rules by which individual actors, like universities, produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organise time and space and provide meaning to their socio-spatial reality. as we are talking about as complex organisations as universities, pluralism in these scalar logics is likely (cf. kraatz & block 2008; howells et al. 2014). however, the degree of pluralism and whether these logics coexist peacefully, compete and hierarchically organise with one another, supersede each other, provide an opportunity for hybridisation or result in a temporary compromise (meyer & höllerer 2010: 1251), are questions that need to be studied empirically. because scalar logics are socially produced, this article applies the concept of ‘scalecraft’ (fraser 2010) to clarify the performativity of scale and scalar logics. kaiser and nikiforova (2008: 541, 543) have aptly noted that scales are instituted by sets of actors through the “scale talk” they engage in and scalar stances they take within particular sociospatial contexts. by using this performativity approach, the present paper claims that scalar logics, as naturalised ways of seeing and valuing the socio-spatial environment, are produced through ‘scalecraft’, which, according to fraser (2010: 344), “is the often highly skilful, yet sometimes unsuccessful, fashioning and refashioning of geographic scale to suit particular needs”. scalecraft can include efforts that are geared towards arranging and rearranging socio-spatial conditions in ways that emphasise the meaning of particular geographic scales and scalar logics while undermining some others (cf. jonas 2006; harrison 2008). what is certain, however, is that these processes can never be perfected. all attempts last for only a brief period and some fail at once (fraser 2010; see also kaiser & nikiforova 2008). 120 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka methodology and research materials the analysis presented in this article is from the university’s perspective; it uses qualitative textual analysis (warren & karner 2010), especially rhetorical analysis (dillon 1991; billig 1996), to interpret a set of operational and financial action plans, official statements and rectors’ speeches through which the studied universities discursively operationalised their scalar strategies and scalar logics in the 1970s and 1980s. also, ten supporting interviews with key administrators from the studied universities were conducted and official histories analysed in order to scrutinise the contemporaries’ viewpoints, opinions and interpretations of key events related to scale and statehood. these documents and narratives are treated both as widely shared, persuasive, political-economic expressions that highlight the fluctuating scalar strategies and logics of the studied universities during the given periods and as descriptions that are disputed or in conflict with competing, alternative, rhetorical descriptions (potter 1996: 106). by comparing this information with the changing governmental and ministerial strategies of these periods – specifically, with the higher education development acts of 1967 and 1986 – one can learn a great deal about the changing and, more or less, conflicting notions of spatiality and scalar relations. in this sense, the present article applies the thinking of cerny et al. (2005) as well as moisio and leppänen (2007) by claiming that scales and scalar logics are greatly shaped by and through hybrid interactions amongst universities’ own ambitions and agency and governmental rule structures. additionally, this article makes an equally important point of avoiding the common conceptualisation of the university as a universal, pre-existing category of analysis. rather, so as not to presume that all universities are alike, this article concentrates on the dimensions that differ between the universities examined. consequently, the present paper adopts the stance that universities are social spaces with distinctive epistemic traditions, disciplinary cultures, national heritages and local institutional conditions (välimaa 2008: 11). in other words, there are numerous universities of varying types (representing different disciplines) and sizes, and each is located in a different place. universities might, therefore, define their environments and missions differently and apply differing scalar strategies and logics; consequently as well, their research and teaching focuses might alternatively be on local, regional, national or universal issues (cf. tierney 1988). the purpose of this cultural frame of analysis is related to epistemological, methodological and philosophical discussions on cultural variation in society as they pertain to academic institutions, disciplines, national traditions and university-operation environments (välimaa 2008: 9). again, in this study the lappeenranta university of technology and joensuu university are juxtaposed to examine the similarities and differences between them (della porta 2008: 214–217). the studied universities are similar in several ways, with both being located in eastern finland1, close to the finland–russia border. they situate in areas that have shared state practices from 1617 to 1743 and again from 1812 onwards. moreover, these universities are both newer, public institutions established in 1969 to promote more balanced regional development and they both faced the same kind of (governmental and regional) expectations during the 1970s and 1980s. in the 1970s, the strongest claim was for better-qualified labour and the ideal of an egalitarian society with equal regional and social rights; in contrast, the 1980s saw the nascent spirit of a highly competitive “information society” – in which scientific knowledge and high technology seemed to be the most important assets for nations and regions in international economic competition (husso & raento 2002; kohvakka 2009; nevala 2009; jalava 2012: 59–60, 162) – come to the fore. the contrasting facets of the studied universities include their differing types, sizes and strategies. from the onset, ujo’s offered programs in a broad spectrum of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences (table 1). and yet, while it did strive from the very beginning to become a comprehensive, ‘humboldtian’ research university, ujo would not realize this aim until 1984 and, early on, served primarily as a pedagogical institution. the university’s first step towards becoming research-intensive came with the establishment in 1971 of its specialised research unit, the karelian institute, whose original aim was to carry out basic and applied research to support material and intellectual development in eastern finland and north karelia. the institute also had strong connections to the autonomous soviet socialist republic of karelia, where it sought to promote the cultural heritage of the historical province of karelia – then divided between finland and the soviet union (nevala 2009). fennia 193: 1 (2015) 121the scalar logics of universities table 1. basic figures for the case universities in 1970–1990.                                         122 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka lut, in contrast, strove from the start to be a small, highly specialised and industry-oriented ‘entrepreneurial’ university; consequently, it evinced only the slightest intention as an institution to grow structurally. lut sought to present itself in this way by exclusively offering the combination of engineering and business studies. the first of lut’s programs, in fact, were exclusively in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, energy technology and industrial engineering and management, and it was not until the early 1990s that it expanded its offerings to include general business studies (table 1). moreover, lut has, throughout its history, emphasised the study of foreign languages. and yet, the university’s close proximity to the finland–russia border and its general interest in russia and the russian economy only lent itself to the university’s instituting study programs after the collapse of the soviet union – as north-eastern europe’s evolving geo-political situation placed new demands on international businesses (kyläheiko 1998; kohvakka 2009). by examining two structurally and culturally distinctive universities, this article seeks to avoid some of the analytically and culturally biased assumptions about universities that might arise when studying only one university, a single type of university or certain cohorts of actors (cf. vainikka 2013: 28). in other words, the present analysis intends to study the various meanings signified by differing scalar processes at dissimilar universities during various periods, rather than merely provide examples of the shared visions of scales and statehood. periodisation offers one means of measuring our distance from the past; of course, this article also accepts that historical periods are no more than labelling constructs later devised by historians and other scholars (tosh 2010: 10, 24). in accordance with heiskala and hämäläinen’s (2007) conceptualisation, then, the present study utilises two distinct spatio-temporal fixes: the period of “keynesian welfare state-ism” (from the 1970s to mid1980s) and the period of “schumpeterian competition state-ism” (from the mid-1980s onwards); these two fixes have discernible, distinctive scalar logics setting them apart from each other (wishard 2004: 306; see also ahlqvist & moisio 2014). whereas the scalar logics of welfare state-ism stress social and regional equality and a spatially dispersed network of ‘nationally’ and ‘regionally’ responsive universities, the scalar logics of competition state-ism place more emphasis on achieving international competitiveness and the greatest possible academic and economic returns with costeffective, differentiated, specialised action (cf. kangas & moisio 2012: 201). how the abovementioned universities responded to these logics is the question this paper now addresses. from criticism to adaptation: two finnish universities and spatial equalisation in the 1970s in the 1960s and 1970s, finland went through a rapid transformation from a poor agrarian nation to a wealthy nordic welfare state. it relied on export-oriented industries and an investment-driven growth strategy that created a large public sector, brought in new technological capabilities and further developed the national education system (heiskala & hämäläinen 2007: 80–81). international influences played an important role in the process, although welfare state-ism took a less comprehensive form in finland compared with its implementation in other nordic countries (espingandersen 1990; kettunen 2001). from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, the so-called keynesian politico-spatial transformation was based on direct government regulation aimed at comprehensively increasing state power and presence. according to moisio (2008: 5), governments during this period created nationally standardised production and consumption frameworks to establish balanced social and regional development throughout national territories. when ujo and lut were established in 1969, the finnish higher-education system was in turmoil. by applying the swedish model to the finnish context, finland replaced the old, academictraditional doctrine – which gave professors most of the formal decision-making power within relatively autonomous universities – with a new, government-led system. during the 1970s, all finnish universities were nationalised and the tuition fees annulled (jalava 2012: 70). decision-making and administration powers were invested in the finnish parliament and the ministry of education (moe). the state’s normative regulation system entailed the national parliament’s creating frameworks for universities’ activities through goaland resource-outlining acts. in this sense, finland resembled other nordic countries (dahllöf & selander 1994; hölttä 1999). spatially speaking, the act for the development of higher education, fennia 193: 1 (2015) 123the scalar logics of universities 1967–1986, fostered social and regional equality by facilitating access to universities and guaranteeing resources in higher education during an era when several new universities across the state space were about to begin operating (hölttä 1988; välimaa 2005). in summary, higher education was considered key for the state building through regional policy (hölttä & pulliainen 1996; jalava 2012; moisio 2012). these government decisions were a double-edged sword for many universities because increased funding “legitimised the government’s endeavour to reform universities, or … to interfere with the internal life of universities in ways that had not been seen before” (välimaa 2005: 248). many universities perceived the governments’ paternalistic policies as treating universities as mere subjects of governance who needed external steering to learn what was in their respective best interests (table 2). lut: defending outward-looking competition strategies analysis of the studied universities reveals that prevailing scalar logics influenced how each university dealt with external pressures. in the 1970s, lut had difficulty adapting to the left-leaning ministry of education’s heavy-handed directives. along with other technology universities and business schools, lut fiercely opposed the decision made in 1971 that cut its ties to the ministry of trade and industry (moti) and brought them under control of the moe, where civil servants were more than eager to interfere in university–industry collaborations (jalava 2012: 70). in particular, the rector, who was a former high official in the moti, took part in several initiatives that were contrary to “state monopoly capitalism” and favoured “institutional autonomy of universities and interests of economic life” (michelsen 1994: 145–146). in addition, lut also adopted a critical stance towards the government’s argument for harmonious and equal territorial development of the state space (cf. moisio & leppänen 2007: 73). in 1973, it sent a memo including the following statement to the moe: “lut is the child of a policy whose aim has been to balance learning opportunities regionally and emphasise the quantitative development of a higher education system. the university, however, takes the view that in the future its operations should be developed in the qualitative direction” [taking into account the quality of its operations] (lut 1973a, translated from finnish). the university justified its arguments further by appealing to its particular identity and structure. lut saw itself as a small but highly specialised and efficiency-oriented university with only a few departments and a minimal number of regionally scaled tasks. its small size and avoidance of multiple logics and tasks were, according to lut, the best ways to avoid organisational overload and ineffectiveness (lut 1973b). the rector’s statement in his opening speech for the 1972–1973 academic year highlighted the importance of competitiveness to technology universities: “universities for engineering and technology form a different kind of entity compared with other universities. the special needs of the surrounding region must not influence these universities’ teaching and research plans too much. the work opportunities and skills of graduating engineers cannot be territorially restricted” (lut 1974, translated from finnish). lut defied inward-looking and equalising state strategies and scalar logics for two reasons: 1. past experience acted as a structural constraint to the institutionalisation processes (cf. pinheiro 2012); key players at lut had more positive experiences cooperating with the moti than with the moe during the initial years, and this retarded lut’s adapting to the new institutionalisation process. in the eyes of lut, the moe was a powerful stakeholder with vast resources, but it was still a new, non-institutionalised actor in the higher-education system. 2. the symbolic and strategic significance of identity-based action gained the upper hand, and a university’s own identity or sense of self and the need to affirm this identity became a desired aim. this meant that the expression of lut’s outward-looking scalar logic, through its evasive attitude towards the moe, was a desired end for the university in itself, despite the knowledge that the expected normative or economic benefits were low or non-existent (cf. rowley & moldeveanu 2003). there were, however, two locally and regionally scaled projects that came to fruition during this time: lut decided to establish a regional advisory board to provide enhanced trust and communication across the stakeholder network, and it also established a specialised research unit to carry out applied research tasks concerning finnish–soviet 124 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka table 2. the case universities and science and higher education policy in finland (husso & raento 2002; kohvakka 2009; nevala 2009).   1970–1980 1980–1990 science and he policy in finland: a period of state-steering in higher education and science policy planning and ‘experimentation’ gets underway. the ministry of education (moe) seeks firmer control over the contents and direction of research and teaching. in 1971, universities of technology and business schools are brought under control of the moe. former ties to the ministry of trade and industry are cut and university-industry cooperation becomes more difficult. many universities protest against the loss of power in decision-making. in the late 1970s resources for science and higher education policies are in decline and the need to reform the policy lines are debated. university of joensuu: after a slow start, the ujo pursues stable but firm growth. it aims to become (at least) medium-sized comprehensive university. new disciplines in seeking are forestry, law, social work, cultural studies and orthodox theology. in the late 1970s, an important step towards the comprehensive university is taken. several new chairs (professorships) are established and the whole organisation diversifies. the focus is on teaching. karelian institute (1971) is established to provide research on regional nature, economy and culture. lappeenranta university of technology: the lut seeks only slim growth. it sees itself as a small but highly specialised university with (inter)national ambitions. in the late 1970s, first signs on growth willingness are occurring. the establishment of new professorships is progressing steadily, although the level of wages is lower compared with the industry and commerce. the biggest shortcomings in staff are among postgraduate students and auxiliary staff. thus, teaching outnumbers research. a separate research group on finnish–soviet trade is established in 1975. science and he policy in finland: new technology-driven science policy emerges. several determined efforts to strengthen research and international academic cooperation are conducted. r&d expenditures in universities increase twofold but the majority of growth comes from outside funding. universities are more dependent on external stakeholders and industrial-economic steering. a new steering philosophy (management by results) is put into effect. every university sets up its own continuing education centre as the driving force of regional higher education policy. university of joensuu: plans for new disciplines are realised when forestry, cultural (folklore) studies, social work, and orthodox theology begin their research and teaching activities. internal organisation is transformed in 1984 as departmental structure is replaced by five faculties: education, natural sciences, forestry, social sciences, and humanities. the university continues to grow steadily: more students, degrees, funding and (international) research projects in fundamental research. the centre for continuing education (cce) is established in 1984 for coordinating the academic engagement with external parties. technology centre (joensuu science park) is founded in 1990 for promoting universityregion interaction on selected key technological areas. lappeenranta university of technology after a longer period of rather slow development, lut experiences a jump upwards. information technology, paper technology, environmental protection technology and finally business studies are added to the organisational structure as new disciplines, departments and subjects. applied research takes a step forward, the role of internationalisation increases and university–industry cooperation in research and product development is gaining ground. the cce is founded in 1987 and technology centre (kareltek) in 1984. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 125the scalar logics of universities trade relations and their impact on south karelia province and kymi county (lut 1978). these concessions, however, were merely symbolic. the regional advisory board had no formal role in decision making and mainly served to improve the university’s image (lut 1977). the research unit, on the other hand, did not coincide with the university’s strategic areas of focus; although lut established plans and procedures that, at regular intervals, communicated to the public a desire to increase the size of the small research unit, there was no actual intention to implement them (kohvakka 2009: 98–99). “the research unit was, before anything, a ministry and city [lappeenranta] project, and it never had an important role in our profile” (rector 1, translated from finnish). all this indicated that lut’s fundamental scalar logic, which was a desire to be a deterritorialised (outward-looking), efficiency-oriented and highly specialised university with carefully selected, industry stakeholders, remained fixed throughout the 1970s. it was argued that lut should operate as a real enterprise with the objective of becoming as effective as possible: “i believe that university productivity can be measured and, particularly, improved. lut has to show an example in this regard. i will do the alignment: the university equals business enterprise. … we have chosen differentiation as our asset” (rector’s inaugural speech, september 7, 1977. see jaakkola 1998: 196–201). ujo: adapting to inward-looking state strategies for ujo, it was easy to adapt to the ideologies and scalar logics of the welfare-state era. the argumentation of harmonious and equal territorial development of one nation was highly visible in the policies and strategies implemented by the government and moe (moisio & leppänen 2007: 73–77). far-reaching measures to construct a large and well-balanced public sector were thus highlighted, which were in line with ujo’s prime purpose. the rector mentioned the institutionalisation process in a public memo in 1973: “the development program of the university takes into account not only the legislation but also the objectives of social policy, education policy and regional policy. the university has two key tasks: the first task is to increase the supply of qualified civil servants and teachers in fields where there is the greatest national and regional demand; the second task is to participate in development projects in which poor regions of eastern finland are being revived” (kirkinen 1973, translated from finnish). the university’s size and type, as well as its organisational heterogeneity, affected the way ujo saw the environment and its different stakeholders. according to the then rector, “the university had to have sufficient structural diversity in order to be useful in its many environments” (rector 2). the expansion of students and staff was relatively steady throughout the 1970s, which inevitably diversified the structure of the organisation (ujo 1975, 1978). the growth of different departments, each with its own scalar logics, was both advantageous and disadvantageous to ujo because of the multiple needs and interests it engendered in a now-complex organisational environment. for example, the natural sciences department included several ambitious young academics who did not want to confine their work to the local or regional scale. much to the dismay of many governmental and regional stakeholders, they expanded their professional aims to the international scale (arbo & eskelinen 2003), as this statement shows: “the negative side is that joensuu is a small city in a remote location with no stakeholders in your own field. partners had to be found elsewhere, often from abroad” (professor 1, translated from finnish). on the other hand, a plurality of scalar logics meant that departments, such as the department of history, geography and other regional studies and the karelian institute also conducted teaching and research activities on the region’s economic and social conditions (ktl 1991; see also ujo 1978). through these units, the university was able to placate (at least somewhat) those stakeholders who thought the university was not regional or territorial enough.2 this was important because, according to the rector, “ujo needed all the resources and support it could get when it reached the status of a comprehensive university” (rector 2). the university realised that the only realistic way to implement organisational growth was linked to resources the moe administered. unlike lut and many other universities, ujo was rather keen to acknowledge the prevailing state building strategies and the supervisor–subordinate relationship between the ministry and universities. for 126 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka ujo, strong state control was not a threat but a guarantee that the regional decentralisation policy, which favoured ujo’s growth ambitions, would continue in the future. “we were attuned to the times and we wanted to ensure that our actions complied with the prevailing [state] projects” (director of administration, translated from finnish). ujo took a decisive step towards becoming a comprehensive or ‘humboldtian’ research university at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. many new department chairs were established in already-existing departments. in addition, decisions were made during this period that eventually led to the establishment of four new disciplines and subjects: forestry, social work, folklore studies and orthodox theology (nevala 2009). the success in structural growth was possible because, to some extent, ujo was able to use its diversified structure and plural scalar logics to build relationships between multiple scales or scalar processes. this generalisation strategy led to the territorialised university model, which was strongly biased towards the needs of the public sector, especially regionally oriented teacher education. rethinking scalar relations: combining inwardand outward-looking strategies in the 1980s in the late 1970s, the prevailing order was challenged in western europe by restructuring-oriented political blocs and interest groups. they promoted strategies and scalar logics in which socioeconomic regulation was relocated to supraand subnational institutional levels and economic assets were redirected to the most competitive entities and regions (brenner 2004a). as allen et al. (1998: 2) assert, the 1980s were, quintessentially, a period of unbridled free-market capitalism, and while this took different forms in different countries and regions, it was evidently an international phenomenon. in finland, from the mid-1980s onwards, the gradual rise of international competition logic, based on a belief in individualism and the efficiency of a free and open market, challenged the old, institutionalised principles of collectivism, conservatism and protectionism (heiskala & hämäläinen 2007; moisio & leppänen 2007). the most far-reaching manifestations of the new mental paradigm were the liberalisation of capital markets, the growth of direct investments, both inward and outward, and the rise of high-technology industries as new engines for economic growth (heiskala & hämäläinen 2007; see also husso & raento 2002). furthermore, the adoption of corporate concepts and managerial ideals at the public-sector institutions, including universities, were implicit in the new philosophy (alajoutsijärvi et al. 2012: 351). in higher education, particularly within countries with a tradition of strong governmental control like as france, the netherlands, sweden and finland, the rise of the competition-state logics led to increased flexibility, decentralised administration and dismantled state regulation (neave 1988). as a result, universities had an obligation to show quality, efficiency and effectiveness to a growing number of stakeholders, and this forced them to seek a new balance between spatially contradicting expectations held by the government, the market and the academic profession (clark 1983; hölttä & pulliainen 1996; jongbloed et al. 2008). in finland, the new higher education development act of 1986 was tightly coupled with an emerging science and technology policy (husso & raento 2002); together, these served to underscore the importance of international academic cooperation, productivity in research and teaching and, above all, technological innovations for the sake of the national economy. according to välimaa (2005), finnish universities strongly supported the policy change because it ensured a significant increase in their basic resources, encouraged them to cooperate with firms in applied research and reasserted their autonomy in resource allocation. in fact, the burden on finnish universities in the 1980s grew heavier than ever; however, they had never before enjoyed such a large and diversified pool of resources as they did in the late 1980s, when finland experienced a period of strong economic growth (see table 2). lut: reintegrating ‘regional’ with the idea of international competitiveness the 1980s proved a fruitful decade for lut. according to the then vice-rector, “especially the second half of the decade was the golden age for lut” (vice-rector, translated from finnish). the preferential treatment technology universities and fennia 193: 1 (2015) 127the scalar logics of universities business schools received from the state and the government’s decision to decrease restrictions on university–industry cooperation meant lut had more leeway to act. it also had vast public and, more importantly, private resources with which to respond to multiple stakeholder pressures. an even more significant development was that the scalar logics lut had already spoken for in the 1970s, such as the freedom of enterprise, competitiveness and productivity, became more widely institutionalised in finnish society. lut viewed these changes in the organisational environment as positive and they increased the organisation’s willingness and capability to meet the expectations of stakeholders with different scalar logics. regionally, the management of new ideals and expectations was steered towards the new service units; the most important of these were the centre for continuing education (cce), which began to operate in 1987, and the technology centre, kareltek, which was established in 1984. an important example came from the university of oulu, which was a pioneer in this sense in finland (salo 2003). the cce’s purpose was to channel the university’s expertise into adult training and service to develop the region and raise its inhabitants’ education levels. however, because the cce held strong regional logic, it was separated from departments whose scalar logic was grounded more in national or international activities. thus, the cce's definition as an “independent service centre” was a clear indication that lut implemented compartmentalisation strategies using both spatial and symbolic means to separate the cce from the research and teaching units (lut 1984): “the departments were interested in the cce only if it were of benefit to them, for example, in the form of research funds or doctoral dissertations. this, however, happened rarely, so our operations diverged sharply from one another” (planning officer of the cce, translated from finnish). the cce was a light and cost-efficient way to respond to increasingly important, but still secondary, regional needs, so the departments could focus on their main tasks: research and teaching with national and international relevance (jaakkola 1998: 84–93, 112–120). kareltek, for its part, was an effort on the part of regional actors to benefit from the applied technology produced at lut. the university was ready to support this kind of technology transfer because it could address two aims simultaneously through the technology centre: first, kareltek, which was funded and administered by the city of lappeenranta, cost-effectively appeased the most pressing demands on lut’s regional effectiveness; even more important, though, was how kareltek offered facilities to the first large, expensive international research project, which was threatened with delay because the university’s own buildings were too small and overcrowded (lut 1984; see also kohvakka 2009: 162). in other words, lut manipulated the regional technology centre as a resource to support the university’s most desired scalar logic: national and, later on, international quality in research and teaching activities (cf. sillince 2006: 201). “the research and teaching units should be built upon the basis of national need. [...] unlike the helsinki university of technology and the tampere university of technology, we are not surrounded by a powerful and demanding economic life. we can build a society considerably on our own terms. it seems selfish, but we believe this is the best way to serve the environment” (the rector’s opening speech for the 1989–1990 academic year, september 6, 1989. see jaakkola 1998: 88). considering the above-mentioned events, lut managed to preserve its specialised outwardlooking profile. throughout the 1980s, lut’s main strategic goal was to create contacts and engineering demand nationally and internationally, especially in the helsinki metropolitan area, where most of the globally scaled firms were located (kyläheiko 1998: 12). this objective was reached primarily because approximately half of lut’s graduates found employment in the helsinki metropolitan area, while only about one fourth remained in kymi county (haapakorpi 1989: 81–82; table 1), where there was no great demand for highly educated engineers and, otherwise, nothing but ‘low-tech’ paper-industry jobs were available. likewise, about half of its professors lived outside the south karelia/kymi area (dahllöf et al. 1998: 48). hence, lut highlighted its role in promoting the competitiveness of domestic production and state strategies concentrating specifically on southern parts of finland (cf. moisio & leppänen 2007: 79). this indicated that scalar logics of the emerging ‘schumpeterian’ social order, which emphasised competition, specialisation and a more centralised state space, was something with which the university was willing to identify. 128 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka ujo: balancing regional constraints with international ambitions the gradual growth of ujo, which lasted through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, culminated in 1984 when its experimental department structure was replaced with a standard faculty system (nevala 2009). when the framework was ready, ujo’s previous, development-stage resource dependence on regional stakeholders decreased. from then on, its scalar logics and activities were changed and more emphasis was placed on strengthening scientific output and credibility amongst the international scientific community. the new rector of ujo emphasised the need for a course change in his inaugural speech in 1982, stating: “the university needs universal applicability, and it has to set out its duties and performance in line with international standards. otherwise it is not a university” (mälkönen 1982, translated from finnish). five years later, the new scalar hierarchy was expressed even more directly by the rector: “the university is not a consulting firm but a research and teaching institute, which does not need to do everything the region wants” (pulliainen 1987a, translated from finnish). ujo was, as the rector stated in 1985, worried about how various ministries directed their attention and resources towards the applied field of technology and product development (pulliainen 1985). the disciplines taught at ujo, which had previously supported building a regionally decentralised welfare state, proved to be rather unsuitable for the growing demands for new technology and industrial innovations. in order to prevent itself from being side-tracked, ujo wanted to show its willingness to adapt to the new order. the university ensured a tight relationship with the moe by volunteering as a ‘pilot’ university for new ‘entrepreneurial’ management and administrative practices, including lumpsum budgeting, discretion in resource allocation and decentralised decision-making (hölttä & pulliainen 1996: 125). through these measures, ujo showed that it was ready to adapt to the new type of university–state alliance characterised by semi-competitive logic and quasi-market mechanisms for promoting cost-effectiveness and internationalisation: “we, at the university of joensuu, take for granted that we will get our fair share of the increasing future resources because we have shown our willingness and ability to adapt to more efficient resource management. our planning system has been created quite recently, and we have switched over from optimistic resource planning, which is still the system at most universities, to realistic planning practices” (pulliainen 1987b: 2). the relative importance of regional stakeholders decreased because state authorities, including the moe, stressed development areas and regional equality logics less and began to emphasise competitive logics (moisio & leppänen 2007: 79), which “favoured the city of joensuu but left vast rural areas surrounding it to the wilderness” (former governor of north karelia county). however, the impact of path dependence, that is, the long history of engagement with regional stakeholders (pinheiro 2012: 45), meant that ujo was not ready to take a risk and neglect institutionalised regional expectations and demands altogether. a professor of forestry supported the multiscaled and segment-oriented strategy of ujo, stating: “only through manifold alliances and linkages can a young university maintain its ability to function” (professor 2). the establishment of the centre for continuing education in 19843 served regional demands in that it organised retraining courses tailored to the specific needs of local people. ujo also decided to support the establishment of the joensuu science park technology centre in 1990 (hölttä & pulliainen 1996; see also clark 1998). the joensuu science park, along with the cce, eased the “regional burden” ujo had to carry (vartiainen & viiri 2002) by providing space that was administratively separate from the university for university–industry cooperation in conducting applied research, product development and university-tobusiness technology transfers. moreover, ujo buttressed the role of the karelian institute as an arena for university–region interaction by introducing three external members to the institute’s board. at the same time, researchers at the karelian institute continued to focus on regional projects in north karelia (ktl 1991). regional logic was relatively easy to blend or hybridise with other scalar logics. according to one of the institute’s researchers, “regional issues sparked an interest at all levels and amongst various actors, from county administrators to the european scifennia 193: 1 (2015) 129the scalar logics of universities ence foundation” (researcher 1). another former researcher from the institute noted the scalar logic issue more hierarchically: “i became more localist the more the university internationalised its functions” (researcher 2). all in all, even though the ujo’s transformation was based on a gradually emerging ‘schumpeterian’ regime of deterritorialisation, the spatial structures and scalar logics constructed in the 1970s still had their impact on the university’s territorial practices. put differently, the academic departments, especially in the international-oriented natural sciences, maintained their scale hierarchy and focus, both of which emphasised academic interaction within supranational disciplinary boundaries. on the other hand, ujo also had humanities and social-science departments and units in which activities were regionally scaled (ujo 1984, 1986). this guaranteed that the university’s management still had a legitimate claim to a strong regional purpose. a professor of human geography stated, “ujo was, before anything, a strong educationally centred university with a tradition of fundamental research” (professor 3). in short, despite its emerging entrepreneurial tendencies, the university’s generalisation strategy and ‘humboldtian’ profile, in which multiple scalar logics coexisted peacefully, prevailed in the early 1990s. discussion and conclusions the finnish university system spread all over the state space from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. new universities outside the helsinki and turku region were seen as a tool of keynesian territorial management (kangas & moisio 2012: 206). their primary role was to strengthen national and regional scales as the main dimensions of social and economic development. it was hoped that regionally responsive universities would increase the education levels of local populations and thereby improve the standard of living within the entire national territory (jalava 2012). starting in the mid1980s, the emerging logics and practices of a ‘schumpeterian’ regime, such as the new public management and the politics of international competitiveness, guided state reorganisation and were increasingly imposed on universities as well (moisio & leppäen 2007; kangas & moisio 2012: 206). however, as this article illustrates, common expectations did not produce common convergent tendencies amongst universities (cf. hay 2000: 512). to explain this spatial variation, the article has paid attention to two universities with different scalar logics and strategies and their role in shaping statehood in finland. in lut, a single scalar logic dominated and additional logics were more peripheral. the specialisation strategy lut chose from the outset led to its departments becoming narrowly focused spatially. the university scaled its activities outwards as it tried to find educational and research niches or fields that were uncommon in finland. lut searched for globally scaled and privately funded industrial partners or stakeholders with significant research and development capabilities. thus, it trained engineers mainly for large enterprises that were located in the helsinki metropolitan area. thinking about the scalar dimensions of lut’s practices, the university can be understood as having been simultaneously international, national and regional (mansfield 2005: 468; vainikka 2014). lut aimed at ‘nordic-class’ and, later on, world-class performance in carefully selected focus areas. nationally, its strategy supported the construction of societal order towards an emphasis on competition, specialisation, privatisation and decreased governmental regulation. regionally speaking, lut was responsive above all to the needs of the helsinki region, and hence, it promoted spatial strategies emphasising a few urban nodes in southern finland. later, in the 1980s, the plurality of scalar logics increased somewhat, as lut more carefully took into account regional networks’ effects on south karelia by establishing the centre for continuing education and by supporting the creation of the kareltek technology centre. this did not, however, invalidate or supersede the previously established scalar logics and hierarchies but, rather, gave the university a piquant local flavour. in contrast, ujo’s generalisation strategy led to a more comprehensive, or ‘humboldtian’, university model in which multiple scalar logics influenced the core mission. through a broad spectrum of disciplines, ujo supported territorialised state strategies and the needs of the public sector both nationally and locally. however, due to its strong focus on teacher and public-servant education, ujo was highly dependent on public funding and territorially equalising welfare-state policies. thus, the 1980s and the emerging ‘schumpeterian’ competition regime caused some problems for the university. many structures and practices had become so ‘fixed’ during the 1970s that the university 130 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka could not abandon them altogether. still, some changes in scalar logics were needed in order to match intensifying competition from rival universities. university administrators saw that, while constructing an equalising welfare state, ujo and its core competencies had become too general and ‘ineffective’. consequently, ujo volunteered as a pilot university for new ‘schumpeterian’ experiments in resource management but otherwise remained a traditional, ‘humboldtian’ university that supported many attitudes, norms and practices created in the 1970s. from the viewpoint of the scalar structuration approach, new arrangements and structures originated from the interaction between inherited spatial or scalar structures and emergent socio-spatial strategies (brenner 2004b; macleod & jones 2007; mackinnon 2011). here a concept of scale has been used to reveal the ‘inbetween-spaces’ (jonas 2006: 402) of action. we should not think of universities as the preassigned and static arenas of universalistic, regionally embedded or ‘glocal’ activities. on the contrary, universities, like scales or scalar logics, are very much relational and political constructs (jones & macleod 2004). particular events and universities’ practices can be seen as multidimensional and as evincing multiple scalar aspects and repercussions visible simultaneously. there may be situations in which regional, national or global distinctions are less important, but it is difficult to think of a situation in which a university produces or gives meaning to only one scale or set of scales at a time (cf. mansfield 2005: 468; vainikka 2014). despite the multidimensional nature of academic activities, particular projects and university choices, as this article illustrates, tend to favour some scales over others and reshape statehood in line with their ideological and socio-political or politico-economic attitudes (mackinnon 2011: 31; see also brenner 2004b). creation of the basis for a territorially integrated welfare state through heavy public investments and state planning in the 1970s represented the policy ujo wanted to support actively, whereas increasing emphasis on technological development, competition and specialisation from the early 1980s onwards were something lut had already proactively defended in the previous decade. given that, historically, universities have played an important role in the development of finnish territorial structures (moisio 2012: 66–67, 135–136, 143, 146), further academic research should more thoroughly examine, for instance, how other technological universities and business schools have taken part in the statehood transformation process compared with multidisciplinary ‘humboldtian’ universities. hence, more empirical studies on universities of various sizes, offering programs in different disciplines are still needed to understand processes in which different spatial relations and state formations are produced at any given time and in any given place. in this regard, a concept of scale offers an interesting heuristic and analytical tool for spatio-historical analyses of higher education institutions. it engenders new research topics and makes it possible for historians to observe the evolution of university organisations from a viewpoint they would not otherwise have. as jonas (2006: 404) aptly remarks, “scale is a lens through which to think about and act upon change”. by entering the territory of human geography, university historians participate in the exciting efforts to bridge the divide between these two disciplines that offer different but closely related ways of looking at the same social interactions and power relations (cf. baker 2003). in this sense, they could form yet another generation that cherishes the legacy of the divergent annales movement by breaking down compartments and encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration (cf. burke 1990). as lucien febvre, one of the two founders of the annales movement in the 1920s, put it, “historians, be geographers. be jurists too, and sociologists, and psychologists” (burke 1990: 2). to febvre “it mattered little whether those who undertake research [on human societies] be labelled at outset geographers, historians or even sociologists” (baker 2003: 20). this apt remark is certainly applicable to research on universities, too. notes 1 ujo was situated in the county (lääni) and province (maakunta) of north karelia, whereas lut was located in the province of south karelia, which was part of a larger administrative entity: kymi county. 2 the bourgeois-minded press and conservative politicians in joensuu were also worried about the alleged “red colour” of the university, that is, the political actions of the students and some university personnel. juxtapositions emerged between the different values and ideas of territoriality, science and academic culture. in more detail, see kuusisto 2014. 3 ujo had engaged in continuing training through the open university already in the 1970s. the establishment of the cce deepened this activity further. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 131the scalar logics of universities acknowledgements the author would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and sami moisio and arto nevala for early discussions leading to the publication of this paper. the article was financially supported by the suomen kulttuurirahasto (finnish cultural foundation) (grant no. 00130408). references ahlqvist t & moisio s 2014. neoliberalisation in a nordic state: from cartel polity towards a corporate polity in finland. new political economy 19: 1, 21–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2013.768608. alajoutsijärvi k, kettunen k & tikkanen h 2012. institutional evolution of business schools in finland 1909–2009. management & organisational history 7: 4, 337–367. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1744935912457624. allen j, massey d & cochrane a 1998. rethinking the region: spaces of neo-liberalism. london, routledge. arbo p & eskelinen h 2003. the role of small, comprehensive universities in regional economic development: experiences from two nordic cases. paper for the 43rd ersa congress, jyväskylä, august 27–30. baker arh 2003. geography and history: bridging the divide. cambridge university press, cambridge. benneworth p & jongbloed bw 2010. who matters to universities? a stakeholder perspective on humanities, arts and social sciences valorisation. higher education 59: 5, 567–588. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9265-2. billig m 1996. arguing and thinking: a rhetorical approach to social psychology. cambridge university press, cambridge. brenner n 2001. the limits to scale? methodological reflections on scalar structuration. progress in human geography 25: 4, 591–614. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1191/030913201682688959. brenner n 2004a. urban governance and the production of new state spaces in western europe, 1960–2000. review of international political economy 11: 3, 447–488. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969229042000282864. brenner n 2004b. new state spaces. oxford university press, oxford. brubaker r & cooper f 2000. beyond “identity”. theory and society 29: 1, 1–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1007068714468. burke p 1990. the french historical revolution. the annales school, 1929–89. polity press, cambridge. cerny pg, menz g & soederberg s 2005. different roads to globalization: neoliberalism, the competition state, and politics in a more open world. in soederberg s, menz g & cerny pg (eds). internalizing globalization: the rise of neoliberalism and the decline of national varieties of capitalism, 1–31. palgrave macmillan, new york. clark br 1983. the higher education system: academic organisation in cross-national perspective. university california press, berkeley. clark br 1998. creating entrepreneurial universities: organisational pathways of transformation. pergamon, oxford. dahllöf u & selander s (eds) 1994. new universities and regional context. acta universitatis upsaliensis, upsala. dahllöf u, goddard j, huttunen j, o’brien c, román o & virtanen i 1998. towards the responsive university. the regional role of eastern finland universities. publications of higher education evaluation council, helsinki. delanty g 2001. the university in the knowledge society. organization 8: 2, 149–153. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508401082002. della porta d 2008. comparative analysis: case-oriented versus variable-oriented research. in della porta d & keating m (eds). approaches and methodologies in social sciences. a pluralist perspective, 198–222. cambridge university press, cambridge. dillon gl 1991. contending rhetorics: writing in academic disciplines. indiana university press, bloomington. esping-andersen g 1990. the three worlds of welfare capitalism. cambridge university press, cambridge. fraser a 2010. the craft of scalar practices. environment and planning a 42: 2, 332–346. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a4299. haapakorpi a 1989. ylemmän korkeakoulututkinnon suorittaneiden sijoittuminen työmarkkinoille. opetusministeriö, helsinki. harrison j 2008. stating the production of scales: centrally orchestrated regionalism, regionally orchestrated centralism. international journal of urban and regional research 32: 4, 922–944. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00815.x. harvey da 2005. brief history of neo-liberalism. oxford university press, oxford. hay c 2000. contemporary capitalism, globalization, regionalization and the persistence of national variation. review of international studies 26: 4, 509–531. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026021050000509x. heiskala r & hämäläinen tj 2007. social innovation or hegemonic change? rapid paradigm change in finland in the 1980s and 1990s. in heiskala r & hämäläinen tj (eds). social innovations, institutional change and economic performance. making sense of structural adjustment processes in industrial sectors, regions and societies, 80–94. edward elgar, cheltenham. howells jrl, karataş-özkan m, yavuz ç & atiq m 2014. university management and organisational change: a dynamic institutional perspective. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 7: 2, 251–270. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu005. husso k & raento p 2002. science policy and research in finland. fennia 180: 1–2, 261–274. hölttä s 1988. recent changes in the finnish higher education system. european journal of education 23: 1–2, 91–103. hölttä s 1999. regional cooperation in postsecondary education in europe – the case of nordic countries. journal of institutional research in australasia 8: 2, 31–46. 132 fennia 193: 1 (2015)mikko kohvakka hölttä s & nuotio j 1995. academic leadership in a selfregulative environment: a challenge for finnish universities. tertiary education and management 1: 1, 12–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13583883.1995.9966850. hölttä s & pulliainen k 1996. the changing regional role of universities. tertiary education and management 2: 2, 119–126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13583883.1996.9966892. jaakkola j 1998. suuntaa ja synergiaa: rehtorin puheita yliopiston alkuvuosikymmeniltä. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu, hämeenlinna. jalava m 2012. the university in the making of the welfare state: the 1970s degree reform in finland. peter lang, frankfurt am main. jessop b 2000. the crisis of the national spatio-temporal fix and the tendential ecological dominance of global capitalism. international journal of urban and regional research 24: 2, 323–360. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00251. jessop b 2008. state power. polity press, london. jonas aeg 1994. the scale politics of spatiality. environment and planning d: society and space 12: 3, 257–264. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d120257 jonas aeg 2006. pro scale: further reflections on the ‘scale debate’ in human geography. transactions of the institute of british geographers 31: 3, 399– 406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2006.00210.x. jones m & macleod g 2004. regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the english questions. transactions of the institute of british geographers 29: 4, 433–452. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.2004.00140.x. jongbloed b, enders j & salerno c 2008. higher education and its communities: interconnections, interdependencies and a research agenda. higher education 56: 3, 303–324. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-008-9128-2. kaiser r & nikiforova e 2008. the performativity of scale: the social construction of scale effects in narva, estonia. environment and planning d: society and space 26: 3, 537–562. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d3307. kangas a & moisio s 2012. creating state competitiveness, re-scaling higher education: the case of finland. in aalto p, harle v & moisio s (eds). global and regional problems. towards an interdisciplinary study, 199–224. ashgate, farnham. kettunen p 2001. the nordic welfare state in finland. scandinavian journal of history 26: 3, 225–247. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/034687501750303864. kirkinen h 1973. general principles on the development of the university, memo, february 9, 1973. the archives of the emeritus professor heikki kirkinen. kogan m, bauer m, bleiklie i & henkel m 2000. transforming higher education: a comparative study. jessica kingsley publishers, london and philadelphia. kohvakka m 2009. kasvukertomus: 40-vuotiaan lappeenrannan teknillisen yliopiston elämäkerta. lappeenrannan teknillinen yliopisto, jyväskylä. kraatz ms & block es 2008. organizational implications of institutional pluralism. in greenwood r, oliver c, sahlin k & suddaby r (eds). the sage handbook of organizational institutionalism, 243– 275. sage, london. ktl 1991. saimaalta kolille: karjalan tutkimuslaitos 1971–1991. joensuun yliopisto, karjalan tutkimuslaitos, joensuu. kuusisto a 2014. maakunnan ja tieteen välissä. tutkimus joensuun korkeakoulun politisoitumiskeskustelun diskursseista pohjoiskarjalaisessa lehdistössä 1969–1975. suomen historian lisensiaattitutkielma, itä-suomen yliopisto. kyläheiko k 1998. the regional role and the effectiveness of lappeenranta university of technology: self-evaluation report. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu, lappeenranta. lut 1973a. lausunto fytt-toimikunnan mietinnöstä, 19 huhtikuuta 1973 (the report on the referendum of the fytt committee, 19 april, 1973). minutes of lut senate, archives of lappeenranta university of technology. lut 1973b. toimintaja taloussuunnitelma vuosille 1975–1979. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu, lappeenranta. lut 1974. vuosikertomus 1972–1973. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu, lappeenranta. lut 1977. alueellinen neuvottelukunta, 22 kesäkuuta 1977. minutes of lut senate, archives of lappeenranta university of technology. lut 1978. toimintaja taloussuunnitelma vuosille 1980–1984. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu, lappeenranta. lut 1984. toimintaja taloussuunnitelma vuosille 1986–1990. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu, lappeenranta. mackinnon d 2011. reconstructing scale: towards a new scalar politics. progress in human geography 35: 1, 21–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132510367841. macleod g & jones m 2007. territorial, scalar, networked, connected: in what sense a ‘regional world’? regional studies 41: 9, 1177–1191. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343400701646182 mansfield b 2005. beyond rescaling: reintegrating the ‘national’ as a dimension of scalar relations. progress in human geography 29: 4, 458–473. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph560oa. meyer re & hammerschmid g 2006. changing institutional logics and executive identities: a managerial challenge to public administration in austria. american behavioural scientist 49: 7, 1000–1014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0002764205285182. meyer re & höllerer ma 2010. meaning structures in a contested issue field: a topographic map of shareholder value in austria. academy of management journal 53: 6, 1241–1262. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.57317829. michelsen k 1994. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu 1969–1994. lappeenrannan teknillinen korkeakoulu, espoo. moisio s 2008. towards attractive and cost-efficient state space: political geography of the production of state transformation in finland. world political science review 4: 3, 1–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.2202/1935-6226.1053. fennia 193: 1 (2015) 133the scalar logics of universities moisio s 2012. valtio, alue, politiikka. suomen tilasuhteiden sääntely toisesta maailmansodasta nykypäivään. vastapaino, tampere. moisio s & leppänen l 2007. towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic transformation of statehood in finland, 1965–2005. fennia 185: 2, 63–87. moore a 2008. rethinking scale as a geographical category: from analysis to practice. progress in human geography 32: 2, 203–225. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309132507087647. mälkönen p 1982. tieteen oltava kansainvälistä. karjalan maa 9.9.1982. neave g 1988. on the cultivation of quality, efficiency and enterprise: an overview of recent trends in higher education in western europe, 1986–1988. european journal of education 23: 1–2, 7–23. neave g & van vught fa (eds) 1991. prometheus bound. the changing relationship between government and higher education in western europe. pergamon press, oxford. nevala a 2009. uudisraivaaja: joensuun yliopiston 40-vuotishistoria. joensuun yliopisto, saarijärvi. paasi a 2004. place and region: looking through the prism of scale. progress in human geography 28: 4, 536– 546. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph502pr. pinheiro r 2012. university ambiguity and institutionalization. a tale of three regions. in pinheiro r, benneworth p & jones ga (eds). universities and regional development. a critical assessment of tensions and contradictions, 36–55. routledge, new york. potter j 1996. representing reality. discourse, rhetoric and social construction. sage, london. pulliainen k 1985. rehtorin kirje kulttuurija tiedeministeri gustav björkstrandille 7.8.1985, archives of university of joensuu. pulliainen k 1987a. yliopisto ei ole konsulttitoimisto. karjalan maa 15.10.1987. pulliainen k 1987b. reflections on the current problem of the university of joensuu. sanansaattaja. joensuun yliopiston tiedotuslehti 5.8.1987, 1–2. rowley tj & moldeveanu m 2003. when will stakeholder groups act? an interestand identity-based model of stakeholder group mobilization. academy of management review 28: 2, 204–219. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amr.2003.9416080. rüegg w (ed) 2011. a history of the university in europe. vol iv universities since 1945. cambridge university press, cambridge. salo m 2003. pohjoinen alma mater: oulun yliopisto osana korkeakoululaitosta ja yhteiskuntaa perustamisvaiheista vuoteen 2000. pohjois-suomen historiallinen yhdistys, rovaniemi. sillince jaa 2006. resources and organisational identities: the role of rhetoric in the creation of competitive advantage. management communication quarterly 20: 2, 186–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0893318906293587. smith n 1993. homeless/global: scaling places. in bird j, curtis b, putnam t, robertson g & tickner l (eds). mapping the futures: local cultures, global change, 87–120. routledge, london. swyngedouw e 1997. niether global nor local: ‘glocalisation’ and the politics of scale. in cox k (ed). spaces of globalization, 137–166. guilford, new york. thornton ph & ocasio w 1999. institutional logics and the historical contingency of power in organizations: executive succession in the higher education publishing industry 1958–1990. american journal of sociology 105: 3, 801–843. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/210361. tierney wg 1988. organizational culture in higher education: defining the essentials. journal of higher education 59: 1, 2–12. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.2307/1981868. tosh j 2010. the pursuit of history. aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history. pearson education ltd, harlow. trow m 2007. reflections on the transition from elite to mass universal access: forms and phases of higher education in modern societies since wwii. in forest j & altbach p (eds). international handbook of higher education, 243–280. springer, dortrecht. ujo 1975. toiminta-ja taloussuunnitelma vuosiksi 1977–1981. joensuun korkeakoulu, joensuu. ujo 1978. toimintaja taloussuunnitelma vuosille 1980–1984. joensuun korkeakoulu, joensuu. ujo 1984. toimintaja taloussuunnitelma vuosille 1986–1990. joensuun yliopisto, joensuu. ujo 1986. toimintaja taloussuunnitelma vuosille 1988–1992. joensuun yliopisto, joensuu. vainikka j 2013. the role of identity for regional actors and citizens in a splintered region. the case of päijät-häme, finland. fennia 191: 1, 25–39. vainikka j 2014. a citizen of all the different bits: emotional scaling of identity. geojournal. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10708-014-9596-0. vartiainen p & viiri a 2002. universities and their local partners: the case of the university of joensuu. industry & higher education 16: 2, 83–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.5367/000000002101296153. välimaa j 2005. social dynamics of higher education reforms: the case finland. in gornitzka å, kogan m & amaral a (eds). reform and change in higher education, 245–268. dordrecht, springer. välimaa j 2008. cultural studies in higher education research. in välimaa j & ylijoki o-h (eds). cultural perspectives on higher education, 9–25. dortrecht, springer. warren cab & karner tx 2010. discovering qualitative methods. oxford university press, oxford. wishard d 2004. period and region. progress in human geography 28: 3, 305–319. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph488oa. regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, sweden and norway katri suorsa suorsa, katri (2007). regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, sweden and norway. fennia 185: 1, pp. 15–29. helsinki. issn 00150010. this article discusses how the national innovation policies in finland, sweden and norway consider regionality, especially peripheral regions. this aspect is of interest considering how these three countries perform well in international competition while having substantial differences between different regions in terms of their economical development. the northernmost parts of finland, sweden and norway are raised as examples as they are especially challenging areas in the context of innovation activities. as a theoretical background i introduce the concepts of innovation systems and innovation policy and define the challenges involved when implementing innovation policies in peripheral regions. the study is realised by analysing 20 innovation policy documents: ten from finland, six from sweden and four from norway. i use qualitative content analysis as a research method. this investigation shows that, in spite of the importance of regions in innovation activities, national innovation policies in the research countries do not consider regionality, or, more specifically, the lessfavoured regions. meanwhile, regional innovation systems, especially institutes of higher education, are seen as important for the economic development and competitiveness of the countries and their national innovation systems. katri suorsa, department of geography, po box 3000, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland or lönnrot institute, kajaani university consortium, po box 51, fi-87100 kajaani, finland. e-mail: katri.suorsa@oulu.fi. introduction in a knowledge-based economy, knowledge creation and knowledge transfer are seen as the most important devices for innovation creation and, subsequently, also for the economic growth of nations and regions. the importance of regions as key arenas of innovation has increased because the innovation process is, at present, understood as a regional phenomenon. however, when considering innovations, the term ‘region’ usually refers to the innovation centres of metropolitan areas in more developed countries. peripheries, i.e. regions with fewer resources that are located far from core areas and main markets, are not normally recognised in innovation policies and strategies. northern europe, especially finland and sweden, have enjoyed success in international competition in the field of information and communication technology business. in all the nordic countries, the ict clusters of the capital cities are important links between national and international networks (mariussen 2004: 8). however, there are substantial regional differences in innovation activities and economic development in finland, sweden and norway. there are peripheral regions especially in the northernmost parts of these countries. their greatest challenges are their distant location from the core areas and the lack of key actors in innovation process and resources, e.g. hightech enterprises, institutes of higher education and r&d institutes. these factors generally decrease the opportunities for providing education and establishing internationally competitive businesses in peripheral regions when compared to the core areas of the countries. hence, especially young people (i.e. potential future experts, entrepreneurs and innovators) are moving away from the peripheral northern parts of finland, sweden and nor16 fennia 185: 1 (2007)katri suorsa way (gløersen et al. 2006; jauhiainen 2006, 2007). however, the concept of welfare state is based on the idea that all citizens, regardless of their sex, age or the region where they live, are equally entitled to the same rights and opportunities (e.g. education and work). this is why equality and a balanced regional development are also considered in the innovation policies of the nordic countries (sotarauta & srnivas 2005: 35). the policies consider innovation activities (i.e. research and development, possibilities for higher education, creating new knowledge and products) important for the economic development of peripheral regions. some innovation policy measures are directed especially at the less-favoured regions. for example, the northern periphery programme of the european union is aimed at the peripheral regions of scotland, norway, sweden and finland (northern periphery… 2007). the problem is, however, that the regions are faced with quite demanding challenges that make the promotion of innovation-related economic activities difficult. the present study investigates how national innovation policies in three nordic welfare states, finland, sweden and norway, consider peripheral regions. i will first introduce the theoretical background of the study and then describe the northernmost parts of finland, sweden and norway with respect to their locational, demographic and economic peripherality and their challenges in implementing innovation activities. in finland, the study area contains the regions of northern ostrobothnia, kainuu and lapland; in sweden, the norbotten county; and, in norway, nordland, troms and finnmark. after presenting the background, i will introduce the research methods and materials as well as the main findings of the study. the study will end in a discussion of the challenges involved in enforcing innovation policies to the peripheral regions of northern europe. innovation policy and peripherality innovation policy and innovation systems in the 1990s, the concept of innovation policy has changed from a research and technology policy to a more holistic innovation policy that integrates other political sectors, such as education and competition and regulatory, regional, agricultural and foreign policies. this results from a new understanding of r&d infrastructures, changes in economy (i.e. globalisation), increasing co-operation between different sectors of the economy, increasing role of ict and knowledge transfer and new paradigms in economic theories (lundvall & borrás 1997; biegelbauer & borrás 2003). when knowledge creation and transfer are considered the most important devices for economic growth and well-being, creating and sustaining innovations are regarded as the keys to improved global competitiveness (cooke 2004; corona et al. 2006). therefore, the role of innovation policies and, especially, the tools used to promote companies’ innovation activities are emphasised. recent theories also emphasise that companies’ ability to innovate does not solely depend on the entrepreneurs, as also communities, and especially regions, have an effect on innovation processes (corona et al. 2006). this is why the focus of innovation policies in the 1990s lay on institutions, especially on creating bridging institutions, and networks. lundvall and borrás (1997: 37) define innovation policies as “elements of science, technology and industrial policy that explicitly aim at promoting the development, spread and efficient use of new products, services and processes in markets or inside private and public organisations. the main focus is on the impact on economic performance and social cohesion”. the major objective of an innovation policy is to enhance the learning ability of firms, knowledge institutions and people. an innovation policy should also cope with the possible negative effects of the learning economy, such as social and regional polarisation (lundvall & borrás 1997: 38). however, tödtling and trippl (2005: 1204) state that innovation and regional policies emphasising high-tech and knowledgebased or “creative” industries are targeted at successful regions. the concept of innovation system, which is also used as a theoretical framework in this study, is used in politics to define actors with an effect on innovation activities (miettinen 2002). the main point in the innovation system framework is that innovations are developed through co-operation between different actors (e.g. firms, r&d institutes, educational institutes, political organisations, etc.) of the system. in that sense, the actors, their cooperation and relationships constitute the system (lundvall et al. 2002: 219–220). interactive learning between the actors of the system is emphasised especially in territorially based systems of innovafennia 185: 1 (2007) 17regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, … tion (gregersen & johnson 1997: 482). the focus is on the innovation process and the factors that affect that process, not on innovations as such (nelson 1993). besides market relations, also other relations (power relations, trust and loyalty) are considered (lundvall & maskell 2000: 359–369). a functioning innovation system needs actors and their co-operation at both the national and regional levels. political actors (e.g. governments, ministries) function at the national level and shape national systems (e.g. research, education, technology and innovation policies). the actual innovation processes happen between these actors at the regional level in firms, research institutes or projects. the role of institutes of higher education is emphasised because they develop new knowledge and educate people (nelson 1993; lundvall et al. 2002). peripheries in innovation policy the innovation system framework is based on studies of successful regions, such as the silicon valley. the results from those studies have been regarded as universal and adaptable to every region. however, there has lately been a shift of focus to studying also the less-favoured regions. nevertheless, the concepts used in studying successful regions were originally developed to explain the rise of economically prosperous regions. it is, therefore, difficult to adapt them to the conditions of economically challenging, less-favoured regions (benneworth & charles 2005: 540). this is a challenge especially when the innovation system framework is used in innovation policy. rosenfeld (2002) identifies the following three types of less-favoured regions: first, older industrialised regions dominated by labour-intensive industries that have lost their cost advantage to newly industrialised regions, second, semi-industrialised regions that had many small craft industries that operate with low levels of technology and, third, peripheral or less populated regions. the focus of this study is on peripheral regions. peripherality can originate from the physical/ geographical location or social situation of the region. for example, keeble et al. (1988, in spiekermann & aalbu 2004: 7) define peripheral regions as lacking accessibility to the main markets. in this sense, the accessibility of a region determines its competitive advantage or disadvantage. the accessibility of a region consists of two functions. the first represents the activities or opportunities to be reached, while the second represents the effort, time, distance or cost needed to reach them (spiekermann & neubauer 2002: 7; spiekermann & aalbu 2004: 7–8). in the context of innovation, peripherality can also result from a lack of resources and networks. for example, according to benneworth and charles (2005: 539), a region can be defined as peripheral if it lacks the knowledge resources that enable the creation of agglomeration economies and the development of a competitive advantage in knowledge-based activities. consequently, copus (2001) uses the concept of aspatial peripherality to describe regions with poor knowledge resources, e.g. poor quality of the local information technology infrastructure and no access or poor access to local, national and global institutional structures and networks. the regions that are aspatially peripheral face the greatest challenges in innovation activities. they need their own policy measures to enhance their innovation activities and to prevent social and regional polarisation. in the case of innovation, the challenges of lessfavoured regions usually lie in the lack of necessary infrastructure, social capital, co-operation partners and markets (tödtling & trippl 2005). the lack of “dynamic clusters” and supporting institutions leads to a lower level of innovation activities compared with more central and agglomerated regions. therefore, national r&d funding is low in peripheral regions. also networking is low, smes dominate the business and clusters are often missing or weakly performing. consequently, less-favoured regions need to find new solutions for building dynamic networks and co-operation (tödtling & trippl 2005: 1208–1210). according to morgan and nauwelaers (1999), the challenge is also that sticky “branches” (where tacit knowledge is emphasised and new knowledge is created) are often located in core regions, while “downstream” activities are located in peripheries. “downstream” activities are more mobile and can thus move to different regions with lower production costs. hassink (2005) claims that political lock-ins are a development challenge in less-favoured regions. old political practices are regarded effective even though the needs of industry have changed. policy-makers should both learn and unlearn (see also lorenzen 2001). for example, morgan (2004) criticises the cluster-building innovation policy used in many countries. this policy often develops institutions that supposedly create an innovative cli18 fennia 185: 1 (2007)katri suorsa mate, but it does not consider the private sector. such an innovation policy is not effective if the learning ability of the region is not considered. oughton et al. (2002) refer to the concept of a regional innovation paradox in innovation policy. in politics, there is a need to invest on innovation activities in lagging regions, but the regions have a relatively low capacity to use public funds earmarked for investment in innovation-related activities because of the lacking learning capacity and infrastructure. according to morgan and nauwelaers (1999), the problem in innovation policy is that it is still concentrated on r&d and a narrow understanding of innovation. as a consequence, less-favoured regions are not considered innovative because they do not have the required competence. according to oughton et al. (2002), there is a need for a policy that helps firms in peripheral regions to utilise public funds. thus, the policy should also increase the level of r&d spending in the business and education sectors as well increase the region’s ability to absorb public funding. hence, the innovative capacity of a firm is related to the learning ability of the region. therefore, there is a need for an innovation infrastructure, possibilities for learning and creation of new knowledge. when using a broad understanding of innovation (e.g. new methods in working, better and more effective networking relationships, etc.) less-favoured regions are considered more innovative (morgan & nauwelaers 1999). tödtling and trippl (2005: 1212–1215) emphasise that, in peripheral regions, innovation policy should concentrate on “catching up learning”, attracting new firms to the region and strengthening potential clusters. key features of the research area: northern finland, sweden and norway the northern parts of europe are peripheral when measuring with locational, demographic and educational as well as economical factors. therefore, northern finland, sweden and norway have many challenges in innovation activities. for example, the number of relevant actors, e.g. innovative enterprises, experts and institutes of higher education, is low and geographical distances to main markets and between actors are large. hence, cooperation and networking are challenging. locational peripherality when measuring accessibility (i.e. peripherality) by travel cost indicators and potential accessibility, the northernmost parts of finland, sweden and norway are very or extremely peripheral on the european scale. espon project 2.1.1 (2007) identifies kainuu and finnmark as very peripheral and the other regions in the research area as peripheral. the regions and their municipalities are also peripheral on the intra-nordic scale, especially municipalities with a poor transport infrastructure (e.g. no airports or railways) (spiekermann & aalbu 2004). because of better motorway networks, municipalities in northern sweden are more accessible than those in northern finland or norway (spiekermann & aalbu 2004) (fig. 1). there are six airports with scheduled service in northern norway, five in sweden and eight in finland. the amount of air travellers was over a million a year in tromsø, langnes and bodø in norway; over 500,000 in luleå in sweden and oulu in finland; over 100,000 in alta, kirkenes and hammerfest in norway, kiruna in sweden, rovaniemi, kittilä and ivalo in finland; and under 100,000 in lakselv and banak in norway, gällivare and pajala in sweden, kuusamo, kajaani, kemi-tornio and enontekiö in finland (finavia 2006; statistics norway 2006; statistics sweden 2006). however, the nordic peripheral regions are economically more developed than other european regions with low accessibility. national assets and policies in education, r&d and innovations help, to a certain degree, to overcome the locational disadvantage (spiekermann & neubauer 2002: 36–40). regarding aspatial peripherality (see copus 2001), northern finland, sweden and norway are not as peripheral as other peripheral regions in europe. nevertheless, the nordic peripheral regions have other disadvantages due to their distant location, e.g. very high travel costs of participating in european co-operation and a high population loss resulting from negative net migration (spiekermann & neubauer 2002: 36–40). also, institutions of higher education and research centres are small and few in number. demographic peripherality the northern parts of finland, sweden and norway are sparsely populated (table 1). the regions are relatively large. for example, the land area of northern finland (150,000 km2) is 44.9 percent of fennia 185: 1 (2007) 19regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, … higher education institute airport railway capital city largest cities in region 10° 10° 20° 20° 30° 70° 60° 60° 55° 65° 65° 0 100 km oulu alta oslo tromsø luleå bodø kemi rovaniemi kajaani norrbotten nordland troms northern ostrobothnia lapland kainuu finnmark stockholm helsinki sweden finland norway arctic circle fig. 1. research area: northernmost finland, sweden and norway. table 1. statistics of the research area. sources: statistics finland 2006; statistics norway 2006; statistics sweden 2006. northern finland northern sweden northern norway northern ostrobothnia kainuu lapland norrbotten nordland troms finnmark land area (km2) 35,290 21,567 93,004 98,249 36,074 24,884 45,757 population 378,006 85,303 185,800 251,740 236,257 153,585 72,937 population density (people/km2) 10.7 4.0 2.0 2.6 6.5 6.2 1.6 netmigration 344 –593 –719 –347 –774 285 –402 gdp per capita (€) 26,309 20,620 24,870 28,324 27,236 28,376 24,667 gdp per capita (index: country average=100) 92 70 85 93 80 83 72 tax revenue (million €) (per cent of total national) 1840 (6.1) 386 (1.3) 924 (3.1) 1164 (2.7) 1844 (2.4) 1240 (1.6) 412 (0.5) unemployment rate 10.5 17.5 12.9 7.7 4.7 4.1 5.7 20 fennia 185: 1 (2007)katri suorsa the area of finland, but the population (649,000) is only 13.7 percent of the whole population of finland. northern norway (107,000 km2) contains 33.0 percent of the land surface of norway, and the population (462,000) is 10.1 percent of the population. norrbotten county (98,000 km2) covers 22.4 percent of the land area of sweden, while the population (252,000) is 2.8 percent of the population of sweden. the municipalities are relatively small. the largest city is oulu (population 126,000) in northern finland. other large cities are luleå (population 72,000) in northern sweden and tromsø (population 62,000) in northern norway (fig. 1). except for northern ostrobothnia in finland and troms in norway, the regions in the research area lost inhabitants in 2005 (statistics finland 2006; statistics norway 2006; statistics sweden 2006). as morgan (2004) states, localised learning is important in the innovation activities of firms (see also morgan & nauwelaers 1999; lorenzen 2001). for localised learning, universities are important while they create new knowledge and educate people. the research area contains four universities and 10 university colleges or universities of applied sciences. they are relatively small, especially in norway (table 2 and fig. 1). education statistics differ from each other in sweden, norway and finland. therefore, comparison is difficult. in this study, i define higher education as lasting about 13–14 years (including compulsory school). in all, the level of education in the research region is lower than the national average, which is 25 percent in finland, 34 percent in sweden and 24 percent in norway (statistics finland 2006; statistics norway 2006; statistics sweden 2006). furthermore, the level of education is higher in regions with a university. similarly, economic performance seems better in regions where the level of education is higher. economic peripherality espon project 2.1.1 (2007) calculates the typologies of lagging regions on the basis of gdp per inhabitant and unemployment rate. in 2001, kainuu and lapland were identified as lagging regions, northern ostrobothnia as a potentially lagging region and the other regions in the research area as non-lagging. compared with the respective national averages, the unemployment rates in northern finland, northern sweden and northern norway are higher (table 1). the national average in finland is 6.4 percent; in sweden, 4.6 percent; and in norway, 4.1 percent (statistics finland 2006; statistics norway 2006; statistics sweden 2006). the gross domestic product per capita is also lower than the national average. however, there are differences in the economic situations between the regions in the research area. northern ostrobothnia and norrbotten are close to the national average, whereas kainuu and finnmark are table 2. education statistics in northernmost finland, sweden and norway. sources: ministry of education 2005; statistics finland 2006; statistics norway 2006; statistics sweden 2006. region people with a degree on higher education (per cent) higher education institute (number of students in 2002) northern finland northern ostrobothnia 23.6 university of oulu (15,800) university of lapland (rovaniemi) (7900) oulu university of applied sciences (4000) kainuu 18.8 rovaniemi university of applied sciences (3000) kemi-tornio university of applied sciences (2800) lapland 20.7 kajaani polytechnic (2000) northern sweden 29.0 luleå university of technology (10,200) northern norway nordland 20.9 university of tromsø (5500) bodø university college (4100) finnmark university college (alta) (1900) troms 22.6 harstad university college (1400) nesna university college (1100) narvik university college (1100) finnmark 19.8 saami university college (kautokeino) (200) fennia 185: 1 (2007) 21regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, … quite far from it. the tax revenue that the state got from those areas is low. the state got 6.1 percent of its tax revenues from northern ostrobothnia in 2002, and only 1.3 percent from kainuu and 3.1 percent from lapland. the tax revenue from norrbotten county was 2.7 percent of the total tax revenue of sweden in 2004. norway offers a tax reduction to the residents of the most northern parts of the country. therefore, the tax revenues were very low, namely 2.4 percent from nordland, 1.6 percent from troms and 0.5 percent from finnmark in 2006. the most important employment sectors are similar in all the research regions. most people are employed in the service sector (especially health care and social work), in industry and trade, hotels and restaurants (eures 2006; statistics finland 2006; statistics norway 2006). however, manufacturing, mining and quarrying also employ people in northern sweden and northern norway (eures 2006). research questions and materials the present article discusses the ways the national innovation policies in finland, sweden and norway consider regionality. by regionality i mean regions as such, activities that happen at the regional level, and the qualities of locations and regions. the main focus is on less-favoured peripheral regions. i discuss how much the regions are considered, what are the main themes connected them and what kinds of regions are considered in the innovation policy documents in finland, sweden and norway, using the northernmost parts of the countries as examples (fig. 1). this study is based on the policy strategy documents for innovation in the countries in question. i investigated the most recent documents from the most important public actors of the innovation systems in finland, norway and sweden. the study material consists of 20 documents, ten from finland, six from sweden and four from norway. nine of them are written in english, four in finnish, five in swedish and three in norwegian. the analysed documents are from public funding organisations and public administration, and they are the most significant innovation policy documents from the investigated countries. the documents include the actors’ innovation strategies (e.g. the education and research strategy of the finnish ministry of education) and the innovation policy guidelines of the governments. the same documents have been used also in other studies (e.g. goodnip 2003; european trend chart… 2005a, 2005b, 2005c). the documents will be examined using qualitative content analysis. content analysis is the most often used method in qualitative research and can be performed in many different ways (tuomi & sarajärvi 2002: 105), making it a flexible tool of analysis (white & marsh 2006). i have chosen qualitative content analysis as my purpose is to gain a general idea of the innovation policy documents in the context of regionality and find out how the regions are discussed in the text. my aim is to analyse the documents as a text, not as a means to construct reality (cf. discursive analysis). this makes qualitative content analysis the most suitable tool (see tuomi & sarajärvi 2002: 105). however, there are some weaknesses in the method. for example, tuomi and sarajärvi (2002) argue that the analysis of the content analysis is often only a superficial presentation of the results that are not interpreted properly. white and marsh (2006) maintain that the qualitative method is subjective. researchers may miss some of the analytical concepts because the analysis involves interpreting the text while simultaneously counting the concepts and words. also the categorisation might change during the research (i.e. when the researcher finds different or better ways of categorising). in this study i adhered to my first categorisation. however, another person might have used other categories or interpreted the concepts differently, which might have yielded different study results. the categories, or analytical constructs (see white & marsh 2006), are based on existing theories and previous research. regionality and the northern periphery are used as the main themes. first i marked all the paragraphs that dealt with regions (e.g. regional innovation systems, regional development, the regional task of universities) and innovation activities (e.g. education, r&d). in all, 285 paragraphs were selected from finnish documents, 441 from the swedish and 301 from the norwegian ones. after that i analysed the selected paragraphs according to the following three categories: society, practical activities and governance. the categories were divided in subcategories (see table 3). i counted the number of times a category was used in each document and also studied which categories were combined in the documents. after that i studied what kinds of regions were discussed and how the peripheral regions were taken into consideration in innovation-related policy documents. 22 fennia 185: 1 (2007)katri suorsa empirical analysis of innovation policies despite the similarities in the social structures of finland, sweden and norway, there are differences in their innovation policies. this derives mostly from the differences in their economic structure (see cooke 2004). norway has rich natural resources (e.g. oil) and is dependent on export of raw materials. therefore, it has just recently developed a comprehensive research, technology and innovation policy. there are large international corporations in sweden that are active in r&d. therefore, expenditure on r&d is high in the private sector. public r&d funding is relatively low, but the amount of money invested in it is rising. in finland the public sector has influenced the economy, especially the research and innovation policy, since the 1960s. one reason is that finland has no natural resources besides wood, and has not had any large, internationally active r&d corporations before nokia (gergils 2006; see also european trend chart… 2006a, 2006b, 2006c). in finland, sweden and norway, the concept of an innovation system is used in innovation policy. the main public actors are almost the same in these three countries. however, in terms of regionality, there are some differences. in finland and sweden there are no actors that would directly deal with regional aspects on the national level, whereas in norway the ministry of local government and regional development is a main actor in the national innovation policy. the tasks of the actors also differ slightly between the countries. in sweden the parliament, the council of state and the ministries design the general policy. the public funding organisations formulate and realise technology and innovation policies (european trend chart… 2005a). in finland the science and technology council and in norway the research council of norway formulate the innovation policy which is then implemented by public funding organisations and r&d institutes (european trend chart… 2005b, 2005c). finland, sweden and even norway (although not a member of the eu) are part of the european system of innovation. for example, the structural funds, the innovation policy of the eu and the innovation and regional development programmes have an effect on innovation policy and systems in the research countries (gregersen & johnson 1997: 486–489). the main actors of the innovation systems in finland, sweden and norway are mentioned in appendix 1. the role of the regional level in innovation policy has strengthened during the recent years. several programmes are directed to the development of regions. the most important are the centre of expertise programme and regional centre programme organised by the ministry of the interior in finland; regional growth programmes and vinnväxt organised by vinnova in sweden; and skattefunn in norway. in addition, there are regional technology parks in several locations in finland, sweden and norway (european trend chart… 2006a, 2006b, 2006c). the innovation policy programmes of the regions mostly deal with higher education and business development. nevertheless, the organising actors of the national innovation systems are physically located in the core regions (i.e. the capital city region) of the studied countries. most of the implementing actors (higher educational institutes, enterprises, technology centres, research institutes) are distributed more widely, although they also tend to be concentrated in certain regions (see gergils 2006). innovation policy documents in the studied countries the material regarding national innovation policies in finland, sweden and norway is varied in terms of their specific purpose. documents written by ministries or governments are mostly proposals on how to improve the innovation or research policies. these documents are more detailed and longer, especially the swedish and norwegian proposals from the government. the length of the 20 analysed documents varies from 15 pages (85 paragraphs) to 110 pages (455 paragraphs) in finland, from 49 pages (172 paragraphs) to 301 pages table 3. categories used in the analysis. themes categories society practical activities governance regionality northern periphery economy regional development technology education, research co-operation policy programmes, financial support fennia 185: 1 (2007) 23regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, … (1336 paragraphs) in sweden and from 41 pages (189 paragraphs) to 201 pages (1139 paragraphs) in norway (see appendix 2). the analysis shows that in sweden the innovation policy is more focused on the research policy than in the other two countries. especially the headings of the documents mostly deal with education and research. the swedish documents did not mention the terms ‘innovation policy’ or ‘innovation system’ as often as the norwegian and finnish ones. ‘innovation system’ was a popular term particularly in the finnish documents. this observation is related to the differences in national innovation systems and policies which are more holistic in finland than in sweden, where innovation-related policies are mostly directed at education and research systems (see gergils 2006). the organisation that published the document affected its content. this was especially evident in finland, where innovation policy is defined by more actors than in sweden and norway. for example, documents by the ministry of education and the academy of finland mostly deal with education and research subjects. documents from tekes (finnish funding agency for technology and innovation) and the ministry of trade and industry consider economic topics. all the documents were futureoriented: their purpose was to find solutions for creating successful future policies to develop the country in question. nevertheless, most of them also discussed the past innovation policy, education and research systems and economic progress as well as present threats to the economy. all the documents emphasised the importance of co-operation between actors, and therefore the idea of an innovation system was built into the texts. nevertheless, the innovation system or its actors were not defined in any document. the analysis indicated that regional aspects were not considered as important in the national innovation policy documents. only 835 of 9641 paragraphs (8.7 per cent) mentioned regionality and innovation activities together. there were slight differences between countries. in finland, the total number of paragraphs in the analysed documents was 2459, and regionality and innovation activities were mentioned in 285 (11.6 percent) of them, in sweden the total number was 4583 and regionality and innovation activities were mentioned in 441 paragraphs (9.7 percent), while in norway the total number of paragraphs was 2644 and regionality and innovation activities were mentioned in 109 of them (4.1 percent). there were differences between documents. some focused more on regionality and innovation activities than the others. the difference was based only on the purpose of the document, not on the organisation that had published the document. some documents were directed more to the regional level, while the aim of the other documents was to develop the whole nation. in finland, the document that considered regionality the most was aluei den elinvoima syntyy innovaatioista (“the vitality of regions arise from innovations”) by tekes (47.8 percent); in sweden, en politik för tillväxt och livskraft i hela landet (“a policy for growth and vitality for the whole country”) by the government (22.0 percent); and in norway, from idea to value by the ministry of trade and industry (21.7 percent). regionality in innovation policy documents when considering regionality, innovation policy documents in finland, sweden and norway dealt mainly with the same themes (table 4). the most table 4. main themes in innovation policy documents (number of paragraphs; percents in brackets). country economy regional development education, research cooperation technology programmes, financing policy total finland 34 (11.9) 39 (13.7) 84 (29.5) 28 (9.8) 2 (0.7) 58 (20.4) 40 (14.0) 285 (100) sweden 60 (13.6) 25 (5.7) 140 (31.7) 35 (7.9) 13 (2.9) 118 (26.8) 50 (11.3) 441 (100) norway 46 (15.3) 13 (4.3) 71 (23.6) 12 (4.0) 6 (2.0) 109 (36.2) 44 (14.6) 301 (100) total 140 (13.6) 77 (7.5) 295 (28.7) 75 (7.3) 21 (2.0) 285 (27.8) 134 (13.0) 1027 (100) 24 fennia 185: 1 (2007)katri suorsa frequently occurring main theme in finland and sweden was that of practical activities, especially research and education. the role of the education system, not only higher education but also basic and adult education, was considered important for the development of regions. the documents also emphasised that research in different sectors affect the economy as well as the social development and welfare of regions. in norway the main theme was governance, especially programmes and financing, which were the second in finland and sweden. programmes and funding were either concrete programmes or funds aiming to develop regions (e.g. funds for less favoured regions in sweden) or ideas of programmes aiming to increase networking and co-operation between actors within a region and between regions. this refers to the general idea of innovation policy as a tool for promoting financing and co-operation between actors. however, the documents did not consider regional differences or the actors missing in regions. this refers to a regional innovation paradox: the need to fund innovation activities in all regions whether or not they can benefit from funding (see oughton et al. 2002). i attempted to find out which themes were mentioned together by first selecting the main category and then categorising the other themes that were referred to. therefore, there could be many subcategories with one main category. the themes most often mentioned together were programmes dealing with the economy (130 paragraphs) and education and research (101 paragraphs) (table 5). these paragraphs dealt mostly with financial aid or programmes with the purpose of boosting the economic growth of the regions, or education and research programmes to enhance either the educational level of people or research in every region. most aid and programmes were only ideas, not concrete programmes. education and research were also often mentioned together with economy (106 paragraphs) and co-operation (116 paragraphs). these paragraphs dealt mostly with higher education institutions, the importance of education and research for regional economical development, and co-operation between research institutes and other regional actors. these issues were emphasised even more when the main category and subcategory were combined (e.g. economy and education + education and economy, 186 paragraphs). this kind of analysis also shows that most of the programmes were directed to education and research (225 paragraphs), economic (144 paragraphs) and co-operation (122 paragraphs) issues rather than to regional development (73 paragraphs). despite today’s stressed importance of ict, technology as such was not often mentioned when regarding innovation activities and regions (see tables 4 and 5). the themes addressed with technology were mainly broadband connections that should cover the whole country or distance education that is carried out via the internet. peripheral regions in innovation policy documents this study shows that the term ‘region’ was a vague concept in innovation policy documents in finland, sweden and norway. the regions that were named were mostly municipalities or counties, especially when talking about less-favoured regions. successful city regions and rural areas were also mentioned. otherwise the term ‘region’ was quite abstract, e.g. “regions should enhance their table 5. themes mentioned together in innovation policy documents. subcategory main category economy regional development education, research cooperation technology programmes policy economy 42 80 36 19 14 15 regional development 37 44 16 21 9 9 education, research 106 79 116 21 39 21 cooperation 33 17 58 4 21 11 technology 7 8 5 0 0 0 programmes 130 64 186 101 24 45 policy 55 54 68 38 12 35 fennia 185: 1 (2007) 25regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, … strengths”, “co-operation between universities and other regional actors”, “universities improve the regional economy”, etc. when emphasising higher education and the role of universities in regional development, peripheral regions with only a few educational and research institutes are left outside the innovation policy measures that are directed to co-operation and building of new knowledge. universities’ spheres of influence were not identified, either. regions are mostly regarded as homogenous in innovation policy documents. regional differences were not considered. nonetheless, the documents emphasised that regionally specific characteristics need to be taken into account when targeting innovation policy measures. regarding differences between regions, finland was different than the other two studied countries. the finnish documents mostly dealt with growth centres and their responsibility to develop the surrounding regions that are lagging behind in development. the northern parts of finland were not mentioned at all. this goes to indicate that the finnish innovation policy is directed more to strong regions than economically lagging regions. in sweden and in norway the documents were more detailed and also peripheral, northern regions were mentioned. for example, the documents discussed the challenges (e.g. lack of skilled workforce, entrepreneurs and innovative firms) as well as the strengths (e.g. the strong space technology cluster in northern sweden) of the northern parts of the countries. the norwegian documents named a number of programmes directed to northern norway. the differences between countries in the amount of details in the documents reflect the differences in their innovation policies. according to gergils (2006), innovation policies in sweden and norway are more top-down governed than in finland, where proposals to concrete actions come from the regions themselves or sectors that implement the actions. this is why the finnish national innovation policy documents do not discuss regions in much detail. the principles of the welfare state were well illustrated by the documents. for example, the documents considered it important for all regions to have the same opportunities for education, recreation, entrepreneurship and culture. this was especially the case in education and research documents. however, regions should also take responsibility for their economical development by enhancing their areas of strength, since the documents regarded the growing economical gap between regions as a threat to the society. nevertheless, the documents considered the concentration of economic activities in certain regions with educated workforce and research opportunities as economically more effective. this shows that the ideas of a welfare society, and especially regional policies focusing on the even development of the whole country and gaining global competitiveness, are often in mismatch. however, some documents emphasised that competitiveness is gained through balanced regional development. conclusions the purpose of this study was to investigate how the national innovation policies in finland, sweden and norway take regionality, especially the less-favoured peripheral regions, into consideration. the analysis shows that regionality is not widely discussed in the finnish, swedish and norwegian national innovation policy documents. regional innovation systems, and especially the role of institutions of higher education, are seen as important for the countries’ economic development, competitiveness and national innovation systems. it is also considered important for every region to have the same opportunities for economic and social development. every region should use its own strengths in economic development. innovation policy at the national level does not consider the differences between regions. in fact, the concept of regionality remains quite abstract in innovation policy documents. the regions (or their boundaries) are not defined. this is interesting, because in the academic debate innovation activities are seen as regional phenomena (e.g. lundvall & maskell 2000). furthermore, institutions of higher education are considered vital for the economic development of the countries. the co-operation of institutions of higher education and actors in regions and between regions is emphasised. however, regional differences in e.g. the amount of actors are not considered in the documents. what exactly is the effective geographical distance between actors and how large is the geographical coverage of the influence of an institution of higher education? for example, the institutions of higher education in northern finland, sweden and norway are small and distances between them large. the national innovation policies in finland, sweden and norway consider balanced regional 26 fennia 185: 1 (2007)katri suorsa development important. however, most measures are targeted at regions that already have more possibilities and strengths than the peripheral regions in the northern parts of the countries. the threat is that regional disparities will grow. to secure balanced regional development, public policies need to create programmes to develop regional opportunities for regional innovation activities. however, the reality (“what is done”) and the strategies (“what should be done”) are not in line. the challenges of peripheral regions, for example, the northern parts of finland, are well recognised. especially in kainuu and lapland, the population is declining and ageing, unemployment is high and regions do not attract new businesses or people. many innovation policy measures are supposed to develop the whole country. in reality, some actions even decrease the opportunities of less-favoured regions and innovation policy measures do not reach them. for example, the ministry of education is, at present, studying whether there are too many institutions of higher education in finland and discussing whether the teaching in certain fields of science should be closed in smaller university units or whether the universities should be united into larger ones. such decreases in education funding will have an effect on the affected regions’ ability to make use of innovation policy measures and programmes (see oughton et al. 2002). most innovation policy programmes are directed to co-operation between institutions of higher education and industry. as was already mentioned above, national innovation policies do not seem to consider regional differences and the challenges that, for example, the northernmost parts of finland, sweden and norway face in the context of innovation activities. therefore, it would be interesting to study further how national innovation policies are implemented in less-favoured regions. especially the co-operation between the few small existing institutions of high education and local firms needs to be studied further, as their effective interaction is considered important for the economical development of the regions, at least in policies and theories. acknowledgements i thank arne isaksen, björn asheim and patrik sandgren for their help with the selection of the research material. i am grateful for the funding from the science foundation of the university of oulu and the geography graduate school of finland. i also much appreciate the referees’ constructive comments. references benneworth p & d charles (2005). university spinoff policies and economic development in less successful regions: learning from two decades of policy practice. european planning studies 13: 4, 538–557. biegelbauer ps & s borrás (2003). introduction: ideas and the transition from technology to innovation policy. in biegelbauer p & s borrás (eds). innovation policies in europe and the us, 1–16. ashgate, hampshire. cooke p (2004). introduction: regional innovation systems – an evolutionary approach. in cooke p, m heidenreich & hj braczyk (eds). regional innovation systems. the role of governances in a globalized world, 1–18. 2nd ed. routledge, london. copus ak (2001). from core-periphery to polycentric development: concepts of spatial and aspatial peripherality. european planning studies 9: 4, 539– 552. corona l, j doutriaux & sa mian (2006). building knowledge regions in north america. emerging technology innovation poles. 301 p. edward elgar, cheltenham. espon project 2.1.1 (2007). spatial typologies nuts level 3. <http://www.espon.eu/mmp/online/website/content/tools/832/873/605_en.html>. 14.2.2007. eures (2006). labour market information. <http://europa.eu.int/eures/main.jsp?catid=2613&acro=lmi &lang=en&countryid=se&regionid=se0&nuts2co de=se08&nuts3code=se082>. 25.8.2006. european trend chart on innovation. annual innovation policy report for finland. covering period: september 2003 – august 2004 (2005a). 42 p. european commission, enterprise directorate-general. european trend chart on innovation. annual innovation policy report for sweden. covering period: september 2003 – august 2004 (2005b). 48 p. european commission, enterprise directorate-general. european trend chart on innovation. annual innovation policy report for norway. covering period: september 2003 – august 2004 (2005c). european commission, enterprise directorate-general. european trend chart on innovation. annual innovation policy report for finland 2004–2005 (2006a). 70 p. european commission, enterprise directorate-general. european trend chart on innovation. annual innovation policy report for sweden 2004–2005 (2006b). fennia 185: 1 (2007) 27regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, … 73 p. european commission, enterprise directorate-general. european trend chart on innovation. annual innovation policy report for norway 2004–2005 (2006c). 61 p. european commission, enterprise directorate-general. finavia (2006). matkustajat: 11/2006. (passengers: 11/2006). <http://www.finavia.fi/files/finavia/ matkustajat_pdf/0_inet_matk_lentoasemittain. marras06.pdf>. 20.12.2006. gergils h (2006). dynamic innovation systems in the nordic countries? denmark, finland, iceland, norway and sweden. 423 p. sns förlag, stockholm. gløersen e, a dubois, a copus & c schürmann (2006). northern peripheral sparsely populated regions in the european union and in norway. nordregio report 2006: 2. 183 p. goodnip (2003). good practices in nordic innovation policies. part 3. nordic innovation policy measures, documents and government structures. step, oslo. <http://www.step.no/reports/y2003/ 0803.pdf>. 8.6.2005. gregersen b & b johnson (1997). learning economies, innovation systems and european integration. regional studies 31: 5, 479–490. hassink r (2005). how to unlock regional economis from path dependency? from learning region to learning cluster. european planning studies 13: 4, 521–535. jauhiainen js (2006). multipolis: high-technology network in northern finland. european planning studies 14: 10, 1407–1428. jauhiainen js (2007). regional and innovation policies in finland – towards convergence and/or mismatch? regional studies 41 (in print). keeble d, j offord & s walker (1988). peripheral regions in a community of twelve member states. 137 p. commission of the european community, luxembourg. lorenzen m (2001). localized learning and policy: academic advice on enhancing regional competitiveness through learning. european planning studies 9: 2, 163–185. lundvall b-å & s borrás (1997). the globalising learning economy: implications for innovation policy. 179 p. commission of the european community, luxemburg. lundvall b-å, b johnso, es andersen & b dalum (2002). national systems of production, innovation and competence building. research policy 31: 2, 213–231. lundvall b-å & p maskell (2000). nation states and economic development: from national systems of production to national systems of knowledge creation and learning. in clark gl, mp feldmann & ms gertler (eds). the oxford handbook of economic geography, 353–372. oxford university press, oxford. mariussen å (2004). competitive advantages of national economies. paper presented at nordregio, april 2004. miettinen r (2002). national innovation system. scientific concept or political rhetoric. 168 p. edita, helsinki. ministry of education (2005). education statistics. <http://www.minedu.fi>. 30.6.2005. morgan k (2004). the exaggerated death of geography: learning, proximity and territorial innovation systems. journal of economic geography 4: 1, 3–21. morgan k & c nauwelaers (1999). a regional perspective on innovation: from theory to strategy. in morgan k & c nauwelaers (eds). regional innovation strategies. the challenge for less-favoured regions, 1–18. regional studies association, norwich. nelson rr (1993). a retrospective. in nelson rr (ed). national innovation systems. a comparative analysis, 505–525. oxford university press, new york. northern periphery programme 2007–2013 (2007). <http://www.northernperiphery.net/2007/aboutthe-programme-g.asp>. 3.10.2007. oughton c, m landbaso & k morgan (2002). the regional innovation paradox: innovation policy and industrial policy. journal of technology transfer 27: 1, 97–110. rosenfeld sa (2002). creating smart systems. a guide to cluster strategies in less favoured regions. european union-regional innovation strategies. < h t t p : / / w w w. c o m p e t i t i ve n e s s . o r g / a r t i c l e / articleview/376/1/27/>. 14.2.2007. sotarauta m & s srnivas (2005). the co-evolution of policy and economic development: a discussion on innovative regions. mit ipc local innovation systems working paper 05-001. 48 p. spiekermann k & j neubauer (2002). european accessibility and peripherality: concepts, models and indicators. nordregio working paper 2002: 9. 46 p. spiekermann k & h aalbu (2004). nordic peripherality in europe. nordregio working paper 2004: 2. 38 p. statistics finland (2006). statfin. <http://www.stat.fi/ tup/statfin/index.html>. 20.12.2006. statistics norway (2006). statistical yearbook of norway 2005. <http://ssb.no/english/yearbook/ emne08.html>. 29.12.2006 statistics sweden (2006). statistical yearbook of sweden 2005. 781 p. statistics sweden, stockholm. tödtling f & m trippl (2005). one size fits all? towards a differentiated regional innovation policy approach. research policy 34, 1203–1219. tuomi j & a sarajärvi (2002). laadullinen tutkimus ja sisällönanalyysi. 158 p. kustannusosakeyhtiö tammi, helsinki. white md & ee marsh (2006). content analysis: a flexible methodology. library trends 55: 1, 22– 45. 28 fennia 185: 1 (2007)katri suorsa a p p en d ix 1 . m ai n a ct o rs o f in n o va ti o n s ys te m s in f in la n d , sw ed en a n d n o rw ay ( b as ed o n e u ro p ea n t re n d c h ar t… 2 0 0 6 a, 2 0 0 6 b , 2 0 0 6 c) . fi n la n d sw ed en n o rw ay g en er al p o li cy th e g o ve rn m en t th e g o ve rn m en t th e pa rl ia m en t (s to rt in ge t) sc ie n ce a n d t ec h n o lo gy c o u n ci l pa rl ia m en t m in is tr y o f fi n an ce m in is tr y o f ed u ca ti o n , in d u st ry e tc ., m in is tr y o f en vi ro n m en t, m in is tr y o f d ef en ce , o th er m in is tr ie s m in is tr y o f ed u ca ti o n m in is tr y o f lo ca l g o ve rn m en t an d r eg io n al d ev el o p m en t m in is tr y o f in d u st ry a n d tr ad e m in is tr y o f ed u ca ti o n , m in is tr y o f t ra d e an d i n d u st ry , o th er m in is tr ie s p ro m o ti n g an d su p p o rt in g o rg an is at io n s a ca d em y o f fi n la n d t ek es r es ea rc h c o u n ci l v in n o v a k n o w le d ge fo u n d at io n r es ea rc h c o u n ci l o f n o rw ay in n o va ti o n n o rw ay si v a ed u ca ti o n a n d p u b li c re se ar ch o rg an is at io n s u n iv er si ti es (2 0 ) po ly te ch n ic s (2 9 ) te ch n ic al r es ea rc h c en tr e (v t t ) o th er p u b li c re se ar ch in st it u te s (1 9 ) u n iv er si ti es ( 2 1 ) c o ll eg es ( 4 2 ) u n iv er si ti es ( 7 ) c o ll eg es ( 2 6 ) si n t ef li n ka ge s an d te ch n o lo gy tr an sf er sc ie n ce a n d te ch n o lo gy pa rk s fo u n d at io n f o r fi n n is h in ve n ti o n em p lo ym en t an d e co n o m ic d ev el o p m en t c en tr es in n o va ti o n b ri d ge n u t ek in ve st i n s w ed en a ge n cy si n t ef g ie k in n o va ti o n n o rw ay v en tu re c ap it al su p p o rt si tr a fi n n ve ra fi n p ro in d u st ry in ve st m en t lt d p ri va te v en tu re c ap it al is ts in d u st ri fo n d en a lm i b u si n es s pa rt n er sw ed is h p ri va te eq u it y & v en tu re c ap it al a rg en tu m fennia 185: 1 (2007) 29regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, … appendix 2. research material. document1 published language pages/ paragraphs analyzed paragraphs (number) main theme finland 1 2003 english 140 / 373 19 governance (programmes, financing 8) 2 2001 english 52 / 170 26 governance (programmes, financing 7, policy 6) 3 2004 english 56 / 402 55 innovation (education, research 35) 4 2003 finnish 20 / 84 4 society (regional development 3) 5 2004 finnish 110 / 455 43 governance (programmes, financing 11, policy 19) 6 2003 finnish 31 / 182 87 innovation (education, research 23, cooperation 11) 7 2002 english 31 / 230 2 society 8 2001 english 15 / 85 5 no main theme 9 2003 english 63 / 231 27 society (economy 4, regional development 10) 10 2006 finnish 40 / 247 15 innovation (education, research 16) sweden 11 2004 english 49 / 172 17 no main themes 12 2000 swedish 49 / 196 2 no main themes 13 2000 swedish 301 / 1336 63 innovation (education, research 36, cooperation 5, technology 2) 14 2001 swedish 49 / 199 14 governance (programmes, financing 3, policy 3) 15 2001 swedish 207 / 1205 266 governance (programmes, financing 74, policy 33) 16 2005 swedish 290 / 1430 75 innovation (education, research 33, cooperation 8) norway 17 english 41 / 189 40 governance (programmes, financing 11, policy 9) 18 2003 norwegian 48 / 353 58 governance (programmes, financing 32, policy 9) 19 2005 norwegian (nynorsk) 151 / 963 142 governance (programmes, financing 49, policy 25) 20 2005 norwegian 201 / 1139 61 innovation (education, research 35, cooperation 4) 1 analysed documents finland 1 academy of finland: scientific research in finland – a review of its quality and impact in the early 2000s; 2 ministry of trade and industry: business environment policy in the new economy; 3 ministry of education: education and research 2003–2008. development plan; 4 ministry of education: strategy of ministry of education 2015 (opetusministeriön strategia 2015); 5 council of state: strategy document of the government 2004 (hallituksen strategia-asiakirja 2004. hallituksen poikkihallinnolliset politiikkaohjelmat ja politiikat); 6 tekes: alueiden elinvoima syntyy innovaatioista; 7 tekes: the future is in knowledge and competence; 8 science and technology policy council of finland: innovation policy: competent, learning competitive finland; 9 science and technology policy council of finland: knowledge, innovation and internationalisation; 10 science and technology policy council of finland: science, technology, innovations (tiede, teknologia, innovaatiot) sweden 11 ministry of industry: employment and communication; ministry of education: innovative sweden; 12 regeringens proposition 1999/2000:81. forskning för framtiden – en ny organisation för forskningsfinansiering; 13 regeringens proposition 2000/01:3. forskning och förnyelse; 14 regeringens proposition 2001/02:2. fou och samverkan i innovationssystemet; 15 regeringens proposition 2001/02:4. en politik för tillväxt och livskraft i hela landet; 16 regeringens proposition 2004/05:80. forskning för ett bättre liv norway 17 ministry of trade and industry: from idea to value. the government’s plan for a comprehensive innovation policy; 18 st.prp.nr.51 (2002–2003). virkemidler for et innovativt og nyskapende næringsliv; 19 st.meld.nr.25 (2004–2005). om regionalpolitiken; 20 st.meld.nr.20 (2004–2005). vilje til forskning tourism’s role in rural development of finnish lapland: interpreting national and regional strategy documents hakkarainen maria and seija tuulentie hakkarainen, maria & seija tuulentie (2008). t�uri���� r�le in rural �e�el���t�uri���� r�le in rural �e�el��� �ent �f finni�h la�lan�: inter�reting nati�nal an� regi�nal �trategy ��cu�ent�. fennia 186: 1, ��. 3–13. hel�inki. issn 0015�0010. rural c���unitie� in ��ar�ely ���ulate� area� are facing c�n�i�erable ��cial change� a� a re�ult �f �e���ulati�n an� the intr��ucti�n �f new f�r�� �f li�eli� h��� an� w�rking �ractice�. the c���unitie� al�� ha�e t� �eal with en�ir�n� �ental change� cau�e� by the increa�e in the u�e �f natural re��urce� an� by gl�bal i��ue�, �uch a� cli�ate change. antici�ati�n an� a�a�tati�n, a� well a� acti�e �artici�ati�n, are i���rtant �trategie� f�r l�cal c���unitie�. strategic �e�el���ent w�rk i� �art �f the �lanning �y�te� at �any ge�gra�hical le�el�. thi� article a�k� h�w �trategy ��cu�ent� take int� acc�unt future �r���ect� f�r t�uri�� �e�el���ent. the �bjecti�e i� t� exa�ine h�w change� in ��erating en�ir�n�ent�, lan��u�e �attern�, an� in the nature�ba�e� in�u�trie� �f l�cal ru� ral c���unitie�, are taken int� acc�unt in the “�e�el���ent ��eech” �f t�uri�� �trategie�. the relati�n�hi� between t�uri�� �trategie� an� �ther rural �trategie� i� al�� briefly a��re��e�. the gra���r��t le�el �f l�cal c���unitie� i� intr��uce� by analy�ing the gr�u� �i�cu��i�n� hel� at the �illage �f l�kka in finni�h la�� lan�. textual analy�i� i� carrie� �ut by u�ing c�ntent analy�i� an� rhet�rical analy�i�. the re�ult� �h�w that an increa�e in t�uri�� i� regar�e� a� ine�itable an� that t�uri�� �e�el���ent i� �ften �i�cu��e� �e�arately fr�� �ther real�� �f rural life, e�en th�ugh �ifferent rural li�elih���� are in �any way� �tr�ngly in� terc�nnecte�. maria hakkarainen & seija tuulentie, finnish forest research institute, po box 16, fi-96100 rovaniemi, finland. e-mails: maria.hakkarainen@metla.fi, seija. tuulentie@metla.fi. introduction in regi�nal �e�el���ent, t�uri�� i� �ften �een a� a �echani�� f�r the ec�n��ic �ur�i�al �f �eri�h� eral c���unitie� (kn�w� 2000; na�h & martin 2003; saarinen 2004, 2007), an� thi� i� al�� the ��licy target in finlan� at b�th the nati�nal an� regi�nal le�el�. h�we�er, the benefit� �f the gr�wth �f t�uri�� are �el��� que�ti�ne� in ��licy ��cu� �ent�. dra�tic �tructural change� in the lab�ur �arket� highlight the nee� t� �tu�y future �cenari�� an� ��licie� ��re th�r�ughly; thi� i� e��ecially the ca�e in relati�ely re��te area� �uch a� finni�h la�lan�. e��l�y�ent in �ri�ary �r��ucti�n in thi� regi�n ha� �ecrea�e� fr�� ��er 30,000 e�� �l�yee� in the 1960� t� �lightly ��re than 4000 e��l�yee� at the turn �f the �illenniu� an�, n�w� a�ay�, the large�t �ect�r in the li�elih��� �tructure �f finni�h la�lan� i� the �er�ice in�u�try (regi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan� 2002). change� in li�elih��� �tructure are i��acting e�ery fiel� �f life. the tran� �iti�n fr�� tra�iti�nal, �elf��u�taining li�elih���� t� the ���ern��ay �arket ec�n��y, an� e��ecial� ly t� the generati�n �f �er�ice� an� ex�erience�, ha� �eant b�th ec�n��ical an� cultural change� f�r in�i�i�ual� an� l�cal c���unitie�. t�uri�� ha� been the f�cu� �f �e�el���ent in finni�h la�lan� �ince the 1980�. the key �tati�tic� �n t�uri�� �h�w that t�uri�� ha� a �ignificant �i� rect effect �n inc��e� an� e��l�y�ent in the re� gi�n. in 2006, �irect inc��e fr�� t�uri�� in la�� lan� wa� a��r�xi�ately 500 �illi�n eur��, the increa�e ��er the year 2000 being 176 �illi�n eu� r��. direct t�uri���ba�e� e��l�y�ent in la�lan� wa� equi�alent t� at lea�t 5000 �er��n�year�, an� it ha� increa�e� by 1770 �er��n�year� �ince the year 2000 (table 1). h�we�er, there are c�n�i�er� 4 fennia 186: 1 (2008)hakkarainen maria and seija tuulentie table 1. s��e �tati�tic� regar�ing t�uri�� in finni�h la�lan� (regi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan� 2008; stati�tic� finlan� 2008). 2000 2006 direct t�uri�� inc��e 324 �illi�n eur�� 500 �illi�n eur�� direct t�uri�� e��l�y�ent 3,230 �er��n�year� 5,000 �er��n�year� nu�ber �f regi�tere� ��ernight� 1,690,000 2,117,000 – nu�ber �f ��ernight� by f�reigner� 539,435 826,000 fig. 1 main ski resorts (white circles) in finnish lapland. pale grey shading denotes national parks, white lines are commune borders, grey circles are main settlements and grey lines indicate road network, rivers and other water bodies. able �ifference� within the �r��ince; e.g. 86 �er cent �f the ��ernight� were regi�tere� in the fi�e large�t t�uri�t re��rt� (table 2). the t�uri�� �trategy f�r finni�h la�lan� f�r the �eri�� 2003–2006 ha� a���te� a regi�n��riente� �e�el���ent a��r�ach, an� fell re��rt� i� �een a� engine� f�r �e�el���ent. it i� argue� in the �trat� egy that channelling �ublic �u���rt t� the re��rt� i� the ���t effecti�e way t� enhance t�uri��. the ��aller, quieter �lace� an� �illage� �ut�i�e the t�uri�t re��rt� are regar�e� a� �uitable alternati�e� f�r wi�ening the �i�er�ity �f t�uri�� in the regi�n (lts 2003: 32). t�uri�� in la�lan� ha�, acc�r�ing t� all the rele�ant in�icat�r� (table 1), increa�e� an� the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2007–2010 c�n� tinue� t� e��ha�ize the r�le �f the t�uri�t re��rt� (fig. 1) a� engine� �f �e�el���ent. h�we�er, a l�t �f w�rk i� �till require� t� ��rea� the benefit� �f re��rt��riente� t�uri��. acc�r�ing t� pekka kau�� �ila (2004), the ���iti�e effect� ha�e n�t exten�e� int� the area� �urr�un�ing the re��rt�. thi� i� a �a� j�r challenge f�r �e�el��er� an� it can al�� be a que�ti�n �f life an� �eath f�r ��all �illage�. there are c�n�i�erable ����ibilitie�, but al�� �any �r�b� fennia 186: 1 (2008) 5tourism’s role in rural development of finnish lapland: … le�� in��l�e� in c��bining tra�iti�nal nature� ba�e� w�rk with the ��rt �f “new w�rk” a���ciate� with the fiel� �f t�uri�� (�ee e.g. müller & jan���n 2007: 12). the ��cial an� cultural characteri�tic� �f ��all �illage� in re��te area� nee� t� be taken int� acc�unt when �r���ting t�uri�� w�rk a� a ��luti�n t� the e��l�y�ent �r�ble�� in �eri�her� al area�. t�uri�� i� �ften �een by g��ern�ent� a� a �echani�� f�r i��le�enting their re�i�tributi�n ��licy. h�we�er, the l�cal re�i�ent� will gain un� equally, if they gain at all, an� f�r ���e �ay e�en be har�e� (hall & jenkin� 1998: 36). in the �re�� ent �a�er, the t�uri�� �e�el���ent an� rural �trat� egy ��cu�ent� are analy�e� in �r�er t� �eter�ine h�w they �eal with i��ue� c�ncerning nature an� rural en�ir�n�ent, an� h�w they antici�ate chang� e� in their ��erating en�ir�n�ent. the fir�t �bjec� ti�e i� t� exa�ine the r�le �f rural en�ir�n�ent�, e��ecially the r�le �f f�re�t�, which c��er ���t �f the lan� an� are inten�i�ely utilize� by �ifferent li�elih����, in the t�uri�� �trategie� �f finlan� a� a wh�le an� �f finni�h la�lan�, an� the �ec�n� i� t� in�e�tigate h�w change� in i��ue� c�ncerning li�elih���� an� the natural en�ir�n�ent are an� tici�ate�. the thir� �bjecti�e i� t� eluci�ate what kin� �f rural ��ciety the ��cu�ent� �i�cur�i�ely c�n�truct, an� h�w the�e �iew��int� fit in with the nee�� an� ex�ectati�n� �f l�cal c���unitie�. strategies as social facts: the importance of the audience d�cu�ent� �uch a� t�uri�� �trategie� are ‘��cial fact�� in that they are �r��uce�, �hare�, an� u�e� in ��cially �rganize� way�. they are n�t, h�we�er, tran��arent re�re�entati�n� �f �rganizati�nal r�u� tine�, �eci�i�n��aking �r�ce��e� �r �r�fe��i�nal �iagn��e�. they c�n�titute ��ecific ty�e� �f re�re� �entati�n that a��ly their �wn c�n�enti�n�. d�cu� �ent� are �ften u�e� t� create a certain kin� �f �re�ictability an� unif�r�ity �ut �f a wi�e �ariety �f e�ent� an� ��cial arrange�ent�, an� thu� they �� n�t �i��ly �e�cribe cla��e� an� �y�te��, but are actually acti�e in creating an� �ha�ing the�. thi� �iew i� cl��e t� the ��cial c�n�tructi�ni�t i�ea �f ��ciety a� a hu�an �r��uct, in the �en�e that textual �r��uct� can be �een a� acti�n� that change the w�rl� an� c�n�i�t �f �any kin�� �f ch�ice (berger & luck�ann 1967; atkin��n & c�ffey 2004). tran��arency �ay n�t be ����ible in �trategy ��cu�ent�, but it i� i���rtant t� rec�gnize the ��wer �f �uch ��cu�ent�. the ai� in the ��cu� �ent� i� t� try t� �ake the� a� legiti�ate an� re�� re�entati�e a� ����ible. d�cu�ent� nee� t� be analy�e�, a� their ba�ic feature i� that they c�nceal the w�rk �f an in�i�i�ual act�r. their �ery an�� ny�ity i� �art �f the �fficial �r��ucti�n �f ��cu� �entary reality. thu�, analy�i� i� nee�e� t� �h�w what kin�� �f ch�ice ha�e been �a�e an� h�w the ��cu�ent� clai� whate�er auth�rity �ay be at� tribute� t� the�. we �h�ul� a�k, what are the �re�i�e� f�r the argu�entati�n in the ��cu�ent� an� what are the target au�ience� �f the text? rhe� t�rical analy�i� i� an i���rtant �eth�� in �tu�ying h�w �ifferent �er�i�n� �f reality are �a�e t� be c�n�incing, an� h�w rea�er�, li�tener� �r �artici� �ant� can be engage� (tuulentie 2003; atkin��n & c�ffey 2004). f�r exa��le, the �reface t� finlan��� nati�nal t�uri�� strategy e��ha�ize� that it ha� been �re�are� in cl��e c���erati�n with “t�uri�� act�r�” an� that the �re�arati�n �r�ce�� ha� in� clu�e�, in a��iti�n t� the actual w�rking gr�u�, ���e 2000 acti�e �artici�ant� fr�� �ari�u� �art� �f finlan�. it al�� �tate� that the �trategy will ha�e a ���iti�e i��act �n ec�n��ic gr�wth an� e�� �l�y�ent, an� �n a ��re equal �e�el���ent �f the c�untry�� in�i�i�ual regi�n�. la�lan��� t�uri�� strategy �tate� that “the �e�el���ent �f t�uri�� in la�lan� i� an �n�g�ing �r�ce��, in which acti�n� are ba�e� �n ��licie� that ha�e been jointly agreed upon an� regularly re�i�e�” (la�lan� t�uri�� strategy… 2003). the�e are ���e �f the feature� that �er�e t� �trengthen the legiti�acy an� rele� �ance �f the ��cu�ent. h�we�er, it i� i���rtant t� realize that ��cu�ent� �� n�t exi�t in i��lati�n. d�cu�ent� refer t� �ther realitie� an� ���ain�, an� al�� t� �ther ��cu�ent�. when analy�ing ��cu�entary reality, �ne �u�t, theref�re, l��k be� y�n� the in�i�i�ual text� (atkin��n & c�ffey 2004). table 2. nu�ber �f ��ernight �tay� �er t�uri�t re��rt in finn� i�h la�lan� in 2006. t�uri�t re��rt regi�tere� ��ernight �tay� in 2006 r��anie�i 441,000 le�i 297,000 yllä� 282,000 saari�elkä 275,000 pyhä�lu��t� 158,000 6 fennia 186: 1 (2008)hakkarainen maria and seija tuulentie the rhet�rical un�er�tan�ing �f c���unicati�n i� ba�e� �n the �rinci�al that any text (�ral �r writ� ten) i� �r��uce� in a ��cial c�ntext in which the r�le� �f the a��re���r an� the a��re��ee can be �efine� (su��a 1989). rhet�rical analy�i� can �lace e��ha�i� �n �ifferent feature� in the text�. one �f the ���t influential �ub��i�i�i�n� wa� �a�e in ancient ti�e� by ari�t�tle. he �i�tin� gui�he� between eth��, �ath��, an� l�g��, �ean� ing the trait� that are relate� t� the ��eaker, th��e relate� t� the au�ience, an� th��e relate� t� the argu�ent it�elf. the i�ea� �f new rhet�ric (perel� �an 1982; su��a 1989) e��ha�ize e��ecially the �eaning �f the au�ience an� the fact that ar� gu�ent� are alway� a��re��e� t� an au�ience. thi� ��e� n�t refer t� an au�ience that i� �hy�i� cally �re�ent, n�r ��e� it �ean an au�ience that i� ex�re��ly a��re��e�, but an au�ience that i� the gathering �f th��e, wh� the ��eaker want� t� influ� ence thr�ugh hi� �r her argu�ent� (perel�an 1982: 14). further��re, the �re�i�e� �f argu�en� tati�n ha�e t� be �hare� with the au�ience. thi� i� achie�e�, f�r exa��le, thr�ugh the general nature �f argu�entati�n: it i� ea�ier t� gain br�a� acce�� tance f�r ���ething that i� generally c�n�i�ere� t� be a g��� thing, �uch a� health, than f�r ���e� thing that i� ba�e� �n a �ery �etaile� an� c�ncrete argu�ent (perel�an 1982: 27–32). if thi� acce�� tance i� gaine� at the general le�el, it i� ����ible t� tran�fer it t� ��re c�ncrete i��ue�. f�r exa��le, becau�e cancer i� regar�e� a� a ba� thing, it i� ����ible t� u�e cancer a� a �eta�h�r f�r ���e ��� cial �hen��en�n in �r�er t� �ake it l��k like a �r�ble�. thir�ly, argu�entati�n alway� u�e� natu� ral language, an� thu� it i� ine�itably a�bigu�u� by nature. the analy�i� �h�ul� b�th exa�ine the text a� a wh�le an� al�� re�eal the ch�ice� �a�e u�ing ��ecific lingui�tic �ean�. in thi� article, we f�cu� �ri�arily �n the i��ue �f au�ience�: at wh�� the ��cu�entary text� are a�� �re��e� an� in what way� �� they c���unicate with �ifferent au�ience�. in the beginning �f �ur analy�i�, h�we�er, we �a�e a quantitati�e c�ntent analy�i� �f the text�. t� �u��ari�e the inf�r�ati�n �n �electe� i��ue� in the ��cu�ent�, we calculat� e� the nu�ber �f reference� t� �ifferent c�nce�t� in �ix ��cu�ent� (table 3). h�we�er, rural �trate� gie� were �ealt with �nly when they referre� t� the t�tality �f li�elih���� in rural �i�trict�. in a��iti�n, the draft f�r la�lan� t�uri�� strat� egy 2007–2010 (lts 2007a) wa� �i�cu��e� in a f�cu� gr�u� c���ri�ing the inhabitant� �f a ��all �illage, l�kka, in ea�tern la�lan�. the tran�cri�t �f thi� �i�cu��i�n wa� al�� analy�e� an� c���are� t� the c�ntent� �f the regi�nal �trategy. results of the documentary analysis the �ali�ity �f all the ��cu�ent� i� ba�e� �n the �eclarati�n that a large nu�ber �f �artie� were in� ��l�e� in the �re�arat�ry �r�ce��. the au�ience� can be regar�e� a� the “nati�n” �r “regi�n” f�r which the �trategy �e��n�trate� that t�uri�� i� an i���rtant �art �f the ec�n��ic life. the ��cu� �ent� al�� inclu�e the �tate�ent that the �ur���e i� t� a��eal t� the financier� (fts 2006). when c�n�ucting a textual analy�i�, it i� n�t �nly i���rtant what ha� been written, but al�� t� rec�gni�e what i� n�t ex�re��e�. thu�, �ur fir�t que�ti�n� are: what i� taken f�r grante� in the ��cu�ent�? what are the un�erlying a��u��ti�n� that �� n�t e�en ha�e t� be in�icate�? one c��� ��n feature in t�uri�� �trategy ��cu�ent� i� that the gr�wth �f t�uri�� i� �een a� the �nly ����ibil� ity. the ��cu�ent� �� n�t inclu�e any �cenari�� table 3. d�cu�ent �ata: �trategie� an� abbre�iati�n� u�e� in the table� �f thi� �tu�y. strategy abbre�iati�n 1. finlan��� t�uri�� strategy t� 2020 (mini�try �f tra�e an� in�u�try) fts 2. la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2003–2006* lts1 3. draft f�r la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2007–2010* dlts2 4. la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2007–2010* lts2 5. de�el���ent strategy f�r finni�h rural area� (mini�try �f agriculture an� f�re�try) nrs 6. la�lan��� rural pr�gra��e 2013* lrs *strategie� 2, 3, 4 an� 6 f�r�ulate� by the regi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan�. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 7tourism’s role in rural development of finnish lapland: … that a��re�� �eclining t�uri��. ex�re��i�n� like “t�uri�� bring� well�being t� all �f la�lan� an� further� regi�nally�balance� �e�el���ent” i� tak� en a� the �ain �i�i�n �f the la�lan� strategy (lts 2003). thi� al�� a��lie� t� finlan��� strategy (fts 2006): “t�uri�� i� a �ignificant ��urce �f e��l�y� �ent an� �r���erity, which will hel� finlan��� ec�n��y gr�w further, an� it i� al�� �f regi�nal �ignificance a� a ��urce �f li�elih���.” h�we�er, the nati�nal �trategy i� ��re cauti�u� in it� antici� �ati�n an� �r��i�e� a li�t �f ta�k� that ha�e t� be fulfille� in �r�er t� realize thi� kin� �f �e�el��� �ent. b�th the nati�nal (fts 2006) an� the la�� lan� t�uri�� strategie� (lts 2007a,b) �re�ent the ���iti�e i��act� �f t�uri�� �n regi�nal �e�el��� �ent in a ��werfully e��ha�ize� �anner, an� t�uri�� i� regar�e� a� a ble��ing f�r re��te an� �eri�heral area�. the natural environment nature i� regar�e� a� �ne �f the �ain attracti�n� in finlan�, an� e��ecially in la�lan�. nature a� �uch i� frequently �enti�ne� in the �trategie� – in the nati�nal �trategy 61 ti�e� an� in the regi�nal �trategie� ab�ut 50 ti�e� in each text (table 4). h�we�er, what i� �eant by “nature” re�ain� ���ewhat ��en. nature i� relate� t� �uch a�jec� ti�e� a� clean, varied, silent an� peaceful. in the la�lan� strategy the a�jecti�e� “arctic” an� “n�rthern” are �ften relate� t� nature. cleanne�� i� the feature ���t �tr�ngly e��ha�ize� in b�th the nati�nal an� regi�nal �trategie�. nature�ba�e� ac� ti�itie� are regar�e� a� an i���rtant �e�el���ent branch in t�uri��. fr�� the ��int �f �iew �f rhet�ric, “nature” i� a u�eful c�nce�t: there i� �uch a uni�er�al agree�ent that nature i� g��� an� i� a thing that t�uri�t� l��k f�r, that the �ifferent act�r� can agree �n the i�ea that clean, unique nature i� what finlan� – an� e��ecially la�lan� – can �ffer t� t�uri�t� (cf. perel� �an 1982: 27 ab�ut uni�er�al �alue�). h�we�er, when it c��e� t� the que�ti�n �f “real” nature an� it� feature�, it i� n�t �� ea�y t� write ab�ut it. na� ti�nal �ark� are �enti�ne� in b�th the nati�nal an� regi�nal t�uri�� �trategie�, an� they can be �een a� referring t� the ��rt �f natural en�ir�n�ent that will c�ntinue in the future in the f�r� that it i� in n�w. in finlan�, an� al�� in internati�nal �ar� keting, la�lan� with it� �any large nati�nal �ark� re�re�ent� “high nature” an� an ex�tic re��urce f�r t�uri��, wherea� in finlan��� t�uri�� strategy (fts 2006) la�lan� recei�e� little �enti�n. one i���rtant a��ect �f finni�h nature, the c�untry�� f�re�t�, are �enti�ne� �nly a c�u�le �f ti�e� in each �trategy. thi� i� e��ecially intere�ting becau�e t�uri�� entre�reneur� in la�lan� ha�e recently �e�an�e� that the f�re�t� in certain area� �h�ul� n�t be u�e� f�r f�re�try, but �h�ul� in�tea� be �et a�i�e f�r t�uri�� an� �ut���r recreati�n u�e (e.g. mäkinen 2006). the u�e an� the nature �f f�re�t� thu� �ee� t� be a c�nte�te� i��ue, an� �ne that i� c�n�eniently a��i�e� in the �trategy ��cu� �ent�. h�we�er, there are ���e �ign� that the f�r� e�try i��ue i� al�� entering the �trategy ��eech: la� �lan��� sec�n� t�uri�� strategy �eal� with the ��re c�nte�te� f�re�try i��ue� an� refer� t� the ����ibility �f the tra�e in natural �alue� (lts 2007b). the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2003–2006 (lts 2003) �enti�n� f�re�t� �nly a few ti�e�, but the c�nce�t �f wil�erne�� i� frequently u�e� an� can be regar�e� a� inclu�ing f�re�t�, it� �ain functi�n being a� a ��re attracti�e an� r��antic a� w�r� f�r thi� ty�e �f natural �urr�un�ing. “va�t” an� “clean” are a�jecti�e� u�e� t�gether with wil�er� ne�� (lts 2003, engli�h �er�i�n). s��eh�w, h�w� e�er, the w�r� “wil�erne��” ha� �ani�he� fr�� the late�t �er�i�n �f the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy. n�r ��e� it a��ear in finlan��� t�uri�� strategy. thi� �ay be �ue t� the fact that the �fficial wil�erne�� nature �r�tecti�n area� were e�tabli�he� in n�rth� ern la�lan� in 1991 (erä�aalaki 17.1.1991/62), an� they were ��re acti�ely �i�cu��e� at the ti�e when the fir�t la�lan� t�uri�� strategy wa� f�r� �ulate�. wholeness of rural society in thi� �tu�y we c�n�i�er the rural �trategie� fr�� the ��int �f �iew �f the wh�le rural ��ciety. we table 4. nature an� nature�u�e relate� c�nce�t� �lu� their frequencie� in the �trategie�. f�r abbre�iati�n�, refer t� ta� ble 3. strategy fts lts1 dlts2 lts2 nature 61 48 23 49 wil�erne�� – 11 – – f�re�t 2 1 3 3 scenery 8 13 5 7 natural �alue tra�e – – 1 1 nati�nal �ark 4 16 18 20 pr�tecte� area 2 6 7 7 8 fennia 186: 1 (2008)hakkarainen maria and seija tuulentie a�k t� what extent the�e �trategie� re�re�ent the wh�le range �f li�elih���� an� relati�n�hi�� be� tween the �ifferent ��here� �f rural life. peri�heral area� recei�e attenti�n in the �trategie�. the na� ti�nal t�uri�� �trategy �tate� that “the �trategy ha� a clearly ���iti�e effect �n ec�n��ic gr�wth an� e��l�y�ent, an� it al�� further� a ��re balance� �e�el���ent in the �ifferent area�. t�uri�� i� in a central r�le in the ec�n��ie� �f the re��te area�, an� the ���iti�e i��act� �f the �trategy are e��ha� �ize� e��ecially in the ��ar�ely ���ulate� area� �f n�rthern an� ea�tern finlan� an� in t�uri�t re��rt� with a ca�acity f�r gr�wth in n�rthern finlan� an� p�hj�i��p�hjan�aa.” the i�ea �f �e�el���ent in the t�uri�� �trate� gie� ha� �arallel� with t� peter burn��� (1999: 330) �i�i�i�n between the attitu�e� “t�uri�� fir�t” an� “�e�el���ent fir�t”. acc�r�ing t� burn�, the a�� �r�ach “t�uri�� fir�t” with it� f�cu� �n �e�el��� �ent i� t�tally �irecte� at t�uri��, while the a�� �r�ach “�e�el���ent fir�t” �ee� t�uri�� �nly a� a t��l f�r nati�nal an� regi�nal �e�el���ent. s��e reference� t� the a��r�ach “�e�el���ent fir�t” can be �een in the ��ening �aragra�h� �f the �trat� egie� (in the fir�t cha�ter� �f finlan��� t�uri�� strategy t� 2020 an� la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2003–2006, an� in the �ec�n� cha�ter �f la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2007–2010), where t�uri�� i� �een a� a �echani�� f�r ec�n��ic welfare in rural area�. sub�equently, h�we�er, the t�uri�� �trate� gie� rely ��re an� ��re �n the “t�uri�� fir�t” a�� �r�ach. the t�uri�� �trategy ��cu�ent� al���t c���letely �ffer har�ly any �eth��� �r t��l� f�r �r���ting t�uri�� in the area� ar�un� t�uri�t re� ��rt�. the fra�ew�rk �f �e�el���ent an� refer� ence� t� c���erati�n al�� f�cu� �n t�uri�� �take� h�l�er�. rural �trategie� inclu�e ��re �lan� an� t��l� f�r the integrate� �e�el���ent �f the �iffer� ent �ect�r�. thi� al�� reflect� �ifference� in the �trategie�� target au�ience�. t�uri�� �trategie� �ut t�uri�� �e�el��er� fir�t, while rural �trategie� �tri�e f�r br�a�er l�cal �e�el���ent. the e��ence �f h�w rural area� are re�re�ente� in the ��cu�ent� can be �u��e� u� in the i�ea that �e���ulati�n �f the c�untry�i�e i� a �r�ble� an� t�uri�� i� a �a�er a� ���t �f the t�uri�t �e�ti� nati�n� are �ituate� in the rural area� (fts 2006). finlan��� nati�nal t�uri�� �trategy i� al���t �e� ��i� �f �i�cu��i�n ab�ut �ther rural li�elih���� an� their relati�n�hi� t� t�uri�� (table 5). the �nly exce�ti�n i� �ne figure in which agriculture an� f�re�try are �enti�ne� a� �art� �f a br�a�er fra�e �f t�uri��. fi�hery an� rein�eer her�ing are n�t at all inclu�e� in the fra�e. the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2003–2006 (lts 2003) a��re��e� tra�iti�nal li�elih���� an� their relati�n�hi�� t� t�uri�� in ��re length (table 5). the tw��way interacti�n i� al�� rec�gni�e�: tourism creates opportunities for other industries, but at the same time it is strongly dependent on them (lts 2003: 6). planning �r�ce��e� are regar�e� a� a f�ru� f�r rec�nciling the intere�t� �f �ifferent ru� ral li�elih����. m�re inten�i�e �ial�gue i� al�� �e� �an�e� t� a��ance the �i�er�e u�e �f f�re�t an� water re��urce�. al���t all �f the �i�cu��i�n� ab�ut the relati�n�hi�� between �ifferent rural li�elih���� ha�e been ��itte� fr�� the late�t �er� �i�n �f the �trategy (lts 2007b). tra�iti�nal li�eli� h���� recei�e �uch le�� attenti�n. it �i��ly �tate� that the intere�t� �f rein�eer her�ing, �ining, an� table 5. nu�ber �f reference� t� �ifferent f�r�� �f li�elih��� in the �trategie�. f�r abbre�iati�n�, refer t� table 3. strategy fts lts1 dlts2 lts2 nrs lrs t�uri�� (in rural �trategie�) 7* 165* c�llab�rati�n between the t�uri�� in�u�try an� �ther li�elih���� 2 2 3 3 – 16 t�uri�� in�u�try�� �e�en�ence �n �ther li�elih���� – 2 1 – tra�iti�nal li�elih���� – 3 – 1 – 9 rein�eer her�ing – 3 – 2 1 72 – all a��ect� regar�ing rein�eer – 9 4 8 – 118 fi�hery (in�u�try) – 4 – 1 4 37 agriculture 1 – – 1 207 48 f�re�try – 2 3 4 43 34 – f�re�t �ect�r 1 – – 2 1 *the�e figure� c�ntain all reference� t� t�uri��, n�t �nly t� the t�uri�� in�u�try. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 9tourism’s role in rural development of finnish lapland: … f�re�try can be the �����ite t� th��e �f t�uri��, but that a balance between the�e intere�t� can be reache� thr�ugh �r��er lan��u�e �anage�ent ��licy. a� regar�� f�re�try, h�we�er, the tra�e in recreati�nal an� �cenic �alue� i� �enti�ne� a� a new i�ea. with re��ect t� the ba�ic t�uri�� attrac� ti�n� in la�lan�, it i� �triking that the draft �f la�� lan� t�uri�� strategy 2007–2010 (lts 2007a) ��e� n�t �enti�n rein�eer her�ing at all. after cir� culati�n f�r c���ent�, rein�eer her�ing gaine� �lightly ��re attenti�n in the final ��cu�ent (lts 2007b). la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2003–2006 (lts 2003) ��int� �ut that t�uri�� �e�el���ent �h�ul� f�cu� �n t�uri�t re��rt�. thi� �a�e ��licy target i� c�n� fir�e� in the finlan��� t�uri�� strategy t� 2020 (fts 2006) an� in the late�t la�lan� t�uri�� strat� egy 2007–2010 (lts 2007b). quite the c�ntrary, finlan��� rural de�el���ent strategy f�r 2007–2013 (frds 2007), ��e� n�t �i�cu�� the r�le �f t�uri�t re��rt� at all, but the rural �trategy �f la�� lan�, la�lan��� rural �r�gra��e 2013 (lrp 2005), take� the �a�e ��int �f �iew a� the regi�nal t�uri�t �trategie�. since the e��ha�i� i� �n t�uri�t center�, the ba�ic re�i�ential unit� in la�lan�, �illage� an� ��all c���unitie�, bec��e al���t in�i�ible. ne�� erthele��, al���t all the t�uri�t re��rt� in la�lan� ha�e e��l�e� ar�un� �l� �illage�, which �till ha�e their tra�iti�nal ���ulati�n an� life�tyle�. l�cal c���unitie� are �ften regar�e� a� an e�� �ential �art �f rural area�, an� a �tr�ng �en�e �f c���unality tie� t� a �en�e �f �lace i� e��ha� �i�e� (e.g. h�l�ila 2001). m�re��er, the c�nce�t� �f l�cal an� l�calne�� ha�e been regar�e� a� i�� ��rtant in the fiel� �f t�uri��: t�uri�t� are ex�ecte� t� be intere�te� in l�cal culture an� t� ha�e inter� acti�n with the l�cal� (s�ith 1978). thu�, it i� in� tere�ting t� n�te h�w rural c���unitie� an� their interacti�n with t�uri�t� are a��re��e� in �trategy ��cu�ent�. in rural �trategie�, the tra�iti�nal rural i��ue� are �i�cu��e� a l�t, while c���unity an� c���unality i��ue� are n�t �� ���ular (table 6). l�calne�� recei�e� ���e ��re attenti�n in t�uri�� �trategie�. l�calne�� i� al�� �iewe� fr�� �ifferent �irecti�n�: the �ain i��ue� are 1) h�w the l�cal ���ulati�n benefit� fr�� t�uri�� an� 2) h�w t� u�e l�cal culture a� t�uri�� attracti�n (lts 2003). h�we�er, the�e ��int� �f �iew� are �nly �en� ti�ne�, n�t �e�el��e� in any c�ncrete way. the �ifference between the la�lan� t�uri�� strategie� an� finlan��� t�uri�� strategy i� in the e��ha�i� �lace� �n the l�cal ���ulati�n: finlan��� t�uri�� strategy t� 2020 (fts 2006) ha� �tr�nger �e�an�� with ��re nu�er�u� �enti�n� that the l�cal ���� ulati�n� �u�t be in��l�e� in �lanning an� that thi� �u�t be taken int� acc�unt in e�ery �eci�i�n. thi� i� al�� the �fficial g�al �f recent �lanning ��licie� (�ee jauhiainen & nie�en�aa 2006). anticipation of changes being strategy �e�ice� f�r the future �f a li�eli� h���, it i� t� be ex�ecte� that the antici�ati�n �f change� in an ��erating en�ir�n�ent i� i���rtant. in�ee�, each �f the ��cu�ent� inclu�e� a cha�ter �n antici�ati�n (table 7). the antici�ati�n �f ����ible change� �uch a� cli� �ate change i� an intere�ting t��ic �ince it i� �ealt with �ery �ifferently in the finlan��� t�uri�� strat� egy (fts 2006) an� in the la�lan� t�uri�� strate� gy (lts 2007b). in the f�r�er, cli�ate change i� a �art �f a l�ng li�t �e��n�trating the threat� t� the table 6. nu�ber �f reference� t� c�nce�t� relate� t� t�uri�t �e�tinati�n� an� tra�iti�nal rural life. f�r abbre�iati�n�, refer t� table 3. strategy fts lts1 dlts2 lts2 nrs lrs t�uri�t �e�tinati�n 56 93 95 106 – 14 – �ki re��rt 1 6 9 8 – – – fell re��rt – 7 4 6 – 2 rural 5 1 7 8 c���unity – – – – 2 13 l�cal c���unity – 1 – – 1 – c���unality 4 – – – 10 6 l�cal 24 14 3 9 48 45 village – 2 4 7 13 66 10 fennia 186: 1 (2008)hakkarainen maria and seija tuulentie t�uri�� in�u�try. in the latter, cli�ate change i� �ainly un�er�t��� a� a ���iti�e fact�r, alth�ugh the �r�ble�� f�r s�uthern la�lan� are �enti�ne�. the final �er�i�n �f the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2007–2010 (lts 2007b) �enti�n� cli�ate change �ixteen ti�e�, an� in nine �f the�e the �e��age i� that cli�ate change will benefit t�uri�� in la�� lan�. three �f the �enti�n� �ee cli�ate change a� a ����ible threat (f�r t�uri�� in s�uthern la�lan�), an� the re�t are ��re �r le�� neutral. the i�eal �f �u�tainability i� fir�ly integrate� int� the t�uri�� �trategie�. su�tainability, �u�tain� able �e�el���ent, an� �u�tainable t�uri�� are �f� ten �enti�ne� an� their �rinci�le� are ex�laine� in cha�ter� �e�icate� t� thi� t��ic (lts 2003; fts 2006; lts 2007b). su�tainability wa� al���t ��it� te� fr�� the late�t la�lan� t�uri�� strategy: the �raft �er�i�n (lts 2007a) ha� �nly �ix �enti�n� an� they were �ainly relate� t� ec�l�gical i��ue�. h�we�er, the final �er�i�n �f the �trategy (lts 2007b) increa�e� the nu�ber �f �enti�n� t� the le�el �f the �re�i�u� �trategy. al��, an entire cha�� ter �e�icate� �nly t� �u�tainability wa� rein�tate� in the text. thi� �h�w� h�w ea�ily a text can a�� �re�� �nly a ��ecific au�ience in a certain �ect�r �f life, wherea� in actual fact the au�ience i� u�ually far wi�er. a br�a�er �er��ecti�e wa� rein�tate� in the �ec�n� la�lan� t�uri�� strategy in the c�ur�e �f circulating the �raft �er�i�n a��ng �takeh�l�� er�. su�tainability an� �u�tainable �e�el���ent are �ealt with in the f�r� �f generalitie� with little c�ncrete c�ntent. they are u�e� in a �ery flexible �anner t� ju�tify a wi�e range �f i��ue�. f�r exa�� �le, the la�lan� t�uri�� �trategy 2007–2010 �tate� that (lts 2007b: 20) “�u�tainable �e�el��� �ent i� ��werfully �re�ent in t�uri�� in ea�tern la�lan� becau�e �f regi�nal �lanning an� the awar�ing �f the internati�nal pan park� certifi� cate.” here �u�tainable �e�el���ent i� un�er� �t��� in a �ery narr�w �en�e �nly in relati�n t� nati�nal �ark�. t� �efine �u�tainability in thi� way in a regi�n that �uffer� fr�� �any �ra�tic ��cietal, ec�n��ic, an� ec�l�gical change�, an� a lack �f t�uri�� in�e�t�ent� c���are� t� �ther �art� �f la�lan�, �i�ini�he� the argu�entati�e ��wer �f �u�tainability. in general, �e��ite all the re�earch ��ne ar�un� the�e c�nce�t�, the u�e �f the ter� �u�tainability an� it� �ifferent �er�i�n� �ee�� t� re�ain at the le�el �f ab�tract �alue�, e.g. beauty �r ju�tice, but n�t a� c�ncrete �alue� bel�nging t� a ��ecific being, �bject, �r gr�u� (cf. perel�an 1982: 27). one �ften�ex�re��e� c�ncern regar�ing re��te regi�n� i� relate� t� �igrati�n an� the ���ulati�n age �tructure. thi� i��ue �f �e��gra�hic change� in rural area� i� briefly �ealt with in the nati�nal t�uri�� �trategy. the effect� �f gr�wing t�uri�� are �ainly regar�e� �i��ly a� being ���iti�e, but there i� al�� a �enti�n that neg�tiati�n� with l�� cal �e��le are nee�e�. the �r�ble� �f ���ula� ti�n age �tructure in rural area� i� n�t �ealt with in the nati�nal t�uri�� �trategy at all, an� the la� �lan� t�uri�� strategy (lts 2003) regar�� the c�n�equence� �f ageing in a ���iti�e light in the �en�e that well��ff �eni�r� nee� ��re t�uri�� �er�ice�. de��gra�hic change� in rural area� are �ealt with briefly in finlan��� t�uri�� strategy. i��ue� �uch a� �afety, terr�ri��, an� cri�e are li�te� b�th in finlan��� t�uri�� strategy an� in the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy a� threat�, an� their being ab�ent a� a��antage� f�r finlan� a� a wh�le an� f�r la�� lan� a� a regi�n. table 7. nu�ber �f reference� t� c�nce�t� relate� t� the antici�ati�n �f change�. f�r abbre�iati�n�, refer t� table 3. strategy fts lts1 dlts2 lts2 nrs lrs cli�ate change 11 – 12 16 8 – – negati�e 2 – 2 3* 1 – ���iti�e – – 8 9 – – neutral 9 – 2 4 7** su�tainability 30 19 6 21 21 14 safety, �ecurity 38 27 22 43 *tw� negati�e �enti�n� in�icate i��act� �n regi�n� �ther than la�lan�, but the�e are al�� tran�f�r�e� t� the benefit �f la�lan� later �n in the ��cu�ent. **f�ur �enti�n� a��re�� �re�enti�n �r �itigati�n (�l�wing ��wn) �f cli�ate change in a neutral �anner. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 11tourism’s role in rural development of finnish lapland: … regional strategy from the point of view of a small, remote village l�cal ��int� �f �iew in “�e�el���ent ��eech” were �i�cu��e� in the c�ur�e �f �ne �illage �eet� ing hel� in finni�h la�lan�. fi�e �illager� rea� the �raft �f the new regi�nal �trategy an� we then hel� a f�cu� gr�u� �i�cu��i�n with the rea�er� ab�ut the �illager�� ��int� �f �iew regar�ing the �raft. a �e�� �f the �i�cu��i�n wa� �rawn u� a� an �ffi� cial c���ent �n the �raft. the �tate�ent re�re� �ente� the �nly c���ent �n the �raft �a�e by a �illage. the f�cu� gr�u� wa� �art �f the acti�n re� �earch �r�ce��, which wa� launche� in the ��ring �f 2007 at the �illage �f l�kka. the ai� �f thi� ac� ti�n re�earch �r�ce�� i� t� �ake certain w�rking� life�relate�, e�ery�ay �ractice�, �r�ble��, an� ����ibilitie� �i�ible t� the l�cal �e��le the��el�e� (hakkarainen 2007). the �illage �f l�kka i� l�cate� in central la�� lan�, in the �unici�ality �f s��ankylä. thi� re� ��te �illage lie� �n the �h�re �f finlan��� large�t hy�r�electric re�er��ir. s���i�, the wil�erne�� area ar�un� l�kka, ha� �tr�ng cultural�hi�t�rical �ignificance f�r the l�cal �e��le, a� well a� f�r the larger nati�nal au�ience. the �e�i�e �f the �re�i� �u� �elf��ufficient ec�n��y in l�kka i� linke� t� the ��erall �tructural change� in ��ciety, an� in the l�cal c�ntext it i� cl��ely linke� t� the c�n�tructi�n �f the l�kka hy�r�electric re�er��ir in 1967, which re�ulte� in the �er�anent fl���ing �f ���t �f s��� �i�. in a��iti�n, the re�er��ir re�ulte� in �ra�tic change� in the �hy�ical en�ir�n�ent �f s���i� an� in li�elih���� �uch a� rein�eer her�ing an� far�ing becau�e the �a�ture� were c��ere� by the water. a� �e�a�tating a� the re�er��ir ha� been, it ha� �ince �r��e� t� be an excellent fi�hing area, an� fi�hing i� n�wa�ay� �ne �f the �ain li�eli� h���� in l�kka. during the �a�t few year�, the l�� cal �e��le ha�e �e�el��e� t�uri�� acti�itie� an� they ha�e �lan� t� c�n��li�ate t�uri�� a� �ne �f their li�elih����. (l�kan kylä 2007). the f�cu� gr�u� �eeting at which the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy wa� �i�cu��e� (2.4.2007) wa� �ne �f the �eeting� an� w�rk�h��� arrange� �ur� ing the c�ur�e �f the acti�n re�earch �r�ce��. the �eeting began with a �i�cu��i�n ab�ut �e���ula� ti�n, an� the �illager� ex�re��e� their c�ncern f�r the future �f the �illage in the face �f the �eclining birth rate. the �illager�� �ain an� ���t �triking c���ent regar�ing the �raft �er�i�n wa� that re� ��te �illage� are in�i�ible in the �trategy. h�we�� er, they �i� acce�t thi� becau�e the �trategy wa� regar�e� a� being �irecte� at the entire regi�n �f la�lan�. on the �a�e gr�un��, the e��ha�i� �n t�uri�t re��rt� wa� acce�te�. the �illager� �i�� cu��e� a l�t ab�ut the relati�n�hi�� between the �illage� an� rural area� an� t�uri�t re��rt�. one unan�were� que�ti�n highlighte� the ����ibilitie� �f rural area� a� a wh�le – an� e��ecially their �wn �illage – with re��ect t� linking u� with the nearby re��rt�� bu�ine�� en�ir�n�ent? the �raft �i� n�t a��ear t� a��re�� thi� i��ue. ne�erthele��, the �illager� wi�he� that the t�ur� i�t centre� w�ul� a��u�e re���n�ibility f�r the �e� �el���ent �f the �urr�un�ing c�untry�i�e. they a��u�e� that the regi�nal �trategy i� ��re benefi� cial t� t�uri�t re��rt� an� nati�nal�le�el �rgani�a� ti�n�. the �illager� c�ul� benefit ��re if the near� by re��rt� w�ul� �raw u� �lan� that take int� ac� c�unt the �urr�un�ing c�untry�i�e, inclu�ing it� �illage�. in it� �re�ent �tate, the �illage �f l�kka i� �irectly inclu�e� �nly in the li�elih��� p�licy pr�gra��e �f s��ankylä �unici�ality. one c�ncrete exa��le �f the acti�n re�earch �r�ject �uring the �trategy f�r�ulati�n i� relate� t� the acce��ibility �f thi� �articular �illage. at �re�ent, there i� �nly �ne r�a� lea�ing t� the �il� lage �f l�kka, which �ean� that t�uri�t� �u�t �ri�e 80 kil��etre� fr�� the �ain r�a� t� fin� the �il� lage. one i���rtant �r�ject f�r the �illager� i� t� get a ��re �irect, �h�rter c�nnecti�n t� the �ain r�a�, but thi� wa� n�t inclu�e� in the �raft �f the la�lan� t�uri�� strategy. after circulati�n �f the �raft f�r c���ent�, the r�a� i� n�w �enti�ne� a� �ne i���rtant i��ue f�r t�uri�� �e�el���ent (lts 2007b). the �illager�� �iew��int� �iffere� in �any way� fr�� the “�fficial” �trategy thinking. f�r exa��le, the way la�lan� wa� �i�i�e� int� t�uri�� area� in the �raft wa� regar�e� a� artificial, an� the �illag� er� rec�gni�e� that thi� �i�i�i�n wa� ba�e� �n the nee�� �f the t�uri�t re��rt� an� �f the �ut�i�e �lan� ner�. f�r the �illager�, �e��gra�hic change in the c�untry�i�e wa� a far ��re i���rtant i��ue than cli�ate change. the �illager� c���ente� �n cli� �ate change by �aying that “the l�kka re�er��ir will l��e it� c��er �f ice ���eti�e between �i�� may an� �i��june – an� then life will g� �n.” conclusions thi� article exa�ine� the way �trategic t�uri�� �lanning c���unicate�: wh� �ay� what t� wh��? 12 fennia 186: 1 (2008)hakkarainen maria and seija tuulentie the ��erall c�nclu�i�n i� that t�uri�� �trategie� create a relati�ely cl��e� ��eech c���unity. the �trategie� c�n�truct their �wn t�uri�� reality with har�ly any �i�cu��i�n �n larger ��cietal �y�te�� an� �ther fiel�� �f life, an� the argu�entati�n f�l� l�w� �trictly the l�gic �f the li�elih��� in que�ti�n. the ba�ic �re�i�e that t�uri�� i� gr�wing an� it i� the an�wer t� �any �e�el���ent �r�ble�� i� har�ly que�ti�ne�. e��ecially in a �eri�heral re� gi�n, �uch a� la�lan�, t�uri�� �trategie� a��ear t� be �tr�ngly c�nfir�ing the ���iti�n �f t�uri��. the�e regi�nal t�uri�� �trategie� can be �een a� the t�uri�� in�u�try�� argu�entati�n f�r t�uri��. the �ther ����ibility c�ul� be that �ifferent, an� e�en unex�ecte�, �cenari�� �h�ul� be antici�ate�, an� that the wi�er fra�ew�rk �f regi�nal �e�el��� �ent �h�ul� be taken ��re int� acc�unt. the ab�tractne�� �f the w�r�ing i� �ne feature ty�ical �f the language �f �lanning – thi� re�e�� ble� what su��a (1989) ha� calle� an in�tituti�n� alize� argu�entati�e �trategy in which all the gen� erati�e ��tentiality �f rhet�ric ha� �i�a��eare� an� turne� argu�entati�n int� a rituali�tic ex� change �f �eaningle�� �tate�ent�. thi� i� e��e� cially a��arent in i��ue� �uch a� “nature” an� “�u�� tainability” where they re�ain al���t t�tally at the le�el �f ab�tract �alue�. the language �f �trategic �lanning �ake� it �if� ficult f�r �r�inary �e��le t� bec��e in��l�e� in the �r�ce��. partici�ati�n require� e��ecially the ca�ability t� u�e the �a�e �i�c�ur�e a� �lanner� �� (staffan� 2002). in the ca�e �f t�uri�� �trate� gie�, the �illager� �f l�kka c�ul� n�t fin� any clue a� t� h�w they c�ul� �artici�ate in t�uri�� �e�el� ���ent – alth�ugh they were �ery willing t� �� ��. fr�� the rural ���ulati�n�� ��int �f �iew, t�uri�� i� i���rtant, but at the gra���r��t le�el it i� u�ually c�nnecte� t� �ther rural li�elih���� an� �ractice�. thu�, the t�tality �f the li�ing en�ir�n�ent an� li�elih���� i� ��re i���rtant than the �trategie� that �eal with in�i�i�ual li�elih����. acknowledgements the auth�r� w�ul� like t� thank the �r�ject gr�u� “t�uri�� a� w�rk” f�r their �u���rt. the �r�ject i� fun�e� by the aca�e�y �f finlan� an� c��r�inate� by �r�fe���r s�ile veij�la at the uni�er�ity �f la�� lan�. references atkin��n p & a c�ffey (2004). analy�ing ��cu�en� tary realitie�. in sil�er�an d (e�). qualitative research: theory, method and practice, 56–75. sage, l�n��n. berger pl & t luck�ann (1967). the social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology knowledge. 219 �. anch�r b��k�, new y�rk. burn� p (1999). para��xe� in �lanning. t�uri�� elit� i�� �r brutali��? annals of tourism research 26: 2, 329–348. frds (2007) = finlan��� rural de�el���ent strategy f�r 2007–2013. <http://www.mmm.fi/attachments/5guynggyn/5hrf8nuuz/files/currentfile/ s u o m e n _ m a a s e u d u n _ k e h i t t a m i s s t r a t e g i a _ 08022007.pdf>. 12.6.2008 fts (2006) = finlan��� t�uri�� strategy t� 2020. publications of ministry of trade and industry 21/2006. 104 �. <http://ktm.elinar.fi/ktm_jur/ktmjur.nsf/all/ 3d61db118241a034c22571800022fec4?open document>. 12.6.2008. hakkarainen m (2007). para� ��r� ei �le �akka�e��a �aan �iha�aalla? t�i�intatutki�uk�ella tiet�a elinkein�jen �uut�k�e�ta. in tyr�äinen l & s tuu� lentie (e��). lu�nt��atkailu, �et�ät ja hy�in��in� ti. finnish forest research institute, working papers 52, 105–120. hall cm & j jenkin� (1998). the ��licy �i�en�i�n� �f rural t�uri�� an� recreati�n. in butler r, cm hall & j jenkin� (e��). tourism and recreation in rural areas, 19–42. wiley, chiche�ter. h�l�ila m (2001). kylä kau�ungi�tu�a��a yhtei�kun� na��a. yhtei�öelä�än �uut�� ja jatku�uu�. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 850. 158 �. jauhiainen js & v nie�en�aa (2006). alueellinen suunnittelu. 292 �. va�ta�ain�, ta��ere. kau��ila p (2004). matkailuke�ku�ten kehity��r��e��i ja r��li aluekehityk�e��ä �aikalli�ta��lla: e�i�erk� keinä le�i, ruka, saari�elkä ja yllä�. nordia geographical publications 33: 1. 260 �. kn�w� i (2006). t�uri�� a� a �echani�� f�r far� �ur�i�al. journal of sustainable tourism 14: 1, 24–42. lrp (2005) = la�lan��� rural �r�gra��e 2013. re� gi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan�. 60 �. <http://www. lapinliitto.fi/aluekehitys/maaseutu/maaponteva. pdf>. 20.12.2008. lts (2003) = la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2003–2006. regi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan�. 59 �. (in finni�h an� in engli�h). <http://www.lapinliitto.fi/englanti/ matstraeg.pdf>. 20.12.2008. lts (2007a) = la�lan� t�uri�� strategy 2007–2010, draft �er�i�n. regi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan�. < h t t p : / / w w w. l a p i n l i i t t o . f i / p a a t o k s e n t e k o / lh221007/liite8.pdf>. 18.5.2007. lts (2007b) = la�lan� t�uri�� �trategy 2007–2010. regi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan�. <http://www.lapinl i i t t o . f i / m a t k a i l u / m a t s t r a 2 0 0 7 2 0 1 0 . p d f > . 13.10.2008. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 13tourism’s role in rural development of finnish lapland: … l�kan kylä [the �illage �f l�kka]. <http://www.sodankyla.fi/lokka/elinkein.htm> 08.01.2007. mäkinen l (2006). mu�ni�n hakkuille tuli täy�tyr� �äy�. new��a�er kaleva 30.12.2006. müller dk & b jan���n (2007). the �ifficult bu�ine�� �f �aking �lea�ure �eri�herie� �r���er�u�: �er� ��ecti�e� �n ��ace, �lace an� en�ir�n�ent. in müller dk & b jan���n (e��). tourism in peripheries perspectives from the far north and south, 3–18. cab internati�nal, athenaeu� pre��, gate�� hea�. na�h r & a martin (2003). t�uri�� in �eri�heral ar� ea� – the challenge� f�r n�rthea�t sc�tlan�. the international journal of tourism research 5: 3, 161–181. perel�an ch (1982). the realm of rhetoric. 179 �. uni�er�ity �f n�tre da�e, l�n��n. regi�nal c�uncil �f la�lan� (2002). la�in työ��i�a�la�in työ��i�a� ennu�te �u�teen 2020. ptm alue�alli/la��i �tii� �i�tel�ä. <http://www.lapinliitto.fi/aluekehitys/ tvennuste.pdf>. 29.3.2007. saarinen j (2004). vii�einen �ljenk�r�i? matkailu ja �aa�eu�un aluekehity�. maaseudun uusi aika 12: 3, 26–38. saarinen j (2007). t�uri�� in �eri�herie�: the r�le �f t�uri�� in regi�nal �e�el���ent in n�rthern fin� lan�. in müller dk & b jan���n (e��). tourism in peripheries perspectives from the far north and south, 41–52. cab internati�nal, athenaeu� pre��, gate�hea�. staffan� a (2002). kil�ailu tie���ta kiri�tyy. su�ertyy� �it eletyn kau�ungin tulkkeina. in bäcklun� p, j häkli & h schul�an (e��). osalliset ja osaajat. kansalaiset kaupungin suunnittelussa, 180–199. gau�ea�u�, hel�inki. stati�tic� finlan� (2008). <http://pxweb2.stat.fi/dialog/varval.asp?ma=040_matk_tau_104_fi&ti=saa puneet+vieraat+ja+y%f6pymiset+kaikissa+majoi tusliikkeiss%e4&path=../database/statfin/lii/ matk/&lang=3&multilang=fi>. 28.01.2008. su��a h (1989) hy�in��inti��litiikka ja �uunnitte� luret�riikka: ta�au� a�unt���litiikka. yhdyskuntasuunnitelun täydennyskoulutuskeskus publica-publications a 17. 244 �. tuulentie s (2003). f�r an� again�t the right� �f the sa�i �e��le: the argu�entati�n �f the finni�h �aj�rity in the �ebate �f the sa�i right�. in jent�ft s, h min�e & r nil�en (e��). indigenous peoples. resource management and global rights, 275– 296. ebur�n delft, the netherlan��. emplacement in hostile spaces: hopeless notes – commentary to van liempt urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa129570 doi: 10.11143/fennia.129570 reflections emplacement in hostile spaces: hopeless notes – commentary to van liempt aura lounasmaa lounasmaa, a. (2023) emplacement in hostile spaces: hopeless notes – commentary to van liempt. fennia 201(1) 112–117. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129570 in her keynote lecture from the finnish geography days in 2022 ilse van liempt offers a hopeful and useful approach to understanding refugees’ processes of belonging and home-making. she focuses on arrival infrastructures, which encompass both the formal and the informal processes and structures that greet migrants as they arrive. important part of these is emplacement, where the focus can turn into how migrants themselves become part of creating arrival infrastructures and making home in new environments, including the public spaces they inhabit. my commentary draws from my experiences of the united kingdom (uk) hostile bordering practices, and i am reminded that hostility, policing migration and migrants and bordering practices are not only present, but often framing both the formal and informal infrastructures. secondly, i reflect on the meaning of home here: the patriarchal and heteronormative home can follow a migrant on their route, as well as become part of the bordering practice for new arrivals. hence for some, home itself becomes a prison, a site of violence or a place of non-belonging. finally, the emergence of the techno-borderscape (godin & doná 2020) has moved large parts of arrival infrastructures, both the bordering and the support that these represent, and possibilities of home-making online, with many migrants simultaneously having reduced access to the digital spaces. keywords: bordering, hostile environment, forced migration, arrival infrastructures, home aura lounasmaa, (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8667-6524), space and political agency research group, tampere university, finland. e-mail: aura. lounasmaa@tuni.fi introduction after years of working with refugee students in the united kindgom (uk) and experiencing the effects of its increasingly hostile environment policies towards all new migrants as well as existing minority populations, i was relieved and hopeful when listening to ilse van liempt’s (2023) fennia lecture during the geography days in tampere in october 2022. van liempt, who has conducted observations, © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129570 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8667-6524 mailto:aura.lounasmaa@tuni.fi mailto:aura.lounasmaa@tuni.fi fennia 201(1) (2023) 113aura lounasmaa semi-structured interviews and photo-voice workshops with recently arrived youth and refugee women in amsterdam, found that forced migrants find ways to participate and contribute to informal arrival infrastructures, which in turn help emplacement in new urban environments. in her research, she found that public and semi-public places became important places of emplacement and belonging, and that the concept of home was often stretched to gain new meanings outside the house, bringing wider communities into the sphere of family. arrival infrastructures, introduced by meeus, arnaut and van heur (2019) provide a useful lens for understanding the formal and informal networks, support services, connections and places that new arrivals navigate in order to find the information, human connections and resources they need in order to settle into the new society. by focusing on emplacement, van liempt highlights that arrival does not, nor should it, lead (uniquely) to integration. integration here is understood to mean a version of assimilation, where the newly arrived begins to contribute to the existing societal and economic structures, evident for example in the finnish integration law and programmes (finnish national agency for education 2022). emplacement, on the other hand, allows those arriving to participating and cocreate the arrival infrastructures and begin to shape the places and societies where they settle (or pass by). hostile arrival infrastructures van liempt describes the typical process of arriving, being registered, getting placed in a reception centre, waiting, (hopefully) receiving refugee status and being housed, usually far away from the reception centre they initially stayed in. she explains how this process is disruptive and violent, but mostly so due to practical, administrative reasons. after the extreme violence of uk migration policies i have navigated in my years of supporting refugee students, i ask myself immediately, where in this process does european rising nationalism, violent border practices across the european union and hostile immigration policies reside? uk’s latest “illegal immigration bill” introduced by the tory government in march 2023 and currently (may 2023) awaiting ratification, “extinguishes the right to seek refugee protection in the uk” (unhcr 2023) and follows a deal in 2022 with the rwandan government to deport all asylum seekers who have arrived through irregular channels to rwanda. uk’s extreme violence towards migrants and efforts to stop anyone from seeking refugee protection in the country have been escalating steadily since 2012, when theresa may, the then home secretary announced her plan to make uk into a hostile environment for migration (kirkup 2012). uk is not alone. in finland, the 2023 parliamentary election saw the far-right party true finns campaign largely on promises of further immigration controls and reduce even work based immigration to finland rise to the second largest party in the parliament. finding a joint programme for a government may prove to be impossible, as all other parties see work-based immigration as necessary for the finnish economy (uusi suomi 23.3.2023). in the netherlands, de jonge and gaufman (2022) note that media has normalised populist radical right politicians such as thierry baudet, and hence moved their views closer to the mainstream. what do these anti-immigrant politics do to the arrival infrastructures? yuval-davis, wemyss and cassidy (2019) show how hostile immigration policies move through administrative processes and everyday encounters by deliberately obfuscating the rules governing migration, thus implicating health care providers, employers, educational institutions and landlords in border governance. the authors call these processes everyday bordering. instead of trusting border guards and immigration officials with policing the entry of non-nationals through the state borders, the uk immigration bills of 2015 and 2017 have made people with little training and access to legal advice personally responsible for checking whether individuals have the correct immigration status to access services and institutions. as the risk of misinterpreting the rules benevolently is too high (personal fines of up to £10,000), the research shows that both individuals and institutions err on the side of exclusion and deny access to services and jobs for those who look or sound like they might be migrants. this way hostile environment begins to affect not only migrants, but also racialised nationals. and these everyday bordering practices do not end where legal personal liability for erroneously welcoming a migrant does. examinerlive reported in 2021 that 4 in 5 immigration raids in yorkshire resulted in no detentions, something migration experts believe is due to large number of raids being conducted 114 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections based on unverifiable tip-offs (brooke 2021). the immigration compliance and enforcement (ice) receives approximately 50,000 anonymous tip-offs annually (corporate watch 2018), demonstrating that people will go out of their way to police border regimes in their immediate environments. van liempt focuses in her lecture on the ways in which new arrivals become part of the arrival infrastructures, shaping them and creating their own informal arrival infrastructures to catch those spaces where formal infrastructures or the existing networks are insufficient. this allows arrivals to begin to shape their cities, not just for themselves but also for their neighbours, creating new and expanding existing spaces of connection and belonging that benefit the whole city. we must, however, understand, how some of these new arrival infrastructures stem from the hostility and existing bordering practices. as formal arrival infrastructures, such as housing support and access to health and education are reduced and the system increasingly directed towards detention and deportation, migrants are left with no choice but to create their own networks of support and information. many civil society initiatives, such as university access programmes (e.g. open learning initiative at central european university) and mediterranean sea rescues arise from the same place: when states become more hostile and refuse to provide the support that new arrivals need, civil society and individuals feel compelled to take action, even if this means the action is criminalised. furthermore, as yuval-davis, wemyss and cassidy (2019) show, hostility, bordering and racial profiling is built into some of these arrival infrastructures. arrival infrastructures is a useful concept, which allow us to see the different formal and informal practices that surround (forced) migrant arrivals. understanding this concept in the context of hostile environment and everyday bordering policies allows us to see arrival infrastructures as more nuanced network of practices, which are simultaneously used for supporting and policing arrivals. we should indeed celebrate the ways in which arrival infrastructures make the newly arrived participants and authors in some innovative emplacement activities and spaces, without losing sight of how these practices arise from unfulfilled needs, gaps left in services and outright hostility by the state and non-state actors. hostile homes my second point of sadness arises from research that queers the home. quintero (2021) has studied the meaning of home for lgbtq+ refugees in london through poetry and participatory action research. many of the poems written by the participants talk about being homeless or having never had a home, because their sexuality has made them invisible, unlovable or dead to their families. the concept of home is still presented as desirable, even though some have never had this experience in the places that have been called home in the past. home is something that needs to be built around the people who love the writers; somewhere they can be themselves. the construction of home around patriarchal, heteronormative structures that idealise nuclear family make home also unsafe for all of those, who are living with domestic or intimate partnership violence. one of quintero’s participants also shares their experiences of abuse, and in this poem home becomes ‘my hell home’. here, home is no longer a positive, safe place, but the place where the participant is subjected to violence, feels unsafe and tries to kill themselves at christmas. migration brings further issues to those for whom the home is not a place of safety and belonging. several studies have highlighted the difficulty of migrants to leave abusive homes or relationships, because the victim’s immigration status may depend on the abuser; because the victim may not be entitled to any public funds or support; because of language and cultural barriers in reporting abuse; lack of social support networks; because of mistrust of authorities and a myriad of other reasons why victims are either not reporting abuse or not receiving support (e.g. voolma 2018). heteronormativity is often reinforced by faith groups, and individuals may need to negotiate belonging in diasporic communities, stuck between hostile public spaces and dangerous homes. this point is presented harrowingly in razeman and nyoni’s (2014) short film listen, where a woman tries to report domestic abuse to the police through a translator, but both the translator and the woman’s young son interfere on her behalf, applying their own cultural frameworks and understanding to what is best. the woman returns ‘home’, where her life is at risk, while avoiding deportation to ‘home’, where her life might equally be at risk. https://openeducation.group/about/ https://openeducation.group/about/ fennia 201(1) (2023) 115aura lounasmaa the women and young people in van liempt’s study talk about the importance of public spaces in emplacement and homemaking. she points out how claiming public spaces as part of one’s home is an act of defiance against state defined private spaces marked as the territory they are allowed to own and occupy. claiming public space, existing out in the open and claiming space where migrants are expected to be invisible1 are indeed important moments of resistance and agency in redefining the territories of belonging. again, with the joyous; alongside the celebration of agency in building homes out in the public, i am reminded that some are forced to seek home outside of the walls of their houses as those houses are unsafe, or they are denied identity and belonging inside the family home. yet others are unable to escape those walls and take refuge in the public space, and the concept of home becomes only hopeless: a loveless and dangerous prison. the concept of emplacement allows us to move beyond the home and thinking about belonging beyond (patriarchal) family structures. of course, as yuval-davis (2011) reminds us, belonging is always marked by exclusion, and so outside of emplacement exists a vast placelessness. digital borders finally, when thinking about emplacement, i wondered about the role of digital spaces in the process. digital spaces are important in every part of migration: connecting with families, friends and those helping migrants move and settle in new countries; finding information about routes, places to settle and legal and practical problems; moving money, phone credit or finding support (godin & doná 2020). after arrival, all state services from health care appointments, social security payments and school enrolments can only be accessed online. supporting refugee students through uk lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 highlighted the importance and difficulties with emplacement in digital spaces. refugees in our university access programme (olive2) noted the practical limitations of connecting online, as internet connections and digital hardware are not part of what is seen as necessary arrival infrastructure and hence was not provided by the state as part of housing. esenowo (2022) also notes that many refugees lack the digital skills that are required in order to study, find work or even to access basic services such as healthcare or benefits. digital training is not provided and yet migration and bordering processes, as well as the arrival infrastructures, are largely digitised. godin and doná (2020) call this move of bordering into digital platforms a techno-borderscape. where yuval-davis, wemyss and cassidy (2019) describe the border as dynamic and penetrating all aspects of everyday life, the techno-borderscape moves those practices into the digital space. surveillance and policing are digital, but so are the more supportive parts of arrival infrastructures. yet, access to the technologies and digital skills is limited to many newly arrived. the covid-19 restrictions and lockdowns highlighted the importance of digital spaces further. some students organised mutual aid, peer tutoring and other support online (lounasmaa et al. forthcoming). the isolation of lockdowns also brought some sort of justice to asylum seekers as the rest of the population was now placed on a house arrest and an indefinite wait just like them. as ashen fernado states in masserano and others (2021, 162): as an asylum seeker, you will see non-asylum seekers experiencing the same as us through lockdown: they will have to stay at home, they will not be able to travel and work legally. those who had access to hardware and internet connections were often relieved not to have to traverse public spaces, with limited funds for travel, in order to access education and peer-support. some previous courses had seen students travel over night from cardiff to london in order to access a day’s teaching; with online teaching this was not necessary. online teaching came with some issues of disconnect, and difficulties building communities, but for some refugee students it broke the isolation caused by remote housing and lack of nearby communities to connect with. those who were excluded from previous, urban-centered projects and spaces where emplacement could happen, were now connecting to new opportunities and able to create communities online. the shared experience of being alone in a new, hostile country cannot necessarily be shared with families and friends far away, but housing policies that locate refugees far from each other, move them around often and disconnect them from already found communities reduce the opportunities they 116 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections have for emplacement. for some, digital spaces can offer alternative spaces for emplacement and important ways to connect with arrival infrastructures. others are further isolated by their lack of access to these spaces. although in many places we have now largely moved back to the physical spaces and physical connections and the face-to-face encounter is prioritised, digital spaces remain important places of connection and information for new arrivals. it is important to keep thinking about how we create and maintain digital spaces and how they connect with arrival infrastructures. questions of access and digital skill require more of our attention, as do questions of safety and border policing online. digital spaces are also marked by hate speech and harassment, which are used to silence and exclude minorities. yet, the techno-borderscape is now an essential part of arrival infrastructure and emplacement. hopeful conclusions i wish to end this paper in the hopeful notes that van liempt’s study offers. while it is important to keep in mind how hostility in its different forms frame arrival infrastructures, emplacement and home-making, van liempt’s participants share notes of hope in their efforts to occupy public spaces and build connections in their new neighbourhoods. quintero’s (2021) participants share this hope and sense of ownership in building new homes to replace the ones they were not welcome in. the new home, whether it is at an organisational space, a digital community, a new house or the people who make us feel safe is built by those residing in it. notes 1 a finnish coalition party member mia laiho tweeted on the 15 march 2023 while campaigning for the finnish parliamentary election that the change in finland has been enormous, in a shopping centre in vantaa she could see “11–12-year old children hanging out without parents, migrants everywhere. one person with a bloody nose”. the tweet was accompanied by #gangcrime. 2 for more information about the open learning initiative at university of east london see their website and blog. references brooke, s. (2021) 'unverifiable tip-offs' – four in five yorkshire immigration raids end with no one being detained, examinerlive 19.4.2021. <https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/unverifiable-tipoffs-four-five-20387321>. 7.4.2023. corporate watch (2018) the uk border regime: a critical guide. corporate watch and freedom press, london. <https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/uk_border_regime.pdf>. godin, m. & doná, g. (2020) rethinking transit zones: migrant trajectories and transnational networks in techno-borderscapes. journal of ethnic and migration studies (jems) 47(14) 3276–3292. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2020.1804193 esenowo, i. (2022) “digital literacy for refugees in the united kingdom”. in cantat, c., cook, i. m. & rajaram, p. k. (eds.) opening up the university: teaching and learning with refugees, 156–163. berghahn books, oxford. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800733114 finnish national agency for education (2022) national core curriculum for integration training 2022. <https://www.oph.fi/sites/default/files/documents/national_core_curriculum_for_integration_ training_2022_0.pdf>. de jonge, l., & gaufman, e. (2022) the normalisation of the far right in the dutch media in the run-up to the 2021 general elections. discourse & society 33(6) 773–787. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221095418 kirkup, j. (2012) theresa may: we’re going to give migrants a really hostile reception, the telegraph, 25.5.2012. <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9291483/theresa-may-interviewwere-going-to-give-illegal-migrants-a-really-hostile-reception.html>. 7.4.2023. van liempt, i. (2023) becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement. fennia 201(1) 9–22. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 https://uel.ac.uk/our-research/research-school-education-communities/olive https://olivecourseuel.wordpress.com/ https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/unverifiable-tip-offs-four-five-20387321 https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/unverifiable-tip-offs-four-five-20387321 https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/uk_border_regime.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2020.1804193 https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800733114 https://www.oph.fi/sites/default/files/documents/national_core_curriculum_for_integration_training_2022_0.pdf https://www.oph.fi/sites/default/files/documents/national_core_curriculum_for_integration_training_2022_0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265221095418 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9291483/theresa-may-interview-were-going-to-give-illegal-migrants-a-really-hostile-reception.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9291483/theresa-may-interview-were-going-to-give-illegal-migrants-a-really-hostile-reception.html fennia 201(1) (2023) 117aura lounasmaa lounasmaa, a., masserano, e., quintero, s. with kim and her friends, charles, joel mordi, thabo makuyana, elizabeth achola & ashen fernando (forthcoming) “writing collaboratively in a lockdown: building connection in online writing groups with refugees, migrants and local communities”. in moran, l. & dooly, z. (eds.) stories of the pandemic: global narrative biographical perspectives on lives lived during covid-19. springer. masserano, e., lounasmaa, a., achola, e. p., fernando, a., goba, p. l., makuyana, t., mordi, j. & phantsi, j. l. (2021) transformative storytelling without borders: the case of olive. in moran, l. (ed.) the sociological observer 3(1): remaking social futures through biographic, narrative and lifecourse approaches: story-making and story-telling in pandemic times, 158–164. <https://sociology.ie/wpcontent/uploads/2022/07/sociological-observer-31.pdf>. meeus, b., arnaut, k. & van heur, b. (eds.) (2019) arrival infrastructures. migration and urban social mobilities. palgrave mcmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91167-0 quintero, s. (2021) the meaning of home among lgbtq+ refugee. ma thesis, university of east london. summary and participants’ poems available: <https://www.soniaquintero.co.uk/community-projects>. razeman, h. & rungony, n. (2014) listen. nordic factory, denmark and finland. short film. unhcr (2023) statement on uk asylum bill 7 march 2023. <https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/statementuk-asylum-bill>. uusi suomi (2023) nyt repesi sanna marinin ja riikka purran raju taistelu – ja täysi kakofonia 23.3.2023. <https://www.uusisuomi.fi/uutiset/nyt-repesi-sanna-marinin-ja-riikka-purran-raju-taistelu-ja-taysikakofonia/22d1e070-d08f-4bc7-8439-7b8c118a53e0>. 15.5.2023. voolma, h. (2018) “i must be silent because of residency”: barriers to escaping domestic violence in the context of insecure immigration status in england and sweden. violence against women 24(15) 1830–1850. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801218755974 yuval-davis, n. (2011) the politics of belonging. sage, london. yuval-davis, n., wemyss, g. & cassidy, k. (2019) bordering. polity press, cambridge. https://sociology.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sociological-observer-31.pdf https://sociology.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sociological-observer-31.pdf https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91167-0 https://www.soniaquintero.co.uk/community-projects https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/statement-uk-asylum-bill https://www.unhcr.org/uk/news/statement-uk-asylum-bill https://www.uusisuomi.fi/uutiset/nyt-repesi-sanna-marinin-ja-riikka-purran-raju-taistelu-ja-taysi-kakofonia/22d1e070-d08f-4bc7-8439-7b8c118a53e0 https://www.uusisuomi.fi/uutiset/nyt-repesi-sanna-marinin-ja-riikka-purran-raju-taistelu-ja-taysi-kakofonia/22d1e070-d08f-4bc7-8439-7b8c118a53e0 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801218755974 development is a dynamic process with social, economic, environmental, political, cultural, and above all, geographical dimensions. opportunities for development have never been equal on the earth, and research on development is intrigued by the dilemma of inequality between different continents and regions in the world. why do some societies and cultures prosper while others suffer from poverty and negative trajectories? sustainable development trajectories involve maintaining values that people consider important, may those be economic, social or environmental. in the local reality, sustainability requires motivation and capacity of the people to use land and other resources cautiously through time (raquez & lambin 2006). equal and sustainable development requires identification of geographically and thematically scalable coping strategies. if we manage to identify these strategies, do we have tools to keep development on sustainable paths also for the future generations? geographers have traditionally been in the forefront of observing spatial as well as temporal dimensions of development. the question of how and why standard of living and quality of life vary between regions motivates geographical research on development. regional dependence relations, roles of institutions, land property rights and gender issues are among the key issues in the development process. more recently the overall rise of environmental awareness, such as considering the role of biodiversity and climate change in human development, has broadened the scope of development research (ma 2003; unep 2007). today, development geography and research on development issues in general is multidisciplinary, aiming to grasp the continuously transforming spheres of development in the midst of gradual and sudden changes of the societies and the environment. the fennia special issue on development geography is a glance on some of the ongoing development research activities of the finnish researchers and their international colleagues. articles demonstrate different approaches to development studies in terms of methodologies and applications, and they represent approaches of the natural preface: development geography and social sciences and humanities. together these articles work towards understanding the multiple dimensions of development. articles share a common goal typical to geographical research. they study and try to solve development problems through holistic understanding of interactions between humans and the nature. with different case studies, articles take readers to development issues in namibia, china, ghana, tanzania and kenya. the fist article deals with one of the fundamental problems of development, that of land property rights and gender inequality. author siiskonen has worked for many years in an agrarian society in ovamboland, north-central namibia, where access to arable land defines political and social status of society’s members. siiskonen focuses in his article on the property rights and gender inequality amongst widowed and divorced persons as seen from their life histories. the case study links parish registers with anthropological, ethnographic, socio-economic and cultural information and shows, for example, that remarriage has been a coping strategy for many widows and divorced women in the 1930s and 1940s, especially if they were at favourable childbearing age. the case study illustrates how parish registers can provide a useful source for investigating long-term societal and cultural changes, and how such research may open eyes to see the underlying linkages between land ownership and socio-economic development. forests are known to be key ecosystems in maintaining biological diversity and mitigating climate change. simultaneously, however, forests are facing many land use pressures that degrade and threaten their viability (fao 2005). consequences of forest degradation are severe for the environment, and devastating for those societies, whose livelihoods are dependent on the faith of the forests (ma 2003; unep 2007). the second article by zhou, luukkanen, tokola and hares emphasizes the importance of forests biodiversity for local development and livelihoods. suppressing the negative human influences on forests resources requires understanding the response of forests to human disturbance. the authors study forest degradation and their restoration potential in the upper min river watershed in sichuan, china, using quantitative stand characteristics and species diversity indices as indicators. human activities, such as logging, combined with natural disturbances cause soil erosion and forest degradation in the area. the article demonstrates that human impacts cause different abundance, evenness and richness of tree species in the studied site, and suggests using nearnatural forests as references when developing forest restoration strategies for the future. the third and fourth article by juhola and fagerholm and käyhkö, respectively, contribute to an important discussion of how to identify the key stakeholders when defining the value-base of the development. development co-operation has been accused or being imperialistic in nature, neglecting indigenous knowledge at the expense of expert, top-down flow of information. both articles combine indigenous knowledge and local perceptions in the process of defining sustainable development in rural communities. juhola explores in her article the social constructions of the concept of agricultural biodiversity. the case study evolves around an idea that biodiversity conservation is promoted through understanding of the discursive positions on cultivated species. discourses of an indigenous rice variety (oryza glaberrima) in the upper east region of ghana are studied using qualitative methods such as interviews and focus group discussions. juhola identifies three positions from which she explores the construction and conservation of the rice variety drawing attention to different, often conflicting social meanings of the species. furthermore, juhola shows how these discursive positions become institutionalised into social rules, norms and practices, which further establish the efforts to conserve o. glaberrima. fagerholm and käyhkö explore spatial patterns of social landscape values in a rural community in zanzibar, tanzania. as people attach commonly approved social values subjectively to landscape, authors have mapped four social values (subsistence, traditional, aesthetic and leisure) of the local farmers through participation and analysed these patterns cartographically and quantitatively. this type of participatory gis (participatory geographical information systems, pgis) approach combines community participation with the use of geographical information techniques and allows analysis of stakeholder data in a geographical form (voss et al. 2004). the case study reveals the uneven spatial distribution and clustering of these four social values in the landscape. the authors discuss the role of pgis and social landscape values in the planning and management of multifunctional cultural landscapes. the last article brings up an important topic of empowering local people in the decision-making of land use and land management. recently, local participation has been integrated into land use legislation and policies with an aim to allow local communities to manage natural resources efficiently and in a sustainable manner. the authors himberg, omoro, pellikka and luukkanen studied the benefits and constraints of participation in forest conservation and management among population groups engaged in forest-related activities in taita hills, kenya. they focused specifically on local people’s perceptions of participation during the transformation of forest policy. the authors concluded that efforts to conserve forests for ecological services were important, and emphasized sustainable uses of forest products. shortcomings, such as inadequate access to updated information about management practices and legal rights, hampered participation. according to the respondents, the direction of development was good, although the tools for participation and the support from the government remained inadequate. this fact may gradually lead into unsuccessful conservation efforts. when dealing with development research, it is fundamental to discuss about human capacity development as part of undertaking research, especially when developing societies and their problems are in focus. academic research is not independent from cultural and social outreach of research. thus, human capacity building should be extended into academic development research through shared research and teaching activities between partners involved. it is crucial that research teams learn from each other and that there is a flow of knowledge between people involved. in finland, this type of teaching and research collaboration is promoted by unipid, the finnish university partnership for international development (https://www.jyu.fi/hallinto/unipid/en). unipid network aims to establish research and development co-operation between universities in finland and abroad, and to support sustainable development, research and education around the world. unipid allows finnish universities to accomplish their role in the promotion and implementation of sustainable development. it fosters exchange of knowledge between universities in finland and in developing and transition countries by strengthening their partnerships in the fields of research and higher education. furthermore, it links finnish universities to national, european and global sustainable development networks. unipid has kindly supported the publication of this fennia special issue. references fao (food and agriculture organization of the united nations) (2005). global forest resources assessment 2005: progress towards sustainable forest management. 350 p. fao forestry paper 147. rome. ma (millenium ecosystem assessment) (2003). ecosystems and human well-being: a framework for assessment. 245 p. island press, washington. raquez p & ef lambin (2006). conditions for a sustainable land use: case study evidence. journal of land use science 1: 2–4, 109–125. unep (united nations environment program) (2007). global environment outlook: environment for development (geo-4). 540 p. progress press ltd., malta. voss a, i denisovich, p gatalsky, k gavouchidis, a klotz, s roeder & h voss (2004). evolution of participatory gis. computers, environment and urban systems 28: 6, 635–651. guest editors niina käyhkö and sanna mäki department of geography, university of turku e-mails: niina.kayhko@utu.fi, sanna.maki@utu.fi urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa41354 doi: 10.11143/41354 preliminary enviromagnetic comparison of the moss, lichen, and filter fabric bags to air pollution monitoring hanna salo salo, hanna (2014). preliminary comparison of the suitability of three sampling materials to air pollution monitoring. fennia 192: 2, pp. 154–163. issn 17985617. air quality and anthropogenic air pollutants are usually investigated by passive biomonitoring, which utilizes native species. active biomonitoring, instead, refers to the use of transplants or bags in areas lacking native species. in finland, the standardized moss bag technique sfs 5794 is commonly applied in active monitoring but there is still a need for simpler and labor-saving sample material even on the international scale. this article focuses on a preliminary comparison of the usability and collection efficiency of bags made of moss sphagnum papillosum, lichen hypogymnia physodes, and filter fabric (filtrete™) in active biomonitoring of air pollutants around an industrial site in harjavalta, sw finland. the samples are analyzed with magnetic methods (i.e. magnetic susceptibility, isothermal remanent magnetization, hysteresis loop and hysteresis parameters) highly suitable as a first-step tool for pollution studies. the results show that the highest magnetic susceptibility of each sample material is measured close to the industrial site. furthermore, moss bags accumulate more magnetic material than lichen bags which, on the contrary, perform better at further distances. filtrete™ bags are tested only at 1 km sites indicating a good accumulation capability near the source. pseudo-single-domain (psd) magnetite is identified as the main magnetic mineral in all sample materials and good correlations are found between different bag types. to conclude, all three materials effectively accumulate air pollutants and are suitable for air quality studies. the results of this article provide a base for later studies which are needed in order to fully determine a new, efficient, and easy sample material for active monitoring. keywords: harjavalta (finland), air pollution, active monitoring, bag technique, magnetic methods, material comparison hanna salo, department of geography and geology, university of turku, fi20014 turku, finland. e-mail: hanna.salo@utu.fi introduction air quality impacts on the health and well-being of people and environment on all geographical and temporal scales (fenger 1999). biomonitoring is a common way to study air quality and anthropogenic air pollution, and it is defined as the use of organisms and biomaterials to obtain information on certain characteristics of the biosphere (wolterbeek 2002). traditional indicator species, especially leaves and needles, have been recently investigated successfully with easy, fast, cost-effective, and usually non-destructive magnetic methods (e.g. lehndorff et al. 2006, mitchell & maher 2009). the research method of environmental magnetism (also enviromagnetics) has found various applications e.g. in geography, archaeology, and climatology throughout the world after it separated as its own discipline in the 1980s. even though lichens and mosses are excellent bioaccumulators and commonly used in biomonitoring since the 1970s (szczepaniak & biziuk 2003), they fennia 192: 2 (2014) 155preliminary enviromagnetic comparison of the moss,... have been utilized in few enviromagnetic studies so far (e.g. jordanova et al. 2010, fabian et al. 2011, salo et al. 2012, chaparro et al. 2013). biomonitoring can be passive or active. according to szczepaniak and biziuk (2003), passive biomonitoring refers to the use of native plants whereas active monitoring includes the exposure of well-defined species as transplants or bags. the latter exposure method is especially valuable in polluted areas suffering for the absence of native species (i.e. moss or lichen desert). furthermore, active monitoring has several advantages: the initial element concentrations and exposure periods are well-known (ares et al. 2012), the transplants collection efficiency is greater for most elements (adamo et al. 2003), and they may be positioned flexibly without the fear of vandalism since they are rather inconspicuous. as pointed out by fernández and carballeira (2000), native plants may yield results underestimating the deposition of heavy metals because of the possible adaptation of material to its surroundings, and therefore, active monitoring is the most accurate method. the bag technique has been applied for both lichens and mosses (e.g. adamo et al. 2003, culicov & yurukova 2006), although moss bags are more familiar. however, many moss bag techniques have comprised due to the lack of internationally standardized method making the result comparison harder. a wide range of lichen and moss species used for active monitoring has been reported in research papers. stated by ares et al. (2012), the most suitable species for moss bag technique come from the genus sphagnum. these species have an excellent water retention and high cation-exchange capacity (little & martin 1974). in finland, the moss bag technique was standardized in the 1990s, and the recommended species is primarily sphagnum papillosum and secondarily s. girgensohnii. as for lichens, widespread hypogymnia physodes is used also as transplants because it is moderately sensitive to heavy metals and so 2 (hauck & huneck 2007). in turku (sw finland), magnetic biomonitoring of both native and transplanted lichen h. physodes proved to be functional, although transplants near the city center in the lichen desert area attracted birds (limo 2010, salo et al. 2012). the purpose of this study is to preliminary compare the usability and collection efficiency of s. papillosum moss bags (standardized method in finland) and h. physodes lichen bags in magnetic monitoring of air pollutants. also filter fabric (filtrete™) bags are tested at the most heavily polluted sites. the bags were exposed to air pollutants at the limited number of sample sites around an industrial point source in harjavalta (sw finland) in the fall 2011 for a collection period of six months. study area, materials and methods study area the study area harjavalta (61°19´n, 22°19´e) is located in sw finland (fig. 1a) at the southern boreal coniferous zone along the kokemäenjoki river and the pori–helsinki highway and railroad. primarily the industrial park, a cluster of heavy metal and chemical industries within 1 km from the town centre, produces copper, sulfuric acid, nickel and special chemicals, as well as fertilizers by refining cuand ni-concentrates and other raw materials. the industrial park is regarded as the main emission source in the town, but air pollutants can originate also from two foundries, traffic, and domestic heating systems. the fly-ash load from the cu-ni smelter’s pipe is usually held as the most significant pollution source, but various dustproviding sources, e.g. concentrate or slag handling, are more important at short distances (salo & mäkinen 2014). common air pollutants are sulfur dioxides, dust, and heavy metals such as cu, ni, zn, pb, as, cd, and hg (jussila 2009). in 2011, the average annual emissions of so 2 and total dust were 2970 t and 6.8 t, respectively. over 300,000 t of cu-slag and over 150,000 t of granulated nislag are formed annually as by-products from the smelting. separate slag heaps located nearby are an additional dust emission source when they remain uncovered or their edges dry out (nieminen et al. 2002). bag preparation and sampling the moss sphagnum papillosum and lichen hypogymnia physodes were chosen for comparison. the moss bags were prepared after the standard sfs 5794 (finnish standards association 1994), except for the longer exposure time. the green parts of the moss were collected from a non-polluted bog in honkajoki. after removing the pieces of other vegetation and litter, the moss was washed in hcl and rinsed with deionized h 2 o in the laboratory. the lichens of about 3–4 cm diameter were 156 fennia 192: 2 (2014)hanna salo collected with underlying bark from pinus silvestris trunks between the heights of 50–200 cm in the rural area of kemiö. in addition, a synthetic filter fabric (filtrete™) used e.g. in ventilation windows was preliminary tested. the filter fabric has an electrical charge, which effectively traps small particles such as pollen and air pollutants, and onesided plastic net, which protects it from rainwater. the plastic net was removed before the fabric was ripped in smaller pieces. each sample material was placed in a polyamide net (with 0.64 cm2 mesh) and closed with a cotton thread. one part of a material was stored as a non-exposed control sample and its magnetic results were subtracted from the data. the bags were transported to the field and back to the laboratory in sealed plastic bags. in the laboratory, the exposed bags from the same sampling site were combined into one composite sample according to the material type. as for lichen samples, the bark pieces were removed. the composite samples were dried to constant weight at t<40 °c and homogenized. approximately 2/3 of moss and lichen samples were ground by retsch pm100 planetary ball mill (500 rpm, 30 s for moss; 300 rpm, 10 s for lichen) equipped with a zro 2 (zirconium oxide) grinding bowl and balls. ground material was used for magnetic susceptibility analyses and unground material for irm and hysteresis measurements. all the tools used in a sample preparation were washed and finally rinsed with deionized h 2 o. the moss, lichen, and filtrete™ bags (fig. 2) were exposed to air pollutants around the industrial park for a sampling period of six months (181– 185 days) in the fall 2011. for the moss bags, the collection period was longer than notified in the standard. it was a compromise made to enable the sample material comparison by ensuring enough accumulation time for the lichen and filtrete™ bags. the background level for pollutants was determined from the southern shore of sääksjärvi lake locating 17.5 km in ne from harjavalta. the bags were hung in trees at a height of 2.5–3 m from the ground at the approximate distances of 1, 3, and 6 km from the cu-ni smelter’s pipe, which acted as the starting point of four transects (sw, se, ne, nw) (fig. 1b). five moss bags and three lichen bags were placed in all sample sites while two filtrete™ bags were tested only at 1 km and background sites. however, the moss bags were lost from sample site 2. the prevailing wind directions d harjavalta a c b fig. 1. the study area, harjavalta, is situated in sw finland (a). the sampling bags were placed at the distances of 1, 3, and 6 km from the industrial point source (b). wind roses indicate prevailing wind directions (c) and strengths (d) during the sampling period in fall 2011. (© national land survey of finland 2010). fennia 192: 2 (2014) 157preliminary enviromagnetic comparison of the moss,... and the strongest winds (>4 m s-1) in the study area were from se–s–sw during the sampling period (fig. 1c, d). the lithogenic contribution to the bags is considered minor because the ground was covered either with vegetation or snow during the sampling period. magnetic methods magnetic susceptibility (volumeor mass-specific) represents the concentration of magnetic minerals in a sample, and measures the ease with which a material can be magnetized (thompson & oldfield 1986). mass-specific susceptibility (χ x 10−8 m3 kg−1) was measured at the department of geography and geology, university of turku, using a bartington ms2b dual-frequency (0.47 and 4.7 khz) susceptibility meter. a standard 1 cm3 plastic container was tightly filled with sample material (moss, lichen, filter fabric). the mass-specific susceptibility of each sample is the average value of five low frequency measurements. the validity of the susceptibility measurements was confirmed by preparing two subsamples from the non-exposed control, background, and exposed bag samples. in the case of filtrete™ bags, the whole material was measured and the average value was calculated. b a c fig. 2. the bags of moss sphagnum papillosum, lichen hypogymnia physodes, and white filter fabric (filtrete™) were exposed at background and 1 km sites (a), while only moss (b) and lichen (c) bags were exposed at 3 and 6 km sites. magnetic mineralogy, concentration, and grain sizes of a sample can be investigated with isothermal remanent magnetization (irm), hysteresis loop and hysteresis parameters. irm acquisition curves and hysteresis loops for selected samples were measured at the department of physics, university of helsinki, using a princeton vibrating sample magnetometer (vsm) model 3900. hysteresis parameters, saturation magnetization (m s ), saturation remanence (m rs ), and coercive force (h c ) were obtained after paramagnetic slope correction. coercivity of remanence (h cr ) was determined from direct current (d.c.) demagnetization of saturation remanence. hysteresis loops and irm curves were measured up to 1 t at room temperature. statistical methods the magnetic data were statistically analyzed with ibm spss statistics version 20. the magnetic susceptibilities of each sample material followed the normal distribution. thus, the comparison of susceptibilities between different bag types was done by paired samples t-test. the null hypothesis (h 0 ) was that the mean difference between paired observations is zero. the linear relationship between magnetic susceptibilities obtained by each sample material was investigated with the pearson correlation coefficients (r) and the associated level of significance (sig.). background samples were excluded from the analyses. results magnetic susceptibility and correlations magnetic susceptibility varies between -1.5 x 10−8 and 127.3 x 10−8 m3 kg−1 for the moss bags, and between 0.7 x 10−8 and 77.2 x 10−8 m3 kg−1 for the lichen bags (table 1). the susceptibilities of the filtrete™ bags from 1 km sampling sites are between 8.4 x 10−8 and 132.1 x 10−8 m3 kg−1. the background samples have susceptibilities of 1.0 x 10−8, 3.4 x 10−8, and 0.4 x 10−8 m3 kg−1, respectively. furthermore, the susceptibility of ten clean filter fabric samples range between -2.3 x 10−8 and -0.9 x 10−8 m3 kg−1 with the average value of -1.4 x 10−8 m3 kg−1 and standard deviation of 0.5. for moss and lichen bags, the highest and lowest susceptibility values are measured at 1 and 6 158 fennia 192: 2 (2014)hanna salo km sites. a trend of decreasing susceptibility with increasing distance from the cu-ni smelter’s pipe is distinguished in each transect. the background level is reached typically at 6 km, except for lichen bags in nw line. generally, the moss bags yield higher susceptibilities at 1 km sites, while the lichen bags at 3 and 6 km sites. paired samples t-test indicates that the means of susceptibilities (19.2 x 10−8 and 15.9 x 10−8 m3 kg−1, respectively) between moss and lichen bags are equal (sig. >0.05). thus, the obtained susceptibilities are statistically similar. filter fabric bags have magnetic susceptibilities close to the same concentration as moss and lichen bags. the means of susceptibilities from 1 km sites between moss and filtrete™ bags (48.2 x 10−8 and 44.6 x 10−8 m3 kg−1), and lichen and filtrete™ bags (33.8 x 10−8 and 44.6 x 10−8 m3 kg−1) are equal (sig. >0.05) in the paired samples t-test. the highest susceptibility for filtrete™ bags, and also for moss and lichen bags, is found from nw line at sample site 10. here, however, the lichen bags have the lowest value (77.2 x 10−8 m3 kg−1), whereas the other two bag types have susceptibilities close to 130 x 10−8 m3 kg−1. a linear relationship is found between the susceptibilities of different sample types (fig. 3). pearson’s correlation coefficient (r) for the susceptibilities of moss and lichen bags is 0.982. furthermore, moss and filter fabric bags have a very strong correlation of 1.000 while lichen and filter fabric bags have a correlation of 0.976. the former two correlations are significant at the 0.01 level while the latter is significant at the 0.05 level. id direction, distance (m) χ mrs ms mrs/ms hcr hc hcr/hc moss sphagnum papillosum 1 sw, 1060 16.2 1.09 15.50 0.07 33.22 6.60 5.0 2 sw, 3060 3 sw, 6050 1.0 4 se, 1030 24.1 0.62 5.94 0.10 41.02 8.25 5.0 5 se, 3010 7.5 0.087 1.94 0.04 32.77 11.92 2.7 6 se, 5940 ˗1.5 7 ne, 980 25.3 1.47 17.95 0.08 36.04 7.86 4.6 8 ne, 2840 2.1 9 ne, 6070 0.8 10 nw, 1040 127.3 9.22 83.54 0.11 31.07 9.06 3.4 11 nw, 3390 5.0 0.56 5.20 0.11 28.96 9.63 3.0 12 nw, 5960 2.9 0.69 4.60 0.15 29.92 16.38 1.8 bkgd ne, 17600 1.0 lichen hypogymnia physodes 1 sw, 1060 13.1 0.84 9.72 0.09 36.60 8.66 4.2 2 sw, 3060 6.4 0.64 6.59 0.10 38.04 10.16 3.7 3 sw, 6050 3.1 4 se, 1030 15.3 1.37 14.07 0.10 36.12 9.01 4.0 5 se, 3010 12.4 0.87 9.50 0.09 34.47 9.29 3.7 6 se, 5940 1.4 7 ne, 980 29.7 2.00 20.46 0.10 34.65 8.65 4.0 8 ne, 2840 5.2 9 ne, 6070 0.7 10 nw, 1040 77.2 9.62 90.91 0.11 30.54 9.34 3.3 11 nw, 3390 8.1 0.91 8.71 0.10 40.15 10.22 3.9 12 nw, 5960 9.2 bkgd ne, 17600 3.4 filter fabric (filtrete™) 1 sw, 1060 8.4 4 se, 1030 19.6 2.90 30.22 0.10 34.11 8.32 4.10 7 ne, 980 18.2 3.01 28.81 0.10 35.26 8.90 3.96 10 nw, 1040 132.1 23.64 195.80 0.12 34.75 10.77 3.23 bkgd ne, 17600 0.4 table 1. the location of sample sites and magnetic parameters (mass-specific susceptibility (χ x 10−8 m3 kg−1), saturation remanence (m rs (mam2 kg-1)), saturation magnetization (m s (mam2 kg-1)), coercivity of remanence (h cr (mt)), coercive force (h c (mt)), and ratios of m rs /m s and h cr /h c ) for moss, lichen, and filter fabric bags. fennia 192: 2 (2014) 159preliminary enviromagnetic comparison of the moss,... magnetic mineralogy hysteresis loops and irm acquisition curves (fig. 4a) rapidly reach saturation at 0.2 t. furthermore, the coercivities and coercivities of remanence of the samples range roughly between 7–11 mt, and 29–41 mt, respectively (table 1). these parameters indicate that low-coercivity magnetite is the dominant magnetic mineral in the samples. hysteresis ratios of m rs /m s and h cr / h c plotted in the day diagram show magnetite to fall in the pseudo-single-domain (psd) region closer to the mixing line for single-domain (sd)– multidomain (md) grains than for superparamagnetic (sp)–sd grains (fig. 4b). discussion and conclusions in this study, the moss sphagnum papillosum and lichen hypogymnia physodes were pretreated differently before the bag preparation. the moss was devitalized by acid-washing for obtaining homogenous material and to even out the initial element levels (finnish standards association 1994, ares et al. 2012), while native lichen without pretreatments was used. according to adamo et al. (2007), the accumulation performance of materials is not drastically altered in the devitalization. furthermore, devitalized sphagnum species accumulate trace metals passively due to their excellent ionexchange properties (adamo et al. 2003). howev b a c fig. 3. linear relationship exists between magnetic susceptibilities of moss and lichen bags (a), moss and filter fabric bags (b), as well as lichen and filter fabric bags (c). 160 fennia 192: 2 (2014)hanna salo er, the elemental composition of the natural lichen (and moss) may differ even though it is collected from the same remote area (frati et al. 2005), and, therefore, the bag or transplant technique with devitalized species gives more accurate results for the air contamination. the moss bag preparation is consequently the most laborious whereas the collection of lichen is slow and requires large areas in order to obtain enough material for the bags. hence, artificial, ready-to-use -material would be ideal; filtrete™ does not require any special preparations or treatments. in the case of moss and lichen bags, all transects in harjavalta show decreasing magnetic susceptibilities with increasing distance from the industrial park. similar patterns dominate studies both from harjavalta and other industrial areas (e.g. hanesch et al. 2003, salo & mäkinen 2014). susceptibilities in each sample type show great variations in 1 km distances with the highest values found at nw (site 10). this result from the circumstances during the accumulation period, i.e. site 10 is located in the prevailing wind direction. overall, the magnetic results of moss and lichen samples indicate stronger accumulation of low-coercivity magnetite close to the industrial park. previous studies about harjavalta (e.g. jussila 2009, salo et al. 2012, salo & mäkinen 2014) imply more intense pollution dispersal to the se and nw from the industrial area along the prevailing wind directions and kokemäenjoki river valley. the very same pattern can be distinguished in this study: susceptibility a b fig. 4. irm acquisition curves (mn – magnetization (am2 kg −1) normalized by max. value) (a), and day plot –diagram (b) for different bag types. in the day plot, the single-domain (sd), pseudo-single-domain (psd), and multi-domain (md) boundaries for grains and mixing lines are shown after dunlop (2002). values are higher in se and nw than in sw or ne at further distances. the species’ capacity to accumulate and uptake given elements is affected by morphological and structural features (cercasov et al. 2002, culicov & yurukova 2006). for example, loppi and bonini (2000) found statistically significant (sig. <0.05) differences in concentrations for al, b, fe, hg, pb, sb, and zn, with moss hypnum cupressiforme retaining higher values than lichen parmelia sulcata except for hg and zn. further, adamo et al. (2007) reported higher element load in moss h. cupressiforme than lichen pseudevernia furfuracea, with statistically significant differences for al, fe, and zn. this study at hand lacks chemical analyses which would make the element accumulation capacity estimations possible, but some differences can be seen in the day plot -diagram (fig. 4b): the magnetite grain sizes are slightly more dispersed in the moss bags than in the lichen or filtrete™ bags. maybe the structure of moss enables more wind to flow through the bag while smaller particles get trapped. as for the comparison of moss and lichen bags’ collection efficiency, presented by mass-specific susceptibilities in this study, the moss bags are more effective at 1 km sites in se and especially nw (sites 4 and 10, respectively), while the lichen bags perform better at further distances of 3 and 6 km as well as background site. location or wind conditions of individual site do not explain the difference in sites 4 and 10 since the bags were exposed together. here, the so 2 , nox, and/or heavy fennia 192: 2 (2014) 161preliminary enviromagnetic comparison of the moss,... metal levels may have been high enough to deteriorate lichens accumulation capacity. according to jussila et al. (1991), hypogymnia physodes starts to perish when the pollutant level exceeds its tolerance. moreover, so 2 is very harmful for most lichen species and may cause lichens to deteriorate and even die (häffner et al. 2001). lichen species are also more sensitive to gaseous air pollutants than mosses (coskun et al. 2009). mikhailova (2007), for example, has reported the decreased abundance of the epiphytic h. physodes around a copper smelter in the middle urals due to the cu stress. furthermore, the element contents of the lichen transplants vary with time, rather than increase linearly, because rainwater for instance removes particles from the lichen surfaces (backor & loppi 2009). adamo et al. (2003) instead have concluded that wet conditions improve lichens accumulation capacity. nevertheless, the lichen transplants of h. physodes reach the balance with surrounding environment and the contents of native lichens within a time frame from 4–6 months (palomäki et al. 1992), to 7 months (pilegaard 1979) or 1 year (mikhailova & sharunova 2008). the comparison of accumulation capacity made by adamo et al. (2007) between lichen bags, moss bags, and synthetic filters (quartz fiber and cationexchange) resulted in a very poor performance of artificial materials. the preliminary test with filter fabric (filtrete™) gives promising results as for mass-specific susceptibility and weather tolerance in this article. the filtrete™ bags work well near the emission source but their usability at further distances remains unknown. moreover, they correlate perfectly with moss bags, but the small sample number impacts on the reliability of the results. this connection, however, is an encouraging indicator that filtrete™ could be suitable substitute for moss bags: ready-to-use, effective, durable, and effortless. to conclude, all three sample materials effectively accumulate air pollutants during the exposure period of six months and tolerate well different weather conditions. the results obtained with filtrete™ are interesting and favourable. magnetic susceptibilities indicate that the lichen bags are more efficient accumulators at further distances than moss bags, whereas the situation is opposite near the emission source. moss bags appear to be a better choice since high pollution levels, e.g. so 2 , may deteriorate the accumulation capacity of the lichen and, thus, distort the results. finally, these preliminary results of this article can be used in future studies for finding and/or developing a new, labor-saving, and effective material for active (magnetic) monitoring of air pollution. acknowledgements this study was funded by the high technology foundation of satakunta, and the department of geography and geology, university of turku. the comments of two anonymous referees and joni mäkinen for improving this manuscript are highly appreciated. references adamo p, giordano s, vingiani s, castaldo cobianchi r & violante p 2003. trace element accumulation by moss and lichen exposed in bags in the city of naples (italy). environmental pollution 122: 1, 91–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s02697491(02)00277-4. adamo p, crisafulli p, giordano s, minganti v, modenesi p, monaci f, pittao e, tretiach m & bargagli r 2007. lichen and moss bags as monitoring devices in urban areas. part ii: trace element content in living and dead biomonitors and comparison with synthetic materials. environmental pollution 146: 2, 392–399. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2006.03.047. ares a, aboal jr, carballeira a, giordano s, adamo p & fernández ja 2012. moss bag biomonitoring: a methodological review. science of the total environment 432, 143–158. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. scitotenv.2012.05.087. backor m & loppi s 2009. interactions of lichens with heavy metals. biologia plantarum 53: 2, 214– 222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10535-009-0042-y. cercasov v, pantelica a, salagean m, caniclia g & scarlat a 2002. comparative study of the suitability of three lichen species to trace-element air monitoring. environmental pollution 119: 1, 129– 139. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0269-7491(01)00170-1. chaparro mae, lavornia jm, chaparro mae & sinito am 2013. biomonitors of urban air pollution: magnetic studies and sem observations of corticolous foliose and microfoliose lichens and their suitability for magnetic monitoring. environmental pollution 172, 61–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2012.08.006. coskun m, steinnes e, coskun m & cayir a 2009. comparison of epigeic moss (hypnym cupressiforme) and lichen (cladonia rangiformis) as biomonitors species of atmospheric metal deposition. bulletin of environmental contamination and toxicology 82: 1, 1–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00128-008-9491-9. 162 fennia 192: 2 (2014)hanna salo culicov oa & yurukova l 2006. comparison of element accumulation of different mossand lichen bags, exposed in the city of sofia (bulgaria). journal of atmospheric chemistry 55: 1, 1–12. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10874-005-9002-x. dunlop dj 2002. theory and application of the day plot (mrs/ms versus hcr/hc) 1. theoretical curves and tests using titanomagnetite data. journal of geophysical research 107: b3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2001jb000486. fabian k, reimann c, mcenroe sa & willemoeswissing b 2011. magnetic properties of terrestrial moss (hylocomium splendens) along a north– south profile crossing the city of oslo, norway. science of the total environment 409: 11, 2252– 2260. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2011.02.018. fenger j 1999. urban air quality. atmospheric environment 33: 29, 4877–4900. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s1352-2310(99)00290-3. fernández ja & carballeira a 2000. differences in the responses of native and transplanted mosses to atmospheric pollution: a possible role of selenium. environmental pollution 110: 1, 73–78. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0269-7491(99)00278-x. finnish standards association 1994. air protection. bioindication. moss bag method. standard sfs 5794. pp. 3. frati l, brunialti g & loppi s 2005. problems related to lichen transplants to monitor trace element deposition in repeated surveys: a case study from central italy. journal of atmospheric chemistry 52: 3, 221–230. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10874-005-3483-5. hanesch m, scholger r & rey d 2003. mapping dust distribution around an industrial site by measuring magnetic parameters of tree leaves. atmospheric environment 37: 36, 5125–5133. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2003.07.013. hauck m & huneck s 2007. lichen substances affect metal adsorption in hypogymnia physodes. journal of chemical ecology 33: 1, 219–223. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10886-006-9225-6. häffner e, lomský b, hynek v, hällgren je, batic f & pfanz h 2001. air pollution and lichen physiology. water, air, and soil pollution 131: 1–4, 185–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1011907530430. jordanova d, petrov p, hoffmann v, gocht t, panaiotu c, tsacheva t & jordanova n 2010. magnetic signature of different vegetation species in polluted environment. studia geophysica et geodetica 54: 3, 417–442. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11200-010-0025-7. jussila i, laihonen p & jormalainen v 1991. a bioindicator study on the effects of air pollution on forest ecosystem at pori-harjavalta district in sw finland. turun yliopisto, satakunnan ympäristöntutkimuskeskus. sykesarja b2, pori, 62. (in finnish) jussila i 2009. porin–harjavallan alueen sammalpallotutkimukset vuonna 2007. turun yliopisto, satakunnan ympäristöntutkimuslaitos. tutkimusraportti 1/2009, pori, 43. (in finnish, with english summary) lehndorff e, urbat m & schwark l 2006. accumulation histories of magnetic particles on pine needles as function of air quality. atmospheric environment 40: 36, 7082–7096. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2006.06.008. limo j 2010. magnetic susceptibility of epiphytic lichen, hypogymnia physodes, as an indicator of airborne heavy metal concentrations and air quality in the city area of turku, finland, in the year 2005. unpublished master thesis. 79 p., 14 appendix p. department of geography, university of turku. (in finnish, abstract in english) little p & martin mh 1974. biological monitoring of heavy metal pollution. environmental pollution 6: 1, 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0013-9327(74)90042-1. loppi s & bonini i 2000. lichens and mosses as biomonitors of trace elements in areas with thermal springs and fumarole activity (mt. amiata, central italy). chemosphere 41: 9, 1333–1336. http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/s0045-6535(00)00026-6. mikhailova in 2007. populations of epiphytic lichens under stress conditions: survival strategies. lichenologist 39: 1, 83–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0024282907006305. mikhailova in & sharunova ip 2008. dynamics of heavy metal accumulation in thalli of the epiphytic lichen hypogymnia physodes. russian journal of ecology 39: 5, 346–352. http://dx.doi.org/10.1134/s1067413608050068. mitchell r & maher ba 2009. evaluation and application of biomagnetic monitoring of traffic-derived particulate pollution. atmospheric environment 43: 13, 2095–2103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2009.01.042. national land survey of finland 2010. topographic database 1:10 000. nieminen tm, ulkomaanaho l & shotyk w 2002. enrichment of cu, ni, zn, pd and as in an ombrotrophic peat bog near a cu-ni smelter in southwest finland. the science of the total environment 292: 1–2, 81–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ s0048-9697(02)00028-1. palomäki v, tynnyrinen s & holopainen t 1992. lichen transplantation in monitoring fluoride and sulphur deposition in the surroundings of a fertilizer plant and a strip mine at siilinjärvi. annales botanici fennici 29: 1, 25–34. pilegaard k 1979. heavy metals in bulk precipitation and transplanted hypogymnia physodes and dicranoweisia cirrata in the vicinity of a danish steel works. water, air, and soil pollution 11: 1, 77–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/bf00163521. salo h, bucko ms, vaahtovuo e, limo j, mäkinen j & pesonen lj 2012. biomonitoring of air pollution in sw finland by magnetic and chemical measurements of moss bags and lichens. journal of geochemical exploration 115, 69–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gexplo.2012.02.009. fennia 192: 2 (2014) 163preliminary enviromagnetic comparison of the moss,... salo h & mäkinen j 2014. magnetic biomonitoring by moss bags for industry-derived air pollution in sw finland. atmospheric environment 97, 19–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2014.08.003. szczepaniak k & biziuk m 2003. aspects of the biomonitoring studies using mosses and lichens as indicators of metal pollution. environmental research 93: 3, 221–230. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ s0013-9351(03)00141-5. thompson r & oldfield f 1986. environmental magnetism. allen & unwin ltd., uk. wolterbeek b 2002. biomonitoring of trace element air pollution: principles, possibilities and perspectives. environmental pollution 120: 1, 11–21.http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0269-7491(02)00124-0. the long-term adaptation of a resource periphery as narrated by local policy-makers in lieksa urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa74368 doi: 10.11143/fennia.74368 the long-term adaptation of a resource periphery as narrated by local policy-makers in lieksa maija halonen halonen, m. (2019) the long-term adaptation of a resource periphery as narrated by local policy-makers in lieksa. fennia 197(1) 40–57. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74368 the paper’s general objective is to question the point of view whereby peripheries are seen only through a static downturn with no reflections on dynamicity or adaptation. the focus is set on the standpoints of actors in local government and their interface with the broader structures. the aim is to create a productive dialogue with evolutionary economic geography studies paying attention to actors and resilience studies where the human perspectives in adaptation are emphasised. the town of lieksa, finland, is used as a case study to exemplify a forest resource periphery located in relative isolation at the regional and national scale, but within a developed economy in europe. the results, based on interviews with key local policy-makers, show that development did not stop at the time of the first bust despite the domination of the downturn. the study reveals two waves of restructuring which both include a type of regional bust followed by different kinds of institutional recovery. in general, the human adaptation appears as reactions reflecting the variation of giving up, forward-looking acceptance, desperate resistance, re-orientation with external support and search for renewal with an optimistic attitude. above all, the resilience regarding the local governmental actors emphasises their flexible adaptability and ability to develop institutional capacities to tolerate their vulnerability, the uncertainties of the economic future and the difficulties of locals to influence it – and if anything – to act and bounce forward in spite of repetitive busts and restructuring phases. keywords: evolutionary economic geography, regional resilience, resource periphery, peripheralisation, local decision-making, narrative analysis maija halonen, karelian institute, university of eastern finland, p.o. box 111, 80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: maija.halonen@uef.fi introduction the transformation of northern resource-based peripheries has been contextualised by continuous economic restructuring in advanced economies since the mid-1900s. the boom and bust of the resource cycle are central to understanding the background of this restructuring (clapp 1998; markey & heisler 2010; ryser et al. 2014). as per a traditional model, only three phases can be observed: the initial boom, large-scale exploitation and ultimate collapse (clapp 1998; hayter 2000, 19; ryser et al. 2014). collapse has led to restructuring which is often characterised by shrinking socio-economic structures, declining employment, depopulation and high proportions of ageing people (e.g. bryant & joseph 2001; polèse & © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.74368 fennia 197(1) (2019) 41maija halonen shearmur 2006; lehtonen & tykkyläinen 2014). by the downward trends, increasing demographic isolation, power imbalances and the absence of realistic alternatives for diversified development, the vulnerability has become a characteristic of resource peripheries (freudenburg 1992). in the latest research, the development of the peripheries is still made up of booms and busts but attention is turning to regional waves, reflecting the multidimensional character of restructuring rather than focusing on the boom and bust of one sector (jacquet & kay 2014; ryser et al. 2014). the whole concept of the periphery as having a static predestined position has also been compromised, which has required the remapping of the changing role of the periphery (kortelainen & rannikko 2015; kühn 2015). newer pathways have brought periphery studies closer to the dynamic orientation through the concepts of path dependency, industry life cycles and adaptation with the weight set on the institutions (halseth et al. 2017; ryser et al. 2018). these pathways have also given rise to the framework of regional resilience – often blending in part with evolutionary economic geography (eeg) in the context of peripheries (carlsson et al. 2014; isaksen 2015; kotilainen et al. 2015; vatanen & kotilainen 2016; hayter & nieweler 2018). the mainstream theories of economic geography have rarely been seamlessly adaptable to peripheries whose industrial, environmental, cultural and geopolitical development diverge from the cores (hayter et al. 2003; kortelainen & rannikko 2015). as a result, differentiated institutional perspectives and path-dependent development patterns have been found (hayter et al. 2003; isaksen 2015). in particular, the standpoints of local governments and their interface with the broader structures are seen as substantial when investigating the peripheries, but which tend to be overlooked in core-based studies with an emphasis on endogenous development and industrial processes and outcomes (isaksen 2015; hayter & nieweler 2018; ryser et al. 2018). this article attempts to create a productive dialogue with those eeg studies that have paid attention to actors – especially in local decision-making beyond the firm level – institutional changes within and outside of a region and unevenness of places (see hodgson 2009; mackinnon et al. 2009; bathelt & glückler 2014; hassink et al. 2014; martin & sunley 2015a; pike et al. 2016). the critical voices towards quantified macro-level approaches in resilience are taken seriously and the human perspectives in adaptation are emphasised by exploring the cognitive processes of local actors – their knowledge in the face of the unknown and reactions among changing structural environment (see hudson 2009; bristow & healy 2014; gong & hassink 2017). the paper’s general objective is to question the point of view whereby peripheries are seen only through a static downturn with no reflections on dynamicity or adaptation. ‘periphery’ is understood here as a concept that connects the case of lieksa, finland, to a context that sets boundaries for adaptation but, as such, does not prevent the evolution. the town of lieksa with its 4,000 km² hinterland represents a finnish resource periphery in the industrialised north situated in the most land-locked part of fennoscandia in the vicinity of the russian border (tykkyläinen et al. 2017). local policy-makers are seen as a way to investigate not only the changes in formal institutions influencing adaptation but also to gain information about informal institutions that shape the mutable position of the locals. through this framework, the paper examines: 1) what kinds of waves of restructuring and forms of adaptation can be found based on the interviews with local policy-makers?, 2) what kinds of formal and informal institutions have influenced adaptation and how have these institutions changed over time?, and 3) how have experiences from the previous wave affected adaptation during the last wave? these questions are investigated in the long-term, by starting from the tail end of the initial boom in the 1940s and by focusing on the waves of restructuring since the 1960s. premises for the evolutionary adaptation of a resource periphery peripheries with resources, booms and busts ‘periphery’ refers here to the remote sparsely populated rural region situated in the border area at great distance to the centres (cf. kühn 2015). these physical structures may appear persistent, but neither the structures of the economic landscape nor the regional economy within the periphery are 42 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers static by their nature. for resource peripheries, the initial boom cycle results from the extraction of natural resources. the ‘boom’ describes the domino effect caused by increased demand for natural resources followed by exponential growth in extraction leading to a high demand for the workforce and construction of infrastructure, finally accelerating population growth and thus new demands for municipal services (jacquet & kay 2014; deacon & lamanes 2015; keough 2015). such booms can be found on the peripheries in developed countries where growth has developed intensively after the second world war (wwii) within a relatively protected trading network and the state has made significant investments especially in developing the infrastructure (halseth 2017). the ‘bust’ representing the abrupt decline results from deep shocks such as collapse in demand, the overexploitation of the resource or changes in market access, transportation or production technologies, often leading to declining employment together with industry adjustment, downsizing or closures (clapp 1998; keough 2015; kortelainen & rannikko 2015; kotilainen et al. 2015; halseth 2017). restructuring resulting from bust is portrayed as a multi-causal, contingent and path dependent process with uncertainty about the future, thus being anything but straightforward, mechanical or easy from the perspective of local policy-makers planning for long-term timelines (markey & heisler 2010; hayter & nieweler 2018). for the resource peripheries, the closures, openings and redirections of economic connections that radically change the positionality of local economies are essential parts of the transformation processes (kortelainen & rannikko 2015). while different kinds of market forces induce economic development, the interactions of various actors at different spatial scales are seen to play a role in the geographically variable development of places (martin 2000). ‘peripheralisation’ refers to such a process where the role of the periphery is mostly externally reproduced through the economic, social, political and communicative interaction between actors (kühn 2015). the changes may appear as disruptions in protected and supported trading networks resulting from globalisation or as diminished state investments caused by the adoption of neoliberal policy approaches (halseth 2017; halseth & ryser 2017, 98–105). although the locals are seen as having little control over the development that is significantly driven by external conditions, currently the wider policies and the support of central government are compensated by the greater responsibility of local actors in the creation of economic development (keough 2015; halseth 2017; hayter & nieweler 2018). this has led the local governmental actors into a confusing process of transformation where the role is redefined and repositioned, but the structures including the legal and practical tools are outdated leading to poorly resourced possibilities to respond to the changing role (halseth & ryser 2017, 162–163). this dramatically re-shaped relationship between the state and the periphery (markey & heisler 2010) that relates to globalisation and moving towards neoliberal policies is understood here as a significant part of the institutional changes reproducing peripheralisation and influencing the adaptation of the periphery. institutions in evolution peripheries are understood here as evolving economic and societal systems which are influenced by actors at various spatial scales (cf. martin & sunley 2006; pike et al. 2016). in order to attain a greater understanding of the variable development of regions and localities, the role of institutions, actors and spatial policies must be investigated (hassink et al. 2014; martin & sunley 2015a). attention is directed to the question of how spatial policy and socio-economic structures emerge from institutions and the behaviours of actors (boschma & martin 2007), and how actors’ beliefs shape understandings of socio-economic evolution (hodgson 2009). path dependence is understood here as behaviour that reproduces these institutional forms (hudson 2005), which essentially means that a path-dependent process or system evolves from the basis of its own history, meaning that the future is dependent on the steps taken in the past (martin & sunley 2006). path dependence is not understood as good or bad, but rather as limiting the available choices for the next step and setting the terms of development (martin & sunley 2006; henning et al. 2013). this article adopts the perspective of institutions as informal conventions, norms and social routines, as well as the formal rules and regulations that steer the socio-economic environment and fennia 197(1) (2019) 43maija halonen human behaviour generating patterns of interaction between the actors (martin 2000; bathelt & glückler 2014). institutions are understood as mediators of the interactions that uphold spatial variety, resulting in different economic landscapes with different historical path dependencies and unevenly developed economies (mackinnon et al. 2009). this interplay is upheld by actors across scales, although institutions tend to be geographically and temporally embedded in places (essletzbichler & rigby 2007; hassink et al. 2014). some actors are expected to be structurally more powerful than others, influencing uneven sociospatial relations (pike et al. 2009). although the evolutionary approach rejects, in principle, ideas of destiny and inevitable process (hodgson 2009) as well as predetermined and fixed power hierarchies (hassink et al. 2014), places tend to be tied to certain hierarchical roles by past decisions (mackinnon et al. 2009). in this context, the outcome reflects the marginalisation and powerlessness of peripheries, a role that is upheld by institutions and economic decline. this does not suggest that the role is persistent; rather, it is evolving together with the changing institutions (bathelt & glückler 2014). given that institutions can provide stability and buffers during crises, they have a tendency to be thick and sticky, which often leads to the slowing down of both changes and adaptation (essletzbichler & rigby 2007). resilience in adaptation peripheries operating in a politically marginalised and vulnerable position are considered to suffer from the consequences of external shocks, which can comprise sudden events or long-lasting transformation processes (adger 2006; kühn 2015; tykkyläinen 2015). the question arises of how they maintain long-term development and adapt to short-term shocks and long-term stresses (cf. simmie & martin 2010; boschma 2015). here, the adaptation is seen as an ongoing process that concerns the restless development of a region where evolutionary resilience is observed as the reactions and reconfigurations of structures following a disturbance (dawley et al. 2010; boschma 2015; martin & sunley 2015b). in this context, peripheries face pressure to transform and renew their economic and institutional structures in order to recover and adapt to the challenging socio-economic conditions (simmie & martin 2010; markey et al. 2012). in some cases, the resilience approach has been interpreted as overemphasising the need for flexibility, self-help and competitive fitness from the locals by neglecting the impact of external factors such as the role of the state, institutions and policies (see hassink 2010). this seems also to be a flaw in practice as the central-level authorities have increased their expectations of local development but failed to provide the power, resources or authority to the locals in order to meet the new expectations (ryser et al. 2018). the paradox is that the resource peripheries especially, are seen as having defects in endogenous resources and limited capacity to adapt to change for which reasons it requires supplemental support and direction from the state or central government (markey & heisler 2010; carlsson et al. 2014). as hayter and nieweler (2018, 86) express it, there is “the need to somehow brainstorm initiatives and generate institutional capacity, often simply to maintain the status quo or slow the rate of decline”. given that the state government is seen as a centrally important actor by controlling local governance and resources available to local actors (pike et al. 2010), an examination of resilience should include paying attention to how national policy assists or hinders local recovery and how local institutional and political conditions respond to these policies (cf. martin 2012). similarly than the whole process of restructuring, the process of adaptation can be portrayed as anything but straightforward or mechanical. it demands weaving inside the nested adaptive cycles interacting between the scales and including pressures from both acute shocks and slow-burn stresses (pendall et al. 2010). it can also require navigating between regional waves which may represent the simultaneous responses to both the booms and busts of various sectors (ryser et al. 2014). along these waves, the process of adaptation may take different forms, varying from resistance and recovery to re-orientation and renewal resulting in different outcomes (cf. martin 2012). interests may also diverge and come into conflict (mackinnon et al. 2009) which creates political debate between actors (martin 2012). however, when creating local resilience, some similarity of interests among actors and overlapping institutional structures is needed that bears out the supportive basis for the change and actors with the ability to lead (cf. boschma 2015). 44 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers when scrutinising resilience from the perspective of actors on the periphery, attention continues to be directed towards adaptability by developing capacities to reduce vulnerability but also increase the ability to tolerate and confront the uncertainties and economic inefficiencies (hudson 2009; dawley et al. 2010). thus, it is important to pay attention to how local actors interpret and articulate changes in economic conditions and how these interpretations shape local actors’ reactions to the changes (bristow & healy 2014). after all, as the policy-makers act based on their perceptions, expectations and conventions (martin & sunley 2015b), the focus must be placed on the question of how the adaptation is lived, experienced and narrated along the path. this can be examined through analysing how local actors describe and explain the change, their vulnerability and strategies, and capacities to deal with change (cf. brown 2016). narrated case study as a method narratives comprised of interviews with local policy-makers the research method used here is an empirical case study through which temporal socio-economic adaptation is examined within its real-life policy-making context, and with prior conceptual information utilised for support (e.g. yin 2003). the methodological orientation adopts the idea of following the evolutionary path of the locality by utilising interview data as a means of capturing the socio-spatial relations and processes that depict economic development and regional policies, as well as the behaviours of actors (pike et al. 2016). the data accord with inductive field research, which includes the collection of historical narratives of local socio-economic change by affording interviewees a relatively large amount of freedom to describe structural changes, adaptation and their understandings of the position of their locality during the restructuring phases (cf. martin & sunley 2015a). the research adheres to narrative orientation by moving from the use of numbers to words, and changing the focus from the general and universal towards the local and specific (pinnegar & daynes 2007). by using narrative inquiry, focus is placed on the interaction between society and actors, temporal continuity (past, present and future), and the specific place where the phenomenon occurs (clandinin & connelly 2000). given that the objective is to analyse adaptation where it actually occurs (cf. martin 2012), the narratives are produced from the position of the actors of local decision-making bodies representing the perspectives of local government. as is true of any narrative produced during an interview, the narrative of each storyteller is an assemblage of smaller episodic stories, which collectively offer a description of the series of events and decisions concerning economic development (pinnegar & daynes 2007; estola et al. 2017). as much as the narratives reveal the experiences of individuals, they should be seen as a combination of first-hand and historic narratives. each narrative represents the standpoint of wider social constructions from the past in the cognitive context of the interview (clandinin & connelly 2000; andrews 2015; hyvärinen 2017). the interviews were conducted during the period of economic stagnation in 2010 and 2011, in the aftermath of the great recession of 2008–2010. in practice, all available key policy-makers of the town authority in lieksa were interviewed. these eight policy-makers were either holders of an office or political actors and they were selected on the basis of the knowledge they had gained during their long experience in public decision-making (table 1). two retired policy-makers were chosen due to their long experience and wide-ranging perceptions of the town’s policy processes. as all interviewees but one had acted in policy-making for several years or even decades, they were able to complement the historical information on the basis of their firsthand experiences and memories. the narratives were analysed using content analysis as a method that enables the making of replicable inferences from texts (krippendorff 2004). the interviews were organised under themes that reflect episodic changes and means of adaptation using phrases, sentences or paragraphs as units for analysis. these were re-contextualised on the basis of previous literature (cf. krippendorff 2004) referring to conceptual information pertaining to eeg and resilience studies, and contextual information regarding the resource peripheries and the case study area. the analysis is supported by excerpts from the interviews, translated from finnish to english by the author. fennia 197(1) (2019) 45maija halonen the excerpts appear in the same form as the transcribed interview data. the interviewees are anonymised using codes from i1 to i8. case study of lieksa as a resource periphery the case study town of lieksa was chosen as it represents a typical periphery with a relatively small population, weak urban system and considerable distance from major markets (polèse & shearmur 2006). it is a sparsely populated forest resource periphery situated close to the russian border and in a relatively isolated location at the regional and national scale, but within a developed economy in europe (cf. halseth 2017; fig. 1.). as a whole, the lieksa municipality covers 4,000 km2, with about 80% of its 11,500 inhabitants living in its centre (63°19’ n, 30°01’ e). this centre is nationally classified as a local centre in rural areas with a relatively intense structure having over 400 inhabitants per square kilometre and jobs numbering more than 2,000. its commuter belt concentrates on primary production in agriculture after which scattered sparsely populated areas begin with extensive forest and wetlands (see helminen et al. 2014). latest position at the time of interviews years in total town manager 20< city treasurer (retired) + chairman of board of the industrial estate 30< rural manager (retired) 30< rural manager 10< technical manager 10< member of the finnish parliament (current) + chairman of the municipal council (current) + incumbent (retired) 20< chairman of municipal board (current) + incumbent (retired) 30< chairman of municipal board 10> table 1. the latest position(s) of interviewees and years in local public duties in total. fig. 1. lieksa as a distant periphery from the regional centre joensuu (ca. 100 km) and capital city helsinki (ca. 500 km). 46 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers in lieksa, the initial boom of the forest-industry dates from the beginning of the 20th century (tykkyläinen et al. 2017) when the growing european timber market expanded the utilisation of forest resources, increasing the demand for the local labour force (aarnio 1999, 166–173) and accelerating population growth (halonen et al. 2015). rural population growth was sustained up to the mid-1960s, with the assistance of the finnish government, as a corollary of the post-wwii settlement policy when 9.1% of the land area was redistributed through the land acquisition act (tykkyläinen 1995, 139–140). it consolidated lieksa’s position as a resource periphery of forestry and small-scale farming (saarelainen 1995) and increased employment in public services offered for the growing population (fig. 2). a severe bust followed less than two decades later, in the 1960s, and initiated the first wave of restructuring (fig. 2). mechanised logging increased productivity in forest work but resulted in a deep decline in jobs in forestry work (kotilainen et al. 2015) that was exacerbated by closures of unprofitable small-scale farming (rannikko 1999). with the rationalisation of primary production, the entry of the baby boom generation to the labour market and the temptation of urban lifestyles, whole families left their homes and moved to bigger cities in finland or even further to sweden (cf. rannikko 1999). from the late 1960s, the restructuring was mitigated through formal institutions, initially by regional policy fig. 2. the population and employment by main sectors 1940– 2010 (sources: statistics finland 1979, 2018a). fennia 197(1) (2019) 47maija halonen funding that was allocated to disadvantaged regions (moisio & leppänen 2007), which also advanced the establishment of the industrial estate in lieksa. foundations for increasing the export of manufactured goods were laid through institutional agreements that finland made with the european free trade association (efta) in 1961 and with comecon countries in the 1970s (kotilainen et al. 2017). in parallel, the establishment of spatially equal welfare services and decentralisation of public tasks represented formal institutions that alleviated the decline. employment in manufacturing related to low-cost mass production and public services following the nordic welfare state model resulted in growth, while primary production continued its downhill trend (tykkyläinen et al. 2017; fig. 2). in total, the employment of the labour force in lieksa was stabilised adhering to a gradual decline rather than increased, but output and employment were seemingly value added in pielinen karelia (fig. 3) – the sub-region of four municipalities, lieksa being the biggest by population and workplaces (statistics finland 2018b). the next bust took place in the 1990s and initiated the second wave of restructuring. since then no growth has been observed in either population or employment in any of the main three sectors (fig. 2). at the beginning of the second wave, the nationwide recession led to a plunge in demand in the domestic market and cuts to public spending (kiander 2001, 36–39), while simultaneously exports to the soviet market came to an end. this turbulent time can be seen as a slump in both the employment of the labour force and the value added of output and employment (fig. 3). this was also a time of changes in the institutional atmosphere. the political aspirations and the accession of finland to the european union (eu) in 1995 diminished the support for the disadvantaged regions and tended to stress the growth policies and strengths of competitive regions (kortelainen 2010, 353–356), thus decreasing the opportunities of finnish peripheries (suorsa 2007). these institutional changes replicate the common challenges of peripheries following the adoption of neoliberal policies. empirical findings regarding institutional changes and adaptation tail end of the initial boom followed by the shock of the first bust the narratives explaining the tail end of the initial boom from the late 1940s reflect the history of a livelihood based on natural resources that enabled the purchasing of land for small-scale farming fig. 3. gross value added of output and employment1 in sub-regional unit pielinen karelia and employment %, employed % of the labour force2 in lieksa (sources: lieksa 1980; statistics finland 1982, 2010, 2018a). 48 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers and the availability of forest work: “with small-scale farming and forestry work people survived” (i2). the emphasis is set on the influence of the formal institutional policies on population growth after wwii, but these narratives can also be seen to reflect the informal construction of peripheralisation. by underlining the compensation for the clearing of land that has only a negligible role in the clearing of fields under the land acquisition act (maatalousministeriön asutusasiainosasto 1953; central statistical office 1970), an interviewee added weight to the position of lieksa as a distant periphery: many neighbourhoods were established after the war. … a village was established as a result of so-called swedish clearing3, that is finland-swedish land owners, who did not want to donate their land, paid in order to [compensate their obligation to dispose the land and get] the farms cleared elsewhere, in the periphery (i3). this positioning not only as a distant but also as a border periphery was supplemented by a description of informal political reasoning that aimed at strengthening military security against the soviet union which in retrospect proved to be strategically outdated: “settlement at the border was favoured, and the prevention of its depopulation. it was a military understanding back then, but nowadays no one anticipates that aggression towards finland would occur as front lines through the border” (i1). the interviewees had very little to say about the role of local decision-making in this process after the war, but rather they presented the town as a small cog in a larger national development machine. the adaptation is strongly considered as reactions representing the imbalanced power of local government within the national decision-making system. as typical on peripheries, the most tangible task of the local authority was to take part in the construction of the basic infrastructure and services for the growing population that turned out to be temporary if anything: back then, a school was established in almost every village; it was based on colonisation. residential loss, which happened most severely at the turn of the seventies, depopulated these villages in a few years. it was said jokingly that the roads were built, then the electricity. then came tv, where people saw how life is lived in the big world. so, they run away. left for southern finland and sweden (i1). the narratives describing the first bust in the 1960s reflect the depth of the consequences resulting from the challenges in primary production. the vulnerability appeared as rough structural change that pushed the periphery into demographic isolation: “this rough structural change – no compensatory jobs were created. forestry was a big loser, agriculture another” (i5). small-scale farming became inadequate as a livelihood for the families who used to be dependent on hundreds of seasonal jobs in forest work: people could not live there anymore. there was no livelihood for those families, big families, in those relatively small farms. here forestry had constituted the major part, thousands of workers, and now we are speaking of tens or hundreds of forestry workers… [from the late] 1960s, about 600 people [per year] migrated in the top years (i6). this description exemplifies the weak capacity of a system to adapt its economic structure in order to maintain the possibility of securing a livelihood. the immediate response to this shock was described as the powerless reaction of giving up which poorly reflects the adaptation typical of growth regions. in the most eloquent proposal of the time, temporary bunkhouses were considered adequate for people passing through, highlighting how no means of resisting out-migration existed: i remember when i was listening to the council session. the chairman of the council suggested … that no development plans are needed. a bunkhouse behind the station, where people can stay temporarily. for those who have sold their land, forest and possessions, and are waiting for their money to get away (i1). adaptation appeared as a form of acceptance that the population was shrinking, whilst no capacity existed to create a survival strategy for the unemployed to adapt to this new situation on-site. the narratives imply that neither the rapid boom nor the bust were locally planned or manageable. fennia 197(1) (2019) 49maija halonen from recovering with the state to the darkening skyline the solutions from the early-1970s seem to be more balanced in socio-economic terms reflecting adaptation as recovery through both path dependency and re-orientation. nevertheless, now that the forest industry had gone through rationalisation, the forest mills and other forest-related factories were seen as providing the foundation for industrial activities: “lieksa has had strong industrial production, a sawmill and the pankakoski board mill. it has been a strong industrial town after all” (i8). here the narrative is interpreted as a reflection of path dependency in industrial development but also as an informal institutional convention that stresses the role of forest industries as the backbone of the town. the support of governmental industrial development support funding was considered crucial for re-orientation through job creation in light industries: “quite a lot has been invested here in labour policy. particularly the state has played a role in getting employment here. to establish industrial manufacturing and for that reason the industrial estate was established with the assistance of the state” (i1). the case exemplifies the central role of the state and its formal institutional policy instruments in remapping a new role for the periphery. by controlling and steering the financial resources, the state was able to increase capacities that reduced the vulnerability and facilitated local adaptability, which turned the bust into recovery. the industrial estate established in the 1970s was regarded as providing recovery as it smoothed out the losses in heavier industries and agriculture: “the industrial estate of lieksa … it has been a success story, when you consider how massively people left those rural areas” (i6). these greenfield investments did not constitute an expansion of existing industry; rather, the objective was to move from the processing of natural resources towards diversified manufacturing. this shift in industrial policy to promoting smalland medium-sized industry instead of just heavy industry represented a shift to renewal based on the growing demand for exported consumer goods boosted by the efta and comecon agreements and the availability of labour. the expansion of municipal health care and school reform in the early 1970s played a key role in local development, also boosting local employment. the local episode, though, reflects a rather desperate attempt to use formal policies to resist the change but which hardly manifests the local capacity to sustain development in the long-term. the idea was based on the local model of scattered spatial structure: “there was talk about service villages, in the 1970s. … [the service villages] had a bank and a post office, a couple of grocery stores, and a school” (i5). the model included the building of public rental houses in each village, but the interviewees merely saw this as a political misstep without any long-term rationality: “the planning secretary back then said: ‘oh my god! why build there when there are no people?’ …nevertheless, they were built, apparently it was political. … now there are [empty houses]. impossible to sell” (i6). in the 1980s, opportunities in the tourism industry were mooted now that the heyday of mass production was over and the declining competitiveness of manufacturing seemed obvious (korhonen & tykkyläinen 1983). however, as both the recreational use of nature and environmental protection were raised as new developmental objectives, they provoked conflicts in forest use, especially at the turn of the 1990s (eisto 2009). locally, the disjuncture in interests was not experienced between the old and new industries but rather between different valuations of the economy and environment. indeed, tourism and protection were in juxtaposition in koli hills: the metsähallitus [the state-owned forest administration] has been a relatively good master. with it, we have managed. but we have had tough fights. … this was because the ministry of environment tried to get these [areas] under its control and was not willing to develop these (i3). this short episode represents the divergent formal policies of state government that remap differently the position of peripheries – this time hampering rather than assisting in reducing vulnerability and taking advantage of new economic possibilities as capacities for adaptation. another bust shocking and out mapping the periphery the economic depression in the early-1990s was taken as a starting point that drastically changed the society and organisation of industries: “the recession in the 1990s changed finland, made 50 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers another kind of society, another kind of industry” (i6). further job losses in manufacturing were explained in the context of wider economic processes that transferred assembly and component manufacturing from nordic peripheries to less expensive countries in asia: “we still talk about the china syndrome. … well, it is probably even cheaper in india nowadays. when salaries rise, production probably goes elsewhere” (i6). this episode indicates the disruptions in protected trading networks following globalisation that did not so much change the role of the periphery in the global economic system but rather took it away. other disruptions in the old type of nationally managed network fell upon agriculture, which confronted a bust the second time – this time after joining the european union: “structural change is visible in farming. … probably the eu affected for some part. i remember when finland joined [the eu], in 1994 or a little earlier. … prices dropped, no possibilities to continue” (i8). these narratives reflect the power of external changes in deepening the vulnerability and marginality of the periphery that was not in the hands of the locals or even the state anymore for that matter. in finland, new formal institutional policies in the 1990s concentrated very much on the development of hi-tech industries which influenced growth mainly in urban areas and practically bypassed the resource peripheries of this kind (tykkyläinen et al. 2017). locally this was also seen as a missed opportunity; they were overlooked because local policy-makers were stuck with conventional industries and the wider societal transformation was poorly recognised: “lieksa could have invested in electronic businesses of this kind earlier … efforts should have been made already in the 1980s. the development could have been different, but it is easy to say this in hindsight. … not only the traditional ones, agriculture and forestry” (i2). thus, the narrative reflects the informal institutional behaviour that prioritises conventional production, thus hindering the search for new opportunities and resources for industrial renewal. expectations towards restructuring in a time of limited institutional power and uncertainty in the narratives, every kind of profitable industrial activity was considered an appropriate economic basis for the future, but the forest industries were still referred to as the backbone of local economic life: “among others plenty of investments have still taken place in kevätniemi sawmill, and pankakoski board mill is still working. they are the grounding pillars among the industries” (i3). a few examples that had managed to survive from the latest bust comprised a small collection of both natural-based and non-natural resource-based manufacturing: “pankakoski [board mill] is one of the bigger employees, joptek [manufacturing of rubber and plastic products], kevätniemi sawmill …some other entrepreneurs who have added to their workforces and expanded, perhekokki which produces ready meals” (i3). abandoning bulk production and concentrating on specialisation was considered most critical to ensuring these peripheral firms’ competitiveness: “here there has been relatively diverse and small-scale manufacturing, and merchandise is needed, not mass production” (i6) and “special know-how on a relatively large scale exists here” (i2). the restructuring was portrayed through the capacities of firms to renew their production thus reflecting the resilience of firms rather than putting any weight on formal institutional policies. the institutional change towards neoliberal policies can be seen resulting from the policies of central government, as the state had the power to change the structures of the national economic networks. as the local decision-making was influenced by the changes in its environment, these new policies changed the local institutional behaviour: every now and then there is a discussion about support through the industrial estate… when these economic development programmes are under planning. one would think that the input of the municipality would be higher. but no, it does not fit with contemporary thinking. the eu-regulations and others work against it, so this kind of competitive advantage cannot be given (i5). apart from the formal institutional changes, the contradiction in informal institutional behaviour was increasing with the changing attitudes towards biased and sticky perception relating to the robustness of heavy industry: “these changes. for some, this is so difficult. they longed for those few big factories. … the change has already happened in lieksa. we are not dependent on one industry anymore” (i6). the experiences from the last bust also added the fear of industrial plants leaving which shifted fennia 197(1) (2019) 51maija halonen expectations towards smaller industrial units: “i do not believe in these massive factories. on the contrary, they run away. … some kind of smaller industry is surely better” (i7). expectations were increasingly focusing on tourism although this seemed more like a vision than a concrete action: “it is under development. it is a dream for the future in lieksa, that tourism could be increased” (i3). expectations for its larger-scale development were focused on the koli hill area with its national park which was seen as requiring interest in both the protection of the natural landscape and recreational tourism: “an understanding about protection, an understanding about this is also beneficial. sources of conflict create a loss for everyone” (i6). tourism in ruunaa rapids in the border backwoods was already identified as benefiting from forestry, as it had improved its accessibility by maintaining the public roads and the dense network of forest roads: “some 10,000 tourists each year in the summer seasons and some thousands in the winter seasons. … it stems from good road connections …. to ruunaa and onwards via relatively good forest roads to stateowned land” (i1). these mindsets were quite different to those of the late-1980s debate, which was marked by conflicts. bio-energy has become very topical in lieksa since the interviews, but the narratives produced only one brief mention about it – in addition in terms of the fact that expectations for employment are exaggerated: “this bio-energy, the climate issues. plenty believe in these. but they’re not able to employ as many as they say” (i7). this perspective is quite different from the formal institutional policies of the town in 2018, only ten years after the interviews, as the town has planned to invest in infrastructure that supports the construction of a bio-refinery (lieksa 2018a). it may be seen as a formal institutional turning point that facilitates the renewal of the industrial path by bridging local natural resources and manufacturing. this relatively rapid change represents the flexibility of local policy-makers to adapt to changes when the window of opportunity opens. by receiving support from the state and the eu through erdf (european regional development fund) funding granted by the regional council of north karelia (lieksa 2018b), lieksa seems to be remapped as a resource periphery within a wider support system with a topical development theme again. reflections regarding decision-making and relative adaptation with disharmonious framing when assessing resilience from the perspective of actors in local decision-making, the focus settles on their adaptability and the ability to develop capacities to tolerate their vulnerability, the uncertainties of their economic future and the difficulties of locals to influence it. the resilience of local decisionmaking demands the ability to endure their position in a periphery that appears to be far beyond the main centres: “everybody else thinks about lieksa as remote. … they wonder how we live here, when there is nothing here” (i2). this seems to result from the mental peripheralisation of actors at the national scale, which positions the town as too distant to benefit from economic action and hence reproduces a vision of the static downturn with no reflections on dynamicity in the future. nevertheless this periphery was supported by regional policy and eu projects, supra-regional actors were typically presented as obstructive parties who peripheralise the town without trying to support its capacity to be renewed: as a member of parliament… we see the wide-ranging know-how that exists in different municipalities. but not everyone wants to know. … another member of the parliament [from the electoral district of the capital city] spoke right before me and said: ‘what is the point of feeding any more money there, to those kinds of regions, draining regions?’ (i7). this example represents two informal institutional perceptions on two spatial scales that set the peripheries in a different structure – the first placing the emphasis on the renewal and the latter on the static downturn. local policy-makers were confronting the pressure on them to take responsibility for the planning of economic development for the future. however, the speed of the economic changes and the obscure direction of the state planning seem to be hampering the planning. in a sense, comprehensive formal institutional planning was dropped but informal conventions in policy-making still reflected the need for direction from the central level: 52 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers the predictability of the world economy has got weaker and plans should be made faster. longterm planning is done based on quarterly reports. planning should be done but comprehensive planning is absent even at the level of the whole of finland. we just have to adapt to this situation but how do we reckon with it? what should we do? (i6). when the obstacles to planning are overcome, local decision-making collides with the outdated structures of practical tools thus leaving them ill equipped to fulfil the objectives: “we have good municipal economic developmental programmes … and there are good objectives. but as for the means – the municipality does not have them. it is mostly about creating an image and some infrastructure” (i5). in spite of all the obstacles and downturns, local policy-makers have managed to hold on to their optimism for development and twist the understanding of “a good state” or “successful”. at the time of the interviews, the financial crisis had been underway for two years, but had not hit the town severely. indeed, the atmosphere was quite the opposite and this optimistic attitude was explained in an unusual way. given that the town had been at the bottom for such a long time, small setbacks in the graph had become meaningless: “we have been in quite a good state, during this current recession, as we have lived quite steadily after the previous recession, at the bottom. unemployment is very high. the impact of this banking crisis has hardly had any influence on lieksa” (i2). it is important to understand that these statements are highly relative to the background of the severe busts. no subsequent crisis has exceeded the bust in the late-1960s. from this point of view, the policymakers experienced and perceived lieksa as a relatively successful industrial town since the early1970s. adaptation on the periphery seems to require making good use of overcoming the most severe bust and formulating it as the capacity to tolerate vulnerability and to bounce forward in spite of repeated busts and restructuring phases: we can talk about the survival story of lieksa though. when we consider the factors that caused these migration flows. … it must be remembered that living on those farms would have been impossible: 4–5 hectares under cultivation, 10–15 hectares of forest, 5–6 children, and no extraearnings for the men in forestry, as the work was done by machines. still, it has been possible to construct this kind of industrial community, as it is now (i6). from this perspective, the town has passed the phase where there was nothing for the future: “the former town manager used the phrase ‘the last one turns out the light’. he represented a view that if we continue along this road, there will be a time when the town will no longer exist” (i1). conclusions the paper’s general objective was to question the point of view whereby peripheries are seen only through a static downturn with no reflections on dynamicity or adaption. as a starting point, the predestined position of peripheries was compromised, which required the remapping of the changing role of the periphery (kortelainen & rannikko 2015; kühn 2015). dynamicity was explored by outlining the waves of restructuring and changes in adaptation which were here seen as the reflections of economic evolution and evolutionary resilience of peripheries (cf. carlsson et al. 2014; kotilainen et al. 2015; hayter & nieweler 2018). notwithstanding, the case study of lieksa represents a typical downward periphery which has confronted an initial boom followed by a major bust (e.g. clapp 1998), it also shows that development did not stop at the first bust. firstly, this long-term examination supports the idea of regional waves (ryser et al. 2014) of restructuring including simultaneous booms and busts depending on the industrial sector and the selected viewpoint. secondly, it reveals two waves of restructuring which both include a type of regional bust followed by different kinds of recovery. common for both the busts investigated were the external changes in technologies and markets that pushed the local development into bust. the most explicit difference was shown in the recovery phases that manifest the changes in the structural environment that were governed by the formal national institutions. while the first recovery was assisted more by the formal policies, the second bust was deepened by the failure of support at the formal national level. thus, the results reflect the role of institutional changes in the economic evolution and unevenness of places (cf. hodgson 2009; fennia 197(1) (2019) 53maija halonen mackinnon et al. 2009; hassink et al. 2014; martin & sunley 2015a). the recovery of the second wave buttress the previous findings on peripheries after the institutional changes following the neoliberal policies (e.g. markey & heisler 2010; halseth 2017) and emphasises their vulnerability when a disturbance occurs. true to form based on previous studies (e.g. halseth & ryser 2017; hayter & nieweler 2018), either in this case there were no signs of improved structures to confront these disturbances although the expectations towards local policy-makers in this respect have not diminished, rather the opposite. this seems to have led to a situation where support and direction through the formal national institutions have been withdrawn while local government requires supportive changes in formal institutions in order to fulfil the expectations of developmental planning on one hand. on the other hand, local decision-making seems to be stuck to the informal convention as a follower of bigger national level planning. the changes in the local planning environment could be described as greater responsibility and expectations in increasingly obscure and fuzzy structures. the critical voices towards quantified macro-level approaches were taken seriously by placing greater emphasis on human perspectives (bristow & healy 2014; gong & hassink 2017), which resulted in rather different perceptions in resilience (cf. dawley et al. 2010). while the typical quantified examinations highlight success in adaptation as the measured outcomes showing recovery though growth, this human perspective offered an insight from the experiences of actors during the process of socio-economic adaptation and how it stagnates or bounces forward. most importantly, these inductive narratives revealed the behaviours, interpretation, beliefs and expectations of actors before, during and after the phases of recovery, which fits poorly with the forms of adaptation that are shown through the numeric indicators. in general, the adaptation appears as powerless reactions when confronting and adapting to external changes. reactions though are not presented in the same way from the beginning to the end, revealing the diversity of reactions from phase to phase. adaptation is shown through the variation of giving up, forward-looking acceptance, desperate resistance, reorientation with external support and reconfiguring renewal with an optimistic attitude. as such, adaptation does not necessarily result in resilience as success, but as a strategy for negotiating periods of turbulence; it may encompass an acceptance of the loss of some inhabitants or businesses, as long as the town retains its core industrial performances and ability to function. after a major bust and severe downturn, every kind of industrial activity has been considered an appropriate economic basis for the future, which seems to be requiring the reconciliation of different kinds of economic, recreational and environmental values. forest industries were still referred to as the backbone that has created positive path dependency for industrial activity, but the experiences from both busts have added the fear of industrial plants leaving and increased expectations towards a more diversified economy. in spite of all the obstacles and downturns, the local policy-makers have managed to twist the understanding of “a good state” or “successful”, which seems to be a prerequisite for holding onto an optimistic and forward-looking orientation. being at the bottom for such a long time and finding relative success from its history, small setbacks had become rather meaningless. the line between giving up, acceptance and resistance is thin, and all of these forms of adaptation may be seen as strategic steps taken in order to bounce forward – or drift into hindering path dependence, stagnation or decline with no future prospects. the resilience regarding the perspective of local governmental actors on the periphery seems to be emphasising their flexible adaptability and the ability to develop institutional capacities to tolerate their vulnerability, the uncertainties of their economic future and the difficulties of locals to influence it – and if anything – to act and bounce forward in spite of repetitive busts and restructuring phases. notes 1 value added (gross) is the value generated by any unit engaged in a production activity. in market production, it is calculated by deducting from the unit’s output the intermediates (goods and services) used in the production process and in non-market production by adding up the compensation of employees, consumption of fixed capital and possible taxes on production and imports (statistics finland 2010). 54 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers 2 employment % is the proportion of employed people in relation to the labour force (employed and unemployed in total) (statistics finland 2018a). 3 the so-called swedish clearing (ns. ruotsalaisraivaus) meaning compensation for clearing land by the swedish-speaking population: the finnish-speaking population was settled in a way that would not alter the share of the finnishand swedish-speaking populations in the municipalities of finland. this released some of the swedish-speaking land owners from their obligation to dispose of their land, but in such cases they were required to provide compensation by covering the costs for clearing fields elsewhere (laitinen 1995; land acquisition act 396/1945, 53§, 92 §). acknowledgements i would like to thank the kyösti haataja foundation for funding this research and the reviewers for their constructive comments. references aarnio, j. (1999) kaskiviljelystä metsätöihin: tutkimus pielisjärven kruununmetsistä ja kruununmetsätorppareista vuoteen 1910. department of geography, publications 4. university of joensuu, joensuu. adger, n. w. (2006) vulnerability. global environmental change 16(3) 268–281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. gloenvcha.2006.02.006 andrews, m. (2015) ‘a very elementary transformation of one’s existence’: narrating moments of political change. in reid, h. & west, l. (eds.) constructing narratives of continuity and change: a transdisciplinary approach to researching lives, 37–48. routledge, london and new york. bathelt, h. & glückler, j. (2014) institutional change in economic geography. progress in human geography 38(3) 340–363. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513507823 boschma, r. (2015) towards an evolutionary perspective on regional resilience. regional studies 49(5) 733–751. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.959481 boschma, r. & martin, r. (2007) editorial: constructing an evolutionary economic geography. journal of economic geography 7 537–548. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbm021 bristow, g. & healy, a. (2014) regional resilience: an agency perspective. regional studies 48(5) 923– 935. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2013.854879 brown, k. (2016) resilience, development and global change. routledge, london and new york. bryant, c. & joseph, a. e. (2001) canada’s rural population: trends in space and implications in place. the canadian geographer 45(1) 132–137. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2001.tb01177.x carlsson, e., steen, m., sand, r. & nilsen, s. k. (2014) resilient peripheral regions? the long-term effects of ten norwegian restructuring programmes. norsk geografisk tidsskrift norwegian journal of geography 68(2) 91–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2014.894565 central statistical office (1970) statistical yearbook of finland: new series – 65th – year 1969. iv maanmittaus ja asustustoiminta, e. clearing of fields. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. clandinin, d. j. & connelly, f. m. (2000) narrative inquiry: experience and story in qualitative research. jossey-bass publisher, san francisco. clapp, r. a. (1998) the resource cycle in forestry and fishing. canadian geographer/le géographe canadien 42(2) 129–144. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1998.tb01560.x dawley, s. pike, a. & tomaney, j. (2010) towards the resilient region? local economy 25(8) 650–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690942.2010.533424 deacon, l. & lamanes, t. (2015) resiliency and resource-based communities: a canadian case study. sustainable development and planning vii 193 719–724. https://doi.org/10.2495/sdp150601 eisto, i. (2009) kylläpä kestää: paikallisesti kestävän kehityksen ja ympäristölähtöisen kehittämistoiminnan suhde harvaanasutulla maaseudulla [still on the path? assessing the relationship between environment-based rural development interventions and local sustainability]. dissertations in social sciences. joensuun yliopiston yhteiskuntatieteellisiä julkaisuja nro 1. (in finnish) http:// epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-219-299-8/urn_isbn_978-952-219-299-8.pdf essletzbichler, j. & rigby, d. (2007) exploring evolutionary economic geographies. journal of economic geography 7 549–571. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbm022 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.02.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.02.006 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513507823 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.959481 https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbm021 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2013.854879 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2001.tb01177.x https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2014.894565 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1998.tb01560.x ttps://doi.org/10.1080/02690942.2010.533424 https://doi.org/10.2495/sdp150601 http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-219-299-8/urn_isbn_978-952-219-299-8.pdf http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-219-299-8/urn_isbn_978-952-219-299-8.pdf https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbm022 fennia 197(1) (2019) 55maija halonen estola, e., uitto, m. & syrjälä, l. (2017) elämäkertahaastattelu. in hyvärinen, m., nikander, p. & ruusuvuori, j. (eds.) tutkimushaastattelun käsikirja, 153–173. vastapaino, tampere. freudenburg, w. r. (1992) addictive economies: extractive industries and vulnerable localities in a changing world economy. rural sociology 57(3) 305–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.1992. tb00467.x gong, h., & hassink, r. (2017) regional resilience: the critique revisited. in williams, n. & vorley, t. (eds.) creating resilient economies: entrepreneurship, growth and development in uncertain times, 206–216. edward elgar, cheltenham and northampton. https://doi. org/10.4337/9781785367649.00021 halonen, m., kotilainen, j., tykkyläinen, m. & vatanen, e. (2015) industry life cycles of a resource town in finland – the case of lieksa. european countryside 7(1) 16–41. https://doi.org/10.1515/ euco-2015-0002 halseth, g. (2017) introduction: political economy perspectives on the transformation of resource towns and peripheries. in halseth, g. (ed.) transformation of resource towns and peripheries: political economy perspectives, 1–10. routledge, abingdon, oxon and new york. halseth, g. & ryser, l. (2017) towards a political economy of resource-dependent regions. routledge, abingdon, oxon and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315225296 halseth, g., ryser, l. & markey, s. (2017) localization and globalization: industrial reorganization in mackenzie, british columbia. in halseth, g. (ed.) transformation of resource towns and peripheries: political economy perspectives, 51–84. routledge, abingdon, oxon and new york. hassink, r. (2010) regional resilience: a promising concept to explain differences in regional economic adaptability? cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 3 45–58. https://doi. org/10.1093/cjres/rsp033 hassink, r., klaerding, c. & marques, p. (2014) advancing evolutionary economic geography by engaged pluralism. regional studies 48(7) 1295–1307. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.889815 hayter, r. (2000) flexible crossroads: the restructuring of british columbia's forest economy. ubc press, vancouver and toronto. hayter, r. & nieweler, s. (2018) the local planning-economic development nexus in transitioning resource-industry towns: reflections (mainly) from british columbia. journal of rural studies 60 82–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.03.006 hayter, r., barnes, t. j. & bradshaw, m. j. (2003) relocating resource peripheries to the core of economic geography's theorizing: rationale and agenda. area 35(1) 15–23. https://doi. org/10.1111/1475-4762.00106 helminen, v., nurmio, k., rehunen, a., ristimäki, m., oinonen, k., tiitu, m., kotavaara, o., antikainen, h., & rusanen, j. (2014) kaupunki-maaseutu-alueluokitus: paikkatietoihin perustuvan alueluokituksen muodostamisperiaatteet. suomen ympäristökeskuksen raportteja 14/2014. henning, m., stam, e. & wenting, r. (2013) path dependence research in regional economic development: cacophony or knowledge accumulation? regional studies 47(8) 1348–1362. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.750422 hodgson, g. m. (2009) agency, institutions, and darwinism in evolutionary economic geography. economic geography 85(2) 167–173. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01020.x hudson, r. (2005) rethinking change in old industrial regions: reflecting on the experiences of north east england. environment and planning 37 581–596. https://doi.org/10.1068/a36274 hudson, r. (2009) resilient regions in an uncertain world: wishful thinking or a practical reality? cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 3(1) 11–25. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp026 hyvärinen, m. (2017) kertomushaastattelu. in hyvärinen, m., nikander, p. & ruusuvuori, j. (eds.) tutkimushaastattelun käsikirja, 174–192. vastapaino, tampere. isaksen, a. (2015) industrial development in thin regions: trapped in path extension? journal of economic geography 15(3) 585–600. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbu026 jacquet, j. b. & kay, d. l. (2014) the unconventional boomtown: updating the impact model to fit new spatial and temporal scales. journal of rural and community development 9(1) 1–23. keough, s. b. (2015) planning for growth in a natural resource boomtown: challenges for urban planners in fort mcmurray, alberta. urban geography 36(8) 1169–1196. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 2723638.2015.1049482 kiander, j. (2001) laman opetukset: suomen 1990-luvun kriisin syyt ja seuraukset. government institute for economic research, discussion papers no. 27(5). government institute for economic research, helsinki. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.1992.tb00467.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.1992.tb00467.x https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785367649.00021 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785367649.00021 https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2015-0002 https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2015-0002 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315225296 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp033 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp033 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.889815 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.03.006 https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4762.00106 https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4762.00106 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.750422 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.750422 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01020.x https://doi.org/10.1068/a36274 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp026 https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbu026 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1049482 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2015.1049482 56 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers korhonen, m. & tykkyläinen, m. (1983) lieksan luonnonvaroista ja niiden hyödyntämismahdollisuuksista. lieksan kaupunki, luonnonvarojen hyödyntämisprojektin julkaisuja no 1. kortelainen, j. (2010) aluepolitiikka. in niemelä, p. (ed.) hyvinvointipolitiikka, 346–366. wsoypro oy, helsinki. kortelainen, j. & rannikko, p. (2015) positionality switch: remapping resource communities in russian borderlands. economic geography 91(1) 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecge.12064 kotilainen, j., eisto, i., & vatanen, e. (2015) uncovering mechanisms for resilience: ssrategies to counter shrinkage in a peripheral city in finland. european planning studies 23(1) 53–68. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820086 kotilainen, j. halonen, m., vatanen, e. & tykkyläinen, m. (2017) finland: resource town transitions in finland: local impacts and policy responses in lieksa. in halseth, g. (ed.) transformation of resource towns and peripheries: political economy perspectives, 296–316. routledge, abingdon, oxon and new york. krippendorff, k. (2004) content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. 2nd ed. sage publications, thousands oaks, london and new delhi. kühn, m. (2015) peripheralization: theoretical concepts explaining socio-spatial inequalities. european planning studies 23(2) 367–378. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.862518 laitinen, e. (1995) vuoden 1945 maanhankintalain synty, sisältö ja toteutus. in laitinen, e. (ed.) rintamalta raiviolle: sodanjälkeinen asutustoiminta 50 vuotta, 52–138. atena kustannus, jyväskylä. land acquisition act 369/1945. lehtonen, o. & tykkyläinen, m. (2014) potential job creation and resource dependance in rural finland. european countryside 6(3) 202–224. https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2014-0011 lieksa (1980) municipal report of lieksa 1979. lieksa (2018a) lieksan kaupungin talousarvio vuodelle 2018. 445/10.100/2017. lieksa (2018b) lieksan kaupungin kevätniemen bioterminaarialueen rakentamisen kilpailutus käynnissä. lieksan uutisarkisto. <http://www.lieksa.fi/uutiset/-/asset_publisher/aq0ebcrucqcz/ content>. 29.5.2018. maatalousministeriön asutusasiainosasto (1953) statistical data: results of settlement activity under the land acquisition act and supplementary legislation. 10. clearing of field under the acquisition act. asutustoiminnan aikakauskirja 3/1953. mackinnon, d., cumbers, a., pike, a. birch, k. & mcmaster, r. (2009) evolution in economic geography: institutions, political economy, and adaptation. economic geography 85(2) 129–150. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01017.x markey, s. & heisler, k. (2010) getting a fair share: regional development in a rapid boom-bust rural setting. canadian journal of regional science 33(3) 49–62. markey, s., halseth, g. & manson, d. (2012) investing in place: economic renewal in northern british columbia. ubc press, vancouver and toronto. martin, r. (2000) institutional approaches in economic geography. in sheppard, e. & barnes, t. j. (eds.) a companion to economic geography, 77–94. blackwell publishers ltd., oxford and massachusetts. martin, r. (2012) regional economic resilience, hysteresis and recessionary shocks. journal of economic geography 12 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbr019 martin, r. & sunley, p. (2006) path dependence and regional economic evolution. journal of economic geography 6 395–437. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbl012 martin, r. & sunley, p. (2015a) towards a developmental turn in evolutionary economic geography? regional studies 49(5) 712–732. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.899431 martin, r. & sunley, p. (2015b) on the notion of regional economic resilience: conceptualization and explanation. journal of economic geography 15 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbu015 moisio, s. & leppänen, l. (2007) towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic transformation of statehood in finland 1965–2005. fennia 185(2) 63–87. pendall, r., foster, k. a. & cowell, m. (2010) resilience and regions: building understanding of the metaphor. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 3(1) 71–84. https://doi.org/10.1093/ cjres/rsp028 pike, a., birch, k., cumbers, a., mackinnon, d. & mcmaster, r. (2009) a geographical political economy of evolution in economic geography. economic geography 85(2) 175–182. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1944-8287.2009.01021.x pike, a. dawley, s. & tomaney, j. (2010) resilience, adaptation and adaptability. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 3(1) 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsq001 https://doi.org/10.1111/ecge.12064 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820086 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820086 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.862518 https://doi.org/10.2478/euco-2014-0011 http://www.lieksa.fi/uutiset/-/asset_publisher/aq0ebcrucqcz/content http://www.lieksa.fi/uutiset/-/asset_publisher/aq0ebcrucqcz/content https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01017.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01017.x https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbr019 https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbl012 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.899431 https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lbu015 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp028 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp028 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01021.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2009.01021.x https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsq001 fennia 197(1) (2019) 57maija halonen pike, a., mackinnon, d., cumbers, a., dawley, s. & mcmaster, r. (2016) doing evolution in economic geography. economic geography 92(2) 123–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2015.1108830 pinnegar, s. & daynes, j. g. (2007) locating narrative inquiry historically: thematics in the turn to narrative. in clandinin, d. j. (ed.) handbook of narrative inquiry: mapping a methodology, 3–34. sage publications, thousands oaks, london and new delhi. https://doi. org/10.4135/9781452226552.n1 polèse, m. & shearmur, r. (2006) why some regions will decline: a canadian case study with thoughts on local development strategies. papers in regional science 85(1) 23–46. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1435-5957.2006.00024.x rannikko, p. (1999) savottojen ja väestökadon suomi. in löytönen, m. & kolbe, l. (eds.) suomi: maa, kansa ja kulttuuri, 211–221. suomen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 753, jyväskylä. ryser, l., markey, s.,manson, d., & halseth, g. (2014) from boom and bust to regional waves: development patterns in the peace river region, british columbia. journal of rural and community development 9(1) 87–111. ryser, l., halseth, g., markey, s., gunton, c. & argent, n. (2018) path dependency or investing in place: understanding the changing conditions for rural resource regions. the extractive industries and society 6(1) 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2018.10.009 saarelainen, a. (1995) raivaussavuista euroaikaan. pielisjärven maaseutu yhteiskunnan muutoksissa 1945–1995. in laitinen, e. (ed.) rintamalta raiviolle: sodanjälkeinen asutustoiminta 50 vuotta, 184– 238. atena kustannus, jyväskylä. simmie, j. & martin, r. (2010) the economic resilience of regions: towards an evolutionary approach. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 3(1) 27–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp029 statistics finland (1979) väestön elinkeino: väestö elinkeinon mukaan kunnittain 1880–1975. tilastollisia tiedonantoja 63. tilastokeskus, helsinki. statistics finland (1982) 201 -population over 15 years by sex and belonging to labour force 1980. unpublished data printout 17.12.1982. statistics finland (2010) 905 -tuotanto ja työllisyys seutukunnittain 1975–2008. <http://pxnet2.stat. fi/pxweb/pxweb/fi/statfin_passiivi/statfin_passiivi__kan__altp/statfinpas_altp_pxt_905_200800e_ fi. px/?rxid=bfbfa614-26ae-4f71-8daa-50aa1e36e081>. 17.12.2010. statistics finland (2018a) 001 population by area, main type of activity, sex, age and year 1987– 2017. <http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/statfin__vrm__tyokay/statfin_tyokay_pxt_001. px/?rxid=efa5c872-cf43-4d90-926b-66655a221f42> 17.12.2018. statistics finland (2018b) 009 -employed labour force in area (workplaces) by area, employer sector, sex and year 1987–2016. <http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/statfin__vrm__tyokay/ statfin_tyokay_pxt_009.px/?rxid=efa5c872-cf43-4d90-926b-66655a221f42>. 21.9.2018. suorsa, k. (2007) regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, sweden and norway. fennia 185(1) 15–29. tykkyläinen, m. (1995) asutustoiminnan taloudelliset vaikutukset. in laitinen, e. (ed.) rintamalta raiviolle: sodanjälkeinen asutustoiminta 50 vuotta, 139–158. atena kustannus, jyväskylä. tykkyläinen, m. (2015) turmoil in rural communities as an extreme event exemplified by the cases of hungary and the russian north. geographische zeitschrift 103(1) 37–55. tykkyläinen, m., vatanen, e., halonen, m. & kotilainen, j. (2017) finland: global-local links and industrial restructuring in a resource town in finland: the case of lieksa. in halseth, g. (ed.) transformation of resource towns and peripheries: political economy perspectives, 85–111. routledge, abingdon, oxon and new york. vatanen, e. & kotilainen, j. (2016) paikallistalouksien uusiutumiskyky: itäsuomalaisia esimerkkejä. terra 129(3) 176–186. yin, r. k. (2003) case study research: design and methods. 3rd ed. applied social research methods series vol. 5. sage publications, thousand oaks. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2015.1108830 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226552.n1 https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226552.n1 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1435-5957.2006.00024.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1435-5957.2006.00024.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2018.10.009 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp029 http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/fi/statfin_passiivi/statfin_passiivi__kan__altp/statfinpas_altp_pxt_905_200800e_fi.px/?rxid=bfbfa614-26ae-4f71-8daa-50aa1e36e081 http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/fi/statfin_passiivi/statfin_passiivi__kan__altp/statfinpas_altp_pxt_905_200800e_fi.px/?rxid=bfbfa614-26ae-4f71-8daa-50aa1e36e081 http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/fi/statfin_passiivi/statfin_passiivi__kan__altp/statfinpas_altp_pxt_905_200800e_fi.px/?rxid=bfbfa614-26ae-4f71-8daa-50aa1e36e081 http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/statfin__vrm__tyokay/statfin_tyokay_pxt_001.px/?rxid=efa5c872-cf43-4d90-926b-66655a221f42 http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/statfin__vrm__tyokay/statfin_tyokay_pxt_001.px/?rxid=efa5c872-cf43-4d90-926b-66655a221f42 http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/statfin__vrm__tyokay/statfin_tyokay_pxt_009.px/?rxid=efa5c872-cf43-4d90-926b-66655a221f42 http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/statfin__vrm__tyokay/statfin_tyokay_pxt_009.px/?rxid=efa5c872-cf43-4d90-926b-66655a221f42 landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi, subarctic finland gabriele broll, friedrich-karl holtmeier, kerstin anschlag, hans-jörg brauckmann, sabine wald and birgit drees broll, gabriele, friedrich-karl holtmeier, kerstin anschlag, hans-jörg brauckmann, sabine wald & birgit drees (2007). landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi, subarctic finland. fennia 185: 2, pp. 89–105. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the objective of this paper is to differentiate the landscape in the treeline ecotone in subarctic finland with an examination of its mosaic structure and functional role in treeline dynamics. highly varying topography is a key factor controlling drainage conditions, vegetation, local climates and soils. natural drainage classes, soil data (ph, c org , n t , c/n ratio, moisture) and dominant vegetation were used to characterize site conditions and to show the grouping of six representative sites along a synthetic topographical transect (model). the abrupt increase in soil moisture and ph values at the distal end of the lowest zones indicates a relatively sharp and ecologically important limit between well drained sites (ridge tops, upper valley side, interfluves) and valleys with both poorly and very poorly drained sites. remains of birch wood in wind-scarps, hummocks and peaty layers give evidence of former open birch forest in present treeless sites. forest decline has enforced the contrasts in site conditions between windswept and snow accumulating topography. the landscape mosaic and resultant site conditions are strongly influencing treeline dynamics and consequently, the landscape mosaic needs to be carefully considered when discussing the possible effects of the changing climate in the treeline ecotone. gabriele broll & hans-jörg brauckmann, division of geoand agroecology, ispa, university of vechta, po box 1553, d-49364 vechta, germany. friedrich-karl holtmeier, sabine wald & birgit drees, institute of landscape ecology, university of münster, robert-koch-str. 26, d-48149 münster, germany. kerstin anschlag, department of geography, university of bonn, meckenheimer allee 166, d-53115 bonn, germany. e-mail: gbroll@ispa.uni-vechta.de. ms received 6 march 2007. introduction in the subarctic finland, treeline usually occurs as altitudinal ecotones reaching from the closed mountain birch forests (betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii) to the scattered and usually stunted individuals of this tree species. due to the effect of high latitude the treeline is located at relatively low elevation at about 300 to 380 m a.s.l. (holtmeier 1974; seppälä & rastas 1980). the width of the treeline ecotone depends for its most part on the mountain slope gradients and is usually wider on gently sloping terrain than on steep slopes. the treeline is characterized by considerable patchiness mainly caused by the effects of topography on site conditions – such as drainage, wind and translocation of snow, and the resulting effects on soil moisture, and temperature, etc. the distribution pattern of the vegetation units clearly reflects these conditions (holtmeier 2003, 2005a). the objective of this paper is to differentiate the landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone using topography-dependent landscape spatial-ecological units (site types) identified by vegetation, soils and natural drainage classes and to assess the influence of the landscape mosaic on natural regeneration of the mountain birch. this is demonstrated with examples from one of our study areas, which 90 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees we consider to be representative of the treeline ecotone in northern finnish lapland. the intention of the present paper is to draw attention to the spatial structures and their functional role (e.g., forman 1995) in treeline dynamics at the landscape scale, particularly in view of the on-going discussion on the possible response of the altitudinal and northern treeline to a changing climate (holtmeier & broll 2005). study area the studies were carried out on the northwest-exposed slope of rodjanoaivi (509 m a.s.l.), a gently rounded fell top (figs. 1 and 2). while the upper and lower parts of the mountain slope are relatively steep, the slope gradient at the level of the treeline ecotone is comparatively gentle. the study area is located within the zone of discontinuous permafrost where periglacial processes are active and diverse (seppälä 1997; hjort 2006). the area belongs to the granulite complex of northern finnish lapland (korsman et al. 1997). sandy-skeletal basal melt-out till mixed with preglacial saprolite covers the bedrock in most parts of the treeline ecotone. a thick till (up to three metres) has become dissected by melt waters and the small tributaries of the teno river. as a result, the land surface is characterized by a locally varying topography. small ridges rounded and widened on top with gently sloping interfluves slightly rise for a few metres up to about 20 metres above the tsierromjohka and its diminutive headwaters. locally, small bedrock outcrops project through the till. due to the influence of the varying surface in the treeline ecotone on blowing snow (holtmeier et al. 2004; holtmeier 2005a), snow depth varies widely and abruptly. in wind-swept places, the snow cover does usually not exceed a few centimetres depth whereas it may reach a metre or more at accumulation sites (holtmeier 1974). in northern finland, the winter is the windiest season (autio & heikkinen 2002). on rodjanoaivi, wind comes mainly from the west and northwest. the nearest meteorological station is located at the field station of kevo subarctic research institute (fig. 1). the climate at kevo meteorological station (107 m a.s.l.) is subcontinental with a mean annual air temperature of −1.7°c and a mean annual precipitation of 414 mm (haapasaari 1988; ok sanen & virtanen 1995). however, the climate can be compared with only caution to the windier climate at rodjanoaivi as kevo is located within pine forest in a relatively protected valley, whereas rodjanoaivi lies within the subcontinental zone of fig. 1. location of rodjanoaivi, northern utsjoki. fennia 185: 2 (2007) 91landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… fig. 2. rodjanoaivi study area. a = area covered by the aerial photo (fig. 3), b = mapped area (see fig. 4). northernmost fennoscandia. in the treeline ecotone, winter temperatures are likely to be higher than at kevo or in the valley of the teno river where inversions are very common. summer temperatures are likely to be lower because of greater elevation and mostly windy conditions. on the wind-swept topography, the mountain birch forest becomes increasingly scattered at an altitude of about 240 m a.s.l. to 300 m a.s.l. solitary trees (3 m to 5 m high, diameter 8 cm to 20 cm) and tree groves occur up to about 370 m a.s.l. mainly within the valleys and on wind-sheltered slopes (figs. 4 and 5). in the present treeline ecotone, oligotrophic dwarf shrub-lichen-heath prevails locally alternating with exposed mineral soil. different kinds of podzols and hydromorphic soils form a very locally varying mosaic, which largely corresponds to the vegetation spatial distribution pattern (drees 2004; wald 2004). bare soil and bedrock debris (saprolite) are typical above the historical treeline. soil acidity is generally high (ultra acid to very strongly acid, schoeneberger et al. 2002). the seasonally frozen soils show a cryic temperature regime with the long-term mean annual temperature at 50 cm depth above 0 °c (broll 1994, 2000; yli-halla & mokma 1998; holtmeier 2003; holtmeier et al. 2004). methods the landscape mosaic was mapped using an enlarged oblique black-and-white-air photo (topographical survey of finland) together with coloured photos taken by ourselves from an airplane cruising about 300 m above ground (fig. 3). the map (fig. 4) is based on the topographical map of finland 1:20 000 (sheet no. 3914 06, rodjanoaivi, 1977) and on aerial images. detailed mapping was carried out in the field from 1998 onwards focusing on the distribution of soils and vegetation along characteristic topographical gradients from wind-swept and dry convex topography to better wind-protected moist to wet sites (leeward slopes, concavities). the results were used to develop a synthetic transect (model). 92 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees fig. 3. north-west-facing slope of rodjanoaivi. photo taken from a low-flying aircraft (250–300 m above ground). view to the southeast. extremely wind-eroded sites (ridge tops, upper rim of valley sides) occur as nearly-white patches. wind-swept, gently sloping or almost level interfluves show light-grey colour, whereas valleys and other depressions occur in dark-grey. (photo f.-k. holtmeier, 5 august 1998). vegetation was mapped using the braun-blanquet-method (braun-blanquet 1964; westhoff & van der maarel 1973). coverage was estimated using a modified scale of hult-sernander-du rietz (after daniëls 1987; for further information see drees 2004; anschlag 2006). the size of the plots varied from 4 m2 in heath vegetation and hummocks to 9 m2 on deflation sites, in willow shrub and grass bogs. ten plots per site were mapped. the distribution pattern of the vegetation (identified by the dominant species) was used to demarcate different sites. some dwarf shrub species, in particular betula nana and empetrum hermaphroditum are ubiquitous in the study area and show comparatively tall growth in wind-sheltered, snow-rich and moist sites. by contrast on windswept and dry topography they display espalierlike or mat-like growth. the differing physiognomy can therefore be used as an indicator of site properties. humus profiles were described and sampled at representative sites (= spatial-ecological units). soil samples were taken from the litter layer, from the o horizon and from the a horizon. all soil chemical analyses refer to fine soil (≤ 2 mm). the samples were analyzed using standard methods for soil acidity, carbon and nitrogen. organic carbon and total nitrogen content were measured by an elemental analyzer (euro ea, eurovector) and soil acidity in 0.01 m cacl 2 by using a glass electrode (sparks et al. 1996). to describe soil acidity we use the descriptive terms (schoeneberger et al. 2002) based on ph classes: ultra acid (< 3.5), extremely acid (3.5 to 4.4) and very strongly acid (4.5 to 5.0). higher ph does not occur in the study area. soil moisture was measured in the topmost 5 cm by tdr (time domain reflectometry, delta-t devices ltd., cambridge) on one representative plot per site. each plot measurement consisted of 10 randomly selected local measurements (n = 700). soil moisture was measured weekly from 25.06.2003 to 27.08.2003. to characterize soil moisture conditions the following “natural drainage classes” (i. e. prevailing wetness condition of a soil; schoeneberger et al. 2002) were used: excessively, well, moderately, somewhat poorly, poorly and very poorly drained. a few wooden remains (mainly from buried rootstocks) and peat were collected for radiocarbon-dating to provide a better insight into treeline history. the dating was done by the leibniz institute for applied geosciences (hannover, germany) (holtmeier & broll 2006). results the air photo, showing the northeast-facing slope of rodjanoaivi (fig. 3), provides a first impression of the spatial pattern of the landscape (fig. 4) in the upper drainage area of tsierromjohka. convex, relatively gently sculptured, wind-exposed dry terrain (light-grey colour) alternate with shallow valfennia 185: 2 (2007) 93landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… fig. 4. mosaic of topographydependent vegetation types, soils, and drainage classes on the northwest-facing slope of rodjanoaivi. 1 extremely wind-eroded sites with exposed mineral soil. small dwarf shrub and lichen patches. excessively to somewhat excessively drained. 2 wind-swept interfluves. somewhat excessively or excessively drained. mosaic of low-growing dwarf shrub-lichen heath only locally interspersed with exposed mineral soil. 3 slopes of interfluves and valley sides. well to moderately drained. closed dwarf shrub-lichen cover. 4 foot zone (slope bottom) of interfluves and shallow depressions. well drained. ”dry/mineral hummocks”. dwarf shrub vegetation and willow shrub. 5 valleys and depressions. valley floor poorly drained. ”wet/organic hummocks”. luxuriant dwarf shrub vegetation and willow shrub. 6 grass bogs. poorly or very poorly drained. 7 solitary living old mountain birches (tree height 3–5 m, diameter up to 20 cm). 8 dead old mountain birches. stems still in upright or leaning position (diameter up to 20 cm). 9 stream. 10 intermittent run-off channel. leys, former drainage channels, swales and other depressions (dark-grey colour) exhibiting moist to wet conditions. the most heavily wind-eroded, dry places (mainly on top of small ridges and at the upper rim of valley sides) almost lacking vegetation, emerge as nearly-white patches in the air photo (see also fig. 5). the mapped area (fig. 4) is considered to be representative of the landscape mosaic on rodjanoaivi. soil data (soil moisture, c org , n t , c/n and ph) from the identified spatialecological units are presented in the figs. 6, 7 and 8). 94 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees fig. 5. tsierromjohka drainage area. view northwest. norwegian high fells in the background. wind-eroded soils and patchy low-growing dwarf shrub-lichen heath on wind-exposed topography. comparatively tall dwarf shrub vegetation and willow shrub (grey colour) in more wind-protected, snow-rich and moister places. (photo f.-k. holtmeier, 2 september 2000). convex topography ridge tops, slightly convex gently sloping interfluves and the upper rim of valley sides are usually characterized by dry conditions due to strong winds and permeable substrate (fig. 6, type e, l). these sites can be attributed to the drainage classes “excessively drained” to “somewhat excessively drained”. because of the sandy-skeletal substrate soil moisture varies rapidly in dependence from precipitation (anschlag 2002). ridge tops, interfluves, upper valley sides wind-exposed sites are covered by a locally varying mosaic of low, scattered dwarf shrub-lichen heath (empetrum hermaphroditum, mat-like betula nana, arctostaphylos alpina, vaccinium uliginosum, vaccinium vitis idea), espaliers of loiseleuria procumbens, scattered cushions of diapensia lapponica, and – admixed – grasses (juncus trifidus, carex bigelowii, luzula spicata, luzula arcuata, deschampsia lapponica) and mosses (e.g., polytrichum piliferum, polytrichum juniperinum and gymnomitrium corallioides). the coverage of lichens and mosses is low. the prevailing lichens including cetraria nivalis and ochrolechia frigida are interspersed with thamnolia vermicularis, alectoria ochroleuca, alectoria nigricans, stereocaulon paschale and different cladonia species. the latter are usually represented by their thallus fragments which remain after reindeer grazing. fig. 6. mean values and standard deviation of soil moisture of topmost 5 cm at different sites, based on weekly tdr measurements from 25 june to 27 august 2003 (n = 700). for multiple comparison, the nemenyitest was used (α = 0.05) (lozán & kausch 1998). differences in soil moisture between sites e and l (a), d and h (b) and t and w (c) are not significant, whereas these groups differ significantly from each other and from site g (d). fennia 185: 2 (2007) 95landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… the lichen-dominated patches correspond to the arctic empetrum-cetraria type of haapasaari (1988). shallow but well developed podzols occur, with a maximum depth of about 15 cm under lichendominated patches and about 20 cm under dwarf shrub cover (mainly empetrum, betula nana and vaccinium species) with pleurozium schreberi. under lichen cover, the thickness of the organic layer varies from 2 cm to 4 cm, while litter is almost missing. under dwarf shrub vegetation, an almost 10 cm thick organic layer has built up. in the litter layer (lichens and dwarf shrubs), c/n ratios are comparatively wide due to an elevated soil organic carbon content and low total nitrogen. carbon and nitrogen sharply decline in the topsoil. soil acidity of the topsoil is extremely high (ultra acid to extremely acid, schoeneberger et al. 1998, fig. 7a). the dwarf shrub-heath is interspersed with comparatively large patches of open mineral soil exposed by wind erosion. towards extremely wind-swept places the plant cover becomes increasingly lower and dispersed. the species number (about 15) is low compared to better wind-protected sites. vegetation coverage is at a minimum (< 5%). low mats of empetrum hermaphroditum with cetraria nivalis and cetraria nigricans admixed show the highest coverage. other hardy species such as loiseleuria procumbens, diapensia lapponica, carex bigelowii and juncus trifidus also occur at very low coverage. fig. 7. soil data from convex topography and its foot zone. a – top, lichens and dwarf shrubs, b – slope of convex topography, c – footzone, dwarf shrubs, mineral hummocks (podzolised). l – litter, o – organic horizon, a – a horizon. 96 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees the few individuals of betula nana display espalier-like growth (1 cm to 2 cm high). this vegetation type corresponds to the “deflation sites” of haapasaari (1988). mountain birch seedlings are exceptional on extremely wind-eroded topography (holtmeier 2003; holtmeier et al. 2003) although open mineral soil is favourable to birch seedling establishment in general. extremely wind-eroded sites wind erosion is particularly strong on prominent convex topography and along the upper rim of the wind-facing valley sides (figs. 3 and 5). the sandyskeletal mineral soil has become widely exposed and about 60–90% of the soil profile has eroded. enrichment of coarse material on the surface is mainly due to deflation of the finer fractions (holtmeier et al. 2004). organic carbon and total nitrogen content are low, whereas ph (very strongly acid, schoeneberger et al. 1998) is higher than under dwarf shrub-lichen patches (cf. holtmeier et al. 2004). soil moisture conditions on the extremely wind-eroded sites with mineral soil exposed (fig. 6 type e) are not significantly different from the sites covered by low lichen-dominated vegetation (fig. 6 type l). on the wind-eroded sites, there still exist isolated patches of shallow undisturbed podzol covered with dwarf shrub-lichen heath. wind erosion is also active. the wind-driven mineral particles cause abrasive damage similar to ice-particle abrasion to exposed dwarf shrubs and mountain birches. these vegetation patches may become completely destroyed in the not too distant future. wind-scarps (10 cm to 20 cm high) mark the gradually downwind receding front of remaining closed dwarf shrub vegetation (see also broll & holtmeier 1994). downwind migration of this front will come to an end on the upper leeward side of convex topography where wind velocity decreases and a snow drift builds up (holtmeier et al. 2003; holtmeier et al. 2004; holtmeier 2005a). locally, in wind-exposed sites remains are found of an up to 20 cm thick organic layer usually covered with a thin fragmentary lichen crust and a few low-growing dwarf shrubs and grasses. the weakly decomposed organic matter (reddish colour) accumulated about 700 to 1300 years ago, most probably under more humid climatic conditions, when the plant cover was more luxuriant than at present. largely rotten stems and other wooden residues found in the peat provide evidence of former birch stands (cf. holtmeier & broll 2005, 2006). on the well drained gently sloping interfluves, closed dwarf shrub-lichen vegetation is restricted to relatively snow-rich and moist sites such as small former drainage channels and shallow hollows (dark-grey colour), where they form dense mats. betula nana may reach 20 cm to 30 cm in height. this vegetation type is equivalent to the betula nana-lichenes-subtype of haapasaari (1988). also low growing willows (salix glauca, salix lapponum) occur. soil moisture (fig. 6 type l) is significantly higher than in the more wind-exposed sites. mountain birch stands became established only on more wind-sheltered, snow-rich sites, such as leeward (south, southeast exposures) slopes of convex topography and a few metres deep depressions. at such sites, melt water and seepage provide more favourable moisture conditions than on excessively drained convex topography. young birches become increasingly affected by the strong winds when growing beyond the relatively wind-protected zone close to the surface. hummock terrains on gently sloping terrain of the interfluves, there are large areas of small, usually closely spaced low hummocks (height 10 cm to 30 cm, diameter 30 cm to 50 cm). low lichens (ochrolechia frigida, cladonia species, mostly thallus fragments) with sporadic dwarf shrub (empetrum, vaccinium uliginosum, vaccinium vitis idaea, arctostaphylos alpina) and grass specimen associated cover the relatively dry tops of the hummocks, while taller-growing dwarf shrubs (mainly empetrum and low betula nana), with lichen and mosses admixed, grow in the moist grooves between the hummocks. most of these hummocks have a silt content of 40% to 50%. mineral hummocks are usually podzolised and became cryoturbated after the podzol had developed. the tops of the hummocks show cracks caused by desiccation. many of them are wind-eroded. some organic hummocks consist almost completely of weakly decomposed (reddish colour) organic matter. probably, the hummocks developed under a plant cover that was more luxuriant than at present. the peaty hummocks often contain wooden residues that probably indicate a former open birch forest similar to the present uppermost forest stands at lower elevation (cf. holtmeier & broll 2006). fennia 185: 2 (2007) 97landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… slopes the more wind-protected and relatively snow-rich slopes of the ridges, interfluves and the valley sides (cf. fig. 4) are well drained (upper slope) to moderately drained (lower slope, footzone). closed dwarf shrub vegetation, mainly empetrum, betula nana and different vaccinium species (vaccinium uliginosum, vaccinium myrtillus) are typical of the well drained section. coverage increases from the relatively dry upper slopes towards the foot zone. the organic layer is deeper than in lichen-dominated heath. the relatively high nitrogen content results in a comparatively narrow c/n ratio. as on top of convex topography soil acidity is very high (fig. 7b). foot zone of ridges, interfluves and valley sides in the foot zone, deep and long-lying winter snow cover and lateral seepage cause comparatively moist conditions to prevail (fig. 6 type d). with some reservation (see below) this zone can be considered a transition zone between the dry and wind-swept convex terrain to the more wind-protected, snow-rich and moist valleys of tsierromjohka and its headwaters. empetrum hermaphroditum again has the highest coverage. vaccinium myrtillus, which needs protection by snow in the winter and usually does not occur on wind-swept topography, is well represented in the dwarf-shrub-lichen heath. in contrast to the more wind-exposed topography cladonia-species (c. gracilis, c. rangiferina, c. stellaris, c. uncialis, etc.) are common. in addition barbilophozia hatcheri and stereocaulon paschale occur with greater frequency. phyllodoce coerulea and salix herbacea, both chionophilous species, are well represented at these sites. moreover, pedicularis lapponica, solidago virgaurea and cornus suecica that are typical forest plant species are very common. this vegetation type corresponds to the arctic myrtillus-lichenes-type of haapasaari (1988). willows (salix glauca, salix lapponum) are common in the footzone. in the moister sites of the foot zone, particularly on somewhat poorly drained or poorly drained terrain gently sloping towards the little streams, mineral and organic hummocks (up to 50 cm high) occur, separated by deep troughs. the sides of the hummocks are usually steep or even vertical, in contrast to the low dome-shaped hummocks on the comparatively dry interfluves. the tops of most hummocks, from which the strong winds usually blow the snow off in the winter, are covered with snow-intolerant (chionophobous) lichens or/and with dwarf shrub vegetation (betula nana, empetrum hermaphroditum, vaccinium myrtillus, vaccinium uliginosum, vaccinium vitis idaea). also, rubus chamaemorus (generally more typical of bog areas) regularly occur within the dwarf shrub-vegetation though at low coverage. moss cover (sphagnum fuscum), on the other hand, may reach 20% to 40%, locally even up to 90%. after longer-lasting dry weather conditions the lichen cover usually shows cracks although these hummocks have higher moisture content than those on the wind-swept and dry convex areas. the lower parts of the hummocks are covered by relatively tall-growing dwarf shrubs, willow shrub, herbs (e.g., potentilla palustris, cornus suecica), different mosses and lichens. locally solitary mountain birches (3 m to 4 m high) are growing in the hummocky area. the average age of the living trees ranges between 80 and 90 years. the oldest living birch tree we found growing at about 360 m a.s.l. was 225 years old (tree ring analysis, holtmeier et al. 2003). as is evidenced by wood remains, the foot zone as well as in the not-too-wet valley sites (cf. fig. 4) were once covered with open birch forests up to at least 380 m a.s.l. (holtmeier et al. 2003; holtmeier & broll 2006). we may distinguish between “dry” (well drained) and “wet” (poorly drained) hummocks. “dry” hummocks are more common in the well drained parts of the foot zone than in poorly drained depressions. “wet” hummocks are located in the poorly drained places, often bordering bogs (see also van vliet-lanoë & seppälä 2002). the hummock terrain in the foot zone is considered to be a spatial subunit characterized by a vertical rather than a horizontal moisture gradient. on top of the well-drained hummocks (fig. 6 type h, see also fig. 7c), soil moisture is similar to soil moisture in the places covered by dwarf shrubdominated heath (fig. 6 type d) but significantly higher than on wind-eroded sites. soil moisture usually increases towards the hummock basis. the troughs of the “dry hummocks” are partly covered by shallow peat layers where intermittent runoff has not prevented the accumulation of plant residues. the litter layer, consisting mainly of dwarf shrub leaves, is usually less deep than on the “wet” 98 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees hummocks and ranges from 11 cm to 15 cm. in “dry” hummocks in most cases not affected by cryoturbation, organic carbon content and c/nratio usually decrease from the l horizon to the basis of the humus profile, while ph increases. high total nitrogen content results in a narrow c/n ratio when compared to the podzols on flat topography and gentle slopes. as in the other places characterized by podzols, ph in the topsoil is extremely low (ultra acid to extremely acid, schoeneberger et al. 2002, fig. 7c) however, ph increases slightly in the mineral soil. occasionally, thin peaty layers embedded in the more decomposed organic matter indicate the influence of temporary higher moisture (anaerobic conditions) due to more humid climatic conditions or change of the drainage system. most hummocks have become podsolized. in hummocks with a high content of fine mineral, soil horizons have become cryoturbated. as reported by seppälä (1998; see also luoto & seppälä 2002; van vliet-lanoë & seppälä 2002) permafrost may exist in high hummocks (> 1 m; 0.7 m, luoto & seppälä 2002). in august 2001 and in the following three summers we did not find any with a frozen core, but may be soil temperature was below 0°c over more than two years indicating permafrost in this area. even in organic hummocks, the organic matter may be interspersed with clay and sand layers pushed upward from the mineral substrate (till) by frost action even though the contents of silt and clay (about 40 %) and fine sand (25– 35%) are not unusually high. also, aeolian material has been deposited in these places. at poorly drained sites, gleyzation occurs locally resulting in podzols with hydromorphic features. the troughs between the hummocks are comparatively wet (wet to permanently wet) (fig. 6 type t), showing moisture conditions similar to poorly drained willow shrub (fig. 6 type w). during the winter, snow accumulates within the troughs and around the basal part of the hummocks. the troughs are partly covered with grasses (e.g., carex vaginata, deschampsia flexuosa, calamagrostis lapponica), dicranum species and other mosses (mainly sphagnum ssp.). phyllodoce coerulea is well represented. salix species and betula nana are also common, while the coverage by the other dwarf shrub species and by lichens is low. locally moss coverage exceeds 70% with dicranum species prevailing. in some troughs between the “dry” hummocks a few centimetres thick peaty layer has accumulated. in other troughs, acting as drainage channels for intermittent run-off after rain or snow melt, the stony (very stony or boulder-rich loam) substrate is exposed or covered with only little organic matter. the troughs between the “wet” hummocks show hydromorphic features similar to the grass bogs and willow shrub sites. valley floor topographical gradients vary in tsierromjohka and its headwaters and around the older drainage channels (only intermittent run-off). in the lowgradient sections, mineral and organic sediments have accumulated on block-rich material with the development of wide floodplains several metres in extent. in the steeper sections, the streams have made two to three metres deep cuts into the sediments and locally exposed the bedrock. although moisture in the valleys is generally higher in comparison to the windy convex terrain, variegated microtopography causes conspicuous differences between sites. the valley floors are poorly drained and covered by closed, almost luxuriant dwarf shrub vegetation (dark-grey colour). coverage decreases from the moist valley bottom to the relatively dry upper edge of the valley sides. some valley sections are characterized by a dense net of narrow, intermittently flooded blockrich drainage channels. in these channels and also in places where lateral seepage and run-off from higher terrain cause wet conditions, grow up to one metre high willow shrubs (mainly salix lapponum, salix glauca and hybrids (fig. 6 type w). the willows are usually mixed with betula nana (same height as the willows but lower coverage), other common dwarf shrub species, mosses, lichens, grasses (carex bigelowii, carex aquatilis, carex brunescens, carex magellanica, deschampsia flexuosa, juncus filiformis, vahlodea atropurpurea, agrostis mertensii) and equisetum species (equisetum sylvaticum, equisetum palustre). moss species such as warnstorfia exannulata and polytrichum commune respectively alpinum typically occur. the coverage of the mosses varies widely. typically, this kind of willow shrub covers 50 cm to 80 cm high hummocks. most of them are “wet” hummocks (see also van vliet-lanoë & seppälä 2002). these consist of fine mineral and/or organic (peaty) material. the mineral content is usually low. dark, highly decomposed matter, alternating with less decomposed material, indicates climatic fluctuations and/or temporary water table rise. the “wet” hummocks are characterized by a fennia 185: 2 (2007) 99landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… fig. 8. soil data from the valley floor. a – willows and dwarf shrubs, organic hummocks, b – willows, humusrich skeletal soils, c – grass bogs. l – litter, o – organic horizon, a – a horizon. comparatively thick organic layer varying from 15 cm up to 30 cm in the moister places. the l horizon, which usually consists of mosses and dwarfshrub litter, is characterized by a wide c/n ratio (> 35). neither organic carbon, nor total nitrogen and c/n change much by depth. soil acidity, however, is lower compared to the podzolised sites (> 4, extremely acid, schoeneberger et al. 2002) in the upper topsoil and changes little with depth (fig. 8a). soil moisture conditions in the “wet” hummocky sites are not significantly different from willow shrub sites (fig. 6 type h and w). due to poorly drained conditions podzolisation does usually not occur in these hummocks. where minimal amounts of fine material accumulate, willows can also be found on the humus-rich coarse skeletal soils. the comparatively narrow floodplains are usually covered with willow shrub and grass vegetation growing on fine to coarse sediments or on stones and boulders. on stream banks, skeletal soils occur with a thick (≥ 10 cm) organic layer on stones and boulders. also, in gullies (steep gradient sections), skeletal humus-rich soils develop locally where rock fragments (pebbles, cobbles, stones and boulders) accumulate. intermittent flooding prevents almost any accumulation of litter at the stream sides and here the organic carbon content of the organic layer is lowest in comparison with other sites. as total nitrogen is very low as well, resulting c/n ratio is comparatively wide. soil acidity is even lower than in the podzol sites and increases little with depth (fig. 8 b). 100 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees next to the streams (e.g. alongside tsierromjohka) and in very poorly-drained or waterlogged depressions, small grass bogs (with percolating water) developed (cf. figs. 3 and 4). the largest is about 500 m2. small sedge stands dominated by carex rostrata occur with eriophorum angustifolium, carex brunescens and calamagrostis stricta admixed. also represented are scattered plants of equisetum palustre, andromeda polyfolia and potentilla palustris. in addition, bryophytes such as sphagnum teres, mnium pseudopunctatum, warnstorfia exannulata and paludella squarrosa are characteristic of such sites. the mosses cover up to 100%. betula nana, salix species and also betula czerepanovii are found at very low densities at the rim of the bogs, the latter usually on slightly convex sites. as in the other poorly and very poorly drained places, ph is not extremely low (very strongly acid) compared to the podzol sites (ultra to extremely acid, fig. 7 c). soil moisture is significantly higher than in troughs between the hummocks and in willow shrub (fig. 6, type g). the organic layer is up to 30 cm, locally even up to 60 cm deep. in many cases it has built up above a continuous stony layer. the degree of decomposition and the amount of un-decomposed plants vary in the different layers and do not show a regular decrease or increase with depth. the same holds true for organic carbon content, total nitrogen, c/n ratio, and ph (fig. 8c). at the bog edges and also in other wet places within the valleys, mountain birch seedlings may be numerous, if not suppressed by dense dwarf shrub vegetation (cf. holtmeier et al. 2003). nevertheless, many birch seedlings were found also in some dense willow stands (anschlag 2002, 2006). birch seedlings occur at high densities also in periodically flooded sites. however, survival rate is very low as can be concluded from the absence of older young growth. discussion the choice “natural drainage classes” combined with soil types, soil moisture and vegetation proved to be an appropriate tool for characterizing site conditions (site types). in the treeline ecotone on the northwest-facing slope of rodjanoaivi, six significantly different spatial-ecological units, characterized by a combination of natural drainage classes (schoeneberger et al. 2002), soils and vegetation, can be grouped along the topographic gradient from excessively-drained convex topography to very poorly drained concave topography. fig. 9 provides a visualized synthesis. extremely wind-eroded sites and lichen-dominated dwarf shrub-heath are at the dry end of the transect, while grass bogs are at the wet end. soil moisture data (cf. fig. 6) closely correspond to the natural drainage classes. however, instead of following a steady gradient, soil moisture increases abruptly from the distal end of the foot zone towards the valley floor thus demarcating the two main spatial ecological units (cf. figs. 7, 8 and 9). that limit is also reflected in an abrupt change in soil acidity from about ph 3 on the podzol sites to about ph 4 and above on the valley floor sites (see below). this great difference in ph between the “dry” sites and the poorly drained sites (stream sides, bogs, and “wet hummocks”) indicates different ecological properties, for example a higher base saturation in the valley floor sites compared to the surrounding areas. higher base saturation might be explained in terms of translocation of ca and mg by seepage from excessively and somewhat excessively drained convex to poorly and very poorly drained valley sites. by contrast, the vegetational aspect changes little from the foot zone towards the hummock areas on the valley floor (cf. fig. 9), and does not reflect the abrupt change in soil moisture conditions and soil acidity. more distinct vegetation limits, reflecting different soil moisture conditions, occur between organic-hummock areas on the valley floors and the stream sides and between valley floors and grass bogs, the latter restricted to the wettest, poorly drained or waterlogged depressions. they are characterized by plant communities of the scheuchzerio-caricetea nigrae (drees 2004) and they can be classified as low-moor bogs (schoeneberger et al. 1998). the most conspicuous vegetation limits occur where contrasts in wind velocity, snow depth and soil temperature are strongest: i.e. between wind-swept and wind-eroded convex topography (tops) and the more wind-sheltered snow-rich areas including the leeward slopes of convex topography (low ridges, interfluves) and upper valley sides (cf. fig. 9). soil temperatures vary most on wind-eroded convex terrains and in summer due to low heat conductivity of excessively drained sandy-skeletal substrate and lacking litter layer and/ or humus-rich topsoil (cf. broll 2000; holtmeier 2003; holtmeier et al. 2003; holtmeier et al. 2004) whereas the other more wind-protected and moister sites with a closed fennia 185: 2 (2007) 101landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… fig. 9. visualized synthesis of topography-dependent spatial-ecological units (site conditions, vegetation types, soils, and drainage classes) in the treeline ecotone. vegetation cover show relatively smooth temperature amplitudes. the contrasts between microclimates and soil moisture conditions of wind-swept convex topography and wind-sheltered leeward slopes, valleys and other depressions probably became more pronounced after the decline of the upper mountain birch forest and resulting downslope advance of the alpine zone in most parts of the study area (holtmeier 2005a; holtmeier & broll 2006). consequently, the intensity of wind erosion and the extent of deflation areas have considerably in102 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees creased. on wind-eroded topography, soil moisture became more dependent on actual precipitation and thus varies rapidly often causing moisture stress to the plants. the differences in birch-seedling densities correspond to these changes in the vegetational aspect. this holds also true for the chance of being invaded by birch in foreseeable future. extremely low birch-seedling densities or even lack of birch seedlings can be primarily attributed either to lack of soil moisture, nutrients and reindeer damage or to waterlogged conditions, while in the well drained to poorly drained sections of the transect (landscape units) competition with closed dwarf shrub communities occurs to be the main factor responsible for only sporadic seedling establishment. on the streamsides (poorly drained conditions), chance of being invaded by birch is low because of intermittent flooding despite high seedling densities. the many deflation sites and great intensity of wind erosion are due mainly to the high susceptibility of the sandy substrate to wind erosion. in subarctic finland, wind erosion (aeolian activity) is quite common in sandy areas (e.g., seppälä 1995, 2004; tikkanen & heikkinen 1995; käyhkö et al. 1999a, b). wind erosion had probably begun about 4800 years bp (seppälä 1995). in the rodjanoaivi study area, however, the onset of wind erosion below the present altitudinal tree limit seems to be younger as is evidenced by the eroded podzols and also by the peat layers that were still accumulating at these sites about 700–1300 years ago and the wood residues indicating (open) birch stands that still existed in many present treeless wind-eroded places 350–150 years bp or even longer (holtmeier & broll 2006). thus, wind erosion on rodjanoaivi occurred rather late during the “latest episode of aeolian activity” (onset at ad 1100–1650) as suggested by käyhkö et al. (1999a) for inland dunes in northern fennoscandia. winderosion is still active in the present treeline ecotone and in the former forested zone above. consequently, the area of exposed mineral substrate is expanding as has also been observed on mountains about 30 km northeast of rodjanoaivi (cf. holtmeier et al. 2003; holtmeier et al. 2004). in finnmark (northern norway), evans (1995) has estimated a lowering of the surface by one to three millimetres per year due to deflation. käyhkö (2007) found the deflation rate in some dune blowout basins in northern finland to be even 9 mm per year on a decadal basis. these dune blow-outs are the most active deflation areas in lapland. in modern times, excessive overgrazing (holtmeier 1974, 2005b; kumpula & nieminen 1992; ok sanen et al. 1995; burgess 1999; helle 2001) trampling and also reindeer wallowing (in peat remains) have enhanced wind erosion (cf. holtmeier 2003, 2005a; holtmeier et al. 2004). similar observations were made in the southern swedish scandes (kullman 2005). podzols are the most common soils in the treeline ecotone except for grass bogs and organic hummocks. jauhiainen (1969) considers “subalpine” podzols as a relic of a warmer period (5000–3000 bp), when the treeline was about 150–200 m higher than at present (aas & faarlund 2001). indeed, the rotten root stocks and other wooden residuals found in many present treeless sites provide evidence of former forests, particularly when taking into account that many trees have decayed without leaving any visible remains (cf. holtmeier & broll 2006). the very shallow podzols on well-drained and wind-exposed convex topography, at present covered with mat-like growing dwarf shrub-lichen heath, are common also to other areas in northern fennoscandia where permeable glacial till covers acidic bedrock (e.g., meier et al. 2005). however, the current vegetation (see above) is very probably different from the vegetation that existed when the podzols developed. more humid climatic conditions might have favoured podzolisation at excessively to somewhat excessively drained sites. it may be speculated that in the treeline ecotone on rodjanoaivi, podzolisation on wind-swept topography is likely to have been more intensive before the open birch stands declined. these stands would have trapped blowing snow (cf. also for holmgren & tjus 1996) thus increasing soil moisture (holtmeier 2005a). very likely, soil moisture was not only higher but also less variable than at present. on the other hand, however, lower transpiration might have compensated for the reduced melt water supply. however, podzolisation is going on also at present where dwarf shrub-lichen heath on a permeable substrate ensure low ph values (broll 2000). at all sites, organic carbon ranges between 40% and 50% in the litter layer, except for the grasscovered stream sides, where it is below 40% (topsoil) because almost no litter accumulates. total nitrogen is mostly above 1%. lower nitrogen (< 1%) content was measured on windswept convex topography and at the streamside sites (topsoil). soil acidity is generally higher in the podzol fennia 185: 2 (2007) 103landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… sites (excessively, well to moderately drained and somewhat poorly drained sites) than in the wetter sites (grass-covered stream sides, grass bogs, “wet hummocks”) below. in the hummock areas within the valleys, shallow depressions and in the footzone of convex topography, long-lying winter snow, lateral seepage and near-surface water tables will ensure a permanent moisture supply. moreover, the vegetation here is generally more productive than on dry (excessively drained and well-drained) convex topography. these conditions have favoured podsolization of minerogenic hummocks, except for poorly drained sites. podzolation of “dry” hummock soils must have been completed before the hummocks became cryoturbated, maybe during the little ice age (van vliet-lanoë & seppälä 2002) or earlier. the troughs of the “dry” hummocks are partly covered by shallow peat layers where intermittent runoff has not prevented accumulation of plant residues. the usually deep organic horizon on “wet” (mineral and organic) hummocks in the poorly drained places is likely to have accumulated at higher soil moisture than at present. besides climatic change or change of the drainage system (pattern) increased accumulation of blowing snow from the previously forested low ridges and interfluves in valley and other depressions may have enhanced soil moisture increase (holtmeier 2005a; holtmeier & broll 2006). conclusions in general, heat deficiency is the main factor controlling plant growth and many other biological processes in the subarctic. in the present study area, i. e. at the local scale, however, the highly varying local topography is the key factor controlling drainage (run-off, seepage), vegetation, soils, local climates (microclimates), and also reindeer grazing in the treeline ecotone resulting in marked landscape patchiness. site quality (e.g., soil moisture conditions, soil acidity, soil types, snow cover, relative wind velocities, etc.) can almost be deduced from the topographic position. the present situation (e.g., wind-erosion, topographically-controlled relocation of snow and its effects on soil moisture distribution), however, can be explained only by including the past (historical) combined effects of climate, occasional mass outbreaks of the autumnal moth (epirrita autumnata) and over-grazing by reindeer (in modern times) on the mountain birch forest. the landscape mosaic may have a lasting effect on treeline dynamics. topographically-controlled distribution of soil moisture, wind velocity and relocation of snow and resultant effects override the influence of the regional thermal conditions (see also kullman 2005). local topography will not radically change in the near future. the effects of local topography on site mosaic and ecological conditions will override the influence of rising temperature. under warmer and drier conditions local topography is likely to influence site conditions in a way different from its effects in a warmer and more humid climate (holtmeier & broll 2005). the results of the present local study may be applied to other subarctic treeline areas characterized by similar geomorphology and substrates (sandy-skeletal basal till) and thus allow – cum grano salis – upscaling of the relationships between topography, drainage classes and resulting ecological conditions identified on rodjanoaivi, for example by interpretation of topographic maps, air photos or satellite imagery. acknowledgements we wish to publish this paper at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the kevo subarctic research station. our thanks go to the german research foundation (deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft) for supporting our research in lapland and to labiat (eu) committee for funding field work in 2002 and 2003. also, we want to thank dr. seppo neuvonen and mrs. m.sc. saini heino (kevo subartic research institute, university of turku) for practical help in organizing our field work and prof. dr. marja-liisa räisänen (geological survey of finland, university of kuopio) for many good discussions. not last we want to thank prof. dr. robert m. m. crawford (university of st. andrews, scotland) and two anonymous referees who revised the manuscript. moreover, we are grateful to the technicians of the laboratory (ispa, university of vechta) for doing the soil analyses and mr walter fangmann (also ispa, vechta) for drawing the map. references aas b & t faarlund (2001). the holocene history of the nordic mountain birch belt. in wielgolaski fe (ed). nordic mountain birch ecosystems. man and biosphere series 27, 5–22. 104 fennia 185: 2 (2007)g. broll, f.-k. holtmeier, k. anschlag, h.-j. brauckmann, s. wald and b. drees anschlag k (2002). bodenfeuchteverteilung in abhängigkeit von vegetationstypen im waldgrenzökoton am rodjanoaivi (finnisch-lappland). diploma thesis. 52 p. institute of landscape ecology, university of muenster, muenster. anschlag k (2006). regeneration der fjellbirke (betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii) und wurzelsysteme ihres jungwuchses im waldgrenzökoton, finnische subarktis. phd thesis. 133 p. fachbereich geowissenschaften der mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen fakultät, university of muenster, muenster. autio j & o heikkinen (2002). the climate of northern finland. fennia 180: 1–2, 61–66. braun-blanquet j (1964). pflanzensoziologie. 3rd ed. 865 p. springer verlag, wien. broll g (1994). influence of the soil mosaic on biodiversity at heath sites in the european subarctic. transactions 15th world congress of soil science (mexico) 14a, 220–231. broll g (2000). influence of over grazing by reindeer on soil organic matter and soil microclimate of well-drained soils in the finnish subarctic. in lal r, jm kimble & ba stewart (eds). global climate change and cold regions ecosystems. advances in soil science, 163–172. crc press, boca raton, florida. broll g & f-k holtmeier (1994). die entwicklung von kleinreliefstrukturen im waldgrenzökoton der front range (colorado, usa) unter dem einfluß leewärts wandernder ablegergruppen (picea engelmannii und abies lasiocarpa). erdkunde 48, 48–59. burgess p (1999). human environmental interactions in upper lapland, finland. arctic centre reports 27. 80 p. daniels fja (1982). vegetation of the angmagssalik district, southeast greenland, iv shrub, dwarf shrub and terricolous lichens. meddr. grønland. bioscience 10. 78 p. drebs a, a nordlund, p karlsson, j helminen & p rissanen (2002). climatological statistics of finland 1971–2000. 99 p. finnish meteorological institute, helsinki. drees b (2004). vegetationskundliche charakterisierung von standorttypen im waldgrenzökoton im nördlichen finnisch lappland. diploma thesis. 75 p. institute of landscape ecology, university of muenster, muenster. evans r (1995). impacts of reindeer grazing on soils and vegetation in finnmark. norut informasjons teknologi, rapport 2033/2-94. forman rtt (1995). land mosaics. the ecology of landscapes and regions. 632 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. haapasaari m (1988). the oligotrophic heath vegetation of northern fennoscandia and its zonation. acta botanica fennica 135, 1–219. helle t (2001). mountain birch forests and reindeer husbandry. in wielgolaski fe (ed). nordic mountain birch ecosystems. man and biosphere series 27, 279–291. hjort j (2006). environmental factors affecting the occurrence of periglacial landforms in finnish lapland: a numerical approach. phd thesis. 162 p. shaker verlag, aachen. holmgren b & m tjus (1996). summer air temperature and tree line dynamics at abisko. in karlsson ps & tv callaghan (eds). plant ecology in the subarctic swedish lapland. ecological bulletin 45, 1959–1969. holtmeier f-k (1974). geoökologische beobachtungen und studien an der subarktischen und alpinen waldgrenze in vergleichender sicht (nördliches fennoskandien/zentralalpen). erdwissenschaftliche forschung viii. 130 p. mainz. holtmeier f-k (2003). mountain timberlines. ecology, patchiness, and dynamics. advances in global change research 14. 369 p. holtmeier f-k (2005a). relocation of snow and its effects in the treeline ecotone – with special regard to the rocky mountains, the alps and northern europe. die erde 136: 4, 343–373. holtmeier f-k (2005b). change in the timberline ecotone in northern finnish lapland during the last thirty years. report kevo subarctic research station 23, 97–113. holtmeier f-k & g broll (2005). sensitivity and response of northern hemisphere altitudinal and polar treelines to environmental change at landscape and local scales. global ecology and biogeography 14, 395–410. holtmeier f-k & g broll (2006). radiocarbon-dated peat and wood remains from the finnish subarctic – evidence of treeline and landscape history. the holocene 16: 5, 743–751. holtmeier f-k, g broll, a müterthies & k anschlag (2003). regeneration of trees in the treeline ecotone: northern finnish lapland. fennia 181: 2, 103–128. holtmeier f-k, g broll & k anschlag (2004). winderosion und ihre folgen im waldgrenzbereich einiger nordfinnischer fjelle. geoöko 25, 203– 224. jauhiainen e (1969). on soil in the boreal coniferous region. fennia 98: 5, 1–123. käyhkö j (2007). aeolian blowout dynamics in subarctic lapland based on decadal levelling investigations. geografiska annaler 89a: 1, 65–81. käyhkö j, p worsley, p pye & ml clarke (1999a). a revised chronology for aeolian activity in subarctic fennoscandia during the holocene. the holocene 9: 2, 195–205. käyhkö j, a vuorela, k pye & p worsley (1999b). landsat tm mapping of evidence for current wind activity in northern fennoscandia. international journal of remote sensing 20: 2, 421–443. korsman k, t koistinen, j kohonen, m wennerström, e ekdahl, m honkamo, h idman & y pekkala (eds) (1997). suomen kallioperäkartta – berggrundskarta over finland – bedrock map of finland 1: 1 000 000. geological survey of finland, espoo. fennia 185: 2 (2007) 105landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi… kullman l (2005). wind-conditioned 20th century decline of birch treeline vegetation in the swedish scandes. arctic 58: 3, 286–294. kumpula j & m nieminen (1992). the inventory of reindeer pastures in finland by satellite imagery. in tikkanen e, m varmola & t katermaa (eds). extended abstracts. symposium on the state of the environment and environmental monitoring in northern fennoscandia and kola peninsula, 6–8 october, 294–296. rovaniemi. lozán jl & h kausch (1998). angewandte statistik für naturwissenschaftler. 287 p. parey, berlin. luoto m & m seppälä (2002). characteristics of earth hummocks (pounus) with and without permafrost in finnish lapland. geografiska annaler 84a: 2, 127–136. meier k-d, d thannheiser, j wehberg & v eisenmann (2005). soils and nutrients in northern mountain birch forests: a case study from finnmarksvidda, northern norway. in wielgolaski fe (ed). plant ecology, herbivory, and human impact in nordic mountain birch forests. ecological studies 180, 19–32. oksanen l, j moen & t helle (1995). timberline patterns in northernmost fennoscandia. relative importance of climate and grazing. acta botanica fennica 153, 93–107. oksanen l & r virtanen (1995). topographic, altitudinal and regional patterns in continental and suboceanic heath vegetation of northern fennoscandia. acta botanica fennica 153: 92–105. schoeneberger pj, da wysocki & cg olson (1998). glossary of landform and geologic terms. part 629 (version 3.0) of the national soil survey handbook september 1998. schoeneberger pj, da wysocki, ec benham & wd broderson (eds) (2002). field book for describing and sampling soils. version 2.0. natural resources conservation service, national survey center, lincoln, ne. seppälä m (1995). deflation and redisposition of sand dunes in finnish lapland. quarternary science review 14, 799–809. seppälä m (1997). distribution of permafrost in finland. bulletin of the geological society of finland 69, 87–96. seppälä m (1998). new permafrost formed in peat hummocks (pounus), finnish lapland. permafrost and periglacial processes 9: 4, 367–373. seppälä m (2004). wind as a geomorphic agent in cold climates. studies in polar research. 358 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. seppälä m & j rastas (1980). vegetation map of northernmost finland with special reference to subarctic forest limits and natural hazards. fennia 158, 41–61. sparks dl, al page, pa helmke, rh loeepert, pn soltanpour, ma tabatabai, ct johnston & me summer (eds) (1996). methods of soil analyses, part 3, chemical methods. soil science society of america book series 5, soil science society of america, american society of agronomy, madison, wisconsin. tikkanen m & o heikkinen (1995). aeolian landforms and processes in the timberline region of northern finnish lapland. prace geograficzne 98, 67–90. van vliet-lanoë b & m seppälä (2002). stratigraphy, age and formation of peaty earth hummocks (pounus), finnish-lapland. the holocene 12: 2, 187– 199. wald s (2004). die böden im standortmosaik oberhalb des birkenwaldes auf nordfinnischen fjellen (utsjoki, finnisch-lappland). diploma thesis. 106 p. institute of landscape ecology, university of muenster, muenster. westhoff v & e van der maarel (1973). the braunblanquet approach. in handbook of vegetation science. ordination and classification of communities, junk, den hague. yli-halla m & dl mokma (1998). soil temperature regimes in finland. agricultural and food science in finland 7, 507–512. distance between home and workplace as a factor for job satisfaction in the north-west russian oil industry mattias spies spies, mattias (2006). distance between home and workplace as a factor for job satisfaction in the north-west russian oil industry. fennia 184: 2, pp. 133–149. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper investigates in a combined theoretical and empirical approach the interrelatedness of job satisfaction and distance between home and workplace under long-distance commuting conditions. after discussing the concepts of long-distance commuting and job satisfaction on a theoretical level, the focus is on the situation of employees working in russia’s oil industry. the empirical analysis is based on questionnaire data from a survey that captures employees’ experiences in an oil company, which operates in the komi republic and nenets autonomous district. the paper reveals factors influencing the perception of and dealing with commuting distances reaching up to several thousand kilometres. the influence of differences in the organisation and length of shifts and in the compensation for travel expenses is analysed in detail. ultimately, the goal of this research is to find out whether or not commuting distances face upper constraints concerning employees’ job satisfaction and to discuss potential implications for developments in remote areas. the results show that growing commuting distance does not necessarily cause lower job satisfaction. instead, a more important factor in this respect is the organisation of long-distance commuting in a way that meets the understanding and needs of the involved employees and gives room for individual coping strategies. mattias spies, department of geography, university of joensuu, po box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: mattias.spies@joensuu.fi. ms received 1 december 2006. introduction distance is a shaping feature of the russian north, as well as of most other remote parts of the world. it is usually viewed as imposing costs and having frictional effects on economic activities and hence, necessitates efficient coping strategies. these preconditions have led to the development of long-distance commuting as an important element of natural resources exploitation in remote areas around the world. the distances that the employees cover during the journeys between their home and workplace make daily commuting unfeasible. on-site accommodation and compact work-schedules characterise workers’ everyday experience on duty, while long resting periods at home after the end of each work turn act as highly regarded rewards. distances of several thousand kilometres and even commuting between different continents are reasonable within this setting. long-distance commuting is widely applied and has social, political and economic consequences for the employees and their families, companies and communities. there is, however, surprisingly little concrete research done attempting to unravel the underlying structures and patterns of interrelated factors (storey 2001b). storey (2001b) argues that studies on long-distance commuting involve too many assumptions and hypotheses, but too few supporting (or rejecting) proofs based on primary field research. one frequently presented assumption is a generally high job satisfaction among long-distance commuters, usually explained with financial incentives and abundant free time (for example houghton 1993; tykkyläinen 1996). however, the concept of job satisfaction includes various other factors that raise the question if these 134 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies two motives alone are conclusive for understanding such a complex matter. this article attempts to unravel the influence of one very particular and inherently geographical aspect of long-distance commuting affecting the job satisfaction of employees: distance. other potentially influencing factors, such as development disparities in the home regions of the employees and different living conditions, are not considered. the argumentation is based on a survey among employees of a russian oil company working on a remote production site in the nenets autonomous district. within an increasingly intensive discussion on the real costs of the soviet policy for populating the north with a large and permanent population, long-distance commuting, or the vakhtovyi method in russian, is considered a promising and efficient alternative. the russian experience of labour mobility is thus worth a thorough examination, with an additional look on the meaning of distance in the russian context of a vast geographical territory. this paper introduces an example for the application of the vakhtovyi method in russia. it aims to contribute to a better overall understanding of long-distance commuting by providing wellfounded knowledge on underlying factors based on a combined theoretical and empirical approach. research question when commuting distance covers several thousand kilometres, the issue cannot be addressed in the same way as in traditional daily mobility behaviour. does distance actually matter at all regarding the employees’ choices of employment and perception of their work situation? employment opportunity and job accessibility seem to be independent from the spatial connectedness of home and workplace. on the other hand, tykkyläinen (1996) has demonstrated strong attachments of long-distance commuters to their home environments and showed that home atmosphere and lifestyle cannot be transferred to other places. therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the degree of remoteness and separation from the home environment influences the subjective perceptions of long-distance commuters. long physical distance narrows down the possibility of returning home by complicating journey arrangements and increasing travel time. therefore, one has to understand not only the absolute space but also relative or individually perceived views on distance (janelle 2001). the rationale of this paper is to unravel whether distance between home and workplace is an important element of job satisfaction in long-distance commuting and furthermore, if it can be extended without facing upper constraints? case study and data this study is based on a survey conducted among the employees of the zao severtek oil company in late 2004. the firm was established in 1996 to exploit oil deposits in the tundra of the komi republic and the nenets autonomous district, northwest from usinsk. it was originally owned in equal shares by two oil companies, the russian lukoil and the finnish fortum. however, since autumn 2005, lukoil has been the sole owner of severtek. the construction of all production facilities was completed in summer 2005 and full production was achieved shortly after. the total oil reserves of severtek are estimated at 30–40 million tons and an annual yield of 2.5 million tons is targeted. the oil is transported via a company-owned pipeline east to the kharyaga terminal and from there to the markets via pipelines owned by lukoil and transneft (fig. 1). possible shortages in the pipeline transportation may cause reduction in overall future oil production of severtek and hence, may turn out to be a serious problem for the enterprise (hanna 2004). the main production facilities of severtek are currently at and around the south shapkino oil field. at south shapkino, there are laboratories, a processing plant for enhancing the quality of the produced oil, a heliport and the accommodation buildings for the employees. in november 2004, severtek had a staff of 589 individuals, 320 of which were workers. a significant part (166) lives in the usinsk region; five live in moscow and the majority (418) come from other regions of russia (severtek 2004). accordingly, most employees commute to usinsk for their work duties. table 1 summarises some personal information on the employees. the workforce is dominantly male, rather work-experienced and lives with a partner, usually with children. the majority of the employees are flown from usinsk to the south shapkino oil field and are accommodated there for their work period. nearly all of the 320 workers and part of the administration and research staff work at the field in two shifts. the usual rotation is 15/15 (15 days work fennia 184: 2 (2006) 135distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … fig. 1. map of research area. each between seven o’clock in the morning and the evening. the average income of 867 usd per month (an average of the first nine months of 2004) is comparably high in russian standards (severtek 2004). the main difference in the management of ordinary workers and highly skilled employees is the way in which travel expenses are refunded. while the workers have to cover the travel expenses from home to the head office in usinsk by themselves, the costs of highly skilled employees are covered by the company. this is explained by the shortage of educated specialists in the russian oil and gas industry (naskova 2004). the accommodation complex at south shapkino is new and modern. all facilities have been constructed since 2001 and are designed to offer a table 1. personal information on employees. average age 38 years sex ■  male ■  female 94% 6% family status ■  are married /cohabitating ■  have children 83% 77% former work experience ■  in another oil company ■  with long-distance commuting 61% 65% period followed by 15 days resting at home) but can be extended to 30/30 if the employees of two subsequent shifts agree on it. at the oil field, the work is organised into two daily shifts of 12 hours, 136 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies large variety of amenities. it can be reached by helicopter from usinsk in about 75 minutes the year round, or by vehicles along winter roads over frozen rivers and tundra. however, harsh climate and location in the far north are inevitably limiting the comfort. construction and maintenance of the infrastructure is demanding and expensive, and space in the complex is therefore rather limited. the complex is designed to host a maximum of 250 people. some dormitory rooms are designed for two occupants but most employees have to share rooms of approximately 10 m2 with three other individuals (at any given time, two of the four employees will be working their shift). the employees are provided with free food, primary health care and laundry services. leisure time possibilities are mostly limited to indoor activities (tv, fitness room, table tennis etc.) due to climatic constrains in winter, and few opportunities in the tundra during summer. strict intern security regulations (for alcohol use, contact with reindeer herders etc.) are further limiting personal freedom and decision-making. therefore, workers’ life is strongly characterised by 12 hours of work and subsequent sleeping time. the survey among severtek’s employees reported in this paper aimed at reaching all staff working at the oil field in south shapkino. a self-administered questionnaire in russian language was disseminated to all present employees of two subsequent rotational shifts, of about 220 members each. of these 440 subjects, 357 responded and returned the filled-in questionnaire. limitations the main limitation of the study is that the data was collected from one company only. therefore, it is justified to come to conclusions on the meaning of distance in long-distance commuting for the employees of severtek only. any attempt for conclusions on a wider scope has to keep this precondition in mind. nevertheless, it seems reasonable to allow some degree of generalisation from this case study due to the similar working arrangements and conditions in other oil and gas companies in the russian north. it is difficult to estimate to what extent the findings suit to other regions of the world with longdistance commuting. although the common trend in long-distance commuting research is to transfer findings from one context to another, this is criticised by storey (2001b). the mere size of russia constitutes a unique environment for long-distance commuters. both distribution and collection of the questionnaires was done with the help of severtek. there is hence a possibility of bias in the data, as some employees may have felt uncomfortable to express their genuine feelings and opinions. however, no direct indication of biased answers was found in the data analyses. theoretical background long-distance commuting long-distance commuting (ldc) is a concept of workforce organisation and recruitment that is widely applied in the oil, gas and mining industries, as well as in all other industrial activities that take place in remote areas without sufficient local supply of labour and that lack the potential to attract labour to move in permanently. ldc is defined by hobart (1979: 2) as “…all employment in which the work place is so isolated from the worker’s homes that food and lodging accommodation are provided for them at the work site and schedules are established whereby employees spend a fixed number of days working at the site, followed by a fixed number of rest days at home. the expectation is that the employees will work an indefinite number of work and home rotation cycles.” most commonly, the travelling between home and work place is organised by air, often referred to as flyin/fly-out. commuting distance, transportation systems, work schedule details, on-site accommodation and other factors can vary significantly between different long-distance commuting operations and it is hence difficult to find one accurate generic descriptive definition (shrimpton 1994). for example, shift lengths can vary from a few days to several weeks or even months. what defines the concept and distinguishes it from traditional forms of labour organisation is the unambiguous spatial and temporal separation between the employees’ home and workplace. based on this intermittent principle, the spatial range of available employment opportunities is extended widely for both employees and employers (houghton 1993). therefore, this form of commuting is used by various employers and industries located in regions with insufficient labour pools, thus giving access to distant labour markets. on a grand scale, long-distance commuting was first developed and applied in the offshore oil infennia 184: 2 (2006) 137distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … dustry in the gulf of mexico after the world war ii (storey 2001a; the chamber of minerals and energy western australia 2005). ldc has since developed further and spread around the world. a frequent use of onshore long-distance commuting operation started in canada and australia in the 1970s, in many cases replacing the traditional establishment of mining towns at newly opened mining sites. ever since, ldc has become more and more common, a process that is very likely to continue (storey 2001b). there are several reasons for the growth of longdistance commuting around the world. one reason is the unbalanced spatial distribution of population and natural resources (storey & shrimpton 1989). building mining towns at remote places is not sufficient anymore. the decline in the number of remote resource towns in favour of long-distance commuting is based on three principal reasons. first, long-distance commuting is often more cost-effective than the construction of resource towns, allowing capital savings (costa 2004). especially front-end costs are drastically reduced and replaced by more evenly-distributed investments in transportation (houghton 1993). additionally, as demonstrated by tykkyläinen (1996), longer working hours and leaner organisation structures are common in long-distance commuting operations reducing over-all costs in spite of higher transportation expenditures. second, the progress has been strongly influenced by rapid technology development. reliable and cheap transportation and communication technology are essential for establishing long-distance commuting operations (tykkyläinen 1996). in addition, technological development in the mining industry works in favour of long-distance commuting. increased automation and replacement of human labour by machinery reduce the need of labour force, which in turn leads to lower transportation costs. third, workers’ preferences have changed. the majority of mining workers are no longer willing to move to remote places in order to work in a mine (storey & shrimpton 1989; tykkyläinen 1996). this is the case especially for employees with a partner and family. due to the higher standard of living in urban regions, including better infrastructure, health and education facilities and a wide spectrum of recreational possibilities, the workers and their families are unwilling to accommodate to the spartan life style of the resource towns. unstable commodity prices, a trend towards smallerscale operations and stricter regulations for environmental and social planning in the mining sector also support long-distance commuting. consequently, there is no reason to believe that this trend in remote areas would change in the near future. what are the political, social and economic impacts of this development? conflicting messages have been given by the different stakeholders involved and it is difficult to judge the overall sustainability of long-distance commuting (heiler & pickersgill 2001; costa 2004). the implications can be divided into three groups: first, the organisation of work differs from a normal work situation including special arrangements on working schedules, transportation issues, accommodation and other practical aspects in order to ensure a smooth production process. consequently, facets of working life normally not in the scope of management have to be handled regularly (storey & shrimpton 1989). the maintenance of a harmonious working and living atmosphere among people living together in remote places, often with rather limited space and privacy, belongs to this category. second, long-distance commuting has implications for the employees’ well-being and family life. it is often assumed that the compact working schedule affects negatively the health and safety conditions. nevertheless, these relationships are not fully proven and understood (costa 2004). alike, the impact on families remains unclear. on one hand it is reasonable to argue that the regular partings and reunions cause stress on families and that the extensive absence of parents is problematic. on the other hand, employees do not juggle the competing interests of work and domestic responsibilities and do not have to commute several hours each day, which reduces some stress (heiler & pickersgill 2001). third, community life and regional development face new challenges in longdistance commuting settings, especially in areas with traditional village-type settlements. the long periods of absence, for example, make it difficult for residents to participate and contribute to community life. many communities also experience out-migration of inhabitants due to their improved financial position and complain that the local share of the benefits from mining activities is too narrow (storey 2001b). these implications are often related to the ‘fly-over’ problem, which leads to the exclusion of rural communities from the benefits from mining activities in their vicinity. the supply to and positive spill-over from the industry are arranged and shared between the mining site and a few, mostly metropolitan, areas from where 138 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies the mining process is organised and where most employees live. however, long-distance commuting contributes to the wealth of rural areas by enabling mining projects that would otherwise be unprofitable and by increasing employment possibilities. on a theoretical level, the implications of longdistance commuting are extensive and challenge the traditional concepts of spatial structures and behaviour. physical distance is perceived differently as it loses much of its limiting impacts on commuting activities. mobility decisions are based on distance perceptions and scales that are altered by modern communication and transportation technology (tykkyläinen 1996). more concretely, long-distance commuting changes the clear distinction between short-term mobility and permanent migration and obscures the meaning of traditional travel-to-work areas (houghton 1993; mcquaid et al. 2001). these factors indicate a changing connotation of distance. obviously, commuting under these new preconditions enables employees to cover much longer distances in travelling to and from work. it seems like spatial interaction is almost a random function of distance (tykkyläinen 1996). in addition to an absolute notion of space expressed in kilometres, also alternative concepts are relevant for the analysis of long-distance commuting. concepts like time distance and economic distance express a clearly individual or relative view on distance and help explain its changing meaning (gatrell 1983). janelle (1968) developed the concept of timespace convergence based on a relative understanding of space and shows how the effort needed to cope with distance is changing over time, for example by introducing more powerful means of transport. he concludes “…that physical points (places on the earth) are in relative motion with respect to one another…[and that] the structure of the resulting space, the frame of reference for human activities, is constantly in flux…” (janelle 2001: 15474). long-distance commuters obviously utilise the opportunities of this relativity, based on improved transport and communications technology, to overcome the friction of distance. they are extending their spatial leverage into areas that would be otherwise inaccessible. this results in growing personal extensibility (janelle 1973; adams 1995). in russia, long-distance commuting is known as the ‘vakhtovyi’, or ‘shift work’ method. its principles are similar to those in other regions and described above. the sparsely populated north with its rich natural resources represents a substantial part of the country. due to this precondition, longdistance commuting was and is an important aspect of the mining and hydrocarbon industry. ever since the planned and industrialised exploitation of riches of the north started, labour supply was a crucial question. several policies have been applied in order to ensure a sufficient potential of labour in the oft-extreme locations of natural resources extraction (bond 1985). long-distance commuting is one of the potential approaches and one that has recently attracted more attention, even though it is by no means a new concept in russia. sveshnikov (1988: 280) defines early examples of long-distance commuting as “expedition-related commuting-type settlements” that are supplied with food and other goods from supporting towns in more favourable natural conditions. armstrong (1976) refers to cases of mineral resource extraction in remote northern locations in the 1960s, which applied the ‘shift method’. today, long-distance commuting is indispensable for the industry in russia’s northern and eastern peripheries. these parts of russia have experienced significant out-migration since the dissolution of the soviet union and the subsequent mitigation or disappearance of many benefits for its inhabitants (heleniak 1999; göler 2005). an increasing awareness of the real costs of maintaining a large and permanent population at remote locations in the north, often with extreme natural conditions, and the new geo-political realities of the post-soviet period, have led to a different assessment of the value of these northern settlements (hill & gaddy 2003). today, russian officials promote long-distance commuting as a promising alternative development strategy for the north and claim that it should gradually replace permanent settlements (drobizheva 1999; walsh 2003). nevertheless, ongoing attempts to resettle voluntarily the population from russia’s peripheries to central parts of the country are facing more difficulties than expected and are often related to place attachment, as thompson (2002, 2004) and round (2005) have demonstrated. furthermore, any effort to replace permanent settlements in russia’s peripheries by long-distance commuting operations is likely to increase the fragmentation of the country between a few prospering urban areas and locations of natural resource extraction on one side and vast, ‘empty’, underdeveloped hinterlands (dienes 2002). fennia 184: 2 (2006) 139distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … long-distance commuting is currently, in spite of its potential problems, an important way of attracting people to northern workplaces due to the reasons explained above, employees’ preferences for living in the south and a lack of high skilled employees (naskova 2004; juurikkala & lazareva 2006). borisov (2004), for example, estimates that over ten percent of the workers in the oil and gas industry of the khanty-mansi autonomous district have their homes in a different region of russia and that the share of gazprom’s employees working with the vakhtovyi method will grow up to 16 percent in 2006. to conclude, present developments in russia’s peripheries and a simultaneous thrust of many natural resource extracting companies further north and east into even more remote places support the presumption that the number of long-distance commuting operations over increasing distances will continue to grow. job satisfaction and commuting research on job satisfaction is an important part of organisational behaviour and work psychology. the importance for psychological research can be evaluated from two different perspectives (spector 1997). first, from a humanitarian perspective, a fair and respectful treatment of people is worth an endeavour. job satisfaction appears here as evidence of good treatment of employees. second, from a utilitarian perspective, it is crucial that satisfaction leads to employees’ behaviour that supports the organisational functioning. a look at the theories of job satisfaction gives an impression of the problems and complexities related to the issue. according to dipboye et al. (1994), there are three different sets of important job satisfaction theories. the first is the two-factor theory. it tries to explain job satisfaction with extrinsic job factors (e.g. working conditions, salary) and intrinsic factors (e.g. responsibility and achievement). job satisfaction occurs only when the intrinsic needs are fulfilled. the second set of theories compares the level of access to an aspect with the level of actual need to access this aspect (dipboye et al. 1994). it deals with the degree of discrepancy between these two categories and defines it as the reason for satisfaction or dissatisfaction. this comparison can focus on a global level, measuring a value of overall job satisfaction. furthermore, as recently stressed, it can look only at certain aspects of the job reality and give emphasis to these facets. the third set of theories is most recently developed and applied, and focuses on the individual characters of employees and on cognitive processes that constitute job (dis)satisfaction. aspects like individual values and needs, personality traits, and the comparison of their own achievements at work with those of members of relevant social groups come to the forefront now (thierry 1998). job satisfaction is influenced by a variety of factors and is far from being the result of any straightforward causal connection between any such factors. it is always difficult to deal with, for example, feelings and attitudes. individuals tend to have their own personal point(s) of reference in the perception of their environment (iverson & maguire 2000). for freeman (1978), this is the reason why job satisfaction has not received as much attention from economists as it should have due to its importance for economic processes in organisations. the theoretical positioning is challenging. furthermore, the specification of concrete determinates and potential effects of job satisfaction are multifaceted. when dealing with an interrelationship between personality traits and situational variables (thierry 1998), it is not surprising that many factors influence job satisfaction. they can be divided into three groups: personal characteristics (e.g. age, gender, personality and traits), job-related factors (e.g., salary, job design, labour conditions and participation in decision-making), and, finally, non-work factors (e.g. life satisfaction and family situation) that are important determinants for job satisfaction. spector (1997) provides detailed information about, as he calls them, antecedents of job satisfaction. among the personal factors he stresses particularly the concept of locus of control, which is a cognitive variable representing the belief/disbelief in self-determination (spector 1997). for this study, it is necessary to connect these insights on job satisfaction to the discussion on commuting in general and long-distance commuting in particular. it is valuable to look at specific aspects of and influential factors for job satisfaction. this emphasis on partial job satisfaction (johansson 2004) justifies the in-depth look at longdistance commuting as one particular determinate of job satisfaction. due to two reasons, it is not easy to establish the link between commuting and satisfaction. first, little attention has been paid so far on commuting as a determinant of job satisfaction. in addition, when it has been done, it has usually been understood as short distance or daily commuting. 140 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies commuting studies often approach the question of job satisfaction indirectly by emphasising stress as the main factor (e.g. cassidy 1992; koslowsky et al. 1996; mclennan & bennetts 2003). nevertheless, the effects of stress are very similar to those of job satisfaction. mclennan and bennetts (2003) name job performance, health and psychological adjustment as being affected by stress and hence, also job satisfaction is certainly influenced by commuting. commuting is often referred to as a plague of modern man and generally associated with negative outcomes (koslowsky et al. 1996). distance, measured in kilometres or in time, is in this assessment of (daily) commuting one of the main determinants for stress and job satisfaction. whether this applies also to long-distance commuting or not will be considered later. some results (cassidy 1992) point to the fact that longer commutes lead to a more negative experience of commuting. the relationship between distance and stress of commuting is, again, not straightforward. johansson et al. (2003) have found that time distance has a non-linear influence on commuters’ behaviour. they show that the time sensibility is much lower for very short and very long commuting distances. however, it has to be mentioned here that long time distance is defined by the authors as beyond one hour of travelling time (johansson et al. 2003), which is, in terms of longdistance commuting as it is understood in this study, still a short distance. concurrent results are provided concerning the means of influencing and levelling the stress caused by commuting. the fact that people seek control over their journey to work can be identified as the common bottom-line for all of these measures (mclennan & bennetts 2003). impedance, a concept of perceived speed and control of travelling, is very important and every attempt to increase the level of perceived speed and control helps to abate stress (cassidy 1992). the question, whether the findings concerning daily commuting, stress and job satisfaction can be applied to long-distance commuting, cannot be answered conclusively on a theoretical level. there are few literature references concerning this issue. jenkins (1997) studied job satisfaction and longdistance commuting but he does not specifically deal with this question. neither do chen et al. (2003), who studied the determinates of perceived occupational stress among chinese offshore oil workers. the issue is taken into account only indirectly by giving a decisive importance to the journey to and from work and the isolation from communities and family. i argue that job satisfaction in long-distance commuting is most likely influenced by some of the basic factors mentioned above relating to daily commuting. the perceived level of control is believed to be one of these central aspects. employees seek a level of flexibility and control that meet their specific needs, and this matter may be compromised by long-distance commuting (heiler & pickersgill 2001). in a second assumption i hypothesise that the meaning of distance for job satisfaction and stress in long-distance commuting differs from that in daily commuting, but that it still impacts the perceived level of control. this appears to be especially valid if the subjective perceptions of individuals are considered. it seems likely that a several thousand-kilometre distance between home and workplace could lead to a strong feeling of helplessness, i.e. lack of control. does distance matter? approach to the analysis in the analysis, physical distance is given in kilometres, as other forms of distance, such as travelling time or economic cost were not readily available. the use of physical distance has the advantage of being consistent and containing implicit information on relative concepts of distance considered in the analysis and interpretation. the distance values are based on the estimations given by the employees. it is assumed that they have sufficient knowledge of the distance they cover during their journeys to and from work. some employees, however, referred to severtek’s headquarter in usinsk when specifying the distance between home and workplace (see, for example, the minimum value of two kilometres in table 2), while others referred to the accommodation complex at south shapkino. estimation errors and different associations with the term ‘workplace’ lead to slightly distorted data. nevertheless, the setting of this research does not require absolutely precise distance values and their impact can be considered secondary if compared with the total range of values. of the total 357 returned questionnaires, 306 had valid distance values, the descriptive statistics of which are shown in table 2. the values differ significantly and they are not normally distributed. job satisfaction is measured as summated scales (cf. bryman & cramer 2004) of the employees’ satfennia 184: 2 (2006) 141distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … table 2. descriptive statistics distance and job satisfaction. valid n mean median standard deviation minimum maximum what is the distance between your home town/region and severtekworkplace? (km) 306 1071.26 360 1180.89 2 10000 job satisfaction (summated scale) 222 87.98 89 9.56 59 112 isfaction with 26 aspects of their work situation under long-distance commuting conditions (see fig. 2). this approach is based on the idea of partial job satisfaction (johansson 2004). therefore, from all of the aspects covered by the questionnaire i have chosen those that allow conclusions on overall job satisfaction. a wide range of intrinsic and extrinsic job aspects is covered. the respondents were asked to rate their opinion on these 26 aspects on a five point likert scale. the satisfaction values are derived from these agreement figures with the assumption that a strong agreement equals high satisfaction whereas a strong disagreement expresses compelling dissatisfaction. some answers had to be scored reversely before summing up the answers to an overall satisfaction indicator. the highest possible score of 130 (26*5) expresses very high satisfaction and 26, the lowest possible score (26*1), dissatisfaction. the use of mean values of data acquired with likert scales is controversial. nonetheless, bryman and cramer (2004) argue that most writers are prepared to treat such data as interval/ratio variables if used in summated scales. the number of cases is reduced to 222 due to missing values. the summarised outcome for the overall job satisfaction is illustrated in table 2. two approaches are chosen for testing the relationship between job satisfaction and distance between home and workplace. first, the immediate correlation between both factors is tested by calculating spearman’s correlation coefficient based on 222 valid cases. the missing normal distribution of the distance values inhibits the use of other testing methods (e.g., martens 2003). the second approach classifies the cases in three groups according to the distance between home and workplace. the distance groups (table 3 and fig. 2) are formed for cases with commuting distances up to 300 kilometres, between 300 and one thousand kilometres and for more than one thousand kilometres. the rationale behind these threshold values is based on the home place of the workers and the character of travel arrangements. the majority of employees travelling up to 300 kilometres live in the wider usinsk region. accordingly, their journey is comparatively unproblematic. the second group includes employees coming mostly from other parts of the komi republic or north-west russia. within this region, traffic connections and infrastructure are rather developed and supportive for commuters, e.g. direct flights from syktyvkar to usinsk. the last group includes employees travelling more than one thousand kilometres. due to distance and/or traffic connections the commuting arrangements of these employees are time consuming and comparatively difficult to organise. the kruskal-wallis test is performed in order to analyse the average job satisfaction of these three groups. this nonparametric variance analysis assumes homogeneity among the means of different groups and is based on the ranking of the scores (eckstein 2004). significant differences between the mean values of job satisfaction exist if it is possible to reject the homogeneity hypothesis. the kruskal-wallis test measures the influence of a categorical factor on a metric variable (martens 2003). the average job satisfaction is in a strict sense not such a metric variable. therefore, a second test is applied in which the categorical factor is formed by four groups of job satisfaction and subsequently, their influence on the distance variable is analysed. the four groups are formed by following the quartiles of the distribution and indicate increasing job satisfaction. another matter of complication is the fact that the working conditions in severtek are not equal for all employees, as stated earlier. the most striking differences are the unequal repayment of travel expenses and variations in the shift’s length, which potentially influence job satisfaction and commuting distance. while dealing with the interrelationship between job satisfaction and distance, this 142 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies fig. 2. agreement with underlying factors (clustered by distance groups). fennia 184: 2 (2006) 143distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … unequal treatment possibly has an influence on the employees’ perceptions. travel costs, especially airfares, are not trivial in russia when compared to the average income. it seems reasonable to assume that employees who incur no commuting costs are happier with their jobs, especially under the conditions of long-distance commuting. the same applies to the different shift lengths. the 30/30-day rotation reduces by half the necessary monthly travel efforts because it limits the commuting to one journey into each direction instead of two in the 15/15 shifts. this saves time and money. longer shifts could function, therefore, as a tool for altering time and economic distances. based on these reasons, it is necessary to test if both aspects have an influence on the immediate connotation of distance for job satisfaction. this can be done by dividing the employees into different groups based on travel refunds and shift lengths before analysing their average job satisfaction and commuting distances. furthermore, it is informative to show if these parties are represented equally in the distance and job satisfaction groups. in the case of different travel refunds, the first group includes the white-collar management and supervisory staff. this group (n = 42) represents employees receiving refunds for their travel expenses. the second group (n = 208) includes those in severtek who are not paid for their travel efforts, that is, the blue-collar staff. in order to compare the average job satisfaction of the two groups of employees, the mann-whitney test is performed. this is the equivalent of the kruskal-wallis test for two-independent-samples and proceeds in a similar way by ranking the scores and assuming homogeneity among mean values (eckstein 2004). cross-tabulation and the calculation of the pearson chi-square reveal if the division of employees, belonging either to white or blue collar staff, across the job satisfaction and distance groups is evenly distributed or not. the same tests and procedures are applied in order to analyse the influence of different shift lengths on job satisfaction and the distance covered during journeys to and from work. at the time of employee surveying, 124 were working 15/15 rotations, while 172 employees were working 30/30 periods. research findings an analysis of the 26 underlying factors of the overall job satisfaction leads to an ambivalent outcome (fig. 2). the average agreement value of all cases for the 26 factors expresses neutral attitudes of the employees. however, some particular factors differ from the average, either negatively (for example factor 18: “my pay is adequate for my needs”) or positively (for example factor 7: “work on a rotational basis and accommodation complexes are modern ways to organise work on an oilfield”). one general trend found among the 26 factors when divided into the three distance groups is a higher satisfaction for the third group, the longest distances. in 21 of the 26 factors, this group shows the highest average satisfaction suggesting a higher job satisfaction among the employees with the longest commuting distance. this does not support the assumption that job satisfaction would decrease with growing commuting distance. further statistical testing is needed to demonstrate if this trend can indeed be confirmed, and to unravel its possible reasons. the outcome of spearman’s correlation is slightly positive (kühnel & krebs 2004) and statistically significant (0.144; p = 0.032*), indicating a higher job satisfaction rate with increasing commuting distance, and pointing to the same direction as the results from the analysis of the 26 factors above. despite the significant positive correlation between these factors, it is risky to make strict conclusions, as the positive value of the correlation coefficient is rather close to zero to indisputably indicate any major trend. the second approach of analysing the relationship between job satisfaction and commuting distance is based on the comparison of the average values of groups. at first, the mean job satisfaction is specified for the three distance groups. table 3 contains the average ranks of those groups and shows increasing figures indicating increasing commuting distance. the kruskal-wallis test indicates that the differences between the distance groups are significant by comparing the mean ranks. the homogeneity hypothesis has to be rejected and it is possible to conclude that the average job satisfaction increases significantly with the distance summarized in three groups. in order to control the results from the first comparison of mean values and kruskal-wallis test, a further reversely designed statistical approach can be applied to give additional support to these findings. table 3 shows a tendency of increasing average commuting distance within the four groups of growing job satisfaction. the significance of the differences between the four groups is even strong144 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies table 3. mean rank comparison distance and job satisfaction groups. distance groups a n mean rank of satisfaction values < 301 km (usinsk region) 102 101.75 301–1000 km (komi rep. and nw russia) 41 107.62 > 1000 km (rest of russia) 79 126.10 total 222 job satisfaction groups b n mean rank of distance values first quartile 60 111.13 second quartile 54 94.14 third quartile 56 105.47 fourth quartile 52 136.44 total 222 a differences in mean ranks are significant (χ2 = 6.59, df = 2, p = 0.037*). b differences in mean ranks are significant (χ2 = 12.39, df = 3, p = 0.006**). table 4. mean rank comparison employee groups. employee groups n mean rank job satisfaction a white-collar 28 88.95 blue-collar 157 93.72 total 185 what is the distance between your home town/region and severtek-workplace? b white-collar 42 121.68 blue-collar 208 126.27 total 250 a differences in mean ranks are not significant (u = 2084.50, z = −0.44, p = 0.663). b differences in mean ranks are not significant (u = 4207.50, z = −0.38, p = 0.706). er than in the previous analysis (also in the case where the extreme values are excluded), supporting the earlier conclusions. remarkable is the outcome of group number four representing the employees with the highest job satisfaction rates: the average commuting distance of this group is clearly higher than in other groups, stressing the positive correlation between these variables. an analysis was designed in an attempt to answer the questions of how severtek’s employees react to the unequal refunding of travel expenses and how this different treatment influences job satisfaction and commuting distance. despite the differences in benefits between white-collar and blue-collar workers, there are no significant differences in job satisfaction nor in the distances covered during the journeys to and from work (table 4). the calculation of the mann-whitney test confirms this outcome by leading to results that do not allow one to reject the homogeneity assumption. the interpretation of the results from cross-tabulating both employee groups with the four groups of job satisfaction as well as three distance groups leads to similar outcomes. the observed counts and expected counts in table 5 and the calculation of the pearson chi-square result in probability values that do not prove any significant dependency between the variables. both approaches for analysing the importance of the unequal payment of travel refunds indicate that this policy does not significantly influence job satisfaction nor the commuting distance. those who receive extra compensation for their journeys to usinsk are not automatically more satisfied with their long-distance commuting job. the financial advantage, which certainly helps to cover long distances, does not automatically lead to longer commuting distances either. differences in job satisfaction seem not to be caused by unequal travel refunds but rather by other factors not considered fennia 184: 2 (2006) 145distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … table 5. cross-tabulation employee groups * job satisfaction and distance groups. job satisfaction groups a distance groups b 1st quartile 2nd quartile 3rd quartile 4th quartile < 301 km 301–1000 km > 1000 km employee groups white collar count 7 9 9 3 19 7 16 expected count 7.9 7.1 6.7 6.4 19.3 8.7 13.9 blue collar count 45 38 35 39 96 45 67 expected count 44.1 39.9 37.3 35.6 95.7 43.3 69.1 a differences between counts and expected counts are not significant (χ2 = 3.76, df = 3, p = 0.288). b differences between counts and expected counts are not significant (χ2 = 0.79, df = 2, p = 0.675). table 6. mean rank comparison rotation groups. rotation groups n mean rank job satisfaction a 15/15 82 89.89 30/30 132 118.44 total 214 what is the distance between your home town/region and severtek-workplace? b 15/15 124 103.92 30/30 172 180.64 total 296 a differences in mean ranks are significant (u = 3968.00, z = −3.28, p = 0.001***). b differences in mean ranks are significant (u = 5136.00, z = −7.64, p = 0.000***). here. the connection between refunds for travel expenses and commuting distance is, on the other hand, too intuitive to be used to deny that it influences the results found here. it is reasonable to conclude that there are no explicit signs showing that the refunding of travel expenses, and thus economic distance, is crucial in the analysis of the relationship between job satisfaction and distance. finally, as a last approach to empirical analysis, an assessment of the connotation of different shift lengths (15/15 or 30/30 day rotations) for job satisfaction and commuting distance was performed using the same tests as above. the comparison of mean ranks for job satisfaction and commuting distance for the two groups show (table 6) considerable differences. those in severtek who are working on longer rotational shifts are more satisfied and they clearly commute over longer distances. the mann-whitney test values for these differences are highly significant. not surprisingly, the cross-tabulation (table 7) of the two rotation groups with the job satisfaction and distance groups displays a significant pattern. table 7. cross-tabulation rotation groups * job satisfaction and distance groups. job satisfaction groups a distance groups b 1st quartile 2nd quartile 3rd quartile 4th quartile < 301 km 301–1000 km > 1000 km rotation groups 15/15 count 30 23 19 10 89 27 8 expected count 23.0 18.8 20.7 19.5 59.5 23.9 40.6 30/30 count 30 26 35 41 53 30 89 expected count 37.0 30.2 33.3 31.5 82.5 33.1 56.4 a differences between counts and expected counts are significant (χ2 = 12.78, df = 3, p = 0.005**). b differences between counts and expected counts are significant (χ2 = 71.01, df = 2, p = 0.000***). 146 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies as the distribution of counts and expected counts shows, employees working on the longer 30/30 day shift are clearly over-represented in the fourth job satisfaction group and the third distance group. the 15/15 group reveals a contrary outcome and accordingly, is represented more strongly in the first job satisfaction and distance group. the pearson chi-square’s outcome confirms that this pattern is statistically significant and that the variables are dependent on each other. the comparison of the mean ranks and the cross-tabulation suggest that shift length is important for the job satisfaction and average commuting distance for the personnel of severtek. those in the company who work on the 30/30 days shift are more satisfied with their situation and their average commuting distance is clearly longer. this result could indicate a negative linear correlation between job satisfaction and commuting distance, and the cost and efforts related to it. by working shifts twice as long it is possible to reduce commuting distance and expenses by half. for that reason, working on longer shifts could be perceived as a mechanism for reducing economic and time distances. reducing these distances and simplifying the commuting process seemingly leads to higher job satisfaction. variations in shift lengths alter the perception of physical distance and the satisfaction with the work situation and long-distance commuting. conclusions and discussion the majority of the results presented here indicate a positive linear correlation between job satisfaction and commuting distance. the observed increase of job satisfaction with growing commuting distance is noticeable especially for the group containing the longest distances. the general positive correlation between theses variables is not strongly pronounced but is confirmed by comparing different groups of job satisfaction and distance levels. most of the applied tests plus the analysis of the 26 underlying factors of overall job satisfaction lead to a similar result. however, the higher job satisfaction and commuting distance of those employees who work on longer rotational shifts can be interpreted indirectly as a sign for a negative influence of increasing distance on job satisfaction, as longer shifts are one option for reducing commuting efforts. further discussion of these counter-intuitive results within the theoretical settings introduced in this paper is required to better understand the underlying factors. increasing distance between home and workplace does not lower job satisfaction inevitably. concepts like locus of control and impedance, which are used in order to explain the relations between commuting, distance and job satisfaction, point to a presumable lower job satisfaction with increasing distances but fall short of explaining the observed situation. they cannot fully explain the relationship between the variables used in this research. on the other hand, these concepts make it difficult to explain the higher job satisfaction as a causal result of increasing commuting distance. only if the control over travel arrangements, speed and costs and hence, time and economic distances, is fully independent of travel distance, it will be possible to decrease the importance of these concepts. in a real life situation, this kind of constellation seems unlikely. again, the influence of longer rotational shifts on job satisfaction as found in the analyses above supports this argumentation. therefore, it appears very reasonable that other factors influence the employees’ job satisfaction more strongly than the plain commuting distance. the differences between the 26 underlying factors for job satisfaction show which aspects could cause the higher satisfaction among the commuters with the longest commuting distance. especially factors that deal with the income and the company’s treatment of the employees show a higher satisfaction among these commuters. this suggests that the refunding of commuting expenses to the highly skilled and educated employees only is influential. these are the employees with a higher income and more prestigious position in the company. in this context, it seems possible that financial aspects and the status of employees within the firm are overruling or levelling off the influence of distance on the jobs satisfaction. however, the analysis also revealed that the employees with supposedly better job are not necessarily the more satisfied ones. furthermore, they are not the employees who commute over the longest distances. therefore, this possible explanation also fails in its reasoning for the causes of higher job satisfaction among those who commute over the longest distances. after rejecting the idea that growing commuting distance is resulting directly in higher job satisfaction and accepting that occupying higher positions does not necessarily result in higher job satisfacfennia 184: 2 (2006) 147distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … tion, the only concrete hint on how to interpret the meaning of distance under long-distance commuting conditions are the differences between rotational groups. different shift length does not change the physical distance between the employees’ homes and severtek’s oil field. however, it has an important influence on the distance covered by the employees during their journeys to and from work. when it comes to the arrangement of the commuting process and its associated costs, it appears that choosing an easy and uncomplicated way of organising long-distance commuting is important for employees. they strive for higher impedance and flexibility. by voluntarily choosing to work longer rotational shifts, they successfully apply coping strategies for overcoming time and economic distances and increase their personal extensibility. the evidently higher job satisfaction and commuting distance of those who work longer shifts is a clear indication of this. this important finding stresses the significance of an individual or relative concept of distance as opposed to an absolute understanding and provides evidence for time-space convergence. therefore, rather than the absolute number of kilometres, the individual perception and experience of commuting distance are factors influencing job satisfaction. in the analysis of the interdependence between job satisfaction and commuting distance in longdistance commuting, no general upper limit of the distance between home and workplace was found. long-distance commuting is therefore an alternative strategy for economic activities in remote locations, likewise in big countries such as russia. large physical distances, as found between the locations of remote natural resource extraction operations and places where the staff of these operations can live comfortably, are not necessarily barriers for development. more important than plain distance is the organisation of long-distance commuting operations in such a way that it meets the needs and expectations of the involved employees. the arrangement of shift lengths so that they simplify commuting efforts and lower expenses are suggested as a satisfactory and relatively easy measure to improve job satisfaction. acknowledgements this paper is an outcome of the project “does the geography of russian northern peripheries really change?” funded by the academy of finland (contract number 208149) as a part of the russia in flux programme and researcher exchange grants. i want to thank markku tykkyläinen, andrew r. bond, harley johansen, the participants of the cass 2005 course and the anonymous referees for their valuable comments. i also thank matthew sawatzky and briana egan for checking and improving the language of the manuscript. references adams pc (1995). a reconsideration of personal boundaries in space-time. annals of the association of american geographers 85: 2, 267–285. armstrong t (1976). the ‘shift method’ in the arctic. polar record 18: 114, 279–281. bond ar (1985). northern settlement family-style: labour planning and population policy in norli’sk. soviet geography 26: 1, 26–47. borisov dv (2004). vakhtovyi metod kak osobaia forma organizatsii trudovogo protsessa: na primere predpriiatii neftegazovoi promyshlennosti. phd thesis. 143 p. moskovskii gumanitarnogo universiteta. bryman a & d cramer (2004). constructing variables. in hardy m & a bryman (eds). handbook of data analysis, 17–34. sage publications, london. cassidy t (1992). commuting-related stress: consequences and implications. employee counselling today 4: 2, 15–21. chen wq, tw wong, ts yu, yz lin & cl cooper (2003). determinants of perceived occupational stress among chinese offshore oil workers. work & stress 17: 4, 287–305. costa s (2004). a review of long distance commuting: implications for northern mining communities. paper presented at the canadian institute of mining, metallurgy and petroleum conference, edmonton, may 11, 2004. 13 p. <http://www. cim.org/meetings/abstracts/s43a1725p1442_ en.pdf>. 13.11.2006. dienes l (2002). reflections on a geographic dichotomy: archipelago russia. eurasian geography and economics 43: 6, 443–458. dipboye rl, cs smith & wc howell (1994). understanding industrial and organisational psychology. an integrated approach. 660 p. harcourt brace college publishers, forth worth. drobizheva l (1999). comparison of élite groups in tatarstan, sakha, magadan, and orenburg. postsoviet affairs 15: 4, 387–406. eckstein pp (2004). angewandte statistik mit spss. praktische einführung für wirtschaftswissenschaftler. 366 p. gabler, wiesbaden. freeman rb (1978). job satisfaction as an economic variable. the american economic review 68: 2, 135–141. 148 fennia 184: 2 (2006)mattias spies gatrell ac (1983). distance and space: a geographical perspective. 195 p. clarendon, oxford. göler d (2005). rückzug aus der nördlichen peripherie? jüngere räumliche entwicklungen im hohen norden ostsibiriens und des fernen ostens – ein beitrag zur peripheren transformationsforschung. 160 p. institut für länderkunde, leipzig. hanna p (2004). acting ceo severtek. personal conversation in usinsk (russia). 3.11.2004. heiler k & r pickersgill (2001). shiftwork and rostering arrangement in the australian mining industry: an overview of key trends. australian bulletin of labour 27: 1, 20–42. heleniak t (1999). out-migration and depopulation of the russian north during the 1990s. post-soviet geography and economics 40: 3, 155–205. hill f & c gaddy (2003). the siberian curse – how soviet planners left russia out in the cold. 303 p. brookings institution press, washington, d.c. hobart cw (1979). commuting work in the canadian north: some effects on native people. in mougeot m (ed). proceedings: conference on commuting and northern development february 15 & 16 1979, 1–38. university of saskatchewan, institute for northern studies, saskatoon. houghton ds (1993). long-distance commuting: a new approach to mining in australia. the geographical journal 159: 3, 281–290. iverson rd & c maguire (2000). the relationship between job and life satisfaction: evidence from a remote mining community. human relations 53: 6, 807–839. janelle dg (1968). central place development in a time-space framework. the professional geographer 20: 1, 5–10. janelle dg (1973). measuring human extensibility in a shrinking world. the journal of geography 72: 5, 8–15. janelle dg (2001). time-space in geography. in smelser nj & pb baltes (eds). international encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences, 15746–15749. elsevier, amsterdam. jenkins r (1997). job satisfaction – its effects on safety and turnover on a fifo operation. the ausimm bulletin 1997: 4, 17–23. johansson e (2004). job satisfaction in finland – some results from the european community household panel 1996–2001. the research institute of the finnish economy (etla), discussion paper 958. 46 p. johansson b, j klaesson & m olsson (2003). commuters’ non-linear response to time distance. journal of geographical systems 5: 3, 315–329. juurikkala t & o lazareva (2006). non-wage benefits, costs of turnover, and labour attachment: evidence from russian firms. bofit discussion papers 4/2006. 25 p. koslowsky m, a aizer & m krausz (1996). stressor and personal variables in the commuting experience. international journal of manpower 17: 3, 4–14. kühnel sm & d krebs (2004). statistik für die sozialwissenschaften. grundlagen, methoden, anwendungen. 654 p. rowohlts enzyklopädie, reinbeck. martens j (2003). statistischen datenanalyse mit spss für windows. 308 p. oldenbourg, münchen. mclennan p & m bennetts (2003). the journey to work: a descriptive uk case study. facilities 21: 7/8, 180–187. mcquaid rw, m greig & j adams (2001). unemployed job seeker attitudes towards potential travel-to-work times. growth and change 32: 3, 355– 368. naskova o (2004). head of human resource department severtek. personal communication in usinsk (russia). 5.11.2004. round j (2005) rescaling russia’s geography: the challenges of depopulating the northern periphery. europe-asia studies 57: 5, 705–727. severtek (2004). information on average pay of severtek employees. 1 p. unpublished. shrimpton m (1994). rotational work systems: community and regional development implications. 93 p. institute of social and economic research offshore oil project, memorial university of newfoundland, st. john’s. spector pe (1997). job satisfaction. 96 p. sage publications, thousand oaks. storey k (2001a) fly-in/fly-out and fly-over: mining and regional development in western australia. australian geographer 32: 2, 133–148. storey k (2001b). fifo mining in australia: what do we really know about its social and economic impacts? 21 p. unpublished. storey k & m shrimpton (1989). impacts on labour of long-distance commuting employment in the canadian mining industry. institute of social and economic research, report 3. 264 p. sveshnikov vk (1988). development problems in the soviet far north. in mänty j & n pressman (eds). cities designed for winter, 275–293. building book ltd, helsinki. the chamber of minerals and energy western australia (2005). fly in / fly out: a sustainability perspective. a discussion on the triple bottom line impact of fly in / fly out operations in western australia’s resource sector. 19 p. <http://www. cmewa.com.au/userfiles/file/publications%20%20human%20resources/fifo%20report. pdf>. 13.11.2006. thierry h (1998). motivation and satisfaction. in drenth pjd, h thierry & cj de wolff (eds). handbook of work and organizational psychology, volume 4: organizational psychology, 253–289. psychology press, hove. thompson n (2002). administrative resettlement and the pursuit of economy: the case of chukotka. polar geography 26: 4, 270–288. thompson n (2004). migration and resettlement in chukotka: a research note. eurasian geography and economics 45: 1, 73–81. fennia 184: 2 (2006) 149distance between home and workplace as a factor for job … tykkyläinen m (1996). commuting with on-site accommodation in the mining industry and its effects on spatial structures. fennia 174: 2, 223– 243. walsh np (2003). russia to relocate 600,000 from frozen north. the guardian 30.5.2003. <http:// w w w. g u a r d i a n . c o . u k / i n t e r n a t i o n a l / s t o r y / 0,,966659,00.html>. 13.11.2006. cherishing the reproductive work within academia for securing emancipatory work outside academia – commentary to refstie urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa124807 doi: 10.11143/fennia.124807 reflections cherishing the reproductive work within academia for securing emancipatory work outside academia – commentary to refstie diana vela-almeida vela-almeida, d. (2022) cherishing the reproductive work within academia for securing emancipatory work outside academia – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 78–80. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 this commentary to refstie’s article for a more reflexive co-production of knowledge grounded in critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable imperatives aims to expand her critique on the role of an ethics of care in dismantling the neoliberal university. it highlights the need to build transformative practices that start in our workplaces and where reproductive labor is collectively rewarded. this can result in an inclusive space of care for one another, a conducive working environment for the radical production of knowledge and the joyful engagement in education as a truthfully transformative practice. keywords: neoliberal university, ethics of care, reproductive labor, transformative academia diana vela-almeida (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7631-9750), copernicus institute of sustainable development, utrecht university, the netherlands. e-mail: d.r.velaalmeida@uu.nl hilde refstie’s (2021) article is both an urgent and timeless invitation to push for a critical reconfiguration of research relevance in academia. her article calls for a more reflexive co-production of knowledge grounded in critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable imperatives. i have many points of conversation to make with her insightful reflections, but i will limit my reading to, what is to me, her most compelling argument: the care and responsibilities in the call for ‘doing our part’ to radically resist the neoliberal university. i choose this point of departure as it comes at a time when i feel exhausted by the never ending demands of a neoliberal academia, and perhaps skeptical on the role of current academia in shaping meaningful transformation. perhaps this is not because i lack faith in our academic work to effectively be transformative. it has to do with the fact that the neoliberalization of university has systematically alienated our possibilities to shape our worktimes, desires and priorities and instead has created the cultural and material conditions that make academia unbearably supercilious and self-absorbed. this is also a feeling overwhelmingly shared by many colleagues of mine juggling with the multiple pressures that the neoliberal university put upon us. © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7631-9750 fennia 200(1) (2022) 79diana vela-almeida i write this commentary in an effort to expand refstie’s (2021, 169) critique on creating “the right conditions” for dismantling the neoliberal university. refstie (2021, 166) references mountz and colleagues (2015) to define the neoliberal university as an “institution where logics, techniques, principles, and values from the sphere of commerce – such as competition, privatization, efficiency, and self-reliance – are applied to the university to instill productivity and excellence.” this reinforces a perverse system sustained by criteria of economic efficiency and strenuous competition that commodifies education, research, outreach and public engagement, and ultimately exacerbates processes for cooptation of radical ideas, the mainstreaming of sustainability practices and the greenwashing of solutions. refstie (2021) also argues that research relevance in the pursuit of social change is challenging and backbreaking at minimum, due to the pressure for fast research, rush deadlines and metric-oriented production that disciplines the time and space of scholars. this is indeed pernicious for young scholars – mostly experiencing temporary and precarious working environments – who navigate an arena of competition and individual self-achievement. these practices not only promote neoliberal and patriarchal notions of meritocracy and distinction, but they endure legacies of exploitation and reinforcing injustices. this is particularly harder for female scholars, indigenous scholars, people of color and scholars from the global south (collective 2019), as we navigate an academic space that tends to disfavor us and celebrates white, male and individual academic exceptionalism. neoliberal university does not protect young scholars, yet, a core principle within any university is to advance the future of its scholars. these scholars suffer heavy pressure to play with the keynotes of the dominant academic culture and the effervescent production cycle of academia. this poses serious challenges in finding the radical potential and political impact for academic work. considering this, resftie (2022, 168) claims that to resist a neoliberal university implies slowing down. her call for “more reflexive coproduction” supposes having an adequate space in research to stop, reflect, resist, address and subvert the forces that sustain power structures of subordination, as otherwise scholarship implicitly or explicitly reinforces inequality and prevents societal change. she explains that this is a call for an “ethics of care” (ibid., 166), a form of action-oriented research that engages with different publics, scrutinizes certainties, holds institutions accountable, engages in activism/advocacy and amplifies the social impact of our work for concrete political actions. while i unequivocally back her invitation, i believe research relevance is only one part of an organic continuum of our role in shaping transformative practices in academia. i am certain that she will agree with me in the need to expand the ethics of care beyond research and co-production of knowledge themselves. for example, transformative practices need to start in the places we work in. yet this has proven to be strenuous. we call for emancipatory practices outside of our own daily life spaces and routines, and advocate for radical change, while we have lost the ability of governing our own workplaces. we assign the work of transformation upon others, while feeling disenfranchised to contribute to the internal reconstitution or take part in decision-making of the places where we spent most of our weekly time. the hectic rush of the neoliberal university exhausts people and dismantles collective organization. but securing emancipatory work outside academia needs in the first place cherishing the reproductive work within academia. our academic work entails far more reproductive labor and relationships of care we might even acknowledge. the production of knowledge and education will always be a commons and the result of the labor of a large group of people building relationships of care. yet, socially reproductive labor is not collectively rewarded inside our universities. as such, not only our production needs to be accountable, but our reproduction needs to be reshaped. it is essential to transgress the system of a neoliberal university that spotlights scholars in their role for social transformation and invisibilizes all of the reproductive forces that sustain them: all the partners, mothers, families, friends, cleaners, caretakers, cookers, students, other colleagues, administrative staff, among others. all of them and their intertwined relationships fill the needs for all the ideas, practices and knowledges to emerge. we need to openly recognize and collectively reward the work done by everybody that makes academia possible, including all the critical forces within. this is a call for an ethics of care that builds upon emancipatory politics inside our own spaces. this means a radical examination of institutions in 80 fennia 200(1) (2022)reflections order to shape honest and constructive relationships based on collective well-being that include the needs and desires of everybody participating in productive and reproductive labor. it is about improving our internal working spaces and flourishing them with radical and transformative possibilities. it is also about assuming the collective responsibilities that this entails from within. for that, we need to amplify deliberative spaces and learn to be defiant in pushing these demands. we are all co-responsible for shaping an ethics of care and self-care where all people’s works are embraced and we need the time and the space for building these relationships with daily actionable tasks. a push for a slow academia implies not only to be able to reflect more and produce less but to celebrate our reproductive practices: a collective engagement in communal supportive actions and a safe place where our feelings are acknowledged. this commitment is not only symbolic, it implies guaranteeing the material conditions for that, the time pace to do so, the valuation of collective practices, and the institutional support that enhances that the creative, transformative, but above all emancipatory work can flourish. we deserve a university that supports an inclusive ethics of care for one another, a conducive working environment for the radical production of knowledge and the dedicated and joyous engagement in education as a truthfully transformative practice. in that sense, creating critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable academic practices takes place through daily collective reinforcement. that implies having the possibilities to explore practices collectively recognized as valuable and a space that encourages critical action without the fear of being risky to our self-development. resisting the increasing neoliberal university requires a push back from all imaginable spaces. spaces that ultimately can be filled with joyful, constructive and emancipatory passion. for that, we all are accountable for the changes in the radical practices we envision elsewhere. references collective, p. (2019) assembling disruptive practice in the neoliberal university: an ethics of care. geo grafiska annaler: series b, human geography 101(1) 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2019.1568201 mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j., walton-roberts, m., basu, r., whitson, r., hawkins, r., hamilton, t. & curran, w. (2015) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme 14(4) 1235–1259. <https://www.acmejournal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058> 9.12.2022. refstie, h. (2021) reconfiguring research relevance–steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2019.1568201 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058 https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 leaving or rescuing the (story) map? – commentary to saxinger, sancho reinoso and wentzel urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa120599 doi: 10.11143/fennia.120599 reflections leaving or rescuing the (story) map? – commentary to saxinger, sancho reinoso and wentzel laura lo presti lo presti, l. (2022) leaving or rescuing the (story) map? – commentary to saxinger, sancho reinoso and wentzel. fennia 200(1) 68–71. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120599 this paper reflects on some issues raised by the reading of saxinger, sancho reinoso and wentzel essay (published in the last issue of fennia) and their theoretical and methodological concerns on how to conciliate geographic information systems (gis) ontology with the representation of spatial-fuzzy qualitative data emerging out of ethnographic research. recalling the intense debate between cartographers, gis scientists and human geographers on the limits and failures of cartographic representation, the counterfactual doubt raised by pickles in his book a history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping, and the geo-coded world, published in 2004, resonates strongly: “what if, after all, cartography and maps were not what we thought they were . . . or at least not only what we thought they were?” (page 194). restoring such a question for the sake of this commentary is a way to rework the issue in an era of pervasive digital mapping, not by replacing the “quantitative” map with the “story” map – the dialectical model that has accompanied the critique of geographers during the 1980s and 1990s – but by multiplying the theoretical perspectives on the humanistic potential of maps, moving beyond the narrowed normative focus on “effective” storytelling as put by the recent the esri story map. keywords: cartographic humanities, story maps, post-representational cartography, anthropology, geography laura lo presti (http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3073-0376), university of padova, department of historical and geographic sciences and the ancient world, italy. e-mail: laura.lopresti@unipd.it introduction in recent years, story maps – online software and applications that allow the integration of interactive cartographic content with texts, images and audio-visual components – have gained central stage both in the digital humanities and in online cartography market narratives. story maps are often celebrated as creative, widely accessible, and narrative panaceas against the most technicist, quantitative and anti-humanist nuances associated with most institutional digital mapping tools. in © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120599 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3073-0376 mailto:laura.lopresti@unipd.it fennia 200(1) (2022) 69laura lo presti this regard, it is worthy of appreciation as an ethnographic project, like the one described by saxinger, sancho reinoso and wentzel (2021), which aims to engage with digital cartographic storytelling as an outreach medium by considering its limits and potentialities. as a geographer broadly interested in cultural cartography and cartographic humanities, as well as concerned with examining the position of the map in social sciences and the humanities and the various ways maps and mapping have been retheorised over the past thirty years, the reading of this paper was salutary in reflecting on two correlated issues. the first concerns the perception of geography from outside, which usually overlaps with cartography as an utterly positivistic and empiricist discipline, naturally confident in making and reading maps. indeed, it is common for geography to still be perceived as a locative repository of descriptive facts about the world rather than an intellectual and critical perspective about the world, a discipline that should rightly belong to the humanities. the second issue, which somehow follows the first one, reflects on the potentials and limitations of digital cartography in visualising qualitative, ethnographic – let’s say “carnal” – data. it does so theoretically, as a move to appreciate the work that maps do beyond their perceived technical representation, and practically, as an invitation to “pluralise” the software. such considerations can be mutually discussed since map scholars have produced rich literature, which is helpful to refine the above-mentioned argument beyond a focus solely on technical and positivistic concerns. this means, of course, situating ourselves theoretically: where do “we” speak from when we speak about mapping? in which sociocultural disciplinary context are cartographic theories and practices inserted? in which paradigm and through which theoretical coordinates is it necessary to explore cartography, maps and mappings today? another map to tell more than thirty years ago, wood and fels (1986, 72) argued that “[t]he anthropology of cartography is an urgent project”. this bold statement was made from the perspective of map designers who wanted to understand why and how people use maps. seeing social anthropologists’ emic perspective on the limits and potentiality of cartographic storytelling has been an opportunity for me to know more about their “mapping culture” (roberts 2012). in their historical and theoretical considerations on cartography, ethnography and narrative, saxinger, sancho reinoso and wentzel (2021) acknowledge that maps have not only been widely used as research tools by anthropologists, but such use (and related critique and frustration) mirrors the similar ambiguous relationship that social and cultural geographers had with what edney (2019) has defined as “the cartographic ideal”. for many aspects, the various paradigms that cross the field of social and cultural anthropology find more than a resonance with the historiography of human geography. the map, in fact, has long been a contested icon of desire and apprehension for geographers. although it is widely accepted that “maps and cartography comprise a primary part of the geographer’s technology, methodology and language” (bradshaw & williams 1999, 250), with the dismantling of the neopositivist paradigm and in the aftermath of the cultural turn, cartography has been decreed by cultural and critical geographers as a dead science and has been increasingly removed from their primary research activities. why, then, are cartography and geography still perceived in close conjunction? perhaps because of the political and material conditions that affected the structuring of geography as a discipline. for a long time, geography has been considered ancillary to history (and indeed – among geographers, at least in italy – it was used to jokingly say that those who do not go down in history, go to geography!). for geography to exist as an academic discipline, geographers did not have to step on the toes of historians and anthropologists, which is one of the reasons why geography had to deal exclusively with the locatedness of things and the classification of places (e.g., classical cartography) but not with the much more difficult-to-grasp relationships between human beings and places (e.g., human geography). italian geographer dematteis (2008, 14) defines this traditional perception of geography – “geography of bones” – as a locational knowledge to which contemporary geographers should oppose a “geography of the flesh of the world”, thus pushing for a substantial theoretical work of deconstruction and de-objectification. in this respect, when the authors admit that many members of their research group had little or even no training in using arcgis and digital story maps, this 70 fennia 200(1) (2022)reflections revelation does not really surprise me, because many cultural and social geographers, particularly in europe, could confess the same. as a young scholar, when listening to numerous stories and anecdotes about the material detachment of many geographers from cartography and, in particular, from the alleged technological revolution inaugurated by gis, i usually perceive both a sense of loss and victory. on the one hand, the loss of technical skills that would have allowed human geographers to critically and creatively produce and use cartographic tools without relying on the work of other professionals (who, more often, lack a critical theoretical background, and for this reason it is easier to feel the pleasure of contesting them). on the other hand, the critical detachment from tools traditionally linked to the discipline has allowed, especially for cultural geographers, to practice a geography free from a rigid methodology and ready to explore new and different ways of conceiving and practicing the relationships between space, places and subjectivity. it is this difference that needs to be stressed further. in the wake of critical cartography, looking differently at maps for anthropologists might mean “to understand that telling a story in maps is not a new phenomenon and, moreover, has always been political” (saxinger et al. 2021, 12). however, as bruno (2002, 207) rightly contends, “to persist in this position is to risk producing a notion of mapping that is restricted, placed wholly in the service of domination. what remains obscured are the nuanced representational edges of cartography, the diversity of cartographic practices, and the varied potentials of different mapping processes”. in fact, from the vantage point of cultural geographers, who have already gone through such an epiphanic deconstructive and critical phase, a different look on maps would entail taking – or even restoring – a more humanistic view of them, valuing their potential as triggers of memories, life stories and introspective and relational spaces. this theoretical inclination falls within the broader idea of maps as mapping, where the force of mapping as an enabler of movements of different kinds is highlighted rather than generalising about its political power or even mere situational power. a map possesses a narratological character by dint of the fact that it may allow humans to move, discuss and feel about something beyond the actual content of its representation. however, while for writers, artists and adherents to humanities, historical cartographies have always been considered forms of narrative, contemporary digital cartographic storytelling is still mainly addressed as a technical representational concern; thus, only questions and problematics related to design are discussed, leaving out any possibility of experiencing mapping as a creative and critical process. this does not mean that we can bypass the problem of representation. the consideration at stake, however, is not that representations are always inadequate or partial, as critical scholars often acknowledge, but that mapping performances themselves are not thoroughly representational. in fact, we cannot expect that a specific frame (i.e., a photograph, a text or a map) can in reality contain everything we think is related to nuanced and humanistic conceptions of space and time. our knowledge is always partial and so are our research tools (whether a diary, an interview or a map), but they all participate in (with what we think are limits and affordances) and construct our reality. however, since this argument is quite well known in the humanities and social sciences, i would avoid centring the discussion on a dialectic between qualitative and quantitative data. in this respect, there is a large amount of literature on critical, qualitative and humanistic gis that focuses on ontic (agarwal 2004), anthropological (crampton 2009) and post-phenomenological (zhao 2022) gis conditions that suggests going beyond a positivistic understanding of it (leszczynski 2009a, 2009b). since i believe that many of the topics addressed in contemporary discussions of mapping, gis and big data often rely on earlier debates, modes and metaphors circulating in the late 1980s and 1990s, we need more theoretical and practical effort to tell another map. it is always more beneficial to have a reading that extends beyond these rigid schemes and allows us to see things differently! in this sense, there are diverse ways in which cartography can be thought of as a narratological tool. the use of maps in interviews or focus groups, not just as the communicative result of a project, may be seen as a form of storytelling. moreover, i can see how the (even digital) map elicitation method can serve as a method of ethnographic research that has been used for instance in many contexts, such as migration (buckle 2020). an original take on narrative mapping is provided by peterle’s (2019) idea of carto-fiction, and rossetto’s (2019) book offers unpredictable fennia 200(1) (2022) 71laura lo presti ways to do justice to the narratological character of cartographic objects. in the end, there are many connections between cartographic storytelling and ethnographic mapping, and this is a strong statement that needs to be further explored. nonetheless, i would share all the other critiques that authors do of the arcgis story map. however, arcgis (and the arcgis story map app) does not cover the entire universe of digital mapping. in this respect, we should better distinguish the limit of our own use of the software and of the software itself from all the other available software. are all digital forms of cartographic storytelling a mere replication of the conventional euclidean map? or the digital can actually offer – if the right skills and knowledge are applied – more possibilities for representation, movement and storytelling? i leave this as an open question. as bennett (2010) suggests, it is crucial to make visible both the negative and recalcitrant power of things and their productive and positive value. in other words, the aim of “a geography of the flesh of the world” (dematteis 2008, 14) is to deploy a composite arsenal of theories and methodologies, as well as of actions and emotions, which is able to readdress the power of maps in less reductive terms. references agarwal, p. (2004) ontological considerations in giscience. international journal of geographical information science 19(5) 501–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658810500032321 bennett, j. (2010) vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. duke university press, durham. durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391623 bradshaw, m. & williams, s. (1999) scales, lines and minor geographies: whither king island. australian geographical studies 37(3) 248–267. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8470.00082 bruno, g. (2002) atlas of emotion: journeys in art, architecture, and film. verso books, new york. buckle, c. (2020) touching, scrolling and swooping: performing and representing migrant stories through geospatial technologies. geoforum 111 83–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.03.004 crampton, j. (2009) being ontological: response to postructuralism and gis: is there a “disconnect”? environment and planning d: society and space 27(4) 603–608. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1607a dematteis, g. (2008) zeus, le ossa del bue e la verità degli aranci. biforcazioni geografiche. ambiente, società, territorio 53(3–4) 3–13. edney, m. (2019) cartography: the ideal and its history chicago. university of chicago press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226605715.001.0001 leszczynski, a. (2009a) postructuralism and gis: is there a “disconnect”? environment and planning d: society and space 27(4) 581–602. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1607 leszczynski, a. (2009b) rematerializing giscience. environment and planning d: society and space 27(4) 609–615. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1607b peterle, g. (2019) carto-fiction: narrativising maps through creative writing. social & cultural geography 20(8) 1070–1093. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1428820 pickles, j. (2004) a history of spaces: cartographic reason, mapping, and the geo-coded world. routledge, new york. roberts, l. (2012) mapping cultures: place, practice, performance. palgrave macmillan, london. rossetto, t. (2019) object-oriented cartography: maps as things. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429437441 saxinger, g., sancho-reinoso, a. & wentzel, s. i. (2021) cartographic storytelling: reflecting on maps through an ethnographic application in siberia. fennia 199(2) 242–259. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.110918 wood, d. & fels, j. (1986) designs on signs: myth and meaning in maps. cartographica 23(3) 54–103. https://doi.org/10.3138/r831-50r3-7247-2124 zhao, b. (2022) humanistic gis: toward a research agenda. annals of the american association of geographers 112(6) 1576–1592. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.2004875 https://doi.org/10.1080/13658810500032321 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391623 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8470.00082 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.03.004 https://doi.org/10.1068/d1607a https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226605715.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1068/d1607 https://doi.org/10.1068/d1607b https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1428820 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429437441 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.110918 https://doi.org/10.3138/r831-50r3-7247-2124 https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.2004875 shrinking geographies or challenged rurality’s? three points of reflection – commentary to syssner urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa121861 doi: 10.11143/fennia.121861 reflections shrinking geographies or challenged rurality’s? three points of reflection – commentary to syssner marlies meijer meijer, m. (2022) shrinking geographies or challenged rurality’s? three points of reflection – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 251–254. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121861 by asking ‘what could geographers do for shrinking geographies’ josefina syssner offers a very comprehensive overview of what has been and should be on the research agenda’s for understanding rural shrinking geographies. in this commentary i would like to address three issues related to the fennia keynote, that may add an additional perspective or a moment of reflection: 1) the issue of demographic change, rather than shrinkage, 2) how we can imagine the future of shrinking geographies, and 3) what nordic perspectives have to offer. in conclusion, i believe that peripheral geographies, and challenged rurality’s deserve a key position within geography and related disciplines, and call for a repolitisation of the topic: what we research, how we conceptualise or even advice has consequences for those living and imagining futures in peripheral, rural and depopulating regions. keywords: shrinkage, rural geography, nordic perspectives, future, critical geography marlies meijer (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4751-402), landscape architecture and spatial planning group, department of environmental sciences, wageningen university, the netherlands. e-mail: marlies.meijer@wur.nl jij woont hier ver vandaan, zeggen ze elders in het land. dan zeg ik, insgelijks, u ook, a’j ’t zien van dizze kant. [you live far away from here, they say. and i say you too, if you see it from my side.] lohues (2008) – singer-songwriter from drenthe, the netherlands with her keynote and publication in fennia, josefina syssner (2022) offers a very comprehensive overview of how the research agenda’s for understanding rural shrinking geographies have developed over the past decades. doing so, she does not only look at shrinkage as a geographical phenomenon, but also offers an inside view from those living and dealing with the changing demographics in rural peripheries. the thoroughness of her work deserves a great compliment and will benefit all shrinking researchers. besides thorough, syssner demonstrates that she is not a romantic, and neither should we be: consequences of shrinkage (declining economies, downsizing social infrastructures, failing (growth) policies, health risks and high living costs) are real, and will hurt a large group of people – as © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121861 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4751-402 mailto:marlies.meijer@wur.nl 252 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections well as others may thrive living under marginal circumstances. while the resilience and selforganisational capacity of those staying in shrinking regions is often addressed as a resource and development potential, the opposite is equally true, as we have addressed in the journal of rural studies (meijer & syssner 2017). communities lacking social capital, not being part of the right networks or without any other entrepreneurial capacities might not resist the consequences of decline and will be left behind – temporarily at least (meijer 2020). in this commentary i would like to address three issues related to the keynote, that may add an additional perspective or a moment of reflection: 1) the issue of demographic change, rather than shrinkage, 2) how we can imagine the future of shrinking geographies and 3) what nordic perspectives have to offer. is it shrinkage? first of all, syssners’ contribution explicitly refers to shrinkage, largely defined by declining population numbers. though the temporal, legacy and active dynamics of shrinkage are addressed, ageing and selective out-migration might have more structural effects for regional development, than declining population numbers by itself. the question ‘what could geographers do for post-declining regions?’ was already raised and i would like to stretch this debate a little further, especially given the postpandemic situation – wherein a substantial number of formerly shrinking regions experienced population growth, but not necessarily prosperity (bock & haartsen 2021). in the netherlands, shrinkage became a dominant topic on national and regional policy agenda between 2005–2015. shrinkage was recognised as a potential crisis for rural peripheries, with farreaching consequences for local livability and economic development. the migration crisis of 2015 turned the tide: the population in most rural peripheries stabilised and is now slowly growing again – due to the post-pandemic effects, international migration and a shortage of housing in (by now) all parts of the netherlands. the question is: have we passed the state of crisis? policy-makers say yes: those years of problematizing shrinkage did not resolve the problem, and only led to stigmatisation of rural areas. amongst them there is a tendency towards growth policies (attracting businesses, and labour forces to ensure economic viability and livability for the long term) visible again. scientists are more reluctant to claim victory and point towards more structural demographic changes, with unsettling effects for rural development (daly & kitchin 2013; bock & haartsen 2021). steinführer and grossmann (2021) warn for the hidden dynamics of old-age immigration in shrinking areas: population growth can go hand in hand with amplified ageing of the population – augmenting the consequences of decline: a population in need of care facilities, and a growing lack of labor force to provide such care. in the netherlands, and probably other north-western european countries as well, we mostly witness a large share of older migrants as a cause of rural population growth. another significant growth group concerns recognised refugees, who are offered residences in rural areas, but tend to resettle to larger towns as soon as they legally can. as such, their contribution to growth is temporarily and challenging for policy-makers. underlying causes of population change remain unchanged: pupil numbers and the share of young professionals are declining faster than ever before. syssner (2022) nicely illustrated the persistence of growth-thinking with her own empirical observations from interviewing policy-makers the one-year population numbers actually grew. bock and haartsen (2021) argue for keeping rural depopulation on the policy agenda, despite observing population growth, given the undercurrent of destabilizing consequences of ongoing processes of population change. in response to ‘what could geographers do for shrinking geographies?’, should we not alter our vocabulary? abandon shrinkage – and address the underlying challenges of population change, peripheralisation and a growing (geographical, economic and social) divide between national and regional institutions? imagining the future second, as a planner i am concerned with the future, our imaginations of the future and mostly how to achieve such futures through spatial interventions. syssner (2022) demonstrates that shrinking geographies have pointed us to ways of envisioning futures without growth: through acknowledgement fennia 200(2) (2022) 253marlies meijer of structural decline, and policy strategies such as adaptation, smart shrinkage, rightsizing and degrowth as our newest branch on the tree. scientists and policy-makers regularly claim that rural peripheries might become frontrunners in this respect, being the first to deal with the effects of declining welfare states, neo-liberalisation and small, but dynamic governance networks. but are they? can we claim successful examples of smart adaptation, rightsised or degrown places, over the long term? so far, my (undoubtedly limited) observation is that shrinking areas can adapt and even flourish, but this is mostly due to factors that are difficult to control: an influx of capable individuals, changing global circumstances or national policies, including structural funding (see also rutgers 2022). i agree with syssners call for positive, forward-looking and inclusive policies for shrinking areas. however, all options – digitalisation, sustainability, or a focus on temporality, aging and globalisation – seem to have serious downsides or are heavily nuanced. it leaves me wondering: what kind of imagination do we have to offer to those making future plans? is degrowth, as marxist alternative, the answer? or will rural peripheries soon be marked by other, more extreme challenges, such as climate change, energy crises (including becoming a favorable location for renewable energy) and biodiversity loss? nordic perspectives third, syssners (2022) keynote ends with a promise: a unique perspective from nordic countries. at the same time the paper acknowledges that, despite facing long term shrinkage, the phenomenon has been under-researched and insufficiently acknowledged by policy-makers in nordic countries. it leaves me wondering what will we learn, when looking into the scandinavian mirror? is it just a reflection from another part of the world? or does the nordic have a unique perspective to offer on shrinking geographies? as a start, i have a unique nordic perspective to offer from my own country. here we perceive shrinkage as phenomenon of recent, and now faded-out, interest as well. however, thanks to the historical study by melis (2013), we can reflect on five decades of rural shrinkage in the most northern province of the netherlands: groningen. it teaches us about the long-term dynamics of changing, peripheral and shrinking rural regions in the 20th century. the study builds on a report (bedreigd bestaan – endangered existence) published to shed light on the consequences of population decline for this specific region in 1959. ahead of its time, the report and indicated ‘community organisation’ as a future for northern groningen. awareness raising and stimulating self-reliance among the local population were regarded as important pillars for securing local livability, but also became part of the regional identity, over the decades. but, most importantly, while policy-makers and scientists had claimed problem awareness – and organised all sorts of conferences, thematic groups and discussion tables – those undergoing the everyday consequences of decline felt increasingly distanced from the framed problems and formulated policies. nobody objects to improved livability, or sustainable economic development. however, with such depoliticised and vague policy objectives, local stakeholders found it difficult to imagine what this would exactly imply for them and turned out to have had diverging interests and imaginations for the future (see melis 2013). these longitudinal case studies, and the critical analysis of how enduring shrinkage has shaped the geographies of nordic countries, can help us further understand shrinking geographies and policy responses. conclusion – let’s repoliticise shrinking geographies! to conclude, and in addition to syssners call for further understanding shrinking geographies – there is indeed much we have not studied yet – i would like to amplify syssners appeal for a re-politisation of the topic: how we frame the problem as scientists, and whether politicians and policy-makers decide to invest in shrinking regions or whose initiatives to support, is also a political choice. we should be aware of the (negative) externalities of formulated solutions: social exclusion, uneven resource distribution or infrastructural development, the pressure to catch up with global development forces or just living with the noise clean energy produces (demeterova et al. 2020). a focus on rightsizing or smart adaptation, however is also a choice not to invest in peripheral regions, made by 254 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections national level governments (küpper et al. 2018). moreover, a call for self-organisation and local resilience, will also support the interests of the capable, networked and well-positioned individuals – and exclude others (meijer & syssner 2017; salemink et al. 2017). a policy focus on topics we all agree on (livability, social cohesion, sustainability), neglects other issues of importance for marginalised groups in rural societies – including international migrants, or those unable to out-migrate (woods 2018). as scientist i am intrigued by these questions: i hope to expand our research after the failures and revival of governance for decline – with team shrinkage (or whatsoever) on our side. as a person growing up in a peripheral – now shrinking – region (drenthe), i hope our imaginations will not let us down and provide an honest, yet hopeful and inclusive perspective for the rural of the future. references bock, b. & haartsen, t. (2021) who is afraid of population decline? the struggle of keeping rural depopulation on the dutch agenda. ager: journal of depopulation and rural development studies 33 35–56. https://doi.org/10.4422/ager.2021.22 demeterova, b., fischer, t. & schmude, j. (2020) the right to not catch up – transitioning european territorial cohesion towards spatial justice for sustainability. sustainability 12(11) 4797. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114797 daly, g. & kitchin, r. (2013) shrink smarter? planning for spatial selectivity in population growth in ireland. administration 60(3) 159–186. küpper, p., kundolf, s., mettenberger, t. & tuitjer, g. (2018) rural regeneration strategies for declining regions: trade-off between novelty and practicability. european planning studies 26(2) 229–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 lohues, d. (2008) hier kom ik weg [song]. on allenig ii. greytown recordings. melis, k. g. (2013) naar een leefbare regio: regionale leefbaarheid en identiteiten in noord-groningen tijdens de tweede helft van de twintigste eeuw. stichting groninger historische publicatie, groningen. meijer, m. (2020) when it goes wrong … learning from challenged (and revived) community initiatives. journal of rural studies 74 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.11.006 meijer, m. & syssner, j. (2017) getting ahead in depopulating areas: how linking social capital is used for informal planning practices in sweden and the netherlands. journal of rural studies 55 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.07.014 rutgers, j. (2022) van panacee tot paradox: de interne dynamiek van regionale samenwerking in nederlandse krimpgebieden. doctoral dissertation. radboud university, nijmegen, the netherlands. https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/242383 salemink, k., strijker, d. & bosworth, g. (2017) the community reclaims control? learning experiences from rural broadband initiatives in the netherlands. sociologia ruralis 57(s1) 555–575. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12150 steinführer, a. & k. grossmann (2021) small towns (re)growing old. hidden dynamics of old-age migration in shrinking regions in germany. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 103(3) 176–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1944817 syssner, j. (2022) what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? fennia 200(2) 98–119. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 woods, m. (2018) precarious rural cosmopolitanism: negotiating globalisation, migration and diversity in irish small towns. journal of rural studies 64 164–176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.03.014 https://doi.org/10.4422/ager.2021.22 https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114797 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.11.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.07.014 https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/242383 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12150 https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1944817 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.03.014 public spending on rural tourism in sweden urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa46265 doi: 10.11143/46265 public spending on rural tourism in sweden åsa almstedt, linda lundmark and örjan pettersson almstedt, åsa, linda lundmark & örjan pettersson (2016). public spending on rural tourism in sweden. fennia 194: 1, 18–31. issn 1798-5617. tourism is an important part of rural policies in european countries. an increased demand for rural amenities is seen as creating a more diversified labour market and contributing to the restructuring of the economy, from primary sectors and manufacturing to a more service-oriented economy, which has been termed a “new rural economy”. as a result, and as often presented in many policy documents, tourism is now seen as a universal tool for rural development. the purpose of this study is to investigate the distribution of public spending on tourism in rural areas in sweden. it focuses on public spending on the main programme for rural development, the swedish rural development programme, but also on the regional structural funds programmes, from 2000 to 2013. another subject of interest is how policy makers understand rural tourism as presented in policy documents since these documents, to a great extent, direct programme spending in terms of projects and their content. this study is based on register data on programme spending, policy documents and programme evaluation reports. results show that a relatively small amount of total public spending targets tourism – mainly going to accommodation, activities and marketing efforts – indicating that tourism is still not a prioritised area despite policy makers’ understanding of rural tourism as expressed in policy documents. thus, although public efforts target adequate parts of the tourism industry, they cannot be expected to contribute significantly to the restructuring of the rural economy. keywords: descriptive statistics, eu policy, rural development, sweden, the new rural economy, tourism åsa almstedt, linda lundmark & örjan pettersson, department of geography and economic history, umeå university, se-901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: asa. almstedt@umu.se, linda.lundmark@umu.se, orjan.pettersson@umu.se introduction the restructuring of rural areas in europe has in recent decades been prominent (schmied 2005; woods 2005, 2011; oecd 2006). generally, it has meant that employment in traditional rural businesses such as agriculture and other natural resource activities has decreased. in many rural areas, the population composition has changed due to ageing and depopulation, which have also affected social structures. this causes structural problems in terms of further out-migration, unemployment and poor economic performance. the overall development in many european countries entails expanding metropolitan regions, with many rural regions lagging behind. however, territorial cohesion between regions within the european union (eu) has been prioritised since all regions are seen as contributing to growth and welfare in europe (copus & hörnström 2011). tourism is often presented as a means to counteract this negative development as, in some instances, rural environments have been found to attract new inhabitants, tourists, entrepreneurs and businesses and, thus, can be considered a resource for increasing possibilities to live and work in rural areas (findlay et al. 2000; müller 2006). it is argued that tourism can attract in-migrants since it offers service-oriented jobs and opportunities to start businesses (findlay et al. 2000; paniagua 2002; lundmark 2006; lundmark et al. 2014). for this reason, an increased demand for rural amenities is © 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 19public spending on rural tourism in sweden seen as creating a more diversified labour market and contributing to the restructuring of the economy, from primary sector and manufacturing to a more service-oriented economy. this general transition has been observed in many rural areas throughout europe and has been presented as a “new rural economy” (hill 2005; halseth et al. 2010; shucksmith et al. 2011; copus 2015). as a result, tourism has come to be seen as a universal tool for development in rural areas. one reason for this may be the perception of tourism as promising a high return on invested money, because the tourism sectors are characterised as providing cheap jobs and not requiring higher education (lundmark 2006; hall 2007). in line with eu recommendations, many member states have incorporated tourism measures into national rural and regional development programmes that are co-funded by the eu (nylander & hall 2004; woods 2011). however, tourism is no guarantee for economic development (e.g., hall & jenkins 1998; fleischer & felsenstein 2000; hall 2007; carson & carson 2011), and knowledge of how the tourism industry functions and which factors contribute to successful tourism among policy makers is of great importance. the present study deals with the specific case of sweden, where it is clear that rural tourism plays an important role in the corresponding policy documents (e.g., government offices of sweden 2000, 2007, 2012). these documents are the result of a process where the responsible agencies consult stakeholders from the public, private and the voluntary sectors and have to be approved by the eu. the process of forming these partnerships and developing the policy documents is not investigated in this article. instead, we are interested in how public spending is distributed among various measures that promote tourism in rural areas. potentially, this indicates policy makers’ priorities and understanding of rural tourism. thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the distribution of public spending on tourism in rural areas in sweden. its focus is on the main programme for rural development, the swedish rural development programme, but also the regional structural funds programmes in place, from 2000 to 2013. questions in focus are: what are the priorities regarding rural tourism in the programmes above; and, how is public spending distributed by sector and geographic location for measures promoting rural tourism? policy documents have also been reviewed in order to investigate policy makers’ understanding of rural tourism as presented in the documents since they, to a great extent, give direction to the programme spending in terms of projects and their content. rural tourism, as defined in this paper, refers to tourism that takes place in rural areas. the study is based on register data on programme spending, policy documents and, to some extent, available programme evaluation reports. it should be noted that the intention of this study is not to evaluate the actual impact of policy. for such a study, more time would need to elapse to show the real effects of spending. theoretical perspectives on regional development and policy in the eu general theoretical perspectives and key concepts related to regional development have influenced policies on territorial cohesion and rural development, not least within the eu and its member states (woods 2005; pike et al. 2006; dax & kahila 2011; tödtling 2011). therefore, we introduce some of these aspects briefly before we move on to rural tourism more specifically. theories on regional development increasingly focus on endogenous growth processes and – more recently – evolutionary perspectives (hassink & klaerding 2011; mackinnon & cumbers 2011). according to these views, key concepts for explaining regional development include agglomerations, clusters, knowledge, learning, creativity, innovation, social capital, entrepreneurship, institutions and path dependency (sunley 2000; pike et al. 2006). european regional development policies have also been inspired by ideas about governance (tödtling 2011). governance implies a gradual movement away from direct state intervention (i.e., government) in order to stimulate development of ‘softer’ ways of promoting change. for example, this involves partnerships with numerous actors, both private and public, working in networks and frequently emphasising local/regional engagement and bottom-up perspectives. from an european perspective, this often includes ideas about multilevel governance, where actors on various geographical/administrative levels, from the eu to the very local level, participate and together contribute to achieving certain goals, such as sustainable development. governance might give subnational levels more freedom to choose their way ahead, but also tends to place more responsibility on local 20 fennia 194: 1 (2016)åsa almstedt, linda lundmark and örjan pettersson and regional actors to manage their future. presumably, one advantage is that regional and local strategies, to a larger extent, may consider their own circumstances and resources to stimulate development. even though the ambition is to promote growth and cohesion throughout the eu, objections have been raised that such a strategy leads instead to widening gaps between different parts of the eu. it has been argued that this approach to regional development mainly benefits already strong regions, whereas lagging regions find it difficult to compete for eu funding and investments (woods 2005; schucksmith et al. 2011; tödtling 2011; wiberg 2013). no doubt, many rural areas in europe have to handle structural disadvantages due to low population densities, long distances to more dynamic metropolitan areas and potential markets, poor transport infrastructure and path dependency based on traditional rural and natural resource sectors such as agriculture, forestry and mining (woods 2005; roto et al. 2014). it should also be kept in mind that rural areas in europe are heterogeneous with various conditions for development (woods 2005; copus & hörnström 2011). the heterogeneity and changed perceptions of rural areas and their development potentials have led to a shift in rural policy, from the top-down, subsidy-based policy targeting the agricultural sector to a multi-sectoral, place-based policy acknowledging the varying development potentials of rural areas, referred to as “the new rural paradigm” (oecd 2006). behind this shift are factors such as an increased focus on amenities, pressures to reform agricultural policy, and decentralisation trends in regional policy. one example is the eu's common agricultural policy (cap) which was complemented in the early 21st century with a wider rural development policy (the second pillar) where not only rural challenges are in focus but also the opportunities rural areas offer, for example, regarding tourism, recreation, and environmental services (dax & kahila 2011; woods 2011). in sweden, as in many other eu countries, the main policy instrument is the rural development programme, which is the focus of this study. theoretical perspectives on rural tourism tourism has frequently been launched as an alternative which potentially can contribute to more positive development that attracts visitors, in-migrants and investment, thus creating new employment and income opportunities in rural areas (hall & jenkins 1998; woods 2005; lundmark 2006; cawley 2010; halseth et al. 2010; woods 2011). many rural areas also benefit from an increasing demand for authentic and unique experiences based on local amenities, such as the natural landscape, recreational activities, culture and heritage (stolarick et al. 2010). however, expectations are often unrealistic with tourism perceived as an easy way to achieve economic development and restructuring (hall & jenkins 1998; hall 2007). hall et al. (2009: 125) argue that the high expectations “manifest a certain lack of knowledge and understanding of tourism dynamics and the very nature of tourism”, and are often based on the global economic importance of the tourism industry as a whole. however, global trends are not easily transferable to the rural local context (saarinen 2007). for tourism to benefit rural regions as a whole, tourism planning needs to be integrated into regional and local development goals (saarinen 2003). nonetheless, tourism is often planned separately without considering overall social and economic development (liu & liu 2009). there are also frequent misinterpretations and over-estimations of tourism’s contribution to rural economies (hall et al. 2009). this is particularly true for nature-based tourism which, according to hall (2007: 29), “tends to be very small-scale, often highly seasonal, and fails to attract the large number of tourists characterised by mass pleasure tourism”. although such tourism development does not meet the expectations of big improvements, it could still be considered sufficient for some rural areas (hall 2007). in a swedish context, there are only a few local areas in the sparsely populated northern part where tourism has had a major impact on labour market change and population development. these are mainly ski resorts, whereas in the rest of this large area tourism has, so far, not led to a substantial restructuring of the local and regional economy (pettersson & westholm 1998; pettersson 2001; lundmark 2005). some researchers point to the difficulties of developing tourism in certain places. for example, müller (2013) argues that the greatest challenges to rural tourism are not tourism industry-related, but are factors such as rural depopulation, the decline of rural services and declining interest in rural areas. another example is the difficulty of developing tourism to help diversify the economy in pefennia 194: 1 (2016) 21public spending on rural tourism in sweden ripheral areas traditionally dependent on exporting natural resources (staples) because of path dependency and institutional lock-in (carson & carson 2011). this suggests that tourism development may not be suitable for all rural areas. for instance, hall et al. (2003) stress that tourism is best suited as a complement in areas with a diverse and thriving rural economy as income and employment inequalities may be the result in areas with a weak economy. nevertheless, governments continue to support tourism as a growth strategy, especially in areas where seemingly few other business alternatives exist (hall & jenkins 1998; fleischer & felsenstein 2000; schmallegger & carson 2010). in order for tourism to succeed a number of components are required. these include attractions, the promotion of tourism attractions and community, tourism infrastructure (roads, airports, trains, buses, water and power services, parking, signs, recreation facilities), services (restaurants, accommodation, other tourism-related businesses), and hospitality, i.e. how tourists are treated by tourism businesses and community residents (wilson et al. 2001). it is also important to understand the tourist market and have the required skills and training in tourism (wilson et al. 2001; gunn & var 2002; hall et al. 2003). moreover, wilson et al. (2001) stress the need to develop tourism packages which contain high-quality attractions and businesses that make tourists spend more money, stay longer and return. other important factors are sufficient funds for tourism development, strategic planning, coordination and cooperation between entrepreneurs and businesses, and involvement/ support from the community and local government (wilson et al. 2001). to conclude, nature, scenic landscape and other features are not enough to attract tourists; rather tourism must be seen as a system of dynamic interrelations among different functioning parts. similarly, it must balance supply and demand (gunn & var 2002). rural tourism in sweden nature-based tourism is one of the most common forms of rural tourism in sweden, especially in northern sweden with its vast areas of forests and the scandinavian mountain range (müller 2013). in farming areas, particularly in southern sweden, farm-based tourism has given farmers new economic opportunities (e.g., farm-stays, farm shops with local food, hunting, horse riding) (müller 2013). in terms of nature-based tourism, the economic value is often limited. in fact, it is indirect spending on various services that generates the most revenues in the area. moreover, many entrepreneurs are lifestyle driven rather than financially motivated. another challenge for nature-based tourism companies is the distance between the producer and the market (ibid.). a general obstacle to rural tourism is the limited supply of services and labour in sparsely populated areas (waldenström & westholm 2009). investment in tourism facilities is affected by the difficulty rural businesses have getting access to capital; this makes public financial support essential (müller 2013). both the rural development programme and the regional structural funds programmes focused on in this study see tourism as an important potential contributor to rural development, and they financially support projects and enterprises that wish to develop new businesses and activities which are in line with the aim of the programmes. in addition, these programmes are important because projects require match funding from project applicants and thus have an impact on the allocation of public and private investments at local and regional levels. methods and materials this study is mainly descriptive in character. it covers 16 development programmes in sweden, part of eu policy, over two programme periods, 2000– 2006 and 2007–2013. two programmes belong to the rural development programme part of cap (i.e., the environmental and rural development plan for sweden 2000–2006, and the rural development programme for sweden 2007–2013) and the other 14 to the regional structural funds programmes which are part of the cohesion policy (table 1). the methods used are descriptive statistics based on the register data and review of policy documents and programme evaluation reports for the retrieval of data and general programme information. the programmes’ policy documents were reviewed to analyse how rural tourism is understood. this was accomplished by searching for paragraphs mentioning tourism and then compiling quotes regarding rural tourism. data on public spending are based on register data for the rural development programme for 2007–2013, and programme evaluation reports to the other programmes. access to register data made it possible 22 fennia 194: 1 (2016)åsa almstedt, linda lundmark and örjan pettersson to analyse the distribution of spending in more details. corresponding data were not available for the other programmes and, consequently, more emphasis has been placed on the rural development programme for 2007–2013. as a result, geographical and sector distribution is based solely on the rural development programme for 2007– 2013, whereas the estimation of public spending is based on all programmes where these data exist. however, for most of the regional structural funds programmes for 2000–2006, the information is comparatively poor. this is because tourism efforts have been incorporated into broader measures and, thus, are not distinguishable. the register data are derived from a database compiled by the swedish board of agriculture (sba) containing information on each project and enterprise that received support from the european agricultural fund for rural development. there are two kinds of support available. enterprise support targets individual enterprises (mainly for investments in infrastructure and purchases of external services). project support targets groups of enterprises, organisations, associations, etc. “where the benefit of the activity reaches more parties than just the applicant(s)” (mainly enables development activities such as marketing, the promotion of local development opportunities, and research collaborations) (government offices of sweden 2008: 203). the variables of relevance for this study include project title, name of grant receiver, geographic coordinates, granted amount of funds, measure code, category (the field of activity), subcategory, and “tourism activities (yes/no)”. the last variable denotes which projects and enterprises outside of the main tourism measure (“promoting 2000–2006 2007–2013 objective 1 programme for norra norrland objective 1 programme for södra skogslän norra region objective 2 programme västra region objective 2 programme öarna region objective 2 programme södra region objective 2 programme north sweden (övre norrland) mid-north sweden (mellersta norrland) north mid-sweden (norra mellansverige) east mid-sweden (östra mellansverige) stockholm småland and the islands (småland och öarna) west sweden (västsverige) skåne-blekinge table 1. regional structural funds programmes in sweden, 2000–2006 and 2007–2013. swedish names are in brackets. the tourist industry”, measure code 313) relate to tourism. for example, micro-enterprises with tourism activities (“business development in micro-enterprises”, code 312) and projects to increase a place’s attractiveness (“village renewal and development”, code 322) were used by sba when retrieving data to meet our request for rural tourism data. thus, public spending also includes data for tourism-related measures. most of these data belong to the programme objective “diversification and a better quality of life in rural areas” (under axis 3, one of the four thematic axes corresponding to the objectives of rural development policy). it also includes the leader (i.e., a bottom-up approach to rural development which in 2007–2013 was part of the rural development programme) projects involving tourism. measures that indirectly benefit tourism, such as environmental measures, are not included in this study. to analyse distributed spending by sector and geographic location, data for measure code 313 are the most complete and, thus, we focus on them. a limitation is that geographic coordinates indicate the location of the grant receiver which, in a few cases, differs from the location of the actual project. however, for enterprise support the location of the grant receiver generally coincides with the location of the enterprise. by the term ‘sector’ we mean the various fields of activity in rural tourism, such as accommodation and tourist activities (e.g., fishing, hiking). some clarifications need to be made. public spending, as it relates to this study, consists of eu funds and the national funding required by the eu. the register data received from sba and the data for most of the other programmes only show eu funds. however, since we are more interested in fennia 194: 1 (2016) 23public spending on rural tourism in sweden the proportions rather than the exact amount of public spending, we present national funding as a percentage of total project/enterprise spending according to policy documents. also, these data show granted funds rather than paid out funds. potentially, these numbers may differ somewhat if repayment has been demanded. nonetheless, we consider using data for granted funds relevant, especially considering that payment for 2007–2013 was not yet completed when conducting the study. the discrepancy using data for granted funds should be less than that which would be caused using data for paid out funds. it is possible that granted funds better represent policy makers’ ambitions and priorities than paid out funds. moreover, estimating public spending on rural tourism is complex because of the many programmes involved and the varying scope of data. therefore, all the results presented below should be considered as indications rather than exact measures. we begin by presenting the statements about rural tourism found in policy programmes so as to illustrate policy makers’ understanding of rural tourism. we then analyse public spending on rural tourism within these programmes in relation to other focus areas such as agriculture and innovation. this indicates policy makers’ priorities regarding rural tourism. thereafter, distribution by sector and geographic location is presented, focusing on the rural development programme for 2007–2013. the understanding of rural tourism in policy documents the investigated policy documents generally describe rural tourism in positive terms and emphasise its ability to generate economic growth, especially for the 2007–2013 period. for example, the policy document guiding the regional structural funds programmes for 2007–2013 states: “the tourism industry has come to play an increasingly important role in sustainable growth in many regions. a successful tourism industry not only generates jobs within tourism businesses, but also leads to essential business developments, services and employment in other areas. tourism is particularly important to rural and sparsely populated areas of significant natural and cultural value” (government offices of sweden 2007: 16–17). a similar statement in the policy document for the rural development programme for 2007– 2013 emphasises tourism’s growth potential, employment opportunities and favourable impact on other local businesses (government offices of sweden 2008). in this policy, tourism is regarded as one of the priority areas under “new production of goods and services” and part of “food production with added value”, both of which are regarded as nationally-prioritised development areas; the latter being associated with the vision “sweden – the new culinary nation” (ibid.). quotes such as “visits to natural attractions, handicraft centres, manufacturing sites and events have grown in popularity faster than the average rate for tourism around the country” and “it has become increasingly important for enterprises wishing to remain competitive in the market to offer interesting or exciting experiences and other activities” are part of the reasoning behind the tourism measure (code 313) (government offices of sweden 2008: 212). activities such as staying on a farm, horse riding, culinary experiences and various activity packages are described as “market concepts that have developed well and are attracting growing numbers of visitors” (ibid.: 212). the document also specifies what is needed for rural tourism to develop successfully, as illustrated in the following quote: “package deals or other combinations of travel, accommodation, food, activities and experiences are increasingly in demand from customers. success in this area calls for a thorough knowledge of the business and quality products. accessibility and logistical solutions for travel and transport are other factors of importance for the development of tourism in rural areas” (ibid.: 212). other components that are emphasised and described as “crucial to the proper realization of the area’s development potential” are cooperation between tourist enterprises at local and regional levels in terms of product development, marketing and logistics, and “greater professionalism and competence in the industry” (ibid.: 213). in older programmes, tourism is also acknowledged as contributing to the local economy, but is less emphasized, which suggests a more moderate view of tourism. for example, the environmental and rural development plan for 2000–2006 states: “tourism is a growing branch within the services sector which has increased in economic importance. service is a product which is consumed where it is produced, which means that rural tour24 fennia 194: 1 (2016)åsa almstedt, linda lundmark and örjan pettersson ism could be of increasing significance for the rural economy if it is used in the right way” (government offices of sweden 2000: 228). thus, given the understanding of rural tourism presented above, the expectation would be that a considerable amount of public funds would be spent on rural tourism. public spending on rural tourism public spending on rural tourism takes place foremost within the rural development programme. this programme relates to small and micro enterprises with clear links to agriculture, forestry and the wider rural development at the local level. for large-scale investments and more strategic projects, regional development programmes apply. one example is cooperation efforts regarding destination development (government offices of sweden 2008; saerg 2011). as already indicated, it was not possible to estimate the total amount of public spending on rural tourism for the regional structural funds programmes for 2000–2006 because of lack of data. however, estimates were possible for the two programmes covering northern sweden. the objective 1 programme for norra norrland was granted approx. sek 270 million in eu funds (eur 1 = sek 9), plus additional national public funding (the total programme budget comprised: eu funds sek 3.7 billion, and national public funds sek 2.8 billion). the norra region objective 2 programme was granted approx. sek 370 million plus national public funding (total budget: eu funds sek 1.6 billion and national public funds sek 2.5 billion). the relatively large proportion of money spent on tourism in northern sweden may be explained to some extent by the region’s long tradition of tourism based on its nature, parts of which are referred to as europe’s last wilderness (county administrative board of norrbotten 2010). the trend continues in subsequent programmes, i.e. the regional structural funds programmes for 2007–2013. as table 2 shows, the two programmes covering the northern part of sweden (i.e., “north sweden” and “mid-north sweden”) spend a bigger share of their budgets on tourism than the rest of the programmes together. in fact, in the “mid-north sweden” programme, tourism is declared a key industry. this is the only programme with tourism as a separate effort area (“1.3 tourism and the experience industry”) (saerg 2011). in contrast, three programmes spent no money on tourism (i.e., “north mid-sweden”, “east midsweden” and “west sweden”). in total for all individual programmes, tourism was granted almost sek 514 million from eu funds. this is six per cent of the total support granted to the programmes (approx. sek 8.5 billion) (saerg 2013). national public funding (i.e., 50% of total public spending for “north sweden”, “mid-north sweden” and “skåne-blekinge”, and 60% for stockholm and småland and the islands) is added to this. this makes tourism the third biggest priority area just before “information society” (5.7%), but after “research and technological development, innovation and entrepreneurship” (66%) and “transport investments” (15.2%) (saerg 2013). this clearly demonstrates that tourism is a prioritised area; however, in terms of funding, it is small when compared with investments in research and development (r&d) and transportation. table 2. granted tourism support in the regional structural funds programmes, 2007–2013 (source: saerg 2013). regional structural funds programmes,  2007–2013  tourism support, eu funds (million  sek), jan 1, 2007 – june 30, 2013  share of programme budget (%)  north sweden  216.3   9.6  mid‐north sweden  233.7  14.7  north mid‐sweden  0  0  east mid‐sweden  0  0  stockholm  11.5   3.5  småland and the islands  28.2   4.5  west sweden  0  0  skåne‐blekinge  23.9   3.7  total   513.6   6.0  note: although the data do not cover the full programme period all decisions on granted support were already made within this period.    fennia 194: 1 (2016) 25public spending on rural tourism in sweden within the environmental and rural development plan for 2000–2006, approx. sek 85 million was granted to rural tourism and at least sek 31 million to tourism-related activities, including national public funding (table 3). substantially more money, approx. sek 810 million, was allocated to rural tourism in the rural development programme for 2007–2013, including tourism related measures. national public funding (54.19 % for enterprise and project support, and 60 % for leader projects) is added to this. looking at the programme period 2007–2013, the budget for axis 3 (“diversification and a better quality of life in rural areas”), which includes the tourism measure “promoting the tourist industry” (code 313), was sek 3.7 billion including national public funding. this is approx. 10% of the total budget. this can be compared to sek 5.7 billion for axis 1 (“improving competitiveness in the agricultural and forestry sector”, approx. 16% of total budget), sek 23.3 billion for axis 2 (“improving the environment and the landscape”, approx. 64% of total budget), and sek 2.4 billion for axis 4 (‘leader’, approx. 7% of total budget) (government offices of sweden 2012).1 according to the policy document, the budget for code 313 is sek 625 million including national public funding, which is 1.7% of the total budget (ibid.). although these data do not exactly match the register data from sba, they indicate the proportions. once again, in policy programmes, tourism is stated as being important for rural development. however, in terms of actual spending, it is obvious that a substantial amount of funding goes more or less directly to the agricultural sector (the main targets in axis 1 and axis 2), whereas tourism development receives a comparatively small amount. distribution of public spending distribution by sector in terms of enterprise support, a total of sek 238 million was distributed to 818 enterprises, i.e. on average sek 291,000 per enterprise (table 4). the biggest sector is ‘accommodation’, which received nearly 60% of the total enterprise support. a significant share of this went to small-scale accommodation under the sub-categories “cabins, rental” (sek 46 million) and “b&b, boarding house” (sek 16 million). the second biggest sector is “nature, hunting, fishing, outdoor recreation” (17% of enterprise support), followed by “food including food tourism” (13% of enterprise support). in comparison, “culture, history, amusement” was granted about 3% of enterprise support, which suggests that this is not a prioritised focus area within the programme. in terms of project support, a total of sek 286 million was distributed to 493 projects, i.e. on average sek 579,000 per project (table 5). the biggest sector is “nature, hunting, fishing, outdoor recreation”, which received nearly 31% of total project support, followed by “general development/marketing” (27%), and “culture, history, amusement” (18%). thus, compared to enterprise support, no single dominant sector exists. an analysis of the distribution of public spending by sector shows that emphasis varies betable 3. granted tourism support in the rural development programme, 2000–2006 and 2007–2013. programme period  tourism measure  (million sek)  other tourism related measures  (million sek)  number of projects/  enterprises  total programme budget  (million sek)  2000–20061 84.6  31 3572 16 046 2007–2013 enterprise support3   238.3  44.5  1015  36 3324 2007–2013, project support3  285.5  62.4  622  ‐  2007–2011, leader5 179.7  ‐  706  ‐  1 granted funds, including national public funding (source: slu 2007).  2 includes only tourism projects, not tourism related projects.  3 granted funds, excluding national public funding (source: register data from sba 2014).  4 data from 2012 for the whole programme (including enterprise and project support), including national public funding (approx. 50%; source: government  offices of sweden 2012).  5 paid out funds, excluding national public funding. data do not separate direct tourism measures from tourism related measures and cover solely paid out  funds up to and including 2011 (source: register data from sba 2014).     26 fennia 194: 1 (2016)åsa almstedt, linda lundmark and örjan pettersson tween enterprise support and project support. for example, considerably more enterprise support is directed towards ‘accommodation’, sek 142 million compared to nearly sek 8 million of project support and sek 76 million of project support was directed towards “general development/marketing” compared to only sek 1.6 million of enterprise support (part of ‘other’). this difference may be explained by the character of each support type. project support focuses mainly on enabling development activities (e.g., marketing, research collaborations) while enterprise support mainly goes to investments in physical infrastructure (e.g., building cabins, trails, improved access to attractions) (government offices of sweden 2008). thus, the allocation of funding to sectors largely corresponds with many of the components needed for rural tourism to succeed (e.g., wilson et al. 2001). for example, accommodation is part of the basic services for tourists, marketing is part sector number of enterprise support granted funds (million sek) share of total enterprise support (%) accommodation 418 142.6 59.8 nature, hunting, fishing, outdoor recreation 177 40.0 16.8 food incl. food tourism 107 30.8 12.9 other1 47 9.5 4.0 horses incl. equestrian tourism 44 8.7 3.7 culture, history, amusement 25 6.8 2.8 total 818 238.3 100.0 1‘other’ includes the categories “retail shops”, ‘handicraft’, “sports/exercise”, “manufacturing/services etc.”, “general development/marketing”, and ‘other’. of promotion, and several of the sectors (e.g., nature, culture, horses, food, sports) relate to various attractions. geographical distribution the funding for tourism in the rural development programme for 2007–2013 (code 313) goes to either enterprise support or project support. the map in figure 1 indicates that municipalities located in regions with traditional tourism destinations were often granted the highest amounts of enterprise support; these include the west coast close to gothenburg, areas nearby stockholm, the south-eastern coast, gotland, areas close to norway and areas in the northernmost sweden. for example, the highest amount of enterprise support was granted to kiruna, sweden’s northernmost municipality which already has a diversified tourism industry based on, for example, its vast wilderness areas, the sami culture, mining and the ice hotel in jukkasjärvi. table 4. granted enterprise support for rural tourism (measure code 313) in the rural development programme for 2007– 2013 (source: register data from sba 2014). sector number of project support granted funds (million sek) share of total project support (%) nature, hunting, fishing, outdoor recreation 131 87.5 30.6 general development/marketing 125 76.3 26.7 culture, history, amusement 109 51.3 18.0 food including food tourism 60 39.4 13.8 horses incl. equestrian tourism 24 9.8 3.4 accommodation 18 7.9 2.8 sports/exercise 14 7.8 2.7 other1 12 5.6 2.0 total 493 285.5 100.0 1‘other’ includes the categories ‘handicraft’, “manufacturing/services etc.”, and ‘other’. table 5. granted project support for rural tourism (measure code 313) in the rural development programme for 2007–2013 (source: register data from sba 2014). fennia 194: 1 (2016) 27public spending on rural tourism in sweden this suggests in general that areas with already established tourism enterprises receive the most public funding and, presumably, this strengthens their relative position. nevertheless, many other rural areas also receive enterprise support. this might reflect priorities within regions and/or a tradition in these areas of applying for funds. with regard to distribution per capita, it seems that the highest values are to be found in areas with relatively small populations such as in northern sweden. conversely, it should be noted that one of the counties in northern sweden, västerbotten county, did not grant enterprise support to tourism because of a decision made at the regional level (county administrative board of västerbotten 2011). the distribution of project support shows three distinct regions with the highest amount of granted support: the metropolitan regions of stockholm and malmö, and the scandinavian mountain range, especially the östersund region (fig. 2). in addition, gotland and parts of the mountain area in the västerbotten county stand out, the latter both in terms of the amount of funds granted and per capita. this includes the municipality of storuman, the location of the hemavan/tärnaby ski refig. 1. distribution of granted enterprise support for rural tourism (measure code 313) in the rural development programme for 2007–2013 at the municipal level, and amount of granted enterprise support per capita (source: register data from sba 2014). 28 fennia 194: 1 (2016)åsa almstedt, linda lundmark and örjan pettersson sort. consequently, it suggests that project money, at least in some cases, is being channelled into areas already undergoing restructuring into tourism as mentioned earlier (e.g., pettersson & westholm 1998; lundmark 2005). however, since data on project support reflect the location of the grant receiver, which, as already noted, may differ from the location of the project, the resulting pattern is slightly misleading. for example, the head offices of several organisations applying for funds are in stockholm and, thus, the coordinates give the position of stockholm even though project names or descriptions reveal that the projects target other areas in sweden. concluding remarks this paper set out to answer questions on the priorities of rural development and regional structural funds programmes regarding rural tourism, and how public money is distributed by sector and geographic location for measures that promote rural tourism in sweden. a review of relevant policy programmes indicates that policy makers have fig. 2. distribution of granted project support for rural tourism (measure code 313) in the rural development programme for 2007–2013 at the municipal level, and amount of granted project support per capita (source: register data from sba 2014). fennia 194: 1 (2016) 29public spending on rural tourism in sweden general knowledge of product supply and demand concerning rural tourism, at least on paper. for instance, they acknowledge the demand for experience-based activities (e.g., food tourism, equestrian tourism), the need for activity packages to attract tourists, the importance of knowledge of the tourism business and greater professionalism, and also the role small businesses play in the development of rural areas. however, given the understanding of rural tourism in the policy documents, we would expect a higher emphasis on tourism in the actual spending. instead data on spending reveal that tourism is not a highly prioritised area. in fact, the actual amount of money granted to rural tourism is relatively small, at least when compared to support targeted at sectors such as agriculture in the rural development programme and research/ innovation/entrepreneurship and transport investments in the regional structural funds programmes. of course, investment in transport infrastructure is comparatively costly and may, in some cases, also indirectly benefit the tourism sectors. it is obvious that the rural development programme mainly supports traditional rural sectors such as agriculture and forestry, whereas tourism receives much less public funding. this corresponds with more general tendencies within the eu where the agricultural sector still receives a major share of the overall funding for rural development; this might also reflect a kind of institutional conservatism (dwyer et al. 2007; dax & kahila 2011). altogether, this gives the impression that tourism is not as highly prioritised as is often stated in policy programmes. the relatively small amount of public funding granted to rural tourism, especially when compared with the financial resources going to the agricultural sector, leads to the conclusion that expectations about the restructuring of the rural economy promoting tourism should be somewhat moderated. however, this coincides with a general perception among decision-makers that tourism is an “easy path to economic development and restructuring” (hall & jenkins 1998: 38). the actual distribution of funding by sector and geographic location was also investigated for the swedish rural development programme for 2007–2013. distribution by sector indicates that many of the sectors relate to the components needed for rural tourism to succeed (e.g., wilson et al. 2001), for example accommodation, activities, marketing and packaging. this suggests that policy makers, at least to some extent, understand what is needed for rural tourism to become successful. on the other hand, the pattern of the geographical distribution is less clear. when it comes to enterprise support, there is a tendency for traditional tourism destinations along the coasts and in mountain areas to attract most grants, whereas for project support five areas stand out (i.e., the stockholm and malmö metropolitan regions, the östersund region, the västerbotten mountain area and gotland). nonetheless, apart from these trends, public spending is also allocated to rural areas in many other parts of sweden. this reinforces the impression that tourism is often seen as a tool for development in all rural areas, irrespective of the specific preconditions in these areas, and even though researchers have claimed that tourism may not be suitable for all rural areas (e.g., hall et al. 2007; carson & carson 2011). this might reflect lack of alternative ideas as to how to stimulate development in rural areas facing general depopulation, structural unemployment and generally poor conditions (e.g., müller & jansson 2007). finally, as this paper demonstrates, lack of tourism data prevents a more detailed analysis. to evolve the field of tourism research and public spending, there is a need for more detailed (e.g., no missing data for certain variables) and comparable data between programme periods so that more encompassing evaluations can be made. the responsibility for the collection of such basic information rests firmly with the responsible authorities. data should be easily accessible and transparent to users, and included variables should be developed in cooperation with users and researchers. notes 1 technical support is also included in the programme budget (sek 1.2 billion, approx. 3%). references carson da & carson db 2011. why tourism may not be everybody’s business: the challenge of tradition in resource peripheries. the rangeland journal 33: 4, 373–383. http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/rj11026. cawley m 2011. adding value locally through integrated rural tourism: lessons from ireland. in halseth g, markey s & bruce d (eds). the next rural economies: constructing rural place in global economies, 89–101. cabi publishing, wallingford. copus ak 2015. the new rural economy and macroscale patterns. in copus ak & de lima p (eds). territorial cohesion in rural europe: the relational 30 fennia 194: 1 (2016)åsa almstedt, linda lundmark and örjan pettersson turn in rural development, 11–34. routledge, oxon. copus ak & hörnström l (eds) 2011. the new rural europe: towards rural cohesion policy. nordregio report 2011:1. nordregio, stockholm. <http:// w w w. n o r d r e g i o . s e / p u b l i c a t i o n s / p u b l i c a tions-2011/the-new-rural-europe-towards-rural-cohesion-policy/> 14.01.2015. county administrative board of norrbotten 2010. objective 1 norra norrland sweden: final report 2000–2006. the county administrative board of norrbotten, luleå. <http://www.lansstyrelsen. se/norrbotten/sitecollectiondocuments/sv/omlansstyrelsen/eu-ochinternationellt/slutrapport%20m%c3%a5l%201%20nn%20201002-18.pdf> 17.06.2014. (in swedish) county administrative board of västerbotten 2011. regional implementation strategy for the rural development programme 2007–2013 västerbotten county. revised version 2011-02-01. the county administrative board of västerbotten, umeå. <http://www.lansstyrelsen.se/vasterbotten/sitecollectiondocuments/sv/lantbruk-ochlandsbygd/landsbygdsutveckling/landsbygdsprogram/genomf%c3%b6randestrategi%20 f%c3%b6r%20landsbygdsprogrammet%20 i%20v%c3%a4sterbotten%202007-2013.pdf> 17.06.2014. (in swedish) dax t & kahila p 2011. policy perspective – the evolution of eu rural policy. in copus ak & hörnström l (eds). the new rural europe: towards rural cohesion policy, 87–106. nordregio report 2011:1. nordregio, stockholm. <http://www. nordregio.se/publications/publications-2011/ the-new-rural-europe-towards-rural-cohesionpolicy/> 14.01.2015. dwyer j, ward n, lowe p & baldock, d 2007. european rural development under the common agricultural policy’s ‘second pillar’: institutional conservatism and innovation. regional studies 41: 7, 873–887. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343400601142795. findlay am, short d & stockdale a 2000. the labourmarket impact of migration to rural areas. applied geography 20: 4, 333–348. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0143-6228(00)00012-6. fleischer a & felsenstein d 2000. support for rural tourism: does it make a difference? annals of tourism research 27: 4, 1007–1024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(99)00126-7. government offices of sweden 2000. environmental and rural development plan for sweden 2000–2006. <http://www.government.se/cont e n t / 1 / c 6 / 0 2 / 6 0 / 9 3 / 0 d 3 1 3 d 0 c . p d f > 17.06.2014. government offices of sweden 2007. a national strategy for regional competitiveness, entrepreneurship and employment 2007–2013. <http:// w w w . g o v e r n m e n t . s e / c o n t e n t / 1 / c6/07/74/17/1fdb10a6.pdf> 17.06.2014. government offices of sweden 2008. rural development programme for sweden 2007–2013. < h t t p : / / w w w. g o v e r n m e n t . s e / c o n t e n t / 1 / c6/08/27/27/ee703769.pdf> 17.06.2014. government offices of sweden 2012. rural development programme for sweden 2007–2013. version 2012. (in swedish) gunn ca & var t 2002. tourism planning: basics, concepts, cases. routledge, london. hall cm 2007. north-south perspectives on tourism, regional development and peripheral areas. in müller dk & jansson b (eds). tourism in peripheries: perspectives from the far north and south, 19–37. cabi, wallingford. hall cm & jenkins jm 1998. the policy dimensions of rural tourism and recreation. in butler r, hall cm & jenkins j (eds). tourism and recreation in rural areas, 19–42. wiley, chichester. hall cm, müller dk & saarinen j 2009. nordic tourism: issues and cases. channel view publications, bristol. hall d, mitchell m & robert l 2003. tourism and the countryside: dynamic relationships. in hall d, roberts l & mitchell m (eds). new directions in rural tourism, 3–15. ashgate, aldershot. halseth g, markey s & bruce d 2010. the next rural economies: constructing rural place in global economies. cabi publishing, wallingford. hassink r & klaerding c 2011. evolutionary approaches to local and regional development policy. in pike a, rodríguez-pose a & tomaney j (eds). handbook of local and regional development, 139–148. routledge, london. hill b 2005. the new rural economy: change, dynamism and government policy. the institute of economic affairs, london. liu a & liu h 2009. government approaches to tourism: an international inquiry. international journal of tourism policy 2: 3, 221–238. http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/ijtp.2009.024554. lundmark l 2005. economic restructuring into tourism in the swedish mountain range. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 5: 1, 23–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250510014273. lundmark l 2006. restructuring and employment change in sparsely populated areas: examples from northern sweden and finland. doctoral dissertation. department of social and economic geography, umeå university, umeå, sweden. lundmark l, ednarsson m & karlsson s 2014. international migration, self-employment and restructuring through tourism in sparsely populated areas. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 14: 4, 422–440. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2014.967995. mackinnon d & cumbers a 2011. introduction to economic geography: globalization, uneven development and place. pearson prentice hall, harlow. müller dk 2006. amenity migration and tourism development in the tärna mountains, sweden. in moss lag (ed). amenity migrants: seeking and sustaining mountains and their cultures, 245–248. cabi, wallingford. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 31public spending on rural tourism in sweden müller dk 2013. sweden. in fredricsson c & smas l (eds). small-scale tourism in rural areas: trends and research in nordic countries, 41–46. nordic working group 1b: future rural areas. nordregio working paper 2013:3. nordregio, stockholm. <http://www.nordregio.se/en/publications/publications-2013/small-scale-tourism-in-rural-areas/> 17.06.2014. müller dk & jansson b 2007. the difficult business of making pleasure peripheries prosperous: perspectives on space, place and environment. in müller dk & jansson b (eds). tourism in peripheries: perspectives from the far north and south, 3–18. cabi, wallingford. nylander m & hall d 2004. rural tourism policy: european perspectives. in hall d, kirkpatrick i & mitchell m (eds). rural tourism and sustainable business, 17–40. channel view publications, clevedon. oecd 2006. the new rural paradigm: policies and governance. oecd rural policy reviews. organisation for economic co-operation and development, paris. paniagua a 2002. urban-rural migration, tourism entrepreneurs and rural restructuring in spain. tourism geographies 4: 4, 349–371. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616680210158128. pettersson ö 2001. microregional fragmentation in a swedish county. papers in regional science 80: 4, 389–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/pl00013630. pettersson ö & westholm e 1998. fattigfickor och gräddhyllor: en mikroregional analys av välfärdens geografiska fördelning i dalarna. dfr-rapport 1998:1. dalarnas forskningsråd, falun. (in swedish) pike a, rodríguez-pose a & tomaney j 2006. local and regional development. routledge, london. roto j, grunfelder j & rispling l (eds) 2014. state of the nordic region 2013. nordregio report 2014: 1. nordregio, stockholm. saarinen j 2003. the regional economics of tourism in northern finland: the socio-economic implications of recent tourism development and future possibilities for regional development. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 3: 2, 91–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250310001927. saarinen j 2007. tourism in peripheries: the role of tourism in regional development in northern finland. in müller dk & jansson b (eds). tourism in peripheries: perspectives from the far north and south, 41–52. cabi, wallingford. saerg 2011. regional structural funds programme for regional competitiveness and employment in mid-north sweden 2007–2013. revised operational programme. swedish agency for economic and regional growth, stockholm. (in swedish) saerg 2013. a collected progress report by 201310-25: an investment for the future. the european regional development fund, programme period 2007–2013. dnr. 6.1.15-2013-4202. swedish agency for economic and regional growth, stockholm. <http://www.tillvaxtverket.se/download/18.e8f46b8140a162b4fe40e4/1383223361 095/20131025+rapport.pdf> 03.04.2014. (in swedish) schmallegger d & carson d 2010. is tourism just another staple? a new perspective on tourism in remote regions. current issues in tourism 13: 3, 201–221. schmied d (ed) 2005. winning and losing: the changing geography of europe’s rural areas. ashgate, aldershot. shucksmith m, talbot h & lee r 2011. meta-narratives as heuristic generalisations of rural change. in copus ak & hörnström l (eds). the new rural europe: towards rural cohesion policy, 19–36. nordregio report 2011:1. nordregio, stockholm. <http://www.nordregio.se/publications/publications-2011/the-new-rural-europe-towards-rural-cohesion-policy/> 14.01.2015. stolarick k, denstedt m, donald b & spencer gm 2010. creativity, tourism and economic development in a rural context: the case of prince edward county. journal of rural and community development 5: 1/2, 238–254. <http://www.jrcd.ca/ viewarticle.php?id=397> 14.01.2015. sunley p 2000. urban and regional growth. in sheppard e & barnes tj (eds). a companion to economic geography, 187–201. blackwell, oxford. tödtling f 2011. endogenous approaches to local and regional development policy. in pike a, rodríguez-pose a & tomaney j (eds). handbook of local and regional development, 333–343. routledge, london. waldenström c & westholm e 2009. the natural resource turn: challenges for rural research and policy. journal of rural and community development 4: 1, 102–117. <http://www.jrcd.ca/viewarticle.php?id=243> 14.01.2015. wiberg u 2013. a competitive local and regional milieu for firms and people. in lundström mj, fredriksson c & witzell j (eds). planning for sustainable urban development in sweden, 23–33. swedish society for town and country planning, stockholm. wilson s, fesenmaier dr, fesenmaier j & van es jc 2001. factors for success in rural tourism development. journal of travel research 40: 2, 132–138. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/004728750104000203. woods m 2005. rural geography: processes, responses and experiences in rural restructuring. sage, london. woods m 2011. rural. routledge, london. where is climate asylum? where is climate asylum? the eu has a long-established human rights-based approach to international affairs. this should extend to the protection of those driven abroad by natural disasters. through its cooperation with the countries affected, the eu can put in place safe legal pathways for climate migrants. the new pact on migration and asylum, launched by the european commission in 2020, addresses the safety of refugees, but does not, as yet, refer to the needs of individuals affected by climaterelated events. the 1951 refugee convention predates the global recognition of the dangers of climate change, and does not recognise climate stress as grounds to seek refugee status. it would be in keeping with its role as a leading actor against climate change were the eu to push for the recognition of the status of climate refugee. (noonan 2022, my emphasis) the above excerpt from the document the future of climate migration is a kind reminder by eamonn noonan (with ana rusu), a specialist at the strategic foresight and capabilities unit of the european parliamentary research service (eprs), to the european parliament. the brief report draws from a study climate change and migration, requested by the parliament’s committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs a couple of years back, along with other documentation about this increasingly alarming issue (kraler et al. 2020). in parallel to these, the parliament ordered another this editorial discusses an alarming issue in the time of climate change: climate mobilities and, particularly, forced climate migration and the need for climate refuge and climate asylum. the focus is on the european union (eu) where migration and asylum policies are being currently developed under the 'new pact', yet with little intention to relate with climate mobilities of any kind. neither does the eu's environmental and climate policy green deal give much attention to human mobility. at the same time, the eu has commenced many briefings on the topic, which shows that the subject matter itself is well known. the editorial hence asks, where is climate asylum if not in the eu, and when, if not at this juncture of creating new asylum policies? keywords: climate asylum, climate migration, climate refuge, refugees, displacement, mobilities urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa131020 doi: 10.11143/fennia.131020 © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 2 fennia 201(1) (2023)editorial related briefing from the eprs, the concept of ‘climate refugee’: towards a possible definition. this report, first delivered in 2019 and updated two years later, begins by identifying the global scope of climate change-related displacement: since 2008, over 318 million persons have been displaced because of climate disasters, this is the equivalent of one person being displaced every second, or the entire australian population being displaced every year. in 2020 alone, 30.7 million people were displaced because of environmental disasters, notably linked to climate change. as the number of people affected by climate change could double by 2050 according to the international federation of red cross and red crescent societies (ifrc), the annual displacement of millions of persons worldwide due to environmental disasters needs to be addressed. (apap 2019/2021, my emphasis) this briefing, written by joanna apap (2019/2021, 7), reminds the european parliament that, in 2009, the council of europe suggested that the united nations (un) guiding principles on internal displacement from 1998 “could be taken as a model to develop a global guiding framework for the protection of displaced persons crossing international borders as a result of climate change and natural disasters”. this suggestion was followed by the international nansen initiative setting the first broadly acknowledged agenda for the protection of cross-border displaced persons in the context of disasters and climate change. it stresses the responsibility of states, specifically, in the provision of this protection – an issue fiercely debated ever since in the un cop meetings. the latest summit in sharm el-sheikh, in 2022, resulted in a decision to establish a loss and damage fund that can be used to compensate for internal displacement and relocation expenses. collective decisions regarding international climate mobilities, instead, remain unmade. the suggestion in noonan's (2022) report, for the eu to act as a vanguard, seems well justified when placed in the framework opened in apap’s (2019/2021) briefing. yet in the current political climate in europe, it is a very radical proposal. in my own ongoing research on the new pact, with gintarė kudžmaitė and jouni häkli, we have found that the current and developing eu policies framing migration and asylum governance express hardly any views on climate migration, and the same applies to policies of environmental governance. the documents outlining the new pact on migration and asylum – launched in 2019 and intended to be finalized by the spring of 2024 – mention climate change altogether five times (communications and factsheet, both from 2020). two of these mentions are made in connection with migration in general but none of them are related with refuge, asylum, or displacement. they are characterized by a declarative tone, without any commitment from the eu: key societal challenges faced by the world today – demography, climate change, security, the global race for talent, and inequality – all have an impact on migration. (european commission 2020a, 1) demographic and economic trends, political instability and conflict, as well as climate change, all suggest that migration will remain a major phenomenon and global challenge for the years to come. (european commission 2020a, 17) in addition to these, climatic and environmental factors potentially impacting asylum, migration or border management of the eu are brought up in the migration preparedness and crisis blueprint (european commission 2020b, 31), in the context of discussions with “representatives of the main third countries of origin, transit and/or destination as well as representatives of key international partners and stakeholders”. they are introduced in parallel with migratory flows and smuggling activities that are considered problems to be solved with the mentioned representatives (preferably outside the eu territory), and not as matters to be faced with them in a humanitarian manner. another key strategy of the eu where climate mobilities ought to be discussed is the grean deal. its initial portrayal, from 2019, refers to migration only once, in the context of so-called ‘multicrises’ that the eu sets out to prevent globally: the eu also recognises that the global climate and environmental challenges are a significant threat multiplier and a source of instability. the ecological transition will reshape geopolitics, including global economic, trade and security interests. this will create challenges for a number of states and societies. the eu will work with all partners to increase climate and environmental resilience to prevent these challenges from becoming sources of conflict, food insecurity, population displacement and forced migration, and support a just transition globally. climate fennia 201(1) (2023) 3kirsi pauliina kallio policy implications should become an integral part of the eu’s thinking and action on external issues, including in the context of the common security and defence policy. (green deal 2019, my emphasis) this policy line is very passive, if not hostile, towards climate-induced migration. linking the “prevention of challenges from becoming sources of […] population displacement and forced migration” (green deal 2019) with security and defense policies hints toward border control and migration management instead of humanitarian asylum policy, which is in line with the previously mentioned blueprint linked with the new pact. hence, the conclusion from these two key eu policies regarding climate mobilities is that people whose habitats become ruined and whose livelihoods diminish due to climate change effects, and whose vulnerabilities thus increase, are not welcome in the eu. where is the climate asylum then, if not here, and when, if not now? this is what many european scholars and activists are thinking about. there are many obvious reasons why the eu should stand at the humanitarian forefront in the global climate crisis. first, the prosperity of eu countries stems from the colonization of the rest of the world. this wealth makes europe more resilient in the face of the effects of climate change. second, carbon emissions – direct and indirect, previous and present – are multiple in the eu compared to most (if not all) countries where impacts of climate change are bigger and whose adaptive capacities are poorer. third, the eu manifests itself globally as the leading figure of democracy with human rights at its heart. if none of the millions of people forced to leave their places of origin due to the negative impacts of climate change are recognized as climate refugees in the eu’s evolving migration and asylum policy, how does the union position itself geopolitically? another, yet connected paradox that critical migration studies scholars are pondering these days in europe is the expressed need – or perhaps better desire – of many states to recruit labor from beyond the eu. instead of organizing safe routes and passages for climate migrants and other asylum seekers to enter the eu member states legally, with work permits, my home country finland for instance is seeking to invite thousands of labor migrants yearly, from places of its choosing. while it is openly declared that their role would be to work for the finnish society – to take care of our elderly and ill, to grow and deliver our food, to clean our facilities, to build our infrastructures – it is not clarified why the people who have to leave their places of origin and may even choose to come to finland are not welcome to do this work. given that finnish language is not spoken by anyone else but finns, and that even trained professionals coming from beyond the eu are requested to accomplish a finnish degree to be qualified in the labor market, there is no place in the world from where people could just come and start working in finland. one explanation to the current strategy in finland and other eu members states can be found from what baldwin (2014) calls ‘new racisms’. the present and emerging policies are actively continuing the continent’s colonial history by categorizing people beyond the eu borders by race, class, and nationality, and allowing some of them to fulfill our needs while leaving others to struggle with the consequences of our unsustainable and exploitative lifestyles. in such policy climate, the recognition of climate refugees as suggested by noonan (2022) and apap (2019/2021) in their recent briefings to the european parliament seems utopic. indeed, the statement “the opinions expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the european parliament”, included in both reports (ibid.), seems very necessary. that said, a seed of hope lies in these very documents: the parliament has been informed about the alarming climate mobilities situation in the world and the eu’s current disregard of it. perhaps the members of the parliament, also representing many of us european scholars, will respond to the call. i truly hope to see this happening in the finalization of the new pact during the next year. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) fennia editor-in-chief https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159 4 fennia 201(1) (2023)editorial content of the issue this issue of fennia includes five research papers, of which one is based on the fennia lecture 2022 from the finnish geography days, one review article, and in the reflections section we have five commentaries to articles and one lectio praecursoria. moreover, developing one step further our dialogical publication practices, we have asked for brief reflections from ilse van liempt to the commentaries she received to her lecture-based article. her views are included below as part of the introduction. in 2022, we organized exceptionally two fennia lectures, due to the postponing of the ngm conference because of the pandemic. the nordic geographers meeting (ngm) lecture held at joensuu, by josefina syssner (2022), led to a special issue on rural nordic geographies published in our previous issue. the second one, by ilse van liempt, took place in tampere in november, and is included in the present issue. it is accompanied by four commentaries, two of which are coming from the discussants at the site and two from the open peer review process carried out during the spring (one of these will be published in a later issue). ilse van liempt’s article becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement resonates to some extent with the theme of the editorial, with focus on the city as a place of asylum, in the context of amsterdam, the netherlands. taking the perspective of asylum seekers and refugees – their experiences and mundane activities – van liempt (2023) seeks to broaden the scope for seeing the city as a multi-sited context where ‘organic emplacement’ enacted by refugees takes place, alongside with top-down activities by state institutions. sometimes these activities are made in collaboration with local ngos, grassroots organizations, and local people, but she has identified also rather personal ways in which refugees take space in the city. van liempt talks about the importance of making the city a home to oneself, by engaging with urban life in places of one’s own liking, including beyond the neighborhoods and facilities appointed by the state. this social, material, and mental homemaking in public and semi-public spaces offers a break away from the ‘stuckness’ of being a stranger to oneself and to others – the refugee. in a new dialogical format for the journal, we include in this issue commentaries to van liempt, by mélodine sommier, aura lounasmaa, and katharyne mitchell, and as promised a response from the author in this editorial. sommier (2023) exposes the racial structures at play in academia and acknowledges the position of power from which she speaks, turning attention to the experience of becoming part of the city for racialized immigrants. lounasmaa (2023) draws from experiences of hostile bordering practices, and explores the meaning of home in a time of the ‘techno-borderscape’ that has increasingly moved arrival infrastructures online. mitchell (2023) focuses upon spaces of embodied migrant agency to counter static concepts, resisting temporal and spatial logics that seek to manage and contain migrant bodies. rather than introducing these commentaries further as we might in a traditional editorial, we instead connect descriptions of these reflections to the comments that follow by van liempt. in her own reflections on the commentaries, van liempt first acknowledges what a treat it is when people read your work with care and take the time to respond, and how lucky she felt to be read by three great female scholars and receive their take on her work (the fourth commentary by another female geographer forthcoming later this year). in mitchell’s response, van liempt finds a fascinating comparison between her work and the work on the flaneur. the commentary pays attention to how her work provides a more complicated and nuanced way of how strolling around the anonymous city is experienced by newcomers. to continue this thought, van liempt says: “while strolling around offers freedom and can be liberating, the capacity to stroll ‘unnoticed’ is limited for those ‘who stand out’. that is, the anonymity of the city (and the crowd) can very well be liberating, but at the same time alienating.” in connection with this van liempt notes that, in her response, sommier rightly reminds us that it is important to always connect migration and space to race, in order to expose the complexities and nuances of the experiences of becoming part of the city for racialized migrants. the combination of mitchell’s and sommier’s responses reminded her of a quote by teju cole, a member of the walking https://fennia.journal.fi/issue/view/8642 fennia 201(1) (2023) 5kirsi pauliina kallio & james riding artist network, on how it is not possible to be black flâneur. after two black men got arrested in a starbucks in 2018, he posted a social media comment: this is why i always say you can’t be a black flâneur. flânerie is for whites. for blacks in white terrain, all spaces are charged. cafes, restaurants, museums, shops. your own front door. this is why we are compelled, instead, to practice psychogeography. we wander alert, and pay a heavy psychic toll for that vigilance. can’t relax, black.1 regarding lounasmaa’s commentary, van liempt finds herself in strong agreement with that home can be a hostile place, too, and that it is equally important to include non-belonging in our analysis instead of romanticisizing this idea of home and belonging as a happy place. lounasmaa’s references to work on ‘queering the home’ she considers inspiring, as it points to that a home needs to be built around people and that it is a place where you can be yourself. this creates an interesting relation to her own findings around how people can feel at home in a city or certain parts of the city. going back to mitchell’s comments, van liempt picks up a link with yet another concept that seems fascinating to her: the geosocial. it triggered her a lot and made her think of how it is indeed a helpful way to further conceptualize global-local interdependencies and to situate newcomers’ emplacement in a more concrete spatial-social context. the journal editor is very happy about this connection, too, as the concept has been developed in their collaborative research, and thus this open review process on van liempt’s article is taking forward their joint work as well (mitchell & kallio 2017). referring back to her own article, van liempt underlines that new spatial scales and new societal forms are indeed created through giving meaning to events and places that are important to newcomers; hence foregrounding transnational relations and the explanatory power of this frame to better understand the transnational in everyday practices is highly relevant. van liempt thus finds that the concept of the geosocial really helps to critique global-local binaries and provides a good framework to study interconnectedness across scales in a more nuanced way. looking at her data again, she started to wander how to conceptualize the moments of emplacement where newcomers want to break with the transnational context and try to be local, very local, and just local. these ruptures and challenges of borders, also from the inside, are worth more attention in her mind. the editors of fennia wish to thank the lecturer, the two discussants, and the two reviewers for their engaged work on this dialogical publication. we have learned a lot during the process, again, about how respectfully delivered and received critique works, and how openness in publication processes can be inspiring and supportive, leading to new ideas and perhaps new collaborations. while it requires engaged work from everyone involved, it also gives back. following the lecture, our research papers section includes four original articles. the first of these is by oleksiy gnatiuk, kostyantyn mezentsev and grygorii pidgrushnyi. we want to acknowledge that they have produced the article in lviv, ukraine, during the past year of war. titled travelling abroad and geopolitical preferences – case of kharkiv, dnipro and mariupol, ukraine, the paper offers a crossanalysis of east ukrainians’ geopolitical preferences vis-à-vis their travel experiences in european countries and in russia (gnatiuk et al. 2023). while the analysis itself concerns people’s expressed views in 2018–2020, the paper reflects upon the findings to some extent in the current geopolitical situation. the main result is that especially long-term visits in europe clearly correlate with proeuropean attitudes and connect with weaker pro-soviet sentiments, and respectively, those who travel mostly in russia express less support for european geopolitical and cultural integration and have stronger pro-soviet sentiments. while this may seem an obvious outcome, many nuances in the analysis support the authors’ argument that migration policy, including the visa-free regime, is an “effective tool for the eu to improve attitudes towards the european project in ukraine”, and to support the westernization of the country more broadly (gnatiuk et al. 2023, 41). the third article by eerika albrecht, jani lukkarinen, miikka hakkarainen and niko soininen is accompanied by a commentary in the reflections section, stemming from the open peer review process with hanna lempinen as one of the reviewers. their paper hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland concerns a hot topic in current debates over environmental and energy policies (albrecht et al. 2023). the authors offer a critical frame analysis of the finnish system of water governance and regulation, drawing from two sets of 6 fennia 201(1) (2023)editorial research materials: first, expert interviews with representatives from the hydropower industry, public administration, and ngos (carried out in the spring of 2021), and second, a broad collection of news articles published by the national broadcasting company (from 2017–2021). they align with recently presented concerns by the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc) and the intergovernmental platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (ipbes) where closer attention to climate and biodiversity interactions is demanded, as this nexus is often harmfully overlooked in transformative policies. this is true also in finland where discussion on climate and nature policies is typically decoupled or juxtaposed. based on the results that reveal three main framings from the policy debate, the paper calls for socio-ecological-technical transformations in aquatic ecosystems where, first, reconciliation of interest in river restoration, second, recreational uses of aquatic environments, and third, the flexible energy function of hydropower in energy transition are center-staged. the fourth original article takes us back to the theme of migration in europe yet, this time, at focus is voluntary migration for education and, also, for work. in his article south asian students’ migration to, within and from finland and sweden: connecting the dots to arrivals and departures, zain ul abdin shows that the stay-or-leave migration decisions of international students in higher education are often preceded by mobilities in the host country (abdin 2023). during his fieldwork in 2018, he familiarized with the experiences and views of students from india and pakistan in four major nordic cities with respected universities and polytechnics: in stockholm and gothenburg, sweden, and in helsinki and turku, finland. through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, including informal associations, abdin – who has a decade-long personal experience of being an international student from south asia in the two countries – gained a good understanding of how the students navigate in their everyday lives and which matters influence their decisions to leave or stay in the country or the region. based on his findings he emphasizes the importance of translocal analysis alongside with the transnational perspective, in understanding the (im)mobilities of international students. our final full-length article is by katri gadd and faleha ubeis, whose paper “freedom is a treasure that only those who lose it can know”: a spatiotemporal exploration of 22 iraqi women’s interlegalities delves into legal geographies as experienced by iraqi women. with a survey with close to 200 participants, and in-depth group and individual interviews with 22 women – interviewed remotely due to the pandemic, several times during the research – they have sought to understand how women in iraq, including in kurdistan, find themselves in the legal spaces and normative orders of their society (gadd & ubeis 2023). through metaphorical mapping, they have explored together with the participants the complex landscapes of ‘interlegalities’ where state laws and people’s knowledge of them entangle with religion, traditions, ideologies, experiences, and beliefs. this experiential perspective opens an important window to legal landscapes in this middle eastern context where gender plays an important role. in addition to the original articles, this issue includes one review article by jussi jauhiainen who has assessed co-authored international peer-reviewed scientific articles between african scholars and researchers in eu countries, finland specifically. his paper titled research collaboration outputs between the european union and africa: the case of co-authored scientific articles between finland and africa is motivated by a broadly acknowledged need to develop research practices originating and based in africa, to promote more grounded development in african societies. this aim is encouraged and funded also by the european commission. jauhiainen (2023) finds great potential in finland’s competences in technology and innovations for scholarly co-operation and related development work: commitment to economic competitiveness, rdi, carbon-free sustainability transition, people’s welfare, and anticorruption measures are identified as the country’s internationally respected achievements. the review ends with a recommendation for equal and symmetric long-term partnerships with african actors, which should include a wide range of partners. co-authorships in journals like fennia that are open to high-quality contributions from everywhere in the world are one practical way to promote this development. in the reflections section, we have two more commentaries by elisa pascucci and hanna lempinen and one lectio praecursoria by violeta guttierez-zamora. pascucci (2023) reflects upon refstie’s (2021) article reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the coproductive turn in searching for sustainable solutions published in a previous issue of the journal. fennia 201(1) (2023) 7kirsi pauliina kallio & james riding extending the four commentaries published last year by häkli (2022), lyytinen (2022), vela-almeida (2022), and lorne (2022), pascucci argues project-based research funding is a politicized and coercive tool, and that (gendered and racialized) precarization and even abuse have a longer and more ingrained history than what we commonly identify as the ‘neoliberalization’ of academia. lempinen (2023) reflects upon a paper by eerika albrecht, jani lukkarinen, miikka hakkarainen and niko soininen in this issue of the journal called hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland (albrecht et al. 2023). lempinen responds by emphasizing the political and affective nature of all resource-related societal developments, acknowledging localized injustices generated as externalities of existing nature-related governance frameworks. extending emergent interconnections between the environment, climate, injustice, migration and extraction in this issue of the journal, guttierez-zamora (2023) shares her lectio praecursoria, recognizing the plurality of knowledge, values, and experiences interwoven in mexican community forestry. in the sierra sur of oaxaca, guttierez-zamora deeply explores community forestry, an alternative form of forest management. feminist political ecology, the neoliberalization of nature, and environmental justice are engaged with in an ethnographic study which describes the collective efforts of rural populations to maintain and manage forests in sustainable ways. we are put in mind here once more of climate displacement. specifically, the destruction, extraction, and long-term contamination of habitats which leads to the landscape no longer being able to support life, displacing local communities. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) fennia editor-in-chief james riding (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819) fennia reflections section editor notes 1 teju cole, “the starbucks thing hit me harder than expected,” facebook, 18 april 2018. references abdin, z. u. (2023) south asian students’ migration to, within and from finland and sweden: connecting the dots to arrivals and departures. fennia 201(1) 65–78. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119776 albrecht, e., lukkarinen, j., hakkarainen, m. & soininen, n. (2023) hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland. fennia 201(1) 47–64. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120946 apap, j. (2019/2021) the concept of 'climate refugee': towards a possible definition”. eprs – european parliamentary research service, pe 698.753. <https://policycommons.net/artifacts/1335316/theconcept-of-climate-refugee/1941760/>. baldwin, a. (2014) pluralising climate change and migration: an argument in favour of open futures. geography compass 8(8) 516–528. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12145 european commission (2020a) communication from the commission to the european parliament, the council, the european economic and social committee and the committee of regions on a new pact on migration and asylum on a new pact on migration and asylum. <https://eur-lex.europa. eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:85ff8b4f-ff13-11ea-b44f-01aa75ed71a1.0002.02/doc_3&format=pdf>. european commission (2020b) commission recommendation (eu) 2020/1366 of 23 september 2020 on an eu mechanism for preparedness and management of crises related to migration (migration preparedness and crisis blueprint). <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/ pdf/?uri=celex:32020h1366>. gadd, k. & ubeis, f. (2023) “freedom is a treasure that only those who lose it can know”: a spatiotemporal exploration of 22 iraqi women’s interlegalities. fennia 201(1) 79–93. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120307 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819 https://m.facebook.com/walkingartistsnetwork/posts/1066870813450882/ https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119776 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120946 https://policycommons.net/artifacts/1335316/the-concept-of-climate-refugee/1941760/ https://policycommons.net/artifacts/1335316/the-concept-of-climate-refugee/1941760/ https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12145 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:85ff8b4f-ff13-11ea-b44f-01aa75ed71a1.0002.02/doc_3&format=pdf> https://eur-lex.europa.eu/resource.html?uri=cellar:85ff8b4f-ff13-11ea-b44f-01aa75ed71a1.0002.02/doc_3&format=pdf> https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:32020h1366 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/pdf/?uri=celex:32020h1366 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120307 8 fennia 201(1) (2023)editorial gnatiuk, o., mezentsev, k. & pidgrushnyi, g. (2023) travelling abroad and geopolitical preferences – case of kharkiv, dnipro and mariupol, ukraine. fennia 201(1) 23–46. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117041 green deal (2019) communication from the commission to the european parliament, the european council, the council, the european economic and social committee and the committee of the regions: the european green deal. com/2019/640. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/ ?qid=1588580774040&uri=celex%3a52019dc0640>. gutiérrez-zamora, v. (2023) recognizing the plurality of knowledge, values, and experiences interwoven in mexican community forestry. fennia 201(1) 134–139. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129243 häkli, j. (2022) towards washing the baby in the bathwater? – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 72–73. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 jauhiainen, j. (2023) research collaboration outputs between the european union and africa: the case of co-authored scientific articles between finland and africa. fennia 201(1) 94–107. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115611 kraler, a., katsiaficas, c. & wagner, m. (2020) climate change and migration: legal and policy challenges and responses to environmentally induced migration. european union policy department for citizens’ rights and constitutional affairs directorate-general for internal policies, pe 655.591. <https://policycommons.net/artifacts/3181012/climate-change-and-migration/3979528/>. lempinen, h. (2023) towards more locally aware resource governance? – commentary to albrecht and colleagues. fennia 201(1) 124–129. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.130300 van liempt, i. (2023) becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement. fennia 201(1) 9–22. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 lorne, c. (2022) moving policy out of time – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 81–85. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 lounasmaa, a. (2023) emplacement in hostile spaces: hopeless notes – commentary to van liempt. fennia 201(1) 112–117. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129570 lyytinen, e. (2022) revisiting the ‘dual imperative’ of forced-migration studies – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 74–77. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 mitchell, k. (2023) migrant agency and embodiment in space – commentary to van liempt. fennia 201(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129714 mitchell, k. & kallio, k. p. (2017) spaces of the geosocial: exploring transnational topologies. geopolitics 22(1) 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 noonan, e. (with rusu, a.) (2022) the future of climate migration: at a glance – thinking about tomorrow. eprs – european parliamentary research service, pe 729.334. <https://policycommons. net/artifacts/2287966/the-future-of-climate-migration/3048078/>. pascucci, e. (2023) project management and research governance – towards a critical agenda beyond neoliberalization? – commentary to refstie. fennia 201(1) 130–133. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.126176 refstie, h. (2021) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 sommier, m. (2023) racialized immigrants becoming part of the city: connecting migration, space and race – commentary to van liempt. fennia 201(1) 108–111. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129437 syssner, s. (2022) what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? fennia 200(2) 98–119. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 vela-almeida, d. (2022) cherishing the reproductive work within academia for securing emancipatory work outside academia – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 78–80. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117041 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?qid=1588580774040&uri=celex%3a52019dc0640 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?qid=1588580774040&uri=celex%3a52019dc0640 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129243 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115611 https://policycommons.net/artifacts/3181012/climate-change-and-migration/3979528/ https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.130300 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129570 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129714 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 https://policycommons.net/artifacts/2287966/the-future-of-climate-migration/3048078/ https://policycommons.net/artifacts/2287966/the-future-of-climate-migration/3048078/ https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.126176 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129437 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 24961_02_hayrinen.pdf integrating regional policy with technology policy – the experience of finland marja häyrinen-alestalo, antti pelkonen, tuula teräväinen and suvi-tuuli waltari häyrinen-alestalo, marja, antti pelkonen, tuula teräväinen & suvi-tuuli waltari (2006). integrating regional policy with technology policy – the experience of finland. fennia 184: 1, pp. 3–17. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in order to be responsive to the ideas of new governance, governments have seen the demands of policy integration as increasingly important. in finland, both regional policy and technology policy have received hegemonic positions. regional policy had a key role in the welfare state programme that supported equal rights and opportunities, and only slowly promoted structural change in industry. technology policy has been taken as an evidence of finland’s rapid transformation into a competitive high-tech and market-driven country that has adopted the knowledge-based economy as the key model for further development. the centre of expertise programme, a central government effort to promote technological development and competitiveness at the regional level, illustrates a shift towards technology-driven regional policy. as the programme has become internationally renowned, this paper takes a closer look at its concept, and scrutinises the kind of a model it provides for regional policy efforts. the analysis shows that the programme has a partly conflicting position at the intersection of regional and technology policies. the evolution of the programme also reflects changes in the interpretation of the regional dimension of the knowledge-based economy. marja häyrinen-alestalo & antti pelkonen, helsinki institute of science and technology studies, university of helsinki, department of sociology, research group for comparative sociology, po box 18, fi-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mails: marja.alestalo@helsinki.fi, antti.pelkonen@helsinki.fi. the regional dimension in the knowledge-based economy current visions of the oecd, the european union and their member states refer to new governance requiring cross-sectoral approaches and integrations of various policy areas (e.g. oecd 2002). these ideas have echoed theories of a comprehensive policy-making where the mandates of government authorities become flexible and inclusive to the interests of a broad set of stakeholders (stoker 1998; häyrinen-alestalo & pelkonen 2004). modern technology policy is hypothesised as having generic possibilities to develop into an integrative policy. the areas of interest move ahead of customary technology policy, and social issues penetrate into a policy that has been – and still is – primarily market-oriented. some studies, however, indicate that the integrative capabilities of technology policy are limited (remoe 2005). its goals are close to economic and industrial policies, and to the attempts to keep national economies competitive in international markets. accordingly, technology policy has become hegemonic in its ability to steer other policies towards its goals. today, the political aspirations also emphasise the premises of the knowledge-based economy that has trust in marketand technology-driven elements of economic growth and is highly selective in relation to the integrative visions of socio-economic development. the tensions between the economic and social issues are visible especially in finland, which belongs to the nordic welfare states but has since the late 1980s adopted market governance more rapidly than the other nordic countries (häyrinen-alestalo et al. 2005). 4 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. häyrinen-alestalo, a. pelkonen, t. teräväinen and s.-t. waltari regional policy cannot be considered an autonomous political agenda, as it has always been related to other national policy goals, mostly to employment policy but also to the processes of industrial modernisation, and to the government attempts to neutralise changes due to unbalanced regional development and labour mobilisation. the narratives from the nordic countries also point to the importance of changing ideologies. the welfare state has been an aggressive attempt to equalise opportunities – both human and material – between different parts of a country and to penetrate into economic and social issues. in finland, there are contradictory aspirations between mobilisation that is responsive to the structural changes of industry and the attempts to keep agriculture still alive. in the knowledge-based economy, the regional dimension faces many problems. at the turn of the millennium the arguments for the coming of a new economy spoke for industrial structures where new technologies dominate and are supposed to be neutral to market fluctuations and non-reflexive to regional inequalities. in the view of the finnish technology policy-makers, high-tech–driven society should not compensate for regional deficiencies. the state can promote the processes of change but it should be careful with such activities that may be dysfunctional for market choices. accordingly, there is a tension between the former programmes of equal opportunities and the current visions of economic progress, i.e. between the processes of decentralisation and concentration. in the knowledge-based economy the relations between international super-states and nationstates are transforming especially in the case of regional policy. until recently the aims of nationstates have concentrated on the problem of underdeveloped regions. the knowledge-based economy tends in turn to identify and support national strengths that help national economies to penetrate into international markets. as these markets are selective, the political power of nation-states tends to become weaker than before. the diminishing power of european states becomes evident when an effort is made to study regional policy and its integration with technology policy. regions are part of the eu’s strategy in two respects. firstly, an attempt is made to identify the best areas of competence in the context of the knowledge-based economy. here, the emphasis is on models that imitate developments in the capital regions and other growth areas. secondly, the eu has prepared a large adjustment programme for regions that otherwise would drop out of the europeanisation process. it is characteristic of these programmes that the local authorities collaborate also directly with the eu. in the extreme cases, a regional programme may start to function as a general standardisation process that allows only a few deviations for local peculiarities. the aims of the study in respect to policy integration, finland provides an interesting example because regional policy has been an integral part of industrialisation after the world war ii and the welfare state programme thereafter. the development in political priorities illustrates linkages between an institutionalising regional policy and science, technology, industrial, economic and social policies. here, technology policy is visible but does not overrun other policies. in recent years, finland has served as an internationally recognised super model of the knowledge-based economy. it has ranked on the top of several competitiveness studies. the rise of the knowledge-based economy since the late 1980s has strengthened the role of technology policy and transformed the aims of regional policy in a radical way. as a result, the finnish governments have seen regional competence centres and other hightech–based programmes as a means to pursue an expanding technology policy. in this article, we make an effort to study policy integration in finland by analysing the evolution of technology and regional policies and the conditions for market governance and the market forces logic to become a uniting element between these policies. we try to find empirical evidence of the ways the competitive elements have gained importance in regional policy, and how the old ideas of disqualification have disappeared, through a twofold analysis of the welfare state and the knowledge-based economy: 1. we start by demonstrating the changes in the priorities of regional policy and their linkages to the aims of technology policy. after a slow beginning the structural change of industry has been a rapid process in finland during which technology policy has received a dominant role. therefore we ask: • what were the political choices and ideological preferences that institutionalised regional policy as an important area of nafennia 184: 1 (2006) 5integrating regional policy with technology policy… tional policy? what kind of means has the state used for the renewal of regional policy? • how can technology policy solve problems that become evident when competitive aspirations are introduced in regional policy? what are the elements of policy integration? how does political pressure for decentralisation turn into a policy of concentration? • in which way has the europeanisation process changed the role and power of a nation-state in the frame of the knowledgebased economy? 2. we take a closer look at the centre of expertise programme, a government effort to promote top-level expertise and networking at regional level. established in 1994, the programme illustrates well the penetration of the model of the knowledge-based economy into the framework of regional policy. it has served as a successful example of technology-driven regional initiatives by becoming a cornerstone of current regional policy. however, the goals of regional and technology policies are often contradictory, posing challenges for their integration. the former is geared towards equal opportunities, whereas the latter is based on highly qualified and competitive technologies. concomitantly, we analyse: • what kinds of obstacles and tensions have emerged in the programme in terms of policy integration? • how has the model of the knowledgebased economy been interpreted during the evolution of the programme? in order to sharpen the local viewpoint, we take some specifying examples of the possibilities and limits of current policy orientation from the satakunta centre of expertise that is situated in the city of pori, a middle-sized old industrial city on the coast of western finland. our analyses are based on public and private sector documents, such as the policy guidelines and future visions of the european commission and the finnish national and local authorities in the fields of technology, economic, regional and industrial policies. the historical data consists of the cabinet programmes in finland 1957–2003, statutes for the advancement of the regions 1975– 2002, annual reports of the key ministries and the national technology agency of finland (tekes) 1983–2005, relevant statistics (statistics finland & eurostat) as well as the memoirs of two former prime ministers (urho kekkonen and kalevi sorsa). personal interviews have been conducted in 2005 among senior officers of the ministry of trade and industry, the ministry of the interior, tekes and the most relevant development agencies within satakunta region. in addition, we utilise some previous interviews that we have made among the decision-makers of the finnish technology policy elite. from industrial policy into technology policy – regional policy meets local, national and international demands setting regional priorities to advance industrialisation finland industrialised relatively late and the modernisation efforts of the government after the world war ii indicate tensions between the state and industry. due to unstable modes of governance, the legitimacy of governmental activities was often questioned and the ideological differences between the political parties were notable. in the early post-war period, the government made the first efforts to modernise national industry and to integrate industrial policy with economic policy. despite the modernisation of finnish industry, driven by the substantial war debts paid to the soviet union, the economic performance was still moderate in the 1950s. referring to the industrialisation committee, prime minister kekkonen (1952), however, proposed state penetration into economic and industrial issues and stressed the need for a discussion of industrial policy in the parliament to open the closed circle of industry. as the emphasis was on raw-material based state-owned industries, the prime minister demanded regional policy efforts to better utilise the “extraordinary” natural resources of northern finland to make national industry more diversified. public investments were needed to establish new state-owned industries in the north and to build infrastructure for a rapid regional transformation. due to the high proportion of agricultural population in the country, the aim was to advance industrialisation to promote a radical mobilisation of agricultural population. nevertheless, the political support to the idea of the regional superiority of the north was weak. in fact, regional policy moved 6 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. häyrinen-alestalo, a. pelkonen, t. teräväinen and s.-t. waltari towards equalisation of opportunities in the late 1950s being linked to class-based injustices. thereafter, the cabinet programmes (1959–1970) bring up industrialisation and equal economic development among various regions in the country as a general objective of economic policy. the problems were mostly related to under-development such as unemployment and slow modernisation of the peripheral areas. regional policy appears as a separate chapter in the finnish cabinet programmes in the early 1970s. it was a politics for under-developed regions with the aim to renovate local administration, to establish a public support system for disqualified regions and to increase linkages to industrial and labour policies. at the end of the 1960s, there was a net emigration of labour force of 200,000 people from finland to sweden, a figure that was comparable to the southern european peripheral areas (alestalo 1986). for governing the serious situation, the government established the fund for under-developed regions in 1971 to support economic activities. in those days, the idea of knowledge-based industries was not yet clearly developed. in the search for new areas of production, the government still favoured raw-material–based industries, stressed the importance of natural resources, and made efforts to regulate increasing labour mobilisation. the aims of state regulation were stabilised by passing a law for the advancement of regional development (act 451/1975). according to this strategy, it was necessary to have a broader view of a balanced socio-economic progress instead of picking up a few disqualified areas. permanent employment together with a rise of income and better public services should be guaranteed for every citizen. this implied expanding state penetration into socio-economic issues, and the rise of the welfare state programme. the welfare state in the service of regions the finnish welfare state demonstrates a state-led approach that soon integrated social and industrial policies and built a comprehensive strategy for the equalisation of the opportunity in science, education and health policies. in the beginning, the political atmosphere was beset with conflicts due to the problems of labour mobilisation within the country and the high net emigration to sweden. the areas of loss felt disappointed whereas the areas of gain faced problems in housing and services provision (sorsa 1998). at the same time, a great structural change proceeded in finland and the economic progress was among the fastest in western europe (alestalo 1986). the unbalanced situation activated regional policy that for its part strengthened the division between good and low performers but was still opposite to the current policy of concentration. the idea of the peripheral areas in demand of compensations especially in the northern and eastern parts of finland became increasingly obvious. southern finland had to pay compensations on the behalf of the under-developed areas. in addition, the government saw economic growth in the capital area as unhealthy. in the middle of severe political disputes, the government made efforts to move towards centralised planning at local, regional and national levels. the visions were a combination of regional, social and technology policies. technology policy aims provoked conflicts of interest between the planning office at the council of state and the ministry of trade and industry. the ministry wanted to see the goals of technology policy only through the use and development of technology. in the government policy the technological side of regional policy was, however, stabilised by passing several laws (act 451/1975, 532/1981, 1168/1988) for the advancement of regions, through committee and ministerial reports with references to broad regional policy issues (board of industries/committee 1980; technology committee 1980) and efforts to institutionalise the making of relevant statistics and foresights. the economic turbulences in the middle of the 1970s and in the beginning of the 1980s legitimised the arguments for this kind of rationalisation. the openings of regional policy towards welfare policy soon dealt with classifications of basic, support-needing and specific areas. from 1966 up to 1977 the criteria for geographical boundaries followed a zonal pattern but thereafter more complex regions were defined (yli-jokipii & koski 1995). at the same time there were both efforts to centralise and decentralise national administration and regional responsibilities. in general, regional policy of the welfare state aimed at constructing a general programme with an attention to the industrial needs of the under-developed regions and to the dysfunctional centralisation of economic activities to southern finland. the allocation of subsidies through the fund for under-developed regions emphasised the promotion of entrepreneurial acfennia 184: 1 (2006) 7integrating regional policy with technology policy… tivities instead of loans. first references were also made to the knowledge-based society that was closer to bell´s (1973) definition of the scientification of society rather than to the current idea of the knowledge-based economy. according to the government it was necessary to invest in local level r&d, primary and higher education and social welfare. also new technologies and the establishment of growth centres were mentioned as means to promote modernisation in the peripheries. more industrial jobs had to be created for the under-developed areas to make the structures of production and population more diversified (ministry of trade and industry 1973; board of industries/committee 1980). the first steps towards market governance were taken at the end of the 1970s when a government seminar ended in a consensual declaration of the importance of high-level competences instead of cheap labour force or energy-intensive production and high investments (sorsa 1998). the process was, however, hegemonic and tightly in the hands of the government. later on new regulations set norms for the distribution of government support for industries, and restricted the choice of location of government-owned industries together with a programme for the decentralisation of public sector decision-making and its provision of services. regional estimations for a balanced population development were also made to keep the agricultural population in the peripheral areas (valkonen 1980). even though the government plans of decentralisation were resisted and there started to be tensions between the interventionist state and the internationalising and market-driven industries, regional policy was still high on political agenda. it crossed all kinds of policies, such as economic, industrial, agricultural, forestry, energy, social, housing, education, university, communication and cultural policies (cabinet programme 1975). little by little the welfare state made several visions of technologisation as a means to make finland a high-tech country and to take a distance from regional compensations. aside from the levelling down of local disqualifications the government argued for the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises and their role in technology transfer (technology committee 1980). more space was given to the integration of public and private interests to promote the finnish economy. the role of industry in the establishment of the national technology agency of finland (tekes) was also notable. the idea was to promote modernisation through government investments in r&d. for the first time the regional dimension and the focus on national inequalities became less visible. technology policy considerations emphasised the need to raise the general level of high-tech in the country and took the success in international markets as the ultimate criterion. competitive innovations penetrate into regional priorities a more systematic development of finland into a super model of the knowledge-based economy started in the late 1980s when the government made a radical turn in its political ideology (cabinet programme 1987). according to the ideas of neo-liberalism and new managerialism, the welfare state policy with high taxes and high social spending was criticised. the government accepted competition, privatisation and market governance as new polical arguments (alestalo 1993). finland’s excellent economic performance from the latter part of the 1990s up to the beginning of the millennium also activated a discussion on the new economy that is based on new technologies and adopts the principles of an expansive marketand high-tech–driven technology policy. the simultaneous growth of the economy and worldmarket success of the finnish ict-industry (nokia) intensified government efforts to pursue an internationally competitive technology policy. this approach created tensions between the public and the private provision of goods (häyrinen-alestalo et al. 2005). the knowledge-based economy tends to question the idea of a compensatory state. in the early 1990’s the finnish governments launched new competitive programmes pointing to commercialisation, investments in new technologies, and to the privatisation of state-owned companies and public services. policy-makers also trusted in the validity of the concept of innovation system that tends to see all national producers of knowledge as important and capable of adopting market orientation. by highlighting the competitive aspects the state was unable to solve new regional policy dilemmas. the regional innovation system has, however, been systematically built by the establishment of the centres of expertise (see later), and the regional employment and economic development centres (te-centres) with efforts to integrate 8 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. häyrinen-alestalo, a. pelkonen, t. teräväinen and s.-t. waltari the technology units of the latter organisations into the activities of tekes. originally te-centres were local r&d and marketing units. later on their priorities have changed and the tasks have moved from consulting and advice into regional centres that try to integrate international, technological and regional services towards a coherent strategy. in the course of this transformation, the technology units have influenced the priorities of regional technology policy programmes making them follow the knowledgebased economy. the national duties have also been responsive to increased international competition, transformation of the productive structures and research-based activities (annual reports of tekes 1986–1990). in recent years the integration of international and national technology programmes into regional programmes has been strengthened through the attempts to clarify and renovate the regional profile and strategy of tekes. these efforts have been a mixture of competitive concentration and competitive decentralisation. new goals have been accomplished by increasing the amount of personnel in the te-centres after 2001. today there are 14 technology units at the centres. according to the representatives of tekes, one problem of the te-centres has been in that the results come from one place but the strategic and operational management comes from another. as there have been problems in integration, an establishment of a forum for cooperation has been proposed. moreover, interaction between tekes, the te-centres and the planning and organisation councils for the regions has been emphasised (ministry of the interior 2003). it also seems that the focus on innovation has not been so strong than has been expected. moreover, in the spring 2006 there was a dispute in the government between the centre party and the social democrats concerning the degree of decision-making autonomy and the model of governance of the te-centres. current national policy has a trust in large technology centres and new technology-intensive production. therefore the process has favoured concentration and uneven development of the regions (fig. 1). in this respect, the division of labour and responsibilities between the state, the municipalities (over 400) and the regional centres of expertise is not clear even though new laws of regional development have been passed by the parliament (act 1135/1993, 55/2002). these laws have abolished the programme for the under-developed regions from the political agenda and introduced a demand for more comprehensive national strategies but still they concentrate the final regulation into the hands of the government. the market-dependent angle has become more evident. for example the fund for under-developed regions has been transformed into a state-led company, finnvera, allocating venture capital and being also willing to take risks. it has been argued that competitive funding provides a possibility of making choices. the range of choices is, however, often limited due to the push towards a standardised set of opportunities that are characteristic of the knowledge-based economy. internationalisation and new regionalism the simultaneous processes of globalisation, europeanisation as well as national concentration and fig. 1. research and development expenditure per inhabitant in finland by region 2004. source: statistics finland 2005. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 9integrating regional policy with technology policy… decentralisation have created tensions between the former and the current regional and technology policies in finland. the representatives of tekes and the ministry of trade and industry refer to the needs of self-regulation and self-identification of local strengths because knowledge-based and market-driven technological competencies require local efforts to go ahead of local disqualifications. they say that in front of globalisation, regional competences cannot be based on whatever local peculiarities but on internationally recognised skills and competencies. in this view, all applicants should compete for the same resources irrespective of their location. by following this kind of policy, the majority of both public and private r&d funding has gone to the capital area and other growth areas (fig. 1). international competitiveness has introduced an idea of strong regions into technology policy. new arguments of quality also tend to integrate more closely the goals of urban and rural policies by referring to r&d, transfer of technology, and networking with local universities and other producers of knowledge. in the view of the representatives of the ministry of trade and industry the emphasis should be on positive interaction, as it is difficult to break a negative circle. international competition has intensified the centre of expertise-type of thinking. when regional changes in production, employment and population are compared with the development of the whole country (the association of finnish local and regional authorities 2006), two types of concentrations become evident in finland. in the midst of wide differences between the regions, the capital area and large cities have taken the lead. during the rapid growth period the differences between the growth-potential and disqualified regions have increased and in the periods of slow growth decreased. accordingly, regional policy is closely related to international markets where turbulences are difficult to neutralise by national efforts. in recent years finland has been praised for its high investments in r&d especially in new technologies. the share of r&d expenditure of gdp was 3.5% in 2005 (statistics finland 2006). fig. 1 tells, however, a story of permanent disqualifications. in fact, the majority of the finnish municipalities have been dropped of regional innovations. the number of these regions is so high that the arguments for new governance and regional cooperation have lost their political validity. the main problems are related to unemployment, mobilisation of educated labour force, ageing and the capability of the municipalities to provide lawregulated services. the last problem is acute as there are elaborations of new criteria for public services depending on the amount of local population. this strategy indicates both a loss of regional autonomy and public funding. the entrance of finland into the european union in 1995 led to radical changes in the finnish regional policy and the ways the development areas were defined. yli-jokipii and koski (1995) mention the main changes that were made in the renewal of national statutes of regional policy. they stress among others the adaptation of the eu indicators to estimate the regional performance, the use of larger sub-regions, the reduction of the measures on the scale of performance and the turn towards programme-based projects. irrespective of accomplished adaptations to the eu norms finland’s participation in the eu’s regional programmes has been in many ways problematic. obviously as an eu member state finland has been able to apply funds for regional purposes from the structural funds. this possibility has increased individual choices of the regions instead of nationally centralised governance. the aims of combating unemployment and promoting structural transformations in industry and agriculture have been, however, only partially successful. too many areas are still lagging behind the expected development. the difficulties in the crossings between the sectoral mandates have also been a finnish peculiarity. in addition, national programmes have been initiated due to large regional exclusions. these exclusions make the efforts to promote “a new partnership for cohesion” (european commission 2004) a difficult task also for the advanced new technologies-driven countries. this tension is important to note together with the good experiences of the projects to improve social wellbeing. these projects have had a broader scope than the knowledge-based economy (council of state 2004). the centre of expertise programme – changing interpretations of the knowledge-based economy the centre of expertise programme illustrates the shift towards technology-driven regional policy 10 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. häyrinen-alestalo, a. pelkonen, t. teräväinen and s.-t. waltari and the breakthrough of the knowledge-based economy in finland. in the words of the former prime minister lipponen (2000), the change of regional policy paradigm in the early 1990s put increasing emphasis on competitiveness, entrepreneurship and collaboration, and success in the global economy was set as the key political objective. the new policy reflected the conceptions of regional innovation systems and models that stress the importance of local networking in regional economic development. these ideas were inspired by studies of the regional dimension of inter-firm collaboration and institutional organisation of dynamically developing regions as well as michael porter’s ideas on industrial clusters (miettinen 2002). in many countries, these concepts were turned into policy measures and often implemented in the form of programmes aiming at facilitating co-operation and networking between companies. for instance, a programme based on the idea of local networking was established in denmark in the late 1980s. in finland, the new regional policy was build around six programmes, one of which was the centre of expertise programme. it aimed at promoting top-level expertise in specific regions in selected technological fields by increasing regional co-operation and networking. in a short period of time it became the flagship of new regional policy. although the background of the centre of expertise programme lies in such general considerations and policy developments, there were also concrete models according to which the centres were developed. regional technology centres and science parks based on the silicon valley model had been developed quite rapidly in finland since the early 1980s (pelkonen 2003) and of these oulu in the northern finland stood out as a success story already in the early 1990s. oulu had been able to create dynamic collaboration between universities, firms and public research institutes while such interactions were relatively weakly developed in other parts of the country. the concrete idea of the programme was to “duplicate” the oulu model and to transfer it to other parts of the country. the programme was started in 1994 when the council of state nominated the first eight regional centres of expertise. in the following year three network-based centres were added to the programme. according to the original concept, the centres ought to be based on already existing strong knowledge base such as university research, technology parks, research units and high-tech firms. the objective of the programme was to enhance collaboration between local actors in selected technological fields, to develop world class know-how and thereby promote regions’ competitiveness. as the emphasis was on existing strong knowledge infrastructures, the first eight centres were all based on university cities (helsinki, turku, tampere, vaasa, oulu, jyväskylä, kuopio and lappeenranta) and most fields of expertise focused on new growth areas such as biotechnology, information and communication technologies, health technologies and energy and environmental technologies. the idea was that surrounding regions could also benefit from the programme as knowhow would be spread from the centres to neighbouring areas (ministry of the interior 1990). at the beginning, thus, the programme was strongly developed in the framework of the knowledge-based economy in which growth poles are prioritised and their competences strengthened. accordingly also the helsinki region – the most research intensive area in the country – was included in the programme. there was, however, reluctance among the actors in helsinki concerning the programme as it was regarded as a means of regional policy and considered that such policy or “oulu model” are not needed in the capital region. according to our interviews, the committee for the centre of expertise programme which is responsible for the coordination of the programme also saw it necessary to include helsinki in the programme as otherwise the programme would have been stigmatized as a means of decentralisation. at the outset the programme revolutionised regional policy thinking: thus far the leading principle had been to support the weak regions and to level down differences between the regions whereas now the strongest know-how was taken as the object of development. the idea was to promote the already strong regions and fields of expertise and thus strengthen the knowledge-based economy. during the evolution of the programme, there have, however, been different stages which reflect changing interpretations of the knowledge-based economy. in the late 1990s and early 2000, the programme expanded considerably both in terms of regions and technological fields, but, conversely, latest guidelines refer to a stricter model based on fewer centres and technological fields and increasing emphasis on international competitiveness. these changes also illustrate the partly conflicting position of the programme at the intersection of regional and technology policies. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 11integrating regional policy with technology policy… a tool for modern and growth-oriented regional policy the centre of expertise programme model emphasises regions’ own initiatives and activeness while the state’s role focuses on creating the general framework and defining the criteria according to which regions can apply for the programme. three sets of criteria have been used: 1. quality criteria (quality related to research and education, business activities and internationalisation), 2. impact criteria (impacts on regional and national development) and 3. organisational criteria (critical mass, networking, organisation, funding). in addition regional specialisation and division of labour have been important criteria when fields of expertise have been selected (ministry of the interior 1996). regions that are nominated to the programme then receive state funding for coordination costs, project preparation and seed funding for top projects. in order to receive state funding, however, it is necessary that regional actors also make own investments. for instance, in the satakunta centre of expertise, the city of pori has been an important financier as it has provided seed funding as well as funding for coordination of the activities. actual development projects in the centres are funded through normal funding channels such as the eu structural funds, tekes, employment and economic development centres and firms. the aim of the state funding is integrative in the sense that it brings different actors together and catalyses joint activities in the region. thus the programme is not based on a strict topdown state regulation but rather on a general framework that regions can implement relatively freely once accepted in the programme. in practice, however, the state funding for the centres has been rather small although it has grown from 1.68 million euros in 1994 to 9.5 million euros in 2004 (ministry of the interior 1996; committee for the centre of expertise programme 2004). during the same period the number of centres has grown from 8 to 22 which means that the average funding per centre has not increased. the irrelevance of the state funding is reflected in that many centres tend to prioritise the centre of expertise status vis-à-vis the state funding they receive. yet, the basic state funding has generated significant amounts of project funding in the centres. for instance, in 1999–2001 project funding in all centres was some 150 million euros (ministry of the interior 2003). the insignificance of the state investments also tends to raise some concern as similar programmes with substantially higher budgets have been started in several countries (neuvo 2004: 4). consequently, there are views in the state administration that better results would have been achieved if more state funding had been invested. primarily, the programme can be seen as a tool for identifying and marketing regional strengths and profiles but it cannot – and it is not intended to – direct development in the regions. in general terms, regional development is strongly path-dependent as it relies on historical, cultural and institutional factors which change slowly and are difficult to influence upon. the development of an industrial cluster in a certain region, therefore, is often the result of strongly localised conditions and development trajectories that have evolved over decades (miettinen 2002: 97). through the programme as well as other state level policy instruments it is thus possible to influence certain elements and generate or strengthen local and regional development processes. yet, how the development actually unfolds in a region is a complex issue depending on broad socio-economic factors. according to our interviews, the programme is seen as a successful tool of modern and growthoriented regional policy both in regional policy and technology policy administrations. differing from the traditional regional policy based on even distribution of funds, the approach of the programme is founded on competition and strengthening such structures that generate growth, jobs and new entrepreneurship. similarly, it has also been able to gain a strong support among political decision-makers. formally the decisions concerning the programme have been made by the government and all political parties have supported the centre of expertise policy. in this respect there is a clear difference to general regional policy which has been loaded with controversies among political parties. recently, the programme has also become an internationally renowned model and it is often used as a best practice example in the eu and the oecd. in this respect, its model has been reflected in the aims of the eu to boost the lagging lisbon strategy. in the brussels european council meeting in march 2005 the heads of state emphasised – referring to the finnish experience – that the member states should develop their innovation policies inter alia with the focus on “developing partner12 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. häyrinen-alestalo, a. pelkonen, t. teräväinen and s.-t. waltari ships for innovation and innovation centres at regional and local level” (council of the european union 2005: 4). an attempt to transfer the finnish model has recently been made in france where a similar, ambitious programme has been started rather successfully (oecd 2006). according to evaluations, the programme has indeed had significant impacts on regional growth processes (ministry of the interior 2003). as a result of the projects, over 1300 new firms were established and 23,000 new jobs were created between 1994 and 2001. most jobs were created in helsinki, oulu and tampere regions which are among the strongest growth regions in the country. moreover, the programme has had important impacts in raising the technological level and in enhancing capacities to exploit national r&d resources and the eu structural funds in different localities (ministry of the interior 2003) as well as in promoting regional cooperation and networking (state audit office 2001). in terms of territorial networking, the programme has activated different stakeholders to reflect on regional strengths and created common discussion forums. for instance, in the helsinki area, collaboration and interaction between universities, research institutes and firms has increased substantially over the last decade as new science parks and technopoles have been created (pelkonen 2005). as an expression of the progress, the european competitiveness index ranked uusimaa region as europe’s number one in competitiveness and creativity in 2004 (robert huggins associates 2004). the centre of expertise programme has been an important factor in this development. in the view of a representative of the ministry of trade and industry, the role of the programme has been decisive in the development of the knowledgebased economy in the capital region. similarly, in middle-sized areas, it has substantially activated cooperation between local actors. satakunta area provides one example in which the programme has contributed to the creation of a culture of cooperation, the lack of which has earlier been an obstacle to regional development. problems related to the programme model and the coherence of regional policy initiatives in the early stages, the programme faced problems in terms of commitment of different actors and doubts over its impacts. while these troubles have now mostly been solved, some problems remain. one of them is related to the links between the individual centres of expertise. the cooperation between the centres is vague which makes the clustering effects at the national level weak. local actors in satakunta, for instance, consider that the programme model hinders territorial development by actually preventing cooperation between regions due to the lack of coordination and resources allocated into creating such structures. in this respect, joint strategic efforts and financing between the centres could offer a possibility for a competitive advantage for regions in terms of international competition and resource allocation. collaboration might also release some resources from administration to the actual regional development work as the limited resources could be utilised in a more efficient way. stronger clustering between the centres could also increase the coherence of the programme. recently, the lack of collaboration has indeed been acknowledged by policy-makers and politicians and the next programme period (2007–2013) will comprise a new model based on clusters of various centres of expertise. the lack of cooperation has also been related to the principle of competition which is at the centre of the programme model. the centres are in strong competition with each other which hinders their motivation for cooperation. on the one hand, by increasing territorial division of labour, the programme tends to decrease competition, but its actual organisation places regions and centres in continuous mutual competition as, for instance, the centres have to compete even for the allocation of the basic state funding. according to some representatives of the state administration, however, there should be even more competition: the current logic is seen to be based slightly too much on even distribution and thus there should be more dynamics. besides these general issues, there have been particular problems with two types of centres of expertise: centres focusing on “softer” fields on the one hand and network-based centres on the other. in 1998, the programme was expanded to include not only strictly technological fields but also new soft areas of knowledge and know-how such as marketing, design, cultural production and learning. such expansion reflects the aims of a broader technology policy and a more inclusive approach to the knowledge-based economy. subsequently, centres of expertise focusing on, for instance, fennia 184: 1 (2006) 13integrating regional policy with technology policy… chamber music in kainuu and travelling in lapland were included in the programme. although such soft fields are regarded as highly important in terms of future growth and employment, so far their development has not been as fast as was expected. growth in terms of jobs has not been that important and some of the centres have been operating on a rather vague basis. also the development of the networked centres of expertise which are based on the cooperation of several smaller centres has been problematic. currently the programme includes four networked centres (food processing, tourism, metal industry and wood processing) but all of them have experienced serious troubles. there seems to be problems of coordination, mutual competition and lack of commitment. according to our interview data, the networked centres have actually been included in the programme by political decisions and not by quality criteria. the committee for the centre of expertise programme which makes the proposal of the centres has not included them in the proposals but they have been added in when final decisions have been made at the government. if these problems seem to be characteristic to some centres, internationalisation is one that is common to most of them. the original idea has been that the centres should be so strong that they would attract foreign know-how, experts and firms. thus far such internationalisation has taken place only in a very limited degree and mainly in the three biggest centres (helsinki, tampere and oulu). this has led the smaller centres to question the rationality of the objective of internationalisation. in satakunta centre of expertise, for instance, it is considered that the possibilities for increasing the region’s importance in national and international levels are limited due to the lack of adequate resources. the generic model of a successful growth centre with a world-class expertise and competitive performance might not, therefore, be reasonable for a region like satakunta. already the understanding of successful regional development is somewhat different in the area in comparison with the programme’s objectives. most of the resources in satakunta have thus far been used for creating regional know-how and local cooperation structures. from their perspective, the centre of expertise programme is therefore ultimately a regional programme and a tool for development within the area. there also seems to be some problematic overlaps between the centre of expertise programme and other policy programmes which reflect incoherence in overall regional policy. of these, most important are related to the regional centre programme which was started in 2001 with the aim of developing a network of 34 regional centres covering every region in the country. the focus of the programme is less on top level expertise and more on traditional economic development policies. the objective is to balance the regional structure and development. yet, there seems to be some confusion between the programmes as they are often implemented in same regions. besides the regional centre programme there are also other slightly overlapping programmes and currently another competitive programme, policy mix for large urban regions, is being prepared. in one region, there can thus be various regional policy programmes running simultaneously (e.g. the centre of expertise programme, regional centre programme, objective 1, island development programme, rural policy programme) which may easily lead to confusion. this is acknowledged by a representative of the ministry of the interior who stresses that it is then “undoubtedly difficult for elected officials in different meetings to discern what the actual strategy of the region is”. tensions between regional policy and technology policy in principle, the centre of expertise programme is placed at the intersection of regional and technology policies. yet, the policy sectors’ divergent foundations and ways of thinking have tended to bring forth conflicts in the course of the programme. originally, it reflected a reorientation in regional policy in which knowledge and knowhow were raised as key aspects of the policy and the role of urban regions became increasingly important. similarly, the beginning of the programme overlapped with changes in science and technology policy. with the introduction of the concept of national innovation system increasing emphasis was put on networks, clusters and relationships between organisations in the early 1990s. focusing on regional and local networking the programme concept thus fitted neatly also in the framework of national science and technology policy. during the evolution of the centre of expertise programme, a central tension has evolved around the question of how large geographical and tech14 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. häyrinen-alestalo, a. pelkonen, t. teräväinen and s.-t. waltari nological scope it should cover. in the beginning it consisted of 8 centres, all of which were based on universities and existing technology centres. such focus supported also the priorities of technology policy. since the mid-1990s the programme has, however, expanded considerably and currently there are 22 centres which include 45 different fields of expertise. the expansion has widened the geographical coverage of the programme and thus highlighted the regional dimension. it has also taken it towards a broader definition of the knowledge-based economy emphasising larger technological and geographical scale. at the same time the expansion has to some degree compromised the key objective of the programme which is the development of world-class expertise. a representative of the ministry of the interior brought this forward in his interview by saying that “we are now in a situation that i guess nobody can really argue that there would be so much world top class know-how and in so many different fields (in finland)”. in the mid-term evaluation of the programme it was shown that the level of know-how in certain centres was high only by finnish standards but relatively far from the international top (ministry of the interior 2003: 129–134). the expansion of the programme has indeed been seen as problematic in particular in the technology administration. it is considered fragmented with too many themes and too small units. in this way it does not support regional concentration and development of growth poles which is seen as necessary in tekes for instance (tekes 2004). it is therefore argued that there is a need to find a better focus to the programme and reduce the number of centres. from the perspective of technology policy it thus seems that the objective of programme has become slightly obscure. is the goal actually to develop top level expertise or to distribute know-how to the different parts of the country? representatives of regional policy have been much more moderate in approaching the same question. the expansion of the programme has also been related to political pressures. the government makes the final decision concerning the centres that are included in the programme. often the number of centres has risen from the amount proposed by the committee for the centre of expertise programme during the discussion at the government. this indicates that there has been some reflection of regional equality at the political level but also power politics has been involved. similarly, there have been some conflicts between the ministry of the interior and the technology administration concerning the organisation and coordination of the programme. in this respect, an underlying tension in terms of the regional dimension between the two policy domains becomes visible. while regional equality has traditionally been a central principle of regional policy, in technology policy side there is a clear view that technology policy does not have regional dimension. high quality is thus the most important criterion and funding cannot be allocated according to regional aspects. such an underlying tension was visible in particular in the beginning of the programme as the ministry of trade and industry was very reluctant in respect to it. in the words of a representative of the ministry, it was considered at that time that “the programme competes with innovation policy and, since it is coordinated by the ministry of the interior, it must be some kind of a regional policy plot and the ministry of trade and industry should not be involved in it”. only during last a couple of years it has been more active which has been largely due to the change of government. the position of the minister of trade and industry shifted after the 2003 elections from the social democrats to the centre party and the latter has traditionally strong support in rural areas and thus places a lot of emphasis on the regional policy perspective. also funding of the programme has created tensions between the ministries. although the organisational responsibility has been in the ministry of the interior, it has had only very limited resources to invest in the programme and for a long time the funding had to be collected from different ministries. in the ministry of trade and industry, for instance, the situation was regarded as paradoxical as other ministries had to fund a programme that was clearly identified to the ministry of the interior. while currently the funding has been regrouped to one source, new tensions tend to arise. in the technology administration it is considered that the programme has been driven too far away from those actors that are responsible for the development and content of technology policy (koskenlinna 2004). also the council of state (2005) has considered that the programme should be better integrated to the ministry of trade and industry. such a change refers to a stronger regional concentration of resources in the programme. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 15integrating regional policy with technology policy… towards a stricter model of the knowledgebased economy latest guidelines concerning the centre of expertise programme confirm that the programme will comprise a model that promotes increasing regional concentration and embraces a stricter interpretation of the knowledge-based economy. accordingly, the next programme period (2007– 2013) which is currently under preparation will concentrate on promoting competitiveness in fewer centres of expertise than thus far (committee for the centre of expertise programme 2005). cooperation between the centres will be strengthened through a cluster-based model: there will be 6–8 national clusters to which different centres will contribute. thus, also the links to national technology policy will be strengthened and regional specialisation will be increasingly promoted. increasing cooperation and building clusters is undoubtedly important, as it is unlikely that individual finnish regions can be highly successful in new high tech fields in which heavy investments are made globally and competition is fierce. yet, it is also reasonable to ask how many regions in finland can base their success in knowledge and know-how. and more specifically, what kinds of regions can base their future success in the knowledge-based economy model? in particular regions which have been public sector-driven and lack strong industrial base are facing problems. on the other hand, currently large regions and parts of the country are completely left outside these programmes and policies focusing on fostering knowledge-based growth (siuruainen 2003). the new programme model also strengthens this discrepancy. therefore it has been argued that more measures should be directed in enhancing the competitiveness of those regions that are not covered by current innovation and competitiveness policy (vihriälä 2003). if a region does not have structures for knowledge creation and diffusion, keeping up with knowledge-based development becomes increasingly difficult. in this respect it is worth to note that also the centre of expertise programme is more apt for enhancing the existing knowledge infrastructures and it clearly does not suit as well for creating such structures or networks (ministry of the interior 1996). thus further consideration is needed at the highest levels of decisionmaking on how different regions are developed in the framework of the knowledge-based economy and whether some regions should develop alternative development paths. conclusions along with the increasing complexity of socioeconomic issues the demands for integrative policies have received government attention. however, the attempts to implement these requirements have met many problems. partly they are dependent on the changes in the underlying state ideology that draws the general outlines and specifies the division of labour between the state, industry and other actors. partly the problems refer to the objectives of various policies, the structures of power between them, and to the inflexibility to cross customary mandates. today the idea of a knowledge-based economy has penetrated into the visions of the super-states and their member countries. in principle, the knowledge-based economy refers to policy integration, but as our study indicates, the conditions of integration are limited. in principle market governance has taken power from state regulation, and strict competitive elements have strengthened the efforts to identify the best economic performers and to elaborate regional profiles on this basis. in finland the state that has adopted the principles of market governance still wants to regulate more policy issues than is typical for a market-oriented state. the relationship between technology policy and regional policy in finland provides a good angle to the analysis of policy integration and the role of the policies under various political ideologies, i.e. the welfare state and the neo-liberal knowledgebased economy. high-techand market-driven technology policy fits well to the latter frame and is also high among the political priorities of the eu. modern technology policy is not, however, very reflexive to new social problems. regional policy in turn has gone through a long history of state compensations and regional disqualifications reflecting the goals of an ideologically coherent period of the welfare state and slowly advancing industrial modernisation. thereafter a competitive technology policy has become hegemonic bringing in tensions between the idea of the equalisation of opportunity and new, quite standard sets of competitive performance. when the current finnish government has pushed technology policy towards regional issues, new tech16 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. häyrinen-alestalo, a. pelkonen, t. teräväinen and s.-t. waltari nologybased approaches have been adopted as the primary strategy. finland is an excellent example of a nation-state that first established raw-material based state-owned industries and new regional universities all over the country and is now filling it with the centres of competence. this strategy indicates that regional issues are highly politicised and full of conflicts of interest. the centre of expertise programme reflects well the transition towards a technology-driven and competitiveness-oriented regional policy as well as some conflicts that have arisen in attempting to integrate regional and technology policies. at the same time, the evolution of the programme shows changes in how the framework of the knowledgebased economy has been interpreted. the expansion of the programme has been an indication of a broad approach in which a range of geographical and technological areas were drawn into the programme. this resulted in a model which included very different kinds of regions both in terms of foundations for knowledge-based development and level of know-how. the scale went from large cities with internationally recognised base of science, research and industry, to middle-sized cities aiming to develop top-level expertise in one or two fields and to small peripheral localities with one very specific field of expertise. interestingly, the concept proved quite successful in these very different kinds of environments. yet, there is, undoubtedly, a trade-off between quality and scale. in a small country like finland the limits become apparent quite soon. the recent guidelines of the centre of expertise programme refer to a model of substantially higher quality criteria and fewer regions. reflecting a stricter version of the knowledge-based economy, it raises concern over balanced regional development. dropping some regions out of the programme will be a serious backlash for those areas. a key question will thus be whether other state programmes will be able to take care of these regions and how the coordination between the various regional policy programmes can be improved. an alternative approach would have divided the programme into different categories. such a model would have enabled differentiation between the centres and promoted concentration of resources without excluding any of the current centres. ultimately, the question of how to strike a balance between competitiveness and regional diversity and equality will still remain open in regional and technology policies. acknowledgements the study is a national extension with an emphasis on regional policy of the oecd-initiated project “monitoring and implementing horizontal innovation policy” (2004–2005; remoe 2005). the project has been funded in finland by tekes. we thank sampo villanen who helped in collecting the data in pori. this study constitutes a part of pelkonen’s dissertation. he has contributed to the planning of the study and written the chapter “the centre of expertise programme – changing interpretations of the knowledgebased economy” and related conclusions. references act 451/1975. <http://www.finlex.fi>. 7.6.2005. act 532/1981. <http://www.finlex.fi>. 7.6.2005. act 1168/1988. <http://www.finlex.fi>. 7.6.2005. act 1135/1993. <http://www.finlex.fi>. 7.6.2005. act 55/2002. <http://www.finlex.fi>. 7.6.2005. alestalo m (1986). structural change, classes and the state. finland in an historical and comparative perspective. 170 p. research group for comparative sociology, university of helsinki. alestalo m (1993). the rise of neo-liberalism in finland: from the politics of equal opportunity to the search for scientific excellence. science studies 6: 2, 35–47. annual reports of tekes (1986–2004). the finnish funding agency for technology and innovation, helsinki. the association of finnish local and regional authorities (2006). rakennemuutoskatsaus 2006. 79 p. the association of finnish local and regional authorities, helsinki. bell d (1973). the coming of post-industrial society. a venture in social forecasting. 507 p. basic books, new york. board of industries/committee (1980). teollisuuspoliittinen yleisohjelma. komiteanmietintö 1980: 20. 61 p. cabinet programmes in finland (1957–2003). <http://www.valtioneuvosto.fi/tietoavaltioneuvostosta/hallitukset/hallitusohjelmat/fi.jsp>. 15.4.2005. committee for the centre of expertise programme (2004). kohti kansainvälisiä ja vetovoimaisia osaamiskeskuksia. osaamiskeskusohjelman kansalliset linjaukset. 21 p. ministry of the interior, helsinki. committee for the centre of expertise programme (2005). osaamiskeskusohjelma 2007–2013. esitys ohjelman toimintamalliksi ja tavoitteiksi.ja tavoitteiksi. <http://www.oske.net.html>. 2.11.2005. council of the european union (2005). presidency conclusions. european council, brussels, 22–23 march 2005. council of state (2004). osaava, avautuva ja uudistu-osaava, avautuva ja uudistufennia 184: 1 (2006) 17integrating regional policy with technology policy… va suomi. valtioneuvoston kanslian julkaisusarja 19/2004. 148 p. council of state (2005). government resolution on the structural development of the public research system. government, helsinki. european commission (2004). a new partnership for cohesion – convergence, competitiveness, cooperation. third report on economic and social cohesion. 206 p. office for official publications of the european communities, luxembourg. häyrinen-alestalo m & a pelkonen (2004). teknologiapolitiikan näkymättömät kansalaiset. in lemola t & p honkanen (eds.). innovaatiopolitiikka – kenen hyväksi, keiden ehdoilla?, 177–193. gaudeamus, helsinki. häyrinen-alestalo m, a pelkonen, t teräväinen & s villanen (2005). changing governance for innovation policy integration in finland. in remoe s (ed). governance of innovation systems. volume 2. case studies in innovation policy, 111–138. oecd, paris. kekkonen u (1952). onko maallamme malttia vaurastua? 129 p. otava, helsinki. koskenlinna m (2004). välittäjäorganisaatiot suomessa – rakenteelliset haasteet. 56 p. ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. lipponen p (2000). uusi aluepolitiikka. a speech at the future forum of the finnish government 6.9.2000. seinäjoki, finland. miettinen r (2002). the national innovation system. scientific concept of political rhetoric. 168 p. edita, helsinki. ministry of the interior (1990). alueellisen teknologiapolitiikan työryhmän raportti. aluepoliittisia tutkimuksia ja selvityksiä 7/1990. ministry of the interior (1996). osaamiskeskusohjelmatyöryhmän loppuraportti. aluekehitysosaston julkaisut 6/1996. ministry of the interior (2003). huippuosaamisesta alueille kilpailukykyä. osaamiskeskusten väliarviointi 1999–2002. sisäasiainministeriön julkaisu 4/2003. 208 p. ministry of trade and industry (1973). teollisuuden aluepolitiikan suuntaviivat. 195 p. ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. neuvo y (2004). esipuhe. in committee for the centre of expertise programme. kohti kansainvälisiä ja vetovoimaisia osaamiskeskuksia. osaamiskeskusohjelman kansalliset linjaukset. ministry of theministry of the interior, helsinki. oecd (2002). dynamising national innovation systems. 96 p. oecd, paris. oecd (2006). examens territoriaux de l’ocde: france. oecd, paris. pelkonen a (2003). intermediary organisations and commercialisation of academic research. vest – journal for science and technology studies 16: 1, 47–77. pelkonen a (2005). state restructuring, urban competitiveness policies and technopole building in finland – a critical view on the glocal state thesis. european planning studies 13: 5, 685–706. remoe s (ed) (2005). governance of innovation systems. volume 1: synthesis report. 120 p. oecd, paris. robert huggins associates (2004). european competitiveness index 2004. 73 p. robert huggins, pontypridd. siuruainen e (2003). valtion teknologiarahoituksen alueellinen hyödyntäminen. selvitysmiehen raportti 28.2.2004. ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. sorsa k (1998). sisäänajo. politiikan kuvioita 1969– 72. 341 p. otava, helsinki. state audit office (2001). osaamiskeskukset aluekehitystyössä. valtiontalouden tarkastusvirasto 13/2001. 81 p. statistics finland (2005). research and development 2004. science, technology and information society 2005:4. statistics finland (2006). <http://www.stat.fi>. 8.11.2006. stoker g (1998). governance as theory: five propositions. international social science journal 50: 155, 17–28. technology committee (1980). komiteanmietintö 1980:55. council of state, helsinki. tekes (2004). innovations generate regional vitality. 32 p. tekes, helsinki. valkonen t (1980). alueelliset erot. in valkonen t, r alapuro, m alestalo, r jallinoja & t sandlund. suomalaiset. yhteiskunnan rakenne teollistumisen aikana, 181–221. wsoy, juva. vihriälä v (2003). mietintöön liitetty täydentävä huomautus. in suomen aluekehittämisstrategia 2013. aluekehittämistrategiatyöryhmän mietintö. sisäasiainministeriön julkaisu 10/2003. yli-jokipii p & a koski (1995). the changing pattern of finnish regional policies. fennia 173: 2, 53– 67. theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region. the role of transnational networks of local actors on regional identity and institutionalization cristina del biaggio del biaggio, cristina (2010). theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region. the role of transnational networks of local actors on regional identity and institutionalization. fennia 188: 1, pp. 137–148. issn 0015-0010. the article is a theoretical contribution on the ongoing debate on cross-border regions, regional identity and local networks. it shows how the alps are being institutionalized and how a pan-alpine regional identity is built across national boundaries. the aim is to show how the alpine actors (ngos, alpine leaders and scientists, alpine population, etc.) contribute to what paasi calls “the institutionalization of regions”. the paper proposes an application of existing theories on identity and regional identity to the alpine case. the combination of the different theories enables one to better identify the actors involved in the building of the alps and other european cross-border regions. the proposition of paasi will be combined with the contribution of avanza and laferté on identity, which differentiate the concepts of identification, social image and belonging. the analysis and comprehension of regional institutionalization is advanced if it is broken up into the three components of identity distinguished by avanza and laferté. in that way, the role of each component can be underscored and regional actors easily identified. this distinction is particularly interesting in order to capture the processes of region building and multi-level governance currently going on in the alps. an integrated framework combining the different concepts is proposed. finally, the paper will show how the alpine region is part of a more generalised process of renewed regional governance, where european crossborder regions play a central role promoting them as “pivotal spaces of integration” (sidaway 2009: 749). furthermore, a final critical point about the participation of the population in this process will be addressed. keywords: identity; regional identity; institutionalization of regions; cross-border regions; alps; regional identity; belonging; social image; identification; transnational networks; regional governance cristina del biaggio, department of geography, university of geneva, unimail, bd. pont-d’arve 40, 1211 geneva 4, switzerland. e-mail: cristina.delbiaggio@unige.ch introduction the alps constitute one of the “largest continuous unspoilt natural areas in europe”1, shared by eight countries. besides the well-known natural and landscape features, the 1100 km mountain range constitutes the living space of 13 million people, speaking four languages with all the derived dialects. the fact is that in the last two decades, a considerable variety of transnational networks have been initiated in the alps. these are linking different actors and objects as protected areas (alparc), municipalities (alliance in the alps), small businesses (nena), cities (alpine town of the year), scientists (iscar), touristic resorts (alpine pearls) and many others. the aim of this paper is not to give results of the research i am conducting in the alpine countries, but to propose a theoretical understanding of these initiatives. in other words, i intend to answer to the question: which scientific framework can facilitate the understanding of the impleurn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2525 138 fennia 188: 1 (2010)cristina del biaggio mentation of these local actors’ networks? which theories can help to better understand the “making of” the alpine region? in particular, i will explore the theory of the “regional institutionalization” forged by anssi paasi (1986) and focus on the distinction between “identity of a region” and “regional consciousness”. taking the example of the alpine arc, the role of identity in the making of regions will be emphasized. the analysis on identity by french-speaking scholars, less known by the anglo-americanspeaking geographers, can add a wider and deeper view on how to understand paasi’s contributions. the works of different scholars (e.g. avanza and laferté, debarbieux, di méo), in addition to the ones by paasi, represent an interesting tool for understanding how the alps and other european regions are being institutionalized. i will examine how two alpine projects can be understood with help of existing theories on regions and identity: the alpine convention framework as an example of a “scaling down” state-led initiative, and locally-based networks as “scaling up” proposals for implementing the goals of the alpine convention. the aim is to show how alpine leaders contribute to what anssi paasi calls the “spatial socialization” process (paasi 1996: 8), and to the institutionalization of the alpine region. i will conclude this paper discussing how the initiatives described above are materialized in regional institutions and how they thus lead to forms of regional governance. the emergence of the alps under the effect of two socio-political processes the first approach, which can be identified as a “scaling down” initiative, emanated from the nongovernmental association cipra (commission for the protection of the alps) and resulted in an international treaty called alpine convention2, which came into force in 1995 in the eight countries bordering the alps. although not every member has ratified the different protocols of the convention3, the agreement made it possible to sketch a map of the region, thereby, defining its limits. the alpine region is therefore recognised as being inside the territorial limits outlined by the convention. and it is precisely inside this area that a new space of action has been created. one consequence stemming from the nature of the convention, which is an international treaty, is that the actors leading the process actually come from outside the alps. some scholars have noted, not without some criticism, the “colonial manner” (bätzing 1994: 186) in which the convention and the different protocols were established. bätzing pointed out that the convention was made in rome, bonn, and paris, but not in the alps. on the other hand, this “scaling down” process is accompanied by numerous other initiatives that are more local in nature. since the 1990s, a variety of transnational networks were initiated in the alps, which are linking different actors such as businesses, municipalities, protected areas, cities, ski resorts, and so on. if cipra played an important role in stimulating the birth of these networks, the involvement of local leaders is central to the success of their initiatives. the aim of these networks, i.e. the implementation of the alpine convention’s principles at a local level, is to mitigate one of the major criticisms of the treaty, namely that it is an “ineffective paper tiger” (balsiger 2007: 5). the result of this “pan-alpine activism” (debarbieux 2008b: 40) is the evolution of an alpine regional identity for collective action4 through an “ecoregional institutionalization” process (balsiger 2007: 4). the prefix “eco” can be understood in two different ways: on the one hand the alps can be seen as a natural, mountain region; on the other hand, the initiatives undertaken in the alps, thanks to the input of the alpine convention, aim at the creation of a territory “under the umbrella of sustainable development” (balsiger 2007: 4), a concept which is constantly used by the alpine actors (debarbieux & rudaz 2008: 504). in that sense, the alpine region emerges, as highlighted by debarbieux, under the double effect of collective actions which refer to these representations (debarbieux 2008b: 52). more generally we can say that “a transalpine identity has emerged to reinforce the regional institutional architecture” (balsiger 2007: 5). norer, with an enlightening german word, speaks about a growing “alpenbewusstseins”5 (2002: 5) based on the shared representation of nature, among other things. the authors quoted in the last paragraphs refer to different notions to capture the contemporary evolution occurring in the alps. they use the concepts of “institutionalization”, “identity”, “representation”, “region”. in the following chapter i would like to discuss these concepts and how they are related in order to build a theoretical framework capable of uncovering the processes defennia 188: 1 (2010) 139theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region … scribed above. the goal is to know if (and how) the alps are undergoing a “regional institutionalization” process, in the manner that anssi paasi describes it, which is “a sociospatial process in which a territorial unit emerges as part of the spatial structure of the society concerned, becomes established and identified in various spheres of social action and consciousness, and may eventually vanish or deinstitutionalize in regional transformation” (paasi 1991: 243). in that sense, regions cannot be considered as frozen and static, but instead as a “consequence of a complex process of reproduction, production and creation of space” (raagmaa 2002: 56) under the effect of changing social relations (gilbert 1988: 216). in that way, there is a connection between the “spatial” (region, the french territoire and place) and identity. this link will be explored in the following paragraphs by using the concept of “regional identity”. identity and territoire6 it is widely assumed in the scientific community that regions are socially constructed (bourdieu 1980; murphy 1991; allen et al. 1998; macleod 2001; fall 2003; gonon & laserre 2003; debarbieux 2004a; debarbieux 2004b; balsiger 2006; häkli 2008; debarbieux & rudaz 2010). therefore, the focus in regional studies must be placed on the process of “contingency and becoming” (painter 2008: 343). regions and regional identity are in that sense both “resources for, and the outcomes of, human action”. or, as paasi writes, “regions are simultaneously both products and constituents in social action” (2002b: 200). referring to paasi, there is a link between identity and social action, since, as he points out, regions and regional identity are social facts that can generate action, as long as people believe in them (2002a: 139). thus, the building of regions has to be considered as a dialectical process. on the one hand, it contributes to social action and, on the other hand, it is a construct built by social practices and discourses. therefore, a strong link of co-construction between identity and places can be emphasized. in fact, one cannot look at identity only as an individual or social category, but rather, it should also be acknowledged as a spatial category (paasi 2001: 10). in that sense, as the french geographer di méo argues, the territoire forms the visible and readable figure of social identity, because it can be mapped and its limits can be drawn. it is therefore the tangible object of an immaterial social reality (di méo 2002: 178). di méo, in the same article, adds that identity leans on cut and delimited territoires for a precise purpose. identity uses territoires as an efficient bond of social groups. following di méo, the territoire gives to identity a material consistency made by signs and symbols which are inserted in objects, things, landscapes and places (di méo 2002: 175). for this reason, identity cannot exist in individuals, but develops, grows and changes with social interactions (pohl 2004: 12918). as pohl suggests, the culture, tradition, landscape, and history form regional identity, and are also part of it. in the alps, the distinctiveness of the alpine territory, its landscape and its topographic specificities seem to be powerful engines for collective action, which, in turn, helps to build a common identity. working together with the goal of protecting the mountain territoire, local actors share experiences and know-how through their networks, but also common representations of alpine nature and society. thanks to this shared identity, they act to construct the alps as they imagine them: a territoire shaped by sustainable development. searching for alternatives for the “identity catchword” the concept of “shared identity”, as pointed out by numerous authors in recent decades became a “catchword” (häkli 2001: 115), something “indefinable” (bray 2002: 14) or “ambiguous” (brubaker & cooper 2000: 2). so, how do we truly grasp it? instead of discussing here the relevance of the concept, i propose a way to capture it, by using three notions coined by the sociologists gilles laferté and martina avanza. in their proposals, partly a response to brubaker’s famous article “beyond ‘identity’” (brubaker & cooper 2000), laferté and avanza suggest looking at identity distinguishing three senses of it: identification, social image and belonging. i will answer, presenting their theory, the following questions: how can these three concepts help us understand the alpine process? and how can they be linked to the notion of regional identity? avanza and laferté define these concepts as follows: • identification can be qualified as social action where identity attribution is external and practiced on individuals within a social institution, 140 fennia 188: 1 (2010)cristina del biaggio following a codified technique (avanza & laferté 2005: 144). notably, the most emblematic actor of the process of identification is the state while attributing categories (avanza & laferté 2005: 144). nevertheless, the authors do not identify the bureaucratic apparatus as the only one capable of classifying persons and societies; • the social image concerns the social production of discourses and symbols (representations), which designates territoires and groups (avanza & laferté 2005: 143); • belonging defines the participation of people to the collective ”thing” and to the group (avanza & laferté 2005: 144). the distinction of these three concepts of identity is useful if applied to the alpine case. the combination of avanza and laferté’s theory with paasi’s institutionalization of regions gives a territorial basis to the sociological distinctions of identity made by avanza and laferté. for the specific case of the alps, this helps to clearly identify the different actors (and their actions) involved in the complex process of the alpine regionalization. paasi distinguishes two facets forming the socalled “regional identity” (paasi 1986: 131−138, 2002a: 146, 2009: 469). on the one hand is regional consciousness, which indicates the identification of inhabitants within a specific region. on the other is the identity of a region which “refers to such features of nature, culture and inhabitants that distinguish a region from others” (paasi 2009: 469). in that way, and following paasi, discourses on identity of regions are typically discourses by scientists, politicians, administrators, cultural activists or entrepreneurs, whose aim is to make a distinction between “their” region and that of “the others”. in order to clarify the links between the two coupled theories (fig. 1), i propose following this structure and discussing it with the help of the alpine example. these combined concepts will bring out the different actors involved in the regionalization process and the actions they undertake to achieve it. as explained in the precedenting paragraphs, the identification process of the alpine region was undertaken mostly by scientists (debarbieux 2008b: 43) and politicians with a “scaling down” approach, notably during the constitution of the alpine convention (bätzing 1994). in the identification process, the alpine non-governmental organization cipra, and the international scientific committee on research in the alps (iscar), both also played key roles. from a theoretical point of view, the concept of identification refers to the fig. 1. regional identity. regional identity regional consciousness identity of a region identification belonging scaling up process scaling down process social image fennia 188: 1 (2010) 141theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region … identity of a region as both allude to the attempt by different actors to objectivise the “self” in comparison to the “other”. if avanza and laferté allude first of all to sociological characters, their theory can also be applied to characters and elements used to objectivise regions (nature, topography, culture, etc.), as paasi proposes with the concept of “identity of a region”. in our case study, the dramatic topographical and microclimatic complexity of the alps, that set them apart from other ecosystems (balsiger 2007: 29) is often highlighted. martin price (1999: 88) shares the opinion of balsiger while declaring that the alpine convention contributes to the recognition that the alps are a region with distinct environmental and cultural characteristics. the social image implies a representation of the alps that promoters of the alpine initiatives espouse and convey to the broader population. this is clearly linked to the concept of “sustainable development”. this principle is integrated in the alpine convention, as described by cipra: “the alpine convention is an agreement between various countries for the protection and sustainable development of the alpine region”7, and permanently used as reference by the local networks, whose members, “together with their citizens, strive to develop their alpine living environment in a sustainable way”8. as debarbieux analyses, the alpine convention and the actors who identify themselves with it, try to generalize sustainable development at the entire mountain range level. in so far, the image of the alps that the local leaders share, contributes to shape their regional consciousness, in the name of which they act. as confirmed by derbarbieux, these actions are motivated by a certain representation of the quality of the alpine environment (2008a: 101). therefore, we can say that there is, indeed, a shared image of the alpine nature among local actors, who try to steer all human activity in the alps on a sustainable path (balsiger 2007: 15). the concept of social image, thus, has some commonality with that of identity of the region, since it helps, as does the concept of social image, to highlight the special characteristics of a particular region which are to be protected. this link between the two concepts is not direct, but mediated through the representation the actors have from the identity of the region and thanks to which they implement their actions and projects. the first impressions drawn from reading and listening to the discourses of local leaders i interviewed, is that they share an image of the alps as being, on the one hand, “beautiful and extraordinary”, and on the other, particularly “fragile” place. in that sense, the networks are seen as a possible innovative medium to solve “common alpine problems” and are an important way for “seek[ing] strategic advantage” (häkli 2008: 475). this leads, as martin price emphasizes, to the recognition that various issues cannot be solved through national legislation, and that coordinated regional initiatives are indispensable to solving common problems (price 1999: 88). the image of a fragile and shared mountain environment makes local leaders act at a transnational level, and thereby to contribute to what jouni häkli calls a “politics of bridge”, where “one seeks to appropriate the unifying rather than the separating aspect of the mountains” (häkli 2004: 65). although a shared image of the alps seems to be present amongst alpine leaders, there is disagreement about the actions that should be lead at the panalpine level, as well as the form that pan-alpine networks should take. in a previous paper, i called this discord a “dilemma between technical links and political influence” (del biaggio 2009: 109). the debate surrounding this question implies defining the role of the networks, the primary objective of which is the sharing of experience. however, certain leaders express their wish, not necessarily shared by others, to go beyond simple exchanges on technical points and to develop a political voice for the alps that reaches beyond its frontiers to the state level, and even the european union (del biaggio 2009: 109). the sense of belonging involves an analysis, as with the concept of regional consciousness, at the inhabitant’s level. even if my research is not focused on alpine inhabitants, but more at the leader and network level, the initial results clearly show a lack of involvement by the population in the development of the networks, and in the creation of pan-alpine institutions. this occurs despite the major pan-alpine networks efforts to stress the importance of the population’s involvement in their activities. alparc underlines the “environmental education and awareness-raising targeting the general public” as two key components of its role9. the charter of alliance in the alps includes a principle called “participation of the population”, which clearly underlines the active role that the population should have in the implementation of the pan-alpine goals at the local level. so, the question can be raised about the capacity of the 142 fennia 188: 1 (2010)cristina del biaggio local leaders to pass the pan-alpine consciousness and engagement to the population. the initial results of my research show that there is a clear gap between the two levels. specifically, the entire process seems to be firmly in the hands of the leaders (del biaggio 2009). this confirms what häkli discovered in the pyrenees, which is that the majority of the population living on both sides of the mountain range are still linked to their local political community, and do not see the development of the transboundary region as a whole (häkli 2004: 65−66). the alpine and the pyrenean examples seem to add further credence to the statement made by sidaway and based on a study in the border region between spain and portugal, that different “visions” of the relations between politics and territory coexist (sidaway 2001: 771). the first two concepts, identification and social image, entail a process which can be considered as “scaling down”. in fact, they are in the hands of some scientific and political leaders acting at the pan-alpine level, promoting actions that should reach the alpine nature and population. the concept of belonging is integrated in a “scaling up” approach, in which the feeling of belonging to a common region, the alps, should bring people to act in the name of it. the articulation of the three (belonging, social image, identification) represents a useful research approach – one designed to identify the different actors (and their actions) involved in the process occurring in the contemporary alpine region. it helps to grasp the “indefinable” and “ambiguous” concept of identity and regional identity. indeed, in the construction of the pan-alpine region and of the resulting alpine regional identity, three major actors can be distinguished. they play a specific role in the construction of an alpine regional identity: the scientists and alpine ngos which identify the alpine region as such; the local leaders and the promoters of the pan-alpine initiatives who contribute to communicating a certain image of the alps and its related projects; and finally, the population, which is supposed to act in the name of a pan-alpine consciousness. the crisis of the nested spaces the combination of sense of belonging, social image and identification applied to the process of regional institutionalization demonstrates how new places, as regions, are imagined and built. in the alps, and in other european regions, this occurs while the nation-state seems to lose power in favour of new actors (agnew 2001: 6; häkli 2004). presently, it is difficult to answer with an unanimous “yes” the question raised by di méo (2002: 177): “do we belong to one social group, to one territoire?”, since in the contemporary world every person can have broader social and spatial experiences. in that sense, it is possible to pretend that, as debarbieux does, spatialities and temporalities are multiple and heterogeneous. the emergence of new actors weaken the pertinence of the so-called “magical triangle” (debarbieux 2006: 345), which assumes the sumperimposition between culture, territoire and identity. the new and complex combination of actors and spaces makes it impossible to analyse the new modes of governance with the ancient model of the “nested territorial politics” (debarbieux 2006: 345−352). instead, we can affirm, as brenner does, that we are facing “re-scaled territorialities” (brenner, in amin 2002: 387), a “proliferation of scales and scalar complexity” (amin 2002: 387), where “nation-states become less and less satisfactory as units of analysis” (hannerz 1996: 48). or, as chris rumford summarizes it, society and the nationstate do not inevitably inhabit the same space (2006: 163). this leaves space for new forms of identities and collaborations. as keating points out, a renegotiation of identities and the emergence of layered identities is possible thanks to more porous borders (2003: 11). as paasi clearly states in a recent article, we are facing a “proliferation of discursively constituted and institutionally materialized and embedded spatial scales” (2009: 467). this is due to, as paasi shows, increasing “tangled hierarchies”, with different temporalities and spatialities. this allows the finnish geographer to say that new places, new spaces and new scales of organization are being created, which enable new actions. in the european context, it is interesting to see that the european union, thanks to its cross-border cooperation programmes, gave rise to new forms of regionalism, and thereby, to new forms of regional identities (agnew 2001: 107). as discussed before, it is possible to consider the alps as being created with help of two types of initiatives, on the one hand the initiatives undertaken by the local leaders and networks and, on the other, the important catalyst of the european union, as promoter of transnational projects. as seen before, these projects can take a territorial form, with the confennia 188: 1 (2010) 143theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region … struction of new places and new institutional contexts designed to better reflect the scale of belonging of the population and its leaders. i would like to conclude this section with a symbolic quote by leitner, who conceptualizes the way in which new types of cooperation, not linked to the old territorial units, can give rise to regional governance: “transnational networks represent new modes of coordination and governance, a new politics of horizontal relations that also have a distinct spatiality. whereas the spatiality of a politics of scale is associated with vertical relations among nested territorially defined political entities, by contrast, networks span space rather than covering it, transgressing the boundaries that separate and define these political entities” (leitner, in jones et al. 2005: 417). in the following section, i will give more details on the potential links between territorial projects detached from nested spaces (as networks) and regional governance. the materialization of regional identity in institutions and governance as we have seen, regional identity can be a useful tool to further understanding the alpine regionalization process. in the following paragraphs the emphasis will be placed on how these identities are likely to materialize in an institutional form. in other words, i will answer the following question: what can we expect from these new territorial and institutional reconfigurations? a good answer is given by gordon macleod (1998: 840), who comments on the theory of regional institutionalization, saying that in the contemporary world, the theory of the institutionalization of regions may provide useful elements in order to understand the emergence of particular socially cohesive territories, their institutionalization and their establishment as specific sites for political governance. thus the region has the opportunity to become a space of political governance, where regional identity could play an important role, since it is the basic component for the creation of new spaces of identification and belonging. regional identity can materialize in new institutionalized regions, or, as balsiger underlines it with the alpine case, in “new forms of expression for democratic legitimacy and accountability” (balsiger 2007: 5). anssi paasi, in his regional institutionalization’s theory, emphasizes four steps of the process that allow territorial units to pass from the stage of “regions on paper” to “regions of social practice” (paasi 2002b: 200). in that sense, it seems plausible to formulate the hypothesis that the alpine region is following this same path. as we have seen, the “territorial shape” can be identified by the alpine convention’s boundaries, the “symbolic and conceptual shape” can be recognised in the importance given to the value of sustainable development. moreover the alpine region is developing an important structure of institutions, as is evidenced by the establishment of networks by local actors. this is confirmed by the observations of bernard debarbieux, who thinks that the different alpine initiatives bring about a “process of political institutionalization, in particular under the form of lobbies, which aim to influence deliberative and democratic processes in the name of a legitimacy acquired with help of widely shared social identities” (2008a: 101). as discussed before, the question of whether we can speak about a proper “establishment of a region” as part of the “spatial structure and social consciousness of the society” (paasi 1991: 246) is still open. this might be possible in the future, if the alps, as other crossborder regions, are able to turn from “regions in discourses” and “on paper” into “regions as social practice” with concrete effects on the daily life of people (paasi 2002b: 200). an institutionalized region, as i just described it, also has important affinities with the idea of governance. this is particularly true in an european context where it is possible to think in terms of “multi-level governance” (perkmann 1999: 665) and where local actors’ networks and cross-border regions play an important role. following jessop, governance can be defined as ways in which disparate but interdependent social agencies are coordinated to achieve specific social objectives, so that one can define the field of governance studies as concerned with the resolution of (para-)political problems in and through specific configurations of governmental (hierarchical) and extra-governmental (non-hierarchical) institutions, organizations and practices (jessop 1995: 317). this definition can be successfully applied to the alpine institutions, which are clearly defining a collective goal, which is to build a space of alpine “transnational regional sustainable development” (balsiger 2007: 15), following a “model of multi-actor cooperation” (balsiger 2007: 33; debarbieux 2008b: 40). in the specific case of the alpine region, the role of reticular initiatives seems particularly impor144 fennia 188: 1 (2010)cristina del biaggio tant. the existing alpine networks have been created thanks to the initiative of cipra, with the aim of finding specific tools to implement the alpine convention (balsiger 2007: 28). thanks to financial support from interreg programmes for the so called “alpine space”, the networks could realize a considerable number of projects10. with these programmes, the european union tried to promote cross-border cooperation inside europe, and in doing so, “a move towards new forms of rule” (keating 2003: 2) came into existence. o’dowd highlights the fact that interreg programmes allowed the transnational regions to assume a pioneering role, so that regions considered peripheral can now be seen as the heart of a new european space (o’dowd in: mcneill 2004: 155). networks of local actors seem to have played an important role for the re-negotiation of collective identities: “co-operation projects as interreg have helped redefine borders as complex zones in which multiple identities can be expressed and negotiated” (bray, in keating 2003: 12). but, what is a network? a good way to further understand the reality of networks is captured in the following definition by balsiger: “[networks are] ties between actors on the basis of their common relationship to ‘events’. events can include actual joint participation in events such as social gatherings or professional conferences, or comembership in organizations or coalitions” (balsiger 2006: 12). balsiger proposes a link between networks and what he calls “events”. these allow the involved actors to share common interests and are likely to last over time. to push the implication of actors in a longer scenario, it is possible to say, as vertovec (2001: 573) does, that “some networks are marked by patterns of communication or exchange of resources and information along with participation in socio-cultural and political activities”. the impression is that alpine leaders promote two kinds of actions: on the one hand they promote socio-cultural activities and projects, but, at the same time, they embark on a project that is eminently political. new actors, or new bodies of actors, chose new scales and new spaces of belonging that are more relevant to successfully promoting their collective action. markus perkmann makes the explicit link, already emphasized above, between transnational cooperation and new forms of governance. he starts his article by diminishing the impact of networking on governance, affirming that there is a tendency to “overemphasize cross-border regions as emerging territorial units equipped with selfgoverning capacities” (perkmann 1999: 660). for perkmann, this kind of cooperation only has a positive financial impact. although the author is critical about the long-term effects of cross-border cooperation, he underscores an important point that cannot be underestimated and that moderates his initial point of view: “cross-border cooperation governance is in fact helping to create new opportunities for actors that might change their strategic landscape both on a border, as well as on european level” (perkmann 1999: 661). in other words, cross-border cooperation can create opportunities for “new spaces and scales of action”. jouni häkli resumes this idea affirming that crossborder regionalization can challenge the state through the new scalar constructs (2008: 475). häkli continues by saying that “emerging transnational political spaces can be conceptualized as scales that help actors to skirt the traditional statecentred patterns of networking. transnational scales, then, are produced and reproduced in processes that set alternative perimeters to networks of cooperation between actors who seek strategic advantage from this cooperation” (2008: 475). although perkmann, in contraposition to häkli, does not see how transborder regions could challenge the domination of nation-states, he concludes his article writing that “cross-border cooperation is symptomatic of the newly emerging european policy characterized by the operation of cross-level networks encouraged by structural funds” (perkmann 1999: 665). european practices which have been implemented in the recent decades allow us to conceptualize of the european space as a place where a multi-level governance exists, and where political action can be done on new scales, not limited by the traditional historical spatial grid. in that sense “cross-border cooperation has fostered the development of governance disconnected from politics rooted in national territories” (häkli 2004: 65). balsiger sees the same evolution in the alps, and describes in the following manner, how the alpine transborder region can contribute to take new forms of governance inside the european context: “the alpine convention represents an international initiative characterized by three features that may contribute to theory building and governance reform. the first of these relates to its ecoregional but comprehensive sustainable development scope, the second to its process-based apfennia 188: 1 (2010) 145theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region … proach to the framework protocol model of international agreement, and the third to its permeability to nonstate actor influence” (balsiger 2007: 29). we discussed the first and third features, the second is not central to this paper, as it is more about the way in which the convention and its protocols were discussed and put into force. what is important to recall is that the combination of these three features enables the alpine initiatives to participate in the process of institutionalization. conclusion in this paper i explored the link between identity and territoire, giving particular focus to the contemporary debate on the definition of these two concepts. having discussed how we may think about these two fundamental notions for geography, it is easier to understand the debates on regional identity. a main distinction, suggested by paasi, was made between the regional consciousness and the identity of regions included in the more general concept of regional identity. the contribution of martina avanza and gilles laferté on the discussions about “identity”, distinguishing the notion of identification from the concepts of social image and belonging, is particularly interesting in order to capture the different actors and processes of regional building and multi-level governance in europe in general, and in the alps in particular. the analysis of regional institutionalization gains on comprehension if it is broken up into the three components of identity distinguished by avanza and laferté (identification, social image and belonging). in that way, the role of each component in the regionalization process can be identified and the different facets of identity emphasized. thanks to these concepts, the role of the actors involved in the process of alpine regionalization were put forward. the identification process and the production of social image in the alpine region were discussed in the paper. the positive role of leaders and ngos in the implementation of their main project, primarily the application of the principles of sustainable development in the entire alpine arc, was highlighted. having identified the area of action (the perimeter of the alpine convention), alpine leaders are acting based on the image of the alps they wish to implement. the building of different kinds of transnational networks is one of the favoured and uncontested forms that leaders use to give concrete expression to this image. although the main objective seems to be clear, some disagreements among the local leaders in how to pursue them were emphasized. this, among other debates, leads to what i called the “dilemma between technical link and political influence”. concerning the discussion about regional belonging, an important question was raised in the paper related to the role of the population in the creation of transborder regions. häkli (2004: 65−66), bringing examples from the pyrenees context, declares that: “a vast majority of the population of these border regions remain connected to their local political communities and everyday concerns instead of viewing the development of the cross-border region as a whole”. some preliminary results from the alps (del biaggio 2009) noted the lack of participation by the entire population in the alpine region and is corroborated by other experts on the alps (debarbieux & rudaz 2008: 513). the participation of the broader population in transborder spaces is particularly important in order to enable the shift from “regions on paper” to “regions of social practice” (paasi 2002b: 200); or, as underscored with the three conceptions of “identity” coined by avanza and laferté, in order to be able to talk about belonging and not just in terms of social image and identification while speaking about regional identity. and if, as häkli (2008: 477) wrote, “in the long run the success of major political innovations will depend on their appeal among the ‘ordinary people’”, the path seems to be still quite long before a “new political space” can be observed in the alps, as long as the re-bordering process is elite-driven. even if these processes do not concern the entire alpine population, one should not underestimate a development that could constitute “something” important, not yet defined, for the future of the alpine territory. the alps could be an emblematic chantier, transforming the alps from a peripheral border region to a “pivotal space of integration” (sidaway 2001: 749). in conclusion, with this paper i presented theoretical tools that helped me to recognize how regional identity contributes to the process of regional institutionalization occurring in the alps. in that regard, so far, it may be easier to answer the question raised by jouni häkli about the “possible erosion of the nation-state, the rise of the region, and the uncertain future of cross-border governance” (2008: 476). however, important questions remain for further discussion and studies: what kind of regional governance will 146 fennia 188: 1 (2010)cristina del biaggio the alps face in the coming years? is it possible to say, as häkli argued concerning catalonia, that in the alps cross-border governance means “governing the mountain” (häkli 2004: 60)? disclaimer all the translated citations are my own translations. acknowledgements the author is grateful to jörg balsiger for giving consent to use his draft versions of papers. thanks to jörn harfst and mathieu petite for their useful comments. i am also grateful to the two anonymous referees whose comments were very helpful in developing this paper. a warm thanks to gabriela velásquez orner, who kindly corrected my english. notes 1 <www.alpconv.org/theconvention/index_en> 20.08.2010. 2 for an historical overview of the convention: bätzing 1994; price 1999; norer 2002; balsiger 2007. 3 the 29th of september 2010, the swiss parliament voted against the ratification of the nine protocols of the alpine convention by a vote of 102 to 76. this demonstrates that the battle for sustainable development in the alps has not yet gained traction in all of the alpine countries. 4 a special issue of the journal alpine research is dedicated to this question (articles downloadable in french and english at <http://rga.revues.org/index853.html>, 12.08.2009). 5 this concept can be translated in english as “alpine awareness”. 6 the concept of territoire is not used here as a specific notion designing the equivalent of the state as used in geopolitics, which denominates the “delimited space of governing” (giraut 2008: 59−60). the concept of territoire/territory has a different history and therefore different meanings in the french and anglo-american geographical traditions, and i will therefore use, without entering into the epistemological debate, the french term “territoire” (“territory”) and consider it in a non-specific way. unfortunately, there are only french publications at this time on the debate between french and anglo-american meanings of this concept, among them: debarbieux 1999; giraut 2008. 7 <www.cipra.org/en/alpenkonvention> 17.08.2009. 8 <www.alpenallianz.org/en/about-alliance-in-thealps> 17.08.2009. 9 <www.alparc.org/index.php/our-actions/environmental-education-and-awareness-raising> 20.09.2010. 10 for example, for the two oldest alpine networks (alliance in the alps and the alpine network of protected areas) these interreg projects can be mentioned: dynalp 1 and 2 (<www.alpenallianz.org/en/ projects>) and the alpencom (<www.alpencom. org/pages/index.php>). references agnew j 2001. regions in revolt. progress in human geography 25: 1, 103−110. allen j, massey d & cochrane a 1998. rethinking the region. routledge, london. amin a 2002. spatialities and globalisation. environment and planning a 34, 385−399. avanza m & laferté g 2005. dépasser la ‘construction des identités’? identification, image sociale, appartenance. genèses 61, 134−152. balsiger j 2006. regional identity and resource policy effectiveness: sustainable mountain development in the swiss alps and california’s sierra nevada. <http://www.eui.eu/personal/fellows/balsiger/ docs/balsiger_bc2006.pdf> 15.08.2009. balsiger j 2007. regionalism reconsidered: the alpine convention as a model of earth system governance. paper presented at the 2007 amsterdam conference on the human dimensions of global environmental change, may 24−26. <www.2007amsterdamconference.org/papers. htm#top> 15.08.2009. bourdieu p 1980. l’identité et la représentation. éléments pour une réflexion critique sur l’idée de région. actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 35, 63−72. bray z 2002. boundaries and identities in bidasoatxingudi, on the franco-spanish frontier. phd thesis presented at the european university institute, department of political and social sciences. brubaker r & cooper f 2000. beyond ‘identity’. theory and society 29, 1−47. bätzing w 1994. die alpenkonvention – ein internationales vertragswerk für eine nachhaltige alpenentwicklung auf dem mühevollen weg der politischen realisierung. in franz h (ed). gefährdung und schutz der alpen, 185−204. österreichische akademie der wissenschaften, vienna. debarbieux b 1999. le territoire: histoires en deux langues. a bilingual (his-)story of territory. in chivallon c, ragouet p & samers m (eds). discours scientifiques et contextes culturels: géographies françaises et britanniques à l’épreuve postmoderne, 33−46. maison des sciences de l’homme d’aquitaine, bordeaux. debarbieux b 2004a. de l’objet spatial à l’effet géographique. présentation générale. in debarbieux b & fourny m-c (eds). l’effet géographique: construction sociale, appréhension cognitive et fennia 188: 1 (2010) 147theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region … configuration matérielle des objets géographiques, 11−33. maison des sciences de l’homme-alpes, grenoble. debarbieux b 2004b. the symbolic order of objects and the frame of geographical action. geojournal 60, 397−405. debarbieux b 2006. prendre position: réflexions sur les ressources et les limites de la notion d’identité en géographie. l’espace géographique 4, 340−354. debarbieux b 2008a. construits identitaires et imaginaires de la territorialité: variations autour de la figure du «montagnard». annales de géographie 660−661, 90−115. debarbieux b 2008b. cultures et politiques dans les alpes contemporaines : enjeux de société, de spatialité et de réflexivité. revue de géographie alpine 96: 4, 37−52. debarbieux b & rudaz g 2008. linking mountain identities throughout the world: the experience of swiss communities. cultural geographies 15, 497−517. debarbieux b & rudaz g 2010. les faiseurs de montagne. cnrs editions, paris. del biaggio c 2009. the institutionalization of the alpine region: an analysis based on a study of two pan-alpine networks (alliance in the alps and alparc). journal of alpine research 97: 2. di méo g 2002. l’identité: une médiation essentielle du rapport espace/société. géocarrefour 77: 2, 175−184. fall jj 2003. planning protected areas across boundaries: new paradigms and old ghosts. journal of sustainable forestry 17: 1−2, 81−102. gilbert a 1988. the new regional geography in english and french-speaking countries. progress in human geography 12, 208−228. giraut f 2008. conceptualiser le territoire. historiens & géographes 403: 9, 57−67. gonon e & laserre f 2003. une critique de la notion de frontières artificielles à travers le cas de l’asie centrale. cahiers de géographie du québec 47: 132, 433−461. hannerz u 1996. transnational connections. routledge, london. häkli j 2001. the politics of belonging: complexities of identity in the catalan borderlands. geografiska annaler 83b: 3, 111−119. häkli j 2004. governing the mountains. cross-border regionalization in catalonia. in kramsch o & hooper b (eds). cross-border governance in the european union, 56−69. routledge, london & new york. häkli j 2008. re-bordering spaces. in cox kr, low m & robinson j (eds). handbook of political geography, 471−482. sage, london. jessop b 1995. the regulation approach, governance and post-fordism: alternative perspectives on economic and political change? economy and society 24: 3, 307−333. jones jp, woodward k & marston sa 2005. human geography without scale. transactions of the institute of british geographers 30: 4, 416−432. keating m 2003. european integration and the nationalities question. politics & society 32: 3, 1− 20. macleod g 1998. in what sense a region? place hybridity, symbolic shape, and institutional formation in (post-)modern scotland. political geography 17: 7, 833−863. macleod g 2001. new regionalism reconsidered: globalization and the remaking of political economic space. international journal of urban and regional research 25: 4, 804−829. mcneill d 2004. new europe: imagined spaces. hodder arnold, london. murphy ab 1991. regions as social constructs: the gap between theory and practice. progress in human geography 15: 1, 22−35. norer r 2002. die alpenkonvention. völkerrechtliches vertragswerk für den alpenraum, institut für wirtschaft, politik und recht. universität für bodenkultur wien, vienna. diskussionspapier nr. 93-r-02. <www.boku.ac.at/wpr/wpr_dp/dp-93. pdf> 16.09.2009. paasi a 1986. the institutionalization of regions: a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of regions and the constitution of regional identity. fennia 164, 105−146. paasi a 1991. deconstructing regions: notes on the scales of spatial life. environment and planning a 23, 239−256. paasi a 1996. inclusion, exclusion and territorial identities. the meanings of boundaries in the gobalizing geopolitical landscape. nordisk samhällsgeografisk tidskrift 23, 6−23. paasi a 2001. europe as a social process and discourse. considerations of place, boundaries and identity. european urban and regional studies 8: 1, 7−28. paasi a 2002a. bounded spaces in the mobile world: deconstructing “regional identity”. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93: 2, 137−148. paasi a 2002b. regional transformation in the european context: notes on regions, boundaries and identity. space & polity 6: 2, 197−201. paasi a 2009. regions and regional dynamics. in rumford c (ed). the sage handbook of european studies, 464−484. sage, london. painter j 2008. cartographic anxiety and the search for regionality. environment and planning a 40: 2, 342−361. perkmann m 1999. building governance institutions across european borders. regional studies 33: 7, 657−667. pohl j 2004. regional identity. in smelser nj & baltes pb (eds). international encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences, 12917−12922. elsevier, amsterdam. 148 fennia 188: 1 (2010)cristina del biaggio price mf 1999. towards co-operation across mountain frontiers: the alpine convention. european environment 9, 83−89. raagmaa g 2002. regional identity in regional development planning. european planning studies 10: 1, 55−76. rumford c 2006. theorizing borders. introduction. european journal of social theory 9: 2, 155−169. sidaway dj 2001. rebuilding bridges: a critical geopolitics of iberian transfrontier cooperation in a european context 19, 743−778. vertovec s 2001. transnationalism and identity. journal of ethnic and migration studies 27: 4, 573−582. holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of central europe václav treml, vlasta jankovská and libor petr treml, václav, vlasta jankovská & libor petr (2006). holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of central europe. fennia 184: 2, pp. 107–119. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. central european hercynian mountain ranges – krkonoše mts., hrubý jeseník mts. and vosges, schwarzwald, harz – represent the only islands of alpine forest-free area between the alps and western carpathians in the south and the scandes in the north. based on data from previously published pollen profiles and on newly taken cores, comparison of the development of the alpine timberline position is presented. the labský d ö ul profile in the krkonoše mts. spans the whole holocene, the keprník profile in the hrubý jeseník mts. brings information from ca 2500 bp to the present. the exceptional position of the krkonoše mts. in terms of permanent presence of alpine forest-free area throughout the holocene was confirmed. in other mountain ranges, the alpine forest-free areas probably vanished or were restricted only to the exposed peaks during the periods of positive temperature anomalies in the middle holocene. later in the period 4000–500 bp, forest free areas reappeared, although the relative contribution of climatic and anthropogenic causes to their formation remains unclear. taking into account the supposed extent of temperature oscillations in the middle and late holocene and the existing pollen records the authors assume that the alpine timberline in the hercynian mid-mountains of central europe varied only slightly. václav treml, department of physical geography and geoecology, faculty of science, charles university in prague, albertov 6, 128 43 prague, czech republic. e-mail: treml@natur.cuni.cz. vlasta jankovská, institute of botany, czech academy of sciences, po vrívcí 3b, 603 00 brno, czech republic. libor petr, department of botany, faculty of science, charles university in prague, benátská 2, 128 01 prague, czech republic. ms received 3 august 2006. introduction the term alpine timberline refers to the ecotone between forest and alpine belt (körner 1999) or subalpine shrub formations. the factor determining the absence of forest is the temperature decline related to the increasing altitude (körner 1999). the alpine timberline ecotone presents a transition zone of varying width and structure (armand 1992), inferring differences in ecotone response to changing temperature conditions. in general, the response of the alpine timberline to changing temperature conditions is somewhat delayed (slatyer & noble 1992; paulsen et al. 2000). its position is determined by long-term climatic trends rather than by immediate temperature conditions (paulsen et al. 2000). in contrast, local or regional advances of treeline or tree-species line (for more detail, see körner 1999) as response to the short or mid-term temperature increase can be very rapid (e.g. bugmann & pfister 2000; kullman 2007). moreover, responses to climatic changes are sometimes opposite, such as advance of timberline due to higher temperature and decline due to higher precipitation or drought (wilmking et al. 2004). certain variations of the alpine timberline position due to climatic oscillations during the holocene can be detected. in central europe, timberline fluctuation is estimated at up to 200 m (tinner & theurillat 2003). for the high sudetes (krkonoše and hrubý jeseník mts.) and western carpathians, oscillations up to 400 m are reported (firbas 1952; 108 fennia 184: 2 (2006)václav treml, vlasta jankovská and libor petr ložek 2001) although this phenomenon still remains open. this study aims at summarising the development of the timberline position in the hercynian mountains of central europe based on detailed interpretation of previously published data and on newly constructed pollen diagrams from krkonoše and hrubý jeseník profiles. methods study area hercynian mountain ranges of central europe with their primary forest-free areas represent the only alpine islands between the scandes, the alps and western carpathians (jeník 1998). they include vosges, harz, krkonoše mts. (~ giant mountains/ karkonosze/riesengebirge) and hrubý jeseník mts. (fig. 1). large forest-free area has developed also in the schwarzwald mts. but it is probably of secondary origin (friedmann 2000). the same holds true for the forest-free area on the summit of šumava (bayerischer wald) mountain range. all these mountains are characteristic by relatively high rainfall, from 2200 mm in the highest parts of the vosges mts. to 1500 mm in the hrubý jeseník mts. the average july temperatures range from 8.7 °c in the highest parts of the krkonoše mts. (snvežka 1602 m a.s.l.) to 11.5 °c in the vosges mts. (hohneck, 1363 m a.s.l.). apart from the vosges, where european beech (fagus sylvatica l.) is present, the timberline is formed by norway spruce (picea abies [l.] karst.). the extent of forest-free area has increased in the past by deforestation in all the mentioned mountain ranges (jeník & lokvenc 1962; jeník & hampel 1991; friedmann 2000; schwartz et al. 2005). pollen analysis and sedimentology this study presents two new pollen profiles that bring information about history of the alpine belt in the krkonoše and hrubý jeseník mts. pollen cores were collected in the labský d ö ul valley (krkonoše mts.) and keprník mt. (hrubý jeseník mts.). the locality labský d ö ul is situated in a lake of glacial origin filled with deposits (engel et al. 2005). this profile provided the longest pollen record ever analyzed in krkonoše: from late glacial period to the present. the locality lies close to the timberline which is lowered here by avalanches. the 1283 cm long core (cirque bottom, fig. 1. locations of the investigated central european hercynian mid-mountains. fennia 184: 2 (2006) 109holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of … table 1. radiocarbon data from labský d ö ul and keprník sites. site depth (cm) lab. no. dated material 14c age (uncal. bp) laboratory labský d ö ul 205 erl 6295 peat 4080 ± 49 phys. inst. der uni. erlangen labský d ö ul 230–250 cu 1916 peat 4380 ± 148 radiocarbon laboratory khig pvrfuk labský d ö ul 354 erl 6318 peat 5024 ± 53 phys. inst. der uni. erlangen labský d ö ul 438 erl 6319 wood fragment 5272 ± 57 phys. inst. der uni. erlangen labský d ö ul 547 poz-13708 wood fragment 5780 ± 60 poznań radiocarbon laboratory labský d ö ul 797 erl 7380 plant macroremnant 8216 ± 94 phys. inst. der uni. erlangen labský d ö ul 963 erl 6184 plant macroremnant 9572 ± 54 phys. inst. der uni. erlangen keprník 50–51 poz-13744 peat 2090 ± 35 poznań radiocarbon laboratory 50°45'n, 15°33'e, 990 m a.s.l.) was collected with russian peat sampler. except for the peat layer up in the profile, the core contained mainly of inorganic matter. the section between 810 and 830 cm contamined during sampling and was discarded from analyses. the profile from mount keprník (50°10'n, 17°07'e, 1429 m a.s.l.) was taken from a pit dug in an earth hummock. the organic sediment had a peaty character with sedge remains. the locality is situated on a plateau in the northern part of the mountain range at a distance of 200 m (60 m of altitude) above the timberline. the samples for pollen analysis were processed with standard acetolysis method (moore et al. 1991), and pollen grains were identified according to the handbook by beug (2004). pollen diagrams including stratigraphic zones were created using tilia (grimm 1992) software. the sediment from labský d ö ul was analysed for organic matter content (determined by loss-on-ignition, loi) and particle size distribution (determined by wet sieving). based on these two indicators, the litostratigraphic units (segments with similar characteristics e.g., particle size distribution, organic matter proportion, colour) of the profile were determined. radiocarbon dating (14c) was carried out by laboratories in erlangen, poznan (for accelerator mass spectrometry, ams) and at the faculty of science of the charles university in prague (for conventional 14c) (table 1). absolute data are expressed, if not indicated otherwise, as uncalibrated radiocarbon years bp. linear age-depth model (r2 = 0.98) from uncalibrated radiocarbon data was, in the case of labský d ö ul, created for the depth ranging from 205 to 963 cm. chronostratigraphic zones are used according to lang (1994). interpretation of the alpine timberline altitudinal shifts when interpreting the pollen diagrams in relation to the timberline position, main emphasis was put on the proportion between woody species and herbs (ap/nap). this proportion allows approximate determination between the dominance of forests and forest-free areas in the vicinity of the profile. macroscopic remains of plant species (macrosubfossils), however, would provide better information about the timberline position (tinner & theurillat 2003). unfortunately, macroremains of plant species were not mentioned in the majority of previously published studies, so we had to concentrate on the ap/nap percentage when interpreting the timberline fluctuation. concerning the ap/nap rate, critical arboreal proportion was considered to be 70–80%, representing the approximate value of woody species proportion in the central european profiles situated at or just below timberline (e.g., gouillé rion, gouillé loéré, grande tsa [tinner et al. 1996; tinner & theurillat 2003; wright et al. 2003], and the northern side of vysoké tatry mts. [obidowicz 1993]). for variations of ap/nap, it was always taken into account whether the change of the value was due not only to the change of dominant species with different (higher or lower) pollen production. in a case where timberline was constituted by spruce at the time, a propor110 fennia 184: 2 (2006)václav treml, vlasta jankovská and libor petr tion of ≥ 50% spruce pollen was also considered indicative of closed stands at the locality (obidowicz 1993). results krkonoše mts. the profile from labský d ö ul allows reconstruction of the early holocene timberline. the simplified pollen diagram (fig. 2) shows data from late glacial period to ca 8000 bp corresponding to the profile depth from 1283 cm to 790 cm. according to the pollen analyses from lower parts of the profile, the markedly different pollen composition between 810 and 830 cm (jankovská 2004) is due to contamination from the upper parts of the core (ca. 500–650 cm). pollen curves of salix, juniperus, betula nana type, ephedra distachya and e. fragilis type and also the presence of pinus haploxylon type (i.e. pinus cembra) clearly delimit the forest-free stage in the profile. higher pollen curve of pinus sylvestris type is produced by pollen from local pinus mugo stands or by influx of p. sylvestris from lower altitudes, or by combination of both factors. in this period (i.e. before ca 9500 bp), alpine timberline was probably situated clearly below the investigated site. the first significant oscillation of ap/nap curve is recorded at around 1200 cm (ld1). before this period (early stage after deglaciation), closed pine forests have probably not occurred in the vicinity of the lake and thus, regional (climatic) rather than local driving factors are suggested. at around 9600 bp (ld2), a markedly lower proportion of arboreal pollen was recorded. it is not clear whether the decrease of ap curve was caused by local disturbance or by climatic influence. during the following period, the ap curve approaches 80% and passes it constantly at 8200 bp. at the same time, the proportion of organic matter in the lake sediment rises from 7–9% to 20–25%. apparently, the timberline composing of pioneer woody species pinus and betula passed the level of labský d ö ul profile as late as around 9200–8800 bp. another decrease of ap pollen takes place at 8200 bp (ld3), set off by resedimentation below this part of the profile. other parameters also, such as increase of betula nana type and juniperus, and lower organic content in the sediment, probably indicate the increase of forest-free area either due to local disturbance or climate. the ap/nap oscillation mentioned above represents only minor wiggles in ap/nap curve in the range from 85 to 95% arboreal pollen. these slight shifts in the ap/nap curve probably reflect local vegetation changes and/or avalanche events. hence, more elevated localities can give more evidence about the alpine timberline position during the most part of middle and late holocene. norway spruce has been sporadically present at the labský d ö ul site (based on stomata) since 7500 bp, more abundantly from 6800 bp, and as a major timberline forming species since the atlantic period (jankovská 2004). hrubý jeseník mts. the investigated pollen profile taken from an earth hummock at the summit of the keprník mt. covers a time span since ca 2500 bp and hence, it records a period similar to other pollen profiles analysed in the hrubý jeseník mts. (rybnívcek & rybnívcková 2004). at the summit of mount keprník, the ap proportion in the mentioned time period was between 70 and 80% (zone k1, k2, fig. 3). at the same time, no woody species stomata were found in the investigated profile. the profile shows a regression of woody species typical for mixed oak forests and progression of beech and fir in the k2 zone. direct indicators of human activities are present in the uppermost layers (k3). in the whole profile, there are only minor shifts in ap/nap curve. with respect to the absence of spruce stomata remnants and ap < 80% (in exposed windy position with potentially high pollen influx from lower areas), it can be concluded that closed forest has not been present in the summit area of the keprník mt. during the last 2500 years. other evidence includes occurrence of earth hummocks since at least 2090 bp. these landforms are usually quickly destroyed after colonisation by trees (treml & k vrížek 2006). discussion evolution of the alpine timberline in the krkonoše mts. and the hrubý jeseník mts. in the krkonoše mts., the alpine timberline position during the younger dryas can be estimated at 500–600 m according to the equilibrium line altifennia 184: 2 (2006) 111holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of … fig. 2. simplified pollen diagram, radiocarbon data, loss-on-ignition and litostratigraphic units (u1–u5) in the “labský d ö ul” core. light rectangle across pollen diagram indices contaminated part of the profile (810–830 cm depth). tude at approximately 1200 m a.s.l. it follows that the timberline reached the upper locations with a time lag which corresponds to the relatively late deglaciation (bourlés et al. 2004). three distinct oscillations of ap/nap curve were detected before the timberline finally passed the labský d ö ul cirque bottom. it is suggested that the first one (ld1) represents a climatically driven timberline descent 112 fennia 184: 2 (2006)václav treml, vlasta jankovská and libor petr fig. 3. simplified pollen diagram, summit of mt. keprník (1429 m a.s.l.). rather than a result of local disturbances. the second significant oscillation of ap/nap curve (ld2) also reflects regional rather than local cause. before this period, timberline had still remained below the labský d ö ul site and therefore, local disturbance in closed pine-birch forest would not be significantly manifested in the ap/nap curve. the third oscillation (ld3) could be correlated with the central european oscillation ce 2 (haas et al. 1998), which was recorded also in the high tatra mts. (kotarba & baumgart-kotarba 1999). the labský d ö ul profile gives insight to timberline position from deglaciation until ca 8000 bp, whereas other pollen profiles from the summit areas of the krkonoše mts. (fig. 4) cover a time period since 7600 ± 130 bp, which is the time span of the panvcava peat bog profile (huettemann & bortenschlager 1987). this peat bog is located on an exposed highly elevated planated surface and thus, it is supposed a prominent part of its pollen is brought by wind from windward valleys (jeník 1998). high proportion of herb and dwarf shrub pollen was detected (25–30% gramineae, 10% calluna) at the bottom of this profile (huettemann & bortenschlager 1987). this suggests that at the given time (~ 7600 bp), either the timberline had not yet reached the pan vcava peat bog (1300 m a.s.l.) or that it had already been lowered below this level. in the following period (after 7400 bp according to huettemann & bortenschlager 1987), the alpine timberline reached at least the level of the panvcava peat bog and since varied apparently only a little. nevertheless, according to speranza et al. (2000) there was a colder period between 2640 ± 60 and 2480 ± 35 bp, but there is no evidence of a timberline shift due to this temperature oscillation. in the following period, no marked trend in forestation or deforestation was detected in the highest parts of the krkonoše mts. at less elevated panvcava peat bog, ap reaches 90% of the pollen spectrum (jankovská 2001), and at úpa peat bog (1430 m a.s.l.) it reaches approximately 80% (svobodová 2004). considerable proportion (20–30%) of the pollen spectrum belongs to pine, mainly from local pinus mugo stands. at the pan vcava peat bog, picea pollen represents about 10–20% during 4000–800 bp (jankovká fennia 184: 2 (2006) 113holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of … fig. 4. positions of described pollen profiles within the krkonoše and hrubý jeseník mts. (1) labský d ö ul; (2) pan vcava peat bog (huetteman & bortenschlager 1987; speranza et al. 2000; jankovská 2001); (3) úpa peat bog (svobodová 2004); (4) keprník; (5) velký d ved; (6) barborka; (7) velká kotlina; (8) velký máj (5–8; rybní vcek & rybnívcková 2004). 2001, 2004), while at úpa peat bog it reaches only 5–15% (svobodová 2004). this is probably a consequence of longer distance between the úpa peat bog and the timberline during this period. moreover, both pan vcava and úpa pollen profiles show significantly smaller number of picea pollen, as compared with sites recently surrounded by spruce forest (labský d ö ul, barborka). this indicates that at least úpa peat bog was situated above the alpine timberline during 4000–800 bp. human-induced changes in vegetation are present in the above mentioned pollen profiles since the medieval period (jankovská 2004). based on existing data, it is not possible to determine the exact level that the closed forest reached during the climatic optimum of the holocene (i.e. atlantic chronozone, lang 1994). most likely, a closed tall-trunk stand cannot be expected at locations where well developed sorted patterned ground is present (above ca. 1430–1450 m a.s.l.). should these landforms become overgrown by trees, they usually lose their raised centre morphology, which is not the case of the above mentioned patterned ground (sekyra et al. 2002). the maximum elevation of closed forest could, therefore, have been only about 100 m higher than today. profiles from the hrubý jeseník mts. (fig. 4) contain pollen record from 4620 bp onwards. high proportion of hazel pollen indicates hazel stands at the summit locations (about 1300 m a.s.l.) during the period 4620–3500 bp (rybní vcek & rybnívcková 2004), although direct evidence in the form of macroscopic remains is missing. some presently forest-free localities show relatively low proportions of arboreal pollen also during the period 1945–800 bp: approximately 60% at velká máj (peat bog on the summit plateau) and at velká kotlina (peat bog on the cirque bottom), where the oscillations of ap/nap curve were more pronounced (rybní vcek & rybní vcková 2004). this indicates permanently forest-free areas during this period, although significant local changes in timberline position probably took place in the area of 114 fennia 184: 2 (2006)václav treml, vlasta jankovská and libor petr the velká kotlina cirque. compared to both the above mentioned sites, the proportion of arboreal pollen was higher at mt. keprník (70–80%). however, the presence of earth hummocks at the summit of keprník since at least ca. 2100 bp is considered a proof of absence of forest, as such landforms could not persist the physical action by tree roots in a closed forest (treml & kvrížek 2006). similar earth hummocks of the same age occur also on the summit of prad ved mt. at 1492 m a.s.l. (treml et al. 2006). at presently forested localities such as barborka and velký dved (rybnívcek & rybnívcková 2004), the ap proportion between 3700 and 800 bp fluctuates at around 85%. the noticeable decrease of woody species pollen, namely beech and fir, observed in most profiles at around 500 bp (zone k3 in the case of keprník), can be ascribed to human influence. however, a synergic action of the last little ice age could be involved aside human influence in the uppermost locations of the hrubý jeseník mts. during the last 800–500 years (hošek 1972). based on the evidence from all mentioned pollen profiles, it can be concluded that in the hrubý jeseník mts. the alpine timberline did not advance to the most exposed summits (e.g. keprník mt., velký máj mt.) during the period ca 2000–800 (500) bp and that forest free areas also persisted on steep slopes of the velká kotlina cirque. the rest of the presently forest-free areas, however, were forested and remained so until as late as 800–500 bp. alpine timberlines in the neighbouring midmountains: vosges, schwarzwald and harz the extent of alpine forest-free area in the neighbouring hercynian mid-mountains is quite limited (tables 2 and 3). in the vosges mts., forest-free areas of natural origin are found only in the highest exposed parts of the summit plateaus (carbiener 1963). large part of the area previously called “chaumes primaries” originates from deforestation during the iron age (schwartz et al. 2005). during younger dryas, timberline altitude is estimated at 500 m (schloss 1979), ascending rapidly to at least 1100 m in the early holocene with the advance of pine and birch (schloss 1979; edelman 1985). at the beginning of the boreal period (ca. 9000 bp), timberline reached an altitude of ca. 1200 m a.s.l. (lemée 1963). in the vosges mts., the early holocene timberline development may have been affected by mesoclimatic phenomena of some valleys with glaciation relicts (mercier et al. 1999). according to schwartz et al. (2005), tilia occurred at an altitude of 1060 m at around 8000 cal. bp (ca 7200 bp), whereas at present its occurrence does not exceed 900 m. this fact suggests warmer climate than at present. during the climatic optimum (8000–4500 bp), even the highest parts were forested. after ca. 4500 bp, beech stands in the highest parts thinned down and the timberline reappeared (de valk 1981). at the most exposed locations, it existed until the beginning of summer farming activities (grazing, hay making, forest clearance), which resulted in timberline lowering and formation of the majority of the present-day forest-free areas at around 1400–1200 bp (schwartz et al. 2005). in schwarzwald, the altitude of the timberline in the younger dryas is estimated at 750 m (lang 2006). during the early holocene it advanced rapidly to the level of the highest peaks where closed stands of pine and birch were formed. present forest-free area is probably secondary and originates from the period of expansion of the summer farming to the highest parts at around 1000 ad (bogenrieder 1982; friedmann 2000). in the harz mts., the summit of brocken mt. (1141 m a.s.l.) was forested during the climatic optimum of the holocene (firbas 1952; beug et al. 1999). altogether four treeless periods are documented in the brocken summit area (beug et al. 1999): 1) from younger dryas to 9700 bp, 2) from ca 5700 to 5300 bp, 3) from 2900 to 2800 bp and 4) after 500 bp. the latest forest-free period is documented from the 16th century, i.e. before the intensified human influence (tackenberg et al. 1997). however, the evidence for a natural origin of the forest-free area at the brocken summit is mainly floristic (hauepler 1970) and historical (tackenberg et al. 1997). although direct evidence (archaeological findings, soil charcoal, etc.) of early anthropogenic impact is missing, human contribution to the formation of the forest-free area at brocken summit can not be excluded (beug et al. 1999). extent of the alpine belt during the holocene based on the present vertical extent of the alpine belt in various hercynian mountains of central europe (table 3) it can be assumed that the most “endangered” alpine forest-free areas during the holocene were situated in the harz and vosges fennia 184: 2 (2006) 115holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of … table 2. list of sources and sites which were used for reconstruction of alpine timberline position. mountain range site/source age start of record proxy used for treeline reconstruction author of study vosges gazon de faing, 1230, 1290 m only relative biostratigraphic dating – since boreal pollen lemée 1963 vosges altenweiher 926 a.s.l., moselotte 1290 ca 8000 bp resp. 2500 bp pollen de valk 1981 vosges sewensee 500 m late glacial pollen schloss 1979 vosges rossberg 1190 m 7600 bp – the oldest charcoal charcoals – soil profiles schwartz et al. 2005 vosges goutte loiselot 850 m late glacial pollen edelman 1985 vosges several sites on hautes chaumes (above 1200 m) soil profiles carbiener 1963 schwarzwald 9 sites (654–1280 m) late glacial pollen lang 2006 harz brocken summit area historic data tackenberg et al. 1997 harz brocken summit area floristic data hauepler 1970 harz several sites in brocken area (highest 1100 m) late glacial pollen beug et al. 1999 krkonoše labský d ö ul 990 m late glacial, first 14c date 9200 bp pollen, stomata this study krkonoše pan vcavské rašeliništ ve 1325 m 7600 bp pollen huettemann & bortenschlager 1987 krkonoše pan vcavské rašeliništ ve 1320 m 3100 bp pollen, pollen concentration speranza et al. 2000 krkonoše pan vcavské rašeliništ ve 1325 m 3995 bp pollen jankovská 2001 krkonoše úpské rašeliništve 1420 m 3440 bp pollen svobodová 2004 krkonoše summit plateaus (above 1430–50 m) persisted from late glacial soils this study hrubý jeseník velký máj 1350 m 1945 bp pollen rybní vcek & rybnívcková 2004 hrubý jeseník velká kotlina 1400 m ca 1700 bp pollen rybní vcek & rybnívcková 2004 hrubý jeseník barborka 1315 m ca 3700 bp pollen rybní vcek & rybnívcková 2004 hrubý jeseník velký d ved 1395 m 4600 bp pollen rybní vcek & rybnívcková 2004 hrubý jeseník keprník 1423 m 2090 bp pollen this study hrubý jeseník keprník 1415–1423 m, prad ved 1450–1490 m 2100 bp earth hummocks – soils this study, treml et al. (2006) table 3. recent vertical extent of the alpine belt in hercynian mid-mountains of central europe – difference between elevation of the highest peak and the uppermost outposts of the timberline. values in brackets correspond to the average height of natural nondepressed alpine timberline (treml & banaš 2000). maximal elevation of the alpine timberline (m a.s.l.) t** (°c) vertical extent of the alpine belt (m) corresponding gradient of summer temperature (°c) vosges 1360 8.0 60 0.3–0.4 harz 1125* 7.8 20 0.1–0.2 krkonoše 1370 7.1 210 (300) 1.2–1.3 (1.8) hrubý jeseník 1430 7.2 60 (140) 0.3–0.4 (0.8) * … sensu tackenberg et al. (1997) ** … average temperature april–september (growing season, 1981–1990) at the maximal elevation of the alpine timberline, calculated from data published by migala (2005), with temperature lapse 0.6°c/100 m. 116 fennia 184: 2 (2006)václav treml, vlasta jankovská and libor petr mts. during the latter half of the holocene, when the woody species constituting the timberline today were already present in the harz and vosges mts., there were probably no naturally treeless areas during periods 0.5–1°c warmer than today. the existence of such positive temperature anomalies is likely, considering the recent holocene temperature estimates from central europe (haas et al. 1998; hieri et al. 2003). this hypothesis is supported also by the pollen analyses. they show that during the holocene, the alpine timberlines in hercynian mountain ranges of the central europe developed in different ways. in the krkonoše mts. large forest-free areas were present throughout the holocene, whereas in the harz and vosges mts., even the uppermost locations (except for steep slopes, rocks, block fields or exposed peaks) were forested during the climatic optimum (de valk 1981; beug et al. 1999). the alpine forest-free areas in the vosges reappeared after 5000 bp (de valk 1981). in the hrubý jeseník mts., according to recent temperatures and holocene temperature estimates (e.g., hieri et al. 2003), the alpine forest-free area probably had a very limited extent during the warmer periods of the holocene. it expanded most likely before 2000– 2500 bp, which is the age of the part of the pollen profile documenting forest-free areas at summit localities (velký máj, velká kotlina – rybní vcek & rybnívcková 2004, keprník). presence of treeless areas at the summits of the hrubý jeseník is also proved by an earth hummock rise around 2100 bp. in the schwarzwald mts. the actual relatively large forest-free area is of anthropogenic origin (friedmann 2000). the history of alpine areas can be related to present-day biodiversity. for example, the butterfly communities of the krkonoše mts. differ greatly from those present in the harz, hrubý jeseník and králický sn vežník mts. they are more similar to those of the west carpathian mountain ranges (mavrák & kuras 2006). this fact could confirm the notable distinctions of the forest-free area development in the krkonoše mts. as compared to other mentioned hercynian mountain ranges. the presence of many plant species and diversified communities dependent strictly on forest-free areas in all those mountain ranges (jeník 1998) indicates that long lasting forest-free enclaves have been in existence. nevertheless, the presence of these forest-free patches depend on soil conditions, water regime or slope inclination rather than on temperature. rate of timberline fluctuation the maximum amplitude of timberline oscillations in central european mid-mountains is governed by their low altitude and a very limited space between their summits and the timberline. in the krkonoše mts., the presence of a closed forest cannot be expected at sites with well developed sorted forms of patterned ground at altitudes above 1450 m a.s.l. sorted forms of patterned ground formed here at the end of the last glacial stage (traczyk & migovn 2003). the maximum difference in the timberline position compared to the present is, therefore, less than 100 m. in other central european hercynian mountain ranges, the timberline ascended to its highest locations. minimum difference in the timberline position ranged therefore from 25 m (harz mts.) to 40–150 m (hrubý jeseník mts.). however, it is possible that during some of the cold oscillations recorded in the central europe (for example ce 8, haas et al. 1998) the timberline was situated lower than today and the total fluctuation would therefore be several tens of meters. as for the vysoké tatry mts., obidowicz (1993) argues that during the climatic optimum, the alpine timberline was only 50 to 100 m higher than today. the above mentioned smaller timberline oscillations correspond to temperature reconstructions (haas et al. 1998; hieri et al. 2003) that estimate the extent of summer temperature fluctuations in mid and late holocene to 1 °c. nevertheless, the changes in timberline position in this period may not have been as vigorous as earlier in the holocene (tinner & kaltenrieder 2005) due the well established stable communities strongly influenced by competition. this is true for the krkonoše mts. even today: as temperature increases, the timberline ascends first at disturbed localities with low herb cover (such as old debris flow tracks) and higher rates of seedling establishment (treml 2004). conclusions during the holocene, harz, vosges, schwarzwald and hrubý jeseník mts. were prone to disappearance of alpine forest-free areas in the periods of favourable climatic conditions. most likely, a temperature dependent alpine belt was absent from these areas during the climatic optimum. in contrast, a large alpine area was maintained throughout the holocene in the krkonoše mts. in the hrubý fennia 184: 2 (2006) 117holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of … jeseník mts., a temperature dependent forest-free area existed at least since 2000 bp to the present. in the krkonoše mts., alpine timberline gradually advanced from 500–600 m in the younger dryas to 1000 m (9200–8800 bp). after 7400 bp timberline ascended at least to 1320 m, which is the altitude of the pan vcava peat bog. maximum timberline position in the krkonoše mts. has not exceeded 1450 m a.s.l., as this is the lower limit of well developed sorted patterned ground formed in the late glacial. therefore, it has passed the present maximum by 60 m only, and the average positions of the natural timberline by 150 m. during 4000– 800 bp, the alpine timberline was situated probably below the úpa peat bog (1420 m a.s.l.). in the labský d ö ul profile, three distinct oscillations of ap/ nap curve were recorded during the early holocene. of these, at least two (ld1 and ld2 – 9600 bp) oscillations are believed to be timberline descends due to climatic shifts rather than local disturbances. acknowledgements this study would not have been possible without the support from grant projects gacr 205/06/0587, vav mzp sm/6/70/05 and msm 0021620831. we also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on the manuscript, and tereza chýlová for improving the english translation. references armand ad (1992). sharp and gradual mountain timberlines as a result of species interaction. in hansen aj & f di castri (eds). landscape boundaries: consequences for biotic diversity and ecological flows. ecological studies 92, 360–378. beug hj (2004). leitfaden der pollenbestimmung: für mitteleuropa und angrenzende gebiete. 263 p. verlag dr. friedrich pfeil, münchen. beug hj, i henrion & a schmüsser (1999). landschaftgeschichte im hochharz. 454 p. papierflieger verlag, clausthal-zellerfeld. bogenrieder a (1982). die flora der weidfelder, moore, felsen und gewässer. in der feldberg im schwarzwald. die natur und landschaftschutzgebiete b.-w. 12, 244–316. bourles dl, r braucher, z engel, j kalvoda & jl mercier (2004). deglaciation of the giant mountains indicated by 10be dating. in drbohlav d, j kalvoda & v voženílek (eds). czech geography at the dawn of the millenium, 25–39. nakladatelství univerzity palackého, olomouc. bugmann h & c pfister (2000). impacts of interannual climate variability on past and future forest composition. regional environmental change 1, 112–125. carbiener r (1963). les sols du massif du hohneck, leurs rapports avec les tapis végétal. in r carbiener. le hohneck, 103–152. ass. philomatique d’alsace et lorraine, strasbourg. de valk ej (1981). late holocene and present vegetation of the kastelberg (vosges, france). dissertation. 120 p. university of utrecht, utrecht. edelman hj (1985). late glacial and holocene vegetation development of la goutte loiselot (vosges, france). dissertation. 152 p. university of utrecht, utrecht. engel z, v treml, m k vrížek & v jankovská (2005). lateglacial/holocene sedimentary record from the labe source area, the krkonoše mts. acta universitatis carolinae, geographica 39: 1, 73–88. firbas f (1952). spätund nacheiszeitliche waldgeschichte mitteleuropas nördlich der alpen 2. 282 p. verlag von gustav fischer, jena. friedmann a (2000). die spätund postglaziale landschaftsund vegetationsgeschichte des südlichen oberrheintieflands und schwarzwalds. freiburger geographische hefte 62. 222 p. grimm ec (1992). tilia 1.11 and tilia graph 1.17. 65 p. illinois state museum, research and collection center, springfield. haas jn, i richoz, w tinner & l wick (1998). synchronous holocene climatic oscillations recorded on the swiss plateau and at timberline in the alps. the holocene 8: 3, 301–309. hauepler h (1970). vorschläge zur abgrenzung der höhenstufen der vegetation im rahmen der mitteleuropakartierung. göttinger floristische rundbriefe 4, 54–62. hieri o, af lotter, s hausmann & f kienast (2003). a chironomid-based holocene summer air temperature reconstruction from the swiss alps. the holocene 13: 4, 477–484. hošek e (1972). present evolution of alpine timberline in the jeseníky mts. ochrana pvrírody 27, 110–113. huettemann h & s bortenschlager (1987). beitrage zur vegetationsgeschichte tirols vi: riesengebirge, hohe tatra – zillertal, kühtai. berichte des naturwissenschaftlich-medizinischen vereins in innsbruck 74, 81–112. jankovská v (2001). vegetation development in the western part of the giant mts. during the holocene (pan vcavské rašeliništ ve mire – palaeoecological research). opera corcontica 38, 11–19. jankovská v (2004). giant mountains in postglacial – vegetation and landscape. opera corcontica 41, 111–123. jeník j (1998). biodiversity of the hercynian mountains of central europe. pireneos 151–152, 83–89. jeník j & r hampel (1991). die waldfreien kammlagen des altvatergebirges (geschichte und ökologie). 128 p. mssgv, stuttgart. 118 fennia 184: 2 (2006)václav treml, vlasta jankovská and libor petr jeník j & t lokvenc (1962). die alpine waldgrenze im krkonoše gebirge. rozpravy vceskoslovemské akademie vved 72: 1, 1–65. körner ch (1999). the alpine plantlife. 338 p. springer, berlin. kotarba a & m baumgart-kotarba (1999). problems of glaciation of the high tatra mountains – josef partsch synthesis in the light of current knowledge. zeitschrift für geomorphologie 113, 19–31. kullman l (2007). tree line population monitoring of pinus sylvestris in the swedish scandes, 1973– 2005: implications for tree line theory and climate change ecology. journal of ecology 95, 41–52. lang g (1994). quartäre vegetationgeschichte europas. 371 p. gustav fischer verlag, jena. lang g (2006). late-glacial fluctuations of timberline in the black forest (sw germany). vegetation history and archeobotany 15, 373–375. lemée g (1963). l’évolution de la végetation et du climat des hautes vosges centrales depuis la derniére glaciation. in carbiener r. le hohneck, 185–193. ass. philomatique d’alsace et lorraine, strasbourg. ložek v (2001). malá fatra mts. and alpine timberline oscillations. ochrana pvrírody 56: 2, 35–40. mavrák p & t kuras (2006). influence of alochtonous dwarf pine (pinus mugo) to invertebrates communities, case study epigeic arachnids in the prad ved reserve (hrubý jeseník). in proceedings of zoologické dny 2006 conference, 55–56. czech association of zoologists, brno. mercier jl, j kalvoda & d bourles (1999). utilisation du 10be produit pour datter la derniére sequence glaciaire dans les monts du centre de l’europe. acta universitatis carolinae, geographica 34: 2, 137–142. migala k (2005). climatic belts in the european mountains and the issue of global change. geographical studies 78. moore pd, ja webb & me collingson (1991). pollen analysis. 216 p. blackwell, oxford. obidowicz a (1993). fluctuation of the forest limit in the tatra mts. during the last 12,000 years. dokumenty geograficzne 4–5, 31–43. paulsen j, um weber & ch körner (2000). tree growth near treeline: abrupt or gradual reduction with altitude? arctic, antarctic and alpine research 32: 1, 14–20. rybnívcek k & e rybní vcková (2004). pollen analyses of sediments from the summits of the prad ved range in the hrubý jeseník mts (eastern sudetes). preslia 76: 4, 331–348. schloss s (1979). pollenanalytische und stratigraphische untersuchungen im sewensee. dissertationes botanicae 52. 138 p. schwartz d, m thinon, s goepp, ch schmitt, j casner, t rosique, p wuscher, a alexandre, e dambrine, ch martin & b guillet (2005). premières datations directes de défrichements protohistoriques sur les chaumes secondaires des vosges (rossberg, hautrhin). approche pédoanthracologique. comptes rendus geoscience 337, 1250–1256. sekyra j, m kociánová, h štursová, j kalenská, i dvo vrák & m svoboda (2002). recent cryogenic processes. in soukupová l, m kociánová, j jeník & j sekyra (eds). arctic-alpine tundra in the krkonoše, the sudetes. opera corcontica 32, 31– 37. slatyer ro & ir noble (1992). dynamics of montane treelines. in hansen aj & f di castri (eds). landscape boundaries: consequences for biotic diversity and ecological flows. ecological studies 92, 327–345. speranza a, j van der plicht & b van geel (2000). improving the time control of the subboreal/subatlantic transition in a czech peat sequence by 14c wiggle-matching. quarternary science reviews 19, 1589–1604. svobodová h (2004). development of the vegetation on úpské rašeliništve mire in the holocene. opera corcontica 41: 1, 124–131. tackenberg o, p poschold & g karste (1997). veränderungen der subalpinen vegetation und landschaft des brockens (harz). verhandlungen der gesellschaft für ökologie 27, 45–51. tinner w, b amman & p germann (1996). treeline fluctuations recorded for 12,500 years by soil profiles, pollen, and plant macrofossils in the central swiss alps. arctic, antarctic and alpine research 28: 2, 131–147. tinner w & p kaltenrieder (2005). rapid responses of high-mountain vegetation to early holocene environmental changes in the swiss alps. journal of ecology 93: 5, 936–947. tinner w & jp theurillat (2003). uppermost limit, extent, and fluctuations of the timberline and treeline ecotone in the swiss central alps during the past 11,500 years. arctic, antarctic and alpine research 35: 2, 158–169. traczyk a & p migovn (2003). cold-climate landform patterns in the sudetes – effects of lithology, relief and glacial history. acta univesitatis carolinae, geographica 25, 185–210. treml v (2004). recent tendencies of alpine timberline shifts in the krkonoše (giant) mts., high sudetes. in drbohlav d, j kalvoda & v voženílek (eds). czech geography at the dawn of the millenium, 151–162. nakladatelství univerzity palackého, olomouc. treml v & m banaš (2000). alpine timberline in the high sudetes. acta universitatis carolinae, geographica, 15: 2, 83–99. treml v & m kvrížek (2006). effects of dwarf pine (pinus mugo) on patterned ground in the czech part of the high sudetes. opera corcontica 43, 45–56. treml v, m kvrížek, z engel & l petr (2006). patterned ground in the high sudetes – morphology and the period of origin. geomorfologický sborník 5, 68– 74. wilmking m, gp juday, va barber & hs zald (2004). recent climate warming forces contrasting growth fennia 184: 2 (2006) 119holocene timberline fluctuations in the mid-mountains of … responses of white spruce at treeline in alaska through temperature thresholds. global change biology 10, 1274–1736. wright he, i stefanova, jfn van leeuwen & b ammann (2003). the patterned fen of la grand tsa at 2330 m in the swiss alps. in ravazzi c & w tinner (eds). excursion guide to xxvii moor-excursion of the institute of plant sciences, 46–50. university of bern, bern. migrant agency and embodiment in space – commentary to van liempt urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa129714 doi: 10.11143/fennia.129714 reflections migrant agency and embodiment in space – commentary to van liempt katharyne mitchell mitchell, k. (2023) migrant agency and embodiment in space – commentary to van liempt. fennia 201(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129714 in this reflection, i use van liempt's analysis of emplacement as a helpful instigation to challenge and nuance three current theoretical debates in migration studies and geography. focusing on the spaces of embodied migrant agency i counter the legacy of static concepts such as ‘immigrant integration’, refine ideas about the city and public space, and explore the contemporary politics of refusal. in each of these conversations, bringing in ideas of the spatial agency of migrants helps us to contest received ideas and categories and open up new ways of thinking about scale, society, public space, and refusal. keywords: agency, embodiment, migration, space, refusal katharyne mitchell (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9238-7318), department of sociology, university of california, the united states. e-mail: kmitch@ucsc.edu introduction ilse van liempt's (2023) excellent paper on local emplacement in amsterdam focuses on how forced migrants forge their own sense of belonging in a city through placing themselves in certain locations and spaces. rather than relying purely on state provided forms of accommodation and aid in the local infrastructure of reception centers, the migrants also form alternate social and spatial relationships as they negotiate their surroundings. in addition to the empirical data brought out in the study, the idea of active emplacement and migrants' agency and embodiment in space © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129714 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9238-7318 mailto:kmitch@ucsc.edu fennia 201(1) (2023) 119katharyne mitchell contributes to several key theoretical debates and ongoing conversations. here i briefly explore three of these and consider how they are emerging as important sites of discussion and contention in the broader migration literature. immigrant integration over the last decade, the concept of immigrant integration has been vigorously critiqued by a number of scholars in diverse disciplines (wieviorka 2014; korteweg 2017; schinkel 2017, 2018; favell 2019; penninx 2019; abdelhady & norocel 2023). in many respects, however, immigrant integration still remains a dominant way of framing the manner in which migrants are perceived to become part of a national society. eminent migration scholars continue to write evaluative studies comparing immigrant integration around the globe (e.g. alba & foner 2015), and governments continue to fund research programs geared toward finding successful ways to integrate newcomers into the supposedly bounded and static territory of nation-states. given the staying power of the concept, it is worth repeating some of the main points of critique, and showing how an emphasis on migrant agency and embodiment in space can help to counter its stubborn legacy. the focus of immigrant integration is almost always on the society or social system as seen from above, rather than on the actions, everyday practices, experiences, and subjectivity formation of migrants themselves (wieviorka 2014). while primarily a demographic project at core, it is nevertheless also an exercise in neocolonial power, using tools of measurement that quickly become problematic in how they define and establish categories, especially those involving racialized communities (schinkel 2017; abdelhady & norocel 2023). these definitions and categorizations are important to consider because they often have negative material effects for immigrants, through the formation of discourses, flow of resources, establishment of systems of governance, and subjection to violence. the concept of immigrant integration also tends to reify the idea of a bounded entity (the nation-state or the society) that is breached and threatened by immigrants who are projected as bringing difference with them, jeopardizing the existing society and in need of management. the core idea of ‘society’ itself is based on an unexamined and vague meaning, with implicit assumptions about boundaries and stasis and lacking a deep engagement with colonial history or power. it assumes an identity that is always already complete, setting up a perpetual tension between insiders and outsiders (schinkel 2018). the concept of immigrant integration also rests on assumptions about scales as fixed in time and space, rather than as actively produced and reproduced socially (marston 2000). it is a good example of the operation of methodological nationalism (wimmer & glick schiller 2002), reflecting essential assumptions about a national society that is bounded and contained, with a reliance on the nationstate as the key unit of analysis and theoretical back-stop. in addition to the now large literature on transnationalism, which highlights the importance of transnational ties and ongoing movements across social spaces and scales, the idea of emplacement similarly challenges the fixity and stasis of immigrant integration through its emphasis on the interdependencies between scales. the concept of the ‘geosocial’ is a helpful way to further conceptualize these global-local interdependencies, the “dynamic relations by which, on one hand, the borders and territories of the world order are maintained, challenged, and (re)defined; and on the other hand, people constitute themselves as subjects and communities capable of transformative agency across and within such border-laden realities” (mitchell & kallio 2017, 1; mitchell & sparke 2020). emplacement, as van liempt's (2023) paper shows, is composed of everyday, local actions by migrants who use and produce space in new, fundamentally geosocial ways. the migrants create new scales through giving meaning to events and places that are important to them – not necessarily at the level of the local infrastructure that is provided by the state, nor the broader neighborhood, nor even necessarily the city. it is a kind of insurgent spatial and social integration from below that cannot be identified or categorized or managed in advance. these small, often private actions are constrained within larger structures of power, yet nevertheless challenge the idea of static scales wholly produced from above, such as the nation or even more vaguely ‘society’, that are joined by immigrants coming from ‘the outside’. rather, migrants are constantly producing new spatial scales and new societal forms through their movements and actions across space and between scales, and through taking space 120 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections and reworking it in ways that give their lives meaning (sparke 2018; vuolteenaho & lyytinen 2018). it is through this intimate process of meaning-making and creating personal belonging that migrants aid in the (re)formation and transformation of an already integrated and interdependent society. stadtluft macht frei (city air makes you free) according to historians, there was a period in german history when serfs who escaped to the city and took up residence for ‘a year and a day,’ id est, a long time, could become independent and continue living as free inhabitants. this potential urban freedom was possible because of the avoidance of recognition by the serf's owner – presumably because of the numbers of people cohabiting in one place and the invisibility it brought. equally important, it was possible to survive economically outside of the social world of the manor house; an escaped individual could make an independent living – either through providing labor to others for some form of exchange, or through the possibility of taking common or 'public' land and using it for a livelihood. i start with this medieval german phrase to underscore a long-standing assumption about urban space: that it can provide the path to some form of individual freedom from social servitude or constraint; further, that this opportunity is derived, to a large degree, from the potential to be invisible and/or to access public space. i would add a third, more modern urban freedom, that of the flaneur. baudelaire described the flaneur as a person who could wander unrecognized in a crowd, encounter others in fleeting ways and enjoy being part of something, yet without any feelings of social attachment. this figure and idea of the wanderer became a metonym for the experience of modernity (berman 1983). van liempt's (2023) article brought out some of these practices and assumptions about the value of the anonymous city experience for ‘outsiders’ and complicated them in interesting ways. unlike reception centers that were often isolated or located on the urban periphery, the larger city of amsterdam appeared to be a space of freedom for many migrants interviewed in the article. it offered a number of free or inexpensive places to do things that were impossible or difficult to achieve in private or more managed places. these included eating, drinking coffee and socializing in a park, going to a library, visiting a community center, and just sitting and people-watching. in these uses, it was the physical spaces of the city that felt liberating to migrants. the ability to access commonly held land and property enabled a kind of temporary escape and refuge from surveillance and management, enabling people to let down their guard, at least for a time. many felt liberated by being invisible in the sense of not being seen or recognized vis-à-vis their identities as refugees. additionally, ‘semi’ public spaces, such as balconies, were especially enjoyable for some, as they enabled a degree of public access and sociality, while simultaneously maintaining a boundary of privacy and protection. in many respects, these experiences typify those of the archetypal flaneur. these embodied practices of space-making are important to validate, and help to counter topdown narratives and evaluations of ‘immigrant integration’ as noted above. at the same time, it is also useful to reflect on assumptions about public space, visibility, and the figure of the unrecognized outsider in a more fine-grained way. while the city was reported as a site of freedom for some migrants because of the ability to enter common space and to passively and ephemerally encounter different types of people without necessarily being recognized as a refugee or outsider, this was not a universally positive experience. some migrants in the study desired greater social contact and more of a personal encounter, attempted to converse with locals, and were largely rebuffed. the figure of the flaneur, as described by baudelaire and others, is known for ‘his’ (see wolff 1985 for one of many feminist critiques on the essentially masculinist quality of the figure) ability and willingness to pass unnoticed through the urban crowd. yet this passage through a place presupposes a point of return to somewhere, presumably a ‘home’ with social ties and a familial sense of belonging. for those migrants seeking to create their own sense of belonging in a new environment, wandering without the possibility of a deeper engagement or more personal encounter was not merely unsatisfying, in some cases it was humiliating and depressing. when invisibility is desired and brings security and freedom, as it does for some, it can be a wonderful experience. but when it is not a choice, because of racial prejudice, linguistic or cultural challenges, or other reasons ascribed to one's personal identity, it can produce great emotional distress and harm. fennia 201(1) (2023) 121katharyne mitchell further, as feminist critiques have pointed out, the capacity to wander unnoticed depends on who the outsider is and, i would add in the situation for many migrants, where the city is located. because of visible characteristics of difference such as skin color, what may be possible for migrants in large, diverse cities such as amsterdam, may not be possible in smaller and/or more ethnically homogeneous cities. in these types of situations, as kallio and häkli (2023) document, the fear of standing out, as well as the constant effort to blend in, hide, or become ‘invisible’ can have extremely negative physical and psychological effects. thus, the promise and lure of the city – the idea that stadtluft macht frei – is a highly contextual one. public space and the anonymity of the crowd can be alienating as well as liberating, especially if a more intimate encounter is desired, yet seemingly impossible to achieve. if visibility and invisibility is not a choice, but rather a condition, it can have the opposite effect of the flaneur's encounters of pleasurable urban anonymity. the politics of refusal through my recent work on church asylum (mitchell & macfarlane 2022; mitchell 2023), i have become interested in the form of refusal that is expressed when migrants grow tired of waiting for the decisions of both state and pastoral actors and decide to ‘take’ sanctuary by squatting churches. in a sense they are refusing their positioning as docile subjects; they are also challenging and resisting the time horizon and spatial norms of hegemonic institutions such as the church and the state. taking spaces and times back that would normally be ‘given’ through humanitarian processes, such as a legalization of refugee status or sanctuary in a church, refuses the normal order of things. it resists temporal and spatial logics that seek to manage and contain migrant bodies, even when ostensibly beneficent in intent. what does it mean to opt out of humanitarian programs and forms of care, to refuse aid or the promise of aid? to not ‘stay’ where one is put? the concept of refusal as a form of resistance has re-emerged in the last few years in the domains of both humanitarian assistance and academic research. it is a complex idea with a complicated history. the idea of ‘ethnographic refusal’ was first employed in anthropology by ortner (1995), who used the term critically, challenging ethnographers' refusal to deploy thick, or nuanced analysis in the study of subaltern forms of resistance, for fear that their research would undermine their subjects of study and advance dominant narratives. more recently it has been taken up in indigenous studies, where it is employed differently by different scholars. for some, refusal emphasizes an unwillingness to engage with researchers, journalists, humanitarians, and others outside the community to promote narratives that have become harmful to those inside the community (tuck & yang 2014). these include, first and foremost, individual ‘pain narratives’ that have set up minoritized and indigenous populations as passive victims of slow violence, instead of directing readers towards the institutions causing the structural damage in the first place (dorries & harjo 2022; mitchell-eaton & coddington 2022). for others (simpson 2017), refusal is an important epistemological stance, one that runs counter to recognition politics in systems of settler colonial governance. contemporary cases of research refusal are starting to attract scholarly attention in migration sites as well. these include refugee camps, border spaces, and migrant squats (spathopoulou & meier 2020; giudici 2023). additionally, refusal is becoming more evident in the growing resistance of some migrants to various forms of delayed or insufficient state-based and pastoral care, as noted above. resistance in these cases takes many forms, including squatting, public demonstrations, the refusal of traditional forms of allyship, and the constitution of new alliances and solidarities (pfeifer 2018; dadusc & mudu 2022; meier forthcoming). humanitarian assistance of all kinds, whether it comes from the government, ngos, non-profits, or individuals is often desperately needed, yet it is also inevitably imbricated in larger structures of violence and power that can produce harm for recipients (see the essays in mitchell & pallister-wilkins 2023). assistance is often accompanied by various forms of surveillance, management and control, much of which can make recipients feel listless and passive. the state-based provision of housing for forced migrants in the netherlands described in van liempt's (2023) paper is just one example of this type of migrant assistance and management. as she shows, there is little to no choice of location or 122 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections type of housing accommodation, and the expectation is that the migrants will need to relocate quickly and often. among the ramifications of this kind of constant movement and constraint on agency are not just the loss of choice, but importantly, also a loss of a sense of belonging and capacity to create a home. the constant (dis)locations caused by being ‘placed’ by others in temporary arrangements, as well as the sense of time passing fruitlessly by, can lead to feelings of alienation and passivity, especially when paired with the inability to work. in this context of waiting, anxiety, displacement, and (re)placement, refusal is made through the act of emplacement. emplacement in locations and situations chosen by migrants themselves is an example of political agency through a resistance to spatial determination from above, and the use of space in ways that have not been granted or managed by others. in this context, forging spaces of belonging in public and semi-public spaces exemplifies a contemporary politics of refusal, an act of being against humanitarian care and its properties of management and control, and for a fuller and more embodied agency in space. references abdelhady, d. & norocel, o. c. (2023) re-envisioning immigrant integration: toward multidirectional conceptual flows. journal of immigrant & refugee studies 21(2) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2023.2168097 alba, r. & foner, n. (2015) strangers no more. immigration and the challenges of integration in north america and western europe. princeton university press, princeton. https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161075.001.0001 berman, m. (1983) all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. verso, new york. dadusc, d. & mudu, p. (2022) care without control: the humanitarian industrial complex and the criminalisation of solidarity. geopolitics 27(4) 1205–1230. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1749839 dorries, h. & harjo, l. (2020) beyond safety: refusing colonial violence through indigenous feminist planning. journal of planning education and research 40(2) 210–219. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x19894382 favell, a. (2019) integration: twelve propositions after schinkel. comparative migration studies 7(21) 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0125-7 giudici, d. (2023) (in)visibility: on the doorstep of a mediatized refugees' squat. in boggacni, p & bonfanti, s. (eds.) migration and domestic space, 137–152. springer, new york. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23125-4_8 kallio, k. p. & häkli, j. (2023) trapped in (in)visibility: contested intercorporeality in undocumented migrants’ lives. geopolitics 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2189105 korteweg, a. (2017) the failures of ‘immigrant integration’: the gendered racialized production of nonbelonging. migration studies 5(3) 428–444. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnx025 van liempt, i. (2023) becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement. fennia 201(1) 9–22. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 marston, s. a. (2000) the social construction of scale. progress in human geography 24(2) 219–242. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913200674086272 meier, i. (forthcoming) acts of disengagement in border struggles: fugitive practices of refusal. antipode. mitchell-eaton. e. & coddington, k. (2022) refusal and migration research: new possibilities for feminist social science. in mayer, t. & tran, t. (eds.) displacement, belonging, and migrant agency in the face of power, 198–222. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003170686-25 mitchell, k. (2023) migration, memory, and the insurgent temporalities of sanctuary. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2022.2150672 mitchell, k. & kallio, k. p. (2017) spaces of the geosocial: exploring transnational topologies. geopolitics 22(1) 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 mitchell, k. & macfarlane, k. (2022) sanctuary space, racialized violence, and memories of resistance. annals of the american association of geographers 112(8) 2360–2372. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2060792 mitchell, k. & pallister-wilkins, p. (eds.) (2023) the routledge international handbook of critical philanthropy and humanitarianism. taylor & francis, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003162711 mitchell, k. & sparke, m. (2020) hotspot geopolitics versus geosocial solidarity: contending constructions of safe space for migrants in europe. environment and planning d: society and space 38(6) 1046–1066. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818793647 https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2023.2168097 https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691161075.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1749839 https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x19894382 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0125-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23125-4_8 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2189105 https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnx025 https://doi.org/10.1191/030913200674086272 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003170686-25 https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2022.2150672 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2022.2060792 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003162711 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818793647 fennia 201(1) (2023) 123katharyne mitchell ortner, s. (1995) resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. comparative studies in society and history 37(1) 173–193. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500019587 penninx, r. (2019) problems of and solutions for the study of immigrant integration. comparative migration studies 7 13 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0122-x pfeifer, m. (2018) becoming flesh: refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in german necropolitical spaces. citizenship studies 22(5) 459–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2018.1477918 schinkel, w. (2017) imagined societies: a critique of immigrant integration in western societies. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316424230 schinkel, w. (2018) against ‘immigrant integration’: for an end to neocolonial knowledge production. comparative migration studies 6(1) 31–17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0095-1 simpson, a. (2017) the ruse of consent and the anatomy of ‘refusal’: cases from indigenous north america and australia. postcolonial studies 20(1) 18–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2017.1334283 sparke, m. b. (2018) welcome, its suppression, and the in-between spaces of refugee sub-citizenship – commentary to gill. fennia 196(2) 215–219. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 spathopoulou, a. & meier, i. (2020) turning the gaze upon power: refusal as research in/to and against the eu border regime. by discoversociety 1.4.2020 <https://urly.fi/39tv>. 15.4.2023. tuck, e. & yang, k. w. (2014) r-words: refusing research. in paris, d. & winn, m. t. (eds.) humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, 223–247. sage publications, thousand oakes. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611.n12 vuolteenaho, j. & lyytinen, e. (2018) reflections on the variations and spatialities of (un)welcome – commentary to gill. fennia 196(1) 118–123. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 wieviorka, m. (2014) a critique of integration. identities 21(6) 633–641. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2013.828615 wimmer, a. & glick schiller, n. (2002) methodological nationalism and beyond: nation–state building, migration and the social sciences. global networks 2(4) 301–334. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00043 wolff, j. (1985) the invisible flâneuse. women and literature of modernity. theory, culture & society 2(3) 37–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276485002003005 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500019587 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0122-x https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2018.1477918 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316424230 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0095-1 https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2017.1334283 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70999 https://urly.fi/39tv https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611.n12 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70290 https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2013.828615 https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00043 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276485002003005 importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal distribution limits of vascular plants in scandinavia: are the mountains high enough? arvid odland odland, arvid (2010). importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal distribution limits of vascular plants in scandinavia: are the mountains high enough? fennia 188: 2, pp. 149–162. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the main aim of the present paper was to study regional differences in the altitudinal distribution limits of vascular plants in relation to mountain height and latitudinal position. altitudinal limits from previously studied areas were compared with the altitudinal distribution limits given by lid and lid (2005) as a reference. based on these comparisons, different trend lines were used to evaluate the effects of mountain height and thereby estimate how high a mountain must be for vascular plants to reach their potential altitudinal limits. study areas were hardangervidda and aurland in southern norway, jämtland in central sweden, lule lappmark in northern sweden, troms in northern norway and graubünden in switzerland. a regression analysis of the altitudinal limits for 177 vascular plants in scandinavia compared with the same species in switzerland gave a highly significant (p < 0.001) linear equation with a slope coefficient of 0.95 and a y-intercept of 1057. species limits in hardangervidda, aurland and jämtland, however, showed non-linear altitudinal trends for the whole mountain ranges when they were compared with the highest recorded limits for the same species in scandinavia. differences between the recorded altitudinal limits from scandinavia (mostly from the jotunheimen mountains) and the same species from switzerland were in average the same for lowland, boreal and high altitudinal species (p > 0.422). comparisons within scandinavia show that lowland/boreal and high altitudinal species showed different altitudinal distribution patterns. the position of the forest limit increased on average with 72.4 m per degree increase in latitude from switzerland to northern scandinavia. the altitudinal span of the alpine zone was approximately 1100 m in switzerland and in jotunheimen but considerably lower in the southern scandinavian study areas. studies of altitudinal distribution limits of vascular plants may give an indication of to what extent the height of a particular mountain influence plant distribution and thereby its vegetation zonation. keywords: scandinavia, distribution limit, forest limit, mountain summits, climatic change arvid odland, telemark university college, 3800 bø, norway. e-mail: arvid.odland@hit.no introduction the altitudinal limit of a plant is often used as an indicator of its hardiness toward the extreme climatic conditions in high mountain areas, e.g. the ellenberg temperature indicator value or the respiration value (dahl 1998). if growth is not restricted by space, humidity or edaphic conditions, the altitudinal limits for vascular plants are in most cases constrained by too low summer temperatures. both arctic and alpine distribution limits are often found to be confined to areas where the mean temperature of the warmest month lies between 1.0 oc and 3.0 oc (rannie 1986; karlsen & elvebakk 2003; callaghan et al. 2004). for more than a century, altitudinal limits for vascular plants have urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2845 150 fennia 188: 2 (2010)arvid odland been recorded in different parts of the world (e.g. reisigl & pitschmann 1958; pauli et al. 1999). not surprisingly, the highest limits have been recorded where the mountains are highest, and there the uppermost plants are often found several hundred metres below the summit (grabherr et al. 1995; körner 2003). in areas where the mountains are lower, several plants may be found on the mountain peak (e.g. walther et al. 2005). on the highest mountains it is often reported that there is an exponential increase in species richness approximately 1000 m downwards from the uppermost occurrences of vascular plants (grabherr et al. 1995; nagy & grabherr 2009). regional and world-wide comparisons of the altitudinal limit of forest trees have resulted in numerous scientific papers and text-books (e.g. holtmeier 2003). in scandinavia, forest limits reach their highest elevation in south central norway (above 1200 m), but from there they decrease in all directions (e.g. dahl 1998; strand 1998). the decreasing trend from north to south does not follow the general trend of increasing summer temperatures (e.g. aune 1993) as we should expect, but a significant decrease in maximum mountain height (e.g. moen 1999) may possibly explain this deviation. regional comparisons of maximum distribution limits of other vascular plant species have so far received little attention. altitudinal limits for vascular plants can be given for any mountain, but their explanations are often difficult, as indicated by the extensive discussions on the causality of the altitudinal forest limits. often it is of interest to know whether the actual species reach their maximum possible altitudinal limit within the actual geographic area. studies on summit floras and on plant altitudinal limits are becoming increasingly popular as a study approach, and one can mention at least three important reasons for this. firstly, recorded altitudinal limits are frequently used as a basis for studies on altitudinal gradients in vascular plant species richness, where species richness is quantified as the number of species with altitudinal limits within 50 or 100 m elevation bands (e.g. odland & birks 1999; grytnes & vetaas 2002). the range of a species along an altitudinal gradient is geometrically constrained by the height of the mountain. this is an example of the so-called hard boundary (colwell & lees 2000), and the altitudinal variation in species richness is therefore highly influenced by the height of the actual mountain (grytnes & vetaas 2002). secondly, previous studies on plant distribution limits are now being reanalyzed in order to find possible effects on climatic change (e.g. klanderud & birks 2003; walther et al. 2005; jurasinski & kreyling 2007; lenoir et al. 2008). mountain height may in such studies influence the rate of potential invasion of new species. thirdly, it is often assumed that high mountain areas may become refuges for many low competitive alpine plants with increasing global warming (e.g. stanisci et al. 2005), and evaluations of floristic and ecological conditions in high mountain areas are therefore essential (guisan & theurillat 2000). in general, there are three main factors that determine the altitudinal limits of vascular plants (rahbek 1995; dahl 1998; körner 2000, 2003): (1) the height of the actual mountain determines the variation in climate and growing season length within the area; (2) the regional climate character is essential for plant distribution, and this is again generally a function of latitude and altitude, and; (3) the available mountain area and thereby also the variation in habitats are strongly related to mountain height. in the jotunheimen mountain range, the highest mountain is 2469 m, and here the highest recorded vascular plants limit is 2370 m (lid & lid 2005), which is approximately 1200 m above the forest limit. on the highest mountains we can expect to find a zone below the summit where no plants are growing, while on lower mountains (e.g. < 2000 m), several vascular plants may be found even on the summit. the height and total area of the alpine zone above the forest limit is considered to be of major importance for the vertical extent of the alpine zone and its species richness. relationships between the altitudinal span of the alpine zone in relation to the mountain height are given for different european mountain areas by ozenda (1988) and on a global scale by körner (2003). in a previous study (odland 2009), the effect of mountain height on vascular plant species richness was investigated. in aurland western norway, with a mountain height of 1764 m, it was shown that species richness within the 1500−1600 m elevation band was 41.0% lower, and the 1600−1700 m elevation band was 65.7% lower than within same altitudinal bands in jotunheimen where the mountains are much higher. it was assumed that maximum mountain height and its effect on temperature conditions by the massenerhebungeffekt could partly explain these differences in species richness. a strong effect of mounfennia 188: 2 (2010) 151importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal … tain height on species richness was also found by stanisci et al. (2005) when they analyzed changes in species richness along the altitudinal gradient (2405 m versus 2730 m in the central apennines, italy). it was shown that 70% of the species did not reach the highest summit, and a drop in mean temperature was observed at soil level along the same gradient from 3.11 oc to 0.03 oc. the pattern of decreasing species richness along the altitudinal gradient in aurland indicated that the effect of low mountain height was particularly strong at elevations less than approximately 400 m below the summit (odland & birks 1999; odland 2009). the effect of mountain massif height on plant life at high altitudes is also shown by the general altitudinal decrease in species diversity. in areas where the mountains are relatively low (< 2500 m), a linear decreasing trend in species richness has been found (odland & birks 1999; odland 2009), while in areas where the mountains are much higher, exponential decreasing trends have been found (grabherr et al. 1995; körner 2003). åberg (1952) compared the altitudinal limits of species common to lule lappmark, northernmost sweden, with graübunden in switzerland (data from braun-blanquet & rübel 1932−1936), and the two series of extreme values were tested for their correlation. he found a strong correlation between the two series, a fact that was also taken as an estimate of the ecological significance of the species concept. the altitudinal limit of a certain species in lule lapmark was assumed to give an approximate measure of its hardiness also in graübunden and vice versa. but he also emphasized that there may occur naturally exceptions caused by ecological differences and unequal distribution of alpine ecotypes. a species that in lule lappmark reached 1000 m a.s.l. should theoretically in switzerland be found within an interval of 2497 ± 316 m a.s.l., while a species that in switzerland reached 2500 should be found at 973 ± 235 m a.s.l. these differences were paralleled by the difference in the position of the forest limits. åberg (1952) anticipated that the mountains in lule lappmark, reaching over 2000 m, were high enough allowing vascular plants to reach their climatic altitudinal limit. dahl (1998) also compared altitudinal limits of plant species in norway with their corresponding limits in the alps, and on average the limits were situated approximately 1000 m higher in the alps, a difference he also found to be paralleled by the altitudinal difference in the position of the climatic forest limit. it is generally considered that effects of global warming will allow species to move upward and colonize new areas at higher altitudes, but highmountain populations are expected to suffer from increased habitat fragmentation and increased competition with species from lower elevation areas (walter et al. 2005). a 2−3 oc increase in temperatures may result in an advance upward by approximately 600 m (grace et al. 2002). the rate to which such upward migration may happen depends, however, on available space and habitat surface (guisan & theurillat 2000; theurillat & guisan 2001). sætersdal et al. (1998) state: “however, for some species, such as mountain plants, there may be nowhere for them to migrate because they are already at the top of the mountains.” if the mountains are not high enough even boreal species may occupy the summits and creating a strong competition for available space, a competition that high altitudinal plants most likely will loose. the main aims of this study are to compare the altitudinal distribution limits of vascular plants from different regions with the highest recorded values for scandinavia as given by lid and lid (2005) as a reference. two possible altitudinal trends will be tested: (1) if the limits of all included species show the same pattern in the study area as in the reference area, a linear altitudinal trend with a slope coefficient close to 1.0 should be found, and; (2) if we compare the differences in altitudinal limits for both lowland and for high altitudinal species between the two areas there should be no significant altitudinal trend, but for areas situated at different latitudes, the altitudinal limits should be displaced according to differences in temperature conditions. both of these trends will be assumed to indicate that the actual mountain areas are high enough for all plants to reach their potential altitudinal limits within the actual study areas. possible deviations from these null models will be discussed in relation to mountain height and the complex altitudinal environmental gradients. study areas, data, and methods this study is based on previous floristic investigations from different mountain areas in scandinavia (fig. 1) where the altitudinal limits of vascular plants have been recorded. this is a comparative study, and the altitudinal limits for vascular plants within the different study areas are related to re152 fennia 188: 2 (2010)arvid odland corded limits given by lid and lid (2005). most species have their scandinavian altitudinal limits within or in the vicinity of the jotunheimen mountain massif, central norway, but some have their limits in other mountain areas. a few limits were adjusted according to the highest records presented by halvorsen and salvesen (1983). otherwise, the original records were retained even though some areas have re-sampled, and new limits have recently been found (klanderud & birks 2003; kullman 2007; moen & lagerström 2008; høitomt & olsen 2010). the following criteria have been used to select species to be used for the comparisons (see also åberg 1952): • the included species should be found from the forest limit ecotone and upward • the species should be frequent, and have a relatively high ecological tolerance • species taxonomy should be comparable; some taxa (subspecies and variants) are aggregated to reduce the risk of misidentification (cf. åberg 1952; moen & lagerström 2008) • introduced, anthropochorous species (cf. dahl 1998) are omitted • wetland species are omitted • northern unisentric species in scandinavia (cf. dahl 1998) are omitted in comparative studies between sites that are geographically widely separated, altitude per se is a poor environmental predictor. therefore the altitudinal position of the forest limit is used as a “zero level” when regional altitudinal distribution patterns are compared (körner & paulsen 2004). the alpine zone is defined as the vertical zone between the forest limit and the mean altitudinal limit of the three vascular plants species with the highest record altitudes because some species may be found on extreme heights in microclimatic favourable sites. species recorded within the study areas in scandinavia are separated into three groups according to their maximum altitudinal limits: (1) lowland species not recorded above the forest limit, (2) boreal forest species with a max limit approximately 500 m above the forest limit, and (3) high altitudinal species reaching the highest summits (more than 500 m above the forest limit). the data from hardangervidda represent several years of floristic inventories published by lid (1959). the study area cover most parts of the hardangervidda mountain plateau with mountains up to 1719 m high. the climatic forest limit varies from approximately 1000 m in the west to 1100 m in the south-eastern part. some new limits published by halvorsen and salvesen (1983) have been included. the data from aurland (odland 1991, 2009; odland & birks 1999) represents floristic inventories during two summers supplied with earlier published records. the floristic data from jämtland covers extensive studies on several mountain tops in the south-western part of central sweden, on the border with norway (kilander 1955). some of the mountains here have been resampled (kullman 2007; moen & lagerström 2008). kullman (2007) showed that the forest limit had increased and that the flora had changed on the summits. 17 species were lost and 57 had established on at least one mountain since the 1950s. a majority of the species had changed their altitufig. 1. geographic location of the study areas. latitudinal position and other information from the study areas are given in table 1. graubünden switzerland is not shown. norway sweden finland n denmark atlantic ocean stockholm copenhagen fennia 188: 2 (2010) 153importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal … dinal distribution within the range of ± 50 m, but some even more. the changes were assumed to be results of climatic change, reindeer grazing and hikers. åberg (1952) compiled lists of altitudinal limits from lule lappmark, northernmost sweden from different sources. this is a mountainous area with 7 peaks higher than 2000 m. he maintained that these were sufficiently high to permit even the most high-altitudinal species to reach their climatic limit. engelskjøn and skifte (1995) measured altitudinal limits of vascular plants in the district of troms in northern norway. the study summarizes data from the whole county, sampled during a long period of time. several mountains on the northern border between sweden and norway reach 1700 m. åberg (1952) gave distribution limits also for the same species from graubünden switzerland based on previous published floristic data. based on these data, åberg (1952) compared the distribution limits of species between north scandinavia and the alps. in the two northernmost areas, only few lowland species have been included. regression analyses and lowess trends (degree of smoothing = 0.5, number of steps = 2) were performed by the minitab program. results some general data and results from the study areas are presented in table 1. differences in mountain height, species limit, alpine zone limit and position of the forest limit along the latitudinal gradient from 46 on to 69 on are shown in fig. 2. the southnorth trend lines showing the general decrease in forest limit (1) and alpine zone limit (2) are drawn on the basis of data from graubünden and jotunheimen as given in table 1. in total, the altitudinal difference in the position of the forest limit between the study areas is 1600 m. the climatic forest limit in switzerland lies 1130 m higher than the highest forest limit in scandinavia, and in troms in north norway the forest limit lies 470 m below this limit. in hardangervidda, aurland and jämtland the limits are lower than the general trend suggests, and in these areas the summits are relatively low (fig. 2). the altitudinal difference between the summit and the uppermost occurrences of vascular plants in the alps is obviously much greater than in scandinavia. this indicates that in case of climatic changes, there is limited space available for plant uplift. the altitudinal difference between table 1. general data and results from the study areas. switz = graubünden switzerland, scand = scandinavia (jo = jotunheimen mountain massif where most species reach their max limits), h = hardangervidda, a = aurland, jä = jämtland, ll = lule lappmark, t = troms. (2) = total number of species recorded from the study area used in the comparisons. (6) = highest mountain in the study area. (7) = altitudinal position of the climatic forest limit. (8) = difference between the highest forest limit in scandinavia (jotunheimen) and the other study areas. (9) = altitudinal difference between mountain summit and position of the forest limit. (10) = maximum altitudinal recorded vascular plant limit. (11) = altitudinal limit for the alpine zone, as defined by the mean distribution limit for the three species with the highest altitudinal limits ± sd (standard deviation). (12) = number of plants found at the highest mountain (summit). (13) = altitudinal difference between summit and uppermost plant limit (6–10). (14) = vertical range of the alpine zone (11–7). switz. scand. h a jä ll t (1) latitude on 46.5 61.5 60.2 60.8 63.0 67.0 68.6 (2) no vascular plants studied 177 350 189 252 176 292 (3) no lowland plants 50 35 15 0 0 0 (4) no boreal plants 74 173 80 72 20 41 (5) no high altitudinal plants 53 142 94 180 156 251 (6) max mountain height (m) 4057 2469 1710 1764 1796 2001 1717 (7) max forest limit altitude 2350 1220 1100 1150 880 800 750 (8) diff. forest limit +1130 –120 –70 –340 –420 –470 (9) diff. summit-forest limit altitude (6–7) 1893 1249 610 614 916 1201 967 (10) max limit vascular plants 3560 2370 1690 1764 1782 1900 1700 (11) mean max 3 vasculars ± sd (alpine zone limit) 3443 ± 132 2357 ± 12 1694 ± 5 1764 ± 0 1778 ± 17 1800 ± 95 1700 ± 0 (12) no vasculars at the summit 0 0 8 10 1 1 3 (13) diff. summit-max limit vascular plants (6–10) 497 99 20 0 14 101 17 (14) alpine zone range (11–7) 1093 1137 594 614 898 1000 950 154 fennia 188: 2 (2010)arvid odland fig. 2. relationships between some altitudinal limits measured within the study areas and their position along the latitudinal gradient (legends as in table 1). general trend lines are drawn from graubünden switzerland to jotunheimen southern norway and extended northwards to troms northern norway. line (2) shows the decrease in the altitudinal limit of the alpine zone, and line (1) shows the altitudinal position of the forest limit. the forest limit and the mean limit for the three highest-growing vascular plants in the alps may also give an indication of the vertical range that could be available for plant growth if all vascular plants should reach their climatic distribution limit. in the alps this range is close to 1100 m (table 1, no 14), and also nearly the same in jotunheimen where most plants have their highest limit in scandinavia. in terms of temperature, this vertical range represents a range of approximately 6 oc calculated on the basis of a lapse rate of 0.6 oc per 100 m increase in altitude. in lule lappmark and troms the altitudinal spans reach almost the same values, while in hardangervidda, aurland and jämtland the spans are much smaller. comparisons of altitudinal distribution limits altitudinal limits for species recorded in switzerland are in fig. 3a plotted against their maximum limits in scandinavia. the figure shows that most plants included respond in the same way, i.e. that both lowland and high altitudinal species show the same altitudinal trends, but that the general trend line is displaced in altitude due to differences in latitude (and climate). the linear altitudinal trend has a slope coefficient 0.95 (table 2) which indicates a high parallelism between the distribution limits for all plants between these areas. the y-intercept is –1057 m which close to the difference in forest limit (1130 m) (table 1). in hardangervidda and aurland, the scatter-plots indicate not-linear altitudinal trends as shown by lowess lines (fig. 3b, 3c). the altitudinal limits for the high altitudinal plants are here obviously constrained by the mountain height which in these areas are lower than 1800 m (table 1). the boreal species lie here in general 100–150 m lower than in the reference data (table 2). up to an altitude of approximately 1600 m, however, the comparative altitude records follow linear trends with slope coefficients close to 1.0 (table 2). the altitudinal pattern is quite similar in jämtland (fig. 3d) and here the boreal species follow a linear trend with a slope coefficient of 0.86. the altitudinal limits in the northernmost areas, lule lappmark (fig. 3e) and troms (fig. 3f), follow linear functions with a regression slope coefficients close to 0.8 for all species (table 2.) differences in altitudinal limits between the studied areas differences between altitudinal limits given in lid and lid (2005) and for the same species in the acarea equation r2 p n max limit var. switzerland y = 0.95 * x + 1057 88.3 < 0.0001 177 925 – 2370 hardangervidda y = 1.00 * x – 116 72.2 < 0.0001 208 900 – 1590* aurland y = 1.00 * x – 156 76.6 < 0.0001 93 850 – 1620* jämtland y = 0.86 * x – 59 72.2 < 0.0001 183 940 – 1780* lappmark y = 0.76 * x – 142 73.3 < 0.0001 176 925 – 2370 troms y = 0.85 * x – 365 78.8 < 0.0001 292 900 – 2370 table 2. results of linear regression analyses where the maximum limits of vascular plants in the different study areas (y) is given as a linear function of the max limit in scandinavia (x). ranges of max limits of the included species within the different areas in scandinavia are given. n = number of species used. * = regression based on lowland and boreal species only. fennia 188: 2 (2010) 155importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal … fig. 3. max limits for vascular plants in scandinavia as given by lid and lid (2005) compared with the max recorded limits for the same species from the actual study areas. dotted lines show maximum mountain altitude (not shown for graübunden) and maximum forest limit altitude. some comparisons show significant linear trends, while others show deviations from a linear trend, especially for high-altitudinal species. a null-model suggests that the trend line should follow a straight line with a slope coefficient close to 1.0, but with a displacement according to differences in latitude (regional climate). fig. 3a. switzerland; the linear regression line is drawn, and the equation is given in table 2. fig. 3b. hardangervidda; the actual altitudinal trend is shown by a lowess line. lowland and boreal species follow a linear trend with a slope coefficient close to 1.0 (table 2). fig. 3c. aurland; the actual altitudinal trend is shown by the lowess line. lowland and boreal species follow a linear trend with a slope coefficient close to 1.0 (table 2). fig. 3d. jämtland; the actual altitudinal trend is shown by the lowess line. lowland and boreal species follow a linear trend with a slope coefficient of 0.86 (table 2). fig. 3e. lule lappmark; the altitudinal trend for all species is shown by a linear regression line with a slope coefficient of 0.76 (table 2). fig. 3f. troms; the altitudinal trend for all species is shown by a linear regression line with a slope coefficient of 0.85 (table 2). 156 fennia 188: 2 (2010)arvid odland fennia 188: 2 (2010) 157importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal … tual study areas are shown in fig. 4. fig. 4a shows that there is no significant altitudinal trend if we compare limit differences for the same species recorded in switzerland and in scandinavia. there may be major differences in altitudinal limits for some species, but these differences show no overall significant trend. this indicates that the lowland, the boreal, and high altitudinal species show the same altitudinal trend. in average, the vascular plants have their altitudinal limits 1057 m higher in switzerland, and this difference equals the forest limit differences between these areas (table 1). the study areas in scandinavia show deviating patterns. the altitudinal trends in hardangervidda (fig. 4b), aurland (fig. 4d) and jämtland (fig. 4f) are shown by lowess lines. boreal species are mostly found less than 400 m below their maximum limits in scandinavia while high-altitudinal species are found 700–900 m lower than their altitudinal limits in scandinavia. by splitting the hardangervidda distribution data into two floristic groups; 208 lowland and boreal species and 142 high altitudinal species, different trends appear (fig. 4c). lowland and boreal species are here in average found 116 m below their altitudinal limit in scandinavia, and these show no altitudinal trend. the difference between the forest limits shows almost the same value (table 1). for the 142 high altitudinal species, there is a strong linear altitudinal trend (r2 = 74.5) which shows that the difference between their limits in hardangervidda and scandinavia increase strongly with their ability to grow at very high altitudes. similar trends are also found for species in aurland (fig. 4e) and jämtland areas (table 3). fig. 4. plots showing the difference between the max altitudinal limit of a plant in the actual study area compared with the max altitudinal limit in scandinavia as given by lid and lid (2005). a null-model suggests that if there is no effect of too low mountain height, a scatter-plot should follow a horizontal line (no altitudinal trend) with a y-intercept altitudinally displaced according to the difference in the general climatic condition between the areas. in switzerland (fig. 4a), there is no significant altitudinal trend (p = 0.422). the maximum limits lie in general 1057 m higher in switzerland than in scandinavia, and the difference is on average the same for species with different altitudinal limits. in hardangervidda (fig. 4b), aurland (fig. 4d), and jämtland (fig. 4f) the differences follow non-linear altitudinal trend as shown by the lowess lines. high altitudinal species are within the study areas found 700–900 m lower than the max limits given in lid and lid (2005), while the differences are much smaller for lowland and boreal species. by splitting the species into two groups, two patterns emerge: lowland and boreal species show no altitudinal trend, while the high-altitudinal species show strong linear altitudinal trends (p < 0.0001) as shown by the data from hardangervidda (fig. 4c) and aurland (fig. 4e). equations are given in table 3. within lappmark (fig. 4g) and troms (fig. 4h) the altitudinal differences increase for all species with increasing max altitudinal limits (table 3). area equation r2 p n max limit var. switzerland y = 0.047 * x – 1057 0.40 0.422 177 925 – 2370 hardangervidda (1) y = –0.003 * x + 116 0.00 0.942 208 900 – 1590 aurland (1) y = –0.005 * x +156 0.00 0.936 93 850 – 1620 jämtland (1) y = –0.002 * x + 221 0.00 0.900 72 940 – 1370 hardangervidda (2) y = 0.69 * x – 918 74.5 < 0.0001 142 1600 – 2370 aurland (2) y = 0.75 * x – 1048 68.4 < 0.0001 94 1650 – 2370 jämtland (2) y = 0.32 * x – 218 37.9 < 0.0001 180 1380 – 2370 lappmark y = 0.24 * x + 142 21.4 < 0.0001 176 925 – 2370 troms y = 0.15 * x + 365 9.8 < 0.0001 292 900 – 2370 table 3. results of linear regression analyses of the altitudinal difference between plant limit in the reference area (max scandinavia) in relation to the max limit in the study area. n = number of species used. regression analyses of species within hardangervidda, aurland, and jämtland were performed on two data sets: (1) = lowland and boreal species only, and (2) = high altitude species only. variations in the max limits in scandinavia are given for the species included in the regression analyses. 158 fennia 188: 2 (2010)arvid odland in the two northernmost areas (lule lappmark and troms), all species show significant altitudinal trends (fig. 4g, 4h). high altitudinal species are mostly found 800–900 m lower in these areas compared with their max limits in scandinavia, while lowland and boreal species are mostly found approximately 400 m lower than their max limits in scandinavia. the significant linear altitudinal trends show a decreasing slope coefficient from south to north, which may indicate a decreasing effect of too low mountain height northwards (table 3). discussion when we compare altitudinal limits for plants from different areas we should expect to find major variations both on a local scale (neighbouring mountains) and on a broad geographic scale (different region or country). the most obvious reasons for such variations are related to differences in climate, mountain height, total area, and edaphic factors (bedrock, substrate and habitat variation) (e.g. moser et al. 2005). there may, however, also be effects related to different opinions about species taxonomy and possible ecotypes within a taxon. some species are also naturally rare, and the chance of finding such species at their uppermost occurrences is low (åberg 1952). differences in sampling effort can also be important, and one can not assume that time spent within each area is equal (åberg 1952; engelskjøn 1994; moen & lagerström 2008). time lag between sampling year and possible environmental changes during this period may also represent a source of error (e.g. grabherr et al. 1995; walther et al. 2005). despite these possible sources of error it is assumed that the general trends found in this study gives important information about ecological effects of mountain height and latitude between the investigated mountain areas. scattered outposts of vascular plants are reported from very high altitudes (6400 m in the central himalayas), often in microhabitats whose thermal regime is similar to the more common situation far below. körner (2003) therefore maintains that altitude per se becomes a doubtful criterion for estimating conditions for life in high mountains. below the uppermost outposts of higher plants, species richness increases with decreasing altitude. in both tropical and temperate mountain areas, the altitudinal interval between the uppermost occurrences and the uppermost closed vegetation may approach 1000 m. from this elevation, there may be an additional 1000 m down to the forest limit (grabherr et al. 1995). to reduce the effect of extreme outposts, the mean value for the three highest records of vascular plants has been used here (table 1). effects of mountain height and space for both species richness and species distribution limits along altitudinal gradients, it has been maintained that there is a strong species-area relationship (e.g. rahbek 1995). this is because area and habitat diversity are closely linked, and therefore number of species increases generally with area. in the alps, areas above 4000 m include less than 0.03% of the area at 2000 m. unfavourable climate combined with a strong reduction in available land area will therefore constrain plant growth and species richness on the highest mountain peaks (körner 2000). the height of the mountain may therefore be used as a proxy for available area variation in habitats and total variation in climate (cf. the massenerhebung effect, holtmeier 2003; odland 2009). differences between mountain height and distribution limits of vascular plants are shown in fig. 2. the values vary from close to zero in some of the studied areas to 497 m in graubünden, switzerland. grabherr et al. (1995) present the similar values for some high mountain areas in the world: kilimanjaro (5896 – 5760 = 136 m), himalaya (8848 – 6400 = 2448 m), andes (7084 – 5800 = 1284 m) and the alps (4807 – 4450 = 357 m). in scandinavia this interval lies between 0 and 101 m (table 1 no 13). this shows that the areas which today lie above the upper limit for vascular plants is very small in scandinavia, and consequently the available space for plant growth in case of future temperature increase is very limited. relationships between mountain height, latitude, forest limit and species limits due to the general patterns of decreasing temperatures from south to north, most organisms show decreasing altitudinal limits along the same geographic gradient, and this includes also the forest limits. it is assumed that both the polar and alpine forest limit have a bioclimatic characterisation (jobaggy & jackson 2000; holtmeier 2003; körner & paulsen 2003; nagy 2006). the climatic forest fennia 188: 2 (2010) 159importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal … limit in an area may therefore be used as a reference to which other distribution limits can be compared, but the height of the mountains should always be considered. according to körner (2003), the distance between the forest limit and snowline varies mostly between 800 m and 1600 m, with a mean of about 1100 m, and this range roughly corresponds to the altitudinal range of the alpine zone. in jotunheimen, the snowline lies at approximately 2200 m, i.e. 1000 m above the forest limit. in the other areas it has been difficult to estimate the position of the snowline because of the low mountain heights (åberg 1952). the altitudinal span of the alpine zone is 1093 m in graubünden (table 1 no 14). if we use the position of the climatic forest limit as a bioclimatic indicator, this indicates that the upper limit of the alpine zone lies in switzerland at an altitude where the mean july temperature is approximately 6 oc lower that at the forest limit. if we assume that the species limit and forest limit both in graubünden switzerland and jotunheimen represents climatic limits, the lines (1) and (2) in fig. 2 indicate that the position of the forest limit in hardangervidda, aurland and jämtland lie much lower than the general latitudinal trend suggests. dahl (1998) emphasized the importance of the mountain height for the altitudinal distribution limits for plants, and he maintained that no climatic timber-line could be recognized unless there were, in the neighbourhood, mountains that exceed the climatic timber-line by at least 200 m. this study indicates, however, that the mountain height has to be much higher than this if the forest should reach its potential altitudinal limit. in lule lappmark and troms, however, the forest limit position seems to reach its potential altitude, but not all the high altitudinal species. the forest limit in troms lies 1600 m lower than in graubünden (table 1), and this gradient represents a geographical span of 22 on latitude. the general trend is then a 72.4 m decrease in altitude of the climatic forest limit for each degree increase in latitude. similar latitudinal trends have been reported after forest limit studies elsewhere. in the northern appalachian, the alpine tree line decreases from 1480 m at 44 on to 550 m at 55 on which corresponds to an 83 m increase for every 1o increase in latitude (cogbill & white 1991). malyshev (1993) measured decreases between 70 m and 90 m per degrees for various transects in northern asia, and körner (1998) found by a linear regression of the tree line altitude/latitude relationship between 70 on and 45 on a general decrease of 75 m per degree increase of latitude. fairly similar results have also been found in different parts of the world (e.g. crawford 1989; gorchakovsky 1989; sveinbjörnsen 2000). schickhoff (2005) studied the relationship between latitudinal and altitudinal position of forest limits on the himalayan south slopes, and he found a general decrease of 68 m for each degree increase in latitude, but the variation was considerable, probably due to both variable mountain heights and variation in humidity. general latitudinal trends of decreasing forest limits and the vertical extension of the alpine zone have been shown both for europe (nagy 2006; nagy & grabherr 2009) and globally (körner 2003). according to nagy and grabherr (2009), there appears to be a general linear decrease in the forest limit altitude from the alps (c. 2600 m at 41 on) to the scandes (c. 600 m at 69 on). they consider the upper limit of the tree line ecotone to lie at about 1300 m in southern and at 600 m in northern scandinavia. the altitudinal span between the forest limit and the upper limit of the alpine zone as defined here is shown in table 1 (no 14) and fig. 1. this indicates that the mountains in hardangervidda, aurland, and jämtland are far too low to give the high altitudinal plants possibilities to reach their potential altitudinal limits. also the mountains in lule lappmark and troms appear to be too low. it is therefore possible that the forest limit isohypses in parts of scandinavia as shown in dahl (1998), moen (1999) and heikkinen (2005) are strongly modified by mountain heights, and that they regionally could be situated at higher elevations if the mountains were higher. variations in the distribution limits of vascular plants differences between altitudinal limits for plants between the study areas and the reference records also show different altitudinal trends. when the limits from switzerland and scandinavia are compared, a highly significant linear trend with a slope coefficient close to 1.0 was found. this shows that, despite major variations, species with limits at different altitudes show the same altitudinal trend, and from this we may infer that both lowland and high altitudinal plants, in general, reach their potential limit in both these areas. the nonlinear altitudinal trends in hardangervidda, aur160 fennia 188: 2 (2010)arvid odland land and jämtland may be interpreted as a result of the low mountain height. lowland and boreal species follow, however, closely a linear regression lines with a slope coefficient close to 1.0, indicating that the low mountain height does not influence their altitudinal distribution limit. comparisons of differences in species limits between the study areas have revealed three different patterns: (1) no trend for the whole altitudinal range (scandinavia and switzerland); (2) no altitudinal trend for lowland and boreal species, but an increasing trend for the high-altitudinal species (hardangervidda, aurland and jämtland), and; (3) increasing trend with increasing altitudes along the whole gradient (lappmark and troms). this indicates that species with different distribution limits have similar trends along the whole gradient when comparing switzerland and scandinavia. in aurland, hardangervidda and jämtland, however, high altitudinal species do not reach their potential altitudinal limits. lowland and boreal species do not appear to be influenced by the low mountain height. in lappmark and troms no such pattern was found because few (less than 8) lowland and boreal species were included in the study. table 3 shows that the linear regression slope coefficient and the r2-values decrease strongly from south to north in scandinavia which may indicate that the general effect of too low mountain height decreases northwards. the relatively low slope coefficients in lule lappmark and troms as shown in table 2 and fig. 3e and 3f indicate also that the mountains there are too low for all vascular plants to reach their potential altitudinal limits. implication for species distribution in a warmer world predictions of effects of climatic warming assume an upward migration of plants resulting in a change of their altitudinal distribution limits. we may therefore expect a strong competition for the limited space one the mountain tops in the future (guisan & theurillat 2000; walther et al. 2005; parolo & rossi 2008). as an example, sanz-elorza et al. (2003) found that high mountain grasslands were replaced by shrubs from lower altitudes in the central iberia peninsula. it may be tempting to apply the general relationship between temperature and altitude to claim that a 3 oc increase in temperature will result in an altitudinal advance of approximately 500 m, both for the forest limit and for other vascular plants. there are, however, numerous reasons why we can not use this general relationship for a particular area, and the main constraint will often be lack of available space (see review by theurillat & guisan 2001). theurillat and guisan (2001) calculated that an increase of 3.3 k in mean air temperature, corresponding to an altitudinal shift of 600 m in the european alps, would on average reduce the area of alpine vegetation by 63% and the nival zone would by 81%. for scandinavia we should expect even higher reductions of these zones due to the low mountain height. it can, however, not be assumed that species and plant communities may find equivalent surface areas with similar physiographic conditions when shifting upwards in elevation. theurillat and guisan (2001) assume therefore that an increase of 1−2 k in mean temperature may not shift the present forest limit upwards by more than 100−200 m. the study of moen and lagerström (2008) indicates, however, that major changes in the summit flora can result from impacts other than climate change. grazing of semi-domestic reindeer, sheep and tourist hiking may locally change the natural vegetation composition. therefore, generalizations on possible future changes on the summit flora based on climatic change are difficult. each species and each mountain area should be evaluated individualistically. conclusions this study presents a method whereby the effect of mountain height on the altitudinal distribution limits of vascular plants and also on the position of the forest limit can be evaluated. the method requires records of vascular plants distribution limits in the actual mountain area and similar data from a reference regional area where plants are assumed to reach their max potential distribution limits. comparisons between distribution limits from switzerland and scandinavia indicate that even the highest mountain massif in scandinavia, (jotunheimen, central south norway) is just sufficiently high to allow all plants to reach their present potential maximum limits, while the lule lappmark mountains (northern sweden) are close to being high enough. in the other studied areas, the mountains are estimated to be 200 to 600 m too low for the high altitudinal species to reach their potential limits. effect of low mountain height in parts of scandinavia will be increasingly important in the future due to climate change and therefennia 188: 2 (2010) 161importance of mountain height and latitude for the altitudinal … by a stronger competition for space on the summits. acknowledgements sincere thanks to two anonymous reviewers and t tonsberg for valuable comments and suggestions and to ta lerstang for making fig. 1. references aune b 1993. national atlas of norway. klima. norwegian mapping authority, hønefoss. callaghan tv, björn lo, chernov y, chapin t, christensen tr, huntley b, ims ra, johansson m, jolly d, jonasson s, matveyeva n, panikov n, oechel w, shaver g, elster j, henttonen h, laine k, taulavuori k, taulavuori e & zöckler c 2004. biodi-biodiversity, distributions and adaptations of arctic species in the context of environmental change. ambio 33, 404−417. cogbill cv & white ps 1991. the latitude-elevation relationship for spruce-fir forest and treeline along the appalachian mountain chain. vegetatio 94, 153−175. colwell rk & lees dc 2000. the mid-domain effect, geometric constraints on the geography of species richness. tree 15, 70−76. crawford rmm 1989. studies in plant survival. blackwell scientific publications, oxford. dahl e 1998. the phytography of northern europe. cambridge university press, cambridge. engelskjøn t 1994. highand mid-alpine vegetation in north scandinavia. ecology and thermal relations. tromura 74, 1−65. engelskjøn t & skifte o 1995. the vascular plants of troms, north norway. revised distribution maps and altitudinal limits after benum, the flora of troms fylke. tromura 80, 1−227. gorchakovsky pl 1989. horizontal and altitudinal differentiation of the vegetation cover of the ural mountains. pirineos 133, 33−54. grabherr g, gotfried m, gruber a & pauli h 1995. patterns and current changes in alpine plant diversity. in chapin fsiii and körner ch (eds). arctic and alpine biodiversity, 167−181. springer, berlin. grace j, berninger f & nagy l 2002. impacts of climate change on the tree line. annals of botany 90, 537−544. grytnes ja & vetaas or 2002. species richness and altitude, a comparison between null models and interpolated plant species richness along the himalayan altitudinal gradient, nepal. american naturalist 159, 294−304. guisan a & theurillat j-p 2000. assessing alpine plant vulnerability to climate change, a modelling perspective. integrated assessment 1, 307− 320. halvorsen r & salvesen ph 1983. bidrag til vesthardangerviddas karplanteflora. blyttia 41, 93−106. heikkinen o 2005. boreal forests and northern and upper timberlines. in seppälä m (ed). the physical geography of fennoscandia, 185−200. oxford university press, oxford. holtmeier f-k 2003. mountain timberlines. ecology, patchiness, and dynamics. kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht. høitomt t & olsen sl 2010. nye høydegrenser for en rekke karplanter i norge. blyttia 68, 75−80. jobbagy j & jackson rb 2000. golbal controls of forest line elevation in the northern and southern hemispheres. global ecology & biogeography 9, 253−268. jurasinski g & kreyling j 2007. upward shift of alpine plant increases floristic similarity of mountain summits. journal of vegetation science 18, 711−718. karlsen sr & elvebakk a 2003. a method using indicator plants to map local climatic variation in the kangerlussuaq/scoresby sund area, east grenland. journal of biogeography 30, 1469−1491. kilander s 1955. kärlväxternas övre gränser på fjäll i sydvästra jämtland samt angränsande delar av härjedalen och norge. acta phytogeographica suecia 35, 1−198. klanderud k & birks hjb 2003. recent increases in species richness and shifts in altitudinal distributions of norwegian mountain plants. the holocene 13, 1−6. kullman l 2007. long-term geobotanical observations of climate change impacts in the scandes of west-central sweden. nordic journal of botany 24, 445−467. körner ch 1998. a re-assessment of high elevation treelin positions and their explanation. oecologia 115, 445−459. körner ch 2000. why are there global gradients in species richness? mountains might hold the answer. tree 15, 513−514. körner ch 2003. alpine plant life. functional plant ecology of high mountain ecosystems. 2nd ed. springer, berlin. körner ch & paulsen j 2004. a world-wide study of high altitude treeline temperatures. journal of biogeography 31, 713−732. lenoir j, gègout jc, marquet pa, de ruffray p & brisse h 2008 a significant upward shift in plant species optimum elevation during the 20th century. science 27, 1768–1771. lid j 1959. the vascular plants on hardangervidda, a mountain plateau of southern norway. nytt magazin for botanikk 7, 61−128. lid j & lid dt 2005. norsk flora. 7ed. det norske samlaget, oslo. 162 fennia 188: 2 (2010)arvid odland malyshev l 1993. levels of the upper forest boundary in northern asia. vegetatio 109, 175−186. moen a 1999. national atlas of norway. vegetation. norwegian mapping authority, hønefoss. moen j & lagerström a 2008. high species turnover and decreasing plant species richness on mountain summits in sweden, reindeer grazing overrides climate change? arctic, antarctic, and alpine research 40, 382−395. moser d, dullinger s, englisch t, niklfeld h, plutzar c, sauberer n, zechmeister hg & grabherr g 2005. environmental gradients of vascular plant species richness in the austrian alps. journal of biogeography 32, 1117−1127. nagy l 2006. european high mountain (alpine) vegetation and its suitability for indicating climatic change. proceedings of the royal irish academy 106b, 335−341. nagy l & grabherr g 2009. the biology of alpine habitats. oxford university press, oxford. odland a 1991. endringer i flora og vegetasjon som følge av vannkraftutbyggingen i aurlandsdalen. nina forskningsrapport 15, 1−76. odland a 2009. interpretation of altitudinal gradients in south central norway based on vascular plants as environmental indicators. ecological indicators 9, 409−421. odland a & birks hjb 1999. the altitudinal gradient of vascular plant richness in aurland, western norway. ecography 22, 548−567. ozenda p 1988. die vegetation der alpen im europäischen gebirgsraum. gustav fischer verlag, stuttgart. parolo g & rossi g 2008. upward migration of vascular plants following a climate warming trend in the alps. basic and applied ecology 4, 100–107. pauli h, gottfried m & grabherr g 1999. vascular plant distribution patterns at the low-temperature limits of plant life – the alpine-nival ecotone of mount schrankogel (tyrol, austria). phytocoenologia 29, 297−325. rahbek c 1995. the elevational gradient of species richness, a uniform pattern? ecography 18, 200−205. rannie wf 1986. summer air temperature and number of vascular species in arctic canada. arctic 39, 133−137. reisigl h & pitschmann h 1958. obere grenzen von flora und vegetation in der nivalstufe der zentralen ötztaler alpen (tirol). vegetatio 8, 93−129. sanz-elorza m, dana ed, gonzàles a & sobrion a 2003. changes in the high-mountain vegetation of the central iberian peninsula as a probable sign of global warming. annals of botany 92, 273−280. schickhoff u 2005. the upper timberline in the himalayas. hindu kush and karakorum, a review of geographical and ecological aspects. in broll g & keplin b (eds). mountain ecosystems. studies in treeline ecology, 275−354. springer, heidelberg. stanisci a, pelino g & blasi c 2005. vascular plant diversity and climate change in the alpine belt of the central apennines (italy). biodiversity and conservation 14, 1301−1318. strand g-h 1998. kriging the potential treelevel in norway. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 52, 17−25. sveinbjörnsson b 2000. north american and european treelines, external forces and internal processes controlling position. ambio 29, 388−395. sætersdal m, birks hjb & peglar s 1998. prediction changes in fennoscandian vascular-plant species richness as a result of future climatic change. journal of biogeography 25, 111−122. theurillat j-p & guisan a 2001. potential impact of climate on vegetation in the european alps, a review. climatic change 50, 77−109. walther g-r, breissner s & burga ca 2005. trends in the upward shift of alpine plants. journal of vegetation science 16, 541−548. åberg b 1952. kärlväxternas höjdgränser i lule lappmark och i graubünden, en jämförelse. svensk botanisk tidsskrift 46, 286−312. mind maps of employment development in sparsely populated regions of sweden tommy lind & ulf wiberg lind, tommy & ulf wiberg (2011). mind maps of employment development in sparsely populated regions of sweden. fennia 189: 1, pp. 32–42. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. employment options form an essential part of individuals’ and households’ living conditions. in this paper we present how people in sweden perceive current and future job options. the empirical case is the northern half of the swedish territory, which is divided into four counties. the analysis is based on data from a questionnaire, distributed to 4,000 inhabitants aged 15−85 years in september 2008. after reminders a response rate of 64.1% was reached. the anota method is used as the analytical instrument. two categories of determinants behind attitudes to job options in general on the local labor market have been chosen. the first category includes a set of personal attributes, while the second includes a set of locational characteristics. further, it is analyzed how the respondents perceived the specific role of the manufacturing industry, the service industry and r&d in the development in their county. the two categories of determinants are used in this part as well. the analysis reveals a rather widespread anxiety about both the current and future provision of job options. the most satisfied and optimistic respondents were young, male and high-income earners living in coastal municipalities with a low unemployment level. there were also some striking differences in views among sub-groups on the role of the manufacturing industry, the service industry and r&d, with greatest contrasts found between the manufacturing industry and r&d. the highest share of respondents who regarded the manufacturing industry as very important was among men, over 30 years, with a low education and living in municipalities with a high unemployment level. the highest share of respondents who regarded r&d as very important was among women, under 30 years, highly educated and living in coastal municipalities with a low unemployment level. keywords: northern sweden, employment, anota analysis, path dependency, manufacturing industry, service industry, r&d tommy lind & ulf wiberg, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, se 901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: tommy.lind@geography. umu.se, ulf.wiberg@geography.umu.se introduction a majority of peripheral and sparsely populated regions across the western world are characterized by stagnation and depopulation. in various regional science publications, problems with growing gaps in terms of socio-economic conditions between expanding and declining communities, and measures to handle them, have been discussed over several decades. in gløersen et al. (2006) and gløersen et al. (2009), recent analytical overviews across the nordic countries are presented. these studies highlight the demographic sparsity and remoteness, reflected by distances to main european markets, as core elements for the understanding of the specific problems of and challenges to economic activities and service provision, which are important determinants of good socio-economic living conditions. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2736 fennia 189: 1 (2011) 33mind maps of employment development in sparsely … a major dimension of the problem has been, and will continue to be, the provision of job opportunities. the nordic overview by gløersen et al. (2006: 125−130) shows that northern sweden has problems rather similar to those in the northeast parts of finland. almost all municipalities have had unemployment rates above the national average over long periods of time. in this paper we will discuss the mindset among people in the swedish north about this important prerequisite for life chances and welfare. we will analyze how the current local labor market situation is perceived as well as perceptions about job options in general 10−15 years ahead. the view on the role of the manufacturing industry in regional development compared to the view on the role of the service industry and research and development efforts will also be examined. these three sectoral approaches have been used over several decades as active elements of governmental regional development programs in lagging regions across sweden as well as in several other countries. our hypothesis is that opinions about this vary to some extent, due not only to personal attributes such as gender, age, education and income, but also to the place characteristics of the areas where people have settled. the empirical case is the northern half of the swedish territory, which is divided into four counties – jämtland, västernorrland, västerbotten and norrbotten. the total population is 878,000. as shown in figure 1, a majority of the population lives in cities and the nearby surroundings along the coast of the gulf of bothnia. during a period of 200 years, from early 1800 up to around 1960, the territory went through both a very long and strong population growth. since then, stagnation or decline has occurred in most municipalities. in the counties of norrbotten and västerbotten, for example, the population increased by approximately 750% between 1800 and 1960. in jämtland and västernorrland the increase was approximately 350%, the same as the total for sweden during that time period. since 1960 the total population in the north has decreased by 5.8%, and as the total population of sweden has increased significantly the relative share has been reduced from 12.4% to 9.4%. the only county that has a higher population today compared with 1960 is västerbotten (increase of 7.5%). however, this growth has been concentrated to the university city of umeå with the establishment of the university there in the 1960s as the major explanation. empirical data and method the analysis is based on data from a questionnaire, which was distributed to 4,000 inhabitants aged 15−85 years in the four counties in september 2008. the respondents were chosen through a random sampling procedure. after reminders up to december 2008, an overall response rate of 64.1% was reached. the main task was to investigate and analyze opinions among people living in these counties regarding an institutional change in the form of regionalization. a more precise precondition for the study was that politicians in this regional context had suggested that the central government merge these four counties into two regions with empowered political mandates to handle regional development issues, regional transport infrastructure issues and the organization of advanced health care. the questionnaire also included questions about how the respondents perceived various dimensions of place-related living conditions and their views about living conditions in the future (lidström 2009). all chosen specific tasks addressed in this paper are operationalized into dependent variables and tested toward a set of explanatory variables. these are a mix of the respondents’ personal attributes and indicators of place or sub-region characteristics. in the analysis the method anota is used, which can handle categorical data (keller et al. 1985; bethlehem 2006). it is a method for the analysis of contingency variables with a nominal variable (y) to be explained by a set of nominal variables (x 1….. x n ). the method is a direct derivate of the linear model of regression analysis or analysis of variance, and translates a series of bivariate contingency tables into tables of regression coefficients. in these, the effects of category j of x n on category i of y is standardized for the effects of the other explanatory variables included in the analysis (dana 2001). the calculated coefficients are corrected for possible effects of other explanatory variables and thus present “pure” effects (bethlehem 2006). theoretical perspectives as mentioned in the introduction the regional setting addressed in this paper may, in both a spatial and societal sense, be characterized as marginal with related development problems (for a definition of marginality, see e.g. sommers et al. 1999; 34 fennia 189: 1 (2011)tommy lind and ulf wiberg fig. 1. population distribution in 2005 in the four northernmost counties of sweden – number of inhabitants within a radius of 30 km. fig. 1. population distribution in 2005 in the four northernmost counties of sweden – number of inhabitants within a radius of 30 km. fennia 189: 1 (2011) 35mind maps of employment development in sparsely … gurung & kollmair 2005). since the mid 1900s there has been a significant population decrease in most municipalities. this negative path started as a consequence of technical advances within laborintensive basic industries with rather low productivity, especially agriculture and forestry, in combination with a rapidly growing demand for labor in other sectors with higher productivity in southern sweden. the more peripheral locations in relation to the main european markets were a further disadvantage for production of heavy goods in the north. the adjustments in the region have resulted in high efficiency, an advanced standard of industrial production and services, growing production volumes and increased export, but have led to a diminishing demand for labor. we may describe this restructuring, driven mainly by global market forces and the related division of labor, as both a push and pull process (see e.g. pettersson 2002). since the mid 1960s, educational efforts and a wide range of regional policy measures have been implemented to handle the imbalances that have appeared, but it has been a great challenge to achieve an economic restructuring with sustainable results in terms of jobs and positive net migration. it should also be noted that there has been a substantial expansion of jobs in public welfare service institutions. this has resulted in a considerably high proportion of public employment in several municipalities in the north. the highest dependency is found among the municipalities with low population numbers (gløersen et al. 2006: 131). this fact represents a major structural weakness across the four counties. in a report from the commission of the european community (cec 2005), some policy implications related to this are addressed (see also shucksmith et al. 2009). a viewpoint expressed in this report is that the promotion of economic competition and growth with the greatest potentials could mainly favor the cities in marginal and peripheral regions. a reason for this is that these communities have more available resources and thereby the potential to act as economic dynamos with high productivity within a gradually increasing knowledge-oriented economy. the development pattern in the swedish northern periphery is far from unique in an international comparison. development paths of places and regions are often rather stable in character over time. a suggested concept for the main barrier to breaking a negative trend is “path dependency”. the principle of path dependency originates from studies of the development of technologies, which have shown that technologies used over a long period of time, but increasingly inefficiently, cannot be easily replaced by new and more efficient ones. there often arises a “lock-in effect”, when well established tools and methods block out the introduction of new technology (david 1985). the principle of path dependency has also been noted in organizational frameworks. in studies of institutions, american economist and nobel prize winner douglass c. north (1990) has found a similar pattern of barriers to renewal in cases of institutions having become inefficient. these findings are close to results reached by the human geographers gould and white (1986), who testified that it is easier to change economic conditions than an image in people’s eyes, or mental maps in their terminology. according to this statement we may expect that a majority of people living in a region have well established, but rather rigid, attitudes to economic, social and cultural place-related conditions and development perspectives. opinions are related to subjective norms and are thus rooted in personal values, which are formed through experiences of and influences from meetings with other people (ajzen 1991). these personal meeting experiences may vary between a dominance of contacts in a local community context to a wide global contact pattern. the opinions may also be influenced by the ethnic composition of the local population. in general, the share of inhabitants born outside sweden is much lower in the sparsely populated northern regions compared with the metropolitan areas. in the four counties, the share of people born abroad is presently 7%, while the corresponding share in the county of stockholm is 20% and the average for sweden is 14% (statistics sweden 2011). this means that the northern periphery has had much less in-migration of people with experiences of other both formal and informal organizational frameworks for economic, social and cultural life and development patterns across time. thus, there may be a much lower potential for breaking path dependency by introducing concepts based on influences from successful economic transformations elsewhere. the concept of “social capital” was coined to highlight the importance of networks, common norms and trust as facilitators of coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit (westlund 2006). putnam (1993) has also stated, on the basis of em36 fennia 189: 1 (2011)tommy lind and ulf wiberg pirical findings in italy, that social capital is a crucial factor behind the successful development of regions. this viewpoint is in conflict with the above-mentioned view on path dependency as a barrier to early reactive strategies to handle risks of stagnation and decline. putnam’s results have also been criticized by portes and landolt (1996), for example, who argue that common norms create conformity, which implies restrictions both on daily life among people and on business initiatives and entrepreneurship. based on questions in the same questionnaire as in the empirical part of this paper, westin (2009) has found that the northern part of sweden can generally be characterized by strong local social capital. people also have a strong connection to the county where they live, although there are vast internal differences. comparisons with studies across the whole of sweden also indicate that the social capital in the north is a bit above the average level for the nation (rothstein 2007, 2009). social and cultural life are well organized, with a plurality of civil organizations. a rather high proportion of people in the survey state that they trust other people in the region, and are also active in various voluntary organizations. this may be regarded as both a strength for and a barrier to a creative economic renewal process. florida (2002) has launched another important dimension behind successful regional development, stressing the share of the population that could be defined as the creative class. these people often have a higher education, but florida also stresses that the specific creative potential lies in attitudes and capacities in form of tolerance, talent and technology. according to his perspective, places that may attract this category will have a high capacity to react to early warnings of the need for reorientation of the present economic profile and to launch a revised growth-oriented development path. in northern sweden we may find empirical support for this viewpoint. among the five local labor markets with population growth in the north since 1960, four host a university campus and firms linked to research profiles there. in these city regions, the share of people with a higher education is also clearly above the national average. as a consequence of policy changes aiming at the reduction of barriers to flows of information, people and goods across national borders, and a rapid expansion of ict capacities, today national economies are very open and dependent on global economic processes. embedded in this are both threats and challenging options. for firms that have based their production and sales relations on restrictions for outsiders to compete on the same market, this causes a new, very vulnerable situation. for other firms, the reduced barriers provide opportunities to widened market relationships and growth of production. this globalization pattern may thus be regarded as having disadvantages for some firms and advantages for others. also here, we can refer to a study based on questions in the same questionnaire as in the empirical part of this paper. lundgren (2009) has found that large proportions of people in the north have international contacts and personal experiences from other countries, and often use another language than swedish in these contacts. a majority of the inhabitants may thus be characterized as having “globalized” minds. further, he found that 48% saw advantages for sweden with globalization while 42% saw advantages for the northern part. only 22% saw obvious disadvantages with globalization for the northern communities. a general characteristic of those who were positive to globalization is that they are high-income earners, have a high education and have an active interest in societal development issues. those with a negative attitude toward globalization are low-income earners, have short educational experience and have a low interest in societal issues. the earlier discussed path dependency dimension has an interesting connection to the concept of product cycles, which is rooted in schumpeter’s (1939) ideas on business cycles (see e.g. törnqvist 1993: 143 ff.) according to the product cycle concept, products and whole firms can be divided into different categories depending on the revenue generated by the product and its competitive qualities. in the introductory stage, r&d may often play a critical role in the product development. the competitive dimension is very much about unique features – product competition. in later stages, the competitive advantages of products and firms gradually turn into a matter of price competition. sectors that have reached a mature status thus also contribute to high path dependency. at a general level the manufacturing industry, service industry and r&d in the north represent these three product life-cycle stages. most of the manufacturing industry has a long history in the region and many of the firms have reached a mature level, characterized by standardized products fennia 189: 1 (2011) 37mind maps of employment development in sparsely … and price competition. a major part of the service industry is younger, and more characterized by competition rooted in product renewal or the development of completely new products. r&d clearly represents efforts toward more knowledgeintensive production, including the development of quite new product concepts and market niches. all three are currently well established across the four counties, but r&d activities are much more concentrated to the main cities and linked to their universities than the others are. perceptions of current and future local labor market conditions during the early 21st century, sweden in general faced a rather good economic development associated with a growth of jobs. the territory in focus in this study was no exception to this pattern. official statistics (statistics sweden 2011) show that during the period 2004−2008 the number of employed men and women increased across all four northern counties. the total number of employed men increased by 1.3%, and women by 0.9%. the economic crisis that started during the latter part of 2008 did not immediately result in a reduced number of jobs, but several private firms announced the need to fire a number of employees during 2009. the results concerning views on the current and future local labor market situation presented in tables 1 and 2 reflect that the change toward more problematic conditions had been considered by many people. a total of 51.6% of the respondents had the opinion that the current labor market situation where they live was bad. table 2 reveals that the view among 29.7% was that the conditions will get worse in the future, and only 18.9% had an optimistic view of the future. the tables also show the results of the anota analysis in terms of partial effects of various predictor variables on the dependent variable. significant values on at least a 5% level are in bold text. the values may be interpreted in exactly the same way as regression coefficients in a multiple regression analysis with dummy variables or the interpretation of effects in an analysis of variance (bethlehem 2006). according to the hypothesis presented in the introduction, we have examined the extent to which opinions are shifting due to personal attributes, and whether locational characteristics matter. the table 1. opinions in 2008 on the current local labor market situation in the four northernmost counties of sweden. good bad no opinion overall distribution 40.4 51.6 8.0 effects of: gender man 2.9 –1.8 –1.1 woman –2.6 1.6 1.0 age (year) 15–29 –4.5 2.0 2.5 30–49 2.2 1.8 –4.0 50–64 –2.9 5.9 –3.0 65– 4.4 –13.1 8.7 education lower education 1.6 –1.6 0.0 upper secondary school –0.7 1.5 –0.8 higher education 0.1 –2.1 1.9 househould income (sek) 0–200 000 –14.5 10.1 4.3 201–400 000 –4.1 3.7 0.4 401–600 000 4.1 –2.3 –1.8 601– 13.5 –12.1 –1.4 opinion about globalization advantages 3.7 –3.7 0.0 neither nor –2.6 2.6 0.1 negative –4.3 5.9 –1.6 no opinion –1.6 –0.5 2.1 municipal type coast 4.4 –6.0 1.7 inland –6.4 8.8 –2.4 county norrbotten 7.4 –6.9 –0.6 västerbotten 0.6 –1.0 0.4 västernorrland –4.3 4.6 –0.3 jämtland –6.8 6.1 0.7 unemployment less than 3% 7.9 –8.6 0.7 more than 3% –6.6 7.2 –0.6 *) bold numbers mean a significant effect at a 0.05 level. latter dimension is operationalized in three ways. the first is to compare respondents living in the coastal municipalities with the much more sparsely populated inland municipalities (see delimitation in fig. 1). the second is to make comparisons across the four counties. the third is to control for the unemployment rate in the municipality where the respondent lived during 2008, which had a mean value of 3%. based on the mean value, the unemployment variable has been transformed into a dummy variable: over and under 3%. 38 fennia 189: 1 (2011)tommy lind and ulf wiberg among the tested predictor variables we identified some significant differences related to both personal attributes and locational characteristics. the control of personal attributes shows that a higher proportion of men perceived the current job situation as good. when controlling for age groups we found that a significantly higher proportion of those aged 50−64 regarded the job situation as bad, while educational level revealed no significant differences. a much more significant and important dimension was household income. as expected, a much higher share of respondents in low-income households were less satisfied compared with respondents in high-income households. we also checked for opinions on globalization. a significant pattern is that among respondents who see advantages with globalization there was a significantly higher proportion who perceived the local labor market as good. among respondents with a negative opinion about globalization, the share who perceived the local labor market as good was significantly lower. when checking for different locations across the four counties we found a significantly more positive view among respondents living in the more densely populated municipalities along the gulf of bothnia compared with the interior municipalities. a comparison across the four counties shows the most positive views in the northernmost county of norrbotten, while we found a significantly opposite situation in the county of västernorrland. we also found that in municipalities with a high unemployment rate there was a significantly higher share of dissatisfied people. the anota analysis presented in table 2 reveals the following differences in views about the job situation on the local labor market 10 to 15 years in the future. among the tested personal attributes, age group, household income and opinion on globalization showed significant differences. the most positive view on future job options was found among the youngest respondents, while the most pessimism was found among respondents between 50−64 years of age. this is further reflected when controlling for household incomes. the largest proportion of optimistic respondents was found among those with the lowest incomes. plenty of them are presumably currently students or just on the threshold of the labor market. those who are positive toward globalization expect that the labor market will improve, while those who are negative toward globalization expect that the labor market will be worse in 10−15 years. when checking for locational attributes we found a significantly larger proportion of respondents with an optimistic view among those who live in the coastal municipalities compared with the interior parts. a comparison across the counties shows that the share of optimistic respondents was highest in the county of norrbotten and the highest share of pessimistic respondents was in västernorrland county. it was further found that the most table 2. opinions in 2008 on job options in the coming 10−15 years in the four northernmost counties of sweden. better same worse no opinion overall distribution 18.9 39.4 29.7 12.0 effects of: gender man 1.4 1.5 0.1 –3.0 woman –1.3 –1.4 –0.1 2.7 age (year) 15–29 4.8 1.4 –7.2 0.9 30–49 1.7 0.8 1.6 –4.1 50–64 –2.0 –2.8 5.1 –0.3 65– –2.7 2.2 –5.2 5.7 education lower education –2.2 1.8 0.1 0.3 upper secondary school 1.0 –1.2 0.6 –0.4 higher education –0.1 0.9 –1.5 0.7 househould income (sek) 0–200 000 5.5 –5.9 –2.2 2.6 201–400 000 –0.1 –3.7 2.5 1.4 401–600 000 –2.0 4.3 –0.4 –1.8 601– –1.0 4.3 –1.9 –1.5 opinion about globalization advantages 3.3 3.5 –4.0 –2.8 neither nor 0.4 1.0 1.3 –2.7 negative –3.4 –2.3 8.0 –2.3 no opinion –5.2 –7.9 –1.3 14.3 municipal type coast 0.6 3.7 –4.6 0.3 inland –0.8 –5.5 6.7 –0.4 county norrbotten 3.8 –0.0 –3.4 –0.4 västerbotten –1.2 2.0 –0.6 –0.3 västernorrland –0.4 –3.3 4.4 –0.7 jämtland –3.8 2.1 –0.6 2.3 unemployment less than 3% 1.9 3.1 –5.5 0.4 more than 3% –1.6 –2.6 4.6 –0.4 *) bold numbers mean a significant effect at a 0.05 level. fennia 189: 1 (2011) 39mind maps of employment development in sparsely … optimistic respondents live in municipalities with low unemployment. a comparison between the results in tables 1 and 2 shows that the pattern of differences across the various parts of the territory is characterized by high congruity. against this general background we will highlight opinions about the roles of the manufacturing industry, service industry and r&d in regional development. table 3 shows that almost half of the respondents, 46.9%, regarded the manufacturing industry as very important for regional development. the results from the anota analysis show smaller differences than those presented in tables 1 and 2. nevertheless, we found some significant differences. as regards personal attributes, a significantly higher share of men compared with women had the opinion that this sector is very important. much greater significant differences were found when checking for age groups. the strongest contrasts were between the respondents up to 29 years and those over 50 years. a much smaller proportion of the young respondents regarded this sector as important for regional development. this is also reflected in differences among respondents when considering household income. when checking for views on globalization, we found that a significantly higher proportion of respondents who have a positive view on it regarded the manufacturing industry as very important. further, it can be noted that among respondents living in locations with high unemployment a significantly larger proportion regarded this sector as very important. as mentioned, the service industry in the north generally has a shorter history than the manufacturing industry. many service firms are also much less rooted compared with manufacturing firms, and may thus be much easier to relocate if needs arise for adaptation to changed competitive conditions or other locational preferences. however, even with rather small local markets many of these firms have developed efficient and competitive solutions to overcome distance friction toward national and international markets. ambitious public efforts in terms of investments in ict infrastructure and the promotion of adequate education and competence building across the territory have created comparative advantages for many firms. table 4 shows that 37.4% regarded this industry as very important for regional development, but we can note that this share is quite lower compared with the corresponding figure for the role of the manufacturing industry. among the age groups table 3. opinions in 2008 about the importance of the manufacturing industry for the socio-economic development in the four northernmost counties of sweden. very important quite important not important no opinion overall distribution 46.9 38.8 5.8 8.5 effects of: gender man 4.3 –0.3 –0.3 –3.7 woman –3.9 0.2 0.3 3.3 age (year) 15–29 –16.4 –3.0 7.9 11.4 30–49 –1.7 2.6 0.8 –1.6 50–64 5.4 –0.5 –2.4 –2.5 65– 5.3 –0.5 –2.7 –2.1 education lower education 1.5 –2.3 0.3 0.5 upper secondary school 0.2 0.4 –0.6 0.0 higher education –2.5 2.0 1.2 –0.7 househould income (sek) 0–200 000 –5.0 –1.8 1.5 5.3 201–400 000 1.3 –1.0 –0.8 0.5 401–600 000 3.1 0.3 –1.0 –2.4 601–w –3.3 3.4 1.9 –1.9 opinion about globalization advantages 5.8 –1.5 –0.2 –4.0 neither nor –0.2 4.1 –0.5 –3.3 negative 0.5 1.0 2.0 –3.5 no opinion –13.8 –1.3 –1.4 16.6 municipal type coast –0.8 0.9 0.1 –0.3 inland 1.2 –1.4 –0.2 0.4 county norrbotten 0.1 –1.0 1.1 –0.2 västerbotten 1.9 1.0 –1.7 –1.1 västernorrland –2.0 0.2 0.2 1.6 jämtland –0.1 –0.3 0.8 –0.3 unemployment less than 3% –3.9 2.9 1.0 –0.0 more than 3% 3.3 –2.5 –0.9 0.0 *) bold numbers mean a significant effect at a 0.05 level. we found that the most negative opinions appeared among the youngest and the most positive opinions among respondents aged 50−64. further, we found that a significantly higher proportion of respondents with a lower education regarded this industry as not important. we can also note that, even in this case, we found that among respondents who see advantages with globalization there was a significantly higher share who regarded this 40 fennia 189: 1 (2011)tommy lind and ulf wiberg industry as very important for regional development. when checking for locational characteristics, we found a pattern similar to that of the manufacturing industry. in locations with high unemployment, a larger proportion of respondents regarded the service industry as very important. as discussed above, r&d activities mean a clear opportunity to restructure the economy into a more knowledge-oriented profile and thus achieve a break of path dependency based on mature product concepts and market orientation. table 5 shows that 44.5% regarded r&d as very important for regional development. when we checked for personal attributes there was a significant gender difference, with a larger share of women regarding this sector as very important. between the age groups there were also some differences. among respondents in the 30−49-year table 4. opinions in 2008 about the importance of the service industry for the socio-economic development in the four northernmost counties of sweden. very important quite important not important no opinion overall distribution 37.4 43.3 9.2 10.0 effects of: gender man 0.8 1.9 0.6 –3.3 woman –0.8 –1.7 –0.5 3.0 age (year) 15–29 –6.9 –7.0 3.6 10.3 30–49 0.8 1.1 0.7 –2.6 50–64 2.1 2.7 –1.9 –2.9 65– 0.7 –0.3 –0.6 0.3 education lower education –3.2 –0.7 2.5 1.4 upper secondary school 0.3 0.5 –0.6 –0.3 higher education 3.1 –0.5 –1.6 –0.9 househould income (sek) 0–200 000 –3.5 –2.2 1.2 4.5 201–400 000 0.4 –0.3 –0.4 0.3 401–600 000 0.1 1.4 0.5 –2.0 601– 2.7 0.1 –1.3 –1.5 opinion about globalization advantages 7.5 –1.1 –1.4 –4.9 neither nor –2.7 6.2 –0.7 –2.9 negative –0.7 0.6 4.2 –4.1 no opinion –14.3 –3.8 –1.0 19.1 municipal type coast –1.0 1.0 0.4 –0.4 inland 1.4 –1.4 –0.5 0.6 county norrbotten 1.7 –1.1 –0.0 –0.6 västerbotten 1.0 0.5 –0.3 –1.2 västernorrland –2.5 0.5 0.1 1.9 jämtland –0.5 0.2 0.5 –0.2 unemployment less than 3% –3.0 2.7 0.5 –0.2 more than 3% 2.6 –2.3 –0.5 0.2 *) bold numbers mean a significant effect at a 0.05 level. table 5. opinions in 2008 about the importance of r&d for the socio-economic development in the four northernmost counties of sweden. very important quite important not important no opinion overall distribution 44.5 39.2 9.6 6.7 effects of: gender man –2.4 1.9 1.2 –0.7 woman 2.1 –1.7 –1.1 0.6 age (year) 15–29 –4.9 0.2 1.8 2.9 30–49 –5.4 1.3 4.4 –0.3 50–64 1.7 1.9 –2.8 –0.7 65– 7.1 –4.1 –2.6 –0.4 education lower education –2.3 1.2 –1.0 2.1 upper secondary school –2.5 1.1 1.6 –0.2 higher education 9.3 –4.3 –3.0 –2.0 househould income (sek) 0–200 000 1.8 –6.2 0.1 4.4 201–400 000 0.1 –1.5 1.3 0.1 401–600 000 –1.5 4.2 –1.4 –1.3 601– 0.9 1.3 0.0 –2.2 opinion about globalization advantages 3.1 1.3 –1.9 –2.6 neither nor 3.1 –2.1 0.8 –1.8 negative –0.8 –0.2 4.0 –2.9 no opinion –9.1 –0.9 –1.0 11.0 municipal type coast 2.9 –1.0 –1.1 –0.7 inland –4.2 1.5 1.6 1.1 county norrbotten 3.3 –2.8 –0.4 –0.1 västerbotten –0.6 2.8 –1.2 –1.0 västernorrland –2.7 1.8 0.4 0.5 jämtland –0.2 –3.0 2.2 1.1 unemployment less than 3% 1.1 –0.3 –0.7 –0.1 more than 3% –0.9 0.2 0.6 0.1 *) bold numbers mean a significant effect at a 0.05 level. fennia 189: 1 (2011) 41mind maps of employment development in sparsely … age group, a significantly lower proportion regarded this sector as very important compared with the over 65-year age group. checks on educational level showed, as might be expected, that a significantly larger proportion of respondents with a higher education regarded r&d as very important, but household incomes showed no significant differences. when checking for locational characteristics, we found that the coastal regions had a higher share of people claiming that r&d is very important for the future of the county, but checks for county and local unemployment level showed no significant differences. conclusions the analyses carried out in this paper intended to present opinions among people in the swedish north on employment options, which is a crucial dimension of welfare and an important prerequisite for achieving a balance in population development and demographic composition. for several decades, strategies for economic growth and job creation have been on the agenda in both specific regional policy programs and several sector policy fields. the efforts in the north have generally, from a long-term perspective, managed to compensate for consequences of market forces through the concentration and relocation of plants and service supply to more cost-efficient locations nationally or internationally. but the rather limited expansion of jobs has not led to even stabilization of the number of inhabitants. for example, official statistics (statistics sweden 2011) show that the total number of those employed in the four counties increased by 0.4% between 1985 and 2008, while the total population decreased by 2.9%. we found that a rather high proportion of the respondents across the territory worry about the employment situation and how job options will develop further on. when controlling for a set of personal and locational attributes, we found some significant contrasts. the most satisfied and optimistic respondents were young, male and highincome earners living in coastal municipalities with a low unemployment level. however, we did not find that a larger share of people with a higher education are satisfied and optimistic compared with the others. this indicates that this category feels a rather high degree of uncertainty about a sufficient supply of relevant job options for them in the north. other studies in european regions support our findings in tables 1 and 2 about contrasts between coastal and inland municipalities in perceptions of job opportunities now and in the future. according to cec (2003), rural inhabitants appear to be less optimistic about the future compared with urban inhabitants. ray and ward (2006) present an interesting explanatory, arguing that it may be difficult to imagine a positive rural future. their viewpoints relate to the pastoral rural discourse in which quality of life is considered the antithesis of change. this means that preserving economic, social and cultural structures and related values of the past is more desired than elaborating and striving for a new, alternative structural composition. this viewpoint has a clear connection to the path dependency dilemma discussed above. further, we can make the following comments regarding the opinions revealed on the role of the manufacturing industry, service industry and r&d in regional development. the high share of respondents who regarded the manufacturing industry as very important can be interpreted as a further indication of a strong path dependency. on the other hand, we can note that almost as large a proportion of the respondents regarded r&d, with its trend-breaking potential, as important. this could be interpreted as an open attitude toward a renewal of the economic structures throughout the swedish north. but to achieve this, more offensive strategies and entrepreneurial initiatives are needed. however, when controlling for personal attributes we found some distinctions in line with the theoretical discussion above. the highest share of respondents who regarded the manufacturing industry as very important was among men, over 30 years of age, with low education and living in municipalities with a high unemployment level. the highest share of respondents who regarded r&d as very important was found among a quite different mix of people. those were women, younger than 30 years of age, highly educated and living in coastal municipalities with a low unemployment level. none of the tested groups regarded the service sector as the most important one. the results concerning opinions on the role of manufacturing industry and r&d can be compared with those from a similar study in västra götaland county in southwestern sweden (nilsson & weibull 2007). there, the share of respondents who regarded the manufacturing industry as very important for future regional development was 44% and thus slightly lower than in the north. the 42 fennia 189: 1 (2011)tommy lind and ulf wiberg corresponding share who regarded r&d as very important was 49%, which was slightly higher than in the north. similar to the results in our study, higher proportions of respondents who are women, highly educated, aged over 65 years and living in the most densely populated areas regarded r&d as very important. references ajzen i 1991. the theory of planned behavior. organizational behaviour and human decision processes 50, 179−211. bethlehem j 2006. anota – analysis of tables. sage publications, thousand oaks. commission of the european community (cec) 2003. eurobarometer: public opinion in the european union. commission of the european community, luxembourg. dana lp 2001. global marketing co-operation and networks. international business press, binghamton. david pa 1985. clio and the economics of qwerty. american economic review, papers and proceedings 75, 332−337. florida r 2002. the rise of the creative class – and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. basic books, new york. gløersen e, dubois a, copus a & schürmann c 2006. northern peripheral, sparsely populated regions in the european union and in norway. nor-nordregio report 2006: 2. gløersen e, dubois a, roto j, rasmussen ro & sterling j 2009. development perspectives for the nspa: opportunities and challenges. analytical report. nordregio electronic working paper 2009: 3. gould p & white r 1986. mental maps, 2nd ed. allen & unwin, boston. gurung gs & kollmair m 2005. marginality: concepts and their limitations. ip6 working paper no. 4. development study group, department of geography, university of zurich. keller wj, verbeek a & bethlehem jg 1985. anota: analysis of tables. cbs-report. netherlands central bureau of statistics, voorburg. lidström a (ed) 2009. kan norra sverige regionaliseras? beslutsprocesser och medborgarperspektiv. forskningsrapporter i statsvetenskap vid umeå universitet 2009: 2. lundgren n 2009. norrland, sverige, europa och världen. in lidström a (ed). kan norra sverige regionaliseras? beslutsprocesser och medborgarperspektiv. forskningsrapporter i statsvetenskap vid umeå universitet 2009: 2. nilsson l & weibull l 2007. universitet, högskolor och regional utveckling. in nilsson l (ed). det våras för regioner – västsverige 1998−2005. sominstitutet, göteborgs universitet. north dc 1990. institutions, institutional change and economic performance. cambridge university press, cambridge. pettersson ö 2002. socio-economic dynamics in sparse regional structures. gerum, umeå university 2002: 2. portes a & landolt p 1996. the downside of social capital. the american prospect 26: 94, 18−21. putnam r 1993. making democracy work. princeton university press, princeton, nj. ray c & ward n 2006. the futures of rural policy: the significance of rural futures studies. discussion paper no. 7, centre for rural economy, university of newcastle upon tyne, newcastle upon tyne. rothstein b 2007. vem i hela världen kan man …. lita på. in holmberg s & weibull l (ed). det nya sverige. som-rapport 41. som-institutet, göteborgs universitet, göteborg. rothstein b 2009. tillitens mekanismer. in holmberg s & weibull l (ed). svensk höst. som-rapport 46. som-institutet, göteborgs universitet, göteborg. schumpeter j 1939. business cycles: a theoretical, historical and statistical analysis of the capitalist process. mcgraw-hill, new york. shucksmith m, cameron s, merridew t & pichler f 2009. urban-rural differences in quality of life across the european union. regional studies 43: 10, 1275−1289. sommers l, mehretu a & pigozzi wm 1999. towards typologies of socioeconomic marginality: north/ south comparisons. in jussila h, marjoral r and mutambirwa cc (eds). marginality in space – past, present and future: theoretical and methodological aspects of cultural, social and economical parameters of marginal and critical regions, 7−24. ashgate, aldershot. statistics sweden 2011. <www.scb.se> 19.7.2011. törnqvist g 1993. sverige i nätverkens europa. gränsöverskridandets former och villkor. liberhermods, malmö. westin k 2009. finns det en norrländsk identitet? in lidström a (ed). kan norra sverige regionaliseras? beslutsprocesser och medborgarperspektiv. forskningsrapporter i statsvetenskap vid umeå universitet 2009: 2. westlund h 2006. social capital in the knowledge economy. theory and empirics. springer, verlag. forest-related employment in the european north: current trends and future development linda lundmark lundmark, linda (2005). forest-related employment in the european north: current trends and future development. fennia 183: 2, pp. 81–95. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. knowledge about the impact of climate change on the forest-related employment is important for making relevant policy decisions in areas where forestry is economically important. this paper contrasts two different areas in sweden and finland in terms of population structure, employment structure and forest-based economy. the paper discusses the future possible outcomes of climate change in terms of forest-related employment. the geographical level of analysis is the county of norrbotten in sweden, and the county of lappi in finland. these are sparsely populated peripheral areas with ageing populations. there has been a decline or stagnation in the economic and social conditions and the survival of many rural communities, in particular those inland, is seriously threatened. in the context of climate change the issue of how the forest growth will change and how well the different areas will adapt to these changes are addressed. linda lundmark, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, se-901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: linda.lundmark@geography.umu.se. ms received 24 january 2005. defining the problem climate change is inextricably linked to socioeconomic development through its effect on natural resources, for example on forest growth and species composition. however, this relationship has seldom been highlighted in the literature. the bulk of previous research has mainly been concerned with the cause of climate change; whether or not our society has caused the global climate to change. there has been a division between those who argue that mankind and our emissions of co 2 have indeed caused the climate change (crowley 2000) and those who claim that the climate change is caused by natural fluctuations. for example the theory developed by milutin milankovitch (1941) suggested that climate change is caused by variations in solar radiation received at the earth’s surface. however, there are few studies that directly discuss the consequences of climate change for human society as environmental living conditions change (mccarthy et al. 2001). in this paper it is argued that whatever the causes for global climate change are, there is no doubt that changes in climate will affect human society in various ways. furthermore, there is evidence that particularly the circumpolar north is susceptible to future climate change (houghton et al. 2001; sweden’s… 2001). this paper presents baseline scenarios and two scenarios of climate change, in two time slices, 2020 and 2050, within the forest-related sectors in the north of europe. for this purpose, two case study areas have been chosen; the county of norrbotten, sweden and the county of lapland in finland (fig. 1). this allows for comparisons of socioeconomic systems and processes of change in different national contexts. despite differences in scale and economy, these areas exhibit many similarities providing useful examples for wider discussion and generalisation about different processes of change and their different degrees of impact within the varied physical, social and economic environments. many households in these areas are economically dependent on forest natural resources, either through forest-related employment or by owning resources in some part of the production chain. a changing climate therefore might have wide-rang23240_1_lundmark.indd 81 12.6.2006 11:02:56 82 fennia 183: 2 (2005)linda lundmark fig. 1. overview of swedish norrbotten and finnish lappi. ing effects on the social and economic conditions. one way to determine the vulnerability of a society with regard to the issue of climate change is to estimate the total employment effect of forest as a natural resource in a given society by using a multiplier model. the nature of forestry and the forest sectors is complex and highly integrated in economic networks far beyond the forest itself. transportation, processing, accounting, marketing and technological development provide some examples of activities that can be associated with it. forestry is interpreted as involving logging, timber evaluation, reforestation and forest conservation including other forestry and logging related service activities. forest sectors are the sawmilling industry, the wood processing industry (both chemical and mechanical) and wholesale trade with wood products. forest-related activities are the activities created indirectly or activities induced by forestry or by other forest sectors. taken together these activities comprise the forest-related employment. a warmer climate in combination with increased precipitation stimulates the bio-mass growth, like shrubs and a more rapid growth of seedlings and young forest. furthermore an increase of the annual growth period affects the annual increment of forest biomass as a whole. together this could be understood as being a possibility for the forest sector employment. this paper focuses on the socioeconomic effects resulting from climate change in the european north. knowledge regarding this relationship can be used to assess the vulnerability of societies to climate change with special reference to forest-related employment. thus, the overall aim is to calculate how different levels of forest growth directly and indirectly affect the number of employed and furthermore, how employment varies due to differing economic and institutional situations in the case study areas. the overall aim can be formulated in the following research question: what happens to the forest-related employment when socioeconomic conditions like population development, employment in other sectors, levels of reinvestment, productivity increase and changes in price development? how will changes in annual increment and harvest rate as an effect of climate change affect the forest-related employment? this development, as well as the consequent change in employment, will be calculated by sim23240_1_lundmark.indd 82 12.6.2006 11:02:57 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 83forest-related employment in the european north: current… ulating a base line scenario and two different scenarios of climate change applied to two time slices, 2020 and 2050. the year 2020 is chosen as an approximation of actual time perspective among various stakeholders in elaboration of management strategies regarding the forest. 2050 is approximately one generation away from that, giving as a result a further dimension of value to management in a long-term perspective. through multiplier analysis of the forest and forest-related sectors it is possible to take into consideration the extended effect of changing growth rates. in respect to the long-term perspective considered, it should be noted however, that climate change is not the only change which will affect the forest or the forest sectors. large global, national or local political or forest management regime changes as well as changes in industry localization strategies influences the employment in the sector at different locations. competition from other countries and technological innovations and adoption of new technique also affect the employment. theoretical framework changes in technology and communication, and land-use changes like shifts in agriculture and forestry are important driving forces for environmental change. however it is equally true that changes in the natural systems could affect the socioeconomic system or even disturb the living conditions (adger & kelly 1999; kelly & adger 2000; jansson & stålvant 2001). the complexity within a socioeconomic system does not allow for a full incorporation into a model. instead, employment and demography have been chosen as indicators. a first step to examine how climate might affect the socioeconomic situation is to analyse the restructuring of employment. the assumption is that the forest-related employment is dependent on several interconnected factors like sector-specific characteristics and global, national and local institutional rules and economies, as well as forest ecosystems characteristics. the conceptual framework of the connection between different systems is summarized below (fig. 2). the importance of the level of dependence on forest resources and industries has been discussed in terms of ‘forest resource communities’ (tykkyläinen et al. 1997). the location specific characteristics and the global economic and institutional setting in which the socioeconomic system is found will a) form the backdrop to any development or change in the sector specific characteristics and b) will have implications for the way in which a certain society can adapt to, or cope with, an external factor in the form of climate change (fig. 2). potential responses, or non-responses for that matter, to climate change must also be seen in the light of both local, national and global economy and institutions. the more multinational the companies get the more likely it is that the effects of climate change are not taken seriously, because the risks as seen from the view of the company, are spread out (lehtinen 2001). this is very much a fig. 2. conceptual framework of the relationships between climate, natural systems and society as discussed in the text. the indicators presented are used in the further elaboration of a model. 23240_1_lundmark.indd 83 12.6.2006 11:02:57 84 fennia 183: 2 (2005)linda lundmark contributing factor for the restructuring of the forest-related employment and the sustainability of the same (saastamoinen 2001). there are also other location-specific characteristics that might have importance to the potential responses, all related to tradition, culture and history. more specifically “how things are done” differs between societies and groups in society. furthermore, this response in terms of management of natural resources and greenhouse gas emissions will have effect on the climate too. important for a socioeconomic impact analysis of climate change are the concepts of adaptive capacity and vulnerability (yohe et al. 1999; yohe & tol 2002; turner et al. 2003a, 2003b; metzger & schröter 2004). climate change research has gone from analysing the climate change exposure of natural systems and analysing the sensitivity of them to consider different socioeconomic systems’ ability of adaptation. the third report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (mccarthy et al. 2001) conceptualises the problem, showing a way forward for climate change research. turner et al. (2003a) argue that a focus limited to disturbances and stressors is not enough for understanding the impacts on and responses of, the affected system or its components. as suggested by turner et al. (2003b) a full vulnerability assessment is not as straightforward as one might envision, given the complexity of factors, processes, and feedbacks operating within even relatively simple coupled human–environment systems. one way to do this is to use indicators for vulnerability (adger & kelly 1999; kelly & adger 2000). vulnerability is a function of potential impacts, understood as the exposure and sensitivity of a system, and adaptive capacity. vulnerability is in general terms interpreted as the ability of a society to adapt to internal and external threats. more specifically; “vulnerability is the degree to which a system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes” (mccarthy et al. 2001: 6). adaptive capacity is at the core of understanding the vulnerability of a society to climate change. in this paper adaptive capacity is understood as being embedded in the social, institutional and economic structures of a society. it should be noted though, that adaptive capacity can and will change as part of socioeconomic processes on local, national and global scale. the idea that different systems (locales) are not equally vulnerable to the same exposure to climate change is not new, but has not been applied frequently in research (metzger & schröter 2004). the strong socioeconomic variation in vulnerability by location, even to hazards created by globalscale processes and phenomena will promote the role of ‘‘place-based’’ analysis (kasperson & kasperson 2001; turner et al. 2003a). a specific strength of place-based analysis is the prospective for increased public involvement and collaborative assessment (national… 2001). the majority of the vulnerabilities of a society are socioeconomic in character (table 1). this means that they are processes that will exist independent from climate change. others are partly or entirely caused by, or induced by, climate (table 2). the socioeconomic vulnerabilities can also be triggered by the effects of climate change. this is for example the case when climate change introduces uncertainty, perceived or real, of for example decreasing returns on capital investments (blennow & sallnäs 2002; kostov & lingard 2003). changes in company investment strategies could have devastating impact on the forest-related labour market. sca as an example has redirected its investments to include wastepaper as a source of raw materials to produce bulk paper. because of this development, the need for virgin fibres for paper production is decreasing, and transport of wastepaper to peripheral locations is uneconomical. this is part of the ongoing transnationalisation of the forest-related sectors, and will inevitably lead to geographical redirection of investments in bulk production. the means to counteract such a development in order to retain workplaces is to reinvest in new technology for the older plants to increase their products quality (lindgren 1997). with a possible slump in access to virgin fibres due to climatic variations these new investments can in no way be taken for granted. however, with respect to the forest growth dynamics, 50 years is a short period in relation to the rotation time in these areas. therefore the negative effects on quality, species distribution and composition are not expected to have a significant impact. however, it is possible that the increasing growth rate could have an impact on the amount of harvestable timber. all other possible effects like difficulties in harvesting due to the increase precipitation and the increased amount of wetlands as well as the decreasing period of time with frozen ground are not directly included in the model described in the methodological chapter. the vulnerabilities and impacts summarised in tables 1 and 2 are includ23240_1_lundmark.indd 84 12.6.2006 11:02:58 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 85forest-related employment in the european north: current… table 1. overall vulnerabilities in forestry and forest related economy. source: adapted from layton 2000. location-specific characteristics and processes global and national systems and processes • increasing efficiency in processing, harvesting and production, decreasing employment • growing efficiency in harvesting, processing and production, causing increasing competition and decreasing employment • management structures that cannot act to ensure the sustainability of the forest holdings • a slow economic growth in europe at large will decrease the demand • protection of the environment in the form of nature reserves and the like causes loss of economic potential and few chances to increase employment • developing countries will enter the market causing further competition • cash-flow problems of the existing enterprises • political instability making it difficult for domestic enterprises to import raw material • enterprise structure such as smaller companies with less potential to invest money in innovation and sustainability • due to the size of the industry in north america serious problems arise when there is a recession there. this is because they dump their over-production in europe and elsewhere, causing closures of paper and pulp mills table 2. climate change impacts on forestry and forest-related activities. source: adapted from layton 2000. effect on forest natural system effect on forest-related activities • an increase in the size of wetlands will limit the tree growth and will damage already existing stock • decreasing quality or quantity of infrastructure • precipitation is expected to increase, causing disruption of the existing transport network • other tree species will appear causing changes in production technologies in the sawmilling and wood processing industries • the sawmilling industry will be affected the most, because of the lower quality of timber, in comparison to the pulp and paper industries that will receive enough raw material • seasonal disruptions within infrastructure, i.e. the condition of forest roads, force timber producers to harvest during a limited period, thereby hindering the “just-in-time” production systems • increased silvicultural costs to keep good quality timber ed in the concepts of productivity increase mean, production value and reinvestment. the development of new commodities based on forest resources has enabled forest regions to survive the decline in demand on products. this ability to adapt, has upheld the continuity of development and modernisation in northern sweden and finland (layton 2000; layton & pashkevich 2003). the productivity increase is an indicator for technological developments, quality of physical infrastructure and communication networks and other productivity increasing measures. the value of forest raw material and forest-based products is dependent on the demand, the cost of producing it, and the competition from other regions. if there were to be increased competition or decreased quality, the production value would change. an increased cost due to silvicultural activities, maintaining sustainable forestry and ecological diversity, is an example of that. changes in the environment also have an impact on productivity and property values and might entail greater financial risks for investors. for instance, stakeholders will be reluctant to invest in areas where climate change is expected to have a negative influence on the return of investments. international relations between stakeholders and between nations vary. this point brings the question of the larger perspective into focus. the global context in terms of competition and possibilities of supply and demand is an important factor to include in a discussion. the demand and price level on the timber is not determined exclusively within a region but is dependent on factors external to the area itself. furthermore, stakeholders are not always rooted in the area where they operate, giving less incentive for investors because of the lack of local commitment (lehtinen 2001). infrastructure is important for the delivery of timber to pulp and paper industries and sawmills. if 23240_1_lundmark.indd 85 12.6.2006 11:02:58 86 fennia 183: 2 (2005)linda lundmark the infrastructure is inoperable, destroyed or undermined by climate, the stakeholders are less motivated to invest in forest and forest sectors because new roads have to be built. materials and methods as this study focuses on socioeconomic changes over the coming 50 years, the methodology is also based on futures studies. although there are many ways to study the future, there are nevertheless three main categories that may be identified: there are forecast methods, scenario building and expert based studies. the forecast often involve simulation, or modeling of the future based on historical evidence thus projecting a future trend. the assumption is that there is a causal relationship between the underlying factors of such change, and that these factors can be altered in order to see how certain modifications affect future processes. the difference between scenario building and expert based studies is mainly that the latter explicitly asks experts to comment on what they think is likely to happen in the future while the former draws on research results to give examples of alternative outcomes of, in this case, climate change. thus, a scenario is “…a coherent, internally consistent, and plausible description of a possible future state of the world. scenarios commonly are required in climate change impact, adaptation, and vulnerability assessments to provide alternative views of future conditions considered likely to influence a given system or activity” (mccarthy et al. 2001: 147). in this paper both the forecast/trend method and the scenario method is applied. multiplier models and employment a modified multiplier model is applied to estimate the size of the forest-related employment and a model is developed to forecast a possible forestrelated employment development by using forest growth rates based on different climate change scenarios. the model output is thus an estimated number of people that are directly employed in forestry and the forest sectors as well as the additional number of employed, which comes about through the investments from these in a region. the models most frequently employed are basic/non basic, input-output and keynesian multiplier models. simplistically speaking the basic/non basic method, also called export base theory or multiplier, is concerned with two sectors: the export base sector and the residentiary sector (dicken & lloyd 1990) and is therefore much coarser in resolution than the input-output multiplier alternative. the latter is much more accurate provided that the data needed is possible to obtain and that it is of good quality (harris 1997; lindgren et al. 2000). these methods all have in common that they can be used to approximate the total employment effects of a sector in a defined geographical area. in research on employment multipliers, employment has been categorized as direct, indirect and induced (arpi & nyberg 1978; dicken & lloyd 1990; laws 1995; bull 1997; harris 1997; lindgren et al. 2000). direct employment is resulting from the production of final products in forestry or forest sector activities. the indirect employment is generated through the purchase of intermediate goods and services in related sectors such as marketing and transportation inputs (theophile 1996; hodges et al. 2004). finally the induced employment is employment resulting from the effects of the forest sector multiplier via increasing incomes and thus consumption. the multiplier effects of a leading export sector such as forestry and the forest industries are naturally of great socioeconomic importance in regions that are strongly dependent economically on such activities; hence regional and local specialisation must be regarded as being exceptionally sensitive and vulnerable to external changes affecting demand and production. on the other hand, high specialisation can also be an advantage if the enterprises are strong or dominating in their product segment, thus being less vulnerable than if operating in a segment with many serious competitors. one study of forest multiplier effects estimates that for every 10 jobs in forestry and the forest industry sectors, 8 jobs are created elsewhere in the economy (contreras-hermosilla & gregersen 1991). however, this multiplier of 1.8 is a global estimation and the same multiplier is not applicable everywhere. geography also matters and each activity, in each community at any given time will affect the multiplier. this is a point, which has been shown by for example lindgren et al. (2000). they investigated the multiplier effects of the forest industries on service sector economy using a keynesian multiplier method. they concluded in their analysis of four municipalities in northern sweden that the multiplier for forest-related activities is approximately 1.5, but that it varies slightly between municipalities. 23240_1_lundmark.indd 86 12.6.2006 11:02:58 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 87forest-related employment in the european north: current… arpi and nyberg (1978) calculated the multiplier as a function of population in swedish municipalities. according to their estimation, the general multiplier in small municipalities (under 10 000 inhabitants) is 1.2. the multiplier is 1.35 for municipalities with between 10,001 and 50,000, and finally they establish a multiplier of 1.5 for municipalities with 50,001–100,000 inhabitants. beyond that, the multiplier will most likely come close to the 2.0 mark. based on the findings by lindgren et al. (2000) where the multiplier was estimated to about 1.63 and because of the low population density, a multiplier of 1.65 is chosen in the trend baseline and scenarios. the model and its constituent parts a model has been developed in order to estimate the number of employed in forest-related sectors and activities (for an overview of original values and annual change in the baseline trend scenario, please consult the appendix). the model result shows the development of the forest-related employment. the product of the equation is thus a number of employed (e t ), including employment created directly or indirectly by forestry or forest sectors and those employed as a result of those two. e t =((s wag *e prod )+r inv )*m/a wag the local economic input by forest-based industries and forestry, the multiplicand, is estimated by using the amount of money reinvested and the amount of money that is circulated locally [((s wag *e prod )+r inv )]. sum of wages (s wag ) in the region corresponding to forestry and forest sector activities are estimated. the wages are assumed to have a local effect because of the size of the areas studied, although it is inevitable that some of the earnings will be spent elsewhere. the average annual productivity increase mean is measured and included in the model (e prod ). due to the productivity increase mean, an employment increase is unlikely. to incorporate this development in the model the change in number of active in forest-related employment is introduced as a percentage of the sum of wages. in this way, the technological and infrastructural developments also are considered, along with other measures taken to make the production more efficient and effective. reinvestments (r inv ) have been estimated as the percentage of the production value that is reinvested in the region. the rest can be considered leakage (lindgren 1997). in order for the change in the annual increment to be incorporated in the model, the production value is based on the amount of harvesting that is probable to occur. the felling follows the past development, which means that the felling is a share of the annual increment and that this increment will differ depending on the climate in the future. since the production value is imperative for the amount of money reinvested in the regions the annual increment increase is incorporated in the model. the production value in the industries has been projected as a trend into the future and is not dependent on the price development as is the forestry. the multiplier (m) is based on the number of people living in the area, which means that it will change when the population development reaches certain thresholds defined by arpi and nyberg (1978). average wages (awag) in the regions are included as is the average annual change. by dividing the calculated sum of money by the average wages in the region, a number of employed is obtained. this is the estimated total that can be supported (fulltime) directly or indirectly by forestry, forest sectors and forest-related activities in a region. in the model the competition on the world market is assumed to be proportionately the same. in the case of projected price changes and decreased reinvestments in the areas, it could be argued that this will occur if the market changes due the changes proposed in tables 1 and 2. globally, the demand on forest products is expected to increase slightly in the future due to population growth and increasing living standards in many parts of the world (whiteman et al. 1999). it is not, however, expected to be a deficiency in the supply. one explanation for this has to do with the amount of forest harvested. in sweden only around 80% of the annual increment is harvested, while this figure is 75% in finland. the possible entrance of a new strong supplier, like russia, would entail market changes in the case study areas. however, adaptations and changes could be made in lappi and norrbotten with regards to diversification of the products, moving towards for example bio fuel production and development as well as tourism causing other supply/demand dynamics. as such, the model is supply oriented, albeit depending on how the simulation assumptions are made, the demand is also included in the price and the reinvestment variables. an integrated model solution 23240_1_lundmark.indd 87 12.6.2006 11:02:58 88 fennia 183: 2 (2005)linda lundmark can help evaluating effects on one area if the conditions would change in the other. however, with respect to developments affecting the other area it can also be done through direct manipulation of model inputs manually. this method has been chosen to facilitate the interpretation of the output. in the model a linear relationship in all the variables is assumed and it is therefore static in character. however, it allows for a possible trend to unfold for the future, introducing interesting results as a starting point for discussion. it is thus a method to quantify the possible impacts of climate change in terms of employment, and to simulate potential socioeconomic scenarios. climate change and forest growth with increasing temperatures and longer growth periods the amount of timber available in the future will increase. the effect of climate change on forest growth has been addressed in many studies (schenk 1996; hogg & schwarz 1997; price et al. 1999a, 1999b; lasch et al. 2002, to mention a few). the warming tendencies has been greatest over mid-latitude northern continents in the latter part of the twentieth century (sweden’s… 2001), and the annual mean temperature in sweden is expected to rise by 4°c with a greater increase in winter than in summer. according to the sweclim (the swedish regional climate modelling programme) model scenario the forest growth will increase and therefore the conditions for forestry as well as for agriculture will be better in the century to come (sweden’s… 2001). using the examples of rovaniemi in northern finland and tampere in southern finland, kellomäki and väisänen (1997) concluded that in the event of climate change the total stem volume will increase. talkkari et al. (1999) estimated this increase using three different scenarios both during current climate conditions and with a changing climate on three different sites in finland. according to the different scenarios the stand volume increase would be 7.3%, 9.1% and 22% greater than the development under current conditions in the northern parts of finland. in comparison to the current climate scenario the stem wood production increase is 9.1%, 12.5% and 28.5% for the computed scenarios. departing from these figures the schematic growth rate increases of 7% and 15% for the period 2001–2050 have been chosen in this paper. however, it is worth noting that the time period considered here will show rather small differences in the growth scenarios due to the relatively short time frame. forest growth can be attributed to many environmental conditions, processes and societal factors. this paper only covers the growth attributed to a few of those, namely climate change, forest management and level of logging. thus, the increased possibility of hazards like forest fires, extended flooding or pests has not been directly considered in this paper. model results in the following paragraph the results of the model presented in the previous section is offered. as stated earlier, one important variable in the model is the population development (fig. 3). following the trend to the year 2050 it is clear that the population will decrease in both areas and that the decrease will slow down at the end of the period studied. the baseline forecast assumes that the regional employment will not be affected by climate change, producing a future trend based on current growth and logging conditions. alternative climate change scenarios are based on highest and lowest temperature increase estimations, representing an annual increment increase of 7% and 15%. although lappi has a smaller population than norrbotten at present, there are almost twice as many people involved in forest-related employment (table 3, fig. 3). an explanation for this could be the rapid modernisation and rationalisation of forestry and the forest sectors in sweden during 0 50000 100000 150000 200000 250000 300000 19 80 19 85 19 90 19 95 20 00 20 05 20 10 20 15 20 20 20 25 20 30 20 35 20 40 20 45 20 50 lappi norrbotten fig. 3. population development from 1980 to 2050. source: statistics sweden 2005 and lapin liitto 2005 to recent date, on which the trend line is based. 23240_1_lundmark.indd 88 12.6.2006 11:02:59 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 89forest-related employment in the european north: current… the 1980s and 1990s, a development currently under way in finland. due to other socioeconomic developments like labour costs and production value a different development is seen in lappi than in norrbotten. labour market changes in all forest-related activities following a development trend derived directly from past experiences would mean that the number of employed is decreasing in all three scenarios according to the model results (table 3). the level of forest-related employment in 2001 is higher in lappi than in norrbotten. for the 2020 point in time there is not much difference between the three growth scenarios. however, there is a marked negative change in the number of employed both in lappi and in norrbotten. the negative change is also present in the 2050 time slice. as expected the least negative change is predicted in the 15% growth increase trend, where the model suggest that around 3400 people work in forest-related labour markets or as a consequence of it in lappi. this equals a 73% decrease compared to 2001. in norrbotten this figure is around 4250 or a decrease of 35%. the difference between the two areas decreases. however, at the end of the period lappi has just around 1000 less employed than norrbotten, although the number of employed in lappi was considerably higher at the onset of the simulation. to put these figures in perspective of the total development in the areas, the employment development in forest-related employment is related to the population development (fig. 4). put together, this illustrates another development. the share of the population working directly or indirectly as a result of forestry or forest-based industries has increased in norrbotten from 2.5% to around 5.2%. in lappi the development is negative, going from more than 6.5% down to under 5%. this development is due to the less negative population development in lappi. because of the small variation between the different annual increment scenarios the presentation of results hereafter will concentrate around the baseline scenarios. the population development is part of the model as the multiplier is based on the number of inhabitants in each area. to test the sensitivity of the model to the size of the multiplier (and indirectly the population) the multiplier was set to 1.5 (instead of 1.65 when the population exceeds 100,000) throughout the period and in both areas, following the result from lindgren et al. (2000) (table 4 c2, table 5 c2). the original number of employed in 2001 was around 500 persons higher when m = 1.65, than in the m = 1.5 simulation. at the end of the period this difference is just around 50 persons. this result suggests that the model in table 3. the results of the simulations of employment; the number of employees in forest-related activities. norrbotten lappi increment increase in wood supply increment increase in wood supply baseline 7% 15% baseline 7% 15% 2001 6497 12,497 2020 4550 4562 4577 7432 7440 7450 2050 4112 4171 4244 3352 3384 3423 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 5.5 6.0 6.5 20 05 20 10 20 15 20 20 20 25 20 30 20 35 20 40 20 45 20 50 year % lappi norrbotten fig. 4. share of forest-related employment in the base line scenario. note: the trend breaks are caused by a multiplier change due to the population trend reaching a threshold. the change in the size of the multiplier was from 1.65 to 1.50. source: regarding population development, statistics sweden 2005 and lapin liitto 2005. 23240_1_lundmark.indd 89 12.6.2006 11:02:59 90 fennia 183: 2 (2005)linda lundmark not sensitive of changes in the multiplier in the long run and therefore not particularly sensitive to a population trend that is overestimating or underestimating the population development. the mean productivity increase was high in the trend scenario both in sweden and finland because of the past rapid technological development and increasing effectiveness and efficiency of the production. although the productivity increase is assumed to continue in the base line scenario, there is reason to believe that it will slow down in the future. this is mainly because the industry still needs some people to manage the forest and the machinery, and much has been rationalized already. the increased productivity is also hampered by introducing new products and the manufacturing of these. to test what impact a lower mean productivity increase would have, a test run was made applying a 2% mean productivity increase instead (table 4 c3, table 5 c3). as anticipated the results show that this factor has a large impact on the employment predictions in the model. for lappi a lower productivity increase means that the decrease of employment would be less radical than in the trend line scenario. instead of a 73% decrease there would be a decrease of 43% over the period. this is almost twice as many employed as in the trend line scenario. in norrbotten it means that instead of a 35% decrease, a 23% decrease in the forest-related labour market is to be expected. since the forestry and forest related activities have gone from being highly dependent on labour for production to today being a capital intensive, efficient and modern industry, the productivity of each worker is much higher. therefore the increase in annual increment does not have such an effect on the number of employed, especially since it is assumed that this productivity increase per person also will continue in the future. the investment strategies of the industry will be adjusted in the future. this is due to both climate change and other developments in economy and politics. if investors should hesitate to invest in the areas because of lower return on the investments it is interesting to see the consequences of that in the model. this is done by lowering the inflow of capital to the areas by simulating a reinvestment of 3% of the production value instead of 5% (table 4 c4, table 5 c4). in terms of employment it would mean a lot to both areas. in norrbotten the model table 4. summary of the base line results in norrbotten; the number of employees in the forest-related activities. note: in c2 the multiplier is assumed to be 1.5 already in 2001. trend baseline scenarios c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 baseline multiplier = 1.5 from 2001 mean prod. increase = 2% from 2002 reinvestment of 3% from 2002 90% of increment from 2020 annual price development changes of 1% from 2002 2001 6497 5907 6497 6497 6497 6497 2020 4550 4562 4577 3859 3887 3849 2050 4112 4171 4244 3230 3285 2867 table 5. summary of the base line results in lappi; the number of employees in the forest-related activities. note: in c2 the multiplier is assumed to be 1.5 already in 2001. trend baseline scenarios c1 c2 c3 c4 c5 c6 c7 baseline multiplier = 1.5 from 2001 mean prod. increase = 2% from 2002 reinvestment of 3% from 2002 80% of increment from 2002 80% of increment 2002– 2040 then 90% annual price development changes of 1% from 2002 2001 12,497 11,361 12,497 12,497 12,497 12,497 12,497 2020 7432 7440 10,204 6517 7451 7451 7451 2050 3352 3384 7069 2707 3384 3454 3454 23240_1_lundmark.indd 90 12.6.2006 11:02:59 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 91forest-related employment in the european north: current… predicts about 1000 less jobs and in lappi around 600 less jobs in 2050, compared to the trend line scenario. the difference is large for the 2020 time slice as well with 700 less in norrbotten and almost 900 less in lapland. there is also a possibility that the amount of harvested raw material in the areas will change. the current development in both areas suggests that the standing stock will increase in the future because far from all the forest growth is harvested (myllyntaus & mattila 2002). during recent decades, wood harvests have been relatively constant, although global population and incomes have increased (ece/fao 2006). this means that the consumption of wood globally has been relatively stable for a long period (solberg et al. 1996). however, testing the development trend for different harvest rate scenarios shows that the harvest rate has a limited effect on employment (table 4 c5, table 5 c5, c6) compared to the trend line scenario. the same result appears when the harvest rate in lappi is changed. the sensitivity of the forest-related sectors to fluctuations on the world market has also been tested. from the results it may be concluded that price developments are important for the total number of employed in these sectors. the analysis shows that the employment is 25% less in norrbotten at a price development of 1% instead of 3.65% as in the trend (table 4 c6, table 5 c7). for lappi the difference is around 10%. a summary of baseline trends and scenarios in norrbotten shows that it is the price development scenario of 1% that has the most negative effect on the employment in comparison to other scenarios elaborated on here. instead of a 37% decrease in employment, there is a 56% decrease in the scenario compared to the trend line scenario. in lappi it is the lower reinvestment scenario that has the largest employment impact. compared to the least negative development, observed in the mean productivity increase scenario, the difference is over 4000 employed. discussion in terms of regional development, employment change and vulnerability, the model predictions suggest that both norrbotten and lappi will have fewer people employed in forestry, the forest sectors and forest-related activities despite an increase in the annual increment. analysis shows that an increased level of harvesting will increase employment, but only to a limited degree. from the beginning of the study period, lappi has got a higher proportion of employed in the forest-related employment than norrbotten, indicating a higher dependence on forest-related activities. this difference is decreasing to be almost negligible at the end of the study period. this shows that lappi would go through more rapid changes during the period to come than norrbotten. vulnerability connected to one sector affects the rest of the community more if the dependence is high. a closer look at the proportion of total population engaged in forest-related employment shows that while in lappi the proportion is decreasing, it is increasing in norrbotten. this development is caused by the different trends in population development in the areas. investments can be affected by climate change because the investors believe that it affects the product and demand in a negative way (blennow & sallnäs 2002), either qualitatively or by disturbing the production chains. this in turn is caused by difficulties in harvesting, or the extra cost it entails to modify the industry to adjust to species changes for example (tables 1 and 2). some of these factors do not occur within the time frame considered here. the nature of the demand is also important for the forest-related employment in relation to investment strategies. the needs and wants from the customers in general might change so products high in demand today may be ‘out of fashion’ in the future. in reference to climate change impact this could affect the production so that some areas are not able to supply the products in demand. put together these processes determine how much capital there is to be invested in the areas. most likely is that investment changes come about through a structural change in the sector itself, for example closure of sawmills and paper and pulp mills in the case areas. legislative changes regarding forest management are a way for governments to counteract negative responses from stakeholders. there might also be a need of other special measures to counterbalance the negative effect of climate change to protect the production and to maintain the recreational value of the forest. climate change and related policies of silviculture and harvesting have impact on the location and size of industries (sawmills, paper and pulp mills) and where the felling takes place. the willingness of stakeholders to invest in forests, infrastructure and enterprises will be affected not only by laws 23240_1_lundmark.indd 91 12.6.2006 11:02:59 92 fennia 183: 2 (2005)linda lundmark and regulations, but also by quality and assortment changes in the raw material. changes in company investment strategies could have devastating impact on the forest-related labour market. the results of the model show that a decrease of reinvestments from 5% of the production value to 3% would be negative to employment. there are clear indications that the growth of forests will increase. according to solberg et al. (2003) this could have impacts on the supply and availability of round wood. an increase in supply often means a reduction of price. an increase of raw material supply at the local, regional or national level will reduce the need to import raw material since the demand is predicted to be stable (whiteman et al. 1999). the forestry is affected by climate change when spruce and pine biomass will be met by more competition from deciduous tree species. this either means that a management regime would include more silvicultural measures or that the management would be more directed towards other tree species than today. at present, forest rotation period is 80 to 100 years, and even if the changes would come quite abruptly or rapid they are not likely to affect the harvesting of neither mature forest, nor the processing industries during a period of around 50 years. an increase in biomass production has at least two implications on forest-related employment and especially the silvicultural aspects of it: firstly, it means that more work in terms of thinning will be needed in order to maintain good quality and to be able to harvest the stems easily and secondly; it will indirectly affect other businesses. in the former case, the increase biomass will affect both the price and competition situation, because stakeholders that invest more money will get better quality to harvest. the model results support the idea that the price level is important for a positive development of, or at least a less negative, employment development in forest-related sectors. the latter example is illustrated by the decreasing recreational value of the forest for tourism businesses for example. if the landscape is vegetated by overgrown and inaccessible unmanaged forests there will be little interest for recreation and tourism as well. this indicates that there are more stakeholders that should be interested in a positive development than the obvious ones directly linked to forestry. theophile (1996) point out that alternative, non-extracting, uses of forests like for example nature tourism, provide many jobs in a local economy. containing the economic impact within the local or regional economy is important because then the positive multipliers are benefiting the community from which the resource is extracted (hodges et al. 2004). however, the issue of leakage from the local economy is becoming a serious problem in the globalised reality of post-industrial society. one of the most important results from the model prediction is that there is only a slight difference between the different growth scenarios and this is true for all trends and socioeconomic scenarios presented here. this implies that an increase of the annual increment is not the most important factor that affects the forest-related employment in lappi and norrbotten, at least not in a perspective of less than 50 years. however, changes of this natural resource could have further implications for the forest-related employment in a longer time perspective. if the distribution of species suitable for the forest industry is differently dispersed geographically in the future, and if the quantity and quality of the timber assortment is changing this will alter the value of the growing stock, the raw material and the value of the land itself. for the forest industry complications will arise since in the long run spruce and pine biomass will go down and deciduous trees necessitate for the forest industries to adapt to this new assortment of raw material. at present, forests have a growth period of about 100 years, and even if the changes would come quite abruptly or rapid they are not likely to affect neither the harvesting, nor the processing industries during a period of less than 50 years. conclusions according to model predictions, both norrbotten and lappi will have a decreasing number of people in forest-related employment. this is happening despite a positive climate change effect on annual increment. as the title of the paper indicates the initial assumption was that the positive impact of climate change on annual increment in the forest would have positive effects on employment as well. this positive relationship has not been found to be significant. the development of the forestry and the related sectors has moved and is still moving towards a more capital intensive management. in general terms this means that the productivity rate of the each worker is so high that the increasing amount of harvestable forest does not involve employment of more people. with regard to climate change and increased annual increment it is 23240_1_lundmark.indd 92 12.6.2006 11:03:00 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 93forest-related employment in the european north: current… only a minor difference between the growth scenarios. because of different population development situations, lappi has a decreasing proportion of the population in forest-related activities while it is increasing in norrbotten. in this study the expected increase of extreme events and hazards has not been taken into account. however, it could be argued that the higher the share of the population involved in one single sector or part of the economy is, the more vulnerable the area is to climate related events or hazards. norrbotten has a higher dependence on forestry and forest-related activities in the future than does lappi, indicating that norrbotten is more sensitive, especially with regards to immediate or sudden forest-related sector changes in the future. acknowledgements the research in this article has been carried out within the eu funded project balance – global change vulnerabilities in the barents region: linking arctic natural resources, climate change and economies. the author would also like to thank urban lindgren at the department of social and economic geography, umeå university, sweden, as well as the referees for valuable comments. references adger n & pm kelly (1999). social vulnerability to climate change and the architecture of entitlements. migration and adaptation strategies for global change 4, 253–266. arpi g & l nyberg (1978). turismens regionala och lokala betydelse – undersökningar och undersökningsmetoder. forskningsrapport från kulturgeografiska institutionen, uppsala universitet, stencil 58. 69 p. blennow k & o sallnäs (2002). risk perception among non-industrial private forest owners. scandinavian journal of forest research 17, 472–479. bull c (1997). the economics of leisure sustainability. in foley m, jj lennon & ga maxwell (eds). hospitality, tourism and leisure management: issues in strategy and culture, 195–209. bookcraft ltd., london. contreras-hermosilla a & h gregersen (1991). largescale forest-based industrial development in developing countries. unasylva 167. <http://www. fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/u4200e/u4200e06.htm>. 12.12.2005. crowley tj (2000). causes of climate change over the past 1000 years. science 289, 270–277. dicken p & pe lloyd (1990). location in space. theoretical perspectives in economic geography. 3rd ed. 431 p. harpercollinspublishers, new york. ece/fao (2006). european timber trends and prospects: into the 21st century. un-ece geneva timber and forest study papers. chapter 6 supply and demand of forest products in market economies. <http://www.fao.org/wairdocs/x6829e/ x6829e08.htm>. 6.2.2006. finnish statistical yearbook of forestry (2003). 388 p. finnish forest research institute, helsinki. harris rid (1997). the impact of the university of portsmouth on the local economy. urban studies 34, 605–626. hodges a, d mulkey, e philippakos & j alavalapati (2004). economic impact of florida’s forest industries. <http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/body_fe282>. 6.2.2006. hogg eh & ag schwarz (1997). regeneration of planted conifers across climatic moisture gradients on the canadian prairies: implications or distribution and climate change. journal of biogeography 24, 527–534. houghton jt, y ding, dj griggs, m noguer, pj van der linden, x dai, k maskell & ca johnson (eds) (2001). climate change 2001: the scientific basis. contribution of working group l to the third assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. <http://www.grida.no/climate/ ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm>. 12.12.2005. jansson b-o & c-e stålvant (2001). the baltic basin case study: towards a sustainable baltic europe. continental shelf research 21, 1999–2019. kasperson jx & re kasperson (2001). international workshop on vulnerability and global environmental change. stockholm environment institute (sei). <http://www.sei.se/risk/workshop.html>. 12.12.2005. kellomäki s & h väisänen (1997). modelling the dynamics of the forest ecosystem for climate change studies. ecological modelling 97, 121–140. kelly pm & wn adger (2000). theory and practice in assessing vulnerability to climate change and facilitating adaptation. climatic change 47, 325– 352. kostov p & j lingard (2003). risk management: a general framework for rural development. journal of rural studies 19, 463–476. lapin liitto (2005). lapland by figures 2003. <http:// www.lapinliitto.fi/>. 20.12.2005. lasch p, m lindner, m erhard, f suckow & a wenzel (2002). regional impact assessment on forest structure and functions under climate change – the brandenburg case study. forest ecology and management 162, 73–86. laws e (1995). tourist destination management. issues, analysis, policies. 224 p. routledge, london. layton i (2000). trends and prospects within the forest sector in norrbotten and the arkhangelsk oblast. in axensten p & g weissglas (eds). nuclear 23240_1_lundmark.indd 93 12.6.2006 11:03:00 94 fennia 183: 2 (2005)linda lundmark risks, environment and development cooperation in the north of europe, proceedings of the apatity conference 19–23 june 1999. cerum, report 7/2000, 87–96. layton i & a pashkevich (2003). forest-sector case studies in the barents region. comparisons between the northern dvina and the pite river basins. gerum, working report 141. 141 p. lehtinen aa (2001). nordic forest communities, vulnerability and the question of environmental justice – a view from geography. in hytönen m (ed). social sustainability of forestry in northern europe: research and education: final report of the nordic research programme on social sustainability of forestry. temanord 2001: 575, 315–331. lindgren u (1997). local impacts of large investments. gerum, kulturgeografi 1997: 2. 199 p. lindgren u, ö pettersson, b jansson & h nilsagård (2000). skogsbruket i den lokala ekonomin. skogsstyrelsen report series 2000: 4. 119 p. mccarthy j, of canziani, na leary, dj dokken & ks white (eds) (2001). climate change 2001: impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. contribution of working group ll to the third assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. <http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg2/index.htm>. 12.12.2005. metzger m & d schröter (2004). concept for a spatially explicit and quantitative vulnerability assessment of europe. eva, working paper 6. 36 p. milankovitch m (1941). kanon der erdbestrahlungen und seine anwendung auf das eiszeitenproblem belgrade. 636 p. belgrade.636 p. belgrade.belgrade. myllyntaus t & t mattila (2002). decline or increase? the standing timber stock in finland, 1800–1997. ecological economics 41: 2, 271–288. national research council (ed) (2001). science and policy implications of abrupt climate change. 175 p. national academies press, washington. price dt, dh halliwell, mj apps & ch peng (1999a). adapting a patch model to simulate the sensitivity of central-canadian boreal ecosystems to climate variability. journal of biogeography 26, 1101– 1113. price dt, ch peng, mj apps & dh halliwell (1999b). simulating effects of climate change on boreal ecosystem carbon pools in central canada. journal of biogeography 26, 1237–1248. saastamoinen o (2001). economic and social factors in sustainable forestry. in hytönen m (ed). social sustainability of forestry in northern europe: research and education: final report of the nordic research programme on social sustainability of forestry. temanord 2001: 575, 295–313. schenk hj (1996). modeling the effects of temperature on growth and persistence of tree species: a critical review of tree population models. ecological modelling 92, 1–32. solberg b, d brooks, h pajuoja, tj peck & pa wardle (1996). long-term trends and prospects in world supply and demand for wood and implications for sustainable forest management – a synthesis. in solberg b (ed). long-term trends and prospects in world supply and demand for wood and implications for sustainable forest management. efi, research report 6, 7–42. solberg b, a moiseyev & ami kallio (2003). economic impacts of accelerating forest growth in europe. forest policy and economics 5, 157–171. statistics sweden, scb (2005). statistic database. <http://www.scb.se>. 12.12.2005. sweden’s third national communication on climate change (2001). ds 2001:71. 285 p. ministry of the environment, stockholm. swedish statistical yearbook of forestry (1992). sveriges officiella statistik. 321 p. skogsstyrelsen, jönköping. swedish statistical yearbook of forestry (1994). sveriges officiella statistik. 353 p. skogsstyrelsen, jönköping. swedish statistical yearbook of forestry (2003). sveriges officiella statistik. 345 p. skogsstyrelsen, jönköping. talkkari a, s kellomäki & h peltola (1999). bridgingbridging a gap between a gap model and a physiological model for calculating the effect of temperature on forest growth under boreal conditions. forest ecology and management 119, 137–150. theophile k (1996). forests and employment. unasylva 47: 4, 44–48. turner bl, re kasperson, pa matson, jj mccarthy, rw corell, jx kasperson, l christensen, n eckley, a luers, ml martello, a polsky, c pulsipher & a schiller (2003a). a framework for vulnerability analysis in sustainability science. pnas 100: 14, 8074–8079. turner bl, pa matson, jj mccarthy, rw corell, l christensen, n eckley, gk hovelsrud-broda, jx kasperson, re kasperson, a luers, ml martello, s mathiesen, r naylor, a polsky, c pulsipher, a schiller, h selin & n tyler (2003b). illustrating the coupled human–environment system for vulnerability analysis: three case studies. pnas 100: 14, 8080–8085. tykkyläinen m, p hyttinen & a mononen (1997). theories of regional development and their relevance to the forest sector. silva fennica 31: 4, 447–459. whiteman a, c brown & g bull (1999). the outlook for forest product markets to 2010 and the implications for improving management of the global forest estate. 141 p. fao working report forestry policy and planning division, rome. yohe g, m jacobsen & t gapotchenko (1999). spanning “not-implausible” futures to assess relative vulnerability to climate change and climate variability. global environmental change 9, 233– 249. yohe g & rsj tol (2002). indicators for social and economic coping capacity – moving toward a working definition of adaptive capacity. global environmental change 12, 25–40. 23240_1_lundmark.indd 94 12.6.2006 11:03:00 fennia 183: 2 (2005) 95forest-related employment in the european north: current… a p p en d ix 1 . o ri gi n al v al u es a n d a n n u al c h an ge i n t h e b as el in e tr en d s ce n ar io . n o rr b o tt en la p p i o ri gi n al v al u e 2 0 0 1 a n n u al c h an ge o ri gi n al v al u e 2 0 0 1 a n n u al c h an ge p ri ce p er m 3 ( m ea n ) 3 1 2 ( se k ) 4 .5 0 % 3 1 .0 5 ( eu r o ) 3 .6 0 % p ro d u ct iv it y in cr ea se m ea n 0 .9 6 0 .9 6 a ve ra ge w ag es ( in cl u d es s o ci al f ee s) 4 5 6 ,0 0 0 2 .5 0 % 4 5 ,1 0 3 2 .4 0 % su m o f w ag es 1 ,3 9 3 ,4 4 9 ,3 5 5 3 .5 6 % 2 6 3 ,1 1 3 ,4 7 1 3 .5 6 % p ro d u ct io n v al u e in d u st ry 6 ,4 2 1 ,8 9 5 ,9 4 4 2 .9 0 % 1 ,4 8 4 ,4 0 0 ,0 0 0 0 .7 0 % p ro d u ct io n v al u e fo re st ry 1 ,6 2 1 ,9 3 8 ,0 2 2 h ar ve st x p ri ce * 8 5 ,3 3 4 ,0 0 0 h ar ve st x p ri ce * a n n u al i n cr em en t (m 3 ) 6 ,3 5 0 ,5 0 0 0 .6 1 4 ,9 7 2 ,0 0 0 0 .9 h ar ve st ( m 3 ) 5 ,1 9 8 ,5 1 9 .3 a n n u al i n cr em en t x h ar ve st r at e* * 3 ,7 5 3 ,8 6 0 a n n u al i n cr em en t x h ar ve st r at e* * po p u la ti o n 2 5 5 ,4 8 6 0 .9 7 1 1 8 9 ,2 8 8 0 .9 7 9 h ar ve st r at e 8 1 .8 6 % 7 5 .5 0 % so u rc e: s w ed is h s ta ti st ic al y ea rb o o k o f f o re st ry 1 9 9 2 , 1 9 9 4 , 2 0 0 3 a n d f in n is h s ta ti st ic al y ea rb o o k o f f o re st ry 2 0 0 3 . p o p u la ti o n d ev el o p m en t a n d a ve ra ge w ag es c o m e fr o m st at is ti cs s w ed en 2 0 0 5 a n d l ap in l ii tt o 2 0 0 5 . *p ro d u ct io n v al u e in f o re st ry i s a re su lt f ro m m u lt ip ly in g th e p ri ce a n d t h e h ar ve st ed a m o u n t. p ro d u ct io n v al u e in t h e in d u st ry f o r 2 0 0 1 : t h e p ro d u ct io n c ap ac it y o f th e in d u st ri es w as m u lt ip li ed w it h t h e av er ag e p ri ce f o r th e p ro d u ct s p ro d u ce d , o b ta in ed f ro m a b o ve m en ti o n ed o ffi ci al s ta ti st ic s. ** th e h ar ve st i s ca lc u la te d a s a p er ce n ta ge o f th e an n u al i n cr em en t in t h e fo re st . 23240_1_lundmark.indd 95 12.6.2006 11:03:00 23240_1_lundmark.indd 96 12.6.2006 11:03:00 mapping the forbidden gunnar olsson olsson, gunnar (2010). mapping the forbidden. fennia 188: 1, pp. 3–10. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. mapping the forbidden is in itself forbidden. and in my understanding the most forbidden of everything forbidden is that which refuses to be categorized, that which is neither this nor that, ungraspable forces which do not sit still but hop capriciously about. aristotle consequently knew what he did, when he between the two concepts of identity and difference inserted a third position called “the excluded middle”, a non-bridgeable gap which in the same figure unites and separates, liberates and imprisons; an unruly space located beyond the realm of conventional reason; a no man’s land of liminality which the well behaved must never enter. but aristotle also argued that what one cannot do perfectly, one must do as well as one can. gunnar olsson, uppsala universitet, kulturgeografiska institutionen, box 513, s-751 20 uppsala, sweden, e-mail: gunnar.olsson@kultgeog.uu.se. one reason why the forbidden remains forbidden is that it is one with the taboo, a concept which is etymologically connected not merely with the terms “under prohibition” and “not allowed”, but with the words “sacred” and “holy” as well. what is taboo is consequently doubly tied first to the forbidden itself then to the strongest form of the taken-for-granted, i.e. to those aspects of the unconscious which are crucial enough to be blessed by the gods themselves, by definition beyond reach. as one siren sings come, another blares danger. but why should i devote my professional life to issues which are not important enough to be taboo? how could i possibly stop wondering about how i understand how i understand? these are the questions with which i grappled also in my latest, perhaps last, book, a minimalist piece called abysmal: a critique of cartographic reason (olsson 2007). and let it now be known that that title was carefully chosen, for the noun “abyss” is synonymous with the terms “deep gorge” or “bottomless chasm”, the rift which cuts through the landscape of understanding, one set of categories placed here, another set there. as in the book itself i would now like first to descend into this canyon and then ascend again from the depths with a map of what i have found. a dangerous expedition indeed, because the abyss is not merely one with aristotle’s excluded middle but the very home of power itself. and so strong are the socialization forces built into ordinary language that the adjective “abysmal” tells the potential trespassers how they should feel if they try to break into that palace off limits: abysmal! horribly bad! for these reasons of power and socialization i am once again reminded of enuma elish, the babylonian tale of how the god marduk gained and retained his elevated position as the lord of lords. the premise of this oldest creation epic extant is that in the beginning of the beginning nothing has yet been formed, because in the beginning of the beginning nothing has yet been named. all that there is are the spatial coordinates of above and below, cardinal positions waiting to be inundated by the fluids of masculine apsu and feminine tiamat, the former sweet, the latter bitter. and as if to underline the spatiality of its own structure, the term apsu literally means “abyss” and “outermost limit”, by linguistic coincidence connected also to “the great deep”, “the primal chaos”, “the bowels of earth”, “the infernal pit”. a perfect example of proper name and definite description merged into one. eventually there is a tremendous power struggle and sweet apsu is killed by ea, the most outstanding of his offspring. on top of the corpse, i.e. across the abyss, ea then builds a splendid palace urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2672 4 fennia 188: 1 (2010)gunnar olsson for himself and his wife damkina. there, in the chamber of destinies, their son marduk is conceived, the most awesome being ever to be (dalley 1989: 235): impossible to understand, too difficult to perceive. four were his eyes, four were his ears; when his lips moved, fire blazed forth. the four ears were enormous. and likewise his eyes; they perceived everything. marduk’s weapons are numerous, but most decisive is the magic net in which he goes to capture the recalcitrant tiamat and the four winds by which he eventually blows her up. when it is finally over, marduk, great lord of the universe, “crossed the sky to survey the infinite distance; he stationed himself in the apsu, that apsu built by [ea] over the old abyss which he now surveyed, measuring out and marking in” (sandars 1971: 92, emphasis by the author). no longer dressed in the warrior’s coat of mail but in the uniform of a land surveyor, he then proceeds first to the construction of a celestial globe and finally to the creation of a primeval man, the prototype of you and me, a creature explicitly designed to serve as slaves of the ruler’s vassals, three hundred stationed as watchers of heaven, an equal number as guardians of the earth. not an invention formed in the image of the almighty, though, but a savaged concoction stirred together from the blood of the slaughtered kingu, tiamat’s lover and commander in chief. mankind a dish of boudins à la mésopotamie. nothing like a perfect copy of the perfect original, merely a black sausage. and as a way of guarding his ambiguity he gave to himself a total of fifty names. throughout these events the abyss remains the power center par excellence, the broken clay tablets of enuma elish the ultimate proof of the babylonians’ insights into the secret workings of human thought-and-action. and therein lies in my mind the real reason for keeping the abysmal gap between categories taboo, for it is in the ontological transformations of the excluded middle that the magicians of power are performing their tricks. hence it is only by entering that forbidden space of imagination that the analyst can ever hope to understand how the absent is made present, the present made absent. the connections between presence and absence are vividly expressed also by the figure of janus, my own favorite among gods. what intrigues me with this pivotal symbol of gate-keeping is less that he is equipped with a body that makes him see in opposite directions at the same time, more that he has a mind which allows him to merge seemingly contradictory categories into one meaningful whole. from his watchtower at the middle of the bridge he is consequently in a position to keep both sides of the abyss under constant surveillance, in the same glance catching a glimpse of the pasts that once were and of the futures that have yet to come. given the greek fear of the void – itself well expressed by the concept of the excluded middle – it is not surprising that janus was invented in rome and not in athens. in the lands surrounding the mare nostrum, though, he was everywhere to be seen, for not only was his image stamped on practically every coin, but in religious prayers this janitor of janitors was the first to be mentioned and in cultural rituals this son of january was equated with the beginning of all beginnings. diana was his godly consort, a connection which explains why the doors of his temple stayed open in times of war and why they were shut in times of peace. like ordinary lovers, gods need their privacy too. janus’s main concerns were one with my own: creativity, power, socialization. defiantly i therefore pray again (olsson 1991: 16): oh janus! help me become a sinner. let me understand how you break definitions and thereby create. show me how you erase what others see as irresolvable paradoxes. teach me the equation of that third lens inside your head whereby contradictory images are transformed into coherent wholes. speak memory, speak! spreach, janus, spreach! and babel’s walls come mumbling down. accordingly, and throughout my scholarly and artistic life, i have been searching for a place inside janus’s head. from that zero-point of the excluded middle i have then tried to grapple with the taboos of limits, the sins of trespassing, the braiding of epistemology and ontology, the challenge of writing in such a way that the resulting text actually is what it is about. with the aim of understanding how janus stayed sane while ordinary people in similar situations of double bind go crazy, i have therefore tried to place him on the operation table, cut his skull open, lay his brain bare, investigate how his mind is wired. why and how, for instance, did the romans elevate this categorical juggler to godly status, when we, their descendants, diagnose his counterparts as schizophrenic madmen? fennia 188: 1 (2010) 5mapping the forbidden why did they afford him a special place in their pantheon, while we isolate his likes in the soundproofed cells of the asylum? perhaps the reason is that without distinctions our thoughts-and-actions would have nothing to stick to, our lives nothing to share. such vacuities are in fact the norm in the realm of psychosis, that literally unthinkable province where there are no initiation rites, no scars, no individuals, hence no society either. and this emptiness may well explain why the deeply psychotic is so frightening, because the deeply psychotic lives outside the laws of thought, an inhabitant of the excluded middle, an alien beyond both identity and difference. a non-mappable world without fix-points, scales and projection screens – a cartographer’s nightmare. lest it be thought that my understanding of the void is too closely tied to the abrahamitic world, i now recall a stunning visit to the city of kandy, once capital of the sinhalese kingdom which in 1815 was annexed by the british and made a part of colonial ceylon1. there the high priest of the temple – the shrine which among other relics houses the tooth of buddha, historically the national symbol – granted me and my wife a rare audience. not just any audience, though, but a visit to the holiest of the holy, a small room on the upper floor with an altar bestrewn with jasmine flowers and the sacred tooth enshrined in a casket of gold. before entering this forbidden place, we were most carefully instructed how to behave, especially not to step on the threshold, the barrier that separates the commoners in an antechamber and the higher classes in a middle room, on the one side, from the inner sanctum with the king, his closest ministers and the water-increasing official, on the other. a wonderful illustration of how the excluded middle can be materialized in an untouchable janitor. the mind boggles as it encounters the walls of babel, kreml and berlin in yet another setting, the hierarchical structure of the three chambers of the temple highly reminiscent of the narthex, nave and sanctuary of the orthodox church, the kandyan threshold effectively serving the same exclusionary functions as the russian iconostasis. most revealing is nevertheless the story that before king vimaladharmsuriya i in 1592 entered the same room as we did in december 2007, he kneeled and put his forehead on the polished threshold. the stamp of power in the place of power, the mark of cain in a buddhist context, a clear warning that anyone who sets foot on the threshold is trampling not on a material object but on power itself. this circumstance, rather than the greek fear of the void, is in my analysis the real reason why the excluded middle is excluded. and as a way of protecting his own holiness from possible usurpers, the jewish lord put a mark on the restless wanderer so that no one who found him would kill him. in the same breath a blessing and a curse, yet another indication that it is in the nature of absolute power to violate every rule of behavior, to do exactly as it pleases. the reason is, of course, that in a norm system where both a and not-a are valid at the same time, everything is permitted. no wonder, therefore, that it is from a position in the excluded middle that the almighty rules, his words-and-deeds predictably unpredictable, his palace surrounded by a non-penetrable defense system, his propaganda machine everywhere to be heard and nowhere to be evaded. yet everything codified in the constitutional law of mose’s first stone tablet, in my heretic (hopefully not blasphemous) interpretation the most penetrating show of power and submission ever formulated. it is hard to imagine a more power-filled statement. the first stone tablet is nothing less than a socialization instrument that no one can escape, hated whip and enjoyable carrot in the same document. a rhetorical masterpiece firmly rooted in the concept of trust, a social glue which under the label pistis was foundational to aristotle as well; the common point is, of course, that without pistis there can be no communication and that holds regardless of whether the chosen language is that of money, poetry, logic, geometry or anything else. this in turn led aristotle to the insight that dialectics and rhetoric are the twin sisters of each other, just as it later led nietzsche to the conclusion that the two activities of logic and geometry are forms of rhetoric which after long use have become so credible that they have changed names and turned into categories of their own. it cannot be said more clearly: reasoning is a persuasive activity grounded in the tension between personal trust and social verification. in a very general sense it is this question of how we find our way in the unknown that lies at the heart of european culture, perhaps of all cultures. in erich auerbach’s influential analysis of mimesis it is located exactly in the taboo-ridden interface 6 fennia 188: 1 (2010)gunnar olsson between the certainties of odysseus’s scar and the ambiguities of abraham’s fear, you and i dangling in the abyss in-between (auerbach 1953). two modes of understanding, two modes of being, two ways of living which over the centuries have been condensed, purified and eventually codified, one in aristotle’s laws of thought, the other in the biblical formulation of the commandments, the latter not merely the ten that can be counted on the fingers (the holy bible, exod. 20: 3−17, deut. 5: 6−21), but a staggering total of six-hundred-andthirteen. the interpretations vary accordingly, even though it is generally agreed that the ten words of the decalogue may be divided into two groups such that the first three or four govern the relations between god and man (the constitutional law) and the rest regulate the relations between man and man (the civil and criminal law). in times of crisis it is the first tablet that tells the ruler how to rule and the subjects how to submit, and that is regardless of whether the potentate happens to be a machiavellian prince, a dictatorial führer, an elected prime minister, a concerned parent. it is hard to imagine a more power-filled statement, not the least because it is there that yhwh for the first time reveals his own name, an expression so closely related to the hebrew word for “to be”, hvh/hjh, that it is often translated as “the being”. as a way of further stressing its importance, it was this invisible entity itself, not one of its usual emissaries, who in the prologue let his subjects know that it was i who liberated you, i who let you out of the land of egypt, i who cut your chains. the implication is, of course, that since i have proven myself to be such an outstanding leader in the past, you are wise to trust me also in the future; accordingly, every incumbent assures the voters that they never had it so good, that they should read his lips and scrutinize his record. although you should prepare yourself for blood, sweat and tears, at the end of day there will be milk and honey. thus i decree, because i am who i am. such are the self-referential words of the law’s prologue. immediately following that naked piece of rhetoric comes the first paragraph of the constitutional law, a proposition as stunning now as when it was first uttered: i shall be your dictator! wherever this almighty happens to be – and by definition he is at the same time everywhere and nowhere – he shall rule over everyone and everything, like the surveying marduk measuring in and marking out, showing mercy to those who love him and killing those who hate him. the unknown genius who was the first to coin the phrase that there must be no power before (or according to some translations, “beside”) me, was certainly wise enough to realize that whoever declares that he shall be my supreme ruler leads a dangerous life. for that reason he proceeded to erect around the apsu palace a two-tier defense system consisting of both a wall and a moat, the former constructed as a ban on the (mis)use of metaphor, the latter as a rule against the creative associations of metonymy. the purpose of the second paragraph is consequently to ensure that the weapons gathered in the rhetorical arsenal will not fall into enemy hands, rephrased that any critique must be silenced before it is uttered. in that mood the jealous lord now declares that you shall for ever know your place, never commit the sins of trespassing, never question his authority. in particular you shall not possess the means for making of me a graven image, picture, statue or any other caricature, never use my name in vain or tie it to a definite description. the recent debacle about the danish mohammed pictures in its proper light (olsson 2006), for the graven image has always been the master key to idolatry and thereby to the doors of competing ideologies and potential usurpers. in the present context it is especially noteworthy that the hebrew term for “image” refers more to the dwelling place of the divine than to the pictorial representation of its invisible being (stamm & andrew 1967: 82). it follows that if you tell me where you are, i shall tell you what you are. yet, as soon as i attempt to make the invisible visible, i run the risk of falling into the trap of misplaced concreteness, of deifying the reified. but by outlawing the as-if, the untouchable guarantees that no news will ever issue from his subjects but exclusively from himself. it cannot be said more clearly: the second paragraph amounts to a devastating auto-da-fé, a combined prohibition against picture-making and story-telling, the two primary modes of translation, understanding and reasoned critique. even so, the declaration that i shall be your dictator is so outrageous that no censor will ever be strong enough to get it generally accepted. other socialization techniques must therefore be mobilized as well and that is indeed the purpose and function of the third paragraph. with that goal firmly in mind, the lawmaker therefore once again reminds the congregation that it was he who took them out of the land fennia 188: 1 (2010) 7mapping the forbidden of bondage, he who gave them the freedom that he himself is now set to take back. therefore, after all these ordeals, i hereby declare that you deserve a rest. however, this precious time you must not spend alone but always in the company of your likes. in the synagogue and the church, at the playgroup and the faculty meetings, the confirmations, funerals and family dinners – it is at these gatherings that my officials will instruct you how to think-and-act. the kantian thesis about the necessary unity of consciousness in another form, for you must always remember that you are nothing but a cog in my machinery. i am the spiritualized embodiment of your unconsciously taken-forgranted, the pivot of the world. and provided you honor your father and mother i shall grant you a long lease on the land that i give you. like the drip drip drip of the raindrops, when the summer shower’s through, so a voice within me keeps repeating you, you, you. and so it is that i read the commandment to keep the sabbath holy as the most crucial paragraph of the constitutional law, the ultimate guarantee that the power structure of monotheism will survive. and so it also is that aristotle’s laws of thought and mose’s laws of submission may be read as alternative maps of power, two codifications with the shared purpose of showing how in the same breath you can both tell the truth and be believed when you do so. it is difficult to imagine two formulations of greater historical significance, layers of meaning deeply embedded in the takenfor-granted, a palimpsest of the already but not yet. every map is a palimpsest, a product of imagination, that uniquely human faculty which assigns to the semiotic animal the privilege of making the absent present and the present absent. simsalabim and the vistas from elsewhere lie open in front of us, the image of a reality never seen before, a utopian no-where miraculously changed into an existing now-here, a shade of blue turned into an ocean, a line into a road, a dot into a city. by all accounts a most remarkable version of the incantation “let there be and there is,” an outstanding case of rhetoric performed on the high wire. no wonder, therefore, that in absolute regimes even the most innocuous map tends to be treated as a state secret, for just as no magician wants his tricks to be revealed, so every ruler guards his palace and masks his face. and that in turn explains why the biblical redactors let the lord say to moses (the holy bible, exod. 33: 19−23): “i will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and i will proclaim my name, my lord, in your presence. i will have mercy on whom i will have mercy, and i will have compassion on whom i will have compassion. but”, he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” then the lord said, “there is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. when my glory passes by, i will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until i have passed by. then i will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” what a remarkable passage, nothing less than an exhibition of power undressed, an image viewed from an abysmal cleft, a name spoken in an utterance of self-reference. even more remarkably, i here detect an allusion to the second paragraph of the constitutional law with its double ban on picture and story, the two modes of representation that lie at the heart of cartographic reason. no wonder that the surveyor of power leads such a dangerous life, for how can his analyses be trusted when the faceless phenomenon he sets out to capture is itself steeped in distrust. the liar’s paradox in a different context, for you can never tell in advance who in the early hours might be knocking on your door. and therein lies the profound difference between the social ethics of the first and the second stone tablet. for even though the concept of pistis permeates both documents, the form of trust which ties you and me together is mutual, the trust between the ruler and his subjects is at best (or is it at worst) one-sided; since the absolute is by definition self-referential, his name (if a name it is) cannot be translated into a definite description. it is highly fitting that the sign of the covenant that the lord makes with noah is a rainbow, a palette of fleeting colors in the clouds rather than a material object on the ground. even so, the doubters refuse to be silenced and that explains why abraham took the lord to task for not keeping his promises of many children and why job sued him for slandering, a court case never to be forgotten. in between is the story of jacob, one of the greatest crooks ever born, yet one of the richest rewarded (see miles 1995; olsson 2007, chapters “abr(ah)am” and “peniel”) . of the latter much can be said, but nothing more important than the fact that in the chronicles it was he who was the first to claim that he had seen god’s face and survived; in the eyes of the almighty the blasphemy of blasphemies, to the present analyst a propaganda trick of gigantic proportions. it may in 8 fennia 188: 1 (2010)gunnar olsson fact be instructive to approach the first third of the hebrew bible as the story about a power struggle so violent that the self-proclaimed lord is eventually forced to withdraw. thus, after the book of job he never speaks again. and as if to continue the assault, the new testament contains many references to the commandments of the second stone tablet but makes no explicit mention of the first. fascinating glimpses of the interface between the knowledge of power and the power of knowledge. in the interface between knowledge and power lies the art of mapping. and just as no map can be a perfect map, so any account of power and knowledge depends on the three primitives of map-making: 1) the chosen fix-points; 2) the scales through which the points are translated into connecting lines; and 3) the projection screen or mappa, the taken-for-granted plane onto which the pictures and travel stories are cast and preserved. it is tempting to associate the fix-points with the first paragraph of the constitutional law, the scales with the second, the mappa with the third. fix-points first. for have i not already noted that in the realm of power nothing sits still, that its jealous ruler never sleeps in the same bed two nights in a row. since the earliest accounts his palace has been variously located in the abyss between categories, in the untouchable threshold between this and that, in the face which must not be seen, i.e. always in the cleft of the excluded middle. in addition, the lord’s name is in most creation myths given as a tautology, by definition true but not informative. ungraspable is the ungraspable, who for that reason is free to do whatever it pleases. predictably unpredictable, inherently untrustable. always there to see never to be seen, bentham’s panopticon in advance of itself. for what my eyes happen to catch depends both on where my body stands and on how my mind has been molded. then the scale, by definition the translation function that enables me to claim that this is this and that that is that. yet i have repeatedly stressed that in the dialectial realm of power everyone and everything hops capriciously about, sometimes appearing as a this sometimes as a that. to put it bluntly, god (a term which to me functions as a pseudonym of power) does not operate according to the laws of logic. and therein lies in my understanding the reason why the social sciences in comparison with the hard sciences have accumulated so little knowledge. if it is true, which i believe it is, that human action is structured like a tragedy – everything beautifully right in the beginning; everything horribly wrong in the end; no one to blame in between – then the social sciences are faced with a tremendous challenge, easier to state than to do anything about. but if human action actually is structured as a tragedy, how can we then rely on the principle of truth preservation for tying our premises and conclusions together? surely the most common purpose of human action is to topple truth, not to preserve it, to falsify rather than retain what is presently the case. less a matter of formal logic more an instance of creative imagination. this to me is the problem of trust and verification, the real issue that the mapmaker’s scale is addressing. finally the mappa, the formation of the takenfor-granted, the painter preparing the canvas to ensure that the paint will not run off and the surface not crack, the glazier polishing the tain of the mirror. this is in effect what the unconsciously adopted socialization techniques are designed to do, making you and me obedient and predictable in the process. everything hidden in the mandatory meetings of the sabbath. as might be expected a similar form of cartographic reason guided the thoughts-and-actions of the greeks as well. nowhere is this more evident than in plato’s republic with its three figures of the sun, which together with the concept of goodness functions as the analyst’s fix-point par excellence; the divided line, which embodies the scale through which abstract ideas are turned into concrete things, degrees of truth corresponding to degrees of being; and the cave wall, the mappa of the surveyor’s projection screen, the taken-forgranted background without which there would be no shadows to observe, hence no maps to hide and seek. that screen, though, is not an innocent tabula rasa, but a receptor covered in layers of social gesso. and just as the painter’s first task is to prepare the canvas, so the mind-surveyor knows that he too casts his figures onto a charta with similar characteristics; paraphrasing him who loved the academy and hated the poets, not every thing can be seen and not every idea can be thought. being believed when i tell the truth is essentially a question of the cartographer’s mappa, the projection screen onto which the fixing points and scaling lines are leaving their traces. most stunningly it now seems that the early development of fennia 188: 1 (2010) 9mapping the forbidden greek mathematics and geometry, including the theory and practice of triangulation, grew out of a mode of thought which in itself may be understood as an instance of cartographic reason. the trailblazer in that remarkable adventure of cognitive history is reviel netz, brilliant classicist presently at stanford (netz 1999, 2004). while netz’s overarching interest is in the birth of deduction (athens, roughly 440 bce), his real focus is on the intellectual technologies through which a small group of people were sharing their convictions. extraordinarily difficult, especially as the paradoxical proposition ”a equals b” is exactly what mathematics is about. although both the old epidictics and the new apodictics are acts of persuasion, the difference is that in the former the truth of a proposition is merely asserted, while in the latter it is demonstrated; here it should be remembered that since the athenian culture was highly polemical, there was a strong need for greater clarity in the arguments, a demand for certainty which the greek mathematicians were determined to meet. it was in fact to that end that they invented an entirely novel type of rhetoric, an approach which set them aside from all other intellectuals, the endlessly debating philosophers in particular. as a way of reaching their goal, they focused on the form rather than the content of the argument, on the how rather than the what of whatever they did. the reasoning tools they developed were surprisingly simple and essentially two: the diagram and the ordinary language, the latter highly formulaic and with a minimal vocabulary of only 100 to 200 words. and in spite of (indeed because of) the fact that the constructed figures were imperfectly drawn, the reasoner could always tell exactly where on the road from the particular to the general he was. what kept him on track was the practice of carefully lettering (i.e. baptizing) the intersections of the drawings. and for that reason there are obvious connections between the mathematician’s diagram, on the one hand, and the landsurveyor’s map, on the other. this family resemblance between mathematics and cartography is further heightened by the circumstance that just as the letters of the diagrams do not stand for objects but on objects, so the main fix-point in the landscape map is not the parish church understood as a social symbol but the spire interpreted as a peircean index, by definition a position which can be seen, pointed to and talked about. it follows that whereas modern science is a science of equations, the ancient science was a science of diagrams. so dominant was in effect this bodily mode of thought that for the greek mathematicians the diagram became a substitute for ontology. the proofs were consequently drawn rather than spoken, a drama in which the eye, the index finger and the tongue were the lead actors. indeed it was the simplicity in form that generated the complexity in meaning, the nonexactness of the particular drawing that led to the necessity of the general conclusion. if netz is correct, then it was the dual practice of finger-tracing and story-telling that generated what is presently called deductive reason. the term “shaping” in the title of his masterpiece should therefore be taken literally, itself a parallel to the fact that the most crucial proofs in euclid’s elements were blessed with the approval stamp of quod erat faciendum rather than with the better known quod erat demonstrandum; “which was to be shown” rather than “which was to be demonstrated”. playing in the same league of legitimation is the perfect passive imperative, a verb form which in english may be rendered as “let it come about”, “let it have been cut”, a syntactic device which in both the speaker and the listener creates the feeling that everything has been settled beforehand. as ludwig wittgenstein used to put it, to follow a rule is to follow it blindly. rephrased, the core of every proposition lies in the diagram, in the eyes of the unaware a visual illustration, in the mind of the initiate a schematic (re)presentation. once again the orthodox icon comes to mind, for like the icon the diagram is in actuality a picture which is not a picture. stunning connections! even so, the most remarkable aspect of the netzian reconstruction is the fact that when it was first introduced there were no diagrams of antiquity extant, and that is despite the fact that the preserved texts often refer to them. yet he was convinced that without the picture of the lettered diagram (perhaps drawn in sand or on a dusted surface) the explorers would never have found their way in the unknown, never been able to translate their insights into a story that could be shared with others. subsequent events have nevertheless bore him out, for not only has a palimpsest with an erased copy of a copy of the archimedes codex actually been found, but this treasure contains a set of lettered diagrams of exactly the type that he had envisioned (netz & noell 2007). what for centuries had been absent has consequently now become present again, not only 10 fennia 188: 1 (2010)gunnar olsson in the imagination of a dedicated scholar, but in the material world as well. glorious achievement of erasing the eraser, because what we are now beginning to understand is how we are believed when we say that something is something else. when push comes to shove, even the most theoretical physicist shows himself to be a practicing geographer. in tentative conclusion: like the body that projects it, every meaning is asymmetric, every map a palimpsest, every palimpsest an epistemological travel story. and since in that world of self-reference no ground is solid, no translation perfect, no projection screen untainted, i have but the faintest idea of what will happen next. no wonder that people get frightened, for how can anyone find the way in a world in which the fix-points are unfixed, the scales twisted, the mappae crumpled. such is nevertheless life in the taboo-laden inbetween. and in my experience that holds regardless of whether you are an apprentice or a fullfledged poet, a young graduate student or an aging emeritus. the difference is nevertheless profound, for whereas the former keeps asking whether it will ever happen again, the latter struggles with the challenge of not letting it happen again, of not imitating himself, of not doing once more what he has already done so many times before. but, who knows, perhaps all of physics, poetry, mathematics and cartographic reason are nothing but the work of mirror neurons in the brain, chemical reactions triggered by the likeness of this and that, life itself a mimetic desire that can never be satisfied. but if that is the case, what are then the relations between creativity and self-plagiarism, the metaphoric pictures of the earth and the metonymic travels of the mind? notes 1 many thanks to the venerable reverend pinnawala sangasumana for making it all possible. references auerbach e 1953. mimesis: the representation of reality in western literature (translated by willard r. task). princeton university press, princeton, nj. the holy bible. the new international version 1973. zondervan publishing house, grand rapids, michigan. dalley s 1989. myths from mesopotamia: creation, the flood, gilgamesh, and others. oxford university press, oxford. miles j 1999. god: a biography. simon & schuster, new york. netz r 1999. the shaping of deduction in greek mathematics. cambridge university press, cambridge. netz r 2004. the transformation of mathematics in the early mediterranean world: from problems to equations. cambridge university press, cambridge. netz r & noell w 2007. the archimedes codex: revealing the secrets of the world’s greatest palimpsest. weidenfeld and nicolson, london. olsson g 1991. lines of power/limits of language. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. olsson g 2006. när himmelbjerget kom till mohammed. in buciek k, bærenholdt jo, haldrup m & pølger j (eds). rumslig praxis: festskrift til kirsten simonsen. roskilde universitetsforlag, roskilde. olsson g 2007. abysmal: a critique of cartographic reason. university of chicago press, chicago. sandars nk 1971. poems of heaven and hell from ancient mesopotamia. penguin, harmondsworth. stamm jj & andrew me 1967. the ten commandments in recent research. scm press, london. becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa127425 doi: 10.11143/fennia.127425 becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement ilse van liempt van liempt, i. (2023) becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement. fennia 201(1) 9–22. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 for refugees, arriving in a new place is inherently emotional – fraught with experiences of disorientation and fear of the unknown – but it can also be liberating and result in new connections. this article explores a series of questions around how forced displacement is experienced and turned into local emplacement. it is argued that it is important to recognize that global migration is grounded through attention to the ways in which such processes are locally lived and produced. i acknowledge that, on arrival, forced migrants become entangled in an infrastructure – laid out for them as a special category of migrants – that is directing them towards certain institutions and places; however, at the same time, i argue that this is not the only infrastructure which they use and explore. starting from the issue of how refugees themselves try to build connections and find their way in a new city enables the exploration of potential overlaps, gaps and tensions between the official response to arrival and the everyday lived experiences of refugees. the city as a whole is explicitly taken as the unit of analysis in this article, without limitations to specific places dedicated to refugees or specific neighbourhoods where it is known that refugees arrive and/or are housed. it is argued that a focus on public and semi-public spaces is important as it allows an exploration of spaces that are meaningful to refugees and might result in new insights on connections or disconnections with already existing infrastructures. this approach offers more room for the unexpected – but also the mundane and the everyday – which all play an important part in the production of a counter-narrative against the formal and institutionalized way of framing the arrival of refugees in which refugees’ own experiences are the more central focus. keywords: forced displacement, local emplacement, refugees, public space, arrival infrastructures ilse van liempt (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4978-3101), human geography and spatial planning department, utrecht university, the netherlands. e-mail: i.c.vanliempt@uu.nl © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4978-3101 10 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper introduction when ahmed (not his real name), a 30-year-old syrian man, arrived in the netherlands he was told to register in ter apel. this central reception centre, located in a green village in the north of the netherlands on the border with germany, houses up to 2,000 people and can be reached by bus in 30 minutes from the train station at emmen (see fig. 1): i did not have any idea for trains because in syria we didn't use the train or tram or metro. they just said ‘you can go to ter apel and this dagkaart is for free’. i looked at the map – i'm very good with maps – but i didn't know what to do with it because i don’t know the train, the tram, the metro system. i spoke a little bit of english at the time but i was afraid to ask people because i don't know these people and i heard that european people don't like people from the middle east, especially those with black hair and a beard. so i thought maybe they would look at me and think ‘he is dangerous’. but i had no choice and asked a man how to get to ter apel, because i'm afraid to ask women – maybe she will get the police on to me or something. i don't know. but the man did not know anything and then a woman came to me – she was 45 or something – and she said ‘can i help you?’. i told her ‘if you would’. i want to go to this address – to ter apel – but i don't know how to get there. she told me, okay, follow me. and we sat and she invited me to coffee and she told me ‘okay, take this train and then that one’ and i understood a little bit and i went to zwolle first and then to emmen and then ter apel. 1 km ter apel th e n et h er la n ds g er m an y n379 n391 busstop n366 permanent location temporary location coa reception centers 50 km see map ter apel emmen zwolle amsterdam ©uu geo c&m 10292 fig. 1. location of reception centres in the netherlands. fennia 201(1) (2023) 11ilse van liempt at the time when ahmed arrived in the netherlands (summer of 2015), the arrival of refugees was met with ambiguity and caused significant political turbulence. there was a lot of kindness, like that shown by the woman who helped ahmed to find his way to the first administrative location. both the number of volunteers who supported refugees and the donations made also increased rapidly in this period. at the same time, however, refugees were accused of stealing native residents’ jobs, occupying advantaged positions within an already tight social housing market and profiting from dutch welfarestate benefits (van heelsum 2017). in some cases, riots were organized near asylum-seeker centres. young syrian men, in particular, became stigmatized in media reporting; a rhetoric of othering directed at arab or muslim refugee men became noticeable in the general discourse on refugee migration (also huizinga 2022). ahmed’s quote, above, illustrates that the refugees themselves were also aware of this rhetoric and were even (trying to) adjust(ing) their behaviour to these pre-conceived ideas around forced migration. arriving in spaces on the edges of towns, often in industrial/military environments that are highly institutionalized and isolated, makes asylum-seekers feel very disorientated (kreichauf 2018; zill et al. 2020). like many other reception centres, ter apel also has a military history as a former north atlantic treaty organisation (nato) military base. there are eight courtyards and 250 people live around each one in houses shared by 16 people. there are also offices, a health centre, leisure facilities and a school. everyday life in these centres is fraught with experiences of surveillance, control, rules and regulations. asylum-seekers, for example, have no control over who shares their rooms, are often not allowed to cook their own food and must move to another centre whenever they are ordered to. people in reception centres generally suffer from a lack of privacy (van der horst 2004) and the centres are typically permeated by stress and uncertainty (ghorashi et al. 2018). research has shown that residing in reception centres as a result of these conditions even has a direct negative impact on people’s mental health (bakker et al. 2014). the ways of forcing people into prolonged waiting are described by khosravi (2019) as ‘stolen time’ and by fontanari (2017) as ‘temporal injustice’. thorshaug and brun (2019) also apply the concept of ‘temporal injustice’ to the context of reception centres and show how this injustice is expressed in the ‘throwntogetherness’ (massey 2005) of the material conditions, institutional governance and experiences and practices of inhabiting the centres. these environments offer little for people to do and, because they are often located in isolated places such as on the outskirts of towns, people’s isolation is increased, in both physical and also mental terms in the form of a sense of isolation (van liempt & bygnes 2022). these normative temporal frameworks of modern state systems are sometimes disrupted – as in the case of sanctuary practices (coutin 1993; darling 2010; mitchell 2022) or alternative forms of accommodation (zill et al. 2020). however, the refugees themselves also need to find ways to deal with these systems. the disorienting materiality of the centres, combined with asylum-seekers’ lack of knowledge on legal procedures and rights and their insecurity due to not speaking the local language, results in them often experiencing very limited autonomy to discover the city and meet other people outside the centres. additionally, these locations are often poorly accessible by public transport and financial constraints highly impact on asylum-seekers’ mobility. as a result, it often takes some time before asylum-seekers can look beyond the formal infrastructures laid out for them and explore the new environment on their own terms. it is important to stress, however, that – even in temporary reception centres that could easily be framed as unhomely – there are examples of homemaking practices that tell us much about the everyday lived experiences of forced migrants (blunt & dowling 2006; thorshaug & brun 2019; boccagni 2022). even when asylum procedures offer an unclear time perspective and reception centres set material and institutional barriers to mobility that is beyond their control, asylum-seekers do long for more familiarity with their new environment. in this article i focus on forced migrants’ local emplacement by taking the moments and places of arrival as vantage points and exploring how forced migrants become part of the city. the research is based on fieldwork in amsterdam and, as such, has an urban focus, although many refugees in the netherlands also arrive in non-urban areas as a result of dutch dispersal policies (van liempt & miellet 2021). 12 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper life after ter apel from ter apel, asylum-seekers are moved to other reception centres where they have to await the outcome of their asylum procedure. there are 180 reception centres in the netherlands, all spread across the country (see fig. 1) and there are regular movements between them. when refugees receive housing on their own, their place in the centre needs to be filled; many centres are also temporary so that, when they close, people are again moved around. this institutional practice makes it hard for asylum-seekers to build attachments to places of arrival and create a home for themselves. in the dutch context, dispersal applies to the allocation of housing to refugees after successful completion of their asylum procedure. in other countries, dispersal starts earlier, when asylumseekers are still going through the asylum procedure (arnoldus et al. 2003; van liempt & miellet 2021; darling 2022). this means that housing might be offered in yet another part of the country to where they stayed in reception centres and might be a new and disorienting experience. when legally recognized as refugees, asylum-seekers in the netherlands receive a one-time housing offer by the central agency for the reception of asylum seekers (coa) (arnoldus et al. 2003; de hoon 2017). this is social housing and refugees are prioritized in gaining access to it so they are not on the waiting list. the dutch housing act (huisvestingswet 2014) lays down the principles and formula of the target setting for housing for refugees; these are set bi-annually for each municipality by the ministry of the interior, based on the total population of the municipality and an estimation of the number of permit-holders requiring housing that year (arnoldus et al. 2003; de hoon 2017). dutch municipalities are obliged by law to offer housing to recognized refugees and can be penalised for failing to do so. although there is no formal obligation to accept the housing offer and refugees can take up residence anywhere and find housing independently, in practice this is difficult due to the, on average, 10-year-long waiting list when they refuse this offer. however, it is also difficult because of an increasingly unaffordable housing market and refugees’ lack of social networks which could help them to find housing outside the official system. el moussawi (2023) shows, in her work on the housing trajectories of refugees in belgium, how limited access to affordable housing once asylum-seekers have received protection status results in what she calls ‘continued displacement’. the moment when refugees receive their own house keys is important in terms of settlement, especially because the earlier period in reception centres is very stressful. a 34-year-old man from iraq, for example, explained that he had stayed in several reception centres where he always felt stressed and unsafe. his last experience with reception centres was in the former prison in amsterdam (bijlmerbajes) where he felt very unhappy and had a difficult time coping with all sorts of different people and conflicts. when he was offered a house for himself it was a turning point in his life: when i was allocated my own house, i was so happy. it is important to be independent, to have your own room to sleep in, your own toilet. and a kitchen for yourself – not having to share your kitchen feels so good. i was very happy when the news came. arrival infrastructures for refugees receiving the keys to your own house is an important moment when arrival really does take shape. formal infrastructures of arrival like the housing allocation system determine where people are housed and which services are offered to them by the state. in this article i argue that these directive infrastructures shape people’s lives, although they are not the only ones which refugees use and explore. starting from the question how the refugees themselves try to build connections and find their way in a new city offers the opportunity to look beyond the architecture of bureaucracy and legalistic logics and practices and enables us to take a closer look at all the factors which play a role in starting somewhere new. arrival infrastructures are defined by meeus, arnaut and van heur (2019, 1) as: “those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated”. the concept of arrival infrastructures allows us to see how refugees use and experience various infrastructures and how they may even produce their own. this makes it a useful concept if we want fennia 201(1) (2023) 13ilse van liempt to answer the question of how refugees emplace themselves in a new environment after forced displacement. it refrains from setting a territorial limit and follows refugees in their everyday, mundane behaviour in new environments. this takes us beyond neighbourhoods of arrival and points out which spaces in the city are important for the process of arrival from the refugees’ point of view. this perspective thus allows us to gain an idea of how the various layers of arrival infrastructures, ranging from top-down approaches enacted by supranational, national or local authorities to bottom-up initiatives developed by citizens, volunteers, activists and civil society, are (or are not) interlinked and how they are experienced. gill (2018), in his work on welcoming refugees, also illustrates how important it is to distinguish between institutionalized, statist ways of seeing and responding and the more organic ways. his work enables us to identify the tensions that arise between the different ways of welcoming refugees in abstract and more solidaristic and autonomous ways. when asked about their contact with dutch people, many refugees say that they long for these types of encounter because they are important for them in finding their way in; however, this does not happen automatically and is often experienced as quite difficult. many of our interviewees experienced unequal power relations in their interactions with dutch people and illustrated this by saying that the dutch often expressed their attitudes and ideas about syrians through stereotypical images, as if all syrians were backward and uneducated (van liempt & staring 2020). these unequal power relations or implicit recognition of discrimination make refugees feel less at home. participatory research in amsterdam with local organisations and newcomers the findings presented here are based on empirical research with people with a refugee background who recently arrived in the city of amsterdam. the research was part of a european project funded by the humanities in the european research area (hera 2019–2022). apart from amsterdam, research was also conducted in leipzig, brussels and newcastle. this article is based only on the findings from amsterdam and is produced in collaboration with a local arts initiative, framer framed (werkplaats molenwijk) and a community organisation called boost (see fig. 2). this community centre gives newcomers and locals the opportunity to jointly develop its programme through language courses, informal conversation lessons, sewing, cycling lessons and buddy projects to help new arrivals to find jobs and learn the language. the two organisations were the starting point for this data collection. the organisations are based in neighbourhoods where the different asylum-seekers have typically arrived: transvaal (east amsterdam) and molenwijk (north amsterdam). both neighbourhoods still have a relatively large share of social housing, hence they are an important arrival location for refugees who are offered accommodation within the social housing system. both neighbourhoods also have relatively high proportions of migrant communities. in transvaal, 50% of residents, for example, have moved in from outside europe. in the east of amsterdam, participatory observations (210 hours) were conducted in a community centre called boost by mieke kox, a postdoctoral researcher on the hera project for amsterdam. next to observations and repeated informal conversations with 77 newcomers, 22 official semistructured interviews were conducted with young visitors having a refugee background. all the interviews except one were held in a room in the community centre, where privacy was guaranteed. one interview took place in the home of the respondent. it often took a while before people consented to a formal interview. mistrust towards research and recording interviews is common in refugeerelated research (van liempt & bilger 2018). we tried to reduce this lack of trust by explaining in depth what the research was about – although most of all by spending time with people. our focus on everyday experiences made the interviews for some more interesting as they were less standard than the refugee research projects they had been involved in earlier, which only seemed to be interested in integration as a pre-defined concept. in molenwijk, 172 hours of (participatory) fieldwork were conducted through neighbourhood observations and observations in the library and participation in language cafés and community activities by rik huizinga, a postdoctoral researcher on the hera project for amsterdam. a total of 21 in-depth interviews were conducted with young refugees in this neighbourhood. 14 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper the ages of participants in both neighbourhoods varied between 19 and 37 years. all respondents were generally able to speak dutch or english at a sufficient level to be interviewed and no translators were used. most participants were from syria, eritrea or sudan. both types of fieldwork demonstrated the importance of taking time to build meaningful relationships with community organisations working with refugees (huizinga et al. 2022) and involved volunteer work by the two researchers. academic research can often be seen as extractive. in this project, we valued simply listening and learning from those with whom we work (ibid.). more than just gathering data, researchers were also present in the organisations, helping with filling in forms, translating and generally spending a lot of time with people. showing a willingness to talk about ‘everyday stuff’ that might seem unrelated to research is a useful way to build rapport and trust. in our research, these conversations often also revealed important insights, as we were interested in how people manage to feel at home in a place that is new to them. leaving the field was challenging, as some participants had built up expectations around friendships that were not continued. in addition to observations and interviews, a photo-voice workshop was organized in the summer of 2021 in werkplaats molenwijk. the photo-voice method was designed to document ideas, experiences and emotions around homemaking after arrival. the workshops were conducted in collaboration with a professional and experienced photographer. five female refugees from syria, afghanistan and eritrea who were living in the neighbourhood participated. using the camera on their smartphone, participants were invited to explore how they find their way in. each week, the participants were asked to take three photographs and to add a few sentences that expressed their points of view on the themes discussed, such as feeling at home, identity, safety and exploring new places. the photos were discussed with the group, which resulted in a lot of additional information on the meanings behind the photos and the intimacies which the photos represented. emotions were triggered during the workshops and were dealt with in an ethical way. the workshops resulted in a photo exhibition in the same art-based community centre and attracted visitors from the neighbourhood and beyond. using the photo-voice method allowed us to amstelamstel amsterdamamsterdam zuidoostzuidoost communitycommunity schiphol airport amsterdam badhoevedorp amstelveen noordzeekanaal ijmeer het ij shopping center boven ’t ij amsterdam zuidoost ouderkerk a/d amstel 1 km werkplaats molenwijk framer framed oba (central library) community center boost bijlmer bajes permanent location temporary location coa reception centers ©uu geo c&m 10292 fig. 2. reception centers and research locations in amsterdam. fennia 201(1) (2023) 15ilse van liempt document the role which the public space plays in newcomers’ homemaking processes in a creative way. it also resulted in a good sense of how those refugee youth who had recently arrived felt and oriented themselves in a new environment. the meetings were seen by participants as opportunities to learn new skills and meet new people – the exhibition was a great event where people felt proud to share their stories. all the interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed in atlas.ti. this latter was a collaborative experience with some of our participants, as the results were shared and discussed both halfway through and at the end of the project, during a presentation at the community centre. emplacement by the refugees themselves through conversations, it was found that, in general, arrivers with a refugee background feel secure and safe compared to their country of origin. one of the participants of the photo-voice workshop, for example, explains why she took a photo of the local shopping centre (see fig. 3) and what this space means to her: during the war in syria, it was not safe and was impossible to do your groceries because there was a lot of bombing. here, in the shopping centre boven ‘t y, i feel safe because i see more people doing their shopping. when i see the crowd of people, i feel safe. nonetheless, the participants described many insecurities and anxieties at the local level, always in relation to specific places and sometimes specific times of the day. fig. 3. shopping center boven ‘t ij. 16 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper participants in our research told us that moving away from reception centres or deprived neighbourhoods in order to explore the city on your own terms and to build your own connections to the new place of arrival and feel part of the city is important. it can be liberating to go for a stroll in the city, to dress up, to have a coffee on a terrace, to do touristy things – but also to just sit and watch people or go to a party where nobody knows that you are a refugee. visiting the centre of larger cities, especially for those who have an urban background1, can be an important part of homemaking – like this 30-year-old afghan man who likes to walk in the city centre: when the community centre where i like to go is closed, i go for a walk in the city centre. if the weather is nice, i just take a seat somewhere in the sun and then i watch people. it is always crowded and i like to watch people. it is the crowdedness that makes me forget my problems. going to the park and meeting up with friends was also often mentioned as a means to get away from the house and enjoy oneself. eritrean coffee rituals were sometimes moved from private to public spaces, as figure 4 from one of the photo-voice workshops shows. fig. 4. eritrean coffee ritual in the park with friends. drinking coffee with friends is a way to remember home, as it illustrates transnational feelings and practices of belonging. however, it is also a sticky practice that contributes to people’s local sense of home. puwar’s (2004) concept of space invadors fits these descriptions very nicely. appropriating places in the city centre or other public spaces, spaces from which refugee bodies have conceptually been excluded, is an important part of homemaking and empowerment for the refugees themselves. schiller and çağlar (2011) emphasize in their work how migrants can also be seen as scale-makers and fennia 201(1) (2023) 17ilse van liempt how they organize and evaluate localities on their own terms. in so doing, they shape public spaces, become visible and potentially find recognition and belonging. puwar (2004, 1) adds to this that it “disturbs the status quo while at the same time bearing the weight of the sediment past”. experiences of exclusion should not be overlooked in this process of space-invading. local places are shaped by certain rules, behaviours and discourses of bodies that fit in and those which do not (shaker et al. 2022). a sense of belonging as such is always relational – it is the result of an interaction between how people see themselves and how others respond to them and the power hierarchies around it. refugees in the city have to deal with everyday forms of othering; however, feeling the ‘urban vibe’ can also make a person feel at home, alive and hopeful for what the city might offer them in the near future. feeling part of it confirms their right to the city and acknowledges their presence. ahmed’s favorite place in amsterdam, for example, is the central public library (oba): i like to go to oba, the central library and sit in the café on the rooftop. you can see the city from above, you can see how the city breathes. he likes to take a more distant look at the city and dream about his future in it. this conceptualization of urban belonging reinforces the importance of looking beyond where refugees arrive if we want to understand how people find their way in a new environment and how newcomers are engaged in remaking their everyday lives in a new context after migration. global migration is grounded through attention to the ways in which such processes are locally lived and produced (also massey 1994; mitchell 1997; lamb 2002; hall 2021). and creating a feeling of home and a sense of belonging is not only bound to a person’s house or neighbourhood (čapo 2015) but goes beyond these spaces. it often takes place in the dynamic space of the city, where there is a wide range of opportunities to make connections with others. it is important to move beyond the territorial trap and the view of neighbourhoods and places of arrival as ‘delimited containers’ (meeus et al. 2019) when homemaking and belonging to the city are analysed. some people, especially those who were single, told us that they do not much like staying at home and actually prefer to go outside. as 30-year-old abdo (not his real name), who is single, said: a house is just for sleep. you have gas and heat and those i need to cook. if i stay at home i read my book, do my homework or i look at my computer. when i go to my friend’s house we break out, we are doing something. i always try to keep myself busy, to not be inside the house too much, to go outside. a focus on public space reveals different processes of homemaking and allows us to see when and how refugees take back control over where they like to go and feel at home, especially when feelings of displacement, loneliness and isolation also make up important parts of their everyday experiences. public spaces can be seen as concrete spaces where people try to make sense of a new life and new relationships and it can even be seen as a form of everyday resistance to a ‘refugee life’ that some people experience as a life ‘stuck away in a neighbourhood with few social interactions’. going to the city centre can be an important part of the process of gaining control over one’s mobility. here we refer not only to physical but also to mental mobility in terms of migrants trying to reconnect with themselves and questioning the labels attached to them as refugees (also suerbaum 2018; kallio et al. 2019). the refugee label is highly politicized (zetter 2007) and the ascribed identities that are forced upon refugees through dominant discourses most of all shed light on their position as marginalized groups in receiving societies. empirical research with refugees shows that there are important differences in how refugees, upon arrival, appropriate the category of refugee. sometimes it can be a positive experience and ‘refugeeness’ (malkki 1995) becomes part of a collective identity in exile; however, the label can also be experienced as a burden that overrules people’s social identity in many different ways. as such it is often experienced in contradictory terms. during interviews it was often pointed out how certain spaces made people feel less visible as a refugee and how this was appreciated. in the context of the 2015 migration flows and the european union’s ‘migration crisis’, there has been a political and media push to de-label refugees and focus on a new frame of ‘economic migrants’ (crawley & skleparis 2018). while this does not seem to reduce the space for protection or hospitality for the already settled refugees in the netherlands, they did have to deal with resentment, mistrust and stereotyping by dutch citizens, making it harder for the refugees to find their place in society. the 18 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper hierarchies of refugees are played out in policies and also in everyday practices – like, for example, volunteers who ‘prefer to help syrian refugees over eritreans’ (van heelsum 2017). it is interesting to explore how refugees deal with and try to escape these labels and the meanings attached to certain spaces in the context of emplacement. spaces are thus of fundamental value to understanding one’s self and one’s social environment (massey 2005). homemaking in (semi-)public spaces public and semi-public spaces in theory offer a great deal of potential for building relationships with the city and with other people, although our empirical research in amsterdam shows that it is not selfevident for refugee youth who are new to the city to immediately exploit the potential of public and semi-public spaces (van liempt & kox 2023). abrihet, a young eritrean who had been in the netherlands for a couple of years, explained, for example, that he was still afraid to approach dutch people in the streets: i’ve asked someone in the street for directions but i got ignored even though i asked it politely. this makes me sad and insecure about whether i should speak dutch in the streets. people don’t understand me and they didn’t want to try to understand me. here [in boost] people understand that my dutch isn’t that good yet. community centres can fill an important role in providing a safe space where people feel less reluctant to encounter others and where interaction across difference is often commonplace (wessendorf 2013). some of the insecurities that come with not yet speaking the language and/or not knowing the norms and rules of behaviour in public spaces can be crossed in these semi-public spaces. community centres can feel like a second home or even a second family, as one of the interviewees described it. another interesting in-between space which we discovered through our photo-voice workshops in a high-rise neighbourhood in north amsterdam was the meanings attached to balconies. this space can invoke feelings of home because you can furnish it in such a way that it evokes a sense of home (see fig. 5). from the balcony, you can also observe the public space on your own terms and gradually get to know the codes of the street better and (re)consider old and new uses of public space. in addition, the balcony is a place of rest and reflection that facilitates connections with both the new surroundings and the past. homemaking for refugees involves many different contexts and memories of places and people (see al-ali & koser 2002; ahmed et al. 2003; ralph & staeheli 2011; boccagni 2017). long (2013) conceptualizes home as an interplay between the house and the world, the intimate and the global, the material and the symbolic. this deterritorialization of people and place opens up new and significant ways of understanding the importance of place in a fluid, changing and contested globalized world (massey 1992; gieryn 2000; gustafson 2009). at the same time, this deterritorialization runs the risk of diminishing the important relationship that refugees have with particular places in the new context of arrival and overlooks specific lived experiences. concrete places and people may trigger emotional and affective responses that are part of homemaking processes, offer opportunities to socialize and be an important part of finding one’s place in a new city of arrival. boccagni’s (2017) conceptualization of homemaking as an active process involving efforts to establish security and familiarity – as well as a sense of control or autonomy in a new place – fits the situation of refugees very well. boccagni’s definition of home incorporates questions around both how home is reconstituted, reimagined and enacted and about home as a special kind of relationship with place, one that revolves around materiality and the realm of social relationships, memories and discourses. claiming public space by playing football in the park and/or bringing objects/doing activities that remind people of home are illustrative of this. it is important to acknowledge that homemaking for refugees takes place beyond borders, both in transnational fields and also through concrete ‘sticky’ place-making in the public space. one can feel at home in relation to places, specific settings and certain people. places can trigger memories and emotions and make one feel at home. schiller and çağlar’s (2011, 15) process of “migrant subjective rescaling”, in which migrants grant symbolic value to specific places and develop “their own hierarchies of places based on the value and prestige of localities within migrant transnational fields” fits these experiences very well. taking fennia 201(1) (2023) 19ilse van liempt refugees’ agency into account, it becomes clear that, to a certain extent, there is a reordering taking place, when attachments grow beyond the static territories that were defined as their new ‘home’ by the government. younes (not his real name), a 29-year-old syrian, explained how happy he was when he was allocated a house in amsterdam after having spent time in ter apel and a reception centre in zwolle and more than a year in another reception centre in hoogeveen: the first time i arrived in amsterdam was so pretty. i went to the centre, just to walk around. i went to a coffee shop and to some bars. it is just beautiful. later my brother asked me to visit him but i don’t like to visit other places. i prefer to stay in amsterdam. people can visit me but i don’t leave amsterdam. when i visit family, for example in germany for two or three days, i always want to go back home. i love amsterdam. conclusion the interviews revealed that asylum-seekers often feel quite disoriented and lost on arrival because of the specific institutional and material aspects of asylum accommodation, the dispersal policies which force them to relocate many times and the language barriers. in order to be able to understand the everyday experiences of forced migrants in new places of arrival, it is argued that a focus beyond the infrastructures laid out for them is needed and that people’s own explorations of spaces that are meaningful to them result in new insights on homemaking and belonging to new places of arrival. fig. 5. the balcony as an in-between space between public and private. 20 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper through interviews with refugees it was shown that emplacement (schiller & caglar 2016) goes beyond bureaucracy and occurs in many different settings and places. the local level as such is a more appropriate scale at which to think about integration than the national level, as the local level is where real interactions take place (also huizinga & van hoven 2018). moreover, by engaging actively in reorientation strategies while in a disorientating situation, refugees also challenge the temporal injustices forced upon them. community-based and participatory art-based research methods (lenette 2019) are fitting ways to examine these experiences of arrival, disorientation and re-orientation. emphasizing how people experience the urban fabric instead of using an inward-looking concept such as integration is the way forward. cities change as a result of migration; thus, by focusing too much on how people fit into already existing infrastructures, we overlook the dynamic layers of urbanity that shape how our urban landscapes look as well as the participation of refugees in economic/cultural/public life. experiences in this landscape are both positive in terms of micro-connections and negative in terms of microaggressions (peterson 2020). our research also shows that it is important to not always be reminded of the refugeeness of a person’s identity and to move beyond the ethnic lens (dahinden 2016). the notion of emplacement (schiller & caglar 2013, 499) emphasizes that “all individuals live within a social nexus composed of all those to whom they are connected by various forms of interaction”. as such, the city can also be a very liberating space for refugees where people can re-invent themselves and settle as well as build new connections. notes 1 most syrians in the netherlands come from larger cities and are used to living in an urban environment (van liempt & staring 2020). acknowledgements this essay is based on a keynote lecture i was asked to give at the finnish geography days in tampere (2022). i want to thank the organisers kirsi pauliina kallio and jouni häkli for inviting me. the empirical research that the lecture was based on was conducted in the context of a project called ‘the everyday experiences of young refugees and asylum seekers in public spaces’ which was financially supported by the hera joint research programme, co-funded by ahrc, bmbf via dlr-pt, f.r.sfnrs, nwo, and the european commission through horizon 2020. i am grateful to the field researchers involved in the dutch part of the project: mieke kox and rik huizinga and i want to thank karine versluis who facilitated the photo-voice workshop and all participants who spent their time talking and sharing their valuable stories and photos with us. references ahmed, s., castaneda, c. & fortier, a. (eds.) (2003) uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration. berg, oxford. al-ali, n. & koser, k. (2002) new approaches to migration? transnational communities and the transformation of home. routledge, london. arnoldus, m., dukes, t. & musterd, s. (2003) dispersal policies in the netherlands. in robinson, v., andersson, r. & musterd, s. (eds.) spreading the ‘burden’? a review of policies to disperse asylum seekers and refugees, 25–64. policy press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.46692/9781847425782.004 bakker, l., dagevos, j. & engbersen, g. (2014) the importance of resources and security in the socio-economic integration of refugees: a study on the impact of length of stay in asylum accommodation and residence status on socio-economic integration for the four largest refugee groups in the netherlands. journal of international migration & integration 15 431–448. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-013-0296-2 blunt, a. & dowling, r. (2006) home. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401354 boccagni, p. (2017) migration and the search for home: mapping domestic space in migrant’s everyday lives. palgrave macmillan, new york. http://www.heranet.info https://doi.org/10.46692/9781847425782.004 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-013-0296-2 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401354 fennia 201(1) (2023) 21ilse van liempt boccagni, p. (2022) at home in the centre? spatial appropriation and horizons of homemaking in reception facilities for asylum seekers. in beeckmans, l., gola, a., singh, a. & heynen, h. (eds.) making home(s) in displacement: critical reflections on a spatial practice, 139–154. leuven university press, leuven. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv25wxbvf.9 čapo, j. (2015) durable solutions: transnationalism, and homemaking among croatian and bosnian former refugees. refuge: canada’s journal on refugees 31(1) 19–29. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.40139 coutin, s. b. (1993) the culture of protest: religious activism and the u.s. sanctuary movement. westview press, boulder. crawley, h. & skleparis, d. (2018) refugees, migrants, neither, both: categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in europe’s “migration crisis”. journal of ethnic and migration studies 44(1) 48–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1348224 dahinden, j. (2016) a plea for the “de-migranticization” of research on migration and integration. ethnic and racial studies 39(13) 2207–2225. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1124129 darling, j. (2010) a city of sanctuary: the relational re-imagining of sheffield’s asylum politics. transactions of the institute of british geographers 35(1) 125–140. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00371.x darling, j. (2022) systems of suffering: dispersal and the denial of asylum. pluto press, london. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2k4fx1d el moussawi, h. (2023) “finding housing was an illness”: refugees’ sense of continued displacement in belgium. housing studies 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2023.2180493 fontanari, e. (2017) “it's my life”. the temporalities of refugees and asylum-seekers within the european border regime. etnografia e ricerca qualitativa 10(1) 25–54. https://doi.org/10.3240/86886 ghorashi, h., de boer, m. & ten holder, f. (2018) unexpected agency on the threshold: asylum seekers narrating from an asylum seeker centre. current sociology 66(3) 373–391. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392117703766 gieryn, t. f. (2000) a space for place in sociology. annual review of sociology 26 463–496. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463 gill, n. (2018) the suppression of welcome. fennia 196(1) 88–98. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 gustafson, p. (2009) mobility and territorial belonging. environment and behaviour 41(4) 490–508. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916508314478 hall, s. m. (2021) the migrant’s paradox: street livelihoods and marginal citizenship in britain. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452966571 van heelsum, a. (2017) aspirations and frustrations: experiences of recent refugees in the netherlands. ethnic and racial studies 40(13) 2137–2150. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1343486 de hoon, m. (2017) dispersal and residential mobility of asylum migrants in the netherlands. in geurtjens, k. (ed.) beyond the refugee crisis: a reflection from different perspectives on the dutch case, 10–13. institute for transnational and euroregional cross-border cooperation and mobility, maastricht. van der horst, h. (2004) living in a reception center: the search for home in an institutional setting. housing, theory and society 21(1) 36–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036090410026806 huisvestingswet (2014) wetten.nl regeling huisvestingswet 2014 bwbr0035303 <https://wetten. overheid.nl/bwbr0035303/2022-01-01> 2.6.2023. huizinga, r. p. (2022) carving out a space to belong: young syrian men negotiating patriarchal dividend, (in)visibility and (mis)recognition in the netherlands. ethnic and racial studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2156805 huizinga, r. p. & van hoven, b. (2018) everyday geographies of belonging: syrian refugee experiences in the northern netherlands. geoforum 96 309–317. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.002 huizinga, r. p., hopkins, p., de backer, m., finlay, r., kirndörfer, e., kox, m., bastian, j., benwell, m. c., felten, p., haack, l., hörschelmann, k. & van liempt, i. (2022) researching refugee youth. royal geographical society (with ibg), london. https://doi.org/10.55203/vcat7733 kallio, k. p., häkli, j. & pascucci, e. (2019) refugeeness as political subjectivity: experiencing the humanitarian border. environment and planning c: politics and space 37(7) 1258–1276. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418820915 khosravi, s. (2019) what do we see if we look at the border from the other side? social anthropology 27(3) 409–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12685 kreichauf, r. (2018) from forced migration to forced arrival: the campization of refugee accommodation in european cities. comparative migration studies 6(7) 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-017-0069-8 lamb, s. (2002) intimacy in a transnational era: the remaking of ageing among indian americans. diaspora 11(3) 299–330. https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2011.0003 lenette, c. (2019) arts-based methods in refugee research creating sanctuary. springer nature, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8008-2 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv25wxbvf.9 https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.40139 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1348224 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1124129 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00371.x https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2k4fx1d https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2023.2180493 https://doi.org/10.3240/86886 https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392117703766 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.70040 https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916508314478 https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452966571 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1343486 https://doi.org/10.1080/14036090410026806 https://wetten.overheid.nl/bwbr0035303/2022-01-01 https://wetten.overheid.nl/bwbr0035303/2022-01-01 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2156805 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.002 https://doi.org/10.55203/vcat7733 https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418820915 https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12685 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-017-0069-8 https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2011.0003 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8008-2 22 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper van liempt, i. & bilger, v. (2018) methodological and ethical dilemmas in research among smuggled migrants. in zapata-barrero, r. & yalaz, e. (eds.) qualitative research in european migration studies, 269–285. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76861-8_15 van liempt, i. & bygnes, s. (2022) mobility dynamics within the settlement phase of syrian refugees in norway and the netherlands. mobilities 18(3) 506–519. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2022.2129030 van liempt, i. & kox, m. (2023) the inclusionary potential and spatial boundaries of (semi-) public space: refugee youth’s everyday experiences in the urban fabric of amsterdam. in backer, m., hopkins, p., van liempt, i., finlay, r., kirndorfer, e., kox, m., benwell, m. c. & horschelmann, k. (eds.) refugee youth: migration, justice and urban space, 65–80. bristol university press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.1011738.10 van liempt, i. & miellet, s. (2021) being far away from what you need: the impact of dispersal on resettled refugees’ homemaking and place attachment in small to medium-sized towns in the netherlands. journal of ethnic and migration studies 47(11) 2377–2395. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2020.1845130 van liempt, i. & staring, r. (2020) nederland papierenland. syrische statushouders en hun ervaringen met participatiebeleid. sociaal en cultureel planbureau, the hague. long, j. (2013) diasporic dwelling: the poetics of domestic space. gender, place and culture 20(3) 329–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2012.674932 malkki, l. h. (1995) purity and exile: violence, memory, and national cosmology among hutu refugees in tanzania. university of chicago press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226190969.001.0001 massey, d. (1992) politics and space/time. new left review 1/196. massey, d. (1994) space, place and gender. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. massey, d. (2005) for space. sage, london. meeus, b., arnaut, k. & van heur, b. (eds.) (2019) arrival infrastructures. migration and urban social mobilities. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91167-0 mitchell, k. (1997) transnational discourse: bringing geography back in. antipode 29(2) 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00038 mitchell, k. (2022) migration, memory and the insurgent temporalities of sanctuary. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2022.2150672 peterson, m. (2020) micro aggressions and connections in the context of national multiculturalism: everyday geographies of racialisation and resistance in contemporary scotland. antipode 52(5) 1393–1412. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12643 puwar, n. (2004) space invadors. race, gender and bodies out of place. berg, oxford. ralph, d. & staeheli, l. (2011) home and migration: mobilities, belongings and identities. geography compass 5(7) 517–530. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00434.x schiller, n. g. & çağlar, a. (2011) locating migration. rescaling cities and migrants. cornell university press, ithaca, new york. schiller, n. g. & çağlar, a. (2013) locating migrant pathways of economic emplacement: thinking beyond the ethnic lens. ethnicities 13 494–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796813483733 schiller, n. g. & çağlar, a. (2016) displacement, emplacement and migrant newcomers: rethinking urban sociabilities within multiscalar power. identities 23(1) 17–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2015.1016520 shaker, r. van lanen, s. & van hoven, b. (2022) “i’m trying to give them my face”. everyday embodied agency of the muslim other in amsterdam. sociological forum 37(1) 27–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12777 suerbaum, m. (2018) becoming and “unbecoming” refugees: making sense of masculinity and refugeeness among syrian refugee men in egypt. men and masculinities 21(3) 363–382. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x17748170 thorshaug, r. ø. & brun, c. (2019) temporal injustice and asylum reception centres in norway: towards a critical geography of architecture in the institution. fennia 197(2) 232–248. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.84758 wessendorf, s. (2013) commonplace diversity and the “ethos of mixing”: perceptions of difference in a london neighborhood. identities: global studies in culture and power 20(4) 407–422. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2013.822374 zetter, r. (2007) more labels, fewer refugees: remaking the refugee label in an era of globalization. journal of refugee studies 20(2) 172–192. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem011 zill, m., van liempt, i., spierings, b. & hooimeijer, p. (2020) uneven geographies of asylum accommodation: conceptualizing the impact of spatial, material, and institutional differences on (un)familiarity between asylum seekers and local residents. migration studies 8(4) 491–509. https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mny049 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76861-8_15 https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2022.2129030 https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.1011738.10 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2020.1845130 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2012.674932 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226190969.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91167-0 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00038 https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2022.2150672 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12643 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00434.x https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796813483733 https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2015.1016520 https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12777 https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x17748170 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.84758 https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2013.822374 https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fem011 https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mny049 tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism: a case study of finnish package tourism in crete urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa40925 doi: 10.11143/40925 tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism: a case study of finnish package tourism in crete vilhelmiina emilia vainikka vainikka, vilhelmiina (2016). tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism: a case study of finnish package tourism in crete. fennia 194: 1, pp. 64–78. issn 1798-5617. the mass tourism destination is a well-known spatial category for large-scale tourism practices. however, little critical attention has been paid to the construction of the category itself in relation to the spatialities of different social groups. this study scrutinizes the situated spatial relationships within mass tourism in a flexibly conceptualized mass tourism destination. social constructionist methodology and different place theories are utilized in order to analyze tourist guides’ reflections of finnish mass tourism in crete. the positionality of the guides to mass tourism spatialities was tested with a twofold interview agenda: asking the guides to evaluate their own spatialities and those of their clients. drawing parallels between the mass tourism destination and the seaside resort are not straightforwardly supported in these interviews. the daily movement of the guides, their destination knowledge or discussions about the destination and their leisure-time activities all shape their relationship with the destination and produce spatialities that are evaluated in relation to their clients’ spatialities. the guides construct two ideas of spatiality of mass tourism, intensive and extensive, through which spatialities are interpreted at an ideological and practical level. these spatial constructions reflect the hybrid character of the contemporary mass tourism and contextualize the mass tourism destination as different combinations of situated spatial experiences. based on the results the academic research should utilize different user perspectives to the theorization of mass tourism destination. keywords: mass tourism destination, social construction, tourist guides, place, crete, finland vilhelmiina vainikka, department of geography, university of oulu, p.o. box 3000, 90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: vilhelmiina.vainikka@oulu.fi introduction tourism has been a fast growing phenomenon for decades. mass tourism has formed the core of this growth. advances in transport in the 1950s and 1960s and increased free-time for the middle class multiplied the ways holidays could be spent abroad and promoted the democratization of large-scale aviation-based tourism (löfgren 1999). package tours were developed, especially in europe, to accommodate the rapid growth in demand and provide trips at lower prices (rosselló & riera 2012). in finland too, the beginning of airbased outbound tourism for the masses took the form of charter package tours in the late 1960s (selänniemi 2001). along with the growth in tourist experiences, transforming cultural values and advances in information technology, the masses are more scattered than ever before. the conceptualization of mass tourism as a category for analysis (cf. brubaker & cooper 2000) has led to different interpretations of the current changes. some perceive mass tourism as being in decline and being replaced by “new tourism” (poon 1993) or as growing only because of new markets (shaw & williams 2002), while others state that mass tourism is in fact transforming into a form of global ‘mega-tourism’ (wheeller 2003). mass tourism itself is seen as changing (torres 2002; bramwell 2004). tourism categories are blurring as a result of product diversification (duval 2004). more recently low-cost carriers and internet booking sys© 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 65tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism tems (casey 2010; rosselló & riera 2012) have challenged the idea of mass tourism founded on charter-based package tours and diversified its destination network. the package tours themselves have changed over the years and are not as rigidly packaged anymore: tourists can make their own decisions on how to use their time and choose from a variety of options (torres 2002; aquiló et al. 2005; räikkönen & honkanen 2013). also in finland low-cost carriers and otherwise improved airline connections to central europe and asia have made possible large tourist flows to large numbers of destinations (finavia 2014), but package tours continue to be one central part of finnish outbound tourism and its imagery. package tours are the focus in this study as a stereotypical but changing form of mass tourism, as well as being a large and democratized tourism phenomenon. in this sense, this is not a study of finnish mass tourism overall, but a part of finnish mass tourism. the need to rethink the categorization of mass tourism has received surprisingly tangential interest from researchers in tourism and human geography (vainikka 2013). mass tourism has been used both as a category of analysis in research and as an everyday category of practice among industry professionals and in the general discourses amongst people. as long as there has been mass tourism, there has also existed some degree of critique towards it within research and in general discourse by the elite whose privilege to travel has been under threat, resulting in “tired stereotypes that set ‘the real traveler’ against the turistus vulgaris” (löfgren 1999: 8). to step back from the simplified hierarchical notions of mass tourism that foster partial academic knowledge on the phenomenon, more emphasis should be placed on the relationship between the different users and the product (such as the destination) in question (miller 1987). michel maffesoli (1996, see also obrador 2012) claims that today’s masses are not a homogeneous entity but rather such culture should be conceptualized as separate, fragmented neo-tribal groupings based on tastes and lifestyles which people move between and identify themselves with. contemporary mass tourism can consist of different forms of ‘tourisms’ even within mass package tourism representing diverse motivations (see jacobsen et al. 2014). the key argument in this paper is that as spatial categories, mass tourism destinations are never separate of human experience. the way such categories, analytical or practical, are constructed, draw from situated knowledges (rose 1997) and are relational to those who construct them. in this case, a social group of guides is of interest and how its members are socialized into the practices of the field to produce and interpret their knowledge on mass tourism. by letting tourist guides evaluate both their own relationship with the place and how they see their clients’ spatial practices, the twofold positionality to mass culture can be addressed. the chosen approach recognizes historically bound interpretations (mccabe 2005) and considers contextuality as a “reflexively constituted relationship” (mccabe & stokoe 2004: 606). the research questions are: how do guides interpret mass tourism and its spatiality? how do guides describe their own spatiality in relation to that of their clients? spatialities refer to different connections that people have with places, not only material but also meanings and emotions. the theories of place help to address the category of mass tourism destination analytically. they also help to conceptualize how the established international agglomerations of tourism or homes for global tourism are not only the resort-areas but are relational to other activities outside their imagined bounds and unfold into what other scholars might categorize as “alternative tourism”. the mass tourism flow from finland to crete is analysed as “mass tourism” regardless of how many different spatialities (‘destinations’) it might represent. local guides have been researched in tourism studies to some extent (gmelch 2003; jokinen & veijola 2008; rantala 2010), but in this case the guides interviewed represent the expatriates of their clients’ (tourists’) main country of origin as the tour operator reps in andrews’ work (2011). the guides’ role in interpreting the phenomenon is professional, but they also have personal roles such as being a tourist and seasonal inhabitant at the destination. their talk of the phenomenon as representatives of an institutional social group in an interview situation is not neutral, but a part of the process of identity construction and differentiation, something they cognitively intend to represent (mccabe 2005). they are likely to formulate meanings based on their (both personal and professional) identity, values or attitudes in relation to wider cultural discourses on travelling and holidaying, and reveal how they create their knowledge in relation to dominant cultural ideologies (mccabe 2005) and memberships of different groups (obrador 2012). guides are insiders of mass tourism because they are working within the 66 fennia 194: 1 (2016)vilhelmiina vainikka phenomenon, but still outsiders to other tourists’ experiences or locals’ viewpoints. in a cultural sense, their viewpoint is closer to that of the tourists’ and they are able to better understand clients’ cultural context. guides’ contribution brings valuable knowledge from the industry to the partial canon of academic knowledge (see tribe 2006) by offering a context outside research in which the knowledge on spatialities and its limits can be addressed. their job is to observe, evaluate and sense the phenomenon, places, and their clients’ needs by looking, discussing and hearing (see cheong & miller 2000). therefore, their views on mass tourism spatialities are based on large numbers of discussions with their clients, who they cannot choose. they also contribute to their clients’ spatial relationship with their suggestions and help. this paper is organized in the following sections. first, i will present the theoretical discussion about the relationships between mass tourism and the place that this study concentrates on. second, i will introduce the methodology, methods and the case study area of crete. the analysis section is divided into three parts. the first one concentrates on analysing the working role of the guides based on interview material. the second part addresses the different spatialities of the guides based on mental maps and interviews on their physical movements, place-based knowledge and leisuretime activities. the third section introduces the ideas of intensive and extensive spatiality in relation to mass tourism, based on the guides’ views on both their own spatiality and that of their clients. at the end, a discussion is provided and implications for further research are highlighted. conceptualizations of a mass tourism destination as a place the concept of a mass tourism destination brings tourism studies and geography into dialogue around the concept of place in many ways. different spatial theories can be utilized simultaneously to conceptualize mass tourism and a mass tourism destination. firstly, mass tourism destinations have been conceptualized as the result of large-scale capitalist-oriented tourism developments: material, bounded space, or even in some cases an administrative unit (e.g. butler 1980). the stereotypical mass tourism settings and purpose-built seaside resorts are highly specialized from the neighbouring areas with similarities to other destinations but this does not mean that they are identical in their development or functions (e.g. aguiló et al. 2005; ivars i baidal et al. 2013). in the traditions of sustainability, industry, destination management and development studies (brey et al. 2007; saraniemi & kylänen 2011) a mass tourism destination is understood as being a developed, governed and marketed entity (ashworth & voogd 1990) where there is an aim of improving visitor satisfaction or controlling impacts. tourists thus literally consume these spaces (see urry & larsen 2011) and influence their transformation under the control of tour operators (e.g. turner & ash 1975; krippendorf 1987). reducing mass tourism into certain locales, resorts or sights, explained by their material qualities, ignores the individual wanderings outside these mass spaces and the diverse contexts and ways in which these places are consumed and produced. it has to be acknowledged that destinations can be perceived on many different scales; they may be a country, city or even a tourism product (saarinen 2004). secondly, the mass tourism destination category is socially constructed by attaching meanings to places (squire 1998; young 1999; saarinen 2004) and symbolically consumed (urry & larsen 2011). people categorize the same physical entities as particular types of places alongside identifying themselves as particular types of category members (mccabe & stokoe 2004: 604). tourist guides, or any other people, are members of society and culture, influenced by different discourses that affect their identity and choice-making. places, conceptualized as social constructions, are negotiated (jackson 1989) and a part of the judgment of taste (bourdieu 1984; löfgren 1999). they are also sources and results of belonging (vainikka 2012). the label ”mass tourism destination” can thus be seen as a symbol of ‘destruction’ or popularity. similarly for some researchers the concept of mass tourism destination has been a category that exemplifies the loss of authenticity (e.g. boorstin 1964; turner & ash 1975; relph 1976; poon 1993), but for some the complexities of the category itself is interesting (e.g. miller & auyong 1998; obrador pons et al. 2009; anton clavé 2012). this is an important level in understanding places of mass tourism, because places are produced through hierarchical categorizations that have material effects. in this sense, it is not only significant what is described and how something is fennia 194: 1 (2016) 67tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism told but also in what context and when. edward relph wrote an influential book in 1976 on placelessness that became a popular framework for the judgment of any place that has been considered to have lost its authenticity. he later (relph 2000) commented on his own work and acknowledged that the world back then was very different from today and that the thesis of placelessness was situated in that framework. nowadays each place should “be assessed carefully on its own terms” (ibid.: 618). in a similar fashion, dan knox (2009: 146) argues: “certainly, we could argue that the spanish coastline has become relatively unattractive in relation to an idealized notion of pristine nature, but’ […] ‘without understanding what motivates people to continue to visit such apparently unattractive places. it may well be that such places have an attraction that tourist studies have thus far failed to grasp in any meaningful sense.” the previous quotation suggests that the different positions of tourists and researchers to address the destination have led to conflicting interpretations and urges for more in situ interpretations that make better use of different individual and social perspectives. thirdly, a mass tourism destination can be considered in terms of relational space: places of flows and encounters that are embodied, sensed, practised and performed. these places are simultaneously produced and consumed by tourists, (local) workers, tourism professionals and the encounters between them (edensor 2001; sheller & urry 2004; urry & larsen 2011). this approach highlights that places are never ready, but in the process of making and in connections with other places (massey 2005; agarwal 2012), such as the homes of tourists and other destinations. the active role of different people in both the construction and consumption of a tourist place, and the intertwined character of it is embodied, cognitive and affective (rakić & chambers 2012). contemporary people are becoming increasingly mobile in their everyday lives and more connected through social networks that have a role in creating tourism (e.g. larsen et al. 2007), but different social groups and individuals are situated in distinct ways with regard to these flows (massey 1994, 2005) of tourism. the framing of the so called mobile class has though been criticized, because the research is mainly conducted by members of that same group itself, i.e. western academics and journalists (massey 1994). it also excludes or passivizes anything that is left outside it, not taking into consideration that they are relations that produce (im)mobilization, not characteristics of the objects, such as the local resident or the tourist (franquesa 2011). in mass tourism, in particular, it is important to address the complexity of the phenomenon because it represents the democratization of international travelling in different situated relations. some researchers have already applied relational thinking to mass tourism destinations (obrador pons et al. 2009), as urban structures that are accumulations of innovations in the form of leisure, lifestyle-related mobility (anton clavé 2012) or its effects on the restructuring of coastal resorts (agarwal 2012) and in relation to mobile practices in youth tourism (knox 2009). mass tourism destination is thus continuously produced in different relations. influenced by hägerstrandian time-geography ”the destination” can be thought of as an accumulation of all those places and paths that one visits (as a guide or tourist) and takes during the trip, meaning that each person has her/his unique assemblage of that destination (pred 1984; see also hottola 2005, 2013). in this way, a tourist or guide or any other person does not only consume and produce the resort but also creates places that “can be conceptualized as cumulative archives of personal experience emerging from unique webs of situated life episodes” (paasi 2002: 807; cf. vainikka 2012). paths are ways tourists or guides move in space and time in a given period of time and this movement occurs within social structures that provide the context for objects and humans in the place (see pred 1984). compared to the physical transformations of the destination this notion acknowledges the momentary (yet accumulative and contextual) character of place construction. at a collective level these different paths and nodes create different versions of a mass tourism destination that does not necessarily have clear boundaries. methodology, material and case study area the spatial category of mass tourism destination is not neutral or natural, but it is created in culturally and socially situated discursive practices in a specific moment of time (see berger & luckmann 68 fennia 194: 1 (2016)vilhelmiina vainikka 1967; burr 1995). language and intersubjective discursive practices construct the reality, but the material world and social relations are also active in shaping the ways of seeing it. in the interview situation, the guides project themselves and their knowledge as they seem appropriate while possibly playing down other practices or people (see mccabe 2005). their talk is “culturally embedded, flexibly deployed and ideological” (ibid.: 87). semi-structural interviews were conducted in may 2013 in crete and took place in a quiet hotel room. the voluntary interviews were recorded and transcribed. ten participated guides represent the two largest tour operators in finland: seven from finnmatkat (tui group) and three from aurinkomatkat-suntours (finnair group), but the analysis does not separate them by company. the interviews included several questions about the guides’ experiences of spatiality, their relationship with their work and the destination, and the spatialities of their clients. the interviewer also asked them to draw mental maps (gold & white1974) of areas they see representing their daily physical movement, destination discussions with clients or the knowledge needed of them and their own leisure-time activities. after going through the contexts of the guides and the mental maps, a more rigorous discourse analysis was applied following the steps outlined by tuffin and howard (2001) to the whole material and looked for similarities and differences between and within interviews, in addition to the functions of the language and ideas that were constructed. several rounds of close-reading of this material were conducted by asking the question: how do the guides articulate mass tourism’s spatiality? crete is the largest island and the most popular destination outside athens in greece (e.g. apostolakis 2013). it has a population of 600,000. crete’s historical legacy has contributed to european civilization and to the idea of europe. with mass tourism, crete is a meeting point for the european cultures of tourism. crete was chosen as the mass tourism destination of this study because it has been a long established destination for finnish mass charter package tourism. it has offered places for relaxation, culinary experiences, culture, heritage and activities of many kinds. it is known amongst other things as a family destination and a popular repeat visit destination. charter flights have been the only direct route and are of a seasonal character between finland and crete. crete is the largest package tour destination for finns in greece with its several resorts (e.g. in the chania region, paleochora, agios nikolaos, hersonissos) and the country itself is the second largest destination for finnish package tours. in 2013, more than 172,000 finnish charter package tour passengers out of a total of the 938,000 visited greece (afta 2014). the resort area near the third largest city of crete, chania, on the north-west coast is the focus in this study as it is a central tourist area from a finnish perspective. it was also chosen because the area has several village-resorts close together along the coastal road such as platanias, agia marina, gerani, maleme, agii apostoli and kato stalos. this setting inspires to rethink the concept of a destination more flexibly and the study considers the scales that guides preferred. a spatial separation is not made between different spatial preferences, as has been made in some previous studies that have treated coastal tourists as a category representing certain motivations other than those visiting other areas (e.g. andriotis 2011). the guides’ contexts the interviewed tourist guides were young, most of them under or 25 years old and had worked as guides from a couple of months to a couple of years. this is a bias of the material but also reflexive of the typical guide career that is short due to the year-round seasonal character. the following discussion concentrates on the ways that guides make sense of their personal relationship with their work and mass tourism. the guides work under different job descriptions: three worked in theme hotels, three in more management-oriented positions, two had an online role and two worked as basic service guides. there is not just “one guide role” but rather different versions of it exist in terms of their tasks and responsibilities. some of them have multiple responsibilities varying from handling transfers to welcoming receptions, service hours at hotels or excursions in different ’servicescapes’ (bitner 1992). the guide role is in this context to a lesser extent group leading and more about being available in time and space for possible contacts with customers (cf. edensor 2001; rantala 2010; see räikkönen & honkanen 2013). the role of the guide is not described to be a static one, but it is affected by changes in tourism and society, just as tourism itself is changing. their spatiality has been extended to the virtual world, fennia 194: 1 (2016) 69tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism which affects their physical mobility: “nowadays there are many things you can check instantly on the internet instead of driving to rethymno to check it out” (interview 6). the development of online services has made it possible for their clients to be in contact with the guide already from home before the trip. in addition, the guide’s role includes reporting and background information gathering for pre-trip use. the virtual world is considered both as a tool and as a ’servicescape’. it is not straightforward for the guides to ‘know’ about their clients’ practices. the guides evaluated that, thanks to the better access to destination and travel information online, many clients satisfy their growing interest for such information and actually do ‘independently’ tasks that previously were the responsibility of the guides, such as informationsearching and help during the trip. the guides also feel that in a mass tourism destination the number of clients is so large, that it limits their knowledge of them. one guide exemplifies: “a mass crowd, so that you are not able to make as close contact as in smaller destinations, where there are fewer clients and you spend more time with them” (interview 8). this reflects the ”mass effect” resulting in regarding the mass as being rather distant due to the high numbers of clients. however, guides name groups of people for whom they continue to be important and who might therefore be highlighted in their ‘knowledge’: those who do not have time to plan their vacations or gather information themselves, and those who do not have the necessary online skills or trust in them, or who are first-timers at the destination or those who appreciate face-to-face conversations. in fact, some repeater tourists are seen as important informants to the guides. all the interviewed guides are working in the same destination region, but their relationship to it has been and is different. most of them had spent a relatively short time on crete, some months (less than a year), either during one or two seasons, and only two had several years of experience. only three guides had visited crete on their own holiday before working as a guide, so their views are heavily situated in a working context. some of the guides had applied for crete either because they liked the island or they wanted to get to know it, but some had wished to go somewhere else and they were appointed there instead. crete is a meaningful, known place in the mass tourism or package tour destination network, and finns have an established and dynamic relationship with it. it is common to know someone who has been to crete, possibly several times and has talked about it. as pau obrador pons et al. (2009) stated, mass tourism destinations are already present in everyday life in the countries of origin and return there, for example, in the form of postcards creating an ongoing process and relationship. there are wider public discourses (mccabe 2005) in finland that the guides have identified with or not, and shared with their friends, but their own experiences have altered their views of the island. their image might have covered the whole island even though it may only be based on certain features of resorts: “[…] this is not nearly as touristic as i had thought, that is, there is plenty of local life here” (interview 4). “[…] i thought that it must be really boring here because this is not known among young people as a party place[…] i noticed that there is plenty of life here, maybe even more than on rhodes ” (interview1). “well, i had heard a lot of good things and my exboyfriends’ mother is crazy about this island of crete” (interview 6). destinations have both national and more intimate collective levels of meaning that are in other words scalable. the guides often prefer to talk about crete as an island because that scale seems to better fit to their ideas than specific resorts do. spatialities of guides based on mental maps and interviews for the guides, their movement and being-in-place happens to a great extent within the limits of their work and the different tasks result in different kinds of ‘destinations’ in terms of experiences and knowledge: “i have done different work tasks in each destination so i have seen them a bit differently” (interview 3). the guides drew mental maps to exemplify the area (’servicescape’ in bitner 1992) in which their daily physical movement is mostly done. these ‘destinations’ do not necessarily correspond with a resort as bounded territory and are dynamically adjusted. the first of two mental maps is drawn by a guide working at a themed hotel, demarcating a very restricted spatiality in her daily movement, see figure 1a: “now i just have to do this because… it is gerani where that blue village 70 fennia 194: 1 (2016)vilhelmiina vainikka is located and we do not move anywhere away from that hotel” (interview 5). she also mentions that within the drawn area, there are different places that they work in depending on whether they are at the service desk or engaging in activities. the other guide has a more varied job description and she drew a more scattered and larger area representing her daily movements, but more restricted than the area of her discussions (bigger circle), see figure 1b. the airport, office and locales visited during excursions are highlighted in this version as places she moves between and in her talk she adds hotels. the dynamic character of being and moving in place is reflected here as a continuous making of the destination (see pred 1984) and “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus” (massey 1994: 154). the second set of maps (fig. 2) represents the areas that the guides consider central in their daily discussions with their clients: what they are asked about and what they feel they need to fig. 1. two mental maps representing the area for daily physical movement. (interviews 5 and 1) know about. the construction of the mass tourism destination is possible through language without simultaneously being there. the spatiality in this theme is extended beyond their own physical movement as the area covered in discussions is larger, covering almost the whole of western crete: working simultaneously on two spatial scales. the ’servicescape’ is thus widened to a mental level. the two examples provided include places outside the resort area. the first one is drawn in a more scattered style highlighting specific areas of interest for her clients even though they are staying at the theme hotel, see figure 2a. whereas the other one is drawn by an online guide, working from an office, whose clients may be located in many parts of the island and asking about different areas, see figure 2b. she drew a more unanimous larger area, although in the interview, some places and paths are highlighted more than the others. these areas include paths and places which clients ask about: e.g. where to visit and how to get there? fennia 194: 1 (2016) 71tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism this talk is marked by the dynamic interaction and relationship between the guides and their clients. the clientele is said to be different in different parts of the season which adds to this dynamicity. an older guide sees a long term change: “previously you had to take them into a minimarket holding hands, but nowadays it is clear already that they want to know more thoroughly about things” (interview 9). the spatiality of the guides’ knowledge is relational to their clients’ needs, interests and questions and they feel they cannot control it totally (see wright 2002), although the guides talk also exemplifies the use of their own ideological frameworks in describing places: “i almost try to say to everyone that they should go somewhere else… because it [agia marina] is a very touristic area” (interview 1). the knowledge needed about the place is in relation to tourists as members of groups (see obrador 2012): “families with children ask what could they do or where could they go with them […] couples ask where they could go with a rented car […] some older people might have questions like is there still that thing that used to be here ten years ago” (interview 3). this generalizing excerpt exemplifies ways the guides highlight different phases of life as marking different ways to ask about as well as consume and produce (make) those places which indicates that there are not two identical trips or experiences of a place (see pred 1984; paasi 2002). construction of ”parallax spatiality” the guides construct an idea of ”parallax spatiality”, that is, a relation between their positionality and those of their clients (tourists’). although both have ‘travelled’ to the same location, the guides have applied for working (there) as a guide and practise that profession by spending their seasonally organized everyday life in the same place their clients have come for a short holiday (crick 1989; gmelch 2003). both positions are products of these processes and dialogue between mobility and stillness (see franquesa 2011; lagerqvist 2013). “if you are here as a worker, there is not much more to do or see after visiting the sights but the basic life works very well here” (interview 7). ”parallax spatiality” is also something that the guides feel that their clients expect of them in terms of knowledge and professionalism: they assume that the guides have been at the destination longer than them and know everything about the fig. 2. two mental maps representing the area covered in discussions. (interviews 4 and 2) 72 fennia 194: 1 (2016)vilhelmiina vainikka place at once, although this is not necessarily the case: “we didn’t move away much at all then [on holiday]… now i have toured a whole lot” (interview 5). as already noted, the length of time spent on the island might be very different in the case of a new guide or a repeat tourist’. it has to be acknowledged that a holiday is a flexible concept in its own right as the boundaries between work and leisure have become more blurred and also because growing numbers of retired tourists do not necessarily fit into the categorical divide. however, the separation between work and holiday is consistently present in the guides’ talk as a relevant context for the phenomenon marking time as a resource. for guides, their own holiday mobility is directed towards finland, where their clients lead their everyday lives. the relationship to the home country and culture is in this sense different. the last set of mental maps represents the areas where the guides spend their weekly time off, when they get to decide what they want to do. the guide in the first example spends time in the agia marina resort area close to where she lives and in the neighbouring city of chania, where she visits frequently for shopping and to connect with the local life, see figure 3a. occasionally she also visits rethymno to meet her guide friends. the other guide highlighted leisure-time spent in platanias and agia marina (circle with initials vp) dining out and exercising with her friends, whereas her daily movement is concentrated near chania, see figure 3b. these areas are more restricted than the ones for their daily movements, although not exhaustively so. the difference they make in scales is even more clearly seen in relation to the areas they need to know about or discuss with their clients. their short leisure time makes them evaluate the distances they are able or willing to travel within the limited time available. the guides characterize themselves as people who have looked to living abroad, are keen travellers, and in addition, like to work with people in customer service. they would like to explore the island more, but they find their limited leisure time filled with necessary everyday chores or relaxing in the same place their clients spend their holidayeveryday. resorts are seasonal homes that both the guides and their clients share. the guides see that their clients have relatively more freedom in terms of their holiday schedule, but they are able to recognize some limitations in these ‘freedoms’ as everyone has some restrictions and conditions that might limit their decisions. this relational dialogue between freedom and restriction is the outcome of the processes that have ended in the different posifig. 3. two mental maps representing the area of leisure. (interviews 1 and 2). fennia 194: 1 (2016) 73tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism tions the guides and tourists are in: one got the job and the other one got the holiday (franquesa 2011). so it is not necessarily a negative-positive dichotomy. one guide (fig. 3a) exemplifies the relationship between her tourist identity and the restrictions of her everyday life in a nutshell: “i will try to see a bit more this summer [of crete than during last summer]… it is nice to go see local life once in a while [in chania]… it is nice to get out of [the resort] because otherwise they [clients] come along there on the streets [laughs]. but often… you just want to stay home and sleep and […] do daily chores: doing the laundry […] stay on the beach or by the pool” (interview 1). in the previous excerpt the guide, however, prefers to avoid clients while on her leisure time because their relationship is coloured by the work context. this does not mean that the presence of tourists or clients were bad per se but in the context of leisure, they prefer not to be doing their work, i.e. being in the role of a guide serving the clients. the closest to travelling that the guides get is when they familiarize themselves with and gather information about the new destination after arriving there. constructing intensive and extensive spatiality of mass tourism throughout the interviews, the guides categorize the spatialities of mass tourism into two sets of ideas: intensive and extensive spatiality. these ideas combine their views on their own spatiality as guides and the spatiality of their clients. intensive spatiality marks the sensuous connection to the place whereas extensive spatiality is based on exploration. intensive spatiality of mass tourism the guides construct an idea of intensive spatiality by describing mass tourism as an assemblage of ”small things” even of everyday quality: using a rather small area, sensuous experience, embodied practices, living in the moment or seizing the moment, sensing the atmosphere of the place, relaxation and spending time with loved ones. it is an inwards looking relationship that is created between the place and the person. the guides frame intensive spatiality as involving those clients who, for example, spend time at the hotel (especially the theme hotel) and who focus on relaxation, being in the sun and sand, spending time with family rather than touring all over the island: “after all people come here to get the sun and they want to lounge around and relax” (interview 1). the guides criticize, as seasonal residents, the resorts for not having visibly local everyday life and a categorization is made between those locals working at resorts and those who live and work in the local villages: “these holiday villages that are full of tourists in the summertime […] the locals who are there, are there mainly for work, so there is not the kind of local everyday-life there” (interview 8). this highlights the mobile character of these places, where almost nobody stays permanently. although part of everyday life (seasonal) for locals does take place in the resorts, an idea is given that it would be preferred if their non-workrelated life would be visible as well: as in the villages outside the resorts where people are said to live traditional lives in a setting in which time seems to have stopped and offer sensations of ‘pastness’ (see lagerqvist 2013). the seizing the moment effect is based on physical features, but also on the atmosphere that is sensed while in the place. there is a link between intensive and extensive spatiality, and some guides would prefer intensive spatiality to occur after the extensive spatiality: “if you go to those small villages, the atmosphere is totally different […] the scent that you get there [in the mountain villages]… the air is so different, is fresh there compared to here in platanias agia marina” (interview 6). the trips from finland to relaxing crete and from the tourist resort to the ‘stillness’ of the local village are however a result of choices which require moving (see franquesa 2011; lagerqvist 2013). the guides also exhibit understanding towards intensive spatiality that stems from the ways the destination is experienced in relation to the shared cultural background. it can be something emotional or sensuous, rather hard to put in words as one guide exemplifies: “cretan atmosphere. … that humanity of people… it is somehow so tangible… here people acknowledge you immediately… in finland you don’t get that in the same way from a stranger… also children get noticed” (interview 9). this refers to the hospitality and cultural features that are appreciated and longed for in relation to the guide’s or tourists’ own cultural context. it also highlights the power of encounters in creating an atmosphere. and the need of everyone to be ap74 fennia 194: 1 (2016)vilhelmiina vainikka preciated, not thought of as intruders, as indeed mass tourists are often described to be in various discussions (see boorstin 1964; turner & ash 1975). the spatial relationship is not only between a person and the place but also evolves between people and their relationships, it is shared and social: both between locals and tourists, and among tourists. repeat visitors were named as a group of people who have deepened their relationship and overcome temporal restrictions in getting to know a place by returning to the same place several times: “when they have visited the same place several times, they have acquaintances there and maybe even on a level of friendship with some of the locals” (interview 8). there are social networks that create tourism or keep it going (larsen et al. 2007). the spatiality of the two groups is articulated through a sense of shared viewpoints and practices. some of the guides have found ways to experience the resort or create a sense of belonging in a similar manner as perhaps their clients have: “there are several nice cafés in platanias square and this café culture has become totally rooted in me. i like to sit there and watch the course of life […] this crete is a little like a summer home to me” (interview 7). intensive spatiality is even something to be promoted on some occasions. in the following excerpt, the guide makes a contribution in that vein. an everyday and holiday practices are combined in a theme hotel: “so that we get families to spend quality time together, which they do not necessarily find time for at home, so we try to teach people to spend time as a whole family” (interview 4). the theme belongs to the wider discussions in finnish society about the challenges of work and family life. the sociality of tourism is characterized here as something that is also highlighted by the tour operator in creating a product for the contemporary families for the contemporary needs in a holiday context that some are interested in (see obrador 2012). “a view of mass tourism as alienating takes for granted the inhospitality of the spaces of mass tourism for families” (obrador 2012: 402). “if it is a family with children, i will not be suggesting for them to go touring the whole island. they cannot bear to be in the car” (interview 1). this kind of contextual sensitivity is considered to be the key to a successful guide-client relationship, and the knowledge of the guide is always used in relation to the client’s context even though their own values may be somewhere else. for instance, holidays are acknowledged as being temporally limited: “probably they have done a lot of work during that year and when they go for a holiday, they just want to relax” (interview 8). people are making decisions regarding travelling and places they visit with various motivations in dialogue with their needs and wants: “they ask which are the good restaurants and are there grocery shops, cashpoints, pharmacies, doctors and issues like this that are linked to their own security and running of their holiday because it is everyday life for that one-week-holiday” (interview 2). this refers to the resort as a holiday home for tourists, resembling a form of cottage culture (see lagerqvist 2013; hiltunen & rehunen 2014). extensive spatiality of mass tourism by extensive spatiality, that is perhaps more outwardly oriented than intensive spatiality, the guides highlight the character of tourism as a movement between the places and ”work of tourists”: using a larger area, getting to know new places and people. guides reveal their own values and adopted as well as learnt ideologies in relation to wider discourses about travelling and holidaying (see mccabe 2005) by wishing for certain kinds of practices from their clients: exploring the locale. for one guide, the meaning of crete is only found outside the coastal resort: “i usually highlight to clients that they should go explore the island and that you get a whole different perception of the whole place when you really […] go to places that are not necessarily the most touristic ones” (interview 6). in this role, she is encouraging and teaching clients from her professional, educated perspective. she is also making a hierarchical distinction between the touristic places and the ‘local’ places and suggests that even inside the tourism phenomenon the touristic places would not be ”in place”. another guide exemplifies: “a couple of great guys were here with undefined accommodation for two weeks. they came to tell that they will not be using the room other than for three days and that they have rented a car for ten days and they do not know where they will be going” (interview 5). in this way, the guides express sharing similar attitudes and values with certain clients, such as independent tourists, who take risks and are adventurous. they also acknowledge elsewhere that certain spatial practices are not possible for all due to the different restrictions and personal preferences. the guides link extensive spatiality to both the spatial practice and mental attitude: “at easter people were not satisfied with just knowing where the fennia 194: 1 (2016) 75tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism church was but they wanted to know what happens inside” (interview 4). the interest in the local issues is growing among their clients and already common in finnish mass tourism: “they ask directly where they can find a really fully cretan [restaurant]… whose owner has a little farm where all the food comes from. those are very popular here” (interview 6). in finland organic and local food has been trendy discussion topics in recent years but in crete this has been a rather daily practice. the neighbouring city of chania is often asked about and visited. the relationship between chania and the resort area is symbiotic in the guides’ talk. other places frequently mentioned are cretan villages, beaches, or heritage or natural sites. some do it by themselves and some ask guides for advice or use guided excursions. the hybrid character of contemporary mass package tourism is present in the interviews as mixed travel motivations: “a little bit in the middle of nowhere this our place [theme hotel], it is a quiet area and near the beach so people very much want to go from there” (interview 5). the thematic all-inclusive hotel is seen to provide something but not necessarily all, and therefore, there is also movement outside it if people want to experience something else. the guides evaluate that the strengths of crete lie in the possibilities for both intensive and extensive spatialities that it offers for different groups of tourists, and this highlights the heterogeneousness within mass tourism and the place as actively speaking to visitors: “crete is a sufficiently large enough island, diverse enough, that people like to move around […] these independent travellers are, by the way, also a big group, who rather do by themselves and go by bus and before anything walk” (interview 10). in this sense, the importance lies in the relationship between a person and the destination and how well they complement each other. the place, the path to reach it and activities carried out are all considered important in the spatiality of mass tourism. concluding remarks the concept mass tourism destination brings often to mind a named spatial entity, such as platanias, benidorm or playa del inglés, that are specialized from their surroundings as tourism infrastructures that attract a large number of tourists. transformations in global tourism, the growing tourist flows, better connections and changes in tourist consumption and production present challenges for the mass tourism destination as a category of analysis. in addition to more general approaches, tourism research should pay attention to various experiences of and user perspectives that re-negotiate wider discourses, to the spatialities of mass tourism destinations. in this research, the spatial framing of the mass tourism destination was left open by addressing it as an agglomeration of different spatialities through situated knowledge. the interview design with the questions of the guides’ own spatiality and their clients’ spatiality gave more insight into how spatialities are interpreted. mass tourism practices are evaluated at an ideological level that contains the ideas of ‘right’ tourism or vacationing (see also mccabe 2005). however, the level of practice is highlighted frequently as challenging the ideology. the suitable decisions are made in specific contexts. for example, lounging on the beach was considered an unappreciated way of holidaying/travelling, as well as a necessary act or understandably desired act in the case of some tourists, and in their own case something constrained by the current situation but still needed (even enjoyed), or something they also like in their own holidays. the interviews conformed to an idea that individuals have intersecting and overlapping, yet different, versions of mass tourism destinations. social groups, the phases of life, previous experiences of other destinations and the overall relationship to travelling need all to be addressed when analysing mass tourism destinations as collective constructs or as ”fields of encounter” of different interests. the conceptualization of mass tourism destinations should underline user perspectives and that everyone encounters the locale and constructs it into a place in their own way (see wright 2002, and especially relph 2000). thus more sensitive interpretation could be created than what the categorization ”mass tourists” may suggest. the results indicate that the ‘professionality’ and ‘knowledge’ of mass tourism are not straightforward processes. for example, repeat tourist who has been to the destination several times during several decades was described as possessing a great deal of existential knowledge about the destination compared with a new young guide working in the destination for the first time. in addition to the momentary (event) character of destination knowledge, there are personal or collective preferences in it. guides are not present in the destination selection or in the whole tourist experience of 76 fennia 194: 1 (2016)vilhelmiina vainikka the client. in this regard, the different experiential knowledges would be important to study further in order to contribute to the better academic theorization of mass tourism. in this study, i did not try to interpret the interviewees’ responses in relation to certain academic ideals of travelling but rather seek how guides positioned themselves in regard to different spatialities. the findings conform to the idea that as an analytical category, mass tourism should not be locked in any specific kind of spatiality or place from the ‘tourist’ (country of origin) point of view, not for the guides’ ”working destination” nor for their views of their clients’ spatiality. the interactivity of the guides’ work, which is influenced by the tour operator and the clients, leads to different physical and mental spatial framings. there is no straightforward way to frame mass tourism destination that would adequately cover mass tourism, rather the fragments that construct it. sun-and-sand seems an easy explanation for motivations and resort for its spatiality but according to interviews, they are only façades behind which more complex collective relationships develop recognizing both enclavic and heterogeneous tourist spaces (edensor 2001). intensive spatiality highlighting sensuous experiencing and stillness and extensive spatiality indicating movement and exploration were seen to stem from the same flow of people, but taking place in various locations. the recognized spatialities thus frame the mass tourism destination in the talk of the guides. places and spatial practices are made meaningful through their relationship. the interplay between these spatialities reflects the combinations of ”the destination” that tourist and guides create in their action. this study conforms to the idea that mass (package) tourism in finnish case is seen as a largescale, popular phenomenon that is democratized (different social classes) and mixed (different motivations) and as such it is difficult to generalize. i would call this challenge as ”mass effect”, which in this case reflects the relationship between the guides and the large numbers of clients which could have led to the confirmation of the myth of a homogeneous mass. the guides do not, however, produce a stereotypical representation of a finnish tourist, which is possibly a result of their work role as customer servers who need to be able to put themselves into their clients’ place. the quantity of clients is rather reflected as dynamic, contextual and scattered groups. the growing independence of tourists in mass tourism suggests that discussion between the macro and micro levels of mass tourism theory is important. in the guides’ talk, the development of mass tourism is twofold. on one hand, there is a growing trend of services in forms of all-inclusive resorts and tour operator-led theme hotels set for intensive spatiality. these developments are understood as a result of the hectic pace of contemporary everyday life. these places respond to the needs of those who need to get to a place in which they are allowed to relax and spend time with their significant ones. on the other hand, there are a growing number of independent tourists that desire to visit new places, know about the everyday practices of local people and use local services, opening possibilities for the resorts and the areas nearby. both of the developments are seen as responses to contemporary life at home, but local elements can be present in both of the spatialities. research and discussions between different interest groups, locals and tourists could reveal common agendas and separate desires for the future. acknowledgements i want to thank the anonymous referees for their instructive comments. i also appreciate the helpful comments of jarkko saarinen, joni vainikka, eva kaján, kaarina tervo-kankare and maaria niskala. i want to show my gratitude for the co-operation for anna salmi, janne ohralahti and maria widell (aurinkomatkat) and kari henner and liselotte hyllendahl (finnmatkat/tui). and of course, all the interviewees: thank you for giving your precious time. a previous draft was presented at the annual conference of atlas 2013 in malta. the fieldwork for this study was supported by the union of finland – greece associations (suomi-kreikka yhdistysten liitto ry) with a grant from the arvo allonen memory fund (arvo allosen muistorahasto) and by the department of geography, university of oulu. references afta 2014. lentäen tehdyt vapaa-ajan valmismatkat sisältäen räätälöidyt matkapaketit. <www. smal.fi/index.php?361> 28.01.2014. agarwal s 2012. relational spatiality and resort restructuring. annals of tourism research 39: 1, 134–154. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.05.007. andrews h 2011. the british on holiday. charter tourism, identity and consumption. channel view, bristol. andriotis k 2011. a comparative study of visitors to urban, coastal and rural areas. evidence from the fennia 194: 1 (2016) 77tourist guide reflections on the spatialities of mass tourism island of crete. european journal of tourism research 4: 2, 93–108. anton clavé s 2012. rethinking mass tourism, space and place. in wilson j (ed). routledge handbook of tourism geographies, 217–224. routledge, london. apostolakis a 2013. individuals’ perceptions for natural resources: the case of cretan beaches. anatolia 25: 1, 117–130. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2013.838689. aquiló e, alegre j & sard m 2005. the persistence of the sun and sand tourism model. tourism management 26: 2, 219–231. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2003.11.004. ashworth g & voogd h 1990. can places be sold for tourism? in ashworth g & goodall b (eds). marketing tourism places, 1–16. routledge, london. berger p & luckmann t 1967. the social construction of reality. doubleday, new york. bitner mj 1992. servicescapes: the impact of physical surroundings on customers and employees. journal of marketing 56: 2, 57–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1252042. boorstin d 1964. the image. harper & row, new york. bourdieu p 1984. distinction. a social critique of the judgement of taste. routledge & kegan paul, london. bramwell b 2004. mass tourism, diversification and sustainability in southern europe’s coastal regions. in bramwell b (ed). coastal mass tourism, 1–31. channel view, clevedon. brey te, morrison am & mills je 2007. an examination of destination resort research. current issues in tourism 10: 5, 415–442. http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/cit315.0. brubaker r & cooper f 2000. beyond ‘identity’. theory and society 29: 1, 1–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1007068714468. burr v 1995. an introduction to social constructionism. routledge, london. butler rw 1980. the concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: implications for management of resources. the canadian geographer 24: 1, 5–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.1980.tb00970.x. casey me 2010. low cost air travel: welcome aboard? tourist studies 10: 2, 175–191. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797611403061. cheong s-m & miller ml 2000. power and tourism. a foucauldian observation. annals of tourism research 27: 2, 371–390. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(99)00065-1. crick m 1989. representations of international tourism in the social sciences: sun, sex, sights, savings, and servility. annual review of sociology 18, 307–344. duval dt 2004. trends and circumstances in caribbean tourism. in duval dt (ed). tourism in the caribbean, 3–22. routledge, london. edensor t 2001. performing tourism, staging tourism: (re)producing tourist space and practice. tourist studies 1: 1, 59–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/146879760100100104. finavia 2014. lentoliikennealan murros jatkuu. aasian merkitys korostuu. toimintakertomus 2011. <https://www.finavia.fi/fi/tiedottaminen/julkaisuarkisto/> 04.11.2014. franquesa j 2011. “we’ve lost our bearings”: place, tourism and the limits of the “mobility turn”. antipode 43: 4, 1012–1033. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00789.x. gmelch g 2003. behind the smiles: the working lives of caribbean tourism. indiana university press, bloomington. gold p & white r 1974. mental maps. penguin books, middlesex. hiltunen mj & rehunen a 2014. second home mobility in finland: patterns, practices and relations of leisure oriented mobile lifestyle. fennia 192: 1, 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.11143/8384. hottola p 2005. the metaspatialities of control management in tourism: backpacking in india. tourism geographies 7: 1, 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461668042000324030. hottola p 2013. tourism spaces, behaviours and cultures: the metaspatialities of tourism. in wilson j (ed). routledge handbook of tourism geographies, 139–146. routledge, london. ivars i paidal ja, rodríguez sánches i & rebollo jfv 2013. the evolution of mass tourism destinations. new approaches beyond deterministic models in benidorm (spain). tourism management 34, 184–195. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2012.04.009. jackson p 1989. maps of meaning. unwin hyman, boston. jacobsen jks, skogheim r & dann gms 2014. sun, sea, sociability, and sightseeing: mediterranean summer holidaymaking revised. anatolia. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13032917.2014.931288. jokinen e & veijola s (eds) 2008. töissä tunturissa. ajatuksia ja kirjoituksia matkailutyöstä. lapland university press, rovaniemi. knox d 2009. mobile practices and youth tourism. in obrador pons p, crang m & travlou p (eds). cultures of mass tourism. doing the mediterranean in the age of banal mobilities, 143–155. ashgate, farnham. krippendorf j 1987. the holiday makers. understanding the impact of leisure and travel. butterworthheinemann, oxford. lagerqvist m 2013. ‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’: the intertwinedness of mobility and stillness in cottage living, fennia 191: 2, 92– 105. http://dx.doi.org/10.11143/8287. larsen j, urry j & axhausen kw 2007. networks and tourism. mobile social life. annals of tourism research 34: 1, 244–262. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2006.08.002. löfgren o 1999. on holiday. a history of vacationing. university of california press, berkeley. maffesoli m 1996. the time of the tribes. the decline of individualism in mass society. sage, london. massey d 1994. space, place and gender. polity press, oxford. massey d 2005. for space. sage, london. mccabe s 2005. ‘who is a tourist?’: a critical review. tourist studies 5: 1, 85–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797605062716. 78 fennia 194: 1 (2016)vilhelmiina vainikka mccabe s & stokoe h 2004. place and identity in tourist accounts. annals of tourism research 31: 3, 601–622. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2004.01.005. miller d 1987. material culture and mass consumption. blackwell, oxford. miller ml & auyong j 1998. remarks on tourism terminologies: anti-tourism, mass tourism, and alternative tourism. in miller ml & auyong j (eds). proceedings of the 1996 world congress on coastal and marine tourism, 1–24. university of washington, washington. obrador p 2012. the place of the family in tourism research: domesticity and thick sociality by the pool. annals of tourism research 39: 1, 401–420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.07.006. obrador pons p, crang m & travlou p 2009. introduction: taking mediterranean tourists seriously. in obrador pons p, crang m & travlou p (eds). cultures of mass tourism. doing the mediterranean in the age of banal mobilities, 1–20. ashgate, farnham. paasi a 2002. place and region: regional worlds and words. progress in human geography 26: 6, 802– 811. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132502ph404pr. poon a 1993. tourism, technology and competitive strategies. cabi, oxon. pred a 1984. place as historically contingent process: structuration and the time-geography of becoming places. annals of the association of american geographers 74: 2, 279–297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1984.tb01453.x. rakić t & chambers d 2012. rethinking the consumption of places. annals of tourism research 39: 3, 1612–1633. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2011.12.003. rantala o 2010. tourist practices in the forest. annals of tourism research 37:1, 249–264. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2009.09.003. relph e 1976. place and placelessness. pion limited, london. relph e 2000. author’s response: place and placelessness in a new context. progress in human geography 254: 4, 617–619. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913200100189139. rose g 1997. situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. progress in human geography 21: 3, 305–320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913297673302122. rosselló j & riera a 2012. pricing european package tours: the impact of new distribution channels and low-cost airlines. tourism economics 18: 2, 265–279. http://dx.doi.org/10.5367/te.2012.0121. räikkönen j & honkanen a 2013. does satisfaction with package tours lead to successful vacation experiences? journal of destination marketing & management 2: 2, 108–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jdmm.2013.03.002. saarinen j 2004. ‘destinations in change’: the transformation of tourist destinations. tourist studies 4: 2, 161–179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797604054381. saraniemi s & kylänen m 2011. problematizing the concept of tourism destination: an analysis of different theoretical approaches. journal of travel research 50: 2, 133–143. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0047287510362775. selänniemi t 2001. pale skin on playa del anywhere: finnish tourists in the liminoid south. in smith vl & brent m (eds). hosts and guests revisited: tourism issues of the 21st century, 80–92. cognizant, new york. shaw g & williams am 2002. critical issues in tourism. blackwell, oxford. sheller m & urry j 2004. places to play, places in play. in sheller m & urry j (eds). tourism mobilities. places to play, places in play, 1–10. routledge, london. squire sj 1998. rewriting languages of geography and tourism. cultural discourses of destinations, gender and tourism theory in the canadian rockies. in ringer g (ed). destinations. cultural landscapes of tourism, 80–100. routledge, london. torres r 2002. cancun’s tourism development from a fordist spectrum of analysis. tourist studies 2: 1, 87– 116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14697602002001098. tribe j 2006. the truth about tourism. annals of tourism research 33: 2, 360–381. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2005.11.001. tuffin k & howard c 2001. demystifying discourse analysis: theory, method and practice. in mchoul a & rapley m (eds). how to analyse talk in institutional settings. a casebook of methods, 196–205. continuum, london. turner l & ash j 1975. the golden hordes. international tourism and the pleasure periphery. constable, london. urry j & larsen j 2011. the tourist gaze 3.0. sage, london. vainikka j 2012. narrative claims on regions: prospecting for spatial identities among social movements in finland. social & cultural geography 13: 6, 587–605. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2012.710912. vainikka v 2013. rethinking mass tourism. tourist studies 13: 3, 268–286. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797613498163. wheeller b 2003. alternative tourism – a deceptive ploy. in cooper c (ed). classic reviews in tourism, 227–234. channel view, clevedon. wright s 2002. sun, sea, sand and self-expression: mass tourism as an individual experience. in berghoff h, korte b, schneider r & harvie c (eds). the making of modern tourism, 181–202. palgrave, basingstoke. young m 1999. the social construction of tourist places. australian geographer 30: 3, 373–389. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049189993648. cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study in finland pekka kauppila kauppila, pekka (2011). cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study in finland. fennia 189: 1, pp. 20–31. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. over the last decades, peripheral, rural areas have been faced with social and economic challenges, such as economic restructuring, unemployment, out-migration and an ageing population. due to declining traditional industries, tourism has often been highlighted as a vehicle to revitalize the economy of rural areas. the aim of the study is to conceptualize the regional development process of resorts, in relation to their location municipalities at a local level in finland. gis (geographical information systems) technology and georeferenced data, so called grid data, are utilized in the statistical socio-economic analysis of the four largest resorts – levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs – on the finnish periphery. the study results show that the development process of the resorts has been very positive in terms of the indicators of regional development. along with the absolute progressing, the relative importance of the resorts within their location municipalities has strengthened. the outcome of the study is presented in the classic core–periphery framework: the resorts are considered to be cores and the surrounding area to those cores is a periphery. as a consequence, there is an emergence of a polarization process within the municipalities under study, as a result of tourism development. it is obvious that the role of the resorts within the location municipalities in the regional development will strengthen in the future. generally speaking, from the viewpoint of the regional development of peripheral, rural areas, the main challenge is to extend the positive socio-economic impacts of resorts, cores, to a wider geographical area, a periphery. keywords: northern finland, resort tourism, gis, regional development, core, periphery pekka kauppila, department of geography, p.o. box 3000, fin-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: pekka.kauppila@oulu.fi introduction in terms of regional development, the positive socio-economic impacts of tourism have been highlighted in peripheral, rural areas that suffer from economic restructuring, unemployment, out-migration and an ageing population. therefore, tourism literature has emphasized the role of tourism as a tool for regional development, particularly from the peripheral viewpoint (e.g. butler et al. 1998; müller & jansson 2007; saarinen 2007; hall et al. 2009). it seems, however, that the industry has a tendency to accumulate spatially and temporally: tourism demand and supply meet at resorts. if the tourism phenomenon concentrates in resorts, it is then obvious that positive regional development – an increase in the number of enterprises, jobs and permanent population – can be discovered in those destinations. according to prideaux (2004: 28–29), a consensus exists, concerning the functions of resorts at a general level: they provide a large number of attractions and services for both day-trippers and overnight stayers. he, however, distinguishes macro and micro level perspectives with respect to the resort concept. the former refers to an urban community and the latter to a hotel complex with versatile entertainment and recreation services. naturally, these two approaches have different impacts on regional development and the local community. the importance of resorts in the tourism development of finland is manifested throughout the urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa4066 fennia 189: 1 (2011) 21cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study … current tourism policy (suomen matkailustrategia 2020 2010): one key point of the policy is resortoriented tourism development and hence, resorts are expected to strengthen their position in both tourism demand and supply. in this light, the number of enterprises and jobs should also increase, and resorts can therefore be interpreted to also become nodes for regional development over a wider geographical area. the aim of the study is to conceptualize the regional development process of resorts in relation to their location municipalities at a local level in finland. the paper demonstrates that the core–periphery dichotomy can be realized within municipalities in western countries. the outcome of the study is presented in a widely cited classic regional development framework, i.e. the core–periphery framework. generally speaking, from the viewpoint of utilizing tourism as an effective tool for regional development, the basic idea is to extend the positive socio-economic impacts of tourism from resorts, cores, to a larger geographical area, a periphery. in practice, this requires the integration of resorts and the surrounding area into one functional entity in social and economic terms, in order to alleviate regional disparities at a local level. the four largest resorts – levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs – in northern finland are applied as case studies, and the number and structure of enterprises, jobs and the permanent population are used as the indicators of regional development. in finland, resorts are not independent municipalities, but they are a part of a municipality (see vuoristo 2002). resorts are thus equated with villages which are not always regarded as official statistical areal units. therefore, when studying statistically, the socio-economic characteristics and changes of geographical units smaller than municipalities, gis (geographical information systems) technology and georeferenced data, so called grid data, seem to be a respectable option. core–periphery models in tourism in tourism research, the concepts of core and periphery were introduced in the 1960’s and 1970’s (see christaller 1963; lundgren 1975; hills & lund gren 1977). in the context of regional development, the concepts were applied, for example, in the classic models by myrdal (1964), friedmann (1966) and hirschman (1970). notwithstanding this, it was prebisch who highlighted the concepts of core and periphery for the first time in 1949 (lumijärvi 1983: 92). concerning developing countries and their international tourism, the dependence concept is often manifested (see brohman 1996; khah 1997; scheyvens 2002; telfer 2002). frank’s (1969) theory on the terms of the trade of the capitalist world system and the concept of surplus is usually mentioned in the background of the dependence concept. according to the theory, metropolises, cores, accumulate economic surplus from the surrounding satellites, a periphery, and they utilize that surplus for their own development. as a consequence of this, metropolises will strengthen their position in relation to satellites, since the satellites are not able to benefit from the overall growth of well-being. simultaneously, satellites become increasingly dependent on metropolises. frank states that a polarization process – on the one hand accumulation and on the other hand decline – emerges along with countries between regions. this kind of dependency theory can be discovered in the background of the classic core–periphery models in tourism (see lundgren 1975; hills & lundgren 1977; britton 1980, 1982). in this respect, it is noteworthy that pearce (1995) has classified the traditional core–periphery models in tourism, into the group of structural models. according to friedmann (1966), a widely cited regional development theorist, the core and periphery concepts are considered to be relative in nature and therefore, they can be recognized on different geographical scales. this implies, for example, that centres, cores, can be found in rural areas, in a periphery, and these cores can be differentiated from the surrounding areas at a local level. furthermore, friedmann emphasizes the dynamic nature of the concepts of core and periphery: the position of regional units can vary, over time, between a core and a periphery. thus, it is possible to have a development within a periphery. in other words, a periphery is not doomed to be a periphery forever. from the viewpoint of regional development, botterill et al. (2000) summarize the differences between the concepts of core and periphery through the following variables: economy and population, information flows, the power relations of decision-making, as well as the infrastructure and service structure (table 1). the distance to markets is one variable which is often added to the list: it is long in the case of a core, whereas, in the case of a periphery, it is short (stuart et al. 2005: 236–237). finally, shields (1991) 22 fennia 189: 1 (2011)pekka kauppila points out that the concepts of core and periphery do not only have a dimension that is geographical, but also such that is social and cultural. christaller (1963) implies that tourism is a typical phenomenon for peripheral areas. however, it is widely known that at present, in absolute terms, the largest tourist flows can be found in cities (e.g. page & hall 2003). according to christaller, the regions of origin are located mainly in cities, cores, and trips are mostly directed to rural areas, a periphery. later in tourism research, attention has been paid to the core–periphery relationship between developed (core) and developing (periphery) countries at a global level, emphasizing the power relations of those two country groups (see hills & lundgren 1977; britton 1980). along with britton’s (1980) international level approach, the core–periphery relationship in tourism has also been noticed at the lower regional levels, as within countries (brown 2006). in the case of tobago and barbuda, for example, weaver (1998) expresses their position in the global tourism system by using the concept of “the peripheries of periphery”. those two islands are located – both in physical and social senses – in the periphery of the countries’ main islands, trinidad and antigua. however, the main islands belong to a periphery from the perspective of the global tourism system, since they are developing countries. recently, a new, theoretical core–periphery model has been presented by papatheodorou (2004). in his approach, papatheodorou categorizes resorts into two groups, core and peripheral, based on the level of the development process in the context of western countries. the characteristics of core resorts include artificial attractions, diversified traffic services and a well-developed infrastructure, as well as a service structure. furthermore, international tour operators, hotel chains and air companies operate in core resorts. naturally, peripheral resorts represent the opposite ends of a continuum, compared to core ones. according to papatheodorou, core and periphery are relative concepts and they can also be recognized at the different regional levels. in addition, he stresses, contrary to britton (1980), the dynamic nature of resorts: over time, peripheral resorts are not doomed to belong to this category forever, and they may become core resorts. as noted, the focus of the presented tourism core–periphery models is not to scrutinize regional development from a local level viewpoint, but the core–periphery relationship in the structural framework of tourism. actually, regional development in itself is not local, because the phenomenon is recognized at the different regional levels. however, the message of the tourism core–periphery models can be interpreted from the perspective of regional development at a local level: the development of tourism either strengthens or creates the core–periphery relationship in a periphery, since tourist flows accumulate in enclave resorts. along with tourist flows, investments focus on resorts, accelerating the concentration of enterprises, jobs and population. it has been argued that tourism and its development has an effect on the uneven distribution of capital in a geographical sense and thus, it contributes to increasing disparities with respect to regional development (britton 1991). in other words, due to the accumulation process, the surrounding areas of resorts are incapable of benefiting from tourism. literature presents many examples in which the polarization process – the accumulation and detable 1. the characteristics of core and periphery (botterill et al. 2000, table 1.1). core periphery high level of economic vitality and a diverse economic base low level of economic vitality and dependent on traditional industries metropolitan in character. rising population through in-migration with a relative young age structure more rural and remote – often with high scenic values. population falling through out-migration, with an ageing structure innovative, pioneering and enjoys good information flows reliant on imported technologies and ideas, and suffers from poor information flows focus of major political, economic and social decisions remote from decision-making leading to a sense of alienation and lack of power good infrastructure and amenities poor infrastructure and amenities fennia 189: 1 (2011) 23cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study … cline generated by tourism – has been discovered in regional development, both in developing countries and in the peripheral areas of western countries. in developing countries, this has been recognized at a local level, among others, in indonesia (hussey 1989; shaw & shaw 1999; walpole & goodwin 2000), mexico (brenner & aguilar 2002; brenner 2005) and senegal (diagne 2004). in the periphery of western countries, the polarization process has been noted at a sub-regional level in the scottish highlands (getz 1981, 1986) and at a local level in the spanish pyrenees (lasanta et al. 2007). for example, the study results of the spanish pyrenees have proved that in a municipality which has a ski resort or infrastructure enabling accessibility to a ski resort which is located in the vicinity of that municipality, the number of the population, as well as the change in the population structure and the economic dependency ratio have developed positively, compared to the other municipalities in the pyrenees. furthermore, the change of the economic structure of those ski resort municipalities has occurred quicker than in the other municipalities within the region. to sum up, all the above-mentioned examples underpin the core–periphery dichotomy which is generated by tourism. as an outcome of the tourism development, resorts have characteristics of cores and the surrounding area of those resorts resembles a periphery. large northern resorts, data and method in the finnish context, resorts are defined – in a geographical sense – as smaller regional units than municipalities and therefore, they constitute a functional centre of their own, within one municipality, or on the border of two or more municipalities (vuoristo 2002). in other words, resorts are a part of their location municipality. thus, resorts can be interpreted to resemble prideaux’s (2004) macro level view. examples of these are the cases which are under study: levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs (fig. 1). the location municipalities of the resorts are kittilä (levi), kuusamo (ruka), inari (saariselkä) and kolari (ylläs). along with a remote physical location, the municipalities are peripheral in both social and economic terms. this is supported by the fact that the number of their population, as well as their economic activity, is modest. for example, in 2009, the number of the population varied from less than 4 000 (kolari) to over 16 000 (kuusamo) and in 2008, the range of the number of jobs was from about 1 300 (kolari) to almost 6 000 (kuusamo) (finlandcd 2011). it is noteworthy that the land area of the location municipalities is large and therefore, the population density of the municipalities is low. the age structure of the municipalities differs from finland: in 2009, the average age of the location municipalities was a few years higher than in finland in general (41.3 years) (finlandcd 2011). with respect to the economic structure of the municipalities, in 2006, the proportion of the primary sector was higher than on an average in finland. the range of the municipalities varied between 6% (kittilä) and 9% (inari), whereas, the average of finland was 3% (georeferenced data by statistics finland 2008a). generally speaking, the following interpretation is relefig. 1. the location of levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs in northern finland (modified from kauppila 2010, fig. 2). 24 fennia 189: 1 (2011)pekka kauppila vant: the location municipalities have, more or less, the characteristics of a periphery (see botterill et al. 2000). the development history of the resorts is long in the context of finland. the first stage of the development process of the four largest resorts in finland – levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs – can be found in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s (kauppila 2004; kauppila & rusanen 2009). in referring to butler’s (1980) seminal destination life cycle model, the stage is interpreted as the exploring stage. large-scale development began, at least, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and during that time, according to the destination life cycle model, the resorts moved onto the development stage (kauppila 2004; kauppila & rusanen 2009). recently, very extensive plans have been publicly manifested for the resorts for the next few years. at the present time, the largest resorts in northern finland are target areas for hundreds of thousands of accommodation nights, several dozens of enterprises, hundreds of jobs, permanent residents and second homes (table 2). other bases for the selection of the resorts as the case studies have been manifested elsewhere (see kauppila 2004, 2010; kauppila & rusanen 2009). it is noteworthy that in the present paper, the resort of ylläs includes both the villages of äkäslompolo and ylläsjärvi in terms of enterprises, jobs and the permanent population (cf. kauppila 2004; kauppila & rusanen 2009). the absolute distance between these two villages is only about ten kilometres and thus, they are considered to be one functional entity. referring to prideaux’s (2004) macro level view, resorts are regarded as local level regional units, but are not always paralleled with the lowest official statistical regional unit, i.e., the municipality. along with the case of finland, this has also been noticed in england by agarwal and brunt (2006). they have manifested this problem when attempting to provide comparable resort level data: resorts are usually considered to be district level regional units, although the geographical area of a “real” resort is just a part of a district. hence, when the study area is smaller than a municipality in a geographical sense, gis technology and georeferenced data, so called grid data, then seems to be a respectable option for the statistical socio-economic analysis of resorts. georeferenced data is based on co-ordinates and in practice, residents, for example, can be defined as their residence, i.e. a property. in this study, the aggregation level of the grid data is, however, the 1 km x 1 km grid cell. in literature, it has been recognized that the size of an areal unit influences the phenomena that is being investigated (see oppershaw & taylor 1979, 1981). this is used to call the maup-problem (modifiable area unit problem). if data is based on administrative regions (e.g. municipalities), it then ignores the internal differences of the region under study. this phenomenon is conceptualized as an ecological fallacy (see martin 1991: 57–58). in the present study, the ecological fallacy concept is seen as a challenge when using municipality level data for describing the socio-economic regional development at the resort level. municipality level data provides the impression of an equally distributed phenomenon within the region, although this kind of situation is known to be very exceptional in human geography in general. instead of an equal distribution, the paper also assumes regional differences within the municipalities. a model and the principles and challenges for using gis and georeferenced data in the context of finnish resorts have been presented extensively elsewhere (see kauppila 2004; kauppila & rutable 2. basic information on levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs (summer cottage statistics by statistics finland 2006; georeferenced data by statistics finland 2008a; statistics finland 2008b; finlandcd 2011). levi ruka saariselkä ylläs location municipality/ town kittilä kuusamo inari kolari commercial accommodation nights (2007) (% international tourists) 688 717 (27) 841 129 (12) 377 012 (32) 419 026 (24) enterprises (2009) 146 63 64 126 jobs (2006) 752 303 355 340 permanent population (2007) 814 347 345 580 second homes (2004) 1 092 1 036 205 591 fennia 189: 1 (2011) 25cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study … sanen 2009). briefly, when defining the resorts from the surrounding environment with grid cells, the following model was put into practice. firstly, after checking the co-ordinates of the resorts from maps to outline the core areas of the destinations, the most populated grid cell (1 km x 1 km) was chosen as the so-called centre grid. the reason for the choice of the most populated grid cell as the centre grid was that the coverage of the job variable is not as complete as the population variable, due to the missing co-ordinates of some jobs (see kauppila 2004; häkkilä & kauppila 2009a, 2009b, 2010; kauppila & rusanen 2009). it is noteworthy that the largest grid cell, in terms of the number of jobs, was located in all the cases either in the same grid cell as the most populated grid cell or alongside it. actually, the concentration of jobs at the resort level is much higher than the population (see häkkilä & kauppila 2009a, 2009b). secondly, the study area was expanded to cover the grid cells around the centre grid (7 km x 7 km), so the resorts encompass a land area of 49 km2. hence, the geographical area of each resort is equal and the resorts have the same opportunity for population and jobs coverage. in the case of ylläs, the villages of äkäslompolo and ylläsjärvi were first treated as a resort of their own and the data of the destinations were integrated into one entity at a later stage. generally, the applied model is highly suitable for outlining the core areas of the resorts. the strengths of gis and georeferenced data underlie the fact that resorts can be freely constituted, ignoring administrative boundaries. in principle, there are no limitations to the outlining. georeferenced data includes a range of socio-economic variables stressing population, but variables related to economic activities are largely ignored. unfortunately, there is no georeferenced data dealing with enterprises, for example, and in the case of enterprises, the data is based on postal code areas and the finlandcd database. the postal code areas are the following: levi (99130 sirkka-rauhala), ruka (93825 rukatunturi), saariselkä (99830 saariselkä) and ylläs (95970 äkäslompolo and 95980 ylläsjärvi). it must be emphasized that the postal code areas do not exactly fit the geographical areas of the resorts under study, outlined by gis and georeferenced data (see kauppila 2004; häkkilä & kauppila 2009a). in this respect, the modifiable area unit problem still exists. the data for the research was provided by statistics finland. regional development: resorts and location municipalities the development process of the resorts in the finnish periphery has resulted, first and foremost, in an increase in the number of day-trippers and accommodated tourists. as a consequence, this has led to a growth in the number of enterprises, jobs and the permanent population over the last few decades (table 3). this process can be noticed, in particular, at levi and ylläs. it has to be borne in mind that in the case of ylläs, in 1993, the number of enterprises only includes the village of äkäslompolo, since there was no enterprise data available concerning the village of ylläsjärvi. in absolute terms, at levi, for example, the number of enterprises has increased to almost 120, jobs to over 700 and the permanent population of nearly table 3. enterprises, jobs and the permanent population of levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs, in relation to their location municipalities. the relative numbers (%) indicate the proportion of the resorts of their location municipalities. the absolute numbers of the resorts are in parenthesis (georeferenced data by statistics finland 1970, 1980, 2008a; finlandcd 1993, 2011). enterprises jobs permanent population resort 1993 2009 1980 2006 1970 2007 levi 14 % (36) 34 % (146) 3 % (37) 34 % (752) 5 % (365) 14 % (814) ruka 4 % (21) 7 % (63) 3 % (126) 5 % (303) 1 % (175) 2 % (347) saariselkä 12 % (36) 18 % (64) 5 % (111) 15 % (355) 0 % (28) 5 % (345) ylläs 16 % (33) 42 % (126) 5 % (58) 32 % (340) 4 % (220) 15 % (580) 26 fennia 189: 1 (2011)pekka kauppila 450. the development process of ruka and saariselkä has been similar to levi and ylläs, but the intensity seems to be slightly lower. all in all, the development process of the resorts has progressed in absolute terms. in 1980–2006, the total increase in the jobs of the resorts was over 1 400. respectively, from 1970 to 2007, the total number of the permanent population increased by nearly 1 300 people. it is noteworthy that during the study period, the development of the number of jobs in the municipalities of inari and kolari would have been negative without the positive development trend of saariselkä and ylläs. furthermore, in 1980–2006, in the case of kittilä, almost 80% of all the jobs were created at levi. from 1970 to 2007, all of the location municipalities have had a decreasing trend in terms of their permanent population. for example, the municipality of kolari has lost almost a fourth of all its population and the municipality of kittilä, about a fifth in the study period (georeferenced data by statistics finland 1970, 1980, 2008a). as noted earlier, all of the resorts under study have had an increasing population trend. it must be emphasized that if the resort data had included “nonstatistical” seasonal residents – workers, telecommuters and second homers – the population would have been substantially greater. from the perspective of the location municipalities, the importance of the resorts has strengthened in regional development (see table 3). this relative viewpoint can be demonstrated best in the cases of levi and ylläs. for example, the proportion of jobs at the levi and ylläs resorts was a third of all the jobs in the municipalities of kittilä and kolari in 2006, but it was only a few percent in 1980. this tendency is similar in all the cases, but the intensity varies. basically, the relative changes of enterprises and the permanent population at the resorts follow the development trend of jobs. to conclude, the resorts under study have increased their value within their location municipalities, both in absolute and relative terms from the standpoint of regional development. at a municipality level, the relative changes have been very rapid in those areas with a strong positive development process of the resort associated with a small-sized regional economy in terms of enterprises, jobs and permanent population. this is not only due to the fact that the development process of the resorts themselves has been extremely positive during the last decades, but simultaneously, the other parts of the municipalities, except the municipality centres, have declined (see kauppila 2004). therefore, the regional development of the municipalities resembles the structure of two growth poles at the local level. it is obvious that the role of the resorts within the location municipalities in regional development will strengthen in the future. actually, the current regional development plan of lapland sketches the regional structure of the whole of lapland until 2030 (lappi – pohjoisen… 2009). referring to the plan, the regional structure of the municipalities will be concentrated in the tourism development corridors between the municipality centres and the resorts. of course, the role and importance of the resorts in regional development will depend on the demand of tourism in the future. if the tourism demand will not increase at the resorts, then it is obvious that the role of the resorts in regional development within the location municipalities will not strengthen either. on the other hand, the development process of the municipality centre and other centres has an influence on the entire regional structure of the municipalities. in the cases under study, the polarization process of regional development seems to be pronounced in the municipalities of kittilä and kolari. the absolute size of ruka is about the same compared to levi, saariselkä and ylläs, with respect to regional development indicators, but the size of the regional economy of the town of kuusamo is substantially larger than the other location municipalities under study. for example, in 2009, the number of the population in kuusamo (16 669 inhabitants) was almost threefold in comparison with inari (6 863) and kittilä (6 115) and more than fourfold in terms of kolari (3 854) (finlandcd 2011). in terms of enterprises and jobs, the ratio between the municipalities is in line with the number of the population. therefore, the relative importance of ruka, within the town of kuusamo, is lower. in other words, kuusamo is less dependent on ruka than, for example, kittilä is on levi or kolari is on ylläs. nevertheless, from the perspective of regional development, the relative importance of the resorts within their location municipalities has increased in all the cases. along with the quantity indicators, the age structure of the resorts differs nowadays from the municipalities. in 1970, at the resorts, the proportion of the young age group (less than 16 years) varied between 17% (saariselkä) and 34% (ylläs), whereas in the municipalities, the range was from 32% (kittilä) to 38% (kuusamo) (georeferenced fennia 189: 1 (2011) 27cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study … data by statistics finland 1970). hence, in the case of the resorts, the proportion of the age group was lower than in their own location municipality. in 2007, the corresponding figures of the resorts varied from 19% (saariselkä) to 25% (levi and ruka) and in the location municipalities, they were between 18% (kolari) and 23% (kuusamo) (georeferenced data by statistics finland 2008a). contrary to 1970, at the resorts under study, the proportion of the age group was higher than in their own location municipality. it has to be borne in mind that in 2007, the youngest age group was defined to be less than 18 years. in terms of retired people (more than 64 years old), in 1970, there were no substantial differences between the resorts and the municipalities, but in 2007, at the resorts, their proportion was less than 10%, whereas in the case of municipalities, the range varied from 17% (inari) to 20% (kolari) (georeferenced data by statistics finland 1970, 2008a). therefore, in the resort cases under study, the proportion of retired people was lower than in their own location municipality at the present time. in conclusion, the age structure of the resorts has changed over time, and nowadays, the destinations have a healthier age structure compared to the location municipalities in relative terms. furthermore, the unemployment rate of the resorts has remained notably lower than the average of the location municipalities during the last decades (finlandcd1993, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2011). the service and enterprise structure of the resorts is diversified over time. the standard industrial classification by statistics finland changed in 2008 and it is therefore not possible to completely compare the diversification. in 2009, along with accommodation, restaurant and programme services, a large number of other businesses, such as local grocery stores, retail trades, construction, transportation and real estate firms, are situated within the resorts (finlandcd 2011). furthermore, some public services – nursery, fire station, comprehensive school (not at saariselkä) and church (not at ruka) – can be found at the destinations (kauppila 2008). bearing in mind that there are only a few hundred people living permanently at the resort, without tourism and tourists, the service and enterprise structure of the destinations would be more one-sided. along with the age structure, the economic structure of the resorts differs nowadays from the municipalities. in 1970, at the resorts, the proportion of the primary sector varied between 11% (saariselkä) to 56% (ylläs), whereas in the case of municipalities, the range was from 29% (inari) to 50% (kittilä) (georeferenced data by statistics finland 1970). thus, in the resort cases, the proportion of the primary sector was about the same or even higher (ylläs) than in their own location municipality. in 2006, the corresponding figures of the resorts were from 0.3% (levi) to 3% (ruka) and in the case of municipalities, the range varied between 6% (kittilä) and 9% (inari) (georeferenced data by statistics finland 2008a). hence, the proportion of the primary sector was lower than in their own location municipality. in terms of the tertiary sector, in 1970, in the resort cases, it varied between 28% (ylläs) and 89% (saariselkä) and in the municipalities, the range was from 35% (kittilä and kolari) to 53% (inari) (georeferenced data by statistics finland 1970). at all the resorts, except saariselkä, the proportion of the tertiary sector was about the same as in their own location municipality. however, in the case of the ylläs resort, it was even lower than in the municipality of kolari. in 2006, the corresponding figures of the resorts were between 86% (ruka) and 96% (saariselkä) and in the municipalities, the range was from 74% (kuusamo) to 84% (kittilä) (georeferenced data by statistics finland 2008a). to conclude, in the case of the resorts, the proportion of the tertiary sector was substantially higher than in their own location municipality. generally speaking, the overall economic transition from the primary sector to the tertiary sector has been very rapid at the resorts, compared to their location municipalities. in practice, concerning the resorts, agriculture and forestry has been substituted for the tourism industry over time. at the resorts, the secondary sector has never been a great contributor to the economy. in terms of saariselkä, the resort was found for a tourism purpose and had no traditional settlement or industries before the tourism era. this accounts for the low primary sector and high tertiary sector rates which were already present in 1970. to sum up, both from the quantity and structural perspectives, the aforementioned regional development process is exceptional for peripheral rural areas. generally speaking, those areas suffer from economic decline due to economic restructuring. a decrease in the number of enterprises, jobs and the permanent population, as well as unemployment, out-migration and an ageing population are considered to be indicators of this. at present, the 28 fennia 189: 1 (2011)pekka kauppila core–periphery dichotomy can be found within the municipalities. the polarization process is generated by tourism development and as a consequence of this, the resorts tend to have resembled the characteristics of cores and the surrounding area is a periphery (see botterill et al. 2000). conclusions the aim of the study was to conceptualize the regional development process of resorts in relation to their location municipalities at a local level in finland. the number and structure of enterprises, jobs and permanent population were applied as the indicators of regional development. the data for the research was provided by statistics finland and it was analyzed by using gis technology and georeferenced data. the study results proved that the regional development processes of the four largest resorts – levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs – in northern finland have been very positive within their location municipalities. thus, based on the findings of the paper, the resorts more resemble the characteristics of cores than a periphery in terms of the development of the economy and population and therefore, they are defined as cores. more precisely, the resorts are considered to be “cores in a northern periphery”. it is widely known that over the last decades, a great deal of public and private capital has been invested in the largest resorts in northern finland. according to the results of this research, the outcome of the investments has been successful from the viewpoint of the resorts, with respect to the number and structure of the enterprises, jobs and permanent population. utilizing the core–periphery terminology, the surrounding area of those cores can be conceptualized as a periphery, in other words “a periphery in a northern periphery”. as a consequence, the polarization process within the municipalities is very strong at the moment, but there are, however, some differences in the rate of the changes between the municipalities. basically, the polarization within the location municipalities in social and economic terms seems to be distinct with the strong positive development process of the resort associated with a small-sized regional economy in terms of the enterprises, jobs and permanent population. to conclude, the concepts of core and periphery, generated by tourism, can also be found at a local level in the finnish periphery. hence, the study results underpin the fact that has been recognized both in developing countries (e.g. hussey 1989; shaw & shaw 1999; walpole & goodwin 2000; brenner & aguilar 2002; diagne 2004; brenner 2005) and in the peripheral areas of western countries (e.g. getz 1981, 1986; lasanta et al. 2007). from the theoretical perspective, the study associates the core–periphery relationship with the development process of resorts, focusing on two important variables in terms of regional development, i.e. economy and population. to put it briefly, when resorts progress over time, from a local level recreation centre to a regional, national and finally even an international level resort, the changes in the number and structure of the enterprises, jobs and population are positive compared to the surrounding area of those resorts. simultaneously, due to tourism, development resorts are moving on from peripheries to cores from the viewpoint of regional development. thus, the concepts of the core and periphery are dynamic in nature as, for example, friedmann (1966) and papatheodorou (2004) have manifested. the dy(2004) have manifested. the dynamic nature of destinations implies that the changes in the roles of regional development over time – from a periphery to a core – are associated with the destination life cycle model by butler (1980). during the early stages of the model, resorts resemble the characteristics of a periphery and in the latter stages, apart from an overall decline of the regional economy, they can be considered to be cores (see kauppila 2004, 2006). as noted earlier, in finland, the lowest official statistical regional unit is the municipality, but gis technology and georeferenced data enable the study of non-administrative geographical units that are smaller than municipalities statistically. without gis and georeferenced data, the present research design would be challenging, even impossible to realize. the strength of using gis is that it provides an opportunity to outline and analyze resorts, whilst ignoring administrative boundaries. it is noteworthy to remark that georeferenced data, so called grid data, is quite rare world-wide. there are, however, some examples of the utilization of grid data in the context of swedish resorts from the viewpoint of second home tourism (see müller 2005). although georeferenced data includes a wide range of socio-economic variables, it would be relevant to extend the database, addressing enterprises and economic activity variables generally. this would provide a new and diversified approach to study the nexus fennia 189: 1 (2011) 29cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study … of the tourism development of resorts and regional development. basically, resorts as cores are key nodes in tourism-oriented regional development, because they are considered to be locations for the accumulation of tourists and the tourism industry. as a result of this, the positive tourism development of resorts leads to, among others, a growth in the number of enterprises and jobs. from the viewpoint of the regional development of peripheral rural areas, the main challenge is to extend the positive socio-economic impacts of resorts to a wider geographical area. in practice, this means collaboration between resorts, cores, and the surrounding area, a periphery, both within the tourism industry and between the tourism industry and other local industries (see kauppila et al. 2009). actually, the basic idea of the above-mentioned collaboration is to integrate resorts and the surrounding area into one functional entity in social and economic terms, in order to decrease regional disparities between cores and a periphery at the local level. as a consequence, tourism can be used more effectively as a tool for regional development, based on the larger multiplicative effects on the area and smaller leakages from that area. recently, lacher and nepal (2010) have demonstrated in the case of three villages in northern thailand that it is possible to utilize tourism and the tourism industry successfully in regional development at a local level in a periphery. they emphasize a strategy to increase the positive socioeconomic impacts of tourism. using that strategy, on the one hand, leakages can be reduced, and on the other hand, it is possible to increase local economic development, distribute tourism income throughout the region and convert more local residents into stakeholders in the tourism industry. generally speaking, lacher and nepal highlight that the more the supply side of tourism in peripheral areas is dependent on cores outside the regions of destination, the more leakages there are from the areas. in other words, the more linkages are developed within the industries in a periphery, the larger the economic benefit for the area. as noted earlier, based on the links between local industries within a region, a periphery can evolve a core over time. references agarwal s & brunt p 2006. social exclusion and england seaside resorts. tourism management 27: 4, 654–670. botterill d, owen re, emanuel l, foster n, gale t, nelson c & selby m 2000. perceptions from periphery: the experience of wales. in brown f & hall d (eds). tourism in peripheral areas: case studies, 7-38. channel view publications, clevedon. brenner l 2005. state-planned tourism destinations: the case of huatulco, mexico. tourism geographies 7: 2, 138–164. brenner l & aguilar ag 2002. luxury tourism and regional development in mexico. the professional geographer 54: 4, 500-520. britton sg 1980. a conceptual model of tourism in a peripheral economy. in pearce dg (ed). tourism in the south pacific: the contribution of research to development and planning, 1-12. university of canterbury, nz national commission for unesco/ department of geography, nz mab report no. 6. britton sg 1982. the political economy of tourism in the third world. annals of tourism research 9: 3, 331–358. britton s 1991. tourism, capital, and place: towards a critical geography. environment and planning d 9: 4, 451-478. brohman j 1996. new directions in tourism for third world development. annals of tourism research 23: 1, 48–70. brown f 2006. dynamics of core and periphery in tourism: changing yet staying the same! tourism recreation research 31: 1, 79–81. butler rw 1980. the concept of a tourist area cycle of evolution: implications for management of resources. the canadian geographer 24: 1, 5–12. butler rw, hall cm & jenkins j (eds) 1998. tourism and recreation in rural areas. john wiley & sons, chichester. christaller w 1963. some considerations of tourism location in europe: the peripheral regions underdeveloped countries recreation areas. regional science association; papers xii, lund congress 1963, 95-105. diagne ak 2004. tourism development and its impacts in the senegalese petite côte: a geographical case study in centre–periphery relations. tourism geographies 6: 4, 472–492. finlandcd 1993. regional database. statistics finland, helsinki. finlandcd 1998. regional database. statistics finland, helsinki. finlandcd 2002. regional database. statistics finland, helsinki. finlandcd 2006. regional database. statistics finland, helsinki. finlandcd 2011. regional database. statistics finland, helsinki. 30 fennia 189: 1 (2011)pekka kauppila frank ag 1969. capitalism and underdevelopment in latin america. historical studies of chile and brazil. monthly review press, london. friedmann j 1966. regional development policy: a case study of venezuela. m.i.t. press, cambridge, massachusetts. getz d 1981. tourism and rural settlement policy. scottish geographical magazine 97: 3, 158-168. getz d 1986. tourism and population change: longterm impacts of tourism in the badenoch and strathspey district of the scottish highlands. scottish geographical magazine 102: 2, 113-126. hall cm, müller dk & saarinen j 2009. nordic tourism: cases and issues. channel view publications, clevedon. hills tl & lundgren j 1977. the impact of tourism in the caribbean: a methodological study. annals of tourism research 4: 5, 248-267. hirschman ao 1970. the strategy of economic development. 14th ed. yale university press, new haven. hussey a 1989. tourism in a balinese village. the geographical review 79: 3, 311-325. häkkilä h & kauppila p 2009a. matkailukeskusten määrittäminen paikkatietotekniikalla ja kehityksen seurantaan soveltuvat paikkatietoaineistot: esimerkkinä hiekkasärkät, ruka, syöte ja levi. pohjois-pohjanmaan liitto, julkaisu b: 56. häkkilä h & kauppila p 2009b. rukan ja vuokatin matkailukeskusten sosioekonomiset piirteet paikkatietonäkökulmasta. oulun yliopisto, lönnrotinstituutin julkaisuja n:o 13. häkkilä h & kauppila p 2010. kilpisjärven matkailukeskuksen sosioekonominen rakenne ja kehityksen seuranta: paikkatietonäkökulma. helsingin yliopisto, kilpisjärven biologinen asema, kilpisjärvi notes 23. kauppila p 2004. matkailukeskusten kehitysprosessi ja rooli aluekehityksessä paikallistasolla: esimerkkeinä levi, ruka, saariselkä ja ylläs. nordia geographical publications 33: 1. kauppila p 2006. matkailukeskusten muuttuvat toiminnot tilassa ja ajassa: teoreettinen näkökulma. matkailututkimus 2: 1, 19–40. kauppila p 2008. pohjois-suomen suurten matkailukeskusten monet toiminnot: asukkaiden ja työllisten näkökulma. terra 120: 1, 22–29. kauppila p 2010. resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in northern finland. fennia 188: 2, 163–178. kauppila p, leinonen r & saarinen j 2009. sustainable tourism planning and regional development in peripheries: a nordic view. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 9: 4, 424–435. kauppila p & rusanen j 2009. a grid cell viewpoint to resorts: case studies in northern finland. scandinavian journal of hospitality of tourism 9: 1, 1–21. khan mm 1997. tourism development and dependency theory: mass tourism vs. ecotourism. annals of tourism research 24: 4, 988–991. lacher rg & nepal sk 2010. from leakages to linkages: local-level strategies for capturing tourism revenue in northern thailand. tourism geographies 12: 1, 77–99. lappi – pohjoisen luova menestyjä 2009. lapin maakuntasuunnitelma 2030. <http://www.lapinliitto. fi/c/document_library/get_file?folderid=53982&n ame=dlfe-3226.pdf> 29.3.2011. lasanta t, laguna m & vicente-serrano sm 2007. do tourism-based ski resorts contribute to the homogeneous development of the mediterranean mountains? a case study in the central spanish pyrenees. tourism management 28: 5, 1326– 1339. lumijärvi t 1983. aluetaloudelliset kehitysteoriat, erityisesti keskus–periferia-mallit aluepolitiikan tulkitsijoina. tampereen yliopisto, aluetiede, tutkimuksia, sarja b 31/83. lundgren joj 1975. tourist penetration/the tourist product/entrepreneurial response. tourism as a factor in national and regional development, occasional paper 4, 60-70. martin d 1991. geographical information systems and their socio-economic applications. routledge, london. myrdal g 1964. economic theory and under-developed regions. gerald duckworth, london. müller dk 2005. second home tourism in the swedish mountain range. in hall cm & boyd s (eds). nature-based tourism in peripheral areas. development or disaster?, 133–148. channel view publications, clevedon. müller dk & jansson b (eds) 2007. tourism in peripheries: perspectives from the far north and south. cab international, wallingford. oppenshaw s & taylor pj 1979. a million or so correlation coefficients: three experiments on the modifiable areal unit problem. in wrigley n (ed). statistical application in the spatial sciences, 127– 144. pion, london. oppenshaw s & taylor pj 1981. the modifiable areal unit problem. in wrigley n & bennett rj (eds). quantitative geography: a british view, 60–70. routledge & kegan paul, london. page sj & hall cm 2003. managing urban tourism. pearson, harlow. papatheodorou a 2004. exploring the evolution of tourism resorts. annals of tourism research 31: 1, 219–237. pearce d 1995. tourism today: a geographical analysis. 2nd ed. longman, harlow. prideaux b 2004. the resort development spectrum: the case of the gold coast, australia. tourism geographies 6: 1, 26–58. saarinen j 2007. contradictions of rural tourism initiatives in rural development contexts: finnish rural tourism strategy case study. current issues in tourism 10: 1, 96–105. scheyvens r 2002. tourism for development. empowering communities. pearson, harlow. fennia 189: 1 (2011) 31cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study … shaw bj & shaw g 1999. “sun, sand and sales”: enclave tourism and local entrepreneurship in indonesia. current issues in tourism 2: 1, 68–81. shields r 1991. places on the margin: alternative geographies of modernity. routledge, london. statistics finland 1970. georeferenced data, unpublished. statistics finland 1980. georeferenced data, unpublished. statistics finland 2006. summer cottage statistics, unpublished. statistics finland 2008a. georeferenced data, unpublished. statistics finland 2008b. transport and tourism. tourism statistics in 2008. statistics finland, helsinki. stuart p, pearce d & weaver a 2005. tourism distribution channels in peripheral regions: the case of southland, new zealand. tourism geographies 7: 3, 235–256. suomen matkailustrategia 2020 2010. 4 hyvää syytä edistää matkailutoimialojen kehitystä. <http:// www.tem.fi/files/27141/matkailustrategia_ 020610.pdf> 29.3.2011. telfer dj 2002. the evolution of tourism and development theory. in sharpley r & telfer dj (eds). tourism and development. concepts and issues, 112– 148. channel view publications, clevedon. vuoristo k-v 2002. regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland. fennia 180: 1-2, 251-259. walpole mj & goodwin hj 2000. local economic impacts of dragon tourism in indonesia. annals of tourism research 27: 3, 559-576. weaver db 1998. peripheries of the periphery: tourism in tobago and barbuda. annals of tourism research 25: 2, 292-313. spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s supply chain hämäläinen esa and ulla tapaninen hämäläinen, esa & ulla tapaninen (2008). spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s supply chain. fennia 186:2, pp. 83–93. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper examines the impacts of transportation costs to the supply chain management of the nordic paper industry from a transport geographic view point. the discussion is illustrated by complete cost management accounting data from one paper mill. the main research questions are: what are the transportation costs and how have they developed during the study period concerning the exports to the market? how have the supply chain costs developed? do order size and transportation costs have any causality in cost per unit of paper? so far, the transportation costs concerning finnish paper mills have been examined rather scantly. we perceive that transportation costs together with sales costs have crucial effects on the mill profits. the costs rise due to the spatial heterogeneity of the european market. in paper industry, the freight transportation costs have not decreased as in many other industries. the transaction of a small customer order can cost more than twice as much as a large one to the same export markets. in addition, the productivity of aged paper machines has not improved as expected, while the paper sales prices have decreased due to the continuous oversupply. in some geographical ranges, the location planning of paper industry may transform towards local production units near the market. esa hämäläinen, department of geography, university of turku, fi-20014 turku, finland. e-mail: esa.hamalainen@utu.fi. ulla tapaninen, centre for maritime studies and department of geography, university of turku, fi-20014 turku, finland. e-mail: ulla.tapaninen@utu.fi. ms received 15.06.2008 introduction the main purpose of this paper is to examine the past years’ development of the transportation costs and their effects especially on the paper industry. even though nordic geographers have widely examined transportation, the specific topic of our study, paper industry, has not been within these studies (see e.g. arlbjørn et al. 2008). according to bowersox and closs (1996), transportation costs do not usually increase systematically in relation to distance, because of many other factors, e.g. customs, handlings in ports, lower containerisation costs, plus loading and unloading processes. it is therefore justified and also innovative to look at paper freight transportation costs from the spatial point of view. rodrique et al. (2006) consider that “looking through spatial lenses” would give a more comprehensive insight into the nature of transportation and its geographical dimensions. it must be noted that paper industry is a significant sector of the finnish economy and employment. the sector’s value of the total exports in 1995 was ca. 50 per cent and was still as high as 18 per cent in 2007. the finnish board and paper mills export annually around 13 million tons of paper products valued 10 billion euro (2007) mainly to europe (forest industry 2008). in finland, there is a discussion going on of what to do in paper industry in order to maintain future competitiveness in the global markets (oinonen 2008). it is worth examining the issue in more detail also from the geographic perspective, particularly with valid case-mill data, to get a clearer picture of the development during the past years. lately, paper industry has put effort into assuring the prominence and competitiveness in their sectors (forest industry 2008). however, transportation costs have been on the side ways in these researches. there have been inventory-based exam84 fennia 186: 2 (2008)hämäläinen esa and ulla tapaninen inations concerning paper mills (e.g. eloranta et al. 1994; lehtonen et al. 1998; lehtonen 2000; koskinen et al. 2008). these studies put aside the spatial heterogeneity and distance as a relevant research issue. in paper deliveries to the distant markets, inventories play an important and generally costly role in the supply chain by allowing spatial specialization balance supply and demand. in this paper, supply chain (sc) from the view of a paper mill is understood as a total process from the point of timber-yard to the consignees covering all the cost components between. in this process, the transportation costs cover the physical functions and costs outside the mill, where the packed paper rolls leave an inventory at the paper mill and finally arrive at the consignees of printing houses. the physical delivery covers truck-short sea–truck modals and is a time consuming, costly and continuous function. usually large paper mills sell, manufacture and deliver customer orders of different dimensions to dozens of countries and to hundreds of customers. well-managed supply chain functions are inescapably the driving forces in international trade. these are crucial for the immobile and peripheral heavy industries. these are firmly bound to a certain location and cannot be easily moved to a different and probably affordable manufacturing location with lower wages or other production costs. different approaches to supply chain management the nordic forest industry is heavily dependent on the export markets in europe. it has to ensure that its costs and revenues are competitive. this means that it has had to increase or maintain the efficiency of all its operations. carlsson and rönnqvist (2005) consider that a central opinion in the forest industry today is that the competitiveness lies in improved integration between different parts of the supply chain from the mill to the customers. supply chain management (scm) was introduced in the early 1980s (see e.g. christopher 1992; drucker 1998). stank et al. (2005) describe supply chain as a strategic concept. according to mohanty and deshmukh (2005), scm is a loop, which starts with a customer and ends with a customer and through the loop flow all materials, finished goods, information, and transactions. ho et al. (2002) and larson et al. (2007) note that the underlying topic is the integration of processes throughout the supply chain with the goal of adding value to the customer. kosior et al. (2006) consider supply chains “open-loop” systems whereby goods are produced and distributed in the marketplace according to historical or anticipated demand. respectively, a rising demand for shipping and delivery, particularly of smaller units, creates a higher frequency (suarez-villa 2003). chopra and meindl (2004) stress, that supply chain performance is optimized when an organizational strategic approach is adopted by all chain partners. from the view of a paper mill, fogelholm et al. (2003) consider that the smaller demand batches in paper manufacturing increase costs by scaling up the grade-changes, trim waste, recycling and lost production time and therefore lower margins. more frequent shipping may decrease warehousing costs per unit, but tend to raise both production unit costs and shipping unit costs. these supply chain functions, including transportation, can be modelled and examined from the cost point of view (kaplan 1988), from the supply chain point of view (porter 1985), from the point of time (stalk 1988), and from the point of location and transportation geography (weber 1929, hoover 1948, lösch 1967, dicken and lloyd 1990, hesse et al. 2004, rodrique et al. 2006 and preston and o’connor 2008). in supply chain process, kaplan (1988) emphasizes the importance of the cost of a product as the sum of the cost of all activities required to manufacture and deliver the product to end customers. according to porter (1985), every firm’s value adding chain is composed of activities which are linked to each other and to the activities of its suppliers, channels and buyers. from the view of time management, stalk (1988) notes that time-to-market decisions are essential elements for a successful business; a company that can bring out new products faster than its rivals, enjoys a huge competitive advantage. originally developed by toyota car manufacturer (see e.g. monden 1981), justin-time (jit) does not bring the hoped improvements in paper industry. in outgoing flows from the mill, inventories increased from 45 days in 1979 up to 75 days by the end of the 1980s jit when introduced by (eloranta et al.1994). respectively, koskinen and hilmola (2008) considered in their recent article, that still the paper mill’s supply chain process from the mill inventory takes averagely 45 days before the rolls are delivered to the consignees in foreign locations. this indicates that some parts of the paper rolls are stored in the infennia 186: 2 (2008) 85spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s … ventory for several months resulting in capital costs before reaching the consignees. the higher the level of inventories a firm has, the lower its rate of returns (koumanakos 2008). diesen (1998) notes, that in cyclical paper industry, a supply driven distribution system is mainly based on the function for inventory. production taking place in large batches is simply pushed to the market with the hope that what is being produced will be sold. it is obvious that the intermediate inventories balance the demand variations coming from the market, and jit does not function from the mill to the distance consignees as hoped. some considerations on transportation geography transport geography is a sub-discipline of geography (see e.g. rodrique et al. 2006) concerned about movements of freight, people and information. it links spatial constraints and attributes with the origin, destination, extent, nature and purpose of the movements (miller and shaw 2001, black 2004). rodrique et al. (2006) note, that transportation is a geographic process, which has elements that non-geographical analysis techniques do not capture. in particular, geographic processes often exhibit properties of spatial dependency and spatial heterogeneity. the old school geographer weber (1929) noted that three factors would influence costs and location: transport costs, labor costs, and the cost savings from agglomeration or deglomeration. later hoover (1948) considered that the fundamental feature is proximity, which is an important aspect of agglomeration economies, formed in order to reduce transaction costs thereby eliminating the influence of distance. finally lösch (1967) detected that because of the transportation costs, the demand will decrease when going farther away from production unit to another unit, and also the price will not increase because of the competitive suppliers. this kind of a phenomenon is natural especially in bulky paper industries, which are not able to move after the customers or due to cheaper manufacturing costs. especially the economic and environmental implications of the spatial uncertainties will provide subjects to transport geographers. the nordic paper industry is a relevant research target offering an enormous supply chain and transporting varieties to be examined from the spatial point of view. hobbs (1996) notes that transaction costs, and their reduction, lie at the heart of the interest in supply chain management. in a recent study, fawcett et al. (2008) considered that supply chain managers perceive customer satisfaction and service as more enduring than cost savings, which is understandable because it is cheaper to hold existing customers than to acquire new ones. unfortunately, most transportation researchers – other than geography originated – seem to forget that supply chain, including transportation, is mostly space and time related activity. this notion has been raised by several transport and location geographers like hall et al. (2006), eddington (2006b) and knowles et al. (2008). major improvements in transport technologies and falling transport costs, not least thanks to cheap oil, changed the role of transport and these improvements were very effective in putting transport out of consideration in economic geography (hall et al. 2006). also hesse et al. (2004) stress that geography has not paid adequate attention to logistics, as the focus has mainly been on individual mobility issues. textbooks on urban or general transport geography, like those edited by taaffe et al. (1996), hoyle et al. (1998) and knowles et al. (2008), raise more freight connected questions than they did in earlier editions, particularly with regard to trade and ports. other spatial implications of transportation have been directly addressed in geography only by a few authors who have developed an insight in to wholesale activities and their geographical distribution (see e.g. glasmeier 1992, seppälä 1997, mckinnon 1998, riemers 1998). mccann (2005) discovered that in the models constructed by the new geographical economists, transport costs themselves were brought into these models in a highly abstract and often inaccurate fashion. it is understandable, while transportation costs are usually very difficult to obtain for research and there exists no abstract model for them. this strongly supports the idea that there is a need for geographic based empiric case study on the transportation costs. friction in transportation geography the theme of friction is not generally found outside transportation geography. according to rodriques et al. (2006), the comparative advantages between countries are disturbed by the frictions of space and this is central to many geographical 86 fennia 186: 2 (2008)hämäläinen esa and ulla tapaninen considerations of economic processes. dicken (1998) notes, that the classic trade theory dismisses the role of transport, particularly the fact that transport costs have a fundamental impact on the amount of trade and goods exchange. transport geography is emphasizing on those spatial dimensions, which are mainly affecting on the origins of those cost components. these occurrences are called frictions in transporting geography. the present trend of increasing transport costs because of higher fuel prices will strengthen the possibilities for using sea transport in combination with fast modes to curtail the frictions (henstra et al. 2006). for the finnish paper export industry, intermodal truck/train-short sea-truck transporting is the backbone of the international trade. this obligatory and costly function should be eliminated by some other supply chain advantages like higher production efficiency. hall et al. (2006) emphasize, that globally, the physical amount of freight increased during the last twenty years because of the lower costs. this situation may change substantially in coming years and there will be a strong ‘reality check’ due to fuel prices for less expensive transportation and spatial structure as short sea transporting. the space economy is a complex non-linear dynamic system (plummer et al. 2006). respectively, hesse et al. (2004) notice that there is a need for empirical research: since distribution is closely related with the value chain interdependencies with production system, the networks and markets are relevant subjects of examination. this means to study the degree to which supply chain principles as transportation costs are becoming decisive for location decisions of such firms. the nordic paper producers have financed the export inventories to minimize the delivery time to the customers to serving customers smoothly. this costly warehousing may affect essentially the paper mill’s profits, because the paper prices are under strong competition pressured down and no extra is gained from the customers for a shorter delivery time. empirical data and survey methods the significance of transportation differs greatly from country to country due to the distance. our key subject was to examine the main components of the supply chain costs in the mill level, and to also review in more detail how the total transportation costs of the finished packed products were developed during the study period. according to baxter and chua (1998), there are practical difficulties in conducting case study research because of the lack of access to field sites. correspondingly, ballou (2001) noted, that the acquisition of correct and reliable data is crucial to the successful practical application of any model. the best model, if implemented with incorrect data, will produce false supply/demand chain configurations. yin (2003) emphasized that the “distinctive need” in conducting case-study research lies in the “desire to understand complex phenomena”. lewis (1998) notes, that case studies offer a potentially effective and efficient means for comparing complex and disparate operations settings. their iterative triangulation employs systematic iterations between literature review, case evidence, and intuition. the case study method is well suited to produce context-dependent knowledge (flyvbjerg 2006) and case study research can provide discoveries which are not possible to acquire through other methods (mccutcheon and meredith 1993). the paper industry was selected as the research objective because of the importance of the sector to finland, and also because the topic has been studied minimally from the view of transport geography. the writers have a deep experience from the paper industry. in this study, we address linkages between the paper mill, transportation costs and the importance of transportation in the whole supply chain management in delivering paper rolls to the main markets in europe. the transportation is defined by using costs in euro per paper ton as a key meter to show how the transportations function as a part of the supply chain from the mill inventory to the consignees. our case mill is a finnish integrated printing paper mill with several machine lines. the case mill was selected as a research topic because it describes very well a typical printing paper mill, which has customers, paper sales and deliveries in a large area, mainly in europe. therefore the results can be generalized in some extend to cover all the nordic paper mills. the acquired empirical mill data contains complete years from 2001 to 2007, 84 months in total. this valid and reliable quantitative data was queried and captured from the mill’s database and transferred to excel spreadsheets. these source figures, based on in packed net tons and euro per ton, were calculated by the mill economics by using the mill’s cost management accounting system. we combined these numbers to a single large dataset, which was infennia 186: 2 (2008) 87spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s … dexed to prevent the release of confidential business information. however, inside the dataset the processed figures are valid and fully comparable between each other. the paper manufacturer gave the data for the research purposes and we also had several discussions with the financial managers of the case-mill and also with some other mills to focus our study on the relevant issues. in this study the supply chain costs cover the total costs from the timber-yard at the mill through manufacturing and converting units to consignees: variable, fixed, capital, warehousing and transportation costs. the variable costs include timber, fiber, chemicals, energy etc. and the fixed costs cover wages, maintenance and overhead. the capital costs contain the interests and depreciations. the transportation costs have been sorted out from the data on the country level to find out the spatial differences. the transportation costs cover the truck transporting from the mill to the harbor, the short sea transporting, the truck transporting to the distribution center and final delivery to the consignee. we studied separately the sales costs, which in our study cover the commissions to the sales agents, and mill warehousing and inventory costs at the export harbor and at the import harbor at the target country, and also possible other intermediate inventory costs in foreign locations between the harbors and consignees. all these costs we have summed up to the level of export countries. our problem statement is to explore the characteristics of the transport costs to the paper mill as a part of the supply chain costs. how has the supply chain costs developed during the study period? has the order size and the transportation costs any causality in euro per paper ton? has the productivity of the paper machines increased in saleable packed net tons per hour? how have the paper prices and the supply chain costs developed on the mill level? how does the distance affect the transport costs from the mill to western europe? some findings from the empiric data due to the fact that the paper mills are using similar raw materials (pulp, chemicals and paper machines) and common transportation means, the results from this study can be generalized in some extend to cover all nordic mills. the sales costs cover all the warehousing costs in different locations and the commissions to the sales agents. the total supply chain costs (= total costs of the mill) in the mill developed moderately during 2001–2007 (fig. 1) depending on the cost type. in 2005 there fig. 1. development of the supply chain cost components in % in one finnish paper mill (2001 = 100) and paper price development in €/t 2001–2007. 88 fennia 186: 2 (2008)hämäläinen esa and ulla tapaninen was the industrial block out, which increased the sales and especially the warehousing costs, because the mills produced a lot of stock orders beforehand, which were delivered during the block-out period. the capital costs as interests and depreciations have lowered during the study years indicating that the investment level has decreased in some measure. the chemical and energy costs have increased and the average paper prices have lowered substantially. risi (2007) has estimated that the development of sales prices in paper products will not be satisfactory because of oversupply and lowered demand in main markets in western europe and the usa. respectively, in whole asia, paper demand is growing, but the long transportation limits the paper deliveries from europe. also the production capacity has increased steadily in that area. the printing houses, which are mainly purchasing the paper products, constantly have a deep knowledge of the paper markets, so that they aim to acquire products at the lowest price. local paper producers derive an obvious advance in form of delivery time and transportation cost. this is called locational advantage (curry and sheppard 1982). according to ela (2004), transporting costs generally have been cut almost in half since 1987, the main reason being efficient outsourcing. in our empiric peripheral paper mill, far from the main markets, the average transporting costs in euro per ton have varied to some extent, but remained at a high level all the time (fig. 2). an obvious consequence of the above described progress is that the finnish paper industry faces economic challenges. the bulky paper products, production methods, transportation and the whole supply chain process do not fundamentally differ according to the country the paper grades are manufactured in. this means that the efficient and profitable value adding chain, which porter (1985) stresses, is difficult to achieve, because a paper product is relatively easy to replace with comparable but more affordable grade produced by a competitive supplier. we looked at the transportation costs more deeply through the spatially sorted data, and our material shows (fig. 3) that the transport costs from the mill increase clearly as a function of distance. this means that the average values in the mill level give a meager picture of the transportation costs. it is obvious that the domestic transportation is affordable, but to the main markets in europe the costs are much higher due to multimodal transportation. there are not many real choices to lower the intermodal transportation costs in a paper mill due to the type of the industry. in the future the fuel costs and the environmental issues will put more pressure on the truck and even on the short sea transport costs (winebrake 2008). we also studied if there is any correlation between the order size and the transportation costs by using the order data. the order data is based on the sales to one important overseas country and all these orders have been transported by using multimodal means. the data covered different sizes of orders, 2386 in total. these have been delivered during 84 months to the consignees, on average 28 orders per month. according to the material the fig. 2. average transport costs (€/paper ton) calculated as a comparable index to main export countries 2001– 2007 from one finnish paper mill. € /t fennia 186: 2 (2008) 89spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s … transportation costs of the small customer orders, such as a few tons or some hundred kilos of packed paper cost even twice as much as larger ones (fig. 4). the consignees don’t normally have large inventories of their own. instead they pick the rolls from the distribution center when they need them in printing machines. figure 4 also shows the interesting finding, that the variation of the order sizes is huge. this supports the studies that the large inventories balance the demand at the market and the jit, delivering smaller units, do not bring the expected lower costs in paper industry from the mill to the consignees. it is obvious that the significances of the geography impacts to finnish paper industry are very crucial. our findings from the empiric data support the theoretical views mentioned in previous chapters, that when researching paper freight transport, the spatial dimensions should be used in these examinations to see the variation in the marker more clearly. the fig. 3. the development of the average transportation costs €/t from the mill inventory to the consignees during 2001– 2007. 90 fennia 186: 2 (2008)hämäläinen esa and ulla tapaninen average mill values do not show the interesting geographic heterogeneity. without an exception, all the industries are working incessantly to make manufacturing more efficient in time unit when fighting against the rising costs. this is important for the whole nordic paper industry far from the main markets with lowering paper prices and printing paper demand especially in western europe. there are perpetual discussions if the paper machine lines have become more productive by using the continuous remedy, automation and other improvement methods. lamberg et al. (2006) note, that productivity in paper industry has risen enormously due to larger machines and increase of speed. our empiric mill data shows that the efficiency of these older paper machine lines (pm 9, pm 8 and pm 7) has barely increased at all (fig. 5). this demonstrates also explicitly, that the total supply chain costs per manufactured paper ton have not decreased during the same period. it is obvious, that if the costs do not follow the decreasing paper prices, these fig. 4. relation between transportation costs €/ton and delivered orders to one over sea country in europe during 2001–2007. n = 2386 orders, average order size = 0.65 units and average transportation cost = 1 unit. fig. 5. packed net production efficiency, monthly development in tons per machine hour in three older paper machines in one paper mill during 2001–2007. fennia 186: 2 (2008) 91spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s … older mills in periphery are soon facing serious economic problems. the main purpose of these investments is, in reality, to increase machine speed to produce more saleable packed net tons. instead of the efficiency investments, haarla (2003) suggests that there is great potential in product differentiation, which will become more important due to the growing number of aged paper machines. this process concerns more and more topically finnish paper business, because the comparative advantages of the finnish paper industry are noteworthily disturbed by the frictions of the spatial elements. these geography heterogeneities and distances directly affect the economic future of the nordic mill through the transportation and sales costs especially in older paper mills. discussion and conclusions the paper industry, which is an extremely important industry sector for the finnish economy, is in challenging economic situation due to many reasons. the study showed that the total supply chain costs have remained on a very high level in a periphery paper mill both absolutely and relatively when comparing them with the paper price development. this process concerns more and more topically finnish paper business, because the comparative advantages of the finnish paper industry are clearly disturbed by the frictions of the spatial elements. these geographic heterogeneities and distances directly affect the economic future of the nordic mill through the transportation and sales costs especially in older paper mills. the transportation costs are worth looking through the spatial presence, because the average costs figures forget the geographic diversity. small size orders are very expensive to deliver, and therefore should be avoided. also the variety of the orders is huge. the productivity of the aged paper machines in packed net tons and in time unit has not improved. also during the past years the investments have lowered presumably because of the tight economy. the above described development distinctly demonstrates that the transportation and sales units costs €/t, which are impossible to avoid, must be surpassed by some other fashions than only by the productivity investments on the older machinery. this indicates that these older paper machines situated in periphery will meet more tightening competition from the paper mills closer to the market in europe. these non-avoidable transportation costs cannot be covered with higher paper prices, as long as there is an oversupply situation in the market. as a result, the mill management should look carefully at the whole supply chain costs including transportation costs and sales costs of the country and even customer level. the paper industry has worked intensively for years to stay competitive in finland mainly by using larger and faster machines. transportation and sales costs, fixed costs, energy prices, fiber costs, capable site management, paper demand and produced grades are irrevocably steering mill shut downs and location decisions in the coming years in the nordic countries. there are not many relevant tricks to lower the intermodal transportation costs in a paper mill due to the type of the industry. in the future, the fuel costs and the environmental issues will possibly put more pressure on the truck and even the short sea transport costs. as a conclusion, we see that if the present development of the paper prices and the supply chain costs continues in the finnish paper industry, then: – there will be further mill shut downs, firstly due to negative costs development and secondly due to oversupply, which should be eliminated as soon as possible, to get paper prices up again. – smaller order transports and deliveries to the consignees should be avoided, if possible. – the mills should focus more on the transporting issues, and also to lower the intermediate inventories, both together and intensively. on the whole, the supply chain costs together with transport costs are to increase, so there are indications that the paper industry is transforming, in some measure, into a more local based industry instead of a global one. the transportation costs together with the sales costs (15–17% of the whole supply chain costs, see fig. 1) are a considerable part of the costs in a paper mill. in the case of a small single order, the transportation costs can be up to 30% of the sc costs depending on the customer’s location from the mill. the paper companies located in finland and other nordic countries are working intensively to adapt to this challenging economic and demand situation, mainly by closing the unprofitable machine lines and mills. our study contains the complete supply chain costs data from one typical inland paper mill. so the results cannot be generalized in such, but still 92 fennia 186: 2 (2008)hämäläinen esa and ulla tapaninen our study gives some indications of the other paper mills and paper manufacturing, because these processes are common. it can give interesting and useful insights to the whole supply chain research field, which especially the finnish and nordic paper industry far away from the european markets, should utilize more actively. geography as a science has not studied largely the supply chain costs concerning the paper industry, and this paper is published to fulfill a part of this shortage (arlbjørn et al. 2008). future research would benefit from focusing to cover several mills to get a deeper picture of the nordic paper industry. transport geographic studies concerning paper industry could focus in more detail on the supply chain management and the variations on the consignee and paper grade level. these customer based orders should be examined in more detail as they might expose how the transportation costs behave and aid in finding an optimal order size in relation to the transportation costs. scm studies in the future should cover a larger number of paper mills and machine lines to deepen the knowledge of this research topic. acknowledgements the research was funded by metsäteho oy and metso automation oy. references arlbjørn js, p jonsson & j johansen (2008). nordic research in logistics and supply chain management: an empirical analysis. international journal of physical distribution & logistics management 38: 6, 452–474. ballou r (2001). unresolved issues in supply chain design. information systems frontiers 3:4, 417–426. black wr (2004). recent developments in u.s. transport geography. in hensher d & k button, handbook of transport geography and spatial systems. elsevier, oxford. baxter ja & wf chua (1998). doing field research: practice and meta-theory in counterpoint. journal of management accounting research 10: 69–83. boversox dj & dj closs (1996). logistical management: the integrated supply chain process. mcgraw-hill, new york. carlsson d & m rönnqvist (2005) supply chain management in forestry – case studies at södra cell ab. european journal of operational research 163: 589–616. christopher m (1992). logistics & supply chain management – strategies for reducing cost and improving services. financial times professional, london. chopra s & p meindl (2004). supply chain management: strategy, planning, and operation. 2nd ed. pearson prentice-hall, upper saddle river, nj. curry l & e sheppard (1982). spatial price equilibria. geographical analysis 14: 279–304. dicken p (1998). global shift. 3rd ed. guilford, new york. dicken p & pe lloyd (1990). location in space. 3rd ed. harper collins, new york. diesen m (1998). economics of the pulp and paper industry. gummerus, jyväskylä. drucker p (1998). management’s new paradigms. forbes magazine, october 5, 151–177. eddington r (2006b). understanding the relationship: how transport can contribute to economic success. the eddington report, volume i. the stationery office, london. eloranta e, j ranta, m ollus & p suvanto (1994). uusi teollinen suomi. sitra. wsoy, juva. european logistics association (2004). excellence in logistics 2004 – differentiation for performance. ela/at kearney survey, brussels. fawcett se, gm magnan & mw mccarter (2008). benefits, barriers, and bridges to effective supply chain management. supply chain management 13: 35–48. flyvbjerg b (2006). five misunderstandings about case-study research. qualitative inquiry 12: 2, 219–245. fogelholm j & e hämäläinen (2003). economic reporting in different configurations in paper mills. ippta journal (india) 15: 1, 37–41. forest industries (2008). <http://www.forestindustries. fi/tilastopalvelu/pages/default.aspx>. 15.06.2008. glasmeier a (1992). the role of merchant wholesalers in industrial agglomeration formation. annals of the institute of british geographers 80: 259–278. haarla a (2003). product differentiation: does it provide competitive advantage for a printing paper company? helsinki university of technology. laboratory of paper technology reports, series a17, espoo. hall p, m hesse & j-p rodrique (2006). reexploring the interface between economic and transport geography. environment and planning a 38: 1401– 1408. henstra d, c ruijgrokand & l tavasszy (2007). globalized trade, logistics and intermodality: european perspectives. in leinbach tr & c capineri (ed). globalized freight transport, 135–163. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham. hesse m and j-p rodrique (2004). the transport geography of logistics and freight distribution. journal of transport geography 12:3, 174–184. fennia 186: 2 (2008) 93spatial characteristics of the transports in the paper mill’s … ho dck, kf au & e newton (2002). empirical research on supply chain management: a critical review and recommendations. international journal of production research 40:17, 4415–4430. hobbs je (1996). a transaction cost approach to supply chain management. supply chain management 1: 2, 5–27. hoover em (1948). the location of economic activity. mcgraw-hill, new york. hoyle bs & r knowles (1998). modern transport geography. 2nd ed. wiley, chichester. kaplan r (1988). one cost system isn’t enough. harvard business review, january-february, 61–64. knowles r, i docherty & j shaw (ed) (2008). transport geographies: mobilities, flows and spaces. blackwell, oxford. koskinen p & o-p hilmola 2008. supply chain challenges of north-european paper industry. industrial management & data systems 108: 2, 208–227. kosior jm & d strong (2006). supply/demand chain modeling utilizing logistical-based costing. journal of enterprise information management 19: 3, 346–360. koumanakos dp (2008). the effect of inventory management on firm performance. international journal of productivity and performance management 57: 5, 355–369. lamberg j-a & j ojala (2006). evolution of competitive strategies in global forestry industries: introduction. in lamberg j-a, j näsi, j ojala & p sajasalo (eds). the evolution of competitive strategies in global forestry industries: comparative perspectives 1–29, springer, dordrecht. larson pd, rf poist & a halldorsson (2007). perspectives on logistics vs. supply chain management. journal of business logistics 28: 1, 1–24. lehtonen j-m (1999). supply chain development in process industry. acta polytechnica scandinavica. industrial management and business administration series no. 4, espoo. lehtonen j-m & j holmström (1998). is just-in-time applicable in paper industry logistics? supply chain management 3: 1, 21–32. lewis mw (1998). iterative triangulation: a theory development process using existing case studies. journal of operations management 16, 455–469. lösch a (1967). the economics of location. translation of second edition. yale university press, new haven. mccann p (2005). transport costs and the new economic geography. journal of economic geography 5: 305–318. mccutcheon dm & jr meredith (1993). conducting case study research in operations management. journal of operations management 11: 239–256. mckinnon a (1998). logistical restructuring, freight traffic growth and the environment. in banister d (ed.) transport policy and the environment, 97–109. spon press, london. miller hj & s-k shaw (2001). geographic information systems for transportation: principles and applications. oxford university press, oxford. mohanty rp & sg deshmukh (2005). supply chain management: theories and practices. biztantra, delhi. monden y (1981). how toyota shortened supply lot production time, waiting time and conveyance time. industrial engineering, september 13, 22–30. oinonen h (2008). challenging prospects for the finnish paper industry. paper and timber 1, 14–18. plummer p & e sheppard (2006). geography matters: agency, structures and dynamics at the intersection of economics and geography. journal of economic geography, april 11: 1–19. porter me (1985). the competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance. free press, new york. preston jm & k o’connor (2008). revitalised transport geographies. in knowles r, j shaw & i docherty (ed). transport geographies: mobilities, flows and spaces, 227–237. blackwell. riemers c (1998). functional relations in distribution channels and locational patterns of the dutch wholesale sector. geografiska annaler 80b, 83–97. risi (2007). <http://www.risiinfo.com>. 15.05.2008. rodrique j-p, c comtois & b slack (2006). the geography of transport systems. routledge, abingdon. seppälä u (1997). an evolutionary approach for locating economic facilities. acta polytechnica scandinavica, mathematics, computing and management in engineering series no: 83, espoo. stalk g jr (1988). time – the next source of competitive advantage. harvard business review 66: 4, 41–51. stank tp, br davis & bs fugate (2005). a strategic framework for supply chain oriented logistics. journal of business logistics 26: 2, 27–45. suarez-villa l (2003). the e-economy and the rise of technocapitalism: networks, firms, and transportation. growth and change 34: 4, 390–414. taaffe e, h gauthier & m o’kelly (1996). geography of transportation. 2nd ed. prentice-hall, englewood cliffs, nj. weber a (1909). über den standort der industrien. tübingen. (english translation by friedrich cj (1929): alfred weber’s theory of location of industries. university of chicago press, chicago). winebrake jj, jj corbett, a falzarano, js hawker, k korfmacher, s ketha & s zilora (2008). assessing energy, environmental, and economic tradeoffs in intermodal freight transportation. journal of the air & waste management association 58, 1004– 1013. yin rk (2003). case study research, design and methods. 3rd ed. sage, london. 28571_2_potthoff.pdf grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from hardanger, western norway kerstin potthoff potthoff, kerstin (2009). grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from hardanger, western norway. fennia 187: 2, pp. 81–98. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. expansion of subalpine forests and upslope shift of tree-lines are expected in temperate and boreal mountain ecosystems due to global climate change. on a local scale, climatic forces are modified by a number of controlling factors. site history is of central interest because it impacts on the importance of air and soil temperature vs. other factors. in many mountain areas, the grazing record is an important part of the site history. this study compares the tree and ground cover of two localities having different grazing histories in the tree-line ecotone of western norway. data from the sampling of trees, saplings, seedlings and ground cover, tree age determinations, aerial photographs, interviews and literature research are used. the results show differences in the structure of the tree-line ecotone with regard to tree age, height, circumference and the structure of the understory. ground cover differs in species composition, mainly with regard to light preferences. together, the differences stress the importance of site history consideration in order to understand changes in the tree-line ecotone, because dissimilar site histories may create differing local responses to future global and regional climatic changes. kerstin potthoff, department of geography, university of bergen, po box 7800, no-5020 bergen, norway. e-mail: kerstin.potthoff@geog.uib.no. ms received 17.06.2009. introduction among the many factors influencing the spatial and physiognomic structure of, and tree establishment at, the tree-line ecotone (see smith et al. 2003; dalen & hofgaard 2005 for references; holtmeier & broll 2005, 2007), temperature has received special attention (see körner & paulsen 2004 for tree-line terminology). based on the seasonal mean root zone temperature, the climatic altitudinal tree-line can be predicted globally with an accuracy of ±50 m (körner & paulsen 2004; körner & hoch 2006). on a regional scale, the macroclimate (summer temperature and precipitation) controls the tree-line altitude, together with its geographical location and species composition (kjällgren & kullmann 2002). however, on a local scale, global and regional climatic forces are modified by controlling factors related to topography, soil, microclimate, tree species, recent biotic and human influences, and site history (kjällgren & kullmann 2002; holtmeier 2003; hiller & müterthies 2005; mellmann-brown 2005; holtmeier & broll 2007). the site history is of central interest because it modifies the importance of temperature vs. the other controlling factors (hofgaard 1997, 1999; dalen & hofgaard 2005; rössler et al. 2008). in the norwegian mountains, as in other european mountains, grazing has been an important part of site history in numerous areas (frödin 1940, 1941; reinton 1955; austrheim & eriksson 2001; tasser & tappeiner 2002; dullinger et al. 2003b; mayer et al. 2005; marie-pierre et al. 2006; potthoff 2007). grazing influences vegetation through selective defoliation, trampling, alteration in the concentration of nutrients and propagule dispersal (rook et al. 2004). grazing thus affects competitive plant species interactions resulting in changes in vegetation community composition (including distribution and abundance) (milchunas et al. 1988; archer & smeins 1991; palmer et al. 2004). 82 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff the specific effect of grazing on the tree-line ecotone will presumably vary between the open and tree/shrub-covered patches of the ecotone. the influences on open patches are likely to resemble those on low-alpine vegetation where, independent of grazing intensity, the monocotyledonous vegetation seems to be less affected by grazing than shrub-dominated vegetation (wielgolaski 1975; spatz 1978; cernusca 1991; olofsson et al. 2001; tasser & tappeiner 2002; olofsson 2006; potthoff 2007). experiments with nardus stricta and calluna vulgaris showed nardus stricta as the stronger competitor, which may be of special relevance under intense grazing pressure or abundant nutrient input (hartley & amos 1999). brancaleoni and gerdol (2006) report a conversion of subalpine dwarf shrub heath into grassland due to fertilization. the effects of grazing on tree establishment and growth, and thus on those areas covered by trees or in the process of being covered, are complex. on the one hand, high grazing intensity reduces or prevents tree establishment; on the other hand, grazing may enhance tree establishment due to the removal of vegetation and the creation of gaps (linhart & whelan 1980; mitchell & kirby 1990; cairns & moen 2004; pollock et al. 2005; mariepierre et al. 2006; camarero & gutiérrez 2007). competition with ground vegetation can thus be a crucial factor for tree establishment (bolli et al. 2007). by contrast, experiments have shown that the establishment of trees influences ground vegetation, whereas the course of succession is, among other factors, altered by the presence of herbivores (hester et al. 1991). the average current-year shoot production of saplings and aboveground biomass is reduced by grazing (vandenberghe et al. 2007), and intense grazing decreases the height increment (hester et al. 1996; hester et al. 2005). the frequency of tree damage can be related to grazing intensity (mayer et al. 2005; mayer et al. 2006). through its controlling effect on tree establishment and tree growth, grazing influences the structure of existing tree-covered areas; for example, by reduction of shrub cover (perevolotsky & haimov 1992; kirby 2001). moreover, grazing affects the proportion of open vs. tree-covered areas, and thereby, it also impacts upon the ratio of subalpine relative to alpine areas. in regions with a long grazing history, as for example in many european mountains, the influences of grazing will probably have long-term effects that again may impact on the development of the future tree-line ecotone. the latter is of special interest in the light of global climate change and potential tree-line changes. this study investigates the relevance of grazing history to tree cover and ground vegetation in the tree-line ecotone. it compares two localities in western norway with different grazing histories under similar climatic conditions, and aims to answer the following two questions. how does grazing history influence: 1) the structure of tree cover and establishment of trees? 2) the composition of the ground cover? study area the study area is located in hardanger, western norway. the two seasonally inhabited farmsteads of storlii (c 890 m a.s.l.) and berastølen (914 m a.s.l.), and their respective grazing areas were investigated (fig. 1). at present, storlii farm is used for goat grazing and processing milk in the summer. in 2007, 131 goats were grazing at storlii. storlii is thus the seasonal farm at the tree-line ecotone with by far the largest number of grazing livestock in the region. at berastølen in the same year, seven head of cattle were grazing with occasionally some sheep. however, none of these animals was observed close to the investigation site. large herbivores grazing at both localities were moose, red deer and roe deer. according to local informants, the numbers of these visiting creatures are similar at both localities. the annual precipitation measured at liseth (748 m a.s.l.) gives a reference value of 1110 mm for the study area (norwegian meteorological institute 2008a) (fig. 1). the closest weather station with a longer-term temperature record is located at bu, 117 m a.s.l. (bu is located about 15 km northwest of øvre eidfjord, fig. 1). corrected by −0.6 °c per 100 m altitude, the mean july temperature at 900 m a.s.l. is c 9.9 °c (aune 1993). due to the short distance (c 10 km; cf. fig. 1) between the two seasonal farms, the climate can be assumed to be similar on a regional scale. the bedrock at berastølen is migmatite; at storlii, it varies from granite to diorite, quartz diorite and monzodiorite (sigmond 1998). all these types of bedrock are similar in their mineral content (j. sulebak, personal communication 2008). at each seasonal farm, a slope (west-exposed at storlii and north-west exposed at berastølen) was fennia 187: 2 (2009) 83grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … fig. 1. aerial photographs of berastølen and storlii taken in 1961 (photos: terratec as) and a map of the study area. inserted figure: sampling design. inserted map: tree cover as plotted from an aerial photograph; only the area between storlii and the transect on both sides of the road was plotted. the area category for forest indicates a greater occurrence and a larger number of trees west of the seasonal farm. however, a comparison with the present situation shows that the forest is more open, as it can be depicted in map data on this scale. 84 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff chosen for closer investigation. the slope of storlii is generally steeper than that of berastølen, which appears to result in storlii having a lesser proportion of moist areas. these differences have been taken into account by including moisture and inclination as environmental variables in the analysis of the ground cover (see methods). another difference is that a road crosses the slope at storlii (see fig. 1). this may affect species composition due to immigration of plants in the vicinity of the roadside and their subsequent establishment in the tree-line ecotone. to minimize the influence of plant immigration, a buffer zone along the road was excluded from the investigation (see methods). methods trees, saplings and seedlings were sampled to document the current structure of the tree cover (including all growth stages), which reflects present and past land use. moreover, tree age was determined based on tree-ring analysis to record the history of tree establishment. aerial photographs taken in 1961 allowed an overview of the structure of the tree cover at that time. ground cover was sampled to investigate the modern vegetation composition. when compared, differences in species composition can reflect different site histories. ordination methods were used to investigate the relevance of environmental variables other than grazing history that may have created differences between the two localities. interviews and literature research were carried out to gather historical information about land use. sampling of tree and ground cover two transects of 170 m in length and 10 m in width were selected at a distance of c 500 m from the respective seasonal farmsteads, starting at 935 (storlii) and 957 m a.s.l. (berastølen), and terminating just below the highest advances of trees (1016 m a.s.l. and 983 m a.s.l., respectively). when compared with the broadscale climatic map of the upper forest limit provided by aas and faarlund (2005), the trees grow relatively close to the climatic limit. in storlii, the transect was discontinuous due to the road cutting the slope, and a zone of c 20 m on both sides of the road was ignored in the study. in both study areas, the transects were divided into 17 segments of 10 m in length each, thus creating 10 × 10 m plots. each plot was divided into four quadrants, and in each quadrant, a 1 × 1 m quadrat was placed at random (fig. 1), but such quadrats in which stones or tree stems (living and dead) covered more than 25% were not selected. in each 10 × 10 m plot, tree species were identified and the number of trees was counted. in order to be classified as a tree, an individual had to reach at least 2 m in height. the height and circumference of each tree were measured. polycorm trees were treated as one individual, and the highest stem was chosen for measurement. in each 1 × 1 m square, species sub-plot frequencies (16 subplots) were recorded, and the selected nomenclature follows lid and lid (1998). betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii was sampled as seedlings, saplings (in different height classes) and collectively (summing up all occurrences of the species betula pubescens). environmental variables specific environmental variables were considered to account for possible differences between the two localities caused by factors other than grazing (i.e. there was no intention to investigate the completeness and complexity of environmental variables controlling the composition of vegetation at the respective localities). slope [°], aspect [°] and altitude [m a.s.l.] were documented, and the first two variables were used to calculate a heat index, modified after parker (1988): heat index = cos (aspect – 202.5) * sin (slope). this index gives a rough estimation of the insolation and is useful for testing whether differences in inclination are controlling dissimilarities in vegetation composition between the two localities. soil samples were taken from the root zone at about 10 cm depth. the ph (h 2 o) was measured, and the actual moisture content estimated in classes from 1 = dry to 6 = strongly wet (following arbeitsgruppe boden 1994). the mean height position of the lichen melanelia olivacea (holien & tønsberg 2006) was measured as an indicator of snow depth. this measurement was carried out in the 10 x 10 m plots, and average values were used for all four quadrats located within the respective plot. for those plots where trees or lichen was missing, the average value of the two adjacent plots (above and below) fennia 187: 2 (2009) 85grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … was applied. moreover, ground cover [%] (indicating bare areas, for example, due to trampling) and tree cover [%] (reflecting ground shading) were documented as environmental factors. a categorical variable (1 = storlii, 0 = berastølen) was used to represent seasonal-farm identity. all non-categorical variables were transformed to zero skewness to achieve homoscedasticity (økland et al. 2001; quian et al. 2003). transformed data had a skewness < 10−4, except for ground cover and tree cover, which retained a skewness of −1.23 and 1.23 respectively. ordination methods ordination methods were used to analyse the species data of the 1 × 1 m quadrats, including betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii in different height classes and the environmental variables. a preliminary detrended correspondence analysis (dca) with default settings was conducted to decide on the ordination method. the largest length of gradient of the dca was 5.47 standard deviations (sd) (a complete species turnover occurs in 4 sd; hill & gauch 1980; økland 1990). according to lepš and šmilauer (2003), at a value larger than 4.0 sd, unimodal methods are appropriate. following quian et al. (2003), both dca and global nonmetric multidimensional scaling (nms) were applied (see also recommendations by økland 1990; økland 1996). the canoco version 4.5 program (ter braak & šmilauer 2002) was used to carry out dca (default settings, down-weighting of rare species) and the pc-ord version 4 program (mccune & mefford 1999) was used in the nms. the nms was first run in the autopilot mode (slow and thorough, sørensen distance), followed by a two-dimensional run with the best starting configuration of the autopilot results. the kendall rank correlation coefficient τ was calculated to compare the results for the dca and nms. moreover, τ was used to investigate correlations between the dca and nms results and the environmental variables. tree ring and aerial photograph analyses increment cores of a representative sample of trees, i.e. covering the entire range of heights and diameters, were taken along the transects as close as possible to the stem base above the root collar. stem discs were cut from trees too thin for coring. in addition, the extraction height and stem diameter at the extraction height were measured. in storlii, 25 trees were sampled; in berastølen, 26 trees. cores and discs were sanded, and annual rings identified and counted (for standard procedures, see schweingruber 1988). in those cases where the increment borer did not intersect the pith, the latter was estimated. because trees could not be sampled directly at the stem base, tree ages are minimum ages. aerial photographs from 1961 (scale 1:15 000) were analysed to obtain an overview of the spatial patterns of the tree cover. trees were identified following the principles for image interpretation in jensen (2007). the trees were plotted onto a scan of the relevant photograph, and the resulting layer was inserted into a map. due to original differences in scale between the aerial photographs and the map, the trees may slightly overlap with map elements, such as a road. interviews and literature on land use history semi-structured interviews, field conversation and a literature survey have been used to obtain an overview of land use, especially the grazing history of the two localities (cf. lundberg 2002 for combining different sources in historical geographical research; see also kvamme 1988, motta et al. 2006, and räsänen et al. 2007 for the potential of pollen analysis and dendrochronology). the first two sources provide information mainly on the recent history (since about the second half of the 20th century) while written sources were used to cover the older history. the literature survey covered material from pollen analyses (moe 1978; odland 2007), the history of the local authority district of eidfjord, which includes the farms owning storlii and berastølen (lægreid & lægreid 1992) and other publications including information about the localities (olafsen 1910; opedal 1981). due to a lack of data, it was not possible to get a complete grazing history for the two seasonal farms. this may be one reason why holtmeier (2003) states that it is often difficult, if not impossible, to identify and evaluate the site history influence on the present tree-line ecotone. however, the material was comprehensive enough to obtain an insight into the grazing history. the material was analysed focussing on the following aspects: estimation of the point in time when grazing/seasonal farming started; estimation of the grazing intensity (high or low); and significant changes in grazing intensity, either gradual or sudden. 86 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff results structure of the tree cover at present, the uppermost part of the tree-line ecotone at berastølen is made up of large open areas and patches of trees with a dense understory (fig. 2). at storlii, the uppermost tree cover consists of tree patches that are in most cases interconnected. in flatter terrain, open areas are mainly covered by mires. the trees at storlii are arranged more evenly than at berastølen, and a dense understory is lacking (fig. 3). within a short distance, there is a shift from an occurrence to a complete lack of trees. the aerial photographs show a similar situation prevailing for storlii in 1961 (fig. 1), while they reveal a complete lack of trees at berastølen. the lack of trees at berastølen at that time is also mentioned by informants. betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii is the only tree species occurring in the 2007 vegetation samples other than one juvenile individual of sorbus aucuparia. the transect at berastølen includes more than three times the number of trees as at storlii (148 vs. 41 individuals). smaller and thinner trees dominate at berastølen, whereas higher fig. 2. the tree-line ecotone at berastølen (view southeast). the photograph depicts an area with a relatively high number of tree stands. the circle indicates the approximate location of the inserted picture. (photo kerstin potthoff, 2007). fig. 3. the tree-line ecotone at storlii (view east). storlii is located just outside the left side of the photograph. the circle indicates the approximate location of the inserted picture. (photo kerstin potthoff, 2007). fennia 187: 2 (2009) 87grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … tree height in classes 4-6 m 6-8 m 8-10 m 10-12 m berastølen storlii 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2-4 m o cc ur re nc e in % berastølen ≥ 50 cm40-50 cm30-40 cm20-30 cm10-20 cm0-10 cm tree circumference in classes storlii 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 o cc ur re nc e in % fig. 4. height and circumference of betula pubescens at berastølen and storlii. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 seedling ≤ 50 cm 50-100 cm 100-200 cm berastølen storlii seedlings & sapling classes o cc ur re nc e in % berastølen storlii 18 16 14 12 n um be r of tr ee s 10 8 6 4 2 0 1–24 25-49 50-74 75-89 90-104 ≥150135-120-105149134119 tree age in classes fig. 5. seedlings and saplings of betula pubescens at berastølen and storlii. the occurrences at storlii add up to slightly more than 100% because different seedling classes may occur within one plot. fig. 6. age structure of betula pubescens in classes. nb: classes vary in range; the youngest tree age detected was 18 years. and thicker trees are predominant at storlii (fig. 4). the number of sub-plots with seedlings and saplings is about three times the number at storlii as at berastølen (114 vs. 39). at berastølen, seedlings (only one individual) and saplings from ≤ 50 cm up to 2 m occur, with the class from 1–2 m dominating, while in storlii, the latter class is missing (fig. 5). tree-age structure differs significantly between the two areas. in berastølen, most trees are young (age classes 1–24 and 25–49 years; fig. 6), with the youngest one being 18 years old. only two samples are 50 years or older, the oldest aged 61 years. in contrast, the youngest sample at storlii belongs to the age class 50–74 years, whereas all other samples are at least 93 years old, the oldest one registering 158 years. most of these trees belong to the age classes 90–104 and 120–134 years. samples of four trees from storlii were not included in the figure because the number of tree rings differed strongly between the radii. no visual cross-dating was possible, which made ring counts too unreliable. however, all trees are at least 110 years old. ground cover the two localities in comparison a comparison of the ground cover shows that the two localities are numerically quite similar in the number of species, average number of species per 88 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff storlii berastølen number of species 65 66 number of species occurring in more than one plot 51 62 average number of species per plot 19 18 unique species (occurring in only one locality) 27 28 shannon index 3.25 3.28 table 1. numerical comparison of the storlii and berastølen vegetation. plot, species unique to one of the two localities, and the shannon index (table 1). only the exclusion of rare species leads to a difference between the localities, with storlii containing a higher number of rare species. a comparison of the most frequent species (at least 10%, i.e. 109, of a maximum sub-plot frequency of 1088) shows a number of species common to both localities, but also species important for only one of the localities; some occur exclusively in one of the localities (table 2). comparing these species in terms of the ellenberg ecological indicator values adjusted to nordic conditions (vevle 2008) and the various species occurrence in grazed habitats reveals both differences and similarities. species favoured by grazing occur in both localities. agrostis capillaris is favoured by grazing, and is especially abundant in permanent pastures (kielland-lund 1975; grime et al. 2007), and deschampsia cespitosa is favoured to some extent because herbivores generally avoid it because of the silica content in its leaves (grime et al. 2007). moreover, ranunculus acris and rumex acetosa, both important at storlii, are favoured by grazing (kielland-lund 1975; grime et al. 2007). the most noticeable difference in indicator values concerns the species’ light demand. values at berastølen mainly range from plants growing in a semi-shaded environment to species occurring in full light and “light-loving” plants (hill et al. 1999, translation of ellenberg indicator values). this probably reflects the large open areas of that site. the range of light demand at storlii is extended to more shaded conditions as the occurrences of, for example, luzula pilosa and phegopteris connectilis show, while light-loving plants are almost absent from the table. temperature and moisture values do not show any distinct distribution. however, at berastølen, saussurea alpina and juniperus communis are common, which are indicators of cold/cooler sites. both reaction and nitrogen values show clearer patterns where the range of reaction values is extended towards species growing in acid locations at berastølen, and where a higher number of species growing in locations that are more fertile occurs at storlii. dca and nms only the first and second axes of the dca are of interest for an ecological interpretation, because the results show a strong decrease of eigenvalues from axes 1–3 (0.476, 0.207, 0.009; length of gradient 3.997, 2.673, 1.587; total inertia: 2.282). however, the eigenvalue of axis 2 is already low. these results correspond with the choice of a twodimensional nms. correlations between the dca and nms axes suggest comparable results of both types of analyses: the dca axis 1 and nms axis 2 are strongly correlated (τ = 0.881, p < 0.01), and dca axis 2 and nms axis 1 show a relatively strong correlation (τ = −0.505, p < 0.01). both nms and dca separate the two study areas along one of the axes (dca along axis 1, nms along axis 2). as visible in the diagram of the dca results, a greater number of light-loving plants and species growing in full light (see previous section) are located more in the right part of the diagram, whereas species tolerating shade are located in the lower part of the diagram (fig. 7). the correlation of the dca and nms axes with the environmental variables shows the strongest correlation of the dca axis 1 and nms axis 2 with the “seasonal-farm identity” (table 3). neither those nor dca axis 2 and nms axis 1 are strongly correlated to any other environmental variable (τ < 0.5). the secondand third-highest correlation values occur with ph (range: 4.2–6.4) and snow depth (range: 0.6–2.6 m), while tree cover (range: 0–100%) is not significantly correlated to any of the axes. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 89grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … la tb mc rd ne berastølen & storlii agrostis capillaris 7 xf x 4 4 cornus suecica 5 4 7 2 2 deschampsia cespitosa 6 x 7 x 3 deschampsia flexuosa 6 x x 2 3 geranium sylvaticum 6 4 6 6 7 melampyrum sylvaticum 4 4 5 2 2 solidago virgaurea 5 x 5 x 4 trientalis europaea 5 5 x 3 2 vaccinium myrtillus 5 x x 2 3 vaccinium vitis-idaea 5 x 4 2 1 berastølen bartisa alpina 8 3 8 7 3 betula nana* 8 3 9 1 2 carex bigelowii* 8 3 5 1 3 empetrum hermaphroditum 8 3 6 4 2 juniperus communis 9 2 4 7 2 salix glauca –g – – – – saussurea alpina* 9 1 5 5 3 thalictrum alpinum* – – – – – vaccinium uliginosum 6 x x 1 3 storlii anthoxanthum odoratum 7 3 6 2 2 betula pubescens – – – – – calamagrostis epigejos* 7 5 x x 6 gymnocarpium dryopteris 3 4 6 4 5 luzula pilosa* 2 x 5 5 4 maianthemum bifolium 3 x 5 3 3 phegopteris connectilis 2 4 6 4 6 ranunculus acris 7 x 6 x x rumex acetosa 8 x x x 6 viola palustris* 6 x 9 2 5 table 2. the most important species in storlii and berastølen (at least 10% of a maximum sub-plot frequency of 1088) and their ellenberg indicator values after vevle (2008). the english translation of most categories follows hill et al. (1999). a. light. 1: plant in deep shade; 2: between 1 and 3; 3: shade plant; 4: between 3 and 5; 5: semi-shade plant, rarely in full light; 6: between 5 and 7; 7: plant generally in well-lit places, but also occurring in partial shade; 8: light-loving plant; 9: plant in full light, found mostly in full sun. b. temperature. 1: indicator of extremely cold sites, only occurring in high mountain and boreal–arctic areas; 2: between 2 and 3; 3: indicator of cool sites; mainly in alpine–subalpine or temperate–boreal areas; 4: between 3 and 5 (especially montane species); 5: indicator of moderately warm sites, from lowland up to alpine areas, mainly in sub-montane-temperate areas; 6: between 5 and 7; 7: indicator of warm sites in northern central europe in lowlands only; 8: between 7 and 9, mainly in sub-mediterranean areas; 9: indicator of extremely warm sites, occurring in especially warm locations only. c. moisture. 1: indicator of extreme dryness, restricted to soils that often dry out for some time; 2: between 1 and 3; 3: drysite indicator, more often found on dry ground than in moist places; 4: between 3 and 5; 5: moist-site indicator, mainly on fresh soils of average dampness; 6: between 5 and 7; 7: dampness indicator, mainly on constantly moist or damp, but not on wet soils; 8: between 7 and 9; 9: wet-site indicator, often on water-saturated, badly aerated soils; 10: indicator of shallow-water sites that may lack standing water for extensive periods; 11: plant roots under water, but for some time exposed, or plant floating on the surface; 12: submerged plant, permanently or almost constantly under water. d. reaction. 1: indicator of extreme acidity, never found on weakly acid or basic soils; 2: between 1 and 3; 3: acidity indicator, mainly on acid soils, but exceptionally also on nearly neutral ones; 4: between 3 and 5; 5: indicator of moderately acid soils, only occasionally found on very acid or on neutral to basic soil; 6: between 5 and 7; 7 indicator of weakly acid to weakly basic conditions, never found on very acid soils; 8: between 7 and 9; 9: indicator of basic reaction, always found on calcareous or other high-ph soils. e. nitrogen. 1: indicator of extremely infertile sites; 2: between 1 and 3; 3: indicator of more or less infertile sites; 4: between 3 and 5; 5: indicator of sites of intermediate fertility; 6: between 5 and 7; 7: plant often found in richly fertile places; 8: between 7 and 9; 9: indicator of extremely rich situations, such as cattle resting places or near polluted rivers. f. indifferent. g. value missing. * species occurring exclusively in only one of the sampled areas. grazing history the sysendalen valley, where the storlii seasonal farm is located, has a long history (fig. 1). pollen analysis indicates grazing activity since about 5000 bp, and archaeological data show the presence of humans with relationships to neolithic agriculture; however, information about the permanency of presence or frequency of visits is lacking (moe 1978; indrelid & moe 1982; odland 2007). moreover, bog iron ore was extracted probably between about 2000 bp and 1700 bp (odland 2007). since about ad 600, use intensity increased, and anecdotal records and pollen analysis point to a permanent population, and an intensive use of the valley (including grazing) before the black death (ad 1349), and the following depopulation (opedal 1981; odland 2007). the potential traces of permanent settlement indicate the earliest pos90 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff fig. 7. distribution of plots and species along dca axes 1 and 2. only species with a weight between 3% and 100% are shown. circles: plots on storlii; triangles: plots on berastølen. bet.p50. = individuals of betula pubescens belonging to height class of 50–100 cm; bet.pge. = betula pubescens cumulative; hie.sp2. = group probably consisting of individuals belonging to the section prenanthoidea. dca nms variable axis 1 axis 2 axis 1 axis 2 altitude −0.024 −0.184** 0.307* 0.006 heat index −0.274** −0.039 0.237* −0.238* ph 0.038 0.445** 0.331* −0.025 moisture 0.16 0.117 −0.142 0.124 snow depth 0.422* 0.198* 0.036 −0.427* ground cover 0.276* 0.166 −0.33* 0.216* tree cover −0.094 −0.057 0.132 −0.079 grazing history −0.706** 0.116 0.28* −0.688* * significant p ≤ 0.001 ** significant p ≤ 0.01 table 3. kendall rank correlation coefficient (τ) for dca and nms results and environmental variables. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 91grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … sible use of storlii for seasonal farming, while livestock grazing may have occurred earlier. olafsen (1909) points out that those seasonal farms that later became spring farms (see explanation later), are the oldest seasonal farms and most likely of the same age as permanent farms. the first people to arrive after a possible depopulation are recorded in the mid-17th century (lægreid & lægreid 1992). grazing land at a seasonal farm is explicitly mentioned for the first time in 1802 (lægreid & lægreid 1992), and it is very likely that this included storlii. because the number of livestock on the farm of garen (fig. 1), the owner of storlii, increased from 1723 towards the mid-19th century (lægreid & lægreid 1992), it is likely that grazing intensity on the seasonal farm increased as well. subsequently, until the 1960s, the number of cattle decreased while the number of sheep doubled. although this development led to a general increase in grazing intensity, it has probably led to a reduction of grazing intensity on the seasonal farm because sheep use greater areas than cattle for grazing and are less attached to the seasonal farm than dairy livestock. however, the numbers of sheep and cattle on the farm of garen appear to influence grazing intensity at storlii only until somewhat before 1910, because olafsen (1910) mentions exclusive goat grazing for that year, and his phrasing (the seasonal farm is “now used as a seasonal farm for goats only” (p. 4, translated)) indicates that this practice differs from a previous one. since the 1940s, the seasonal farm has been leased for goat grazing, and the numbers have been fairly stable with about 130 animals since the 1950s (interview data). based on a roughly estimated grazing area of 260 ha (interview data projected onto the map), the livestock density would be 0.5 goats/ha. two other aspects have influenced grazing intensity on the seasonal farm. according to interview data, the farm has been used as a spring farm, i.e. used for a shorter period before proceeding to the summer farm higher up in the mountains, and commonly also in autumn before the return to the permanent farm. however, at least since the 1940s, it has been used as a summer farm. when the shift happened remains unclear, but olafsen’s phrasing already indicates summer use in 1910. summer use means a more comprehensive use of resources due to a more extended stay than during spring and autumn. in western norway, this would commonly be about two weeks in each of those seasons. the other aspect influencing grazing intensity is the use of the area in connection with livestock trading; a system that included livestock purchase, feeding it up on good mountain pastures, and long-distance movement to larger cities for sale (lægreid & lægreid 1992). farmers of garen were mainly involved in this kind of business in the first part of the 19th century, and kept such livestock on storlii during summer, which again increased grazing intensity (table 4). berastølen was part of a common grazing area including several seasonal farms owned by different permanently settled farms (lægreid & lægreid 1992). the earliest documentation for such permanent settlement is from ad 1398; however, undated grave mounds indicate the possibility of earlier use (lægreid & lægreid 1992). because it is not possible to identify how many animals of the different permanent farms stayed on the respective seasonal farms belonging to the common grazing area, a relationship between the number of animals on the permanent farm and the grazing intensity on berastølen cannot be established. however, a summing up of the animals on all the possible owner farms of berastølen shows a pattern similar to that of garen, as an increase in the number of livestock until about the mid-19th century, followed by a decrease in cattle and an increase in sheep until the 1960s. goat numbers had a peak in 1939 and this decreased until the end of the 1960s when goat farming was abandoned. according to olafsen (1909), berastølen is among the seasonal farms listed in the 1723 tax rolls. berastølen was used for spring (and probably also autumn) grazing before it was turned into a summer farm when livestock density on the existing summer farm became too high (interview data). lægreid and lægreid (1992) mention 1837 as a year in which berastølen was used as a spring farm only, which indicates that grazing intensity probably increased afterwards due to an extended stay during summer. the types of livestock grazing on the seasonal farm were cattle, goats and sheep (interview data). most farms abandoned seasonal farming in the 1950/60s. the last farm that carried on with fully fledged summer farming had 35–36 goats and about 37–38 cows (the latter including owned and rented livestock), but it reduced its activities in the 1960s. based on a roughly estimated grazing area of about 700 ha (equal to a grazing radius of c 1.5 km) and a cow–goat ratio of 2.6, the livestock density equals roughly 0.2 goats/ha (cow–goat ratio according to lundberg 2005). 92 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff thereafter, the area was used for sheep (c 10 animals) and cattle grazing (c six dairy cows early in the season), but later, cattle only until 1989. in 2007, seven head of cattle were grazing in the area and occasionally some sheep. the somewhat restricted availability of data on the earlier grazing history of the two seasonal farms makes it challenging to compare grazing intensities. comparing the seasonal farms, both are likely to have a grazing history of at least 200 years and probably much longer. the number of animals on their owner farms increased towards the mid19th century, and both localities have been used for a certain time as spring, and later as summer farms, which most likely increased the grazing intensity. the change on storlii to exclusive goat herding may have increased grazing intensity, and at least it increased pressure on the shrub vegetation. the seasonal farm of storlii has been kept in full use until the present day, while grazing pressure on berastølen has been reduced since the 1950/60s. discussion seasonal-farm identity vs. other environmental variables the strong correlation between “seasonal-farm identity” and the dca/nms axis that separates the two localities indicates “seasonal-farm identity” to be the variable of overriding importance for the differences between the two farms. the lack of a strong correlation with any of the variables that were included to account for possible natural differences among the localities supports the “seasonal-farm identity” relevance. at the same time, the results imply that the two localities are quite similar with regard to their natural conditions. the analyses do not explain which aspect of the seasonal farm identity is the cause of the differences. because the grazing history up to the present is an important difference between the areas, and under the assumption that no other important difference has been missed, it is likely that grazing history is storlii ad 600–1349 • increased use of the sysendalen valley • permanent settlement may have occurred 1349–mid-1600s • low use intensity due to depopulation of the valley mid-1600s–mid-1800s • increase in number of livestock (esp. cattle and sheep) on the farm of garen • 1802: grazing land at a seasonal farm mentioned • livestock trading mid-1800s–mid-1900s • decrease in head of cattle and increase in number of sheep on the farm of garen 1910 • storlii used for goats only • change from spring/autumn to summer use sometime before? 1940s–2007 • still used for goats; since 1950 with about 130 animals berastølen ad 1398 • first documentation of a permanently settled farm that was one of the owners of berastølen 1723 • seasonal farm listed in tax rolls until the mid-1800s • increase in number of livestock on the owner farms 1837 • used as a spring/autumn farm sometime after 1837 • used as a summer farm mid-1800s–mid-1900s • decrease in the head of cattle and increase in the number of sheep on owner farms 1950s/1960s • significant decrease of grazing intensity due to abandonment of seasonal farming 1950s/1960s–1989 • first sheep (c 10 animals) and cattle (c six animals) grazing, later only cattle; milking of cattle in the beginning of the season 2007 • seven head of cattle grazing in the area table 4. overview of the grazing histories of storlii and berastølen. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 93grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … relevant. this will be discussed in more detail in the next section. higher correlation values could have been expected for the variable “tree cover” because light conditions appear to affect the composition of the vegetation. however, the tree cover density might not reflect the amount of insolation that reaches the ground due to, for example, the steepness of the slope at storlii. moreover, a stronger correlation could have been expected for “moisture” due to visible differences in moisture conditions in the study areas. possible reasons for the lack of a strong correlation may be 1) a classification of the variable that is not detailed enough to capture important differences in moisture content, and 2) differences in weather conditions that impact on the actual soil moisture. however, moisture conditions are at least partly reflected by the ph values because the highest of these occur in the plots located in the wettest areas. grazing history and tree cover the differences in tree cover between the two areas support the indicated relevance of grazing history. at berastølen, high grazing intensity appears to have been a key factor for the lack of trees at the beginning of the 1960s. several authors show that grazing may reduce not only tree growth but also the establishment of trees (kinnaird 1974; linhart & whelan 1980; hester et al. 1996; cairns & moen 2004; hester et al. 2005; pollock et al. 2005; vandenberghe et al. 2007). others mention a reduction of tree-covered areas due to human use such as seasonal farming in norwegian and other mountain areas (emanuelsson 1987; holtmeier 1993; aas & faarlund 1995; schnitzler & muller 1998; hofgaard 1999; bryn & daugstad 2001; dullinger et al. 2003b; hiller & müterthies 2005; holtmeier & broll 2005). the trees present at berastølen and the old ones at storlii show that tree growth is possible at the altitude under discussion, and the occurrence of the old trees at storlii makes it less likely that a warmer climate is the (only) reason for present tree growth at berastølen (for a discussion of the relevance of climate vs. land use change, see e.g. hofgaard 1997, 1999; gehrig-fasel et al. 2007; bryn 2008; rössler et al. 2008). a complete lack of trees in previously tree-covered areas appears to be possible, considering a long grazing history. the needed duration will depend on the maximum age of the tree species and grazing intensity. according to schweingruber (1993), birch has a lifespan of seldom more than 100 years. hytteborn et al. (1987) found a betula pubescens tree over 160 years old in northern sweden, and holtmeier et al. (2003) even found a 225-year-old specimen of betula pubescens ssp. czerepanovii in northern finland. however, these individuals, especially the latter, are probably rare exceptions. assuming a maximum tree age of about 160 years (cf. results from storlii), the duration of the berastølen grazing history, which lasted at least 280 years, because berastølen is listed in the tax rolls from 1723, is long enough to cause a lack of trees. the use of firewood is very likely to have increased the rate of deforestation because the seasonal farming included milk processing that demanded an extensive amount of firewood, in addition to that needed for general heating (kvamme 1988; aas & faarlund 1995; olsson et al. 2004; potthoff 2004). firewood was commonly collected around the seasonal farms and supplied with wood that was cut at lower altitudes (kvamme 1988; potthoff 2004). the grazing animals prevented or restricted regrowth resulting in a lowering of the tree-line (kvamme 1988; aas & faarlund 1995; potthoff 2004). the current occurrence of relatively young (age classes 1–24 and 25–49), thin and small trees (cf. figs. 4 and 6), and saplings over the complete range of heights (cf. fig. 5) at berastølen coincides with a significant reduction of grazing intensity in the 1950/60s and following tree growth. other authors (motta et al. 2006; bolli et al. 2007; camarero & gutiérrez 2007) show a similar relationship between abandonment or reduction of agricultural use, and tree establishment and regrowth is found in many norwegian and other mountain areas where the tree-line was depressed due to human use (holtmeier 1993; schnitzler & muller 1998; olsson et al. 2000; tasser & tappeiner 2002; dullinger et al. 2003b; olsson et al. 2004; engum 2006). at present, the speed of establishment of new trees at berastølen may decelerate because almost no seedlings were found in the samples, and higher saplings outnumber smaller ones. apparently, the latter applies to the transect surroundings as well. a reason for this rarer occurrence of seedlings and small saplings may be that the most appropriate habitats for birch establishment are already colonized, while thick ground cover vegetation, moisture conditions or other environmental 94 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff factors may hamper further colonization (miles & kinnaird 1979; holtmeier 1993; dullinger et al. 2003a; holtmeier 2003; holtmeier et al. 2003; broll et al. 2007). the conditions at berastølen appear to be comparable to the patterns broll et al. (2007) describe for subarctic finland where low density or lack of birch seedlings is among other factors attributed to lack of soil moisture, waterlogged conditions or competition with dwarf shrub communities. however, the lack of appropriate habitats does not necessarily apply to areas at higher elevation where they may be available. at storlii, the present grazing intensity appears to prevent tree establishment. although seedlings and a large number of smaller saplings occur, the sapling class of 100–200 cm height is absent in the samples, and the tree cover is dominated by higher, thicker and older trees (cf. figs. 4, 5, and 6). however, the present grazing pressure does not appear to be strong enough to remove birch completely from the understory, although a complete removal, most likely in combination with trampling, is possible as the vegetation directly around seasonal farm buildings shows (cf. vandvik & birks 2004). increased summer temperatures during the last two decades, in average about 0.6 °c higher than normal temperatures (norwegian meteorological institute 2008b and data provided by the norwegian meteorological institute) may have supported tree establishment. however, a similar occurrence of numerous seedlings and small saplings did not occur at berastølen, and the short distance between the two seasonal farms of c 10 km (fig. 1) makes differences in macroclimate unlikely. the occurrence of a larger amount of seedlings and smaller saplings may be a result of grazing causing a thinner ground cover and openings of bare ground, which support birch establishment (kinnaird 1974; miles & kinnaird 1979; helle 2001; grime et al. 2007). thus, the current structure of the understory and present regrowth patterns appear to be in line with the younger grazing history. however, the occurrence of larger and older trees can only be explained by the older grazing history because it appears impossible that these trees could develop under a grazing pressure comparable to that of recent times. nearly two-thirds of the sampled trees are at least 120 years old (fig. 6). at the lightly grazed berastølen farm, birch trees are 2–3 m high at an age of 15–20 years. assuming that a birch, after about 10–15 years, has reached sufficient height to keep its top out of goat reach, the 120-year-old trees at storlii would have escaped destruction by goats around 1900. this time frame coincides with the data on grazing history. goat keeping at the farm is mentioned in 1910 as a newer practice. about one-third of the sampled trees are 90–110 years old. the youngest of this group would have been above goat reach in the late 1920s; thus, at a time when goats were probably present at storlii. reasons that may account for the occurrence of these younger trees are a gradual increase in grazing pressure over some 20 years or an initial large number of saplings that was gradually reduced. moreover, especially favourable climatic conditions for the establishment and growth of birch trees may have resulted in a growth of seedlings and saplings that surpassed the amount that could be grazed. only two trees are older than 150 years; this is probably due to the maximum age of betula and not to a reduction of a previously higher grazing intensity. grazing history and ground cover the long history of grazing has influenced the ground cover at the seasonal farms both directly and indirectly via the tree cover. the frequent occurrence of species favoured by grazing is a direct consequence of the grazing history caused by the direct and indirect influences of grazing (rook et al. 2004). moreover, the grazing history exerts an indirect influence on the ground cover due to its influence on the tree cover, thereby impacting on the light conditions. at storlii, species common in more shaded habitats occur, with ellenberg indicator values of 2 and 3 (vevle 2008; table 2), which appears to be related to a long history of tree cover at that locality. in contrast, at berastølen, a number of light-preferring species are important with ellenberg indicator values of 8 and 9 (vevle 2008; table 2), which are typical for more alpinelike vegetation, pointing to an historical lack of tree cover at that locality. conclusions historical information on land use will, in many cases, be fragmented and only give time slices, which limit or even prevent the statistical hypothesis testing of causal relationships. however, data from the present study give a strong indication of the relevance of a long-lasting grazing history. the currently visible influence of grazing history on fennia 187: 2 (2009) 95grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … the structure of the tree cover at berastølen started when grazing hampered growth and the establishment of new trees at least 280 years ago. this resulted in a lack of trees. at storlii, the presently visible influence of grazing history started most likely c 160 years ago (approximately the maximum age for trees) at a time when grazing intensity was lower than during the last c 100 years, before the farm was used for goats only. a lower grazing intensity would have allowed the establishment of the trees currently present. differences in the tree-line ecotone structure of berastølen and storlii with regard to the understory, tree age, height, circumference, and the species composition of the ground cover indicate the significance of site history as an important local factor that can modify the global and regional influences of climate on the tree-line ecotone. in areas with dissimilar site histories, the effects of future global and regional climatic changes may be modified differently, thereby creating different responses on a local scale. assuming a continued increase in temperature and the maintenance of the management system, one can anticipate that regrowth at berastølen will proceed; however, the speed of establishment of new growth may differ between sites depending on the accessibility of appropriate habitats. if the grazing intensity at storlii stays high enough to prevent the regrowth of trees, the area may become treeless in a long-term perspective when considering the present age of the trees. acknowledgements i thank sebastian eiter, tone marie ektvedt, anders lundberg, arnfinn skogen and the landscape research group at the department of geography, university of bergen, together with an anonymous reviewer. all have generously supported this work in different ways by their assistance during fieldwork and with tree-ring counts, in the identification of species, and by making valuable comments on the manuscript. kjell helge sjøstrøm kindly helped to prepare figure 1. references aas b & t faarlund (1995). skoggrenseutviklingen i norge, særlig i det 20. århundre. in selsing l (ed). kilder for klimadata i norden fortrinnsvis i perioden 1860–1993, 89–100. arkeologisk museum i stavanger, stavanger. aas b & t faarlund (2005). the holocene history of the nordic mountain birch belt. in wielgolaski fe (ed). plant ecology, herbivory, and human impact in nordic mountain birch forests, 5–22. springerverlag, berlin. arbeitsgruppe boden (1994). bodenkundliche kartieranleitung. 392 p. bundesanstalt für geowissenschaften und rohstoffe & geologische landesämter in der bundesrepublik deutschland, hannover. archer s & fe smeins (1991). ecosystem-level process. in heitschmidt rk & jw stuth (eds). grazing management. an ecological perspective, 109– 139. timber press, portland, oregon. aune b (1993). temperaturnormaler. normalperiode 1961–1990. 38 p. det norske meteorologiske institutt, olso. austrheim g & o eriksson (2001). plant species diversity and grazing in the scandinavian mountains – patterns and processes at different spatial scales. ecography 24, 683–695. bolli jc, a rigling & h bugmann (2007). the influence of changes in climate and land-use on regeneration dynamics of norway spruce at the treeline in the swiss alps. silva fennica 41, 55–70. ter braak cjf & p šmilauer (2002). canoco reference manual and canodraw for windows user’s guide: software for canonical community ordination (version 4.5). 500 p. microcomputer power, ithaca. brancaleoni l & r gerdol (2006). recovery of subalpine dwarf shrub heath after neighbour removal and fertilization. plant ecology 183, 227–235. broll g, f-k holtmeier, k anschlag, sw brauckmann & b drees (2007). landscape mosaic in the treeline ecotone on mt rodjanoaivi, subarctic finland. fennia 185, 89–105. bryn a (2008). recent forest limit changes in southeast norway: effects of climate change or regrowth after abandoned utilisation? norwegian journal of geography 62, 251–270. bryn a & k daugstad (2001). summer farming in the subalpine birch forest. in wielgolaski fe (ed). nordic mountain birch systems, 307–315. unesco & parthenon publishing group, paris & new york. cairns dm & j moen (2004). herbivory influences tree lines. journal of ecology 92, 1019–1024. camarero jj & e gutiérrez (2007). response of pinus uncinata recruitment to climate warming and changes in grazing pressure in an isolated population of the iberian system (ne spain). arctic, antarctic and alpine research 39, 210–217. cernusca a (1991). ecosystem research on grassland in the austrian alps and in the central caucasus. in esser g & d overdieck (eds). modern ecology. basic and applied aspects, 233–271. elsevier science publishers, amsterdam. dalen l & a hofgaard (2005). differential regional treeline dynamics in the scandes mountains. arctic, antarctic and alpine research 37, 284–296. 96 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff dullinger s, t dirnböck & g grabherr (2003a). patterns of shrub invasion into high mountain grasslands of the northern calcareous alps, austria. arctic, antarctic and alpine research 35, 434–441. dullinger s, t dirnböck, j greimler & g grabherr (2003b). a resampling approach for evaluating effects of pasture abandonment on subalpine plant species diversity. journal of vegetation science 14, 243–252. emanuelsson u (1987). human influence on vegetation in the torneträsk area during the last three centuries. ecological bulletins 38, 95–111. engum h-c (2006). alpine treog skoggrenseendringer. indikator på klimaforandringer eller endret arealbruk? 133 p. department of geography, university of bergen, bergen. frödin j (1940). zentraleuropas alpwirtschaft i. 411 p. h. aschehoug & co., oslo. frödin j (1941). zentraleuropas alpwirtschaft ii. 583 p. h. aschehoug & co., oslo. gehrig-fasel j, a guisan & ne zimmermann (2007). tree line shifts in the swiss alps: climate change or land abandonment? journal of vegetation science 18, 571–582. grime jp, jg hodgson & r hunt (2007). comparative plant ecology. a functional approach to common british species. 748 p. castlepoint press, colvend. hartley se & l amos (1999). competitive interactions between nardus stricta l. and calluna vulgaris (l.) hull: the effect of fertilizer and defoliation on aboveand below-ground performance. journal of ecology 87, 330–340. helle t (2001). mountain birch forests and reindeer husbandry. in wielgolaski fe (ed). nordic mountain birch ecosystem, 279–291. unesco & parthenon publishing group, paris & new york. hester aj, j miles & ch gimingham (1991). succession from heather moorland to birch woodland. i. experimental alteration of specific environmental conditions in the field. journal of ecology 79, 303–315. hester aj, fjg mitchell & kj kirby (1996). effects of season and intensity of sheep grazing on tree regeneration in a british upland woodland. forest ecology and management 88, 96–106. hester aj, k lempa, s neuvonen, k høegh, j feilberg, s arnthórsdóttir & g iason (2005). birch sapling responses to severity and timing of domestic herbivore browsing – implications for management. in wielgolaski fe (ed). plant ecology, herbivory, and human impact in nordic mountain birch forests, 139–155. springer-verlag, berlin. hill mo & hgj gauch (1980). detrended correspondence analysis: an improved ordination technique. vegetatio 42, 47–58. hill mo, jo mountford, db roy & rgh bunce (1999). ellenberg’s indicator values for british plants. technical annex. 46 p. center for ecology and hydrology & natural environment research council, huntingdon. hiller b & a müterthies (2005). humus forms and reforestation of an abandoned pasture at the alpine timberline (upper engadine, central alps, switzerland). in broll g & b keplin (eds). mountain ecosystems. studies in treeline ecology, 203– 218. springer, berlin. hofgaard a (1997). inter-relationships between treeline position, species diversity, land use and climate change in the central scandes mountains of norway. global ecology and biogeography letters 6, 419–429. hofgaard a (1999). the role of “natural” landscapes influenced by man in predicting repsonses to climate change. ecological bulletins 47, 160–167. holien h & t tønsberg (2006). norsk lavflora. 224 p. tapir akademisk forlag, trondheim. holtmeier f-k (1993). der einfluß der generativen und vegetativen verjüngung auf das verbreitungsmuster der bäume und die ökologische dynamik im waldgrenzbereich. beobachtungen und untersuchungen in hochgebirgen nordamerikas und den alpen. geoökodynamik 14, 153–182. holtmeier f-k (2003). mountain timberlines. ecology, patchiness, and dynamics. 369 p. kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht. holtmeier f-k, g broll, a müterthies & k anschlag (2003). regeneration of trees in the treeline ecotone: northern finnish lapland. fennia 181, 103– 128. holtmeier f-k & g broll (2005). sensitivity and response of northern hemisphere altitudinal and polar treelines to environmental change at landscape and local scales. global ecology and biogeography 14, 395–410. holtmeier f-k & g broll (2007). treeline advance – driving processes and adverse factors. landscape online 1, 1–33. hytteborn h, jr packham & t verwijst (1987). tree population dynamics, stand structure and species composition in the montane virgin forest of vallibäcken, northern sweden. vegetatio 72, 3–19. indrelid s & d moe (1982). februk på hardangervidda i yngre steinalder. viking 45, 36–71. jensen jr (2007). remote sensing of the environment. an earth resource perspective. 592 p. pearson prentice hall, upper saddle river, nj. kielland-lund j (1975). beitets påvirking på ulike skogvegetasjonssamfunn. in solbu i (ed). gjengroing av kulturmark. internordisk symposium 27–28 nov. 1975, 1–8. landbruksbokhandelen, ås. kinnaird jw (1974). effect of site conditions on the regeneration of birch (betula pendula roth and b. pubescens ehrh.). journal of ecology 62, 467–472. kirby kj (2001). the impact of deer on the ground flora of british broadleaved woodland. forestry 74, 219–229. kjällgren l & l kullmann (2002). geographical patterns of tree-limits of norway spruce and scots pine in the southern swedish scandes. norwegian journal of geography 56, 237–245. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 97grazing history affects the tree-line ecotone: a case study from … körner c & j paulsen (2004). a world-wide study of high altitude treeline temperatures. journal of biogeography 31, 713–732. körner c & g hoch (2006). a test of treeline theory on a montane permafrost island. arctic, antarctic and alpine research 38, 113–119. kvamme m (1988). pollen analytical studies of mountain summer-farming in western norway. in birks hh, hjb birks, pe kaland & d moe (eds). the cultural landscape – past, present and future, 349– 367. cambridge university press, cambridge. lægreid t & a lægreid (1992). gardsog ættesoge for eidfjord. 592 p. eidfjord kommune, eidfjord. lepš j & p smilauer (2003). multivariate analysis of ecological data using canoco. 269 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. lid j & dt lid (1998). norsk flora. 1014 p. det norske samlaget, oslo. linhart yb & rj whelan (1980). woodland regeneration in relation to grazing and fencing in coed gorswen, north wales. journal of applied ecology 17, 827–840. lundberg a (2002). the interpretation of culture in nature: landscape transformation and vegetation change during two centuries at hystad, sw norway. norwegian journal of geography 56, 246–256. lundberg a (2005). landskap, vegetasjon og menneske gjennom 400 år – naturmiljø, arealbruk, slitasje og skog i hystadmarkjo, stord. 251 p. fagbokforlaget, bergen. marie-pierre j, a didier & g balent (2006). patterns of ash (fraxinus excelsior l.) colonization in mountain grasslands: the importance of management practices. plant ecology 183, 177–189. mayer ac, bl estermann, v stöckli & m kreuzer (2005). experimental determination of the effects of cattle stocking density and grazing period on forest regeneration on a subalpine wood pasture. animal research 54, 153–171. mayer ac, v stöckli, w konold & m kreuzer (2006). influence of cattle stocking rate on browsing of norway spruce in subalpine wood pastures. agroforestry systems 66, 143–149. mccune b & mj mefford (1999). pc-ord. multivariate analysis of ecological data, version 4. 237 p. mjm software design, gleneden beach, oregon. mellmann-brown s (2005). regeneration of whitebark pine in the timberline ecotone of the beartooth plateau, u.s.a.: spatial distribution and responsible agents. in broll g & b keplin (eds). mountain ecosystems. study in treeline ecology, 97–115. springer-verlag, berlin. milchunas dg, oe sala & wk lauenroth (1988). a generalized model of the effects of grazing by large herbivores on grassland community structure. the american naturalist 132, 87–106. miles j & jw kinnaird (1979). the establishment and regeneration of birch, juniper and scots pine in the highlands. scottish forestry 33, 102–119. mitchell fjg & kj kirby (1990). the impact of large herbivores on the conservation of semi-natural woods in the british uplands. forestry 63, 333– 353. moe d (1978). studier over vegetasjonsutviklingen gjennom holocen på hardangervidda, sør-norge. ii. generell utvikling og tregrensevariasjoner. 141 p. botanisk museum, bergen. motta r, m morales & p nola (2006). human landuse, forest dynamics and tree growth at the treeline in the western italian alps. annals of forest science 63, 739–747. norwegian meteorological institute (2008a). månedsnormaler (1961–1990). <http://met.no>. 04.02.2008. norwegian meteorological institute (2008b). vestlandet siden 1900. <http://met.no/./?module=articles ; a c t i o n = a r t i c l e . p u b l i c s h o w ; i d = 8 7 2 > . 10.02.2009. odland as (2007). kulturlandskapets utvikling i sysendalen. 196 p. department of biology, university of bergen, bergen. økland rh (1990). vegetation ecology: theory, methods and applications with reference to fennoscandia. 233 p. botanical garden and museum, university of oslo, oslo. økland rh (1996). are ordination and constrained ordination alternative or complementary strategies in general ecological studies. journal of vegetation science 7, 289–292. økland rh, t økland & k rydgren (2001). vegetation-environment relationships of boreal spruce swamp forests in østmarka nature reserve, se norway. 190 p. natural history museums and botanical garden, university of oslo, oslo. olafsen o (1909). om eiendomsretten til hardangervidden. en retshistorisk undersøgelse. 217 p. det mallingske bogtrykkeri, kristiania. olafsen o (1910). de vigtigste støler og fælægre paa hardangerviddens nordog vestside. en historisktopografisk beskrivelse. 148 p. det mallingske bogtrykkeri, kristiania. olofsson j (2006). shortand long-term effects of changes in reindeer grazing pressure on tundra heath vegetation. journal of ecology 94, 431–440. olofsson j, h kitti, p rautiainen, s stark & l oksanen (2001). effects of summer grazing by reindeer on composition of vegetation, productivity and nitrogen cycling. ecography 24, 13–24. olsson ega, g austrheim & sn grenne (2000). landscape change patterns in mountains, land use and environmental diversity, mid-norway 1960–1993. landscape ecology 15, 155–170. olsson ega, sk hanssen & k rønningen (2004). different conservation values of biological diversity? a case study from the jotunheimen mountain range, norway. norwegian journal of geography 58, 204–212. opedal ho (1981). i skuggen av hardagerjøkulen. simadalen og sysendalen. gardar og folkeminne. 179 p. norsk bokreidingslag, bergen. palmer scf, ij gordon, aj hester & rj pakeman (2004). introducing spatial grazing impacts into 98 fennia 187: 2 (2009)kerstin potthoff the prediction of moorland vegetation dynamics. landscape ecology 19, 817–827. parker kc (1988). environmental relationships and vegetation association of columnar cacti in the northern sonoran. vegetatio 78, 125–140. perevolotsky a & y haimov (1992). the effect of thinning and goat browsing on the structure and development of mediterranean woodland in israel. forest ecology and management 49, 61–74. pollock ml, jm milner, a waterhouse, jp holland & cj legg (2005). impacts of livestock in regenerating upland birch woodlands in scotland. biological conservation 123, 443–452. potthoff k (2004). change in mountain summer farming practices: a case study from stølsheimen, western norway. norwegian journal of geography 56, 158–170. potthoff k (2007). persistence of alpine grass-dominated vegetation on abandoned mountain summer farms in western norway. norwegian journal of geography 61, 192–206. quian h, k klinka, rh økland, p krestov & gj kayahara (2003). understorey vegetation in boreal picea mariana and populus tremuloides stands in british columbia. journal of vegetation science 14, 173–184. räsänen s, c froyd & t goslar (2007). the impact of tourism and reindeer herding on forest vegetation at saariselkä, finnish lapland: a pollen analytical study of a high-resolution preat profile. holocene 17, 447–456. reinton l (1955). sæterbruket i noreg i. sætertypar og driftsformer. 481 p. h. aschehoug & co., oslo. rook aj, b dumont, j isselstein, k osoro, mf wallisdevries, g parente & j mills (2004). matching type of livestock to desired biodiversity outcomes in pastures – a review. biological conservation 119, 137–150. rössler o, a bräuning & j löffler (2008). dynamics and driving forces of treeline fluctuation and regenration in central norway during the past decades. erdkunde 62, 117–128. schnitzler a & s muller (1998). towards an ecological basis for the conservation of subalpine heathgrassland on the upper ridges of the vosges. journal of vegetation science 9, 317–326. schweingruber fh (1988). tree rings. basics and applications of dendrochronology. 276 p. d. reidel publishing company, dordrecht. schweingruber fh (1993). trees and wood in dendrochronology. morphological, anatomical, and tree-ring analytical characteristics of trees frequently used in dendrochronology. 402 p. springer-verlag, berlin. sigmond emo (1998). geologisk kart over norge. berggrunnsgeologisk kart odda, m 1:250 000. norges geologiske undersøkelse, trondheim. smith wk, mj germino, te hancock & dm johnson (2003). another perspective on altitudinal limits of alpine timberlines. tree physiology 23, 1101–1112. spatz g (1978). der einfluss von bewirtschaftungsänderungen auf die vegetation von almen im gasteiner tal. in cernusca a (ed). ökologische analysen von almflächen im gasteiner tal, 163–180. universitätsverlag wagner, innsbruck. tasser e & u tappeiner (2002). impact of land use changes on mountain vegetation. applied vegetation science 5, 173–184. vandenberghe c, f freléchoux, m-a moravie, f gadallah & a buttler (2007). short-term effects of cattle browsing on tree sapling growth in mountain wooded pastures. plant ecology 188, 253– 264. vandvik v & hjb birks (2004). mountain summer farms in rødal, western norway – vegetation classification and patterns in species turnover and richness. plant ecology 170, 203–222. vevle o (2008). økologiske faktortal. <http://www2. hit.no/af/nv/nvlink/flora/hit1kar141299.htm>. 12.06.2008. wielgolaski fe (1975). comparison of plant structure on grazed and ungrazed tundra meadows. in wielgolaski fe (ed). fennoscandian tundra ecosystems, 86–93. springer-verlag, berlin. two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities michael jones jones, michael (2010). two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities. fennia 188: 1, pp. 123–136. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in december 2002, fires ravaged parts of the historic city centres of trondheim, norway, and edinburgh, scotland. seven years later, the fire site in trondheim had been redeveloped while a gaping hole remained in edinburgh. in 2003, the events surrounding the fires, the affected historical landscapes, and the planning and redevelopment processes were studied. through guided field visits and qualitative interviews with planners, architects and representatives of interest organizations, expectations concerning possible outcomes from redevelopment were gauged. the present article aims to assess the results of these studies in the light of the actual outcomes. preconditions governing building development include physical factors such as availability of vacant land and institutional factors such as property ownership and planning regulations. catastrophic fires can result in occupied land becoming unexpectedly vacant. this gives developers, architects and planners scope to shape the new urban landscape on the fire site by implementing ideas that accord with prevailing planning ideologies. present planning is characterized by tension between dialogic ideals of communicative planning theory and neo-liberal realities of new public management. debates in the two cities after the fires illustrated tension between expectations related to the desire to save or re-create features reflecting the historical landscape or to create something new. cooperation among the site owners allowed rapid redevelopment in trondheim, whereas lack of a common front among owners contributed to delay in redeveloping the edinburgh site. complexities of land tenure appear also to have caused delay in edinburgh. in both cities the planning process showed more features of new public management than communicative planning theory, although the edinburgh case indicates that new public management cannot always guarantee rapid and efficient redevelopment. in addition to the architect’s role, development and commercial interests appear to have the greatest influence on the final outcome in both cities. keywords: trondheim, edinburgh, fires, planning, document analysis, interviews michael jones, department of geography, norwegian university of science and technology, no-7491 trondheim, norway. e-mail: michael.jones@svt.ntnu.no introduction on the same day – 7 december 2002 – fires ravaged parts of the historic city centres of respectively trondheim in norway and edinburgh in scotland. fortunately there was no loss of human life, but the damage caused by the fires was considerable, although they were limited spatially. seven years later, the fire site in trondheim had been redeveloped while the fire site in edinburgh remained a gaping hole. the present article1 compares the processes of change in the urban landscape initiated by the fires in the two cities. the article is partly based on the work of two groups of master students from the department of geography, norwegian university of science and technology, who in 2003 studied the events surrounding the fires. they also collected material illustrating the historical landscapes that were affected by the fires, and through field work, interviews and urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2547 124 fennia 188: 1 (2010)michael jones document analysis investigated the processes of planning and redevelopment that were initiated during the first year following the fires. the findings of these student reports (jordet 2004; ekker 2004) are here assessed in the light of the actual outcomes seven years later. the article begins with some photographs showing the fire-ravaged sites in the two cities as they were during or immediately after the fires and as they were after an interval of several years. reference is made to the simultaneous losses incurred and opportunities gained that catastrophic fires bring to landscapes. this is followed by a discussion of the tension between the dialogic ideals of communicative planning theory and the neo-liberal realities of new public management that planners are faced with when dealing with the outcomes of such fires. the methods used in the studies are presented, followed by two narratives concerning the fire sites in respectively trondheim and edinburgh – a tale of two cities (to borrow the title of the famous novel by charles dickens). finally some conclusions that might explain the differences in the outcome in the two cities are suggested. catastrophic fires in the landscape – losses incurred and opportunities gained figs. 1–3 show the ravages of the fires in trondheim and edinburgh during or immediately after the respective conflagrations in 2002. figs. 4–7 show the fire sites as they were a few years later, in 2008 in the case of trondheim and in 2007 and 2009 in edinburgh. the contrast between the redeveloped site in the former case and the gaping hole left by the fire in the latter case is striking. like other types of landscape change, changes caused by catastrophic fires in the landscape have both material and cognitive dimensions. materially the physical landscape undergoes change both through the disappearance of the existing urban fabric on the site of the fire as well as through the creation of the new landscape that results from the redevelopment of the site – or not, as the case might be. the cognitive dimension includes the values attributed to the landscape before the fire and the feelings of loss that the fire entails, as well as various ideas concerning the future of the fire site. the result is often negotiation between different interests with differing value judgements regarding the potential uses of the area and the appearance of the new landscape that will arise. preconditions for landscape change include both physical factors and institutional factors. among preconditions governing building development in the city landscape are physical factors such as the availability of vacant land. vacant land can include open land within the built-up area, or within convenient reach of the city in terms of communications and transport. it may also be land that has been made vacant through the demolition of buildings or other structures. among institutional factors governing building development are property ownership and planning regulations, fig. 1. the fire in the centre of trondheim on 7 december 2002. the fire spread to engulf the wooden building in the foreground at the southern end of the fire site. the buildings destroyed by the fire were built in the 1740s and were typical of the building style of the period, although the large shop windows were of later date. photo: rune petter ness, adresseavisen 9.12.2002. published with permission. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 125two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities fig. 2. the north-western corner of the fire site in trondheim a few days after the fire. the miniature statue of liberty marked the entrance to a night club. frosty weather led the water used to extinguish the fire to freeze to icicles. photo: roger midtstraum. published with permission. fig. 3. the fire site in edinburgh viewed from the cowgate a few days after the fire. demolition work was taking place to make the site safe. part of the south bridge is on the left, and the buildings in the background on the other side of the 18thcentury urban viaduct are similar to those destroyed. photo: robin adamson, city development department, city of edinburgh council. published with permission. 126 fennia 188: 1 (2010)michael jones fig. 4. the south-western corner of the new building constructed on the fire site in trondheim as it appeared in 2008. photo: michael jones. fig. 5. the reconstructed line of the medieval street, borkegata, forming an open backyard behind the new building constructed on the fire site (left) as it appeared in 2008. the buildings on the right and straight ahead are brick buildings that survived the fire. photo: michael jones. which can allow occupied land to become vacant and available for building. such factors include instruments such as planning consent, building permits, compulsory purchase, agreements allowing private interests to develop or redevelop a site, or total redevelopment under the auspices of public authorities. among physical preconditions for change in the city landscape, fire is the most dramatic. a catastrophic fire can result in previously occupied land becoming suddenly and unexpectedly vacant. buildings are lost, ruins need to be cleared, and less badly damaged buildings need to be secured and made safe. the sites may find new uses, such fennia 188: 1 (2010) 127two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities fig. 7. the fire site in edinburgh viewed from the south bridge in 2009. the building in the centre is the back of adam house, an a-listed building in 1950s architecture. photo: michael jones. fig. 6. the cowgate viewed from the south bridge in 2007 with the boarded up fire site to the left. photo: michael jones. as parking lots, new open spaces or redevelopment, or may simply remain empty. fires destroy, but at the same time provide potential for something new. this potential may or may not be realized. where realized, this provides wide scope for developers, architects and city planners to shape the new urban landscape on the fire site. an opportunity is provided for implementing ideas that accord with prevailing planning ideologies and fashions. urban landscapes change through interplay between broad societal processes and locally contingent historical and geographical conditions. in architectural or planning history, architectural styles and planning ideologies are often described in terms that associate particular prevailing ideas with particular periods, e.g. medieval, renaissance, baroque, neo-classical, jugend, functional, or postmodern. these terms bring to the mind’s eye certain images of urban landscapes with particular characteristics. while the provenance of such ideas relates to general societal trends in particular periods, their implementation in practice is dependent on historical and geographical contingency, e.g. periods of economic growth in particular towns, the distribution of wealth, investments by wealthy financiers, the planning apparatus, the pre-existing urban fabric, the availability of land, and the role of particular individual persons. 128 fennia 188: 1 (2010)michael jones a catastrophic fire is a contingent event that provides an opportunity to apply general architectural and planning ideas in a concrete situation. communicative planning theory versus new public management according to tore sager (2009), present-day planning is characterized by tension between the dialogic ideas of communicative planning theory (cpt) and the neo-liberal realities of new public management (npm). sager makes a comparison between cpt and npm from a planner’s point of view. derived from the ideas of habermas (1990), cpt emphasizes the principles of discourse ethics, dialogue, commitment to mutual understanding and the force of the better argument. this is the ideal of deliberative democracy in which decisions should be reached through debate (bohman & rehg 1997). this requires open processes involving the public. in cpt, says sager, the role of the planner is that of facilitator and mediator, and one of the planner’s tasks is to help the empowerment of marginalized groups. cpt tends to be favoured by educators and professional planners, suggests sager. on the other hand, npm (lane 2000) emphasizes marketorientation, competition, economic efficiency and accountability. npm favours lenient control of developers. the role of the planner is as expert in legal-procedural matters, with the aim of finding solutions in harmony with the market. npm, suggests sager, tends to be favoured by politicians and administrators. although there exist what sager (2009: 67) calls “patches of common ground” between cpt and npm, in that both show concern for user influence, he nonetheless shows that the two approaches emphasize different things. both paradigms are responsive to users’ needs, involvement and satisfaction, but in different ways. cpt emphasizes discursive practice in a liberal, pluralistic society. it advocates an open participatory process involving a broad range of affected groups, and by this means aims to be socially oriented, fairnessseeking, inclusive and consensus-seeking. npm emphasizes communication with stakeholders and information to the public. it advocates entrepreneurism and the provision of services and facilities through competition. it stresses the benefits of development and employment growth, decentralization and coordination, market and business rationality, efficiency in the public interest, management orientation with attention to results, and tendering, privatization and outsourcing. summing up sager, then, cpt argues that democracy is enhanced through broad participation; npm, although not anti-democratic, finds it sufficient to ascertain consumer interests through consultation. in cpt, users are citizens, including all affected groups and interests and the wider community; in npm, users are customers, whose influence depends on willingness to pay. cpt puts weight on common goods, collective action, social movements, neighbourhood groups and community activities, while npm stresses individual preferences and rights. cpt favours the empowerment of lay people, whereas npm gives priority to improved public sector performance through consultation and cost-effectiveness. for cpt, participation is a value in itself, whereas npm stresses the market logic of output performance and customer satisfaction. cpt opens up the planning process, while npm narrows the public debate. cpt emphasizes dialogue with local interests, but npm is more interested in flexible planning. while cpt shows respect for local knowledge, npm gives a strong position to developers. cpt politicizes the planning process by bringing in a wide range of interests, whereas npm depoliticizes planning by maintaining a distance to political decision-making. it could be said that on a modernity–postmodernity scale, cpt can be regarded as closer to postmodernity and npm as closer to modernity. studies of the fire-ravaged sites in trondheim and edinburgh – questions and methods to facilitate comparison of the planning processes related to the fires in trondheim and edinburgh, the approach and methods of study in each case were similar. the same questions were addressed by the two groups of students – one in each city. in each case, the investigation contained three parts with each their set of questions: 1. the fire and its immediate consequences. questions addressed were: what happened and why; what damage was incurred; what were the consequences of the fire for people, businesses and cultural activities; how did the city council refennia 188: 1 (2010) 129two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities act; and what were the reactions of non-governmental organizations and the public. 2. historical background. of interest here were: what buildings existed before the fire, and what were their functions and appearance; what were the property rights and user interests pertaining to the site; what was its planning status; and what values were associated with the site by different groups in the area. 3. planning process after the fire and future uses of the site. questions here concerned: how did the planning process proceed; what debates ensued between proponents of respectively conservation and modernization; what visions were provided by architects; what were the views of owners, economic and cultural interests, and the community; how were different interest groups involved in the process; what conflicts arose; and which actors were ultimately heard. the study began in each case with guided field visits involving inspection of the fire-ravaged sites. general information was provided through lectures given by academics and public officials with knowledge of the sites, and through meetings with key informants. the students undertook document analysis of newspaper articles, internet sources, official reports from the fire investigations, local plans, information from public enquiries, maps and drawings, and articles in periodicals and other publications. qualitative interviews were undertaken with representatives of the city council, owners and tenants, representatives of planning and conservation bodies, architects, representatives of non-governmental organizations, affected stakeholders, and community organizations. the fire site in trondheim the quarter that burnt down in trondheim (fig. 8) consisted for the most part of 2½-storey wooden houses of the type that give their distinctive charfig. 8. map of central trondheim, showing the location of the fire site. 130 fennia 188: 1 (2010)michael jones acter to a large part of central trondheim. these particular houses were built between 1841 and 1845 after a fire destroyed part of the town in 1841. they were the last wooden houses to be built in the traditional style before building in wood was prohibited in the centre of trondheim in 1845 after another fire nearby the year before. gradual changes to the facades occurred over the years as the area was transformed from dwellings into a mixed commercial and residential area (håpnes 2003). today it lies on a pedestrian precinct, which is the main shopping street of trondheim. the fire-ravaged buildings included both old-established businesses (shops) as well as restaurants, cafes and night clubs which began appearing in the area in the 1970s. this area is one of the main arenas for saturday shopping and for night life in the city. above the commercial premises were small rented apartments. the fire started in a restaurant chip pan. it got out of control and spread to a ventilation shaft that was not built of fire-resistant material. the fire quickly spread to the adjoining wooden buildings. by the time the fire was extinguished, the premises of twelve businesses located in the wooden buildings were totally destroyed; two other businesses in wooden buildings suffered extensive smoke and water damage, as did two businesses and the offices of the trondheim business association (næringsforeningen i trondheim) located in an adjoining brick building. the fire site had a complex pattern of ownership and tenancy. parts of the site belonged to three limited companies (aksjeselskap) owned by some of trondheim’s largest property investors, renting out to shops, hairdressers, cafes and restaurants, with small rented apartments above. another part of the site was in the joint ownership (sameie) of five shop owners who ran their own businesses and also rented out premises. the brick-built house of commerce (handelsstandens hus) was owned by trondheim business association and was partly used as offices and partly rented out to restaurants. the other property owners on the site were all members of the business association. the fire site was in the middle of an area of high conservation interest. a detailed plan for central trondheim (midtbyplanen), approved in 1981, had as a specific aim the maintenance of trondheim’s character as a city of wooden houses. a building conservation classification undertaken in 1978 and revised in 1991 listed buildings worthy of conservation into three categories: a for buildings worthy of total protection; b for buildings of high antiquarian value; and c for buildings of general antiquarian value. the buildings destroyed by the fire were all of catgories b or c. adjoining the site was the a-listed post office building in jugend style, built in stone in 1909-11, but this escaped damage. apart from individual buildings, archaeological traces of the medieval city underground are subject to automatic protection under the cultural heritage act of 1978. all excavation work, whether for archaeological purposes or for development, requires the approval of the historical conservation authorities. archaeological excavations after the fire uncovered the remains of a medieval street (borkegata) and a vaulted cellar from before 1708. immediately after the fire there ensued a debate in the media between those who wanted to rebuild the site in the same style as before the fire and those who wanted to build in an architectural style that reflected the present. the former group expressed strong feelings of loss of cherished landscape elements (wooden buildings) and claimed that new glass and concrete buildings would be out of keeping with the character of the city centre. the latter group argued that the city centre already contained a mix of old and new buildings in different styles, and wanted the fire site to be rebuilt in a way that reflected modern development. there was tension between, on the one hand, expectations related to the desire to re-create a copy of the historical landscape, and on the other hand, expectations related to the desire to create something new and modern. the city conservation officer and most architects were against building a replica of the lost buildings, but were concerned with keeping the character of the area as a social arena. the city planning authorities prepared a planning brief for redevelopment, which was approved in april 2003. the principal guidelines were that the area should maintain the small-scale character of the ‘city of wooden houses’ (including height restrictions), renewal should be in keeping with the surrounding buildings and combine new thinking with respect for the past, the historical features uncovered by the archaeological excavations should be treated as a resource, and the area should serve as a social arena with a multiplicity of functions. the owners of the site established a common steering group to deal with the aftermath of the fire fennia 188: 1 (2010) 131two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities and invited an architectural competition (with encouragement from the city council building committee). an agreement was signed by all the owners and this common front allowed the competition to be held without delay. the architectural competition took place in 2003. there were four invited participants selected by the steering group. the entries were judged by a jury consisting of three architects and two members of the steering group. the winning design was by team 3, a group of three architectural offices (see team 3 2003). the aim of the proposal was to provide “interesting and attractive wooden buildings” (interview with one of the architects involved, 5.11.2003). the property plot boundaries were respected, giving functionally separate buildings but with a uniform design. the construction was to consist of inner concrete cores with outer massive wood facades. it was designed principally for commercial uses (including a proposal for a hotel). the inner part of the fire site was to be opened up through the establishment of new passages between the buildings, in keeping with the narrow alleys and passages that are otherwise characteristic of central trondheim. these would give access to a backyard, also a feature typical of the historical buildings of central trondheim – instead of the alternative of an enclosed shopping mall. the historical heritage was to be respected by allowing the main passage to follow the line of the medieval street uncovered by the archaeological excavation, and by incorporating the vaulted cellar into the building. with a few modifications, this proposal received planning consent in 2004 and the first of the new complex of buildings opened in december 2005. on the basis of the document analysis and interviews undertaken in the study, a number of conclusions can be drawn concerning the redevelopment of the fire site in trondheim: first, the wishes of the owners were paramount in the renewal of the site. economic considerations were primary, although subject to planning restrictions on the volume and height of the new construction, stipulations regarding the protection of historical elements, and the proviso that the new construction should be in keeping with surroundings through use of wood. second, all the site’s owners from the beginning worked together instead of individually, thus avoiding conflicts that might have delayed the process. third, modern architectural ideas were strongly represented in the winning design, and these were realized by the architects working in close cooperation with the owners and the city authorities. there was general agreement among the owners, the involved architects and the city authorities that a replica should not be built, despite the initial public debate that tended to favour this. fourth, there was little direct consultation with the general public. although the views of the public, as expressed in the mass media and public meetings, generally favoured reconstruction in the old style, this was rejected by most architects and planners, who feared historical falsification. the general public had initially a largely negative reaction to the architectural proposals, although opinion has changed somewhat after the construction was completed. it can be concluded that the planning process conformed more to npm than to cpt. the fire site in edinburgh the fire in edinburgh occurred in the edinburgh old town (fig. 9). edinburgh old and new towns (along with dean village) were inscribed on the world heritage list in 1995 on the grounds that their architecture and landscape illustrate an important era in human history. the organically developed medieval old town was juxtaposed with the late 18th and early 19th century formalized planning and architecture of the new town, which represented the optimism of the scottish enlightenment. edinburgh is characterized by stone tenement buildings. the fire site was towards the southern edge of the world heritage site where the south bridge crosses the cowgate. the south bridge is an extension of the north bridge, which was constructed to provide access to the new town, while the cowgate is a street belonging to the old town. this arrangement led to a vertically segregated townscape, involving physical and social segregation between the wealthy who moved to the new town and the poor who were left in the old town (fraser 1989; mckean 1992). by the late 20th century, the cowgate had become an area of pubs and clubs, and one of the main venues for edinburgh festival fringe activities. two alternative narratives were identified concerning the cowgate. the first narrative was that it was a noisy, dirty and troublesome place, characterized by drinking; this was the narrative of 132 fennia 188: 1 (2010)michael jones fig. 9. map of edinburgh world heritage site, showing the location of the fire site. complaining local residents. the second narrative was that it was a place of vitality and cultural activities, and a social meeting place; this was the narrative of outsiders who came to enjoy the area’s social facilities. above, the south bridge had once been a prominent place but had degenerated and become neglected. along the bridge were cafes and bargain stores. close by lies edinburgh university, and hence for much of the year the area is characterized by a transient population of students. the fire started in a disused lift shaft due to an electrical fault. the fire was able to spread because fire walls had been knocked through when several adjoining buildings had become a department store. the buildings had no concrete or steel girders to support the walls, and, once the wooden roof beams and floors burnt out, the walls of the 7-8 storey buildings collapsed. after the fire had been extinguished, it was considered necessary to demolish most of what remained standing for safety reasons. the fire site had a complex pattern of ownership and tenancy both horizontally and vertically. it consisted in part of long narrow burgage plots separated by narrow closes. these were built with tenements, which were buildings of several storeys that could have different owners on different storeys. on the site were eight properties, including one owned by the university of edinburgh. thirteen buildings with a multitude of tenants at different levels were destroyed or affected. as part of the world heritage area, the site had certain conservation interests. the original neoclassical design proposed for the area by the architect john adam in 1785 had been rejected in favour of a simpler and cheaper design by robert kay in 1786. nonetheless, the buildings constructed on an urban viaduct traversing the cowgate, and with a uniform facade that integrated shops fennia 188: 1 (2010) 133two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities and dwellings were an architectural innovation. at the southern end of the south bridge, an early example of a department store was built in 1873. the site contained some c-listed buildings and facades (i.e. of local significance), which were almost completely destroyed by the fire. part of the former department store, which suffered smoke and water damage, was b-listed (i.e. of regional significance). adam house, an adjoining building completed in 1954 to the design of the architect william kininmonth, who was known for mixing modern and traditional impulses, was a-listed (i.e. of national significance) but escaped damage. at ground level there was a layer of deposits that was of potential archaeological interest but remained unexcavated. photographic documentation and building-archaeological investigations were undertaken during the demolition of the ruins immediately after the fire. there was broad agreement among several of the principal historical and conservation interests that most of the buildings were not of significant conservation value and they were not considered a great loss. in the debate immediately after the fire, heritage groups wanted to conserve as much as possible of the historic fabric and expressed concern over the demolition work. community and residents’ organizations feared that nothing would be built on the site for a long time, and wanted a mixture of flats and businesses and restrictions on the number of drinking permits. they saw an opportunity for upgrading the area. the opinion of the city and world heritage authorities was that the fire site was a small and relatively insignificant part of the world heritage site, that many of the buildings had suffered detrimental alteration over the years, and several were in poor condition with uses that were in part undesirable; their main concern was for a good and functional rebuilding of the site. after a round of consultations on the draft, the city council planning brief was approved in october 2003 and presented some urban design principles for the redevelopment of the site. among the recommendations were that the original building line and roof heights were to be reinstated, and an end gable and the symmetry of the georgian facades of the south bridge were to be kept. natural stone facing and slate roofing should be used. a new landmark building was considered inappropriate. the redevelopment should be in keeping with the surrounding townscape. remaining fragments of the historic walls and structures on the site should be kept to ensure continuity of history in the redevelopment. the site owners were interested in maximum floor use for economic reasons since the costs of rebuilding were expected to be greater than what they would receive from their insurance claims. a conservation architect (james simpson) and a modern architect (malcolm fraser) were engaged to prepare a plan for the site that would integrate conservation interests into a modern building, including a square and a pedestrian link from the south bridge down to the cowgate. problems arose, however, because of disagreements among the owners. the owners had twelve months in which to agree, after which the city council could issue a compulsory purchase order for the site. however, at the end of this period, the council decided not to do this as it was feared that legal proceedings would drag out. a mediation firm was engaged by the architects, but failed to obtain agreement, and the plans for a modern development respecting conservation interests was shelved. no official architectural competition was held. however, a web design firm (indigo media) and the editor of an architectural website (adrian welch) organized an unofficial open competition. seven architects and 25 students submitted designs, which were judged by a jury of seven architects, writers and academics. the winning design (by ron galloway associates) incorporated a 12-storey tower and three 7-storey buildings in stone and glass with new closes and wynds. the scheme envisaged a variety of uses including offices, nightclubs and residential space. a lowerlevel more traditional design (by thomas hamilton) won second prize. alongside architects, the general public was invited to send in their ideas and comments about the future of the site. one quarter of the 80 who responded wanted the site to be rebuilt as it had been before the fire. on the basis of the document analysis and interviews undertaken in the immediate aftermath of the fire, some tentative conclusions can be drawn concerning the lack of redevelopment on the edinburgh fire site: first, economic considerations meant that the owners aimed at maximum utilization to cover among other thing a shortfall in insurance compensation. second, disagreements among the owners contributed to delays. further, it took time to settle insurance claims and draw up legal documents, in134 fennia 188: 1 (2010)michael jones cluding updating titles. the complexities of land tenure and scottish property law were further causes of delay. third, the initial attempts to combine modern architecture with respect for heritage interests failed due to the lack of agreement among the owners, despite the views of heritage groups and city planners. fourth, public consultation in the initial phase after the fire took the form of responses to the draft planning brief. there was some public involvement in the unofficial architectural competition, and heritage and community groups expressed their views in the media debate. in 2004 developers were invited to submit bids. in competition with 25 other developers and after 18 months of negotiation, the development company whiteburn projects bought out the owners and commissioned allan murray architects to produce a new design. their plan provided for a hotel, with restaurant, bar, retail businesses, art gallery, cafes, and nightclub. open courtyards and terraces at different levels were to be connected with walkways and steps linking the south bridge to the cowgate. the main building was to be topped by a glass dome (see architecturescotland 2006; 2008; 2009; allan murray architects 2010). whiteburn projects commissioned a heritage report, which presented a history of the site and concluded that, in view of “its convoluted history of major change”, it would be better to encourage a new development rather than rebuilding the original 18th-century facades (wright 2008: 87). according to information from allan murray, a series of public meetings and consultations with heritage bodies took place before the plan was finalized. a discussion in the press arose when a strong protest against this scheme was made by writers and artists criticizing it as an example of international modernism out of place in edinburgh’s old town. heritage groups were critical of the hotel fronting onto the south bridge on the grounds that it broke the uniformity and symmetry of the original south bridge project. the world heritage trust criticized the new scheme as “lacking empathy” with the surroundings. against this, it was argued that the criticisms were based on a faulty understanding of the site’s complex history. business interests supported the project, and the city council’s head of planning found the scheme “an appropriate response to a difficult site.” with the site in single ownership, the redevelopment plan was submitted to the city council and approved, subject to some conditions concerning lowering the height of the tallest building and choosing facade materials that were in keeping with the old town. planning consent was given in january 2009, subject to the negotiation of modifications. the developers, who dubbed the project soco [south bridge–cowgate], aimed to start construction in 2009 with completion expected in 2011, but in early 2010 re-development had still not commenced. the scheme as it was finally approved reflects strong developer interests, and conforms more to npm than to cpt. conclusions the case studies in trondheim and edinburgh show in opposite ways the importance of co-operation among owners for the outcome of planning on complex urban sites. an innovative form of cooperation in trondheim led to rapid redevelopment of the fire site, while the lack of a common front among the owners appears to have been an important cause of delay in redeveloping the fire site in edinburgh. another contributing factor to the delay appears to have been the particular complexities of land tenure in edinburgh. while the planning process in both cities showed more features of new public management than of communicative planning theory, the edinburgh case indicates that new public management cannot always guarantee rapid and efficient redevelopment. another difference may be that the fire site in trondheim was in the heart of the city’s commercial area – the main shopping street – with great pressure to repair the damage without delay, whereas the site in edinburgh was more marginal. in both cases, the general public and local community interests have been kept at bay – airing their views in the media and public meetings but not having a strong influence on the outcome. architectural competitions gave a certain transparency to the issues debated, but ultimately the physical form of the new urban landscape is to a large extent determined by the successful architect. the role of the city planning authorities has been more or less limited to issuing planning guidelines and giving planning consent. in both cases development and commercial interests appear to have the greatest influence on the final outcome. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 135two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities notes 1 the article is based on a paper presented at the 3rd nordic geographers’ meeting held in turku, finland, 8–11 june 2009, in the session on “landscape, modernity and postmodernity”. acknowledgements the case studies presented in this article are based on reports (jordet 2004; ekker 2004) prepared by two groups of master’s students at the department of geography, norwegian university of science and technology, presenting the results of field courses undertaken in respectively trondheim and edinburgh during autumn 2002. the students participating in the course in trondheim were kristin eik-nes, lars ekker, anna ekrem, erik fjellheim, erlend balgaard havdal, rita merete kjølsøy, sigurd nielsen, steinar onarheim, reidun onsøien, markus steen, olav a. thorsberg, anders strand vestjordet, berit wolden, and jorunn øye . the students participating in the course in edinburgh were stian aune, aslaug bjørke, gaute dahl, jørn fenstad, torgeir haavik, håkon jordet, wenche larsen, steinar lillefloth, jørn michaelsen, hilde nymoen, and ingvill stensheim. the students were advised in their work by the present author and heidi grete betten. anne sofie lægran proposed the topic of study and assisted with drawing up the programme for the courses. radmil popovic provided technical assistance with the maps (figs. 8 and 9). in trondheim, we would like to thank eirik einum (prosjektog teknologiledelse as) for conducting a visit to the fire site, and the following persons for their willingness to provide the students with information: olaf arnstad (senrumseiendom trondheim as), bente haugrønning (trondheim city building permits office), arne henriksen (team 3), gunnar houen (city conservation office), nils kristian nakstad (næringsforeningen i trondheim), arild nordberg (simon engen foto), idar støwe (trondheim city planning office), liv svare (prosjektog teknologiledelse as), ingrid sætherø (architect and jury member), christian sørensen (sørensens tobakk), anne isabel udbye (tante isabel) and magnus westerberg (city director, trondheim municipality). in edinburgh, we would like to thank especially robin adamson (property conservation officer, city of edinburgh) for arranging and chairing a full-day seminar at the city chambers business centre, when presentations were given by representatives of various public bodies involved with the consequences of the fire. thanks are due to architects james simpson and malcolm fraser for conducting a visit to the fire site, and john gerrard for a guided tour of edinburgh old town. we would like to thank the following persons for their willingness to provide the students with information: norma aldred (national monuments record of scotland, royal commission on the ancient and historical monuments of scotland (rcahms)), senga bate (royal fine art commission for scotland), david connolly (addyman associates), bill cunningham (edinburgh city council), tony davey (the gilded balloon), malcolm fraser (malcolm fraser architects), veronica fraser (national monuments record of scotland, rcahms), dan frydman (indigo media ltd.), anna grant (city of edinburgh planning department), richard griffith (edinburgh world heritage trust), sharon haire (historic scotland), john lawson (city archaeologist), ranald macinnes (historic scotland), rosemary mann (edinburgh old town association), sean o’reilly (architectural heritage society of scotland), jo scott (southside community council), james simpson (simpson and brown architects) and diane watters (national monuments record of scotland, rcahms). we also thank margaret mackay (school of scottish studies, university of edinburgh) for assistance with practical arrangements. among sources of information on developments in edinburgh from 2004 onwards have been articles in architecturescotland (http://www. architecturescotland.co.uk/news/) and the edinburgh evening news. (http://edinburghnews.scotsman. com/), and e-mail correspondence with allan murray architects. references allan murray architects 2010. soco – edinburgh. <http://www.ama-ltd.co.uk/ama/soco.html> 21.6.2010. architecturescotland 2006. cowgate fire site plans to be submitted. 6 jul 2006. <http://www.architecturescotland.co.uk/news/> 26.5.2009. architecturescotland 2008. soco phoenix rises from cowgate ashes. 25 sep 2008. <http://www.architecturescotland.co.uk/news/> 26.5.2009. architecturescotland 2009. soco on time. 23 jan 2009. <http://www.architecturescotland.co.uk/ news/> 26.5.2009. bohman j & rehg w (eds). 1997. deliberative democracy: essays on reason and politics. mit press, cambridge ma. ekker l (ed). 2004. midtbybrannen: øving i landskap og planlegging (geog 3505), høsten 2003. acta geographica – trondheim, serie d, nr. 13: feltkursrapporter. geografisk institutt, ntnu, trondheim. fraser ag 1989. the building of old college: adam, playfair & the university of edinburgh. university press, edinburgh. habermas j 1990. moral consciousness and communicative action. polity press, cambridge. håpnes rå 2003. brannkvartalet, to bygninger, seks historier. in sandvik pt (ed). trondhjemske samlinger 2003, 7–23. wennbergs trykkeri as, trondheim. 136 fennia 188: 1 (2010)michael jones jordet h (ed). 2004. the edinburgh old town fire: history and redevelopment: report from master’s field course in geography, september 2003. acta geographica – trondheim, series d, no. 11: field course reports. department of geography, ntnu, trondheim. lane, j-e 2000. new public management. routledge, london. mckean c 1992. edinburgh: an illustrated architectural guide. royal incorporation of architects in scotland, edinburgh. sager t 2009. planners’ role: torn between dialogical ideals and neo-liberal realities. european planning studies 17: 1, 65–84. team 3 2003. byplanmessige betraktninger: branntomta i trondheim. arne henriksen arkitektkontor, jenssen & skodvin og cv hølmebakk arkitektkontor, oslo. wright apk 2008. south bridge/cowgate development site edinburgh: heritage report. whiteburn projects [edinburgh]. this special issue originated around the theme of spatial development in northern europe. a source of inspiration has been the european spatial planning observation network (espon) and the numerous studies conducted within the programme. originally, we welcomed european spatial analyses, both regional and transnational. the focus was on the economic, social and political aspects of geographic studies dealing with regional development, as well as border studies and various fields of economic geography. we gave special consideration to papers addressing nordic issues. articles accepted to this special issue of fennia cover the topics mentioned above and range from theoretical considerations of spatial innovation systems to cross-border co-operation. the volume consists of four articles devoted to regional cooperation and development on transnational level. they are based on both theoretical and empirical research. the included papers also describe and reflect on the contextualised key elements of knowledge-based growth according to location factors. the issue begins its exploration of regional dynamics with theoretical analyses of scale and temporality in innovation systems. using a conceptual approach, with examples of executed foresight projects, the opening paper presents the complexities and theoretical challenges involved in spatial analysis. the two following papers analyze in particular the innovation policy options used to support regions in a transnational context. the papers provide insights both at the transnational nordic level, including innovation policy options in finland, sweden and norway, and local cases from northern finland. particular attention is paid to the concept of regional development zones. after dealing with regional development, the issue moves on to present the final paper and concludes with a discussion of cross-border issues concerning the finnish-russian frontier. as our studies illustrate, geographical domains of innovation systems, cross-border co-operation and regional development zones have had an increasing impact on regional studies and economic geography during recent decades. spatial dynamics and scalar processes are background factors underlying the actualization of regional development. the analyses show that making beneficial use of new tools to support regional growth requires a sound understanding of economic factors of scale, inter-organizational co-operation models and public sector development policies. there is evidence that deterministic thinking in terms of readily created and copied “best practice” models or structures is in most cases not sufficient to assess the geographical domain of spatial (re)structuring and economic regional development. it is obvious that transnational and transregional contexts and value systems should be recognized more strongly. the same applies to multi-actor development processes and the multiplicity of scales. joint agreements between public, private and university sectors have become an essential mode for regional development actions. methods for facilitating growth in regional structures and enhancing core-periphery interactions require problem solving that involves several actors. these can be associated with multiple layers of actors operating on different spatial scales. the operational level is, however, local. for example, the diffusion of knowledge resources from one locality to another will eventually lead to an expansion of knowledge on a region. in time, the knowledge level of a nation will increase. north europe provides a good and feasible starting point for such analyses. we see clear added value when discussing innovation systems and prerequisites for economic success. it seems that various layers of centrality vs. peripherality overlap in particularly diverse and interesting ways in the nordic countries. absolute distances have not fully lost their significance even if factors such as access to education and ability to cater to innovative entrepreneurship have an increasing role in setting the scene for regional development. the papers of this special issue will help to develop an understanding of these currently topical aspects of regional development for academic researchers as well as for professionals and policy makers. these topics are connected to ongoing preface discussions of regional economic growth. the pivotal question is the future location of economic activities – and how regional shares of economic growth are distributed. we hope that this special issue, together with the previous special issue (volume 184:1) of fennia, which deals with similar topics, will add new knowledge to this fascinating sub-discipline of geography. finally, we want to thank the contributors and the editorial staff of fennia for providing the opportunity to produce this peer reviewed special issue. we hope that this issue brings forth new ideas and stimulates future research interest in the fields of economic geography and regional development. we also want to warmly thank the expert scholars who acted as reviewers in the editorial process. in helsinki, 18 november 2007 guest editors tommi inkinen, department of geography, university of helsinki. e-mail: tommi.inkinen@helsinki.fi kaisa schmidt-thomé, centre of urban and regional studies (ytk), helsinki university of technology. e-mail: kaisa.schmidt-thome@tkk.fi participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social landscape values of rural communities in zanzibar, tanzania nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö fagerholm, nora & niina käyhkö (2009). participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social landscape values of rural communities in zanzibar, tanzania. fennia 187: 1, pp. 43–60. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. people attach commonly approved social values subjectively to landscape. these values vary spatially and can be studied in geographical context. in sustainable management of cultural landscapes, social values should be taken into account as professionally as the analysis of physical landscape features. this case study applies participatory and gis techniques in the mapping and geographical analysis of social landscape values in a multifunctional cultural landscape in zanzibar island, tanzania. social landscape data were collected with single-informant interviews using participatory gis (pgis) techniques. four different social landscape values (subsistence, traditional, aesthetic and leisure) were mapped on an orthophotoimage individually by 149 informants. data were spatially and statistically analysed to construct understanding of the community level patterns of the social landscape values. results show geographical differences between individually and collectively held values in their distribution and clustering across the landscape. these patterns reflect local culture and its interpretation of different social landscape values. results address the importance of local stakeholder participation when spatial planning and management of multifunctional cultural landscapes are realized. the paper discusses these management implication and methodological challenges of using participatory gis techniques in studying cultural landscapes. nora fagerholm & niina käyhkö, department of geography, fi-20014 university of turku, finland. e-mails: nora.fagerholm@utu.fi, niina.kayhko@utu.fi. introduction social values in cultural landscapes most of the current problems in the management of natural resources in cultural landscapes lie in the interface between people and the environment. sustainable management can only be achieved if pluralistic land uses under the umbrella of long-term social, economic and ecological values are appreciated and taken into account in land use planning (luz 2000; potschin & hainesyoung 2006; raquez & lambin 2006). there is a need for broader understanding of the complex human-nature interaction in contemporary cultural landscapes especially in political decision making. solutions for many of these management challenges lie in the actions of the people and the ways they value and use the land. however, there is a great imbalance in how the knowledge and needs of different stakeholders are taken into account in spatial planning. it has been argued that far too little emphasis is still given to the expertise of the local residents and communities in relation to, for example, patterns and qualities of vegetation, soils, species and land cover (williams & patterson 1996; luz 2000; brown et al. 2004; black & liljebald 2006). it is well known that local communities play a crucial role in sustainable landscape management. they possess valuable knowledge of the functions and social values attached to cultural landscapes, and this social knowledge is essential when tackling land use and land management issues for better future development. social landscape values are subjectively experienced, place-related and contextual, and tend to vary spatially (tuan 1977; zube 1987). capturing social knowledge in landscapes requires the dedi44 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö cated participation of local inhabitants (sauer 1925). in societal processes, the meeting and control of the physical and social environment is crucial (kaltenborn 1998; luz 2000; brown 2005; black & liljeblad 2006). spatial data on the social landscape can depict how communities are using the environment and how they perceive and experience it and, as soini (2001) sees it, mapping enables understanding of differences between the social values of landscapes and natural scientific assessments made on them. it is necessary to gain knowledge of the complex social-ecological systems within contemporary landscapes and provide techniques which enable collection, retrieval and analyses of social landscape values in a spatial form (alessa et al. 2008). recently, the social meanings of places have started to gain wide interest in the context of the geographical analysis of landscapes (brown et al. 2004; mcintyre et al. 2004; brown 2005; black & liljeblad 2006; kyttä & kahila 2006; brown & raymond 2007; gunderson & watson 2007; tyrväinen et al. 2007). as landscapes can be understood both as complex mosaics of the physical environment and social constructions and processes experienced by people with their senses, contemporary landscape research faces a challenge to integrate these approaches, especially for practical landscape management needs (potschin & haines-young 2006). cultural landscape research has also been criticised for concentrating merely on the textual interpretation of landscapes which tends to lack the necessary applicable knowledge to landscape management and planning (olwig 1996; soini 2001). potschin and haines-young (2006) identify needs for transdisciplinary models and tools in landscape analysis which would serve practical needs in society and support the sustainable management of cultural landscapes. physical landscape patterns and distribution of natural resources can be quite effectively mapped with the aid of various spatial data sets, such as aerial photographs and satellite images. recently, the combined use of spatial data has produced an increased understanding of the dynamics and development of landscapes from the perspective of land use and land cover patterns (e.g. lambin et al. 2003; pontius et al. 2004; käyhkö & skånes 2006; hartter et al. 2008). social values, which are associated with various places in landscapes, on the other hand, are more difficult to measure, since they are built on individually perceived, subjective and qualitative information. when people become acquainted with a specific space, this space develops into a place and values are attached to it (tuan 1977). hence, it can be said that social landscape values emerge from environmental experience (brown 2005). these values can be e.g. aesthetic, religious, cultural or recreational. social landscape values have commonly approved meanings, as they are socially constructed. the concept of landscape value can be seen to act as an operational bridge in applied landscape management and planning (brown 2005). it connects the geography of place, i.e. the location of specific places, with the psychology of place, which refers to the underlying place-related perceptions. it is important to remember, however, that people have different expectations, needs and desires and these influence the ways they attach values and set preferences to various places (relph 1976; zube 1987). for example, aesthetic values do not concentrate on the same places for all people because of individual differences in perception and experience. participatory gis and mapping of social landscape values participatory gis (participatory geographical information systems, pgis) techniques combine community participation with the use of digital geospatial techniques and enable the collection, storage and analysis of stakeholder data in a geographical form. in practice, pgis solutions are various, depending on the aims of the application, the level of the information needed and the knowledge of the participants. pgis practices have been commonly used in urban planning and in the allocation of natural resources (e.g. kingston et al. 2000; craig et al. 2002; voss et al. 2004). for the mapping and geographical analysis of social values attached to landscapes, the use of participatory gis techniques is a useful approach. land management challenges are typical examples where stakeholder participation is needed in a geographical form. in many developing countries, for example, information on the local social values on cultural landscapes is completely missing, and natural resources are under constant pressure from various stakeholders (ma 2003; fao 2006). for rural developing communities, a sustainable landscape has a multiple social and economic importance by providing e.g. life support, energy, shelter, food and means of income (sitari 2005; käyhkö et al. 2008). hence, understanding of the geofennia 187: 1 (2009) 45participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … graphical patterns and variation of social values on the land is urgently needed in the circumstances where traditional and new stakeholders meet and share the use of natural resources. such a baseline understanding is essential for the sustainable management of multifunctional landscapes and could be potentially integrated with geographical data of physical resources. participatory mapping of social landscape values has been approached both from the individual and group data collection perspectives (e.g. mcintyre et al. 2004; gunderson & watson 2007). methods, such as sticker dots, point markers and polygon delineations on the maps have been applied (mcintyre et al. 2004; brown 2005; black & liljeblad 2006; tyrväinen et al. 2007) and in some cases data have been collected via map interfaces through the internet (kyttä & kahila 2006). one particular challenge for pgis is the application of ambiguous data set structures in the participatory mapping efforts. for example, social values are often continuums rather than discrete points and patches in the landscape. in previous studies, social value typologies have been approached from different starting points. for example, alessa et al. (2008) used 14 landscape values, namely aesthetic, biological, cultural, economic, future, historic, intrinsic, learning, life sustaining, recreational, spiritual, subsistence, therapeutic and wilderness, in the mapping of the social spaces. this value typology has been modified by brown and colleagues in several case studies (brown & reed 2000; brown 2005; raymond & brown 2006) and is originally founded on the work of rolston and coufal (1991). tyrväinen et al. (2007) used 11 different values, such as valuable nature site, forest feeling and unpleasantness in mapping urban green areas in finland. the values were based on previous swedish studies regarding the social values of open spaces (regionplaneoch trafikkontoret 2001; ståhle & sandberg 2002, cit. tyrväinen et al. 2007). in addition, manning et al. (1999) have proposed 11 human preference-based values for national forests and tarrant et al. (2003) a 12-point scale to measure public values of national forests. this case study explores possibilities of applying participatory and gis techniques for the mapping and geographical analysis of social values in multifunctional cultural landscapes, especially in the context of a developing society. through studying social landscape values it is possible to establish an understanding of the geographical patterns of the social values; what kind of patterns the social landscape values form, what and where the most important areas in the social landscape are, how the values might change and modify cultural landscapes and how the social spatial data reflect the land cover data of the physical environment. the study has three main objectives. firstly, to map social landscape values of the local inhabitants in the village of matemwe, zanzibar (tanzania) based on single-informant interviews and participatory gis techniques. four social values, namely subsistence, aesthetic, traditional and leisure, were selected for the study because these were considered essential in the social landscape of the local community. secondly, to analyse and compare the geographical patterns of these social landscape values, and thirdly, to identify the most important characteristics of the social values, which could contribute to the sustainable planning and management of multifunctional cultural landscapes, such as matemwe. furthermore, the paper discusses methodological aspects of the use of participatory gis techniques for the spatial analysis of social values. description of the case study site the zanzibar islands are located in the eastern coast of tanzania, approximately 30 km north-east from dar es salaam. the population of the main island unguja (zanzibar) is estimated at about 700,000 people and is growing approximately with an annual rate of 3.1% (tanzania sensa 2003). the zanzibar islands have a tropical monsoon climate, with two rainy seasons from march to may and october to december and an average annual temperature of 26 c° (hettige 1990). the contemporary zanzibar landscape is a mosaic of indigenous and cultivated vegetation, which expresses the combined and long-term influences of different cultures and land use activities, such as spice farming and shifting cultivation. the zanzibar islands have experienced dramatic changes in land use and land ownership throughout their history (lofchie 1965). today, the “environment is being more heavily utilised than ever before” and the fast growing tourism since the early 1990s is one significant contributing factor to this (rgz 2004). the administrative region (swa: shehia) of matemwe is situated in the north-eastern coast of unguja island (fig. 1). matemwe consists of sev46 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö eral sub-villages with a total population of about 7300 (tanzania sensa 2003). geologically, matemwe lies in the coral rag area, where bedrock consists of exposed, porous coral and where loose soil deposits are generally shallow and mainly found in the crevasses of the bedrock. the majority of the coral rag forests are characterised by ferns, grasses, indigenous trees and scrubs (zfdp 1997) with marginal opportunities for permanent agriculture (commission for land and environment 1995). shifting cultivation is practiced widely across the forested and scrub covered land as the traditional form of agriculture, and occasional permanent fields and agroforests can be found in the vicinities of the villages. the cultivation cycle is short (3–5 yrs) and in many places fields are shifted even annually. coral rag forests provide important livelihood services, such as firewood, extraction of coral and building poles for construction, materials for handicrafts, medicinal plants and sites for practicing traditional beliefs (sitari 2005; käyhkö et al. 2008). thus, the socio-economic importance of the forest products is high for the local communities, but due to multiple uses, there is general concern over the long-term sustainability of the forest resources (zfdp 1997; rgz 2004). sea resources bring additional sources of livelihood for the villagers, especially through fishing and seaweed farming (käyhkö et al. 2008). as tourism is rapidly intensifying along the coastal fringe, it influences both the forest and sea related livelihoods of the villagers. tourism potentially creates new opportunities for employment and the market in general, but tourist facilities also push local people to migrate inland, sell their lands, change areas for cultivation and restrict access to beach areas and sea resources in particular (gössling 2002; mustelin 2008). material and methods overall study design the mapping and analyses of the social values of the matemwe communities consisted of several fig. 1. study site on the eastern coast of tanzania and land cover in the shehia of matemwe in 2004. there is no clear boundary for the shehia and therefore, for the purpose of the study, a fixed boundary was established. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 47participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … work phases. initially, the theoretical considerations and practical preparations for the study were made, including a literature review of the practical approaches of pgis and selection of the social landscape values. four social values, subsistence, aesthetic, traditional and leisure, were chosen for the study of the social dimension in the landscape among the local communities of matemwe. these values were based on commonly practiced land use activities as well as the values they attach to their village landscape which were grouped under a typology of four social landscape values (table 1). comparisons to similar research papers were also made when formulating the value typology applicable to the matemwe case, even though most previous studies concern developed societies (brown & reed 2000; brown 2005; raymond & brown 2006; tyrväinen et al. 2007; alessa et al. 2008). once the theoretical setting was formulated, the research approach was locally adjusted for matemwe through discussions with the village leader (swa: sheha) and planning officers in the department of commercial crops, fruits and forestry (dccff), which is a government department under the ministry of agriculture, livestock and natural resources in zanzibar. a combination of participatory mapping with semi-structured interview questions was chosen for the data collection technique (see e.g. black & liljeblad 2006; gunderson & watson 2007). social values were collected individually as geographical information from each of the informants because of the subjective nature of the information, but the data were analysed collectively to identify the geographical patterns of the values across the whole landscape of the study area. subsequently, the results were shown to a group of 20 informants in a reflective focus group with lively discussion. the focus group discussion played an important role in informing the community members and raising discussion among them. it also assisted in the interpretation of the results. together with the case study, these participatory methods and the significance of social data in landscape planning were also introduced to the planning sector in zanzibar. participatory mapping and the interviews the spatial collection of the social value data was organised through a participatory mapping campaign, which took place in matemwe in november–december 2007. this pgis campaign was based on the use of the most recent digital georeferenced aerial photographs (2004, 0.5 m pixel size), which were obtained from the department of survey and urban planning (dosup) in zanzibar town. aerial photographs have been found useful in pgis campaigns since they are visually attractive without too much abstraction of the landscape (corbett et al. 2006). the use of aerial photographs was tested in earlier pgis campaigns in zanzibar and found useful and reliable for location-specific tasks given to the community members (makandi 2008). aerial photographs were printed at a scale of 1:5000 on a laminated paper sheet for data collection. a total of 149 community members from all the 21 sub-villages of matemwe were interviewed. table 1. social landscape values and their respective activities/indicators and interview questions used in the study. social value activity/indicator interview questions to locate the activities subsistence shifting cultivation do you or your family cultivate crops or seaweed, where?seaweed cultivation grazing where are your grazing areas? collection of firewood, construction materials, medicinal plants, wild fruits/vegetables, building poles for selling, coral rock for making lime stone, hunting areas where do you collect forest products? traditional religious or sacred place are there religious or sacred places for you in the landscape, where? aesthetic beautiful, attractive place where are the most beautiful places here? leisure social interaction, recreation where do you go on your spare time? are there e.g. some important meeting places for you or do you go to the surroundings? 48 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö the boundaries of the recent census (2002) enumeration areas were not available, and thus the amount of persons sampled in each sub-village was determined according to the relative amount of buildings in the sub-villages according to the 2004 aerial photograph interpretation. this provided the only applicable spatial estimate of the population distribution in matemwe. informants were selected from the sub-villages by the sheha or his assistant who were given detailed instructions of the amount of participants, their age (15–30 yrs, ≥31 yrs) and gender division for each sub-village. because most of the people have several livelihoods (sitari 2005), this was not included in the selection criteria. the informants were selected on the same day or the day before the interview situation. each participant received a small monetary compensation since they were not able to attend their normal daily activities while waiting to be interviewed. the interviews were made by two local field assistants from the dccff. local field assistants were used since it was considered essential that the interviews were conducted in fluent swahili. before the interviews, the questionnaire had been translated from english into swahili and the social value concepts and related interview questions (table 1) were discussed with the field assistants to ensure that the same understanding of terms and concepts was shared. the semi-structured interviews lasted 20–40 minutes for each informant and started with an introduction to the topic of the interview, orientation with the aerial photographs and collection of the background information (e.g. age, household details, source of living, and level of education). then the participants marked their homes onto the printed aerial photographs and continued marking social landscape values one by one as polygon delineations using drawing ink. for each value mapped the participants were allowed to mark as many places on the map as they wanted to. via supplementary questions, such as what crops they cultivate and how often they change the field location, additional attribute information was associated with the value polygons. all delineated polygons had unique identifiers in terms of the social values and these were linked with unique informant identifier codes to each person interviewed. social value delineations were transformed into cell-based geographical information immediately after each interview since informants marked their values on the same map sheet but were not allowed to see each other’s delineations. the data transformation was done manually in the field as follows. the image map which contained informant delineations was overlaid with a transparent grid (fig. 2). each grid cell (50x50 m, 0.25 ha) had a unique identifier number. if the delineated value polygon covered at least one third of a cell area, the cell code number was attached with the social value polygon. informants’ homes were marked with one cell accuracy. subsequently, unique identifiers could be used to transform manual cell data into digital data in gis. methods of analysis analogue spatial data sets collected in the field were recorded on the computer after each interview day. this ms excel 2003 database included informant background as well as data on the delineations for each value (fig. 2). the general characteristics of the informants were analyzed with fig. 2. spatial data collection of social landscape values with participatory mapping and data transformation from manual field notes into digital form and gis datasets. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 49participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … spss 14.0 using descriptive statistics and cross tabulations. these statistics were used to obtain an overall understanding of the informants for the interpretation of the social landscape value data. descriptive statistics were also analysed from each of the four values in ms excel. however, given the data collection methodology and the approximate character of social value data in geographical form, these measures, especially data on the size of the delineated areas, should not be interpreted as exact but rather as uncertain geospatial data of social values (maceachren et al. 2005). the geographical data on the informants’ homes and their individual social value delineations were converted into digital gis data (in arcgis 9.2/9.3) on the basis of the unique cell identifiers (numbers) (fig. 2). each value area (minimum one cell, 0.25 ha) and home data were stored as vector polygons, which were rectangular in shape. additional information related to the social landscape value delineations was stored as attribute data for polygons representing one delineated social value. to analyse the geographical distributions of each social landscape value, individual informantspecific delineations were grouped into social value layers in gis for spatial analysis and visualisation. since it was expected that the physical distance between informant homes and value locations might explain some of the variation in the geographical distribution of the values, the approximate distances between informant’s home and corresponding social value delineations were calculated as the straight-line distance using hawths’s analysis tools (beyer 2004). the calculations were made from the middle points of the polygons (0.25 ha). each social landscape value layer (4 layers) contained two types of geographical data: the presence (cell value 1/0) and intensity (total number of informants’ entries for each cell) of the social value. the social value intensity data were spatially analysed with a selection of landscape metrics using fragstats 3.3 software. the purpose of the analysis was to describe the geographical patterns of each social value in landscape (within the whole study area). the intensity values were classified into four classes based on natural breaks in the data and converted into raster format to be handled in the software. total patch area, number of patches and patch area mean, range and standard deviation were calculated with the 4-neighbour rule. mean euclidian nearest neighbour distance was calculated for each intensity class based on the nearest straight-line neighbours of each patch. this analysis was used to measure patch context and isolation at landscape scale. to analyse the overall diversity of the social values at landscape scale, all four values were combined into one gis vector layer. the diversity and relative occurrence of the overlapping four social values were analysed with the shannon diversity index which is a popular measure of species diversity and has also been used to study social data (krebs 1989; reed & brown 2003). the index was calculated to every social value cell based on the relative amount of informant entries of each value in the cell. the index does not have a specific range but is dependent on the richness and occurrence of social landscape values. from the vector intensity grids, the spatial distribution (clustering vs. distribution) of the values was analyzed using a hot spot analysis. getis-ord gi* statistics were calculated for each cell based on the summed intensity (total amount of overlapping informants’ entries in every cell) (haining 2003). looking at the neighbouring cells, the statistics calculate where features of high value and features of low value tend to cluster in the study area and compares this to random chance. clusters of high values represent hot spots of social landscape value intensity. the outcome from the analysis is a statistically significant z score. the larger the positive z score is (i.e. how many standard deviations away from the mean it is), the more intensive is the clustering of high values and vice versa. a z score near zero indicates no apparent concentration of the intensity values. based on the distance at which spatial autocorrelation peaks, a threshold distance of 100 meters was used in the analysis. in this study, the confidence level of 95% was used and the intensity value hot spots were identified as those areas where the z score is more than 1.96 standard deviations away from the mean. results characteristics and livelihoods of the informants altogether 149 informants were interviewed in this case study (fig. 3). according to the gender and age, 50% (74) were men and 50% (75) women with a mean age of 35 years. approximately half of the informants (47%) were over 30 years 50 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö the youngest informant being 15 and the oldest 80 years old. the majority were married (72%) and around 20% were single, 1% divorced and 5% widowed. households were large with 5 to 10 members (73% of informants) and 4 children on average (max 19). a quarter of the informants did not have children. the education level among adults was low. half of the informants had no formal education, 12% had some elementary education and 5% had completed elementary school. secondary education was completed by one third (32%) of the informants and one of the informants was a high school graduate. the informants commonly depended on several livelihoods. the main livelihoods were subsistence farming (71%), fishing (19%) and seaweed cultivation (43%). in general, men seemed to practise fishing and women cultivation of seaweed. only one of the male informants said he helped his wife with seaweed cultivation and only some women practised fishing. subsistence farming was practised by both genders and the main form of farming was shifting (slash and burn) agriculture. livestock, such as cows, goats, chicken or ducks were maintained by only 13% of the informants, primarily in the sub-villages towards the inland regions. some (7%) practised small-scale business such as selling chicken soup. only one out of ten informants earned a salary through working for the hotels, schools, or shops or as drivers and tailors. social landscape values and associated activities the informants delineated a total of 989 areas on the aerial photographs during the participatory fig. 3. location of the informant homes (n = 147, cells = 111) and the total number and gender distribution of the informants per sub-village. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 51participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … mapping campaign. these consisted of places which represented subsistence, traditional, aesthetic and leisure values of the local inhabitants. the highest response rate (n %) was established for the traditional and lowest for the aesthetic values (table 2). subsistence value primarily concerns those land uses which satisfy the basic daily needs of the community members in matemwe. subsistence value consists of four land use activities, namely agricultural fields, grazing areas, seaweed cultivation and collection of the forest products. on average, the informants had one to two agricultural fields in cultivation with four to five different food crops. this cultivation pattern is typical for the coral rag areas, where fields are shifted regularly and where mixed crops are cultivated. the most common crops are maize, cassava, sorghum and different kinds of peas. livestock consists mainly of goats, cows, chicken and ducks which are kept freely in the forest areas and around the home but gathered together for the nights. various forest products, such as firewood, construction materials and medicinal plants, are collected from the surrounding environment. some men also practice hunting and extract coral stone for lime making. women cultivate seaweed in the tidal area, and sell dried harvest for industrial purposes. traditional value primarily relates to religion, and plays an important role in the rural communities. hence traditional value was readily mapped by almost all of the informants (table 2). typical traditional places are graveyards (86%) and sacred sites for practising traditional natural religions (12%) alongside islam. one of the drawn traditional places also represented a place where a sorcerer practises his healing traditions. aesthetic value was attached to sites where the informants have the possibility for social interaction or finding business opportunities and shopping (together 53%). beautiful views, the beach and occasional newly-built private buildings and the cooling sea breeze were mapped as aesthetic only by approximately one quarter of the informants. home was mentioned as a beautiful place by 15% of the informants, mainly women. the low response figure (table 2) indicates that a large part of the informants found it challenging to map beautiful places. the places where the informants spend their leisure time were different between men and women. men have their own meeting places (swa: maskani), where third of the informants (30%) meet to change ideas and play board games. these sites are usually located in central places in the subvillages. popular meeting places are also around the shops in inland mfuru matonga and at the fish market in coastal kigomani (see fig. 3). half of the informants (50%), usually women, spent their spare time at home doing home chores and weaving baskets. some attended quran school classes (8%) in their leisure time and young men liked to play soccer on the soccer grounds (9%). geographical patterns of the social landscape values most of the informants marked one to two areas per value (for subsistence value per land use activity) on the orthophotomap (table 2). the average table 2. statistics on social landscape value delineations (n = number of informants, n (%) = relative number of informants, sd = standard deviation, intensity 1 (%) = relative amount of cells that have no overlapping area delineations). no. of no. of areas/ area size (ha) aver dist. to inten. n n (%) cells areas inform. aver min max sd home (m) 1 (%) subsistence 110 73.5 640 492 4.47 0.45 0.25 2.25 0.27 685.5 69.8 fields 138 92.6 256 158 1.14 0.42 0.25 1.00 0.21 523.8 96.5 grazing areas 52 34.9 104 66 1.27 0.41 0.25 1.75 0.29 356.0 97.1 seaweed cult. 107 71.8 130 111 1.04 0.41 0.25 1.00 0.19 1219.1 75.4 forest prod. 141 94.6 303 157 1.11 0.56 0.25 2.25 0.37 643.0 96.7 traditional 146 98.0 205 206 1.41 0.44 0.25 2.25 0.29 695.5 59.8 aesthetic 93 62.4 166 144 1.53 0.51 0.25 2.00 0.35 1974.2 62.7 leisure 131 87.9 133 147 1.12 0.36 0.25 1.50 0.24 394.5 72.9 52 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö area size of the delineated areas ranged between 0.4 and 0.6 hectares, which is equal to one to two cells. in general, leisure places seemed to be the smallest in size and areas for the collection of the forest products the largest. the standard deviations for the sizes of the areas were highest for the collection of forest products and aesthetic places. this is explained by the varying nature of the sites attached to these values (e.g. spot-like houses and sea front area). seaweed cultivation and agricultural fields are generally small and compact, and they also have the smallest variation in size between the informants. the subsistence value had the highest coverage (160 ha), number of patches (360) and largest geographical distribution of the four mapped values (fig. 4, table 3). the proportion of the cells with intensity value 1 (only one informant entry in the cell) is highest (75–97%) (table 2) and the nearest neighbour distance between subsistence patches was also notably shorter compared with the other values (table 3). the components of subsistence value all tended to be individual delineations for subsistence uses with little overlap between the informants (fig. 5). coral rag forest has high individual subsistence value for the community members of matemwe, which is why their geographical patterns in the forest areas surrounding the subvillages were scattered and quite evenly distributed. geographically, distribution of seaweed farming was distinct and concentrated on the tidal zone with long average distances to homes. agricultural activities and use of the forest products, on the other hand, concentrated in the vicinity of the informant homes but were geographically fragmented (table 2 and fig. 5). although all the values mapped in matemwe included direct use of land, subsistence could be considered as the most important value for the livelihoods of the villagers. however, it was not located nearest to the informants’ homes. this is contrary to previous studies made in developed context, which have pointed out that values which include direct or active use of the land are located nearest to home sites (brown et al. 2002). for the villagers in matemwe, it is not always possible to obtain fields or keep livestock and to collect forest products in the immediate vicinity of the home because of the limited space and the characteristics of the coral soil. hence, these activities need to be scattered in the surrounding forest areas. during the mapping process, the informants delineated altogether 206 areas for traditional values with an average size of 0.4 ha (table 2). approximately 40% of the traditional sites overlap between the informants, which means that traditional value has the least amount of individual delineations between the informants. this results from the fact that graveyards and scared places are normally shared with several families. traditional sites are spatially fragmented, but concentrate around the sub-villages within approximately 700 m from the informants’ homes (fig. 4, table 2). aesthetic and leisure values concentrated on sub-villages. in general, leisure values tended to cover small areas, and there were many single cell entries, which were marked as appealing leisure spots on the aerial photographs (fig. 4). in total, there are 82 leisure patches, which cover an area of 33.3 ha (table 3). because leisure time is usually spent near homes, the mean home distance to delineated leisure places was short, around 400 meters. beautiful places are often shared between the informants and thus had the highest geographical concentration and intensity in the studied landscape (table 3, fig. 4). the amount of delineated aesthetic places was 144 and their size was on average 0.5 ha (table 2). in total, the aesthetic places cover an area of 42.3 ha of matemwe landscape (table 3). while leisure spots are found in most of the sub-villages, aesthetically appealing places seemed to be concentrated along the coasttable 3. landscape metrics on social landscape value patch mosaic (enn dist. = euclidian nearest neighbour distance). tot. patch patch area (ha) enn dist. (m) area (ha) no. mean range sd mean range sd subsistence 160.00 360 0.44 2.00 0.32 162.9 3104.6 220.1 traditional 51.00 111 0.46 1.50 0.31 226.6 1499.3 254.3 aesthetic 42.25 71 0.60 4.75 0.77 309.4 2396.1 537.1 leisure 33.25 82 0.41 2.00 0.33 248.3 1183.3 217.8 fennia 187: 1 (2009) 53participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … fig. 4. geographical distribution of the delineated areas, the intensity of overlapping areas and intensity range for the four social landscape values in matemwe. 54 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö fig. 5. geographical distribution of the delineated areas, the intensity for overlapping areas and intensity range for the components of subsistence value in matemwe. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 55participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … line with the longest distances (1974 m) from the homes of the informants (fig. 4, table 2). however, distribution of the aesthetic value overlapped with that of leisure value and it is evident that among the villagers of matemwe beautiful places are for large part related to social interaction. together, the four social landscape values covered 262 ha (1049 cells) of matemwe land and tidal area (fig. 6a). values seemed to have little overlap as over 90% of the cells illustrate the presence of one value and the diversity index was zero. the highest diversity class (1.50−2.00) represented only less than one percentage of the cells and all four values coexist only in two cells (diversity index 2.0). in general, the social value diversity is low in matemwe and the few cells of high diversity were scattered in the major subvillages. when the intensities (total amount of informant entries/cell) from each social landscape value were taken into account, there were eight geographical hot spot clusters of the social values (fig. 6b). these were mainly sub-villages, such as kigomani, matemwe mtakuja, mbupurini and mfuru matonga, or graveyards (see fig. 3). one specific hot spot was the area of an international hotel in the southern part of matemwe with high aesthetic value. hot spot areas varied from 1.25 to 4.25 ha with a mean size of 2.4 ha and a total coverage of 21.5 ha (8.2% of the total area covered by the social values). all hot spot sites were located in or nearby the sub-villages, where the highest intensifig. 6. a) value diversity as shannon index and b) hot spot map as the gi z score deviation from standard deviation for subsistence, aesthetic, traditional and leisure values. 56 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö ties of leisure, traditional and aesthetic values could be identified. these meeting places, graveyards and beautiful places represent shared social space of matemwe community and are mainly located on the coastal area. the subsistence value overlapped the hot spot areas only by one hectare (four cells). it must be kept in mind, however, that the hot spots do not alone depict important areas for the community since individual subsistence values are crucial for the livelihoods of the community members. it is evident that, in contrast to subsistence value, traditional, aesthetic and leisure values are collective in character and they are clustered into the same socially meaningful sites in the village. such sites act as key nodes for social activities and are also aesthetically appreciated places among the community members and appeared as hot spots in the analyses. this fundamental difference in the meaning of subsistence and other social values is the reason why there was little spatial overlap between them. discussion social landscape values and management of multifunctional cultural landscapes the participatory mapping and geographical analysis of four social landscape values has broadened the understanding of the social landscape of the rural community of matemwe. these results have several implications for the development of multifunctional cultural landscapes. in the following section, the most important characteristics of these social values and their potential contribution to future landscape planning and management are discussed especially in the light of the situation in matemwe and zanzibar, but also in the wider context of developing societies. the most significant result of this paper is the difference in the geographical patterning of the four studied social values and how this influences landscape development and planning. while subsistence value was individual-based and scattered in the landscape, other values tended to cluster and be shared between the informants. these patterns of the social landscape values reflect fundamental activities of the local inhabitants the longterm influences of the land uses to the present landscape patterns, both physical and social. subsistence farming, grazing and other uses of the forests form the basis of the livelihoods of the local communities and create a constant element of change in the landscape. one of the most alarming influences of this dynamic land use pattern is the gradual diminishing, even loss of the essential forest resources. especially along the coastline, where the largest sub-villages are located, forests have clearly deteriorated during the last decades (käyhkö et al. 2008; käyhkö & fagerholm, submitted). for land use planning, scattered and dynamic subsistence farming is challenging to manage because natural resources should be maintained not only for the purpose of the community livelihoods but also for the essential ecosystem services they provide at the local, regional as well as on a global scale (unep 2007). the changes in the state of forest resources has been studied quantitatively to find the key areas of forest loss and recovery but in shifting cultivation landscapes there is a call for research in multiple disciplines to find the drivers of the changes (hartter et al. 2008). this knowledge, together with a supportive policy environment directing investments in local participation, alternative livelihood development, protection area allocation and technology and infrastructure investments can reduce the pressure of shifting cultivation on forests (müller & zeller 2002). in contrast to the scattered subsistence values, traditional, aesthetic and leisure values were clustered to places characterised by intensive social interaction and cultural traditions. the well-being of the local people is dependent on these meeting places, graveyards and aesthetically appreciated sites and changes in these key nodes would have a significant effect on the social landscape in matemwe. these areas, where collective social landscape values meet, have stability established through the long-lasting past and present interaction of several community members and in development and planning processes the implication of this shared social landscape is essential. the study has shown that culture has a significant effect on the interpretation of social landscape values. in a rural developing society such as matemwe, subsistence value is so crucial for the livelihoods of the local communities that it also affects the perception and experience of other social values. for example, aesthetic value was related more to social interaction than to the visual view. it is evident that most of the villagers in matemwe do not experience nature in an aesthetic way as something they would interpret as beautiful with their eyes. in contrast, nature is mainly fennia 187: 1 (2009) 57participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … seen as a resource because it has high utility importance in daily life, also noted by gössling (2002) in a study in coastal zanzibar. the results from this study are essentially different from social values studies made in a developed context where aesthetic places are among the most important and easily mapped (e.g. brown & raymond 2007; tyrväinen et al. 2007). it seems that rural subsistence-based communities hold a different concept of aesthetics compared to a society where direct contact to nature is not predominant. another landscape planning and management challenge emerging both from the results of the analyses as well as from other social value studies is the interaction between local communities and other stakeholders active in the area. the coastal area in matemwe seems to be an essential part of the social landscape of the community where social values cluster. however, the very same coastal space is today occupied by hotels and international tourists as a substantial part of the eastern coastline in zanzibar is being sold to tourism entrepreneurs from abroad (rgz 2004). the coexistence of the traditional and new land uses is evident in matemwe (käyhkö et al. 2008) and raises questions about sustainable landscape development and management. due to hotel construction, some settlements have been forced to move inland and traditional religious places, such as graveyards have been transferred away from the coast. additionally, access to the sea resources has been restricted, especially in front of the hotel areas (gössling 2001; mustelin 2008). these developments are against the national principles where regarding tourism development “prior and traditional right of use and access to land” is recognised for the local communities (rgz 2003). for the future planning of rapidly changing coastal landscapes, these local and multifunctional needs and expectations should be taken seriously and efforts to increase positive interactions between stakeholders should be introduced. the local communities and tourism need to find a way to share the same land successfully to mutually benefit each other. an initial starting point would be to respect and appreciate the geographical meanings of the social landscape values. for the practical needs in landscape management, knowledge of landscape perceptions are needed (soini 2001). participatory techniques, where multiple stakeholder preferences are collected and analysed in a spatial form, would be one possible way of trying to solve conflicting land uses. this case study included only the community people in matemwe but it would have also been interesting to include other stakeholders, such as the hotel and private land owners. such analyses would be interesting to implement in the future. there is already evidence of successful efforts of combining social values held by varying stakeholders to allocate future tourism growth and development (raymond & brown 2007). it is a well acknowledged fact that sustainable management of multifunctional cultural landscapes can only be achieved if participation of local stakeholders with their multidimensional and pluralist values are included in the process. methodological considerations of participatory mapping of social landscape values participatory mapping is a valuable tool to capture spatial information on social landscape values at local community level (soini 2001; brown 2005; black & liljeblad 2006; kyttä & kahila 2006; gunderson & watson 2007; tyrväinen et al. 2007). the method used in matemwe enabled the community, who do not have experience in landscape management, to produce valuable data of the social values attached to their land and living space. furthermore, it can be concluded that the participatory mapping process itself had value in capacity-building among the villagers. participation is stated in several national documents of zanzibar, such as the national land use plan (commission for land and environment 1995), the indicative tourism master plan for zanzibar and pemba (united republic of tanzania 2003) and the zanzibar tourism policy statement (rgz 2003), but thus far its practical implementation has remained modest. some interview based participation has been realised but this case study is among the first to collect stakeholder data in spatial form. with spatial analysis of social landscape values, it was possible to establish understanding and produce data of the geographical patterns and the variation of social landscape values and depict areas that are especially important in the social landscape of matemwe. however, the methodology used has some aspects regarding representation, informant sampling and data collection, which need to be considered and discussed. mapping of social values was done with the aid of aerial photographs. in contrast to abstract map 58 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö representations, which have been found to be problematic in participatory gis campaigns (e.g. zurayk et al. 2001), use of the image map was successful, since participants were able to read and identify places and areas on it with little support (see also taylor et al. 2006). it seems the people in matemwe have good site knowledge and have come accustomed to their environment in their daily lives. mapping scale has an effect on the size of the social value delineations made by the informants and hence area sizes vary in different studies (black & liljeblad 2006). in this study, the social value delineations made by the informants were in general quite small in size and seem to be area specific because of the large scale orthophotoimage. interpretation of individually identified social landscape values is challenging as one needs to estimate the representativeness of the samples used in the analyses both in terms of their geographical distribution and content. originally, the informant sampling was planned to be accomplished according to the proportion of inhabitants on the basis of the 2002 census enumeration data. however, census areas were geographically inadequate and thus, the sampling was based on the relative amount of buildings according to a 2004 aerial image. this method has shortcomings as the amount of buildings does not really reflect the number of inhabitants. furthermore, selection of the informants was in the hands of the village leader, sheha, and his assistant. it is possible that some of the informants were their relatives. however, as most of the sub-villages are clan-based i.e. they are formed around the same family or a couple of families, it is not likely that such subjective selection had too much influence on the geographical representation of the sample. additionally, the monetary compensation for the informants could have generated some prejudice in the results, but had compensation not been given it would have certainly lowered the motivation to participate in the mapping process. the collection of data with the grid sheet was experienced to be appropriate and effective in the context of zanzibar. with a smaller amount of informants other methods of data collection (e.g. using transparent sheet on which the mapping would be done) would also have been worth considering. the method of data collection for the social value delineations has not been used previously and it can be argued that some of the precision of information was lost when data were collected with the 50x50 m grid sheet. it is obvious that some of the areas drawn on the map were smaller than the 0.25 ha grid cell which was the minimum resolution in the study. in participatory gis approaches, we should, however, question the necessity of accuracy which, in general, is seen as an essential character of scientific data (mccall 2006). the delineations of the social values in the real world often have an imprecise boundary like some natural features such as habitat boundaries. reality is frequently ambiguous (mccall 2006) and we should consider if it is misleading to represent it in a precise and accurate way. in addition, ethical aspects were considered as data were not collected with such a precision that it could be connected to individual informants and their delineations on the map. this study represents one approach for handling uncertainty in geospatial data and it can be said that there is a need for further research and technical development in analyzing ambiguous and continuous data sets. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank all the finnish and tanzanian members of the research project “sustainable landscapes in zanzibar” for their commitment and interest in researching zanzibar. we would like to thank dr. bakari asseid, mrs miza khamis and mr abass juma mzee of the department of commercial crops, fruits and forestry (dccff) for guidance and field facilitations of the study, and the department of survey and urban planning, the government of zanzibar for allowing the use of spatial data. the work was financially supported by the geography graduate school, the ministry for foreign affairs of finland (project 50173), the university of turku, department of geography and the laboratory of computer cartography (utu-lcc) and the department of commercial crops, fruits and forestry, ministry for agriculture, livestock and natural resources, zanzibar, tanzania. references alessa l, a kliskey & g brown (2008). social-ecological hotspots mapping: a spatial approach for identifying coupled social-ecological space. landscape and urban planning 85: 1, 27−39. beyer hl (2004). hawth’s analysis tools for arcgis. < h t t p : / / w w w. s p a t i a l e c o l o g y. c o m / h t o o l s > . 31.03.2008. black a & a liljeblad (2006). integrating social values in vegetation models via gis: the missing link fennia 187: 1 (2009) 59participatory mapping and geographical patterns of the social … for the bitterroot national forest. final report jfsp project no. 04-2-1-114. 31 p. aldo leopold wilderness institute, misoula, mt. brown g (2005). mapping spatial attributes in survey research for natural resource management: methods and applications. society & natural resources 18: 1, 17−39. brown g & p reed (2000). validation of a forest values typology for use in national forest planning. forest science 46: 2, 240–247. brown gg, p reed & cc harris (2002). testing a place-based theory for environmental evaluation: an alaska case study. applied geography 22: 1, 49−76. brown g, c smith, l alessa & a kliskey (2004). a comparison of perceptions of biological value with scientific assessment of biological importance. applied geography 24: 2, 161−180. brown g & c raymond (2007). the relationship between place attachment and landscape values: toward mapping place attachment. applied geography 27: 2, 89−111. commission for land and environment (1995). national land use plan. 140 p. revolutionary government of zanzibar, ministry of water, construction, energy, lands and environment. corbett j, g rambaldi, p kyem, d weiner, r olhson, j muchemi, m mccall & r chambers (2006). overview: mapping for change − the emergence of a new practice. participatory learning and action 54, 13−19. craig wj, tm harris & d weiner (eds) (2002). community participation and geographic information systems. 383 p. taylor & francis, london. fao (food and agriculture organization of the united nations) (2006). global forest resources assessment 2005 – progress towards sustainable forest management. fao forestry paper 147. 350 p. gössling s (2001). tourism, economic transition and ecosystem degradation: interacting processes in a tanzanian coastal community. tourism geographies 3: 4, 430–453. gössling s (2002). human–environmental relations with tourism. annals of tourism research 29: 2, 539–556. gunderson k & a watson (2007). understanding place meanings on the bitterroot national forest, montana. society & natural resources 20: 8, 705−721. haining rp (2003). spatial data analysis: theory and practice. 432 p. cambridge university press, new york. hartter j, c lucas, ae gaughan & ll aranda (2008). detecting tropical dry forest succession in a shifting cultivation mosaic of the yucatán peninsula, mexico. applied geography 28: 2, 134–149. hettige pml (1990). land evaluation and land suitability classification – unguja & pemba islands. 142 p. food and agriculture organization of the united nations, zanzibar. kaltenborn bp (1998). effects of sense of place on responses to environmental impacts. applied geography 18: 2, 169–189. käyhkö n & h skånes (2006). change trajectories and key biotopes – assessing landscape dynamics and sustainability. landscape and urban planning 75: 3–4, 300–321. käyhkö n, m orjala & j mustelin (eds) (2008). sustainable landscapes in zanzibar. publicationes instituti geographici universitatis turkuensis a 172. 152 p. käyhkö n & n fagerholm (submitted). dynamic land use and land cover changes behind declining forest resources in a coastal village of matemwe, zanzibar, tanzania. land use policy (lupd-09-00178). kingston r, s carver, a evans & i turton (2000). webbased public participation geographical information systems: an aid to local environmental decision making. computers, environment and urban systems 24: 2, 109−125. krebs cj (1989). ecological methodology. 654 p. harper & row publishers, new york. kyttä m & m kahila (2006). pehmogis elinympäristön koetun laadun kartoittajana. yhdyskuntasuunnittelun tutkimusja koulutuskeskuksen julkaisuja b 90. 175 p. lambin ef, j helmut, hj geist & e lepers (2003). dynamics of land-use and land-cover change in tropical regions. annual review of environmental resources 28, 205–241. lofchie mf (1965). zanzibar: background to revolution. 316 p. princeton university press, new jersey. luz f (2000). participatory landscape ecology – a basis for acceptance and implementation. landscape and urban planning 50: 1–3, 157–166. ma (millenium ecosystem assesment) (2003). ecosystems and human well-being: a frame work assessment. 245 p. island press, washington. maceachren am, a robinson, s hopper, s gardner, r murray, m gahegan & e hetzler (2005). visualizing geospatial information uncertainty: what we know and what we need to know. cartography and geographic information science 32: 3, 139–160. makandi h (2008). mapping land use patterns using remote sensing, gis and participatory methods. in käyhkö n, m orjala & j mustelin (eds) (2008). sustainable landscapes in zanzibar. publicationes instituti geographici universitatis turkuensis a 172, 55–61. manning r, w valliere & b minteer (1999). values, ethics, and attitudes toward national forest management: an empirical study. society & natural resources 12: 5, 421–436. mccall m (2006). precision for whom? mapping ambiquity and precisiness in (participatory) gis. participatory learning and action 54, 114–119. mcintyre n, m yuan, rj payne & j moore (2004). developing values-based approach to managing rec60 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nora fagerholm and niina käyhkö reation on canadian crown lands. working papers of the finnish forestry institute 2, 285−293. finnish forest research institute, helsinki. mustelin j (2008). tourism’s effects on the coastal communities in the east coast of unguja island. in käyhkö n, m orjala & j mustelin (eds) (2008). sustainable landscapes in zanzibar. publicationes instituti geographici universitatis turkuensis a 172, 105–111. müller d & m zeller (2002). land use dynamics in the central highlands of vietnam: a spatial model combining village survey data with satellite imagery interpretation. agricultural economics 27: 3, 333–354. olwig kr (1996). recovering the substantive nature of landscape. annals of the association of american geographers 86: 4, 630–653. pontius rg jr, e shusas & m mceachern (2004). detecting important categorical land changes while accounting for persistence. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 101: 2–3, 251–268. potschin m & r haines-young. (2006). “rio+10”, sustainability science and landscape ecology. landscape and urban planning 75: 3–4, 162–174. raquez p & ef lambin (2006). conditions for a sustainable land use: case study evidence. journal of land use science 1: 2, 109–125. raymond c & g brown (2006). a method for assessing protected area allocations using a typology of landscape values. journal of environmental planning and management 49: 6, 797–812. raymond c & g brown (2007). a spatial method for assessing resident and visitor attitudes toward tourism growth and development. journal of sustainable tourism 15: 5, 1–22. reed p & g brown (2003). values suitability analysis: a methodology for identifying and integrating public perceptions of ecosystem values in forest planning. journal of environmental planning and management 46: 5, 643–658. regionplaneoch traffikkontoret (2001). upplevelsevärden – sociala kvaliteter i den regionala grönstrukturen. rapport 4. katarina tryck ab, stockholm. relph e (1976). place and placelessness. 156 p. pion, london. rgz (revolutionary government of zanzibar) (2003). zanzibar tourism policy statement. 29 p. <http:// www.zanzibartourism.net/docs/policystatement. pdf>. 04.08.2008. rgz (revolutionary government of zanzibar) (2004). state of the environment report of zanzibar. 38 p. rolston h & j coufal (1991). a forest ethic and multivalue forest management. journal of forestry 89: 4, 35–40. sauer c (1925). the morphology of landscape. university of california publications in geography 2, 19−54. reprinted in leighly j (ed) (1969). land and life: a selection from the writings of carl ortwin sauer, 315−350. university of california press, berkley. sitari t (2005). forestry in the community lifeworld in unguja island, zanzibar. in sitari t (ed) (2005). forestry, community and biodiversity in zanzibar. turku university department of geography publications b 3, 37–58. soini k (2001). exploring human dimensions of multifunctional landscapes through mapping and map-making. landscape and urban planning 57, 225–239. ståhle a & a sandberg (2002). sociotop som redskap i grönområde planeringen. stockholms stadsbyggnadskontor, rapport 2002: 4. tanzania sensa 2002 (2003). population and housing census. <http://www.tanzania.go.tz/census/regions. htm>. 31.03.2008. tarrant ma, hk cordell & gt green (2003). pvf – a scale to measure public values of forests. journal of forestry 101: 6, 24−30. taylor j, c murphy, s mayes, e mwilima, n nuulimba & s slater-jones (2006). land and natural resources mapping by san communities and ngos: experiences from namibia. participatory learning and action 54: 79–84. tuan y (1977). space and place: the perspective of experience. 235 p. edward arnold, london. tyrväinen l, k mäkinen & j schipperjn (2007). tools for mapping social values of urban woodlands and other green areas. landscape and urban planning 79: 1, 5–19. unep (united nations environment program) (2007). global environment outlook, geo 4, environment and development. 540 p. progress press ltd., malta. united republic of tanzania (2003). indicative tourism master plan for zanzibar and pemba – final report. 114 p. <http://www.zanzibartourism.net/ docs/masterplan.pdf>. 01.08.2008. voss a, i denisovich, p gatalsky, k gavouchidis, a klotz, s roeder & h voss (2004). evolution of participatory gis. computers, environment and urban systems 28: 6, 635−651. williams dr & me patterson (1996). environmental meaning and ecosystem management: perspectives from environmental psychology and human geography. society & natural resources 9, 507−521. zfdp (zanzibar forestry development project) (1997). zanzibar long-term forestry plan 1997–2006. technical paper 72. 99 p. oy edita ab, vantaa. zube eh (1987). perceived land use patterns and values. landscape ecology 1: 1, 37−45. zurayk r, f el-awar, s hamadeh, s talhouk, c sayegh, a-b chehad & k al shab (2001). using indigenous knowledge in land use investigations: a participatory study in a semi-arid mountainous region in lebanon. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 86, 247–262. discourse in a modern arctic: can we supplant sovereignty? – commentary to pawliw, berthold and lasserre urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa102004 doi: 10.11143/fennia.102004 reflections discourse in a modern arctic: can we supplant sovereignty? – commentary to pawliw, berthold and lasserre alexandra carleton carleton, a. (2021) discourse in a modern arctic: can we supplant sovereignty? – commentary to pawliw, berthold and lasserre. fennia 199(1) 129–131. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102004 in this reflection i contemplate on the nature of claiming sovereignty over the arctic through the political discourse, as used in the harper administration. i question the mobilization of discourses to substantiate claims and lasting jurisdiction over the arctic as the true nature of reconstructing narratives. in particular, whether the truer questions are how and why we seek sovereignty over areas of wilderness and why discourse is needed at all to legitimise the goodness of such claiming. keywords: pawliw, franklin, canadian sovereignty, indigenous, goodness alexandra carleton (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4857-2986), independent researcher. e-mail: alexandralcarleton@gmail.com the article written by pawliw, berthold and lasserre (2021) is an apt discussion of fluctuating attitudes to the arctic in political discourse, and poignantly highlights that political discourse changes to suit political motivations. on the back of perceived slights, that canadian sovereignty had been breached in the twentieth century, narratives used during harper’s term in office reasserted canadian sovereignty over the arctic, reframing and celebrating franklin’s lost expedition. in the article (pawliw et al. 2021), discourse is understood as a method of influence (seignour 2011), to create or rewrite the narrative of canadian sovereignty. discourse is evaluated as history, as preservation of cultural sites/ heritage, and also as means of inculcating the notion that unity has always existed between the settler and indigenous populations. this last narrative, the inclusion of the indigenous as valued members of the canadian identity is the most problematic and, upon reflection, may be seen as a lesson in rewriting socio-cultural dynamics seen throughout the history of indigenous exclusion. pawliw, berthold and lasserre (2021, 13) only go so far as to admit that “canadian claims to the northwest passage are constructed on the mobilization of inuit title”, yet the formation of the northern identity – the formation of an identity which may serve politically in the search for arctic dominance – is anything but indigenous in ontology. the mobilization of diverse discourses to suit, substantiate and propitiate those who would seek to secure lasting claim and lasting jurisdiction over the arctic is the true nature of reconstructing narratives and it is a danger. although pawliw, berthold and lasserre do not suggest that these discourses are flag-bearers to claims that may occur in the future, it is this underlying fact that resonates most soundly. moreover, the unquestioned assumption that these discourses are allowed or justified resounds of continued coloniality. © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 130 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections seeking sovereignty over wilderness the most important aspect of the piece is that it belies a much more serious question of how we seek sovereignty over areas of wilderness and that, too often, it is done by grand words and gestures speaking of attachment. but is this actual attachment? of course, there is no true attachment that needs discussion. there is also no true attachment to an entity like the wilds of the arctic which has, for itself, its own seasons and its own nature unconfined by human interests and indeed, for its existence so far, with very little interest in human confines. polar wildernesses, for those of us who have lived there at all, have their own tune and she (if we may do her the disservice of anthropomorphising her) pays little regard to our whims and fancies: it is precisely this harsh majestic nature i believe that amundsen and nansen revered so much. wisdom might suggest that claiming sovereignty over the far reaches of the earth is advantageous for a resources race, in pursuit of humanity’s desire to dominate over rather than have dominion for. and perhaps jurisdiction is the best method of preservation. yet, whether this is the only model for preserving the domains of the wild – and in fact exercising true protective dominion – is another question. in contradistinction lies the antarctic, which has no national jurisdiction and whose terms of treaty are to come to an end in the near future. what is to be said for these areas of white wild spaces? placement of the indigenous yet this truth has little place in discourse which seeks to claim the arctic. utilising the voice of sovereignty, and establishing historic bonds (most cleverly by drawing a line of attachment to the indigenous occupation of the area as though to conjure a line of continual historic attachment as used in indigenous claims for autochthony), may almost have been configured by legal counsel. indeed, “trying to show that canadians do occupy this territory and that their sovereignty is indeed inherited from past events, here rooted in tragedy and in the old narrative of a canadian history forged on the fight against nature (lasserre 1998)” (pawliw et al. 2021, 10) identifies the discourse to cement the arctic as part of a broader national consciousness. but this is, even as the authors admit, the formation of a “new canadian identity” (ibid., 12), thus separating the seeking of a discourse attached to the discovery and exploration of the arctic coastline from the existent canadian identity. indeed, it was during harper’s term that the discourse was pursued. it is, insofar as not actually admitted in the article, a claim potentially fraught with false intention. this may not be seen until many years in the future, demonstrate the actual involvement of indigenous identity, autochthony and ontology and a demonstration of the necessity to preserve and respect the ways of being of this group of people regardless of whether it changes or not. seeking a goodness to our arctic claims the primary reflection here is not, however, to once again underscore the need for indigenous inclusion. that would be too easy and presumptuous for someone not of indigenous origin and not involved in politics. my aim here is to question the nature of our seeking and claiming at all. whether, in the mark of an advanced humanity, our need to claim, dominate, seek (and eventually destroy simply by being there) is indeed a direction to continue pursuing without pausing to think. fair to say that states will vie for control over both ends of the earth, with its untapped resources. again, the discourse matches the money poured into research – engineering, science, fieldwork, tourism, market models, offshore gas reserves – used to recapitulate and legitimate the original discourse for resources and human expansion. the question is to what degree humanity needs to feel better about itself for seeking such expansion. what i mean is this: if we consider it past the point of return that we will inhabit, utilise and develop the vast wilderness of the arctic (much to many of our chagrin), why is discourse needed at all to legitimise the inherent goodness of such activity? in much the same way, the discourse to align new canadian identity with indigenous history may be useful, even necessary to make claiming legitimate. yet why is there such a need to integrate such discourse with the notion of goodness? in much the same way as harper’s discourse laid claim to 131fennia 199(1) (2021) alexandra carleton franklin himself, and laid claim to the indigenous through including leona aglukkaq, environment minister and minister responsible for parks canada (pawliw et al. 2021, 12), the use of positive language such as “hero”, “wonderful” and “great” (ibid., 15, 16) speaks of conjuring a goodness which may, or may not be there. in this, i think the language mentioned in the article to be of much deeper (and possibly conjuring) motivation. indeed, the “use it or lose it” (ibid., 17) admission together with celebration of franklin’s notion of tracing a line through a land so wild (ibid., 17), may point to human desire not to travail the wild sovereign, but to tame it. the suggestion, at the conclusion of the paper, that trudeau has moved away from this claiming discourse is intriguing but ultimately cannot change the impact of the previous government. references pawliw, k., berthold, e. & lasserre, f. (2021) the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin’s lost expedition. fennia 199(1) 9–24. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98496 seignour, a. (2011) méthode d’analyse des discours. l’exemple de l’allocution d’un dirigeant d’entreprise publique. revue française de gestion 2(211) 29–45. https://doi.org/10.3166/rfg.211.29-45 towards washing the baby in the bathwater? – commentary to refstie urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa121950 doi: 10.11143/fennia.121950 reflections towards washing the baby in the bathwater? – commentary to refstie jouni häkli häkli, j. (2022) towards washing the baby in the bathwater? – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 72–73. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 as a response to hilde refstie’s research paper ‘reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the coproductive turn in searching for sustainable solutions’, in this commentary i reflect on some of the issues that i consider key elements in her timely and important argument. i mainly pay attention to how she lays out the key problems in co-creative research in our fast-paced academia that meets the increasing demands for relevance coming from the policymaking for sustainability. yet, refstie’s paper also states that we do not necessarily have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. i end with some remarks on where refstie’s argument for rescuing the critical potential of co-creative research meets its understandable limits. keywords: co-creation, nudging, critique jouni häkli (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3033-2976), faculty of management and business, tampere university, finland. e-mail: jouni.hakli@tuni.fi it is a great pleasure for me to comment on hilde refstie’s fennia lecture and the subsequent paper that develops a highly interesting and timely critique of a growing co-productive trend in academic research (refstie 2022). the paper gives us a lot to think about. in my comments i will focus mostly on the idea of co-creation as a way to involve stakeholders in knowledge production that serves policy development, and to some extent also on the problems involved in the ways in which the notion of sustainability lends itself to political uses. to start from the idea of co-creation, which forms the core of refstie’s argument, i fully agree on the need to pay more attention to the risks involved when research agendas are being set top-down. in such situations, co-creative knowledge production may end up adopting uncritically the ideas, world views, and strategies of powerful societal players, such as major companies, governmental institutions, higher education organizations, funding agencies, and importantly, as the paper also points out, their new partnerships. in this context, increasingly characterized by “fast policymaking” as refstie (2022, 160) characterizes it, the language of co-creation risks becoming just another legitimation strategy – especially so when coupled with another prime tool for legitimating development projects: the notoriously fuzzy concept of sustainability. in view of these starting points, refstie’s key message is that co-creative settings risk co-opting academic work so that its contents get “nudged” towards © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3033-2976 fennia 200(1) (2022) 73jouni häkli goals set top-down, and the space for critical questioning narrows down (refstie 2022, 163). this is a paradoxical outcome for co-creative research that has represented attempts to achieve precisely the opposite. yet, as the paper convincingly argues, such impacts coming from co-creative research settings are difficult to identify because they are not openly imposed top-down, but rather occur as a set of smaller choices about research foci, priorities, and partnerships down the line. this makes it difficult to sustain a critical awareness of the problems in co-creative research, especially as the latter is perceived as the new stronghold of academic research’s societal relevance. having laid out the challenges, refstie’s paper nevertheless takes its aim at a more positive note, stating that we do not necessarily have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. more specifically, we do not have to be helplessly co-opted in co-creative processes orchestrated top-down. instead, we can struggle to regain control of our work and its broader ethical and political ramifications. this might occur through sustained efforts at “critical reconfiguration” the idea of societal relevance of academic research (refstie 2022, 161). mindful of the multiple efficiency pressures in current neoliberalized academia, refstie points at the need to secure spaces for scholarly activism that allow slower and deeper reflexivity concerning co-creative research agendas, following ideas that come from critical, feminist and decolonial thought. as the notion of research relevance is one of the paper’s core ideas, it would merit some more discussion on what it means in practice to reconfigure it – what might be the steps towards rescuing the radical potential of the co-productive turn. this is where refstie’s detailed and thoroughly arguedfor discussion on redeeming the critical potential of co-creative research remains sketchy and does so in a way that leaves much space for further elaboration. indeed, what could be “the right conditions” that allow critical scholars to sustain the “critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable” edge of their co-creative efforts, at once societally relevant and academically progressive (refstie 2022, 169)? in this paper we are left short for an answer, but understandably so as questions of this magnitude can only be touched upon in the space of one academic paper. this notwithstanding, i have thoroughly enjoyed reading and commenting on refstie’s paper, which presents an important critical discussion on questions that fast scholarship on policymaking for sustainability fixes has often had too little time, or courage, to reflect upon. acknowledgements i wish to thank fennia editors kirsi pauliina kallio and james riding for the possibility to engage in a conversation with hilde refstie on her inspiring text. references refstie, h. (2022) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 project management and research governance – towards a critical agenda beyond neoliberalization? – commentary to refstie urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa126176 doi: 10.11143/fennia.126176 reflections project management and research governance – towards a critical agenda beyond neoliberalization? – commentary to refstie elisa pascucci pascucci, e. (2023) project management and research governance – towards a critical agenda beyond neoliberalization? – commentary to refstie. fennia 201(1) 130–133. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.126176 in this contribution to the debate that followed the publication of hilde refstie’s timely and cogent reconfiguring research relevance, i propose to take a closer look at the funding structures that bind academia and other institutional and private sector actors into networks of collaboration and research co-production often experienced as dysfunctional. in particular, i focus on competitive funding bids that distribute financial and labour resources by awarding short-term ‘projects’, with particular reference to european union (eu) projects. drawing on my current research work on the ‘project economy’, co-led with nadine hassouneh and funded by the kone foundation at tampere university, i make two initial suggestions that expand on some of the points raised so far in the discussion hosted by fennia. first, project-based research funding is a more politicized and coercive tool than we tend to think. second, project management and project-based work, and the associated patterns of (gendered and racialized) precarization and even abuse, have a longer and more ingrained history than what we commonly identify as the ‘neoliberalization’ of academia. by way of conclusion, i highlight how scrutinizing the funding architectures that enable and constrain our work help us to explore the relation between research and policy, beyond the limits of critical categories such as ‘neoliberalism’. keywords: eu projects, nudging, project management, neoliberalization elisa pascucci (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6880-9859), eurostorie coe, university of helsinki, and faculty of management and business, tampere university. email: elisa.pascucci@helsinki.fi it’s december 2022, and i am sitting in front of my computer screen, attending a course offered by a brussels-based consulting and training company on the planning and management of european union-funded ‘projects’. beside the trainer, a grant writer with decades of experiences in helping organizations secure eu funding, sitting across my virtual zoom desk are freelance project managers, non-governmental organizations staff working in fields spanning sustainable urban development and agriculture, and academics and university staff from countries including finland, the netherlands and czech republic. a glimpse into a european union made of logical frameworks, stakeholder analyses and excel spreadsheets, in which the boundaries between “being a research institution and © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.126176 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6880-9859 fennia 201(1) (2023) 131elisa pascucci a consulting company”, as one of hilde refstie’s (2021, 165) interviewees put it, appear as blurred as ever. everybody, across the public and private sectors, is dealing in the same tools. everybody, and especially academics, is looking for ‘partners’ for their projects. indeed, as i will soon find out, many of the participants are there to ‘reach out’ and ‘network’, more than for the content of the course. this snapshot from my recent research reminds us of how much time and resources academics employ in designing and developing projects that, through competitive funding bids, allow us to maintain the essential conditions for our research work to take place: paid (if on a short-term and precarious basis) collaborators, equipment, travel budgets, time off teaching. securing ‘partners’ beyond academia, thus enhancing the impact of research, is essential in this endeavour, and it is indeed a prerequisite for accessing funding from major state, supra-national and private donors. such are the structures that bind us. we have no choice but entering the competition for funding. we have no choice but frantically looking for partners, as many of my fellow trainees in the course were doing. at stake are not only promotions and careers, but also, often, the very chance of staying in employment. has this rendered research ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-production’ pointless buzzwords, empty performances we engage in to survive in a neoliberal academic environment? can we still rescue research co-production, partnerships and policy-relevance from such fate? far from being despondent, these questions, as refstie (2021) shows, are urgent. the discussion she offers addressing them is precious in its courage and nuance. refstie (2021) details how emerging from her research is a picture of academics being ‘nudged’ in certain directions when it comes to designing research and forming partnerships. a term borrowed from behavioural economics, nudging refers here to “a form of “soft paternalism” that steers people in certain directions without taking away their full choice” (refstie 2021, 164, see also thaler & sunstein, 2008). although the context is different from the one in which refstie conducted her fieldwork, preliminary results from my research on eu projects have led me to question the limits of the word ‘nudging’. perhaps the semblance of ‘full choice’ we are left with is merely ‘freedom to obey’, to say it with historian of management johann chapoutot (2020)? the violent politics of seemingly ‘technical’ eu project bureaucracies have been examined in detail in fields such as development, humanitarian aid and migration governance (for a recent example, see welfens & bonjour 2022, on the eu trust fund for africa). while academics have been less keen on turning the gaze upon their own sector, refstie’s (2021) piece highlights that such critical soul searching is sorely needed. this is particularly true in conditions, such as the ones examined in her study, where we are required to engage in fast, policy-relevant research, co-produced with non-academic partners, competing for funding through schemes that are far from those traditionally supporting essential, ‘blue-sky’ scientific research (if there was ever such a thing, that is). we must stare directly at the power we are subject to, and eu funding is illuminating in this regard. in the training for eu projects management that i studied in my research, there was no mincing of words when it came to discussing the political nature of eu funding tools. trainers were explicit about how studying closely to the eu commission political priorities, incorporating not only their managerial tools, but also the nuances of their language, was essential to build successful applications. many eu programs are criticized for the opacity that characterizes projects selection (welfens & bonjour 2022). applicants, consultants and grant writers in training, i found, are often encouraged to develop their knowledge of commission policies and politics as a way to work around this opacity, and survive in a ruthless market. we can argue that, even in such an environment, people and organizations retain capacity for tactical agency. after all, the strategic behaviour eu project management trainees are encouraged to adopt in applications could be seen as an example of that – even though the words written in the application files, far from being mere deceptive tactics, have real material consequences. academics too, we may claim, can ‘nudge back’ the powers that impose themselves through competitive funding tools marked by scarcity and obscurity. yet, in today’s universities, can we go beyond that? can we make research co-production critical and emancipatory, moving towards a more radical and disruptive politics of academic knowledge production? the answers to these questions in the fennia debate range from refstie´s (2021) nearly gramscian ‘optimism of the will’, to more cautious, contextual positions (häkli 2022; lyytinen 2022). 132 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections my tentative suggestion is that, before beginning to answer those questions, we study more closely the managerial tools we are dealing with when it comes to research and university governance. as social scientists, we still know relatively little about them, and our familiarity with critical management literature remains scarce. as geographers, for instance, we tend to assume they are the product of processes of ‘neoliberalization’ – indeed refstie’s (2021) piece offers a focused and helpful review of these discussions. to be sure, since the late 1960s project bureaucracies have proliferated in previously state-dominated sectors, like international development, following the global spread of broader neoliberal restructuring (freeman & schuller 2021). yet project management, chapoutot’s (2020) has shown, has been around for much longer. indeed, it is one of the tools most intimately connecting modern liberal europe to its authoritarian roots, with ideologies, technologies, and even actual people travelling seamlessly from the genocidal violence of world war ii (wwii) to the edges of the stakeholdervalue ‘new economy’ (ibid.). while this may be a daunting realization, a lucid appraisal of the nature of modern liberal management can free us from “dispiriting” and “analytically limiting” discussions of neoliberalism (lorne 2022, 82). in analyses of university governance in particular, an unspoken nostalgia for the imagined ‘good old days’ of intellectual freedom and job security often characterizes critiques of the so-called ‘neoliberal turn’ (ahmed 2021). however, the modern university has incorporated elements of violent managerialism (if of a different, state-sanctioned kind), classist corporatism (often disguised as intellectual patronage, or even ‘collegiality’) and white heteropatriarchy well before the application of xxi century neoliberalising policies. the kinetic, embodied violence of these power structures has been borne by persons and bodies classified as non-white, non cis-male, non-heterosexual, non-middle class (ibid.). crucially, these persons and bodies are also the ones who disproportionately engage in the daily labour that de facto reproduces universities, as discussed in diana vela-almeida’s (2022) commentary. this violent exploitation is resilient, to the point that it has often found in instrumental critiques of neoliberalism a convenient shield against accountability (as in the case of skepticism against diversity and equality or anti-harassment policies; ahmed 2021). engaging the history of project management in universities and research institutions offers one possible vantage point to understand a violence that is historically entrenched, and continues unabated. acknowledgments i wish to thank hilde refstie’s for the inspiring fennia lecture at the finnish geography days 2021, as well as the colleagues who have commented on the text subsequently published in fennia. i am grateful to fennia’s editors james riding and kirsi pauliina kallio for giving me the opportunity to publish this commentary. references ahmed, s. (2021) complaint! duke university press, durham. chapoutot, j. (2020) libres d’obéir. le management, du nazisme à aujourd’hui. gallimard, paris. freeman, s. & schuller, m. (2021) aid projects: the effects of commodification and exchange. world development 126, 104731. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104731 häkli, j. (2022) towards washing the baby in the bathwater? – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 72–73. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 lorne, c. (2022) moving policy out of time – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 81–85. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 lyytinen, e. (2022) revisiting the ‘dual imperative’ of forced-migration studies – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 74–77. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 refstie, h. (2021) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 thaler, r. h. & sunstein, c. (2008) nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. penguin books, new haven. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104731 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121950 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.123036 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 fennia 201(1) (2023) 133elisa pascucci vela-almeida, d. (2022) cherishing the reproductive work within academia for securing emancipatory work outside academia – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 78–80. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 welfens, n. & bonjour, s. (2022) seeking legitimacy through knowledge production: the politics of monitoring and evaluation of the eu trust fund for africa. journal of common market studies. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13434 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.124807 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13434 santa claus, place branding and competition c. michael hall hall, c. michael. santa claus, place branding and competition. fennia 186: 1, pp. 59–67. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. santa claus has been described as the world’s strongest brand. although santa claus has been examined in the context of product and retail branding, the santa mythology has been little discussed with respect to place branding. the article examines santa claus in relation to place branding and competition and provides a number of international examples where santa is integrated into place branding strategies in order to construct regional advantage, particularly with respect to attracting tourists. such strategies are regarded as extremely significant for peripheral areas which otherwise do not have the resources available for place branding that urban areas do. the paper concludes by noting potential future issues for santa related place branding and christmas tourism including the impact of climate change and issues of authenticity. c. michael hall, department of management, college of business & economics, university of canterbury, private bag 4800, christchurch, new zealand, and department of geography, po box 3000, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: michael.hall@canterbury.ac.nz place competition place branding is an integral part of contemporary place competition. place branding, also referred to as place marketing and place imaging and reimaging, is regarded as an important component in the attraction and retention of mobile capital, firms, people (including skilled and unskilled workers, domestic and international migrants, and domestic and international tourists), and in the promotion and sales of locally produced goods and services (e.g. kotler et al. 1999; danmarks turistråd 2000; kotler & gertner 2002; halkier & therkelsen 2004). although the value of place competitive strategies, such as place branding, is often highly contested many policy makers remain enthusiastic about the place competitive discourse and the opportunity to become winning places (e.g. karppi 2001; malecki 2004; bristow 2005; hall 2005, 2007; nyseth and granås 2007). nordic cities and regions appear increasingly concerned with how their places are branded and perceived in the national and international marketplace. however, the majority of research on place branding in the nordic, as well as international context, appears primarily focussed on cities and urban regions rather than the more peripheral areas (jansson & power 2006). in one sense this is not surprising as it reflects ongoing competition between metropolitan areas to be positioned as cosmopolitan cores and, in some cases, so called ‘world-class cities’. yet ironically it may well be the peripheral areas that, in comparative terms, arguably most need the benefits of attracting new capital, people and firms (müller & jansson 2007). urban place competition discourse tends to focus on such regional policy ideas as cultural quarters, growth poles, technopoles, cultural cities, creative cities, urban revitalization, networks, clustering and innovation (malecki 2004; hall & williams 2008). however, with the exception of the last two concepts, much of the place competition discourse does not transfer easily to the ‘simpler’ economies of peripheral areas, especially given some of the attributes of peripherality such as lack of accessibility and a relative sparse population. nevertheless, changes in regional policy thinking are still relevant to peripheral areas. for example, cooke and leydesdorff (2006) argue that there has been a significant shift in the terrain of thinking of regional advantage from one that fo60 fennia 186: 1 (2008)c. michael hall cuses on competitive or comparative advantages of regions to one that focuses on the constructed advantages between regions. brands are clearly important contributors to the construction of regional advantage. although the concept of a brand is consistently debated in the marketing literature the american marketing association definition of a brand, ‘a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers’ provides a useful working definition for present purposes. place branding is therefore the development of a place brand and its promotion in order to differentiate a place from other locations so as to gain advantage for its firms, organizations, people, products and services. place branding is also multi-directional. internal place branding is concerned with brand development and construction in relation to place identity, including community pride and the creation and maintenance of an attractive environment. external place branding is concerned with the communication of brand and brand values, including place attributes, to external markets in order to fulfil place branding goals and objectives. place branding is undertaken via a mix of material and intangible means. material strategies include such mechanisms as flagship projects or signature developments, often as part of broader planning strategies or redevelopment projects. immaterial strategies include the use of advertising, slogans, media placement and the development of new place myths (jansson & power 2006). for urban areas there is usually sufficient capital to seek to develop flagship projects. such a strategy is often much more difficult for peripheral areas given the smaller economic resource base, although it can be done, as exemplified by the development of the ice hotel in jukkasjärvi, sweden, which has proven to be a far more significant branding element for the region in terms of media coverage than the nearby mine at kiruna. for many peripheral regions, and particularly northern areas, one possibility for place branding may be the use of a natural feature. for example, finnmark in norway makes substantial use of north cape as a socially constructed flagship element in its branding. another natural feature that may be used is an icon animal or plant. for example, churchill on the shore of hudson bay in manitoba, canada, promotes itself as the ‘polar bear capital of the world’. however, many northern peripheral areas have a number of common natural features that make it extremely difficult to utilise them for branding purposes as a means of differentiation, such as winter snow, conifers and beech trees, although they are still important aspects of place, especially for tourism. therefore, in such situations, the place branding focus moves towards the immaterial and intangible, often through the development of new place myths and slogans. urban examples of such place slogans include “espoo – a city for creativity and expertise” and vantaa “the good life city” (it should also be noted that the latter slogan is also used by albany, georgia, usa, which is also the ‘pecan capital of the world’). the world’s strongest brand although stemming from different historical sources santa claus (also referred to as saint nicolas) and father christmas have become combined in much of the world’s popular and commercial imaginations. santa claus has been described as the world’s strongest brand (arruda 2003) (see also aaltonen 2004 for a commentary in the finnish media). according to arruda (2003), ‘santa claus is the envy of brand managers everywhere. his brand attributes are clear and desirable to virtually everyone. even parts of the world that have no connection to the holiday know who he is and what he stands for’. the presence of santa in shopping centres, retail outlets and homes clearly provide a strong visual presence for the santa brand while the connection with christmas clearly encourages consumption, gift-giving and expenditure as part of what is termed the ‘christmas spirit’ (clarke 2006, 2007). in the united states for example, 1.9 billion christmas cards are given each year while 20.8 million christmas trees were cut on farms for purchase in 2002 (us census bureau 2005). although some may decry the loss of much of the historical connection to notions of charity and the spirit of yuletide there is no doubting the contemporary retail importance of santa both as a general part of seasonal shopping (e.g. said 2006; snellman 2006a; coca-stefaniak et al. 2008) and seasonal advertising in general. in addition, the commercial use of santa as part of ‘advertainment’ may be associated with particular product requests (otnes 1994; o’cass & clarke 2002; pine & nash 2002; pine et al 2007). the growth of santa as a brand, particularly in those places with no traditional cultural connection to father christmas or fennia 186: 1 (2008) 61research note saint nicolas is also arguably a potent commodified symbol of globalisation (ger & belk 1996). however, while there is substantial academic and media literature on santa as a brand, there is surprisingly little academic discussion of the contribution that santa makes to place competition in northern latitudes and the extent to which different locations have sought to claim the christmas character as their own. pretes (1995), for example discussed the development of ‘the santa claus industry’ as a form of postmodern tourism with respect to the development of the santa claus village in rovaniemi. although he noted that an essential element of the rovaniemi strategy was ‘convincing the rest of the world that finland was the real home of santa claus – against rival claimants in alaska, sweden, norway, and greenland’ there was no discussion of the various uses of santa claus as a part of place competition. similarly, haahti and yavas (2004) provided a useful account of the image of the santapark in rovaniemi but do not provide a comparative perspective. the following section discusses the different ways in which places use santa for place branding purposes. santa claus and place branding table 1 provides examples of the way that santa claus or related myths are used for place branding. it should be emphasised that this is by no means an exhaustive list and instead represents some of the more overt examples of connections between santa claus and place for reasons of place branding and competition. with the exception of santa claus, indiana, which is included by virtue of its postal significance all of the examples are from high latitudes. this therefore ignores theme parks such santa’s workshop, north pole, cascade, colorado (http://www.santas-colo.com/) which is open from may to december each year. although santa’s workshop does provide a postal service, santa and christmas is not integrated into place branding of the local jurisdiction (pikes peak). similarly, while the office of the turkish prime minister, directorate general of press and information notes that the villages of demre and patara in anatolia were homes of the bishop of myra – the historical origins of st. nicholas – and the connection is noted on a number of tour company websites it is not being used as a formal part of place promotion by local bodies. nevertheless, this may well happen in the future due to the increasing coverage to the historical connections and the potential to increase christmas season tourism (seal 2005). lapland has been described as the ‘santa tourism superpower’ (snellmann 2006b) and it clearly has had first mover advantage with respect to santa claus related tourism at an international level. focussed initially on rovaniemi which has the greatest concentration of santa and christmas related infrastructure in terms of theme parks and activities as well as the most overt use of santa in branding, santa tourism has also become an important christmas season tourism activity for a number of other locations in the region. for example, as of april 2008 visit finland reported that for the uk market alone there were 20 tour operators offering christmas packages to lapland with flight destinations to ivalo, kajaani, kittilä, kuusamo and rovaniemi while air access is also available from kirkenes (norway) and kiruna (sweden) as part of package tours (visit finland 2008). undoubtedly, santa tourism has contributed substantially from an economic development perspective (lähteenmäki 2006) with tourism being the largest contributor to the gdp for any finnish region except åland (ministry of trade and industry 2006; hall et al. 2008). halpern (2008) also estimates that airport-related international tourism in lapland contributed 36 million euros to the regional economy in 2005 with most arrivals occurring during the christmas season via charter flights. santa tourism and branding is also extensively supported at the national government level and by finnair the national carrier. visit finland, for example, provides a booklet written for the marketing purposes of tourism related to the christmas season which emphasises the supposed finnish nature of santa claus: why does the real santa claus live in finland? you can meet him on any day of the year, without any charge, only in finland. santa claus’ own animal, the reindeer, lives in finland. there is snow on the ground during the christmas season. at the arctic circle, santa claus has a post office of his own and the world’s only main santa post office. the finnish santa claus receives by far the most letters from the children around the world. the only real amusement park of santa claus, the santapark, is situated in finland. there are wide circles in finland that have committed themselves to help santa claus (visit finland 2007). nevertheless, despite the undoubted significance of santa tourism to the region and the re62 fennia 186: 1 (2008)c. michael hall gion’s present leading status in terms of numbers of visitors, substantial long-term issues for place competitiveness remain. within lapland itself, there is the potential for increasing competition for locations to be associated with santa. although rovaniemi is clearly the market leader the rise of international travel to other destinations presents substantial challenges, especially as travel operators to other lapland destinations increasingly promote holiday packages as being more ‘authentic’ than those available in rovaniemi. in the longer term the fact that there are so many santa tourism options available in lapland may even call to question the uniqueness of the lapland santa experience (e.g. activities abroad 2008). although perhaps the harshest comments can be found with the scan meridian tour company a long time ago, we hit upon the idea of taking children to meet the real father christmas. and in lapland we found exactly what our young and young at heart travellers wanted. then as now, the secret lay in travelling to villages in the snows where traditional finnish lutheran customs are played out on a small scale. there, father christmas can service his sledges and reindeer against a background of snow covered forests. and teams of huskies can happily bark up all the wrong trees, whilst you enjoy snowmobile rides and experience the habits and habitats of the reindeer and the huskies. unfortunately (one might say) the idea caught on so well that the mass-market operators felt they had to come crashing into the act. however, some villages were not big enough for their masses, so they persuaded the inhabitants of rovaniemi, the so called capital of finnish lapland, saariselkä and levi to put on snow-dusted plastic replicas of the real thing with discos, bars and other home “comforts” the mass-market seems unable to do without. such trips have all the magic of a visit to a shopping centre in croydon after a freak fall of snow (with apologies to croydon). but such once-in-a-lifetime experiences, we feel, need to be just that – genuine, traditional, memorable, mystical and exciting. we offer tobogganing and snowmobiling, not discos; ice-fishing, not fast food; pine clad rooms or open-fired log cabins, not soulless cell blocks; and herds of huskies, not people. to avoid the masses, we’ve retreated to just three special places, harriniva, [ylläshumina] and kakslauttanen. we have departures… for no more than 50 people at a time. if you would like to join us, we would love to have you but please remember: no discothèques, no fruit machines and no television. just a family christmas or new year with like-minded people (scanmeridian 2006). in terms of place branding rovaniemi is not differentiated even within finland. although rovaniemi is ‘the christmas city’, turku promotes itself as the ‘christmas city of finland’. authenticity is also regarded as integral to the turku christmas experience. dodson (2007) writing in the guardian recommended to readers, ‘so unless you want to entertain small children, avoid lapland this christmas and head for a weekend in old finland instead. go to the city that’s so good they named it a capital twice’. although the two cities are arguably positioning themselves for different markets, with turku concentrating on longer stay visits, the branding of the two cities raises the wider issue of the international competitiveness of christmas place brands. snellman (2006b) notes that ‘cities compete quite fiercely for the tourists’ custom’ with christmas markets in the german towns and cities receiving an aggregate of approximately 160 million visitors. munich’s weihnachtsmarkt alone attracts around 3 million visitors from home and abroad. in the baltic region stockholm’s christmas market at skansen is advertised in finland. tallinn declared itself the ‘nordic christmas capital’ in 2001, while pärnu in estonia and riga in latvia have given themselves the title of ‘baltic christmas city’. two norwegian towns have also positioned themselves with respect to christmas tourism, although unlike other nordic countries norway has lagged substantially behind with respect to developing christmas tourism. the norwegian towns’ christmas tourism is based on the character of julenissen as well as elves and trolls and has developed a strong linkage to the japanese market as well as the norwegian diaspora in the united states. in alaska, the town of north pole near fairbanks is seeking to develop its christmas focus via the development of a theme city concept and its promotion is getting increasing international coverage (e.g. rush 2007). the town’s post office also receives considerable mail for santa which also presents substantial branding opportunities for the town. surprisingly, the country that receives most christmas mail for santa, canada, has not connected santa to a specific place branding strategy and instead promotes the idea of santa being at the north pole. although given current developfennia 186: 1 (2008) 63research note ments with respect to arctic sea sovereignty claims, the promotion of such a national or even international imagining may not be completely politically innocent (shukman 2007) and may represent a significant tourism opportunity for a northern community. greenland also promotes itself as santa’s home and nuuk, the capital, has lain claim to santa by having the world’s biggest post-box situated outside of santa’s post office at the tourist information centre. however, the capacity of greenland to respond to letters to santa is under substantial threat because of public spending cuts, which is not likely to help the long-term development of santa tourism. in contrast, the finnish trade ministry financially support the replies to letters to santa in rovaniemi (smith and bagenal 2006), again emphasising the linkages between santa and place branding. conclusions: the future of the world’s strongest brand santa claus and christmas clearly has a powerful influence on consumer spending, including holiday decisions. the increasing association of santa claus and similar mythical characters with places illustrates the significance of such mythologies for place branding in both material and immaterial forms. rovaniemi and lapland have been at the forefront of santa related place branding but other locations, some within other slightly different christmas traditions such as in norway, are also seeking to utilise santa and christmas in order to construct place advantage over other regions. this is especially important in the northern peripheral context given the relative absence of other potential competitive factors, but is also extended to other peripheries. nevertheless, new factors are emerging that may challenge some of the developments that underlie santa branding and tourism. the issue of commodification and perceived authenticity of the santa experience is obviously one dimension that is already starting to influence travel companies in their destination choice. however, perhaps far more importantly in the longer term will be assurances to the customer that some of the environmental images that have been developed as part of the brand, such as snow and reindeer, will be available for visual consumption. in the wider context concern over the melting arctic sea ice and ice caps is already starting to develop a link between climate change and santa (e.g. robison 2007), while in finland concern is being expressed about ‘snow security’ for the christmas tourist season with rovaniemi being portrayed as a potentially riskier destination that other resorts areas. for example, a story from the french afp press agency with respect to the impacts of climate change on lapland and the relative climate advantage of enontekiö over rovaniemi (branchereau 2007) was widely covered internationally. furthermore, at least two travel companies are using assurances on snow cover as part of their promotions. in their faq page canterbury travel (2008) stated: will there be snow? a strange question to ask perhaps, but in the year 2003 one location in lapland, namely rovaniemi city, and its immediate environs, initially suffered from lack of snow. following this occurrence canterbury travel transferred passengers on our day tours to a northern location where there was plenty of snow. as a result we have decided not to feature day tours to this immediate area. we still operate 2 one-day tours via rovaniemi airport (namely christmas past christmas present and the north pole post office) to locations where snow levels were not a problem. similarly, santadays (2008) stated with respect to snow availability, ‘there will be snow in lapland! reports of lack of snow were exaggerated in previous years and only applied to a small area near rovaniemi. the better quality trips take place in the far north of lapland where snow is virtually guaranteed and counted in metres not inches!‘ place branding is a slow process with no guarantee of long-term success. to date a number of locations have achieved success with their branding in terms of santa and christmas. however, for place brands to succeed in the longer term they have to be believable and reflect local assets and characteristics. unfortunately, for a number of the northern locations that are seeking to use the mythology of santa as their basis for constructed advantage, climatic change may well lead to the loss of the christmas environment that sets the all important context for the authenticity of the brand. 64 fennia 186: 1 (2008)c. michael hall references aaltonen, j (2004). santa claus is a strong brand. helsingin sanomat 15.12.2004. <http://www.hs. fi/english/article/santa+claus+is+a+strong+brand /1101978059271>. 1.4.2008. activities abroad the activity travel company (2008). santa lapland experience, <http://www.activities a b r o a d . c o . u k / b o o k i n g / vi e w b y c a t e g o r y. aspx?parentid=2&categoryid=7>. 1.5.2008. american marketing association marketing power (2008). dictionary, <http://www.marketingpower. com/_layouts/dictionary.aspx>. 1.4.2008 arruda, w (2003). urban voice – could santa be the world’s strongest brand? brandchannel.com. 22.12.2003. <http://www.brandchannel.com/ brand_speak.asp?bs_id=74>. 1.4.2008. branchereau, g (2007). global warming may soon see santa don shorts. afp press release, 17.12.2007. bristow, g (2005). ”everyone’s a winner”: problematising the discourse of regional competitiveness. journal of economic geography 5, 285–304. canada post (2007). santa’s post office prepares for a busy season...guinness world recordstm holder gets ready to deliver!, press release 9.11.2007. <http://www.canadapost.ca/personal/corporate/ about/newsroom/pr/archive-e.asp?prid=1260>. 1.4.2008. canterbury travel (2008). faq. <http://www.santaholidays.com/html/faq.html>. 1.4.2008. clarke, p (2006). christmas gift giving involvement. journal of consumer marketing 23:5, 283–291. clarke, p (2007). a measure for christmas spirit. journal of consumer marketing 24:1, 8–17. coca-stefaniak, ja, f stasi, g codato, e franco & g roberts (2008). reclaiming customers through a retailer-led tcm scheme in italy. journal of place management and development 1:1, 115–124. danmarks turistråd (2000). branding danmark. dan-danmarks nye ansigt i verden. danmarks turistråd. københavn. dodson, s. (2007). christmas’s second city. lapland might be the capital of christmas, but finns head to their country’s oldest city of turku for a more traditional festive break. the guardian 18.12.2007. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/dec/18/ finland.christmasnewyear>. 1.4.2008. ger, g & rw belk (1996). i’d like to buy the world a coke: consumptionscapes of the “less affluent world.” journal of consumer policy 19:3, 271– 304. haahto, a & u yavas (2004). a multi-attribute approach to understanding image of a theme park: the case of santapark in lapland. european business review 16:4, 390–397. hall, cm (2005). tourism. rethinking the social science of mobility. pearson education, harlow. hall, cm (2007). tourism and regional competitiveness. in tribe j (ed). advances in tourism research: new directions, challenges and applications, 217–230. elsevier, oxford. hall, cm, d müller & j saarinen (2008). nordic tourism: issues and cases. channel view, clevedon. hall, cm & a williams (2008). tourism and innovation. routledge, london. halkier h & a therkelsen (2004). umbrella place branding. a study of friendly exoticism and exotic friendliness in coordinated national tourism and investment promotion. spirit discussion paper, 26. aalborg university, aalborg. halpern, n (2008). lapland’s airports: facilitating the development of international tourism in a peripheral region. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism, 8:1, 25–47. jansson, j & d power (eds) (2006). the image of the city – urban branding as constructed capabilities in nordic city regions. nordic innovation centre, oslo. karppi, i (2001). competitiveness in the nordic economies, nordregio wp2001:2. nordregio, stockholm. kotler, p, c asplund, i rein & d haider (1999). marketing places europe. pearson education, london. kotler, p & d gertner (2002). country as brand, product, and beyond: a place marketing and brand management perspective. journal of brand management 9:4–5, 249–261. kretchmer, sb (2004). advertainment: the evolution of product placement as a mass media marketing strategy. in galician, m (ed) handbook of product placement in the mass media: new strategies in marketing theory, practice, trends, and ethics, 37–54. haworth press, binghampton. lähteenmäki, m (2006). from reindeer nomadism to extreme experiences: economic transitions in finnish lapland in the 19th and 20th centuries. international journal of entrepreneurship and small business 3:6, 696–704. malecki, ej (2004). jockeying for position: what it means and why it matters to regional development policy when places compete. regional studies 38:9, 1101–1120. ministry of trade and industry (2006). matkailun aluetaloudelliset vaikutukset – matkailun alueellinen tilinpito (regional economic effects of tour-(regional economic effects of tourism – regional tourism satellite account). ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. müller, dk & b jansson (eds) (2007). tourism in peripheries: perspectives from the far north and south. cab international, wallingford. nyseth, t & b granås (2007). place reinvention in the north. dynamics and governance perspectives. nordregio, stockholm. o’cass, a & p clarke (2002). dear santa, do you have my brand? a study of the brand requests, awareness and request styles at christmas time. journal of consumer behaviour 2:1, 37–53. otnes, c, yc kim & k kim (1994). all i want for christmas: an analysis of children‘s brand requests to santa claus. the journal of popular culture 27:4, 183–194. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 65research note pine, kj & a nash (2002). dear santa: the effects of television advertising on young children. international journal of behavioral development 26:6, 529–539. pine, kj, p wilson & as nash (2007). the relationship between television advertising, children‘s viewing and their requests to father christmas. journal of developmental & behavioral pediatrics 28:6, 456–461. pretes, m (1995). postmodern tourism: the santa claus industry. annals of tourism research 22:1, 1–15. robison, p (2007). save santa claus‘s home from melting, seattle mayor urges kids. bloomberg. <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20 601082&sid=aa3eutbqfed0&refer=canada>. 30.11.2007. rush, p (2007). santa’s alaskan home. new zealand herald, associated press release 5:00am tuesday december 11 2007. said, c (2006). santa claus inc. the big guy in red is all about brand identity, selling photo packages and driving hordes of holiday shoppers into the stores. san francisco chronicle 16.12.2006. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ c / a / 2 0 0 6 / 1 2 / 1 6 / m n g m 8 n 0 u v s 1 . d t l > . 1.4.2008. santadays (2008). about lapland, <http://www.santadays.co.uk/lapland/about_lapland.asp>. 1.4.2008. scanmeridian (2006). father christmas holidays in lapland, <http://www.scanmeridian.co.uk/christmas/>. 1.4.2008. seal, j (2005). christmas turkey. the guardian 3.12.2005. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2005/dec/03/turkey.guardiansaturdaytravelsect ion?page=all>. 1.4.2008. shukman, d (2007). canadian vessels assert arctic claim. bbc news 16.10.2007. <http://news.bbc. c o . u k / 2 / h i / s c i e n c e / n a t u r e / 7 0 4 7 8 2 5 . s t m > . 1.4.2008. smith, n & f bagenal (2006). santa is sorry, but the elf post is down. the sunday times 26.11.2006. <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ article650069.ece>. 1.4.2008. snellman, rv (2006a). is santa claus becoming an overworked seasonal jack-of-all-trades? does the stripping santa meet ministry guidelines? is the brand in danger? helsingin sanomat international edition – culture, 26.12.2006 <http://www.hs.fi/ english/article/bupdated+2612b+is+santa+cla us+becoming+an+overworked+seasonal+jackof-all-trades+/1135223912098>. 1.4.2008. snellman, rv (2006b). santa tourism superpower. four days in lapland can cost as much as a fortnight in the caribbean, but it’s worth it. helsingin sanomat international edition – business and finance, 19.12.2006. <http://www.hs.fi/english/art i c l e / s a n t a % 2 0 to u r i s m % 2 0 s u p e r p o w er/1135223794225>. 1.4.2008. us census bureau (2005). facts for figures. the holiday season. cb05-ff.19-2 (updated) 19.12.2005. <http://www.census.gov/press-release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/005870.html>. 1.4.2008. visit finland (2007). the abc on santa claus, <http:// www.visitfinland.com/w5/trade/index.nsf/(pages)/ the_abc_on_santa_claus>. 1.4.2008. visit finland (2008). christmas in finland – official travel and tourism guide, <http://www.visitfinl a n d . c o m / w 5 / i n d e x . n s f / ( p a g e s ) / u k _ christmas?opendocument&np=g>. 1.4.2008. 66 fennia 186: 1 (2008)c. michael hall ta b le 1 : ex am p le s o f sa n ta c la u s re la te d p la ce b ra n d in g c o u n tr y lo ca ti o n w eb si te s c h ri st m as ch ar ac te r / b ra n d lo ca li sa ti o n m es sa ge m at er ia l ev id en ce o f b ra n d c an ad a n o rt h p o le h 0 h 0 h 0 (o ffi ci al c an ad ia n p o st al co d e fo r m ai l to sa n ta c la u s) h tt p :/ /c an ad ap o st .c a/ sa n ta sco rn er sa n ta c la u s (i n en gl is h ); fa th er c h ri st m as (i n fr en ch ) n o rt h p o le m o re th an 11 ,0 0 0 cu rr en t an d re ti re d c an ad a p o st em p lo ye es re fe rr ed to as th e p o st al el ve s re p ly to th e m o re th an a m il li o n le tt er s th at ar e re ce iv ed an d o ve r 4 0 ,0 0 0 em ai ls (c an ad a p o st 2 0 0 7 ) fi n la n d r o va n ie m i h tt p :/ /w w w .p o st i. fi /p o st im er kki ke sk u s/ jp p /e n _i n d ex .h tm l (s an ta c la u s’ m ai n p o st o ffi ce ) h tt p :/ /w w w .s an ta cl au sl iv e. co m / h tt p :/ /t o u ri sm .r o va n ie m i. fi /? d ep ti d = 6 3 3 5 (t o u ri sm in fo rm at io n se rv ic e) h tt p :/ /w w w .s an ta cl au s. fi /? d ep ti d = 1 4 5 6 1 (a fa ir yt al e o f c h ri st m as ) (r o va n ie m i d ev el o p m en t a ge n cy ) sa n ta c la u s; ‘r o va n ie m i – th e c h ri st m as c it y’ t h e ca p it al ci ty o f la p la n d , r o va n ie m i is a u n iq u e d es ti n at io n b o th w it h re sp ec t to lo ca ti o n an d se rv ic es . lo ca te d w h er e la p la n d b eg in s, yo u ca n cr o ss th e a rc ti c c ir cl e, m ee t sa n ta c la u s an d en jo y th e b ri gh tn es s o f th e su m m er n ig h ts o r, in w in te r, ad m ir e th e n o rt h er n li gh ts . r o va n ie m i is an ad ve n tu re in it se lf . t h e a rc ti c c ir cl e is w h er e yo u ’l l fi n d sa n ta an d h is el ve s w h en th ey w an t to co m e o u t o f th ei r se cr et p la ce s an d m ee t p eo p le . t h e m ag ic o f c h ri st m as is re al it y h er e. sa n ta c la u s’ m ai n p o st o ffi ce re ce iv ed o ve r h al f a m il li o n vi si to rs an d le tt er s a ye ar . (t h e r o va n ie m i to u ri sm w eb si te cl ai m s 7 0 0 ,0 0 0 ); sa n ta p ar k; sa n ta c la u s v il la ge fi n la n d tu rk u h tt p :/ /w w w .c h ri st m as ci ty .c o m / (b u re au o f c u lt u ra l a ff ai rs , tu rk u ) ‘c h ri st m as ci ty o f fi n la n d ’ ‘t h e ge n u in e at m o sp h er e o f th e tu rk u c h ri st m as c it y is b as ed o n th e lo n g tr ad it io n s o ft h e ci ty ’‘ tu rk u th e c h ri st m as c it y o ff in la n d ,g lo w s o fw ar m th an d tr ad it io n s fr o m th e en d o f n o ve m b er an d fa r in ja n u ar y’ . c h ri st m as st re et , fe st iv al ev en ts g re en la n d t h e n o rt h p o le (g re en la n d as ga te w ay ) h tt p :/ /w w w .g re en la n d .c o m / (o ffi ci al to u ri sm an d b u si n es s si te s o f g re en la n d ) h tt p :/ /w w w .s an ta .g l/ sa n ta c la u s ‘r eg ar d le ss o f w h ic h ve rs io n o f sa n ta c la u s yo u b el ie ve in , h o w ev er , th er e is o n ly o n e th in g yo u n ee d to kn o w – th at sa n ta c la u s li ve s in g re en la n d .’ n u u k h as sa n ta ’s p o st o ffi ce an d p o st b o x. (5 0 ,0 0 0 le tt er s a ye ar ) ic el an d d im m u b o rg ir in m yv at n ssv ei t h tt p :/ /w w w .s an ta w o rl d .i s/ sa n ta c la u s, yu le la d s ‘f ro m ti m e im m em o ri al sa n ta c la u s h as li ve d at d im m u b o rg ir in m yv at n ss ve it , ca rr yi n g o u t h is w o rk o f gl ad d en in g yo u n g h ea rt s o f al l ag es o ve r th e c h ri st m as p er io d . fo r m an y ye ar s n o w sa n ta h as b ee n an sw er in g le tte rs fr o m ch il d re n , le av in g gi ft s in th ei r sh o es an d b ri n gin g p eo p le p re se n ts at c h ri st m as . a ll th is h e h as d o n e fr o m h is h o m e in d im m u b o rg ir ’. c h ri st m as m ar ke t, sa n ta c la u s p o st o ffi ce , sa n ta in re si d en ce fr o m la te n o ve m b er n o rw ay d rø b ak h tt p :/ /w w w .j u le h u s. n o / sa k/ 0 0 0 0 0 3 .a sp (t re ga ar d en ’s c h ri st m as h o u se ) ju le n is se n (‘ c h ri st m as el f) al so n is se r ju le h u se t( th e c h ri st m as h o u se ) (1 0 m o n th s a ye ar ), p o st o ffi ce (2 0 ,0 0 0 le tt er s a ye ar ) n o rw ay sa va le n h tt p :/ /w w w .j u le n is se n .n o / b ar n n is se .h tm l ju le n is se n (‘ c h ri st m as el f) al so n is se r (g n o m es ) sa n ta st re et , sa n ta ’s h o u se an d w o rk sh o p (s ea so n al ); to u rs fr o m u k w it h a ct iv it ie s a b ro ad fennia 186: 1 (2008) 67research note sw ed en m o ra (d al ar n a) h tt p :/ /w w w .s an ta w o rl d .s e/ sa n ta c la u s sa n ta w o rl d – to m te la n d (y ea r ro u n d ) u sa n o rt h p o le , a la sk a (n ea r fa ir b an ks ) h tt p :/ /w w w .n o rt h p o le al as ka . co m / h tt p :/ /w w w .n o rt h p o le al as ka . co m /t h em ec it y/ w el co m e. h tm l h tt p :/ /w w w .s an ta cl au sh o u se . co m / ‘w h er e th e sp ir it o f c h ri st m as li ve s y ea r ro u n d ’ sa n ta c al u s is al o fe at u re d o n th e to w n ’s em b le m ‘w h en d ev el o p ed as a fu ll y im p le m en te d th em e ci ty ,w e w il l en th u si as ti ca ll y sa y, “s an ta h as p re p ar ed a se cr et ci ty , a ro m an ti c p la ce , fu ll o f li gh t an d th e m ag ic o f c h ri st m as ye ar -r o u n d . c o m e v is it n o rt h p o le , a la sk a! ”’ sa n ta c la u s h o u se , 1 2 m sa n ta st at u e, sa n ta la n d r v p ar k, sa n ta ’s su d s la u b d ro m at , p o st o ffi ce , st re et b an es al l h av e c h ri st m as th em es (4 0 0 ,0 0 0 le tte rs a ye ar ) u sa sa n ta c la u s, in d ia n a h tt p :/ /w w w .s an ta cl au sm u se u m . o rg / h tt p :/ /w w w .l eg en d ar yp la ce s. o rg / (s p en ce r c o u n ty v is it o r’ s b u re au an d li n k to p o st o ffi ce an d o th er at tr ac ti o n s) sa n ta c la u s sa n ta c la u s an d a b ra h am li n co ln (t h e co u n ty w as h is b o yh o o d h o m e) ar e u se d in th e co u n ty ’s p ro m o ti o n n o m yt h o lo gi ca l ac co u n t o f c h ri st m as lo ca ti o n gi ve n in st ea d an h is to ri ca la cc o u n ti s p ro vi d ed ,‘ c o m e ex p lo re th e h is to ry o f o u r m ag ic al to w n ; it ’s a gr ea t p la ce to vi si t w it h fr ee ad m is si o n !’ (s an ta c la u s m u se u m ) sa n ta c la u s p o st o ffi ce is lo ca te d in th e k ri n gl e p la za m ai n ro ad th ro u gh to w n is kn o w n as th e c h ri st m as b o u le va rd ; sa n ta ’s c an d y c as tl e; sa n ta c la u s m u se u m ; h o li d ay w o rl d ; sa n ta ’s lo d ge ; la ke r u d o lp h c am p gr o u n d ; c h ri st m as la ke v il la ge th em ed ga te d co m m u n it y; p o st o ffi ce ; vo lu n te er s en su re th at ea ch ch il d re ce iv ed a re p ly fr o m sa n ta c la u s (1 0 ,0 0 0 le tt er s a ye ar ) the 3rd nordic geographers meeting was held in turku, finland, 8–11 june 2009, under a theme “change – society, environment and science in transition”. reflecting the comprehensiveness of the theme, during the four days of the conference in the university premises change was discussed from a 360° view angle. in 66 parallel sessions, change was reviewed from the viewpoints of physical environment, climate, economy, innovation, landscape, tourism, cities, children’s geographies, food and education, just to name a few. the fact that change is strongly present in all these aspects reflects the dynamic and fluid state of contemporary societies globally. regarding the future, change is constantly in the state of becoming, making the planning of the future today perhaps more challenging than ever. this special issue of fennia brings together a sample of the variety of perspectives portrayed in the conference. the first two papers of the special issue are based on keynote presentations from the plenary lectures of the conference. in the first paper, gunnar olsson maps the forbidden, although in his words “the mapping of forbidden is in itself forbidden”. this forbiddingness present in the paper intertwines closely with the notion of taboo, which drives olsson in thinking about questions such as “why should i devote my professional life to issues which are not important enough to be taboo?”, and “how could i possibly stop wondering about how i understand how i understand?”. in the paper, he also discusses the notion of abysmal, the theme of his latest book. anne buttimer’s plenary lecture on explorations of alexander von humboldt (1769−1859) has developed further in that the topic of her paper covers also the journeys of a finnish geographer johannes gabriel granö (1882−1956). these two gifted scholars of their times both found inspiration from the altai mountains in central asia, and did important work in unravelling the complexities of landscapes and lifeways in this remote region. this paper describes the trips of humbolt and granö and their revealing of innovative insight into interactions of society and the environment. the other eight papers of this volume are based on presentations from different parallel sessions. the first one of these original papers “networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and environmental change” is authored by stanley d. brunn, lomme devriendt, andrew boulton, ben derudder and frank witlox. the authors analyze the importance and connectedness of european cities using hyperlinks, or the electronic information provided by the google search engine. the results demonstrate how hyperlinks represent valuable databases in measuring the impact of crises as well as regional and global urban linkages. elga apsïte, anda bakute, lïga kurpniece and inese pallo deal in their paper with future climate change impacts on the runoff of five latvian river basins at the end of the 21st century. their simulation results based on the conceptual rainfall-runoff model indicate major differences in hydrometeorological parameters in the future. both scenarios of the model demonstrate changes in seasonal runoff patterns where the major part of river runoff will be generated in winter, followed by spring, autumn and summer. change in the mining industry is the topic of the paper by erika knobblock and örjan pettersson, titled “restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment implications for northern sweden”. common to numerous countries all around the world, employment in northern parts of sweden has been largely dependent on the extraction of natural resources. this dependency, together with the shifting demands and price fluctuations for raw materials, has had a major effect on local mining communities in the county of västerbotten. the authors focus their study on the time period since 1990. after 2002, there has been some increase in the mining employment. restructuring in mining generates new business opportunities in subcontracting, consultancy and equipment production, but also creates new challenges for regional development. change is essentially present in the paper by päivi kymäläinen and paulina nordström in their study of “temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of asylum seekers in the city preface urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa3677 of turku, finland”. the authors discuss the notion of temporarity and argue that this has a significant role in today’s urban spaces and peoples’ experiences of them. the theoretical aspects of temporary geographies are illustrated with empirical material collected among young asylum seekers in 2008–2009. the material demonstrates the feelings of momentarity in urban space as the uses of the city by asylum seekers were tinted with uncertainty while waiting for the decision on residence permit. elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven in their study of “making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active research methods with young people” discuss the simultaneous use of various “new” creative and (inter)active research methods. the authors use examples from their research project with young people in cedar, vancouver island, canada. the findings demonstrate that combining the two methods motivates people to share their experiences of everyday places and gives a detailed picture of sensed daily places. karen heikkilä and gail fondahl contribute to post-colonial studies in their article “indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from research with tl’azt’en nation, british columbia”. heikkilä and fondahl discuss the value of indigenous place names as messengers of knowledge about the natural world, indigenous language and (oral) history. the results clearly show the value of indigenous toponymy in education. change is written and illustrated in the paper “two fires and two landscapes – a tale of two cities”, where michael jones describes the landscape change, and the planning and redevelopment processes seven years after a ravaging fire. the fire hit the historic city centres of trondheim in norway and edinburgh in scotland, in 2002. jones studied how the prevailing planning ideologies, communicative planning theory and neo-liberal realities of new public management meet at historical site where vacant land suddenly becomes available. jones argues that the planning process in both cities showed more features of new public management than of communicative planning theory. cristina del biaggio explores change in crossborder cooperation, regional identity and local networks in the paper “theoretical reflection on the making of the alpine region. the role of transnational networks of local actors on regional identity and institutionalization”. del biaggio shows how the alps are being institutionalized and how a pan-alpine regional identity is built across national boundaries. the paper proposes an application of existing theories on identity and regional identity to the alpine case. the 10 papers accepted for publication in this special issue make history in the sense that they are the first ones to be published solely in an electronic form. fennia, as of this very issue, turns into an open access journal. open access means that from now on the contents will be available free of charge on the internet, after a respectable history of 120 years and 187 volumes of printed issues. open access also means – so we hope – a wider audience in the globalised and more competitive scientific publication arena, where journals are becoming ever more specialized. for geographers, narrowing scope is not necessarily the preferred change in publishing. global challenges and their complex regional analyses on various spatio-temporal scales often involve a wealth of methods and a combined physical and human geographical ‘hybrid’ approach. such manuscripts may experience difficulties in finding their place in highly specialized journals. therefore, we believe that there is a growing market for holistic journals that cover various aspects of geography. fennia is there to serve such needs. open access fennia employs the ojs freeware platform hosted by the federation of finnish learned societies. this means easier submission, and more transparent and faster review process. it will also allow more flexibility in the manuscript length and use of colours in illustrations free of charge. we hope that you will enjoy the new fennia as a reader as well as an author. helka moilanen and paulina nordström guest editors jukka käyhkö editor south asian students’ migration to, within and from finland and sweden: connecting the dots to arrivals and departures urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa119776 doi: 10.11143/fennia.119776 south asian students’ migration to, within and from finland and sweden: connecting the dots to arrivals and departures zain ul abdin abdin, z. u. (2023) south asian students’ migration to, within and from finland and sweden: connecting the dots to arrivals and departures. fennia 201(1) 65–78. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119776 much of the current research on international student migration is focused on home-to-host and stay-or-leave migration behaviours. however, there is a possibility that international students might migrate within the host country before making their final stay-or-leave migration decisions. this paper adapts stepwise migration theory as an analytical tool with which to investigate the migration behaviour of indian and pakistani students. based on 57 interviews and extensive participant observation, it analyses the factors that prompt south asian student migration to, within and, subsequently for some, from finland and sweden. the findings support the argument that international student migration is multistage. initial origin-to-destination migration is often insufficient to meet the high-set ambitions of talented young migrants. disappointment with perceived missing opportunities in the university city or town lays the basis for subsequent intercity and stayor-leave migration stages. subsequent migration within the destination country impacts on the students’ stay-or-leave aspirations, while the origin-country situation influences return-or-onward migration decisions. keywords: student, migration, asia, nordic, intercity, return zain ul abdin (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2756-3455), karelian institute, university of eastern finland, finland. e-mail: zain.abdin@uef.fi © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction research on international student migration (ism) has progressed from only analysing the reasons for students leaving their home country and the factors attracting them to the destination country, to investigating the phenomenon at different stages (carlson 2013; geddie 2013; mosneaga & winther 2013). typically, the first stage concerns the students' movement from their country of origin to the destination country, while the second stage focuses on whether they return to their home country or move to another destination (e.g. tu & nehring 2020). i argue that there is a third stage in ism, which involves moving between different locations within the host country before making a final decision on https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119776 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2756-3455 mailto:zain.abdin@uef.fi 66 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper staying or leaving. there is limited research on the socio-spatial trajectories of international students both before and after they complete their degrees in the destination country (riaño & piguet 2016). examining the patterns of intercity mobility of international students within the destination country, in addition to the origin-to-destination and stay-or-leave stages, can contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of ism. much of the current research views migration as an isolated event instead of a process (carling & schewel 2018). multistage migration theories, such as stepwise, transit, serial and onward, feature migration as a process that involves multiple stops of short and long-term duration at various destinations. stepwise migrants purposefully keep migrating until they reach their preferred destination in a hierarchical manner (siu 2007; paul 2011). onward migrants decide to remigrate to the next country after facing certain experiences, such as disillusionment and racism, in the original migration destination (ndukwe 2017; ramos 2018). serial migrants live in several countries, calling each home at a certain stage in life before moving on to the next (ossman 2013). transit migration attenuates mixed flows of temporary migrants, including refugees and labour migrants (düvell 2008). the present paper utilizes multistage migration theories, specifically stepwise, as analytical tools with which to study the migration patterns of pakistani and indian international students in, out of and within finland and sweden. migration research emphasizes examining migration within the context of events that take place before, during and after the move (kou & bailey 2014). to retain skilled workers, many oecd (the organisation for economic co-operation and development) nations are now implementing train-and-retain strategies, such as those observed in finland and sweden (li & pitkänen 2018; li 2019). these countries have extended post-graduation job-search permits from one to two years and grant continuous residence permits to incoming non-eu (european union) students. finnish and swedish higher-education institutions – including universities (yliopistot/ universitet) and universities of applied sciences/polytechnics (ammattikorkeakoulut) or university colleges (högskolor) – offer a wide range of english-taught courses to attract international students. after joining the european union in 1995, the two nordic countries increased their english-medium degree programmes to produce knowledge-based economies, as encouraged by the european union’s lisbon strategy. as a result, the proportion of foreign students among the total student population in these countries is currently higher than that in the united states (us) (oecd 2022). although phd programmes are exempt, sweden started charging fees for non-eu students in 2011 and finland followed suit five years later. current studies on the mobility patterns of foreign students in finland and sweden primarily examine their movement from the home to the host country, as well as their decision to either stay, return or onward migrate (e.g. li 2019; mathies & karhunen 2021). this research paper distinguishes itself by focusing on the internal mobility of indian and pakistani students within finland and sweden, which occurs after their arrival but before they make a definitive decision regarding their future plans. the primary reason for migrating cited by pakistani and indian students is the lack of high-quality educational options in their home country. with a growing youth population and limited course offerings, gaining admission to a reputable university at home is becoming increasingly difficult, resulting in more students applying to higher-ranked universities abroad (beech 2018; king & sondhi 2018). however, perkins and neumayer (2014) posit that university rankings have a minimal impact on the number of students choosing to study abroad. the primary goal of international student mobility is often permanent immigration (marcu 2015). in finland, approximately 70% of international students continue to reside in the country three years after completing their studies (mathies & karhunen 2021). the decision to migrate, including where to study and whether to stay permanently, is significantly influenced by the social networks of the migrants (brooks & waters 2010; van mol et al. 2018). social facilitation studies have shown that families often invest in their children's future, seeking to improve the family's socio-economic status and sometimes to establish a foundation for future family migration (sondhi & king 2017). normative influence studies, on the other hand, have explored the indirect pressures that motivate students to migrate. for example, if students have a successful experience abroad, this can attract future students to the same destination. cairns and smyth (2011) discovered that northern irish students with friends abroad are twice as likely to migrate to similar destinations. fennia 201(1) (2023) 67zain ul abdin the objective of this article is to investigate the decision-making processes of pakistani and indian students during various stages of their international student migration (ism) in finland and sweden. specifically, the study examines what the factors are that prompt south asian students to migrate to, within and from these countries, with a focus on how the three stages are connected and why some south asian students decide to migrate to other cities from their university cities. the article provides an overview of relevant concepts and theories, followed by a description of the data collection and analysis methods in the following two sections. the fourth and fifth sections present empirical evidence on the motivations for migrating to the nordic countries, patterns of intercity migration and the decision to stay or leave. the article concludes with a discussion of the study's findings and their implications. conceptualizing ism as multistage migration international student migration (ism) research typically examines either single-staged or doublestaged migration patterns, where the initial home-to-host movement and subsequent stay-return-oronward migration stages are analysed separately or as a combination of the two (e.g. hazen & alberts 2006; king & sondhi 2018; li 2019; liao & asis 2020; mathies & karhunen 2021). this focus on the two stages has emerged as developed countries changed their policies to attract and retain young, talented students to produce knowledge economies and generate revenue from student migration (findlay 2011; li 2019). consequently, research has increasingly focused on how students choose their study destinations and whether they stay in these countries upon graduation or use their degrees to migrate elsewhere. however, there is a possibility that students may also migrate between cities after arriving at their initial host destination but before making a final stay-or-onward-migration decision. in such cases, student migration becomes tripleor multistage. to expose this possibility, the literature on multistage migration is brought into dialogue with ism studies. migration is generally considered and understood as a solitary event that involves moving from country a to country b (carling & schewel 2018). be that as it may, numerous migrants face choices between various pathways at different stages of their journeys. in this vein, recent research has engaged explicitly and theoretically with multiple migration trajectories in order to notify migration as a process rather than an event (paul 2011; kou & bailey 2014). theories of onward, transit and stepwise multistage migration recognize that migrants may have multiple stops of shortand longterm duration in various countries before reaching their final destination (paul 2011; walton-roberts 2021). in both transit and stepwise migration, migrants generally have a clear idea of their intended final destination (ahrens et al. 2016). stepwise migration, for example, is a deliberate strategy pursued by migrants with limited resources to work their way towards their desired destination. due to strict visa restrictions, such migrants are often unable to enter western countries directly and, instead, move through a hierarchy of countries to reach their final destination (king & newbold 2007). the study by zijlstra (2020) on the stepwise migration of iranian students highlights the importance of the initial study destinations in shaping students' migration trajectories. following the designated hierarchical path in stepwise migration, the first stage for iranian students is typically moving to turkey, while the second stage is moving from turkey to a more-desirable destination such as the us or europe. students who can afford higher tuition fees often go directly to the us to study, while those with lower economic capital may choose to attend top-ranked private universities in turkey in a bid to accumulate the capital needed to move on. these students often receive scholarships, research stipends and teaching assistantships, as well as free housing, to add to their economic capital. the opportunities available to students in their initial study destination play a crucial role in their planned stepwise migration to western countries. onward migration theory differs from transit and stepwise migration theories in terms of intentionality. onward migration theory does not assume that migrants have a predetermined final destination but, rather, that remigration is contingent on the circumstances and opportunities which migrants encounter in their initial destination. for example, african migrants decide to onward migrate to a new country after experiencing disillusionment and racism in their first country of migration (ndukwe 2017). indian nursing students pursue multistage pathways between india 68 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper and canada while adhering to canadian immigration laws (baas 2019). in the case of iranian stepwise migration, some students may abandon their plans to move on to western countries like germany after experiencing a common language and culture in turkey (zijlstra 2020). however, it is unclear whether these students moved between cities in turkey before making their stay-or-leave migration decisions. onward, transit and stepwise multistage migration theories offer different perspectives on how migrants navigate their journeys. however, these theories often overlook the significance of cities as destinations and the translocal networks that migrants form. examining migration through a translocal lens highlights the complex interplay between the global and local forces that shape the migration experience (anthias 2012; ndukwe 2017). translocal theory encourages the extension of the analytical focus beyond the nation-state and borders on places/cities as migration destinations to bring the local back into the discussion (brickell & datta 2011; greiner & sakdapolrak 2013). cities in and of themselves are more than just transportation hubs or brief rest stops for migrants. the experience of student migrants is influenced not only by changes in countries but also by the particular cities and neighbourhoods, since university cities provide student migrants with a place to study, work and acquire social capital for creating a life in their new host country (plöger & becker 2015). whereas hospitable or encouraging opportunities, such as the development of translocal networks, may change migrants' feelings of identity and belonging to their new cities, hostile and exclusionary experiences in finding new opportunities or developing such networks while maintaining their original ties to their places of origin may very well drive migrants to seek better opportunities elsewhere (sassen 2001; faist 2013). the act of relocating to a new domestic destination to pursue further education or better job opportunities due to dissatisfaction with the current place of residence indicates that student migration is not restricted to international boundaries only (raghuram 2013). to properly investigate multi-stage student migration, it is necessary to examine specific cities and locations, in addition to countries, in a single study. international students are particular about the places/cities in which they choose to study because the location of their university degree can improve their chances of finding employment in the host country and the local job market after they have returned (bilecen & van mol 2017). the emphasis on opportunities in origin and destination cities dates back to the theory of mobility, one of the four main theories of migration (stouffer 1940). according to this hypothesis, migration is influenced by the number of opportunities present in both the current location and the future destination. migrants are compelled to search for new locations with better chances when they are disappointed by the opportunities they are missing in their current city of residence. migration is negatively impacted on by the opportunities that exist between the current location and the potential migration destination as well as by the number of migrants competing for these possibilities. in sum, migration is influenced by both the attractiveness of the destination city and the repulsion of the home city. even though many international students carefully consider university cities before applying for admission, there has been a lack of focus on cities as migration destinations in the literature on ism (van mol & ekamper 2016). the quality of life offered by certain university cities is a significant factor that motivates students to choose these cities as study destinations (prazeres et al. 2017). like the way in which universities are ranked from best to worst, cities are also assessed by students – with, for example, london and seoul having particular reputations among international students looking for admission. a favoured location can lead to the place deciding at which university to study (nachatar singh et al. 2014). however, once students have arrived, we do not know whether they remain in these cities or move onward. student migrants are more likely than other migrants to engage in internal or external mobility when socioeconomically dissatisfied with a particular city (kou & bailey 2014; ndukwe 2017). poor opportunities make graduates leave their hometowns for cities perceived to be better (sun et al. 2020). a group of educated immigrants who moved to london for its worldwide appeal were dubbed ‘cosmopolitan movers’ by ahrens, kelly and van liempt (2016). the transnational literature on refugee studies and onward migration shows that work, family, social networks and diversity are all reasons for onward journeys in larger cities (mulder et al. 2020). the literature on translocal theory suggests fennia 201(1) (2023) 69zain ul abdin that local-to-local relations are one of the key factors in deciding on to which city to move (greiner & sakdapolrak 2013). the present study aims to underscore the importance of cities in the student migration of pakistanis and indians. its multistage approach aims to understand more complex mobilities at local and international levels as well as the trajectories of students. in addition to contributing to academic research and theory development, studying how students make decisions via the lens of cities and locations is instructive for educational practitioners, regional governments and policymakers alike (van mol & ekamper 2016). combining interviews with ethnography i conducted 57 semi-structured interviews and participant observation to gather detailed information about the experiences of south asian student migrants. the use of both semi-structured interviews and participant observation in migration research enables researchers to compare and contrast migrants' verbal descriptions of their experiences in their new environment with their observable actions and behaviours (denzin & lincon 2005; kvale & brinkmann 2015). this comparative analysis helps researchers to gain a more-comprehensive understanding of the significance and relevance of migrants' experiences. i am an international student from south asia who has been living in nordic countries for the past decade, giving me significant insight into the life of south asian students in the region. from january to may 2018, i conducted fieldwork in stockholm and gothenburg in sweden and helsinki and turku in finland. i utilized snowball and random sampling techniques, leveraging my existing contacts to recruit participants. i also had informal conversations with pakistani and indian international student communities during the interview period and after the pandemic's deintensifying. i lived with a group of students in flats in helsinki, turku and stockholm and stayed with a pakistani student in his family's flat in gothenburg, providing opportunities for informal discussions. i interviewed 28 indians and 29 pakistanis in finland and sweden, with equal representation from various cities. i recorded all interviews with the participants' consent and conducted them in hindi, urdu, english or punjabi, based on the interviewee's preference, as i am fluent in all four languages. each interview lasted approximately one hour and was recorded on a secure universityprovided laptop for transcription and translation purposes. i use pseudonyms for the names of the 15 female and 42 male respondents and keep the specific cities of residence confidential in order to protect the anonymity of the participants. although i aimed for a better gender balance among the respondents, as a male researcher working within south asian cultural norms it was easier to recruit male participants. the vast majority of respondents came from middleor upper-middle-class backgrounds, while only a few came from an elite class. this background information is significant as international students going to finland or sweden must meet certain financial requirements. respondents, including those from richer backgrounds, worked various jobs to minimize their reliance on their finances while studying. the respondents' ages at the time of the interview ranged from 24 to 45, with a 31-year-old average. they had arrived in finland and sweden between the ages of 18 and 39, with a 25-year-old average age on arrival. between two and 12 years, respondents' stays in finland or sweden ranged from two to an average of six years. most of the respondents came to finland and sweden to pursue master's degrees, as these are the most common english-taught programmes for international students (mathies & karhunen 2021). nine of the respondents came to study on a one-year master's programme available only in sweden. bachelor's degree programmes in finnish universities are rarely offered in english (ibid.). among the 57 respondents, only 12 completed their degrees on time, while 23 took longer than expected and 22 had incomplete degrees. a considerable number of those who completed their degrees were pursuing their next degrees, such as phds, at the time of the interviews. the interviews were designed to collect information on migration, remittance-sending and the integration behaviour of pakistanis and indians who entered finland and sweden as students. the answers were all coded thematically using nvivo software for qualitative analysis (e.g. schreier 2012). the patterns of multistage migration that emerged through the thematic analysis prompted further exploration of the factors that influenced initial migration and the reasons that encouraged students 70 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper to remigrate a second or third time. meanwhile, reviewing the literature on multistage migration revealed that the current literature on ism is concentrated on singleor double-stage migration and that research on internal movement is missing, whereas the multistage migration literature lacks depth on the ism topic. the three stages of migration are described in detail in the following sections. first stage: choosing finland and/or sweden students from pakistan and india gave a variety of explanations for why they decided to study in finland or sweden. pakistanis attributed finland's and sweden's success to their home-country’s inadequate education systems, their own lack of resources and anxiety about the future. indians, in contrast, cited stiff competition in the local job market and challenges getting into government universities. students are forced to explore other practical possibilities since they are frustrated with their inability to get into national universities. the surrounding community provides them with ideas or the social capital to emigrate and families with enough financial resources are able to turn the ideas or social capital generated by the local community into actual decisions to emigrate. both pakistanis and indians highly regarded the nordic countries for providing (previously) free education and these students considered obtaining a foreign degree and the possibility of a better future as significant reasons for selecting finland or sweden. pakistani students in sweden preferred sweden over the united kingdom (uk) due to the availability of free education in the past, while indian students in finland mentioned specific degree programmes and free education as important factors. germany and the uk were viewed as the primary competitors of sweden. two students, yawar – (male, 33) from pakistan and studying in sweden – and gaurav – (male, 30) from india and studying in finland – respectively admitted that: a class fellow found free education in sweden and finland […]. we were 20 students in our class. four–five came in the first attempt. nine students came to sweden on a single flight afterwards. sweden for the reason of free education. the uk rejected our visas because of ielts [international english language testing system]. sweden also accepted you without ielts if your prior education was in english at that time. because of free education! well, i have been living abroad for the last 10 years. i was working in england when i decided that i should continue my studies. so, i was looking at where i could go with minimum expenses. i filtered some options. finally, ended up with norway and finland. so, norway is a bit more expensive, then i just tried for finland. […] just go for free education! yeah, that’s how i ended up in finland. ‘so, you didn’t come from india, you came from the uk?’ [interviewer] no, i went back to india and then i sorted out the procedure to come here. based on yawar and gaurav's cases, it can be inferred that many students preferred finland and sweden over the uk because they wanted to avoid high tuition fees and strict admission requirements. the respondents prioritized affordability when considering the feasibility of migrating to another country, rather than university rankings or language barriers. this finding is in line with perkins and neumayer's (2014) argument that university rankings have little impact on students' choice of destination. additionally, the data supports king and sondhi's (2018) and beech's (2018) claims that a larger number of young people and limited course options in india influence students' decisions to study at highly ranked foreign universities. the respondents were also frustrated with the overall education system in their home countries and migrated to search for better career opportunities abroad. during my observations of the participants, i inquired about how they came to know about studying in finland and sweden so that i could understand the role of social networks in their decision-making. the respondents frequently cited friends as the most common source of information and their family members also played a significant role in steering them away from more competitive countries like the uk and towards the two nordic states. like yawar, gaurav also learned about the availability of free education in finland from a friend. based on their personal experiences, those who were already studying abroad guided others through messaging platforms like whatsapp and facebook, suggesting that they prioritize bigger cities with greater job prospects and view universities in smaller towns as a back-up option in case of admission denials or for lower profiled candidates. this finding is consistent with van mol and ekamper's (2016) argument that exchange students are attracted to university fennia 201(1) (2023) 71zain ul abdin towns in metropolitan areas. however, it is noteworthy that south asian international degree-seeking students are drawn to larger cities primarily for the sake of better work opportunities rather than, for instance, for a more vibrant social life or a better nightlife. yawar's experience aligns with the findings of cairns and smyth (2011), who suggest that international students can act as facilitators for others from their home country to study abroad. in yawar's case, family played an important role in providing financial support for his migration expenses, including flights, rent and board. this is consistent with many studies (including sondhi & king 2017) which indicate that students often require financial support from their parents to cover the costs of studying abroad. however, unlike other studies that suggest that this investment is intended to support family migration later, this does not seem to be the case for indian and pakistani students in the nordic countries. one reason for this is that nordic countries like finland and sweden only recognise spouses and children as close family members – rather than parents, as in certain english-speaking countries like the uk. this makes it less likely that parents will join their children studying at higher-education institutions in these countries, unless the students are minors. to summarize, south asian students were attracted to finland and sweden due to the free education and lower english-language requirements. they prioritized feasibility in terms of finances, job opportunities, fees and scholarships over city or university rankings. social networks played a significant role in helping them to emigrate, with friends providing guidance on the application process and parents providing financial support. the experiences of living in their initial university cities and towns changed, in some cases, after they experienced fewer opportunities. these experiences are discussed in the next subsection. second stage: intercity migration around half of the respondents received admissions in helsinki, turku, stockholm and gothenburg and most of them found work opportunities in their university cities. for example, a significant number of students who studied in turku were able to secure cleaning jobs while studying and a few were able to get a paid phd position after completing their degrees. on the other hand, the remaining half who could not find jobs in these or the smaller cities where they gained admission, had to migrate between cities to find better job opportunities. overall, 30 participants reported intercity migration in their pursuit of better job opportunities. students moved between cities during and after the completion of their degrees, with many of them moving between cities during the summer break. seasonal migration patterns were observed more frequently among students from smaller cities in finland, with a higher number of indian students following this strategy compared to their pakistani counterparts. for example, two indian students named karan and arjun would move to helsinki from smaller cities in finland during the summer and winter holidays to work, with karan delivering food and arjun distributing early-morning newspapers. this strategy was commonly used to accumulate sufficient funds for survival in the following year and to demonstrate the necessary funds for visa extensions. missing job opportunities in smaller university towns and full-time work permissions during holidays were additional reasons for this type of migration. after completing their studies, many south asian students permanently migrated to other cities. in sweden, this was more common because the one-year master's degree programme allowed them to leave the university town sooner than in finland, where the programme lasted two years. once they completed their courses, they were no longer required to stay in the university town for their thesis. while most permanent intercity migration was driven by economic opportunities and visa extensions, some students also moved to pursue better university degrees, which required switching schools. gaurav (male, 30) had lived in the uk and cyprus for six years before returning to india to pursue higher-education opportunities. he eventually received admission to a university in a smaller town in finland and used his savings from his time in the uk and cyprus, as well as some assistance from his family, to cover his expenses to get there. however, upon arriving in the university town, gaurav found it to be dissatisfying in the following manner: it was very difficult to find a job. some […] people were there and when i asked for the job, they said like well here only […] people can work. my savings were running out. i was just hoping for it [job]. my 72 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper friends moved to turku […]. i got my university transferred to turku: a bigger, more-open city with cheaper travel options compared to up north. i got a job there in one week. my life slowly improved. gaurav encountered discrimination while searching for a job in the smaller town where he studied. he believed that this was due to another group of foreign students from a specific nationality who already lived there and had established roots. as a result, he decided to follow the example of senior students and moved to another town to seek better opportunities. he stated that he was much happier to have found a part-time job to support his studies in this new city. moving upon experiencing discrimination matches with faist’s (2013) premise that feelings of being targeted encourage migrants to continue their journeys and with the findings of ndukwe's (2017) study on african migrants in finland, which also revealed that discrimination can lead to intercity migration. however, this study suggests that discrimination may not always come from locals, as intense competition for limited job opportunities can turn fellow international students into unfair competitors. during participant observation, i learned about jahangir, who came to finland from pakistan to pursue a master's degree in information technology. jahangir had to contact his family in pakistan to ask for urgent help during his third month when he lost his wallet while cycling back from the library, leaving him unable to cover his living expenses. meanwhile, his family sent him 1,000 euros with someone who was travelling to finland to help him out; he started looking for a job to support himself because he knew that 1,000 euros would only last for a couple of months. despite his efforts in searching for a job in his university town, jahangir faced repetitive rejections in response to his job applications, including in the areas of food delivery, cleaning, dishwashing and packaging. a senior indian student then advised him to visit the cleaning company’s office at least once a week and visit the supervisor’s house in case his prior method failed. despite this, jahangir still struggled to find a job, until a senior student from pakistan suggested that he apply for jobs in other cities with better opportunities. jahangir eventually secured an early-morning delivery job in helsinki and relocated there to gather funds to continue his education later on. this move to a different city in search of better opportunities aligns with the findings of sun, pan and he (2020), who suggest that missing opportunities often prompts graduates to move to other towns. this extension of focus to international degree students beyond locals provides an addition to the ism literature. the examples of jahangir, gaurav and yawar illustrate the crucial role of social networks in facilitating intercity migration for international students. greiner and sakdapolrak's (2013) research supports this, highlighting the significance of social networks with local-to-local relations in guiding and facilitating moves. in the cases of jahangir and gaurav, senior indian and pakistani students respectively guided them on how to find jobs and to which cities to migrate. in yawar's case (see first stage), his friend informed him about free education in sweden and a group of classmates accompanied him to study there. yawar also relied on his social networks to find temporary work in a distant city before eventually moving to stockholm to remotely continue his studies. overall, these examples demonstrate how social networks can be instrumental in helping international students to navigate challenges and opportunities during their time studying abroad. yawar (male, 33) shared with me that: i came for a master’s in blekinge county. ‘ok, so the summer job you got was also there?’ no, it was in västerås. ‘how far is that from there?’ from there, mister, it is about 600 km. ‘ok, ok so you moved there only for the job?’ only for the job, exactly! ‘did it affect your studies?’ no, it was summer. it didn’t affect me. from there, i directly went back to the university. resumed studies once again. ‘how long did you stay there?’ i stayed there for eight months you can assume. then i moved to stockholm. got premo [newspaper delivery job] in stockholm. the reason for moving here was work. ‘did you finish your studies before moving?’ actually, luckily, i had completed all of my courses. only the thesis was remaining. so, for this reason, no great effect was exerted on my studies. in sum, the cases of yawar, jahangir and gaurav show that south asian students often choose to migrate to the nordic states due to the limited opportunities in their home countries. the availability of job opportunities in university towns determines whether or not they will move onwards to other cities within the host country. this highlights that employability is a significant factor in attracting international students to certain cities. this adds a nuance to the work of prazeres and others (2017) and van mol and ekamper (2016) whereby employability is another factor that attracts some fennia 201(1) (2023) 73zain ul abdin international students to certain cities on top of the quality of city life. south asian international students preferred the actual feasibility of survival after migrating in terms of prospective job opportunities over nightlife, for example. those who find it difficult to survive think of moving to either bigger cities or returning/onward migrating. the next section contains findings on this final stage of stay-return-or-onward student migration. third stage: stay-or-leave temporalities around half of the participants expressed their intention to leave finland or sweden in the long run, with reasons ranging from emotional ones to a lack of job opportunities or aspirations for better careers. some participants who mentioned their plans to move to other countries have now already moved to switzerland for a higher salary or the us for family reasons and better career opportunities. others, such as both rakesh – a male indian student in sweden – and afaf – a female pakistani student in finland, who revealed their plans to leave their respective nordic countries, have not yet left. rakesh (male, 34) struggled with his two-year master's degree programme in computer science in kronoberg county and was considering switching to a one-year programme in another town. he said: i applied for free education and came here. i applied for jobs during my studies. the problem here is that, if you want to do a professional job, your swedish level should be very high! […] i got into a two-year computer science programme […]. in kronoberg county, it was a two-year course. i moved to gothenburg to change to a one-year course. […] i would like to go to canada or maybe the us because my girlfriend is there. i would like to move there […]. well, she is earning like 10,000 dollars every month. if i go there, i will have a good [job] opportunity. while rakesh was planning to onward migrate, most indian students expressed their desire to return to their home country. they explained that they want to take care of their parents and take advantage of improved career opportunities in india. on the other hand, pakistani students mainly aspire to onward migrate to another country for better opportunities and wish neither to stay in finland in the longer term nor return to pakistan. at this stage, the focus for both indians and pakistanis is on finding a regular, well-paid job, which is a stark contrast to the low-paid student jobs at the second intercity mobility stage. for example, afaf, a 27-year-old female pakistani student in finland, who was attracted to study there because of the free education system, plans to onward migrate to canada to find a regular well-paid job. she came to a city in lapland in finland with only 1,500 euros and, like karan and arjun (see above), moved to espoo near helsinki each summer to work in odd jobs and save money for her studies. after completing her courses in lapland, she moved to helsinki to work fulltime in a job while waiting to complete her thesis. her exact words were: studies! free studies! i would say that i always wanted to have a career abroad. it was basically the biggest motivation […]. i brought 1,500 euros […]. living here wasn’t really expensive […]. i used to work in the summer in espoo. so, i used to earn maybe 6,000–7,000 euros in three months. so, then i survived on that money for the following year […] i wouldn’t move to pakistan but i will move from finland […] because i went to canada in the summer last year, so most probably to canada. today, i got a job offer from dubai as well. perhaps i will go there. i don’t know, let’s see. but i do want to move because i do not see myself progressing in finland. based on the participants' intentions, it appears that the desire to return migrate is influenced by the employment opportunities in their home country. indian respondents expressed a greater inclination towards returning to india compared to pakistani respondents, possibly due to the perceived availability of job opportunities in india. however, those who do plan to return often consider finland and sweden as their second homes and wish to maintain their connections with these countries. zafar, a 38-year-old male pakistani student in finland, explained that: finland has a place in our hearts. i missed city x when i went to pakistan after my master’s […] as far as keeping ties over here, it is more a kind of backup solution, to be honest. never thought about citizenship when i came here but lately, i am thinking […] why not have it! […] if things do not go well for me in pakistan, i will move somewhere else. […] actually, my supervisor offered me a job […]. i turned him down. […] i said that i would love to come back and work here but, for the moment, i am going back home. 74 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper zafar, one of the older participants in the study, who had previously worked in pakistan after completing his bachelor's degree, decided to pursue a master's degree abroad to find better job opportunities. at 31 years old, he moved to a bigger city in finland to pursue his education. unlike rakesh and afaf, zafar did not have to move between cities to find a job to support his studies. he found a part-time cleaning job and was quickly promoted to a supervisory role by his boss, allowing him to cover his living expenses while pursuing his degree. after completing his master's degree with good grades, he secured a paid phd position which he is now closer to completing. while zafar wants to return to pakistan, he intends to do so only after securing the means to return to finland. zafar is unique in that he is an exception to the majority of pakistani students who intend to onward migrate from finland. it is common for reality to deviate from the intentions, however. for example, unlike karan and arjun, who received it developer jobs in estonia, afaf – who wanted to move to canada in 2018 – was still residing in finland as of 2022. after getting married in pakistan, she applied for her husband to join her in finland and they both moved to a bigger city in the north of the country where her husband found a professional job. this is not an uncommon occurrence and, during my time in finland and sweden, i have witnessed similar deviations from people's plans. for example, 25 pakistani and indian students came to pursue english-medium master’s programmes in eastern finland in 2013. only a few months after their arrival, three of them returned to their home countries. among the remaining students, some managed to find temporary work distributing advertisements in the university town, while others sought opportunities for employment in larger towns during the summer months. some students secured financial aid in the form of a stipend from the university, while the rest utilized the funds which they had brought with them to cover their expenses until the end of their taught courses. following their completion, some of the students were able to secure funding while working on their theses at the university. others moved to helsinki as they were no longer required to stay in the university town for their courses. after completing their master's degrees, some of them secured paid phd positions in countries like the netherlands, france or belgium as well as different cities in finland. a few of them continued working in helsinki; only one person secured a paid phd position at the same university. as of 2022, one of the students who left finland to pursue a paid phd position has returned to work for an international company, while the rest have found professional jobs in the countries where they completed their phds. those who continued working in helsinki either found better jobs or moved on to other countries, such as the us, the uk and switzerland, for even better career opportunities. as for sweden, 10 south asian students were accepted onto the electrical engineering programme at a university in blekinge county in 2009. after completing their first semester, most of the students moved to gothenburg or stockholm, as they were unable to secure work in their university town. they returned to the university town to continue their studies after working for up to three months. after completing their second semester, many of them once again moved to stockholm or gothenburg but, this time, several changed to online courses and only needed to return to the university town for laboratory work. as of 2022, three of the students were working as taxi drivers in stockholm, a few others had started small businesses – including shops in stockholm or other cities – and only one had returned to their home country. the finding that many of the participants are still residing in finland and sweden matches with mathies and karhunen (2021) who found that 70% of international students are still living in finland three years after their graduation. this study extends the focus to include another nordic country to add to the return migration literature on ism (king & sondhi 2018; liao & asis 2020; mathies & karhunen 2021). at the final stage, in line with marcu (2015), many of the respondents reported their intention to secure citizenship and permanent residence before returning or migrating onwards. however, the finding that some student migrants aspire to migrate onwards to another country for employment or to return to care for their parents in their towns of origin only after securing themselves against future uncertainties in the long run, adds to the student migration literature. overall, multiple stages of international student migration are interconnected. student mobility to the next stage depends on their satisfaction and challenges faced in the initial place, the accumulation fennia 201(1) (2023) 75zain ul abdin of further mobility capital and the enticing opportunities in the next place. at the initial origin-todestination stage, indians and pakistanis mentioned certain frustrating factors in the origin countries, combined with foreseeable career-development opportunities abroad. at the interregional level, unsatisfying job opportunities in the smaller university towns made students move. at the final stay-or-leave stage, the pursuit of even better careers or emotional reasons such as taking care of parents steered their choices. a discussion of these findings with the existing literature follows in the subsequent section. discussion and conclusion studying initial origin-to-destination and final stay-leave-or-onward migration that only examines international student migration overlooks the complexity of the process, as it ignores internal migration. the present study explored the intercity migration stage in addition to home-destination and stay-or-leave stages to show that international student migration can also be triple or multistage rather than single or double stage. while existing research on multistage migration often focuses on countries as stepping-stones in which migrants can gather human capital for moving on, this study suggests that replacing entry-point states with entry-point places adds a local layer to the analysis (paul 2011; walton-roberts 2021). the present study’s findings suggest that replacing the entry-point states with entry-point places adds a local layer of migration. intercity migration findings on top of initial origin-to-destination and final stay-or-leave movements imply that ism is translocal. mobilising translocality theory (brickell & datta 2011; greiner & sakdapolrak 2013) by adding places to countries allowed this study to bring the local back into the study of ism as a multistage phenomenon. the framework of stepwise migration that paul (2011) developed and zijlstra (2020) employed to study student migration is adapted here to study the multiple stages of pakistani and indian student migration to, into and from the nordic countries. in a disaggregated stage-wise analysis, this study examined why pakistani and indian students choose finland or sweden, why they move between different cities within these countries and what influences their decision to stay or leave. by examining each stage separately, the study found that students are motivated to migrate due to better opportunities in their destination country and dissatisfaction with opportunities in their home country. once they find satisfactory employment, they are less likely to move again. however, those who are dissatisfied with their current situation continue to search for better opportunities in subsequent stages of migration. there were some exceptions, however, such as those who were motivated by emotional reasons, including taking care of their parents. for each of the above-mentioned approaches, a holistic assessment of student migration as a multistage process allows for a more nuanced consideration of the dynamics that affect decisionmaking at each juncture. thus, the argument that pakistani and indian students participate in complex and often multistage intercity migration adds a new level of analysis by suggesting a novel stage of migration worthy of investigation and corresponds with other studies of students from different parts of the world who also experience migration as a multistage phenomenon (mosneaga & winther 2013). the stage of migrating between cities both before and after the degree completion gains further importance when international students seek further opportunities, such as those for further higher education (phds) or permanent employment (carlson 2013; geddie 2013). university cities are more than just transit hubs or migratory stopovers because they give student migrants a place to study, work and acquire social capital (plöger & becker 2015). in conclusion, there is a need to expand the focus of ism research beyond traditional home-tohost or stay-or-return factors and to include the third stage of intercity migration within the host country. investigating the socio-spatial dimension of ism, both before and after the completion of degrees in destination countries, allows for a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. this research used stepwise migration theory to analyse three stages of student migration in order to understand the factors that prompt south asian student migration to, within and – subsequently for some – from finland and sweden. it found that the students’ search for a better life involves multiple stages of migration that are interconnected to one another. 76 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper the first migration step from an origin to a destination country is often insufficient to satisfy the high-set ambitions of young indian and pakistani talents. the need to undertake a second and third migration stage implies that student migration is not a one-off step but an interconnected multistage endeavour with the first step of a processual movement laying the basis for additional migration steps to follow. their social and cultural factors are the main driving force for their initial destination choice in their search for a better life. their international experiences from the first migration step are useful in their second intercity migration and the third step – to stay or to leave. studying the three stages together – or a multistage understanding – also enables a systematic comparison of student migrants’ aspirations along the length of the entire migration trajectory. future research with a longitudinal perspective which includes immigration policies and visa renewal challenges could address how student migrants’ perspectives change over time based on experiences while abroad, acquired competencies and accumulated capital. acknowledgements the kone foundation provided funding for this study as part of the programme our essential neighbours. i sincerely appreciate the insightful criticism and comments from marta bivand erdal, aija lulle, paul fryer, and heikki eskelinen. i want to thank everyone who participated for sharing their life experiences and enabling this research. references ahrens, j., kelly, m. & van liempt, i. (2016) free movement? the onward migration of eu citizens born in somalia, iran, and nigeria. population, space and place 22(1) 84–98. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1869 anthias, f. (2012) transnational mobilities, migration research and intersectionality. nordic journal of migration research 2(2) 102–110. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10202-011-0032-y baas, m. (2019) the education-migration industry: international students, migration policy and the question of skills. international migration 57(3) 222–234. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12540 beech, s. (2018) adapting to change in the higher education system: international student mobility as a migration industry. journal of ethnic and migration studies 44(4) 610–625. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1315515 bilecen, b. & van mol, c. (2017) introduction: international academic mobility and inequalities. journal of ethnic and migration studies 43(8) 1241–1255. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300225 brickell, k. & datta, a. (eds.) (2011) translocal geographies: spaces, places, connections. routledge, london. brooks, r. & waters, j. (2010) social networks and educational mobility: the experiences of uk students. globalisation, societies and education 8(1) 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767720903574132 cairns, d. & smyth, j. (2011) i wouldn’t mind moving actually: exploring student mobility in northern ireland. international migration 49(2) 135–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00533.x carling, j. & schewel, k. (2018) revisiting aspiration and ability in international migration. journal of ethnic and migration studies 44(6) 945–963. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1384146 carlson, s. (2013) becoming a mobile student: a processual perspective on german degree student mobility. population, space and place 19(2) 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1749 düvell, f. (2008) transit migration in europe. centre on migration and policy and society (compas), oxford. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018408096442 denzin, n. & lincon, y. (2005) the sage handbook of qualitative research. 3rd ed. sage, california. faist, t. (2013) the mobility turn: a new paradigm for the social sciences? ethnic and racial studies 36(11) 1637–1646. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.812229 findlay, a. (2011) an assessment of supply and demand-side theorizations of international student mobility. international migration 49(2) 162–190. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00643.x geddie, k. (2013) the transnational ties that bind: relationship considerations for graduating international science and engineering research students. population, space and place 19(2) 196–208. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1751 greiner, c. & sakdapolrak, p. (2013) translocality: concepts, applications and emerging research perspectives. geography compass 7(5) 373–384. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12048 hazen, h. & alberts, h. (2006) visitors or immigrants? international students in the united states. population, space and place 12(3) 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.409 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1869 https://doi.org/10.2478/v10202-011-0032-y https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12540 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1315515 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300225 https://doi.org/10.1080/14767720903574132 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2009.00533.x https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1384146 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1749 https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018408096442 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.812229 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00643.x https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1751 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12048 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.409 fennia 201(1) (2023) 77zain ul abdin king, k. & newbold, k. (2007) onward emigration to the united states by canadian immigrants between 1995 and 2000. international migration review 41(4) 909–929. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2007.00105.x king, r. & sondhi, g. (2018) international student migration: a comparison of uk and indian students’ motivations for studying abroad. globalisation, societies and education 16(2) 176–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.1405244 kou, a. & bailey, a. (2014) ‘movement is a constant feature in my life’: contextualising migration processes of highly skilled indians. geoforum 52 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.01.002 kvale, s. & brinkmann, s. (2015) interviews: learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing. 3rd ed. sage, thousands oaks. li, h. (2019) the role of the migration industry in chinese student migration to finland: towards a new meso-level approach. in liu, h., dervin, f. & du, x. (eds.) nordic-chinese intersections within education, 21–49. macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28588-3_2 li, h. & pitkänen, p. (2018) understanding the integration of mainland chinese students: the case of finland. nordic journal of migration research 8(2) 107–115. https://doi.org/10.1515/njmr-2018-0008 liao, k. & asis, m. (2020) back to the philippines: connecting aspirations, return and social remittances in international student migration. asian and pacific migration journal 29(3) 402–421. https://doi.org/10.1177/0117196820964999 marcu, s. (2015) uneven mobility experiences: life-strategy expectations among eastern european undergraduate students in the uk and spain. geoforum 58 68–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.017 mathies, c. & karhunen, h. (2021) do they stay or go? analysis of international students in finland. globalisation, societies and education 19(3) 298–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1816926 mosneaga, a. & winther, l. (2013) emerging talents? international students before and after their career start in denmark. population, space and place 19(2) 181–195. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1750 mulder, c. h., lundholm, e. & malmberg, g. (2020) young adults’ migration to cities in sweden: do siblings pave the way? demography 57(6) 2221–2244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00934-z nachatar singh, j. k., schapper, j. & jack, g. (2014) the importance of place for international students’ choice of university: a case study at a malaysian university. journal of studies in international education 18(5) 463–474. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315314523990 ndukwe, t. (2017) african immigrants in finland in onward translocal and transnational mobility and migration, and the political implications. journal of black studies 48(2) 115–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934716680323 oecd (2022) international student mobility (indicator). 01.02.2022 <https://data.oecd.org/students/ international-student-mobility.htm>. 31.05.2022. ossman, s. (2013) moving matters: paths of serial migration. stanford university press, redwood city. paul, a. (2011) stepwise international migration: a multistage migration pattern for the aspiring migrant. american journal of sociology 116(6) 1842–1886. https://doi.org/10.1086/659641 perkins, r. & neumayer, e. (2014) geographies of educational mobilities: exploring the uneven flows of international students. the geographical journal 180(3) 246–259. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12045 plöger, j. & becker, a. (2015) social networks and local incorporation: grounding high-skilled migrants in two german cities. journal of ethnic and migration studies 41(10) 1517–1535. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2015.1015407 prazeres, l., findlay, a., mccollum, d., sander, n., musil, e., krisjane, z. & apsite-berina, e. (2017) distinctive and comparative places: alternative narratives of distinction within international student mobility. geoforum 80 114–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.02.003 raghuram, p. (2013) theorising the spaces of student migration. population, space and place 19(2) 138–154. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1747 ramos, c. (2018) onward migration from spain to london in times of crisis: the importance of lifecourse junctures in secondary migrations. journal of ethnic and migration studies 44(11) 1841–1857. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1368372 riaño, y. & piguet, e. (2016) international student migration. oxford bibliographies 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0141 sassen, s. (2001) the global city: new york, london, tokyo. princeton university press, princeton nj. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400847488 schreier, m. (2012) qualitative content analysis in practice. sage, thousand oaks. siu, l. (2007) memories of a future home: diasporic citizenship of chinese in panama. stanford university press, redwood city. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804767859 sondhi, g. & king, r. (2017) gendering international student migration: an indian case-study. journal of ethnic and migration studies 43(8) 1308–1324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300288 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-7379.2007.00105.x https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.1405244 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.01.002 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28588-3_2 https://doi.org/10.1515/njmr-2018-0008 https://doi.org/10.1177/0117196820964999 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.017 https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1816926 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1750 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00934-z https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315314523990 https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934716680323 https://data.oecd.org/students/international-student-mobility.htm https://data.oecd.org/students/international-student-mobility.htm https://doi.org/10.1086/659641 https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12045 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2015.1015407 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.02.003 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.1747 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1368372 https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199874002-0141 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400847488 https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804767859 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2017.1300288 78 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper stouffer, s. a. (1940) intervening opportunities: a theory relating mobility and distance. american sociological review 5(6) 845–867. https://doi.org/10.2307/2084520 sun, y. f., pan, k. f. & he, z. l. (2020) intercity migration behavior of chinese graduates: from home region to work destination. the annals of regional science 64(1) 111–132. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-019-00958-3 tu, m. & nehring, d. (2020) remain, return, or re-migrate? the (im)mobility trajectory of mainland chinese students after completing their education in the uk. international migration 58(3) 43–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12589 van mol, c. & ekamper, p. (2016) destination cities of european exchange students. geografisk tidsskrift–danish journal of geography 116(1) 85–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/00167223.2015.1136229 van mol, c., snel, e., hemmerechts, k. & timmerman, c. (2018). migration aspirations and migration cultures: a case study of ukrainian migration towards the european union. population, space and place 24(5) e2131. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2131 walton-roberts, m. (2021) bus stops, triple wins and two steps: nurse migration in and out of asia. global networks 21(1) 84–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12296 zijlstra, j. (2020) stepwise student migration: a trajectory analysis of iranians moving from turkey to europe and north america. geographical research 58(4) 403–415. https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12434 https://doi.org/10.2307/2084520 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-019-00958-3 https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12589 https://doi.org/10.1080/00167223.2015.1136229 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2131 https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12296 https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12434 community resilience: a useful concept for declining icelandic communities? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa122522 doi: 10.11143/fennia.122522 reflections community resilience: a useful concept for declining icelandic communities? matthias kokorsch kokorsch, m. (2022) community resilience: a useful concept for declining icelandic communities? fennia 200(2) 245–250. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122522 in recent years, resilience has become an increasing focal point of community studies, in particular for settlements in the peripheral north, which face severe socio-economic and demographic challenges. not all researchers and practitioners were equally excited about the transfer of this concept – deeply rooted in ecology – to the social sciences. unsurprisingly there is a growing literature that engages critically with community resilience. this reflection takes up some of the main criticism and projects it onto iceland; a country that can serve as magnifier in the exploration of community resilience for a variety of reasons. the main aim of this reflection is to keep the discussion going about theoretical and analytical insufficiencies within the field of community resilience. shortcomings of existing definitions, the role of politics and agency as well as the determination of equilibria and the question of an endpoint to resilience are the essential strands of argumentation. keywords: iceland, regional development, community resilience, shrinkage matthias kokorsch (http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2220-8323), coastal communities and regional development, university centre of the westfjords, iceland. e-mail: matthias@uw.is © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction over a decade ago resilience has appeared as promising concept for community studies. however, the transfer from ecological perspectives over to the social sciences still proves to be challenging. non-surprisingly there is a growing literature that engages critically with it (wilson 2017; dornelles et al. 2020). in this reflection, the critique on community resilience will be applied to the icelandic context. a country that has very specific challenges in terms of community development and that can be considered as an excellent laboratory for approaches from the social sciences given its comparatively undiversified economy, uneven population distribution and limited internal markets. this reflection is a response to the statement of berkes and ross (2013, 6), who contended that “resilience literature at the level of ecosystems is well developed, but the same cannot be said for the local and community level.” it deems appropriate to investigate what happened since. five main https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122522 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2220-8323 246 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections strings of argumentation will be applied after a brief review of current developments in iceland, namely: definition problems, elaborations of neoliberalism and agency, the determination of equilibria and the question of an endpoint to resilience. the current situation of regional development in iceland some of the latest reports from nordregio on population development should be raising concern for icelandic policy makers, especially with regards to old age dependency ratios and working age population in rural and remote areas (gassen & heleniak 2019). in 2019 iceland counted some 159 localities, of which 57 count less than 500 inhabitants and 82 below 2,000 (statistics iceland 2019). many villages have experienced severe population decline, show an imbalanced gender distribution and face the challenge of further outmigration. the situation in many places would look even more problematic without the ever-growing influx of migrant workers. many of whom working in professions no longer sought by (former) locals. in addition, since around 1950 iceland has experienced several waves of municipality amalgamations, with numbers going down from 229 in 1950 to 72 in 2020 (samband íslenskra sveitarfélaga n.d.). the processes of amalgamations were frequently contested and the results of financial pressures and changing local responsibilities. much of the challenging population and socio-economic development can be related to the privatization of fishing rights and the (following) centralization process. many former fishing villages had to strive for new opportunities and faced a struggle for scarce financial resources and other governmental support. for many fishing villages, the loss of access to the main livelihood was a transformational shock (rapid and sudden changes due to political process) more than a structural change (slow and gradual changes) or slow burn (hastings et al. 2016; kokorsch 2018). hence, adjustments happened with varying success and still many places struggle to attract both, new people to the villages and truly sustainable ideas for socio-economic development. nonetheless, in many regions of iceland the fisheries are still one of the most important, if not the most important, industries. while most european and nordic countries developed endogenous strategies for rural development in the early 1990s, the same cannot be said about iceland. and still it seems that iceland needs to realize that the answer to spatial disparities and uneven regional development requires novel tools and concepts instead of top-down approaches that far too often have resulted in large scale heavy industries (benediktsson 2014). one example stands out though. in 2012 the fragile communities project was launched by the icelandic regional development institute. this project has been following a classic bottom-up approach, building on local-empowerment and the realization of local ideas. the success of the project varies between the participating communities and the underlying objectives. so far 13 communities have taken part in this project with ten being traditional fishing villages. a new threat is adding stress to small and remote communities in iceland: the so called fourth industrial revolution. a recent report by the government of iceland and its committee on the fourth industrial revolution estimates that some 73% of jobs in the sector of agriculture and fisheries are likely to be replaced due to automation with 44% jobs in the rural communities being at high risk and another 44% being at moderate risk (þorsteinsson et al. 2019). while we might observe another misuse of the very term revolution – since a revolution is usually meant to bring about improvement – surprisingly enough, most strategic plans and other policy documents in iceland highlight the positive aspects of it. this neglects that many communities will experience another transformational shock. especially the combination of low work force in the stem (16% and thus by far the lowest share in the nordic countries) and an overreliance on fisheries, heavy industries and tourism should raise concern (þorsteinsson et al. 2019). this very short and incomplete summary of current challenges alone is enough to justify an analysis of resilience in iceland. and indeed, this has been done in previous years with the following definition: “community resilience is the ability of a community to cope and adjust to stresses caused by social, political, and environmental change and to engage community resources to overcome adversity and take advantage of opportunities in response to change“ (amundsen 2012; cf. kokorsch & benediktsson 2018). however, the critical voices regarding this very concept seem to get more prominent and thus it is time to revisit resilience in iceland. fennia 200(2) (2022) 247matthias kokorsch community resilience: critical voices even though we might have found a suitable, yet very context specific definition, there are many vague or even circular definitions that sometimes relate to other equally fuzzy concepts such as sustainability. the following quote summarizes it quite well: “qualities of resilience are evident in the notion of adaptive capacity, which is generally used to analyse how a system does, or does not, respond to endogenous and exogenous changes […]’’ (wilson 2012, 1220). one can simply argue that resilience is not needed, when it is indeed equated with adaptive capacity. if resilience is based on other concepts, is it then even adding more value? in many cases adaptative capacity, transformation and/or or adjustment are more precise (scott 2013; cretney 2014; robinson & carson 2016). temporal aspects feed into this as one can see in the differentiation between resilience as trait or process (robinson & carson 2016). resilience has its strength for analysing sudden events and shocks, such as natural disasters, but it has weaknesses for assessing slow processes such as structural changes (wilson 2012). looking into processes, in some cases resilience translates into reluctance; reluctance to change existing orders and approaches. this almost matches the definition of perverse resilience, that is “[…] resilience within a system that is undesirable to the extent that it is socially unjust, inconsistent with ecosystem health or threatens overall system viability” (phelan et al. 2013, 204). this is in line with the differentiation between non-critical versus critical theory and non-conflict versus conflict theory within the resilience discourse (biermann et al. 2015; olsson et al. 2015). community resilience can and should never be apolitical and it requires a critical evaluation of the political framework. otherwise, injustice and inequality will be manifested (biermann et al. 2015). agency of locals is another essential component of the political dimension. according to scott (2013, 605): “while resilience offers a potential re-framing of rural development, its adoption within policy discourses should also be treated with caution. this is particularly the case when the rhetoric of resilience is translated to a social context with overtones of self-reliance”. the political level has too often been neglected in its role as possible stressor for regional and community development. resilience can be used as countermeasure against the adverse effects of neoliberal politics (hornborg 2013; biermann et al. 2015). the question is then: how exactly can it be used? and there we get back to the starting point, reconsidering some other more established concepts as more applicable. berkes and ross (2013) bring in aspects of general and specific resilience, eventually calling for an integrated approach. according to them, the study of community resilience requires “[…] various principles of complexity, such as feedbacks, nonlinearity, unpredictability, and scale” [especially since] “[…] communities are more than the sum of their individuals, households, and groups, are not necessarily cohesive, and comprise dynamic combinations of actors and groupings with multiple interests and shifting alliances” (berkes & ross 2013, 15). the discussion of non-linearity, unpredictability and scale bring about another aspect that is frequently addressed in (community) resilience: equilibrium. we do not even have to go back far in time for discussing this point. looking at postpandemic lifestyles in the nordic countries, we can consider this somewhat resilient: bouncing back into a dubious back-to-normal situation with high speed of recovery. but is that really resilient? back to “normal” where normal was everything but sustainable? not only this example raises concerns whether it is even always desirable to be resilient. nonetheless, most resilience literature seems to agree on two forms of resilience when discussing temporality and status. resilience as in bouncing back is problematic for resource dependent communities. it might lead back into times of resource exploitation, monotonous local economic structures, and questionable working conditions. and who is about to set the standards for an equilibrium (cf. scott 2013, 600)? what is the baseline and how can we deal with fluctuations, for example in terms of demographics? bouncing back would bring us into a status that particularly requires resilience and is thus contrary to this very concept. bouncing forward, as in evolutionary resilience sounds promising at first sight. however, it is usually blind towards exit-strategies, or it does not question whether the adjustments to a new system, that might not be desirable, is something to aim for. bouncing forward is typically based on a naive belief in exponential growth and progress, even in times of austerity. resilience as in being prepared for transformation requires 248 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections the political and economic sphere, which in most cases is exactly the stressor that makes resilience necessary (cf. scott 2013). in other terms: how should the cause be the cure? lock-ins and path dependency, which are in many cases the result of the economic and political setting make it even more difficult (scott 2013; kokorsch & benediktsson 2018). and yet – no matter in which direction we bounce – the question on how to deal with non-resilient places remains unaddressed and unanswered in most publications. the lack of an endpoint might even be the most important one for rejecting resilience approaches in community development. three reasons can be given for neglecting this discussion. first, the context of nordic welfare states in which debates around endpoints to community development seem to be contrary to this philosophy. second, positive end goals seem to be the core of community resilience. third, a clear antonym for resilience has not been defined. is it fragility, is it vulnerability? having a clear response to that, might also answer the question how to exactly deal with places qualifying for the end of the scale. the answer to this is clearly stated in the ecological understanding of resilience. and indeed, in a truly evolutionary approach, we would allow for some form of extinction and in particular welfare states should be able to respond to it. resilience and icelandic community development reconsidering the definition of amundsen (2012) that was applied to the icelandic case before, it provides almost everything that is needed for a descriptive approach to community resilience. taking a closer look at the individual aspects reveal some challenges though (fig. 1). considering resilience as reluctance to changes of existing orders and approaches, iceland is indeed a very resilient system (kristinsson 2018). unfortunately, however, it qualifies also for the definition of perverse resilience, since economic growth and head-counts are the main tools for measuring successful community development accepting threats to the overall system viability. fig. 1. community resilience in the context of different external stressors and local obstacles in iceland. fennia 200(2) (2022) 249matthias kokorsch especially when developing new endogenous strategies, the results of out-migration, lacking funds and decreasing agency can be seen. remaining inhabitants of the fragile communities in iceland, or similarly affected communities without this label, are confronted with the responsibility to stop an accelerating downward spiral. celebrating the rediscovery of endogenous strategies with an overemphasis on individual responsibility and adaptability is neoliberalism in disguise – or a perverted epitome of community resilience (joseph 2013). talking about national politics, one can detect a strange version of an adaptive cycle within the resilience context. the cycle starts with a socio-economic weakening and draining, continuing with decreased agency, then offering some form of rehabilitation temporarily with the aim of local empowerment and capacity building. that is schizophrenic resilience. the first communities finished the fragile communities project. what are they labelled now and how to continue from here? hardly any former or still fragile community is doing significantly better in terms of population or socio-economic development. hardly any is present in funded projects on a scale that matters or makes a difference. we can see that while the projects target essential aspects of resilience, namely agency, self-efficacy, empowerment, optimism, and self-esteem (berkes & ross 2013, 17) other crucial elements are not addressed. in particular, the financial support and very narrow timeframe, in combination with lock-ins of sorts do not allow for long-term resilience. apart from this very nuanced program, reviewing innovation and community development policies in iceland show further shortcomings. they are neither sufficient for a bouncing back, due to an undesired state and the impossible definition of an equilibrium, nor for bouncing forward, due to the overarching growth-oriented end-goals. hardly any national or local policy maker would vote for the second option given the following choice: (a) either a village of 1,000 people working in fisheries, or (b) having 500 inhabitants in a place that try to make a decent living without an overreliance on extractive fisheries; a community with innovate workforce that tries and fails and constantly discovers new pathways. and this – very simplified and exaggerated example – leads to the normative dimension of community resilience, and possibly the normative setting of many development policies in general. conclusion getting back to the initial statement from berkes and ross (2013), who questioned that resilience literature is well developed at the local and community level, i would argue – at least for iceland – that there are good reasons why their concerns are still justified. there are yet too many unanswered questions before one can apply a truly holistic process and future oriented community resilience approach. until then other terms, such as persistence and robustness, or concepts such as adaptive capacity, community capacity and transition theory still seem to be more practical or should be further developed (yamamoto 2011; wilson 2012; cretney 2014; robinson & carson 2016). terms that could easily do without resilience but not vice versa. in other terms, community researchers are well equipped with descriptive concepts, and for a normative concept, it is not well developed enough. especially transition theory seems to be more suitable since it “[…] emphasises interactions and scale-independence geographically and temporally; the ability to look both backwards and forwards along pathways; an emphasis on power relations; the bounded nature of transitional opportunities; and the overlapping nature of processes of change“ (robinson & carson 2016, 118). acknowledgements this reflection was inspired by discussions in the research group fieri (fostering innovation ecosystems in rural iceland) funded by the strategic research and development program 2020–2023 – societal challenges, no. 200235-5601. references amundsen, h. (2012) illusions of resilience? an analysis of community responses to change in northern norway on jstor. ecology and society 17(4) 46. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-05142-170446 https://doi.org/10.5751/es-05142-170446 250 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections benediktsson, k. (2014) nature in the ‘neoliberal laboratory’. dialogues in human geography 4(2) 141–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820614536340 berkes, f. & ross, h. (2013) community resilience: toward an integrated approach. society and natural resources 26(1) 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2012.736605 biermann, m., hillmer-pegram, k., knapp, c. n. & hum, r. e. (2015) approaching a critical turn? a content analysis of the politics of resilience in key bodies of resilience literature. resilience 4(2) 59-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2015.1094170 cretney, r. (2014) resilience for whom? emerging critical geographies of socio-ecological resilience. geography compass 8(9) 627–640. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12154 dornelles, a. z., boyd, e., nunes, r. j., asquith, m., boonstra, w. j., delabre, i. & oliver, t. h. (2020) towards a bridging concept for undesirable resilience in social-ecological systems. global sustainability 3(e20). https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.15 gassen, n. s. & heleniak, t. (2019) the nordic population in 2040 – analysis of past and future demographic trends. nordregio report 2019:6. https://doi.org/10.30689/r2019:6.1403-2503 hastings, c., wortley, l., ryan, r. & grant, b. (2016) community expectations for the role of local government in regional australia: meeting the challenges of ‘slow burn’. the australasian journal of regional studies 22(1) 158–180. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.135217916646354 hornborg, a. (2013) revelations of resilience: from the ideological disarmament of disaster to the revolutionary implications of (p)anarchy. international policies, practices and discourses 1(2) 116–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.797661 joseph, j. (2013) resilience as embedded neoliberalism: a governmentality approach. resilience 1(1) 38–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.765741 kokorsch, m. (2018) mapping resilience – coastal communities in iceland. phd dissertation, faculty of life and environmental sciences, university of iceland. https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/877 kokorsch, m. & benediktsson, k. (2018) where have all the people gone? the limits of resilience in coastal communities. norsk geografisk tidsskrift – norwegian journal of geography 72(2) 97–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2018.1450289 kristinsson, g. h. (2018) the icelandic power structure revisited. veftímaritið stjórnmál og stjórnsýsla/ icelandic review of politics and administration 14(1) 1–34. https://doi.org/10.13177/irpa.a.2018.14.1.1 olsson, l., jerneck, a., thoren, h., persson, j. & o’byrne, d. (2015) why resilience is unappealing to social science: theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific use of resilience. science advances 1(4) e1400217. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400217 phelan, l., henderson-sellers, a. & taplin, r. (2013) the political economy of addressing the climate crisis in the earth system: undermining perverse resilience. new political economy 18(2) 198–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2012.678820 robinson, g. m. & carson, d. a. (2016) resilient communities: transitions, pathways and resourcefulness. geographical journal 182(2) 114–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12144 samband íslenskra sveitarfélaga (n.d.) sveitarfélög á íslandi árið 1950. <https://www.samband.is/wpcontent/uploads/2022/08/sameining-sveitarfelaga-1950-2026.pdf> 20.10.2022. scott, m. (2013) resilience: a conceptual lens for rural studies? geography compass 7(9) 597–610. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12066 statistics iceland (2019) classification of localities by size 1991–2019 by localities, year and division. <https://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/ibuar/ibuar__mannfjoldi__2_byggdir__byggdakjarnareldra/ man03500.px/table/tableviewlayout1/?rxid=401acda3-a29f-48a8-b728-26cc94e7fbe6> 18.10.2022. wilson, g. a. (2012) community resilience, globalization, and transitional pathways of decision-making. geoforum 43(6) 1218–1231. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.03.008 wilson, g. a. (2017) ‘constructive tensions’ in resilience research: critical reflections from a human geography perspective. the geographical journal 184(1) 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12232 yamamoto, d. (2011) regional resilience: prospects for regional development research. geography compass 5(10) 723–736. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00448.x þorsteinsson, f., jónsson, g., magnúsdóttir, r., jónsdóttir, l. & þórisson, k. (2019) iceland and the fourth industrial revolution. committee report. government of iceland, prime minister's office. <https:// www.government.is/library/01-ministries/prime-ministrers-office/fjorda-idnbyltingin-skyrsla-enska_ hq.pdf> 17.10.2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820614536340 https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2012.736605 https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2015.1094170 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12154 https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.15 https://doi.org/10.30689/r2019:6.1403-2503 https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.135217916646354 https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.797661 https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.765741 https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11815/877 https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2018.1450289 https://doi.org/10.13177/irpa.a.2018.14.1.1 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1400217 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2012.678820 https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12144 https://www.samband.is/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/sameining-sveitarfelaga-1950-2026.pdf https://www.samband.is/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/sameining-sveitarfelaga-1950-2026.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12066 https://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/ibuar/ibuar__mannfjoldi__2_byggdir__byggdakjarnareldra/man03500.px/table/tableviewlayout1/?rxid=401acda3-a29f-48a8-b728-26cc94e7fbe6 https://px.hagstofa.is/pxen/pxweb/en/ibuar/ibuar__mannfjoldi__2_byggdir__byggdakjarnareldra/man03500.px/table/tableviewlayout1/?rxid=401acda3-a29f-48a8-b728-26cc94e7fbe6 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.03.008 https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12232 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00448.x https://www.government.is/library/01-ministries/prime-ministrers-office/fjorda-idnbyltingin-skyrsla-enska_hq.pdf https://www.government.is/library/01-ministries/prime-ministrers-office/fjorda-idnbyltingin-skyrsla-enska_hq.pdf https://www.government.is/library/01-ministries/prime-ministrers-office/fjorda-idnbyltingin-skyrsla-enska_hq.pdf multiple meanings and boundaries of growth in shrinking regions in east and north finland urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa119537 doi: 10.11143/fennia.119537 multiple meanings and boundaries of growth in shrinking regions in east and north finland maija halonen halonen, m. (2022) multiple meanings and boundaries of growth in shrinking regions in east and north finland. fennia 200(2) 120–136. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119537 growth stands out as a key development object in contemporary green economy policies. it is particularly interesting in the nordic context such as in east and north finland, where many regions are rich in natural resources, but also shrinking and lagging. therefore, their regional development is simultaneously framed by an expected sustainability transition that alternates between green growth and degrowth agendas, and the socio-economic phenomenon of shrinkage. this article examines how growth is understood and framed among regional development actors, with special interest placed on different meanings, possible critics, and the boundaries of growth. the interviewed actors are positioned as intermediaries who possess special knowledge regarding regional development. the interviews show that the understanding of growth in this context requires various framings that combine global, regional, and local perspectives on sustainable development, as well as the burdens of shrinking and lagging regions balanced against cohesive and inclusive promises of green growth. the hegemonic frame is approached through a lens of green growth, yet the shrinking population remains in the background. growth appears as a favoured means to tackle societal problems, which reflects a missionoriented goal setting. critical statements are directed at growth policies and funding instruments that do not seem to promote cohesive and inclusive growth. the clearest boundary for growth relates to nature, but it is far too early to make interpretations on an intentional degrowth agenda. from the regional actors’ perspective, setting boundaries for growth in a context of long-term shrinkage, sparse population, and extensive natural surroundings seems trivial. handling the peripheries’ societal problems related to shrinkage and their struggle for resources appears as the more relevant mission that also requires growth in various forms. keywords: regional development, socio-economic shrinkage, growth, sustainability, green economy, natural resources maija halonen (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8265-5606), department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, finland. e-mail: maija.halonen@uef.fi © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119537 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8265-5606 mailto:maija.halonen@uef.fi fennia 200(2) (2022) 121maija halonen introduction the current national policy programs in finland follow european and global policies centred around growth and sustainability objectives (unep 2011; ec 2019; finnish government 2019, 2021). the typical claim is that the green economy could be used to address ecological or social crises and challenges by way of increased efficiency and innovations that also create new growth (oecd 2011; jacobs 2012; dale et al. 2016; hickel & kallis 2020). similar growth and sustainability objectives are embraced in regional policies such as the smart specialisation policies of the european union (eu) (e.g. mccann & soete 2020). for example, the joint smart specialisation strategy of east and north finland (enf) (2019, 1) states: “the sustainable use of natural resources and smart technological solutions promote growth and well-being in the entire east and north finland”. growth appears as a fundamental part of any development objectives typically phrased as ‘green growth’ under the ‘green economy’. the promotion of growth is an interesting objective for regions such as east and north finland for two reasons. firstly, these regions are rich in terms of natural resources due to which green growth appears as a promising direction for development. secondly, many municipalities within these regions are lagging in terms of economy, and shrinking in terms of demography, which highlights the need for alternative development trajectories. to understand the context in which the regional actors are promoting growth requires taking into account both sides: valuable natural resources and deep shrinkage. shrinkage is deep, firstly, because the economic downturn and deep unemployment due to structural changes has been a long time, even decades in some cases (andreasson et al. 2020; ec 2021; makkonen et al. 2022). most are also demographically shrinking in terms of their population that are ageing and becoming increasingly centralised (grunfelder & roto 2013; roto 2013; jokinen & cuadrado 2020). centralisation manifests as growing urbanisation in regional centres and their surroundings, while extensive sparsely populated areas are shrinking (helminen et al. 2020). a relevant framework for shrinkage can be determined through the observations of similar nordic rural or relatively small urban patterns (syssner 2020). the multidimensionality of growth is highly interesting because regional development is simultaneously framed by the socio-economic phenomenon of shrinkage, and an expected sustainability transition that fluctuates between green growth and degrowth agendas. the question of growth as a prevailing development agenda is discussed in literature on shrinkage (e.g. reverda et al. 2018; syssner 2020) and sustainable development (e.g. dale et al. 2016; hoffman 2016; sandberg et al. 2019), but rarely presents their interrelation with regional development (donner-amnell 2020). this is identified as a research gap, which this paper seeks to fill. growth itself is an essential research focus in regional and economic geography, including several approaches to growth (capello 2019). the multidimensionality of growth has been manifested in outputs based on theorisation, a synthesis of research findings, and the empirical measurement of growth (e.g. makkonen & inkinen 2015; capasso et al. 2019; capello 2019; coenen & morgan 2020). however, qualitative, contextualised and actor-based approaches have received less attention, although they are crucial for creating knowledge on the different frames that shape regional growth tendencies. this paper contributes to regional growth research by scrutinising the qualitative interpretations that concern the reasoning and questioning of growth in a specific nordic context of shrinking resource regions. the main question that the paper sets out to explore is, how regional development actors understand and frame growth, specifically in relation with regional development, shrinkage and natural resources. my interest is on the different meanings, normative statements, possible critics, and boundaries of growth. the interviewed development actors are seen here as regional intermediaries who are presumed to have unique but wide-ranging knowledge and perceptions on regional development in this specific context. therefore, i expect them to provide different types of framings, which reveal the multidimensional meanings of growth. as a means to understand the discourses of development, analysis of frames enables the assessment of the situations or circumstances in which growth is presented (flanagan et al. 2021). 122 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper growth, sustainability, and shrinkage in regional development towards green and inclusive growth? in general, growth appears as a favourable target for regional development, and a new growth path is seen as a sign of renewing the development (martin & sunley 2015; grillitsch & sotarauta 2018; mackinnon et al. 2019). in modern theories, growth refers to an increase in the production capacity of a region and its ability to maintain the increase, which is usually achieved by high levels of competitiveness and innovation (capello 2019). the interest and debates have typically concerned different sources of growth, and the role of technology, markets, institutions, knowledge and diversification in the promotion of growth (farole et al. 2011; mccann & ortega-argilés 2015; ketterer & rodríguez-pose 2016; balland & rigby 2017; dall’erba & fang 2017). recently, increasing interest on the combination of environmental and economic perspectives, and the role of green economy as a desirable potential, has occurred. for rural-like regions, potential appears through their natural endowments and specialisation in resource-based industries that are seen as crucial for the transition to a low-carbon economy (oecd 2020a). however, the form that green economy should take and how it should be promoted remains unclear (gibbs & o’neill 2017). capasso and others (2019) have identified the conditions that influence green growth. according to this synthesis, skills, technologies, markets, policies, and institutions reflect the basic conditions for any economic growth, whereas the availability of natural resources and economic feasibility, due to transport distances, influence specifically the promotion of green growth. in addition, questions whether growth is green anymore and when the ‘planetary boundaries’ will be crossed are raised (rockström et al. 2009, also capasso et al. 2019). thus, a very basic question has remained the same since the 1970s, as to when the limits of growth will be reached if global growth trends of industrialisation and resource depletion continue their current trajectory (meadows et al. 1972, 23). against this, green growth has understandably faced criticism, and has been presented as “a project with a utopian charge” which allows “business as usual” to continue (dale et al. 2016, 1, 19). the climate change mitigation agenda under the prevailing gross domestic product (gdp) growth paradigm and finding sustainable renewable energy sources to compensate fossil energy have been seen as highly problematic (hoffman 2016). according to the degrowth agenda, the only sustainable way to harness the environmental crisis is the managed decline of fossil fuel production, and a reduction in natural resource use through diminished production and consumption (sandberg et al. 2019; eaton 2021). in all, green growth is full of struggles between tackling the environmental crisis and social inequity while still boosting economic growth (parr 2016), which in rural regions are seen as three interdependent objectives (oecd 2020a). the struggle appears when assessing the justice of the distribution of social, economic, and environmental costs or benefits resulting from green growth (parr 2016; ciplet & harrison 2020). socio-economic (in)equity is also a critical approach employed for assessing the circumstances in which growth is acceptable or unacceptable. this question is typically raised when assessing whether and to what extent poorer societies (most commonly referring to the developing south) should have an acceptable right to boost their growth over richer societies (mostly referring the global north) that have remarkably accelerated the environmental problems (hoffman 2016). the idea that some regions would have more acceptable rights to strive towards growth than others is interesting in the geographical context of this paper, although the gap between lagging and more prosperous regions in finland is nothing compared to the gap between the global south and north. in the oecd (2020a) report on rural development, the just transition is seen referring to a development which contributes to job creation and social justice, which for example in rural resource regions can be promoted by finding new ways to add value to natural resources. another question is how well the current economic environment enables and creates possibilities for lagging regions to grow. smart specialisation1 has been raised as a major driving concept through which innovation-led growth and cohesion between regions should be achieved, which necessitates the promotion of the economic development of weaker regions in particular (mccann & ortegaargilés 2015). however, hassink and gong (2019) note that exemplary cases of smart specialisation tend to represent structurally strong regions, rather than structurally weak regions. they conclude fennia 200(2) (2022) 123maija halonen that even if these strategies should promote the economies of structurally weak regions, they are incapable of doing so precisely due to their structures and institutional capacity, which in turn only deepens regional inequalities. as an example, depopulation is presented as a typical weak structure, which has resulted in difficulties in entrepreneurial discovery (ghinoi et al. 2021). towards a normative turn through new ends, missions, and modesty? mccann and soete (2020, 19) argue that if smart specialisation would work as a “smart specialisation strategy for sustainable and inclusive growth”, a shift in logic is necessary. according to them, any toplevel guidance (including funding) should be more closely linked to the central objectives of the eu’s growth strategy green deal “that aims to transform the eu into a fair and prosperous society” (ec 2019, 2). this would mean the framing of innovations and economic growth through their intermediate role, which reflects a shift towards mission-oriented policies (mazzucato 2018; wanzenböck et al. 2020). when taking the mission-oriented approach, the promoted innovations or industrial performance are not seen as end objectives but means to tackle economic, social, or environmental challenges (wanzenböck et al. 2020) and ways to respond to social needs often framed by ideological norms and values (coenen & morgan 2020). climate change is a grand challenge that affects all societies. yet flaws in sustainable and inclusive growth and demographic challenges, such as ageing (mazzucato 2018; coenen & morgan 2020), are of particular concern for regions examined in this study. these problems are regarded as ‘wicked’, meaning that they are complex and interconnected, and thus difficult to handle (mazzucato 2018). although many societal problems are globally shared, their contextuality and place-sensitivity regarding their regional and local manifestations should be noticed (wanzenböck & frenken 2020). furthermore, the nature, identification and significance of these problems vary because places and regions approach environmental and societal problems through specific contextual frames (flanagan et al. 2021). hospers and syssner (2018) present an illustrative example of how shrinkage appears as a problem in nordic peripheries, and how its meaning can vary only by changing the perspective. as they note, many shrinking peripheries can provide social services only with the assistance of an equalisation system of funding, which allocates resources from prosperous to lagging regions. when changing a frame of social services to one of regional development, and a frame of equality to one of effectiveness, funding resources tend to be allocated to the most successful places in terms of their existing or expected growth (ibid.). as a consequence, the described approach of growth-favouring allocation seems to widen the gap between prosperous and lagging regions, rather than promote inclusiveness of regions. the problems and rhetoric concerning shrinkage appear highly similar, whether seen in economic or population terms. despite arguments in favour of degrowth, it remains a marginal perspective, whereas green growth has been given a dominant role in handling environmental and societal challenges (sandberg et al. 2019). growth, as the leading principle, manifests success, progress, development and opportunities, while the idea of shrinking portrays its undesirable opposite, raising images of decline, regression and failure (reverda et al. 2018; capello 2019). therefore, the strategies for countershrinkage that result in partial growth (see kotilainen et al. 2015) can be problematic, since the possible signs of renewing development stay hidden under the shroud of shrinkage (halonen 2019). no easy way for accepting and adapting to shrinkage has appeared, although it has been identified as the most suitable long-term strategy for urban and rural areas (hospers 2014; syssner 2020). in some cases, shrinking may only be a transition phase towards a yet smaller but stable and better condition (humer 2018). as reverda, hermans and maurer (2018) argue, regrowing ‘smaller’ may in suitable circumstances lead to a flexible and sustainable status, which requires a reasonable, pioneering spirit from the actors driving the development. but even if such a spirit may arise among a group of actors, values like modesty seem overlooked in the prevailing culture of growth (reverda et al. 2018), and concurrently traditional instruments seem unsuited for non/degrowth strategies (humer 2018). as a further consideration, questions like what regional value actually is, how it is framed, and by whom need investigation (see uyarra et al. 2019). 124 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper framing through the interviews of east and north finland description of the empirical area the context of east and north finland (enf) exemplifies nordic regions that have been defined as peripheral and sparsely populated for a long time. east finland has even been referred to as the most extreme case of dispersed settlement patterns in north europe (gløersen et al. 2006). in total, enf consists of seven provinces (maakunta): central ostrobothnia, northern ostrobothnia, lapland, kainuu, northern savonia, north karelia, and south savo. population and economic activities are highly concentrated in regional urban centres, their surroundings, and a few local centres in rural areas, while the major part of the regions is classified sparsely populated areas with the lowest category of economic activity (fig. 1; helminen et al. 2020). fig. 1. spatial structure of the regions (maakunta) and regional centres of east and north finland. (data sources: syke 2013; nls & ek 2021). fennia 200(2) (2022) 125maija halonen enf (2019) regions have identified an ageing population, economic restructuring, the supply of skilled labour, and the availability of services as common challenges in remote areas. although many characteristics are common for all the regions, there is some variation between them. especially, northern ostrobothnia and occasionally central ostrobothnia stand out as exceptions when comparing the development or structures of the examined regions (also makkonen et al. 2022). for example, while most of the enf regions have depopulated for decades, in northern ostrobothnia the population has increased (fig. 2). in terms of elderly dependency rate, ageing is less severe in northern and central ostrobothnia compared to other regions in the enf (oecd 2020b). variation exists also within these exceptional regions, where better economic performance and dense population structure concentrate especially in the western and coastal surroundings of the regional centres of oulu and kokkola, while the deeper shrinkage is mainly associated with sparsely populated inland areas (makkonen et al. 2022). according to recent population projections, in all enf regions, most municipalities will lose people, except for the regional urban centres, their surrounding municipalities, and other individual exceptions (sánchez gassen & heleniak 2019). fig. 2. population by region (maakunta) in 1990–2020 (source: statistics finland 2022). interview data of regional development actors the data is based on interviews with 20 directors or managers in regional or subregional development organisations. the interviewees are responsible for broad regional or subregional development. ‘regional’ refers to organisations (interviews 1h1–1h7) established by the municipalities of the whole province, and ‘subregional’ to organisations (interviews 2h1–2h13) commonly established by a few neighbouring municipalities, or exceptionally by one municipality. the interviews were carried out in 2020–2021 and the data covers all regions in enf (as in fig. 1), including at least one regional and one subregional interviewee. the interviews were conducted in finnish, and quotes have been first translated by me and then proofread by a professional proofreader. the interviews were semi-structured according to the main themes of the research, but specific questions were tailored on the basis of the region of the interviewee (e.g. due to the type of economic or population structure, or location). half of the themes and questions focused on general perspectives regarding regional development and the rest were more closely connected to smart 126 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper specialisation strategies (addressing the whole of enf and individually by region). growth was raised as part of several themes by the interviewees, but issues regarding favourability and the boundaries of growth were asked by the interviewer. i see interviewees as development actors who possess special professional expertise and knowledge regarding the development of their regions, which is why i expect that their statements have a high level of meaningfulness and credibility in their regional context (see van lente et al. 2020). i also regard interviewees as intermediaries due to their ‘in-betweenness’ in different scales, arenas, and actors (also medd & marvin 2007; moss 2009). more precisely, i understand them as translators of the strategies, providers of guidance, and supporters of innovations and funding, and thence crucial links between policy and practice (howells 2006; medd & marvin 2007; inkinen & suorsa 2010). respectively, i expect them to be able to assess a range of alternatives, and provide normative values and judgements (kivimaa et al. 2019; flanagan et al. 2021), which are valuable for the framing analysis. framing through discourses the statements of the interviewees are seen here as composing of discourses, which construct the objects of knowledge, conceptual frameworks, and the relations between them (fairclough 1995, 39). typically, hegemonic discourse dominates the way of thinking, and any challenge by alternative discourses has been difficult (shepperd 2000). however, through framing, development actors may link elements of development together, set goals, and reveal contesting approaches (benford & snow 2000). in practice, framing can include the bridging of different yet related frames (e.g. lagging and shrinking), the clarification of existing values or beliefs (e.g. values behind the (un)favourable growth), and the transformation of old meanings or the creation of new ones (e.g. meanings beyond growth in terms of gdp) (ibid.). by flanagan, uyarra and wanzenböck (2021), framing the problem is expected to clarify its complexity, and to reveal the boundaries and expectations of what should be assessed and legitimated. i understand describing, linking, and bridging as a part of the analytical framing, whereas setting goals, contesting, valuing, and statements on how things should be as a part of the normative framing (rothman 2011). according to syssner (2020), both frames should at least be considered and adjusted, and in the interviews, the normative framing is occasionally clearly expressed (e.g. the justification of (non)growth), but typically the goal or what is regarded as favourable is presented more implicitly. the analysis is based on sections and expressions of the interviews which focus either on growth exclusively, or wider approaches relevant to growth. the phrases, sentences and paragraphs of the interviews formulated the text units for the analysis, and were organised according to the following analysis process (see table 1, the quotes from one interview are used as an example). in phase 1, the text units were divided under two main frames: those expressing meanings of growth, and others that expressed its boundaries. in phase 2, the text units under the main frames were organised further into subframes according to the following framing analysis: 1) hegemonic descriptions (under the growth frame), 2) practical bridging and necessary reasoning (under the growth and boundaries frames), 3) statements of justification, inclusion and/or justice (under the growth and boundaries frames), 4) questioning of growth (under the boundaries frame). finally, these subframes were named based on the content of the interviews. multiple meanings and boundaries through different frames meanings of favourable growth hegemonic green growth frame. the green growth agenda is well adopted and taken as an acceptable norm among the regional development actors. the green deal of the eu is explicitly presented as a possibility for growth in regions that hold rich natural resources in terms of wide forests, clean water, arable land, and minerals. in the interviews, the boost in forest bioeconomy (any kinds of forest utilisation but especially forest-related industries that can replace plastic products or fossil-based energy), is most commonly raised as a favourable basis for new growth, while the fennia 200(2) (2022) 127maija halonen table 1. the process of frame analysis. phase 1 main frames meanings of favourable growth practical and normative boundaries of growth phase 2 subframes hegemonic descriptions: the green deal of the eu… it’s very good for us [for the region] …forest, food, and water are our advantages now and in the future in finland and globally… top technologies and innovation platforms are developed based on them. (1h1) -> hegemonic green growth frame bridging and reasoning: the starting point for our economic development is that when turnover increases, the smart solutions increase, and the well-being and wealth of people increase. then we would be in quite a good state. (1h1) -> virtuous cycle growth frame bridging and reasoning: new things are going on in the field of the wood industry … which positively influences our otherwise problematic economic development and loss of other activities. … this is the kind of development that when one field declines, another grows. (1h1) -> (re)balancing growth frame statements of justification: we could benefit from smart specialisation if we could use natural resources better without destroying them more. … with r&d and otherwise increasing the product range, which would increase the value added and thence turn over, rather than just cutting [more] wood. (1h1) -> spatially inclusive and sustainable growth frame statements of justification: it is a dangerous policy in a country like finland if the state only invests in three, six, or nine centres. then the state turns its back on other centres and their potential. (1h1) -> spatially unjust growth frame questioning growth: we are modest in a way. … we have little willingness to grow and much more settle for getting a livelihood. … the kind of willingness to grow and develop could repair the regional development, well-being, and vitality. … this mentality is different in eastern than western finland. (1h1) -> growth boundaries for shrinking regions are trivial frame questioning growth: [without global assessment, the risk] is that no environmental benefit will be gained. … e.g., if cuttings of wood will be decreased in finland and sweden, it does not help for climate change if they are increased in brazil. (1h1) -> global growth boundaries are necessary frame 128 fennia 200(2) (2022) utilisation of other resources is more bound to the specific conditions and characteristics of the regions. for example, arable land is mentioned especially in the western and southern regions of the enf, clean water specifically in inland water areas, and minerals as scattered spots in different regions according to their existence. even the sparsity of population and wide land areas are presented as enabling characteristics for new growth potential, which among others, enables the growth of wind parks for energy production and a non-refined utilisation of nature such as recreation and well-beingrelated use more widely. in the interviews, wind parks were mainly raised in western parts and in some inland parts of the enf. more recently, the interest and willingness to boost wind power have increased, and this has induced a debate on the spatially unjust potentials to benefit from space and wind since the construction of wind-turbines is limited in some parts next to the eastern border area due to defence (radar) reasons. although most references to green growth are related to possibilities that might increase competitiveness, using the strengths and specific capacities of the regions, the green deal is also seen as favourable since it is connected to the aims of cohesion and inclusiveness between the regions. as described by the development actors, in an ideal scenario, research, innovations and economic activities assist in managing the global challenges regarding climate change and energy. by being part of that development, the enf regions are expected to get a share from that green growth. exemplifying quote: the main idea is sustainable development, sustainable growth. […] of course, when someone produces solar panels for energy, the production and transport to the customers causes more pollution than if they were not produced at all. however, if those solar panels replace more polluting sources of energy, their use will [result in] savings or be more sustainable. […] when looking at our strategy for smart specialisation and the growth it pursues, i would consider it seeks to promote growth that is based on the principles of sustainable development. (1h3) virtuous cycle growth frame. in this frame, regional and subregional development actors bridge multiple growth goals together. they largely repeat typically favourable forms of regional growth, such as turnover and tax revenue. these are most often bridged with growth of other objectives, like competitiveness, internationalisation, innovation, investment, earnings, and the regional economy in terms of employment, population, services, or development in general. preferably, growth can refer to both quantitative and qualitive conditions such as the wellbeing of people in general, specific groups like inhabitants and workers, or the environment. the interviewees stress that some kind of change is ongoing in the relations of growth and development, and point out that it may also require the abandonment of some previous values. however, qualitative growth may be difficult to measure and set clear values for. at this point, change is expressed more like an early change in mindset rather than a turning away from the hegemonic growth orientation. in the expressed framing deployed in the discourses, the growth of turnover appears mostly as a means to the other goals such as employment or services. to some extent, growth is framed through microlevel development by concentrating on the ability of businesses to survive in global competition. more commonly, growth is framed through the whole regional system, which is seen as requiring growth from many linking aspects, in order to achieve a positive cycle of development. the favourable growth conditions remain close to myrdal’s ‘virtuous cycle’ that is reached by the ‘cumulative causation’ of ‘positive feedbacks’ (see fujita 2007; pressman 2014). in this frame, no singular mode of growth rises above another, and all are a crucial for the system to function, develop, and to be vital. exemplifying quote: if we think of most top businesses, the aim is the economic growth of the business […] because, in the long term, it influences the lower scale, too. […] if we consider the aims of smart specialisation, the growth aim also concerns the increase in innovation and wider development activities, rather than the growth of a single area. not only the growth of the economy, but in the general strengthening of the development of our regions. so our innovation structures and business actions would be more robust. through those, our population base would strengthen because our attraction would be better, and we could gain a more [suitable] population which could then strengthen the innovation activities, livelihoods, and other things. the strengthening of a kind of circle in which every sector will grow and become more robust. not just one, but all together. (1h4) fennia 200(2) (2022) 129maija halonen spatially inclusive and sustainable growth frame. regional and subregional development actors seem to justify green growth by inclusive regional development yet not always explicitly. instead, the way that expectations are expressed or the wider context infer the idea. the most striking growth expectations focus on the value added of natural resources, which is presented as a way to balance the distribution of the economic value gained from natural resources. compared to prosperous regions, the examined regions appear as lagging resource frontiers since they mainly provide resources, and the majority of the further processing is executed and the value added gained outside the region. the expectations towards the value added of production are hoped to be increased by adding further processing of the main commodities, and also the side streams typical of an industrial-based circle economy. according to the interviewees, more support should be directed towards the effective use of natural resources and the increase of turnover rather than the sales of the wood. thus, these statements reproduce the approaches to green growth as a solution for socio-economic challenges, without deepening environmental crises. value added is rarely presented as the end goal itself, but as a way to improve human skills, employment, earnings and the regional economy of the weaker regions, which further supports the provision of services and the wellbeing of citizens. therefore, the overall mission seems as a struggle of a ‘lagging resource hinterland’. in regional centres, the mission appears surprisingly similar, although they have a relatively good grounding in terms of innovation potential, skills, and the overall economic and demographic structure. to some extent, smart specialisation as a policy tool was regarded as a way to promote such goals and actions. however, critical voices towards smart specialisation were also pointed out – especially from the side of the most peripheral subregional interviewees who regarded their institutional power and type of economic actors as too minor or weak to boost economic development. against this background, the smart specialisation does not necessarily balance but deepens the regional inequalities (also hassink & gong 2019). while some regions may already present examples of concrete steps regarding new green growth, others express only a wish to change the deep vicious cycle followed by the long-term regression. exemplifying quote: the increase of value added, so more money would stay and bring benefits for the regional economy. so not only the raw material would exit, but also value added products. it would make more sense economically, but also from perspectives [such as] employment, more employees, and more educated and skilled persons. […] if we develop further in general, we could get more jobs which require higher skills, and this would diversify the employment structure of our region further. (2h1) practical and normative boundaries of growth (re)balancing growth frame. in the interviews, specific growth needs are commonly identified when crucial pieces are missing, which in turn prevents the balanced function of the system and ultimately impacts the wellbeing of the inhabitants. ageing is a typical characteristic related to the need to achieve growth. the growth of a suitable workforce is needed in social and health services to fill the many jobs that have become available due to retirement, and to boost the growth of turnover to increase tax euros needed for the provision of services. the growth of suitable, specialised and well skilled employees is also needed to meet the demand for labour in new growing businesses, to compensate for employment losses due to economic restructuring. yet the overall growth of the population or economic activities are not necessarily presented as the main goal. the processes of slowing population decline or job losses and balancing the dependence ratio are regarded as being in rather a good state already. however, if the population grows, restrained growth is seen as more favourable than experiencing a wave of new inhabitants. nevertheless, the declining population structure is still presented as a severe problem for regional development, and as a boundary for economic growth in the long term. exemplifying quote: when populations decline, the amount and volume of the services diminish. the big question concerns […] social and health [services] because here it is a sick [elderly] population which increases by age structure. so, more care and health care will be needed in the future, but our 130 fennia 200(2) (2022) other age groups are decreasing. there will not be enough workforce for social and health services. the option is to get a workforce from outside or abroad, but will there be enough money for that? or will efficiency, robots, remote technology, and other technological solutions solve it? (1h2) spatially unjust growth frame. the most critical framing regarding the skewed growth-centric views relates to prevailing policies that seem to favour large size and expected growth numbers in terms of population, users, or economic measures. through this framing, the interviewees present that the allocation of funding for investments, infrastructure and innovation activities are not completely inline with the principles of cohesive and inclusive growth policies (e.g. direct national investments, funding sources of the eu and business finland, or loans from finnvera). instead, the allocation funding resources are seen as an example of wider processes that polarise and increase disparities. according to the most critical interviewees, the purpose of the allocations should not be based on the regional position only but be directed towards those investments and actions that are realistic to execute, and which support favourable regional development. especially, the location in a shrinking region should not be regarded as a barrier for funding if the remaining criteria are otherwise fulfilled. in some circumstances, the funding criteria for innovation activities seem to favour the economic environment close to main research units, driven by high-tech industries, and possessing critical mass in terms of economic performance. these are typical of the biggest centres in finland and some of the regional centres in the enf. similar problems regarding the absence of critical mass seem to concern improvements in infrastructure that tend to follow higher centralisation and the amount of people and businesses, and thus the expected volume in traffic. paradoxically, the absence of critical mass may even be intentional if the aim is to develop nature-based tourism in a way that is also sustainable for the local environment – which mostly refers to a smaller number of people using nature such as walking, hiking, fishing, skiing, or something else. a problem arises if these tourist destinations need support for infrastructure or other purposes, and are considered too minor compared with mass tourism locations such as the biggest ski-based resorts in lapland or tourist centres in more dense or accessible destinations in southern finland. on the whole, some development actors argue that public funding should be better allocated to actions which reduce the barriers of regional development (namely in the lagging regions), instead of re-boosting the growth of regions which are already in a better position in terms of infrastructure, research centres, the market environment, or critical mass. exemplifying quote: it is a dangerous policy in a country like finland if the state only invests in three, six, or nine centres. then the state turns its back on other centres and their potential. i have described development potential from the perspective of our region, but it is also rather meaningful for the growth of finland. […] these r&d the investments for the innovations are really minor in regions like ours […] compared to [the so-called growth triangle of] tampere-turku-helsinki, with the weight in population and business volumes, investments are minor in the regions of east and north finland. this can easily escalate into a vicious cycle. […] the smart specialisation is needed especially in these kinds of regions which do not have everything, but which can be specialised based on their strengths, and debottlenecking issues which prevent strengthening. for example, [the capital city] helsinki does not need [extra support] because it already has diversified education and research institutes supported by the state. (1h1) growth boundaries for shrinking regions are trivial frame. this framing emphasised a regioncentric point of view on setting possible boundaries. development actors pondered whether limits should be set for growth or not, and how relevant the question is for regions which have been lagging and shrinking for such a long time. these statements aptly serve to unwrap the multidimensional interrelation of shrinkage and sustainable development, and their peculiar manifestations in the studied regions. the amount of people and human activities were regarded minor compared to the wide natural environment where any limits for growth were yet to be achieved (or even in the near future), even if growth would occur in some fields. these types of answers were slightly more common for the regions in eastern rather than western finland. these regions were thought to be deeply lagging, shrinking, and sparsely populated which is why the development actors were more concerned about the modesty of economic actors and their possible unwillingness to pursue growth, rather than the need to set boundaries for growth. in fennia 200(2) (2022) 131maija halonen terms of a cultural turn towards nongrowth, this modesty could even be interpreted as a favourable condition for sustainable development. instead, modesty manifests mainly as a hindrance for new green growth and as a mark of a lagging region. especially in those regions where regression has been severe and has lasted for a long time, even imagining the boundaries for growth appeared to be trivial. exemplifying quote: i would like to think that we will raise, and our vitality will grow. i would not like to think we will only decline because we have been declining, and if we go with the flow, we will certainly decline. [but] if we fight against it – now there are signals and a spirit that the direction of development could improve a bit. […] we probably do not have boundaries for growth in this kind of region as the basic industrial activities are rather small, and we do not have any massive industries. (2h3) global growth boundaries are necessary frame. when changing the framing from a lagging and shrinking regional perspective to a global perspective, setting boundaries for growth appeared highly relevant and as a norm among the development actors who reflected different scales of growth and related boundaries. while they could begin their responses with the rather jargon-laden rhetoric typical of development actors, the deeper content became explicit as they linked boundaries to concrete examples. the jargon manifests as loose references to the triangle of social, economic, and environmental sustainability, or to the general theorems of ppp (profit, people, planet), which were felt as important guiding aims in any development and economic actions, although they were difficult to achieve. the development actors’ motives varied depending on the approach taken. from an economycentric perspective, the image of the region would suffer significant damage if its natural resources would be used beyond their limits. from an environmental perspective, the clearest boundaries were related to nature that is crucial for the region. although the development actors were favourably disposed towards forest bioeconomy in general, they would still set boundaries for new mills and other operations even if these could lead to an overuse of the forest either locally or totally. lessons were learned from the mining operations in talvivaara (a mining area in kainuu) that escalated a nature crisis in 2011–2013 due to serious leaks in the gypsum sediment basin and the pollution of water (sairinen et al. 2017). this type of nature catastrophe seems to be firmly in mind when any boundaries for activities close to fundamentally important water areas were considered. the setting of exact boundaries turned out to be outside their area of expertise, however, the development actors argued that especially in these types of important water cases, the issues of economic growth should be valued below environmental values, and boundaries should be set based on that perception. similarly, the continuous growth of mass tourism was regarded as an economic activity for which boundaries should be set for the sake of nature preservation. the interviewed development actors would set boundaries at least for the construction of massive tourist centres near fragile nature areas, in favour of the growth of visitors by an extension of the seasons. overall, boundaries seemed difficult to set from a regional development perspective, although it was seen necessary to do so. exemplifying quote: globally, the boundaries of growth were already crossed quite some time ago, maybe since the 1970s or even earlier. if we now consume the natural resources of the world three times more than the carrying capacity of the globe, in principle, the boundaries of growth have been crossed everywhere. […] even economists have been asking what we will do with the endless growth if there is no planet where we can live. […] if i think of our top fields […] primary production, mining minerals and forestry need to match global criteria to an increasing extent in the future. (1h7) discussion on the complexities of multiple frames of analysis the understanding of growth in the context of shrinking regions and in the vicinity of natural resources requires framing that combines global, regional, and local perspectives on sustainable development, as well as the burdens of shrinking and lagging regions on one side, and cohesive and inclusive promises of green growth on the other. growth is explicitly framed through the lens of green growth, while the issues of a shrinking population remain in the background. in general, the hegemonic framing of green growth reproduces the discourses of prevailing policy agendas such as the green deal and national programmes (e.g. ec 2019; finnish government 2019, 2021), and growth-centric 132 fennia 200(2) (2022) views common among researchers in this field (e.g. martin & sunley 2015; grillitsch & sotarauta 2018; mackinnon et al. 2019). in the interviews, growth appears to be framed and favoured as a means to tackle societal problems and not only growing economic parameters, and thus resembles a process of mission-oriented goal setting (see mazzucato 2018; wanzenböck et al. 2020). the regional problems covered in this study reflect challenges typical of nordic sparsely populated regions, and the overall mission of the examined regions seems to be to change their position as a lagging and shrinking resource hinterland, through the means of green growth. whilst this study focused on nordic shrinkage and resource regions within the eu context, similar types of policy processes and mission settings can also be found from scotland where shrinkage and lagging regions are common phenomena (see scottish government 2022). so far, the realisations of green growth are in the very early stages, although the difficulties common for weaker regions are highlighted (also hassink & gong 2019). the interviewed development actors also offered critical statements regarding current growth policies and funding instruments, which in these cases do not seem to promote cohesive or inclusive growth. so far, the shift in logic and toplevel guidance towards a “smart specialisation strategy for sustainable and inclusive growth” (mccann & soete 2020, 19) appears unrealised as the implementation lacks a full consideration of local or regional characteristics and available resources. it is insufficient to balance the gap caused by other innovation or investment policies. framing through effectiveness is presented as a dominant way to allocate funding, but one which reasserts the gap between prosperous and weaker regions – thus affirming the findings of previous research (e.g. hospers & syssner 2018; hassink & gong 2019). as long as growth manifests the leading principles of success, progress, development and opportunities, shrinking decline reflects an undesirable opposite of growth, with regression and failure (reverda et al. 2018; capello 2019), and the examined regions seem to have no other option than to strive for growth in any form. favourable growth indicators though vary, from numeric changes in population, employment, and regional economy, to abstract and qualitative changes in knowledge, ways of acting, and wellbeing. growth may be seen as either total or partial when something is expected to grow, but simultaneously, something else may be expected to decline. depending on the type of reasoning, growth appeared as possible, plausible, or sometimes as wishful thinking that only reproduces the current growth-centric jargon. when assessing the relevance of growth, arguments wavered between necessary and unnecessary growth, which relates to balanced or imbalanced regional structures. herein, growth is having a clear value if it creates balance and supports continuity. from this framing, the end goal is a stable and better condition for the region rather than growth itself, which hints towards the idea of adapting to at least seeing the state as a smaller place, yet perhaps not so intentionally as hospers (2014) or humer (2018) have presented. shrinkage in terms of population, economy and employment loss were regarded as issues that raise boundaries and present a need for growth. the question of sustainable boundaries appears to be multidimensional in the context of lagging and shrinking regions, and reveals a political struggle which concerns conflicts between the environmental crisis, social equity, and economic growth (also parr 2016). through the frames of regional socio-economic equity, the justification for growth is surprisingly similar when compared to the acceptance of growth in poorer and richer societies (see hoffman 2016). the gap between the lagging and prosperous regions in finland cannot be compared with the gap between the poorer and richer societies globally, but the basis for argumentation is much the same. accordingly, the ultimate goal should be a cohesion and inclusiveness of the regions involved, and thus the growth of lagging regions appears to be more acceptable than the further growth of more prosperous areas. development actors also identify environmental crises as severe problems, and try to set boundaries for both general growth, as well as growth within their region. the clearest boundaries for growth in enf related to nature, which is crucial for the region. however, it is far too early to make any interpretations on intentional degrowth based on the research data. conclusions as a conclusion, i suggest that frame through which growth is approached and the specific context in which regional development takes place should be acknowledged when assessing the acceptability fennia 200(2) (2022) 133maija halonen and necessity of growth. whilst different viewpoints on growth and the questioning of its rationality manifest especially in the context of shrinking, sparsely populated, rural, and/or peripheral regions, the findings also reflect the need for a reconsideration of growth in the wider context to which these regions belong. growth does not fall easily between simplistic lines of good or bad growth, or (green) growth or degrowth, and further studies should consider when, where and under which circumstances growth could be regarded as a relatively justified necessity, and when it may not. more generally, growth appears as a vague concept which should be defined better in policies, and its conceptual flexibility in different contexts needs to be acknowledged. above all, the content of the growth should be comprehensively discussed, and carefully assess of the overall appropriateness of using growth instead of alternative concepts such as development, well-being or functional capability. notes 1 within the “cohesion policy of the european commission, smart specialisation is a place-based approach characterised by the identification of strategic areas for intervention based both on the analysis of the strengths and potential of the economy ... it is outward-looking and embraces a broad view of innovation…” (ec 2022). acknowledgements i would like to thank the kone foundation for funding this research [sixth cycle in the periphery, 29.11.2019], the interviewees for their valuable contributions, and the reviewers for their thoughtful comments. references andreasson, u, randall, l. & norlén, g. (2020) socioeconomic factors. in lundgren, a., randall, l. & norlén, g. (eds.) state of the nordic region 2020: wellbeing, health and digitalisation edition, 38–51. nordic council of ministers 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.6027/nord2020-052 balland, p.-a. & rigby, d. (2017) the geography of complex knowledge. economic geography 93(1) 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2016.1205947 benford, r. d. & snow, d. a. (2000) framing processes and social movements: an overview and assessment. annual review of sociology 26 611–639. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611 capasso, m., hansen, t. heiberg, j., klitkou, a. & steen, m. (2019) green growth – a synthesis of scientific findings. technological forecasting & social change 146 390–402. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.06.013 capello, r. (2019) space, growth and development: a historical perspective and recent advances. in capello, r. & nijkamp, p. (eds.) handbook of regional growth and development theories: revised and extended, 24–47. 2nd ed. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788970020.00008 ciplet, d. & harrison, j. l. (2020) transition tensions: mapping conflicts in movements for a just and sustainable transition. environmental politics 29 (3) 435–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1595883 coenen, l. & morgan, k. (2020) evolving geographies of innovation: existing paradigms, critiques and possible alternatives. norsk geografisk tidsskrift – norwegian journal of geography 74(1) 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2019.1692065 dale, g., mathai, m. v. & oliveira, j. a. p. d. (2016) introduction. in dale, g., mathai, m. v. & oliveira, j. a. p. d. (eds.) green growth: ideology, political economy and the alternatives, 1–19. zed books, london. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220553.0005 dall’erba, s. & fang, f. (2017) meta-analysis of the impact of european union structural funds on regional growth. regional studies 51(6) 822–832. https://10.1080/00343404.2015.1100285 donner-amnell, j. (2020) elinvoimaista ja kestävää kehitystä kasvuseutujen ulko-puolella? tapaustutkimukset jämtlannista ja kainuusta [vitality and sustainable development outside growth regions? case studies from jämtland, sweden and kainuu, finland]. terra 132(3) 115–131. https://doi.org/10.30677/terra.95473 eaton, e. (2021) approaches to energy transitions: carbon pricing, managed decline, and/or green new deal? geography compass 2021 15(2) e12554. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12554 http://dx.doi.org/10.6027/nord2020-052 https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2016.1205947 https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.06.013 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788970020.00008 https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1595883 https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2019.1692065 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220553.0005 https://doi.org/10.30677/terra.95473 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12554 134 fennia 200(2) (2022) ec [european commission] (2019) the european green deal sets out how to make europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050, boosting the economy, improving people’s health and quality of life, caring for nature, and leaving no one behind. press release 11.12.2019. <https://ec.europa.eu/ commission/presscorner/detail/e%20n/ip_19_6691> 6.6.2021. ec [european commission] (2021) internal market, industry, entrepreneurship and smes. northern and eastern finland. <https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/regional-innovation-monitor/baseprofile/northern-and-eastern-finland> 7.7.2021. ec [european commission] (2022) smart specialisation platform. what is smart specialisation? <https://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu/what-we-do> 24.11.2022. enf [east and north finland] (2019) east and north finland in industrial transition. smart specialisation strategy 2019–2023. <https://elmoenf.eu/smart-east-and-north-finland/> 20.5.2021. fairclough, n. (1995) critical discourse analysis: the critical study of language. longman, london & new york. farole, t., rodríguez-pose, a. & storper, m. (2011) cohesion policy in the european union: growth, geography, institutions. jcms: journal of common market studies 49(5) 1089–1111. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2010.02161.x finnish government (2019) programme of prime minister sanna marin’s government 2019. publications of the finnish government 2019 33. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-287-811-3 finnish government (2021) sustainable growth programme for finland. publications of the finnish government 2021 69. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-383-694-5 flanagan, k., uyarra, e. & wanzenböck, i. (2021) towards a problem-oriented regional industrial policy: possibilities for public intervention in framing, valuation and market creation. working paper. birkbeck, university of london, london. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2021.2016680 fujita, n. (2007) myrdal’s theory of cumulative causation. evolutionary and institutional economics review 3(2) 275–283. https://doi.org/10.14441/eier.3.275 ghinoi, s., steiner, b., makkonen, t. & hassink, r. (2021) smart specialisation strategies on the periphery: a data-triangulation approach to governance issues and practices. regional studies 55(3) 402–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2020.1791321 gibbs, d. & o’neill, k. (2017) future green economies and regional development: a research agenda. regional studies 51(1) 161–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2016.1255719 gløersen, e., dubois, a., copus, a. & schürmann, c. (2006) northern peripheral, sparsely populated regions in the european union and in norway. nordregio report 2006 2. grillitsch, m. & sotarauta, m. (2018) regional growth paths: from structure to agency and back. papers in innovation studies, paper no. 2018/01. centre for innovation, research and competence in the learning economy, lund university, lund. grunfelder, j. & roto, j. (2013) population ageing. in roto, j., grunfelder, j. & rispling, l. (eds.) state of the nordic region 2013, 23–30. nordregio report 2014:1. halonen, m. (2019) booming, busting – turning, surviving? socio-economic evolution and resilience of a forested resource periphery in finland. dissertation in social sciences and business studies 205. university of eastern finland, joensuu. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-61-3200-6 hassink, r. & gong, h. (2019) six critical questions about smart specialization. european planning studies 27(10) 2049–2065. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1650898 helminen, v., nurmio, k. & vesanen, s. (2020) kaupunki-maaseutu-alueluokitus 2018: paikkatietopohjaisen alueluokituksen päivitys [urban-rural classification]. suomen ympäristökeskuksen raportteja 21/2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10138/315440 hickel, j. & kallis, g. (2020) is green growth possible? new political economy 25(4) 469–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964 hoffman, u. (2016) can green growth really work? a reality check that elaborates on the true (socio-)economics of climate change. in dale, g., mathai, m. v. & oliveira, j. a. p. d. (eds.) green growth: ideology, political economy and the alternatives, 22–41. zed books, london. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220553.ch-001 hospers, g.-j. (2014) policy responses to urban shrinkage: from growth thinking to civic engagement. european planning studies 22(7) 1507–1523. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 hospers, g-j. & syssner, j. (2018) introduction urbanisation, shrinkage and (in)formality. in hospers, g-j. & syssner, j. (eds.) dealing with urban and rural shrinkage: formal and informal strategies, 9–16. regionen in europa, zürich. howells, j. (2006) intermediation and the role of intermediaries in innovation. research policy 35 715–728. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2006.03.005 humer, a. (2018) strategic spatial planning in shrinking regions. in hospers, g.-j. & syssner, j. (eds.) dealing with urban and rural shrinkage: formal and informal strategies, 73–86. regionen in europa; 5, zürich. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/e%20n/ip_19_6691 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/e%20n/ip_19_6691 https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/regional-innovation-monitor/base-profile/northern-and-eastern-finland https://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/regional-innovation-monitor/base-profile/northern-and-eastern-finland https://s3platform.jrc.ec.europa.eu/what-we-do https://elmoenf.eu/smart-east-and-north-finland/ https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2010.02161.x https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2021.2016680 https://doi.org/10.14441/eier.3.275 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2020.1791321 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2016.1255719 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1650898 http://hdl.handle.net/10138/315440 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220553.ch-001 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2006.03.005 fennia 200(2) (2022) 135maija halonen inkinen, t. & suorsa, k. (2010) intermediaries in regional innovation systems: high-technology enterprise survey from northern finland. european planning studies 18(2) 169–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310903491556 jacobs, m. (2012) green growth: economic theory and political discourse. centre for climate change economics and policy, working paper no. 108; grantham research institute on climate change and the environment working paper no. 92. jokinen, j. c. & cuadrado, a. (2020) demographic trends. in lundgren, a., randall, l. & norlén, g. (eds.) state of the nordic region 2020: wellbeing, health and digitalisation edition, 13–24. nordic council of ministers 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.6027/nord2020-052 ketterer, t. d. & rodríguez-pose, a. (2016) institutions vs. ‘first-nature’ geography: what drives economic growth in europe’s regions? papers in regional science 97 25–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/pirs.12237 kivimaa, p., boon, w., hyysalo, s. & klerkx, l. (2019) towards a typology of intermediaries in sustainability transitions: a systematic review and a research agenda. research policy 48 1062–1075. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.006 kotilainen, j., eisto, i. & vatanen, e. (2015) uncovering mechanisms for resilience: strategies to counter shrinkage in a peripheral city in finland. european planning studies 23(1) 53–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820086 van lente, h., boon, w. p. c. & klerkx, l. (2020) positioning of systemic intermediaries in sustainability transitions: between storylines and speech acts. environmental innovation and societal transitions 36 485–497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2020.02.006 mackinnon, d., dawley, s., pike, a. & cumbers, a. (2019) rethinking path creation: a geographical political economy approach. economic geography 95(2) 113–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2018.1498294 makkonen, t. & inkinen, t. (2015) geographical and temporal variation of regional development and innovation in finland. fennia 193(1) 134–147. <https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/46476> 7.12.2022. makkonen, t., inkinen, t. & rautiainen, s. (2022) mapping spatio-temporal variations of shrinkage in finland. fennia 200(2) 137–156. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119495 martin, r. & sunley, p. (2015) towards a developmental turn in evolutionary economic geography? regional studies 49(5) 712–732. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.899431 mazzucato, m. (2018) mission-oriented innovation policies: challenges and opportunities. industrial and corporate change 27(5) 803–815. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dty034 mccann, p. & ortega-argilés, r. (2015) smart specialization, regional growth and applications to european union cohesion policy. regional studies 49(8) 1291–1302. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2013.799769 mccann, p. & soete, l. (2020) place-based innovation for sustainability. publications office of the european union, luxembourg. https://doi.org/10.2760/250023 meadows, d. h., meadows, d. l., randers, j. & behrens iii, w. w. (1972) the limits to growth: a report for the club of rome’s project on the predicament of mankind. 5th ed. universe books, new york. https://doi.org/10.1349/ddlp.1 medd, w. & marvin, s. (2007) strategic intermediation: between regional strategy and local practice. sustainable development 15 318–327. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.345 moss, t. (2009) intermediaries and the governance of sociotechnical networks in transition. environment and planning a 41 1480–1495. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4116 nls [national land survey of finland] & ek, k. (2021) administrative borders finland. dataset. <https:// avaa.tdata.fi/web/paituli/metadata>. 5.7.2021. oecd (2011) towards green growth. oecd green growth studies, oecd publishing, paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264111318-en oecd (2020a) rural well-being: geography of opportunities. oecd rural studies, oecd publishing, paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/d25cef80-en oecd (2020b) oecd regions and cities at a glance – country note: finland. https://doi.org/10.1787/959d5ba0-en parr, a. (2016) the how and for whom of green governmentality. in dale, g., mathai, m. v. & oliveira, j. a. p. d. (eds.) green growth: ideology, political economy and the alternatives, 72–89. zed books, london. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220553.ch-003 pressman, s. (2014) fifty major economists. 3rd ed. routledge, london & new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203797938 reverda, n., hermans, m. & maurer, n. (2018) towards a culture of degrowth. in hospers, g-j. & syssner, j. (eds.) dealing with urban and rural shrinkage: formal and informal strategies, 17–30. regionen in europa, zürich. rockström, j., steffen, w., noone, k., persson, å., chapin, f. s. iii, lambin, e., lenton, t. m., scheffer, m., folke, c., schellnhuber, h., nykvist, b., de wit, c. a., hughes, t., van der leeuw, s., rodhe, h., sörlin, s., snyder, p. k., costanza, r., svedin, u., falkenmark, m., karlberg, l., corell, r. w., fabry, v. j., hansen, j., walker, b., liverman, d., richardson, k., crutzen, p. & foley, j. (2009) planetary https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310903491556 http://dx.doi.org/10.6027/nord2020-052 https://doi.org/10.1111/pirs.12237 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.006 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820086 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2020.02.006 https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2018.1498294 https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/46476 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119495 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.899431 https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dty034 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2013.799769 https://doi.org/10.2760/250023 https://doi.org/10.1349/ddlp.1 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.345 https://doi.org/10.1068/a4116 https://avaa.tdata.fi/web/paituli/metadata https://avaa.tdata.fi/web/paituli/metadata https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264111318-en https://doi.org/10.1787/d25cef80-en https://doi.org/10.1787/959d5ba0-en https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220553.ch-003 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203797938 136 fennia 200(2) (2022) boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity. ecology and society 14(2) 32. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-03180-140232 rothman, s. b. (2011) revising the soft power concept: what are the means and mechanisms of soft power? journal of political power 4(1) 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379x.2011.556346 roto, j. (2013) population change and urbanisation. in roto, j., grunfelder, j. & rispling, l. (eds.) state of the nordic region 2013, 17–22. nordregio report 2014 1. sairinen, r., tiainen, h. & mononen, t. (2017) talvivaara mine and water pollution: an analysis of mining conflict in finland. the extractive industries and society 4(3) 640–651. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.05.001 sánchez gassen, n. & heleniak, t. (2019) the nordic population in 2040. executive summary. nordregio. working paper 2019 2. sandberg, m., klockars, k. & wilén, k. (2019) green growth or degrowth? assessing the normative justifications for environmental sustainability and economic growth through critical social theory. journal of cleaner production 206 133–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.09.175 scottish government (2022) cities and regions: policy actions. <https://www.gov.scot/policies/citiesregions/>. 5.9.2022. shepperd, e. (2000) competition in space and between places. in sheppard, e. & barnes, t. j. (eds.) a companion to economic geography, 169–186. blackwell publishers, oxford & massachusetts. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405166430.ch11 statistics finland (2022) 11ra – key figures on population by region, 1990–2020. <https://pxdata.stat.fi/ pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/> 17.10.2022. syke [suomen ympäristökeskus] (2013) kaupunki-maaseutu-luokitus (ykr). open data set. <http:// metatieto.ymparisto.fi:8080/geoportal/catalog/search/resource/details.page?uuid=%7bbdd349c33656-4b3c-a590-77901c058da2%7d> 5.5.2021. syssner, j. (2020) pathways to demographic adaptation: perspectives on policy and planning in depopulating areas in northern europe. springer briefs in geography, springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 unep (2011) towards a green economy: pathways to sustainable development and poverty eradication a synthesis for policy makers. <www.unep.org/greeneconomy> uyarra, e., ribeiro, b. & dale-clough, l. (2019) exploring the normative turn in regional innovation policy: responsibility and the quest for public value. european planning studies 27(12) 2359–2375. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1609425 wanzenböck, i. & frenken, k. (2020) the subsidiarity principle in innovation policy for societal challenges. global transitions 2 51–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.glt.2020.02.002 wanzenböck, i., wesseling, j. h., frenken, k., hekkert, m. p. & weber, k. m. (2020) a framework for mission-oriented innovation policy: alternative pathways through the problem–solution space. science and public policy 47(4) 474–489. https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scaa027 https://doi.org/10.5751/es-03180-140232 https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379x.2011.556346 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.05.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.09.175 https://www.gov.scot/policies/cities-regions/ https://www.gov.scot/policies/cities-regions/ https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405166430.ch11 https://pxdata.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/ https://pxdata.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/en/statfin/ http://metatieto.ymparisto.fi:8080/geoportal/catalog/search/resource/details.page?uuid=%7bbdd349c3-3656-4b3c-a590-77901c058da2%7d http://metatieto.ymparisto.fi:8080/geoportal/catalog/search/resource/details.page?uuid=%7bbdd349c3-3656-4b3c-a590-77901c058da2%7d http://metatieto.ymparisto.fi:8080/geoportal/catalog/search/resource/details.page?uuid=%7bbdd349c3-3656-4b3c-a590-77901c058da2%7d https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 http://www.unep.org/greeneconomy https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1609425 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.glt.2020.02.002 https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scaa027 moving policy out of time – commentary to refstie urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa125169 doi: 10.11143/fennia.125169 reflections moving policy out of time – commentary to refstie colin lorne lorne, c. (2022) moving policy out of time – commentary to refstie. fennia 200(1) 81–85. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 this paper is prompted by hilde refstie’s lecture on co-production and the role of academia in the search for sustainability in times of fast policymaking. my aim is to keep the conversation going by reflecting on how policy researchers negotiate all kinds of tensions and contradictions when traversing academic and policy worlds. it seems to me that those involved in making and researching fast policy are – in rather different ways – moving out of time: there is an urgent search for ‘solutions’ to the many, different crises we are now facing. yet, the very existence of political alternatives requires holding open the possibility of interrupting the now all-too-familiar rhythms of fast policy. while calls for ‘slow scholarship’ may push back against the increasing tempo of the neoliberal academy, if we are not careful such appeals risk reproducing existing exclusions and inequalities, not least among those struggling by on temporary contracts. confronting these dilemmas and antagonisms may help go some way towards reconfiguring research relevance in the present political moment. keywords: co-production, fast policy, neoliberalism, policy mobilities, slow scholarship, sustainability colin lorne (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1000-0800), geography and environmental studies, faculty of arts and social sciences, the open university, milton keynes, uk. e-mail: colin.lorne@open.ac.uk introduction sometimes it can seem like academics are so sure about what is going on that they dismiss ideas before the conversation has even got going. perhaps the rush to coin new terms in academia also encourages hasty, and often rather ungenerous, critique? or maybe, it is just all-too-easy to be cynical these days? this certainly seems to be so when dealing with concepts gaining traction beyond the narrow confines of academia. ‘co-production’ is one such example. it is a malleable idea that has found its way remarkably smoothly into policymaking worlds – spanning everything from climate crisis to healthcare reform – and i must admit i have always been a little bit suspicious. © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.125169 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1000-0800 mailto:colin.lorne@open.ac.uk 82 fennia 200(1) (2022)reflections and so, it is a joy to engage with hilde refstie’s (2021) lecture on co-production and the role of academia in the search for sustainability in times of fast policymaking. my own hesitations towards the concept of co-production were carefully yet critically prized apart in effort to salvage its more radical potential. this produces a wonderfully generative and reflexive appeal to hold open the possibility of other ways of doing ‘policy relevance’ to help imagine more hopeful futures. as refstie outlines, there are of course all kinds of antagonisms and ambiguities in the turn towards coproduction gathering pace over recent decades. but rather than try to tidy everything away, what if we take time to work through those tensions to rethink what policy researchers do – and what they do not or will not do – through their research practices? in this reflection piece, i take up refstie’s call to keep the conversation going by thinking through the rather awkward relationships between fast policy and fast research. there is, no doubt, something really important in the need to redefine and reconfigure research relevance. although, as refstie (2021, 163) insists, in order to do so meaningfully, the “workings of power in co-productive spaces must therefore be continuously interrogated”. and it is here where i want to begin. working the spaces of power throughout her lecture, hilde refstie constantly reminds us to be alert to power and politics when moving across academic and policy worlds. on my reading, at least, this is a call for academics to be relentlessly critical without ever slipping into cynicism or fatalism. i do sometimes worry, for example, we still give a little too much weight to concepts like neoliberalism in a way that can become utterly dispiriting, and sometimes analytically limiting, too. for me, refstie is making an appeal to a particular kind of openness encouraging researchers to work within, beyond and against ‘mainstream’ spaces of politics and policy. as such, i could not help but be prompted to read this in conversation with newman’s (2012) working the spaces of power: activism, neoliberalism and gendered labour and the insistence to continuously negotiate the many ambiguities and uncertainties of research rather than assuming an all-knowing position. bringing these into dialogue with refstie’s lecture prompts us to pay attention to how the themes of “making visible”, “generating public conversations” and “creative labour” (newman 2012, 4) can help academicactivists forge alternative political visions and policy agendas. it is important therefore that refstie’s call to rescue the radical potential of co-production demands we raise questions over how we might overcome silences in research and who is otherwise made absent. studying fast policy ‘from within’, as well as the depoliticising dynamics of co-production, really can narrow the focus of research, making it impossible to raise some topics or ask particular kinds of questions. those concerns about the “questions never posed, the articles never written, and the collaborations never formed” (refstie 2021, 168) resonated strongly with the many conversations i have had over the years with other fixed-term contract researchers entangled within the worlds of ‘policy relevant’ research – many of whom have since left academia entirely as their contracts ran out. making visible, then, is not just about what questions are asked, but also who is asking the questions. and this relates to another challenge of co-production in fast policymaking – who are researchers actually talking with? as newman (2012) insists, conversations with a wide range of publics are not only crucial for winning support for particular policies or forcing legislative reform but can become vital cultural-political work to help shift the balance of forces in the present moment. for a progressive or radical politics involves more than simply finding ways of addressing different audiences – all those uneven and unresolved relationships playing out through the turn to co-production. rather, generating public conversations can help build new connections and alliances that make other kinds of politics possible. this is, i think, precisely the double-meaning of articulation that stuart hall advocated (see, for instance, his interview with grossberg (1996)). unless academics give voice to concerns resonating beyond the academy, we risk existing in separate worlds from where policy is made and where political struggles take place. for me, this is expressed in refstie’s comments on those critical academic voices that may often be recognised yet their reports are filed away and gather dust on bookshelves somewhere else. i do not, however, take this as a gesture towards a kind of middle-of-the-road liberalism nor an appeal to technocratic fennia 200(1) (2022) 83colin lorne consensus-building. rather, in the terms of janet newman and the many voices in working the spaces of power, refstie’s lecture appeals to the need to thinking creatively: “making new things and generating the possibilities of alternative ways of living, working and practising politics” (newman 2012, 4). after all, there are all kinds of different ways academics might intervene, be that interacting with (and opposing) municipal or national governments, the everyday struggles of grassroots activism, or phoning up radio talk shows to make an argument, as just a few examples. this will no doubt be punctuated by all kinds of frustrations, antagonisms and failures. but rather than retreating to an uncompromisingly certain position, perhaps we might follow an approach inspired by refstie whereby policy researchers have to instead try to get to grips with the many different tensions and contradictions that register within their own research practices. on the urgency of fast policy there has been remarkable expansion of interest in ‘fast policy’ in recent years (peck & theodore 2015). in fact, such is the enthusiasm among critical geographers, anthropologists and others researching how policy moves in a globalising world, it has been hard to keep up! but for anyone studying policymaking, it is difficult to ignore the seemingly ever-expanding cast of policy intermediaries – thinktanks, management consultancies and, of course, academics – circulating the latest ‘models’ and ‘exemplars’ in a bid to provide shortcuts to help ‘solve’ the latest crisis. in these times of fast policymaking, refstie (2021) underscores how the notion of ‘sustainability’ can be mobilised in almost any direction. and when combined with ‘co-production’ in the name of sustainable solutions to this, that or the other, it is hard to not nod in agreement over how this can be appropriated into a form of ‘washing’. it is funny how the grand claims of ‘radical transformation’ really can be used by policymakers to promote business as usual. we need only look to social media to observe the pivot to ‘inclusive growth’ among policy intermediaries who only a few years ago were promoting more-or-less the same policy ideas simply badged in terms of bolstering ‘growth’. and this points to another key issue raised in refstie’s lecture: there are all kinds of contradictions bound up with accumulation strategies proclaiming sustainability. this is neatly illustrated through different cities and their advocates proclaiming to be learning from and promoting the un sustainable development goals in extremely visible ways to compete with other cities to attract globally mobile capital. it is probably not wholly surprising, then, that many self-declared ‘world-leading’ universities have also been drawn towards sustainability fixes binding together contradictory claims of promoting ‘business and entrepreneurship’ whilst fostering ‘social justice and responsibility’. some ideas seem to be difficult to resist in the worlds of fast policy. such is the urgency for ‘sustainable solutions’ to all kinds of different crises – so often combined with appeals to co-producing knowledge, however ambiguous or weakly-defined – there appears to be no time for questions, we just need to act now! and herein lies the problem for researchers responding to policy problems that have already been pre-determined by other ‘stakeholders’ somewhere else. as refstie rightly emphasises, if policy researchers arrive at already-defined research questions, we risk being bound to the policy agendas and short time-frames of a clientelist politics, be that election cycles or timesensitive profit maximation. in short, ‘policy relevant’ research is increasingly conditioned by the co-productive dynamics of fast policy. that should really make us stop and think. how academics are enrolled into the search for policy relevant research “can therefore not be divorced from discussions of the systems that guides them” (refstie 2021, 167). and this is a concern i take up for the remainder of the commentary. making fast policy move otherwise? it is important that refstie concludes her lecture, informed by anti-colonial and feminist politics, calling for collective action resisting the acceleration and intensification of the neoliberal academy. as noted, ‘slow scholarship’ is not about speed per se, but rather the structuring forces of marketisation, competition and notions of individual self-reliance that – among other things – condition what kinds of research are possible (mountz et al. 2015). calls for slowness are by no means new. in fact, the 84 fennia 200(1) (2022)reflections pressures of time run throughout many conversations i have had with precariously-employed university workers and how this is precisely the stuff of the first volume of marx’s (1867) capital we’re talking about here! wherever our starting points, the awkward relationship between fast policy and fast policy research demands closer attention. with the pressure on, academics are increasingly drawn towards seeking funding from new sources beyond more conventional routes to try to sustain their jobs and livelihoods. and as emphasised by refstie, these conditions play directly into the reinforcing of existing policy and political agendas foreclosing how researchers might foster new and innovative ways of making policy move differently. refstie makes an important contribution in calling for reconfiguring research relevance towards the multiple imperatives of being critical, rooted, explanatory and actionable. there is an awful lot to agree with on the insistence that research “should be able to explain phenomena, lead to impact, be anchored with stakeholders, while at the same time explore, expose, and question hegemony and traditional assumptions about power in the pursuit of social change” (refstie 2021, 165). so, too, is the acknowledgement that achieving all these things even some of the time is perhaps impossible. i did wonder, though, what might constitute ‘rooted research’ for policy researchers traversing the circuits of fast policy? this might be quite a troubling question. as bok (2015) has observed, however critically-minded, fast policy researchers can themselves become the jet-setting intermediaries perpetuating a similar elitism they set out to critique when following the policy. but if we are to imagine a progressive politics of place beyond place (following massey 2011), we perhaps risk ‘rootedness’ being problematically understood in rather introspective terms of localness. to articulate political alternatives attuned to spatial difference, ‘translation’ might remain a useful framing for researchers navigating the worlds of co-production and fast policy (clarke et al. 2015). this speaks directly to ongoing debates within policy mobilities scholarship over the role of academic researchers – and their institutions – becoming intermediaries themselves circulating and reworking policy in motion. as the municipal official in refstie’s (2021, 165) lecture puts it, just “where is the line between being a research institution and a consulting company?” such boundaries can be troubling for those researching fast policy. indeed, as baker and temenos (2015, 841) ask: what role do institutions such as universities play in the transfer of policy ideas and promoting ‘best practice’ models? how is our own work implicated in the mobility and immobility of certain policy ideas? how do researchers’ engagements with elected officials, policy practitioners, activists and the like see them embroiled in the very process under investigation? these are unsettling questions. unsettling precisely because academic policy researchers do not always occupy fixed positions – methodologically and contractually. as i have written about elsewhere, when policy researchers become attached to the policies they are following, the idea of insider/outsider binaries do not easily hold. rather, fast policy researchers differently negotiate multiple, contradictory subjectivities which, in different times and spaces, may be altogether far more precarious (lorne 2020). i agree wholeheartedly therefore with encouraging an expanded notion of public intellectuals – though what capacity exists to hold academic institutions to account today remains uncertain. after all, we must be careful not to romanticise universities, nor slowness, for that matter. with a view from britain, where protracted industrial action rumbles on, it is not easy being optimistic in terms of what academia might enable in terms of a progressive, let alone radical politics. though we might ask, at what time have universities ever really been a place for challenging prevailing orthodoxies? it may be uncomfortable for many academics to be confronted by this, not least as it questions the very institutions upon which their own (academic) identities and practices rest – and with it the reproduction of deeply-entrenched inequalities, exclusions and exploitations. there is great appeal, therefore, in refstie's concluding remarks discussing the public role of universities and what a ‘new university’ might look like. not only does this bring into focus existing problems and tensions between the role of universities as employers, as sites of knowledge production and as powerful intermediaries in the legitimising of circulating policy and political agendas, it also holds onto emancipatory ideals of universities as places of collective learning, creativity and contestation. it remains an open question as to whether academic researchers can together make fast policy move otherwise in these troubling times. fennia 200(1) (2022) 85colin lorne conclusions it seems to me that those involved in making and researching fast policy are – in rather different ways – moving out of time: there is an urgent search for ‘solutions’ to the many, different crises we are now facing. yet, the very existence of political alternatives requires holding open the possibility of interrupting the all-too-familiar rhythms of fast policy. while calls for ‘slow scholarship’ help push back against the increasing tempo of the neoliberal academy, if we’re not careful such appeals risk reproducing existing exclusions and inequalities, not least among those struggling by on temporary contracts. confronting some of these dilemmas and antagonisms may help go some way towards reconfiguring research relevance in the present political moment. thinking across these differences is unquestionably challenging. and whether we like it or not, it can be all too easy for academics to fall into individualist modes of working, rather than fostering a spirit of responsibility and care. inspired both by hilde refstie’s lecture, and the open process of peer review encouraged by fennia, what if we start from a more careful – if no less critical – position of listening and learning, rather than necessarily rushing to critique? and as such, how might we work within, beyond and against fast policy and fast research to cultivate alternative political possibilities? these are questions i have certainly got a lot of time for. references baker, t. & temenos, c. (2015) urban policy mobilities research: introduction to a debate. international journal of urban and regional research 39(4) 824–827. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12252 bok, r. (2015) airports on the move? the policy mobilities of singapore changi airport at home and abroad. urban studies 52(14) 2724–2740. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014548011 clarke, j., bainton, d., lendvai, n. & stubbs, p. (2015) making policy move: towards a politics of translation and assemblage. policy press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.46692/9781447313380 grossberg, l. (1996) on postmodernism and articulation: an interview with stuart hall. in morley, d. & chen, k. (eds.) stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, 131–150. routledge, london. lorne, c. (2020) struggling with the state i am in: research policy failures and the english national health service. emotion, space and society 38 100746. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100746 marx, k. (1867) capital: critique of political economy volume 1. penguin, london. massey, d. (2011) a counterhegemonic relationality of place. in mccann, e. & ward, k. (eds.) mobile urbanism: cities and policymaking in the global age, 1–14. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., et al. (2015) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme 14(4) 1235–1259. <https://acme-journal. org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058> newman, j. (2012) working the spaces of power: activism, neoliberalism and gendered labour. bloomsbury, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781849666725 peck, j. & theodore, n. (2015) fast policy: experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism. university of minnesota press, minneapolis and london. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677306.001.0001 refstie, h. (2021) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12252 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014548011 https://doi.org/10.46692/9781447313380 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100746 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781849666725 https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677306.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 zines beyond a means: crafting new research process – commentary to valli urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa109263 doi: 10.11143/fennia.109263 reflections zines beyond a means: crafting new research process – commentary to valli jen bagelman bagelman, j. (2021) zines beyond a means: crafting new research process – commentary to valli. fennia 199(1) 132–135. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109263 in this commentary i engage with chiara valli's creative zine-making in bushwick, nyc. in keeping with the spirit of zines, this piece offers a series of (not always connected!) reactions, questions, feelings which address the key question raised by chiara: how can research become more inclusive? chiara provides a wonderful reflection in her commentary and i conclude by engaging on the questions of consent that she got me thinking about. keywords: zines, participatory action research, creative geographies jen bagelman (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9322-1835), newcastle university, newcastle upon tyne, ne1 7ru, uk. e-mail: jen.bagelman@newcastle.ac.uk twitter: @bagel_woman in her article, chiara valli (2021) offers a brilliant account of zines – both how they have been mobilized (especially by geographers) and how they may be used to promote deeper participatory research. chiara argues, to heed long-standing feminist calls for participant engagement in the entire research process, we need to think about zines as more than a means to an end. that is, zines should not be simply seen as a product but rather, a process that empowers participants to actively be part at all stages of research. this includes engaging participants in the reading/discussion of participants’ own transcriptions. inspired by the creative zine-ethos that chiara offers, i will continue not through the conventional essay-form but rather through a series of (not always connected!) reactions, questions, feelings. i seek to embrace a more casual (one might say erratic?) mode of communicating to (hopefully) provoke some ongoing chats on the theme that chiara identifies: how research can become more inclusive. © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 133jen bagelmanfennia 199(1) (2021) *chiara describes in her article, zines are the practice of ”cutting, rearranging, and creatively pasting printed materials in a new pamphlet” (valli 2021, 25). first – let’s start with zines. it’s hard to represent zine-making in the linear space of a word document, with its cursor flashing awaiting tidy lines and complete sentences. if i had to, it might look something akin to: cut +paste find a piece of scrap of paper (maybe a receipt … maybe a gum wrapper) and repurpose it: jotting notes all over = until it’s something new shift words over here on the page (and under here) scratch through and refuse this bit paste a photo glue some images all together here, making a collage of thoughts/emotions/blurredput-through-blender-poetry* in a generative turn, chiara streeeeeeetches (this already stretchy) zine process by proposing something new: bring the beauty of zine-making to the practice of analysing and disseminating research. instead of asking participants to work with magazines, or other ephemera as source material to draw inspiration chiara suggests that scholars take seriously their own data (transcripts from interviews etc.) as source material, waiting to be cut into – and repurposed. chiara coins the term ‘interviews-based zine-making’ (ibzm) to describe this process, which culminates in a collectively produced zine, to be disseminated in academic and more-than-academic outlets. grounded in feminist scholarship (from alison mountz, harriet hawkins, caitlin cahill, sarah de leeuw to cindi katz…), chiara makes the case that encouraging this type of participation with transcribed texts (from researcher-conducted interviews) we may be able to democratize the research process. i think it’s great that chiara develops this method through practice [btw: her main research is situating in gentrifying neighbourhood of bushwick (nyc). the big questions animating her work: big q no. 1: how long-time residents experienced and made sense of the process of gentrification underway in their neighbourhood and if – and how – there were trying to resist. big q no 2: how new residents, and particularly members of the … local art-scene, made sense of their own role within the process of gentrification, how they related to long-term residents and how if at all they were trying to resist gentrification]. 134 reflections fennia 199(1) (2021) ab’s of ibzms as described by chiara: 1. conducts interview 2. transcribe 3. selects a few interviews 4. print out interviews – with different fonts/colors 5. workshop: researcher invites participants (those involved before or new) 6. read and discuss the material 7. create a zine cutting/pasting up the interview materials 8. researcher assembles zine, prints and distributes = i think this step-by-step guide is a great springboard, to encourage co-production! i especially like the idea that through these workshops the researcher can help unearth perspectives from interviews otherwise foreclosed…finding “assonances, disagreements, and connections...” (valli 2021, 25). great! learning how chiara used zine-making in her work, provoked a few questions: jen: you note that “the researcher, possibly together with facilitator, sets up the workshop.” i know in your case you did work with a facilitator. i wondered: do you think with ibzms there’s benefit in relinquishing the organization to a facilitator who – perhaps – has been less involved in the research process? chiara: ………………………… jen: i also wonder: did you feel your presence shaped the outcomes of the crafted zines? did you sense participants looking to you as the researcher, to shape their crafting in a way that reflects your vision? chiara: ………………………… jen: i also wondered about the dissemination: did participants get a chance to decide where these did not go? i wonder if you’ve read sara smith’s new book, intimate geopolitics: love, territory, and the future on india's northern threshold (rutgers university press, 2020). i think you’d enjoy this – and it reflects on some of these questions of refusal/consent. chiara: ………………………… jen: and, what would you say to the sceptic who argues that giving participants the chance to re-work (potentially) their own testimony/quotes somehow moves this away from capturing anything resembling authentic responses, and becomes more of a performance (ps: i don’t believe this – but curious your thoughts!). chiara: ………………………… jen: did participants have a chance not to cut up the materials – if they felt they represented their views in tact? chiara: ………………………… jen: something i’ve increasingly wondered about zines, do you feel their highly tactile nature is exclusionary? i guess i am wondering about the ableist bias of zine-making (partly because a great phd student in my department @dphillipjones recently pointed out to me in a workshop that for his participants – with tourette’s – zine-making can be a powerful mode of communication but also one that spark challenges for some participants. chiara: ………………………… [after reflecting on chiara’s responses to the commentators] … i was very interested in chiara’s reflections, especially as they relate to questions of consent. she notes: “i feel that the question of refusal/consent in using research materials from interviews is always a very delicate one, and although anonymity provides some protection, in conflicted communities this 135fennia 199(1) (2021) jen bagelman might not be enough.” i like the fact that she honestly reflects how she is “constantly working on this” – indeed it is ongoing work. she has offered us some important tips for orienting ourselves, as researchers, to keep open to this (sometimes uncomfortable) work. thinking seriously about questions of ‘ethnographic refusal’ raised by audra simpson work in mohawk interruptus (2014) might also be generative in this context. here refusal is framed in generative terms and structures possibilities. it is also an engaged research ethos that “acknowledges the asymmetrical power relations that inform the research and writing” (simpson 2014, 104). chiara’s text and her responses are a welcome addition adding to the geographer's methodological toolbox. i can't wait to try experimenting with research data in this crafty way. thanks chiara! references simpson, a. (2014) mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. duke university press, durham, nc. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1198w8z smith, s. (2020) intimate geopolitics: love, territory, and the future on india's northern threshold. rutgers university press. valli, c. (2021) participatory dissemination: bridging in-depth interviews, participation, and creative visual methods through interview-based zine-making (ibzm). fennia 199(1) 25–45. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99197 the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: cases from northern europe tanja löytynoja löytynoja, tanja (2008). the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: cases from northern europe. fennia 186: 1, pp. 15–29. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. locations such as geodetic lines, geographical extreme points and national boundaries fascinate tourists because of their specific character, and therefore many of these have become significant tourist attractions and resources for tourism development. the aim of this paper is to conceptualize specific locations, and to analyse their development from a point or a line into a tourist attraction. in addition, the production of specific character is discussed. the transformation of specific locations into tourist attractions is approached through four cases in northern europe. each of the cases is discussed using dean maccannell’s model of sight sacralization in order to test its applicability in the empirical context. it is noted that specific locations develop into attractions in a series of stages, but the model of sight sacralization does not fully explain their transformation or their specific character. the stages may occur in different order, they can be overlapping or same stage can take place several times during the process. furthermore, the development of specific locations does not end to the last stage of the model. it is suggested that specific locations should be approached more widely through social and political processes that influence their production and development. tanja löytynoja, department of geography, po box 3000, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: tanja.loytynoja@oulu.fi. introduction a group of tourists is swarming around a monument. most of them are photographing it, and each other posing in front of it. a nearby painted line on the ground interests them equally. some tourists are straddling the line, and even jumping across it. after a while a group heads for the souvenir shop to buy certificates, t-shirts and other commodities. in addition, most people will send a couple of postcards with a special postmark to friends and relatives. the above activities are typical of tourists visiting the arctic circle at rovaniemi in finland, but they can take place in connection with any tourist attraction that is based on a specific location. the equator, the meridian at greenwich, and north cape, for example, are locations where an invisible geodetic line or a geographical extreme point has been transformed into a tourist attraction (jacobsen 1997; timothy 1998, 2001). thousands of tourists visit places like this every year, record the event by taking photographs, and buy souvenirs as proof of their visit. many people are also eagerly engaged in activities such as crossing a line, standing on it, or walking round a monument that represents an extreme point. specific locations can be conceptualized as locations that interest tourists because of their specific character. when standing on a border, for example, it is possible to be in two or more places at the same time (ryden 1993: 1). in the case of the arctic circle, this means being at once “in the north” and “in the south”. furthermore, since borders mark the limit of something, they are considered exciting and mysterious places. this becomes especially evident in the context of ideological boundaries, such as the iron curtain that once ran 16 fennia 186: 1 (2008)tanja löytynoja between eastern and western europe, or the borders of conflict or demilitarization zones (medvedev 1999; timothy et al. 2004). in addition, crossing a political or temporal border often means transition to another country, culture, or time zone. not only are tourists tempted to cross borders, but crossings of the equator and other geodetic lines have been significant occasions for sailors since the 16th century, entailing various initiation rites and ceremonies (richardson 1977; mires 2006). extreme points are by nature geographically or politically significant sites, usually exact locations that have been defined and marked on the ground. they attract tourists because they express the limits of territories or of natural phenomena (vuoristo & vesterinen 2001: 20–22). the fascination inspired by certain locations has also been noticed by the tourism industry, and many specific locations have been transformed into tourist attractions which may even achieve significance as international tourist destinations (pretes 1995; jacobsen 1997; birkeland 2002). especially in peripheral areas, where many of these attractions are located, such a location offers an opportunity for differentiation from other attractions, and when properly commercialized, a means of generating an income from tourism. the aim of this paper is to discuss specific locations and their development into tourist attractions. what makes these locations fascinating, and how are they produced? the development of specific locations is approached in the context of northern europe, discussing the production of attractions and their specific character through four cases: north cape, the arctic circle, the centre point of finland and the easternmost point of the european union. the first two cases, north cape and the arctic circle at rovaniemi in finland, are examples of specific locations that have developed into international tourist destinations that receive hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, while the latter two are single attractions of mainly local significance for tourism. the purpose is to adapt dean maccannell’s (1976) theoretical model of sight sacralization to these cases and to examine empirically whether the model serves to explain their development as attractions. north cape has been previously discussed from this viewpoint by jacobsen (1997). the other cases are investigated in order to see if the development processes equal to north cape and to find out which elements have an influence on the development. attractions and the production of a specific character tourist attractions can be conceptualized in many ways. they are often defined as elements with a pulling power or magnetism which attracts visitors (lew 1987: 554; gunn 1988: 37, 46). according to lew (1987: 554), tourist attractions consist of all the elements of a “non-home” place, so that landscapes, activities, tourism services and experiences can all be considered to be attractions. it is important, however, to note that a tourist attraction in itself does not draw tourists in or have any inherent pulling power but that the image of attractiveness is created by the tourists (see leiper 1990: 368–369). it depends on the tourists’ interests and preferences as to which elements are perceived as tempting. consequently, tourists themselves have a role in the production of a tourist attraction. it is for this reason that a tourist attraction is often understood as a system which consists of various components, the tourist being one of them. maccannell (1976: 109), for example, approaches attractions through a relationship between a tourist, a sight and a marker, i.e. any information that refers to the sight. a systemic approach to attractions has been developed further by leiper (1990), whose model replaces the sight with the concept of a nucleus, the central element of an attraction, or any feature or characteristic of a place which is visited by tourists. for gunn (1988: 49), who originally introduced the concept in 1972, a nucleus signifies the principal attracting force. despite the perceived attractiveness of a nucleus, it may not always be enough to pull in large numbers of visitors. presentday tourists want new experiences, exciting activities and opportunities for shopping, eating well and sleeping in pleasant accommodation. a monument at a specific location may cause some passers-by to stop and take photographs, but if there are no tourism services in the vicinity they will usually move on towards the next attraction. in addition, sightseeing alone does not provide local tourism entrepreneurs with an income. consequently, additional attractions are usually needed around the nucleus. according to gunn (1988: 50), the grouping of attractions into larger complexes makes them more fascinating and successful. attractions are also essential elements in the development of tourist destinations, because destinations usually form as combinations of attraction fennia 186: 1 (2008) 17the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: … clusters, connecting routes and a service community (gunn 1988: 56–60). in his model of tourist attraction, leiper (1990: 381) divides a marker into three parts: a general marker consisting of information received before travelling, a transit marker comprising information received en route, and a contiguous marker found at the nucleus. the first two correspond to maccannell’s off-sight marker, whereas the third is parallel to an on-sight marker (cf. maccannell 1976). consequently, a picture representing a monument, a story told by a friend, a map and a description in a brochure are all off-sight markers with which tourists are often in touch before visiting a sight, whereas a monument, a sign and a story told by a guide at the location are examples of on-sight markers. sometimes a marker may even become more important than the actual sight, as is obvious in the context of specific locations (culler 1981; timothy 2001: 44–52). when tourists are photographing the arctic circle, for example, they are not recording the location itself but a painted line and a sign, the on-sight markers of the location. there are various ways of classifying tourist attractions on the grounds of their characteristics, of which the most interesting in the context of specific locations is that proposed by wall (1997). he approaches tourist attractions on the basis of spatial characteristics: points, lines and areas, and bases his classification on visitor behaviour, the potential of an attraction for commercial development, and its requirements in terms of planning and management. in point attractions such as monuments, historic sites and sporting events, for example, visitors are concentrated in a small area. this can lead to congestion and a reduction in the quality of the visitor’s experience. on the other hand, point attractions are quite easy to commercialize because activities can be directed at one location. linear attractions, such as coastlines, highways and routes, can also become crowded, but the visitors are usually dispersed over a wider area than with point attractions. linear attractions nevertheless resemble point attractions in that they are often developed as a series of nodes separated by less developed areas. the third type of attraction, an area, can serve large numbers of visitors, as they are usually dispersed over many different locations, which makes their commercial exploitation much more challenging. the cases discussed here are examples of point attractions and linear attractions. attractions are often unique and exceptional, but some typical, representative elements can also become attractions (koivunen 2006), e.g. landscapes, customs and food. specific locations are of interest because of their peculiarity, however. what makes an attraction specific depends on a definer, a context and the characteristic of the attraction. for a member of the most traveled people, for example, a website for people who want to rank themselves on the grounds of their travels, every country is specific, and the list contains not only countries but also territories, autonomous regions, enclaves, island groups, major states and provinces. the goal is to visit all 673 of these destinations (most traveled people 2007). on the other hand, the degree confluence project urges its participants “to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location.” (degree confluence project 2008). they are then asked to post pictures and narratives of their visits on a website, as in the case of the most traveled people. consequently, members of these two virtual communities can be categorized as place collectors, visiting places and crossing boundaries for competition and status reasons, and enumerating the locations they have visited (timothy 1998). the more remote and difficult to reach, the more valued a location is among collectors (butler 1996: 216). specific locations are not approached in that sense here, however, but are understood as exact locations, points and lines which are of interest to tourists and are manifested as attractions in the landscape of tourism. specific locations are usually abstract and invisible in the landscape until they are marked on the ground with a sign, a monument, a line or some other material object (raivo 1996; timothy 1998, 2001). thus a location has to be made visible by means of on-sight markers before it can become a tourist attraction, but as is previously stated, offsight markers are equally significant for visualizing an attraction and providing it with a specific character. furthermore, a location can be made into a meaningful place by defining and naming it (cresswell 2004: 2–7). a location expressed with coordinates, such as 71°10’21”n, 25°47’40”e, is unknown for most people until it is defined, in the case as north cape. because it is often perceived as the northernmost point of europe, north cape gains added meanings of northernness, remoteness and a mystic place where you can see the midnight sun, to name just a few. meanings are 18 fennia 186: 1 (2008)tanja löytynoja often produced in relation to other places, and represented through dualisms such as north-south, sacred-profane or ordinary/everyday-extraordinary (shields 1991; birkeland 2002; urry 2002). binary oppositions as well as superlatives are much used in tourism marketing, which is a powerful means of making places, constructing images and producing a specific character for a location. naming is also the first stage in maccannell’s model of sight sacralization (1976), which has been widely used in tourism research (see fine & speer 1985; jacobsen 1997). according to maccannell, sight sacralization takes place through five stages. first, a sight has to be differentiated from other attractions that are worth visiting. this is usually done through naming. second, a sight has to be framed and elevated. framing takes place by constructing an official boundary around the attraction, thus controlling admission to it, while elevation means the displaying it through effective promotion, or opening it up to visitors. third, at the stage of enshrinement, a special setting is created for its preservation and admiration, emphasizing its unique characteristics. fourth, a sight is represented through mechanical reproduction. especially in the case of a highly commercialized destination, the name and image of an attraction are used in connection with various souvenirs and tourism products. in addition, the photographs taken by tourists, pictures in brochures and narratives in guidebooks are expressions of the mechanical reproduction of an attraction. the fifth and final stage in sight sacralization is social reproduction, in which destinations, companies or regions are named after famous attractions. at this stage the sight becomes a basis for identification. although sight sacralization offers a framework for approaching the creation of an attraction and the production of a specific character for it, the model does not fully explain the development of an attraction. it has been noted that the stages of sight sacralization can take place in a different order (jacobsen 1997), in addition to which, maccannell’s approach has been criticized for regarding attractions as static elements without paying attention to their dynamic structure and constant transformation (saarinen 2001: 36). the aim in this paper is to examine whether sight sacralization can explain the development of specific locations. three cases from finland are discussed and compared with jacobsen’s interpretation of the making of north cape into an attraction (fig. 1). the process of sight sacralization: cases in northern europe north cape north cape in northern norway has fascinated explorers, travellers and tourists for centuries. the spectacular landscape and the image of this promontory as lying the edge of europe have constituted the primary nuclei of the attraction. according to fig. 1. the case studies. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 19the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: … jacobsen (1997), its history as an attraction began in 1553, when the promontory was named and marked on a map as the result of an expedition. through maps and written reports produced by early visitors, north cape became known as the northernmost edge of the world (in europe). originally north cape was accessible only from the sea, and it was only in 1956 that a road was constructed to it. tourism had already started to become a business there during the 19th century, however, and the numbers of visitors increased when regular steamship tours were started. in addition, north cape interested many famous visitors, such as king oscar ii of sweden and norway, who travelled there in 1873. jacobsen (1997) interprets these visits of celebrities as an expression of elevation, whereas the development of tourist accessibility and the controlling of the tourism business through the establishment of a nature reserve, the fencing of the plateau and the charging of an admission fee have been means of framing the attraction. the next stage of development, enshrinement, has taken the form of the construction of monuments to be remembered by visitors, for example (jacobsen 1997). although mechanical reproduction takes place at the fourth stage in the model of sight sacralization, this started very early in the case of north cape, leading jacobsen (1997) to suggest that it was actually the second stage in the development of the location. it has been reproduced by artists and travel writers constantly ever since its “discovery”, and home-produced souvenirs were already being sold there at the end of 19th century. thus walking sticks, animal figures made of sealskin and painted stones, for example, were produced in large quantities before the second world war, and stamps, certificates and postcards were bought as proof of a visit (birkeland 2002). nowadays north cape is intensively reproduced, and there are various commodities for sale referring to the specific location. according to birkeland (2002), a new period in the development of tourism began in 1987 when the airline company sas started to invest in north cape. a new, massive service building was constructed, and this became a dominant marker on the plateau. at the moment, north cape hall is operated by a hotel chain, and the building includes a hotel, restaurants, a souvenir shop, a post office, exhibitions, a movie theatre and an ecumenical chapel. north cape has been reproduced socially, too. tourists are offered the opportunity to join the royal north cape club, for people who have visited north cape. in addition, the hotel group, ships, and even the surrounding municipality have been named after this attraction (jacobsen 1997). apart from the stage of mechanical reproduction, the development of north cape into a tourist attraction has mainly followed the model of sight sacralization. it is possible to outline a timescale for this (fig. 2), but it does not tell us why the attraction has been developed in that particular way, by whom, or how it has gained its specific characfig. 2. the process of sight sacralization at north cape (following jacobsen 1997). 20 fennia 186: 1 (2008)tanja löytynoja ter. to clarify this, north cape has to be approached as a socio-spatial construct which is historically produced, constantly transforming and represented through different practices and discourses (saarinen 2001). the focus of this paper is to test the model of sight sacralization, however. some viewpoints considering the specific character of the attraction should be put forward anyway. the specific character of north cape consists of both natural and contrived elements. according to jacobsen (2000), north cape has two different images. first, it is considered a remote, monumental and impressive place, an image in which the promontory is represented as a mythical, sacred site and a symbol of the edge of europe. second, it is felt to be a commercial and crowded tourist place. the construction of a large service building has increased commercialization and the arrival of over 200,000 visitors1 a year has strengthened its image as a contrived attraction and a touristic place. tourists who approach the north cape with a “romantic gaze” (urry 2002) consider the appeal of the place to have diminished because of crowding and commercialization. furthermore, as jacobsen (2000) has noticed, north cape is often considered a place one should see. the success of many contrived tourist attractions is based on this same phenomenon: “their broad popular fantasy appeal --has lasted for so many years that they become popular because everyone visits them, rather than for their inherent attraction. they become world landmarks – famous for being famous.” (pretes 1995: 13). consequently, many tourists are motivated to visit north cape because of its famous character. north cape has become known as the northernmost point of europe, but knivskjelodden, a headland near the promontory, reaches even farther north. this flat headland is not as impressive as the promontory, however, and thus the plateau gained the image of being on the edge of europe (jacobsen 1997; birkeland 2002). the actual northernmost point is accessible by foot, but most of the tourists seem to be satisfied with north cape hall and its surroundings on the plateau. in other words, rather than the actual location, tourists are searching for markers of the location. these markers have been reproduced in various brochures and photographs, and thus they have come to symbolize north cape. tourists are expecting to see the wellknown off-sight markers on the spot, and if the onsight markers equate with mental images they have created, the attraction is usually experienced as authentic. consequently, authenticity of origin is not so important in the context of tourism as constructed, subjective authenticity, the image of being authentic (wang 1999; cohen 2007). the arctic circle the arctic circle at rovaniemi in finland is perhaps one of the best examples of a location which has been transformed from a geodetic line into a tourist attraction and finally into an international tourist destination. just like north cape, the position of the arctic circle was marked on early maps, but it remained invisible in the landscape until 1929, when it was marked by a sign on the main road near the town of rovaniemi. the sign was erected by the local colonel and was aimed at tempting passing tourists (sassi & heij 1975). there had been a demand among tourists for some kind of monument representing the location of the arctic circle. cutcliffe hyne, for example, describes his visit to lapland in 1898 as follows: “on this stage we were due to recross that imaginary boundary, the arctic circle, and come once more into that temperate zone which was our more native atmosphere, and we were on the keen lookout for some official recognition of its whereabouts. i do not quite know what we expected to see – a cairn or a wooden notice would have satisfied us – but the absence of any mark whatever jarred upon us. that a country which could mark off the kilometres on its roads with fine red posts, should ignore a geographical acquisition like the arctic circle, seemed a piece of unappreciative barbarism.” (hyne 1898: 271). the marker of the arctic circle became a sight which was represented in photographs, postcards and tourism brochures. thus mechanical reproduction started as soon as the location was defined and marked in a particular place. quite soon it was also being reproduced in souvenirs. a small cabin was built for the visit of mrs roosevelt at the arctic circle in 1950, and for the first few years this cabin was open in the summer months, so that it was possible to buy coffee and souvenirs and send a postcard with the special postmark (sassi & heij 1975). the cabin was later extended and rebuilt, but the development of the site into a significant tourist destination did not begin until 1985, when the present santa claus’ village started to be established there (pretes 1995). this destination now represents a combination of the arctic circle, the christmas theme and the fennia 186: 1 (2008) 21the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: … nature and culture of lapland, and the village, which consists of santa claus’ office, a christmas exhibition, santa’s post office, shops and restaurants, is visited by over 300,000 tourists2 every year. there is also a theme park known as santapark located in the vicinity of the arctic circle nowadays, and the international airport is not far away. these three attractions constitute the christmas triangle region, which during the christmas season alone it is visited by over 60,000 foreign tourists and day visitors arriving on charter flights (rovaniemen matkailustrategia 2006). the development of the arctic circle into a tourist attraction started when the sign was founded near the town of rovaniemi (fig. 3). at first the attraction was based on the geographical location, but since the construction of the cabins, and especially santa claus’ village, the geodetic line has been transformed into one of the attractions of the destination. furthermore, the painted line of the arctic circle was the first expression of framing the attraction. there are now several service buildings framing santa claus’ village, and the markers of the arctic circle are located in the midst of these. the construction of the first cabin and of the present-day exhibitions related to the history of the arctic circle and christmas can be interpreted as a stage of enshrinement. the arctic circle, which is marked on the ground with a line and a sign, is reproduced through souvenirs, a certificate, tourism promotion pictures, and thousands of photographs taken by tourists every year. the christmas theme has been commercialized even more strongly, with one-day packages including a meeting with santa claus. in addition, as a manifestation of social reproduction, many companies have been named after the arctic circle and christmas. the specific character of the arctic circle at rovaniemi is based on several elements. first, the arctic circle is manifested as a mystical line drawn at a point where it is not only possible to experience the midnight sun or the darkness of the northern winter, but also to transfer from the south to the north. second, the arctic circle as a home of santa claus makes the location even more exciting. third, the arctic circle marked at santa claus’ village is not in its actual location but is a touristic location. the actual position of the arctic circle varies, and is in fact constantly moving, being capable of ranging over a distance of as much as 200 kilometres. at the present moment it is located a couple of kilometres north of its markers and is slowly moving northwards (ollikainen & poutanen 1997). similarly, the first sign and the roosevelt cabin were not located exactly on the arctic circle, either. according to sassi and heij (1975), the location of the sign was estimated and the cabin was built on a site donated for this purpose. fourth, because the arctic circle is a geodetic line that circulates the globe, it is possible to find it in other places and countries as well. there are many competing attractions around the world that make use of the arctic circle for tourism purposes (timothy 2001), including the middle tornio valley on the fig. 3. the development of the arctic circle at rovaniemi in relation to the model of sight sacralization. 22 fennia 186: 1 (2008)tanja löytynoja finnish-swedish border, which is also marketed as the land of the arctic circle (prokkola 2007). the centre point of finland the geographical centre point of a country, state, or other region can be conceptualized as a specific case of an extreme point. it is usually defined on the grounds of national boundaries, a landmass, a continental shelf, an intersection of latitudes and longitudes, or regional characteristics, and it has a strong symbolic value. a centre point carries connotations of the core of a nation, and has often become a place for personal identification. on the other hand, many centre points have originally been located “in the middle of nowhere”, but they have been moved to a more favourable place for better accessibility or for image reasons (pekonen 1998; ridanpää & löytynoja 2003). one major motive for relocation has usually been the potential of the location as a tourist attraction. in finland, the geographical centre point was defined by the magazine suomen kuvalehti in 1958, by a simple method that involved hanging a plumb line over the map of finland. the centre of gravity that the intersection of the lines demonstrated was located in the middle of a swamp, but as the centre point of finland was meant to become a tourist sight, it was moved to the nearest village by a main road. a sign was erected in this village, and the next year it was replaced with a monument (valentin 1958; sivuranta 2002). the result was that the village of leskelä in the municipality of piippola came to be known as the centre point of finland, and the monument was pictured in guidebooks and on postcards and photographed by passing tourists. no significant additional attractions were provided in the vicinity of the monument, however. in 1972 the monument marking the centre point of finland was demolished because of roadworks and transferred to the other side of the road, where it was reconstructed in an identical form but larger. the monument is still there, and a small park has now been constructed around it. many development projects have taken place in the village of leskelä since the 1990’s, and some of these have included the production of new tourism services around the centre point and marketing of the village as a tourist attraction. the specific location has been connected with the local cultural heritage, for example (löytynoja 2006). the tourism services in question have been of a seasonal nature, however, or have existed only for the duration of a particular project. any record considering the total number of visitors has kept either. at the moment there are some programme and catering services available to on request, and art exhibitions are organized in the house of the village association which is located near the centre point monument. despite its unique character, the centre point of finland at leskelä is not the only such point to have been defined (ridanpää & löytynoja 2003). in 1975 the centre point of mainland finland was identified as lying in the municipality of puolanka. so for a long time two centre points coexisted. both were regularly mentioned in guidebooks and brochures, but they were based on different definitions. moreover, since 1998 there have been two monuments representing the location of the centre point of finland in the village of leskelä, as in the context of a development project, a new monument was set up next to a newly constructed layby beside the road, not far from the site of the original monument. thus the specific location was copied and manifested by two synonymous markers. the second monument was erected on the grounds that the monument of 1972 was located slightly to one side of the main road. furthermore, the exact location of the centre point has been contested by neighbouring municipalities. new calculations performed by the national land survey of finland in 2002–2005 led to the recognition of six centre points (ruotsalainen 2005), each based on a different measurement of centrality. in general there has been much active discussion over the authenticity and ownership of the centre point of finland (ridanpää & löytynoja 2003; löytynoja 2006). as a result of contestation, two more signs have been provided to mark this specific location, and a new areal unit known as the “centre point region of finland” has emerged as a consequence of regional and international cooperation. the region has not yet been clearly delimited, however, but is subject to different interpretations and negotiations. regardless of all these contestations, the village of leskelä in piippola has still retained the image of being the centre point of finland. the centre point of finland is a good example of an attraction which has gone through the stage of naming several times (fig. 4). it was first named as such in 1958, and the attraction and its location have been variously redefined since. there have fennia 186: 1 (2008) 23the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: … been many actors involved in this process, including a national magazine, local officials, project personnel and the national land survey of finland. furthermore, the erecting of the first monument, the construction of a larger one and the marking of the “new” centre points can be interpreted as manifestations of elevation. the stage of enshrinement is closely related to elevation, so that the demolition of the first monument and its reconstruction on the other side of the road can be seen as an act of enshrinement. on the other hand, no very clear framing of the attraction has taken place. it is framed by a small park and a lay-by beside the road, but no fences have been set up, nor is any entrance fee charged. in addition, the centre point has been used more recently as a regional concept (the centre point region of finland), which could be considered an effort at framing, although no agreement has been achieved as to its composition. some mechanical reproduction has taken place since the marking of the location, as photographs and references have appeared in guidebooks. as a consequence of the contestation of the site, a certificate and some souvenirs representing the monument have been produced. social reproduction has been quite efficient too, so that companies, associations and even the new, emerging region have been named after the attraction. the easternmost point of the european union when finland joined the european union in 1995 it became its easternmost country, in addition to which the boundary between finland and russia was the longest external border of the eu at that time. this enhanced the specific character of the boundary, and soon the easternmost point on it became a peculiar attraction. a monument was erected by the local rotary club near the extreme point, in ilomantsi, in 1996, and local tourism organizations together with the border guard service developed the attraction over the next few years by constructing a small-scale tourism infrastructure, including a parking place, information signs and a hut with a camp-fire, and by creating some programme services. there were organized tours with a guide, for example, beginning with a welcoming toast at the monument and continuing with an opportunity to photograph the monument and to have dinner around the camp-fire. as a token of their visit, participants also received a certificate. the number of visitors remained quite low, however, being less than 7000 in 1998 and decreasing since then (pitkäniitty 2006). one reason for this might be that the easternmost point of the eu has lost its charm or novelty, but perhaps a more important factor is the highly peripheral location of the attraction, combined with the fact fig. 4. the stages of sight sacralization in the case of the centre point of finland. 24 fennia 186: 1 (2008)tanja löytynoja that, by definition, it is located in the border zone and hence a border zone permit is required to visit it. consequently, it is mainly visited by some tourist groups and place collectors. again, the monument was not built exactly at the easternmost point. the actual extreme point was located on a nearby island, but because of the difficulty in reaching it, the point was moved to the mainland. furthermore, this small movement is not the only transformation that the point has encountered (löytynoja 2008). after the enlargement of the eu in 2004, its easternmost point has no longer been located in finland but in cyprus. despite that, ilomantsi in finland is still marketed as the easternmost point of the eu, or more precisely, as the easternmost point of the continental eu. according to the media (stt 2004), the representatives of finland and cyprus have made a deal that finland can keep the easternmost point, whereas cyprus can promote itself as the southeastern point of the eu. it is therefore still possible to visit the easternmost point of the eu in finland, even though this point is actually located far, far away from its marker. in this case naming of the attraction took place twice, in 1995 and in 2004 (fig. 5), and framing and elevation started when the monument was set up. when visiting the monument, one can move around only in the area marked on the map, and later even the path leading to the monument was bounded with a rope. although the border zone permit is in effect a means of controlling access to the attraction, it can be interpreted at the same time as a marking a form of enshrinement. elevation has taken place through active promotion, e.g. the organizing of a millennium celebration at the easternmost point of the eu. the attraction has also achieved the fourth stage of sight sacralization, in that it has been mechanically reproduced in photographs, brochures, souvenirs and a special postmark. mechanical reproduction was especially powerful during a marketing project in 1999–2000 (rytkönen 2000). furthermore, the adjective “easternmost” has been used in marketing to emphasize the specific location of the municipality, the easternmost village, and some companies. but even so, the last stage of sight sacralization has not been realized properly. no companies have been named after the extreme point, for example, but identification with the boundary has become more common. comparison of the cases and their development processes of the four cases of specific locations discussed above, the arctic circle is an example of a geodetic line, whereas the other three cases are geographical extreme points. in addition, the easternmost point of the eu is located on the national boundary and on the external border of the eu which makes its position even more interesting. fig. 5. sight sacralization in the case of the easternmost point of the eu. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 25the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: … each of these locations has a certain specific character, but their significance as a part of the tourism industry is something very different. the development of each of the four specific locations into a tourist attraction started from its naming and the defining of its specific character. north cape stands out from the other cases, however, because it has a far longer history as an attraction (jacobsen 1997). furthermore, it was originally a natural attraction with an appeal that was based on its impressive and distinctive landscape, and its location on the northern extremity of europe. the arctic circle, the centre point of finland and the easternmost point of the eu, on the other hand, have been created purposefully. their transformation into an attraction started in each case from the erection of a single sign or monument purporting to manifest the exact spot concerned. tourism development can alter the original character of an attraction, however, as it has been the case with north cape. the transformation from a natural sight into a contrived attraction seems according to gunn (1988: 48) to be representative of a tendency common to all attractions: “every attraction today is created. --in the context of modern tourism, even the most compelling places do not become true attractions until they are provided with access, lookout points, parking areas, interpretation programs, and linkages with service centers.” despite its specific character, a single location is seldom attractive enough to interest numbers of tourists without additional attractions around it. north cape and the arctic circle have developed into attraction complexes and commercialized destinations, whereas the centre point of finland and the easternmost point of the eu are mainly single attractions with a low level of commercialization. north cape and the arctic circle (santa claus’ village) have been developed by or in cooperation with national and international tourism companies3 since the 1980’s, which may also be one explanation for their success. on the arctic circle, the christmas theme has been connected to the specific location by virtue of santa claus’ village, and it seems that many tourists actually visit the destination because of santa claus. furthermore, both north cape and the arctic circle have many supplementary services, including catering services, accommodation (at north cape) and programme services that strengthen the nucleus. they also fit into wall’s (1997) definition of point attractions and linear attractions, in that they have developed into visitor concentrations with occasional crowding (jacobsen 2000). the centre point of finland and the easternmost point of the eu do not follow the principles of this classification, however. all of the locations discussed here are peripheral, which is probably a part of their appeal. the arctic circle at rovaniemi is quite accessible in the context of northern europe, however (fig. 6), as its location close to the airport, beside the e4highway and in the vicinity of the town of rovafig. 6. categorization of the specific locations by accessibility and the level of commercialization. 26 fennia 186: 1 (2008)tanja löytynoja niemi facilitates tourist access. as a curiosity, the centre point of finland is located by the same highway, but the attraction does not tempt tourists in the same way as the arctic circle. this is probably because of limited commercialization and the fact that it is located in a region which has not yet achieved a tourism profile. thus location in the middle of a country does not automatically guarantee large numbers of visitors. furthermore, the location of the easternmost point of the eu is highly peripheral, which means that tourists have to purposely travel to this attraction. despite its remoteness, north cape is located on the route of passing cruise ships. however, the level of commercialization and accessibility can only partly explain why some of these attractions have succeeded better than others. as tourists participate in the construction of attractions through their mental images, it is important to consider the meanings given to the locations one is discussing. north cape and the arctic circle, for example, may also interest tourists because of the ideas of the north and the arctic that are connected with them. according to davidson (2005: 9), everyone has his own subjective idea of what constitutes the north, but there are still many general characteristics of the north which are recognised by most people of the same origin: “for a scandinavian, north – further north, arctic north – represents a place of extremes that is also a place of wonders: of the ‘fox fires’, the aurora in the winter sky, the habitation of the sami, of legendary magicians and heroes.” this image is much used in the context of tourism, and many of the people who visit the arctic circle or north cape are certainly motivated by it. on the other hand, the finnish–russian border has been perceived for centuries as a boundary between east and west, and there is something left of this image even nowadays but the number of visitors to the easternmost point of the eu in ilomantsi has remained quite low. there are many reasons for this. perhaps it is not perceived as “eastern” enough, or interest in an attraction defined on political grounds does not run so deep as that in the more image-provoking idea of the north. it seems to be typical of specific locations that despite the existence of exact coordinates and a sign marking the spot, this is not necessarily the real location. north cape, the arctic circle at rovaniemi, the centre point of finland and the easternmost point of the eu are all attractions of that kind. their on-sight markers have never been located in the exact spot, but instead they have been placed somewhere which is more suitable for tourism, or is perceived as more attractive. in addition, some specific locations have been shifted to another place because of political changes, or on the grounds of image (ridanpää & löytynoja 2003). what happens to the authenticity of an attraction if it does not exist in its actual location? and is it even possible in some cases to define the actual location because of its dissonance? as previously noted, a marker of an attraction may sometimes become more important than the attraction itself (culler 1981; timothy 2001). the visible markers of a location are often experienced as more authentic than the actual location, and because of this the tourist gaze is usually directed at monuments, signs and other markers that represent the location. in the context of tourism, a specific location exists in the spot where the sign or monument manifesting it stands, the spot which, in addition, has come to be known among tourists as the famous sight. consequently, the history of a place as a tourist attraction is often enough to create an image of authenticity. this also explains why some locations are perceived as authentic ones even after being moved. because of various redefinitions, continuous transformation, and the mobile character of specific locations, they are especially interesting examples of tourist attractions. this makes them difficult to approach from the perspective of sight sacralization, however. as the above cases show, the stages of sight sacralization can be outlined, but there are differences in the development processes. the development of north cape follows the model of sight sacralization most closely, but differs in the order of the stages (jacobsen 1997). the other cases reveal that several stages of sight sacralization can take place at the same time, and that some stages can even be included in the development process more than once. the centre point of finland, for example, has been in the stage of naming several times because of redefinitions of its location. elevation and enshrinement, which are often intertwined, can also take place throughout the process of development. furthermore, one feature common to all the cases is that mechanical reproduction started early in their development. at the beginning this took the form of maps, travel narratives and photographs, and later on brochures, souvenirs and various tourism services. it is also interesting to note that contestation of a location seems to increase both mechanical and sofennia 186: 1 (2008) 27the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: … cial reproduction, as these are available as means for image-building and identification when the “ownership” of the location is challenged (löytynoja 2006). on the other hand, contestation can also endanger the development of an attraction if the interest of tourists is focused on other, competing attractions. in addition, it is suggested that mechanical reproduction is often active during development and marketing projects and usually increases when the attraction becomes more commercialized. thus the stage of mechanical reproduction seems to be the crucial point for the success of an attraction and should be noted more closely in connection with its development. conclusions the appeal of a specific location consists of the location itself, additional attractions and various meanings connected with it. the most tempting attractions are usually ones in which all these three aspects are interconnected. in the cases discussed here, the specific character is constituted by different elements which also have an effect on the development of the attractions. a specific location can be attractive enough to interest tourists as such, like north cape originally was. travellers visited the promontory because of its perceived magnetism and the image of the edge of europe. as a consequence of the present-day tourism industry and its commercialization, however, many additional services have developed around the nucleus at north cape, too. furthermore, a specific location can be connected with other attractions, so that together they constitute an attraction complex. this has taken place at the arctic circle near rovaniemi, the development of which has been strongly influenced by the christmas theme and the construction of santa claus’ village. on the other hand, because of a low level of commercialization, a remote location or a less attractive surrounding tourism region, a specific location may remain at the level of a single attraction which is mainly visited by place collectors, some tourist groups and occasional passers-by. the centre point of finland and the easternmost point of the eu are examples of this. despite their specific character, they are in danger of remaining just monuments and curiosities unless new tourism products centred on them are developed in the near future. maccannell’s theory of sight sacralization is useful in the context of specific locations, but it does not fully explain the development of a specific location into a tourist attraction. as the four cases show, there are several problems in approaching the transformation of specific locations through the model of sight sacralization. first, as jacobsen (1997) has emphasized, the stages of sight sacralization may take place in a different order from that in the model. second, some stages may recur as the process of development continues. third, instead of developing step by step, an attraction can reach several stages at the same time. consequently, the stages should be understood as simultaneous rather than sequential processes. fourth, not all attractions necessarily go through all the stages of sight sacralization. all five stages could be outlined in this paper, but some were not so clearly in evidence. fifth, the process of development does not end with the stage of social reproduction but continues through constant redefinition or mechanical reproduction, for example. on the other hand, some attractions may become involved in a process of de-sacralization as well, if their specific character vanishes and they are no longer attractive to tourists. thus, attractions require continuous product development and image-building to maintain their appeal. the model of sight sacralization offers a starting point for analysing the development of specific locations into tourist attractions, but wider approaches are needed in order to understand the process. specific locations should not be taken out of context, but should be examined as a parts of larger attraction complexes if they are connected with such. in addition, the history of an attraction, the demands expressed by tourists, the motives of tourism developers and the possibilities for future development should all be investigated. tourist attractions are constantly changing constructions which are often re-defined, re-marked and re-interpreted. they do not exist alone, but rather their production and development is influenced by various social and political processes. acknowledgements this article is part of the research project crossing borders, building identities: new regionalizations, tourism and everyday life in northern europe (academy of finland, project 1210442). the author would like to thank eeva-kaisa prokkola and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. 28 fennia 186: 1 (2008)tanja löytynoja notes 1 north cape received 198,969 visitors in the period 1 may – 31 august 2007 based on ticket sales in north cape hall (innovation norway 2008). the number of visitors during the whole year will have been higher, however, because north cape hall is also open outside the summer season. 2 according to optical counters, santa claus’ office in santa claus’ village received 324,291 visitors in 2006 (santasalo 2007). this number does not include all visitors to santa claus’ village, however, e.g. people visiting only the shops or passers-by who just stop at the arctic circle are not included. the estimated total number of visitors annually is around half a million (huhtamo 2008). 3 north cape hall has been operated by scandinavian airlines and rica hotels. tourism products on the arctic circle have been developed together with some british tour operators, for example (on the development of charter flights during the christmas season, see hakulinen et al. 2007). references birkeland ij (2002). stories from the north. travel as place-making in the context of modern holiday travel to north cape, norway. 343 p. institutt for sosiologi og samfunnsgeografi, universitetet i oslo, oslo. butler rw (1996). the development of tourism in frontier regions: issues and approaches. in gradus y & h lithwick (eds). frontiers in regional development, 213–229. rowman & littlefield, lanham. cohen e (2007). ‘authenticity’ in tourism studies: aprés la lutte. tourism recreation research 32: 2, 75–82. cresswell t (2004). place: a short introduction. 153 p. blackwell publishing, malden. culler j (1981). semiotics of tourism. american journal of semiotics 1: 1–2, 127–140. davidson p (2005). the idea of north. 271 p. reaktion books, london. degree confluence project (2008). <http://www. confluence.org>. 16.1.2008. fine ec & jh speer (1985). tour guide performances as sight sacralization. annals of tourism research 12: 1, 73–95. gunn ca (1988). vacationscape. designing tourist regions. 2nd ed. 208 p. van nostrand reinhold company, new york. hakulinen s, r komppula & s saraniemi (2007). lapin joulumatkailutuotteen elinkaari. concordelennoista laajamittaiseen joulumatkailuun. 95 p. matkailun edistämiskeskus, helsinki. huhtamo a (2008). vs: lisätietoja napapiiristä. personal email 12.4.2008. hyne c (1898). through arctic lapland. 284 p. adam and charles black, london. innovation norway (2008). norges 50 best besøkte attraksjoner for perioden 1. mai – 31. august 2007. <http://www.innovasjonnorge.no/reiseliv_fs/ pdf/ferdig%20attraksjonliste%202007.pdf>. 9.4.2008. jacobsen jks (1997). the making of an attraction. the case of north cape. annals of tourism research 24: 2, 341–356. jacobsen jks (2000). tourist perceptions of the ultimate european periphery. in brown f & d hall (eds). tourism in peripheral areas. case studies, 74–90. channel view publications, clevedon. koivunen l (2006). nähtävyyksiin tutustumassa. in koivunen l, t syrjämaa & i-m söderholm (eds). turistin tilat. tilallisuus modernin matkustajan kokemuksena, 121–134. turun historiallinen yhdistys, turku. leiper n (1990). tourist attraction systems. annals of tourism research 17: 3, 367–384. lew aa (1987). a framework of tourist attraction research. annals of tourism research 14: 4, 553–575. löytynoja t (2006). suomen keskipiste, vaarinkin valinta? sijainti perinteenä ja perinteen kiinnittyminen paikkaan. in knuuttila s, p laaksonen & u piela (eds). paikka. eletty, kuviteltu, kerrottu. kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 85, 308–332. löytynoja t (2008). national boundaries and placemaking in tourism: staging the finnish-russian border. in paasi a & e-k prokkola (eds). ngp yearbook 2007. the changing cultural geographies of place, region and mobility. nordia geographical publications 36: 4, 35–45. maccannell d (1976). the tourist. a new theory of the leisure class. 214 p. schocken books, new york. medvedev s (1999). across the line: borders in postwestphalian landscapes. in eskelinen h, i liikanen & j oksa (eds). curtains of iron and gold. reconstructing borders and scales of interaction, 43–56. ashgate, aldershot. mires pb (2006). lines. journal of geography 105: 4, 182–184. most traveled people (2007). <http://www.mosttraveledpeople.com>. 23.10.2007. ollikainen m & m poutanen (1997). napapiiri kateissa. tähdet ja avaruus 2/98, 26–29. pekonen l (1998). usa:n keskikohta on harhautusta. helsingin sanomat 13.5.1998. pitkäniitty m (2006). vs: eu:n mantereen itäisin piste ja muut rajaan liittyvät matkailukohteet. personal email 28.6.2006. pretes m (1995). postmodern tourism. the santa claus industry. annals of tourism research 22: 1, 1–15. prokkola ek (2007). cross-border regionalization and tourism development at the swedish-finnish border: “destination arctic circle”. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 7: 2, 120–138. fennia 186: 1 (2008) 29the development of specific locations into tourist attractions: … raivo pj (1996). maiseman kulttuurinen transformaatio. ortodoksinen kirkko suomalaisessa kulttuurimaisemassa. nordia geographical publications 25: 1. 370 p. richardson kp (1977). polliwogs and shellbacks: an analysis of the equator crossing ritual. western folklore 36: 2, 154–159. ridanpää j & t löytynoja (2003). liikkuvat sijainnit, muuttuvat alueet. kulttuurimaantieteellinen tarina suomen keskipiste(id)en matkasta. kulttuurintutkimus 20: 2, 35–43. rovaniemen matkailustrategia (2006). rovaniemen matkailu ja markkinointi oy & rovaniemen kaupunki. <http://tourism.rovaniemi.fi/includes/file_ download.asp?deptid=17733&fileid=20959&fil e=20070322150832.pdf&pdf=1>. 23.10.2007. ruotsalainen r (2005). suomen keskipisteistä. memo 3.2.2005. maanmittauslaitos, helsinki. <http:// www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/popupdocuments/ suomen_keskipisteet_2005.pdf>. 16.3.2005. ryden kc (1993). mapping the invisible landscape. folklore, writing and the sense of place. 326 p. university of iowa press, iowa city. rytkönen t (2000). eu:n itäisimmän pisteen ulkomaanmarkkinointihanke. loppuraportti. ilomantsin matkailu oy. unpublished project report. saarinen j (2001). the transformation of a tourist destination. theory and case studies on the production of local geographies in tourism in finnish lapland. nordia geographical publications 30: 1. 105 p. santasalo t (2007). matkailukohteiden kävijämäärät 2006. matkailun edistämiskeskus e 54. 108 p. sassi d & h de heij (1975). napapiirin maja rovaniemi. 40 p. rovaniemen kaupungin matkailulautakunta, rovaniemi. shields r (1991). places on the margin. alternative geographies of modernity. 334 p. routledge, london. sivuranta m (2002). suomen keskipiste löytyi ripustamalla. helsingin sanomat 27.3.2002. stt (2004). ilomantsi aikoi luovuttaa eu:n itäisimmän pisteen kyprokselle. kaleva 30.4.2004. timothy dj (1998). collecting places: geodetic lines in tourist space. journal of travel & tourism marketing 7: 4, 123–129. timothy dj (2001). tourism and political boundaries. 219 p. routledge, london. timothy dj, b prideaux & ss kim (2004). tourism at borders of conflict and (de)militarized zones. in singh tv (ed). new horizons in tourism: strange experiences and stranger practices, 83–94. cabi publishing, wallingford. urry j (2002). the tourist gaze. 2nd ed. 183 p. sage publications, london. valentin (1958). missä on suomen keskipiste? suomen kuvalehti 34/1958, 6–8. vuoristo k-v & n vesterinen (2001). lumen ja suven maa. suomen matkailumaantiede. 345 p. wsoy, helsinki. wall g (1997). tourism attractions: points, lines, and areas. annals of tourism research 24: 1, 240–243. wang n (1999). rethinking authenticity in tourism experience. annals of tourism research 26: 2, 349–370. regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion and competitiveness jussi s. jauhiainen, susanna harvio, juho luukkonen and helka moilanen jauhiainen, jussi s., susanna harvio, juho luukkonen & helka moilanen (2007). regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion and competitiveness. fennia 185: 1, pp. 31–47. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this article analyses regional development zones (rdzs). rdzs aim to combine economic growth with balanced regional development by directing development in a zonal way between growing centres and less central areas. the zones are generally formed along major roads or railroads between larger centres. rdzs cross many administrative borders and physically connect areas to each other. the empirical material of the study is derived from finnish spatial planning documents at the national, regional and local levels as well as of semistructural questionnaire (373 answers) and interviews with key actors involved in the studied rdzs. the ouka rdz crossing finland in west-east direction between oulu and kuhmo is studied in-depth regarding the goals of the european union territorial agenda. rdzs can become an important integrative tool for territorial cohesion as expressed in the territorial agenda. however, a more efficient concentration of functional activities and land use to core rdz structures, as well as enhancement of the belongingness of inhabitants and key economic actors to the rdz, are needed for this purpose. jussi s. jauhiainen, susanna harvio, juho luukkonen & helka moilanen, department of geography, po box 3000, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: jussi.jauhiainen@oulu.fi. introduction knowledge-based development, innovations and internationalization are buzzwords in today’s regional development aiming to raise the competitiveness of regions. territories with an innovative milieu, social capital and enough, but not too many differences in their physical and natural characteristics and well-developed internal and external networks have the greatest potential for success. in the contemporary world, large urban areas gather crucial resources, necessary actors and institutional thickness for knowledge-based economic growth. however, territorially, most of europe is not consisted of large urban agglomeration, but rather of peripheral areas. a key challenge for cohesion and competitiveness is the interaction between centres and peripheries. this article deals with regional development zones (rdzs). the aim of rdz is to combine economic growth (competitiveness) with balanced regional development (cohesion) by directing and enhancing development in a zonal way in and between centres and peripheries. as tools for regional development, rdzs aim to intertwine two broader policy orientations, namely the competition-oriented workfare state and the distributionoriented welfare state (see jessop 1993; amin 1999; macleod & goodwin 1999). in the former, the public sector and central authorities support strategies and organization of private sector-led regional development. the latter refers to the public sector holding a key strategic position in organizing regional development and actively using public sector resources to guide the development. these two regional development policy strands lie in the background of the current finnish regional policy (jauhiainen 2007). a rdz, a territory with a system of production and social and institutional base has an active endogenous role in development. as garofoli (2002: 227) expresses, a territory “includes all those historical, cultural and social factors that are the basis of specific models of productive organization, of the continuous interaction among economic and social actors and, therefore, of the actual processes 32 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen of economic and social transformation.” the endogenous potential of polycentric urban regions is recognised in the densely built europe (see priemus & zonneveld 2004) but has not as yet been given much consideration in peripheral areas. rdzs have existed in various forms during history. among the first well-known contemporary rdzs is the ‘blue banana’ from the 1980s, stretching between london and milan. currently, the most debated rdz is the ‘pentagon’ of europe inbetween london–paris–milan–munich–hamburg. there are also nationally designed rdzs. for example, the united states, south africa and china have various zones of empowerment, enterprise and export known as development zones with special status and incentives to attract (foreign) direct investment and promote regional economy. examples of such incentives are exemptions or deductions of taxes, increased assess to investment credits, loans and reduced government and public sector regulations (ge 1995; wong & tang 2005). however, this article does not discuss these zones based on external top-down policy. instead, the emphasis here is on the endogenous potential of rdzs as regional development tools to simultaneously promote competitiveness and cohesion. the key question is how growing centres and declining peripheries are organised within rdzs towards proactive and efficient territorial integration. in this article, current regional development is conceptualized as zones, corridors and networks. geographical proximity and territorial embeddedness in various forms are issues that are at stake. the way rdzs are linked to growing centres and peripheral areas will also be analysed. the research questions are as follows: • what are the regional development zones in finland? how are they defined in strategies at different spatial levels, presented in regional development plans and implemented in practice when connecting central and peripheral areas? • how does one important finnish regional development zone, the ouka crossing the country in west-east direction, relate to the european union’s territorial agenda? the conceptual elaboration for this article regards competitiveness, cohesion and peripherality. these notions derive from scientific articles, the european union documentary and finnish spatial development strategies. the main empirical material comes from an analysis of rdzs in finland (see also jauhiainen et al. 2007). the ouka rdz (oulu–kajaani-kehittämisvyöhyke) is analysed in detail regarding competitiveness and cohesion. special attention is paid to how the ouka rdz responds to the regional development challenges posed by the territorial agenda of the european union. first, the recent national guideline for territorial development, competitiveness, well-being and eco-efficiency. perspectives for spatial structure and land use in finland, was studied to determine how it both visually and textually presented the rdzs in finland (ministry of the environment 2006). the strategy titled “land use and regional structure in year 2017” from the 1990s was studied to investigate the continuity of such a policy (ministry of the environment 1995). second, the most recent regional development plan as well as regional strategic programs and land-use plans of each regional council with a rdz were analysed. these plans have been approved of from the year 2003 onwards, depending on the region. the study included investigating whether and, if so, how, the rdzs were discussed in these plans. in addition, selected larger urban areas in different parts of finland were similarly analysed to trace evidence of rdzs. the applied method was that of basic visual and textual analysis of respective plans. to indicate opportunities and challenges of rdzs in the recent european union and finnish territorial development policies, the study focused on the economic, social and political aspects of six rdzs in finland. these represent the variety of rdzs in the country. for a more in-depth analysis, the ouka rdz was studied regarding its geographical context, economic and social resources and governance. the geographical context was characterised by location and accessibility (internal and external transport network, physical and temporal connection to helsinki), natural resources (renewable and nonrenewable resources) and social resources (population and employment distribution and density). the dynamics of social resources was analysed using a geographical information system by measuring population change in 1995–2005 and employment change in 1995–2003 in each square kilometre. governance was studied through a questionnaire among key regional development actors dealing with economy, politics and regional planning in six rdzs. in total, 373 persons from six rdzs, mostly from public and non-governmental sectors involved in regional development issues, completed a four-page semi-structural questionnaire sent by e-mail in 2006 (response rate fennia 185: 1 (2007) 33regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … 25.5%). the methods used in the analysis were basic frequencies and cross-tables. in addition, ten persons from rdzs were interviewed to analyse further the interpretations received from the questionnaire. for the ouka rdz, also additional interviews were conducted. furthermore, a database of regional development projects funded by the european union in 2000–2006 was formed from the ouka data. the aspects analysed were how the projects focus on ouka territorially and thematically by having either an economic, cultural or environmental focus. territorial cohesion policy of the european union after decades of almost exclusively focusing on lagging regions and regions with structural problems in its member countries, the european union regional development policies have recognised that without successful urban agglomerations, europe cannot become a globally leading economic area (nordregio 2005). therefore the european union increasingly promotes competitiveness by enhancing the performance of urban areas. this is evident in the european union structural policies for 2007–2013. however, concentration also has another, more negative side to it, namely increasing the lagging behind and divergence of smaller peripheral areas. scott and storper (2003: 589) argue that a crucial task for regional development in global economy is to create and sustain agglomerations without which countries cannot enter the highest ranks of global economy, while simultaneously ensuring that income disparities remain socially just and politically tolerable. this is the demanding task of regional development: to simultaneously remain competitive and cohesive. therefore the concentration of global competitiveness into one megaregion in europe, ‘the pentagon’, is not the aim of the european commission, but rather a polycentric territorial development throughout the continent (priemus & zonneveld 2004: 287). unlimited concentration creates undesirable effects also to growing urban areas which experience rising housing costs, growing traffic congestion and declining social and ecological quality. towns and cities cannot direct the material and social consequences of growth, which may result in unwanted sprawl in the urban fringe. in the recent political discussion about the european spatial development, competition and cohesion go together in regional development if applied appropriately. the strategies are to improve comprehensive skillful networking of urban regions, promote endogenous development and enhance partnership between urban regions and surrounding less developed areas. ministers responsible for spatial planning in european countries expressed this in 2006 as follows: “it is necessary to devise and build networks as “bridges” for the sustainable spatial and socio-economic development of the european continent. sustainable development is better achieved by boosting interactions among the different systems and strong networks may help to promote sustainability.” (european conference of ministers… 2006). however, as amin (1999: 375) mentions, there is a risk of parochial optimism being centred on the belief that building local capabilities would be sufficient for establishing a privileged position within global networks. the critical success is “not the presence of local relations of association and institutional advancement but the ability of places to anticipate and respond to changing external circumstances.” european spatial development perspective and territorial agenda growth and decline certainly have a spatial dimension manifested in concrete places everywhere in the world. during the 1990s, cooperation between the european union member states deepened in regional development and spatial policy matters. as an outcome emerged a new layer in policy discussion about the spatial impacts of concentration and dispersal. as a result, two major documents of spatial importance were designed in the european union: the european spatial development perspective and the territorial agenda. the european spatial development perspective (esdp), approved in 1999, indicates guidelines for how europe should develop spatially not only within the european union, but also across its external borders. the main goals of the esdp are to develop a balanced and polycentric urban system and a new urban-rural partnership; secure parity of access to infrastructure and knowledge; and achieve sustainable development, prudent management and protection of nature and cultural her34 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen itage (commission of the european communities 1999). however, the implementation of esdp is challenging because it is not a legally binding agreement. as faludi and waterhout (2002) clearly express, the esdp is not a ‘masterplan’ designed and implemented by ‘brussels’. instead, esdp is more informal, rather a compromise between different traditions of spatial planning in various european countries (janin rivolin & faludi 2005) and between these countries and the commission (schön 2005: 389). nevertheless, from the spatial planning perspective, the esdp is a key strategic document enhancing inter-european spatial development policies and practices. among these goals are cross-border development, territorial structure based on interactive and linked urban centres (polycentrism) and trans-european networks tying european regions together. the esdp fortified the focus on territorial dimension in the european union. one significant result is the goal of territorial cohesion alongside with economic and social cohesion in the draft of the treaty establishing the constitution for europe. albeit this constitution was rejected in referenda in france and the netherlands, the target of territorial cohesion endures on the european political agenda. in the leipzig informal ministerial conference in may 2007, the ministers responsible for spatial development in the european union member states agreed on the policy document territorial agenda of the european union. this clearly expresses the need to strengthen territorial cohesion in the european union (territorial agenda… 2007). the territorial agenda (ta) can be seen as a continuum from the esdp as it is built upon the latter’s main objectives (territorial agenda… 2007: 3). as faludi (2006b: 13) expresses, the esdp agenda has been modified “under the flag of territorial cohesion”. territorial cohesion includes competitiveness and convergence of european regions. in 2004, the third cohesion report of the european union concluded that territorial cohesion can be used to reduce existing disparities, prevent territorial imbalances and assist in making sectoral policies with a spatial impact more coherent. another goal is to improve territorial integration and encourage cooperation between regions (commission of the european communities 2004: 27). in the ta, territorial cohesion means focusing on development opportunities to encourage cooperation and networking, bringing coherence and coordination between regional and sectoral policies, paying attention to the strengths of individual areas and targeting policy instruments more effectively (faludi 2006a). polycentrism is a method to intertwine centres and their hinterlands, conceptualise and communicate competing strategies and prepare development options. it supports the catching-up of national economies by strengthening the growth centres as the economic locomotives of a country, but also strongly supports the spreading of economic growth potential to secondary cities and regions to avoid internal polarisation (schön 2005: 394). faludi (2006a: 671–673) carefully explains how the idea of territorial cohesion has ‘french roots’ in experiences gained from the administrative decentralisation of france since the 1960s. besides the regulative institutions at european and national levels, also various local-regional interest groups such as inhabitants, enterprises, planning agencies and governmental and non-governmental organisations are involved in this process. the government works alongside a range of non-state actors to realise policy goals implementing multi-level governance. in addition, the role of regions or territories increases in spatial planning practices organised along development zones. this satisfies better the management of european cohesion and structural funds dealing with regional development as well as facilitates integrated proactive spatial planning strategies in the european union member states (schout & jordan 2007: 835–837). the emphasis on spatial and territorial aspects means that places and geographical context matter, policies are differentiated according to the territorial context, that the thematic integration of sectoral policies with impact on certain places (whatever the spatial level) is desirable and that the involvement of actors from subnational levels (regions and municipalities) is crucial for successful strategies and their translation into the ‘regional language of people’ (the territorial state… 2005). applied appropriately, it is expected that territorial cohesion will strengthen the endogenous potential in territories and overcome imbalance between territories (schön 2005: 393). territorial cohesion policy gives weight to comprehensive spatial strategies which take into account specific regional characteristics. territorial cohesion has two sides: “one more interventionist in the sense of actively pursuing balanced development throughout the territory concerned… and the other concerned with co-ordination” (faludi fennia 185: 1 (2007) 35regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … 2004: 1355). in other words, territorial cohesion is said to merge two spatial planning traditions. the regional economic approach focuses on the location of economic development, while the comprehensive integrated approach focuses on land use (faludi 2004: 1355). these traditions appear also in camagni’s (2007: 135) definition of territorial cohesion as “the territorial dimension of sustainability”. here territorial cohesion policies require an integrated approach which takes into the consideration socio-cultural, economic and environmental aspects of a particular territory (camagni 2007: 137). the ta established the goals as follows: promoting polycentric development and innovation through networking of city regions and cities; new forms of partnership and territorial governance between urban and rural areas; promoting regional clusters of transnational competition and innovation in europe; strengthening and extending transeuropean technological networks; promoting trans-european risk management including the impacts of climate change; and strengthening ecological structures and cultural resources as added value for development (territorial agenda… 2007). such an agenda emphasising territories and territorial relations was received positively by various organizations, e.g. the council of european municipalities and regions (council of european… 2007). nevertheless, the ta is also a political statement and a mental framework for collective learning about the desired spatial structure (zonneveld & waterhout 2005: 22). therefore the ta needs to be analysed, for example, with regard to how networking is linked to spatial development and what its impact on territorial cohesion will be. however, the ta process is only at its beginning stage in 2007. the road map of territorial cohesion into practice is being designed in the action plan. as in the case of the esdp, territorial cohesion does not have a legal binding status in the spatial development plans of the european union member states. spatial development, territorial cohesion and peripheries in the contemporary world of globalisation and multi-scalar flows, spatial development can be generally categorised upon three simplified models. the first model of centre-periphery means an unregulated concentration of people and material recourses into one or more growing centres. the long-term result is congestion in the centre and consequential decline of periphery. the second model is hierarchic spatial organization of society into centres, hinterlands and peripheries promoted by regulative public sector intervention. this hierarchic network needs substantial public resources. in the third, dynamic model, larger and smaller centres and their neighbourhoods form an interactive network. the result is a polycentric spatial structure in which each actor enhances the network’s potential for innovation through participation. while each of the three models is based on networks, their direction and level of interaction vary (hadjimichalis & hudson 2006: 859). furthermore, it has to be taken into account that very diverse organizational systems may coexist, cooperate and compete within the same territory (garofoli 2002: 226). in this article, networked regional development is conceptualised through networks, zones and corridors (fig. 1). conceptualisation is elaborated further from studies by mustikkamäki and viljamaa (2001) and jauhiainen et al. (2007). the first (”network”) is a functional network. while geographical proximity within the network can be an asset, it is not necessary. the actors in the network select partners due to their core resources that improve the network performance by complementing it. technology transfer and innovation networks are examples of functional networks. a network of a transnational enterprise having subsidiaries in many centres around the world also belongs to this category. the role of a particular locality is less important and can be replaced by another locality, for example, in the relocation of economic activities from western europe to china and india. the second (“zone”) is a physical-functional network with emphasis on tackling development challenges or enhancing cooperation between key actors in a territorially connected area. geographical proximity plays an important role. the network derives from structural and content-related activities. examples of such networks are national and international networks between urban regions, urban areas near to each other and internal networks within a functional urban region. the key actors are local authorities or private sector representatives. a proper infrastructure facilitating material and immaterial flows within the zone is important. attention is paid also to the identity and image of the network to facilitate its marketing and lobbying. 36 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen the third (“corridor”) is a physical network in which geographical proximity and territorial continuity are crucial elements. such a network follows major infrastructures, e.g. a road, railroad or river that ties the partners physically together. local authorities possess a significant role here. the aim is to enhance the connection between infrastructure and land-use within the network area to intensify material flows between network centres. a corridor can develop into a zone when its development strategy and practices are enhanced by complementing resources within the network and creating a collective identity for it. seen from a different scalar perspective (also ahlqvist & inkinen 2007 in this volume), the same flow can have different impacts. the spatial scope and orientation of interactions between places do not coincide exclusively with the polycentric system as a whole. flows are dynamic and vary considerably between types of interactions (meijers & romein 2003: 180–181). moving across scales indicates how there are deconstructing elements within and between nodes, i.e. challenges in governance of the nodes, in fostering of economic flows within the nodes and increasing the belongingness of people and other actors to the node. centres and peripheries can be intertwined towards zonal development by means of polycentrism. as faludi (2006a: 669) expresses, the esdp does not explicitly define the locations where such zones should be created. rather, there is a need for cooperation and initiatives from below to create transnational development strategies. inside the broader goal of competitiveness, territorial cohesion could become a key policy to promote polycentric development based on interactive rdzs. rdzs could be territories to promote and strengthen the capacity of local initiatives. polycentric development and peripheries currently, the debate on polycentrism is interested in larger centres and focused on the well-developed areas of europe. however, as much as 72 per cent of inhabitants in the european union live in towns and villages with less than 100,000 inhabitants (council of european… 2007). in the current discourse, being small means being peripheral – while being both small and located in a remote area signifies being ‘double peripheral’. in regional development, periphery has traditionally been defined through accessibility and geographical absolute distance (see keeble et al. 1988). transport and travel costs, together with the lack of agglomeration advantages, have explained the weak economic performance of remote areas. as a consefig. 1. networked regional development: network, zone and corridor. fennia 185: 1 (2007) 37regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … quence, traditional regional policy tools have focused mainly on improving transport and communication infrastructure (copus 2001: 539, see also vickerman et al. 1999) and developing deep peripheries with resource transfer (spiekermann & aalbu 2004: 29). the location and accessibility of a peripheral area to economic core regions have defined the area’s competitiveness, productivity and economic success (spiekermann & neubauer 2002: 7). considering that ‘geography matters’, i.e. that location of people and economic activities is of great significance, it is of utmost importance how nodes and flows enhance the formation towards a polycentric network. geographical proximity is still important in forming other proximities, such as institutional proximity providing a basic level of trust and reducing uncertainty to draw people into mutual projects even when they have had no earlier social interaction (lagendijk & lorenzen 2007: 458). cultural proximity supports necessary trustbuilding for innovation-led regional development (gertler 2003). studying italy, garofoli (2002: 235) suggests twinning more and less peripheral areas to build real strategic alliances. it involves both a system of development actors of a well-developed area (such as consortia of enterprises, associations of interests, service centres and intermediate institutions, and educational and research institutions) and a system of local actors (embedded and trustbased networks between smes, etc.) in a less developed area. in rdzs these systems network within geographical proximity, binding actors from centres and peripheries to cooperation. lagendijk and lorenzen (2007) and torre and rallet (2005) have recently discussed spatial and non-spatial proximity. spatially bounded geographical proximity is a product of the historically accumulated construction of transport infrastructures and meeting places shaping territorially bounded spaces along social, institutional, political and economic dimensions. spatially-bound geographical proximity underpins their connectivity and positionality. this has an objective dimension (what is easy and affordable to reach) and also a subjective sense (what feels to be near). spatially unbounded proximity is definable along two dimensions: belonging meaning social proximity and similarity meaning institutional proximity. both are fundamental in organisational proximity. significant in rdzs is to consider how geographical proximity meets with organisational proximity (table 1) and how these forms of proximity affect the formation of rdzs. the information society has created new meanings for periphery since the significance of physical distance has changed. communication infrastructure facilitates the economic potential of all regions. as information technology reaches peripheral regions, economic success of a region cannot be derived directly from its physical location. copus (2001) defines the new periphery with the concept of aspatial peripherality through the quality of local information technology infrastructure, human capital (especially capacity to utilise information society technologies), quality of local business networks, local embeddedness and civic society, local institutional structures/networks and quality of links to european/global markets and information networks. these elements either boost or weaken a region’s economic development and its ability to exploit the possibilities brought by new accessibility (copus 2001: 544–546, see also terlouw 2001: 83–84). in rdzs, the elements of aspatial peripherality are, however, partially linked to spatial dimensions of peripherality as physical context affects the quality and nature of local networks. in the context of innovations, periphery can be understood as a region with deficient regional innovation system (gren 2003: 4). the elements defining aspatial periphery are crucial in defining table 1. geographical and organisational proximity. source: lagendijk & lorenzen 2007: 461. geographical proximity organizational proximity strong weak strong local systems of innovation/production (clusters, agglomerations) and temporary co-localization (projects, meetings) co-location without (direct) interaction (agglomeration, corridor) with indirect effects in urbanization economies weak non-localized interaction (trans-local organizations, value chains, etc.) activities in isolation, for example, in rural peripheral areas 38 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen regional innovation systems in a periphery. although innovations are usually found to arise due to agglomeration advantages, there are also successful regions in peripheral europe (see gren 2003). in fact, a peripheral region can equally experience economic growth when these geographically unbounded characteristics increase their significance in regional development (copus & skuras 2006: 79–81). different networks help to overcome obstacles arising from a remote location. a wider recognition of the possibilities of a periphery is needed to maximise the potentials of remote regions (vaessen & keeble 1995: 490; copus 2001: 549; terlouw 2001: 83). the concept of polycentrism has opened up new possibilities to innovative activities in peripheries. however, this concept leaves the concrete spatial organisation of innovation actions open. one possibility to spatially manage innovations is through rdzs in which actors are geographically and functionally connected. according to the study regarding peripheries by copus and skuras (2006: 82), “businesses accessing spatially defined horizontal networks may favour local economic activity as they tend to increase their marginal propensity to consume locally produced products. further to this argument, businesses that access spatially defined vertical networks increase their exports and increase their multiplier effect in the local area.” a wider knowledge of the benefits of zonal organisation of innovation activities is, however, needed to realise the potentials of rdzs. important is the additional value rdzs bring to innovation potential compared to non-geographical and spatially unbounded networks. regional development zones in finland and territorial cohesion regional development zones as potential tools for spatial development appeared in the finnish context in the 1980s. among the first was the hht from the national capital helsinki via hämeenlinna to tampere connecting the two largest urban agglomerations of the country. the importance of hht made national authorities to consider other rdzs in finland as well as to recognise their potential international significance. at the same time in the 1980s there was a discussion about the development zone ‘blue banana’ between london and milan. the first spatial development vision for finland in 1996 and the early notions of polycentric spatial structure increased consciousness about rdzs in the country (ministry of the environment 1995; haarni & vartiainen 1996). in the spatial development vision for finland 2030, the ministry of the environment, the entity responsible for guidance of spatial planning, identifies several development zones between major agglomerations. accordingly, the rdzs with good logistics enhance polycentric spatial structure and networking of urban regions. the rdzs link urban centres with their hinterlands as well as improve and guide cooperation between urban regions (ministry of the environment 2006). also the ministry of the interior and other key regional development actors paid attention to rdzs in the early 2000s (antikainen 2005; antikainen et al. 2006). the aim to combine economic competitiveness with balanced regional development fits to the european and national development goals for regions. addressing the significance of the rdzs for such a combination played an important role in the finnish presidency of the european union in 2006 when the territorial agenda was prepared. furthermore, the idea of polycentrism has been enhanced in finland by the european union policies (see antikainen 2005). this includes also the broader european union -oriented research program espon and its results promoting a polycentric spatial structure for the european union member states (nordregio 2005). in the early 2000s, rdzs consolidated their position in the finnish national spatial development strategies. rdzs are becoming a tool to balance regional development, which has been the task of national regional policy. the idea is not to create passive subsidy transfer to marginal areas but to actively improve connections and cooperation within the zones located in various parts of the country. centers and less central areas can be tied together as development zones along major transport infrastructures. in general, rdzs aim to increase new and better employment opportunities, broaden economic structures, attract new enterprises, boost cooperation among the public sector as well as between the public and private sectors and enhance the image of the area (ministry of the environment 2006). according to the most recent development plans of regional councils and the national spatial development vision for finland 2030, one can identify approximately a dozen rdzs in finland (fig. 2 and table 2). there is no single concept or practice fennia 185: 1 (2007) 39regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … fig. 2. regional development zones in finland. table 2. regional development zones in finland. source: jauhiainen et al. 2007. name size (sq.km) length (km) inhabitants (millions) type development phase hht zone 9100 220 1.70 international stabile e18 corridor 8500 500 1.50 international stabile mid-nordic 60,500 500 0.80 international stabile bothnian arc 46,000 400 0.60 international stabile ouka 16,500 400 0.20 international stabilizing torneå valley 49,000 600 0.08 international idea sk quality corridor 3900 100 0.12 regional idea jjä 4900 50 0.08 supra/regional idea arctic corridor 32,100 400 0.02 reg./international idea for the rdzs. networks, corridors and zones are equally called rdzs in regional development documents. some rdzs are a few kilometres wide corridors along transport and communication structures. others are broad, sparsely populated and consist mostly of un-built areas. the more advanced zones have their own organisation, funding and staff, while the less developed are still just an idea. following the analysis of various spatial development documents, it came out that some finnish rdzs, such as the hht, the e18, the bothnian arc, the mid nordic and the ouka, act on the international level. the others’ focus is regional or local around medium-sized towns. the smallest rdz has less than 20,000 inhabitants, whereas the largest has a population of almost two million people. rdzs are often based on an agreement between administrative organisations involved in their activities. therefore rdzs are seldom functionally coherent. in practice, only parts of several municipalities are active in a rdz. as indicated above, 373 key public and nongovernmental sector actors of six rdzs answered to a semi-structured questionnaire in 2006. most respondents were not well aware of the rdzs in finland. the best known rdzs were the bothnian arc, the ouka rdz and the torneå valley, of which about three out of five were aware of. of the studied rdzs, the arctic corridor and the southern karelia quality corridor were the least known and only about every fourth knew them to some degree. surprisingly, the hht and the e18 were known only by one third of the respondents. however, the respondents were not from these zones (jauhiainen et al. 2007). 40 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen there is not yet a proper understanding about the specific possibilities of rdzs in contemporary regional development. according to these key actors, rdzs should address quite basic regional development issues, such as employment and economic structure (fig. 3). the most important goals are to increase new jobs in municipalities, improve transport and connections and diversify economic structure within the zone. still, rather few see rdzs as important strategic or practical tools for regional development. the least important goals were rdzs as an action tool for the private sector, as a crucial instrument for practical development and as a strategic base for developing the area. for many regional development actors, rdzs have not as yet been truly established as regional development tools. a further challenge is that rdzs cross many municipal and regional administrative borders and require inter-sectoral cooperation. many actors have not found a proper position for rdzs among traditional strategic planning by regional councils or detailed land-use planning by municipalities. public sector (regional) authorities lead the rdzs, and most private sector and non-gov 37 42 59 59 61 65 69 79 82 84 86 85 87 103 103 110 110 121 131 135 146 150 151 152 154 158 167 180 132 175 162 162 146 164 152 174 161 178 163 173 200 193 191 178 198 164 173 149 168 158 162 157 160 160 137 138 154 123 123 127 127 111 125 90 104 80 97 90 66 57 60 64 51 63 54 71 38 50 45 52 42 34 51 36 36 20 17 12 27 22 14 18 13 16 13 10 5 7 3 10 2 14 7 6 9 4 3 2 5 8 6 8 0 % 20 % 40 % 60 % 80 % 100 % of f er an operations model to business (n=359) of fer an essential tool f or practical development (n=360) of f er a basis for strategic development (n=361) of f er an operations model to spatial planning (n=360) increase residents to the rdz (n=361) balance regional development (n=362) increase jobs in technology (n=360) increase the accessibility of centres (n=361) increase the revenue of enterprises (n=360) improve the accessibility of peripheral regions (n=358) assist in specialising industrial structure (n=359) unif y regional development strategies (n=358) increase cooperation betw een private actors (n=358) increase cooperation betw een centres (n=360) increase cooperation betw een public actors (n=357) increase investments to the rdz (n=362) increase public-private-partnership (n=361) promote regional marketing to investors (n=362) increase w ell-being of citizens (n=365) increase international connections (n=361) maintain jobs (n=361) increase the amount of public development f unds (n=362) increase cooperation betw een municipalities (n=361) increase regional visibility (n=363) increase new enterprises (n=361) diversify industrial structure (n=360) develop traff ic lanes and connections (n=361) increase new jobs to municipalities (n=362) very important important slightly important not important fig. 3. significance of aims of regional development zones. answers by key public and non-governmental regional development actors in six rdzs. fennia 185: 1 (2007) 41regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … ernmental actors have not realised their opportunities. due to the project-based administration of rdzs, some actors question the political accountability and legitimacy of rdzs in regions and municipalities. the answers to the questionnaire and the analysed planning documents of regional councils and functional urban regions show that rdzs have, at the moment, many challenges as tools to combine competitiveness and balanced territorial structure. for many, rdzs still remain undefined wishes rather than focused strategies and their implementation. nevertheless, leaning on zonneveld and waterhout (2005), rdzs gain importance as concrete tools to build mental frameworks for territorial cohesion. these ‘mental frameworks’ boost the vital elements of territorial cohesion, namely territorial integration and cooperation. from a strategic spatial development viewpoint, rdzs have strong connection to material reality by directing human activities to selected areas. this is a significant element of territorial cohesion, which camagni (2007) calls “the territorial dimension of sustainability”. there are various structural and organisational reasons for today’s rather weak performance of rdzs in finland. first, many so-called rdzs are in fact passive transport corridors or extensions of towns along major roads. they have not been integrated into regional development plans. different actors at regional level consider the possibilities of rdzs differently. some claim they are important, while others in the same region consider them insignificant. second, the activities of rdzs are mostly narrow cooperation between official public regional development actors. openness and participation to the activities of rdzs are mostly unsatisfactory. the large size of many rdzs makes it difficult to find commonalities between actors and interests. therefore rdzs in finland in general are merely visions and wishes for a balanced growth than the reality of a conscious policy. fragmentation of physical structure, development almost exclusively based on the public sector and lack of resources for concrete activities hinder the development of rdzs. furthermore, it is difficult to establish one best practice because rdzs differ very much from each other. of the less stabilised zones, the arctic corridor may have more importance in the future when large energy fields in the barents regions will be opened. also the opening of an efficient railroad transport connection from korea and china through russia to finland will significantly alter the importance of many finnish rdzs, depending on their position as regards this transit traffic. ouka regional development zone and the territorial agenda of the european union the following analyses the ouka rdz (oulu–kajaani-kehittämisvyöhyke) with regard to the key aspects addressed in the european union territorial agenda (territorial agenda… 2007). the ouka rdz is among the most well-known rdzs in finland. in 2006, the zone covered nine municipalities reaching from oulu at the northern edge of the baltic sea eastwards to the vartius border station in kuhmo next to the russian border (fig. 4). the road distance from oulu to vartius is 256 km and from oulu to helsinki about 600 km. the total area of the ouka zone is 16,500 km2 of which 2000 km2 is water. with a population of 206,000 inhabitants it is among the medium-sized finnish rdzs. although the area has a centuries-long tradition of east-west export and import of goods, the first report about a possible east-west development zone came out as late as in 1995. the idea was to connect oulu and kajaani in finland with arkangelsk and komi in russia. in 2004, the regional authorities of two finnish regions, northern ostrobothnia and kainuu, started to develop a regional development zone ouka to promote prerequisites for their development. the emphasis was directed on using knowledge flows, improving transport connections, making the zone better known and more attractive, distributing welfare and developing a specific zonal model. development projects were started to achieve these goals. the activities include various aspects: development of competence, development of cooperation, ouka an as activity area and the ouka transport corridor. regional planning documents of northern ostrobothnia and kainuu describe the ouka as an international development zone from oulu all the way to kostomukša and arkhangelsk in russia. the ouka zone is also part of the european union transport corridor called the northern axis or the northern east-west corridor. in 2006, ouka was managed by a board of 14 members from public sector organisations all over the zone. the first budget period was in 2004–2006 and the second in 2007–2010 (ouka 2006). 42 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen the ouka rdz has been recently analysed in detail from the viewpoints of spatial structure, population dynamics, economy and politics (see jauhiainen et al. 2007). the following will discuss the opportunities and challenges the ouka rdz has from the point of view of the key aspects of the european union territorial agenda (territorial agenda… 2007). regarding the goal of polycentric development and innovation achieved through networking of urban regions, the spatial structure of ouka consists of two regional centres (oulu and kajaani), one small town (kuhmo) and a number of small municipal centres along roads, railroads and rivers. the city of oulu with its surroundings is the second fastest growing area in finland, while the rest of the rdz experiences population decline. two-thirds of the population live in the oulu river valley in the west on an about 50-kilometer-long stripe stretching from the city of oulu towards the southeast, whereas the oulu lake area and the upper kainuu area have significantly less people. a vast majority of the zone is very sparsely populated, having less than twelve persons per square kilometre. there has not been much cooperation between oulu and kajaani. their rather independent administrative position is due to active state-led regional policy in the 1960s–1980s when the finnish territorial structure was organised along hierarchic centres and their hinterlands. however, at present the role of larger centres is increasing. ouka aims to enhance cooperation between these centres and encourage networking within the zone. in the usage of the european union structural funds for 2000–2006, priority was given to direct the activities along the ouka zone. enhancing cooperation between actors in the zone has been a secondary, but nevertheless important goal in the european union co-funded projects. the improvement of infrastructure in the zone is different in different parts of the area. the projects in the objective 2 area have mostly focused on infrastructure, but elsewhere infrastructure improvement did not play such an important role. most projects funded by the structural funds focus only partially on the ouka rdz. the projects are targeted either to wider geographical regions (e.g. projects for the whole region) or smaller territories (e.g. municipal or sub-regional projects). this is partly due to the oulu and kainuu areas belonging to different regional development programs and their intertwining is administratively difficult. with regard to internal accessibility, ouka is characterised by long distances that nevertheless enable daily interaction between regional actors. fig. 4. ouka regional development zone. fennia 185: 1 (2007) 43regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … ouka aims at the zonal organisation of innovative activities, but the possible results become visible only after a few years. there are strategies to internationalise the ouka by extending it to russia and sweden through the bothnian arc rdz. according to priemus and zonneveld (2004: 292), in polycentric urban networks, international aviation connections (through airports), harbour connections (through seaports) and high-speed train networks (through stations) are important. interconnectivity of networks is relevant for passenger and freight transport. in ouka, there is one harbour (oulu) with several weekly freight connections to european and other ports, two airports (oulu and kajaani) and railroad connections (one in east-west and two in north-south direction). the domestic oulu airport is the second busiest in finland having 2300 daily passengers whereas kajaani is used by under 300 passengers daily. the rail connection between the two centres of ouka is rather poorly served and has less than 500 daily passengers. however, the importance of the railroad is growing due to freight to russia. the road network is the main internal connection within the rdz. regarding territorial governance and partnership between urban and rural areas, the abovementioned administrative mixture is a challenge. ouka passes through two regions (northern ostrobothnia and kainuu) and two european union nuts 2 areas and reaches two international borders. of the zone’s nine municipalities, only one is moderately urban and the rest predominantly rural. the western and eastern parts belong to different spatial development plans, making the management and intertwining of european, national and regional funds difficult. ouka is not yet an entirely functional zone. for example, there are ten municipalities that belong to the functional urban region of oulu, but only two of them take part in the ouka activities. the governance structure of ouka is rather loose as regards development and planning. in 2004–2006, there were 14 members from municipalities, one full-time employed project manager and one part-time consultant in the management board (ouka 2006). some smaller municipalities expressed that their voice is not heard in ouka. this indicates difficulties in formal urban and rural partnership. until 2007, enterprises, non-governmental organisations and inhabitants’ representatives were absent from the management board. this is what hadjimichalis and hudson (2006: 868–869) warn about networks having rhetorical emphasis upon partnership, equality and equity between partners whereas often the reality is of asymmetrical power positions, democratic deficit and political unaccountability. nevertheless, the ouka rdz has geographical proximity, something which purely functional networks do not have. as a consequence, ouka has the potential for using spatial proximity to enhance its innovative activities. for example, rural parts can be included more efficiently in food production chains within the rdz. common road and rail networks are an asset for the governance of the whole zone. it facilitates the change from weak to strong organizational proximity. as lagendijk and lorenzen (2007) indicate, temporary co-localisation with projects and meetings is important in intensive local systems of innovation and production. garofoli (2002: 236) underlines the importance of regional authorities and other public and intermediate institutions (for instance, national and regional development agencies) in supporting and coordinating local initiatives, assisting the diffusion of knowledge about successful cases and encouraging the replication of best practices. this requires a strong commitment to planning capacities and to coordinating local systems which favour initiatives in local economic development and interregional collaboration. regarding the clustering of emerging internationally competitive innovations, ouka has significant potential in selected activities. the oulu fur is a well-known cluster in information and communication technology (ict) despite small regional and national markets. the said ict sector employs approximately 15,000 people and a substantial number of individuals are involved in research and development activities in e.g. the world’s leading ict company nokia and at the university of oulu (ala-rämi 2007). however, there are only two larger employment and productive clusters (the central parts of oulu and kajaani). oulu holds over 80 per cent of total net sales of the rdz while a majority of the zone is peripheral. besides the oulu fur, local strands of innovation activity lie in kajaani (measurepolis), vuokatti (snowpolis) and rokua (humanpolis). these small technology development clusters belong to the multipolis innovation network which promotes innovative actions in localities not only in northern finland, but also in northern scandinavia. nevertheless, cooperation between innovative technology enterprises and universities has not as yet been fully explored (jauhiainen 2006). according to interviews with 44 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen respective polis managers, these technology clusters cooperate partly within the ouka rdz. two out of three polis leaders have cooperated with well-being and environmental technology actors within ouka. the exploration of the potential of ouka requires cooperation with enterprises to form a regional innovation system. however, stronger clustering and focusing on selected internationally competitive activities would retain resources from traditional sources of living, such as agriculture and low-tech manufacturing. to achieve the potential of territorial cohesion, strong technological networks are needed. in general, the ouka rdz has a very good basic technological network structure. there are plans to enhance wireless communication to cover the whole oulu fur as well as the generally peripheral kainuu region. this would facilitate information transfer and potentially improve education, working and leisure possibilities at distance in selected topics. the multipolis network is an example of the use of technological networks in developing high technology. however, geographical proximity is also needed because face-to-face interaction is crucial in many phases of technology development (ala-rämi 2007). the coming together of regional actors improves embedded knowledge, but technological networks are needed to connect it to global pipelines (maskell et al. 2006) and to overcome problems of aspatial peripherality (copus 2001). risk management has not been a major theme in ouka thus far. however, the oulu river is a potential topic. the river is important in energy production and there are also plans to introduce other sustainable energy sources, such as wind power plants and bioenergy fields within the zone. there is strong pressure to build housing by the riverside, which makes the impacts of climate change a relevant issue in certain waterfront areas that can be flooded. however, the land rise lessens the threat of flooding. the added value for development gained through ecological structures and cultural resources is also addressed in ouka. the most widelyknown project of ouka is to re-introduce salmon into the oulu and lososinka rivers that are blocked by several water power stations. specific passages for salmon would improve the zone’s potential for tourism and bring back lost ecological qualities. in general, green networks are important regarding ecological significance (biodiversity), landscape value and agriculture. however, such networks need to have spatial coherence that will suit the habitat demands of wildlife (priemus & zonneveld 2004: 292). from the point of view of cultural heritage, the most important project in ouka is via pix following an old road along the ouka rdz. this project aims to revive the history of the zone as a route to import tar in past centuries with ict practices. the seemingly small and trivial examples involving salmon and tar are important when attempting to strengthen the inhabitants’ sense of belonging to the zone. conclusions this article discussed regional development zones (rdz) as tools to take into account competitiveness and cohesion as expressed in the european union regional development policies, especially in the recently launched territorial agenda. empirical examples derived from finland in which rdzs have been promoted in spatial development during the past two decades. in finland the polycentric development is becoming a key strategy for regional policy. in the early 2000s, rdzs are present in many national and regional development strategies and plans. however, as discussed above, despite national strategies and regional and local practices regarding rdzs, there is not as yet a clear definition, strategy or implementation for them. the finnish rdzs vary in size, resources, organisation, administration and performance. some are located in-between main urban agglomerations, but there are also rdzs in more peripheral areas. nevertheless, the national authorities see rdzs as tools to overcome disadvantage rising from peripheral location by intertwining a centre and more peripheral localities into partnership to foster their endogenous potential, as exemplified by the case of ouka. as presented above, many challenges exist in the ouka rdz as regards the goals of the territorial agenda of the european union. to get better advantage out of rdzs, there is a need for more careful and critical consideration of them as integrative tools of spatial development strategies and practices (see also amin 1999). rdzs can become concrete tools towards interactive polycentric territorial structure and balanced spatial development instead of the currently increasing concentration of activities into larger urban agglomerations. rather than stressing opposing differences (centre vs. periphery, growth vs. fennia 185: 1 (2007) 45regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … decline, concentration vs. dispersal, urban vs. rural), rdzs enable the intertwining and networking of actors and endogenous potential to promote economic growth and social and ecologic sustainability. in fact, added value arises from linking spatial, cultural and organisational proximities facilitating actors’ commitment to regional development and mobilisation of endogenous local resources. rdzs as mental frameworks (see zonneveld & waterhout 2005) help thinking across administrative and territorial borders. compared to loosely spatially-binding thematic networks or passive transport corridors, actively intertwined rdzs have spatial proximity that enhances social capital and commitment needed for cohesion and competitiveness. applied appropriately, they also deepen territorial cohesion and trust needed to form an efficient regional innovation system. this way rdzs become an efficient, targeted policy instruments that use geographical proximity for cooperation, specialisation and new division of labour and tackle down some disadvantages of spatial and aspatial peripheries. as discussed above, the governance of many finnish rdzs is challenging because the zones cross many sectoral, administrative and territorial borders. intraregional consensus, proactive national, strategic regional planning and quality and quantity of participants are important in developing rdzs. rdz activities must be open to people and enterprises to justify rdzs as tools bringing more social justice and territorial cohesion into regional development. endogenous development and the inhabitants’ and key economy actors’ belongingness to the rdz are also necessary for that purpose. the special qualities of each rdz have to be accounted for. to achieve territorial cohesion, i.e. sustainable economic growth with reasonably balanced development, more focus ought to be placed on the functional activities of rdzs and common logistics and communication infrastructure should also be supported. this means efficient concentration of activities and land use to the core structure along each rdz. geographically close physical and material infrastructures help the interaction between two or more functional centres. a clear definition is needed to distinguish rdzs and their activities from broader strategic alliances, spatially less coherent networks and passive infrastructure corridors. rdzs can become an important integrative tool for regional development in the european union struggling for competitiveness and cohesion. references ahlqvist t & t inkinen (2007). technology foresight in scalar innovation systems. spatiotemporal process perspective. fennia 185: 1, 3–14. ala-rämi k (2007). communication and proximity in collaboration between high. technology enterprises in northern finland. european planning studies 15: 8, 1047–1062. amin a (1999). an institutionalist perspective on regional economic development. international journal of urban and regional research 23: 2, 365– 378. antikainen j (2005). monikeskuksinen suomi – monikeskuksinen eurooppa. in eskelinen h & t hirvonen (eds). espon maantieteen päivillä joensuussa 2004. karjalan tutkimuslaitoksen raportteja 2/2005, 11–23. antikainen j, j luukkonen & t pyöriä (2006). kaupunkiverkko ja kaupunkiseudut 2006. sisäasiainministeriön julkaisu 10/2006. 153 p. camagni r (2007). territorial development policies in the european model of society. in faludi a (ed). territorial cohesion and the european model of society, 129–144. lincoln institute of land policy, cambridge. commission of the european communities (1999). european spatial development perspective: towards balanced and sustainable development of the territory of the eu. 82 p. office for official publications of the european communities, luxembourg. commission of the european communities (2004). a new partnership for cohesion: convergence, competitiveness, cooperation. third report on economic and social cohesion. 206 p. office for official publications of the european communities, luxembourg. copus a (2001). from core-periphery to polycentric development: concepts of spatial and aspatial peripherality. european planning studies 9: 4, 539– 552. copus a & d skuras (2006). business networks and innovation in selected lagging areas of the european union: a spatial perspective. european planning studies 14: 1, 79–93. council of european municipalities and regions (2007). cemr response to the european territorial agenda and the leipzig charter on sustainable european cities. cemr, brussels. <http://www.ccre. org/docs/cemr_response_to_european_territorial_agenda.pdf>. 12.6.2007. european conference of ministers responsible for regional planning (2006). lisbon declaration on “networks for sustainable spatial development of the european continent: bridges over europe”. 46 fennia 185: 1 (2007)j. s. jauhiainen, s. harvio, j. luukkonen and h. moilanen <http://www.coe.int/t/e/cultural_co-operation/ e n v i r o n m e n t / c e m a t / l i s t _ o f _ c o n f e r e n c e s / 14cemat_14_en.pdf>. 12.6.2007. faludi a (2004). territorial cohesion: old (french) wine in new bottles? urban studies 41: 7, 1349– 1365. faludi a (2006a). from european spatial development to territorial cohesion policy. regional studies 40: 6, 667–678. faludi a (2006b) the king is dead – long live the king. why there is no renewed european spatial development perspective and what happens to the esdp agenda anyhow. paper for the regional studies association international conference ‘shaping eu regional policy: economic, social and political pressures’. leuven, belgium 8/9 june 2006. faludi a & b waterhout (2002). the making of the european spatial development perspective: no masterplan. 204 p. routledge, london. garofoli g (2002). local development in europe: theoretical models and international comparisons. european urban and regional studies 9: 3, 225– 239. ge w (1995). urban enterprise zone. journal of regional science 35: 2, 217–231. gertler m (2003). tacit knowledge and the economic geography of context, or the undefinable tacitness of being (there). journal of economic geography 3: 1, 75–99. gren j (2003). reaching the peripheral regional growth centres. centre-periphery convergence through the structural funds’ transport infrastructure actions and the evolution of the centre-periphery paradigm. european journal of spatial development 2003: 3. 22 p. haarni t & p vartiainen (1996). kaupunkiverkostoituminen suomessa. suomen ympäristö 64. 26 p. hadjimichalis c & r hudson (2006). networks, regional development and democratic control. international journal of urban and regional research 30: 4, 858–672. janin rivolin u & a faludi (2005). the hidden face of european spatial planning: innovations in governance. european planning studies 13: 2, 195–215. jauhiainen j (2006). multipolis – high technology network in northern finland. european planning studies 14: 10, 1407–1428. jauhiainen j (2007). regional and innovation policies in finland – towards convergence and/or mismatch? regional studies 41. (in print.) jauhiainen j, s harvio, j luukkonen & h moilanen (2007). kehittämisvyöhykkeet aluekehittämisessä. sisäasiainministeriön julkaisuja 22/2007. 125 p. jessop b (1993). towards a schumpeterian workfare state? preliminary remarks on post-fordist political economy. studies in political economy 40, 7–39. keeble d, j offord & s walker (1988). peripheral regions in a community of twelve member states. 137 p. commission of the european community, luxembourg. lagendijk a & a lorenzen (2007). proximity, knowledge and innovation in peripheral regions. on the intersection between geographical and organizational proximity. european planning studies 15: 4, 457–466. macleod g & m goodwin (1999). space, scale and state strategy: rethinking urban and regional governance. progress in human geography 23: 4, 503–527. maskell p, h bathelt & a malmberg (2006). building global knowledge pipelines: the role of temporary clusters. european planning studies 14: 8, 997– 1013. meijers e & a romein (2003). realizing potential: building regional organizing capacity in polycentric urban regions. european urban and regional studies 10: 2, 173–186. ministry of the environment (1995). alueiden käyttö ja aluerakenne vuonna 2017. 68 p. ministry of the environment, helsinki. ministry of the environment (2006). competitiveness, well-being, and eco-efficiency. suomen ympäristö 31en/2007. 40 p. ministry of the environment, helsinki. mustikkamäki n & k viljamaa (2001). verkostojen monet kasvot. verkostoitumalla monikeskuksiseen ja tasapainoiseen aluerakenteeseen. 64 p. suomen kuntaliitto, helsinki. nordregio (2005). potentials for polycentric development in europe. project report for espon 1.1.1. 1000 p. espon, luxembourg. ouka (2006). oulu–kajaani-kehittämisvyöhykehankkeen esittelymateriaali. (unpublished illustrative material of ouka, in finnish.) priemus h & w zonneveld (2004). regional and transnational spatial planning 1: problems today, perspectives for the future. european planning studies 12: 3, 283–297. schön p (2005). territorial cohesion in europe? planning theory & practice 6: 3, 389–400. schout j & a jordan (2007). from cohesion to territorial policy integration (tpi): exploring the governance challenges in the european union. european planning studies 15: 6, 835–885. scott a & m storper (2003). regions, globalization, development. regional studies 41: 6–7, 579– 593. spiekermann k & h aalbu (2004). nordic peripherality in europe. nordregio working paper 2004: 2. 30 p. nordregio, stockholm. spiekermann k & j neubauer (2002). european accessibility and peripherality: concepts, models and indicators. nordregio working paper 2002: 9. 43 p. terlouw k (2001). regions in geography and the regional geography of semiperipheral development. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 92, 76–87. fennia 185: 1 (2007) 47regional development zones in finland: territorial cohesion … territorial agenda of the european union (2007). final draft. agreed on the occasion of the informal ministerial meeting on urban development and territorial cohesion in leipzig on 24/25 may 2007. the territorial state and perspectives of the european union (2005). towards a stronger european territorial cohesion in the light of the lisbon and gothenburg ambitions. a background document for the territorial agenda of the european union. unpublished. torre a & a rallet (2005). proximity and localization. regional studies 39: 1, 47–59. vaessen p & d keeble (1995). growth-oriented smes in unfavourable regional environments. regional studies 29: 6, 489–505. vickerman r, k spiekermann & m wegener (1999). accessibility and economic development in europe. regional studies 33: 1, 1–15. wong s & b tang (2005). challenges to the sustainability of ‘development zones’: a case study of guangzhou development district, china. cities 22: 4, 303–316. zonneveld w & b waterhout (2005). visions on territorial cohesion. town planning review 76: 1, 15–27. hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa120946 doi: 10.11143/fennia.120946 hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland eerika albrecht, jani lukkarinen, miikka hakkarainen and niko soininen albrecht, e., lukkarinen, j., hakkarainen, m. & soininen, n. (2023) hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland. fennia 201(1) 47–64. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120946 hydropower, as a flexible energy source, has sparked renewed interest in the ongoing decarbonisation of the society. simultaneously, a wider transformation of the socio-ecological system towards more sustainable practices of energy production is required. our paper draws from the sustainable transformation theory and the concepts of transformability, hydro-social cycle, and aquatic regime to study a system of water governance and regulation in finland. our case study data consists of 16 semi-structured interviews and 207 news articles from yle national broadcast company. we studied the policy frames to reveal how the water governance actors understand, view and make sense of future river use and restoration, and how they utilise the frames for strategic purposes. results demonstrate that the future river use and restoration were framed by four modes of thinking: 1) hydropower as a ‘cultural trauma’, 2) restoring rivers and dam removal after hydropower construction and operation to improve ecological flows in rivers, 3) improving the social acceptance of hydropower and dam removal, and 4) improving the efficiency of the hydropower regime as a flexible source of power. our paper shows that to enable pathways for socio-ecological-technical transformations of aquatic ecosystems further scientific scrutiny should be focused on reconciliation of the interest of river restoration, recreational uses of aquatic environments and the flexible energy function of hydropower in energy transition. removal of migration barriers and small-scale hydropower plants and building fishways and bypasses are part of this transformation. furthermore, the river regulation needed to give impoundment facilities the flexibility, causes changes in water levels which may be a potential source of conflict between riparian residents and hydropower operators. therefore, more emphasis should be placed on water governance that recognises the local dynamics and interactions within the social-ecological systems. keywords: sustainability transformation, frame analysis, river restoration, hydropower eerika albrecht (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0094-623x), miikka hakkarainen & niko soininen (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0941-0594), law school, center for climate change, energy, and environmental law, university of eastern finland, finland. e-mail: eerika.albrecht@uef.fi, mhakkarainen87@gmail.com, niko. soininen@uef.fi jani lukkarinen (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6362-2470), finnish environment institute, environmental policy centre, finland. e-mail: jani.lukkarinen@syke.fi © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120946 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0094-623x https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0941-0594 mailto:eerika.albrecht@uef.fi mailto:mhakkarainen87@gmail.com mailto:niko.soininen@uef.fi mailto:niko.soininen@uef.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6362-2470 mailto:jani.lukkarinen@syke.fi 48 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper introduction in environmental law and governance, hydropower development clashes with biodiversity targets and water quality objectives of the eu’s (european union) water framework directive, and the conflict is well documented (wieringa & morton 1996; ziv et al. 2012; abazaij 2015; lees et al. 2016; barbarossa et al. 2020; wang et al. 2021). the construction, operation, and maintenance of hydroelectric dams entail trade-offs against sustainable development objectives, for while power plants provide electricity and contribute to overall development, they decrease ecological connectivity and damage biodiversity, cultural values and local livelihoods (zarfl et al. 2015; halbe et al. 2018; schneider et al. 2019; soininen et al. 2019). the carbon neutrality targets set in the paris agreement art. 5 call for rapid reduction of fossil fuels in the energy system. diffusing renewable energy sources, such as wind power, contribute renewable electricity but also increase the intermittency of power generation. such measures affect hydropower as part of the solution to stabilise the electricity system by providing flexibility; on the other hand, hydropower has faced heavy criticism because of the ecological damage and negative local social impacts it causes (abazaj 2015; moran et al. 2018). thus, despite the benefits in advancing the transition towards a low-carbon society, hydroelectricity is an ambivalent energy source. on the one hand, the need for clean and affordable energy globally has resulted in an increase in hydropower projects, especially in the global south (zarfl et al. 2015). on the other, in the global north, the removal of dams to free and restore rivers has been seen as a way to return rivers’ ecological functions (lejon et al. 2009; o’connor et al. 2015; bellmore et al. 2017; chaffin & gosnell 2017). this partially reflects the decreased relative importance of hydropower in the electricity generation mix (e.g. soininen et al. 2019), while at the same time highlighting a regime shift towards cultural valuation of the post-industrial roles of rivers as recreational resources and better functioning ecosystems. recently, the international science panels on climate change and biodiversity – the ipcc (intergovernmental panel on climate change) and ipbes (intergovernmental platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services) – issued a report demanding closer attention to climate and biodiversity interactions that have been overlooked in transformative policies (pörtner et al. 2021). this has led to the emergence of experimentation with adaptive responses that provide in situ solutions to identified conflicts. for example, in finland, river ecosystem restoration requires unprecedented adaptivity from hydropower production to better acknowledge other values of rivers. however, the finnish environmental planning system (e.g. granting of water permits) has a proven degree of maladaptivity, rooted in technology-driven governance (soininen et al. 2019). the governance of aquatic resources in finland has leaned heavily towards allocating the maximum amount of available water for hydropower production of electricity (belinskij & soininen 2017). hydropower was a high political priority in the country after the world war ii and was supported by an alliance of both industry and politicians, as it boosted regional development and electrification of the country (myllyntaus 1991; pokka 1991; alaniska 2013). as the demand for electricity increased over the years, interpretations of the 1902 act, and political pressure to pass legislation deviating from its strict rules, increased accordingly (myllyntaus 2002). before the 1930s, the water rights act (31/1902) favoured fisheries over power and prohibited the building of large-scale hydropower dams that would have blocked the entire fairway of the river. in the beginning of the 1930s a great recession, and by the end of the decade world war ii led to the introduction of ad hoc legislation that established far-reaching exemptions to the 1902 water rights act (myllyntaus 1991; pokka 1991). the finnish parliament passed legislation that allowed urgent permitting of certain damming and regulation projects and relaxed the criteria and procedural safeguards for granting permits to hydropower operations. the standard criterion for permits after the legal changes was that the societal benefits of hydropower operation had to outweigh the harms. and they did, almost without exception. this consideration was enshrined in the law with the passing of the water act in 1961 (264/1961) and is in operation still today (belinskij & soininen 2017; iho et al. 2022). more recently, the environmental regulation has imposed strict limits on the expansion of hydropower and stringent criteria in the review of existing permits. article 4 of the water framework directive (wfd) sets the objective of achieving good ecological status of european waters and promotes the non-deterioration principle, two aims that are difficult to reconcile with hydropower fennia 201(1) (2023) 49albrecht et al. production (abazaj et al. 2016; feichtinger & pregernig 2016). moreover, the wfd (art. 11) requires a periodical review of existing permits. in finland the hydropower capacity can only be increased in rivers with existing hydropower plants, as most of the rivers have already been built for hydropower generation and the remaining free-flowing rivers are legally protected (soininen et al. 2019; similä et al. 2021). the main thrust of the wfd is thus the review of existing permits, and the directive is part of a regulatory setting that has started to shift the focus of governance actions from the management of aquatic resources to the restoration and rewilding of rivers (polizzi et al. 2015; lehtoranta et al. 2017; oksanen et al. 2020). we argue that the socio-ecological trade-offs and discursive contestations are connected to different heuristics of change employed by the actors (e.g. feola 2015). the societal debates and knowledge conflicts regarding sustainability of localised socio-ecological conditions of rivers are connected and studied in relation to wider socio-technological views of water governance regime transformation (pahl-wostl et al. 2010; hordijk et al. 2014; patterson et al. 2017). to bridge the epistemic challenges of different transformation heuristics, we turn from a political ecology focus on the underpinning spatiotemporal developments and power relations towards actors’ positions in framing the sustainability challenges (e.g. lawhon & murphy 2012). the trade-offs in the level of societal development (e.g. pathways to achieving a low-carbon society) and land-use planning (e.g. addressing ecological restoration in specific river basins) are closely connected to the perspectives and interests of diverse societal actors who are either tied to or challenge the dominant aquatic regimes (bavinck & gupta 2014; mustonen & lehtinen 2021). the actors that participate in the meaning-making and knowledge conflicts use discursive framing of political issues and specific societal challenges that require further scrutinising and prioritising (bjärstig et al. 2022). significantly, the frames exclude certain challenges and may become mutually exclusive, further polarising the societal dialogues. in this paper, we apply frame analysis to study how the water governance actors understand, view and make sense of the future sustainability of river use and restoration in finland. the analysis enables the exploration of policy frames in expert talk and in news media, which can present the issue at hand as either neutral or politically contested (e.g. rosenbloom et al. 2016). this approach opens views on disentangling multiple developments in the national policy sphere, cultural orientations towards water bodies, technical development of diverse future solutions and locally politicised issues. our research focuses on a time when the calls for river restoration are increasing while the position of hydropower in the energy system remains strong, signalling a potential shift in the current hydro-social cycle (e.g. swyngedouw 2004). essentially, we ask: what is the status of the sustainability transformation in the hydropower sector? how are river use and restoration framed in expert talk and news media in finland? the remainder of the article consists of four sections. in the following section, we turn to the transition perspective embedded in the socio-ecological dynamics of water governance. after that, we explain the data and methods and embark on the frame analysis, which reveals the perceptions and sense making of the water governance actors and news media. finally, we discuss our findings and put forward conclusions and the insights gained. transformation dynamics in hydropower governance: applying the lens of contested aquatic regimes over the last decade, the sustainability transition literature has struggled to better engage with geographically embedded ecological and social challenges related to change (truffer et al. 2015; calvert et al. 2019; köhler et al. 2019). some headway can be made by drawing from the water governance literature which is geographically embedded and conceptualises water in terms of river basins or catchments, which are often characterised as complex adaptive systems with emergent social-ecological properties, feedbacks and path dependencies (chaffin 2014; feola 2015; akamani 2016; pahl-wostl 2020). several scholars have characterised and identified conditions and requirements for socio-technical, social-ecological, and governance changes that enable river basins as socialecological entities to maintain their core functions under change (folke et al. 2002; gunderson et al. 50 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper 2002; meadowcroft 2011; o’brien 2011; frantzeskaki et al. 2016; pahl-wostl 2020). however, the water governance literature lacks a nuanced, empirically reasoned, understanding of intentional change towards more sustainable systemic conditions inscribed into transformation heuristics. moreover, the socio-spatial embedding of sustainability, which concerns specific places, as well as the transscalar nature of the environmental issues and issues of power regarding whose interests are advanced and whose are threatened in the transformation processes, have remained blind spots in transition scholarship (truffer et al. 2015). three concepts bridging this gap are of value in this study. first, we build on the concept of transformability, which refers to system characteristics enabling new social-ecological pathways and transformational change (walker et al. 2004; chapin et al. 2009; folke et al. 2010). transformations can occur spontaneously or deliberately, in which case they pursue a particular goal (e.g. good ecological status of waters) (folke et al. 2010; o’brien 2011); and are often triggered by crises or regime shifts sparked by an environmental conflict or litigation over the use of natural resources or environmental change (o’brien 2011; cosens et al. 2014). on the other hand, legal and governance systems are established to provide predictability over time and to maintain stability in society (cosens & gunderson 2018, 12; wenta & mcdonald 2019). although stability is a component necessary to ensure the functioning of an energy system, it might hinder emergent socio-ecological developments towards sustainability. second, the hydro-social cycle comprises the political ecologies of water through which water is produced, made known, and directed to specific uses (swyngedouw 2004; linton & budds 2014). swyngedouw (2015) has studied how authoritarian governments, such as franco’s regime in spain, harnessed rivers for development to bring the country into hydro-modernity. similarly, taming and harnessing hydrological systems to serve electrification and advance modernisation projects have been mainstream practice in more democratically governed societies. a careful tracking of shifts in sustainability and participation in a hydrological and social realm can offer ways to rethink socioecological transformations towards more sustainable systems (swyngedouw et al. 2002). third, the concept of aquatic regime takes in the water ecosystem of the river basin and the flowaltering governance system attached to it (bavinck & gupta 2014; mustonen & lehtinen 2021). the concept originates from the notion of flow regime in aquatic ecology, which captures how hydropower alters river flow and ecological connectivity (bunn & arthington 2002; mustonen & lehtinen 2021). yet aquatic regimes can also be conceptualised from the perspective of transformation, as socialecological systems are not in any permanent states but rather move through phases that are connected to societal values, demands and uses of specific hydrological landscapes. we approach these concepts as means to understand different transformation dynamics at play in the finnish public debate on river restoration and the future of hydropower with respect to its social, ecological and economic impacts (see fig. 1). the hydro-social cycle embraces the temporal aspect of transformations and changing social valuation in defining the role of water. for its part, the dominant aquatic regime presents a set of practices historically connected to management of water bodies in diverse planning contexts. in the political framing of river use and restoration, public discourses and actor positions become central in promoting and challenging alternative aquatic regimes with different socio-technical and socio-ecological practices related to flow-management (e.g. rosenbloom et al. 2016; bjärstig et al. 2022). in this light, we suggest that political framing of hydropower can be best captured using both concepts; this approach will enable us to understand the interplay between and within contradictory aquatic regimes, which in turn leads towards shifts in hydro-social cycles and transformations of aquatic regimes. furthermore, the interplay of aquatic regimes potentially increases transformability of the system – and thus goes beyond the discursive exchange to yield tangible outcomes. for sustainability transitions (e.g. geels & schot 2007; turnheim et al. 2015), the frames can reveal the diversity of future pathways and keep actors mindful of the need for solutions to persistent environmental challenges. moreover, the societal frames emphasise the political and normative nature of the regulatory arrangements underlying the established and alternative energy transition trajectories (pinker et al. 2020). our frame analysis sought to understand differing perceptions and meaning-making of the water governance actors. framing is an analytic process that is used to make sense of public issues or fennia 201(1) (2023) 51albrecht et al. perceived reality in a way that promotes the salience of a particular problem definition, interpretation and suggested solution (entman 1993; hansen 2015; van hulst & yanow 2016). framing has been conceptualised as having an institutional or cultural origin (goffman 1974; schön & rein 1994) or as the active selection of frames in which actors choose and defend policy positions by selecting what is relevant to the issue and what is not (entman 1993; ryan et al. 2001). although these two views have been described as reflecting two separate schools of thoughts (lindahl et al. 2016), in our analysis framing river restoration and hydropower appears to be rooted in institutional positions and cultural values that may be actively chosen to support policy positions and the frames evolve over space and time. we draw on the concept of place-related, put forward by lindahl and colleagues (2016), inasmuch as water governance involves a material dimension of water travelling through the hydrological cycle. this requires an open and dynamic understanding of places (massey 1997) as social relations within socio-ecological systems. framing is also connected to the making of energy landscapes by building on and (re-)producing multiple ecological, social and political scales (calvert et al. 2019; da silva & hussein 2019). frames evolve over space and time, as socioecological systems are in continuous change, that is, water availability or flood frequency may vary (chapin et al. 2009, 12). frames have been defined as interpretive lenses that derive from institutionalised narratives that guide political action and combine meanings, metaphors, and images (schön & rein 1994; van hulst & yanow 2016). in policy controversies, frames are developed for strategic purposes as they reflect policy positions, also called policy frames (e.g. fischer & forester 1993; tynkkynen 2010; van hulst & yanow 2016; dekker 2017). compared to policy frames, which are actively communicated by policy actors to support a particular position, news frames are often taken for granted, presenting a packaged world (gamson 1985, 618; hansen 2015). yet these journalistic frames do not develop in isolation: they incorporate political and cultural values and are constituted by multiple social actors, including corporate powers, the political elite and social movements (ryan et al. 2001). frames might evolve or lose their explanatory power over time once issues became politicised and de-politicised. actors might also absorb frames from each other, and in the transitional context, technological solutions and socio-ecological preconditions might change. fig. 1. conceptual understanding of transformation through hydro-social cycles and aquatic regimes. 52 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper case study on hydropower in finland expert interviews and news articles the case study data consist of 16 expert interviews and 207 news articles. case study research can combine multiple sources of data and methods and is therefore suitable for research orientations which aim at comprehensive understanding of the transitional process and policy issue at hand (yin 2009). we contacted water governance actors in order to collect empirical evidence on the policy framings of the hydropower debate. the participants for this study were selected based on their expert status (see table 1 for identifiers and descriptions) and represent a wide range of professional backgrounds, encompassing actors from the hydropower industry, public administration and ngos. the interviews, semi-structured in format, were conducted in march and april in 2021 via microsoft teams communications software. all interviews were recorded and transcribed. the transcribed interviews and news material from yle national broadcasting company were imported to atlas.ti software, enabling the qualitative coding of the interviews. table 1. list of interviews according to institutional status and the values and interests they represent. group identifier values and interests industry int1 economic orientation, flexible power, collaboration industry int2 economic orientation, flexible power, collaboration ngos int3 ecological orientation, river restoration, good ecological status of waters administration int4 planning orientation, local planning, choosing effective measures, removal of small-scale hydropower administration int5 planning orientation, local planning, choosing effective measures, removal of small-scale hydropower industry int6 economic orientation, flexible power, collaboration industry int7 economic orientation, flexible power, collaboration industry int8 economic orientation, flexible power, collaboration industry int9 economic orientation, flexible power, collaboration administration int10 planning orientation, local planning, choosing effective measures, removal of small-scale hydropower administration int11 planning orientation, sins of the past, local planning, choosing effective measures, removal of small-scale hydropower industry int12 economic orientation, flexible power, collaboration administration int13 perspective on the administrative court system administration int14 ecological orientation, river restoration, good ecological status of waters administration int15 planning orientation, local planning, choosing effective measures, removal of small-scale hydropower ngos int16 ecological orientation, river restoration, returning migratory fish, good ecological status of waters table 1. list of interviews according to institutional status and the values and interests they represent to explore framing of hydropower debate in public media, news material on hydropower was collected from the web news of yle, the national broadcasting company, between 2017 and 2021 (see table 2). these years were selected because of the increasing public debate in the finnish news media calling for improving the ecological condition of and restoring rivers. since the weser-ruling, case c-461/13 bund v germany [2015] ecr i-433 (‘bund‘), after which the wfd objectives have been legally binding in keeping to the non-deterioration principle (paloniitty 2016), governments in eu member states have taken more action to restore river basins. the finnish government introduced a river restoration funding programme for the years 2020 to 2022, nousu (ministry of agriculture and forestry 2022), which funds river restoration projects, with measures including dam removal and building fishways. fennia 201(1) (2023) 53albrecht et al. frame analysis our analysis began with a content analysis, which formed the basis for the frame analysis (goffman 1974; van hulst & yanow 2016). we focused on ecological, social and economic impacts of hydropower and the transitional aspects that might support or hinder river restoration and removal of small-scale dams and hydropower plants. when the interviews were coded, we divided the text excerpts into 11 groups, with 166 codes. after this, we distinguished three institutional groups, creating a unique dataset for each to enhance the comparison of the different frames. next, we coded the 207 news articles from 2017–2021 and classified them based on topic. our examination of this five-year period revealed the shift in interest, noted above, from building fishways to the removal of dams and small-scale hydropower (see fig. 2). when combining the analysis of these two datasets with the frame analysis methods (described in chapter 2), we distinguished four frames: ‘cultural trauma’, ‘river restoration’, ‘social acceptance and recreation’ and ‘flexible power’. in the section that follows, we will turn to the framing the sustainability challenges underpinning the spatiotemporal developments and power relations towards the transformation heuristics. table 2. news articles from yle. table 2. news articles from yle national broadcasting company year news articles (n = 207) 2021 51 2020 43 2019 43 2018 29 2017 46 fig. 2. news articles from 2017 to 2021 classified according to suggested water governance solutions. 54 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper varying lenses on hydro-social regime – four frames of hydropower hydropower as a cultural trauma hydropower construction has caused a ‘cultural trauma’ due to the loss of migratory fish; for example salmon fishing on the kemijoki river ceased with the building of hydropower (alaniska 2013; autti 2013). arguments within this frame recognises the historical significance of the need for hydropower during the early twentieth century as well as the need to repair the damage done in the past: “the power plant harnessed one of the best salmon rivers in europe. the kemi river of the past disappeared but the dream of the return of the salmon and the trauma of the loss of the river remain.” (yle 6.11.2019). this frame was pronounced in the interviews, especially that with the environmental nongovernmental organisations (engos) and environmental administration, and in the news material, which more often reported on the restoration projects than on the environmental conflicts. one of the interviewees commented: […] i think hydropower construction in the past happened under acceptable circumstances, but this also caused big losses. valuable migratory fish stocks were lost, and migration paths cut, spawning areas ruined and now it’s high time to remedy those mistakes and it’s expensive and long-term work to do so. […] (int5) one key factor linking the current considerations of ecological flows to the past is the strong permanence of hydropower permits (soininen et al. 2019). within this frame, the calls for revising the current finnish water act (587/2011) were welcomed, as many hoped that a revision would make it easier to introduce a range of ecological compensation measures; these are still lacking in many older permits, especially those granted for smaller hydropower plants, that is, ones with a capacity of less than 5 mw (e.g. kosunen & mikkola 2017, 126). river restoration the methods proposed for restoring riverine ecosystems and fish stocks were numerous, with these including dam removal, fish ladders, natural bypass streams, a novel ‘fish elevator’ and fish stocking. within this frame, the actors often equated compensation measures with fish ladders, even when the discussion was not remotely about them. this confounding of the two could at least partly be explained by the media attention that technical fishways have received and the fact that returning ecological flows might not be cost-effective in every context. however, the costs of building fish ladders in finland are rising, in some cases significantly, from the initial estimates (koljonen et al. 2021, 32). one industry representative commented on this in the following way: […] public discussion has drilled into people the idea that a fish ladder is the way forward. […] a fishway doesn’t solve everything. i do not think building a fish ladder at every power plant will make the world better. […] (int1) most interviewees stressed that regardless of how the costs are divided between public, private and citizens’ organisations, measures should be planned and chosen for the specific local context. most of the actors agreed with the need to take the local circumstances of each river basin into account. representatives of administration and industry in particular considered it important that the authorities chose a measure due to its estimated positive impact in the specific setting, rather than searching for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ measure for all locations. this also applied to ecological flows: no single solution was suggested as superior to others. especially interviewees in administration and ngos emphasised the importance of restoring ecological flows. natural bypasses were suggested by some interviewees, but only those from ngos advocated them. some of the actors pointed out that there is still uncertainty about how to design bypasses so that certain fish species can navigate their way through them, and that more research is needed. some industry representatives also mentioned ecological flows as one option among many, emphasising the need for locally adapted solutions instead. none of the actors, including those representing industry, opposed the removal of dams, which would be the most transformative approach to river restoration. the question was only about agreeing on the price: fennia 201(1) (2023) 55albrecht et al. good collaboration between stakeholders is in order to pinpoint locations with high nature values. that would be the key. and then providing the right tools for that. for example, paying a fair price and buying the area from its owners and then rewilding it. (int6) dam removal is framed as a viable option in places where production values are low and current or potential nature values are high. none of the actors proposed removal of large dams, and some noted that dismantling such installations would be so costly, due to the high costs of compensation the operator, that such a course of action would not be worth pursuing. hence, removal was seen as viable only for small-scale hydropower and dams that produce no electricity and serve no flood control purpose. the interviewees representing industry made the point that no measure should be pursued simply for its popularity; rather, the effectiveness of a measure or measures should be estimated before production capacity is sacrificed. the news material featured the development of technical solutions as well as the political atmosphere relating to river restoration and returning migratory fish over time. most of the articles on dam removal projects were published in 2021, with hiitolanjoki being the project that figured most visibly, because it involved private investment in river restoration and a 20-year legal battle between the hydropower company and one local activist (yle 5.10.2019, 1.8.2021). under the headline “the endangered fish species has been given new hope” (yle 30.11.2021), the news media highlighted arguments for dam removal due to its favourable impact on migratory fish, especially the endangered lake trout. other topics covered included fishway and river restoration projects throughout the country, many of which had received government funding for piloting different techniques, such as fishways, fish ladders, fish elevators and fish transfers. social acceptance and recreation the social acceptance of hydropower can be examined at different scales. within this frame, ecological considerations were the primary factors impacting acceptability on a national scale. favourable views might have been encouraged by environmental ngos and other activists, as currently both traditional and social media discourses are focused on migratory fish. on a local scale, residents and summer homeowners along the river, the regulation of flow is of concern, as they are often the first groups to experience any short-term changes in flow. a representative of ely-centre noted: […] i know examples […] from northern finland where the short-term changes in regulation are considered significant and it causes harm to other water usage and the people living along the river experience this. […] we also get contacts asking ‘can’t you do something about this?’ and once we determine the flow is within the permit parameters then there’s barely anything we [the supervisory authority] can do about it. (int4) overall, the chances of local communities and riparian residents of influencing hydropower projects were depicted as limited. flow regulation requires the balancing of several conflicting interests, including generation of low-carbon electricity and profitability, the grid requirements between base and peak loads, recreational use of the waters, flood risk management and ecosystem needs. industry representatives argued that collaborative efforts can minimise tensions relating to recreational use, exemplifying how the flow can be adjusted according to the needs of different events happening on a river that require a certain water level. impact assessments of hydropower projects must consider social impacts. riparian residents can appeal permit decisions, but such appeal processes are lengthy and require a knowledge of how to argue in administrative courts (albrecht & ratamäki 2016). interviewees from industry mentioned that flow regulation is sometimes discussed and planned with locals, but that this is not a standardised practise. in addition, one representative commented that exploiting the flexibility of hydropower output and accommodating the increasing importance of recreational use of rivers poses challenges: […] summer cabin owners come even earlier […] and because of that […] adequate water level for recreation is even more important today. […] we’ve had to pay even more attention to ensure the lakes are at an adequate level for recreation. (int7) 56 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper the news material stresses the importance of recreational values, and some of the river restoration projects were framed as improving the recreational value of the rivers concerned: “the aim of the river restoration is to enable fish migration and breeding and to improve the recreational use of the touru river” (yle 2.10.2018). these river restoration projects were often located in municipal areas and therefore in active recreational use. on the other hand, the most visible conflicts in the media centred on fisheries obligations and building more hydropower. industry representatives in the north of finland opposed stricter fisheries obligations, whereas other actors, ngos such as the wwf (world wildlife fund) among them, demanded them (yle 20.9.2017, 15.12.2017). the prospect of building more hydropower in the kemi river basin has been a source of prolonged environmental conflict (yle 22.5.2017, 31.10.2019). the proposed sierilä power plant received an environmental permit but the project triggered a social movement (yle 19.7.2019, 17.7.2020). flexible power considering that hydropower provides 15% to 25% of finnish electricity and 45% of the renewable electricity production, hydropower remains an important part of the country’s energy system (official statistics of finland 2020). several of those interviewed for this study considered it a necessity that has its place in the future energy mix, although ecologically harmful. in the news material, hydropower was framed as part of the nordic energy markets. one reservation here is that the market price depends on weather conditions in rainy years, the price of energy overall is cheaper and during dry years it is higher. as one headline announced: “the hot summer dried up the hydropower and sent the wholesale price skyrocketing by 40 per cent” (yle 4.1.2019). the main reason for this was hydropower’s capacity to adjust output based on grid requirements. other renewable energy sources, namely solar and wind, are intermittent, and hydropower production can flexibly be adjusted depending on the output of other energy sources and grid needs. this framing was predominant among industry representatives, as it was most common to emphasise hydropower’s flexibility and profitability: i think that regarding the whole electricity market the significance of hydropower will grow due to its flexibility, so when more wind power is built, or maybe in the future solar power as well, which are both […] weather dependent […], this creates more need for flexible power generation […] in the electricity market. (int9) the actors viewed the future of small and large hydropower plants differently. if the discussion centred on national hydropower output as a whole regardless of the size of the power plants, hydropower was mostly considered significant, especially for its flexibility. representatives of smallscale hydropower producers pointed out that the smaller installations are profitable, since a plant’s lifecycle is long, and even a run-of-the-river plant provides a mostly steady output. hence, it can be economically significant to its owner: […] if the production capacity is, say, under 100 mw then in that case, we can say it actually has some significance, but if you have a 1 mw plant then i think it has zero significance. it mainly has just economic significance to the project planner, and it’s taken into consideration that way but otherwise it has no significance. (int13) especially the industry’s representatives but also interviewees in administration pointed out that hydropower plants, even small ones, provide municipalities real estate taxes, increasing their societal acceptance. however, most actors considered only large power plants to be of any national significance both now and in the future. however, industry representatives indicated that the public discussion and compensation measures that may be required in the future negatively impact small-scale hydropower generation in particular. hence, it is too early to estimate if all small-scale hydropower will become unprofitable, but for low-carbon electricity generation to have enough pros to outweigh its ecological cons, the future as framed will undoubtedly bring challenges for small-scale hydropower in finland. discussion – the socio-ecological trade-offs in contested hydro-social regimes the ongoing societal focus on sustainability transformation has revealed socio-ecological trade-offs and policy mismatches in river use and restoration. in terms of hydro-social cycles, hydropower fennia 201(1) (2023) 57albrecht et al. remains strongly established in the nordic energy system as a flexible power source that balances out what is increasingly variable electrical power from renewable sources. however, advocates of alternative uses and roles of river ecosystems have become more vocal, pointing towards the emergence of alternative and multiple aquatic regimes that vary territorially. this was also confirmed in the four frames – cultural trauma, river restoration, social acceptance and recreation, and flexible power – identified in our analysis. the diverging frames and perspectives on transition need to be considered across the policy contexts and spatiotemporal scales of water governance (da silva & hussein 2019). this requires overcoming epistemic challenges, uneven power relations (e.g. hydropower company and riverside residents), as well as legal and governance-related barriers, to ensure socio-ecological transformation towards sustainable use of rivers and its multiple benefits. furthermore, the case challenges the capacity of established legislative frameworks to navigate the demands of current sustainability transitions (pinker et al. 2020). drawing on these insights and considerations, in what follows we put forward three syntheses that position the governance of hydropower in transition across territorial contexts. first, over the past five years, the dominant aquatic regime of finland has placed increasing emphasis on dam removal projects and returning ecological flows. according to our interviewees, river restoration, building fishways and migration barrier removals were spotlighted as a solution for improving the ecological condition of rivers required by the wfd. some actors criticised the hydropower industry for favouring measures that allow them to retain as much of the river flow as possible for power generation. overall, in the present case, the sustainability challenges were mostly framed as governance choices such as which measures and which type of collaboration to favour, and where. some interviewees pointed out that the european commission has expressed concern that the lack of compensatory measures in finland for rivers where dams and hydropower are built could violate the country’s obligations under the water framework directive regarding ecological flows (ec 2015, 2019). second, dam removal projects are gaining momentum globally, especially in north america and europe (foley et al. 2017; habel et al. 2020). given this trend, hydropower in finland should also be seen as case necessitating a balancing between the socio-ecological valuation and energy demands. our findings suggest that within this context the removal of small hydropower plants and other small migration barriers is considered more feasible than the removal of large-scale plants with economic significance. according to our study, compensation based on the power plant’s market value would markedly improve companies’ willingness to remove dams. significantly, the impacts of removal projects are reviewed, as the water act requires that they have a water permit (similä et al. 2021). in addition, habel and others (2020, 6) suggest that inputs of different actors should be considered in considering dam removals, with projects ideally including short-term and long-term scenarios anticipating the impacts of the removal. it is noteworthy that even in rapidly developing nations, such as china and brazil, one sees a clash between the concern for ecological sustainability, the interests (viability) of local communities and the national interest in providing electricity have slowed hydropower development (atkins & hope 2021; sun et al. 2021). such tensions reflect questions of political, social, economic, and legal feasibility of dam removal projects (patterson et al. 2021). if we are to consider sustainability transformations more rigorously in the hydro-social cycle, innovations in governance are sorely needed. these would enable societal inclusion, mobilisation of effective compensation measures, mapping of the legal landscape and clarification of the limits on river restoration. a more comprehensive governance would also encompass biodiversity impacts and potentials in the particular locations where dam removals take place. third, emphasis should be placed on reconciling the interests of recreational uses of rivers and the water management system. many of the actors suggest that unpredictable fluctuations in flow regulation negatively impacts local acceptance of water governance actions, and thus residents’ reactions to fluctuations in the flow need to be considered more carefully. furthermore, many argued that collaboration between national, regional and local actors in planning and managing river restoration improves social acceptance. regardless of which measures are used, and where, to reinstate ecological flows, it is likely that altering flows will affect water levels. an illustrative example is the proposed dam removal on the sélune river in france, which has faced local opposition, including 58 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper from local politicians. fuelling the opposition is ‘a fear of the salmon’, as some local fishers considered overt campaigning for restoration of the river as elitist, fearing the impacts the return of salmon would have on other local fish stocks that have prospered in the reservoirs (germaine & lespez 2017, 668). in our study, all actors were in favour of enabling the returning of salmon, although, depending on the framing, some recommended a stepwise approach in the process of allowing migratory fish to return to the rivers. others suggested that dam removal alone is not sufficient to restore rivers’ ecological condition, urging instead that habitats and environmental flows be restored at the river basin-level. these findings and considerations indicate that the including local communities in the planning of possible transformative changes to flow regimes would further recognition in water governance of the socio-ecological nature of the hydro-social cycles. finally, we would point towards the broader conceptual implications of the empirical lessons. the traumas of past energy transitions of harnessing hydropower to meet growing hydropower needs on the national scale have institutionalised the aquatic regime of modernity (mustonen & lehtinen 2021). the energy transition frame of hydropower as a necessary balancing component of the energy mix builds on that same regime, one that may overshadow more nuanced frames on hydropower as well as perspectives accommodating more systemic transformations (e.g. geels & schot 2007; turnheim et al. 2015). meanwhile, the views indicate that there are different takes on the matter and that more will emerge because they are territorially embedded. the varying valuation and the emergence of alternative aquatic regimes, where the territorially embedded socio-ecological transformations lie at the core of the knowledge claims (feola 2015). the territorial and trans-scalar dimensions related to social and cultural aspects of energy have also been addressed through the concept of energyscape (kaisti & käkönen 2012; howard et al. 2013; lempinen 2019). however, the space for territorially embedded responses has to be enabled in the governance frameworks of the system-level energy transition. hence, it is noteworthy how hydropower and river restoration were framed in the expert talk (e.g. as a sin of the past and large scale, whereby small-scale power plants could be removed) differed from the news media framings (e.g. reporting on floods or droughts and on licencing of hydropower projects or dam removal). rather than intensifying this juxtaposition between different aquatic regimes, local and national scales or socio-technical transitions and socioecological transformations, we suggest that the focus be directed on environmental governance frameworks that might bridge the recurring discrepancies. in particular, the transformability of water governance and legislation systems can enhance the systemic capabilities of anticipatory navigation between different registers of societal valuation and establishment of adaptive policy measures (e.g. walker et al. 2004; folke et al. 2010). conclusions in this paper we have explored the framing of the future sustainability of hydropower and river restoration in finland. we explored which type of technological solutions are selected for restoring rivers and how they evolve over time. we studied the social acceptance of the water governance regime and the need to balance between ecological targets and hydropower as a flexible energy source. our results, although scrutinising a water governance system in one national context, has wider implications for research on social-ecological systems, as our study reveals the policy frames reflecting the crucible in which the modes of power, multiple values and interests, multiple interpretations of policy problems, and preferred outcomes on river restoration hydropower projects. according to our findings, more emphasis should be placed on water governance that recognises the variety of local social-ecological systems. similarly, heino and koljonen (2022) argue that the policy instruments should recognise that river ecosystems are spatially and temporally dynamic metasystems. this requires further thinking based squarely on the hydro-social cycle (swyngedouw 2002; linton & budds 2014), as this makes it possible to steer the socio-ecological system towards better recognition of biodiversity, societal and cultural values and adaptation needs. however, striking a balance between socio-economic benefits and functioning aquatic ecosystems has been challenging, as the social acceptance of hydropower often becomes framed as a conflict between hydropower and migratory fish. future research would do well to ask, what aspects of the water governance regime fennia 201(1) (2023) 59albrecht et al. are open to change and what remain unchallenged? to enable pathways for socio-ecological transformations of aquatic ecosystems further scientific scrutiny must be focused on river restoration, recreational uses of aquatic environments and the flexible energy function of hydropower in energy transition in the context of global change require. this article has wider implications for understanding sustainability trade-offs and environmental conflicts related to hydropower. in the global context, the relevance of hydropower for electricity systems as a source of flexible energy is increasing as climate policies drive the transition to a carbonneutral society and industry representatives use the climate crisis to reframe and protect their economic interests (e.g. zarfl et al. 2015; abazaj et al. 2016). furthermore, the river regulation needed to give impoundment facilities the flexibility required of hydropower causes changes in water levels which may be a potential source of conflict between riparian residents and hydropower operators. similarly, sustainable hydropower of the future in finland is mostly framed as flexible and large-scale, based on existing or decreased rather than increased capacity. the significance of large-scale power plants in the national grid might be enough to justify negative ecological impacts, whereas locally viable compensation measures with tangible benefits should be pursued to reinstate ecological flows instead of sustaining small-scale hydropower plants. acknowledgements the research on which this article is based on has received funding from strategic research council (src) of the academy of finland project blueadapt (decisions 312652 and 312747), academy of finland research project sushydro – regoverning the existing hydropower system (decision 332189), olvi foundation, saastamoinen foundation and wihuri foundation. the authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. references abazaj, j. (2015) coherence issues between catkins, climate, energy and water in the case of european hydropower: can we have it all? in mauerhofer, v. (ed.) legal aspects of sustainable development, horizontal and sectoral policy issues, 347–370. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26021-1_18 abazaj, j., moen, ø. & ruud, a. (2016) striking the balance between renewable energy generation and water status protection: hydropower in the context of the european renewable energy directive and water framework directive. environmental policy and governance 26(5) 409–421. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1710 akamani, k. (2016) adaptive water governance: integrating the human dimension into water resource management. journal of contemporary water research & education 158 2–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1936-704x.2016.03215.x alaniska, k. (2013) the extinction of the king of fishes: kemijoki powerplants construction and the issue of the migratory fishes 1943–1964. dissertation. acta universitatis ouluensis b humaniora 117. university of oulu, oulu. <http://jultika.oulu.fi/files/isbn9789526202518.pdf>. albrecht, e. & ratamäki, o. (2016) effective arguments for ecosystem services in biodiversity conservation – a case study on finnish peatland conservation. ecosystem services 22 41–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2016.09.003 atkins, e. & hope, j. (2021) contemporary political ecologies of hydropower: insights from bolivia and brazil. journal of political ecology 28 246–265. https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2363 autti, o. (2013) valtavirta muutoksessa – vesivoima ja paikalliset asukkaat kemijoella. dissertation. acta universitatis ouluensis e scientiae rerum socialium 136. oulun yliopisto, oulu. <http://jultika.oulu. fi/record/isbn978-952-62-0239-6>. barbarossa, v., schmitt, r. j. p., huijbregts, m. a. j., zarfl, c., king, h. & schipper, a. m. (2020) impacts of current and future large dams on the geographic range connectivity of freshwater fish worldwide. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 117 (7) 3648–3655. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912776117 bavinck, m. & gupta, j. (2014) legal pluralism in aquatic regimes: a challenge for governance. current opinion in environmental sustainability 11 78–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2014.10.003 belinskij, a. & soininen, n. (2017) bringing back ecological flows. the case of migratory fish and the regulation of hydropower in finland. ympäristöpolitiikan ja -oikeuden vuosikirja 10 89–149. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26021-1_18 https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1710 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1936-704x.2016.03215.x http://jultika.oulu.fi/files/isbn9789526202518.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2016.09.003 https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2363 http://jultika.oulu.fi/record/isbn978-952-62-0239-6 http://jultika.oulu.fi/record/isbn978-952-62-0239-6 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912776117 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2014.10.003 60 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper bellmore, j. r., duda, j. j., craig, l. s., greene, s. l., torgensen, c. e., collins, m. j. & vittum, k. (2017) status and trends of dam removal in the united states. wires water 4 (2) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1164 bjärstig, t., mancheva, i., zachrisson, a., neumann, w. & svensson, j. (2022) is large-scale wind power a problem, solution, or victim? a frame analysis of the debate in swedish media. energy research & social science 83 102337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102337 bunn, s. & arthington, a. (2002) basic principles and ecological consequences of altered flow regimes for aquatic biodiversity. environmental management 30 492–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-002-2737-0 calvert, k., greer, k. & maddison-macfadyen. m. (2019) theorizing energy landscapes for energy transition management: insights from a socioecological history of energy transitions in bermuda. geoforum 102 191–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.04.005 chaffin, b. c. & gosnell, h. (2017) beyond mandatory fishways: federal hydropower relicensing as a window of opportunity for dam removal and adaptive governance of riverine landscapes in united states. water alternatives 10(3) 819–839. chaffin, b. c., gosnell, h. & cosens, b. a. (2014) a decade of adaptive governance scholarship: synthesis and future directions. ecology and society 19(3) 56. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-06824-190356 chapin iii, f. s., kofinas, g. p. & folke, c. (2009) framework for understanding change. in chapin iii, f. s., kofinas, g. p. & folke, c. (eds.). principles of ecosystem stewardship: resilience-based natural resource management in a changing world, 1–28. springer verlag, new york. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73033-2_1 cosens, b. & gunderson, l. (2018) an introduction to practical panarchy: linking law, resilience, and adaptive water governance of regional scale socio-ecological systems. in cosens, b. & gunderson, l. (eds.) practical panarchy for adaptive water governance – linking law to social-ecological resilience, 1–18. sringer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72472-0_1 cosens, b., gunderson, l. & chaffin, b. (2014) the adaptive water governance project: assessing law, resilience and governance in regional socio-ecological water systems facing a changing climate. natural resources & environmental law. idaho law review 51 1–27. dekker, s. (2017) the field guide to human error investigations. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315202778 ec (european commission) (2015) swd/2015/50 final. commission staff working document. report on the progress in implementation of the water framework directive programmes of measures. accompanying the document communication from the commission to the european parliament and the council. the water framework directive and the floods directive: actions towards the “good status” of eu water and to reduce flood risks. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ txt/?uri=swd:2015:050:fin>. ec (european commission) (2019) swd/2019/46 final. commission staff working document. second river bains management plans – member state: finland. accompanying the document report from the commission to the european parliament and the council on the implementation of the water framework directive (2000/60/ec) and the floods directive (2007/60/ec) second river basin management plans – first flood risk management plans. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ en/txt/?uri=swd:2019:30:fin>. entman, r. m. (1993). framing: towards clarification of a fractured paradigm. journal of communication 34(4) 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x feichtinger, j. & pregernig, m. (2016) beyond mandated participation: dealing with hydropower in the context of the water framework directive. environmental policy and governance 26(5) 351–365. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1699 feola, g. (2015) societal transformation in response to global environmental change: a review of emerging concepts. ambio 44(5) 376–390. https://doi.org/10.1016/10.1007/s13280-014-0582-z fischer, f. & forester, j. (eds.) (1993) the argumentative turn in policy analysis and planning. duke university press, durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381815 foley, m. m., bellmore, j. r., o’connor, j. e., duda, j. j., east, a. e., grant, g. e., anderson, c. w., bountry, j. a., collins, m. j., connolly, p. j., craig, l. s., evans, j. e., greene, s. l., magilligan, f. j., magirl, c. s., major, j. j., pess, g. r., randle, t. j., shafroth, p. b., torgersen, c. e., tullos, d. & wilcox, a. c. (2017) dam removal: listening in. water resources research 53(7) 5229–5246. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017wr020457 folke, c., carpenter, s. r., elmqvist, t., gunderson, l. h., holling, c. s. & walker, b. (2002) resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. ambio 31 437–440. https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447-31.5.437 folke, c, carpenter, s. r., walker, b. h., scheffer, m., chapin, f. s. iii & rockström, j. (2010) resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. ecology and society 15(4) 20. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-03610-150420 https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1164 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102337 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-002-2737-0 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.04.005 https://doi.org/10.5751/es-06824-190356 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73033-2_1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72472-0_1 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315202778 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=swd:2015:050:fin https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=swd:2015:050:fin https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=swd:2019:30:fin https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=swd:2019:30:fin https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1699 https://doi.org/10.1016/10.1007/s13280-014-0582-z https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822381815 https://doi.org/10.1002/2017wr020457 https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447-31.5.437 https://doi.org/10.5751/es-03610-150420 fennia 201(1) (2023) 61albrecht et al. frantzeskaki, n., thissen, w. & grin, j. (2016) drifting between transitions: lessons from the environmental transition around the river acheloos diversion project in greece. technological forecasting and social change 102 275–286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2015.09.007 gamson, w. (1985) goffman’s legacy to political sociology. theory and society 14(5) 605–622. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00160018 geels, f. & schot, j. (2007) typology of sociotechnical transition pathways. research policy 36 399–417. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2007.01.003 germaine, m.-a. & lespez, l. (2017) the failure of the largest project to dismantle hydroelectric dams in europe? (sélune river, france, 2009–2017). water alternatives 10(3) 655–676. goffman, e. (1974) frame analysis. harper & row, new york. gunderson, l. h. & holling, c.s. (eds.) (2002) panarchy: understanding transformations in human and natural systems. island press, washington. habel, m., mechkin, k., podgorska, k., saunes, m., babiński, z., chalov, s., absalon, d., podgórski, z. & obolevski, k. (2020) dam and reservoir removal projects: a mix of social-ecological trends and costcutting attitudes. scientific reports 10 19210. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76158-3 halbe, j., knüppe, k., knieper, c. & pahl-wostl, c. (2018) towards an integrated approach to address tradeoffs between ecosystem services: insights from the dutch and german rhine, hungarian tisza, and chinese yangtze basins. journal of hydrology 559 984–994. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.02.001 hansen, t. & coenen, l. (2015) the geography of sustainability transitions: review, synthesis and reflections on an emergent research field. environmental innovation and societal transitions 17 92–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2014.11.001 heino, j. & koljonen, s. (2022) a roadmap for sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem services through joint conservation and restoration of northern drainage basins. ecological solutions and evidence 3(2) e12142. https://doi.org/10.1002/2688-8319.12142 hordijk, m., sara, l. m. & sutherland, c. (2014) resilience, transition or transformation? a comparative analysis of changing water governance systems in four southern cities. environment and urbanization 26(1) 130–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247813519044 howard, d. c., burgess, p. j., butler, s. j., carver, s. j., cockerill, t., coleby, a. m., gan, g., goodier, c. j., van der horst, d., hubacek, k., lord, r., mead, a., rivas-casado, m., wadsworth, r. a. & scholefield, p. (2013) energyscapes: linking the energy system and ecosystem services in real landscapes. biomass and bioenergy 55 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biombioe.2012.05.025 van hulst, m. & yanow, d. (2016) from policy “frames” to “framing” theorizing a more dynamic, political approach. the american review of public administration 46(1) 92–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074014533142 iho, a., soininen, n., vehviläinen, i., koljonen, s., artell, j. & belinskij, a. (2022) rivers under pressure: interdisciplinary feasibility analysis of sustainable hydropower. environmental policy and governance 33 191–205. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2013 kaisti, h. & käkönen, m. (2012) actors, interests and forces shaping the energyscape of the mekong region. forum for development studies 39(2) 147–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2012.680250 koljonen, s., kurhinen, j., vehanen, t., van ooik, t., rankila, m., sarnola, t., rannikko, l., ruotsalainen, h., linjama, t., haakana, h. & ilmonen, j. (2021) commissioning a fish ladder or a natural bypass – practical experiences and insights. (kalatien tai luonnonmukaisen ohitusuoman tilaajana toimiminen – kokemuksia ja vinkkejä käytännöistä). natural resources and bioeconomy studies 2021(32). luonnonvarakeskus (luke), helsinki. <https://jukuri.luke.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/547500/lukeluobio_32_2021.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y>. kosunen, n. & mikkola, i. (2017) a report on finland’s hydropower plants with less than 5 mw capacity and on the fisheries compensations of their imminent flow regulation projects (selvitys suomen alle 5 mw vesivoimalaitosten sekä niihin välittömästi liittyvien säännöstelyhankkeiden vesilain mukaisten lupien kalatalousvelvoitteista). linnunmaa oy, joensuu. köhler, j., geels, f. w., kern, f., markard, j., onsongo, e., wieczorek, a., alkemade, f., avelino, f., bergek, a., boons, f., fünfschilling, l., hess, d., holtz, g., hyysalo, s., jenkins, k., kivimaa, p., martiskainen, m., mcmeekin, a., mühlemeier, m. s., nykvist, b, pel, b., raven, r., rohracher, h., sandén, b., schot, j., sovacool, b., turnheim, b., welch, d. & wells, p. (2019) an agenda for sustainability transitions research: state of the art and future directions. environmental innovation and societal transitions 31 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2019.01.004 lawhon, m. & murphy, j. t. (2012) socio-technical regimes and sustainability transitions: insights from political ecology. progress in human geography 36(3) 354–378. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511427960 lees, a. c., peres, c. a., fearnside, p. m., schneider, m. & zuanon, j. a. s. (2016) hydropower and the future of amazonian biodiversity. biodivers conserv 25 451–466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-016-1072-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2015.09.007 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00160018 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2007.01.003 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76158-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.02.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2014.11.001 https://doi.org/10.1002/2688-8319.12142 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247813519044 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biombioe.2012.05.025 https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074014533142 https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2013 https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2012.680250 https://jukuri.luke.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/547500/luke-luobio_32_2021.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://jukuri.luke.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/547500/luke-luobio_32_2021.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2019.01.004 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511427960 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-016-1072-3 62 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper lehtoranta, v., sarvilinna, a., väisänen, s., aroviita, j. & muotka, t. (2017) public values and preference certainty for stream restoration in forested watersheds in finland. water resources and economics 17 56–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wre.2017.02.004 lejon, a. g. c., renöfält, b. m. & nilsson, c. (2009) conflicts associated with dam removal in sweden. ecology and society 14(2) 4. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-02931-140204 lempinen, h. (2019) arctic energy and social sustainability. palgrave pivot cham, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02269-3 lindahl, k. b., baker, s., rist, l. & zachrisson, a. (2016) theorising pathways to sustainability. international journal of sustainable development & world ecology 23(5) 399–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2015.1128492 linton, j. & budds, j. (2014) the hydrosocial cycle: defining and mobilizing a relational-dialectical approach to water. geoforum 57 170–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.008 massey d. (1997) a global sense of place. in barnes, t. & gergory, d. (eds.) reading human geography: the poetics and politics and inquiry, 315–323. london, arnold. meadowcroft, j. (2011) engaging with the politics of sustainability transitions. environmental innovation and societal transitions 1(1) 70–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2011.02.003 ministry of agriculture and forestry (finland) (2022) the programme to return migratory fish (vaelluskalakantojen elvyttämisohjelma nousu). <https://mmm.fi/vaelluskalat/vaelluskalaohjelma>. moran, e., lopez, m. c., moore, n., müller, n. & hyndman, d. w. (2018) sustainable hydropower in the 21st century. pnas 115(47) 11891–11898. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809426115 mustonen, t. & lehtinen, a. a. (2021) endemic renewal by an altered boreal river: community emplacement. climate and development 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2020.187042 myllyntaus, t. (1991) electrifying finland: the transfer of a new technology into a late industrialising economy. elinkeinoelämän tutkimuslaitos (etla), helsinki. myllyntaus, t. (2002) water of life and death (elämän ja kuoleman vesi). historiallinen aikakauskirja 100(2002) 2. o’brien, k. (2011) global environmental change ii: from adaptation to deliberate transformation. progress in human geography 36(5) 667–676. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511425767 o’connor, j. e., duda, j. j. & grant g. e. (2015) 1000 dams down and counting. science 348(6234) 496–497. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa9204 official statistics of finland (osf) (2020) production of electricity and heat [e-publication]. statistics finland, finland. <http://www.stat.fi/til/salatuo/2020/salatuo_2020_2021-11-02_tie_001_ en.html>. 11.5.2022. oksanen, m., ratamäki, o. & haapasalo, t. (2020) from fish management to fish rewilding: a finnish case analysis. in serafimova, s. (eds.) dimensions of intraand intergenerational justice in the debates about sustainability. avangard prima, sofia. pahl-wostl, c. (2020) adaptive and sustainable water management: from improved conceptual foundations to transformative change. international journal of water resources development 36(2–3) 397–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2020.1721268 pahl-wostl, c., holtz, g., kastens, b. & knieper, c. (2010) analyzing complex water governance regimes: the management and transition framework. environmental science & policy 13(7) 571–581. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2010.08.006 paloniitty, t. (2016) the weser-case: case c-461/13 bund v germany. journal of environmental law 28(1) 151–158. https://doi.org/10.1093/jel/eqv032 patterson, j., schulz, k., vervoort, j., van der hel, s., widerberg, o., adler, c., hurlbert, m., anderton, k., sethi, m. & barau, a. (2017) exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability. environmental innovation and societal transitions 24 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2016.09.001 patterson, j., soininen, n., collier, m. & raymond, c. m. (2021) finding feasible action towards urban transformations. npj urban sustainability 1(1) 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00029-7 pinker, a., argüelles, l., fischer, a. & becker, s. (2020) between straitjacket and possibility: energy initiatives and the politics of regulation. geoforum 113 14–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.04.016 pokka, h. (1991) rakennettujen vesistöjen jälkivalvontajärjestelmät. dissertation. suomalaisen lakimiesyhdistyksen julkaisuja, a-sarja. suomalainen lakimiesyhdistys, helsinki. polizzi, c., simonetto, m., barausse, a., chaniotou, n., känkänen, r., keränen, s., manzardo, a., mustajärvi, k., palmeri, l. & scipioni, a. (2015) is ecosystem restoration worth the effort? the rehabilitation of a finnish river affects recreational ecosystem services. ecosystem services 14 158–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2015.01.001 pörtner, h. o., scholes, r. j., agard, j., archer, e., arneth, a., bai, x., barnes, d., burrows, m., chan, l., cheung, w. l., diamond, s., donatti, c., duarte, c., eisenhauer, n., foden, w., gasalla, m. a., handa, c., hickler, t., hoegh-guldberg, o., ichii, k., jacob, u., insarov, g., kiessling, w., leadley, p., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wre.2017.02.004 https://doi.org/10.5751/es-02931-140204 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02269-3 https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2015.1128492 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2011.02.003 https://mmm.fi/vaelluskalat/vaelluskalaohjelma https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809426115 https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2020.187042 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511425767 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa9204 http://www.stat.fi/til/salatuo/2020/salatuo_2020_2021-11-02_tie_001_en.html http://www.stat.fi/til/salatuo/2020/salatuo_2020_2021-11-02_tie_001_en.html https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2020.1721268 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2010.08.006 https://doi.org/10.1093/jel/eqv032 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2016.09.001 https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00029-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.04.016 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2015.01.001 fennia 201(1) (2023) 63albrecht et al. leemans, r., levin, l., lim, m., maharaj, s., managi, s., marquet, p. a., mcelwee, p., midgley, g., oberdorff, t., obura, d., osman, e., pandit, r., pascual, u., pires, a. p. f., popp, a., reyes-garcía, v., sankaran, m., settele, j., shin, y. j., sintayehu, d. w., smith, p., steiner, n., strassburg, b., sukumar, r., trisos, c., val, a. l., wu, j., aldrian, e., parmesan, c., pichs-madruga, r., roberts, d. c., rogers, a. d., díaz, s., fischer, m., hashimoto, s., lavorel, s., wu, n. & ngo, h. t. (2021) ipbes-ipcc co-sponsored workshop report on biodiversity and climate change. ipbes and ipcc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4782538 rosenbloom, d., berton, h. & meadowcroft, j. (2016) framing the sun: a discursive approach to understanding multi-dimensional interactions within socio-technical transitions through the case of solar electricity in ontario, canada. research policy 45(6) 1275–1290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.03.012 ryan, c., carragee, k. m., & meinhofer, w. (2001) theory into practice: framing, the news media, and collective action. journal of broadcasting & electronic media 45(1) 175–182. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4501_11 schneider, f., kläy, a., zimmermann, a. b., buser, t., ingalls, m. & messerli, p. (2019) how can science support the 2030 agenda for sustainable development? four tasks to tackle the normative dimension of sustainability. sustainability science 14 1593–1604. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00675-y schön, d. & rein m. (1994) frame reflection: towards the resolution of intractable policy controversies. basic books, new york. da silva, l. p. b. & hussein, h. (2019) production of scale in regional hydropolitics: an analysis of la plata river basin and the guarani aquifer system in south america. geoforum 99 42–53. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.019 similä, j., soininen, n. & paukku, e. (2021) towards sustainable blue energy production: an analysis of legal transformative and adaptive capacity. journal of energy & natural resources law 40(1) 61–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/02646811.2021.1875687 soininen, n., belinskij, a., vainikka, a. & huuskonen, h. (2019) bringing back ecological flows: migratory fish, hydropower and legal maladaptivity in the governance of finnish rivers. water international 44(3) 321–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2019.1542260 sun, l., niu, d., wang, k. & xu, x. (2021) sustainable development pathways of hydropower in china: interdisciplinary qualitative analysis and scenario-based system dynamics quantitative modelling. journal of cleaner production 287(10) 125528. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.125528 swyngedouw, e. (2004) social power and the urbanization of water: flows of power. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198233916.001.0001 swyngedouw, e. (2015) liquid power: contested hydro-modernities in twentieth-century spain. mit press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029032.001.0001 swyngedouw, e., kaika, m. & castro, e. (2002) urban water: a political-ecology perspective. built environment 28(2) 124–137. truffer, b., murphy, j. t. & raven, r. (2015) the geography of sustainability transitions: contours of an emerging theme. environmental innovation and societal transitions 17 63–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2015.07.004 turnheim, b., berkhout, f., geels, f., hof, a., mcmeekin, a., nykvist, b. & van vuuren, d. (2015) evaluating sustainability transitions pathways: bridging analytical approaches to address governance challenges. global environmental change 35 239–253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.08.010 tynkkynen, n. (2010) a great ecological power in global climate policy? framing climate change as a policy problem in russian public discussion. environmental politics 19 (2) 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010903574459 walker, b., holling, c. s., carpenter, s. r. & kinzig, a. (2004) resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems. ecology and society 9(2) 5. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-00650-090205 wang, j., chen, l., tang, w., heino, j. & jiang, x. (2021) effects of dam construction and fish invasion on the species, functional and phylogenetic diversity of fish assemblages in the yellow river basin. journal of environmental management 293 112863. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112863 water act (264/1961) water act (587/2011) water rights act (31/1902) wenta, j. & mcdonald, j. (2019) the role of law and legal systems in climate change adaptation policy. in keskitalo, e. c. h. & preston, b. l. (eds.) research handbook on climate change adaptation policy, 69–90. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham and northampton. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786432520.00011 wieringa, m. j. & morton, a. g. (1996) hydropower, adaptive management, and biodiversity. environmental management 20 831–840. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01205963 yin, r. k. (2009) case study research: design and methods. 5th ed. sage, thousand oaks. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4782538 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.03.012 https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506878jobem4501_11 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00675-y https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.11.019 https://doi.org/10.1080/02646811.2021.1875687 https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2019.1542260 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.125528 https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198233916.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262029032.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2015.07.004 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.08.010 https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010903574459 https://doi.org/10.5751/es-00650-090205 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112863 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786432520.00011 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01205963 64 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper zarfl, c., lumsdon, a., berlekamp, j., tydeks, l. & tockner, k. (2015) a global boom in hydropower dam construction. aquatic sciences 77 161–170. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-014-0377-0 ziv., g., baran, e., nam, s., rodriguez-iturbe, i. & levin, s. a. (2012) trading-off fish biodiversity, food security, and hydropower in mekong river basin. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 109(15) 5609–5614. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201423109 news data references yle (22.5.2017) viimeinenkin este sierilän voimalaitoksen tieltä poistui – rakentaminen voi alkaa jo vuoden päästä. <https://yle.fi/a/3-9626801>. 22.5.2017. yle (20.9.2017) wwf:n suojeluasiantuntija: työ vaelluskalojen palauttamiseksi on ajankohtaisempaa kuin koskaan. <https://yle.fi/a/3-9841167>. 20.9.2017. yle (15.12.2017) ely: iijoen vesistöön yli miljoona kalanpoikasta ja kalaportaat kaikkiin voimaloihin – voimayhtiön mielestä vaatimukset ovat kohtuuttomia. <https://yle.fi/a/3-9952380>. 15.12.2017. yle (2.10.2018) porohoitajat tyytyväisiä vuotoksen tekojärven hylkäämiseen. <https://yle.fi/a/3-10056763>. 2.10.2018. yle (4.1.2019) sähkön hinta kivunnut lähelle edellistä nousukautta – sähkön kulutus palannut laman edelle. <https://yle.fi/a/3-10581648>. 4.1.2019. yle (19.7.2019) helsingissä paljastui yllätys: vanhimmalla yhä käytössä olevalla vesivoimalalla ei ehkä olekaan tarvittavaa lupaa – ”ei tämä kelpaa”. <https://yle.fi/a/3-10886573>. 19.7.2019. yle (5.10.2019) mies taisteli 20 vuotta vesivoimayhtiötä vastaan – ja voitti: ”en luota lakimiehiin vaan itseeni". <https://yle.fi/a/3-11002779>. 5.10.2019. yle (31.10.2019) kemijoki oy sai poikkeamisluvan sierilän vesivoimalan rakennuksiin. <https://yle.fi/ a/3-11044685>. 31.10.2019. yle (6.11.2019) kauna kemijoen valjastamista vastaan ei katoa, vaikka toivoa lohen paluusta on vielä – näin neljä miestä puhuu kuningaskalasta ja patoamisen jäljistä. <https://yle.fi/a/3-11051974>. 6.11.2019. yle (17.7.2020) rovaniemen sierilässä soudetaan taas vesivoimalaitosta vastaan. <https://yle.fi/a/311452594>. 17.7.2020. yle (1.8.2021) historiallinen tapaus hiitolanjoella – liki 100-vuotias vesivoimalaitos puretaan lohen tieltä. <https://yle.fi/a/3-12040886>. 1.8.2021. yle (30.11.2021) suomi palauttaa jokia luonnontilaan kiihtyvällä vauhdilla – tainionvirta vapautuu vesivoimasta päijänteen taimenille. <https://yle.fi/a/3-12207891>. 30.11.2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00027-014-0377-0 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1201423109 https://yle.fi/a/3-9626801 https://yle.fi/a/3-9841167 https://yle.fi/a/3-9952380 https://yle.fi/a/3-10056763 https://yle.fi/a/3-10581648 https://yle.fi/a/3-10886573 https://yle.fi/a/3-11002779 https://yle.fi/a/3-11044685 https://yle.fi/a/3-11044685 https://yle.fi/a/3-11051974 https://yle.fi/a/3-11452594 https://yle.fi/a/3-11452594 https://yle.fi/a/3-12040886 https://yle.fi/a/3-12207891 recognizing the plurality of knowledge, values, and experiences interwoven in mexican community forestry urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa129243 doi: 10.11143/fennia.129243 reflections: lectio praecursoria recognizing the plurality of knowledge, values, and experiences interwoven in mexican community forestry violeta gutiérrez-zamora gutiérrez-zamora, v. (2023) recognizing the plurality of knowledge, values, and experiences interwoven in mexican community forestry. fennia 201(1) 134–139. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129243 during my doctoral defense at the university of eastern finland on january 27th, 2023, i introduced my doctoral research with the present lectio praecursoria. this lectio delves into the plurality of experiences, values and knowledge interwoven in the development of community forestry in the sierra sur of oaxaca, mexico. in the last 40 years, mexico has promoted community forestry as an alternative to forest management directed by the central government or private companies. as an alternative, community forestry is based on social justice and environmental sustainability principles, aiming for communities to use forests for social and economic development while conserving them. the research examines how forest communities have created their paths to achieve these objectives, like creating community forestry companies for wood and non-wood forest products. based on ethnographic methods and documental analysis in the sierra sur of oaxaca state, the research investigated the challenges, paradoxes and changes forest dwellers face when managing and working in their community forestry companies while conserving their forests. furthermore, this study contributes to understanding how different environmental governing rationalities intersect when 1) socio-territorial conflicts arise, 2) women's access to productive labor is encouraged, and 3) the plural values of the forest are adapted. the lecture addresses one of the critical inquiries of this research: how various environmental governing rationalities intertwine in community forestry to shape and regulate people's behavior and interactions with forests. keywords: feminist political ecology, community forestry, environmentality, neoliberalization of nature, environmental justice violeta gutiérrez-zamora (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0242-6497), department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, finland. e:mail: violeta.gutierrez.zamora@luke.fi © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129243 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0242-6497 fennia 201(1) (2023) 135violeta gutiérrez-zamora madam custos, honored opponent, colleagues, friends, and family. on a november afternoon in 2015, i sat with mr. toledo1 in his front yard to talk about his experiences working for the community forestry enterprise. when i asked him how the timber harvesting started, he told me: “every year before the forestry activities begin, we offer a gift to the owner of the forest, of the mountain, el monte. when we started our own forestry company, we offered the gift to the place where the first pine fell; it was the first time the rite was performed in this way for that specific purpose. we took a lamb, mezcales, music, the violin, cigarettes, and tortillas as usual. from then on, it became a custom.” the owners of the mountains are mythological beings that inhabit and protect the mountains, the forest, and their animals. they are known in the local zapotec variant as wachi or more commonly called in nahuatl as chaneque. in the mesoamerican tradition, a gift is offered for cultivating corn and beans, caring for cattle, or asking for the return of someone lost in the forest. mr. toledo is a senior member of a zapotec community in the municipality of zimatlán in oaxaca, mexico. a community embedded in the mountainous range called sierra sur and widely recognized for being one of the leading producers of authorized and certified wood in southeastern mexico. like many other ejidos and agrarian communities in the country, its inhabitants have improved their living conditions by collectively using their forests and setting up diverse community-led ventures. at the same time, these rural communities interweave their own ways of relating to the forest with their contemporary situations. they adapt, rethink and reconfigure their costumes and coexistence with the forest. today they also offer a gift to the wachi or chaneque when they start a new company or community infrastructure, such as a sawmill or a water bottling plant. oaxaca state has an intricate topography due to the union of two major mountain ranges, the sierra madre oriental and the sierra madre del sur. like the forests, cultural and linguistic diversity seems more resistant in these mountains. specifically, they have been an excellent refuge for the temperate forests, flourishing at altitudes between 2,000 and 3,700 meters above sea level. these forests have a high ecological diversity and are home to 24 species and three varieties of native conifers, and 52 species of oaks. not to mention emblematic fauna like the puma, the tree ocelot, the opossum, the coatí, and the golden eagle. since the late 19th century, illegal logging, fires, and the expansion of farming and cattle ranching have been the most critical factors in the deforestation and degradation of mexican temperate forests. yet, oaxaca is still mexico's second most forested state. rural communities in this state own about 80% of forest land through the singular communal system of land tenure, better known as ejidos and agrarian communities. community forestry has emerged and been promoted as a viable solution to deforestation and poverty in this socio-ecological landscape. but the path to creating community forestry in rural mexico has been challenging and ever evolving. in the case of the sierra sur and sierra norte of oaxaca, industrial forestry was introduced by the federal government in the 1940s when it granted timber concessions to private and state-owned logging companies. by the early 1980s, the unfair profit-sharing and working conditions led to several communities mobilizing against the logging concessions and managing to stop their renewal. some forestry officials saw this situation as an opportunity to build another model that could benefit economically the sierras’ poor population. together with officials and other supporters, many communities started organizing their own community forest management and timber enterprises. this was a highly significant socio-economic change, as mr. toledo recalled. many rural communities in states like oaxaca, guerrero, michoacán, puebla, and durango began developing their own community forestry plans and enterprises. the core purposes of community forestry, thus, became three. first, for rural communities to use the benefits of forest resource extraction, like timber production, for economic and social development. secondly, to support community members’ involvement and participation in conserving, managing, and deciding over their forests. and thirdly, to avoid illegal logging by expanding forest management plans approved by forest authorities. 136 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections: lectio praecursoria from this perspective, we can affirm that community forestry has brought significant benefits in terms of social and economic development that support the efforts against deforestation. however, following a critical research approach based on political ecology, in my dissertation (gutiérrez zamora 2023), i point out that community forestry programs are not flawless. like all peoples and cultures, forest communities live with their own contradictions and complexities. in this sense, it is crucial to consider the several shades that arise when designing and implementing environmental policies and programs. for this purpose, i conducted nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in an agrarian community in 2015, 2017 and a short visit in 2019. i also conducted interviews in two neighboring communities that also developed their community forestry enterprises. my ethnographic fieldwork included participant observation, informal conversations, in-depth and semi-structured interviews, and collecting public documents and institutional records. during my fieldwork in the sierra sur of oaxaca, i was driven by the challenges, paradoxes, and tensions people face when managing, exploiting, and trying to conserve their forests. notably, the following: 1) socio-territorial conflicts, 2) women’s limited access to decision-making and productive labor, and 3) the recognition of plural values of the forest. such challenges, paradoxes, and tensions led me to consider further the historical context in which community forestry occurs. when i first arrived at this agrarian community in september 2015, i worked as an assistant researcher for a research project funded by the academy of finland. this project aimed to investigate the impacts of the finnish-mexican technical cooperation in forestry implemented in some rural communities of guerrero and oaxaca between 1988 and 1991. but my study took another direction after we arrived in this zapotec community. in our first meeting with the authorities, they asked us to dedicate some of the research to their land conflicts with the neighboring communities. a couple of months earlier, the disputes over forest lands had escalated, leading to fears that clashes and roadblocks would occur again. the more i learned from their forestry work and community organization, the more i wondered how a community described as a successful model continued to experience many land disputes that resulted in overt violence with other communities. i needed to explore how such communities, their populations, and forests fluctuated between indifference and the interference of the mexican state and other non-state actors. when analyzing such fluctuation, it became evident that community forestry develops in a particular historical context. a context with a wide diffusion of policies that promote monetary incentives and the efficiency of the free market as central elements for solving our social and environmental problems. in political ecology, such a process is called the neoliberalization of nature. this concept can be better understood when considering the commodification of land, water, and forests and the deployment of free market mechanisms in conservation strategies. as well as the rapid involvement of private corporations in environmental governance. in this way, my thesis aims to understand how community forestry operates in relation to the ‘neoliberalization of nature.’ i wanted to know how communal and neoliberal ways of knowing and being with the forest shape and regulate community forestry. theoretically, i employed the notion of ‘interwoven environmentalities’ to achieve this aim (gutiérrez zamora 2023). let me explain what i mean. by extending foucault’s analysis of governmentality and biopolitics, political ecologists and other scholars (luke 1995; agrawal 2005; ulloa 2005; fletcher 2010, 2017; cepek 2011) have used the concept of environmentality or eco-governmentality in studying the current interactions of societies and natures. in such analysis, scholars bear in mind that power is exercised in daily life by individuals and collective actors like companies, non-governmental organizations, and other social institutions that participate in environmental governance. it helps to recognize how individuals, as subjects, participate in their own rule, acting upon themselves. in other words, it allows us to consider how individuals internalize certain environmental practices and discourses as rationalities. the notion of environmentality acquires significant importance when thinking about decentralized power in environmental regulation, that is, beyond a central state. particularly critical to understanding how these rationalities organize and govern our ecological attitudes, perceptions and conduct. fennia 201(1) (2023) 137violeta gutiérrez-zamora the plural notion of environmentality permitted me to acknowledge the existence of different environmental rationalities in managing, knowing and being with the environment. it also allowed me to investigate how these rationalities frame the rules and norms we establish to give sense to our relationship with nature. in this way, i proposed that in community forestry, there are two main rationalities for managing, knowing, and being with the forest, communal and neoliberal (gutiérrez zamora 2023). both are interwoven to regulate and govern people’s conduct with their forests. such an approach allowed me to understand community forestry’s contradictions and tensions. but also to look at how different ecological rationalities transform or preserve specific practices and values. when i focused on the land and territorial conflicts, i followed the marked traces and the absences that various institutions, projects, and political changes left materially in the forests. but also symbolically, in other words, how people give sense to their interactions with forests as territories. we started using the responsibilization concept to theoretically explore how community forestry policies and programs urged communities to take further responsibilities. for example, in the conservation of forests, wood productivity, poverty alleviation, and conflict resolution. by responsibilization, i refer to the process of self-regulation in which people are rendered and internalize a sense of responsibility for duties previously considered the obligation of others, like the state or government officials. this concept led me to explore how community forestry as a global and national narrative can also work to transfer the responsibility of ‘failures’ to community members. i use the concept of responsibilization in my first article (see gutiérrez-zamora & hernández estrada 2020). i analyze how state strategies for conflict resolution often neglect their tangible results. they create ‘hope’ that someday the state could fulfill its security duties and provide legal certainty over the land. but also, they produce a sense of injustice among the rural population, leading to taking justice into their own hands. such a process permits the reproduction of direct violent clashes in land conflicts. in the second article included in my dissertation (see mustalahti et al. 2020), we also use the concept of responsibilization and question how state programs in different countries have designed ‘targets’ for effective timber production. in my contribution, i explore how the state attributes responsibility for their achievements and failures to forest communities’ performance and how community members assume it. alongside, i started another inquiry from my conversations with female community members in their kitchens, farming plots, and walks. these women gave me tremendous insights into the projects that aim to ‘include’ women in community forestry and how the gender division of labor has a bearing on the concerns and relationships with the forest and forestry activities. for example, mrs. lucrecia frequently recalled how she and the comuneras provided service and work for the community, called tequios. “we also go; we are the ones who cook at festivities. but also there in the mountains when we give the gift to the chaneque and when it is needed. even when fires or conflicts arise, we give these services.” these conversations made me question how women are represented in the community forestry success stories offered by official literature and male community members. in my third article (see gutiérrez-zamora 2021), i critically question how current gender mainstreaming strategies developed in community forestry, how they have been implemented, and their impacts on women’s lives. theoretically, i build upon feminist political ecology and discuss the coloniality that these strategies entail. furthermore, the article shows how male labor is pushed to be adjusted to meet the necessities of the timber market and how this adjustment directly impacted women’s work and access to forests (gutiérrez-zamora 2021). when forest stands are exploited, they become masculine spaces of forestry production, a ground of male labor and skill, heavy lumber, chainsaws, and operations. women’s presence and mobility have been partially restricted in this productive forest. while men work in the woods and obtain salaried employment, women are more in charge of household chores and the cultivation labor that secures the food necessities of the families. the description of such realities let me understand how diverse dispositifs of power operate in the everyday distribution and recognition of labor and influence our understanding of whose knowledge and work are ‘valuable.’ 138 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections: lectio praecursoria such an approach also supported the analysis of the fourth article (see gutiérrez-zamora et al. 2023), where we developed what the absence or presence of women meant for recognizing the plural values of the forest. in this last article, i also discuss how monetary incentives and instrumental values remain dominant in decision-making. i show how industrial forestry and the socialization of forestry knowledge introduced a division of the forest into communal and productive spaces that coexist in tension. the forest, as a productive space, has acquired metric and instrumental qualities based on silvicultural and administrative knowledge and values. still, communities still keep a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of el monte, like mr. toledo and mrs. lucrecia reminded me. the fourth article shows how the forest as a communal space continues to be built as part of the values of reciprocity, spirituality, and territoriality. here, i want to point out that these environmental rationalities are interwoven in today’s community forestry governance. based on my findings, i proposed that community forestry cultivates a communal entrepreneurial subjectivity. such subjectivity in the community has been crucial in gaining some economic and political autonomy for rural communities. yet, in recent years, it has also functioned as an entry point for policies and principles that encourage community members to be more and more productive and efficient so they can access the free market of wood and other non-wood forest products. i agree with other scholars on the need to acknowledge how community members creatively embrace, adapt, and reconfigure their specific communal responsibilities and entrepreneurial aspirations by deploying diverse forms of organizing and valuing their interactions with the forests. my dissertation findings will be useful to communities, academics, practitioners, and others involved in financing and planning community forestry initiatives. particularly for those involved in the complex dynamics and realities of rural ‘communities’ and who look beyond the well-intentioned discourses of socio-environmental programs. recognizing the collective efforts of these rural populations to maintain and manage forests is essential to guide public policies toward environmental justice. but it is also crucial to address the inequalities in the distribution and recognition of responsibilities, work, benefits, and burdens that impact the lives of the different members of these communities. notes 1 to maintain confidentiality, all people’s names in this lecture are pseudonyms. references agrawal, a. (2005) environmentality: community, intimate government, and the making of environmental subjects in kumaon, india. current anthropology 46(2) 161–190. https://doi.org/10.1086/427122 cepek, m. l. (2011) foucault in the forest: questioning environmentality in amazonia. american ethnologist 38(3) 501–515. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x fletcher, r. (2010) neoliberal environmentality: towards a poststructuralist political ecology of the conservation debate. conservation & society 8(3) 171–181. https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-4923.73806 fletcher, r. (2017) environmentality unbound: multiple governmentalities in environmental politics. geoforum 85 311–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.06.009 gutiérrez-zamora, v. (2021) the coloniality of neoliberal biopolitics: mainstreaming gender in community forestry in oaxaca, mexico. geoforum 126, 139–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.023 gutiérrez zamora, v. (2023) interweaving environmentalities in the heart of mountains: community forestry in the sierra sur of oaxaca, mexico. dissertations in social sciences and business studies no 292. university of eastern finland, joensuu. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-61-4733-8 gutiérrez-zamora, v. & hernández estrada, m. (2020) responsibilization and state territorialization: governing socio-territorial conflicts in community forestry in mexico. forest policy and economics 116, 102188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2020.102188 gutiérrez-zamora, v., mustalahti, i. & garcía-osorio, d. (2023) plural values of forests and the formation of collective capabilities: learnings from mexico’s community forestry. environmental sociology 9(2) 117–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2135063 luke, t. w. (1995) on environmentality: geo-power and eco-knowledge in the discourses of contemporary environmentalism. cultural critique 57–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354445 https://doi.org/10.1086/427122 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x https://doi.org/10.4103/0972-4923.73806 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.06.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.023 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-61-4733-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2020.102188 https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2135063 https://doi.org/10.2307/1354445 fennia 201(1) (2023) 139violeta gutiérrez-zamora mustalahti, i., gutiérrez-zamora, v., hyle, m., devkota, b.p. & tokola, n. (2020) responsibilization in natural resources governance: a romantic doxa? forest policy and economics 111, 102033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.102033 ulloa, a. (2005) the ecological native: indigenous peoples’ movements and eco-governmentality in columbia. 1st ed. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203958674 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.102033 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203958674 towards more locally aware resource governance? – commentary to albrecht and colleagues urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa130300 doi: 10.11143/fennia.130300 reflections towards more locally aware resource governance? – commentary to albrecht and colleagues hanna lempinen lempinen, h. (2023) towards more locally aware resource governance? – commentary to albrecht and colleagues. fennia 201(1) 124–129. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.130300 this text grew out as a commentary on the article “hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland” (albrecht et al. 2023) during the manuscript review process. while the article itself is a timely contribution to expanding our understanding on how rivers are framed and related to in a national context where the history of coercive ‘modernization’ meets an urgent demand to decarbonize, the authors’ observations also invite discussion beyond the explicit scope of water governance. considering the range of extractive and renewable resource projects that are expected to unfold across the country in response to the demands of the ‘green transition’, i make use of this text as an opportunity to discuss albrecht and colleagues’ (2023, 58) conclusion that “more emphasis should be placed on […] governance that recognises the local dynamics and interactions within the social-ecological systems”. i take a focus on the inseparably political, affective and situated nature of all resource-related developments and debates, which all pose their unique challenges for translating the idea(l)s of locally aware environmental and resource governance frameworks into practice. keywords: environmental governance, resource development, just transition, hydropower, energyscape hanna lempinen (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1416-8544), arctic centre, university of lapland, finland. e-mail: hanna.lempinen@ulapland.fi powering ‘development’ waterways have occupied an integral role in the modernization of post-world war ii finland. at the face of rapid industrialization and national identity building, established uses and traditional meanings and valuations of rivers were forced to give way to perceiving them as a source of power and prosperity, desperately desired to fuel the development of the small and peripheral nation (see suopajärvi 2001; rannikko 2022; for similar developments in canada, see desbiens 2013). it was of course not only rivers that became viewed as a valuable ‘resource’ (cf. bridge 2009; hast 2021); in the hectic pursuit of ‘development’, regional employment prospects and national economic gain also © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.130300 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1416-8544 mailto:hanna.lempinen@ulapland.fi fennia 201(1) (2023) 125hanna lempinen other natural environments have shared their fate (e.g. tanskanen 2001; ruuskanen 2010; hast 2021). the decades-long national hydropower development scheme left behind not only massive industrial infrastructure that continues to block the flows of water and all life dependent on engagements with it, but also a ‘cultural trauma’ (albrecht et al. 2023) that was allowed to unfold in the name of ‘national interest’ (suopajärvi 2001), ‘major regional development project’ (vola 2020) and the ‘good of the society’ (strauss 2011). despite its tragic local histories and the increasing political emphasis on nature conservation, restoration and other ecosystem services and values, hydropower has maintained its image as a source of reliable and environmentally benign form of power generation. owing to its relative flexibility, hydropower is seen as a key resource that can compensate for the intermittency of other forms of renewable energy generation, thus instrumentally contributing to energy affordability and security of supply (ministry of economic affairs and employment 2022, 42). hydropower also continues to enjoy popularity among finnish citizens: in the annual survey of national energy attitudes commissioned by the finnish energy industry, around two thirds of the respondents agree either somewhat or completely agree with statements of hydropower being ‘environmentally friendly’ (total 73%) and ‘necessary for mitigating climate change’ (70%). nearly a third of the respondents express their support for additional hydropower construction in the country. only around 10% of the respondents somewhat or completely disagree with these statements (see finnish energy 2022, 11–12, 14). despite its widespread acceptance, hydropower has also featured as a prominent source of local environmental conflicts since the 1950s (cf. pettersson et al. 2017). what kind of space and voice should be given to the minority opposing hydropower in a situation where an overwhelming majority of is willing to grant the hydropower industry its societal license to operate or even expand? (cf. lesser et al. 2023) albrecht and others’ (2023) article paints an appropriate picture of the complexities of hydropower: while it is a flexible and low-carbon source of electricity, its construction has had – and continues to have – a detrimental impact on waterways as well as on the species and (multispecies) cultures that depend on their flows. while the authors’ interest lies in the management of waterways, the discussions they engage in bear significance also in other contexts of resource (un)development. similar ‘ambivalence’ (ibid.) characterizes the local implications of all resource development projects, extractive and renewable alike. the harms and losses that are being experienced locally as a result of policies aspiring towards maximizing “common normative goods” (sovacool et al. 2019, 582) lie at the very heart of the contemporary energy sustainability dilemma. they also reflect more broadly the spatial and temporal complexities associated with implementing just transitions towards a low-carbon world. sustainability depoliticized in their article, albrecht and colleagues (2023) identify a set of frames that rivers are being made sense of in the expert and media debates of contemporary finnish society: as a source of flexible power; in terms of preserving and restoring their ecological values and functions; in terms of the value they have in providing sociocultural ecosystem services for riparian communities and other users; and in relation to the persistent cultural trauma that also contemporary water governance has to come to terms with. through drawing attention to the oftentimes conflicting societal understandings of what rivers are ‘for’ and what should be done with them, the authors arrive at the core of what ‘political’ entails: the right to define the prevailing state of affairs and the ability to influence its desired future trajectories (cf. stirling 2014). however, at the same time the authors make several references to the possibility or goal of ‘striking a balance’ (albrecht et al. 2023) between the often conflicting interests and values of different stakeholders. such a statement is problematic in the sense that depoliticizes a situation that is political at its very core through suggesting that such a balance between often irreconcilable wants, needs and worldviews of manifold different actors could somehow be achieved. instead, in many instances the possibility of such a ‘balance’ does not exist: diverse losses and gains are bound to occur in a manner that treats those involved in an uneven manner, and involved actors are bound to have an unequal say in defining and deciding on what this ‘balance’ entails. 126 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections policies nor policy transitions are never amoral, neutral or value free, but instead built on and carved out of an existing social order and prevailing, asymmetrical power relations (stirling 2014; sovacool et al. 2019). fully acknowledging this inseparably political nature of hydropower (and other) resource development projects – and the perspectivality of the notion of sustainability itself – places a tremendous challenge on the frameworks of resource governance. while a wealth of legislation that should in principle guarantee those most impacted a say in what will happen does exist, in practice the existing governance frameworks have ‘a proven degree of maladaptivity’ (albrecht et al. 2023): the possibilities for local communities and those residing by the impacted waterways can at best be described as ‘limited’ (ibid.). similar challenges have observed in other national resource governance contexts. the channels of participation that existing legislation provides have left (parts of the) local communities underrepresented and, as a result, with a profound experience of being excluded and devalued (strauss 2011; suopajärvi 2013; pettersson et al. 2017; möttönen et al. 2022). i would argue that much of the incapability of our environmental governance frameworks to identify and value citizens’ everyday lives and experiences does not stem only from inadequacy of the frameworks themselves but more profoundly from our manners of relating to resources as a society. as sejersen and thisted (2021, 369) conclusively summarize: in the field of resource extraction there is consensus that emotions [and everything labelled as such] should be avoided. we are constantly reminded that […] discussions should be based on facts and rational arguments rather than let the emotions prevail. this ‘dominant techno-scientific governmentality’ (dale 2016) of resource management and related cultures of argumentation constitute a ‘truth’ about resources, what should be done with them and why that leaves very little room for non-expert voices to participate in the processes of its definition – equally within the formal frameworks of public participation and in broader societal debates (also strauss 2011; desbiens 2013). paradoxically, this remains the case even when those societal resource-debates deemed as ‘objective’ or ‘rational’ have been established as thoroughly penetrated by affective states and statements (see weszkalnys 2016; lempinen & lindroth 2021; sejersen & thisted 2021; kangasluoma & lempinen 2022). the way in which finnish water governance has been geared towards allocating the maximum amount of water for hydropower production (albrecht et al. 2023) is not any less dependent from hopes, fears and wants of different actors involved than resistance of hydropower is. the same also holds true in the context of implementing the ongoing ‘just green transition’ towards low-carbon and no-carbon societies more broadly. only through comprehensively understanding the local impacts of a given development project the true distribution of benefit and harm, the diverse range of losses that are being experienced (beyond monetary terms) and those who suffer them and those who need to be included and heard can be identified (for excellent discussions on the notion of energy justice e.g. jenkins et al. 2016; maccauley & heffron 2018; williams & doyon 2019; cha 2020). while financial harm and monetary losses are (relatively) effortless to quantify, agree upon and compensate for, the losses that do not translate to monetary terms are difficult to grasp. my own work with finland’s ‘just’ peat transition and experiences of those most affected by the transition – those deriving their livelihood from peat extraction – has highlighted some of these challenges. for finland’s peat entrepreneurs, what is being lost in the transition is not a source of employment and income, but an integral part of everyday life and identity and a deep attachment to peatland as a profoundly meaningful space. as within the frameworks of resource governance more broadly, these personal and sociocultural losses remain unidentified and unaccounted for (cf. mcgrath & mcgonagle 2016; della bosca & gillespie 2018; lempinen & vainio 2022). on the ‘local’ in their article, albrecht and colleagues (2023) make a well-justified demand for better awareness and inclusion of the local circumstances to which the planned (un)development is intended to become a part of. for them, the conceptual answer lies to a great extent in the interplay of a hydro-social cycle and an aquatic regime: the changing meaning and functions of waterways that have an impact on how fennia 201(1) (2023) 127hanna lempinen the communities among whom they flow interact with them and collectively shared understandings of how these bodies of water should be managed. similar conceptual attempts have been made also by other authors: rannikko (2022) builds on the notion of hydro-social networks, others have relied on the concept of an energyscape (kaisti & käkönen 2012; strauss et al. 2013; lempinen 2019). what all of the notions above share is the idea that the planned development project is not constructed to a sociocultural void but instead becomes a part of an existing ‘actor-network’ (latour 2005) or, in clarke’s (2005) terms, ‘situation’: a unique, constantly changing and perspectival spatiotemporal mosaic co-constituted by human, nonhuman and ideational entities alike. when becoming a part of this socio-environmental fabric, local (un)development projects inevitably “alter the ways in which [some] people live, work, play, relate to one another, organize to meet their needs, and generally cope as members of society” (vanclay 2002, 190). this is even more the case in a situation where multiple resource developments are underway in the same local setting, but their permitting takes place in isolation from other projects. the environmental and social impacts of each project are assessed individually – and often insufficiently (suopajärvi 2013, 2015; hildebrandt & sandham 2014) – without a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of their simultaneous introduction to the same socioenvironmental setting that constitutes the local resourcescape. the situated nature of what the ‘local’ or a ‘place’ entails resists generalization. furthermore, the human communities and places affected by development projects are not uniform but internally heterogenous (vanclay 2002; del río & burguillo 2008; lempinen 2019). it might be that while some residents or right-holders are harmed, not all of them necessarily experience the same kinds of harm and, as a result, have the losses that occur to them compensated for; for others, the planned developments might reap financial or other gains. the internal diversity of communities and stakeor rights-holders within a given project implementation or development plan yet again underlines the political nature of how resources are related to. the tension between different viewpoints and the unbalanced power relations between the actors who present them is not limited to a juxtaposition between the local and the national or the periphery and the centre, but also applies to the conflicting viewpoints that by default exist within the communities that are touched by planned and ongoing resource development projects. if ‘striking a balance’ between the resource developers or project owners and local communities is a problematic in its own right – both as a practice as well as an idea(l) –, so is the assumption of being able to ‘balance’ the contradicting interests and worldviews within local communities. concluding thoughts on rivers and beyond the contemporary ‘reality’ in finland is roughly that additional hydropower capacity can be constructed only to already dammed rivers. this state of affairs does not, however, mean that construction of hydropower would have been left in history or that planned hydropower projects at the remaining (technologically and economically) suitable sites in rivers that have already been dammed would not be contested. in the densely dammed kemijoki river, the conflict around constructing a dam in the village of sierilä continues to escalate both on ecological and sociocultural grounds. the decades-long debate for enabling the return of the mighty migratory salmon also continues. construction of a bypass would (at least theoretically) enable the return of the fish whose loss had such a detrimental impact on local cultures and communities. at the same time, the return of the fish would not be synonymous with reversing the cultural trauma that damming the kemijoki river caused. the associated experiences of deep injustice also still echo in the background also in societal debates revolving around other resource development projects in the contemporary north. at the other end of the spectrum lies the removal of dams at sites where the role of electricity generation is insignificant or where the natural values are considered more important than the revenue that can be gained from hydropower construction. while welcome from the ecological perspective, removing a dam that has been woven to the fabric of the everyday experience of those whose lives intersect with it can also bring about loss to some. one such example is the planned dam removal at the mouth of the vantaanjoki river in helsinki, where the surroundings of the vanhankaupunginkoski dam have become an integral part of the recreational and cultural landscape – a part of shared history 128 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections for the capital residents and a protected site of site of local cultural heritage – whose preservation in its existing state is also fiercely advocated. it is easy to agree with the authors’ demand to make ‘better recognition of biodiversity, societal and cultural values and adaptation needs’ an integral part of water governance frameworks. calling for similar improvements in other sectors of resource governance is equally effortless to justify. identifying the blind spots and calling for improvement in existing environmental legislation is a political act and act of justice in its own right. just like the frames and interpretations of other actors can become integrated to other actors’ frames and political agendas, research-based knowledge can feed into how different policy and societal actors make sense of their specific fields and the ways in which these sectors relate to the world around them. the difficulty lies in pointing out the how this should be done in practice. what would a placesensitive governance framework that would be both genuinely inclusive and nondiscriminatory towards alternative ways of valuing the multispecies world that we are a part of look like? how to ensure that the resources and expertise needed for implementation for such policies in practice is a completely different debate. overall, the challenge is not solely about not re-designing our environmental and resource legislation, administration and governance but instead an endeavour of going deep into acknowledging and re-assessing the values embedded in and cherished by our societies. embracing the irrevocably political and affective nature of all resource-related societal developments and being sensitive to truly acknowledging the localized injustices that are inevitably generated as externalities of our existing nature-related governance frameworks is a humble start. acknowledgements this commentary was written while working with a research grant from jenny and antti wihuri foundation (grant number 00190203). references albrecht, e., lukkarinen, j., hakkarainen, m. & soininen, n. (2023) hydropowering sustainability transformation: policy frames on river use and restoration in finland. fennia 201(1) 47–64. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120946 bridge, g. (2009) material worlds: natural resources, resource geography and the material economy. geography compass 3(3) 1217–1244. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00233.x cha, j. m. (2020) a just transition for whom? politics, contestation, and social identity in the disruption of coal in the powder river basin. energy research & social sciences 69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101657 clarke, a. (2005) situational analysis: grounded theory after the postmodern turn. sage, thousand oaks. dale, b. (2016) governing resources, governing mentalities: petroleum and the norwegian integrated ecosystem-based management plan for the barents and lofoten seas in 2011. the extractive industries and society 3 9–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.10.002 della bosca, h. & gillespie, j. (2018) the coal story: generational coal mining communities and strategies of energy transition in australia. energy policy 120 734–740. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.04.032 desbiens, c. (2013) power from the north: territory, identity, and the culture of hydroelectricity in quebec. university of british columbia press, vancouver. finnish energy (2022) finnish energy attitudes 2022. <https://energia.fi/files/7560/finnish_energy_ attitudes_2022.pdf>. hast, s. (2021) yhteensovittamattomat luonnonvarat? tutkimus lapin luonnonvaraistumisesta. lapland university press, rovaniemi. https://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-337-285-6 hildebrandt, l. & sandham, l.-a. (2014) social impact assessment: the lesser sibling in the south african eia process. environmental impact assessment review 48 20–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2014.04.003 jenkins, k., mccauley, d., heffron, r., stephan, h. & rehner, r. (2016) energy justice: a conceptual review. energy research & social science 11 174–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.10.004 kaisti, h. & käkönen, m. (2012) actors, interests and forces shaping the energyscape of the mekong region. journal of development studies 39(2) 147–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2012.680250 kangasluoma, s. & lempinen, h. (2022) making of the arctic dream – affective resources in the strategies of arctic coastal states. globalizations 20(3) 400–414. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2091869 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120946 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00233.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101657 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2015.10.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.04.032 https://energia.fi/files/7560/finnish_energy_attitudes_2022.pdf https://energia.fi/files/7560/finnish_energy_attitudes_2022.pdf https://urn.fi/urn https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2014.04.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.10.004 https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2012.680250 https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2091869 fennia 201(1) (2023) 129hanna lempinen latour, b. (2005) reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. oxford university press, oxford. lempinen, h. (2019) arctic energy and social sustainability. palgrave, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02269-3 lempinen, h. & lindroth, m. (2021) fear and hoping in the arctic: charting the emotional fabric of resource extraction. the extractive industries & society 8(2) 100872. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2021.01.007 lempinen, h. & vainio, a. (2022) “selviääkö tästä mitenkään?” – turpeesta elantonsa saavien kokemukset suomalaisen turvepolitiikan oikeudenmukaisesta siirtymästä. terra 134(3) 149–167. https://doi.org/10.30677/terra.113497 lesser, p., poelzer, g., guregell, k., tost, m. & franks, d. (2023) exploring scale in social license to operate: european perspectives. journal of cleaner production 384 135552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.135552 maccauley, d. & heffron, r. (2018) just transition: integrating climate, energy and environmental justice. energy policy 119 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.04.014 mcgrath, m. & mcgonagle, h. (2016) exploring ‘wicked problems’ from an occupational perspective: the case of turf cutting in rural ireland. journal of occupational science 23(3) 308–320. https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2016.1169437 ministry of economic affairs and employment (2022) carbon neutral finland 2035 – national climate and energy strategy. publications of the ministry of economic affairs and employment energy 2022 (55). http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-327-843-1 möttönen, s., salo, m. & konttinen, e. (2022) kansalaiset ympäristöhallinnan osapuolena: keski-suomen turvekiista esimerkkinä. alue ja ympäristö 51(1) 207–210. https://doi.org/10.30663/ay.115637 pettersson, s., hallikainen, v., naskali, a., rovanperä, s. & tuulentie, s. (2017) ympäristökonfliktit suomessa: mistä on kiistelty ja miksi? terra 129(2) 87–107. rannikko, p. (2022) koskien valjastamisesta patojen purkuun – hiitolanjoen hydrososiaalinen rytminvaihdos. terra 134(3) 169–182. https://doi.org/10.30677/terra.115605 del río, p. & burguillo, m. (2008) assessing the impact of renewable energy deployment on local sustainability: towards a theoretical framework. renewable and sustainable energy reviews 12(5) 1325–1344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2007.03.004 ruuskanen, e. (2010) turpeesta voimaa ja lämpöä. vapo, jyväskylä. sejersen, f. & thisted, k. (2021) mining emotions: affective approaches to resource extraction. in nord, d. c. (ed.). nordic perspectives on the responsible development of the arctic: pathways to action, 369–389. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52324-4_17 sovacool, b., martiskainen, m., hook, a. & baker, l. (2019) decarbonization and its discontents: a critical energy justice perspective on four low-carbon transitions. climatic change 155 581–619. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02521-7 strauss, h. (2011) for the good of the society: public participation in the siting of nuclear and hydropower projects in finland. acta universitatis ouluensis, e scientiae rerum socialium 118. dissertation. <http://jultika.oulu.fi/files/isbn9789514295072.pdf>. strauss, s., rupp, s. & love, t. (2013) powerlines: cultures of energy in the twenty-first century. in strauss, s., rupp, s. & love, t. (eds.) cultures of energy: power, practices and technologies 10–38. left coast press, walnut creek. stirling, a. (2014) transforming power: social science and the politics of energy choices. energy research & social science 1 83–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.02.001 suopajärvi, l. (2001) vuotosja ounasjoki-kamppailujen kentät ja merkitykset lapissa. acta electronica universitatis lapponiensis 28. dissertation. https://lauda.ulapland.fi/handle/10024/61734 suopajärvi, l. (2013) social impact assessment in mining projects in northern finland: comparing practice to theory. environmental impact assessment review 42 25–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2013.04.003 suopajärvi, l. (2015) the right to mine: discourse analysis of social impact assessments of mining projects in finnish lapland in the 2000s. barents studies 1(3) 36–54. tanskanen, m. (2000) näkyvän takana: tutkimus metsäojitetun suomaiseman kulttuurisuudesta. university of joensuu – department of geography, publications no 8. vanclay, f. (2002) conceptualizing social impacts. environmental impact assessment review 22 183–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0195-9255(01)00105-6 vola, j. (2020) untied resource as a threa/-t/-d for social fabric(ation). in tennberg, m., lempinen, h. & pirnes, s. (eds.) resources, social and cultural sustainabilities in the arctic. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429057366-4 weszkalnyz, g. (2016) a doubtful hope: resource affect in a future oil economy. journal of the royal anthropological society 22(1) 127–146. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12397 williams, s. & doyon, a. (2019) justice in energy transitions. environmental innovation and societal transitions 31 144–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2018.12.001 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02269-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2021.01.007 https://doi.org/10.30677/terra.113497 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2022.135552 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.04.014 https://doi.org/10.1080/14427591.2016.1169437 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-327-843-1 https://doi.org/10.30663/ay.115637 https://doi.org/10.30677/terra.115605 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2007.03.004 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52324-4_17 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02521-7 http://jultika.oulu.fi/files/isbn9789514295072.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.02.001 https://lauda.ulapland.fi/handle/10024/61734 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2013.04.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0195-9255(01)00105-6 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429057366-4 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12397 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2018.12.001 young people as agents in regional shrinkage – commentary to syssner urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa122487 doi: 10.11143/fennia.122487 reflections young people as agents in regional shrinkage – commentary to syssner marika kettunen and eeva-kaisa prokkola kettunen, m. & prokkola, e.-k. (2022) young people as agents in regional shrinkage – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 258–262. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122487 this paper reflects on josefina syssner’s fennia lecture “what could geographers do for shrinking geographies”. in this commentary, we extend upon and complement syssner’s inquiry by suggesting that to gain a better understanding of regional shrinkage and shrinking geographies it is important to ask the who question as well. shrinkage and the policies used to deal with it impact different people in different ways, and people have different abilities to react to these changes or to take part in shaping the policies. in this reflection paper, we focus on a specific age group that is often considered important in regional development and policy discussions but that has been ignored in the debates on shrinking geographies – young people. in the end, we ask what geographers could do to increase the understanding of and possibilities for young people to live a good life in shrinking regions in times of environmental crises. keywords: young people, youth participation, shrinking regions, regional development, environmental crises marika kettunen (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6067-569x) and eeva-kaisa prokkola (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3237-6953), geography research unit, university of oulu, finland. e-mail: marika.kettunen@oulu.fi, eeva-kaisa. prokkola@oulu.fi intertwined geographies of shrinking and geographies of young people in her fennia keynote lecture presented in the nordic geographers meeting (ngm), josefina syssner touches upon the timely and societally relevant topic of shrinking geographies (see also syssner 2022). with a focus on the nordic states, syssner brings to the fore various ways in which geographers and geographical inquiry could do for shrinking regions, for example, by providing information on what it means to live in shrinking rural regions and by making explicit the implicit geographical imaginations of shrinking and decline. moreover, she elucidates how shrinkage is treated differently at different scales and in different places by various policy actors, both formal and informal. in so doing she raises important what, when and where questions related to shrinking regions, discussing them in light of current research findings as well as future research needs. aligned with syssner’s thoughts, we concur that geographical inquiry in the context of shrinking regions or shrinkage entails a possibility to address this timely societal issue beyond the narrow focus © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122487 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6067-569x https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3237-6953 fennia 200(2) (2022) 259marika kettunen & eeva-kaisa prokkola of shrinkage as a tool of governance. in order to do so, it is important that we also ask the who (see kallio 2014), and take a closer look at those who are involved and those who are missing, those whose lives are affected by the shrinkage and policies used to deal with shrinkage and those whose perspectives are (or are not) heard in the current discussions. with the who question in mind, this commentary extends the debate on shrinking geographies by highlighting the structural and symbolic significance of young people’s agency with respect to shrinking regions. as syssner mentions, young people and their mobility decisions are pivotal for rural regions. although children and young people are a key group in state building and regional development trajectories, their perspectives are often ignored in political decision-making and regional research. at the same time, young people’s decisions and opportunities to move or stay are often treated as the reason for regional shrinkage in the first place, as selective out-migration is linked to depopulation and reducing fertility rates. from this adultist perspective, which is prevalent in much of the literature concerning shrinking regions, young people are often regarded as an important age group to be taken into consideration merely for the sake of their role as future adults. the active agency of young people is rarely recognized. growing up in places shrinking or ‘left behind’ although there is little research that explicitly addresses young people in the context of shrinking geographies, there is a wide body of research concerning young people in rural and sparsely habited regions, offering insight into how young people live and negotiate belonging in these regions. as also syssner brings forth, many sparsely habited regions in the nordic countries have experienced declines in terms of accessibility to welfare services and educational opportunities. as municipalities have centralized their educational networks, many village and neighborhood schools have been closed. syssner reminds us, importantly, how equal access to schooling and other public serves is the core of the nordic welfare state model. hence, besides contributing to a vicious cycle of shrinkage in rural areas, the centralization of schooling also heightens the structural inequalities that frame young people’s lives and possibilities. this is especially the case in an era when acquiring formal education is regarded as increasingly important (kettunen & prokkola 2022). another youth-related shrinkage question mentioned by syssner concerns outmigration decisions. in sparsely habited and rural shrinking regions it is often young people and especially young women who choose to leave. youth researchers have shed light on the complexities of staying in place or moving out and have argued that a certain mobility imperative for rural youth exists: outmigration from rural regions has become a culturally and structurally powerful norm among many rural young people (e.g. farrugia 2016; juvonen & romakkaniemi 2019). for instance, gendered expectations and gendered possibilities can influence young people’s decisions to stay or leave rural areas (e.g. pöysä 2022). corbett and forsey (2017, 430) note how attitudes towards youth migration are contradictory as “youth are simultaneously encouraged and blamed as they are chided to aspire higher”. in other words, there is both pressure to look beyond the immediate horizon (encouraged to aspire) and to stay in the home region (chided for wanting out). moreover, as geographers and others have shown, the imaginations of urban and rural play a crucial role in the mobility decisions of young people (e.g. forsberg 2019). sometimes living in a rural or remote shrinking place is considered stigmatizing and encourages the label ‘left behind’ (wenham 2020). these geographical imaginations can influence young people’s understanding of themselves, here and there, and contribute to their decision to out-migrate. young people may grow up with the idea that there is no future for them in the shrinking region (see also kettunen 2022). it seems that young people are caught in the middle of two conflicting narratives, the one highlighting regional vitality (collective wellbeing) and the other emphasizing personal success (personal wellbeing) (e.g. komu & adams 2021). it is therefore important that geographical research critically engages with the negative imaginaries and stereotypes of shrinking regions: how are the current development trajectories narrated, how is shrinkage or population decline articulated in the local communities, and what difference do these make for young people’s sense of self and future plans? 260 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections tackling shrinkage through youth engagement and participation? the importance of engaging citizens and the local community has been highlighted in the context of both urban (hospers 2014) and rural shrinkage (kahila et al. 2022), yet to date there is little research that explicitly takes into consideration the active agency of young people in the context of shrinking regions or shrinkage. young people are often viewed as targets of regional policy initiatives rather than as active agents of regional change. there are also different stances towards different groups and groupings of young people. the underaged young people in shrinking regions are the subject of various policies and practices ranging from formal education to initiatives that aim to foster young people’s sense of belonging to their home region. similarly, those who have left their home region and are now young adults are courted as potential returnees in regions that experience population decline (e.g. rérat 2014). young adults and their offspring are considered important for the tax revenues and vitality of the region. top-down policy and research narratives, however, seldom recognize young people’s agency but rather simplistically reduce young people into quantified numbers and figures. in recent years, however, the importance of engaging young people in local and regional decisionmaking has been recognized. for example, in kainuu, a shrinking region in rural eastern finland, young women have been heralded as key actors in defining the future of the rural and sparsely habited region (haanpää et al. 2021). they have been invited to take part in regional planning and policy making, arenas that are not traditionally characterized by young female agents. while the unspoken aim of such practices nevertheless seems to be to empower young people to tackle shrinkage, that is, to deal with predefined challenges and to increase regional vitality through enabling growth, these initiatives signify an important shift in thinking about young people and their role in shrinking regions. young people are now more often seen as active agents both capable of and willing to take part in regional development (also kettunen 2022). young people and shrinking geographies in times of environmental crises in this commentary, we have noted how young people are often considered as future adults and how this ‘future speech’ puts various expectations on them. the emphasis on futurities also holds a possibility to look at shrinkage as an opportunity for change (see also hospers & reverda 2015). this is especially crucial in times when the ideal of (economic) growth does not neatly match with the pressing need to respond to environmental crises and transition towards climate-neutral societies. lehtinen (2019), for example, has pointed out how shrinking geographies and the idea of shrinking in an economic sense (or degrowth, as lehtinen calls it) has remained on the margins of geographical thought, despite the fact that such perspectives would be beneficial for rethinking the relationship between economy and wellbeing. in the context of shrinking regions and depopulation, the need for multiple transitions seems all the more urgent. sustainable transitions cannot succeed unless the shrinkage policy is coupled with the ‘leave no one behind’ commitment (undp 2018). thus, more knowledge is needed on how multiple transitions impact, and are impacted by, the actions of different groups and generations. we propose that geographers do more to strengthen our understanding of young people’s perspectives on shrinkage and to better recognize the agency of young people in local and regional development. the key question is to rethink what is meant by success or good life and to ensure that young people in shrinking places and regions have the possibility to a live a good life despite the multiple crises and transitions. future research could take into consideration young people’s active role, participation or resistance towards top-down ‘smart shrinking’ initiatives, right-sizing or degrowth policies. in relation to the alternative perspectives and models on shrinkage that also syssner underlines, it would also be important to investigate the ways in which young people might mobilize around, take part in, and renew multiple transition processes. research could also illuminate the responses that young people’s grassroots participation and engagement stirs up in the local communities: is the political agency of young people valued in the society (skelton 2010) or are they considered unknowledgeable actors in their communities (kettunen 2021). fennia 200(2) (2022) 261marika kettunen & eeva-kaisa prokkola we conclude that paying attention to young people’s perspectives – and similarly to other groups or minorities whose perspectives have traditionally remained unheard in the arena of regional development – and asking the who question would enable a widening of the discussion regarding what shrinking regions and shrinkage means and who the relevant actors are considered to be. it is also important to bear in mind that young people are not a homogenous group. more inclusive policies and practices that recognize intersectionality and intersecting differences such as age, gender, race, place and class are needed to deal with the shrinkage in a socially and environmentally just manner. references corbett, m. & forsey, m. (2017) rural youth out-migration and education: challenges to aspirations discourse in mobile modernity. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 38(3) 429–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2017.1308456 farrugia, d. (2016) the mobility imperative for rural youth: the structural, symbolic and nonrepresentational dimensions of rural youth mobilities. journal of youth studies 19(6) 836–851. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1112886 forsberg, s. (2019) ‘the right to immobility’ and the uneven distribution of spatial capital: negotiating youth transitions in northern sweden. social & cultural geography 20(3) 323–343. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14649365.2017.1358392 haanpää, s., koivisto, a., lähteenmäki-smith, k., manu, s., siltanen, k. & komulainen, m. (2021) naisnäkökulmaa kainuuseen. pilottihankkeen loppuraportti b:20. regional council of kainuu, kajaani. <https://www.kajaani.fi/tiedostot/naisnakokulmaa-kainuuseen-loppuraportti/?1620661229> 25.11.2022. hospers, g. j. (2014) policy responses to urban shrinkage: from growth thinking to civic engagement. european planning studies 22(7) 1507–1523. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 hospers, g. j. & reverda, n. (2015) managing population decline in europe’s urban and rural areas. springer international, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12412-4 juvonen, t. & romakkaniemi, m. (2019) between mobility and belonging: the meanings of locality among youth in lapland in the transition to adulthood. young 27(4) 321–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308818791672 kahila, p., hirvonen, t., jolkkonen, a, kurvinen, a., lemponen, v., makkonen, t., rautiainen, s., copus, a., teräs, j., turunen, e., lebbing, j., vester l. & meijer, m. (2022) mitä on älykäs sopeutuminen? valtioneuvoston selvitysja tutkimustoiminnan julkaisusarja 2022:42. prime minister’s office, helsinki. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-383-173-5 kallio, k. p. (2014) who is the subject of political action. acme 13(3) 428–433. <https://acme-journal. org/index.php/acme/article/view/1016> 25.11.2022 kettunen, m. (2021) “we need to make our voices heard”: claiming space for young people’s everyday environmental politics in northern finland. nordia geographical publications 49(5) 32–48. https://doi.org/10.30671/nordia.98115 kettunen, m. (2022) ”i have already imagined myself elsewhere” a bottom-up perspective on youth outmigration. in yeasmin, n., uusiautti, s., koivurova, t., & heleniak, t. (eds.) the future of the arctic human population: migration in the north, 145–161. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003185024 kettunen, m. & prokkola, e.-k. (2022) differential inclusion through education: reforms and spatial justice in finnish education policy. environment and planning c: politics and space 40(1) 50–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544211001383 komu, t., & adams, r.-m. (2021) not wanting to be “stuck”: exploring the role of mobility for young people's wellbeing in northern finland. in stammler, f. & toivanen, r. (eds.) young people, wellbeing and placemaking in the arctic, 32–52. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003110019-4 lehtinen, a. (2019) tahtomattaan radikaali: talouden supistumisen maantiede. terra 131(4) 235–246. <https://terra.journal.fi/article/view/83468> 25.11.2022. pöysä, v. (2022) syrjäseudun pojat: tutkimus paikasta, materiasta ja maskuliinisuudesta aikuistuvien poikien elämässä. dissertations in social sciences and business studies no. 279. university of eastern finland, joensuu. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-61-4608-9 rérat, p. (2014) highly qualified rural youth: why do young graduates return to their home region? children's geographies 12(1) 70–86 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.850849 skelton, t. (2010) taking young people as political actors seriously: opening the borders of political geography. area 42 145–151. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00891.x https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2017.1308456 https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1112886 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1358392 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1358392 https://www.kajaani.fi/tiedostot/naisnakokulmaa-kainuuseen-loppuraportti/?1620661229 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12412-4 https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308818791672 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-383-173-5 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1016 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1016 https://doi.org/10.30671/nordia.98115 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003185024 https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544211001383 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003110019-4 https://terra.journal.fi/article/view/83468 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-61-4608-9 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.850849 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00891.x 262 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections syssner, j. (2022) what could geographers do for shrinking geographies? fennia 200(2) 98–119. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 undp (2018) what does it mean to leave no one behind? a undp discussion paper and framework for implementation. july 2018. <https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/povertyreduction/what-does-it-mean-to-leave-no-one-behind-.html> 25.11.2022. wenham, a. (2020) “wish you were here”? geographies of exclusion: young people, coastal towns and marginality. journal of youth studies 23(1) 44–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2019.1704408 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/poverty-reduction/what-does-it-mean-to-leave-no-one-behind-.html https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/poverty-reduction/what-does-it-mean-to-leave-no-one-behind-.html https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2019.1704408 land use rights and gender in ovamboland, north-central namibia, since the 1930s harri siiskonen siiskonen, harri (2009). land use rights and gender in ovamboland, northcentral namibia, since the 1930s. fennia 187: 1, pp. 5–15. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in agrarian economies arable land is the most important form of property and productive resource, so that access to land defines the political and social status of a member of society. this paper examines changes in property and particularly land use rights in north-central namibia, paying special reference to gender inequality in access to land. the problem is approached by exploring the coping strategies of widowed and divorced persons after the dissolution of their marriage. where property rights and gender inequality have traditionally been investigated on the basis of administrative records, survey data or oral information, this paper approaches such problems from a new perspective, through life histories of the christian population transcribed from parish registers of the evangelical lutheran church in namibia. linking of the parish register data to anthropological, ethnographic, socio-economic and cultural information markedly widens our scope for discussing rights over communal lands. the paper shows that remarriage was a real solution for many widows and divorced women in the 1930s and 1940s if they were at the best childbearing age. a dramatic decrease in the remarriage rate occurred from the mid-1950s onwards, however, which was related to socio-economic changes in society. harri siiskonen, department of history, university of joensuu, po box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: harri.siiskonen@joensuu.fi. introduction “if my husband passes away, everything will be taken away by the family of the man. and i will be left with nothing but i’m the one who does all the working in the fields … when we got independence, meme netumbo ndaitwah, she is the one who told people about human rights. she says a woman must have a right” (lebert 2005: 83). this comment by meme c made in an interview reveals well the vulnerable situation facing widowed and divorced women in north-central namibia. in agrarian economies arable land is the most important form of property and productive resource, and access to land defines the political and social status of a member of society. the crucial question is on what principles the rights to land are based. one of the most far-reaching changes in african customary land use systems in the long-term has been the transformation in the direction of western-styled private property regimes. in traditional societies access to land was defined through family structures, marriage laws, inheritance practices and gender (lastarria-cornhiel 1997; see also rocheleau & edmunds 1997). in north-central namibia, the area studied in this paper, land use was based on communal ownership, so that the allocation of land, its inheritance and various issues related to land use rights were resolved in consultation with the local kings or headmen and their representatives at the village level. this led to a situation in which no written contracts related to the allocation of land were available, nor any statistical data dealing with land use rights. access to land was an issue that invoked questions among the early european travellers, traders, missionaries and ethnographers. since the mid-nineteenth century europeans visiting or staying in north-central namibia wrote about their observations and researchers working in the re6 fennia 187: 1 (2009)harri siiskonen gion were tackled on the topic. the problem prior to namibia’s independence in 1990 was that it was impossible to find any systematically collected information or studies focusing on women’s land use rights in north-central namibia. access to land became a burning issue in namibia after independence. questions of the use of communal lands aroused both great hopes and considerable fears among the local population. the leading political party, swapo (the south west africa people’s organization), had emphasized during the independence campaign the importance of eliminating the injustices in the ownership of land, and soon after independence the prime minister summoned a land conference to discuss a solution to this question in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness. as expected, the process of deciding upon a land reform was time-consuming and fraught with problems. the first land use act governing communal lands, approved in 2002 after years of discussion, provided for the future privatization of land tenure, in that it lent the force of law to the principle of inheritance of land use rights by relatives of a deceased person (werner 1997; ron 2002). during the preparation of the communal land act several research projects were launched to provide information for the political decision makers. special reference was paid to the situation in north-central namibia, which is the most densely populated part of the country. the first visible problem to be tackled was privatization of the communal land by fencing it in, especially since the legislative uncertainty that followed independence had increased speculation in communal land (tapscott & hangula 1994; hangula 1995; fuller et al. 1996; werner 1998). thereafter research has turned to inheritance and gender issues related to the allocation of land. studies have been based on oral information collected by various methods, which causes problems when analysing long-term changes in land use rights (see solomon et al. 1994; becker & hinz 1995; lebeau et al. 2004; gordon 2005; hubbard & caplan 2005). the problem related to all previous research is the lack of valid statistical data. the objective of this paper is to deepen our understanding of changes in property and land use rights in north-central namibia from the 1930s up to the early 1990s, paying special reference to the gender inequality in access to land. when contracting a marriage it has traditionally been the man who has applied for land from the headman of the ward, who is the representative of the king or headman at the village level. ‘ownership’ of the allocated communal land has been understood as a life-long lease that terminated upon the death of the tenant. the dissolution of marriages concerned particularly the women, and their behaviour reflects well the changes in the socio-economic and cultural structures of society. the problem to be considered here is approached by exploring the coping strategies of widowed and divorced persons after the dissolution of their marriage. the crucial question is how they reacted to the ensuing insecurity. one survival strategy was a new marriage, which is approached by analysing remarrying patterns among widowed and divorced persons. the second question is related to mobility. did the end of the marriage compel the widows and divorced women to move away from their homesteads? these parameters predict well the changes that occurred in the rules of inheritance and land ownership. where property rights and gender inequality have traditionally been investigated on the basis of administrative records, survey data or oral information, this paper approaches such problems from a new perspective, through life histories of the christian population transcribed from parish registers of the evangelical lutheran church in namibia (elcin). these rarely used parish registers provide excellent empirical data for analysing demographic and socio-economic changes in local communities (see siiskonen et al. 2005). compared with the fragmentary ethnographic information, parish registers give us better possibilities for identifying long-term changes in land use rights. the problem related to parish registers is that they do not directly tell us why someone moved or remarried, but when analysing widows and widowers as a group, for instance, it is possible to find common features in their behaviour. linking of the parish register data to anthropological, ethnographic, socio-economic and cultural information markedly widens our perspective for approaching land use rights in the case of communal lands. data and methods elcin has been an independent church since 1957. it is a mission-type church that has its origins in the work of the finnish missionary society (later the finnish evangelical lutheran mission) (buys & nambala 2003: 162–163). finnish misfennia 187: 1 (2009) 7land use rights and gender in ovamboland, north-central … sionaries entered north namibia in 1870, but christianity spread only with difficulty until the 1910s. thus where only three parishes, with 827 members, had been established by 1900, the figure had grown to 24,000 by 1930 and to 410,000, divided into 92 independent parishes, by the end of 1990. the proportion of christians in the population of the colonial administrative region of ovamboland, where the finnish missionary work was concentrated, grew from about one per cent in 1900 to about one quarter by 1933, and exceeded the proportion of adherents to the traditional religion by the late 1950s. by the early 1990s about two thirds of ovamboland’s population were members of elcin, and with the catholics and anglicans also working in the region since the 1920s, about 80–85 per cent of ovamboland’s total population is now christian (notkola & siiskonen 2000: 26–30, 59–67). the five elcin parishes selected for the present purpose were elim, nakayale, okahao, oshigambo and tshandi, which cover the most densely populated parts of the region quite evenly. the three main selection criteria were: (1) that the parish was old, a so-called ‘mother parish’, (2) that it had remained administratively undivided for as long as possible, to avoid ‘technical’ boundary changes, and (3) that the parish registers were in a sufficiently good physical condition and had been kept systematically. the most populous of the ovambo communities, uukwanyama, was excluded from the analysis due to inadequate entries in the parish records. uukwanyama’s oldest parish, engela, is located near the angolan border and many of its parishioners were living in the part of the traditional uukwanyama community that belonged to portuguese angola and now to angola, so that it became impossible in many cases to trace couples in this parish on account of lively unregistered migration traffic over the border. the collection and analysis of the data was based on the family reconstitution method (see fleury & henry 1965). the criterion for selecting a person for examination was marriage. the database consisted of 8125 marriages which had been entered into in the sample parishes between 1925 and 1985 and were then traced until 1992. altogether 1945 of the marriages concerned came to an end during the period 1925–1992, on account of the death of the husband in 1067 cases, the death of the wife in 450 cases, divorce in 408 cases and for an unknown reason in 20 cases. some of the instances had to be excluded from the final analysis on account of deficient information. the numbers of these and the reasons for their exclusion will be mentioned when analysing the parameters related to the ending of a marriage. the main reason for ending the investigation at 1992 is that internal migration increased considerably after namibia’s independence in 1990, reducing the reliability of the data. the ovamboland area the region now known as north-central namibia was called ovamboland during the colonial era, when it was governed in a manner that took advantage of the administrative structures of the historical ovambo communities. ovamboland was more restricted in area than present-day northcentral namibia, which is divided into four regions: omusati, oshana, ohangwena and oshikoto (fig. 1), but as we will be concentrating mostly on the time before namibia’s independence, the term ovamboland describes the region better than the neutral term north-central namibia, even though it does imply an ‘ethnic label’ (see mendelsohn et al. 2000). ovamboland is the most densely populated part of namibia. according to the 1991 census, approximately 44 per cent (0.618 million) of country’s population (1.4 million) were living in the former ovamboland region, which accounted for less than seven per cent of country’s surface area. the population of ovamboland had increased sixfold between the 1920s and 1990s. assuming an exponential trend, population growth must have been just over 2 per cent per year during the 1950s and 1960s, reaching 3 per cent during the 1970s and 1980s (notkola & siiskonen 2000: 17–18). due to the economic structure of the ovambo communities, this will have directly increased the pressure on land. thus access to land began to regulate marriage among the men, in that those who could not afford to pay for land use rights had to stay with their relatives, even though it was every man’s desire to have his own homestead. in order to fulfil this desire, a man needed to work as a migrant labourer outside ovamboland for several years (moorsom 1977: 52–87; gordon 1978: 261–294; mckittrick 1996: 115–129; miettinen 2005: 35–68). 8 fennia 187: 1 (2009)harri siiskonen omusati ohangwena oshikoto o kavango r iver kun ene river n nakayale tshandi okahao elim onankali omulonga oshigambo lake oponono etosha pan angola former ovamboland international boundary current regional borders main roads town centre of the congregation 0 40 80 km oshana ondangwa oshakati oshitutuma etosha national park commercial private farms kunene kavango kunene otjozondjupa 17o 18o 19o 17o 18o 14o 15o 16o 17o 19o fig. 1. the area studied and the locations of the sample parishes. source: shemeikka et al. 2008: 12. remarriage and access to land in ovambo communities the husband and wife traditionally belonged to different matrilineages. the ownership and inheritance of property was organized within the matrilineage, which jointly owned certain lineage property, in particular cattle. the individual did not “own” this property in the sense of absolute individual ownership rights. such assets as clothing, ornaments, household goods and modern commodities such as motor vehicles were regarded as individual property, and in principle both men and women were able to own these. where the ownership of land is concerned, it was the man who applied for access to land from the representatives of the king or headman at the village level (becker & hinz 1995: 64–65). ownership of land was traditionally regarded as a lifelong lease that terminated upon the death of the tenant. this meant that women did not have any legal rights to inherit land. according to lebert’s recent observations, a young man even today may be provided with land only if he plans to marry (lebert 2005: 71–92; see also lebeau et al. 2004: 218–240). in addition to human suffering, the death of a husband had far-reaching material consequences for the widow and her children. one survival strategy for a widow was a new marriage, the incidence of which can be analysed from the elcin church registers. the present analysis of remarriage on the part of widows/widowers is based on two 30-year cohorts (1925–1954 and 1955–1984), the criterion for selection of the cases being the day on which the marriage ended. a total of 1067 marriages ended in the death of the husband between 1925 and 1992, although 227 marriages that ended after 1984 were excluded from the analysis on account of the shortness of the followup period. this left 840 marriages in the sample parishes that ended in the death of the husband in 1925–1984. of these cases, a further 49 were excluded from the final data because of poor followup information, so that the final data included 791 widows, of whom 12 per cent (95 cases) remarried during the follow-up period (table 1). the life of these widows followed continuously until 1992. remarrying on the part of a widow was closely connected with age. thus about 30 per cent of the widows younger than 30 years remarried, and fennia 187: 1 (2009) 9land use rights and gender in ovamboland, north-central … table 1. remarrying of widows by age in the cohorts of marriages ending in 1925–1954 and 1955–1984. sources: main books & history books. elim, nakayale, okahao, oshigambo & tshandi parish archives. remarrying of widows by age in the dissolution cohort of marriages 1925–1954 age of the widow time from the dissolution to a new marriage (years) total number of widows share of remarried %<1 1–3 4–7 8– total 0–19 1 1 0 0 2 4 50.00 20–29 7 23 6 3 39 111 35.14 30–39 3 7 0 1 11 65 16.92 40–49 0 0 0 0 0 34 0.00 50– 1 0 0 0 1 22 4.55 total 12 31 6 4 53 236 22.46 remarrying of widows by age in the dissolution cohort of marriages 1955–1984 age of the widow time from the dissolution to a new marriage (years) total number of widows share of remarried %<1 1–3 4–7 8– total 0–19 0 0 0 0 0 1 0.00 20–29 1 12 0 0 13 79 16.46 30–39 3 10 0 0 13 131 9.92 40–49 2 2 0 0 4 150 2.67 50– 0 0 0 0 0 194 0.00 total 6 24 0 0 30 555 5.41 about 22 per cent of those younger than 40 years. a striking change in the marriage behaviour of widows occurred during the period studied here, however, in that remarriage was notably more common among women who had been widowed before the mid-1950s, 22 per cent of whom remarried, as compared with only 5 per cent of the women widowed between 1955 and 1984. marriage behaviour also changed noticeably among the young widows (under 30 years old), as about 36 per cent of those widowed before 1955 remarried but only 16 per cent of those widowed in 1955 or after. remarriage among young widows continued to decrease during the last two decades of the overall period, so that only 2 (9.1%) out of 22 young women widowed between 1975 and 1984 remarried during the follow-up period, which varied in length from 7 to 17 years. remarriage seems to have been an option to be reckoned with for widows who were at the best fertile age before the 1960s, and 19 per cent of all remarriages occurred within a year of the end of the previous marriage and 77 per cent within three years. marriages ending in the death of the wife were less common than those ending in the death of the husband, and the data for 1925–1984 include 450 such cases, only 409 of whom could be included in the final data set, on account of deficient information in some cases (table 2). the age structure of the widowers and their behaviour after the ending of their marriage differed markedly from the situation among the widows. one of the greatest differences was the high rate of remarriage, as 44 per cent of the widowers remarried, whereas the corresponding figure among the widows was only 12 per cent. the widowers also remarried sooner, even though they were older than the widows at the time. a radical change also occurred in the remarriage behaviour of the widowers during the follow-up period, in that before the mid-1950s most of those who remarried were between 20 and 40 years of age, but since that time it has been rare for widowers younger than 30 years to remarry. this can be explained by the fact that the age of both females and males at their first marriage was rising throughout the period studied. the mean age at first marriage among 10 fennia 187: 1 (2009)harri siiskonen men rose from 25 years in the 1925–1935 marriage cohort to 30 years in the 1976–1985 marriage cohort, the corresponding figures among the women being 20 years and 25.3 years. the remarrying of widowers also decreased slightly during the last decades (notkola & siiskonen 2000: 75–77). migration – a signal of insecurity? migration in the ovambo communities was concentrated around the date of marriage. about 31 per cent of the registered moves of females and about 20 per cent of those of males occurred between one year before and one year after the date of marriage. it is also noticeable that the rate of migration decreased from the 1950s onwards (notkola & siiskonen 2000: 131–140). one objective of the analysis of migration on the part of widows is to find out whether the death of the husband affected their mobility. widowers were excluded from this analysis because they very seldom moved if they had once succeeded in gaining access to land. migration was similarly analysed in two cohorts defined by the ending of the marriages, the first including marriages which ended in the death of the husband between 1925 and 1944 and the second in 1945 to 1964 (table 3). to increase the comparability between the cohorts, marriages that ended after 1964 were excluded from the migration analysis, for two reasons. first, a possible third cohort, of marriages that ended in 1965–1984, would still have included numerous potential migrants, and second, and more importantly, new parishes were established in ovamboland from the 1960s onwards by splitting the old ‘mother parishes’. the problem from the point of view of migration analysis is that parishioners living in the area of a newly established parish were registered as migrants in the parish registers, even though they did not migrate anywhere. when considering table 3 it should be remembered that this, too, may include some ‘technical moves’ in the category of moves octable 2. remarrying of widowers by age in the cohorts of marriages ending in 1925–1954 and 1955–1984. sources: main books & history books. elim, nakayale, okahao, oshigambo & tshandi parish archives. remarrying of widowers by age in the dissolution cohort of marriages 1925–1954 age of the widower time from the dissolution to a new marriage (years) total number of widowers share of remarried %<1 1–3 4–7 8– total 0–19 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.00 20–29 10 4 1 0 15 32 46.88 30–39 19 12 1 0 32 62 51.61 40–49 14 1 0 0 15 27 55.56 50– 6 1 0 0 7 15 46.67 total 49 18 2 0 69 136 50.74 remarrying of widowers by age in the dissolution cohort of marriages 1955–1984 age of the widower time from the dissolution to a new marriage (years) total number of widowers share of remarried %<1 1–3 4–7 8– total 0–19 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.00 20–29 1 1 0 0 2 11 18.18 30–39 17 20 1 0 38 74 51.35 40–49 22 10 5 4 41 76 53.95 50– 14 10 6 2 32 112 28.57 total 54 41 12 6 113 273 41.39 fennia 187: 1 (2009) 11land use rights and gender in ovamboland, north-central … table 3. migration of widows in 1925–1964. the dissolution cohorts of marriages 1925–1944, 1945–1964. sources: main books & history books. elim, nakayale, okahao, oshigambo & tshandi parish archives. moves of widows in the dissolution cohorts of marriages time elapsed between the dissolution of a marriage and a move 1925–1944 1945–1964 total moves % moves % moves % 0–3 19 35.85 30 19.74 49 23.9 4–7 5 9.43 26 17.1 31 15.12 8–10 4 7.55 10 6.58 14 6.83 11– 25 47.17 86 56.58 111 54.15 total 53 100 152 100 205 100 widows who did not move 47 158 205 total number of dissolved marriages 100 310 410 curring 11 years or more after the death of the husband. the final data for the migration analysis are based on information on the behaviour of 410 widows. the shortest distance for a move to be recorded in the register of migrants is between parishes, for although in real life a high proportion of all moves take place within the same parish, there are unfortunately no written sources available to allow us to investigate the extent of this migration. the areas of the parishes also vary greatly, which complicates the migration analysis and detracts from its precision and reliability. despite these weaknesses, parish registers form the only continuous series of empirical data that permit longitudinal analysis of mobility within the population. the migration data reveal the insecurity felt by widows after the death of their husbands, in that a half of them subsequently moved, although this figure does not describe the situation in the best possible way because it includes moves which occurred after an interval of up to 11 years and probably also includes many ‘technical moves’ because of the splitting of parishes. if we concentrate on moves which occurred within ten years of the death of the woman’s husband, a marked change in the migration behaviour of widows can be recognised during the period studied here. almost 19 per cent of the widows whose husband died before 1945 moved within three years, whereas the corresponding figure in the 1945–1964 cohort was 10 per cent. how the decrease in the migration rate of widows is related to societal and cultural changes will be discussed next. discussion life in rural areas was, and still is, closely bound up with land, which means that the most crucial issues that needed to be solved from the point of view of a widow or divorced woman were related to access to land and the inheritance of movable property. at the beginning of the twentieth century finnish missionaries were drawing attention to the insecure situation of women if their marriages ended, whether through widowhood or divorce, and they reported cases of the banishment of widows from their homesteads soon after their husband’s death. following the expansion of missionary work and the growth in the number of christians, it became easier for the missionaries to observe the problem. the missionaries’ concern over the insecure position of widows in the early twentieth century was justified. the parish registers suggest that remarriage was a real solution for many widows and divorced women in the 1930s and 1940s if they were at the best childbearing age. a dramatic decrease in their remarriage rate occurred from the mid-1950s onwards, however, marking a radical change in their marriage behaviour that provokes several questions, since it does not support the common belief that such people aim to remarry quickly. solomon et al. (1994: 43) drew attention to the same issue and proposed that further research should be conducted on this topic. the low remarriage rate among widows and divorced women since the 1950s is approached in 12 fennia 187: 1 (2009)harri siiskonen this article from three perspectives. 1) is there a systematic error in recording remarriages in the parish registers? 2) was remarriage a viable solution for widows? 3) how were remarriages related to changes in property rights and land use practices in ovambo communities? the registering of a new marriage might have become a problem, especially for a divorced woman, if the local pastor refused for some reason to solemnize it. evidence of behaviour of this kind can be found in the minutes and correspondence of the finnish missionaries (see felm 1957). it is also probable that some women were married by a magistrate instead of in church and that their new marriage was not recorded in the parish registers. cohabitation without marriage also seems to have been a solution for both sexes, an assumption supported by the results of the 1991 census. about 10.6 per cent of males (15 years and above) in the former ovamboland and 11.1 per cent of females were living in an informal relationship, figures which correspond well to the nation-wide average for cohabitation without marriage (12.1%) (ron 1994: 266–271). under-registration of remarriages only partly explains the behaviour of widows and divorced women, as there is also a ‘natural explanation’. the mean age at first marriage among both christian men and women in ovamboland was exceptionally high in the african context throughout the period studied here. the mean age of women at their first marriage rose steadily from 20 years in the 1925–1935 marriage cohort to 25.3 years in the 1976–1985 cohort. at the same time the age of men at their first marriage rose from 25 years to 30 years (notkola & siiskonen 2000: 75). the high age of women at their first marriage restricted their possibilities for remarrying in the monogamous system, as women who were older than 30 years were not desirable partners for men planning their first marriage. due to the noticeable age difference between men and women at first marriage, there were twice as many widows as widowers in the population monitored here, and this inevitably detracted from the possibilities of remarrying. furthermore, the parish registers suggest that remarriage was not the most desirable solution for middle-aged or older women who already had children from their first marriage. it is also worth emphasizing the occurrence of a noticeable change in the behaviour of widows during the second half of the twentieth century. since the late 1950s remarriage does not seem to have been the most agreeable solution even for young widows (under 30 years old). the 1991 census also supports this claim (ron 1994: 266–271). the traditional rules of inheritance and the expansion of the migrant labour system caused increased insecurity among ovambo widows and divorced women, so that when dissatisfaction with the traditional inheritance rules was transformed into concrete action among the christian population in the late 1940s, the ovambo church ministers’ meeting decided in 1947 to send a delegation to the native commissioner of ovamboland, mr eedes, to ask for an adjustment to the south west african civil marriage law which would enable community of property in marriage in ovamboland. their appeal was recognised in 1954, when the marriage legislation was revised (miettinen 2005: 294–297; see also tuupainen 1970: 118–126; becker & hinz 1995: 29–30). nevertheless, the principle of community of property or the making of a will between spouses has not solved the crucial problems related to inheritance, because both have concerned only movable property, not access to land. the most important issue in the survival strategy of a widow was her relation to the land acquired by her deceased husband. traditionally the husband’s relatives decided whether the widow could stay on the land or not (hubbard & caplan 2005: 77–82). since the 1960s there have been some sporadic observations of changes in the system of allocating land. bruwer (1961: 40–41) found cases in uukwanyama around 1960 in which a widow had a homestead of her own where she lived with her children (cf. kreike 1995: 11), and the recently published report by hubbard and caplan (2005) presents some corresponding examples from other ovambo communities. the uukwambi headmen, for instance, modified the inheritance law in 1960 so that “widows and children were not to be expelled from the deceased’s homestead, but were to inherit the kraal and lands. if the widow was young and married another man she had to hand over the homestead and lands to the senior headman, who could then sell them.” an insurmountable constraint on continuing to live on the same land for many widows was the new payment for the right to use the land insisted upon by the local headmen (hubbard & caplan 2005: 84–85, 94–95; lebert 2005: 73–74). despite of the fact that expulsions of widows have still been common from the land acquired by their deceased husbands, the migration data support the conclusion that the position fennia 187: 1 (2009) 13land use rights and gender in ovamboland, north-central … of the widow has been improving little by little since the 1960s. becker (1993: 107) reports that around 1990 land was allocated to women only if they were widows, and a divorced woman could gain access to land only in special circumstances. a radical improvement in the situation of widows occurred in 1993, when the ndonga king’s council guaranteed the right of a widow to remain on her deceased husband’s land without further payment (becker & hinz 1995: 67). the demographic and health survey of 1992 supported the demand for a change in the system of allocating land in north-central namibia and claimed that more than one third of the 1809 households interviewed there were headed by women (katjiuanjo et al. 1993: 9, 150–151). it is very plausible that the increasing unwillingness of widows to remarry may have some connections with the changes in the inheritance system. the parish registers suggest that instead of remarrying, many widows have preferred to continue living on the farm of their deceased husband either as single parents, if possible, or with one of their sons, to whom the land might have been allocated. another option taken up by widows if they have been forced to leave their homestead has been to return to their matrilineal relatives. if their children already had homesteads of their own, the widows have sometimes gone to live with one of their sons. furthermore, children of widows have been a sought-after labour force to be taken in as foster children by the widows’ matrilineal relatives. a new marriage has seldom been the best possible solution for a widow if she has passed the age of 30 years (cf. bruwer 1961: 40–41; mckittrick 1995: 254; kreike 1996: 267– 269; hubbard & caplan 2005: 81–97). the end of a marriage usually affected the life of a widower in a different way from that of a widow, as it did not normally jeopardize his rights to stay on his land. however, if he was incapable of effectively tilling the land it could revert back to the headmen for re-allocation. a man’s capability for cultivating his fields was based on the labour provided by his wife and children, i.e. the women’s work formed the backbone of the ovambo economy. the parish register data support the claim of kreike (1996: 257–267) regarding the importance of the wife and her children as a labour force for the man, since the widowers and divorced men in the sample parishes clearly made an active effort to remarry. this was not restricted to young men, but older men also tried to find a new wife quickly (see also lebert 2005: 71–92). the loss of the wife’s labour input upon her death caused problems especially for migrant labourers, but there are also several examples where a wife divorced her husband during the latter’s migrant labour contract period and moved with her children to the farm of her new partner (mckittrick 1995: 246). conclusions parish registers provide an excellent source not only for investigating long-term changes in population development but also for analysing societal and cultural changes. in this study parish registers were used for exploring changes in land ownership in the former ovamboland in north-central namibia, and particularly the socio-economic position of widows after the dissolution of their marriage. the use of research results based on oral information and survey data in combination with life histories gathered from parish registers can open up new possibilities for understanding changes in land ownership in north-central namibia. the contracting of a marriage was considered important for both females and males, although the ages of brides and bridegrooms at their first marriage rose steadily. the negative or indifferent attitudes towards the contracting of a marriage that have been presented recently are reflections of growing pressure against the christian and traditional institutions of marriage, which have been closely linked to economic and power relations within the ovambo communities. the parish registers suggest that a return to the oppressed position of a married woman does not attract widows or divorced women who have children from their first marriage, and the minor improvements in the position of widows with regard to land use rights seem to have further reduced their interest in remarrying. today even young widows and divorcees prefer life as single parents or cohabitation without marrying. the parish registers reveal that traces of such a transformation in the institution of marriage reach back as far as the 1950s. 14 fennia 187: 1 (2009)harri siiskonen references becker h (1993). namibian women’s movement 1980 to 1992. from anti-colonial resistance to reconstruction. 421 p. verlag für interkulturelle kommunikation, frankfurt. becker h & mo hinz (1995). marriage and customary law in namibia. working documents 30. 141 p. centre for applied social sciences, windhoek. bruwer jp (1961). the kuanyama of south west africa. 152 p. ma thesis, university of stellenbosch. buys gl & svv nambala (2003). history of the church in namibia 1805–1990. 449 p. gamsberg macmillan, windhoek. felm (1957). minutes of the missionaries’ annual conference, onajena 9–12 january 1957, hha: 28, felm (finnish evangelical lutheran mission), naf (national archives of finland). fleury m & l henry (1965). nouveau manuel de dépouillement et d’exploitation de l’état civil ancient. 183 p. institut national d’etudes démographiques, paris. fuller b, s nghikembua & tf irving (1996). the enclosure of range lands in the eastern oshikoto region of namibia. ssd research report 24. 18 p. university of namibia, windhoek. gordon rj (1978). variations in migration rates: the ovambo case. journal of southern african affairs 3: 3, 261–294. gordon r (ed) (2005). the meanings of inheritance. perspectives on namibian inheritance practices. 145 p. legal assistance centre, windhoek. hangula l (1995). communal land reform in namibia and the role of traditional authorities. ssd discussion paper 11. 24 p. university of namibia, windhoek. hubbard p & p caplan (2005). customary laws on inheritance in namibia. issues and questions for consideration in developing new legislation. 169 p. legal assistance centre, windhoek. katjiuanjo p, s titus, m zauana & jt boerma (1993). namibia demographic and health survey, 1992. 221 p. ministry of health and social services, windhoek. kreike ehpm (1995). the ovambo agro-silvipastoral system: traditional land use and indigenous natural resource management in north-central namibia. forestry publication 4. 86 p. directorate of forestry, windhoek. kreike eh (1996). recreating eden: agro-ecological change, food security and environmental diversity in southern angola and northern namibia, 1890–1960. 456 p. phd thesis, yale university. lastarria-cornhiel s (1997). impact of privatization on gender and property rights in africa. world development 25: 8, 1317–1333. lebeau d, e iipinge & m conteh (2004). women’s property and inheritance rights in namibia. 240 p. university of namibia, windhoek. lebert j (2005). inheritance practices and property rights in ohangwena region. in gordon r (ed). the meanings of inheritance. perspectives on namibian inheritance practices, 71–92. legal assistance centre, windhoek. mckittrick m (1995). conflict and social change in northern namibia, 1850–1954. 330 p. phd thesis, stanford university. mckittrick m (1996). the ‘burden’ of young men: property and generational conflict in namibia, 1880–1945. african economic history 24, 115–129. mendelsohn j, s el obeid & c roberts (2000). a profile of north-central namibia. 79 p. gamsberg macmillan, windhoek. miettinen k (2005). on the way to whiteness. christianization, conflict and change in colonial ovamboland, 1910–1965. 370 p. finnish literature society, helsinki. moorsom r (1977) underdevelopment, contract labour and worker consciousness in namibia, 1915–72. journal of southern african studies 4: 1, 52–87. notkola v & h siiskonen (2000). fertility, mortality and migration in subsaharan africa. the case of ovamboland in north namibia, 1925–90. 188 p. basingstoke, macmillan. rocheleau d & d edmunds (1997). women, men and trees: gender, power and property in forest and agrarian landscapes. world development 25: 8, 1351–1371. ron (republic of namibia) (1994). 1991 population and housing census, report b, statistical tables, volume 1. 424 p. national planning commission, windhoek. ron (republic of namibia) (2002). promulgation of communal land reform act no. 5 of 2002. government gazette of the republic of namibia no. 2787. shemeikka r, v notkola, j kuhanen & h siiskonen (2008). hiv and fertility decline in north-central namibia 1980–2004. finnish yearbook of population research (2007–2008) 43: 7–32. siiskonen h, a taskinen & v notkola (2005). parish registers: a challenge for african historical demography. history in africa: a journal of method 32, 385–402. solomon b, h becker & h kaishungu (1994). improving the legal and socio-economic situation of women in namibia. uukwambi, ombalantu and uukwanyama integrated report, part ii: the legal aspects. namibia development trust (ndt), windhoek. tapscott c & l hangula (1994). fencing of communal range land in northern namibia: social and ecological dimensions. ssd discussion paper 6. 15 p. university of namibia, windhoek. tuupainen m (1970). marriage in a matrilineal african tribe. a social anthropological study of marriage in the ondonga tribe in ovamboland. transfennia 187: 1 (2009) 15land use rights and gender in ovamboland, north-central … actions of the westermarck society xviii. 171 p. the academic bookstore, helsinki. werner w (1997). land reform in namibia: the first seven years. nepru working paper 61. 17 p. namibia economic policy research unit, windhoek. werner w (1998). the evolution of land tenure in oshikoto. in cox j, c kerven, w werner & r behnke (eds). the privatisation of rangeland resources in namibia: enclosure in eastern oshikoto, 18–41. overseas development institute, london. 24961_03_salo.pdf geographical impacts of financial integration sinikka salo salo, sinikka (2006). geographical impacts of financial integration. fennia 184: 1, pp. 19–26. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. financial markets are usually seen as forerunners in globalization, since the immaterial and weightless nature of finance seems to make geography less relevant than in most other industries. this picture of finance as the most global of businesses, however, is only partly true. for some parts of the financial markets, geography has lost its importance already a long time ago, but there are others where international and regional integration is still incomplete and on-going. globally, the most important of the on-going processes is the financial opening up of the big emerging market economies, which poses huge challenges for international policy coordination and the development of institutions; at the european level, retail banking markets and payments systems are still very fragmented and a lot of work is needed to achieve the goal of a single market at least in the euro area. finally, at the subnational level, the impact of financial integration is mostly felt through the changes in the variety of services and customer relationships available to sme’s and households. at each of these levels, financial integration holds great promise in terms of growth, efficiency and economic opportunities, but also requires significant adjustments in public policy and private business performance. sinikka salo, member of the board, bank of finland, po box 160, fi-00101 helsinki, finland. introduction financial markets are often seen as forerunners in globalisation. this is understandable, since the immaterial and “weightless” nature of money seems to make geography less relevant in the world of finance than in most other industries. it is easy to present examples which lend support to the view of finance-led globalisation. money can move from one part of the world to another in seconds, and contracts worth hundreds of millions of euro are made daily in the financial markets, over the telephone, between parties based on different continents. in helsinki, for example, we may check the prices of shares traded on the new york stock exchange at least as quickly and with greater precision than the prices of vegetables in the open-air market of our home town. the picture of financial markets as extremely globalised is, however, only partly correct. it is true that for some parts of the financial markets, geography has lost its importance already a long time ago, but there are others where international and regional integration is still incomplete and ongoing. in the last ten years, highly significant progress has taken place in this area. let me start my brief survey of what financial integration means from a regional perspective by considering some of the recent developments in europe and in the world. i shall discuss the regional implications of the on-going integration process and finally close with some policy-related remarks. trends in financial integration in europe let me review the european financial markets first. europe has a long history of international capital movements, both in the form of short-term “hot” money flows and as foreign direct investment in industries across national borders (see e.g., giovannini & mayer 1991). true integration of european financial markets is much more recent, however. the most visible sign so far of financial integration in europe is the common currency euro, the creation of which indeed started a new era of 20 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sinikka salo financial integration in the area. after the adoption of the common currency in 1999, money markets in the euro area were rapidly integrated and e.g., interest rates were unified as the result. hence, financial conditions in a macroeconomic sense are now rather similar throughout the euro area. however, in europe, and more specifically in the euro area, large and very important parts of the financial market are not yet completely integrated. retail banking markets, for example, remain today mainly national in nature, so that a cross-border supply of housing loans or deposit accounts is a rare exception rather than the norm. similarly, securities markets are still organised on a national, country-by-country basis so that the trading of stocks issued in another country usually requires rather expensive custody arrangements. the clearing and settlement stage of international share transactions in particular is much more expensive than similar transactions in the domestic market. other sectors where europe is still financially fragmented include the payment system and the venture capital market. in practice, all this fragmentation means that, at least for entities other than banks and large multinational companies, national borders still have a substantial influence in european finance (jokivuolle & korhonen 2004). the european situation is not stagnant, however. various eu authorities, the commission and the european central bank (ecb) in particular, are pushing hard towards a more complete financial integration of the eu. last december, the commission published an important white paper defining its financial services strategy for the following five years (european commission 2005). the goals listed in this paper include a stronger integration of retail markets in banking, insurance, securities, and asset management. another goal is international supervisory convergence, which is obviously important in the context of financial integration. finally, the commission wants europe to be active also on the global stage, supporting active liberalisation of financial services in the context of the wto negotiations, and intensifying regulatory dialogue with the us and other trading partners of the eu in the international financial markets. parallel with the work of the commission and the ecb, the private sector – i.e. the markets themselves – is also preparing for much closer integration. very important in this regard are the attempts of the stock exchanges to create larger european and even global market places for the trading of securities. stock exchange business in its modern form requires large fixed investments in information infrastructure and has therefore very large economies of scale. trading costs can be greatly reduced if the processing of trades is concentrated into bigger centres (see hasan & malkamäki 2001; schmiedel et al. 2006). at first, mergers and acquisitions within the stock exchange industry seek to exploit these economies of scale through sharing of technology and processing capacity and by doing so, cutting trading costs to a fraction of the larger, european-level pools of trading lists and creation of truly unified market places. turning to financial institutions, the international consolidation of banking and insurance industries has long been overdue, with the exception of the nordic area and the benelux countries, but it is very likely to soon gain pace. the reasons are not too different from those which are now transforming the stock exchange industry. the increasing complexity of both technology and regulation is increasing the economies of scale in banking, too, and is therefore building up pressure for reorganisations in the form of mergers and acquisitions. meanwhile, the largest commercial banks in the euro area have formed a new organisation, the european payments council, to coordinate the creation of a single euro payments area as required by the ecb and the commission (ecb 2006). globalisation and finance globally, the degree of financial integration achieved so far is obviously smaller than in the euro area or even in the whole eu. however, the past and present global level changes also have such huge proportions that calling them “epic” would be no exaggeration. the most important part of these developments is the entry of developing asia into the global financial markets, both as a target and a source of international investment. in particular, the emergence of china as a major player in international financial markets has brought 1300 million people for the first time in contact with world’s capital resources. the financial liberalisation of india, with its 1000 million inhabitants, has a potential similar to china to transform the world economy. it seems certain that only a small part of the eventual impact on the world financial markets arising from the opening up of these giant asian economies has yet been experienced, and much more is to come. this prospect has attracted an fennia 184: 1 (2006) 21geographical impacts of financial integration enormous amount of public attention in the last years. much of the current globalisation debate has focussed on the alleged “flight of capital” to asia, but the facts do not support this belief. in fact, ever since the asian crisis of 1997, the developing asia has been a capital exporter rather than importer. in other words, any investment from the developed west to developing asia has been more than matched by investment to the opposite direction, from these relatively poor countries to world financial markets – in many cases ultimately to the u.s. government securities (see imf 2004). in view of this, a fair characterization of the asian participation in “globalisation” so far denotes to markets for industrial exports and raw materials imports rather than in capital markets. it has been mainly based on rapid acquisition of technological and commercial know-how and deregulation, which has allowed chinese and indian factories to apply this know-how. although much of the technological transfer has been initiated by foreign direct investment in china and india, so far the net capital flow has scarcely reflected the congregation of china’s and india’s capital needs with the capital resources of the developed world. the reasons for the yet incompletely accomplished potential of developing asia in the international financial markets lie behind the painful experience of the asian crisis of 1997. the crisis was caused by extensive over-borrowing by a number of countries in the form of short-term bank loans. this exposed the weakness of the institutions which are needed to channel capital from developed to the developing world. serious problems existed in the risk management of the lending banks, but especially in the management practices, economic transparency, and the legal systems of the asian countries. since the 1997 crisis, asian governments have been reluctant to allow large-scale dependence on foreign capital, and are effectively using all funds flowing into their countries for accumulating foreign exchange reserves rather than importing more capital goods. thus, they have chosen an exportled growth strategy, which uses domestic saving as the ultimate source for financing their rapid expansion. this cautious strategy has caused a lot of frustration in the west, as exports to the developed world from the developing asia clearly exceed the imports. however, after the asian crisis, the international community has started a great effort to increase the stability of the global financial markets and to create a better, more secure environment for investing in the developing countries. the international monetary fund (imf), in particular, started to work consistently for ensuring sound economic governance in all countries of the world. traditionally, the role of the imf has been to provide emergency support for countries falling into balance-ofpayments difficulties such as currency crises. the new role of the imf is more preventive. it has started two very important programmes for benchmarking economic policy and economic institutions across the world. under the so-called rosc (reports on the observance of standards and codes) programme, the imf reviews the observance of international standards and codes in the areas of (1) economic and fiscal transparency and availability of data; (2) financial sector standards such as the state of financial supervision, reliability of the payments system, and combating the financing of terrorism; (3) market integrity, including standards for corporate governance, accounting and auditing, and (4) insolvency procedures and creditor rights in each country. in another important programme, the so called financial sector assessment program, the imf looks at and reports on the soundness and stability of the financial sector in each country (cf. schneider 2003). participation in these imf programs is voluntary, and the asian giants have not yet joined in. however, peer pressure and the prospect of concrete benefits in the form of better creditworthiness encourages more and more countries to join these efforts to improve the performance and stability of international financial markets. in summary, the current developments in international financial integration suggest that even though financial markets are global, they are far from being fully integrated yet, and the full effects of financial integration are still to be felt. regions in financial integration the world economy as a whole should benefit greatly from better integration. financial integration is expected to accelerate economic growth and productivity, as the growing supply of finance and new productive investment opportunities projects are matched with each other more efficiently than before. the distributive and regional effects of integration, however, are much more complicated. an analysis of the effects on eco22 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sinikka salo nomic regions of the kind of financial integration we are currently experiencing is particularly challenging. this is due to two main reasons. first, the current financial integration cannot be analysed simply as a case of economic regions moving from financial isolation to sharing a common financial market. this would be the standard approach of international economics, but here it does not apply very well. in fact, regions – referring to areas smaller than a country – have been financially integrated at the national level already for a long time. in finland, for example, the national financial markets have been quite well unified for decades, so that speaking of some specific financial markets of say, the present-day helsinki region, is not viable. money, credit and financial investments flow quite smoothly within finland from one region to another and financial conditions are not too different in different parts of the country. the same holds true for all developed countries at present. under the circumstances, the impact of financial integration on economic regions cannot be analysed satisfactorily by using the simplest tools of international economics or economic geography. instead, the question is, how financial integration between nations affects economic regions within countries. this is a much more complicated issue, as we cannot assume that international financial integration will have a similar impact on all regions within a given country. furthermore, regions have different policy concerns from those of nations: national economic policy has to do with “hard” methods like taxation and financial regulation. regional policy makers, however, are more concerned on aspects that can be regionally differentiated, such as infrastructure and education, as well as promoting cooperation between firms in regional industrial clusters, etc. hence, the emphasis on “soft” and proactive policies is greater at the regional than national level. the second reason which complicates the analysis of the impact of financial integration is that our key concern is not the impact of integration on the financial services industry itself, but rather on the impact of financial integration on the regional economy as a whole (see o’brien 1992). this contrasts with the standard approach which would analyse the effect of integration of an industry on the structure and performance of that same industry. here, however, we are mostly interested in the effects outside the financial services industry. focussing on these “second-round” or indirect effects of financial integration is essential as in most regions, the financial services industry forms a relatively small portion of the economy. in finland, for example, financial services account for about 1.6 per cent of all jobs, and in germany, the respective value is 3 per cent. while the direct employment impacts of financial services are not negligible, it is clear that the indirect effects of the financial industry are much greater. this is because finance is a necessary input to virtually any sector of the modern economy, and the performance of financial markets is, therefore, a precondition of good performance of the economy as a whole. how does finance influence the rest of the economy? the financial markets are, firstly, a market for channelling savings to investment; secondly, a market for risk; thirdly, a market for corporate control; and, finally, they provide an infrastructure for making payments. these functions of financial markets are in fact studied by quite different branches of economic theory and therefore, a unified theory of the role of financial markets in the economy is not really available (see levine 1997). the market for savings is analysed by macroeconomics; the market for risk is analysed using the theory of finance; and the market for corporate control is analysed using the theory of industrial organisation. finally, the intermediation of payments is usually analysed in the context of monetary theory (or recently, network economics). in many financial relationships, these different functions of financial markets appear intertwined, but they are nevertheless conceptually separate and their purposes and impacts on financial integration are also different. the functions of finance in the economy market for savings the ongoing financial integration process concerns each of the four functions of financial markets. therefore, we must take into account all of them when trying to get a full picture of what future financial integration will mean to regions. let us first look at the macroeconomic aspect. viewed from this perspective, what the financial markets do is transfer resources in time and in space. from the point of view of a saver, financial markets are useful as they help them to transfer fennia 184: 1 (2006) 23geographical impacts of financial integration their resources forward in time – just as from the point of view of a borrower, the markets enable a transfer of resources backwards, from the future to the present. from the geographic point of view, however, the very same transfer of resources happens in space: the resources flow from the location of the saver to the location of investment. from this perspective of financial intermediation in space the resources are not moved in time at all, but only from one place to another (cf. obstfeld & rogoff 1995). there is a reason to believe that the importance of intercontinental capital flows could even grow in the future. this is because some economic fundamentals suggest that regional differences in the propensity to save and invest should grow in the future. one of the fundamentals is population ageing in the highly developed parts of the world. this ageing, especially in europe and japan, will keep investment demand relatively subdued. this may denote that europe is to join japan as one of the significant capital exporters of the world – unless europe’s government deficits remain too large and use resources which otherwise could be invested productively in the emerging economies of the world. the effect of financial integration of the market for savings is that the market rates of return on capital will generally converge as a result. at the same time, both saving and investment will increase as on average, savers will get a higher rate of return for saving and similarly, on average, investors’ capital costs will decline. who actually collects the benefits from this process depends on the initial situation of savers and investors in different parts of the world. the classical view of this process emphasises the equalising force of financial integration. according to this view, the rate of return for capital is generally highest in countries or regions where capital is relatively scarce and other resources relatively ample; by the same token, the rate of return is lowest where capital is relatively ample. the effect of financial integration is, consequently, to equalise the capital intensities of regions and hence equalise productivity and real income differentials as well. the classical view may, however, be too simplistic. as the result of the emergence of the socalled “new economic geography” (a school of thought associated especially with paul krugman and his co-authors, see e.g., helpman & krugman 1986 for a famous exposition), the classical view is no longer considered as the whole truth. new economic geography emphasises the importance of economies of scale in many industries. in these industries, the rate of return on capital is not necessarily a declining function of previous investment, but may well be an increasing function of the amount of capital which has previously been invested (“sunk”) in a particular industry in a particular region. for these kinds of industries, the integration of markets can lead to agglomeration and concentration to centres where the economies of large-scale operation can be best achieved. a perfect example of the economics of agglomeration is the financial services industry itself. especially in securities markets, the benefits of large scale operation are so important that the financial services industry concentrates in great cities such as london or frankfurt even though the cost of labour and land in these financial centres is higher than in other cities. fortunately, the benefits of concentration emphasised by new economic geography can be achieved also in smaller cities, at least in the case of narrowly focused “niche” industries. even finland has several examples of firms which are world-class actors in their markets even though they may not be very big companies as such, and even if they are not located in a large metropolis. market for risks let us now turn to the second function of financial markets, the transfer of risk. financial markets allow investors to diversify their assets so that the overall risk of their portfolios is reduced. also, the markets allow entrepreneurs to sell some of their business risks to outside investors so that firms can grow faster and take more investment risk. the markets also price risks and this affects capital costs for firms and the return expectations of savers. generally, riskier projects must have higher rates of return than less risky ones in order to be realized. financial integration will mean that some of the risks which were not possible to get rid of before, will become diversifiable risks after integration. so, the process of financial integration reduces the prices of those risks which it helps to diversify (stulz 1981). this implies that capital costs of firms are reduced and, at the same time, the obtainable risk/ return mix is improved for savers. because certain risks will become cheaper, they depress financial asset prices less than before integration and therefore, required rates of return decline and asset 24 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sinikka salo prices generally appreciate as a result of increased diversification possibilities. the biggest gainers from this process are the companies which, before integration, represented “dominant risks” in their home country but which thanks to integration can spread their ownership and their business risks internationally. nokia is a perfect example of this. it would be very risky and virtually impossible to have an industrial giant like nokia in finland without the broad international ownership made possible by financial integration. what then is the regional dimension of the increasing possibilities to diversify investment risks in world markets? an important effect is that integration makes it possible for companies operating in their home regions to finance larger investments and specialise in a more courageous way than they otherwise could. thus, financial integration favours, or even enables, greater regional specialisation and concentration of business, especially for companies which are large enough to benefit from the possibility of an internationally diversified ownership. as a result of increased diversification of asset holdings, savers are able to isolate themselves better from economic fluctuations taking place in their home region. market for control the third function of financial markets is to transfer control (jensen & ruback 1983). buying a large number of shares in a company will give the investor some control in its management. actually, corporate control is at least as important object of trading in the stock market than funds themselves. this has very important economic functions as if the market works well, this control will end up with those owners who can put resources to most efficient use. also, selling some corporate control to outside investors will allow innovators to get much more capital than would be possible otherwise. this is actually the main principle of the venture capital industry. in financial integration, the market for corporate control will work so as to spread the most efficient management methods from region or country to another. companies which could be better managed will change owners and be reorganised. the effect of this is that the market value of “best practice” management and “best practice” technologies will increase at the expense of substandard management and production practices. the market for corporate control is thus crucial for innovation and productivity improvements. the role of foreign direct investment in technology transfer has been understood already for some time (see unctad 1998). over the last ten years, financial integration has probably had the greatest impact just through the market for corporate control. this is apparent from the example of china, which has been a major exporter of capital for about 10 years now, since 1997. in net terms, china has been investing abroad more than other countries have invested in china. for chinese development, however, the important issue has not been the net capital flow – which was outward in any case – but rather the foreign direct investment. the effect of this phenomenon is that instead of capital as such, china has been importing foreign control, management and technology in large amounts and this has actually revolutionized the chinese economy and also the world economy in the process. in the public debate about international financial integration, the corporate control aspect of integration is carried out under the rubric “foreign ownership”. in the media, the question is posed by contrasting international, distant ownership with local or national ownership. a popular worry is that distant ownership is by its nature destructive, whereas local ownership is often seen as more sensitive to requirements of fairness. regionally, the international integration of the market for corporate control means that global instead of national best practice increasingly makes the norm for the efficiency of corporate management. another beneficial effect is that new start-up companies could have a wider choice of potential investors to contact, and consequently a higher probability of finding one with enough expertise to understand the particular business idea in question, whatever this may be in each case. the importance of control and trust for financial relationships is very important at the fundamental level due to the problems of asymmetric information, which are inherent to financial contracts. economists classify these problems to cases of “hidden action”, where monitoring and shared responsibility is needed to ensure that both parties fulfil their share of the contract, and to cases of “hidden information” where screening and risk sharing is important to make sure that projects or securities are as good as they are claimed to be when financial contracts are made (leland & pyle 1977). the importance of monitoring, screening and control emphasise the value of proximity. this is fennia 184: 1 (2006) 25geographical impacts of financial integration why information concerns put certain limits on how far financial integration can go. hence, financial integration in itself is a force which favours the concentration of financial activities to larger units and to large financial centres. however, this force will be felt mainly in those financial services which are capable to render “at arm’s length”. these services include securities, deposits, payments, and nowadays even routine insurance and consumer credit. it can be argued, however, that there also exist categories of financial services which cannot be commoditised to be rendered at arm’s length. these are services where tacit information on companies, individuals or investment projects is necessary for successful business. the best example of this is the venture capital finance of start-up companies. private equity investment to small and medium-sized companies is by definition not commoditised, because if it were, the stock could be traded in open markets. but the nature of information problems implies that the stocks in small firms are more valuable to a venture capitalist who knows the firm and its management and has some control on the way it is developed (zook 2002). private equity investment does not necessarily need to be locally or regionally based. indeed, financial integration may well increase such investment in the long range due to specialised expertise that can be at least as important for successful investment as geographical proximity. however, other things being equal, distance does matter in private investment. thus, we can predict that information concerns will remain a counterforce to pressures for geographic concentration, in those categories of financial services in which private information is essential. provision of a payment system last but not least on the list of the functions where financial integration will matter is the payment system. the current fragmentation of the payment system is most serious in the segment of retail payments, denoting to the payments to and from households and small firms. this is, first and foremost, a hindrance to effective competition in the financial services industry. if fast, reliable, and unified international systems of account transfers and direct debit were established, the market for financial services such as mortgages, time deposits, asset management, and life insurance would become much more competitive. the high fees charged currently on international credit card transactions could also be reduced by more intense competition in that sector. in the medium term, further progress in the international integration of the payments industry can be expected mainly in the euro area where the creation of the single euro payments area is already under way (salo 2006). the completion of this project will not only facilitate payments in the area but it will also make financial services more competitive. in this way, the benefits to businesses from operating in the euro are would be strengthened. conclusions from a regional perspective financial integration holds great promise in terms of growth efficiency and economic opportunities, but it also requires significant adjustments in public policy and private business performance. financial integration is a great equaliser in the sense that the more it progresses, the less geography matters for the provision and availability of financial services. however, this does not necessarily mean that regions will become more equal as a result. when financial barriers go down, the importance of other regional factors than finance is emphasised. this means that the quality of less mobile factors such as the skills of the labour force, communications and other local infrastructure, and the level of informal business networks in the region, will in time become much more important for economic success. where these prerequisites for success are not competitive, the region will suffer economically from financial integration despite the increasingly equal access to financial services. in fact, it is the increasingly equal access to finance which supports the growth of importance of other dimensions of competitiveness. it is interesting to note that those dimensions of competitiveness which are emphasised by financial integration are usually the responsibility of policy makers at the local or regional level. this means that financial integration increases the responsibility of local governments for the economic success of the regions where they work and also emphasises the importance of regional coordination of policies regarding things such as infrastructure, education, and business promotion. 26 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sinikka salo there are, however, limits to how far financial integration can proceed. these limits are determined by the fact that many financial relationships require trust and information that is hard to establish from a distance. as the structure of financial services is likely to consolidate to bigger units and concentrate in large cities in the future, these information concerns constitute a counterforce to such tendencies, especially in the financing of small, growing, and medium sized firms. but even the venture capital industry and the financing of sme’s cannot escape the fact that sufficient scale is necessary for financial services. also in the future, small and diverse concentrations of firms will find financing more difficult than larger and more specialised ones. therefore, in order to combine the benefits of specialised information, geographic proximity and efficient size, the creation of strong, specialised business clusters will be even more essential in the future to ensure the success of a region in the international financial integration, financial consolidation, and tougher competition. it is the challenge for local policy makers and business communities to act as catalysts in the formation of such structures. references ecb (2006). towards a single euro payments area – fourth progress report. 23 p. european central bank, frankfurt am main. european commission (2005). white paper, financial services policy 2005–2010. giovannini a & c mayer (eds.) (1991). european financial integration. 348 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. hasan i & m malkamäki (2001). are expansions cost effective for stock exchanges? a global perspective. journal of banking and finance 25: 12, 2339–2366. helpman e & p krugman (1986). market structure and foreign trade. 271 p. mit, cambridge. imf (2004). global financial stability report, september 2004. 229 p. international monetary fund, washington. jensen m & r ruback (1983). the market for corporate control. the scientific evidence. journal of financial economics 11: 1, 5–50. jokivuolle e & k korhonen (2004). overview of financial integration. in koskenkylä h (ed). financial integration. bank of finland studies a 108, 15– 40. leland h & d pyle (1977). informational asymmetries, financial structure and financial intermediation. journal of finance 32: 2, 371–387. levine r (1997). financial development and economic growth: views and agenda. journal of economic literature 35: 2, 688–726. o’brien r (1992). global financial integration: the end of geography. 120 p. royal institute of international affairs, london. obstfeld m & k rogoff (1995). the intertemporal approach to the current account. in grossman g & k rogoff (eds.). handbook of international economics, 1731–1799. elsevier, amsterdam. salo s (2006). promoting integration of european retail payment systems: role of competition, cooperation and regulation. presentation at the suerf seminar “the adoption of the euro in new member states: challenges and vulnerabilities on the last stretch”, in malta, 4 may 2006. forthcoming in suerf publication series. schmiedel h, m malkamäki & j tarkka (2006). economies of scale and technological development in securities depository and settlement. journal of banking and finance 30: 6, 1783–1806. schneider b (ed) (2003). the road to international financial stability: are key financial standards the answer? 240 p. palgrave macmillan. stulz r (1981). a model of international assert pricing. journal of financial economics 9: 3, 383– 406. unctad (1998). world investment report 1997. transnational corporations, market structure and competition policy. unctad, geneva. zook m (2002). grounded capital: venture financing and the geography of the internet industry, 1994– 2000. journal of economic geography 2: 3, 151– 177. water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and inflowing rivers, nw russian karelia leo koutaniemi and kalevi kuusela koutaniemi, leo & kalevi kuusela (2006). water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and inflowing rivers, nw russian karelia. fennia 184: 2, pp. 121–132. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the purpose of this research project was to study the annual cycle of basic water properties in a lake covered by ice for about half the year close to the arctic circle. samples were collected from the water column of the lake and the outlets of inflowing rivers with a ruttner sampler from twelve locations during six visits in 1996–1997, a total of 31 samples each time. the analyses were made in accordance with the finnish standards and included determinations of organic solids, alkalinity, colour, conductivity, total phosphorus (totp), total nitrogen (totn), ammonia (nh 4 +) and nitrate (no 3 −). lake paanajärvi is an east–west oriented tectonic lake (width 0.6–1.3 km, length 24.5 km, max. depth 128 m) surrounded by carbonate rich rocks and taiga forests. with over nine-tenths of the lake inflow into the western end and the outlet at the opposite eastern end of the lake, the topmost water layers of the lake behave much like a through-flow river. most of these waters come from finland and have been affected by human activity while all other inflowing waters drain from natural conditions. seasonally, the winter time is characterized by the lowest of all colour values, the highest of all alkalinity contents, and by settling of phosphorus. all these features are mainly due to minimal discharges, high proportion of groundwater flow in relation to surface flow and calm conditions thanks to the ice-cover. spring-time starts with violent nival floods in may associated with the maximal colour values, minimal alkalinity contents, and the rise of the spring turnover, temperature stratification and biotic activity which proceed in a wave-like fashion through the lake controlled by the through-flow and warming of river waters entering into the western inlet end of the lake. the uptake of nutrients is best seen in a rapid decrease of nitrate in the epilimnion in association with the increase of ammonia as a result of metabolism of organisms. the autumn turnover in late september and early october is associated with close to equal values of all parameters in the whole water column of the lake. the exhaustion of nitrate in the epilimnion suggests that nitrate may be a limiting factor for the biotic life. other typical features of the lake are the lower temperatures and nutrient levels in the outlet deep compared to the inlet deep of the lake, and this may have led to adaptation and specialization among the biota within this “mini-baikal” by fennoscandian standards. leo koutaniemi, department of geography, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: leo.koutaniemi@oulu.fi. kalevi kuusela, oulanka research station, university of oulu, liikasenvaarantie 134, fi-93999 kuusamo, finland. e-mail: kalevi.kuusela@oulu.fi. ms received 28 march 2006. introduction lake paanajärvi is a tectonic headwater lake of a large koutajoki basin draining into the white sea. the lake is a 24.5 km long, 0.6–1.3 km wide and 128 m deep collector of waters flowing east from the kuusamo uplands (fig. 1). over nine tenths (93.8%) of the inflowing waters end in the western end of the lake, and the majority of this water (92%) comes from finland via the oulankajoki river (in brief oulanka in the following) (table 1). the hydrology of lake paanajärvi has many specific features. firstly, the theoretical retardation 122 fennia 184: 2 (2006)leo koutaniemi and kalevi kuusela table 1. drainage measures for the main sub-regions in the lake paanajärvi basin (koutaniemi & kuusela 1993: 77). note: the areal percentages presented herein differ a little from those marked in fig. 1 where they refer to the whole oulanka-olanga basin. basin area (km²) share (%) discharge (m³/s) oulanka 2163 37.3 24 kitkajoki 1841 31.8 21 kuusinkijoki 1006 17.3 9.3 tervajoki 432 7.4 5.2 mutkajoki 95.6 1.6 1.15 selkäjoki 86.7 1.5 1.04 mäntyjoki 48.5 0.8 0.59 malinajoki 22.5 0.4 0.27 fig. 1. lake paanajärvi in relation to the oulanka-olanga basin. sub-basins around the lake: (1) tervajoki (also known as sovajoki), (2) mäntyjoki, (3) malinajoki, (4) mutkajoki (also known as astervajoki), (5) selkäjoki (koutaniemi et al. 1999: fig. 1 with some additions). time of the water is five months, but the hypolimnion waters are changed only during the spring and autumn turnovers since the topmost water layer behaves much like in a through-flow river. secondly, snowmelt floods are high (up to 3–3.5 m) and violent due to the small number of lakes along the main headwater river (oulanka) and the steep relief by finnish standards. thirdly, the summertime epilimnion is totally formed at first in the inlet end of the lake from where it spreads eastwards and reaches the whole lake in july at the latest. fourthly, the thermal stratification is much clearer than in typical finnish lakes due, as a rule, to the through-flow. fifthly, in the winter the water mass of the eastern (outlet) deep stays colder than that of the western (inflow) deeps (see fig. 2). sixthly, as the topography creates a tunnel-like formation around lake paanajärvi, winds which blow along the valley often develop into storms resulting in rapid changes in the water layering (koutaniemi 1984; koutaniemi & kuusela 1993; koutaniemi et al. 1999). arvola et al. (1993: 96) report of a storm lasting a day and the following night, which dropped the upper level of the metalimnion from 14 m to 20 m in august 1992. fennia 184: 2 (2006) 123water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and inflowing rivers, nw … fig. 2. above: sampling sites (black arrowheads, names of lake points according to old finnish farms) and the main geological elements (a–c). sub-regions (a) and (b) belong to the nutrient rich karelian schist belt, the finnish side of which is strongly human induced e.g. by clear-cuttings (marked by shading as they were by 1984). sub-region (c) is in natural conditions as (b) but is composed of acid archean granite-gneisses. below: sampling sites of the lake (kylli etc.) projected along the longitudinal profile of the lake with a temperature distribution in march 1993 (koutaniemi & kuusela 1993: figs. 1 and 15 with some additions). the bedrock in the area is mostly composed of karelian schists rich in easily erodible basic carbonate rocks which provide a favorable setting for the buffer capacity. in addition, the valley bottoms of oulanka and its main tributaries are thickly covered by silts and sands (koutaniemi 1979: 31–35) whereby infiltration and groundwater production is a slow process which further adds to the buffer capacity (e.g. kämäri 1984: 21). archean acid granite-gneisses are to be found on a larger scale only in the headwater areas of the river kuusinkijoki in finland and in two small basins of the rivers malinajoki and mutkajoki close to the lake outlet (figs. 1 and 2). the finnish side of the basin has long been under strong human influence (cultivation, forest cutting, ditching of forests and peat bogs, fish farming, tourism etc.), while the russian side has stayed uninhabited and in a natural state since the end of the second world war when finland had to cede the paana124 fennia 184: 2 (2006)leo koutaniemi and kalevi kuusela järvi area to the soviet union (koutaniemi & kuusela 1993). based on tradition and personal local knowledge, hänninen (1912: 30) notes that lake paanajärvi is frozen abnormally late (november/december; cf. leppäjärvi 1995: 136) thanks to its great depth, but is ice-free at the same time (late may) as local lakes due to the through-flow. the first limnological observations were made by lauri maristo in 1937. he measured a ph of 7.5 and, on the basis of water plants, determined the lake to be oligotrophic (maristo 1941: 74). the soviet period did not produce any published material. since “glasnost”, opening of the border and collapse of the soviet union, several scientists from finland and the russian academy have conducted multidisciplinary studies on the paanajärvi basin (e.g. special issue in fennia 177: 1; kuusela & systra 2003). the preliminary water quality mapping in august 1990 revealed high ph and alkalinity values in the inflowing rivers and high nitrogen concentrations in the lake outlet (kuusela 1991). a summary of the studies made in 1990–1993 (koutaniemi & kuusela 1993) showed that both in the lake and the rivers, alkalinity, total nitrogen and nitrate contents were at a higher level in the winter than in the summer. total phosphorus, however, behaved the opposite, especially in the epilimnion. these values were mostly so low that according to the scale by forsberg and ryding (1980: 197), the lake and the inflowing rivers were oligotrophic except for the river kuusinkijoki, where mesotrophy was obvious. primary production and plankton have features which indicate that the inorganic phosphorus could be a limiting factor (arvola et al. 1993: 93). the present work is the first systematic attempt to study the basic features of the water chemistry in the lake paanajärvi area, which was recognized for its particular character among finnish naturalists as early as one hundred years ago (e.g. koutaniemi 1992). the same source material has been a basis for a paper on temperature stratification (koutaniemi et al. 1999), one symposium presentation on the nutrients in the lake (kuusela & koutaniemi 2003) and an unpublished master’s thesis (linnilä 2004). the opening of the russian border in the late 1980s allowed daily visits from finland to lake paanajärvi directly across the border until the mid1990s. during the latter half of the 1990s, these special border crossing arrangements came into a halt, meaning in practice that after this it has taken a day to travel to the lake area. performing the present study was thus much more complicated than the preliminary water quality studies in the early 1990s, when the water samples could be taken to laboratory for analyses on the very same day. this is why, for example, sampling of the spring turnover of 1996 was missed: the abnormally late ice-break only took place two days after the permission to cross the border back home had expired. from time to time, repeated and unexpected restrictions to move in the lake area have led to gaps in the data which are best seen in the figure illustrations. methodology water samples were taken with a ruttner sampler during six visits (july, august and september 1996 and april, june and july 1997) from the outlets of the inflowing rivers and five sites (named according to the old finnish farms) along the lake (see fig. 2): kylli (a strait between the inlet basin and the lake), rajala (deep), leppälä (deep), sirkelä (a shallow transverse shoal) and mäntyniemi (deep). lake water samples were taken normally from the depths of 1, 5, 10, 30, 60 and 80 meters. the samples were processed in the laboratory within 48 hours of sampling; in summer they were transported in cooled boxes. the laboratory of the oulanka research station analyzed the samples for organic solids, alkalinity, colour, conductivity, total phosphorus (totp), total nitrogen (totn), ammonia (nh 4 +) and nitrate (no 3 −) according to the finnish standards. the nitrate content also includes nitrite (no 2 −) since it had been noticed earlier in this laboratory that nitrite concentrations are insignificant in the headwaters of lake paanajärvi. the ph results are not presented herein due to a lengthy delay before their measurement. however, in the early 1990s, it was possible to measure the ph within 6–8 hours of sampling. the rivers studied herein had at that time slightly alkaline water: in the late winter (12 samples) ph was 7.3–7.9, in august (15 samples) 7.3– 8.2 (koutaniemi & kuusela 1993: 78). the product-moment correlation coefficient (r) and its significance (p) were calculated for colour vs. organic solids and for alkalinity vs. conductivity and totp. the lake consists of an eastern and a western basin which are separated by the sirkelä shoal (fig. 2). the eastern basin represents about fennia 184: 2 (2006) 125water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and inflowing rivers, nw … 30% of the surface area and contains 20% of the water volume (koutaniemi et al. 1999: 30). the terminology used here is adopted from wetzel (1983). results inflowing waters the water colour had a similar seasonal pattern in all rivers (fig. 3): it was at its lightest in september and april (14–36 mgpt l−1) and darkest in june (47– 76 mgpt l−1). the lowest values (from 14 to 47 mgpt l−1) were found in the river mäntyjoki, the highest ones (30–69 mgpt l−1) in the inlet (oulanka). the latter were a little lower than in the outflow of the lake (32–76 mgpt l−1). the colour of the water did not correlate with organic solids (r = 0.000, n = 31). the load of organic solids was much the same in all rivers except in summer 1996. in august, for instance, the contents (3.90–6.35 mg l−1) were about twice as high as for other dates (0.75–3.95 mg l−1) (figs. 3 and 4). the load from the lake was mostly lower than in the inlet, but nearly equal to that of the inflowing rivers. alkalinity was high year round in the rivers of tervajoki, selkäjoki and mäntyjoki (figs. 3 and 4) with its maximum of 1.16 mmol l−1 in the lastmentioned case. the lowest values (0.16–0.17 mmol l−1) were measured in the rivers of malinajoki and mutkajoki. alkalinity remained reasonably stable (0.26–0.50 mmol l−1) in the inlet and outlet, the former giving regularly slightly higher values. alkalinity correlated very significantly with conductivity in river waters (r = 0.993, p < 0.001, n = 34). the load of phosphorus had a large range (figs. 3 and 4). the highest concentrations (up to 12.67 μg l−1) were measured in oulanka during the late winter. the values were almost twice that of the lake surface water. the quantities in the inlet were higher than in the outlet and both exceeded those for the lake in most cases. totp did not correlate with alkalinity (r = −0.03, p > 0.05, n = 31). total nitrogen contents had in almost every river a clear declining trend during the summer 1996, the opposite being true with ammonia (figs. 3 and 4). in the inlet, the values were in all cases higher (range 99–771 μg l−1) than in the outlet (88–266 μg l−1). the nitrate compounds were at their maximum in april as well as ammonia and total nitrogen in oulanka. the annual differences were great. in july 1996, for example, the range of totn was 253– 403 μg l−1, while a year later only 51–128 μg l−1. in places, nitrate increased by over fifty times from august 1996 to april 1997. in the outlet of the lake totn varied between 88 and 266 μg l−1. lake water the water colour varied within a range of 31–77 mgpt l−1 (fig. 3). during the summer time (june– august) it was about 55–60 mgpt l−1, in the winter (april) around 35 mgpt l−1. the water was darkest (65–70 mgpt l−1) in june. the annual course of the water colour was much the same as in the rivers, but with a smaller variation. the water colour did not correlate with organic solids (r = 0.11, p > 0.05, n = 116). the amount of organic solids ranged from 0.8 to 6.0 mg l−1 without any clear seasonal pattern (figs. 3 and 5). the western basin featured equal values (around 3 mg l−1, except for rajala) in the whole column of august 1996, the same being true for the eastern basin a month later. the contents at rajala were also equal at all depths but double in relation to the other sites. this phenomenon coincided with the highest values in the inflowing rivers. alkalinity was at its highest in april and lowest in june (figs. 3 and 5). the vertical variation was widest in the epilimnion (0.27–0.50 mmol l−1). in the hypolimnion the range was 0.27–0.39 mmol l−1. conductivity correlated very significantly (r = 0.959, p < 0.001, n = 121) with alkalinity and followed its vertical and seasonal pattern. the total phosphorus contents varied both temporally, spatially and vertically in a wide range (2.05–12 μg l−1) (figs. 3 and 6). august and june differed from other dates by their high values in the epilimnion, and, as a whole, the surface waters of the western basin were richer in phosphorus than those of the eastern basin. the vertical distribution of totp followed the temperature stratification in an approximate manner. in september 1996, for example, the concentrations of phosphorus were almost evenly distributed during the first phases of the autumn turnover. totp did not have any correlation with alkalinity (r = 0.02, p > 0.05, n = 114). the total nitrogen concentrations varied between 74 and 391 μg l−1 (figs. 3 and 7). the highest contents were recorded in july 1996 and in april 1997. the vertical distribution of all deep sites followed the temperature stratification espe126 fennia 184: 2 (2006)leo koutaniemi and kalevi kuusela fig. 3. contents of colour, organic solids, alkalinity, total phosphorus and total nitrogen in the inflowing rivers and deep sites of the lake. in order to clarify general annual trends the values of the deep sites are presented as means of all depths together with standard errors. cially in april. before the autumn turnover, nitrogen had been distributed similarly to phosphorus, i.e. rather evenly both vertically and horizontally throughout the lake. the nitrate concentrations in april were both horizontally and vertically at a much higher level (50 μg l−1 or more) than at any other time (fig. 7). during the open water season the values were low in the epilimnion and declined to zero, especially in the eastern basin. at the same time the values of the hypolimnion increased much more in the inlet than in the outlet. fennia 184: 2 (2006) 127water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and inflowing rivers, nw … fig. 4. nitrate, ammonia and total nitrogen in the inflowing rivers and the lake outlet. the contents of ammonia varied greatly both temporally, vertically and by sites (fig. 7). analysis proved, however, that as a rule, the decrease in nitrate values was closely connected with the increase in ammonium values. this was most clearly seen in the eastern basin as indicated by the following values: depth (m) nitrate (μg l−1) ammonia (μg l−1) from july to august 1996 (1) 21.0 → 0.0 3.7 → 23.1 (5) 26.2 → 2.5 3.0 → 23.9 (10) 23.0 → 1.9 4.4 → 20.6 from june to july 1997 (1) 2.2 → 0.4 1.5 → 8.9 (5) 10.0 → 0.0 3.0 → 8.9 (10) 12.3 → 0.0 2.2 → 14.2 discussion and conclusions seasonal trends in water quality the water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and the inflowing rivers is characterized by several seasonal regularities and causalities. the winter is a season when the water colour is at its minimum, alkalinity at its maximum, the values of totp and totn have opposite trends in the lake, and the nutrients of rivers have a declining trend, except for oulanka (see fig. 3). low colour values are due to minimal discharges and calm conditions attributed to the ice-cover. the peak in the alkalinity values originates in the increase of groundwater flow, the decreasing surface flow and the decomposition of biota which produce alkalinity enriching bicarbonates (see puro 1999: 33). the decrease in the totp values is connected with the low winter-time discharges and settling into the bottom sediments supported by the reactivity of phosphorus bound in the soil particles (see wetzel 1983: 295). the same is true with both the totp and totn in all rivers except for oulanka, where the winter-time peaks in nutrient contents are mainly due to high inputs of human effluent in relation to low winter-time discharges. the wintertime excess of total nitrogen and nitrate contents is in accordance with earlier observations (koutaniemi & kuusela 1993: fig. 18), and is a normal phenomenon in lakes when the biota does not use it and decomposition releases it into water (e.g. wetzel 1983: 241–242). the spring floods are typified by the highest of all colours and lowest of all alkalinity values. both parameters are closely connected with snowmeltinduced extreme floods caused by the steep relief. the minimum in alkalinity concentrations is due to large volumes of acidic snowmelt waters together with humic acids from the peat bog areas, the maximum in colour caused by physical and chemical erosion throughout the drainage basin. 128 fennia 184: 2 (2006)leo koutaniemi and kalevi kuusela fig. 5. organic solids, alkalinity and conductivity by dates and depths in the deep sites of the lake. conductivity is presented only for mäntyniemi as an example of the high correlation with alkalinity. the warming of river and lake waters initiates the spring turnover, temperature stratification and biological activity. the development of temperature stratification and its spreading from the inlet end via the through-flow towards the outlet end of the lake is a key event for all biological activity. it is reflected in the uptake of nutrients at different times depending on place, depth and year (figs. 5–7). the increase in the biological activity is best seen through the rapid uptake of nitrate in the epilimnion at the same time as the metabolism of organisms liberates nitrate as ammonium (see wetzel 1983: 253). nutrients are also used efficiently in the rivers (fig. 3). contrary to the totn values, the phosphorus in the lake increases due to the rapid uptake and turnover by phytoplanktonic bacteria and algae (see wetzel 1983: 270–271), as well as the high loads brought by oulanka. the autumn turnover is characterized by close to equal contents of most parameters through the water column in the lake (figs. 3 and 6). from here onwards follows a period of sedimentation. the clear thermocline typical of lake paanajärvi does not prevent the re-distribution of chemicals in any way. the values for phosphorus, for instance, diminish in the whole water column all through the winter. thus a new phosphorus load is needed for the next production season either from the headwaters, melting snow or bottom sediments. non-seasonal phenomena also worthy of emphasis are four non-seasonal phenomena. firstly, the inflowing rivers which feed lake paanajärvi are geographically distinct and supply three types of water. two small subbasins (malinajoki and mutkajoki) with acid rocks provide waters with the lowest of all alkalinity and conductivity values. typical for three other sub-basins (mäntyjoki, selkäjoki and tervajoki) with basic rocks, are the highest of all alkalinity and conductivity values. the effects of all these waters are nevertheless of minor importance since the inlet flow via oulanka is superior both in volume, richness in nutrients and as regards its trough-flow in controlling water chemistry of lake paanajärvi. secondly, the uptake of nitrate to the point of elimination in the summer-time epilimnion indicates that nitrate may be a limiting factor for the aquatic life. arvola et al. (1993: 93) are of an opinion that inorganic phosphorus would be a limiting factor for the primary production. this particular fennia 184: 2 (2006) 129water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and inflowing rivers, nw … fig. 6. total phosphorus contents of the lake water by dates, depths and sampling sites, and the temperature stratification of corresponding dates (redrawn from koutaniemi et al. 1999: fig. 3). note: dividing dotted lines in some temperature curves refer to extreme values when marked differences occurred along the lake. dependence was not investigated and therefore no estimations can be made here. thirdly, the comparison of the alkalinity values with those of the neighbouring basins revealed the following rule: the higher the alkalinity the smaller the difference between the summerand wintertime values of the lake waters. the comparison was based on the following mean values from a depth of one metre in all cases: lake paanajärvi (summer 0.36 mmol l−1, winter 0.47 mmol l−1), the data for 57 lakes collected by näpänkangas et al. (1999: 52) and näpänkangas and ylitolonen (1999: 38) both from the river kem basin (rich in acid rocks) draining into the white sea (0.26 and 0.38 mmol l−1) and the river iijoki basin (rich in acid rocks and peat bogs) flowing into the gulf of bothnia (0.18 and 0.27 mmol l−1). accordingly, the winter-time values in our samples were 1.30, and in two other cases 1.46 and 1.50 times higher than in the summer-time, respectively. the explanation remains open, but to all appearance the phenomenon is connected with the high proportion of winter-time groundwater flow in our study area owing to the relatively steep relief. fourthly, the alkalinity values offer a textbook example of how differences in the bedrock may 130 fennia 184: 2 (2006)leo koutaniemi and kalevi kuusela fig. 7. contents of total nitrogen, nitrate and ammonia of the lake water by dates, depths and sampling sites. appear clearly in natural conditions (cf. kämäri 1984: 13). values of three sub-basins (mäntyjoki, selkäjoki and sovajoki) with basic rocks are on a high level of their own (fig. 3). detailed checking of the original data revealed another interesting finding. the question is whether the input of two small areas (malinajoki and mutkajoki) with acid rocks can be seen in the alkalinity values of the outflow. focused upon the outlet part of the lake (see fig. 2) these inputs are sufficient to decrease the outflow values to a lower level than in the inlet, although on the way through the lake alkalinity is enriched by the highest of all alkalinity values, i.e. by the three first mentioned rivers. perhaps the most exceptional feature of results presented here is the high amount of organic solids in august 1996 in all rivers and in the western basin (rajala). to all appearances, they originate in river erosion caused by heavy rains. precipitation of 77 mm between 6th and 15th july at the oulanka meteorological station (25 km upstream from the lake) resulted in almost tripled discharge (from 20 up to 55 m3/s−1), and, from this flow alone, 36 million cubic metres of additional water entered lake paanajärvi. on the sampling day (12th august), about three weeks after the flood peak, the signs of the flood were to be seen in the inlet (organic solids in the range 2.7–6.4 mg l−1), were uniform in all depths at rajala (5.6–6.0 mg l−1), had possibly a faint effect in leppälä (2.8–3.4 mg l−1) but were absent in the eastern basin. there the extra input appeared a month later as higher values than elsewhere in the lake at that time. signs of the flood were not recognizable in other parameters, but this need not be in conflict with the flood hypothesis. tikkanen (1990: 26–27) has fennia 184: 2 (2006) 131water chemistry in lake paanajärvi and inflowing rivers, nw … shown that the increase of nutrient contents caused by summer floods is relatively low thanks to the growing season, and that the peak is over soon after the flood. according to the assessment of the trophic state of the water body (forsberg & ryding 1980: 197), lake paanajärvi and its inflowing rivers (except for oulanka) are oligotrophic by their relatively low totp and totn contents. the rapid usage of nitrate in the epilimnion suggests oligotrophy, too. contrary to both these two, the ratio of nitrate to ammonia speaks for higher nutrient levels in two ways. firstly, the contents of these two had often opposite trends, although the values of ammonia ought not to be related to nitrate in oligotrophic lakes. secondly, the ratio of nitrate to ammonia was mostly of the order 1–10 (median 5), but this ratio should be one-to-one in lakes where the natural nitrate resources are low (see wetzel 1983: 234–237, 253–254). thus, the water chemistry of lake paanajärvi has also mesotrophic features. conductivity and alkalinity had a very high correlation (r = 0.96). this is in accord with kämäri’s (1984: 38) results, which revealed that this correlation is stronger in kuusamo (r = 0.99) than in southern finland (r = 0.70) due to differences in the bedrock and soils (see also forsius 1987: 49). kämäri (1984) also detected that alkalinity had a correlation with totp and totn. no dependence between alkalinity and totp was found in our data. the colour values are a surprise since higher values were observed in the outlet than in the inlet (fig. 3), yet lakes are normally known for their clarifying effect. one possibility is that the three side-rivers of the lake (mäntyjoki, selkäjoki and sovajoki) with their abnormally high alkalinity and ph-levels contribute to the decomposition of humus acids, the results of which raise the colour values (seppänen 1986: 186). fig. 3 also shows decreasing late-summer trends in 1996 for colour and organic solids in river waters. this has its natural explanation in the abnormally dry late summer for this particular year. precipitation sums for august and september were half and one-third of long-term mean values. the question of nutrient rich waters from finland being a threat to the water quality of lake paanajärvi warrants examination. the nutrients originate mainly in human activity (e.g. cultivation, ditching and ploughing of forests and peat bogs, aqua-culture, tourism etc.) which has been substantial during the last fifty years. in spite of improved methods for purifying waste-waters, care in ditching operations, overgrowth of most of the earlier ditches and limitations in cultivation, the winter-time inputs are still alarmingly high (fig. 4). nevertheless, the general trend is not critical. the totn and totp values in the present material were lower than in those from the early 1990s (arvola et al. 1993: 98; koutaniemi & kuusela 1993: 82). furthermore, arvola and ylitolonen (in prep.) have observed that in oulanka and in its main tributary kitkajoki, the declining trend has continued over the last three decades with its greatest decline from 1991–93 to 1996–97. the discussion ends with an example of an inconceivable discrepancy. the question is of totp contents best seen in april 1996 in fig. 3. the values for total phosphorus are at their highest in the inlet and outlet ends of the lake, the former (12.8 μg l−1) being clearly higher that the latter (8.8 μg l−1). all other lake values are clearly lower (range 2.5–6.3 μg l−1, mean 3.8 μg l−1). the decrease in totp values between the inlet and the lake is logical due to the winter-time settling and storing into the lake bottom sediments. the discrepancy, however, lies in the high outflow value of 8.8 μg l−1, since such high concentrations have not been detected elsewhere in the lake. since totn values were already in 1990 clearly higher in the outlet than in the inlet (kuusela 1991: 18), it seems that nutrient contents of the outlet have stayed on a high level for a longer period. human activity perhaps lies behind this phenomenon. the outlet end has always been the only entrance to lake paanajärvi (except for military personnel who have their own road at the inlet end). the outlet end has witnessed much activity since the 1970s when there were many workers making preparations for a water power plant (abandoned since the late 1980s). nowadays the number of visitors is 3000–4000 per year, and as before, the present visitors use the sauna and wash their dishes in a small, muddybottomed and weedy bay, from where the waste and dish effluents drain to the outlet rapids wherefrom the water samples were collected. ultimately, it would appear that the lower levels of nutrients together with the earlier findings of lower temperatures in the eastern basin (see fig. 2) indicate that the opportunities for of aquatic life are more restricted in the eastern basin than in the western one. either the summer season is too short for the warmth to spread evenly in this lake which, in its time, was the deepest one in finland, or the temperature difference is caused by different mix132 fennia 184: 2 (2006)leo koutaniemi and kalevi kuusela ing mechanisms of surface and deep waters (see koutaniemi et al. 1999: 34). since this situation must have continued for thousands of years it would be interesting to know, together with the question of high nutrient levels in the outlet, if cooler and more demanding conditions have led to any adaptation or specialization among the lake biota, which can be seen, for example, in the phenology or growth parameters of certain subpopulations. acknowledgements the authors wish to thank the ministry of the environment for financial support, oulanka research station for performing the water analyses, arto huhta and juri shustov for help in the fieldwork, the authorities of the paanajärvi national park for helping with practical questions. thanks also to two anonymous referees for their comments. references arvola l, a karusalmi & t tulonen (1993). observations of plankton communities and primary and bacterial production of lake paanajärvi, a deep subarctic lake. oulanka reports 12, 93–107. arvola l & a ylitolonen (in prep.). long-term and short-term variability of water chemistry in two high latitude boreal rivers i europe (finland). forsberg c & s-o ryding (1980). eutrophication and trophic state studies in 30 swedish waste-receiving lakes. archivum für hydrobiologie 1: 2, 189– 207. forsius m (1987). suomen järvien alueellinen happamuustilanne (summary: regional extent of lake acidification in finland). publications of national board of waters and the environment 9. 108 p. hänninen k (1912). havaintoja paanajärvestä (beobachtungen betreffs des paanajärvi-sees). meddelanden av geografiska föreningen i finland 9. 33 p. kämäri j (1984). suomen karujen pienvesistöjen happamoitumisherkkyys. national board of waters, report 239. 85 p. koutaniemi l (1979). late-glacial and post-glacial development of the valleys of the oulanka river basin, north-eastern finland. fennia 157: 1, 13– 73. koutaniemi l (1984). the role of ground frost, snow cover, ice break-up and flooding in the fluvial processes of the oulanka river, ne finland. fennia 162: 2, 127–161. koutaniemi l (1992). oulanka-paanajärvi -alueen nousu maailmankartalle. terra 104: 2, 111–125. koutaniemi l & k kuusela (1993). paanajärvi basin and basic features of its hydrogeography, ne finland/nw karelia. oulanka reports 12, 71–85. koutaniemi l, k kuusela & j shustov (1999). thermal stratification in paanajärvi, northern republic of karelia, russia. fennia 177: 1, 27–35. kuusela k (1991). vesinäytteiden otossa paanajärvellä. oulun luonnonystäväin yhdistys ry, tiedotuksia 16: 1, 13–20. kuusela k & l koutaniemi (2003). preliminary results of annual nutrient analyses in lake paanajärvi. in ieshko j & j barskaya (eds). priroda national park paanajärvi, trudi b biologija, 104–109. karelian research centre, petrozavodsk. kuusela k & y systra (2003). publications about paanajärvi during the national park designation and establishment period (1988–2002). in ieshko j & j barskaya (eds). priroda national park paanajärvi, trudi b biologija, 171–177. karelian research centre, petrozavodsk. leppäjärvi r (ed) (1995). hydrological yearbook 1992. 168 p. national board of waters and the environment, helsinki. linnilä k (2004). paanajärven vedenlaatu ja siihen vaikuttavat tekijät. ma-thesis. 60 p. department of geography, university of oulu, oulu. maristo l (1941). die seetypen finnlands auf floristischer und vegetationphysiognomischer grundlage. annales botanici societatis zoologicae-botanicae fennicae vanamo 15: 5. 314 p. näpänkangas j & a ylitolonen (1999). kuusamon eteläosan vesistötutkimus 1999 (summary: a study of lakes in the southern parts of kuusamo in 1999). alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 143. 69 p. näpänkangas j, a ylitolonen & j jokela (1999). kuusamon keskija pohjoisosan vesistötutkimus 1997–1998 (summary: a study of lakes in the central and northern parts of kuusamo in 1997– 1998). alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 123. 77 p. puro a (1999). järvien tila. alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 88, 28–41. seppänen h (1986). sovellettu limnologia i. 2nd ed. 239 p. otakustantamo, espoo. tikkanen m (1990). temporal variations in water quality and fluvial erosion in a small drainage basin in southern finland. fennia 168: 1, 1–29. wetzel rg (1983). limnology. 2nd ed. 767 p. cbs college publishing, philadelphia. rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to ansell and colleagues urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa102004 doi: 10.11143/fennia.102004 reflections rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to ansell and colleagues tatek abebe and tanu biswas abebe, t. & biswas, t. (2021) rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to ansell and colleagues. fennia 199(1) 118–128. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102004 in this piece, we reflect upon a recent article published in fennia by ansell and colleagues. we identify and discuss aspects of learning that educational research, policies and institutions can consider, addressing the needs and subjectivities of learners and activating a politics around rights in education. rights in education foreground the intrinsic value of learning, inviting us to realign the purpose of education with the overall purpose of life on this planet. it pursues a ‘bottom-up’ strategy for rethinking education as community formation to incorporate complex sources of knowledge and modes of knowing and becoming for children. in order to think about rights in education, we uphold an analytical distinction between schooling and education. the distinction enables us to raise some questions, reflect on them and suggest preliminary ideas for decolonial, childist strategies to envisage education, highlighting how education and the ‘future’ are intimately woven and exploring what they mean for each other and for childhood. we do so particularly by critiquing ‘western schooling’ as a mode of learning which is a conspirator of capitalism deeply rooted in philosophical racism and contributing to a global epistemological loss. finally, we outline four strategies of moving forward with a decolonial, childist lens of reimagining education as community formation and welcome further discussions on rights in education. keywords: rights in education, childhood, future, decoloniality, childism, community formation tatek abebe (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3811-0486), department of education and lifelong learning, norwegian university of science and technology, paviljong a, dragvoll loholt alle 7049 trondheim, norway. e-mail: tatek.abebe@ntnu.no tanu biswas (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4498-8703), department of philosophy, university of bayreuth, universitätsstr. 30, 95447 bayreuth, germany. e-mail: biswas.tanushree@gmail.com © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 119tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) introduction the article by ansell and colleagues (2020), on which this commentary is based, demonstrates how schooling in rural peripheries of the global south perversely engages ‘aspiration’ only to generate paradoxical outcomes for children and young people. one of these paradoxes is that whereas schooling is a privileged practice through which new social possibilities and futures can be imagined, it works as a hegemonic institution that shapes and often stifles creativity and ethical-moral alternatives. a second paradox is that although education is considered a basic human right, it is realized by making schooling an obligation that children cannot easily refuse. nor is what children learn in schools something that is co-developed in ways that attends to their needs and subjectivities. another paradox is that the task of educating future citizens in a common institutional framework is understood as means to equalize social and economic differences. yet, ongoing processes of privatizing and commodifying education contributes to a reality in which schooling increases social and economic inequalities not only of the present generation but also for the future. a further paradox is the discrepancy between the (opportunity) cost of educating children in schools, especially for low-income families and communities such as those in laos, india and lesotho; and the insecurity and uncertainties — and sometimes ‘disjuncture’— about children's educational outcomes and successes. ansell and colleagues (2020) ask the important questions as to why, despite these paradoxes, schooling is invested upon and remains overloaded with economic, moral and economic expectations and hopes. which processes sustain schooling as a social investment and as a privileged model of education for children in the rural peripheries of the global south? how and why the conditions of exclusion from the global economy and production of surplus populations continue to be facilitated by the project of schooling? the articles’ theorization on how schooling produces subjects who are alienated from their communities’ ways of life and livelihoods draws attention to what other, possibly relevant, knowledge systems are ‘out there’ that are not part of schooling, and consequently remain unacknowledged as education. global agendas on education for all (efa) and united nations development goals like millennium development goals (mdgs) and sustainable development goals (sdgs) that have re-scripted the purpose of education globally, pressure nations and their citizens to align themselves with a template of western schooling that is presumed to work everywhere. schooling is a mode of learning deeply rooted in and historically resonating with western colonial culture and practices of knowledge transmission, contributing to the ‘exclusion’ of a vast range of knowledge systems and traditions. the point with this critique is that the tendency to formalize or standardize that which is otherwise informal, or ‘the everyday,’ has failed children and young people in many social and cultural contexts of the global south. at the same time, as some of the most privileged school-children in the world are now going on school strikes for climate justice – asking whether the time they spend in school is pointless in the face of the planetary crisis – we begin to question whether this model serves children in the global north too. in this reflection piece, we build on these concerns of appropriate, relevant, and contextual learning for the future. we uphold the significance of activating debates around rights in education and facilitating a re-engagement with complex knowledge systems that are otherwise marginal or are excluded from mainstream knowledge economy. we do so by embracing powerful impulses from decolonial proponents and engaging with the education as community formation using the childist lens. our reflection begins by considering schooling through a critical decolonial lens which is not limited to the global south and concerns a north-south continuum. we then discuss the potential of the rights in education framework in challenging global knowledge orders that privilege schooling as a singular form of ‘education’ based on the supremacy of ‘white scientific knowledge’. that takes us to making a case for broadening pathways to rely on pluralist indigenous philo sophies to re-imagine education, childhood and future. finally, we discuss education as community formation in recognizing that in pursuing pluralist indigenous philosophies we risk embracing a regressive ideal of education that reinforces adult-child hierarchies. in conclusion, we propose four preliminary strategies and welcome engagement from stakeholders within the promising framework of rights in education. 120 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections schooling through the decolonial lens of global epistemic (in-)justice the valorization of schooling as an educational practice superior to other ways of knowing and learning reflects the unequal power relations that engender the paradoxes of schooling. in recent years, the notion of cultural imperialism has been invoked as a warning that knowledge and practices of international development (including global development goals and efa initiatives) are, in fact, historically specific to the western world and do not necessarily reflect the realities of children elsewhere. postcolonial scholars have proposed the term ‘epistemological violence’ to highlight hegemonic cultural interpretations of scientific knowledge that construct the ‘other’ as problematic or inferior, with implicit or explicit negative consequences for the ‘other’ (teo 2008; mbembe 2016). as serpell (2018) argues, the institutionalized public systems of schooling that draw on competitive, capitalist values not only promote an extractive definition of success but also inflict violence by stigmatizing unschooled children as ‘incomplete’ and ‘incompetent’. schoolchildren who are intellectually competent by indigenous cultural criteria but did not meet the official criteria for progression to the next grade often attribute their educational ‘failure’ to personal shortcomings (ibid.). santos (2014) argues further that the struggle for social justice today needs to move beyond addressing political and economic inequalities to also attend to ‘cognitive justice’ or ‘epistemic justice’. he notes that much of the knowledge produced in colonized and post-colonized societies has been incorporated into the mainstream school knowledge economy only marginally. contemporary schooling renders certain types of knowledge invisible, unlearned, silenced, ignored, or made irrelevant. this failure to include the knowledge systems of certain communities and societies or perceiving their knowledge as “pagan, mystic, non-scientific” – “epistemicide” (santos 2014, 30)— is a pervasive problem that represents the depoliticisation of knowledge and learning itself. schooling propels childhood to an imagined future, viewing children as ‘embodiments of the future’ and a site of social investment (kjørholt 2013). yet, the significance of schooling and what it teaches children is also nested in the culture and history of society. arguably, western schooling produces future workers who are servants of capitalism regardless of where in the world they are schooled. as ansell and colleagues (2020) systematically show with comparative examples from laos, lesotho and india, schooling in the global south particularly produces subjects who are in many ways a “surplus population” that is not necessary for the global capitalist economy or as katz (2011, 58) puts it – subjects who are rendered a “waste”. the future-working-child is meant to be schooled, but not educated so that she can be deployed into labor whenever needed. however, she is often dismissed and replaced or sits idle, hoping for fitting opportunities to arise that match her ever-increasing aspirations. this reality has crystalized in the world-wide problem of schooled unemployed youth who scramble for precarious jobs (jeffery 2005; jeffrey et al. 2010; clemens & biswas 2019). research also shows how schooling alienates children from rural futures and the physical environment, contributing to a decline in their skills for resource conservation and environmental management (abebe 2020; biswas & sharma forthcoming). this is not only because children have limited access to land as they come of age, but they are also learning about land in a socio-historical context that is characterized by rapid population growth, land-grabbing, deforestation, and environmental degradation. the destruction of the physical environment heightens young people's sense of displacement from the future. katz (2004) argues that this displacement is a consequence of rural communities’ insertion into the capitalist system that erodes existing patterns of social reproduction. thus, children learn farming or herding, but they have no land on which to do it, or they attend school long enough to learn skills that are inappropriate for non-agricultural employment (ibid). yet, as ansell and colleagues (2020) show, schooling also stimulates unattainable aspirations and what durham (2017) calls “elusive adulthoods”. the problem of schooled unemployment and elusive adulthoods whereby young people struggle to achieve their socio-economic aspirations are interlinked with the ‘academization of education’. schooling represents the academicization of education – a reductive practice that contributes to the ‘narrowing’ of knowledge (also see biesta 2015; fitzsimons 2002). in other words, we find that schooling abstracts societal knowledge in ways that disconnects learners from local realities. this abstraction of knowledge, in turn, contributes to the narrowing of complex knowledge systems that cannot be ‘scholarized’. 121tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) we argue that schooling is inherently a western epistemological project in which eurocentric systems of thought are imposed upon and expected to presumably alter, ‘tame’ or ‘civilize’ the subaltern and her ways of existing. we are particularly agitated by the pluralistic modes of knowing, doing, and becoming that have been erased and continue to be erased by the universal promotion of mass schooling under the pretext of fulfilling a ‘right to education’ which, in fact, concerns only the ‘right to schooling’. we mourn the alternative futures of childhoods that have been irrecoverably displaced due to the ‘ideal white pupil’ model and, as a result, the various meaningful versions of childhoods that have not been envisioned in both the global south and the global north. drawing upon critical comparative insights provided by ansell and colleagues (2020) and our respective scholarships on education and childhood over the past years, we find that schooling has contributed to taking children out of community forming economies globally. this involves not only spatiotemporal standardization of community life but also of childhood and children’s time so that their task is re-scripted to become only participation in institutionalized public schooling. yet, the incompatibility of the school calendar with communal agricultural work cycles engenders the ways compulsory schooling, for example, renders children – who must be absent from classes for sustaining the local economy of coffee production in ethiopia – as being problematic, ‘delinquents’ and ‘truants’ (abebe 2011, 2015). nieuwenhuys (1994) similarly argues that formal education led indian children’s life to be more burdensome as it did not relieve them from contributing to familial livelihoods but instead was added on top of those activities. these paradoxes imply the economic and cultural significance of childhood to society and reimagination of what meaningful education for children could be, invoking ideas of rights in education. rights in education we are interested in how communities strategize and push back against the supremacy of ‘white scientific knowledge’ and the privileging of schooling as a singular form of ‘education’. that is to say, the ways young people and their communities fight for rights ‘in’ education and not just right ‘for’ education. rights in education evokes questions that not only challenge the global knowledge order but also inscriptions of new practices through the mediums of resistance/revolution/activism so as to re-politicize knowledge and re-introduce it in the debates around epistemic justice. the ruptures in social reproduction require solutions in the projects of development and schooling by reorienting educational institutions as sites for reimagining learning. given that promises of education for a better future are not met, it is time to rethink education outside the neoliberal paradigm and delink schooling from market-driven requirements of the capitalist economy (ansell et al. 2020). a similar impulse comes from young climate activists from some of the most privileged welfare states in the world; young activists for whom neither the right to schooling, nor future income appears to be under threat. despite their materially privileged positions they choose to go on school strike and question the hours demanded of them in school, because the current fossil-fueled neoliberal economy puts the future right to life for them and future generations into threat. their indirect challenge to economic priorities of their governments, too, persuades us to move away from the discourse of rights ‘to’ education to instead inscribing rights ‘in’ education. rights in education activates an onto-epistemological politics that attaches intrinsic value to life and realigns the purpose of education with the overall purpose of sustaining life on the planet. unlike the right to education, which is about access, rights in education attend to the basic social, economic, cultural and gendered needs and subjectivities of learners as part of community formation processes. it draws attention to alternative strategies of intergenerational sharing of knowledge which seem to be neglected in the age-segregated context of schooling. rights in education proposes to define schooling curricula upward by including educational goals such as social justice, citizenship, diversity, values, learning in a global context, and sustainable development (wu & geo-jaja 2016). this ‘bottom-up’ approach to create the content of curriculum is indispensable because it opens a space to contest what constitutes knowledge and addresses the enduring legacy of colonialism that haunts schooling in the global south. it also helps to locate learning at the heart of a decolonial approach to reach the possibility of non-eurocentric modes of education. yet, given that the overheated planetary crisis that will continue 122 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections to confront the lifespans of the authors and readers of this text, and those lifespans that go beyond ours, there are additional touchstones of how a childist, decolonial analysis of rights in education should unfold in our view. the unprecedented case (earth justice 2019) filed by a transnational collective of 16 young climate activists including greta thunberg under the united nations convention on the rights of the child (uncrc), asserts that the climate crisis is a children’s rights crisis in so far as high carbon-emitting economic policies are violating the rights guaranteed to children by the uncrc, for example the right to life, health and prioritizing the best interest principle. complementary to this (and similar climate litigation cases filed by legal minors across the world) are courageous acts of non-violent civil disobedience, organised globally under the umbrella of the fridays for future movement, which appeal to profound pedagogical concerns that are directly linked to the rights of the future generation, environmental sustainability and post-colonial global inequity, for example by asking, “why study for a future if there is no future?” (biswas & mattheis 2021). their question not only evokes the crisis of existentialism heightened by a capitalist system that is under the verge of collapse, but also the childist dimension of deep interdependence (e.g. joseffson & wall 2020) and communities of care. nobel peace prize winner malala yousafzai’s advocacy for education that resonates with girls’ aspirations is another example of how young people are performing an educational task for their communities that ‘adultist’ educational structures of instrumental schooling fail to do. given these and other struggles for climate justice and educational justice (e.g. elaw 2017; eauc 2020; climate case chart 2020); it is time to recognize the inseparable question of childhood and education, acknowledging children as future-makers seriously (spyrou 2020) and considering how to enable their role in education for community formation. moving with the ‘relational ontological turn’ in critical childhood studies (spyrou 2018; spyrou et al. 2019) we understand ‘education’ as essentially an intergenerational relationship (see also hoveid & hoveid 2019). while education involves an intergenerational transfer of knowledge, values, and skills, we find that it also needs to be a reciprocal and co-generational process in order to enable younger generations to be active parts of community formation. by co-generational, we refer to a childist understanding of educational relationality that moves away from the hierarchy of adults as teachers and children as learners to instead fostering horizontal educational practices, with children and adults as co-learners. for example, by opening up to the philosophical richness that awaits adults if they participate in children’s playfully constructed worlds as guests (biswas 2020) or the courageous ways of socio-political civic engagement that adult citizens can learn from young activists who choose to go on school strike to fight for intergenerational climate justice, despite the harsh adultist reactions they must face (biswas & mattheis forthcoming) or in a broader socio-political sense involving questions of right to stay put (aitken 2018) and how city governance could be directly realized with children’s participation and perspectives (sundhall 2017). there is also a need for a shift from looking at intergenerational learning within families to harness the potential for extrafamilial places of intergenerational encounters as sites of learning (mannion 2018). a relational view on rights in education focuses on intergenerational dimensions of learning in interrelated contexts and spheres of life. it includes learning that takes place, yes, in schools and playgrounds, lecture theaters, and within school buildings but also with peers or siblings ‘at home’, on-line (in virtual spaces) and, most intriguingly, through embodied mobilities (in cars, on trains, and while walking, climbing, and playing) (abebe & waters 2017). yet, there is a sense that learning, in part, depends upon involvement in various activities: while herding, farming the fields, trading in the marketplace, or at weddings and festivities and funerals. rights in education also entails problemsolving and transformative education which are predicated on designing programs nested in progressive ideas of learning for the future. it foregrounds intergenerational dimensions of sociomaterial practice and learning, including in issues such as children’s rights and participation, and in wider society as it faces ecological and other challenges (mannion 2018, 314). while such a view of the intertwined question of education and childhood strongly resonates with the relational ontological turn in critical childhood studies, the childist lens particularly demands that the adult-as-teacher and child-as-learner hierarchy does not reproduce itself while ‘putting the child back’ into processes of community formation. 123tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) making a case for pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and education rights in education engenders the revitalization of indigenous knowledge and educational features that were rendered meaningless by colonial and neoliberal conditions. it calls forth the imagining of an inclusive education that is responsive to the subjectivities, contexts, and needs of multiple generations, addressing such questions as what education as community formation implies. our engagement with questions of rights in education not only bring to light issues of resistance to an unproblematized acceptance of school curriculum but also the need re-politicize knowledge, schooling, and learning in order to reintroduce them in the debates on educational justice as part of a larger global concern with epistemic (in)justice. on a pragmatic level this includes acknowledging the pedagogical significance and reactivating practices such as multilingualism, musical performance, and ways of transmitting collective memories like rituals, oral history, folklore, dance, art, handicrafts, proverbs, poetry, drama as well as architectures and technology that reflect the histories, cultures, and identities of pre-colonial societies (tedla 1995). on a philosophical level, this includes confronting the history of philosophical racism that has also seeped into philosophical commitments that underlie what constitutes ‘being educated’ and ‘being knowledgeable’ across the globe today. in our view, a way of confronting this history is by broadening scholarly and social pathways to rely on pluralist indigenous philosophies to re-imagine education, childhood and future. an example of a pluralist indigenous philosophy that embeds interdependent existence and can be helpful to understand how rights in education, childhood and the future are intertwined is ubuntu. ubuntu represents the worldviews of indigenous black populations of sub-saharan africa, transmitted from generation to generation through observation, experience, language, and art. the widely acknowledged maxim ‘i am who i am because of who we all are’ indicates that a pluralistic relationality is at the core of what it means to be a human being. the worldview of ubuntu reveals that “what happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual” (mbiti 1969, 106). ubuntu is about socialization, that is, how one would not know how to think, walk, speak, or behave unless s/he has learned it from others. at the same time, it is also about the spiritual dimensions of how a person needs other human beings to be human (tutu 2004, 25). ubuntu relationality is pluralistic as it is not about ‘i am ...because you are’ but rather ‘i am ...because we are’. ubuntu suggests that – like every member of the family and community – children develop personhood through social interactions, which means that they must “prize communal and harmonious relationships with others” (metz 2016, 324). this emphasis on the community over the individual does not reject the individual but acknowledges that the two are co-creators, interdependent, and mutually sustaining (see chilisa 2020). this implies that adults also realize their personhood through relationships with children, making room for a co-generational understanding of education for sustainable futures. the philosophy of ubuntu is consistent with the ideals of education for sustainable futures in so far as it emphasizes values of interconnectedness, including interpersonal values (regards for others); intrapersonal value (regard for self) and environmental values (regard for the environment) (maphala 2017). we find that it serves a pertinent role to help us grasp pluralistic relationalities, human-nature interaction and sustainable co-generational futures. serpell and adamson-holley (2017) further invite us to think about how the african traditional practice of assigning social responsibility to children from an early age is highly compatible with contemporary goals (if not practices) of education elsewhere. their argument is that african societies prime children to learn about sustainability and interdependence: knowledge about agriculture, environment, nutrition, sibling care and so on are not only part of learning and socialization that school curricula overlook but also necessary for cultivating social responsibility and peaceful coexistence. in calling for educational reforms, one ‘bottom-up’, ‘active learning’ educational strategy they found to be productive is what they call the ‘child-to-child approach’ (serpell & adamson-holley 2017). these forms of knowledge and strategies of learning push us into a space outside the binding strictures of the classroom as well as adults as educators. yet, in arguing for education that reflects local and indigenous knowledge systems one needs to be careful in how one advocates instilling pride in ‘local’ traditions, which can very quickly escalate to large scale nationalisms. sometimes such traditions need to be challenged in order to promote progressive social change, to redress the intersectional, hierarchical relations between classes, 124 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections genders and generations, exclusive injustices towards ethnic minorities, the differently casted and abled, and to resolve conflict between ethnic and religious groups. in other words, we recognize the philosophical value of ubuntu for a decolonial, childist approach to global education, but we exercise caution in so far as we do not automatically favor ‘local pride’. this is not the least because all forms of knowledge are in some ways ‘local’ but shared across space and over time. another example of an extra-familial site of decolonial learning is education in spiritual contexts. by spiritual learning, we imply the connection of humans with nature as well as a metaphysical appreciation of the significance of traditions and affirmation of all life as a powerful, culturally motivating force. what it means to be an educated person or a critical learning subject in spiritual settings differs from how the dominant western model of schooling views the child as a ‘tabula-rasa’ learner. across sub-saharan africa (as in most parts of the world), for example, western style schooling replaced diverse forms of education that emphasize spirituality – and religious education as well. schooling in sub-saharan africa is practiced as an antipode to, not alongside with, religious learning such as qur’anic education, which traditionally were the main sources of knowledge, literacy skills, and ethos of life for children as community members. such forms of education are based on different understanding of the purpose and goals of life, which include education, how to be critical learner as well as the meaning of children and childhood. islamic educational practices view children as a divine gift to be honored as part of the spiritual practices of adults too. in the age-old educational practices of the ethiopian orthodox church, the child is viewed as spiritually endowed and as possessing capacities that in certain ways exceed those of adults. the ‘rinponche children’ of the tibetan buddhist traditions (e.g., the dalai lama as a child) are similarly viewed as having onto-epistemological capacities that exceed those of most adults. in addition to how children may be viewed, another defining dimension of spiritual contexts is the relationship between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’. while ‘western schooling’ limits the value of inanimate objects to their usefulness for human beings, indigenous worldviews understand life and resulting human-nature relationality in a wider sense. such views are not limited to the african or asian continent but are also found, for example, in the indigenous sami spirituality of northern scandinavia too (bunikowski 2015). yet, doing away with spirituality as part of the ‘western’ secularization project instigates educational structures that chronically compromise on spiritual sensibilities that allow children to navigate the social, moral and emotional landscapes of their societies throughout their lifespans. we view this as a ‘global epistemological loss’ which is not restricted to societies in the global south like those that ansell and colleagues (2020) have studied. this is an important and often overlooked point; because spiritual learning is not just integral to children’s wellbeing and well becoming but it also enables them to develop meaningful and satisfying lives and fit constructively into their societies. article 27 of the uncrc is particularly relevant here as it explicitly recognizes the role of spiritual development not only in the realization of children’s ‘full potential’ and to flourish as human beings but also as integral to an ‘adequate standard of living’. we often witness child rights advocates (who seem to rely on the ‘ideal white pupil’ imagination) drawing attention to the cultural reasons why children’s rights to education are not fulfilled or the political economic and material deprivation that hinders effective learning in schools. however, what is neglected is how children realize rights in education and develop reciprocal and meaningful lives, as well as find happiness within a supportive community of educators outside formal schools, including in spiritual contexts (bourdillon 2014). with the above examples we demonstrate that it is necessary to make in-roads into pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and education by tapping into non-colonial histories and use historical knowledges as inertia to move forward progressively. the examples reveal the significance of the past in the present, invoking the notion of sankofa – a west african (akan) concept that means ‘to go back and fetch’ – lending interpretation for why history matters and its contemporaneity in the present-day lives and experiences of childhoods (tedla 1995). having said that, the challenge for a childist decolonial engagement remains that, in pursuing pluralist indigenous philosophies and revitalization of the ‘global epistemological loss’ which is a direct consequence of colonialism; one does not succumb to a regressive, adult-centric intergenerational ideal of education. what then could be some progressive decolonial childist strategies to re-imagine education as community formation that takes children as future-makers seriously? 125tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) reimagining education as community formation ansell and colleagues’ (2020) critique of schooling and the manipulation of aspiration that disappoint today’s generation of children and the wider society has ushered us to reflect upon the issue of ‘what beyond’ school systems globally. their comparative empirical insights presented have been impulses for us to connect ideas about educational philosophies, childhood, and the future as well as reimagine education that attends to the question of generational segregation. we think that the unjust crisis highlighted should not be tackled as solely a ‘global south’ issue but must be considered as part of a north-south continuum. the critique of schooling that is implicit in the climate protests of privileged children in the global north in conjunction with the dysfunctional implementations of the ‘right to education’ in the global south led us to discuss ‘schooling’ through the decolonial lens of epistemic injustice. the resulting global epistemological loss of various pluralistic indigenous philosophies that could have guided educational practices is related to the upkeep of ‘an ideal white school child’ whose present time is systematically claimed in the name of an education for a future that deters her from negotiating that future. rights in education, seems to be a promising framework for further engagement for decolonial responses. however, we remain alert that proceeding on a decolonial note that simultaneously minimises adult-child power hierarchies is a key hurdle in reimagining education as community formation. in this concluding section, we lay out four preliminary strategies of moving forward with a decolonial, childist lens of reimagining education as community formation. the first strategy is restructuring and reclaiming the spatio-temporality of global childhoods. since schooling and its conspirator – capitalism – ejected children out of community forming economies by separating social reproduction from that of economic production (e.g. katz 2004), there is a need to reclaim the space and time of childhood to develop children’s situated learning by facilitating their participation in familial and community livelihoods. this appears to be too obvious a point to make but it is an indispensable one. for example, learning through laboring-with-others is an integral part of children’s identity and gives value to what it means to be a child in diverse socio-cultural contexts of the global south. it increases children’s learning experiences through observation, the contribution of material value so vital to the sustenance of life as well as the transference of complexly valued and valuable skills that are rendered useless through schooling. this realization further persuades us to consciously partake in the decolonial project by imagining education that does not take children out of community forming economies. however, such practices need to be situated not only in the project of relevant and useful education but also in the re-conceptualization of intergenerational education as a co-generational exercise. the second strategy is altering the global economic and political structures, including moving away from capitalism as the modus operandi for which schooling is in service. as ansell and colleagues (2020) highlight, without schooling the capitalist system that creams off profit from the precarious labor market would not exist. this implies that the strategies of education for the future cannot be separated from delinking schooling from capitalism as well as the wider political and economic structures of neoliberalism. this strategy also requires models of education that disengage from western ideologies of international development that equate schooling with education. among other possibilities, such model should be realized with pluralist indigenous philosophies of childhood and education because they offer very rich spiritual understandings of the meaning of life as well as human-nature relationships. we also call for reimagination of education and learning beyond its curriculum to incorporate a temporal dimension knowledge sharing/transmission in which, for example, ancestral knowledge and philosophies such as ubuntu are linked with the knowledge and philosophies of the ancestors that the present generation will become. in other words, a reimagination of children’s education and futures to unfold not in a linear sequence but rather as an interlocking of pasts, presents, and futures or in which past and future resonate in the present. the third strategy is to make existing institutions and educational systems work. this can be achieved, for example, through cultivating educational practices for multiple generations and fostering intergenerational learning encounters in familial and community settings. in the global south, this might entail connecting more fully with aspects of learning that are situated in everyday livelihoods in which multiple generations take part. apprentice education can be one platform for intergenerational 126 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections relating and learning. however, it requires systematic planning and adequate political will and economic investment to facilitate its efficacy in transferring skills and knowledge across generations. in the global north, the existing institutional settings of kindergartens and old homes can be used as intergenerational learning sites where education and care for children and aging populations are combined. such intergenerational learning centers can potentially facilitate reciprocal learning and co-generational care for early childhood and old age, enhancing the reality of generational interdependence. finally, whereas there are aspects of education that can be adapted to local realities; we need to rethink the inseparable imaginations of childhood and education afresh, and address questions that engender rights in education for the future, in both the global south and the global north. promoting rights in education for community formation is entwined with questions of educational policies and practice. in tandem with fostering co-generational learning, there can be, for example, development of policies for non-formal education where children actively acquire skills alongside other generations outside schools. national educational policies could support shared community conceptions of a good life that are culturally enriching and morally and ethically justifiable. they could also promote diverse forms of education devised with children so that their learning is geared towards and is responsive to the wider cultural, socio-economic and political changes within their societies and beyond. the important role of language in schools and other contexts of education and in preparing children and young people to deal with transient livelihoods cannot be overemphasized. we propose these outlines to invite future discussions and debates on rights in education by stakeholders of education including governments, international development actors, communities, families as well as children and young people in different spatial scales and contexts. references abebe, t. (2011) gendered work and schooling in rural ethiopia: exploring working children’s perspectives in evers, s. notermans, c. & van ommering, e. (eds.) not just a victim: the child as catalyst and witness of contemporary africa, 147–171. https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004204003.i-276.56 abebe t. (2015) political economy of children’s work: economic restructuring, the coffee trade and social reproduction in post-socialist ethiopia. in ansell n., klocker n., skelton t. (eds.) geographies of global issues: change and threat. geographies of children and young people, vol 8, 1–22. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-95-8_24-1 abebe, t. (2020) lost futures? educated youth precarity and protests in the oromia region, ethiopia. children’s geographies 18(6) 584–600. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2020.1789560 abebe, t. & waters, j. (2017) geographies of laboring and learning: introduction. in abebe, t., waters, j. & skelton t. (eds.) labouring and learning. geographies of children and young people, vol 10, 1–17. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-032-2_25 aitken, s. (2018) young people, rights and place: erasure, neoliberal politics and postchild ethics. routledge, new york and london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315519258 ansell, n. p., froerer, r., huijsmans, c. e., dungey, a., dost, p. & piti (2020) educating ‘surplus population’: uses and abuses of aspiration in the rural peripheries of a globalising world. fennia 198(1–2) 17–38. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.90756 biesta, g. j. (2015) good education in an age of measurement. ethics, politics, democracy. abingdon, oxon and routledge, new york. biswas, t. (2020) little things matter much – childist ideas for a pedagogy of philosophy in an overheated world. büro himmelgrün, munich. biswas, t. & mattheis, n. (2021) strikingly educational: a childist perspective on children’s civil disobedience for climate justice. educational theory and philosophy [online feb 4 2021] https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1880390 biswas, t. & sharma, r. (forthcoming) will future ladakhi monks be happy monks? a need for dialogue concerning a special pedagogy for child monks. in illman, k. & schäfer, a. (eds.) emerging ladakh. identity and belonging in the context of increasing changes. center for interdisciplinary area studies, halle. bourdillon, m. (2014) neglected dimensions of child well-being. children's geographies 12(4) 497–503. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2014.953315 bunikowski, d. (2015) sámi reindeer husbandry as a way of life: on culture, philosophy, cosmology, and law. in koivurova, t. & hasanat, w. (eds.) current developments in arctic law 3, 3–6. university of the arctic thematic network on arctic law, rovaniemi. 127tatek abebe & tanu biswasfennia 199(1) (2021) chilisa, b. (2020) indigenous research methodologies. 2nd ed. sage, los angeles, ca. clemens, i. & biswas, t. (2019) rethinking education in times of globalization – but where to start the rethinking? in clemens, i., hornberg, s. & rieckmann, m. (eds.) bildung und erziehung im kontext globaler transformationen, 237–250. barbara budrich, leverkusen. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvm201r8.17 climate case chart (2020) youth for climate justice v. austria, et al. <http://climatecasechart.com/ climate-change-litigation/non-us-case/youth-for-climate-justice-v-austria-et-al/> 27.4.2021 durham, d. (2017) elusive adulthoods: introduction. in durham, d. & solway, j. (eds.) elusive adulthoods: the anthropology of new maturities, 1–38. indiana university press, bloomington, in. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv3hvcd1.4 earth justice (2019) communication to the committee on the rights of the child: in the case of chiara sacchi (argentina); catarina lorenzo (brazil); iris duquesne (france); raina ivanova (germany); ridhima pandey (india); david ackley, iii, ranton anjain, and litokne kabua (marshall islands); deborah adegbile (nigeria); carlos manuel (palau); ayakha melithafa (south africa); greta thunberg and ellen-anne (sweden); raslen jbeili (tunisia); & carl smith and alexandria villaseñor (usa); petitioners, v. argentina, brazil, france, germany & turkey. <https://earthjustice.org/sites/default/ files/files/2019.09.23-crc-communication-sacchi-et-al-v.-argentina-et-al-redacted.pdf> . 12.12.2020 eauc [alliance for sustainability leadership in education] (2020) english climate emergency education bill launched <https://www.eauc.org.uk/english_climate_emergency_education_>. 27.04.2021 elaw (2017) petition: riddhima pandey v. union of india (march 2017) <https://elaw.org/petitionridhima-pandey-v-union-india-march-2017> 27.04.2021 fitzsimons, p. (2002) enframing education. in peters, m. (ed.) heidegger, education, and modernity, 171–190. rowman & littlefield publishers, lanham. hoveid, h. & hoveid, m. (2019) making education educational. a reflexive approach to teaching. springer nature switzerland, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27076-6 jeffrey, c. (2010) timepass: youth, class and the politics of waiting in india. stanford university press, stanford, ca. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804775137 jeffrey, c., jeffery, p. & jeffery, r. (2005) when schooling fails: young men, education and low-caste politics in rural north india. contributions to indian sociology 39(1) 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/006996670503900101 josefsson, j. & wall, j. (2020) empowered inclusion: theorizing global justice for children and youth. globalizations 17(6) 1043–1060. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1736853 katz, c. (2004) growing up global: economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. the university of minnesota press, minneapolis. katz, c. (2011) accumulation, excess, childhood: toward a countertopography of risk and waste. documents d'anàlisi geogràfica 57(1) 47–60. kjørholt, a. t. (2013) childhood as social investment, rights and the valuing of education. children and society 27(4) 245–257. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12037 mannion, g. (2018) intergenerational education and learning: we are in a new place. in punch, s. & vanderbeck, r. (eds.) families, intergenerationality, and peer group relations, geographies of children and young people 5, 307–327. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-026-1_5 maphalala, m. c. (2017) embracing ubuntu in managing effective classrooms. gender and behavior 15 10237–10249. mbembe, a. (2016) decolonizing the university: new directions. arts and humanities in higher education 15(1) 29–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022215618513 mbiti, j. s. (1969) african philosophy and religion. heinmann, london. metz, t. (2016) recent philosophical approaches to social protection: from capability to ubuntu. global social policy 16(2) 132–150. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468018116633575 nieuwenhuys, o. (1994) children’s life worlds: gender, welfare and labor in the developing world. routledge, london. santos, boaventura de sousa (2014) epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide. routledge, london and new york. serpell, r. (2018) situated understanding of human development in africa: systematic inquiries at the nexus of psychology, social science and history. culture & psychology 24(3) 382–397. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067x18779034 serpell, r. & adamson-holley d. (2017) african socialization values and nonformal educational practices: child development, parental beliefs, and educational innovation in rural zambia. in skelton, t., abebe, t. & waters, j. (eds.) laboring and learning. geographies of children and young people, vol 10, 19–43. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-032-2_22 spyrou, s. (2018) disclosing childhoods. in disclosing childhoods, 1–14. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47904-4_1 128 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections spyrou, s. (2020) children as future-makers. childhood 27(1) 3 –7. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219884142 spyrou, s., rosen, r. & cook, d. (eds) (2019) reimagining childhood studies. bloomsbury, london. sundhall, j. (2017) a political space for children? the age order and children’s right to participation. social inclusion 5(3) 164–171. https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v5i3.969 tedla, e. (1995) sankofa: african thought and education. peter lang, new york. teo, t. (2008) from speculation to epistemological violence in psychology: a critical-hermeneutic reconstruction. theory & psychology 18(1) 47–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354307086922 tutu, d. (2004) god has a dream: a vision of hope for our time. doubleday, new york. wu, x. & geo-jaja, n. (2016) from rights to education to rights in education: a dialogical roadmap for autonomy development. in geo-jaja, m. a. & majhanovich, s. (eds.) effects of globalization on education systems and development, 3–21. sensepublishers, rotterdam. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-729-0_1 resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism networks – a case study from northern finland urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa41450 doi: 10.11143/41450 resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism networks – a case study from northern finland outi kulusjärvi kulusjärvi, outi (2016). resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism networks – a case study from northern finland. fennia 194: 1, 3–17. issn 17985617. in tourism studies, it has been widely recognized that resort-oriented tourism development creates challenges for regional development, mainly due to its enclave nature and lack of regional economic linkages. however, there have been relatively few studies on the destination-scale cooperative networks, although, they are vital in increasing the positive regional economic impacts of tourism development. this paper is an empirical qualitative study exploring the connections between resort-oriented tourism development and tourism business cooperation in the case study area of the ruka-kuusamo tourism destination in northeast finland. the interest is on how the local cooperative networks of the ruka tourist resort are spatially constructed within the ruka-kuusamo tourism destination. the research data consists of semi-structured interviews conducted for ten tourism actors located in the ruka resort. the results show that the businesses located in the ruka resort cooperate at the regional scale mainly in marketing, while their partners in production cooperation are located mostly within the resort, particularly in its very core area. the resort appears to function as a basis for spatial identification for tourism actors, which, in turn, affects entrepreneurs’ motivation to cooperate at the local and regional scale. tourism entrepreneurs operating in the very core of the resort perceive the area as the principal area for their operations, and therefore, they do not particularly engage with the surrounding areas and businesses or with other actors located there. thus, for smaller enterprises outside the core, it can be difficult to benefit from the resort’s core’s growth via network relations. this contributes mainly to the development of the core areas alone, creates challenges for sustainable regional economic development in the destination region, and hinders the resort’s tourism growth in the long run. keywords: tourism destination development, cooperation, enclave resorts, sustainable regional development, qualitative study, finland outi kulusjärvi, department of geography, university of oulu, po box 3000, fi-90014 oulu , finland. e-mail outi.kulusjarvi@oulu.fi introduction experiencing the tranquility of the natural environment is a frequent need for many individuals. the characteristics of the periphery offer counterpoint to the everyday environment of the citizens of urban core areas, as a result of which rural areas are often regarded as attractive tourism destinations (montanari & williams 1995: 6). for instance, in the peripheries of scandinavia, the attractiveness of the natural environment has been used as a basis for developing tourism into a significant new branch of industry. nevertheless, typically tourist flows largely concentrate there in core areas. for example, in northern finland, the tourism industry has been developed around winter sport activities, and hence, tourist flows largely concentrate on tourist resorts located near fells. in other words, tourism development is resort-oriented. © 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 4 fennia 194: 1 (2016)outi kulusjärvi in finland, at all spatial scales, from local to national, tourism is developed by supporting resorts and their enterprises. tourism growth is sought by increasing particularly international tourism demand (työja elinkeinoministeriö 2010: 15, 19). as mentioned by müller and brouder (2014), tourism businesses in the peripheries of scandinavia have had to pool their resources due to the demands of globalization, i.e. in order to gain international visibility. as tourism grows and becomes more international, tourism enterprises in the resorts are typically also increasingly national or international operators. in consequence, destinations tend to become spaces homogenous with each other. for instance, skiing destinations in northern finland are transforming towards the resort structures similar to central european alpine destinations. at the same time, they weaken their linkages with the local communities in their surroundings (saarinen 2004: 161, 169–171). in these circumstances, the positive economic impacts of tourism typically remain mainly within the areas occupied by tourists and do not spread beyond the resort into the surrounding peripheral areas (britton 1982; walpole & goodwin 2000: 572). the described development in northern finland is similar to the more extreme enclave development of tourist resorts in the developing world. even though tourism is commonly considered as one of the only industries with positive future prospects and potential to revitalize declining rural regional economies, tourism growth does not automatically lead to rural development (saarinen 2008: 101). as ribeiro and marques (2002: 212) have noted, there is often a gap between the expected and realized socio-economic benefits of tourism development for a regional economy. for this reason, it is also necessary to look at the development of tourist resorts from the perspective of sustainability in a wider tourism region and in local communities. resort-oriented tourism development can be appropriate and successful in terms of business growth, at least in the short-term. also, a resort’s growth can create tax income for the municipality and, at least to some extent, business opportunities and employment for local people. in the regions of resort-oriented tourism development, there are challenges related to the socioeconomic impacts of tourism. this paper argues that the positive employment and economic benefits of tourism should impact to the greatest possible extent the residents of the destination region. where this holds true, these matters can be expected to contribute to the well-being of the local community. in order to distribute the benefits of resort-oriented tourism development equitably within a wider region than the resort alone, cooperation between the core and the surrounding periphery is vital. in finnish tourism planning (työja elinkeinoministeriö 2010; lapin liitto 2011; pohjois-pohjanmaan liitto 2011), it is expected that resorts and other functional cores (such as municipality centers) work as engines within which enterprises located in the surrounding peripheral areas can network and thereby benefit from the resorts’ tourism growth. it is presumed that core-periphery cooperation can effectively distribute the positive impacts from the resorts to a wider region. however, the ways in which the cooperation ought to happen have not been specified in the strategies. furthermore, there have been relatively few studies on destination-scale cooperation networks in tourism research. in the current study, new insights on the role of local-scale tourism cooperation in rural tourism areas of resort-oriented development will be searched for. the case study area is the municipality of kuusamo in northeast finland (fig. 1). in the study, the focus is on the ruka tourist resort, which draws most of the tourists travelling to kuusamo. ruka is best known as a winter tourism destination and, measured by its ski ticket revenue, it is the second largest ski resort in finland. still, as kauppila (2011: 28) has pointed out, the development of tourism in ruka has not been able to save the municipality of kuusamo from high unemployment and population loss. the aim of the present paper is to critically engage with the interrelations between the resortoriented tourism development and attendant construction of the local cooperation networks of tourism enterprises. the state of networking of tourism businesses located in tourist resorts in rural areas will be examined. the paper asks: how are the local tourism business cooperative networks of a tourist resort spatially constructed within the regional tourism destination? in the current preliminary study, the topic is studied from the viewpoint of the enterprises located in the ruka tourist resort. that is, the focus is on the linkages that enterprises located in ruka have within and beyond the resort. hence, all the interviewed tourism actors are located in the resort. the interest here is not necessarily in the cooperation between the resort and the surrounding pefennia 194: 1 (2016) 5resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism riphery, but in examining what the core area of tourism is and how it is (re)produced by way of tourism business networking. the theoretical background of this study is based on the research literature of regional development studies in tourism geography and on the research of relational economic geography, which will be introduced in the following section. after this, the case study area of ruka-kuusamo and its recent tourism developments will be briefly introduced. afterwards, there will be an overview of the research materials and analysis. the results chapter will be divided into two subsections, the first covering cooperation taking place at the regional scale, and the second concerning cooperation concentrating to the resort. in the discussion and conclusions, the paper will consider the current state of networking as regards to sustainable tourism and regional development. also, needs for future research will be presented. tourism and peripheral development tourism for regional development the positive economic impacts of tourism on regional development are often the major motivator for developing tourism, which is viewed as a way fig. 1. case study area kuusamo municipality and tourist resort ruka in north-eastern finland. 6 fennia 194: 1 (2016)outi kulusjärvi to generate income and employment for local people residing in declining rural areas (williams & shaw 1998: 11). however, as has been recognized, tourism is not a self-evident tool for regional development (e.g. oppermann 1996; ribeiro & marques 2002). thus, the goals of tourism development should not be set before the needs of other local livelihoods and tourism should be developed as one industry alongside others. burns (1999) has underlined that the main target in tourism planning should not be tourism growth but improvement of social well-being. in his view, instead of a tourism-first approach, tourism planning should be carried out from a developmentfirst approach. that is, tourism should be used only as one of many possible development tools. saarinen (2006: 47) has similarly emphasized that traditional local industries should be valued equally alongside tourism. burns (2004) has later paid close attention to the challenges of carrying out tourism planning and policies from the perspective of sustainable regional development. commonly, tourism planning is conducted from the perspective of tourism industry only, which can lead to neglecting the needs of other livelihoods. in addition, planning is limited to the scale of administrative units and connections across those entities are rarely taken into consideration. burns states that in order for tourism to contribute to sustainable growth and wider societal development, the multiple sectors of the tourism industry and the various local industries should be involved together and cooperate in tourism planning. similarly müller (2011: 253) states that tourism has to be integrated into broader community development in order for it to be sustainable. challenges of spatial concentration of tourism development nelson and winter (1982, as cited in papatheodorou 2004: 222) have noted that typically tourist flows concentrate only in a small number of enterprises. this is because it is relatively easy to enter the tourism industry due to the low investment needs, but only a few businesses manage to achieve a reputation of expertise and a stable position in tourism markets. strong tourism enterprises have a key role in triggering tourism development and starting to build up a destination (pearce 1981: 16–19). as papatheodorou (2004: 225–226) notes, market polarization is linked with the spatial polarization of tourism development due to the interdependence of economic and spatial dynamics. nature-based tourism, in particular, is a strongly place-based branch of economy and, thus, tourism businesses are typically located around tourist pull factors and form business clusters (huybers & bennett 2003: 572; braun 2005: 5). that is, tourism and its impacts commonly spread unevenly in space (williams & shaw 1998: 12; hall & page 1999: 1). this can be considered challenging for the requirement of regional sustainability. the spatial concentration of tourism development occurs at all spatial scales from local to global (papatheodorou 2004: 225). thus, core and periphery are relative concepts (friedmann 1966). britton’s (1982) core-periphery model in tourism presents core-periphery relations on a global level. according to the model, tourist flows are orientated from the core, developed countries, to the peripheries, developing countries. nevertheless, the power in tourism development remains in the core as the main tourism operators are located there. tourist flows then concentrate in certain places in the peripheral areas in the destination countries which become enclave resorts. the outside areas cannot equally benefit from a resort’s development. gradually, these enclave resorts become core areas more prosperous in comparison with the surrounding periphery (getz 1981; weaver 1998; walpole & goodwin 2000: 572; kauppila 2011: 20, 22). such enclave tourist resort development is more extreme in the developing world. however, as saarinen (2004: 171) notes, tourist resort development in the peripheries of the western countries clearly has similar challenges. tourism-induced income and employment, public and private services and other facilities are often developing and maintained in tourism destinations, while surrounding spatial structures can decline socio-economically and politically. as a result, tourist resorts typically differentiate from their surrounding areas which then cannot equally benefit from the resorts’ development. although there are economic leakages outside tourist resorts (see murphy 1985: 91), it is crucial to recognize the extent to which they fall on to the surrounding rural areas. tourism operators in a resort can purchase products and services and hire employees from outside the region. according to saarinen (2006: 49), in the current mode of development in northern finland, the links of tourism development to the local and fennia 194: 1 (2016) 7resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism regional traditional economies and production are not strong enough in regard to regional development. as kauppila (2004: 93) notes, in addition to economic impacts, innovativeness, the level of infrastructure and the possibilities for decision-making are typically greater at resorts. caballos-lascurain (1996: 13) has pointed out that enclave tourism development does not typically take into account the needs of the communities surrounding a resort. in the whistler resort in canada, a progrowth model of tourism development has led to the rise of no-growth interests among local residents. there has been a call for more affordable housing and schools, and a better consideration of environmental conditions affecting the residents’ quality of life. locals have wanted whistler to be seen not only as a tourist resort but also as a community (gill & williams 2011: 636, 638). arell (2000: 125) has noted in the rural scandinavian context that the spatial concentration of tourism development has had downsides to small-scale tourism enterprises located outside the resort. also, in the finnish lapland, local villagers have experienced the resort-oriented tourism strategies as more beneficial to tourist resorts than to them (hakkarainen & tuulentie 2008: 11). in conclusion, tourism concentrates on certain areas because both natural characteristics of a region and its socioeconomic factors vary between different localities. as conceptualized by brouder and eriksson (2013: 378–379), regional socioeconomic structures offer distinct preconditions for a tourism sector to develop. the growth or the decline of the tourism industry in a certain region is affected by the economic development history of the region, i.e. previous events and choices made in the past. it is noteworthy, however, that in principle regional actors have the capability to alter the course of development, i.e. break the path dependence of development. networking practices can be regarded as an example of such intentional actions. a call for network cooperation the wider regional economy could benefit from resort tourism development if tourism enterprises are capable of taking advantage of their close proximity and, at the same time, let positive income and employment impacts spread to surrounding areas (agarwal 2012: 1473). in this process of tourism and community development, both tourism business networks (novelli et al. 2006; lagos & courtis 2008) and the connections of tourism businesses to other local livelihoods (telfer & wall 2000; saarinen 2006; agarwal 2012; graci 2013) have been considered vital. network cooperation in tourism development can happen, for instance, in the process of marketing a tourism region. typically, relatively small tourism enterprises can benefit from the economies of scale as they together create a critical mass of tourism enterprises and attractions which they then promote collectively to create a regional wellknown tourism brand (meyer-cech 2005: 146; wang & fesenmaier 2007: 865). the geographical proximity of firms in a business cluster has not been regarded as a sufficient condition to enhance knowledge transfer. furthermore, cognitive, organizational, social, and institutional proximity impact how effortless interactive learning is (boschma 2005: 71). therefore, the joint actions of tourism actors, i.e. intentional cooperation, have a central role in fostering growth and competitiveness in rural tourism areas (schmitz 1999: 468–469; williams & copus 2005: 307, 317). as koster (2007) describes, “development of tourism at a regional level means the various communities, which comprise a region, will cooperate and integrate their collective attractions, capital, infrastructure, and natural and human resources in such a way to promote the region as a destination to potential tourists”. similarly brouder and eriksson (2013: 379–383) state that the economic success in rural communities is dependent on the capabilities of individuals and firms to exploit and recombine existing local human capital and create new knowledge. intensified knowledge transfer is regarded to result in an increase in the adaptability of the enterprises, which then raises the innovativeness and competitiveness of a tourism region (weidenfeld et al. 2010: 607, 617). although the link between knowledge transfer and the growth in competitiveness has been difficult to prove empirically in the context of different fields of businesses and different spatial scales, the connection has been widely used as a theoretical starting point in network studies, also in tourism research (see weidenfeld et al. 2010: 604). despite its importance, cooperation at a regional level has its challenges. as carson et al. (2013: 13–14) note, tourism actors can have a low engagement to cooperate within an externally defined tourism region. this is due to the local culture of operating in isolation because of not know8 fennia 194: 1 (2016)outi kulusjärvi ing the possible benefits of the cooperation activities, as well as to the reliance on public sector leadership. tourism actors can have general lack of capacity to develop networking and cooperation practices, even locally. weidenfeld et al. (2010: 617) have explained the lack of regional cooperation by tourism actors’ unwillingness to learn from geographically proximate enterprises offering similar products due to their competitive relations. the distance, due to which competition grows too intense, is case-specific depending on, for example, tourist amounts. as joshi et al. (2009: 241) note, a sense of solidarity would motivate entrepreneurs to cooperate. despite the challenges in cooperation at a regional level, even short-term and externally-managed cooperation networks aiming to increase tourism in rural areas can have significant longterm benefits for the community. cooperation can increase tourism actors’ knowledge on the benefits of sustainability for tourism and also for communal development. moreover, they can give rise to the formation of new bottom up born cooperation in future (conway & cawley 2012). as brouder (2012) has pointed out, when tourism development is endogenous and local tourism networks exist, tourism can enhance geographically bounded social capital giving rise to further rural development. case study area: ruka resort in kuusamo the case study area, the kuusamo municipality of finland, is a peripheral region at the national scale. it is sparsely populated and its natural environment is characterized by wilderness. hence, tourism in kuusamo is based on its pristine and topographically diverse natural environment. an important nature tourism attraction in the area is the pan park certified oulanka national park, with visitor numbers of 171,500 in 2011 (metsähallitus 2012). other pull factors are nature-based activities and accommodation, catering and transportation services (kauppila 1997). clearly, however, the ruka tourist resort (fig. 2) still attracts most tourists travelling to kuusamo. during the peak season, the resort can be considered a population center comparable to the municipality core when measured by the number of residents. a significant number of the tourism businesses active in kuusamo are located in ruka. for instance, 23,000 out of the total 40,000 beds and 28 out of 64 restaurants are located in the resort (ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys 2013). this is partly explained by the strategic choices made in tourism planning: since the 1970s, substantial public investments have been aimed at developing tourism in ruka. from the 1980s onwards, tourism in ruka was institutionalized, and it attracted especially mass tourism. after the economic depression of the 1990s, a new phase of development started. the city of kuusamo took part in the planning and a new tourism strategy was created (kauppila 2009: 227–229). in 2000, the number of tourism overnight stays in kuusamo was 260,000, and by the year 2010, the number had increased to 430,000 (kauppila 2012: 28). measured by growth in visitor numbers, tourism development has been successful during this period. the aim of the ruka tourism strategy created by the town of kuusamo in 2000 was to develop ruka into an international, year-round, diverse tourist resort that is connected with the wider tourism region (kuusamon kaupunki 2000: 5–6). in the vision for ruka, the following was outlined: “. businesses and societies will cooperate in producing leisure activities and services for business travel. in all practices, the principles of sustainable development will be followed and environmental values will be taken into account. local cultural history and diversity and pristine wilderness and fell environments and waterways will be the pull factors of tourism products. -“ as one part of the strategy, the town hired ecosign mountain resort planners ltd. to make a tourist resort plan for ruka between 2001–2003. the plan was to contribute to the strategic aims set (kuusamon kaupunki 2000: 5). the starting point for the planning work was the idea of a tourist resort as a compact, “humanly pleasing” pedestrian village. accommodation facilities were to be situated within a walking distance of the services. compact planning was said to contribute to sustainable development, which in this case referred to its ecological aspects. another principle goal of the planning was fostering regional cooperation, which meant marketing, trail maintenance, and other development work was to be done by a collective organization to which membership was to be compulsory (leikoski 2005: 116–117). today, the ruka pedestrian village (see fig. 2) hosts over 1000 beds, 15 restaurants, ten shops, and an unfennia 194: 1 (2016) 9resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism derground parking hall right next to the slopes (ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys 2014a). in addition, there are tourism businesses located outside the village. tourism development has evidently created income and employment in kuusamo. compared with other local industries, tourism offers the most employment opportunities. the direct employment impact of tourism industry was 674 full-time equivalent jobs in 2010, 7.9% of which fell to non-local seasonal workers (kauppila 2012: 22, 32). however, as kauppila (2004, 2011: 25–26, 28) has noted, the socio-economic benefits are unevenly distributed spatially within the region. according to him, the number and structure of the enterprises, jobs and permanent population have increased in the resort as the surrounding areas in the municipality have declined. for instance, the permanent population of ruka has increased from 175 to 347 during 1970–2007. if seasonal residents (workers, telecommuters and second home owners) were included in the numbers, the growth would be even higher. kuusamo, as a whole, still faces the common challenges of the so-called less favored areas: the population of 16,000 residents decreases and the unemployment rate of 14.7% (2013) is higher than the national average (kuusamon kaupunki 2011; pohjois-pohjanmaan ely-keskus 2013). according to kauppila (2011: 27–28), due to this polarization process, ruka has become a core located in a periphery in a northern periphery. there seems to be a need to reassess the extent to which tourism development in its current mode is capable of fostering the socio-economic well-being of local communities in kuusamo. research method in this preliminary study, the research data consists of semi-structured interviews conducted by the author with ten tourism actors in ruka in november 2012. interviews were chosen as the data collection method since the interest was to look at not only the spatial form of local tourism networks but also to see how the actual networking practices fig. 2. map of the ruka resort and the ruka pedestrian village. 10 fennia 194: 1 (2016)outi kulusjärvi are interconnected to the interviewees’ conceptions on tourism business networking and the destination. lynch et al. (2000) state that by studying human behavior it is possible to map the structure of networks and, at the same time, gain more indepth knowledge about the attitudes and values that impact behavior. it is possible to picture the networks both from the actors’ perspective and from ‘above’ (tinsley & lynch 2001: 370). the chosen research method connects with the theory of structuration by giddens (1979: 69) which sees structure and agency in a dialectical relationship. that is, structures impact the behavior of actors but, at the same time, their action (re)produces these structures. for instance, a business environment can affect how tourism actors view the importance of networking and are then willing to cooperate. then, their actions impact the kind of cooperation environment that is built. the interviewees were selected based on purposeful sampling from the contacts obtained in a previously conducted research in the area. nine of the interviewees are either management-level employees or entrepreneurs in local tourism businesses and one was the executive manager of the ruka-kuusamo tourism organization at the time. measured by the employment capacity, six of the enterprises are small (1–10 full-time equivalent jobs) and three are large (21 or more full-time equivalent jobs) in the kuusamo context. the interviewed actors represent the fields of businesses in tourism which get direct tourism income and which are expected to cooperate on tourism service production. these include three program providers, two accommodation agencies, one accommodation and catering service, one ski lift company, one maintenance company, one taxi company, and one regional tourism organization. almost all the enterprises produce services in other fields of businesses as well. for instance, five enterprises provide accommodation and catering services. due to the geographical focus of the current preliminary study, all the enterprises are located in the ruka resort. the interviewees were asked about their thoughts on networking: the current state of cooperation, its importance and benefits, challenges and hoped-for future prospects. by including the spatial dimension in the conversation, it was possible not only to illustrate the spatial construction of the networks but also to understand the social factors that impact the networking. in the interviews, most informants candidly related about their views on the sensitive topic by telling about their experiences and expressing their personal opinions. however, a clear minority did not readily discuss the negative experiences of cooperation, especially if those were connected to a specific enterprise. also, whether the interviewees expressed their personal opinions or those that fit the official stance of the company varied between, but also within, the interviews. on the whole, however, results do not represent the ‘airbrushed’ state of networking but include the sensitive issues impacting the spatial construction of the cooperative networks. that was the main goal in using interviews as the data collection method. the collected data was analyzed by qualitative content analysis. the aim was to discover how the conceptions of networking differed according to the company’s location within the resort. attention was also given to the ways how the interviewees perceive their enterprises’ spatial sphere of operations, as well as to ruka and kuusamo as spatial entities. although the current interview data is not representative enough for a detailed quantitative analysis on the spatiality of tourism business cooperative relations, the collected data proved to be sufficient for answering the research question: “how are the local tourism business cooperative networks of the ruka tourist resort spatially constructed within the rukakuusamo tourism destination?” types and scales of cooperation the tourism actors in ruka acknowledge that their enterprises can benefit from tourism business cooperation. most often improving the enterprise’s reputation – usually the international reputation – was seen as the main benefit. in addition, the possibility of using the services and resources of other enterprises to complement one’s own products and services was considered important. although the interviewees noted that they do not always have enough resources to cooperate, they underlined the significance of the cooperation practices in ruka-kuusamo. cooperation was described as “the only way to success”, “the lifeline of everything” and “the cornerstone of operations”. however, the tourism actors had diverging opinions about which kinds of cooperation were the best for achieving the desired benefits as well as within which areas to cooperate. these issues will be considered next. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 11resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism joint marketing at the regional scale when asking the interviewees about whether the enterprises in ruka cooperate with businesses located outside the resort, i.e. elsewhere in kuusamo, the interviewees answered in the affirmative. evidently, however, tourism businesses cooperate at a regional scale mainly in joint marketing. they agree on its importance in regard to tourism destination competitiveness. increasing the prominence of the tourist destination was hoped to result in increased numbers of tourists in the region, which was regarded as a benefit by both small and large businesses. it seems that even the largest companies do not have enough resources to gain an international reputation on their own. in kuusamo, destination-scale joint marketing is coordinated by the ruka-kuusamo tourism organization, which was founded in 2002 by the largest tourism businesses in the region and by the town of kuusamo (ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys 2014b). today, the organization is comprised of 160 member companies (rytkönen 2012) who represent 90% of all the tourism revenue received by the tourism enterprises in the municipality. the organization is responsible for marketing the tourism region both in finland and internationally (ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys ry 2014c). however, in some enterprises, joint marketing at the municipality scale may not be considered a priority in their marketing cooperation practices. one of the interviewed entrepreneurs (from a large company operating in the ruka pedestrian village) noted that in order to achieve an international reputation, joint marketing should be done in a larger area than just the municipality. he described this as follows: “of course we try to push the regional cooperation forward all the time, to expand it. and i see that in international tourism the whole northern finland is this area. when the aim is to go to the international markets, there kuusamo is such a small region that its money is definitely not enough to make itself visible. if the whole northern finland is there, its money is in a league of its own. then it is possible to even achieve something visible.” according to the interviewee, the more businesses participating in marketing cooperation, the better. however, he did not believe that it was essential to have the small enterprises located outside the resort involved in the joint marketing. from the perspective of the interviewed small enterprises, this issue was somewhat different. they want to be involved in joint marketing. furthermore, they wish to ensure that all cooperating enterprises get their share of the tourist flows and income. there is a call for joint sales in which the practice of allocating the income is agreed upon in advance. in this way, enterprises would cooperate not only in attracting customers to the region but also in sharing the “business pie” created (cf. brandenburger & nalebuff 1998: 14). as the results show, it is mainly marketing cooperation that happens at a regional scale. it is worth noting that although the member companies cooperate on marketing activities, this does not necessarily mean that they cooperate in practice or are in contact with each other. formal joint marketing relations, at their narrowest, can be based solely on belonging to the same organization, i.e. paying the membership fee. spatial concentration of cooperative production networks unlike in joint marketing, production cooperation requires of an enterprise at least some knowledge of other businesses and their services, actual contact with them, or joint actions. in this paper, the concept “production cooperation” refers to those activities that enterprises do together in order to produce tourism services (e.g. accommodation, programs, catering) for their customers. this occurs, for instance, when an enterprise buys products or services from another company. if a cooperating partner operates as a subcontractor, the product is offered to the customers under the name of the main supplier. alternatively, businesses can work as more equal partners, in which case products may also be developed in cooperation. production cooperation can be planned, for example, in the long-term joint production of program providers, or it can happen on an ad hoc basis, as in event production. the need to cooperate in service production emerges because businesses tend to specialize only in some tourism services, and few enterprises are capable of offering all the services customers need during their stay. production cooperation can occur between the fields of tourism business (e.g. accommodation service buying program services), within a field of business (e.g. larger program providers buying services from smaller enterprises such as reindeer or husky farms or fishing program providers) or even between businesses offering similar 12 fennia 194: 1 (2016)outi kulusjärvi products (e.g. when a program provider hires extra staff or equipment from a similar business). in the ruka resort, enterprises cooperate in producing tourism services, and businesses have lasting and well-functioning cooperation partnerships. nevertheless, it is noteworthy that cooperative production networks appear to concentrate geographically. the majority of cooperative networks are clustered in the ruka pedestrian village which is the very core area of the ruka resort, although, some businesses utilize services outside the pedestrian village as well as outside the resort. that is, the area of most cooperation in production is yet smaller than the resort and seems to exclude the enterprises located outside the very core. according to the interviewees operating in the pedestrian village, cooperation functions well there. enterprises located in the village have cooperated for years, and interviewees claimed that there was a good spirit among the oldest companies. the interviewed tourism actors distinguish the pedestrian village, built at the foot of the front slopes, from the other parts of the resort. the tourism actors in the village, as well as those operating outside of it, refer to the very core area as “the ruka village”, “the upper village” or “the center of ruka”. the village borders namely refer to the pedestrian village, which the interviewees described as being situated “high up” and “on top”. for instance, the upper village is clearly marked as separate from the business area located away from the slopes further downhill, which is referred to as ‘down’ in comparison to the pedestrian village. the main body organizing the business cooperation in the village is the ruka pedestrian village organization (hereafter rpvo). its aim is to put the village on the map, improve its attractiveness, increase customer numbers, and make the operational preconditions better for the tourism actors in the village (rukan kävelykyläyhdistys ry 2014). in principle, businesses located outside the village are also allowed to join the association. however, one interviewee mentioned: “joining the association actually gets an enterprise nowhere as such if it is located further away. in the constitution of the organization it is outlined that the actions are tethered to the upper village here. the aim of all the association’s operations is to increase the revenue of the member companies. if an event is organized, it is organized here; we never go down there, close to the grocery store, to do it. then it does not really benefit them [the companies located outside the pedestrian village] at all.” the member businesses of the rpvo are mainly located in the pedestrian village, which the interviewees considered understandable. the interviewee justified the sphere of the organization’s actions by the constitution of the village that he presented as neutral, as if defined by an outsider. thus, the interviews show that tourism actors in the pedestrian village perceive the operational environment of their businesses as being concentrated in the pedestrian village. the interviewed entrepreneurs located in the pedestrian village see the benefits of production cooperation to be best achieved by cooperating at the village scale. this was evident in the comments of one interviewee: “absolutely, it is important that the tourism entrepreneurs cooperate in ruka. otherwise we would not have founded this kind of ruka pedestrian village organization in the area. around 90 percent of all the businesses in the village are now members. the only way to succeed is to cooperate.” from the perspective of the interviewed businesses located outside the pedestrian village elsewhere in ruka, the current scale of production cooperation perceived differently. many of the interviewed actors see the business connections with the ruka pedestrian village as beneficial, and hence, consider it problematic that the cooperative production networks of the village are mainly concentrated in that area. an entrepreneur from outside the village illustrated his experience of cooperation with the village as follows: “they are so big and strong companies and they cooperate with each other. it is very difficult to get in. i have tried it, with very bad results, though. with such results that i will not go there again.” one possible way to enter the village cooperative networks was said to be to open a new office for one’s enterprise in the village. however, the high rents were considered as hindering small businesses from operating at the very core of ruka. another possibility of gaining access was to cooperate with an enterprise that is located elsewhere in kuusamo but also has an office in the pedestrian village. consequently, the pedestrian village was found to be a space where it is hard for tourism actors located outside to go and do business. furthermore, the interviewees indicated that the use of public spaces is governed rather by the businesses in the village than the town of kuusamo, which owns the land. for instance, some of the business actors operating outside the very core felt that they fennia 194: 1 (2016) 13resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism are not allowed to bring promotional material to the pedestrian village. it seems that to the tourism actors located outside the village, the area is seen as more of a private than a public space. based on the study results, the tourism enterprises in ruka are interested in cooperating with such tourism areas that have better visibility and attract more tourists than their own. commonly, the enterprises located outside the pedestrian village hope to cooperate with the village, whereas the businesses at the very core wish to get connections to the higher regional level. at the same time, the aim of the businesses to keep their customers within the range of their company in order to get as large a share as possible of tourists’ spending seems to reduce the willingness to cooperate. to the businesses in the pedestrian village, cooperation in production with the enterprises outside the core does not always seem essential since they are able to capitalize on the natural environment of the surrounding areas without cooperation, for instance, by having their own accommodation and safaris in the surrounding areas. furthermore, as most tourist flows concentrate in the core area of the resort, there does not seem to be a strong need for production cooperation with the surrounding areas. discussion and conclusions this paper has given an account of the local-scale tourism networking in the rural areas of resort-oriented tourism development. as the study results have demonstrated, resort-oriented tourism development seems to make cooperative networks similarly resort-centered. the businesses located in the ruka resort cooperate at the ruka-kuusamo destination scale mainly in marketing while their partners in production cooperation are located mostly within the resort. the cooperative production networks, the ones that require actual contact and joint actions with other businesses, concentrate particularly in the very core area of the resort. this contributes mainly to the development of the core areas alone and hinders the surrounding rural areas from benefitting from the positive impacts of tourism development, since it is production cooperation that could channel tourism income spatially. currently, production cooperation is likely to be insufficient distributing the benefits of tourism development in the way whereby the finnish tourism strategies intend them to do. in regard to strengthen the sustainable regional development impacts of tourism, cooperation in marketing should not be regarded as a sufficient way to cooperate. this paper has demonstrated that, for smaller enterprises outside the core, it can be difficult to benefit from the growth of the resort’s core and its tourist flows through network relations. this is because the role of the businesses located outside the resort may be regarded as inconsequential by some tourism actors. the experiences of small enterprises indicate their lack of power in networks. this is due to the fact that production cooperation with the surrounding areas is not essential to the large enterprises in the very core. therefore, they are able to exclude the smaller enterprises located outside the core from the cooperative production networks. for the businesses in the ruka pedestrian village, resort-centered cooperation in tourism production seems justified in terms of tourism growth. as noted by koster (2007: 140), a shortsighted interest in developing an individual community only creates resistance to cooperate within the scope of the wider tourism region. spatial concentration of the cooperative networks can have, in the long run, negative effects also on the growth and development of the businesses in the core. in a case where local smes in the surrounding areas are left out of the networks, it is axiomatic that their knowledge of and connections to the local community and natural environment are also excluded from tourism services. as arell (2000: 131) has pointed out, when enterprises network effectively within a large area and utilize the local traditions and know-how of older generations for the tourism development of today, the tourism region can become creative and successful. similarly brouder and eriksson (2013: 138) note that the access to and the invocation of local knowledge contributes to the survival of new micro-firms in the rural tourism industry. in terms of tourism supply, by way of core-periphery cooperation, it would be possible to diversify the supply of services of the destination and attract a wider range of market segments (viken & aarsaether 2013: 38). in the case of the finnish lapland, the local characteristics could be utilized for profiling the relatively similar tourist resorts (lapin liitto 2007: 31). based on the aforementioned notions of long-term business success and sustainable regional development, a move towards a destination region-based tourism should be made. then, tourism development would better contribute to socioeconomic development and well-being in local communities. 14 fennia 194: 1 (2016)outi kulusjärvi spatial identification and destination development based on the results of the current study, there is a social division and lack of networking between the core and the surrounding areas in kuusamo. the tourism actors in the ruka resort typically associate themselves primarily with the closest sphere of operations. for actors who are located in the very core of the resort, this area can be very small, the ruka pedestrian village. the pedestrian village located ‘up’ appears to be higher not only in altitude but also in the tourism actors’ perceptions of value. that is, resort-oriented tourism development has created a space in a resort weakly connected to the local small-scale tourism development outside the core via networking relations. thus, the core is a differentiated area not only measured by its economic and demographic characteristics but also in a sociocultural sense. this attests to the enclave nature of resort-oriented tourism development also in the scandinavian context. the tourist resort appears to function as a basis for spatial identification for tourism actors. however, there is not necessarily one clear or a collectively shared identity. the tourism actors within the resort are not an internally homogeneous group. the heterogeneity of the local actors creates challenges for the destination development. the spatial scale of identification seems to be significant in determining which area is conceived as the area for tourism growth and development. when entrepreneurs perceive the resort as the principal area of their operations, they do not particularly engage with the surrounding rural areas and businesses or with other actors located there. then, this affects how entrepreneurs are motivated to cooperate at the local and regional scale. the current study has demonstrated how the spatial identification of local tourism actors is linked to the spatial construction of local and regional tourism networks. from another perspective, networking practices have a role in (re)producing tourism destinations as social and functional spatial entities. this is because, as with any region, also tourism destinations are constructs that are continuously built and re-built in socio-spatial practices at different spatial scales. regional structures affect the way local actors identify with the region and, in turn, produce it in their daily (net)working practices. in other words, the becoming of a tourism destination is affected simultaneously by territorial and relational processes. while these processes operate in the global-local nexus, they are also locallybased and historically contingent (see paasi 1991, 2009, 2011). as the current study has indicated, the spatial identification of tourism actors is connected to the construction of local tourism networks. in tourism research, attention should be paid to this co-constitution of territorial structures and relational agency in tourism destination transformation, as saarinen (2014: 51) has argued. thus, it will be central to study local tourism stakeholder’s views and agency related to tourism networking and destination change. pro-sustainable tourism research and policies should recognize and encourage local tourism actors’ possibilities to take part in local tourism networks, reproduce them, and, in this way, affect the course of destination’s future development. acknowledgements i highly appreciate the anonymous reviewers for their comments that improved the manuscript. i am also grateful to the colleagues at the department of geography for their advice, especially to mikko kesälä for making the maps. i would like to acknowledge the academy of finland for research funding (relate coe, 272168). references agarwal s 2012. resort economy and direct economic linkages. annals of tourism research 39: 3, 1470–1494. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.04.001. arell n 2000. the evolution of tourism in the tärna mountains. in brown f & hall d (eds). tourism in peripheral areas: case studies, 91–100. channel view publications, clevedon, uk. boschma ra 2005. proximity and innovation: a critical assessment. regional studies 39: 1, 61–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0034340052000320887. brandenburger am & nalebuff bj 1998. co-opetition. doubleday, new york. braun p 2005. creating value to tourism products through tourism networks and clusters: uncovering destination value chains. in proceedings of the oecd-korea international tourism conference “global tourism growth: a challenge for smes”. gwangju, korea, september 6–7, 2005. britton sg 1982. the political economy of tourism in the third world. annals of tourism research 9: 3, 331–358. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(82)90018-4. brouder p 2012. creative outposts: tourism's place in rural innovation. tourism planning & development 9: 4, 383–396. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2012.726254. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 15resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism brouder p & eriksson rh 2013. staying power: what influences micro-firm survival in tourism? tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 15: 1, 125–144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2011.647326. burns pm 1999. paradoxes in planning. tourism elitism or brutalism? annals of tourism research 26: 2, 329–348. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(98)00099-1. burns pm 2004. tourism planning: a third way? annals of tourism research 31: 1, 24–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2003.08.001. caballos-lascurain h 1996. tourism, ecotourism and protected areas. iucn, gland, switzerland. carson da, carson db & hodge h 2013. understanding local innovation systems in peripheral tourism destinations. tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 16: 3, 457–473. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2013.868030. conway t & cawley m 2012. organizational networking in an emerging ecotourism destination. tourism planning & development 9: 4, 397–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2012.726256. friedmann j 1966. regional development policy: a case study of venezuela. the m.i.t. press, massachusetts. getz d 1981. tourism and rural settlement policy. scottish geographical magazine 97: 3, 158–168. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00369228108736501. giddens a 1979. central problems in social theory. action, structure and contradictions in social analysis. macmillan, london. gill am & williams pw 2011. rethinking resort growth: understanding evolving governance strategies in whistler, british columbia. journal of sustainable tourism 19, 4–5: 629–648. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2011.558626. graci s 2013. collaboration and partnership development for sustainable tourism. tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 15: 1, 25–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2012.675513. hakkarainen m & tuulentie s 2008. tourism’s role in rural development of finnish lapland: interpreting national and regional strategy documents. fennia 186: 1, 3–13. hall cm & page sj 1999. the geography of tourism and recreation: environment, place and space. routledge, london. huybers t & bennett j 2003. inter-firm cooperation at nature-based tourism destinations. journal of socio-economics 32, 571–587. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2003.08.011. joshi a, lazarova m & liao h 2009. getting everyone on board: the role of inspirational leadership in geographically dispersed teams. organization science 20: 1, 240–252. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1080.0383. kauppila p 1997. miksi kuusamoon? tutkimus kuusamon kesävetovoimatekijöistä. nordia tiedonantoja 3. pohjois-suomen maantieteellinen seura ja oulun yliopiston maantieteen laitos, oulu. kauppila p 2004. matkailukeskusten kehitysprosessi ja rooli aluekehityksessä paikallistasolla: esimerkkeinä levi, ruka, saariselkä ja ylläs. nordia geographical publications 33: 1. the geographical society of northern finland and the department of geography, university of oulu, oulu. kauppila p 2009. the development process of ruka tourist resort. in hall m, müller dk & saarinen j (eds). nordic tourism. issues and cases, 226–229. channel view publications, bristol. kauppila p 2011. cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study in finland. fennia 189: 1, 20–31. kauppila p 2012. matkailu, kaivostoiminta ja aluekehitys: esimerkkeinä kuusamo, kittilä ja sotkamo. in kauppila p & kuosku k (eds). kuusamon aluetalousraportti. tutkimuksia 1/2012, 44–168. koillis-suomen naturpolis kehittämisyhtiö oy, kuusamo. koster r 2007. a regional approach to rural tourism development: towards a conceptual framework for communities in transition. loisir et société / society and leisure 30: 1, 133–156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07053436.2007.10707743. kuusamon kaupunki 2000. ruka 2005. unpublished report. kuusamon kaupunki, kuusamo. kuusamon kaupunki 2011. talousarvio 2012. taloussuunnitelma 2013–2014. kuusamon kaupunki. lagos d & courtis pg 2008. business clusters formation as a means of improving competitiveness in the tourism sector. european research studies xi, 1–2. lapin liitto 2007. lapin matkailustrategia 2007–2010. julkaisu a22/2008. lapin liitto, rovaniemi. lapin liitto 2011. lappi – elämänvoimaa. matkailustrategia 2011–2014. lapin liitto, rovaniemi. leikoski e (ed) 2005. ruka. ensimmäiset 50 vuotta. rukakeskus oy, helsinki. lynch p, halcro k, johns n, buick i & gillham m 2000. networks and networking: a strategic tool for small hotel survival and success? in williams a (ed). proceedings of the 9th annual chme hospitality research conference, 114–124. huddersfield, april 26–27, 2000. metsähallitus (2012). kansallispuistojen, valtion retkeilyalueiden ja eräiden muiden suojeluja virkistysalueiden kävijöiden rahankäytön paikallistaloudelliset vaikutukset vuonna 2011. <http://www.metsa.fi/sivustot/metsa/fi/eraasiatjaretkeily/virkistyskaytonsuunnittelu/suojelualueidenmerkityspaikallistaloudelle/sivut/kansallispuistoihinsijoitetutrahatpalautuvatmonikertaisina. aspx> 21.02.2014. meyer-cech k 2005. regional cooperation in rural theme trails. in hall d, kirkpatrick i & mitchell m (eds). rural tourism and sustainable business, 137–148. channel view publications, clevedon, uk. montanari a & williams am 1995. introduction: tourism and economic restructuring in europe. in 16 fennia 194: 1 (2016)outi kulusjärvi montanari a & williams am (eds). european tourism, 1–15. john wiley & sons, chichester. murphy p 1985. tourism: a community approach. methuen, london. müller dk 2011. conclusion: polar tourism for regional development? in grenier aa & müller dk (eds). polar tourism: a tool for regional development, 251–255. presses de l’université du québec, québec. müller dk & brouder p 2014. dynamic development or destined to decline? the case of arctic tourism businesses and local labour markets in jokkmokk, sweden. in viken a & granås b (eds). tourism destination development: turns and tactics. ashgate, farnham. nelson r & winter s 1982. an evolutionary theory of economic change. harvard university press, cambridge. novelli m, schmitz b & spencer t 2006. networks, clusters and innovation in tourism: a uk experience. tourism management 27: 6, 1141–1152. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2005.11.011. oppermann m 1996. rural tourism in southern germany. annals of tourism research 23: 1, 86–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(95)00021-6. paasi a 1991. deconstructing regions: notes on the scales of spatial life. environment and planning a 23: 2, 239–256. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a230239. paasi a 2009. regional geography i. in kitchin r & thrift n (eds). international encyclopedia of human geography, 214–277. elsevier, amsterdam. paasi a 2011. the region, identity, and power. procedia social and behavioral sciences 14, 9–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2011.03.011. papatheodorou a 2004. exploring the evolution of tourism resorts. annals of tourism research 31: 1, 219–237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2003.10.004. pearce dg 1981. topics in applied geography. tourist development. longman, london. pohjois-pohjanmaan ely-keskus 2013. työllisyyskatsaus 06/2013. <http://www.ely-keskus.fi/documents/10191/235106/tyollisyyskatsaus_kesakuu_2013.pdf/effbbcc6-4349-4221-9ae0d8d9418c9234> 19.08.2014. pohjois-pohjanmaan liitto 2011. pohjois-pohjanmaan matkailustrategia 2015. pohjois-pohjanmaan liitto, oulu. ribeiro m & marques c 2002. rural tourism and the development of less favoured areas. international journal of tourism research 4, 211–220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jtr.377. ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys ry 2013. rukan ja kuusamon matkailun faktoja. <http://www.ruka. f i / t a l v i / e t u s i v u / ? f i l e = c o n t e n t _ exec&id=140&submenu=174> 10.10.2013. ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys ry 2014a. rukan ja kuusamon matkailun faktoja. <http://www.ruka. f i / t a l v i / e t u s i v u / ? f i l e = c o n t e n t _ exec&id=140&submenu=174> 27.02.2014. ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys ry 2014b. ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys ry. <http://www.ruka.fi/talvi/ yritykset/?file=target_exec&id=886> 24.02.2014. ruka-kuusamo matkailuyhdistys ry 2014c. rukakuusamo matkailuyhdistys. <http://www.rukax. fi/web/guest/yhdistys> 24.02.2014. rukan kävelykyläyhdistys ry 2014. rukan kävelykyläyhdistys ry. <http://www.rukankavelykylayhdistys.fi/index.asp> 21.03.2014. rytkönen t 2012. executive manager of ruka-kuusamo tourism organization. interview conducted in ruka, 16.10.2012. saarinen j 2004. ‘destinations in change’. the transformation process of tourist destinations. tourist studies 4: 2, 161–179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468797604054381. saarinen j 2006. tourism in peripheries: the role of tourism in regional development in northern finland. in müller d & jansson b (eds). tourism in peripheries: perspectives from the far north and south, 41–52. cabi publishing, wallingford. saarinen j 2008. contradictions of rural tourism initiatives in rural development contexts: finnish rural tourism strategy case study. current issues in tourism 10: 1, 96–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/cit287.0. saarinen j 2014. critical sustainability: setting the limits to growth and responsibility in tourism. sustainability 6, 1–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su6010001. schmitz h 1999. collective efficiency and increasing returns. cambridge journal of economics 23, 465–483. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cje/23.4.465. telfer dj & wall g 2000. strengthening backward economic linkages: local food purchasing by three indonesian hotels. tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 2: 4, 421–447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/146166800750035521. tinsley r & lynch p 2001. small tourism business networks and destination development. hospitality management 20: 4, 367–378. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0278-4319(01)00024-x. työja elinkeinoministeriö 2010. suomen matkailustrategia 2020. työja elinkeinoministeriö, helsinki. viken a & aarsaether n 2013. transforming an iconic attraction into a diversified destination: the case of north cape tourism. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 13: 1, 38–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2013.771994. walpole mj & goodwin hj 2000. local economic impacts of dragon tourism in indonesia. annals of tourism research 27: 3, 559–576. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(99)00088-2. wang y & dr fesenmaier 2007. collaborative destination marketing: a case study of elkhart county, indiana. tourism management 28, 863–875. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2006.02.007. weaver db 1998. peripheries of the periphery: tourism in tobago and barbuda. annals of tourism research 25: 2, 292–313. fennia 194: 1 (2016) 17resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0160-7383(97)00094-7. weidenfeld a, williams am & butler rw 2010. knowledge transfer and innovation among attractions. annals of tourism research 37: 3, 604–626. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2009.12.001. williams f & copus a 2005. business development, rural tourism, and the implications of milieu. in hall d, kirkpatrick i & mitchell m (eds). rural tourism and sustainable business, 305–322. channel view publications, clevedon, uk. williams am & shaw g 1998. tourism & economic development. european experiences. john wiley & sons, chichester. dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in rural finland markku tykkyläinen tykkyläinen, markku (2006). dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in rural finland. fennia 184: 2, pp. 151–167. helsinki. issn 00150010. this study analyses the socio-economic transformation of finnish peripheral areas. changes are scrutinised in the context of industrial restructuring in order to unravel the mechanisms that impact on rural transformation. a policy shift towards rationalisation of the primary sector commenced in the mid-1960s, and regional policy promoted rural industrialisation. in recent years depopulation combined with improving productivity in services has restricted the growth of public sector employment in the northern, north-eastern and eastern parts of the country. the analysis ends by scrutinising the impacts of the boom in the information and communication technology sector on the rural economic landscape at the turn of the millennium. two geographically almost identical industrial development patterns are detected: the regional policy-based rural manufacturing boom of the 1970s and the reindustrialisation period at the turn of the millennium, led by the growth and spatial expansion of the information and telecommunication technology cluster. markku tykkyläinen, department of geography, university of joensuu, po box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: markku.tykkylainen@joensuu.fi. ms received 21 december 2006. formation of the rural economic landscape rural economic systems throughout the developed world are very much regulated by national policies and increasingly by global pressures of competition. regulation theories argue that the main forces for socio-economic changes occur within national economies and that the world economy consists of relations between national economies and their institutions (lipietz 1986). these theories emphasise that structural changes can be explained by specific national modes of production, and many research papers have demonstrated a greater readiness to address the social and institutional regulation of regional spaces as well (collinge 1999; krätke 1999; macleod & jones 1999). regulative principles are applicable to rural settings, as has been demonstrated by marsden (1998), although the mainstream policies of the current era have been focused more on deregulation than on regulation in many countries. emphasis now tends to be placed on explanations based on shifts towards new societal structures, influenced by such tendencies as post-productionism, post-fordism, the information society, globalisation and competition between regions and localities. changes in regulative regimes on any geographical scale are likely to lead to rural restructuring, but it is also obvious that various other economic and societal factors, such as globalisation, improvements in productivity, economic integration and competition, are having increasingly strong impacts on rural economic development. rural economies are affected by various institutions and development policies, e.g. land use planning, conservation, rural industrial policy and the provision of public services. land ownership differs from country to country, leading to different agricultural and forest management systems. furthermore, the composition of the farming system (i.e. size of farms, specialisation, etc.) is influenced by national legislation and institutions and the cultural and industrial legacy of each region. rural development is deeply rooted in the history of each country, often originating from fundamental 152 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen political processes such as colonisation, land reforms or measures enacted in response to unemployment and migration. jones (1997) introduced the notion of spatial selectivity to interpret the dynamics of local change. if development in particular areas is supported by geographically varying policy measures, this concept of spatial selectivity could be useful when attempting to explain differences in development paths and societal structures between these areas. spatial selectivity implies that the state has a tendency to confer privileges on certain areas through various development policy instruments, as has actually been the case in finland and the eu. in this finnish regulative environment the modes of production in the various branches of the primary sector (such as agriculture and forestry) are far from being market-based. in a parallel manner, rural industrialisation in remote areas is regulated by various policy measures such as regional and structural policies. since the late 1980s industrial and regional development has been promoted in conjunction with universities and research and development activities, with the aim of helping finland to develop into an advanced information society (castells & himanen 2001; vuorinen et al. 2005). the notion of path dependence has been proposed to enrich our understanding of the capacity of regions and rural areas to adjust to restructuring (boschma & lambooy 1999), although it has usually been applied to studies dealing with the problems of old industrial regions and transitional economies. these studies nevertheless illustrate how path dependence can create difficulties for regions in generating advanced production and adapting to new modes of institutional organisation. the notion of inertia, or negative lock-in, seems to be highly relevant for describing the lack of adaptability shown in this type of region. such regions are too easily regarded as fairly homogenous entities, characterised by particular technoindustrial structures and institutional environments that are strongly geared towards their industrial past, so that sectors and even whole regions can become locked into rigid trajectories because their techno-industrial legacy from the past (in terms of resources, competences and socio-institutional structures) has eroded or weakened their ability to adjust to changes. this idea could also be specified to a rural setting. on the other hand, the process of dependence can also work other way round. path dependence can be a sequence of creative development (park & lee 2004). knowledge creation depends on the knowledge already accumulated within the actors and organisations in a region, and is therefore cumulative and integrative. the accumulation of innovative knowledge leads to the formation of a path of lively industrial development. the cumulative nature of the technological process narrows down the range of potential choices, but it may lead to a trajectory entailing the accumulation of innovations, and can thus be regarded as self-reinforcing path creation, a situation of positive lockin. park and lee (2004) employ this concept to explain the success of the finnish economy, boosted by the national innovation system. from a rural perspective, however, the crucial issue is what the impacts of such a nationwide path creation process may be for rural areas, given that it is not endogenous from the beginning. this article depicts and theorises upon the transformation of the finnish rural areas from a nationally and spatially selectively controlled industrialising society into a part of the contemporary information society. finnish regional and industrial regulative practices are discussed in the context of geographical changes in industry in order find the factors and dependences which impact on rural transformation. the article scrutinises the impacts of the boom in the information and communication technology sector on rural industrialisation at the turn of the millennium and analyses the role of service provision in geographical restructuring and demographic changes. the manifestations of recent developments indicate the competitiveness and potential that rural areas display. national policies and rural transformation livelihoods in rural areas of finland have been very much regulated by the national policy instruments governing agriculture, forestry and manufacturing during the 20th century (palomäki 1980). because of the country’s geographical position, national self-sufficiency in food products and a dispersed settlement structure have been favoured in societal policy for decades (katajamäki 1988; granberg 1989). finland is the european union’s most sparsely-populated country, where regional structures have largely been determined by the logistics of the resource-based sector until the recent fennia 184: 2 (2006) 153dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … times (kortelainen 2002; stv 2006: 606–608). the immense growth of the electronics and telecommunication industries has taken place very recently, in the 1990s (tykkyläinen 2002). the diversification of the finnish economy has been proceeding gradually, in the context of policy changes. because of its specialisation and export orientation, the economy was in urgent need of reliable trading connections, and it was for this reason, and in order to establish economic stability, that finland opted for gradual integration into the european market. the country became an associated member of the european free trade association in 1961, then a full member in 1986, and finally a member of the european union in 1995. more recently, it has joined the euro and schengen areas. eu membership entailed the introduction of common agricultural policy financial support from the eu’s structural funds and various local initiative programmes. these new tools are now been used in conjunction with national regional policy measures. at the same time support for research and development activities continued and the centres of expertise policy for promoting innovative industries was launched (oecd 2005: 67–147). the new policy regime combining national and eu tools became effective in the mid1990s, just as the country was beginning to recover from the economic recession of the early 1990s. geography of rural settlements the post-wwii settlement policy which boosted rural growth for a long time came to an end in the mid-1960s, leading to a new manufacturing-oriented growth policy. during the late 1960s and early 1970s the finnish economy grew rapidly, and accelerated migration took place from the rural areas to the urban and urban-rural fringe areas. increasing numbers of people were being employed in the manufacturing and service sectors. the expansion of the welfare state in particular provided jobs in the towns, and also in the centres of over 400 rural municipalities (stv 1973: 3). the municipalities adjacent to the larger cities were the most rapidly growing rural areas in finland up to the 1990s, which this pattern changed along with the growth of the “new” economy. economic growth in the 1990s directed the largest migration surpluses first towards the central districts of the major cities instead of the urban-rural fringe areas (stv 2004: 150, 2005: 152), with accelerating migration from peripheral areas during the recovery (muilu & rusanen 2004: 1507), after which urbanisation once more targeted the urban-rural fringe areas in the late 1990s. the focus of this study is on the vast, intensely rural eastern and northern areas, which have traditionally posed problems for development (yli-jokipii & koski 1995). the northern part of finland (lapland and the north-eastern parts of north ostrobothnia), the eastern parts of central ostrobothnia, the northern parts of central finland and the majority of the east-central parts of the country (etelä-savo, pohjois-savo, north karelia and kainuu) constitute an objective 1 area, which has been receiving economic support from the eu over the period 2000–06 (fig. 1). farms in the east and north are smaller than those in the south, and forestry is an important source of income in the rural areas of pohjois-savo, etelä-savo and north karelia, and tourism in lapland. the objective 1 area constitutes the most peripheral part of the country and is the main target area for eu funding in finland. in 2000–06 it belonged to the same category of less-developed areas as the objective 1 areas in northern sweden, the more remote parts of ireland, large parts of portugal and spain, southern italy, the eastern part of germany and burgenland in austria. the geographical macro-regions of rural society in finland consist of the relatively wealthy and industrialised southern parts of the country and the west-coast ostrobothnian provinces characterised by small and medium-sized industries, including telecommunications industries, and farming. the inland part between 61 and 64 degrees of latitude consists of lake finland (raivo 2002: 92–93), where the rural landscapes are characterised by forest, industrial localities and scattered settlements. the underprivileged areas are the north and north-eastern borderlands, which consist of sparse rural settlements and forests with few urban areas, thus matching the definition of an objective 1 area (fig. 1). significant rural restructuring has been going on in the eastern and northern parts of the country for decades (eskelinen & fritsch 2006), and as a consequence, these areas have been a major focus of regional and rural development policy, even though production and population are concentrated in the southern regions. on the other hand, their rural manufacturing activities, for instance, are often linked to global production 154 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen fig. 1. nuts 3 regions, rural core and remote rural areas, and the objective 1 region. chains and come up to modern technological standards, which is not shown in the statistical averages. degree of rurality: socio-economics by geographical classifications when the finnish regional planning system was revised in the late 1990s, a new urban-rural classification was introduced on the basis of travel-towork areas and the socio-economic characteristics of municipalities. the traditional administrative divisions and the hierarchical classification of central places were set aside. in 1995 the official administrative division of municipalities into cities and rural districts was abolished, since when the concept of a rural community has become entirely a contractual matter; so that a municipality could declare itself either urban or rural. in 2001 there were 448 municipalities in the country, of which 338 considered themselves rural. according to this classification, about 36 per cent of the total population lived in rural areas. whatever the classification is, the rural population in finland is still large fennia 184: 2 (2006) 155dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … in proportional terms compared with figures for other high-income countries. a more specific classification of settlement structure gives more detailed results. according to statistics finland, 62.1 per cent of the population lived in urban municipalities in 2003, with 16.9 per cent in semi-urban and 20.3 per cent in rural municipalities. the definition of rural used here is rather complex (stv 2004: 77): municipalities are classified as rural if less than 60 per cent of their inhabitants live in urban settlements and if the population of the largest urban settlement is below 15,000, although the definition also includes areas where between 60 and 90 per cent of the population live in urban settlements, on condition that the largest urban settlement has fewer than 4000 inhabitants. the rural population defined in this way declined from 27.0 to 24.3 per cent between 1990 and 1995 and to 21.5 per cent (1,114,587 people) by 2000 (stv 2004: 77). in parallel with the economic recovery of the 1990s, migration accelerated and, in contrast to the situation in the 1980s, the larger cities absorbed a considerable proportion of the migrants (stv 2004: 150), although some went to suburban municipalities adjacent to cities. on a regional scale, out-migration hit the objective 1 area hard, and it was outlying districts such as kainuu that were most affected. according to another classification (keränen et al. 2000), the municipalities of finland can be grouped as urban (58), urban fringe (84), rural core (181) and remote rural (129). the remote rural municipalities are mainly located in the objective 1 area, while the rural core consists of the municipalities south of oulu in the western parts of finland (the ostrobothnian regions). this classification thus basically divides rural finland into two entities: the western and south-western rural core and the traditional forestry-based remote rural areas of the central, eastern and northern parts of the country. this classification was slightly revised in 2001, but the original version is still valid for depicting the rural core and remote rural areas in finland (elinvoimainen maaseutu 2004: 27–29). the classification into rural core and remote rural is used by statistics finland in its areal classification of rural indicators. in the newest classification, for the year 2006, the proportion of the land area assigned to remote areas has increased from 59.2 to 62.4 per cent compared with the classification of 2000 and the proportion of the population from 10.5 to 10.7 per cent (suomen maaseututyypit 2006). measured in the same way, the capacity of the rural core areas dwindled in favour of the rural remote areas and urban-rural fringe areas, reflecting ongoing spatio-economic restructuring. the indicators reveal certain socio-spatial characteristics related to the remoteness and structures of rural areas in finland (table 1). the size of the inactive population is greater than the national avtable 1. socio-economic indicators for rural finland. source: compiled from keränen et al. 2000 and the regional and industrial… 2005. indicator rural core % of finland remote rural % of finland finland, total number of municipalities 181 40.0 129 28.5 452 population, 1999 891,240 17.2 544,471 10.5 5,170,900 land area (sq. km), 1999 72,179 23.7 180,417 59.2 304,530 number of jobs, 1998 306,879 14.4 171,486 8.1 2,125,535 employed persons, 1998 342,151 16.1 184,376 8.7 2,125,535 taxed incomes (mill. eur), 1998 10,258 14.7 5,887 8.4 69,710 active farms, 1998 45,916 52.1 20,402 23.2 88,069 manufacturing (cde) personnel, 1998 71,248 16.0 26,789 6.0 444,467 avg. population per municipality 4,924 4,221 11,440 population density, inh./sq. km 12.3 3.0 17.0 inhabitants/jobs 2.9 3.2 2.4 employed persons/jobs 1.11 1.08 1.00 taxed income/inhabitants 11,600 10,812 13,481 inhabitants/active farms 19 27 59 land area (hectares)/active farms 157 884 347 156 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen erage, and incomes are below the national average. the ratio of employed persons to the number of jobs indicates that at least one-tenth of those who were employed had to commute to urban areas (table 1). remote rural municipalities are increasingly encountering problems with providing services because of the costs related to low population densities. considerable geographical differences between the rural core and remote rural areas exist in the composition of production in all economic sectors. most of the active farms are located in the rural core areas, and the farms in south and westcentral finland are bigger and more productive than those in the peripheries. the average field area per farm in 2003, for instance, was about 40 hectares in the southern and south-western nuts 3 regions (uusimaa, itä-uusimaa, and varsinaissuomi) but only 21 hectares in lapland and eteläsavo (stv 2004: 158). the sizes of forest holdings show precisely the opposite of this spatial pattern, being more than 100 hectares per farm in lapland and over 80 hectares in kainuu in contrast to 25 hectares in varsinais-suomi (seutukuntaja maakuntakatsaus 1998: 47). farms in the rural core and the urban-rural fringe municipalities – most of which are located in varsinais-suomi, uusimaa, satakunta, ostrobothnia and south ostrobothnia – concentrate on food production, whereas those in the remote rural areas still combine agriculture and forestry. in the north the role of the public sector is especially important, so that the public sector accounted for one-quarter of the value of gdp in kainuu and lapland, for instance, in the late 1990s as compared with only 15 per cent in the south (seutukuntaja maakuntakatsaus 1998: 75). from farming colonisation to efficient production economic development is very much dependent on past economic decisions, which form the chain of development stages referred to as path dependence. finland was highly rural at the beginning of the 20th century, and its economy was greatly dependent on natural resources. agriculture and forestry provided work for 70 per cent of the active population up to 1920, and this proportion declined to below 50 per cent only during world war ii (niinisalo 1974: 218). the number of farms reached its maximum, almost 300,000 holdings of arable land ≥ 2 hectares, in the mid-1960s (granberg 1989: 199), at the same time as the post-war settlement policy came to an end. the decline in employment in primary production gained momentum in the 1970s, when it decreased by an average of 5.2 per cent annually. the post-1965 restructuring of agriculture was a result of more efficient production on farms on the one hand, and of the fact that thousands of small farmers ceased production on the other. the decline continued during the 1980s and later (table 2), during which time restructuring has been rapid. while the overall number of farms has declined due to rationalisation pressure and will continue to do so, the number of larger farms has increased. the number of farms with over 50 hectares of field area, for example, was 2952 in 1980, and rose to 4764 in 1990, 10,897 in 2000 and 13,394 in 2005 (stv 2000: 136, 2006: 160). in spite of the decline in labour, agricultural production has remained high (stv 2004: 166). on the whole, politicians still give priority to national production, implying that the principles of the country’s agricultural policy have not changed fundamentally with eu membership, since increased efficiency at the farm level had already been set as a major political target in the mid1960s, when the colonisation phase had finally come to an end. this policy has continued into the new millennium. rural industrialisation rural growth patterns the number of people working in the manufacturing sector in rural areas increased by 46 per cent in the 1970s, followed by a decline in the 1980s and a recovery in the 1990s. during the last decades rural areas have acquired an increasing share of total employment in manufacturing (table 3). thus some of the jobs lost in the primary sector have – at least numerically – been compensated for by industrialisation. the geographical pattern of rural industrialisation in the 1970s operated partly according to the well-known production cycle model, which presupposes that an advanced industry will originate in the core and move to the periphery as its product goes into mass production (norton & rees 1979). empirical data on rural industrialisation in fennia 184: 2 (2006) 157dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … table 2. persons employed in agriculture and forestry, 1990–2005. source: stv 1992: 370, 1996: 334, 2000: 348, 2004: 158, 381 and 2006: 160, 408; labour force statistics 2001: 24; yearbook of farms statistics 2001: 55. agriculture and forestry: self-employed and employed persons (1000 persons) agriculture and forestry: employees as % of persons employed in the sector agriculture and forestry as % of the total in the economy all industries (1000 persons) number of active farms 1990 207 24 8.4 2,467 129,114 1991 198 26 8.5 2,340 126,084 1992 187 25 8.6 2,174 121,349 1993 173 25 8.5 2,041 116,281 1994 178 24 8.7 2,054 114,510 1995 170 26 8.1 2,099 99,964 1996 159 25 7.5 2,127 94,114 1997 153 24 7.1 2,169 90,203 1998 144 27 6.5 2,222 88,070 1999 144 28 6.3 2,296 … 2000 142 28 6.1 2,335 79,783 2001 135 28 5.7 2,367 77,320 2002 127 28 5.4 2,372 75,474 2003 120 28 5.1 2,365 73,714 2004 116 29 4.9 2,365 72,054 2005 116 31 4.8 2,401 69,517 note: employees in 1990–1993 according to the standard industrial classification 1988 (sf), other labour data according to the standard industrial classification 1995 (sf). including 893 farms possessing less than 1 hectare of arable land in 2000, 1001 farms in 2001, 1148 in 2002, 636 in 2003, 793 in 2004 and 570 in 2005. finland nowadays nevertheless demonstrate that new industries start mainly in peripheral areas, with the shift of existing activities from the south playing a minor role (jatila 2001). thus the main mechanism of rural industrialisation has been based on the development of new (but often mature-stage) light industry rather than relocation. this boom in the manufacturing sector has been supported by regional policy, but in spite of the rapid percentage increase it has not been able to prevent the considerable out-migration of population from rural areas. employment in manufacturing declined in almost all localities in the 1980s, although output grew. rural areas also suffered from deindustrialisation and more than one-tenth of the manufacturing jobs were lost in the 1980s. the decade ended in an economic boom, soon to be followed by a deep economic crisis in the early 1990s which was concomitant with that experienced in east central europe, leading to a decline in both manufacturing production (by 10 percent) and employment (by 20 percent). the industrial decline was especially severe in the sectors producing traditional consumer goods, such as shoes, clothes and ceramic ware, and the spatial outcome of the crisis was a drop in employment in most localities. manufacturing output gradually recovered from 1992 onwards, however, through a trend that originated predominantly in the high-tech sectors, while the losers were the traditional labour-intensive sectors, many of which had exported goods to the cmea countries during the 1970s and 1980s. a considerable part of this light industry was located in old industrial towns and rural peripheries. the growth of finnish industry continued towards the end of the 1990s, i.e. the number of manufacturing jobs increased, as did output, and finland returned to the growth rates of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the first wave of rural industrialisation had taken place. this was in effect a reindustrialisation. the leading growth sectors were now electronics and related industries, as the electronics sector (sic 32: communication equipment and apparatus) alone grew by an amazing 158 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen table 3. employment in the manufacturing sector. source: industrial statistics (various years); statfin 2001–2006; altika 2005; regional and industrial… 2005. personnel in the manufacturing sector (wage earners, salaried persons and owners) rural municipalities urban municipalities all municipalities year persons % persons % persons % 1970 82,711 17.0 405,092 83.0 487,803 100.0 1980 121,018 21.4 443,309 78.6 564,327 100.0 1990 105,110 22.9 354,351 77.1 459,461 100.0 1995 98,966 24.0 313,413 76.0 412,379 100.0 1998 111,360 26.1 315,051 73.9 426,411 100.0 change δ in % δ in % δ in % 1970–1980 38,307 46.3 38,217 9.4 76,524 15.7 1980–1990 −15,908 −13.1 −88,958 −20.1 –104,866 −18.6 1990–1995 −6,144 −5.8 −40,938 −11.6 −47,082 −10.2 1995–1998 12,394 12.5 1,638 0.5 14,032 3.4 1970–1998 28,649 34.6 −90,041 −22.2 −61,392 −12.6 note: the figures include all municipalities having at least three manufacturing establishments. data for 1970–1990 include establishments with at least 5 employees, and those for 1995–1998 smaller establishments. the classification of the municipalities as urban or rural is based on the situation in 1998. the new classification system is explained in the text (stv 2004: 73). numbers of jobs in the manufacturing sector rural municipalities semi-urban municipalities urban municipalities all municipalities year jobs % jobs % jobs % jobs % 1998 60,310 14.1 76,290 17.9 289,823 68.0 426,423 100.0 2002 61,597 14.5 74,411 17.6 287,733 67.9 423,741 100.0 change δ in % δ in % δ in % δ in % 1998–2002 1,287 2.5 −1,879 −2.5 –2,090 −0.7 −2,682 −0.6 note: the new definition of rural municipalities is explained in the text. in semi-urban municipalities between 60 and < 90% of the population live in urban settlements and the population of the largest urban settlement is at least 4000 inhabitants but less than 15,000. in urban municipalities at least 90% of the population live in urban settlements or the population of the largest settlement is at least 15,000 inhabitants (stv 2004: 79). personnel in the manufacturing (cde) sector (wage earners, salaried employees and owners) year rural core persons % of finland remote rural persons % of finland finland, total persons % of finland 1995 63,765 15.3 24,831 5.9 417,597 100 2000 72,744 16.0 27,961 6.2 454,005 100 2003 70,764 16.2 26,465 6.1 435,043 100 change δ in % δ in % δ in % 1995–2000 8,979 14.1 3,130 12.6 36,408 8.7 2000–2003 −1,980 −2.7 −1,496 −5.4 −18,962 −4.2 1995–2003 6,999 11.0 1,634 6.6 17,446 4.2 371 per cent from 1995 to 2000 (statfin 2001– 2006). the most successful growth industries were narrow in scope, however, the information and communication technology (ict) cluster being composed of the nokia company and enterprises supplying semi-finished products, subcontracting and investment goods and services (ali-yrkkö 2001; fennia 184: 2 (2006) 159dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … leinbach & brunn 2002: 494–495). the success of nokia boosted related industries such as components and contract manufacturers, the manufacturers of mobile phone covers, the producers of circuit boards and the suppliers of production automation and telecom services. these contract manufacturers established their assembly lines in areas, where inexpensive premises and labour were available, i.e. often in low-cost rural environments. the geographical distribution of the leading ict firms and their research and development centres in the late 1990s was a highly clustered one centred in largish travel-to-work areas such as the urban regions of helsinki, oulu, turku, salo, tampere and jyväskylä (oecd 2005: 96). such a pattern often prevails in a developing industrial sector where industries at their growth or innovative stages remain in close proximity to the sources of skilled labour and specialised inputs, as indicated in the american study of barkley (1988). a finnish manifestation of this process was that components were manufactured all over the finland, partly boosted by the centres of expertise, which could enlist the services of universities and polytechnics in addition to businesses (castells & himanen 2001; husso & raento 2002). the networking of the ict industry can be interpreted as being based on competitive advantage, which is dependent on each product and production process, corporate purchasing policies and the type of final market; all factors that are unique, so that specific location patterns are produced (cf. glasmeier 1988). as a result, this system of producers and localities constitutes a spatially optimised network of industrial actors (bathelt et al. 2004). the spatial configuration of the ict cluster can also be explained in part by the fact that usually only a rather limited number of companies expand greatly, which results in an uneven spatial pattern. both distributional explanations have the same impact: the trickle-down effects are spatially limited and network-like, and thus the direct spin-offs from the ict cluster are spatially selective. as a result of success in suitable low-cost environments, manufacturing employment grew in many rural municipalities in the late 1990s and up to 2002 (table 3). part of the growth was indirectly linked to the growth of the electronics industry or was induced (i.e. generated by growing domestic consumption). factories belonging to the ict cluster were established in competitive localities throughout the country, and although many rural industrial establishments did not offer white-collar jobs (such as head office or research and development activities) to the same extent as those in the urban-oriented ict firms did, their contribution to employment was clearly a positive one during the ict boom. this latest trend reveals how many remote areas can still possess potentials for industrialisation. the companies succeeded in increasing the number of manufacturing jobs in both the rural core and remote rural areas more than in the rest of finland during the boom years (table 3). this geographically extensive growth was possible because of the supply of labour in various rural localities, obviously assisted by the provision of higher education and vocational training all over the country. core-periphery settings in the growth of manufacturing rural industrialisation has prevailed during the last three decades, and employment in manufacturing in the surroundings of cities has grown particularly rapidly. but how has the growth manifested itself in the core-periphery relations existing in the country? what geographical macro-structures can be found? growth in the manufacturing sector diffused to the rural peripheries, as happened in many other advanced countries at that time (e.g. haynes & machunda 1987). a trend surface analysis, which can be used to reveal spatial macro-structures in employment changes, shows that the growth decade of the 1970s favoured peripheral locations (tykkyläinen 2002), and that the further north or east a place was, the higher was the increase in the number of jobs at that time. the fact that the surface is inclined more steeply towards the east than towards the north indicates that an easterly location was even more beneficial. the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in the largest job losses in the industrialised southern parts of finland, although the industrialised areas in the eastern parts of the country declined as well and suffered more than the western parts in relative terms at a latter stage in that period (during the depression of the early 1990s), as many companies in the western parts of the country were more flexible in adapting to the new conditions. also, the information society which produced new mobile technologies originated in the west and south. 160 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen the spin-offs from the rise of the new economy in the 1990s gradually spread to the rural areas, and manufacturing expanded particularly in ostrobothnia (on the west coast), south ostrobothnia and north ostrobothnia. rural areas on the whole benefited from the boom in the finnish economy and experienced a virtual re-industrialisation. thus the net increase in industrial jobs in rural areas between 1995 and 1998 was 12,400, or 88 per cent of the national total (table 3). the growth in employment in manufacturing in many western localities (e.g. ostrobothnia) indicates that the industrially diversified economic areas in the west, with many small and medium-sized companies, were responsive to these newly induced growth impacts. from 1994 to 2000 the finnish economy grew strongly, and this led to a continuous rise in employment in manufacturing up to 2001. the nuts 3-level figures for 1995–2002 indicate that the most intense growth took place in central ostrobothnia, south ostrobothnia and north ostrobothnia (over 20 per cent; statfin 2001–2006), with increases of over 10 per cent in north karelia (19%), ostrobothnia (16%) and pirkanmaa (12%), while the greatest decrease in jobs was in kainuu, by 10 per cent. other areas with a decline were south karelia (−3%), satakunta (−2%) and kymenlaakso (−1%), all regions with traditional high-volume production. lapland also showed below-average growth (2%; statfin 2001–2006). contrary to the situation in the 1970s and 1980s, revival of employment in manufacturing during the late 1990s took place in the early phase of growth in many major urban areas, such as oulu, helsinki, tampere, jyväskylä and joensuu (fig. 2). much of this growth can be explained by the ict boom, which, unlike the growth in the 1970s, started from the hi-tech sector developing mainly in dense research and development environments. the growth in manufacturing employment peaked in 2000, but the number of jobs continued to increase in some remote rural areas. the geographical pattern of growth became rather sporadic in the objective 1 area after the boom (fig. 2). as indicated in fig. 2, the balance of the re-industrialisation period was positive. the net increase in manufacturing jobs was over 17,000 in 1995–2003 (table 3), and in percentage terms employment in the rural core and remote areas clearly benefited from the ict boom (table 3). but how did the boom manifest itself as a function of distance? did the southern parts benefit more than the more peripheral ones? the hypothesis that the changes in employment in manufacturing were not dependent on distance has to be rejected at the 0.05 level of significance (fig. 3). growth was higher the more peripheral the location was, but the relationship was far from being a one-to-one correspondence, as there was considerable variation between municipalities, and as seen in fig. 3, the majority of this variation was not connected with distance, i.e. the geographical location of the municipality relative to the capital city. the data indicate that growth was slightly greater the more northerly the location is, although the high error variance leads to the qualification that even this dependence is very weak and irregular. if stricter levels of significance (p < 0.01 and p < 0.001) are used, the causal relationship can be said to be a result of chance. poor development in the very north and kainuu is also reflected in a downward turn in the trend in the extreme north, indicating poor success on the part of the small municipalities in the remotest peripheral area (fig. 3). the geographical pattern of growth in rural areas in the 1990s resembled in its later stage that of the 1970s, as growth diffused all over the country, although the growth in manufacturing jobs had not been as strong in relative terms in the north and east as it had been in the 1970s. nevertheless, most non-metropolitan localities succeeded in increasing the number of jobs in manufacturing, and the three-tier classification of settlements indicates that employment in the manufacturing sector grew in the rural municipalities in the late phase, 1988– 2002, when it was already declining in the semiurban and urban municipalities (table 3). employment in manufacturing grew in the central parts of the country, in etelä-savo, central ostrobothnia and pirkanmaa, in the declining phase of the growth cycle, from 2000 to 2003 (statfin 2001–2006), and also in some remote municipalities in eastern finland. this geographical development reveals a spin-off effect of growth extending selectively to the competitive peripheral localities. in general, employment went into decline most rapidly in the remote rural municipalities, as shown in the figures for the years 2000–2003 (table 3). during this shrinking phase the change in employment in manufacturing was not dependent on distance at any statistically significant level (p = 0.232), for in parallel with this decline in employment in rural areas, declining trends also prevailed in former growth areas such as the greater helsinki area, oulu and many regional centres (fig. 2). fennia 184: 2 (2006) 161dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … fig. 2. growth and decline in employment in manufacturing during the economic boom of the late 1990s and the saturation of the boom from 2000 to 2003. municipalities where employment in manufacturing grew are marked by grey shading. source: regional and industrial… 2005. in the latest phase, after 2003, many assembly-line investments abroad show that companies were eager to look for low-cost environments globally rather than increasing production in low-cost domestic environments. the comparison of growth processes in time and space reveals how different driving forces can bring about new economic landscapes (cf. essletzbichler 2004). in finland the late-stage diffusion of ict-based growth was comparable to the boom of the 1970s and revealed that the rural areas were able to offer competitive industrial locations towards the end of the millennium. there are now signs of slower growth performance, however, in the most remote areas, such as the remote rural areas (table 3), northern finland (lapland) and the eastern border zone (kainuu and part of north karelia) (fig. 2). it is obvious that the latest country-wide boom was affected by growth derived from the geographically scattered pattern of expansion in the ict industry, namely the emergence and expansion of firms in centres such as oulu, salo, tampere, jyväskylä, etc. this multi-nodal geographical growth has been considered beneficial to ict companies due to the lower costs in regional centres relative to the greater helsinki area, but even so, the ict sector is underrepresented in rural areas (elinvoimainen maaseutu 2004: 136), and 162 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen r2 1 = 0 = 0.010 .0306x + 10.54 fig. 3. changes in manufacturing personnel in 1995– 2003 as a function of the shortest road distance from the capital city. h0: ρ = 0, h1: ρ ≠ 0, t = 2.082*, df = 426, h1 = true. source: regional and industrial… 2005 and eniro 2006. rural industrialisation has been largely the result of indirect and induced diffusion effects. there are nevertheless several rural localities which have been benefited from greenfield investments in the ict sector. public sector employment the shift from a welfare state to the market-led provision of services has affected remote communities in the european north (persson 1998). in the past, public services (education, health care, social welfare, etc.) were provided in all regions of finland on an equal basis. this deliberate maintenance of services in remote regions was based on a system of subsidies and reimbursements, but it generated jobs and to a certain degree counterbalanced regional disadvantages. in fact, many social reforms from the late 1960s onwards were first implemented in remote areas such as lapland, kainuu and north karelia and gave a certain developmental boost to these regions. the economic crisis of the early 1990s led to budget cuts and rationalisation in the public sector, and at the same time the entire paradigm of the welfare state was re-evaluated, leading to an emphasis on efficiency and the market-led provision of services. the rationalisation of public services has had severe impacts on remote areas. the northernmost regions were in the most vulnerable position because of the relatively large size of the public sector, which accounted for more than 26 per cent of gdp in kainuu and lapland in 1997, and for 24–25 per cent in etelä-savo, pohjois-savo and north karelia. in all the southern regions, however, its contribution to gdp was clearly below the national average of 18 per cent (stv 2000: 290). local and regional development in remote rural areas is greatly dependent on what happens in the public sector, and during the ict boom the number of jobs in the public sector grew only slowly in eastern and northern finland (see fig. 4 and table 4). the increase in employment in the public sector varied by region during the seven-year period, from 2 per cent in lapland to 28 per cent in itäuusimaa (fig. 3). employment grew fast in the southern regions, which have been the magnets for migration, so that, logically, new public sector jobs have been created to serve the growing populations. the recovery of the finnish economy, the growth of the new ict sector and the decline in primary production in the peripheries have resulted in self-reinforcing growth and decline processes. the changes in the public sector have had considerable impacts on the labour market and its geography. over 110,000 new jobs were created fennia 184: 2 (2006) 163dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … fig. 4. population changes and changes in public sector employment (classes l–q) by regions at the nuts 3 level; h0: ρ = 0, h1: ρ ≠ 0, t = 5.69***, df = 17, h1 = true. source: statfin 2001– 2006. table 4. persons employed in public services in the provinces of eastern finland and lapland. source: statfin 2001–2006. persons employed in public services, etc. (l–q) pohjois-savo, etelä-savo and north karelia lapland and kainuu finland, total time 1000 persons % of all employed 1000 persons % of all employed 1000 persons % of all employed 1995 69,483 34 35,544 37 601,250 31 2002 77,952 35 36,968 37 715,232 32 growth in % 12 4 19 in the public sector between 1995 and 2002, which is ten times more than in manufacturing during the same period, but the growth in public sector employment could not have been possible without revenues from the booming manufacturing industries. population changes migration and population changes can be used as rough aggregate indicators of the relative socioeconomic success of the finnish regions. migration has continued during the eu era. people have left the northern and eastern regions as unemployment has plagued the whole objective 1 area and the level of incomes has clearly remained below the national average. by contrast, uusimaa and the areas to the east, north and west of the capital, constituting the nuts 3 regions of itä-uusimaa, pirkanmaa, varsinais-suomi, central finland and kanta-häme, have received in-migrants, resulting in clear population gains (fig. 5). oulu, with 32 per cent of the population of north ostrobothnia, and its adjacent municipalities formed the only distinctive growth area outside the southern core. finland is still very rural compared with many other countries, with a regional system consisting of a network of regional centres, towns and scattered rural settlements. certainly, many finnish socio-spatial structures such as the provision of services, the scattered network of universities and polytechnics and the system of over 400 local government bodies, etc. have contributed to the persistence of rural settlement structures over the last decades. this infrastructure has been an important seedbed for rural industrialisation. two factors dominate rural depopulation today: the on-going decline in primary sector employment and the reorganisation of the public (and private) service sector. both are pushing people out of the countryside. there are signs of counteractive developments in remote areas, such as the expansion of tourism (lapland), the emergence of small enterprises and the growth in teleworking (often combined with the more extensive use of holiday 164 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen homes), but these counteractive forces play only a minor role and are not strong enough to stop depopulation. it is also evident that the fastest-growing branches of the economy, the service industries, do not boom in the peripheries to the same extent as in the metropolitan areas. this circumstance accelerates migration (hanell & lähteenmäki-smith 2006). the lesson learned from history is that regional policy measures have been more or less powerless to prevent depopulation of the countryside. this does not mean that the current depopulation trend will have to continue unabated. as was said about the spin-offs from the ict industry in finland in the late 1990s, local development is based on competitive advantages, which depend on various factors related to companies themselves and local business environments. conclusions this study has presented evidence for substantial divergent tendencies in the development of rural areas in finland over the past decades. rationalisation and the movement towards more efficient agriculture since 1965, the late-fordist manufacturing boom in the 1970s, deindustrialisation, the spin-offs of the new ict economy and the implementation of market-led doctrines regarding the provision of public services have brought about geographical transformations in the socio-economic structures of rural areas. the findings indicate that there are factors such as industrial and demographic structures which lead a region to become locked in to a vicious circles of economic decline, depopulation and rationalisation of the service sector. at least in the finnish case, there is not much evidence that rural areas fail to be susceptible to manufacturing growth. many people have attributed this geographically extensive competitiveness at the latest stage in development, to the finnish regional innovation system and the provision of comprehensive education all over the country. the innovative attributes of a region are certainly path-creating measures in general (bowen 2006), but in the finnish case they are strongly facilitated by public and private actors working jointly and systematically. rural depopulation continued after finland joined the eu in 1995, and the less-favoured areas have suffered even though the eu structural funds have provided support for rural actors and infrastructure. this period starting from 1995 is merely a moment in the long-term transformation of the rural areas of finland, in the sense that the principles of rural policy espoused from the mid-1960s onwards are still being adhered to. the persistent decline of the remote rural areas over the last decades indicates that the restructuring forces of the market economy and government policy can easily override sheltering regional or local policy fig. 5. population changes by regions at the nuts 3 level and distances of the regional centres from the capital; h0: ρ = 0, h1: ρ ≠ 0, t = 2.936**, df = 17, h1 = true. source: statfin 2001–2006 and eniro 2006. fennia 184: 2 (2006) 165dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … measures. only active, path-creating measures can ensure efficient and more sustainable self-reinforcing positive results. it is therefore imperative for local actors, such as local authorities, policy makers and entrepreneurs, to adjust continuously to the changing conditions of competitiveness and to make full use of the comparative advantages of their locality. this is economically more sustainable in the long run than any external intervention which tries to maintain employment in peripheral areas artificially. the changes in the geographical pattern of rural socio-economic circumstances can be explained in part by a variety of policy-related factors, e.g. the promotion of efficiency in agricultural production, changes in macro-economic and regional subsidies, and the facilitation of the emergence of new industries associated with the information society, etc. moreover, changes in the competitive advantages of rural areas have also played a decisive role. the manufacturing boom of the 1970s, for instance, was related to the labour advantage of peripheral areas and the intensification of regional policy. it was more profitable for firms to expand production in peripheral areas, with government support, than in the industrial core regions, given that there was a substantial measure of political will in parliament to reinforce the competitiveness of remote and rural areas. the latest growth phase, the rapid growth in the ict sector in the 1990s, benefited the urban agglomerations and diffused into rural localities both directly and via increases in intermediate demand and consumption. the industrial boom dispersed into the rural areas in a manner that resembled the geographical pattern of the boom based on regional policy in the 1970s, except that this time growth took place more vigorously in the western and southern parts of the country and the boom was based on the participation of growing industries in the industrial networks rather than on growth in the branch plant economy combined with relatively standard low-tech production. the vast remote rural areas succeeded in increasing their numbers of jobs in the manufacturing sector, although more vigorous growth took place in the more prosperous rural core areas. rural areas in finland have been dependent on three basic factors in recent times: their primary production has been dependent on national and eu policy measures, rural manufacturing has been able to become part of the supply chains of advanced industrial networks and to benefit from the spin-offs of economic growth, and the development of the service sector has been greatly regulated by political considerations, with integration processes and policy shifts almost abolishing national guidelines such as the doctrine of equally distributed services and the strategic demands for maintaining settlement in the remote areas. the restructuring of the rural areas of finland over the last decades indicates that no short-term policy can really be sufficient to arrest the depopulating forces there. it is a more complex and embedded issue than can be managed by regional policy only. rural socio-economic patterns are the results of numerous, mostly long-acting and often supralocal, factors and intentions, and these processes are subject to change. acknowledgements the contributions of timo pakarinen and mika saarelainen in making the maps and turo vakkuri in editing the databases are acknowledged. thanks are extended to malcolm hicks for checking the language of the manuscript. this study is part of research projects nos. 117817 and 208149 funded by the academy of finland. references ali-yrkkö j (2001). nokia’s network – gaining competitiveness from co-operation. etla b 173. 100 p. altika (2005). electronic database. statistics finland, helsinki. barkley dl (1988). the decentralization of high-technology manufacturing to nonmetropolitan areas. growth and change 19: 1, 13–30. bathelt h, a malmberg & p maskell (2004). cluster and knowledge: local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation. progress in human geography 28: 1, 31–56. boschma ra & jg lambooy (1999). evolutionary economics and economic geography. journal of evolutionary economics 9, 411–429. bowen jr jt (2006). the geography of certified tradeinduced manufacturing job loss in new england. the professional geographer 58: 3, 249–265. castells m & p himanen (2001). the finnish model of the information society. sitra reports series 17. 130 p. collinge c (1999). self-organisation of society by scale: a spatial reworking of regulation theory. environment and planning d: society and space 17, 557–574. 166 fennia 184: 2 (2006)markku tykkyläinen elinvoimainen maaseutu (2004). maaseutupolitiikan yhteistyöryhmän julkaisu 10/2004. 318 p. eniro (2006). road distances. electronic database. <http://www.eniro.fi.> eskelinen h & m fritsch (2006). the reconfiguration of eastern finland as an interface periphery. in eskelinen h & t hirvonen (eds). positioning finland in a european space, 54–70. ministry of the environment & ministry of the interior, helsinki. essletzbichler j (2004). the geography of job creation and destruction in the u.s. manufacturing sector, 1967–1997. annals of the association of american geographers 94: 3, 602–619. glasmeier a (1988). factors governing the development of high tech industry agglomerations: a tale of three cities. regional studies 22: 4, 287–301. granberg l (1989). valtio maataloustulojen tasaajana ja takaajana. bidrag till kännedom av finland´s natur och folk 138. 214 p. hanell t & k lähteenmäki-smith (2006). metropolisation in the bsr: trends and policy responses in finland. in eskelinen h & t hirvonen (eds). positioning finland in a european space, 16–29. ministry of the environment & ministry of the interior, helsinki. haynes ke & zb machunda (1987). spatial restructuring of manufacturing and employment growth in the rural midwest: an analysis for indiana. economic geography 63: 4, 320–333. husso k & p raento (2002). science policy and research in finland. fennia 180: 1–2, 261–274. industrial statistics (various years). statistics finland, helsinki. jatila u (2001). yritysten sijaintipaikan valinta päätöksenteko-ongelmana. ph.lic. thesis. 193 p. helsinki school of economics and business administration, economic geography, helsinki. jones m (1997). spatial selectivity of the state? the regulationist enigma and local struggles over economic governance. environment and planning a 29, 831–864. katajamäki h (1988). alueellisen työnjaon muotoutuminen suomessa. turun yliopiston maantieteen laitoksen julkaisuja 121. 144 p. keränen h, p malinen & o aulaskari (2000). suomen maaseututyypit. suomen aluetutkimus far, selvityksiä 20. 86 p. kortelainen j (2002). forest industry on the map of finland. fennia 180: 1–2, 227–235. krätke s (1999). a regulationist approach to regional studies. environment and planning a 31, 683– 704. labour force statistics 2000 (2001). labour market 2001:6. 34 p. leinbach tr & st brunn (2002). national innovations systems, firm strategy, and enabling mobile communications: the case of nokia. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93, 489– 508. lipietz a (1986). new tendencies in the international division of labour: regimes of accumulation and modes of production. in scott a & m storper (eds). production, work, territory: the geographical anatomy of industrial capitalism, 16–40. allen and unwin, london. macleod g & m jones (1999). regulating a regional rustbelt: institutional fixes, entrepreneurial discourse, and the ‘politics of representation’. environment and planning d: society and space 17, 575–605. marsden t (1998). new rural territories: regulating the differentiated rural spaces. journal of rural studies 19: 1, 107–117. muilu t & j rusanen (2004). rural definitions and shortterm dynamics in rural areas of finland in 1989– 97. environment and planning 36: 1499–1516. niinisalo kv (1974). kymenlaakson alueellinen kehitys vuosina 1910–1970. phd thesis. 287 p. university of tampere, tampere. norton rd & j rees (1979). the product cycle and the spatial decentralization of american manufacturing. regional studies 13, 141–151. oecd (2005). oecd territorial reviews: finland. 216 p. oecd, paris. palomäki m (1980). industrial development and regional standard of living in finland. in walker df (ed). planning industrial development, 189–213. john wiley & sons, chichester. park s-c & s-k lee (2004). the national and regional innovation systems in finland: from the path dependency to the path creation approach. ai & society 19: 180–195. <http://www.springerlink. com/content/cxk76v0b19ll9jug/fulltext.pdf.> 8.1.2007. persson l-o (1998). a rural community faces the turmoil of the welfare state: the case of härjedalen. in neil c & m tykkyläinen (eds). local economic development: a geographical comparison of rural community restructuring, 27–51. united nations university press, tokyo. raivo p (2002). the finnish landscape and its meanings. fennia 180: 1–2, 89–98. regional and industrial statistics on manufacturing database (2005). statistics finland, helsinki. seutukuntaja maakuntakatsaus (1998). 141 p. statistics finland, oulu. statfin (2001–2006). electronic database. statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1973 = statistical yearbook of finland 1973 (1974). 547 p. statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1992 = statistical yearbook of finland 1992 (1992). 614 p. statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1996 = statistical yearbook of finland 1996 (1996). 661 p. statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2000 = statistical yearbook of finland 2000 (2000). 685 p. statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2004 = statistical yearbook of finland 2004 (2004). 718 p. statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2005 = statistical yearbook of finland 2005 (2005). 702 p. statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2006 = statistical yearbook of finland 2006 (2006). 712 p. statistics finland, helsinki. fennia 184: 2 (2006) 167dynamics of job creation, restructuring and industrialisation in … suomen maaseututyypit 2006 (2006). maaja metsätalousministeriön julkaisuja 7/2006. 67 p. tykkyläinen m (2002). spatial turns in manufacturing since 1970. fennia 180: 1–2, 213–226. vuorinen p, a kuparinen, p honkanen, s kangaspunta & t kuitunen (2005). innovation policy and performance. in innovation policy and performance: a cross-country comparison, 99–116. oecd, paris. yearbook of farm statistics 2001 (2001). 262 p. information centre of the ministry of agriculture and forestry, helsinki. yli-jokipii p & a koski (1995). the changing pattern of finnish regional policies. fennia 173: 2, 53–67. societal impact through lingual plurality societal impact through lingual plurality broadening the audience of international academic publishing if you want to contribute to the state-of-the art as a scholar, in nearly every research field this means publishing your work at least partly in english. while there are lively discussions going on in other languages – quantitatively the next linguistic arenas being french, german, spanish and chinese – the critical edge advances most importantly in anglophonic debates. according to curry and lillis (2017), a couple of years ago there were more than 9,000 peer-reviewed journals published in other languages than english. this offers important arenas especially for discussing geographically specific matters in national and regional contexts, and to young scholars who benefit from writing first articles in their mother tongue. however, even in these cases national publication forums may not be selected as they recent tendency towards internationalization of academic publishing has reinforced the dominant role of english language in scholarly debates and discussions. the monolinguistic development has led to several drawbacks: it risks to sustain global inequalities in knowledge production, limits the access of non-native english speakers to international publishing, and disengages place-specific knowledge from national and local contexts, not only in scholarly communities but also among decision-makers and within the civil society. in response, fennia seeks ways towards multicultural publishing, including lingual plurality. the journal has a long history in multilingual publishing yet, in its present form – following international standards of journal publishing, with modest resources – its content is solely in english. the editorial briefly introduces this linguistic development, since 1889, and presents ideas for further activities. fennia’s current multilingual strategy emphasizes the popularization of the peer reviewed content in different languages, which is implemented through collaboration with the online popular science forum versus. this serves two ends in broadening the audience, beyond the academy and the primarily englishspeaking world. the collaboration of fennia and versus has already yielded multilingual popular science articles accessible in the contexts that the research concerns and in the societies where the authors work. based on positive experiences and feedback, we are eager to continue similar efforts promoting linguistic plurality. as achieving these aims requires notable extra effort – from authors, editors, and the publisher – we call for support and commitment from the funding agencies and academic institutions that we rely on, along with the scholarly community whose voluntary work forms the basis of all activities in fennia. keywords: multilingualism, scholarly publishing, open science, research popularization, anglophonic hegemony urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa109358 doi: 10.11143/fennia.109358 © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 2 editorial fennia 199(1) (2021) tend to be less respected by research institutions and funding agencies; publishing nationally does not advance research careers as powerfully as international publications (read: publishing in english). another drawback of the increased pressure for english publishing is the loss of local knowledge. scholars conducting research in non-anglophonic contexts are balancing between international and regional journals. the latter often means ‘perishing’ in the global academic community. therefore, much of the research accomplished in different local contexts ends up available only for the englishspeaking academic audience. this is particularly distressing in geography where geographical plurality and contextualization are among the core aims. while scholars are increasingly linguistically capable of accessing these publications, many local actors such as decision-makers, developers, public administration, students, and members of the civil society cannot read academic english. such ‘knowledge flows’ to global arenas may therefore have disturbing implications to the development of local research communities and the societies at large (curry & lillis 2018). as a further aspect, collyer (2018) points out that current academic publishing mechanisms risk to sustain or even deepen global inequalities in academic knowledge production. these mechanisms, leaning on anglophonic dominance, allow systematic marginalization of non-native english speakers particularly in the global south. specifically, her analysis shows that many high-ranking journals tends to publish research conducted in the geographical area of the journal, emphasizing northern scholarship and with marginal interest in studies from the global south. moreover, oftentimes citations can only be made to english publications and referencing scholarly work published in other languages is not favored; following the idea that the peer reviewers and the readers should be able to verify the made arguments through the cited work. the access of scholars from the global south to publish in such journals can be further halted by financial barriers, due to the expensive processes of english translation, language editing, and in some cases article processing changes. some disciplines closely connected to societal practices – such as law, local governance, education, and social work – continue to value publishing in national languages more than others, as their scope reaches beyond the academy. yet in most areas of research, like that of geography, scholarly debates in english have adopted a dominant position. both natural and human geographers meet internationally in english-speaking conferences and publish their work in journals where the (usually only) language used is english. in its present form, fennia stands among these journals, however the journal used to be rather multilingual. established in 1889, and originally named fennia: bulletin de la société de géographie de finlande, it was first published in four languages: french, german, swedish and finnish. in the 1910s, the number of articles in french started to decrease while german became the leading international language. at the same time, indications of english as an emerging language of science started to appear, first in the form of summaries as early as 1907. the first full article published in english, by pentti eskola in the volume 33, was published in 1912–1913. in the early 1920s, the french title of the journal was substituted by a latin version societas geographica finniae. for the next five decades, the journal published articles and phd theses regularly quadrilingually, and occasionally in french or including a french summary. at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, a notable internationalization took place in fennia, and both finnish and swedish content became rare. a decade later, we start to see the rise of the anglophonic domination. the last piece published in german is an article by uuno varjo, in 1972. in 1976, the name of the publisher at the journal front cover was translated into english, geographical society of finland. after that, the journal has been published solely in english. it continued the tradition of publishing phd and licentiate theses in parallel with research articles until the early 1990s. in 2000, the name was changed once again, into its present form: fennia – international journal of geography. since then, the journal has followed international standards of journal publishing, with central focus in refereed original articles published in english. the geographical society of finland publishes another journal – terra – in finnish and swedish, thus in that regard we follow a trilingual strategy. but this clearly does not offer a broad multicultural coverage. during the recent years, fennia has considered different possibilities to move beyond the anglophonic hegemony, including lingual plurality and dialogue (see reflections on academic publishing in our 2017 195(2) issue). we make a slight nod towards multilingualism on our webpage by stating that our main language is english, which in practice means that other languages can be https://fennia.journal.fi/issue/view/4566 kirsi pauliina kallio et al. 3fennia 199(1) (2021) used during the production of the articles, that we welcome papers including materials and references in other languages, and that we are acknowledgeable of the different positions from which native and non-native speakers of english contribute to the journal and seek to take this into account in the publication processes as feasible. however, with our rigorously international profile and limited editorial resources, we have not found a way to return to publishing high-quality scholarly work in other languages. instead, our current experimental strategy focuses on the popularization of the fennia content in different languages, through collaboration with the online popular science forum versus (kallio & riding 2019). this serves two ends: broadening the audience beyond the academy and moving their impact beyond the primarily english-speaking world. we began this tryout by publishing popularized texts based on fennia articles in finnish (lehtinen 2018; kaisto 2019), and by asking commentaries to articles popularized in english from finnish experts (sawatzky & albrecht 2018). this allowed us, among other things, to ‘give back’ to the finnish taxpayers and the members of the society, who support the journal through state subsidies and membership fees. yet we felt this was not enough. our authors come from various countries and linguistic areas, and the topics discussed in their articles may concern any part of the world. hence, for many authors the opportunity to popularize their work in the finnish context makes little sense. therefore, the versus forum also publishes popularized content from fennia in english where appropriate (sawatzky & albrecht 2017; nielsen 2020). our latest opening is to broaden the scope to other languages, with the aim to make our work accessible in the very contexts that the articles concern, and in the societies where the authors work. the first example of the multilingual format is the article by moritz albrecht, gleb yarovoy and valentina karginova-gubinova (2020), included in the previous issue of fennia, on russian waste policy and management in the karelian republic. obviously, the social interest towards this highly topical article is among russian speaking communities, yet it concerns the neighboring countries as well. to reach the key audiences, versus edited two parallel versions of the paper: first, a popularized article in english with commentaries in english, finnish and russian (yarovoy et al. 2021a); second, the same popularized article and commentaries all translated into russian (yarovoy et al. 2021b). the commentaries consist of views from local russian ngo staff to finnish governmental officials working on the waste matter. each discussant was free to choose the language of their contribution. in this way, we wanted to create a manifold and linguistically plural space of discussion, bringing together diverse voices from russia and finland, and being accessible in terms of language for local russian decisionmakers and others whom the issue concerns. within the past couple of months, the publications have received notable interest. according to versus reader statistics, particularly the popularized article in russian has stayed within top 20 of the most read publications, the readers coming mainly from russia. both articles were also widely shared in the social media, by twitter primarily. based on the positive experiences from our first experiment in multilingual popular science publication, and the discussion it sparked, we are continuing similar efforts that promote linguistic plurality. our next endeavor is to publish an international discussion among youth activists who are involved in the fridays for future movement and other environmentally oriented youth networks, around the world. this will be based on the article by huttunen and albrecht (2021) – included in this issue – which continues discussion on youth environmental citizenship in the journal (bowman 2019; huttunen et al. 2020; lock 2020; wood 2020). our aim is to invite and engage both young activists and scholars in a linguistically and geographically rich discussion around the topic. further, we are planning on a special issue to result in a multilingual popular theme issue in versus, published as a dialogue between diverse nordic languages. with these “small experiments” we hope to contribute to “the ecosystem of [our] discipline’s publications”, thus joining a broader movement in alternative non-profit scholarly publishing; as highlighted in a recent report from the cooperate for open study that explored, with 32 journals, the aspired dimensions of ethical open scientific publishing (herman 2021, 12): the intention of this feasibility study was to identify the needs that must be met in order for participating publications to increase capacity and build toward sustainability. however, it quickly became clear that the publishing industry’s standard definition of increased capacity (i.e., more issues, more articles, quantifiably more content) was not at all how these publications approached capacity. instead, when asked what was next for their publication, several participants described 4 editorial fennia 199(1) (2021) small experiments that they hoped to have the time or resources to carry out. instead of defining stability through growing in size, participants described carving out a specific role or specialty within the ecosystem of their discipline’s publications. from this perspective, it was easier to understand why there was little to no competitive undertone when discussing sharing knowledge or skills among peer publications. for the participants of this study, becoming more unique held more promise than meeting the expectations of a traditional scholarly journal, and vying for status and readers through impact factors and rankings. compared to a publication process that ends in the copy-editing phase of the article, the multilingual popularization of the papers requires notable extra effort – from authors, editors, and the publisher. unsurprisingly, then, the major challenge in promoting lingual plurality is related to resources. the efforts to promote the multilingual publishing that we have in mind are carried out by the support of three finnish scientific societies that publish fennia, versus and another two scientific journals, all non-profit. hence the implementation of our aims depends on, first, locating funding agencies who wish to support the societies’ commitment to multilingualism. this is clearly needed for translation and language editing services as no editor can be competent on all languages. a move where “resources are directed toward local or context-driven solutions” is emphasized in the results of the cooperate for open study, too, which shows that our endeavors go along an international trend (herman 2021, 4). moreover, following other similar surveys, they bring up the “importance of providing direct support for the production of open scholarship rather than using mechanisms such as apcs (fuchs & sandoval 2013) or subscriptions (holcombe & wilson 2017, 5; reinsfelder & pike 2018)”. we hope that these developments start taking place soon, in finland and beyond. secondly, academic institutions that do not typically support researchers towards multi-lingual activities – as their success is measured through english publications in high-ranking refereed journals – should also see the value of alternative formats of publishing, including popularization and multilingualism. the broadening of the publishing field challenges various quarters to new ways of thinking about scientific publishing. our publishing scheme does certainly not claim to solve at once the multiple drawbacks created by the anglophonic dominance. it rather serves as one attempt to provide space for researchers to widen the visibility and societal impact of their work, in the geographical and linguistic contexts most relevant to them. we wish that such endeavors by researchers – to advocate plurality and equality in access to research knowledge – will gain increasing appreciation in academic communities and their supporters around the world. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) fennia editor-in-chief anna marjaana heikkinen (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2955-4862) versus co-editor-in-chief content of the issue this issue of fennia includes four original research articles, two articles in the reviews and essays section, and seven reflections texts of which six are commentaries to our published articles, stemming from the open review processes. as our next ‘open opening’, we invite the authors of the original articles to respond to these commentaries, to continue the thematic debates in the reflections section. the first original article is by kim pawliw, étienne berthold and frédéric lasserre. their paper the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin's lost expedition discusses the role of cultural heritage in arctic geopolitics, specifically in the canadian context where a failed expedition of discovering the northwest passage, in the mid-19th century, was used in the 2000s by the conservative government of stephen harper, with the intent of giving rise to ‘canadian arctic 5kirsi pauliina kallio et al.fennia 199(1) (2021) identity’ as part of a geopolitical power game where the sovereignty over the arctic was at stake. through narrative discourse analysis the authors show how the british explorer sir john franklin was established, during harper’s term in 2006–2015, as a significant figure representing canada’s diversity and, thus, uniting the people under a shared northern identity. by drawing attention to the socially constructed nature of cultural heritage that can be made to serve state power, the analysis offers a welcomed novel perspective to geopolitical analysis. our second research paper is a methodological exploration by chiara valli, titled participatory dissemination: bridging in-depth interviews, participation, and creative visual methods through interviewsbased zine-making (ibzm). it introduces a particular form of participatory research aiming at strong societal impact, which the author has named ‘interviews-based zine-making (ibzm)’. in her own study, she offered the transcribed texts from the research interviews to the study participants and other members from the local community, to be ripped apart and rearranged into pamphlets that, concurrently, comment on and communicate the research results to the local community and other lay audiences. the collective processes proved fruitful both for the dissemination and the research itself; the ‘experts by experience’ helped to interpret and enrich the analysis that the researcher had created from the very same materials before sharing them. besides for action research scholars, valli proposes that this practice can be useful in bringing participatory elements into more traditional research projects where data gathering is made through interviews and other researcher-led methods. continuing the discussion on youth environmental citizenship in fennia, the third original article by janette huttunen and eerika albrecht offers a media analysis that reveals how the fridays for future movement was received in finland in 2019, by the major news media, and in the social media platform twitter where the views of the general (adult) public were enthusiastically expressed. the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland identifies three dominating framings of the phenomenon. first, by approaching the youth activities in terms of ‘sustainable lifestyle’, the media discussions emphasized individuality as characteristic to environmental citizenship. from another perspective, youth participation was linked with formal politics through what huttunen and albrecht call ‘the active youth frame’. thirdly, the media discussions paid attention to the strike aspect of these activities, emphasizing ‘school attendance’ as a central matter. based on the analysis the authors argue that the public debate on youthful environmental citizenship is dominated by the adult voice and an individualizing perspective, which resonates with findings from other geographical contexts and begs further research and public debate that gives visibility to young people’s own interpretations of their activities, including the collective and cooperative elements of environmental citizenship. the last research paper in this issue, a comprehensive spatial model for historical travel effort – a case study in finland, is co-authored by timo rantanen, harri tolvanen, terhi honkola and outi vesakoski. it offers an in-depth description of a comprehensive spatial historical travel environment model, created by the authors, combining high-quality terrain and landscape spatial data with information from historical sources on the studied landscape. contributing to interdisciplinary research on human and cultural spread, the empirical focus is on travel effort and contacts between population groups in finland during two historical periods: the pre-medieval period (approx. 12th–15th centuries) and the post-medieval period (from late medieval time to the late 19th century). methodologically, the paper suggests that the multi-dimensional approach combining spatial data archives with archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data, in a gis analysis, offers novel opportunities to studying the human past. empirically, the results highlight a notable difference in the overall travel effort in southern and northern finland, and the variability of the least-cost routes in different landscapes and between different source data combinations in each cost surface. the first review article is by sören köpke who offers a critical literature review related to the global agri-food system, connected directly or indirectly with political ecology. in reinvigorating a political ecology of the global agri-food system he identifies seven potential perspectives to this research agenda, all of which are introduced and discussed in relation to each other. köpke argues that each one of them provides fitting theoretical and methodological instruments for the analysis of the complex empirical problems of global agri-food systems and, thus, invites more scholarly 6 editorial fennia 199(1) (2021) work specifically from political ecologists whose attention has remained largely in extractivism, energy production, water, and conservation. in the second review article diana soeiro introduces urban living labs as potential research sites for applied geographical study, based on the principles of co-creation, exploration, experimentation, and evaluation. her article smart cities and innovative governance systems: a reflection on urban living labs action research makes four methodological suggestions: urban living labs enable balancing between top-down and bottom-up research strategies; the settings are particularly fruitful for comparative qualitative analyses; the research processes encourage cooperation between public and private actors; and that in the related innovation strategies, the role of governance should be rethought so that it pushes forward rather than hinders novel co-creative process. such approaches are gaining foothold in many urban contexts – including in tampere where the editor-in-chief is based – with great potential to cross-disciplinary projects that aim at strong societal impact. the reflections begin with an intervention from daniela ferreira and mário vale which reflects on the meaning of the term cyberspace for geographers, and is called from cyberspace to cyberspatialities? it takes the reader through a history of cyberspace and related concepts drawing upon a range of thinkers in geography and beyond, arguing that cyberspace is a significant geographical concern. the section continues with a commentary by tatek abebe and tanu biswas which reflects upon the fennia lecture 2019 article by nicola ansell and colleagues. their commentary titled rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future builds on concerns of appropriate, relevant, and contextual learning for the future, embracing powerful impulses from decolonial proponents using the childist lens. the reflections on recent articles published in fennia continue with a commentary by alexandra carleton called discourse in a modern arctic: can we supplant sovereignty? it reflects upon the article by kim pawliw, étienne berthold, frédéric lasserre that opens this issue of the journal, noting that it enacts a serious question of how we seek sovereignty over areas of wilderness and may point to a human desire to tame it. next, we present a small review forum on interviews-based zine-making (ibzm) emanating from the second research article published in this issue by chiara valli. in the first response, jennifer bagelman continues the cut and paste mashup aesthetic of the original article and retains the spirit of zines, asking, how can research become more inclusive? in the second reply, sofia cele notes that ibzm is both a participatory method of data collection and a participatory way to disseminate results, arguing it is important to bring forward this dual nature of the approach. the reflections end with another review forum on the third original research article published in this current issue by janette huttunen and eerika albrecht on the fff youth climate strikes in finland. in the first response, georgios kyroglou argues that it is the recognition of young people’s agency that can be particularly problematic. while similarly in the second reply, arita holmberg focuses in particular upon adult depoliticization of this youth protest movement. finally, lena von zabern and christopher d. tulloch focus their commentary on individualized lifestyle choices and a dominant adult voice in relation to the media representation of environmental citizenship in the fff movement. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) james riding (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819) fennia editor-in-chief & fennia reflections section editor references abebe, t. & biswas, t. (2021) rights in education: outlines for a decolonial, childist reimagination of the future – commentary to ansell and colleagues. fennia 199(1) 118–128. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.107490 albrecht, m., yarovoy, g. & karginova-gubinova, v. (2020) russia’s waste policy and rural waste management in the karelian republic: building up a ruin to come? fennia 198(1–2), 135–150. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.95519 7kirsi pauliina kallio et al.fennia 199(1) (2021) bagelman, j. (2021) zines beyond a means: crafting new research process – commentary to valli. fennia 199(1) 132–135. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109263 bowman, b. (2019) imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research. fennia 197(2) 295–305. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.85151 carleton, a. (2021) discourse in a modern arctic: can we supplant sovereignty? – commentary to pawliw, berthold and lasserre. fennia 199(1) 129–131. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102004 cele, s. (2021) communicating back: reflections on ibzm as participatory dissemination – commentary on valli. fennia 199(1) 136–138. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109264 collyer, f. m. (2018) global patterns in the publishing of academic knowledge: global north, global south. current sociology 66 56–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392116680020 curry, m. j. & lillis, t. (eds.) (2017) global academic publishing: policies, perspectives and pedagogies. multilingual matters, blue ridge summit, pa. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783099245 curry, m. j. & lillis, t. (2018) the dangers of english as lingua franca of journals. inside higher ed 13.3.2018 <https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/03/13/domination-english-language-journalpublishing-hurting-scholarship-many-countries> 12.6.2021. ferreira, d., & vale, m. (2021) from cyberspace to cyberspatialities? fennia 199(1) 113–117. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.100343 fuchs, c. & sandoval, m. (2013) the diamond model of open access publishing: why policy makers, scholars, universities, libraries, labour unions and the publishing world need to take noncommercial, non-profit open access seriously. triplec: communication, capitalism & critique 11(2) 428–443. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v11i2.502 herman, k. (2021) exploring mutuality: a report on independent open access publications in the social sciences. libraria. <https://zenodo.org/record/4795689#.ylgwfqgzy2w> holcombe, a. & wilson, m. c. (2017) fair open access: returning control of scholarly journals to their communities. lse impact blog 23.10.2017 <https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/10/23/ fair-open-access-returning-control-of-scholarly-journals-to-their-communities/> 12.6.2021. holmberg, a. (2021) the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland – commentary to huttunen and albrecht. fennia 199(1) 144–146. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.108085 huttunen, j. & albrecht, e. (2021) the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland. fennia 199(1) 46–60. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102480 huttunen, s., salo, m., aro, r. & turunen, a. (2020) environmental citizenship in geography and beyond. fennia 198(1–2) 196–209. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.90715 kaisto, v. (2019) lasten alueelliset mielikuvat ja identiteetit muutoksessa suomen ja venäjän raja-alueella. versus 21.11.2019 <https://www.versuslehti.fi/tiededebatti/lasten-alueelliset-mielikuvatja-identiteetit-muutoksessa-suomen-ja-venajan-raja-alueella/> 12.6.2021. kallio, k. p. & riding, j. (2019) open policies, open practices – open attitudes? fennia 197(1) 1–7. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80428 kyroglou, g. (2021) an ‘inconvenient truth’? the problem of recognition of the political message – commentary to huttunen and albrecht. fennia 199(1) 139–143. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.108034 köpke, s. (2021) reinvigorating a political ecology of the global agri-food system. fennia 199(1) 89–103. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99209 lehtinen, a. (2018) megatrendejä ja kasvukipuja? kiinteistönjalostuksesta laadulliseen kaavoitukseen. versus 20.12.2018 <https://www.versuslehti.fi/tiededebatti/megatrendeja-jakasvukipuja-kiinteistonjalostuksesta-laadulliseen-kaavoitukseen/> 12.6.2021. lock, r. (2020) beyond imagining: enacting intergenerational response-ability as world-building – commentary to bowman. fennia 198(1–2) 223–226. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98008 nielsen, h. d. (2020) dangerous border – but for whom? versus 10.12.2020 <https://www.versuslehti.fi/ tiededebatti/dangerous-border-but-for-whom/> 12.6.2021. pawliw, k., berthold, étienne, & lasserre, f. (2021) the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin’s lost expedition. fennia 199(1) 9–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98496 rantanen, t., tolvanen, h., honkola, t. & vesakokiski, o. (2021) a comprehensive spatial model for historical travel effort a case study in finland. fennia 199(1) 61-88. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98357 reinsfelder, t. l. & pike, c. a. (2018) using library funds to support open access publishing through crowdfunding: going beyond article processing charges. collection management 48(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2017.1415826 sawatzky, m. & albrecht, m. (2018) translating eu energy policy into energy independence: reunion island’s rocky road as a french overseas territory. versus 15.10.2018 <https://www.versuslehti.fi/ 8 editorial fennia 199(1) (2021) tiededebatti/translating-eu-energy-policy-into-energy-independence-reunion-islands-rocky-road-as-afrench-overseas-territory/> 12.6.2021. soeiro, d. (2021). smart cities and innovative governance systems: a reflection on urban living labs and action research. fennia 199(1) 104–112. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.97054 valli, c. (2021) participatory dissemination: bridging in-depth interviews, participation, and creative visual methods through interview-based zine-making (ibzm). fennia 199(1) 25–45. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99197 wood, b. (2020) youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research – commentary to bowman. fennia 198(1–2) 217–222. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.91089 yarovoy, g., albrecht, m. & karginova-gubinova, v. (2021a) building up a ruin to come: why the russian waste reform seems doomed to fail in rural areas? versus 15.2.2021 <https://www.versuslehti.fi/ tiededebatti/building-up-a-ruin-to-come-why-the-russian-waste-reform-seems-doomed-to-fail-in-ruralareas/> 12.6.2021. yarovoy, g., albrecht, m. & karginova-gubinova, v. (2021b) почему российская «мусорная» реформа обречена на провал в сельской местности? versus 15.2.2021 <https://www.versuslehti.fi/ tiededebatti/почему-российская-мусорная-реформ/> 12.6.2021. von zabern, l. & tulloch, c. d. (2021) changing thoughts, changing future – commentary to huttunen and albrecht. fennia 199(1) 147–151. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109348 an overview of the nordic battery belt: an emerging network for cooperation within the nordic battery cluster urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa120695 doi: 10.11143/fennia.120695 an overview of the nordic battery belt: an emerging network for cooperation within the nordic battery cluster ejike okonkwo okonkwo, e. (2022) an overview of the nordic battery belt: an emerging network for cooperation within the nordic battery cluster. fennia 200(1) 52–67. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120695 there is an increasing global demand for batteries in the decarbonisation process and an attempt to increase its production within europe, thereby reducing the dependency on the asian market. consequently, the battery industry cluster is emerging in the nordic region with the requisite raw materials for battery production in norway, sweden, and finland. the industry will encounter medium and long-term challenges in its supply value chain due to the envisaged transport connectivity issues in the region, especially as the industry begins experiencing growth. regional networks will play a key role in mitigating these challenges by providing a space for cooperation among actors; however, how regional networks address these transport connectivity issues still needs to be explored. this paper introduces results from a qualitative study that adopts the network approach in examining the nature and the role of a novel network within the nordic battery cluster. they show that the nordic battery belt (nbb) is an emerging cross-border regional network established to proactively identify the prevailing and the envisaged connectivity challenges within the nordic region. the nbb, therefore, contributes to the development of logistical strategies and inventories for sustainable and cost-effective transport systems, which will support the battery industry’s supply chain and reduce the industry’s carbon footprints. overall, the paper advances the understanding of networks and their role in the regional energy transitions literature viz-a-viz the battery industry. keywords: battery industry, regional energy transitions, cooperation, network, nordic battery belt (nbb) okonkwo ejike (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4622-5785), school of management, university of vaasa, finland. e-mail: ejike.okonkwo@uwasa.fi © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction batteries are innovative technologies expected to play an increasing role in the decarbonisation process via the reduction of the intermittency of renewable energy while also contributing to economic growth and environmental sustainability (stephan et al. 2019; halleux 2022). as the demand for batteries in the decarbonisation process continues to increase, battery industry cluster https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120695 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4622-5785 mailto:ejike.okonkwo@uwasa.fi fennia 200(1) (2022) 53ejike okonkwo is emerging in the nordic region, including norway, sweden, and finland, to meet this increasing demand (löfmarck et al. 2022). following this development, new regional networks have been established to strengthen the industry cluster (kvarken.org 2021a). europe accounts for 17% of the global demand for batteries; a sector projected to be worth over €250 billion annually by 2025 (halleux 2022). due to the strategic importance of batteries in europe, it has become imperative to scale up battery production through a range of measures that covers “raw materials extraction, sourcing and processing, battery materials, cell production, battery systems, reuse and recycling” (ibid, 2). in the nordic region, increasing investment in the battery industry to support an accelerated decarbonisation process is taking place. while this could be considered a good move towards the right direction, murphy and smith (2013) observe that inadequate infrastructural development could hamper access to natural resources and their optimal utilisation. against the backdrop that the nordic battery industry is envisaged to face mediumand long-term transportation challenges in its supply value chain due to the inadequate transport connectivity in the area where the battery factories are domiciled (löfmarck et al. 2022). while burgeoning research on the role of batteries in the decarbonisation process exists, some of which highlights the importance of cooperation in battery development among the private sectors. however, within the nordic context, the transport connectivity challenges in the emerging battery cluster and the role of regional networks in solving them remains underexplored. this paper is a qualitative case study that utilizes secondary data to examine a novel regional network referred to as the nordic battery belt (nbb) to understand the reason for its emergence, nature, composition, and role in strengthening the transport connectivity of the battery cluster. in addition, network perspective will be utilized to facilitate the understanding of the nbb and will be conceptualised herein as “deliberately designed and intentional structures, instruments or tools that are voluntary constructions” (hoppe & miedema 2020, 6). the emerging battery cluster and the concomitant regional network will open a new space for regional cooperation towards solving the mediumand long-term transport connectivity challenges projected to confront the industry (löfmarck et al. 2022). as shown in the paper, there is a surge of battery cluster within the nordic region albeit with envisaged transport connectivity challenges. this being the case, a cross-border regional network hereafter refers to the nordic battery belt (nbb) was established to improve the industry’s supply value chain and strengthen the links to the european and international energy market. its main objective is to develop an effective logistical strategy that will foster a sustainable cluster thereby improving the sector’s competitive advantage (kvarken.org 2021a). this study increases the understanding on the role of networks in the decarbonization process viz-a-viz developing an effective logistical strategy considered essential in fostering a sustainable battery cluster and regional energy transitions particularly within the nordic context. the paper is composed of the following sections: a review of related literature, theoretical underpinning, an empirical background of the battery cluster in the nordic region, a description of research materials and methods, introduction of results, followed by a discussion, recommendation, and conclusion sections. mind the gap: the role of cooperation in advancing the battery industry battery production is a complex process that involves the interaction of different institutional stakeholders (liu & agusdinata 2020). multidisciplinary expertise and interdisciplinary collaborations of actors are required to address the challenges in battery development (booth et al. 2021). some of these challenges include carbon footprints (peiseler et al. 2022). others include additional emissions in storing electricity in new battery technologies (schmidt et al. 2019). while lack of comprehensive regulatory framework for battery waste management has also been identified (dobrowolski et al. 2021). studies have also shown that part of these challenges include health and safety hazards (tang & yuan 2021). in addition, low battery performance and longevity issues of battery cells remain one of the main issues affecting the efficiency of batteries (robinson et al. 2021). cooperation and collaboration are also imperative for meeting the increasing demand for batteries in europe while at the same time reducing the dependency on the asian battery market (beuse et al. 2018). additionally, cross-sectoral knowledge is considered as an essential factor in developing such an important modern 54 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays technology (stephan et al. 2019). one of the ways to achieve knowledge co-creation is through effective and inclusive multi-stakeholder participation and continuous dialogue in the policy process, which among other things, increases the sustainability of the battery industry (petavratzi et al. 2022, 19). other benefits associated with active stakeholder involvement is its ability to accelerate the pace of diffusion (stephan et al. 2019). studies suggest that private (actors) project developers play an essential role as the first mover in the diffusion of renewable technologies (steffen et al. 2018). network actors are also involved in framing policies for local technology learning to reduce implementation costs. they also contribute to improving knowledge by contributing to the technology standardisation process, permitting processes, grants, and public procurement (neij & nemet 2022). meanwhile, other studies relating to cooperation in strengthening the battery industry have focused mainly on the role of the private sector actors in the technology development aspect of the battery industry rather than on the role of regional networks in solving connectivity challenges. for instance, these studies have dealt with issues in the following areas: collaborative and interactive learning in the private sector among “material suppliers, production equipment manufacturers, cell manufacturers, system integrators and end users, with cell manufacturers acting as a central node for coordination of inter-sectoral learning” (malhotra et al. 2019, 478). furthermore, collaboration among private actors working with wind technologies, solar photovoltaics (pv), and biomass is well known (steffen et al. 2018). another area that has been investigated is the knowledge exchange between private sectors involved in developing, producing, and using unique technologies (stephan et al. 2019). the imperativeness of strengthening the sustainability of the battery industry through capacity building is also well noted. for example, the closest attempt that examined issues relating to infrastructural development that supports the transportation of battery raw materials points to the negative impact such infrastructural development could have on biodiversity (petavratzi et al. 2022). besides the practical sustainability challenges with infrastructural development, the study also suggests other diverse challenges within the industry, such as poor institutional connectivity and low stakeholder participation, regarded as governance challenges with implications for poor data management in accessing the environmental impact of battery production. for instance, the study shows that inadequate investment in infrastructural development is one of the economic and social challenges for battery production as it not only hampers the supply value chain but also leads to opposition from local communities who expects that infrastructural development will naturally constitute one of the positive externalities for battery-related activities in their local communities. on that account, this suggests the importance of infrastructural development for the efficient operation of the industry; yet the study does not provide insight into how network actors are working to address these infrastructural challenges. the preceding thus constitutes noticeable gaps that require further examination. as already stated, there are burgeoning studies related to batteries, as can be deduced in the studies outlined above, and they provided important insights into understanding the importance of cooperation among actors within the industry. despite these contributions by previous research, studies that deal with the role of regional networks towards strengthening the transport connectivity and the supply chain within an emerging battery context have been underexplored. the rationale, and process for selecting the nordic battery belt in this study based on the observed gaps, this paper examines an empirical case relating to the nature of a novel regional institution, the nordic battery belt (nbb), established to strengthen the battery cluster. the nbb aims to develop transport strategies that address the projected medium-and long-term connectivity challenges within the nordic context where the industry is domiciled (löfmarck et al. 2022). the following questions guide the study that aims to increase understanding of the role of networks in proffering solutions to the transport connectivity challenges; how can the nature of the nbb be understood through the network theoretical perspective? why is establishing the nbb important in the emerging nordic battery industry? this paper is based on a qualitative study of the nordic battery belt (nbb) composed of actors from three nordic regions of nordland, norway; ostrobothnia, finland; and västerbotten, sweden, respectively. the actors from these regions include the kvarken council egtc, vaasa region development company vasek, skellefteå municipality, kokkola region fennia 200(1) (2022) 55ejike okonkwo development company kosek, rana utvikling, and midtskandia. i used tables and diagrams to ensure an easy understanding of the information presented in this paper (cf. belt et al. 2011). the nbb was selected because the research aims to increase the knowledge of the role of regional networks in the nordic battery cluster. i adopted qualitative methods to ensure an understanding of a phenomenon in different contexts (bengtsson 2016). i searched for journal publications related to the research topic using ‘battery’ and ‘institutions’ as keywords in the ‘title’ field with the boolean operator ‘and’ for articles collected in scopus published in the last five years from 2018 to 2022. these papers were selected because they represent the latest research on network and institutional aspects of the battery industry. the initial search that cut across different disciplines displayed 1 350 results. since some results were unrelated due to their disciplinary affiliations, i streamlined the search by selecting only the most related fields that fit the research topic, such as innovations, technology, and social sciences. in doing so, i further reduced the results to 228 articles from which i selected the final literature used in the study. by doing so, only the most relevant articles were included in the paper, allowing for in-depth reading of the documents before i made the inclusion and exclusion decisions. the selection criteria include articles with some of these keywords either in the topic or in the abstract: battery, networks, electrification, energy storage, innovation, and institutions. also, i included only regularly published articles written in english due to the scope of the researcher’s language proficiency. in addition, i used official conference reports that provided an empirical contribution within the research context and data from official government and private companies websites. for instance, i extracted the perspectives of some regional actors on the nbb from the information available on kvarken.org because they have the most updated information on the nbb attributable to their role as the coordinator within the emerging network. furthermore, i gathered information that provided the contextual understanding of the constituting actors in the nbb through the official websites of other actors such as vasek.fi, skelleftea.se, kosek.fi, ranautvikling.no, regionvasterbotten.se and kvarken.org et cetera. the rationale for utilising different secondary data sources was to ensure the triangulation of perspectives for improved undertraining of the phenomena (cf. lune & berg 2017). lastly, the network theoretical framework facilitated the understanding of the importance of human factors in the transition process, while content analysis augmented the secondary data analysis. content analysis is “a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts to the contexts of their use” (krippendorff 2018, 18). also, context analysis facilitates making sense of collected data and reaching conclusions, ensuring research rigour, credibility, and trustworthiness (bengtsson 2016). since this paper aims to provide an overview of the nbb rather than understanding the cooperation processes within the nbb; hence, it relies solely on secondary data. although this is not to say that primary data collected via semi-structured interviews of some of the actors in the nbb could not have increased our insight into the stakeholders’ perspectives regarding the industry and the regional network. i compensated for this limitation by utilising a recent official report based on empirical findings viz-a-viz the nbb to increase the understanding of the emerging network. network theoretical perspective in regional energy transition networks play a crucial role in context-based innovation policies that support the diffusion of new cluster at the regional level (fornahl & hassink 2017). these policies also influence the direction and pace of the diffusion of technological innovation (stephan et al. 2019). network theoretical perspective is utilised in regional transition studies to understand the role of actors in the decarbonisation process (hoppe & miedema 2020). in addition, it facilitates the understanding of the contribution of networks to the policy process (klijn 2008). as well as their role towards solving complex societal problems (van bueren et al. 2003). network theoretical underpinning also offers a perspective from which to analyse technological developments (lee & su 2021). the theory also support the claim that the energy transition is accelerating due to human factors, such as increasing collaboration and coalitions among actors (sovacool et al. 2020). put differently, the human factors can be understood as collaboration among "different actors operating at various scales in activities that influence a region’s transition" (coenen et al. 2021, 223). 56 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays context-specific factors such as political conditions, economic structures, and available material resources influence the nature of a formed network (fuchs & hinderer 2014). these initial contextual conditions affect the policy intervention adopted (fornahl & hassink 2017, 3). that being the case, networks can be seen as "deliberately designed, intentional structures, instruments or tools that are voluntary constructions, and are not the result of a mandate from an external actor” (hoppe & miedema 2020, 6). policy networks, for instance, are made up of multiple interdependent actors (lee & su 2021). there is also structural dependence of members and the absence of subordinates (turrini et al. 2010). within a network, members participate equally in managing the affairs such as decisionmaking, goal setting, strategy, planning, and so on (hoppe & miedema 2020, 7). a network’s overall objective is to attain a win-win goal for its members through a combined utilisation of resources, alignment of interests, goals, actions, commitment, and compliance of actors, as well as openness in interaction (hoppe & miedema 2020). network actors collaborate with other actors through exchanging ideas and resources (lutz et al. 2017). trust within the network has also been identified as an essential factor that enhances and sustains cooperation (klok 2018). individual actors within the network usually have predefined goals they want to achieve, and this motivation influences their level of commitment (fuchs & hinderer 2014). in most instances, network actors are within close geographical locations and possess similar economic contexts, such as raw materials and well-established infrastructure (lutz et al. 2017; milward et al. 2010). empirical studies suggest that some countries, although in proximity, differ significantly in their “levels of development, governance regimes and strategies for the exploitation of raw materials for battery production” (petavratzi et al. 2022, 15). other studies suggests that this is not the case within the nordic region as they have similar contexts and a robust historical cooperation tie (löfmarck et al. 2022). networks also play an imperative role in the formation of clusters and the latter contributes to a region’s development (fornahl & hassink 2017, 2). they also argued that “clusters are not closed entities but are embedded within an ecosystem of networks, actors, linkages, rules" (ibid, 3). lastly, for these scholars, networks and their policy intervention ensure the sustainability of clusters and their ability to renew themselves, thus preventing their decline. the emerging battery cluster and the need for cooperation in the nordic region as the demand for batteries to support the decarbonisation process continues to increase, so are the emerging battery industries at different places to meet these demands. within the eu, one of the decarbonisation strategies is to reduce the dependency on the asian market for its supply of battery products and services within the sector (beuse et al. 2018). hence, many european countries and regions have begun looking inwards to align their decarbonisation strategies with the increased utilisation of available local resources. within the nordic context, three countries comprising norway, sweden, and finland, are experiencing a surge in battery industries (löfmarck et al. 2022, 3). one of the driving factors is the availability of the natural raw materials needed to produce batteries, such as cobalt, nickel, lithium and graphite, copper, vanadium, and other critical materials (ibid.) hence, it follows naturally that the energy transition strategies in the nordic region would support the increased utilisation of these available local resources. besides these resource endowments, several other factors help the surge of the battery industry in the nordic region such as the availability of clean energy (energyvaasa 2019). transport infrastructure and effective regional institutions are also some of the crucial factors that support the battery industry (löfmarck et al. 2022). based on the economic prospects and the favourable conditions to operate in the region, an increasing number of companies have indicated interests in investing in the battery industry. already, some companies have completed the construction of battery production plants and have begun operations, such as the northvolt plant in skellefteå, the kedali industry and boliden battery industry projects in sweden (löfmarck et al. 2022). the building phase is underway in mo i rana, norway, by freyr, a norwegian-based battery company. while in the vaasa region in finland, the planning phase to construct a battery factory is already in full swing as different companies have expressed interest, such as grafintec, which intends to build an anode material plant in vaasa; also, keliber, a company domiciled in kokkala plans to construct a lithium hydroxide plant (ibid.). fennia 200(1) (2022) 57ejike okonkwo the growth of the battery cluster in the nordic region hinges on the fact that the three countries not only share proximities but also have similar contexts such as governance structure and strong institutions, level of economic and infrastructural development and a solid historical tie of crossborder cooperation (aula et al. 2020). empirical reports suggest that although the nordic region has a well-established transport infrastructure, this does not negate the absence of connectivity issues orchestrated by inadequate infrastructures such as roads, rail lines, and seaports connecting especially the east-west areas that can adequately support the industry in the long term (löfmarck et al. 2022). given the proximity and similarity of contexts, the battery cluster will face similar connectivity challenges that could impact the supply value chain of the emerging industry in the medium and long term as the sector starts experiencing increased growth in the next few years. for instance, the report claims that while the current state of the existing infrastructure in the next three years is adequate in ensuring the operations of the supply value chain, it is still vital to improve them further to serve the needs of the growing industry. solving the identified connectivity challenges require nordic cooperation and collaboration among regional actors (löfmarck et al. 2022, 53). studies regard this form of cooperation as an “umbrella term for the system of norms, international organisations, treaties and agreements, formal and informal contacts, and common projects and customary procedures” (landiss 2012, 4). nordic cooperation also facilitates the establishment of strong ties in achieving mutual socio-economic and political objectives, overcoming common challenges, maintaining economic and political cohesion, legitimising issues of common concern, and fostering unity and recognition of shared cultural heritage (notaker 2022). this form of cooperation usually takes place loosely through networks and within various sectors; it promotes learning, knowledge exchange and harmonised policy positions between member states, it also adopts a "bottom-up approach characterised by informal networking and coordination among national administrations and stakeholders" (stie & trondal 2020, 5). deep integration, weak disintegration, and differentiated integration are the three main forms of cooperation among the countries in the region (ibid.). differentiated cooperation ensures that different regional institutions collaborates on different policy issues and at varying times and pace (leruth et al. 2019). the nbb can be regarded as a cross-border network with an element of differentiated cooperation because it connects three countries within the region, with the aim of addressing common (transport connectivity) challenges or ‘crises’ in the battery cluster. overall, the emerging battery industry in the nordic region has a reasonable prospect based on the factors already outlined, and cooperation within the network (nbb) will further strengthen the industry’s competitive market advantage as well as reduce the carbon footprints by shortening the transportation distance within the battery cluster supply chain. an insight into the nordic battery belt this section presents the nature and role of the nbb, as well as the perspectives of key stakeholders concerning the emerging battery industry. three regions comprise the nbb: ostrobothnia, nordland, and västerbotten in finland, norway, and sweden, respectively (löfmarck et al. 2022). in a nutshell, figure 1 below captures the composition and objectives of the nbb. as shown in figure 1, the nordic battery belt is a cross-border network comprising different crossregional actors such as the kvarken council egtc, the vaasa region development company vasek, skellefteå municipality, and the kokkola region development company kosek. rana utvikling, midtskandia, and future cleantech solution. the composition of the nbb reinforces the claim that regional energy transition is a complex process. studies have also shown that different actors often cooperate to achieve common goals in the decarbonisation process (droege 2018). the nbb plays an imperative role in the decarbonization process by is identifying the envisaged mediumand longterm logistical issues that will likely affect the supply value chain within the nordic battery cluster. the aim is to ensure sustainable and cost-effective transportation of human and material resources, which could also ensure reduced carbon footprints of the industry (löfmarck et al. 2022). in addition, the nbb works towards removing barriers to cooperation in the regional market by developing logistical strategies and inventories to strengthen the battery cluster in the region (kvarken.org 58 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays 2021a). against this backdrop, "inter-organisational relation is important for the formulation of joint vision or establishment of collaborative innovation projects" (hansen & coenen 2015, 100). therefore, developing transport strategies to address the anticipated connectivity challenges will contribute towards ensuring the sustainability of the battery cluster. some of the identified connectivity challenges to be addressed include the following: missing railway link between storuman (sweden) and mo i rana (norway); underway but needs to be completed: norrbotniabanan between umeå in the south and luleå in the north (sweden); road conditions in sweden (e4 is planned to be redrawn around skellefteå, but east-west roads over to norway are considered poor; e12 is an essential east-west connection); railway capacity between ylivieska and oulu (finland); new port road in vaasa (finland); widening and deepening the fairway to vaasa (finland); widening and deepening the fairway to mo i rana (norway); developing digitalisation as a competitive advantage in all countries; infrastructure for electric air traffic possible is needed in more airports; also vertiports for evtols / could solve certain goods transport issues. (löfmarck et al. 2022, 4). as already stated, batteries support the decarbonisation process. while such a transition presents substantial economic opportunities for the nordic countries, it is pertinent to invest towards an improved infrastructure that would contribute to the growth of the battery industry. the connectivity challenges outlined above are gradually receiving attention to ensure the development of enhanced logistical infrastructures and solutions that will strengthen the battery value chain in the nordic region. despite the progress that has been recorded so, more needs to be done because “many areas in finland still need improved connections to the european and international market; thus, a fixed link across the kvarken would benefit all three countries – not only sweden and finland but also norway” (kvarken.org 2021b, 2). improving the transport infrastructure and connectivity will enhance the movement of goods and services in the battery-producing region and strengthen the value chain of the battery cluster (ibid.). it is imperative to note that such developmental activities will present opportunities and challenges, hence, the need for multi-stakeholder involvement (nordichub 2021). fig. 1. an illustrative summary of the nordic battery belt (nbb). fennia 200(1) (2022) 59ejike okonkwo solving the identified issues would require increased cooperation among regional actors; the nbb will thus contribute to increased cooperation among key stakeholders through the various knowledge co-creation events and discussions it organises that improves the business growth in the nordic energy market (löfmarck et al. 2022). to gain more insight, table 1 provides an overview of the actors that constitute the nbb. table 1. regional actors within the nordic battery belt. actors objectives focus the kvarken council (kvarken region) provides a platform for cooperation for regional actors; eliminate border barriers (kvarken.org). transport, business, education, research and development, culture, environmental issues (ibid.). vaasa region development company (vasek) improves the precondition for business activities in the vaasa region (vasek.fi). business development services, regional development, marketing (ibid.). skellefteå municipality (västerbotten, sweden) provides favourable conditions for a thriving battery industry (skelleftea.se). municipal administration and active involvement in the development of the battery industry (ibid.). kokkola region development company (kosek) pro-bono business and development services for all entrepreneurs and companies (kosek.fi). new entrepreneurship, operating companies, business transfers (ibid.). rana utvikling (nordland, norway) facilitates new commercial activities and improve operations for the business community (rana utvikling.no). free consultations and support services to start-ups and companies in the region (ibid.). midtskandia improves transport and logistics solution in the east-west direction (regionvasterbotten.se). advocacy for infrastructural development, skills supply, innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainable energy development (ibid.). as shown in table 1, the kvarken council functions as a neutral network that enables different types of cross-border cooperation. it currently plays a coordinator-like role in fostering regional cooperation, especially within the nbb, and increasing the region’s visibility at the national and european levels (kvarken.org 2021c). the second actor is vasek, located in the ostrobothnia region in the western part of finland. the vaasa region is considered one of the energy clusters in the nordic countries (energyvaasa 2019). vasek works primarily as a facilitator for emerging businesses; they promote and reinforce regional growth and competitiveness among the regional authorities, municipalities, local action groups and enterprises. the next actor is skellefteå, a municipality in västerbotten region in the northern part of sweden (oecd 2021). the area has abundant natural resources that support various industrial activities, northvolt battery factory is within this region (jörgen 2022). skellefteå plays an active role in developing a well-established strategy for the battery industry in sweden; they are also one of the key investors in the emerging industry (ibid.). in addition, the municipality is 60 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays involved in the rapid development of different ancillary projects that support the sustainability of the battery industry, such as the construction of new housing units, schools, and leisure centres; these projects will attract and retain local and international labour force (skelleftea.se 2021). the kokkola region development company (kosek 2022) also plays a similar role as vasek in providing pro-bono services that support the growth and development of emerging businesses. rana utvikling is also a regional development company in the nordland region of norway that helps new businesses; the first lithium-battery cell production company, referred to as freyr, is at moi i rana. there is a high concentration of energy companies in the region, also renowned for its vast capabilities in hydrobased electricity production (rana utvikling n.d.). finally, midtskandia is a “nordic border regional cooperation forum between nordland’s county municipality with municipalities in helgeland, norway and the västerbotten region with municipalities in sweden” (regionvasterbotten.se). its objective is to remove border barriers and contribute to an increased joint cross-border development project (ibid.). with the continuous growth of the battery industry cluster, an interesting observation is a high optimism among regional actors and stakeholders regarding the enormous potential and economic opportunities therein. these actors also share a sense of solidarity and commonality of purpose. figure 2 below summarises some of the stakeholders’ perspectives on the importance of the battery industry and the nbb. fig. 2. the perspective of key stakeholders on battery production and the nbb. ffiigguurree 22:: tthhee ppeerrssppeeccttiivvee ooff kkeeyy ssttaakkeehhoollddeerrss oonn bbaatttteerryy pprroodduuccttiioonn && tthhee nnbbbb inventory & strategy mathias lindström, kvarken council's director: the nbb will produce a strategy to contribute to sustainable and cost-effective transport in the region (sand 2021b). k v a r k e n . o r g imagining future-outlook tom einar, ceo, freyr battery, norway: the nbb will be the battery industry’s silicon valley (sand 2021a). multiplier effect richard carstedt, regional councillor for västerbotten: multiplier effects from battery production, such as: job creation, real estate development, new services within the energy industry, and new common labour market (sand 2021a). attraction for labour mobility riitta björkenheim development director, vasek: cooperation within the nbb will create an attractive region for young people and international labour (sand 2021a). industry value creation tom einar, ceo, freyr: companies investing in the battery industry will provide safe, cost-effective, clean battery cells for the rapidly growing green energy market. the companies will also serve as an agent for climate change mitigation through batteries which support green electrification (sand 2021a). cross-border infrastructure mathias lindström, kvarken council's director: emergence of new groundbreaking infrastructures that supports the objectives of the nbb, such as new ferry, electric air traffic etc. (sand 2021b). market value creation arne langset, ceo/head of secretariat at indre helgeland region, norway: cooperation in nbb will lead to a common labour market, joint infrastructural investments, and joint recruitment strategies (sand 2021b). fennia 200(1) (2022) 61ejike okonkwo figure 2 shows the brief compilation of the opinions of some stakeholders that were expressed at different regional planning meetings consisting of the private and public actors, as shown above, and elaborated in the discussion section. sand (2021a) notes that these opinions are mainly on the battery industry’s expected contribution and the role of the nbb in fostering the sector. the opinion of the stakeholders suggests a high optimism and a positive synergy in their views regarding battery production in the region and the role of the nbb. in addition, they may have foreseen the numerous potentials and opportunities the emerging industry could bring to the region. for that reason, it can be said that this is a promising outlook for the future and a possible indication of the stakeholders’ willingness and commitment to cooperate towards strengthening the battery cluster. besides the identification of the mediumand long-term connectivity challenges that are expected to confront the battery industry, particularly with regards to the east to west links, the nbb has also made other recommendations that go beyond connectivity-related issues to other activities that can overall strengthen the growth and sustainability of the industry (löfmarck et al. 2022). these include improving the visibility of the battery-producing potential and the regional economic opportunities in the international space through branding and public relations. in doing so, the region could attract more investors and skilled labour (ibid.). for instance, the appellation of the ‘nordic battery belt’ draws attention to the geographical space (nordic region) in which the battery industry is emerging. previous studies have shown that branding is vital as it highlights a novel, innovative space for cooperation in a region (wäckerlin et al. 2020). empirical report has also suggested that there should be continued cooperation in knowledge co-creation within the nbb and across the public and private sectors, such as companies, universities, and the government, as this will strengthen the industry and the decarbonisation process (löfmarck et al. 2022). the report also suggests the imperativeness of learning from other contexts on how to address the logistical loopholes through cooperation and improved data sharing. finally, it notes that the battery industry is a capital-intensive project, hence, the need for governments of the constituting regions to continuously fund the work that is being done by the nbb towards improved infrastructural development and start-up financing and other energy-related ventures. making sense of the role and importance of the nordic battery belt identification of the mediumand long-term logistical challenges the findings reveal that the nordic battery belt (nbb) is an eu collaborative enterprise funded by interreg botnia-atlantica aimed at “developing a strategy for sustainable and cost-efficient crossborder logistics for the emerging battery cluster” (kvarken.org 2021a, 2). the nordic countries of norway, sweden, and finland all have well-established transport infrastructure; however, empirical studies suggest that more transport infrastructure will still be needed to connect more areas within the region, as identified already (löfmarck et al. 2022). on that account, this means that the preexisting condition within the nordic context before the emergence of the battery industry cluster is somewhat characterised by transport connectivity challenges, especially in the northern part of the region. the connectivity issues can be attributable to the elongated topography and vastly rocky terrain, making construction difficult (sovacool et al. 2018). over time, this has contributed to some of the connectivity challenges the emerging industry has to overcome. according to aslani and colleagues (2013a), a more effective and efficient supply chain is required as renewable energy uptake increases. reiteratively, while the existing infrastructure in the region is adequate to support the battery cluster, it is expected that the industry will experience growth in a few years. as a result, thus there will be an increased need for transport infrastructure and connectivity that supports the supply value chain. the emerging battery industry is expected to face medium-and long-term connectivity challenges within the context in which it operates. studies have shown that context-specific conditions influence the nature of a network formed (fuchs & hinderer 2014). contextual factors also influence the kind of policy intervention adopted (fornahl & hassink 2017, 3). consequently, the nbb was established in response to the contextual connectivity challenges with the aim of improving the supply value chain within the industry. the findings hence suggest that nbb’s role as a regional network is to 62 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays proactively identify these potential challenges and develop logistical strategies and inventories that will facilitate the transportation of human and material resources within the battery cluster; because improved connectivity would ensure the removal of barriers to regional energy cooperation, increase the region’s competitive advantage in the energy market, and reduce the industry’s carbon footprints when the distances are shorter and well-connected. the justification for establishing a regional network such as the nbb aligns with claims that energy transitions involve different actors (coenen et al. 2021). this assertion hinges on the fact that the nbb is a deliberately designed structure, and its voluntary nature entails that the members of the network are not compelled or obligated in their actions by external forces, as already observed (hoppe & miedema 2020). in addition, "regional actors are better able to design successful policies than national actors due to their knowledge of place-specific conditions and ability to finetune policies" (hansen & coenen 2015, 97). networks are thus designed to ensure the sustainability of clusters and their ability to renew themselves, thus preventing their decline (fornahl & hassink 2017). the establishment of the nbb will thus contribute to the sustainability of the battery cluster in the nordic region. the chances and rate of achieving a sustainable battery cluster will depend on the level of commitment and cooperation among the actors in the nbb. concerning this, empirical studies also reveal that "companies are not that interested in establishing formal structures in cooperating within the nbb" (löfmarck et al. 2022, 51). hence, the nbb remains a bottom-up approach to solving the identified logistical challenges, its effectiveness will still be to a large extent contingent on the degree of implementation of its strategies and recommendations by the regional and national authorities. fostering regional cooperation within the nordic battery cluster the battery cluster in the nordic region will face similar connectivity challenges; that being the case, cooperation, and collaboration within the nbb in developing a common logistics strategy could benefit the battery cluster. this aligns with the claims that human factors such as collaboration and cooperation contribute to the energy transition process (sovacool et al. 2020). the establishment of the nbb thus reinforces the claim that the energy transition process involves cross-jurisdictional and multi-actor participation (hoppe & miedema 2020). nordic cooperation will be beneficial in solving the identified “east-west transport infrastructure connectivity challenges existing in all the nordic countries” (löfmarck et al. 2022, 53). according to cleophas and colleagues (2019) and gatta and others (2019) collaboration among actors remains one of the keyways to achieving sustainable and cost-effective logistics. the nbb will thus provide the space for cooperation where the constituting actors will leverage their diverse economic expertise, business acumen and finance experiences to develop the needed logistical strategies. the emergence of the nbb thus entails that science and technology are not the only drivers of the energy transition; regional actors also shape and influence transitions through cooperative and collaborative interactions such as the exchange of knowledge and resources (lutz et al. 2017; hess & sovacool 2020; coenen et al. 2021). this cooperation implies that the region could leverage the common opportunities geared towards reducing carbon-based energy dependency and increasing renewable energy production and distribution (aslani et al. 2013b; hongisto & tukiainen 2020). clusters are not closed entities but are embedded in an ecosystem of actors, linkages, and rules (fornahl & hassink 2017, 3). the nordic battery cluster comprises different unique and related companies that will face similar transport connectivity challenges in its supply value chain. hence, cooperation via the nbb embedded in the nordic context, where the battery industry is domicile, plays an imperative role and will likely positively impact the battery cluster within the broader energy ecosystem. as stated earlier, cooperation between the nordic countries is strong due to the historical antecedents, similarity of contexts and path dependence (tallqvist et al. 2019). in this regard, cooperation among actors in the nbb will probably be seamless due to the region’s close historical ties and evolution. another important point is that the growth of the battery industry and the consequent emergence of the nbb is reconfiguring and deepening nordic cooperation. for instance, although the kvarken region is historically comprised of areas in finland and sweden, such as the ostrobothnia, southern ostrobothnia, central ostrobothnia, county of västerbotten and the municipality of örnsköldsvik in fennia 200(1) (2022) 63ejike okonkwo sweden (kvarken.org 2021c). the establishment of the nbb has now extended the existing cooperation within the kvarken region also to include the nordland region of norway. accordingly, proximity and the similarity of contextual factors facilitate regional collaboration and the growth of the battery cluster. complimenting the efforts of stakeholders in the nordic battery cluster with the growth of the battery industry, regional cooperation involving key stakeholders will become increasingly important and the nordic battery cluster will be driven not only by the nbb but also by other key stakeholder both within the public and the private sectors. as shown in table 2, the stakeholders are one of the main actors that will play critical roles alongside the nbb in ensuring a thriving battery cluster in the region. as already mentioned, clusters contribute to a region’s development and networks, actors and institutions are among the drivers of a cluster development (fornahl & hassink 2017, 2). the aim for establishing the nbb strongly reinforce the suggestions of other stakeholders and this synergy will likely present a strong and harmonized policy goal. for instance, table 2 suggests that some stakeholders are already advocating for a joint regional labour strategy, such as establishing a new labour market and joint infrastructural development to strengthen cooperation in the internal energy market (sand 2021b). the stakeholders’ views indicate high optimism about the prospects of the battery industry, and such high confidence may hinge on the historical successes achieved through cooperation within the region, as suggested by (aula et al. 2020). the stakeholders’ perception also suggests their active involvement in the exchange of ideas that could strengthen and contribute to the sustainability of the emerging battery cluster. furthermore, the positive perception expressed in table 2 by the stakeholders seems to be in harmony or synergy with each other; also, their commitment to actively participate in fostering the growth of the industry suggests that they expect a positive contribution from the industry in terms of job creation, infrastructural development, and revenue. the disposition of the stakeholder towards the sector could be because of the win-win situation for all who are involved in the emerging industry. furthermore, they emphasised positive economic externalities from the industry; however, this is not to say that the industry may not pose some environmental challenges, but now, it seems the focus of the stakeholders is on how to get the initiative started while also taking cognisance of the potential sustainability issues that may arise in the process. the harmony between stakeholders’ opinions also suggests that these key players have a commonality of purpose, which could be essential in influencing the transition process and in achieving the predetermined decarbonisation objectives. while cooperation plays a pertinent role in regional energy transitions, it is necessary to note that different factors can influence cooperation, such as the interests, goals, and actions of actors within a network (hoppe & miedema 2020). although on one hand the actors from the three constituting regions have similar interests to ensure the growth and sustainability of the battery cluster through improved infrastructure connectivity. on the other hand, while cooperating, regions could sometimes also harbour individual interests, and this could manifest through unhealthy competition in terms of having a slight edge over others and this could be a potential grey area. studies on nordic cooperation have also pointed towards the tendency of an individual country’s interest encroaching on nordic cooperation (aula et al. 2020). consequently, how effective the nbb turns out will also depend on the level of trust in the form and the level of competition therein. the way forward: leveraging on the unique nordic context via the nbb the regional level is renowned for its innovation policies supporting new cluster and its potential diffusion (fornahl & hassink 2017). regional innovation policies should be place-based or context specific to avoid the over-standardisation syndrome or misapplication of innovative strategies, that is, the one-size-fits-all approach (ibid.,1). furthermore, studies suggest that actors and the network within proximity are characterised mainly by similar economic contexts such as raw materials and well-established infrastructure (lutz et al. 2017; hongisto & tukiainen 2020). as observed earlier, the battery industry is emerging in the nordic region with similar contexts, consequently, the cluster is also expected to face similar connectivity challenges. thus, the actors within the nbb must continue 64 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays to leverage the shared similarities to their advantage. for example, the geographical proximity of the nordic countries could facilitate the realisation of sustainable and cost-effective transport connectivity within the nordic battery cluster. the regional actors within the nbb could also continuously leverage other regional shared characteristics towards consolidating cooperation. for instance, the similar operational knowledge base of regional development agencies that constitute the nbb in areas such as business strategy and economic development. these agencies provide favourable conditions for businesses to thrive via pro-bono services for business development, particularly for start-ups. proximity increases the synergy among network actors and the chances of realising a sustainable and cost-effective transport system that fosters regional economic development. networks cooperate through information and knowledge sharing (lutz et al. 2017). hence, there is a need for continued and increased dissemination of information regarding the emerging battery industry among the public, the academic community, and potential investors (löfmarck et al. 2022). cooperation within the nbb therefore needs to continue because of its vital role in providing the opportunity for the exchange of ideas and resources in developing the region’s logistical strategies. finally, the solid historical ties that is inherent in nordic cooperation could serve as a morale booster, an added advantage and a reassuring factor that should be continuously leverage towards a sustainable industrial cluster. based on the adoption of hoppe and miedema (2020, 6) conceptualisation of network in this paper, the most likely weakness of the nbb will be due to its voluntary nature characterised by informal attributes which, to a large extent, lacks the jurisdiction or the requisite authority to implement its logistical strategies that were developed. consequently, their contributions could likely be undermined by low compliance from national governments who not only have the wherewithal to translate policy strategies into action but are also known for enacting legislation that is ‘border-blind’ (interreg 2022). hence, such impediments from the central government could manifest through bureaucratic delays or red-tapism in implementing cross-border transport strategies. overall, this study only provided an overview of the nbb; future research could augment this study by eliciting feedback through semistructured interviews from actors in the nbb on how it will ensure the full implementation of its strategies within the region. conclusions there is no doubt that batteries support the decarbonisation process, and as a result, there is an increasing demand for them. consequently, there is an emerging battery cluster in the nordic region of norway, sweden, and finland, which will contribute to meeting this rising demand by utilising its available local natural resources for battery production. as the industry begins experiencing growth, it is expected that there will be mediumand long-term transport connectivity challenges in the supply value chain. that been the case, it is imperative to ascertain the role of networks’ towards solving the infrastructural challenges – an aspect in regional energy transitions literature that is currently underexplored. the paper examined the nordic battery belt (nbb), regarded as a regional network established to develop logistical strategies for solving the connectivity challenges in the nordic region. the network perspective enhanced the understanding of the role of the nbb in the emerging nordic battery cluster. from the results, the main driving factor for establishing the nbb is the contextual (infrastructural) conditions within the nordic region, which also poses a challenge to the sustainability of the battery cluster. thus, the establishment of the nbb is to facilitate cooperation towards strengthening the supply value chain within the cluster. the nbb not only identifies the mediumand long-term logistical challenges, but also fosters regional cooperation within the battery cluster, as well as compliments the efforts of stakeholders in the battery industry in the region. it is also interesting that stakeholders see massive potential in battery production and are keen on cooperating towards an accelerated regional energy transition. empirically, this paper increased the understanding of the connectivity challenges in the nordic context that may impede an accelerated decarbonisation process; theoretically, it increases the knowledge on the role of network (nbb) in regional energy transitions. the researcher thinks the paper could be further strengthened methodologically by collecting primary data from stakeholders in the battery industry via semi-structured interviews. fennia 200(1) (2022) 65ejike okonkwo acknowledgements i would like to thank the evald and hilda nissi foundation and nordenskiöld-samfundet for the doctoral study grants. my appreciation also goes to fennia for their inputs in the reviewing and editing process of the manuscript. references aslani, a., helo, p., feng, b., antila, e. & hiltunen, e. (2013a) renewable energy supply chain in ostrobothnia region and vaasa city: innovative framework. renewable and sustainable energy reviews 23 405–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2013.03.012 aslani, a., naaranoja, m. & wong, k.-f. v. (2013b) strategic analysis of diffusion of renewable energy in the nordic countries. renewable and sustainable energy reviews 22 497–505. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2013.01.060 aula, i., amundsen, r., buvarp, p., harrami, o., lindgren, j., sahlén, v. & wedebrand, c. (2020) critical nordic flows: collaboration between finland, norway and sweden on security of supply and critical infrastructure protection. national emergency supply agency. <https://www.huoltovarmuuskeskus.fi/ files/8c21565b6c4e2f8b05f62b7d5967fa24cc0e932a/critical-nordic-flows.pdf>. belt, p., mottonen, m. & harkonen, j. (2011) tips for writing scientific journal articles. industrial engineering and management working papers, 5. bengtsson, m. (2016) how to plan and perform a qualitative study using content analysis. nursingplus open 2 8–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.npls.2016.01.001 beuse, m., schmidt, t. s. & wood, v. (2018) a “technology-smart” battery policy strategy for europe. science 361(6407) 1075–1077. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau2516 booth, s. g., nedoma, a. j., anthonisamy, n. n., baker, p. j., boston, r., bronstein, h., clarke, s. j., cussen, e. j., daramalla, v., de volder, m., dutton, s. e., falkowski, v., fleck, n. a., geddes, h. s., gollapally, n., goodwin, a. l., griffin, j. m., haworth, a. r., hayward, m. a., cussen, s. a. (2021) perspectives for next generation lithium-ion battery cathode materials. apl materials 9(10) 109201. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0051092 cleophas, c., cottrill, c., ehmke, j. f. & tierney, k. (2019) collaborative urban transportation: recent advances in theory and practice. european journal of operational research 273(3) 801–816. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2018.04.037 coenen, l., hansen, t., glasmeier, a. & hassink, r. (2021) regional foundations of energy transitions. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 14(2) 219–233. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsab010 dobrowolski, z., sułkowski, ł. & danielak, w. (2021) management of waste batteries and accumulators: quest of european union goals. energies 14(19) 6273. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14196273 droege, p. (2018) urban energy transition: renewable strategies for cities and regions. elsevier, amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.1016/c2016-0-02038-7 energyvaasa (2019) establishing a battery factory? <https://www.gigavaasa.fi/wp-content/ uploads/2019/11/gigavaasa-battery-factory-brochure-web-1.pdf>. fornahl, d. & hassink, r. (2017) the life cycle of clusters. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781784719289 fuchs, g. & hinderer, n. (2014) situative governance and energy transitions in a spatial context: case studies from germany. energy, sustainability and society 4(1) 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13705-014-0016-6 gatta, v., marcucci, e., delle site, p., le pira, m. & carrocci, c. s. (2019) planning with stakeholders: analysing alternative off-hour delivery solutions via an interactive multi-criteria approach. research in transportation economics 73 53–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.retrec.2018.12.004 halleux, v. (2022) new eu regulatory framework for batteries: setting sustainability requirements. <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/eprsbri(2021)689337>. 12.10.2022. hansen, t. & coenen, l. (2015) the geography of sustainability transitions: review, synthesis, and reflections on an emergent research field. environmental innovation and societal transitions 17 92–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2014.11.001 hess, d. j. & sovacool, b. k. (2020) sociotechnical matters: reviewing and integrating science and technology studies with energy social science. energy research & social science 65 101462. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101462 hongisto, p. & tukiainen, t. (2020) sustainable baltic sea region: towards economic transformation by smart specialisation strategies. unigrafia 2020. <https://smartup-bsr.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ smart_specialisation_strategies.pdf>. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2013.03.012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2013.01.060 https://www.huoltovarmuuskeskus.fi/files/8c21565b6c4e2f8b05f62b7d5967fa24cc0e932a/critical-nordic-flows.pdf https://www.huoltovarmuuskeskus.fi/files/8c21565b6c4e2f8b05f62b7d5967fa24cc0e932a/critical-nordic-flows.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.npls.2016.01.001 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau2516 https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0051092 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2018.04.037 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsab010 https://doi.org/10.3390/en14196273 https://doi.org/10.1016/c2016-0-02038-7 https://www.gigavaasa.fi/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/gigavaasa-battery-factory-brochure-web-1.pdf https://www.gigavaasa.fi/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/gigavaasa-battery-factory-brochure-web-1.pdf https://doi.org/10.4337/9781784719289 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13705-014-0016-6 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.retrec.2018.12.004 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/eprsbri(2021)689337 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2014.11.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101462 https://smartup-bsr.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/smart_specialisation_strategies.pdf https://smartup-bsr.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/smart_specialisation_strategies.pdf 66 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays hoppe, t. & miedema, m. (2020) a governance approach to regional energy transition: meaning, conceptualization and practice. sustainability 12(3) 915. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12030915 interreg (2022) strand of cooperation: cross-border. <https://interreg.eu/strand-of-cooperation/interrega-cross-border-cooperation/>. 1.11.2022. jörgen, l. (2022) the battle for europe’s largest battery factory. <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hgvxl7irhc4>. 11.5.2022. klijn, e.-h. (2008) governance and governance networks in europe. public management review 10(4) 505–525. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030802263954 klok, p.-j., denters, b., boogers, m. & sanders, m. (2018) intermunicipal cooperation in the netherlands: the costs and the effectiveness of polycentric regional governance. public administration review 78(4) 527–536. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12931 kosek (2022) koseka partner for your company at every turn. <https://www.kosek.fi/en/>. 19.3.2022. krippendorff, k. (2018) content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. sage publications, thousand oaks, london and new delhi. kvarken.org. (2021a) nordic battery belt logistics partnership kicks off in skellefteå. <https://www. kvarken.org/nordic-battery-belt-logistics-partnership-gathers-in-skelleftea-for-kick-off/>. 11.3.2021. kvarken.org. (2021b) the kvarken region – a global future region with a golden opportunity. <https:// www.kvarken.org/en/the-kvarken-region-a-global-future-region-with-a-golden-opportunity/>. 11.3.2021. kvarken.org. (2021c) about the kvarken council. <https://www.kvarken.org/en/the-kvarken-council/>. 11.3.2021. landiss, p. (2012) nordic cooperation in the post-cold war era: a case study of institutional persistence. the university of missouri-saint louis. <https://irl.umsl.edu/dissertation/337> lee, m.-t. & su, w.-n. (2021) investigation into the development of lithium-ion battery electrolytes and related knowledge transfer using research paper-based social network analysis. journal of energy storage 41 102890. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2021.102890 leruth, b., gänzle, s. & trondal, j. (2019) differentiated integration and disintegration in the eu after brexit: risks versus opportunities. jcms: journal of common market studies 57(6) 1383–1394. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12957 liu, w. & agusdinata, d. b. (2020) interdependencies of lithium mining and communities’ sustainability in salar de atacama, chile. journal of cleaner production 260 120838. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.120838 löfmarck, a., lepola, a., martinsen, k. g., utriainen, m., ilomäki, r. & rintamäki, s. (2022) nordic battery belt logistics local and regional supply chains and logistics solutions. <https://www.kvarken.org/ projekt/nordic-battery-belt-logistics-local-regional-supply-chains-and-logistics-solutions/>. 13.10. 2022. lune, h. &. berg, b. l. (2017) qualitative research methods for the social sciences. 9th ed. pearson, harlow. lutz, l. m., fischer, l.-b., newig, j. & lang, d. j. (2017) driving factors for the regional implementation of renewable energy – a multiple case study on the german energy transition. energy policy 105 136–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.02.019 malhotra, a., schmidt, t. s. & huenteler, j. (2019) the role of inter-sectoral learning in knowledge development and diffusion: case studies on three clean energy technologies. technological forecasting and social change 146 464–487. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.04.018 milward, h. b., provan, k. g., fish, a., isett, k. r. & huang, k. (2010) governance and collaboration: an evolutionary study of two mental health networks. journal of public administration research and theory 20(supplement 1) i125–i141. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mup038 murphy, j. & smith, a. (2013) understanding transition – periphery dynamics: renewable energy in the highlands and islands of scotland. environment and planning a: economy and space 45(3) 691–709. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45190 neij, l. & nemet, g. (2022) accelerating the low-carbon transition will require policy to enhance local learning. energy policy 167 113043. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113043 nordichub (2021) building the nordic silicon valley of the battery industry. <https://nordic-battery-belt. b2match.io/>. 17.3.2022. notaker, h. (2022) beacons of nordicity: nordic conservation day 1970 and the reimagination of history. scandinavian journal of history 47(5) 648–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2021.2022530 oecd (2021) mining regions and cities case of västerbotten and norrbotten, sweden. oecd, rural studies, oecd publishing, paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/802087e2-en peiseler, l., bauer, c., beuse, m., wood, v. & schmidt, t. s. (2022) toward a european carbon footprint rule for batteries. science 377(6613) 1386–1388. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp9505 petavratzi, e., sanchez-lopez, d., hughes, a., stacey, j., ford, j. & butcher, a. (2022). the impacts of environmental, social and governance (esg) issues in achieving sustainable lithium supply in the lithium triangle. mineral economics 35(3–4) 673–699. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13563-022-00332-4 https://doi.org/10.3390/su12030915 https://interreg.eu/strand-of-cooperation/interreg-a-cross-border-cooperation/ https://interreg.eu/strand-of-cooperation/interreg-a-cross-border-cooperation/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgvxl7irhc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgvxl7irhc4 https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030802263954 https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12931 https://www.kosek.fi/en/ https://www.kvarken.org/nordic-battery-belt-logistics-partnership-gathers-in-skelleftea-for-kick-off/ https://www.kvarken.org/nordic-battery-belt-logistics-partnership-gathers-in-skelleftea-for-kick-off/ https://www.kvarken.org/en/the-kvarken-region-a-global-future-region-with-a-golden-opportunity/ https://www.kvarken.org/en/the-kvarken-region-a-global-future-region-with-a-golden-opportunity/ https://www.kvarken.org/en/the-kvarken-council/ https://irl.umsl.edu/dissertation/337 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2021.102890 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12957 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.120838 https://www.kvarken.org/projekt/nordic-battery-belt-logistics-local-regional-supply-chains-and-logistics-solutions/ https://www.kvarken.org/projekt/nordic-battery-belt-logistics-local-regional-supply-chains-and-logistics-solutions/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2017.02.019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.04.018 https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mup038 https://doi.org/10.1068/a45190 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113043 https://nordic-battery-belt.b2match.io/ https://nordic-battery-belt.b2match.io/ https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2021.2022530 https://doi.org/10.1787/802087e2-en https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abp9505 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13563-022-00332-4 fennia 200(1) (2022) 67ejike okonkwo rana utvikling (n.d.) the rana region’s leading resource for business development. <https://ru.no/ en/>. 19.3.2022. regionvasterbotten.se (2022) region vasterbotten. <https://www.regionvasterbotten.se/externarelationer-och-strategiskplatsutveckling/externa-relationer/midtskandia>. 19.3.2022. robinson, j. b., xi, k., kumar, r. v., ferrari, a. c., au, h., titirici, m.-m., parra-puerto, a., kucernak, a., fitch, s. d. s., garcia-araez, n., brown, z. l., pasta, m., furness, l., kibler, a. j., walsh, d. a., johnson, l. r., holc, c., newton, g. n., champness, n. r., shearing, p. r. (2021) 2021 roadmap on lithium sulfur batteries. journal of physics: energy 3(3) 031501. https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7655/abdb9a sand, a. (2021a) the nordic battery belt will become the industry’s silicon valley. <https://www.kvarken. org/nordiska-batteribaltet-ska-bli-branschens-silicon-valley/>. 30.11.2021. sand, a. (2021b) the quark region – a global region of the future with a golden location <https://www. kvarken.org/kvarkenregionen-en-global-framtidsregion-med-guldlage/>. 30.11.2021. schmidt, t. s., beuse, m., zhang, x., steffen, b., schneider, s. f., pena-bello, a., bauer, c. & parra, d. (2019) additional emissions and cost from storing electricity in stationary battery systems. environmental science & technology 53(7) 3379–3390. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.8b05313 skelleftea.se (2021) industries. <https://business.skelleftea.se/etablera-i-skelleftea/branscher-2/>. 30.11.2021. sovacool, b. k., noel, l., kester, j. & zarazua de rubens, g. (2018) reviewing nordic transport challenges and climate policy priorities: expert perceptions of decarbonisation in denmark, finland, iceland, norway, sweden. energy 165 532–542. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2018.09.110 steffen, b., matsuo, t., steinemann, d. & schmidt, t. s. (2018) opening new markets for clean energy: the role of project developers in the global diffusion of renewable energy technologies. business and politics 20(4) 553–587. https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2018.17 stephan, a., bening, c. r., schmidt, t. s., schwarz, m. & hoffmann, v. h. (2019) the role of inter-sectoral knowledge spillovers in technological innovations: the case of lithium-ion batteries. technological forecasting and social change 148 119718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119718 stie, a. e. & trondal, j. (2020) introducing the study of nordic cooperation. politics and governance 8(4) 1–10. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v8i4.3726 tallqvist, j., satu, e., forstén, e., heino, m., holm, e., jonsson, h., lankiniemi, s., pitkämäki, a., pokela, p., riikonen, j., rinkkala, m., ropponen, t. & roschier, s. (2019) batteries from finland. spinverse. <https://www.businessfinland.fi/49cbd0/globalassets/finnish-customers/02-build-your-network/ bioeconomy--cleantech/batteries-from-finland/batteries-from-finland-report_final_62019.pdf> tang, t. & yuan, h. (2021) the capacity prediction of li-ion batteries based on a new feature extraction technique and an improved extreme learning machine algorithm. journal of power sources 514 230572. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2021.230572 turrini, a., cristofoli, d., frosini, f. & nasi, g. (2010) networking literature about determinants of network effectiveness. public administration 88(2) 528–550. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2009.01791.x van bueren, e. m. (2003) dealing with wicked problems in networks: analysing an environmental debate from a network perspective. journal of public administration research and theory 13(2) 193–212. https://doi.org/10.1093/jpart/mug017 vasek.fi (2022) vaasa region development company. <https://www.vasek.fi/vaasanseudun-kehitys-oyvasek/>. 19.3.2022. wäckerlin, n., hoppe, t., warnier, m. & de jong, w. m. (2020) comparing city image and brand identity in polycentric regions using network analysis. place branding and public diplomacy 16(1) 80–96. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-019-00128-4 https://ru.no/en/ https://ru.no/en/ https://www.regionvasterbotten.se/externa-relationer-och-strategisk https://www.regionvasterbotten.se/externa-relationer-och-strategisk https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7655/abdb9a https://www.kvarken.org/nordiska-batteribaltet-ska-bli-branschens-silicon-valley/ https://www.kvarken.org/nordiska-batteribaltet-ska-bli-branschens-silicon-valley/ https://www.kvarken.org/kvarkenregionen-en-global-framtidsregion-med-guldlage/ https://www.kvarken.org/kvarkenregionen-en-global-framtidsregion-med-guldlage/ https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.8b05313 https://business.skelleftea.se/etablera-i-skelleftea/branscher-2/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2018.09.110 https://doi.org/10.1017/bap.2018.17 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119718 https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v8i4.3726 https://www.businessfinland.fi/49cbd0/globalassets/finnish-customers/02-build-your-network/bioeconomy--cleantech/batteries-from-finland/batteries-from-finland-report_final_62019.pdf https://www.businessfinland.fi/49cbd0/globalassets/finnish-customers/02-build-your-network/bioeconomy--cleantech/batteries-from-finland/batteries-from-finland-report_final_62019.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2021.230572 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2009.01791.x https://doi.org/10.1093/jpart/mug017 https://www.vasek.fi/vaasanseudun-kehitys-oy-vasek/ https://www.vasek.fi/vaasanseudun-kehitys-oy-vasek/ https://doi.org/10.1057/s41254-019-00128-4 making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active research methods with young people elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven trell, elen-maarja & bettina van hoven (2010). making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active research methods with young people. fennia 188: 1, pp. 91–104. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper explores the added value of the ’new’ creative and (inter)active research methods in geographical research. using examples from our research project with young people in cedar (vancouver island, canada) we analyze the contributions and limitations of walks, mental mapping, photography and video when compared to only interviewing. given our engagement with everyday places and a participatory research approach, we explicitly focus on and evaluate the research methods for their qualities in revealing different aspects of place, and for their success in involving young people with various interests and abilities actively in the whole research process. the findings suggest that, in addition to revealing diverse aspects of everyday places and practices on different levels of detail, the ’new’ research methods motivate and enable different individuals to participate and share their experiences. furthermore, combining the ’new’ methods or combining them with interviews has an added value as such a mix is able to paint a detailed picture of daily places, colored by the way different individuals see, hear, smell, use or experience them. keywords: canada, visual/(inter)active/creative research methods, children/ youth geographies, participatory research, place experiences, everyday life elen-maarja trell & bettina van hoven, department of cultural geography, faculty of spatial sciences, university of groningen, p.o. box 800 9700av groningen, the netherlands. e-mails: e.m.trell@rug.nl, b.van.hoven@rug.nl. making sense of place ’place’ is defined in geographic research as “space which people have made meaningful” (cresswell 2004: 7). there are various ways in which people ‘make places’, for example, by naming them, or modifying some elements in the environment to suit their needs (cresswell 2004). perhaps more importantly, places are (re)produced through people’s imaginations, memories, emotions and feelings, both positive and negative, and by using different senses (relph 1976; thrift 2009). thrift discusses place experiences during a walk in the countryside as compared to a walk in the city. he illustrates how places are constructed through different senses and people’s bodies: “think, for example, of a country walk and place consists of not only eyes surveying prospect but also push and pull of hill and down dale, the sounds of birds and wind in the trees […] or think of a walk in the city and place consists not just of eye making contact with other people or advertising signs or buildings, but also the sound of traffic noise and conversation […] the smell of exhaust fumes and cooking food” (thrift 2009: 92). such impressions can construct place as welcoming and pleasant or hostile and aggressive. koskela and pain (2000) show the latter to be the case in a study on women’s experience in the city where fear was a guiding principle (see also semi 2004). the examples illustrate that, whereas places can be known through one’s vision and imagination the “more direct modes of experience” such as taste, smell and touch1 play a similarly important role (tuan 1975: 151; thrift 2008, 2009). until recently, much geographic research on meanings of place has given priority to the so-called representational aspects and indirect ways of knowing a place (tuan 1975; laurier & philo 2006; thrift 2008). little attention was paid to, for example, urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2522 92 fennia 188: 1 (2010)elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven people’s experiences of place outside the visual or communication of place outside the interview context. however, with the revival of ideas by merleau-ponty (1945; 1995), bourdieu (1990) and de certeau (2002), among others, (human) geographers have increasingly focused on everyday places and place experiences (see eyles 1989; felski 2000; de certeau 2002 for a discussion of the importance of ‘everyday’) and the ‘non-representational’ aspects of place (lorimer 2005; thrift 2008). laurier and philo (2006; 2007; see also laurier 2008), for example, have devoted a series of works to explore everyday encounters in a café and wylie (2005) explores the relationship between landscape and self through thoughts, sensations and encounters he experiences during a walk along the south west coast path (see also mccormack 2003). thrift (2008) argues that, when given a chance to use our various senses we start to notice the “event-ness of the world” and the small details that make up the everyday lives and place experience of our research participants (thrift 2008: 12). when producing knowledge about place (experiences) in a ‘standard’ interview setting, respondents are asked to recall memories and imaginations of places without visual, audible, olfactory or tactile stimuli. as a result, some small details, or ‘layers’ of place (experience) may be lost to the production of knowledge. sometimes, it is necessary to see, hear, smell or feel a place in order to make sense of it and to communicate it to outsiders, “sensitivity cannot be shared the way thoughts can”, as tuan (1975: 152) argues. therefore, geographers have begun to explore ‘new’ research methods (e.g. walks, photography, videography, that take a respondent ‘into the field’ and in so doing complement (or replace) the interview (see panelli et al. 2002; hörschelmann & schäfer 2005; carpiano 2009). an interesting example is the research by cele (2006) who used walks, drawing and photography (in addition to interviewing) for exploring daily places of children. enabling children to create objects (place representation) in an artistic and imaginary way (e.g. drawing), and to interact with each other, the researcher, and place itself (e.g. when walking or taking photos), provided possibilities for communicating a range of, what cele (2006) calls, ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ aspects of place.2 concrete aspects of places include the appearance of a place, the physical characteristics and objects present, but also the ways in which individuals use places and objects. a sound or a smell are concrete aspects of place. abstract aspects refer to the inner processes place evokes in individuals (cele 2006). they refer to dreams and imaginations people attach to places, memories connected to places, how places make people feel (cele 2006). abstract aspects of place are often connected to the social dimension of place i.e. other people, friends, relations. in addition to revealing a range of aspects and experiences about place, by using these methods cele (2006) engaged children more actively in the research process. cele’s (2006) research fits into broader, participatory, approach taken by many youth and children’s geographers in order to engage young people more actively in creating knowledge about what their world is like. whereas the necessity and benefits of engaging young people in research has been established (best 2007), in practice, it is often a challenge to get preoccupied and busy young people interested and involved in a research project. creative and interactive research techniques, such as drawings and mental maps (matthews 1984a; 1984b; young & barrett 2001), photoor video projects (hörschelmann & schäfer 2005; panelli et al. 2002), diary keeping (latham 2003; punch 2002), soft-gis (kyttä 2008) and forms of participatory diagramming (kesby 2000; pain & francis 2003) have been adopted as means by which it is more appealing for young people to get involved in a research project. the above examples illustrate that several ‘new’, methods have been used by both, geographers interested in place experiences (e.g. wylie 2005; carpiano 2009) and geographers interested in engaging young people in research (e.g. hörschelmann & schäfer 2005; cele 2006). whereas it seems to be acknowledged that interviews are not always sufficient for revealing different layers of place nor for empowering youth, not much is known about what the exact qualities of the ‘new’ methods for achieving these goals are when compared to only interviewing. in this paper our aim is to fill this gap by comparing the relative contributions, limitations and different insights that can be generated with walks, mental mapping, video and photography when compared to interviewing. in order to compare the methods we will use data gathered with young people during a research project conducted in cedar (vancouver island, canada) which focused on their everyday places and place experiences. in addition, by adopting a fennia 188: 1 (2010) 93making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active … participatory research approach, we focused on engaging young people with different interests and abilities as active participants in the whole research process. considering this research focus and approach, we compare and evaluate each method in terms of (1) its qualities for revealing the multiple aspects and meanings of daily places and (2) possibilities it provides for involving young people in research. in the sections that follow, after briefly introducing the research approach we will give an overview of the characteristics of interviews, walks, mental mapping, video and photography. we then use examples from our research practice to illustrate the added value (and shortcomings) and compare the ‘new’ research methods to interviewing. research approach research location and group our research project was carried out in the village of cedar, on vancouver island (british columbia, canada) (see figure 1). the project (on location) lasted 9 months. it involved four students/researchassistants from cedar community secondary school, three male and one female. at the time of finishing the project the students were 17 years old. none of them represented an ethnic minority. the project was introduced to the students through in-class presentations by the researchers. in order to participate, students were required to obtain consent from their parents. the consent forms contained info about the aim and procedure of the project based on initial ideas by the researchers. no new consent was sought once the students had shaped the project to their own wishes (see also heath et al. 2009 for more information about the use of informed consent in youth research). the participants then received basic training in (video) interviewing. guided by the researchers, the students were actively involved in preparation and data collection phases of the project e.g. they were brainstorming about research questions and possible respondents, planning, preparing, carrying out and filming interviews etc. participatory research: generating knowledge with young people in a participatory research project, at least in its ideal form, the knowledge, priorities and perspectives of the participants ”are not only acknowledged but form the basis for research and planning” (cornwall & jewkes 1995: 1667). researcher and research participants can be seen as research partners all of whom actively contribute to the project. research participants contribute their “subject expertise” and the researcher his or her “academic and methodological expertise” (heath et al. 2009: 74). participatory research should therefore enable researchers to focus on reflection and action with and by research participants rather than on them (cornwall & jewkes 1995, our emphasis). participatory research in combination with various creative and interactive methods has found appreciation in youth research as means by which to give young people more control over the entire research project. in the research by cele (2006) discussed above, walks enabled children to take on a more active role. in addition, photography enabled children to take initiative and have more control over the research project because the researcher was entirely absent from the moment of data generation (cele 2006). other researchers (kellett et al. 2004; kellett 2005; valentine 2001) have found that using a combination of creative and interactive methods encourage and enable young people to develop and practice new skills (i.e. communication, writing and organization skills and critical thinking) that support and improve their self-esteem. fig. 1. research location (cedar marked with a rectangle) 94 fennia 188: 1 (2010)elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven with regards to (1) our aim of revealing different layers of place experience and (2) our group of youth respondents in cedar, a participatory approach and using a mix of creative and interactive methods seemed like a suitable fit. in practice, we introduced the methods to our research participants and involved them in selecting the methods to express themselves. by using a variety of methods we provided an opportunity for young people with different interests and abilities to take part in the project since, as heath et al. (2009: 87) observed, “some young people are simply better at telling stories than others, better able to articulate their views”, table 1 gives an overview of the methods used, possibilities they offer for youth to approach the research in a creative and active manner and interact with each other, and the potential of each method for facilitating youth-place interaction . research methods in order to illustrate the aspects of place that the ‘new’ visual and creative research methods reveal and compare their benefits (and limitations) to interviewing, in the sections below we will first provide an overview of some basic characteristics of interviewing followed by walks, mental mapping, video and photography. secondly, using a specific location (cedar community secondary school) from the research project in cedar as an example, we will contrast and compare interviews to the ‘new’ methods. “there’s not really much to say…”3: exploring place by using interviews data collection using interviews continues to be one of the most widely used approaches in social research practice (heath et al. 2009). interviews, in their most common form, are “verbal interchanges where one person, the interviewer, attempts to elicit information from another person” (dunn 2000: 51). in order to carry out an interview it is necessary to have “some form of direct access to the person being interviewed” (dunn 2000: 51). such real time contact is usually achieved by face-to-face meetings. with the increasing technological possibilities, new creative ways to access people have been explored, for example, interviews that are conducted via telephone or online, often via a chat program like msn messenger. interviews have many benefits, such as allowing researchers to understand how meanings differ between people, exploring topics more in-depth, giving respondents an opportunity to intervene, raise additional issues and so on. relatively recently, the interview process has gone through many creative transformations. using images or activities to stimulate discussion, elicit information but also minimize power imbalance between the interviewer and the respondents has found its appreciation within youth research practice (see for instance heath et al. 2009). however, when exploring place-related information in geographical research, interviews also impose restrictions. importantly, interviews often do not take place ‘on location’ i.e. during an interview a respondent has no direct contact with the place or objects s/he is talking about (but see anderson 2004; hitchings and jones 2004 for exceptions). the information revealed is based only on one’s mental image of the place, or one’s memories. it is challenging then to capture small nuances, multi-sensual dimensions and embodied practices of people’s place experiences using only the interview method. tuan (1975) and recently thrift (2008) insist that those nuances make up a substantial part of what place means to people and how place influences them. method creativity interaction: youth – researcher interaction: youth – place interaction: youth – youth interviews * walks * * * mental mapping * * * individual video/photography * * video & walk * * * * table 1. research methods and their interactive and creative qualities (after cele 2006) fennia 188: 1 (2010) 95making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active … walks “[w]e have felt [the] walks to be three-way-conversations, with interviewee, interviewer and locality engaged in an exchange of ideas; place has been under discussion but, more than this, and crucially, under foot and all around, and as such much more of an active, present participant in the conversation, able to prompt and interject” (hall et al. 2006: 3). hall et al. (2006) imply that when walking and experiencing places in an embodied way, a different type of knowledge can be obtained than using methods that are used only indoors. a type of knowledge, that is “taken for granted by the participants, but is often crucial, as it reveals how places function for people” (cele 2006: 128; see also kusenbach 2003). walks allow a researcher to capture interaction between youth and place as it happens. the knowledge gathered in this context is closely tied to the physical experiences of place. as a research technique, walks in general include a combination of “conversation, unstructured observations and experiences” (cele 2006: 149). cele (2006) calls walking (with children) a performance-based research method where being active and on the move, while constantly seeing, hearing, feeling and smelling the place, triggers conversations and reflections that would probably not occur otherwise. conversation is also one of the central parts of the walks.4 walks allow the respondent to “be in charge” – the researcher is the one “going along” (carpiano 2009: 263) and can be bracketed outside the data generation process or observe it (van hoven & meijering forthcoming). the above-mentioned characteristics of the walk enable researchers to study in detail how place matters to people, and how people use and are influenced by places. walks have been used, for example, in studies exploring the relationship between children and urban environment (see raittila 2006) or the role of places for people’s well-being (see carpiano 2009). in order to make the walk tangible and recall it later voice recorder, photo or video camera are often used by researchers (see cele 2006). mental mapping mental mapping is an activity that is considered to encompass a great deal of creativity (particularly when working with young people). although some structures and guidelines i.e. the theme of the map, can be provided by the researcher, a respondent is relatively free in choosing the content, detail, design and layout of her/his map. the possibility to express oneself in a creative manner is one of the greatest strengths of mental mapping. although there is no direct interaction between the objects, places, events and the respondents, (undirected) mental mapping allows for more creativity and freedom to express oneself with less influence from the researcher. information about (the meaning of) places in mental maps is based on respondents’ view of the relative importance of places in their daily lives (see also matthews 1984a; 1984b; young and barrett 2001). the respondent chooses which elements to include and exclude from the map which means that the places a researcher chooses to focus on in an interview may be absent altogether. if done in a group context, the group can influence the places respondents add to their mental maps and the ways in which they talk about these places. this process can also trigger spontaneous discussion about daily places, activities, and people with whom the respondents spend time. the mental maps (such as in figure 2 below) summarize an individual’s use/ opinions/knowledge about her/his environment. mental maps provide an overview of places, objects or activities relative to each other. they can also be used to make an assessment about the relative importance of places for an individual e.g. which place is positioned in the centre (see figure 2). whereas mental maps as such may provide enough information for a psychologist to analyze additional meanings conveyed by the use of fig. 2. example of a mental map (by kevin, male, 17) 96 fennia 188: 1 (2010)elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven shapes and colors included on each map, for geographers interested in the meanings of places additional information is necessary. hence, explanations by the ‘author’ of the map are essential. the explanations are usually given in the form of a discussion in the group context and/ or with the researcher following the mental mapping session. one might argue that when using interviews or discussions to explain the maps, words become dominant and the value of the mental mapping technique is undermined. another drawback of mental mapping is that it is a method which, similarly to interviews, is used indoors i.e. not on location the respondent is communicating. there is no direct contact between the respondents and the places they show on their maps. the respondents instead have to resort to using their recollections. however, the mental mapping process and the resulting group dynamics themselves can be valuable outcomes and means of ‘breaking the ice’ between the researcher and the respondents. in addition, the mental maps can serve as basis for other research methods used, providing an anchor-point for the students as well as the researcher when exploring the local context. video/photography according to various authors (see prosser 1998; pink 2007; edwards & bhaumik 2008 for example), much of our knowledge about the world, and consequentially about our places, is built on the visual. therefore, in line with the rapid developments and decreasing prices of technology, the interest in and use of visual research methods, such as video and photography, has sharply increased within a great variety of research disciplines dealing with people and places e.g. sociology, planning, geography (pink 2007). the development of digital and computer technologies has made photography as well as video easy and relatively cheap to use. video and photography can be incorporated into a research process in several ways. both can be used as a researcher-led or respondent-led technique. in case of the latter, asking respondents to film or take photos of their everyday environment can be very beneficial as it allows the researcher to get an overview of people’s interaction with places without “intruding on their daily schedules or following them around” (cele 2006: 155). filming and/or taking photos can be an empowering experience as young people are in charge of the process and get to represent the things they choose, when and from whichever angle they choose. the benefit of using video over photography is the possibility for the respondents to narrate their videos while filming, thus providing some form of an explanation to the images while experiencing a location first hand. in addition, in geographical research these methods can be used outdoors, therefore, similarly to walks, they enable the research participants to be inspired by direct contact with their environment. video and photography also have their drawbacks. analyzing video-data is a time-consuming process. knoblauch et al. (2006: 14–16) note: “a few minutes of recording produce a large quantity of visual, kinesthetic, and acoustic data that must be transcribed and prepared for analysis.” moreover, the researcher has to be well aware of the influence, relationship and weight s/he attaches to different elements (sound, images, transcript) of the video data (see knoblauch et al. 2006 for a detailed discussion of the elements of video data). the researcher has to make a choice whether to ask respondents to explain their creation (in which case words could become dominant) or to interpret the images independently. in the context of (participatory) youth research the latter is not favored. in order to empower young people they should be included in interpreting the data/their creation.5 the complex technology may be a further challenge when using video as a research method (knoblauch et al. 2006), although this may be the case more for the researcher than the youth respondents. research methods in practice in order to discuss the ‘new’ research methods and aspects of places they help to unveil in this paper, we focus on a specific location – cedar community secondary school (ccss) (see table 2). cedar community secondary school (ccss) appeared to be one of the key, shared places of the participants. it was, consequentially, a place represented by all participants by one or another research method. however, even though we mainly use information revealed about ccss, we will also refer to other locations and experiences from our project where more appropriate i.e. where the merits or limitations of individual methods appear more clearly. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 97making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active … table 2. cedar community secondary school represented using different research methods ryan (male, 17) kevin (male, 17) shaleeta (female, 17) evan (male, 17) in te rv ie w s “well...it [cedar school] is really my social outpost. i love it in school. it is the place that i have grown up with, i’m not sure what to do with my time when i have no school… i guess it just gives me something to do.” (researcher-led interview) “there’s not really much to say about the environment [at cedar school] because it’s just a normal, relaxed, easygoing environment. […] i like pretty much everything about this school. […] it’s a really nice comfortable place” (peer-led interview) “when i first came here i felt really... i, i was not impressed with the school environment. but now that i’ve been here for a while it’s much better. i haven’t had too many problems here. i’ve had problems at other schools, but not here” (peerled interview) “the school environment at cedar is really, really neat. just […] the way that the school is basically laid out is that, it really makes for easy social interaction, in just that it’s so open” (researcherled interview) w al ks : i m ag es & co n ve rs at io n ryan: “a bird just came out of the school! oh yeah, we should get the birds! we have birds in our rafter. i can hear them, but i can’t see them right now, they’re up in there. there’s a bunch of… yeah, the dung [laughing] (screenshot, traces of birds on cedar community secondary school) […] m en ta l m ap s & e xp la n at io n s “my school is a good place and i stay there a lot so i put down my school” “anyway, i got the school right here because i like coming to school, although i don’t really do much but it’s social…” “and this is like…the cedar school” “so, school, that’s self-explanatory” v id eo / p h o to gr ap hy ryan’s photo & explanation: “this is my school. it is currently the main focus of my life. all of my activities come from school in some way, even if it is making plans with my friends” kevin’s video & narration: “and just like that i’m at the school. in order to get to my favorite place, up there, i have to get up there [filming the school roof]. […] and just like that i’m up.[…] and this, this is my favorite spot to be [the school roof]. in fact i even come up and read right there, right in the shade. i just love this place.” shaleeta’s photo: shaleeta with friends at school. no detailed explanation added. school not represented on evan’s video. disposable camera not returned. table 2 illustrates the kind of information that the students in our project generated about ccss when using different methods. in the sections below, information from table 2 serves as basis for discussing different qualities of research methods. in order to eventually assess the added value and success of each method, we will consider aspects of places revealed and aspects of methods such as 98 fennia 188: 1 (2010)elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven creativity/interactivity for involving different individuals, as criteria. “it’s a really nice comfortable place”6: interviewing in practice in our project we used both structured and unstructured interviews as well as peer-led and researcher led interviews. the participants also practiced conducting individual interviews with each other. in addition, they conducted a number of peer-led interviews among their friends and classmates. finally, the students planned, prepared, conducted and filmed (semi-structured) interviews with, for example, the manager and a security guard of the local shopping mall and the principal of their school. unstructured discussion/group-interview was the most frequently used form of interviewing in our project. the researcher was guiding the discussion but the conversation usually remained informal. we used group-interviews, for instance, as a support for the visual/active and creative approaches where the participants could explain the contents of their mental maps, photos and videos to the researcher. as an addition to the ‘new’ methods, interviews were beneficial because they gave young people a chance to explain their creation and include information that was forgotten or unclear to the adult researcher. in such a way, the young people obtained more control over the way in which the information they provided was interpreted. interviews carried out in a group context also had its drawbacks. it appeared that more articulate individuals became dominant, and so did their opinions and preferences. however, the students were aware of that, were later able to reflect on their role in a group and divide roles for their own research project accordingly. the same individuals who talked much during ‘practice-interviews’ were the ones who preferred to take a role as interviewer during the peer-led interviews. peer-led interviews enabled the research participants to learn new skills such as preparing interview questions, playing a role of an interviewer or camera (wo)man. the information the students gathered during interviews also allowed them to reflect on their own role in society. for example, a piece of information revealed by the manager of woodgrove mall about security guards regularly dispersing larger groups of teenagers was later often quoted and used by the students in discussions about their encounters with adult mall visitors, exclusion and marginalization they experience while in the mall (and their motivation for transgressing the mall rules). focusing on the information revealed about cedar school, during the interviews students were asked to describe their school environment. it was a concrete question which prompted everybody to talk about their school. however, the students limited themselves to strictly answering the question (see table 2). table 2 illustrates that the discussions focused on the social and cultural dimensions of the school. interviews revealed that the students have a similar, positive, opinion about their school. school appears as more or less equally significant for everybody. interviews triggered associations and comparisons thus revealing different aspects of students’ character, family life and friends i.e. shaleeta (see table 2). in addition, based on interviews, estimations could be made about different levels of attachment students feel towards their school e.g. compare ryan and shaleeta (table 2). one of the disadvantages of the interviews was that the students did not talk much about what their places look like. since our meetings were held at school they may not have felt it necessary to describe the building to the researcher. however, as appeared from the photos and videos, there were many details about the layout and the school building itself that made it a meaningful place for the students. these details, like the view from the school roof, the local scenery, a little bird or a forgotten football were too common for them to mention or to even remember. however, as appears from table 2, such small details contributed to making the school meaningful and special for many of the students. “oh yeah, we should get the birds!”7: walking with young people in our research project, the students were in charge of planning the walk. the walk, which lasted roughly three hours, took us through cedar village centre, through a forest area (which was used as a running-track for cedar secondary gym lessons) leading to a residential area and eventually back to cedar school. we used walks in conjunction with video. the students recorded the entire walk with a video-camera, and a photo camera was used by the researchers to capture students in interaction with their places. conversations during the walk evolved around daily activities, interests, memofennia 188: 1 (2010) 99making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active … ries and friends and were mostly triggered by the objects encountered on the way. table 2 includes a still from a clip from the beginning of the walk. the quote next to it reveals the main strengths of walks; the objects that are encountered during the walk actively participate in the walk and the data generated. for example, a bird flying by prompted ryan to film the school rafter where the birds nest and discuss the noise they make and the traces they leave (see table 2 and the quote in the subtitle above). ryan indicates that the birds are a part of the school experience and that it was not the first time the students noticed their presence. it is quite possible that ryan would hear the birds during class and that they affect his in-class experience (e.g. provide a welcome distraction during boring moments or prove to be annoying during exams). the possibility of being outdoors and hearing the birds thus had a direct influence on the way ryan represented his school. he was able to reveal a new dimension of his school experiences that was not talked about in the interview. the encountered objects or situations may also trigger discussions about more abstract aspects of place. in the wider context of the walk, an interaction with a cedar tree, for example, sparked a discussion about the history of cedar and, eventually, its social problems. similarly, seeing a dog inspired students to talk about local life-style which led to a discussion about places in the neighborhood they liked or disliked. in our study, the walk facilitated interaction not only between people and places but also among people (respondents and researcher). walks can be a good means for the researcher and respondents to get to know each other outside the formal ‘classroom’ context. after the walk, the students felt more at ease in the researcher’s presence and were more eager to take initiatives. hence, walks can be considered useful for balancing the unequal power-relations. the possibility of interaction between the researcher and the students during the walk allowed the researcher to compare adult and youth perspectives and revealed in detail how places were interpreted and used by young people. the researcher’s reactions to young people’s stories and encountered objects, however, influenced the kind of information and detail young people were willing to reveal. similarly to cele’s (2006) findings, in our study walks and interviews appeared to provide different, even contradictory information about young people’s use and experiences of places. for example during interviews the students claimed that they “never actually do anything in cedar [village]” (evan, male, 17). however, during the walks it appeared that most of their friends live in cedar, that they often hang out at these friends’ places and that some of their favorite places for solitude and recreation are in cedar. the disadvantages of walking were mainly of practical nature. first of all, walks can be very time-consuming. as noted above, our walk in cedar lasted three hours. participants may not be willing or able to give up such a big part of their day (or week) to go for a walk with a researcher. in our research project, evan was, for example involved in planning the walk but had too many other engagements to join the group later. secondly, when one’s target group is young people (or children) there may be other restrictions involved in taking them out for a walk without the supervision of parents or teachers. therefore, cooperation with a parent, local youth worker or teacher may be necessary. thirdly, and specifically for research dealing with places and place experiences of a group of people, a disadvantage of walking can be that it is not possible to include everybody’s meaningful places equally. in our project, the distances between different person’s individual key places were too great to cover during an afternoon of walking (or driving). the route the students chose for the walk for practical reasons (time and accessibility) was therefore more familiar to some students than others. in addition to limitations experienced in our project, carpiano (2009) added, for example, natural conditions (i.e. it may not be possible to conduct a walking tour with extremely cold/warm weather), time of day (i.e. the time of day that respondents are able to walk with the researcher may be the time of day that a neighborhood is un-naturally quiet or busy) or vague language respondents use that may be understandable in a concrete situation but make analyzing an audio/video recording challenging. “so, school, that’s self-explanatory”8: mental mapping in practice in our research project, the participants were asked to make a mental map of their meaningful daily places. instructions were given to include places that they like as well as places that they dislike. besides that, they were free to choose whatever color, shape, size or detail they wanted the places on their map to have. 100 fennia 188: 1 (2010)elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven mental maps were useful for the (adult) researcher to get an overview of the wider context of young people’s lives/places. it also proved to be beneficial for making a distinction between the participants’ shared and individual key places. considering the interaction between the students and the researcher, mental maps were a good starting point for discussions about the daily places of participants in more detail. while making the mental maps, the students engaged in conversations about their daily activities and people they spend time with. the time spent on making the mental maps and the spontaneous and unstructured conversations that occurred during that time between the researcher and the students allowed both to become familiar with each other and were a good means of ‘breaking the ice’. looking at the information revealed about ccss in table 2, mental mapping appears to have added value in revealing locations of places in relation to each other (compare where ‘school’ is located on different maps, its position to other places). furthermore, mental mapping reveals respondents’ view of relative importance of places in their daily lives (see also young and barrett 2001). whereas during interviews students were asked explicitly about their school and they were expected to talk about this place, in the mental mapping process they were not told which places to include. when making mental maps, all of the students individually and voluntarily chose to include cedar school on their maps as a meaningful place. in practice, we combined mental mapping with a discussion about the maps. as mentioned above and as appears when looking at figure 2, mental maps do not provide much additional information about details of places, their meanings or personal reasons for including specific locations on the map.9 hence, the participants were involved in interpreting the maps. looking at table 2 it appears, however, that even the explanations from the authors of mental maps may not provide much additional information. concerning the ccss example, the students considered its importance “selfexplanatory” and did not elaborate much on its meaning on their maps. “in fact i even come up and read right there, right in the shade”10: video & photography in practice in our project, the emphasis was on respondentgenerated images (both photos and movies). although a video-camera was always present during our group-discussions and meetings, only the students were actively using it for recording their places and (peer-led) interviews. in addition, the students received disposable cameras for their individual data collection, took turns in taking the video camera home to record and narrate their daily places and used the digital photo-camera during the walk and peer-led interviews. since the students narrated their videos, both abstract and concrete aspects of place were revealed. besides the words they selected, the tone of voice of the students when talking about their place while experiencing and being present, was very expressive and an invaluable addition to the video images. a good example is kevin who, while filming the school roof, stresses his strong positive emotions towards this place with the sound and pitch of his voice. in contrast, the written explanations on the back of photographs were more general comments in which the students described what was depicted on a photo or giving an opinion about a place. the fact that it was possible to use video and photography outdoors provided further advantages similar to walking (see above), e.g. students were active and seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling their places. objects/people/events took part in data generation and generated different and additional information to interview data. since we used video and photography in individual data collection, the participants were able to be alone and unrestricted by schedules imposed by the researcher when using these methods. a clear advantage of such choice appears from the example of kevin in table 2. kevin did not reveal the school roof as his special place in the in-class interview, nor did he mention it during the walk with the rest of the group. in his video, however, the school roof appears as his favorite place. individual data collection using video was suitable in his case as it allowed him to choose the time and means by which it was comfortable for him to reveal the importance and his use of this place. one limitation of the researcher not being present during individual data collection is the fact that s/he cannot observe the interaction between people and their places or point out/ask questions about details that respondents may be too accustomed to notice or reveal. kevin’s example in table 2 also illustrates the qualities of individual data collection using video and photography in enabling youth to communifennia 188: 1 (2010) 101making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active … cate their intimate places and comfort zones. similar tendencies appeared from the video-data of ryan who took the camera to one of his favorite places near a creek behind his house and evan filmed the door of his bedroom where he hangs “everything that is special” to him. discussion and conclusions in this paper, we explored the additional value of walks, mental mapping, video and photography when making sense of place by comparing ‘new’ methods to more ‘traditional’ research method – interviewing. we furthermore discussed the limitations of each method and their suitability for involving young people more actively in whole research process. given our engagement with everyday place experiences, we explicitly focused on and emphasized the suitability of different methods for exploring the multiple aspects and meanings of daily places for different individuals. table 3 gives an overview of the discussed methods and the information they revealed. table 3 illustrates that the ‘new’ research methods have additional advantages for exploring people-place relations. the results of our study in part support cele’s (2006) findings in that interviews reveal mostly abstract aspects of places (i.e. social and cultural aspects, opinions and memories). but more creative and interactive methods are able to include objects, events and the respondent’s whole body and senses in generating knowledge and communicating a place (table 3). in so doing, they reveal emotions triggered by direct contact with the object/place/event. especially methods that can be used ‘in the field’ enabled research participants to communicate place by using their senses (olfactory, tactile, auditory, visual). in the context of our project, the (individual) video data collection appeared to be the best method for gathering information about emotions connected to places and gaining a ‘feel’ for places and what they ‘sound like’. furthermore, both video and photography, communicated the appearance of places better than any of the indoor-methods used (i.e. interviews and mental mapping). however, analyzing the visual data proved to be a challenge because of the abundance of different elements captured, especially on film and because there is little guidance in methods literature (rose 2001 is a notable exception). another challenge of using visual methods is the possibility of coincidental things to be overrated. for example, things that are encountered often may be overemphasized as meaningful. therefore, video and photography can best be used in combination with interviews. a further limitation of the creative and interactive methods is the difficulty to involve larger number of respondents. therefore, the methods offer limited possibilities to reach wider-ranging conclusions about place. concerning the involvement of different individuals, the creative and interactive methods were beneficial because they enabled young people to express themselves both individually and in a group context. in that way, it was possible for youth to generate knowledge while interacting with their places but also with their peers and the researcher. video and photography, for example, were beneficial for young people for communicating their places without the presence/influence of the group or the researcher. such an opportunity was useful for involving the views of students who were shy or less articulate in the group context, who were very active or whom the schedule of the researcher did not suit. however, because data collection where the researcher is not present intable 3. themes and aspects of place revealed with different research methods method themes/aspects of places revealed interviews abstract aspects (i.e. thoughts, memories, feelings towards places) walks concrete aspects (birds, tractor, dogs, sounds, smell – appearance of place); abstract aspects (memories, activities, opinions, interaction with each other and place) mental maps (& discussion) location of places in relation to each other; relative importance of places; shared and individual key places; information about past experiences, opinions, future plans, interests and hobbies video & photography concrete aspects (appearance, sounds, smells); written explanations behind photos revealed use of places, information about friends and favorite places; narration of video revealed emotions, personal meanings, use of place 102 fennia 188: 1 (2010)elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven volve a certain amount of discipline and responsibility, they may not be suitable for all individuals. video appeared as the most attractive method for all of the students. the fact that it was chosen as a technique for their individual research project (movie about cedar school) illustrates this point. (inter)active methods such as making the individual video or walking proved to be very successful for students such as kevin who were highly active and knew the local environment well. it was difficult for kevin to sit still or concentrate on one task for a long time.11 for example, when asked by a teacher during photography class to take photos of significant places in cedar school he claimed he was always on the move and never stopped long enough to have any significant places (hence there are no photos by kevin in table 2). filming, and the possibility to walk/climb/run outside with the video camera, enabled kevin to be on the move and still express himself and contribute to the research project. for a creative and artistic person such as shaleeta making (very detailed and comprehensive) mental maps appeared to be a good means to express herself.12 talkative and outgoing evan enjoyed being the ‘interviewer’ during the (peer-led) interviews where he could interact with others. he often took the initiative and liked to lead interviews and discussions. comparing individual interviews with methods used in group context, the latter (i.e. mental mapping, walks) had added value as they created a more relaxed atmosphere where attention was not focused on one individual, everybody could be exactly as active as they wanted and choose different means to express themselves. therefore, mixing methods and giving young people a chance to choose the method they feel most comfortable with appeared beneficial in order to involve everybody as equally as possible. the methods discussed in this paper could also be applied for involving or working with respondents from other age groups. however, in that case, different practical limitations and considerations should be taken into account (see carpiano 2009 for an example). in the context of the participatory approach chosen in our research project, combining the ‘new’ creative and interactive methods proved to be particularly successful. the ‘new’ methods motivated young people with different character, interests and abilities to express themselves and be involved in our project. first, the creative and interactive components of the ‘new’ methods provided individuals, with different skills and abilities, ways to express themselves, and thus motivated them to stay involved with the project. second, the qualities of creative and interactive methods enabled respondents to choose to work outside the group context and without the presence of the researcher. hence, the combination of methods gave the participants more control over the research process. the outcomes of our project demonstrate that when employed in such a way the ‘new’ methods have added value as they have the potential to motivate respondents to include additional information about their comfort zones and personal meaningful places (where they would not go with an adult researcher or a whole group). we would emphasize, too, that the students learned new skills (i.e. how to carry out an interview or edit a movie) and gathered knowledge that was useful to them when reflecting on their daily lives (i.e. using information, concepts and terminology of the project in their everyday communication) during the project. we may conclude then that the mix of methods was successful in terms of empowering youth. acknowledgements the authors are grateful to the respondents and ms. susann young at cedar community secondary school for their assistance and for sharing their everyday lives with us. special thanks are extended to our colleague prof. paulus huigen for his guidance and support throughout the process of writing this paper. the authors would furthermore like to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the earlier version of this paper. dr. nadine schäfer was an inspiration for us on the participatory research methods and tamara kaspers-westra kindly helped to prepare the map of vancouver island. this project would not have been possible without the financial support from the international council of canadian studies (iccs), association for canadian studies in the netherlands (acsn), groninger universiteits fonds (guf), faculty of spatial sciences (university of groningen) and canadian studies centre (university of groningen). notes 1 different modes of knowing a place often overlap and co-occur. for example, a smell can be a reminder of a certain history with a place. 2 see trell and van hoven (2009) for more details about importance of different aspects of places for young people’s attachment to place. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 103making sense of place: exploring creative and (inter)active … 3 kevin (male, 17) interview with the researcher. 4 carpiano (2009) refers to such walks (also car or bike-rides) as ‘go-along’ qualitative interviews. 5 see hörschelmann & schäfer (2005) for a detailed discussion about issues relating to interpreting images in youth research. 6 kevin (male, 17), peer-led interview. 7 ryan (male, 17), filming & narrating the cedar walk 8 evan (male, 17), discussing mental maps. 9 since the aim of our project was to explore student’s daily meaningful places in general the resulting maps covered a very wide range of places. when focusing on one specific place and mapping it, one can assume that more concrete aspects and details will be revealed. 10 kevin (male, 17), individual video data collection. 11 kevin has an attention deficit disorder 12 although creative writing would have suited her best. references anderson j 2004. talking while walking: a geographical archaeology of knowledge. area 36, 254– 262. best a 2007. representing youth: methodological issues in critical youth studies. new york university press, new york. bourdieu p 1990. the logic of practice. stanford university press, california. carpiano rm 2009. come take a walk with me: the “go-along” interview as a novel method for studying the implications of place for health and wellbeing. health & place 15, 263–272. cele s 2006. communicating place, methods for understanding children’s experiences of place. almqvist & wiksell international, stockholm. de certeau m 2002. the practice of everyday life. university of california press, california. cornwall a & jewkes r 1995. what is participatory research? social science and medicine 41:12, 1667–1676. cresswell t 2004. place: a short introduction. blackwell publishing, oxford. dunn k 2000. interviewing. in hay i (ed). qualitative research methods in human geography, 50–82. oxford university press, malbourne. edwards e & bhaumik k 2008. visual sense: a cultural reader. berg, new york. eyles j 1989. the geography of everyday life. in gregory d & walford r (eds). horizons in human geography, 102–117. macmillan education ltd, london. felski r 2000. doing time: feminist theory and postmodern culture. new york university press, new york. hall t, lahua b & coffey a 2006. stories as sorties. qualitative researcher 3: 3, 2–4. heath s, brooks r, cleaver e & ireland e 2009. researching young people’s lives. sage, london. hitchings r & jones v 2004. living with plants and the exploration of botanical encounter within human geographic research practice. ethics, place and environment 7, 3–19. van hoven b & meijering l (forthcoming). on the ground. thinking through the production of knowledge. in cloke p, del casino v, panelli r & thomas m (eds). companion to social geography. blackwell, oxford. hörschelmann k & schäfer n 2005. performing the global through the local – globalisation and individualisation in the spatial practices of young east germans. children’s geographies 3:2, 219–242. kellett m 2005. how to develop children as researchers. a step-by-step guide to teaching the research process. paul chapman publishing, london. kellett m, forrest r, dent n & ward s 2004. just teach us the skills please, we’ll do the rest: empowering ten-year-olds as active researchers. children & society 18, 329–343. kesby m 2000. participatory diagramming: deploying qualitative methods through an action research epistemology. area 32, 423–435. knoblauch h, schnettler jr & soeffner hg 2006. video analysis. methodology and methods: qualitative audiovisual data analysis in sociology. peter lang, frankfurt am main. koskela h & pain r 2000. revisiting fear and place: women’s fear of attack and the built environment. geoforum 31, 269–80. kusenbach m 2003. street-phenomenology: the goalong as ethnographic research tool. ethnography 4: 3, 449–479. kyttä m 2008. children in outdoor contexts. vdm verlag dr. mueller, sarbrücken. latham a 2003. research, performance, and doing human geography: some reflections on the diaryphotograph, diary-interview method. environment and planning a 35:11, 1993–2017. laurier e & philo c 2006. possible geographies: a passing encounter in a café. area 38:4, 353–363. laurier e & philo c 2007. a parcel of muddling muckworms: revisiting habermas and the english coffee house. social and cultural geography 8: 2, 259–281. laurier e 2008. how breakfast happens in the café. time & society 17:1, 119–143. lorimer h 2005. cultural geography: the business of being ‘more-than-representational’. progress in human geography 29:1, 83–94. mccormack dp 2003. an event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect. transactions of the institute of british geographers 28:4, 488–507. matthews mh 1984a. cognitive mapping abilities of young boys and girls. geography. journal of the geographical association 69:4, 327–336. matthews mh 1984b. cognitive maps: a comparison of graphic and iconic techniques. area 16:1, 33– 40. 104 fennia 188: 1 (2010)elen-maarja trell and bettina van hoven merleau-ponty m 1945; 1995. phenomenology of perception. routledge, london. pain r & francis p 2003. reflections on participatory research. area 35, 46–54. panelli r, nairn k & mccormack j 2002. “we make our own fun”: reading the politics of youth with(in) community. sociologia ruralis 42:2, 106–130. pink s 2007. doing visual ethnography: images, media and representation in research. sage, london. prosser j 1999. image-based research: a sourcebook for qualitative researchers. routledgefalmer, london & new york. punch s 2002. research with children: the same or different from research with adults? childhood 9:3, 321–341. raittila r 2006. methodological approaches to preschool children’s relationship with the urban environment. in tani s (ed). sustainable development through education. proceedings of the international conference on environmental education. helsinki, 14 june 2005, 111–126. university of helsinki, helsinki. relph ec 1976. place and placelessness. pion press, london. rose g 2001. visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. sage publications, london. semi j 2004. fear in urban space: experiences of space and fear among young people in joensuu. the finnish journal of youth research (“nuorisotutkimus”) 22:1, 17–29. thrift n 2008. non-representational theory. routledge, new york. thrift n 2009. space: the fundamental stuff of geography. in clifford n, holloway sl, rice sp & valentine g (eds). key concepts in geography. sage publications, london. trell em & van hoven b (forthcoming). place attachment in rural areas: a participatory research project with youth in cedar, british columbia. in den toonder j (ed). re-exploring canadian space. canada cahiers. tuan y-f 1975. place: an experiential perspective. geographical review 65: 2, 151–165. valentine g 2001. at the drawing board: developing a research design. in limb m & dwyer c (eds). qualitative methodologies for geographers. issues and debates, 41–54. arnold, london. wylie j 2005. a single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the south west coast path. transactions of the institute of british geographers 30, 234–247. young l & barrett h 2001. adapting visual methods: action research with kampala street children. area 33:2, 141–152. learning from and with shrinking regions for global transformations – commentary to syssner urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa122756 doi: 10.11143/fennia.122756 reflections learning from and with shrinking regions for global transformations – commentary to syssner sunna kovanen kovanen, s. (2022) learning from and with shrinking regions for global transformations – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 255–257. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122756 this is a commentary to the fennia lecture and article “what could geographers do for shrinking geographies?” by josefina syssner. in the piece i open up questions concerning shrinking from a global perspective and point to further discussions on global east, south, and spatial justice in post-fossil transition, which i encourage the nordic research to engage with in the future. keywords: shrinking, global east, degrowth, spatial justice sunna kovanen (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1777-3328), chair of regional planning, brandenburg technical university of cottbus-senftenberg, germany. e-mail: sunna.kovanen@b-tu.de syssner´s (2022) article is a thorough and clear overview of the current research on shrinkage especially in the nordic context. it is pleasant to read and it highlights biases, overlooked aspects and important new directions in spatial planning and policy. in this commentary, i expand the discussion that syssner opens up towards the end of her article on the spatial imaginaries of shrinking and on alternative perspectives and models to deal with it. for the start, syssner implies modestly, that we as geographers should do something to the shrinking regions, which i certainly agree with. however, the actual lesson of the text comes clear only when reading further, and points to a quite another direction: what can we learn from shrinking regions for the spatial planning, development and policy in general. or better to say, as syssner (2020, 5) states in her recent book on the same topic, from the fact that the “decades of growth policy did not make growth happen in these areas”. © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122756 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1777-3328 mailto:sunna.kovanen@b-tu.de 256 fennia 200(2) (2022)reflections because why, one might ask, should the research on shrinkage matter other than for the places and people facing it, if they are becoming less anyway? if urbanization is an undeniable megatrend, what does the research on shrinking areas still has to say to other debates? if so much good work is already out there and the problem is acknowledged, why do we still not understand it properly? the work we can do is not just to understand the conditions and consequences of shrinkage, because as syssner shows, here we already have a rich tradition to draw upon. what remains to be done is to ask better questions about the nature of the problem. one telling example about an impasse in the framing of shrinkage are the local policymakers, who insist on claiming their municipality as a growing one, although it has been shrinking since decades, while silently adapting to the reality behind closed doors. this phenomenon relates to further, widely spread curious assumptions, that shrinking is a result of a bad local policy or that shrinking places will simply and neatly disappear, once the policy and media stops paying attention to them. as syssner (2022, 106) summarizes: “unrealistic and biased ideas about growth and the negative framing of demographic decline have constituted a hindrance to the evolvement of strategies for coping with decline”. therefore, the article is an important call to challenge such biased ideas with sound empirical evidence and openness to unexpected perspectives. syssner shows, that this does not matter only for the people in shrinking regions themselves. her short insights to alternative approaches emphasize, that shrinking regions can well contribute to tackling – or accelerating – global challenges of climate change and ecological tipping points, digitalization, and adaptation to ageing, to name a few. i finish the commentary with few further reflexions from a global perspective to nordic shrinking. syssner positions her case clearly in the nordic context and also her plea to do more research from nordic rural areas is convincing and justified. however, one remains asking, what about the research done globally? what similarities and specialities can we identify in comparing shrinkage between global north, east and south? there is no reason to expect that certain places and contexts would have less relevance for theory building on spatial change, justice, resource patterns and global interconnections than others (haase, rink & grossmann 2016). thus, i encourage to do future research in and from the nordic countries while building up networks, discussions and comparisons with diverse other contexts, too often marginalized and considered not qualified for theorization from western perspective. for further reading i can recommend, for example, maes, loopmans and kesteloot (2012), mihály (2019), and wu and colleagues (2022). finally, global ecological destruction raises difficult questions also for the future of shrinking regions, not yet explicitly addressed in syssner’s article. first is the question on spatial justice and the different scales of political power and responsibility mobilized in debates on justice. claims to equal welfare and the definition and experience of an adequate welfare standard voiced by the residents of a northern shrinking region are negotiated within the borders of a nordic nation state and with a reference to the urban citizens of the same nation. at the same time, the current research on ecowelfare state reminds, that these nordic, national welfare standards in general lead to a severe overconsumption on a global scale (koch 2018; hirvilammi 2020). although the maintenance of the welfare standard in nordic countries contributes to the destruction of living conditions elsewhere, the protection of ‘our’ (white) welfare system is used as an argument against migration (simonsen 2015). such questions on global responsibility and interdependencies are, however, yet very seldomly discussed when searching for new ways to adapt to shrinkage and keep the promise of qualified public services in the nordic countries. so, in what terms is shrinkage then a problem in a first place? it is certainly much more complex than simple difference in income levels, the lack of employment or certain services. in a society, where economic growth and urbanization are not just development trajectories among others, but norms attached to prosperous, desirable and successful future, shrinking is strongly connected to a stigmatization and the loss of societal standing. canavan (2013) and morton and müller (2016) have studied the shrinking processes of a previously prosperous coal industry and mass tourism. according to the authors, the experienced negative effects of shrinkage such as the loss of an identity, of the connectivity to global mobility flows and of external recognition may overweighed the possible positive benefits, that might actually be much more real and tangible, such as improvement of the natural environment, reduction of noise, health risks and waste. more importantly, such experiences fennia 200(2) (2022) 257sunna kovanen may hinder the openness of the residents to alternative solutions that accept the situation and build upon the possibilities that shrinkage provides. gibson-graham (2006, 33, 50–51) has powerfully described the process, how such dependent and passive subjectivities and regional identities are constructed to serve major national and international industrial development projects, so that when the capital leaves the region, what remains are passivity and frustration. simultaneously, however, other examples show that the availability of space for experiments, quality of natural environment and the possibility for self-sustained living in local and regional value chains in the very same regions also draw others to remigrate or temporary stay there and build up new, perhaps more frugal ways of living and working (cunha, kastenholz & carneiro 2020; houtbeckers & kallio 2019). these are just a few examples of the potentials that shrinking regions provide for ecological transformations, conflicts and inequalities, that need to be taken seriously – if not only shrinkage, but also new means of small-scale and sustainable production and caring in shrinking regions are to be turned from a marginal phenomenon to a liveable future. here i would welcome stronger engagement of the fields of circular economy, as syssner mentioned, as well as economic geography and innovation with social and solidarity, diverse and community economies, degrowth, post-development and climate transition debates – and with experiences of and studies on shrinking. references canavan, b. (2013) sustainable tourism: development, decline and de-growth. management issues from the isle of main. sustainable tourism 22(1) 127–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2013.819876 cunha, c., kastenholz, e & carneiro, m. j. (2020) entrepreneurs in rural tourism: do lifestyle motivations contribute to management practices that enhance sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems? journal of hospitality and tourism management 44 215–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhtm.2020.06.007 gibson-graham, j. k. (2006) postcapitalist politics. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. haase, a., rink, d. & grossmann, k. (2016) shrinking cities in post-socialist europe: what can we learn from their analysis for theory building today? geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 98(4) 305–319. https://doi.org/10.1111/geob.12106 hirvilammi, t. (2020) the virtuous circle of sustainable welfare as a transformative policy idea. sustainability 12(1) 391. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010391 houtbeckers, e. & kallio, g. (2019) talous käytäntöteoreettisesti: kotitalouksien omaehtoinen ruuanhankinta taloutta koskevan tiedon lähteenä. tiede ja edistys 2 150–169. https://doi.org/10.51809/te.105312 koch, m. (2018) sustainable welfare, degrowth and eco-social policies. in vanhercke, b., ghailani, d. & sabato, s. (eds.) social policy in the european union: state of play 2018. european trade union institute (etui) and european social observatory (ose), brussels. maes, m., loopmans, m. & kesteloot, c. (2012) urban shrinkage and everyday life in post-socialist cities: living with diversity in hrušov, ostrava, czech republic. built environment 38(2) 229–243. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23799122 mihály, m. (2019) opposing peripherialization? acme an international journal for critical geographies 18(2) 551–575. <https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1559/1475> 23.11.2022. morton, t. & müller, k. (2016) lusatia and coal conundrum: the lived experience of the german energiewende. energy policy 99 277–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.05.024 simonsen, k. (2015) encountering racism in the (post-) welfare state: danish experiences. geografiska annaler series b, human geography 97(3) 213–222. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43966307 syssner, j. (2020) pathways to demographic adaptation: perspectives on policy and planning in depopulating areas in northern europe. springerbriefs in geography. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 syssner, j. (2022) what could geographers do for shrinking geographies? fennia 200(2) 98–119. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 wu, c.-t., gunko, m., stryjakiewicz, t. & zhou, k. (eds.) (2022) postsocialist shrinking cities. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367815011 https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2013.819876 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhtm.2020.06.007 https://doi.org/10.1111/geob.12106 https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010391 https://doi.org/10.51809/te.105312 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23799122 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1559/1475 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.05.024 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43966307 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367815011 restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment implications for northern sweden erika knobblock and örjan pettersson knobblock, erika & örjan pettersson (2010). restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment implications for northern sweden. fennia 188: 1, pp. 61– 75. issn 0015-0010. in the past, employment in northern sweden has been largely dependent on natural resources. shifting demands and price fluctuations for raw materials have caused boom periods as well as times of crisis in local communities. during the first decade of the 21st century, increasing global demand for minerals resulted in substantial investments in the swedish mining industry. the purpose of this article is to assess the importance of mining for employment in the county of västerbotten, northern sweden, by focusing on the time period after 1990. mining employment constitutes a rather small part of all employment in the study area, due to a restructuring process that started in the 1960s. however, results show that mining employment has increased slightly, especially after 2002. global demand for minerals and related technology and services make it reasonable to believe that this change will have a deeper significance for employment opportunities in the study area. restructuring in mining generates new business opportunities in subcontracting, consultancy and equipment production, but also creates new challenges. consequently, it is important to make strategic decisions on regional and local levels concerning how to make use of the development in the mining industry to stimulate long-term regional employment growth. keywords: employment, mining, resource-based communities, restructuring, sweden. erika knobblock, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, se-90187 sweden. e-mail: erika.knobblock@geography.umu.se. örjan pettersson, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, se-90187 sweden. e-mail: orjan.pettersson@geography.umu.se. introduction the extraction and further processing of the county of västerbotten’s natural resources such as timber and minerals were of great importance for the industrialization and modernization of northern sweden during the early 20th century (sörlin 1988; nilsson 2000; westin 2006). in the 1950s, more than 12 000 persons were employed in västerbotten’s mining sector (sgu 2007). however, restructuring processes meant fewer job opportunities in resource-based activities such as mining (pettersson 2002; lundmark 2006). during the 1970s and 1980s, it was often questioned whether mining could continue to be of significant importance for regional development in a post-industrial society (närp 1982; liljenäs 1992). even in northern sweden, where mining was still present, its role as a major industrial activity was beginning to be contested, particularly due to rationalizations leading to significantly fewer employment opportunities than just a couple decades previously. the swedish mining industry also experienced fierce global competition from mines located in other parts of the world where production costs were generally lower, causing declining prices for minerals and metal products. nevertheless, during the late 1990s and early 21st century mining experienced a recovery. swedish mining legislation was deregulated in 1992, allowing foreign companies to establish branches as well as conduct exploration and mining in sweurn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2600 62 fennia 188: 1 (2010)erika knobblock and örjan pettersson den. another important aspect is that the world market prices for metals and other minerals were gradually rising over an unusually long time period (2003–2008), caused mainly by high growth rates in developing economies such as those of china and india (humphreys 2010). this gave rise to a global boom in mining activities, affecting mining areas all around the world. in this sense, the development in västerbotten and northern sweden is far from unique. similar changes have been observed in neighbouring nordic countries finland and norway (nordregio 2009), as well as in australia (rolfe et al. 2007). although many mining areas in developed countries have been hit hard by restructuring processes during the post-war period and some have even been completely abandoned by the mining industry, there are still countries, regions and communities where mining is of significant importance to the economy (crowson 2009). within the european union it has been emphasized that the mining industry and the accessibility of metals and other minerals for the internal market is of strategic relevance (commission of the european communities 2008). from a theoretical perspective, hayter et al. (2003) argue that it is urgent to bring natural resources into the focus of economic geography research. they claim that natural resources still play an important role in the global economy, whereas within economic geography the issue has received comparatively little attention in recent years. from this point of view, it seems highly relevant to study how the local and regional economies of sparsely populated and natural resourcedependent societies in developed countries respond to a development induced by changes at the global level regarding the demand for raw materials such as minerals. in 2008 15 mining operations were undertaken in sweden, making the country an important raw material producer in the european union (sgu 2009). mainly, three regions of sweden are involved: two in the northernmost part of the country and one in south-central sweden. first, there are three mines in the county of norrbotten, two producing mainly iron ore and one copper. secondly, there are six mines in the county of västerbotten, producing complex sulphide ores. these activities are described in more detail further on. finally, in south-central sweden there are three mines producing complex sulphide ores (bergstaten 2009). between 2004 and 2008, large investments were made in exploring sweden’s mineral assets (sgu 2007). the total exploration cost in sweden was 92 million usd in 2007 (sgu 2009). according to the mining inspectorate of sweden (bergstaten), approximately one-third of all exploration activities in sweden between 1990 and 2008 were undertaken in västerbotten. 35% of those holding an exploration license in sweden 2008 were foreign companies, bringing investments, know-how and new business networks to the region. the increased interest in sweden’s mineral resources has to date resulted in an extension of the life expectancy of several mines: closed mines are being considered for re-opening and previously unknown deposits have been discovered in the county of västerbotten (fig. 1). some of these newly found deposits have led to the opening of a mine, whereas others are in the planning phase for starting up in the forthcoming years. however, the recent financial crisis that began in autumn 2008 has meant that at least some of these mining projects face a more uncertain future. even so, scenarios of hundreds of new jobs for each new mine, in areas characterized by small labour markets and structural unemployment, have been presented in the local and national media and by local politicians as a blessing and perhaps even the beginning of a new era of growth and prosperity similar to that of the early 20th century. the purpose of this article is to analyse employment change within the mining sector and related activities in the county of västerbotten. what implications will restructuring in the mining industry have for local and regional employment? focus is on the development pattern since the early 1990s, particularly the period after 2000. although this article focuses on employment within the mining industry, mining has further implications on aspects like policy making, land use, physical infrastructure and the environment. the methods and data used are described in the following section. in the next part of the article a number of theoretical perspectives are presented on natural resource extraction and mining, and their importance for local and regional development. this is followed by a description of mining activities in the study area. thereafter, results from the analysis of employment figures and the interviews regarding organizational changes within the region’s mining sector are presented. in the final section, these results are related to the more general debate regarding the extraction of natural resources for promoting local/regional development fennia 188: 1 (2010) 63restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment … fig. 1. mining districts in the county of västerbotten. in sparsely populated areas in developed countries. the extent to which these changes offer new opportunities to these areas is also discussed. methodology and data the quantitative information behind the analysis comes mainly from two sources: official data from various government agencies and semi-structured interviews with 15 mining sector actors. employment figures come from statistics sweden (scb), whereas data regarding mining activities has been provided by the geological survey of sweden (sgu) and the mining inspectorate of sweden (bergstaten). focus is on areas where mining activities are present, leading to a division of västerbotten into three geographical areas (see fig. 1): the skellefte district (consisting of the municipalities skellefteå, norsjö and malå) and the gold line (consisting of sorsele, storuman and vilhelmina municipalities). since the municipal level is the most disaggregated level of official data available from statistics sweden, and since the municipality of lycksele is part of both the skellefte district and the gold line, lycksele has been 64 fennia 188: 1 (2010)erika knobblock and örjan pettersson treated as its own ‘district’. at the beginning of the studied period the development in lycksele was largely due to changes in the kristineberg mine, located in the northern parts of lycksele municipality and belonging to the skellefte district. during the 21st century the development in the gold line is also affecting the development in lycksele, especially since 2005 when the svartliden gold mine went into production. in the article, activities related to the industry of mining and quarrying in the swedish standard industrial classification (sni data) are examined (table 1). companies and production units in the sni data are classified according to the activity they carry out, with data available for both the day-time population (defined as the number of employees at the workplace location) and the night-time population (defined as the residential location of the employee). another source of information is the swedish standard classification of occupations (ssyk data). several occupations are linked to the mining industry; however, data on specific occupations was only available from the early 21st century. occupational data for the day-time population was available at municipal level, whereas night-time population data was available only at county level. in addition, some key figures regarding active firms in the county’s mining sector were gathered from three other sources: the mining inspectorate of sweden, georange (2008, a non-profit organization focusing on the development of the mining sector in northern sweden) and affärsdata (a database containing information concerning swedish firms). interviews with mining actors such as juniors (i.e. mining companies only performing exploration activities), majors (i.e. companies with mines in operation) and related activities/subcontractors in västerbotten were held in late 2008. the semistructured interviews mainly provided complementary information about recent changes within the mining sector, e.g. employment needs and organizational changes. in fact, the interviews were conducted during months when the demand for minerals dropped dramatically due to the economic recession. the 15 interviews were conducted with ceos or managers working either at mining companies or at companies clearly related to the mining industry. related companies, for example, manufacture machinery and instruments for mining and quarrying. they supply technical consulting and technical support for, e.g., chemical analysis, education and staff training, and repair machinery and conduct wholesale of mining machinery and equipment. the mining companies had mines in production or newly discovered deposits, for which they had applied for exploitation concessions. as shown further on (fig. 2), mining creates employment in additional sectors than those included in table 1. it also has indirect quantitative and qualitative effects. quantitative effects in the form of (localized) infrastructure, services, construction and transportation, as well as qualitative effects such as know-how, technological development table 1. classification of industrial sectors and occupations in mining (sni and ssyk codes). code refer to in text geographical context available years day-time / night-time population population sni 10-14 relates to the industry of mining and quarrying mining industry workers municipal level 1990–2007 yes/yes 16–64 years ssyk 711 miners, quarry workers and stonecutters miners municipal and county level 2001–2007 yes/no 16–64 years and gender ssyk 811 mineral-processing plant operators. drillers and related workers mineral plant operators municipal and county level 2001–2007 yes/no 16–64 years and gender ssyk 812 metal-processing plant operators and metal melters metal plant operators municipal and county level 2001–2007 yes/no 16–64 years and gender source: sni and ssyk classification, statistics sweden. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 65restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment … and innovations which can be sold and exported, are created in related activities (cf. wiberg 2009). the intention of this paper is to calculate the actual workforce in the industry instead of making general assessments about multiplier and induced effects.1 however, all majors and a selection of juniors in västerbotten were interviewed about which related businesses they make use of, making it possible to calculate the minimum employment levels in related activities. the restructuring of the mining industry the mining sector is a mature industry that has undergone substantial changes over the past decades. increasing globalization, neoliberal tendencies, innovation and technological development have led to industrial restructuring in several ways, with major implications for firms, places and regions related to mining activities (neil et al. 1992; neil & tykkyläinen 1998; dale 2002; bridge 2004). the mining sector has long been known to be sensitive to the development of the world economy and business cycles. increasing demand for raw materials drives up the world market prices in a way that increases mining companies’ profitability. deposits that were previously judged as unprofitable can suddenly be worth considering again. increased demand also stimulates the search for new deposits and investments in highrisk projects such as new mines. during the recent global boom, the demand generated by investments and economic growth in asia, especially china and india, drove up the market prices of many minerals (humphreys 2010). when the economy turns down, there is a need to reduce costs and slow down production. during such periods mines can be closed, temporarily or permanently (cutter & renwick 2004). mining is well known to be a risky business, with high levels of financial risk taking (houghton 1993; tykkyläinen 1998; hayter 2000; storey 2001; bridge 2004). the richness and profitability of a single mine is seldom known to any high degree of precision in advance, and dramatic turns in market prices could make production extremely profitable during some periods and not profitable at all during others. the capital intensity of mining is another factor that makes the business hazardous. the need for heavy investments in infrastructure and equipment, and also the fact that it usually takes several years from the discovery to the start-up of a new mine, imply difficulties in launching production during periods of high demand and high price levels for specific minerals. to cope with these problems some shallow, rich deposits are extracted as open-cast mines, which lowers the necessary investment and reduces the risk. mining is a highly globalized industry in the sense that many companies operate in several countries and on various continents (ds 2002: 65; sgu 2007: 1; unctad 2009). low transport costs for raw materials also imply that mining can take place far from the end markets. furthermore, for instance, the frasier institute performs a global survey among mining companies and, based on this, map the pros and cons of the world’s different mining regions and countries (frasier institute 2008)2. their index indicates that sweden is of great interest to the global mining industry from many points of view. neoliberal tendencies have contributed to the development and restructuring of the world’s mining business (bridge 2004). a sign of this is that sweden, together with more than eighty other countries, has implemented deregulation and liberalization of relevance to the mining sector (ds 2002: 65). during the late 1980s and early 1990s, swedish mineral legislation was changed to attract and to make it easier for foreign mining companies and investors to explore and start operations within sweden. the mineral sector had previously been protected, not least because natural resources and the supply of minerals were long recognized to be of strategic (military) importance (humphreys 1995). in the past, exploration activities were mainly conducted by the geological survey of sweden, but due to increasing costs this exploration nearly ceased and is today conducted by the mining companies themselves. the end of the cold war, increased free trade and the gradual reduction of economic importance of the mineral sector in relation to other and faster-growing sectors in developed economies led to a reduction of protectionism in the mineral sector. instead, deregulation was seen as a way to attract foreign tncs (transnational corporations) to invest in the country’s mining industry and bring in new capital and technological know-how, thereby contributing to the industry’s survival in increasing global competition. it is interesting, however, to note that in recent years the european union has begun to engage in issues relating to raw materials. for in66 fennia 188: 1 (2010)erika knobblock and örjan pettersson stance, the eu commission has highlighted it as a problem that the trade bloc largely relies on imports of important minerals from other parts of the world (commission of the european communities 2005, 2008; sgu 2009). sweden’s role, not least the northern parts’ importance, in the supply of certain metals has been recognized as valuable both for the eu and for the regional/local level (the county boards of norrbotten and västerbotten 2008; sgu 2009). for many decades, the mining industry was generally organized according to the same principles as many other large scale manufacturing businesses. this production mode has been labelled fordism. the level of vertical integration was rather high, and the mining companies often dominated the manufacturing sector and labour market in mining towns. there is a vast body of literature on communities that are dependent on the exploitation of natural resources (neil et al. 1992; neil & tykkyläinen 1998; halseth 1999; hanink 2000; barnes et al. 2001; dale 2002). since the mining industry as such is based on localized, limited and non-renewable resources, many mining towns and regions have experienced dramatic lifecycles (bengtsson 1997; hayter 2000). an initial start-up period with many new jobs in the construction of the necessary physical infrastructure as well as mining and surrounding services would cause a local boom. since many of these mining projects demanded a great deal of labour and were located in relatively sparsely populated and isolated areas, it was often necessary to build up new communities around the mining activities. thereafter usually followed a period when the mining company made efforts to reduce production costs through different rationalization measures. if no new jobs were created in other businesses, this strategy led to economic stagnation or the beginning of a negative trend in terms of job opportunities and population. finally, the resource became exhausted and the mine was closed down. several case studies describe the difficulties these towns and regions experience due to winding down and final closures (närp 1982; neil et al. 1992; dale 2002). the heavy reliance on one production sector, the relative isolation and the lock-in effects of path dependency among local businesses, decision makers and people, have often given rise to difficulties in pursuing alternative strategies for local development (crowson 2009). structural unemployment, social problems, out-migration and calls for government intervention, public grants etc. were common (dale 2002). however, in some places new businesses, for example in the tourism sector, have mitigated the problems of restructuring within the mining sector (johansen 1998; jussila & järviluoma 1998; neil & tykkyläinen 1998). there have also been changes within the mining sector, not least in order for the firms involved to handle the financial risks associated with mining. the main tendency has been towards a more flexible production mode (often labelled post-fordism; see for instance holly 1996; peck 2000). for example, the contemporary mining industry is less vertically integrated compared to some decades ago. one example of flexible specialization is that many functions have been out-sourced and that mining companies often rely on subcontractors and consultants for substantial parts of their activities. in this way, the mining companies reduce their risk by transferring it to other actors, while the major company itself can adjust production volume and costs more easily. the binding up of financial capital and the societal responsibility associated with single-company mining towns also imply high exposure to risks related to the dramatic changes in world market prices for minerals and metals (houghton 1993; tykkyläinen 1998; hayter 2000; storey 2001; bridge 2004; humphreys 2010). the mining industry as such is well known for attracting risk capital in global economic boom periods, while less financial capital is available during times of economic recession. this cyclic pattern regarding mining activities requires flexibility among authorities and municipalities, e.g. concerning physical planning and housing, as well as a dynamic labour market, to cope with temporary ups and downs (rolfe et al. 2007). in australia, for instance, the goal to become more flexible has resulted in the fly-in/fly-out model of mining employees, pursued from the late 1980s and onwards (houghton 1993; tykkyläinen 1998; storey 2001). instead of founding a permanent settlement close to a new mine as would have been natural in previous decades, the mining companies build up more temporal accommodation where the workforce stays during their working periods. staffs mainly commute long-distance by airplane to and from the metropolitan areas. technological improvements also mean that a mine can be run with a relatively small number of employees. finally, the dispersal of production over several countries and continents could be seen as a risk-reducing strategy. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 67restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment … mining operations in the county of västerbotten in 2008 there were five mines in operation and 61 granted exploitation concessions in the study area (bergstaten 2009). in early 2009 a sixth mine, blaiken, was re-opened after having been closed for a period of time (sr 2009). mines in the study area produce sulphides such as gold, zinc, copper, lead and silver. västerbotten’s role as a raw material producer of sulphides took off in 1924 when a gold ore deposit was discovered 30 km west of the town of skellefteå (fig. 1). the so-called boliden deposit was europe’s largest gold mine until 1967, when it closed (sgu 2009). the mine’s location gave name to the mining settlement of boliden and the (international) mining company boliden. however, even before the opening of the boliden mine it was known that there were other interesting exploration sites in the surrounding areas (lundgren 2006). during a period of more than 80 years, several mines have been opened and closed within the area, usually referred to as the skellefte district. the skellefte district runs through several municipalities besides skellefteå, such as norsjö, malå and lycksele. the most long-lived mine is kristineberg, which has been in operation since 1940 (georange 2003). the mining activities in the skellefte district have been of great importance for the development of the region and have given rise to substantial employment effects, particularly in the mining communities but also in the municipalities involved (lundkvist 1980). in summer 2010, four mines were in operation in the skellefte district: maurliden, renström and kristineberg are operated by boliden, whereas the björkdal gold mine is run by the canadian mining company gold-ore. over the years, other parts of västerbotten have also been of interest for exploration and mining. for instance, the swedish state owned and boliden operated a copper mine in stekenjokk (vilhelmina municipality) during the period 19751987. the actual mine was located in the high mountains whereas many mine workers chose to settle in the relatively nearby village of klimpfjäll, giving rise to a boom period for the settlement. the sudden closure of the mine in 1987 resulted in societal problems such as a dramatic increase in unemployment, out-migration and vacant housing (nygren & karlsson 1992). in recent years, focus has shifted towards a regional tectonic zone in the interior areas of västerbotten. this rather diffuse stretch is usually referred to as the gold line (sgu 2009: 1). it runs mainly through the municipalities of sorsele, storuman, vilhelmina and lycksele. since the late 1980s, several juniors and majors have been involved in the exploration of this area and as a result a number of prospects have been found. since 2005, the australian major mining company dragon mining has had a gold mine in operation in svartliden at the border between the municipalities of lycksele and storuman. in blaiken, close to the border between the municipalities of sorsele and storuman, the swedish mining company scan mining started up production in summer of 2006, but the production was stopped in december 2007 due to bankruptcy. in 2008 blaiken was acquired by the regional mining company lappland goldminers, which went into production again in spring 2009 (bergstaten 2009). for a number of years, lappland goldminers have been preparing to start up mining in fäboliden in lycksele municipality, relatively close to dragon mining’s mine in svartliden. furthermore rönnbäcken, a promising nickel deposit located in the mountain range outside the gold line in storuman municipality, is being explored by swedish ige nordic. it is generally expected that there are more mine deposits to extract along the gold line. as a result, the gold line has emerged as a new mining district, alongside the already established skellefte district. the development in recent years offers hope for new employment opportunities in the mining sector in municipalities or areas with little or no prior experience of mining activities. some deposits in västerbotten are rather limited and will only be in production for a short period of time. these mines cannot be expected to have long-term effects on the surrounding economy or create any larger employment needs compared to larger deposits, which can be in production for decades. the storliden mine, which was in production between 2002 and 2008, is one example of a small-scale mine extracted during a short time period, with a very limited workforce consisting of 45 employees. however, it is quite often the case that further exploration at the depth or in nearby surroundings leads to continued mining for many years after the initial findings have been depleted. competitiveness and growth potential have a great deal to do with the ability of firms to change 68 fennia 188: 1 (2010)erika knobblock and örjan pettersson and create new income sources in the mining industry. according to the interviews with majors and juniors in västerbotten this process has taken different paths, for example through r&d, costefficiency measures, expanding to new markets or developing new products. there are several examples of activities in the study area that have previously been conducted by the mining companies but now are out-sourced to subcontractors. in the past boliden ab, the largest major in västerbotten, had its own personnel in most steps of the production chain, whereas new actors such as the foreign majors gold-ore and dragon mining, already from their planning phase in västerbotten, used subcontractors for substantial parts of their production, even in steps which could be regarded as core activities such as exploration, drilling, blasting and transportation in the mine. today, boliden has changed its organization structure towards more out-sourcing. nevertheless, their workforce still comes mainly from the surrounding area. although the area is sparsely populated, the mines are within reach through daily commuting by car from several small to medium-sized communities. at the present scale of operation, there is no obvious need for solutions such as the fly-in/fly-out model frequent in australia’s and canada’s remote mining districts (houghton 1993; tykkyläinen 1998; storey 2001; rolfe et al. 2007). on the contrary, many majors and juniors prefer local employees due to their local knowledge and mining experience. in 1990, 1.3% of the total workforce in västerbotten was mining industry workers, and the county’s mining sector represented 15.1% of the national mining sector. since then the region’s share of mining industry workers has decreased, to 10.7% in 2007. recently, however, new possibilities to develop businesses and work opportunities connected to mining have emerged. great interest in västerbotten’s mining districts has resulted in at least 95 related activities (wiberg 2009). both juniors and majors in västerbotten work in close cooperation with subcontractors and consultants, who perform related activities such as exploration, drilling, mine development, chemical analyses etc. regional demand has created new business opportunities in the area, which also can be exported (wiberg 2009). this has, for instance, led to a specialization regarding mining among consultant firms in northern sweden, and also to the establishment of a well known international consultant firm in the study area. the mining industry can be seen as a production system (dicken 2003). the basic functions in västerbotten’s mining industry are core activities (exploration, mining and mineral dressing) and are distinguished from activities performed by others than the mining companies, here called related activities in the production system (fig. 2). related activities are tasks such as development of equipment, transportation or drilling. mining companies often perform core activities (grey boxes in the figure) themselves or in close collaboration with con equipment & consultants subcontractors exploration mining mineral dressing smelter / plant for recovery of recycled metals core activities related activities fig. 2. organization of mining activities in the county of västerbotten. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 69restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment … sultants or subcontractors. companies carrying out related activities are characterized by skill development and flexibility to various degrees. activities found in the box in the upper part of fig. 2, such as producers of equipment or consulting services performing chemical analyses or seeking permissions, need specialized skills and often a high degree of education to perform their work. they market and sell their specialized knowledge as either services or equipment. businesses in the upper part of the figure are in this study from within the region, often developed as a spin-off from the mining companies. according to interviews they often have a close collaboration with mining companies, especially regarding development of medium to high-tech equipment used in core activities. subcontractors, in the lower part of fig. 2, are characterized by more labour-intensive activities and usually require less highly educated personnel. instead, they need to be flexible and trained to perform various tasks, in order to adjust to production in either the mines or other sectors within the region. these companies are often highly dependent on local labour and on flexible solutions, since the demand for their services often varies due to production fluctuations in the mines. the main focus in this study is on core activities, but related activities are also covered to some degree. employment in västerbotten’s mining industry during the period 1990−2007, the number of persons employed within the mining industry in västerbotten decreased from about 1 700 to 880 (a 48% reduction). during the same period, the relative importance for the county’s labour market has been reduced from 1.3% to 0.7% of total employment. the proportion of employment in the mining industry is naturally slightly higher in the mining districts (1.5%−1.8%). employment in the mining industry therefore represents a rather small fraction of the total labour market, yet of significant importance to the local mining communities within these districts. noteworthy is that, whereas many jobs were lost during the 1990s due to rationalizations, the early 21st century meant a significant upturn for employment in mining (fig. 3). during the period 2001–2007, the number of those employed in the mining industry rose by 34%. this was in accordance with the development at the national level, though the shift came rather early in västerbotten and was more profound. intensified exploration, increased production in established mines and the start-up of new mine projects in the skellefte district as well as in the recently discovered gold line contributed to fig. 3. mining industry workers in västerbotten 1990−2007. 70 fennia 188: 1 (2010)erika knobblock and örjan pettersson this regional boom in mining activity. however, due to the economic recession, 2008 and 2009 saw a substantial drop in exploration activities and investments, causing lower employment needs in exploration (sgu 2009: 1). this has had a strong negative impact on a number of local subcontractors, particularly those performing exploration for juniors or majors. in 2007, slightly less than two-thirds of all mining industry workers residing in västerbotten worked in the skellefte district (as compared to almost three-fourths in 1990). approximately one of five had their workplace in lycksele municipality and 13% in the gold line district. a small number worked in other municipalities. even though there have been prior periods of increased employment, for example in 1993 when production and employment levels in the skellefte district rose, the years after 2002 are especially interesting concerning mining industry workers in the county of västerbotten. employment levels from 2002 and onwards increased throughout the time period in the region as such, but with various fluctuations among the three districts. there was a shift towards higher employment levels in all three districts in 1994–1995, and in 2004 and onwards. the increase in the 1990s was quite temporary, while changes occurring after 2004 seem to have stayed at a higher level due to the extraction of new deposits and changes in global demand, increasing the production pace and thereby raising the demand for labour. lycksele municipality, being part of both the skellefte district and the gold line, has seen a slightly increasing number of workers since 2001. another municipality with mining industry workers is vilhelmina, which itself has no mining activities, but the svartliden mine is located only about 5 km from the municipal border and, due to commuting, has an impact on the residential population (i.e. night-time population, see fig. 3). the day-time population, where the workplace location of employees is studied, is slightly higher than the night-time population of mining industry workers in västerbotten, and has been so during the whole period, indicating commuting to the county from neighbouring areas (fig. 3). the difference between day-time and night-time mining industry workers increased most rapidly in 2003, which is connected to the opening of the svartliden mine. commuters are mainly workers from nearby communities and municipalities, with former experience of mining from mines such as the laisvall (closed 2001) in norrbotten county. commuting indicates that more municipalities than those included in the skellefte district, such as gold line and lycksele, are affected by the changes in the mining industry in västerbotten. of all districts, lycksele has the greatest difference between day-time and night-time mining populations, with more mining jobs than inhabitants working in the mining industry. even if most people live and work in the same municipality, nearly half of lycksele’s mining industry workers had their residential location outside the municipality and were commuting to lycksele. the skellefte district has had more residential mining industry workers than actual mining jobs since the 1990s. along the gold line, the day-time population has surpassed the night-time population in recent years, indicating commuting to the area due to new work opportunities. regarding specific mining occupations, the number of miners and mineral plant operators has increased by 72% since 2001. the skellefte district had a peak in 2005, and the gold line had a gradually increasing level until the last year of available data (table 2). these occupations have also risen gradually in lycksele municipality, most likely as an effect of expanding production both along the gold line and in the skellefte district (table 2). table 2. employment of miners and mineral plant operators 2001−2007, day-time population. 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 change change, % skellefte district 207 234 254 274 322 276 295 +88 43 lycksele municipality 66 61 73 75 77 84 93 +27 41 gold line 4 4 5 19 39 79 88 +84 2200 total 277 299 332 368 438 439 476 +199 72 source: statistics sweden, ssyk codes 711 and 811. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 71restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment … the change in the gold line is due to activities in the blaiken and svartliden mines. the development in the skellefte district fluctuates during the period, not least caused by changed activities in two local mines. new employment has also been created in the skellefte district, largely due to a restart of the björkdal gold mine and intensified exploration. since the increase is in the category of mineral plant operators (which includes well drillers, borers and related workers), it is most likely due to an exploration “boom” in västerbotten. the number of miners residing in the study area increased by 46% during the period 2001−2007, with a particularly sharp increase between 2004 and 2006. the proportion of women increased threefold during the period, and in 2007 represented about 10% of the miners (table 3). mining has traditionally been a sector dominated by men, and still is. however, technological advances have improved working conditions and slightly increased the number of women working in the sector. related activities in västerbotten’s mining industry a trend among firms in various sectors and regions is their concentration of business to core activities and higher cost efficiency. this is also evident among major companies in västerbotten, compared to the 1980s when major companies such as boliden ab, sought to have many of their activities in-house (metall 2000; ds 2002: 65). the employment decline between 1990 and 2007 described above suggests that the number of work opportunities was reduced mainly due to cost-efficiency measures. this development is not exclusive to mining operations in västerbotten (shapiro et al. 2007). some related firms that were interviewed have activities abroad or are interested in further establishment outside sweden and europe, partly as a strategy for reducing their dependency on regional demand. however, most related interviewees stated that it is difficult to meet regional or national demand, especially during boom periods, and at the same time expand beyond national or european borders due to knowledge gaps, time constraints or a shortage of qualified labour. in addition to mining industry workers, there are related activities and subcontractors that are not seen as core activities in fig. 2, but still carry out work clearly related to the mining industry. in västerbotten, employees in the category of metal plant operators (ssyk code 812) are mainly employed at the rönnskär smelter in skellefteå municipality, which is seen as a related activity according to fig. 2. the number of employed metal plant operators in the study area decreased between 2001 and 2007 from 585 to 474 (night-time population), a decline of 19%. 28% of all women in the category had lost their jobs, compared to 18% of all men. in 2007, 424 men and 50 women worked as metal plant operators. the owner of the smelter, boliden ab, has outsourced a substantial part of the activities instead of having all human resources inhouse. the company had almost 900 persons working at rönnskär in 2008 (boliden 2009). based on the interviews, 27 related activities in västerbotten were identified and have been divided into categories according to their sni coding (table 4). the largest group of related activities, apart from metal plant operators, are those producing equipment for the industry. the group which has increased most is drilling companies, followed by transportation, even if these numbers table 3. employment of miners and mineral plant operators 2001−2007, night-time population. 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 change change, % miners men 219 218 224 233 246 287 298 +79 36 women 8 9 7 7 23 29 33 +25 313 drillers and plant operators men 59 98 88 125 149 152 201 +142 241 women 11 11 12 19 23 18 17 +6 55 total 297 336 331 384 441 486 549 +252 85 source: statistics sweden, ssyk codes 711 and 811. 72 fennia 188: 1 (2010)erika knobblock and örjan pettersson are on a fairly low level. another important group is those businesses providing construction, electricians and mechanical services. employment in related activities increased from 556 employees in 2004 to 901 employees in 2007, a change of 62%. figures include regional companies, whereas the rönnskär smelter is excluded. concluding remarks substantial changes have taken place within the global mining industry since the early 1990s. growing global demand for minerals and the swedish mining deregulation in 1992 increased international mining actors’ interest in sweden’s mineral deposits, leading to the entry of several foreign mining companies and substantial foreign investment. today foreign companies conduct exploration and mining, but also related activities such as consulting in västerbotten. the industry has been transformed by this internationalization and increased flexible specialization, and these changes have led to a growth in employment outside the mining companies. consequently, some mining employment has moved from core activities performed by the mining companies to related activities (often subcontractors). some of these firms are not registered as performing mining activities, according to the swedish standard industrial classification (sni). mining employment in the study area of västerbotten generally declined between 1990 and 2007. however, the implementation of flexible strategies leads to the conclusion that it is not entirely a case of declining work opportunities. instead, mining employment is transferred into other sectors, from core activities to related activities such as the development of equipment and manufacturing, or is outsourced to subcontractors. in fact, data and interviews indicate that the number of work opportunities among related activities is higher today than the number of jobs in the mining industry. there is, however, a significant difference between related activities like consulting and manufacturing, which are knowledge-intensive, and activities like mining and transportation, which are more labour-intensive. subcontractors often perform labour-intensive tasks. during financial crisis these subcontracting firms face an uncertain future, while firms in other related sectors are usually less vulnerable. the high-risk profile of subcontracting firms reveals their weaknesses when it comes to local and regional development based on mining. in spite of this, flexibility also creates new business opportunities for related firms. as a matter of fact, some are highly competitive within their niche on the international market and also have the ability to sell their products to customers outside mining. even though employment in mining has generally decreased since 1990, more recent years have witnessed a remarkable employment recovery. during the period 2001−2007 there was 34% employment growth in the region’s mining sector, also increasing the number of women employed in the sector. mining has traditionally been totally dominated by men, but in 2007 about 10% of miners were women. this is a substantial change, albeit starting at a very low level. another new feature during recent years is activities undertaken along the gold line, resulting in new mines and employment. due to existing settlements, most employees live in the mining districts or commute table 4. employees in related activities 2004−2007. related activity number of companies employees per sector 2004 2005 2006 2007 equipment 11 416 386 421 518 drilling 3 47 92 185 243 transportation 2 16 24 32 46 services 7 74 75 84 91 consultants 4 3 4 4 3 total 27 556 581 726 901 source: affärsdata 2009. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 73restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment … relatively short distances, even though the study area is remote and sparsely populated. the difficulties involved in building a sustainable development in mining have been widely acknowledged (neil et al. 1992; freudenberg 2002; cutter & renwick 2004). exhaustion of non-renewable resources lies in the very nature of mining communities, and dramatic fluctuations in demand for minerals and metals are the normal state of these businesses. however, the recent economic recession has not meant that mining investment in the study area is back at the same low levels as during the 1980s and 1990s. instead, a rather quick recovery of the demand for minerals and metals has kept mining investments in västerbotten at a high level. exploration investments there are among the highest in europe, and the demand for gold is still strong. however, exhaustion, shifts in demand and short-term mining investments affect municipalities in the region when planning for social services, housing, land use, etc. it is also difficult to attract labour to become residential and thereby contribute to local and regional growth when the individual mines tend to be rather small and short-lived. from this perspective, it is not likely that new mines will have large long-term effects on employment and population figures. at this stage, neither core nor related mining activities can alone reverse the declining tendencies in västerbotten’s mining districts. as mentioned, new employment opportunities have lately been created in related activities rather than in the mines. hence, one option would be to diversify the local and regional economies through mining-related activities, especially those knowledge-intensive activities that make use of the vast experience in mining and that are able to benefit from the presence of new international mining companies in the region. this could potentially contribute to making the firms, their employees and even the communities less vulnerable to the risks associated with exhaustion of the region’s mineral resources, layoffs due to rationalizations and the recurrent dramatic upand down-swings in the mining industry. such a strategy could be promoted through investments in r&d, education and training. in this way, a strategy based on fostering mining-related activities could help to diversify the economy and thereby strengthen regional competitiveness and development potentials. notes 1 sörensson (2003) and lind (2009) have estimated multiplier effects based on scenarios of increased mining activities in the gold line district. 2 the frasier institute’s survey includes, for example, questions about infrastructure, taxation, political stability, mineral potentials, employment agreements and regulations regarding environment and land use. references barnes tj, hayter r & hay e 2001. stormy weather: cyclones, harold innis, and port alberni, bc. environment and planning 33: 12, 2127−2147. bengtsson o 1997. grängesberg utan gruvdrift. avveckling och utveckling i ett 10-årigt perspektiv. arbetsrapport oktober 1997. dalarnas forskningsråd, falun. bergstaten 2009. årsrapport 2008. bergstaten. boliden 2009. årsredovisning 2008. boliden ab. bridge g 2004. mapping the bonanza: geographies of mining investment in an era of neoliberal reform. the professional geographer 56: 3, 406−421. commission of the european communities 2005. european industry: a sectoral overview. commission staff working paper. brussels 5.10.2005. commission of the european communities 2008. communication from the commission to the council and the european parliament on the competitiveness of the metals industries. a contribution to the eu’s growth and jobs strategy. brussels 22.2.2008. the county boards of norrbotten and västerbotten 2008. analys av norrbottniska och västerbottniska naturresursers betydelse för hållbar tillväxt. länsstyrelsen västerbotten och länsstyrelsen norrbotten. crowson p 2009. the resource curse: a modern myth? in richards jp (ed). mining, society and a sustainable world, 3−36. springer, berlinm, heidelberg. cutter sl & renwick wh 2004. exploitation, conservation, preservation: a geographic perspective on natural resource use. 4th ed. john wiley & sons, danvers. dale b 2002. an institutional approach to local restructuring: the case of four norwegian mining towns. european urban and regional studies 9: 1, 5−20. dicken p 2003. global shift. reshaping the global economic map in the 21st century. 4th ed. sage, london. ds 2002: 65 2002. inför en ändrad minerallag. vissa kompletterande mineralpolitiska frågor. regeringskansliet, näringsdepartementet. 74 fennia 188: 1 (2010)erika knobblock and örjan pettersson frasier institute 2008. survey of mining companies 2007/2008. the frasier institute. freudenberg wr & wilson lj 2002. mining the data: analyzing the economic implications of mining for nonmetropolitan regions. sociological inquiry 72: 4, 549−575. georange 2003. exkursionslokaler i norra västerbotten. georange. georange 2008. klusterdatabas. data material from georange. halseth g 1999. “we came for the work”: situating employment migration in b.c.’s small resourcebased communities. the canadian geographer 43: 4, 363−381. hanink dm 2000. resources. in sheppard e & barnes tj (eds). a companion to economic geography, 227−241. blackwell, oxford. hayter r 2000. single industry resource towns. in sheppard e & barnes tj (eds). a companion to economic geography, 290−307. blackwell, oxford. hayter r, barnes tj & bradshaw mj 2003. relocating resource peripheries to the core of economic geography’s theorizing: rationale and agenda. area 35: 1, 15−23. holly bp 1996. restructuring the production system. in daniels pw & lever bf (eds). the global economy in transition, 24−39. addison wesley longman, harlow. houghton ds 1993. long-distance commuting: a new approach to mining in australia. the geographical journal 159: 3, 281−290. humphreys d 1995. whatever happened to security of supply? minerals policy in the post-cold war world. resources policy 21: 2, 91−97. humphreys d 2010. the great metals boom: a retrospective. resources policy 35: 1, 1−13. johansen h 1998. mining to tourism: economic restructuring in kellogg, idaho. in neil c & tykkyläinen m (eds). local economic development: a geographical comparison of rural community restructuring, 251−268. united nations university press, new york. jussila h & järviluoma j 1998. extracting local resources: the tourism route to development in kolari, lapland, finland. in neil c & tykkyläinen m (eds). local economic development: a geographical comparison of rural community restructuring, 269−289. united nations university press, new york. liljenäs i 1992. from mine to outer space: the case of kiruna, a town in northern sweden. in neil c, tykkyläinen m & bradbury j (eds). coping with closure: an international comparison of mine town experiences, 247−265. routledge, london. lind t 2009. back to the basics? modelling socioeconomic impacts of new mines in the interior of västerbotten, sweden. master thesis, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, umeå. lundgren å 2006. guldfeber: berättelsen om guldriket och dess människor. guldriket, skellefteå. lundkvist g 1980. den industriella utvecklingen 1990–1975: basindustrin boliden. skelleftebygdens historia del 2. skellefteå kommun, skellefteå. lundmark l 2006. restructuring and employment change in sparsely populated areas. examples from northern sweden and finland. gerum kulturgeografi 2006: 2, umeå university. metall 2000. gruvnäringen. en rapport från metall. metalls utredningsavdelning, stockholm. neil c, tykkyläinen m & bradbury j (eds) 1992. coping with closure: an international comparison of mine town experiences. routledge, london. neil c & tykkyläinen m (eds) 1998. local economic development: a geographical com parison of rural community restructuring. united nations university press, new york. nilsson j-e 2000. norrland – från förlovat land till förlorat stödområde? in axelsson s (ed). några tankar kring sekelskiftets regionala problembild, 81−97. sir rapport 123. swedish institute for regional research, östersund. nordregio 2009. north norden: a new mining era. journal of nordregio 2009: 3. nygren l & karlsson u 1992. closure of the stekenjokk mine in north-west sweden. in neil c, tyk kyläinen m & bradbury j (eds). coping with closure: an international comparison of mine town experiences, 99−118. routledge, london. närp 1982. tynande gruvsamhällen i norden. nordiska ämbetsmannakommittén för regionalpolitik. basprojektet. december 1982. peck j 2000. places of work. in sheppard e & barnes tj (eds). a companion to economic geography, 133−148. blackwell, oxford. pettersson ö 2002. socio-economic dynamics in sparse regional structures. gerum kulturgeografi 2002: 2, umeå university. rolfe j, miles b, lockie s & ivanova g 2007. lessons from the social and economic impacts of the mining boom in the bowen basin 2004−2006. australasian journal of regional studies 13: 2, 134−153. sgu 2007. bergverkstatistik. årsrapport. statistics of the swedish mining industry 2007. per. publ. 2008: 2. sveriges geologiska undersökning. sgu 2007: 1. årsredovisning 2006. sveriges geologiska undersökning. sgu 2009. metals and minerals. sweden’s contribution to raw material supply in europe. geological survey of sweden. sgu 2009: 1. mineralmarknaden. tema: guld. per. publ. 2009: 4. sveriges geologiska undersökning. shapiro d, russel b & pitt l 2007. strategic heterogeneity in the global mining industry. transnational corporations journal 16: 3, 1−34. sr 2009. blaikengruvan öppnar omedlbart. sveriges radio norrbotten. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 75restructuring and risk-reduction in mining: employment … <http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/norrbotten/nyheter/artikel.asp?artikel=2643705> 18.2.2009. storey k 2001. fly-in/fly-out and fly-over: mining and regional development in western australia. australian geographer 32: 2, 133–148. sörensson r 2003. effektstudie av gruvetableringari i lycksele och storumans arbetsmarknadsregioner. report 11: 2003. cerum, umeå universitet, umeå. sörlin s 1988. framtidslandet. debatten om norrland och naturresurserna under det industriella genombrottet. kungliga skytteanska samfundets handlingar nr 33. carlssons, stockholm. tykkyläinen m 1998. towards translocal communities: a mine in western australia. in neil c & tykkyläinen m (eds). local economic development: a geographical comparison of rural community restructuring, 226−247. united nations university press, new york. unctad 2009. world investment report 2009. transnational corporations, agriculture production and development. united nations conference on trade and development. united nations publication, new york and geneva. westin l 2006. trading natural resources for public grants. development rhetoric image and social capital in north sweden. in ito k, westlund h, kobayashi k & hathori t (eds). social capital and development trends in rural areas 2, 71−84. marg, kyoto. wiberg u 2009. förutsättningar för hållbar tillväxt i gruvoch mineralsektorn. swedish agency for economic and regional growth. rapport 0004. technology foresight in scalar innovation systems: a spatiotemporal process perspective toni ahlqvist and tommi inkinen ahlqvist, toni & tommi inkinen (2007). technology foresight in scalar innovation systems: a spatiotemporal process perspective. fennia 185: 1, pp. 3–14. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in this paper we discuss the concept of scalar innovation systems in the nordic countries. we use empirical examples of a transnational foresight project, and provide a literature-based formulation of a scalar innovation system model that combines temporal and spatial dimensions. our research examples show that geographical scaling brings forth new research problems and approaches for the development of innovation systems. we claim that understandings of the effects of geographical scaling are a critical element in the innovation landscape. these spatiotemporal interconnections comprise the essence of “scales” in this text. we conclude by addressing the key dimensions that are the basis for theoretical assessment of spatially bound innovation systems. toni ahlqvist, vtt technical research centre of finland, po box 1000, fi-02044 vtt, finland. tommi inkinen, department of geography, po box 64, fi-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mails: toni.ahlqvist@vtt.fi, tommi.inkinen@helsinki.fi. introduction for some time now, scaling has been a common denominator in the debate about the development of regions in geography. there are at least three different lines of thought in this debate. the first states that every activity takes place in a global agenda and therefore activities should be understood primarily from the global perspective. this argument can be called globalism, following beck’s (2000) treatise. the key of the argument is that the upper end of the spatial continuum is the decisive scale of human endeavours. the second line, definable as “new regionalism” (e.g. lovering 1999), states that the regions are the primary motors of economic activity in contemporary societies. this argument puts the emphasis on the lower end of the spatial continuum. the third line states that scale is a social construction created in the realization of human activities (e.g. swyngedouw 1997). this argument stresses that there is no clearcut categorical division between local and global scales – the spatial scales are constructed in the juxtaposition of the everyday micro-level occurrences and, thus, scale is continuously created and activated in situ (massey 2001). the scale discussion in geography has mainly concerned the spatial dimension of scaling. this paper seeks to diversify the understanding of scaling by adding more spatiotemporal emphases to the discussion. we do so by examining the interlinkages between technology foresight (tf) and innovation systems. tf is commonly associated with analysis describing and explaining the potential future development trends and disruptions of technologies and their socio-spatial impacts. moreover, tf refers to proactive and participatory processes that link the current decisions with strategic knowledge of the potential changes in the actor’s environment (e.g. eerola & holst-jörgensen 2002; könnölä et al. 2007). the second concept, innovation system, is commonly used to refer to the overall fabric of national research and development activities. innovation system is in most cases based on cooperation and interconnection between public organizations, private sector research and development (r&d) efforts and universities. innovation system approaches have gained impetus in academic and policy circles since the 1990s as a key perspective for understanding the systemic nature of modern economies. furthermore, innovation system approaches 4 fennia 185: 1 (2007)toni ahlqvist and tommi inkinen are also utilized as policy lenses to organize, mobilize and streamline the collaboration networks of multiple stakeholders in different economic environments. innovation systems can be approached on a spatial basis – they can be seen e.g. as national or regional systems – or they can be approached as sectoral systems (e.g. lundvall 1992; cooke et al. 1997; malerba 2002; inkinen & jauhiainen 2006). national and regional levels are the most widely used spatial levels to which innovation scales are associated. the concept of “scalar” has been used to describe and explain the scaling processes of various societal issues including politics, economics and local development as well as methodology (e.g. swyngedouw 1997; brenner 2001; boyle 2002; deas & giordano 2003; lindseth 2006; bailey 2007). in the context of our study, innovation creation in the contemporary world is in most cases an international affair. this is due to the expansion of global markets. “national” innovation system refers to these activities within a nation state embedded in international networks. for example, international scholarly exchange is one expression of the expansion of the national innovation system to the international scale. the nordic countries provide a feasible platform to demonstrate selected empirical examples of the innovation processes and paths taking place in the current knowledge-based economies. several points make the nordic countries of global interest. first, denmark, finland, norway and sweden constantly score top-ten positions on practically all scales of measurement on innovation and r&d indexes (e.g. oecd 2007; wef 2007). second, the nordic countries have public sector driven innovation systems. there are national differences among these systems (suorsa 2007) but their goals and key methods are, to a large extent, similar and complementary to each other. third, all of the countries have relatively high taxation levels and support a large public sector to provide a platform for the nordic welfare system. in this paper we discuss the concept of scalar innovation systems in the nordic countries. to back up the discussion, we present some empirical examples of the foresight project called nordic ict foresight (see ahlqvist et al. 2007a, 2007b). our examples show that geographical scaling brings forth new research problems and challenges for the development of innovation systems. furthermore, understanding the effects of geographical scaling as a critical element in the innovation landscape can also shed light on the much debated issues of the present and future locations of r&d. in order to take up the task we shall provide a literature-based discussion on innovation systems and technology foresight. on the basis of international debate we propose a schematic model in order to display the relationships between the spatial and temporal scales. scalar innovation systems and technological development innovation system, spatial scale and technology foresight geographical concepts are widely used in the analyses and debates surrounding innovation creation. in these debates, national and regional categories are the most employed. the scalar process involves recognition of spatial changes taking place between individual, local, regional, national, transnational and international levels. the geographical scale has several implications for innovation policies and systems. r&d activities and development processes are often studied through a narrowly focused lens, with one selected spatial scale. european-level analysis has been conducted in e.g. the european spatial observation network (espon 2004). the espon project can also be regarded as one example of combining regional-, nationaland international-level knowledge of r&d under a common framework (inkinen 2005: 1117–1118). there are several possibilities for approaching spatial scale as a measurable setting for innovation activities (see uotila & ahlqvist 2007). the most common is physical distance and proximity. for example, fischer (2001) has analysed the role of geographical proximity in the innovation processes. he points out that close proximity is a beneficial but not the only sufficient factor in the innovation creation. cooke, on the other hand, (2001) approaches regional innovation systems as a kind of international bottom-up processes. he argues that the regional development process is inevitably interconnected with the functioning of national and international partnerships and networks of collaboration. this view has also been supported by analyses concentrating on selected industrial segments (cf. cooke 2002). furthermore, koch and stahlecker (2006: 141) provide conclusions regarding proximity and innovation creation in fennia 185: 1 (2007) 5technology foresight in scalar innovation systems: a … three cities in germany. they argue that in the early phases of the development of kibs (knowledgeintensive business services) firms, the proximity of suppliers and clients plays a decisive role. this is interlinked with the circulation of tacit knowledge in close geographical settings. moreover, proximity induces the possibilities of attaining highly skilled labour. the conclusions of koch and stahlecker stress the role of the private sector in the innovation system. knowledge-intensive companies are the driving motors of a knowledge-based economy both in terms of employment and financial investments. in the same vein, the study of leiponen (2001) reveals the fine line between organizational knowledge creation and individual knowledge creation. thus the significance of one or two key persons in an innovative organization can become too great and a problem arises if the goals of these key persons and the organization begin to differ. therefore, the knowledge management is also a question of human resource management. we have conceptualized some key elements and actors in the finnish national innovation system in the fig. 1. the public sector is the driving motor in innovation system creation, because the public sector fundamentally aims to increase the wealth of the national economy. since the 1990s, innovation creation and the development of a knowledge-based economy have been of great interest to the public sector. in order to breed innovations, innovation system approaches have been developed at different geographical and sectoral levels. innovation systems include individuals, organizational networks and collaboration arrangements. flows of finances, information and human competences mediate in these networks. innovation production thus intertwines interests of the private, pubic and university sectors. this intertwinement has been characterized as the “triple helix” (etzkowitz & leydesdorff 2000) or bug model (e.g. anttiroiko & kasvio 2005). an essential part of the national innovation system is the university sector. husso (2001) discusses the geographical attributes of the finnish innovation system with specific reference to universities. he concludes that the goals of university research within the framework of innovation systems change over time. these changes concern goals of the supported r&d activity. according to husso (2001: 49) the main challenge in the integration process of innovation systems is “the conflict between the external control of universities and the science system and the internal values and objectives of scientific research.” therefore, organizational changes are needed but the methods of integrating the innovation system have to struggle with organizational borders and different value spheres. an interesting example of a chancing innovation system is the process of renewal of the highest fig. 1. characterization of a national innovation system. modified from suorsa (2006). global context national innovation systems regional innovation systems public sector politics education strategic guidance for national economy societal context and values: legitimation of the innovation system private sector firms think tanks private sector based bodies public finance private finance universities, research institutions and non-profit organisations conducting research in consortiums mediating organisations 6 fennia 185: 1 (2007)toni ahlqvist and tommi inkinen education currently taking place in finland. in this process, finnish universities are required to enhance and streamline their research in order to yield results that are more applicable from the product development and business perspectives. for example, the concept of “innovation university” has been deployed in the helsinki capital area. it refers to a plan to combine the helsinki university of technology, helsinki school of economics and school of art and design. this new structure is planned to be coordinated and financed in close cooperation with industry and government. “innovation university” is an example of a locally situated organisational structure that is perceived, mainly by the public and private sector, as a potential motor of the national innovation system. regional specifications are also occurring in other parts of finland in the discussions dealing with the future of the national university system. the key drivers in the restructuring of the university sector are innovation pressures based on global university benchmarks. thus the local intertwines with the regional and national according to international pressures. in fig. 1, regional innovation system refers to actions conducted by local-level organizations distributing the financial attributes from regionally targeted funds. in the case of finland, the european union’s regional development funds are an example of this. the funding source comes from an international spatial scale (eu) and the financial resources are distributed in the national economy through regional and local actors. regional support funds are also fixed to a location that limits the amount of potential beneficiaries to those who are located in that specific support area. the scheme presented in fig. 1 provides the starting platform for our analysis. the innovation and knowledge creation process is pivotal in knowledge transfer. in other words, the macrolevel innovation system approach of fig. 1 should be understood on specified organizational levels. one of the most widely known analyses is the theory of organizational knowledge creation by nonaka and takeuchi (1995). in their seci model (socialization, externalization, combination, internalization) the initial letters refer to the conversion of information in different stages of knowledge processing. the concepts of “tacit” and “explicit” knowledge are used in their framework to explicate differences in different knowledge types. the seci model provides a rather pragmatic approach to the knowledge creation process. the actual processes and emerging new practices are contextual and are created in certain organizational settings. similarly, conceição and heitor (2007: 2) point out the distinctiveness of local, regional, national and international contexts of r&d policies. they argue that the innovation system policies are primarily based on a linear view of innovation; i.e., financial and material inputs to r&d yield higher innovation outputs, whereas the research results show that there are no self-evident linear causalities between the inputs and outputs. quite the contrary, in scholar communities the innovation process is increasingly understood as a complex multidimensional process based on networked relations. therefore there is a gap between research theory and political practice and a growing need to translate and mediate these network perspectives into the field of actual policy-making. our approach towards knowledge creation and innovation systems shows that knowledge transfer processes and innovation system practices are spatially interlinked. local action can be regionally, nationally or internationally funded and the action results in innovation with possible extensions to the global scale via networks on all spatial scales. the real challenge lies in the information transfer from one scale to another in a way that avoids unnecessary overlapping. for example, the development of e-governance services seems to have significant overlapping between nationaland locallevel administrations. we conclude this section by addressing the connection between innovation systems and tf. this can be regarded as a tool for the strategic management of an innovation system. georghiou and keenan (2006: 764) have defined five classification steps to demonstrate the essence of tf. according to them, tf aims at: 1) exploring future opportunities so as to set priorities for investment in science and innovation activities, 2) reorienting science and innovation systems, 3) demonstrating the vitality of science and innovation systems, 4) bringing new actors into the strategic debate and finally 5) building new networks and linkages across fields, sectors and markets or around problems. these five points can be seen to include policy relevance (1 & 2), assessment (3) and networking (4 & 5). tf thus incorporates aspects of applied research with policy and networking practices. our aim is to discuss these dimensions of tf through the lens of spatial scales. for example, points 4 fennia 185: 1 (2007) 7technology foresight in scalar innovation systems: a … and 5 on the list suggest that technological development and change is fundamentally connected to strategic planning and social networking structures. this issue has also been discussed by kameoka et al. (2004), who bring up the question of socioeconomic levels in the foresight procedures. the view of integrating multiple activity levels in the tf process creates challenges, because foresights are usually focused on quite broad macrolevel themes. socioeconomic and human centred needs, on the other hand, are mainly micro-level issues taking place in local environments. furthermore, this creates a need to balance long-term temporal perspectives with contemporary policy practices. what is required, in one respect, is a more systemic understanding of the channels through which the technological development actualizes in a certain socio-spatial setting. georghiou and keenan (2006: 775) raise this point in their conclusions as follows: “a systematic understanding of the rationale behind a particular foresight intervention can in turn lead to an evaluation framework. however, the systems rationale also leads us to the realisation that foresight cannot be evaluated independently of its context”. the contextualisation of tf is probably one of the key issues which innovation-driven local economies face in the short term. therefore, innovation processes happen in multiscaled contexts – they are activated by local actors (individual and actor contexts) in localized spatiotemporal histories (community context) in the context of national and transnational relations. towards the scaling of innovation geographies spatial scale has several impacts on the design and methodology of the analysis of technological change. the broader the scale, the more general and quantifiable are the tools, measurements and policy recommendations. spatial scale amounts to much more than just geographical proximity or mere physical distance. the concepts of relative and relational (see harvey 1973) or socially lived, mentally signified and experienced (see simonsen 1996) spatialities can be used as a starting point for opening up the scaling process. the first thing is to recognize that technologies are pervasive and their impacts on social settings take place in a permeating manner. the source of technological development lies in the innovations. innovation has traditionally been defined as a new solution that either manifests itself as a new endproduct or service (radical innovation) or as a means to improve existing organizational functioning through the service or production process (incremental innovation). innovation can thus be a product or service or a solution to improve efficiency. innovations, by definition, should have a market value or an impact on economic measurements. in addition, in the field of geography, innovation has been traditionally understood as a spatial diffusion process where new inventions and technologies spread from the centres towards the peripheries (e.g. dicken & lloyd 1990: 239– 245). spatial structures are always in a state of change. changes take place within and between the actors operating on specific spatial scales (ref. fig. 1). at least the following essential macro-scale processes causing the changes can be identified: 1) economic globalization and the emergence of new markets, 2) the changing focuses in the development of technologies, 3) changing preferences in lifestyles and values and 4) environmental change and the condition of nature. as broad meta-categories these factors also have an impact on r&d investments and profiling of scaled innovation systems. these top-level macro phenomena are factors influencing the international sphere of innovation system scaling. interestingly, the development of a “knowledgebased society” or “information society” is very much understood as a national issue. this perspective is based on various e-society benchmark studies that compare nations according their performance on r&d indicators. however, national-level analyses can be questioned on the basis of organizational sectors and the “essence” of international innovation creation. for example, in finland private sector r&d equals some 70% of the whole national expenditure whereas the public sector proportion is 10% and the university sector is some 20%. the functioning of the private sector, strongly influenced by the importance of nokia and its subcontracting network, is driven by global market logic. therefore, the measuring of the r&d expenditure of a multinational corporation is not mainly a national issue. product and process development takes place across the world and the product markets are also global. this obvious point demonstrates the problematic behind assessing national knowledge intensiveness on the basis of measurement traditions that have their roots in state-centric worldviews. 8 fennia 185: 1 (2007)toni ahlqvist and tommi inkinen as a result of the considerations, we present the following scheme that depicts the meta-factors of spatial scaling in the context of tf. our conceptualization is based on the fact that construction and production are always local issues in the sense of actual manufacturing and design. development and production must be done physically somewhere and therefore there are micro-level issues of individuals, organizations and their local-scale combinations. in the networked development process, nonetheless, the spatial scales are overlapping. the local scale is integrated to the regional and national by networked structures. the national hosts the regional whereas the national is embedded in the international. the international can be regarded as the test-bench for innovative products. whether or not they will break through depends on the needs and demands of the current market situation. fig. 2 shows that the spatial scales are intertwined with the societal actors. organizational arrangements and development actions generated through cooperation forms the basis for spatial scaling processing. therefore, innovation systems and r&d are a fruitful starting point for spatial scaling typology because of the international “spirit” of research. the essence of science as an international affair thus helps the process of knowledge transfer of individuals and teams. our framework demonstrates the flux of components relevant to r&d systems. knowledge creation and human capital are fundamentally bound to key individuals, their teams and networks. the local development of innovation transcends the spatial scales fig. 2. ideal model of a spatiotemporally scaled innovation system. construction: policies practices components of innovation systems: organizational linkages and flows of information carving the way for foresight and the future demands of technology ideal scales of the innovation system production: products services impacts: micro scale everyday life local regional national international past present future elements at the lower end of the spatial continuum (local scale) distribution: global markets measurement: benchmarking national wealth networking: finance knowledge goods impacts: national economies stock markets macro scale elements at the upper end of the spatial continuum (global scale) fennia 185: 1 (2007) 9technology foresight in scalar innovation systems: a … from this local production level to broader spatial scales. production location is also a market scale but commonly r&d-based product development aims at global markets that are commonly the only level capable of providing a potentially extensive pool of customers. we can exemplify spatial scaling and technological change by looking at the digitalization of television broadcasting, a process that is currently taking place in the nordic and other industrialized countries. firstly, the scaling process starts from the international level: different nations can be benchmarked and compared with each other in respect of “digitalized development”. the international level is essential in the development of new services that have a global market potential. the second phase in the scaling process considers the national level. here, digitalization is managed and governed by the national administrations. thus the implementation is bound to the national development plans and national polices. national innovation system structures can also be used to support the execution of the implementation. in addition, state owned national television companies and related agencies are the major organizations behind the change. the third spatial scale emerges because digitalization requires actions and cooperation from regional players such as local operators and service providers. these can also be national or international players. the regional level also becomes important when considering the advertising for local markets and the operability of commercial television companies. fourthly and finally, the actual successfulness of the digitalization is dependent on local customer adoption of the technology. if there are too many households without the prerequisites to change the status quo, the whole project might encounter critical difficulties. this has happened in finland where the initial goal was to end all analogical broadcasts on one date (31.8.2007). now, the decision-makers have stated exceptions to already agreed decisions resulting to frustration of the consumers and retailers of electronics. this demonstrates the importance of aligning long-term strategic planning with present policy-making. on the basis of fig. 2, a triad combining space, time and process can be extrapolated. space is explicitly present in the figure through spatial scales. the figure lists some decisive elements in the local scale (lower part of fig. 2), such as construction, production and impacts. in the global scale (upper part of fig. 2) the decisive elements are listed under the headings of distribution, management, networking and impacts. time is brought into the picture through three temporal levels: past, present and future. it should be noted that fig. 2 is an ideal model and thus in order to attain a more strategic temporal perspective one should add different future temporalities. these temporalities could include e.g. short-term span (1–5 years), mediumterm span (5–10 years) and long-term span (over 10 years). the third level of the model is the actual process and its perspective, as is sketched in the present dimension of the figure (dot with lines). this process level is decisive in the actualization of spatiotemporal scales in the innovation system, since it is in the research and development processes that the approaches combining different spatial and temporal scales are constructed. the process level constructs a kind of “hermetic” worldview: it creates a view on the past spatiotemporal scales from which it is emerging; it creates an awareness of its present location and visions about its future positions in this matrix. scaling perspectives in the nordic ict foresight project scaling research process in a tf project in this section, we discuss the questions of technology foresight and spatial scales on the basis of selected results from the nordic ict foresight project. we discuss and interpret some results of the project in a fashion that depicts the key levels – process, time and space – of the spatiotemporally scaled innovation system model presented in fig. 2. it can be summarized at the start that the project’s spatial perspective in the middle ground between national and eu levels created its research approaches. furthermore, the temporal perspective that looked forwards to the nordic ict applications and ict environments ten years from now, created a tension between present-day actions and future strategies. the complete research reports of the nordic ict foresight project are to be published in 2007 (see ahlqvist et al. 2007a, 2007b). the core partners in the process were the vtt technical research centre of finland, foi swedish defence research agency, sintef norwegian institute of technology and dti danish technological institute. in addition to the core partners some 15 cooperation partners contributed to the nordic ict foresight 10 fennia 185: 1 (2007)toni ahlqvist and tommi inkinen process by participating in the workshops and giving expert viewpoints in the different phases of the project. the data in the research process was gathered in three steps: 1) desktop survey, 2) expert workshops (multiple preparatory meetings and small organizational workshops; three larger and structured international workshops) and 3) additional expert iterations via small surveys and comment rounds (see ahlqvist et al. 2007a). the main aim of the project was to identify key future developments of the ict applications in the nordic context. it should be noted that the spatial component of the project is “between” the ideal scales of the model presented in fig. 2. the spatial target of the results was transnational, i.e. the project was to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of the nordic innovation system as a collective. this spatial dimension is, however, tightly linked to the up-scaled european (international) context since the somewhat explicit political idea was to enhance nordic cooperation activities in european development. moreover, there were also down-scaled dimensions that conditioned the transnational spatial target of the project. the key contexts of the innovation systems on the nordic level are obviously national. therefore, the national level was framing the foresight analyses. there were also some regional scale nuances to the study (e.g. in the context of remote sensing applications for the barents sea, see ahlqvist et al. 2007a, 2007b), although the critical analytical insight travelled between the national, transnational (nordic) and international (european) scales. the transnational scale, between international and national, produced interesting twists in the research process. firstly, it created some problems in defining suitable technological aims. the key problematic of the study was general: the analysis of the futures of ict applications and related environments on the nordic level. these issues, to be assessed coherently and systematically, needed a framework. the problem was that the framework should not direct the study excessively; at least it should not level off the potential new ideas and insights gained during the process. the technological themes of the project were thus divided into four broad categories: experience economy, health, production economy and security. experience economy widely covers the media, communication and entertainment applications of ict. it touches upon such themes as mobility, content digitalization, new terminals, user interface development and user-generated content. health emphasizes consequences of icts in the health sector and discusses such issues as health information systems, document distribution, storing and management, data organization, health consultation, self medication, home care and support for the elderly. production economy considers the ict applications in the production industries. in the theme of production economy such topics as internet-based information systems, logistics, and industrial sensor systems are of importance. in the fourth theme, security, the focus is on security in general and on information security in particular. security in general covers issues such as general crisis management, natural catastrophes, and prediction and prevention of external and internal infrastructural crises. the project’s view in terms of scale was also reflected on the level of research questions. since the national or sub-national level was not the appropriate one for this study, the researchers had to synthesize national-level exercises, such as national foresight studies, and regional, or even local, case examples into a nordic-level research challenge. indeed, the transnational scale induced some interesting reflections on the sociocultural elements of ict adoption. the key question to be answered was the following: what is the special value and meaning of “nordicness” in the context of ict applications. in the actual research process there were five research phases. in the first phase, desktop survey, the boundaries of the technological field were defined. the second phase, swot analysis, identified trends in the national ict business and research environment in four nordic countries: finland, sweden, norway and denmark. the third research phase, the scenario and vision workshop, had two purposes: to create a set of external scenarios in nordic ict applications and to produce a set of socio-technical ict application visions. the fourth phase, the roadmapping workshop, created roadmaps on socio-technical visions at the levels of science and education, technologies, businesses and industries, markets and government. in the final research phase, the action workshop, a set of actions to be taken by the key players in the nordic countries were depicted. in addition to these research intensive phases, dissemination and evaluation activities were also included in the project. the key results of the desktop survey illustrate that there are significant differences in scope, scale and goals for foresight activities in the analysed fennia 185: 1 (2007) 11technology foresight in scalar innovation systems: a … table 1. example of temporal dimension of the scalar model: nordic level summary of roadmaps and emerging technology evaluations. short-term: 1–5 years medium-term: 5–10 years long-term: over 10 years • converging ict solutions • formation of modular ict • disparate groups of ict technologies and products: technologies are without a common framework • separate applications are utilized in different technological platforms: e.g. mobile, non-mobile, entertainment, work, production, and housing • increase of relationships between different icts • central technological platforms are being constructed • towards a mobile network society • personally tailored communication and media services: ubi services, intelligent agents, distributed data storage and information search... • compatible, multi-channelled devices: convergence, forming ad hoc heterogeneous networks, context awareness… • new technological solutions: 3d screens, flexible screens, fuel cell batteries etc. • embedded intelligence in materials and objects • convergence and compatibility of ict groups • existing mobile network society > ubiquitous solutions in everyday environments • ad hoc heterogeneous networks • spontaneously linking and communicating devices and platforms • everyday environment is immersed in ubiquitous solutions and embedded systems • ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing • sensor networks nordic countries. it can be stated in a generalized fashion that the studied swedish material had strong descriptive socio-technical emphases, the danish material combined descriptive technological emphases with societal-flavoured policy recommendations and the norwegian material combined mainly descriptive technological and policy foci with some societal emphases. the finnish material combined mainly descriptive technological foci with quite technologically oriented policy initiatives (cf. innovation policy, see suorsa 2007 in this volume). the steps in the nordic ict foresight project suggest that the scaling has both temporal and spatial nuances in the descriptive and analytical tasks. therefore the scalar approach of innovation production is relevant in the mode of description and explanation, i.e. in the way how issues are selected, discussed and presented. this is a detailed way of looking at “top-down” or “bottom-up” modes of thinking on the collective and spatially bound entities as suggested in the model framework of fig. 2. examples of temporality and spatiality we have discussed the scaling process on the basis of the research design of the nordic ict foresight project. this is a question of research process – design, sampling and methodology. it is also a question of how reality is analysed and presented. the second step that needs to be taken is to assess the phenomena giving the content to our scalar model. in order to assess the content we take a closer look on the constructed socio-technical roadmaps. these were constructed for each of the four nordic ict foresight themes (experience economy, health, production economy, security). table 1 presents a summary of these roadmaps with three timescales. the example presented shows that when one is to consider realising alternatives of development paths one should have temporal dimensions in the research design. this example clarifies the importance of time in our conceptual model (fig. 2). the technological solutions of table 1 should be considered as content fields of a particular issue – technology in our case. the dynamic changes in technological roadmaps show the increase of generality when moving towards longer time-periods. spatial implications are also more difficult to assess for the longer periods: how will markets change and what spatial consequences do technological changes cause? table 1 shows that the short-term changes of ict solutions are related to different user-contexts of technology (cf. inkinen 2006) whereas in the medium term (5–10 years) there is an overall trend towards the actualization of a mobile network society (cf. kellerman 2006). this means that technological readiness for the realization of a new level of the network society will be “somewhat” reached. finally, in the long term (over 10 years), the mobile network society will more or less exist. this means that the everyday environment will be equipped with sensors and communication terminals which 12 fennia 185: 1 (2007)toni ahlqvist and tommi inkinen are constantly forming ad hoc links. ict devices will network spontaneously with other devices, platforms and everyday objects. this will create possibilities for different services, but also form specific information threats. the social and ethical dimensions of technologies should already be important in societal discussions in the short and especially in the long-term – networking technologies enable transparent utopian development trajectories as well as dystopian ones (e.g. webster 2002). next, we illustrate the spatial dimension by discussing the key outcomes of the health theme. we selected the health theme as an example, because health-specific innovation processes are working in a quite complementary fashion in all nordic countries. the nordic countries also have clear strengths in health technology r&d including advanced basic research and r&d in biotechnology and the medical sciences. in addition, the nordic health infrastructures are advanced and, to a large extent, alike. an important factor is the tradition of cooperation between public and private actors. the spatial perspective of the health theme was the most predominant in the policy recommendations. as a conclusion of the project, an initiative for the creation and integration of transnational nordic test markets for ict applications and policies in the health sector was formed. the starting point for the test market would be to create a nordic test market concept. this concept would form the foundation for formulating a common nordic health record on how to store, handle and distribute patient data. the second step would be to establish a common platform of information exchange for suppliers and providers of services on the local scale. the third proposed measure would be to make a platform for the applications of distance medicine that could, if necessary, be applied on the global scale. the discussion of the nordic health technologies demonstrates that the nordic ict foresight project approached its target countries mainly from the transnational scale with national particularities and international potentials. this analysis could be intensified by providing a regional approach from each of the nation states. the project scaling can also be considered in the other direction – towards the international level as shown in fig. 2. the project provided some considerations of the global market potential for health products, but in general the absence of the commercialization of r&d efforts was seen as a common deficit. the transnational level could be divided into a description of all four nordic countries included in the tf study. the problematic of scaling can be elaborated by looking at national, regional, local, institutional and individual levels of the innovation process. an example of such a scanning can be done in all countries by listing all the actors that match with the content or substance themes of the analysis in question. conclusions we have proposed a framework to analyse the scalar spatiotemporal perspectives of the research and development processes. we used the scales of the nordic ict foresight project in three dimensions: scaling research process, scaling temporalities and scaling spatialities. the research process was scaled form the start as a transnational exercise that aims to create a future-oriented view of ict development at the nordic level. the temporal scaling was done in several phases of the project. we used a selected example of the roadmap work that presented the temporal change in three time periods: short-term, medium-term and long-term. the spatial scaling of the project was completed mainly through national-level comparisons between nordic countries that together comprise the transnational spatial category “nordic states”. the recognition of spatial scale as an elemental part of innovation production refers to the core of economic geography and distribution of production activities. the spatial distribution of the subcontracting networks of multinational corporations is one of the current issues both in academic analysis and public debates. our conceptual approach has shown that innovation systems are collaboration networks comprised of flows of finances, organizational agreements and political decisionmaking. as described, the task of understanding innovation systems on the basis of scaling spatiality is not an easy one. the framework presented here incorporates societal phenomena into a geographical and temporal context. our study suggests that the main geographical dimensions of spatially scaling innovation systems include: • recognition of spatial scale as an elemental part of innovation production • the local as the basis of innovation creation • spatial interlinkages between levels of administrations (international law–eu directives fennia 185: 1 (2007) 13technology foresight in scalar innovation systems: a … and policy–national law and governance–regional governance–local governance) • the international level as the field of competition including market potentials, collaboration networks and global finance • national and regional scales tend to lose their importance in the current development towards global and local levels these points crystallize the issues we think are essential in the geographical analysis of innovation system processes shown in fig. 2. the overall picture of the development actions requires paying attention to all special scales that are constructed through historical development paths. a seminal development in the future will be the birth of crossnational collaboration networks in innovation support. these can be called joint innovation systems including two to five participating countries aiming to create collaborative innovation support systems. this idea is now visible in the initiatives to create transnational innovation zones. the rationale behind these zones states that if one country is too small to create productive internal innovation systems it is advisable to combine resources with other countries in a similar position. our scalar model is designed to demonstrate the theoretical complexity that is involved. organizational arrangements and agreements comprise the essential core of the actual realisation of the functioning of the innovation systems. the nordic ict foresight project provided a technology-based analysis on a transnational scale. future research trajectories in innovation systems could combine multiple spatiotemporal scales with technological or other substance categories. this research strategy could bring some new insights to the nuanced socio-technical relations structuring and scaling of the global landscape. references ahlqvist t (2005). from information society to biosociety? on societal waves, developing key technologies, and new professions. technological forecasting and social change 72: 5, 501–519. ahlqvist t, h carlsen, js iversen & e kristiansen (2007a). nordic ict foresight. futures of the ict environments and applications on the nordic level. vtt publications 653. 147 p. ahlqvist t, h carlsen, js iversen & e kristiansen (2007b). nordic ict foresight. futures of the ict environments and applications on the nordic level. summary report. 56 p. nordic innovation centre, oslo. anttiroiko av & a kasvio (2005). informational cities and global restructuring. in anttiroiko av & a kasvio (eds). e-city. analysing efforts to generate local dynamism in the city of tampere, 19–42. tampere university press, tampere. bailey i (2007). neoliberalism, climate governance and the scalar politics of eu emissions trading. area 39: 4, 431–442. beck u (2000). what globalization is? 180 p. polity, london. boyle m (2002). cleaning up after the celtic tiger: scalar ‘fixes’ in the political ecology of tiger economies. transactions of the institute of british geographers 27: 2, 172–194. brenner n (2001). the limits to scale? methodological reflections on scalar structuration. progress in human geography 25: 4, 591–614. castells m (1996). the rise of the network society. 556 p. blackwell, london. conceição p & mv heitor (2007). diversity and integration of science and technology policies. technological forecasting and social change 74: 1, 1–17. cooke p (2001). from technopoles to regional innovation systems: the evolution of localised technology policy. canadian journal of regional science 24: 1, 21–40. cooke p (2002). knowledge economies: clusters, learning and cooperative advantage. 218 p. routledge, london. cooke p, m uranga & g etxebarria (1997). regional innovation systems: institutional and organisational dimensions. research policy 26: 4–5, 475– 491. deas i & b giordano (2003). regions, city-regions, identity and institution building: contemporary experiences of the scalar turn in italy and england. journal of urban affairs 25: 2, 225–246. dicken p & pe lloyd (1990). location in space. theoretical perspectives in economic geography. 432 p. harper & row, new york. eerola a & b holst-jörgensen (2002). technology foresight in the nordic countries. a report to the nordic industrial fund, center for innovation and commercial development. risoe-r-1362 (en). 70 p. espon (2004). the territorial impacts of eu research and development policies. the final report of espon 2.1.2 project. 323 p. espon office, luxembourg. etzkowitz h & l leydesdorff (2000). the dynamics of innovation: from national systems and “mode 2” to a triple helix of university-industry-government relations. research policy 29: 2, 109–123. fischer m (2001). innovation, knowledge creation and systems of innovation. the annals of regional science 35: 2, 199–216. georghiou l & m keenan (2006). evaluation of national foresight activities: assessing rationale, process and impact. technological forecasting and social change 73: 7, 761–777. 14 fennia 185: 1 (2007)toni ahlqvist and tommi inkinen harvey d (1973). social justice and the city. 336 p. johns hopkins university press, baltimore. husso k (2001). universities and scientific research in the context of the national innovation system of finland. fennia 179: 1, 27–54. inkinen t (2005). european coherence and regional policy? a finnish perspective on the observed and reported territorial impacts of eu research and development policies. european planning studies 13: 7, 1113–1122. inkinen t (2006). the social construction of the urban use of information technology: the case of tampere, finland. journal of urban technology 13: 3, 49–75. inkinen t & js jauhiainen (eds) (2006). tietoyhteiskunnan maantiede. 271 p. gaudeamus, helsinki. kameoka a, y yokoo & t kuwahara (2004). a challenge of integrating technology foresight and assessment in industrial strategy development and policy making. technological forecasting and social change 71: 6, 579–598. kellerman a (2006). personal mobilities. 212 p. routledge, london. koch a & t stahlecker (2006). regional innovation system and the foundation of knowledge intensive business services. a comparative study in bremen, munich and stuttgart, germany. european planning studies 14: 2, 123–145. könnölä t, t ahlqvist, a eerola, s kivisaari & r koivisto (2007). foresight at a contract research organisation: linking stakeholders and methods in participatory processes. research article submitted to the cost a22 conference “from oracles to dialogue; exploring new ways to explore the future” july 9–11 2007. leiponen a (2001). knowledge services in the innovation system. sitra 244. 120 p. lindseth g (2006). scalar strategies in climatechange politics: debating the environmental consequences of a natural gas project. environment and planning c: government and policy 24: 5, 739–754. lovering j (1999). theory led by policy: the inadequacies of the ‘new regionalism’ (illustrated from the case of wales). international journal of urban and regional research 23: 2, 379–395. lundvall bå (ed) (1992). national systems of innovation. towards a theory of innovation and interactive learning. 317 p. pinter, london. malerba f (2002). sectoral systems of innovation and production. research policy 31: 2, 247–264. massey d (2001). geography on the agenda. progress in human geography 25: 1, 5–17. nonaka i & h takeuchi (1995). the knowledge-creating company: how japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. 284 p. oxford university press, london. oecd (2007). oecd science, technology and r&d statistics. 228 p. oecd publications, paris. simonsen k (1996). what kind of space in what kind of social theory? progress in human geography 20: 4, 494–512. suorsa k (2006). alueelliset innovaatiojärjestelmät ja innovaatiopolitiikka. in inkinen t & js jauhiainen (eds). tietoyhteiskunnan maantiede, 23–43. gaudeamus, helsinki. suorsa k (2007). regionality, innovation policy and peripheral regions in finland, sweden and norway. fennia 185: 1, 15–29. swyngedouw e (1997). neither global nor local: “glocalization” and the politics of scale. in cox kr (ed). spaces of globalization. reasserting the power of the local, 137–166. the guilford press, new york. uotila t & t ahlqvist (2007). linking technology foresight and regional innovation activities: network facilitating innovation policy in lahti region, finland. manuscript accepted by european planning studies. webster f (2002). theories of the information society. 2nd ed. 304 p. routledge, london. wef (2007). global information technology report 2006–2007. 361 p. oxford university press, oxford. oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize segment risto laulajainen laulajainen, risto (2011). oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize segment. fennia 189: 1, pp. 1–19. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. novel movement data are used to chart worldwide mineral oil product shipments by handysize (15,000–59,999 dwt) and larger (60,000+ dwt) tankers. the data are from 2004 which allows comparisons with earlier studies about crude oil shipments. theory about ship movements and attached freight rates (rp rule) gets indirect support. non-existence of global data below the handysize enforces the use of fragmentary data from a refinery company and a world-class port. both data sets are believed to be representative for the purposes used. export shipments of the refinery company reveal a linear non-logarithmic distance function for vessel classes in the 2,000–67,000 dwt range. the function is practically identical with oil product exports from the said port. the thinking is then extended to larger vessel sizes and crude oil cargoes, the principle of fungibility. keywords: distance function, fungibility, handysize, novel data, oil product tankers risto laulajainen, department of human and economic geography, gothenburg business and law school (handelshögskolan), po box 630, se-405 30 gothenburg, sweden. e-mail: risto.laulajainen@geography.gu.se introduction this report is the final part of a tanker project that was started in 2005 with crude oil tankers (laulajainen 2010), and continues now with product tankers carrying light and medium (“clean”) oil distillates, a geographically unchartered corner of our discipline (for terminology, see stopford 1997). these are the external frames. the overall angle is to chart vessel movements and investigate possibilities for rationalizing their routing. the availability and quality of empirical data is central to such ambition. some progress has been made down to the panamax size class (60,000 dwt) but beyond that possibilities deteriorate markedly, as will become apparent below. focus on routing shall not overshadow other fruitful research avenues such as the build-up of maritime supply/demand balances for the some 275 coastal refineries worldwide, or the ownership structure and operating areas of tanker companies, assumedly connected with the availability of shipping finance. these alternatives imply book-size reports and must be shelved for the time being. the idea’s realization remained uncertain for a long time because most product cargoes were thought to be too small and local to rise wider interest. there were only a few precedents to look for tangible advice and they were about dry bulk, not tanker, shipping and from time periods when today’s small cargoes were quite normal, if not outright large. isserlis (1938, tables ix and x) analyzed 12,491 dry cargo “voyages” by uk-registered vessels of above/below 3,000 grt (4,500 dwt) in 1935, recording sailing frequencies, cargoes, cargotons and gross freight revenues on all significant trade routes, with loading and discharging ports/regions given in remarkable detail. british ships accounted for 27% of the world tonnage and the ubiquitous empire comprised 25% of its population, which made the report a fair proxy about the global market. it only lacked proper analysis. nossum (1996) continued the tradition by mapping global dry bulk flows during 1945–1990. citing escalating data effort, but also reacting to growing vessel size, he raised the minimum size as follows (’000 dwt: 7–8): 10/1945, 14/1960, 18/1968, 40/1978 and 50/1988. the series indiurn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2839 2 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen rectly suggests the exclusion of vessels used for minor bulk commodities – or oil products if the study were about tankers. the mapping was done at five-year intervals by variable vessel size class. the major ports are there, but flows receive only verbal commentary. the emphasis was on economics, not geography, and description overwhelmed analysis. these monographs are paralleled by numerous reports about shortsea shipping and port overseas connections (forelands). the former are spatially constrained, by definition, and emphasize economics (e.g. wijnolst et al. 1993; musso & marchese 2002). the latter can handle only a few ports, at best, and are constrained in that way (e.g. matheson 1955; laulajainen 2011). closest to the theme comes this author’s excursion to handysize dry bulk carriers in 1997, in which current data problems surfaced in a diluted form (laulajainen 2006). the perception of clean product marginality rested on two ideas. refineries locate close to markets, to minimize shrinkage during transport and storage, and to respond to host-government preferences. refining technology is widely available and scale economies are benign enough to allow location in most industrialized countries (stell 2003). these shibboleths need to be modified. refineries are conglomerates of production units with specific threshold sizes and optimal capacities whose mix cannot be decided at will. capacity can be built only at discrete intervals, whereas consumption changes smoothly. feedstock and output can be varied by selecting suitable technologies but only at a cost. it follows that, although aggregate volumes may be in balance, there still are qualitative imbalances to be evened out by product transports. refineries also supply feedstocks, naphta in particular, for the petrochemical industry which need not be co-located (chapman 1991: 84–86, 132; laulajainen & stafford 1995: 247–250). the other consideration is that refineries are not particularly welcome as neighbors. they occupy seaboard locations which have many competing uses. they pollute environment and are an eyesore. the difficulty to get building permits has pushed much us refining capacity to the canadian seaboard and small caribbean islands (cellineri 1976: 61– 68). capacity growth in the middle east gulf (meg) is partially credited to similar problems in western europe and parts of asia, too. then there are other factors. multinationals can maximize operational flexibility and minimize taxes and red tape by locating close to, but not within, crude-oil production areas such as venezuela (verlaque 1975: 219; laulajainen 2011). meg exemplifies the desire of producing countries to maximize value added. it is not by chance that the largest 120,000 mt (mt = tonne, metric ton) movements in our data are from meg to asia pacific. most shipments are much smaller, however, and quite numerous. a typical size might be 30,000 mt and the total number several thousands. but beyond that, the worldwide picture is hazy, to say the least. specifically, are product tankers and particularly the dominant handysize class amenable to a profound geographical analysis in the first place? if it is, is route planning feasible, in line with dry bulk and crude oil shipping (laulajainen 2006, 2008)? for this to be meaningful at oceanic scale, the trading network must have a fair degree of connectivity. another condition is that rates are high enough to make their differentiation, i.e., regional markets, possible. the handysize segment ends at 25,000 dwt, or 15,000 dwt depending on author, but product transports continue down to 2,000 dwt (stopford 1997, table 11.9; glen & martin 2002: 263). the wider definition is adopted here because a larger piece of a little-known sector will then be uncovered. the low end is rather opaque but geographical features familiar from previous studies can still be recognized. neste oil, the finnish refinery company, and the port of amsterdam then play an important role. three more world-class ports are outlined in a parallel study (laulajainen 2011). the simultaneous use of several data sources creates occasionally problems of compatibility, and these are in no way mitigated by their dispersion over extensive geographical areas. therefore, one shall not expect accounting accuracy but accept the wider views offered as a substitute. the beginning is made by selecting and organizing the data of vessel movements, to be substantiated later on with refinery and port data. the major trade flows, their connectivity and rate functions are identified after principles developed for dry bulk carriers and “dirty” tankers. the functions are applied to vessels typical for each trade and profitabilities explained by respective logistical characteristics. the refinery’s competitive position is set against its relative location, technological sophistication and changing price structure. its maritime exports are described by a vessel size–distance function, substantiated by similar functions for amsterdam and the lmiu data at large. to the extent functions from various sources fennia 189: 1 (2011) 3oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … link smoothly, it is justified to speak about vessel fungibility. global market two types of data are used for measuring the market size, about vessel movements and vessel charters (fixtures). movements originate from lloyd’s marine intelligence unit (lmiu large and handy movement data 2004). the former file is administered, meaning that vessel characteristics, cargo quality and size, loading and discharging ports and sea canals with dates are indicated. the latter is semi-administered, meaning among others that cargo status and quality are unknown (appendix 1). an example clarifies the geographical basics. consider a 30,000 dwt tanker loading in the following sequence: flushing – shell haven – amsterdam (multiporting) and unloading everything in bremen. it sails under one charter, carries three separate cargoes (part cargoes) estimated at 8,000 mt each, and visits four ports. the total sequence comprises three data lines. the three part cargoes combined are a cargo leg. the preceding ballast leg is implied to begin in the latest discharging port. the ballast and cargo legs combined give a full cargo cycle, also called trip. a vessel’s arrival and departure can be determined by direct observation if nothing else. its cargo status (loaded/ballast) is a harder nut to crack. deduction may be the only alternative and it becomes increasingly hazardous when vessel size declines and crude oil carriers are substituted by product tankers. one should be able to tell, for example, whether a tanker en route from rotterdam to milford haven, both refinery locations, is in ballast or laden, and with what. the problem has been solved by lmiu down to 60,000 dwt. thereafter the files are semi-administered which enforces considerable shortcuts by the analyst and constrains his/her activity. the necessary details are elaborated in appendix 1 and the outcome in table 1 and appendix 2. the geographical breakup is a 11-region mesh, which broadly corresponds chartering practice when larger areas are substituted for ports (fig. 1). the new feature is that the pacific is given a separate region. the handysize segment dominates clean tanker geography. when panamaxes and aframaxes operate mainly from the meg and from/in north atlantic, handysizes have an integrated worldwide network. this is made tangible by trades with at least one cargo per week, the minimum traffic density that allows a degree of route planning on a continental scale (fig. 2). the system’s connectivity is good. there is only one isolated region, although a closer look also discloses one sink and one source, which either absorbs or generates external cargoes. then there are imbalances in opposite flows that support differentiated freight rates. the share of local traffic is very large, with three regions capturing a 68% share of the total. all this fits perfectly with the industry’s general characteristics as outlined in the introduction. perhaps unexpectedly, correspondence appears best with the largest crude oil vessels which ply the longest routes (table 2). the conclusions are qualified by the caveat that the movements are derived as much as observed. table 1. cargo leg overview, 2004. upper lim clean cargoes dirty cargoes class ’000 dwt/mt legs fixt ratio legs fixt ratio handysize 60/50 12,186 3,383 3.60 n.a. n.a. n.a. large 1,100 588 1.87 panamax 80/67 498 282 1.76 2,227 620 3.67 aframax 120/100 586 302 1.94 9,081 3,175 2.86 suezmax 175/145 16 3 n.a. 3,880 1,444 2.69 vlcc 300/250 0 1 n.a. 3,527 1,271 2.77 total 13,286 3,971 3.35 18,715 6,510 2.87 notes: roundings possible. selected estimate underlined. class limits approximate. sources: drewry fixture data (2004); lmiu handy movement data (2004); lmiu large movement data (2004); lmiu vessel data (2004); woodhouse (2004). 4 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen 01 0210 09 03 07 06 wcna wcsa ecsa ecna cont wafr saf meg fe aus 08 05 04 fig. 1. clean fixture regions – 11-region mesh, 2004. note: region 11 is pacific ocean. identification numbers and regional acronyms are used interchangeably. 98 3 4 32 1 1 35 6 2 18 2 2 1 2 1 1 1 1 8 35 1 2 3 1 1 11 1 1 1 8 1 1 meg aus ecna ecsa wcsa saf wcna wafr fe cont fig. 2. clean handysize shipments per week, 2004. note: annual shipments/50 rounded upwards to closest integer; n = 244. sources: lmiu movement handy data (2004). fig. 1. clean fixture regions – 11-region mesh, 2004. note: region 11 is pacific ocean. identification numbers and regional acronyms are used interchangeably. fig. 2. clean handysize shipments per week, 2004. note: annual shipments/50 rounded upwards to closest integer; n = 244. sources: lmiu handy movement data (2004). table 2. network systemic elements, 2004. segment nodes active arcs no-loop systems separate arcs in largest node handysize, clean 10 18 2 8 panamax, dirty 7 5 3 4 aframax, dirty 8 9 3 6 suezmax, dirty 7 9 2 6 vlcc, dirty 7 11 1 7 note: region 11 ignored on handysize line. sources: fig. 2; laulajainen (2008, table 2). rate structure rates underlie profitability calculations. differentiated rates reflect differentiated costs, distance and volume-related costs in particular. only spot fixtures have the geographical detail to allow analytical conclusions. they were supplied by drewry shipping consultants (drewry fixture data 2004). the smallest vessel was 14,369 dwt and 53 fixtures were below 25,000 dwt. small vessels are too many and offer too little commission to be of much fennia 189: 1 (2011) 5oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … interest for international consultants and are mostly traded at local platforms (fagerholt 2004: 46). cargo tonne is the preferred size indicator and dwt is often left unreported. lmiu’s movement and vessel data, and e.a. gibson shipbrokers’ tanker book (woodhouse 2004) were consulted to close such gaps. the remaining cases were allocated to size classes by cargo tonnes (table 3). a conversion ratio 1.0 dwt = 0.800 mt was observed. the link between rate and cost need not be so intimate as to preclude surplus profits. the dirty tanker segment offered indications to that effect (laulajainen 2008, app. 3). there were 6,500 fixtures for 18,700 cargo legs in four size classes when there are now 4,000 fixtures for 13,300 cargo legs in three size classes, mostly handysizes (table 1). the 11-region set is used for specifying the trades and deriving their rate functions (fig. 1). the larger classes have only three routes with a meaningful number of fixtures: 3-1, 6-3 and 6-7, plus two local markets in 3-3 and 6-6. there is no sharp boundary between handysizes and panamaxes. overall, ports are the same and trades have their typical, distance-related vessel sizes (table 5). therefore, it is reasonable to consolidate all handy to afra fixtures into one set. the number of functions gets almost halved and the 12 trades with an acceptable number of observations leave only 115 fixtures redundant (table 4). vessel size is controlled by cargo tonne. the existence of two parallel rating systems is another, although minor, complication. the dominant system is the worldscale (worldscale 2004, preamble 3). its essential feature is “flatrate” (= ws 100), a tonne rate for a round trip between a given port pair by a standard vessel in standard conditions. the actual quotes are related to the flatrate and reflect the state of the market and vessel size. larger vessels have smaller unit costs when fully employed and ws quotes decline with increasing ship size. the alternative system is lumpsum, which quotes an undifferentiated total freight caseby-case. both systems give identical results in identical circumstances (fungible) and their relative use seems to escape rational explanation. there is a pronounced geographical dimension, however – lumpsum dominates the clean trades 6-3 and 7-9 and is well-entrenched in the local markets 6-6 and 7-7 (table 4). the fungibility is exploited here and both types of quote are consolidated into one set which naturally enhances the information value of available data. ws quote and lumpsum reflect the angle of a cargo owner. the ship owner angle is provided by time charter equivalent (tce/day). it is derived by dividing total freight revenue minus major costs (bunkers, port charges, possibly capital costs) by the time at sea and in port (cf. laulajainen 2007, table 3). the indicator is used routinely in time charters. weekly rates for each trade are estimated from the function: table 3. fixture overview, 2004. clean fixtures dirty fixtures segment ws lump total ws lump total class by dwt handysize 2,320 1,005 3,325 n.a. n.a. n.a. panamax 156 63 219 483 137 620 aframax 240 62 302 2,808 367 3,175 suezmax 1 2 3 1,345 99 1,444 vlcc 1 0 1 1,169 102 1,271 class by mt handysize 41 17 58 n.a. n.a. n.a. panamax 57 6 63 n.a. n.a. n.a. total 2,816 1,155 3,971 5,805 705 6,510 % 71 29 100 89 11 100 note: twenty of the handysize fixtures are for cargoes below 20,000 mt. sources: drewry fixture data (2004); woodhouse (2004). 6 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen rate = a + b 1 * bcti + b 2 * dist + b 3 * cargo + b 4 * lump + e in which rate = $/mt bcti = baltic clean tanker index dist = nautical miles between regional reference ports (26 regions) cargo = estimated payload, mt lump = 1/0 variable, 1 when a lumpsum and 0 when a ws quote a, b i = parameters e = error term. bcti (2004) indicates the general state of the market and is indispensable for explaining temporal data. it should be noted that the clean index does not follow closely the index for dirty cargoes. since many tankers can be used for both type of cargo, a fair amount of arbitrage is possible. distance is necessary because longer transports are more expensive (worldscale 2004). one-way distance is used to emphasize the point that round voyages (rv, two-way) cannot be assumed. the relation is linear when terminal charges are overlooked. when not, approximate linearity can be assumed at long, but not short, distances. logarithmic transformation reduced the r-sqrs by about 0.100 and was rejected. vessel size measures economies of scale. cargo tonnage originates from charterparty or is an educated guess, typical for the trade. it functioned equally well as deadweight tonnages. scale economies suggest linearization by taking logarithms. the effect on r-sqr was negligible, however, and the idea was abandoned. it appeared plausible that the ratio cargo mt/dwt (= load factor) affects the rate when the charterer is compelled to pay for unused cargo space (part cargo). the idea is connected to the state of the market and therefore tricky to use. vessel size is probably the ship owner’s reference point in a bull market, whereas in a bear market he/she is content to charge for the cargo tonnes only. in experiments, the variable usually lacked statistical significance and was rejected. although fixtures based on ws quotes and lumpsums appear fungible, they may be used by different types of market actor. a dichotomous variable lump is consequently added. the estimation succeeds well. nine of the twelve equations have r-sqrs at or above 0.50 (table 4). the main coefficients, when significant, have logical signs and are internally consistent. the lump coefficient is inconsistent but it is also the most speculative one. the implied profits are standardized by: table 4. rate functions, 2004. trade fixt. lump rate r-sqr see coefficients interc. % $/mt (adj) bcti dist cargo lump 1-1 561 0.13 13.19 0.656 2.20 0.00909 0.00328 –0.347 8.708 1-3 70 0.00 15.75 0.742 2.02 0.00781 0.00224 –0.167 2.765 3-1 575 0.02 24.57 0.742 4.02 0.01872 0.00514 –0.240 –3.556 –8.743 3-3 820 0.09 14.47 0.499 3.98 0.01154 0.00436 –0.119 –1.390 –1.723 3-4 96 0.03 27.23 0.616 5.07 0.02512 0.00667 –0.417 6.475 –15.948 6-3 128 0.97 29.65 0.416 7.21 0.01332 0.00188 –0.156 –14.654 25.927 6-5 55 0.05 25.21 0.671 3.02 0.01396 0.00429 –0.161 9.749 –3.869 6-6 101 0.64 15.15 0.310 10.12 0.01436 0.00484 –11.064 6-7 416 0.01 25.95 0.789 3.84 0.02324 0.00401 –0.197 –13.005 7-7 787 0.75 11.61 0.594 2.24 0.00609 0.00069 –0.112 –4.185 9.716 7-8 105 0.03 27.59 0.743 3.75 0.01517 0.00433 –0.276 –15.469 0.149 7-9 62 0.98 34.42 0.354 6.05 0.01350 0.00368 –2.902 rest 115 all 3,967 0.29 18.62 0.691 5.31 0.01242 0.00420 –0.179 –1.971 –1.506 notes: based on handysize, panamax and aframax fixtures. rest consists of small trades. distances one-way. all coefficients at least 0.05 significant. trade 7-6 with 34 observations does not support a function. source: drewry fixture data (2004). fennia 189: 1 (2011) 7oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … 1. selecting for each trade typical input values, 2. applying the parameters to get weekly $/mt, 3. subtracting bunker costs, the main variable cost item, 4. scaling the net revenues by the total time. the result is an approximation of the time charter equivalent ($/day). the use of typical rather than average input values facilitates comparison. similar trades are grouped into five cases (table 5). case a when one macro system (table 3) includes several local trades, their tces tend to stabilize at the same level. see also case e. case b similar logistics lead to similar tces. this is a variation of case a. the two trades begin in europe and meg and end in west and east/south africa, respectively. there are no return cargoes. the distances are the same, the cargoes almost the same and both trades use the ws system exclusively. case c imbalance in opposite trades is reflected in their relative tces. case d opportunities for new cargoes at destination are reflected in relative tces; the idea has been elaborated by laulajainen (2007, table 8 ff). case e lumpsum system, even when inoperative (!), suggests lower tce, reinforcing the effect of longer distance. the same phenomenon is visible in case a. the conclusions tally well with those derived in previous studies about “dirty” tankers. a logical continuation would be to apply the simulator developed for global bulk vessel movements (laulajainen 2006, 2007, 2008). unfortunately, the available data are insufficient for the purpose. the missing movement data about handysize vessels, in particular, makes the effort table 5. typical tces (“profits”) explained, 2004. case trade variables $/mt tce commentary dist cargo lump $’000/d a same macro system promotes similar profits in local trades 1-1 1,500 30.0 0.00 14.33 31.1 3-3 1,500 30.0 0.00 15.35 33.5 6-6 1,500 30.0 0/1 13.74 29.7 lumpsum inoperative 7-7 l 1,500 30.0 1.00 10.65 22.3 lumpsum 100% ws 1,500 30.0 0.00 14.83 32.3 b similar logistics lead to similar profits 3-4 4,000 30.0 0.00 28.92 29.0 west africa 6-5 4,000 35.0 0.00 24.72 28.9 east africa c imbalance in opposite trades reflected in profits 1-3 4,000 35.0 0.00 15.42 16.8 backhaul (small flow) 3-1 4,000 35.0 0.00 26.29 31.0 fronthaul (large flow) d opportunities at destination reflected in profits 6-3 6,000 55.0 1.00 30.25 34.0 better 6-7 6,000 55.0 0.00 28.62 35.3 worse e lumpsum although inoperative suggests lower profits 7-8 4,000 30.0 0.00 27.73 27.7 7-9 6,000 30.0 1.00 35.68 24.6 lumpsum inoperative notes: profit in accounting sense observes also capital charges, such as depreciation and interest on capital, now included in worldscale’s hire element. $/mt and tce are annual averages. $/mt does not deduct bunkers, tce does. $/mt is based on one-way distance and loading time, tce on round-voyage distance and full port time. trade 6-3 comprises suez canal charges $140,000 ($4,300/day) as a negative item. this is controversial because the ws system ignores canal charges. trade 6-6 not split into ws and l because lumpsum coefficient statistically insignificant. source: worldscale (2004, preamble 3). 8 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen meaningless. fixtures can be used to approximate trade volumes but vessel and cargo histories, i.e., time sequences of loading and discharging ports and the weekly availability of cargoes, are needed for applying the formula of rate potential, the keystone of simulated rates. since this is not possible, it is better to turn attention to a refining company with extensive maritime exports, made mostly with vessels smaller than handysizes. it is then possible to compare its activity with data from other partial sources, viz. the port of amsterdam authority (2004) and lmiu handy movement data (2004). micro level cases lmiu’s semi-administered movement data (appendix 1) ends at the 15,000 dwt size. the frequent aggregation of ship movements on a particular data line makes the analysis of individual cargo legs impossible. the desire to penetrate to the bottom of matters makes the use of additional sources necessary. port statistics come first in mind. the normal practice is that ships report at arrival and departure their latest or next port. in scandinavia, the reports are available for academic research at port and national authorities. “elsewhere” they seem to be semi-classified information, at best. when they are made available it is in an aggregate shape. in a fortunate case, aggregation may be a cascade by commodity group, country and vessel size class. among four world-class ports contacted (amsterdam, antwerp, rotterdam and singapore) this happened to be the case in amsterdam. that is the reason for amsterdam’s inclusion. the favored alternative is naturally access to individual trips (loading–cargo leg–discharging–ballast leg). business company databases routinely contain this information. the clou is to get access to it. companies in general consider locational data about sales, revenues and costs too sensitive for release to the public domain. in our case, neste oil, the 2004 export shipments were thought to be only of historical interest, in a rapidly moving market where the changing price structure of crude oil was a central ingredient (harki 2009b). common language and ethnic background undoubtedly helped, too. the same request at some other companies operating in the baltic was flatly turned down. from a wider angle, a refinery may not know where its sales will end if they are distributed by traders. neste did not export through traders. its data file comprised also the smallest shipments, down to 2,000 mt. these features allow a comprehensive analysis. neste oil is finland’s dominant oil company, with the government as a majority owner. its refineries in sköldvik (porvoo) and in 2004 naantali imported 9.2 mmt crude oil by sea (primorsk, fredericia, kaliningrad, etc.) and 4.3 mmt by rail, and distributed 13.4 mmt products 60/40 domestically/abroad (fortum ltd 2004). maritime transports dominated exports. their large share and penetration of the north sea heartland may astonish. the foundation was laid in 1975 when the sköldvik refinery had doubled capacity but faced muted demand at home, in the aftermath of the 1973 price hike. fortunately, the surplus could be placed overseas (cf. rodgers 1958: 349; chapman 1991: 137–138, 220). this was an eye-opener and the refinery duly became a conduit of soviet exports in a refined form. the task was facilitated by the extensive dismantling of refinery capacity in the eu in the 1980s, supported by widespread resistance to new refineries on the congested seaboard. operation in constantly changing export markets called for flexibility, possible only by sophisticated technology such as catalytic cracking and hydrocracking, able to cope with numerous crude qualities and convert them to novel, environmentally friendly products. the hefty differential between low-quality and high-quality crudes, some $10/ bbl ($73/mt), played directly into neste’s hands. that benefit has subsequently dwindled to $3.5/ bbl (26$/mt) following the closure of low-quality saudi fields and the upgrading of us refineries – but in 2004 it mattered (blas 2009). neste oil’s operations are evaluated best against its competitors. most of them were in scandinavia or the balticum, or at least exported through its ports (table 6). available information calls for care in interpretation. roughly 60% of neste’s export tonnage was shipped in vessels small enough to escape the handysize definition, and the neste and lmiu data sets are only broadly comparable (appendix 1). all quoted refineries supplied the local market, but exports could easily approach the 50/50 mark. mažeikiu nafta in lithuania and preem in sweden being typical cases (preem ab 2004; maižeikiu nafta 2005). russian exports pose the main dilemma because no refinery was on the seaboard (maižeikiu lithuanian-owned) and most were far inland. kirishi is only 110 km from st. petersburg but moscow, yaroslavl and fennia 189: 1 (2011) 9oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … rjazan are already 650–900 km from baltic ports. it is very much a question of rail tariffs, which at such distances comprise up to 10%–12% of the fob cost and are three times higher than pipeline tariffs (byev et al. 2006: 88–89). klaipeda even received crude oil from kazahstan, a distance of 3,000 km. the terminal is a subport of klaipeda and exports are registered there. the gdansk refinery was half the size of sköldvik (atlas... 2003; george 2003; lorimer 2003; stell 2003; tykkyläinen 2003; lmiu handy movement data 2004; byev et al. 2006: 38–40, 89–90; surgutneftegaz 2009). neste was thus in a favorable competitive position in the baltic (fig. 3). competition intensified beyond the baltic but it was less advanced technologically than one might expect1. neste considered only the swedes and immingham as equals (harki 2009b). the market shares in the core market baltic–north sea, biscaya–western mediterranean tended to stay within 85%–90%, whereas the pull of north america grew on the north sea and the relatively modest market in québec and maritime provinces absorbed more than new york (fig. 3). but geographical closeness alone was not sufficient. technical excellence tuned to market preferences carried much weight, particularly in california, notwithstanding the distance (9,000 nm) and panama canal charges ($140,000). neste also excelled there with three 35,000–40,000 mt cargoes of high-grade gasoline. globally, california is the cul-de-sac of oil logistics, with 15% of supplies coming from the outside, from alaska and via refineries in the vancouver area. it is comparatively isolated from the caribbean by the congested panama canal and from the asia pacific by the vast spaces of the ocean. yet, korea and japan were the closest overseas sources and also neste oil’s keenest competitors. the surcharge toward korea, “only” 5,000 nm distant, was 24 $/mt, which wiped away the calculatory 23 $/mt refinery margin1. an important reason for the comparatively low korean presence, table 6. handysize oil product exports from some refineries in nw europe, 2004. company/class refin. intake maritime cargos by region cargos no bbl/day mmt 1–3 6–8 rest trans % % % neste oil (sköldvik, naantali) 2 252 5.0 419 aframax 84,000 dwt 0.1 2 panamax 67,000 dwt 0.4 8 handysize 15–59,999 dwt 2.4 138 small 10–14,999 dwt 1.4 129 mini 2–9,999 dwt 0.7 142 lmiu 15–59,999 dwt finland (sköldvik, naantali) 2 252 1.7 12 85 3 127 north baltic (russia, estonia) 1 336 17.1 2 97 1 702 mid baltic (latvia, litva, kalin.) 1 260 13.2 8 89 4 576 poland (gdansk) 1 90 1.1 6 85 9 54 denmark (kalundb, fredericia) 2 176 1.3 9 90 2 58 sweden (brofjord, gothenburg) 3 406 5.1 11 85 4 218 norway (mongstad, slagen) 2 310 3.0 11 87 2 145 uk (immingham) 2 447 5.2 17 78 5 195 all lmiu 14 2,277 47.7 7 92 2 2,075 world, seaboard 275 53,600 781.3 28,500 notes: domestic shipments excluded. canary isl., puerto rico, virgin isl. and similar are considered foreign territories. neste data cargos and tonnes (dwt = 0.8 mt). lmiu data non-treated (100%) transits. percentages from transits. roundings possible. region 1-3 refers to north american atlantic coast & caribbean and region 6-8 to baltic & north sea & biscaya & w. mediterranean. they originate from a 26-region mesh. nynäshamn refinery specialized in bitumen and is outside this study. global figures without scaling (app. 1). sources: stell (2003); lmiu handy movement data (2004); harki (2009a), laulajainen (2010, fig. 4). 10 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen 450,000 mt or 3% of the market, must have been the refineries’ modest technical sophistication (lmiu handy movement data 20042). of course, sophistication becomes expensive and is never an end in itself but a vehicle to gain meaningful competitive advantage. fungibility most of neste’s cargoes were quite small. only 60% exceeded the approximate handysize lower boundary 12,000 mt (15,000 dwt; fig. 4). a full cargo often consisted of several qualities, up to five, but it was unusual that a vessel discharged in more than one port, and then close to each other. the smallest cargoes, down to 2,000 mt (2,500 dwt), were chemicals, bitumen and bunkers. fuel oil cargoes could also be small, 3,000–4,000 mt, but only when channels and ports were shallow. the total share of non-clean cargoes was 3.5%. distant shipments were always gasoline. loading in both sköldvik and naantali for the same trip was unusual. distances reflect the refinery locations at the far end of the baltic. three zones can be outlined: northern europe up to 2,000 nm (one-way), east coast north america (ecna) about 4,000 nm and los angeles 9,000 nm (fig. 4). cargo size and distance seem to change in tandem, tying together the small end of the market and the rest. the link is weak when individual cargoes are considered, but quite strong when trips are aggregated by cargo size and distance. it may even be possible to speak about the fungibility of the oil tanker market; observations made in one n p pr p = porvoo n = naantali pr = primorsk neste oil product exports 650 330110 ‘000 tonnes 1470 1080 700 60 110 460 fig. 3. neste oil maritime product exports, 2004. source: harki (2009a). fig. 3. neste oil maritime product exports, 2004. source: harki (2009a). fennia 189: 1 (2011) 11oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … part of the market having full validity elsewhere. the neste data must then be complemented with other sets to bridge the gap to the lmiu product shipments above the 60,000 dwt mark, not to speak of “dirty” cargoes such as crude oil. in that purpose, oil-product export data was collected from some major ports. amsterdam’s data suits best for this report. the port has very little oil refining but functions as an outlet for rotterdam refineries (charlier 1996: 310–311). the exports almost double neste’s, and also cover mediterranean and south atlantic, with singapore as the most distant destination (fig. 5). the distribution radius of oil products thus approaches that of crude oil. the data sets are only broadly comparable with each other (table 7). the neste data are detailed by vessel (except dwt), cargo and port. distances are measured from sköldvik/naantali. the amsterdam data are not about individual vessels or ports but aggregated first by dwt class (with cargo tonnage) and then by country. a dwt class is estimated here by its midpoint. one-way distances are measured from rotterdam (proxy) to a country’s most likely discharging port (2004). the lmiu data identify vessels with dwt, cargo tonne, loading and discharging ports. these distances are between regional reference ports in a 26-region mesh (e.g. laulajainen 2010, fig. 4). the “clean” data are aggregated for the analysis, at neste by region, i.e., distance (fig. 3), amsterdam and lmiu by dwt class. the amsterdam class intervals are given in the source, the lmiu intervals are set at 10,000. other reasonable classifications affected results only marginally. classes with only one observation in amsterdam and lmiu data were rejected. also, the us westcoast observation was rejected from neste data because of the panama canal effect. the modest fit of the lmiu function is due to the meg–far east trade. vessels employed there were “too large” considering the distance! otherwise, the estimates are reasonable to good (table 8). consolidation into one set gives a rising exponential curve (fig. 6). since its fit is slightly inferior to a linear equation, the latter parameters are reported. dummy coefficients for amsterdam and lmiu data confirm the figure’s message. these gratifying results encourage a look at “dirty” cargoes. can the concept of fungibility be extended also to them? there is no profound reason why not, not in the construction of vessels at least. the greater volatility of light over heavy fractions necessitates more sophisticated cargo-handling equipment and greater care by the crew, but these are differences of degree, not of substance. the idea is put to the test with the help of lmiu “dirty” cargoes, mostly of crude oil but also heavy distillates and residues (fig. 7). the vessels carrying them are routinely classified as panamaxes, aframaxes, suezmaxes and vlccs, with limits at cargo size trip length (one-way) range 2,000 – 66,900 mt range 70 – 8,949 nm case 400 379 358 337 316 295 274 253 232 211 190 169 148 127 106 85 64 43 22 1tonne 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 case 400 379 358 337 316 295 274 253 232 211 190 169 148 127 106 85 64 43 22 1 nm 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0 fig. 4. neste oil maritime product export cargo sizes and distances, 2004. source: harki (2009a). cargo size trip length (one-way) range 2,000–66,900 mt range 70–8,949 nm fig. 4. neste oil maritime product export cargo sizes and distances, 2004. source: harki (2009a). 12 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen amsterdam product exports ‘000 tonnes 2000 4000 1000 100 200 500 fig. 5. amsterdam port product exports, 2004. source: port of amsterdam authority (2009). fig. 5. amsterdam port product exports, 2004. source: port of amsterdam authority (2009). table 7. data for functional relationships, clean cargoes 2004. data set mmt trips unit groups size used reject tonnage variable no. no. pct neste oil 5.0 419 ship/port 9 1 2.2 mt/dwt amsterdam 8.0 n.a. s-class/ctry 6 3 10.8 dwt lmiu 74.2 1,100 ship/port 7 2 0.3 dwt/mt total 87.2 n.a. 22 7 1.4 notes: conversion factors based on lmiu data: mt/dwt = 0.800; dwt/mt = 1.250. sources: lmiu movement data (2004); port of amsterdam authority (2004); harki (2009a). 80,000, 120,000 and 180,000 dwt. scatterplots by 1,000 and 10,000 dwt classes (panamax and the others) suggest acceptable functions for panamaxes and vlccs. the few outliers in the upper-lefthand corner are “special cases”, lifts from offshore oil fields to coastal brazil, us gulf and the north sea (panamaxes) or from meg and yanbu to ain sukhna, the beginning of the sumed pipeline (vlccs). aframaxes and suezmaxes, by contrast, must be consolidated before anything like a function can be sensed. obviously, these two size classes are veritable all-round workhorses suited for all situations: short distances, shallow ports and channels, and variable cargoes. the functional fits are weaker than at “clean” shipments (table 8). an obvious reason is that neste and amsterdam shipments both have one geographical origin. the same effect exists also in fennia 189: 1 (2011) 13oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … table 8. vessel size as function of distance, clean and dirty cargoes 2004. data set obs. r-sqr see coefficients interc. (adj) dist amst lmiu clean neste oil 9 0.919 4,649 10.16 4,794 amsterdam 6 0.940 3,145 8.84 –207 lmiu 7 0.666 11,703 18,74 9,527 all clean 22 0.956 8,294 11.04 –7,335 41,202 3,352 dirty (lmiu) panamax 18 0.468 3,862 5.95 56,582 afrasuez 80 0.304 21,372 10.44 98,215 vlcc 15 0.764 30,886 23.12 136,904 all dirty 26 0.839 37,700 32.42 68.824 lmiu dirty (pana)/clean 25 0.767 7,809 10.74 46,402 notes: distance one-way, nautical miles. all functions linear. coefficients significant at about 1% risk. excluded dirty classes: panamax 78, 79 (not in all dirty); vlcc 36, 40, 42. sources: lmiu movement data (2004); port of amsterdam authority (2004); harki (2009a). nm 6000500040003000200010000 dwt 140000 120000 100000 80000 60000 40000 20000 0 -20000 data neste lmiu amst fig. 6. vessel size as function of distance, clean cargoes 2004. legend: large marker neste oil; small marker above lmiu; small marker below amsterdam port. vessel classes, see text. distances one-way. sources: lmiu movement data (2004); port of amsterdam authority (2004); harki (2009a). fig. 6. vessel size as function of distance, clean cargoes 2004. legend: large marker neste oil; small marker above lmiu; small marker below amsterdam port. vessel classes, see text. distances one-way. sources: lmiu movement data (2004); port of amsterdam authority (2004); harki (2009a). “dirty” shipments: meg dominates large crude oil cargoes and the effect is visible in the good fit of the vlcc equation. when all the size classes are consolidated and the vlcc outliers above excluded, the joint function is quite acceptable. not unsurprisingly, the parameters deviate from the “clean” parameters, a rather crucial test of fungibility. therefore, the “clean” lmiu and “dirty” panamax data are joined into one set, scatterplot prepared and parameters re-estimated. the “dirty” half has two-thirds of observations but the “clean” half has a wider range (fig. 8). therefore, it is impossible to decide which one dominates. rather, the “clean” set continues the “dirty” set. this can be interpreted as a kind of proof for the fungibility. conclusion this report took to its task to create a holistic idea about the “clean” oil product shipping market, particularly the thousands of smallish tankers that do not meet the minimum size criterion of a panamax vessel, 60,000 dwt (50,000 mt). to that purpose, it has combined existing global and local databases and created from them a tangible idea about the “clean” market, described its structure and commented on its rationality. because the underlying data are not readily available, the results have been extensively tabulated. handysize product tankers apparently dominate shipments exceeding 3,000 nm, an opinion based on widely distributed spot fixtures. these accumulate on large trades and overshadow the dense net14 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen work of small shipments which cover the tributary seas and their inlets. this disguised volume is probably comparable with the conventionally published one, but the number of movements is so large that they are likely to remain beyond the grasp of expensive commercial surveys. the pattern of “clean” handysize shipments does not radically differ from that of “dirty” shipments in general. major crude-oil producing areas have developed sizable refining industries, high prices stimulate production all over the world, major consuming areas are increasingly reluctant to allocate seaboard locations to oil refineries, and the ownership of production and refining have never been as decentralized as they are now. therefore, long-distance shipments reflect as much differences in crude-oil quality and pricing, and temporary imbalances between product demand and refinery capacity, than a split between resource owners and their customers. there are 12 to 13 major trades worldwide. three of them are actually clusters of within-region movements in ec north america, continent and asia pacific, comprising two-thirds of the total volume. the major trades generate at least one cargo per week, the approximate threshold of cargo density for formal route planning. the other element is the trades’ relative profitability for the ship owner. since there are no data about actual vessel movements, dynamic simulation similar to the one about the “dirty” tanker market is ruled out. plain tce ($/day) estimates are the only possibility, and they give promising indications. relative profits in various operative situations, basically local trade balances, are logical and in line with earlier results. apparently, the principles already derived can be carried over to smaller size segments, the basic idea of fungibility. practical verification leads to the calculation of vessel size–distance functions. the first set of functions covers the “clean” shipments in the neste oil, port of amsterdam and lmiu data. the second set covers the “dirty” shipments in the lmiu data, differentiated by size class. the third set covers all “clean” and panamax “dirty” shipments in the lmiu data. the three sets generate scatterplots where the subsets join neatly with each other. the statistical fits are acceptable and parameters logical, subsets included. perhaps more importantly than anything else, a seemingly impenetrable segment of ocean bulk shipping has been partially opened and shown to follow the same economic principles as the mainstream. notes 1 finland’s export price (fob) of oil products to the usa $394.7/mt and import price (cif) of crude oil worldwide $371.8/mt (un comtrade 2004, sitc 333 and 334). nm 12000 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0 dwt 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000 0 segm vlcc suez afra pana fig. 7. vessel size as function of distance, dirty cargoes 2004. legend: trades in upper-left-hand corner meg/yanbu – ain sukhna. vessel classes 10,000 dwt, distances one-way. sources: lmiu large movement data (2004). fig. 7. vessel size as function of distance, dirty cargoes 2004. legend: trades in upper-left-hand corner meg/yanbu – ain sukhna. vessel classes 10,000 dwt, distances one-way. sources: lmiu large movement data (2004). nm 600050004000300020001000 dwt 130000 120000 110000 100000 90000 80000 70000 60000 segm dirty clean fig. 8. vessel size as function of distance, lmiu clean and dirty panamax cargoes 2004. notes: panamax classes 78 and 79 excluded. distances one-way. source: lmiu large movement data (2004). fig. 8. vessel size as function of distance, lmiu clean and dirty panamax cargoes 2004. notes: panamax classes 78 and 79 excluded. distances one-way. source: lmiu large movement data (2004). fennia 189: 1 (2011) 15oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … 2 a rule-of-thumb indicator for technological excellence is the total of catalytic treatment charges out of the total crude oil intake. the percentage can be a bit vague because some streams are consecutive while others are parallel. it was 188% at the conoco immingham refinery, 136% at sköldvik, 130% at shell gothenburg and 116% at preem brofjorden. the corresponding us figures were east coast 142%, gulf coast 146% and california 155%. south korea’s most active refineries in onsan and ulsan had 81% and 51%, respectively (stell 2003; see also laulajainen & stafford 1995, figure 5.32). acknowledgements acknowledgement is due to wally mandryk (lloyd’s marine intelligence unit), brendan martin (gibson shipbrokers), susan oatway (drewry shipping consultants), robert porter (worldscale association, london) and abbass vashoeey (port of amsterdam authority) for complimentary data and advice, as well as howard stafford (university of cincinnati) for help in mining published data sources. special thanks are due to jan van weesep, editor-in-chief of tesg, utrecht, whose analytical stringency superseded the author’s. references atlas zheleznyh i avtomobiljnyh dorog 2003. ast astrelj, moscow. baltic clean tanker index (bcti) 2004. baltic exchange, london. blas j 2009. narrow oil spreads put pressure in modern refineries. financial times, 24, 23 june. byev d, novikova a, zelenina j, zinkina i & gubanova o 2006. logistika neftenalivnyh perevozok. seanews, saint petersburg. cellineri le 1976. seaport dynamics, a regional perspective. lexington books, lexington. chapman k 1991. the international petrochemical industry. blackwell, oxford. charlier j 1996. the benelux seaport system. tidschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 87: 4, 310–321. drewry fixture data 2004. drewry shipping consultants, london. fagerholt k 2004. a computer-based decision support system for vessel fleet scheduling – experience and future research. decision support systems 37: 1, 35–47. fortum ltd 2004. annual report. <www.fortum. com/webannualreport2004> 12.4.2010. george n 2003. trucks trundle in from russia while oil pipeline stays closed. financial times, 3, 25 november. glen d & martin b 2002. the tanker market: current structure and economic analysis. in grammenos cth (ed). the handbook of maritime economics and business, 215–279. lpp, london. harki m 2009a. exports of oil products 2004. neste oil, helsinki. harki m 2009b. phone interview. neste oil, helsinki. 4 march. isserlis l 1938. tramp shipping cargoes and freights. journal of the royal statistical society 101: 1, 53–146. laulajainen r 2006. the geographical foundations of dry bulk shipping. gothenburg school of business, economics and law, gothenburg. laulajainen r 2007. the geographical foundations of tanker (dirty) shipping. maritime policy and management 34: 6, 553–576. laulajainen r 2008. operative strategy in tanker (dirty) shipping. maritime policy and management 35: 3, 315–341. laulajainen r 2010. geography sets the tone to tramp routing. international journal of shipping and transport logistics 2: 4, 364–382. laulajainen r 2011. port-turntable, the foreland concept repackaged. manuscript. laulajainen r & stafford ha 1995. corporate geography. kluwer, dordrecht. lmiu handy movement data (semi-administered) 2004. lloyd’s marine intelligence unit, london. lmiu large movement data (administered) 2004. lloyd’s marine intelligence unit, london. lmiu vessel data 2004. lloyd’s marine intelligence unit, london. lorimer a 2003. russia’s new oil gateways. lloyd’s shipping economist, 15–18, december. maižeikiu nafta 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ma> 12.4.2010. matheson mh 1955. the hinterlands of saint john. geographical bulletin 5–6, 65–102. geographical branch, department of mines and technical surveys, ottawa. musso e & marchese u 2002. economics of shortsea shipping. in grammenos cth (ed). the handbook of maritime economics and business, 280–304. lpp, london. nossum b 1996. the evolution of dry bulk shipping 1945–1990. fearnley & egers, oslo. port of amsterdam authority 2004. trade statistics by country, unpublished. preem ab 2004. annual report. <www.preem.se/upload/pdf> 12.4.2010. rodgers a 1958. the port of genova: external and internal relations. annals of the association of american geographers 48: 4, 319–351. stell j (ed) 2003. worldwide refining survey. oil & gas journal, 1–41, 22 december. stopford m 1997. maritime economics. routledge, london. surgutneftegaz 2009. general information. <www. surgutneftegaz.ru/en/oil/about/> 12.4.2010. 16 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen tykkyläinen m 2003. north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics. fennia 181: 2, 145–177. un comtrade 2004. united nations commodity statistics database, sitc 333 and 334, new york. <http://comtrade.un.org.ezproxy.ub.gu.se> 12.4.2010. verlaque ch 1975. géographie des transports maritimes. doin, paris. wijnolst n, peters c & liebman p (eds) 1993. european shortsea shipping. llp, london. woodhouse z (ed) 2004. tanker book. e.a. gibson shipbrokers, london. worldscale 2004. new worldwide tanker nominal freight scale. worldscale association (london)ltd & worldscale association (nyc) inc. fennia 189: 1 (2011) 17oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … a large volume of mineral oil product (“clean”) shipments are made by handysize vessels of 15,000–59,999 dwt. when the question is sharpened to a percentage, only guesstimates can be given. lloyd’s marine intelligence unit gives a fairly reliable estimate of the “large” vessel classes, 60,000 dwt and over. in addition, it has compiled a semi-administered file of the handysize class (lmiu handy movement data 2004). about the classes below 15,000 dwt nothing is available worldwide, and it is unlikely that they will be covered by a global census in the near future. yet, in the neste oil database these classes make twothirds of export legs and one-third of tonnage (table 6). the best that can be done currently is to make use of the handysize data. its semi-administered state means many things. a line in the data file aggregates 1 to 95 individual “transits” (“legs”/“trips” in this author’s terminology). analysis of individual legs is thereby ruled out. the emphasis is on ocean traffic and legs from/to/within great lakes are also excluded here. remain 49,200 legs. liquid cargoes other than mineral oil products are included, such as liquid ammonia and vegetable oils. ready examples are 100 legs from ambes, garonne estuary, and 157 legs from pasir gudang, johore strait. such loading ports should be excluded here, case by case, but the workload becomes prohibitive. one goes the other way. since mineral oil products originate from corresponding refineries, the seaboard (port) refineries identify important origins with a total of 26,600 legs. one half of them are guesstimated to be cargo legs. following the same reasoning, 1,400 relevant cargo legs originate from the ports of the former soviet union. these ports seldom have refineries that are found far inland at major oil fields and consumption centers. distances of 1,000–2,000 km by pipeline or rail are quite usual. return legs from foreign refinery destinations to these export ports are 1,300, roughly in balance with calculatory cargo legs. the small size of some port refineries, below 50 bbl/d, may raise doubts about their true export capacity. they are given the benefit of the doubt and retained, a total of 2,000 cargo legs. for example, amsterdam has only a 10 bb/d refinery but is connected by pipeline with rotterdam’s refineries and handles a large share of its exports (charlier 1996: 310–311). because the cargo status of individual leg strings is not known, multiporting cannot be identified. multiporting raises the number of port visits 16%–17% in the larger “clean” size classes and the “dirty” tanker segment and should also apply here. the corresponding discount reduces the number of calculatory mineral oil product legs to 12,300. a factor of unknown magnitude are cargoes swapped between refinery ports, be it for quality difference or company affiliation. they, naturally, are very real ones but complicate the cargo/ballast split. they are identified best by asking cargo owners directly during data collection. observations based on vessel draught are unreliable because pipelines connect refineries and tank farms into vast networks. all legs 49,166 from seaboard refinery ports 26,568 cargo from seaboard refineries, 50% 13,284 from former soviet ports 2,796 cargo from former soviet ports, 50% 1,398 all cargo 14,682 discount for multiporting, 17% –2,496 oil product legs, 244 per week 12,186 fixtures 3,383 ratio 3.60 note: figures rounded. the cargo legs are tabulated within the 11-region mesh and the cell elements divided by 50 to arrive at average full week cargo flows between the regions. the ratio legs/fixtures is compared with clean and dirty vessel classes of 60,000 dwt and above (table 1). compatibility is acceptable. this is how things look at the global level. but it is a good policy to also have a look at the national level when there is an opportunity to do so. finland is a good example, due to the availability of neste oil’s export statistics and the author’s familiarity with local conditions. the lmiu handy movement data (2004) transits are disaggregated as follows. “refinery” means a refinery location rather than a company or plant. appendix 1. lmiu handysize movement file, 2004. 18 fennia 189: 1 (2011)risto laulajainen from domestic refinery other total all oil all oil oil to foreign refinery 40 40 5 0 40 foreign other 43 43 42 0 43 domestic refinery 25 13 22 0 13 domestic other 19 10 20 10 20 total 127 106 89 10 116 less 50%, remains 63.5 44.5 less 17%, remains 53 37 90 difference 26 notes: estimates underlined in the body of table subject to discussion. direct total estimates in bold. strictly calculatory total estimate in normal text. shipments from foreign refineries handled in the context of appropriate countries. “refinery” is the source of most oil product cargoes. the two first elements 40 + 43 correspond formally to neste oil’s export cargoes in the handysize class (table 6). but neste’s own figure is 138. the difference originates from bremen (44) and kalundborg (11) where the vessels were very close to the 15,000 dwt limit used by lmiu. since the conversion factor from mt to dwt is an approximation, the result falls easily within the measurement error. therefore, both counts are used in parallel as seems fit (table 6). transits between the refineries, 25 legs, are inventory balancing or swaps of intermediates and the share of cargo legs can vary within 50%–100%. the smallest possibility is adopted here. the remaining 19 legs are deliveries to coastal depots, own or customers’. the corresponding 22 ballast legs are in the “other” column on the way to “domestic refinery.” the 20 “domestic other” originate from companies other than neste and have some ballasting matches between port pairs. they need not be oil cargoes at all, but if they are, trader activity is again a possibility. the grand total of 116 cargo legs is thus 26 legs larger than the calculatory total estimate of 90. the calculatory route can be used in a global discussion. a national discussion is preferably based on direct observation. fennia 189: 1 (2011) 19oil product tanker geography with emphasis on the handysize … appendix 2. clean tanker cargo legs – 11-region mesh, 2004. handysize 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 tot 1 1,736 24 201 8 4 3 52 2 44 24 2,099 2 43 378 16 2 14 5 10 1 3 20 493 3 274 16 4,766 66 6 32 20 2 12 1 5,196 4 4 6 14 50 2 5 81 5 1 5 4 9 101 46 19 185 6 19 1 90 6 40 879 118 1 1 1,155 7 6 5 40 9 159 1,843 102 45 5 10 2,224 8 1 2 2 25 130 3 163 9 40 1 2 44 380 12 5 485 10 19 5 2 21 41 88 11 7 1 5 4 16 tot 2,143 443 5,133 141 177 1,132 2,141 240 513 103 22 12,186 panamax 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 tot 1 10 1 3 1 15 2 1 1 3 57 8 34 1 3 2 2 107 4 1 1 5 0 6 7 48 1 5 122 143 4 2 332 7 6 28 2 4 40 8 2 2 9 0 10 0 11 0 tot 76 9 85 1 8 131 173 6 9 0 0 498 aframax 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 tot 1 3 1 1 5 2 0 3 48 2 59 1 2 6 5 123 4 0 5 0 6 13 2 58 2 1 25 334 435 7 1 3 17 21 8 2 2 9 0 10 0 11 0 tot 64 5 117 3 2 30 359 0 1 5 0 586 suezmax 3 to 3 1 6 to 7 14 7 to 7 1 note: roundings possible. sources: lmiu handy movement data (2004); lmiu large movement data (2004). communicating back: reflections on ibzm as participatory dissemination – commentary on valli urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa109264 doi: 10.11143/fennia.109264 reflections communicating back: reflections on ibzm as participatory dissemination – commentary on valli sofia cele cele, s. (2021) communicating back: reflections on ibzm as participatory dissemination – commentary on valli. fennia 199(1) 136–138. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109264 this paper reflects on interviews-based-zine-making as participatory dissemination as explored by valli in this issue of fennia. it discusses three main aspects of the approach. the first aspect relates to ibzm as being dissemination of result or an additional research method. the second focuses on the entanglements between representation and the potential tensions and conflicts that may arise when the workshop participants read interview transcripts from other members of the community. the third aspect focuses on interpretation and how to deal with the thin line between representation of research participants’ understandings of interview transcripts and the researcher’s interpretation and analysis of these. keywords: participatory dissemination, workshop, qualitative methods, zine-making, participatory methods sofia cele (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9291-5168), department of social and economic geography, uppsala university, box 513, 751 20 uppsala, sweden. e-mail: sofia.cele@kultgeog.uu.se introduction doing participatory research is a blessing and a curse. a blessing because it provides such valuable material and closeness to your research participants. but closeness is also a difficulty, if perhaps not a curse. at some point you normally start to distance yourself from your research subjects and return to academia. often with an empty feeling of not communicating back as much as you would like to. the difficulties in dealing with closeness and distance in participatory qualitative methods, and how to disseminate your results and give back to community have been widely discussed. however, few people actually address this in practice. chiara valli has studied gentrification processes in bushwick, new york, and in particular the role of cultural workers in gentrification processes and the emotional consequences for long-term residents (valli 2015, 2017). it is not surprising that valli after having worked with in-depth participatory methods as well as with visual and art-based methods now continues to explore participatory dissemination methods in order to give back to the community and find ways to disseminate research results. participatory dissemination engages research participants in the interpretation of preliminary research findings. the method valli explores is a creative approach that she calls interviews-basedzine-making (ibzm). briefly described this is done through a zine making workshop. valli has chosen 16 of her 40 in-depth interviews with people in the bushwick community and written short summaries of these using the research subjects’ own words. the workshop participants use the interview © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 137fennia 199(1) (2021) sofia cele transcripts as the base for discussion and later cut and paste these into a (or several) zine(s). the finished zine is then distributed in the community. valli’s approach to give back to the community she has been doing research in is impressive and genuine. this does not mean that the method is perfect, nor is it streamlined or un-problematic. but then, what is in the messy reality of the world-out-there? valli has chosen to follow the suggestion of routledge (1996, 403) to “live theory as a series of practices – experimental, experiential, imaginative” and wishes to achieve what she calls participatory dissemination. she wants to share the research results with people in the community but also do this as a participatory practice. thus, dissemination of results as communication and dialogue rather than a researcher telling participants what their lives are about. valli’s contribution is exploratory. she does not claim to know all the answers or present a perfect approach to how participatory dissemination should be performed. refreshingly, a reflective approach enables valli to comment on her own mistakes and suggest how her practice can be improved. while reading valli’s (2021) text there are a number of aspects that particularly intrigue me, and that may need further discussion in the future. dissemination of results or method? the first aspect concerns the relationship between ibzm as being dissemination of results and it being a method. valli (2021) uses the term participatory dissemination, but what is actually described is to a large extent the gathering of even more research material. the participants react to interview transcripts, they discuss amongst each other and they also interact with valli herself in this process. the finished zine is of course also useful material in a research process. the result of the discussion and the zine is of course very dependent on the interview transcripts that valli has chosen to include in the workshops. the framing of the ibzm as dissemination of results is not uncomplicated. it could be viewed as unsuitable (almost unethical?) to not recognize the zine-making workshops as a method and hence not take the result into account. valli is not unaware of the fine line between method and dissemination of results and reflects to some extent about this in the paper. however, i see it as crucial to acknowledge the complex ethical issues that might arise during the workshop sessions. this calls for emphasizing the process of ibzm as a research method that communicates back to the community. ‘dissemination of (preliminary) results’ has an unproblematic ring to it that fails to include the complexity of the method that valli describes. valli’s own approach towards the participants seems reflective, open and empathic. she is aware of the complex and ethical issues that might arise during these processes. but it is important to bring forward this dual nature of the approach in order to be able to problematize the complexity of the method and process. representation and conflict the second aspect relates more directly to how the research participants react to the interview transcripts and how this, in turn, might affect the community. as recognized by valli (2021), the selection of interview transcripts is just as important as the initial selection of the interviewees. there are endless possibilities to steer the workshop discussion, to plant conflict in the community and just generally provide biased material if this is not problematized enough. the method involves members of the community who read, react to, and make a zine out of interview transcripts. depending on the size and closeness of the community there is definitely a risk that participants recognize the interviewees even if attempts have been made to hide their identity. there could also be difficulties with participants agreeing with their transcripts being used and read by other members of the community even if they have been anonymized. however, these things can be solved with reflective awareness and care. a serious consequence that needs to be properly considered though, is that when participants read what other people of the community have said, this can increase conflict and anger just as easily as it could increase mutual understanding. how the process turns out is of course dependent on how the process is led, the degree of existing conflict in the community and the individual participants in the 138 reflections fennia 199(1) (2021) workshops and interviews. in valli’s case she describes how some of the workshop participants react negatively towards what is expressed in the interviews, but that there was no conflict between the workshop participants. if the selection of interviews is insensitive this can cause anger and conflict among the participants or in the community. however, it would also be unsuitable to filter the contributions in a way so that it does not cause conflict. thus, there is an ethical minefield and numerous difficult decisions to make in connection to this process. but again, this is a not an argument against the method. it is a call for a continuous exploration and reflection surrounding the many twists and turns that are connected to ibzm. layers of interpretation a third aspect that is interesting to explore further relates to the potential difficulty that can arise when the participants do not agree with, or recognize, what is expressed in the interviews. there can also be interpretations made by the workshop participants that are completely different from the interpretations made by the researcher. valli (2021, 37) emphasizes that if the researcher and the participants disagree ”the zine-makers have the ultimate right to interpret and represent the given material as they wish”. the zine is not an outlet for valli’s (2021, 37) own interpretations but a ”parallel, complementary outlet to a beyond-academic audience”. this is an important distinction and statement. however, there are still some issues to untangle here. if ibzm is to be called dissemination of (preliminary) results is it enough to provide participants with interview transcripts disconnected from interpretation? but again, if you provide your interpretation and it is different from that of the workshop participants where do you draw the line between dissemination of your results and their participation in interpreting and reflecting on the material? where is the line between representation of their views and your analysis? and if the researcher and the workshop participants disagree who has the right to interpretation? how should you deal with this in the research process? valli (2021) clearly states that her analysis is expressed elsewhere – in academic papers and in her dissertation. this is a straightforward and sensible approach, but it could also be seen as expressing power if the analysis goes against what is outspokenly expressed in the workshops. there is no simple answer and this conflict is not unique to this method/process. however, the more participatory you get the more obvious it also becomes that the interpretations we make of people and communities are not representations of their views, but interpretations that they might not necessarily always agree with. what part of our results should we disseminate back to participants? and what should we do if our results are not well received? ibzm might to some extent hold the answer to some of these if not all questions. it is a creative method that allows for multiple voices to be expressed simultaneously, and these voices can be contradictory, messy and conflicted just as they can be in tune with each other. valli’s (2021) work with developing this research practice (and may i call it research method?) is genuinely important and her paper is an inspiring account of her process of giving back to the community she has researched. references routledge, p. (1996) the third space as critical engagement. antipode 28(4) 399–419. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1996.tb00533.x valli, c. (2015) a sense of displacement: long-time residents' feelings of displacement in gentrifying bushwick, new york. international journal of urban and regional research 39(6) 1191–1208. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12340 valli, c. (2017) pushing borders: cultural workers in the restructuring of post-industrial cities. geographica 14. doctoral thesis. department of social and economic geography, uppsala. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1084525/fulltext01.pdf valli, c. (2021) participatory dissemination: bridging in-depth interviews, participation, and creative visual methods through interview-based zine-making (ibzm). fennia 199(1) 25–45. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99197 24961_01_foreword.pdf foreword finland futures research centre and finland futures academy organised an international conference in june 2006 under the title “changing foresight practices in regional development – global pressures and regional possibilities” in collaboration with economic geography, pan-european institute and pori unit of the turku school of economics. this fennia special issue “foresight and innovation in regional development” publishes a selection of papers presented in the conference. the conference brought together people from the public sector and various research organisations and business corporations. the objective was to share and discuss new ideas concerning regional development and globalisation, and generate multidisciplinary and productive discussions from different scientific and institutional backgrounds. there were some 180 participants from 24 countries giving 43 presentations in twelve workshops and seven poster presentations. the conference was partitioned into seven thematic sessions as follows: • innovation systems in the creative economy • strategies for the globalising economy • practical applications (case studies) • theories of foresight and regional development • foresight methods in regional development • the future of regional and global governance • the changing roles and impacts of companies, universities and public actors in regional development some 15 to 20 years ago, in the wake of the rise of information and knowledge society, one of the mantras of the discourse was that this evolution would dramatically reduce the significance of space and place. an attitude emerged that geography had turned archaic, that distance had become irrelevant and place was insignificant in the contemporary society. these prophecies have, however, proved premature. in the eu policy, for example, regions have their special agendas e.g., dg regions, committee of regions in eu parliament, special funding programs for regions in framework programs and structural funds, etc. in finland and europe as a whole, the increasing concentration of people and economic activities in a relatively small number of metropolitan areas has raised concern among ordinary people as well as in politicians. in academic communities, multidisciplinary research interest towards areas, regions and territories is lively and growing. questions and problems concerning regions cannot be solved by single organisation or by regional governmental organisations. there is a quest for collaboration and co-operation of regional stakeholders within networks of regional development and innovation. universities and other educational institutions play an important role in this work together with private companies, governmental organisations and the civil society. furthermore, multi-disciplinary approach is essential in carrying out this challenging task. the papers in this special issue demonstrate the large variety of approaches connected to regional development and foresight, as well as the complexity and interconnectivity of the world we live in. examples from russia, ireland, latin america and finland demonstrate how people far apart are faced with similar questions and problems. the answers and solutions naturally vary from region to region, but in the globalised world, regions are surprisingly similar. this notion makes us ask if we indeed are imprisoned in a common iron cage of global economy. we wish to thank the editorial board of fennia for this opportunity to publish selected conference papers in this classical and distinguished journal, and hope that this special issue of fennia serves as a mind opening reading experience for those interested in regional development. our warmest thanks go also to the authors a well as to the expert reviewers of the manuscripts. in turku, 19 january 2007 juha kaskinen and riikka saarimaa, guest editors 28571_3_landauer.pdf adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen landauer, mia, tuija sievänen & marjo neuvonen (2009). adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change. fennia 187: 2, pp. 99–113. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. cross-country skiing has a long history in finland, and it is a part of the national identity of finns. this study on cross-country skiers’ adaptation to changing climate describes groups of cross-country skiers with reference to their motives for skiing, and their perceptions and preferences on climate change adaptation tools. the data was collected by means of a web questionnaire contacting skiers in ski areas, mainly in southern finland, and on the websites of ski associations. on the basis of a cluster analysis, we found three groups of skier types, each of which has different perceptions of means for adapting their skiing behaviour to the decreasing skiing opportunities close to home. one group of skiers, the ‘social type’ group, placed emphasis on skiing traditions and social reasons. this group is the most liable to give up skiing if the skiing conditions close to home are poor. the ‘outdoor type’ group, whose skiing motives were related to skiing environment qualities (nature, landscape, winter) and the ‘technical type’ group motivated by fitness objectives, were interested in behavioural adaptation, for example, travelling further away and using artificial snow tracks. with a better understanding of skiers’ behaviour, it is possible to identify adaptation strategies that can help providers of skiing services, such as municipal agencies and the ski tourism industry, as well as skiers themselves, to prepare for climate change. mia landauer, department of landscape, spatial and infrastructure sciences – institute of landscape development, recreation and conservation planning, university of natural resources and applied life sciences (boku), peter-jordan-strasse 82, a-1190 vienna, austria. e-mail: mia.landauer@boku.ac.at. tuija sievänen & marjo neuvonen, finnish forest research institute, pl 18, fi-01301 vantaa, finland. e-mails: tuija.sievanen@metla.fi, marjo.neuvonen@ metla.fi. ms received 02.12.2008. introduction cross-country skiing has a strong tradition in finland, and skiing is often mentioned as part of the finnish national identity. outdoor recreation in general plays a very important part in the daily life of finns. almost all finnish people participate in some form of recreation during the year, and two out of three engage in outdoor recreation every week (pouta & sievänen 2001). cross-country skiing is one of the favourite outdoor recreation activities among finns: 40% of the population go skiing 19 times during the winter season on average (pouta & sievänen 2001). cross-country skiing is an everyday sport and leisure activity, but for many it is also a popular way to spend active holidays. skiing is the main purpose of about 10% of tourist trips made to participate in outdoor and nature activities (pouta & sievänen 2001). finnish people learn to ski by the age of five on average (sievänen 1995), and 94% of the finnish adult population have cross-country skiing skills (pouta & sievänen 2001). exercise, relaxation, contact with nature, being with family or friends and spending leisure time are important motives for skiing (sievänen 1995). in addition, skiing is considered an excellent way of taking exercise in order to enhance one’s physical and mental health in all age groups (wöllzenmüller & wenger 2005). the nordic concept of “everyman’s right”, the traditional right of free access, allows skiing in forests, fields and on ice-covered lakes. however, 100 fennia 187: 2 (2009)mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen skiing most often takes place on prepared ski tracks in recreation areas close to the home (even in larger cities) provided by the authorities responsible for recreation administration in municipalities. for an average finn, a suitable ski area with prepared ski tracks is at a distance of approximately 1.5 kilometres from the place of residence (pouta & sievänen 2001). global warming and climate change are considered to be the most serious environmental problem affecting snow-based recreation and tourism (elsasser & bürki 2004; willbanks et al. 2007; scott et al. 2009), and cross-country skiing is considered to be one of the outdoor activities that is most sensitive to changing climate conditions (scott et al. 2002; neuvonen et al. 2005). winters with permanent snow cover last 4–5 months (approximately 75 to 100 days) in southern finland and in northern finland 7 months (200 days) on average (finnish meteorological institute 2008). climate model projections show that winter temperatures are rising in northern europe (jylhä et al. 2004; alcamo et al. 2007), and reveal a tendency towards warmer winters and reduced snow cover, particularly in southern finland (carter & kankaanpää 2003). it is predicted that snow depth will decrease by 78% in southern finland and by 48% in northern finland in the next 100 years (ruosteenoja et al. 2005). the decreasing number of days with snow cover, the lower snow depth and the rising air temperatures of winter days are expected to have direct influences on cross-country skiing, especially in southern finland, where the majority of the finnish population live (neuvonen et al. 2005). sievänen et al. (2005: 3) point out that outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism are dependent on climate ‘as a precondition for the activities’ and on the weather ‘for the action itself’. this means that changing climate will have an impact on the recreational environment, and will change recreation and travel behaviour (scott et al. 2009). outdoor recreation scenarios under changing climate show that in conditions of warmer winters, participation in cross-country skiing will decrease (sievänen et al. 2005). there are differences among skiers in their sensibility to climate change impacts, depending on their demographic and socioeconomic status (pouta et al. 2009). a longer-term consequence may be that fewer young people will learn basic skiing skills compared with previous generations due to the lack of skiing opportunities close to home (neuvonen et al. 2005). there is a growing interest in studying adaptation methods and developing adaptation policies for winter tourism and recreation in conditions of warming climate, but most studies concerning skiing focus on alpine (downhill) skiing (e.g. wall & badke 1994; abegg 1996; elsasser & bürki 2004; sievänen et al. 2005; scott & mcboyle 2007; unbehaun et al. 2008). neuvonen et al. (2005) suggest that short-term adaptation strategies for crosscountry skiers when skiing conditions close to home are poor could include travelling to more distant locations, using artificial snow tracks, choosing snow-independent activities or investing in new types of recreation equipment using hightech solutions. in the longer term, changes in winter recreation activity preferences and choices are to be expected. a further aspect of the situation is that deterioration of skiing infrastructure may become a serious problem (perry 2004). many countries have national strategies for climate change adaptation, which include the recreation and tourism sector (e.g. breiling & chamranza 1999; marttila et al. 2005; scott & mcboyle 2007). moreover, climate change and winter tourism have also become an issue of concern to international policy makers and institutions such as the world tourism organisation (world tourism organization 2003; scott et al. 2009). there is an increasing need to monitor changes in recreational behaviour, and some trends and predictions have been presented (cordell et al. 1999; neuvonen et al. 2005; sievänen et al. 2005; scott et al. 2008; unbehaun et al. 2008). it is necessary to obtain more information about types of skiers, their preferences, motives and skiing patterns under conditions of climate change, in order to gain a better understanding of potential adaptation strategies and skiing behaviour. outdoor recreation investments often have a long time perspective, since the most important decisions concern land use and also the use of other natural resources. better scenarios and understanding of skiers’ reactions and changing behaviour will help ski service providers and political decision makers to choose the best adaptation strategies, and to plan and make decisions on future skiing infrastructure investments. for crosscountry skiing tourism, short-term predictions are also useful in order to respond at an early phase to the challenges posed by climate change. information is needed to find ways of adapting management practices in ski areas in order to mitigate the consequences of changing conditions. when confennia 187: 2 (2009) 101adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change sidering climate change, the mitigating of effects, such as reduction of travel-related emissions, should also be a concern. from the stand point of mitigation, travelling long distances in order to ski is controversial as an adaptation method, among other things due to the need to reduce our carbon footprint (dubois & ceron 2005). in northern finland, winter tourism already plays an important role in the tourism sector and in the region’s economic activity in general, but most tourism entrepreneurs have very little knowledge and hardly any adaptation strategies for dealing with climate change (marttila et al. 2005; saarinen & tervo 2006), even though enterprises have experience of how variations in weather, and particularly weather extremes during the skiing season, impact their business (tervo 2008). the aim of this study is to increase our understanding of how cross-country skiers are likely to adapt their skiing behaviour to changing climate conditions. the objective is to study cross-country skiers’ preferences and perceptions of the skiing environment, and in particular their interest and willingness to use different types of adaptation methods when skiing conditions are poor. first, we formed skier groups according to their motives for participation in skiing and describe typical skiing patterns. second, we analysed skiing environment preferences and perceptions of adaptation methods in these skier groups. motivation-based classification (see légaré & haider 2008) enables us to gain a deeper insight into the preference heterogeneity among cross-country skiers. factors affecting the behavioural adaptation of skiers under changing climate conditions by understanding past behaviour, we gain insights that help us to predict future behaviour. factors that explain recreational behaviour, particularly participation in a certain leisure activity, include activity-specific variables (i.e. skill level, past experience, access to equipment, access to recreation services and type of natural resources) in particular, and socio-economic factors such as gender, age, income and education in general (e.g. manning 1999; cottrell 2002). further, attitudes, motivations, satisfaction, perceptions or preferences also contribute to the prediction of behaviour (e.g. iso-ahola 1986; lea 1992; pouta 2003). de freitas (2001, 2003) argue that there is little knowledge about the effects of climate on human behaviour, but behaviour can be used as a measure of human sensitivity and satisfaction, and behaviour is a reliable indicator of the significance of weather conditions. weather conditions and the mental image of an area are salient variables in determining recreationists’ satisfaction: human response to climate is interconnected with perceptions (de freitas 2001). weather preferences for a suitable ski area/skiing conditions consist of physical (e.g. rain or snow days, amount of snow) and aesthetic aspects (e.g. visibility, sunshine or cloud), which can be used in determining recreationists’ behavioural responses and their sensitivity to and satisfaction with weather/climate conditions (de freitas 2001). a study of autonomous adaptation in terms of future participation scenarios indicated that a decrease in mean snow depth and number of days with snow cover have direct influences on cross-country skiing opportunities, and that this development leads to decreased participation frequencies (neuvonen et al. 2005). the place of residence and its environmental qualities are factors that configure peoples’ preferences relating to their recreational environment, whereas income level or available leisure time may relate to constraints affecting individual’s choices. none of the background factors alone, but always a set of factors, help to explain participation or non-participation in recreation activities (sievänen et al. 2003). in the study by pouta et al. (2009), sensitivity to climate change was found to differ among different population groups: an urban living environment, female gender and low social status were associated with a higher sensitivity to climate change. recreationists and tourists have two main types of method for adapting to climate change: behavioural and technical (de freitas 2003; scott et al. 2009). in principle, recreationists have good opportunities to choose the activity, and the place and the time for their chosen leisure-time activity (i.d.), but in practice, the choices in the close-tohome environment are limited during the free time available in everyday life. behavioural adaptation can be interpreted as a process where a person changes his or her previous behaviour pattern on account of changing environmental conditions or social setting. when studying behavioural adaptation as a future option, adaptation can be seen as a hypothetical intended way of behaving in the future. when studying the adaptation of cross-coun102 fennia 187: 2 (2009)mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen try skiers, it is essential to understand and know about the skier’s past skiing behaviour. it is important to understand how important cross-country skiing is as a leisure activity for different people, and whether they have acceptable substitutes for skiing. motivation for skiing is one of the relevant factors. personal resources and commitment to cross-country skiing in particular is an issue. this refers, for example, to skiing skills as part of the person’s investment (‘capital’) in leisure, or as a cultural relationship, for example, where skiing is identified as part of the local and national culture. economic resources and the time available for outdoor recreation may act as a constraint on participation, which either upholds or hinders participation. in our study, we first classified skiers according to their skiing motivation and described these groups according to their socio-economic characteristics and skiing behaviour. in adaptation research, it is important to look at potential differences in people’s behaviour that may explain their reactions to changing conditions, and to explore whether some of the factors are related to management practices that can be changed in order to assist the adaptation process of individual skiers. basically, people are used to adjusting their behaviour to their local climatic conditions, having ‘a coping range’ (smit & pilifosova 2003). there are a few studies on climate change and behavioural adaptation that focus on different aspects of behavioural explanations. many focus on issues of spatial, temporal and activity substitution, and others are related to the concept of adaptive capacity (scott et al. 2009). adaptive capacity includes three different components: awareness (identification of weather extremes and changed climate); ability (having skiing skills, having the equipment, the distance to close-to-home skiing destinations, gender, age, income, willingness to travel in order to ski, sensitivity to weather conditions); and action (giving up skiing, willingness to travel for better skiing conditions) (e.g. metzger et al. 2005). grothmann and patt (2005) introduced the idea of taking socio-cognitive variables into consideration in models of adaptation and adaptive capacity, and blennov and persson (2009) stress the role of beliefs in the process of realised adaptive capacity. adaptation to changed environmental conditions could also be described as a decision making process or a series of decisions. driver and brown (1975) presented a social-psychological model that explains the decision making process and factors that affect a person’s decision at each stage of the decision making process. environmental factors are influential at several stages of the process: messages from the environment arouse interest in participation and are used to evaluate the different options before making a choice. if the decision favours participation, experiences of actual participation subsequently either strengthen or weaken the behavioural tendency. if the evaluation of the experience is positive, the expected benefits have been realised. these benefits gained are then reassessed, and the result of the evaluation has an influence on the next decisions made on participation. when considering future adaptation, a hypothetical decision making process must be imaged on the basis of previous experiences (e.g. weather conditions and skiing) and expectations of the resources that will be available in the future. the latter factor is often based on the current situation concerning time and money. indeed, interest and willingness to expend more in terms of time and money to obtain the same benefits, e.g. positive skiing experiences, can be studied if the informant is offered information about options that will be available in the future. a series of ‘negative’ decisions on participation may also teach a lesson: when poor skiing conditions occur often during the skiing season, a person may after some time prefer to give up the activity, or look for other adaptation tools, such as other ski areas/destinations or different types of equipment. in the literature on recreation (i.e. studies on recreation trends in general, such as cordell et al. 1999) there are only a few studies that include cross-country skiing as an activity, and there are even fewer focusing on the behavioural adaptation of cross-country skiers to climate change (e.g. neuvonen et al. 2005). there are several ways for people to cope or adjust their recreational behaviour in changing climatic conditions, but very little is known about the mechanisms and influential factors (e.g. scott et al. 2009). a downhill skiing study by unbehaun et al. (2008) found out that snow-independent substitutes are accepted as a short-term compensation but not for the whole winter holiday, and it is acceptable to travel longer distances and pay more for skiing if the destination can offer suitable skiing conditions. landauer and pröbstl (2008) investigated cross-country skiers’ preferences, and indicated that cross-country skiers in austria consider that landscape and the winter experience are a fundamental part of the skiing experience. technical adaptation strategies, fennia 187: 2 (2009) 103adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change such as artificial snow or ski tunnels, are less preferred. the skier’s motivation is here assumed to be linked with his/her preferences as regards skiing environment and skiing services, and with behavioural changes. in our study, we first classified skiers according to their skiing motivation and described these groups according to their socio-economic characteristics and skiing behaviour. classification of skiers according to their motivation offers a ground for discussing preferences regarding the skiing environment and skiing services and interest in choosing different types of adaptation method if skiing conditions change as a result of climate change. data and methods data the data was collected with a web questionnaire from skiers, who were contacted personally in ski areas in the helsinki region in southern finland in february–march 2007. it was planned to decentralise the on-site delivery locations and dates of the data collection, but due to the extremely short winter season of 2006–2007 the possibilities for decentralisation were limited. skiers from southern finland were chosen because they may have had more experience of warm winters than skiers in other regions. in addition, skiers from recreational and skiing organisations such as suomen latu, suomen hiihtoliitto, nesteen vaeltajat, oulun hiihtoseura/tervahiihto were invited to participate by offering a link to the web questionnaire on the organisations’ website, or by delivering contact postcards containing information on how to access the web questionnaire. attempts were thus made to contact a large number of skiers in ski areas as well as active skiers from skiing organisations. the web survey is an inexpensive way of achieving a large number of responses, and it is convenient for respondents to fill it out at home or otherwise in another comfort indoors rather than out of doors in winter. also, it is possible to create a versatile and visually pleasing questionnaire that respondents can easily access. about 1500 contact postcards (in finnish language) were distributed on-site in ski areas. the card consisted of information about the web address for the survey, the project itself, contact information and information on a travel prize, which it was assumed would serve as an incentive to respond to the questionnaire. a total of 1192 skiers visited the website, and 744 responses were completed well enough to be used for analysis. it is not relevant to determine the accurate percentage of the response rate in the case of an online survey that was open to all interested skiers. specific questions were used in the questionnaire to ensure that the respondents were cross-country skiers. the respondents in the survey were mostly finnish and the majority of them were from southern finland. our data seems to be reasonably representative when compared with what we know about skiers in general, i.e. the skiing population in finland. only 7% of respondents in our data were under 25 years old, which is comparable to the figure of 9% for cross-country skiers who are under 25 years old presented in the finnish national exercise survey (kansallinen liikuntatutkimus… 2006). our skiers were well educated, 61% having a university or polytechnic level degree. in other studies, participation rates are higher among population groups with a high educational level than among those with a lower education level (pouta & sievänen 2001; kansallinen liikuntatutkimus… 2006). variables the questionnaire consisted of 43 questions, including variables relating to skiing ability, the skiers’ activity mode, awareness of climate change and behavioural flexibility, as well as adaptation options. the first part of the questionnaire consisted of basic questions relating to skiers’ individual skiing habits, which were intended to collect information on skiing ability (i.e. skills, equipment and frequencies) and on skiing motives. actionbased adaptation measurements were used to measure skiers’ temporal and spatial behaviour flexibility (i.e. favoured distance to ski areas, planning a skiing trip). the second part focused on preferences regarding ski services in general. this was followed by questions about previous climate change experiences and awareness of climate change. when asked about perceptions of possible adaptation options, respondents were given scenarios of skiing conditions that reflect a hypothetical future situation under conditions of climate change. the hypothetical situation was described for example as follows: ‘if there was not enough snow in your favourite skiing area’ or ‘if there were several winters with lack of snow’. the 104 fennia 187: 2 (2009)mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen variables relating to ski area preferences and adaptation options are described in appendices 1a and 1b. preferences were mostly measured on the fivestep likert scale (see likert 1977). analytical methods in order to identify potential motive groups regarding skiing participation and in order to obtain detailed information on preference heterogeneity in the skier sample, a principal component analysis of skiing motives measured on a five-step likert scale was first carried out. skiers were grouped according to these skiing motive components using k-means cluster analysis, and a three-cluster solution was found to be the best. the skiing patterns and socio-demographic backgrounds of the skier type groups were studied using cross-tabulation with chi-square tests. oneway anova was used to analyse potential differences between the climate change adaptation options of the skier types. multiple comparisons were made between the skier types using tukey’s tests (tukey b and tukey hsd). the aim was to find out which groups differ and whether the differences are statistically significant at p ≤ 0.05. in order to test the reliability of the one-way anova, the kruskall wallis test for the same variables was also applied. the results of the kruskall wallis test were similar to the results of the one-way anova test. finally, the sum variables of ski area and destination choice preferences were counted (appendix 1a and 1b) in order to compress (figs. 1–2) the salient information gathered from the original variables. all the results of the relationships presented in this study are significant at p ≤ 0.05, unless otherwise stated. results skier types and current skiing behaviour skiers in this study participated in skiing activities 20–30 days in a season on average. the typical length of one skiing trip was 11–20 km on average. nearly 30% of the skiers reported 11–30 km (oneway) to be an acceptable distance from home to the ski destination for a day trip. for a holiday trip more than half of the skiers were willing to travel more than 700 km. skiers reported that the decision for making a day trip is typically spontaneous, but ski holidays are planned a couple of months before the holiday begins. the classical skiing style was the most favoured way of skiing. skiers reported that they prefer skiing alone: approximately half of them ski alone, nearly 20% with their partners and only 6.5% with friends. almost all the skiers (86%) learned to ski as children, 12% at school age, and only 2% as adults. in the case of 62% of the skiers, skiing was taught by a family member. other popular outdoor activities among skiers were jogging, cycling, walking and nordic walking (including nordic running and blading). over 85% of skiers had cars at their disposal. principal component analysis revealed three components of skiing motives relating to the skiing environment, social setting, technical skills and interest in fitness (table 1). the cluster analysis based on the principal component scores showed that there are actually three skier group types based on their skiing preferences (table 2). group 1 was called the ‘social type’, which emphasises the importance of traditions and time spent with family and friends when skiing. group 2 is the ‘outdoor type’, which stresses the important qualities of the skiing environment, such as nature, landscape and winter. group 3 is the ‘technical type’, which considers skiing a way of keeping fit and developing skills. the majority of skiers belonged to the outdoor and technical groups. the smallest group was the social group. the classification made it possible to study the socio-economic characteristics of the skier types in more detail. all the groups were dominated by men, but relatively speaking, the most male dominated was the technical type group. there were no statistically significant differences in age class between the groups, but the social type group had more older skiers compared to other groups, while the technical type group had the youngest skiers. as regards skiing company, the technical skiers tended to go skiing alone more often than the others, whereas the members of the outdoor and social groups preferred skiing in company. technical skiers preferred the skating skiing style. the availability of a car was highest in the technical type group, although not to an extent that was statistically significant (table 3). most of the skiers in all groups went day-skiing spontaneously (more than 70% of occurrences in all groups). there were no significant differences of opinion as to how far the skiers are willing to go/travel for skiing in the case of a day trip: the preferred distance from home was 11–30 km, although 3–5 km was preferred in the social group. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 105adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change table 1. principal component analysis of skiing motives. skiing motives component 1 component 2 component 3 skiing environment social features technical skills and fitness nature experience 0.855 winter experience 0.825 landscape 0.772 silence and peace 0.738 recreation 0.721 sustaining skiing traditions 0.780 time with family/friends 0.662 keeping fit 0.853 improving technique 0.735 eigenvalues 3.55 1.38 1.03 interpretation, % 39.45 15.37 11.49 total variance explained, % 66.3 table 2. k-means cluster analysis of principal component scores. motive clusters and mean score principal components social type outdoor type technical type skiing environment –0.177 0.607 –0.485 social features 0.431 0.525 –0.739 technical skills and fitness –1.393 0.457 0.321 total: n=744 n=162 (21.8%) n=285 (38.3%) n=297 (39.9%) table 3. group characteristics. social type outdoor type technical type gender male 50.6%, female 46.3% male 51.6%, female 46.7% male 67.3%, female 39.2% style classical classical and skating skating length of skiing trip shortest (6–10 km) longest (21–30 km) medium (11–20 km) skiing frequency infrequently (6–10 days/season) frequently (more than 80 days/ season) regularly (31–50 days/season) skier type mostly day skiers/ leisure type mostly holiday skiers/ fitness type mostly holiday skiers/ fitness type the members of the outdoor type group were ready to travel further than the members of other groups, even as far as 31–100 km, for a day trip. behavioural and perceptual differences between skiers under conditions of climate change in general, all the skier groups were aware of climate change and it was considered a threat to cross-country skiing. experiences of climate change differed between the groups: the members of the social type group had fewer experiences of climate change than the others. if skiers had to choose an alternative for their regular ski area today because of changed skiing conditions, more than 70% of the respondents of all groups would prefer going to ski in areas with reliable snow in finland rather than elsewhere (abroad). 106 fennia 187: 2 (2009)mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen preferences regarding the important characteristics of ski areas expressed by different skier groups differed to some extent (fig. 1, appendix 1a). the most important characteristics of a ski area in general were related to ski service features, such as good track conditions, natural features such as natural snow reliability and closeness to home. the members of the outdoor type group assessed most characteristics, such as natural features (e.g. the size of the area) and services (e.g. good parking places) more positively than the other groups. in this regard, the technical type group was very similar to the outdoor type group. the social type group differed the most from the other groups, considering natural features such as closeness to home, snow-reliability, service features such as good track conditions and technical features such as artificial snow possibilities and availability of a ski tunnel less important in a ski area. regarding climate change adaptation, the technical and outdoor groups would favour technical adaptation strategies if conditions for skiing were poor. they also placed value on natural features, such as snow reliability and service features, such as good track conditions. the technical type group did not appreciate natural features, such as backcountry skiing (i.e. skiing without prepared tracks), landscape beauty and service features, such as public transport as much as the other groups. opinions on service features, such as versatile tracks, and natural features, such as silence and peace, differed among all the groups, the outdoor type group considering these options more important than the others. natural features in a ski area, such as silence and peace, were more important to the social type group, whereas service features, such as versatile tracks, were more important to the technical type group. the social type group would most likely give up skiing under poor skiing conditions (fig. 2, appendix 1b). regarding the acceptance of substitute options under poor snow conditions, none of the groups would be ready to travel to the same place at the same time as usual, but they would rather choose a region with reliable snow conditions. the outdoor and technical groups would prefer to book their holidays when they are sure of snow in the area (fig. 2, appendix 1b). the social type group could be attracted by snow-independent activities as an adaptation option. all-season activities, snow-independent activities and cultural activities as substitute options were preferred by the social and outdoor groups. the technical type group was not attracted by these options, although indoor activities were accepted by all groups to some extent. this study indicates that finnish skiers are not willing to pay for skiing in general. the majority of skiers expect some support from society for the provision of skiing services. there were, however, some differences between the skier type groups in their perceptions of the division of financial responsibilities. the technical type group would be ready to buy a ski card (a fee for track use). the 1 2 3 4 5 natural snow reliability important appreciates natural features in a ski area needs ski services mean social type outdoor type technical type fig. 1. preferences regarding particular ski area features among skier group types (1=not important…5=very important). fennia 187: 2 (2009) 107adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change 1 2 3 4 5 accepts substitutional options accepts technical adaptation tools and is readyto use and payfor them gives up skiing mean social type outdoor type technical type fig. 2. acceptance of adaptation options among skier group types (1=not likely…5=very likely). social type group could imagine paying parking and service fees, but compared to the other groups, this group considered that additional financing for ski areas is not needed, and that society does not necessarily have to support skiing. the outdoor and social type groups considered that support for services might be needed, in the form of taxes and track fees combined, in order to maintain services in ski areas. according to the outdoor and technical type groups, artificial tracks and ski tunnels could be financed by a combination of taxes and track fees, but the social type group thought that no additional financing is needed. attitudes to taxes or track fees as sole forms of support were not favourable. in the case of artificial snow and ski tunnels there were significant differences among all three skier groups as regards their attitudes to paying for these options. the technical type group had the most positive attitudes to paying for artificial snow and ski tunnels. because the social type group was the least interested in artificial snow, ski tunnels and the availability of services in general, a comparison between only the outdoor and the technical type groups was made. it revealed (although at a 0.10 significance level) that the outdoor type group preferred taxes whereas the technical type group could imagine paying track fees in order to use artificial snow or tunnels. the outdoor type group had more positive opinions on the need to finance services than did the technical type group (fig. 3). discussion and conclusions the purpose of this study was to provide information on skiers’ perceptions and preferences in changing climate conditions. the study identified skier type groups that differ in their skiing behaviour and preferences regarding different adaptation options in a potential future situation of climate change. in this study, the classification (clustering) of cross-country skiers made it possible to focus in more detail on the adaptation strategies and preference heterogeneity of skiers. the clustering procedure revealed three skier type groups. the first group was called the ‘social type’, which emphasises the importance of skiing traditions and time spent with family and friends when skiing. the second group was the ‘outdoor type’, which stressed important qualities of the skiing environment, such as nature, landscape and winter. the third group was the ‘technical type’, which considered skiing a way of keeping fit and developing skills. the majority of the skiers belonged to the outdoor and technical type groups. the smallest group was the social type group. the members of the outdoor and technical type groups had high skiing frequencies, and they were also younger than the skiers in the social type group. the outdoor type group was the most flexible group: they would be most likely to be able to adapt to the changes caused by climate change. they are willing to travel longer distances than at 108 fennia 187: 2 (2009)mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen present to areas with reliable snow, although rather further north in finland than abroad. this group accepted various substitute activities, such as snow-independent or all-season activities instead of skiing if warm winters were to cause poor skiing conditions, but they also accepted technical adaptation tools, such as artificial snow or ski tunnels. by contrast, the technical type group was not interested in substitute activities in ski areas. natural snow-reliability is important, but this group also had positive attitudes to technical adaptation options, such as artificial snow and ski tunnels, and would even be ready to pay for them if necessary. the social type group did not believe in climate change as much as the others. they accepted substitutes, such as snow-independent activities, but they did not accept technical adaptation tools, such as artificial snow or ski tunnels. the study by neuvonen et al. (2005) anticipated that some skiers might give up skiing if the conditions for skiing were to deteriorate. in our study the social group is identified as the type of skiers that are most likely to give up skiing. skiing did not seem to be the main interest of the members of this group, and they would rather search for other alternative recreational activities to replace skiing. according to pouta et al. (2009), female gender, lower socioeconomic status and an urban living environment are associated with a higher sensitivity to climate change. when considering future adaptation strategies for cross-country skiing, the needs, perceptions and preferences of skiers should be taken into account. potential future skiers are most likely to be the skiers who have perceptions and preferences similar to those of the members of our ‘technical type’ and ‘outdoor type’ groups. in general, skiers do not seem to be very loyal to any specific ski areas. it can be assumed that skiers who are willing to travel to northern ski areas in the future are probably the skiers whose perceptions and preferences are close to those of the outdoor type group in our study. under conditions of climate change, in southern parts of the country, ski areas should concentrate more on artificial snow and ski tunnels, which attract skiers similar to the technical type group, because their attitudes towards paying for skiing possibilities are more positive and because environment-related qualities, such as landscape beauty and nature values, are less important. the technical type of skiers are potential users of ski tunnels and artificial snow tracks also for the reason that they do not need very long skiing routes. adaptation research aims, by forecasting future demand and identifying preference groups, to ensure that as many people as possible benefit from adaptation procedures (see mendelsohn 2000). there is, on the one hand, a need to arouse interest by showing that there are possibilities, even in 0 % 10 % 20 % 30 % 40 % 50 % 60 % 70 % 80 % 90 % 100 % artificial tracks or ski tunnels services artificial tracks or ski tunnels services outdoor type technical type cannot say no additional financing needed taxes and track fees track fees taxes fig. 3. comparison of the outdoor and technical groups’ preferences regarding additional financing for services and technical track options at ski areas. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 109adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change the case of cross-country skiing, to adapt to the consequences of climate change. on the other hand, by identifying the development needs of ski areas and studying different ways of keeping ski areas attractive, it is easier to find and realise future adaptation strategies. compared to alpine skiing, cross-country skiing is more vulnerable to climate change (scott et al. 2002; perry 2004; landauer & pröbstl 2008). regarding suitable adaptations for cross-country skiing in a climate change situation, there are several adaptation strategy options for ski areas that skiers consider acceptable. however, the question arises whether skiers are likely to change their behaviour and how. most skiers are interested in travelling further north in order to use areas with reliable snow conditions. about 40% of finns are used to travelling for outdoor and nature-related activities, and 10% of these trips are made to participate in crosscountry skiing (pouta & sievänen 2001). many skiers are in the habit of taking skiing holidays. on the other hand, if a ski area faces a winter with lack of snow, snow-independent activities can be reported as alternative options for skiing in such a winter (compare, e.g., with the cross-country skiing study of landauer & pröbstl 2008, and downhill skiing studies of moen & fredman 2007 and unbehaun et al. 2008). the substitute activities can be used as a tool to enable ski areas to survive shorter winters and to keep the areas attractive (unbehaun et al. 2008). many skiers in our study are also willing to accept technical solutions to ensure skiing conditions. technical adaptation is often mentioned as a suitable adaptation strategy for downhill skiing (harrer 1996; mohnl 1996; könig 1998; bürki 2000; moen & fredman 2007; pröbstl et al. 2008; unbehaun et al. 2008; scott et al. 2009), but nearly all technical adaptation measures require a certain amount of financial capacity (pröbstl 2006). owing to the wide spatial distribution of ski tracks it is expensive and also difficult to maintain or build an infrastructure under poor snow conditions. also, ecological aspects must be taken into account when planning such activities, as artificial snowmaking may cause unwanted environmental impacts (see pröbstl 2006). finnish skiers expect society to provide support for skiing activities and are not in general willing to pay for opportunities to ski. this study reveals that in order to continue skiing even under poor snow conditions, the members of the technical type group were those who could imagine paying for skiing itself, but not necessarily, for instance, for compensating activities, whereas the outdoor type group members expressed willingness to pay for alternative recreational activities in a ski area, but not necessarily for skiing itself. serving different skier groups according to their expectations, preferences and needs will thus present a challenge for ski tourism enterprises. the information gathered in this study contributes to the planning and decision making processes involved in seeking suitable adaptation strategies and policies for cross-country skiing in finland. because cross-country skiing is a health-supporting winter activity, from society’s point of view the local and regional supply of skiing opportunities is valuable, and it could therefore be justified to argue that society should support adaptation strategies aimed at the local and regional provision of municipality and state skiing services. as a solution for financing these services, a ski card (i.e. a day fee for using tracks) could be an option for areas with well-kept ski tracks or ski tunnels and artificial snow tracks in finland, too: ski cards have long been used in many ski areas in central europe (e.g. ramsau in austria). it is not necessary to implement all the possible adaptation strategies in all ski areas under conditions of climate change, but rather to search for strategies that are viable in a certain area with certain conditions and resources. cooperation between ski areas and ski service providers can be used as a tool that will allow more possibilities to be offered to skiers and ski areas alike. more research is needed to clarify preferences and acceptance of adaptation methods among finnish cross-country skiers. in this study, the sample of skiers was limited, and an improved (spatially more representative and larger) sampling of skiers could offer an even better basis for identifying different skier groups and the key elements of adaptation methods. cooperation with ski areas could also provide new ideas for adaptation methods to be tested. research on behavioural adaptation applying more general theories of human behaviour would be helpful to expand our knowledge and understanding of adaptation processes. the theory of planned behaviour (tpb) by ajzen (1991) is one of the most common theories of human behaviour, and it has been applied, e.g. to the study of naturerelated leisure behaviour (ajzen & driver 1991; hrubes et al. 2001). by applying more theoretical approaches, for example tpb theory, as one option for behavioural adaptation studies it would be 110 fennia 187: 2 (2009)mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen possible to produce better predictions of the future demand for ski services. this would offer significant new insights into the adaptation strategies that might be used by the ski tourism industry and public providers of ski services to ensure their survival in conditions of climate change. acknowledgements this study was financed by the university of natural resources and applied life sciences boku, vienna austria, the finnish forest research institute, and european union cost e33. special thanks are due to suomen hiihtoliitto (kari heikkinen), oulun hiihtoseura/tervahiihto, suomen latu, nesteen vaeltajat and hotel savisalo (heikki and sabine savisalo) references abegg b (1996). klimaänderung und tourismus. klimafolgenforschung am beispiel des wintertourismus in den schweizer alpen. schlussbericht nfp 31. 222 p. ajzen i (1991). the theory of planned behavior. organizational behavior and human decision processes 50: 2, 179–211. ajzen i & bl driver (1991). prediction of leisure participation from behavioral, normative, and control beliefs: an application of the theory of planned behavior. leisure sciences 13: 3, 185–204. alcamo jjm, b moreno, m nováky, m bindi, r corobov, rjn devoy, c giannakopoulos, e martin, je olesen & a shvidenko (2007). europe. climate change 2007: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. in parry ml, of canziani, jp palutikof, pj van der linden & ce hanson (eds). contribution of working group ii to the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel of climate change (ipcc), 541–580. cambridge university press, cambridge. blennov k & j persson (2009). climate change: motivation for taking measure to adapt. global environmental change 19: 1, 100–104. breiling m & p chamranza (1999). the impact of global warming on winter tourism and skiing: a regionalized model for austrian snow conditions. regional environmental change 1: 1, 4–14. bürki r (2000). klimaänderung und anpassungsprozesse im wintertourismus. ostschweizerische geographische gesellschaft, neue folge, heft 6. 206 p. carter t & s kankaanpää (2003). a preliminary examination of adaptation to climate change in finland. suomen ympäristö 640, 33–65. cordell kh, bl mcdonald, rj teasley, jc bergström, j martin, j bason & vr leeworthy (1999). outdoor recreation participation trends. in cordell kh (ed). outdoor recreation in american life. a national assessment of demand and supply trends, 219–321. sagamore publishing, champaign. cottrell s (2002). predictive model of responsible environmental behaviour: application as a visitor monitoring tool. in arnberger a, c brandenburg & a muhar (eds). monitoring and management of visitor flows in recreational and protected areas, 129– 135. institute for landscape architecture and landscape management, university of natural resources and applied life sciences (boku), vienna. driver bl & pj brown (1975). a social-psychological definition of recreation demand, with implications for recreation resource planning. in assessing demand for outdoor recreation, 65–68. national academy of sciences, washington. dubois g & jp ceron (2005). changes in leisure/tourism mobility patterns facing the stake of global warming, the case of france. belgeo 1–2, 103–121. elsasser h & f bürki (2004). auswirkungen von umweltänderungen auf den tourismus – dargestellt am beispiel der klimaänderung im alpenraum. in becker c, h hopfinger & a steinecke (eds). geographie der freizeit und des tourismus, 865–875. oldenburg wissenschaftsverlag gmbh, münchen. finnish meteorological institute (2008). climate statistics finland. finnish meteorological institute. <http://www.fmi.fi/saa/tilastot_10.html#5>. 28.03.2008. de freitas cr (2001). theory, concepts and methods in tourism climate research. in matzarakis a & cr freitas (eds). proceedings of the first international workshop on climate, tourism and recreation, 3–20. international society of biometeorology, commission on climate tourism and recreation, porto carras, neos marmaras, greece. de freitas cr (2003). tourism climatology: evaluating environmental information for decision making and business planning in the recreation and tourism sector. international journal of biometeorology 48: 1, 45–54. grothmann t & a patt (2005). adaptive capacity and human cognition: the process of individual adaptation to climate change. global environmental change part a 15: 3, 199–213. harrer b (1996). wirtschaftsgeographische auswirkungen einer veränderten ökologischen situation. konsequenzen für den wintertourismus in deutschland. schriftenreihe des deutschen wirtschaftswissenschaftliches institut für fremdenverkehr an der universität münchen, heft 47. münchen. hrubes d, i ajzen & j daigle (2001). predicting hunting intentions and behavior: an application of the theory of planned behavior. leisure sciences 23: 3, 165–178. iso-ahola se (1986). a theory of substitutability of leisure behaviour. leisure sciences 8: 4, 367–389. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 111adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change jylhä k, h tuomenvirta & k ruosteenoja (2004). climate change projections for finland during the 21st century. boreal environment research 9: 2, 127–152. <http://www.borenv.net/ber/pdfs/ber9/ ber9-127.pdf>. 11.04.2007. kansallinen liikuntatutkimus 2005–2006 (2006). slu:n julkaisusarja 4/06. <http://www.kunto.fi/@ bin/45451/kansallinen+liikuntatutkimus+2005_2 006+aikuiset.pdf>. 28.03.2008. könig u (1998). tourism in a warmer world: implications of climate change due to enhanced greenhouse effect for the ski industry in the australian alps. 229 p. universität zürich, zürich. landauer m & u pröbstl (2008). klimawandel, skilanglauf und tourismus in österreich. naturschutz und landschaftsplanung 40: 10, 336–341. lea s (1992). assessing the psychology of economic behaviour and cognition. in breakwell gm (ed). social psychology of political and economic cognition, 161–183. surrey university press, london. légaré a-m & w haider (2008). trend analysis of motivation-based clusters at the chilkoot trail national historic site of canada. leisure sciences 30: 2, 158–176. likert r (1977). a technique for the measurement of attitudes. in summers gf (ed). attitude measurement, 149–158. kershaw, london. manning r (1999). studies in outdoor recreation: search and research for satisfaction. 2nd ed. 374 p. oregon state university press, corvallis. marttila v, h granholm, j laanikari, t yrjölä, a aalto, p heikinheimo, j honkatuki, h järvinen, j liski, r merivirta & m paunio (2005). finland’s national strategy for adaptation to climate change. ilmastonmuutoksen kansallinen sopeutumisstrategia. maaja metsätalousministeriön (mmm) julkaisuja 1/2005. 276 p. <http://www.mmm.fi/attachments/ 5 e n f d a pe 1 / 5 k g h l f z 0 d / f i l e s / c u r r e n t f i l e / mmmjulkaisu2005_1a.pdf>. 31.03.2008. mendelsohn r (2000). efficient adaptation to climate change. climatic change 45: 3–4, 583–600. metzger mj, mda rounsevell, l acosta-michlik, r leemans & d schröter (2005). the vulnerability of ecosystem services to land use change. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 114: 1, 69–85. moen j & p fredman (2007). effects of climate change on alpine skiing in sweden. journal of sustainable tourism 15: 4, 418–437. mohnl v (1996). the fluctuation of winter sport related snow parameters of the last fifty years in the austrian alps. wetter und leben 48, 103–113. neuvonen m, e pouta & t sievänen (2005). adaptation to climate change for outdoor recreation in finland. in sievänen t, k tervo, m neuvonen, e pouta, j saarinen & a peltonen (2005). naturebased tourism, outdoor recreation and adaptation to climate change. finadapt working paper 11. finnish environment institute mimeographs 341, 21–32. perry a (2004). sports tourism and climate variability. in matzarakis a, cr de freitas & d scott (eds). advances in tourism climatology. berichte des meteorologischen institutes der universität freiburg 12, 174–179. pouta e (2003). attitude-behavior framework in contingent valuation of forest conservation. university of helsinki, department of forest economy, publications 12. 57 p. pouta e & t sievänen (2001). outdoor recreation statistics. in sievänen t (ed). luonnon virkistyskäyttö 2000. luonnon virkistyskäytön valtakunnallinen inventointi lvvi-tutkimus 1997–2000 (summary: outdoor recreation 2000). metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 802, 32–68. pouta e, m neuvonen & t sievänen (2009). participation in cross-country skiing in finland under climate change: application of multiple hierarchy stratification perspective. journal of leisure research 41: 1, 91–108. pröbstl u (2006). kunstschnee und umwelt. entwicklung und auswirkungen der technischen beschneiung. 232 p. haupt verlag, bern. pröbstl u, a prutsch, e dallhammer, h formayer, k grabler, p haas, m jesch, c krajasits, a kulnig & g stanzer (2008). endbericht stratege. strategien zur nachhaltigen raumentwicklung von tourismusregionen unter dem einfluss der globalen erwärmung am beispiel der wintersportregion um schladming. unpublished final report of the project stratege. 81 p. ruosteenoja k, k jylhä & h tuomenvirta (2005). climate scenarios for finadapt studies of climate change adaptation. finadapt working paper 15. finnish environment institute mimeographs 345. 32 p. saarinen j & k tervo (2006). perceptions and adaptation strategies of the tourism industry to climate change: the case of finnish nature-based tourism entrepreneurs. international journal of innovation and sustainable development 1: 3, 214–228. scott d, b jones, c lemieux, g mcboyle, b mills, s svenson & g wall (2002). the vulnerability of winter recreation to climate change in ontario’s lakeland’s tourism region. university of waterloo, department of geography publication series, occasional paper 18. 84 p. scott d & g mcboyle (2007). climate change adaptation in the ski industry. mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change 12: 8, 1411–1431. scott d, j dawson & b jones (2008). climate change vulnerability of the us northeast winter recreation – tourism sector. mitigation and adaptation strategies for global change 13: 5–6, 577–596. scott d, cr de freitas & a matzarakis (2009). chapter 8. adaptation in the tourism and recreation sector. in ebi kl, i burton & gr mcgregor (eds). biometeorology for adaptation to climate variability and change, 171–194. springer. sievänen t (1995). reittiharrastaminen suomessa. metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 577. 92 p. sievänen t, m neuvonen & e pouta (2003). veneilijöiden harrastajaprofiilit. liikunta ja tiede 5–6, 44–51. 112 fennia 187: 2 (2009)mia landauer, tuija sievänen and marjo neuvonen sievänen t, k tervo, m neuvonen, e pouta, j saarinen & a peltonen (2005). nature-based tourism, outdoor recreation and adaptation to climate change. finadapt working paper 11. finnish environment institute mimeographs 341. 46 p. smit b & o pilifosova (2003). from adaptation to adaptive capacity and vulnerability reduction. in smith j, rtj klein & s huq (eds). climate change, adaptive capacity and development, 9–28. imperial college press, london. tervo k (2008). the operational and regional vulnerability of winter tourism to climate variability and change: the case of the finnish nature-based tourism entrepreneurs. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 8: 4, 317–332. unbehaun w, w haider & u pröbstl (2008). trends in winter sport tourism: challenges for the future. tourism review 63: 1, 36–47. wall g & c badke (1994). tourism and climate change: an international perspective. journal of sustainable tourism 2: 4, 193–203. willbanks tj, p romero lankao, m bao, f berkhout, s cairncroo, jp ceron, m kapshe, r muir-wood & r zapata-marti (2007). industry, settlement and society. climate change 2007: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. in parry ml, of canziani, jp palutikof, pj van der linden & ce hanson (eds). contribution of working group ii to the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel of climate change (ipcc), 357–390. cambridge university press, cambridge. wöllzenmüller f & u wenger (2005). richtig nordic ski. cruising, langlauf, skating. 127 p. blw sportpraxis top, münchen. world tourism organization (2003). climate change and tourism. proceedings of the first international conference on climate change and tourism, djerba, 9–11 april 2003. world tourism organization, tunisia. fennia 187: 2 (2009) 113adaptation of finnish cross-country skiers to climate change appendix 1a. sum variables of ski area preference attributes. text in italics contains original variables from the questionnaire, inserted into suitable sum variable groups. 1. ski services = good public transport to the area good parking places services in the area good track conditions versatile tracks 2. natural features = snow reliability possibilities for backcountry skiing landscape beauty silence and peace size of the area closeness to home 3. technical adaptation tools = artificial snow possibilities ski tunnel in the area appendix 1b. sum variables of destination choice preference attributes. text in italics contains original variables from the questionnaire, inserted into suitable sum variable groups. 1. natural snow reliability = cooperation with snow-reliable areas i would travel to a snow-reliable region at the same time i would travel to the same place but at a different time i would book my holiday when being sure of snow in the area 2. acceptance of substitutes = i would travel to the same place at the same time i would choose an area with snow-independent activities i would choose an area with artificial snow or ski tunnel possibilities artificial snow tracks ski tunnel offering all-season outdoor activities in addition to skiing offering indoor activities offering snow-independent activities offering cultural activities 3. give up skiing = i would not go skiing at all in such a winter emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and use of a productive resource in põlva county, estonia jörgensen hans and olof stjernström jörgensen, hans & olof stjernström (2008). emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and use of a productive resource in põlva county, estonia. fennia 186: 2, pp. 95–111. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. our survey among new land and forest owners in põlva county in southeast estonia focuses on the owners’ different motives for obtaining land and forest property through restitution and privatization from 1992 on. in the light of the historical context presented, two clear-cut motives for obtaining property appear: emotional and economic. based on the results from the survey we conclude that the emotional non-economic factors have been most influential for a majority of the landowners, regardless of if the actual property was restituted or purchased. the emotional bonds to landed property are related to the aspiration to regain and repossess family property and thereby related to a certain place affiliation. another interpretation concerns the restrictions with regards to the spread of modern commercial forestry among the – foremost small-scale – property holders for which the actual possession is around 12 ha each. hans jörgensen, department of economic history, umeå university, se-901 87 umeå , sweden, e-mail: hans.jorgensen@ekhist.umu.se olof stjernström, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, se-901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: olle.stjernstrom@geography.umu.se. ms received 10.02.2008. introduction in spite of its limited size of around 45,000 km2 and a population of roughly 1.3 million, estonia’s relatively large forest assets turn the country into an interesting case in point for studying post-socialist property changes. more than half the country’s land area or 2,284,600 ha, is denoted as forest. if we exclude unstocked areas and bush the productive forests constitute 47.3 per cent of the country’s total land area (aastaraamat mets 2005). estonia, together with finland, latvia, sweden, norway and russia, belongs to the group of european countries that have more than 1 ha of forest/wooded land per inhabitant. this is however a quite recent phenomenon in estonia where most forests grow on previously agricultural lands, which were naturally reforested or planted beginning in the 1950s. the current state-owned forest area, which will remain state property, basically corresponds to the 850,000 ha held by the state during the interwar statehood. after soviet annexation in 1940 and the subsequent forced collectivization during the period 1947–51, many chose to leave the countryside. natural reforestation took place as an outcome of the large-scale soviet agriculture, which left previous pastures and remote fields uncultivated. while interwar estonia’s forests were marked by their balanced stock and well developed forestry management, the post-war forests’ stock became extremely diversified (dahlin 1999). the changes associated with the agricultural reform act of 17 october 1991, in force from 1992, are essential for understanding the post-1991 redistribution of land and forest. restitution of land and assets has presupposed claims from a legal person and approval from a governmental authority. when claims have been approved, land and forest have been returned to previous owners or their heirs free of charge. in cases in which privatization has been applied, property has been shifted by means of auction directed by the state. the same goes for land and assets for which no claims have been raised (järvinen et al. 2003). an understanding of individuals’ motives for obtaining land or forest must therefore take into account different 96 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström driving forces that are present in a transforming society like estonia. for example, the size of the holding places restraints on the economic returns, and the non-economic or “intangible” values differ between owners (toivonen et al. 2005). it has been suggested that a great physical distance between the property and the owner’s place of residence, or the lack of emotional and economic bonds to the place of the property, affect both management and maintenance. these ideas, relating to the importance of place for an individual’s decisions, emanates e.g. from tuan (1974); allardt (1975); relph (1976); entrikin (1991) and stjernström (1998). in more recent studies, lindgren et al. (2000) have discussed the important relationship between land use and the forest owner’s place of residence. pettersson (2002) also investigated post-productive forestry, which includes the entrance of new entrepreneurs and alternative incomes from the forests (pettersson et al. 2002). according to allardt (1975), place attachment can be divided into four different categories: economic, social, cultural, and material. economic and material attachments relate to local job opportunities, possession of land and real estate, while social attachment relates to having close relatives and friends. cultural attachments express identification with the local culture, for example dialect and local traditions. allardts’ (1975) classification was an early attempt to conceptualize place attachment into different categories. this enabled to develop other parameters in mobility and migration studies and in studies of regional development. in this regard, human capital as a regional resource can also be considered as a production resource which to various degrees, is connected to the actual place or region. a major outcome of the first ten years of restitution in estonia after 1991 was the return of the interwar property relations, implying a resurrection of many small farm holdings below 10 ha of land or forest. hardly viable in a market economy but important as transitional solutions, these subsistence holdings provided both basic foodstuffs and firewood during the initial years of hardship (jörgensen 2004). in 2004 when estonia joined the european union, the property structure of forests had developed into the following ownership categories: state forest, 36 per cent; private forest, 38 per cent; and forestland subject to further privatization, 26 per cent (aastaraamat mets 2005). when the land reform and privatization processes draw to a close, the share of private forestry is expected to increase to around 60 per cent of the total forest area. however, both restitution and privatization have been circumvented by insecure legal arrangements such as a lack of documentation, resulting in numerous issues of fraud and mismanagement. well-defined and secure property relations were not established at the same pace as the new estonian owners began exploiting their land and forests in the 1990s. it has been shown, for example, that: “it is evident that the high share of illegal logging is directly caused by individuals who are exploiting the weak legal and enforcement system with a desire to gain quick profits” (hain and ahas 2005). like modern farming, modern forestry is multifunctional and the altered property relations have also affected management. in addition to logging, recreation and hunting offer additional income possibilities, which place a focus on issues like environmental protection concerns, biodiversity and sustainable development (järvinen et al. 2003). however, 60 to 70 per cent of the estonian forest owners live far from their relatively small holdings, which in 2004 were around 12.4 ha per unit (ministry of agriculture 2007). the liberal estonian forest policy, based on the forestry act of 1998, is an attempt to resemble the west-european legislation, in which a large share of the decision-making power is handed over to the individual owners. however, since many new owners lack personal experience of forest management or necessary forestry education, it is not uncommon to find widespread distrust of the government as well as weak law-abiding attitudes (hain and ahas 2005). the aims of this article are twofold. the first aim is to place the land restitution and forest privatization processes in estonia after 1991 in a historical context, and the second is to provide empirical insight into these processes, derived from a survey in põlva county in southeast estonia. at this stage of investigation, the analysis is devoted to explaining the actions and motives among the new private forest owners and their relationship to their landed property, or more specifically the different motives, objectives and apprehensions of land and forest ownership. with regard to the processes of restitution and privatization, two motives are discernible. the first is based on economic rationality and is related to the expected future economic gains from property. the second is driven by non-economic issues. here, specific emotional and historical values are at the centre of the owner’s aspiration to own property. in the context of regained independfennia 186: 2 (2008) 97emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … ence and the post-socialist transformation, the interlinked laws on property restitution and privatization have therefore been crucial. hypothetically speaking, we assume that the present landowners in estonia are motivated by two major rationales, either a) emotional bonds to land or b) the immediate or future economic returns from their landed property. the first part of this hypothesis relates to what we call the emotional filter hypothesis, implying that emotional relationships to property have different meanings. on the one hand, a certain size of property can be aspired based on what can actually be managed by a single owner or his/her family. on the other hand, the legal openings provided by restitution allow for repossession of previously expropriated land for which the motives are embedded in historical and symbolic values. the emotional rationality is related to family history and the symbolic meaning of place (sense of place). for smallholders without any previous experience of forestry, the motives for forest ownership or interest in forest management may be weak (toivonen et al. 2005). we therefore assume, on the one hand, that among certain land and forest owners the emotional bonds to the specific property can have a restrictive impact on modern forestry, e.g. volumes of felling and forest management since the economic gains are subjugated to the emotional ones. on the other hand, in the context of the extreme liberalised estonian post-socialist transformation process and its associated property reforms (land reform and privatisation) the economic rationality of the owner must also be seen in relation to the forest industry demand. estimations made in 2000, e.g. concluded that the large volumes of timber cuts made in private forests, which at this point constituted around ¾ of the total cuttings, would increase further. this would not only imply a severe reduction of total forest stock, but also generate severe alterations with regards to the diversity of forest. the cutting of old spruces could therefore, as it was said, not be “compensated by the increment of middle-aged birch stands in drained swamps” (kuuba. 2001). therefore, the initial years of estonia’s transformation, which were characterised by insecure property relations, insufficient forest legislation, absent controls, auditing and suitable enforcement mechanisms, can provide a different and more short-sighted interpretation of the owner’ economic rationality. from the perspectives of the introduction of modern and efficient forest technology, the demand for timber from multi national forest industry corporations, and estonia’s integration in the global market, it is likely to assume that the owner’s possible initial long-term ambitions of returns from forestry can have been overridden by short-term profits. concerning the impacts from emotional bindings to property, which we denote the emotional filter hypothesis, it aims to reflect that land-use decisions taken by the property holders not only are related to market rationality but also to the property holder’s own values and experiences. the property holder may prefer an alternative land-use strategy to maintain family bonds, contribute to ecological preservation or emphasising other aspects that are related to the affiliation of the place. in order to explore these relations we start by presenting the methodology and the survey, followed by a discussion on property reform and the historical context, which provides the framework for an overview of the key problems related to property changes. thereafter we turn towards describing the relevant forest macro-data. finally, we discuss some tentative results from the questionnaires that will constitute the basis for a concluding analysis. property relations in estonia while most of the estonian forests were state property during the interwar independence, the total forest area grew at the expense of agricultural land during the soviet period (1940–1991). owing to this fact, the restitution of interwar holdings since 1992 has provided the main entrance into forest ownership. if claims from individuals have been absent, privatization has been used instead. in comparison to the land restitution process for which the symbolic relationships between land and identity have been crucial, forest privatization has been a less sensitive political issue. according to the former minister of social affairs, arvo kuddo, a main factor behind the decision to carry out restitution after 1991 was the search for justice. restitution was therefore a means to compensate previous owners for their suffering under soviet rule (kuddo 1996). when restitution was chosen as the first priority, it implied that claims at the local municipality level needed to be discussed and solved before privatization could proceed. the sluggishness of the land restitution process and its associated legal impediments has, however, also 98 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström affected the forest privatization process. five years after independence, only 10 percent of the estonian forests were managed privately (roosmaa 1999). property restitution and privatization are essential features of the post-socialist transformation process, and have had far-reaching effects on the agrarian property relations and associated production activities. property rights, however, do not presuppose a system based on private property. it is rather a case of a bundle of rights, stretching from access – or use rights – to ownership rights to a specific resource. important, however, is that functioning property rights legitimize the relationship between the person/persons who dispose a resource and those affected by this. property rights are therefore dependent on the specific context in which they are exercised, implying that both time and space matter (widgren 1995). in the context of privatization, the role of both formal (codified) and informal (cultural) institutions are important. in contrast to the legal codified rules, the informal institutions are sluggish by nature and often need a certain period of adjustment before they are broadly accepted among the public. well functioning institutions can reduce transaction costs, for example that of carrying out and controlling an exchange of property (north 1990). however, the initial property changes in post-socialist states often took place in a kind of legal vacuum, which opened up for exploitation. low transaction costs are therefore dependent on adequate and sufficient information, functioning institutions and efficient enforcement mechanisms. a general problem associated with restitution is destruction. since the 1940s many properties have been destroyed or divided, or have simply vanished. the general neglect of maintenance has also turned restitution into a lottery process or numerous compensation solutions (rabinowicz and swinnen 1997). the current property structure in estonia can be understood from the different turns taken during the radical shifts during the 20th century. these shifts are related to the achievement of the first independence in 1918, the dependence and subjugation during the soviet period 1940–91, and the build-up of market economic relations in the post-1991 period. estonia reached its first independence in the aftermath of the russian revolution and the dissolution of the tsarist russian empire in 1920. the radical land reform of 1919–1926 gave full property rights to 140,000 peasant proprietors. only 4 percent of the land area was left intact after expropriation and redistribution. the properties of the major landowners, the baltic-german nobility, were henceforth fully redistributed. however, the interwar governments chose to keep most forests in the hands of the state, partly as a currency reserve (lipping 1980; kõll 1994; jörgensen 2006). the second major property shift came after soviet annexation in 1940, which ended the short period of independence. interrupted by a german occupation during 1941–44, the ad hoc soviet command economy turned towards a full-scale planned economy after the war, followed by forced collectivization after 1947 (kõll 2004). within the soviet union division of labour, estonia’s role was to specialize in agricultural production. forestry was of secondary importance and parts of the stock therefore remained untouched during the soviet period, during which estonia’s forest areas more than doubled. between 1958 and 1991 the annual increase was in fact 19,300 ha (põllumajandus ministerium 2007b). these forests grew on land considered less significant for large-scale agriculture. in areas where post-war felling was substantial, uneven stands, with regard to both age and species, developed. because of the low economic priority of estonian forests until 1991, large areas of forests were also transformed into national parks or recreation areas, which of course was gainful from the perspective of biodiversity. forest management was divided between different administrations: the state forestry administration 60 per cent; kolkhoz and sovkhoz 38 percent; and military units and other 2 per cent (dahlin 1999). in the second half of the 1980s perestroika and glasnost nourished profound changes in the agrarian areas. starting from the informal agrarian reforms in 1987, based on the experiences from the relatively successful private plot production, some private farmers could apply to lease land from kolkhozes and sovkhozes on an eternal basis. this was legally sanctioned beginning in 1989; however, due to soviet law, formal property rights could not be obtained until after independence in 1991, when the regained independence led to a process of profound economic-political and social restructuring along free market economy lines (jörgensen 2004). the major problems in the forestry sector around 1991 were related to the lack of appropriate management and forestry infrastructure, together with the lack of market institutions. another problem fennia 186: 2 (2008) 99emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … was the dissolution of large-scale agricultural kolkhozes and sovkhozes, which in general had a negative impact on rural development during the first ten years of independence. the less important role of forestry in total employment meant that fewer problems appeared from the dissolution of forest-oriented kolkhozes and sovkhozes. however, since many kolkhozes were functioning as municipalities, they provided services far beyond agricultural activities; the dissolution of large-scale farming thereby affected all kinds of rural activities (unwin 1997). the transfer of management and supervision in estonia of privately owned forests has therefore not been free from friction. modern forestry in estonia the first draft of a new forestry act was presented in 1993, which paved the way for a new perspective on forestry. in 1997, when the share of privately owned forests had increased substantially, the first forestry act was adopted by the estonian parliament. since then forestry has faced increased problems of a juridical character, partly due to the step-wise adjustments to european legislation in which, e.g., conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development are emphasized. forests, however, can generate different kinds of added values in other sectors. for the new holders, owing not least to the fact that reconstruction of the agricultural sector has meant the loss of markets and several legal impediments, the additional forest resource has contributed to the average farming household’s investments and to regional development (järvinen et al.). besides the incomes from felling and recreation, tourism can create additional income for the new estonian forest owners. even though large shares of pine and spruce stands had been deforested by the early 1960s, which severely reduced the total forest volume and gave an unbalanced stock, the present rich biodiversity is one factor of importance (dahlin 1999). on the one hand, in the context of the soviet planned economy, estonia’s role was to be that of a major agricultural producer and several rare species were thus preserved in the less productive and peripheral areas. the forest developed its richness as a biotope due to the lack of exposure to modern forestry cultivation. on the other hand, obvious to anyone travelling through estonia, the rich biodiversity also means that many forests suffer from a lack of appropriate thinning. tall and weak stands on a poor site cannot produce internationally competitive timber or wood. the most common species in the estonian forests are pine, birch and spruce, but the distribution between these species has altered greatly over the past 50 years. from 1958 to 2004, the percentage distribution changed drastically. the stock of pine decreased from 42 to 35 percent, a decrease was also visible in the stock of spruce from 33 to 19 percent, and the increase of birch went from 19 to 26 percent (aastaraamat mets 2005). natural reforestation thereby mostly took place when agricultural land was left aside; this was the case not least for marshlands, which are common in estonia (table 1). table 1. land category areas in estonia (ha) (aastaraamat mets 2005: 2). total land area * state forests other owners land category 1000 ha % 1000 ha % 1000 ha % forest land 2284.6 52.3 859.9 78.7 1425.7 43.5 of which stocked 2138.5 48.9 806.3 73.9 1332.2 40.6 of which unstocked 146.1 3.3 52.6 4.8 93.5 2.9 bushes 70.9 1.6 2.3 0.2 68.6 2.1 agricultural land 1314.3 30.1 8.4 0.8 1306.0 39.8 bogs 250.8 5.7 163.1 14.9 87.7 2.7 inland water bodies 100.6 2.3 13.9 1.3 86.7 2.6 urban settlements 155.2 3.6 0.1 0.0 155.1 4.7 roads 50.0 1.1 7.5 0.7 42.5 1.3 tracks 58.3 1.3 21.2 1.9 37.1 1.1 mineral extraction sites 34.2 0.8 14.2 1.3 20.0 0.6 other land 50.9 1.2 2.1 0.2 48.8 1.5 total 4369.8 100.0 1091.6 100 3278.2 100.0 * total land area does not include lake peipsi 100 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström the forestry act of 1997, in force from 1998, generated a ten-year development plan beginning in 2001. here the objectives were to maximize “the contribution of the forestry sector to national economic and social well-being on a sustainable basis”. the basic regulative and monitoring systems that were implemented implied a separation between the state’s regulation/authority function and the ownership and administration of the state’s forests (fao 2000). in 2004 the estonian forests covered 2,284,600 hectares (more than 52 percent of the total land area) with a growing stock of around 456,075 m3 corresponding to 200 m3 per ha. out of this 92.4 percent were considered as available for wood supply. around 172,000 ha were classified as protected forest with high natural values and these areas are therefore excluded from commercial forestry (aastaraamat mets 2005). the changes in property and market structures after 1991 have induced further increases in the amount of forestlands. thus the re-forestation trend, initiated during the soviet years, has continued. private forestry is estimated to increase up to around 60–65 percent in the nearby future. methods and data this article is based on forest statistical data, current academic research and compilations from our survey among forest owners in põlva county. in may 2006, the põlva county land register or cadastre contained 14,324 properties comprising one ha of land or more. smaller properties and those in urban areas and villages are excluded from this study. the cadastre provided access to data such as size of property, date of registration, identification number, name of municipality and village, but neither names nor addresses to the legal owners. after making a random selection of 800 properties we contacted the estonian cadastre registration authority, from which we obtained name and social security number for the owners of the 800 landed properties. by matching the social security number with the population register in põlva county we then found the owners’ addresses. the questionnaire focused mainly on the landowners’ economical, social and emotional bindings or relations to the property. the respondents were asked to valuate different statements regarding the reasons for their ownership, the importance to regain or to maintain family property, the prospect for economic returns from the property and the future use of the actual property. the actual and possible future land-use is essential in this matter. the questionnaire also brought up issues like occurrence of illegal logging and the owners’ attitudes to forestry cooperation, which however will be presented in a forthcoming article. the mail survey was based on a total of 770 questionnaires sent out in august 2006. five weeks later, after a reminder, a second questionnaire was mailed. at the end of december 2006 the survey had resulted in a response rate of 36 percent (n = 276). considering the widespread public scepticism towards authority practices and questionnaires of this kind, we find the response rate acceptable. since it is common for many properties to have several owners, often within the same family, a single household may also have received two or more questionnaires. the chi2 test shows that the results from the questionnaire are representative in comparison to the total register data with regard to the respondents’ sex and age distribution. the results are, however, less representative for the size-distribution of respondents’ holdings. it is possible that the propensity to respond to the questionnaire is related to the owner’s property size. fewer respondents among larger land and forest owners and overrepresentation of smallscale owners can, for instance, indicate that smallholders, finding the non-economic incentives for property more important than the larger property holders and thus small-scale owners are more likely to respond. this will be discussed later in this article, which is limited to the compilation of results from the first part of our survey. this first part of the survey provides the empirical data related to motives and driving forces for obtaining land and forests. thereby, we scrutinize the new landowners’ relationships to their properties, looking at the emotional bonds to landed property on the one hand and the economic bonds on the other. the põlva county survey 2006 põlva county makes a suitable case for investigating the role of land and forestry among new private proprietors. it is one of 15 estonian counties based on 13 municipalities and one town area, which cover 2,164 square kilometres or 5 percent of estonia’s total area (fig. 1). most of the 32,000 inhabitants, or 73 percent, are rurally based and 27 percent live in towns. the county borders on fennia 186: 2 (2008) 101emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … table 2. distribution of forestland area in estonia and põlva county in 2005 (aastaraamats mets 2005: 4). commercial forest: ha and % protection forest: ha and % protected forest: ha and % total: ha forest available for wood supply: ha and % 1000 ha % 1000 ha % 1000 ha % 1000 ha ha % põlva 95.8 84.9 13.9 12.3 3.1 2.8 112.8 109.7 97.2 estonia 1578.9 69.1 533.2 23.3 172.5 7.6 2284.6 2112.1 92.4 fig. 1. counties and municipalities in estonia 2007. põlva county, the study area, is highlighted (maa-amet 2007). land and across the great lake peipsi to the russian federation. more than half the county is forested. its growing stock of 217 m3/ha places it among the top three estonian counties, with a national average of 200 m3/ha. in relative terms, põlva county has the highest amount of commercial forests and wood supply in estonia. however, as can be seen in table 2, much less of the county’s forested area is devoted to nature protection (aastaraamats mets 2005). according to table 3, almost half of the registered properties in põlva county possess less than 10 ha of land and forest. fifty-seven percent of the holdings have forests and the other 43 percent only possess agricultural land. six of eight forest properties are smaller than 10 ha, which means that a majority of holders possess rather small forests while 3.3 per cent of the forestland can be found among properties containing 30 ha or more. from the cadastre it is possible to analyse the progress in the ongoing land restitution and privatization process. the year of restitution mentioned in the cadastre marks the year when the property was legally re-established. table 3. size distribution of property among owners possessing one ha or more of forestland in põlva county in 2006. size in ha frequency percent 1.00–9.99 6538 45.6 10.00–19.99 983 6.9 20.00–29.99 222 1.5 30.00–39.99 90 0.6 40.00–49.99 47 0.3 50.00– 341 2.4 total 8221 57.4 (põlva county cadastre registers 2006) 102 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström figure 2 shows the annual development of establishment for restituted and privatized landed properties in põlva county from 1993 to 2005. the slow pace of restitution and privatization up to 1995 followed a national pattern due to several legal and administrative difficulties, e.g. too few land engineers in relation to the number of claims for restitution, which in many parts of the country exceeded the amount of land available. the increase of cases closed in 2001 and 2003 was due to the extra effort placed on the processes of restitution and privatization in the light of a forthcoming eu accession. when eu membership was considered to be within reach after 2002, this spurred investments in land and property, driving land prices up and contributing to a better functioning land market (jörgensen 2005). in 2001 the european commission stated in their report that due to the lack of administrative capacity at a local level, 1.6 million ha of land still remained to be registered, of which around 1.1 million ha were to be subjected to restitution or privatization (commission of the european communities 2001). results in our survey, 47 percent of the respondents were female and 53 percent were male. as table 4 indicates, the share of elderly above the age of 64 was 30 percent, which should be compared with the national share of 15 percent according to the 2000 census (statistical office estonia). sources of income seem to be distributed normally among the respondents, except for the share of elderly who have their main income from pension (table 5). while the elderly constituted 30 percent of the respondents, the share of pensioners was almost 40 percent. this indicates that many landowners are either early retired or disabled. a clear minority of respondents stated that their main income was derived from agriculture or forestry. thirty percent of the respondents stated that they had higher education (here, implying university) (table 6). this corresponds well to the national estonian average of 29.6 percent for those befig. 2. numbers of restituted and privatized properties in põlva county 1993–2005 (n = 14195) (põlva county cadastre registers 2006). table 4. age distribution among respondents in põlva county, estonia 2006. age distribution in classes (n = 276) frequency percent 20–34 33 12.0 35–64 159 57.6 65– 83 30.0 no answers 1 0.4 total 276 100.0 fennia 186: 2 (2008) 103emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … tween 20 and 64 years of age, but it is also much higher than the eu average of 20.9 percent for the same age group (riigikogu 2007). in the survey, however, respondents above the age of 65 constituted a much larger group than its share represented on a national basis. the respondents and their land after the initial years marked by the restitution and privatization processes under the legal influence of the government, open market sales and inheritance have become more frequent. the 276 respondents in our survey, who possessed one ha or more in 2006, represents this entire spectrum of owners. thirty-seven percent owned two properties, another 13 percent had three properties and less than 6 percent had four registered properties or more. almost one-third (30 percent) of the respondents stated that they shared ownership of the property with close relatives such as spouses, children or siblings. the others owned their property alone. the relationship between the owner’s place of property and place of residence is described in table 7. almost 30 percent of the respondents lived permanently on their property, 26 percent returned regularly for longer or shorter visits and more than 30 percent stated that they had family history linkages to the specific property, as a former place of residence for either themselves or close relatives. only 10 percent of the respondents lacked any family ties to the place of the property, which supports the importance of emotional bonds to the property. altogether the survey comprised 433 landed properties, of which close to 25 percent were restituted. in contrast to the property changes concerning agricultural land, which foremost has been subjected to restitution after 1991, a majority of forests in this survey have been privatized and sold at market price. with regard to property 1 – denoting the owner’s first piece of forest property – 30 percent obtained this property through restitution. first refusal and purchase of properties were additionally important factors in explaining the possession of property for around 33 percent of the respondents. however, more than 35 percent stated that their main (or single) property had been obtained either as a gift or through inheritance. this can be somewhat questioned based on the table 5. respondents’ main sources of income in põlva county, estonia 2006. types of income/incomes from (n = 276) frequency percent a own property 19 6.9 b own business 24 8.7 c employment in agriculture or forestry 10 3.6 d public sector 32 11.6 e private sector 51 18.5 f pension 108 39.1 g study loans 2 0.7 h unemployment benefit 1 0.4 i other 26 9.4 j total 273 98.9 missing 3 1.1 total 276 100.0 table 6. educational levels among respondents in põlva county, estonia 2006. level of highest education among respondents (n = 276) frequency percent university 83 30.1 secondary school 134 48.6 primary school 53 19.2 total 270 97.8 no answer 6 2.2 total 276 100.0 table 7. relationship to property and place of residence among respondents in põlva county, estonia 2006. owner’s residential connection to the property (n = 276) frequency percent a permanent residence on property 81 29.3 b returning for longer visits to property 25 9.1 c returning for shorter visits to property 47 17.0 d previous residence in the neighbourhood 40 14.5 e family roots 45 16.3 f no bonds 28 10.1 g total 266 96.4 h * no answer 10 3.6 total 276 100.0 104 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström fact that we can assume that the landed property was initially restituted to elderly or deceased relatives. it is thus likely that the share of restitution cases is higher than the percentage distribution in table 8 indicates. motives for obtaining property in order to reflect the owners’ motives for obtaining landed property, the respondents were asked to evaluate a number of motives (table 9). the responses support the hypothesis that emotional factors play an influential role but also one anomaly, which concerns the second most important factor in the survey: the importance of having access to wood for heating and construction. considering the relatively high energy prices and the insecure incomes in rural areas, it makes sense to use firewood from one’s own forests. in fact, most old farmhouses in the countryside are heated purely by wood and the option to use wood for heating in many city apartments provides a further incentive. for most owners, the least important factor seemed to be the possible incomes to be derived from the forest. in other words, support for the emotional hypothesis can be found, when not taking into account the possibility to substitute costs for heating. thus it seems to have been less important to acquire land for additional income possibilities than to regain family property and reconnect to the place where, e.g., cultivation of the land provides a certain meaning. the results in table 9 also support some of the findings from table 10. emotional factors, together table 8. respondents’ ways of obtaining land and forest in põlva county, estonia 2006. respondents’ ways of obtaining land and forest (n = 276) property 1 property 2 property 3 frequency percent frequency percent frequency percent a restitution 83 30.1 20 18.7 6 15.8 b first refusal 28 10.1 28 26.2 7 18.4 c purchase 63 22.8 21 19.6 10 26.3 d inheritance 67 24.3 3 2.8 5 13.2 e gift 30 10.9 21 19.6 6 15.8 f parcelling 1 0.4 12 11.2 4 10.5 g other 1 0.4 2 1.9 0 0 total 273 98.9 107 100.0 38 100 missing 3 1.1 total 276 100.0 276 100.0 276 100.0 * owners can possess more than one property (property 1, property 2, etc.). only a few respondents declared possession of more than three properties. table 9. respondents’ valuation of motives for obtaining property in põlva county, estonia 2006. most important motives for obtaining property. 1 = most important, 5 = not at all important. (n = 276) numbers mean std. deviation regain family property 189 2.1376 1.56834 access to wood for heating and construction 220 2.3136 1.43243 access to second home 174 2.4770 1.52704 re-establish contact with family home district 177 2.4859 1.57071 access to arable land for own use 213 2.5634 1.52401 income possibilities 191 2.7644 1.44440 fennia 186: 2 (2008) 105emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … with some of the economic factors related to the household’s economic status, are to be considered as the most important. the statement “preservation of nature”, in table 10, is held by the respondents as the most important while “regaining former family land” is valued lower in table 10 than in table 9. this can be seen not only as a problem of consistency in the respondents’ answers, but also as the result of how they judge the relative importance in relation to other statements in the questionnaire. the high ranking of “preservation of nature” can be interpreted as an indicator supporting the idea that emotional motives and reasons for land ownership are more important than economic gains. however, it can also be interpreted as a mirror of common environmental consciousness. notably, the statement regarding the possibilities of “economic benefits” from the forest is ranked relatively low. in this regard it would be interesting to take a closer look at the individual landowners who stated that they had some income from the forest. after the respondents ranked the list of statements, they were asked to pinpoint the primary, second and third most important statements. around 44 percent of the respondents pinpointed “access to wood and timber” for heating and construction as the most important factor among the statements. this time only four percent of the respondents ranked “preservation of nature” as the highest ranked factor, which could reflect the difference between the individual’s private interest and the general public interest. from the outset, many owners show an interest in environmental protection and nature conservation, but when it comes to the individual’s private interest or choices, other factors such as limits on household support and income become more important. forest incomes even though the survey supports the assumption that emotional reasons play an important role for the new landowners in põlva county, and are seemingly more important than economic reasons, the economic gains from property are not absent. in the questionnaire, respondents were asked whether or not they had forestland. almost twothirds (63 per cent or 172 respondents) stated that they owned forestland, which implies that the rest of the respondents could not have any such income. the size of forest properties was generally small, and almost half the respondents (45 per cent) had forest properties smaller than 10 ha. not very surprisingly, 60 percent of the respondents stated that they did not have any income whatsoever from forestry. a reasonable assumption from this is that the size of property matters and larger forest property holders need to have higher incomes from forestry. however, the number of respondents in our survey is too low to confirm this assumption. only ten respondents stated that they in the last three years had incomes from forestry corresponding to 25 percent or more of their total income (table 11). among those with less income, 40 per cent stated that they had had some income from their forests during the past three years. it is in fact table 10. respondents’ valuation of land and land ownership in põlva county, estonia 2006. 1 = most important, 5 = not important at all n = 276 no. mean std. deviation access to wood for heating and construction 210 1.8095 1.09015 access to berries and mushrooms 181 2.1934 1.14560 economic benefits from the forest 170 3.0941 1.35981 land for recreation 166 2.3373 1.22378 preservation of nature 164 1.7866 0.83457 land for hunting and fishing 155 3.9226 1.30700 possible future place of residence 154 3.3831 1.49596 work possibilities 152 3.7829 1.30672 investment possibilities 151 3.2185 1.35102 land for pasture 150 4.6533 0.75072 regaining former family land 147 3.0884 1.61722 106 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström possible that more forest owners had income from forestry, but this income was unevenly distributed between different years. since the questionnaire was limited to incomes covering the past three years, it may have had an impact on the responses from smaller forest owners, which do not harvest on a regular basis. from a five-year perspective, 27 percent of the forest owners have sold timber, on average 419 m3, which seems to be a rather modest volume before the number of small forest properties is considered. emotional versus economic bonds the differences between forest owners who have regained property through restitution and those who have purchased their property in open market sales can be explained in terms of emotional and economic motives. a majority of the so-called emotional-categorized owners have obtained most of their property through restitution, inheritance or gift, while the economic-categorized owners mainly bought their land on the market. the significant difference between the two groups is due mostly to the expectation of additional incomes from the property among those in the latter category. with regard to accessibility to wood (for heating purposes), accessibility to arable land, and land for the possible location of a second home, no significant difference can be found between the two owner categories. however, the possibilities of regaining former family property and re-establishing family ties have a significant importance for the emotional category. when it comes to incomes from forestry, it is reasonable to believe that forest owners who have bought their land or forest need to have incomes from the properties to a larger extent. however, the survey shows that the share of forest owners with restituted property declaring incomes from land or forest property is higher than that of those who have bought their property on the market (table 12). the share of owners who reside on their restituted – regained – property is also higher than that of owners who bought their land. as indicated by table 13, the relationship to a specific place – the place of property – seems to be more important for owners who have regained former family properties. owners with restituted property consist of individuals who are much older than the group that has purchased their land. the average age in the restituted group was 59 years (median value is 62 years), while the average age for the other group was 52 years (median value 49 years). discussion the multifaceted property system developing in estonia after 1991 shows the existence of different rationalities for obtaining landed property. this is due to the experiences from shifting property relations during estonia’s first independence 1920–1940 and its associated land reform, which ended with the soviet nationalization and forced collectivization after 1940. bearing this in mind, our overall hypothesis, discussed in relation to the survey results, is based on the emotional bonds to land versus the future economic gains from landed property. the “emotional filter hypothesis”, based on the different emotional relationships to property, implies that while a certain size of property can be aspired to, e.g. on the basis of calculations on table 11. respondents’ percentage incomes from forestry and size of property, põlva county, estonia 2006. (n = 172) distribution of incomes from forestry in percentage classes total size class 0% 0.5–4,99% 5–9.99% 10–14.99% 15–19.99% 20–24.99% more than 25% 1–9.9 ha 78 7 5 5 2 0 2 99 10–19.9 ha 19 3 5 6 3 2 0 38 20–29.9 ha 6 1 4 4 1 2 3 21 30–39.9 ha 0 0 3 2 0 0 2 7 40–49.9 ha 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 50 ha– 1 0 1 2 0 0 3 7 total 104 11 18 19 6 4 10 172 % 60% 6.4% 10.5% 11% 3.5% 2.3% 5.8% 100% fennia 186: 2 (2008) 107emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … how much land can be managed by a single owner or household, the legal opening provided by restitution also allows for repossession of previously expropriated land. in this later sense, historical and symbolic values nourish an emotional strategy related to family history and the symbolic meaning of place (sense of place). hypothetically speaking, it is possible that if the owner’s economic incentives are weak at the expense of emotional bonds this can have a negative impact on the volumes of felling when too many owners consider the non-economic factors to be more important. on the other hand, the initial insecure property arrangements during transition also opened up for frauds and illegal logging however, needless to say, both the emotional and the economic rationales are stylized and must be regarded as two kinds of extremes. the economic motives, which comprise both financial gains from the property as well as certain costs for maintaining and preserving the same property, e.g. taxes, maintenance and investments need to be regarded as long-term motives too. yet, in the re-established baltic market economies there are reasons to discuss both the emotional and economic motives for obtaining property since it is in the light of the historical circumstances and the strong symbolic values circumventing landed property that we need to understand the property reforms. when the illegal soviet confiscation of property was ended by restitution, it thus gave legitimacy to the previous owners and/or their heirs. hereby, the regained family property materialized the owner’s relationship between family and geographical origin which then expressed the recognition of the years of unfairness. one example is e.g. the destiny of the estonian-swedes, which left estonia in great table 12. respondents’ estimation of incomes from property. respondents representing those who have obtained land through restitution (emotional owners) or purchases (economic owners) põlva county, estonia 2006. questionnaire study. transfer of property important neither not important income from property (n = 166) restitution 37% 29% 34% purchase 45% 16% 29% access to wood (n = 195) restitution 71% 11% 18% purchase 61% 10% 29% access to arable land (n = 186) restitution 53% 10% 37% purchase 62% 12% 26% access to second home (n = 149) restitution 57% 8% 35% purchase 62% 16% 22% regain family property (n = 162) restitution 88% 6% 6% purchase 38% 6% 56% re-establish family connections (n = 151) restitution 77% 6% 17% purchase 34% 14% 52% table 13. income, place of residence and place relation among restituted and non-restituted landowners in põlva county, estonia 2006. questionnaire study. (n=234) transfer of property income from own forests living on the property placerelation restitution* 74% 50% 100% buying** 61% 28% 71% total (number) 241 234 234 * restitution also includes inheritances and gifts ** buying includes buying land on the market or at auction 108 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström numbers in 1944 and after 1991 applied to have their former property restituted (grubbström 2003). restitution in itself is – and has been – a relatively complicated process. if land cannot be returned because of destruction or city expansion, the claimed land must be compensated with land somewhere else. an additional problem is the relatively split ownership structure characterized by small lots. most forest properties are relatively small and the number of forest owners is quite high, which requires cooperation among the small-scale owners in order to maintain rational forestry. it is also conceivable that restitution has created a group of involuntary forest owners, which increase the probability of a worsened silviculture through a lack of genuine interest and knowledge. another consequence concerns the distance between the owner’s residence and the location of the forest property, which can have a negative impact on the actual property. the emotional motives or bonds to property are often stronger than the economic ones. in our survey the owner considers the economic returns from the property as being subjugated to the importance of place and a vertical support through generations. the owner is familiar with the land and finds the routes and paths, attends to the cultural and nature heritage, etc. to compensate for a public requirement of private land by replacing it with land located somewhere else is not always free from complications. while the economic losses can be compensated for, the emotional values are harder to both define and evaluate; it is hard to replace the affiliation with a certain sense of place with property located somewhere else. the results from our survey go in two directions. on the one hand, we find significant emotional bonds among those who bought land in comparison with landowners who received land through restitution. this does not imply that the emotional landowners are uninterested in monetary returns from their property. in fact, we cannot say how much of the restituted land that was sold or parcelled out for site leaseholds for second homes or for other purposes. however, it goes without saying that landowners starting with restituted property might have ambitions to expand their possession from buying neighbouring land. others claim to see additional incomes from tourism, hunting and fishing activities. an interesting aspect of emotional ownership is to what extent it can affect the supply of wood if the economic returns from modern rational forestry are subjugated to emotional ownership. thus, if large shares of forest owners are guided mainly by emotional bonds, it may affect estonian forestry in a negative way. this implies, on the one hand, that we may have an “emotional filter” linked to the ownership, which can aggravate the implementation of modern forestry methods. on the other hand, the emotional factor also enhances for the preservation of the rich forest biotope estonia developed during the soviet period when forestry was not a main economic activity. thus in the long-run there may appear restrictions on the supply of timber for the estonian forestry-based industry. it is possible that many small-scale land and forest owners, in order to meet the demands of the forest industry, either try to sell off their property or to establish efficient co-operation with other property holders. during the past ten years, huge efforts have been put into developing forest-based industry like modern sawmills furniture industries, wooden houses, etc. this rapid development within the forest industry sector has caused a growing demand for timber, which also has had an effect on imports, mainly from russia. thus, environmental concerns, efficiency in forestry and the possibility to meet demand can be regarded as signs of this development. in this context the emotional filter hypothesis functions as a supply barrier that can have both positive and negative effects. one of the positive effects is related to environmental pressures, especially when the demand is high and the forests are more likely to face environmental problems like over-logging and monocultivation. if the small-scale forest property structure is dominated or at least affected by emotional property concerns, it can have a protective effect on the forest resource as a whole, on the one hand. on the other hand, a small-scale forestry sector is not unique to estonia. sweden and finland are also closer to this property structure. however, in sweden and finland the context differs from the perspective of the market institutions. in both cases, producers’ cooperative associations are essential to both maintaining high productivity and reducing transaction costs. it is sometimes more important to be a property owner than to have economic gains from a property. this is in line with the “emotional filter hypothesis”, supported by, e.g., lidestav and nordfjell (2005) and mizaraite and mizaras (2005). however, lidestav and nordfjell (2005)also show fennia 186: 2 (2008) 109emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … that owners of restituted forests have more income from forestry than those who bought their properties on the open real-estate market. we would expect to find stronger economic motives among those who bought land on the market than we actually did, which makes some of this study’s findings a bit contradictory. but it is necessary to stress that the families’ ties to the place of property are much stronger among restituted landowners than among others. conclusions this study explores attitudes to forest property among forest owners in põlva county in southeast estonia. even though our survey only covers one county it is likely to expect the existence of similar attitudes to ownership in other counties due to the relative size of estonia and its historical property relations. it is however necessary to mention that there are profound differences in the demand for land, e.g. when comparing põlva county with the tallinn area and the coastal region. the historical settings and distance to population centres are some factors which affect land-use. in the coastal regions it is clear that there is a higher demand of land for second homes and recreation and in these regions the market demand affects both the price of land and job opportunities (grubbström 2003). however it is reasonable to believe that one general feature is constituted by the emotional ties to regained family property. thus the respondents in our survey provide specific understanding of land-use in present estonia, not least with regards to emotional bonds to property. the emotional filter hypothesis expressed by the owner’s ambition to maintain the regained family property and thereby recreating family history continuity – in which other land-uses than modern forestry, e.g. nature and nature preservation has a pronounced role – have formed the general idea of this study. the results of the study partly support the idea that the emotional bindings to the property are strong and may give a negative impact on felling volumes. while it is difficult from this study to foresee the importance of the price elastics among forest owners’ and their willingness to implement rational forest methods it is however clear that the restitution process has been important for forming symbolic meanings of the importance of individuals’ vertical place relation. around 50 % of the forest owners who regained land through restitution also live on the actual property. furthermore, all restituted owners have family connections to the actual area or property. this feeling of having regained land – to possess – is also more important than any other factor, such as getting more land for economic use. it is also clear that many of the regained owners of small forest properties seem to value the preservation of land higher than having economic returns from the property. the property holder in general regards the land as “safe” and many of them show very restricted intentions to turn towards commercial logging. one explanation may be that the properties are too small in order to create any significant contribution to the household economy. however, the market demand in the last years has also been somewhat exceptional. with regards to the construction boom, accompanied by significant exports of wood, this came to a halt in estonia in 2007. in a long-term context we need to consider that since the post-soviet property reforms began, a relatively short period has passed. writing in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008 and the expectations of several years of negative economic growth in estonia, parts of the emotional rationale seem to make more sense. today the relationship between emotional and economic motives for forest ownership is perhaps not only a matter of emotional links or possible earnings from wood, but in as much related to the short-term impact from a down-ward business cycle. at least with regards to illegal logging and general demand, the current market situation may provide us with different interpretations in the forthcoming years. this may imply that the emotional ownership not only will continue to remain important in the future but also perhaps enable for the estonian forests and forest owners to be better prepared for changes in demand in the years ahead. figure 3 is an attempt to summarize and present an overview of the factors affecting the emotional ties to forest property in our study. emotional ties can also be expressed as different approaches to place attachment. in nordic migration research, place attachment is used as one explanation for the obvious stability of residence among the nordic populations. most people do not move often. a majority of the nordic population remains settled in the same region throughout their life and those who once moved away are often inclined to return to their region of origin (stjernström 1998, garvill et al. 2002). in the context of the past fifteen years 110 fennia 186: 2 (2008)jörgensen hans and olof stjernström of transition and property reform there are certainly more motives than simply economic ones to consider in estonia. emotional ties, which to some extent can express the attachments established by previous generations, remain important. for many people it is also a strong symbolic action to reclaim the regained land that used to belong to their family. if emotional factors are important in the ownership of land and forests, one might suspect that the present small-scale owner structure may be inconsistent with rational forestry. the result in this study points in more than one direction. in other national contexts (finland and sweden), small-scale forestry has proven to be possible to combine with highly rational and productive forest industry development. in a forthcoming article, we will therefore explore and discuss the role and function of the producers’ co-operative associations for this development. the case of estonia will here be elucidated from the perspective of the relatively low impact of co-operative structures in the post-1991 development in relation to the important role held by the producers’ co-operative associations, foremost in agriculture, during the interwar independence. references aastaraamat mets (= yearbook forest) (2005). 175 p. metsakaitseja metsauuenduskeskus, tallinn. allardt e (1975). att ha, att älska, att vara: om välfärd i norden. 238 p. argos förlag, lund. commission of the european communities (2001). 2001 regular report on estonia’s progress towards accession. 108 p, brussels. dahlin c-g (1999). skogsbruket. in andré g (ed) baltikum i förvandling – jordbruk, skogsbruk, fiske, miljö, 101–140. the royal swedish academy of agriculture & forestry, hållsta entrikin, jn (1991). the betweeness of place: towards a geography of modernity. 196 p. macmillan education, basingstoke. fao (= food and agriculture organization of the united nations) (2000). state of forestry in the fig. 3. conceptual model of factors influencing emotional ties to a forest property fennia 186: 2 (2008) 111emotional links to forest ownership. restitution of land and … region: synthesis of national reports on forest policy and institutions. united nations, rome. garvill j, e lundholm, g malmberg & k westin (2002). nöjda så in i norden? – motiv och konsekvenser för dem som flyttat och stannat i de nordiska länderna. nord 2002: 6. 60 p. nordiska ministerrådet. copenhagen. grubbström a (2003). sillar och mullvadar, jordägande och etnicitet i estlands svenskbygder 1816–1939. geografiska regionstudier nr 55. 226 p. uppsala university. hain h & r ahas (2005). the structure and estimated extent of illegal forestry in estonia. international forest review 7: 2, 90–100. järvinen e, r toivonen, p kaimre (2003). the information and training needs of private forest owners in estonia. pellervo economic research institute working papers 61. 65 p. helsinki. jörgensen h (2004). continuity or not? family farming and agricultural transformation in 20th century estonia. 179 p. department of economic history, umeå university. jörgensen h (2006). the inter-war land reforms in estonia, finland and bulgaria: a comparative study. scandinavian economic history review 54: 1, 64–97. jörgensen h (2005). subsistence farming in re-independent estonia: expanded private plots! acta historica tallinnensia 9, 69–94. kuddo a (1996). aspects of the restitution1of property and land in estonia. in abrahams r (ed). after socialism – land reform and social change in eastern europe, 157–168. berghan, oxford, kuuba r (2001). changes in forest landscape in estonia. in mander ü, a printsmann & h palang (eds). development of european landscapes, 713–717. conference proceedings vol ii. iale european conference 2001. institute of geography, tartu kõll a-m (1994). peasants on the world market. agricultural experience of independent estonia 1919–39. 150 p. sbs no. 14, almquist & wiksell international, stockholm. kõll a-m (2003) tender wolves. identification and persecution of kulaks in viljandimaa 1940-49. in mertelsmann o (ed) the sovietization of the baltic states, 1940-1956, 127–149. kleio, tartu. lidestav g & t nordfjell (2005). a conceptual model for understanding social practices in family forestry. small-scale forest economics, management and policy 4: 4, 391–408. lindgren u, ö pettersson, b jansson & h nilsagård (2000). skogsbruket i den lokala ekonomin. rapport 4. 119 p. skogsstyrelsen, jönköping, lipping i (1980). land reform legislation in estonia and the disestablishment of the baltic-german rural elite 1919–39. 366 p. university of maryland, ann arbor michigan. maa-amet (estonian land board) (2007). <http:// www.maaamet.ee>. 10.04.2007. mizaraite d & s mizaras (2005). the formation of small-scale forestry in countries with economies in transition: observations from lithuania. smallscale forest economics, management and policy 4: 4, 437–450. north dc (1990). institutions, institutional change and economic performance. 152 p. cambridge university press, new york. petterson ö, u lindgren & b jansson (2002). forestry restructuring in northern sweden. in socio-economic dynamics in sparse regional structures. 29 p. gerum department of social and economic geography, umeå university. põllumajandus ministerium (ministry of agriculture, republic of estonia) (2007a). <http://www.agri. ee/eng/>. 01.06.2007. põllumajandus ministerium (ministry of agriculture, republic of estonia) (2007b). <http://www.agri. ee/eng/>. 11.06.2007. rabinowicz e & jfm swinnen (1997). political economy of privatization and decollectivization of central and eastern european agriculture: definitions, issues and methodology. in swinnen jfm (ed) political economy of agrarian reform in central and eastern europe, 1–32. ashgate, aldershot. relph e (1976). place and placelessness. 165 p. pion, london. riigikogu (the parliament of estonia). <http://www. riigikogu.ee>. 05.06.2007. roosmaa ü (1999). country report on the present environmental situation in agriculture – estonia. <http://www.fao.org/regional/seur/ceesa/estonia. htm>. 14.06.2006. stjernström, o (1998). flytta nära, långt borta. de sociala nätverkens betydelse för val av bostadsort. 199 p. gerum, department of social and economic geography, umeå university. toivonen r, e järvinen, k lindroos & a-k rämö (2005). the challenges of information service development for private forest owners: the estonian and finnish cases. small-scale forest economics, management and policy 4: 4, 451–470. tuan y-f (1974). topophilia. 260 p. columbia university press. prentice-hall, new jersey. unwin t (1997). agricultural restructuring and integrated rural development in estonia. journal of rural studies 13: 1, 93–112. widgren m (ed) (1995). äganderätten i lantbrukets historia. 174 p. nordiska muséets förlag, stockholm. book review: diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa64171 doi: 10.11143/fennia.64171 reflections: book review diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation pedro flores tenorio flores tenorio, pedro (2017). diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation. fennia 195: 1, pp. 118–120. issn 1798-5617. review of the book diagnosing wild species harvest: resourse use and conservation by salo, sirén & kalliola, elsevier academic press, london, 2014, pp. 479, isbn 9780123972040. pedro flores tenorio, la trobe university, melbourne, e-mail: p.florestenorio@ latrobe.edu.au diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation by matti salo, anders sirén and risto kalliola (2014) is an important and timely contribution: it aids both academics and practitioners in their understanding of non-timber forest production, where there is a significant lack of knowledge. with a holistic diagnosis of wild species harvest in the 21st century, it has both theoretical and applicable case study examples – mainly from the peruvian and equatorial amazon basin and from swedish and finnish forests. importantly, the focus of the book contradicts the majority of economic research on forests, which have tended to see the wild species harvest as a backwards sector. indeed, many look at the harvest in the wild as if it needs to be tamed, or replaced by a domestication of species, and going forward, the establishment of species with increasing productivity and economic benefits (reed 1997). however, due to the climate change, a growing interest in the identification of the traits of species in the wild has appeared, meaning the myopia of looking only for short-term profits is starting to seem more risky. investments to conserve the final remaining hectares of macadamia in the wild, in australia, are an example of this new interest in wild species harvest (anic 2014). in the first part of the book, the authors relay a history of the amazon, highlighting the myth of its virginity in the following way: by some 2000 years ago, many of the main amazonian rivers were already surrounded by large human settlements with dense populations, and these persisted up to the sixteenth century (salo et al. 2014, 47). this has a clear link to the sections that follow, identifying the borders between what the authors call ‘the wild’ and ‘not so wild’, and a section which characterises the brazil nut, a species that can live for over a thousand years, which because of its location, was originally thought to have been planted by indigenous communities. the second part of the book involves real stories from the amazon forest, written from the perspective of the authors’ own experiences, and academic and non-academic sources (salo et al. 2014, 41–222). here the authors focus upon the links between an ample choice of wild flora and fauna species harvested in the wild and their respective markets: international, national, or local. it is useful to read the stories first, because they provide a context to the theory that is applied later, to form a formal diagnosis of wild species harvest. in this section, we find interesting histories of wild species harvest from amazonia as a whole, such as, hunting the curassow (nothocrax urumutum), pacas (cuniculus paca), spider monkeys (ateles belzebuth), neotropical otters (lontra longicaudis) and tapir (tapirus terrestris) in ecuador; fishing in the amazon river and its tributaries in peru for black prochilodus (prochilodus nigricans), gamitana (colossoma macropomun), sabalo (brycon spp.), dorado (brachiplatystoma rousseauxii) and red-bellied pacu (piaractus brachypomus); and accounts of a turtle© 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 119pedro flores tenorio egg collection in the peruvian pacaya samiria national reserve from arrau turtles (pocdomenis expansa), the six-tubercled river turtle (pocdomenis sextuberculata) and the yellow-spotted river turtle (pocdomenis unifilis). in addition, the book touches upon forest legislation in peruvian amazonia and experiences with medicinal plants in ecuador. my own interest in diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation started back in 2008, when i visited the department of geography at the university of turku, finland, as part of a coimbra group scholarship for young latin-american lecturers. following this three-month scholarship, i published a paper in fennia about brazil nut harvesting in the peruvian amazonia, from the perspective of ecosystem services, with one of the authors of this book (see kalliola & flores 2011). as such, the book plays an important role in my own background analysis of wild species harvest, and the economics of old-growth forest conservation, with a particular emphasis upon brazil nuts. a real strength of this work is the way in which the authors succeed in illustrating, dissecting, and demonstrating what they have learnt from many years of ethnographic research, which includes insights from the ten year biodamaz (biodiversity of the peruvian amazon) project, in the peruvian amazon (ministry for foreign affairs of finland 2007). in this sense, the book serves as a basis for developing further projects and policies in the study areas that the book is concerned with. indeed, other projects, which inform diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation, have directly contributed to the conservation of the andean amazon, such as the initiative for conservation in the andean amazon, funded by usaid (usaid 2007). having worked on the ground as program coordinator for brazil nuts in the peruvian amazon with the ngo acca (asociación para la conservación de la cuenca amazónica), i consider that this daily conservationist work benefits from the experience and analysis of these projects, and through this book. indeed, perhaps the main contribution of the book is the development of the dwish (diagnosing wild species harvest) procedure. this procedure is especially good at dealing with management and planning if not applied as a recipe (salo et al. 2014, 394). it may be seen, as salo, sirén and kalliola (2014, 394) argue, as an iterative process that would ideally function as part of an adaptive management or governance cycle. for this reason, it should encourage design actions across different levels of governance and from a variety of public, private and third-sector stakeholders. the main questions in developing the steps of dwish are in its potential to improve economic and socio-cultural benefits, by changing the praxis of harvest and management. in turn, what impact this would have on the conservation of biodiversity and the state of the ecosystem. the contribution of this book is to provide an approach to manage this important task and to improve current databases, as the assessment of threats for biodiversity conservation in the wild is a challenge for different stakeholders in different countries. one example of this is actions for biodiversity conservation (abc) in australia (department of environment, land, water and planning of victoria-australia 2015). dwish has three steps: case definition, collecting information about the case, and explorative diagnostics of seven thematic perspectives. the first step defines the resource that is harvested in the wild, then defines the geographical area of interest, and finally, defines the main players in the focus of analysis. the second step highlights the importance of metadata, and the third step aims to include a balanced assessment of the updated information of seven thematic perspectives. this is discussed in part three, which emphasises the uniqueness of the case and its relatedness. it is the most extensive section of the book (salo et al. 2014, 223–388), and provides support for the dwish process based upon systematic work that covers the seven perspectives. these are: 1) resource dynamics behind the provision from nature, 2) management of resource systems, 3) governance shaping incentive structures, 4) costs and benefits weighed by harvesters, 5) knowledge for action and interaction, 6) spatiality in nature and society, and 7) legacies from the past and for the future. a reading guide with figures related to each perspective appears in the margins of the book. the authors also provide a good number of definitions for readers from different backgrounds, so they can start with a baseline in the conceptual framework, claims, hypothesis and diagnosis. among the large number of concepts defined are: harvest, wild, species, biological diversity, biodiversity, genetic diversity, ecosystem diversity, species diversity, species richness, evenness, effective number of species, alpha diversity, gamma diversity, beta diversity, species distribution, population density, ecosystem functions, ecosystem services, biological matter, natural resources, transactions with 120 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: book review nature, harvesters, sustainability of wild species harvest, sustainable development, resilience and social-ecological systems. this book, as such, arms its readers with the right questions, and provides a solid insight into harvest in the wild, especially with respect to challenges, diagnosis of problems on the ground, and how to build action plans that can be shared amongst public sector offices and private stakeholders. the dwish procedure specifically, which is extensively relayed in the book is a practical tool for use in academic discourse and for international agencies, national and local governments, and ngo practitioners. due to the academic background of the authors, there are plenty of useful spatial and biological definitions. however, there are perhaps a number of socio-economic concepts that could be addressed in a further study. for example, the book refers to a type of debt-bondage called ‘enabling’ in rural areas, which is not only greed but adaptation to a low-government presence, as such, the consideration of this practice as adaptation, can be controversial. while the harvest models are presented in a clear way, they do not include many references to game theory and spatial dynamics modelling. yet, these are minor details, in what is otherwise an indispensable and rigorously researched study on, diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation. references [anic] australian national industry council (2014) the nut industry in australia. <http://nutindustry. org.au/anic/industry-snapshots/australian-macadamias.asp>. 30.06.2014. department of environment, land, water and planning of victoria-australia (2015) actions for biodiversity conservation. <http://www.delwp.vic.gov.au/environment-and-wildlife/conservingthreatened-species-and-communities/actions-for-biodiversity-conservation>. 03.05.2017. kalliola, r. & flores, p.a. (2011) brazil nut harvesting in peruvian amazonia from the perspective of ecosystem services. fennia 189(2) 1–13. ministry for foreign affairs of finland (2007) biodamaz: more biodiversity, less poverty in peru. <http://formin.finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=80564&culture=fi-fi>. 04.04.2017. salo, m., sirén, a. & kalliola, r. (2014) diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation. 1st ed. elsevier academic press, london. reed, r. (1997) forest dwellers, forest protectors: indigenous models for international development. allyn and bacon, boston. usaid (2007) the initiative for conservation in the andean amazon. <http://www.amazonia-andina. org/en>. 03.04.2017. http://nutindustry.org.au/anic/industry-snapshots/australian-macadamias.asp http://nutindustry.org.au/anic/industry-snapshots/australian-macadamias.asp http://www.delwp.vic.gov.au/environment-and-wildlife/conserving-threatened-species-and-communities/a http://www.delwp.vic.gov.au/environment-and-wildlife/conserving-threatened-species-and-communities/a http://formin.finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=80564&culture=fi-fi http://www.amazonia-andina.org/en http://www.amazonia-andina.org/en the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa1024480 doi: 10.11143/fennia.102480 the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland janette huttunen and eerika albrecht huttunen, j. & albrecht, e. (2021) the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland. fennia 199(1) 46–60. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102480 the fridays for future (fff) movement is a major climate movement on a global scale, calling for systemic change and demanding politicians act on their responsibilities. in this paper, we present and analyze original findings from a case study on the fff movement in finland, at a watershed moment for young climate activism. we explore the representations of young people’s environmental citizenship within the framings of the fff movement, using an environmental citizenship framework analysis of the finnish news media and twitter discussions. we identified three frames within the media debate on the school strikes: the sustainable lifestyle frame, which focuses on the individual aspects of environmental citizenship, the active youth frame, which focuses on justifications of youth participation in politics, and the school attendance frame, which is concerned about the young people’s strike action. our results explore the many aspects of environmental citizenship that young people express in the fff movement. we reflect on the dominance of adult voices in the framing of this historic movement of young people for action on climate change. our analysis contributes to a step change in the study of this important global movement, which is shaping the emergence of young people as active citizens in finland and around the world. we argue that the fff movement is shaping young people’s perceptions of active citizenship, and we advocate a youth-centred focus on the collective action and justice demands of young people. keywords: fridays for future, youth participation, social movements, social media, environmental politics, environmental citizenship janette huttunen (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0683-9344), faculty of social sciences, business and economics, åbo akademi university, fänriksgatan 3 a, 20500 åbo, finland. e-mail: janette.huttunen@abo.fi eerika albrecht (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0094-623x), law school, university of eastern finland, yliopistokatu 2, 80100 joensuu, finland. e-mail: eerika. albrecht@uef.fi introduction in the fall of 2018, 15-year-old greta thunberg held a one-person climate strike outside the swedish parliament and started a new global climate movement called fridays for future (fff; www. fridaysforfuture.org). the fff movement, also referred to as the climate strike movement, is a grassroots environmental movement that uses protest tactics to demonstrate against the inadequate © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 47fennia 199(1) (2021) janette huttunen & eerika albrecht climate actions taken by politicians (ernman et al. 2020). the movement is historical in its scope and tactics as well as in its capability to mobilise young people in particular to participate (wahlström et al. 2019; de moor et al. 2020). millions of young people around the globe have joined the environmental movement in over 150 countries, and fff has been characterised as one of the most remarkable mass movements of our time (bowman 2019; hayward 2021, 3). its method consists of young people striking on fridays for climate. these climate strikes are organised weekly around the globe on a smaller scale as well as on a larger scale on specific international climate strike days, which attract considerable participation. in march 2019, the international fff climate strike mobilised over 1.6 million young people around the world (wahlström et al. 2019), and on september 27, 7.6 million took to the streets in 185 countries (de moor et al. 2020). in this article, we explore how the fff climate strikes were framed in media discussions in finland in 2019, both in the news and on social media. we focus on the phase during which the movement gained momentum and visibility, exploring the climate strikes of march 15 and september 27, 2019, which were the main events organised by young people in finland as part of the fff movement. the fff movement marks the emergence of a new generation of climate activists. according to studies, the movement mobilised a significant number of young first-time protesters, often female, through social media and peer networks (wahlström et al. 2019; de moor et al. 2020). young climate activists have broadened public discussion into a more encompassing moral debate on the rights and responsibilities of individuals and collectives to achieve a sustainable future that resonates with the concept of environmental citizenship (hayward 2021, 3–4). social media has acted as a platform to share information about the climate strike movement and mobilise young people into action (boulianne et al. 2020). research into the fff movement provides an opportunity to deepen our understanding of youth participation and the concept of environmental citizenship. in this context, by youth participation we mean the process of young people becoming actively engaged in different forms of political activities. according to the political scientist norris (2002, 16), political participation is “any dimension of activity that are either designed directly to influence government agencies and the policy process, or indirectly to impact civil society, or which attempts to alter systematic patterns of social behaviour”. we join scholars who have argued that young people are political actors and that their agency should be better recognised (e.g. pickard 2019; wood & kallio 2019). environmental citizenship, explored further in the next chapter, refers to the intersection of democracy and the environment, where citizens’ rights and responsibilities are critically important (dobson 2003; horton 2006). young people are channelling their climate anxiety into action through environmental citizenship, and their environmental citizenship comes into play in places of everyday life, such as school and spare time activities (albrecht et al. 2020; kallio et al. 2020; reis 2020). young people are not only educated on environmental and ecological politics by adults and institutions such as schools, they are also coactors and leaders in such politics (schindel dimick 2015; bowman 2019). their activity shapes the concept of environmental citizenship, and they are a social group that should be better recognised as environmental citizens (wood & kallio 2019, 11). thus, to deepen our understanding of environmental citizenship and the young, we examine the representations of the fff movement as an expression of environmental citizenship. our aim is to fill the knowledge gap on news media and social-media framings of the young climate strikers’ environmental citizenship. to achieve this, we conduct a frame analysis and explore how the climate strikes were framed in the news media and on twitter in finland in 2019. this article is structured as follows: first, the theoretical framework is presented, followed by the research design. next, the results are displayed, after which the discussion and conclusion are presented. youth participation and environmental citizenship many scholars have argued that young people’s views on politics and participation differ from those of older people (inglehart 1997; dalton 2008; chou 2017). in political science, it is often contended that young people are politically less active than older people in institutionalised forms of political participation – elections and political parties – but politically active in a variety of ways outside the conventional forms of political engagement, such as ecological consumption, protest or online 48 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) activism (dalton 2008; chou 2017; grasso et al. 2018; pickard 2019). changes in societies have transformed expectations and attitudes regarding political participation across generations: higher educational levels and citizens’ increasing cognitive capabilities have led to greater demand for different types of participatory options from the traditional ones (inglehart 1997; dalton 2007). especially more direct forms of political engagement have gained popularity amongst younger generations. for example, young people engage in a range of single-issue movements and participate in a more cause-oriented way, in which the political cause determines the forms of participation (dalton 2008; chou 2017; pickard 2019). in the context of environmental movements, in addition to increasing material well-being, new technology and media forms have emerged, facilitating environmentalism with greater speed and on a larger scale than traditional forms of social movements (caren et al. 2020). the fff movement has successfully mobilised young people around the globe (wahlström et al. 2019; de moor et al. 2020), and the movement challenges the ways we think about youth participation. young people are actively shaping political action on climate change through school strikes on fridays to motivate action against climate change and by using social media while protesting (boulianne et al. 2020). in addition to youth participation, we draw from dobson’s (2003, 5) concept of environmental citizenship, defined as the “ecological politics of everyday life”. environmental citizenship broadens citizen participation in ecological politics beyond nation states to global citizenship (dobson 2003; bang 2005; bowman 2019). according to dobson (2007), this non-territorial form of citizenship develops in the cultural and social spaces of environmentalism. cao (2015, 2) argued that ecological politics can radically transform what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century. the 21st-century environmental movement is characterised by single-issue-oriented causes and lifestyle politics (portwood-stacer 2012). in this regard, it is relevant to study the individual and collective aspects of environmental citizenship. giddens (1991) and bauman (2013), for example, have conceptualised the relationship between individual and collective in late modernity and noted how individuals have varying abilities to make lifestyle choices and how individualisation corrodes citizenship. here, we focus on citizenship in the form of acts and processes rather than status (huttunen et al. 2020, 196). this notion has been conceptualised in three ways. first, environmental citizenship has been conceptualised as an individualised project of a sustainable lifestyle (horton 2006; wood & kallio 2019), which deals with an individual’s relationship towards the common good in environmental issues. this notion is embedded in private lifestyle choices and consumption – how citizens recycle, buy ecological products, eat vegan food and refrain from using excess plastic. environmental citizens practice these lifestyle choices because they trust that these actions will have public consequences and that acting in an environmentally sustainable way is their duty not as citizens of a nation state but as part of a global environmental movement (dobson 2003, 2007; neuteleers 2010). individual lifestyle choices, for example switching off lights, saving water, improving energy efficiency and recycling, are rewarded as green behaviour. second, within green political theory, environmental citizenship has been considered to be citizens’ participation and involvement in environmental decision-making (dobson & bell 2006; hobson 2013; vihersalo 2017; wood & kallio 2019). this highlights the point that individual actions alone are insufficient to address environmental issues (dobson & bell 2006; hobson 2013). a focus on ecological consumption may be depoliticising, and even social movements that build on the politicisation of everyday life choices focus increasingly on building collective politics that aim to foster social change through everyday practices (schlosberg 2019). besides participating in the fff movement, young climate activists sign petitions on social media and join campaigns and boycotts that aim to shift the political and economic system away from fossil fuel dependency (o’brien et al. 2018, 1, 5). their demands are connected to a broader critique of political and economic models that emphasise economic growth (d’alisa et al. 2015; escobar 2015). environmental citizens are motivated into action through collective responsibility towards the environment. they act towards the common good, use protest tactics and participate in public debate that crosses territorial borders (horton 2006, 128; dobson 2007). third, environmental citizenship has been linked to environmental justice demands (dobson 2007). the term “environmental justice” refers to an approach to environmentalism in which concepts like self-determination, access to resources, autonomy, fairness, and justice are central (bowman 2020). 49fennia 199(1) (2021) janette huttunen & eerika albrecht early environmental justice studies mainly focused on communities of colour in the us (bullard 2000; kojola & pellow 2021), as environmental impacts target different communities in different ways. particular communities, such as people of colour, indigenous groups, people living in developing countries and rural citizens, are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, the lack of clean air and extractive activities (schlosberg 1999; holifield 2001; martinez-alier 2002; horton 2006, 128; bowman 2020). environmental justice is a question of global inequality and therefore a matter of environmental racism (holifield 2001; bowman 2020). it is also about empowerment: communities that are harmed by the impacts of environmental destruction demand an end to the systems that harm them in their quest for profit. in climate activism, the justice dimension is linked to climate justice (gardiner 2011; schlosberg & collins 2014), with demands to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, support for a just transition to clean energy, demands for climate leadership and promotion of participation. climate change further exacerbates the deep social, geographical, economic, and intergenerational inequalities that already exist (walker 2020). climate change results in structural violence, as it disproportionately affects those who have contributed less to the problem on a global scale (sanson & burke 2020). intergenerational justice becomes an important concept in climate justice, as climate change – with its substantial risks to health, food security, water availability, housing, agriculture, and natural ecosystems – impacts younger generations more than older generations (albrecht et al. 2020; sanson & burke 2020). the most severely affected by the impacts of climate change will be children in developing countries and those yet to be born (sanson & burke 2020). environmental citizenship is thus a question not only of individual lifestyle or political activism, but also of global equality and intergenerational justice. questions of justice and inequality are also essential in the context of the fff movement. the climate movement uses school strikes as their form of protest; thus, participation in the movement becomes a question of the privilege of getting an education and therefore being able to miss school – an opportunity of which millions of children around the globe are deprived (walker 2020). media analysis of the fff movement in finland finland as a case study the fff movement has mobilised people all over the globe. this study takes a single-country approach and focuses on the movement’s framings in one country, finland, to which the climate strike movement spread in the early stages. on october 20, 2018, a climate march was first organised in helsinki. the event gathered 8,000 participants to listen to the fff movement’s leading figure greta, thunberg (mäkinen 2018), which launched the fff movement in finland. in 2019, several climate strikes were held in over 20 cities and municipalities (koivisto & nelskylä 2019; koskinen 2019), the largest demonstrations being the global climate strikes held on march 15 and september 27, 2019. in the analysis, we refer to these large strikes as “spring” and “fall”. the fff movement has been meaningful in finland from the perspective of youth participation, as it has been capable of mobilising young people into action in a country where the young are typically traditional in their political engagement (myllyniemi 2014). additionally, past environmental movements have failed to mobilise a great number of people for demonstrations in finland, as the existing environmental administration and regulation have arguably reduced the need to protest (konttinen et al. 1999; albrecht 2018). therefore, the fff movement is also meaningful in finland from the point of view of the environmental movement. to explore environmental citizenship within the finnish fff movement, we use material from newspapers and the social media platform twitter. with these two sources, we gain a comprehensive picture of how the movement was framed in finland in 2019. all direct quotes have been translated from finnish or swedish. to protect the identity of twitter users, we do not use direct quotations from twitter. the newspaper material was collected from helsingin sanomat (hs), which is a liberally oriented independent daily newspaper with the largest circulation in finland, and from yle, finland’s national public broadcasting company. the news materials were collected in an online format using the 50 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) search word ilmastolakko (climate strike). in addition, the search terms koululakko (school strike) and ilmastomielenosoitus (climate demonstration) were used. the first news items found with the search word ilmastolakko were from january 10, and the other search terms made the selection of articles more complete, with articles on the 2018 climate demonstration. the search resulted in 195 articles altogether (66 in hs and 129 in yle), of which we selected those that focused on the key events (the two international climate strikes) and persons in the year 2019. the newspaper material used in this article consists of 71 articles in total (27 in hs and 44 in yle). twitter is a social media platform where people can express their views in 280-character microblogs known as tweets. through the use of hashtags, which are labels for content that help others find content on the same topic, discussions can be organised around specific topics, which allows twitter users to contribute to the broader discussions occurring under that tag. social media has played a significant role as an interactive forum mobilising the young into action (reis 2020), and people around the globe have made use of several hashtags in relation to the fff movement, such as #climatestrike and #fridaysforfuture (boulianne et al. 2020). using such hashtags, the fff movement has been capable of spreading its message while inviting others to discussions about climate change. twitter has been criticised as being an elitist social media platform, as it is frequently used by political and business elites (blank 2017). however, it has been an important platform for many social movements, from arab spring to occupy (barrons 2012; wang & caskey 2016), and continues to be a place where social movements can spread their message, create a community and mobilise people (wang & caskey 2016). in june 2020, we collected tweets carrying the hashtag #ilmastolakko (finnish, “climate strike” in the majority language) from the two international climate strike days, march 15 and september 27, 2019. the data consist of 3,858 tweets – 2,023 from march 15 and 1,835 from september 27 – all of which were publicly available and original. the analysed material consists only of these tweets and does not include descriptive information of the authors of the tweets. to follow the ethical research guidelines of the finnish national board on research integrity, tenk, we do not use direct quotations from tweets in the analysis. twitter data inevitably include personal information, as tweets are often accompanied by a person’s real name, picture or identifiable username. twitter data is openly available; thus, direct quotations inevitably diminish the subject’s anonymity, the preservation of which is an important principle in research ethics in human sciences. frame analysis this article is based on the method of frame analysis, which was introduced to the social sciences by goffman (1974) and is used in the analysis of social movements (johnston 2002). frames encourage specific interpretive lenses derived from existing narratives and traditions (allen 2017) and organise information drawn from real experiences (goffman 1974, 47). the frames identified in the literature of social movements are composed of meanings, metaphors and narratives that are developed for strategic purposes, as they reflect policy positions (tynkkynen 2010; van hulst & yanow 2016). framing includes naming, selecting, storytelling, sense making and categorising (van hulst & yanow 2016). it is an analytic process by which “ordinary people make sense of public issues” (benford 1994, 1103). we use frame analysis to make sense of how the news media, as well as people on social media, understand, view, and make sense of the school strike movement and the climate strikes. we draw from the active selection of frames (entman 1993) used in media studies. in our work, frames support the exploration of environmental citizenship, and we focus our analysis on 1) sustainable lifestyle, 2) active youth and 3) school attendance. these three frames are derived from the literature review and capture three different elements of environmental citizenship. the “sustainable lifestyle” frame captures the individualised lifestyle aspects of environmental citizenship; the “active youth” frame captures the fff movement’s message on collective action and is built on the active citizenship elements of environmental citizenship; and the “school attendance” frame captures the justifications for striking and the prominent debate on school attendance. in addition, we examine positive and negative reactions towards the movement on twitter. 51fennia 199(1) (2021) janette huttunen & eerika albrecht varying representations of environmental citizenship in the finnish fff movement the sustainable lifestyle frame the sustainable lifestyle frame was mostly visible on twitter. in the spring, the number of tweets focusing on individual lifestyle choices, marking the sustainable lifestyle frame, was smaller than in the fall (discussed below). in the spring, individual lifestyle choices for environmental protection were discussed mostly in tweets on the climate strikes that had a negative tone, in which people called on the young strikers to make more concrete ecological lifestyle choices before engaging in strike actions. these ranged from cleaning up after themselves in fast food restaurants to refraining from buying new clothes. in many cases, people were critical, ridiculing the young who participated in the climate strikes for their alleged bad environmental choices, such as driving a moped, contributing to food waste in schools because of the strike, or using a chinese cell phone, which were seen as unecological lifestyle choices. the tweeters ridiculed the young climate strikers for their climate strike efforts by explaining that the strikers were hypocritical for demanding climate actions while making unecological choices in their everyday lives. lifestyle choices were not only seen as a possible way to create political change, but rather as something that the young fff participants should do if they wanted to affect climate change – or something they should do before they could even have a say in more traditional arenas of politics. the choices were also featured in tweets providing people with guidance on the kinds of lifestyle choices that could and should be made to save the environment. these tweets suggested, for example, taking diet, production of electricity, public transport, food waste, and recycling into consideration. an adult voice was prominent in such tweets, since they were not written to peers or to “us” (e.g. “we should…”), but rather from an outside standpoint and targeted to the young (“the young should…”, “young people’s best action would be…”, “i listened to the young in the tram and…”). it appears that the sustainable lifestyle politics aspect of environmental citizenship was more visible in the finnish news media and twitter during the climate strike in september. in the news media, the sustainable lifestyle frame was visible in the political demands for a fossil-free and climateneutral society, but also in young people’s open-mic speeches, in which they encouraged each other to use bicycles, eat vegetarian food, and make green consumer choices (sirén et al. 2019). in the fall, the discussions on twitter were largely focused on the individual elements of environmental protection. on twitter, the responsibility to perform environmental actions was placed on individuals, as twitter users provided guidance to others on how to make more sustainable and greener lifestyle choices. however, the tone of the fall was different from that of the spring, as instead of being offered with a condescending tone, the guidance on individual lifestyle choices was given in a more positive, encouraging way. in addition, people listed the personal choices they had made in the name of environmental protection. a prominent subcategory of tweets (prominence measured by the number of similar types of tweets that were sent with the hashtag #ilmastolakko on the day) came from people who could not attend the climate strike but listed the ways in which they were participating: by making choices in their everyday life, either permanently or during the climate strike day, to lead a more environmentally conscious life. these types of choices included working remotely, eating a vegetarian lunch, and donating money to environmental organisations. the active youth frame the climate strike movement in finland was often framed as consisting of active young people whose aim was to convince decision-makers of the urgency of climate action. in the news media, young people took an active role in the fff movement, even when faced with opposition from adults, which was visible in the reactions to the protesters who were not attending school as their form of protest. even before the international climate strikes, three pupils of a swedish-speaking upper secondary school in kauniainen were organising a climate strike in front of the finnish parliament on friday, january 11, 2019 (vuorio 2019). the active pupils situated the finnish school strikes as part of the broader fff movement. “what do we want, climate action. when do we want it, now” and “with greta! 52 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) we stand with greta!” were the slogans of this january 11 strike (takala 2019). during the first international climate strike in finland on march 15, about 3,000 young people participated in the demonstrations in front of the finnish parliament (onali 2019). in addition to the main event in the capital helsinki, the climate strikes were organised in 27 towns and municipalities across finland (koskinen 2019). the newspaper articles covered topics from profiles of the organisers of the demonstrations to young people painting banners at school. the topic of young people’s political participation, active citizenship and political activity were also discussed on twitter in connection with the climate strike in march. three broader perspectives regarding youth participation and political engagement could be detected from the discussions in the spring. first, the strike was seen as an excellent opportunity for children to learn about political participation. people called on schools to take responsibility for encouraging students to participate, to offer them this learning opportunity in democracy and participation. instead of seeing the young strikers as citizens with political influence and the right to affect their future, these strikers were seen as citizens-to-be – people who should learn about the political system now and then be able to use that knowledge later in life by voting and taking part in other societal activities. many of the strikers were not only young but actual children, which may explain this reaction, as children’s political participation and citizenship are often seen as delayed acts, and the role of school is seen “to provide people for their future participation as citizens” (wood & kallio 2019, 14). the second perspective in the discussion about youth participation was the acknowledgement that the right to strike was a basic right – people were informing others of this notion and supporting the young people who were invoking their constitutional right to strike. this perspective was supported by, for example, the ombudsman for children. in the third perspective, focus and visibility were brought to the fact that the young strikers’ means for political influence were restricted, as many of the fff participants are not only young, but minors without the opportunity to participate in political life as full citizens, as they do not have the right to vote. therefore, striking was one of their few means to voice their opinions and influence political decision-making. despite the strong perspectives regarding the role of schools and learning, young people’s citizenship and right to affect politics did manifest themselves in the discussions. in the discussions about youth participation, an adult voice was again present. on twitter, the discussion was not about young people’s voices directly asking for more opportunities for political participation for themselves; rather, people tweeted about the importance of providing young people with this learning experience on democracy and political participation from an outsider’s perspective – instead of asking for more opportunities for “us” or “me”, the tweets talked about “youth” and “children” as “they”. some examples of these types of tweets are “let’s give the young a change to make a difference”, “encourage the young to participate in political discussions”, “children have a right to strike”, and “today students did what education aims for, let’s be proud of them”. in the climate strike on september 27 (sirén et al. 2019), young people demanded support from adults to convey the message “we have to act now” to decision-makers. “instead of single choices, it is more important to influence politics”, said one of the young strikers interviewed by sirén (2019). in an interview with yle, a finnish climate activist stated that the message of the global climate strike is “we, young people, have held enough strikes; now it is time for you adults to demonstrate and tell the policymakers that we have to act now” (tola 2019). as a response to the young climate strikes, finnish political leaders invited them to a discussion to show support for the movement. according to vainio (2019), the minister of education, li anderson, stated that the active citizenship of young people is part of the finnish educational curriculum. however, she said that the timescale of legislative drafting might differ from the young people’s expectations regarding their timeline for change. on twitter, this active youth frame was not visible in the discussion in the fall. the topic of the children’s right, or lack thereof, to strike and be politically active was relatively absent from the twitter discussions, with only a couple of tweets on the whole topic being posted. the voices discussing youth participation and young people’s role as active citizens diminished, as the discussion had a different focus than in the spring. 53fennia 199(1) (2021) janette huttunen & eerika albrecht the school attendance frame from our analysis, it appears that the climate strike movement was framed in the finnish news media as a discussion about compulsory school attendance. most schools allowed participation in the protests; however, students under 18 years of age needed written permission from their parents to participate in the strikes. the national board of education stated that students have the freedom of speech, but it does not mean that they can freely be absent from school (ervasti & rajamäki 2019). an upper secondary school pupil interviewed by grönholm (2019) said, “i think it is wrong if young people are not allowed to participate”. in addition, the young climate strikers interpreted this media debate on school attendance as an attempt to control them and intervene while they were practicing their right to demonstrate (huotari 2019). through this debate, the public’s attention was distracted from the young people’s demand for systemic change and climate action. despite the fact that the organisers of the school strikes were the ones who were interviewed by the newspapers, in these media discourses, an adult voice was dominant. only about one third of the articles (12 (33%) in helsingin sanomat and 20 (34%) in yle news) had a youth voice. in the news media coverage, the adult voice argued that young people’s right to strike had to be weighed against their obligation to participate in compulsory education. most commonly, a headmaster of an upper secondary school or another expert on educational matters was interviewed. there was less room for the youth voice and young people’s views on environmental citizenship in the news media. similarly to in the newspaper material, the topic of attending school on the climate strike day also evoked discussion on twitter. however, the topic was debated only in the spring, and then mostly in support of the school strike. only a few voices, making up fewer than twenty tweets, conveyed direct worry and questioned whether missing school was the best way to influence politics. strike actions were considered to be about influencing politics, not a form of politics themselves. these voices expressed the opinion that children should not have to be striking in the first place, or they were sceptical about whether a school strike actually has any effect. further, they suggested that the event should have been organised in a different way: instead of a school strike, there should have been, for example, an event for all students at school regarding climate change. the majority of the discussion on school attendance on twitter consisted of adults defending children’s right to strike and miss school for this type of cause. the defence for school strikes was rooted in democracy education, since the ideas that schools should teach children about active citizenship and that strikes are a way to learn about active citizenship were used as justifications. in the fall, the topic of attending school was not the subject of intense debate on twitter, as the strike had become more established; there was no need for discussion surrounding the justification of striking and attending a protest. in the fall, the topic of school attendance was mentioned by the city of helsinki, when the city announced that the strike was part of the curriculum. the school attendance frame was therefore less visible on twitter than in the news media. instead of discussions on school strikes, different societal actors – such as private companies, churches, foundations, organisations, museums, and theatres – actively participated in the discussions on twitter in the fall. the discussions surrounding the strike in the fall thus had a more commercial tone, and different organisations used the hashtag #ilmastolakko to promote their own activities. many employees actively highlighted the way their employers handled the climate strike day – offering, for example, a workshop on climate issues for employees. reactions on twitter in 2019, the climate strikes were framed mostly as a positive phenomenon by the majority of the reactions on twitter. in the spring, only 153 (7.56%) of the 2,023 tweets, and in the fall, only 133 (7.25%) out of 1,835, were interpreted as negative reactions to the climate strikes. the rest of the tweets were interpreted as positive reactions, as they were supportive of climate actions, the movement and its goals. we find that the identification of the scope of positive reactions is important, as the movement is often seen as being largely opposed by adults. the positive reactions were diverse: some shared pictures from the strike with the movements’ slogans, some merely stated that 54 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) they were participating in the strike, and others sent out more enthusiastically positive tweets, in which they praised and celebrated the people striking. in the spring, the majority of the positive tweets enthusiastically encouraged and supported the movement and the climate strike. declarations such as “go youth!” and “i support the movement” were common as well as pictures of the strike posted as evidence that the twitter user had participated in and witnessed the event. tweets were characterised by excitement and optimism, in which people cheered the young on or used heart emojis. in the spring, one topic that surfaced was pride – how proud people were of the young climate strikers. this feeling of pride was accompanied by descriptions of emotions, as the tweeters frequently tweeted about what they felt from seeing the strikes and strikers: how the strike made people “tear up”, “gave them chills” or made them “choke up”, and how seeing the young gather in such masses made them feel hopeful about the future. nostalgia in support of the current fff strikers was also visibly present: twitter users both described their own journey in environmentalism in their youth and compared it to the broader climate strike movement of today. alternatively, they listed the lesser reasons they skipped school (lintsata), as they themselves referred to it, in their youth, in defence of the young climate strikers who participated in the strikes despite objections from their school or other adults. in the fall, the tone was much more matter-of-fact. people shared information about the strikes, pictures of themselves on strike and calls for action by telling others that there was room for participation and asking other adults to join the strikes. the focus was on adults, as tweets asked adults to join and adults to show support and stated that it was the adults’ turn to do their part. more focus was also placed on specific policy areas and actual policies, such as energy production with the use of peat (a debated form of energy production). to provide a comprehensive picture of how the climate strikes were framed, we also focused on the negative tweets. however, their meaning should not be overemphasised, as they made up only 7.56 and 7.25% of all tweets. the negative tweets ranged from defiance towards environmentalism (people, for example, declared how much they would be eating red meat and driving their cars as a response to the climate strike) to racism (people wrote, for example, that refugees were the reason for finland’s environmental issues). in the spring, a large part of the negative reactions repeated the sentiments that children should not be used in politics (children were seen as being used in the climate strike politics by political forces). in addition, school strikes were seen as the wrong way to influence this political question, as children should not miss school for any reason, or children should first perform actions that are more concrete in order to be eligible to participate in a climate strike. here, we also identify the school attendance frame in twitter discussions. in the fall, similar sentiments were repeated, alongside a new type of negative reaction, which was criticism of politicians, especially of the governing parties – in particular, the green party – ignited by their participation in the strike. the discussion focused on the role of politicians and on whether the children participating in the strike were capable of understanding the politicians’ double role when governmental actors were protesting against their own government. one important notion from the discussion on twitter was that despite the fff being a movement for the young, the discussions online were not youth-centred: the voice used in discussions was what we here call an adult voice. the adult voice was present in all types of tweets and reactions. in the negative reactions, the adult voice took the form of a condescending and mocking tone targeted at the young. some examples of this are “it would be nice to know how many skipping school today actually worry about the climate”, “wonder how many adults were needed to organise the children’s climate strike”, “the younglings” [nuorisolaiset], and “seems like there is a day off school”. in the positive reactions, examples of the repeated adult voice include “full support for the young”, “the young are not spoiled”, “the future is in the young”, “we adults”, and “our responsibility as adults”. individualised lifestyle choices and a dominant adult voice our analysis shows that in the finnish fff movement, the representations of environmental citizenship vary with focus both on its individual and collective elements, whereas the individual aspects in the form of lifestyle politics are emphasised in the framings of the movement. exploring the framings of the movement also reveals a dominant adult voice in the discussions. 55fennia 199(1) (2021) janette huttunen & eerika albrecht the frames varied with time and different media as the movement became more established. the news media differed from discussions on twitter. during the course of the year, the discussions went from debating children’s right to strike and the importance of attending school, with strong emotional support from adults for the movement displayed in the spring, to highlighting the individual choices and actions of different societal actors, including actual policies in the fall. as the year and movement progressed, there was greater focus on actual solutions, both in the form of actual policies and lifestyle choices embedded in environmental citizenship. the shift in framings can be interpreted as changes in the societal context where the movement operates. this includes both how justified the movement and its actions were perceived to be – and therefore how much debate about the methods used by the movement was needed – and how the movement was able to bring climate change to the forefront of political discussion, transforming the focus in discussions to actual solutions. this is an example of how young people are not only passively learning to become environmental citizens; they are also shaping environmental citizenship through their own activity (e.g. bowman 2019; albrecht et al. 2020), since their activity affects how environmental issues and responsibilities are perceived. we revealed that despite the dominance of the discussion on school attendance, especially in the news media, the fff movement in finland was framed through sustainable lifestyle choices, especially on twitter. the movement was also framed through young people’s political activism through participation and demands for adults and decision-makers to act now. the activists in the fff movement are not only young; many of them are minors who lack the right to vote and thus do not have full formal citizenship in a nation state. lifestyle politics (e.g. chou 2017; pickard 2019) are some of the only ways in which they can display their political engagement; thus, it might not be surprising that more focus was put on the forms of participation accessible to the young. theories also explain that lifestyle choices are made and encouraged out of a belief that such actions have public consequences (dobson 2003, 2007; neuteleers 2010). this guidance and focus on individualised choices may be well intentioned, springing from a desire to encourage sustainable lifestyles to tackle climate crisis. however, when the framings of a movement based specifically on the idea of collective action and demanding action from decisionmakers is once again met by focusing on the individual, this might be disappointing to the young participants. if the focus stays on the politicisation of everyday life (schlosberg 2019), it can take away attention from changes that are needed in actual policies. theories that focus on more collective elements of environmental citizenship note that individual actions are not sufficient in addressing environmental issues (dobson & bell 2006; hobson 2013); thus, there is a need for collective actions and focus on politics. the fff movement has strengthened the image of young people, especially young women, as leaders in ecological politics. greta thunberg, the leading figure of the fff movement, is often portrayed in discussions with global “adult” leaders, and familiarity with thunberg encourages people to engage in collective action in the fight against climate change (sabherwal et al. 2021). the fff movement’s message has been heavily focused on the collective manner in which the fight against climate change should be carried out, as well as placing the responsibility to act on politicians instead of individual citizens. the movement’s complex relationship with politicians, the strikers’ profound scepticism about the efficacy of asking politicians to make decisions, and even the movement’s activists’ calls for systemic, political and social, change have been at the forefront of many studies conducted on the movement (see o’brien et al. 2018; bowman 2019; pickard et al. 2020). however, in the framings of the finnish fff movement, the political demands for systemic change did not take centre stage. our analysis suggests that this is at least partly due to the dominance of an adult voice. in addition to exploring the three frames, our major findings are the dominance of positive reactions on twitter as well as the prevalence of an adult voice in the discussions. despite the fact that the young have taken the most central role in the climate strikes, their experiences did not take centre stage in the various framings of the movement. this might be due to the adult-centric nature of these media outlets, whereas the young use other channels, such as instagram or tiktok. the adult voice was mostly positive and encouraging of the strikes, which is an important observation, since in the news media, adults are often represented as being concerned about children not attending school. 56 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) the positive reactions are important for the movement, since as walker (2020) suggests, the environmental activism of young people cannot take place without supportive action from adults, and the young climate strikers call for adults to respond to environmental problems that cannot be solved by the young people’s individual capacities. thus, the dominance of an adult voice can be a response to the movement’s desire for more adult participation, and it can support the development of young people’s environmental citizenship (hayward 2021, 6). however, the dominance of an adult voice in the media coverage of the movement can be disempowering if it undermines the young protesters. one study from germany (von zabern & tulloch 2021) suggested that media coverage tends to reproduce existing power structures by depoliticising the fff movement’s agenda and demands, reducing the protesters’ voice to apolitical testimonies and framing the young as exploited by an adult agenda. through exclusionary social practices of childhood, embedded in innocence (e.g. garlen 2019), even well-meaning adults may contribute to the undermining of young people’s political agency in their attempt to protect the children from adult responsibilities. it is possible that even a largely positive adult voice can depoliticise young people’s agendas. the dominance of an adult voice may shift the focus away from the young protestors’ demands, and even supportive messages can contribute to the disempowerment of the young: the finnish climate strikes were often seen as an opportunity for the young to learn about politics instead of as political acts in themselves. the effect of the dominance of an adult voice on the political agency of the young, along with the notion that the finnish fff activists’ demands did not take centre stage in the framings of the fff movement, provides interesting sources for further studies. another source for future studies could be the third dimension of environmental citizenship – environmental justice – which was visible only narrowly through its intergenerational aspects in our material. the fff movement is globally connected to the environmental justice movement with demands for climate justice and intergenerational justice (sanson & burke 2020; walker 2020; von zabern & tulloch 2021), as well as global justice, since climate change will disproportionately harm those who have contributed less to the problem (sanson & burke 2020). in a privileged northern european country like finland, the discussions surrounding school strikers are most likely to embody a different tone, since all children are provided with the opportunity to attend school, an essential element when the movement uses school strikes as their form of protest, than in other contexts. in future studies on environmental citizenship, a focus on the justice dimension could provide insights into the unbalanced power structures of the fff movement, as well as deepen our understanding of the role of intergenerational justice within the fff movement. conclusion in this article, we explored the representations of the fff movement as an expression of environmental citizenship. we focused on discussions surrounding the two large climate strikes held in 2019 and explored the discussions both in finnish news media and on twitter. we revealed three frames – the sustainable lifestyle, active youth and school attendance frames – and analysed the positive and negative reactions to the movement on twitter. our results suggest that in finland, the fff movement is an expression of different aspects of environmental citizenship, as it has been framed in various ways through dimensions focused on the movements’ individual elements and on collective political action. our study is limited to exploring the representations of environmental citizenship in the framing of the fff movement only in news media and on twitter in one country. the young climate activists have shifted the public debate remarkably with their demands that politicians no longer remain silent about the urgency of climate change (hayward 2021, 3). our central findings show that to empower the movement and its young activists, young people’s voices should be better represented in the news media and twitter, and they should be heard more in the discussions surrounding the movement. despite the fff movement being a youth-centred movement – by the young and for the young – an adult voice is dominant in the discussions surrounding the movement. for the young participants in the fff movement, this experience has shaped their identity, their emergence as active citizens and their perceptions of active citizenship. 57fennia 199(1) (2021) janette huttunen & eerika albrecht acknowledgements this work was supported by “all youth want to rule their world 2018–2023” research project of strategic research council of the academy of finland (no. 312689 and 326604). references albrecht, e. (2018) peatland politics in finland – local movements, deliberative environmental governance, and arguments. dissertations in social sciences and business studies no 177. university of eastern finland, joensuu. https://erepo.uef.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/20140/urn_isbn_978-952-61-2876-4.pdf albrecht, e., tokola, n., leppäkoski, e., sinkkonen, j., mustalahti, i., ratamäki, o. & viljanen, j. (2020) nuorten ilmastohuoli ja ympäristökansalaisuuden muotoutuminen [youth climate concern and formation of environmental citizenship]. in pekkarinen, e. & tuukkanen, t. (eds.) maapallon tulevaisuus ja lapsen oikeudet. lapsiasiavaltuutetun toimiston julkaisuja, 99–110 hansaprint, turenki. allen, m. (2017) the sage encyclopedia of communication research methods (vol. 1–4). sage publications, thousand oaks, ca. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483381411 bang, h. (2005) among everyday makers and expert citizens. in newman, j. (eds.) remaking governance: people, politics and public sphere. the policy press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt9qgqrt.14 barrons, g. (2012) ‘suleiman: mubarak decided to step down #egypt #jan25 oh my god’: examining the use of social media in the 2011 egyptian revolution. contemporary arab affairs 5(1) 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/17550912.2012.645669 bauman, z. (2013) liquid modernity. polity press, cambridge. benford, r. d. (1994) review of talking politics, by william a. gamson. american journal of sociology 99(4) 1103–1104. https://doi.org/10.1086/230383 blank, g. (2017) the digital divide among twitter users and its implications for social research. social science computer review 35(6) 679–697. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439316671698 boulianne, s., lalancette, m. & ilkiw, d. (2020) “school strike 4 climate”: social media and the international youth protest on climate change. media and communication 8(2) 208–218. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i2.2768 bowman, b. (2019) imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research. fennia 197(2) 295–305. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.85151 bowman, b. (2020) ‘they don’t quite understand the importance of what we’re doing today’: the young people’s climate strikes as subaltern activism. sustainable earth 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42055-020-00038-x bullard, r. d. (2000) dumping in dixie: race, class, and environmental quality. 3rd ed. westview press, boulder. cao, b. (2015) environment and citizenship. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203084335 caren, n., andrews, k. t. & lu, t. (2020) contemporary social movements in a hybrid media environment. annual review of sociology 46 443–65. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054627 chou, m. (2017) disengaged, young people and political disengagement in anglo-american democracies. in chou, m., gagnon, j-p., hartung, c. & pruitt, l. (eds.) young people, citizenship and political participation: combating civic deficit?, 1–30. rowman & littlefield publishers, london. d’alisa, g., demaria, f. & kallis, g. (2015) degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era. routledge, abingdon, oxon. dalton, r. j. (2007) partisan mobilization, cognitive mobilization and the changing american electorate. electoral studies 26(2) 274–286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2006.04.009 dalton, r. j. (2008) citizenship norms and the expansion of political participation. political studies 56(1) 76–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00718.x dobson, a. (2003) citizenship and environment. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199258449.001.0001 dobson, a. (2007) environmental citizenship: towards sustainable development. sustainable development 15(5) 276–285. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.344 dobson, a. & bell, d. (2006) environmental citizenship: introduction. in dobson, a. & bell, d. (eds.) environmental citizenship, 1–18. mit press, cambridge. entman, r. m. (1993) framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. journal of communication 43(4) 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x ernman, m., thunberg, g., thunberg, s. & ernman, b. (2020) our house is on fire: scenes of a family and planet in crisis. penguin books. ervasti, a-e. & rajamäki, t. (2019) opetushallitus: ilmastolakko ei velvoita koulua antamaan oppilaille vapaata. helsingin sanomat 15.3.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-2000006036371.html>. 7.5.2021. 58 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) escobar, a. (2015) degrowth, postdevelopment, and transitions: a preliminary conversation. sustainability science 10(3) 451–462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0297-5 gardiner, s. (2011) climate justice. in dryzek, j., norgaard, r. & schlosberg, d. (eds.) the oxford handbook of climate change and society. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199566600.003.0021 garlen, j. c. (2019) interrogating innocence: “childhood” as exclusionary social practice. childhood 26(1) 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218811484 giddens, a. (1991) modernity and self-identity. stanford university press, stanford. goffman, e. (1974) frame analysis. harper & row, new york. grasso, m. t., farrall, s., gray, e., hay, c. & jennings, w. (2018) socialization and generational political trajectories: an age, period and cohort analysis of political participation in britain. journal of elections, public opinion and parties 29(2) 199–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2018.1476359 grönholm, p. (2019) ”nyt jos koskaan on aika tehdä jotain”, ja siksi osa koululaisista osallistuu suomessakin perjantaina ilmastolakkoon. helsingin sanomat 14.3.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/ art-2000006034879.html>. 7.5.2021. hayward, b. (2021) children, citizenship and environment #schoolstrike edition. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003000396 hobson, k. (2013) on the making of the environmental citizen. environmental politics 22(1) 56–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.755388 holifield, r. (2001) defining environmental justice and environmental racism. urban geography 22(1) 78–90. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.22.1.78 horton, d. (2006) demonstrating environmental citizenship? a study of everyday life among green activists. in dobson, a. & bell, d. (eds.) environmental citizenship, 127–150. the mit press, cambridge, massachusetts and london. van hulst, m. & yanow, d. (2016) from policy “frames” to “framing”: theorizing a more dynamic, political approach. american review of public administration 46(1) 92–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074014533142 huotari, j. (2019) on helpompi vähätellä nuorten vaikuttamisyrityksiä kuin vastata kysymyksiin planeetan kunnosta. helsingin sanomat 18.3.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/mielipide/art-2000006038678.html>. 7.5.2021. huttunen, s., salo, m., aro, r. & turunen, a. (2020) environmental citizenship in geography and beyond. fennia 198(1–2) 196–209. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.90715 inglehart, r. (1997) modernization and postmodernization: cultural, economic and political change in 43 societies. princeton university press, princeton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691214429 johnston, h. (2002) verification and proof in frame and discourse analysis. in klandermans, b. & staggenborg, s. (eds.) methods of social movement research. social movements, protest, and contention, vol 16, 62–91. university of minnesota press, minneapolis and london. kallio, k. p., wood, b. e. & häkli, j. (2020) lived citizenship: conceptualising an emerging field. citizenship studies 24(6) 713–729. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2020.1739227 koivisto, j. & nelskylä, l. (2019) kansainvälinen ilmastolakko näkyi kymmenillä paikkakunnilla suomessa – tuhansia nuoria kokoontui kaupunkien keskustoihin ja mannerheimintie tukkeutui. yle uutiset 27.9.2019 <https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10991519>. 11.5.2021. kojola, e. & pellow, d. n. (2021) new directions in environmental justice studies: examining the state and violence. environmental politics 30(1–2) 100–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2020.1836898 konttinen, e., nieminen, m., litmanen, t. & ylönen, m. (1999) four waves of environmental protest. in konttinen, e., litmanen, t., nieminen, m. & ylönen, m. (eds.) all shades of green. the environmentalization of finnish society, 20–46. sophi, university of jyväskylä, jyväskylä. koskinen, a. l. (2019) jenni haukio kehuu ilmastolakkoilevia koululaisia: ”kiitollinen näistä nuorista!”. yle uutiset 15.3.2019 <https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10691767>. 11.5.2021. martinez-alier, j. (2002) the environmentalism of the poor – a study of ecological conflicts and valuation. edward elgar, cheltenham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781843765486 de moor, j., uba, k., wahlström, m., wennerhag, m. & de vydt, m. (eds.) (2020) protest for a future ii: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 20-27 september, 2019, in 19 cities around the world. <https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/339443851_protest_for_a_future_ii_composition_mobilization_and_motives_of_the_ participants_in_fridays_for_future_climate_protests_on_20-27_september_2019_in_19_cities_around_ the_world> 12.12.2021. myllyniemi, s. (2014) vaikuttava osa. nuorisobarometri 2013. hakapaino, helsinki. mäkinen, v. (2018) 8 000 marssi ilmaston puolesta helsingissä – saamelainen petra laiti läksytti poliitikkoja eduskuntatalon portailla. helsingin sanomat 20.10.2018 <https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art2000005870953.html>. 7.5.2021. 59fennia 199(1) (2021) janette huttunen & eerika albrecht neuteleers, s. (2010) institutions versus lifestyle: do citizens have environmental duties in their private sphere? environmental politics 19(4) 501–517. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2010.489702 norris, p. (2002) democratic phoenix: reinventing political activism. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511610073 o’brien, k., selboe, e. & hayward, b. m. (2018) exploring youth activism on climate change: dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent. ecology and society 23(3) 42. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-10287-230342 onali, a. (2019) tältä helsingin ilmastomielenosoitus näytti – hs kuvasi nuorten viestit päättäjille. helsingin sanomat 15.3.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000006035851.html>. 7.5.2021. pickard, s. (2019) politics, protest and young people. political participation and dissent in 21st century britain. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57788-7 pickard, s., bowman, b. & arya, d. (2020) “we are radical in our kindness”: the political socialisation, motivations, demands and protest actions of young environmental activists in britain. youth and globalization 2(2) 251–280. https://doi.org/10.1163/25895745-02020007 portwood-stacer, l. (2012) anti-consumption as tactical resistance: anarchists, subculture, and activist strategy. journal of consumer culture 12(1) 87–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540512442029 reis, p. (2020) environmental citizenship and youth activism. in hadjichambis, a., reis, p., paraskevahadjichambi, d., činčera, j., boeve-de pauw, j., gericke, n. & knippels, m-c. (eds.) conceptualizing environmental citizenship for 21st century education, 139–148. springer, cham, switzerland. sabherwal, a., ballew, mt. & van der linden, s. (2021) the greta thunberg effect: familiarity with greta thunberg predicts intentions to engage in climate activism in the united states. journal of applied social psychology 51(4) 321–333. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12737 sanson, a.v. & burke, s. e. l. (2020) climate change and children: an issue of intergenerational justice. in balvin, n. & christie, d. (eds.) children and peace. peace psychology book series, 343–362. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22176-8_21 schindel dimick, a. (2015) supporting youth to develop environmental citizenship within/against a neoliberal context. environmental education research 21(3) 390–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2014.994164 schlosberg, d. (1999) environmental justice and the new pluralism. the challenge of difference for environmentalism. oxford university press, oxford. schlosberg, d. (2019) from postmaterialism to sustainable materialism: the environmental politics of practise-based movements. environmental politics [online mar 8 2019] https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1587215 schlosberg, d. & collins, l. (2014) from environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of climate justice. wire’s climate change 5(3) 359–374. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.275 sirén, i., kuokkanen, k. & malmberg, l. (2019) ”että ne kehtaa!” huusi tuhatpäinen joukko – ilmastolakko valtasi eduskuntatalon edustan ja sulki mannerheimintien. helsingin sanomat 27.9.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/art-2000006252356.html>. 7.5.2021. takala, a. (2019) aikuisten saamattomuuteen tuskastuneet nuoret lakkoilivat ilmaston puolesta, eduskuntatalolla parveili satoja nuoria – ”tässä on meidän tulevaisuudesta kyse”. helsingin sanomat 11.1.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/kaupunki/espoo/art-2000005962180.html>. 7.5.2021. tola, t. (2019) atte, 16, on ilmastolakkoillut jo vuoden – aikuinen, olisiko sinunkin aika tehdä jotain? yle uutiset 23.9.2019 <https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10973068>. 11.5.2021. tynkkynen, n. (2010) a great ecological power in global climate policy? framing climate change as a policy problem in russian public discussion. environmental politics 19(2) 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010903574459 vainio, s. (2019) nuoret ilmasto¬aktivistit vaativat ministeri li anderssonilta toimia – ”luulen, että 15-vuotias li olisi ollut aika innoissaan mukana nuorten ilmasto¬liikehdinnässä”. helsingin sanomat 1.11.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/paivanlehti/02112019/art-2000006293773.html>. 7.5.2021. vihersalo, m. (2017) climate citizenship in the european union: environmental citizenship as an analytical concept. environmental politics 26(2) 343–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2014.1000640 von zabern, l. & tulloch, c. d. (2021) rebel with a cause: the framing of climate change and intergenerational justice in the german press treatment of the fridays for future protests. media, culture & society 43(1) 23–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720960923 vuorio, j. (2019) aikuiset ovat saamattomia, joten lukiolaiset ryhtyvät perjantaina lakkoon ilmaston puolesta – rehtori: ”lakko on väärä keino”. helsingin sanomat 10.1.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/ kaupunki/art-2000005960512.html>. 7.5.2021. wahlström, m., kocyba, p., de vydt, m. & de moor, j. (2019) protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities. <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334745801_protest_for_a_ future_composition_mobilization_and_motives_of_the_participants_in_fridays_for_future_climate_ protests_on_15_march_2019_in_13_european_cities> 15.3.2020. 60 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) walker, c. (2020) uneven solidarity: the school strikes for climate in global and intergenerational perspective. sustainable earth 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42055-020-00024-3 wang, z. & caskey, k. (2016) #occupywallstreet: an analysis of twitter usage during a protest movement. social networking 5(4) 101–117. https://doi.org/10.4236/sn.2016.54011 wood, b. & kallio, k-p. (2019) green citizenship – towards spatial and lived perspectives. in davoudi, s., cowell, r., white, i. & blanco, h. (eds.) the routledge companion to environmental planning, 170– 180. routledge, milton park, abingdon, oxon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179780-18 the hidden city of immigrants in helsinki's urban leftovers – the homogenization of the city and the lost diversity urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa121457 doi: 10.11143/fennia.121457 reflections: lectio praecursoria the hidden city of immigrants in helsinki's urban leftovers – the homogenization of the city and the lost diversity hossam hewidy hewidy, h. (2022) the hidden city of immigrants in helsinki's urban leftovers – the homogenization of the city and the lost diversity. fennia 200(1) 86–90. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121457 cities acknowledge the diversity of their population and consider the multicultural component a richness of their socio-cultural assets. immigrants contribute to the reshaping of urban space in many european cities through their amenities. such amenities, be they secular or spiritual, are a clear spatialization of multiculturalism. ethnic retail is an emerging phenomenon in helsinki, and it has increasingly replaced declining independent mainstream retail. often, clusters of immigrant amenities are formed around muslim prayer rooms activating a mosque-bazaar alliance that enjoys a dynamic footfall. such a setting takes place spontaneously and typically at abandoned spaces, called in this dissertation urban leftovers. the leftovers are located in, or nearby, the neighbourhoods with a relative overrepresentation of immigrant population. however, these neighbourhoods are exposed to urban renewal steered by anti-segregation policy, thus facing the threat of erasure. this dissertation examines the capacity of urban planning to plan for diversity. it further studies the characteristics that ethnic retail requires to survive and emerge. the paradigm of the right to the city is deployed to interpret the response of urban planning to multiculturalism. the findings are numerous. first, immigrant amenities prove their capability to play a role in place making and act as catalysts for public life recovery. second, in doing so the created places not only fulfil the socio-cultural needs of immigrants, but they also attract mainstream clientele. third, spontaneity, improvisation and authenticity are the main characteristics empowering the emergence of ethnic retail. however, the findings also show a failure of urban planning to reflect multiculturalism in the growth of the city. often, the retail premises used by immigrants are demolished. furthermore, conventional planning as well as alternative planning methods, such as scenario planning and urban planning competitions, have failed to reflect immigrants in the development. the main constraint preventing planning from being multicultural is the absence of a political interest and, accordingly, a clear vision to deal with the spatialization of multiculturalism. on the contrary, the clear vision of the city is its anti-segregation policy, which is by nature a homogenizing mechanism. thus, the dissertation concludes that immigrants' right to the city has been ignored. keywords: multiculturalism, immigrant amenities, right to the city, urban planning, urban renewal hossam hewidy (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4455-9987), department of architecture, aalto university, finland. e-mail: hossam.hewidy@aalto.fi © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121457 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4455-9987 mailto:hossam.hewidy@aalto.fi fennia 200(1) (2022) 87hossam hewidy honoured custos, honoured opponent and honoured audience on site and online: historically, many cities have witnessed multiculturalism and hosted a population with diverse interests. european cities are currently witnessing a growth of cultural diversity reshaping their urban spaces. immigrants with various religious and cultural backgrounds transform the cityscape with their secular and spiritual amenities. the transformation of the urban space gives the multicultural manifestation its spatial dimension; thus, it poses challenges on the planning system as stated by sandercock (2000, 13–14): […] why we might think of difference as a problem in the managing of cities, or rather, in what ways cities of difference pose a challenge to planning systems, policies and practices. before opening the discussion further about this dissertation topic, let me first explain my motivations to study planning and multiculturalism in helsinki. as an immigrant myself, i could easily observe the transformation of urban spaces in the city of helsinki through the amenities i frequent. i do visit muslims prayer rooms, oriental grocery stores and authentic restaurants. my initial impression as a user was that these amenities were hidden in places abandoned by mainstream retail called in this dissertation urban leftovers (hewidy 2022a). however, what struck me was the rapid clustering of these amenities creating urban hubs. in fact, i became highly motivated to look closer at such a phenomenon and decided to serve as a researcher after being a user and an observer. i am well-equipped with both cultural understanding and language and i assume that i enjoy a considerable margin of trust in the immigrant community. in addition, this dissertation is the natural continuation of what i have started already in my master’s thesis titled “the big issue – the religious dimensions in muslims’ housing within helsinki metropolitan area”. today i am presenting another big issue; immigrant and urban space. upon starting my research, i was driven by several paradoxes related to the studied phenomenon. compared to other cities in europe, helsinki is new to immigration. however, finland has witnessed a growth of immigrant population from 50,000 in 1991 to 450,000 in 2020. thus, today we live in a different helsinki where 17% of its population is of an immigrant background. however, immigrants are less represented in the labour market and the unemployment rate in a few ethnicities exceeds 60%. therefore, many of the ethnic groups find an alternative in self-employment and clusters of ethnic retail have become an obvious urban transformation in helsinki. these clusters were formed at old strip malls left vacant because of the decline of mainstream independent retail which has been replaced by chain stores and retail oligopoly. surrounded by these paradoxes, and troubled by the concerns about what is multicultural planning – i found myself asking: how can planning in a multicultural community consider immigrants and their spatial needs? this dissertation raises awareness on the issue of multicultural planning. multicultural planning is complex and varies in cities according to the degree of openness towards cultural diversity in the receiving societies. accordingly, i argue in this dissertation that multicultural planning is not a distinct category of urban planning nor an elective action but rather an essential right to the city. ultimately, it is a question of equality and neutrality: the equal right of every citizen to urban space, and whether planning can be culturally neutral. ethnic retail is an emerging phenomenon in helsinki and has rapidly brought many vacant premises into life. often, clusters of immigrant amenities are formed around muslim prayer rooms activating a mosque-bazaar alliance that enjoys a dynamic footfall. such a setting takes place spontaneously and typically at abandoned spaces, the urban leftovers. the leftovers are located in, or nearby, the neighbourhoods with a relative overrepresentation of immigrant population. however, these neighbourhoods are exposed to urban renewal steered by anti-segregation policy, thus facing the threat of erasure. this dissertation studies three clusters two of which are situated at two old strip malls called puhos and kontula and the third is in the area of malmi shopping street. in 2019–2020, two planning competitions were held in response to the city objectives of forming urban centers through densification. the results of these competitions are steering both clusters 88 fennia 200(1) (2022)reflections: lectio praecursoria towards displacement. the city is preparing for a full demolition of the kontula mall and a partial demolition of the puhos mall. in 2019, the city of helsinki commissioned a consultant to draw a vision based on scenario planning for the futures of the malmi area. in this dissertation, i focus on the role played by these clusters as place makers and catalysts for public street life recovery. i further study the main characteristics such clusters enjoy, which are called in this dissertation ‘operative tactics’. finally, i examine the capacity of the planning system to integrate such multicultural manifestation in the city master plan, both competitions and the scenario planning process. the research material in this dissertation was collected through semi-structured interviews with planners, consultants, architects, and immigrants running businesses in the studied areas. in addition, field observation and document analysis were also used to collect further research material. for the overall findings, the results showed that the clusters of immigrant amenities have spontaneously enabled a bottom-up place making process and converted abandoned spaces into liveable places full of meanings (hewidy & lilius 2022a). such clusters contributed to the recovery of public street life (hewidy & lilius 2022b). the signs of the place making were clear in empowering a warm place for cultural visibility and attachment. these hubs have not only been satisfying the shopping needs of immigrants but have also become third places for many immigrants to linger enjoying a safe socializing environment. furthermore, the research showed that in addition to enjoying the uniqueness of goods, trades and services, these clusters also have unique characteristics. such characteristics include improvisation, informality, spontaneity and commodification of ethnocultural diversity. thus, it was not difficult to observe that these hubs created distinctive places and succeeded to resist both retail oligopoly and urban homogenization. the results further showed that the municipal planning has ignored the potential of immigrant amenities in creating a diverse cityscape and equally overlooked its role in the livelihood of immigrant community. the city master plan showed a lack of intention for preserving the immigrant amenity clusters. on the contrary, there was an obvious intention to employ anti-segregation policy, which is simply a gentrification process aiming to change the socioeconomic profile of the renewed area. such ignorance has been extended from the city master plan to the idea competitions organized in itäkeskus and kontula areas. interestingly, a few competing teams in both competitions suggested alternative solutions potentially preserving the diverse atmosphere of both strip malls, but the city requested changing them. in fact, the various shortcomings found were merely the symptoms of the lack of any political will to support spatial diversity or to preserve these clusters. the results of the competitions were rather directing towards the unmaking of the place making. an example of such shortcoming is reflected in the following quote from a jury member in the itäkeskus competition: between the jurors there was a discussion. we asked ourselves whom to consult about things relevant to multiculturalism. how we can enrol immigrants in the jury process. we could not find a solution. it was not taken as a specific expert dimension in the jury process, like traffic […] in the jury process multiculturalism did not play any role. (hewidy 2022a, 46) although the scenario planning of malmi area was a positive sign from the city towards openness, the process also suffered from a few shortcomings. for example, the participation of ethnic retail entrepreneurs was very weak as there was no systematic participation process involving them. furthermore, there was no balance between the possible futures and the desired futures which is an essential setting of scenario planning. the logical result of such shortcomings is that the implementation stage can be misleading due to ignoring the cross-sectoral coordination. finally, interpreting such findings through the lens of the right to the city showed the essential need for transformative actions. the right to the city mandates two essential rights: the right to participation and the right to appropriation. the right to participation is to share any decision contributing to the production of space and the right to appropriation sustains the freedom to occupy and use urban space. the results showed that immigrant community was declined both rights for the sake of the anti-segregation policy. fennia 200(1) (2022) 89hossam hewidy to conclude, i argue in this dissertation that the major obstacle that prevents planning from recognizing multiculturalism is the high sensitivity towards segregation. accordingly, the city of helsinki is losing urban diversity through homogenising urban space, a space that is to be withdrawn from immigrants. this research demonstrates that anti-segregation policy is an assimilative mechanism. the dispersal housing policy, in principle, contradicts with the principles of multicultural manifestation, or at least in the way adopted by the city of helsinki. the anti-segregation policy contributes to the erasure of cultural visibility replacing spaces improved by immigrant amenities by placelessness. in such a setting, the use value of immigrants is entirely ignored due to prioritizing exchange value. i agree that the arrival of the new well-off residents may lead to the recovery of the average income in the renewed areas. however, the hidden city of immigrants is erased, their average income will not increase, and their right to the city is declined. therefore, i recommend in this dissertation that it is essential to apply an agenda of multicultural planning in parallel with the blind anti-segregation policy in order to reduce its dramatic consequences. i call for an approach of planning that strives towards the preservation of the clusters of immigrant amenities and reduces the impacts of urban regeneration on them. i further urge improving an effective and inclusive participation process, which was found among the shortcomings. with the lack of effective participation, the practice is not correctly informed of the local knowledge of users. simply, participation should be considered an informative way of communicating people’s interests and needs in spaces under development. furthermore, i strongly recommend that architectural competitions dealing with developing superdiverse areas should be tailored for such a task (hewidy 2022b). this should be reflected in both the formation of the jury and the competition programme in order to integrate the multicultural characteristics of the areas into the potential proposals of the competitions. furthermore, the city as the landowner needs to reduce the power of shareholding companies when given the right to organise urban competitions, to carefully review the competition programmes and to share the programme draft in advance before calling for the competitions. unfortunately, the finnish research pays less attention to multiculturalism as an urban planning phenomenon of a spatial dimension. instead, the research unconsciously creates a negative perception of multiculturalism by focusing solely on segregation and relevant housing studies. consequently, municipal planning adopts the anti-segregation dispersal policy seeking an even socioeconomic distribution. thus, i strongly argue that there is a need for research defining: ‘what is multicultural planning’ and informing the practice and urban policies on ‘how to deal with immigrants beyond anti-segregation policies’. ethnic retail as an emerging phenomenon is a creative solution invented by immigrants to cope with their low representation in the labour market. therefore, i further call for increasing awareness of the clustering phenomenon of immigrant amenities as a creative action where immigrants are considered a socio-capital asset. this will not be achieved without a thorough understanding, and acknowledgment, of the capacity of ethnic retail to re-shape urban spaces and raise the vitality of their vicinities. furthermore, there are many good examples in european cities where immigrant amenities have transformed deprived neighbourhoods and converted them into destinations for tourists and mainstream clientele, not only the co-ethnic groups. these multi-ethnic hubs have become destinations for other visitors seeking authenticity and exoticism. popular examples of such neighbourhoods are found in vienna, london, berlin, paris, oslo and malmö. in canada, mainstream retail has entered the realm of ethnic retailing and ethnic retailers are expanding their businesses beyond the ethnic boundaries. thus, the classical understanding of ethnic retail as an enclave business needs to be reconceptualized. therefore, the dissertation further encourages the city to study best practices and benchmarks which are usually used as sources of information in urban planning and can lead to mutual learning from other cities. otherwise, diversity, celebrated in many cities as attractive destination or new market niche, will be simply lost from helsinki. i argue then that the anti-segregation policy solves nothing. immigrants remain poor and the ethnification of poverty continues: the places that they enjoy and that provide livelihood to them are demolished and replaced with other spaces flattering the newcomers. the erasure of these clusters 90 fennia 200(1) (2022)reflections: lectio praecursoria seems to be intentional in a city fighting against segregation and working heavily through dispersal policy to eliminate, or minimize, the spatial differences. the findings of this dissertation contribute to immigrant integration and wellbeing through spatial planning. it further calls for treating multicultural planning as an essential right to the city. hopefully, the research has a societal impact through the empowering of immigrant communities in helsinki. finally, i do admit that the impacts on ethnic retail are formed by several parties not merely urban planning. such impacts are caused by policymakers, chain stores, shareholding companies, landlords and media. however, i do argue that neglecting immigrants in planning is the logical consequence when a city fears diversity, even when hidden in its leftovers. references hewidy, h. (2022a) the hidden city of immigrants in helsinki's urban leftovers – the homogenization of the city and the lost diversity. aalto university publication series doctoral theses 85/2022. https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/114986 hewidy, h. (2022b) just city planning competitions in helsinki: between the power of image and many images of power. european planning studies 30 (4) 663–683. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1990216 hewidy, h. & lilius, j. (2022a) in the blind spot: ethnic retailing in helsinki and the spontaneous placemaking of abandoned spaces. european planning studies 30 (8) 1493–1513. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1932763 hewidy, h. & lilius, j. (2022b) the death and life of malmi neighbourhood shopping street: is ethnic retail a catalyst for public life recovery in helsinki? european planning studies 30 (2) 336–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1956433 sandercock, l. (2000) when strangers become neighbours: managing cities of difference. planning theory & practice 1(1) 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649350050135176 https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/114986 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1990216 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1932763 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1956433 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649350050135176 bordering the “other”: the case of the finnish-russian border urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa63674 doi: 10.11143/fennia.63674 reflections: extreme geographies bordering the “other”: the case of the finnish-russian border olga hannonen hannonen, olga (2017). bordering the “other”: the case of the finnishrussian border. fennia 195: 1, pp. 113–117. issn 1798-5617. this short reflection on the keynote speech given by henk van houtum at the annual meeting of finnish geographers enhances discussion on bordering and border construction, both within the european union (eu) and via the external border of the eu in the northeast, specifically the finnish-russian border. and it focuses attention upon the problem of eurocentric geographies, and a dominant western perspective of the rest of the world. keywords: border, bordering, second home, russians, finland, transborder mobility olga hannonen, karelian institute, p.o. box 111, university of eastern finland, joensuu 80101, finland, e-mail: e-mail: olga.hannonen@uef.fi we live in an era of extreme borderism, and are witness to the largest fortification of borders in living memory (van houtum 2016). indeed, some borders have been physically demarcated in recent times, and even redrawn, while others have experienced intensified border controls. researching transborder leisure mobility, in the form of russian second-home ownership in finland, i deal directly with mobility across a physically demarcated and strictly controlled border. the finnish-russian border is an external border of the eu and is in many ways both mentally and physically a hard, separating border (kolossov & scott 2013). this external border of the eu, as well as the eu’s internal borders, have different degrees of border openness (boehmer & peña 2012). eu internal borders are considered open and integrated, while the finnish-russian border is a controlled and restricted. studying mobility across the finnish-russian border, that for both europeans and russians requires a visa to cross it, provides a different perspective on borders and bordering in european space. gaining a perspective from the edge of europe, this commentary attempts to demonstrate that so-called extreme geopolitics have always been present in european geographies. gaining a perspective from the edge of europe, this commentary attempts to demonstrate that so-called extreme geopolitics have always been present in european geographies, as something old. modes of extremes and their articulation have changed in recent times to a renewed hardening of borders and “othering”, as something new. extreme geographies refer here to the edge, a border or a gate thinking, within the boundaries of normality (van houtum 2016). in recent times, the number of borders has increased as states begin to circumscribe their territory, even within a supposedly “borderless” european space. the erection of physical demarcations to harden borders, a reintroduction of border controls by several european states, as well as random identity checks while moving from one eu member-state to another, are all examples of a contemporary presence of borders in a “borderless” europe. this demonstrates that the project of constructing a common european space, a european identity, has been undermined. often in relation to the perspective and solution employed by certain european member-states, towards the refugee crisis. an increase in european borders reveals a move in the opposite direction to the state of border and trans-border mobility research. border studies have departed from © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 114 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies thinking of borders as lines and given structures to the performance of borders and bordering practices, while the empirical evidence from europe shows a return to barriers (van houtum 2010; timothy et al. 2016). european space, however, has never been completely “borderless”. for this reason, i intentionally leave the quotation marks. a “borderless” european space has turned out to be an imagined construct, which managers of the european project have tried to promote. the eu has several borders, including amongst others, the schengen area, the euro zone, and old regional imaginaries which continue to divide, such as east and west europe, and the balkans. these borders do not necessarily coincide with the border of a nation state, blurring the boundaries of belonging (häyrynen 2009). the european project itself, while proposing the freedom of mobility by removing borders between the memberstates, has turned into a construction of borders by delimitating those who can enter and belong to the european space. such delimitation of belonging has been referred to as “global apartheid geopolitics” (van houtum 2010, 957). indeed, the eu makes its space fragmented rather than cohesive in relation to foreign property ownership (åkerlund et al. 2015). recent physical expressions of borders demonstrate how a perception of the “other”, the non-european, is constructed. yet fears of the “other” have always been present in the european community, though they may not have always been spoken of as they are now. thus, in relation to borders and mobility there are two separately existing truths: the geography of borderlessness, and the mobility and geography of border discipline (massey 2005; newman 2006; van houtum 2010; gielis & van houtum 2012). indeed, the absence of a physical border does not exclude the presence of invisible or mental barriers that in many ways define the nature of inclusiveness and exclusiveness (newman 2006; gielis & van houtum 2012). these two edges in border thinking form a complex interplay when looking at mobility across european borders. the majority of studies on trans-border and trans-national mobility in europe are made in light of the “de-bordering” and “intensifying mobility” concepts that have naturally appeared during the formation of the “borderless” european space. other groups of people coming from outside the european circle, potentially as mobile as the population of a european country, have been largely overlooked. those, who come to europe from other regions of the world, are often portrayed as unwanted, illegal or dangerous (van houtum 2016). in relation to leisure mobility, tourism geographies have been traditionally dominated by a western theoretical and empirical perspective. as such, the established patterns of tourist mobility have been criticised as being the product of western modern tourism or “eurocentrism” (massey 2005; cohen & cohen 2015; lin & yeoh 2016). cohen and cohen (2015, 12) state that, “tourism [that] originated in the west is characterized by north-to-south, or west-to-east flows, and prioritises westerners as international tourists, while representing the people of the emerging regions as hosts or ‘tourees’.”1 thus tourism practices from emerging, non-western regions or the “margins of this world” (massey 2005, 87), have been safeguarded through borders and mobility regimes, and “have not been matched by adequate theorizing in tourism studies” (cohen & cohen 2015, 11). this is particularly the case when considering the finnish-russian border, that has historically functioned as a dividing line between the east and west. the tourism mobility flow across the finnishrussian border acts in contradistinction to other european examples, with the majority of visitors and second-home owners coming from the east (russia) to the west (finland). mobility, as such, across it has changed during the last few decades. to assess this change and the modification of bordering practices, it is important to provide a short outline of the development of trans-border mobility across this border. the finnish-russian border in its present physical shape was formed after world war ii, during which finland and russia (the soviet union at that time) were enemies. after the war the soviet union annexed 12.5% of the finnish territory. this created national trauma in finland, and a feeling that the country had lost a part of itself. for this reason, the finnish national identity has ever since been constructed through a portraying of the soviet union as the dark “other” (paasi 1999). consequently, in addition to a physical demarcation, the border has a strong symbolic role. thus, the opening of the border for mutual visits, after the soviet union’s collapse, has been met with mixed feelings amongst finns. many were worried that “thousands of unwanted and impoverished russian refugees would fennia 195: 1 (2017) 115olga hannonen flow across the border” (the economist 1992). these fears have not materialised. however, during the 1990s “eastern tourists” were strongly perceived as a source of problems (gurova & ratilainen 2016). yet, with a rapid increase in the number of mutual visits between the two states, the perception of russian visitors has changed. between 1991 and 2015, the number of russian visitors increased tenfold from 350 thousand to 3.5 million visits (federal state statistics service 2016). since 2000, russians have increasingly purchased second homes, becoming the biggest group of foreign property owners in finland (lipkina 2013; hannonen 2016). the high amount of cross-border activity initiated discussions on the creation of a visa-free regime between finland and russia in 1999 (burganova 2011). this visa-free policy has been actively negotiated since 2010. that year the president of finland met with the russian president and the russian prime minister three times. according to the most optimistic estimations made by the russian ambassador, it would have been possible to introduce the visa-free regime with the eu by the end of 2013 (hantula 2013). there have been a number of obstacles in the introduction of this. yet, the desire to move forward and negotiate the matter has become a huge step on the way from one edge of the continuum of border functionality to another. although in 2014 the visa-free discussions were suspended and borders and border control returned in light of the ukrainian conflict and the introduction of sanctions. this contemporary political situation has meant that it is unlikely the bordering practices across the finnish-russian border will change. as such, the border will remain to function as a delimitating line of europe. russian second-home ownership is an example of such delimitation and the “othering” of a particular national group in finnish and european space. soon after russian owners entered the finnish property market, they became the subject of lively coverage in the national press, with increasingly nationalistic rhetoric (pitkänen 2011). russian purchases have been perceived as a threat to the national lake landscape and portrayed as a “russian invasion”, with a fear of potential russian resettlement in finland. russian owners have also been accused of displacing locals through pricing finns out of the market and purchasing permanent residences in rural areas (pitkänen 2011). the ukrainian conflict inflamed a new wave of concerns. currently, russian second homes are viewed as a security issue with the most recent public discourse concerning russian property purchases next to strategic objects in finland and their potential use for possible military interventions. debates about russian property purchases and their restriction have also been held in the finnish parliament. numerous legislative initiatives by members of parliament have sought to restrict land ownership by foreign citizens outside the european economic area2. these parliamentary debates are another example of “othering” and contemporary edge thinking as the discussions float between the edges: the freedom of mobility in relation to foreign second-home ownership on the one side, and suspicions of russian properties on the other. according to one study in a border region of finland, finnish local residents and second-home owners largely agree with the concerns raised in the national press (honkanen et al. 2015). the majority of finnish residents and second-home owners in this border region wish to have limited contact with russian owners and would like to restrict russian purchases of properties in finland (lipkina & hall 2013; hannonen 2016). this indicates a desire to uphold a certain mental and physical distance from russian owners, to move a mental barrier further to the edge of the territory of the finnish state, and reunite it with the physical border. the “othering” of russian owners is reinforced by a clear differentiation between russian nationals and other foreigners. while eu citizens are welcomed to the finnish property market, russian property ownership should be restricted (hannonen in press). for this reason, russian second-home ownership reinforces the symbolism and mental distance of the finnish-russian border, which is strongly rooted in the finnish identity. indeed, civic discourse on the phenomenon of russian second-home ownership demonstrates the influence of a historical past that has produced a strong dividing line between the east and west, and the contemporary perception of russia by finns. when looking at the european community as an open and integrated space, traces of borderism can still be found at any point of the eu’s development. bordering as “othering” and defining the borders of inclusiveness and exclusiveness has always been present in european politics, especially across the external borders of the eu and the finnish-russian border. in this short reflection, the 116 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies empirical case of second-home ownership across the finnish-russian border has demonstrated that “othering” russia has not vanished. it has, rather, taken a new shape since the opening of the border in 1991, and the increase in russian second-home ownership in finland since 2000. as such, contemporary bordering processes across eu’s internal and external borders pose questions. has europe ever departed from an edge, extreme, or border thinking? does it merely move to the extreme; or does it simply reinterpret normality to define its identity? i would like to end this short reflection by noting here that “eurocentric” perspectives are no longer capable of addressing the growing mobility of people from non-western regions. the solutions that the eu proposes now, however, continue to impact mobility and dwelling across its borders. notes 1 “the “touree” is a native-turned-actor, in other words, a native who modifies their behavior to meet tourists’ demands” (yang & wall 2014, 8). 2 over the last 15 years 30 written interrogatories by members of parliament concerning foreign property ownership, and three legislative initiatives (in 2009, 2011 and 2013) and one citizens’ initiative (in 2015) to restrict land ownership by foreign citizens and organisations outside the european economic area were submitted in the finnish parliament. acknowledgments i would like to thank the chief editor of fennia, dr. kirsi kallio, for providing an opportunity to contribute my reflection on the keynote speech, and the editor of the reflections-section, dr. james riding, for his valuable comments and corrections. references boehmer, c.r. & peña, s. (2012) the determinants of open and closed borders. journal of borderlands studies 27(3) 273–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2012.750950 burganova, i.n. (2011) otmena vizovogo rezhima mezhdu rossiey i es: utopia ili real’nost? [отмена визового режима между россией и ес: утопия или реальность?] gramota 3(9) part 2 37–40. cohen, e. & cohen, s.a. (2015) a mobilities approach to tourism from emerging world regions. current issues in tourism 18(1) 11–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2014.898617 federal state statistics service, (2016) number of travels of russian citizens from russia to abroad by purpose of travel in 2015 <http://www.gks.ru> 14.05.2016 gielis, r. & van houtum, h. (2012) sloterdijk in the house! dwelling in the borderscape of germany and the netherlands. geopolitics 17(4) 797–817. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2012.660583 gurova, o. & ratilainen, s. (2016) from shuttle traders to middle-class consumers: russian tourists in finnish newspaper discourse between the years of 1990 and 2014. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 16(1) 51–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2016.1244507 hannonen, o. (2016) peace and quiet beyond the border: the trans-border mobility of russian second home owners in finland. dissertations in social sciences and business studies no 118. university of eastern finland, joensuu. epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-2099-7/urn_isbn_978952-61-2099-7.pdf hannonen, o. (in press) bordering mobilities: the case of russian trans-border second-home ownership in finland. journal of finnish studies. hantula, h. (2013) venäjän eu-lähettiläs: viisumivapaus mahdollinen tänä vuonna. yle uutiset 14.07.2013. <http://yle.fi/uutiset/venajan_eu-lahettilas_viisumivapaus_mahdollinen_tana_vuonna/6732365> 02.11.2015 honkanen, a., pitkänen, k. & hall, c.m. (2015) a local perspective on cross-border tourism. russian second home ownership in eastern finland. international journal of tourism research 18(2) 149– 158. https://doi.org/10.1002/jtr.2041 houtum, van h. (2010) human blacklisting: the global apartheid of the eu’s external border regime. environment and planning d: society and space 28 957–976. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1909 houtum, van h. (2016) pushing the border, the fear and desire for extreme geographies. keynote lecture at the annual meeting of finish geographers. 27.10.2016, joensuu, finland. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2012.750950 https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2014.898617 http://www.gks.ru https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2012.660583 https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2016.1244507 http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-2099-7/urn_isbn_978-952-61-2099-7.pdf http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-2099-7/urn_isbn_978-952-61-2099-7.pdf http://yle.fi/uutiset/venajan_eu-lahettilas_viisumivapaus_mahdollinen_tana_vuonna/6732365 https://doi.org/10.1002/jtr.2041 https://doi.org/10.1068/d1909 fennia 195: 1 (2017) 117olga hannonen häyrynen, m. (2009) the transboundary landscape of the eu-schengen border. journal of borderlands studies 24(2) 56–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2009.9695727 kolossov, v. & scott, w.j. (2013) a finnish-russian borderland on the edge of neighbourhood. in eskelinen, h., liikanen, i. & scott, j.w. (eds.) the eu-russia borderland: new contexts for regional cooperation, 194–210. routledge, london & new york. lin, w. & yeoh, b.s.a. (2016) moving in relations to asia: the politics and practices of mobility. environment and planning a 48(6) 1004–1011. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x16633004 lipkina, o. (2013) motives for russian second home ownership in finland. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 13(4) 299–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2013.863039 lipkina, o. & hall, c.m. (2013) russian second home owners in eastern finland: involvement in the local community. in janoschka, m. & haas, h. (eds.) contested spatialities, lifestyle migration and residential tourism, 158–173. routledge, oxon. massey, d. (2005) for space. sage, london. newman, d. (2006) the lines that continue to separate us: borders in our ‘borderless’ world. progress in human geography 30(2) 143–161. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph599xx paasi, a. (1999) boundaries as social practice and discourse: the finnish-russian border. regional studies 33(7) 669–680. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343409950078701 pitkänen, k. (2011) contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase of foreign second home ownership in finland 1990–2008. fennia 189(1) 43–59. the economist (1992) have vodka, will travel. the economist 324 (7772) 15.08.1992. timothy, d.j., saarinen, j. & viken a. (2016) editorial: tourism issues and international borders in the nordic region. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 16(1) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15022250.2016.1244504 yang, l. & wall, g. (2014) introduction. in yang, l. & wall, g. (eds.) planning for ethnic tourism, 1–12. ashgate, surrey. åkerlund, u., lipkina, o. & hall, c.m. (2015) second home governance in the eu: in and out of finland and malta. journal of policy research in tourism, leisure and events 7(1) 77–97. https://doi.org/10.1 080/19407963.2014.933229 https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2009.9695727 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x16633004 https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2013.863039 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph599xx https://doi.org/10.1080/00343409950078701 https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2016.1244504 https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2016.1244504 https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2014.933229 https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2014.933229 the benefits and constraints of participation in forest management. the case of taita hills, kenya nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen himberg, nina, loice omoro, petri pellikka & olavi luukkanen (2009). the benefits and constraints of participation in forest management. the case of taita hills, kenya. fennia 187: 1, pp. 61–76. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. although they accommodate a wide variety of endemic flora and fauna, the indigenous mountain rain forests of east africa are being depleted. some patches remain in taita hills of kenya and benefit from their management as forest reserves, with limited access to local communities, by the kenyan government. recently, through the forest act 2005, the government began to grant user rights to forest adjacent dwellers through participatory forest management initiatives. we conducted this study in february 2007 among groups engaged in forest-related activities and living near the ngangao, mbololo, mwambirwa and chawia forest reserves in order to offer insights into local people’s perceptions about benefits and constraints of participation in forest management during the transformation of the forest policy. our respondents considered efforts to conserve forests for ecological services, namely water catchment and biodiversity maintenance important. sustainable future use of forest products, especially firewood and medicinal plants were emphasized. however, shortcomings, such as inadequate access to updated information about management practices and legal rights, hampered participation. the respondents viewed this as working without proper tools, which, they stated, may gradually lead to unsuccessful conservation efforts, and felt that the government still prohibits full community participation. nina himberg & petri pellikka, department of geography, po box 64, fi-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mails: nina.himberg@helsinki.fi, petri.pellikka@helsinki.fi. loice omoro & olavi luukkanen, viikki tropical resources institute, po box 27, fi-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mails: loice.omoro@helsinki.fi, olavi.luukkanen@helsinki.fi. introduction the rio earth summit (unced 1992) and the world summit for sustainable development (wssd 2002) have elaborated on the need for environmental conservation, sustainable development and the integration of local participation. subsequently, many countries have implemented strategies to address these concerns. some of these strategies include the enactment of new legislation, the provision of incentives and the restructuring of the forestry sector (gok 1994; grn 1996; grn 2001; rok 2005). new concepts in forest management hitherto unknown in conventional forestry, such as participatory forestry, community forestry (selener 1997; saxena et al. 2001) and joint forest management (misra 1997), have developed and been incorporated into forest policies and legislation. in the early 1990s, development agencies introduced participatory forest management in sub-saharan africa (matose & wily 1996; salomao & matose 2007) with the key objective that the governments that own and administer most of the forest resources (white & martin 2002) would devolve powers to local communities. in the process, governments would improve forest management practices (andersson et al. 2006) or institute ownership and rights over natural resources (potters et al. 2001). in participatory forestry, such decentrali62 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen sation would presumably enable communities to manage their natural resources in an efficient, equitable and sustainable manner (agrawal & ribot 1999; blaikie 2006). the key element in this assumption is that the government devolves powers to local communities to fully manage the forests. unfortunately, this rarely occurs; the local communities to whom such powers are purportedly devolved are seldom allowed to dispose of the productive forest resources, nor are they able to resolve divergent interests between actors and institutions with which they interact (agrawal & ribot 1999). however, other development workers suggest that decentralisation functions differently depending on the types of powers that are decentralised (ribot 2002) and that in specific contexts, decentralisation functions well when systems for accountability and resource transfer are in place (agrawal & ribot 1999; andersson et al. 2006). the involvement of communities in forest resource management is considered a way of increasing democratisation process (nygren 2005), particularly when the communities elect their representatives and establish local institutions to make specific decisions. such representations are also considered signs of democracy (ribot 2006). community participation in forestry in kenya is outlined in the forest act (rok 2005). like most government-instituted policies that outline agenda and activities for implementation (agrawal & gupta 2005), the act defines membership, activities to be undertaken and penalties. in reference to the forests under study, which are remnants of the eastern arc mountains and rated among the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots (conservation international 2005), the management priorities include preservation and conservation (mwang’ombe 2005a). the provisions of the act require that the communities define management objectives and prepare management plans for approval. in so doing, the community’s powers are limited since their plans must conform to the government’s desires. this only confirms the observations of agrawal and ribot (1999) on devolutions in which communities are seldom permitted to exploit the resources of the forests for either commercial or domestic utilisation. instead, such communities are allowed to institute reforestation activities using only indigenous tree species, or to set up activities, such as apiaries, butterfly farming or resin tapping, which do not threaten the wellbeing of the forest. in effect, no powers are devolved; rather, the people engaged in forest activities are granted access, but with no rights over the use of resources. restrictions such as in these forests fail to conform to the spirit of community forestry which, according to agrawal and gupta (2005), should enhance the participation of stakeholders in decision-making and in the accrual of benefits associated with a common forestry resource. in this case, the people engaged in forest activities safeguard the interests of the government by preserving the forest while making no decisions whatsoever about its management. on the other hand, participation means different things to different people. arnstein (1969) differentiated participation into eight levels ranging from low participation, where manipulation is commonplace, to high participation, where control rests in the hands of citizens. he thus refers to participation as the power of degree to which the actors control decision-making. after kenya’s independence, the pre-independence laws governing all the major forests carried over. forest management entailed the enforcement, through policing and punitive actions, of laws to prevent illegal activities. such management led to widespread conflicts between the people and the forest department as more forest reserves were being created amid the rising population. to allay the rising discontent and conflict, the government had to introduce changes in the forestry sector. the changes were effectively instituted in the 1990s even though kenya had previously adopted the district focus for rural development (dfrd) strategy (gok 1983) where government departments adopted a policy of decentralisation. this strategy, however, dwelt on the administrative aspects of the government in which local communities were uninvolved. in what can best be described as the diffusion of administrative services (agrawal & ribot 1999; oyugi 2000), the powers of the central government were devolved to appointees of the central government, namely to government departments in districts that aimed at bringing development closer to the people, and thus improving the delivery of services, local development and management (oyugi 2000). already in 1975, elements of local participation were initiated, but solely on private lands (burley 1982). in 1994, the government initiated the kenya forestry master plan (kfmp), which spelt out the need for reform in forest policy and legislation as well as the importance of involving communities in forest management (gok 1994; luukkanen 1996). subsequently, in 2005, kenya enacted a new forest act. under the act, the director of forfennia 187: 1 (2009) 63the benefits and constraints of participation in forest … estry can confer upon communities all or some rights to the forest provided that such communities are registered as associations and apply for permission to participate in the management of state or local forests. in taita hills, the indigenous forests are important sources of water for the surrounding community as well as for those living in the lowlands further downstream. the agricultural sector employs a majority of the people compared with only five per cent of those engaged in forestry-related activities (rok 2008). the increasing population and declining land holding sizes, without a corresponding expansion of alternative economic activities, are considered major threats to sustainable resource management (mogaka 2002). the aim of this study is to offer insight into local people’s perceptions about benefits and constraints of participation in forest management in taita hills, during the transformation of the forest policy. the people organised into forest conservation groups and residing adjacent to ngangao, chawia, mbololo and mwambirwa forests, were the subjects of this study. through facilitating participatory rural appraisal exercises and a questionnaire study we identified factors motivating and hindering the conservation and livelihood enhancement efforts of our respondents during the early stages of policy implementation. study site and methods the taita hills, a mountain massif located in southeastern kenya (03° 25’ s and 38° 20’ e) in the taita-taveta district, has a topography ranging from 700 m to 2208 m above sea level. indigenous mountain rain forest fragments on the hills accommodate a variety of endemic and threatened flora and fauna. out of twelve remaining forest fragments eight are smaller than 5 ha (bytebier 2001). a presidential directive in 1988 banned the cutting of indigenous forests, while the conversions of indigenous forests into exotic plantations ended in 1984 (beentje 1988; mbuthia 2003). the three largest fragments are ngangao (120 ha), mbololo (185 ha) and chawia (86 ha) located in areas of high potential agricultural activity (pellikka et al. 2009). ngangao is located in the wundanyi division and in the vicinity of six sublocations, which are the smallest statistical units for population data in kenya. mbololo and mwambirwa are located in the voi division: the former in the vicinity of five sublocations and the latter in the vicinity of three sublocations. chawia is located in the mwatate division in the vicinity of four sublocations. the characteristics of the sublocations appear in table 1 and the study area with forests and sublocations is illustrated in fig. 1. participation in forest management is technically open to all households; not all individuals in the vicinity of the forest are involved, however. the composition of the population on the study area is not homogenous, even if the people share the same language and culture within a social structure with common norms. they are differentiated and stratified in various ways based on other attributes. some of these attributes identified by agrawal and gupta (2005) include levels of income, social status and the capacity of individuals to influence decision making process. it is worth assuming that not all people who would be willing to participate in the study area are able to do that, due to the aforementioned attributes as constraints. subsequently, many of the people living around the forests, and who hitherto had informally depended on those forests for their livelihoods, have formed associations and prepared management plans, as the act required, before the user could be conferred such rights. the plans require that the forest areas are divided into different zones and define their conservation status. depending on the forest, these are named as biodiversity conservation zone, utilization-, intervention-, non-consumptive use-, habitat restoration-, afforestation or catchment protection zones (kenya forest working group et al. 2004; mwang’ombe 2005b). at the time of this study, the groups had yet to be granted user rights and were prohibited from extracting any forest resources. they were accorded only some rights and not yet fully-involved in different phases of the management process. they were however, allowed to implement certain activities that ease the pressure on the forests to enhance conservation. the specific activities in which they engage, such as informing forest service and patrolling for minimising unauthorised entries into the forest, serve forest protection. information management, including awareness creation and education among the local population, is often organised under the aegis of non-governmental organisations operating in the area. ecosystem improvement activities, where some of the members are involved in raising indigenous tree seedlings for reforestation, serve forest enhance64 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen fig. 1. the study focuses on benefits and constraints of participation in the conservation and management of the biodiversity “hot spot” forest patches in taita hills, kenya. the largest forests mbololo, ngangao and chawia are indigenous, whereas mwambirwa consists mainly of exotic tree species (pinus patula, pinus eliotii, eucalyptus) and will be rehabilitated and restorated. ment, and income-generating activities such as bee-keeping, butterfly farming and sericulture, resin tapping and tree nursery business, represent alternative forest livelihoods. these offside activities can be seen as “software” for the people’s immediate financial gain, but without access or rights to manage the forest resources in full scale. some members are directly employed as guards, tour guides or research assistants. the latter two are new opportunities that have arisen from recognition of the threat to these forests despite their status as areas of biodiversity. consequently, the constant presence and activity of tourists and scientists from international and national institutions in taita hills generate employment opportunities. the social-cultural context is viewed as playing a crucial role in participation. befu (1977) points out that the socio-cultural context sets the stage on which actors display their behaviour while norms guide in structuring the actors. in the study area, the communities had traditionally laid down their norms regarding forest conservation that were operating long before the government’s intervention. these norms have been understood and implemented through traditional rites. for instance, fighis (sacred forests) have been important sites for medicine men to protect the communities from social evils and for rainmaking. according to ville (1994), the taita ritual complex was used for more than just protecting territory and bringing rain. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 65the benefits and constraints of participation in forest … cutting trees or collecting firewood from these forests is still forbidden, because of their spiritual value. thus, such norms indeed serve in forest protection. people’s participation in forestry was previously more structured within the traditional sense. the local people understood which conservation and utilisation practices to apply, and participated without being coerced in return for fulfilment of their livelihood needs. the taita ritual complex, however, has been overtaken by events such as conversion into christianity, increased demand for forest resources and government land use policies. the study was conducted in january 2007 by firstly using a self-completion questionnaire. the questionnaire was developed based on the research questions and translated into the dawida language, and all respondents completed the form individually. the design included 13 structured and 10 open-ended questions (see appendix 1). secondly, participatory rural appraisal tools including focus group discussions, institutional analysis and swot analysis (pretty et al. 1995; thomson & schoonmaker freudenberger 1997) were used. the data were obtained from farmers living adjacent to four remnant forests distributed across the four geographical areas of ngangao, chawia, mbololo and mwambirwa. these people belong to the taita ethnic group and share a similar language and culture. data were obtained from 172 respondents (ngangao, n = 35, chawia, n = 68, mbololo, n = 34 and mwambirwa, n = 35). three research assistants, familiar with the local languages of dawida and swahili, facilitated the interpretation of the questionnaires and discussions at each site. the respondents were selected based on their involvement in groups or associations in various forestry-related activities. other area residents, not registered in forest-related groups, do not form part of this study. the sub-chiefs and forest officers (government employees) of the area were intable 1. population of the sub-locations within the ngangao, chawia, mbololo and mwambirwa forests, and the number of respondents per sub-location. census statistics were obtained from central bureau of statistics (2001). forest and surrounding sub-location men women total household area km2 density mean household size number of respondents/ sub-location ngangao mwarungu 924 1038 1962 370 7 293 5.3 27 mgambonyi 1931 2042 3973 789 20 199 5.0 7 marumange 462 471 933 189 2 467 – mlondo 768 817 1585 307 3 547 1 saghasa 1269 1317 2586 554 16 159 – werugha 1812 1814 3626 786 6 636 – chawia chawia 796 894 1690 387 6 307 60 wusi 1892 2200 4092 875 11 365 6 mururu 904 1157 2061 481 7 290 2 mbololo ghazi 1445 1523 2968 644 88 34 1 wongonyi 805 863 1668 351 15 109 31 ndome 1828 1614 3442 952 77 45 2 tausa 1540 1642 3182 713 28 113 – mraru 2626 2867 5493 1181 63 87 – mwambirwa kironge 599 654 1253 252 12 109 17 kishau 578 603 1181 238 12 98 17 ndembonyi 385 440 825 176 4 188 1 66 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen formed of the study, and the informants were invited to assemble at central meeting points where the studies were conducted. the participatory study was conducted by dividing the respondents at each study sites according to the alternative forest livelihood activity they were involved in. these activities were: bee-keeping, butterfly and silkworm farming, resin tapping and tree nursery business. focus group discussions (idrc 2009) including institutional analysis exercises were facilitated within these groups. space was created for free discussion that could help both the facilitators and participants to understand the positive and negative dynamics within groups and with other stakeholders involved. all groups draw their organisatorial structures on paper and venn diagramming was used for describing and assessing the role and importance of various stakeholders for the group activities. the discussions were recorded and the benefits and constrains later on detected through content analysis. the participants were further divided into four mixed groups and strengths (s), weaknesses (w), opportunities (o), threats (t) analyses were used to gain insight and further qualitative understanding of the benefits and constraints of the different activities the people were engaged in. the participants were divided in mixed groups in stead of their own group in order to facilitate fresh discussion between members acting in different fields of forest conservation. the groups brainstormed over the state of participatory forest management initiative with the help of swot four field -tool after which the results were presented for all participants, as well as discussed and debated jointly. within the analysis, the strengths and opportunities were considered benefits while threats and weaknesses represented constraints. the participants in our study, although homogenous in terms of language and since the majority originated from taita hills, they also showed differences as individuals based on their religion and social status in the society. these factors were not studied individually, but became evident in the answers of the open-ended questions and during the focus group discussions and institutional analysis. the greatest differentiation existed between committee members and ordinary members. committee members are regarded as leaders in their groups and are entitled to make decisions without consulting ordinary members. other differences existed between gender and age groups as well as between informants with different religious views and affiliations. reasons that propel participation in forest conservation are presented based on the activities undertaken, benefits accrued and their preferences. no distinctions were made between areas, although gender and age variables were factored in for some cases to assess whether there were differences between who participates and in which forestry activities. some of the analyses were based on the total number of responses; some specific questions had multiple responses. in such cases, the total number of responses exceeded the number of respondents (n), whereas in other cases, there were fewer responses, and therefore some response totals fell below n. the data from the structured questions were analysed using spss 13.0 software for windows. frequencies and cross tabulations were generated and used to explain the trends observed; correlations between variables, analysis of variance and preference rankings were performed based on the scores the respondents provided. we analysed the respondents’ preferences concerning the benefits obtained by both genders from the forest for domestic use. they had individually scored the products in a given list based on their perception on the importance of these products. highly valued products were given the highest score (10), while least valued products were given the lowest score (1). these scores were then put into spss to generate the rankings. table 2 shows the forest product rankings (1–10) by male and female respondents, respectively. the answers to open-ended questions were coded and categorized through content analysis (flowerdew & martin 2005) in order to elicit all the different dimensions of the benefits of participation as well as the constraints for it. results gender and age distribution in forest conservation activities the total number of respondents was 172, with men accounting for 60% and females 40%. the distribution of the respondents according to their areas of residence was 20%, 40%, 20% and 20% for ngangao, chawia, mbololo and mwambirwa, respectively. of all the respondents, 25% were under 30 years of age, and 75% were over 30 years. fennia 187: 1 (2009) 67the benefits and constraints of participation in forest … more adult males participated in group nursery (25%) and in improving the forest ecosystem (26%) (see fig. 2). a larger proportion of male youths participated in patrolling (14%) than did adult males (7%). a higher proportion of adult males (14 %) participated in informing forest service than did male youths (5%). the leading activity of female youths was information management (36%) and improving the forest ecosystem (24%), with some involved in group nursery or other activities (12%). the leading activities of the adult females were information management and group nursery (each 21%) as well as improving the ecosystem (18%). the representation of female youths varied notably wider than did that of the female adults. a comparison between youths revealed that a higher proportion of male youths were participating in patrolling, tree nursery and training than were the female youths. in the case of male adults, a higher proportion participated in tree nursery and ecosystem improvements relative to the female adults. correlation analysis between age group and gender was weak (correlation coefficient 0.49) among the male and female youths, but was strong between adult males and females (correlation efficient 0.75), as it was between males and females (0.75) in general. we tested differences in representation by gender and age groups in the different activities, and concluded that there were no significant differences. in the group activities, analysis by gender showed a significant difference between men and women (p = 0.002 pearson’s chi square test) with regard to certain specific activities. more men than women participated in beekeeping and nursery management. conservation for water resources as primary motivation for participation as looked at the motivating factors for participation we saw that the highest response was on the “will to conserve” at 52%, access to forest products at 46%, income at 36% and employment opportunity at 32%. here employment referred to an appointed job given by an outsider person or institution, whereas income is the money earned from one’s own efforts, such as with tree nursery management and beekeeping. only 4% considered social prestige as a motivating factor. further analysis by cross-tabulation to compare motivation preferences by gender showed significant differences between men and women (chi square test); men considered employment (p = 0.025) and income source (p = 0.007) their main reasons for participation. men also felt that social prestige motivated them, whereas this factor was not notably meaningful among the women. mainly due to a few recently grown activities dealing with development and research as well as tourism in the area, people were employed for example as research aspatrolling information management informing forest service tree nursery business ecosystem improvement training other 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 youth men adult men total men youth w omen adult w omen total w omen % a ct iv ity fig. 2. distribution of respondents by age, gender and activities participated in (%). 68 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen sistants, forest guards and tour guides. more men than women were gainfully employed and all types of jobs were more frequent among the respondents over 30 years old than those younger. the frequency of response on the question about tangible benefits showed that water resources elicited a response rate of (67%) and others included employment (45%), income from butterfly farming (40%) and ecotourism (37%). 14% of the respondents, reported deriving no tangible benefits from participation in forest conservation. a correlation analysis was performed between the motivating factors and the benefits accrued. the total number of responses (n) was 852. the r was calculated as 0.047, and proved to be significantly higher than the computed r, which was 0.034 (in a two-tailed test with n = 852, α = 0.05, 1/ √ n: = 1/√852 = 0.034). this indicates that correlation existed between the motivating factors and the benefits the people derive from participation. when the motivation factor “will to conserve” was cross-tabulated with the tangible benefit “water resources”, a two-sided asymptotic significance of the chi-square statistic (p = 0.044) showed a relationship between the two. other higher correlations were found for forest products and butterfly farming. the most preferred benefits for domestic use were water, medicinal plants and firewood. both men and women ranked water as the first forest product, but ranked subsequent products differently. the women ranked medicinal plants higher than firewood, whereas the men ranked firewood as the second most important item, followed by medicinal plants. mushrooms and forest use for leisure were appreciated especially by women whereas men ranked timber fifth important. perceptions of recent changes and expectations of forest conservation out of 172 respondents 35% had noticed an improved water situation including both increase in water flow and better water catchment. 13% considered that planting of indigenous trees had accelerated both inside the forests as well as in the fields. they thought that improvement had taken place both in means of soil erosion control and in biodiversity enhancement (21%). the group members considered that people take more measures individually to protect the forests from illegal logging and fires and that may be due to their increasing awareness of the importance of the forests and their endangered species. our informants mentioned various initiatives that had been created concerning forest conservation. voluntary tree planting and tree nursery activities were most frequently (40%) mentioned. the possibility to organize into groups, associations and committees including the responsibility taken in forest conservation was considered as an important recent development step. incentives in alternative forest based businesses were mentioned frequently (56%). a few people mentioned increased education on conservation issues and growing awareness. new employment opportunities had come up along with the research activities and tourism in the area. table 2. ranking of the benefits derived from forests for domestic uses. men’s rankings women’s rankings rankings by all benefits rank rank rank water catchments 1 1 1 firewood 2 3 3 medicines/herbs 3 2 2 fruits 4 7 7 timber 5 6 6 mushrooms 6 4 4 leisure 7 5 5 honey 8 9 9 others, specify 9 8 8 reduced soil erosion 10 10 10 fennia 187: 1 (2009) 69the benefits and constraints of participation in forest … the most frequently mentioned beneficial factor improving the livelihoods of respondents was clean water for use (17%). sale of seedlings was the second most important factor (14%) followed by bee-keeping (10%). income generating activities in all were mentioned by 38% of respondents. unspecified employment, increase in income level and butterfly farming contributed to this figure. a few people considered socializing in groups, climate improvement and new skills gained as factors for improved livelihood. six percent had not experienced any improvements. someone stated: “the tasks are hard and no tangible benefits available – therefore conservation can be frustrating” (female 42 years). on the other hand, some individuals experienced crucial importance of additional income, like the person who wrote: “i managed to finish secondary education due to employment” (male 20 years). the time spent on conservation was seldom mentioned as an inconvenience in the open questions. time as a cost centre was analysed separately and showed that the mean time that the respondents spent each week on forestry activities was about 11 hours with maximum of 72 hours. more people spent less than 10 hours per week based on a standard deviation of 12.5 hours. most frequent expectations our respondents had regarding forest management were improvements in the environment including aspects of higher biodiversity and forest rehabilitation (48%). conservation of water, timber and firewood resources for future use was also mentioned frequently (30%). forest conservation and rehabilitation was expected to contribute to increasing precipitation and reflects a traditional belief according to which forests “attract” or “call” rain. at the same time many respondents (28%) considered that all forest related activities should generate income and increasing job opportunities were expected. a minority (12%) brought up their expectations on forest products as directly extracted benefits. those respondents felt they were denied access to resources such as firewood, timber and grazing areas, even though the management plans propose regulated access to these resources. a handful of people mentioned that they are waiting to gain more knowledge about forest conservation and a few insisted that community should have more freedom to manage forests in the future. traditional knowledge applied in forest conservation and contemporary practices learned our informants provided information about traditional practices of forest management applied in their forests. those can be categorized into technical and symbolical types of knowledge and practices. most commonly mentioned were the use of herbs and medicinal plants (14%) and favouring of indigenous tree species (23%). traditional protection of forests from destruction like fires or illegal logging was considered important (10%). this included e.g. a common responsibility of patrolling and reporting about suspicious people. our respondents mentioned knowledge on traditional methods in pest and disease control, fertilization and about environmentally friendly tree species (14%). traditional rules tell to plant many trees after cutting one and the village elders should be elected to supervise logging activities. there are traditional laws, governing how trees should be cut and which ones not to cut. preferably only dead wood should be used. the relics of the taita tradition still remain in the form of these rules and practices and sacred groves and caves, which are places for conducting rituals and worshipping, are found both inside and outside the gazetted forests. the value of forests remains high and serves as a traditional way of restricting people from entering and destroying the forests. some locals deeply appreciate these areas for their cultural-historical value. technical knowledge and skills learned for conservation and management were many. majority of respondents mentioned forest improvement skills (58%), like raising seedlings, planting rather indigenous than exotic species, water catchment area conservation, fire prevention, seed identification and collection from forests, use of traditional plants for pest control and soil erosion control. 12 percent had recently gained knowledge on techniques of nursery building and management. less frequently mentioned was knowledge and skills upon income generating activities (4%), like butterfly farming and bee-keeping. participation benefits the environment, but people feel like working without proper tools the good aspects and benefits of the recently launched conservation and management system of the forests were listed by the informants in a fol70 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen lowing way: it was considered by majority (58%) contributing to improved environment including aspects of improved tree cover, reduced soil erosion and intensified patrolling prohibiting illegal logging. second important (13%) benefit was the increased water supply. the income generating alternative forest activities followed (12%) and the participation of the forest adjacent people was mentioned positive by seven percent of informants. however, while looking at the negative aspects, the biggest constraint for forest conservation according to 33 percent of the respondents was that the government still has a strong hold onto forests and does not allow full community participation and use of resources. people felt they were restricted from entering the forests, while some outsiders, like researchers and tourists enter there without nearby residents being aware of it. to quote one of our respondents: “in as much the forests are ours (the local peoples) we are being exploited and yet gain nothing from it. the community does not directly benefit from the revenues from forests” (male 48 years). the biggest need for a direct forest product was for firewood, according to 13 percent of respondents. people also worried about urgent environmental problems, like decreased endemic animal populations and herbal plants, illegal logging and hunting, deliberately started forest fires and inadequate planting of indigenous trees due to difficulties of getting particular seeds and seedlings. those aspects were brought up by 14 percent of informants, while a few less considered careless logging of trees on farms, carried out by ignorant people, being a constraint for conservation. our respondents had opinions on how the forest management system should be improved. most frequent initiatives (24%) concerned more profound and extensive involvement of various stakeholders. people would like to see more teaming up of non-governmental organizations, officers, area residents and religious leaders. the forest adjacent residents should be more widely involved and granted the authority as before to conserve the forests. “more widely” referred to the number of people and their different socio-economical backgrounds. lack of participation by other forest adjacent residents than the members of the organized groups had been noticed. additionally, “as before” meant the period before establishment of forest reserves and had a strong sense of “our forest” in it. transparency in conservation activities was also demanded. the transition of responsibility on forest conservation and management practices should be more clearly starting from the communities upwards to government and then to other stakeholders. some respondents (16%), however, felt the need for assistance in order to conduct properly their conservation work. this included capacity building in modern forest management skills, education on planning and management strategies and easier access to hands-on conservation inputs, like seedlings and fertilizers. the need for access to firewood came up once again and a debate, which was going on about compensation of crop losses of forest adjacent dwellers caused by wild animals, came apparent in the answers. the importance of forest fire prevention was emphasized as well as the need for more training on sustainable forest management methods. the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of participation and the institutions involved strengths and opportunities were considered benefits while threats and weaknesses represented constraints in the swot analysis. the benefit category elicited 47 responses, scoring slightly higher than the 43 elicited by the constraints. a summary of responses is found in the fourfold table 3 below. the institutional analysis exercise showed that the forest act, the ministry of forest and the implemented regulations were perceived ambiguously by the informants. the act was considered a crucially important step forward, but at the same time too restricting and paternalistic. the most visible and positively perceived stakeholder in the analysis was icipe (international centre of insect physiology and ecology). it had been contributing through its programs as an initiator and sponsor for beekeeping, butterfly farming and silk moth rearing. however, unreliable market related to these businesses was perceived as a threat. important stakeholders in the area have been east african wild life society and greenbelt movement. the former has been coordinating and facilitating forest conservation and livelihood activities and preparation of the participatory forest management plans. the latter had contributed to the establishment, advisory work and monitoring services of some of the tree nurseries. the market for tree seedlings included schools, churches, hospitals and individuals locally. the community development trust fund, a joint initiative of kenyan govfennia 187: 1 (2009) 71the benefits and constraints of participation in forest … table 3. the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of participatory forest management according to the respondents. strenghts • forests’ ecological services; water catchment, rain attraction, fresh air, place for leisure • feeling of empowerment through formation of community groups – “we can now make decisions and ask questions” • capacity building has taken place in many disciplines weaknesses • lack of unity • lack of transparency among stakeholders in resource sharing leading to prejudices and uneven distribution of benefits • ignorance • lack of commitment of members • insufficient knowledge about management techniques and legal rights • income from forest products not benefiting the forest itself or the community in large • human-wildlife conflict unsolved • lack of funds • time consumption • hiv/aids occurrence affects implementation of plans opportunities • larger market for forest products • unique, endemic flora and fauna as attraction for tourism related businesses • commercial use of medicinal plants • access to forest resources; seedlings, medicinal plants, resin, sites for apiaries and butterfly farms • improved soil fertility leading to increase in food production • establishment of research centre and employment opportunities threats • unpredictable weather conditions • forest fire outbreaks • over supply on the butterfly market sector causing competition and blockage • conservation efforts going wrong, because of lacking management capacities • thefts • “we are insufficiently equipped to fully engage in forest conservation” ernment and the european commission, was considered as an important source of funds for community-based organizations. however, also frustration and unmet expectations had emerged while dealing with the state administration, like social services and ministry of wildlife as well as with some non-governmental organizations and research projects in the area. the groups had seldom got responses from donors, and were not enough aware of the purposes of ongoing research activities in the area. they also felt barehanded and left alone in the human-wildlife conflict, whereby the farmers on a close range from forests suffer from noteworthy crop losses due to the damages that animals cause. discussion we shall have a look at the underlying factors for peoples perceptions and the challenges of participatory forest management. the relation between direct financial incentives, social benefits and conservation as motivators are discussed. contrary to the observations that direct incentives, notably financial subsidies (morschel et al. 2004) and other schemes, have been used to encourage conservation efforts, this study established that conservation itself can be a strong motivator for community participation. whereas financial incentives (baumann 2000) have proven to be the most important incentive schemes for stakeholders in forest management, studies indicate that they have little propensity to generate significant economic gains (brown et al. 2002). moreover, stakeholders are not only driven by financial goals, but also by their predisposition towards certain goals, such as the security of sustainable resource management and access to forest products (uphoff 1992; pretty 1995). our findings concur with those of lise (2000) and pejchar and press (2006) in that the value and the dependency people attach to the environment motivate them to participate in forest activities. on the other hand, we need to take into consideration that the reason why the “will to conserve” as a motivating factor overshadowed other factors may be attributed to the short duration during which the forest management activities had been implemented. another possible reason could be attributed to recent inputs on awareness-raising 72 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen in conservation; many organisations working in the area seem to stress the importance of it. our study established that fewer members of the youth population engaged in forestry activities, a finding similar to that of munyu and wesonga (2005), who alluded to limited opportunities for economic activities in the area. in our study, however, opportunities for income generation exist, but which the youth had yet to realise. water was emphasized as the most important benefit motivating both men and women to participate, whereas income generating opportunities motivated mostly men. in taita hills, beekeeping is traditionally the duty of men (maundu & ogutu 1986). according to boserup (1970), agricultural activities requiring investments do not attract women’s participation. beekeeping requires investments in equipment, which is likely to discourage the participation of women. other reproductive roles, such as obligations for house maintenance, may also gear women more towards activities that meet their immediate needs (omoro 1998). we know that non-agricultural sources of income are on the rise in the taita households. according to a study by soini (2005) on livelihood strategies in the taita hills, families have a unique and changing set of assets and incentives. even if they consider themselves farmers, they are increasingly multi-occupational and continue to derive their livelihood from offfarm income creation. the respondents expect economical opportunities through the new management system. they emphasised how the value of biodiversity could be harnessed to serve livelihoods, such as ecotourism. taita hills have good ecotourism potential due to the unique forest biodiversity, great sceneries, interesting taita culture and central location within the coastal tourism circle (himberg 2008). the cultural and religious values attached to forests seem to strengthen the bond between people and nature. the possibility to engage in forest management work by applying traditional skills was considered an asset. on a positive note, the respondents stated that they had learnt new skills for alternative forest-based businesses. however, they felt the need for continuous education on management issues, which currently was limited. as bhattacharya and basnyat (2003) state, one of the major thrusts of empowerment is capacity development; the transition of empowerment into actual practice is a challenge for the sustainability of forest conservation. the forest act stipulates the functions and structures to be established. out of necessity, such structures have their own internal arrangements, which introduce elements of stratifications. in effect, the associations formed have executive committees and ordinary members. elements of dissatisfaction, however, arose despite the democratic election of the committees. participation was differentiated, and committees have been known to pursue other interests or to overlook their members’ interest while making certain decisions that cause the rest of the members to feel that they have the upper hand or that the decisions lack sufficient transparency. nygren (2005) describes this phenomenon as the promotion of hierarchical relations over democratic participation. the results reflected strong perceptions of the respondents striving towards more comprehensive decision making power in forest conservation. the respondents saw challenges in the implementation of equal legal rights and of benefit sharing mechanisms both inside their groups and in other adjacent forest populations. these challenges were also identified in a study of kumar (2002), who assessed the net social benefits of joint forest management for local communities in india and showed that the regime reflected the social benefits of the rural non-poor, leaving the poorest in the village as the net losers. he suggests that management plans should include compensatory mechanisms to help the poorest. the findings of this study are applicable only to those people living in taita hills, who belonged to an association or group engaged in forest conservation. the result of this study may have been different had the rest of the population of the area been interviewed. suffice it to say, however, that the respondents’ choices were biased against those who were granted some rights to manage the forests. thus, the results of this study can not represent the views of taita communities comprehensively. more in-depth understanding of the incentives for forest management could have been gained if we would have studied the socio-economic stratification of our respondents. the methodology used in this study can be criticised upon the aforementioned issues. however, the pra tools used allowed a rapid way in to detect the socioeconomical and ecological realities of the participants and enabled useful brainstorming and knowledge sharing sessions. we wanted to record the mindsets of the respondents firstly through individual responses to the questionnaire and afterwards through the group exercises in order to see whether or not the personal opinions and the ones fennia 187: 1 (2009) 73the benefits and constraints of participation in forest … expressed within groups were in line with each other. this adds to the reliability of the study. bhattacharyaa and basnyat (2003), who emphasise the importance of assessing empowerment status in joint forest management programmes, state that joint forest management resolutions are explicit with regard to the empowerment of local communities, but that the local people are seldom able to avail the opportunity from it due to their own socio-cultural and economic constraints. one aspect that we also need to consider is the relatively small sizes of the forests. the informants had accepted restrictions on these forests to regulate extractive commercial use. the remaining options are conservation and the non-extractive use of forest products. prior to the enactment of the forest act 2005, conservation was the only option because access to government forest reserves was denied (although illegal timber extraction has still been a serious problem). another reason for the willingness of the respondents to conserve relates to their observations and wider awareness of diminishing water yields. according to lekasi et al. (2005), who conducted a pra study in the chawia area, farmers recalled trends in water availability and in soil fertility from the 1920s to 2005 and reported a crucial decrease in yields and soil condition since the 1960s due to the destruction of forests and the introduction of unsuitable species of exotic trees. in reality, water from these catchment areas goes beyond the geographical coverage of the study area. perhaps the government should introduce external incentives to further encourage conservation efforts, as is done elsewhere with the payment for ecosystem service (pes) (turpie et al. 2008). such external incentive schemes could encourage these communities to ensure sustained conservation of the forests and support both local livelihood and national and global interests. conclusions this study showed that preservation of common resources such as water and biodiversity motivated these people to participate in forest management. despite the weaknesses, threats and other constraints enumerated by the respondents, the benefits of forest conservation activities were emphasized. two driving forces behind the will to participate in forest conservation are evident: first, a real concern about the state of the local environment and about the people’s dependency on forest based livelihoods, and second, conservation efforts as the only means to grant local people access to planning and decision making and new employment opportunities. our respondents offered positive feedback about the change from the former situation to the more participatory one. nevertheless, following components in the conservation system still seemed to generate dissatisfaction, a lack of transparency within the groups, limited opportunities for conservation and use of forest resources as well as inadequate access to new information concerning forest management practises and legal rights. the results of this study may facilitate further planning and decision-making regarding participatory forest management in taita hills region. the traditional knowledge concerning forest conservation could be more applied if more systematically aggregated and taken into consideration in various phases of the participatory forest management process. both, the traditional knowledge, treasured by the local people and the contemporary knowledge about forest conservation practices should be more exposed and distributed. acknowledgements we are grateful for the invaluable contribution of the communities of ngangao, chawia, mbololo and mwambirwa. we wish to thank our research assistant, mr amon mghanga, as well as mr jonam mwandoe and the forest guards who facilitated the translation work. we also appreciate the help of dr alfred agwanda and ezekiel ogutu, who assisted us with the spss software. the study was made possible by funding from the academy of finland for the taitatoo project at the department of geography, university of helsinki (geoinformatics in environmental conservation and community-based natural resource management in the taita hills, kenya, http://www. helsinki.fi/science/taita). references agrawal a & jc ribot (1999). accountability in decentralization: a framework with south asian and african cases. journal of developing areas 33: 4, 473–502. agrawal a & k gupta (2005). decentralization and participation: the governance of common pool resources in nepal’s terai. world development 33: 7, 1101–1114. 74 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen andersson kp, cc gibson & f lehoucq (2006). municipal politics and forest governance: comparative analysis of decentralization in bolivia and guatemala. world development 34: 3, 576–595. arnstein sr (1969). a ladder of citizen participation. journal of the american institute of planners 35, 216–224. baumann p (2000). sustainable livelihoods and political capital: arguments and evidence from decentralization and natural resource management in india. odi working paper 136. 44 p. overseas development institute, london. beentje hj (1988). an ecological and floristic study of the forests of the taita hills, kenya. utafiti 1: 2, 23–66. befu h (1977). social exchange. annual review of anthropology 6, 255–281. bhattacharya ak & b basnyat (2003). empowering people through joint forest management: a study from madhya pradesh, india. international forestry review 5: 4, 370–378. blaikie p (2006). is small really beautiful? community-based natural resource management in malawi and botswana. world development 34: 11, 1942– 1957. boserup e (1970). women’s role in economic development. 283 p. st. martins, new york. brown d, y malla, k schreckenberg & o springatebaginski (2002). from supervising subjects to supporting citizens: recent developments in community forestry in asia and africa. natural resource perspectives 75. 4 p. overseas development institute, london. burley j (1982). obstacles to tree planting in arid and semi-arid lands: comparative case studies from india and kenya. 52 p. the united nations university, tokyo. bytebier b (2001). taita hills biodiversity project report. 121 p. national museums of kenya, nairobi. central bureau of statistics (2001). 1999 population and housing census: counting our people for development, vol. 1: population distribution by administrative areas and urban centres. 415 p. ministry of finance and planning, nairobi. conservation international (2005). biodiversity hotspots. <http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org/ages/default. aspx>. 23.11.2008. flowerdew r & d martin (2005). methods in human geography: a guide for students doing a research project. 366 p. pearson education limited, essex. (gok) government of kenya (1983). district focus for rural development. government printers, nairobi. (gok) government of kenya (1994). kenya forestry master plan. 422 p. government printers, nairobi. (grn) government of the republic of namibia (1996). forestry strategic plan. ministry of environment and tourism, windhoek. (grn) government of the republic of namibia (2001). forest act. ministry of environment and tourism, windhoek. himberg n (2008). community-based ecotourism as a sustainable development option: case of the taita hills, kenya. 141 p. vdm verlag dr. müller, saarbrücken. idrc (2009). the international development research centre. <http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-56615201-1-do_topic.html>. 16.04.2009. kenya forest working group, forest department & ngangao community forest association (2004). participatory forest management plan: ngangao forest, taita-taveta district. 45 p. the east african wild life society, wundanyi. kumar s (2002). does “participation” in common pool resource management help the poor? a social cost-benefit analysis of joint forest management in jharkhand, india. world development 30: 5, 763–782. lekasi jk, iv sijali, p gicheru, l gachimbi & mk nyagw’ara (2005). agricultural productivity and sustainable land management project report on participatory rapid appraisal for wusi sub-location in the taita hills catchment. slm technical report 10. 23 p. kenya agricultural research institute, nairobi. lise w (2000). factors influencing people’s participation in forest management in india. ecological economics 34: 3, 379–392. luukkanen o (1996). kenya forestry master plan reveals new forest resource trends. in palo m & g mery (eds). sustainable forestry: challenge for developing countries, 359–369. kluwer academic publishers, netherlands. matose f & l wily (1996). institutional arrangements governing the use and management of miombo woodlands. in campbell b (ed). the miombo in transition: woodlands and welfare in africa, 195– 219. cifor, bogor. maundu pm & m ogutu (1986). agriculture and animal husbandry. in were gs & r soper (eds). taita taveta district socio-cultural profile, 77–100. ministry of planning and national development & university of nairobi, nairobi. mbuthia kw (2003). ecological and ethnobotanical analyses for forest restoration in the taita hills, kenya. ph.d. thesis. 151 p. miami university, ohio, u.s.a. misra pk (1997). potentialities of jfm: some reflections. wastelands news 12: 4, 32–33. mogaka h (2002). economic instruments for the reduction of forest biodiversity loss in kenya. gef/ undp/fao cross border biodiversity project “reducing biodiversity loss at selected cross-border sites in east africa”. economics component technical report 16. 43 p. nairobi. morschel j, dm fox & jf bruno (2004). limiting sediment deposition on roadways: topographic controls on vulnerable roads and cost analysis of planting grass buffer strips. environmental science & policy 7: 1, 39–45. munyu w & d wesonga (2005). technology and youth livelihood strategies: an impact study of the fennia 187: 1 (2009) 75the benefits and constraints of participation in forest … entrepreneurship and employment training programme. report for the global education partnership. 18 p. global education partnership, united states. mwang’ombe j (2005a). restoration and increase of forest connectivity in taita hills: surveys and suitability assessment of exotic plantations for restoration. a report. <www.cepf.net/xp/static/pdfs/final_eawls_taitahills.pdf>. 15.04.2008. mwang’ombe j (2005b). participatory forest management plan for mwambirwa and mbololo forests. 56 p. the east african wild life society, wundanyi. nygren a (2005). community-based forest management within the context of institutional decentralization in honduras. world development 33: 4, 639–655. omoro lma (1998). women’s participation in soil conservation: constraints and opportunities – the kenyan experience. advances in geoecology 31: 2, 1463–1468. oyugi wo (2000). decentralization for the good governance and development: the unending debate. regional development dialogue 21: 1, 3–22. pejchar l & dm press (2006). achieving conservation objectives through production forestry: the case of acacia koa on hawaii island. environmental science & policy 9: 5, 439–447. pellikka p, m lötjönen, m siljander & l lens (2009). airborne remote sensing of spatiotemporal change (1955–2004) in indigenous and exotic forest cover in the taita hills, kenya. international journal of applied earth observation and geoinformation 11: 4, 221–232. potters j, d reeb & mr crollius (2002). the progress of participatory forestry in africa. presented at second international workshop on participatory forestry in africa. defining the way forward: sustainable livelihoods and sustainable forest management through participatory forestry. <ftp://ftp. fao.org/docrep/fao/006/y4807b/y4807b05.pdf>. 15.12.2007. pretty jn (1995). regenerating agriculture: policies and practices for sustainability and self reliance. 320 p. earthscan, london. pretty jn, i guijt, j thompson & i scoones (1995). participatory learning and action – a trainers guide. 178 p. iied, london. ribot jc (2002). democratic decentralization of natural resources: institutionalizing popular participation. 38 p. world resources institute, washington, dc. ribot jc (2006). choose democracy: environmentalists’ socio-political responsibility. global environmental change 16: 2, 115–119. (rok) republic of kenya (2005). the forest act 2005. kenya gazette supplement no 88 (acts no 7). 76 p. government printer, nairobi. (rok) republic of kenya (2008). taita district development plan 2008–2012. a globally competitive and prosperous kenya. zero draft june 2008. 142 p. ministry of state for planning, national development and vision 2030, nairobi. salomao a & f matose (2007). towards communitybased forest management in mozambique: can this make a difference? – community-based natural resources management of miombo woodlands in mozambique. miombo woodland: policies and incentives. 36 p. cifor, harare, zimbabwe. saxena kg, ks rao, kk sen, rk maikhuri & rl semwal (2001). integrated natural resource management: approaches and lessons from the himalaya. conservation ecology 5: 2, 14. <http://www. consecol.org/vol5/iss2/art14>. 16.09.2009. selener d (1997). participatory action research and social change. 384 p. the cornell participatory action research network, cornell university, ny. soini e (2005). livelihood capital, strategies and outcomes in the taita hills of kenya. icraf working paper 8. 48 p. world agroforestry centre, nairobi. thomson t & k schoonmaker freudenberger (1997). crafting institutional arrangements for community forestry. community forestry field manual 7. fao. <http://www.fao.org/docrep/w7483e/w7483e0a. htm>. 10.12.2008. turpie jk, c marais & jn blignaut (2008). the working for water programme: evolution of a payments for ecosystem services mechanism that addresses both poverty and ecosystem service delivery in south africa. journal of ecological economics 65: 4, 788–798. unced (1992). report of the united nations conference on environment and development: earth summit agenda 21. 300 p. united nations, new york. uphoff n (1992). monitoring and evaluating popular participation in world bank-assisted projects. in bhatnagar b & ac williams (eds). participatory development and the world bank: potential directions for change. world bank discussion paper 183, 135–153. the world bank, washington d.c. ville j (1994). taita hills – should man and wildlife be divorced? swara 6, 23–25. nairobi. white a & a martin (2002). who own the world’s forests? 30 p. forest trends, center for international environmental law, washington d.c. usa. wssd (2002). report of the united nations of world summit on sustainable development. 170 p. united nations, new york. 76 fennia 187: 1 (2009)nina himberg, loice omoro, petri pellikka and olavi luukkanen appendix 1. the self-completion questionnaire included both structured and open-ended questions. 1. have you noticed any changes in forest management in your area? please, explain. 2. what kind of initiatives have been created concerning forest management? 3. which kind of community forest management are you involved in? (structured) 4. how did you get involved in forest management? (structured) 5. how many group members are you? 6. how long have you participated in forest management? (structured) 7. what activities do you undertake when you participate in forest management? (structured) 8. what motivates you to participate in community forest management? (structured) 9. what kind of tangible benefits do you obtain from participating in community forest management? (structured) 10. indicate the type of employment that has arisen during your participation in forest management. (structured) 11. please, rank in order of preference (1–10) the benefits you obtain from the forest for domestic use. (structured) 12. how many hours per week do you approximately use for participatory forest management? 13. please, estimate your personal average monthly income, generated from participatory activities, in respect to the following seasons? 14. what are your expectations regarding forest management? 15. what is your position in participatory forest management system? (structured) 16. what traditional practices of forest management are applied in this forest? 17. what is good about the way the forest management is organized? 18. what negative factors can you find about the way the management is organized? 19. how would you like to see the management system reorganized? 20. what knowledge and skills have you gained along with the new responsibilities on forest management? 21. how have your sources of livelihood changed since you started participating in community management? (structured) 22. please, specify the possible factors that have improved your livelihood. 23. what are your other views regarding your participation in forest management that has not been covered in this interview? racialized immigrants becoming part of the city: connecting migration, space and race – commentary to van liempt urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa129437 doi: 10.11143/fennia.129437 reflections racialized immigrants becoming part of the city: connecting migration, space and race – commentary to van liempt mélodine sommier sommier, m. (2023) racialized immigrants becoming part of the city: connecting migration, space and race – commentary to van liempt. fennia 201(1) 108–111. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129437 building on ilse van liempt’s (2023) lecture, this commentary addresses the connection and shift between forced displacement and local emplacement by addressing what becoming part of the city means for racialized immigrants. by bringing forward the notion of racialization i hope to contribute to a growing body of literature discussing how malleable and productive the concept of race – albeit erased and relegated to the past – keeps on shaping conversations about and across europe. connecting migration, space and race offers a particularly rich context in which to have this discussion because, as all three elements are mutually constructive, addressing them together exposes some of the complexities and nuances of the experience of becoming part of the city for racialized immigrants. addressing this topic calls into question my own experience as an immigrant which, as a french white woman living in finland and working at the university, is shaped by many privileges. it is therefore important to highlight the position of power from which i talk, in part because of the extent to which whiteness permeates much of our conceptual and methodological work as researchers. however, committed we, as individuals, might be to anti-racism, it is important to recognize that we are working within the structures of academia and as such are working within a (discursive) space that has historically been organized through whiteness. exposing the racial structures at play in academia is a small but critical step to contest it and work towards change within the academy as well as society. keywords: race, migration, space, interdisciplinary, racialization mélodine sommier (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5398-5320), department of language and communication studies, university of jyväskylä, finland. e-mail: melodine.c.m.sommier@jyu.fi immigrants in europe: covert racialization and the erasure of race as goldberg (2015, 107) reminds us, “every racism is relationally structured”. connecting race and immigration therefore automatically invites us to look at the structures and relations through which racialization processes take place. thus, our focus cannot reduce race to immigrants and immigration, but need to address the role played by receiving societies and hosts in (re)producing racialized as well © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.129437 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5398-5320 mailto:melodine.c.m.sommier@jyu.fi fennia 201(1) (2023) 109mélodine sommier as hegemonic a-racial positions. this aspect is key in the european context since the term ‘immigrant’ is a covertly racialized category, and the term ‘european’ covertly signifies whiteness. literature has shown how europeanness is shaped by and shaping whiteness without explicit mentions of a racial order or a white supremacy hierarchy (beaman 2019). referring to the invisibilization of discourses of whiteness in europe, essed and trienekens (2008, 69) talk of a “floating concept”. they argue that “european-ness probably means ‘white’ (whichever way white gets to be defined), ‘plus’ something else. this plus refers to a continuum between popular (everyday practice) and high culture.” (ibid.). what the authors describe are the multifaceted and covert ways in which the category ‘european’ is constructed as inaccessible for many. such inaccessibility is due, in part, to the erasure of race in europe that points to two intertwined aspects: the pervasiveness of whiteness, and the use of other social dimensions to position racialized individuals while refusing “to acknowledge the structures of race ordering the social” (goldberg 2015, 93). as individuals are taught not to think through race, they are instead encouraged to think in terms of ethnicity, culture, nationality, religion and so on (morning 2009). the category ‘immigrant’ illustrates the discursive shift from race to culture. as a result, racial hierarchy is maintained and racism enacted without mentioning race but instead focusing on ethnicity and culture – a well-known and powerful discursive strategy to depoliticize and individualize the discriminations people face (titley 2004; bonilla-silva 2021). the erasure of race is intertwined with neoliberal ideologies that contribute to dismiss racism altogether by pointing the fingers at individual incidents rather than structural inequalities, and overlooking the way racism is not only about losses but also about gains – as macintosh powerfully reminds us “as a white person […] i was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth” (macintosh as cited in hooks 2009, 74). going to a new place means going through many emotional, spatial and institutional adjustments. when talking about her move from kentucky, the place where she grew up, to california where she went to study, hooks (2009, 12) talks about these adjustments, including that of learning to identify new forms of racism: “away from my native place i learned to recognize the myriad faces of racism, racial prejudice and hatred, the shape shifting nature of white supremacy”. this resonates with the experiences of racialized immigrants in europe who are faced with the challenges of identifying how race and racism play out in that specific post-racial space. contrary to how the term post-racial is sometimes used in public discourses, it does not mean that race belongs to the past or that it is only relevant elsewhere (usually thinking of the united states) (salem & thompson 2016). rather, a postracial reality means that there are new ways of thinking, talking, and ordering racial and racist expressions (goldberg 2015), and in europe such new ways typically rely on proxies. for racialized immigrants to put a name on what they experience and perceive can therefore be particularly difficult and alienating as processes connected to race are constantly concealed and denied (lentin 2008). connecting race and migration studies is therefore central to apprehend the various ways in which racialization processes permeate immigrants’ experiences in connection to the power dynamics at play in host societies. thus, a call for the racialization of immigration studies (e.g. sáenz & manges douglas 2015) starts from the premise that race is woven into the fabric of society and mediates life experiences – of immigrants as well as hosts – in connection with social class, gender and other social dimensions. categories used to describe privileged mobilities such as ‘expatriates’, ‘digital nomads’ or ‘global citizens’ remind us of the covert racialization that permeate all subject positions, some as invisible and privileged, and others as minoritized and marginalized. interdisciplinary and local focus: developing new tools notwithstanding similarities among discourses of race circulating in europe, local idiosyncratic discourses exist. part of the work that awaits us as we conceptualize race in connection to immigration in europe is to identify similarities and differences through which race is (covertly) deployed across european countries. for instance, in the netherlands, where van liempt’s (2023) work was conducted, discourses of race align with the colorblind and universalist framework that circulates in many european countries (lentin 2008), but are supplemented by local discourses of tolerance and openness towards 110 fennia 201(1) (2023)reflections differences that further contributes to disconnect dutchness from racism (essed & hoving 2014; çankaya & mepschen 2019). in contrast, discourses of race in finland are articulated around specific strategies of erasure connected to discourses of victimization and nordic exceptionalism (hoegaerts et al. 2022) while, in turn, discourses of race in france are connected to deep-seated national ideologies of secularism, universalism and republic (sommier 2020). despite the variety and complexities of racial formations in europe, these are often discussed through examples and scholarship from the united states (us), whether it is to argue race has no place in europe today or to address european racial realities through us lenses. developing conceptual tools that depart from us-centric frameworks and speak to the specificities of european racial realities is therefore essential. increasing scholarship is produced on race, racism and racialization processes specific to the european contexts (e.g. goldberg 2006; wekker 2016; boulila 2019) but tends to remain within the boundaries of a few academic disciplines, such as race and ethnic studies or cultural studies, rather than being incorporated across fields of study. and yet, since race permeates and organizes society as a whole, exploring racial structures and imaginaries should permeate all disciplines to gain deeper understandings of racial realities as well as the contexts they shape. as such, focusing on space has proven useful to apprehend the malleability, volatility, relational and contextual dimensions of race. key concepts such as ‘white space’ (anderson 2015), ‘racial landscapes’ (james et al. 2016), ‘periphrastic space’ (goldberg 1993) or ‘critical spatial literacy’ (amoo-adare 2011) all shed light on the way social realities take shape through the intersection of race and space. scholars have repeatedly shown how social geography can benefit from and to the study of race since spatial and racial boundaries are mutually constitutive (neely & samura 2011). such a multilayered focus also helps capture the complexities of lived realities and, echoing van liempt’s (2023) plea, contributes to move away from dichotomous and reductive approaches to migration. although work on race and space is often from and about the united states, this approach is particularly relevant in europe as a means of capturing the concealed omnipresence of race. as goldberg (2006, 340) argues, europe’s slavery and colonial past is embedded in “the archite(x)ture of european space”. yet, this past and its contemporary ramifications, for instance in connection to issues of belonging, are buried. thus, connecting race, space and immigration offers opportunities to make the invisible visible and to question “[d]ominant discourses [which] miss historical explanations and dismiss the connection between present ethnic humiliations and the brutality of colonization, slavery, and antisemitism” (essed & hoving 2014, 7). the connection between space and race illustrates how explicitly bringing in race as an object of research can help scholars capture nuances, complexities, contradictions, dialectic relationships between past and present, local and transnational, individual and structural, as well as bridge gaps between disciplines to sharpen conceptual and methodological tools. this commentary therefore ends on such a call for researchers across fields of study to recognize and apprehend race as a recurrent structuring element of european realities that requires us to turn towards transdisciplinary and multi-layered approaches. references amoo-adare, e. (2011) engendering critical spatial literacy: migrant asante women and the politics of urban space. in oyĕwùmí, o. (ed.) gender epistemologies in africa, 101–118. palgrave macmillan, new york. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116276_6 anderson, e. (2015) the white space. sociology of race and ethnicity 1(1) 10–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214561306 beaman, j. (2019) are french people white? towards an understanding of whiteness in republican france. identities 26(5) 546–562. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2018.1543831 bonilla-silva, e. (2021) racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the united states. 6th ed. rowman & littlefield, london. boulila, s. c. (2019) race in post-racial europe: an intersectional analysis. rowman & littlefield, london. çankaya, s. & mepschen, p. (2019) facing racism: discomfort, innocence and the liberal peripheralisation of race in the netherlands. social anthropology/anthropologie sociale 27(4) 626–640. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12699 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116276_6 https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214561306 https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2018.1543831 https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12699 fennia 201(1) (2023) 111mélodine sommier essed, p. & hoving, i. (2014) innocence, smug ignorance, resentment: an introduction to dutch racism. in p. essed & i. hoving (eds.) dutch racism, 9–29. brill, leiden. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401210096_002 essed, p. & trienekens, s. (2008) ‘who wants to feel white? ’race, dutch culture and contested identities. ethnic and racial studies 31(1) 52–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701538885 goldberg, t. d. (1993) racist culture. philosophy and the politics of meaning. blackwell publishers, oxford. goldberg, t. d. (2006) racial europeanization. ethnic and racial studies 29(2) 331–364. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870500465611 goldberg, t. d. (2015) are we all postracial yet? polity press, cambridge. hoegaerts, j., liimatainen, t., hekanaho, l., & peterson, e. (2022) finnishness, whiteness and coloniality. helsinki university press. https://doi.org/10.33134/hup-17 hooks, b. (2009) belonging: a culture of place. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203888018 james, m., kim, h., & redclift, v. (eds.) (2016) new racial landscapes: contemporary britain and the neoliberal conjuncture. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315756103 lentin, a. (2008) europe and the silence about race. european journal of social theory 11(4) 487–503. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431008097008 van liempt, i. (2023) becoming part of the city: local emplacement after forced displacement. fennia 201(1) 9–22. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 morning, a. (2009) toward a sociology of racial conceptualization for the 21st century. social forces 87(3) 1167–1192. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.0.0169 neely, b. & samura, m. (2011) social geographies of race: connecting race and space. ethnic and racial studies 34(11) 1933–1952. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.559262 sáenz, r. & manges douglas, k. (2015) a call for the racialization of immigration studies: on the transition of ethnic immigrants to racialized immigrants. sociology of race and ethnicity 1(1) 166–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214559287 salem, s. & thompson, v. (2016) old racisms, new masks: on the continuing discontinuities of racism and the erasure of race in european contexts. nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal 3(1) 1–23. <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98p8q169>. sommier, m. (2020) “how else are you supposed to dress up like a black guy??”: negotiating accusations of blackface in online newspaper comments. ethnic and racial studies 43(16) 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1689279 titley, g. (2004) resituating culture. council of europe, strasbourg. wekker, g. (2016) white innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race. duke university press, durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374565 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401210096_002 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701538885 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870500465611 https://doi.org/10.33134/hup-17 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203888018 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315756103 https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431008097008 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.127425 https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.0.0169 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.559262 https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214559287 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/98p8q169 https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2019.1689279 https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374565 contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase of foreign second home ownership in finland 1990−2008 kati pitkänen pitkänen, kati (2011). contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase of foreign second home ownership in finland 1990−2008. fennia 189: 1, pp. 43–59. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. cross-border and international second home ownership is a worldwide phenomenon and growing in popularity as people seek desirable environments further away than before. as the desired landscapes are also likely to possess a considerable local and national value, research is needed to find out how host societies perceive and receive the newcomers. this paper explores the finnish public debate on foreign second home ownership from 1990 to 2008, a period that has witnessed a considerable growth in foreign property ownership. the paper uses the concept of cottage landscape to analyse how second homes are positioned nationally and how foreign second home ownership is debated in relation to the national definitions and valuations. based on changing emphases and fears related to the phenomenon, three periods of public debate are distinguished. the results demonstrate the iconic image of cottage landscape in the finnish society by showing how foreign second home ownership is perceived as a threat to the finnish way of life, landownership rights and national identity. from the perspective of the host society, foreign second home ownership is a complicated and emotional matter with potential to raise opposition and even conflicts when the foreign demand focuses on locally or nationally valued landscapes. therefore research on the internationalisation of second home ownership can no longer ignore the perspective of the host society. keywords: second homes, public discourse, national landscape, contested landscapes, international second home tourism, foreign second home ownership kati pitkänen, centre for tourism studies, kuninkaankartanonkatu 7, p.o.box 86, fi-57101 savonlinna. e-mail: kati.pitkanen@uef.fi introduction “we are soon standing on the last shore!” (helsingin sanomat, 19 may 1992) “treasures of our shores to foreigners?” (helsingin sanomat, 13 september 1993) ”russians are invading eastern finland piece by piece” (itä-savo, 4 march 2007) ”buy a piece of fatherland” (suomen kuvalehti, 3 october 2008) these are examples of finnish newspapers and magazine headlines reacting to the loosening of restrictions of foreign property ownership and the gradual increase in foreign second home purchases during past decades. finland is no exception, but cross-border and international as well as domestic second home ownership are growing in popularity worldwide. second homes and multiple dwelling are an established part of leisure in many countries and have also for a long been a topic of academic research (coppock 1977; hall & müller 2004; mcintyre et al. 2006). more recently, improved access to communication and transportation, general opening of borders, and growth in income and private financial resources have enabled certain classes of people to seek desirable environments or cheaper and available properties abroad (williams & van patten 2006; mccarthy 2007; woods 2009). in research literature a well-known example of internationalisation of second home ownership are ‘snowbirds’, peourn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa4126 44 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen ple who migrate seasonally to sunnier and warmer locations within or across national boundaries (karisto 2000; williams et al. 2000, 2004; timothy 2002; mchugh 2006; haug et al. 2007). examples of single nationalities crossing borders in search for second homes include brits and dutch in rural france (buller & hoggart 1994; hoggart & buller 1995; chaplin 1999a, 1999b; priemus 2005), americans in mexico and canada (timothy 1994) as well as germans in denmark (tress 2002) and sweden (müller 1999, 2002). these previous studies on the internationalisation of second home ownership have mainly focused on the geographical patterns of foreign ownership (hoggart & buller 1995; müller 1999) and foreigners’ motives and their integration to the receiving country (buller & hoggart 1994; chaplin 1999a, 1999b; müller 2002). foreign ownership has been analysed especially as a part of international amenity migration and globalization of countryside (mccarthy 2007; woods 2009). some studies have referred to potential negative impacts on rural communities such as rising of property prices, real estate speculation, gentrification, language problems, cultural differences, and creation of seasonal communities and ethnic enclaves (buller & hoggart 1994; müller 1999; timothy 2002). however, it has been stated that these developments are geographically uneven as the globalised market has materialized only in relatively small number of rural landscapes meeting the requisite aesthetic and amenity requirements ( mccarthy 2007). although these amenity landscapes with exceptional natural environment are also likely to possess a considerable local and national value and be important locations of domestic tourism and leisure, no studies have reported on conflicts or hostility between the newcomers and host society. furthermore, there is lack of research on how host societies perceive and debate foreign second home ownership. this paper sheds light on these matters by exploring the finnish public debate on foreign second home ownership. the paper reviews finnish media discourse from 1990 to 2008, a period that has witnessed a growth of foreign property ownership for the first time in a century. it is asked: what kind of public discourse has revolved around foreign second home owners, what kinds of fears have been raised and what these fears are based on? the paper uses the concept of cottage1 landscape (halseth 1998; pitkänen 2008) to refer to an imagined space of second homes and their related practices and meanings. cottage landscape is a cultural practice, a way of valuing, giving meaning and making sense of the material and immaterial settings of cottage life (mitchell 2002b; matless 2003). the concept is here used as a tool to analyse how second homes are positioned nationally and how foreign second home ownership is debated in relation to the national definitions and valuations. the paper first introduces the cultural approach to landscape and the context of finnish cottage landscape as a nationally valued space. the paper then proceeds to apply the approach in the analysis of finnish public discourse. cultural approach to landscape the cultural approach to cottage landscape derives from the cultural geography’s discursive accounts into landscape. these were popularised by the cultural turn in social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s that emphasised interpretative and discursive analysis and linked landscape to the notions of power, representation and visuality (wylie 2007). in his seminal work dennis cosgrove (1984) interpreted landscape as a socially induced way of seeing. for him landscape was a kind of ‘veil’, an act of power of certain socio-economic classes which hides behind the underlying truth (wylie 2007). extending from this interpretation don mitchell (2000) has stressed landscape as work, a product of human labour, people and social systems that go into its making. for mitchell (2000, wylie 2007) landscapes are always under work, open to change, alteration and contestation. however, at the same time powerful social interests are trying to represent landscape as fixed, total and natural. david matless (1998, 2003), in turn, has argued that landscape should be conceived in terms of practice and an ‘art of living’. landscape is not only about visuality and symbolic representation, but also constituted by corporeal practices and performance (matless 1998; wylie 2007). what landscape is (and how it should be ‘read’), therefore, cannot be approached without considering how it works (mitchell 2000) or what it does (mitchell 2002b; matless 2003). these interpretations move from conceiving landscape as an ‘image’ and a visual entity into understanding it as a process. landscape can then be best described as a medium and cultural practice (mitchell 2002b). it is a fennia 189: 1 (2011) 45contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … unique mixture of imaginal and material qualities, practices and their economic, social, political and aesthetic values (matless 2003). one particular function of landscape often considered by cultural geographers is that landscape can make something that is cultural appear as natural, taken for granted and right (matless 1998; mitchell 2000, 2002a). however, the meaning of the landscape is not stable but it is constantly struggled over, contested and defended by different social actors in their efforts to use the landscape according to their ways of seeing and living (matless 1998; gold & revill 2000; mitchell 2000, 2002a). an established example of the naturalization of meaning, power and contest are national landscapes. iconic images of nature and national landscape have played a powerful role in the shaping of modern nation-states as the expressions of a claimed natural relationship between a people or nation and the territory or nature it occupies (cosgrove 2003). these landscapes have become valued as national landscapes that evoke the historic home of the people, their virtues, the ways of life, and authentic national experience (gold & revill 2000). matless (1998) writes about ‘landscaped citizenship’ referring to appropriate conduct, aesthetic ability and art of right living associated with landscape whereby individuals and nations give form to themselves environmentally. according to gold and revill (2000) any threat to such landscape becomes reified as a threat both to the way of life it symbolizes and to the very idea of landscape. the flip side of national or any other valued landscapes is that as much as they are about belonging, they are also about exclusion, keeping out those you do not like and identifying yourself largely in terms of who you are not (kinsman 1995; mitchell 2000). arguments over landscaped citizenship always work in relation to a sense of ‘anti-citizenship’ (matless 1998). hence, landscapes are embedded with codes and barriers accessible to some whereas certain claims, practices and groups are excluded from or made invisible in it. these exclusions can have economic or political grounds, but can also involve struggles over issues of race, ethnicity and gender (e.g. kinsman 1995; halfacree 2003; dowler et al. 2005). following these interpretations, the cottage landscape is here understood as a nationally valued landscape, an imagined space that works to assert certain claims, practices, meanings and values related to finns, finnishness, finnish natureculture relationship and finnish cottage life and its environmental surroundings. it is argued that by enforcing certain images and values, it excludes others and is the result and site of continuous contestation and struggle related to power, national identity and values. finnish cottage landscape as a national landscape the strong cultural significance of cottages in finland derives from the social development in the 20th century. in contrast to what the headlines in the introduction might let one expect, the history of finnish cottage culture is international. the origin of second home ownership dates back to the 18th century and time under the swedish rule. later the russian occupation at the beginning of the 19th century made finland a destination of the russians (jaatinen 1997; lovell 2003). this international era ended in the russian revolution and finnish independence in 1917 after which second home ownership remained a privilege of the finnish urban upper classes. second home ownership became a mass phenomenon after the second world war when the urbanising society sought one’s way to the countryside for summer. the relative abundance of land, inheritance and cheaper prices for relatives made it possible also for lower middle-class and working class families to acquire second homes (vuori 1966; löfgren 1999). today second home ownership is a largescale phenomenon. there are 485,100 second homes and approximately 800,000 finns belong to the cottage owner households (statistics finland 2010). during the 20th century second home ownership has remained almost entirely a domestic phenomenon. this has been partly due to national legislation that has restricted property ownership from foreigners. foreigners have been allowed to buy properties since 2000, after the accession of finland to european union (eu) in 1995 and the five year derogation period of national legislation. the 2000s has gradually witnessed an increase in the number of foreign second home purchases. especially the ski centres in lapland and finnish lakeland in southeastern finland, within a few hours reach from st. petersburg, have attracted a growing number of foreign second home tourists (tuulentie 2006; pitkänen & vepsäläinen 2008; kotilainen et al. 2010; fig 1). 46 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen finnish lakeland is one of the most popular areas for second homes. relatively accessible from the large population centres in southern finland, the amenity-rich landscape of the area has attracted a dense stock of cottages along the lake shores. the lakeland landscape is a relic of the ice age with labyrinth-like structure and rocky shores. the biggest lake in the area is called lake saimaa, the fourth largest lake in europe. the lakeland landscape has many symbolic meanings in the finnish culture. during the rise of the nationalistic ideology at the turn of the nineteenth century, the lakes were adored as a national landscape (eskola 1997; häyrynen 2005). correspondingly, ever since the accelerated urbanisation in the 1950s, the lake landscape has been seen as a symbol of the golden youth and countryside nostalgia (pitkänen & vepsäläinen 2006). it has been argued that in the second half of the 20th century the cottage development along the lakeshores has been absorbed into the national landscape imagery (karisto 2006; pitkänen 2008; vepsäläinen & pitkänen 2010). a cottage by a lake has become an iconic second home and national landscape. moreover, the appreciation of the cottage landscape has resulted in the construction of powerful cultural facades on how second home landscape and life there should be like (karisto 2006; periäinen 2006; pitkänen 2008). hence, second homes are an integral part of finnish culture and the way of life. moreover, they are intertwined with the ideas of the nation and national landscape creating an illusion that a cottage by a lake is an eternal and natural part of finnishness (also periäinen 2006). this cultural image, however, hides a complex reality of change and contested meanings. in her article on finnish second home landscape, pitkänen (2008) suggests that one of the current factors changing and challenging the established cultural imagination related to second homes is the foreign second home ownership. data collection and analysis national media coverage, such as newspaper accounts, provides a rich data for the analysis of finnish cottage culture. the foreign interest in second homes has raised a lot of interest on national and regional levels during the past couple of decades. this interest has manifested in regular media coverage and attention. foreign second home ownership has received both negative and positive attention and it has been portrayed as significant not only regionally but for the nation as a whole. research material used in this study consists of a series of newspaper accounts published during the time period of 1.1.1990–31.12.2008. the accounts were acquired from an electric newspaper archive, arkisto (http://www.helsinginsanomat. fi/yritykset/sanoma-arkisto) maintained by the leading newspaper publisher in finland, sanoma corporation. the analysed material forms an extensive cross-section of the finnish media discourse including both serious and tabloid journalism. the limitation of the archive, and thereby also the analysed material, is lack of visual material connected with the original articles and items. the fig. 1. foreign property purchases in finnish municipalities during years 2003–2009 (source: national land survey of finland, official property price register) fennia 189: 1 (2011) 47contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … archive comprises the content of the following newspapers: • since 1990: helsingin sanomat (hs) is the leading newspaper paper in finland, read by more than three-fourths of the residents of the helsinki metropolitan area and by a quarter of all finns. the paper is independent and nonaligned. the average daily circulation of the paper in 2010 was 397,838 copies. • since 1993: ilta-sanomat (is) is the leading tabloid (60% share of the market) and the second biggest newspaper in finland. the paper is read by 734,000 people daily. in 2008, the average audited circulation of the paper was 161,615 copies. • since 1998: taloussanomat (ts) is a financial newspaper published only online since 2008. • since 2001: in addition, the archive contains summaries provided by esmerk oy. esmerk monitors almost all finnish national and local newspapers and leading periodicals and provides media analyses and summaries. articles and items were searched from the archive using a boolean search of terms covering the different synonyms of second home (tourism/tourist/property) and foreigners in finnish. after an initial review the material was complemented with similar searches on terms indicating second homes and germans and russians. the final material comprises 454 newspaper accounts (hs: 263, is: 114, ts: 34, esmerk: 43). most of the accounts were published as articles or news items, but the material also includes 41 accounts published either as invited addresses or under the section meant for readers’ letters and opinions. the material was analysed using thematic coding and analysis. the focus in the analysis was on ‘what’ was said rather than ‘how’ or ‘to whom’ and the purpose was to identify common thematic elements across newspaper accounts (braun & clarke 2006; riessman 2008). the analysis proceeded from the identification of latent nuances to the creation of descriptive thematic categories (cope 2005; braun & clarke 2006). to begin with, all the accounts were read through carefully and categorised according to their latent negative, positive or neutral content so that the same account could belong to one or more of these categories. excerpts of original accounts or keywords were listed as codes under these categories as notes to facilitate further analysis. concurrently, notes were made also of the type of the account (e.g. readers’ letters) and the nationalities of the foreign second home owners mentioned in the text. the accounts included a variety of arguments for, against or neutral to foreign second home ownership. at the second stage, based on the notes made at the first stage, these arguments were collated and sorted into thematic categories to gain an overview of the different themes and arguments related to the phenomenon at different times. it was studied: what kind of negative and positive aspects of foreign second home ownership are raised as well as what kind of neutral issues, and how these issues change during the study interval (table 1). on the basis of continuity, emergence and persistence of different themes as well as number of accounts published each year, three distinct periods of media coverage were distinguished: 1990−1996, 1997−2004 and 2004− 2008 (fig. 2). at the final stage, a closer look was taken on the negative publicity and especially the embedded national rhetoric to identify collective fears related to the phenomenon. all excerpts (altogether in 49 accounts) in which explicit or implicit nationalistic rhetoric was used to argue against foreign second home ownership were identified and assorted thematically and in relation to the three periods. these were then used to analyse how the cottage landscape works to naturalise and assert certain meanings, practices and values related to the national culture-nature relationship. the three analysis periods are presented in the following sections supported by relevant background information and figures. three periods of media debate figure 2 illustrates the development of media coverage on foreign second home ownership during the three analysis periods. figure 3, in turn, shows the annual number of foreign property purchases. comparing these figures reveals that media coverage of foreign second home ownership in the 1990s and 2000s parallels the rate of foreign property purchases. both are also related to the development of national legislation concerning foreign property ownership. originally, acquiring properties was restricted from foreigners already in the grand duchy of finland in the russian empire in 1851. after the independence in 1917, property ownership was restricted also from russians by an order 48 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen negative i ii iii t dubious real estate business 21 3 25 49 national rhetoric 23 0 26 49 threat to the nation 22 1 21 44 rush of foreigners/too many foreigners/foreign invasion 20 2 21 43 environmental impacts 31 0 1 32 public opposition 7 2 20 29 raise of price level 10 0 18 28 permanent houses used as cottages 7 4 17 28 reciprocity, finns cannot buy abroad 2 0 15 17 impacts on the everyman’s right 7 0 1 8 ‘bad foreigners’ 3 1 4 8 selective real estate business 2 0 6 8 ethnic enclaves 0 0 3 3 dependence on foreign cottage owners 0 0 2 2 positive i ii iii t economic revenues (private and public) 11 6 30 47 boosts real estate business 7 1 10 18 vitalises rural areas 2 3 9 14 ‘good foreigners’ 4 1 6 11 image of finland 4 1 3 8 internationalisation 4 1 3 8 demand on unwanted properties 1 1 6 7 intensified second home development 1 0 1 2 threat of foreign invasion accelerates shoreline protection 1 0 0 1 neutral i ii iii t scope and statistics 33 9 43 85 legislation 36 2 4 42 no signs of foreign invasion 27 10 2 39 examples of properties bought by foreigners 3 2 31 36 examples of foreign cottage owners 8 4 17 29 foreigners are no worse than finns 18 0 0 18 russian dacha culture 1 7 9 17 examples from abroad 13 1 1 15 ‘rush of germans’ discourse in the 90s 3 3 4 10 general comments about people’s attitudes 8 0 2 10 finns have the right to buy properties abroad 7 0 1 8 there is plenty of available shoreline 4 1 1 6 historical examples 0 5 1 6 unknown impacts 2 0 4 6 free trade 2 0 4 6 no effect on real estate prices 2 0 4 2 table 1. coding scheme of the thematic analysis. a single newspaper account can be categorised under one or more of the themes. of the senate in 1918 and by law in 1920 set to ban foreign property ownership in the province of vyborg in karelian isthmus (hämäläinen 1983; virtanen 2010). one of the factors driving the development of the regulation was russian second home ownership in karelian isthmus which was seen to raise local property prices and pose a political threat to the whole nation (hämäläinen fennia 189: 1 (2011) 49contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … 1983). in 1939, the orders were complemented by a law (219/1939). according to this law, subject to a licence from the ministry of the interior, only those foreigners residing permanently in finland or former finnish nationals were permitted to own properties (ailio 1957). there are no complete figures available on foreign second home purchases before the 1990s, but it has been estimated that for example in the 1980s foreigners bought approximately 150 properties annually most of these being permanent or second homes (finnish government bill 120/1992). the 1939 law was struck down only 60 years later as property ownership was freed as a part of the process of accession to eu. the first period covers the years 1990−1996 when the amount of newspaper coverage peaked during the accession to and negotiations with eu. as a result of the negotiations finland, along with austria and sweden, was allowed to maintain special restrictions fig. 2. number of newspaper accounts in the three periods of the analysis. fig. 3. number of foreign property purchases in the three periods of the analysis (sources: national land survey, bill 171/1999, 19901992 figures are estimations). 50 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen concerning second homes for a five-year derogation period. during this time those residing permanently outside finland were required to apply for a permit from the county administrative board to buy a second home (finnish law 1613/1992). these regulations were finally abandoned in 2000 (finnish law 1299/1999) as foreign property purchases had remained at a very moderate level. according to a finnish government bill (171/1999) and national land survey of finland, foreigners bought approximately 290 properties annually 1993−1998 and a half of these were second homes. the media debate quieted down in the mid 1990s and was moderate also in the early 2000s. these years 1997−2004 cover the second period of the analysis. the third period 2004−2008 is marked by the growth of russian second home ownership, which has initiated a renewed public debate. national land survey has kept rough track2 of the number of second home properties sold to foreigners in the 2000s. after a temporary decrease in the beginning of the 2000s, the amount of foreign purchases has increased annually. the growth in the share of foreign purchases has been fast especially since 2005. although the share of foreigners of the total property market is still low, one to two percents annually, in some municipalities where only a limited number of properties are sold annually, foreigners cover almost a third of all property purchases. rush of germans (i period, 1990−1996) the first period of media coverage is characterised especially by the accession to european economic area (eea) in 1994 and eu in 1995 and the related changes that were required to the national legislation concerning property ownership. eu demanded that the contemporary legislation based on nationality was discriminating and should be abandoned allowing all eu citizens to buy properties in finland. in the media, it was feared that the deregulation would immediately result in a rush of second home buyers from europe. the negative publicity peaked in 1992 along with the preparation of the legislation in the parliament. a general fear expressed in many of the accounts directly or indirectly was the ‘rush of germans’: “rich germans come and buy all the finnish forests and lake shores as their second home plots” (hs, 6 december 1992). in some of the accounts it was estimated that the demand from germany and central europe would easily double the number of the contemporary 400,000 cottages. finland was compared especially with denmark that had been a member of eec since 1973 and as an old eu country had negotiated a derogation legislation to protect its second homes from the demand from central europe. similar demand was seen to be obvious also in the finnish case. in many of the accounts it was stated that “finland is the only country in western europe where shoreline development is allowed (hs, 19 may 1992)”. the rush of european second home tourists combined with domestic demand was seen to be catastrophic and result in the congestion of shorelines, damages to fragile nature and other negative environmental impacts. the foreign demand was also seen to dramatically decrease the openness of shorelines and thereby restrict everyman’s rights, the traditional nordic legal free right of access to the land and waterways, and the right to collect natural products. the national regulation of land use and shoreline building was seen as inefficient to prevent the damages. therefore the need to develop regulation and planning and “safe the lakeshores (hs, 31 december 1992)” was emphasized as an important agenda before the accession. the importance of shoreline conservation in the public discourse is explained by the topicality of the theme at the beginning of the 1990s. the council of state had enforced a shoreline protection programme in 1990 that had raised a debate on landownership rights (nieminen 1994). this debate is reflected also in the analysed data. in one of the readers’ letters it was claimed that fear of foreigner invasion was used as a tool to reclaim the land from landowners for nature conservation without resistance (hs, 26 july 1990). on the other hand, it was also feared that foreign interest in the shores would hinder the execution of the programme. landownership rights have traditionally been strong in finland (nieminen 1994; jokinen 2004). the constitutional protection of property covers land ownership and gives the owners the right to manage and develop their properties. these rights can only be restricted by legislative measures and losses to the owners must be compensated. besides the resistance to nature conservation, this liability for damage was visible in the analysed data. even if the mainstream publicity was against selling, there were a few remarks on how the demand from abroad would raise land prices and benefit landowners. along with the preparation of fennia 189: 1 (2011) 51contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … new derogation legislation, it was even suggested that “later it might be necessary to think how the landowners are compensated (hs, 26 august 1992)” when they would not get the market price of their property due to the exclusion of foreigners from the property market. however, these remarks were only exceptions to the mainstream publicity which emphasized the negative consequences of selling land to foreigners. the potential impacts are very similar to those referred to in international literature (buller & hoggart 1994; müller 1999; timothy 2002). besides damage to finnish nature, foreign buyers were associated with dubious real estate business, land-jobbing and money laundering. a frequent fear in the accounts was that the external demand would raise property prices and thereby affect the possibilities of finns to acquire second homes. these fears materialised finally in the new fiveyear derogation legislation set to monitor how the foreign demand would affect the price level, the execution of nature conservation programmes or otherwise be against national interest (finnish government bill 120/1992). besides the accounts reporting on the preparation of legislation, the foreign second home property ownership was made a national issue also in many other ways. the cottages and cottage landscape was represented as a precious national property. the cottage landscape was strongly associated with the finnish lakeland landscape held as a national landscape. the landscape of water, forest and cottages on lakesides was represented as something that was unique in the whole europe. these spots on the lakesides were finns’ or “our shores (hs, 28 august 1993)”, “the soil of the fatherland (hs, 30 september 1993)”, “national treasure (hs, 27 may 1993)”, “crown jewels (hs, 16 june 1996)”, “the gems of the shores (hs, 13 september 1993)” or “the most beautiful seductions of the finnish maiden (hs, 31 december 1992)”. property prices were seen to be too low and selling properties to foreigners was deemed as discounting land or even “prostitution (hs, 19 december 1992)”. an account reporting on parliamentary proceedings related to the accession into eea quoted the words of eero paloheimo, mp of the green party, “in eea finland is doomed like the north american indians once were. the land goes for free… (hs, 18 june 1992)”. the outer threat was not particularly characterised, the accounts wrote simply about foreigners, big money from abroad or europeans, central europeans or germans at the most. the focus on national rhetoric was on characterising the cottage landscape as the legitimate property of finns and finland as well as an important source of finnishness. therefore, it was important that the landscape would stay in the finnish possession also to prevent the scenario that ”the next generation of finns will end up as crofters on their own shores (hs, 12 january 1993)”. no rush of foreigners after all (ii period 1997−2004) the number of newspaper accounts decreased notably after the mid 1990s reaching the lowest point in 1997. years 1997−2004 mark a second period of the data characterised by abating negative publicity and change into neutral media coverage. this was mainly due to the fact that contrary to the fears and speculations in the first period the number of foreign property purchases did not start to increase. during this period, typical were accounts that only reported the number and different nationalities of foreign buyers. these numbers were used to reassure that no foreign rush on finnish shores had taken place or was to be expected to do so. the rhetoric employed in these accounts was also moderate in comparison with those of the first period. the most provoking accounts of the period include accounts titled like “the fear of foreigners’ lust for land has proved to be groundless (hs, 10 october 1997)”,” the shores remain in the possession of finns (hs, 15 january 1998)”, “finland has remained in the domestic hands (hs, 30 may 1999)”, “the finnish shores do not excite foreigners (hs, 2 may 2000)”, “the foreigners did not rush to buy second homes from finland (hs, 30 august 2004)”. also the rescission of the derogation period in january 2000 received only very moderate interest. helsingin sanomat speculated in december 1999 that: “the deregulation is not expected to increase the share of foreign buyers in the finnish second home market (hs, 4 december 1999)”. the nationalities of the foreigners interested in finland represented in the media changed during the second period. whereas during the first period the foreign second home tourism was thought to come from germany and other central european countries, during the second period, the direction gradually changed to east. this change, however, was noted without any drama reassuring that the overall number of foreign buyers still remained 52 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen very low. helsingin sanomat reported in 1998 that: “the finnish cottage life with its fishing opportunities appeals more to the russians than germans after all. finland was a popular second home destination already during the era of autonomy. the shoreline cottages and plots, however, are attainable only to the most affluent russians (hs, 15 january 1998)”. the emergence of russian demand was reflected also in the emergence of a variety of different perspectives to the phenomenon. in a number of accounts it was reminded how the russians had owned second homes in finland already a century ago and there were also few accounts on the russian dacha culture and its similarities to the finnish cottage culture. however, the most notable increase was in the number of accounts on foreign interest in commercial cottages. the number of articles on the russian interest in holiday and rental cottages in finland increased after the turn of the 21st century. this parallels with the overall increase in inbound tourism from russia (kotilainen et al. 2010). besides reporting on russians renting cottages the accounts increasingly reported on the development of commercial cottage landscapes, rental cottages and holiday villages, planned and built especially for russian demand. however, these commercial endeavours and the increase of russian tourists did not raise negative publicity. during the second period foreign second home ownership was, for the first time, bound to the idea of reciprocity. this is related to the topicality of karelia question, a political dispute over the returning of a border area called karelia from russia to finland. the area was ceded to the soviet union in the second world war and the population was evacuated to finland. the loss was considered significant; the ceded area covered approximately 10 per cent of the whole country and vyborg, the second most important town of the time. therefore, during the cold war and especially after the collapse of the soviet union an emotional debate over the return of the area to finland has surfaced in the media and politics frequently (paasi 1999). the preparation of russian land reform in the beginning of the 2000s raised the finnish hopes of the possibilities to buy land in the ceded area. in the analysed data, finns, whose birthplace or roots were in the area, were reported looking for opportunities to buy land or properties to be used as second homes. in some accounts it was speculated that the land reform would open up the possibility to “buy the land back to finns piece by piece (hs, 16 may 2002)”. a couple of accounts even reported that on her visit to the karelian isthmus in 2002 president tarja halonen “conciliated the fears arisen in russia over the potential finnish property purchases in karelia (hs, 28 may 2002)”. russian invasion (iii period since 2005) the third and still on-going period is characterised by the re-emergence of a heated media debate over foreign property ownership. the annual number of foreign purchases started to increase rapidly after the slow second period and in four years the annual foreign purchases almost quadrupled. this has been due to increasing demand from russia. whereas in 2003 and 2004 the russians were buyers in one third of the foreign property purchases, in 2008 their share was over 80 per cent. this growth has reawakened the media interest on the phenomenon and has started a third period of publicity. the third period is characterised by many elements familiar from the previous periods. like in the previous periods, the main focus of many accounts have been the annual figures and their development. whereas in the second period this type of accounts were published once a year or biannually, along the third period the pace has accelerated so that in 2008 the newspapers reported the figures quarterly. also the coverage on incoming tourism from russia and russian investors in finnish commercial cottage business has continued as a popular theme. during the third period, the newspapers reported on altogether 14 new holiday village plans run by russian investors. these investments were greeted with pleasure as they were seen to create new jobs and revitalise the local economy. old businesses or land for new developments were purchased especially from eastern finland and lapland: “russian money floods into the finnish tourist centres (ts, 21 october 2006)”. the greatest difference from the second period is the change from neutral back to the negative publicity of the first period. even though the change in the nationalities of incoming second home tourism clearly changed already in the second period, this change raised interest only in the third period. many of the themes related to the fear of the rush of germans have been revitalised during the third period, with a focus on a ‘russian invasion’: “in finland people are nervous that the russians come and buy all our shores and land, fennia 189: 1 (2011) 53contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … build their luxurious dachas and resettle in finland. a few years ago people were afraid that the germans will come with similar intentions. this did not happen (is, 12 november 2005)”. the change from central european tourists into russians has not been simple as feelings among civil society towards russia and russians are very complicated (paasi 1999). according to vihavainen (2004) the attitudes towards russia have always been twofold. although russophilia has almost always been distinctive to the finnish society at the political, cultural as well as human level, the basic historical attitude has been a certain kind of negativeness (paasi 1999). russia has been the ‘other’ to finland and it has been used to reflect the finnish self-identity (vihavainen 2004). similarly, the political history still affects the relationship. the countries have frequently been on opposite sides in wars and finland has been part of russia during its history. the last war between the two countries ended in 1944 and the traces of the war are still visible in eastern finland, where also the russian second home purchases have mostly taken place (pitkänen & vepsäläinen 2008). deriving from this background, the national rhetoric employed in the accounts over russian second home tourists has been aggressive. like in the first period, the cottage landscape under threat was identified as the national lakeland landscape. this landscape was represented as ”the saimaa lakeside (ts, 29 july 2007)”, “the pearls/best spots on the shore of saimaa (is, 13 july 2007)” as well as “national landscape/heritage (is, 18 july 2007)” and a “finnish idyll (is, 25 november 2008)”. compared with the rhetoric of the first period, however, the representation of the outer threat was different and more dramatic. the emergence of the russian buyers in the finnish real estate business was represented to be against national interests. the newspapers reported on the “conquest of finland by russia/russians (is, 31 july 2007, hs, 18 november 2008)”, “the colonization/russification of finland (is, 23, 25, 26 february 2008, hs, 27 february 2008)”, “the transformation of saimaa lakesides into dacha villages (hs, 29 july 2007)” and “the loss of freedom (is, 29 february 2008)”. it was reminded that russia was the occupying state, the old enemy that had won more than enough land in the last wars in which the sacrifices had been harsh. a reader’s letter in ilta-sanomat in 2007 summarised these thoughts: “the russians buy the best places along the finnish shores as the stupid and greedy landowners sell them. why did my father waste five years of his best youth in the war defending the independence if the then enemy now invades our country with money (is, 31 july 2007)?” the emotional national rhetoric was supported by the concrete negative impacts of russian second home ownership raised in many accounts. the negative impacts are similar to those raised during the first period, but this time the arguments were backed up with hearsay experiences or the fact that russians indeed are buying properties in finland. in many accounts, the focus was on the dubious features in the real estate business connected to, for example, the background of the buyers and money laundering: “the russians’ rapidly increased buying power has initiated a debate on the origin of the money. many suggest the origin is suspicious (is, 23 february 2008)”. in some accounts, rumors were spread that russians are willing to pay almost anything for the properties they desire: ”according to real estate agents a russian buyer does not bargain, but pays the offer price. there are cases that a russian buyer has paid even more than the offer – to prevent the selling to a competing russian buyer (is, 26 february 2008)”. this was seen to have led to the creation of a selective market and marketing available properties only in russia: ”the finns sell properties to russians secretly… the properties are for sale only on russian websites and in russian (ts, 29 june 2008)”. the russian interest in the finnish real estate market was reported leading to a raise in the price level and eventually to the displacement of finnish second home buyers: “the overheated market leads to rising prices – at the moment the situation is completely wild. the russian demand has increased the prices by a fifth (is, 28 july 2007)”. besides outbidding the finnish second home buyers, during the past couple of years an increasing number of accounts reported on the displacement of locals from the housing market and change of residential areas to vacation use. it was reported that the russian interest did not only focus on lakeside and second home properties, but also houses and plots meant for permanent residence provided with municipal engineering were increasingly sold to russians. these negative features were used to argue that local residents, the common people and the finns in general were against allowing russians to buy properties in finland: “for the decision-makers all that matters are roubles and euro and dollars. 54 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen but the common people are against it (is, 25 february 2008)”. the accounts reported on a couple of petitions and local initiatives organized as resistance to restrict russian property purchases. one of the key arguments for the local opposition was the claim for reciprocity in land trading. like in the second period, the reciprocity claim was supported by the emotional arguments related to karelian question. a reader’s letter in helsingin sanomat in 2009 pleaded that: “the finnish government should take care of the rights of the finnish landowners of karelia and other ceded areas and help its own citizens. russia will most certainly take care of its own. the finnish possession in these areas is eternal (hs, 7 august 2007)”. as a new feature it was reported that the possibilities of finns to purchase land abroad are limited. the criticism focused especially on russia, and a clear preference was made between eu and non-eu citizens: “because finns do not have similar rights in russia, it is not fair that russians can buy from finland. it should be reciprocal. the spanish and all other eu-citizens have reciprocal rights (hs, 17 january 2008)”. these notions supported claims on revising the current legislation: “timo soini, the leader of the parliamentary party the finns thinks that new legislation should be introduced to stop selling properties to non-eu citizens – that is for russians… leasing is acceptable but buying not, says soini (is, 25 february 2008)”. along with the growth of awareness of the phenomenon and its negative features also a number of positive impacts were recognized such as revenues for local economy and business life and revitalisation of the rural real estate market. the newspapers also introduced a number of examples of russian buyers to the audience. these accounts underlined how the russian second home buyers are mostly ‘common people’. in 2008 iltasanomat headed an account “not mafiosos, but russian intelligentsia (is, 10 july 2008)” and a week later helsingin sanomat reported on family formin who had purchased a second home in valkeala: “cottage life in valkeala seems so familiar that one would think the family has read the rough guide of cottaging in finland (hs, 20 july 2008)”. interestingly also many of the second home owners interviewed in the newspapers seemed to have lineage in finland. hence, in between the lines the russians were evaluated according to the ways of right living in the finnish cottage landscape. discussion the media debate around foreign second home ownership clearly demonstrates the iconic image cottage landscape has in the finnish society. a cottage by a lake is a stereotypical image of the cottage culture and has taken on the role of national landscape. the cottage landscape, however, is not only about collective representation. in finnish as well as international context it has been emphasized that second homes are an important part of people’s leisure pursuits but also their whole life cycle and lifestyles (jaakson 1986; karisto 2006). being sometimes the only stable place during one’s life cycle second homes have become to be valued as sites for traditional lifestyles and emotions such as rootedness and stability (kaltenborn 1998). besides the cultural values the cottage landscape, thus, represents a significant emotional and material investment. this combination of cultural as well as subjective values and investment can also be found underlying in the debate over foreign second home owners. these values became challenged at the beginning of the 1990s along the accession to eu. the media debate that followed was a part of the larger process of redefining the national identity and independence in relation to europe and globalization (ruuska 1999). deregulation of property ownership raised a lot of negative publicity and fears that found a culmination point in the debate over foreign second home ownership. the threat of the rush of germans was politically used by those actors opposed to the accession to appeal to the public. the negative publicity gradually vanished by the turn of the millennium only to surface again a decade later. although there were signs of emerging russian interest in the finnish property market in the second period, the idea of ‘russian invasion’ has hit the media consciousness to the full only during the past couple of years. the media debate evolved from the very onesided publicity of the first period, to neutral orientation in the second period and finally to the third period characterized by negative nuances. the fears related to the increase of foreign second home owners surfaced especially during the first and the third period. the focus of the fears was very similar during both of these periods. the most significant difference between the first and the third period was the fear of the first period that the massive foreign demand would cause severe environmental consequences. it was feared fennia 189: 1 (2011) 55contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … that this would lead into overdevelopment and closing up shorelines thereby spoiling the landscape and restricting the public access of lakeshores. the popularity of the theme can be explained by the general raise of environmental consciousness in the 1980s as well as the topicality of the theme at the beginning of the 1990s. hence, at that time, appealing on the environmental consequences provided legitimate and widely acceptable grounds to oppose foreign ownership in the defence of the finnish cottage landscape. during the third period there has not been any single and dominating cause for the fear of russian invasion, but the most specified explanations have been the rise of property prices and dubious real estate business. however, during both periods, in most of the accounts no specific reason for the perceived threat has been given. the rush of foreigners into the finnish property market has simply been seen to be a great national loss and against national interests. regarding foreign cottage owners a threat is grounded on the features of finnish culture and society. at least three prominent explanations can be found. firstly, foreign second home ownership challenges the finnish way of life. according to matless (1998) the idea of national landscape embeds also the idea of a landscaped citizenship and right way of living. as gold and revill (2000) put it, a threat to a valued landscape is perceived as a threat to the way of life it symbolizes. second homes are in many ways an integral element of the finnish way of life. there are powerful cultural images of how second homes and life there should be like. cottage owners, thus, are considered knowing the cultural codes of cottaging and behaving accordingly. in this respect, the foreign ownership poses a threat which is revealed, for example, in accounts that try to convey a positive image of foreign second home owners. instead of reporting on the positive features of the foreigners’ own culture and traditions, the emphasis has been on how well the newcomers have adopted the finnish ways of cottaging. similarly, in the debate over foreign second home ownership, issues such as gentrification and displacement have been associated with second homes for the first time. it has been feared that wealthy foreigners will restrict the possibilities of finnish cottage buyers. interestingly, however, similar questions are not raised in respect of wealthy finnish cottage owners, but cottage ownership is considered something natural and socially equal in relation to the social class or socio-economic position in the finnish society. cottaging is seen as a citizenship right, almost a civic duty. as in other nordic countries second home ownership is relatively widespread in the finnish society, but maybe not as widely as people like to think. as cottage ownership tends to be a life course matter, the majority of cottage owners are well-off urbanites and belong to a rather narrow generational group (nie minen 2009). furthermore, during the last decades the rise in second home property prices has been continuous leading to the regional differentiation and creation of elite landscapes in the most attractive areas (pitkänen & vepsäläinen 2008). hence, the cottage landscape works to hide these features and naturalise the image of cottage landscape as equal. secondly, foreign second home ownership challenges finnish landownership rights. as often stated, the function of the landscape is to hide its social origins, embedded power relations and the labour that has gone into its making (cosgrove 1984; mitchell 2000; wylie 2007). one of the functions of the cottage landscape is that it naturalises a set of ideas of landownership. this becomes obvious in the way foreign second home purchases are seen to propose a threat to the idea of finnish private landownership. the cottage landscape under threat is frequently referred to as ‘our lakeshores/property/landscape’ and it has been held utmost important that the land would stay in the possession of finns. especially in the rhetoric of the first period it was held important that the contemporary and future generations of finns would not have to lease the land that was righteously theirs and thus become crofters on their own land. foreign landownership also seems to have raised questions on what landowners should be allowed to do with their property. during the third period, it has been feared that russians will build pretentious and high-priced estates deemed clearly unsuitable for the finnish cottage landscape. however, similar criticism is not raised on the constructions of finnish cottage owners. up to the present, the strong landownership rights in finland have guaranteed landowners relatively free development rights and affected also the cottage landscape tremendously (granö et al. 1999; jokinen 2004). according to granö et al. (1999) this has led to a situation in which the best shores are occupied by cottages and have become almost entirely inaccessible to other forms of use. according to jokinen (2002) on the level of individual 56 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen properties the weak regulation has allowed intensive management and, for example, the creation of artificial shores and jetties by earth fillings and removals, dredging and concrete are common. thirdly, foreign second home ownership challenges national identity and raises fears related to the foreign influence. as said in the beginning the valued landscapes are as much about belonging as they are about exclusion and identifying yourself in terms of who you are not (kinsman 1995; matless 1998; mitchell 2000). in the debate over foreign second home ownership the exclusive function of cottage landscape is emphasized especially in the debate over russians, a group that has traditionally and historically represented the ‘other’ to finns. the debate changed from the early 1990’s representation of the relatively faceless threat of western globalization into the 2000’s situation where the threat suddenly came from the direction people are used to connecting it with, the east. in the most pointed comments the cottage landscape is threatened by a hostile invasion. these comments are not external to the fact that besides the recent growth in second home ownership the russian ‘invasion’ has also affected many other areas of social life in finland. the closeness of russia has become a significant element in the local economies and lifestyles in the border areas and there is a significant minority of russians living in finland (kotilainen et al. 2010). according to a poll commissioned by ilta-sanomat (8 march 2008), approximately 70 percent of respondents wanted to restrict non-eu residents’, thus russians’, possibilities to purchase properties in finland. interestingly, the most positive towards russians were people from eastern finland. hence, the russian invasion is most feared by people not really even affected by it. it is here that the iconic value of the cottage landscape is proven. in a way the cottage landscape has provided a scapegoat, thus a legitimate vehicle to externalise the historical prejudices and suspicions felt against russians. conclusions a growing amount of research in second home tourism focuses on the impacts of second homes on local communities (e.g. casado-diaz 1999; mottiar & quinn 2003; marjavaara 2008). however, the impacts of foreign and cross-border second home ownership have rarely been analysed although the results of this study illustrate that from the perspective of the host society it is not unimportant where the demand comes from. foreign second home ownership is a complicated and emotional matter with potential to arise opposition and even conflicts especially when the foreign demand focuses on locally or nationally valued landscapes. therefore research on foreign second home ownership cannot ignore the perspective of host society. leisure practices are part of landscaped citizenship, the art of right living whereby societies perceive themselves (matless 1998). second homes are a specific form of leisure not comparable to other forms of tourism as they are directly entwined with practices such as landownership and dwelling in landscape. furthermore, foreign second home ownership is a specific form of second home tourism as the newcomers do not (always) share the language and culture of the host society. foreign second home ownership, therefore, does not cross only borders between nations, but also between cultures, societies, ideologies and the ways of living and perceiving the world. sometimes, like in the finnish case, the borders can also be historical, reproduced in prejudices and attitudes coloring the way the host society debates the foreign arrivals. furthermore, when the inbound second home tourism comes from a single nationality or area, the images and fears tend to be escalated by historical relations and national stereotypes. on the other hand, the fear of the unknown can also be concretised by singling out a nationality to focus on. the way the host society debates foreign second home ownership in the media is not necessarily equal to how the foreigners are received in local communities and by individuals. however, negative publicity influences how people perceive the foreigners and can convey the feeling of general hostility and conflicts. the publicity can therefore hinder the integration of the newcomers to local communities and, in the worst case, escalate conflicts although the foreign property ownership would not inflict direct negative impacts. in the finnish as well as global context, more research is needed to study how and if the public opinion manifests locally in the attitudes and actions of the host community residents. more research is also needed to study the political dimension and exclusive structures of leisure and second home tourism. the finnish case shows how certain ways of seeing and living in the cottage landscape have become axioms that are valued and held right despite their embedded disfennia 189: 1 (2011) 57contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … crepancies. as a carrier of collective and subjective value, emotions and meanings the cottage landscape is a powerful tool for the creation of meaning in the finnish society. the analysis illustrates how the cottage landscape has been transformed into a political construction to support certain claims on land and relationship between people and land. the debate shows how by naturalizing social and cultural meanings the cottage landscape is used to sustain the idea of cottage landscape as the legitimate and equal property of finns. furthermore, the human labour and landownership rights that have gone into its making become hidden and naturalised. notes 1 cottage is the closest translation to the finnish word ‘mökki’ which is widely applied in colloquial and official contexts and has strong cultural value to finns. 2 it is not allowed to record the nationality of the buyer, so foreigners are tracked down from property purchase registers by location of permanent residence and name of the owner. acknowledgements the author would like to thank mervi hiltunen, antti honkanen, ari lehtinen, olga lipkina, dieter müller, mia vepsäläinen and two anonymous reviewers for their help in improving the manuscript. the paper was made possible by funding from the academy of finland (projects sa:114532, sa:255424) and kone foundation (project: local impacts of transborder tourism and leisure). references ailio e (ed) 1957. suomen laki i. suomen lakimiesliitto, helsinki. braun v & clarke v 2006. using thematic analysis in psychology. qualitative research in psychology 3: 3, 77–101. buller h & hoggart k 1994. the social integration of british home owners into french rural communities. journal of rural studies 10: 2, 197–210. casado-diaz ma 1999. socio-demographic impacts of residential tourism: a case study of torrevieja, spain. international journal of tourism research 1: 4, 223−237. chaplin d 1999a. back to the cave or playing away? gender roles in home-from-home environments. consumer studies & home economics 23: 3, 181–189. chaplin d 1999b. consuming work/productive leisure: the consumption patterns of second home environments. leisure studies 18: 1, 41–55. cope m 2005. coding qualitative data. in hay i (ed). qualitative research methods in human geography, 223–233. 2nd ed. oxford university press, oxford. coppock t (ed) 1977. second homes: curse or blessing? pergamon press, oxford. cosgrove d 1984. social formation and symbolic landscape. croom helm, london cosgrove d 2003. landscape and the european sense of sight – eyeing nature. in anderson k, domosh m, pile s & thrift n (eds). handbook of cultural geography, 249–268. sage, london. dowler l, carubia j & szczygiel b 2005. introduction: gender and landscape: renegotiating morality and space. in dowler l, carubia j & szczygiel b (eds). gender and landscape, 1–16. routledge, london. eskola t 1997. teräslintu ja lumpeenkukka: aulankokuvaston muutosten tulkinta. musta taide, helsinki. finnish government bill 120/1992. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle ulkomaalaisten yritysostoja ja kiinteistönhankintaa koskevaksi lainsäädännöksi. edilex legal information service. <http://www. edilex.fi/virallistieto/he/19920120> 8.2.2011. finnish government bill 171/1999. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle laiksi ulkomailla asuvien ja ulkomaisten yhteisöjen kiinteistönhankintojen valvonnasta annetun lain kumoamisesta. edilex le-edilex legal information service. <http://www.edilex.fi/ virallistieto/he/19990171> 8.2.2011. finnish law 1613/1992. laki ulkomailla asuvien ja ulkomaisten yhteisöjen kiinteistönhankintojen valvonnasta. finlex data bank. <http://www. finlex.fi/fi/laki/alkup/1992/19921613> 8.2.2011. finnish law 1299/1999. laki ulkomailla asuvien ja ulkomaisten yhteisöjen kiinteistönhankintojen valvonnasta annetun lain kumoamisesta. finlex data bank. <http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/alkup/ 1999/19991299> 8.2.2011. gold jr & revill g 2000. landscape, defence and the study of conflict. in gold jr & revill g (eds). landscapes of defence, 1−20. prentice hall, harlow. granö o, roto m & laurila l 1999. environment and land use in the shore zone of the coast of finland. publicationes instituti geographici universitatis turkuensis n:o 160. university of turku, turku. halfacree k 2003. landscapes of rurality: rural others/other rurals. in robertson i & richards p (eds). studying cultural landscapes, 141–164. arnold, london. hall cm & müller dk (eds) 2004. tourism, mobility and second homes: between elite landscape and 58 fennia 189: 1 (2011)kati pitkänen common ground. channel view publications, clevedon. halseth g 1998. cottage country in transition: a social geography of change and contention in the rural-recreational countryside. mcgill-queen’s university press, montreal. haug b, dann gms & mehmetoglu m 2007. little norway in spain. from tourism to migration. annals of tourism research 34, 202–222. hoggart k & buller h 1995. geographical differences in british property acquisitions in rural france. the geographical journal 161: 1, 69–78. hämäläinen v 1983. karjalan kannaksen venäläinen kesäasutuskysymys maamme itsenäisyyden kaudella. historiatieteen laitoksen julkaisuja 6. tampereen yliopisto, tampere. häyrynen m 2005. kuvitettu maa: suomen kansallisen maisemakuvaston rakentuminen. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, helsinki. jaakson r 1986. second-home domestic tourism. annals of tourism research 13: 3, 367–391. jaatinen s 1997. elysium wiburgense. villabebyggelsen och villakulturen kring viborg. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur of folk 151. finnish society of sciences and letters, helsinki. jokinen a 2002. free-time habitation and layers of ecological history at a southern finnish lake. landscape and urban planning 61: 2-4, 99–112. jokinen, a. (2004): luonnonvarojen käytön ja dynamiikan hallinta yksityismailla. acta universitatis tamperensis 1045. tampere university press, tampere. kaltenborn bp 1998. the alternate home – motives of recreation home use. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 53: 3, 121–134. karisto a (ed) 2000. suomalaiselämää espanjassa. kansanelämän kuvauksia 49. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, jyväskylä. karisto a 2006. kesämökki ja arjen ympäristöpolitiikka. in massa i & ahonen s (eds). arkielämän ympäristöpolitiikka, 122–137. gaudeamus, helsinki. kinsman p 1995. landscape, race and national identity: the photography of ingrid pollard. area, 27: 4, 300–310. kotilainen j, piipponen m & pitkänen k 2010. valtakunnanrajan vaikutus itä-suomen uusiutumiseen. in kotilainen j & eisto i (eds). luonnonvarayhdyskunnat ja muuttuva ympäristö: resilienssitutkimuksen näkökulmia itä-suomeen, 144–157. re-reports and studies in social sciences and business studies no 2. publications of the university of eastern finland, joensuu. lovell s 2003. summerfolk. a history of the dacha 1710−2000. cornell university press, ithaca. löfgren o 1999. on holiday: a history of vacationing. university of california press, berkeley. marjavaara r 2008. second home tourism: the root to displacement in sweden. gerum 2008: 1. department of social and economic geography, umeå university. matless d 1998. landscape and englishness. reaktion books, london. matless d 2003. introduction: the properties of landscape. in anderson k, domosh m, pile s & thrift n (eds). handbook of cultural geography, 227–232. sage, london. mccarthy j 2007. rural geography: globalizing the countryside. progress in human geography 32: 1, 129–137. mchugh ke 2006. citadels in the sun. in mcintyre n, williams dr & mchugh ke (eds). multiple dwelling and tourism: negotiating place, home and identity, 262–277. cabi, wallingford. mcintyre n, williams dr & mchugh ke (eds) 2006. multiple dwelling and tourism: negotiating place, home and identity. cabi, wallingford. mitchell d 2000. cultural geography: a critical introduction. blackwell publishers, oxford. mitchell d 2002a. cultural landscapes: the dialectical landscape: recent landscape research in human geography. progress in human geography 26: 3, 381–389. mitchell wjt 2002b. introduction. in mitchell wjt (ed). landscape and power, 1–4. the university of chicago press, chicago. mottiar z & quinn b 2003. shaping leisure/tourism places – the role of holiday home owners: a case study of courtown, co. wexford, ireland. leisure studies 22: 2, 109–127. müller d 1999. german second home owners in the swedish countryside: on the internationalization of the leisure space. kulturgeografiska institutionen. umeå universitet, umeå. müller d 2002. reinventing the countryside: german second-home owners in southern sweden. current issues in tourism 5: 5, 426–446. nieminen m 1994. rantojensuojeluohjelma: kilpailevia tulkintoja ja vertautumatonta rationalisuutta. publications of the department of sociology 59. university of jyväskylä, jyväskylä. nieminen m 2009. kesämökkibarometri 2009. ministry of employment and the economy & statistics finland. <http://www.tem.fi/files/22175/mokkibaro08_raportti.pdf> 8.2.2011. paasi a 1999. boundaries as social practice and dis-boundaries as social practice and discourse: the finnish-russian border. regional studies 33: 7, 669–680. periäinen k 2006. the summer cottage: a dream in the finnish forest. in mcintyre n, williams, d & mchugh k (eds). multiple dwelling and tourism: negotiating place, home and identity, 103–144. cabi, wallingford. pitkänen k 2008. second-home landscape: the meaning(s) of landscape for second-home tourism in finnish lakeland. tourism geographies 10: 2, 169–192. pitkänen k & vepsäläinen m 2006. the changing historical dimensions of lake tourism at savonlinna. savonlinna – the pearl of lake saimaa. lake representations in the tourist marketing of savonlinna. in hall cm & härkönen t (eds). lake tourism: fennia 189: 1 (2011) 59contested cottage landscapes: host perspective to the increase … an intergrated approach to lacustrine tourism systems, 67–82. aspects of tourism 32. channel view publications, clevedon. pitkänen k & vepsäläinen m 2008. foreseeing the future of second home tourism: the case of finnish media and policy discourse. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 8: 1, 1–24. priemus h 2005. importing and exporting spatial needs: a dutch approach. european planning studies 13: 3, 371–386. riessman ck 2008. narrative methods for the human sciences. sage, los angeles. ruuska p 1999. muuttuva käsitys kansakunnasta. in alasuutari p & ruuska p (eds). post-patria? globalisaation kulttuuri suomessa, 71–107. sitran julkaisusarja 224. vastapaino, tampere. statistics finland 2010. rakennukset ja kesämökit 2009. asuminen 2010. official statistics of finland. <http://www.stat.fi/til/rakke/2009/rakke_ 2009_2010-05-28_fi.pdf> 8.2.2011. timothy dj 1994. recreational second homes in the united states: development issues and contemporary patterns. in hall cm & müller d (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite landscape and common ground, 133–148. clevedon, channel view publications. timothy d 2002. tourism and the growth of urban ethnic islands. in hall cm & williams am (eds). tourism and migration: new relationships between production and consumption, 135–152. kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht. tress g 2002. development of second-home tourism in denmark. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 2: 2, 109–122. tuulentie s 2006. tourists making themselves at home: second homes as a part of tourist careers. in mcintyre n & mchugh k (eds). multiple dwelling and tourism: negotiating place, home and identity, 145–158. cabi, wallingford. vepsäläinen m & pitkänen k 2010. second home countryside. rural representations in the finnish second home popular discourses. journal of rural studies 26: 2, 194–204. vihavainen t 2004. uusi asetelma – uusi identiteetti. in vihavainen t (ed). venäjän kahdet kasvot: venäjä-kuva suomalaisen identiteetin rakennuskivenä, 433–443. edita, helsinki. virtanen pv 2010. vanhan viipurin läänin erityiset maanhankintaja maanomistussäännökset. maanmittaus 85: 1, 18–26. vuori o 1966. kesähuvilanomistus suomessa. kartoittava tutkimus kesäasutuksesta ja huvilanomistuksesta taloudellisena ilmiönä. annales universitatis turkuensis, sarja – series c osa – tom. 3. university of turku, turku. williams am, king r, warnes a & patterson g 2000. tourism and international retirement migration: new forms of an old relationship in southern europe. tourism geographies 2: 1, 28–49. williams am, king r & warnes t 2004. british second homes in southern europe: shifting nodes in the scapes and flows of migration and tourism. in hall cm & müller d (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes: between elite landscape and common ground, 97–112. channel view publications, clevedon. williams dr & van patten sr 2006. home and away? creating identities and sustaining places in a multi-centred world. in mcintyre n, williams dr & mchugh ke (eds). multiple dwelling and tourism: negotiating place, home and identity, 32–50. cabi, wallingford. woods m 2009. the local politics of the global countryside: boosterism, aspirational ruralism and the contested reconstitution of queenstown, new zealand. geojournal, doi: 10.1007/s10708-0099268-7. wylie j 2007. landscape. routledge, london. an ‘inconvenient truth’? the problem of recognition of the political message – commentary to huttunen and albrecht urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa108034 doi: 10.11143/fennia.108034 reflections an ‘inconvenient truth’? the problem of recognition of the political message – commentary to huttunen and albrecht georgios kyroglou kyroglou, g. (2021) an ‘inconvenient truth’? the problem of recognition of the political message – commentary to huttunen and albrecht. fennia 199(1) 139–143. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.108034 this commentary reflects on huttunen and albrecht’s exploration of the representations of young people’s environmental citizenship within the framing of the fridays for future (fff) movement in the finnish news media and on twitter. in particular, it problematises the issue of the recognition of young people’s agency by their adult contemporaries, at a watershed moment for global environmental activism. it argues that although young people actively bring the climate change in the forefront of political discussion aiming to shape how environmental responsibility is being understood, the success of the movement will largely depend on the acknowledgement of their political message by its intended recipients; namely their adult contemporaries and politicians. keywords: environmental movement, climate strikes, political participation, young people, youth activism georgios kyroglou (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4111-5544), school of social sciences, nottingham trent university, 50 shakespeare street, nottingham, ng1 4fq, united kingdom. e-mail: georgios.kyroglou@ntu.ac.uk nothing is inherently political; politicisation requires a political agent which can transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-grabs (fisher 2009, 79) in maybe one of the most widely-cited articles in the field of political participation, brady (1999, 739) identifies four intertwined elements in virtually all available definitions of political participation. these are a) activities or actions, b) by ordinary citizens, c) intended to influence a desired outcome, and addressed towards d) politicians, government personnel, or decision-makers. in their article, huttunen and albrecht discuss the first three as parts of the three separate but interconnected frames they have identified with regards to the fff climate strikes in finland: the ‘sustainable lifestyle’; the ‘active youth’ and the ‘school attendance’ frame. the backbone of their analysis derives from the acknowledgment that “young people are political actors and that their agency should be better recognised” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 47). but as i will argue in this brief commentary, it is this recognition of young people’s agency that can be particularly problematic. the political agency of young people has been the focus of an extensive body of work. the available understandings range from young people as passive neoliberal consumers to radical revolutionary rioters (bowman 2014; kyroglou & henn 2017; pickard et al. 2020). ginwright, © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 140 reflections fennia 199(1) (2021) cammarota and noguera (2006, xiii) point out that “youth activism has always played a central role in the democratic process and continues to forge new ground for social change” (elsen & ord 2021). the methods of the fridays for future (fff) mobilisations are clearly defined in the article as “consist[ing] of young people striking on fridays for climate” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 47). following the example of its leading figure greta thunberg, the fff movement demonstrates in practice how a one-person political action may create ripple effects in a conducive socio-political environment and achieve eventually global repercussions. in turn, young people are taking the lead by addressing the (adult) politicians, with the aim of forcing them to take environmental action. huttunen and albrecht (2021, 46–47) clarify: “[t]he fff movement […] is a grassroots environmental movement that uses protest tactics to demonstrate against the inadequate climate actions taken by politicians”. according to the first three elements of brady’s definition therefore, the fff mobilisations in finland comprise of ‘young people taking action for environmental change’ and epitomise – in the famous words of abraham lincoln in the gettysburg address – the necessary requirements of democratic governance in western liberal democracies: “…government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” (oppenheimer & edwards 2012, 232). these three elements in brady’s definition broadly coincide with the three frames huttunen and albrecht have identified in their article: the ‘active youth’ frame defines the agency behind the action as residing on young people. the ‘school attendance’ frame indicates the methods of chosen actions, whereby young people skip school to demonstrate for their environmental concerns. in turn, the ‘sustainable lifestyle’ frame captures the intended outcome of the said actions, which aims to influence change through individual lifestyle choices. these frames are defined as the processes “…by which ‘ordinary people’ make sense of public issues’” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 50). the analysis of the frames of the movement in the finnish news media and twitter however, reveals an additional frame which although it consistently operates in the undercurrent, it by-and-large shapes the other three. this has been very poignantly identified by the authors in what they call an ‘adult voice’ (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 54). as they put it, “…despite the fff being a movement for the young, the discussions online were not youth-centred” (ibid., 54). instead, “[t]he adult voice was present in all types of tweets and reactions” (ibid., 54). my understanding is that this adult-voice refers to the process of ‘interpretation’ and the eventual ‘recognition’ (or not) by the adults of the political message of young people. greta’s initial message about the urgency of environmental action has found fertile ground in the voices of other young people globally. the proliferation and reproduction of the fff mobilisations worldwide is merely the manifestation of young people having successfully received – and acted upon – this message. as a result, huttunen and albrecht (2021, 47) point out that “the international fff climate strike mobilised over 1.6 million young people around the world” in march 2019, whereas “7.6 million took it to the streets in 185 countries” by september of the same year. during this time however, the movement found itself in its next impasse which consists of the ‘recognition’ or the ‘interpretation’ of young people’s message by the adults, many of whom are the politicians, government personnel, or the decision-makers that can raise young people’s ‘lifestyle’ political message on the institutional domain. but the interpretation of the final recipient is often nothing like the original message. i believe that huttunen and albrecht make – maybe – their most significant contribution in the article by exploring the problems behind the recognition of young people’s political message by the adults on twitter and the mainstream media of the country. in the words of a young climate activist, this message is: “we, young people, have held enough strikes; now it is time for you adults to demonstrate and tell the policymakers that we have to act now” (tola 2019 in huttunen & albrecht 2021, 52). the problem of the recognition of the political message behind a political action is of course not new. for instance, only a few years ago the uk witnessed a series of riots of young people in london and all around the country in august 2011 (lightowlers 2015). should one classify these riots as a form of political participation? after all, they adhere to the first three components of brady’s conceptualisations of political participation, insofar they involved a) actions, b) by ordinary people, in order c) to bring about desired change. although the labour party condemned the acts of violence across britain, it recognised that there was an “inconvenient truth” – reminiscent of al gore's 2006 environmental campaign about global 141georgios kyrogloufennia 199(1) (2021) warming – in the form of the message passed by the rioters, which should be addressed by politicians (lamprianou 2013, 23). as a result, the riots were perceived by the labour party as actions (albeit admittedly unlawful) by ordinary citizens charged with a discernible political message. in other words, the praxis of the riots was an unlawful, but symbolically effective political way of expressing the ordinary citizens’ demands for change. on the other hand however, the uk prime minister at the time, david cameron, on the 15 of august 2011 in oxfordshire, dismissed the london riots as acts of “pure criminality” (lamprianou 2013, 23), on the grounds that they were not involving the mainstream political sphere. in essence, their telos was not achieved through a narrow set of ‘prespecified’ and ‘lawful’ praxis, in order for it to be considered political as conventionally defined. an even more recent example may be found in the differing conceptualisation of the black lives matter mobilisations, in minnesota but also around the globe in march 2020. the republican us president donald trump, tweeted that these were merely an act of “thuggery” (cbs news 2020), whereas the opposition leader at the time joe biden portrayed the mobilisations in response to george floyd’s murder “...just the latest in a series of injustices stemming from racism against black people” (mangan 2020), and called for institutional reforms in the police forces. likewise, huttunen and albrecht under the ‘school attendance’ frame discuss the requirement of a ‘prespecified’ praxis for the message to be ‘acceptable’ in the eyes of the adult recipients. for example, the authors show how the national board of education missed the content of the message entirely, stating that “students have the freedom of speech, but it does not mean that they can freely be absent from school” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 53). in this way, the public’s attention was conveniently “…distracted from the young people’s demand for systemic change” (ibid., 53). such a narrow interpretation of political action which needs to involve some kind of ‘acceptable’ or externally and upwardly-defined ‘right’ way of making a political statement however, would exclude even the french revolution as the par-excellence symbolic manifestation of popular political participation, on the grounds that its praxis was fundamentally ‘unlawful’ and not ‘political’ insofar it did not directly include the aristocracy of the time. the almost comical-if-it-wasn’t-so-serious effect of the misinterpretation of young people’s intended political message may be better discerned under the ‘sustainable lifestyle’ frame. this has been previously very poignantly described by fisher in his brilliant ‘postcapitalist desire’. discussing a clip from a former tory mp’s 2010 appearance in a uk comedy panel show at the time of occupy london, fisher (2020, 39) writes: “what she famously claimed was that the protesters of occupy had no authenticity or validity because they went into starbucks, and maybe they had iphones […] they’ve got iphones and therefore they can’t really be anti-capitalist”. likewise, huttunen and albrecht (2021, 51) report how the young strikers were criticised by users of twitter based on their lifestyle choices, such as “…driving a moped, contributing to food waste in schools because of the strike, or using a chinese cell phone…”. similarly to the criticism of the former mp, many social media users concluded that “… the strikers were hypocritical for demanding climate actions while making unecological choices in their everyday lives” (ibid., 51). once again the authors discern an ‘adult voice’ behind these tweets, which paternalistically ‘advise’ for different lifestyle choices, in order to ‘grant’ its recognition of their political message and therefore political agency. this last point leads ultimately to the discussion of the ‘active youth’ frame. fisher (2020, 39) making a similar point identifies a narrative about subliminal desire, or as brady (1999) would put it, the intended outcome behind the action. this narrative further advances the criticism of the adult-voice under the ‘sustainable lifestyle’ frame discussed above: “these protesters have the products of advanced capitalism therefore…it’s not only that they’re hypocrites, it’s that they don’t really want what they say they want […] they may claim ethically that they want to live in a different word but libidinally, at the level of desire, they are committed to living within the current capitalist world” (fisher 2020, 39). this framing denies the political agency of young people by essentially refusing not only their voice, but their ability to identify their own desires. it implies a paternalistic imposition, which instead of closing its ears to young people’s voice, it deliberately misconstrues it: ‘yes, i hear you..’ it says. ‘you may indeed be saying that this is what you want, but let me know better’. it conceives political agency of young people as something that is being ‘given’ and certainly not as something that young people are ready for. the climate strikes therefore are being re-framed as mere political 142 reflections fennia 199(1) (2021) rehearsals. huttunen and albrecht (2021, 52) very eloquently capture this by saying “instead of seeing the young strikers as citizens with political influence and the right to affect their future, these children were seen as citizens-to-be” and the fff movement as a good opportunity to train their political agency – but not to actively exercise it. the discussion above points back to the problem of the recognition of the political message by its intended recipients. for a political message to be deemed as such, it does not suffice to consist of ‘actions for desired change’. these actions must also be publicly recognised as such. this means however, that the young people’s own intent behind their actions do not suffice to determine the latter’s political character. even though none of these frames may fully capture the full extent of subjectivities of each individual protestor, the recognition and interpretation of their political message rests largely in the eye-of-the-beholder. pickard (2019) posits in the words of schwartz (1984, 1118) that “whether something counts as being political participation depends on our point of view, our interpretation, our conceptual template […]. participation is subjective contingent on the conceptual lens of the observer”. late prof. inglehart (1971) attributed shifts in values between young people and their older contemporaries to the differential socioeconomic conditions during their formative years. as the authors acknowledge “young people’s views on politics and participation differ from those of older people” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 47). in that respect therefore, huttunen and albrecht make a significant contribution in exploring the frames through which young people’s political participation in the fff movement is being understood, recognised and eventually validated by their older contemporaries. they discern three intertwined frames, namely the ‘sustainable lifestyle’; the ‘active youth’ and the ‘school attendance’ frame. implicit behind all three they discern also an ‘adult-voice’ in the discussion. irrespective of the framing of the fff movement by its adult recipients in the finnish news media and on twitter, young people have undoubtedly already voiced their political message. the fff movement has managed to “bring the climate change in the forefront of political discussion, transforming the focus in discussions to actual solutions” shaping at the same time “how environmental issues and responsibilities are [being] perceived” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 55) in the mainstream political discourse. however, the success of the movement will largely depend on the acknowledgement of their political message by its intended recipients; namely their adult contemporaries and politicians. references bowman, b. (2014) 2011: young rioters and imagined revolution in the british utopia of calm. postcolonial studies 17(1) 90–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.912189 brady, h. e. (1999) political participation. measures of political attitudes 2 737–801. cbs news (2020) ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’: trump tweet flagged by twitter for ‘glorifying violence’ 29.5.2020. <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-minneapolis-protesters-thugsflagged-twitter/>. 3.6.2021. elsen, f. & ord, j. (2021) the role of adults in “youth led” climate groups: enabling empowerment. frontiers in political science 3 [online apr 23 2021] https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.641154 elsen, f. & ord, j. (2021) the role of adults in “youth led” climate groups: enabling empowerment. frontiers in political science 3 [online apr 23 2021] https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2021.641154 fisher, m. (2009) capitalist realism: is there no alternative? zer0 books, winchester, uk. fisher, m. (2020) postcapitalist desire: the final lectures. repeater books, london, uk. ginwright, s., cammarota, j. & noguera, p. (2006) beyond resistance!: youth activism and community change: new democratic possibilities for practice and policy for america’s youth. routledge taylor & francis group, oxon, uk. huttunen, j. & albrecht, e. (2021) the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland. fennia 199(1) 46–60. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102480 inglehart, r. (1971) the silent revolution in europe: intergenerational change in post-industrial societies. american political science review 65(4) 991–1017. https://doi.org/10.2307/1953494 kyroglou, g. & henn, m. (2017) political consumerism as a neoliberal response to youth political disengagement. societies 7(4) 34. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc7040034 lamprianou, i. (2013) contemporary political participation research: a critical assessment. in demetriou, k. (ed.) democracy in transition, 21–42. springer, berlin. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30068-4_2 143georgios kyrogloufennia 199(1) (2021) lightowlers, c. l. (2015) let’s get real about the ‘riots’: exploring the relationship between deprivation and the english summer disturbances of 2011. critical social policy 35(1) 89–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261018314545597 mangan, d. (2020) biden ‘furious’ over trump’s call for violence against americans in minneapolis protests of george floyd death. cnbc 29.5.2020 <https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/george-floydbiden-blasts-trump-minneapolis-protest-tweets.html>. 3.6.2021. oppenheimer, d. & edwards, m. (2012) democracy despite itself: why a system that shouldn’t work at all works so well. mit press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9195.001.0001 pickard, s. (2019) defining and measuring political participation and young people. in politics, protest and young people, 57–87. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57788-7_3 pickard, s., bowman, b. & arya, d. (2020) “we are radical in our kindness”: the political socialisation, motivations, demands and protest actions of young environmental activists in britain. youth and globalization 2(2) 251–280. https://doi.org/10.1163/25895745-02020007 schwartz, j. d. (1984) participation and multisubjective understanding: an interpretivist approach to the study of political participation. the journal of politics 46(4) 1117–1141. https://doi.org/10.2307/2131245 indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from research with tl’azt’en nation, british columbia karen heikkilä and gail fondahl heikkilä, karen & gail fondahl (2010). indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from research with tl’azt’en nation, british columbia. fennia 188: 1, pp. 105–122. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. apart from conventional understandings of its utilitarian function as spatial labels (often eponymous in character), toponymy is seldom appreciated as palimpsest or for the layers of meaning it assumes, conveyed in place-name etymologies and local knowledge associated with the named places. over the years, a growing body of literature has emerged on the use of toponymy in several research fields: the range spans from linguistic investigations into placenames and naming practices to the use of place-names in tracking environmental change, locating places of archaeological interest, and understanding the knowledge possessed by local communities about the natural environment. the latter focus describes place-names research with tl’azt’en nation, the dakelhspeaking people whose territory lies in the stuart-trembleur watershed of central british columbia, canada. from the perspective that indigenous place-names communicate knowledge about the natural world, indigenous language and (oral) history, this paper will draw upon examples of dakelh place-names to demonstrate the value of indigenous toponymy in education. key words: british columbia, toponymy, first nations, indigenous, participatory research, culturally sensitive education. karen heikkilä, university of eastern finland gail fondahl, university of northern british columbia introduction ethnographic studies of how children acquire knowledge have indicated multiple literacy and numeracy practices (baker et al. 1996), and with indigenous peoples in particular, knowledge seems to be based on the socio-cultural as well as the ecological, internalized, practiced and transmitted in a “habitus”1 governed by the subsistence way of life (sarangapani 2003: 203). schooling, however, does not necessarily represent the multiplicity of epistemologies, and is thus perceived as problematic by indigenous peoples who view state-sponsored, introduced western-modeled education as antithetical to the values and knowledges that define their communities’ worldviews. “western” standardized education, after all, has often played a part in the marginalization of these peoples, perpetuating the idea that indigenous peoples, their knowledges and ways of life have no place in the present (urion 1993). to remedy the alienating and homogenizing influences of formal education, there is a pressing need for schools to accommodate other, nondominant (and often non-“western”) ways of knowing. the need for indigenous ways of knowing in the curriculum is underscored by a dearth of ancestral knowledge among younger aboriginals, at the root of which is insufficient exposure to their community’s oral tradition and to life on the land (rosenberg & nabhan 1997). one means of introducing such knowledge into formal education is through the use of indigenous toponymy to demonstrate the “knowledge-practice-belief” (berkes 1999) basis of traditional ecological knowledge (tek).2 as an articulation of tek, toponyms “represent a complex body of knowledge… accumulated over long periods of being part of specific natuurn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2531 106 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl ral environments and ecosystems” (müller-wille 2000: 146), and “…constitute a detailed encyclopedic knowledge of the environment, [telling] much about how native people perceive, communicate about, and make use of their surroundings” (afable & beeler 1996: 185). as well, the role of indigenous toponymy in curriculum is recognized to be liberative, serving as a medium to reflect on the indigenous ancestral past for guidance on living “right” in the present (basso 1996:59). beyond their capacity for relaying environmental information, place-names possess the potential to be employed in a post-colonial exploration and reclamation of identity (nash 1999). places that are referred to by their indigenous names anchor indigenous identity to those places, replacing histories of dispossession and erasure of cultural knowledge with accounts grounded in precise locations (cruikshank & argounova 2000). in other words, the symbolically rich resources of place-names and place-based narratives serve to re-establish meanings locally and affirm a sense of continued indigeneity. this is seen most clearly in efforts concerned with the construction of culturally appropriate curriculum, where the transmission of culture is active and the use of cultural knowledge is emphasized over the need to amass and protect it for reasons of posterity (see cruikshank 1981; cruikshank & argounova 2000). from research with tl’azt’en nation (see heikkila 2007), we propose that indigenous toponyms can serve as valuable tools to sensitize education and to increase its accessibility and appeal to indigenous students. tl’azt’en nation the tl’azt’enne are dakelh (carrier)-speaking people of the stuart-trembleur lakes watershed in central interior british columbia, canada. their territory, comprising some 6 500 square kilometers north of fort st. james, is embedded in a region that experiences a continental climate and a short growing season. the region straddles the upper watersheds of two major rivers, the fraser and skeena, which support numerous fish species, including several types of salmon. migrating waterfowl descend upon the region’s lakes to nest in the spring, returning in late summer to molt in preparation for migration southward (morice 1897; hall 1992; sam 2001). the territory’s lakes, ponds, rivulets and rivers are home to beavers and muskrats, prized for fur and meat. the territory is densely blanketed with spruce, fir, pine, aspen and birch, and along alluvial systems, with black cottonwood and willow. in addition to serving as habitat for game such as moose, mule deer and black bear, and fur-bearing animals such as marten, fisher and lynx, the forest exists as a source of edible plants, and materials for shelter, medicines, and implements such as nets, baskets and canoes (hudson 1983; hall 1992). traditionally hunter-gatherers and foragers, the tl’azt’enne led a generally mobile way of life and adhered to a social organization consisting of patrilocal hunting bands (morice 1895; jenness 1943; donahue 1977; hudson 1983; fiske 1987). thorough understandings of their surroundings were crucial for survival, and similar to other athapaskan peoples, the tl’azt’enne employed a subsistence technology that “depended on artifice rather than artifact” (ridington 1990: 12). knowledge of the land and its resources was valued over material accumulation: crucial to semi-nomadic survival was the know-how to hunt, fish, and trap and to construct dwellings, weaponry and tools in unpredictable and severe conditions. yun and dune, the two main knowledge systems in the tl’azt’en worldview, pertain respectively to the mastery of utilitarian skills and ritual (ceremonial and customary) conduct (deborah page, tl’azt’en youth meeting, 27/02/04). these systems of knowledge represented the necessary guides to life in a hunter-gatherer society: understanding the habits of game animals, adhering to proper harvesting methods, observing rituals and taboos, and following etiquette befitting social relations (jenness 1943). stories, vision quests and dreams took on a kind of meta-level importance, where their motifs and morals provided a means to connect present reality to myth time (jenness 1943; furniss 1986; ridington 1990), and in turn, to place individuals communally as well as within the physical environment that sustained the community. from pre-contact trading relations with the northwest pacific coastal indigenous nations, cultural borrowing is evident among the tla’zt’enne. rather than a replacement of the basic paternal athapaskan3 group structure of the dakelh bands, northwest coastal enculturation was absorbed as an addition to the prevailing structure (ives 1990). a conspicuous vestige of coastal influence that continues to play a role in tl’azt’en culture is the matrilineal system, which “function[s] solely in the area comparable to a social welfare system, fennia 188: 1 (2010) 107indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … i.e., the potlatch system” (walker 1974: 380). this coastal import remains an appendage to the basic athapaskan identity of the tl’azt’enne. over time, the ancestors of present-day tl’azt’enne became gradually less mobile. permanent villages at lake outlets began to emerge, where salmon harvesting was carried out from late-summer to mid-fall. as people congregated at village sites for the salmon harvest, they fulfilled the key social obligations of participating in potlatches and other clan ceremonies (kobrinsky 1977; furniss 1986; carlson and mitchell 1997). in time, family-owned hunting and gathering territories known as the keyoh emerged (hudson 1983; morris 1999; brown 2002). the balhats (potlatch) and clan systems regulated rights to resources within the keyoh, and permission had to be sought of keyoh-owning families to hunt and trap within these territories (morris 1999). the balhats was carried out in order to affirm property rights and resource use in the keyoh (morris 1999; brown 2002). the advent of european presence and settlement in tl’azt’en territory further intensified permanent villages, especially in the vicinity of trading posts, missions and homesteads (see morris & fondahl 2002). as their ancestral lands progressively fell under state control and ownership, the tl’azt’enne were forced to settle on government reserved land (i.e., parcels of “indian land”, under federal jurisdiction, within tl’azt’en traditional territory) (morris & fondahl 2002). the current onreserve population of tl’azt’en nation (approx. half of the total 1 500 members) is concentrated in three villages: tache, binche, and dzitl’ainli (middle river). despite the hegemonic legacy of the reservation system, tl’azt’en access to and use of land was assiduously negotiated between tl’azt’en leaders and the state (see morris & fondahl 2002). even today, the tl’azt’enne still depend on subsistence hunting for their livelihood on their traditional territory, supplemented by wage employment and government subsidies. a challenge that is implicitly linked to the injustices of the reservation as well as a residential school system, and one that is frequently expressed by tl’azt’en elders, is the limited amount of time youth spend on the land and their limited knowledge of their ancestral language and culture. at present, the dakelh language is introduced in a pre-school program at the on-reserve school but is spoken fluently in few households, which poses an obstacle to the younger generation relearning it. over the years, the tl’azt’enne have sought to improve the socio-economic well-being of their community through negotiated power arrangements. an instance is the tl’azt’en nation – university of northern british columbia co-management of the 13 000 ha john prince research forest, located on tl’azt’en traditional territory.4 further, in 2003, members from tl’azt’en nation and the university of northern british columbia (unbc), as part of their on-going co-management partnership, formed the non-profit chuntoh education society, mandated to expand culturally appropriate educational opportunities for tl’azt’en nation, especially through on-the-land programming involving tl’azt’en cultural experts. this society developed the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh program (see mitchell 2003), a land-based culture camp program that aims to connect the learning of natural sciences to tl’azt’en culture.5 elders teach traditional skills in a seasonally-based program offered to both tl’azt’en and other local children in late elementary school grades. in 2004, tl’azt’en nation and unbc launched a five-year co-managed research project, “partnering for sustainable resource development”, with several areas of investigation, including the documentation and perpetuation of tl’azt’en tek, and the investigation of culturally appropriate means of enhancing science education to improve tl’azt’en student retention and achievement (see http://cura.unbc.ca).6 the toponymy research described below was envisioned as addressing both of these areas, and having potential for inclusion in the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh program. “indigenizing” science education: a case for indigenous toponymy and on-the-land camp programs the literature on aboriginal education in canada cites science as a curricular area requiring considerable reform to help indigenous students succeed. low rates of enrollment in senior secondarylevel science courses amongst indigenous students appear to correlate with insufficient exposure to these subject areas during elementary school, where many students are placed in remedial programs with limited science instruction (macivor 1995). a weak foundation in science is also due to a lack of proper facilities and equipment (particularly in rural schools), few indigenous role models in the field of science, and the mistrust many parents have towards institutionalized education that 108 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl limits family support for science learning (macivor 1995: 84). a significant factor contributing to low attainment in science is insufficient representation of indigenous lifeways in the curriculum (mackay & miles 1995; battiste 2000; cajete 2000). the sense of cultural discontinuity experienced by indigenous students in learning science is rooted in interpretations of the world based on “a traditional frame of reference (...that may include the physiography and natural history of their homelands), [within which] cognitive and even moral conflicts may limit or preclude any effective engagement with western science” (semken 2005: 150). undoubtedly “the scientific” has negative connotations for many indigenous nations, whose territories and ways of life have been disrupted by resource extraction and the wastage and contamination that often result from land development activities; opposed to place-specific knowledge systems such as tek that assume the interrelatedness of beings and a spiritual commitment to local ecologies, western science seems a totalizing force toward the construction of universal understandings of phenomena based on paradigms (see smith 1999; battiste & henderson 2000; howitt 2001; semken 2005). the objectivity and analytical detachment of the paradigmatic authority is indeed incongruous with the personal authority that propels the initiation of several indigenous led on-theland programs across canada.7 these programs seem to provide a much-needed space for experimentation into ways in which to introduce tek to children and youth, and can be understood as a transition step to revamping the formal curriculum followed in community or band schools. the programs could be also called laboratories of learning, as the successes and failures experienced through the running of such programs can prove to be important lessons for informing how a culturally appropriate education should be modeled. additionally, on-the-land programs provide a natural venue for increased community and parental involvement, more representative of traditional ways of imparting knowledge (yamamura et al. 2003). in fact, the idea of on-the-land programs can be best encapsulated by remarking that when indigenous communities play a part in the development of their own curriculum projects and teach in a manner they determine, they increase their chances for cultural advancement and continuity (dean 2004; enkiwe-abayao 2004). a significant part of the tl’azt’en-initiated yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh culture-based outdoor science camp program lies in its goal of creating an opportunity for youth to become immersed in the land and the tl’azt’en culture. to teach about the land in the context of the tl’azt’en culture, it is crucial to introduce learners to tl’azt’en conceptions of the landscape and their sui generis relationship to the land. these elements are intricately bound with that which indigenous peoples recognize to be at the core of their epistemologies: the investment of self in knowing and protecting one’s surroundings. hence, there is a need to include tek in science education to bring about a more critical and decolonizing approach to the teaching and learning of science. this has been stressed in the literature as a means to problematizing science to uncover its inherent eurocentric biases and to balancing the western scientific literacy that is taught in schools with other knowledge traditions (see for example aikenhead 1997; snively & corsiglia 2000; smith 2000). in comparing and contrasting tek and western science, battiste and henderson instruct on the functioning as well as the possible complementarity of both systems of knowledge: the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples is scientific, in the sense that it is empirical, experimental, and systematic. it differs in two important respects from western science, however: traditional ecological knowledge is highly localized and it is social. its focus is the web of relationships between humans, animals, plants, natural forces, spirits, and land forms in a particular locality, as opposed to the discovery of universal “laws”. it is the original knowledge of indigenous peoples. indigenous peoples have accumulated extraordinarily complex models of species interactions over the centuries within very small geographical areas, and they are reluctant to generalize beyond their direct fields of experience. western scientists, by contrast, concentrate on speculating about and then testing global generalizations, with the result that they know relatively little about the complexities of specific, local ecosystems (battiste & henderson 2000: 44) while allowances are increasingly made in the curriculum for the teaching and learning of indigenous languages and culture (see for example bc ministry of education 2006), indigenous perspectives remain largely absent from the core subject area of science. it is a reality that the inclusion of tek in science education is problematic, with aboriginal culture and knowledge content treated as tangential to standard curricular mandates. the concept of tek as a “tried and tested” system of fennia 188: 1 (2010) 109indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … acquiring and validating information about the world is simply not acknowledged. where part of the curriculum, tek is mostly relegated to indigenous language classes, to the learning of traditional stories as part of language arts activities or to segregated hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering trips that entail a break from school (mccaskill 1987; aikenhead 1997; aikenhead & huntley 1999). alternatively, an effective indigenous school curriculum has been defined as one that is placebased, engages learners in “studies associated with the surrounding physical and cultural environment” and involves increased contact time with “elders, parents and local experts” (barnhardt & kawagley 2004: 63). from this perspective, indigenous cultural content is regarded as being complementary, rather than subsidiary, to science, entailing a shift of focus from “teaching about culture to teaching through culture” (barnhardt & kawagley 2004: 62, emphasis added). such a philosophy has evoked inspiration for teaching tek outside the drawn-out and prohibitive process of educational reform. on-the-land learning programs, effected on a small-scale level and community-led, offer an opportunity for local empowerment where culture-based education can be encouraged without the bureaucracy and red-tape associated with either adjusting to or reforming the formal school curriculum. from a broader standpoint, such programs symbolize the reclamation of education – an institution historically linked to paternalism, racism and cultural dispossession – as a means to transmit cultural knowledge and values. this sentiment may well be the driving force behind the initiation of on-the-land programs, which seek to integrate “the indispensable role of the land as the classroom in which the heritage of each indigenous people has traditionally been taught” (battiste & henderson 2000:53). in this light, place-names have a significant role to perform as aids in making the land accessible in human terms, as signs, pathfinders, containers of knowledge (e.g. environmental, historical, geographical), and meditations of events and people of long ago. in teaching tl’azt’en youth to re-connect with the land, place-names have an inestimable importance because they are tangible markers of places on the land that give substance to the culture of their people. therefore, incorporating dakelh toponymy in educational programs, such as the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh program, has the effect of re-instating dakelh names on the map, of keeping the land from being lost to tl’azt’enne (pauline joseph, cpnis, 19/05/04). methods in view of the ongoing negotiations in canada between the state and indigenous communities over aboriginal and treaty rights8, as well as the precedential aboriginal land claims settlements in northern canada, the onus of proving aboriginal presence on and utilization of ancestral lands rests with indigenous communities: evidence of use and occupancy of these lands must be proved by the communities in order to secure future rights to them. to this end, many communities have chosen to conduct land use and cultural heritage surveys known as traditional use studies (tus) (see for example freeman 1976; castonguay 1979; wonders 1987, müller-wille 2000; tobias 2000; collignon 2006). at the time of our research with tl’azt’en nation, the community had already completed a tus, which included the documentation of 640 dakelh place-names. given tl’azt’en nation’s interest in toponyms beyond land claims, our collaborative work shifted focus from the recording and mapping of place-names to the analysis and verification of names. one aim of our research was to establish a rigorous and reproducible methodology to collect additional cultural information about place-names that tl’azt’en researchers could use over time to enrich their place-name data banks. a second objective was to consider the place-names’ pedagogical potential. thus a limited number of toponyms (nine) were chosen for our study, by tl’azt’en member beverly bird9 (table 1). a key criterion used by ms. bird in selecting the toponyms was location: as it was likely that toponyms would initially inform the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh program’s curriculum, rather than formal educational curricula (given bureaucratic obstacles), ms. bird chose places on or near the john prince research forest land base (fig. 1) where the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh program is held, so that children who participate in the program can visit or at least see these places. another criterion used by ms. bird was the physiographic or cultural-use descriptiveness of place-names. several types of watercourses, for example, were chosen because segments of their names contain information on the direction of the flow of water. place-names based on the types of resources found on or near 110 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl d ak el h na m e & g lo ss o ffi ci al na m e a lt er na te n am e g eo gr ap hi ca l f ea tu re lo ca ti on ( se e fi g. 1 ) c hu zg hu n “a d ow n fe at he rs p la ce ”( w he re d uc ks a nd g ee se m ou lt) . a ls o re fe rs to th e tr ee d sh or el in e of th e la ke . ch uz = s no w fla ke ; s of t o r ho llo w w oo d. -g hu n (fr om b un gh un ) = la ke , l ak e ar ea . te zz er on la ke c hu zg hu n bu n la ke n or th er nm os t b ou nd s of th e jo hn p ri nc e r es ea rc h fo re st . pa ra lle l t o an d no rt h of p in ch i a nd st ua rt la ke s. c hu z ti zd li th e po in t a t w hi ch th e w at er s of c hu zg hu n di sc ha rg e. tiz dl i = th at fl ow s ou t; st ar tin g to fl ow ; fl ow in g cr ee k; w at er r un ni ng o ut o f a la ke ; be gi nn in g of a r un ni ng r iv er ; r iv er r un ni ng o ut o f a b od y of w at er ; r un ni ng w at er ; w he re w at er r un s ou t; flo w in g aw ay fr om a b od y of w at er . _ _ la ke o ut le t fa r w es te rn e nd o f t ez ze ro n la ke . k uz kw a r iv er fl ow s ou t o f te zz er on l ak e vi a c hu z tiz dl i. k ’u z ko h k ’u z (fr om ‘u ’k ’u z) = h al f; pa rt s th at m ak e a w ho le ; h al f a s id e of fi sh . -k oh (f ro m ‘u ko h) = c re ek , r iv er , s tr ea m . k uz kw a r iv er _ r iv er /c re ek fl ow s ou t o f t ez ze ro n la ke , i n th e no rt hw es te rn p ar t o f t he jo hn pr in ce r es ea rc h fo re st . h ad oo da te lh k oh d es cr ib es th e so ft qu al ity o f t he b ed o f t he la ke it ta ke s its n am e. h at du da te hl c re ek n in gw us k oh (li t. “s oa pb er ry c re ek ) r iv er /c re ek fl ow s ou t o f h at du da te hl l ak e in to th e m id dl e of t ez ze ro n la ke at it s no rt he rn s ho re . c hu zg hu n ko h te zz er on c re ek yu ts ’u zu k ya t’s uz ak (b ot h na m es r ef er to th e ac tiv ity o f l an di ng a bo at o r ca no e) c hu z ko h r iv er /c re ek m ea nd er in g cr ee k at th e fa r ea st er n en d of t ez ze ro n la ke . fl ow s ab ov e ya tz ut zi n la ke . te sg ha r ef er s to th e m os sy q ua lit y of th e la ke be d, w hi ch is p ri m e w hi te fis h ha bi ta t. a ls o de sc ri be s th e la ke a re a as a r ef ug e or “ re st in g ar ea ” fo r m ig ra tin g w at er fo w l. te s = b ed ; b ed di ng . -g ha = h ai ry , f ur ry o r m os sy . pi nc hi l ak e b in k oh b in ch e bu n te sg ha b un q ez -r en [ ju zg hu n] la ke li es b et w ee n st ua rt a nd t ez ze ro n la ke s. b in t iz dl i th e po in t a t w hi ch th e w at er s of t es gh a di sc ha rg e. _ b un t iz dl i la ke o ut le t so ut hw es t p or tio n of p in ch i l ak e. b in tl ’a t no o is la nd a t t es gh a’ s fa rt he st e nd (f ar th es t u ps tr ea m e nd o f t he la ke ). -t l’a t = p os te ri or ; b ac ks id e (in di ca tin g ba ck w at er a re as , u ps tr ea m fr om s et tle m en ts ). _ b in ta to h (“ am on g la ke w at er s th at s ho al ”) b in ta t tl ’a t is la nd fa r ea st er n en d of p in ch i l ak e. k ’a zy us -y us = r id ge (a rc ha ic d ak el h fo rm ). pi nc hi m ou nt ai n k ’u z yu s b in ch e d zu lh te sg ha d zu lh n at ad ilh t’ o* (“ w at er r is in g” , r ef er ri ng to th e m ul tit ud ino us p on ds , l ak es , s w am ps a nd s tr ea m s su rr ou nd in g th e m ou nt ai n) m ou nt ai n lo ca te d be tw ee n pi nc hi a nd te zz er on la ke s. *s p el li n g t o b e ve ri fi ed b y th e c ar ri er l in gu is ti c c o m m it te e. ta b le 1 . d ak el h t o p o n ym s in cl u d ed i n t h e st u dy fennia 188: 1 (2010) 111indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … named features provided a third criterion. the study place-names included two lakes (chuzghun and tesgha) one mountain (k’azyus), one island (bintl’at noo), two creeks (hadoodatelh koh and chuz koh), two lake outlets (chuz tizdli, bin tizdli) and one river (k’uz koh). the research methods and procedures, developed in adherence to tl’azt’en nation guidelines for research in tl’azt’en territory (tl’azt’en nation 1997), were approved by both the unbc research ethics board and tl’azt’en nation chief and council (band council resolution no. 0520). to ensure community participation in the planning, execution and evaluation stages of the research, a steering committee made up of community elders and researchers was struck. extant sources of dakelh toponymic information as a first step in this study, existing sources of dakelh toponymic information were reviewed. through tl’azt’en nation’s history, the band has authorized and conducted numerous studies concerning place-names, resulting in a “tl’azt’en nation place-names database”. a “tl’azt’en placenames study” (1996) and “tl’azt’en place-names project” (2003) specifically documented dakelh toponymy. two broader studies conducted by the tl’azt’en treaty office, the “elders’ interviews” (1984-1995)10 and the “tl’azt’en traditional use study” (tus) (1998–1999), also included the documentation of some dakelh place-names. a fig. 1. dakelh toponyms researched and their locations in the vicinity of the john prince research forest, british columbia, canada. 112 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl project carried out under the auspices of the yinka dene language institute (ydli) in 1994 to compile a dakelh language lexicon (see poser 1998) involved verifying some place-names culled from the early twentieth century works of the oblate missionary, adrien gabriel morice, and the recording of additional place-names in interviews with dakelh speakers. transcripts of interviews from the latter four studies were available for review, for references to the chosen place-names and their surroundings and associated legends, stories, environmental, cultural and traditional use information. maps created by the carrier sekani tribal council11 such as the 1: 50 000 “carriersekani territory southern section” (1995) and “tl’azt’en nation traditional territory” maps (2004) also provided information on dakelh placenames and their locations. in the past, individuals with an interest in the history of their family’s subsistence areas also collected keyoh place-names from their oldest living family members and used them to construct maps of their hunting and trapping territories. while the maps were not available,12 many research participants talked of there being such a thing as keyoh place-names, exclusive to family members who hold the territory. along with those materials collected by tl’azt’en nation, published sources containing information on dakelh place-names were reviewed (morice 1897, 1978 [1904], 1907, 1932, 1933; carrier linguistic committee 1974; kobrinsky 1977; hall 1992; akrigg & akrigg 1997; poser 1998; sam 2001). copies of notes from julian steward’s research of the mid twentieth century were also consulted (steward 1940). these works provided background information on several of the study place-names.13 however, the information from these sources was minimal and fragmented. a review of archival and published information on the study place-names exposed gaps and discrepancies. several facets of the chosen placenames had to be verified, including spelling, dialect, location, translation, meaning and whether the places were associated with any stories or legends. thus interviews were required with tl’azt’enne knowledgeable about the dakelh language, traditions and life on the land. interviews to gain an understanding of the tl’azt’en-led place-name studies that had been previously undertaken, interviews were carried out with the community researchers who directed these studies, about the purpose of the tl’azt’en place-names research projects, methodology employed, and areas of interest within the tl’azt’en traditional territory.14 the tl’azt’en researchers were also asked for suggestions as to which elders to interview on the toponyms; each person provided the names of a number of tl’azt’enne who are members of families on whose keyohs the toponyms occur and/or who are regarded by the tl’azt’en community as having authoritative knowledge of the dakelh language and the tl’azt’en culture. participants were then recruited from this list of names. using a “snowballing” technique based on a peer recommendation process (sherry & fondahl 2004), a total of 12 individuals were identified, ten of whom were available for interviewing. the individuals were mostly elderly males.15 an interview guide, consisting of open-ended questions (johnson 1992; hart 1995; grenier 1998; tobias 2000) was devised, reviewed by tl’azt’en colleagues, pre-tested and revised. it was designed to verify and expand on information from the earlier place-name projects. formal interviews were then conducted with elders pierre john, walter joseph sr., robert hanson, sophie monk, frank duncan, louise alexis, elsie alexis, catherine coldwell, stanley tom and alexander tom.16 morris joseph, a tl’azt’en member fluent in dakelh, assisted with the interviews. during interviews, the participants were shown maps17 of the study area, and the places of interest were either pointed at or referred to by their english or french toponyms. a 1: 125 000 map of the study area was specially commissioned by tl’azt’en nation for use in the interviews; a mylar sheet placed over the map served as a way to mark events, the settings of stories and legends, trails and additional locations and place-names. the participants were then asked for the traditional dakelh names of the places, any alternate names, dialectal affinity, and literal translations and glosses.18 they were asked to expound on translations and interpretations in light of the eco-cultural attributes of the places, to share stories about the places, and to focus especially on those places they knew most about. once interviews were transcribed, content analysis was performed (kitchin & tate 2000; silverman 2000; mccracken 1988; holland 1995). the analysis was presented to the community for verification and feedback. community review of the content analysis was vital in terms of ensuring fennia 188: 1 (2010) 113indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … that the information was accurate and interpreted properly. a panel of elder experts, known as the tl’azt’en place-names committee, verified the findings on each of the nine place-names.19 this protected the indigenous concepts, terms and place-names from being misconstrued, misrepresented or ignored altogether. several tl’azt’en nation members identified by beverly bird because of their knowledge of the tl’azt’en culture and their experience in the conduct of qualitative research, reviewed the written analysis: renel mitchell, beverly leon, and deborah page, as well as ms. bird herself.20 feedback from the tl’azt’en place-names committee was incorporated, and guidelines were developed for the inclusion of the toponymic information into the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh culture-based outdoor science camp program (see heikkila 2007). dakelh toponyms: repositories of tl’azt’en knowledge tl’azt’en traditional toponyms exist as more than place designators. if the tl’azt’en ancestral territory is analogized to a history book or family tree, a memoryscape (see nutall 1992) upon which the performance of place routines keep alive ancestral knowledge of the land, the toponyms can also be understood to function as symbolic resources, incorporating information on the specific attributes of places and often highlighting a place’s role in navigation and its resource potential. place-names also convey teachings and practices about the relationship between the tl’azt’enne and their ancestral territory. father morice, one of the first missionaries to come to tl’azt’en territory, summed up his observations of the terrain as “par excellence a land of lakes” (1933: 646). journeying through the land, one appreciates the aptness of this statement – rivulets, creeks and rivers crisscross the land, feeding into or draining lakes and ponds of various sizes. since water is such a major entity in tl’azt’en territory, its prominent role in survival and identity for the tl’azt’enne is unsurprising. people have fished in streams and lakes, hunted and trapped along shorelines, and depended on water for transport. water has also played a symbolic role in people’s lives; hydronyms, usually of river mouths and lake outlets and paired with the suffix – whut’enne (meaning “people of a certain place”), function to describe the different dakelh communities (see kobrinsky 1977). nak’azdli whut’enne and tache whut’enne are examples of ethnonyms that define as well as distinguish the groups of dakelh speakers living by the outlet of nak’al koh (stuart river) and at the mouth of duzdli koh (tachie river). as bodies of water have been a means of sustenance, mobility and social life for dakelh-speaking peoples, the significance of water in their worldview is appreciable from understanding the names given to places on or along water bodies as well as the water bodies themselves. as the research was based on assembling tl’azt’en tek associated with the study sample of nine place-names, there was a need to examine the geographical terms expressed in place-names and to document the topographic, biotic, and cultural use descriptions for each place. the result was a discovery of patterns in the gathered information that were indicative of the logic behind tl’azt’en place-naming. one pattern, in particular, concerns the role of referents in lake place-names as orientating devices for water travel. toponyms as tools for teaching navigation study toponyms were found to exhibit particles that act as directionals. for instance, place-names with the particles, -che and tizdli indicate direction into or out of a lake system. thus, the main tl’azt’en village, tache, is where a river flows into nak’al bun (stuart lake); chuz tizdli is the place where the kuzkwa river flows out of chuzghun (tezzeron lake). these particles, unlike the global direction given by a compass, give direction from a local vantage point. in the tl’azt’en culture, where rivers and creeks were the primary mode of travel in the past, these particles intimate people’s reliance on waterways to leave and return to their home territory. another example of a directional is -tl’at, a suffix sometimes found in lake place-names, denoting “the end of the lake”. this particle seems to indicate to travelers on water a movement away from a settlement into more remote areas. for instance, nak’al bun (stuart lake), tesgha (pinchi lake) and dzinghubun (trembleur lake) host sites that contain tl’at as part of their names. nak’alat, bintl’at, and dzintl’at are located away from the outlets of the lake systems to which they belong, as well as from principal villages on these lakes. the ending tl’at signifies that traveling to the “end” of the lake is to move upstream, and away from settlements – an orienting function in traveling the 114 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl waters of tl’azt’en country. together with the aid of other landforms (such as mountains, hills, islands and coves), knowledge of the -che, tizdli and -tl’at parts of lakes guided travelers on water to both upand downstream places. toponyms as tools for teaching concepts of ecology biotic information that hints at the resource potential of places was also found to reside in the study place-names. chuzghun (tezzeron lake) includes the root chuz, which translates as “snowflake” (poser 1998: 71), and refers to the idea that the lake is a “down feathers place”, commonly regarded as a nesting place for waterfowl (catherine coldwell & betsy leon; cpnis21, 31/03/04; cpnvs, 27-28/04/05). chuz, in this context, refers to the molting process water birds undergo after the nesting period. the appearance of bird down in water resembles snowflakes (catherine coldwell cpni, 25/06/04). indeed, elder robert hanson (cpnis, 03/06/04) felt that the prefix of the placename, chuz, was amiss, and that it should rather read as ts’uz, meaning “feather”. as ts’uz is also the prefix of the word tsuzchus, meaning “down feather”, this observation conforms to the idea of a “molting lake”, the term noted by akrigg and akrigg (1997: 265) to describe tezzeron lake as a place “where ducks and geese molt”.22 an alternate interpretation for the etymology of chuzghun was provided by stanley tom and alexander tom (cpni, 21/12/04), keyoh holders in the area of this lake, who maintain that the placename refers to old, hollow trees that line the lakeshore. since these trees grow thickly on the shoreline, they give the lake the appearance of a basin when viewed from a distance, as from on top of an incline. the trees were described as “getting old and …soft… [they are] hollow and fall apart when [struck]”. the interviewees gave the meaning of the prefix, chuz, as “soft wood” and the suffix, -ghun, as “area”, subsequently translating the whole name as “a body of water surrounded by trees” (cpni, 21/12/04). also significant is the consideration of the short forms or contractions of place-names that are used by dakelh speakers as an alternative to the complete forms of names. stanley tom and alexander tom suggest that chuzghun derives from a special term, chunzool, “hollow wood”, which is contracted to chuz in the place-name chuzghun (cpni, 21/12/04). stanley and alexander tom’s description of the trees that grow along the lake suggests black cottonwood (populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa), which can be found growing on low to medium elevation, on moist to wet soil (mackinnon et al. 1999: 19). containing whitish, wispy-like hairs, cottonwood seeds drift through the air like “giant summer snowflakes” to germinate (mackinnon et al. 1999: 19). this phenomenon may correspond to the idea behind “snowflake lake”, poser’s etymology for chuzghun (1998: 67).23 as well, the reference to black cottonwood is reconciled with the interpretation “soft wood” when viewed in the light of tl’azt’en material culture: the wood of this tree species is highly pliable and was used to make dugout canoes and paddles (hall 1992). the various interpretations of the toponym suggest lessons in the multiplicity of resources that a location may offer, as well as the multiplicity of interpretations that language may engender. toponyms as tools for exploring the seasons and subsistence round clues to the tl’azt’en subsistence round appear in certain toponyms. place-names carrying the -che and tizdli particles, as well as the place-names chuzghun and tesgha contain environmental information pertaining to faunal life cycle and critical habitats such as nesting and refuge sites. while serving as navigational aids, -che and tizdli placenames also suggest opportunities for hunting, snaring and fishing by the very nature that the places marked by these names are typically those that remain open or ice-free during the winter. river mouths and lake outlets attract birds and mammals, and allow for fishing even when lakes are mostly frozen. in some cases, as with the toponym chuzghun, stages of the life cycle of animals are evoked. chuzghun summons up the yearly migration of waterfowl northwards, the birds’ need for shelter in lakes and slow-moving rivers and creeks, and the processes of molting and nesting that the birds undergo after they find refuge. this information on waterfowl is part of tl’azt’en knowledge relating to subsistence. through observing the seasons, habits and habitats of the birds, it was possible to predict their arrival, to locate when and where they nest, and to develop efficient harvesting strategies. at the time of the molt, waterfowl are at their most vulnerable, being largely grounded and awkward away from water. accounts of the traditional means of clubbing or netting waterfowl fennia 188: 1 (2010) 115indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … in the molting stage are given in morice (1897) and hall (1992). tesgha (meaning “hairy or furry bed or bedding” (morris joseph, pers, comm, 10/06/04/; alexander tom, cpni, 21/12/04)), the lake that lies parallel to chuzghun, is also associated with waterfowl, in terms of it serving as an “overnight resting” place (betsy leon, cpnis, 31/03/04). geese and ducks flock on this lake before flying off to other lakes in the vicinity to nest because parts of tesgha are shallow enough for grasses and other semi-aquatic plants to flourish. such an ecosystem sustains a variety of waterfowl as well as whitefish fry, which typically use the blades and stalks of the grasses to hide (cpnvs, 27-28/04/05). according to tl’azt’en knowledge, the shallow eastern portion of tesgha is habitat for whitefish (robert hanson, cpni, 10/06/04). the island, bintl’at noo, located at the eastern end of tesgha, once served as a fishing and hunting camp: this lake system was associated with the autumnal activities of harvesting whitefish and waterfowl. historical information on subsistence is also part of dakelh place-names. the toponym bilhk’a (whitefish lake) translates literally as “snare and arrow”24 (walter joseph and pierre john, cpni, 02/06/04), indicating the kinds of traditional technology used in subsistence activities. from the 1900s to 1940s, bilhk’a played an important role as a source of whitefish to people from throughout the stuart-trembleur watershed (hudson 1983). bilhk’a was also associated with hunting and trapping (robert hanson, cpni, 10/06/04). the name of the lake emphasizes the value of the lake and its surrounding environs as a place where it is possible to hunt, trap and fish. people traveled to this lake in the fall, when whitefish were plentiful in areas of the lake where spawning occurred (sophie monk, cpni, 03/06/04). the wooded recesses of the periphery of the lake contributed to bilhk’a’s significance as they provided access to small and large game. toponyms exploring environmental consciousness the place-name interviews yielded particular insights into the way knowledge is recalled in a culture that has relied on the oral transmission of information. for tl’azt’enne, routes to keyohs and other resource important areas were memorized and unraveled as needed with the help of placenames and their attendant narratives. people relied upon mental maps that contained detailed information about places on the land, gained from knowledge inherited from elders, personal experience or the experiences of others (cf. brody 1981; müller-wille 1984; collignon 2006). occasionally, place-names evoke narratives bordering on the mythic and/or involving the superhuman. these accounts, in providing the context needed to understand the significance of places-names and the places they mark, give toponyms depth. explaining the origins of places and phenomena, being prescriptive and cautionary, or allowing a momentary view of mystical power, these stories carry a subtext that demonstrates the strong spiritual ties between people and the places on which they depend. the sentiment that emerges from these stories can be termed “environmental consciousness”, a moral awareness to honor and engage with places on the land. the two examples below provide an understanding of this ethic. one instance of environmental consciousness is glimpsed in place-name narratives that involve mythic beings. the place-names chuzghun and bin tizdli, for instance, are associated with accounts of giant animals that tell not only of medicine power but demonstrate the sacredness of the land. the presence of animals such as giant dolly varden trout and frogs in these places suggests an offsetting of human might and a creation of balance in the interactions between humans and animals. giant animals serve as powerful reminders that not all things in nature can be controlled or known with surety. it is in this regard that places exude a kind of importance or sacredness, which creates awareness and respectfulness in people as they travel through the land. with regard to place-name narratives involving giant animals, a cautionary message often underlies these stories. an episode of the story of the giant frog of bin tizdli tells of a time when a man came to seek the frog with the intention of capturing and selling it (robert hanson, cpni, 03/06/04). what ensued was a catastrophe, where the man drowned during a sudden squall that blew in over the lake. the story warns of the consequences that can befall those who trespass or exceed the bounds of another’s space and privileges. place-name narratives dealing with giant animals seem to also relate a time in the past when animals were extraordinary and endowed with special powers that could either aid or thwart humans. for fear of suffering misfortune, people travelled with caution through places associated with such animals, re116 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl specting their existence and space. such stories emphasize the importance of respect for all life and for the land. giants, human and animal, are also featured in narratives relating to the origins of places. ulhts’acho, an island upriver from the village of nak’azdli on stuart lake is the namesake of an ogre whose tragic death caused its formation (catherine coldwell, cpni, 25/06/04). the story not only tells of the origin of the island and a nearby islet, but relays a moral about respect for life and nature. gluttony made ulhts’acho kill his dog – his only companion – to get at the lingcod livers in its stomach. after carelessly flinging its carcass into the lake, ulhts’acho realized the heartless deed he had committed. he waded out to retrieve the body of his dog, but never returned. his body, and his dog’s, after being tossed by the waves and swept along by the current, finally settled and became an island. the story of ulhts’acho exemplifies the interdependence between humans and animals, and cautions against impulsivity, greed and mistreatment. it touches on the continuity between life and the earth – people and animals can be transformed after death into landscape features that endure through the seasons, and ever remind of proper behavior. toponyms as tools for discussing local governance environmental consciousness is also intimated in the workings of the keyoh system and related toponymies. keyoh or family territories are defined according to both physical and social bounds. on a material level, keyoh limits are marked by “posts”, or “topographical partitions” by way of hills, mountains, watersheds, meadows, and trails (margaret mattess, cpnis, 19/05/04). lakes and islands, which can also be claimed as part of a family’s keyoh, are also used as posts (stanley tom & alexander tom, cpni, 21/12/04). although keyohs are thus demarcated, there remains a degree of reciprocity in sharing land and resources. this is observed in the social ties between keyoh holders and others. on a social level, keyoh boundaries are maintained through respect and deference towards the family members who have disposition rights to the piece of land. in interviews, participants were reluctant to talk about places in somebody else’s keyoh. this reluctance was apparently steeped in anxiety of trespassing on and misrepresenting another’s authority over and knowledge of a specific area used for subsistence. the unwillingness to discuss another’s keyoh was explained cogently by walter joseph (cpni, 02/06/04), who remarked that talking about places in someone else’s keyoh is an intrusion synonymous to crossing or cutting through the keyoh without having first informed the owner. while keyoh boundaries are not absolute, there is an unspoken rule between keyoh holders and others that obtaining permission to use or travel through the keyoh is obligatory. this is a tacit acknowledgement of the keyoh holder’s tenure and authority over the keyoh. even conversing about the place-names in another’s keyoh is a breach of respect and trust: the place-names can be specific to the keyoh in which they belong, forming not only a part of the owner’s knowledge of the keyoh but standing also as authoritative symbols of that knowledge. through the keyoh system, use of land is controlled, keeping harvesting and regeneration of resources in balance. the place-name content presented in this section illustrates the wealth of meanings to be appreciated from studying indigenous toponymy. because dakelh toponyms often depict physiography or the fecundity of places in the context of the tl’azt’en seasonal subsistence round, their application in curriculum can serve to enrich understandings of local ecologies, including particular tek associated with specific places or ecosystems. furthermore, because of the metaphoric power of place-names to transform places in the physical landscape into places that feed and instruct the moral imagination, the important questions of environmental consciousness, connected to sense of place, cultural survival and self-determination, arise for reflection. such content is important in the makings of culturally-appropriate curriculum to inculcate a strong sense of self and to build appreciation for ancestral teachings. conclusion dakelh toponyms continue to occupy an important place in the make-up of tl’azt’en identity – place-names aid remembrance of people and events in the past, and are markers of a continued tl’azt’en presence on the land. knowledge of toponyms demonstrates personal experience with the land, and to learn place-names is to learn about the land. tl’azt’enne who were interviewed during the course of the research have indicated that fennia 188: 1 (2010) 117indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … place-names represent much more than the places themselves: to know place-names is to be also acquainted with the narratives and memories linked to the places marked. in this way, toponymy contributes to the continuity of oral tradition: placename referents, meanings, attendant narratives and memories are relayed when people know and use toponyms. an interesting point that interviewees brought up time and again during the research was the notion that traveling to named places is of utmost importance to appreciate the essence of placenames. this point supports the idea that to truly know place-names, one must have a relationship with the land: traveling and harvesting are ways of establishing a personal connection with the land. travel entrenches patterns or systems of placenames in people’s consciousness, binding them with places on the landscape, which serve as repositories of ancestral knowledge. for tl’azt’enne, to whom the land is an inalienable part of cultural identity and heritage, the link between rights to land and rights to language and culture is embodied in the idea of remembering places and using dakelh place-names. placenames provide the opportunity for dakelh language maintenance and the learning of oral tradition, both vital issues underlying tl’azt’en cultural continuity. knowing the place-names and stories of one’s homeland is part of knowing one’s language and heritage. but the intensity of the connection between knowing the toponymy and stories of one’s homeland and knowing one’s language and heritage depends on the health of the land and the intactness of places on the land. the well-being and completeness of places are vital not only for place-names to be known and stories to be remembered but ultimately for the continuity of tek and indigenous identity. because of the interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter of the study place-names (i.e., navigational, environmental, historical, ethical, political), we believe that the information will find relevance to environmental, science and social studies applications in outdoor science camp programs. as importantly, utilizing indigenous toponymy in a communitydriven educational project like the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh science camp program promotes knowing, cherishing and protecting places through direct, personal involvement with the land. acknowledgements this paper is dedicated to the memory of robert hanson, esteemed tl’azt’en elder and teacher. we are indebted to the tl’azt’en members who facilitated this research through their willingness to share information. special thanks are due to beverly leon, beverly bird, morris joseph, deborah page, catherine coldwell, pierre john, walter joseph sr., stanley tom, alexander tom, margaret mattess, pauline joseph and dr. william poser. we are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. this manuscript was submitted to tl’azt’en nation for review prior to its initial submission to fennia. notes 1 borrowed from pierre bourdieu (1977) to mean a framework for the objects of knowledge consisting of a society’s social, historical and political structures, perpetuated through performance. 2 three terms used in canada to refer to aboriginal peoples’ knowledge systems are: traditional ecological knowledge (tek), indigenous knowledge (ik), and traditional knowledge (tk). there is no absolute definition for these terms (see berkes 1993, mcgregor 2000) other than they indicate the knowledge held by a particular aboriginal community that has been transmitted through time and that assumes an emotional and spiritual connection with the local landscape. at times, the usage of the terms ik and tk is observed in contexts where there is a need to distinguish knowledge specific to indigenous communities from knowledge stemming from the western scientific tradition. tek is used to refer more specifically to indigenous peoples’ knowledge of their local environments, including their values concerning sustainable and responsible use of natural resources (see grenier 1999). tek is the term that tl’az’ten nation has chosen to use to identify the knowledge of its people (see tl’azt’en nation n.d. a; tl’azt’en nation and unbc cura 2005); hence, out of deference to this choice, tek is used in this publication when discussing aboriginal knowledge, including the knowledge shared by tl’azt’enne. (tl’azt’enne is the plural collective noun for tl’azt’en.) 3 the term athapaskan refers to a branch of the nadene speech family that subsumes languages such as gwich’in, dogrib, slave, dakelh, western apache and navajo. each of these languages belongs to one of the three athapaskan subfamilies – northern, pacific and apachean – representing the range of athapaskan speakers from interior alaska to western canada, the pacific northwest, northern california and the american southwest. na-dene expansion occurred across the bering strait into present-day alaska toward the end of the final great glacial period 118 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl (c. 10 000 bc) (vanstone 1974). in the postglacial period an eastand southward spread took place into what is today the yukon territory and interior british columbia, where the ancestral na-dene became adapted to a subarctic environment abounding in large and small game and fish. the new environments catalysed considerable cultural change as observed in the distinct cultural make-up of the various athapaskan sub-families: linguistic evidence suggests a common athapaskan lineage (vanstone 1974). 4 for more information on this research forest see fondahl and atkinson (2007) and grainger et al. (2006). 5 the yunk’ut whe ts’o dul’eh (we learn from our land) program, developed mostly by renel mitchell, is held on the john prince research forest. for more information see mitchell (2003) and http://www.cstc. bc.ca/cstc/69/the+chuntoh+forest+education+society. 6 this project was funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, under their community-university research alliance (cura) program. it built on several years of previous collaborative research between tl’azt’en nation and unbc. 7 some examples include: the reconnecting with the land program in manitoba, the big trout lake landbased program in ontario, the nutchimiu-attuseun training centre on-the-land program in quebec, the avataq cultural institute inukjuaq and kuujjuaq summer camps in nunavik, the mi’kmaq and wuastukwiuk (maliseet) cultural-enrichment summer camp in new brunswick, and rediscovery summer camps held in several parts of canada (inac 2006). these programs deliver traditional land-based skills and environmental and cultural education to children and youth of aboriginal ancestry, and include the participation of community elders as instructors. on-theland programs are in some instances initiated by schools – in the northwest territories, for instance, schools such as sir alexander mackenzie school (inuvik), chief julius school (fort mcpherson), and paul william kaeser school (fort smith) organize outdoor experiential camps as part of their curricula to teach students bush survival skills, environmental awareness and traditional knowledge. 8 tl’azt’en nation has been in treaty negotiations with the provincial and federal governments since 1993. a treaty, which would result in recognition of aboriginal land ownership, governance, resource management and economic independence, has yet to be signed. 9 beverly bird, a respected tl’azt’en member, had long-time involvement in tl’azt’en cultural and treaty research, and was tl’azt’en co-leader of the co-managed cura project’s tek research stream. she suggested place-names as a topic for a thesis project in which tl’azt’en nation would be interested. 10 a series of interviews conducted to produce tl’azt’en and nak’azdli elder biographies. 11 tl’azt’en nation is a member of the carrier sekani tribal council, along with seven other dakelhand sekani-speaking first nations. 12 tl’azt’en nation has chosen to restrict access to some of its internally-generated maps and documents during treaty negotiations, due to the potentially sensitive nature of these materials. 13 no published information was available on four of the chosen place-names: chuzghun koh, hadoodatelh koh, bin tizdli, and bintl’at noo. 14 interviewees included beverly bird (researcher, tl’azt’en place-names study 1996), renel mitchell, (researcher, traditional use study 1999), and margaret mattess and pauline joseph (researchers, tl’azt’en place-names project 2003). 15 several people explained that knowledge of the keyoh and livelihood related to hunting and trapping is passed down from father to son. the pool of pretest and formal interviewees involved individuals ranging from 40 to 80 years old, with the majority of individuals being male. only one younger interviewee was nominated; he was considered to be “an exception to the rule”, as most youth do not know the dakelh language or the land as well as their fathers and grandfathers. 16 tl’azt’en researchers feel strongly about giving credit to tl’azt’enne who have contributed their knowledge or perspectives to research projects, rather than preserving anonymity, on condition that the participants are comfortable with having their identities revealed. the consent form used in this study gave interviewees the option of electing to have their name either mentioned or withheld in publications; all interviewees chose to be identified. 17 an aerial photograph of the john prince research forest area was also available to research participants as an extra recall aid; most participants preferred the map as a way to locate and remember places over the aerial depiction. 18 beyond a literal translation of a place-name, it is useful to obtain a gloss or meaning based on its root words. this is important in making the place-name understandable to the non-native speaker. an example is the dakelh place-name tsinteltehnoola, literally “burbot [lingcod]-underwater-island” (poser 1998: 302). a gloss, “island where lingcod are found underwater”, enables speakers of english to form a general understanding of this toponym’s meaning. 19 the committee consisted of catherine coldwell, mildred martin, pierre john, sophie monk, helen johnnie, and betsy leon. mrs. coldwell and mrs. leon are members of the nak’azdli band, whose traditional territory borders that of tl’azt’en nation’s to the south; many individuals of the two communities are related and do possess extensive knowledge of places in both territories. mrs. coldwell is a founding member of the carrier linguistic committee. she collaborated with various linguists on dictionary, place-name and traditional plant use projects, and continues to be involved in dakelh language and cultural programs. beverly bird, a tl’azt’en member, is her daughter. 20 all four women have worked in various capacities in tl’azt’en-led and tl’azt’en–unbc joint research projects. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 119indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … 21 cpni, cpnis and cpnvs stand for cura placenames interview, cura place-names information session and cura place-names verification session, respectively. the interviews and sessions were taped and coded by date. 22 “tezzeron” was unanimously regarded by research participants as a corruption of the native name, chuzghun. many instances of the kinds of corruptions produced by the early surveyors and travelers in carrier territory are found in morice (1902, 1933). some corruptions are based in inaccurate transcriptions of the native name, which have the effect of distorting or excluding the original sounds of the name. other corruptions are mistakes in interpretation such as designating whole geographical features by a name reserved for a part on or within them, or giving a native geographical term of a feature as its proper name. 23 father morice’s rather different interpretation of the etymology of chuzghun is also worthy of note. he gives the meaning of the name as “paddle after lake” or paddle lake (1933: 648). discrepancies, however, exist between morice’s translation and that espoused in more recent dakelh language and cultural research. morice transcribed the prefix of chuzghun as tces, which corresponds to chus rather than chuz (poser 2000). the word chus does mean “paddle” and may reflect morice’s familiarity with local knowledge of the lake as a place to obtain wood for making canoes and paddles. this may have had an influence on how he transcribed and interpreted the name. another discrepancy is morice’s recording of the name of the lake as tces-ra-ñ-pen [chus-gha-ngbun], whereas the carrier linguistic committee (1974) and poser (1998) give it as chuzghun. the suffix -ghun was a point of obscurity in the place-name verification process, as none of the tl’azt’en place-names committee members could confidently explain the meaning of the term (cpnvs, 27-28/04/05). speculations were made about -ghun being a short-form for bunghun (lake). however, while -ghun, bun and bunghun all are designators in lake names, bun and -ghun are both representative of big lakes (e.g. nak’al bun and chuzghun), while bunghun is a designator for smaller lakes found within keyohs (morris joseph, pers. comm., 26/03/04). maps of dakelh place-names (clc 1974; cstc 2004) show bun and -ghun referencing lakes of considerable breadth, and bunghun, the smaller lakes that intermittently dot the landscape. the suffix -ghun was also thought to denote a lake located along a ridge (cpnvs, 27-28/04/05; cpnvs, 16/12/05). 24 bilh or “snare” is an all-embracing term for any device that snags or catches, and includes such implements as snares, snare wire, nets and webs (poser 1998: 60). references afable po and beeler ms 1996. place-names. in goddard i (ed). handbook of north american indians 17, language, 185–199. smithsonian institution, washington, dc. aikenhead g 1997. toward a first nations cross-cultural science and technology curriculum. science education 81, 217–238. aikenhead g and huntley b 1999. teachers’ views on aboriginal students learning western science and aboriginal science. canadian journal of native education 23, 159–174. akrigg gpv and akrigg h 1997. british columbia place names. university of british columbia press, vancouver. baker d, clay j & fox c (eds). 1996. challenging ways of knowing in english, maths and science. falmer press, london. barnhardt r and kawagley o 2004. culture, chaos and complexity. cultural survival quarterly 27, 59–64. basso kh 1996. wisdom sits in places: landscape and language among the western apache. university of new mexico press, albuquerque. battiste m 2000. maintaining aboriginal language, culture, and identity in modern society. in battiste m (ed). reclaiming indigenous voice and vision, 192–208. university of british columbia press, vancouver. battiste m and henderson h 2000. protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage. purich publishing ltd., saskatoon. berkes f 1993. traditional ecological knowledge in perspective. in inglis jt (ed). traditional eological kowledge: concepts and cases, 1–9. international development research centre, ottawa. berkes f 1999. sacred ecology: traditional ecological knowledge and resource management. taylor and francis, philadelphia. bourdieu p 1977. outline of a theory of practice. cambridge university press, cambridge. british columbia ministry of education 2006. shared learnings: integrating bc aboriginal content k-10. aboriginal education initiative, british columbia ministry of education. <http://www.bced.gov. bc.ca/abed/shared.pdf>. 19.09.2009. brody h 1981. maps and dreams: indians and the british columbia frontier. douglas and mcintyre, vancouver. brown d 2002. carrier sekani self-government in context: land and resources. western geography 12, 21–67. cajete g 2000. indigenous knowledge: the pueblo metaphor of indigenous education. in battiste m (ed). reclaiming indigenous voice and vision, 181–191. university of british columbia press, vancouver. carlson ak and mitchel ls 1997. cultural heritage review of a portion of fort saint james forest dis120 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl trict b.c. report commissioned by the british columbia ministry of forests, victoria. [clc] carrier linguistic committee 1974. central carrier country. carrier linguistic committee. pg printers, fort st. james. [cstc] carrier-sekani tribal council 1995. carriersekani territory southern section map. 1: 50 000. carrier-sekani tribal council. accessed from the tl’azt’en natural resources office collections, tache. [cstc] carrier-sekani tribal council 2004. tl’azt’en nation traditional territory map. 1: 50 000. carrier-sekani tribal council. accessed from the tl’azt’en natural resources office collections, tache. castonguay r 1979. the relevance of native toponymy in illustrating land occupancy in the canadian north. onomastica 56, 1–12. charters-vogth o 1999. indian control of indian education: the path of the upper nicola band. canadian journal of native education 23, 64–100. collignon b 2006. knowing places. the inuinnait, landscape, and the environment. cci press, edmonton. cruikshank j 1981. legend and landscape: the convergence of oral and scientific traditions. arctic anthropology 18, 67–93. cruikshank j and argounova t 2000. re-inscribing meaning: memory and indigenous identity in sakha republic (yakutia). arctic anthropology 37, 96–119. dean b 2004. indigenous education and the prospects for cultural survival. cultural survival quarterly 27, 14–18. donahue p 1977. 4500 years of cultural continuity of the central interior plateau of british columbia. thesis, (phd). university of wisconsin. enkiwe-abayao l 2004. ifugao knowledge and formal education. cultural survival quarterly 27, 26–29. fiske j 1987. fishing is women’s business: changing economic roles of carrier women and men. in cox ba (ed). native people, native lands: canadian indians, inuit and metis, 186–198. carleton university press, ottawa. fondahl g & atkinson d 2007. re-making space in north-central british columbia: the establishment of the john prince research forest. bc studies 154, 67–95. freeman m (ed). 1976. inuit land use and occupancy project. ministry of supply services canada, department of indian and northern affairs, ottawa. furniss e 1986. the carrier indians and the politics of history. in morrison rb & wilson cr (eds). native peoples: the canadian experience, 508–546. oxford university press, toronto. grainger s, sherry ee and fondahl g 2006. the john prince research forest: evolution of a co-management partnership in northern british columbia. forestry chronicle 82, 484–495. grenier l 1998. working with indigenous knowledge: a guide for researchers. international development research centre, ottawa. hall l 1992. the carrier, my people. friesen printers, cloverdale. hart e 1995. getting started in oral traditions research. occasional papers of the prince of wales northern heritage centre, government of the northwest territories, yellowknife. heikkila k 2007. teaching through toponymy: using indigenous place-names in outdoor science camps. thesis, (ma). university of northern british columbia. herman rdk 1999. the aloha state: place names and the anti-conquest of hawai’i. annals of the association of american geographers 89, 76– 102. holland t 1995. words to live by: investigating navajo naming practices. names 43, 275–293. howitt r 2001. rethinking resource management: justice, sustainability and indigenous peoples. routledge, london. hudson d 1983. traplines and timber: social and economic change among carrier indians of northern british columbia. thesis, (phd). university of alberta. [inac] indian and northern affairs canada 2006. youth. indian and northern affairs canada. <http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/si45_e. html>. 01.09.2006. ives jw 1990. a theory of northern athapaskan prehistory. university of calgary press, calgary. jenness d 1943. the carrier indians of the bulkley river: their social and religious life. in bureau of american ethnology, bulletin 133, 469–586. smithsonian institution, washington, dc. johnson m (ed). 1992. lore: capturing traditional environmental knowledge. dene cultural institute and international development research centre, ottawa. karjala m & sherry e 2003. the aboriginal forest planning process: a guidebook for identifying community level criteria and indicators. <http:// cura.unbc.ca/pubs/afpp.pdf>. 07.07.2005. kitchin r & tate n 2000. conducting research into human geography: theory, methodology and practice. prentice hall, essex. kobrinsky v 1977. the tsimshianization of the carrier indians. in helmer j, van dyke s & kense f (eds). problems in the prehistory of the north american subarctic: the athapaskan question, 201–210. university of calgary, calgary. macivor m 1995. redefining science education for aboriginal students. in battiste m & barman j (eds). first nations education in canada: the circle unfolds, 73–98. university of british columbia press, vancouver. mackay r & miles l 1995. a major challenge for the education system: aboriginal retention and dropout. in battiste m & barman j (eds). first nations education in canada: the circle unfolds, 157– fennia 188: 1 (2010) 121indigenous toponyms as pedagogical tools: reflections from … 178. university of british columbia press, vancouver. mackinnon a, pojar j & coupé r (eds). 1999. plants of northern british columbia. lone pine publishing, vancouver. mccaskill d 1987. revitalization of indian culture: indian cultural survival schools. in barman j, hebert y & mccaskill d (eds). indian education in canada – vol. 2 the challenge, 157–178. university of british columbia press, vancouver. mccracken g 1988. the long interview. sage university paper series on qualitative research methods 13. sage, beverly hills. mcgregor d 2000. the state of traditional ecological knowledge research in canada: a critique of current theory and practice. in laliberte, r, sette p, waldram j, innes r, macdougall b, mcbain l, barron, f (eds). expressions in canadian native studies, 436-458. university of saskatchewan extension press, saskatoon. mitchell r 2003. yunk’utw whe ts’o dul’eh (we learn from our land). discussion paper and culturebased science camp curriculum development prepared for the chuntoh education society, tache, british columbia. morice ag 1895. three carrier myths. transactions of the canadian institute 5, 1–36. morice ag 1897. in the land of the black bear – among the natives of b.c. narratives of a missionary by the rev. fr. morice – oblate missionary of mary immaculate. translated from french by dwight dodge. delhomme et briguet, paris. morice ag 1902. british columbia maps and place names. in a first collection of minor essays, mostly anthropological by the rev. a.g. morice, 44–54. stuart’s lake mission, quesnel. morice ag 1907. the great dene race. anthropos 2, 1–34, 181–196. morice ag 1910. the great dene race. anthropos 5, 113–142, 419–443, 643–653, 969–990. morice ag 1932. the carrier language. anthropos. verlag der internationalen zeitschrift, mödling bei wien, st. gabriel, austria. morice ag 1933. carrier onomatology. american anthropologist 35, 632–658. morice ag 1978. the history of the northern interior of british columbia, 1660–1880. interior stationery, smithers (originally published in 1904). morris p 1999. negotiating the production of space, tl’azt’en territory, 1969–1984. thesis, (ma). university of northern british columbia. morris p and fondahl g 2002. negotiating the production of space in tl’azt’en territory, northern british columbia. the canadian geographer 46, 2, 108–125. müller-wille l 1984. the legacy of native toponyms: towards establishing the inuit place name inventory of the kativik region (quebec). onomastica canadiana 65, 2–19. müller-wille l 2000. nunavut – place names and self-determination: some reflections. in dahl j, hicks j & jull p (eds). nunavut: inuit region control of their lands and their lives, 146–151. international work group for indigenous affairs, copenhagen. nash c 1999. irish placenames: postcolonial locations. transactions of the institute of british geographers 24, 457–480. nuttall m 1992. arctic homeland: kinship, community and development in northwest greenland. university of toronto press, toronto. poser w 1998. nak’albun/dzinghubun whut’en bughuni (stuart/ trembleur lake carrier lexicon). yinka dene language institute, vanderhoof. poser w 2000. carrier transcription correspondence chart. <http://www.ydli.org/dldocs/orchart.pdf>. 11.11.2004. ridington r 1990. little bit know something: stories in a language of anthropology. douglas & mcintyre, vancouver. rosenberg j & nabhan g 1997. where ancient stories guide children home. natural history 10, 54–61. sam l (ed). 2001. nak’azdli t’enne yahilduk (nak’azdli elders speak). theytus books ltd., penticton. sarangapani p 2003. indigenising curriculum: questions posed by baiga vidya. comparative education 39, 199–210. semken s 2005. sense of place and place-based introductory geoscience teaching for american indian and alaska native undergraduates. journal of geoscience education 53, 149–157. sherry e & fondahl g 2004. methods for developing local level criteria and indicators of joint forest management. draft report, university of northern british columbia. silverman d 2000. analyzing talk and text. in denzin n & lincoln y (eds). handbook of qualitative research, 821–834. sage, thousand oaks. smith lt 1999. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed books, new york. smith gh 2000. protecting and respecting indigenous knowledge. in battiste m (ed). reclaiming indigenous voice and vision, 209–224. university of british columbia press, vancouver. snively g & corsiglia j 2000. discovering indigenous science: implications for science education. science education 85, 6–34. steward jc 1940. field notes and other material. carrier national anthropological archives smithsonian institution file 7053. accessed from the tl’azt’en natural resources office collections, tache. thornton, tf 1997. know your place: the organization of tlingit geographic knowledge. ethnology 36, 1–12. tl’azt’en nation 1997. tl’azt’en nation guidelines for research in tl’azt’en territory. < http://cura. unbc.ca>. 14.09.2005. tl’azt’en nation 1995. tl’azt’en culture and language program – statement of philosophy. tl’azt’en free press june 1–9, 3–6. 122 fennia 188: 1 (2010)karen heikkilä and gail fondahl tobias t 2000. chief kerry’s moose: a guidebook to land use and occupancy mapping, research design and data collection. union of british columbia indian chiefs & ecotrust canada, vancouver. urion c 1993. first nations schooling in canada: a review of changing issues. in stewin i, mccann l & stewart j (eds). contemporary educational issues: the canadian mosaic, 97–107. copp clark pitman ltd., mississauga. vanstone j. 1974. athapaskan adaptations: hunters and fisherman in the subarctic forests. ahm publishing, arlington hills. walker s 1974. kinship. in antoine f, bird c, isaac a, prince n, sam s, walker r & wilkinson d (eds). central carrier bilingual dictionary, 379–393. summer institute of linguistics, fort st. james. wonders w 1987. native claims and place names in canada’s western arctic. the canadian journal of native studies 7, 1, 111–120. yamamura b, netser s, and qanatsiaq n 2003. community elders, traditional knowledge and a mathematics curriculum framework. education canada 43, 44–46. york g 1990. the dispossessed: life and death in native canada. little, brown and company ltd., toronto. book review: refuge: transforming a broken refugee system urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66415 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66415 reflections: book review refuge: transforming a broken refugee system elisa pascucci pascucci, elisa (2017). refuge: transforming a broken refugee system. fennia 195: 2, pp. 197–201. issn 1798-5617. can capitalism help refugees? review of the book refuge: transforming a broken refugee system by betts & collier, penguin random house, london, 2017, pp. 266. isbn 9780241289235. elisa pascucci, space and political agency research group (sparg), university of tampere, e-mail: elisa.pascucci@staff.uta.fi less than a year after the beginning of what came to be known as the ‘european refugee crisis’ of 2015, a un officer in lebanon described his work in refugee protection to me as driven by “the idea and the anticipation and the objective that capitalism would benefit refugees at a larger scale than humanitarian delivery can.” the optimistic suggestion that capitalism can help refugees is at the core of alexander betts and paul collier’s book refuge: transforming a broken refugee system (2017). it is by far the most debated book in the field of refugee research and policy published in 2017. other writers have authoritatively taken issues with several aspects of the volume – from its allegedly “ethnocentric” understanding of the dynamics of refugee migration (crawley 2017), to the “prickly” manner in which its critique of humanitarianism and the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) is articulated (hargreaves heap 2017). this review essay will focus on the authors’ claim that an aptly regulated capitalism can help saving a collapsing global humanitarian regime – an increasingly influential paradigm within the “neophile” world of international aid and development (scott-smith 2015). as betts and collier seem to suggest, albeit without fully developing this line of argument, at stake in this global shift is not only the future of refugee governance, but also a possible new legitimacy for global capitalism, one that builds upon and expands traditional notions of “corporate social responsibility”. in other words, refuge intercepts, summarizes, and infuses new confidence into a global trend towards humanitarian innovation through new, globalized “refugee economies”. as this review will discuss, however, claims of novelty hide a far more complex historical reality. the authors of the book are a professor of international affairs and director of the oxford refugee studies centre (betts), and a professor of economics at blavatnik school of government and former director of research at the world bank (collier) – highly influential scholars mostly engaging in policy research. betts in particular has pioneered work on refugee economies, innovation in refugee aid, and extensively consulted for the united nations and national governments. written “for a generalist audience” rather than for an academic one, as the authors explain in the introduction, the book is comprised of two main parts. the first one offers a diagnosis of what is defined as the “global disorder” of the refugee regime. this is described as a crisis of governance that reached its tragic peak with the panic-fueled policies that followed the waves of migration across the mediterranean caused by the arab uprisings and the syrian conflict. the second part of the book is devoted to the authors’ proposal for rethinking this global regime. the first question they address is framed as ethical in nature, and it concerns the ‘duty of rescue’. such ethical imperative, they claim, should be contextualized within a © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 198 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: book review rational acknowledgement of the logic driving states’ decisions, namely comparative advantage and burden-sharing in humanitarian policies. building on this foundation, the central part of the book makes the case for a marriage of humanitarian principles and capitalist economic development. it does so by proposing ways of creating new and more functional ‘havens’ and restoring refugee economic autonomy, as well as new paths to post-conflict reconstruction and recovery and a new, more synergic global governance. most of the proposals outlined rely on the political, legal and operational distinction between refugees and economic migrants. in re-affirming this distinction, the book avoids fully engaging with decades of empirical research that has highlighted the complex, mixed character of contemporary migratory movements within and from conflict zones, as well as the unstable epistemologies upon which migration categories rely (see allen et al. 2017; crawley 2017). as several critics have pointed out, few would disagree with one of refuge’s central claims: that denying refugees the right to work is “a catastrophic error”, as the authors authoritatively claimed in an opinion piece for the guardian (betts & collier 2017a). the point is assertively articulated, emerging from a timely and useful synthesis of the failures of the refugee regime. however, their argument about the need to grant access to labour markets in order to make refugees economically autonomous is not a new one, and is far from uncontested (see crawley 2017). refugee livelihood assistance has preoccupied the international community since the creation of the league of nations in 1919 (eastoncalabria 2015). the link between refugee (and migration) governance, economic development and security has been high on international policy agendas at least since the 1950, when the united nations relief and works agency (unrwa) explicitly sought to facilitate job creation in order to remove palestinian refugees from their relief rolls (talhami 2003, 139). in the last two decades, the social and economic autonomy of refugees has imposed itself as a policy diktat through the language of self-reliance and resilience (easton-calabria 2015; ilcan & rygiel 2015). these last two, however, have proven difficult targets to achieve. the economic autonomy secured by integration in local markets in first countries of asylum is often precarious, unstable and elusive to the point that many prefer the rather basic assistance they receive in camps to the self-reliant destitution they experience after settling in cities (jaji 2012; newhouse 2015). choosing not to engage with the critical literature on these topics, the book focuses instead on two selected case studies, namely syrian refugees in jordan since 2012 and refugee policies promoting economic self-reliance in uganda since the late 1990s. the last one is based on a 3-year research project led by betts at the oxford refugee studies centre. indeed the case study provides interesting examples of refugees’ economic agency resulting in small-scale commercial and entrepreneurial initiatives, from retailers of mobile telephones to young people founding non-governmental organizations (ngos). however, some important questions remain unaddressed. the authors aptly warn against any romanticization of refugee life in uganda, and mention how, in settlements like nakivale, the involvement of refugees in trade and retail businesses has produced inequalities as well. nevertheless, readers are swiftly reassured that the settlement is “at least better than almost every other refugee camp in africa” (betts & collier 2017b, 164). in the context of uganda’s national selfreliance strategy, “young people”, the authors write, “at least have the chance to aspire” (betts & collier 2017b, 164). this statement begs the question of whether, for the majority of refugees in uganda, the examined policies and economic initiatives have produced anything more than widespread, precarious self-employment – what the authors refer to as “cultures of self-help” (betts & collier 2017b, 167). issues like the uneven distribution of land and the consequences of the withdrawal of food rations are listed in a short paragraph, but never actually addressed. the assumption that assistance generates dependency is left unquestioned, and there is no discussion of the studies suggesting that, in several hosting countries across africa, what refugees “tend to see of the drive towards self-reliance is a refusal of unhcr and ngos to provide resources” and an attempt at “saving money on refugee aid” (bakewell 2003, 6). in the case of the syrian refugee crisis in jordan, the authors advance a proposal that promises to address the country’s concerns related to both national security and economic development. central to this move is the transformation of refugees into work force in the context of special economic zones (sezs). sezs are bounded geographical areas where business, trade, and labour are subject to special regulations in order to attract foreign investment. as such, they are spatial technologies that fennia 195: 2 (2017) 199elisa pascucci have historically served to put developing countries’ vast supply of cheap labour to use in the context of export-oriented industrialization. over the last few decades, the idea has been revived and expanded to advanced economies through so-called “hub globalization”, in which significantly relaxed regulation and the facilitated movement of goods and people in specific areas aim to accelerate the transition from industrial to service economies (park 2005). according to the fascinating narrative outlined in the preface to the volume, the authors developed the idea of matching refugees and private companies within sezs while working in jordan in 2015. in particular, they were inspired by the geographical proximity of the za’atari refugee camp and the king hussein bin talal development area (khbtda), a sez that was then operating “below capacity” (betts & collier 2017b, 171). the proposal was promptly taken up by donors and international institutions through the jordan compact, approved during the london conference on syrian refugees of 2016. the international community thus committed to around $2bn in aid and investment for jordan, while the country agreed to issue as many as 200,000 work permits for syrians, and to facilitate investment in at least five sezs. importantly, the european union revised the so-called preferential rules of origin, thereby facilitating the export of products manufactured in jordan, especially in the garment industry. the idea of combining refugee spaces and economic zones, however, is also not entirely new. as betts and collier (2017b, 179) quickly mention, it has been experimented, among other places, in thailand for burmese refugees and in the philippines, where the bataan refugee processing centre, established in 1980, was converted into the bataan technology park in 2014. refuge’s lack of engagement with such historical and empirical precedents should not be overlooked, because it is what allows the authors to express their optimism on the governability of ‘refugeefriendly capitalism’. this optimistic stance is reiterated in the conclusions of the book, where, anticipating potential criticism, betts and collier express their faith in the capacity and willingness of states and corporations to prevent exploitative working conditions for refugees (betts & collier 2017b, 235–236). in this regard, two major points are worth making. first, as noted, attempts to turn refugees into workers, whether within international organizations, public bureaucracies, or large private companies, have happened in the past and continue to happen in the present. their outcomes, however, are often not as clean, orderly, and even progressive as betts and collier’s book seems to assume. unrwa’s early large-scale plans for the employment of displaced palestinians served a primarily political purpose, namely the integration of palestinians into neighboring countries, and stalled in the face of refugee opposition and because “the employment of refugees was five times as costly as maintaining them on relief” (talhami 2003, 139). the success of efforts for the (temporary) economic integration of syrians in jordan, promoted by the jordan compact, has so far been assessed on the basis of the number of work permits issued. as acknowledged by the international labour organization (ilo) in a report published in june 2017, however, what has been measured so far is more likely to be the legalization of previously existing syrian employment, rather than the creation of new job opportunities through economic development (ilo 2017). “work permits”, the report states, “did not bring significant advantages” (ilo 2017, 55). the majority of the syrians involved in the ilo study continued to work with no actual written contract and no social security coverage, and experiences of unpaid overtime were common. even in the presence of improved formal regulations, securing ‘decent work’ for refugees is a much more elusive, complex target than refuge envisages. second, global humanitarianism itself is a material assemblage that generates its own economic relations, as well as relying on and facilitating the production of specific ‘commodities’ – from tents and anti-malnutrition foods to domestic services targeting expatriate aid workers (jennings & bøås 2015; redfield 2013). this material imprint, including the (often precarious) employment the humanitarian sector offers to a growing number of refugees (farah 2010; malkin 2015), has effects that need to be taken into account in any discussion of refugee governance. refuge itself includes examples of this entrenched complexity, which are unfortunately left unexplored. following the new influx of congolese refugees in 2013, the maize-milling business quoted by betts and collier as one of the most successful instances of refugee economic autonomy in uganda ended up having as one of its main clients the local world food program’s relief operations (betts & collier 2017b, 164). these phenomena highlight uneven geographies of development, aid, and refuge, in which policy outcomes are determined not only by donors’ power, humanitarian ethics, and the political and social agency of 200 fennia 195: 2 (2017)reflections: book review refugees, but also by the friction of encounters “that shapes the direction and the form of capitalism as it moves through space” (domosh 2010, 430). refuge provides an agile and readable overview of the intricate crisis of global refugee governance. it is lucid and bold in identifying the “impossible choices with which we present refugees: long-term encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys” (betts & collier 2017b, 9). “for refugees”, betts and collier (2017b, 9) write, “these options are the refugee regime”. the book advances arguments that have been and will be widely discussed, and that will continue to influence and likely inform refugee policies in the near future. rather than offering a new cure, however, its proposals are a symptom of how contemporary refugee governance and humanitarianism are deeply affected by what cowen and smith (2009, 40) famously described as the “filtration of geoeconomic logic into the gamut of social institutions and mentalities”. in the sez model advocated by refuge, the incorporation of refugees into the labour force is temporary and not leading to local integration – the preferred ‘durable solution’ remaining return. rather, the syrian refugee crisis is turned into a development opportunity for hosting states, while at the same time giving “a number of multinational corporations” reasons for investing “that partly connect to corporate social responsibility and party to core business interests” (betts & collier 2017b, 172). in other words, refugees help global capitalism at least as much as global capitalism helps refugees. references allen, w., anderson, b., van hear, n., sumption, m., düvell, f., hough, j., rose, l., humphris, r. & walker, s. (2017) who counts in crisis? the new geopolitics of international migration and refugee governance. geopolitics 1–27. 01.06.2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1327740 bakewell, o. (2003) community services in refugee aid programmes: a critical analysis. new issues in refugee research working paper no. 82. unhcr evaluation and policy analysis unit, geneva. <http://www.unhcr.org/research/working/3e71f15a4/community-services-refugee-aid-programmescritical-analysis-oliver-bakewell.html>. 19.10.2017. betts, a. & collier, p. (2017a) why denying refugees the right to work is a catastrophic error. the guardian 22.03.2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/22/why-denying-refugeesthe-right-to-work-is-a-catastrophic-error>. 09.10.2017. betts, a. & collier, p. (2017b) refuge: transforming a broken refugee system. penguin, london. cowen, d. & smith, n. (2009) after geopolitics? from the geopolitical social to geoeconomics. antipode 41(1) 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00654.x crawley, h. (2017) migration: refugee economics. nature 544 26–27. https://doi.org/10.1038/544026a domosh, m. (2010) the world was never flat: early global encounters and the messiness of empire. progress in human geography 34(4) 419–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509342367 eas ton calabria, e. e. (2015) from bot tom up to top down: the ‘pre -his tor y ’ of refugee livelihoods assis t ance from 1919 to 1979. journal of refugee studies 28 (3) 412– 436. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fev004 farah, r. (2010) unrwa: through the eyes of its refugee employees. refugee survey quarterly 28(2–3) 389–411. hargreaves heap, s. (2017) refuge: transforming a broken refugee system. refugee history. <http://refugeehistory.org/blog/2017/5/19/refuge-transforming-a-broken-refugee-system> 28.09.2017. ilcan, s. & rygiel, k. (2015) “resiliency humanitarianism”: responsibilizing refugees through humanitarian emergency governance in the camp. international political sociology 9 333–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12101 [ilo] international labour organization (2017) work permits and employment of syrian refugees in jordan: towards formalising the work of syrian refugees. ilo regional office for arab states. <ht tp://w w w.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public /-arabstates/-ro-beirut /documents/publication/ wcms_559151.pdf> 09.10.2017. jaji, r. (2012) social technology and refugee encampment in kenya. journal of refugee studies 25 221–238. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fer046 jennings, k . m. & bøås, m. (2015) transac tions and interac tions: ever yday life in the peacekeeping economy. journal of inter vention and statebuilding 9 (3) 281–295. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2015.1070022 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 201elisa pascucci malkin, n. (2015) my brother’s keeper: the double experience of refugee aid-workers. journal of peacebuilding & development 10(3) 46–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/15423166.2015.1085811 newhouse, l. (2015) more than mere survival: violence, humanitarian governance, and practical material politics in a kenyan refugee camp. environment and planning a 47(11) 2292–2307. https://doi.org/10.1068/a140106p park, b. (2005) spatially selective liberalization and graduated sovereignt y: politics of neoliberalism and “special economic zones” in south korea. political geography 24(7) 850–873. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2005.06.002 redfield, p. (2013) bioexpectations: life technologies as humanitarian goods. public culture 24(1) 157–184. scott-smith, t. (2015) humanitarian neophilia: the innovation turn and its implications. third world quarterly 37(12) 2229–2251. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1176856 talhami, g. h. (2003) palestinian refugees: pawns to political actors. nova science publisher, inc., new york. depopulation and shrinkage in a northern context: geographical perspectives, spatial processes and policies depopulation and shrinkage in a northern context: geographical perspectives, spatial processes and policies the idea for this special issue of fennia was developed in parallel with the arrangement of the 9th nordic geographers meeting on multiple geographies, which took place from june 19th–22nd 2022, in joensuu, finland. the keynote speaker for the fennia lecture was josefina syssner, and her presentation was titled what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? highlighting the topic of shrinking geographies at an international geographic conference held in a nordic regional centre surrounded by shrinking places was a natural choice as it directly addresses issues of local concern. while the topic is well suited to the spatial processes and challenges in joensuu and north-karelia, it requires scrutiny beyond the shrinking finnish-russian borderlands. depopulation and broader socio-economic shrinkage have constituted a unifying characteristic of many nordic regions outside the major urban growth centres during the last decades. current demographic and socio-economic trends in the nordic and baltic countries show that growth is and will most likely be limited to a few places, predominantly metropolitan areas and larger urban centres (e.g. heleniak & sanchéz gassen 2019; espon 2020a; mdi 2022). the covid-19 pandemic questioned previsions of continuous urbanisation as rural living trends became increasingly popular and provided hope for, at least, a temporary window of opportunity for shrinking places. however, such trends are subject to volatile processes through an array of depopulation and shrinkage are a common socio-spatial phenomenon in many northern localities and are frequently accompanied by a stigmatization of the affected localities and their populations. this editorial introduces the special issue on depopulation and shrinkage in a northern context that takes its point of departure from the nordic geographers meeting 2022 on multiple geographies and its keynote lecture by josefina syssner on the question: what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? the special issue displays a range of contributions from northern context that discuss and evaluate the heterogenous processes of shrinking localities from multiple perspectives within and beyond geography. through broad, yet empirically detailed and multiscalar focused assessments it stresses that shrinkage as a phenomenon is a fundamental character of nordic and other societies, which requires a rethinking and should be acknowledged as a ‘natural’ development trajectory in planning and development. keywords: shrinking, depopulation, nordic countries, multiple geographies urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa122933 doi: 10.11143/fennia.122933 © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 92 fennia 200(2) (2022)editorial socio-spatial influences and are prone to shift quickly, particularly in locally framed settings (cf. schlömer et al. 2018). for example, when russia invaded ukraine, eastern finland’s proximity to the russian border decreased its attractiveness as a rural residence area, seemingly closing the window of opportunity that had risen during the pandemic (e.g. kolehmainen 2022; uutissuomalainen 2022). hence, while various trends and developments continuously affect the fate and opportunities of shrinking localities and might flatten, even out or reverse the shrinkage of localities, shrinking geographies will remain a constant and potentially challenging reality of societal transformations. consequently, they require academic and societal attention beyond the assessment of trends and numerical analysis. in the northern european context, the consequences of shrinkage and depopulation for localities – such as reduced tax bases, increasing dependency ratios, oversized and costly infrastructure, cuts in public service provision and the effects on local identities – have been studied to great lengths (see syssner 2022). the challenges that derive from these socio-spatial processes provide reasons to address the topic more closely. massey (2005, 131) once described places “as open, as woven together out of ongoing stories […] as unfinished business”. following this idea, locally embedded shrinking geographies must be seen as parts of a relational assembling of space entwined with the power geometries which constitute global and local processes. hence, they are both the result and reproducers of contemporary societal structures and political developments. rodriguez-pose (2020, 8) exemplifies this more concretely by referring to the revenge of “places that don’t matter” based on their emerging role to fuel populist sentiments or voting behaviour in many countries. protests such as convoy finland or bensinupproret in sweden against soaring fuel prices are examples linked to experienced or perceived inequalities between growth-centres and declining, often rural localities. in a similar vein, the success of the sweden democrats – a right-wing populist nationalist party – in the swedish election in september 2022, has also been interpreted as a protest of the periphery against the centres of power (sr 2022). such societal developments directly point to the potential socio-spatial reach of shrinking geographies and the need to geographically unfold these processes. the connections raised above show that shrinking places ‘do matter’. the negative effects attached to depopulation and shrinkage have reinforced the stigmatisation of these localities and justified attempts to remediate shrinkage rather than to rethink the trajectories and potentials of it. political institutions from the european union (eu), national governments and regional bodies are indeed designing and mobilising various strategies to address the issue of declining localities and regions (leetmaa et al. 2015; küpper et al. 2018; espon 2020b). yet, while attempts to plan for demographic adaptation, to work for smart shrinkage, and question conventional growth-rhetoric have sparked alternative development approaches in a variety of places, planning for growth, but managing decline has remained a reality for politicians and planners in nordic peripheries (e.g. schatz 2017). the current framing of places subject to decline and depopulation shapes the aim of this special issue. it combines the question raised by josefina syssners’ keynote, on the potential of geographers to address shrinking geographies, and the wider focus of the conference on the multiplicity of geographical research (albrecht et al. 2022). the collection of papers in this special issue discusses, displays, and unfolds the potentials that multiple geographical perspectives can provide to approach shrinkage as a spatial reality in various (nordic) places/regions. it combines critical perspectives framed in multiple strands of human geography and related fields to assess the spatially complex, societally pressing, and politically sensitive processes of shrinkage. taken together, the individual contributions offer a broad, multidimensional, and sensitive spatial understanding that enables researchers, planners, and policy makers to rethink their approaches to address these processes in the nordic context. for this purpose, the special issue includes original articles from authors in estonia, finland, norway, and sweden, followed by a series of commentaries that extend the geographic reach of perspectives within and beyond the northern european realm. the contributions cover a wide array of geographical thoughts, and their multiple geographies perspectives enable the evaluation of shrinkage through a heterogenous lens. the following section briefly introduces the contributions, provides some framing thoughts, and adds a practical layer on the open processes that guided the development of this collection. fennia 200(2) (2022) 93moritz albrecht & maija halonen & josefina syssner multiple geographies of shrinkage providing the initial impetus for the academic debate in this special issue, the contribution by josefina syssner refines the thoughts presented in her ngm 2022 keynote lecture what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? she provides a review of research drawing on a substantial range of literature on shrinking geographies that assess the spatial configurations of resource patterns of shrinkage. in her contribution syssner suggests that geographical research can assist in clarifying why patterns of shrinkage take the shape they do, what consequences these patterns have locally, and how shrinkage tends to be associated with a certain stigma. syssner also gives an overview of the wide array of policy responses to shrinkage identified in academic literature. she skilfully complements this review with a brief assessment of alternative models in planning and development that incorporate shrinkage in a more constructive manner. while providing a northern perspective, syssner calls for more geographical engagement with the topic. she raises the need to provide thorough, spatially grounded perspectives that overcome the negative stigmatisations of shrinkage and treat it as a developmental process among many, including challenges but also potentials and benefits. the other contributions in this special issue offer diverse attempts to answer this call from a nordic perspective. the collection is loosely framed in three sections: bordering shrinkage, contextualising development and planning in shrinking places and regions, and livelihoods of shrinking geographies. defining shrinkage is a wicked problem, as many of the contributions in this special issue illustrate. the first two papers are directly concerned with the complex processes and shades of ‘bordering’ between shrinking and not shrinking. since the results of these socio-spatial processes are often equated with the demarcation of the border between successful and failing places, these contributions directly raise awareness of the problems of such dualistic stigmatisations. maija halonen’s (2022) paper multiple meanings and boundaries of growth in shrinking regions in east and north finland addresses this aspect from a discourse-oriented perspective of regional policy actors. based on studies in shrinking regions in east and north finland, halonen examines how growth is conceptualised by regional development actors. her work assesses the variegated meanings, criticism, and boundaries that different actors attribute to delineate growth and consequently shape the political discourse of what counts as shrinkage. approaching the issue from the other, shrinking side, teemu makkonen, tommi inkinen and simo rautiainen (2022) contribute a methodological discussion on how varying measurements of shrinkage may in turn affect our understanding of shrinkage in their paper mapping spatio-temporal variations of shrinkage in finland. by utilising indicators such as depopulation, job loss and housing vacancy, different time periods and various spatial scales, they show how the employment of different indicators and spatio-temporal scales results in a widely different assessment as to whether particular regions are identified as shrinking or not. while both papers focus on finland their core messages are clearly applicable in a broader northern european context and even beyond. turning to contributions that contextualise processes of development and planning for shrinking regions and places, the often thin and fluid line between being labelled as shrinking or not also plays a role in the article by linda lundmark, doris carson and marco eimermann (2022), titled spillover, sponge or something else? dismantling expectations for rural development resulting from giga-investments in northern sweden. linked to the common yet paradoxical situation of planning for growth but managing decline, their case study of northern sweden demonstrates how efforts have been made in regional planning for demographic adaptation, smart shrinkage, and right-sizing. however, current green technology giga-investments in northern sweden contribute to a rapid re-shift towards growth trajectories in policy and public debate. in this setting, they discuss the potential of positive spillover effects and development opportunities for rural and sparsely populated municipalities in the north. shifting the debate to local levels of implementation and practice, aksel hagen, ulla higdem and kjell overvåg (2022) study the attempts of 31 municipalities tied to the norwegian planning system in norway’s inland region to meet the challenges faced by shrinking rural localities. the article planning to meet challenges in shrinking rural regions. towards innovative approaches to local planning points out the paradox between awareness of shrinkage while continuing to plan for growth as a 94 fennia 200(2) (2022)editorial dominant pathway in norwegian local planning. the authors explain the structural and institutional dilemmas that reproduce this problematic situation as well as their consequences for planning. another contextualisation is provided by moritz albrecht and jarmo kortelainen (2022) who study revitalisation projects and related processes in six shrinking small town centres in finland. framed by accounts on planning, place-making, and urban shrinkage, their paper contested planning efforts for the revitalization of small town centres in finland employs an assemblage approach that contrasts local planning efforts with the complex spatial processes of place-making. it highlights the relations, challenges and potentials of small town developers to engage with alternative approaches to plan for or with shrinkage. their contribution raises the need for more inclusive and spatially attentive approaches while addressing the limited capacities of small towns to engage in policy experimentation within the current planning framework. the final two contributions provide contextual examples that focus on the effects that shrinking geographies inflict on local livelihoods. dean carson, doris carson, linda lundmark and anna-karin hurtig (2022) employ extensive quantitative and qualitative datasets to analyse resource deserts in sparsely populated areas in southern swedish lapland. their article resource deserts, village hierarchies and de-growth in sparsely populated areas: the case of southern lapland, sweden focuses on the presence of three key resources in 54 small settlements: preschools, grocery stores, and petrol stations. specifically, they explore the effects on local livelihoods in places that have been subject to long-term disinvestment and further address the potential and challenges of local ‘de-growth’ approaches. in the last article everyday materialities, territorial bordering, and place-identity defined by recent administrative reform: reactions from estonian dispersed ruralities, kadri kasemets and raili nugin (2022) assess the effects of the estonian municipal reforms of 2017 on the materialisation of everyday mobilities, governance and related identities in rural villages. it employs an ethnographic approach and 60 in-depth interviews with local activists and inhabitants from ten villages in three sparsely populated areas in estonia. the contribution assesses how the reform, initiated as a response to population decline, has produced shifts in everyday governance and spurred changes in the potentials for participative governance. it also shows how the reform has affected the bordering of local identities that are important for local activism. the original articles of this special issue are supplemented by four shorter texts in the reflections section. the paper by matthias kokorsch (2022), community resilience: a useful concept for declining icelandic communities?, provides a critical assessment of the conceptualisation of resilience in relation to declining icelandic localities. the three scientific commentaries by marlies meijer, sunna kovanen, and marika kettunen and eeva-kaisa prokkola critically discuss the keynote article by josefina syssner (2022). meijer’s (2022) commentary shrinking geographies or challenged rurality’s? three points of reflection – commentary to syssner stresses that peripheral geographies and challenged ruralities deserve a key position within geography and that the topic of shrinkage needs to be repoliticised – both in terms of what we research and what advice we offer to those living in peripheral, rural and depopulating regions. in the second commentary learning from and with shrinking regions for global transformations – commentary to syssner, kovanen (2022) stresses the need to scrutinise how environmental and spatial justice is either neglected or mobilised in shrinking regions. she also highlights the potential of a more explicit integration of the fields of economic geography and innovation, social and solidarity economies, circular economy degrowth and climate transition with experiences of and studies on shrinking. finally, kettunen and prokkola’s (2022) commentary young people as agents in regional shrinkage – commentary to syssner emphasises the importance of acknowledging the impacts of shrinkage on different groups, especially young people. the reflection papers not only provide additional perspectives from those seen in the rest of the special issue, but also increase the geographical reach of this collection. altogether, this collection presents shrinkage as a multidimensional and evolving phenomenon which requires constant adaptation, and various strategies to rescale and rethink what shrinkage means in various geographical contexts. while the concrete subjects of analysis and their approaches to regional development and local planning do not reflect a paradigm shift or transformation away from managing shrinkage, they clearly contradict the idea that shrinking localities are places that do not matter or should be of less concern than their growing, perceived as successful counterparts. fennia 200(2) (2022) 95moritz albrecht & maija halonen & josefina syssner although shrinkage tends to require managing and remediating negative consequences related to the declining characteristics within a community or a region, the socio-spatial capacities and relations of shrinking places and their surrounding society seem more important in enabling or hindering the liveability of the places. most importantly, all contributions point to the fact that shrinkage as a phenomenon is a fundamental character of nordic and other societies, which requires a rethinking and, akin to planning for growth, should be acknowledged as a ‘natural’ development trajectory. making of the special issue to conclude this editorial, we wish to share our experiences on the process of editing this special issue from both a practical and an academic perspective. while the fennia journal is a frontrunner for open review processes in geographical publishing (see previous issues), this has been the first special issue to employ an open review process for all its contributions. shifting the writing and review process from an activity of solitary authors to a more constructive scholarly discussion format resulted in a multistep process. the only part that lacked a fully open approach was the act of collecting contributions. contrary to an open call, we employed a snowballing method initiated by the guest editors with focus on northern academic networks related to shrinking geographies. it is possible that an open call could have enabled a more balanced geographical distribution instead of the slight bias towards finland and sweden. following the initial collection of contributions, an internal open pre-review process was initiated wherein all but one of the manuscripts were read and commented on by the author(s) from two of the other papers (carson et al. was submitted later). the pre-review process culminated in a joint online feedback seminar on march 25th, 2022, where manuscripts were presented and feedback from prereviewers and other authors was given to each contributor. additionally, in most cases written review statements were offered to the authors. this not only provided constructive peer feedback to each manuscript but also allowed a certain alignment of the articles and a more thorough understanding of the whole for everyone involved. following this pre-review round, all manuscripts were revised before being submitted to the official fennia open review process. to find reviewers for the open review process, potential candidates with a key focus on topical expertise were contacted by authors and editors alike (see also kallio & riding 2019). this meant that in some cases the reviewers and the authors were well aware of each other’s work and some had past or even ongoing research collaboration. in our experience the close professional relations between authors and reviewers did not affect the reviews nor create a ‘laissez-faire style’ but, instead, produced fruitful and critical open review discussions, as the example of josefina syssner’s integration of the review comments from marlies meijer and sunna kovanen illustrates. generally, as with blind review processes, it was challenging to attract reviewers able to spare the time required for reviewing. additionally, while the editorial work of managing the complete review process for the special issue was carried out in only 6 months, if taken on actively by the reviewers, the open review process adds an additional time requirement and rounds of engagement for the reviewers compared to the usual blind review process. this is an important aspect that we, as the editorial team, failed to express more clearly at the outset of the process. overall, the open reviews provided critical yet constructive reviews, while the intensity of the open review discussions covered a rather wide spectrum ranging from a business as usual (comments provided, revisions by the author, revisions accepted by the reviewers) to very intensive and detailed discussions on a wide variety of aspects linked to the respective manuscript. in the case of this special issue, the mix of familiarity between reviewers and authors, and the employment of young, enthusiastic scholars as reviewers spurred the most intense, open review discussions where all sides invested time and much thought to jointly improve the respective manuscripts. naturally, assembling such a review process in our self-centred, competitive academic environment might be wishful thinking in most cases. nonetheless, while it is obvious that not everyone can spend the time to comment repeatedly on the details of a given paper, as editors we enjoyed how the reviewers who actively participated in these discussions did engage openly and personally in the open review process. the reviews clearly 96 fennia 200(2) (2022)editorial took on a motivating constructive tone of critical enquiry rather than the frequently encountered aspects of destructive or cold criticism common in many anonymous review processes. despite some challenges, the positive and open atmosphere of the open review process was also confirmed in follow up discussions with some of the reviewers. as editors, we would like to express our gratefulness to the authors for their diverse and valuable contributions, and to all reviewers for their valuable and thought-provoking comments and, of course, the time spent to review the papers. moritz albrecht (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5784-7793) maija halonen (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8265-5606) university of eastern finland josefina syssner (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7607-7029) linköping university references albrecht, m. & kortelainen, j. (2022) contested planning efforts for the revitalization of small town centres in finland. fennia 200(2) 191–209. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119852 albrecht, m., sidorenko, s., nielsen, h., kortelainen, j. & poikolainen, l. (eds.) (2022) multiple nordic geograhies: 9th nordic geographers meeting 19th–22nd of june 2022, joensuu, finland. university of eastern finland, joensuu. carson, d. b., carson, d. a., lundmark. l. & hurtig, a.-k. (2022) resource deserts, village hierarchies and de-growth in sparsely populated areas: the case of southern lapland, sweden. fennia 200(2) 210–227. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120788 espon (2020a) escape: european shrinking rural areas. espon, luxembourg. espon (2020b) shrinking rural regions in europe: towards smart and innovative approaches to regional development challenges in depopulating rural regions. policy brief. espon, luxembourg. hagen, a., higdem, u & overvåg, k. (2022) planning to meet challenges in shrinking rural regions. towards innovative approaches to local planning. fennia 200(2) 175–190. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119752 halonen, m. (2022) multiple meanings and boundaries of growth in shrinking regions in east and north finland. fennia 200(2) 120–136. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119537 heleniak, t. & sanchéz gassen, n. (2020) the demise of the rural nordic region? analysis of regional population trends in the nordic countries, 1990 to 2040. nordic welfare research 5(1) 40–57. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2464-4161-2020-01-05 kallio, k. p. & riding, j. (2019) open policies, open practices – open attitudes? fennia 197(1) 1–7. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80428 kasemets, k. & nugin, r. (2022) everyday materialities, territorial bordering, and place-identity defined by recent administrative reform: reactions from estonian dispersed ruralities. fennia 200(2) 228–244. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116490 kettunen, m. & prokkola, e.-k. (2022) young people as agents in regional shrinkage – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 258–262. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122487 kokorsch, m. (2022) community resilience: a useful concept for declining icelandic communities? fennia 200(2) 245–250. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122522 kolehmainen, j. (2022) blogi: ukrainan sota ja aluekehitys. mdi, helsinki. 7.9.2022. <https://www.mdi.fi/ blogi-ukrainan-sota-ja-aluekehitys/> 23.11.2022. kovanen, s. (2022) learning from and with shrinking regions for global transformations – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 255–257. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122756 küpper, p., kundolf, s., mettenberger, t. & tuitjer, g. (2018) rural regeneration strategies for declining regions: trade-off between novelty and practicability. european planning studies 26(2) 229–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 leetmaa, k., kriszan, a., nuga, m. & burdack, j. (2015) strategies to cope with shrinkage in the lower end of the urban hierarchy in estonia and central germany. european planning studies 23(1) 147– 165. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820100 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5784-7793 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8265-5606 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7607-7029 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119852 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120788 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119752 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119537 https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2464-4161-2020-01-05 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80428 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116490 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122487 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122522 https://www.mdi.fi/blogi-ukrainan-sota-ja-aluekehitys/ https://www.mdi.fi/blogi-ukrainan-sota-ja-aluekehitys/ https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122756 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820100 fennia 200(2) (2022) 97moritz albrecht & maija halonen & josefina syssner lundmark, l., carson, d. & eimermann, m. (2022) spillover, sponge or something else? dismantling expectations for rural development resulting from giga-investments in northern sweden. fennia 200(2) 157–174. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120530 makkonen, t., inkinen, t. & rautiainen, s. (2022) mapping spatio-temporal variations of shrinkage in finland. fennia 200(2) 137–156. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119495 massey, d. (2005) for space. sage, london. mdi (2022) mdi:n väestöennuste 2022. mdi helsinki. meijer, m. (2022) shrinking geographies or challenged rurality’s? three points of reflection – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 251–254. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121861 rodríguez-pose, a. (2020) the rise of populism and the revenge of the places that don’t matter. lse public policy review 1(1) 1–9. http://doi.org/10.31389/lseppr.4 schatz, l. (2017) going for growth and managing decline: the complex mix of planning strategies in broken hill, nsw, australia. town planning review 88(1) 43–57. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.5 schlömer c., regnery d. & vogel f. (eds.) (2018) demografische prognosen: per annahme in die zukunft. heft 1/2018. bbsr, bonn. sr (2022) election results reveal swedish urban-rural divide. 15.9.2022. <https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/ election-results-reveal-swedish-urban-rural-divide> 23.11.2022. syssner, s. (2022) what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? fennia 200(2) 98–119. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 uutissuomalainen (2022) korona-aikana muuttovoittoisten kuntien määrä on kasvanut selvästi, itäsuomen asema huolettaa yhä enemmän ukrainan sodan vuoksi. 7.8.2022 <https://www.itahame.fi/ uutissuomalainen/4772072> 23.11.2022. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120530 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119495 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121861 http://doi.org/10.31389/lseppr.4 https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.5 https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/election-results-reveal-swedish-urban-rural-divide https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/election-results-reveal-swedish-urban-rural-divide https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 https://www.itahame.fi/uutissuomalainen/4772072 https://www.itahame.fi/uutissuomalainen/4772072 from cyberspace to cyberspatialities? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa100343 doi: 10.11143/fennia.100343 reflections from cyberspace to cyberspatialities? daniela ferreira and mário vale ferreira, d. & vale, m. (2021) from cyberspace to cyberspatialities? fennia 199(1) 113–117. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.100343 this paper is a short reflection on the evolution of the meaning of the term cyberspace for geographers. we argue that the concept of cyberspace has become a rhizomatic one as spatial thinkers have unveiled its complex inner and outer networkings. while cyberspace was initially understood as a new open space ripe for exploration, its intricate connections with real space through the technological infrastructures that make cyberspace possible have led geographers to consider the multiple points of access and types of cyberspace. more recently, there has been renewed attention to the inner geographies of cyberspace and its cyberdivides have been exposed. we briefly retrace this evolution to argue that the way forward is to shift from an idea of cyberspace as a predefined space to a notion of cyberspatialities as ongoing spatial digital formations. keywords: cyberspace, virtual space, cyberdivides, cyberspatialities, digital geographies daniela ferreira (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1541-4161) & mário vale (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4548-2459), centre of geographical studies, institute of geography and spatial planning, universidade de lisboa. r. branca edmée marques, 1600-276, lisbon, portugal. e-mail: danielaferreira2@campus.ul.pt, mario.vale@campus.ul.pt cyberspace had a profound impact on the way human societies are organized and contemporary life is inextricable from its effects. the concept of cyberspace itself has a considerably rich history; one which has provoked serious debates in science, philosophy, and the arts. in geography, the concept was initially received with a mix of interest and scepticism. the interest stemmed from its obvious impact on all forms of human living. geographers had been attentive to the development of new technologies of information and communication since the 1960s. for evans (1979), there was an enthusiasm around the capacity of “mighty micro” to revolutionize our way of life and some futurist terms emerged to refer to this revolution, such as toffler’s (1980) “third wave”, drucker’s (1993) fourth revolution, or bell’s (1979) post-industrial society focused on information. during the mid1990s, the democratization of the internet created some discussion around the new society that could be emerging (negroponte 1995). advances in telecommunications created ‘information superhighways’ and, as a consequence, internet technologies were rapidly adopted. some argued that this new order created a placeless connectivity where we could access any place anytime (webster 2006). this led to a transition to new economic activities, which allowed changes in the model of © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 114 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections economic growth. the emergence of innovations and the globalization context, along with the new techno-economic paradigm, created the conditions for the society of information or the information age (hall & preston 1988; preston 2001), which was the subject of wide discussion (castells 2000). some argued that the information society had not been reached yet (martin 1995), while others believed it had already begun in the 1980s (kellerman 2002). despite this, the practical effects of the adoption of the internet as a crucial means of communicating and accessing information were widely acknowledged. castells and hall (1994) considered that technopoles were changing their structure due to the appearance of a new economy in advanced industrial countries, characterized by a new form of production, consumption and management based in new ways of knowledge transmission through information and communication technologies. this new economy changed the spatial patterns of companies through processes of compression and dispersion (graham & marvin 2001). furthermore, infrastructure and digital devices started to be integrated within cities and, during this process, the service sector became the main sector of economy in western world (webster 2006). geographers greatly contributed to the comprehension of the spatial changes induced by the internet. several works on the geographies of information and technologies were published in the first half of the 1990s, such as goddard’s (1992) work on the geography of information and regional and urban development, hepworth’s (1990) work on the geographies of computers and information technologies, kellerman’s (1993) and graham and marvin’s (1995) work on the geographies of telecommunications, or feldman’s (1994) work on the geography of innovation. however, these works argued against the widespread notion that the internet had rendered space meaningless and that all physical barriers had been overcome, as if proximity does not matter anymore (morgan 2004). geographers recognized that some distances had become shorter, especially when physical services became online services, such as the case of mail (harvey 1991; webster 2006; vale 2009). however, it was also argued that the access to information was not equal for all. some authors were concerned with the growing inequalities associated with the access to technologies, which led to the emergence of the concept of digital divide. it was noted that such divide was not merely digital; it was rooted in social, economic, and spatial divides (dodge & kitchin 2002). such concerns remain to this day as the proliferation of smartphones and digital platforms has recently led to a questioning of how and for whom digitally mediated knowledge is produced (graham 2011; kleine 2013). going back to the 1990s, geographers were also wary of the language being used to describe the characteristics of internet, which included a great number of spatial metaphors. it is important to highlight that while these grand concepts were being conceived, geography was undergoing new theoretical developments. postmodernism was the first important moment in poststructuralist geography and the beginning of the new paradigm, a new way of thinking about the world (ferreira & vale 2020). it implied careful consideration of how spaces are socially constructed and imbued with meaning through the placement of symbols and narratives. in this context, the use of spatial metaphors such as information highway, virtual community, electronic frontier, websurfers, libraries, fora, or lobbies to refer to the hyperspace of the internet was contested by geographers (pile 1994; adams 1997). cyberspace was one of such terms, and indeed the question if whether cyberspace is an actual space or a mere metaphor remains to this day (kellerman 2020), although it has been acknowledged that this language fostered a sense of community, place or belonging regarding different virtual media (paiva 2015). for this reason, cyberspace has become a significant topic of research for geographers since then. several geographic studies have approached the concept of cyberspace in studies of the geographies of internet, cyber geography, geography of cyberspace, and virtual geography (batty 1997; kitchin 1998a, 1998b; crang et al. 1999; dodge & kitchin 2002; kellerman 2002). some of these studies were influenced by humanistic concerns and these focused specially in discussions on the cyberspace experience. while humanist geography was focused on the real places and its experience, over the years this perspective has underpinned some studies on sense of place and community in virtual spaces. for instance, kwan (2001, 23) argued that “an individual’s experience of using the internet may engender a sense of “place” or “community””. however, others such as bolter and grusin (1999) viewed cyberspace as a non-place using augé’s (2000) concept. since then, geographers have leaned toward understanding some virtual spaces as places (relph 2007; paiva 2015). 115fennia 199(1) (2021) daniela ferreira & mário vale on the other hand, geographers influenced by poststructuralist thought, actor-network theory, feminism, and non-representational theory have conceived cyberspace as social technical network that stem from the assemblage of places, infrastructures, interfaces, individuals, and so on (graham 1998; kellerman 2016; ash et al. 2018). different definitions of cyberspace have been made under these perspectives. first, there is the definition of artificial reality. some geographers have argued that since cyberspace is based on computers and sustained by a global network, it is therefore a virtual or artificial reality (benedikt 1991; kitchin 1998a). instead, batty (1997) argued that cyberspace is a space of interactivity and it is not exactly an imagined space because it can be real when the users use the computer to communicate. dodge and kitchin (2002) believe that cyberspace is a conceptual space integrated on information and communication technologies (icts), and not only the technology itself. however, some authors such as graham (2013) still contend that cyberspace remains a geographical metaphor. more recently, cyberspace has been considered a segment of image space. for geography, the concept of image space was considered initially as mental images, meaning it referred to the imagined spaces in our minds expressed through maps and illustrations (phillips 1993). but now, there are new ways to create image space and cyberspace is considered the foremost method to do so (ash 2009). according to kellerman (2016), within image space there are three classes ranging from broader concepts to more specific ones. these concepts are (in descending order of coverage): virtual space, cyberspace, and the internet. virtual space concept is the widest term and it includes all others. crang, crang and may (1999) define virtual space as a digital simulation similar to a space where there is a relation among screen and body. virtual space is the result between the combinations of two types of space: abstract and relative space supported by infrastructures (zook et al. 2004). the concept of cyberspace is one of the subsets of virtual space (kellerman 2016). initially, cyberspace was seen as a science-fiction notion and later it was applied to icts. gibson (1984, 51) referred that cyberspace is defined as a “consensual hallucination”, a graphic representation of abstract data. benedikt (1991, 15) and grosz (2001) argue that it is a “parallel universe” and batty (1993, 615) defines cyberspace as a “new kind of space, invisible to our direct senses, a space which might become more important than physical space itself. (…) it is layered on to, within and between the fabric of traditional geographical space.” the last image space is the internet, which is constituted by three subsets of spaces that integrate cyberspace. firstly, there is internet information space which refers to the information which is stored in sets, sites or systems within the internet (fabrikant & buttenfield 2001). secondly, the internet communications space which concerns the cyberspace of individuals. in this kind of space, it is possible to communicate through various ways, such as whatsapp, snapchat, facebook, or twitter. thirdly, there is the internet screen-space that can be defined as the interfaces between the information and communication space and the user, which can be a pc screen, or a smartphone, for instance. these screen-spaces include a great variety of visual forms: texts, graphics, images, or hypertextual media that combine different elements (zook et al. 2004). while the conception of cyberspace itself has become a stable one in the last decade, the growing geographic literature on the topic has unveiled the complex topographies of cyberspace. for instance, graham (2011) draws attention to the series of elements that promote cyberdivides. on one hand, governmental or private entities can render certain parts of the internet inaccessible, such as the case of china or north korea (faris et al. 2008). the actions of the french government to restrict online content on periods of world war ii are also an example of such barriers that generate cyber divisions (drissel 2006). in addition, there is software specifically developed to limit internet access to approved content, especially for children, companies and schools. these examples show that the division within virtual space is more complex than what the binary definition of digital divide based on access and non-access suggests. graham (2011) also points to cultural differences as an influence on interaction and access to content. namely, language can be considered one of the biggest barriers to access to different types of content. it is likewise necessary to take the context and positionality of information on the internet into account. that is, information on the internet can be interpreted differently according to the aesthetic and emotional relationships that readers establish with such information. in addition to content restrictions and cultural barriers, it is also important to note that platform 116 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections capitalism has generated a new layer of cyber divisions by creating instruments that influence online visibility. as online information in digital platforms has become nearly unlimited, it has also become impossible to access all the information and know everything that is available in a virtual environment. in this context, several mechanisms have emerged to give more visibility to certain contents, making many others invisible. there are processes of classification and hierarchization of content, as well as the application of search algorithms that exacerbate this difference between the visible and the invisible in the online environment (zook & graham 2007). thus, cyberspace is by no means an overcoming of actual space or a wide open space free to roam for everybody. instead, it is a complex concept that is interweaved with everyday life and the real world. it contains its own topographies, divides, and place meanings, most of which stem from but also change the real world. in this sense, cyberspace is not a stable space that is already there. it is an ongoing and highly performative process constituted by temporary assemblages of data, people, devices, infrastructure and space. it is the never-ending product of cyberspatialities, that is, the uneven cyber spatial formations of materialities, such as technologies and interfaces, and immaterialities, such as data and representations, that always produce something new. those cyberspatialities, rather than the technological possibility of cyberspace itself, are what has profoundly changed the economy and the society in the last three decades, and so it should be a significant object of our concern for the foreseeable future. acknowledgements this work was supported by the fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia [sfrh/bd/131253/2017]; and the centre of geographical studies [uidb/00295/2020], [uidp/00295/2020]. references adams, p. c. (1997) cyberspace and virtual places. geographical review 87 (2) 155–171. https://doi.org/10.2307/216003 ash, j. (2009) emerging spatialities of the screen: video games and the reconfiguration of spatial awareness. environment and planning a 41(9) 2105–2124. https://doi.org/10.1068/a41250 ash, j., kitchin, r. & leszczynski, a. (2018) digital turn, digital geographies? progress in human geography 42(1) 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516664800 augé, m. (2000) non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. verso, london. batty, m. (1993) the geography of cyberspace. environment and planning b: planning and design 20(6) 615–616. https://doi.org/10.1068/b200615 batty, m. (1997) virtual geography. futures 29(4–5) 337–352. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-3287(97)00018-9 bell, d. (1979) the social framework of the information society. in dertouzous, m. & moses, l. (eds.) the computer age: a twenty-year view, 163–211. mit press: cambridge. benedikt, m. (1991) introduction. in benedikt, m. (ed.) cyberspace: first steps, 1–18. mit press, cambridge. bolter, j. d. & grusin, r. (1999) remediation: understanding new media. mit press, cambridge. castells, m. (2000) the rise of the network society, the information age: economy, society and culture. blackwell publishers, oxford. castells, m. & hall, p. (1994) technopoles of the world: the making of 21st century industrial complexes. routledge, new york. crang, m., crang, p. & may, j. (1999) virtual geographies – bodies, space and relations. routledge, london. dodge, m. & kitchin, r. (2002) mapping cyberspace. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203165270 drissel, d. (2006) internet governance in a multipolar world: challenging american hegemony. cambridge review of international affairs 19(1) 105–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557570500501812 drucker, p. (1993) post-capitalist society. harper collins, new york. evans, c. (1979) the mighty micro: the impact of the computer revolution. gollancz, london. fabrikant, s. i. & buttenfield, b. (2001) formalizing semantic spaces for information access. annals of the association of american geographers 91(2) 263–280. https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00242 faris, r., wang, s. & palfrey, j. (2008) censorship 2.0. innovations 3(2) 165–187. https://doi.org/10.1162/itgg.2008.3.2.165 feldman, m. p. (1994) the geography of innovation. kluwer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3333-5 117fennia 199(1) (2021) daniela ferreira & mário vale ferreira, d. & vale, m. (2020) geography in the big data age: an overview of the historical resonance of current debates. geographical review [online oct 22 2020] https://doi.org/10.1080/00167428.2020.1832424 gibson, w. (1984) neuromancer. harper and collins, london. goddard, j. (1992) new technology and the geography of the uk information economy. in robins, k. (ed.) understanding information business, technology and geography, 178–201. belhaven, london. graham, m. (2011) time machines and virtual portals: the spatialities of the digital divide. progress in development studies 11(3) 211–227. https://doi.org/10.1177/146499341001100303 graham, m. (2013) geography/internet: ethereal alternate dimensions of cyberspace or grounded augmented realities? the geographical journal 179(2) 177–182. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12009 graham, s. (1998) the end of geography or the explosion of place? conceptualizing space, place and information technology. progress in human geography 22(2) 165–185. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913298671334137 graham, s. & marvin, s. (1995) telecommunications and the city: electronic spaces, urban places. routledge, london. graham, s. & marvin, s. (2001) splintering urbanism. networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203452202 grosz, e. (2001) architecture from the outside: essays on virtual and real space. mit press, cambridge. hall, p. & preston, p. (1988) the carrier wave: new information technology and the geography of innovation, 1846–2003. unwin hyman, boston, ma. harvey, d. (1991) the condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. blackwell, oxford. hepworth, m. (1990) geography of the information economy. guilford, new york. https://doi.org/10.3406/netco.1990.1055 kellermann, a. (1993) telecommunications and geography. belhaven, london. kellerman, a. (2002) the internet on earth: a geography of information. wiley, london. kellermann, a. (2016) geographic interpretations of the internet. springer, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33804-0 kellerman, a. (2020) is cyberspace there after all? in warf, b. (ed.) geographies of the internet, 19–33. routledge, abingdon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367817534-3 kleine, d. (2013) technologies of choice? icts, development, and the capabilities approach. mit press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9061.001.0001 kitchin, r. (1998a) cyberspace: the world in the wires. wiley, chichester. kitchin, r. (1998b) towards geographies of cyberspace. progress in human geography 22(3) 385–406. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913298668331585 kwan, p. (2001) cyberspatial cognition and individual access to information: the behavioural foundation of cybergeography. environment and planning b 28(1) 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1068/b2560 martin, w. j. (1995) the global information society. gower pub co, london. morgan, k. (2004) the exaggerated death of geography: learning, proximity and territorial innovation systems. journal of economic geography 4(1) 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/4.1.3 negroponte, n. (1995) being digital. alfred a. knopt, new york. paiva, d. (2015) experiencing virtual places: insights on the geographies of sim racing. journal of cultural geography 32(2) 145–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2014.978128 phillips, r. s. (1993) the language of images in geography. progress in human geography 17(2) 180–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913259301700203 pile, s. (1994) cybergeography: 50 years of environment and planning a. environment and planning a 26 1815–1823. preston, p. (2001) reshaping communications: technology, information and social change. sage, london. relph, e. (2007) spirit of place and sense of place in virtual realities. techné: research in philosophy and technology 10(3) 17–25. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne20071039 toffler, a. (1980) the third wave. william morrow, new york. webster, f. (2006) theories of the information society. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203962824 vale, m. (2009) conhecimento, inovação e território. finisterra – revista portuguesa de geografia xliv(88) 9–22. zook, m. & graham, m. (2007) mapping digiplace: geocoded internet data and the representation of place. environment and planning b: planning and design 34(3) 466–482. https://doi.org/10.1068/b3311 zook, m., dodge, m., aoyama, y. & townsend, a. (2004) new digital geographies: information, communication, and place. in brunn, s., cutter, s. & harrington j. (eds.) geography and technology, 155–176. kluwer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2353-8_7 rural restructuring and gendered micro-dynamics of the agricultural labour market urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa59542 doi: 10.11143/fennia.59542 rural restructuring and gendered micro-dynamics of the agricultural labour market martin hedlund, linda lundmark and olof stjernström hedlund, martin, linda lundmark & olof stjernström (2017). rural restructuring and gendered micro-dynamics of the agricultural labour market. fennia 195: 1, pp. 25–35. issn 1798-5617. based on a comparison of the employment trajectories of two cohorts of men and women in the agricultural sector in sweden, this article gives an account of the past 50 years’ decline in employment in agriculture. the findings show that the decline of employment in agriculture was the result of fewer entries into the sector and more exits out of the sector. the findings also suggest that the restructuring of the agricultural sector has had greater effects on women than men, with women exiting the sector to a greater degree or never entering it to begin with. keywords: agricultural decline, rural restructuring, off-farm employment, lifecourse perspective, sweden martin hedlund, linda lundmark & olof stjernstöm, department of geography and economic history, umeå university, universitetstorget 4, 90187, umeå, sweden. e-mails: martin.hedlund@umu.se, linda.lundmark@umu.se, olof. stjernstrom@umu.se introduction employment in agriculture has declined steadily across the developed world, not least in the nordic countries, during the post-world war ii era. in sweden, rural areas have been experiencing a gradual depopulation for several decades, which to some extent is related to industrial innovations within agriculture and rural industry in the post-war era (flygare & isacson 2003). structural change induced by innovations in production has resulted in more specialized firms (sæther 2010), but has also meant that farm output has grown without creating new jobs (almstedt et al. 2014). in a swedish context, this has not necessarily meant a consolidation of farms into what has been termed super-production and thus a contradiction to multi-functionality; instead, a more small-scale agriculture has become the norm for hyper-production in this context (almstedt et al. 2014). the driving force behind this development can be found in the interplay between technological and organizational innovations and policy decisions (flygare & isacson 2003; sæther 2010), and is also one of the reasons behind the current process of rural restructuring. thus, once the backbone of rural societies, agriculture has now become less important for employment in contemporary rural areas in general (woods 2005; oecd 2006), but also in the case discussed here. a large body of literature has theorized and investigated the reasons behind agricultural decline and its implications for rural regions (ilbery 1998; evans et al. 2002). the literature on recent rural restructuring describes a changing labour market, going from a focus on natural resources to services (shaw & williams 1994; woods 2005; oecd 2006). in public policy, the inclination has been to reshape rural places towards the new economy (woods 2010) by focusing on service instead of primary production. in brief, the new economy, defined by this shift of economic focus, also entails a shift in labour market © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 26 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper dynamics and mobility patterns into labour markets with high levels of mobility within and between sectors and regions (lundmark et al. 2014). previous agricultural restructuring has been attributed to innovation, rationalization and more effective practices within the farm itself, rather than being part of an economic shift that changes the composition of the rural labour market in its foundations. the aim of this study is to investigate how the labour market trajectories for men and women working in the swedish agricultural sector were affected by the structural changes in the agricultural labour market described above. of special interest are changes in labour market dynamics for individuals working in agriculture during this period of intensification and rationalization within the swedish agricultural sector. the transformation of the agricultural sector in developed countries has meant that the number of farmers has decreased, and that the share of the population working in agriculture is smaller (woods 2005). however, previous quantitative studies have mostly focused on how employment in agriculture has changed on the aggregate level, whilst less is known about changes on the individual level (troughton 1986; ilbery & bowler 1998; parson 1999). in order to investigate individual-level changes, this paper applies a life-course perspective on the men and women working in agriculture. by following the work trajectories of individuals rather than the stock of agricultural workers, it is possible to observe exits from and entries into the sector, as well as which sectors individuals exited or entered. compared with the more common cross-sectional method, this approach gives more information on how employment in agriculture declined from the perspective of the individual. furthermore, with the individual rather than the sector as a vantage point, it is possible to capture how agricultural employment is related to the larger labour market. empirically, this task is undertaken by comparing employment trajectories between two cohorts of agricultural workers, the first born in 1938–1940 and the second in 1958–1960. the possibility/incitement for individuals to continue to work in agriculture is dependent on changes within the sector itself, but also on changes within the labour market in general, creating a dynamic network between agriculture and other economic mainstays. an increasingly competitive environment due to new technology and globalizing markets should mean that it has become harder economically to continue to work in the agricultural sector (flygare & isacson 2003). furthermore, several studies show that the conditions for agricultural workers are different for women. for example, in farmer households it is much more common for the women to engage in off-farm employment should it be needed for the household economy (ember 1983; buttel & gillespie 1984; rosenfeld 1985). another important question is therefore whether there is a gender difference in the changes in the agricultural labour dynamics. specific research questions are: 1) to what extent did exits from agriculture differ between the 1940 and 1960 cohorts, and between men and women?; 2) which sectors of employment did those who exited agriculture enter? was there a difference between the cohorts and sexes?; and 3) to what extent did re-entry into agriculture differ between cohorts, between sexes, and between previous sectors of employment? answering the above questions gives a picture of the labour-market dynamics involved in the decline of agricultural employment in sweden. however, there are similarities between sweden and other developed countries when it comes to agricultural change. the mechanization and the rise of productivist agriculture has led to a decrease in agricultural employment all over the developed world (woods 2005). between 1983 and 2003 employment in agriculture decreased by 30% or more in most oecd countries, and in 2003 the share of total employment in agriculture was less than 5% in the majority of oecd countries (oecd 2006). whilst the swedish agricultural sector and the general swedish labour market has its distinct particularities (not least due to the cold climate) there are reasons to believe that this study can shed some light on the dynamics of agricultural decline in other countries as well. structural changes on the rural labour market in sweden the literature on rural restructuring describes a labour market transformation from natural resources to services (shaw & williams 1994; woods 2005; oecd 2006). the structural change in rural areas, like development in urban areas, is strongly related to the development of various economic activities. economic change is not to be viewed as an isolated process, but is rather interlinked with other change fennia 195: 1 (2017) 27martin hedlund, linda lundmark & olof stjernström in society. how they are linked together, and under what circumstances, is not always straightforward to uncover, and understanding the structure and the causality between different parameters and results is complex (hoggart & paniagua 2001). rural restructuring can be theorized and investigated in many ways, but the main part of research focuses on aggregated change. one strand of research focuses on social and economic changes within the agricultural sector (ilbery & bowler 1998; shucksmith & herrmann 2002; woods 2005), and another on social and economic restructuring on a local or regional level (pettersson 2002; hedlund & lundholm 2015), departing from a geographical rather than a sectorial perspective. one main strand of research representing the latter approach focuses on population development in rural areas, including colonization, urbanization, depopulation, ageing populations, et cetera (boyle & halfacree 1998; woods 2010). the problematization of depopulation in rural areas relates to economic restructuring, urbanization and technological development. the specialization and modernization of the agricultural sector started earlier than industrialization, and restructuring processes in the agricultural sector served as a pre-condition for the industrialization process. whilst the agricultural restructuring in the 20th century has continued to impact population density, population composition and urbanization, the extensive nature-based sectors, such as agriculture and forestry, still characterize many rural areas today, and the production capacity measured as production per workhour has increased many times over (almstedt et al. 2014). the literature discussing agricultural change normally identifies, or refers to, the three waves of agricultural revolution: the prehistoric domestication of crops and animals; commercial modes of production; and the ongoing process of agricultural industrialization (troughton 1986; parson 1999). many studies of agricultural change depart from capitalization and the substitution of capital for labour (parson 1999). the globalization of agricultural production and the internationalization of the food market is another central theme (friedmann & mcmichael 1989; alston & pardey 2014). these macro changes have affected the local production conditions, and the agricultural intensification of production has resulted in, among many other things, not only off-farm input such as labour, machinery, technology, et cetera, but also rationalization and the need for off-farm employment. the agricultural sector has developed from traditional family-based farming into production for a wider (global) market since world war ii (parson 1999; lobao & meyer 2001). women’s role in the restructuring process is somewhat hidden, according to lobao and meyer (2001). to some extent, this problem emanates from how historical register data include the women on a family farm. however, it is rather well known that there is a clear gendered division of labour on family farms (rosenfeld 1985; lasley et al. 1995; barlett et al. 1999). the institutionalization of welfare production, for instance in the swedish case, has resulted in off-farm employment for many women in relation to traditional family farming. an important condition in the transformation of the agricultural sector involves property rights and gender. in small-scale farm production, farm properties were mostly owned by men and transferred to men after retirement (dribe & lundh 2005). this might have had an impact on the institutionalization of household work and the growth of the public sector and welfare institutions. this process also contributed to creating a labour market accessible to women lacking previous labour market experience. another dimension of the changes towards service entails that the ‘new’ labour market opens up opportunities for women in rural areas that were not previously available, which is currently regarded as presenting the possibility to retain the female workforce in rural areas (hedlund & lundholm 2015). ‘multifunctionality’, as described by mccarthy (2005: 773–774), is “the idea that rural landscapes typically produce a range of commodity and non-commodity use values simultaneously and that policy ought to recognize and protect that entire range of values”. as a concept, multifunctionality “… encapsulates the diversity, non-linearity and spatial heterogeneity” in rural society (wilson 2001: 96). however, the novelty of multifunctional rural areas can be questioned as being ahistorical, since it seems to forget a long history of highly diverse activities in rural areas before the productivist era (müller 2010; vepsäläinen & pitkänen 2010). wilson (2001) sets out multifunctionality as trajectories along which individual farm businesses move, ranging between the productive and the non-productive. multifunctionality, whilst having relevance at the individual farm-unit level, has far greater potential at the regional and national levels. 28 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper for economic sectors in decline or in the process of rationalization, national and supra-national policies could have great influence through, for instance, subsidies and other public or state financial support. in their study of kansas farmers, mishra and goodwin (1997) show that policy changes have an effect on off-farm employment. an alternative meaning of the importance of women in off-farm employment is shown by kelly and shortall (2002). in their study of irish family farms, they show that women with off-farm employment could serve as farm-supportive breadwinners in times of transformation or economic hardship. family farms looking for alternative or complimentary incomes could apply different strategies, of which off-farm employment is one and external subsidies or investments might be another. off-farm employment and investments are linked to the individual farm, whereas external subsidies make the farm dependent on the development of agricultural policies. in recent years, public policy has become increasingly oriented towards supporting other economic activity than agriculture in rural areas (almstedt et al. 2015). previous research has shown that men and women have held different roles on the family farm, with men often having the most influence over the business. due to rationalization, it was therefore often the women who left agriculture for other job opportunities. based on such research, it is reasonable to believe that the agricultural restructuring has had different implications for men and women. method and data the data used in this study consist of a combination of census and register data on the entire swedish population between 1960 and 2010 at five-year intervals. the census data cover the period 1960– 1990, and the register data 1990–2010. among other variables, the data sources contain information on employment, year of birth, gender, income and parish of residence, which were the variables used in this study. the data was extracted from the astrid-database which is located at the department of geography and economic history at umeå university. the data in astrid stems from a combination of census data (1960–1990) and annual registers (1985–2010) at statistics sweden. in sweden, researchers may be granted access to longitudinal, but anonymized, census and register data as long as certain conditions are fulfilled. for the purpose of this study, the data were prepared in two steps. in the first step, two cohort groups of agricultural workers were selected: the first born between 1938 and 1940, and the second born between 1958 and 1960. in order to qualify into one of the groups, the individuals in the specified cohorts also had to have worked in agriculture when they were 20 and 25 years old, respectively. this resulted in a cohort group born in 1938–19401 of 3,893 agricultural workers (3140 men and 753 women), and a cohort group born in 1958–19602 of 2,184 agricultural workers (1824 men and 360 women). in the second step, a status variable was created showing which sector the individual worked in, or that the individual was not working. the sector in which the individual worked was based on a four-digit sectorial code aggregated into five broader sectors: agriculture, other natural resource, manufacturing, service, and public. when the groups had been selected and the status variable defined, the work-life trajectories of the cohort groups were analysed by gender. the employment status of the agricultural workers was measured each five years, starting at age 30–32 and ending at age 50–52 (at ages 20–22 and 25–27, all selected individuals worked in agriculture). the data analysis consisted of comparing the relative changes of the work-life trajectories between the cohorts and between genders. this analysis was conducted with the help of descriptive graphs and tables from the sequence analysis r-package traminer (gabadinho et al. 2011). the empirical part of this study contains one significant limitation related to the data sources. the data only contain one employment code per individual and year, even though some individuals held more than one job; only the job from which the individual received the highest salary during the year is listed. this means that the study is unable to capture off-farm work, which is a fairly common practice amongst farmers, especially women. thus, part-time work off the farm is displayed as an exit from agriculture in cases in which the income from the off-farm work is larger than that from agriculture. in the cases in which the income from agriculture is larger than that from the off-farm work, the data holds no information on any off-farm work. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 29martin hedlund, linda lundmark & olof stjernström micro-dynamics of employment in the swedish agricultural sector in order to investigate the changes in employment trajectories of agricultural workers in sweden, the analysis begins with the data for the men’s cohorts and then moves over to the women’s cohorts (table 1, 2; fig. 1). as a second step, the intra¬-individual change in income from switching to another sector was compared between the cohorts in order to investigate the extent to which it was more difficult to remain in agriculture in the 1960 cohort (table 1, 2). table 1 shows the average rate of transition between the sectors for each cohort. the rows show average transition rate from sector and the columns show average transition rate into sector five years later. for example, the figure 24% in the second row of the first column means that 24% on average of the male cohort 1940 who worked in natural resource sectors worked in agriculture five years later. table 2 shows the share of the cohorts who worked in each sector (or were not working) between age 30 and age 50. age 20 and 25 is omitted from the table since all individuals, by selection, worked in agriculture at those ages. figure 1 is a sequence index plot of all the cohorts. the individuals in each cohort are distributed along the y-axis, where the whole y-axis comprises 100% of the individuals in the cohort, and the x-axis is a temporal axis. each pixel-row in the figure thus shows the employment trajectory of one or several individuals measured with a five-year interval, starting at age 20 and ending at age 50, for each cohort. the individuals in the figure have been sorted based on a clustering-technique included in the traminer-package. men in agriculture at age 30 in the men’s 1940 cohort, 27% of men had exited agriculture, with most of them going into services (10%) and manufacturing (8%). a slightly smaller share of them (6%) started working in other natural resource sectors such as forestry, gardening and mining, and only a tiny share of a nr m p s nw sector/cohort 1940 1960 1940 1960 1940 1960 1940 1960 1940 1960 1940 1960 m en a 86 83 3 3 4 3 1 1 4 6 2 4 nr 24 23 50 56 9 5 2 1 11 10 3 5 m 7 7 3 3 76 72 1 1 10 13 3 4 p 8 10 5 3 5 1 70 71 10 11 2 5 s 10 8 4 3 8 4 2 2 74 77 3 5 nw 16 33 5 6 9 5 2 4 9 11 59 41 w om en a 74 83 1 3 1 3 4 1 3 6 16 4 nr 20 23 41 56 0 5 17 1 7 10 15 5 m 1 7 1 3 75 72 8 1 8 18 7 4 p 5 10 0 3 3 1 79 71 5 5 8 5 s 9 8 1 3 4 4 12 2 65 69 9 5 nw 31 33 2 6 4 5 13 4 8 10 42 41 table 1. average transition rates between sectors by cohort and sex in percentage (a = agriculture, nr = natural resources, m = manufacturing, s = services, p = public, nw = not working). 30 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper the men started working in the public sector (1%) or became unemployed (2%). as the individuals grew older employment in agriculture continued to decrease: by age 40, 63% of the men worked in agriculture, and by age 50 employment in agriculture had decreased to 53% of the cohort. it was mainly employment in manufacturing and services that increased, whilst the public sector only increased slightly and other natural resource sectors stagnated. the share who did not work also increased slightly, to 3% of the men at age 40 and 7% at age 50. table 1 shows the average share of individuals who remained in or switched from one sector into another for every five years between ages 30 and 50. in the men’s 1940 cohort, 86% of those who worked in agriculture still did so five years later, whilst 12% of them had switched to another sector and 2% were not working. once in another sector, approximately 75% of the men’s 1940 cohort were still in that sector five years later, with the exception of other natural resource sectors, where only half remained five years later. other natural resource sectors were less stable than the others, with 24% of the men having returned to agriculture five years later; this reflects the fact that this sector is more closely related to agriculture than the others are. the top left diagram in figure 1 summarizes the information above. it shows that approximately a third of the men switched to another sector before age 40 and remained in this new sector. of the men’s 1940 cohort, 44% remained in agriculture during the whole period, and another 20% worked in agriculture for most of the studied period but had also periods during which they did not work, or worked in other sectors. for the men’s 1960 cohort there were many similarities, but also some interesting differences. the greatest difference was naturally that the number of individuals in the cohort was much smaller: 1,824 men in the 1960 cohort compared to 3,140 men in the 1940 one (a decrease of 42%). in other words, there was a great decrease in youths entering agriculture between 1940 and 1960. there were also interesting differences in the trajectories of the individuals in the 1960 cohort. first and most important is that the share working in agriculture after age 25 was smaller. at age 30, the difference was only 1%, but already at age 35 it had increased to 5%, and at age 45 it was 10%. at age 50, the difference decreased again to 5%, as a large portion of the 1940 cohort exited agriculture between ages 45 and 50. this means that a larger proportion of the men exited agriculture faster in the 1960 cohort. the men who left agriculture in the 1960 cohort mainly entered the service sector, whilst the share entering a n r m s p n w co ho rt /a ge 30 35 40 45 50 30 35 40 45 50 30 35 40 45 50 30 35 40 45 50 30 35 40 45 50 30 35 40 45 50 men 19 40 73 67 63 63 53 6 6 7 5 6 8 11 12 12 14 10 11 13 13 17 1 2 2 3 4 2 3 3 4 7 19 60 72 62 58 52 48 5 6 6 7 8 6 8 9 9 9 12 15 17 20 23 2 3 3 4 4 4 8 7 8 8 women 19 40 48 46 53 41 39 1 1 3 2 1 3 4 5 6 7 4 9 11 12 13 4 10 15 22 26 40 30 12 17 14 19 60 57 43 38 30 24 7 6 6 4 6 5 3 5 6 6 12 14 16 18 18 13 19 23 30 32 6 14 12 12 14 ta b le 2 . sh ar e o f th e in d iv id u al s in d iff er en t se ct o rs o f em p lo ym en t b y ag e, c o h o rt a n d s ex i n p er ce n ta ge ( a = a gr ic u lt u re , n r = n at u ra l re so u rc es , m = m an u fa ct u ri n g, s = s er vi ce s, p = p u b lic , n w = n o t w o rk in g) . fennia 195: 1 (2017) 31martin hedlund, linda lundmark & olof stjernström manufacturing was smaller compared with the 1940 cohort. this is most likely a reflection of the general shift from manufacturing to services after 1990. another difference to the 1940 cohort was that a larger share in the 1960 cohort was not working. however, this increase was not primarily due to a larger group of individuals who were unemployed for longer periods; it was mainly an effect of increased turbulence in the 1960 cohort. thus, the share who entered unemployment five years after a working period was approximately 2% higher in the 1960 cohort compared with the 1940 cohort, but the share not working who remained in unemployment five years later was 18% lower in the 1960 cohort (table 2). fig. 1. sequence index plot of the employment trajectories divided by cohort and sex. 32 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper the diagrams on the individual trajectories for the men’s cohorts (fig. 1), shows that there is a slightly larger group in the 1960 cohort who exited agriculture relatively early and never returned (for work in another sector or no work at all). there was also a much smaller group who stayed in agriculture for the whole period (45% in the 1940 cohort and 34% in the 1960 cohort). on the other hand, the group who stayed in agriculture but also had shorter periods of no work, or of work in other sectors, was much larger in the 1960 cohort (23% in the 1940 cohort and 31% in the 1960 cohort). one interpretation of the larger exits and the higher turbulence in the men’s 1960 cohort is that it was harder for this cohort to continue working in agriculture compared with the 1940 cohort, most likely due to increased competition, rationalization, and a lack of profitability in the agricultural sector. whilst this interpretation fits the rural restructuring framework argued for above, it must still be investigated in more detail before more definite conclusions can be drawn. women in agriculture compared with the men’s cohorts, fewer women continued to work in agriculture. in the women’s 1940 cohort, only 16% of the women worked in agriculture for the whole period whilst 44% in the men’s 1940 cohort stayed in agriculture with no interruptions. however, another 16% of the women stayed in agriculture but were registered as ‘not working’ at age 30 and/or 35. during the 1970s (when the 1940 cohort was 30 years old) it was still common for women in a household to exit paid employment in order to raise children, which is the most likely explanation for the large share of women ‘not working’ at ages 30 and 35. it is therefore more reasonable to say that 32% of the women stayed in agriculture for the whole period, rather than 16%. another 20% of the women’s 1940 cohort continued to work in agriculture but exited for another sector after age 40 (10%), or revealed a more turbulent pattern in which they had periods of working in other sectors or not working at all, only to return to agriculture (10%). this did not differ from the men’s 1940 cohort. the women’s 1940 cohort was not working to a greater extent than the men’s cohort. a figure of 40% of the women at age 30, and 30% at age 35, was registered as ‘not working’ whilst the same figure for men was 3% at both ages. after age 35 many women returned to employment and at age 40 only 12% of the women were not working. as mentioned above, the high share of women not working at ages 30 and 35 in the 1940 cohort can be ascribed to a social structure whereby women for a period exited employment to raise children, rather than ‘unemployment’. but even when this is accounted for, there was still a larger share of women who exited paid employment, and 15% of the women were more or less without paid employment after age 30, compared with 3% of the men. of the women, 38% exited agriculture early for long-term work in another sector. most of them (20%) went into the public sector, 10% of the women went into the service sector, 6% of them went into the manufacturing sector, and only a small fraction of them (2%) worked in other natural resource sectors for a longer period. compared with the men’s 1940 cohort the women exited to other sectors to a greater extent, and were much more likely to enter the public sector than men were. in the women’s 1960 cohort, quite extensive changes had taken place. the largest change was of course that the share of women not working at ages 30 and 35 was substantially lower in the 1960 cohort compared with the 1940 one. however, in the context of agricultural employment this is not of primary importance, since it is rather part of a general change in women’s working life. furthermore, whilst the share not working at ages 30 and 35 had decreased substantially, the group who was not working for most of the period was only marginally smaller in the 1960 cohort. more important is that the share who stayed in agriculture was substantially lower in the 1960 cohort, with only 16% of the women staying in agriculture for the whole period, whilst in the women’s 1940 cohort 32% of the women stayed for the whole period (including those who did not work at age 30 and/or 35). similar to the women’s 1940 cohort, there was also a group of 20% who continued in agriculture but with a more turbulent pattern. some worked mostly in agriculture but had periods without paid employment, others entered another job early but returned to agriculture later, and the largest group switched to another job at a later stage, primarily in the public sector. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 33martin hedlund, linda lundmark & olof stjernström the group who exited agriculture early for long-term work in another sector was much larger in the 1960 cohort, at 55% compared with 38% in the 1940 cohort. this increase was primarily accounted for by a growth of 8% in the public sector, whilst the service sector and other natural resource sectors grew by 5% each and the manufacturing sector remained on the same level (around 5% of the women). concluding discussion comparing the labour market trajectories and income between two cohorts of agricultural workers, this study presents a detailed account of the changing conditions for men and women working in the agricultural sector. the result of the study show that fewer entered agriculture in the 1960 cohort compared with the 1940 one (42% fewer men and 52% fewer women). furthermore, the individuals in the 1960 cohort exited agriculture to a greater extent and had more turbulent employment trajectories in terms of changing occupation and/or employment sector. taken together, the employment trajectories indicate that it has become harder to work in agriculture, a reasonable result considering the demands for rationalization following the introduction of new technology and intensified global and regional competition. whilst the changes went in the same direction for both sexes, they were more prominent for women, which means that changes in the swedish agricultural labour market have had a greater effect for the women in the sector. this finding is in line with previous studies from other developed countries showing that women in farm households participate to a greater extent in off-farm employment when faced with declining incomes and economic hardship (buttel & gillespie 1984; kelly & shortall 2002). however, it was the general development and structure of the swedish labour market that determined where those who exited agriculture ended up. men who exited agriculture went mainly into manufacturing and the service sector, whilst women mainly went into the public sector and the service sector, a pattern that reflects the general gender segregation of the job market. furthermore, the number entering the service sector was substantially larger in the 1960 cohort whilst the number entering manufacturing was slightly smaller compared with the 1940 cohort. this is also a reflection of the general development in the swedish labour market during this period, with a growing service sector and a stagnant manufacturing sector (hedlund & lundholm 2015). therefore, for understanding the dynamics of agricultural restructuring, it is necessary to take into account not only factors within the agricultural sector but also the available opportunities in other sectors. this is also in line with the institutionalization of traditional household work in sweden such as childcare, elderly care, cleaning, washing, et cetera. the emerging public service sector offered paid work to many individuals lacking a formal education. the service sector can be seen as a way out from an agricultural sector that over time came to be less profitable. what is harder to explain is why the female labour market seems to have been more affected by the structural change of the swedish agricultural labour market development during the time analysed. how agricultural properties are inherited might offer an interesting line of analysis. if the property in general terms is more often owned solely by the man, this might put the woman in a much more vulnerable position. in the swedish case, the emerging public sector offered a possibility for women to support themselves. in a more general sense, the results offer a description of the labour market aspects of the decline and transformation of the agricultural sector on the individual level. the largest part of this decline was due to fewer entries into the sector, but the exit of farmers and agricultural workers from the sector made a significant contribution as well. based on these results a future strand of inquiry could be to more closely examine the interplay between the ‘push and pull factors’ involved in the decline of agriculture; whether agriculture declined due to economic hardship in the sector or due to better opportunities in other sectors. notes 1 subsequently referred to as ‘the 1940 cohort’. 2 subsequently referred to as ‘the 1960 cohort’. 34 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers of fennia for useful comments on the article, and the swedish research council formas for funding the research. references almstedt, å., brouder, p., karlsson, s. & lundmark, l. (2014) beyond post-productivism: from rural policy discourse to rural diversity. european countryside 6(4) 297–306. https://doi. org/10.2478/euco-2014-0016 almstedt, å., lundmark, l. & pettersson, ö. (2015) public spending on rural tourism in sweden. fennia 194(1) 18–31. https://doi.org/10.11143/46265 alston, j.m. & pardey, p.g. (2014) agriculture in the global economy. the journal of economic perspectives 28(1) 121–146. http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jep.28.1.121 barlett, p.f., lobao, l. & meyer, k. (1999) diversity in attitudes toward farming and patterns of work among farm women: a regional comparison. agriculture and human values 16(4) 343– 354. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007658532422 boyle, p.j. & halfacree, k. (1998) migration into rural areas: theories and issues. wiley, chichester. buttel, f.h. & gillespie, g.w. (1984) the sexual division of farm household labor: an exploratory study of the structure of on-farm and off-farm labor allocation among farm men and women. rural sociology 49(2) 183. dribe, m. & lundh, c. (2005) retirement as a strategy for land transmission: a micro-study of preindustrial rural sweden. continuity and change 20(2) 165–191. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0268416005005497 ember, c.r. (1983) the relative decline in women's contribution to agriculture with intensification. american anthropologist 85(2) 285–304. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1983.85.2.02a00020 evans, n., morris, c. & winter, m. (2002) conceptualizing agriculture: a critique of postproductivism as the new orthodoxy. progress in human geography 26(3) 313–332. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132502ph372ra flygare, i.a. & isacson, m. (2003) jordbruket i välfärdssamhället: 1945–2000. natur & kultur, stockholm. friedmann, h. & mcmichael, p. (1989) agriculture and the state system: the rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. sociologia ruralis 29(2) 93–117. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.1989.tb00360.x gabadinho, a., ritschard, g., mueller, n.s. & studer, m. (2011) analyzing and visualizing state sequences in r with traminer. journal of statistical software 40(4) 1–37. https://doi. org/10.18637/jss.v040.i04 hedlund, m. & lundholm, e. (2015) restructuring of rural sweden employment transition and out-migration of three cohorts born 1945–1980. journal of rural studies 42 123–132. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.10.006 hoggart, k. & paniagua, a. (2001) what rural restructuring? journal of rural studies 17(1) 41–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0743-0167(00)00036-x ilbery, b. (1998) the geography of rural change. longman, harlow. ilbery, b. & bowler, i. (1998) from agricultural productivism to post-productivism. in ilbery, b. (ed.) the geography of rural change, 57–84. longman, harlow. kelly, r. & shortall, s. (2002) ‘farmers' wives’: women who are off-farm breadwinners and the implications for on-farm gender relations. journal of sociology 38(4) 327–343. https://doi. org/10.1177/144078302128756714 lasley, p., leistritz, f.l., lobao, l.m. & meyer, k. (1995) beyond the amber waves of grain: an examination of social and economic restructuring in the heartland. westview press, boulder. lobao, l. & meyer, k. (2001) the great agricultural transition: crisis, change, and social consequences of twentieth century us farming. annual review of sociology 27(1) 103–124. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.103 lundmark, l., ednarsson, m. & karlsson, s. (2014) international migration, self-employment and restructuring through tourism in sparsely populated areas. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 14(4) 422–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2014.967995 mccarthy, j. (2005) rural geography: multifunctional rural geographies-reactionary or radical? progress in human geography 29(6) 773. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph584pr fennia 195: 1 (2017) 35martin hedlund, linda lundmark & olof stjernström mishra, a.k. & goodwin, b.k. (1997) farm income variability and the supply of off-farm labor. american journal of agricultural economics 79(3) 880–887. https://doi.org/10.2307/1244429 müller, d.k. (2010) second homes in sweden: between common heritage and exclusive commodity. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 7(3) 193–201. https://doi. org/10.1080/15022250701300272 oecd (2006) the new rural paradigm: policies and governance. oecd, paris. parson, h.e. (1999) regional trends of agricultural restructuring in canada. canadian journal of regional science 22(3) 343–356. pettersson, ö. (2002) socio-economic dynamics in sparse regional structures. umeå university, umeå. rosenfeld, r.a. (1985) farm women: work farm and family in the united states. the university of north carolina press, chapel hill. sæther, b. (2010) agricultural extension services and rural innovation in inner scandinavia. norsk geografisk tidsskrift–norwegian journal of geography 64(1) 1–8. https://doi. org/10.1080/00291950903557647 shaw, g. & williams, a.m. (1994) critical issues in tourism: a geographical perspective. blackwell publishers, london. shucksmith, m. & herrmann, v. (2002) future changes in british agriculture: projecting divergent farm household behaviour. journal of agricultural economics 53(1), 37–50. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1477-9552.2002.tb00004.x troughton, m.j. (1986) farming systems in the modern world. in pacione, m. (ed.) progress in agricultural geography, 93–123. croom helm, london. vepsäläinen, m. & pitkänen, k. (2010) second home countryside. representations of the rural in finnish popular discourses. journal of rural studies 26(2) 194–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jrurstud.2009.07.002 wilson, g.a. (2001) from productivism to post-productivism ... and back again? exploring the (un)changed natural and mental landscapes of european agriculture. transactions of the institute of british geographers 26(1) 77–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00007 woods, m. (2005) rural geography: processes, responses, and experiences in rural restructuring. sage publications, london. woods, m. (2010) rural. routledge, new york. changing thoughts, changing future – commentary to huttunen and albrecht urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa109348 doi: 10.11143/fennia.109348 reflections changing thoughts, changing future – commentary to huttunen and albrecht lena von zabern and christopher d. tulloch von zabern, l. & tulloch, c. d. (2021) changing thoughts, changing future – commentary to huttunen and albrecht. fennia 199(1) 147–151. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109348 in response to huttunen and albrecht’s article in this issue of fennia we want to focus our commentary on the two key-findings regarding the media representation of environmental citizenship in the finnish fridays for future (fff) movement: individualised lifestyle choices and a dominant adult voice. this commentary dovetails into the authors’ critical reflection on the insufficiency of individual action alone in addressing environmental issues and the potential risks of a dominant adult voice for youth agency. by doing so, we will also touch on broader ideas of change within the fff and climate change framing and aspects of (intergenerational) climate justice. keywords: fridays for future, greta thunberg, environmental citizenship, climate change media framing, intergenerational justice lena von zabern (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0314-6622), independent researcher. former ma student in international studies on media, power and difference, universitat pompeu fabra, barcelona, spain. e-mail: lenavzabern@gmail.com christopher d. tulloch (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5476-0887), department of communication, universitat pompeu fabra, barcelona, spain. e-mail: christopher.tulloch@upf.edu when you enter the gardens of peggy guggenheim’s palazzo venier dei leoni at the canale grande in venice you are greeted by eight words in yellow neon lights that span the wall of the guggenheim art collection: “changing place, changing time, changing thoughts, changing future” (peggy guggenheim collection 2021). located in the heart of a sinking city (levermann 2019), the installation from italian contemporary artist maurizio nannucci may now be interpreted as both: a warning sign for the urgent need for climate action and the reassurance that change is not only possible but now inevitable (cannon 2019). in march 2019 it was this rather hopeful idea of the possibility of change towards a more sustainable global environmental system with which we ended our study about the media framing of the fridays for future (fff) protests in germany. despite having identified that german media coverage tended to reproduce existing power structures by marginalizing and depoliticizing the political agenda of a system critical protest (von zabern & tulloch 2021), we watched with interest as to whether further studies would be able to show that the idea of intergenerational climate justice and the protesters’ demands for system change would ultimately get a hold in the media agenda (e.g. goldenbaum & thompson 2020; hayes 2021). within their comparative framing analysis of the fff movement in finnish news and social media in spring and fall 2019, huttunen and albrecht (2021) not only added the most relevant component of environmental citizenship but also identified a shift in framing. © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. reflections fennia 199(1) (2021)148 this shift became particularly evident in the school attendance frame – a frame that had also dominated early german media coverage (von zabern & tulloch 2021). throughout the beginning of coverage in late 2018/spring 2019 this framing reduced the issues fff sought to address to debates about compulsory education. the fall 2019 results from huttunen and albrecht (2021, 55) on the dying discussions about the legitimacy and justification of fffs collective environmental action indicate how much the “societal context where the movement operates” changed. this shift is especially interesting as it proves that young people were eventually able to bring “climate change to the forefront of political discussion, transforming the focus in discussions to actual solutions.” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 55). individualized lifestyle choice and climate justice the question that we would like to pick up on here is whether the majority of these solutions represented in the fff media coverage sufficiently addresses the climate crisis and structural responsibility. the strong media focus on the individual lifestyle aspect of environmental citizenship which huttunen and albrecht identify as a prominent frame is rightly questioned in its benefits for the fff movement. individualized sustainable lifestyle choices as a solution to tackle global warming are without doubt important and highly necessary but alone they risk shifting responsibility onto the individual rather than addressing powerful polluters which bear the historical and intergenerational responsibility for the root causes of the crisis. (santarius 2007; schindel dimick 2015; young friends of the earth 2015). a similar dynamic can be seen in media studies on climate change discourse and climate refugees where a focus on (individual) climate change adaptation has in the past depoliticized the climate crisis and “made those affected by it responsible for their own survival” (methmann 2014, 416; hoeg 2017). from an environmental citizenship perspective, huttunen and albrecht (2021) show that individual action alone is not enough to address environmental issues (dobson & bell 2006). this is also relevant in regard to inclusiveness and the justice component of such action. global justice perspectives indicate that sustainable lifestyle choices are also a question of access and privilege: while quoquab and sukari’s (2017) study from malaysia hints at the lack of awareness building programs, walker’s (2020, 1) article shows that in case of “environmentally vulnerable participants” short-term burdens overpowered long-term environmental concern. the risk of depoliticization and lack of climate mitigation action that comes along with the prominence of such framing is also reiterated by greta thunberg at the margin of the world economic forum in davos 2019: “some people say we all caused the climate crisis together. but that is just a convenient lie. because if everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty […]” (betancur 2019). who gets to speak? one of the most interesting findings in view of the above is the simultaneous lack of “political demands for systemic change” in the framing of the finnish fff movement (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 55). similar to the german fff coverage in 2019, the finnish coverage focuses strongly on official sources – in this case ‘adult voices’. although these voices have been largely in favour of the protest and may be interpreted as adult participation needed in solving the climate crisis (hayward 2021; huttunen & albrecht 2021), they may undermine the protester’s self-agency as legitimate actors of change (kettrey 2018, von zabern & tulloch 2021). this is especially visible in the framing of finnish protesters as apprentices in political-decision making. rather than representing strikes “as political acts in themselves” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 56) the perceived illegitimacy of the protester is used to undermine their political demands and seems to marginalize their agenda. against this backdrop it would be all the more important that the media, as influential shapers of public and political opinion (merkley & stecula 2019) would include the voices of those most affected by global warming to avoid contributing to the “age-old political problem where marginalized citizens and those living in distant places and times are materially and existentially threatened by the decisions and actions of other individuals, companies, or states” (o’brien et al. 2018, 22). this should also extend to children of lowerincome countries which are bearing the double brunt of local and intergenerational climate injustice. 149lena von zabern & christopher d. tullochfennia 199(1) (2021) a more intersectional perspective in future studies on these particular vulnerabilities and -isms would thus be fruitful (krieger 2020; mocatta & howley 2020). at the same time, as huttunen and albrecht already mentioned, scholars could contribute here by including social media channels used primarily by younger age groups in their analysis (vom orde & durner 2020; díaz-pérez et al. 2021; tankovska 2021). changing future this brief reflection on the key-findings from huttunen and albrecht (2021) shows that while there have been shifts in discourse in finnish media coverage on the fff movement from spring to fall which may be applied to german coverage, system critical demands, mitigative solution and youth voices have not been prominently represented. looking at these findings from a protest paradigm angle (mcleod & hertog 1999) this may hint towards the fact that aspects of the movement which threaten hegemonic power-relationships were not supported (curran 1982; smith et al. 2001). while this reveals something about the media’s proclivity to reproduce these power structures, to a certain extent it also tells us something about change. looking back to nanucci’s eight words in 2021, we find them illuminated. in germany (changing place), almost three years after greta thunberg demonstrated in front of the swedish parliament (changing time), leading german climate activist luisa neubauer (changing thought) is now discussing climate action next to germany’s top candidates for chancellor on national prime time television (ard 2021). the german green party has a real chance in the fall elections (vates 2021) and the german constitutional court recently ruled that germany’s 2019 climate protection act is in part unconstitutional (changing future) (dw 2021). the study from huttunen and albrecht (2021) is thus not only important because it shows how the fff protests fosters active (environmental) citizenship but also because they offer a critical and highly-reflective insight into societal and ecological transformation as it unfolds. the global covid-19 crisis and its impact on both fff protests and environmental and climate change narratives (see burger et al. 2020; galeigha & burrows 2020; lyytimäki et al. 2020; mocatta & howley 2020) will still have to show where this journey leads. references ard (2021) anne will: von corona-krise bis klimapolitik – kann die union noch kanzleramt? das erste 9.5.2021 <https://daserste.ndr.de/annewill/videos/von-corona-krise-bis-klimapolitik-kann-die-unionnoch-kanzleramt-,annewill7020.html>. 2.6.2021. betancur, k. c. (2019) gretas welt. zeit online 31.1.2019 <https://www.zeit.de/2019/06/klima-aktivistingreta-thunberg-klimaschutz-schuelerin>. 2.6.2021. burger, a., kristof, k. & matthey, a. (2020) the green new consensus study shows broad consensus on green recovery programmes and structural reforms. umweltbundesamt <https://www. umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/376/publikationen/thenewgreenconsensus_englisch_ bf.pdf>. 28.5.2021. cannon, s. m. (2019) climate strikes: greta thunberg calls for ‘system change not climate change’ – here’s what that could look like. the conversation.com 15.3.2019 <https://theconversation.com/ climate-strikes-greta-thunberg-calls-for-system-change-not-climate-change-heres-what-that-couldlook-like-112891>. 31.5.2021. curran, j. (1982) communication, power and social order. in bennett, t., curran, j., gurevitch, m. & wollacott, j. (eds.) culture, society and the media, 202–235. routlegde, new york. díaz-pérez, s., soler-i-martí, r. & ferrer-fons, m. (2021) from the global myth to local mobilization: creation and resonance of greta thunberg’s frame. comunicar 68(3). https://doi.org/10.3916/c68-2021-03 dobson, a. & bell, d. (2006) environmental citizenship: introduction. in dobson, a. & bell, d. (eds.) environmental citizenship, 1–18. mit press, cambridge. deutsche welle (2021) german climate law is partly unconstitutional, top court rules 29.4.2021 <https://www.dw.com/en/german-climate-law-is-partly-unconstitutional-top-court-rules/a-57369917>. 2.6.2021. ghaleigh, n. s. & burrows, l. (2020) resetting or reversion in the new climate normal. in ramraj, v. (eds.) covid-19 in asia: law and policy contexts, 411–425. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197553831.003.0029 150 fennia 199(1) (2021)reflections goldenbaum, m. & thompson, c. s. (2020) fridays for future im spiegel der medienöffentlichkeit. in haunss, s. & sommer, m. (eds.) fridays for future – die jugend gegen den klimawandel. konturen der weltweiten protestbewegung, 181–204. transcript verlag, bielefeld. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839453476-009 hayes, s. (2021) the greta effect: visualising climate protest. webinar at university of exeter, 24.2.2021 <https://universityofexeter.zoom.us/rec/share/odc0x4uhet_ay_ugsvobjxju6fhehyc2fo0fx2q5fegs9ofg rzlhkaorf4to6ci.6byhop5xlaet-chy?starttime=1614175400000>. 25.5.2021. hayward, b. (2021) children, citizenship and environment #schoolstrike edition. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003000396 høeg, e. (2017) sinking strangers. master thesis. universitat pompeu fabra, spain. huttunen, j. & albrecht, e. (2021) the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland. fennia 199(1) 46–60. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102480 kettrey, h. h. (2018) activism without activists: news media coverage of youth as illegitimate political agents in the virginity-pledge movement and gay-straight alliances. mobilization – an international quarterly 23(3) 359–364. https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671x-23-3-349 krieger, n. (2020) enough: covid-19, structural racism, police brutality, plutocracy, climate changeand time for health justice, democratic governance, and an equitable, sustainable future. american journal of public health 110(11) 1620–1623. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2020.305886 levermann, a. (2019) "venedig wird definitiv untergehen" (interview by linda fischer for zeit online). zeit online 19.11.2019 <https://www.zeit.de/wissen/umwelt/2019-11/klimawandel-venedig-hochwasserklimaforschung-anders-levermann>. 1.6.2021. lyytimäki, j., kangas, h., mervaala, e. & vikström, s. (2020) muted by a crisis? covid-19 and the longterm evolution of climate change newspaper coverage. sustainability (switzerland) 12(20) 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208575 mcleod, d. m & hertog, j. k. (1999) social change and the mass media’s role in the regulation of protest groups. in demers, d. & ames, k. v. (eds.) mass media, social control and social change: a macrosocial perspective, 305–330. iowa state university, iowa. merkley, e. & stecula d. (2019) framing climate change: economics, ideology, and uncertainty in american news media content from 1988 to 2014. frontiers in communication 4(6) 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00006 methmann, c. (2014) visualizing climate-refugees: race, vulnerability, and resilience in global liberal politics. international political sociology 8(4) 416–435. https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12071 mocatta, g. & hawley, e. (2020) the coronavirus crisis as tipping point: communicating the environment in a time of pandemic. media international australia 177(1) 119–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x20950030 o’brien, k. selboe, e. & hayward, b. m. (2018) exploring youth activism on climate change: dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent. ecology and society 23(3) 42. https://doi.org/10.5751/es-10287-230342 vom orde, a. & durner, a. (2020) international data on youth and media 2020. internationales zentralinstitut für das jugend und bildungsfernsehen (izi) <https://www.br-online.de/jugend/izi/ english/international%20data%20on%20youth%20and%20media.pdf>. 2.6.2021. peggy guggenheim collection (2021) changing place, changing time, changing thoughts, changing future. guggenheim-venice.it. <https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/works/changingplace-changing-time-changing-thoughts-changing-future/>. 1.6.2021. quoquab, f. & sukari, n. n. (2017) why sustainable consumption is not in practice? a developing country perspective. in leal filho, w., pociovalisteanu, d. m. & al-amin, a. (eds.) sustainable economic development. world sustainability series, 103–112 springer, cham. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-45081-0_6 santarius, t. (2007) klimawandel und globale gerechtigkeit. bpb.de 31.5.2007 <http://www.bpb.de/ apuz/30435/klimawandel-und-globale-gerechtigkeit?p=all>. 2.6.2021. schindel dimick, a. (2015) supporting youth to develop environmental citizenship within/against a neoliberal context. environmental education research 21(3) 390–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2014.994164 smith, j., mccarthy, j.d., mcphail, c., et al. (2001) from protest to agenda building: description bias in media coverage of protest events in washington, d.c. social forces 79(4) 1397–1429. tankovska, h. (2021) reach of social media used by teens and young adults in germany 2020. statista. <https://www.statista.com/statistics/1060015/social-media-usage-germany-age-most-popular-15-25/>. 2.6.2021. vates, d. (2021) wie sich das land unter einer grünen-kanzlerin verändern würde. redaktionsnetzwerk deutschland 11.5.2021 <https://www.rnd.de/politik/annalena-baerbock-wie-sich-das-land-unter-einergruenen-bundeskanzlerin-veraendern-wuerde-jgakpqv6ircmppc2gy55zh6hdm.html>. 2.6.2021. 151fennia 199(1) (2021) lena von zabern & christopher d. tulloch von zabern, l. & tulloch, c. d. (2021) rebel with a cause: the framing of climate change and intergenerational justice in the german press treatment of the fridays for future protests. media, culture & society 43(1) 23–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443720960923 walker, c. (2020) uneven solidarity: the school strikes for climate in global and intergenerational perspective. sustainable earth 3, 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42055-020-00024-3 young friends of the earth (2015) climate myth #5: we can solve climate change ourselves by changing our lifestyles. youngfoe.eu 16.11.2015 <https://youngfoee.eu/news/climate-myth-5-wecan-solve-climate-change-ourselves-by-changing-our-lifestyles/>. 2.6.2021. untitled what determines the timberline? olavi heikkinen, mervi tuovinen and jyrki autio heikkinen, olavi, mervi tuovinen & jyrki autio (2002). what determines the timberline? fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 67–74. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. both the northern (latitudinal) and the upper (altitudinal) timberlines are phytogeographic transitions between the forested boreal vegetation zone and treeless areas. these two timberlines, which intermingle in northern fennoscandia, are mainly controlled by the cold climate, although other natural and anthropogenic factors are of noticeable importance at least locally. the roles of the various controlling factors are discussed in this article. the timberline and tree line in northern finland are usually formed by the mountain birch (betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa), which extends further than the scots pine (pinus sylvestris) or the norway spruce (picea abies). the northern coniferous timberline in finland follows approximately an isoline that represents an effective temperature sum of 600 degree days. hazardous events also regulate the growth and occurrence of trees in addition to average conditions. trees growing at the timberline have adapted themselves in many ways to the prevailing harsh circumstances. pollen research and megafossil analyses (such as tree ring studies) show that the timberline has moved and its tree species composition has changed, primarily due to climatic fluctuations. this is one clear indication that the timberline is a dynamic ‘combat zone’. olavi heikkinen, mervi tuovinen & jyrki autio, department of geography, p. o. box 3000, fin-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mails: olavi.heikkinen@oulu.fi, mervi.tuovinen@oulu.fi, jyrki.autio@oulu.fi introduction the boreal vegetation zone, characterised by coniferous forests, comprises almost the whole of finland. often named the taiga, especially by russian scientists, this zone is bordered in the far north by the treeless arctic vegetation zone, the tundra, and the phytogeographic transition between these two main zones is called the timberline region. the position of the timberline is mainly controlled by the cold climate, although many other natural and anthropogenic factors are of noticeable importance, at least locally. the timberline region is a visually attractive and ecologically important ecotone. this article considers the factors determining the location and nature of the timberline, especially in northern finland. timberline terminology the terms related to the timberline are numerous and rather ambiguous (hustich 1966, 1979; heikkinen 1984b; heikkinen et al. 1995). according to hustich (1966), the timberline region consists of a series of forest and tree lines, which range from closed forest to the treeless area (fig. 1). the southernmost, or lowest, definable line is the economic forest line. forest fellings should not be extended beyond this line, because natural regrowth will be uncertain. the physiognomic forest line, where the forest clearly thins out so that ‘the squirrel is unable to jump from tree to tree’, is most generally regarded as the timberline. this line is also called the biological forest line (or empirical, phytosociological, or vegetative forest line), because up to this line the forest regenerates naturally. the propagation of trees may be slow and random, however, because seed years are infrequent. the physiognomic forest line is often drawn along the line where the canopy coverage is about 30 percent. above and north of this line the trees become smaller and grow in groups or individually. this belt is bounded by the tree line, the extreme boundary where trees are still arboreal in size and shape. finally, one arrives at the tree-species line. there are nevertheless stumps or logs of dead 68 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)olavi heikkinen, mervi tuovinen and jyrki autio trees to be found in lakes and mires located beyond and above these forest and tree lines, proving that climatic conditions were once more favourable than they are today. in many cases, human action has also devastated the marginal forests (hustich 1966; mattsson 1995). the outermost remnants of dead trees indicate the location of the historical tree line. the timberline in northern finland can be latitudinal or altitudinal in character. as the altitude increases, the temperature declines at an average lapse rate of 0.65 degrees centigrade (ºc) per hundred metres. the horizontal distance over which a similar cooling takes place is about one hundred kilometres. when climatic conditions attributable to latitude primarily determine the position of a timberline, it is called northern or arctic timberline. beyond it stretches the treeless tundra. the cooling of the climate in a vertical direction determines the timberline on the fells, so it is often referred to as the upper or alpine timberline. the area above the tree line is called the open fell summit (paljakka in finnish). in northern fennoscandia, for instance, the latitudinal and altitudinal – and also oceanic and continental – features vary in many ways, making the characterisation of timberlines problematic (moen 1999). the northern and upper timberlines resemble each other in many respects, although the rhythm and intensity of solar radiation and illumination may differ widely. this is evident when conditions at the northern timberline are compared with those affecting the upper timberline at middle latitudes, not to mention lower latitudes. at places on the northern timberline, where the topographic features are not variable, the vegetation cover is fairly homogeneous, but at the upper timberline the relief plays a major role. this results in unequal exposure to solar radiation and wind, so that growth conditions vary over short distances, giving rise to a vegetation mosaic (e.g., heikkinen 1984b; autio 1995). the tree-species composition of the northern timberline in eurasia differs markedly from that in north america: the bush-like juniper (juniperus communis) is the only tree species common to both continents (hustich 1966; troll 1973). in spite of this, however, so many climatic parameters and indicators follow the northern timberline relatively well (tuhkanen 1980, 1984) that almost the same external factors apparently control the tree species occurring on both continents. the timberline and tree line in northern finland are usually formed by the mountain birch (betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa), which extends further fig. 1. the timberline region. the idea and concepts according to hustich (1966). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 69what determines the timberline? than either the scots pine (pinus sylvestris) or the norway spruce (picea abies). the most northerly birches are not always proper trees, however, but are often low-growing, stunted, and ramified (holtmeier 1985). regulating factors trees growing at the timberline struggle for existence and to propagate themselves in spite of the severe conditions. this is why the timberline region is often referred to as a ‘combat zone’ (heikkinen et al. 1995: 8). the width of this zone may only be a few tens or hundreds of metres at a mountainous upper timberline, but on canadian and siberian lowlands it can be hundreds of kilometres wide. efforts are being made to find out which climatic factor is strongest in regulating the location of the timberline – in other words, which factor is the most critical to the vital functions of trees. so far no clear answer has been found. it was discovered long ago that the timberline more or less follows the 10 ºc isotherm for the warmest month of the year (supan 1884; köppen 1919). temperature sums and lengths of various thermal seasons have also frequently been used to characterise tree lines (tuhkanen 1980, 1984, 1993). the position of the timberline seems to relate relatively well to climatic parameters, such as the length of the growing season, the effective temperature sum, the duration of the frost-free season, potential evapotranspiration, precipitation during the growing season, the amounts of light and nutrients, carbon dioxide deficiency, and relative humidity (hare 1954; hustich 1958; tuhkanen 1980, 1984). the values for radiation parameters, such as annual global net radiation and net radiation during the growing season (ritchie 1960), are associated with the position of the boreal and arctic vegetation zones, and the location of the timberline has also been explained in terms of airmass climatology (bryson 1966). the position of the arctic front in summer closely coincides with the northern timberline in eurasia and canada (mitchell 1973; tuhkanen 1993), while in finnish lapland the northern forest and tree lines are seen to be associated with effective temperature sums (fig. 2). many local features may also cause deviations from the potential climatic timberline and tree fig. 2. the thermal factors have a significant impact on the location of the timberline in finland, as elsewhere: comparison of the locations of certain forest and tree lines with calculated temperature sums in the normal period 1961–1990 (ritari & nivala 1993; tasanen & veijola 1994). 70 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)olavi heikkinen, mervi tuovinen and jyrki autio line. the influence of topographic features, soil conditions, or paludification, for instance, may force the timberline and tree line southwards or to lower altitudes (eronen 1979; tasanen & veijola 1994; autio 1995; veijola 1998). although trees growing under extreme conditions have adapted themselves to drastic environmental changes in addition to average climatic conditions, random, hazardous events may also regulate their occurrence and growth (hustich 1983). the wind may chop trees down or desiccate their foliage, or abrasion by ice and snow particles carried in the wind may destroy those parts of a tree that protrude from the snow, whereas the branches growing below the snow surface will be protected in winter (holtmeier 1981, 1985). particularly spruces benefit from this, to the extent that their lower branches may touch the ground, take root, and grow into cloned individuals (fig. 3). low air temperatures sometimes cause growth disturbances. night frosts occur most frequently in valley bottoms, into which the heavy, cold air drains on calm nights (jalkanen & närhi 1993). temperature inversion often occurs in such places during the growing season, causing serious damage to the trees or even their death (tikkanen & heikkilä 1991). cold air lakes may hinder reforestation in depressions even in southern finland (rajakorpi 1985). as the snow cover protects trees from frost desiccation and abrasion, the remotest trees are often found growing in valleys, where the soil is also more favourable than on steep, rocky, and often frost-shattered slopes (wardle 1980; kullman 1981). heavy loads of snow, rime, and ice accumulating on trees can break their crowns and branches in early winter, particularly on elevated terrain (fig. 4), causing the timberline on many fells to remain further south than it would be on purely climatic grounds (norokorpi & kärkkäinen 1985; norokorpi 1994). there are several biological factors, such as plant diseases and animals, that threaten trees in marginal areas. insects can sometimes cause damage over large areas. by way of example, the larvae of a geometrid, epirrita autumnata, destroyed thousands of square kilometres of birch woods in lapland in 1965–1966 (kallio & lehtonen 1973), and the area still has not recovered from the damage. parts of the affected area are likely to turn into tundra-like vegetation under the present climatic conditions (haapasaari 1988) and reindeer grazing. the timberline is not always natural, as human activities have affected it for centuries, shifting it southwards and to lower altitudes. fires, grazing, and air pollution have also destroyed or strained forests in timberline regions (sirén 1961; hämetahti 1963; hustich 1966; mattsson 1995). a timberline that results from this human influence can be called an anthropogenic timberline. a dynamic timberline trees at the timberline have various means of adaptation and self-defence against cold, wind, and snow. the tops of spruces in the north are pointed, which reduces the snow load on the crown (fig. 5). trees growing at the timberline are usufig. 3. severe conditions in the timberline region can affect the shape of trees. trees grow branches and needles more readily, or exclusively, on the leeside. abrasion by ice crystals carried in the wind is strongest just above the snow cover. (photo: olavi heikkinen, 08/91). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 71what determines the timberline? ally smaller than elsewhere. the spruce, birch, and juniper, in particular, which grow as trees in sheltered forests, may be bush-like, cushionshaped, or even mattress-shaped on the upper fell slopes (holtmeier 1981). pine, on the other hand, does not vary much in shape. some tree species, such as spruce and birch, sometimes propagate only vegetatively under severe conditions. this is necessary when the climate is so harsh that the trees are unable to produce seeds capable of germination during the summer months. the scots pine, however, is not able to regenerate vegetatively. its northern limit is thus located in areas where the trees still receive enough warmth to produce viable seeds (henttonen et al. 1986). as to the vital functions of trees at the northern timberline, they have in many ways adapted themselves to a short, light summer and a long, cold winter. growth begins quickly at the beginning of the growing season, and the trees have a lower optimum temperature than those in the south, so that they can utilise all the light they receive for twenty-four hours in the day. furthermore, the needles of conifers reach a greater age in the north than in the south (jalkanen 1993). the physical and biochemical adaptability of the cells enables them to become inured to the cold in winter. pollen research (hyvärinen 1993) and megafossil analyses, such as tree ring studies (e.g., eronen 1979), show that the timberline has moved and its tree-species composition has altered as a result of climatic fluctuations. the birch was the pioneer tree species in finnish lapland, spreading to the area soon after the deglaciation, which took place about 10,000–8,800 years ago. pine forests later replaced the birch woods, at least on the lowlands. the pine forests of lapland were at their thickest and most extensive about 7,500– 4,000 years ago (see eronen et al. 1991; veijola 1998), when the climate was on average warmer than nowadays. the limits of both pine and birch have retreated since then. the spruce, which remains behind the birch and pine in finnish lapland and grows at lower altitudes, spread to finland from the east, reaching its northern limit some 2,500 years ago (moen 1999). the timberline, which is controlled by many factors, is primarily dependent on climatic conditions and tends to advance during favourable climatic periods that last for some decades or centuries (e.g., heikkinen 1984a). when the climate began to warm up after the little ice age (around 1500–1800 ad), saplings of various tree species appeared beyond the timberline in many places in fennoscandia (hustich 1958). in some cases these pioneers died without ever becoming fullgrown. an unfavourable climatic period of a few decades or centuries may not necessarily force the timberline to retreat, although it may prevent the fig. 4. trees struggle for survival in the timberline region. the photograph is taken on the aakenustunturi fell in 1994, when the crown snowload caused severe damage to the trees. (photo: jyrki autio, 03/94). 72 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)olavi heikkinen, mervi tuovinen and jyrki autio trees from regenerating. if cold periods continue for long, the timberline is bound to recede (kullman 1993) or be reduced to a chain of isolated relicts, as has happened in canada, for instance (nichols 1976; payette & gagnon 1979). human activity is apparently accelerating the global greenhouse effect. it may therefore be assumed that temperatures are rising and the vegetation period is being prolonged, especially at high latitudes. the quantity of carbon dioxide, a significant greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere has been on the increase since the nineteenth century. this has probably stimulated photosynthesis in trees and enhanced their growth. it has already been suggested that tree growth has accelerated recently, especially at high elevations, due to the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide content (e.g., cooper et al. 1986), but not all researchers share this view unreservedly. changes in the growth rate of trees and shifting of the timberline may not, however, be directly related to each other (mccarroll et al. 1999). references autio j (1995). altitudinal zonation of heath vegetation in finnish lapland: an example from the pyhätunturi fjell. in heikkinen o, b obrebska-starkel & s tuhkanen (eds). environmental aspects of the timberline in finland and in the polish carpathians. prace geograficzne – zeszyt 98, 17–39. bryson ra (1966). air masses, streamlines and the boreal forest. geographical bulletin 8, 228–269. cooper cf, j gale, vc lamarche jr, da graybill, hc fritts & m rose (1986). carbon dioxide enhancement of tree growth at high elevations. science 231, 859–860. eronen m (1979). the retreat of pine forest in finnish lapland since the holocene climatic optimum: a general discussion with radiocarbon evidence from subfossil pines. fennia 157, 93–114. eronen m, p huttunen & p zetterberg (1991). opportunities for dendroclimatological research in fennoscandia. paläoklimaforschung – palaeoclimate research 6, 81–92. haapasaari m (1988). the oligotrophic heath vegetation of northern fennoscandia and its zonation. acta botanica fennica 135, 1–219. hämet-ahti l (1963). zonation of the mountain birch forests in northernmost fennoscandia. annales botanici societatis zoologicae botanicae fennicae ‘vanamo’ 34: 4, 1–127. hare fk (1954). the boreal conifer zone. geographical studies 1, 4–18. heikkinen o (1984a). forest expansion in the subalpine zone during the past hundred years, mount baker, washington, u.s.a. erdkunde 38, 194–202. heikkinen o (1984b). the timber-line problem. nordia 18, 105–114. heikkinen o, b obrebska-starkel & s tuhkanen (1995). introduction: the timberline – a changing battlefront. in heikkinen o, b obrebska-starkel & s tuhkanen (eds). environmental aspects of the timberline in finland and in the polish carpathians. prace geograficzne – zeszyt 98, 7–16. henttonen h, m kanninen, m nygren & r ojansuu fig. 5. example of the adaptation of trees to a natural hazard. the narrow, pointed spire prevents the drifting snow from forming a damaging snow load in the crown. (photo: olavi heikkinen, 03/ 90) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 73what determines the timberline? (1986). the maturation of scots pine seeds in relation to temperature climate in northern finland. scandinavian journal of forest research 1, 243– 249. holtmeier f-k (1981). what does the term “krummholz” really mean? observations with special reference to the alps and the colorado front range. mountain research and development 1: 3–4, 253–260. holtmeier f-k (1985). climatic stress influencing the physiognomy of trees at the polar and mountain timberline. eidgenössische anstalt für das forstliche versuchswesen, berichte 270, 31–40. hustich i (1958). on the recent expansion of the scotch pine in northern europe. fennia 82: 3, 1– 25. hustich i (1966). on the forest-tundra and the northern tree-lines. reports from the kevo subarctic research station 3, 7–47. hustich i (1979). ecological concepts and biogeographical zonation in the north: the need for a generally accepted terminology. holoarctic ecology 2, 208–217. hustich i (1983). tree-line and tree growth studies during 50 years: some subjective observations. collection nordicana 47, 181–188. hyvärinen h (1993). holocene pine and birch limits near kilpisjärvi, western finnish lapland: pollen stratigraphical evidence. in frenzel b (ed). oscillations of the alpine and polar tree limits in the holocene. paläoklimaforschung – palaeoclimate research 9, 19–27. jalkanen r (1993). abiotic and biotic diseases of the northern boreal forest in finland. the finnish forest research institute, research papers 451, 7–21. jalkanen r & p närhi (1993). red belt phenomenon on the slopes of the levi fell in kittilä, western lapland. the finnish forest research institute, research papers 451, 55–60. kallio p & j lehtonen (1973). birch forest damage caused by oporinia autumnata (bkh.) in 1965– 66 in utsjoki, n finland. reports from the kevo subarctic research station 10, 55–69. köppen w (1919). baumgrenze und lufttemperatur. petermanns mitteilungen 65, 39–42. kullman l (1981). recent tree-limit dynamics of scots pine (pinus sylvestris l.) in the southern swedish scandes. wahlenbergia 8. kullman l (1993). pine (pinus sylvestris l.) tree-limit surveillance during recent decades, central sweden. arctic and alpine research 25, 24–31. mattsson j (1995). human impact on the timberline in the far north of europe. in heikkinen o, b obrebska-starkel & s tuhkanen (eds). environmental aspects of the timberline in finland and in the polish carpathians. prace geograficzne – zeszyt 98, 41–55. mccarroll d, s hicks & r jalkanen (1999). conclusion. response of trees to potential climatic change. in hicks s, r jalkanen, t aalto, d mccarroll, m gagen & e pettigrew (eds). forest (forest response to environmental stress at timberlines), final report env4-ct95-0063, 163– 164. thule institute, oulu. mitchell vl (1973). a theoretical tree line in central canada. annals of the association of american geographers 63, 296–301. moen a (1999). national atlas of norway: vegetation. norwegian mapping authority, hønefoss. nichols h (1976). historical aspects of the northern canadian treeline. arctic 29, 38–47. norokorpi y (1994). havumetsänrajan sijainnin määräytyminen suomessa. the finnish forest research institute, research papers 539, 7–15. norokorpi y & s kärkkäinen (1985). maaston korkeuden vaikutus puustoja kasvupaikkatunnuksiin sekä tykkytuhoihin kuusamossa (summary: the effect of altitude on stand and site characteristics and crown snow-load damage in kuusamo in northern finland). folia forestalia 632. payette s & r gagnon (1979). tree-line dynamics in ungava peninsula, northern quebec. holoarctic ecology 2, 239–248. rajakorpi a (1985). microclimate and soils of the central part of the hämeenkangas interlobate complex in western finland. fennia 162, 227– 337. ritari a & v nivala (1993). pohjois-suomen numeerinen ilmastomalli mesoskaalassa. the finnish forest research institute, research papers 479, 88–98. ritchie jg (1960). the vegetation of the northern manitoba. establishing the major zonation. arctic 13, 210–229. sirén g (1961). skogsgränstallen som indikator för klimatfluktuationerna i norra fennoscandien under historisk tid. communicationes instituti forestalis fenniae 54: 2, 1–66. supan a (1884). grundzüge der physischen erdgunde. veit et comp, leipzig. tasanen t & p veijola (1994). metsänraja tutkimuskohteena – kirjallisuuskatsaus. the finnish forest research institute, research papers 539, 80–145. tikkanen m & r heikkilä (1991). the influence of clear felling on temperature and vegetation in an esker area at lammi, southern finland. fennia 169, 1–24. troll c (1973). the upper timberlines in different climatic zones. arctic and alpine research 5, a3– a18. tuhkanen s (1980). climatic parameters and indices in plant geography. acta phytogeographica suecica 67, 1–105. tuhkanen s (1984). a circumboreal system of climatic-phytogeographical regions. acta botanica fennica 127. tuhkanen s (1993). treeline in relation to climate, with special reference to oceanic areas. in alden j, jl mastrantonio & s odum (eds). forest development in cold climates, 115–134. plenum, new york. 74 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)olavi heikkinen, mervi tuovinen and jyrki autio veijola p (1998). the northern timberline and timberline forests in fennoscandia. the finnish forest research institute, research papers 672. wardle p (1980). engelmann spruce (picea engelmannii engel.) at its upper limits on the front range, colorado. in ives jd (ed). geoecology of the colorado front range: a study of alpine and subalpine environments, 339–350. westview, boulder. travelling abroad and geopolitical preferences – case of kharkiv, dnipro and mariupol, ukraine urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa117041 doi: 10.11143/fennia.117041 travelling abroad and geopolitical preferences – case of kharkiv, dnipro and mariupol, ukraine oleksiy gnatiuk, kostyantyn mezentsev and grygorii pidgrushnyi gnatiuk, o., mezentsev, k. & pidgrushnyi, g. (2023) travelling abroad and geopolitical preferences – case of kharkiv, dnipro and mariupol, ukraine. fennia 201(1) 23–46. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117041 the paper investigates the relationship between travel abroad experience and individual geopolitical preferences in three geopolitical fault-line cities in the eastern part of ukraine. employing binary logistic regression as a principal research method, we show that travel experience to european countries positively correlates with pro-european attitudes and corresponds to weaker pro-soviet sentiments. on the contrary, travel experience to russia is associated with somewhat weaker support for european geopolitical and cultural integration but stronger pro-soviet sentiments. travel experience to russia is less important predictor of geopolitical preferences than visiting european countries. pro-european attitudes, compared with pro-soviet sentiments, are much more interlinked with international travel experience. the data on bilateral travellers evidences that possible effect of visiting european countries basically neutralises the effect of visiting russia in terms of impact on geopolitical preferences. although the relationship between travel abroad experience and geopolitical preferences is similar in all three cities under investigation, certain variations between them may be explained by different economic, sociocultural and institutional background. the revealed correlations seem to cover both direct causal effect of travel abroad on geopolitical preferences and a reverse causality, namely self-selection of destination country according to personal pre-existing geopolitical views. the importance of discovered relationships for the integration of ukrainian society into european civilization project is apparent not only considering visa-free regime between ukraine and the european union (eu), but also in view of the russian military invasion in 2022 as a cause of flows of refugees from ukraine to europe. keywords: travelling abroad, geopolitical preferences, geopolitical faultline cities, ukraine oleksiy gnatiuk (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1818-2415) & kostyantyn mezentsev (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1974-7860), department of economic and social geography, taras shevchenko national university of kyiv, ukraine. e-mail: alexgnat22@ukr.net, mezentsev@knu.ua grygorii pidgrushnyi (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2116-8366), institute of geography, national academy of sciences of ukraine, ukraine. e-mail: pidgrush@gmail.com © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117041 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1818-2415 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1974-7860 mailto:?subject= mailto:?subject= https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2116-8366 mailto:?subject= 24 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper introduction after the approval of visa-free travel regime between ukraine and the european union (eu) in may 2017, politicians and experts stressed that this event will increase the number and duration of trips by ukrainians to the eu countries, promoting their integration into the european community and dispelling in their minds certain myths about the west, instilled already by soviet propaganda and disseminated in ukraine by pro-russian political actors. in particular, the then president of ukraine petro poroshenko called the signing of visa-free travel an absolutely historic day for ukraine and the eu: “ukraine is returning to the european family. ukraine is saying goodbye to the soviet and russian empires” (radio svoboda 2017). dmytro ostroushko, a director of gorshenin institute in kyiv, pointed out that visa-free travel paves a way “for the spiritual integration of ukrainians into the european community… it even indirectly affects the quality of life of ukrainians, because the more they know, the more they will strive to achieve a better standard of living here in ukraine.” (lb.ua 2017). similarly, iryna sushko, executive director and leading expert on migration and border management in co europe without barriers (kyiv), believed that “…for us, ukrainians, visa-free travel has not only a practical value, so that we will be able to make various trips more often and more regularly. it will give us a sense of closeness to the eu. it seems to me that the forthcoming civilisation change is very important for our self-awareness.” (ibid.). on the other hand, even after the beginning of the russo-ukrainian hybrid warfare in 2014, many ukrainians were still visiting russia. in particular, despite the constantly diminishing popularity of russia as a destination for labour migrants from ukraine, it still remained one of the main suppliers of work migrants and students to russia. moreover, a lot of ukrainians have close family ties in russia and thus were more or less regularly visiting them (pozniak 2021). another recent wave of migrants from ukraine to russia took place in 2014–2015 due to war in donbas, and many of these people decided to return over time (mukomel 2017). in addition to the standard cultural influences and experiences, these visitors are potentially affected by both ‘hard’ (e.g. messages translated via the media) and ‘soft’ (e.g. social media, movies, etc.) russian propaganda, aimed at cultivating negative image of the west, demonising western military alliances, notably the north atlantic treaty organization (nato), stigmatising certain aspects of western culture, and eroding trust in western democratic institutions (helmus et al. 2018; u.s. department of state 2020). moreover, in 2018, vasyl hrytsak, the then head of the ukrainian security service, warned darkly that russia’s security services attempted to recruit 90% of ukrainian labour migrants (milakovsky 2018). the visa-free regime between russia and ukraine, established in 1997, continued to operate even after the annexation of crimea and the beginning of the military conflict in donbas. for the first time, the idea of cancelling the visa-free regime with russia appeared in the ukrainian parliament in 2016. it was criticised by the ministry of foreign affairs mainly due to the risks for ukrainian migrant workers: the introduction of visas would have complicated the procedure for ukrainian citizens to travel to the russian federation, which in turn would have led to an increase in social tension. as a result, ukraine cancelled the visa-free regime with russia only on july 1, 2022, that is, almost six months after the start of the full-scale russian invasion (bbc russian 2022). in view of this, a question of relationship between travelling abroad and geopolitical preferences of ukrainians certainly deserves scientific scrutiny. in this paper, in line with berlinschi (2019) and minakov (2019), we understand individual geopolitical preferences primarily as positive or negative attitudes to the idea of joining (or aligning with) certain foreign entity (i.e. geopolitical block, international organization, or another individual country). scientific literature, based on empirical investigation, has already explained mechanisms through which visiting other country may change individual (geo)political preferences (e.g. berlinschi 2019). thus, it is possible that ukrainian citizens with the experience of travelling abroad are potentially among the most ardent advocates of controversial pro-western or anti-western geopolitical ideas, narratives and alliances. in that case, they should not be underestimated as a power that may turn the scales to certain political regime, in a crucial moment, in the own city, region, or even the whole country. the latter consideration is especially important in the era of regional and global geopolitical turbulence that the world has entered with the outbreak of a full-scale russian-ukrainian war in 2022. fennia 201(1) (2023) 25gnatiuk et al. the aim of this paper is to reveal the relationship between the individual geopolitical preferences of ukrainians and their background of travel abroad. in order to capture correlations between the travelling abroad experience and geopolitical preferences, we rely on survey data in three ukrainian cities employing binary logistic regression models. since the calculated correlations may reflect both direct (travelling abroad impacts the geopolitical preferences) and reversal (geopolitical preferences predefine the pattern of abroad travels) causal effects, the empirical results are further discussed in view of the existing scientific literature on the topic in order to find the most likely interpretation of them. our research focuses on three cities located in the eastern and south-eastern parts of ukraine: dnipro, kharkiv, and mariupol. the choice of case studies is based on the following considerations. ukraine is characterised by tangible regional differences of voting behaviour and related geopolitical attitudes (see birch 2000; barrington 2002; barrington & herron 2004; osipian & osipian 2012; kulyk 2016). the main feature of this geopolitical regionalisation is polarisation and oscillation between the two main geopolitical vectors: pro-western and pro-russian. the main dividing line between the more pro-western and more pro-russian regions has gradually shifted eastwards since 1991, and in mid2010s it was lying between the donbas and the adjacent east-southern regions (kulyk 2016). three cities, selected for the study, are located just nearby this dividing line. their inhabitants, living together in the same neighbourhoods, streets, and buildings, espouse controversial and conflicting geopolitical attitudes and narratives. this semi-hidden fault-line, being almost imperceptible in periods of relative geopolitical stability, activates in times of geopolitical cataclysms, in particular after the orange revolution in 2005 (zhurzhenko 2011) and the revolution of dignity and beginning of the russoukrainian hybrid warfare in 2014 (gentile 2017; stebelsky 2018; buckholz 2019; kutsenko 2020; nitsova 2021). socio-political trajectories of such cities, being places of heightened political confrontation and tensions between coexisting irreconcilable narratives, are of pivotal importance not only for the modern ukrainian national project and opposing russia-supported projects of ‘donbas’ and ‘novorossiya’ (minakov 2017; kuzio 2019), but also for the entire european and the global geopolitical order (gentile 2017). this consideration became even more evident with the outburst of the full-scale russian military invasion into ukraine in 2022, which has already led to the almost complete destruction of mariupol, finally captured by russian troops, and significant damage to urban structures in kharkiv and dnipro. the rest of the article is organised as follows. the next section presents a review of relevant scientific literature and conceptualises the relationships between travelling abroad experience and geopolitical preferences. after that, we reveal national context of geopolitics and international mobility in ukraine. the following section contains a description of three selected cities as case studies. then the research methodology and data are presented, followed by the empirical analysis and discussion of the findings. the final section draws key concluding remarks. travelling abroad experience and geopolitical attitudes visiting another country can change a person’s perspective in many ways. at the same time, the travel experiences themselves are different in terms of purpose and duration. the literature addressing the impact of international mobilities to the travellers (geo)political orientation basically distinguishes between short-term tourist trips, regular visits for family or business reasons, and longer migration, including labour and study migration. there is a lot of empirical evidence of the impact of long-term or regular migrations on (geo)political preferences. based on expanded literature review, berlinschi (2019) points out that long-term mobility abroad can change an individual’s political preferences for two main reasons. the first reason implies exposure to new information acquired abroad. migrants have access to other media channels being exposed to alternative ideas, values and world views (wood 2019). they often encounter political, social and cultural norms, attitudes, and institutions that are very different from, or even in outright conflict with, those prevailing in their home countries (fidrmuc & doyle 2007; wood 2019). the new information may change migrants’ perceptions, push them to dispel some of their prejudices shaped by the media and communication in home country, re-evaluate the benefits 26 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper resulting from certain policies or institutions, and, in result, change own (geo)political beliefs, including the desirability of certain policy regimes. the second reason is a migration-induced change in the benefits resulting from some policies or institutions. migrants economically benefit from close ties with their destination countries; they acquire information on job prospects and prices in destination countries, develop social networks and improve language skills. consequently, they may attach a higher value to free mobility to their destination countries and, if the geopolitical choices of origin countries affect mobility constraints, migration may affect geopolitical preferences (berlinschi 2019). in this way, reputation of (former) host country benefits from migration through the mechanism of so called all geopolitical remittances, constituting de-facto a kind of soft power for countries receiving the migrants. furthermore, benefits of return migrants from an enriching experience abroad may also translate into improvements in the quality of domestic political institutions by increasing direct participation in the political system and by raising awareness and demand for political accountability (batista & vicente 2011; barsbai et al. 2017). not only democratic host countries benefit from geopolitical remittances, but authoritarian regimes as well, as revealed by the studies on the experiences of kyrgyz and ukrainian labour migrants in russia (gerber & zavisca 2019; ruget & usmanalieva 2021). thus, it is not surprising that long-term migration experience is significantly associated with critical assessment of governance and civic activism (perez-armendariz & crow 2010; batista & vicente 2011; nikolova et al. 2017). returnees come back with new ideas and are likely to promote specific political objectives (li & mchale 2006). experience of migration may affect citizens’ opinions of conditions in their home country (whyte 2010) and often cause increase in accountability and improvement of political institutions (li & mchale 2006; spilimbergo 2009; batista & vicente 2011; beine & sekkat 2013; docquier et al. 2016; karadja & prawitz 2016; mercier 2016). electoral outcomes in origin countries may be affected through return migration or diaspora voting in foreign polling stations (fidrmuc & doyle 2007; pfutze 2012; chauvet & mercier 2014; barsbai et al. 2017). foreign education acquired in democratic destinations seems to promote democracy in home countries (spilimbergo 2009). lodigiani and salomone (2012) reveal that international migration to countries with higher female political empowerment significantly increases the parliamentary share of females in the origin countries. carlson and widaman (2002) found students who studied abroad for a year to be significantly more interested in international politics upon their return compared to a control group who did not study abroad. at the same time, there is evidence that international travel in some geographic context generates political skepticism (e.g. decker 2017 on middle eastern conflicts). long-term trips abroad make impact on people’s identity formation. interacting with a foreign culture may question or degrade the identity of the home country (savicki & cooley 2011) or strengthen supranational identity as opposed to a national one (king & ruiz-gelices 2003). regarding behavioural issues not directly linked to the question of (geo)politics but nevertheless important for domestic policy, migration experience may change, for instance, fertility behaviour in women returning to their native countries (lindstrom & saucedo 2002; bertoli & marchetta 2012). the effects of short-term trips on (geo)political preferences are far more vague. it is unlikely for someone who spent a few days in a foreign country to experience local social security standards or quality of political institutions. however, even short-term travellers to another country are exposed to different cultural environments, ways of living, and quotidian practices in destination countries. encountering people of different backgrounds increases tolerance and intercultural awareness (stitsworth 1989; yu & lee 2014). nevertheless, empirical evidence in favour of the impact of travelling abroad on cultural behaviours and general political awareness, as well as civic and (geo)political demands and preferences in home countries, is controversial. on the one hand, individuals with recent international travel experience are more interested, knowledgeable, and participatory in politics than individuals with no international experience and have different views on foreign policy (wood 2019). even after a short time abroad students had a greater intercultural awareness, better communication multicultural skills, and more personal development (chieffo & griffiths 2004; kitsantas 2004). tourism travels enhances crosscultural understanding, leading to enhanced tolerance, understanding, and a reduction of negative fennia 201(1) (2023) 27gnatiuk et al. stereotypes (aleshinloye et al. 2020). quite old but relevant study (pool 1958) asserts that international travel influences people, making them more open-minded and liberal in their views. on the other hand, some authors came to less strong or ambiguous conclusions. var and ap (1998) argued that mass tourism seldom generates strong intercultural relationships and reinforces stereotypic images between peoples of different nations, while nyaupane, teye, and paris (2008) found a lack of evidence supporting the notion that travel positively changes one’s attitudes. litvin and smith (2021) point out that those who travel internationally have strongly differentiated views from those who do not, but that these are neither necessarily more liberal nor conservative than those who have not travelled abroad. similarly, one more old but relevant seminal research revealed that foreign travel counteracts self-interest, thus leading to a convergence among different points of view (pool et al. 1956). nevertheless, recently, a growing body of literature focuses on tourism as a geopolitical framing, in particular, a role of tourism encounters in the production of geopolitical discourse and practice (mostafanezhad & norum 2016; gillen & mostafanezhad 2019). international tourism operates literally on the leading edge of globalisation by continually transferring consumer tastes, cultural practices, business people and capital across the globe (hazburn 2004). tourism, as a fluid event, has actively participated in the (re)production of spatial knowledge at various scales (sheller & urry 2006; king 2015). to a notable extent, it can provide embodied evidence to intensify or challenge the preexisting geographical imaginations of certain places or people (crouch et al. 2001). this conceptual approach is also very concerned about tourists as an independent agency that participates in or challenges existing geopolitical contexts via their own tourism and cultural experiences, including inside and outside the official government policymaking (agnew 2003; hannam 2013; an et al. 2020). with regard to our research topic, an and others (2020) performed an interesting discourse analysis of chinese tourist writings about africa on the popular chinese online tourist forum. the research founded that chinese tourists’ conceptions of africa are mainly built through five discursive perceptual frames. noteworthy, much tourist writing corresponds with the official chinese geopolitical narrative of china-africa relations; however, the authors found that some chinese tourists’ descriptions of africa fit uneasily into the official chinese geopolitical conceptions. such tourism-related geopolitical discourses are powerful instruments as they divide up the world and can lead to wars and conflicts over space and resources (o’tuathail 2002). consequently, governments have long used tourism as a means of spreading ‘propaganda’ directed at tourists, with such exposure likely to result in altered political attitudes of the traveller towards their own nation’s political system (e.g. richter 1983). and vice versa: authoritarian political regimes often practice restrictions of tourist trips to undesired destinations. for example, chinese outbound tourism has been relatively limited until recently by the chinese government explicitly because of geopolitical concerns (arlt 2006); the similar function was performed earlier by the iron wall between the western and socialist geopolitical blocks. regardless of the type of travel, substantial changes in geopolitical views and attitudes of the travellers are more expected when the origin and destination countries differ in terms of institutions, policies, or world views, id est when the informational shock is sufficiently important (berlinschi 2019). the impact of migration on the demand for political accountability in cape verde is higher for migrants to the united states (us) than for migrants to portugal (batista & vicente 2011); the effect of return migration on political participation in mali is higher for migration to non-african countries (chauvet & mercier 2014); the effect of migration on civic engagement in romania and bulgaria is higher for migration to the most civically engaged countries (nikolova et al. 2017); the correlation between political leaders’ migration experience and the evolution of democracy during their leadership is higher for migration from developing countries to high income oecd countries (mercier 2016). evidence that the effects of migration on home country politics are contingent upon the characteristics of destination countries can be found also in fidrmuc and doyle (2007), spilimbergo (2009), and barsbai and colleagues (2017). in view of this, it can be expected that visits to developed european countries will have a more noticeable effect on the geopolitical views of ukrainians than trips to former soviet countries, since the institutions, economic systems and world views present in ukraine are still relatively closer to those present in other former soviet countries although in the recent years are rapidly converging the european ones. 28 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper geopolitics and international mobility of ukrainians visa liberalization was undeniable advantage that virtually every citizen of ukraine could feel from deepening cooperation with the eu. according to the results of the national annual monitoring surveys, after the launch of the visa-free regime in 2017, only 25% of respondents took advantage of this opportunity, including 11% travelling for tourist purposes, 7% visiting relatives or friends, and 6% looking for work, while 76% of respondents did not take the opportunity to travel to europe without a visa (shulha 2020). the survey by the rating group ukraine (2021) reports similar figures: 9% of the respondents have travelled to europe many times, 21% several times, and 70% have never visited the eu. thus, it turns out that the vast majority of ukrainians, even after three years of visa liberalization with the eu, has no direct experience of being there. among those who used the visa-free regime, the vast majority visited the eu no more than once or twice in the last three years; a relatively small proportion of respondents visited the eu more than five times. according to the above data, the citizens of ukraine still mostly get an idea of the eu countries not from their own experience but rather from the media and personal communication (shulha 2020). people from the eastern regions of ukraine, bordering russia, are the least likely to visit the eu. as of february 2017, almost 20% of residents of the western part of ukraine had visited eu countries, while in the eastern part this figure reached only 2% (lb.ua 2017). at the same time, 2% of the respondents have travelled to the commonwealth of independent states (cis)1 countries many times, 11% several times, while 87% have never been there (rating group ukraine 2021). in particular, prior to 2014, russia was the primary destination for ukrainian labour migrants. in 2012, russia was by far the most popular destination for labour migrants from ukraine (43% of all ukrainians working abroad) but the kremlin’s seizure of crimea and its dealings in the donbas produced a sudden shift in ukrainian migration patterns toward the eu, especially poland (chukhnova 2020). thus, ukraine is no longer the main supplier of labour migrants to russia and dropped to third place after tajikistan and kazakhstan (pozniak 2021). in 2017, russia was the second most important destination for labour migrants from ukraine after poland (25% and 40% respectively) (state statistics service of ukraine 2017). as of mid-year 2020, 6.1 million migrants from ukraine resided abroad, and more than 53% of them resided in russia (international labour office 2017). the absolute volume of migration flows to russia remains impressive, for instance, in the first half of 2019, approximately 164,600 labour migrants and 13,700 students from ukraine entered russia (ukrajinska pravda 2019), which together constitutes 0.4% from the total population of ukraine. the same year, 21,609 students of ukrainian origin studied in russia (migration data portal 2022). in 2021, ukrainian labour migrants in russia accounted for 5.1% of total remittance inflow to ukraine (for comparison: poland 38.7%) (ibid.). russia and other cis countries remain the main travel destination for ukrainians from the east and south of the country, especially from the regions bordering russia (rating group ukraine 2021). over the past 20 years, the nature of international mobility of ukrainians has been essentially changed with growing role of circular and education migration, and ukrainian migrants have became more flexible and mobile (mezentsev & pidgrushnyi 2014). most ukrainians still have low spatial mobility both inside and outside the country. in particular, according to the 2021 survey, 16% of ukrainians have never left their community in the last five years, while circa 30% have visited another city or village in ukraine one or more times (rating group ukraine 2021). there are indications of a correlation between the international mobility and geopolitical attitudes of ukrainians. the 2005 survey provided evidence that experience of labour migration may change the geopolitical priorities of ukrainians. in particular, ukrainians with labour experience abroad, comparing with those earned at home, were more inclined to support relations with developed countries of the west (29.2% vs. 16.9%) and less inclined to develop primarily relations with russia (4.9% vs. 8.5%) or the cis countries (9.7 vs. 11.0%) (pribytkova 2006). the labour migrants, visited the foreign countries in search of earnings more than two times, appraise the establishment of relations with developed countries of the west more positive than other ukrainians (46.7% vs. 16.9%), support more often the ukraine joining the eu (66.7% vs. 46.1%), the perspectives of collaboration between ukraine and the international monetary fund (imf) (46.7%–50.0% vs. 33.9%) and the entry into nato fennia 201(1) (2023) 29gnatiuk et al. (20.0%–27.8% vs. 15.0%) (ibid.). unfortunately, these are aggregated data without distinction of separate migrant destinations. according to the recent 2021 survey, self-identifications of ukrainians correlate with their international mobility, in particular, visiting the eu or the cis countries. visits to eu positively correlate with feeling european: 5.5% of respondents who have visited the eu many times, 4.7% of respondents who have visited the eu several times, and 3.0% of respondents who have never visited the eu. a similar, although less significant correlation, was found for visiting cis countries and feeling soviet: 4.0% of respondents who have travelled to the cis countries many times, 3.3% of respondents who have visited the cis countries several times, and 2.9% of respondents who have never visited the cis countries (rating group ukraine 2021). case studies as geopolitical fault-line cities our case studies are three ukrainian cities: kharkiv (eastern part of the country, pop. ca. 1.4 million), dnipro (central-eastern part of the country, pop. ca. 1.0 million) and mariupol (south-eastern part of the country, pop. ca. 450,000). all population numbers are given for 2021, id est before the full-scale russian invasion into ukraine in 2022. the first two cities belong to the largest ukrainian metropolises and rank among the most significant industrial and cultural centres of the country. mariupol, before been destroyed by the russian army during the russo-ukrainian warfare in 2022, was the second largest city in the donetsk region. before 2022, all three cities clearly met the criteria of geopolitical fault-line cities (see gentile 2017). in particular, two of them (kharkiv and mariupol) are located in proximity of the russian border with all the ensuing consequences like intense cross-border ties, exposure to the informational space of the neighbouring country, relatively weak connections to the national centre of power, identity blurring, and, finally, absorbing the flows of internally displaced persons (idps) or refugees generated by the military actions during the russo-ukrainian hybrid warfare (gentile 2017). all three cities have significant ethnic russian minorities (app. 25% in kharkiv and dnipro and 45% in mariupol) and predominance of russian speakers (from app. 50% in dnipro up to app. 80% in mariupol) (state statistics committee of ukraine 2001). in terms of geopolitical preferences, before 2022, all these cities hosted significant non-pro-western contingents, if not outright pro-russian, that hold views incompatible with european vision for ukraine (gentile 2020a, 2020b). even in conditions of the continuing hybrid russo-ukrainian warfare in 2014–2022, pro-russian forces stably had majorities in the local councils, except for dnipro. furthermore, pro-western and pro-russian contingents were exposed to different truths portrayed within the russian and non-russian informational spaces (gentile 2017), as well as to multiple contested geopolitical and ethno-national narratives (zhurzhenko 2011; portnov & portnova 2015; zhurzhenko 2015; stebelsky 2018). all these factors contributed to the periodical activation of the fault-line between opposing population fractions, which was evidenced by the protests and rallies that took place in these cities after the revolution of dignity (gentile 2017; buckholz 2019; kutsenko 2020; nitsova 2021). at the same time, this fault line is formulated rather in political than in languageor ethnicity-based categories, although the factors of language and ethnicity are important for geopolitical preferences (kulyk 2011; portnov 2015a; kulyk 2019; kuzio 2019). logistic regression to analyse the survey data we use individual-level survey data on political opinions and migration experience. the survey (personal interviews) was held in dnipro and kharkiv in 2018, and in mariupol in 2020 (n=1254, 1258 and 1251, respectively, aged 18 years or older). the sample evenly covers all districts of the three cities and relies on a household-based sampling frame, when only one person was selected within each household. the response rates are 28% in dnipro, 36% in kharkiv and 30% in mariupol, taking into account all forms of non-response. the variables used in this particular study are identical across all three databases except for one question absent in the mariupol database but present in the two others. first, we give a brief statistical description of the intensity of visits by residents of the studied cities to certain destinations. this is important for understanding the significance of the potential travelling abroad effects on geopolitical preferences for the urban community as a whole. after that, we report 30 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper separate binary logistic regressions for each city to investigate whether travel abroad experience correlates with individual geopolitical preferences, controlling for relevant confounding factors. the use of logistic regression is widespread in studies of geopolitical preferences, in particular with a focus on ukraine (gentile 2015; sasse & lackner 2018; torres-adán 2021a). our dependent variables (dv) were designed to assess various aspects of pro-european (variables 1–5) and pro-soviet/pro-russian (variables 6–7) sentiments. the variables, together with respective survey questions and coding are presented in table 1. most of the variables are calculated both for natural cutting point (ncp) between agreement and disagreement and for confident agreement (ca) to single out respondents with the strongest geopolitical views. based on the extended literature (hrytsak 1998; wilson 2002; belitser 2003; kuzio 2022), we presumed a certain commonality between the pro-soviet and pro-russian sentiments. dependent variables 3 and 4, which reflect cultural attitudes, are nevertheless important for evaluation of the geopolitical preferences and were employed with a direct intent to explore the geopolitical attitudes rather than the cultural ones. russian propaganda, following the best traditions of the soviet propagandists, claims that ‘rotting’ western culture negatively influences the autochthonous culture and way of life of russian, ukrainian, and other slavic peoples, destroying their spiritual bonds. thus, attitudes to the western (in particular, european) cultural influences are indicative for individual geopolitical preferences. our independent (explanatory) variable is travel abroad status since 1991. the idea was to explore correlations between the respondents’ geopolitical preferences and background of visiting (1) european countries, (2) russia, and (3) both european countries and russia, comparing each time to the control group of respondents who have visited neither european countries nor russia, hereinafter referred also as non-travellers for brevity (see table 1). the visits were accounted without lower limit of duration: it could be both long-term mobility (e.g. work migration) and shortterm travels (e.g. tourist trips). also, the logistic regression models include demographic, socioeconomic, and sociocultural controls based on the previous research on the determinants of foreign policy and geopolitical preferences. demographic variables comprise gender and age in three groups. while gender is supposed to have no significant influence on geopolitical preferences, the support for a western geopolitical orientation is expected to be lower among older age cohorts (o’loughlin 2001; munro 2007; armandon 2013; gentile 2015; rating group ukraine 2021). socioeconomic variables include level of education, material standard of living, and occupation status. high socio-economic status and higher education is known to correlate with pro-western preferences on post-soviet space including ukraine (munro 2007; gentile 2015; torres-adán 2021a), russia (o’loughlin & talbot 2005) and moldova (torres-adán 2021b). our socio-cultural control is self-reported knowledge of the english language, being an indicator of the respondents’ potential direct exposure to the western information spaces, which is supported by the recent studies (gentile 2015; kovalska 2021). since geopolitical preferences before travelling abroad are not known from the survey, and the survey does not differentiate between the specific categories of migrants, the most important limitation of the research methodology lies in the fact that estimated regression coefficients are likely to capture two effects: (1) causal effect of travel abroad on political attitudes, and (2) reverse causality, whereby political attitudes determine travel abroad choices. it is known from the literature that political attitudes may impact the tourist destination preferences (kalmić 2014). facing the same problem, berlinschi (2019) employed identification strategy consisting in instrumenting individual migration with district-level migrant networks in eastern and western destinations eight years before the survey data was collected. focusing on three cities as case studies, we are deprived of the opportunity to carry out such a strategy. the literature indicates that destination choices of at least labour migrants from ukraine are motivated rather economically than politically (bidak 2011; bilan 2017; kabay 2019; nikolaiets et al. 2020), and the similar observation was made for migrants from moldova, czechia and poland (fidrmuc & doyle 2007; lücke et al. 2007) – an argument suggesting that at least for economic migrants the regression coefficients would reflect the effect of travel rather than the reverse causality. moreover, fidrmuc and doyle (2007) found little evidence that political attitudes of labour migrants are defined by self-selection with regard to either their pre-migration political attitudes. however, this consideration fennia 201(1) (2023) 31gnatiuk et al. variable question(s) coding of answers dependent variables (dv) dv 1.1: feeling european (ncp) do you feel european? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 1; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 1.2: feeling european (ca) do you feel european? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 0; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 2.1: belief that that ukraine should defend european values (ncp) do you agree that ukraine should defend european values? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 1; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 2.1: belief that that ukraine should defend european values (ca) do you agree that ukraine should defend european values? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 0; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 3.1: belief that europe positively influences the way of life in ukraine (ncp) do you agree that europe positively influences the way of life in ukraine? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 1; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 3.1: belief that europe positively influences the way of life in ukraine (ca) do you agree that europe positively influences the way of life in ukraine? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 0; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 4.1: belief that western europe negatively influences the culture in ukraine (ncp) do you agree that western europe negatively influences the culture in ukraine? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 1; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 4.2: belief that western europe negatively influences the culture in ukraine (ca) do you agree that western europe negatively influences the culture in ukraine? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 0; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 5: support for hypothetical eu/nato accession do you support ukraine’s ascension to nato and/or the eu? nato only = 1; eu only = 1; both nato and eu =1; no = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 6.1: feeling soviet (ncp) do you feel soviet? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 1; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 6.2: feeling soviet (ca) do you feel soviet? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 0; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 7.1: belief that the soviet period was positive for ukraine (ncp) do you agree that the soviet period was positive for ukraine? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 0; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 dv 7.2: belief that the soviet period was positive for ukraine (ca) do you agree that the soviet period was positive for ukraine? completely agree = 1; rather agree = 0; rather disagree = 0; completely disagree = 0; hard to say = 0; refusal to answer = 0 independent (exploratory) variable travel abroad status have you ever visited the following countries or regions after 1991 (for any reason): european countries? have you ever visited the following countries or regions after 1991 (for any reason): russian federation? visited neither european countries nor russian federation = 0 (reference group); not visited european countries but visited russian federation = 1; visited european countries but not visited russian federation = 2; visited both european countries and russian federation = 3 control variables cv 1. gender gender of the respondent male = 1; female = 0 cv 2. age how old are you? 18-39 = 0; 40-59 = 1; 60+ = 2 cv 3. education status what kind of completed education do you have? completed or uncompleted higher education = 1; otherwise = 0 cv 4. material standard of living how do you assess the financial situation of your household today? good or excellent = 1; otherwise = 0 (fivestep likert scale) cv 5. occupation status what is your main occupation? managers, professionals and supervisors = 1; otherwise = 0 cv 6. self-reported knowledge of english how well do you speak english? can at least communicate or better knowledge = 1; otherwise = 0 table 1. variables for logistic regression: survey questions and coding. ncp = natural cutting point; ca = confident agreement. 32 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper cannot be employed for other categories of travellers. also, labour migrants typically spend more time in countries of destination, and they belong to different socio-economic groups than leisure travellers. thus, it is not possible to draw conclusions about travellers in general based on research on labour migrants. in view of this, while presenting and discussing the research results, we basically talk about correlations between certain geopolitical attitudes and certain travel backgrounds, allowing the possibility of both direct and reverse causalities. framing correlations between travel abroad experiences and geopolitical attitudes scale and patterns of travelling abroad in case study cities table 2 displays the distribution of respondents in dnipro, kharkiv, and mariupol by their travel abroad status. surprisingly, kharkiv, being the largest of the three cities, has the largest share of nontravellers, while mariupol, the smallest of the three cities and the only of them without a status of a regional centre, has the smallest share of non-travellers. nevertheless, in all three cities, the share of non-travellers is quite big – from almost half in mariupol to three quarters in kharkiv. the rest of the population, constituting a fairly solid stratum (from almost 30% in kharkiv to more than 50% in mariupol), have experience of travelling to the countries of our interest. travel status dnipro kharkiv mariupol neither european countries nor russia 61.0 73.5 48.8 only russia 19.2 16.6 29.6 only european countries 7.6 5.3 4.9 both european countries and russia 12.2 4.6 16.7 table 2. distribution of the respondents by their travel abroad status. source: elaboration by the authors based on the survey results. in all three cities, russia is more popular travel destination than european countries. the share of inhabitants with an experience of visiting russia (from 21.2 in kharkiv to 46.3 in mariupol) is significantly higher in comparison with the national average (cf. rating group ukraine 2021). the share of inhabitants with an experience of visiting european countries in dnipro (19.8%) and mariupol (21.6%) generally corresponds to the national average (cf. shulha 2020; rating group ukraine 2021), but in kharkiv it is somewhat lagging behind (9.9%). another observation is that most of travellers to european countries have russia in their travel history as well. to summarise: (1) the effect of travel abroad on geopolitical preferences, if exists, should impact a large part of the population and should be more powerful, in the scale of the whole urban community, in dnipro and mariupol than in kharkiv; (2) final effect of travel to russia, compared to effect of travel to european countries, on the urban community, may be more important due to the numerical prevalence of the respective group of travellers. background of travelling abroad and pro-european attitudes baseline regression coefficients, presented in tables 3–7, despite some individual intercity variations, in general indicate that visiting european countries together with non-visiting russia is a good predictor of pro-european attitudes. in particular, statistically significant positive correlation is observed for visiting european countries and support for ukraine’s the eu/nato accession (odds coefficients ≈ 2.0–3.0). similar significant positive correlations are observed for self-identification with europe, belief that ukraine should defend european values (odds coefficients ≈ 1.5–3.3), assessment of the european influence on way of life in ukraine (odds coefficients ≈ 2.5–6.0). the attitude to the russian propaganda statement that western europe negatively influences the culture in ukraine has no statistically significant relationship with visiting european countries only. fennia 201(1) (2023) 33gnatiuk et al. positive correlation between the experience of visiting european countries and support for geopolitical and cultural ukraine’s integration to the eu may be explained by the direct exposure of the long-term travellers (e.g. labour migrants and students) to political, social, and cultural norms of the european countries (cf. fidrmuc & doyle 2007; beine & sekkat 2013; wood 2019). such travellers may compare quality of life, social security standards, and quality of political institutions in destination countries and in ukraine. as for short-term migrants (first of all, tourists), they are less likely to experience differences in the quality of social and political institutions of ukraine and the eu. nevertheless, during a few days or weeks of stay in the eu they with very own eyes may become convinced that the horrors of the ‘pernicious influences of european culture’ are just fabrications of russian propaganda. similar to the other global contexts, tourist trips to the eu may stipulate ukrainians to be more open-minded, to be more tolerant to the western culture in general or a specific european national culture in particular, to enhance cross-cultural understanding and to dispel pre-shaped stereotypes (yu & lee 2014; aleshinloye et al. 2020; litvin & smith 2021). the rethinking of geopolitical and cultural attitudes by the ukrainians with travel experience to the eu may consequently impact their electoral behaviour and political demands, for example a course to the eu/nato membership (cf. batista & vicente 2011). notably, similar effect was found for labour return migrants in moldova, a country geographically close to ukraine with similar dichotomy of geopolitical vectors (berlinschi 2019). visiting russia, providing no travel experience to european countries, in general, has negative correlation with pro-european geopolitical preferences. this correlation is weaker compared to the outlined above correlation with visiting european countries. in this point, our research generally reproduces the findings by berlinschi (2019) for moldova, where the effect on geopolitical attitudes of labour migration to the cis countries was significantly lower compared to the effect of labour migration to the eu countries. thus, on the one hand, our research supports the point that more table 3. binary logistic regression results (odds ratios). dv 1: feeling european. source: calculations by the authors based on the survey results. notes: odds coef. = exp(b); ncp = natural cutting point (agree); ca = confident agreement; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001. source: calculations by the authors based on the survey results. dnipro kharkiv mariupol ncp ca ncp ca ncp ca male (ref. female) 1.256 1.046 1.260 1.603 0.991 1.060 age 40–59 (ref. 18–39) 0.682* 0.692 0.526** 0.530 0.961 1.241 age 60+ (ref. 18–39) 0.378*** 0.874 0.442*** 0.492 0.528 1.234 higher education (ref. other) 1.128 1.789* 0.634** 2.210* 1.527* 2.325** english skills: can at least communicate (ref. other) 2.038*** 1.280 1.858** 2.061 2.053** 3.068** economy status: excellent or good (ref. other) 1.703** 1.135 1.898*** 0.343* 1.306 0.370 occupation: professional, manager or supervisor (ref. other) 0.931 1.239 0.878 0.513 1.402 0.802 foreign travel status: only russia (ref. non-travellers) 0.899 0.629 0.477* 0.775 0.414*** 0.265** foreign travel status: only european countries (ref. non-travellers) 2.016** 2.740** 2.410** 1.858 2.675** 2.929* foreign travel status: both russia and european countries (ref. non-travellers) 2.172*** 2.130** 2.494** 4.890*** 1.281 0.750 constant 0.365*** 0.058*** 0.370*** 0.038*** 0.196*** 0.030*** hosmer-lemeshow test (sig.) 0.407 0.805 0.142 0.845 0.761 0.321 nagelkerke r square 0.148 0.086 0.135 0.113 0.148 0.122 34 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper table 4. binary logistic regression results (odds ratios). dv 2: belief that that ukraine should defend european values. notes and source: same as in table 3 (see p. 11). dnipro kharkiv mariupol ncp ca ncp ca ncp ca male (ref. female) 0.951 1.143 0.998 1.085 1.216 1.091 age 40–59 (ref. 18–39) 0.804 0.898 1.022 1.184 0.902 0.844 age 60+ (ref. 18–39) 0.521*** 0.968 0.692 0.751 0.559** 0.788 higher education (ref. other) 1.012 1.461* 1.035 1.193 1.120 1.723* english skills: can at least communicate (ref. other) 1.763** 1.276 1.378 1.552 1.556* 1.219 economy status: excellent or good (ref. other) 1.755** 1.276 2.068*** 1.156 1.415 1.457 occupation: professional, manager or supervisor (ref. other) 0.722* 0.755 0.688* 0.514** 0.715* 0.899 foreign travel status: only russia (ref. non-travellers) 0.897 0.774 0.773 0.976 0.617** 0.397** foreign travel status: only european countries (ref. non-travellers) 1.723* 2.285** 3.349*** 2.570** 1.534 2.683** foreign travel status: both russia and european countries (ref. non-travellers) 1.597* 1.307 2.588** 4.573*** 0.835 0.886 constant 0.961 0.186*** 0.357*** 0.131*** 0.788 0.070*** hosmer-lemeshow test (sig.) 0.318 0.156 0.752 0.939 0.727 0.926 nagelkerke r square 0.080 0.048 0.088 0.068 0.057 0.066 table 5. binary logistic regression results (odds ratios). dv 3: belief that europe positively influences the way of life in ukraine. notes and sources: same as in table 3 (see p. 11). dnipro kharkiv mariupol ncp ca ncp ca ncp ca male (ref. female) 0.943 0.943 0.785 0.902 age 40–59 (ref. 18–39) 0.803 0.997 0.792 0.706 age 60+ (ref. 18–39) 0.552** 0.885 0.757 0.647 higher education (ref. other) 1.247 1.548* 1.314* 1.475* english skills: can at least communicate (ref. other) 1.571* 1.826** 2.022*** 1.924** economy status: excellent or good (ref. other) 1.539* 1.197 1.998*** 0.750 occupation: professional, manager or supervisor (ref. other) 0.963 0.631* 0.886 0.674 foreign travel status: only russia (ref. non-travellers) 1.134 0.727 1.054 2.181** foreign travel status: only european countries (ref. non-travellers) 2.551*** 1.828* 5.958*** 5.642*** foreign travel status: both russia and european countries (ref. non-travellers) 1.940** 1.400 3.370*** 5.482*** constant 0.659* 0.157*** 0.342*** 0.111*** hosmer-lemeshow test (sig.) 0.323 0.840 0.914 0.825 nagelkerke r square 0.100 0.060 0.142 0.123 fennia 201(1) (2023) 35gnatiuk et al. table 6. binary logistic regression results (odds ratios). dv 4: belief that western europe negatively influences the culture in ukraine notes and sources: same as in table 3 (see p. 11). dnipro kharkiv mariupol ncp ca ncp ca ncp ca male (ref. female) 0.868 0.762 1.033 0.838 1.067 0.733 age 40–59 (ref. 18–39) 1.650** 1.182 1.458* 1.725** 1.628** 1.917* age 60+ (ref. 18–39) 2.221*** 1.832* 1.351 2.151** 3.035*** 3.287*** higher education (ref. other) 0.685** 0.680* 1.100 0.841 0.803 0.990 english skills: can at least communicate (ref. other) 0.822 0.668 1.303 1.038 0.478** 0.734 economy status: excellent or good (ref. other) 0.955 0.803 0.290*** 0.295*** 1.163 0.671 occupation: professional, manager or supervisor (ref. other) 1.428* 1.288 1.387* 1.237 0.114 1.171 foreign travel status: only russia (ref. non-travellers) 1.147 1.751** 1.781*** 3.744*** 1.442* 1.706** foreign travel status: only european countries (ref. non-travellers) 0.668 0.827 0.930 1.219 0.752 1.335 foreign travel status: both russia and european countries (ref. non-travellers) 0.613* 1.285 0.779 1.247 0.906 0.922 constant 0.490*** 0.135*** 0.613* 0.169*** 0.705 0.083*** hosmer-lemeshow test (sig.) 0.829 0.886 0.095 0.115 0.145 0.189 nagelkerke r square 0.065 0.046 0.100 0.152 0.111 0.070 table 7. binary logistic regression results (odds ratios). dv 5: support for ukraine’s eu/ nato accession. notes: odds coef. = exp(b); * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001. source: calculations by the authors based on the survey results. dnipro kharkiv mariupol male (ref. female) 1.168 1.291 1.144 age 40–59 (ref. 18–39) 0.663** 0.660* 0.681 age 60+ (ref. 18–39) 0.378*** 0.561** 0.346*** higher education (ref. other) 1.198 1.237 1.230 english skills: can at least communicate (ref. other) 1.418 2.292*** 2.642*** economy status: excellent or good (ref. other) 1.750** 3.924*** 1.281 occupation: professional, manager or supervisor (ref. other) 0.648** 1.028 1.024 foreign travel status: only russia (ref. non-travellers) 1.016 0.490** 0.673 foreign travel status: only european countries (ref. non-travellers) 1.905** 3.798*** 2.075* foreign travel status: both russia and european countries (ref. non-travellers) 2.078*** 1.985* 2.758*** constant 0.971 0.271*** 0.267*** hosmer-lemeshow test (sig.) 0.705 0.011 0.053 nagelkerke r square 0.112 0.243 0.208 36 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper differences in terms of institutions, policies or world views between the origin and destination countries corresponds to more substantial impact changes in geopolitical views (cf. batista & vicente 2011; chauvet & mercier 2014; nikolova et al. 2017). also, in case of travel experience to russia, there are significant intercity differences in the correlation coefficients for the same variables. background of visiting russia significantly reduces the odds of being in favour of the eu/nato accession only in kharkiv (odds coefficient 0.49). the odds of feeling european are significantly reduced in kharkiv and mariupol (odds coefficients ≈ 0.4–0.5), but not in dnipro. travelling to russia only seems to reduce support for the statement that ukraine should defend european values, but this correlation is statistically significant only in mariupol. similarly, visiting russia apparently has no correlation with the assessment of the european impact of way of life in ukraine (except for confident agreement in kharkiv). at the same time, background of visiting russia seems to be a good predictor for agreement with a statement about the negative european influence on the culture in ukraine (with average odds coefficient ≈ 1.4–0.7, except for natural cutting point in dnipro, where the effect is statistically insignificant). it should be emphasised that russia has not been a popular tourist destination for ukrainians in recent decades. we can confidently assume that the majority of respondents visited russia as either labour migrants or due to family ties. thus, these should be people who spent in russia long time periods or at least visited russia many times. it is known that for most labour migrants from post-soviet countries to russia, including ukraine, appreciating their income earned in russia is the most salient aspect outweighing negative experiences, and their views of russia are generally positive (gerber & zavisca 2020). at the same time, the example of kyrgyz labour migrants shows that labour migrants to russia have nuanced, pragmatic pro-russian views: highly evaluating their earnings in russia, they disapprove its high levels of corruption and disregard for individual rights (ruget & usmanalieva 2021). nevertheless, russia definitely benefits from geopolitical remittances due to labour migration from the post-soviet space (gerber & zavisca 2020; ruget & usmanalieva 2021). furthermore, ukrainians spending long time periods in russia may be exposed to both ‘hard’ (media) and ‘soft’ (films, social media) russian propaganda disseminating negative image of the west. notably, russian anti-western propaganda targets primarily the western geopolitical alliances and western non-material culture, but leaves aside the brackets the material aspects of culture, including way of life. notably, the benefits of the western way of life seem to be quite acceptable for many people expressing nostalgia for soviet times, as well as the ‘russian world’ (for the discussion of the concept see laruelle 2015; suslov 2018) adherents. while most russians do dislike the west, many of them do practice western pragmatism in their everyday economic lives (guriev et al. 2008). the effect of bilateral travel experience on pro-european attitudes is similar to that of the travel experience to european countries only. this means that direct and/or reversal causal relationships between the geopolitical preferences and travelling to european countries in ukraine are more powerful compared with those between geopolitical preferences and travelling to russia. in some cases, these respondents with bilateral travel experience, who had the opportunity to directly compare the life in ukraine with both european countries and russia, show even greater commitment to ukraine’s integration into the european political and cultural space compared to the respondents having visited european countries only. in particular, such respondents expressed the highest level of support for ukraine’s accession to the eu/nato in dnipro and mariupol (odds coefficients ≈ 2.1–2.8), as well as have the highest level of feeling european in dnipro and kharkiv (odds coefficients ≈ 2.2–2.5). however, this is not a general trend, and in many cases this category of respondents shows less strong pro-european attitudes than respondents having visited european countries only. in mariupol, unlike dnirpo and kharkiv, we found no positive correlation between bilateral travel experience and feeling european, as well as support for the statement that ukraine should defend european values. our findings substantially differ from the results for moldova, where no significant difference with non-migrants was found for return migrants who have worked in both eastern and western destinations (berlinschi 2019). the likely reason for that is that we consider all types of mobility, including short-term travels. for example, for tourists, the difference in the quality of life in russia and fennia 201(1) (2023) 37gnatiuk et al. the eu could be striking, while for travel migrants the opportunity to maximise their earnings is the most important factor. anyway, the issue of double travel experience needs further empirical clarification for different categories of travelers. as for the control variables, the most powerful predictor of pro-european preferences is english language proficiency (cf. gentile 2015; kovalska 2021). first of all, this refers to the feeling european (odds coefficients ≈ 1.8–2.0), assessment of the european influence on the way of life (odds coefficients ≈ 1.6–2.0), support of the eu/nato accession, except for dnipro (odds coefficients ≈ 2.3–2.6), and belief that ukraine should defend european values, except for kharkiv (odds coefficients ≈ 1.6–1.8). excellent/good financial status of the household is also a good predictor of pro-european preferences in dnipro and kharkiv, but turned out to be irrelevant in mariupol. belonging to the younger age cohorts appears to be a strong predictor of pro-european attitudes, especially with regard to the support of the eu/nato accession, european self-identification, and attitudes to european cultural influences (cf. o’loughlin 2001; munro 2007; armandon 2013; gentile 2015). the correlation between higher education and pro-european preferences is rather positive than negative, but, according to the regression results, mostly insignificant, except for belief in europe’s positively influence on way of life in ukraine (odds coefficients ≈ 1.2–1.3). high social status (a role of manager or supervisor), in general, seems to be a weak predictor of pro-european attitudes, with certain inclination to be more negative predictor that a positive one. in particular, it has statistically significant negative correlation with belief that ukraine should defend european values (odds coefficients ≈ 0.7), as well as the support of the eu/nato accession in dnipro (odds coefficient = 0.6), but shows statistically significant positive correlation with belief that europe negatively influences culture in ukraine, except for mariupol (odds coefficients ≈ 1.4). sex/gender is expectably irrelevant for pro-european attitudes. thus, according to the employed analytical model, visiting european countries appears to be a powerful predictor of pro-european preferences along with english language proficiency, good financial status, and belonging to younger age groups. background of travelling abroad and pro-soviet sentiments the results of log-regression for indicators of pro-soviet sentiments are presented in tables 8–9. in kharkiv, background of visiting russia has statistically significant positive relationship with both indicators of pro-soviet sentiments: feeling soviet and considering the soviet period positive for ukraine (odds coefficients = 2.9 and 2.3 for ncp). in mariupol, positive correlation between visiting russia and pro-soviet sentiments is not so strong; moreover, we found statistically significant negative influence of travelling to russia on pro-soviet sentiments in case of confident agreement for both indicators. in dnipro, visiting russia is irrelevant for pro-soviet sentiments. these findings do not directly contradict to the results of national survey (rating group ukraine 2021), according to which the odds of feeling soviet are increased approximately 1.5 times for the cis countries visitors, but indicate that relationship between visiting russia and pro-soviet attitudes may depend on a specific city even within the south-eastern part of ukraine. in mariupol and dnipro, background of travel to european countries negatively correlates with feeling soviet, as well as with a belief that soviet period was positive for ukraine. in kharkiv, visiting european countries is not a reliable predictor for pro-soviet sentiments. the relationship between bilateral travel experience and individual pro-soviet sentiments is ambiguous and depends on a specific city or variable. in mariupol, there is no significant correlation for both indicators of pro-soviet attitudes for natural cutting point, but statistically significant negative correlations (odds coefficients ≈ 1.4) for confident agreement. at the same time, in kharkiv, bilateral travel experience is reliable predictor of feeling soviet and, with low statistical significance, predictor for belief that the soviet era was positive for ukraine. in dnipro, there are neither positive nor negative statistically significant correlations for both variables. according to regression models, the most powerful predictor of pro-soviet sentiments is belonging to the older age cohorts, especially for 60+ cohort (odds for natural cutting point in range from 9.3. to 25.1 for feeling soviet and from 4.2 to 12.0 for assessment of the soviet period), which corresponds to a large body of scholar literature (e.g. gentile 2015; zhuleniova 2020). other, but 38 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper table 8. binary logistic regression results (odds ratios). dv 6: feeling soviet. notes and source: same as in table 3 (see p. 11). dnipro kharkiv mariupol ncp ca ncp ca ncp ca male (ref. female) 0.870 1.051 0.766 0.670* 1.115 1.407* age 40–59 (ref. 18–39) 3.993*** 3.349*** 3.902*** 4.272*** 8.615*** 14.832*** age 60+ (ref. 18–39) 11.075*** 7.934*** 9.343*** 5.419*** 25.174*** 33.548*** higher education (ref. other) 0.928 1.350 0.528*** 0.901 0.905 0.954 english skills: can at least communicate (ref. other) 0.826 0.938 1.224 0.869 0.400*** 0.282*** economy status: excellent or good (ref. other) 0.644* 0.542* 0.801 0.474* 0.782 0.838 occupation: professional, manager or supervisor (ref. other) 0.956 0.520** 0.508*** 0.345*** 0.874 0.836 foreign travel status: only russia (ref. non-travellers) 1.241 1.142 2.780*** 1.889** 1.240 0.633** foreign travel status: only european countries (ref. non-travellers) 0.590 0.744 1.332 0.609 0.471* 0.552 foreign travel status: both russia and european countries (ref. non-travellers) 0.966 0.680 1.715 2.573* 0.852 0.407*** constant 0.185*** 0.067*** 0.338*** 0.097*** 0.234*** 0.071*** hosmer-lemeshow test (sig.) 0.142 0.941 0.731 0.555 0.779 0.587 nagelkerke r square 0.272 0.210 0.367 0.232 0.394 0.345 table 9. binary logistic regression results (odds ratios). dv 7: belief that the soviet period was positive for ukraine. notes and sources: same as in table 3 (see p. 11). dnipro kharkiv mariupol ncp ca ncp ca ncp ca male (ref. female) 0.940 1.043 0.942 0.781 1.202 1.079 age 40–59 (ref. 18–39) 2.362*** 2.232*** 3.026*** 2.314*** 4.657*** 9.587*** age 60+ (ref. 18–39) 5.792*** 6.549*** 4.241*** 2.685*** 11.968*** 17.034*** higher education (ref. other) 0.908 0.833 0.966 0.745* 0.952 0.998 english skills: can at least communicate (ref. other) 1.190 0.939 1.129 0.778 0.781 0.719 economy status: excellent or good (ref. other) 0.512*** 0.413*** 0.167*** 0.329*** 1.075 0.903 occupation: professional, manager or supervisor (ref. other) 1.112 0.899 1.158 0.675* 0.662 0.902 foreign travel status: only russia (ref. non-travellers) 0.954 0.946 2.304*** 1.930*** 1.536* 0.698** foreign travel status: only european countries (ref. non-travellers) 0.428*** 0.405** 1.582 1.345 0.863 0.479 foreign travel status: both russia and european countries (ref. non-travellers) 0.915 1.132 1.555 1.235 0.953 0.415*** constant 0.838 0.222*** 1.235 0.393*** 0.790 0.154 hosmer-lemeshow test (sig.) 0.383 0.238 0.159 0.249 0.505 0.672 nagelkerke r square 0.184 0.224 0.284 0.184 0.276 0.269 fennia 201(1) (2023) 39gnatiuk et al. much weaker, predictors of pro-soviet sentiments are bad economy status of the household (dnipro and kharkiv), prestige profession (for feeling soviet, in dnipro and kharkiv), lack of higher education (in kharkiv only), and low english skills (in mariupol only). nevertheless, we may add to conclusions by gentile (2015) that pro-soviet/pro-russian geopolitically oriented people in south-eastern ukraine are, on average, not only older, low educated and less fluent in english, but also more used to visit russia compared to european countries. taking into account the whole model, including control variables, we found that travel history has not so clear relationship with pro-soviet sentiments as it has with pro-european attitudes. as we can observe from the logistic regression model, age is the most powerful predictor of pro-soviet sentiments, and ukrainians with ‘soviet identity’ seem to keep attachment to certain soviet myths and symbols until their death (cf. wilson 2002 for so called soft soviets in ukraine). the practical implication of this finding is that although creating or breaking down barriers to international mobility of ukrainians (like visa-free travel euukraine regime since 2017) is a powerful factor facilitating or complicating the mental rapprochement of ukrainians with other european nations, it cannot substantially change the proportion of the ‘soft soviets’ in ukraine. (dis)similarities between the case study cities the positive correlation between background of travelling to european countries and pro-european attitudes is similar in all three studied cities. at the same time, the negative correlation between experience of travelling to russia and pro-european attitudes is more expressed in kharkiv and mariupol, but almost invisible in dnipro. the positive correlation between travelling to russia and prosoviet sentiments is most strong in kharkiv, somewhat weaker in mariupol, and almost imperceptible in dnipro. the negative relationship between travelling to european countries and pro-soviet sentiments is most evident in dnipro, less evident in mariupol and almost imperceptible in kharkiv. these differences of travelling abroad effects on geopolitical preferences may be explained by different economic and cultural background that defined different development trajectories of the cities with regard to ethnic identities and geopolitical attitudes. in particular, kharkiv, the first soviet capital of ukraine (l’heureux 2010), remained international and cosmopolitan city without the predominance of any national culture other than the widespread russian language (musiyezdov 2009). during the events of 2014 it stands “neither with europe nor with russia” (filippova & giuliano 2017, 274), the phenomenon evidences, inter alia, by unsuccessful attempt of establishing ‘kharkiv people’s republic’. on the contrary, dnipro, located far from the russian border compared to kharkiv, have rediscovered its ‘ukrainianness’ after the start of the russoukrainian hybrid warfare in 2014, and became known as an ‘outpost of ukraine’ (kupensky & andriushchenko 2022) and ‘the heart of ukraine’ (portnov 2015b). mariupol, temporarily controlled by the ‘donetsk people’s republic’ during the late spring months of 2014, and whose economy until the russian invasion in 2022 was dominated by the two large steelworks, was a typical company town of red directorship much dependent on the soviet industrial legacy (matsuzato 2018) – the circumstances that expectably put it closer to kharkiv than to dnipro in terms of dominating geopolitical preferences. notably, during 2014–2018, in kharkiv, among the people with soviet self-identification, there was a sharp decline of the share of people who identify themselves as rather soviet (so called ‘soft soviets’) with a simultaneous sluggish growth in share of people who uniquely identify themselves as soviet (so called ‘hard soviets’), while in dnipro, the situation is exactly the opposite. in other words, during the recent years of hybrid russo-ukrainian warfare, there was a structural ‘unsoftening’ and ‘unhardening’ of soviet identity in kharkiv and dnipro respectively (havryliuk & gnatiuk 2023). consequently, supposing at least partial direct causal effect of travelling abroad on geopolitical preferences, growing number of ‘hard soviet’ residents of kharkiv could have been more stable in their pro-soviet attitudes, which are easily nourished via visiting russia and difficult to shake via visiting the eu. on the other hand, geopolitical attitudes of the growing stratum of ‘soft soviets’ in dnipro could have been practically insensitive to visiting russia but easily affected by travelling to the west. mariupol stands somewhere halfway between these polar cases. 40 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper conclusions in geopolitical fault-line cities of the south-eastern ukraine, travel experience to european countries is a statistically significant predictor of pro-european geopolitical attitudes and, simultaneously, of weaker pro-soviet (and, consequently, pro-russian) sentiments. on the contrary, travel experience to russia correlates with lower support for european geopolitical and cultural integration, except for the assessment of the european way of life, and stronger pro-soviet sentiments, although the situation varies depending on a specific ukrainian city. these findings seem to capture two possible effects: (1) a causal effect of travel abroad, when ukrainians chose their geopolitical attitudes being exposed to foreign information flows, experiencing the foreign way of life and quality of institutions, and/or benefiting from economic and social remittances, and (2) a reverse causality, when ukrainians more open towards the west are more likely to travel to europe and ukrainians more nostalgic of soviet times are more likely to travel to russia. based on the research literature and sociological surveys addressing international mobilities both in ukraine and in other global contexts (pribytkova 2006; whyte 2010; decker 2017; berlinschi 2019), we may suggest the direct causal effect at least for long-term international mobility. the question whether short-term travellers are exposed to the similar direct causal effect remains open and needs further empirical clarification. based on the research literature addressing including short-term international mobilities (yu & lee 2014; wood 2019; aleshinoye et al. 2020; litvin & smith 2021), we may assume that ukrainian tourists travelling abroad are more open-minded and tolerant to the other cultures, and thus they may change their geopolitical attitudes under their tourist impressions, including dispelling of certain negative stereotypes about the certain country, cultural region or geopolitical block. of course, we cannot dismiss the possibility that a significant share of those long-term migrants chose their destination countries according to their pre-travel geopolitical preferences. the same may be true for short-term tourist trips (kalmić 2014), and there is evidence that tourists may reproduce their domestic cultural and geopolitical narratives about the certain destination places (an et al. 2020). nevertheless, first, there are indications from the literature (e.g. fidrmuc & doyle 2007; lücke et al. 2007; berlinschi 2019) that such a self-selection is not a relevant factor for labour migration from the post-socialist europe. second, the similarity between the geopolitical attitudes of our respondents who visited europe and those who visited both europe and russia may be explained exactly by the direct causal effect. namely, those ukrainians, who had a possibility to directly compare quality of life and institutions in europe, russia, and their homeland, could consciously make a choice for europe and, consequently, western geopolitical and cultural vector for ukraine. if we assume the simultaneous and more or less equal action of two causal mechanisms – both direct and reversal – then the result of the international travels will be the strengthening of both contradictory geopolitical opinions in the ukrainian society. in this way, elimination of the barriers for international mobility may paradoxically lead to strengthening of the existing societal divisions in geopolitically divided societies, similar to those of the geopolitical fault-line ukrainian cities. leaving a chance for such a scenario, we would like to note that the results of our and previous studies indicate, rather, a reverse trend, which is one more argument in favour of the advantage of the direct causal mechanism over the destination pre-selection. for ukrainian travellers from geopolitical fault-line cities, visiting russia is less important predictor of geopolitical preferences than visiting europe. this phenomenon may be explained by the larger difference of institutions, policies and standards of life between ukraine and the european countries than between ukraine and russia (cf. batista & vicente 2011; chauvet & mercier 2014; nikolova et al. 2017; berlinschi 2019). also, pro-russian views of labour migrants to russia are nuanced and pragmatic, reflecting both benefits and negative experiences (gerber & zavisca 2020; ruget & usmanalieva 2021). at the same time, visiting russia seems to be much more important predictor of geopolitical attitudes in ukraine compared to moldova (cf. berlinschi 2019), probably because the russian propaganda machine focuses primarily on ukrainians. while experience of travel abroad was found to be among the key predictors of the strength of proeuropean attitudes, it plays relatively modest role in shaping pro-soviet sentiments. for the latter, the factor of respondent’s age is much more important. it means that pro-european/pro-western attitudes fennia 201(1) (2023) 41gnatiuk et al. represent mostly pro-active, pressing, and conscious choice for ukrainians, while pro-soviet sentiments and soviet self-identification are more rigid elements of mental representations, which could be considered more as a spiritual habit, or just a statement of the fact that ukraine was a part of the soviet union. wilson (2002) conceptualised so called ‘soft soviets’ in ukraine as people that possess a residual attachment to many of the key myths and symbols of the soviet state and society; the soviet legacy has some ambiguous relation to their identity, but cannot be said to constitute it in full. the relationship between travel abroad experience and geopolitical preferences is similar in all three studied cities of south-eastern ukraine. certain differences are observed indicating that each city follows somewhat specific trajectory that may be explained by different institutional, economic and cultural background. that means that probable effects of travel abroad are not necessarily uniform in their nature and strength across the country. the empirical findings of this paper suggest that travel experience is substantially interrelated with geopolitical and cultural preferences of ukrainians, and direct causality here should be supposed at least to the certain extent. in view of this, migration policy should be considered as an effective tool for the eu to improve attitudes towards the european project in ukraine, as well as the other neighbouring countries, including those recently taking course on the integration with eu. in particular, visa-free regime between ukraine and the eu, adopted in 2017, plays extremely important role for ukraine’s geopolitical and cultural integration with eu and, speaking broadly, the west. consequently, recent massive run-out of ukrainians to the eu in the result of the russian invasion, being undoubtedly a tragic event, creates a powerful base for dispelling propaganda-driven myths related to geopolitics and culture and, in this way, contributes to institutional and cultural integration of ukrainian society into european civilisation project in the upcoming years. notes 1 cis, a commonwealth of independent states, established in 1991, includes all post-soviet states except for the baltic states, georgia (withdrew membership in 2008), and ukraine (formally ended its participation in cis statutory bodies in 2018). acknowledgements funding from the norwegian research council (norruss project 287267, “ukrainian geopolitical fault-line cities: urban identity, geopolitics and urban policy”) supported this work. the data collection effort was funded by the department of sociology and human geography at the university of oslo via a småforsk grant. references agnew, j. (2003) geopolitics: re-visioning world politics. routledge, london. aleshinloye, k. d., fu, x., ribeiro, m. a., woosnam, k. m. & tasci, a. d. (2020) the influence of place attachment on social distance. journal of travel research 59(5) 828–849. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287519863883 an, n., zhang, j. & wang, m. (2020) the everyday chinese framing of africa: a perspective of tourismgeopolitical encounter. geopolitics [online aug 30 2020] https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1807957 arlt, w. (2006) china’s outbound tourism. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203968161 armandon, e. (2013) popular assessments of ukraine’s relations with russia and the european union under yanukovych. demokratizatsiya 21(2) 289–308. barrington, l. w. (2002) examining rival theories of demographic influences on political support: the power of regional, ethnic, and linguistic divisions in ukraine. european journal of political research 41(4) 455–491. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.00019. barrington, l. w. & herron, e. s. (2004) one ukraine or many? regionalism in ukraine and its political consequences. nationalities papers 32(1) 53–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/0090599042000186179 barsbai, t., rapoport, h., steinmayr, a. & trebesch, c. (2017) the effect of labor migration on the diffusion of democracy: evidence from a former soviet republic. american economic journal: applied economics 9(3) 36–69. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20150517 https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287519863883 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1807957 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203968161 https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.00019 https://doi.org/10.1080/0090599042000186179 https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20150517 42 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper batista, a. & vicente, p. (2011) do migrants improve governance at home? evidence from a voting experiment. world bank economic review 25(1) 77–104. https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhr009 bbc russian (2022) ukraina vvodit vizovyi rezhim dlia grazhdan rossii 17.7.2022 <www.bbc.com/ russian/news-61798692>. 10.3.2023. beine, m. & sekkat, k. (2013) skilled migration and the transfer of institutional norms. iza journal of migration 2(1) 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1186/2193-9039-2-9 belitser, n. (2003) ukrainian, russian, and soviet identities in modern ukraine. in ukraine and the problem of identity: people, economy, society. conference of ukrainian scientific internship exchange program graduates in the usa, september 18–21, 124–142. lviv. <www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/ files/media/documents/publication/identity.pdf#page=124>. 10.3.2023. berlinschi, r. (2019) migration and geopolitical preferences. post-soviet affairs 35(2) 93–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2018.1548226 bertoli, s. & marchetta, f. (2012) bringing it all back home return migration and fertility choices. cerdi working papers e2012.2 [online feb 29 2012] http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2012994 bidak, v. (2011) mihratsijno-trudovi motyvatsiji nosijiv dukhovno-intelektualnoho potentsialu v rehionalnykh suspilnykh systemakh. rehionalna ekonomika 1 109–117. bilan, y. (2017) migration of the ukrainian population: economic, institutional and sociocultural factors. ubiquity press, london. https://doi.org/10.5334/bbg birch, s. (2000) interpreting the regional effect in ukrainian politics. europe–asia studies 52(6) 1017–1041. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668130050143815 buckholz, q. (2019) the dogs that didn’t bark. problems of post-communism 66(3) 151–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2017.1367256 carlson, j. s. & widaman, k. f. (2002) the effects of study abroad during college on attitudes toward other cultures. international journal of intercultural relations 12(1) 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/0147-1767(88)90003-x chauvet, l. & mercier, m. (2014) do return migrants transfer political norms to their origin countries? evidence from mali. journal of comparative economics 42(3) 630–651. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2014.01.001 chieffo, l. & griffiths, l. (2004) large-scale assessment of student attitudes after a short-term study abroad program. frontiers: the interdisciplinary journal of study abroad 10 165–177. https://doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v10i1.140 chukhnova, m. (2020) ukrainian labor migrants turn west. eurasianet 22.06.2020 <https://eurasianet. org/ukrainian-labor-migrants-turn-west>. 10.3.2023. crouch, d., aronsson, l. & wahlstrom, l. (2001) tourist encounters. tourist studies 1 (3) 253–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/146879760100100303 decker, k. (2017) ignorance is bliss: the impacts of international travel and education on political beliefs. independent study project (isp) collection 2529 [online jul 13 2017] <https://digitalcollections. sit.edu/isp_collection/2529>. 17.11.2021. docquier, f., lodigiani, e., rapoport, h. & schiff, m. (2016) emigration and democracy. journal of development economics 120 209–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2015.12.001 fidrmuc, j. & doyle, o. (2007) does where you live affect how you vote? an analysis of migrant voting behavior. in the second iza workshop: eu enlargement and the labor markets, bonn, germany, september 2007. <www.fidrmuc.net/research/emigrants.pdf>. 10.3.2023. filippova, o. & giuliano, e. (2017). ‘neither with europe nor with russia’: tracking views in kharkiv. visnyk of v.n. karazin kharkiv national university. series sociological studies of contemporary society: methodology, theory, methods 39 269–274. gentile, m. (2015) west-oriented in the east-oriented donbas: a political stratigraphy of geopolitical identity in luhansk, ukraine. post-soviet affairs 31(3) 201–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2014.995410 gentile, m. (2017) geopolitical fault-line cities. in pikulicka-wilczewska, a. & uehling, g. (eds.) migration and the ukraine crisis: a two-country perspective, 6–24. e-international relations, bristol. <www.e-ir. info/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/migration-and-the-ukraine-crisis-e-ir.pdf>. 17.11.2021. gentile, m. (2020a) diabolical suggestions: disinformation and the curious scale of nationalism in ukrainian geopolitical fault-line cities. geopolitics [online nov 1 2020] https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1830766 gentile, m. (2020b) the ‘elephant’ in mariupol: what geopolitical moods prevail in the city. vox ukraine. [online nov 23 2020] <voxukraine.org/en/the-elephant-in-mariupol/>. 17.11.2021. gerber, t. p. & zavisca, j. (2020) experiences in russia of kyrgyz and ukrainian labor migrants: ethnic hierarchies, geopolitical remittances, and the relevance of migration theory. post-soviet affairs 36(1) 61–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2019.1680040 https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhr009 http://www.bbc.com/russian/news-61798692 http://www.bbc.com/russian/news-61798692 https://doi.org/10.1186/2193-9039-2-9 http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/identity.pdf#page=124 http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/identity.pdf#page=124 https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2018.1548226 http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2012994 https://doi.org/10.5334/bbg https://doi.org/10.1080/09668130050143815 https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2017.1367256 https://doi.org/10.1016/0147-1767(88)90003-x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2014.01.001 https://doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v10i1.140 https://eurasianet.org/ukrainian-labor-migrants-turn-west https://eurasianet.org/ukrainian-labor-migrants-turn-west https://doi.org/10.1177/146879760100100303 https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/2529 https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/2529 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2015.12.001 http://www.fidrmuc.net/research/emigrants.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2014.995410 http://www.e-ir.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/migration-and-the-ukraine-crisis-e-ir.pdf http://www.e-ir.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/migration-and-the-ukraine-crisis-e-ir.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2020.1830766 http://voxukraine.org/en/the-elephant-in-mariupol/ https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2019.1680040 fennia 201(1) (2023) 43gnatiuk et al. gillen, j. & mostafanezhad, m. (2019) geopolitical encounters of tourism: a conceptual approach. annals of tourism research 75 70–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2018.12.015 guriev, s., trudolyubov, m. & tsyvinski, a. (2008) russian attitudes toward the west. in åslund, a. & kuchins, a. (eds.) the russia balance sheet 99–114. peterson institute for international economics. hannam, k. (2013) ‘shangri-la’ and the new ‘great game’: exploring tourism geopolitics between china and india. tourism planning & development 10(2) 178–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2013.789655 havryliuk, o. & gnatiuk, o. (2023) urban identities and (geo)political preferences in ukrainian geopolitical fault-line cities under russo-ukrainian hybrid war: do soviet identities matter? east/ west: journal of ukrainian studies [forthcoming]. hazburn, w. (2004) globalisation, reterritorialisation and the political economy of tourism development in the middle east. geopolitics 9(2) 310–341. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040490442881 helmus todd, c., bodine-baron, e., radin, a., magnuson, m., mendelsohn, j., marcellino, w., bega, a. & winkelman, z. (2018) russian social media influence. understanding russian propaganda in eastern europe. rand corporation, santa monica, california. https://doi.org/10.7249/rr2237 hrytsak, y. (1998) national identities in post-soviet ukraine: the case of lviv and donetsk. harvard ukrainian studies 22 263–281. international labour office (2017) short-term migrant workers: the case of ukraine. geneva. kabay, v. (2019) motyvatsija trudovoji mihratsiji naselennia ta mekhanizmy jiji rehuliuvannia v ukrajini. phd thesis. central ukrainian national technical university, kropyvnytskyi. kalmić, l. (2014) the influence of political attitudes on the tourist destination preferences: a case study. turisticko poslovanje 14 19–37. https://doi.org/10.5937/turpos1414019k karadja, m. & prawitz, e. (2016) exit, voice, and political change: evidence from swedish mass migration to the united states. ssrn [online nov 23 2020] https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2862368 king, v. t. (2015) encounters and mobilities: conceptual issues in tourism studies in southeast asia. sojourn: journal of social issues in southeast asia 30(2) 497–527. https://doi.org/10.1355/sj30-2f king, r. & ruiz-gelices, e. (2003) international student migration and the european ‘year abroad’: effects on european identity and subsequent migration behaviour. international journal of population geography 9(3) 229–252. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijpg.280 kitsantas, a. (2004) studying abroad: the role of college students’ goals on the development of crosscultural skills and global understanding. college student journal 38(3) 441–452. kovalska, o. (2021) determinants of individual support for european integration: the case of ukraine. baces working paper 3. pompeu fabra university, barcelona. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/47259 kulyk, v. (2011) language identity, linguistic diversity and political cleavages: evidence from ukraine. nations and nationalism 17(3) 627–648. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00493.x kulyk, v. (2016) national identity in ukraine: impact of euromaidan and the war. europe-asia studies 68(4) 588–608. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2016.1174980 kulyk, v. (2019) identity in transformation: russian-speakers in post-soviet ukraine. europe-asia studies 71(1) 156–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2017.1379054 kupensky, n. k. & andriushchenko, o. (2022) the outpost of ukraine: the role of dnipro in the war in the donbas. in kuzio, t., zhuk, s. i. & d’anieri, p. (eds.) ukraine’s outpost: dnipropetrovsk and the russian-ukrainian war, 107–143. e-international relations, bristol. <www.e-ir.info/publication/ ukraines-outpost-dnipropetrovsk-and-the-russian-ukrainian-war/>. 10.3.2023. kutsenko, d. (2020) experience of implementing decommunization laws in eastern ukraine: a kharkiv case. journal of geography, politics and society 10(3) 55–64. https://doi.org/10.26881/jpgs.2020.3.06 kuzio, t. (2019) russian stereotypes and myths of ukraine and ukrainians and why novorossiya failed. communist and post-communist studies 52(4) 297–309. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2019.10.007 kuzio, t. (2022) ‘eastern ukraine’ is no more: war and identity in post-euromaidan dnipropetrovsk. in kuzio, t., zhuk, s. i. & d’anieri, p. (eds.) ukraine’s outpost: dnipropetrovsk and the russianukrainian war, 28–64. e-international relations, bristol. <www.e-ir.info/publication/ukraines-outpostdnipropetrovsk-and-the-russian-ukrainian-war/>. 10.3.2023. laruelle, m. (2015) the ‘russian world’. russia’s soft power and geopolitical imagination. center on global interests, washington, dc. lb.ua (2017) bezviz: chy stane svit bilsh vidkrytym dlia ukrajintsiv? 10.4.2017 <lb.ua/ news/2017/04/10/363554_bezviz_chi_stane_svit_bilsh_vidkritim.html>. 10.11.2021. l’heureux, m.-a. (2010) cities after the fall of communism: reshaping cultural landscapes and european identity by john czaplicka, nida gelazis, blair a. ruble. the russian review (book reviews) 69(1) 178–179. https://doi.org/10.2307/20621207 li, x. & mchale, j. (2006) does brain drain lead to institutional gain? a cross-country empirical investigation. queen’s university, kingston, ontario. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2018.12.015 https://doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2013.789655 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650040490442881 https://doi.org/10.7249/rr2237 https://doi.org/10.5937/turpos1414019k https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2862368 https://doi.org/10.1355/sj30-2f https://doi.org/10.1002/ijpg.280 http://hdl.handle.net/10230/47259 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00493.x http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2016.1174980 https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2017.1379054 http://www.e-ir.info/publication/ukraines-outpost-dnipropetrovsk-and-the-russian-ukrainian-war/ http://www.e-ir.info/publication/ukraines-outpost-dnipropetrovsk-and-the-russian-ukrainian-war/ https://doi.org/10.26881/jpgs.2020.3.06 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2019.10.007 http://www.e-ir.info/publication/ukraines-outpost-dnipropetrovsk-and-the-russian-ukrainian-war/ http://www.e-ir.info/publication/ukraines-outpost-dnipropetrovsk-and-the-russian-ukrainian-war/ http://lb.ua/news/2017/04/10/363554_bezviz_chi_stane_svit_bilsh_vidkritim.html http://lb.ua/news/2017/04/10/363554_bezviz_chi_stane_svit_bilsh_vidkritim.html https://doi.org/10.2307/20621207 44 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper lindstrom, d. p. & saucedo, s. g. (2002) the short-and long-term effects of us migration experience on mexican women’s fertility. social forces 80(4) 1341–1368. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2002.0030 litvin, s. w. & smith, w. w. (2021) international travel and political views. international journal of tourism research 23(1) 106–109. https://doi.org/10.1002/jtr.2397 lodigiani, e. & salomone, s. (2012) migration-induced transfers of norms. the case of female political empowerment. université catholique de louvain, institut de recherches economiques et sociales (ires). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2214978 lücke, m., mahmoud, t. o. & pinger, p. (2007) patterns and trends of migration and remittances in moldova – the cbsaxa survey 2006. international organization for migration (iom), chisinau. matsuzato, k. (2018) the donbas war and politics in cities on the front: mariupol and kramatorsk. nationalities papers 46(6) 1008–1027. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2018.1480598 mercier, m. (2016) the return of the prodigal son: do return migrants make better leaders? journal of development economics 122 76–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.04.005 mezentsev, k. & pidgrushnyi, g. (2014) ukraine: stable outflow and changing nature. in erőss, á. & karácsonyi, d. (eds.) discovering migration between visegrad countries and eastern partners, 191–211. has rcaes geographical institute, budapest. migration data portal (2020) ukrainian migration overview 22.2.2023 <migrationdataportal.org/ ukraine/migration-overview>. 10.3.2023. milakovsky, b. (2018) ukrainians abroad: the economics and politics of labor migration. wilson centre 15.02.2018 <www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ukrainians-abroad-the-economics-and-politics-labormigration>. 11.3.2023. minakov, m. (2017) novorossiya and the transnationalism of unrecognized post-soviet nations. in beichelt, t. & worschech, s. (eds.) transnational ukraine? networks and ties that influence(d) contemporary ukraine, 65–88. ibidem verlag, stuttgart. minakov, m. (2019) post-soviet easter europe. achievement in post-soviet development in six eastern european nations, 1991–2020. ideology and politics 3(14) 171–193. <http://www.ideopol.org/wpcontent/uploads/2020/03/eng.-2019-3.-10.-minakov-fin-.pdf>. 10.3.2023. mostafanezhad, m. & norum, r. (2016) towards a geopolitics of tourism. research notes. annals of tourism research 61 213–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2016.08.003 mukomel, v. (2017) migration of ukrainians to russia in 2014–2015. in pikulicka-wilczewska, a. & uehling, g. (eds.) migration and the ukraine crisis: a two-country perspective, 105–115. e-international relations, bristol. <www.e-ir.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/migration-and-theukraine-crisis-e-ir.pdf>. 10.3.2023. munro, n. (2007) which way does ukraine face? popular orientations toward russia and western europe. problems of post-communism 54(6) 43–58. https://doi.org/10.2753/ppc1075-8216540604 musiyezdov, o. (2009) kharkivska identychnist: ujavlennia pro misto ta joho istoriju jak chynnyky identyfikatsiji. essay-urban. the online publication series of the centre for urban history of east central europe 5. <http://dspace.univer.kharkov.ua/bitstream/123456789/8939/2/musiyezdov_ukr_5. pdf>. 18.1.2023. nikolaiets, k., yasko, y. & nikolaiets, o. (2020) motyvatsijni chynnyky zovnishnioji trudovoji mihratsiji naselennia ukrajiny. ekonomika ta derzhava 10 34–38. https://doi.org/10.32702/2306-6806.2020.10.34 nikolova, m., roman, m. & zimmermann, k. f. (2017) left behind but doing good? civic engagement in two post-socialist countries. journal of comparative economics 45(3) 658–684. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2016.04.006 nitsova, s. (2021) why the difference? donbas, kharkiv and dnipropetrovsk after ukraine’s euromaidan revolution. europe-asia studies 73(10) 1832–1856. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2021.1912297 nyaupane, g. p., teye, v. & paris, c. (2008) innocents abroad: attitude change toward hosts. annals of tourism research 35(3) 650–667. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2008.03.002 o’loughlin, j. (2001) the regional factor in contemporary ukrainian politics: scale, place, space, or bogus effect? post-soviet geography and economics 42(1) 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/10889388.2001.10641161 o’loughlin, j. & talbot, p. (2005) where in the world is russia? geopolitical perceptions and preferences of ordinary russians. eurasian geography and economics 46(1) 23–50. https://doi.org/10.2747/1538-7216.46.1.23 osipian, a. l. & osipian, a. l. (2012) regional diversity and divided memories in ukraine: contested past as electoral resource, 2004–2010. east european politics and societies 26(3) 616–642. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325412447642 o’tuathail, g. (2002) post-cold war geopolitics: contrasting superpowers in a world of global dangers. in johnson, r. j., taylor, p. & watts m. (eds.) geographies of global change, 2nd ed. blackwell, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2002.0030 https://doi.org/10.1002/jtr.2397 https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2214978 https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2018.1480598 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2016.04.005 http://migrationdataportal.org/ukraine/migration-overview http://migrationdataportal.org/ukraine/migration-overview http://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ukrainians-abroad-the-economics-and-politics-labor-migration http://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ukrainians-abroad-the-economics-and-politics-labor-migration http://www.ideopol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/eng.-2019-3.-10.-minakov-fin-.pdf http://www.ideopol.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/eng.-2019-3.-10.-minakov-fin-.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2016.08.003 http://www.e-ir.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/migration-and-the-ukraine-crisis-e-ir.pdf http://www.e-ir.info/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/migration-and-the-ukraine-crisis-e-ir.pdf https://doi.org/10.2753/ppc1075-8216540604 http://dspace.univer.kharkov.ua/bitstream/123456789/8939/2/musiyezdov_ukr_5.pdf http://dspace.univer.kharkov.ua/bitstream/123456789/8939/2/musiyezdov_ukr_5.pdf https://doi.org/10.32702/2306-6806.2020.10.34 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2016.04.006 https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2021.1912297 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2008.03.002 https://doi.org/10.1080/10889388.2001.10641161 https://doi.org/10.2747/1538-7216.46.1.23 https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325412447642 fennia 201(1) (2023) 45gnatiuk et al. perez-armendariz, c. & crow, d. (2010) do migrants remit democracy? international migration, political beliefs, and behavior in mexico. comparative political studies 43(1) 119–148. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414009331733 pfutze, t. (2012) does migration promote democratization? evidence from the mexican transition. journal of comparative economics 40(2) 159–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2012.01.004 pool, i. d. s. (1958) what american travelers learn. the antioch review 18(4) 431–446. https://doi.org/10.2307/4610100 pool, i. d. s., keller, s. & bauer, r. a. (1956) the influence of foreign travel on political attitudes of american businessmen. the public opinion quarterly 20(1) 161–175. https://doi.org/10.1086/266605 portnov, a. (2015a) post-maidan europe and the new ukrainian studies. slavic review 74(4) 723–731. https://doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.74.4.723 portnov, a. (2015b) ‘the heart of ukraine’? dnipropetrovsk and the ukrainian revolution. in wilson, a. (ed.) what does ukraine think?, 62–70. european council of foreign relations. <ecfr.eu/publication/ what_does_ukraine_think3026/>. 10.3.2023. portnov, a. & portnova, t. (2015) the ‘imperial’ and the ‘cossack’ in the semiotics of ekaterinoslavdnipropetrovsk: the controversies of the foundation myth. in pilshchikov, i. (ed.) urban semiotics: the city as a cultural-historical phenomenon, 223–250. tlu press, tallinn. pozniak, о. v. (2021) ukrainian migrants in europe: situation depending on the region of stay. demography and social economy 2(44) 110–126. https://doi.org/10.15407/dse2021.02.110 pribytkova, i. (2006) transnational labour migration: ukrainian perspective. in iglicka, k. (ed.) the transnational security challenges and dilemmas for the european migration policy, vol. 5/06. center for international relations, warsaw. radio svoboda (2017) ‘bezviz nash’. zalyshylysia formalnosti 17.5.2017 <www.radiosvoboda. org/a/28493883.html>. 11.1.2020. rating group ukraine (2021) pokolinnia nezalezhnosti: tsinnosti ta motyvatsiji. resultaty sotsiolohichnoho doslidzhennia 20 lypnia – 9 serpnia 2021 roku. 20.8.2021. <ratinggroup.ua/files/ratinggroup/reg_files/ rg_generation_of_independence_082021.pdf>. 18.11.2021. richter, l. k. (1983) tourism politics and political science: a case of not so benign neglect. annals of tourism research 10(3) 313–335. https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(83)90060-9 ruget, v. & usmanalieva, b. (2021) migration and soft power: how kyrgyz labor migrants view russia. communist and post-communist studies 54(4) 98–116. https://doi.org/10.1525/j.postcomstud.2021.54.4.98 sasse, g. & lackner, a. (2018) war and identity: the case of the donbas in ukraine. post-soviet affairs 34(2-3) 139–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2018.1452209 savicki, v. & cooley, e. (2011) american identity in study abroad students: contrasts, changes, correlates. journal of college student development 52(3) 339–349. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2011.0035 sheller, m. & urry, j. (2006) the new mobilities paradigm. environment & planning a 38(2) 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268 shulha, o. (2020) geopolitical preferences of ukraine’s population: a critical attitude towards the ‘noalternative’ line. ukrainian society: monitoring of social change 7(21) 42–50. spilimbergo, a. (2009) democracy and foreign education. american economic review 99(1) 528–543. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.99.1.528 state statistics committee of ukraine (2001) all-ukrainian population census'2001 data. <2001. ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/nationality/>. 17.11.2021. state statistics service of ukraine (2017) zovnishnia trudova mihratsiia naselennia (za rezultatamy modulnoho vybirkovoho opytuvannia). statystychnyi biuleten. kyiv. stebelsky, i. (2018) a tale of two regions: geopolitics, identities, narratives, and conflict in kharkiv and the donbas. eurasian geography and economics 59(1) 28–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2018.1428904 stitsworth, m. h. (1989) personality changes associated with a sojourn in japan. the journal of social psychology 129(2) 213–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1989.9711722 suslov, m. (2018) ‘russian world’ concept: post-soviet geopolitical ideology and the logic of ‘spheres of influence’. geopolitics 23(2) 330–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1407921 torres-adán, á. (2021a) still winners and losers? studying public opinion’s geopolitical preferences in the association agreement countries (georgia, moldova, and ukraine). post-soviet affairs 37(4) 362–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2021.1924041 torres-adán, á. (2021b) institutional performance and party cues: their influence on individual geopolitical preferences. the case of moldova (2012–2019). problems of post-communism 70(1) 107-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1963779 ukrajinska pravda (2019) fsb: iz ukrajiny do rf za pivroku pryjikhaly 178 tysiach zarobitchan i studentiv. 19.8.2019 <www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/08/19/7223910/>. 11.1.2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414009331733 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2012.01.004 https://doi.org/10.2307/4610100 https://doi.org/10.1086/266605 https://doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.74.4.723 http://ecfr.eu/publication/what_does_ukraine_think3026/ http://ecfr.eu/publication/what_does_ukraine_think3026/ https://doi.org/10.15407/dse2021.02.110 http://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/28493883.html http://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/28493883.html http://ratinggroup.ua/files/ratinggroup/reg_files/rg_generation_of_independence_082021.pdf http://ratinggroup.ua/files/ratinggroup/reg_files/rg_generation_of_independence_082021.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(83)90060-9 https://doi.org/10.1525/j.postcomstud.2021.54.4.98 https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2018.1452209 https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2011.0035 https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268 https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.99.1.528 http://ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/results/general/nationality/ https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2018.1428904 https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1989.9711722 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2017.1407921 https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586x.2021.1924041 https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1963779 http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/08/19/7223910/ 46 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper u.s. department of state (2020) pillars of russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem. gec special report: august 2020. <www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/pillars-ofrussia%e2%80%99s-disinformation-and-propaganda-ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf> 17.11.2021. var, t. & ap, j. (1998) tourism and world peace. in theobald, w.f. (ed.) global tourism, 2nd ed., 44–57. butterworth-heinemann, oxford. whyte, m. (2010) myth of the social volcano: perceptions of inequality and distributive injustice in contemporary china. stanford university press, stanford, california. wilson, a. (2002) elements of a theory of ukrainian ethno-national identities. nations and nationalism 8(1) 31–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8219.00037 wood, b. l. (2019) the effect of travel on political behavior and foreign policy opinions. washington state university, pullman, washington. yu, j. & lee, t. j. (2014) impact of tourists’ intercultural interactions. journal of travel research 53(2) 225–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287513496467 zhuleniova, o. (2020) local, national and other identities among ukrainians: changes during the covid-19 pandemic. ukrainian society: monitoring of social change 7(21) 349–358. zhurzhenko, t. (2011) ‘capital of despair’ – holodomor memory and political conflicts in kharkiv after the orange revolution. east european politics & societies 25(3) 597–639. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325410387646 zhurzhenko, t. (2015) the fifth kharkiv. new eastern europe xvii (3–4) 30–37. http://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/pillars-of-russia%e2%80%99s-disinformation-and-propaganda-ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf http://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/pillars-of-russia%e2%80%99s-disinformation-and-propaganda-ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8219.00037 https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287513496467 https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325410387646 the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland – commentary to huttunen and albrecht urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa108085 doi: 10.11143/fennia.108085 reflections the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland – commentary to huttunen and albrecht arita holmberg holmberg, a. (2021) the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland – commentary to huttunen and albrecht. fennia 199(1) 144–146. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.108085 this is a commentary to the article “the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland” by janette huttunen and eerika albrecht. in the piece i reflect on the analysis and results of this interesting research, focusing in particular on adult’s depoliticization of children's protest and the potential collective social and political impact of the fridays for future movement for youth. keywords: children, climate protest, adult, fridays for future arita holmberg (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0389-6095), swedish defence university, department for security, strategy and leadership, box 27805, 115 93 stockholm, sweden. e-mail: arita.holmberg@fhs.se the article “the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland” by huttunen and albrecht (2021) constitutes an important and timely contribution to the growing amount of literature that address the global youth social movement concerned with the climate crisis. their analysis of the framing of children’s and youth protests through the lens of environmental citizenship raises a number of points that should be further addressed in future research. the depoliticization by adults of children’s political engagement, revealed by the analysis provided by huttunen and albrecht, is one important matter for understanding the development of environmental citizenship. connected to this issue is the broader question of resistance towards environmental awareness and the sustainability efforts that is spurred by the climate crisis entering the political agenda. much more critical research needs to be directed at scrutinizing this resistance. important efforts have already been made by hultman and others (see for instance hultman 2017), but huttunen and albrecht (2021) research brings an additional dimension to previous work. in connection to the first point mentioned above – on the depoliticization of children’s protest, it is interesting to reflect on the fact that it has been an active strategy of many western countries to educate children on sustainability (corner et al. 2015; barthe et al. 2018; olsson 2018). this has been conducted in much the same fashion as development aid for decades, targeting children and the young generation with certain information and ideals in order to achieve long term change and make children educate their families. the result is very much what we have been observing with the © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 145arita holmbergfennia 199(1) (2021) youth protests in recent years – educated children advocating for social and political change (holmberg & alvinius 2020). it is a prolongation of the strategy to award children knowledge in this area. however, the implications for the social and political dynamic in families, societies and political arenas are under researched. this is where huttunen and albrecht results become so very interesting, and allow us to scrutinize the marginalized role that children and youth are awarded in relation to the most important issue of our time. as the authors note, “…young people are not only passively learning to become environmental citizens; they are also shaping environmental citizenship through their own activity.” (huttunen & albrecht 2021, 55). given the inherent paradox between the strategy to educate children, and the social notion of childhood (limiting their agency) that characterizes western democracies (garlen 2019), it is not surprising that we note a reluctance towards accepting children’s protest and political engagement. however, what is problematic is that also the supportive adult voices may contribute to depoliticizing children’s activism. this testifies to the enormous difficulties associated with the questioning of the social order and with trying to think differently about the politics needed in the anthropocene (dryzek & pickering 2019). given the challenges of accepting and allowing children to speak (and to listen when they speak), the extent of the difficulties associated with incorporating the perspectives of nature and non-human animals becomes apparent (carter & charles 2018; fox & alldred 2020). this is a major future challenge in face of the climate crisis, environmental citizenship and life in the anthropocene. the article also inspires thought on the collective, social and emotional dimension of environmental citizenship. huttunen and albrecht (2021, 56) write “despite the fff movement being a youth-centred movement – by the young, for the young – an adult voice is dominant in the discussions surrounding the movement. for the young participants in the fff movement, this experience has shaped their identity, their emergence as active citizens and their perceptions of active citizenship.” previous research has addressed the social and emotional impact of children’s awareness of the climate crisis (green 2017; compare also norgaard & reed 2017). the impact of the fridays for future movement may well add a collective dimension to this experience. in this context, it becomes relevant to talk about children as a climate precariat, suffering from shared vulnerabilities in relation to their security, perceptions of temporality and identity (holmberg & alvinius 2021). it is likely that we have only caught a first glimpse of the collective social and political force of children’s and youth engagement in relation to the climate crisis. references barthe, s., belton, s., raymond, c. m. & giusti, m. (2018) fostering children’s connection to nature through authentic situations: the case of saving salamanders at school. frontiers in psychology 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00928 carter, b. & charles, n. (2018) the animal challenge to sociology. european journal of social theory 21(1) 79–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431016681305 corner, a., roberts, o., chiari, s., völler, s., mayrhuber, e. s., mandl, s. & monson, k. (2015) how do young people engage with climate change? the role of knowledge, values, message framing, and trusted communicators. wires climate change 6(5) 523–534. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.353 dryzek, j. s. & pickering, j. (2019) the politics of the anthropocene. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809616.001.0001 fox, n. j. & alldred, p. (2020) sustainability, feminist posthumanism and the unusual capacities of (post) humans. environmental sociology 6(2) 121–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2019.1704480 garlen, j. (2019) interrogating innocence: “childhood” as exclusionary social practice. childhood 26(1) 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218811484 green, m. (2017) ‘if there’s no sustainability our future will get wrecked’: exploring children’s perspectives of sustainability. childhood 24(2) 151–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568216649672 holmberg, a. & alvinius, a. (2020) children’s protest in relation to the climate emergency: a qualitative study on a new form of resistance promoting political and social change. childhood 27(1) 78–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219879970 holmberg, a. & alvinius, a. (2021) children as a new climate precariat: a conceptual proposition. current sociology [online jan 4 2021] https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120975461 146 reflections fennia 199(1) (2021) hultman, m. (2017) natures of masculinities: conceptualising industrial, ecomodern and ecological masculinities. in buckingham, s. & le mason, v. (eds.) understanding climate change through gender relations, 107–123. routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315661605-6 huttunen, j. & albrecht, e. (2021) the framing of environmental citizenship and youth participation in the fridays for future movement in finland. fennia 199(1) 46–60. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.102480 norgaard, k. m. & reed, r. (2017) emotional impacts of environmental decline: what can native cosmologies teach sociology about emotions and environmental justice? theory and society 46(6) 463–495. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9302-6 olsson, d. (2018) student sustainability consciousness: investigating effects of education for sustainable development in sweden and beyond. dissertation, department for environment and life sciences, karlstad university, sweden. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1257928/fulltext02.pdf “freedom is a treasure that only those who lose it can know”: a spatiotemporal exploration of 22 iraqi women’s interlegalities urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa120307 doi: 10.11143/fennia.120307 “freedom is a treasure that only those who lose it can know”: a spatiotemporal exploration of 22 iraqi women’s interlegalities katri gadd and faleha ubeis gadd, k. & ubeis, f. (2023) “freedom is a treasure that only those who lose it can know”: a spatiotemporal exploration of 22 iraqi women’s interlegalities. fennia 201(1) 79–93. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120307 in this article, we discuss the spatiotemporal interlegalities of 22 women living in iraq, understood as an emerging legal landscape characterised by legal and normative entanglements rather than parallel systems of laws and morals. iraqi women are situated at the intersections of the coexisting legal spaces and stratifications of various scales and multiple normative orders that have been deeply embedded in iraqi religious and tribal traditions throughout time. it is at these intersections that experiences of non-freedom and struggles for freedom are intimately felt and possible contradictions among the multiple legal spaces and normative orders encountered. herein, we assess women’s opportunities to negotiate the boundaries of their spaces, their abilities to govern those spaces, and the constraints they encounter on their routes to freedom. we used a map metaphor to elucidate the women’s processes for finding their way. women’s freedom in the iraqi context is complex, indicative of multi-layered processes of negotiation within the legally pluralistic landscape. the concept of interlegalities is a useful tool for conceptualising the multifaceted interconnections in the legal landscape of iraqi women. the middle east legal geography has not been widely examined, but the special characteristics of the iraqi context regarding the interplay among legal spaces and normative orders are essential for contributing to legal geography discussions, as some theoretical premises are unsuitable for application to contexts with pluralist legal systems that lack democratic traditions. keywords: interlegalities, rights, spacetimes, women, iraq katri gadd (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3874-2352), institute for human rights, åbo akademi university, finland. e-mail: katri.gadd@uef.fi faleha ubeis, sabisk for consultancy and marketing, netherlands. e-mail: faleha@sabisk.com © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120307 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3874-2352 mailto:katri.gadd@uef.fi mailto:faleha@sabisk.com 80 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper introduction legal geographic researchers have recently shown increasing interest in how individuals’ subjective experiences and meanings are created in continuous interactions with the world and how they transform individuals’ actions (delaney 2010; bennet 2018). in this article, we discuss the subjective experiences of freedom among 22 iraqi women living in iraq. our previous research with the same iraqi women discovered what women’s rights meant to these women and revealed that the one they saw as most important was overall freedom (gadd & ubeis 2021). freedom for our study participants had multiple meanings. however, common to all their conceptualisations was that freedom means the absence of constraints on women’s actions. these constraints can be imposed by other people but also by an increasing workload due to climate change. herein, we address the commonly stressed need for legal geographic research to move beyond positive law and the elucidation of associated rights to acknowledge women’s particular roles in society and the realities of their lives (cuomo & brickell 2019), emphasising embodied, incorporated discourses of rights, such as freedom. comprehensive research has been conducted on iraqi women’s situations. such distinguished scholars as al-ali (2007), ali (2018), efrati (2012), and jones-gailani (2020) have examined multiple aspects of iraqi women’s lives from the times of monarchy to the present day, including freedom. conceptions of freedom have varied at different times but have always been relentlessly transformed by women’s subjective situations and the social and political climate, and memory making. the premise in legal geography is that the body is the entity through which to understand different aspects of the world where the geopolitical is intimately lived (mountz 2013). the safety of the body is considered “the finest scale of geopolitical space” (hyndman 2001, 216). however, sociolegal life does not distinguish between legal spaces on different scales. rather, the scales, from embodied to global, intertwine in different ways. the concept of interlegality, used by scholars such as proux (2005), tønnessen (2011), and van ingen and peeters (2014) to refer to an emerging legal landscape – a field characterised by legal and normative entanglements rather than parallel systems of laws and morals (tschalaer 2012) – provided a useful tool for illustrating the legal space(s) within which the women who participated in this research lived. iraqi women are situated at the intersections of stratified, coexisting legal spaces of various scales and multiple legal/normative orders deeply embedded in religious and tribal traditions upheld throughout time. it is at those intersections that experiences of non-freedom and struggles for freedom are intimately felt and possible contradictions among the multiple legal spaces and normative orders encountered. legal rights are an essential component of women’s everyday lives in iraq, but so are the daily battles over their bodies in homes, on the streets, and in the public discourse more generally. in this article, we map iraqi women’s legal spaces and interlegalities, scaling or zooming in on 22 examples, although they may not represent iraqi women more widely. the spatialisation of the meanings of these (mental) maps emerged from the minds of the individuals who participated in this research. through this mapping, we filter away detailed descriptions of macro-economics, large-scale geopolitical elements, and/or climate change, for instance, but acknowledge their critical impact on iraqi women’s lives. we assess women’s opportunities to negotiate the boundaries of their own spaces, their abilities to govern those spaces, and the possible constraints they encounter, which are difficult to negotiate. we conceptualise the negotiations as maps with potential routes to freedom to govern one’s own space. by a woman’s own space, we mean her immediate surroundings, including her body and mind. by governing one’s own space, we refer to the ability of women to determine what they do, what they are or can be, with whom they associate, how they can look, and what they can know, think, or believe. we illustrate the (gendered) power dynamics of certain laws and norms and the intimate and everyday manifestations and contestations of rights on the finest scale of geopolitical space: women’s bodies and their own spaces. this is an aspect that has not received adequate attention in legal geographical analyses (brickell & cuomo 2019), despite the work of eminent scholars such as al-ali (2007), efrati (2012), ahmed (2014), ali (2018), and saliba (2019), to mention a few. moreover, the question of how women can disrupt historical religious authority and reconceptualise understandings of rights is an important topic today (doorn-harder 2006; frisk 2009; basarundin 2010, 2013). using fennia 201(1) (2023) 81katri gadd & faleha ubeis the map metaphor, we discuss how the women in this study challenged and navigated interlegalities and patriarchal discourses to transform and broaden female spaces for autonomy and to increase their freedom. furthermore, although legal geography has not been widely applied to the middle east, it offers valuable insights into how spatiotemporal interlegalities affect lived experiences. moreover, the special characteristics of the iraqi context regarding the interplay of legal spaces and normative orders are essential contributions to discussions on legal geography, as some theoretical premises are unsuitable for application to pluralist legal systems that lack democratic traditions. the upcoming sections cover the following: first, we present the theoretical framework, situating our work within current legal geography discussions. second, we discuss the methods we used to produce and analyse the data for this study. third, we discuss normative orders of legal spaces for iraqi women, highlighting their prevailing interlegalities. fourth, we delve into the ways in which women negotiate the boundaries of their (legal) spaces. we map the routes through which women try to navigate towards overall freedom. however, women encounter some non-negotiable barriers to their progress, which we discuss in the last empirical section. legal geography: the interlegalities of 22 iraqi women one of the underpinnings of legal geography is that individuals are born into malleable social structures and organisations that are full of spatiotemporal constructions of laws and norms by which people are socialised (von benda-beckmann & von benda-beckmann 2014). by and within these constructions, people live and act/react. individuals move in spaces and abide by the associated laws and norms ‘automatically’, often without conscious realisation, by following what they have learned in different spatiotemporal settings over time (gadd 2016; tedeschi 2020). space-time is an active part of individuals’ lives (massey 2005; philippopoulos-mihalopoulos 2015; shubin 2015), and legal geography provides analytical tools for investigating sociolegal phenomena in space-time. laws and their meanings are created through continuous interactions with the world, which transform individuals’ actions (delaney 2010; bennet 2018). in legal geography, the body is seen as the entity through which to understand the world with its different scales and where the geopolitical is intimately lived (mountz 2013). the body is “the site where the geopolitical is produced and known” (smith 2012, 1518), and the safety of the body is considered “the finest scale of geopolitical space” (hyndman 2001, 216). law is incorporated into the body, which signifies those laws on and through the body (butler 1990). the body is the most intimate space possible, and escaping from it is impossible (al-khayyat 1990). geographers use maps as representations of the realities on the ground. maps can reveal the topographical qualities of a given spatial area at a given time. thematic maps can also portray certain elements or properties in a specific geographic area. furthermore, they can reveal changes in the occurrence of an element over time. for example, we have maps for navigation to facilitate safe sailing free of shipwrecks. depending on the scale of the map, the mapmaker needs to decide what information to include in the map. mapmaking always involves compromises. depending on what the mapmaker wants to show, he or she decides what to include. consequently, maps largely concern communication. herein, we aim to communicate the different dimensions of iraqi women’s legalnormative spaces in the form of mental maps. a mental map, rather than being an object, is a theoretical construct not observable in its original repository (the human brain) but accessible to scrutiny only when reified via behavioural, oral, textual, or graphical acts (götz & holmén 2018). however, by elucidating oral, textual, and behavioural acts, mental maps can be imagined. women occupy multiple and often contradictory social positions (zubair & zubair 2017), which transform their perceptions of ‘how-to-be-in-the-world’ and the legal and moral orders to follow. subjectivity and identity are formed within a set of power relations and reflect a continuous process of negotiating a particular way of being in the world (basarundin 2013). a legal geographic perspective holds that women’s roles and status (at any stage of historical development) reflect historical, social, and cultural circumstances, including class and gender systems (keddie 2007). the orders to follow within such varied roles are formed/transformed by, for instance, the conditions of space-based 82 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper patriarchy and several variables pertaining to the overall sociopolitical context, women’s levels of education, economic and social statuses, geographic origins, employment opportunities (with or without a salary), marital statuses (sadiqi 2016). women embody these variables and transform interlegalities in their bodies (van ingen & peeters 2014). the bodies incorporating the law are dynamic and changing: “a person’s identity takes place in the legal spaces that flow and connect” (braidotti 2002, 2). even the smallest acts in any legal space are, to an extent, controlled, sometimes in an almost invisible way (philippopoulos-mihalopoulos 2015), by multiple, often contradicting legal-moralist orders learned over time. legal spaces and normative orders form and transform interlegalities characterised by legal and social boundaries that are porous and in flux, where legal authorities are constantly contested (tschalaer 2012). interlegality defies legal centralistic approaches that assume the state’s monopoly on the production of law (hoekema 2004). interlegality speaks against classical legal pluralism by acknowledging that different legal and normative orders are co-constitutive rather than separate systems of ethics and morals (van ingen & peeters 2014). unlike these rather static approaches, interlegality stresses the porosity and fluidity of legal (and social) boundaries that result in the entanglement of legal codes and morals among different legal systems (tschalaer 2012). the idea of interlegality promotes a view of laws as fragmented and of normative orders as overlapping and competing rather than distinct (tonnessen 2011). moreover, van ingen and peeters (2014) noted that previous laws and norms leave their imprints on future laws and norms as much as on the people living under them. hence, the dimension of ‘time’ in space-time refers to constant movement. space-time escapes concrete representation because, at the moment of representation, space-time has already changed. however, legal geographic maps promote safer movement in space-time, functioning as maps of knowledge at the time of mapping. approaching iraqi women’s interlegalities through virtual interviews this article is part of a larger project to discover iraqi women’s incorporation of laws and norms. the analysis presented herein is a continuation of an arabic-language online survey (n=190) conducted in 2021. we aimed the survey at women over 18 years of age living in iraq, and we distributed it via social media channels using the snowballing technique. we made personal contact (by phone and via zoom) with professors at two universities in iraq who shared the survey with their female students. moreover, we contacted two women’s organisations operating in iraq that also agreed to distribute the survey. the survey combined different types of responses: some questions had multiple-choice options, whereas others had spaces to provide open responses. for this article, we used numerical analysis to reveal the frequencies of certain responses and analysed the free text responses with theory-driven content analysis, paying particular attention to the rights described in the answers and the elements affecting the realisation of those rights. we identified general patterns from the responses, but we could not observe any further geographic distributions due to the relatively small number of respondents. nevertheless, the survey allowed us to discover the most important rights for the respondents, including ‘freedom’1 and ‘overall freedom’, which we explore herein. this study was conducted during the covid-19 pandemic, which inhibited face-to-face contact. we conducted in-depth thematic interviews with 22 iraqi women living in different parts of iraq, including the kurdistan region,2 via the whatsapp mobile phone application, either as group meetings, including several participants, or individually (with video). the length of the interviews varied from 45 minutes to 2.5 hours. we interviewed the same women several times, which enabled us to deeply explore the issues the interlocutors considered relevant to their lives. in the first session, we explored their normal daily/weekly routines. in the following sessions, we focused on specific topics, such as the spaces the women frequented and their duties, education, marriages, and interpretations of freedom. furthermore, we discussed the factors that hindered them from enjoying their freedom. herein, we concentrate on elements in the interview discussions that revealed aspects of the women’s understandings and perceptions of their rights (especially the right to freedom), the realisation of those rights, and possible contradictions in the legal and normative orders that posed challenges and limited concrete opportunities to enjoy freedom. these topics guided the content analysis of the interview material. fennia 201(1) (2023) 83katri gadd & faleha ubeis in this study, we did not deem any response correct or incorrect, desirable or to be avoided. hence, the needs and desires exemplified in this article are subjective. keddie (2007, 243) wrote: even in the age that favours some degree of intellectual relativism, past and present phenomena are too often seen as good or bad, rather than as dialectical, involving contradictions and intermixtures of good and bad from the view of human happiness and fulfilment, at every stage. the discursively consensual homogeneity of ‘women’ as a group is, of course, often mistaken for the historically specific material realities of different groups of women within iraq (mohanty 2011). differences in class, place, and time mean that there has never been only one set of women operating under one set of rules (keddie 2007). thus, we by no means suggest that our results are representative of all iraqi women. zooming in at the local level could not provide a comprehensive overview of the multitude of legal spaces and normative orders at national, regional, and even global levels that affect the lives of iraqi women. however, it revealed the study participants’ viewpoints. the route maps according to which the participants navigated were ‘drawn’ based on their subjective experiences of legal spaces and normative orders. for this study, we conducted a risk assessment separately for each interviewee. some women participated in our study without their families’ knowledge, and if their participation had become known, it may have caused them danger. thus, the mode of participation had to be carefully designed, and the names used herein are pseudonyms. additionally, we agreed on the interview method with individual participants to mitigate the risks of participating. furthermore, since we discussed some traumatic experiences, sensitivity towards the feelings and beliefs of these women was imperative for creating trust-based relationships with them. one of the authors is iraqi, and her local and sociocultural knowledge helped us conduct the dialogues in a highly considerate and respectful manner. as some topics were extremely sensitive, we needed to constantly assess the body language of the interviewees. this enabled us to alter the order of our questions, omit certain troubling questions, or even interrupt the interview if we detected greater than normal stress in the interviewees’ comportment, in line with ethical research standards. the board for research ethics at åbo akademi university evaluated our study’s ethical parameters positively (these parameters include such things as confidentiality, informed consent, right to withdraw, data protection). however, unfortunately, we were unable to conduct an exhaustive literature review in arabic, which may be a shortcoming of this study. we acknowledge that we did not review the extensive arabic literature for this article. in the following empirical section, we discuss the legal spaces and normative orders that affected the iraqi women in our study, highlighting their prevailing interlegalities. legal spaces and normative orders for women in iraq: the interlegalities of 22 iraqi women as discussed in the previous section, legal spaces are multiscalar. in this section, following a short introduction to the iraqi context, we focus on the women’s maps to illuminate the local (and embodied) space(s) described by the women who participated in this research, such as iraq, home, workplace, or the body, on the finest scale. we illustrate elements in these legal spaces that manifested during our study. these elements determine the extent to which women can govern their own spaces. the normative orders described herein often stemmed from the region’s history. however, what represents a legal space for one woman could represent a normative order guiding ‘how to be’ for another. one example of this is faith. one can experience being ‘in faith’ as if faith is an occupied legal space. faith for another can be a normative order guiding her on how to be and behave in different legal spaces. other normative orders are social norms and the law, together with cultural and traditional attitudes and practices, reinforced by the generally conservative social climate and widespread nepotism surrounding the women in iraq (ali 2018). indeed, social norms and the law transform legal spaces. until the 1980s, iraq was touted as the country with the most educated women and the most developed and efficient higher education system in the middle east (ibid.). via enrolment in high-quality educational establishments and 84 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper possibilities for knowledge creation, the borders of iraqi women’s spaces expanded. however, simultaneously, iraq’s penal law no. 111 (1969) authorised domestic violence in the framework of ta’dib al-zawja (for domesticating the wife, see ali 2018), undermining the safety and integrity of women’s spaces. during the iran–iraq war (1980–1988), the iraqi government outlawed contraceptives and emphasised women’s reproductive responsibility to increase the iraqi population and compensate for the war’s massive death toll (saliba 2019). in 1990, iraq approved the cairo declaration of human rights in islam at the organization of the islamic conference, which acknowledged equal rights for women and men. the approval indicated an equal right to govern one’s own space, regardless of gender. nevertheless, in the same year, then-president saddam hussein issued a decree granting immunity to men accused of committing honour crimes – crimes against women suspected of having violated the codes of social conduct (i.e. the normative orders in al-ali 2007; al-jawaheri 2008). in 2003, the coalition forces led by the united states (us) toppled saddam hussein’s regime. despite the rhetoric of liberating women, women’s rights and lives have continuously been exploited in the name of competing political agendas (ali 2018). moreover, women have been excluded from any meaningful participation in state re-building (ismael 2014), diminishing the potential of women to shape decisions that impact their lives. furthermore, widespread verbal and physical intimidation, domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape, forced or pleasure marriages, female genital mutilation, and honour-based killings have influenced the finest spatiotemporal scale in modern-day iraq, pervading women’s own spaces (ali 2018). consequently, legal rights are an essential component in shaping the legal spaces iraqi women occupy and the normative orders within them, as well as the daily battle over women’s bodies at home, in public spaces, and in discourses. in addition to legal rights, normative orders stemming from religion(s) and traditions shape women’s legal spaces and normative orders. for muslims, shari’a (islamic) law provides guidance for life across spatiotemporal scales. shari’a law is based on the sunna and qur’an, and it provides normative orders for people following its rulings. the sunna, which literally translates as ‘way of life’ or ‘the rule of behaviour’, reflects the prophet muhammad’s example and oral pronouncements (fornara 2018) strongly affecting the legal space(s) of iraqi women. in our survey (gadd & ubeis 2021), 54% of the women replied that religion affected their opportunities and freedom. muslim women have long argued for empowerment, liberation, and/or (gender) justice through taqwa,3 a concept translated by mahmood (2005) as ‘piety’ (piela 2011). piety, strongly related to the idea of appropriate behaviour, necessitates not only virginity for girls and fidelity for wives but also the impossibility that anyone should doubt the piety. consequently, the avoidance of gossip-provoking situations has encouraged veiling and seclusion in some cases in the wider middle east region (keddie 2007). however, some studies have stressed that what is today labelled ‘islamic’ has roots dating back to pre-islamic arabia (bosankic 2014). according to keddie (2007), veiling and seclusion developed in the pre-islamic near east and adjacent areas as markers of urban upperand middle-class women, showing that they did not have to work and protecting them from strangers. unveiled peasants, girl servants, and prostitutes nurtured such images of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (miller 2003; keddie 2007; fornara 2018), and thus, unwritten normative orders. in assyria and other eastern mediterranean and asian territories, dress indicated a woman’s societal rank, and clothing that aligned with the modern definition of hijab (a cloth covering the hair and neck) showed that a woman was married or a member of the elite (fornara 2018).4 the qur’an’s passages have been interpreted as meaning that hijab5 is simply intended to identify women as muslims to protect them from harassment (keddie 2007). according to this reasoning, traditional dress is not a religious requirement but an optional social safeguard to protect women, in their most intimate spaces, from unwanted attention and harassment (miller 2003; fornara 2018). however, according to our survey data, 57% of the respondents were not allowed to decide on their own clothing (gadd & ubeis 2021). it is also relevant to note that a woman who veils in some situations may not do so in all situations and may abandon hijab during one period of her life, only to later resume the practice (khalid 2011). this underlines the porosity of the interlegalities internalised by the women and how they negotiated the orders. in patriarchal systems, women’s opportunities to choose their routes are controlled by others. for example, al-hassani (2020a) applied the concept of sextarianism introduced by mikdashi (2014) in the iraqi context to illustrate a system that impedes women’s progress. according to our survey, 63% of the fennia 201(1) (2023) 85katri gadd & faleha ubeis respondents said that their movements and physical presence in certain locations at certain times were restricted by others, thus determining access to education. sara (in her thirties) from diwania concluded, “it is the patriarchal system in iraq that gave the father the right to own his children and decide their destiny”. tohidi (1998) revealed similar findings regarding the patriarchal control of female mobility in her review study of situations in various muslim countries. some women in our study reported discouragement by their spouses or wider families from working outside the home. piela (2011) stated that women’s perspectives vary and argued that staying at home and having a career are equally acceptable, based on the prophet’s different wives, some of whom pursued careers while others looked after the household. indeed, as interlegality is assembled and transformed by different spaces and norms, various combinations facilitate different opportunities, and map routes vary for different women. for example, urban, rich, educated, working, married women may have more options than rural, poor, unemployed, illiterate, and unmarried women (sadiqi 2016). aysha (in her forties) from the babylon governorate in central iraq reported, “i come from an educated family, so i can choose my own path”. women who are gradually pushed out of public working spaces become increasingly dependent on their husbands or male relatives. sometimes, they experience a lack of ability to govern their space when they are encouraged to have children but are not economically independent (saliba 2019). dependence on husbands has also led to a drastic rise in gender-based violence (ibid.). for some women, family and kin ties are seen as the primary network of socioeconomic protection and a means of gaining resources, power, recognition, and emotional gratification (tohidi 1998). meanwhile, violence against women and girls within families has recently reached new levels of cruelty in iraq (johanssen 2019).6 displaced families headed by women are stigmatised and collectively punished for presumed links with islamic state (is), owing to factors outside their control, such as being associated with men involved with is or living in areas believed to be is strongholds (o’doherty 2019). according to the participants in this study, large areas of their space maps were coloured with notions of sin and shame emerging from their interlegalities. girls learn from an early age what is aib (the arabic word for flaw and shame), what is not (al-khayyat 1990), and what is permissible for girls (and boys) within certain spaces according to the prevailing norms. parents often interpret the prevailing normative orders and pass the knowledge on to their children. nadjua (in her thirties) from bagdad explained: i learned how to be a woman from my parents. a lot of beautiful values. i learned to be honest and not lie, and that men are equal to women. i learned to protect myself and my body. that means keeping my body and soul healthy, respecting my body, and not being a commodity. that means that i give it only to the one i love. it is characteristic of islam (and other monotheistic religions) to celebrate sexuality only within marriage while considering sexual relations outside marriage as unlawful and punishable (husni & newman 2007; piela 2011). this underlines the importance of women’s moral behaviour and sexual conduct (tschalaer 2012) but also hardens the situation for those women who do not consider marriage suitable for them. zahra (in her thirties) from kirkuk in the kurdistan region of iraq told us, “i married against my will and had to choose between the wishes of my parents and the community or their anger and rejection of me”. according to prevailing normative orders, a man must provide materially for his wife. in turn, the wife is expected to have sex with her husband whenever he wants. several women who participated in this research experienced marriage as a contract that allowed husbands access to their bodies (see tschalaer 2012 for similar findings). sunni and shia muslims have different divorce traditions. nadjua (in her thirties) explained her understanding: “a wife can ask a judge for a divorce if she can prove her husband’s betrayal or that she is subject to violence and beating, or if the husband is not providing food, housing, and clothing. in these cases, the judge will order divorce”. however, divorcees, widows, and ‘spinsters’, although occupying different positions in iraqi society, all have a lower status than married women (al-khayyat 1990). thus, traditions, religion(s), and certain laws formed the interlegalities affecting the participants. traditional and religious discourses on women, combined with multiple other factors, from family status to education, affected the women’s mapping. they determined taboos, the size of a woman’s 86 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper own space, what qualities that space could possess, and what behaviour crossed the red line into unacceptability. these interlegalities are repeatedly established in sextarian systems and are challenging to eradicate. those in power who make legislative changes are often the ones who benefit from the system (al-hassani 2020a). nevertheless, women try to negotiate the boundaries of their spaces, what they can decide, and with what consequences. negotiating the boundaries of women’s own spaces: finding a route to govern one’s own spaces as outlined, maps can reveal topographical qualities, portray properties in a specific spatial area, and function as guides on the routes between locations. we have illustrated features that are often drawn on the maps of iraqi women and which they need to navigate. despite formal and legal male dominance, women find some routes to increase freedom and govern and expand their spaces (al-khayyat 1990; keddie 2007). these routes result from carving out women’s spaces within male-dominated political and legal landscapes (ahmed 2014; tschalaer 2015). the routes can be drawn on legal geographic maps to guide women towards ‘places’ they want to go or things they want to achieve. in the following sections, we elucidate possible route maps to overall freedom and to governing one’s own space. the women in this study considered the question of their roles in life and whether they could govern different aspects of their lives or even decide on their own roles. in other words, they wondered how much freedom they had to govern their own spaces and how much influence other factors had on their lives. this ultimately relates to the question of their ability to negotiate the boundaries of their spaces. as described previously, women manufacture spaces within the complexly layered gender hierarchies that leave unquestioned the concept of sexual difference established and reproduced through ideas about the private and public (tschalaer 2015). kandiyoti (1991) discussed ‘bargains with patriarchy’ as a process by which women conform to patriarchal ideas about their modesty and purity to secure the legitimacy of their presence within public spaces. in their research, zubair and zubair (2017) illustrated that women internalise how to control and discipline themselves, their behaviour, and their sexuality while meeting societal expectations. indeed, as mahmood (2001, 212) described: through practices that are both devotional as well as worldly in character; it requires more than the simple performance of acts: piety also entails the inculcation of entire dispositions through a simultaneous training of the body, emotions, and reasons as the sites of discipline until the religious virtues acquire the status of embodied habits. without the incorporation of normative orders, women’s own spaces would be even more limited. by bargaining with patriarchy, as kandiyoti put it, women can negotiate the boundaries of their space(s), using bargaining as the starting point for a route on a map towards greater freedom. however, when bargaining with patriarchy, women must evaluate the consequences of their decisions not only for themselves but also for the wider community. iraqi women’s conduct is not only assessed at the individual level but reflects on the entire family (al-khayyat 1990). when a woman breaks the rules, the whole family is shamed. this means that women must find non-linear routes to reach their goals that will not negatively affect their reputations. due to the possibility of social exclusion and loss of family support, as well as the maintenance of their distinct religious/spiritual identities or social acceptance, women may use their agency and behave in a socially accepted manner (zubair & zubair 2017). consequently, many women embody the traditional submissiveness expected of females (al-khayyat 1990). the factors affecting honour and causing shame are like sandbars in the sea, which women must detour around in their attempts to negotiate the boundaries of their spaces. nevertheless, many women, although wanting to ensure that their rights are respected and acknowledged, cannot afford or are unwilling to assert their rights in ways that estrange them from their families and wider communities (hegland 1995). sana (in her twenties) from kathimiyah explained how she dealt with the conflict between two normative ideals – of a wife and of freedom: “i need to decide what i want. do i want to be a proper wife or freely decide what is right for me?” many women are conscious of emergent conflicts and negotiation in relation to their multiple spaces and shifts in identity formation (zubair & zubair 2017). fennia 201(1) (2023) 87katri gadd & faleha ubeis a family may impose a list of compulsory behaviours to regulate a girl’s or woman’s every movement both inside and outside the home. thus, stretching the boundaries of what is considered a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ woman in society often converges with the idea of ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces (tschalaer 2015). sabrin (in her forties) from the city of hilla told us, “men can come and go as they please. normally, men can leave the house to take a walk or something. girls stay at home. they put things in order, clean, and cook”. however, noor (in her forties) also from hilla, said, “sometimes women find ways to navigate the orders. it is often allowed for women to visit a beauty salon, so they do, [and they] may visit a friend on the way home, which otherwise would not be accepted”. some families may prevent their female members from socialising with unrelated men, dictate the type of clothes they wear, and so on (al-khayyat 1990). however, women may perform and embody honour through their actions (johanssen 2019), and most of the women we spoke with chose this strategy for negotiating the boundaries of their spaces. zubair and zubair (2017) reported similar results in their research. they found that women’s silence can be agentive and strategic and may be used as a form of resistance to the dominant patriarchal culture. indeed, many women assert their agency through the embodiment of respectability, often couched in a symbolic language of piety (tschalaer 2015) and ‘decent’ behaviour. nadia (in her thirties) from karbala said, “obedience just makes life easier”. nadjua (in her forties) explained such female wisdom: if the husband is nervous, gets angry, and screams, the wife must be calm and not respond to him similarly. after he calms down, the wife should punish him gently with her eyes full of love and sadness because she does not deserve this treatment from him. he will then feel sorry and apologise to her. the wife must be smarter than the husband. this is not to say that all women in iraq are oppressed. as nadjua (in her forties) continued: i met my husband at college, and we fell in love. ten years after graduation, we got married. i live a happy life with my husband. he helps me with the house. he also supports me in my work and with our daughter. marriage is especially encouraged for women by iraqi society but tends to shrink the social space of those who do not desire marriage (al-khayyat 1990). moreover, women’s roles as daughters or wives are subject to different sets of normative orders. sometimes, women have difficulty taking over new spaces or roles with new orders and expectations. girls learn from their mothers and other female relatives how to be wives. in our study, marriage and the normative orders within it were seen as something over which the women had very little control. however, they were expected to create happy, peaceful homes. amal (in her thirties) from al-muqdadiyah said: my husband can become aggressive when he is angry. in my family, i learned that the wife is responsible for making a happy home. if my husband acts in an aggressive way and even hits me, it is always my fault. i have done something to make him furious. for instance, if i don´t feel like having sex with him, he gets very angry. according to him, i should be grateful that he still wants me. it is easier just to give him what he wants, so that peace remains in the house and i don´t expose the children to his anger. this example shows that amal considered her children before herself in that space. she was willing to negotiate the boundaries of her own space and accept something she did not want to maintain peace in the household. in some cases, women said that they bought personal lubricants to make sexual intercourse less painful. noor (in her forties) explained, “women buy those products. some feel shy about it, but with me, they talk. their husbands want [sex] more than they do, and women cannot handle it. in this way [with lubricant], it is easier”. again, they could not negotiate the boundaries by temporarily excluding certain actions from this space, but they could make the activity less painful, thus keeping the children safe. according to al-khayyat’s (1990) research in the late 1980s, women were taught to believe that treating their husbands well in bed (obeying demands for sexual intercourse) fulfilled their duty to god. one of her interviewees said, “if i don’t satisfy him, i might lead him to have affairs with other women, or he might try to harm me by acting against my interests in other daily matters, so i respond to avoid problems” (al-khayyat 1990, 96). we and piela (2011) obtained similar findings. many of the participants decided that sexual availability to the 88 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper husband was a wise marital strategy to channel male sexual desire towards the wife rather than other women (thus preventing him from committing adultery). zubair and zubair (2017) described how the women in their research conceptualised sexual submission as a form of agency because through submission, they subverted binaries and hegemonies, meaning that submission appeared to be a route on a map to achieving freedom elsewhere. we perceive this as one aspect of the larger discussion on sextortion in iraqi society, which turns sex into a currency of bribery in a corrupt system (al-hassani 2020b). nadia (in her thirties) explained other reasons for this submission to negotiate boundaries: i need to care for my family’s reputation. it is very important to me. a decent woman is only with one man during her whole life. this is what i have learned. i am lucky, as i have an educated and kind husband. however, i know many who are not as lucky. they need to choose between aggression and direct violence on one side or leaving and living against their own values as indecent women on the other side. however, according to piela (2011), women’s sexual submission to their husbands is also linked to the problems of abuse and marital rape.7 the idea of tamkin, referring to women’s obedience or submission (mir-hosseini 2018), specifically regarding sexual access, means that many women do not realise that they may be victims of rape, thinking that they are only doing their duty. noor (in her forties) explained further, “sometimes doctors are reluctant to state that a woman has been a victim of rape. doctors are afraid that men of the husband’s tribe will come and seek revenge”. the criminal provisions of the iraq penal code do not recognise marital rape and can even grant impunity for sexual violence against women and girls by obliging men to marry their victims in some cases (vilardo & bittar 2018). the discourse around the female body in islam includes factors such as safeguarding women’s modesty (and men’s honour) through segregation; thus, the control of women’s sexuality through the construction of female sexuality as a threat to men’s honour touches the most intimate part of women’s space(s) (rashid 2003; piela 2011). tschalaer (2012) described a religion-related strategy for negotiating the boundaries of one’s own space. she explained that muslim women in india engage in processes of ijtihad (legal reasoning) based on islamic textual sources, such as the qur’an, hadith, and sunna, with the aim of reforming religious thoughts and practices (ibid.). the act of ijtihad is central to many women’s claims to authority and reconstructions of gender norms (abou-bakr & alsharmani 2020). on a smaller scale, we also found this in our research. some women, for instance, tried to find authorisation in the holy texts for their desire to govern their lives and take responsibility for their children. education and wider communication could broaden women’s spaces by allowing them to produce knowledge and improve their lives. education can redirect women’s map routes and provide alternatives. zubair and zubair (2017) studied how women academics organised/reorganised a sense of who they were across space-time and engaged in identity formation and reformation in interand transcultural contexts: how they assumed new positions between the self and the other in an in-between dialogical space (ibid.). this is an instance whereby one broadens one’s own space, what is in it, and how one’s own space relates to others’ spaces. increasing access to the internet has enabled some women not only to meet other people from different cultural and geographic spaces but also to express their opinions and arguments (piela 2011). changing ideas and expanding one’s space are therefore not restricted by geography. alia (in her thirties) from hilla illustrated the importance of broadening one’s space: “women’s rights are matters related to raising their psychological, scientific, and professional levels”. on the other hand, mona (in her thirties) reflected, “i know i have some rights, or that i should have at least some. but what do i get with my legal right to decide whether to cover my body or not if, by choosing what is right for me, i lose my family and, even worse, my children?” thus, these women’s choices regarding clothing or social conduct may be rooted in their faith, but the decisions are also often linked to other, more material factors (fornara 2018). in some cases, women can find non-linear ways to negotiate the boundaries of their own spaces. however, some barriers inhibit certain routes to overall freedom, which the women found challenging to negotiate. the next section discusses such barriers. fennia 201(1) (2023) 89katri gadd & faleha ubeis barriers to women’s routes to overall freedom on a map, one can calculate whether one has enough available time to reach the desired location. we detected such a barrier in women’s legal geographic maps towards overall freedom. however, following proux’s (2005) reasoning, barriers are often constellations of factors forming barriers (not all factors, as such, are barriers). moreover, some barriers are internalised. individuals internalise ideologies, fears, customs, and laws, which together form and transform barriers. on a map, the factors inhibiting women’s access to freedom are clear. they are related to the time available and iraqi society’s expectations of women, which revolve around the places women are expected to frequent and the tasks assigned to them. according to more traditional middle eastern views, women have time-consuming domestic roles, and it is necessary for wives to obtain their husbands’ permission to leave the home and/or work outside of it (piela 2011). some sectors of iraqi society expect women to take full responsibility for housework, child rearing, cleaning, and cooking. especially in families with many children, such chores are time-consuming (al-khayyat 1990). many women in our study shared their struggles with time. naima (in her forties) from bagdad said, “i couldn´t study. i’m too busy with housework and the children”. lamis (in her forties) from the salahaddin governorate had the same experience: “women have too many responsibilities. there is not enough time to study”. indeed, time limited the abilities of these women, as nadjua (in her thirties) explained: “in my routine, i go to work in the morning. when i come home, i do housework, cooking, and cleaning. i get tired and don´t have time to do the hobbies i love”. moreover, desertification in iraq causes sandstorms, which multiply women’s housework and cleaning. in 2023, iraq faced an unpreceded number of severe sandstorms. furthermore, in the summer, there are additional chores for women, and when cleaning roofs (often appropriated as extra living spaces during hot summers), women prepare them for use daily (al-khayyat 1990). furthermore, even if they had sufficient time, not all the iraqi women in this study were encouraged (or even allowed) to work outside the family home. work, which for some represented an opportunity to earn money and increase independence and thus opened a route to overall freedom, was prohibited. sabrin (in her forties) from hilla confirmed this: furthermore, even if they had sufficient time, not all the iraqi women in this study were encouraged (or even allowed) to work outside the family home. work, which for some represented an opportunity to earn money and increase independence and thus opened a route to overall freedom, was prohibited. sabrin (in her forties) from hilla confirmed this: patriarchal interpretations sometimes depict women’s participation in public spaces as undermining their modesty and hence constituting a religious ‘sin’ (tschalaer 2015). this was reflected by sameera (in her twenties) from bagdad: “i have to choose a job that fits the community and not a job that fits my personality”. this aspect of tradition (if lived) can be a severe barrier to women’s access to freedom. life is unpredictable when it is beyond one’s control. before marriage, male family members often make all the decisions. as warda (in her thirties) from the babylon governorate put it, “my family decides. they have a desire to determine my future”. indeed, some girls or women in iraq are inhibited from expanding their own spaces through education and learning, yet women’s higher education used to be a source of iraqi pride. susan (in her twenties) from the city of hilla told us about her desire to study: “a master’s degree would be great! it would augment my salary. however, often girls get married when they are at the bachelor’s level of their studies, making it difficult for them to study further”. fatima (under twenty) continued, “i can study for now. however, if dad says that school ends now, it ends now. a daughter needs to obey her dad; otherwise, she is not a good girl or person”. hence, a father can become a non-negotiable barrier on a girl’s route to freedom. after marriage, women are often seen as their husbands’ responsibilities. naznin (in her forties) from bagdad shared, “my husband prevents me from educating myself. our society is a backward one that denies women´s right to study and develop themselves”. susan (in her twenties) from hilla said: i could not just bring a boy home from the university. there should be an indirect way for him to come and ask if he can marry me. it´s complicated. it is easier among cousins, as we can talk with each other more freely. if a guy unknown to the family just came [and asked], my dad would immediately ask where the guy had met me. 90 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper forty-one per cent of the respondents in our survey directly reported that they could not freely choose their partner. their marriages were already arranged, and they were not allowed to decline these prospects (gadd & ubeis 2021). warda (in her thirties) explained, “i cannot be with the person i want. i am afraid of losing my family bonds, and that prevents me from choosing my partner”. nonetheless, some women found it liberating that choosing their husbands was their parents’ responsibility. samira (in her forties) from bagdad claimed that it was good that she did not need to make all the decisions herself: “parents are better at choosing a partner for me due to their longer life experience”. the fact that women cannot always choose with whom they share their lives means that some remain in unhappy marriages or single. safa (in her forties) from bagdad said, “if i want to remarry, the father of my children will take them away from me”. fear of violence may also deny some women options. the revival of ‘honour killings’ (still part of modern-day iraq) has even been supported by state legalisation (saliba 2019). honour crimes increased after the 2003 invasion, yet the reporting of these crimes declined due to the fear of revenge against abused women or their families (lafta & al-nuaimi 2019; saliba 2019). moreover, some women considered themselves responsible for the happiness of all their family members. nadjua (in her thirties) told us, “often, the woman pressures herself and tries hard to change her husband’s treatment of her. if she fails, she tries again. the reasons for repeated attempts are the love and the children between them. in some cases, this works”. sexual and genderbased violence, such as killing, physical harm, and the exploitation of women, is sometimes legitimised by the perpetrator, the family, and the wider community (johanssen 2019). claiming one’s right to govern one’s own space is stressful – sometimes even dangerous – and with no guarantee of success or improvement. according to the united nations population fund (unfpa 2016), most women who report such crimes decide not to proceed to open legal cases against the perpetrators. many mothers wish an easy and happy life for their daughters and try to teach them obedience towards their husbands. many agree with nadia (in her twenties), who stated that “obedience just makes life easier”. seemingly, a woman is free only within a space determined by others. either other people can reduce female spaces, thus controlling women’s spatiotemporal exploration and liberty, or time is too limited for women to do something for themselves. a woman may feel like a sailor sailing alone across a lake, with no way out of the closed waters. as ala (in her thirties) put it, “freedom is a treasure that only those who lose it can know”. how strongly a girl has been socialised to fulfil the expectations imposed on girls and women has an impact on how much of herself she is willing to sacrifice to govern herself and her space according to her own personal will. on the other hand, aspects such as urban places of residence, higher education (also of parents), and affluent financial situations may open new routes, providing women with more opportunities to govern their spaces and find access to freedom. concluding remarks in this article, we have discussed the spatiotemporal interlegalities of 22 women living in iraq and how they negotiated normative orders and the boundaries of legal spaces to gain overall freedom and govern their own spaces. we have employed the concept of interlegalities to describe legal space(s) formed by diverse laws and normative orders and have used maps as a metaphor to illustrate the interlegalities of women on the one hand and the ways in which they navigate their legal landscapes on the other. we have discussed women’s understandings and perceptions of their rights and freedoms, the realisation of those rights, and possible contradictions in the legal and normative orders standing in the way of their freedom. we have demonstrated how religion, traditions, ideologies, experiences, and beliefs, combined with state laws, knowledge of the laws, and reflections within the digital space, give rise to a complex legal landscape in which different legalities do not merely coexist but entangle and overlap. moreover, we have elucidated how normative orders have a differential impact on women, depending on, for instance, the overall sociopolitical context and women’s levels of education, economic and social statuses, geographical origins, job opportunities, and marital statuses. some factors, such as the time available and iraqi society’s expectations of women and girls, inhibit iraqi women’s access to freedom. such expectations revolve around the places women are expected fennia 201(1) (2023) 91katri gadd & faleha ubeis to frequent and the tasks they are assigned. furthermore, although freedom could bring women independence, it would also bring shame to women who choose to disobey prevailing norms and unwritten rules. it is important to understand the map of interlegalities that position women living in iraq. herein, we have illustrated the overlapping and sometimes seemingly contradictory normative orders constituting iraqi women’s interlegalities. this is an important addition to the current legal geography discussion, which has not extensively discussed pluralist legal systems as incorporated interlegalities. however, it is also important to investigate the complex and relentlessly changing relations among the various legal spaces and normative orders. this could be done through an overlay analysis of maps from multiple legal spaces and the elements within them. however, this is something to be explored in future research. notes .meaning freedom in english الحرية 1 2 the interviews were conducted in arabic, and ubeis either translated the interviews into english or we used english directly when the interviewee spoke english fluently. 3 a qur’anic concept of the moral framework of human behaviour; an ethical awareness related to god and society (piela 2011). 4 thus, first, veiling was a sign of status, as it was for respectable athenian women in the greco-roman world and in pre-islamic iran and the byzantine empire (keddie 2007). 5 such as in surah النور an-nur in aya 31 and in surah االحزاب al-ahzaab in aya 59 in the qur'an. 6 sexual and gender-based violence has no roots in any religion, sect, or nationality, but is a universal phenomenon that has disproportionally affected women and girls under various patriarchal discourses throughout history (johanssen 2019). 7 rape is related to a wider concept of honor. moreover, the understanding of what rape has changed over time and its exhaustive exploration is beyond the limits of this paper. acknowledgements we owe great thanks to our reviewers ruba ali al-hassani and sanna mustasaari for their extremely detailed, constructive, and critical yet encouraging reviews. they offered us their expertise regarding theories, the iraqi context, and english language. references abou-bakr, o. & al-sharmani, m. (2020) islamic feminist tafsir and qur’anic ethics: rereading divorce verses. in reda, n. & amin, y. (eds.) islamic interpretative tradition and gender justice: processes of canonization, subversion and change, 23–66. mcgill-queen’s university press, london. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1bhg2d1.5 ahmed, s. (2014) the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. al-ali, n. (2007) iraqi women: untold stories from 1948 to the present. zed books, london. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220850 al-hassani, r. a. (2020a) maintaining the feminist spring of iraq’s october revolution (part iii of iii). inside arabia. <https://insidearabia.com/maintaining-the-feministspring-of-iraqs-october-revolutionpart-iii-of-iii/>. al-hassani, r. a. (2020b) corruption and exploitation of gender in iraq (part i of iii). inside arabia. <https://insidearabia.com/corruption-and-exploitation-of-gender-in-iraqpart-i-of-iii/>. ali, z. (2018) women and gender in iraq: between nation-building and fragmentation. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517 al-jawaheri, y. (2008) women in iraq: the gender impact of international sanctions. lynne rienner publishers, boulder. al-khayyat, s. (1990) honor and shame – women in modern iraq. saqi books, london. basarundin, a. (2010) in search of faithful citizens in postcolonial malaysia: islamic ethics, muslim activism, and feminist politics. in kassam, z. (ed.) women and islam. greenwood publishing group, santa barbara. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1bhg2d1.5 https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220850 https://insidearabia.com/maintaining-the-feministspring-of-iraqs-october-revolution-part-iii-of-iii/ https://insidearabia.com/maintaining-the-feministspring-of-iraqs-october-revolution-part-iii-of-iii/ https://insidearabia.com/corruption-and-exploitation-of-gender-in-iraqpart-i-of-iii/ https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108120517 92 fennia 201(1) (2023)research paper basarundin, a. (2013) anthropology. in joseph, s. (ed.) women and islamic cultures – disciplinary paradigms and approaches: 2003–2013, 21–35. brill, leiden. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004264731_003 von benda-beckmann, f. & von benda-beckmann, k. (2014) places that come and go – a legal anthropological perspective on the temporalities of space in plural legal orders. in braverman, i., blomley, n., delaney, d. & kedar a. (eds.) the expanding spaces of law – a timely legal geography, 30–52. stanford university press, stanford. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqsdzbj.6 bennet, l. (2018) towards legal psychogeography: pragmatism, affective-materialism and the spatiolegal. revue géographique de’lest 58(1–2) 1–16. https://doi.org/10.4000/rge.7534 bosankic, n. (2014) psychological aspects of niqab wearing: religion, nationalism and identity in bosnia and herzegovina. palgrave pivot, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431615_4 braidotti, r. (2002) metamorphoses: towards a materialist theory of becoming. polity press, malden. brickell, k. & cuomo, d. (2019) feminist geolegality. progress in human geography 43(1) 104–122. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517735706 butler, j. (1990) gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. routledge, london. cuomo, d. & brickell, k. (2019) feminist legal geographies. epa: economy and space 51(5) 1043–1049. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x19856527 delaney, d. (2010) the spatial, the legal, and the pragmatics of world-making: nomospheric investigations. routledge-cavendish, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203849101 doorn-harder, p. (2006) women shaping islam – reading the qur’an in indonesia. university of illinois press, chicago. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/4075514 efrati, n. (2012) women in iraq: past meets present. colombia university press, new york. https://doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231158145.001.0001 fornara, l. (2018) islam’s (in)compatibility with the west? dress code restrictions in the age of feminism. indiana journal of global legal studies 25(1) 463–494. https://doi.org/10.2979/indjglolegstu.25.1.0463 frisk, s. (2009) submitting to god: women and islam in urban malaysia. university of washington press, washington. gadd, k. (2016) understanding the affects in street children’s lives in pelotas, brazil. social & cultural geography 22(4) 461–479. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1593494 gadd, k. & ubeis, f. (2021) discussing the most important rights for women in iraq. institute for human rights working paper no.2 götz, n. & holmén, j. (2018) introduction to the theme issue: ‘mental maps: geographical and historical perspectives’. journal of cultural geography 35(2) 157–161. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2018.1426953 hegland, m. (1995) shi’a women in northwest pakistan and agency through practice: ritual, resistance, resilience. political and legal anthropology review 18(2) 65–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/pol.1995.18.2.65 hoekema, a. (2004) rechts pluralisme en interlegaliteit. vossiusper uva, amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789056293499 husni, r. & newman, d. (2007) muslim women in law and society: annotated translation of al-tahrir al-haddad. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203938317 hyndman, j. (2001) towards feminist geopolitics. the canadian geographer 45(2) 219–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2001.tb01484.x ismael, j. (2014) iraqi women in conditions of war and occupation. arab studies quarterly 36(3) 260–267. https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.36.3.0260 johanssen, h. (2019) breaking the cycle of shame in iraq. policy brief, middle east research institute 4(32) 16. jones-gailani, n. (2020) transnational identity and memory making in the lives of iraqi women in diaspora. university of toronto press, london. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487517311 kandiyoti, d. (1991) bargaining with patriarchy. in lorber, j. & farrell s (eds.) the social construction of gender, 104–118. sage publications, new delhi. keddie, n. (2007) women in the middle east: past and present. princeton university press, princeton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400845057 khalid, a. (2011) lifting the veil: muslim women explain their choice. npr, april 21. <https://www.npr. org/2011/04/21/135523680/lifting-the-veil-muslim-women-explain-their-choice?t=1636711609171>. 9.6.2023. lafta, r. & al-nuaimi, m. (2019) war or health: a four-decade armed conflict in iraq. medicine, conflict and survival 35(3) 209–226. https://doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2019.1670431 mahmood, s. (2001) feminist theory, embodiment and the docile agent: some reflections on the egyptian islamic revival. cultural anthropology 16(2) 202–236. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2001.16.2.202 mahmood, s. (2005) politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. princeton university press, princeton. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvct00cf massey, d. (2005) for space. sage publications, london. mikdashi, m. (2014) sex and sectarianism. the legal architecture of lebanese citizenship. comparative studies of south asia, africa and the middle east 34(2) 279–293. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2773851 https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004264731_003 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqsdzbj.6 https://doi.org/10.4000/rge.7534 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431615_4 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517735706 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x19856527 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203849101 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/4075514 https://doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231158145.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.2979/indjglolegstu.25.1.0463 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1593494 https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2018.1426953 https://doi.org/10.1525/pol.1995.18.2.65 https://doi.org/10.5117/9789056293499 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203938317 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2001.tb01484.x https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.36.3.0260 https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487517311 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400845057 https://www.npr.org/2011/04/21/135523680/lifting-the-veil-muslim-women-explain-their-choice?t=1636711609171 https://www.npr.org/2011/04/21/135523680/lifting-the-veil-muslim-women-explain-their-choice?t=1636711609171 https://doi.org/10.1080/13623699.2019.1670431 https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2001.16.2.202 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvct00cf https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2773851 fennia 201(1) (2023) 93katri gadd & faleha ubeis miller, k. (2003) the other side of the coin: a look at islamic law as compared to anglo-american law – do muslim women really have fewer rights than american women? new york international law review 16(76) 65–145. mir-hosseini, z. (2018) justice, equality and muslim family laws. new ideas, new prospects. in poya (ed.) sharia and justice. an ethical, legal, political, and cross-cultural approach, 73–104. de gruyter, berlin. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574593-005 mohanty, c. (2011) under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. in ashcroft, b. (ed.) the post-colonial studies reader, 259–263. routledge, london. mountz, a. (2013) political geography i: reconfiguring geographies of sovereignty. progress in human geography 37(6) 829–841. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513479076 o’doherty, m. (2019) the legacy of prime minister adil abdul mahdi’s government – a study of human rights violations, corruption, poverty and political instability in the republic of iraq. crystal grove books, mid-rand. philippopoulos-mihalopoulos, a. (2015) spatial justice: body, lawscape, atmosphere. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315780528 piela, a. (2011) piety as a concept underpinning muslim women’s online discussions of marriage and professional career. contemporary islam 5 249–265. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-011-0162-y proux, c. (2005) blending justice: interlegality and the incorporation of aboriginal justice into the formal canadian justice system. the journal of legal pluralism and unofficial law 37(51) 79–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/07329113.2005.10756588 rashid, s. (2003). sexualities: practices: south asia. in joseph, s. & najmabadi, a. (eds.) encyclopedia of women and islamic cultures: family, body, sexuality and health, 387–389. brill, leiden. sadiqi, f. (2016) female perceptions of islam in today’s morocco. journal of feminist scholarship 11 46–60. saliba, s. (2019) rendering iraq: state feminism, imperial feminism and women’s rights under sanctions. western libraries undergraduate research award 17. <https://cedar.wwu.edu/library_ researchaward/17/> 9.6.2023. shubin, s. (2015) migration timespaces: a heideggerian approach to understanding the mobile being of eastern europeans in scotland. transactions of the institute of british geographers 40(3) 350–361. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12078 smith, s. (2012) intimate geopolitics: religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in leh, ladakh. annals of the association of american geographers 102(6) 1511–1528. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2012.660391 tedeschi, m. (2020) the body and the law across borders during the covid-19 pandemic. dialogues in human geography 10(2) 178–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934234 tohidi, n. (1998) the issues at hands. in bodman, h. & tohidi, n. (eds.) women in muslim societies – diversity within unity, 279–294. lynne rienner publishers inc., london. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781685856236-015 tønnessen, l. (2011) feminist interlegalities and gender justice in sudan: the debate on cedaw and islam. religion & human rights 6(1) 25–39. https://doi.org/10.1163/187103211x543635 tschalaer, m. (2012) competing model-nikahnamas: muslim women’s spaces within the legal landscape of lucknow. nordic journal of law & social research 3 65–80. https://doi.org/10.7146/nnjlsr.v0i3.111106 tschalaer, m. (2015) muslim women’s rights activists’ visibility: stretching the gendered boundaries of the public space in the city of lucknow. south asia multidisciplinary academic journal 11 11–18. https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.3928 unfpa (2016) a report on the gbv assessment in conflict affected governorates in iraq. un compound, bagdad, iraq. <https://iraq.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/the%20gbv%20assesment.pdf> 9.6.2023. van ingen, l. & peeters, l. (2014) legal pluralities and interlegality in tanzania: maasai women’s property rights. bachelor thesis in cultural anthropology and development sociology. universiteit utrecht. vilardo, v. & bittar s. (2018) iraq gender profile: a snapshot situation analysis on gender equality and women’s empowerment. un women iraq office in partnership with oxfam. zubair, s. & zubair, m. (2017) situating islamic feminism(s): lived religion, negotiation of identity and assertion of third space by muslim women in pakistan. women’s studies international forum 63 17–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.06.002 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574593-005 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513479076 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315780528 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-011-0162-y https://doi.org/10.1080/07329113.2005.10756588 https://cedar.wwu.edu/library_researchaward/17/ https://cedar.wwu.edu/library_researchaward/17/ https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12078 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2012.660391 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934234 https://doi.org/10.1515/9781685856236-015 https://doi.org/10.1163/187103211x543635 https://doi.org/10.7146/nnjlsr.v0i3.111106 https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.3928 https://iraq.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/the%20gbv%20assesment.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.06.002 extreme and extremist geographies – commentary on the revanchist impulse and its consequences for everyday bordering urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa63677 doi: 10.11143/fennia.63677 reflections: extreme geographies extreme and extremist geographies: commentary on the revanchist impulse and its consequences for everyday bordering james scott scott, james (2017). extreme and extremist geographies: commentary on the revanchist impulse and its consequences for everyday bordering. fennia 195: 1, pp. 102–105. issn 1798-5617. political xenophobia needs to be explained politically. at the same time, while political xenophobia is not a necessary consequence of neoliberalism, the idea of what counts as ‘political’ needs to be expanded. i suggest that one fruitful, non-reductionist strategy for understanding the consequences of identitary bordering consists in exploring links between securitization and the politicization of identity and national belonging. inspired by the ideas of henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy, i approach the extreme geographies of identity politics from an ethical and philosophical perspective, arguing that a powerful revanchist and self-referential narrative of authenticity and autonomy is influencing both everyday bordering practices and the way security is discursively framed. keywords: bordering, identitary politics, political xenophobia, national identity, nationalism, anti-liberalism james scott, karelian institute, university of eastern finland, yliopistokatu 2, fi-80101 joensuu, finland, e-mail: james.scott@uef.fi recent political events have not only seen an upswing in extremism but also extreme polarisation in the search for explanations for this upswing. brexit and ‘trumpism’ can be explained by neoliberal economics, the inequalities of global ‘free’ trade, the worldwide backlash against politics of diversity and perceived threats to identity. in reality, all of these processes are closely intertwined and thus inseparable; emphasis on one or the other factor is ultimately reductionist and likely a result of individual theoretical or political commitments. to add to this complexity, it is not clear that many populists are actually true believers in extreme political ideas. donald trump, for example, is clearly more opportunist that ideologue, willing to use extremist views to the extent that they provide popular support. what is clear, however, is that extremist political ideas of national identity have deep roots and cannot be explained away in terms of underlying systemic or structural logics. to paraphrase gellner’s (1992) famous question: if we live in a post-modern world, why are political (and religious) extremisms so prevalent? as fassin and windels (2016) argue, political xenophobia needs to be explained politically. in contrary to bessner and sparke (2017), simply evoking what collier (2012) terms the “leviathan of neoliberalism” will clearly not do the job. at the same time, while political xenophobia is not a necessary consequence of neoliberalism, the idea of what counts as ‘political’ needs to be expanded. as fassin and windels (2016, 3) argue, political xenophobia needs to be unpacked where it operates as a political discourse and practice: “this, in the end, is what might be learned from the european tale of two crises.” thus, while there is perhaps no clear-cut explanation for the resurgence of extremism, i suggest that one fruitful, non-reductionist strategy for understanding its consequences © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 103james scott consists in exploring links between securitization and the politicization of identity and national belonging. inspired by the ideas of henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy, i approach the extreme geographies of identity politics from an ethical and philosophical perspective, arguing that a powerful revanchist and self-referential narrative of authenticity and autonomy is influencing both everyday bordering practices and the way security is discursively framed. revanchism as defined here specifically refers to recovering lost national and identitary status by suggesting a triumph of realism (and natural laws guiding human nature) over liberal idealism. in accordance with the resurgence of revanchist identity politics, for example in hungary, we see a new conservative appreciation of, and attempt to objectivize, nationalism, supposedly rediscovering the strength of an idea that was always true. in this vein, mitchell (2017) suggests that the new appreciation of nationalism is a reaction to left-wing emphasis of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism and rebukes of national pride and religious faith. this belief has its security-oriented counterpart as well. hanson (2016), a conservative american observer of foreign policy, sees with trump and the resurgence of national pride a reaffirmation of the laws of human nature and the centrality of national (i.e. us-american) will and overwhelming national power as main elements of world security order. junco (2017) has defined nationalism as a social imaginary based on a form of collective narcissism. and indeed, revanchism promotes a narcissistic self-referentiality – the notion that certain group specific ways of being or seeing the world are inherently correct but have been unjustly suppressed or falsified and thus require more forceful representation. moreover, cultural nationalism, coupled with politics of new sovereigntism that reifies national interests and unilateralism (see spiro 2000) presents itself, and gleans much of its popularity, as a counterweight to globalism and that alienation of national culture. put in more pointed terms, we appear to be witnessing the resurgence of a nationstate centred identity politics that not only repudiates liberalism but frames cosmopolitanism, almost in hegelian terms, as antithetical to ‘true’ freedom (axelsen 2013). particularly in national conservative circles, internationalism and globalization are seen as threats to cultural diversity, drivers of a global monoculture that is wiping out diversity rather than increasing it (see deneen 2009). this view of the world (and diversity) is founded on a neo-herderian and highly distorted ideal of the world as composed of countess cultural monocultures and clearly bounded, and often incompatible, cultural spaces. for example, both european and national identity are understood as organic and primordial rather than constructed. identity is destiny rather than choice. in addition, much national conservative sentiment closely associates christian faith with cultural concepts of europe. historical experience, including the emergence and spread of christendom, but also the common experience of the enlightenment define what is, what is not, and what can never be europe. national identity and patriotism are not by definition negative sentiments. however, nationalism becomes a problem when, exacerbated by socio-economic stress and geopolitical instability, it results in obscurantism, identitary bordering and an aggravated accentuation of perceived difference between people, cultures and states. revanchism, therefore, is anything but benign and, at heart, revanchist identity politics are anti-democratic and authoritarian. to quote o’meara (2013, 168), a follower of identitary ideas who does not cloak his opinions in mainstream conservatism, by the “democratic levelling of liberalism” that “suppresses very healthy expressions of authority and superiority” and that robs national societies of the “the collective liberty of a people of nation to pursue its destiny as it took cultural, historical and biological form rather than merely economical.” political xenophobia needs to be understood in political terms and within this context the concept of ontological security (rumelili 2015) is particularly salient as it emphasizes aspects of national identity that are prone to radicalization as well as equates bordering processes to securitization. the revanchist link between identitary bordering and ontological security involves an amplified insistence on the ethics of the particular – “a metaphysical struggle for the meaning of space and locality” (drenthen 2010, 323). nationalist populism has achieved a degree of commonsense status through threat scenarios of terrorism, increasing social burdens, and islamophobia as well as a general dislike of the european union. in terms of extreme geographies, it engenders and justifies practices of everyday border-making that transform individuals and groups into ‘security subjects’ merely on the base of personal traits. securitization is the process by which specific issues, phenomena and/or groups are framed in terms of security (see waever 1995, balzacq 2005). however, states and state104 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies like institutions have no monopoly here; one of the most salient and potentially problematic aspects of securitization is the framing of threat in ways that emphasize national and cultural uniqueness in everyday terms (larsen et al. 2009) and through the appropriation of ‘popular geopolitics’ that emphasise cultural clashes and outright religious wars (williams & boyce 2013; shim 2016). the impacts of identitary bordering on ontological security pose the eu as well as most national societies with concrete dilemmas where collective values, liberal ideas and ethics are put to severe tests that could have considerable domestic social and political repercussions. the revanchist impulse resonates with the illiberal populism that has repudiated many of the basic premises of european union, particularly more cosmopolitan ideas of shared european citizenship and cultural tolerance. playing on a politics of national alienation, illiberalism seeks to change the rules by which questions of migration, citizenship, and ultimately mobility are discussed and dealt with politically. everyday bordering as anti-migrant securitization, and the populist contagion it supports, casts an ominous shadow over intercultural relations as well as social dialogue (kallis 2013; yuval-davis et al. 2016). the case of hungary is an excellent example of this practice. in legitimizing border closures and with a dismissive approach to europe’s refugee crisis, the present hungarian government under viktor orbán has stylized itself as a guardian of europe’s historical legacy and christian culture (e.g. taynor 2015; the guardian 2016). orbán’s government has warned constantly of the dangers of ‘unnatural migration’ and the emergence of parallel (islamic) societies that will threaten europe’s welfare, security and identity (e.g. kegl 2016). this discourse is supported by constant negative hungarian media coverage of europe’s refugee crisis and conspiracy theories that suggest an ‘externally’ driven exploitation of europe’s open societies. the political expedient of social classification reduces the wealth of entanglements, social situations, identities that characterize real life to highly schematic and misleading forms of political and social bordering. sen (2007, 45) warns that the doctrine of singular identities, such as that promulgated in the hungarian case, is a crude classification instrument that is also “grossly confrontational in form and implication.” the idea that choiceless identity forges an individual and/or national destiny lurks behind identitary bordering. similarly, taylor (1991) argues that great political and social harm resides in the unreflective confusion of authenticity of manner (self-identity) and matter (e.g. the definition of social goals). the securitization of migrants and migration threatens to poison multicultural conviviality, for example in europe’s major metropolitan centres, by legitimising a biopolitics of selection that could severely curtail the freedom of movement of ‘suspicious’ groups and individuals. given this situation, how might we go about de-securitizing our bordering practices? revanchism is unreasonable because it ultimately requires violence of one sort or another rather than dialogue to fix belief. furthermore, romanticized notions of true cultures as ‘pure’ have scant basis in historical experience; in terms of most urban contexts around the globe, multiculturalism has been the dominant social reality for decades if not centuries. ultimately, revanchism’s inability to deliver and long term benefits in terms of social development render it unsustainable in the long run. however, in the shorter term we would need a process of desecuritization that involves a conscious decoupling of identity and security related issues in political discourse (rumelili 2015). as sen (2007) urges, political debate must resist singular and civilizational understandings of identity and their reductionist treatment of complex social realities. desecuritization would be an important first stop in opening up notions of community, belonging and citizenship to include ever larger cross-section of humanity. van houtum and bueno lacey (2015) have argued that societies (and the eu) should accept the fact that, similarly to tourism, business and trade, mobility and migration are part of everyday life. a major problem remains the lack of eu-wide migration and asylum policies based on grounded factual knowledge of migration and a resulting emphasis on racialized stereotypes, threat narratives and politics of exclusion. van houtum and bueno lacy also suggest the eu might develop a more decisive geopolitical vision in order to address the causes of migration and help stabilize embattled states from which increasing numbers of affected people are attempting to escape. given the threat these developments pose to national societies and to international relations more generally, the eu, despite its contradictions and crises, is perhaps one of the few potential actors that might provide scenarios of desecuritization based on a holistic understanding of human security and a truly cosmopolitan understanding of political community. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 105james scott references axelsen, d. v. (2013) the state made me do it: how anti-cosmopolitanism is created by the state. journal of political philosophy 21 451–472. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12005 balzacq, t. (2005) the three faces of securitization: political agency, audience and context. european journal of international relations 5(3) 365–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066105052960 bessner, d. & sparke, m. (2017) nazism, neoliberalism and the trumpist challenge to democracy. environment and planning a 49(6) 1214–1223. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x17701429 collier, s. j. (2012) neoliberalism as big leviathan or…? a response to wacquant and hilgers. social anthropology 20 (2) 186–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2012.00195.x deneen, p. (2009) how a culture dies. <https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/how-a-culturedies> 03.04.2017. drenthen, m. (2010) nimby and the ethics of the particular. ethics, place and environment 13(3) 321– 323. https://doi.org/10.1080/1366879x.2010.528627 fassin, e. & windels, a. (2016) the german dream: neoliberalism and fortress europe. near futures online 1 “europe at a crossroads” 03.2016. <http://nearfuturesonline.org/the-german-dreamneoliberalism-and-fortress-europe/> 30.03.2017. gellner, e. (1992) postmodernism, reason and religion. routledge, london and new york. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203410431 the guardian, (2016) hungarian prime minister says migrants are 'poison' and 'not needed'. the guardian 26.06.2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/26/hungarian-prime-ministerviktor-orban-praises-donald-trump> 23.03.2017. hanson, v. d. (2016) the ancient foreign policy. national review 27.12.2016. <http://www.nationalreview. com/article/443347/obama-foreign-policy-ignores-human-nature-time-tested-truths> 26.04.2017. houtum, van h. & bueno lacy, r. (2015) the eu’s self-threatening border regime. the broker online 26.11.2015. <http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/blogs/inclusive-economy-europe/the-eu-s-self-threateningborder-regime> 12.02.2017. junco, j. a. (2017) el relato narcisista. el pais 26.02.2017. kallis, a. (2013) far-right “contagion” or a failing “mainstream”? how dangerous ideas cross borders and blur boundaries. democracy and security 9(3) 221–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/17419166.201 3.792251 kegl, a. (2016) ‘you’re destroying europe’ hungary pm predicts ‘parallel muslim society’ due to migration. sunday express 27.09.2016. <http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/715040/hungaryreferendum-viktor-orban-parallel-muslim-societies-eu-migration-refugees> 21.03.2017. larsen, k.s., krumov, k., le, h.v., ommundsen, r. & veer, k.v.d. (2009) threat perception and attitudes toward documented and undocumented immigrants in the united states: framing the debate and conflict resolution. european journal of social sciences 7 (4) 115–134. o’meara, m. (2013) new culture, new right: anti-liberalism in postmodern europe. 2nd ed. arktos, london. mitchell, j. (2017) a renewed republican party. american affairs 1(1) 7–30. rumelili, b. (2015) identity and desecuritisation: the pitfalls of conflating ontological and physical security. journal of international relations and development 18(1) 52–74. https://doi.org/10.1057/ jird.2013.22 sen, a. (2007) identity and violence. the illusion of destiny. penguin, london. shim, d. (2016) between the international and the everyday: geopolitics and imaginaries of home. international studies review 18(4) 597–613. https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viw025 spiro, p. (2000) the new sovereigntists: american exceptionalism and its false prophets. foreign affairs 79(6) 9–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/20049963 taylor, c. (1991) the ethics of authenticity. harvard university press, cambridge and london. taynor, i. (2016) migration crisis: hungary pm says europe in grip of madness. the guardian 03.09.2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/migration-crisis-hungary-pm-victororban-europe-response-madness> 31.03.2017. wæver, o. (1995) securitization and desecuritization. in lipschutz, r. (ed.) on security, 46–87. columbia university press, new york. williams, j. & boyce, g. b. (2013) fear, loathing and the everyday geopolitics of encounter in the arizona borderlands. geopolitics 18(4) 895–916. https://doi.org//10.1080/14650045.2013.780035 yuval-davis, n., cassidy, k. & wemyss, g. (2016) changing the racialized ‘common sense’ of everyday bordering. open democracy uk 17.02.2016. <https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/nira-yuval-davisgeorgie-wemyss-kathryn-cassidy/changing-racialized-common-sense-of-everyday-bord> 19.04.2017. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12005 https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066105052960 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x17701429 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8676.2012.00195.x https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/how-a-culture-dies https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/how-a-culture-dies https://doi.org/10.1080/1366879x.2010.528627 http://nearfuturesonline.org/the-german-dream-neoliberalism-and-fortress-europe/ http://nearfuturesonline.org/the-german-dream-neoliberalism-and-fortress-europe/ https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203410431 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203410431 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/26/hungarian-prime-minister-viktor-orban-praises-donald-trump https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/26/hungarian-prime-minister-viktor-orban-praises-donald-trump http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443347/obama-foreign-policy-ignores-human-nature-time-tested-truths http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443347/obama-foreign-policy-ignores-human-nature-time-tested-truths http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/blogs/inclusive-economy-europe/the-eu-s-self-threatening-border-regime http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/blogs/inclusive-economy-europe/the-eu-s-self-threatening-border-regime https://doi.org/10.1080/17419166.2013.792251 https://doi.org/10.1080/17419166.2013.792251 http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/715040/hungary-referendum-viktor-orban-parallel-muslim-societies-eu-migration-refugees http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/715040/hungary-referendum-viktor-orban-parallel-muslim-societies-eu-migration-refugees https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2013.22 https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2013.22 https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viw025 https://doi.org/10.2307/20049963 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/migration-crisis-hungary-pm-victor-orban-europe-response-madness https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/migration-crisis-hungary-pm-victor-orban-europe-response-madness https://doi.org//10.1080/14650045.2013.780035 https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/nira-yuval-davis-georgie-wemyss-kathryn-cassidy/changing-racialized-common-sense-of-everyday-bord https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/nira-yuval-davis-georgie-wemyss-kathryn-cassidy/changing-racialized-common-sense-of-everyday-bord planning to meet challenges in shrinking rural regions. towards innovative approaches to local planning urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa119752 doi: 10.11143/fennia.119752 planning to meet challenges in shrinking rural regions. towards innovative approaches to local planning aksel hagen, ulla higdem and kjell overvåg hagen, a., higdem, u & overvåg, k. (2022) planning to meet challenges in shrinking rural regions. towards innovative approaches to local planning. fennia 200(2) 175–190. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119752 in this article we ask to what extent is current demographic development reflected in the present planning and policy practice of shrinking municipalities; whether there is a focus on strategies and measures for population growth; and, finally, to what extent do politicians and planners think we should change the way we plan based on the expected demographic changes. our study illustrates how challenging it is for shrinking municipalities to break with established practices and modes of policy development and to adopt a more sustainable position. the ‘stigma’ of shrinking (sousa & pinho 2015) is at odds with the ideals of the local politicians. however, we find that the response in planning and policy is not uniform: several responses may appear simultaneously and connected to different parts of the societal (master) development plans, thus, making the plans incoherent and contradictory. hence, we contribute to beetz, huning and plieninger’s (2008) and hospers’ (2014) types of responses by adding this muddled or hybrid response, which might be labelled an ‘incoherent response’. overall, we suggest that today’s planning practice in rural areas in norway has neither dared nor wanted to adapt to the most likely developments of a shrinking population, let alone actually doing so openly and consistently. this reluctance has had critical and negative implications for these municipalities. future research should develop theories, concepts and models for more suitable knowledge-based and innovative local planning that can meet this complex societal challenge. keywords: rural development, shrinking societies, realistic planning, innovation, innovative planning aksel hagen & ulla higdem, inland norway university of applied sciences, school of business fac of economy and social sciences, norway. e-mail: aksel. hagen@inn.no, ulla.higdem@inn.no kjell overvåg, university of agder, department of global development and planning, norway. e-mail: kjell.overvag@uia.no © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction norway’s population is increasing, but rural municipalities all over the country are undergoing depopulation. of the most sparsely populated municipalities, 75% have had shrinking populations in the last 20 years, often with residents scattered over a large area. in 2019, 71% of all norwegian municipalities experienced a decline. these demographic developments are expected to continue in https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119752 mailto:aksel.hagen@inn.no mailto:aksel.hagen@inn.no mailto:ulla.higdem@inn.no mailto:kjell.overvag@uia.no 176 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper the coming decades (nou 2020:15). although policy-making and planning have long focused on counteracting these demographic trends, governmental studies show that only massive immigration or a sharp increase in fertility rates can alter this course (ibid.). for most municipalities, the likelihood of a reversal is very low, both currently and in the near future. innlandet county, which is the norwegian case studied in this article, is one of the three most peripheral in norway when it comes to permanent populations (together with the counties in northern norway). innlandet has a low density of population and large parts of the county are experiencing population decline. of the 46 municipalities in innlandet, 31 have had a population decline in the last 30 years (in the period 1991–2021), meaning that they have a lower population number in 2021 than in 1991. the decline varies considerably, from 30 to 1% (see table 1). some municipalities, especially in the eastern and northern parts of innlandet (fig. 1), have had an almost continual decline annually, while others have had some interspersed years with small increases in population numbers. the yearly fluctuations in population development are quite strongly influenced by the immigration of refugees to norway, while the natural population change (births, deaths) has a more stable and declining trend. municipality 1991 (pop.nr) 2021 (pop.nr.) change (pop. nr) change (%) rendalen 2496 1741 -755 -30 % stor-elvdal 3337 2378 -959 -29 % engerdal 1677 1250 -427 -25 % folldal 1989 1518 -471 -24 % grue 5774 4545 -1229 -21 % etnedal 1565 1257 -308 -20 % les ja 2454 1980 -474 -19 % våler 4408 3587 -821 -19 % dovre 3071 2512 -559 -18 % sør-aurdal 3549 2904 -645 -18 % lom 2651 2204 -447 -17 % tolga 1877 1563 -314 -17 % vestre slidre 2529 2120 -409 -16 % åsnes 8540 7227 -1313 -15 % skjåk 2574 2183 -391 -15 % ringebu 5182 4408 -774 -15 % sel 6381 5592 -789 -12 % sør-fron 3493 3064 -429 -12 % vang 1784 1573 -211 -12 % søndre land 6305 5579 -726 -12 % trysil 7316 6580 -736 -10 % vågå 3945 3564 -381 -10 % os 2032 1870 -162 -8 % nord-fron 6167 5705 -462 -7 % gausdal 6448 6023 -425 -7 % nordre land 7038 6581 -457 -6 % eidskog 6451 6099 -352 -5 % nord-odal 5326 5038 -288 -5 % nord-aurdal 6515 6360 -155 -2 % åmot 4422 4338 -84 -2 % table 1. population numbers and change in numbers and percentage (%) 1991–2021. municipalities in innlandet county and innlandet. sorted by %-change. (source: statistics norway 2022). fennia 200(2) (2022) 177aksel hagen, ulla higdem & kjell overvåg fig. 1. changes in population (%) in municipalities in innlandet 1991–2021. (source: statistics norway 2022). municipality 1991 (pop.nr) 2021 (pop.nr.) change (pop. nr) change (%) alvdal 2430 2405 -25 -1 % vestre toten 13358 13459 101 1 % kongsvinger 17464 17851 387 2 % tynset 5398 5537 139 3 % østre toten 14314 14871 557 4 % øystre slidre 3107 3236 129 4 % sør-odal 7428 7914 486 7 % gran 12626 13611 985 8 % løten 7045 7625 580 8 % øyer 4586 5093 507 11 % ringsaker 31399 34897 3498 11 % gjøvik 26250 30395 4145 16 % stange 17645 21072 3427 19 % elverum 17406 21292 3886 22 % hamar 25454 31509 6055 24 % lillehammer 22889 28493 5604 24 % innlandet 356095 370603 14508 4 % 178 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper the decline in population numbers is in the long run expected to continue. the age composition has changed and will keep changing towards a significantly older population. this situation has recently been discussed in the demography committee’s report (nou 2020:15). they argue that the political goals for these districts should not be based on growth, but instead to create good communities for those who live or run a business there. norway has a long tradition of research and policies on rural areas (e.g. teigen 2000, 2019), including the local development, planning and development of rural services (aasbrenn 1990; bråtå et al. 2016). already in 1990, aasbrenn (1990, 6) termed the situation “the thinning-out society”. however, no major research and development projects on local planning, including the role of politicians and political parties, in shrinking rural regions in norway have been undertaken. in the study that this paper draws from, we address three rarely asked questions in the literature on most rural municipalities. to what extent is current demographic development reflected in current planning and policy practice in innlandet? is there a focus on strategies and measures for population growth? to what extent do politicians and planners think we should change the way we plan based on the expected demographic changes? the empirical basis for this discussion is data from an initial study of the situation in innlandet county, norway, financed by the regional research fund innlandet. the aim of the initial study is to gain a better understanding of today’s planning practice for local and regional development in municipalities and counties, where shrinking is evident. this smaller study is part of the development of a national research and co-operation project to be financed, by local municipalities, the regional council and national and international research institutions. the discussions in this article relate to situations where the municipalities are experiencing a decline in the permanent population, that is, the numbers of persons who are registered in the national population register with their residential address in the respective municipalities. several of the municipalities in innlandet undergoing depopulation are simultaneously experiencing a high and increasing number of second homes, with owners leading a multi-house-home lifestyle. this can have significant impacts on the local communities and municipalities (arnesen et al. 2012). however, for the municipalities the permanent populations are still crucial because they are the main criteria for the size of their budgets, due to the existing rules for taxation and income distribution to the municipalities in norway. thus, the focus in this paper is on permanent populations. the structure of the paper is as follows: in section 2, we address the theoretical perspectives of planning related to shrinking rural societies. we then present the case of innlandet county, the planning context and the institutional framework for planning in section 3. next, we present our arguments for using qualitative mixed methods, and we provide an overview of the data in section 4. this is followed by the discussion of the findings. finally, we conclude by adding a fuzzier and hybrid adaptation strategy to the existing literature, and the need to develop theories, concepts and models for more suitable knowledge-based and innovative local planning in shrinking societies. theoretical perspectives on shrinking beauregard (in sousa & pinho 2015) argues that shrinking is a ‘stigma’ that is at odds with the ideals of decision-makers. further, they underline that current theories and policies may lead to the impression that societies are ‘doomed’ if their populations are not growing. in the literature, there is broad agreement that growth-oriented planning, which disregards the data and insists on unrealistic ideas about growth, has hindered the development of other proactive strategies for dealing with the decline (lang 2012; syssner 2020). municipalities and municipal master planning thus fail to recognise the potential possibilities and alternative solutions arising from strategic local master planning with a holistic perspective and a focus on smart and sustainable shrinking. therefore, current strategies, means and measures will often be irrelevant. municipalities may waste scarce resources on unrealistic policies aimed at attracting new residents in competition with other municipalities, consequently disregarding alternatives recognising shrinkage (sousa & pinho 2015; leick & lang 2018; syssner 2020). ‘shrinkage’ has long been on the international research agenda, mostly with a focus on shrinking cities in north america and in parts of continental europe (e.g. gans 1975; hollander et al. 2009). for fennia 200(2) (2022) 179aksel hagen, ulla higdem & kjell overvåg rural and peripheral areas, there has been a small but growing body of research on planning in shrinking regions. this research has partly been based on projects aiming to develop approaches for planning in shrinking regions, for example, in germany (küpper et al. 2018). what has been the reaction to shrinking in policies and planning? beetz, huning and plieninger’s (2008) study of northeastern germany’s countryside revealed four diverging positions: 1) an opening up to alternative lifestyles, which accept a lower standard for quality of life as well as other decreasing welfare services; 2) improvement of competitiveness; 3) ‘passive restructuring’, which assumes that people will continue to out-migrate anyway; and 4) an emphasis that one must not give up the welfare system but keep it as an indispensable good, through support shared between strong and weak regions. hospers (2014) has, in a similar way, identified four policy responses to shrinking in europe. he discusses urban shrinkage in general, but we find it relevant for our study: 1) trivialising, where shrinkage is overlooked and denied; 2) countering shrinkage, with policies directed at attracting new people and businesses to resolve the problem of shrinkage; 3) accepting shrinkage, adapting the content of policies to mitigate the effects of shrinkage, improving the quality of life for the current population; and 4) utilising shrinkage, where the approach confirms that quality of life does not necessarily depend on population density, and tries to take advantage of it. for rural areas in northern europe, syssner (2020) finds that there is a general unwillingness among planners and politicians to face the consequences of shrinkage, which can be seen in connection to hospers’ (2014) response of ‘trivializing’ shrinkage in cities. in contrast, sousa and pinho (2015), discussing shrinking in europe in general, find that the most common response in planning is to keep a strategy for economic growth with a goal of resuming population growth, like beetz, huning and plieninger’s (2008) ‘improvement of competitiveness’ and hospers’ (2014) ‘countering shrinkage’. sousa and pinho (2015) say, furthermore, that this strategy normally fails, whereas both hospers (2014) and syssner (2020) state that it seems that an approach of acceptance and adaptation is the most suitable strategy to address shrinkage. our review of the research on shrinkage leads us to conclude that it has succeeded in revealing the challenges for planning in shrinking regions and contributed to increasing awareness of this issue, but it has also discovered a general unwillingness among planners and politicians to face the consequences of shrinkage. there have been some interesting contributions to new theoretical and practical approaches (e.g. papers from the special issue of european planning studies on ‘re-thinking non-core regions: planning strategies and practice beyond growth’ (leick & lang 2018). nonetheless, the need for the further development of theories, concepts and models, as well as approaches to planning in shrinking regions, is pressing. researchers such as sousa and pinho (2018) state that there is no theory on planning for shrinkage, and that the literature is unclear and confusing. this is particularly so for rural and peripheral regions (syssner 2020). from the applied perspective, espon (2020, 31), for example, calls for “… practical guidance and support for local action, across a wide menu of interventions, [to] increase its potential for real changes”, and that approaches for shrinking areas must be based on evidence and reflect an analysis of pathways to shrinkage. espon (2020, 31) emphasises the need for a policy for shrinking rural areas that “… reflect(s) broader societal objectives than economic growth, such as inclusion, spatial justice, and wellbeing, and support a just transition – towards a sustainable society”. in norway, this issue is highly relevant because local (municipal) planning is fundamental: the municipalities have extensive responsibilities within their territory, such as welfare services, education, infrastructure and societal development. hagen and higdem (2019, 2020a) stress the need for innovation in planning, including policy development, to address the issues arising in shrinking rural societies. this also calls for innovation in planning processes, methods and models (beetz et al. 2008), where co-creation between public, private, ngos and other actors is vital for collaborative innovation (torfing et al. 2016). case and planning context innlandet county is in the south-eastern part of norway (fig. 2). the population is about 371 000, and the density is seven persons per km2 (compared with 15 for norway). there are some small cities in the county, the three largest being hamar (29 000), gjøvik and lillehammer (both about 21 000 inhabitants) (fig. 3). the population is to a large degree and increasingly settled in these cities and other smaller 180 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper settlements, making much of innlandet a peripheral region with respect to permanent population. it is, however, attractive for second homes, with about 90 000 second homes, mostly located in the mountain areas and in municipalities with small population numbers (statistics norway 2022). most of the second homeowners come from outside the county, mostly the oslofjord area. other important industries are agriculture, forestry, tourism, and some branches of production of goods. the population of innlandet has increased by 4% in the last 30 years. the development has, however, been highly uneven among the 46 municipalities, with the population decreasing for 31 and increasing for the other 15, with changes ranging from -30% to +24% (fig. 1 and table 1). the general picture is that the large municipalities are getting larger and the smaller, smaller. it is those 31 municipalities with a long-term decrease in population that are under study in this article. it is also in these municipalities that an ageing population is experienced most strongly and earliest. estimates for future population development in innlandet are subject to great uncertainty, caused in part by international and national migration. statistics norway (ssb) estimates that the decline will continue until 2040 in 20 of the 31 municipalities, whereas another institute has in general criticised the estimates from ssb for being too optimistic for the most peripheral municipalities (vareide 2021). the likelihood of a significant break in the population trend in these municipalities seems to be low. fig 2. counties in norway. (source: regjeringen 2019). fennia 200(2) (2022) 181aksel hagen, ulla higdem & kjell overvåg 1–9 inhabitants per km2 10–19 inhabitants per km2 20–99 inhabitants per km2 100–499 inhabitants per km2 500–1999 inhabitants per km2 2000–4999 inhabitants per km2 5000 or more inhabitants per km2 population per km2 2019 fig 3. inhabitants per km2 in innlandet 2019. (source: statistics norway 2021). in the planning system in norway, responsibilities are divided and shared between the three levels of government: national, regional (the counties) and local (the municipalities). municipalities have extensive responsibilities within their territory, such as welfare services, primary schools, infrastructure (local roads, water, sewage etc.), land-use planning and societal development. the 356 municipalities of norway are all political-administrative entities with equal status as autonomous bodies, grounded on a principle of municipal self-government. the municipalities are required to plan for societal development as well as the municipality’s organisation of public services according to the planning and building act (pba 2008). the current 11 counties in norway (which will become 14 by 2023) are responsible for county roads, collective transport, secondary schools, culture, regional development and regional planning. municipal and regional planning constitutes an interactive planning model at local and regional levels, within a strategic policy-making activity embedded in a multi-level democratic system (sandkjær hanssen et al. 2018). the municipal council itself directs the planning process (pba 2008 § 3¬–3). municipal master plans for societal development in norway is vital in the strategic policy-making. the planning serves as a common arena for public, private and citizen actors to voice their interests, and the municipal council makes the final decisions. the purpose of planning is to “promote sustainable development in the best 182 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper interests of individuals, society and future generations” (pba 2008 § 1–1). the municipality is responsible for formulating strategy and policy for local development that is holistic and sensitive to the local context, a principle embedded in the municipal master plan (pba 2008 § 11–1). the master plan is based on the municipal planning strategy (pba 2008 § 10–1), which is to “comprise a discussion of the municipality’s strategic choices related to social development, including long-term land use, environmental challenges, sector activities and an assessment of the municipality’s planning needs during the electoral term”. therefore, through the measure of a planning strategy, the planning and building act of 2008 provides a strong platform for municipalities’ strategic policy-making. further, the political parties have a longestablished practice of developing party programmes that deal with community development. sometimes there may be some form of interaction between party programme work and planning. regional planning is directed by the county council, and should link local and regional needs and challenges, including ‘translating’ and ‘adjusting’ national policy to regional conditions, and coordinating municipal planning within a region (higdem & hagen 2018). the counties have the role as coordinators for public authorities on different levels, and are responsible for formulating regional planning strategies (rps) (pba 2008 § 7–1) in close cooperation with designated partners such as the local municipalities, the regional state bodies and private interests. thus, the counties represent the most important public authorities for enhancing regional development, and their main instruments in this regard is regional planning (higdem & sandkjær hanssen 2014). regional plans may be developed for a territory or a theme and may cross several territorial (county or municipal) borders. the government relies for most part on soft-law instruments to implement a comprehensive regional plan. a regional plan may, however, give regional planning provisions [i.e. hard law] for land use in a regional master plan intended to safeguard national or regional considerations and interests (pba 2008 § 8–5). approved guidelines for each zone direct the implementation of the plan, as the action plan of regional plans guides the different regional and local actors in their actions and future planning (pba 2008 § 7–2). the county’s planning staff also supervises the municipalities in their planning. a mixed set of qualitative research methods the research was carried out in the winter and spring of 2021, as a part of an initial project called ‘realistic planning’ the study consists of the 31 municipalities in the innland county with a long-term decrease in population (fig. 1 and table 1). the data consist of i) a document study of three main types of documents – planning strategies, master plans and party programmes, ii) workshops, and iii) interviews. we have reviewed the municipals’ societal master plan and the planning strategy for all 31 shrinking municipalities. the societal master plan should, according to the planning and building act (pba 2008), ‘decide on long-term challenges, goals and strategies for the municipal community as a whole and the municipality as an organisation’ (pba 2008 § 11–2, own translation). it thus includes both goals and strategies for the whole society (for example related to the development of jobs and demography) and for the more specific services and tasks for which they are responsible (e.g. primary schools and elderly care). the planning strategy is, simply put, a plan for what plans the municipality needs to develop or update for the next four years. according to the law this strategy ‘should include a discussion of the municipality’s strategic choices related to community development, including longterm land use, environmental challenges, the sectors’ activities and an assessment of the municipality’s planning needs during the election period’ (pba 2008 § 10–1, own translation). we also see that the plan includes both the community perspective and the more specific perspectives of the service sectors. concerning the latter, what is included in both these documents is often excerpts of challenges, goals and strategies taken from separate planning documents relating to the different sectors or from written input to the documents from the sectors’ administration. in addition, we have assessed the local political-party programmes in six of these 31 municipalities. the six municipalities have been randomly chosen. it is particularly interesting to read texts that politicians have formulated themselves about the present and the desired future for their communities, without the influence of planners and planning legislation. how are the challenges of a shrinking population discussed and treated politically in these texts? fennia 200(2) (2022) 183aksel hagen, ulla higdem & kjell overvåg finally, we have reviewed innlandet county’s regional planning strategy and regional political programmes. we have thus i) covered both the local and regional planning strategies and a selection of party programmes. ii) we have conducted four workshops, two with politicians and planners in innlandet county and the others with the municipal executive board in two municipalities. iii) finally, we have conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with top politicians at regional and local levels, that is, mayors, county mayors and key party politicians. this mixed set of qualitative methods provides for an abductive approach and analysis (blaikie 1993; stake 2000) based on a set of theories in dialogue with several aspects of planning practices that provides a rich picture of planning in shrinking rural areas. as we have looked for patterns referring to theories of shrinking, the analysis is inspired by an abductive approach (blaikie 1993) in its interactive development between theory and data. planning practices includes politicians’ understanding, local policy-making in party programmes, interviews with leading politicians and, of course, the planning documents describing today’s situation and future perspectives. from our position, the politicians form an understanding of the range of possibilities and, hence, the framework for the planning activities. the analysis is based on our research questions, and the research questions guided the interview guide, the workshops and the analysis of documents. we used the software-program nvivo, designed for analysing qualitative data, to analyse the experiences from the workshops and the interviews. we transcribed all interviews and imported them into nvivo, where we employed the interview guide to code the text. moreover, we imported the notes and summaries from the workshops into nvivo and coded them on the basis of our research questions. two researchers collaborated on the coding and the analysis to ensure the intersubjectivity of our understanding. nvivo allows for a systematic and transparent analysis. we have restricted the analysed planning documents to the societal part of the municipal master plans and the planning strategies. hence, a total assessment of all types of municipal plans, including plans for separate themes or sectors, would have given a broader and more comprehensive study. a more comprehensive study would also include more interviews with planners, politicians and other actors involved in planning at different levels, especially at the municipal level. current policy response and planning practice to what extent is the current demographic development reflected in planning and policy in innlandet? is there also in innlandet a continued focus on goals for population growth and an unwillingness to face the consequences of shrinkage, which has been a common response in other parts of europe? do politicians and planners in innlandet think we should change the way we plan today? in this section we present our findings on these questions, first, from the municipal planning strategies and societal master plans, then from the programmes by political parties and, finally, from the interviews with politicians and planners. municipal planning strategies and the societal master plan all municipalities include statistics and prognoses for population development, including population numbers and age composition in their plans, and so this is well known, presented and communicated. nevertheless, most municipalities (20 of 31 municipalities, see table 2, column 1) have goals for population growth in the coming years, and a few have goals for stabilising population numbers (table 2, column 2), which is also unrealistic for most of them due to the prognosis. in fact, it is those municipalities with the strongest negative population prognosis that to the largest degree have goals for population growth. several of the municipalities with goals of population growth strongly emphasise strategies for making them more attractive, especially for young people and families. some of them are strongly influenced by telemarksforskning, a norwegian research institute whose consultants have developed what they call an ‘attractiveness model’, with indicators for attractivity connected to settlement, industries and visitors, and where they say that municipalities that succeed in developing their attractivity may be the one exception against the general trends (aastvedt et al. 2019). 184 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper in søndre land municipality, having 5 535 inhabitants in 2021, telemarksforskning have done an analysis in connection with the new societal part of their municipal plan. in the planning strategy, søndre land municipality writes: telemarksforskning estimates that if the municipality succeeds in improving its attractivity and the development in the country does not worsen considerably, the population number in søndre land can be about 5 700 inhabitants in 2040. if the attractivity in the local community is kept at about the same level as today it is estimated that the number of inhabitants will be about 4 700 in 2040. søndre land municipality will follow this up by developing strategies and measures to reverse the population decline. (søndre land kommune 2020, 11our translation) in these planning documents, there are few municipalities that problematise or reflect on the gap between actual population development and their goals for population growth in their planning documents. however, some do. skjåk, with 2 165 inhabitants, is an illustrative example. in their planning strategy (approved in october 2017), they say that “population numbers have decreased by more than four hundred persons in the last 30 years. if the development when it comes to births, municipality (name) 1. population growth is a goal 2. goal of stabilising pop. 3. adaption of main services 4. emphasis on existing pop. eidskog (x) x grue x x våler x (x) trysil x x stor-elvdal x (x) rendalen x (x) engerdal x tolga x folldal x (x) os x (x) dovre x x lesja x x (x) skjåk x (x) lom (x) nord-fron x sel x x gausdal x søndre land x x sør-aurdal x x vestre slidre x nord-odal x x åsnes x x åmot x alvdal x vågå x x sør-fron ringebu x nordre land x etnedal x x nord-aurdal x vang (x) table 2. how planning strategies and municipal plans for the 31 municipalities in innlandet relates to current and future demographic development. fennia 200(2) (2022) 185aksel hagen, ulla higdem & kjell overvåg mortality, inand out-migration does not change, one must expect that it also will be a decrease in the coming years” (skjåk kommune 2017, 9–10, our translation). in the same document, when they discuss their experiences with the existing societal part of the municipal plan, they state that “the main experience with this plan is that some of the goals should be adjusted to a more realistic level, including population development” (skjåk kommune 2017, 4, our translation). in their new societal master plan (approved in 2020), three scenarios are presented: one they call ‘pessimistic’ with a decreasing population, one ‘modest’ with a stable population and one ‘optimistic’ with an increasing population. then, it is stated that “the danger is that it is the pessimistic scenario that is realistic, but we must work towards the optimistic one” (skjåk kommune 2020, 14, our translation). in explaining why they must do this, they discuss in the document the age structure, where they say that those challenges are not necessarily dramatic for them due especially to their many years of experience with a high proportion of old people. then, it is stated that “but a society needs young blood to keep its vitality, and that makes it necessary for incentives for population growth. the future strategies for the municipality must have this as one of its main goals” (skjåk kommune 2020, 10, our translation). this illustrates that despite their recognition of the need for more realistic goals, this is not followed up in the new plan. in our view, the scenario, which includes a decrease in population, is associated with many – and only – negative societal developments (increased centralisation of national/regional services, empty houses and schools etc.), compared with the two other scenarios. when scenarios are developed in this way, it makes it unacceptable for the municipality to have realistic goals for population development. at the same time as most municipalities have population growth as a goal, most municipalities have a more adaptive and realistic approach when it comes to demographic development connected to the parts of the plans that consider main services (especially primary schools/kindergartens and healthcare). as table 2 shows (column 4), more than half of the municipalities that have population growth as a goal simultaneously have an adaptive approach to services. the arguments typically used are both connected to demographic prognoses for changes in population numbers and age structures in their own municipality, implying, for example, the need to evaluate how many schools are needed in the municipality in the coming years. but often it also refers to general trends in norway connected to demography, especially more older people, expected tighter public finances for such services, and difficulties in recruiting personnel. this implies that there will be a strong need for innovation connected, among other factors, to making the services more efficient, the use of welfare technology and more private, public and ngo coproduction. for example, when grue municipality describes challenges within health and welfare services (under the main heading ‘national expectations for societal and service developments’), some of their bullet points state: “[to] be able to deliver good / good enough services within a sustainable economic “frame”. this means a service delivery that is more cost-effective”; “it will be necessary for solutions where as many as possible can stay home longer, with some need for services”; “[to] implement welfare technology”; “[to] have enough qualified and competent personnel for all the tasks that the municipality must solve” (grue municipality 2016, 22, our translation). a few of the municipalities do not have stated goals connected to population development, neither growth nor stabilising, which possibly indicates a kind of trivialisation. but some of them, such as gausdal, sør-aurdal and etnedal, rather have a quite strong focus on the existing population and community (table 2, column 4). hospers (2014) discusses this in connection with the response of accepting shrinkage. for example, in gausdal the vision is ‘together we make it happen’, and they will work together with inhabitants, local industry and ngos, among others on the following areas: good everyday lives, a close and active local community, a greener municipality, public safety and preparedness, sustainable land use and sustainable economy. connected to ‘close and active local community’ it is, among other things, stated that “we want gausdal to be a local community where inhabitants of all ages participate, take joint responsibility and experience inclusion. we can create and develop a sustainable local community best together” (gausdal municipality 2021,13 our translation). having said that, we must stress that all municipalities, including those with population growth as a goal (often one of many goals), of course, deal with the existing community, and not only with potential in-migration etc. 186 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper as we have referred to in the text above, we have given an overview of some of the findings from the municipal plannings strategies and master plans for each of the 31 municipalities in table 2. as discussed, column 1 shows municipalities which have goals or visions of population growth (either as a general goal or vision or an underlying goal lower in the goal hierarchy). column 2 shows municipalities that have goals for stabilising population numbers. column 3 identifies which municipalities have an adaptive approach when it comes to the part of the planning documents that considers the provision of main services. column 4 shows those municipalities where these planning documents include an explicit emphasis on the existing population. where these responses are clearly identifiable in the documents, it is indicated with an x, whereas in the instances where it is not so clear, it is indicated with a small x in brackets. in the discussion section we shall consider how these findings, together with the findings from the other data, relate to policy responses elsewhere in europe. what can be noticed already here is that the columns are not mutually exclusive, and we shall discuss this later as an important finding from this study. party programmes versus planning-dilemmas we have assessed party programmes in six municipalities with population decline and expected population decline. overall, the programmes give the impression of great political commitment to their municipality. population development and settlement pattern are given attention in one or more of the party programmes in five of six municipalities. most programmes signal an ambition to maintain population and secure settlement. some programmes are clearly concerned about the importance of reversing a shrinking population trend. many programmes are mainly concerned with what contributes to the municipality becoming a good community to live in, either as a permanent resident or as a leisure-home resident. we found no party programme that clearly provided a realistic planning perspective for population development. at the same time, in the one municipality that did not directly mention population development, the political programmes were clearly ready to act with regard to societal development. the number of political parties in these six municipalities varies between six and two. the material is too small to say anything about any differences between the various political parties. many of the party programmes report that population development is at once an important and difficult topic. the programmes vary in length and thoroughness. many of these parties are small, run by only a few people. together, they cover many different topics or factors that the individual political party believes are important for population development. there are topics such as the conditions for various types of business, labour market, housing, housing plots, cottages (leisure homes), welfare services, kindergartens, schools, municipal employer policy, internet capacity, transport, recreation, nature and environmental protection, sports and culture and voluntary organisational life. local and regional politicians and planners all informants recognise and agree on the need for developing a new planning practice that addresses shrinkage. all the politicians we interviewed, except one, thought that one should have a more realistic approach to population development. this informant thought it was both politically desirable and even possible to reverse the decline in growth. however, there are different assessments in predictable political (ideological) directions on whether the rural municipalities and the shrinking regions should or ought to plan for a decreasing population as the planning horizon. although there are variations, the main position among politicians is that centralisation, to a certain degree, is a result of a conscious government policy aiming at centralisation. however, there were differing views, somewhat depending on party affiliation, about the extent to which national policy had a decisive impact on population development. for politicians, it is challenging to plan within a framework with a declining population as the realistic result. the explanation is that such a framework or planning will be regarded as the parties’ primary preferred goals and visions for the future, which means an approval of the centralisation of fennia 200(2) (2022) 187aksel hagen, ulla higdem & kjell overvåg services, the downscaling of activities and the reduction of the number of schools and, not least, depopulation. one top politician states: “a party programme has a long horizon containing visions, ambitions and dreams. planning may not to a similar degree be based on dreams; it is much more concrete. the recipe for success is when these two perspectives can meet, that is, the refraction-point between realistic plans and visions, ambitions and dreams.” unsurprisingly, the interviewed planning officials hope for and recommend a more realistic approach to planning than the politicians. most informants agree that the planning focus should shift from population growth and should pay more attention to citizens living and working in the rural municipalities and counties. several of the rural municipalities in the innlandet have more holiday homes than inhabitants (statistics norway 2022. this means that tourism plays a major role in business and job opportunities. it also implies that the number of inhabitants varies greatly, for example, during holidays. most informants are positive about holiday homes and the possibilities the part-time inhabitants create for local and regional societal development. incoherent planning responses our study illustrates how challenging it is for shrinking municipalities to break with established practices and modes of policy development into a more realistic and innovative planning approach. the ‘stigma’ of shrinking (sousa & pinho 2015) certainly shadows the ideals of the local politicians, at least when we observe how politicians formulate themselves orally in debates and in writing, such as in plans and party programmes. the stigma manifests itself as a political admission of defeat and a passive acceptance of negative downward spirals if the planning horizon were to be realistic about a non-growing population. this stigma will, from a political point of view, lead to a pessimistic view of shrinking societies as being unattractive for inhabitants to live in or move to. the innovative potential of a realistic approach (hagen & higdem 2020b), where development in a non-growth situation is possible, is not directly and distinctly found in the policy agendas in these municipalities. on the one hand, our study reveals that municipalities, despite undergoing long-term shrinkage, dismiss it as a premise in their master planning and continue to plan for growth, much like shrinking rural areas and cities in other countries. it further suggests that the response in planning and policy cannot be characterised by only one type of response, but that several responses may appear simultaneously, connected to different parts of the societal master plans, thus, making the plans incoherent and contradictory. the most important of such simultaneous responses is when the planning documents have goals for population growth as well as strategies for the adaptation of main services to a shrinking society. this discrepancy within the planning documents is not surprising and may have several explanations. we already know that the municipalities may fail to link together the different planning types in the planning system sufficiently (sandkjær hanssen & aarsæther 2018). master planning is an arena where politicians steer and develop policy for societal development (pba 2008), and the planning expertise may be neglected, as our informants suggest. plans for public service provision, however, traditionally lean more on the planning expertise and the factual data for future dimensioning of services. our study, therefore, suggests that there is adaptive capacity in the shrinking areas regarding services. such an adaptation may be troublesome, but economically necessary. however, this area is not linked to the overall master planning and societal policy development, and this makes a realistic perspective even more elusive in policy development and the political parties. although they are, of course, well-known facts for politicians when addressing the budget and coping with the local protesters when their small school is being closed, it does not affect the policy-making in general. therefore, we argue, as our analysis suggest, that politicians do not dare to introduce a realistic perspective on policy-making in shrinking societies, although many of them might just want to signal and work towards a more realistic approach. in the context of varied responses to a shrinking society, it is important to recognise that our data suggest that municipalities also deal with the existing community and collaborate with inhabitants, local industry, ngos and so on, in their planning documents. hence, municipalities do not address the potential of in-migration as the sole criterion of success, even though the overall goal is population increase. 188 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper a more realistic planning position will obviously challenge ways of thinking, traditions and economic systems where growth is regarded as a necessary as well as a desired development. it will also challenge what is politically rational practice for a politician and for a political party. not least, a political party is dependent on gaining trust and support in elections. how can a political party and a politician achieve this even if, or precisely because, one recommends a realistic approach? incoherent planning responses municipalities in innlandet have, as mentioned, quite varied responses to shrinkage, and in relation to responses internationally we find several similarities, but also some notable differences. in comparison to north-eastern germany (beetz et al. 2008), we find ‘improvement of competitiveness’ to a large degree in innlandet, and also ‘passive restructuring’, meaning adapting services to shrinkage (and often simultaneously, as discussed above). we do not find any positions where the standard and level of welfare systems and services are discussed or questioned, as beetz, huning and plieninger (2008) have found in germany. municipalities in innlandet, however, often discuss how welfare services can continue to be delivered at a high level in the future, owing to expected tighter finances, more old people, and lack of workforce. though we do not investigate such differences between germany and norway in this article, we can speculate that it could be connected to the national economy, and we think that even questioning the principle of equal welfare services in the whole country might be just another stigma in norway, in the same way as recognising shrinking in planning is. compared with what hospers (2014) has found as responses to urban shrinkage in europe, we find three of them in municipalities in rural innlandet, but not ‘utilizing shrinkage’, where one tries to take advantage of the shrinkage. as our analysis suggests, several municipalities in innlandet may at the same time have goals for population growth (like hospers’ ‘countering shrinkage’) as well as a practical and economic adaptive capacity for shrinkage towards future service provision (like hospers’ ‘accepting shrinkage’). by finding contrasting responses simultaneously, we can add to beetz huning and plieninger’s (2008) and hospers’ (2014) types of responses this muddled or hybrid response, which might be labelled an ‘incoherent response’. as discussed above, we do not find this surprising owing to how the norwegian planning context, including documents, is designed. we do not know why this has not been revealed or commented upon by earlier research in other countries. it could be connected to differences in planning systems, differences in methods (i.e. which planning and policy documents have been studied) and the search for ideal types of responses. conclusions the main conclusion is twofold. on the one hand, our study reveals that municipalities, despite undergoing long-term shrinkage, dismiss it as a premise in their master planning and continue to plan for growth, much like rural areas in other countries. on the other hand, our study suggests that the responses in planning and policy are quite varied, and that there are municipalities and politicians that are highly aware that their plans and policies are unrealistic, but are confused about how to handle them and what the alternatives for the future may be. our study illustrates how municipalities may adapt to shrinking in their plans for public service provision and that there are some municipalities that do not focus on growth, but emphasise the current population and quality of life. this indicates that there can be cases that can be interesting to learn from in future studies. following hospers (2014), we introduce a hybrid adaptation strategy. overall, today’s planning practice in rural areas in norway has neither dared nor wanted to adapt to the most likely developments of a shrinking population, let alone actually doing so openly and consistently. this reluctance has had critical and negative implications for these municipalities. it is crucial, therefore, both to develop knowledge of why local planning in norway disregards shrinkage as well as the consequences this has for planning and the future of rural societies, and to develop theories, concepts and models for more suitable knowledge-based and innovative local planning that can meet this complex societal challenge. fennia 200(2) (2022) 189aksel hagen, ulla higdem & kjell overvåg finally, we argue that planning, rather than encouraging unrealistic visions of tomorrow, should be far more concerned with solving challenges in the present and the probable future. already in 1979, lindblom called for planning theories that were ‘in the range of possibilities’ (lindblom 1979). many planning scholars (e.g. krieger 1987; flyvbjerg 1991; stein & harper 2012) have since agreed, and their works form the basis of our future planning research. finally, future research should develop theories and models to stimulate more knowledge-based and innovative planning practices because innovation has become a pertinent and common term in regional as well as local planning and planning theory (albrechts 2012; hagen & higdem 2020a, 2020b). acknowledgements we thank camilla ulven søgård at innlandet county authority, innlandet statistics, for all help regarding the county map in figure 3. the project was financed by the inland regional research fund (of the norwegian research council). references aasbrenn, k. (1990) uttynningssamfunnet. utfordringer og forskningsbehov. østlandsfoskning, lillehammer. <https://www.ostforsk.no/publikasjoner/uttynningssamfunnet> 10.12.2022. aastvedt, a., magnussen, e., vareide, k & thorstensen, a. (2019) nye grep for en ny framtid: søndre land kommune i møte med framtida. tf-rapport nr. 481 2019, telemarksforskning. <https://www. telemarksforsking.no/publikasjoner/nye-grep-for-en-ny-framtid/3396/> 10.12.2022. albrechts, l. (2012) reframing strategic spatial planning by using a coproduction perspective. planning theory 12(1) 46–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095212452722 arnesen, t., overvåg, k., skjeggedal, t. & ericsson, b. (2012) trancending orthodoxy: the multi house home, leisure and the transformation of core periphery relations. in. danson, m. & de souza, p. (eds.) regional development in northern europe, 182–195. routledge, oxon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203127247-18 beetz, s., huning, s. & plieninger (2008) landscapes of peripherization in north-eastern germany's countryside: new challenges for planning theory and practice, international planning studies 13(4) 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563470802518909 blaikie, n. (1993) approaches to social enquiry. blackwell, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.2307/2076918 bråtå, h. o., alnes, p. k. & lundhaug, k. (2016) kommuners håndtering av stagnasjon eller nedgang i befolkning og sysselsetting. øf-rapport 6/2016. østlandsforskning, lillehammer. <https://www. ostforsk.no/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/062016_kommuners_h%c3%a5ndtering_av_stagnasjon_eller_ nedgang_i_befolkning.pdf> 10.12.2022. espon (2020) european shrinking rural areas: challenges, actions and perspectives for territorial governance. final report. espon, luxemburg. <https://www.espon.eu/sites/default/files/attachments/ espon%20escape%20main%20final%20report.pdf> 10.12.2022 flyvbjerg, b. (1991) rationalitet og magt. akademisk forlag, københavn. gans, h. j. (1975) planning for declining and poor cities. journal of the american institute of planners 41(5) 305–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944367508977673 gausdal municipality (2021) sammen får vi det til. kommuneplanens samfunnsdel 2021–2032. gausdal kommune, segalstad bru. <https://www.gausdal.kommune.no/kommuneplan.423787.no. html> 10.12.2022. gran municipality (2018) kommuneplan. gran kommune. grue municipality (2016) kommunal planstrategi 2016–2019. grue kommune. hagen, a. & higdem, u. (2019) calculate, communicate and innovate – do we need innovate as a third position? journal of planning literature 34(4) 421–433. https://doi.org/10.1177/0885412219851876 hagen, a. & higdem, u. (2020a) calculate, communicate and innovate? in hagen, a. & higdem, u. (eds.) innovation in public planning: calculate, communicate and innovate, 11–33. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46136-2_2 hagen, a. & higdem, u. (2020b) innovation in planning theory: the upcoming perspective. in hagen, a. & higdem, u. (eds.) innovation in public planning: calculate, communicate and innovate, 205–218. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46136-2_12 higdem, u. & hagen, a. (2018) regional planlegging – mellom stat og kommune. in aarsæter, n., falleth, e., nyseth, t. & kristiansen, r. (eds.) plan og samfunn. cappelen damm akademisk, oslo. https://www.ostforsk.no/publikasjoner/uttynningssamfunnet https://www.telemarksforsking.no/publikasjoner/nye-grep-for-en-ny-framtid/3396/ https://www.telemarksforsking.no/publikasjoner/nye-grep-for-en-ny-framtid/3396/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095212452722 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203127247-18 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563470802518909 https://doi.org/10.2307/2076918 https://www.ostforsk.no/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/062016_kommuners_h%c3%a5ndtering_av_stagnasjon_eller_nedgang_i_befolkning.pdf https://www.ostforsk.no/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/062016_kommuners_h%c3%a5ndtering_av_stagnasjon_eller_nedgang_i_befolkning.pdf https://www.ostforsk.no/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/062016_kommuners_h%c3%a5ndtering_av_stagnasjon_eller_nedgang_i_befolkning.pdf https://www.espon.eu/sites/default/files/attachments/espon%20escape%20main%20final%20report.pdf https://www.espon.eu/sites/default/files/attachments/espon%20escape%20main%20final%20report.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/01944367508977673 https://www.gausdal.kommune.no/kommuneplan.423787.no.html https://www.gausdal.kommune.no/kommuneplan.423787.no.html https://doi.org/10.1177/0885412219851876 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46136-2_2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46136-2_12 190 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper higdem, u. & sandkjær hanssen, g. (2014) handling the two conflicting discourses of partnerships and participation in regional planning. european planning studies 22(7) 1444–1461. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.791966 hollander, j. b., pallagast, k., schwarz, t. & popper, f. j. (2009) planning shrinking cities. progress in planning 72(4) 223–232. hospers, g.-j. (2014) policy responses to urban shrinkage: from growth thinking to civic engagement. european planning studies 22(7) 1507–1523. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 krieger, m. h. (1987) planning and design as theological and religious activities. environment and planning b 14 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1068/b140005 küpper, p., kundolf, s., mettenberger, t. & tuitjer, g. (2018) rural regeneration strategies for declining regions: trade-off between novelty and practicability. european planning studies 26(2) 229–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 lang, t. (2012) shrinkage, metropolization and peripheralization in east germany. european planning studies 20(10) 1747–1754. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.713336 leick, b. & lang, t. (2018) re-thinking non-core regions: planning strategies and practices beyond growth. european planning studies 26(2) 213–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1363398 lindblom, c. e. (1979) still muddling, not yet through. public administration review 39(6) 517–526. https://doi.org/10.2307/976178 nou 2020:15 (2020) det handler om norge: bærekraft i hele landet: utredning om konsekvenser av demografiutfordringer i distriktene. kommunalog moderniseringsdepartementet, oslo. <https:// www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/nou-2020-15/id2788079/> 10.12.2022. pba, planning and building act (2008) lov om planlegging og byggesaksbehandling. lov-2008-06-27-71 [the planning and building act]. <https://lovdata.no/dokument/nl/lov/2008-06-27-71> 10.12.2022. regjeringen (2019) regions of norway. <www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/8b2f4434bb024962801a18b 06d4888e4/nye_fylker_med_navn_hoy_jpg.jpg> 19.12.2019. sandkjær hanssen, g. & aaarsæther, n. (2018) introduksjon. in sandkjær hanssen, g. &. aarsæther, n. (eds.) planog bygningsloven: en lov for vår tid, 19–23. universitetsforlaget, oslo. sandkjær hanssen, g., aarsæther, n. & winge, k. n. (2018) lovens intensjoner. in sandkjær hanssen, g. &. aarsæther, n. (eds.) planog bygningsloven 2008 – fungerer loven etter intensjonene?, 27–39. universitetsforlaget, oslo. skjåk kommune (2017) planstrategi 2016–2020. skjåk kommune. skjåk kommune (2020) innovasjon og tradisjon. rullert kommuneplan 2017–2028. skjåk kommune. sousa, s. & pinho, p. (2015) planning for shrinkage: paradox or paradigm. european planning studies 23(1) 12–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820082 stake, r. (2000) case studies. in denzin, n. k & lincoln, y. s. (eds.) handbook of qualitative research. 2nd ed., 435–454. sage, london. statistics norway (2021) map database. <https://kart.ssb.no/>. 25.4.2022. statistics norway (2022) existing building stocks: holiday houses, by type of building (m) 2001–2022. <https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/03174/> 26.4.2022. stein, s. m. & harper, t. l. (2012) creativity and innovation: divergence and convergence in pragmatic dialogical planning. journal of planning education and research 32 (1) 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x11417829 syssner, j. (2020) pathways to demographic adaptation: perspectives on policy and planning in depopulating areas in northern europe. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 søndre land kommune (2020) planprogram kommuneplanens samfunnsdel. planstrategi 2020–2023. søndre land kommune. teigen, h. (2019) distriktspolitikkens historie i norge. cappelen damm akademisk, oslo. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-2944-2020-04-12 teigen, h. (2000) planlegging av bygdenorge: eit 200-års perspektiv. [planning the rural norway: in a 200 years perspective]. in teigen, h. (ed.) bygdeutvikling: historiske spor og framtidige vegvalg, 11–65. tapir, trondheim. torfing, j. & triantafiliou, p. (2016) enhancing public innovation by transforming public governance? in torfing, j. & triantafiliou, (eds.) enhancing public innovation by transforming public governance. cambridge university press, camebridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781316105337.001 vareide, k. (2021) telemarksforsknings og ssbs befolkningsprognoser: fasit 2020. <https:// regionalanalyse.no/artikkel/prognose2020> 10.12.2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.791966 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 https://doi.org/10.1068/b140005 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1361583 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.713336 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1363398 https://doi.org/10.2307/976178 https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/nou-2020-15/id2788079/ https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/nou-2020-15/id2788079/ https://lovdata.no/dokument/nl/lov/2008-06-27-71 http://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/8b2f4434bb024962801a18b06d4888e4/nye_fylker_med_navn_hoy_jpg.jpg http://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/8b2f4434bb024962801a18b06d4888e4/nye_fylker_med_navn_hoy_jpg.jpg https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820082 https://kart.ssb.no/ https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/03174/ https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x11417829 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.1504-2944-2020-04-12 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781316105337.001 https://regionalanalyse.no/artikkel/prognose2020 https://regionalanalyse.no/artikkel/prognose2020 geography and history education in estonia: processes, policies and practices in an ethnically divided society from the late 1980s to the early 2000s urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa54160 doi: 10.11143/54160 geography and history education in estonia: processes, policies and practices in an ethnically divided society from the late 1980s to the early 2000s jaanus veemaa & jussi s jauhiainen veemaa, jaanus & jussi s jauhiainen (2016). geography and history education in estonia: processes, policies and practices in an ethnically divided society from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. fennia 194: 2, 119–134. issn 17985617. this article studies processes, policies and practices for geography and history education in estonia. the analysis covers the societal transformation period in an ethnically divided society from the 1980s to the early 2000s characterized by estonia’s disintegration from the soviet union towards the integration to the european union and nato. geography and history education curricula, textbooks and related policies and practices promoted a particular national timespace by supporting the belongingness of estonia into europe, rejecting connections towards russia and suggesting a division between ethnic estonians and ethnically non-estonian residents of estonia. in geography and history textbooks, the russian-speaking population, comprising then almost a third of the entire population of estonia, was divided into non-loyal, semi-loyal and loyal groups of whom only the latter could be integrated in the estonian time-space. the formal education policies for geography and history supported estonia’s disintegration from the soviet past and pawed way to integration to the western political and economic structures. however, challenging market and sensitive cultural contexts created peculiar, alternative and sometimes opposing local practices in geography and history education. keywords: estonia, geography and history education, critical discourse analysis, school textbooks, national time-space, education policy jaanus veemaa, johan skytte institute of political studies, university of tartu, lossi 36, ee-51003, tartu, estonia. e-mail: jankaf@ut.ee jussi s. jauhiainen, department of geography and geology, university of turku, 20014 university of turku, finland and institute of ecology and earth sciences, university of tartu, vanemuise 46 ee-50010 tartu, estonia. e-mail: jusaja@utu.fi introduction this article studies processes, policies and practices for geography and history education in estonia. the analysis covers the societal transformation period from the 1980s to the early 2000s, characterised by estonia’s disintegration from the soviet union towards the integration to the european union (eu) and nato. the main topic here is estonia but broader connections from the case can be made as regards many central eastern european (cee) and post-soviet countries, and other states facing profound social, economic and political transformations. the five decades long soviet occupation meant that by the end of 1980s estonia had become an ethnically divided society. two-thirds of the population were estonian-speaking ethnic estonians and one third was russian-speaking population consisted of russians, ukrainians, and other people. the political context changed when an independent estonian nation-state was re-established in 1991. in such transformation era, geography and history education and the contexts of related school textbooks became particularly important to reflect the new political reality. for example, pääbo (2014) has illustrated how the contents of the history school textbooks in estonia were used to © 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 120 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen support the transition of estonia from the russian civilization to the construction of the baltic sea region as the estonian historical space. the distancing from the former colonizer russia/soviet union required also change in the memory politics of the country and the promotion of specific geographical and historical knowledge. instead of focussing on the spatio-temporal representation of estonia through history textbooks as the estonian master narrative (see pääbo 2011, 2014), this article opens the complex processes connected to the policies and practices in geography and history education that made possible spatial socialisation, national conciliation and the formation of the post-soviet estonian time-space (see björklund 2004; rubene 2010). to accomplish this, geography and history are very important topics since in the transformation period in estonia, like in the cee countries, the content change priority in education was given to history and geography as well as to civics, ethics, literature and social studies (cerych 1997: 85). the education of geography and history is often regarded as a central medium in national education through which spatial socialisation is channelled and shared spatio-temporal consciousness imposed in a society (paasi 1996). to fit in the new context, the falsifications of the former colonizer need to be removed from geography and history education and the white spots need in the school textbooks to be filled and written. the main research questions of the article are: (1) how state ideology (language policy) and the market economy (textbook publishing business) were involved in the geography and history textbook production processes in estonia in the transformation years from the late 1980s until the early 2000s? and (2) how social and political integration was discussed in geography and history textbooks in that period? furthermore, our methodological interest is to find out (3) the contribution of processual use of critical discourse analysis in the study of geography and history education development along societal transformation. spatial socialization, education and school textbooks of geography and history geography and history are the cornerstones of nation-building connecting profoundly to strategically planned policies and practices of spatial socialisation (paasi 1996). importantly, spatial socialisation highlights the constitutive role of a space and time in building the national identity and framing political developments in society. spatial socialisation plays a vital role in securing the constitution and continuity of the state and legitimising its policies. this process, by promoting shared spatio-temporal consciousness of society members, also helps to organise and implement control and surveillance over the state territory and its population (alonso 1994; brenner 2004; robertson 2011). the process of spatial socialisation is usually conducted by means of spatial imaginations. spatial imaginations are more or less effectively conceptualised and ideologised knowledge about the geography and history of a particular territorial unit, e.g. state, region, etc. the conceptualisation of geographical and historical knowledge is typically built around spatial (e.g. location, place, borders, neighbourhood, scale, relation, affiliation, difference, function, etc.) and temporal (e.g. epoch, period, event, development, process) categories (veemaa 2014: 12–14). the mediation of spatial imaginations takes place through the techniques of visualisation and story-telling in the form of pictures, charts, maps, and written and spoken narratives (häkli 2001). spatial imaginations are legitimised, communicated, and fostered in society by institutions having power. besides formal state regulatory authorities, these also include education and the mass media providing viewpoints on particular events, processes and territories. however, spatial imaginations are often contested, and a purely uniform or ideologically ideal collective spatial imagination does not exist in practice (see smith 1999). the fragmentation of spatial imagination and setbacks in spatial socialisation in general are often characteristic of ethno-culturally divided transitional societies in which nation-building occupies a key place among governmental policies and conciliation between ethnic groups is urgently targeted. therefore, the spatial socialisation tends to be particularly challenging in countries experiencing deep societal transformation, or in which the hegemonic state containing many cultures breaks down and new independent states emerge. the state-building in the post-communist eastern europe, for example, has rarely been only about rational efficiency with regard to the transformation fennia 194: 2 (2016) 121geography and history education in estonia of political and economic regimes. this process has often been exhausted by escalating ethnic conflicts, ideological competitions over national dominance, and vulnerable territorial integrity. in many cases, the confrontation of an oppressor state legacy, including the negative effects of centrally planned migration and long-term cultural antagonisms between ethnic groups, have become an important part of state-building ideology (smith et al. 1998). furthermore, as some scholars have noted, the establishment of independent statehoods in the post-communist eastern europe has often been aggregated into ‘nationalising’ policies. these seek to claim ownership of a state for an ethno-cultural core nation and institutionalise state actions to strengthen the ‘unhealthy’ condition of the core nation (brubaker 2011: 1786; cf. kuzio 2001). such compensatory policies also tend to be grounded on claims that the identity of a core nation or a specific indigenous population constitutes the identity of a nation-state (michaels & stevick 2009). therefore, the officially promoted narratives of geography and history are used to support the existence of the nation-state (see also marsden 2001; van sledright 2008). alternative narratives are often considered by authorities as discreditable to the existence of the nation-state as well as its core nation. the national identity narratives tend to be essential and become exclusionary as regards other than the titular nation (see feldman 2001). in the end, nations are both political constructs and systems of cultural representations (solomos 2000: 203). scholars have argued that national education systems play a particularly important role in social reproduction and identity politics in the state area, thus contributing to spatial socialisation and statebuilding (knight 1982; apple 1996). education constructs and promotes the central ideologies and the symbolic forms to create an integrated social reality of a given state. it facilitates the inhabitants’ learning of common forms of understanding, speaking, and writing, especially concerning culture (poole 1995). newman and paasi (1998: 196) conceive the “pedagogy of space” as the process through which institutional “discursive landscapes of power” infuse the national space – whether understood as the country’s borders or its geographic landscape with certain cultural, social and national meanings. however, silova et al. (2014) point correctly out that multiple pedagogies of space[s] exist that are sometimes complimentary and other times contradictory but always plural, partial and open to contestation. these pedagogies of space are crucial in the discursive system that builds and maintains a linkage between particular spaces, territories, peoples and cultures. geography and history education is important for channelling spatial socialisation and imposing a shared spatio-temporal consciousness in a society (paasi 1996). in education, the promotion of specific geographical and historical knowledge is a tool for learning and sharing how particular events occurred and things are organised in the national time-space. it also manifests power that is ideologised and conceptualised within national education strategies, curriculum design, textbook production, and teaching practices (häkli 2001). history teaching tends to focus on intimate emotional adherence to national identity symbols and narratives and to develop a strong and unique emotional bond to it (carretero 2011: 5). school textbooks are a key medium through which the selected knowledge about the state territory, people and events is passed to the population. they serve for political and instructional purposes (williams 2014: 327). geography and history textbooks are “an expression of societal conditions and represent the ‘regimes of truth’ that prevail in a society and are employed in the construction and control of its social consciousness” (paasi 1999: 14). school textbooks can express different perspectives on the state population. they may try to support the integration of the different ethnic groups living in the state territory, reduce ethno-cultural polarisation and promote national solidarity (morgan 2003). on the contrary, they may also foster the position of one particular ethnic group, often linked to the construction of the nation-state. according to williams (2014: 328), the school textbooks, particularly those of geography and history, tend to valorise the nation, simplify the narrative, change the narrative according to changes in the political environment, hide and even mystify the construction and change of narratives, and retain the deepest underlying narrative template. it is common to argue over the memories of the past and to select those memories that are wanted to cherish, repeat or create new ones to successive generations (van sledright 2008: 116). in the end, school textbooks are key instruments of spatial imagination and spatial socialization. 122 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen materials and methods the main empirical material consists of all history and geography textbooks regarding estonia that were produced in estonia in 1991–2002 and were used in primary and high schools (rummo 1993a, 1993b; toomet 1993; sarapuu 1994a, 1994b; laur et al. 1995; laar et al. 1997; mäesalu et al. 1997; rummo & kont 1999; tõnisson & pihel 1999). this is the empirical material to answer to the second research question, i.e. how social and political integration was discussed in geography and history textbooks? we interpret the meanings of spatial, historical and political imaginations in school textbooks in detail and uncover the ways in which these imaginations become integrated within the social structures in particular places and times. however, before entering in the details of the textbooks, we also place them and their production in the background context. we contextualize the textbook production through complex communicative events, such as the formation of the titular estonian nation, official language policy in estonia, the key education reforms in estonia and the practices of market economy in 1989–2002. this analysis answers to the first research question, i.e. how state ideology (language policy) and the market economy (textbook publishing business) were involved in the geography and history textbook production processes in estonia? for the analysis, we use critical discourse analysis (cda). cda is a method to investigate how language, texts and discourses are related to production and reproduction of inequality, power and domination in society, how these are resisted, and how relations of societal power develop. commonly, cda is applied through the analysis of texts, discourse practices and socio-cultural practices as discursive events (cf. fairclough 1995; van dijk 2008). in this article, we focus on text production and distribution of school textbooks but have to leave out the important issue of consumption. in our analysis, we stress the importance to approach the context processually. this is the third aim in the article, i.e. to find out the potential contribution of the processual use of cda to the study of geography and history education development along societal transformation. this means that the notion of discursive event in cda is extended into processes. therefore, we apply cda to take into account the processual characters of the education policies and practices in the studied transformation period. for such perspective, it is important to contextualize spatial and temporal changes in society in estonia and both formal and alternative policies and practices over the period studied from the late soviet to the eu pre-integration era. legal frameworks, reform policies and institutional practices of education are central mechanisms through which compatibility between knowledge of the national time-space and effective spatial socialisation and national conciliation are connected (blommaert & bulcaen 2000; robertson 2011). we conduct research through four aspects of which the three first elaborate the context for the detailed textbook analysis, e.g. the three firstly mentioned aspects respond to the first research question and the textbook analysis responds to the second research question. firstly, the research begins by contextualising the ethno-cultural conditions in estonia in the transformation period from the late 1980s. the specific focus is on the official state language policy and its role in the estonian state-building (estonian supreme council 1989; high council of the republic of estonia 1992; national constituent assembly 2004 [1938]; see also järve 2002; siiner 2006; hogan-brun et al. 2008; brown 2009). in the analysis here, it is important to ‘return’ to this ethno-political context in which the educational reforms, policies and practices and further geography and history school textbook production took place. secondly, we explore the education reform policies and the enactment of the national curricula in geography and history that guided the composition of all school textbooks in estonian, the official language of the country. we study the reforms in the estonian education system by analysing relevant legislative acts and educational documents produced in 1991–2002. these include the education-related decrees, such as those of primary and high schools, as well as the national curriculum (see the government of estonia 1996, 2002) and local study curricula regarding geographical and historical education material (see käosaar 1998; sulg 1998; kaldma 2000; liiber 2000). the cee countries went through a number of education reforms in the 1990s. in general, key issues were to look for the new core curriculum, reshaping the central control of the curricula and opening the role of teachers and individual schools for curricula reforms (cerych 1997: 85). again, it is important to open this context in estonia. we illustrate the priorities in the educational reforms as well as the legal, ideological, and structural frameworks in the fennia 194: 2 (2016) 123geography and history education in estonia production of national historical and geographical knowledge in the estonian education system. thirdly, we examine the institutional practices of geography and history school textbook production (for the anglo-american context, see marsden 2001). in addition to the production process, we pay attention to legal and economic power relations in the education system. the state, market, and society formed a triangle in which were included textbook authors, cartographers, editors, official reviewers before publishing permission, publishers as well as the state authorities and education officials related to textbooks, and, finally, also schools, teachers and pupils. often in the analysis on education one relies only on one framework, thus simplifying the context. for example, analysing only the formal legal framework gives an idealistic picture of the situation in education. furthermore, the legal (ideal) national education framework often neglects the proper attention to the economic context and local political particularities. as the analysis later illustrates, in the transformation years, alternative and even opposing practices existed in the education forming processes illustrating the complexity of the issue in estonia. such complexity does not rise only from different political views but also (market) economy plays a role here. fourthly, we analyse spatial imaginations in the geography and history school textbooks in estonia (see also berg & oras 2000; for history school textbooks, see pääbo 2014). the imaginations in written texts, pictures, figures, and maps in the school textbooks indicate the institutional practices of knowledge production and are concrete manifestations of geography and history education in their time. we collected data from all history and geography textbooks regarding estonia that were produced in estonia in 1991–2002 for primary and high schools. due to the specific goals of the study, we pay special attention to the arguments regarding the estonian time-space, ethnic relations in estonia, and the geopolitical self-determination of estonia. legalising the borders of societal inclusion in post-soviet estonia the first background context for the later analysis of geography and history textbooks is the official state language policy in estonia and its role in the estonian state-building in the transformation years, in particular creating specific ethno-cultural conditions as discussed below. after the half century of the soviet occupation, estonia’s independence was restored on 20 august 1991. in estonia, as in many post-soviet countries, the processes of independence and ‘return’ to the west were linked to the policies of national consolidation. as kopstein and reilly (2000) have indicated, geographical proximity to the west exercised a positive influence on transformation in the former communist countries – in estonian case to finland, sweden and even to germany. however, the changed ethno-linguistic situation in estonia created a challenge for the re-building of a commonly shared national identity and for achieving the goals of societal integration. right after the second world war, over nine out of ten people in estonia were estonian speakers. in 1989, estonian speakers comprised six out of ten people (61.5 percent). in the 1990s, about every third (ca. 30 percent) 10–19-year-old resident of estonia spoke russian as their mother tongue. later on, by 2000, the share of ethnic estonians grew to 68 percent, due to the departure of the soviet military forces and the large out-migration of slavic groups (institute of international social studies 2003). despite the soviet era substantially increased the amount of russian-speakers in estonia, ethno-linguistic assimilation did not take place. instead, two separate communities of social communication and collective identity emerged – the estonianspeakers and the russian-speakers. although extensive application of the soviet language policy in estonia increased the role of the russian language in public communication, estonian never ceased to be the language of tuition for native estonianspeakers (järve 2002; siiner 2006). russian was a compulsory secondary language in the estonianspeaking schools to facilitate estonians’ communication with the rest of the soviet union citizens, and to impose the soviet politics of territoriality. in the transformation period starting from the late 1980s, the ideal was to achieve societal consensus by overcoming strong ethnic-cultural antagonisms, ideological conflicts, social inequality, and problems concerning the citizenship policy (park 1995). in the late 1980s, the estonian political elite had two visions regarding the constitution of estonia’s statehood and the nation-building. the more nationally-minded politicians advocated the restoration of the republic of estonia according to the principles of its legal continuity (kask 1994). 124 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen by defining the soviet occupation as an illegal disruption of the estonian statehood, this vision also deprived the soviet-era immigrants from the right to a ‘natural’ membership in estonia, and denied their role in the nation (re)building process. the group of other politicians saw the principles of the estonian statehood more liberally. they acknowledged the illegality of the soviet regime, but did not support the need for the legal continuity of the estonian state. their vision of the newly established republic of estonia equated the soviet-era immigrants politically and legally with the ethnic estonians, promoting thereby more ethnically balanced policies of nation-building. however, after independence was secured and the political and security contexts changed, the visions of the major political forces in estonia became to support the restitution thesis. this fostered the division among estonianand russian-speaking ethnic populations in estonia. it also created room for particular conceptualized and ideologized knowledge that needed to be promoted through education, in particular in geography and history. the language policy structured power relations in estonia and contributed to inequalities between estonianand russian-speaking populations. the countermeasures against the soviet ethnolinguistic policy had already been executed in the perestroika era in the late 1980s. the usage of the estonian language was considered an expression of loyalty towards the estonian independence movement and independent estonia (hogan-brun et al. 2008). in 1989, the parliament of the soviet republic of estonia ratified the language act to frame the society’s linguistic legality (estonian supreme council 1989). estonian became then the only official language in state-level public communication and institutions (see järve 2002; brown 2009). this dislodged russian from the administrative regulation process and made it disappear from the officially supported nation-building. in fact, the ideal of a linguistically and culturally cohesive (estonian) nation with the estonian language was seen appealing by the ruling authorities in the new context of independent estonia. the official language policy legitimized the exclusive role of the estonian language in the education system. the civic nationalism and multiculturalism promoted by the international agencies were considered unattractive (hogan-brun & wright 2013: 245). after the independence of the republic of estonia was restored, the citizenship law of 1938 was re-established with the estonian citizenship law (high council of the republic of estonia 1992; see also national constituent assembly 2004 [1938]). this was another fundamental act in defining the exclusive ethnic power in the country (brubaker 2011). the legalisation of estonian citizenship through restitution of the state was an instrument to define the russian-speaking minority politically as a foreign population in estonia (kask 1994). however, they were granted permission to live and work within estonian territory. thus, the legal framework and the related ethno-cultural policies in estonia performed a crucial role in promoting the ethnic-based nation-building and creating the identity connection between the titular nation and the state territory (hogan-brun & wright 2013). ordering knowledge in a transforming society: the estonian education system the second background context for the later analysis of geography and history textbooks is the estonian education system and its reforms in the transformation years, especially the enactment of the national curricula in geography and history that guided the composition of all school textbooks, as discussed below. developing a quality control and steering the education reform and its practices were common challenges in estonia like in the cee countries in the 1990s (cerych 1997: 92). the separation from the soviet education system in the late 1980s was important to the estonian independence movement. the bottom-up social participation of ethnic estonians strongly supported this. non-governmental organisations, prestigious local politicians, and teachers directly connected to the autonomy and independence movements were particularly important in reformulating the former soviet education policy in estonia. at the same time, local russian-speaking authorities and education specialists were gradually detached from the educational reform discussions, policy formation, and decision-making for several reasons such as ideological disagreements, language barrier, personal antagonism (sulg 1998). the general education reform of 1989 in estonia officially paved the way for organising and re-conceptualising the national curriculum for education. this reform was also the first official landmark for erasing the soviet education ideology regarding knowledge about the geography and history of estonia (liiber 2000). the ethno-linguistic legalisafennia 194: 2 (2016) 125geography and history education in estonia tion of estonia (estonian supreme council 1989) was intensively connected to the national education system reform. this was fully implemented after the country gained its independence in 1991. the legal framework upon which the new educational system was built excluded from the statelevel educational policy administration anyone who did not know enough estonian. in the early 1990s, the state power apparatus became strongly estonian-oriented (yiftacel & ghanem 2004). the state-level policy makers and education reformers shared this (linguistic) ideology; however, in practice, the profound political and economic changes in estonia constrained the education reform until the mid-1990s. instead of a long-term strategy, the ruling process in education was synchronised with concrete, immediate contextual needs and a form of “national spirit” consisted of focus on estonian culture, geography, history and language (see also tsai 2002: 230–231). until 1993, the education policy in estonia was carried out without clear ideas on how to regulate and control education officially and how to deal with the contested and non-transparent production of knowledge in education. as an example of the latter was the use of school textbooks from the soviet period in many schools due to the lack of new textbooks and resources to buy them. the first school textbooks in estonian in geography appeared in 1993 (rummo 1993a, 1993b) and in history in 1994 (sarapuu 1994a, 1994b). to foster production, distribution and consumption of ‘appropriate’ estonian-oriented spatial imagination of that time, there was a need of formal regulation of education. without earlier in-depth experience, the preparation for a profound regulative education system was a learning-by-doing process due to the lack of laws, common education agreements, and definitive visions. the stepby-step reform practice in the education system of the early 1990s meant to compose new, temporally limited study programmes for every school year before the national curriculum was drafted and approved. they were composed by a limited number of estonian-minded education specialists and used as general blueprints for new history and geography textbooks. the perspective of the first textbook authors – some of whom active politicians – both in history (see pääbo 2014: 193–194) and geography focussed on constructing the identity of estonia with estonians as the titular nation. the first national curriculum to last four years was drafted only in 1996 at the initiative of the ministry of education. institutions, specialists, and pedagogical practitioners collaborated with this (the government of estonia 1996). the curriculum indicated the general principles of education and embraced its educational and developmental aims based on the needs of the estonian-speaking schools (kalmus 2004). this document also became the obligatory reference as to what to write in the school textbooks. therefore the national curriculum ended the epoch of “ad hoc” organization and formalized what should be in the contents of geography and history textbooks. it did not actually mean a major change since the state ideology and the ideology of the individual authors involved in the textbook production were already rather similar. the education policies that regulated knowledge about the estonian time-space contributed to the ethnically unbalanced nationbuilding in the post-soviet estonia. meanwhile the textbooks had become a more challenging issue in the russian-speaking schools. the high schools in estonia remained divided by the native languages of their pupils, namely estonian and russian, as they had been in the soviet period. teachers in these russian-speaking schools were exempt from the strict principles of the language law. they could continue as teachers even without any knowledge of estonian, and their language of tuition continued to be russian (vare 2006). however, since no geography or history textbooks were produced in estonia in the russian language in the early 1990s, the russian-speaking schools lacked new teaching material. besides the soviet-era material, even new school textbooks originating from russia were in use. as discussed in the next chapter, only from 1996 onwards it was allowed to translate geography and history textbooks from estonian to the russian language. as was the case with the preparation of the study programmes in the early 1990s, the preparation of the national curriculum largely excluded the russian-speaking education specialists. the curriculum did not pay much attention to the integration issues facing the estonian education system and society in general. however, the curriculum was not ideologically instructive for textbook authors and school teachers because it defined only what was necessary to present in the educational material and to teach in the schools but it did not prescribe how to write and teach (see gilbert 1989; cerych 1997; kaldma 2000). in addition, the curriculum did not provide concrete means for continuous monitoring on how the cur126 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen riculum-related knowledge was promoted and interpreted during the everyday teaching work in schools. the schools were allowed to teach additional courses and topics outside the direct content of the curriculum set by the ministry of education. this follows the then common trends of decentralization of education in the cee countries (cerych 1997). for example, the russian-speaking schools in estonia were allowed to teach russian culture, history, and geography in greater detail compared to the estonian-speaking schools. following this, in the 1990s, the formal knowledge regarding geography and history was produced within divided frameworks both in the estonianspeaking and in the russian-speaking schools. first, there was the state level, e.g. the top-down official, obligatory, nationally defined knowledge about geography and history. second, there were various types of less regulated local-level knowledge that often provided an alternative. however, it often highlighted some locally important details in geography and history and did not provide critical or subversive versions of them. the less-imposed regulation in education practice and allowing locally varied usage of additional knowledge for geography and history classes meant that indirectly the central education authorities recognised the existence of linguistic and cultural minorities in estonia. however, such recognition was not free from ideologies. on one hand, the formal national curriculum (the government of estonia 1996) defined the national geography and history as the geography and history of ethnic estonians – namely indicating the necessary topics to be discussed, e.g. locations and events relevant and related to ethnic estonians. on the other hand, the curriculum allowed exceptions for the russian-speaking schools through individual school syllabi. political ideologies and economic practices in the production of estonian school textbooks the third background context for the later analysis of geography and history textbooks is formed through the ideologies and institutional practices of geography and history school textbook production in the transformation years, especially legal and economic power relations in the education system, as discussed below. during the soviet period in estonia, the school textbooks for geography and history were mainly translated from russian or written by local authors following the guidelines of the communist regime. in general, the soviet school system was centralised and unified to ideologize and politicise education to support the soviet politics and foster the related ideological education of pupils (rubene 2010). the education reform in estonia in 1989 created a strong demand for school textbooks with new ideology. the lack of resources and unorganised market meant that in geography and history there were often only instruction textbooks at hand for teachers. along with the development of the educational administrative and institutional system, the educational knowledge production market was opened to private enterprises. such development was common in the 1990s in many cee countries (cerych 1997: 86). however, the ‘free’ market of textbooks was connected to the state political ideology. as mentioned, school textbooks about the geography and history of estonia needed the centralised ministerial approval. this was to guarantee formally that the material corresponded with the national curriculum, i.e. the formal ideological positions of the state (see leonardo 2003; morgan 2003). the minister’s decree also allowed schools to purchase such formally guaranteed educational material from the resources allocated in the national budget. minister of education tõnis lukas – who later became an author of a history school textbook – confirmed this centralised position: “with publication of the study reference material, we are now located between two pure models – centralisation and the free market. in spite of difficulties, and also of oppression, the ministry [of education] does not accept the principal transformation from the centralised to free market system” (odres 1999). in the transformation years, especially in the 1990s, the schools in estonia had very limited budgets. the state authorities provided subsidies to schools to purchase exclusively those textbooks that had been authorised by the subject council, the content controlling body appointed by the central authorities. this created a two-directional interest in the school textbook production process. since the aim of private publishing houses was to create profit, they wanted to produce textbooks that sold well. if the textbook content followed the central authorities’ guidelines, then its price was lower in the market due to the state subsidies, and fennia 194: 2 (2016) 127geography and history education in estonia the schools afforded purchase it. therefore, it was in the business interest to produce textbooks that followed the national guidelines. on the other, by directing subsidies to textbooks that followed these guidelines, the central authorities could through related business logics indirectly control that the textbook used in estonian schools were approved by the content controlling body. the general character of the national curriculum, the lack of professional school textbook authors, and the non-transparency in the production of knowledge for geography and history school textbooks freed political interest groups to propagate their ideological standpoints in the textbook contents. however, in practice existed ideological uniformity in the production of geographical and historical knowledge connected to the particular political and economic context of estonia of the 1990s. the dominant political parties in estonia shared similar ethnocentric visions about estonia’s time-space. even if certain political communities would have pointed out that nationalist overtones existed in geography and history textbooks, the new proposed alternative viewpoints would have been dissolved within the highly articulated and collectively intervened production process of the school textbooks. an alternative content would have created a risk of losing time in preparing the textbook because of the prolonged negotiations with the controlling subject council, potential rejection of the textbook draft and re-writing of its contents, and therefore losing economic profit in the textbook business. therefore, the regulatory practices eliminated the potentially alternative and reactionary voices in the production of educational material (see also apple & christiansmith 1991). the concrete political circumstances in estonia in the 1990s and the respective economic market condition made the school textbook production and contents lean on the political context of the time. again, the russian-speaking context had its peculiarities. during the 1990s, no independent publishing or writing of textbooks in russian existed. the ‘free’ market of textbooks in estonia meant in practice that the development of educational material was entirely in the hands of the native estonian-speaking authors and publishing houses. the exclusion of the russian-speaking actors from the educational knowledge-producing process was not a formal state-level policy by prohibition but a more subtle political practice. the potential interest by the russian-language publishers was cooled mostly by means of constraining administrative reasons such as the strict language policy (estonian supreme council 1989; brown 2009) and the specific requirements of the national curriculum (the government of estonia 1996). in practice, the discussion about the contents of any proposed russian-language school textbook would have created rather complex practical situations. for example, because the only official language of the state administration was estonian, then the proposed text for a school textbook in the russian language would have had to be translated in advance into estonian. furthermore, the various discussion rounds about the contents of the textbook with the education authorities, the content controlling body, and the textbook authors would have needed continuous synchronous translation from russian to estonian and estonian to russian, etc. the neglected interest of the state administration in obtaining proper education material in russian led also to controversies between the official state principles and local education practices. as mentioned, in the early 1990s, the scarcity of school textbooks made in estonia in the russian language resulted in the import of textbooks from russia, including those in geography and history (käosaar 1998). the then-perceived geopolitical enemy russia provided the educational material to form the spatio-temporal consciousness of the russian-speaking minority in estonia. this situation began to change in 1996, when the state authorities granted estonian publishers the opportunity to translate their estonian-language textbooks into russian. this created new business opportunities for publishers since a rather large share of pupils spoke russian. the decision also established the formal control over educational material in russian in estonia. however, some technical challenges emerged such as the lack of competent translators, especially regarding geography textbooks. in general, the reduction of russia’s ideological influence over russian-speaking pupils and teachers in estonia was a rather late political manoeuvre. this indicates that there was a lack of properly planned strategy regarding the ethnic-based national consolidation and identity formation in the post-soviet estonia. the state authorities soon understood that a forceful monopolisation of the geographical and historical discourses in education would not support the societal integration in estonia (kannel 1999). however, the prevailing ethnic 128 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen estonian discourses continued in geography and history textbooks throughout the transformation years, as discussed later in this article. national time-space in estonian school geography and history textbooks throughout the transformation years in the 1990s in estonia, the ideologies and practices of geography and history education produced through textbooks spatial, historical and political imaginations. these integrated within social structures and contexts of the era to form a new national timespace and contribute to spatial socialisation. in the textbooks, the key conceptual sources used for the argumentation and rhetoric about the particular estonian time-space were national security priorities and the status of the russian-speaking minority in the country. the imagination about geography and history of estonia was built on selective storytelling and visualization of spatiality and temporality: geography consisted of location, border, place and neighbourhood, and history consisted of epoch, event and development (see veemaa 2014: 12). the geography and history textbook authors, influenced by and contributing to the dominant national ideology, imagined the key topics on the basis of an unpleasant historical experience with the soviet union, the dangerous geographical neighbourhood of russia, and the need to protect estonian ethno-cultural dominance in estonia (see rummo 1993a; toomet 1993; sarapuu 1994a; kont & rummo 1999). the textbooks supported an ethnically divided society with orientalist tones (see said 1979). by ‘we’ were depicted ethnic estonians in estonia and estonia in the western world. by ‘others’ were meant the russian-speakers in estonia and russia as the non-western world. moreover, the national security issues and status of the russian-speaking minority were seen as inevitably interdependent. the ethnic division of estonia was seen necessary resulting in growing power domination and inequality relations between estonianand russianspeakers. the case of estonia is particular but not at all unique among the post-soviet states. for example, janmaat (2005: 2007) has noticed how in ukraine language has been used as a constituent marker of identity in which russians have then been differentiated as ‘other’ in the school history textbooks (silova et al. 2014). after estonia’s independence was restored in 1991, criticism of russia as the successor of the soviet union was an effective way to confirm the necessity to withdraw from russia’s sphere of influence (park 1995). representing russia as the main threat to estonia’s security rested upon the fear of a military invasion and a possible re-occupation of the estonian territory: “the estonian-russian relationship has been in a state of mutual opposition. the russian understanding of the ‘former soviet countries’ and its defence strategy are both hostile towards estonia. also, there exists a sort of political movement in russia that has openly announced its desire to restore the empire. this is why the first concern of estonian-russian relations is the state-level security” (laur et al. 1995: 147). this promoted and collectively imagined consciousness of the eastern threat to estonia was emphasised by the new location of estonia on the world map. it connected estonia to the eu and nato security spaces (see also berg & oras 2000). since the mid-1990s, the authors of geography and history school textbooks commonly accepted that estonia could not be a neutral political actor in the contemporary world. they argued that the sovereignty and peaceful development of estonia could take place only through intensive cooperation and as-soon-as-possible association with western structures and their democratic values: “due to the sensitive geopolitical location, the most important guarantee of estonian sovereignty is integration with nato and the european union” (laur et al. 1995: 147). the security conceptions largely defined the spatial identity of estonia in relation to the contemporary world system; however, security spaces are dynamic and changing (see also feldman 2001). therefore, they are also unstable for grounding the imaginations of national time-space. in geography and history textbooks, the bordering of the western world was a much more powerful intellectual concept in the building of the spatio-temporal identity of estonia. the ideas of bordering were influenced and inspired by the world divided by civilisations (huntington 1993). based on making cultural differences, this concept reflected how estonia belonged to the west while russia did not belong. the russian empire was a historical mistake as pääbo (2014: 196) puts it. such a definition highlighted the ‘essential’ difference between civilised and democratic europe (estonia) and rather fennia 194: 2 (2016) 129geography and history education in estonia barbarian and despotic asia (russia) (see also said 1979). it helped to justify the vision that russia had no grounds to claim any national interests in europe and that the russian-speaking minorities were natural aliens in europe – the latter including estonia (mäesalu et al. 1997; tõnisson & pihel 1999). in the 1990s, this vision between the western and the eastern civilisations was popular in the estonian society and also among school textbook writers. it was also often introduced in history textbooks. with an illustration of old castles on the border between estonia and russia, the authors of one textbook rhetorically explained how the location makes a difference: “there are in the world only a few such places where the confrontation and co-existence of civilisations are so dramatically materialised. already for many centuries, these two castles have stood on the border of europe and russia, on the border of east and west” (adamson & valdmaa 1999: 52). these visions also tried to emphasise estonia’s spatial continuity and its cultural and moral right to belong to the european – namely western european – space. such boundary drawing helped to naturalise estonia’s project of “returning to” rather than “arriving in” the western world (see also lauristin et al. 1997). it also supported both the ethnocultural perspective based on the ethnic estonian perspective as the titular nation, as well as the perspective of broader belonging to something called “the european”. these become mutually constitutive in geography and history school textbooks (see also michaels & stevick 2009: 242–243). however, pääbo (2014: 201) also finds that estonia’s ‘europeanness’ is constructed through connecting estonia to northern europe (see also pääbo 2011: 257–259). the spatial imaginations about the soviet timespace and geopolitical self-determination in estonian geography and history school textbooks were not only about the selection of political friends and enemies but also helped to define the desirable ethnic relations and ways of conciliation inside estonia. as williams (2014: 327) has noted, when nation-states are reconstituting themselves, there is an emphasis on the ancient roots of the nation and the deep connections between the people of the land and the land of the people. in the 1990s, the russian-speaking minority was perceived as a major possible source of conflict with russia. they were seen crucial in the continuing strategic interests of russia in the baltic area (aalto & berg 2002). in geography and history textbooks, the russian-speaking minority was subdivided into disloyal, semi-loyal, and loyal groups. this imaginative articulation was transferred from the mainstream national ideology and was carefully connected to the national security contexts. the ethnic policies of estonia in the 1990s also shared this viewpoint (laitin 2003). in the textbooks, the first group of russianspeakers was depicted negatively as regards their loyalty to the republic of estonia. especially in the beginning of the 1990s, the state authorities were optimistic about the possible massive out-migration of the russian-speaking population from estonia to russia (park 1995). the russian-speaking minority – though making almost a third of the total population – did not have a moral right to be or stay in estonia. therefore they should migrate to russia or to other countries of their origin. in the textbooks, these potential leavers were seen as typical soviet-era immigrants and foreigners: “the aliens came also by self-initiative or were called in by friends and relatives who were already living in estonia. the immigrants were mainly low-qualified workers /…/. they felt comfortable anywhere, and they searched for a better life. such mentality was dominant among the immigrants” (laur et al. 1995: 133). in the national discourse, this “soviet people” category worked to oppose the old and new situation, i.e. estonia under the soviet regime and estonia as an independent country. by defining the conditions for acceptable members of society, the russian-speakers were represented as temporary aliens not capable of being citizens in the restored republic of estonia (see high council of the republic of estonia 1992; national constituent assembly 2004 [1938]). as the following empirical examples indicate, the formalization of the national curriculum in 1996 did not actually create a major difference in the contents and tones of geography and history textbooks. there is continuity throughout the transformation years. furthermore, after 1996 it was possible to translate estonian geography and history textbooks into russian and use them in the russian-speaking schools in estonia. this created potentially sensitive issues because the russian-speakers were often characterised as relics of the soviet occupation creating an obstacle to the successful integration of estonia into the western world: 130 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen “after gaining independence, estonia still had problems with the soviet legacy, such as russianspeaking workers, who have a strange cultural background, temperament, and living traditions” (adamson & valdmaa 1999: 204). the out-migration of the russian-speaking population was highly welcomed by the estonian state authorities because it increased the proportion of ethnic estonians in the country (laitin 2003). in practice, many left and the birth rate rapidly declined challenging the state’s long-term future. despite this, geography and history textbooks saw unacceptable to reduce the out-migration of the russian-speaking population. for example, in one geography textbook this relationship was represented as follows: “during the 1990s the population has drastically decreased in estonia. in this situation, estonia needs an active ethnic policy. in order to regulate the population processes effectively, restrictions on [the russians’] immigration and supporting the [russians’] out-migration are a necessity” (tõnisson & pihel 1999: 69). due to the negatively perceived experience regarding immigrants from the soviet union, the immigration topic was very sensitive. in the textbooks, the main division regarding the (potential) immigrants was based on the economic ranking of the possible newcomers’ home country. if it was higher than that of estonia, then these people were generally welcomed to the estonian society. in practice, however, it was believed that a possible massive immigration to estonia could only come from undeveloped countries. the semi-loyal russian-speakers were the second, and actually the most common depiction in geography and history textbooks. they would live in a separated russian-speaking community in estonia, because they could not integrate fully into the estonian society. they were often presented as anonymous subjects of negation – non-estonians – whose loyalty to the estonian state should be guaranteed through the national legislation. this dividing concept enabled “our history” to be linked with “our native territory” in the construction of the estonian time-space. the first sentences from one estonian history school textbook are very illustrative: “you live in estonia. this is the land where your parents and grandparents have lived, and also their parents and grandparents for thousands of years. our state is called the republic of estonia” (laar et al. 1997: 5). the third depiction saw possible that selective russian-speakers could be integrated into the nationally constituted estonian society. this loyal russian-speaking minority accepted the rules and laws of the republic of estonia, was motivated to learn the estonian language or already knew it. they were recognised as victims of the soviet forced migration policy and ready to adapt to the values and norms of the estonian society ab imo pectore (cf. hogan-brun & wright 2013). they were ideal for defining the national conciliation through education. however, they were not to be assimilated from above, but rather imagined as people who were capable of connecting their “old, rich russian cultural identity” to the national identity of the republic of estonia. as different but loyal ‘others’ they could be part of the estonian national time-space (rummo 1993b; toomet 1993; sarapuu 1994b). in the state-level integration strategies during the transformation years, only these loyal russianspeakers were defined as innocent victims of the totalitarian regime(s) and eligible for the national integration policies and the conciliatory process in estonia. however, unlike in school textbooks, their non-estonian past and soviet-related spatial identity was emphasised in the state policies. the status of the soviet-era immigrants and their estonianborn descendants was equated to any other new migrants who would settle in estonia after 1991. they could become members of the estonian society, but only by obeying laws and certain rules and having command of the estonian language and culture (estonian supreme council 1989; high council of the republic of estonia 1992). this was also well synchronised with the principles of the estonian language policy (estonian supreme council 1989), which ignored the pressure to grant linguistic autonomy for the russian-speakers. it was ruled out that the soviet-era immigrants would have the legal right to demand their specific time-space in estonia. conclusions in this article, we studied how the state ideology and the market economy were involved in the geography and history textbook production processes in estonia in the transformation years from the late 1980s until the early 2000s. we analysed the discourses regarding social and political integration from the geography and history textbooks of fennia 194: 2 (2016) 131geography and history education in estonia that period. we paid especial attention to the estonian time-space, ethnic relations in estonia, and the geopolitical self-determination of estonia. geography and history education in estonia, like in many transforming post-soviet and cee countries, played an important role in their national consolidation and identity formation (see cerych, 1997; kalmus 2003; björklund 2004; janmaat 2005; brubaker 2011; pääbo 2014; silova et al. 2014). learning the common forms of understanding, speaking, and writing regarding the national time-space and constituting common spatial imaginations are important for spatial socialization in securing the stability of the society and the support for related policies. as this article demonstrates through the analysis of related texts, discourse practices and socio-cultural practices, the societal transformation contexts and related education processes are often very challenging to produce one collectively shared historical and geographical knowledge for the entire society. triangulating politics, business and societal development in the analysis of education development processes illustrates well their complexities. such approach is supported methodologically by the processual use of cda. this reduces the potentially biased and partial interpretations that may arise from concentrating separately only on the formal education reform policy, textbook production or textbook contents or limiting the analysis on one event or moment. in the transformation years of estonia, the state ideology and the market economy were involved in many and sometimes controversial ways in the geography and history textbook production processes. the national education reforms, national curricula and the production of geography and history school textbooks supported the idea of the estonian nation-state consisted of the estonian language and culture. the state ideology fostered the ethnic estonian nation-state through the strict language policy, the market economy through textbook publishing business practices, and the dividing concepts in geography and history textbooks. alternative views were not allowed emerge in the formal education reforms. language, texts and discourses produced and reproduced inequality, power and domination in the estonian society, but created also limited resistance. however, analysing in detail the development of geography and history education in its contexts, we found that difficult economic situation, curiosities of the market economy driven school textbook production and varied local practices created also controversial outcomes. for example, in the early transformation years, the russian-speaking schools obtained teaching material directly from russia, and teachers anyway manoeuvred locally within the nationally set topics. therefore, the national(ist) vision of education policies did not pass through uniformly in local practices in estonia, especially in the areas in which the russian-speaking population was considerable. from the late 1980s until early 2000s, the formal education policies for geography and history supported estonia’s disintegration from the soviet past and pawed way to the future integration to the european union and nato. in geography and history school textbooks, the discourses of social and political integration supported a uniform imagination about estonian time-space in which estonia was a natural part of the western world, russia a threat to estonian sovereignty, and the national identity of the republic of estonia equalled the identity of ethnic estonians. the formal state ideology and the contents of the textbooks were rather similar. as regards the substantial minority of the russian-speaking population, comprising then almost a third of estonia’s population, the textbooks divided them into non-loyal, semi-loyal and loyal groups. in the textbook, only the latter could be integrated in the estonian society enriching the estonian time-space through their cultural peculiarities. in the state policies, these russian-speakers could achieve the proper right to stay in estonia only through formal citizenship policy that requires command of the estonian language and culture. multicultural perspectives between ethnic estonians and other residents of estonia were not presented or discussed in the school textbooks of geography and history. therefore, education policies and practices had little chance to form a shared national consciousness and reduce the ethno-linguistic polarisation in the estonian society. the transformation years following the soviet occupation can be labelled as post-colonial, e.g. after the soviet colonialism. however, in estonia like in many cee and post-soviet states of these years, internal national(ist) policies and practices did not treat the population equally. this is understandable taking into account the context but its acceptability depends on one’s political perspective on postcolonialism. furthermore, the current hostility in estonia towards potential immigration 132 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen of asylum-seekers and continuous harsh criticism towards russia are not only linked to the particularities of the soviet occupation era but also on this transformation period when the estonian ethnic identity was reformed, partly through geography and history education. some scholars such as kitson (2007) suggest as a policy recommendation that in divided societies, history and geography education should be strategically integrated with the general (re-)conciliatory process, promoted and practically executed within the policy reform discourses. geography and history education can hardly dramatically change ethno-cultural relations at the societal level. however, they can be effective mechanisms to continue conciliatory processes by treating equally the population living in the state territory and supporting minorities’ constitutive place in the national time-space. acknowledgements the authors express their gratitude to the constructive criticism provided by the reviewers of fennia and recognize the impact of reviewers of other journals. the article was partly funded by the academy research project nr 259078. references aalto p & berg e 2002. spatial practices and time in estonia: from post-soviet geopolitics to european governance. space & polity 6: 3, 253–270. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1356257022000031968. adamson a & valdmaa s 1999. eesti ajalugu gümnaasiumile. koolibri, tallinn. alonso a 1994. the politics of space, time and substance: state formation, nationalism and ethnicity. annual review of anthropology 23, 379–405. h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 4 6 / a n n u r e v . an.23.100194.002115. apple m 1996. cultural politics and education. teachers college press, new york. apple m & christian-smith l 1991. the politics of the textbook. routledge, new york. berg e & oras s 2000. writing post-soviet estonia onto the world map. political geography 19: 5, 601–625. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0962-6298(00)00005-6. björklund f 2004. ethnic politics and the soviet legacy in latvian post-communist education. nationalism & ethnic politics 10: 1, 105–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13537110490450791. blommaert j & bulcaen c 2000. critical discourse analysis. annual review of anthropology 29, 449–466. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.29.1.447. brenner n 2004. new state spaces. oxford university press, oxford. brown k 2009. market models of language policy: a view from estonia. european journal of language policy 1: 2, 137–146. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/ejlp.2009.4. brubaker r 2011. nationalizing states revisited: projects and processes of nationalization in post-soviet states. ethnic and racial studies 34: 11, 1785–1814. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2011.579137. carretero m 2011. constructing patriotism: teaching history and memories in global worlds. information age publishers, charlotte, nc. cerych l 1997. educational reforms in central and eastern europe: processes and outcomes. european journal of education 32: 1, 75–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1503515. estonian supreme council 1989. eesti nõukogude sotsialistliku vabariigi keeleseadus [language law of the estonian soviet socialist republic]. ensv teataja 4, 60. fairclough n 1995. media discourse. edward arnold, london. feldman m 2001. european integration and the discourse of national identity in estonia. national identities 3: 1, 5–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14608940020028466. gilbert r 1989. text analysis and ideology critique of curricular content. in de castell s, luke a & luke c (eds). language, authority, and criticism: readings on the school textbook, 61–76. falmer press, london. high council of the republic of estonia 1992. eesti vabariigi ülemnõukogu otsus kodakondsuse seaduse rakendamise kohta [decision of the high council of the republic of estonia on applying the citizenship law]. riigi teataja 7, 175. hogan-brun g, ozolins u, ramoniene m & rannut m 2008. language politics and practices in the baltic states. current issues in language planning 8: 4, 469–631. http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/cilp124.0. hogan-brun g & wright s 2013. language, nation and citizenship: contrast, conflict and convergence in estonia’s debate with the international community. nationalities papers 41: 2, 240–258. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.747502. huntington s 1993. the clash of civilizations. foreign affairs 72: 3, 22–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/20045621. häkli j 2001. in the territory of knowledge: state-centred discourse and the construction of society. progress in human geography 25: 3, 403–422. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913201680191745. institute of international social studies 2003. eesti inimarengu aruanne [human development report of estonia]. tpü rahvusvahelisteja sotsiaaluuringute instituut, tallinn. janmaat j 2005. ethnic and civic conceptions of the nation in ukraine’s history textbooks. european education 37: 3, 20–37. fennia 194: 2 (2016) 133geography and history education in estonia janmaat j 2007. the ethnic ‘other’ in ukrainian history textbooks: the case of russia and the russians. compare: a journal of comparative and international education 37: 3, 307–324. järve p 2002. two waves of language laws in the baltic states: changes of rationale? journal of baltic studies 33: 1, 78–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01629770100000221. kaldma k 2000. tagasivaade minevikku – erinevad vaatenurgad. ajalooõpetaja käsiraamat. otsingud, visioonid, ideed. jana seta, riga. kalmus v 2003. is interethnic integration possible in estonia?: ethno-political discourse of two ethnic groups. discourse & society 14: 6, 667–697. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09579265030146001. kalmus v 2004. what do pupils and textbooks do with each other? some methodological problems of research on socialization through educational media. journal of curriculum studies 36: 4, 469–485. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270310001630670. kannel a 1999. eesti keelab vene õpikute kasutamise. eesti päevaleht. newspaper article 21.01.1999 kask p 1994. national radicalization in estonia: legalization on citizenship and related issues. nationalities papers 22: 2, 379–391. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905999408408334. käosaar i 1998. õpikud vene koolis – probleemid ja perspektiivid. in lauristin m, vare s, pedastsaar t & pavelson m (eds). multikultuuriline eesti: väljakutse haridusele, 309–320. vera ii, tartu. kitson a 2007. history education and reconciliation in northern ireland. in cole e (ed). teaching the violent past: history education and reconciliation, 123–154. rowman and littlefield, lanham, md. knight d 1982. identity and territory: geographical perspectives on nationalism and regionalism. annals of the association of american geographers 72: 4, 514–531. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1982. tb01842.x. kont a & rummo t 1999. geograafia 9. klassile. avita, tallinn. kopstein j & reilly d 2000. geographic diffusion and the transformation of the postcommunist world. world politics 53: 1, 1–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0043887100009369. kuzio t 2001. nationalising states’ or nation-building? a critical review of the theoretical literature and empirical evidence. nations and nationalism 7: 2, 135–154. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8219.00009. laar m, tilk m & hergauk e 1997. ajalugu 5. klassile. avita, tallinn. laitin d 2003. three models of integration and the estonian/russian reality. journal of baltic studies 34: 2, 197–222. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01629770300000041. laur m, pajur a & tannberg t 1995. eesti ajalugu 2. avita, tallinn. lauristin m, vihalemm p, rosengren k & weibull l (eds) 1997. return to the western world. cultural and political perspectives on the estonian postcommunist transition. tartu university press, tartu. leonardo z 2003. discourse and critique: outlines of a post-structuralist theory of ideology. journal of education policy 18: 2, 203–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268093022000043038. liiber ü 2000. eesti üldhariduskooli geograafia ainekava ja selle rakendamine õpikutes. master thesis. university of tartu, tartu. marsden w 2001. the school textbook: geography, history, and social studies. woburn press, portland, or. mäesalu a, lukas t, laur m & tannberg t 1997. eesti ajalugu 1. avita, tallinn. michaels d & stevick d 2009. europeanization in the ‘other’ europe: writing the nation into ‘europe’ education in slovakia and estonia. journal of curriculum studies 41: 2, 225–245. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220270802515919. morgan j 2003. imagined country: national environmental ideologies in school geography textbooks. antipode: a radical journal of geography 35: 3, 444–462. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00334. national constituent assembly 2004 [1938]. the constitution of the estonian republic. <http:// www.hot.ee/evp1938/constitution1938.htm> 20.01.2014. newman d & paasi a 1998. fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: boundary narratives in political geography. progress in human geography 22: 2, 186–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913298666039113. odres e 1999. kirjastuste konkurents toob paremad õpikud. postimees. newspaper article 18.11.1999. paasi a 1996. territories, boundaries and regional identity. the changing geographies of the finnishrussian border. john wiley & sons, new york. paasi a 1999. nationalizing everyday life: individual and collective identities as practice and discourse. geography research forum 19, 4–21. park a 1995. russia and estonian security dilemmas. europe-asia studies 47: 1, 27–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668139508412243. poole r 1995. nationalism: the last rites? in pavcovi� a, koscharsky h & czarnota a (eds). nationalism and postcommunism. a collection of essays, 51– 68. ashgate, aldershot. pääbo h 2011. estonian transformation. from an eastern outpost in the west to a western outpost in the east. in törnquist-plewa b & stala k (eds). cultural transformations after communism. central and eastern europe in focus, 253–279. nordic academic press, lund. pääbo h 2014. constructing historical space: estonia’s transition from the russian civilization to the baltic sea region. journal of baltic studies 45: 2, 187–205. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2013.846929. robertson s 2011. the new spatial politics of (re)bordering and (re)ordering the state-education-citi134 fennia 194: 2 (2016)jaanus veemaa and jussi s jauhiainen zen relation. international review of education 57: 3–4, 277–297. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11159-011-9216-x. rubene a 2010. topicality of critical thinking in the post-soviet educational space. european education 41: 4, 24–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/eue1056-4934410402. rummo t 1993a. eesti geograafia 6. klassile. koolibri, tallinn. rummo t 1993b. läänemeremaade geograafia 9. klassile. avita, tallinn. rummo t & kont a 1999. geograafia. maa ja ilm. 9. klassile. avita, tallinn. said e 1979. orientalism. verso, london. sarapuu j 1994a. eesti ajaloo algõpetus 1. õpik põhikoolile. kiir, viljandi. sarapuu j 1994b. eesti ajaloo algõpetus 2. õpik põhikoolile. kiir, viljandi. siiner m 2006. planning language practice: a sociolinguistic analysis of language policy in post-communist estonia. language policy 5: 2, 161–186. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10993-006-9004-9. silova i, mead yaqub m & palandjian g 2014. pedagogies of space: (re)mapping national territories, borders, and identities in post-soviet textbooks. in williams j (ed). (re)constructing memory: school textbooks and the imagination of the nation, 103– 130. sense publishers, boston. smith a 1999. myths and memories of the nation. blackwell, oxford. smith g, law v, wilson a, bohr a & allworth e 1998. nation-building in the post-soviet borderland: the politics of national identities. cambridge university press, cambridge. solomos j 2000. race, multi-culturalism and difference. in stevenson n (ed). culture & citizenship, 198–211. sage, london. sulg ü 1998. muulaste integreerimine eesti ühiskonda läbi hariduspoliitiliste valikute. bachelor thesis. university of tartu, tartu. the government of estonia 1996. eesti põhija üldhariduse riiklik õppekava [national curriculum of basic and general education of estonia]. <https:// www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/23657> 06.01.2014. the government of estonia 2002. eesti põhija üldhariduse riiklik õppekava [national curriculum of basic and general education of estonia]. riigi teataja 20, 116. toomet t 1993. me elame ajaloos. eesti ajalooõpik 5. klassile. koolibri, tallinn. tõnisson a & pihel p 1999. eesti ja euroopa. loodus ja inimgeograafia 9. klassile. koolibri, tallinn. tsai c 2002. chinese-ization and the nationalistic curriculum reform in taiwan. journal of education policy 17: 2, 229–243. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680930110116552. van dijk t 2008. discourse and power. palgrave, houndsmills. van sledright b 2008. narratives of nation-state, historical knowledge, and school history education. review of research in education 32: 1, 109–146. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0091732x07311065. vare s 2006. vene koolide valmisolekust üleminekuks eesti õppekeelega gümnaasiumile 2007. aastal. eesti rakenduslingvistika ühingu aastaraamat 2, 303–326. veemaa j 2014. reconsidering geography and power: policy ensembles, spatial knowledge, and the quest for consistent imagination. dissertationes geographicae universitatis tartuensis 56. university of tartu, tartu williams j 2014. school textbooks and the state of the state. in williams j (ed). (re)constructing memory: school textbooks and the imagination of the nation, 327–335. sense publishers, boston. yiftacel o & ghanem a 2004. understanding ‘ethnocratic’ regimes: the politics of seizing contested territories. political geography 23: 6, 647–676. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.04.003. untitled long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland matti tikkanen tikkanen, matti (2002). long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 31–42. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. finland possesses 72 waterway systems of over 200 square kilometres in size. the five largest of them account for the majority of the country’s surface area. furthermore, there are almost 188,000 lakes of more than five ares in size. altogether 9.9 percent of the surface area consists of water. the lakes have been created over the last 10,000 years or so, either through the emergence of their basins from beneath the ice sheet of the last glaciation or, in most cases, through isolation from the baltic basin. in this article, the post-glacial history of the main watercourses and lake basins in finland and the effects of recent human activity on them and on the quality of their water are examined. on account of the uneven pattern of land uplift, most of the large waterway systems, such as the saimaa, päijänne, näsijärvi, and puula watercourses of the lake district, have altered their outflow in the course of time, some of them more than once. the majority of these hydrological changes took place in the interval 8500–4500 bp. in the case of lake oulujärvi and lake vanajavesi, a transgression that has been going on for thousands of years has led to rises in water level of as much as 10–15 metres. in the case of lake höytiäinen, uncontrolled erosion of the outflow channel in connection with an effort at lowering the water level led to a sudden drop of almost ten metres. elsewhere, the changes in outflow channels meant that the main watershed in the lake district shifted up to 300 kilometres in a se–nw direction. meanwhile, human activity has led to the total or partial drainage of about 3,000 lakes in different parts of the country. about four-fifths of the inland water area in finland is of good or excellent water quality and only five percent is of moderate or poor quality. matti tikkanen, department of geography, p. o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: matti.tikkanen@helsinki.fi introduction the present lakes and rivers of finland have arisen during post-glacial times, i.e., within the last 10,000 years or slightly more. the oldest lakes are those that developed in the supra-aquatic areas of north karelia, where the land began to emerge from beneath the ice sheet before 11,000 bp (hyvärinen 1973). the small lakes and upper reaches of the river systems in the south began to take shape only after the water level in the baltic ice lake had dropped to that of the surrounding ocean, around 10,300 bp (tikkanen 1989; korhola & tikkanen 1996). the majority of the lakes are in fact considerably younger than 10,000 years of age and have been isolated from various stages of the baltic to form independent basins as a result of land uplift. the youngest of all are still in the process of rising from the sea and being cut off as separate basins on the recent coastal area (tikkanen 1990). as the pattern of land uplift in finland has been an uneven one, the land surface has gradually tilted, causing many lakes to flood their banks and alter their direction of outflow. in places even whole watercourses have altered their direction of flow with time, and considerable changes have taken place in the location of the principal watersheds. the majority of the changes in outflow channels occurred in the interval 8500–4500 bp, but the youngest known natural change, in the outflow channel of the längelmävesi lake system, 32 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen occurred as late as 1604 ad (blomqvist 1926; jones 1977). numerous small lakes have become shallower in the course of time as a consequence of the deepening of their outlet channels and the accumulation of bottom sediments, and some had even become filled in entirely. in some cases, rivers have been dredged, lake levels have been lowered artificially, or lakes have been converted into regulation basins for hydroelectric power schemes. water quality has also varied greatly in many waterway systems, mainly as a consequence of human action in recent times. nowadays finland has almost 188,000 lakes of over five ares in area, of which about 56,000 are over one hectare (raatikainen 1985a; raatikainen & kuusisto 1990). the total lake area, 33,522 square kilometres, amounts to 9.9 percent of the country’s surface area. the largest individual lakes are great saimaa (4,380 km2), inari (1,050 km2), and päijänne (1,038 km2). the deepest point, in lake päijänne, is as much as 95.3 metres, but the mean depth of the finnish lakes is no more than 7.2 metres and all the water contained in them would fit into the nearby lake onega in russian karelia without difficulty (tikkanen 1990). in the central parts of the lake district water accounts for more than half of the surface area, but the highest numbers of individual lakes are to be found in the inari district of lapland. there, one area of 100 square kilometres, corresponding to a single basic map sheet (1:20 000), has been calculated to contain as many as 1,466 separate lakes (kuusisto 1985). the lakes are linked together by rivers to form watercourses, the vast majority of which flow into the baltic sea. finland thus has 72 watercourses that are more than 200 square kilometres in area. the five largest watercourses account for the majority of the country’s surface area. this article will provide a brief description of the post-glacial history of the watercourses in finland and a discussion of the effects of human influence on this history and on the condition of the lakes and rivers. separate mention will be made of certain large lakes that have been of major significance for the history of all the other watercourses. changes in outflow direction in the lake district watercourses when the last parts of the great watercourses that make up the lake district of finland became isolated from the baltic basin about 8000 bp, the majority of them originally flowed to the northwest into the gulf of bothnia. the largest of all was a labyrinthine watercourse that skirted round the present-day saimaa and päijänne systems and had its outflow over a threshold in the presentday lake kotajärvi in pihtipudas into the headwaters of the kalajoki river (saarnisto 1971b; ristaniemi 1982, 1987; eronen 1990; tikkanen 1990). the watershed extended as far as the first salpausselkä marginal formation south of the ancient lake saimaa and ancient lake päijänne (fig. 1). the central lake of this vast watercourse, the great lake of central finland, was formed by the ancient lake saimaa and ancient lake päijänne, which were almost at the same level and were separated only by a threshold of selkäydenjärvi at pielavesi in north savo (saarnisto 1970). this large lake had much broader expanses of open water than the current watercourses, especially in the north, and its surface was more than 20 metres above the present level (saarnisto 1970; tikkanen 1990; virkanen & tikkanen 1998) (fig. 2). as the land in the area of the kotajärvi threshold was rising faster than that in other parts of the lake basin, the water level in both the saimaa and päijänne systems rose in the course of time. this transgression served to link new basins to them. the great lake reached its maximum extent about 6000 bp, at which point the rising waters broke through the heinola esker in the south to form a new outlet channel via the kymijoki river. by that stage the water level at the southern tip of lake päijänne had risen about 20 metres (saarnisto 1971a). once the breach had been made at heinola, the kotajärvi threshold dried up and the basins in the north began to be isolated as separate lakes, while water levels in lake päijänne subsided similarly. this meant in turn that the watershed in the south shifted some 300 kilometres further north in places, becoming established in the suomenselkä area (fig. 1). the rising waters of the ancient lake saimaa similarly began to seek new outlet channels. with time, two such channels opened up, through the small lakes of matkuslampi near ristiina (about 6000 bp) and at kärjenlampi near lappeenranta (around 5500 bp). these then operated simultaneously for some time, at which point the outlet channel to the north in pielavesi dried up. the waters of the saimaa area were still flowing into fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 33long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland fig. 1. coastline of finland and the main waterways systems and watersheds around 7000 bp. (1) principal watershed and watershed between major drainage basins; (2) change in watercourse before 7000 bp; (3) outflow channel and basin number. according to tikkanen (1999: 41). 34 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen the gulf of finland via the kymijoki river at that time. the present outflow channel arose around 5000 bp, when these waters broke through the first salpausselkä formation and began to flow through the vuoksi channel into lake ladoga (saarnisto 1970) (fig. 1). the kokemäenjoki watercourse likewise differed greatly in early times from what is known today. the waters of lake näsijärvi and those that flowed into it had their original outlet in the north, passing into the headwaters of the lapuanjoki system at alavus (tolvanen 1924; tikkanen & seppä 2001), while the watershed in the south was located at the pyynikki esker in tampere. thus the waters of lake kyrösjärvi and the loimijoki river still formed a separate watercourse leading to the sea around 7000 bp (fig. 1). as the ancient lake näsijärvi was also transgressive, however, the water level in its southern parts rose, opening a new outlet channel at tammerkoski around 6700 bp (tikkanen & seppä 2001). this meant at the same time that many of the watercourses leading into lake näsijärvi were redirected to the kokemäenjoki system, although the area crossed by the present-day river of that name still lay largely beneath the litorina sea. the lakes that make up the puula watercourse between päijänne and saimaa have shifted their outlet channel in two stages, first from the northwest to the west and later to the south-west, where the present channel, tainionvirta, opened up at koskipää near hartola around 4500 bp (tikkanen 1995). lake puulavesi was artificially redirected in 1831–1854 to flow into the mäntyharju watercourse by the construction of a canal at kissakoski, although a small stream had already developed at that site as a result of the transgression, functioning as a natural outlet channel (hellaakoski 1928). early changes in outflow and continuous transgression even before the time of the changes in the directions of flow of the major watercourses of the lake district, a number of transgressions had taken place that had led to alterations in outflow channels and significant reshaping of drainage basins. one water body affected in this way was lake pielinen in north karelia. it had its original outflow in the north-west, at the threshold in the suofig. 2. extent of the great lake saimaa in northern savo region about 8000 bp (shaded). recent watercourses are indicated in black. the thick arrow in the savonselkä watershed shows the outlet threshold of the ancient lake. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 35long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland menselkä watershed marked by lake kalliojärvi, so that it belonged to the oulujoki drainage basin. this threshold dried up around 8400 bp, when the waters of the transgressive lake opened up a new channel through the esker of uimaharju at the south-eastern end. the lake had, in effect, been an independent basin for no more than about 500 years at that stage (hyvärinen 1966; saarnisto 1971b), although the basin had been occupied prior to that time by an ice lake, which in its later stages had been connected to the sotkamo ice lake via the kalliojärvi valley (sauramo 1928; miettinen 1996; saarelainen & vanne 1997). once a passage had been made through uimaharju and the channel of the pielisjoki river had been established, lake pielinen and its extensive drainage basin were transferred from the oulujoki watercourse to the vuoksi system (fig. 1). the subsequent regression then cut down the length of the lake by some 40 kilometres and reduced its surface area considerably. the effect on water levels was such that the kalliojärvi threshold is nowadays about 66 metres above the lake surface. the kitkajärvi lakes in kuusamo arose in a supra-aquatic position about 9400–9500 bp on the retreat of the ice sheet, and their waters drained away over a threshold of maaselänpuro and into the livojoki river in the iijoki basin. as the outflow channel was located in an area of greater land uplift, the ancient lake kitka was transgressive from the outset. the rising water eventually reached the height of the present threshold on the outflow into the kitkajoki river in the east. the result was a long bifurcation stage, before the maanselkä threshold finally dried up around 8400 bp (heikkinen & kurimo 1977). at the same time the watershed shifted entirely to a point west of the lakes and the whole basin was transferred from the iijoki watercourse, flowing into the baltic, to the koutajoki watercourse, which flows into the white sea (fig. 1). the shoreline of the ancient lake kitka, which is clearly distinguishable in the terrain, is now more than ten metres above the present lake level in the west. correspondingly, the outflow channel from lake kilpisjärvi in enontekiö led over the watershed to the atlantic ocean, via the valleys of skibotn and stordalselva, at a time when the ice sheet closed off the various possible channels to the south (fig. 1). the ice lake in question was about 50 kilometres long at its maximum and its fig. 3. lake oulujärvi during isolation about 8400–8300 bp (shaded). areas submerged after that time are indicated in black. (generalized from koutaniemi & keränen 1983) 36 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen shoreline ran about 20 metres above the present level of the lake in the final stage (taipale & saarnisto 1991). as the ice margin retreated southeastwards, an outflow channel opened up first into the lätäseno valley and, finally, via the present-day route into the muonionjoki river. according to taipale & saarnisto (1991: 295), the ice lake stage lasted about one thousand years and came to an end around 9000 bp. there are many more large lakes in which major changes have taken place in the course of time, even though the result may not have been an alteration in outflow channel. if the threshold was located in an area of faster land uplift, a transgression will have taken place that will have raised the water level considerably in the course of the millennia. one case in point is lake oulujärvi, which was isolated from the ancylus lake stage of the baltic around 8300–8400 bp. its outflow threshold has always been situated in the same place, at the north-western end, although the land rises faster here than elsewhere in the basin. the resulting transgression has raised the water level at the eastern end of the lake by as much as 15 metres (koutaniemi & keränen 1983), so that the original series of basins have combined to form a single large lake. its surface area has doubled since the time of its isolation (fig. 3). a similar history may be traced for the vanajavesi basin on the kokemäenjoki watercourse. vanajavesi’s outlet channel has remained at the north-western end throughout its history as a lake. having been isolated from the baltic around 7500 bp, lake vanajavesi has inundated vast areas of mire on its shores (auer 1924, 1968; saarnisto 1971b) and its transgressive surface has risen by about ten metres at the southern end. likewise, lake pyhäjärvi in säkylä and eura, which was isolated from the baltic around 5600 bp (eronen et al. 1982), has been transgressive ever since. flooded peat areas are to be found on its bottom at the south-eastern end, even though the water level has been lowered artificially by about two metres. regulation and drainage of lakes the inhabitants of finland began to take advantage of the watercourses by the fourteenth century at the latest, harnessing the rapids to provide power for flour mills, planing machines for producing splints and roofing shingles, and, later, sawmills. in many cases this meant the building of dams to raise the water level. otherwise the smaller streams could only be used during the flood season. as various forms of water power have been developed, the rivers have been modified to a stepwise profile and the lake levels have been regulated. nowadays about a third of the total area of natural lakes in the country, i.e., some 10,200 square kilometres, is subject to regulation. about one half serves the needs of hydroelectric power, one quarter flood control, and one quarter water supplies. also, about 20 reservoirs have been constructed for regulation purposes, with a combined surface area of 800 square kilometres (raatikainen 1985b), and about 100 square kilometres of water areas in bays off the estuaries of rivers have been closed off to form freshwater basins (raatikainen 1985b; ollila 1986). the largest reservoirs are those of lokka (417 km2) and porttipahta (214 km2), created by damming the headwaters of the kemijoki river. there are also many small, shallow lakes in danger of growing over in which the water level has been raised to improve their ecological condition (fig. 4). water is usually stored in the regulated basins during the spring flood season and during rainy spells in summer and autumn, and released from them in considerable quantities in winter and at times of dry weather. regulation has thus been used to make substantial alterations in the rhythm of discharge of many rivers. the oulujoki river, for example, no longer has any natural high water period in may and june, as discharge is at its lowest at that time on account of the amounts of water released during the winter, so that virtually its whole storage capacity can be filled with the flood water. sometimes quite extensive and complicated systems of canals and dams are required to ensure an adequate water supply to reservoirs (tikkanen 1990). much of regulation of watercourses is designed to minimize flood peaks. the river systems of ostrobothnia, having few lakes, show great variations in water levels. here, floods are common. efforts have therefore been made to prevent flooding by dredging the channels in order to ensure that the water flows more quickly, raising the banks so that the water will not flood onto the surrounding fields, and storing the water in reservoirs and natural basins. on the other hand, dredging of the headwaters of river systems, in particular, together with the ditching of mires and forests, has accelerated the movement of the wafennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 37long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland ter and made the lower reaches of the rivers more susceptible to flooding. finland still has some 70,000 hectares of land that are in need of flood protection (kytö 1986). settlement has always tended to be concentrated beside the rivers and lakes, but human influence on these waterways remained minimal until the mid-eighteenth century (anttila 1967; vesajoki 1982). at this time began a protracted period of some 200 years during which almost 3,000 lakes were drained either totally or partially and innumerable others underwent at least some lowering of their water level (huttunen 1981; raatikainen 1985b). this drainage, for the purpose of either avoiding flooding or obtaining more arable land, was accomplished by lowering the threshold or digging an entirely new outlet channel (fig. 5). the first known artificial lowering of a lake level in finland was undertaken by lauri nuutinen in the parish of eno in 1743, when he and his family dug a drainage channel through the esker that restrained the waters of lake sarvinginjärvi (palmén 1903; vesajoki 1982). once the water had entered the new channel it began to deepen rapidly, so that the old outlet dried up completely. eventually all that was left of a lake eight kilometres long was a chain of small pools joined by a river that flowed across fertile fields of former bottom gyttja. when others saw that the meadows created by lowering the lake level produced a good crop of hay, an enthusiasm for draining lakes spread rapidly across north karelia and central ostrobothnia. the draining of lakes reached its peak in the nineteenth century, but the practice continued into the twentieth century. numerous small pools were also drained in order to dry paludified forests on their shores. the land gained in the drainage process did not always prove suitable for cultivation, however, as sometimes all that was revealed was a rocky bottom. it was not uncommon, either, for the drainage process to remain incomplete, leaving an expanse of useless boggy ground or a water basin that would soon become overgrown (tikkanen 1990: 249). the work of shaping watercourses in the desired manner did not always go according to plans in other respects, either. many drainage operations ended with the water getting out of hand and deepening the newly dug channel far more than had been intended, leading to an excessive drop fig. 4. lake settijärvi in haapajärvi before and after damming and regulation. 38 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen in the water level. the best-known example of this is the disastrous discharge and lowering of lake höytiäinen in 1859 (fig. 6), when the lake level fell by 9.5 metres and about 170 square kilometres of former lakebed became dry land (sauramo & auer 1928; saarnisto 1968; vesajoki 1980a, 1980b, 1982). in a similar case, the collapse of a dam in a channel being dug through the esker of kangasalanharju in 1830 lowered the surface of lake längelmävesi by two metres very rapidly and laid bare some 30 square kilometres of land (renqvist 1951). water quality the effects of human activity are also clearly reflected in the quality of the water in finland’s lakes and rivers. effluent from industry, settlements or agriculture, and also airborne deposits, have caused the ecological condition of many watercourses to deteriorate. according to a usability classification that corresponded to the situation in the mid-1990s, over four-fifths of the lake basins in finland were nevertheless in an “excellent” (38%) or “good” state (42%), while 16 percent fig. 5. drained and cultivated basin of lake tainusjärvi at jurva, western finland. (author’s photo, 07/95) fig. 6. outflow channel of lake höytiäinen created by uncontrolled erosion in 1859 at kontiolahti, eastern finland. (author’s photo, 06/90) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 39long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland fig. 7. usability ratings of inland waterways in finland in the mid-1990s (generalized from antikainen et al. 1999). 40 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen were in “satisfactory,” 4 percent “moderate” and 0.3 percent in “poor” condition (antikainen 1999; antikainen et al. 1999; antikainen et al. 2000) (fig. 7). the best situation on average is in the lake district and in the north of lapland (tikkanen 1999). particularly marked improvements have been brought about in recent years in the state of the badly polluted lakes and rivers adjacent to large industrial complexes or settlements. on the other hand, a slowly advancing process of eutrophication has affected the general condition of many lakes. the rivers of finland are in a distinctly poorer condition than the lakes: only two out of five are classified as “excellent” (8%) or “good” (31%), while 30 percent are “satisfactory,” 29 percent “moderate” and more than 2 percent “poor” (antikainen et al. 1999). the poorest results apply to the rivers of ostrobothnia and the south coast (fig. 7). the task of improving their state will be a difficult one, because activities such as fish farming, peat mining, and the diffuse loading from forestry and agriculture affect the water quality of the rivers most seriously of all. many finnish lakes have characteristically been undergoing a slow process of acidification throughout post-glacial times (alhonen 1967; donner et al. 1978; huttunen et al. 1978; tolonen 1980; tolonen et al. 1986; korhola & tikkanen 1991), but the trend has been accentuated by the effects of sulphur and nitrogen compounds released in the generation of energy, in industrial processes, and by motor traffic. apart from its own pollutants, finland receives airborne sulphur deposition from beyond its boundaries, chiefly from russia and central europe. the water of acidified lakes is clear and the fish suffer from reproductive difficulties, so that there are a few lakes in southern finland in which acidification has reached the point where there are no fish at all. according to forsius (1992), the estimated proportion of acidic lakes in 1987 was 12 percent of the total number of lakes but only about 0.8 percent of the total lake surface area in finland, and more than 45 percent of the acidic lakes have been acidic already during pre-acidification times due to their high concentrations of organic matter. as a result of recent curbs on sulphur emissions, many small acidified lakes already show signs of recovery and their ph has begun to rise, as elsewhere in europe and north america (stoddard et al. 1999; mannio 2001). nitrogen emissions continue to pose a threat, however, as these are still increasing. the large lakes in finland have not usually been prone to acidification, because they receive various other pollutants and nutrients that neutralize the acid influx, whereas the small lakes in the headwaters of waterways systems, often located in nutrient-poor, forested areas, are more susceptible, as they have a natural alkalinity deficit. alkalinity has also declined over recent decades in some larger watercourses such as the kemijoki drainage basin and lake inari (wahlström et al. 1992). mercury is another problem affecting watercourses in finland. in some lakes in southern and central finland mercury concentrations in the predatory fish are twice or three times the natural background level. mercury enters the ecosystems through both point source and diffuse loading, from industry, the combustion of waste, agriculture, etc. similarly, pronounced regulation of water levels, especially in small reservoirs, is likely to raise the mercury content. mercury persists in watercourses for a long time, but there are now signs that the prevention of emissions from the wood processing industries has reduced concentrations gradually in many river and lake systems from the 1970s onwards (wahlström et al. 1992: 304). in the same way, concentrations of other detrimental substances (notably cadmium, lead, and arsenic) in finland’s waterway systems have diminished by 20–40 percent over recent decades (mannio 2001: 37). many efforts have been made to improve the condition of finland’s lakes and rivers. where lake levels have been lowered too drastically, measures have been taken to raise them. stretches of rapids that had been dredged are now being returned to their original state by rolling the larger rocks back into the channel. water quality has been improved by intensifying and centralizing purification processes, and by leaving protective zones alongside river banks and lake shores, constructing precipitation basins, removing excessively lush vegetation, oxygenating deeper waters that were suffering from oxygen deficiency, and dredging bottom sediments that contain excessive amounts of phosphorus or other pollutants. internal loading in eutrophicated lakes has been reduced by intensified fishing for cyprinids (such as roach and bream). although there is still much room for improvement in the water quality of finnish lakes and rivers, it can now be said with confidence that the decline in their condition has fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 41long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland for the most part been arrested and signs of a distinctly better water quality have been observable in many areas in recent times. references alhonen p (1967). palaeolimnological investigations of three inland lakes in south-western finland. acta botanica fennica 76. antikainen s (1999). vesiemme laatu on paikoin parantunut. ympäristö 13: 5, 16–17. antikainen s, m joukola & h vuoristo (2000). suomen pintavesien laatu 1990-luvun puolivälissä. vesitalous 2/2000. antikainen s, h vuoristo, m joukola & a raateland (1999). vesien laatu 1994–1997. suomen ympäristökeskus, helsinki. anttila v (1967). järvenlaskuyhtiöt suomessa. kansatieteellinen arkisto 19. auer v (1924). die postglaziale geschichte des vanajavesisees. bulletin de la commission géologique de finlande 69, 1–132. auer v (1968). die isobasenrichtung in der gegend des sees vanajavesi. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae 94, 1–30. blomqvist e (1926). vattenståndförändringar och strandförskjutningar i pälkänevesi, joutenselkä, längelmävesi och vesijärvi sjöar sedan början av 1600-talet. svenska tekniska vetenskapsakademien i finland, acta 4, 72–79. donner j, p alhonen, m eronen, h jungner & i vuorela (1978). biostratigraphy and radiocarbon dating of the holocene lake sediments of työtjärvi and the peats in the adjoining bog varrassuo west of lahti in southern finland. annales botanici fennici 15, 258–280. eronen m (1990). suurten järvien kehitys. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 123–126: geology, 18. national board of finland & geographical society of finland, helsinki. eronen m, o heikkinen & m tikkanen (1982). holocene development and present hydrology of lake pyhäjärvi in satakunta, southwestern finland. fennia 160, 195–223. forsius m (1992). acidification of lakes in finland: regional estimates of lake chemistry and critical loads. publications of the water and environment research institute. national board of waters and the environment, finland 10, 1–36. heikkinen o & h kurimo (1977). the postglacial history of kitkajärvi, north-eastern finland, as indicated by trend-surface analysis and radiocarbon dating. fennia 153, 1–32. hellaakoski a (1928). puulan järviryhmän kehityshistoria (die entwicklungsgeschichte der puulaseengruppe). fennia 51: 2, 1–68. huttunen p (1981). ihminen vesiluonnon muovaajana. in havas p (ed). suomen luonto 4: vedet, 35–44. kirjayhtymä, helsinki. huttunen p, j meriläinen & k tolonen (1978). the history of a small dystrophied forest lake, southern finland. polskie archiwum hydrobiologii 25, 189–202. hyvärinen h (1966). studies on the late-quaternary history of pielis-karelia, eastern finland. commentationes biologicae, societas scientiarum fennica 29: 4, 1–72. hyvärinen h (1973). the deglaciation history of eastern finland – recent data from finland. boreas 2, 85–102. jones m (1977). finland. daughter of the sea. dawson & archon books, chatham. korhola a & m tikkanen (1991). holocene development and early extreme acidification in a small hilltop lake in southern finland. boreas 20, 333– 356. korhola a & m tikkanen (1996). the early postglacial history of the lake sirkkajärvi, southern finland, with particular attention to the g stage of the baltic. geografiska annaler a 78, 235– 345. koutaniemi l & r keränen (1983). lake oulujärvi, main holocene developmental phases and associated geomorphic events. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 135, 1–48. kuusisto e (1985). suomi on järvistöjen maa. suomen kuvalehti 29/85, 68–69. kytö j (1986). tulvasuojelu ja maankuivatus. in karlsson k-p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 132: water, 28. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. mannio j (2001). responses of headwater lakes to air pollution changes in finland. monographs of the boreal environment research 18, 1–48. miettinen a (1996). pielisen jääjärven kehityshistoria (abstract: the history of the pielinen ice lake). terra 108, 14–19. ollila m (1986). vesien säännöstely. in karlsson k-p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 132: water, 27–28. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. palmén eg (1903). äldre och nyare sjöfällningar och sjöfällningsförsök i finland. fennia 20: 7, 1–108. raatikainen m (1985a). niitä on 187 888. suomen kuvalehti 28/85, 58–61. raatikainen m (1985b). suomen järvet ovat jääkauden jälkeläisiä. suomen kuvalehti 28/85, 66–69. raatikainen m & e kuusisto (1990). suomen järvien lukumäärä ja pinta-ala (abstract: the number and surface area of the lakes in finland). terra 102, 97–110. renqvist h (1951). sisävedet. suomen maantieteen käsikirja, 145–180. otava, helsinki. ristaniemi o (1982). päijänne transgression in the northern päijänne region in central finland. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 134, 151–171. ristaniemi o (1987). itämeren korkein ranta ja ancylusraja sekä muinais-päijänne keski-suomessa (abstract: the highest shore and ancylus limit of the baltic sea and the ancient lake päijänne in 42 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen central finland). annales universitatis turkuensis c 59, 1–102. saarelainen j & j vanne (1997). sotkamon jääjärvi (abstract: sotkamo ice lake). terra 109, 25–38. saarnisto m (1968). the flandrian history of lake höytiäinen, eastern finland. bulletin of the geological society of finland 40, 71–98. saarnisto m (1970). the late weichselian and flandrian history of the saimaa lake complex. commentationes physico-mathematicae, societas scientiarum fennica 37, 1–107. saarnisto m (1971a). the upper limit of the flandrian transgression of lake päijänne. commentationes physico-mathematicae, societas scientiarum fennica 41, 149–170. saarnisto m (1971b). history of finnish lakes and lake ladoga. commentationes physico-mathematicae, societas scientiarum fennica 41, 371– 388. sauramo m (1928). über die spätglazialen niveauverschiebungen in nordkarelien, finnland. bulletin de la commission géologique de finlande 80, 1–42. sauramo m & v auer (1928). on the development of lake höytiäinen in karelia and its ancient flora. bulletin de la commission géologique finlande 81, 1–42. stoddard jl, ds jeffries, a lükewille, ta clair, pj dillon, ct driscoll, m forsius, m johannessen, js kahl, jh kellogg, a kemp, j mannio, dt monteith, ps murcoch, s patrick, a rebsdorf, bl skjelkvåle, mp stainton, t traaen, h van dam, ke webster, j wieting & a wilander (1999). regional trends in aquatic recovery from acidification in north america and europe. nature 401, 575–578. taipale k & m saarnisto (1991). tulivuorista jääkausiin. wsoy, porvoo. tikkanen m (1989). geomorphology of the vantaanjoki drainage basin, southern finland. fennia 167, 19–72. tikkanen m (1990). suomen vesistöjen jääkauden jälkeinen kehitys (abstract: postglacial history of finnish watercourses). terra 102, 239–255. tikkanen m (1995). history of the puula lake complex, central finland, and shifts in its outlet. fennia 173, 1–32. tikkanen m (1999). muuttuvat vesistöt. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 40– 43. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. tikkanen m & h seppä (2001). post-glacial history of lake näsijärvi, finland, and the origin of the tammerkoski rapids. fennia 179, 129–141. tolonen k (1980). pollen, algal remains and macrosubfossils from lake gallträsk, s. finland. annales botanici fennici 17, 394–405. tolonen k, m liukkonen, r harjula & a pätilä (1986). acidification of small lakes in finland documented by sedimentary diatom and chrysopycean remains. in smol jp, rw battarbee, rb davis & j meriläinen (eds). diatoms and lake acidity, 169–199. dr w junk, dordrecht. tolvanen v (1924). muinais-näsijärvi. terra 36, 208– 218. vesajoki h (1980a). isolation of lake höytiäinen in eastern finland. publications of the university of joensuu b ii 12, 1–26. vesajoki h (1980b). preand post–drainage development of the shore morphology and stratigraphy of lake höytiäinen, eastern finland. publications of the university of joensuu b ii 13, 1–30. vesajoki h (1982). varhaiset järvenlaskut muuttamassa pohjois-karjalan maisemia (abstract: modification of local landscapes by early lake drainages in north karelia, finland). terra 94, 82–88. virkanen j & m tikkanen (1998). the effects of forest ditching and water level changes on sediment quality in a small lake, perhonlampi, central finland. fennia 176, 301–317. wahlström e, t reinikainen & e-l hallanaro (1992). ympäristön tila suomessa. gaudeamus, helsinki. untitled fennia 180: 1–2 (2002), special issue, with cd-rom finland – nature, society, and regions guest editors pauliina raento and john westerholm contents pauliina raento and john westerholm preface 3–4 facts about finland 5–6 instructions for the user 7 nature matti tikkanen and juha oksanen late weichselian and holocene shore displacement history of the baltic sea in finland 9–20 matti tikkanen the changing landforms of finland 21–30 matti tikkanen long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland 31–42 heikki seppä mires of finland: regional and local controls of vegetation, landforms, and long-term dynamics 43–60 jyrki autio and olavi heikkinen the climate of northern finland 61–66 olavi heikkinen, mervi tuovinen and jyrki autio what determines the timberline? 67–74 cartography and landscapes jouni häkli mapping the historical sense of finland 75–81 pirjo jukarainen the boundaries of finland in transition 83–88 petri j. raivo the finnish landscape and its meanings 89–98 päivi maaranen human touch, natural processes: the development of the rural cultural landscape in southern finland from past to present 99–109 niina vuorela, charles burnett and risto kalliola cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps: a finnish perspective 111–121 people and culture john westerholm populating finland 123–140 seppo siirilä, mari vaattovaara and ville viljanen well-being in finland: a comparison of municipalities and residential differentiation in two cities 141–149 pauliina raento and kai husso cultural diversity in finland 151–164 pirkko suihkonen the uralic languages 165–176 reijo norio and markku löytönen the finnish disease heritage 177–182 regions, economy, and society janne antikainen and perttu vartiainen finnish districts and regional differentiation 183–190 kauko mikkonen the competitive advantage of regions and small economic areas: the case of finland 191–198 matti häkkilä farms of northern finland 199–211 markku tykkyläinen spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 213–226 jarmo kortelainen forest industry on the map of finland 227–235 ari aukusti lehtinen globalisation and the finnish forest sector: on the internationalisation of forest-industrial operations 237–250 kai-veikko vuoristo regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland 251–259 kai husso and pauliina raento science policy and research in finland 261–274 preface pauliina raento and john westerholm the volume you are about to read is yet another step in a process that has continued for over one hundred years. in 1999, a hundred years had passed since the first edition of the national atlas of finland, the world’s first national atlas. at the time of its publication, finland was an aspiring nation within the jurisdiction of the russian empire. there was a strong need to demonstrate to the outside world that finland was a capable member of the society of nations and to inform people at home and abroad about this nation’s character and achievements. the current volume expands and updates selected themes of the sixth edition of the national atlas of finland. that edition was published in finnish in 1999 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the national atlas. in the finnish-language volume, the goal was twofold: first, to introduce the achievements and trends of academic geography to the public and, second, to portray finland as part of complex networks of interaction that range from local environments to global contexts. the anniversary edition’s strong temporal approach underscored processes and the evolution of finland toward its current form and status. the emphasis was now on cultural and regional diversity instead of demographic and regional uniformity, as in the earlier editions. this change of emphasis demonstrates the influence of each era and political, economic, and cultural context on what geographers do and how they do it. in this sense, each edition of the national atlas is a reflection of its time and a statement of what its authors deem important and interesting. during the one hundred years, finland has become an equal member of the society of nations, but finnish geographers still wish to share information about their research and their country. thus emerged the idea to select some of the topics for an expanded, updated, and more academic english-language version of the anniversary edition. the history of the national atlas of finland illustrates the development of academic geography, in particular, and scientific knowledge, in general. the previous editions of the atlas emphasized basic research. the first edition, published in 1899, underscored the role of academic contributions in the making of a nation. this emphasis was still clear in the third edition, published in 1925 as the first national atlas of independent finland (since 1917). at the time of these early editions, many details and processes regarding the physical geography and regional structures of finland remained unexamined and vaguely known, and the atlas had a strong educational purpose. by the fourth edition, published in 1960, the basics of finland’s geography had been covered and academic foci gained weight over the political ones. in that edition, themes such as relief and settlement patterns were examined thematically. waterways, vegetation, population, and economic activities, among other themes, were portrayed through cartographic syntheses. since the 1960s it has been necessary to add only details and update these basic data. the fifth edition of the atlas, published in folio format between 1972 and 1994, reflects the exponential growth of statistical data and the development of analytical tools and technology. many of the folios contain detailed representations of data in cartographic format. of course, the current volume is by no means comprehensive – finland has many more faces than has been possible to portray in one volume, and very valuable geographical research is being conducted on other topics as well. these faces and research interests will continue to change, because finland is undergoing a tremendous change in the dawn of the new millennium – just like the rest of the world. one key element in this change is the rapid evolution of information technology and the growth of the amount of information. political-administrative and cultural boundaries are losing their previous significance as the interdependency of local, regional, national, and global spheres of human and natural activity intensifies. these processes will shape both the international exchanges and position of finland and its internal structures. this means that new characteristics will be added to the geography of finland. the fascinating, long history of the national atlas of finland is therefore likely to continue with future generations of finnish geographers. this part of the project would not have been possible without the talent and patience of the authors of this volume. to them we are forever grateful. we wish to express our warmest gratitude also to kirsti lehto, pirkko numminen, and arttu paarlahti of the university of helsinki department of geography for their invaluable help with the illustrations. the technical execution of the attached cd-rom would not have been possible without our colleague timo korhonen of mediakeel ltd. and finally, we wish to thank the geographical society of finland for its support. facts about finland area 338,145 km2 land area 304,473 km2 maximum length 1,157 km maximum width 542 km highest elevation 1,328 m population (end of 2001) 5,194,901 men 2,537,597 women 2,657,304 population density 17.1 persons/km2 life expectancy (2001) 77.6 years men 73.9 years women 81.4 years gdp per capita (2000) 22,156 us dollars independence 6 december 1917 capital city helsinki–helsingfors population (end of 2001) 559,718 municipalities (2002) 448 regions 19 + 1 autonomous region provinces 5 official languages finnish and swedish currency 1 euro = 100 cents for more facts about finland, see <www.stat.fi> instructions for the user there are two kinds of figures in this volume: 1) those named figures are printed in blackand-white in the journal and reproduced in black-and-white or in color on the attached cd-rom. 2) those named cd-figures are included in the cd-rom only. please consult the cdrom to see these color images. if you are using a windows operating system, the cd-rom’s index page should appear automatically, when the cd-rom is inserted in the computer and the computer’s auto run option is active. in other systems, open the index page by doing the following: 1) open internet browser program. 2) go to the browser’s file menu and choose the open option. 3) find index from the cd-rom station. 4) click ok. the contents page of the cd-rom provides the user with direct links to the full text of each article and its illustrations. for example: janne antikainen and perttu vartiainen finnish districts and regional differentiation figures 1 2 3 4 cd-figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 tables 1 2 cd-appendixes 1 2 3 (1) to open the text and illustrations file, click your mouse on the title of the article. (2) to examine a (color) version of the image included in the journal, click the number of the image. (3) to examine a color image included in the cd-rom only, click the number of the image. (4) to examine a table included in the article, click the number of the table. (5) to examine an appendix included in the article, click the number of the appendix. all color images are available as acrobat versions, allowing their high-quality reproduction for classroom use. to print a color image, it is easiest to (1) proceed to the contents page of the cdrom. (2) click the link to the desired figure or cdfigure. (3) choose the link titled “printable acrobat version” below the image. (4) print. to print a black-and-white image, (1) proceed to the contents page of the cdrom. (2) click the link to the desired figure, table, or appendix. (3) print. 1 2 3 4 5← ← ← ← ← incommodious border? rethinking the function of the finnishrussian border jussi laine laine, jussi (2007). incommodious border? rethinking the function of the finnish-russian border. fennia 185: 1, pp. 49–62. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this article examines the manner in which the often-mentioned barrier effect of the finnish-russian border as well as the greater interaction, enabled by the gradual opening of the border, is perceived among actors involved in crossborder co-operation or border management. the discussion surrounding the impacts of borders on the areas they divide provides the analytical basis on which this article is built. it is a composition of several proposals, which taken together suggest that, first and foremost, borders are barriers for interaction, which have several different roles, some of which are more resistant to change. the empirical data consists of 81 questionnaires, originally collected for the exlinea research project from north and south karelia, in finland and in the republic of karelia and the leningrad oblast in russia. the basic assertion of this article is that despite the benefits gained from its partial opening, the finnish-russian border and its side-effects still function as a barrier, separating the two sides from each other and hindering interaction. given the role that the border plays this is not, however, a purely negative thing. a majority on both sides perceives the border as a necessary and useful institution that is sufficiently transparent to enable the two neighbours to interact in a mutually beneficial manner. jussi laine, karelian institute, university of joensuu, po box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: jussi.laine@joensuu.fi. introduction a border is a line that separates one from another. its essential function has been to keep people in their own compartments and to control, regulate, or even prevent interactions between the included and the excluded. reasons for the demarcation are often manifold. throughout the history of the nation-state, political argument has been in vogue; a border consists of a margin around the edge of an entity sovereignly governed by a supreme power. in this sense, the diagnosis of who is in and who is out has also been unproblematic and straightforward. nonetheless, for many whose everyday life is affected by a border, a particular line drawn on a map is often not the factor limiting their actions; it is rather the mental, symbolic, cultural, ethnic and virtual aspects that make a border incommodious from them. especially in today’s europe where cross-border co-operation (cbc) seems to be perceived as a useful tool for regional development and forging togetherness, the role of the border per se has been transforming from a barrier towards a bridge; i.e. from a fence towards a resource. the opening of borders allows more flexibility and movement of various kinds, the benefits of which are now commonly perceived to be greater than the ill effects. in contrast to building cohesion and blurring divides, at the finnish-russian border the issue of concern is more the “ambiguity between co-operation and control” (cronberg 2003: 223). hence, the basic argument behind current eu policies that borders are barriers and barriers are to be removed sounds logical within the european union, but at its external borders such a straightforward course of action may not be feasible – or even desired. in comparison to internal eu borders, the function of the external one is more complex – especially as the role of the border happens to be bulked up with the schengen acquis1. even though undergoing a process of opening, the finnish-russian border still illustrates the existence of fencelike borders in very close proximity to the heart of the ‘borderless world’. accordingly, the strict dif50 fennia 185: 1 (2007)jussi laine ferentiation of external/internal borders in the european context has elicited anderson et al. (2002: 9) to argue that this “variable permeability of borders” represents “one of the major contradictions of the contemporary world”. it is this variation that makes borders worth studying. the aim of this article is to examine the manner in which the often-mentioned barrier effect of the finnish-russian border as well as the greater interaction, enabled by the gradual opening of the border, is perceived by the actors immediately involved either in cbc or border management. a barrier effect exists when the intensity of a certain form of interaction suddenly drops where a border is crossed due to the characteristics of the border (rietveld 1993: 49, 2001: 83). hence, this article focuses primarily on clarifying what these characteristics actually are in the finnish-russian context. the empirical data derives from a standardized questionnaire survey completed by 81 actors involved in cross-border co-operation or border management in north and south karelia, in finland and in the republic of karelia and the leningrad oblast in russia2. it should be noted that these individuals may be regarded as a specific group of people and their opinions may be unrepresentative of the respective national populations. a majority of the respondents can be classified as experts in the grounds of their practical experience and expertise, rather than in the sense that they would plainly obtain a position that allows them to offer authoritative informed views of specialized fields. even though expert opinions are most often regarded as clear, consistent and accurate, it is unlikely that they would be free of personal values and attitudes. relying on the logic of saarinen (1976) that people’s perceptions of a subject tend to be increasingly exaggerated the further away they are from the subject in question, the actors working at the border formed an ideal sample group for this study. certainly, it may well be the difference in interpretative frame that makes the border to appear in a different light depending on the level it is observed from; local level actors view the border through different lens than the actors at the national or supranational level. the perceptions of the local and regional level actors, one would hope, are the most likely to arrive closest to the actuality of situation at the finnish-russian border, an understanding of which may guide us to make better decisions and actions in the future. analytical underpinnings border as a barrier a barrier is defined as any condition or action that hinders or restricts free movement and interaction of people, capital, products, services, ideas, etc. the barrier effect of a border, then, refers to the negative effect of such conditions on border exchanges between territories (lösch 1940/1954: 196–205; de boe et al. 1999: 36; alanen & eskelinen 2000: 22–56). the effect underlines differences between two countries and the lack of spatial integration between them. such a discontinuity can also generate difficulties for cbc, in the sense that differences in behaviour, cultural and linguistic background or in socio-economic level can reduce the possibilities of relationships and interaction. on the other hand, a high barrier effect can be seen as catalyst for increased co-operation in the sense that the ‘differential’ they provide or the ‘complementarity’ they show can encourage flows between areas (de boe et al. 1999: 17). there exist various reasons for the existence of the barrier effect. according to rietveld (1993: 49, 2001: 83), the most important of these are: 1) weak or expensive transport infrastructure service links; 2) consumer preference for domestic rather than foreign products and destinations; 3) government interventions; and 4) lack of information on foreign countries. apart from consumer preferences, all of these may have both monetary and time effects (rietveld 2001: 84–86); e.g. the border crossings entail extra costs and/or time. consumer preference may be based on taste, language or ethnic and cultural differences. in addition to distancebridging costs in transport and communication, linguistic and cultural dissimilarities, as well as differences in the scope of social and political life, political influences may deliberately or unintentionally result in the further separation of countries (peschel 1993: 27). alanen and eskelinen (2000) have examined impact of borders on economic activities. they suggest that borders are primarily institutional obstacles for potential economic activities (see also batten & nijkamp 1990; nijkamp et al. 1990; knox & agnew 1994: 65–106; janssen 2000; blatter 2004). such a way of thought derives from the works of lösch (1940/1954: 196–205; cf. boggs 1940; giersch 1949/1950), who described borders as artificial obstacles for trade. in his opinion, state borders truncate regular market networks, resultfennia 185: 1 (2007) 51incommodious border? rethinking the function of the … ing in economic losses. “tariffs are like rivers”, he argues, “which separate their banks economically more than would correspond to their actual width” (lösch 1940/1954: 200). van houtum (1999: 9–19; cf. o’dowd 2002) has discovered that in addition to economic constraints, borders tend to increase the euclidean, travel or transport, communication, time, economic, administrative, social, cultural, affective, cognitive and/or mental distance. thus, the economic aspect is by far not the sole underlying motive for border analysis. open versus closed borders “the whole issue of borders”, van houtum (1998: 15) states, “would not be so challenging and interesting a subject if man would not want them to be changed”. borders are subject to continuous change not only in space, but also through time. categorizing borders as either ‘open’ or ‘closed’ paints a rather black and white picture. the reality is greyer, as a border may be permeable at one point in time and impermeable at another or may be permeable for some functions and impermeable for other functions. furthermore, a distinction between ‘openness’ and ‘permeability’ has to be made (langer 1999: 32–33). openness refers to “the level of expenses needed to cross the border at official border crossings”, whereas permeability “designates the ability of a border to prevent illegal crossings, inside and outside the check points” (langer 1999). hence, a closed border may be permeable and vice versa. translated into human activities, an open border situation refers to “a centrifugal orientation of the actors contained with the border” (van houtum 1998: 16). in a situation where borders cease to limit the space for action, free movement is prevalent (van houtum 1998: 16; cf. ratti 1993). such an open border no longer functions as a barrier, but rather as a bridge connecting two sides of a border together, creating a meeting place for actors from various levels. in a closed border situation, where borders present an insurmountable barrier, the centripetal effect of the border is more prominent, i.e. people inhabit a closed territory and activities are oriented towards the interior (van houtum 1998: 17). the effect of the border, shown in fig. 1, is the same whether it is examined from a purely economic or a more general perspective. a closed border functions as a dividing line separating the two sides of the border from each other. this forces not only companies, but also people in general to orient themselves towards the interior of the country, limiting simultaneously the potential market fig. 1. influence of the opening of a border on the increase of cross-border contacts. adapted from: heigl (1978) and janssen (2000). 52 fennia 185: 1 (2007)jussi laine area or potential space for action. such a demarcation means weaker competitiveness in relation to other otherwise comparative centres (cf. rietveld 1993, 2001). the location as an edge of a community, often sidelined from the central power’s reach, is what encourages border regions to be referred to as ‘peripheral’. the eu is perhaps the most well known example of what is considered to be an open border situation. in this case national governments have decided to relax – at least certain functions of – their national borders. this decision encourages cross-border economic activities, which in turn aims to deliver economic growth for the states in question and for the union as a whole. consequences of the opening despite their multifaceted blocking abilities, borders need not be associated as inherently disadvantaged; they have also the potential to catalyze innovation. the degree of border openness relates to its relative effect as a barrier. in other words, the effect of a border depends on the capability of people to cross the border. borderlands, then, have distinct features and unique characteristics due to either increased interaction or lack thereof. merkx (2000) describes borderlands as dynamic areas with interplay between restrictions and opportunities. as the barrier effect of the border becomes lower, new forms of movement across the political, restrictive dividing lines can lead to new relations and dynamics, or even give rise to new complex identities along with creating stronger regional attachments (merkx 2000). wilson and donnan (1998: 22; see also donnan & wilson 1999) also note that a border may act both as a barrier and a bridge, even simultaneously. borders limit movement and, consequently, fruitful communication, but two-way flows across it can bring progress and benefits. despite its ill-effects, most notably smuggling, illegal migration and other delinquencies, openness is often seen in positive light. lower barrier effect may enable a border region to develop from a national level periphery towards an international centre by allowing people and enterprises in the close proximity to the border benefit from their new window-position. openness creates new opportunities, for example by the means of new contacts and expanding market area, but on the other hand also competition is likely to intensify as the enterprises across the border are able to capture the same markets. albeit a necessary condition, openness alone is insufficient to transform a border region from a mere transit zone to what van geenhuizen and ratti (2001) refer to as “active space”. in order to generate cross-border interaction and subsequently to deliver social added value in terms of cohesion between the two sides, not only demand, but also creative learning abilities as well as a concern for sustainability is required (geenhuizen & ratti 2001). the dynamics of change and future opportunities it may bring along are often based on the mental constructions people have. these constructions sketched by a person’s perceptions of the reality are often demonstrated through his or her day-today behaviour and actions. in this respect, a border may well be open de jure, but closed de facto. the same applies to interaction; it has to be perceived as mutually beneficial and favourable by actors themselves in order to maintain itself and prosper. in the following emphasis is placed on perception in order to challenge the simple but profound concern of geographers that humans interact most with those to whom they are closest – the axiom being that the way in which a border is perceived affects the volume of interaction across the border. construction and changing role of borders this article ponders how people mentally construct borders according to their own experiences and knowledge, how the consequently reproduced border is perceived, and according to which criteria the neighbouring regions diverge from each others. thus, the analysis of the border barrier effect relies more on social constructions and feelings of belonging, rather than habitual market flow or locational disadvantages models. in trying to determine the actions and behaviour of people at and within the national borders, the borders themselves are no longer seen merely as territorial lines at a certain place in space, but as symbols of processes of social binding and exclusion that are both constructed or produced in society as well as reproduced via perceptions, symbols, norms, beliefs and attitudes (van houtum 2000: 7). borders are doubtlessly in flux, but they are not likely to disappear, as some authors were eager to announce in the 1990s (see reich 1991; ohmae 1995, 1999). others (see e.g. anderson 1995; hirst & thompson 1996/1999; paasi 1996, 2005; newman 1999) call for more analytical approachfennia 185: 1 (2007) 53incommodious border? rethinking the function of the … es to scrutinize the changing role of not only borders, but also the state, power and sovereignty in a globalizing world. traditional definitions and comprehension of borders have been challenged for the simple reason that the context in which they have existed has also altered. the world, where borders were understood merely as concrete, empirical manifestations of state sovereignty, no longer exists. whereas the nation-state has been losing some of its importance, suband transnational regions have elevated their profile. as anderson and o’dowd (1999: 594) have discovered, every state border, and every border region, is unique. even if there are no common solutions to context specific problems, it does not mean that the structural properties of the larger system, which dictate the depth and range of the regional arrangements, could be neglected. local particularities, whether political, economic, social or cultural, can only be understood in terms of wider conceptualizations (anderson & o’dowd 1999: 594). borders guide, and even obstruct, human activities in space. whether concrete or abstract, borders serve a purpose. concrete borders are visible indicators of the limits of an organization’s jurisdiction, whereas abstract borders are cognitive borders – borders that have been mentally conceived by people (van houtum 1998: 39). this distinction is based on dualism between “things as they ‘really’ are and things as they look to us” (koffka 1935: 35). in this respect, perception plays an important role as the starting point of a cognitive process. the knowledge and recognition of environmental stimuli, a ‘spatial cognition’, must be regarded as the subjective ‘knowing of a space’ given that it results from the interaction between appearance and personal perception (van houtum 1998: 39; cf. veitch & arkkelin 1995). it is crucial to understand the role of a border as a barrier in a cognitive sense. as discussed by kamann (1993), territorial units divided by a border are likely develop different cognitive spaces. the information on one side of the border reaches the other side rarely or not at all and thus, spatial cognition, the frame of reference for activities in space, declines across the border (van houtum 1998: 40). cognitive space is determined mainly by personal experience-based reality, but also by knowledgebased reality (van houtum 1998: 41). new contacts invite new information and experiences, which in turn enable people to develop new assumptions about reality. these assumptions guide their actions in everyday life. openness, in terms of more extensive information flows and increased mobility, makes it also possible for one to expand his or her knowledge-based reality, thereby making a positive distinction between the borders of the mind and territorial borders (van houtum 1998: 41). lundén’s (1973) study of different kinds of spatial cognition verifies that a border can cause a true division. even though he discusses the situation at the border between norway and sweden, where the setting differs greatly from that at the finnish-russian border, its message seems valid also here, where – if anything – the role of the border as a separator should be even stronger. his results show that only recreational activities and shopping profit from the division, whereas all other activities are obstructed by the border’s presence. this comes fairly close to the situation at the finnish-russian border, where a great deal of the border traffic consists of short visits for buying lowcost commodities, petrol and tobacco. the finnish-russian border as a barrier barriers for co-operation the part of the exlinea research project that focused on identifying barriers to interaction and cross-border co-operation consisted of 42 borderrelated factors that were grouped in six main categories. the analysis of the collected material shows that the respondents perceive the finnishrussian border as an intermediate barrier for interaction. given that the border used to be practically closed, it can be argued that a significant change has occurred during the last two decades. however, the role of the border as a barrier is perceived as much higher in the case of some factors than in others. in total, the factors that fall under the category of trade conditions is perceived to be the highest barrier, followed by general conditions, level of assistance and economic geography, all of which are perceived as intermediate barriers (fig. 2). in the case of trade conditions, the opinion of both the finnish and the russian respondents is close to analogous, whereas a significant differences between the nationality groups can be found in the case of general conditions and economic geography, which the finnish respondents rank higher than the russians, and level of assistance, which form a higher barrier for the russians than the finns. of the six categories, only border 54 fennia 185: 1 (2007)jussi laine fig. 2. the comparative assessment of the height of the barrier effect (1 = no barrier, 7 = insurmountable barrier). the differences between the finnish and russian responses become more apparent when the main categories are broken up and all the variables studied individually. table 1 illustrates all the factors that are perceived to be high barriers for cbc (m < 4.5). it should be mentioned that not all the factors featured here are directly related to the border per se, but are rather perceived at least to be caused by it and, thus, to have an influence on the formation of the barrier effect. it seems that the interaction across the border is mainly perceived as being hindered by the problems originating from the russian side. from the finnish respondents’ perspective, the main obstacles for interaction are frequently changing rules in business, corruption (in russia) and security problems (in russia). from the russian respondents’ responses, then, it becomes clear that it is particularly the level of assistance, i.e. financial support and political will, from business associations and agencies of various levels as well as from the national government that seems to form the most outstanding barriers for interaction. in the other end, amongst the lowest obstacles (m < 3.5) to cbc a number of surprising factors can be found (table 2). historical events, cultural differences and infrastructure, factors that were assumed to pose a barrier given their prevailing presence in popular writings and discussions, are perceived by the respondents to hinder cbc only to a minor extent. even though the finnish and the russian perspective seem to differ also when it comes to the table 1. the highest barriers for cross-border co-operation (mean). finnish respondents russian respondents 1. frequent changing of the rules in business (5.6) 1. insufficient national business associations’ assistance (5.5) 2. corruption (5.1) 2. insufficient national agencies assistance (5.4) 3. security problems (4.9) 2. insufficient local agencies assistance (5.4) 3. limited product differentiation of local economy (4.9) 3. insufficient regional agencies (5.3) 4. quality of banking system (4.8) 4. insufficient national government (5.2) 5. different language (4.7) 5. insufficient regional business associations’ assistance (5.1) 6. tariffs or duties imposed by russia on exports (4.6) 6. insufficient local business associations’ assistance (4.8) 6. low purchasing power of the nearby markets (4.6) 7. bureaucratic procedures in imports (4.7) 6. different culture (4.6) 7. limited product differentiation of local economy (4.7) 7. bureaucratic procedures in imports (4.5) 7. frequent changing of the rules in business (4.7) 7. technical requirements concerning exports (4.5) 7. limited product differentiation of local economy (4.7) 7. bureaucratic procedures in import (4.7) 8. technical requirements concerning imports (4.5) crossings and infrastructure are perceived as low barriers in total. here, a statistically significant difference3 is found in the case of infrastructure, which the finnish respondents perceive to form a higher barrier for interaction than the russian respondents. fennia 185: 1 (2007) 55incommodious border? rethinking the function of the … table 2. the lowest barriers for cross-border co-operation (mean). finnish respondents russian respondents 1. closeness of check points (1.9) 1. difficult geographical conditions in border regions (1.9) 2. difficult geographical conditions in border regions (2.6) 2. closeness of check points (2.0) 3. inadequate number of check points (2.7) 3. different religion (2.1) 3. different religion (2.7) 4. telecommunications (2.2) 4. roads (3.0) 5. roads (2.3) 5. insufficient local agencies assistance (3.1) 6. large cities in finland too far away (2.4) 5. insufficient regional business associations assistance (3.1) 7. historical events (2.6) 5. insufficient local government assistance (3.1) 8. different culture (2.8) 6. insufficient regional agencies assistance (3.2) 9. low purchasing power of the nearby markets in finland (2.9) 6. insufficient local business associations’ assistance (3.2) 10. political instability (3.0) 6. insufficient regional government assistance (3.2) 11. inadequate number of check points (3.2) 6. large cities in russia too far away (3.2) 12. public transport (3.3) 7. insufficient european (international.) organizations assistance (3.3) 13. different language (3.3) 7. passport officers treatment and attitude (3.3) 14. insufficient (in size) nearby markets in finland (3.4) 8. insufficient national business associations’ assistance (3.4) 8. insufficient national agencies assistance (3.4) 8. telecommunications (3.4) lowest barriers for cbc, a number of similarities can also be found. interestingly both sides perceive closeness of check points, inadequate number of check points, difficult geographical conditions, different religion, roads, the location of large cities the other side of the border and telecommunications to be either low or even very low barriers fort interaction. unlike in russia, it seems that on the finnish side the level of assistance is sufficient and that the infrastructure does not pose a major barrier for cbc either. from the russian point of view, cbc seems to go fairly unhindered by the basic circumstances and setting of the border area; thus, investment in support and assistance could fetch improvements fairly rapidly. greater interaction and its impact respondents perceive cbc at the finnish-russian border in a positive light. this is not only the result of successful policies and practices, but also an essential prerequisite for future development. images of the other are mainly positive; however the finnish respondents have a clearly more restrained positive image of russians than vice versa. the study also reveals that cbc practices at the finnish-russian border have failed to realize their full potential, presumably largely due to several outstanding factors which are underlined as causes of a high barrier effect. while all governing levels on the whole are perceived positively by both sides, actors at the local level are perceived to be the most effective. from the russian perspective, efforts at both the regional level and in particular at the national level are perceived to lag behind in efficiency. furthermore, the impact of the eu, the newcomer in the field, is also seen in a positive light by both sides. the activeness and efficiency of the local level is perceived to be bolstered by private citizens, cultural associations and universities and research centres. most importantly, the potential gains of greater interaction are perceived to be greater than losses in both border regions and, in general, the respondents perceive that both countries stand to gain from interaction (fig. 3). discussion border and flows the finnish-russian border is still perceived as an element of distance. it has various implications not only for spatial interaction alone, but also for the economic development of the border regions. the high barrier effect of trade conditions, but also of 56 fennia 185: 1 (2007)jussi laine fig. 3. comparative assessment of the gains of greater interaction between the two countries (–3 = not at all true, 3 = absolutely true). economic geography, causes the interaction across the border to be weaker than within each respective state. keeping in mind that infrastructure has the ability to drastically alter a region’s competitive advantage, it was encouraging to discover that it was ranked the lowest barrier of all the given main sectors. there are various reasons for the existence of the border barrier effect. in total, none of the 42 factors are perceived as very low barriers or nonbarriers to interaction. a majority of them (33) are perceived to function at least as an intermediate barrier and six as a high barrier for cbc. most of these factors have both monetary and temporal effects. not all of these factors relate strictly to the actual border per se, but at some level all of them originate from it. this indicates that the border ought to be understood as a wider social construction rather than merely as a narrow political line. trade conditions, particularly bureaucratic procedures concerning foreign trade (both imports and exports), and technical requirements concerning both imports and exports, are among the major obstacles to cbc. this supports the way of though that the finnish-russian border functions first of all as an institutional obstacle for potential economic activities. however, like most of the highest ranking barriers from the russian point of view, these factors can be changed fairly easily. while trade obstacles can be changed by decision-makers – provided that there is the will to do so, corruption, security problems and fluctuating rules in business are more deeply imbedded barriers and fennia 185: 1 (2007) 57incommodious border? rethinking the function of the … more resistant to change. from the finnish perspective, it is precisely these factors that pose the highest barriers to interaction. therefore, concentrating on these factors could yield considerable results. the large differences in the evaluation of the separate factors, from a low barrier to a very high barrier, indicate that the open-closed division paints an indisputably exaggeratedly black-andwhite portrayal of reality. the findings suggest a constant juggle between access and control, and support the claims by langer (1999: 32–33) who has argued that a border may be permeable for some functions and impermeable for others. it should be stressed that the mere ranking of factors (tables 1 & 2) neglects the actual differences between them. more often than not, the statistical testing proved that there exists a relatively strong mutual understanding of which factors within each main sector represent the main barriers for interaction and which do not. this is an important prerequisite for the future development of cbc towards a more intensive, mutually beneficial co-operation between equal partners. due to its multifaceted nature, the finnish-russian border is likely to remain as a filter for a diverse set of flows and the regions divided by it as battlegrounds between fragmenting and cohesive forces. there exists, however, a fair amount of potential for the regions to transform from a national level periphery towards an international centre, if the border’s barrier effect continues to decline, enabling each side to expand their contacts and active space across the border. furthermore, as westlund (1999: 107) argues, technical-logistical and political-administrative borders are much less resistant to change than cultural-historical borders. that is to say that even if the political role of the border would change, its mental characteristics etched in people’s memories cannot be erased with a single political decision. newman’s (2003: 130) argument that “the longer they [borders] remain in situ, the harder they are to remove or change” seems to cast doubt onto the notion that proximity equals interaction. consequently, the neo-liberalist logic that borders are barriers and barriers are to be removed sounds too simple when considering the situation surrounding the finnish-russian border. based on the interview material of the exlinea project, ruusuvuori (2004; see also liikanen et al. 2007) concludes that even though border bureaucracy and the red-tape surrounding border crossings should be curtailed, the border itself must be maintained in terms of border control and visas requirements. conversely, for some of the respondents the future opening of the border seem evident, even if they themselves believe that the border should not be totally opened. however, notwithstanding the downplay of the historical aspects, the desire to maintain the barrier effect of the border at least to a certain extent, even if it entails perpetuating peripherality, would suggest that the raison d’être of the border is unlikely to be surrendered in the foreseeable future. border region and cross-border co-operation despite the barrier effect of the finnish-russian border, the respondents hold optimistic perceptions of both the initial conditions as well as the future prospects of cbc. greater interaction is perceived to be mutually beneficial, which is the most probable reason behind the optimistic attitude. evidently, maintaining a positive attitude may well be part of their job description, however their opinion is also encouraged by the gradually improving conditions at the border since the early 1990s. in any case, these positive sentiments are not only the result of cbc practices but also their prerequisite. the border’s barrier effect has an effect on people’s behaviour in different circumstances and on their perception of places and their surroundings (hallikainen 2003: 18). this effect depends on the capacity of people to cross the border, which in itself depends on the characteristics of the border (van der schelde & hœkveld 1992: 483). the characteristics of the finnish-russian border have created a barrier that, despite its increased porosity, hinders interaction and the formation of cross-border regional systems. the underlying aim of cbc is to remove barriers and other factors that contribute to the separation of political entities. in the finnish-russian context, however, the profound mission of co-operation tends to be to overcome the negative effects of the border and develop good neighbourly relations, rather than erase barriers completely. here, for many, good fences really do make good neighbours. the openness of the border may well be an admirable objective, but it has to be borne in mind, as cronberg (2003: 223) argues, that the co-operation practices at the external border of the eu, characterized by a constant juggle between access and control, have to face a remarkably different 58 fennia 185: 1 (2007)jussi laine reality from the eu’s internal borders, where the co-operation aims to build cohesion and blur divides. in the finnish-russian case, a process of ‘hybridization’ is taking place through the development of new transnational communities4 (cf. matzeit 2005: 2). these communities form a link between localities on both sides of the border and help transcend the considerable barriers to interaction that exist between the two countries. eu policies and concrete co-operation projects have aimed to reduce historical animosities, resentment and negative images that have obstructed interaction in the past, often manifested as distrust and suspicion. the positive evaluation of historical events and the other as a partner may suggest that effective co-operation is already taking place – even though the existing opportunities and instruments to enhance cbc are not, in terms of perceptions, being fully utilized. effective cbc cannot be based only on goodwill; it requires input and motivation from both sides. the identifying of highest and lowest barriers for cbc will help to target future co-operation policies and practices more efficiently. as expected, differences do exist. given that most of these differences are, nevertheless, perceived in a fairly positive light, it would be more useful to consider them as potential starting points, rather than simply herald their ability to hinder interaction. both finnish and russian respondents have relatively similar opinions concerning the barrier effect of the border, which indicates that there exists a general awareness of shared problems. this is, according to anderson (2000: 211), the most important requirement for an effective co-operation. on the other hand, the fields or factors, which are perceived not to pose a significant barrier effect, could, following the “go across where the fence is the lowest” logic, be utilized more effectively to generate more intensive co-operation. altogether cbc ranks high in the respondents’ minds and visions. creating good contacts with a former enemy state, across a dividing line that was once envisioned to be the battlefront of the clash of civilizations, seems to be feasible and desirable goal. to realize this would not only be valuable for the sake of these two countries, but a step towards region and trust building on various levels and sectors. thus, the setting enabling conditions for the growth of cbc should remain one of the most important tasks of eu policy (cf. van houtum & scott 2005: 26). people and the construction of the border the last two decades have fundamentally changed the role and function of the finnish-russian border. relying on the ideas of north (2005), a change depends on the ability and effectiveness of the societies in question to create institutions that are productive, stable, fair, broadly accepted and – perhaps most importantly – flexible enough to be modified in response to feedback. in contrast to evolutionary theories, the key to understanding change is to comprehend the intentionality of the actors involved (north 2005: vii). change is a process that is guided by the perceptions of the actors. choices and decisions are made in light of those perceptions with the intent of reducing uncertainty in pursuit of the given goal. thus, change represents a deliberate process shaped by preferences and priorities the actors define for themselves on the grounds of the envisioned outcomes they presume their own actions and decisions will have. in this respect, the role of the border as a mental construction, which is derived from both contemporary and historical experiences, cannot be neglected. the distinction between the finnish and the russian actors was made because of the belief that the time the border used be practically closed would have had a significant impact on the development of different, disjointed cognitive spaces. geographic past of a person influences his or her performance and further contributes to the process of change. this in mind, the perspectives of the different sides were, however, not that different, which raises the question how different the two sides of the border are after all? even if co-operation comprises part of what north (2005: viii–ix) refers to as the “genetic architecture of humans”, so is the human tendency to draw borders and build fences. the somewhat paradoxical finding that opening of the border and intensifying interaction is seen in a positive light, while the opinion that border per se should be maintained endures, denote the existence of a gap between intensions and outcomes. however, the finding that both sides perceive co-operation to be beneficial is the most important prerequisite for the future development of lively interaction. this indicates that in the minds of the respondents the role of the finnish-russian border has begun to transform from a great dividing line into a fuzzier zone of interaction. mental constructions accumulate through time and they change slowly. such fennia 185: 1 (2007) 59incommodious border? rethinking the function of the … changes can, however, be accelerated when people perceive new opportunities or react to new threats to their well-being. practical issues from the time spent crossing the border to the money spent on custom tariffs or bureaucratic procedures influence the mental constructions individuals rely on to explain the world around them. we construct concepts and schemes to make sense of experiences that we then test and modify in light of new experiences (schwandt 2000: 197). these interpretations are not, however, constructed in isolation but against a backdrop of shared understandings, practices, language and the like. all of these factors influence conceptions of the other and result in various evaluations of the other’s perceived usefulness and potential as a partner for co-operation. conclusions this article has utilized the data of the finnishrussian case study of the exlinea project in order to examine the manner in which the often-mentioned barrier effect of the finnish-russian border as well as the increased interaction across is perceived among the actors involved in cross-border co-operation or border management. the analysis attests that despite its gradual and partial opening, the finnish-russian border and its side-effects function still as a barrier separating two sides from each other and hindering interaction between them. given the role that the border bears, this is not, however, a purely negative thing. earlier results have shown that a majority on both sides perceive the border as a necessary and useful institution that is sufficiently transparent to enable the neighbouring nations to interact in a mutually beneficial manner (scott & matzeit 2006: 48; liikanen et al. 2007). the findings of the present study support this conclusion. in contrast to the internal borders of the eu, where cbc aims to build cohesion and blur divides (cronberg 2003: 223), here on the external eu border, where the schengen acquis also plays an important role, cbc is characterized by a continuous juggle between access and control, and thus the barrier function of the border is also highly valued. consequently, the argument that borders are barriers and barriers are to be removed, which seems also to be the basis of current eu policy making, is hardly valid in the finnish-russian case, in which the old dictum that “good fences make good neighbours” seems still very valid. this may well be because the border is no longer seen as a strict cut-off line, with the ability to shut out contacts and retain, if not generate, the mindset of repression, injustice, conflict, or even war, but rather as a social practice, situated within an understanding of neighbourliness that recognizes and respects the values of the other and the contributions that it brings. the border still functions as a barrier, but its partial permeability allows the relations across it to be now, at last, shaped by dialog rather than confrontation. this dialog allows both sides of the border to gain more knowledge about their neighbour, which in turn fosters mutual understanding, another important prerequisite for effective co-operation. to be able to work together we have to trust each other – and to be able to trust each other we have to know each other. increased dialog, and especially its perceived usefulness and profitableness by both sides is the main prerequisite for further changes. furthermore, the respondents see that even though the implementation of cbc policies and practices are high, their effectiveness lags behind. the role of the eu is seen in a positive light as it has brought well-needed vigour not only in form of funding but also in the currency of ideas; its capability to fuel cbc is perceived as successful and its impact beneficial. a lower barrier effect has also increased mobility and, thus, forced people to adapt to new circumstances. confronting the other has also compelled people to re-evaluate their own values and standards in a synergic manner. in this process the border is now being reproduced and acquiring a new role as an area of contact instead of being an area of conflict. it still functions as a barrier and a filter, but more and more it supports cross-border activities. interestingly, the border in a strict sense causes only a few constraints. more importantly, the respondents perceive the border as a barrier because it signifies where one set of rules end and another begins. thus, cross-border flows are also impacted by a complex web of non-economic factors, some of which encourage diminishing the barrier effect and others, which reinforce it. crossing a border is a move out of ones own familiar culture and into a different and unknown one. simultaneously, new opportunities are created but others closed off. this seems to be a relatively high barrier especially for finnish respondents. the russian respondents 60 fennia 185: 1 (2007)jussi laine feel that more assistance would be needed in order to realize cbc in its full potential. the data available for this study does not support claims that there exists the need for considerable healing and trust-building before true co-operation can occur. historical events are not perceived to be a significant barrier for interaction, but this finding does not by any means imply that history has lost its significance. in finnish-russian relations, history has always played a crucial role, and it is highly likely that, at least in the background, it still does. the fact that we must look to the future does not imply that the past – and the valuable lessons learned from it – ought to be forgotten. perhaps, the common past could even function as a further impetus for a future cbc projects. the finnish-russian border region, as border regions in general, is characterized by specific forms of living together, which requires tolerance and solidarity (cf. van houtum 1998: 1). thus, the perception of the other and of interaction with the other has a significant impact on the lives of people. with this in mind, it was hopeful to discover that in terms of perceptions the responses reveals that things are finally beginning to change. the age-old stereotypes about ‘russianness’ and ‘finnishness’, derived from the past related to world war ii and closed border era, have been replaced by more positive images. the image of the other may have a significant effect on the maintenance of the border in people’s minds and its amelioration is likely to open more positive prospects for the future of cbc at the finnish-russian border. notes 1 the acquis is based on an agreement initially signed in schengen, luxembourg, in 1985 with the objective of abolishing border checks on travellers at the mutual borders of the member states. since then the schengen area has expanded and the acquis has been updated by a number of agreements and declarations. finland became a member of the schengen acquis in 25 march 2001. while abolishing control within the area, the acquis requires that border checks at the external border of the schengen area, e.g. at the finnish-russian border, to be intensified. 2 39 from finland and 42 from russia. the data used in this article derives from the exlinea research project, which was supported by the european commission fifth framework programme on research and technological development. see: http://www.exlinea. org. 3 standard deviations and standard errors of the russian responses were consistently considerably higher than those of the finnish responses, largely due to a large number of extreme values. due to this relatively large variability within the russian responses, a statistically significant difference was found only in few cases. since a greater standard error indicates less reliable estimates, the calculated mean values of the russian responses are unavoidably greater simplifications than it the case of the finnish respondents. 4 euregio karelia as a good example. references alanen a & h eskelinen (2000). economic gap at the finnish-russian border. in ahponen p & p jukarainen (eds). tearing down the curtain, opening the gates, northern boundaries in change. sophi 54, 38–54. anderson j (1995). the exaggerated death of the nation-state. in anderson j, c brook & a cochrane (eds). a global world?, 65–112. oxford university press, london. anderson j & l o’dowd (1999). borders, border regions and territoriality: contradictory meanings, changing significance. regional studies 33: 7, 593–604. anderson m (2000). transborder co-operation: an assessment. in hedegaard l & b lindström (eds). the nebi yearbook 2000. north european and baltic sea integration, 201–216. springer, berlin. anderson j, l o’dowd & tm wilson (2002). why study borders now? regional and federal studies 12: 4, 1–12. batten d & p nijkamp (1990). barriers to communication and spatial interaction. annals of regional science 24: 4, 233–236. blatter j (2004). from ‘spaces of place’ to ‘spaces of flows’? territorial and functional governance in cross-border regions in europe and north america. international journal of urban and regional research 28: 3, 530–548. boggs sw (1940). international boundaries: a study of boundary functions and problems. 272 p. columbia university press, new york. cronberg t (2003). euregio karelia: in search of a relevant space for action. in hadegaard l & b lindström (eds). the nebi yearbook 2003, 224–239. springer, berlin. de boe p, c grasland & a healy (1999). study program on european spatial planning: final report of working group i.4: spatial integration, spesp. < w w w . m c r i t . c o m / s p e s p / i n d e x . h t m > . 15.12.2007. donnan h & tm wilson (1999). borders: frontiers of identity, nation and state. 158 p. berg, oxford. giersch h (1949/1950). economic union between nations and the location of industries. review of economic studies 7: 2, 87–97. fennia 185: 1 (2007) 61incommodious border? rethinking the function of the … hallikainen a (2003). venäjän kahdet kasvot. maakunnallisten ohjelma-arkistojen ja vertailuaineiston välittämä venäjä-kuva. acta universitatis tamperensis 967. 233 p. heigl f (1978). ansätze einer theorie der grenze. mitteilungen der österreichischen gesellschaft für raumforschung und raumplanung, band 26. 85 p. hirst p & g thompson (1996/1999). globalization in question: the international economy and possibilities of governance. 2nd ed. 318 p. polity press, cambridge. janssen m (2000). borders and labour-market integration: where is the difference between interregional and cross-border mobility? in van der velde m & h van houtum (eds). borders, regions and people. european research in regional science 10, 47– 68. kamann djf (1993). bottlenecks, barriers and networks of actors. in ratti r & r reichman (eds). theory and practice of transborder cooperation, 65–102. helbing & lichtenhahn, basel. knox p & j agnew (1989/1994). the geography of the world economy. an introduction to economic geography. 2nd ed. 410 p. arnold, london. koffka k (1935). principles of gestalt psychology. 710 p. harcourt, brace & world, new york. langer j (1999). towards a conceptualization of border: the central european experience. in eskeli-eskelinen h, i liikanen & j oksa (eds). curtains of iron and gold. reconstructing borders and scales of interaction, 25–42. ashgate, aldershot. liikanen i, d zimin, j ruusuvuori, h eskelinen (2007). karelia – a cross-border region? the eu and crossborder region-building on the finnish-russian border. publications of the karelian institute 146. 111 p. lösch a (1940/1954). the economics of location. 2nd ed. 520 p. yale university press, new haven. lundén t (1973). interaction across an ‘open’ international boundary: norway-sweden. in strassoldo r (ed). confini e regioni. proceedings of the conference: “problems and perspectives of border regions”, 147–161. institute of international sociology, gorizia. matzeit s (2005). inclusion or exclusion? lessons for cross-border cooperation learned from various case study regions, and first results from fieldwork and synthesis. exlinea newsletter 5, november 2005. 14 p. merkx j (2000). refugee identities and relief in an african borderland: a study of northern uganda and southern sudan. new issues in refugee research working paper 19. 33 p. newman d (1999). boundaries, territory and postmodernity. 203 p. frank cass, london. newman d (2003). boundaries. in agnew j, k mitchell & g toal (eds). a companion to political geography, 123–137. blackwell, malden. nijkamp p, p rietveld & i salomon (1990). barriers in spatial interactions and communications. a conceptual exploration. annals of regional science 24: 4, 237–252. north dc (2005). understanding the process of economic change. 208 p. princeton university press, princeton. o’dowd l (2002). the changing significance of european borders. regional and federal studies 12: 4, 13–36. ohmae k (1995). the end of the nation state. the rise of regional economics. 224 p. free press, new york. ohmae k (1999). the borderless world. power and strategy in the interlinked economy. 276 p. harper business, new york. paasi a (1996). territories, boundaries and consciousness. the changing geographies of the finnishrussian border. 376 p. john wiley & sons, chichester. paasi a (2005). the changing discourses on political boundaries: mapping the backgrounds, contexts and contents. in van houtum h, o kramsch & w zierhofer (eds). b/ordering the world, 17–31. ashgate, aldershot. peschel k (1993). perspectives of regional economic development around the baltic. in lundqvist l & lo persson (eds). visions and strategies in european integration, 19–31. springer-verlag, berlinheidelberg. ratti r (1993). spatial and economic effects of frontiers: overview of traditional and new approaches and theories of border area development. in ratti r & s reichman (eds). theory and practice of transborder cooperation, 23–54. helbing & lichtenhahn, basel. reich rb (1991). the work of nations: preparing ourselves for 21st century capitalism. 352 p. alfred a. knopf, new york. rietveld p (1993). transport and communication barriers in europe. in cappelin r & pwj batey (eds). regional networks, border regions and european integration, 70–88. pion, london. rietveld p (2001). obstacles to openness of border regions in europe. in van geenhuizen m & r ratti (eds). gaining advantage from open borders. an active space approach to regional development, 79–96. ashgate, aldershot. ruusuvuori j (2004). fieldwork in the finnish-russian border region: preliminary results of the exlinea in-depth interviews. karelian institute, university of joensuu. <www.exlinea.org/page.php?men1=2 &men2=1>. 12.2.2007. saarinen tf (1976). environmental planning: perception and behavior. 262 p. houghton mifflin company, boston. schwandt ta (2000). three epistemological stances for qualitative inquiry: intepretivism, hermeneutics, and social constructivionism. in denzin nk & ys lincoln (eds). handbook of qualitative research, 189–214. 2nd ed. sage publications, london. 62 fennia 185: 1 (2007)jussi laine scott j & s matzeit (2006). exlinea “lines of exclusion as arenas of co-operation: reconfiguring the external boundaries of europe – policies, practices, perceptions”. final project report. <www.exlinea.org/pub/jamesfinal_final%20report.pdf>. 18.1.2007. van der schelde b & ga hœkveld (1992). the regional development of borderlands: an explorative study in the franco-italian alps. cashiers de géographie du québec 36: 99, 483–500. van geenhuizen ms & r ratti (2001). introduction: an active space approach to regional development. in van geenhuizen ms & r ratti (eds). gaining advantage from open borders, 3–20. ashgate, aldershot. van houtum h (1998). the development of crossborder economic relations: a theoretical and empirical study of the influence of the state border on the development of cross-border economic relations between firms in border regions of the netherlands and belgium. 256 p. center, tilburg. van houtum h (1999). borders, distances, and spaces: a typology of borders in terms of distances. paper presented at the congress of the european regional science association, dublin, ireland. august, 1999. <www.ru.nl/socgeo/n/personeel/ hvh/dublin.html>. 14.4.2006. van houtum h (2000). introduction: current issues and debates on borders and border regions in european regional science. in van der velde m & h van houtum (eds). borders, regions and people. european research in regional science 10, 1–12. van houtum h & j scott (2005). policy considerations of project results: “good practices” and situational ethics of cross-border cooperation. exlinea policy paper. berlin and nijmegen. <http:// www.exlinea.org/pub/exlinea_policy_paper. pdf>. 18.1.2007. veitch r & d arkkelin (1995). environmental psychology: an interdisciplinary approach. 496 p. prentice-hall, new jersey. westlund h (1999). an interaction-cost perspective on networks and territory. the annals of regional science 33: 1, 93–121. wilson tm & h donnan (1998). nation, state and identity at international borders. in wilson tm & h donnan (eds). border identities: nation, state and identity at international borders, 1–30. cambridge university press, cambridge. 21258_01_esipuhe preface maunu häyrynen and petri j. raivo the recent years have seen a growing international interest in the study of karelia. this interest has not limited itself to the fields traditionally associated with the area, such as regional history or ethnology, but has extended into new areas such as cultural studies, human geography, art and architectural history. this special issue of fennia is a result of a longlasting contact, co-operation and mutual influence of a group of finnish, russian and scandinavian researchers. as its subject area, the publishing project has undergone a long process of metamorphosis, not without sudden change or delicate shifting of meanings. the initial motivation for the project and its cohesive force has been an understanding of karelia as a multicultural landscape, an object of constant reinterpretation, recontextualisation and re-presentation by the different actors historically linked to it. the issue seeks to map out different angles to the study of karelia, placing them into a comparative framework. it has a further, conscious aim to promote a cultural dialogue on karelia across the border and to place its nationalist representations under scholarly analysis, both not always self-evident starting points in the popular discourse. the co-operation that has produced the issue at hand is now continuing in the form of the transboundary landscapes joint research project (2004–2006), coordinated by landscape studies at the university of turku and funded by the “russia in flux” research programme of the academy of finland. the project also deals with the study of the russian-estonian borderland. in her article netta böök, a doctoral student in architectural history at the helsinki university of technology, looks at the different readings of russian karelian architecture – a source of inspiration for the finnish fin-de-siècle national romanticism – and their touristic utilization. maunu häyrynen, professor of landscape studies at the university of turku, focuses on the particular role of karelia as a “liminal zone” in finnish national landscape imagery, arguing that there have been other important contexts besides artistic karelianism that dominates the art historical image of the area. häyrynen’s scope reaches to the reactions to the loss of karelia in the aftermath of the second world war, while gregory isachenko, docent of cultural geography at the university of st. petersburg, carries on with the study of the post-war soviet imagery of the same area. his argument builds on the dramatic changes in the physical landscape on the one hand and on the ideologically dictated total break with the past on the other. only during the recent years does he discern a reconciliation between the present-day and historical images of the vyborg (viipuri) karelia. john lind, professor of history at the university of southern denmark in odense, dwells on the effect of landscape to the early stages of identity formation in karelia. according to him, this could be pointed out in the establishment of borders and primary routes of movement as well as in settlement patterns and colonization of the area, culminating in the religious, political and military confrontation between the rival western and eastern powers. alexandr pashkov, docent of history at the university of petrozavodsk, has studied the origin and development of the russian image of the vyborg province before the finnish independence, noticing an early phase of academic interest, an ensuing period of military and statistical survey and a last stage of touristic promotion to the growing russian middle class. the article tells a rather different story of the area from those of böök and häyrynen, concentrating on economic resources and administrative matters. docent petri raivo, principal lecturer at the north karelia polytechnic, discusses karelia as a finnish lieu de mémoire, revealing the politics of memory manifested in the disputes over war memorials between finland and soviet union/russia. in accordance with isachenko, he too observes a rapprochement between the finnish and russian interpretations of recent history – at least in the acknowledgement of the existence of different versions. networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and environmental change stanley d. brunn*1, lomme devriendt2, andrew boulton1, ben derudder2 and frank witlox2 brunn, stanley d., lomme devriendt, andrew boulton, ben derudder & frank witlox (2010). networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and environmental change. fennia 188: 1, pp. 37–49. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. geographers use a variety of economic, social, and demographic data to measure the importance of global cities and the linkages between cities. we analyze the importance and connectedness of european cities using hyperlinks, or the electronic information provided by the google search engine. hyperlinks are web sites representing information that is produced; they are especially useful in measuring the impact of contemporary crises. we use the phrases economic slowdown and global financial crisis to derive a global financial score (gfs) for 16 core, semiperiphery and peripheral european cities and global warming and climate change to derive a global environmental score (ges). london and paris are in the european core; rome, dublin, madrid and prague are in the semiperiphery; while tallinn, riga, and belgrade are in the periphery. a strong positive relationship exists between the ges and gfs. we examine the linkages of the 16 cities to the 100 largest world cities and illustrate, with “clockgrams,” the linkages london, brussels and athens have with other world cities. we calculated the number of linkages each of the 16 cities had with other world cities to identify europe’s urban cores, semiperipheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries. new york is in the core of both the economic and environmental maps. some world cities are in the semiperiphery of one category and periphery of another. milan, istanbul, and delhi are in the deep periphery for the gfs while toronto and athens are for the ges. hyperlinks represent valuable databases to measure the impact of crises and regional and global urban linkages. keywords: europe, world cities, urban networks, cyberspace, core-periphery relations, environmental change, financial crises, google search engine, hyperlinks. stanley d. brunn & andrew boulton, university of kentucky – department of geography, 1457 patterson office tower, lexington ky 40506-0027, usa. e-mail: brunn@uky.edu lomme devriendt, ben derudder & frank witlox, ghent university – department of geography, krijgslaan 281, s8, b9000 ghent, belgium. e-mail: lomme.devriendt@ugent.be introduction study of the financial and environmental crises “global” and “world” are popular descriptors used by observers and analysts examining the dramatic financial and environmental changes occurring during the past year. countless stories, reports, and editorials looked at the causes and consequences of these changes and how they affected the daily lives of cities, governments, residents, and businesses in large and small cities alike (see http://widerimage.reuters.com/timesofcrisis). reports reflected on the widespread and pervasive impacts of the global economic recession and environmental catastrophes in major world cities (kluger 2006). headline items conveyed the sharp urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2524 38 fennia 188: 1 (2010)s. d. brunn, l. devriendt, a. boulton, b. derudder and f. witlox decline in new york, tokyo and london stock markets, but also in many national and regional exchanges in south america, south and southeast asia, the middle east and southern africa (e.g. new york times, 10 october 2008). rising unemployment, declines in house sales and rising housing foreclosures, government bailout attempts, bank failures and acute professional and non-professional job losses were regular news items (ilo news 2008). at the same time, environmental scientists and government ministries were alerting their governments and citizens to continued temperature increases and rising sea levels, the shrinking of glaciers and ice fields in circumpolar areas, expanded desertification in semiarid areas, and anomalous weather patterns in many world regions (torn & harte 2006; scheffer et al. 2006). on the world financial and environmental maps, few cities were spared unpleasant and gloomy reports about their economic status or environmental condition (glantz 2006). scholars in various disciplines who are interested in the current state of economic and environmental affairs on global and national scales should be in the forefront of analyzing the impacts of aforementioned conditions. geographers, economists, and political scientists should be among those social scientists examining these conditions, but also those in climatology, hydrology, and natural disasters (amelung et al. 2007; grimm et al. 2008; fidrmuc & korhonen 2009; florida 2009). a world cities perspective on the crises a particularly useful perspective is gained by examining these current problems and changes in highly populated places. the world’s largest cities would seem to provide a good starting point as most are connected with other cities both within their regions and at extraregional and global scales. also since much headline news, data, and government decisions are city-based, it makes sense to consider the places where the intensity and magnitude of the problems are most manifest and visible. thus we examine both the major cities themselves as major places of, and players in the economic and environmental crises, and how these cities are linked to one another. the unfolding of the global economic crisis or economic slowdown that began in 2007 and peaked around september 2008 was not centered on only one or two global population, financial, or government centers, but it became worldwide almost simultaneously. while new york, london and tokyo seemed to generate the most press and news, banks and stock exchanges in south asia, latin america, russia, and the middle east were soon included in the spiralling economic recession or collapse. the networks of national and regional banks to creditors and lenders demonstrated the porosity of national borders and the globalization of financial markets. also, the financial institutions demonstrated linkages that were both transnational and transregional. environmental scientists and ministries at the same time were also seeking solutions to acute problems that went beyond national boundaries. global environmental changes, including the short term consequences of global warming, biodiversity loss and desertification required a different mindset than a compartmentalized domestic or national solution. international scientific cooperation and treaties were necessary to correct both impending crises and long term problems. in short, financial and environmental challenges faced rich industrialized countries or coastal megacities, but also small developing countries and developing world cities faced short term precarious environmental problems/crises in their agricultural, industrial or tourist economies. an urban and knowledge basis to understanding current crises we focus on major world cities and the amount, and content of web information generated about their economic and environmental crises (see also devriendt et al. 2009). cities are an appropriate scale of inquiry because these are places where more than half of the world’s population lives. these are also the places which directly or indirectly are and will be most heavily impacted by declining markets, job losses, housing foreclosures, bank failures, plant closures, unemployment increases, downturns in the construction industry and declines in public services (hall 1966; taylor 2004; alderson & beckfield 2007). cities’ economic problems cannot be addressed in isolation given the complex and various connections between cities throughout the world. we can view the cities affected by environmental crises in a similar manner; seldom are environmental challenges confined to the territorial boundaries of one state. problems of water shortfennia 188: 1 (2010) 39networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and … age or water quality, increasingly frequent coastal storms, rising sea levels inundating tourist beaches and hotels, and dependency on foreign fossil fuels, face cities and entire regions throughout the world. large and small cities in hazard prone regions are affected both by unexpected short term environmental events and the unforeseen impacts of projected climate change. a useful barometer to examine both the geography of economic and environmental crises is the content and distribution of web information. information is a core ingredient in a knowledge economy and society (kellerman 2002). identifying problems and resolving them may be considered primarily political and financial, but at their base we need to consider the information generated, reported, and analyzed. we can use a number of components to measure the impact of a knowledge economy. these could include employment in banking, financial, health, education, and communications (print and visual) as well as investments in information and communications technologies, science and technology, education, real estate, and financial institutions (pred 1980; kellerman 2002). employment data on these and related categories can be obtained from government and industry reports and media reports about economic transactions and environmental events (beaverstock et al. 2000). while newspapers or government and industry reports are valuable information sources, we also have access to unprecedented volumes of relevant “crises” information via the worldwide web (www). the web can be characterized as a vast informational archive; it represents a vast, valuable, and easily accessible information source for monitoring changes in urban economics. we also believe that the web provides a very useful lens on the impacts of the current economic and environmental conditions in major world cities. below we present an empirical analysis of current economic and environmental changes based on the volume of web information for major european cities. we use the google, yahoo, bing, and altavista search engines which index billions of web pages—numbers that increase by continuously creating, for all intents and purposes, seemingly inexhaustible databases. these electronic databases are both vast and timely, two characteristics which make critical and judicious analyses of their content an exciting and rich source of insights into the impact of economic and environmental crises on global urban networks. we use the volumes of hyperlink information provided by these search engines to derive real-time informational rankings of major european cities in regards to the global financial crisis, and global climate change. the google database has been used previously to examine urban linkages by brunn (2003), williams and brunn (2004), and devriendt et al. (2008). we follow their procedure to not only identify the importance of these two crises in individual cities, but in measuring the amount or degree of paired linkages between cities (see also devriendt et al. 2009; boulton et al. 2010).1 using google hyperlinks to measure the impact of the global economic and environmental changes at european cities in the global urban system we discuss sixteen major european cities through a quantitative analysis of their individual topical cyberspaces (that is, the amount of web information available about each city in relation to global environmental and economic crises), and the linkages between cities (that is, the volume of joint references to each city in relation to environmental and economic topics). we consider these sixteen to be representative of the variety of urban experiences within europe. some are major world cities, such as london, paris and rome; others are major regional centers in different regions such as madrid in iberia, helsinki in norden, rotterdam in northwest europe, prague in eastern europe, and belgrade in the southeast. we also selected some from europe’s core, another set from the continent’s semiperiphery and the final set in europe’s periphery. the cities are: · core: london, paris, rotterdam, brussels, and milan · semiperiphery: dublin, madrid, helsinki, prague, vienna, and rome · periphery: lisbon, athens, belgrade, tallinn, and riga. we specifically identified cities in each of europe’s core, semiperiphery, and periphery to observe whether there were any salient differences in the volume of information about the economic and environmental crises and if there were any significant or systematic differences in terms of linkages. to obtain a reading of the relatives impacts of environmental and economic crises in each city, 40 fennia 188: 1 (2010)s. d. brunn, l. devriendt, a. boulton, b. derudder and f. witlox we first recorded the absolute numbers of search results or hyperlinks for each of the european cities in combination with the two most frequently used keyword search terms describing the global financial crisis (‘economic slowdown’ and ‘global financial crisis’). for example, “rotterdam, netherlands + economic slowdown” and “rotterdam, netherlands + global financial crisis”. similarly, to obtain data to measure the impact of environmental problems, we recorded the number of hits on ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ categories. for example, searching for the number of (google) web pages that jointly mention “paris” and “global financial crisis” resulted in 283,000 entries.2 given that the correlation between the two financial and the two environmental search terms is high on the web, we examined the two individual categories of the economic data and derived a global financial score or gfs, which is the average of the two data entries for each city. we use the same procedure to derive a global environmental score or ges. the second part of our analysis looked at the relationships between each of the aforementioned sixteen cities to the world’s largest 100 cities in terms of population (demographia 2008). by combining two cities with one information term, we assembled four 16 x 100 city matrices on gfs and ges topics. searching, for example, for the number of (google) web pages that jointly mention “london”, “sydney”, and gfs topics resulted in an average of 119,705 entries. as one would expect, the city results exhibited some variations. we look at the top ten links, or paired linkages, for each of the sixteen european cities. again we would anticipate that there would be differences both in the volume, the ranking, and the location of london’s (versus prague’s or riga’s) most linked cities in terms of economic and environmental information. with these datasets in hand – that is, the hyperlink volume for each city and the hyperlink volume of the pairs of cities – we addressed several questions in this empirical analysis which we discuss below. we provide an analysis of the data and present a set of graphics to represent our findings visually. first, we have a look at the variations in the global economic measures and global environmental measures in europe’s core, semiperiphery, and periphery to discern whether there is a relationship between the global financial scores and global environmental scores for these sixteen european cities. secondly, we look at their links to other world cities and in what parts of the world. thirdly, are there any consistent patterns in the linkages of europe’s cities between cities in europe’s core, semiperiphery, and periphery? and finally, are there any discernible differences in the linkages of europe’s cities in regards to the economic crisis and the environmental crisis data? to aid in understanding these relationships, we constructed some “maps” of europe’s position vis-àvis the world’s current economic crisis and current environmental crisis. empirical analysis this analysis builds on and differs from earlier hyperlink-based publications (brunn 2003; devriendt et al. 2008) in that we limit the number of “unwanted”/irrelevant search results per city. in previous urban studies based purely on hyperlink/web page volume, some ambiguities in data searches emerged. for example, quantifying the hyperlinks of “paris” provides, in addition to “relevant” web pages, substantial numbers of web pages (blogs, “news” sites, forums, etc.) referencing celebrity paris hilton instead of the city “paris”. our mining of the google database relates to cities with information on specific topics. this procedure minimizes, but does not remove entirely, the “paris hilton effect”. adding the words “climate change” to “paris” eradicates the ambiguity as to which paris we are referring and thus removes (many) hilton-related results. thus, our rankings are based on their relationship with global economic measures and global environmental measures (tables 1 and 2). the volume of the global financial crisis hyperlinks ranged from 662,000 for london, 283,000 for paris, 144,000 for vienna and 125,000 for brussels to only 11,000 for tallinn and 10,400 for riga (table 1). rome and madrid had between 89,000 and 100,000 and five other cities (milan, prague, athens, dublin, and lisbon) had between 40,000-59,000. belgrade, helsinki, tallinn, rotterdam, and riga had from 10,000-25,000. the numbers for the economic slowdown category also exhibited wide variance, from 710,000 for london to only 5220 for riga. paris and brussels were the second and third leading cities in hyperlinks for this phrase, but they had only 137,000 and 109,000 respectively. dublin was fourth, but it had only 71,000 followed by rome, madrid, and vienna between 38,000-41,000. four cities fennia 188: 1 (2010) 41networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and … (lisbon, prague, athens, and helsinki) had between 15,000-24,000 hyperlinks. belgrade, rotterdam, tallinn, and riga were the lowest. in general these rankings were similar for cities in both categories. there were some discrepancies between the numbers and those in the three regions. london, paris, and brussels were considered core cities; all had large numbers of hyperlinks. rotterdam and milan, also in the core, did not. cities we considered in europe’s periphery had the fewest hyperlinks. the rankings for the sixteen cities were not that dissimilar when we looked at the number of hyperlinks on the two environmental measures (table 2). in regards to climate change the top four cities were paris with 13 million, london 9.6 million, brussels 2.1 million and rome 1.5 million. lisbon and vienna also had slightly more than 1 million each. madrid, dublin, prague, athens, and milan had more than one-half million each. the fewest hyperlinks were in descending order: belgrade with 122,000 followed by riga and tallinn at 77,000 and 65,000 each. there were fewer global warming hyperlinks for each city, but the ranks remained almost the same. london had the most with 5.5 million followed by paris 3.5 and then rome 1.4 and brussels 1 million. madrid and vienna had about 700,000 each. dublin, prague, milan, and athens were in the middle. the bottom five were rotterdam, helsinki, belgrade, tallinn and riga. using this phrase the results were fairly similar to the core, semiperiphery, and periphery categories we established for the three sets of european cities. looking at the relationship between the global financial scores (based on both financial search terms) and global environmental scores (based on both environmental search terms) for europe’s cities, we observe that there is a strong positive relationship between the two scores: r =0.82; r²= 0 .67 (see fig. 1). not surprisingly, from what was stated above, london and paris were the highest on both scores and riga and tallinn were the lowest. there was some consistency in the clustering of these cities in europe’s cores, semiperipheries, and peripheries. rotterdam was the one of the exceptions; its place on the scattergram was distinctly different from other core cities. athens and lisbon on the other hand were more similar to other semiperiphery cities than the periphery city we classified them. the semiperiphery city category classified most of these cities correctly. when we examine the economic and environmental linkages between the 16 european cities table 1. global economic measures rank city economic slowdown global financial crisis gfs 1 london 710000 662000 686000 2 paris 137000 283000 210000 3 brussels 109000 125000 117000 4 vienna 38200 144000 91100 5 madrid 39500 91600 65550 6 rome 41700 89000 65350 7 dublin 71100 41500 56300 8 milan 38100 58500 48300 9 prague 23800 53200 38500 10 athens 23500 49700 36600 11 lisbon 24900 40300 32600 12 helsinki 15600 18700 17150 13 belgrade 6810 25100 15955 14 rotterdam 9250 11100 10175 15 tallinn 5550 11200 8375 16 riga 5220 10400 7810 (source: google.com, 29 july 2009) table 2. global environmental measures rank city climate change global warming ges 1 paris 13000000 3490000 8245000 2 london 9600000 5570000 7585000 3 brussels 2130000 1050000 1590000 4 rome 1550000 1450000 1500000 5 vienna 1020000 793000 906500 6 lisbon 1320000 370000 845000 7 madrid 854000 799000 826500 8 athens 694000 658000 676000 9 dublin 609000 402000 505500 10 prague 557000 423000 490000 11 milan 423000 425000 424000 12 rotterdam 478000 187000 332500 13 helsinki 405000 181000 293000 14 belgrade 122000 80100 101050 15 tallinn 64500 64200 64350 16 riga 77000 48100 62550 (source: google.com, 29 july 2009) 42 fennia 188: 1 (2010)s. d. brunn, l. devriendt, a. boulton, b. derudder and f. witlox and other cities we discover the extent of their international and transnational dimensions. as noted above, for each of the sixteen, we will look at their top ten links to other world cities. we would anticipate that some of the sixteen would be linked with large european cities, some with north american cities and some with cities in asia and elsewhere. what we did not know in advance in this empirical analysis was what patterns we would uncover. in our examination of the global financial scores for our sixteen european cities, we discover that their top ten connections are accounted for by a total of 35 world cities. all are connected to new york, which is not surprising considering the u.s. and especially wall street stock exchange were identified early as major actors/contributors to the global economic slowdown and financial crises. new york was the most linked city to london, rome, vienna, and milan – all major knowledge and industrial cities – but also dublin, prague, and athens, and the second most linked city for brussels, paris, rotterdam, tallinn, helsinki and belgrade. london had the most links with paris, rotterdam, brussels, belgrade, helsinki and tallinn. what were noteworthy in these rankings were the strong ties with asian (especially chinese) cities as well as singapore and also moscow. singapore was the third most linked city with milan and rotterdam, the fourth most linked with paris, and fifth most linked with madrid. beijing was the second most linked city with dublin, the third for brussels, and the fourth for rome. the chinese capital’s rankings were ahead of hong kong (fourth for dublin and fifth for paris) and tokyo (ranked second for milan). moscow, like singapore and beijing, was linked to many european cities, perhaps not surprising considering its close proximity to some of our selected cities in eastern europe. it was the third most ranked city with tallinn, fourth with brussels, belgrade, and prague, and fifth with athens, helsinki, and riga. berlin also emerged as a major city with links to other european cities. it was the third most linked city with paris, the fourth with athens, and the fifth with brussels, tallinn and belgrade. there were also some unexpected and unusual linkages that defy easy explanation; these include teheran as athens’s third most linked city, delhi as milan’s fourth, sydney as london’s second, cairo fig. 1. relationship between ges and gfs figure 1: relationship between ges and gfs fennia 188: 1 (2010) 43networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and … as vienna’s second, teheran as rotterdam’s fifth. when we consider the sixth through tenth rankings for our sixteen european cities, we also have some new cities, some with only links to only one or two cities. examples include atlanta (with london), shanghai (with dublin), seoul (with brussels), baghdad and mumbai (with paris), karachi (with rome), shanghai (with rotterdam), delhi (with helsinki and lisbon), phoenix (with riga), mumbai (with rome), and miami (with lisbon). another perspective on these variations illustrates the vast differences in the volumes of hyperlinks between pairs of cities. for example, there are more linkages between london and new york (217,000) than between london and other nine cities it is most connected (prague, lisbon, vienna, dublin, belfast, helsinki, tallinn, rotterdam, and riga). this discrepancy illustrates the importance of these two north atlantic anchor cities, london and new york, in the world’s financial markets. the london-new york linkages exceed those of london-paris. brussels links with london (70,000) exceed those of vienna with new york and madrid with mumbai being most linked to madrid. athens in our calculations had more links with teheran than with berlin or moscow and milan had more with tokyo than with paris or brussels. helsinki’s links were with a variety of cities, including london, new york, paris, delhi, and moscow. the top ten linkages in terms of global environmental scores for our sixteen cities are with 34 world cities. all are linked to new york. but new york was not the most linked for all cities; it was the leader for london, paris, rome, dublin, and madrid, and, but not for rotterdam, helsinki, and tallinn, all with more links to london. brussels was most linked to paris. there were also some unexpected patterns, including prague and sydney, belgrade and houston, athens and istanbul, lisbon with hong kong, and vienna with moscow. the pattern of second most linked cities exhibited nearly as much variety as the leading cities. again, some unexplained patterns emerged: berlin was second for vienna and riga; new york for brussels, prague, helsinki, and lisbon; chicago for rome and dublin; and paris for rotterdam and tallinn. other rather surprising linkages were athens and mexico city, milan with bangkok, and madrid with istanbul. in regards to the variation in hyperlink pairs, there are vast differences. there are more linkages between london and new york (4.1 million) than for all of the ten most linked cities to dublin, helsinki, rotterdam, belgrade, tallinn, and riga combined. another way of looking at the london-new york volume is that it exceeds all of the cities most linked to rome. the brussels-paris links (685,000) exceed the london-houston (650,000) links; athens-istanbul (421,000) is more than madrid–new york (436,000), rome-los angeles (402,000) and vienna-new york (487,000). helsinki is most linked to london, new york, and paris (each from 100,000-130,000 links) followed by moscow, berlin, chicago, tokyo, boston, washington, and beijing (each above 60,000 links). to illustrate the linkages that european cities have with other world cities in regards to the current economic and environmental crises, we developed a series of innovative so-called “clockgrams.” each illustrates both the volume and name of each of the ten most linked cities on the ges (see figs 2a, 3a, 4a) and gsf (see figs 2b, 3b, 4b). we illustrate these variations with two cities in europe’s core, london and brussels, and one in the semiperiphery, athens. one reads each graphic by starting at the top, that is, twelve o’clock. by going clockwise one can identify the ten leading cities with which that city is connected and also the volume of hyperlinks (web pages jointly mentioning the two cities in relation to financial topics). when comparing the three ges graphics, it is easy to identify london as having the most total hyperlinks; brussels has only about one-quarter of london’s total and athens has only about one-tenth. the top ten linkages also exhibit some variation. london’s linkages are global: new york, sydney, moscow, hong kong, and são paulo. five of london’s top ten linkages are with u. s. cities. brussels on the other hand has many more linkages with asia: beijing, hong kong, istanbul, singapore, seoul, and tokyo. new york is its only north american linkage. noteworthy also are the ties with moscow. athens, a much smaller city, and much less important on the european and global economic scene, illustrates an expansive network not that dissimilar from new york. its top ten linkages include some in east asia (tokyo and hong kong), south asia (mumbai), southeast asia (singapore), middle east (teheran), australia (sydney), and russia (moscow). its only major european link is with berlin. the clockgrams for the global environmental scores also exhibit some distinct variations. london has far and away more linkages than brussels and athens combined. in regards to the global warming and climate change variables, london 44 fennia 188: 1 (2010)s. d. brunn, l. devriendt, a. boulton, b. derudder and f. witlox fig. 2a. ges clockgram london fig. 2b. gfs clockgram london fig. 3a. ges clockgram brussels fig. 3b. gfs clockgram brussels has a huge volume of linkages especially with one city, new york. this linkage dwarfs all other linkages combined. the other cities on this city’s list of top ten links are mostly a cross section of cities in the u.s. (four), asia (two), and middle east (one); none in europe. brussels has linkages, as it did with the economic graphics shown above, with major cities outside europe; these include cities in europe (berlin and madrid), asia (beijing, hong kong, tokyo and singapore), russia (moscow), australia (sydney), and one in the u.s. (new york). athens, like brussels, also exhibits an international mix, but is dominated by a half dozen cities in the middle east (istanbul), latin america (mexico), u. figure 2a: ges clockgram london figure 2b: gfs clockgram london figure 2a: ges clockgram london figure 2b: gfs clockgram london figure 3a: ges clockgram brussels figure 3b: gfs clockgram brussels figure 3a: ges clockgram brussels figure 3b: gfs clockgram brussels fennia 188: 1 (2010) 45networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and … fig. 4a. ges clockgram athens fig. 4b. gfs clockgram athens s. (new york), canada (toronto), and europe (milan and berlin). moscow and sydney are also included in this city’s mix. we next wanted to observe if there are any distinct patterns in the cities listed most frequently in regards to the economic and environmental crises. the central query was whether there were core, semiperiphery and periphery cities that might be easily identified. we totaled the number of times a given city appeared in the top ten lists of all sixteen fig. 5. global financial cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries fig. 6. global environmental cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries cities. the highest possible score was 16, which would represent a core city, that is, a city that was ranked in the top ten for each of the sixteen cities. the lowest score would be one, which would mean it was important for only one of the sixteen cities. the two diagrams we constructed are fig. 5 for the global financial score and fig. 6 for the global environmental score. on each we identify and map these knowledge regions: core, semiperiphery, periphery, and deep periphery. figure 4a: ges clockgram athens figure 4b: gfs clockgram athens figure 4a: ges clockgram athens figure 4b: gfs clockgram athens figure 5: global financial cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries figure 6: global environmental cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries figure 5: global financial cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries figure 6: global environmental cores, semi peripheries, peripheries, and deep peripheries 46 fennia 188: 1 (2010)s. d. brunn, l. devriendt, a. boulton, b. derudder and f. witlox in regards to the global financial score, new york was clearly identified as the core. no other city was ranked by all european cities, thus this global metropolis becomes the core or center for an understanding of the linkages these cities have to the global financial crises. in the second region are cities mentioned 12–13 times: three of the four cities are in asia: beijing, hong kong, and singapore. moscow is also in the second or semiperiphery category. in the periphery region are five cities with 5–9 linkages; two of these are in europe (berlin and london) and two in north america (los angeles and chicago); the remaining city is sydney. in the deep periphery category are seven cities mentioned only 3–4 times. these are mostly cities in asia: istanbul, shanghai, mumbai, teheran, and delhi; atlanta is the non-asian city in this mix. seventeen other cities had linkages with one or two of the sixteen cities; these are also deep periphery cities. examples of single linkages were brussels with seoul, lisbon with montreal, phoenix with riga, and vienna with cairo. we also identified the same four regions for the global environmental score. new york is the sole core city appearing somewhere in the rankings of all sixteen cities, hence it is our knowledge core. the second zone, or semiperiphery, has three cities: berlin, chicago, and beijing, three major cities in three different economic world regions. the periphery category includes six cities, also in different regions; hong kong and tokyo in asia, boston in the u.s., paris in europe, moscow in russia and sydney in australia. the outer ring, the deep periphery, includes nine cities mentioned 3–4 times. most (four) are in europe and three in north america. there were 15 other cities that had a single or two linkages with the sixteen. examples of single linkages were paris with miami, milan with osaka, prague with são paulo, and rome with rio de janeiro. discussion from our analysis, we identify five major findings. first, the current economic and environmental worlds, as measured in information or knowledge contexts, are very complex. that is, there are no easily discernible or predictable patterns characterizing the linkages between cities. beneath the volume of information/knowledge linkages for any individual city, or within any given pair of cities, captured in terms of search engine data there are many complex interactions between businesses (financial, advertising, icts, real estate, etc.), industries (heavy and light), services (tourism, health care, environmental, and education) and ngos. from our “one day time slice” of data looking at the linkages of the world’s 100 largest cities, the financial worlds and environmental networks are shown to be complex indeed. while one might have expected that new york, london, paris, and tokyo would lead the way in being linked with major cities in europe, this generalization has not been shown to be the case. rather beijing, berlin, sydney, moscow, and even mumbai, cairo, and istanbul enter the picture as being linked prominently to one or more of the sixteen european cities we investigated. tokyo, surprisingly, is eclipsed in this analysis by beijing. second, explaining the results or attempting to provide some authoritative insight into the significance of these results is problematic. whereas new york and london are leaders in terms of linkages in measuring the financial slowdown and crises, beijing, moscow, chicago, sydney and singapore also enter the picture. this complex picture also emerges when looking at cities most linked in regards to information generated about environmental problems, including climate change. in short, it is not simply the case that the world’s largest cities are those most linked with the sixteen european cities. rather, large regional cities in south, southeast, and east asia emerge as important, as do large cities in the middle east and latin america. what we do not know based on this analysis of european cities are the kinds of specific economic and environmental information generated about each city, or the complex business, governmental, and other linkages underpinning these “information” connections (we examined these relationships previous for selected world cities in devriendt et al. (2009)). perhaps these european cities are leaders in the linkages related to service and industrial economies, or to distributions of investments by national and regional banks and other financial institutions. further, it is possible that the volume of linkages is related to diaspora populations investing in major cities, these cities having strong and active tourism economies, or vibrant “sister city” relationships between pairs of cities. a third major finding is that there is a strong and positive relationship between the gfs and ges. while this relationship might be a surprise, on reflection it makes some sense that the many cities fennia 188: 1 (2010) 47networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and … reporting economic problems and financial crises would likely be the same ones where their governments, industrial and service economies, research universities and think tanks would be concerned about the impacts of global warming and climate change. many of the european coastal cities examined here facing potentially serious environmental problems, including rising sea levels, and dependency on imported fossil fuels are the same ones facing financial problems of one sort or another. environmental and economic problems are information-based and most of those reports from any country would emanate from, and relate to, the largest cities and the capital cities. a fourth major finding from our analysis is that the traditional consideration of core-semiperiphery-periphery categories for european cities does not appear to make much sense in a knowledge/ information world where distance is no barrier to communication of economic transactions. that it does not make sense should also not be surprising as the economic recession or depression gripped the continent’s large, medium and small cities, regardless of location. to be sure the largest cities had the most information/knowledge hyperlinks about the economic and environmental categories, but some other large cities had fewer than expected, for example, rotterdam and vienna. the smaller cities, not unexpectedly, had fewer information hyperlinks in part probably because of their population size; this would be the case for riga, tallinn, and belgrade. in short, the small number of hyperlinks simply meant there was less information generated. the fifth pattern is that a different kind of coreperiphery pattern emerges from these results, and it is a pattern that has some unexpected surprises. new york becomes the knowledge/information core around which european cities revolve. that new york is at the center is not that surprising, but what is surprising are the next leading cities which are most linked to european cities. beijing, berlin, moscow, singapore, and hong kong are leaders rather than london and paris. this finding illustrates that the global economic and environmental linkages of many european cities are indeed trans-european, that is, they are in large, important, and emerging financial and decision making centers in south, southeast and east asia. the multitude of major city linkages, even for those ranked, third through tenth, is also a global pattern, not one of highly concentrated linkages amongst european cities. this may be one of the most important and interesting findings of this research. following the above interpretations, the point about the diversity of economic and environmental linkages for these cities needs to be amplified. some of the linkages are surprising as they do not seem to follow any obvious logic. one example is that european cities link with others in europe but also with former colonies. another example is that beijing emerges as a stronger and more dominant linkage of european cities than tokyo. this finding may reflect the dynamic growth of china’s aggressive production and trading climate while the rest of the world was experiencing a slowdown. london comes across as a more important european lynchpin than does paris. that moscow is strongly linked with riga, tallinn, and helsinki should come as no surprise, since it is closer to these cities than to large central and west european cities. what is interesting is that these three northern european cities have stronger linkages with london and new york than with moscow. and there are some unexplained linkages that emerge, for example, milan and barcelona with prague in the financial sphere, mumbai with madrid also on financial crises, and bangkok with milan, also on financial issues. in regards to the environmental crises, there are also some puzzling results, for example, istanbul linked most with cairo (perhaps not unexpected if one considers they are two major players in the middle east information production), mexico city linked with athens, and são paulo linked with prague. what is noteworthy in our analysis is that the only latin american cities that ranked in the top ten with the sixteen european cities were mexico city, são paulo, and rio de janeiro. no major city in sub saharan africa linked as among the top ten linkages with any european city in our study. conclusions and future studies this study represents a first attempt to provide a detailed description and analysis of the linkages of european and world cities in regards to current web information generated about economic and environmental crises. our reading is based on the volume of electronic information pieces, viz., search engine results, based on the linkages of sixteen european cities with the world’s one hundred largest cities. specifically, we looked at the volume of information linkages between cities with respect to two economic crisis related keyword 48 fennia 188: 1 (2010)s. d. brunn, l. devriendt, a. boulton, b. derudder and f. witlox phrases: “global financial crisis” and “economic slowdown”. we also examined two categories of information about the state of the world’s environment: “global warming” and “climate change”. we calculated the number of google search results for each of the four phrases in conjunction with our sixteen cities into combined global financial score (gfs) and global environmental score (ges). our sample deliberately included cities in europe’s core as well as semiperiphery and periphery. the results revealed a much more complex pattern of relationships regarding knowledge generated than what we anticipated. the linkages of these cities seem to follow little regularity with respect to city size or city location, that is, location within europe’s core, semiperiphery and periphery, or with their most linked cities. new york emerges as the dominant city that most european cities are linked; london and paris are not always in the top five and neither is tokyo. the global linkages place berlin, beijing, hong kong and also sydney, singapore, and moscow as strongly linked with europe’s cities in regards to the economic and environmental crises. we also discovered that there was a strong and positive relationship between the gfs for the cities and the ges. since both scores are information-based, it is not unreasonable to assume in knowledge economies that cities that generate the most news about economic crises would also generate much information about their environmental conditions. the findings reported and the approach we adopt offer many additional opportunities for investigation into the current economic and environmental crises where information generated or produced is the framework for linkages in a global network of cities. we would identify four studies that are worthy of investigation. first, how similar would be the results if we investigated the information hyperlinks for sixteen or twenty cities in another region, such as south asia or east asia or latin america? would there be as many or more global linkages? what city or cities would dominate? second, what would be the results of a hyperlink analysis that looked at information generated for european or other cities in chinese or spanish or french? third, what are the specific crisis categories of the linkages between these cities? one could examine the content or subject matter of the top ten search result items for each pair. are they about real estate investments, business closures, bank collapses, unemployment, quality of life, or anomalous weather? fourth, and last, it would be useful to investigate the linkages with smaller populated centers in europe and elsewhere. would these cities have more national and regional ties than the largest ones or would they also be linked globally to places in asia and north america? the results to these and other research questions regarding knowledge economies and societies await further study by economic and urban geographers, and others, interested in the spatial and temporal patterns of the current economic and environmental crises. both human and environmental geographers have much to contribute to our understanding of the regional and global worlds of crisis facing urban humankind. acknowledgements all authors contributed equally to the research and writing of this article and take responsibility for any errors or omissions. the research work is funded by the research foundation–flanders. notes 1 one shortcoming of previous hyperlink analyses is that there is not any critical reflection or discussion on the merits of using search engine data. while there are clear advantages to using the google search engine – especially size (over one trillion unique urls trawled), and timeliness (the index is continuously updated by its distributed network of “spiders”) – some cautions should be noted. for example, when searching via google.com (the us/international version of google), the spelling of search terms and city names in english limits our analysis to the english language web. this and other “problems” regarding these methods are discussed, and how these are addressed in the subsequent analysis, in devriendt et al. (2009). 2 this real-time information analysis was run on 29 july 2009. as the google database is updated on a continuous basis and second by second, as spiders trawl for new, updated and defunct content. we utilize, in order to obtain real “snapshot” data, a script that ran our queries and extracted search results synchronously (see devriendt et al. 2009). fennia 188: 1 (2010) 49networks of european cities in worlds of global economic and … references alderson a & beckfield j 2007. globalization & the world city system. preliminary results from a longitudinal data set. in taylor p, derudder b, saey p & witlox f (eds). cities in globalization: practices, policies, theories, 21–36. routledge, london. amelung b, nicholls s & viner d 2007. implications of global climate change for tourism flows & seasonality. journal of travel research 45: 3, 285–296. beaverstock j, smith r, taylor p, walker d & lorimer h 2000. globalization and world cities: some measurement methodologies. applied geography 20: 1, 43–63. boulton a, devriendt l, brunn s, derudder b & witlox f 2010. world city networks in cyberspace & time: using google hyperlinks to measure global economic & environmental crises. in firmino r, duarte f & ultramari c (eds). icts for mobile & ubiquitous urban infrastructures: surveillance locative media & global networks. chapter 3 igi global, forthcoming. brunn s 2003. a note on the hyperlinks of major eurasian cities. eurasian geography and economics 44: 4, 321–324. demographia 2008. <http://demographia.com/> 16.6.2010. devriendt l, derudder b & witlox f 2008. cyberplace & cyberspace: two approaches to analyzing digital intercity linkages. journal of urban technology 15: 2, 5–32. devriendt l, boulton a, brunn s, derudder b & witlox f 2009. major cities in the information world: monitoring cyberspace in real-time. gawc research bulletin 308. <http://wwwlboroacuk/ gawc/rb/rb308html> 08.10.2009. fidrmuc j & korhonen i 2009. the impact of the global financial crisis on business cycles in asian emerging economies. journal of asian economics, in press. florida r 2009. how the crash will reshape america. the atlantic online (march 2009), 1–14. <http:// realwhartonupennedu/~wongg/research/media/ theatlantic_mar2009pdf> 08.10.2009. glantz m 2006. global warming and coastal deltas: is the netherlands europe’s bangladesh? fragile ecologies. <http://wwwfragilecologiescom/ sep29_06html> 08.10.2009. grimm n, faeth s, golubiewski n, redman c, wu j, bai x & briggs j 2008. global change and the ecology of cities. science 319: 5864, 756–760. hall p 1966. the world cities. mcgraw-hill, new york. ilo news 2008. ilo says global financial crisis to increase unemployment by 20 million. ilo/08/45 20 october 2008. <http://wwwiloorg/global/ about_the_ilo/media_and_public_information/ press_releases/lang--en/wcms_099529/indexhtm> 08.10.2009. kellerman a 2002. the internet on earth. a geography of information. john wiley & sons ltd, west sussex, england. kluger j 2006. global warming heats up. time (26 march 2006). <http://wwwtimecom/time/magazine/article/09171117698000html> 08.10.2009. pred a 1980. urban growth and city systems in the united states 1840–1860. hutchinson, london. the ny times 2008. whiplash ends a roller coaster week. the new york times (10 october 2008). < h t t p : / / w w w n y t i m e s c o m / 2 0 0 8 / 1 0 / 1 1 / business/11marketshtml> 08.10.2009. scheffer m, brovkin v & cox p 2006. positive feedback between global warming & atmospheric co2 concentration inferred from past climate change. geophysical research letters 33(l10702). taylor p 2004. world city network: a global urban analysis. routledge, london. torn m & harte j 2006. missing feedbacks asymmetric uncertainties & the underestimation of future warming. geophysical research letters 33(l10703). williams j & brunn s 2004. cybercities of asia: measuring globalization using hyperlinks (asian cities and hyperlinks). asian geographer 23: 1–2, 121– 147. untitled the finnish landscape and its meanings petri j. raivo petri j. raivo (2002). the finnish landscape and its meanings. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 89–98. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the landscape has played – and continues to play – an important role in the process of constructing a national identity in finland. in this process, certain areas and views, whether real or imaginary, are designated as vital symbols of the national culture. the landscape is not merely an image, a map or a view of the existing motherland, however. it is also a part of the nation’s history, which is marked in the landscape in the form of significant buildings and monuments to historical events, so that the past may be seen as forming an unbroken continuum with the present. work is constantly going on to maintain and renew the national traditions of landscape description. this means that whatever its age and nostalgic associations, the landscape is an integral part of our present-day lives. the images, maps, and discourses associated with the landscape may have altered in the course of time, and even the physical areas or views may have been replaced with new ones, but the ideal of a finnish landscape has persisted. the signs and significations attached to it thus remain a powerful part of our national culture. petri j. raivo, academy of finland (project 4872), department of geography, fin-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: petri.raivo@oulu.fi three faces of the same scene landscape is one of those words whose meaning is closely connected with the context in which it is used, whether we refer to the view that opens up from some vantage point, a historical milieu, an image, a geographical region, or an environment perceived with the senses. it is commonly used as a synonym for an environment characterized by unspoiled nature, a rural area in the traditional sense, surroundings that form significant elements in our cultural history, or simply an aesthetically satisfying view. we can also speak of national, traditional, or idealized landscapes, in which case we allude to cultural meanings that create notions of national or local identity. the word incorporates at least three essential features or connotations, however: it may be understood as referring to (1) a visual scene, (2) a geographical region, or (3) a culturally determined way of viewing or analysing the environment. these properties are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, the notion of landscape frequently subsumes all three. a landscape can thus have many faces, or, in other words, one landscape has numerous new landscapes opening up within it. a scene the most characteristic feature attached to a landscape is its visuality. usually the first connotation that comes to mind is that of the scene that opens up before us when we stand at a certain high point somewhere, or at least a pictorial representation of that scene. the origins of the term landscape in the history of art go back to italy during the renaissance. there, the word paesaggio began to take on the meaning of a painting which had a distant view projected as its background in accordance with the geometrical principles of perspective (cosgrove 1985: 52). from these beginnings, the word landschap came to be used by sixteenthand seventeenth-century dutch artists to refer to a rural scene with characteristic human figures, animals, buildings, and natural environments. eventually, it gained the more general 90 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)petri j. raivo meaning of “any general view depicted in a painting.” another reason for the emergence of landscape as a visual concept lay in the development of cartography, for both these forms of description – a perspective drawing or painting and a map drawn to scale and intended to represent the physical environment as accurately as possible – came to be combined in the form of depicting and viewing landscapes known as the panoramic view (jackson 1964: 47–49). a landscape is nevertheless much more than simply a view or a picture representing such a view. looking, drawing, painting, or photographing cannot in itself be sufficient, as there is something more to a landscape. whereas the human eye can take in just under 180º of a panoramic view at any one time, the physical landscape extends around one for the full 360º. whereas a map, painting, or photograph has the form of a two-dimensional surface, a landscape is at least a three-dimensional construct (mills 1997: 6). the confinement of a landscape to the sense of vision alone is thus apt to reduce its dimensions, for in reality we recall the landscape that we see, compare it with others, taste it, smell it, and so on, just as we can imagine a landscape that we have never physically seen on the basis of what we have read or heard about it (karjalainen 1987: 9). thus, alongside actual visual landscapes, we can also speak of landscapes of sound, of smell, of the mind, and of the memories or expectations that we associate with them (porteous 1996). the experiences that we have of landscapes form a two-way process that engages the full range of the senses and involves not only the physically perceived landscape, but also all the pictures, images, texts, and narrations that are connected with it (daniels & cosgrove 1989; duncan 1990). a region apart from a multidimensional view perceivable with a broad range of the senses, a landscape may also be understood as denoting an area or region. there are differences between languages in this respect, however. the english word landscape and the finnish maisema both refer primarily to the visual environment, but the german landschaft and the swedish landskap have a double meaning that also incorporates that of a certain region or province (granö 1998: 15). geographers have always studied landscapes alongside places and regions, ever since the introduction of the german concept of landscape geography (landschaftskunde). here, landscape referred to an internally consistent area which could be delimited on a map and distinguished from the surrounding areas in terms of certain characteristics (holt-jensen 1988: 37). such descriptions were backed up by a precise, standardized system for classifying the features of landscapes, based on exactly defined terms for identifying the forms coinciding within a given area (see, e.g., passarge 1929). the notions of landscape contained in landscape geography and the associated research methods influenced many national traditions of geographical study, including that of finland. the outstanding figure in finnish landscape geography was, without doubt, johannes gabriel granö (1882–1956). he developed the necessary terminology and methodology and spoke of a perceived environment as a spatial entity that could be divided into two parts: the proximity, extending away from the observer for some 200 metres and perceivable with all the senses, and the landscape, extending as far as the horizon (granö 1930: 14–22). it was the sense of sight that primarily defined the form and limits of the landscape, but granö was also interested in other aspects of the perceived environment. the landscapes of sound, smells, and colours, and the variations in these with the time of day and season of the year thus played an important part in his research alongside the visual landscape. one essential aspect of granö’s method of landscape geography was the description of forms that serve as the visual manifestations of landscapes and regional analyses constructed on the basis of these. the landscape entities, which granö referred to as “districts,” “provinces,” and “regions,” were based on cartographic analyses of established sets of forms and the coincidence of their boundaries. the principal sets of forms recognized in his system were (1) landforms, (2) water forms, (3) vegetation forms, and (4) forms of artificial matter, each with subdivisions (granö 1929a, 1930). these constructs enabled the spatial form and content of a landscape to be defined by means of a specific formula. granö’s main work of landscape geography was his reine geographie, first published in german in 1929 and subsequently in finnish, as puhdas maantiede, in the following year. an english translation was published in 1997 under the title pure geography. some of the specialized terminology that he fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 91the finnish landscape and its meanings created for this purpose is still in use, and he coined many established names for landscape regions in finland, such as the lake region. in fact, the landscape-based system of regions originally proposed for finland by granö in the 1925 edition of the atlas of finland is still current today (granö 1929b). in the most recent map, adapted to the revised post-war boundaries, finland is divided into five major landscape regions, thirteen landscape provinces, and fifty landscape districts (fig. 1) (raivo 1999a: 105). a cultural way of seeing no matter whether we consider views or discourses, images, or areas of physically homogeneous features, one aspect that is common to all these landscape types is that they exist only as cultural environments that are dependent on human concepts, experiences, and appreciations. in connection with the cultural perspective, mention is frequently made of interpretative landscape research. it may be defined as a way of seeing and interpreting cultural environments in which the reproduction of meanings, values, and social order is mediated (cosgrove 1985; daniels & cosgrove 1989). in other words, it is the human cultural presence that makes sense of the semantic meanings attached to a landscape. this cultural dimension associated with landscape is partly subjective, bound to the life-history of the individual, but, at the same time, intersubjective, in that social and cultural background influences that are common to particular groups and communities govern the view taken (raivo 1997: 327). the interpretative approach also emphasizes the ontologically complex nature of a landscape. it can be simultaneously both a concrete physical entity, such as a region or scene, and a painting, a poem, a literary description, or some other culturally generated discourse that can be read and interpreted over and over again (daniels & cosgrove 1989: 1). the cultural meanings attached to a landscape do not spring up out of nothing, but are constantly being produced and reproduced. just the word “landscape” is always charged with innumerable preconceived expectations and significations. in this sense, there is no such thing as a value-independent, neutral, objective landscape. constructing an imagined landscape for finland searching the ideal scene the values and significations attached to a landscape are cultural conventions regarding what people can or would like to see in it. a landscape is always someone’s landscape, with its own creators and observers engaged in producing and reproducing the processes by which meaning is assigned to it. landscapes have had, and continue to have, an important part to play in the process of building national identities. for instance, certain landscapes of particular significance for a nation’s history and traditions may be marked out as codes that belong intimately to the culture in question (see, e.g., lowenthal 1994). one notion inherent in nationalism is that of one nation with common cultural features: a common language, system of values, history, and geographical location. a shared geographical dimension is thus an important element in the sense of community that unites a nation (hooson 1994: 6). a nation must be located somewhere; it must be associated with a clearly delimited area that its members inhabit, just as an independent state has a territory of its own. but alongside this, a nationalistic cultural identity will also incorporate a powerful imaginary geographical aspect in which the nation’s history and cultural traditions are seen as anchored in certain places and landscapes – real or imaginary (daniels 1993). the finnish landscape as we understand it today is largely a product of the grand duchy era in the nineteenth century which has been perpetuated and filled out throughout the period of independence (klinge 1980). the descriptions on which it is based are to be found in the poetry of johan ludvig runeberg and the books of zacharias topelius. in his collection of poems entitled fänrik ståls sägner (tales of ensign stål) (1848 and 1860; see runeberg 1874), runeberg outlined the nature of finnish patriotism and the landscape to which this applied. topelius’ two picture books, finland framstäld i teckningar (finland in pictures) (1845–1852) and en resa i finland (a journey through finland) (1873), and his boken om vårt land (a book about our country) (1875), intended originally as a reader in history and geography for schools, had a major influence on the rise of a national landscape ideal (tiitta 1982, 1994: 280–313). the last-mentioned work, in particular, 92 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)petri j. raivo fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 93the finnish landscape and its meanings created an image of the finnish nation, its tribes, and the landscapes in which it lived. gradually, this image became instilled in the minds of all sectors of society through the medium of the school system. it was through the works of runeberg and topelius that the lake scene became established as the typical or ideal landscape of finland, for which painters then began to seek out suitable manifestations (häyrynen 1996: 147). a lake in the inland, pictured from a nearby hill-top or in bird’s eye view, thus came to be recognized in the art of the nineteenth and early twentienth century as representative of the whole of finland (fig. 2). some other descriptions also gained similar status in the early poetry, paintings, or picture books: narrow eskers crossing lakes, the manor houses and rural iron works milieux of the southern and western parts of the country, and landscapes reflecting the peasant cultures of the various regions were notably popular (cd-fig. 1) (grotenfelt 1988: 36). following independence in 1917, however, pictures of factories, power stations, and mines, symbols of the prosperity and future expectations of the young republic, tended to supersede in books or wall-charts depicting the finnish landscape (hakulinen & yli-jokipii 1983). progress and development have thus played a prominent part in the image of the finnish landscape. the rural cultural landscape was also an important element in the patriotic views of finland. this harked back to classical and neo-classical models with their harmonious environments evoking a pastoral idyll in which traces of human action are clearly visible. the type of idealized agrarian landscape altered radically, however, when the focus was moved further east. then, the image of the swiddens of eastern finland and the poor people who toiled to make and cultivate these clearings gained a certain status alongside the harmonious, luxuriant rural idylls of the south (raivo 1999b: 78–79) (fig. 3). the national romantic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also shaped the picture gallery representing the finnish landscape (cd-fig. 2) (sihvo 1969). this was no longer a matter of fine art, but simply of faithfully recording delightful views of one’s native land, glorifying the hard work put in by its people and romanticizing over its natural beauty. such landscape paintings as akseli gallen-kallela’s view of the unfettered rapids of imatra, imatfig. 1. finland’s physical landscape areas (raivo 1999a: 105). finland’s landscape areas are classified traditionally into three groups by degree of their physical homogeneity of ground, waters, vegetation, and artificial structures. the 5 main landscapes regions consist of 14 landscape provinces and 51 landscape districts. the entities are as follows: 1. southern finland: 1.1 archipelago finland (1.11 åland archipelago, 1.12 kihti archipelago, 1.13 turku archipelago coast); 1.2 the southwest (1.21 satakunta bay coast, 1.22 salo hill district, 1.23 loimaa arable flatlands, 1.24 vakka-suomi hillock district, 1.25 ala-satakunta arable flatlands, 1.26 satakunta hillock district); 1.3 the southern coastland (1.31 gulf of finland archipelago coast, 1.32 lohja lake and ridge district, 1.33 uusimaa arable flatlands, 1.34 helsinki metropolitan districts, 1.35 ylämaa hillock district) 2. lake finland: 2.1 southwest häme (2.11 tammela hillock district, 2.12 kanta-häme arable flatlands, 2.13 pirkanmaa hill district); 2.2 päijät-häme and central finland (2.21 lahti ridge districts, 2.22 päijänne mountainous district, 2.23 puula hill district, 2.24 keuruu–keitele hill district); 2.3 savo (2.31 lappee–kitee ridge district, 2.32 greater saimaa lake district, 2.33 southern savo hillock district, 2.34 northern savo hill district) 3. ostrobothnia: 3.1 southern ostrobothnia (3.11 quark archipelago coast, 3.12 kyrönmaa arable plain, 3.13 lappajärvi hillock district); 3.2 central and northern ostrobothnia (3.21 central ostrobothnian flatlands, 3.22 oulu plain, 3.23 koillispohja fenlands, 3.24 kemi–tornio river district); 3.3 suomenselkä (3.31 suupohja flatlands, 3.32 suomenselkä hillock district, 3.33 suomenselkä peatland) 4. vaara (wooded hill) finland: 4.1 vaara karelia (4.11 pielinen vaara district, 4.12 border karelia mire district); 4.2 kainuu and koillispohja (4.21 kainuu lake district, 4.22 koillispohja vaara district, 4.23 kuusamo vaara district); 4.3 peräpohjola (4.31 peräpohjola river country, 4.23 kemijärvi–salla vaara district) 5. lapland: 5.1 forest lapland (5.11 lapland aapa mire district, 5.12 ounasselkä fell district, 5.13 north salla fell district, 5.14 maaresta–saariselkä fell district, 5.15 inari lake lowland); 5.2 fell lapland (5.21 enontekiö mountainous district, 5.22 enontekiö high fells, 5.23 taka-lappi fell district, 5.24 taka-lappi birch tundra) 94 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)petri j. raivo fig. 2. a view to lake kallavesi from the puijo tower in the city of kuopio. (photo courtesy of matti tikkanen, 07/83) fig. 3. a view to old town porvoo in southern finland. (photo courtesy of matti tikkanen, 06/78) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 95the finnish landscape and its meanings ra talvella (imatra in winter) (1893), or eero järnefelt’s storm clouds rising over lake pielinen, syysmaisema pielisjärvellä (autumn landscape on lake pielinen) (1899), contained a powerful symbolism that reflected the will of the finnish people to gain independence and protested against the pan-slavic repression policies of russia (sarajas-korte 1992: 53–54). the moral landscapes that emerged at this time consisted of unspoiled wilderness, hills stretching away into a blue haze, the glowing red trunks of pine trees, the stark outlines of standing dead pines, and ancient, untouched forests (raivo 1999b: 79). the breakthrough of landscape photography at the end of the nineteenth century again relied very heavily on patriotic and national romantic sentiments. photography allowed the production of popular picture books that were faithful to the earlier tradition but employed new techniques. the landscape was entering the era of mass production. postcards with picturesque views, books of photographs from the whole country or its regions, and other printed matter established the gallery of idealized finnish landscapes more or less in the form in which we know it today (eskola 1997: 17–18). among the early artists in this field and creators of the national landscape, particular mention should be made of the landscape photographer into konrad inha, whose suomi kuvissa (finland in pictures) (1896) and suomen maisemia (finnish landscapes) (1909) recorded, reiterated, and reinforced the images of the earlier national and regional landscapes that poets, writers, and painters had evoked. re-creating territorial unity a few areas that were either entirely new or had new images attached to them were introduced into the national landscape gallery after independence. new regional themes that gained acceptance were the swedish-speaking coast and archipelago and the orthodox area of karelia close to the eastern border. the former symbolized a new harmony between the linguistic groups in the country and the latter, an environment that was quite distinctive and different from anything belonging to the dominant culture, but still definitely finnish. in other words, the landscape reflected the political trends of the time. the archipelago and its inhabitants and cultural landscapes had been depicted earlier, of course, but chiefly in swedish-speaking artistic circles, whereas the question of national landscapes had been very much concerned with the finnish cultural identity. the swedish-speaking archipelago and coastal areas had thus remained external to this process at first (häyrynen 1997). correspondingly, it was now essential to accept the orthodox environments of karelia as part of the national kaleidoscope, albeit with their many symbols that were foreign to the finnish landscape, such as the eightor six-pointed orthodox crosses with the additional cross-piece and the russian-style cupolas. acceptable landscape elements – as far as the majority culture was concerned – were either environments that could be regarded as ‘museum pieces’ and largely of ethnographic significance or more recent religious buildings that had been purged of their ‘russian elements’. the sight of ‘otherness’ was permitted provided it could be adapted to the framework demanded for the national gaze (raivo 1997). it is history and geopolitics that determine the boundaries of landscape regions in the end, for such a boundary is always a national matter and, thus, inevitably political. the finnish landscape must be located within the boundaries of finland. conversely, territorial claims have been justified politically on the grounds of the similarity of the physical landscape, e.g., in connection with the question of eastern karelia in the 1930s and 1940s. then, reference was made to landscape features to justify the notion that the whole of karelia “belonged to greater finland in terms of its natural history” (leiviskä & kärki 1941: 49). the physical boundaries of a natural environment, in this case the granite bedrock of the fennoscandian shield, the drainage basins of major rivers, or the zones in which particular types of coniferous forest occur were similarly transformed into ‘natural’ political boundaries in the context of this geopolitical rhetoric (raivo 1998: 26). world war ii and the subsequent ceding of certain territories to the soviet union meant some changes in the finnish landscape gallery. the areas that had been lost could no longer be held to represent national landscapes and views, and many of the symbolic landscapes of karelia and lapland had to be reconstructed within the country’s new boundaries. the landscapes of northern karelia came to be associated more closely with elements that had previously belonged mostly to the scenery and people of the border region of karelia. the same thing happened in the north, where other lapland scenes took the place of the 96 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)petri j. raivo landscapes of the lost territory of petsamo (raivo 1999b: 81). history, nostalgia, and tradition the mental images of landscapes are linked very closely to history, tradition, and past times, creating a temporal dimension that feeds our own experiences. the fascination of things past, i.e., every item of information, feeling or concept of historical strata, or traces of the past that have remained visible, is an integral part of the attraction that a landscape holds for us. the spirit, or aura, surrounding a landscape arises from our recognition of its history, its past, and the traditions attached to it. the visible traces of the past lend landscapes a temporal perspective and historical continuity (cd-fig. 1). remains of prehistoric settlements, historical towns (such as turku or porvoo), stone castles from historical times (such as olavinlinna in savonlinna), medieval grey-stone churches in southern finland, the characteristic sixteenthand seventeenth-century wooden churches in ostrobothnia, the regional variations of peasant style buildings, and the remains of former agriculture environments represent this perspective and continuity in the case of the physical landscape in finland. further historical aspects of landscapes are to be found in the place names, stories, and memories attached to these entities. the historical landscape is also part of the ideologized past of a nation (crang 1999: 448). in addition to its geographical dimension, a national identity derives its force from the past. it therefore always attempts to present earlier events as a part of the nation’s unbroken history. the combining of the historical dimension with the physical environment and its recording in that environment are essential parts of the ‘landscaping’ of a nation. a nation’s history is frequently marked in the environment in the form of significant buildings, monuments to historical events, and statues to national figures and heroes. these monuments and other historically significant places form a kind of map or narrative engraved in the landscape that tells of the nation’s history as a continuum extending from way back in the past up to the present moment (raivo 2000a: 145). as far as the national narrative is concerned, the principal types of historical landscape are places and scenes representing battles and wars. marks of historical battlefields, fortifications dating from earlier times, statues of heroes and victors, memorials to the dead, and cemeteries are an essential part of the chronological stratification of the landscape in europe and of the collection of pictorial symbols of nation-states. finland is no exception in this respect (raivo 2000b: 139–140). the finnish landscape gained its first features of this kind at an early stage, in the form of battlefields in ostrobothnia dating from the great wrath (1713–1721) and the war between sweden and russia in 1808–1809 (cd-fig. 1) (grotenfelt 1988: 35). this part of the country was poorly endowed with the features looked on generally as the most typical manifestations of the ideal finnish landscape, being largely lacking in eskers and broad expanses of lake that can be viewed from the tops of high hills, but it did serve as the principal arena of war in 1714 and 1808. the events were of such importance that they may be said to be crucial to the national narrative (klinge & reitala 1995). these old battlefields thus came in time to form part of the regional and national gallery of landscapes. constructions, monuments, and battlefields connected with world war ii and its battles and sufferings have now replaced the memorials to earlier wars as the principal features of the nation’s historical landscape. in fact, one can speak of an entirely new type of finnish historical landscape that has just recently acquired particular significance in the nation’s collective memory (raivo 2000b: 83). in spite of its temporal dimension that extends into the past, one characteristic feature of a historical landscape is its actuality, its bond with the present moment. because of their concrete location, landscapes are in existence ‘here’ and ‘now’, and the elements of the past that are connected with them will be interpreted from the perspective of the present. for example, the marks of ancient land use, old buildings, historical monuments, and memorials are located temporally in a past that people remember or are able to imagine, but spatially in the present-day landscape (lowenthal 1975). a historical landscape is therefore a landscape of the memory, and the essential question is what people are able to remember and are desirous of remembering (schama 1996). in other words, the meanings assigned to a landscape and the historical interpretations given to those meanings do not arise of their own accord. instead, they are continually being produced, refennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 97the finnish landscape and its meanings produced, and put forward (cd-fig. 3). it is only the present that can bring the history of a landscape to life. the concept of landscape has altered with time to come ever closer to being a synonym for an old-time agricultural environment. old swiddens, meadows, pasturelands, animal enclosures and the surviving traditional peasant farming milieux, and other old built-up environments have become major objects of landscape conservation in recent times. 156 nationally significant landscape areas has been named since 1995. they all represent traditional old agricultural environments. in addition, 145 of local and regional landscape conservation sites have been set aside (stv 2000: 36) innumerable inventory and conservation projects that focus on traditional or built-up environments have been initiated all over the country. in 1993, the ministry of the environment and the national board of antiquities were able to list a total of 1,772 environments of national significance in terms of their cultural history (rakennettu… 1993). the fortress of suomenlinna in helsinki, the wooden houses in the centre of the town of rauma, the factory site of verla, bronze age burial cairns of sammallahdenmäki, and the wooden church in petäjävesi represent finland on the unesco world cultural heritage list. landscape conservation and the associated planning and design work are emerging as an increasingly significant branch of landscape science (monuments… 1999). all finland’s current national landscapes are in effect echoes from the past. these include such early industrial sites as the tammerkoski area of tampere and the previous manor house and rural iron works milieux. those landscapes that once stood for modernization and the nation’s prosperity and expectations for the future have now been transformed into picturesque monuments to early industrial traditions. conclusions the values and meanings attached to landscapes represent cultural conventions regarding what people can see and want to see in their surroundings. those landscapes that are of relevance to the nation’s history and traditions are incorporated into its cultural code. in other words, the nation is landscaped in accordance with certain places and scenes of particular kinds and selected features associated with them. as a consequence of this same process, however, a certain national history and tradition are marked in the landscape in the form of memorials and monuments. the resulting canonized historical landscapes serve as significant components of the national identity. they are places which bind the members of the nation to a common national past. they are literally parts of the nation’s history that have been inscribed in the landscape. the tradition of describing idealized finnish landscapes has been maintained and renewed over a span of 150 years, but the range of national landscapes has not altered greatly within this time. the images and discourses connected with the landscape have changed with time and some physical scenes have been replaced with others, but the ideal of the finnish landscape has remained very much the same. the signs and significations associated with this ideal still occupy an important role in the national culture. references cosgrove d (1985). prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea. transactions, institute of british geographers new series 10, 45– 62. crang m (1999). nation, region and homeland: history and tradition in dalarna, sweden. ecumene 6, 445–470. daniels s (1993). fields of vision. landscape, imagery and national identity in england and the united states. polity, oxford. daniels s & d cosgrove (1989). introduction: iconography and landscape. in cosgrove d & s daniels (eds). iconography and landscape. essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments, 1–10. cambridge university press, cambridge. duncan js (1990). the city as a text. the politics of landscape interpretation in the kandyan kingdom. cambridge university press, cambridge. eskola t (1997). water lilies and wings of steel. interpreting change in the photographic imagery of aulanko park. university of art and design, helsinki. granö jg (1929a). reine geographie: eine methodologische studie beleuchtet mit beispielen aus finnland und estland. turun yliopisto, helsinki. granö jg (1929b). maantieteelliset alueet. in suomen kartasto 1925: teksti, 111–122. suomen maantieteellinen seura & otava, helsinki. granö jg (1930). puhdas maantiede. wsoy, porvoo. granö jg (1997). pure geography. eds. o granö & a paasi. johns hopkins university press, baltimore. 98 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)petri j. raivo granö o (1998). puhdas maantiede aikansa kuvastimena. in tuhkanen s (ed). j. g. granön puhdas maantiede ja sen uusi tuleminen englanninkielisen käännöksen muodossa. turun yliopiston maantieteen laitoksen julkaisuja 157. grotenfelt g (1988). suomalainen ihannemaisema. arkkitehti 85: 6, 28–37. hakulinen k & p yli-jokipii (1983). maamme kuvat. valistuksen maantieteelliset opetustaulut 1903– 32. weilin+göös, espoo. häyrynen m (1996). landscape in the making of finland. new comparison 21, 146–162. häyrynen m (1997). the adjustable perifery: borderlands in the finnish national landscape imagery. in landgren, l-f & m häyrynen (eds). the dividing line: borders and national peripheries. university of helsinki renvall institute publications 9, 103–111. holt-jensen a (1988). geography: history and concepts. paul chapman, newcastle upon tyne. hooson d (1994). introduction. in hooson d (ed). geography and national identity, 1–12. blackwell, oxford. inha ik (1896). suomi kuvissa. wenzel hagelstam & uno wasastjerna, helsinki. inha ik (1909). suomen maisemia. näkemänsä mukaan kuvaillut i. k. inha. wsoy, porvoo. jackson jb (1964). the meanings of landscape. kulturgeografi 88, 47–50. karjalainen pt (1987). ympäristön eletty mieli. joensuun yliopisto, kulttuurija suunnittelumaantieteen julkaisuja 2. klinge m (1980). bernadotten ja leninin välissä. tutkielmia kansallisista aiheista. wsoy, juva. klinge m & a reitala (eds) (1995). maisemia suomesta. z. topeliuksen ja hänen taiteilijaaikalaistensa kuvateoksen uudelleen toimittaneet matti klinge ja aimo reitala. otava, helsinki. leiviskä i & e kärki (1941). itä-karjala: maa ja kansa. wsoy, porvoo. lowenthal d (1975). past time, present place: landscape and memory. the geographical review 64, 1–36. lowenthal d (1994). european and english landscapes as national symbols. in hooson d (ed). geography and national identity, 15–38. blackwell, oxford. meinig dw (1979). introduction. in meinig dw (ed). the interpretation of ordinary landscapes: geographical essays, 1–7. oxford university press, oxford. mills s (1997). the american landscape. keele university press, edinburgh. monuments and sites: finland (1999) finnish national committee of icomos, helsinki. passarge s (1929). beschreibende landschaftkunde. friederichen, de gruyter & co, hamburg. porteous d (1996). environmental aesthetics. ideas, politics and planning. routledge, london. raivo pj (1996). maiseman kulttuurinen transformaatio: ortodoksinen kirkko suomalaisessa kulttuurimaisemassa. nordia geographical publications 25: 1. raivo pj (1997). the limits of tolerance: the orthodox milieu as an element in the finnish landscape, 1917–1939. journal of historical geography 23, 327–339. raivo pj (1998). karjalan kasvot: näkökulmia karjalan maisemaan. in nevalainen, p & h sihvo (eds). karjala. historia, kansa, kulttuuri, 11–27. sks, helsinki. raivo pj (1999a). maisema ja suomalaisuus. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 104–107. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. raivo pj (1999b). maisema ja mielikuvat. in löytönen m & l kolbe (eds). suomi. maa, kansa, kulttuurit, 70–87. sks, helsinki. raivo pj (2000a). landscaping the patriotic past: finnish war landscapes as a national heritage. fennia 178, 139–150. raivo pj (2000b). ‘this is where they fought’ – finnish war landscapes as a national heritage. in davison g, m roper & t ashplant (eds). the politics of war: memory and commeration, 145–164. routledge, london. rakennettu kulttuuriympäristö: valtakunnallisesti merkittävät kulttuurihistorialliset ympäristöt (1993). museovirasto, helsinki. runeberg jl (1874). fänrik ståls sägner 1–2. gw englund, helsingfors. sarajas-korte s (1992). visual arts at the turn of the century: from paris to the backwoods of karelia. in karvonen-kannas k (ed). finland: creators, 53– 83. retretti, punkaharju. sihvo h (1969). karjalan löytäjät. kirjayhtymä, helsinki. schama s (1996). landscape & memory. fontana, london. stv 2000 = statistical yearbook of finland 2000 (2000). statistics finland, helsinki. tiitta a (1982). suomalaisen maiseman hahmottuminen kirjallisuudessa ja kuvataiteessa. terra 94, 13–26. tiitta a (1994). harmaakiven maa: zacharias topelius ja suomen maantiede. suomen tiedeseura, helsinki. topelius z (1845–1852). finland framstäld i teckningar. helsingfors. topelius z (1873). matkustus suomessa (en resa i finland). helsinki. topelius z (1875). boken om vårt land. läsebok för de lägsta läroverken i finland. helsingfors. translating eu renewable energy policy for insular energy systems: reunion island's quest for energy autonomy urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa60312 doi: 10.11143/fennia.60312 translating eu renewable energy policy for insular energy systems: reunion island's quest for energy autonomy matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht sawatzky, matthew & moritz albrecht (2017). translating eu renewable energy policy for insular energy systems: reunion island’s quest for energy autonomy. fennia 195: 2, pp. 125–141. issn 1798-5617. recognition of the negative impacts of climate change has led to agreement on the need to decarbonise energy systems through the employment of renewable energy. with many national and transnational policies in place, the options available to insular energy systems (ies) differ from those of interconnected areas due to fragility in their production and distribution networks. based on the concepts of policy mobility and translation, this study examines the interplay of eu renewable energy policy and insular governance processes aimed at achieving energy autonomy through renewable energy development. reunion island, a french overseas department and region, is used as a case study to examine local energy governance processes, aspects that shape regional translation of national and eu policy, and the potential effects that create structures and pathways of energy transition. the study shows that reunion island’s regional energy governance committee has significant application potential as a governance tool in other ies and small islands within the eu, but that renewable energy development is restricted due to national policy measures and path dependent governance structural constraints. keywords: energy governance, insular energy system, policy translation, renewable energy development matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht, university of eastern finland, department of geographical and historical studies, 80101 joensuu, p.o. box 111, finland. e-mails: matthew.sawatzky@uef.fi, moritz.albrecht@uef.fi introduction following broad recognition of the negative impacts of climate change, an extensive agreement on the need to decarbonise energy systems through the development of renewable energy sources and energy efficient technologies is taking place in policy debates. while general efforts mainly focus on transnational solutions, like joint energy grids, or political projects, like the eu energy union (ec 2012), insular energy systems (ies) require different transformations. additionally, insular communities are particularly threatened by climate change, have limited response capacities and therefore require particular attention (unep 2014). generally, the development of domestic renewable energy production capacity and energy efficiency measures should increase self-sufficiency, economic value and reduce the environmental impacts of an ies (e.g. weisser 2004; bagci 2009; michalena & angeon 2009; marquardt 2015). we focus on the first measure and employ a relational approach to policy translation and mobility (mccann & ward 2012; kortelainen & albrecht 2014; peck & theodore 2015; © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 126 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper clarke et al. 2015) to evaluate reunion island’s quest for energy autonomy. the island is a french overseas department and region (drom) in the indian ocean. despite being part of france and framed by european union (eu) legislation, its remote location and socio-economic composition make it an ies with many characteristics that provide valuable insights far beyond reunion island’s role as an eu region unlike many other european ies (e.g. duic et al. 2003; michalena & angeon 2009; oikonomon et al. 2009). eu renewable energy policy, framed within the 202020 targets (red 2009), insists that member states develop national policies to reach national objectives in relation to the eu’s overall aims. member states have to develop national renewable energy action plans (nreap) which have to be updated and reported on periodically to the european commission (ec). reunion island is embedded within french legislation and is part of its nreap. while the nreap is a binding part of the eu renewable directive (red 2009) containing certain rules, it is translated within a nationally framed process that defines its final aims and instruments. in france, red translation was firmly rooted in processes deriving from the 2007 grenelle environment forum (grenelle) and the events leading up to its establishment and implementation (whiteside et al. 2010). ‘grenelle’ connotes a set of broad institutional reforms, not simply imposed from above, but agreed to by major actors in civil society after an extensive process of consultation and negotiation with state representatives … ‘grenelle’ now suggests not a one-off procedure but a model to be generalised in french institutions, especially in environmental affairs (whiteside et al. 2010, 450). environmental governance and policy development à la française, represented by the grenelle, have established a kind of meso-corporatist approach favouring groups and associations over individuals (whiteside et al. 2010, 457–458) and plays an important role in the ies transformation on reunion island (e.g. praene et al. 2012). while whiteside et al. (2010, 465) refrain themselves from calling ‘grenelle’ a revolution, they claim that, “opening certain deliberative bodies of the french state to environmental associations changes france’s political opportunity structure – and promises more change in the future.” yet, the french nreap and renewable energy policy instruments developed following the grenelle are not very ambitious compared to other member states’ nreaps and goals (ec 2015). however, reunion island’s regional translation of the french nreap, which includes the objective of energy self-sufficiency by 2030 through renewables (srcae 2013), shows that there are actors attempting to improve the nation’s status within european environmental politics. however, reunion island’s announcement is in line with an increasing amount of islands longing to become 100% renewable (duic et al. 2003) or, in bagci’s (2009) term, “zero energy islands” and further displays the heterogeneity of energy transitions within a common eu policy framework (e.g. sarrica et al. 2016). the governance processes that steer nreap implementation and eu policy translation on reunion island largely happen in the shadows of prominent eu best-practice energy transition examples. yet, evaluating localised translation processes on reunion island as part of a wider policy translation framework of interconnected loops that mobilise and mutate eu policy is noteworthy for three reasons: 1) it is an exception in a national policy environment not among the forerunners in ambitious energy transitions; 2) its insular character provides a showcase of socio-economic as well as biophysical aspects that may arise from ies solutions beyond island locations, and; 3) it can act as a policy laboratory to mobilise eu policy approaches to southern countries and enlarge the range of eu policy implementation to non-member states. studies on developing fully renewable based ies on islands, including one on reunion island (praene et al. 2012), tend to focus on technical aspects (e.g. duic et al. 2003; weisser 2004; bagci 2009; michalena & angeon 2009). while providing important information, socio-economic and cultural aspects based on local particularities, like policy design and transformation (e.g. sovacool 2014; sarrica et al. 2016), are treated as a side issue if at all in these studies. another important difference between reunion island and many other islands is its biomass potential to reach its renewable targets (praene et al. 2012) as opposed to a frequent focus on wind. following, this article examines the processes of reunion island’s ies transformation towards energy independence with a focus on the socio-spatial aspects that affect bioenergy development. the paper begins with a brief description of the research methods and empirical materials followed by an introduction to the study’s aims, the locality and its position within the eu and french fennia 195: 2 (2017) 127matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht energy policy context. subsequently the theoretical framework employed to address the issues of policy translation, mobility and its links to path dependent versus path creative agendas of ies development is presented. empirical results are discussed in the ensuing sections. we conclude by stressing the importance of reunion island’s energy governance committee as part of a translation loop within eu and french renewable energy policy and the possibilities for such a policy instrument to be exported to other jurisdictions. studying renewable energy development on reunion island: methods, data and context thematic interviews were conducted in spring 2015 on reunion island with 14 regional/local actors involved in policy development and bioenergy implementation (see fig. 1). the interviewees included members of regional government agencies, energy production (both renewable and non-renewable sources) and distribution companies, as well as non-governmental organizations (ngo) involved in bioenergy, business and innovation on reunion island. all but two of the interviews were conducted at the interviewee’s offices and ranged between 35 minutes and two hours and 50 minutes, the majority lasted for an hour and a half. two interviews were conducted at cafés selected by the participants for the sake of their convenience. all interviews except one were conducted in french and all but one were recorded; detailed notes were taken during the unrecorded interview. data collection also included participation in the inaugural workshop for smart grid development on reunion island where presentations by the french electric company edf, the island’s only electricity distributor, a university working group and a private company working to develop smart grids were given. the meeting provided an opportunity to observe the prevailing atmosphere and currents in energy fig. 1. location of reunion island (la réunion) and basic environmental and socio economic data (background map data: esri). 128 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper governance on the island. general observations also stem from one of the author’s experiences of living on reunion island for nearly two years. based on the empirical materials, the study evaluates the problematic aspects of developing renewable energy in ies and scrutinises regional eu policy translation processes embedded in a remote island context. more precisely, it asks: 1. how do governance assemblages steer policy translation and implementation on reunion island? 2. how have national bioenergy policies affected reunion island? 3. how does reunion island’s socio-economic and biophysical environment shape its regional translation processes and governance assemblages? in order to address these questions an introduction to the local context of reunion island in relation to energy production and policy is necessary. in terms of energy production and distribution, the island is different from the french mainland, which is characterised by nuclear power, a privatised distribution network and international energy connections with neighbouring countries. reunion island does not have any nuclear reactors, is an ies operating on a supply and demand principle since it also lacks energy storage facilities and cannot rely on neighbouring countries for support (praene et al. 2012). electricité de france (edf), a former state enterprise, has a legal distribution monopoly on reunion island and relies primarily on imported coal to generate electricity (srcae 2013). during peak consumption periods edf also uses heavy fuel oil and can turn on diesel powered turbines to meet energy demands but the number of hours per year that the latter can run are limited for environmental reasons by prefectural order. reunion island also has hydroelectric power, bagasse1 and 60% of households on the island are equipped with solar powered hot water tanks. despite these substantial differences, which according to all interviewees result in much higher energy production costs, electricity is sold to consumers at the same price than on the french mainland for reasons of social equality. reunion island’s interest in developing renewable energy and working towards energy independence began in the early 2000s, preceding both the nreap and the grenelle (table 1). paul vergès, then regional president, is considered as a political visionary who began developing the idea of energy autonomy by 2025 through the proliferation of renewable energies. to achieve this goal, he established a regional energy agency (arer), now spl energies réunion, as a tool to develop the island’s resources and educate the public. accordingly, vergès can be seen as a local energy champion (nybakk et al. 2011). subsequent political discourse has attempted to label reunion island as an experimental energy centre and plays a major role in energy policy translation processes. following the french nreap as a roadmap to meet the eu’s 202020 targets, national objectives have been subsequently translated into regional plans. reunion island’s plan is the regional schema for climate, air, energy (srcae). under the srcae (2013, 8), the regional government established an energy governance committee (egc) to evaluate the current energy situation and determine appropriate future directions for energy development. this committee consists of regional, local and state government actors, as well as private stakeholders, such as energy and waste companies, and the public. it is organised in a hierarchical manner with a strategic committee, secretariat, technical committee and thematic working groups. the current objectives for the region include energy autonomy by 2030, a delay of five years from vergès’ original regional announcement, which some interviewees claimed was based purely on political will without any actual feasibility studies having been conducted. additionally, and contrary to previous potential studies (praene at al. 2012), all interviewees stated that reunion island does not currently have the ability to meet the objective due to its reliance on fossil fuels for transportation, which accounts for approximately half of the energy consumed. the srcae has set the objective of reducing energy consumption for transportation by 10% for 2020 by relying on technological advancements, on-going renewal of the public’s cars and plans to renew part of the regional government's own fleet with electric cars powered by solar energy. since there are currently no biofuel production facilities on the island, any biofuel to replace fossil fuel reliance would have to be imported. paradoxically, the current regional president, didier robert, was elected on promises to reverse vergès’ plans to build a tramway and build a new stilted highway from la possession to saint denis on the ocean instead, though this project is facing local resistance and accusations of fennia 195: 2 (2017) 129matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht corruption (mrmondalisation 2015; reporterre 2015). contrary to energy consumption for transportation, the interviewees were generally optimistic about reunion island’s chances of reaching electrical energy independence, though not within the 2030 time frame. following a brief description of the theoretical framework that underlies this study the remainder of this article will focus on renewable electrical energy production and governance processes. theoretical framework: translating mobile policies this research is based on a relational understanding of space (massey 2005; murdoch 2006) where actors, places, and things interact to (re)produce the spaces we navigate on a daily basis. similarly, governance processes and their assemblages are treated in a relational fashion (e.g. bulkeley 2005; albrecht 2015). kortelainen and albrecht (2014, 144) state that governance is “a process which generates, transports and implements various norms, incentives and other means seeking to influence people’s ways of acting and thinking.” thus, governance is a multi-stakeholder affair where actors, both proximate and distant, may reach across time and space to influence the actions of others. supra-national or national policies aiming at lower-level implementation, such as red, the grenelle laws, or international climate agreements, are prime examples of such governance processes. while they aim to create a distantiated authority based on common targets, their framing as de-centred approaches open to negotiation (allen 2011) provides a breeding ground for a variety of governance assemblages that tie in a multiplicity of relations and affect the local implementation/ direction of policy models. table 1. timeframe of regional energy policy development on reunion island. actor description role in egc edf world’s largest electricity producer and distributor, former state monopoly, privatised in 2004, maintains distribution monopoly in doms strategic committee ademe french agency for environment and energy management, aids companies with energy development projects sidelec inter-communal electricity union, owner of the distribution network used by edf regional council represents the region, in charge of energy production on ri state represented by the prefecture general council represents the department and is in charge of waste management issues on ri spl énergies réunion regional energy agency, formerly (arer), public education, aids local governments and companies secretariat albioma multinational company, largest private electricity producer on ri (solar and bagasse/coal hybrid) technical committees nexa regional development agency temergie energy cluster for companies, supports and promotes renewable energy development other actors waste management, energy efficiency, producers 130 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper therefore, this study follows the concepts of policy mobility and mutation (e.g. peck 2011; mccann & ward 2012; mccann 2013; peck & theodore 2015), which focus on the various processes shaping mobile policies in the continuous spaces between design and implementation elsewhere, but also evaluate the mutation processes that appear along the way when policies and governmental ideas are subject to translation processes. the focus on policy translation through assemblages moves beyond the positivist concept of policy transfer with its linear processes (e.g. dolowitz & marsh 1996, 2000) and offers critical ways to understand the relational processes of mobile policies (e.g. clarke et al. 2015; peck & theodore 2015; albrecht 2017a). to evaluate relational assemblages in relation to mobile policies in spatially differentiated, yet possibly linked localities within the governance processes of mobility and mutation, kortelainen and albrecht’s (2014) concept of “translation loops” is useful. translation loops are “forums in which actors are enlisted and devices developed to design, operationalize, materialize” but also to contest standards or principles of mobile policies (ibid., 147). hence, similar to clarke and his colleagues’ (2015) understanding, this is a relational multi-sited and multi-actored conceptualisation which goes beyond institutional constraints aside it discussing mobile policies designed for a multi-level policy structure. this accounts for the regional implementation and translation of eu and national energy policy on reunion island, and the applicability of ies policy models in different locations with varying socioeconomic framework conditions. the ambitious aims of reunion island as a translation loop of renewable energy policy is conceptually interesting for governance processes in two ways. first, regarding the translation of mobile supra-national and national policies to be implemented on the island, it points out the multiplicity of such policies due to their translations in various spaces (clarke et al. 2015). second, assemblages of policy translation formed around regional actors and their rationalities (in a foucauldian sense) contribute to the relational (re)production of governance assemblages in the translation loop itself (albrecht 2015, 2017a). policy mobility, mutation and translation are influenced by path dependency but simultaneously support path creation (garud et al. 2010). while processes of policy mobility and translation are not path-dependent regimes in themselves (clarke et al. 2015), actors and their rationalities are part of translating assemblages that are influenced by path-dependent aspects rooted in the socio-spatial characteristics of their locality or institution. definitions of path dependency generally include the idea that, “[o]utcomes at a critical juncture trigger feedback mechanisms that reinforce the recurrence of a particular pattern into the future” (pierson & skocpol 2002, 700). it is about reinforcing that which already exists and may limit or remove future alternatives. garud, kumaraswamy, and karnøe (2010) differentiate path dependence from path creation, an emergent process, by focusing on the agency of actors and emphasising the ability of actors to influence processes. ontologically speaking, we do not see path dependency and creation as separate processes but as the extremities of a continuum that exist within relational assemblages. furthermore, we are interested in the relationships between actors in an assemblage and how their choices result in path dependencies or path creation. it should also be noted that innovation may occur within both path creation processes and path dependent processes, though there may be differences in the results, such as the development of radical or incremental innovations. by portraying the role of reunion island as a translation loop within policy mutation processes, the following chapters provide empirical evidence of the inner workings of path dependent and creative assemblages that guide the processes of ies renewable energy governance in relation to local, national and transnational trajectories and policy translations. energy governance assemblages and national policy before describing current governance aspects an earlier policy translation process on reunion island requires attention as it is closely related to the translation processes entailed in red: the grenelle (table 1). the grenelle was a french national assemblage in 2007. its five stages consisted of the establishment of six thematic working groups, public consultation, negotiations and decisions, operational implementation and legislative implementation (ministère 2012). while the process was fennia 195: 2 (2017) 131matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht heavily criticised by environmental ngos and the french political left, it was a novel approach in which opposing parties, including engos, industry members, trade unions and different levels of governments sat at that same table to openly discuss environmental issues. it also led to the creation of two different laws (grenelle i in 2009 and grenelle ii in 2010). as a governance assemblage, the grenelle took place in a limited time span with fixed objectives. the process began in july 2007 and working group recommendations, public consultation and decisions were made by the end of october. the implementation phase and legislative adoption lasted from december 2007 to october 2008. three years after it began, there was still a notable lack of concrete measures in france, and the most notable achievement of the grenelle was the recognition of engos at state-level governance and an open format for actors (garric 2010). however, regional translation of the grenelle fixed reunion island’s objective for energy autonomy by 2030 in national law (grenelle de l’environnement article 56) and created a regional version of the policy: gerri. gerri was the regional form of the grenelle on reunion island (ministère 2009). it began in 2008 when national, regional and local governments formed a public interest group with industry members to develop renewable energy on the island. in doing so, the actors involved in gerri focused on innovation and experimentation in the development process. solar energy was the primary choice of development and this corresponded to national programs which obliged electricity distributors to purchase electricity from renewable sources first and producers were given 20-year contracts with an extremely high guaranteed price. this combination provoked an explosion of solar power development on reunion island in the late 2000s. additionally, following reunion island’s self-proclaimed aims as an experimental centre, gerri established a focus on marine energy, an innovative but risky area of development given the island’s location in the tropics and regular cyclonic activity. in total gerri participated in the launching of 150 projects and ended in 2013 when the region ceased funding (linfo 2013). four important aspects concerning energy governance on reunion island exist within these two assemblages. first, while they are both heralded as open processes, the role of the public was limited. the grenelle included public consultations and “reached” 30,000 participants nationally, but it occurred during a three-week period in which proposed actions were presented as opposed to receiving public input first. regionally, documents concerning gerri make no mention of public participation beyond industrial and commercial actors (ministère 2009). second, both assemblages operated for a fixed time period. third, they aimed to reinforce the position of reunion island as a place of innovation and experimentation (praene et al. 2012), an ideology that entails a great deal of risk for an isolated location with limited regional resources and infrastructure. finally, while they remain important aspects of current renewable energy policy translation processes, the grenelle and gerri initially represented national and regional translations of the eu’s desire for a comprehensive environmental policy, which took effect in 2005 and was framed by greater environmental awareness in general. accordingly, current french national and reunion island’s regional translation of eu energy policy and the resulting energy governance can be interpreted as attempts to foster path creation with mixed results. energy governance committee the energy governance committee (egc) is the main policy tool for reunion island’s energy transformation. according to one interviewee, the egc is based on an idea from the island’s tourism industry, which involved actors in the decision-making process and used their expertise to evaluate existing infrastructure and needs to guide development. while these structures are hierarchical, they are also inclusive, drawing inspiration from the grenelle and gerri. the egc is a tri-level governance structure funded by the french national government and reunion island’s regional government (table 2). the strategic committee sits atop while the secretariat organises and coordinates the activities of seven technical committees. the technical committees act as operational groups for financial studies, renewable energies, energy efficiency, energy precariousness, climate/urban planning/transportation, innovation and training, and international cooperation. the structure is largely a copy of the grenelle and gerri, but one 132 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper significant difference is that technical committee heads come from either public or private institutions or companies. this aspect enables regional actors to have a greater say on what information is presented to decision makers as it potentially shifts the balance of power in governance, increasing regional actors’ (both public and private) reach and their potential to influence policy translation and mutation processes framed though their own rationalities. van waarden and oosterwijk (2006, 443–444) claim that innovative systems, like the egc, are governed by the six i’s (institutes; interdependencies and interlinkages; interests; ideas, information, knowledge, competencies; incentives; and institutions), which may either contribute to or remove path dependencies at various scales. in this regard the interviews reveal a rather positive picture of the egc. the regional government has received delegations from other french departments, including other droms, who were interested in learning more about the egc in order to develop similar structures. theoretically, the inclusion of actors from different parts of the energy sector in the decision making process facilitates the exchange of knowledge and ideas, relationship building, technological development and innovation. it also allows for those in charge, as well as others, to hear first-hand accounts of the challenges facing economic actors. these exchanges offer an opportunity for actors involved in implementing national and supra-national policies and objectives to influence the direction and extent to which policies are translated or developed. we say theoretically because assemblages involve power relations and the interviewees made it clear that those involved in the egc were first and foremost representatives of individual companies who do not disclose everything. the interviewees felt that this level of secrecy was normal and not unhealthy; and the same could be said of virtually any governance process. however, with trust playing an important role in ies implementation processes (michalena & angeon 2009) this could become problematic. the inherent hierarchy within the egc warrants further scrutiny. the description of the egc and its activities in the srcae (2013, 8–10) as well as the interviewees’ descriptions of it reveal some discrepancies. the egc was established for two main purposes: 1) to assess reunion island’s current state of affairs (both quantitatively and qualitatively) in terms of climate, air, and energy, and 2) to share that information with actors and the public to define objectives and a direction for development (srcae 2013, 8). the objectives of knowledge production, distribution and selection of preferential pathways for implementation locate the egc at the core of the island’s policy translation and transformation processes of its energy system. the inclusion of actors and the public is an on-going process in environmental governance (e.g. cohen & mccarthy 2015) and has been coupled with improved renewable energy development and environmental improvement for ies (michalena & angeon 2009). frequently, the opening up of governance processes includes periodic consultation meetings with stakeholders and the public; yet, in many instances these efforts are unsuccessful as decision makers either fail to fully take into account the opinions expressed or opinions counter the prevailing ideals of improved environmental performance (see albrecht 2010; sawatzky 2013). the egc’s structure differs from many others in that it is a formalised inclusion of concerned actors with clearly defined roles in a continual process. the technical committees have dual functions in the egc. they act as a formal reception area to timeframe 2000–2016 regional declaration 2000 grenelle 2007 gerri 2008–2013 nreap 2009 srcea 2013 table 2. key actors within reunion island’s egc framework. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 133matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht translate mobile policies of eu and national origin into regional objectives, while simultaneously generating and providing information for decision makers on the strategic committee at the regional level. thus, they have continuous opportunities to influence policy development and guide translation processes within the wider regionally linked assemblage. the strategic level committee functions similarly, receiving national and supra-national objectives and policies and, in turn, providing information from the regional level in order to influence existing and future policies. overall, the egc has managed to include the main regional energy actors in a meaningful way while functioning as a fulcrum between regional actors and the national government. democratic challenges in the egc the idea of establishing political goals in conjunction with private companies in the egc entails risks and challenges for democratic ideals. all of the interviewees evoked the privileged status of electricité de france (edf) as the only electricity distributor on reunion island and its role as the only private company on the egc’s strategic committee. the interviewees agreed that it was necessary to include edf at the decision-making level due to its distribution monopoly, but the company's goals may diverge from those of other actors in the egc and renewable energy development in general. edf has invested heavily in nuclear power around the world and while there are no nuclear reactors on the island, their investments and expertise in nuclear energy influence their perspective on energy governance objectives at the national level and consequently affects regional energy development. two lines of thought regarding edf’s role on reunion island and the egc appeared in the interviews. first, edf is seen as a public service provider, which benefits the egc and the public. most interviewees, referring to the island's ies, stated that it is easier to have a single, knowledgeable distributor and supported edf’s role. however, there are currently large electricity producers with the potential to operate a distribution network on reunion island and a few of the interviewees stated that their companies would like to become distributors but are legally excluded from distribution (la p’tite gazette 2004). their desire to become electricity distributors is an expression of path creation within the governance assemblage while the policy to maintain edf’s distribution monopoly is a path dependent aspect of it. both elements help shape regional policy translation processes. the second line of thought is more critical of edf’s role in the egc. some of the interviewees stated that edf’s role on the strategic committee was a necessary evil because it is the only actor with the pertinent knowledge and technical abilities to run an ies distribution network. however, many actors cited edf's lethargy or lack of forthrightness on specific issues that would put the company at a competitive disadvantage on the open market, though this was still at an acceptable level for most individuals. one interviewee raised a more important issue when discussing edf’s role in selecting a development direction for reunion island. this individual claimed that renewable energy development should focus on individual or small-scale collective energy systems, ranging from the household or building level up to the neighbourhood level through the use of storage systems for solar or wind power. even though the interviewee admitted that decentralising production and distribution to this level would be costly, he felt that the most prohibitive feature of developing in this manner would be the removal of edf’s clientele and overcoming the company’s influence on the egc. other actors, however, stated that, while edf was on the strategic committee, political representatives made the final decisions. french national policy and its translation framework on reunion island france is known for the particularly strong centralisation of its governance culture. this can be linked to an ideology of equality but, at times, it fails to acknowledge local specificities, which are necessary to understand bioenergy governance and development (albrecht 2015, 2017; albrecht & trishkin 2017). the french law on modernising its electricity service (loi n° 2000–108, article 10 2000), stipulates that distributors must purchase electricity produced from renewable sources before energy produced from non-renewables sources whenever available2. as an effort to break the nation’s dependency on fossil fuels and nuclear energy, this clearly represents an act of path creation. however, in reunion 134 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper island’s translation it only applies to those forms of renewable energy which provide a stable output, like bagasse, which is readily available after the sugar cane harvest. for other renewable forms of energy, like solar and wind, edf’s obligation to purchase is limited to 30% of demand based on their intermittent nature and the fact that the electrical grid is an ies with a single distributor, no external connections and limited storage facilities, which results in system fragility (54 power outages in 2014). a representative from edf stated that while solar production on the island is capable of supplying more than 30% of the daytime requirements, when clouds pass over the solar panels and reduce their production there is not enough warning time to switch over to coal or diesel fired power plants and blackouts may occur. nevertheless, there are pv potential forecasting possibilities for reunion island (diagne et al. 2012) providing enough time to start a diesel based power plant. the exception to this practice on reunion island is intermittent power sources with storage facilities, but these are currently expensive to develop and edf does not have to pay a premium for stored renewable energy, which means that companies are reluctant to invest in such technology. there is currently only one solar facility on the island with a storage capacity of 9mw (akuo 2015). the fragility of the island’s electricity network and the policy translation establishing a maximum threshold of 30% of intermittent renewable energy are consequently hindering energy independence on the island (praene et al. 2012), the achievement of national objectives and the creation of a new energy path. but while the 30% policy is promoted as a protection mechanism to ensure electricity supply, the interviewees were not sure if it was correct. a representative from edf explained that it would be good to raise the percentage through technological advancements, like better warning systems for intermittent power sources which would enable edf to increase its output in a more timely manner. other actors claimed that it was a case of regulatory capture (e.g. engstrom 2012) where the threshold was purposefully established at a lower than possible level for economic reasons and that edf was able to accomplish this because of its political influence and distribution monopoly. in accordance with france's nreap, the regional plan has emphasised the importance of biomass in achieving the island’s energy objectives (srcae 2013, 66). most of the actors interviewed in this study agreed that if eu, national and regional political objectives are to be met by 2020, biomass must play a critical role. while bioenergy development and environmental protection are supposed to support one another, related legislation may have negative effects (e.g. food vs. fuel debate). such effects are amplified on reunion island due to its small size, dense population and rapid urbanisation, all of which are common aspects among many ies. albioma, a private company and the main bioenergy player on reunion island, supplies approximately 10% of the island’s households with biomass based electricity and plans to increase its production (albioma 2015). their current supply comes solely from bagasse and the interviews made it clear that reunion island has a limited amount of biomass due to its small area, dense and growing population, vertiginous topography and poor road network. compounding these effects are a national park and unesco world heritage site. the park covers 40% of the island and harvesting vegetation is forbidden (parc national de la réunion 2007). despite this, the srcae (2013, 61–63) sites three possibilities for increasing biomass energy production: the development of more fibrous sugar cane (see also sabatier et al. 2015), increasing the amount of hectares cultivated and locating other fibre sources. two potential biomass sources were identified in interviews: invasive tree and vegetation species within the national park and biomass from other countries. the former would require special permission from the appropriate authorities and falls in line with current environmental protection trends to remove non-endemic species (sugiura et al. 2009), but would remain a short-term solution. the interviewees claimed that importing biomass from other countries provides a greater source of energy, though not before calculating the carbon footprint of importing biomass and ensuring that it does not contribute to deforestation or food shortages elsewhere. a second national policy intended for environmental protection hindering renewable energy development on reunion island is france’s coastal law (1986, loi n° 86-2)3. this urban planning law was introduced to protect coastal nature and preserve sites, landscapes and cultural and natural heritage from quickly urbanising areas on the coast. it obliges coastal communities to develop in a fennia 195: 2 (2017) 135matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht continuous manner with the existing urban area and forbids the construction of wind turbines over 50 metres tall within 500 metres from any building. on the island, where the majority of the population lives along the coast, this has also resulted in a failure to develop wind energy (cms 2014). another national policy aspect challenging renewable energy development on reunion island identified by interviewees is the regulatory commission on energy (cre). established in 2000, the cre acts as an independent regulatory body for electricity and gas in france and funding demands go through the minister of energy and minister of finance. it consists of two levels: a board called the commission and a committee for disputes and sanctions; two out of six current commission members have worked for edf. the commission’s tasks include, among others, setting the purchase price of electricity from renewable sources for edf (article 314-4 code of energy), advising authorities on the construction of private networks (article l343-1 of the code of energy), and it “ensures the realisation of necessary investments for the proper development of networks (article l 321-6 of the code of energy and article 431-6 of the code of energy)” (cre 2015). according to the interviewees, the cre influences renewable energy development on reunion island in three main ways. first, by establishing the prices that edf has to pay for electricity produced from renewable sources, the cre directly impacts the economic feasibility of projects and, consequently, the willingness of companies to invest in new projects. second, by advising authorities on the development of projects with private networks, the cre influences the direction of energy development. for example, if it refuses to fund projects that focus on the apartment building or neighbourhood level for financial reasons, the cre could end up favouring large-scale projects, thus limiting the type of energy actors involved in renewable energy development. finally, the cre is responsible for the tendering process for new energy projects via its responsibility to ensure network development. this means that it decides when and how new projects will be developed and, according to the interviewees, there have not been enough calls for projects in the last few years. thus, the cre provides another frame in which local translation processes take place and affects the pathways chosen by actors. reunion island as a translation loop of eu and french energy policy politicians and bioenergy actors on reunion island have referred to themselves as innovators for nearly a decade and have built a reputation in france as being a niche for experimental projects (e.g. ministère 2009; praene et al. 2012). as stated above, it was during the vergès era that the quest for energy autonomy really began with a political discourse on renewable energy and innovation, as well as the development of political structures and assemblages, like gerri. however, innovation and experimentation have had questionable impacts on local life. the brief solar power boom of the late 2000s relied on policies designed to develop but not sustain the industry. in 2008, the french national government realised that the industry’s exponential growth was economically unsustainable and placed a moratorium on new projects over 100mw and the price/kwh fell to 0.35€/kwh in 2010 and 0.117€/kwh in 2011 (srcae 2013, 57) causing the blossoming industry to stagnate. more importantly, french banks have become hesitant to support projects without the 20-year guarantee at the advantageous price previously afforded by the policy. it should also be noted that these activities were hardly innovative on the global scale; they were an application of existing technology. the solar boom did however awaken a desire to innovate and attract other renewable energy investors to the island, which remain core aspects of the present energy governance assemblage. reunion island has succeeded in creating an experimental niche for marine energy projects. some of the noteworthy ones include sea water air conditioning, the first large scale urban application of the technology in the world (saudemont 2015), a prototype adapted to the island's swell force for underwater wave energy (washed out during a cyclone, royer 2015), and ocean thermal energy conversion (dcns 2014). while experiments for ocean thermal energy conversion were successful, the company decided to build a full-scale project in martinique where conditions are more favourable. these projects illustrate that policy translations intending to turn reunion island into an experimental energy place have been partially successful, but they also highlight the technological 136 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper and social risks associated with innovation and the possible lack of local returns. so while the island has managed to attract a significant number of innovative actors, hydroelectricity, biomass and solar power are currently driving renewable energy development. discussion reunion island’s path towards energy independence has taken a unique direction. the geographic mix of being an eu outermost region, a french drom and a tropical island have led politicians to translate eu and french energy policy into more ambitious goals than the rest of the nation. yet, since institutional translation is only one aspect of policy translation through (regional) assemblages, current development has fallen short of these aims. for instance, as in many eu localities, it has been unable to effectively reduce its energy consumption for transportation. however, the island has the potential to achieve its objectives pertaining to electricity production and consumption, in part through improving and decentralising participatory governance structures. we believe that the egc is a partial success and understand it as an attempt at path creation. in spite of edf’s monopoly and its role on the egc’s strategic committee, both of which we interpret as path dependent aspects that may no longer be required, the egc represents a new model of energy governance attempting to break away from the previous french model of top-down, centralised governance. its hierarchical structure, which is perhaps a necessity for this type of governance given what is at stake, has found a way to meaningfully include regional actors and given them a chance to influence regional translations of national and supra-national energy policies and thereby influence the future direction of french and eu renewable governance processes. as part of the wider policy translation loop, the egc may also be seen as a governance tool with the potential to be exported to other jurisdictions. an interviewee from the regional government mentioned how other french departments had already visited or called to gather information about the structure to develop their own committee. however, the egc has taken shape in a very specific relational context and the region benefits from france’s solid democratic system, ideology and structure. the national economy, which has been categorized as a state-supported hierarchy (hage 2006, 468) and as a type of bricolage somewhere between a liberal market economy and a coordinated market economy where large firms have an increasing amount of power but still rely on firm-level negotiations (culpepper 2006), must also be taken into account. as a member of the eu, there are subsidies available to actors not existing in most non-eu insular settings. additionally, edf’s experience and monopoly facilitate governance by providing the necessary knowledge and expertise in a single entity, even though its role at the strategic level is questionable. consequently, other french droms are the most likely export destinations for the egc model because edf has guarded its monopoly there as well, and french national policies and objectives apply. nevertheless, monopoly energy providers are rather common in ies and (inter-)national donor institutions also fund sustainable development in island states and communities (e.g. marquardt 2015). this gives the egc wider applicability to become an important institutionalised actor within the wider assemblage that reproduces reunion island as a translation loop. we believe that the system is most readily exportable to areas that have an ies and democracy, in addition to political and financial stability as it is based on democratic principles. it is important that governments choosing to implement a similar energy governance model are familiar with the give and take required. if not, the egc could easily turn into a rhetorical instrument that fails to improve participation. political stability is another prerequisite for the egc model because stability has been shown to aid renewable energy governance (e.g. blumer et al. 2013). without the financial stability offered by reunion island’s regional, national and eu context, the egc model would flounder as smaller companies may not be able to afford the time to attend meetings and give input, leaving only the most economically viable companies to take over the political agenda and potentially failing to address niche markets. two potential problems for the egc are the role of edf on the strategic committee and poor public integration. the importance of edf in the egc is unquestionable, though its role at the decision-making level is already showing signs of becoming problematic. whether or not france will fennia 195: 2 (2017) 137matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht one day privatise the distribution network of droms is an important issue, one that will certainly influence eu energy policy translation in the future. public input and involvement in the egc is a second potential source of problems as their involvement has been rather limited and individuals are practically excluded in public consultation hearings. this supports whiteside, boy and bourgs’s (2010) findings concerning the meso-corporatist character of french environmental governance. this will need to be improved for the egc to continue in a meaningful way and in order to allow wider, public rationalities into policy translation processes. issues of policy translation have both hindered and helped reunion island’s renewable energy development. french and supra-national environmental policies have unintentionally created potential obstacles for renewable energy development in the form of a national park and unesco world heritage site, as well as a reliance on the cre for energy production and network development. the former is simply an unfortunate consequence, though it may be possible to “bend” the rules in translation processes to remove a limited amount of biomass for energy production in the form of invasive or non-endemic species. the latter may also be improved under the energy transition for the green growth (ministère 2015), which should involve greater powers for regions, for example the ability to tender out new renewable energy projects when the region deems necessary. laws obliging electricity distributors to purchase electricity from renewable sources first, in combination with monetary incentives, led to an explosion of solar power and helped create momentum for renewable energy development on the island and could be used again to kick-start and maintain development. reunion island’s drive to become an experimental place for energy production has led to mixed results and the island’s renewable energy production currently relies on proven methods. the innovative experiments have not truly benefitted the local population, even when they are successful, as the ocean thermal energy conversion case illustrates. these experimental projects also highlight the egc’s focus on entrepreneurial translations and the current lack of public inclusion on project development. that said, these types of experiments need to occur somewhere in order for marine energy development to advance, and may one day pay off for reunion island; and they have already provided a solution for the ies of other insular communities. conclusions reunion island’s quest for energy autonomy presents an interesting case for regional, national, eu and insular community based energy governance processes. the egc is the most important governance tool for renewable energy development and the main stakeholder within the translating assemblage on the island. it works under the french nreap and has translated the plan in the srcae with the aim of becoming self-sufficient. this translation goes far beyond french aims due to local peculiarities and potentials that frame reunion island as a translation loop, and represents one possible way to create added value for the island (e.g. bioenergy, stop financial drainage for fossil fuels). yet questions remain surrounding edf’s position on the strategic committee and its consequently prominent role in translation processes on reunion island, resulting in the slowing down of certain potential innovations and decentralisation of the distribution network. while opening the market to real competition may not bring financial gains for customers (weisser 2004), it might speed up the development of alternative solutions and path creation as it opens up translation processes to consider alternative solutions that could move reunion island towards a more decentralised and participatory energy system to achieve energy autonomy. the egc must also look seriously at the current political ambition to sell the island as an innovative place since it has not really reaped the rewards of its investments. the effects of national energy policy translation illustrate that they have both promoted and restricted certain forms of renewable energy development on reunion island. solar energy experienced a boom thanks to the obligation of energy distributors to purchase electricity from renewable sources, but the subsequent moratorium caused the blossoming industry to stagnate, while environmental protection laws currently hinder biomass and wind energy development. these and the other aspects mentioned above raise the question of whether or not the design of eu and french national policies and their corresponding translations are open enough to enable 138 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper a regional translation process that caters to the needs of the island as perceived by regional actors and its particular environment. thus far, it seems they are not. in particular, the role of the cre has failed regional renewable energy development and restricted translation capabilities to a narrow frame, though this may change with the energy transition for the green growth (ministère 2015). the study shows that the question of policy mobility and translation concerning the particularities of the policy target (e.g. insular communities) as portrayed above are important when aiming to understand and implement supra-national and national policy approaches. thus, to evaluate the applicability and development of solutions, such as the egc in locations with an ies and elsewhere, we must go beyond potential calculations, quantitative socio-economic surveys and policy transfer treating localities as unproblematic recipients of policy. this includes integrating the socio-economic fabric that reproduces governance structures and translating assemblages in implementation sites. the fact that national policy translation frequently restricts the direction of reunion island’s energy transformation provides the egc, as a governance tool, with many challenges to translate eu and national energy policy in a way that meaningfully addresses the multiple local expectations and fosters local development. thus, to understand and eventually adjust current developments and local choices, the local peculiarities that underlie these translation processes must be understood. by treating and evaluating the processes shaping reunion island as a translation loop of eu and national energy policy, this study has contributed to this need. notes 1 bagasse refers to the stalks of sugar cane which, after being used for sugar and rum production, may be burned to produce electricity. 2 loi du 10 février 2000 relative à la modernisation et au développement du service public de l’électricité 3 loi n° 86-2 du 3 janvier 1986 relative à l'aménagement, la protection et la mise en valeur du littoral acknowledgements this research has been conducted with the support of the academy of finland project (no. 14878) “contesting bioenergy governance” at the university of eastern finland. we are thankful to the editor at fennia and to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. references akuo (2015) et si une centrale photovoltaïque développait durablement nos territoires? <http://www. akuoenergy.com/bardzour> 26.10.2015. albioma (2015) acquisition de 14 centrales photovoltaïques à la réunion. <http://www.albioma.com/ wp-content/uploads/2015/04/albioma_cp_20150414.pdf> 6.10.2015. albrecht, m. (2010) transboundary governance of the curonian spit world heritage site. journal of environmental planning and management 53(6) 725–742. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2010.488105 albrecht, m. (2015) enlightenment in norway’s oil shadow? governance assemblages of a woodbased district heating network in norway’s’ inland region. journal of environmental policy and planning 17(3) 381–401. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908x.2014.964851 albrecht, m. (2017) the role of translation loops in policy mutation processes: state designed bioenergy regions in germany. environment and planning c: government and policy (in press). https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x16669354 albrecht, m. & trishkin, m. (2017) bioenergy policies: a tool for regional development and source of local conflicts. in karelian research center (ed.) ecological and economic problems of development of regions and countries (sustainable development/management of natural resources), proceedings of the 14th international conference of the russian society for ecological economics, 3.–7.6.2017, 150– 156. karelian research center, petrozavodsk, russia. allen, j. (2011) topological twists: power’s shaping geographies. dialogues in human geography 1(3) 283–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611421546 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 139matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht article 10 (2000) loi n° 2000–108. (2000) loi n° 2000–108 du 10 février 2000 relative à la modernisation et au développement du service public de l'électricité. <http://legifrance.gouv.fr/affichtexte.do?cid texte=legitext000005629085&datetexte=201510> 26.10.2015. bagci, b. (2009) towards a zero energy island. renewable energy 34 784–789. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2008.04.027 blumer, y. b., stauffacher, m., lang, d. j., hayashi, k. & uchida, s. (2013) non-technical success factors for bioenergy project-learning from a multiple case study in japan. energy policy 60 386–395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.05.075 bulkeley, h. (2005) reconfiguring environmental governance: towards a politics of scales and networks. political geography 24 875–902. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2005.07.002 clarke, j., bainton, d., lendvai, n. & stubbs, p. (2015) making policy move: towards a politics of translation and assemblage. policy press, bristol, uk. cms (2014) l’assouplissement par la loi du 15 avril 2013 du cadre juridique de l’implantation des éoliennes terrestes en zone littorale dans les department d’outre-mer, 03.06.2014.<http://www.cms-bfl.com/ newsmedia/publicationdetail/pages/default.aspx?publicationguid=96f8cdd8-8a2f4d4d-93ba19babdc6d8d5> 26.10.2015. coastal law (1986) loi loi n° 86-2 du 3 janvier 1986 relative à l'aménagement, la protection et la mise en valeur du littoral. cohen, a. & mccarthy, j. (2015) reviewing rescaling: strengthening the case for environmental considerations. progress in human geography 39(1) 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514521483 cre (2015) commission de régulation de l’énergie. <www.cre.fr/en> 26.10.2015. culpepper, p. (2006) capitalism, coordination, and economic change: the french political economy since 1985. in culpepper, p., hall, p. & palier, b. (eds.) changing france: the politics that markets make, 29–49. palgrave macmillan, houndmills, basingstoke, hampshire, uk. dcns (2014) ocean thermal energy conversion. <http://en.dcnsgroup.com/produit/ocean-thermalenergy-conversion/> 26.10.2015. dolowitz, d. p. & marsh, d. (1996) who learns what from whom? a review of the policy transfer literature. political studies 44(2) 343–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1996.tb00334.x dolowitz, d. p. & marsh, d. (2000) learning from abroad: the role of policy transfer in contemporary policy-making. governance: an international journal of policy and administration 13(1) 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/0952-1895.00121 diagne, h. m., david, m., lauret, p. & boland, j. (2012) solar irradiation forecasting: state-of-the-art and proposition for future developments for small-scale insular grids. proceedings of the world renewable energy forum 2012 (wref 2012). denver, usa. <https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00918150/document> 1.9.2017. duic, n., lerer, m. & da graça carvalho, m. (2003) increasing the supply of renewable energy sources in island energy systems. international journal of sustainable energy 23(4) 177–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425910412331290760 ec (2012) energy roadmap 2050. european commission, brussels. ec (2015) national action plans. european commission, brussels. <https://ec.europa.eu/energy/en/ topics/renewable-energy/national-action-plans> 27.10.2015. engstrom, d. f. (2012) coralling capture. harvard journal of law & public policy 36(1) 31–39. garric, a. (2010) “la grenelle de l’environnement est devenu un simple label”. le monde 2.11.2010. <http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2010/11/02/le-grenelle-de-l-environnement-est-devenu-unsimple-label_1434166_3244.html> 26.10.2015. garud, r., kumaraswamy, a. & karnøe, p. (2010) path dependence or path creation? journal of management studies 47(4) 760–774. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6486.2009.00914.x hage, j. (2006) institutional change and societal change: the impact of knowledge transformations. in hage, j. & meeus, m. (eds.) innovation, science, and institutional change, 465–482. oxford university press, oxford. insee (2015) réunion. <http://www.insee.fr/fr/regions/reunion/> 5.11.2015. kortelainen, j. & albrecht, m. (2014) translation loops and shifting rationalities of transnational bioenergy governance. in stripple, j. & bulkeley, h. (eds.) governing the climate: new approaches to rationality, power and politics, 144–159. cambridge university press, cambridge. la p’tite gazette (2004) edf garde son monopole dans les dom. <http://www.la-ptite-gazette.com/ archive-actualites-la-reunion/article/edf-garde-son-monopole-dans-les-dom-1533.html> 26.10.2015. linfo (2013) fin du projet gerri – réussir l’innovation. linfo.re 3.04.2013. <http://www.linfo.re/lareunion/economie/fin-du-projet-gerri-reussir-l-innovation> 26.10.2015. 140 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper marquardt, j. (2015) the politics of energy and development: aid diversification in the philippines. energy research & social sciences 10 259–272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.07.013 massey, d. (2005) for space. sage publications, london. mccann, e. (2013) policy boosterism, policy mobilities, and the extrospective city. urban geography 34(1) 5–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2013.778627 mccann, e. & ward, k. (2012) policy assemblages, mobilities and mutations: towards a multidisciplinary conversation. political studies review 10 325–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-9302.2012.00276.x michalena, e. & angeon, v. (2009) local challenges in the promotion of renewable energy sources: the case of crete. energy policy 37 2018–2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.01.047 ministère de l’écologie, du développement durable et de l’énergie (2009) le projet réunion 2030 – gerri. le point sur n° 28 octobre 2009. <http://www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/img/pdf/lps_-_ gerri-v3_cle57e5e6-1_1_.pdf> 26.10.2015. ministère de l’écologie, du développement durable et de l’énergie (2012) la genèse du grenelle de l’envionnement, 28.12.2012. <http://www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/la-genese-du-grenelle-de-l. html> 26.10.2015. ministère de l’écologie, du développement durable et de l’énergie (2015) la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte. <www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/-la-transition-energetique-pour-la-. html> 26.10.2015. mrmondalisation (2015) nouvelle route du littoral: un projet pharaonique sous les tropiques. mrmondalisation, 19.8.2015. <https://mrmondialisation.org/nouvelle-route-du-littoral-un-projetpharaonique-sous-les-tropiques/> 6.10.2015. murdoch, j. (2006) post-structuralist geography: a guide to relational space. sage, london. nybakk, e., niskanen, a., bajric, f., duduman, g., feliciano, d. & jablonski, k. (2011) innovation in the wood bio-energy sector in europe. in weiss, g., pettenella, d., ollonqvist, p. & slee, b. (eds.) innovation in forestry: territorial and value chain relationships, 254–275. cabi, wallingford. https://doi.org/10.1079/9781845936891.0254 oikonomon, e. k., kilias, v., goumas, a., rigopoulus, a., karakatsani, e., damasiotis, m., papastefanakis, d. & marini, n. (2009) renewable energy sources (res) projects and their barriers on a regional scale: the case study of wind parks in the dodecanese islands, greece. energy policy 37 4874– 4883. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.06.050 parc national de la réunion (2007) les actions interdites. <http://www.reunion-parcnational.fr/?lesactions-interdites> 26.10.2015. peck, j. (2011) geographies of policy. from transfer-diffusion to mobility-mutation. progress in human geography 35(6) 773–797. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510394010 peck, j. & theodore, n. (2015) fast policy: experimental statecraft at the threshold of neoliberalism. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677306.001.0001 pierson, p. & skocpol, t. (2002) historical institutionalism in contemporary political science. in katznelson, i. & milner, h. v. (eds.) political science: the state of the discipline, 693–721 w.w. norton & company, new york. praene, j. p., david, m., sinama, f., morau, d. & marc, o. (2012) renewable energy: progressing towards a net zero energy island, the case of reunion island. renewable and sustainable energy reviews 16 426–442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2011.08.007 red (2009) directive 2009/28/ec of the european parliament and the council of 23 april 2009 on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources and amending and subsequently repealing directives 2001/77/ec and 2003/30/ec. reporterre (2015) a la réunion, manifestation massive contre le projet fou d’autoroute sur pilotis. reporterre. 8.6.2015. <http://www.reporterre.net/spip.php?page=redirect&id_article=7635> 6.10.2015. royer, j. (2015) case study: ceto la reunion. <http://coastalenergyandenvironment.web.unc.edu/ ocean-energy-generating-technologies/wave-energy/case-study-ceto-la-reunion/> 26.10.2015. sabatier, d., martine, j. f., chiroleu, f., rousse, c., letourmy, p., van antwerpen, r., gabrielle, b. & ney, b. (2015) optimization of sugarcane farming as a multipurpose crop for energy and food production. gcb bioenergy 7 40–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.12133 sarrica, m., brondi, s., cottone, p. & mazzana, b. m. (2016) one, no one, one hundred thousand energy transitions in europe: the quest for a cultural approach. energy research & social sciences 13 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2015.12.019 saudemont, e. (2015) première mondiale à la réunion: un projet swac de 40 mw froid. pétrole & gaz. 25.05.2015. <http://www.petrole-et-gaz.fr/premiere-mondiale-a-la-reunion-un-projet-swac-de40-mw-froid-4433/> 26.10.2015. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 141matthew sawatzky & moritz albrecht sawatzky, m. (2013) voices in the woods: a study of forest use in eastern manitoba. dissertations in social sciences and business studies, no 55. publications of the university of eastern finland, joensuu. sovacool, b. k. (2014) what are we doing here? analyzing 15 years of energy scholarship and proposing a social science research agenda. energy research & social sciences 1 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.02.003 srcae (2013) schéma régional climat air énergie de la réunion. préfet de la réunion, region réunion, ademe. <http://www.reunion.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/img/pdf/schema_regional_ climat_ai_energie_974_cle2c5f8e.pdf> 1.9.2017. sugiura, s., yamaura, y., tsuru, t., goto, h., hasegawa, m., makihara, h. & makino, s. (2009) beetle responses to artificial gaps in an oceanic island forest: implications for invasive tree management to conserve endemic species diversity. biodiversity conservation 18 2101–2118. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-009-9575-9 unep (2014) emerging issues for small island developing states: results of the unep foresight process. unep, nairobi. van waarden, f. & oosterwijk, h. (2006) turning tracks? path dependency, technological paradigm shifts, and organizational and institutional change. in hage, j. & meeus, m. (eds.) innovation, science, and institutional change, 443–464. oxford university press, oxford. weisser, d. (2004) power sector reform in small island developing states: what role for renewable energy technologies? renewable & sustainable energy reviews 8 101–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2003.10.002 whiteside, k. h., boy, d. & bourg, d. (2010) france’s ‘grenelle de l’environnement’: openings and closures in ecological democracy. environmental politics 19(3) 449–467. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644011003690930 spaces of the forest-based bioeconomy in finnish lapland and catalonia: practitioners, narratives and forgotten spatialities urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa109523 doi: 10.11143/fennia.109523 spaces of the forest-based bioeconomy in finnish lapland and catalonia: practitioners, narratives and forgotten spatialities diana morales morales, d. (2021) spaces of the forest-based bioeconomy in finnish lapland and catalonia: practitioners, narratives and forgotten spatialities. fennia 199(2) 174–187. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109523 over the last decade, the bioeconomy has been increasingly promoted as a strategy able to shift our economies away from fossil fuels and boost local economic growth, especially of rural areas in europe. the bioeconomy is an important part of the european union agenda, it is promoted through european wide strategies that are translated into local and regional policies. however, the bioeconomy does not unfold equally across regions; it has different implications influenced by the spaces and the narratives with which the policies are created and implemented. amongst all the actors participating in the bioeconomy strategies, local practitioners play a crucial role in interpreting the narratives and implementing the policies in a way that makes sense for their local contexts. hence, there is a need to understand how local and regional practitioners apply bioeconomy strategies to grasp how those are expressed in different regional contexts. through the case studies of the forest-based bioeconomy in catalonia and finnish lapland, this paper explains why economic narratives prevail in the local bioeconomy and how regional spatialities are affected by it. the cases show that the bioeconomy remains close to economic growth and is applied through regional economic development policies, thus focusing on specific economic sectors and hindering the role of the bioeconomy in a wider regional transformation. understanding the narratives and how these reflect the spatialities help us to advance a spatially sensitive approach to the bioeconomy, this is, a bioeconomy practised according to the sociospatial conditions, closer to ideas of inclusivity, plurality and justice, and with a greater role in a wider regional transformation, rather than the greening of specific economic sectors. keywords: bioeconomy, forest industry, regional development, place specificities, narratives diana morales (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6277-2784), centre for research on sustainable societal transformations crs, karlstad university, sweden & department of geography, umeå university, 901 87 umeå, sweden. e-mail: diana.morales@umu.se © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109523 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6277-2784 mailto:diana.morales@umu.se fennia 199(2) (2021) 175diana morales introduction by promoting the bioeconomy, the european union advocates for a technological and economic change to address climate change, and reaffirms its intention to maintain a leadership position in the transit towards a fossil fuel free society (european commission, 2012, 2019). the first european bioeconomy strategy was published in 2012 and, since, it has been modified and criticised for not addressing issues of ecological sustainability and social inclusiveness. the conversation about an inclusive and sustainable bioeconomy has started (fritsche et al. 2020), however, a sustainable and inclusive bioeconomy remains vague and challenges the capacities and innovation of local actors in charge of materialising the strategy (morales & sariego-kluge 2021). critical voices in the bioeconomy highlight its unquestioned rush to support growth and innovation without addressing issues of environmental and social justice, and disregarding activities that portray a human-nature relationship without a clear economic benefit (e.g. schmidt et al. 2012; mustalahti 2018). part of what these critiques claim is that the spatialities with which the bioeconomy interacts are often overlooked and, despite the attempts for promoting an inclusive and sustainable bioeconomy, elements of sustainability and inclusion remain vague. in this paper, i refer to spatialities as the social, economic, cultural and natural processes that constitute the spaces inhabited and lived (walker 2009; merriman et al. 2012). by comparing how local practitioners understand and conceptualise the bioeconomy policies, and by examining the narratives with which it is reproduced in lapland (finland) and catalonia (spain), i argue that even if the conceptualisations tend to place the bioeconomy as a wider process of regional sustainable transformation beyond industries, some of the spatialities where it is applied are largely overlooked. this because the policy strategies used to implement the bioeconomy remain strongly linked to regional economic growth, imposing economic growth views over other ways of understanding the bioeconomy. the case studies show that those narratives favour the transition of specific economic sectors but hide diverse socio-spatial configurations and, ultimately, downplay the role of the bioeconomy in a larger regional transformation (understood as a larger societal transformation that includes as much industrial modernisation and economic growth as civil society participation, social innovation and environmental justice). empirical studies explaining how local and regional actors interpret and adapt green policies are still scarce (amundsen & hermansen 2020), and with this paper i intend to contribute to this debate. i begin with an overview of the multiple definitions given to the bioeconomy, paying special attention to the branch of the bioeconomy based on forest resources, as it is the dominant type of bioeconomy in lapland, and gaining relevance in catalonia. then i continue to the methodological and data collection strategies, followed by an explanation of the narratives and how these reflect and conflict with the spatialities. conclusions can be found in the last section. bioeconomy: narratives and conceptualisations the bioeconomy is a long existing concept interpreted in multiple ways, from ecological economy, industrial biotechnology to biomass-based economy replacing fossil fuels (vivien et al. 2019). according to the european commission, the bioeconomy is the part of the economic processes that covers all sectors and systems relying on biological resources (animals, plants, microorganisms and derived biomass). it encompasses economic activities of primary production, such as agriculture and forestry, plus all sorts of industrial sectors that use biological resources to process food, energy or biotechnology, providing elements to substitute fossil fuels (european commission 2018; fritsche et al. 2020). the literature analysing the narratives in the bioeconomy is rich, as the narratives are (e.g. schmidt et al. 2012; de besi & mccormick 2015; birch 2016; bugge et al. 2016; bauer 2018; ramcilovic-suominen & pülzl 2018; vivien et al. 2019; befort 2020). accordingly, narratives seem to juggle between bioeconomy as biotechnology, use of biomass, economic growth, sustainability, competitiveness, sectoral capacities, technological fixes, industrial biotechnology, as well as opposing (yet complimentary) non-technological conceptualisations, inclusiveness and limits to biomass (befort 2020). within this variety of approaches, i focus on those narratives directly related to the use of forest biomass: bioeconomy and economic growth, and bioeconomy as a regional transformation. 176 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper forest-based bioeconomy and economic growth the forest based-bioeconomy (f-bb) is a popular concept amongst northern europe and countries with a strong prevalence of the forest industry (pülzl et al. 2017). it is broadly defined as the use of forest biomass to replace fossil fuels through the means of innovation and technological development (wolfslehner et al. 2016). the f-bb is often promoted as an opportunity to gain regional competitive advantage by exploiting an underutilised resource (pülzl et al. 2017), while creating alternatives to transition away from fossil-fuels and modernising the forest industry (pülzl et al. 2014). the f-bb has been criticised for taking economic growth and environmental sustainability for granted and assuming a positive impact on regional development by creating new jobs (schmidt et al. 2012; ferguson 2015; ramcilovic-suominen & pülzl 2018; vargas-hernández 2019). some argue that the f-bb remains mostly concerned about the economy and its policies are focused on efficiency, productivity and industrial competitiveness, while concerns about sustainability are often used as selling points (ramcilovic-suominen & pülzl 2018). the f-bb is also criticised for focusing on the role of regional innovation systems (comprised by governments, firms and universities), while leaving aside crucial social actors such as civil organisations, conservation groups, citizens and consumers (kitchen & marsden 2011; grundel & dahlström 2016; mustalahti 2018). forest-based bioeconomy as regional transformation behind the concerns about the excessive focus on economic growth, is the acknowledgement of the bioeconomy as part of a wider regional transformation that includes societal, economic and cultural aspects, and not limited to technological changes (kemp & never 2017). critical voices often call for acknowledging the bioeconomy’s role in a transformation towards sustainable regional economies (bauer 2018; albrecht et al. 2021; andersson & grundel 2021). however, the f-bb is embedded in uneven power relations that can undermine its role in such wider transformation. powerful corporate interests can determine the use of natural resources in geographically remote rural areas and co-opt the bioeconomy narratives, as seen in finland (ahlqvist & sirviö 2019) and sweden (holmgren et al. 2022). the bioeconomy is also a contested policy concept that encompasses a diversity of imagined futures and is able to produce transformations at a regional scale (bauer 2018). bioeconomy strategies contain imagined visions of what the future should be, as well as the set of policies, strategies and institutional arrangements needed to achieve those imaginations (schmidt et al. 2012; birch 2016). the f-bb is often promoted through public agencies in charge of agriculture, rurality and forestry, where it is portrayed as a solution for rural unemployment, sluggish modernisation and depopulation (european commission 2018; fritsche et al. 2020). furthermore, both the european commission and the finnish national bioeconomy strategy portray the bioeconomy as a solution to the environmental crisis and the uneven development of rural regions (ministry of agriculture and forestry of finland 2014; ctfc 2018; european commission 2018; fritsche et al. 2020). to achieve those goals, the f-bb endorses the use of existing assets locally available, in order to boost production and industrial modernisation. the way how the narratives described above are grasped and reproduced by those in charge of creating and implementing the policies locally, play a key role in determining whether the spatialities in which the f-bb interact are reflected or not (amundsen & hermansen 2020). i will explore this argument in the following sections. methods and cases the question guiding this analysis is: are the spatialities with which bioeconomy policies interact reflected or overlooked in its narratives, as identified by the practitioners (the people in charge of design and implementation of the bioeconomy polices regionally)? to do so, a case study and qualitative analysis was used to pinpoint the narratives and strategies with which regional practitioners grasp and apply bioeconomy strategies, to then contrast them with the place specific conditions of each region. the cases were selected for having an active bioeconomy strategy with focus on rural development, yet different in their institutional, economic and social contexts (see seawright & gerring 2008). fennia 199(2) (2021) 177diana morales after identifying potential regions that fulfilled the requirements mentioned, and accounting for practical reasons such as pre-existing networks and language, catalonia and finnish lapland were chosen (fig. 1). another reason to study these two regions was that their f-bb practitioners are engaged in processes of policy learning with each other, through field visits, conferences and other exchange platforms (albrecht et al. 2021). they have collaboration efforts to do research and raise funds from the european union and are especially active in the network of f-bb practitioners in europe (andersson & grundel 2021). fig. 1. finnish lapland and catalonia. 178 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper the empirical material analysed comes from a broader project looking at the development of bioeconomy strategies in european regions. one of the project objectives was to understand the narratives and spatialities of the bioeconomy strategies, which i am addressing here. this paper is supported on primary and secondary data. primary data was crucial to obtain in-depth information about how local practitioners apply the bioeconomy and the narratives that help shaping their decisions. it comprises participant observation in meetings, presentations and conferences where practitioners and policy makers linked to the bioeconomy in catalonia and/or lapland shared their experiences and forthcoming agendas. these encounters occurred during 2019 and 2020 both faceto-face and online. additionally, 15 semi-structured interviews, conducted virtually and in situ during march, april and may 2019 in barcelona, girona, solsona (catalonia), and rovaniemi (finnish lapland), inform the results presented here (table 1). the interviewees were selected because of their active involvement in implementing the bioeconomy strategies at regional and national scale. in general, the questions were directed at understanding how each participant understands the bioeconomy, how it is implemented and what challenges and opportunities they encountered. leeni: muuta taulukon fontti oikeaksi! table 1 identifier interviewee interview 1 entrepreneur interview 2 director, catalonia landscape observatory interview 3 (2 participants) consultancy firm sectorial coordinator, accio interview 4 innovation board strategic manager, technology development centre interview 5 circular economy coordinator, accio interview 6 technician, area of bioeconomy and governance, ctfc interview 7 director, ctfc interview 8 (3 participants) director, national institute for agriculture and food technologies inia professional, inia professional, inia interview 9 entrepreneur interview 10 senior expert in research and innovation support services, univ. of lapland interview 11 future bioeconomies manager, lapland university of applied sciences interview 12 expert in international affairs, lapland regional council interview 13 (3 participants) business advisors for small enterprise and farmers, proagria companies expert, proagria interview 14 researcher, national resources institute finland luke interview 15 arctic smart rural community deputy manager, lapland regional council table 1. list of interviews. the secondary data was obtained from various sources and includes reports, scientific publications, conference observations, websites, social media platforms, and policy reports from different scales (european union, research organisations from the european, spanish and finnish level, national policies, and public and private research centres reports from the national and regional level). the secondary data was crucial to obtain information about the european, national and regional bioeconomy strategies and plans as seen from the different scales. fennia 199(2) (2021) 179diana morales to identify how practitioners shape the bioeconomy regionally, i conducted an analysis based on interviews, notes from participant observations at conferences and meetings, and policy documents on the bioeconomy. the data was manually coded and then categorised in n-vivo. two types of coding were used. first, based on characterisations of the bioeconomy found in the data and previous research, terms such as growth, jobs creation, rural development and opportunities, constituted the first set of codes. these were extracted and prioritised according to how many times the thematic was referenced and classified according to the data source (practitioners or reports from industry-related fields, local governments or landscape and rural development agencies). the most repeated and cross-referenced the code, the most prevalent the term. the second set of codes correspond to place specific conditions, codes such as peripheries, access to forests, fires and forest growth management, energy supply, were extracted giving priority to primary sources. with these two sets of codes and referenced data, the analysis consisted on identifying prevalent narratives (code set 1) and contrasting them with place specificities (code set 2). the following section presents the bioeconomy strategies in catalonia and lapland and explains the narratives with which the bioeconomy is portrayed, while pinpointing the place specificities that shape the bioeconomy as a public policy (industrial catalonia, rural catalonia, urban catalonia, industrial lapland, forestry lapland, rural and indigenous lapland). results1: narratives and spatialities catalonia catalonia is a region of contrasts, with both a high and low population density (over 400 inhabitants per square km and less than 10 inhabitants per square km) (ctfc 2018). the urban and rural divide is evident; while urban areas keep growing, rural areas face depopulation and land abandonment. this has contributed to the growth of catalonian forest, now covering around 70% of the region (ibid.). some argue that this creates a good opportunity for the forest-based bioeconomy, while others are concerned with the lack of management and risk of fires (interviews). the bioeconomy public policy landscape in catalonia is shaped by first, the european strategy (european commission 2018). second, the individual actions that different public organisations have designed according to their competences, scope and the spanish bioeconomy strategy to a lesser extent (gobierno de españa 2018). according to the interviewees, the rationales to promote the bioeconomy in catalonia are the incentives given by the european union, regional actors’ perception of the opportunities that the bioeconomy represents, and the acknowledgement of environmentally unsustainable practices. catalonia does not have one regional bioeconomy policy, but a collection of plans dispersed amongst different public agencies applying the bioeconomy according to the population and economic sectors within their competences. hence, the bioeconomy is referred to as circular bioeconomy when tailored to industrial production, or forest-based bioeconomy when targeted at the use of forest biomass. here, the focus is set on two agencies that are taking leadership in promoting the catalonian bioeconomy. first, the regional agency in charge of promoting innovation and competitiveness amongst firms and businesses accio (based in barcelona), and, second, the forest science and technology centre of catalonia ctfc (based in solsona), a public consortium created in cooperation with local universities and governments. accio representatives interviewed emphasised the importance of promoting the bioeconomy amongst the economic sectors that already have potential to transform biomass efficiently, the chemicals industry for example, thus creating wealth by utilising the region’s industrial competitive advantages (infrastructure, large internal markets and capacities to reach external markets). this side of the catalonian bioeconomy is more linked to industrial policies2. it aims to improve the social perception of the regional industries while promoting innovation, efficiency and circularity. for accio, the bioeconomy and the circular economy are complementary approaches, the bioeconomy provides renewable resources and the circular economy maximises their use. therefore, seen from accio, narratives of industrial modernisation are prevalent and applied to an industrial spatiality. the dominant narrative here is the modernisation and circularity of catalonian industries through 180 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper innovation to ”use natural materials and keep them in the loop the longest possible (…), using local biomass and managing the waste created” (interview 3). on the other hand, ctfc aims to “contribute to the modernization and competitiveness of the forest sector, to promote rural development and the sustainable management of the environment” (centre de ciencia y tecnologia forestal de catalunya n.d.). ctfc is divided into six areas, one of which is dedicated to bioeconomy and forest governance (other areas include biodiversity and conservation). the bioeconomy is conceptualised as the use of renewable biomass to add value to forest products while contributing to decarbonise the economy, similar to accio, but building over an underdeveloped economic sector (forestry). the dominant narrative, seen from ctfc, is industrial path creation in a rural spatiality that lacks competitive advantages and faces challenges of depopulation, unemployment and poor accessibility. the catalonian f-bb remains in a nascent stage, partly explained because forestry is not a relevant economic sector for the region, and because the region’s socio-economic dynamics are not strongly shaped by its inhabitants’ relationship with the forests (except from some traditions for example mushroom picking in autumn). most of the population live in cities, separated from their natural surroundings as if ”the end of the city was also a closed door to outer spaces” (interview 1). the type of strategies to promote the bioeconomy depend on who has designed them, and who is the target. the strategies designed by accio target industries and business of all sizes, aiming to promote innovation and collaboration between private actors. some examples are: i) providing grants for firms to reach technological and research centres and to develop circular economy solutions, either individually or collectively; ii) helping firms to find external funding for research and development, iii) collaborating with other regional agencies to obtain additional resources for the grants scheme, and iv) collecting and documenting good practices and successful examples to share with firms. the strategies designed by ctfc are aimed to strengthen the research carried out in the centre, find external partners and create networks, and exchange knowledge with other actors working in the forest-based bioeconomy. some examples are: i) conducting research about potential uses of catalonian forests; ii) collaborating with other regional agencies interested in rural development to, for example, create circular solutions to agricultural production, iii) organising conferences with european partners, and iv) keeping an active networking with european organisations aiming to become a reference point of the forest based-bioeconomy in southern europe. to summarise, accio is driven by an industrial modernisation and circular economy narrative that promotes the use of existing advantages of catalonia’s industrial spatiality. those advantages include having a diverse industrial sector, infrastructure and knowledge production centres that can push technological changes, and a large local market and international networks. their approach is that of an industrial transformation that relies on innovation and technological changes, boosted by strong industrial development. ctfc, on the other hand, is driven by a narrative of rural economic growth and path creation for a rural spatiality characterised by abandonment, lack of jobs and abundant and underutilised natural resources. the forest-based bioeconomy becomes an “opportunity to increase the competitiveness of the [underdeveloped] forestry sector” (interview 6), integrating economic growth with forest management and biodiversity conservation, “processing biomass and managing environmental services and biodiversity, both sides of the same coin” (interview 7). lapland lapland is the northernmost region in finland and has low population density (1.8 inhabitants per square km). it is mostly a rural region, even “in this café in the middle of rovaniemi, we are in the rural area” (interview 12). similar to catalonia, the forest continues to grow beyond the annual harvesting volumes (viitanen & mutanen 2018; interviews), but, in contrast, the regional socio-economic dynamics are profoundly linked to the forest because of the forestry and tourist industry (which, alongside mining, dominate the regional economy), leisure activities, and ancestral traditions and knowledge carried by sami communities and local inhabitants (arctic smartness n.d.; lapland university of applied sciences 2019). the bioeconomy policy landscape is bounded within the finnish national bioeconomy strategy and the lapland’s smart specialisation strategy called arctic smartness (regional council of lapland n.d.; ministry of agriculture and forestry of finland 2014). the finnish bioeconomy strategy pinpoints fennia 199(2) (2021) 181diana morales finnish forest industry strong position in global markets, finland’s natural advantages (forestland and fresh water), and its people’s close relationship with their forests. arctic smartness, on the other hand, has become a priority for regional development and an important tool of place branding. based in these policies, the strategies to promote the bioeconomy, although vary depending on who is targeted, aim to promote research and innovation, gain and maintain recognition at the european level, and to endorse the f-bb as a regional branding. some examples are: i) connecting customers with local food producers, and local producers with the tourist industry and public kitchens, ii) visiting rural villages to explain the benefits of the forest-based bioeconomy, and the forms in which rural entrepreneurs can get involved, iii) promoting entrepreneurship based on existing forest and mining industries, iv) connecting researchers with industries, and v) updating educational curricula with bioeconomy and opening postgraduate programs with applied research. arctic smartness is divided in five clusters, two of which are relevant for the forest-based bioeconomy: the arctic smart rural cluster (rural cluster hereafter), and the arctic industry and circular economy (industrial cluster hereafter). the rural cluster targets rural inhabitants, entrepreneurs and microenterprises. it is managed in collaboration between the regional council and proagria, a cooperative organisation integrated by rural communities and entrepreneurs with national presence and regional branches. the rural cluster conceptualises the bioeconomy as the entrepreneurial activities carried out by rural inhabitants (interviews 13 and 15). from their perspective, rural businesses in lapland have been always practicing the bioeconomy, as they already work with agriculture and forest products. the concern is the creation and survival of rural businesses and villages. [the rural communities cluster] is a different bioeconomy, because the companies are smaller, sometimes one-person companies. we do not want to be so dependent on the national energy grid, or the national food businesses, or imports of food if we can produce it here (…) that is what i understand by the bioeconomy. (interview 11) as the quote shows, the rural cluster supports the production of local food (aiming for a 30% of local consumption to come from local producers), and the establishment of biogas refineries and other local solutions to energy and heating that use the natural resources available (arctic smartness n.d.). practitioners involved in the rural cluster are driven by an economic development narrative applied to a rural spatiality where entrepreneurs already practice the bioeconomy but need support to guarantee income and survival of their businesses, while villages need support to take ownership of energy and heating systems, improving their finances by decreasing their expenses. on the other hand, the industrial cluster targets the larger economic actors in the region (steel and forestry industries), and related smes. the cluster is hosted at digipolis oy, a technological centre located in the kemi-tornio sub region (southwest, frontier with northern sweden). this area alone holds 80% of lapland’s industrial production (interviews). digipolis gathers more than 50 companies (including forestry multinationals, energy companies, biorefineries, research centres, corporate health, inspection and testing companies, amongst others), working as an industrial agglomeration that facilitates innovation and industrial collaboration (interview 12). it also hosts the circular and bioeconomy centre, a project supported by the finnish innovation fund (sitra), with essentially the same goals as the cluster (industrial symbiosis, use of side streams, innovation, entrepreneurship). the industrial cluster conceptualises the bioeconomy as the activities carried out by larger industries (interview 10), aiming to promote innovation and collaboration, circular solutions and innovative ways to modernise production (interview 12). their concern is that the arctic industry’s production systems are circular and more efficient while more economic actors can create businesses by taking advantage of side streams. practitioners involved in the industrial cluster are driven by an industrial modernisation narrative applied to an industrial spatiality dominated by the forestry industry. discussion: reproducing the economic of the bioeconomy the f-bb in catalonia and finnish lapland is dominated by narratives of modernisation, industrial development, creation of jobs, income, creating value and entrepreneurship opportunities. this mirrors what other research concerned with the narratives in the bioeconomy have found. despite the bioeconomy’s potential to drive inclusive and sustainable transformations, its most relevant 182 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper feature is its presumed ability to foster regional economies, remaining at odds with environmental sustainability and human-nature interactions that do not create monetary value (schmidt et al. 2012; mustalahti 2018; ramcilovic-suominen & pülzl 2018). the following section explains this argument. this is about the economy! this is not about politics, it’s about the economy (…) about the numbers and data, not the arguments but the facts. (interview 13) while environmental ethics and climate change are usually acknowledged as the main rationale for the bioeconomy in the european, spanish and finnish strategies, the need to reconcile sustainability with economic growth and regional competitiveness is always stressed. this is reproduced by the practitioners, who see the f-bb as an alternative to address climate change while gaining competitive advantage and promoting regional growth. from the practitioners’ point of view, the bioeconomy is both a process of modernisation and a process of rural economic development. accordingly, the f-bb is implemented in industrial and rural spaces based on socio-economic interactions and acquires distinct connotations. lapland’s economy, argue the interviewees, has always been a bioeconomy because their culture and economic activities have revolved around the forests. as one interviewee puts it, “you can’t just go to a farmer and tell them about bioeconomy just like that, also, that is something they have been doing for 100 years!” (interview 13). the f-bb involves a multiplicity of spatialities (including economic but also cultural and environmental processes shaping rural spaces) and actors (including farmers, family businesses, villages, the tourist and the forest industries). yet, the main concern is how to make the forest industry circular and more efficient and how to ensure the survival of rural businesses and villages. the bioeconomy applied to rural spaces is carried out by rural inhabitants who need support to participate in profitable economic activities utilising forest resources. on the other hand, the bioeconomy applied to industrial spaces is carried out by larger and more powerful economic actors looking for support for modernising and greening their production. as explained, in lapland the f-bb strategy is contained in the regional policy for smart specialisation. the practitioners see smart specialisation as beneficial because it promotes the greening of large industries and because it creates spaces for involving more actors in profitable economic activities. however, even if arctic smartness has been influential in path development and place branding to attract private investment and european union funds, it’s contribution in promoting a wider sustainable transformation remains unclear (interview 9, meetings proceedings). widening the actors who benefit from the bioeconomy is a significant progress towards reducing spatial unevenness, yet, a shortcoming of smart specialisation is its blindness towards other forms of social interaction with the forests, non-profitable activities, sustainable use of resources, forest governance, and traditional knowledges, as pointed out by the bioeconomy critics outlined in the literature review. in addition, there is little said about the actual sustainability of the bioeconomy, how can it coexist with other economic and non-economic activities, or how it can benefit from the contributions of traditional knowledges. indeed, as the interviewees pointed out, the participation of sami communities in the bioeconomy has been rather limited (interviews 11 and 13). to summarise, applying the bioeconomy through smart specialisation in lapland does not solve the critiques amply made by previous research. rather, it reduces rural spatialities to economic constructs and sustainable development to industrial modernisation (gibbs & o’neill 2017; vivien et al. 2019; befort 2020). on the other hand, the catalonian bioeconomy either builds over already established industries or promotes the emergence of a new sector. it pushes technological breakthroughs using an existing robust network and infrastructure, or the development of an economic sector by maximising the use of an abundant resource that needs to be managed. thus, the bioeconomy is either a strategy for rural economic growth via innovation or a tool of industrial modernisation. a strategy of industrial modernisation focused on circularity and practiced by larger economic actors, or a strategy for rural economic growth that is expected to add value to the mediterranean forest biomass, creating more income for forest owners (largely private individuals with small plots of abandoned land) while improving forest management. fennia 199(2) (2021) 183diana morales the bioeconomy is often criticised because sustainability is not implicit. truth is, the bioeconomy is not necessarily sustainable but it is sold as a way to transit towards sustainable economies, but at the end you are doing more of the same, and even worst because the use of biomass is more intensive. (interview 6) the christmas [tourist] season starts earlier and earlier each year, and we are waiting for snow desperately at the beginning of the season (…) there are not enough discussions about climate change, it is very short-term thinking. (interview 9) the quotes show practitioners’ awareness about the shortcomings of implementing the bioeconomy with a strong economic narrative. the problem is not that the role of the bioeconomy in sustainability and inclusiveness is unknown, but that those narratives remain less visible in the practice of the bioeconomy. both catalonian and lapland’s interviewees acknowledged that business as usual scenarios are insufficient to address the environmental crisis. they also acknowledged the importance of conservation and the large variety of uses for forests, including activities where commodification is not yet occurring amply (for example, berries and mushroom picking). but even in these cases, the activities that receive more support are those that imply economic revenue, like ecotourism. practitioners intend to diversify the bioeconomy to reflect the spatialities and integrate the different uses of forest, but these efforts require greater support that, by the time that this research was conducted, was not provided. narratives of the bioeconomy as a process of economic growth and regional transformations may appear complementary; however, when grounded, they can turn contradictory and create spatial unevenness (see ahlqvist & sirviö 2019). this because the narratives with which practitioners design and apply the bioeconomy create stories of ‘success’, becoming the ones that turn into public policies and receive more funding (albrecht et al. 2021). those stories promote pathways, actions, strategies, and interventions to enable the desired outcomes (bauer 2018). they privilege economic over other types of social, cultural and natural processes, and pose deep implications for rural spaces. indeed, rural spatialities can be reduced to become suppliers of biomass and containers of technology, industries and infrastructure, while reinforcing the idea of a unique path to achieve sustainable development (giddings et al. 2002; ollikainen 2014; ferguson 2015; ramcilovicsuominen & pülzl 2018). clusters and innovation the prevalence of economic narratives in the bioeconomy has been pointed out in previous research. in this section i intend to expand this argument by explaining how that prevalence is partly explained by the set of policies and strategies that the practitioners and regional authorities have at hand to implement the bioeconomy. these policies and strategies, including for example incentives for innovation and entrepreneurship, regional branding to attract private investment, and support for clusters and other forms of private collaboration, are typical for the promotion of economic development, but do not address concerns of sustainability, social or environmental justice. thus, even if the bioeconomy is conceptualised as a wider regional transformation, the strategies with which it is grounded have an economic lens that do not see beyond creating economic value. we have grants of 6000 euros, we promote collaboration with technological centres with grants of up to 100.000 euros, and we promote r&d in firms with circular economy projects with grants of up to 500.000 euros if done in collaboration. these instruments are co-financed with the department of territory and sustainability and the waste agency. (interview 3) the catalonian bioeconomy means strengthening and modernising industries with a geographical connection to the region (such as production sites, headquarters, offices, subsidiaries, or r&d centres). it also means boosting an underdeveloped economic sector to promote economic development and forest management in rural areas. as shown in the quote, most of the accio strategies include providing grants and collaborating with other regional public agencies to coordinate efforts and raise funds. on the other hand, ctfc, being a research centre, invests in research and innovation from within or in collaboration with other universities or partners from other european regions. each 184 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper agency focuses on distinctive economic sectors that define how the bioeconomy is understood, shaping the interactions with other actors outside the traditional regional innovation systems (universities, firms and governments), namely consumers, providers, suppliers and rural communities. in lapland, the bioeconomy is promoted by the regional government under the smart specialisation program. the strategies chosen to coordinate the policy implementation are clusters, agglomerations where relevant actors are provided with spaces for innovation and collaboration. it puts together firms and researchers connected to the forestry industry, expecting to develop entrepreneurship and innovation further. as a result of the smart specialisation program, we [we found that] clustering is the best approach to find [and address our] priorities, not [sic] all is smart specialisation, that is a wider concept, but it helps to find those most emerging and promising collaborations. (interview 12) a crucial difference between catalonia and lapland bioeconomies is found on the bet for creating and incentivising agglomerative economies (clusters). while catalonian bioeconomy can rely on a strong regional economy and industrial development, lapland’s bioeconomy requires bigger efforts of organisation and agglomeration. due to the size, diversity and global character of catalonian economy (biorefineries, extensive research and development centres and large local and international markets), the bioeconomy is implemented through direct promotion of private innovation and entrepreneurship to produce greener goods. on the other hand, the catalonian f-bb is led by a sole actor with multiple roles. it has the job to innovate, create the markets and liaise with stakeholders, forest owners, and civil society organisations to strengthen forest governance and promote the bioeconomy as a feasible solution for the forest industry and management. the catalonian f-bb, however, is expected to benefit from the region’s strong regional economy and extensive markets. in lapland, the understanding of regional economies as clusters of prioritised economic activities dominates the discourse, programs and collaborations. arctic smartness has become not only the main strategy for implementing the bioeconomy, but a central strategy of local and regional economic growth that occupies a great part of the regional practitioners’ agenda. from the practitioners’ perspective, the bioeconomy through smart specialisation is an attractive alternative for smaller and geographically remote regions. programs such as smart specialisation, clustering, innovation, grants and collaborations to obtain funds are all typical strategies to promote regional economic development (see gibbs 2000). as the practitioners pointed out, narratives and policies of regional economic development, growth, industrialisation, entrepreneurship and innovation, are seen as ‘easier’ to materialise. the promotion of new economic geographies for production (industrial symbiosis and collaborations) and institutional arrangements (cluster or other forms of agglomeration), are attractive strategies insofar they offer solutions through actions relatively easy to implement (tax breaks, incentives to innovation, spatial redistribution and proximity) (gibbs 2000; kitchen & marsden 2011). also, results measured in terms of how many jobs are created, how many mills are transformed, how many new biorefineries were built, how many new industrial collaborations, innovations, and new businesses, are the most salient and easier to measure. however, these strategies and measures of success often overlook deeper reflections on the relationships between society, the environment and the economy (giddings et al. 2002, interviews 2 and 7 ), as well as the different layers and interactions that comprise the spatialities with which the bioeconomy will interact. as a result, the bioeconomy becomes a policy of sectorial and industrial trans-formation with questionable sustainable credentials that do not see beyond creating economic value. conclusions this paper provides material to unpack the spatialities with which the bioeconomy interacts and to reflect on the processes of implementing the bioeconomy as a policy concept. to answer whether the spatialities of the bioeconomy are reflected or overlooked in its narratives, and how this plays a role in a wider regional transformation, i analysed the bioeconomy strategies in catalonia and finnish lapland as portrayed by its practitioners. table 2 summarises the areas prioritised and overlooked within economic narratives of the bioeconomy. fennia 199(2) (2021) 185diana morales when the bioeconomy is understood as a policy concept able to create imagined futures, the narratives become powerful tools to shape the transformation process (birch 2016; bauer 2018). successful narratives (or desirable imaginations), are supported while less successful ones are left with little support. the case studies show that dominant narratives of economic growth and industrial modernisation, facilitate the transition of specific economic sectors but hide diverse socio-spatial configurations and, ultimately, downplay the role of the bioeconomy in a larger regional transformation. that prevalence is partly explained by the set of policies and strategies the practitioners have at hand to implement the bioeconomy. having no more tools than those traditionally used for regional economic growth, even if the bioeconomy is conceptualised as a wider regional transformation, the strategies with which it is grounded have an economic lens that do not see beyond creating economic value. questioning the dominant narratives and the strategies that apply and reproduce them is relevant when it comes to implementing the f-bb, as the impact on rural areas can be profound. the bioeconomy proposes a route for rural development: that forest biomass can replace fossil fuels and other materials to address climate change while stimulating economic growth, rural development and the modernisation of the forestry industry. these narratives endorse imagined futures of rural spatialities that are not only too narrow in how non-urban spaces and nature are perceived. they also overlook local knowledge, the role of farmers, indigenous communities and other rural inhabitants in rural development (see schmidt et al. 2012; mustalahti 2018). to finalise, this paper is limited by not accounting for local conflicts likely to occur when different economic actors compete for the same natural resources. a future research agenda includes questioning the relationship between the bioeconomy and local knowledges, lives and experiences. several questions remain. what kind of conflicts can emerge from an increased demand for biomass, what is the impact of a forest-based bioeconomy in regional labour markets, or how to govern the bioeconomy and biomass production when its supply depends on a multitude of actors (farmers, landowners, states, corporations)? addressing these kinds of questions is key to keep advancing our knowledge about sustainable transformations. notes 1 more details about the strategies and policies in catalonia and finnish lapland can be found in morales 2020a, 2020b. 2 the smart specialisation strategy ris3cat, the regional industrial pact, the green and circular economy strategy, eco-design strategy and the waste prevention and management program precat 20. leeni: muuta taulukon fontti oikeaksi! table 2. bioeconomy in rural spatialities industrial spatialities prioritised areas in economic growth narratives creation of jobs modernisation infrastructure natural resources income for rural inhabitants creation of jobs modernisation infrastructure natural resources greening of forestry and other industries agglomerations and collaborations circular production overlooked areas in economic growth narratives non-economic relations with nature local and traditional knowledges conservation and biodiversity spatial unevenness environmental justice sustainable use of resources conservation and biodiversity table 2. summary of identified areas within the rural and industrial spatialities within the bioeconomy. 186 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper acknowledgements thanks to the interviewees for the time and generosity with your knowledge. thanks to professor margareta dahlström and the green economies network for the comments and encouragement. references ahlqvist, t. & sirviö, h. (2019) contradictions of spatial governance: bioeconomy and the management of state space in finland. antipode 51(2) 395–418. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12498 albrecht, m., grundel, i. & morales, d. (2021) regional bioeconomies: public finance and sustainable policy narratives. geografiska annaler, series b: human geography 103(2) 116–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1921603 amundsen, h. & hermansen, e. a. (2020) green transformation is a boundary object: an analysis of conceptualisation of transformation in norwegian primary industries. environment and planning e: nature and space 4(3) 864–885. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620934337 andersson, i. & grundel, i. (2021) regional policy mobilities: shaping and reshaping bioeconomy policies in värmland and västerbotten, sweden. geoforum 121 142–151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.005 arctic smartness (n.d.) arctic smartness clusters. <https://arcticsmartness.eu/arctic-smartnessclusters/>. 12.6.2022. bauer, f. (2018) narratives of biorefinery innovation for the bioeconomy: conflict, consensus or confusion? environmental innovation and societal transitions 28 96–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2018.01.005 befort, n. (2020) going beyond definitions to understand tensions within the bioeconomy: the contribution of sociotechnical regimes to contested fields. technological forecasting and social change 153 119923. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.119923 de besi, m. & mccormick, k. (2015) towards a bioeconomy in europe: national, regional and industrial strategies. sustainability 7(8) 10461–10478. https://doi.org/10.3390/su70810461 birch, k. (2016) emergent imaginaries and fragmented policy frameworks in the canadian bioeconomy. sustainability 8(10) 1007. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8101007 bugge, m. m., hansen, t. & klitkou, a. (2016) what is the bioeconomy? a review of the literature. sustainability 8(7) 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8070691 centre de ciencia y tecnologia forestal de catalunya (n.d.) the institution. <https://www.ctfc.cat/en/>. 8.12.2021. ctfc (2018) bioregions forum. memories of the event organised by ctfc, 13 november 2018 in barcelona. <http://www.ctfc.cat/bioregions/en/>. 12.6.2022. european commission (2012) innovating for sustainable growth: a bioeconomy for europe. <https:// ec.europa.eu/research/bioeconomy/pdf/official-strategy_en.pdf>. 12.6.2022. european commission (2018) a sustainable bioeconomy for europe: strengthening the connection between economy, society and the environment. updated bioeconomy strategy. <https://op. europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/edace3e3-e189-11e8-b690-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/ format-pdf/source-85471490>. 12.6.2022. european commission (2019) the european green deal. in: commission e (ed) com (2019). brussels. ferguson, p. (2015) the green economy agenda: business as usual or transformational discourse? environmental politics 24(1) 17–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2014.919748 fritsche, u., brunori, g., chiaramonti, d., galanakis, c. m., hellweg, s., matthews, r. & panoutsou, c. (2020) future transitions for the bioeconomy towards sustainable development and a climateneutral economy. knowledge synthesis final report. the european commission’s knowledge centre for bioeconomy. <https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/jrc121212/ fritsche_et_al_%282020%29_d2_synthesis_report_final_1.pdf>. 12.6.2022. gibbs, d. (2000) ecological modernisation, regional economic development and regional development agencies. geoforum 31(1) 9–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-7185(99)00040-8 gibbs, d. & o’neill, k. (2017) future green economies and regional development: a research agenda. regional studies 51(1) 161–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2016.1255719 giddings, b., hopwood, b. & o’brien, g. (2002) environment, economy and society: fitting them together into sustainable development. sustainable development 10(4) 187–196. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.199 gobierno de españa (2018) estrategia española de bioeconomía. horizonte 2030. grundel, i. & dahlström, m. (2016) a quadruple and quintuple helix approach to regional innovation systems in the transformation to a forestry-based bioeconomy. journal of the knowledge economy 7(4) 963–983. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-016-0411-7 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12498 https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1921603 https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620934337 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.02.005 https://arcticsmartness.eu/arctic-smartness-clusters/ https://arcticsmartness.eu/arctic-smartness-clusters/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2018.01.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.119923 https://doi.org/10.3390/su70810461 https://doi.org/10.3390/su8101007 https://doi.org/10.3390/su8070691 https://www.ctfc.cat/en/ http://www.ctfc.cat/bioregions/en/ https://ec.europa.eu/research/bioeconomy/pdf/official-strategy_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/research/bioeconomy/pdf/official-strategy_en.pdf https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/edace3e3-e189-11e8-b690-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-pdf/source-85471490 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/edace3e3-e189-11e8-b690-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-pdf/source-85471490 https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/edace3e3-e189-11e8-b690-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-pdf/source-85471490 https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2014.919748 https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/jrc121212/fritsche_et_al_%282020%29_d2_synthesis_report_final_1.pdf https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/jrc121212/fritsche_et_al_%282020%29_d2_synthesis_report_final_1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-7185(99)00040-8 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2016.1255719 https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.199 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-016-0411-7 fennia 199(2) (2021) 187diana morales holmgren, s., giurca, a., johansson, j., söderlund kanarp, c., stenius, t. & fischer, k. (2022) whose transformation is this? unpacking the ‘apparatus of capture’ in sweden’s bioeconomy. environmental innovation and societal transitions 42 44–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2021.11.005 kemp, r. & never, b. (2017) green transition, industrial policy, and economic development. oxford review of economic policy 33(1) 66–84. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grw037 kitchen, l. & marsden, t. (2011) constructing sustainable communities: a theoretical exploration of the bio-economy and eco-economy paradigms. local environment 16(8) 753–769. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2011.579090 lapland university of applied sciences (2019) the usage of forest resources in finnish lapland. forest resources and bioeconomy. presentation made at karlstad university (sweden), 14th november 2019. merriman, p., jones, m., olsson, g., sheppard, e., thrift, n. & tuan, y-f. (2012) space and spatiality in theory. dialogues in human geography 2(1) 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611434864 ministry of agriculture and forestry of finland (2014) sustainable growth from bioeconomy. the finnish bioeconomy strategy. <https://biotalous.fi/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/the_finnish_ bioeconomy_strategy_110620141.pdf>. 12.6.2022. morales, d. (2020a) crs policy brief 1. regional bioeconomies in catalonia and finnish lapland. karlstad. <https://www.kau.se/files/2020-02/policy brief 1-2020 eng.pdf>. 12.6.2022. morales, d. (2020b) crs policy brief 3. public sector innovation in värmland (sweden) and finnish lapland (finland). karlstad.<https://www.kau.se/files/2020-12/crs_policybrief_nr3-2020_en_final. pdf>. 12.6.2022. morales, d. & sariego-kluge, l. (2021) regional state innovation in peripheral regions: enabling lapland’s green policies. regional studies, regional science 8(1) 54–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681376.2021.1882882 mustalahti, i. (2018) the responsive bioeconomy: the need for inclusion of citizens and environmental capability in the forest based bioeconomy. journal of cleaner production 172 3781–3790. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.06.132 ollikainen, m. (2014) forestry in bioeconomy – smart green growth for the humankind. scandinavian journal of forest research 29(4) 360–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2014.926392 pülzl, h., kleinschmit, d. & arts, b. (2014) bioeconomy – an emerging meta-discourse affecting forest discourses? scandinavian journal of forest research 29(4) 386–393. https://doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2014.920044 pülzl, h., giurca, a., kleinschmit, d., arts b. j. m., mustalahti, i., sergent, a., secco, l., pettenella, d. & brukas, v. (2017) the role of forests in bioeconomy strategies at the domestic and eu level. in winkel, e. (ed.) towards a sustainable european forest-based bioeconomy: assessment and the way forward, 36–53. european forest institute. ramcilovic-suominen, s. & pülzl, h. (2018) sustainable development – a “selling point” of the emerging eu bioeconomy policy framework? journal of cleaner production 172 4170–4180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.12.157 regional council of lapland (n.d.) arctic smartness. implementing smart specialisation in lapland. <https://arcticsmartness.eu/>. 11.1.2022. schmidt, o., padel, s. & levidow, l. (2012) the bio-economy concept and knowledge base in a public goods and farmer perspective. bio-based and applied economics 1(1) 47–63. https://doi.org/10.13128/bae-10770 seawnght, j. & gerring, j. (2008) case selection techniques in case study research: a menu of qualitative and quantitative options. political research quarterly 61(2) 294–308. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912907313077 vargas-hernández, j. g. (2019) bio-economy at the crossroads of sustainable development. in patti, s. & trizzino, g. (eds.) advanced integrated approaches to environmental economics and policy: emerging research and opportunities, 23–48. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-9562-5.ch002 viitanen, j. & mutanen, a. (2018) finnish forest section economic outlook 2018–2019. executive summary. natural resources and bioeconomy studies. natural resources institute finland (luke), helsinki. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-326-637-7 vivien, f-d., nieddu, m., befort, n., debref, r. & giampietro, m. (2019) the hijacking of the bioeconomy. ecological economics 159 189–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.01.027 walker, g. (2009) beyond distribution and proximity: exploring the multiple spatialities of environmental justice. antipode 41(4) 614–636. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00691.x wolfslehner, b., linser, s., pülzl, h., bastrup-birk, a., camia, a. & marchetti, m. (2016) forest bioeconomy – a new scope for sustainability indicators. from science to policy 4. european forest institute. https://doi.org/10.36333/fs04 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2021.11.005 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grw037 https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2011.579090 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611434864 https://biotalous.fi/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/the_finnish_bioeconomy_strategy_110620141.pdf https://biotalous.fi/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/the_finnish_bioeconomy_strategy_110620141.pdf https://www.kau.se/files/2020-02/policy https://www.kau.se/files/2020-12/crs_policybrief_nr3-2020_en_final.pdf https://www.kau.se/files/2020-12/crs_policybrief_nr3-2020_en_final.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/21681376.2021.1882882 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.06.132 https://doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2014.926392 https://doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2014.920044 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.12.157 https://arcticsmartness.eu/ https://doi.org/10.13128/bae-10770 https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912907313077 https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-9562-5.ch002 http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-326-637-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.01.027 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00691.x https://doi.org/10.36333/fs04 degrowth in city planning urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa65443 doi: 10.11143/fennia.65443 degrowth in city planning ari aukusti lehtinen lehtinen, a. a. (2018) degrowth in city planning. fennia 196(1) 43–57. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65443 this paper summarises the key arguments of degrowth thinking and examines their validity in a city planning setting. the paper argues that much of the reorientation work that is necessary to meet the goals of international climate change conventions needs to be carried out locally, in urban and regional settings, and this creates pressure to renew land-use planning practices. it also argues that in light of the latest carbon footprint studies the currently popular linking of urban planning motives with the doctrine of ‘compactness policy’ – which aims at urban core densification and accumulation of growth options – needs to be re-evaluated. the empirical part of the paper focuses on the inner city planning of joensuu, a city in eastern finland with 75,000 inhabitants which has increasingly been criticised by some residents, civil servants and civic action groups for one-sided promotion of the central city. this is, according to critics, taking place at the cost of the surrounding countryside and peri-urban nodes. the paper illustrates how the ‘tactics of growth’ become manifest in the official local planning procedure and to what degree the planning critique, explicitly or implicitly, leans on degrowth concerns. the gathering of the empirical material progressed as part of my involvement in the local degrowth movement, kohtuusliike, which actively participated in the preparation of the central joensuu general plan 2012. keywords: climate credibility, risks of urban compression, decarbonisation, overconsumption, green space, joensuu ari aukusti lehtinen, department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, p.o. box 111, fin-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: ari.lehtinen@uef.fi introduction supporting growth has long been the priority and unquestioned motivation of urban planning. urban growth is most often associated with population increase and rising employment rates, and it also regularly refers to the extension of local entrepreneurial activities and turnover rates. in addition, the diversification of services and consumption options are generally regarded as positive growth signals, as is the overall strengthening of inter-local competitiveness. moreover, the ranking of cities as a rule rewards growth production and stigmatises those that fail to grow as second-class cities. the more recent pressure of decarbonising city functions has added an element in urban growth planning. today, as goes the much-purported argument among city developers, growth needs to be spatially compressive and accumulating in order to minimise the carbon footprint of daily urban operations. compact cities and densely built city centres are regarded as climate friendly. accordingly, climate concern has become established as the explicit rationale for densifying regional city dynamics (newman & kenworthy 1989; kenworthy 2006; dodman 2009; haarstad 2016; sireni 2016; © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65443 44 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers haarstad & oseland 2017). however, some recent studies on the changes of carbon emissions caused by urban compression have shown that the actual footprints do not necessarily follow the initial thesis. climate strain seems to grow when populations are concentrated due to changes in consumption patterns. urbanisation comes across as resulting in increasingly consumptive lifestyles with increasing levels of carbon emissions. this change seems to exceed the possible reductions of carbon emissions caused by the (estimated) decrease in mobility during urban densification (vandeweghe & kennedy 2007; mclean et al. 2015; ottelin et al. 2015; lehtinen 2017a). this compression critique has not influenced on the preferred trends in urban planning. in general, growth is still the primary objective, though in a highly selective form: favouring concentrations of population and consumption. it is widely believed and argued that spatial growth accumulation promotes decarbonisation. degrowth has not been accepted as a serious alternative despite the widening academic and public debate arguing for it (gorz 1979; victor 2008; jackson 2009; latouche 2009). the necessity of reductions in urban consumption has therefore not been regarded as central in mainstream urban planning. this is, however, a remarkable area of tension in contemporary city development. the dominating doctrine argues that decarbonisation is possible by promoting growth accumulation whereas critics say there is no empirical proof for such a linkage. instead of growth plans, critics favour transition programmes that focus on lowering carbon emissions by diminishing the throughput of energy and matter (e.g. harribey 2011; mälgand et al. 2014; barr & pollard 2017). decarbonisation, they say, is not possible when the overall and per capita throughput is increasing, and this seems to be the case in growth centres. this leads to a number of important questions. why do the promoters of growth lean on and utilise climate concerns rather simplistically? in what way is the growth-critical opposition taken into consideration? what about the climate credibility of growth planning? what kind of motives, rhetoric and techniques can be singled out while studying the tactics employed under the dominant doctrine? how does the degrowth opposition successfully argue for the transition to reduce the throughput of energy and matter? the present study answers these questions by first summarising the main points of degrowth thinking, especially in relation to urban compression and climate change responsibility. second, the paper uses an empirical analysis of growth planning in joensuu, a city of 75,000 inhabitants in eastern finland, and the opposition to it to focus on degrowth issues. finally, the confrontational setting is distilled, focusing on the priorities and tactics of compressive growth vis-a-vis the demands and promises of degrowth planning. arguing for degrowth degrowth, or the post-growth agenda, is a critical research and action programme that questions the background premises and dominant emphases of the growth society. it has grown and spread steadily during the last 15 years and has recently been labelled as the “rebirth of a radical environmentalism” (kallis & march 2015, 360). degrowth scholars and activists aim at freeing the political sphere from the dominant economic thinking which, “links prosperity exclusively with continuous growth in materially and monetarily measurable economic performance” (schulz & bailey 2014, 280). moreover, economic growth is criticised for being the only acceptable rationale in urban planning, leading to the impression that local solutions remain non-communicative with concerns about the planetary limits that humankind is currently facing (see bailey et al. 2010; north 2010; graugaard 2012). the degrowth critique is generally sceptical toward programmes of urban compactness policy that promote forceful rebuilding. it is concerned that the central areas under compression will become densely built and lose their green spaces and older layers of urban architecture while the estate values on the fringes of such centres will decline. the degrowth movement is critical of the fundamental divisions of labour between areas of intense redevelopment and areas with decaying infrastructure. consequently, degrowth’s concern is easily linked to the support of autonomy and relocalisation, and against the exacerbation of dependencies (latouche 2010, 521; kallis et al. 2015, 8). fennia 196(1) (2018) 45ari aukusti lehtinen in addition, degrowth advocates have insistently pointed out the key fallacies of the growth doctrine. they argue that once economic growth reaches a certain stage, it fails to increase welfare and employment. this threshold was, according to them, already reached in the 1970s and 1980s in many countries of the developed world (schneider et al. 2010, 512; eskelinen 2011; papadopoulou 2011, 18–19; oecd 2015). furthermore, they have illustrated that belief in qualitative growth decoupled from environmental degradation is based on false presumptions. on the contrary, upgrading human prosperity has always and everywhere, without exceptions, resulted in expansive strain on the environment (schneider et al. 2010, 512; schulz & bailey 2014, 280; kallis et al. 2015, 6–7). it is also argued that facts against this rule are simply the result of statistical weaknesses like, for example, the exclusion of carbon emissions caused by imported energy and goods (e.g. heinonen & junnila 2012; ottelin et al. 2015). moreover, instead of reiterating the overall risks and outcomes of global population increase, the degrowth critique shows that almost half of private carbon emissions are due to the overconsumption of the richest 10% of humankind (oxfam 2015; joutsenvirta et al. 2016, 156). degrowth thinking also attacks the fallacy of the effectiveness of mainstream growth by arguing that the actual rise of effectiveness in the contemporary world can only be achieved by diminishing the use of energy and material, and through their equitable division (kallis et al. 2015; joutsenvirta et al. 2016). furthermore, degrowth scholars argue that the goals of actual effectiveness and consumption decrease can only be achieved by strengthening political regulation which leans on forceful tariff and tax policies, adequate environmental licensing and emission limits. this type of policy should specifically target major exploiters and polluters ( joutsenvirta et al. 2016). degrowth thinking is hence firmly grounded in the vision of a society which consumes less natural resources. it aims at the equitable downscaling of production and consumption resulting in radical reductions and reorientations of the overall metabolism of societies. the focus is on qualitative changes that prioritise questions of health and education. it supports policies grounded on broad socio-environmental responsibility, especially developing welfare work and the reproductive practices of sharing and caring, which also extend to non-human communities and environmental restoration concerns (kallis et al. 2015). it therefore aims at profound social change based on environmental citizenship, politics of relocalisation and the economy of the commons (brangsch 2011, 63–64; eskelinen 2011, 12; kallis & march 2015, 366). degrowth strategies prioritise local transitions that reduce energy and material consumption, which are claimed to yield reductions of import costs and enhance self-sufficiency. in addition, urban degrowth prefers pedestrian safety, extensive bicycling networks and well-functioning public transportation. it also creatively utilises the existing floor spaces of housing, retail stores and offices ( joutsenvirta et al. 2016, 170–171). consequently, local degrowth initiatives resonate well with urban transition campaigns aiming at low carbon communities (mälgand et al. 2014; schulz & bailey 2014; barr & pollard 2017). degrowth and transition movements foster local actions that reduce environmental impacts, energy consumption and carbon emissions; they both also concentrate on the renewal of urban mobility infrastructure. much emphasis is cast on social innovations developing affordances that help households free themselves from the strains of privately-owned automobiles. mobility is then increasingly regarded as a service (kanninen et al. 2010; kamargianni et al. 2015). similarly, both in degrowth and transition campaigns, the determinism of evermore housing space per capita is challenged by neighbourhood and household level initiatives that creatively re-design rooms for housing (d’alisa & cattaneo 2013; cattaneo & gavalda 2015; lietaert 2015). as part of this renewal, land-use planning is seen as an instrument that can and needs to be developed into a means that supports qualitative maintenance and upgrading. it is argued that this type of qualitative turn in land-use planning offers a feasible alternative to the still largely dominant volume-orientation in urban development. the indoor and outdoor spaces of city centres are, in the degrowth reorientation, primarily regarded as multicultural arenas, meeting places, and attractive areas of dwelling, instead of competitive growth motors that fuel general economic prospects by steadily raising consumption demands. city planning is thus fundamentally divorced from its current associations to volume production (lehtinen & pyy 2017). 46 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers the degrowth planning initiatives focus on and invite these changes in the cultures of mobility, housing and consumption. it is argued that this alternative, though still sporadic and contingent, actually exists and unveils pathways of decarbonisation. it is also underlined that the suggested transition would radically redefine the ideologies and practices of urban planning ( joutsenvirta et al. 2016, 170–171). studying degrowth conditions in joensuu the empirical part of this study was conducted by identifying the formulations that take a stance on growth versus degrowth issues from the land-use policy debate in joensuu. particular attention was paid to the intersections of the dominant and opposing planning argumentations and their positioning in the master plan procedure. the method chosen here is an application of critical reading, or contrapuntal reading, where the researcher identifies both the explicit topics and the hidden or poorly communicated themes in the studied material. in this way it is possible to formulate the more general societal and ideological setting informing the different articulations, but this also enables the composition of nonconformist angles to the specific setting under research. this type of reading thus extends to poorly communicated issues, or those that are entirely ignored by some key stakeholders (said 1991, 1993, 59–60; pöysä 2010; sawatzky 2013; kaakinen & lehtinen 2016). the critical reading was divided into four phases. first, the main thematic hot spots were identified and described, including the dialogical dynamics attached to tensions in compactness policy, landuse intensification, traffic planning, architectural change and green spaces in joensuu. second, the episodes of non-communication were pointed out and documented, both externally in relation to opposing stakeholders and internally in the form of ruptures and decoupling between the agreed upon planning goals and their implementation. third, signs of non-verbalised or non-reflected production of urban growth were collected, and the tactics of decoupling extracted from within the evidence already presented. finally, the explicit and implicit linkages to degrowth alternatives were gathered from the arguments of planning critics. the empirical material consists of the master plan documents, the written civic statements and comments, the juridical complaints and court decisions concerning the master plan, and the planner’s written responses to critics. in addition, the local media debate linked to the planning procedure was utilised. the practical participatory part of the study progressed as part of my involvement in the local degrowth movement, kohtuusliike1. i was involved as an expert on land-use planning and as the secretary of the planning group of the movement during the preparation of the master plan (mp) (2010–2012) and in the subsequent juridical process addressed to the regional administrative court (rac). as the secretary of the planning group, i wrote the movements’s statement to the mp’s goal formulation (20 dec 2010), the statement to the mp draft (13 feb 2011) and the reminder to the mp proposal (5 oct 2011). during the court process, i wrote the juridical claim (16 jan 2013) and response (19 march 2013) to the court statement by the municipal planner who had reacted to our complaint. participation in the planning process included active involvement in mp briefings from 2010–2012 (lehtinen 2014a, 2014b). growth planning and degrowth initiatives in joensuu radical restructuring of the inner city of joensuu was launched in 1962 by a detailed plan which promised thorough modernisation. the traditional wooden town was to be completely rebuilt as blocks of flats, with four storeys being the preferred standard. this is what occurred during the following decades and central joensuu gradually acquired a uniform appearance. this restructuring resulted in the concentration of approximately 10,000 inhabitants in the inner city of about 1.5 km2. in the early 1990s it became obvious that the land-use intensity of the city centre had been left too low. international trends, driven by climate change concerns, promoted densification and complementary building. in joensuu, compressive planning was adopted as the key content of sustainable development, and it also served as the justification for tearing down the last fennia 196(1) (2018) 47ari aukusti lehtinen remaining wooden houses that had not gained conservation status in the city’s core (nevalainen 2004, 170–174). the compression planning turned into a new phase of intense redevelopment in the early 2000s, and the boom has not shown any signs of weakening since. on the contrary, the spatial growth accumulation strategy was reinforced from 2010–2015 in the master plan process. the intense and multiphase planning process ended in the supreme administrative court of finland, which finally rejected all juridical complaints in 2015. the lengthy campaign, as was then summarised by the critics (lehtinen 2014a, 2014b), resulted in only one minor, if symbolically important, success in the regional administrative court: the intention to tear down the wanha jokela restaurant building was deemed illegal (fig. 1, see also hurskainen 2011; rautio & longi 2013). according to the master plan, compressive growth in joensuu is to be conducted by remarkably increasing the land-use intensity and automobile use in the inner city. the aim is to add residential attractiveness and commercial competitiveness to the centre. densification is to begin through inventories of building potentials both in already-built areas and in green spaces. in addition, traffic problems are to be solved by establishing a dense network of roundabouts encircling the planned underground parking hall below the central market square. moreover, as an extension to the master plan, the central railway station area at the eastern end of central joensuu is to be filled with blocks of flats earmarked for commercial, office and residential purposes (fig. 2). in contrast, juridical complaints about the master plan focused on the costs of continuous compression, especially the loss of green spaces and older layers of the city centre2. these complaints were formulated by groups that were highly involved in the master plan process, such as local nature conservationists ( joensuun luonnonystävät), kohtuusliike and the pro-wanha jokela movement. in addition, many individuals were also active in writing complaints about the planned riverside land-use. fig. 1. the wanha jokela restaurant building, closed since 2012, returns to the agenda in 2018 – as an issue of detailed planning. the painting by heli kemiläinen decorates the cover of the album turha kylä ilman jokelaa (pilfink records 2011). the album contains 17 songs by finnish musicians supporting the restaurant. copyright anita latola. 48 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers questions of degrowth were explicitly argued by kohtuusliike during the planning process. in addition, those participants who emphasised issues of environmental or cultural conservation often, more or less implicitly, returned to concerns of overestimated development options causing damage to historical city architecture and green spaces. in general, the degrowth critique attempted to redirect and repoliticise the planning debate, which otherwise tended to favour technical and isolated features, such as individual buildings and building options, traffic arrangements in specific locations and the riverside hot spots. degrowth thinking also surfaced in statements defending common outdoor and indoor spaces, such as parks and the wanha jokela restaurant milieu, from intrusive land-speculation. finally, during the planning process kohtuusliike repeatedly returned to the planner’s rationales for remarkably adding housing and commercial space, and automobile intensity to the inner city. according to kohtuusliike, planning ought to follow the climate and energy commitments signed by the city and favour solutions which guide the public towards lessening community-specific consumption of energy and goods. growth emerging, for example, from rising local throughput resonates poorly with the latest planetary conventions. the master plan largely ignored the transition duties facing individual communities and the humankind in general. kohtuusliike starkly questioned the plan’s realism. the expectations bound to increases in population and consumption trends largely ignored the local and provincial prospects, which do not promise much growth in the city. moreover, the one-sided favouring of the city’s core was regarded by the kohtuusliike movement as regionally irresponsible while undermining the wishes of the smaller provincial centres in north karelia. fig. 2. major planning disputes in central joensuu in the 2010s. copyright noora rämö. contains data from the national land survey of finland topographic database 03/2018 fennia 196(1) (2018) 49ari aukusti lehtinen tactics of growth the episode in joensuu described above is a telling example of the poor planning coordination that handed decision-making power in the most central planning questions to juridical experts. for most of the participants in the planning process it must have been annoying that judges of the administrative courts had to be called upon to solve local planning problems. the critics generally felt that active civic participation in the master plan’s goal formulation, drafting and proposal-making resulted in nothing. planning was, according to the critics, forwarded by the city planners without serious willingness to engage in reciprocal co-management – which is a central imperative in the finnish land use and building act (lba, see ekroos & majamaa 2005). the number of juridical complaints, initially nine to the regional administrative court (rac) and then eight to the supreme administrative court (sac), highlights this collective civic disappointment3. why did the planning process fail to such an extent that the court cases became unavoidable? the politics of compression in joensuu, ongoing since the 1990s, clearly provoked the juridical complaints. active citizens, who had long followed the city planning performance in joensuu, finally had to rise up and speak their voices to question the reasonability and limits of such straightforward urban densification. these critics mainly reacted to individual planning details but they also questioned the general trend dominating city planning. in addition, the necessity to change the entire planning ideology in joensuu was pointed out and reasoned (rac 2014). the high number of juridical complaints reflects the broad feelings of disappointment among the critics but it also reveals the weaknesses of the planning process. it was thought that the planning authorities had misinterpreted the imperative of direct participation, the right of citizens to be involved, emphasised in lba (bäcklund 2002; bäcklund & mäntysalo 2010). listening to critical voices was limited to formal hearings where the agenda was carefully designed beforehand by civil servants and staff members of the private consulting company (at the request of the city planning authorities). the number and diversity of the critical voices led the city planners towards an easy solution. “all concerns could not be taken into consideration,” replied the joensuu city planning office to the juridical complaints ( joensuu 2013, 7). this banal factum contained the connotation that the planner can decide whose voices deserve to be taken into consideration. the power to rank voices strengthened the city planner’s own voice. due to shortcomings in direct participation, the social licence of the planning procedure rested on the democratic vigour of representative participation. the elected members of the city council and board controlled the progress of planning and commented on the draft and the master plan proposal. however, the long and technically demanding process made it difficult for local politicians to keep an eye on the plan’s advancement. the political mandate rested on the skills, courage and schedules of individual council and board members (lehtinen 2014b, 125). the contested interface between the town planning staff and citizens, including their representatives, shows the bearing of local democracy. on one hand, from the side of the authorities, planning is undoubtedly demanding as it has to progress despite the tensions and contrasting pressures attempting to influence it. the plurality of town concerns has to be reduced into a compromise, a kind of single model that can be defended during the years of planning and implementation. the defence of the reductions, quite understandably, becomes a contest over authority (rajaniemi 2006). decisions and agreements once made result in ‘artefacts’ that, from the participants’ points of view, tend to freeze the planning procedure ( jokinen 2005). in joensuu, the planning authorities seem to have frozen the local implementation of climate concerns into a prior model of densification. the compression of the inner city is said to serve the purposes of decarbonisation and its defence is grounded on the compromises initially made in the 1990s. scientific evidence (vandeweghe & kennedy 2007; mclean et al. 2015; ottelin et al. 2015) has shown the fragility of such a compromise but the model is still regarded as the core doctrine of city development in joensuu. this frozen setting has been noticed by critical researchers who have brought up the question of hidden motives of inner city densification. compressive planning, in practice, favours land developers’ private motives at the cost of green spaces and historical architecture (kortelainen & vartiainen 2000). 50 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers the master plan process (2010–2015) confirmed the existence of tactical decoupling4 as climate concerns were favoured only when they supported other master plan goals. city compression, explicitly motivated by local decarbonisation, results in inner city restructuring which supports the financial aims of land developers. this linkage is confirmed by land-use agreements made between the planning authorities and private developers before the public planning procedure was launched (lehtinen 2017a). decoupling in joensuu planning offers a vision of spatially accumulating growth that is good for the planetary climate. this is to be achieved by significantly densifying the inner city, both for housing and commercial purposes. in addition, automobile use is encouraged in the inner city due to prognoses relying on the continuity of traffic growth witnessed in the past. hence, if we follow the explicit argumentation of the planning authorities, decarbonisation is to be carried out by making joensuu’s downtown an increasingly attractive and consuming growth centre in north karelia. this tactic, when examined through the lens of decoupling, serves the dominant trends and private financial interests. the planning profession is, in this respect, reduced to operative guidance which primarily adjusts to dominant and estimated development pressures. the guidance and controlling potential of planning is lost. in this light, the practices of direct and representative participation serve as a veil or mask5 that both conceals and legitimises the already-agreed upon, and frozen, governance of the city. participation becomes a ritual which has no significant influence on the end result. this is disturbing, especially when contrasted with the imperatives of lba, which demand that the planning authorities carefully listen to the concerns emerging from participation, both direct and representative, and proceed in the planning task accordingly. in order to utilise participation as a mask, the planner is obliged to continuously renew the tactic that maintains the decoupling. the following manoeuvres, or tricks, were utilised in the operative conducting of the joensuu master plan. first, decoupling dissociated the general goals from practical priorities in traffic planning. in general, at the level of goals and during the entire planning process all forms of transportation were said to be treated equally. in practice, however, the quick promotion of roundabouts and general fluency of private driving in the city centre soon revealed the hidden priorities. this meant that citizens could not raise their concerns during planning as there was no reason to comment on the balanced goal setting. and then, afterwards, protests were simply too late. goal setting casting equal weight on all modes of transportation could surely be criticised from the start as being unjust due to the long history of favouring automobiles in joensuu. as the ease of driving private cars has been the primary motive for at least half a century in the city, including its central parts, equalisation would now mean first supporting pedestrians and bicyclists as well as public transportation. in addition, especially if following some international spearheads of urban mobility renewal (kamargianni et al. 2015; barr & pollard 2017), the equalisation of traffic in joensuu would also require effective limitations, taxation or fees on private driving. cycling development is perhaps the most striking example of tactical decoupling in joensuu. the town is famous for the popularity of its year-round cycling and this practice is broadly advertised in the official marketing of the town. however, only a few kilometres of cycling paths exist in joensuu’s centre. most cyclists therefore use those paths that are assigned to all non-motorised vehicles or alternatively, and at their own risk, join car lanes. the popularity of cycling in joensuu is mainly due to poor public transportation conditions: the bicycle is, in fact, a year-round necessity for many inhabitants (lehtinen 1997; pyy 2017). second, the pielisjoki river, which runs through central joensuu, also became tactical material for the master plan promoters. the densification of the central city is highly focused on sites by the river. blocks of houses were proposed to be situated in central locations along the river, which is a landscape of national importance according to the finnish heritage agency and the government of finland (lehtinen 2014a, 121). in addition, the detailed planning during and immediately after the completion of the master plan incorporates the opposite shore of the river into intense development. blocks of houses and high-rise towers from 12–14 storeys have been proposed. apartments in highrise blocks with views over the river are attractive for private developers due to the potential maximum financial returns per square metre. construction businesses move towards centres of growth and the question of joensuu’s position in intercity growth ranking is broadly seen as directly reflecting the skills of the planning apparatus. growth is therefore the only alternative for the fennia 196(1) (2018) 51ari aukusti lehtinen planning authorities, and it is to be achieved, for example, at the cost of those centres and regions below any growth options. growth contestation in joensuu has resulted in a series of land-use agreements between developers and the planning authorities. these contracts condition the public procedures of planning and they also force the planner to develop tactics clever enough to confirm their a priori agreements in the final plan document. this dependency, and tactic, was masked in the pielisjoki riverscape planning through the vision of a symmetrical town with equal development on both shores of the river. the promise of symmetry convinced citizens and their representatives to such an extent that no broader doubt emerged, for example, about the consequences of the growth scenario or its reliability in general. third, the planning tactic was set forth in the development of the green spaces of hasanniemi, the southern peninsula of central joensuu at the mouth of the river. the aged forest area in the centre of the peninsula is planned to be significantly reduced by a housing development and general infrastructure expansion, despite widespread civic resistance which first emerged in the late 1990s and again during the master plan process. the civic concern in both episodes arose from the fear of losing the only forest area in central joensuu, which has served as an important outdoor recreation target for local residents for a long time. the planning authorities reacted to the first wave of critics by withdrawing from the housing development in the 1990s but returned to the issue as part of the master plan. this time the response to concerns was clothed in an ecological inventory which showed that no species under the risk of extinction could be found in the immediate area proposed for housing ( joensuu 2012, 18). the move was an excellent example of non-communication in environmental planning (kaakinen & lehtinen 2016). the subsequent decision to continue housing and infrastructure development in the area forced the critical citizens to take the case to court. three of the nine juridical complaints brought to the regional administrative court raised the question of the development of the hasanniemi forest. the tactic of ignoring the outdoor recreation concerns and, instead, focusing on species at risk was successful as all the complaints were rejected in the regional and supreme administrative courts. the court’s explicit justification emphasised that the planned development area is small (e.g. 7,500 m2 for housing) and that the koivuniemi park nearby meets the demands for local outdoor recreation well enough (rac 2014). the court thus equated the recreation values of the aged, uneven stand of forest in hasanniemi with those of the koivuniemi park, which has a younger, even-aged stand of trees. consequently, the hasanniemi forest is currently being drawn into the detailed planning and the proposal now aims at an expansion of the number of single houses, increasing the initial five to eight building sites up to ten. however, the discovery of a nesting couple of highly threatened whitebacked wood-peckers (dendrocopos leucotos) near the planned housing area was made public in december 2017 (kauhanen 2017). city planners have not reacted to this news but, as the nest is not inside the defined development area, detailed planning most likely continues unaffected. this would be in accordance with the conclusions of the earlier inventory results which stated that, “no species under the risk of extinction could be found in the immediate area planned for housing construction.” ( joensuu 2012, 18) however, the hasanniemi conflict clearly illustrates the planning authorities’ intention to use the city centre’s green spaces, even the most central and valued aged forest, as a reserve for its compactness policy. the general goal of town compression seems to legitimise the reduction of those outdoor recreation amenities that have been starkly defended by the inhabitants. alternatively, as was worried in a local publicity (olli 2012), the planning authorities have already agreed to offer these highly attractive building sites for private purposes. however, no proof of an a priori agreement could be found in planning documents. discussion: toward degrowth planning the compression policy in joensuu can, as was done above, be evaluated as a tactical performance or a systematic decoupling operating with hidden priorities, mask constructions and acts of noncommunication. however, city compression can be situated in a more general setting where it is 52 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers linked to both local environmental concerns and international policy pressures demanding actual progress in decarbonisation. densification that results in shrinking green spaces in the city core is incompatible with climate policy favouring urban parks, forests and individual trees as elements that provide shelter from strong winds and intense periods of heat. green spaces in the city centre also offer easy access to nature for all citizens, including those without their own car to drive to more distant outdoor recreation areas. accordingly, city development that seriously promotes climate responsibility would not easily allow building to expand at the expense of green spaces. it would, instead, concentrate on those building sites already partially occupied. the fact that the planning authorities in joensuu have disagreed with this and, on the contrary, allowed significant building pressure to be directed towards the riverbanks and the hasanniemi forest highlights the policy tactics adopted. concern for climate issues informs planning when it supports other aspects of city development. in other words, climate policy submits to spatial growth accumulation. the question here is about the climate credibility of the city’s development. despite active civic pressure, planning in joensuu has not contained much environmental innovativeness or many proclimate acts. this gives the impression that local development has been rushed only to have it completed before more restrictive climate policy is introduced via international conventions, especially as part of eu policy measures. currently, it seems that the city planning authorities are waiting for guidance from above and the citizens’ concerns have not weighed enough to influence a major turn in city development. moreover, the frozen setting of planning is also impervious to those critically innovative voices that have arisen from within the city administration itself. joensuu is participating in a nation-wide decarbonisation programme, which aims at reducing 80% of local climate emissions from 2007 to 2030 (pkm 2016). this commitment, however, does not seem to concern the planning authorities investing in city compression, the fluency of private automobile driving, consumption increase and growth accumulation, or, in one word: throughput. this is a sign of decoupling and non-communication within the city administration6. despite their largely critical tone, the opponents of the master plan 2012 process also included suggestions for alternative development in joensuu. instead of the one-sided favouring of the city core, the critics would strengthen the existing composition of a regional city by maintaining and developing the existing polycentral infrastructure on an equal basis. this type of planning would be developed by improving the general liveability and environmental quality of the centres and areas surrounding the major core. in this case, the mobility services of the areas and between the regional centres would also be strengthened to such an extent that the need for private cars would decrease. the degrowth concern of the critics hence favoured respectful maintenance and slow renewal of the existing polycentral regionality, supported by innovations in mobility services. intense redevelopment due to urban compression was deemed a social and ecological burden. in addition, the critical statements on traffic planning included advice on effective equalisation of inner city mobility. instead of prioritising private automobile fluency in the city’s core, the city planners were asked to promote the conditions of public transportation, pedestrians and bicycling. rather detailed traffic plan suggestions were formulated in the official master plan briefings. the degrowth planning initiatives were explicitly grounded on an aim to advance just mobility but at the same time they were broadly aware of the optional pros of reducing the use of private automobiles, both at the level of the city and within individual households. moreover, the critics seemed to highly appreciate the layered composition of downtown joensuu, both in terms of architecture and greeneries. the master plan critique emphasised the idea of a city that appreciates the historical merits of its present make-up. a unique city core was favoured, instead of intense densification motivated by general growth accumulation options and intercity growth-rankings. a shift away from volume-orientation toward qualitative planning was proposed, aiming at the upgrading of the daily living conditions. the degrowth thinking here was associated with an emphasis on qualitative city renewal – which, if applied and developed systematically, would result in a thorough change to the city’s planning culture. fennia 196(1) (2018) 53ari aukusti lehtinen the alternative plan for joensuu, when reconstituted from the comments of the master plan’s degrowth critics, is clearly grounded on an understanding that the upward trends in city compression and consumption must be reduced. the primary motive arises from climate and environmental concerns but it is also informed by the awareness of the major causes of the problems in the city’s overall economy: the vulnerability of a city deeply mired with overconsumption. the critics thus argue that degrowth planning can be used as a means to balance the local budget deficit caused by rising import and overconsumption costs – it can be seen as a tool to critically examine the constituents of local throughput. finally, the presence of the rather broad critical front stood as a request to radically renew the local planning culture. the opposition, based on its sole active presence, seemed to demand the thawing of the frozen planning setting. city planning, the critics argued, should be developed out in the open and without hidden contracts, tactical manoeuvres and systematic non-communication. planning should move towards co-planning where openly debated disagreements are seen as enriching the process. the voices of the critical front hence contained a call for adding transparency and inclusiveness in the planning of joensuu. in broader city planning literature this type of forwardlookingness is sometimes called agonistic planning (bäcklund & mäntysalo 2010; rannila & loivaranta 2015; bäcklund et al. 2017). degrowth politics, in other words, cannot be separated from the orderly unmasking of central city planning dependencies. notes 1 kohtuusliike was launched in 2009 to promote cultural, political and economic changes that result in the decreased consumption of natural resources in north karelia. the movement has aimed at initiating degrowth alternatives that support moderate ways of thinking, decent ways of living and socio-environmentally just solutions. as part of this work, the movement has participated in regional development and planning debates concerning the future of the province. the emphasis of degrowth issues is central to the movement and it is greatly inspired by similar international initiatives. kohtuusliike can accordingly be seen as a local actor within a broader international degrowth movement (http://www.kohtuusvaarassa.com/). 2 five of the nine complaints addressed central land-use planning issues. in addition, the democracy of the master plan process was questioned by kohtuusliike. the remaining complaints were restricted to private property issues, such as strains on individual land owners due to the plan (rac 2014). the continued complaints to the supreme administrative court were reduced to eight as kohtuusliike regarded its complaint as not being valid enough for further elaboration. moreover, the planning authorities of joensuu did not see the court decision (deeming the plan to tear the wanha jokela restaurant building illegal) as worth bringing to the supreme administrative court. however, the fate of the building will become an issue of detailed planning in 2018. 3 the number of planning complaints linked to the master plan processes was high compared to the average in eastern finland, which varied from one to four from 2013–2015 and were only connected to the most heated questions (rac 2016). of course, most planning decisions never go to court. those citizens who are active in city planning and are disposed to proceed all the way to court represent only a small minority of the population in joensuu. this is also often underlined by the city planners. in this way the planners stigmatise active citizens: instead of regarding them as enriching planning, they are seen as a nuisance delaying the process. 4 tactical decoupling here refers to the tendency of political and planning activities to support dominant practices while explicitly aiming to solve problems that are in fact created under the dominant conditions. decoupling may be developed into systematic divergence between political intention and effect (donner-amnell et al. 2004, 268; lehtinen 2012). 5 the interpretation of participation as a mask has been documented by jussi semi (2017) in a suburban planning context. he identifies episodes of official framing where promoting participation is channelled to produce increasingly competitive individuals and neighbourhoods to strengthen overall competitiveness. participation is not primarily regarded as something valuable in itself. participation can also be developed to serve as a means to soften and hide actual injustices in http://www.kohtuusvaarassa.com/ 54 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers administration and policy routines. mask construction can be seen as a decisive element in tactical decoupling4. 6 the calculations of decarbonisation in joensuu follow the general guidelines provided by the international panel on climate change (ippc) and finnish environmental centre (syke). they advise local actors to refrain from counting the major share of those carbon emissions from international production and transportation chains that are caused by, for example, local consumption of groceries and consumer goods (ottelin et al. 2015; joensuu 2016; lehtinen 2017b). this exclusion has resulted in the impression of local growth economies being able to become climate-friendly. consequently, the local climate programme has recently become a growth-legitimating element in joensuu (http://www.joensuu.fi/ilmasto-ohjelma). acknowledgements i owe a major debt to the activists of kohtuusliike for co-participating in the joensuu master plan procedure and causing the degrowth issue to become an important question in the plan preparation. in addition, warm thanks are due to merja maukonen, ilkka pyy, jussi semi and jenna taajamo, my partners in the ‘symmetric city’ research group (2015–2018), for intense debates significantly upgrading the content of this paper. thanks are likewise due to matthew sawatzky for correcting my english and noora rämö for drawing the map of joensuu. finally, i also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the paper. references bäcklund, p. (2002) miten kuulla asukasta? kaupunkitila ja osallisuuden haasteet. in bäcklund, p., häkli, j. & schulman, h. (eds.) osalliset ja osaajat. kansalaiset kaupungin suunnittelussa, 141–157. gaudeamus, helsinki. bäcklund, p. & mäntysalo, r. (2010) agonism and institutional ambiguity: ideas on democracy and the role of participation in the development of planning theory and practice – the case of finland. planning theory 9(4) 333–350. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210373684 bäcklund, p., häkli, j. & schulman, h. (eds.) (2017) kansalaiset kaupunkia kehittämässä. tampere university press, tampere. bailey, i., hopkins, r. & wilson, g. (2010) some things odd, some things new: the spatial representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement. geoforum 41(4) 595–605. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.08.007 barr, s. & pollard, j. (2017) geographies of transition: narrating environmental activism in an age of climate change and ‘peak oil’. environment and planning a 49(1) 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x16663205 brangsch, l. (2011) economic “indicators” are really about power. political dimensions of object and method in debates on growth. transform! european journal for alternative thinking and political dialogue 3 44–60. <https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01>. 23.01.2018. cat t aneo, c. & gavalda, m. (2015) the experience of urban squat s in collserola, barcelona: what kind of degrow th? journal of cleaner produc tion 18 (6) 581–589. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.01.010 d ’a lisa, g. & cat t aneo, c. (2013) household work and energ y consumption: a degrow th per spec tive, cat alonia ’s case s tudy. journal of cleaner produc tion 38 71–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.11.058 donner-amnell, j., lehtinen, a. & saether, b. (2004) comparing the forest regimes in the conifer north. in lehtinen, a., donner-amnell, j. & saether, b. (eds.) politics of forest. northern forestindustrial regimes in the age of globalization, 255–284. ashgate, aldershot. dodman, d. (2009) blaming cities for climate change? an analysis of urban greenhouse gas emissions. environment and urbanization 21(1) 185–201. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247809103016 ekroos, a. & majamaa, v. (2005) maankäyttöja rakennuslaki. helsinki, edita. eskelinen, t. (2011) growth – an indicator of the past. transform! european journal for alternative thinking and political dialogue 3 7–14. <https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_ newsletter_3_2011_01>. 23.01.2018. http://www.joensuu.fi/ilmasto-ohjelma https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210373684 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.08.007 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x16663205 https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.01.010 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.11.058 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247809103016 https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01 https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01 fennia 196(1) (2018) 55ari aukusti lehtinen gorz, a. (1979) ekologi och politik. bokomotiv förlags ab, stockholm. graugaard, j. (2012) a tool for building community resilience? a case study of the lewes pound. local environment 17 243–260. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.660908 haarstad, h. (2016) where are urban energ y transitions governed? conceptualizing the complex governance arrangements for low carbon mobilit y in europe. cities 54 4–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.10.013 haarstad, h. & oseland, s. e. (2017) historicizing urban sustainability: the shifting ideals behind forus industrial park, norway. international journal of urban and regional research 41(6) 838–854. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12551 harribey, j-m. (2011) let’s talk about money, value and wealth. transform! european journal for alternative thinking and political dialogue 3 21–32. <https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/ transform_newsletter_3_2011_01>. 23.01.2018. heinonen, j. & junnila, s. (2012) yhdyskuntarakenne, elämäntavat ja ilmastonmuutos. aalto yliopiston julkaisusarja tiede+teknologia. aalto yliopisto, helsinki. hurskainen, a. (2011) eri esittäjiä: wanha jokela. <http://www.desibeli.net/arvostelu/5394>. 26.03.2018. jackson, t. (2009) prosperity without growth. earthscan, london. joensuu (2012) joensuun keskustan osayleiskaava, kaavaluonnoksen palauteraportti 16.3.2012. joensuun kaupunginhallitus, joensuu. joensuu (2013) lausunto joensuun keskustan osayleiskaavan hyväksymistä koskevista valituksista. pöytäkirjanote kh 11/18.3.2013. joensuun kaupunginhallitus, joensuu. joensuu (2016) hiilineutraali joensuu 2015. joensuun kaupunki, ympäristönsuojelu, joensuu. jokinen, a. (2005) luonnonvarojen käytön ja dynamiikan hallinta yksityismailla [control of use and dynamics of natural resources in private land areas]. dissertations in acta universitatis tamperensis 1045. university of tampere, tampere. http://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/ handle/10024/67434/951-44-6135-5.pdf?sequence=1 joutsenvirta, m., hirvilammi, t., ulvila, m. & wilén, k. (2016) talous kasvun jälkeen. gaudeamus, helsinki. kaakinen, i. & lehtinen, a. (2016) a bridge that disconnects – on shared and divided socio-spatialities in the pulp mill conflict between uruguay and argentina. forest policy and economics 70 101–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2016.06.005 kallis, g., demaria, f. & d álisa, g. (2015) introduction: degrowth. in kallis, g., demaria, f. & d álisa, g. (eds.) degrowth. a vocabulary for a new era, 1–15. routledge, london. kallis, g. & march, h. (2015) imaginaries of hope: the utopianism of degrowth. annals of the association of american geographers 105(2) 360–368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973803 kamargianni, m., matyas, m., li, w. & schäfer, a. (2015) feasibility study for ”mobility as a service” concept in london. university college london, london. kanninen, v., kontio, p., mäntysalo, r. & ristimäki, m. (2010) autoriippuvainen yhdyskunta ja sen vaihtoehdot. yhdyskuntasuunnittelun tutkimusja koulutuskeskuksen julkaisuja b 101. aalto yliopisto, espoo. kauhanen, h. (2017) valkoselkätikka hasanniemessä. karjalainen 28.12.2017 <http://edition. pagesuite-professional.co.uk /html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=bbef2135ad85-4b88-95b9-3f422bd93476>. 10.04.2018. ke n w o r t h y, j . ( 2 0 0 6 ) t h e e co c i t y : t e n ke y t r a n s p o r t a n d p l a n n i n g d i m e n s i o n s f o r s u s t a i n a b l e c i t y d e v e l o p m e n t . en v i ro n m e n t a n d u r b a n iza t i o n 18 (1) 67– 8 5 . https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247806063947 kortelainen, j. & vartiainen, p. (2000) kohti ekomodernia kaupunkiseutua? in kortelainen, j. (ed.) vihertyvä kaupunkiseutu. suunnittelun ja hallinnan ekomoderni käänne, 9–31. sophi, jyväskylä. latouche, s. (2009) farewell to growth. polity press, cambridge. l atouche, s. (2010). degrow th. journal of cleaner produc tion 18 (6) 519 –522. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.02.003 lehtinen, a. (1997) kaupunki riskiympäristönä: liikenneongelma ja pelon maantiede joensuussa. terra 109(4) 208–214. lehtinen, a. (2012) politics of decoupling: breaks between indigenous and imported senses of the nordic north. journal of cultural geography 29(1) 105–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2012.655031 lehtinen, a. (2014a) ympäristötoimintatutkimus. in massa, i. (ed.) polkuja yhteiskuntatieteelliseen ympäristötutkimukseen, 64–76. gaudeamus, helsinki. lehtinen, a. (2014b) luonto kaavalaudalla. ympäristökysymys joensuun kaupunkisuunnittelussa. in björn, i. (ed.) ihmeellinen luonto, 118–131. pohjois-karjalan historiallisen yhdistyksen vuosikirja 16. pohjois-karjalan historiallinen yhdistys, joensuu. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.660908 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.10.013 https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12551 https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01 https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01 http://www.desibeli.net/arvostelu/5394 http://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/67434/951-44-6135-5.pdf?sequence=1 http://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/67434/951-44-6135-5.pdf?sequence=1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2016.06.005 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973803 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=bbef2135-ad85-4b88-95b9-3f422bd93476 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=bbef2135-ad85-4b88-95b9-3f422bd93476 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=bbef2135-ad85-4b88-95b9-3f422bd93476 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247806063947 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.02.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2012.655031 56 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers lehtinen, a. (2017a) kaupunkisuunnittelu ja kasvun keskittämisen rajat. in lehtinen, a. & pyy, i. (eds.) mitä on laadullinen kaupunkisuunnittelu?, 67–76. kunnallisalan kehittämissäätiö, helsinki. lehtinen, a. (2017b) ilmastolaskelmat antavat luvan kulutusjuhlaan. karjalainen 26.11.2017 <http:// e d i t i o n . p a g e s u i t e p r o f e s s i o n a l . c o . u k / h t m l 5 / r e a d e r / p r o d u c t i o n / d e f a u l t . aspx?pubname=&edid=ce9f829e-b621-4a9a-9be4-d27dd94e3427>. 11.04.2018. lehtinen, a. & pyy, i. (eds.) (2017) mitä on laadullinen kaupunkisuunnittelu? kunnallisalan kehittämissäätiö, helsinki. lietaert, m. (2015) cohousing’s relevance to degrowth theories. journal of cleaner production 18(6) 576–580. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2009.11.016 mälgand, m, bay-mortensen, n., bedkowska, b., hansen, f. n., schow, m., thomsen, a. a. & hunka, a. d. (2014) environmental awareness, the transition movement, and place: den selvforsynende landsby, a danish transition initiative. geoforum 57 40–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.08.009 mclean, h., ranking, k. & kamikazi, k. (2015) inner-suburban neighbourhoods, activists research, and the social space of the commercial street. acme 14(4) 1283–1308. <http://www.acme-journal. org/index.php/acme/article/view/1295>. 13.08.2017. nevalainen, j. (2004) tilapelin tiedonpolitiikat – kamppailu kaupunkikeskustan muutoksesta. yhteiskuntatieteellisiä julkaisuja 67. joensuun yliopisto, joensuu. newman, p. & kenworthy, j. (1989) cities and automobile dependence. gover, aldershot. north, p. (2010). eco-localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change – a sympathetic critique. geoforum 41 585–694. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.04.013 oecd (2015) unemployment rate (indicator). <http://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemploymentrate.htm>. 12.11.2016. olli, m. (2012) hasanniemestä varakkaiden vip-alue. karjalainen 25.11.2012 ottelin, j., heinonen, j. & junnila, s. (2015) new energy efficient housing has reduced carbon footprints in outer but not in inner urban areas. environmental science & technology 49 9574– 9583. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b02140 oxfam (2015) extreme carbon inequality – why the paris deal must put the poorest, lowest emitting and most vulnerable people first. <http://oxfam.or/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachment/mbextreme-barboninequality021215-en.pdf>. 10.02.2017. papadopoulou, e. (2011) a note on economic growth seen through the prism of the crisis. transform! european journal for alternative thinking and political dialogue 15–22. <https://issuu.com/ nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01>. 23.01.2018. pkm (2016) pohjois-karjalan hinku-kunnat. pohjois-karjalan maakuntaliitto, joensuu. <http:// pohjoiskarjala.fi/web/hinku/hinku-kunnat>. 12.12.2016. pyy, i. (2017) kaupungin laidalla: liitostaajaman kaavoitus ja kehittäminen. in lehtinen, a. & pyy, i. (eds.) mitä on laadullinen kaupunkisuunnittelu?, 20–33. kunnallisalan kehittämissäätiö, helsinki. pöysä, p. (2010) kaksin tekstin kanssa. in pöysä, j., järviluoma, h. & vakimo, s. (eds.) vaeltavat metodit, 331–360. suomen kansantietouden tutkijain seura, joensuu. rac [regional administrative court] (2014) joensuun keskustan osayleiskaavaa koskevat valitukset. päätös 14/0019/3 (23.01.2014). itä-suomen hallinto-oikeus, kuopio. rac [regional administrative court] (2016) yleiskaavoitukseen liittyvät valitukset itä-suomessa 2013– 2015 (05.01.2016). itä-suomen hallinto-oikeus, kuopio. rajaniemi, j. (2006) kasvun kaavoitus. tapaus raahe 1961–1996 [zoning the growth. case raahe 1961– 1996]. messon, kankaanpää. rannila, p. & loivaranta, t. (2015) planning as dramaturg y: agonistic approaches to spatial enactment. international journal of urban and regional research 39 788-806. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12214 rautio, t. & longi, s. (2013) oothan vielä. turha kylä ilman jokelaa! dokumenttielokuva hotelliravintola wanhasta jokelasta. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz8erp5wnz4>. 12.03.2018. said, e. (1991 [1978]) orientalism. western conceptions of the orient. penguin books [routledge & kegan paul ltd], london. said, e. (1993) culture and imperialism. chatto & windus, london. sawatzk y, m. (2013) voices in the woods. a study of forest use in eastern manitoba. disser tations in social sciences and business studies 55. joensuu, universit y of eastern finland. http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-1085-1/urn_isbn_978-952-61-1085-1.pdf schneider, f., kallis, g. & mar tinez-alier, j. (2010) crisis or oppor tunit y? economic degrow th for social equit y and ecological sustainabilit y. journal of cleaner production 18(6) 511–518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.01.014 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=ce9f829e-b621-4a9a-9be4-d27dd94e3427 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=ce9f829e-b621-4a9a-9be4-d27dd94e3427 http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=ce9f829e-b621-4a9a-9be4-d27dd94e3427 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2009.11.016 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.08.009 http://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1295 http://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1295 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.04.013 http://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemploymentrate.htm http://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b02140 http://oxfam.or/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachment/mb-extreme-barboninequality021215-en.pdf http://oxfam.or/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachment/mb-extreme-barboninequality021215-en.pdf https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01 https://issuu.com/nextyearcountry/docs/transform_newsletter_3_2011_01 http://pohjoiskarjala.fi/web/hinku/hinku-kunnat http://pohjoiskarjala.fi/web/hinku/hinku-kunnat https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12214 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz8erp5wnz4 http://epublications.uef.fi/pub/urn_isbn_978-952-61-1085-1/urn_isbn_978-952-61-1085-1.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.01.014 fennia 196(1) (2018) 57ari aukusti lehtinen schulz, c. & bailey, i. (2014) the green economy and post-grow th regimes: oppor tunities and challenges for economic geography. geografiska annaler b 96(3) 277–291. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/geob.12051 semi, j. (2017) osallistumisen epäsymmetria. in lehtinen, a. & pyy, i. (eds.) mitä on laadullinen kaupunkisuunnittelu?, 34–42. kunnallisalan kehittämissäätiö, helsinki. sireni, m. (2016) when urban planning doctrine meets low density countryside. european countryside 3 189–206. https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2016-0005 vandeweghe, j. & kennedy, c. (2007) a spatial analysis of residential greenhouse gas emissions in the toronto census metropolitan area. journal of industrial ecology 11(2) 133–14 4. https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jie.2007.1220 victor, p. (2008) managing without growth. slower by design, not disaster. edward elgar, cheltenham. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/geob.12051 https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2016-0005 https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jie.2007.1220 refusals, radical vulnerability, and hungry translations – a conversation with richa nagar urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa121797 doi: 10.11143/fennia.121797 special issue: practicing refusal and relating otherwise: rethinking engagements with knowledge production, activism and borders through a creative praxis of refusal reflections refusals, radical vulnerability, and hungry translations – a conversation with richa nagar richa nagar, isabel meier and aila spathopoulou nagar, r., meier, i. & spathopoulou, a. (2023) refusals, radical vulnerability, and hungry translations – a conversation with richa nagar. fennia 201(2) xxx–xxx. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121797 richa nagar is professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies and holds the title of professor of the college at the university of minnesota. her multilingual and multi-genre work blends scholarship, creative writing, theatre, and activism to build alliances with people’s struggles and to engage questions of ethics, responsibility, and justice. we contacted richa in december 2021 with a request to contribute to our special issue. richa kindly agreed to engage in a written conversation on questions of refusal as they emerge in her intellectual and political journey and in her trilogy, playing with fire: feminist thought and activism through seven lives in india (2006), muddying the waters: coauthoring feminisms across scholarship and activism (2014), and hungry translations: relearning the world through radical vulnerability (2019). we present that conversation in this article. keywords: refusals, radical vulnerability, hungry translations richa nagar (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3629-8622), department of gender, women, and sexuality studies, university of minnesota, usa. e-mail: nagar@ umn.edu isabel meier (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7539-1104), department of geography, northumbria university, uk. e-mail: isabel.meier@northumbria.ac.uk aila spathopoulou (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6563-5232), department of geography, durham university, uk. e-mail: aila.spathopoulou@durham.ac.uk isabel: richa, our special issue is very much devoted to the messy boundaries between academia and activism and what it means to cultivate collectivity and solidarity within and across these spaces. could you begin by telling us a little bit more about your own experience as an activist and feminist scholar; how you think, feel, and practice radical inter-connectedness in your day-to-day life and what you have struggled with the most. the radical vulnerability you describe in your work is a very hopeful and playful practice – and in direct contrast to the realities and demands within academic institutions. how do you manage to stay hopeful and playful within these highly bureaucratized, individualised and extractive spaces of learning, writing and teaching. © 2023 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121797 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3629-8622 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7539-1104 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6563-5232 2 fennia 201(2) (2023)reflections richa: thank you, aila and isabel, for immersing yourself in my work. i appreciate your efforts to connect your concerns about academia and activism with the lessons that i offer about collectivity and solidarity in my writing. as you know from reading hungry translations, many of these lessons emerge in situ through the paths co-traveled with my saathis1 in multiple sites of engagement, including the multi-dimensional movement spaces of sangtin kisan mazdoor sangathan (hereafter skms) in sitapur, parakh theatre in mumbai, and my classes at the university of minnesota. given the focus of this special issue, i would like to begin with the idea of boundaries and borders. i find it important to resist a partition of academia and activism in terms of ‘boundaries,’ which are often clear lines of separation even when they are dotted or blurred. ‘borders’, by contrast, are permeable zones that allow for continuous flows between, within, across, and despite imposed lines and definitions. this insistence on borders rather than boundaries is related to a second point that i would like to make about the categories of ‘academic’ and ‘activist.’ not only are they often simplistically presumed to be separate from one another, but their separation is also often problematically layered onto two other dichotomies: one between ‘the intellectual’ and ‘the political’ and another between ‘the individual’ and ‘the collective’ (for detailed discussion, see nagar & swarr 2010). the argument that the intellectual is political and the political is intellectual is often repeated as if it is common sense, yet assumptions about the intellectual superiority of individual academics (especially, academics from the global north) over all others still reign in our world. the hierarchies engendered by this triple layering are central to the epistemic violence that often reduces lived struggles of movements and collectives to data or stories (read: activist, everyday, political, grassroots) to be explored, assembled, studied, and shaped into arguments by theorists and analysts (read: academic, intellectual, individual, expert).2 such hierarchies erase the co-constitutiveness of story-theory-strategy-performance where the intellectualpolitical-artistic labours are a thoroughly enmeshed creative praxis that is only realizable through dynamic and fissured collectivity.3 it is true that the radical vulnerability that i describe in my work stands in direct contrast to the modes in which we are trained to perform and become successful within academic institutions. more often than not, ‘good’ academic training translates into an academic adviser helping their student to find their distinctive voice, aspiration, and confidence as an individual researcher, writer, speaker, educator, and so on. however, radical vulnerability is impossible to achieve as a solely individual aspiration or value. an inherently collective practice, radical vulnerability demands a mutual surrender of egos in search for deep, ethical relationships through which members of a collective can labour together to create and enact dynamic visions of justice. no doubt, such a surrender of egos and sharing of authority and trust can be a very hopeful and playful practice that can birth co-dreamers, co-authors, co-artists, and co-agitators. at the same time, this vulnerability is extremely difficult emotional labour in a world that is shaped by egos and invested in celebrations of individual merit and glory. radical vulnerability requires letting go of such investments in individual celebrity; it requires acknowledgement of one’s own mistakes, greed, and contradictory desires; it demands a willingness to embrace sorrowful and bitter truths alongside laughter and rapture; it implies an unshakeable belief in the creativity that emerges from a shared journey – one in which the risks and dangers are frequently accompanied by the joys and promises of long lasting bonds, community, and struggles for justice (for a detailed discussion of radical vulnerability as politics of hope, see nagar 2014, 158–182 and nagar et al. 2016). as someone who is committed to agitating institutionalized epistemes, not only in the border zones of academia-activism-arts but also in life more generally, i believe in transforming the spaces of learning, unlearning and relearning by embracing radical vulnerability as a mode of being and growing together (for a detailed discussion, see nagar et al. 2019, 197–240). thus, radical vulnerability becomes an episteme – a way to feel, connect, and relate; a way to find trust, hope, and meaning; a way to dream, dismantle, and co-create in the big and small moments. such everyday living comes with risks of getting hurt, injured, and rejected; it can bring on trauma, illness, and fatigue (which are also common features of conventional academic production). however, the fulfilment that comes from walking together often outweighs these sorrows. https://sangtin.org/about fennia 201(2) (2023) 3richa nagar & isabel meier & aila spathopoulou this episteme, with all its limitations and weaknesses, is what i try to instil into my university classrooms. for instance, my classes are not competitive spaces where students are assessed or graded on their proven brilliance. rather, students are expected to surrender themselves to collective journey of unlearning and relearning where – through an immersion of one’s mind-bodyheart-spirit – we can evolve together as co-learners, co-teachers, and co-creators. at the same time, the bureaucratized, individualised, and extractive nature of academic learning, writing and teaching makes it crucial that radical vulnerability does not become a formula or a demand. for what is achieved organically by moving together for hours, months, and years can be translated in only a limited way into a semester-long class. still, a semester is a long enough time to seed a praxis of moving, unlearning, and relearning together, and to begin grappling with some of the foundational principles that guide this praxis. let me name just three of these. first, knowledge is movement of the heart-mind-body-spirit. such full-bodied movement mobilizes words, actions, art, dreams, and passions. one cannot learn objectively from such movements – we must, in fact, become movements. two, what the self can expect to receive from the other in a radically vulnerable mode is roughly equal to what that self is able to give to the other in that very mode. without risking one’s intimate and fragile moments, without risking one’s trust, there is no true giving or receiving. three, those who seek to build collectivity through radical vulnerability must accept aches, rifts, and tears as the foundational elements of their journey, for it is only by dancing the dance of i/you/we/they that the singular can learn to breathe and thrive in the collective (for a detailed discussion of such pedagogical exploration and examples of journeys that have continued beyond the formal duration of classes that have embraced the spirit of hungry translation, see agitate 2021 and ergun et al. 2021). aila: in your work you are concerned with two different kinds of refusals: one marked by openness and one by foreclosure. can you expand on these different forms of dissenting subjectivities and your own experience of guarding against “slipping into a binary formulation of a reciprocal refusal” (nagar et al. 2019, 21). frameworks often privilege vision as means of knowledge production over all other senses; what collective labours of breaking the frame and reweaving the fabric of life and world can be located in embodied action and knowledge production? richa: the divergent forms of dissenting subjectivities, and the power of their refusals, are precisely what i theorize in my introduction to hungry translations. i do so by recalling and retelling the subtle layers of a few learning moments with saathis of skms. it is impossible to do justice to those stories in the space of this interview – and i hope that interested readers will read the book – but let me touch on the key points i make there. to begin with, the “word-poor”4 realms of the epistemically disciplined are woefully inadequate to grasp the nuanced worldviews and courageous principles that give form, meaning, and momentum to the creative and intellectual yearnings of those who have been pushed to the margins of our dominant systems. for these survivors-artists-activists-theorists – who embody alternative visions of ethics and justice – everyday living often necessitates an active refusal to engage the structuring logics of the disciplined and disciplining minds. at the same time, i caution against a binary formulation of a reciprocal refusal where the dominant frameworks dismiss the poor, and conversely, the poor refuse a monolithic framework that overpowers them. such a formulation erroneously assumes a single structuring logic or power that is determinative of the world. sadly, however, our world is reigned by frameworks that tend to nihilate the political subjectivities of these saathis and of all those people in the global south that are reduced to ‘poor,’ ‘hungry,’ ‘malnourished,’ or ‘rural’ bodies. indeed, the desires and careers of countless certified experts (academics, development practitioners, policy makers) revolve around helping or rescuing these bodies, even as they dismiss the ways in which these same people actively create politics and knowledge by living and honing complex visions of what is ethical, what makes for a good life, and what brings hope. this fundamental conflict is at the core of why the hope of the hungry is entangled with a creative praxis that refuses imposed terms, languages, and frameworks. 4 fennia 201(2) (2023)reflections to give flesh and breath to my argument, i turn to selected moments, or delicate connections, that have proved transformative for unlearning and relearning in collectivity. the first such moment is when skms saathi sunita returns the money that another (relatively privileged) saathi offers to her for the treatment of her critically ill daughter, while also insisting lovingly that he continue to stand with skms. then i linger with two other instances: in one of these, skms saathi tama enacts his insatiable passion for making music with more privileged saathis even as he expresses his awareness of an unjust world where acute hunger of the belly is an everyday reality for him and his mother. in the other instance, saathi prakash expresses his yearning to create a play with a saathi like me, as i sit in minnesota and mourn with him the widespread loss of wheat and mango crops in sitapur during that season. later, i dive into an event in cambodia where saathi rambeti refuses to continue skms’s participation in a global working group on climate change, gender, and food security, thereby pushing skms to forgo a us $5k grant. in each of these moments, saathis defy dominant understandings of what it means to be poor or hungry and they tap into the multiplicity of structuring logics and life worlds to offer new concepts, critiques, and agitations that are a part of their struggle to build a different world. following pham (2018), i argue that their dissent is part of a historically constituted living subjectivity that can reconstruct political relations and order by breaking the frame and recomposing the fabric of life and world. however, dissent is neither monolithic nor a dead end, and so i distinguish between the two kinds of refusals that you summarize in your question. the first one (exemplified by sunita, tama, and prakash above) desires an ongoing relation between self and other despite the unevenness of the terrain on which such relationships must be lived. such refusals remain open to the serendipitous ways in which politics and justice may be realized. the second form of refusal (exemplified through rambeti’s stance) forecloses the possibility of such a relationship in the face of grave epistemic violence. both refusals seek to reweave the fabric of life and world; however, while one takes the risk of opening itself to an ongoing relationship with the other, the second sees no hope in such risk taking or trust placing. a commitment to hungry translation, then, is a commitment to keep unlearning and relearning through an ethical grappling with these layered dissents. to your question about the privileging of ‘vision’ in established frameworks, i am not sure whether such privileging is actually successful in displacing other senses as a means of knowledge production. the kind of relationships that i describe in the first form of refusal, for instance, hinge on a full-bodied togetherness. this togetherness, created through a mutual surrender of egos, involves everything from speaking, listening, singing, dancing, playing, and touching to smelling, tasting, crying, laughing, and butting heads. in fact, ‘envisioning’ in a collective can only happen through entanglements that engage the mind-heart-body-spirit in this mode of surrender. the vocabularies and metaphors that result from such entanglements become crucial for articulating not only a hunger for justice, but also a methodology for realizing that hunger. to give you a flavor of such metaphors, i will share an example. in an event that celebrated twenty years of our collectively-authored book, playing with fire, skms saathi surbala discussed what it has meant for our organization to build collectivity across divides of caste, gender, and class. she said: whoever has a privilege needs to accept the challenge of giving up that privilege. so, for example, if i am going on a cycle and another person is walking on foot, then if i am truly determined to build a friendship with that person, i must let go of my bike and walk on foot alongside them. so from our [different places in the movement and in the world], each of us [in skms] tried to understand the ways in which we were privileged and the challenges that we faced in standing together and what we would have to let go of. and because our determination and friendships were strong, we were able to do this work [with honesty].5 what is noteworthy in surbala’s words here, is the powerful simplicity of her metaphors – the walking, the biking, the moving, the befriending by sacrifice. her metaphors are grounded in the everyday; they define a concrete action and lived knowledge; they encapsulate a principle of, a commitment to, and a vision for collectivity that is inseparable from embodied movement. isabel: in your book hungry translations you write “it is in the impossibility of arriving at completion and of knowing the destination with certitude that the hope for the journey resides” (nagar et al. 2019, 43). we fennia 201(2) (2023) 5richa nagar & isabel meier & aila spathopoulou are intrigued by the political possibilities and openings that can be found within impossibilities, closures, and absences. can you tell us a little bit more about your approach to impossibilities and incompleteness as well as how it demands us to radically reimagine temporalities of justice and hope. what possibilities can be found in the present moment, the future, and in non-linear approaches to temporalities. richa: what you quote at the beginning of your question is my definition of a hungry translation. in this definition, a translation does not seek to be an equivalence between the original and its shadow; rather, translation is a labour and art, it is the politics of telling in turn. following this, i argue that a hungry translation can be seen as a non-stop striving for ethical retelling – an ever evolving relation between self and other – where each one constantly works to listen, feel, trust, and retell ethically, despite the challenges of walking together on an uneven terrain, and despite an understanding that each retelling will be incomplete and imperfect. in other words, hungry translation is a praxis of love. in love, we walk, we dance, we explode, we let go. in love, we become curious and enchanted, ecstatic and miserable, hopeless and strong. in love, we give, we receive, we transform, at times reflecting the textures, tastes, words, and gestures of a lover without even realizing it. there is a beautiful poem called ‘samajh”6 by the hindi poet katyayani that i have translated in muddying the waters thus: we became deer grazed forests intelligently undertook journeys after careful planning fought wars with martial perfection applied all our attentiveness in understanding issues and set aside countless carelessnesses for the rare momentary unexpected moments of love. ever so delicately, katayayani establishes radical vulnerability as a requirement for love. love can only be lived in the “countless carelessnesses” and not in the “martial perfection” with which we develop our frameworks and strategies to fight the battles we think we already know. for, how would love be love if its course were predictable? if it did not jump, flow, flood, and meander like a river? if there was nothing for it to stumble or slip on? the second love loses these qualities, the second it knows with certitude that it has arrived at its destination, it ceases to be a river: it becomes static and brittle – hard as ice.7 as a relationship between self and other on a bumpy terrain, hungry translation is a relation of ever flowing and ever growing love – one that is always in journey, always in process. as long as a self and another yearn to learn about each other, as long as they strive to walk and dance and slip and rise together, there is hope for them to move, play, become, and create together ethically. indeed, the very promise of their journey hinges on the humility and the acceptance that they cannot fully reach or access the other, and this knowledge and hunger enlivens and empowers their togetherness and gives it meaning, substance, goal, and direction. the moment the self is convinced that she knows all there is to know or retell about the other, the journey comes to a halt. there is nothing more to unlearn and relearn; there are no memories, sensations, or stories to grapple with; there are no lives, afterlives, or hauntings to feel; there are no mistakes or sacrifices to make in the struggle to retell and share authority ethically. it is this spirit of impossibilities and incompleteness that has reverberated again and again in the work of collectives i have had the good fortune to co-build or co-travel with. sometimes it is encapsulated in the idea of ‘safar jaari hai’ (the journey continues). at others, it is conveyed in the 6 fennia 201(2) (2023)reflections idea of unsettling knowledges and ethics. and at yet others, it is embodied in the work of agitating knowledges and pedagogies. in all these instances, the verbs imply a continuous movement: an impossibility of arriving at completion and of knowing the destination with certitude. for the hope of justice is found in the continuation of the journey, not in the expectation of arrival. in terms of temporalities, such an approach cannot fit into projects or deadlines, nor can it profess fixed truths or stable conclusions: it can only hold truths that flow with lives and struggles. it is a dance where linear understandings of past-present-future spin, vibrate, and explode to radically transform our understandings of what was or is, what could have been, and what is yet to be. it is an ongoing train ride in which saathis ascend and descend at different platforms based on their hungers and needs, sometimes abandoning the journey temporarily or permanently, and sometimes returning to continue the journey at unpredictable stations. aila: this special issue also reflects on the ways that academic scholarship translates people’s uneven experiences into fixed categories, such as that of the ‘citizen’, ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘translator’ but also the ‘researcher’ and ‘activist’. in your work you insightfully speak of how academic knowledge production “encages” and contains “the nuanced creative and intellectual hunger that is governed by social imaginary” (nagar et al. 2019, 12) of the poor into imposed theories, terms, languages, and frameworks. you wonderfully discuss how even within activist and engaged research contexts, theory is derived from a process of abstraction and extraction that is detached from people’ everyday experiences and struggles. we were wondering whether you see hungry translations – the work of engaging in an ongoing relation between self and other despite the unevenness of the terrain in which such translations take place – also as a way of reclaiming theory for collective liberation. in other words, do you think it is possible, through hungry translations, to save theory from the university/academic institutions and to reconstitute theoretical production as a fundamental activist practice?8 richa: absolutely. a commitment to hungry translation – or the work of engaging in an ongoing relation between self and other despite the unevenness of the terrain in which such translations take place – is an essential practice for reclaiming theory for collective liberation. i am not so sure whether theory needs to be “saved” from academia; however, the academy cannot be assumed to be the exclusive or privileged site for theoretical production. such assumptions need to be dismantled at every step and indeed, this is what i have attempted to do in much of the work that has emerged through co-authored journeys with my saathis, including in hungry translations, muddying the waters, playing with fire, and critical transnational feminist praxis. i have tried to re-live, re-tell, and re-present the creative praxes of skms and parakh theatre not simply as activism or artistry, but also as profoundly grounded and ever-evolving theorizations of such concepts as solidarity, collectivity, translation, hunger, ethics, and justice. so yes, theoretical production is a fundamental activist and artistic practice. and equally, activist or artistic practice – when immersed in the principle of hungry translation – is an essential exercise in theoryand meaning-making with a commitment to shift what is unjust in the direction of just. in this work, theory, story, strategy, and performance are so tightly inter-braided that it is impossible to separate their strands. moreover, this braid is entirely resistant to dominant formulations that place theory in a hierarchical separation from methodology or epistemology, or that regard research as distinct from pedagogy, or that artificially peel away product from process. liberated theory is born in this braid, like flowers grow on a vine: it is immersed in ongoing journeys, it strives for ethical relationships, and it is committed to unstoppable dreams and labours that yearn for justice. and liberated theory does all of this without assuming a priori what justice or ethics look like in a given time, place, or struggle. notes 1 saathi can be translated as friend, companion, comrade, co-traveler. fennia 201(2) (2023) 7richa nagar & isabel meier & aila spathopoulou 2 xaxa (2020) and lashkar (2020) capture this point beautifully in their poems that have inspired the work of agitate! a journal and blog that have emerged from an abiding commitment to radical vulnerability and hungry translations as discussed in this conversation. 3 this idea of collectivity as necessarily fissured and scarred first emerged as “a blended but fractured ‘we’” in playing with fire, a book i co-authored with sangtin writers (see sangtin writers & nagar 2006). this co-authoring played a critical role in the birth of skms. 4 i borrow the term “word poor” from muppidi (2015, 1). 5 see surbala’s response (30:20–31:20 min) in skms & zubaan books 2021. 6 samajh can be translated as: insight, understanding, wisdom. 7 this discussion is a continuation of what i began to articulate in the first chapter (“translated fragments, fragmented translations”) of muddying the waters. there, i note that radical vulnerability involves “acknowledging, recognizing, and sharing our most tender and fragile moments, our memories and mistakes in moments of translation, in moments of love. for, it is in the acknowledgment, recognition, and sharing of these moments, memories, and mistakes that we live our trust and faith, and where we often encounter our deepest courage and insights. it is also in these fragile, aching moments that we come to appreciate alliance work as constituted by fragments of journeys – some fully lived, and others abandoned at different stages . . . interrupted passages through which the cotravelers recognize the power of becoming radically vulnerable together. these fragmented journeys are marked as much by opening ourselves up to the risks of becoming wounded, as they are marked by silences and withdrawals, and by returning to forgive and to love – again and again” (nagar 2014, 23). 8 here, i would like to acknowledge the invaluable conversations that i had with my collaborators at the feminist autonomous centre for research in athens (fac), anna carastathis, myrto tsilimpounidi, marleno nika and aude sathoud around the relationship between theory and activism. i am particularly grateful to myrto tsilimpounidi who introduced me to theories that saved their life and consequently mine and who first expressed their desire to save theory from academic institutions and who keeps on struggling to achieve this. references agitate (2021) volume 3: stories, bodies, movements. spring 2021. <https://agitatejournal.org/issue/ spring-2021/> ergun, e., sajid, n., perry, k-k., naidu, s., keating, al., kamat, s. & nagar, r. (2022) epistemic agitations and pedagogies for justice: a conversation around hungry translations: relearning the world through radical vulnerability. feminist studies 48(1) 146–175. https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0009 lashkar, v. (2020) कुठली मेथडॉलॉजी … which methodology… agitate! blog 28.9.2020 <https:// agitatejournal.org/which-methodology/>. 19.2.2023. muppidi, h. (2015) politics in emotion: the song of telangana. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315749716 nagar, r. (2014) muddying the waters: co-authoring feminisms across scholarship and activism. university of illinois press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038792.001.0001 nagar, r. in journeys with sangtin kisan mazdoor sangathan & parakh theatre (2019) hungry translations: relearning the world through radical vulnerability. university of illinois press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042577.001.0001 nagar, r. & swarr, a. l. (2010) introduction: theorizing transnational feminist praxis. in critical transnational feminist praxis, 1–20. suny press, albany. nagar, r., aslan, ö., hasan, n. z., rahemtullah, o-s., upadhyay, n. & uzun, b. (2016) feminisms, collaborations, friendships: a conversation. feminist studies 42(2) 502–519. https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2016.0016 pham, q. n. (2018) politics beyond dominance: subaltern power and world making. phd dissertation. university of minnesota, twin cities. https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216849 sangtin writers & nagar, r. (2006) playing with fire: feminist thought and action through seven lives in india. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. skms & zubaan books (2021) playing with fire: a collective journey. <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2redtfgre58&t=2293s>. 19.2.2023. xaxa, a. f. (2020) i am not your data. translated to não sou seu dado by borges, a. agitate! blog <https://agitatejournal.org/article/i-am-not-your-data/>. 19.2.2023. https://agitatejournal.org/ https://agitatejournal.org/issue/spring-2021/ https://agitatejournal.org/issue/spring-2021/ https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2022.0009 https://agitatejournal.org/which-methodology/ https://agitatejournal.org/which-methodology/ https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315749716 https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038792.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042577.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2016.0016 https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216849 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2redtfgre58&t=2293s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2redtfgre58&t=2293s https://agitatejournal.org/article/i-am-not-your-data/ resource deserts, village hierarchies and de-growth in sparsely populated areas: the case of southern lapland, sweden urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa120788 doi: 10.11143/fennia.120788 resource deserts, village hierarchies and de-growth in sparsely populated areas: the case of southern lapland, sweden dean bradley carson, doris anna carson, linda lundmark and anna-karin hurtig carson, d. b., carson, d. a., lundmark. l. & hurtig, a.-k. (2022) resource deserts, village hierarchies and de-growth in sparsely populated areas: the case of southern lapland, sweden. fennia 200(2) 210–227. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120788 small villages in northern sweden have seen a continuing removal of key services, such as schools, shops and public transport, since the 1970s. disinvestment in public services has not been strategically planned but has happened in response to population loss and increased costs on a case-by-case basis. more recently, there has been a shift in policy thinking to what might be termed a ‘de-growth’ approach where digitalisation and increased personal mobility are used to provide new ways of delivering services. the purpose of this paper is to examine the existence of ‘resource deserts’ in southern lapland and the emergence (or consolidation) of village hierarchies in allocating public services. we map out the distribution of neighbourhood services (grocery stores, pre-/schools and petrol pumps) among villages, and explore the lived experiences in accessing these resources in different villages. our results show that resource deserts clearly exist in the south and east of the region, while villages in the more sparsely populated western mountain areas were generally in a better position to retain resources. we identify a lack of consistent and transparent service planning at the village level as a key shortcoming in municipal and regional service strategies. there appear to be unofficial settlement hierarchies in the differential treatment of villages that are otherwise similar in population size, population change and distance to central places. we find that political decisions on service allocations are likely influenced by several factors. these include legacy effects relating to historic settlement status, the location of villages in relation to key transport or mobility corridors, as well as ideological factors favouring villages with more ‘exotic’ features and development potential in line with the municipalities’ economic, social and political priorities. we finally argue that a shift to de-growth needs to be more strategically planned if it is to eliminate resource deserts and promote equity of service access across all villages. keywords: resource desert, service decline, village hierarchies, rural planning, sparsely populated areas, northern sweden dean bradley carson (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8143-123x) & anna-karin hurtig (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7087-1467), department of epidemiology and global health, umeå university, sweden. e-mail: dean.carson@umu.se, anna-karin.hurtig@umu.se doris anna carson (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8439-2640) & linda lundmark (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3026-1477), department of geography, umeå university, sweden. e-mail: doris.carson@umu.se, linda.lundmark@umu.se © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120788 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8143-123x https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7087-1467 mailto:dean.carson@umu.se mailto:anna-karin.hurtig@umu.se https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8439-2640 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3026-1477 mailto:doris.carson@umu.se mailto:linda.lundmark@umu.se fennia 200(2) (2022) 211dean bradley carson et al. introduction the southern lapland region in the inland north of sweden is a sparsely populated area (spa) that has struggled with population and economic decline since at least the 1970s. a dominant narrative has revolved around the continuing withdrawal of key services, including closures of schools, shops, health centres and reduction in other public services, particularly outside the municipal centres (carson et al. 2016). only occasionally do we hear about new private or community sector investment in grocery stores, petrol pumps, or hospitality businesses (habibipour et al. 2022). new public sector investment in physical services has been almost non-existent outside of one or two mountain resort villages. service disinvestment has not been strategically planned across the region as a whole, nor within individual municipalities (syssner 2020). as an example, the ‘village futures’ plan in åsele municipality only went as far as to state that the responsibility for addressing the negative impacts of disinvestment rests with the villages themselves, with the municipality only acting in an advocacy role (åsele byaportal 2022). this lack of planning is not unusual in spas like southern lapland and often leads to contradictory policy settings, making it difficult for village communities to take agency (carson & argent 2020). the reasons for disinvestment have mostly been clearly communicated – population loss and increasing cost of service delivery. in addition, sweden’s municipal reforms between the 1950s and 1970s have played a key role in cementing the municipal centres as the main service hubs in spas (wiberg & limani 2015). often-times even in these centres, services are fragile, and municipalities are forced to save costs at the expense of their rural villages. local and county governments in the region appear to pin their hopes for a better future for people living in villages on digital technologies (löfving et al. 2022) and high individual mobility. this despite substantial downgrading of postal services (meaning that online shopping is rarely delivered ‘to your door’) and population ageing making private transport less ubiquitous. nevertheless, the public rhetoric does reflect a recent shift from a ‘decline’ model of development (aiming to reduce costs as quickly as possible) to a ‘de-growth’ model (aiming to identify new ways of delivering accessible and equitable services to smaller populations). our chief concern with this transition is the extent to which it may also be spatially unplanned, resulting in the emergence or persistence of ‘village hierarchies’ within shrinking municipalities where some benefit from the process while others do not. the purpose of this paper is to examine the existence of ‘resource deserts’ (satcher 2022) in southern lapland and the emergence (or consolidation) of village hierarchies in allocating public services. the first part of our research maps out the distribution of key services among villages according to size and distance to identify hierarchies of resource-rich and resource-poor villages. the second part then explores some of the lived experiences in individual villages by drawing on several cases documented during our long-term research engagement in the region. these cases include discussions of 1) the differential treatment of villages in the municipality of arvidsjaur, 2) the example of school closures observed in several municipalities, 3) the apparent favouring of more remote and exotic mountain villages (with prominent tourism development, cross-border mobility and sámi presence), and 4) the political process of selecting sites for the roll-out of ‘virtual health rooms’ (vhrs). together, these case examples point out important inconsistencies in public service planning at the village level and illustrate how certain villages are favoured or neglected in public service allocations. finally, we offer some thoughts on the challenges facing new ways of service delivery as part of a degrowth approach to public service planning. southern lapland villages as sites of decline (and de-growth) the region referred to as ‘southern lapland’ comprises ten inland municipalities, including two municipalities in norrbotten county and eight in västerbotten county, which collectively make up the ‘region tio’ economic development collaboration (johansson et al. 2015). this region experienced peak population in the late 1950s and early 1960s at around 85,000 residents, with a decline of 43% to 48,000 residents in 2020. according to data from statistics sweden (scb), population loss up to the year 2000 was limited to settlements outside of the (current) municipal centres, with those centres growing by 25%. however, since the year 2000, both the region (-15%) and the municipal centres (-8%) have lost 212 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper population, and 40% of residents continue to live outside the municipal centres. no municipality or municipal centre has gained population since the year 2000, while a substantial number of villages (24 out of 54) have either experienced small population growth or no population loss in that time. the economic foundations of the region were forestry, mining, and more recently energy generation (hydropower and windpower). forestry and energy remain important but require fewer resident workers than they once did, and deliver few direct tax benefits to the municipalities. in this century, service sectors such as health, education, local government administration and tourism have increased their share of the workforce if not their total number of resident employees (hedlund & lundholm 2015). the key to service planning in the region is municipal (and to a lesser extent, county) tax revenue, along with equalisation payments from the national government (wiberg & limani 2015). these revenues, per capita and in real terms, have increased dramatically in all municipalities since the year 2000. the municipalities argue, however, that these increases have not kept pace with the rising costs of service delivery related to service technologies, labour force and administration, and compliance (hall et al. 2016). there has been a shift in rhetoric around southern lapland in recent years, with several projects sponsored by european union (eu) agencies, the nordic council of ministers, the swedish national government, and the västerbotten and norrbotten county governments, broadly aimed at examining how innovation in approaches to economic and social development might address the challenges of small and sparse populations. these projects have largely focused on digital innovation (habibipour et al. 2022; löfving et al. 2022), but there have also been investigations of smart specialisation in the traditional industries of forestry and energy production (jungsberg et al. 2020), and processes of economic diversification (dubois & carson 2017). in 2021, the västerbotten section of southern lapland was selected as a ‘model region’ for sweden’s national god och nära vård (‘good and close care’) health services policy, which seeks to find new ways of service delivery beyond the removal of services (jonsson et al. 2022). one of its key promises is that every person should have equivalent and sufficient access to health and care services irrespective of where they live. collectively, these projects can be considered as exploring ‘de-growth’ rather than ‘decline’, looking for ways to manage the process of population loss while maintaining and even improving equity and quality of life (carson et al. 2020). the de-growth model suggests that investment in ‘new ways of doing things’ is more beneficial for residents in declining areas than a continued process of disinvestment. to illustrate this approach, we later discuss the example of the vhrs – a new way to provide health and care services in small villages – which most prominently distinguishes between decline-disinvestment and de-growth-reinvestment approaches. resource deserts and service distribution one ambition of de-growth is to avoid the emergence or persistence of ‘resource deserts’ as areas without ready access to essential services (renting et al. 2012). while one might expect resource deserts to be commonly located in rural areas, the majority of available literature is concerned with urban areas. food deserts are the most discussed form of resource deserts, referring to neighbourhoods without adequate grocery stores or other food outlets (amcoff 2017). there is also literature concerned with access to pharmacies, after-school care, primary care, and public transport (sallan 2020). there is no consistent method for identifying resource deserts, but it is typically proposed that key resources should be within walking distance – which could be anything up to five kilometres. sharkey (2009) examined food deserts in rural areas in the united states (us), using a catchment distance of one mile (1.6 km). australia’s modified monash model of access to primary care uses 5 km (or sometimes 10 km) as a catchment for primary care services (versace et al. 2021). in the past, västerbotten county council (region västerbotten 2018) has offered various kinds of assistance to smaller grocery stores so long as they were at least 10 km distant from the next store. these sorts of (short) distances do not seem very useful in the context of spas, but the idea that key services should be within ready commuting distance remains valid. resource deserts tend to be found in urban neighbourhoods containing the more vulnerable – the poor, ethnic and cultural minorities, and immigrants. satcher (2022) introduces the term ‘multiplydeserted areas’ (mdas), which are correlated with socio-economic and demographic characteristics of fennia 200(2) (2022) 213dean bradley carson et al. residents, showing that about half of neighbourhoods lacking one of the three key resources (food, pharmacy and urban greenspace) typically lack at least one of the other two. in sweden, the national agency for economic and regional growth (tillväxtverket 2021) mapped the distribution of services such as schools, shops, petrol pumps, pharmacies and postal services across sweden, with the entire inland centre and north of the country identified as having low or very low service access relative to the rest of the country. the agency also noted the ongoing process of service removal and closure being focused on areas with already poor access to services. it is difficult to pinpoint this gap in service distribution to a single cause, with a mix of reasons at play. apart from low population densities and public funding constraints, the impacts of changing user demands and self-reinforcing market functions are also critical. residents (at least those without mobility restrictions) may choose to access schools or health services in urban locations outside their assigned catchment areas simply because they expect a better standard or diversity of services. while these issues clearly also affect service concentrations in urban areas, the socio-economic consequences are immeasurably amplified in spas where distance and lack of transport options mean that less mobile people have few (if any) alternatives. central places and rural settlement hierarchies calls for addressing service delivery problems in spas are not new in sweden, where the traditional welfare state model has a long history of striving for equal access to social services regardless of class, occupation, and place of residence. sweden’s municipal reforms between the 1950s and 1970s were explicitly designed to create settlement hierarchies based on merging urban centres and rural catchment areas along the lines of central place theory (christaller 1966). with the municipal centres firmly established as central service hubs, rural villages outside those centres were expected to retain basic ‘neighbourhood services’ (including grocery shops for daily supplies, primary schools, and petrol services) (weissglas 1975). the larger and sparsely populated inland municipalities were granted some exceptions to this central order, allowing them to resource smaller service nodes for their dispersed populations. these formal place hierarchies have largely persisted until today, but there have been shifts within the lower-ranked layer of villages. in västerbotten, for example, villages that have retained neighbourhood services continue to receive formal support as strategic ‘service nodes’, in contrast to smaller ‘service points’ or villages with no physical services where support is essentially limited to ill-defined ‘new coordinated service solutions’ (region västerbotten 2018). the idea that particular settlements are ‘less favoured’ than others has also been discussed in other fields (gerse & szilágyi 2016). in archeological research, methods have been developed for imputing the relative importance of individual settlements to political and economic development. initially, those methods were based on estimating population size (duffy 2015), but it is now widely accepted that a focus on size alone is insufficient (smith 2021). size is an indicator of the level of human activity in a location, but not necessarily of how that location fits into the broader settlement landscape (quinn & ciugudean 2018). paliou and bevan (2016) raise the example of settlements in mining regions, where proximity to ore determines (large) settlement size, but (smaller) settlements located closer to transport routes and other economic infrastructures ultimately accrue more resources and political status. in this sense, the changing strategic importance of major transport infrastructure, and the resulting changes in time-space compression and accessibility, can impact on the status of individual settlements. this is perhaps best illustrated by the ‘rise and fall’ of historic railway towns across many spas, or the coming and going of regional airport hubs. settlement hierarchies are scalar (palmisano 2017). as stipulated in central place theory, a set of relatively unimportant (rural) places are connected to a central place which holds political and economic power, which in turn is connected to a higher-level central place. in sweden, the position of municipal centres as service hubs is firmly protected within this hierarchy. beneath this formal administrative layer, however, hierarchies may be more dynamic. quinn and colleagues (quinn & barrier 2014; quinn & ciugudean 2018) note that central places may ‘rise and fall’ and that there are important differences between settlements in the same layer which are either naturally occurring (such as location on trade routes), coincidental (such as location relative to a route which has not yet developed), or emergent. an emergent property may be the adoption of a new ideology (political, 214 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper economic or cultural ideals) in what had otherwise been an insignificant settlement leading to the emergence of that settlement as a central or higher-level place. for example, a new focus on tourism and ‘attractive’ development in many spas might signify a change in ideology about what industries and locations are worthy of public and private investment (koster & carson 2019). other examples might include the reappreciation of once neglected locations that suddenly become important in deciding the outcomes of government elections. quinn and ciugudean (2018) also emphasise the role of social institutions in differentiating settlements. places where people meet for informal and formal interactions are critical to the roles that settlements play in society. places where desirable outsiders come to interact can become politically powerful, even if their resident populations remain small. quinn and barrier (2014) further emphasise the importance of legacy in that some places may retain certain reputations, resources and power irrespective of growth or decline in population size because of functions they performed in the past. this might be because of legacy infrastructure (like a significant church building) or social ties – where people with power retain links with smaller villages that they or their families once occupied (smith 2021). in contrast to hierarchies, landscapes may be characterised by settlement heterarchies (quinn & barrier 2014; smith 2021) in which different settlements are favoured for particular functions. settlement heterarchies can operate across time as well as space, such that a settlement may be an important market location (with few other functions) for some time, then become more significant as a place of worship (losing the marketplace), and then return (or not) to its market role. the concept of ‘hierarchy’ may have lost favour against the idea of networks and heterarchies, but there remains the implication that settlements failing to attract appropriate resources become of ‘lower order’ (van meeteren & poorthuis 2018) and have fewer opportunities for economic, social and political development (and vice versa). in examining settlement hierarchies in hungary, gerse and szilágyi (2016) describe six levels of settlement, including small villages (<500 residents), and how they interact through work commuting patterns (reflecting the distribution of employment opportunities). their conclusion is that village-tovillage commuting has been increasing, indicating a lack of homogeneity within that settlement level. they also suggest that hungary’s future was likely to be increasingly polycentric (or heterarchical), and that formal planning has had limited impact on this experience. smékalová (2018) examined settlement hierarchies more implicitly by evaluating the distribution of eu cohesion funding among municipalities in slovakia. municipalities were classified into five levels according to population and employment data. funding overwhelmingly was received by municipalities with high service employment, low unemployment, and high levels of education, and rarely received by municipalities with high unemployment and low levels of education. smékalová argued that municipalities attracted resources because of their knowledge of ‘the system’ (gained through high levels of education and familiarity with services economies). these municipalities are able to organise (typically around two or three key people) to be active in seeking resources. humer and granqvist (2020) specifically theorised the impact of different planning approaches on the distribution of health services in finland. they argued that the ‘free market’ approach adopted by finland in its health reforms of 2015–2019 would likely lead to an increasing concentration of resources in ‘central places’ which, as they demonstrate, are not geographically ‘central’ in spas. rather, different sub-regions have different characteristics that determine the optimal location of health services. there should therefore be a stronger consideration of geography (not just population and ‘ideology’) in planning processes. koster and carson (2019) propose something of a settlement hierarchy for spas from a tourism and amenity perspective. they suggest that places which are remote and ‘exotic’ (i.e. more attractive, striking, unusual, and out of the ordinary) become favoured for public and private sector investment, as do those closest to the larger urban centres. what remains are the ‘boring bits in between’ – these typically have few standout attractions, attract only small-scale investment, and struggle to gain political attention. in summary, the literature suggests that uneven development and spatial disadvantage are coupled with the presence or absence of readily accessible key services and resources, although the extent to which this is a ‘chicken-or-egg’ problem remains contested (amcoff 2012). the distribution of resources creates or reinforces settlement hierarchies, heterarchies and/or networks which determine individual access. these may depend on population size, population change, distance from central places, fennia 200(2) (2022) 215dean bradley carson et al. proximity to connecting infrastructure (transport networks), legacy, or types and extent of local action by residents and private sector investors. planning the distribution of key resources in spas is critical to ensure equity of access particularly for more vulnerable residents who are often overlooked by ‘market forces’. swedish policies like god och nära vård provide a framework for such planning in places like southern lapland, but the ability to fulfil such policy promises to move from a declinedisinvestment approach to de-growth-reinvestment is limited by a lack of knowledge of current resource distribution patterns and how they came to exist and persist. methods for identifying resource deserts and village hierarchies selecting villages the unit of analysis for this research is ‘the village’ – a discrete area of settlement which included the categories of småort (50–199 residents) or tätort (200 or more residents) as defined by statistics sweden (scb). in 2022, scb released shapefiles containing resident counts for localities with more than 49 residents quinquennially between 1990 and 2020. prior to 1990, counts were only released for localities with 200 or more residents. across southern lapland and excluding the 10 municipal centres, there were 54 localities included in the 1990–2020 data. twenty-seven of these could also be identified in locality counts dating back to 1960. selecting resources this research broadly follows the approach of satcher’s (2022) ‘multiply-deserted areas’ (mdas), focusing on the key ‘neighbourhood services’ that rural settlements should ideally offer to their residents (weissglas 1975): grocery stores, primary schools, and petrol services. we created a database of grocery stores (as of october 2021) across the 54 villages as a proxy for food access, recognising that these stores also play a broader role by providing postal services, lottery, pharmacy and other distribution functions. in terms of schools, there was a variety of school types (covering different school years) available across different villages, but any village that has a school also has a pre-school (for ages 3–6), which we selected as a proxy for primary schools and childcare services. petrol services, typically a self-service pump, were selected as the third key resource due to the persistent importance of private car travel to access non-local services. other resources, such as access to public transport, recreational facilities, religious facilities, mobile food services, and recycle stations for waste disposal, were also considered as important local resources but were not included due to lack of consistent data or irregular services. independent variables and analysis the ‘settlement hierarchies’ literature considers population size, population change, distance to central places, legacy, community and industrial activity, and ‘ideology’ as determinants of settlement positioning. this research quantified the first five of these, but not industrial activity or ideology. ideology is considered in the discussion section. industrial activity (meaning private sector businesses) is considered in the case examples, but it was not possible to develop a consistent measure for this that would resolve issues around differences in types of business, size of business, location of business operations or impact on local employment. population size and population change 2000–2020 were derived from the scb data files. municipal centres (all of which have all three key resources) were ‘central places’, and distance from village to municipal centre (for the same municipality) was calculated from the scb shapefiles. ‘legacy’ was defined as having once been the centre of a parish or municipality, thus having substantial political-administrative roles at different points in history. in 1862, what were church of sweden parishes became formal administrative units (kommuner). by 1930, there were 20 of these in the inland of västerbotten. between the 1950s and 1970s, amalgamations of municipalities occurred as part of sweden’s municipal reforms. in 1969, there were 14 municipalities in the region, with four https://www.scb.se/vara-tjanster/oppna-data/oppna-geodata/smaorter/ 216 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper of these being subsumed in the early 1970s – tärnaby and stensele into storuman municipality; örträsk into lycksele municipality; and fredrika into åsele municipality. most villages have a community group (byaförening) registered with their municipality. however, relatively few are ‘active’ on a regular basis in terms of providing services, organising events, maintaining community facilities or representing the village in political processes, making it difficult to identify levels of social capital and local action required for effective informal planning (meijer & syssner 2017). ultimately, we decided to derive our own measure of ‘active community group’ as one which had posted to its website or social media in the month prior to the research (june 2021), and had promoted a community activity (organised by the group or someone else) in the previous six months. clearly this is an imperfect measure as some groups may be active but not regularly communicating online, while some of the groups we identify as active may be doing very little or involve a very small number of participants. nevertheless, we were able to derive a consistent measure in this way. analysis of the relationship between presence of key resources and population size, population change (2000–2020), and distance to municipal centres was done using the student’s t-test. analysis of the relationship between key resources and legacy and active community group was done using chi-square tests. in each case, there were two dependent variables, consistent with satcher (2022): 1) the presence of any key resource and 2) the presence of all key resources. finally, stepwise multiple regression analyses were conducted to predict presence of resources (any or all) from population size, change in population 2000–2020 and distance from municipal centres. qualitative data and case examples the case examples draw on qualitative data and ethnographic observations collected by the researchers in a cumulative and unstructured fashion over a seven-year period (2014–2021) as part of a broader research program looking into the socio-economic future of village settlements in the inland north. this included regular visits to more than 20 of the 54 villages to conduct formal interviews (with residents, entrepreneurs and local community leaders), hold information sessions, participate in public workshops, analyse the content of community noticeboards, engage in informal discussions with village residents and municipal planning stakeholders, and collect other observations. reports from the social boards, education boards, and leisure and culture boards of each of the ten municipalities have been reviewed for mentions of villages and their plans for rural service provisions. formal interviews (16 in total) were conducted in 2015–2016 with political leaders and heads of social, education and leisure and culture departments in all municipalities, and again in 2019 with six of the municipalities, focusing on what formal planning was undertaken for villages, and how decisions about resource allocation were made. additional observations were collected by members of the research team participating in meetings related to the virtual health room (vhr) project in västerbotten, as well as meetings of new working groups established within the god och nära vård model region project. it is critical to note that the results describe our observations up until mid-2021. there have been substantial changes in specific villages since then, including the investment in new grocery store models in two of the villages discussed in our case examples (moskosel and kristineberg). there have also been continued discussions about the viability of (pre-)schools in several locations, with the possibility that some schools will not be open by the time this article is published. the dynamic nature of development in these villages is recognised, and what is provided here are individual stories reflecting things that can happen within this village hierarchy. part i: mapping the pattern of resource distribution more than half (29 out of 54) of the villages in this study had at least one of the three key resources (preschool, grocery store, petrol pump), as summarized in table 1. eleven villages (38%) had all three resources, seven (24%) had two of the three, and 11 (38%) had just one. four villages had just a preschool, four had just a grocery store, and three had just a petrol pump. importantly, 78% of villages with a preschool also had at least one of the other two resources, as was the case with 80% of villages with a grocery store, and 85% of villages with a petrol pump. fennia 200(2) (2022) 217dean bradley carson et al. table 1. number of villages with resource combinations. resource combination number of villages all three services 11 pre-school only 4 pre-school and grocery store 1 pre-school and petrol pump 2 grocery store only 4 grocery store and petrol pump 4 petrol pump only 3 pre-school (total) 18 grocery store (total) 20 petrol pump (total) 20 fig 1. distribution of villages with some (circle) and no (square) key resources. 218 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper figure 1 summarises the pattern of resource distribution among villages. villages represented by circles have at least one of the three key resources (29 villages), while villages represented as squares have none (25 villages). the size of the marker reflects population size, while the colour represents change in population 2000–2020 (blue indicating population growth, and red indicating population loss). almost all mountain villages on the western fringes had resources, even the very small ones like slussfors (population 87) and kittelfjäll (population <50). in contrast, villages without resources were common in the eastern parts, and particularly in the south-east. villages with some resources were significantly larger than those without (average 167 residents compared with 84, p>0.05), and significantly more distant from municipal centres (58 km compared with 25 km, p>0.05). however, there was no significant difference in population change (a loss of 1% for villages with resources, compared with no change for villages without). about 40% of villages with resources were historical parish centres, compared with 16% of villages without (p>0.05). similarly, 40% of villages with resources had active community groups, while just 2 of the 25 (8%) villages without resources had an active group. a multiple regression was conducted to predict presence of resources from population size, change in population 2000–2020, and distance from municipal centres. while the model was statistically significant (f=10.90, p>0.05), it accounted for only 40% of the total variance, and population change was not a significant contributor. removing population change increased the overall strength of the regression model (f=15.07) but did not increase the amount of variance explained. in other words, while size and distance were good predictors of the presence or absence of services, other (unknown) factors were also at play. the summary statistics hide some important features of the data. the 20 largest no-resource villages were all larger than the smallest resource village (kittelfjäll), and 10 of these had populations in excess of 100 residents. these were no more distant from municipal centres (21 km on average) than the ten closest resource villages with populations in the same range. the four parish villages without resources compared favourably in size to the four smallest parish villages with resources (about 80 residents). figure 2 shows the 11 villages which had all three resources as circles. the resource-richness of mountain villages is further emphasised here, with slussfors, dikanäs (population 139) and saxnäs (143) notable because of their small population size compared with hemavan (272) and tärnaby (469). what is also stark is the absence of resourced villages (except for glommersträsk, fredrika and rusksele) across a majority of municipalities (arjeplog, arvidsjaur, malå, lycksele, norsjö, åsele and dorotea). villages with all resources were significantly larger than those with fewer or no resources (average 204 residents compared with 110, p>0.05), and significantly more distant from their municipal centres (72 km compared with 35 km, p>0.05). however, there was no significant difference in population change (a loss of 1% for all-resource villages, compared with no change for other villages). nine of the 11 all-resource villages (82%) were historical parish centres, compared with 30% of other villages (p>0.05). similarly, over half of all-resource villages had active community groups, while fewer than 20% of other villages had an active group. a multiple regression was conducted to predict presence of all resources from population size, population change, and distance from municipal centres. while the model was statistically significant (f=7.64, p>0.05), it accounted for only 30% of the total variance, and population change was not a significant contributor. removing population change increased the overall strength of the regression model (f=11.63) but did not increase the amount of variance explained. again, while size and distance were good predictors of the presence or absence of services, other (unknown) factors were at play. none of the four fastest growing villages, and only two of the 21 fastest growing villages had all resources, despite 11 of these (and two of the top four) having populations in excess of 100 people. while all had lost population, four of the ten largest villages (stensele, bastuträsk, moskosel, and kristineberg) were (at the time of this research) without all three key resources. fennia 200(2) (2022) 219dean bradley carson et al. part ii: experiences of village hierarchies in public service allocations this section discusses several case examples drawn from our extended fieldwork to illustrate apparent village hierarchies in public service allocations across the region. the first example presents the case of two competing villages in the municipality of arvidsjaur, focusing on local perceptions of why these villages have been treated differently by the municipality. the second example problematises the inconsistencies in municipal decision-making regarding the closure or retention of village schools. the third example shows how the more remote and exotic villages in the mountains seem to have gained a higher status than other villages. the final case provides insights into the intransparent political process of selecting villages as sites for the vhr project as a foretelling of the challenges facing adoption of a de-growth approach to public service planning. the case of moskosel and glommersträsk the two largest villages in arvidsjaur municipality are moskosel in the north-west and glommersträsk in the south-east. during one of our public seminars, we were told about the perceived history of these two villages and their competition to be seen as the ‘second town’ of the municipality. both fig 2. distribution of villages with all key resources (circle). 220 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper villages had a history in forestry, but moskosel had a state-owned forest company operating the sawmill, while glommersträsk was at the centre of private operations. participants suggested that this history had a continuing effect on contemporary village life, with glommersträsk seen as more entrepreneurial and ‘vibrant’, and moskosel as waiting for the government to address local decline. also glommersträsk’s location on the road connecting arvidsjaur with the larger industrial centre of skellefteå on the coast was mentioned as a reason for the relative advantage of glommersträsk over moskosel. the moskosel-glommersträsk story is interesting here because: • both villages are similarly distant from the municipal centre (~45 km), and not within 50 km of another larger town. • both had experienced similar population development for the entire period, including 2010– 2018 (remaining at just under 200). • there was no notable difference in their age profiles. • both villages had challenges relating to abandoned houses and infrastructure dotting the main street and compromising general village appearance. • while there had been quite visible private investment in glommersträsk (a timber/furniture producer, a berry manufacturing business, a restaurant, and some small tourist activity providers), this had also been the case in moskosel (a camping park, a tent manufacturing company, a cultural centre), but perhaps with less direct local employment. • both villages are located on or adjacent to major tourism and transit roads. • both villages had organised community enterprises to operate a small shop and petrol pump in recent years. nevertheless, at the time of our workshops, moskosel residents felt that the two villages had been treated quite differently by the municipality. glommersträsk had retained its elementary school, while moskosel had not. we were told of concerns that the municipal government was going to cease snow ploughing and turn off the streetlights in moskosel but not in glommersträsk. it was clear from our data that size, demographic profile, and relative isolation were not distinguishing features of the two villages. nor, it would seem, were level of private investment or community participation. the perception of the ‘superiority’ of glommersträsk persisted even when quantitative data about population trajectories was made public. instead, discussions with moskosel residents and municipal leaders suggested some explanations: glommersträsk’s main streets are also main throughways for the municipality (heading to the city of skellefteå), while moskosel sits off the main inland road heading north to smaller centres like jokkmokk and gällivare, which have offered fewer industrial links and political benefits for the municipality than skellefteå. therefore, glommersträsk was more visible within the municipality. in addition, moskosel had a reputation as a village that was ‘losing things’, also reflected in the sign for the village on the main road (fig. 3), while glommersträsk had a reputation as a village that was gaining or retaining things. fig. 3. road-side sign to moskosel, january 2018 (by authors). fennia 200(2) (2022) 221dean bradley carson et al. on the subject of schools one argument made for retaining the school in glommersträsk was the distance children need to commute to the next closest school. however, the same argument was insufficiently strong to preserve the school in moskosel. the same inconsistent application of ‘distance’ as a factor in service allocation occurs across the region as a whole. villages such as gunnarn in storuman municipality and gargnäs in sorsele municipality have retained schools, while latikberg (vilhelmina municipality) has not. the closing of the latikberg school (2017) followed several years of debates based principally on number of enrolments, with only minor consideration given to the issue of commuting. the steady decline in student enrolments at the latikberg school was not a result of fewer children, but more parents commuting to the municipal centre preferring to bring their children with them. in lycksele municipality, ‘remote’ schools in villages such as umgransele and kristineberg face regular threats of closure, despite relatively stable populations and long distances to alternative facilities. kristineberg is particularly interesting, since it is much further distant to the next school than the other villages. kristineberg is a border village, with the municipal centre of malå just 30 km away, allowing families to send their children to school there. proximity to malå has also been cited as a factor in decisions to either remove other services from kristineberg, or not to consider kristineberg as a site for new services. favouring the exotic? the experiences of the more isolated mountain villages in the western part of the region also deserve special attention. these villages have previously been described as the ‘exotic remote’ outposts within the inland north (koster & carson 2019). they are quite distinct in character due to their scenic landscapes, a stronger reliance on tourism, increasing second home investment, and a more prominent and visible sámi presence. as such, they typically stand out from the long list of villages in the forested ‘in-between’ areas to the east, sometimes as positive growth outliers bucking the trend of rural decline (as in the case of a few ski resorts), sometimes as places of cultural significance, and sometimes as places facing politically delicate issues of socio-economic disadvantage that require special government intervention. from this perspective, exotic remote locations are often more ‘visible’ within local or regional government agendas and in a better position to attract new investment or support for retaining services (ibid.). our observations suggests that, in fact, the more remote villages in the municipalities of storuman, vilhelmina, sorsele, and dorotea seem to have had a competitive edge over other villages in their municipalities when it comes to retaining services. the village of tärnaby in storuman municipality has been an official ‘second centre’ since it was merged into the municipality in the 1970s, with elementary and secondary schools, including a nationally-renowned highschool specialising in skiing, and a primary healthcare service similar in scope to those in the municipal centres. the tärnaby region has also attracted substantial local government investment in tourism infrastructure. even here, though, investment has been increasingly re-directed to the ski resort of hemavan (~20 km to the west), and there are regular discussions within the municipality about the extent to which continued tourism growth in hemavan may dilute services in nearby tärnaby. in this context, hemavan is perceived as the booming exotic growth outlier able to attract external entrepreneurs and largescale mobility flows (including cross-border travel from norway, and through its own airport connecting to stockholm). in contrast, tärnaby (which has more permanent residents) is often described as suffering from the legacies of losing its status as a parish centre and, thus, needs to be propped up with public services (müller 2019). the other mountain districts also tend to have similar ‘village pairs’ distinguished by their tourism and service roles (borgafjäll/risbäck in dorotea municipality, and kittelfjäll/dikanäs as well as klimpfjäll/saxnäs in vilhelmina municipality). although their tourism sectors and international visitor mobilities are still rather small-scale (compared to hemavan at least), there is a palpable shift in hierarchy from the residential to the more tourism-oriented villages. for example, kittelfjäll in 222 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper vilhelmina municipality is clearly becoming the municipal priority hotspot with increasing investment in infrastructure, tourism services, modern shop facilities and new petrol pumps emerging in recent years. meanwhile, the nearby residential village of dikanäs has been facing ongoing threats of losing key services, most notably its elementary school. the mountain villages tend to have more prominent sámi presence than the forest villages in the east, arising from different processes of colonisation. while the forests were settled earlier in the 18th century, the mountain areas were less valued for their settlement potential, with much more dispersed settlements established by the state and the swedish church to manage sámi affairs (norlin & lindmark 2021). at the heart of these typically was the church building, which was the site for regular gatherings of sámi people, not least for administrative purposes. sámi residential schools were also usually attached to these churches. although the church is no longer such a central actor, the legacies of being a sámi administrative centre seem to persist. mountain villages often attract local government funding related to their responsibilities as sámi municipalities (bjärstig et al. 2020). this might manifest in extra resources for language services, and at least some attention to sámi culture in what education and health services do exist. availability of such culturally-appropriate services seems to give the villages some bargaining power in arguing why local service facilities cannot simply be closed down as in other villages. virtual health rooms an example of new resource allocation in recent times has been the vhr project. vhrs are public facilities which have equipment for users to take simple health-related measurements and do virtual consultations with distant health professionals. to this point, the vhrs have been targeted largely at older residents with more limited capacity to access non-local health services. after a lengthy trial in slussfors, funding was received to establish one room in each of the inland municipalities in västerbotten (jonsson et al. 2022). an advisory committee of municipal representatives was formed to decide on their location. the decisions were not made based on any quantitative assessment, such as distance from existing healthcare facilities, population size, demographic profile (especially age structure), or catchment potential. instead, a small number of villages selected largely on the basis of ‘name recognition’ were invited to present their case to the committee. the outcomes were illustrative of the relationships between villages and their municipalities: • one municipality decided not to participate because of concerns that it would be pressured to select a village that the municipal leaders did not want in the program. • one municipality requested a ‘mobile’ vhr rather than having to select a single village in preference to others (although it was subsequently encouraged to nominate a village). • the preferred villages in two municipalities argued against having a vhr for fear that this would result in closure of their district nursing stations. • one municipality faced the challenge of choosing between two relatively proximate and equivalently sized villages. despite community enthusiasm appearing greater in one, it was the other which was ultimately selected. • one municipality initially wanted to put a vhr in the municipal centre itself to ease pressure on the primary care facility. vigorous lobbying from residents of a village contributed to changing this decision. the vhr project revealed the lack of strategic approaches to planning for villages at both municipal and county levels. site selection was clearly a political rather than evidence-based process. when comparing population trajectories of selected and non-selected villages, it seems that selected vhr villages are on average slightly larger than non-selected ones (about 180 residents compared to 160 residents). however, vhr villages have collectively experienced greater population loss (20% on average) than non-selected villages (which collectively grew by 5%). perhaps vhrs were awarded as compensation for decline (and loss or threatened loss of services such as district nursing stations) rather than as facilities to manage increasing demand or existing challenges of access. fennia 200(2) (2022) 223dean bradley carson et al. discussion while only 11 (out of 54) villages in this study had all three key resources, villages with one resource were very likely (80–85%) to have at least a second. rather than a heterarchical distribution of resources (where some villages have schools and others have shops or petrol pumps), then, there were clearly resource-rich and resource-poor villages akin to satcher’s (2022) multiply-resource deserts. both maps show that resource-poor villages were more common in the south-east and in the smaller municipalities (by land area), representing the ‘boring bits’ in between the more ‘exotic’ highamenity mountain range and the urbanised coast (koster & carson 2019). even in these, however, distances to resources can be substantial. for example, blåviksjön at the western edge of lycksele municipality is nearly 50 km from the municipal centre. a blåviksjön resident could get petrol and basic foodstuffs at the small grocery store in kattisavan (10 km away) and send their young children to school in umgransele (25 km away), but even this level of access would not be available to a resident of nearby björksele, pauträsk or lauker (which are off the main highway and bus routes). an interesting feature of these (multiply) resource deserts in the south and east is the number of resource-poor villages which have increased in population since the year 2000. many of these (including larger villages such as stensele, skansholm and betsele) are relatively proximate to their municipal centres, which, in the east at least, are somewhat ‘central places’ in a geographic sense. however, an assumption that proximity to municipal centres is ‘good enough’ for resource access is dangerous when applied to village populations as a whole (humer & granqvist 2020). as demonstrated in the case of latikberg, village residents with private transport are readily able to (or prefer to) access services in the centre, but they then have a greater impact on service distribution decisions (school closure in this case) than residents who do not have that level of mobility. with village populations expected to continue to age, this is of course not just an issue of school access. the increasing disparities in levels of mobility will exacerbate the resource desert impacts for the more vulnerable village populations (sallan 2020). while we can identify (multiply) resource deserts, we do not have good guidance from the literature as to what the maps ‘should’ look like, such as we would in urban areas where concepts of access have been more explicitly defined in terms of walking distance or commute times (sharkey 2009). measures around equal access by walking or easy public transport distance are clearly impractical in spas, but those with ambitions of equity in sweden should be concerned about the lived experience in many villages of 90-minute or 2-hour roundtrips for basic necessities (if you have private transport or live near the few public transport routes). some other organisation of resource distribution (or distribution of people to resources) is clearly required. there is, thus, a need for more research on what alternative service models could work or are already in use in other spas, and how local service allocations can be planned for in a more consistent and transparent way. while ideas around the sharing of services across spas are not new (wiberg & limani 2015), more work needs to be done to understand how increased connectivity among villages and better functioning network structures or heterarchies could emerge, for example through more localised public or community transport. there is likely no single solution to address service problems in spas, and a more equitable service model for villages will therefore require a mix of strategies, including increased use of digital services, mobile outreach services, service hubs co-locating with other social and community infrastructure, individual citizen contracts, and supported volunteer service work. resource-rich villages in total have larger populations than resource-poor ones, but there are important exceptions when looking from village to village. in any case, it is hard to argue that the continued presence of resources contributes to rich villages being larger than poor ones. in fact, more resource-poor villages have experienced population growth. there are just a handful of exceptional experiences of growth in resource-rich villages (hemavan and ammarnäs) and population loss in resource-poor villages (kristineberg, moskosel, and stensele) which ‘balance the ledger’ for the summary statistics. generally, however, it appears that some people are quite content to live in resource-poor villages (and even seek them out). yet, these are likely to be highly mobile and contribute to hiding the negative impacts of resource deserts for others. 224 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper distance is more definitively related to presence and absence of resources, but even here other factors seem to be at play. some of these may include legacy effects (quinn & ciugudean 2018). many legacy parish centres are distant from their now municipal centres (particularly those in the mountains, but also fredrika and örträsk in the east), and the distant ones seemed to have retained resources (and, for the moment, population) more than the proximate ones (like stensele, björksele and åskilje). legacy centres also tend to have active community groups, suggesting a residual political organisation that may be effective in preventing the removal of services. it was not possible to access consistent data about community groups and even private sector business activity in these villages, so it is difficult to make judgements about the role of local action and social capital (meijer & syssner 2017). the example of moskosel and glommersträsk is insightful in positioning local action in relation to the idea of ideology. glommersträsk, it appears, has been more closely aligned with the municipality’s development ideals, largely because of lingering perceptions that it has a more prosperous private sector and a reputation of being more entrepreneurial and pro-active, more public-facing and community-oriented, more visible within the municipality, and facing in the ‘right direction’ in terms of connections with the preferred regional centre. the data hint at other aspects of ideology including a preference for ‘modern’ economies (e.g. relatively large-scale tourism in hemavan) over traditional ones (forestry or mining), ‘exotic’ location (mountains) over the ‘boring bits in between’ (the south-east), and possibly the increasing political attention to the needs of sámi people. future research needs to monitor how such development ideals and village hierarchies may change as a result of shifting economic priorities (e.g. the coming and going of contested mining proposals) or the increasing internationalisation of visitor economies (e.g. tourism and car testing) with their associated impacts on key access infrastructure. in any case, as we have seen, these ideological factors may work in combination, with the shifting of resources from tärnaby to hemavan showing ‘mountain, large-scale tourism and modern development’ beats ‘mountain and mediumscale tourism and dated development’ (müller 2019). the shifting of resources between the mountain village pairs (tourism and residential) might ultimately work in favour of both villages if it results in a balance of resource distribution that benefits from the collective catchment. unless this is planned, however, it is more likely that the non-favoured villages will simply become resource-poor. likewise, planning is required to realise the potential of digital services in this context. the three key resources used in this research have limited current potential for digital transformation. while online shopping is ubiquitous globally, its village-level effectiveness depends on postal delivery services which continue to be reduced across much of southern lapland. digital education is also increasingly popular, but not (yet) for the youngest learners, and the increased mobility demanded in a digital society makes access to physical fuel distribution sites even more important. reflecting on digitalisation potential also serves as a reminder that these resources are not just uni-functional, but are places where people meet and interact. digitalisation risks cutting people off (even further) from their village communities. digitalisation also decreases the visibility of villages and their access to the human resources (e.g. teachers, nurses or entrepreneurs) that come with key resources. the vhr program recognised the former through the decision to create ‘rooms’ rather than roll out technologies to people’s homes or mobile devices. its failure to recognise the latter may be part of the explanation for slow uptake of the service model. once you take the physical-digital approach, however, you face the same site-selection challenges as with ‘bricks and mortar’ services, and these may be exacerbated by the inexperience of planners in southern lapland with investing in villages (rather than disinvesting). conclusions this paper has contributed to the discussion of ‘decline and adaptation’ of small villages in spas (carson et al. 2016; syssner 2020) by bringing in some new theoretical considerations around resource deserts and settlement hierarchies. these reveal in more depth the importance of local experiences that may be hidden in summary statistics and political discourses. they also suggest that ‘decline’ is a process which can both be driven or reinforced by planning decisions and operate independently therefrom. removing resources may be coupled with population loss in some places, but not in fennia 200(2) (2022) 225dean bradley carson et al. others. the paper has been based on three key resources – grocery store, preschool, and petrol pump – and these may or may not be the most important resources in all cases. other resources such as public transport connections, recreational infrastructure, hospitality businesses, community halls, and highspeed internet access, may better reflect the status of villages in the eyes of their residents and outsiders. hence, there is more work to be done on mapping village resources for this purpose. the ’decline’ approach to planning in southern lapland has long focused on disinvestment, with just the vhr experience presented here as an insight into the potential for a ‘de-growth’ approach, focusing on new models of service delivery. as yet, we do not have sufficient evidence to envision a southern lapland managing de-growth – whether this might entail closer links between villages (in network or heterarchy models) or digitalisation. we know that new initiatives are occurring (habibipour et al. 2022), which may change village hierarchies and the nature of resource distribution. what is clear, however, is the need to have a more strategic and transparent approach to these initiatives to ensure that vulnerable populations and unfavoured villages do not continue to experience lack of equity and access to even the most basic services. acknowledgments this research was supported through funding from the swedish research council formas (2016– 00352 ‘cities of the north: urbanisation, mobilities and new development opportunities for sparsely populated hinterlands’; 2016–344 ‘mobilities, micro-urbanisation and changing settlement patterns in the sparsely populated north’), the swedish research council forte (2017–00183 ‘strengthening community-based health systems through e-health innovations’), and the kamprad foundation (2022–0029 ‘rural shop innovations in a post-covid world: implications for community development in northern sweden’). references amcoff, j. (2012) do rural districts die when their schools close? evidence from sweden around 2000. educational planning 20(3) 47–60. <https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1208538.pdf> 16.12.2022. amcoff, j. (2017) food deserts in sweden? access to food retail in 1998 and 2008. geografiska annaler: series b 99(1) 94–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2016.1277076 bjärstig, t., nygaard, v., riseth, j. å. & sandström, c. (2020) the institutionalisation of sámi interest in municipal comprehensive planning: a comparison between norway and sweden. the international indigenous policy journal 11(2) 1–24. https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2020.11.2.10574 carson, d. b. & argent, n. (2020) who lives in the inland north? dynamic, diverse, fragile, robust. in lundmark, l., carson, d. b. & eimermann, m. (eds.) dipping in to the north, 15–25. palgrave macmillan, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6623-3_2 carson, d. b., carson, d. a., porter, r., ahlin, c. y. & sköld, p. (2016) decline, adaptation or transformation: new perspectives on demographic change in resource peripheries in australia and sweden. comparative population studies 41(3–4). https://doi.org/10.12765/cpos-2016-11 carson, d. b., eimermann, m. & lundmark, l. (2020). epilogue: from growth to decline to degrowth? the future of northern spas. in lundmark, l., carson, d. b. & eimermann, m. (eds.) dipping in to the north, 393–401. palgrave macmillan, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6623-3_20 christaller, w. (1966) central places in southern germany. translated by c. w. baskin. prentice hall, englewood cliffs. dubois, a. & carson, d. b. (2017). the relational geography of post-staples development – a case in malå, north sweden. journal of rural and community development 12(2–3). <https://journals. brandonu.ca/jrcd/article/view/1461> 16.12.2022. duffy, p. r. (2015) site size hierarchy in middle-range societies. journal of anthropological archaeology 37 85–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2014.12.001 gerse, j. & szilágyi, d. (2016) commuting links between settlement hierarchy levels in hungary. regional statistics 6(1) 221–224. <https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=442179> 16.12.2022. habibipour, a., lindberg, j., runardotter, m., elmistikawy, y., ståhlbröst, a. & chronéer, d. (2022) rural living labs: inclusive digital transformation in the countryside. technology innovation management review 11(9/10) 59–72. https://doi.org/10.22215/timreview/1465 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1208538.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2016.1277076 https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2020.11.2.10574 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6623-3_2 https://doi.org/10.12765/cpos-2016-11 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6623-3_20 https://journals.brandonu.ca/jrcd/article/view/1461 https://journals.brandonu.ca/jrcd/article/view/1461 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2014.12.001 https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=442179 https://doi.org/10.22215/timreview/1465 226 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper hall, p., löfgren, k. & peters, g. (2016) greening the street-level procurer: challenges in the strongly decentralized swedish system. journal of consumer policy 39(4) 467–483. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-015-9282-8 hedlund, m. & lundholm, e. (2015) restructuring of rural sweden – employment transition and out-migration of three cohorts born 1945–1980. journal of rural studies 42 123–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.10.006 humer, a. & granqvist, k. (2020) the gradual city-ness and town-ness of public service locations: towards spatially sensitive sector policies. geoforum 113 81–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.05.008 johansson, j., niklasson, l. & persson, b. (2015) the role of municipalities in the bottom-up formation of a meta-region in sweden: drivers and barriers. scandinavian journal of public administration 19(4) 71–88. <https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/sjpa/article/view/3301> 16.12.2022. jonsson, f., carson, d. b., goicolea, i. & hurtig, a. k. (2022) strengthening community health systems through novel ehealth initiatives? commencing a realist study of the virtual health rooms in rural northern sweden. international journal of health policy and management 11(1) 39. https://doi.org/10.34172%2fijhpm.2021.08 jungsberg, l., byskov herslund, l., nilsson, k., umander, k., kantola, a., teräs, j. & weber, r. (2020) local smart specialisation: an approach to increasing preparedness in rural communities with resource-based industries in the northern periphery. european journal of spatial development 71 1–25. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4288731 koster, r. l. & carson, d. a. (eds.) (2019) perspectives on rural tourism geographies: case studies from developed nations on the exotic, the fringe and the boring bits in between. springer, cham. löfving, l., kamuf, v., heleniak, t., weck, s. & norlén, g. (2022) can digitalization be a tool to overcome spatial injustice in sparsely populated regions? the cases of digital västerbotten (sweden) and smart country side (germany). european planning studies 30(5) 917–934. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1928053 van meeteren, m. & poorthuis, a. (2018) christaller and “big data”: recalibrating central place theory via the geoweb. urban geography 39(1) 122–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1298017 meijer, m. & syssner, j. (2017) getting ahead in depopulating areas – how linking social capital is used for informal planning practices in sweden and the netherlands. journal of rural studies 55 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.07.014 müller, d. k. (2019) an evolutionary economic geography perspective on tourism development in a remote ski resort: the case of tarnaby/hemavan in the swedish mountains. in koster, r. & carson, d. a. (eds.) perspectives on rural tourism geographies, 137–157. springer, cham. norlin, b. & lindmark, d. (2021) generating and popularising historical knowledge in a reconciliation process: the case of the church of sweden and the sami. in keynes, m., åström elmersjö, h., lindmark, d. & norlin, b. (eds.) historical justice and history education, 131–151. palgrave macmillan, cham. paliou, e. & bevan, a. (2016) evolving settlement patterns, spatial interaction and the socio-political organisation of late prepalatial south-central crete. journal of anthropological archaeology 42 184–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2016.04.006 palmisano, a. (2017) confronting scales of settlement hierarchy in state-level societies: upper mesopotamia and central anatolia in the middle bronze age. journal of archaeological science: reports 14 220–240. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.05.029 quinn, c. p. & barrier, c. b. (2014) early regional centers: evolution and organization. in smith, c. (ed.) encyclopedia of global archaeology, 2248–2260. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_963 quinn, c. p. & ciugudean, h. (2018) settlement placement and socio-economic priorities: dynamic landscapes in bronze age transylvania. journal of archaeological science: reports 19 936–948. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.05.046 region västerbotten (2018) regionalt serviceprogram för västerbottens län 2014–2020 (2018 update). region västerbotten, umeå. renting, h., schermer, m. & rossi, a. (2012) building food democracy: exploring civic food networks and newly emerging forms of food citizenship. the international journal of sociology of agriculture and food 19(3) 289–307. https://doi.org/10.48416/ijsaf.v19i3.206 sallan, v. f. (2020) transit's relationship to concentrated poverty: a critical study of resource distribution in southeast michigan. journal of law and society 20 214. satcher, l. a. (2022) multiply-deserted areas: environmental racism and food, pharmacy, and greenspace access in the urban south. environmental sociology 8(3) 279–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2031513 sharkey, j. r. (2009) measuring potential access to food stores and food-service places in rural areas in the us. american journal of preventive medicine 36(4) s151–s155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2009.01.004 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-015-9282-8 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.10.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.05.008 https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/sjpa/article/view/3301 https://doi.org/10.34172%2fijhpm.2021.08 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4288731 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1928053 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1298017 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.07.014 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2016.04.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.05.029 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_963 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.05.046 https://doi.org/10.48416/ijsaf.v19i3.206 https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2022.2031513 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2009.01.004 fennia 200(2) (2022) 227dean bradley carson et al. smékalová, l. (2018) evaluating the cohesion policy: targeting of disadvantaged municipalities. administratie si management public 31 143–154. https://doi.org/10.24818/amp/2018.31-10 smith, m. l. (2021) the process of complex societies: dynamic models beyond site-size hierarchies. world archaeology 53(1) 122–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1965015 syssner, j. (2020) pathways to demographic adaptation: perspectives on policy and planning in depopulating areas in northern europe. springer nature, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 tillväxtverket (2021) tillgänglighet till kommersiell och offentlig service 2021. rapport 0369. tillväxtverket, stockholm. <https://tillvaxtverket.se/vara-tjanster/publikationer/publikationer2021/2021-06-09-tillganglighet-till-kommersiell-och-offentlig-service-2021.html> 16.12.2022. versace, v. l., skinner, t. c., bourke, l., harvey, p. & barnett, t. (2021) national analysis of the modified monash model, population distribution and a socio-economic index to inform rural health workforce planning. australian journal of rural health 29(5) 801–810. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajr.12805 weissglas, g. (1975) studies on service problems in the sparsely populated areas in northern sweden. doctoral dissertation, umeå university. wiberg, u. & limani, i. (2015) intermunicipal collaboration: a smart alternative for small municipalities? scandinavian journal of public administration 19(1) 63–82. <https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/sjpa/article/ view/3120/2647>. 16.12.2022. åsele byaportal (2022) åselebyarnas utvecklingsplaner. <http://www.aselebyar.nu/index.php?expand=1&e xpand2=1&menuid=103&pageid=103&submenuid=772&subpageid=685> 22.3.2022. https://doi.org/10.24818/amp/2018.31-10 https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1965015 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 https://tillvaxtverket.se/vara-tjanster/publikationer/publikationer-2021/2021-06-09-tillganglighet-till-kommersiell-och-offentlig-service-2021.html https://tillvaxtverket.se/vara-tjanster/publikationer/publikationer-2021/2021-06-09-tillganglighet-till-kommersiell-och-offentlig-service-2021.html https://doi.org/10.1111/ajr.12805 https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/sjpa/article/view/3120/2647 https://ojs.ub.gu.se/index.php/sjpa/article/view/3120/2647 http://www.aselebyar.nu/index.php?expand=1&expand2=1&menuid=103&pageid=103&submenuid=772&subpageid=685 http://www.aselebyar.nu/index.php?expand=1&expand2=1&menuid=103&pageid=103&submenuid=772&subpageid=685 untitled the uralic languages pirkko suihkonen suihkonen, pirkko (2002). the uralic languages. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 165– 176. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper deals with the uralic languages, their regional distribution and relationship with one another. the uralic languages are spoken in a large area in north and central eurasia. most of the uralic languages are seriously endangered minority languages – only finnish, hungarian, and estonian are principal national languages spoken in independent countries. despite being relatives, the uralic languages differ remarkably from one another. in the west, the uralic languages have had most intensive relationships with indo-european languages, and in the east, with turkic languages. the differences within the language group carry information regarding these contacts. in the research of the uralic languages, the proto-languages and the original home of the peoples speaking these languages have attracted particular interest. comparative and historical methods and archaeology have been important in the research of the history of the uralic languages. pirkko suihkonen, department of general linguistics, p. o. box 9, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: suihkone@ling.helsinki.fi introduction the uralic languages, their regional distribution, and relationship with one another are examined in this article. in the first section, the uralic languages and peoples belonging to the ethnic group identified by the name of the language are presented within the framework of statistical information. the section also contains a short overview of the investigations on the origin and the history of the uralic languages and their contemporary situation. in the second section of the article, the uralic languages are described within the framework of language typology. in the last section, some focal points in the study of the uralic languages will be summarized. the regional distribution of the uralic languages the concept uralic languages is defined on the basis of their genetic classification, which is carried out according to the historical and comparative methods used in historical linguistics. these methods are used to reconstruct a common proto-language (the parent of the contemporary languages) based on the information available from the daughter languages. the so-called proto-uralic dates back at least 5,000–4,000 years before contemporary era (b.c.e.) (cf. koivulehto 1999a). excluding hungarian, estonian, finnish, livonian, and most of the saami languages, the main areas where the uralic languages are spoken are located in russia (fig. 1). the north-samoyedic languages are spoken in eurasia’s northernmost areas: the nenets live in the nenets, yamalo nenets, and taymyr autonomous areas, the enets in the taymyr autonomous area, and the nganasans in the taymyr autonomous area and the krasnoyarsk territory. the nenets can also be found in the khanty-mansiysk autonomous area. the selkup dialects are spoken in the khantymansiysk autonomous area and in the tomsk region. in addition to their national areas, speakers of mari, udmurt, komi, and especially mordvin are scattered across russia. as a consequence of the relocation of peoples during the soviet period in russia, estonian is also spoken, e.g., in the krasnoyarsk territory in central siberia. the karelian republic, the tver, murmansk and leningrad regions, and st. petersburg are the principal areas where karelians live. the veps live in the karelian republic and in the vologda and leningrad 166 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirkko suihkonen fig. 1. peoples and groups of people belonging to the uralic language family (rikkinen et al. 1999: 49; nacionalnyj… 1990; census of finland 1999; information on the speakers of the saami languages is given by ellen näkkäläjärvi. note that linguistic or ethnic data are usually not included in the census information in western european countries. information on the hungarian people in the czech republic was given by michaela kholova (information services unit, cso), and in austria, by ruth hügelsberger, statistics austria, bundesanstalt statistik, österreich). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 167the uralic languages regions, and the ingrians and the vods are found in the leningrad region. the few remaining livonian-speakers live in northern latvia. most of the people belonging to khanty and mansi ethnic groups live in the khanty-mansiysk autonomous area. khantys also live in the tomsk region and the yamalo-nenets autonomous area. the indigenous saami people live in four countries: in norway, sweden, finland, and russia (fig. 1). many speakers of finnish, hungarian, and estonian also live in other european countries as well as in the united states, canada, and australia. this migration of the peoples speaking the uralic languages, particularly those languages with a large number of speakers, is a consequence of numerous factors. the economic factors have been among the most crucial ones. extensive migration from finland to the usa, canada and australia at the turn and the first half of the twentieth century, and to sweden in the 1960s and 1970s, are examples of migration caused, to a great extent, by periods of structural transformations and even depression in finland’s economy. employment opportunities in the fishing industry in northern norway have been important particularly for people in northern finland. economic reasons caused migration also in the former soviet union: the trans-baikal railroad and numerous mines in siberia were built by people who moved to the east and to the north in order to build a brave new world. in the soviet period, forced transfers of population concerned particularly national minorities and ethnic groups. migration of russians to the areas originally populated by minority groups changed permanently the structure of population in these areas. for example, the estonian and finnish settlements in siberia have their roots in this era. wars have always caused migration, and a war often reorganizes the distribution of people and languages. political, economic, and social reasons are also most crucial for a language’s death. for example, livonian can nowadays be considered to be a dead language, but at the beginning of the last millennium livonians formed a significant minority group in latvia. little by little livonians assimilated to latvians. also the fightings that took place in courland during world war ii were disastrous for livonians. the livonian fishermen in courland on the coast of the baltic sea were economically less dependent on the latvian community and thus survived the longest (e.g., laakso 1991: 116–118). the degree of endangerment the contemporary uralic languages can be divided into four main groups on the basis of the degree of their endangerment. the status of hungarian, finnish, and estonian, which all are principal national languages in independent countries, is protected by law in these countries. the legaladministrative and cultural activities in these countries support and maintain the position of the languages. the languages have the status of majority languages, and their future depends first and foremost on the speakers of these languages. the position of the second group is less stable. the languages such as udmurt, mordvin, mari, and komi, which have a relatively high number of speakers, belong to this group. there are various activities within these groups that support their continuing existence. these languages have an official status in the national administrative regions, and they are taught in school at various levels. they are also taught at the universities, in which they are languages of instruction at the departments where the education of teachers and researchers of these languages is arranged. these languages are used in literature, newspapers, and in productions of modern art and popular tradition, and research of these languages is active. that these languages are minority languages in the administrative regions where they are spoken causes serious problems. the number of people belonging to the ethnic groups is usually noticeably higher than that of the native speakers of these languages. in several ways, the position of karelian, north saami, and nenets falls between this second and the third, weaker group. majority languages have a strong position in everyday life, and, when excluding north saami, they are, e.g., the languages used in all higher education. majority languages also have the most important function in administration, and usually all the innovations are learnt through the majority languages spoken in the area. in particular, assimilation of karelians, mordvins, and komi-permyaks into the main ethnic groups (that usually is russian) has been most extensive in the twentieth century (suihkonen 1987; lallukka 1995). the number of north saami speakers is much smaller than that of the volgaic and permic languages, but the activities supporting north saami are even more vital than those in the mari, mordvin, udmurt, and komi republics. the fact that the speakers of north saami live in three countries (norway, swe168 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirkko suihkonen den, and finland) complicates cooperation in economic and cultural life. the same kind of situation applies to the nenets and the karelians who live in a large area in north siberia and west russia, respectively. the position of the third group is more difficult. the group consists of veps, and the ob-ugric languages khanty and mansi (cf. above the north saami, the karelians, and the nenets). the number of speakers is relatively small, as it is with regard to the number of people belonging to the ethnic group. in spite of the fact that many of the languages have official position in the national administrative regions where they are spoken, and that various political and cultural activities support these languages, the press of the majority cultures and languages is strong. the economic situation is difficult, and the structure of economic life does not support minority nationalities. some parts of the area are rich with natural resources (e.g., one of the world’s richest oil fields is located in the khanty-mansiysk autonomous area), but integration of the local ways of life with the modern industry has proved to be difficult. the small saami languages in finland are located between this third group and the fourth group that consists of the small, seriously endangered baltic-finnic, saami and samoyed languages, some of which are virtually extinct. documentation on the languages belonging to this group is one of the most urgent tasks of uralic linguistics. when a language disappears, a huge amount of the mankind’s cultural inheritance vanishes. documentation of these languages is also important because of the languages themselves, as it is the only way to store information on them. relationships within the group the family tree theory is one of the most common ways to describe the relationships between the members of the uralic language group. according to this theory all the branches in the tree represent daughter languages that have developed from one proto-language over the course of the languages’ history. in the study of the history of the uralic languages before the 1990s, protouralic was dated to circa 6,000–4,000 b.c.e.; proto-finno-ugric 4,000–3,000 b.c.e.; proto-finno-permic 3,000–2,000 b.c.e.; proto-finno-volgaic (proto-finno-mari) 2,000–1,500 b.c.e.; and proto-finno-saami (early proto-baltic-finnic), the proto-language of the baltic-finnic and saami languages, circa 1,000 b.c.e. (korhonen 1981: 27; rédei 2000). according to the most recent studies, the proto-languages in the uralic branch have a longer history. for example, the break-up of proto-finno-saami is now dated to circa 2,500 b.c.e. (sammallahti 1998: 33; cf. koivulehto 1999b). the structure of the family tree is the outcome of a comparative research method. the further one goes back in time, the more difficult it is to recognize linguistic variety. an alternative approach is given in the wave theory, in which the chronological relationships of languages do not have priority. instead, distribution of various linguistic properties forms areal isoglosses of these properties that are like waves cutting across each other. the relative strength of the boundaries between the isoglosses depends on how they bunch together (see anttila 1989: 300–309). the family tree and wave theories are complementary to one another: they stress different aspects in the relationships of languages. according to a third influential approach, the contact theory, many of the properties of the contemporary languages are a consequence of contacts between languages over the course of their history (wiik 2000; cf. itkonen 1966: 9; anttila 2000). evidence of the contacts between the uralic languages and other languages spoken in the same area in various periods of time can be found in all the uralic languages. in the west, the uralic languages have had most intensive contacts with the indo-european languages and, in the east, with turkic languages. linguistic palaentology, a research method in which archaeology and linguistics intersect, has had an important role in dating these connections. linguistic palaentology compares the distribution of cultural words (e.g., the names of plants, seeds, and tools) with the results of archaeological studies and relates the history of the distribution of cultures to linguistic evidence. linguistic palaentology has also been important in the study of the relationships between the uralic languages. the earliest connections between the indo-european and uralic proto-languages are dated to at least 4,000 b.c.e. according to the theoretical framework of this research, proto-uralic was spoken in the area between the baltic sea and the middle course of the volga river, and proto-indo-european in the area between the dnepr and volga rivers to the north of the caspian sea and the black sea. on the basis of the distribution of indo-aryan and indo-iranian loanwords, the area where proto-ugric (the fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 169the uralic languages proto-language of the ugric languages) and proto-samoyed (the proto-language of the samoyedic languages) were spoken is presumed to have been located to the east of the ural mountains (koivulehto 1999a; parpola 1999; kallio 1999). indo-european loanwords, particularly those from pre-baltic and pre-germanic language forms dated to 3,300–2,300 b.c.e., are also important in dating the break-up of proto-finno-saami (koivulehto 1999b; sammallahti 1998). in addition to the area in the forest belt between the baltic sea and the middle course of the volga river, the original homeland of the uralic peoples is thought to have been located in several places between the altay-sayan mountains and northern and central europe. the most important evidence regarding the areas where the uralic languages have been spoken is based on archaeological data. evaluation of archaeological evidence with regard to languages spoken in north and central eurasia is still in progress1 . during the last twenty years, multidisciplinary international study regarding the roots of the peoples speaking the uralic languages has been productive. in the most recent studies, genetic anthropology has become important. some of the uralic-speaking peoples have been studied with regards to their maternal and paternal lineage, that is, the properties of mitochondrial dna (maternal) and the y chromosome (paternal). the maternal inheritance of uralic people living in scandinavia can be seen as a european subset, and the saami inheritance as a sub-branch of that, whereas the paternal lineage is linked to some siberian populations. among the yakuts, this y-chromosome type is very extensive, as it is among the finns, the komi, and the lithuanians. so far, the results of genetic study cover only some fragments of the genetic inheritance of people of north and central eurasia (see sajantila & pääbo 1995; savontaus & lahermo 1999). interpretation of the results of these studies, as well as those obtained in archaeology or genetic anthropology, is one of the most challenging tasks in the study of the histories of the uralic languages and peoples. typological properties of the uralic languages typologically, languages are defined on the basis of linguistic properties and the relationships between these properties. in the following, some of the structural typological properties used in typological classification of contemporary uralic languages are presented. phonology phonologically, there are scarcely any properties common to all the uralic languages, although there are some common tendencies. one of these is the avoidance of initial consonant clusters: for example, latin schola (school) has become koulu in finnish and iskola in hungarian. in the contemporary languages, this rule no longer obtains. for example, in the southwestern dialect of finnish (see raento & husso 2002: cd-fig. 1), the initial clusters are part of the phonotactic system of the language. vowel harmony – “a rule whereby all the vowels of a given word must belong to one of a number of partitions of the overall vowel system” (comrie 1988: 454–455) – is a property that is thought to be inherited from proto-uralic. some variety of palatal vowel harmony is found in the baltic-finnic languages, except for estonian and livonian. this is true also of west mari, hungarian, and some khanty dialects. the following examples are taken from finnish and khanty: in finnish, metsä+ssä signifies ‘in a/the forest’ (forest+inessive), talo+ssa ‘in a/the house’ (house+ inessive), and in khanty’s vakh dialect, sem+äm ‘my eye’ (eye+possessive-suffix-singular1), olv+ am ‘my threshold’ (threshold+possessive-suffixsingular1) (comrie 1988: 455). also the south samoyedic language kamas, which became extinct in the twentieth century, had partial vowel harmony (künnap 1999: 11). quantity correlation of vowels and consonants is another property considered to be typical of the uralic languages. the quantity correlation of vowels that has been considered to have its origin in proto-uralic, is still represented in finnish, for example: tuli ‘fire’ : tuuli ‘wind’. in several languages, the old quantity correlation has been a basis for the development of a new quantity correlation (itkonen 1966: 61–69; on the history of the development of vowels in the uralic languages, sammallahti 1988). consonant gradation, i.e., quantitative and/or qualitative gradation of consonants in the inflected word forms, is considered to be a consequence of parallel developments in the uralic languages. consonant gradation is found in the baltic-finnic languages (except for veps and livonian) and in the saami languages (except for south saami). representative examples 170 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirkko suihkonen in finnish are kukka : kuka+n ‘a flower’ : ‘of a flower’ (flower+genitive) and pata : pada+n ‘a pot’ : ‘of a pot’ (pot+genitive). in the baltic-finnic languages, the gradation concerns stops, whereas in the saami languages it concerns almost all the consonants (korhonen 1981: 135–153). in the samoyedic languages, consonant gradation is found, e.g., in nganasan (helimski 1998: 482). word initial stress that is thought to have been in proto-finno-ugric, occurs in several finno-ugric languages, also in finnish, but this rule has numerous exceptions in most of the languages. for instance, in udmurt, the main stress usually falls on the last final syllable, but there are exceptions to this rule for lexical or grammatical reasons. in erzya, the main stress in the word varies, but it tends to fall on the first syllable (mosin & baju vskin 1983: 2). in literary east mari, the stress is, in most cases, located on the last strong full vowel. in west mari, the rules of stress placement are more complex: in principle, west mari has penultimate stress, but there are several exceptions to the rule (alhoniemi 1985: 17–18). also some khanty dialects lack word-initial stress (kálmán 1976: 1934; cf. itkonen 1966: 150–159). suffixation is the most common type of morphological technique in word formation in the uralic languages. prefixation is a common morphological method only in hungarian. the uralic languages are regarded as synthetic, i.e., word forms consist of several elements connected with each other2. synthetic languages express grammatical relationships with affixes, and for this reason word forms can be long. variation in the synthesis index, developed within the framework of quantitative typology, is remarkable in the uralic languages. according to the calculations made on the basis of the corpora consisting of one hundred words collected from south saami, north saami, inari saami, kildin saami, finnish, erzya, mari, udmurt, and hungarian, the synthesis index (the number of morphemes per number of words) lay between 1.81 (erzya) and 2.22 (finnish) (korhonen 1969: 221). the indices are average figures of the elements they are calculated from. they are based on the structural information on the word form, and they tell nothing about the categories the elements represent. the uralic languages are also considered to be agglutinative. this means that a grammatical category is always expressed with the same morpheme, and that the morphological elements are connected to the roots one after another, and the boundaries between the elements are clear (see comrie 1988: 460). the claim that the uralic languages are agglutinative is only partly true, however: for example in estonian, finnish, hungarian and the saami languages, the degree of morphophonological variation is noticeable. the range of the indices of agglutination (the number of agglutinative constructions per the number of junctures in the words) calculated for the abovementioned languages varies between 0.01 (the saami languages except inari saami) and 0.37 (hungarian) (korhonen 1969: 221). the opposite technique to agglutination is called fusion. in fusional languages, the boundaries between grammatical elements in a word form cannot be clearly drawn. the morphological technique of skolt saami is markedly more fusional than most other uralic languages (korhonen 1969). in the nominal inflection of the uralic languages, there are some elements that have a common origin, but most of the typologically characteristic properties have developed during the separate developments of individual uralic languages. the number of cases varies between three (khanty, northern dialects) and twenty-five (hungarian). in finnish the number of cases is fifteen, and in north saami six. in proto-uralic, the number of cases is reconstructed to have been at least six (itkonen 1966: 69). in the basic form, the core case system of the uralic languages contains grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive) as well as cases expressing information on locational relations. the nominative form is usually the stem of the word form. the local case systems usually differentiate between cases for static position, motion towards something, and motion away from something. the baltic-finnic, volgaic and permic languages, and hungarian further distinguish internal and external local cases. this local case system is illustrated with the following examples from finnish: pöydä+ssä ‘in a/the table’ (table+inessive); pöydä+stä ‘from a/ the table’ (table+elative); pöytä+än ‘to a/the table’ (table+illative); pöydä+llä ‘on a/the table’ (table+adessive; pöydä+ltä ‘from a/the table’ (table+ablative); pöydä+lle ‘on(to) a/the table’ (table+allative) (e.g., itkonen 1966: 69–78; korhonen 1992). in the external local cases, hungarian makes further an additional three-fold distinction between cases that express location close to, and connected with, the element the word form denotes (‘to’, ‘at’ and ‘(away) from’ and ‘on’, ‘on(to)’ and ‘off’). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 171the uralic languages except for estonian, all the uralic languages use suffixes to express possession. in the baltic-finnic, volgaic and saami languages, the case ending precedes the possessive suffix, as in finnish: talo+ ssa+ni ‘in my house’ (house+inessive+possessivesuffix-singular1). in the ugric languages, the possessive suffix is located before the case suffix, as in mansi: kol+uw+n ‘in our house’ (house+ lative+possessive-suffix-singular1) (kálmán 1976: 44–46) and in hungarian: ház+am+ban ‘in my house’ (house+possessive-suffix-singular1+inessive). in the permic languages and mari, both of these orders are found. the following examples are from udmurt: val+ez+tek means ‘without his/ her horse’ (horse+possessive-suffix-singular3+ caritive), and gurt+jos+a+z ‘in/to his/her villages’ (village+plural+inessive/illative+possessivesuffix-singular3) (comrie 1988: 464). all the uralic languages have postpositions, and, in some languages, they can be used as prepositions, as in finnish: pöydä+n keske+llä : keske+llä pöytä+ä ‘in the centre of the table’ (table+genitive centre+allative : centre+allative table+partitive). in expressing number, all the uralic languages distinguish singular and plural, and the saami, ob-ugric and samoyedic languages also a dual. in some languages, the number distinction of possessive suffixes concerns both possessors and the possessed. particularly the third person possessive suffixes have developed to express other grammatical categories. for example in udmurt, the third person possessive suffixes have developed nominalizers that are used in defining a delimited, closed set: meha 7nik+jos+my+ly+os+yz ‘those which belong to our mechanics’ (mechanic+ plural+possessive-suffix-plural1+dative+plural+ nominalizer) (suihkonen 1990: 297–301, 305– 307; cf. kálmán 1976: 69–70 on mansi; nikolaeva 1999: 80–84 on khanty). hungarian is the only uralic language in which the distinction between indefinite and definite noun phrases is systematically done with the aid of articles: egy ház ‘a house’, a ház ‘the house’, ez a ház ‘this (the) house’. in mordvin, the definiteness of noun phrases is expressed with a separate definite declension: kudo ‘a house’, kudo+ 7s ‘the/that house’ (mosin & baju vskin 1983: 24). it must also be noted that grammatical gender does not exist in the uralic languages, although nominal derivation does admit distinctions of natural gender. for example in finnish, kirjailija, ‘a writer (male or female)’, and kirjailija+tar, ‘a female writer’, can be distinguished. the borders between the parts of speech are not always clear in the uralic languages. in all of them, there are many words that can be inflected both nominally and verbally. a finnish example is the word stem tuule‘wind’, ‘to blow’ (itkonen 1966: 80): tuuli = noun+singular : tuule+n = noun+singular+genitive tuuletuulla = verb+infinitive : tuule+e = verb+present+singular3 these words belong to the ancient vocabulary of the uralic languages. the distinction between nouns and adjectives is weak, as is that between adjectives and adverbs. the distinction between nouns and adjectives is differentiated furthest in the saami languages, in which most of the adjectives have different forms in the prenominal and the predicative position. in addition to adjectives, also some nouns can take the comparison suffix as in finnish: ranta : ranne+mpa+na ‘shore’ : ‘closer to the shore’ (shore+comparative+essive). an interesting property typical of all these languages is a large number of nominal and adverbial forms of verbs. all the uralic languages distinguish person and number in verbal inflection. the personal endings are connected to the verbs after the modal and temporal suffixes. in the compound tense forms the personal suffixes are often connected with auxiliaries that can also contain information on temporal and modal distinctions. in number, the saami, ugric and samoyedic languages distinguish a dual in addition to a singular and a plural. the uralic languages differ with regard to the types of tense and mood expressed with verbal inflection. the basic distinction in expressing tense concerns the opposition between present and past, or past and non-past, but the variety within these categories is remarkable. grammatical future is found in komi, udmurt, hungarian, and in some khanty dialects. in udmurt, the future is expressed synthetically with the suffix -o-: jual+o+d ‘you will ask’ (ask+future+singular2), mis’k+o+dy ‘they will wash’ (wash+future+plural2) (perevo v vs vcikov et al. 1962: 201). in hungarian, the verb lesz (to be) has the future form: lesz+ek ‘i shall be’, etc. from the other verbs, the future is formed with the present tense of the auxiliary fog (start) and the infinitive form of the verb that carries the lexical meaning of the verbal 172 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirkko suihkonen phrase: vár+ni fog+nak ‘they will wait’ (wait+infinitive will+plural3). in practice, the compound future is no longer used frequently (keresztes 1974: 49). some tense markers that have been reconstructed to be proto-finno-ugric are represented in the verbal morphology of the modern finno-ugric languages. also some elements of expressing mood (imperative and conjunctive/subjunctive suffixes) from the same historical period have their representatives in the contemporary languages. all the uralic languages have the indicative and the imperative moods, and all the finno-ugric languages (except for mansi) have the conditional. various types of evidentiality are expressed grammatically in several finno-ugric languages. in estonian, there is a special mood used in these kinds of expressions (indirect mood, modus obliquus): sa luge+vat signifies ‘it is said that you read’ (you read+indirect-mood+present) (laanest 1982: 239, 265). in udmurt, some tense forms also carry information on evidentiality: bödti+ 7sko völ+em ‘it was said that i was finishing’ (finish+ present+singular1 auxiliary+perfect) (fokos-fuchs 1954: 154). the indicative, the basic mood, is not marked in the uralic languages. in the baltic-finnic languages, the aspectual distinctions are involved with case marking, e.g., when the activity is not terminative, the noun is in the partitive form, as in finnish: rakenna+n talo+a ‘i am building a house’ (build+singular1 house+partitive). when the activity is terminative, the noun is in the genitive form: rakenna+n talo+n ‘i build a/the house’ (build+singular1 house+ genitive). in the case ending -n above, which is analysed as genitive in the modern finnish, the old proto-uralic genitive case *-n and the accusative case *-m have fallen together. in hungarian, imperfective verbs are changed to perfective ones with perfective prefixes: a barát+om+hoz men+t+em ‘i was going to my friend’ (definitearticle friend+possessive-suffix+singular1+allative go+past+singular1); el+men+t+em a barát+ om+hoz ‘i went to my friend’ (perfective-prefix+ go+past+singular1 definite-article friend+possessive-suffix-singular1+allative) (kerestesz 1974: 114–115). the progressive aspect is typically expressed with verbal nominal forms inflected with locative cases: in finnish, tyttö o+n kävele+mä+ssä ‘a girl is walking’ (girl be+singular3 walk+ infinitive3+inessive). also verbal derivation is used in expressing aspectual distinctions as in udmurt: vsonty+ny ‘to wave’ (terminative): vsona+ ny ‘to wave’ (non-terminative; -ny = infinitive). information on aspect is given, e.g., with the definite verbal conjugation in the ugric and samoyedic languages and mordvin (hajdú 1988: 16– 17; mosin & baju vskin 1983: 95–105). in the definite verbal conjugation verbal inflection is used to give information on the person and number of the subject and object (or, the agent and the target). the following examples are from khanty’s muzhi dialect: m +a+s+em stands for ‘i gave it’ (give+past+singular1/singular3), m +a+s+lam ‘i gave those two / those’ (give+past+singular1-dual3/ plural3) (rédei 1965: 66–67). the variety in expressing diathesis can be compared with that of expressing aspect [diathesis: “the sense is that of the role or ‘placing’ of a subject, e.g. as agent in relation to an active verb, or as patient or ‘undergoer’ in relation to a passive.” (matthews 1997: s. v. diathesis)]. a personal passive is found in the ob-ugric languages: in khanty’s muzhi dialect, -ajis the passive suffix, and kit+s+aj+qn means ‘i was sent’ (send+past+ passive+singular1), kit+s+aj+mqn ‘we two were sent’ (send+past+passive+dual1), and kit+s+aj+uw ‘we were sent’ (send+past+passive+plural1) (rédei 1965: 71). finnish has the impersonal passive, in which the personal ending of the passive form contains information on the agent that is not specified: talo rakenne+tt+i+in ‘the house was built’ (house build+passive+past+unspecified-agent). the verbal nominal system (e.g., participles) usually contains passive and active forms. in udmurt, the participle -emyn often has also the passive function: pinal+ez vande+myn… ‘her child was stabbed…’ (child+possessive-suffix+singular3 stab+participle+past+passive) (fokos-fuchs 1954: 160). in the uralic languages, also some verbal derivational suffixes have passive and reflexive function – cf. the examples from finnish: kulke+a ‘to go’ (go+infinitive): kulke+utu+a ‘be carried (conveyed); drift, be driven (with the wind)’ (go+reflexive-passive-derivation-suffix+infinitive); puke+a ‘dress’ (dress+infinitive): puke+utu+a ‘dress oneself’ (dress+reflexive-passive-derivational-suffix+infinitive). reflexivity is one of the categories that are typically expressed with verbal derivation in the uralic languages: in mansi, the suffix -xathas the reflexive function: masi ‘to clothe’: mas+xat+i ‘to clothe oneself’ (kálmán 1976: 56). also causativity and double causativity in the uralic languages are expressed by the verbal derivation, as in finnish: kulke+a ‘to go’ (go+infinitive): kulje+tta+a ‘to transport; to carry; fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 173the uralic languages to take’ (go+causative+infinitive): kulje+t+utta+a ‘let/make smbd transport, carry, take smthg’ (go+causative+causative+infinitive) (-a = infinitive suffix). with some exceptions, the use of the conjugated negative verb is typical of the uralic languages, although other kinds of techniques of expressing negation exist as well. in finnish, minä e+n tule signifies ‘i do not come’ (i not+singular1 come+connegative-form), sinä e+t tule ‘you do not come’ (you not+singular2 come+connegative-form). in estonian, negation is not expressed with finite negative verb, but information on the person is given with personal pronouns: ma ei palu ‘i do not ask’ (i not ask); sa ei palu ‘you do not ask’ (you not ask). person and number are distinguished in the prohibitive forms (laanest 1982: 242–271). prohibition and sentential negation are given with different lexical elements, e.g., in the ugric languages, which have different particles in expressing prohibition and negation (mansi: taw at k –asalaste ‘s/he did not note it’, tuw ul minen! ‘do not go there!’) (kálmán 1976: 67–68). the syntactic level the uralic languages also differ from one another syntactically. in proto-uralic, the order of the main syntactic constituents, o(bject) and v(erb, predicate), is reconstructed as ov, and in protofinno-ugric, when taking s(ubject) into account, sov (raun 1988: 568–569). in the modern uralic languages this order varies. the principal word order of neutral statements in udmurt is sov, but, for instance, in the baltic-finnic languages it is svo. thus, in udmurt, ta piosmurt val+ez vi+i+z ‘this man killed the horse’ (this man horse+accusative kill+past+singular3), but in finnish, minä ota+n kirja+n ‘i take the book’ (i take+singular1 book+genitive). in the uralic languages, the subject of the sentence is typically in the nominative form, and the object of the transitive sentences is distinguished with the case marking. the agent of the passive sentences in khanty is in the locative case form. in finnish, the agent of the passive type sentences, in which the predicate is formed by the iii infinitive, is in the genitive form: taulu o+n peka+n maalaa+ma ‘the picture is painted by pekka’ (picture+nominative be+present+singular3 pekka+ genitive paint+infinitive-iii+nominative). in basic nominal sentences, several uralic languages have a copula. finnish is one of them: talo o+n suuri ‘the house is big’ (house be+singular3 big). in some languages, in the present tense, this sentence type also occurs without a copular verb, as in udmurt: ar vsin ku 7z ‘ar vsin is long’ (ar vsin long; ar vsin is an old measure of length) (perevo vs vcikov et al. 1962: 137; cf. comrie 1988: 473). nouns can be conjugated in nominal and locative sentences in some samoyedic languages and mordvin. the following examples are from erzya: od ‘young’, od+an ‘i am young’ (young+singular1), od+tado ‘you are young’ (young+plural2); tese ‘here’, tes+ an ‘i am here’ (here+singular1), tes+at ‘you are here’ (here+singular2) (mosin & baju vskin 1983: 4). the uralic languages differ from one another with regard to the order of the comparative standard and adjective, and the use of comparative conjunctions. in finnish, the comparative conjunction kuin ‘than’ is used: markus o+n vanhe+mpi kuin matias ‘markus is older than matias’ (markus be+singular3 old+comparative-suffix than+comparative-conjunction matias=comparative-standard). in udmurt, instead of the comparative conjunction, the comparative standard is marked by the ablative case ending: metr arvsin+ le 7s ku 7z+gem ‘the meter is longer than ar vsin’ (meter ar vsin+ablative=comparative-standard long+ comparative-suffix) (perevovs vcikov et al. 1962: 137). conjunctions in the modern uralic languages are loans or they have developed after the proto-uralic period. in proto-uralic, subordination was expressed with non-finite verbal forms (korhonen 1981: 346). asyndetic co-ordination is still used, e.g., in mansi (cf. kálmán 1976: 346), and coordinative conjunction is not obligatory in some structures, e.g., in finnish: toinen auto ol+i sininen, toinen (ol+i) punainen ‘one car was blue, the other one (was) red’ (one car be+past+singular3 blue, other-one (be+past+singular3) red). also the instructive case connected with nouns has the coordinative function, e.g., in adverbial phrases: kävele+n aamu+i+n illo+i+n ‘i walk every morning and evening’ (walk+singular1 morning+plural+instructive evening+plural+instructive). in the noun phrases, the determiner, adjective attribute, and numeral precede the noun, as in hungarian: piros alma ‘a red apple’ (red apple); két barát ‘two friends’ (two friend+singular), ez a ház: ‘this house’ (this definite-article house) (keresztes 1974: 145). in the noun phrases consisting of a numeral and a noun, the noun is in the singular form also when the value of the numeral is more than one, as in udmurt: vit nunal ‘five days’ (five day+singular+nominative) (cf. the above example 174 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirkko suihkonen in hungarian). in finnish, the noun is in the partitive case: kaksi päivä+ä ‘two days’ (two day+ singular+partitive). in most of the uralic languages, the determiner and adjective do not agree with the noun, although they do, for instance, in the baltic-finnic languages such as finnish: tä+ssä piene+ssä kaupungi+ssa ‘in this small town’ (this+ inessive small+inessive town+inessive). in linguistic typology, the order of the noun modifiers and the main syntactic constituents [(s)ubject, v(predicate), (o)bject] has been one of the characteristic parameters in defining language types. realization of the word order combinations within noun phrases and sentences has been linked with the occurrence of adpositions in languages and used in defining word-order universals (greenberg 1980; hawkins 1983: 74, 67, 79, 81). the pre-nominal order is typical of sov languages, which is the reconstructed order of proto-uralic. it is claimed that the surface word order of the uralic languages is relatively free owing to their high degree of synthesis. because of the variety in the word order patterns in the uralic languages it is also claimed that (at least in the uralic languages spoken in europe) there is no word order model that can be said to be typical of them all (vilkuna 1998). word-order typology as such is not exhaustive in describing the syntactic relationships of languages. in the uralic languages, grammatical relations are expressed with dependent morphological elements and, quite often, the word order is used to express thematic relations. typology developed for investigating the organization of syntactic elements on the basis of discourse-pragmatic reasons can be better used in characterizing the free word order languages, such as hungarian and finnish (see sasse 1995). summary the relationships of the uralic languages are defined with the aid of genetic classification. on the basis of historical linguistic studies and by using typological information on languages we can follow the processes that take place when a language is changing. in spite of the fact that the historical documents of the uralic languages are relatively young – the oldest documents, from hungarian and karelian, date from the thirteenth century – many historical properties of the uralic languages are known. on the basis of the typological description of the uralic languages it can be said that the differences between individual uralic languages are even more notable than expected. an interesting question is how close the contemporary uralic languages are to one another typologically. the uralic languages are not isolated: over the course of history they have been influenced by numerous other languages and cultures. “the uralic languages belong to a large areal-typological linguistic group extending from the atlantic to the pacific, also including the turkic, mongolic and tungusic languages. the members of these four language families are characterised by a number of common structural features” (korhonen 1992: 163). another interesting and important question is how close the uralic languages are typologically to the other languages spoken in north and central eurasia. the uralic languages are spoken in a large area in europe and north and central asia. archaeological studies have provided us with information on the material cultures of the area. the rapid advances in genetic science have produced a great amount of data on the genetic inheritance of the peoples living in this area. there still remain numerous unanswered questions about the history of the uralic languages and peoples. the use of multidisciplinary methods in trying to find answers to these questions is not only promising and challenging, but also very complex, and usually the methods used in other fields of science shed no direct light on the history of languages. also, interactions between the research methods used in comparative historical studies and multi-disciplinary studies are waiting for new evaluations. the more information on the history of the uralic languages and the other languages spoken in the same area will be available, the better the relationships between these languages can be understood. acknowledgements my sincerest thanks to raimo anttila and bernard comrie for their comments on this article, and david steadman for his comments on the english language of some parts of the manuscript. the principal part of the article was prepared at the max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology, department of linguistics, leipzig. notes 1 on different aspects on the history of the uralic people and uralic languages, see itkonen 1966: 22–31. a sumfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 175the uralic languages mary of the theories concerning the original homeland (urheimat) of the uralic peoples is given in rédei (2000). for a complete summary of the most recent studies on the connections of the indo-european and baltic-finnic languages, see anttila (2000). 2 historically, the traditional morphological typological classification of languages, based mostly on edward sapir’s work in the 1920s (see sapir 1949), has its roots in the german language typology (sprachtypology) from the nineteenth century. in this classification, isolation, agglutination, and fusion are the main classes of the morphological technique. these techniques are specified with the properties derived from other levels of languages. moreover, it has been considered that the development of the morphological technique of languages is cyclic. references alhoniemi a (1985). marin kielioppi. apuneuvoja suomalais-ugrilaisten kielten opintoja varten x. suomalais-ugrilainen seura, helsinki. anttila r (1989). historical and comparative linguistics. amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, series iv. 1st ed. 1972. john benjamins, amsterdam. anttila r (2000). the indo-european and balticfinnic interface: time against the ice. in renfrew c, a mcmahon & l trask (eds.) time depth in historical linguistics, 421–528. the mcdonald institute for archaeological research, cambridge. census of finland in 1999 (1999). statistics finland. autumn, 2001. <http://statfin.stat.fi/statweb/statfincatalog_väestölaskenta.asp> comrie b (1988). general features of the uralic languages. in sinor d (ed). the uralic languages. description, history and foreign influences. handbook of uralic studies, 451–477. ej brill, leiden. fokos-fuchs dr (1954). grammaticalischer abriss. in wichmann y (ed). wotjakischer chrestomathie mit glossar. apuneuvoja suomalais-ugrilaisten kielten opintoja varten ii, 135–166. suomalaisugrilainen seura, helsinki. greenberg jh (1980). some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. in greenberg jh (ed). universals of language, 73–113. 1st ed. 1963. mit press, cambridge. hajdú p (1988). die samojedischen sprachen. in sinor d (ed). the uralic languages. description, history and foreign influences. handbook of uralic studies, 3–40. ej brill, leiden. hawkins ja (1983). word order universals. academic press, new york. helimski e (1998). nganasan. in abondolo d (ed). the uralic languages, 480–515. routledge, london. itkonen e (1966). suomalais-ugrilaisen kielenja historiantutkimuksen alalta. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, tietolipas 20. janhunen j (2000). reconstructing proto-uralic typology spanning the millennia of linguistic evolution. in nurk, anu, triinu palo & tõnu seilenthal (eds). congressus nonus internationalis fenno-ugristarum, 7.–13.8.2000, tartu. pars i. orationes plenariae & orationes publicae, 59– 76. tartu. kallio p (1999). varhaiset indoeurooppalaiskontaktit. in fogelberg p (ed). pohjan poluilla. suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 237–239. kálmán b (1976). chrestomathia vogulica. tankönyvkiadó, budapest. keresztes l (1974). unkarin kieli. sks, helsinki. koivulehto j (1999a). varhaiset indoeurooppalaiskontaktit: aika ja paikka lainasanojen valossa. in fogelberg p (ed). pohjan poluilla. suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 207–236. koivulehto j (1999b). verba mutuata. quae vestigia antiquissimi cum germanis aliisque indo-europaeis contactus in linguis fennicis reliquerint (ed. kph ruppel). suomalais-ugrilaisen seuran toimituksia 237. korhonen m (1969). die entwicklung der morphologischen methode im lappischen. finnischugrische forschungen xxxvii, 203–362. korhonen m (1981). johdatus lapin kielen historiaan. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 370. korhonen m (1992). remarks on the structure and history of the uralic case system. journal de la société finno-ougrienne 82, 163–180. künnap a (1999). kamass. languages of the world, materials 185. lincom europa, münchen. laakso j (1991). itämerensuomalaiset sukukielemme ja niiden puhujat. in laakso j (ed). uralilaiset kansat. tietoa suomen sukukielistä ja niiden puhujista, 49–122. wsoy, porvoo. laanest a (1982). einführung in die ostseefinnischen sprachen. 1st ed. 1975. helmut buske, hamburg. lallukka s (1995). assimilation and its measurement: finno-ugrian peoples of russia. in leskinen, h, p pulkkinen, r raittila & t seilenthal (eds). conressus octavus internationalis fenno-ugristarum, jyväskylä 10–15.8.1995. pars i. orationes plenariae et conspectus quinquennales, 83–95. moderatores, jyväskylä. mosin mv & ns baju vskin (1983). ersämordvan oppikirja. apuneuvoja suomalais-ugrilaisten kielten opintoja varten viii. suomalais-ugrilainen seura, helsinki. nacionalnyj sostav naselenija rsfsr po dannym vsesojuznoj perepisi naselenija 1989 g. gosudartsvennyj komitet rsfsr po statistike (1990). respublikanskij informacionno-izdatel’skij centr, moskva. nikolaeva i (1999). ostyak. languages of the world, materials 305. lincom europa, münchen. 176 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirkko suihkonen parpola a (1999). varhaisten indoeurooppalaiskontaktien ajoitus ja paikannus kielellisen ja arkeologisen aineiston perusteella. in fogelberg p (ed). pohjan poluilla. suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 180–206. perevo vs vcikov pn, vm vahru vsev, vi alatyrev, aa pozdeeva & iv tarakanov (eds) (1962). grammatika sovremennogo udmurtskogo jazyka. fonetika i morfologija. udmurtskoe kni vznoe izdatel’stvo, izhevsk. raento p & k husso (2002). cultural diversity in finland. fennia 180, 151–164. raun a (1988). proto-uralic comparative, historical morphosyntax. in sinor d (ed). the uralic languages. description, history and foreign influences. handbook of uralic studies, 555–571. ej brill, leiden. rédei k (1965). northern ostyak chrestomathy. indiana university publications, uralic and altaic series 47. rédei k (2000). urheimat und grundsprache (wissenschaftliche hypothesen und unwissenschaftliche fehlgriffe). in nurk a, t palo & t seilenthal (eds). congressus nonus internationalis fennougristarum, 7.–13.8.2000, tartu. pars i. orationes plenariae & orationes publicae, 109–126. tartu. rikkinen k, p maaranen & p suihkonen (1999). erätaloudesta nyky-yhteiskuntaan. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 48–53. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. sajantila a & s pääbo (1995). language replacement in scandinavia. nature genet 11, 359–360. sammallahti p (1988). historical phonology of the uralic languages. in sinor d (ed). the uralic languages. description, history and foreign influences. handbook of uralic studies, 478–554. ej brill, leiden. sammallahti p (1998). saamic. in abondolo d (ed.) the uralic languages, 43–95. routledge, london. sapir e (1949). language. an introduction to the study of speech. 1st ed. 1921. harcourt, brace & world, new york. sasse hj (1995). prominance typology. in jacobs j, w sternefeldt & t vennemann (eds). syntax. ein internationales handbuch zeitgenössischer forschung/an international handbook of contemporary research 2, 1065–1075. walter de gruyter, berlin. savontaus m-l & p lahermo (1999). uralilainen muinaisuutemme väestögenetiikan valossa. in fogelberg p (ed). pohjan poluilla. suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 60–63. suihkonen p (1987). suomensukuiset kansat väestötilastojen valossa. terra 99, 209–232. suihkonen p (1990). korpustutkimus kielitypologiassa sovellettuna udmurttiin (computer corpus analysis in language typology applied to udmurt). suomalais-ugrilaisen seuran toimituksia 207. viitso t-r (2000). finnic affinity. in nurk a, t palo & t seilenthal (eds). congressus nonus internationalis fenno-ugristarum, 7.–13.8.2000, tartu. pars i. orationes plenariae & orationes publicae, 153–178. tartu. vilkuna m (1998). word order in european uralic. in siewierska a (ed). constituent order in the languages of europe. empirical approaches to language typology. eurotyp 20: 1, 173–233. mouton de grueter, berlin. wiik k (2000). european lingua francas. in künnap a (ed). the roots of peoples and languages of northern eurasia ii & iii. fenno-ugristica 23, historica fenno-ugristica, 202–236. tartu. untitled the competitive advantage of regions and small economic areas: the case of finland kauko mikkonen mikkonen, kauko (2002). the competitive advantage of regions and small economic areas. the case of finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 191–198. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the aim of this article is to answer the question, “what are the prerequisites for the success of finland’s regions and smaller areas, when barriers to trade are being lowered and finland is integrated into the international economy?” the answer is based on a study where regional success factors are defined primarily on the basis of porter’s concept of “the competitive advantage of nations.” empirical findings and observations on the most important locational factors of industrial firms in the modern regional economy add to this definition. the success factors are grouped into two blocks: (1) economic activities (five variables), and (2) locational factors of industrial firms (eight variables). both blocks of variables are analysed with the help of principal components analysis. on the basis of the regional values produced by the first principal component of both blocks, the regions and small economic areas are grouped into four categories that represent their respective competitive advantage. this is done by means of cluster analysis. uusimaa, the southernmost region of finland that includes the capital city helsinki, is in the best position and has the best prerequisites for success. the next regions are southwest finland with its main centre turku and the tampere region (pirkanmaa). south ostrobothnia, north karelia, south savo, and central ostrobothnia have the weakest prerequisites of all nineteen regions. the disparities within the regions are often considerable. the core area of the region is generally in the best position. after the helsinki area, the small economic areas of turku, tampere, oulu, and jyväskylä are in a good position, followed by vaasa, kuopio, lahti, and pori. related studies carried out in the latter part of the 1990s confirm these results almost without exception. the results suggest that the polarisation of finland’s regional economy continues. the new national regional development program, approved by the finnish government for the period 2001–2006, supports this view of the future. kauko mikkonen, department of regional studies, university of vaasa, p. o. box 700, fin-65101 vaasa, finland. e-mail: kauko.mikkonen@uwasa.fi introduction in a world that is becoming internationalised and globalized, the open national economies and the regions involved will have to adapt to continuing changes in the operating environment and to fiercer competition. a severe recession shook finnish society and the basis of the regional economy in the early 1990s (from 1991 to 1993). the causes were largely domestic, but the dissolution of the soviet union and the collapse of trade with eastern europe intensified the crisis (bordes 1993; currie 1993). perhaps the most significant of the changes in finland’s external situation was the membership in the european union at the beginning of 1995. the membership involved the removal of barriers to the movement of people, goods, and factors of production within the area of the european union. on the one hand, european integration has decreased the significance of national borders. on the other hand, the importance of the regional and local level within the nations has strengthened. the expression a europe of regions reflects this development. strong economic growth has characterized the 192 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kauko mikkonen latter part of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. the new growth sectors, especially information and communications technology, have set the pace. finland is moving towards information society at full speed (e.g., alkio & möttölä 2000). the changes may involve threats to, and opportunities for, the development of sub-areas. this depends on their strengths and weaknesses in relation to pressures for external and internal changes and their competitiveness in relation to other sub-areas of the country. this survey is an attempt to answer the question: “what are the prospects for success of the sub-areas of finland in an integrated europe and, more generally, in a globalized world?” the sub-areas’ prospects for success will be evaluated mainly on two regional levels: regions and small economic areas. these regional divisions are associated with the comprehensive reorganisation of the regional administration of finland that was carried out in the 1990s. for the regional development work, the country was divided into nineteen functional-economic “regions” (policy decisions by the council of state, 8 july 1992 & 9 september 1993), and further into 88 “small economic areas” (policy decision by the ministry of the interior, 19 january 1993). since then, one region has been added (itä-uusimaa, policy decision by the council of state, 6 february 1997) and the number of sub-regional units (small economic areas) has decreased to 79 after the changes made at the beginning of 2001 and earlier. in addition, in 1997, the administrative provinces were reduced from twelve to six. at the same time, fifteen employment and economic development centres and their jurisdictions were established (regional… 1998). the content of competitive advantage the present and future prerequisites for regional success can be approached from the standpoint of competitive advantage, a concept introduced by michael porter (1990). in his book, porter examines competitive advantage primarily on the national level, but the concept can also be applied to the sub-areas of a nation, because – as porter (1990: 19, 29) points out – competitive advantage is created and sustained through a highly localized process. the following two premises form the startingpoint for a definition of competitive advantage in the present study: 1) in an open economy, the success of subareas depends on the existing basic industrial structure and its sensitivity to intensified international competition. 2) sub-areas that possess those locational requirements of firms that are (now and in the future) regarded as central are the most favourable operating environments for new and existing companies. below, the content of structural and locational factors and the picture these provide of the prerequisites for success of the sub-areas of finland in an increasingly international world is described in more detail. the description is based mainly on a comprehensive study completed in the mid1990s (mikkonen 1994) and on an analysis complementary to it (mikkonen & luoma 1996; cf. silander et al. 1997). basic industrial structure the relation of gdp to population is widely used as a measure of competitive advantage. it gives an overall picture of the level of production in an area, together with its efficacy and stage of development (cf. the rostow model, e.g., barke & o’hare 1991: 44). a more finely divided specification of the production structure sheds some light on future prospects. predominantly agricultural regions are in a weaker position than others to meet internationalisation. before and at the time of finland’s joining in the eu, researchers were unanimous in this assumption: they believed that finnish agriculture would have difficulties in adjusting to internationalisation and that reductions were inevitable (e.g., rosenqvist et al. 1993: 98; törmä et al. 1995). the pressure on agriculture was due both to finland’s eu membership and the implementation of the gatt programme for tariff reduction. this assumption has since come true. there were 95,562 subsidised active landholdings in finland in the first year of eu membership, in 1995. in 2000, the number of corresponding landholdings was 77,896 – a decline of 17,666 landholdings, or 18.5 percent (suomen… 2001: 20–21). the decline is expected to continue so that the number of landholdings is likely to be about half of what it is today in ten years’ time (according to the minfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 193the competitive advantage of regions and small... ister of agriculture kalevi hemilä in a radio interview, 5 march 1999). according to statistics finland, the size of the employed labour force in the primary sector decreased by 15,881 persons (12%) during the three years from the end of 1995 to the end of 1998. at the same time, the total employed labour force increased by 199,952 persons (10%) (svt 1997: 110, 2001: 112). there are also differences between industrial sectors and between firms inside sectors in relation to international competition (cf. porter 1990: 24–25, 71–72). the volume of exports is one indicator of a region’s level of internationalisation. exports bring more profit and growth potential to a region than business transactions within the region. exports prove that the internationalisation process of a region has started, at least as far as trade is concerned. the most vulnerable industrial sectors are those whose operation has been secured through export subsidies or, on the domestic market, through import controls. the strongest ones are those which have already been integrated into foreign trade. differences between industrial sectors and between firms are reflected on the regional level in the fact that regions and smaller areas which have more enterprises in the export and growth sectors will succeed better than those regions and smaller areas whose economic activities favour declining sectors or are narrow and one-sided (cf. differential growth theory, thompson 1966: 359–360). as for internationalisation, large international companies are in a key position. they have lived through the survival process involved in internationalisation and serve as examples and pacesetters for the development of other companies. they can also create clusters of prosperous companies around them. the characteristics of the basic industrial structure are measured here by means of five variables. the variables of economic activity 1. percentage of jobs in the primary sector 2. gdp per capita 3. export percentage of industrial gross value 4. percentage of industrial establishments in growing sectors (in this study, the metal industry) 5. number of clusters with large firms (minimum of 500 employees) (mikkonen 1994: 37–80; mikkonen & luoma 1996: 102). locational factors of industrial firms location theories of industry, the key works cited below, and numerous empirical locational studies (e.g., littunen et al. 1987; littunen 1991: 47) have been referred to in identifying the most important locational and gravitational factors of entrepreneurship on the threshold of the twenty-first century. in the long term, some of the main factors disappear and new ones emerge. new factors include educational and research infrastructure, a living environment, the quality of life, and the business climate. the availability of a labour force heads the lists in all studies of locational factors. recent studies have paid attention not only to the quantity, but, increasingly, to the quality of the labour force. for example, in porter’s model of the stages of competitive development (porter 1990: 545–546, 452–556), a highly educated labour force, knowledge, and competence are key factors at the innovation-intensive stage of competitive development (cf. suomi 2015 2000: 9). andersson and strömquist (1988: 29–30), for their part, summarized the five major locational factors of the modern “knowledge society” (ksamhället in swedish) as the five k:s (in swedish): kunskap knowledge kompetens competence kreativitet creativity kommunikation communication kultur culture in their view, traditional locational factors, such as natural resources and market access, are not necessarily the most essential prerequisites for efficient production in a k-society. instead, companies resort to areas characterised by networks, knowledge, and rapid growth. on the basis of these references, the following have been chosen as the locational factors of firms, describing the gravitational pull of regions: demand conditions (population potential and income level, respectively); the quantity and quality of the labour force; the educational and research infrastructure; accessibility; and the living environment (cultural services and physical factors). this kind of list is always a generalization. it does not take into account the special demands of individual sectors and the order of importance of the factors in each sector. 194 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kauko mikkonen the locational variables of firms 1. population potential was calculated using the formula where p i,j = the population of regions i and j d ij = the distance between regions i and j the distances between the regions were calculated using coordinates of the main centres of the regions and the pythagorean theorem. 2. income level of population (tax units per capita) 3. percentage of population aged 15–64 4. educational level of population 5. educational and research infrastructure 6. accessibility 7. cultural services 8. physical factors (for more details of the measure of variables and data collection, see mikkonen 1994; mikkonen & luoma 1996: 102–103). the regional dimension of competitive advantage the combination of the above-mentioned economic activities and locational factors of enterprises answers the question of the interregional competitive advantage of finnish regions and small economic areas. handling of the data the concentration of the information contained in the initial variables was carried out by means of principal components analysis. variables describing economic activities and those referring to locational factors were analysed separately. the first principal component of the economic activities is called industrial structure and that of the locational variables regional gravitation. the next stage in the principal components analysis is calculating the values (the component scores) for each region and small economic area through the industrial structure and gravitation components (cf. short 1991: 146–148). the regional values were standardized so that their mean is 0 and deviation 1. the general principle of interpreting the results is: “the higher the regional value, the better the region’s position in the interregional comparison with regard to each dimension.” in the final stage of the analysis, the regions and v = p +σi i n j=1 p dij j i≠j fig. 1. values of the principal components (industrial structure and regional gravitation) in each region (a) and small economic area (b), and four groups produced by cluster analysis. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 195the competitive advantage of regions and small... small economic areas were categorized on the basis of the two main component scores by means of cluster analysis. the standardized values of the industrial structure and gravitation components for each region and small economic area, and the results of the cluster analysis in the case of four clusters, are given in figures 1a and 1b (for details of the principal components analysis and cluster analysis, see mikkonen & luoma 1996: 104–106). results the prerequisites of success for uusimaa in international competition are the best in finland. this region achieved by far the highest values both in terms of industrial structure and regional gravitation. it was the only region to be placed in category i (fig. 1a & fig. 2a). the next category (ii) includes southwest finland (and turku, its main centre) and the tampere region (pirkanmaa). their prospects in interregional competition attain at least the level “good.” most regions, eleven altogether, are found in category iii. the weakest category (iv), from the standpoint of competitive advantage, comprises five regions. of these, kainuu (dominated by its main centre kajaani) is best placed thanks to its wood processing industry, while south ostrobothnia (seinäjoki) comes last, mainly because of its predominantly primary profig. 2. the competitive advantage of regions (a) and small economic areas (b) in finland (categories i–iv). 196 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kauko mikkonen duction. the other regions in this category are north karelia (joensuu), south savo (mikkeli), and central ostrobothnia (kokkola). the competitive advantage varies both between and within the regions. the area dominated by the main centre of the region represents a higher level than the peripheral areas almost without exception. only some small economic areas characterised by export industry offer an exception to this pattern (e.g., rauma in satakunta, varkaus in north savo, and kemi in lapland). the helsinki area is indisputably in the leading position in the country (fig. 1b & fig. 2b). the turku, tampere, oulu, and jyväskylä small economic areas follow (category ii). in category iii, the small economic area of vaasa has the best prerequisites in terms of structural and gravitational factors. kuopio, lahti, and pori are also examples of small economic areas that are well placed among the core areas of the regions. to category iv belong the predominantly rural areas with few industries or only some domestic industries. geographically, most of the small economic areas in this category are located in the barren watershed zone of suomenselkä, which stretches north-east from the coast of the gulf of bothnia and includes the central regions of finland and lapland (fig. 2b). comparisons with other studies other studies concerned with regional competitive advantages confirm the results of this research. using several mutually complementary indicators, ovaskainen (1998) investigated the sensitivity of finnish regions to the european economic and monetary union (emu). his indicators were: structural factors (production and export structure, export orientation, number of sme enterprises, primary production predominance, the publicsector share of gdp); factors indicating regional differences (income per capita, unemployment rate); and factors indicating regional competitive advantage (educational and technological infrastructure). judging by the results, uusimaa has the best chance of benefiting from the emu. the prospects of the tampere region, southwest finland and the vaasa coastal area are also good. kainuu and south savo are in the weakest position. other problematic areas with regard to emu sensitiveness are north karelia, south and central ostrobothnia, and – somewhat surprisingly – south karelia in spite of its strong wood processing industry (ovaskainen 1998: 28–29, 50–53). vartiainen has, by request of the ministry of the environment, developed a national method for describing communities. after his initial investigation (vartiainen 1995), vartiainen and antikainen (1998) carried out a study of the urban network, adapting and further developing the new descriptive method. the method comprises the following items: (1) the strength, versatility, and functional specialisation of the urban district; (2) prerequisites for development in terms of skills and knowledge, cultural factors, and potential for internationalisation; and (3) results as compared with recent patterns of development. each item contains several variables. because vartiainen’s method forms a means of describing and comparing urban districts, large rural areas with their centres remain outside the investigation. this limitation is based on the importance of the urban network for the regional development of finland and its connection with the development of the urban network of the baltic region and the european union (foreword by h. pitkäranta in vartiainen 1995: 5). the urban districts included in the urban network study were 37 in all. in spite of the different set of objectives, the results of the investigation can be compared with the results of the previously mentioned studies. in nearly all respects, the helsinki urban district is in a class of its own in finland. tampere and turku follow. with regard to its prerequisites for the development defined above, oulu is the fourth “excellent” urban district – in the words of vartiainen and antikainen. the jyväskylä, kuopio, and vaasa urban districts form the next group, which can be characterised as having “good” prerequisites for development. the core areas of the remaining provinces have been characterised as “satisfactory” from the standpoint of their prerequisites for development (vartiainen & antikainen 1998: 42–46). conclusions and further remarks the prospects of the regions of finland for success in the international world vary greatly. southern finland is in a more favourable position compared with the rest of the country. the oulu region emerges as the overwhelming growth centre of northern finland. the differences within the various regions are considerable in southern finfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 197the competitive advantage of regions and small... land as well. the regional structure tends to polarise. this development is being speeded up by finland’s membership in the european union and by globalisation in a broader sense. one manifestation of polarisation is strong migration, which continues to flow from the countryside to the population centres and from the northern, central, and eastern parts of finland towards the south. one special feature is the great success of most university cities, led by the strong growth centres that represent top expertise – helsinki, tampere, and oulu (cf. alkio & möttölä 2001). in addition, the future development of regions depends on a number of factors which cannot be quantified exactly. for instance, the bilingualism and international atmosphere of the ostrobothnian coastal region, uusimaa, and the turku region are an undeniable advantage in international interaction. the centres of border districts and of international communications are expected to benefit from expanding internationalism. the eastern and south-eastern parts of finland have a potentially advantageous position when the russian economy and russian trade recover. in a corresponding way, cooperation across the baltic sea will be an opportunity for the finnish ports and more generally as well. the harbours are, among other things, advantageous storing-places for entrepreneurs whose business activity is based on importing raw materials. lapland and the harbours of the gulf of bothnia have, for their part, a strategic gateway role in the development of the transit trade of north-west russia (the barents region). the trends and development measures of national regional policy also have their influence on regional development and competitive advantage. the regional policy target program, approved by the finnish government (9 november 2000), aims at making the content of the finnish regional policy and its measures of execution answer the growing challenges of the open economy (valtioneuvoston… 2000). the recommended measures include the development of a network of regional centres that comprises all the provinces and the support of the rural areas by means of a regional program of their own. the number of regional centres will be 30–40. the government recently confirmed the selection of regional centres for the development program for the period 2001–2006. the planned number of regional centres is based on the number of urban districts (37) examined in the discussed urban network study. in the development of all regions, the new regional policy emphasizes an increase in expertise and the strengths of the different types of districts. this will be further supported by regional political measures. the policy of regional initiatives has thus been placed on a level with the traditional money distribution policy. the parameters and practical measures of the new regional development policy confirm the picture of development indicated by the results of this survey concerning the natural prerequisites for the success of finland’s regions and sub-regions. references alkio j & m möttölä (2000). suomi pääsi vihdoin kovan kasvun aloille. helsingin sanomat 24 december 2000, c5. alkio j & m möttölä (2001). nousukaudella menestys kasautui kolmeen suureen keskukseen. helsingin sanomat 3 january 2001, d1. andersson å & u strömquist (1988). k-samhällets framtid. prisma, stockholm. barke m & g o’hare (1991). the third world: diversity, change and independence. 2nd ed. longman, singapore. bordes c (1993). the finnish economy: the boom, the debt, the crisis and the prospects. in three assessments of finland’s economic crisis and economic policy. bank of finland c 9, 9–94. currie d (1993). the finnish economic crisis: analysis and prescription. in three assessments of finland’s economic crisis and economic policy. bank of finland c 9, 95–134. littunen h (1991). yritysten sijaintitekijät ja hyvä toimintaympäristö. jyväskylän yliopisto, keskisuomen taloudellinen tutkimuskeskus. julkaisuja 109. littunen h, r lääperi & r rajahonka (1987). keskisuomen läänin yritysympäristö. jyväskylän yliopisto, keski-suomen taloudellinen tutkimuskeskus. julkaisuja 87. mikkonen k (1994). kansainvälistyvän suomen alueelliset menestystekijät (abstract: regional success factors in finland’s internationalisation process). 2nd rev. ed. 1995. proceedings of the university of vaasa, research papers 190. mikkonen k & m luoma (1996). the regional possibilities in the process of external integration of the finnish economy. fennia 174, 97–111. ovaskainen m (1998). maakuntien näkymät emusuomessa. jyväskylän yliopisto, keski-suomen taloudellinen tutkimuskeskus. julkaisu 145. porter me (1990). the competitive advantage of nations. macmillan, london. regional classifications handbook. municipalities 1998 (1998). statistics finland, helsinki. 198 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)kauko mikkonen rosenqvist o, j kaipainen, j joki & l granberg (1993). vaasan läänin elintarviketuotannon varautuminen euroopan integraatioon. vaasan läänin seutukaavaliitto – regionplaneförbundet för vasa län. sarja b 64. short jr (1991). an introduction to urban geography. routledge & kegan paul, london. silander m, h tervo & h niittykangas (1997). uusi aluepolitiikka ja yritysten sijaintikäyttäytyminen. jyväskylän yliopisto, keski-suomen taloudellinen tutkimuskeskus. julkaisu 142. suomen maatalous ja maaseutuelinkeinot 2001 (2001). maaseudun taloudellinen tutkimuslaitos (agricultural economics research institute). julkaisuja (publications) 97. suomi 2015. suomen tulevaisuuden menestystekijät ja haasteet (2000). the first final report of the course “suomi 2015.” sitra, helsinki. svt 1997 = official statistics of finland. employment statistics 1995–1996. population 1997: 15. statistics finland, helsinki, 1998. svt 2001 = official statistics of finland. employment statistics 1998–1999. population 2001: 2. statistics finland, helsinki. thompson jh (1966). some theoretical considerations of manufacturing geography. economic geography 42, 356–365. törmä h, t rutherford & t vaittinen (1995). what will eu membership and the value-added tax reform do to finnish food economy? a computable general equilibrium analysis. government institute for economic research. vatt discussion papers 88. valtioneuvoston päätös alueiden kehittämisestä annetun lain mukaisesta tavoiteohjelmasta. sisäasiainministeriö. päätös 9.11.2000, sm-20001861/ha-62. vartiainen p (1995). kaupunkiverkko. kuvausjärjestelmän kehittäminen kansallisiin ja kansainvälisiin tarpeisiin. ympäristöministeriö, alueidenkäytön osasto, tutkimusraportti 3. vartiainen p & j antikainen (1998). kaupunkiverkkotutkimus 1998. kaupunkipolitiikan yhteistyöryhmän julkaisu 2/98. resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border cooperation, regionalization and destination building at the finnish-swedish border eeva-kaisa prokkola prokkola, eeva-kaisa (2008). resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border cooperation, regionalization and destination building at the finnish-swedish border. fennia 186: 1, pp. 31–46. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in the process of nation-building border regions have been integrated with the national centres and cross-border connections have decreased, leaving these regions in a rather peripheral and marginal position. such state-centric, differential development has been challenged in many border regions, particularly in the area of the european union, and there has been a shift towards cross-border partnership and cooperation, manifested in common tourism development strategies and the building of cross-border destinations. this paper examines the regional and institutional framework for cross-border cooperation, networking and tourism development at the finnish-swedish border, which is one of the internal borders of the european union. the conclusion of the paper is that the relational distance created by the border and the dependence of cross-border tourism development on programme funding causes hindrances, particularly when viewed from the perspective of sustainable development of the tourism industry in this northern region. eeva-kaisa prokkola, department of geography, po box 3000, fin-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: eeva-kaisa.prokkola@oulu.fi. introduction cross-border cooperation in border regions is one of the most popular subjects in border research (see van houtum 2000). increased discussion of national borders and their significance has followed upon the remarkable geopolitical changes that have taken place in last two decades. the collapse of the soviet union, the opening of the iron curtain and european integration and enlargement have posed new questions regarding the significance and extent of state governance and regulation. as national borders are lines of transit between political, economic and often socio-cultural entities, i.e. nation-states, it has become almost a cliché to speak of border regions as ‘laboratories’ where one can examine how global and supranational processes transform these structures. despite the wide interest in the problems of state borders in political geography, international relations, sociology, anthropology and many other disciplines, state borders have not gained much attention in the literature of tourism. the theoretical and conceptual foundation for such research relies much on the works of timothy (1999, 2001; see also timothy & teye 2004), who has been studying the relationship between tourism and borders from various perspectives, including cross-border cooperation and planning in border regions. the meaning of state borders for tourism, tourism development and cooperation in border regions has gained more attention in recent years, however, and several articles have been published on this subject (leimgruber 1998; hartman 2006; ioannides et al. 2006; prokkola 2007). this research mirrors the fact that the increasing border permeability and increased frequency of interregional cooperation in the area of the european union (eu), are manifesting themselves more and more obviously in the form of common tourism 32 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola development strategies and in the building of cross-border tourism destinations. by this means touristic production of space is linked with the european spatial planning and regional development policies and contributes to the process of giving meaning and identity to such new cross-border regions (cf. chang 2001; see also jensen & richardson 2004; paasi 2008). at the same time, cross-border collaboration in tourism provides a means of coping with global shifts and changes in regional cross-border dynamics, as well as preparing the way for more sustainable tourism development. the achievement of sustainable tourism involves sustainable exploitation of local resources and the maintenance of an enduring tourism industry (see inskeep 1994; hall 2000). to achieve sustainability – particularly in an open border environment – tourism developers have to recognize both external and internal catalysts for tourism in a destination, which in the context of border regions means that when planning tourism there has to be an awareness of the circumstances and environment in the neighbouring country (timothy 2001: 149). in the european commission’s programmes and rhetoric, too, the sustainability of the tourism industry is inextricably bound to territorial cohesion, cross-border cooperation and networking which are understood as the basis for economically and socially – and thus environmentally – sustainable development in the eu region (com 2006; committee of regions 2006). the purpose of this paper is firstly to scrutinize the regional, political and institutional foundations of cross-border cooperation and tourism development in the context of the finnish-swedish border, where the constant increase in border permeability, particularly since the two countries joined the eu in 1995, in addition to the new politico-administrative instruments, has increased the number of cross-border cooperational organizations and the intensity of networking. secondly, cross-border cooperation and tourism development are examined in the context of four regional organizations. these regional organizations have been selected as examples, for besides cooperation and networking efforts in tourism, they have identified their administrative district as a tourist destination. moreover, cross-border tourism development in this rural northern region is critically discussed in terms of economically and socially sustainable development. the examination is based on materials produced by the four regional cross-border organizations, including project documents, reports, tourism homepages and brochures. the material is scrutinized against the theoretical background on cross-border cooperation and regionalization. particular attention is paid to cross-border development in the eu context. cross-border cooperation, regionalization and tourism development the changing border discourse – from barriers to resources the relationship between national borders and tourism development is complex, for borders manifest themselves in tourism and influence it in many ways. border institutions are built up and maintained by state governance in order to control and regulate movement and transport between states. a physical border can form a barrier to tourism flows, or it can be crossed almost unnoticed. border permeability, the barrier effects caused by the border such as regulations for the movement of people and goods, will directly influence tourism flows and the development and distribution of tourism infrastructures in a border region. border permeability, political situations and socio-cultural cohesion also affect to the potential emergence of cross-border partnership and development (timothy 1999, 2001). timothy (1999: 185–185; see also ioannides et al. 2006) applied the border typology of martinez (1994) to the examination of levels of cross-border partnership. his model identifies five types of border region with respect to cross-border partnership. first, alienated border regions are differentiated and often politically distributed regions where daily interaction and cross-border partnership do not exist at all. second, coexistent border regions often have neutral relations which enable some sort of interaction, but both representatives are inward-looking in their problem-solving and development strategies. third, border regions where cross-border relations are characterized by cooperative partnership, composed of initiatives to solve common problems in legislative cooperation. fourth, border regions characterized by collaborative cross-border partnership maintained by stable and institutionalized cooperation. fifth, integrated border regions, where all border restrictions have been removed and the regions are funcfennia 186: 1 (2008) 33resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border … tionally merged, which will be manifested in an equal distribution of interregional partnership and networking across the border. since border permeability and the level of crossborder partnership mirror political divisions and state regulation, the shift in border discourse should be examined in the context of wider political and economic changes which the state regulation policies have encountered (prokkola 2008). in the process of nation-building, border regions have been integrated with the national centres and cross-border connections have decreased. infrastructures and industries have developed from a state-centric perspective, so that the differentiating influence of state borders can be seen even in border regions that have historically been culturally and ethnically coherent (rumley & minghi 1991). the understanding and implementation of state borders as barriers – in terms of both mobility and development – has left border regions in a rather peripheral and marginal position. similarly, tourism development in border regions has been statecentric, characterized by hierarchically organized centralized state institutions, including the regional and local administrative districts. during recent decades there has been a shift from national policy and regulation towards a more scattered and complex global economic and political environment. state borders are not only contested by global economic institutions and flows of capital, but also by the discourse of regionalism (anderson 1996; keating 1998). it has been argued that regions are contesting states as the principal political anchors of power, and that the functioning of the present politico-economic system is characterized by cross-border networks and partnerships in which national institutions compete for resources and capital on an equal footing with other political and non-political institutions and organizations. alongside the national space of regionalism there are multiple new ‘spaces of regionalism’ such as city regions, cross-border regions and other trans-national regions, which not only become manifested in the implementation of new politico-economic activities, but also in cross-border identifications (jones & macleod 2004; paasi 2008). regions are in a way understood as more natural and advantageous economic entities than states in terms of competitiveness, governance, sustainability and identity (lagendijk 2005). in asia and europe regional tourism in which the region – as opposed to nation-state – has become a focus of tourism development, clustering and destination building (chang 2001: 1598; wachowiak 2006). cross-border cooperation in tourism is understood as a means of increasing regional competitiveness and sustainability, of strengthening regional identity and promoting the emergence of functional and imaginary region. a functional tourism region is created for it serves wider purposes in tourism development, for example, the clustering of tourist attractions, the creation of tourism routes and transportation and knowledge sharing (chang 2001; see also perkmann & sum 2002). the concept of the imaginary region refers to the social construction of a tourism region or destination, often ordered by politicians or a region’s developers (chang 2001: 1600). such new regional (cross-border) tourism spaces are not opposite to national, but nationstates often actively encourage the creation of new regional spaces because they support the national economy and assists sub-national entities in overtaking a larger share of eu resources (deas & lord 2006: 1863). transnational cooperation, multi-scalar governance and regionalism point to the changing role of the state and international borders. the foundation for political and economic activities across national boundaries is no longer established and regulated exclusively by nation-states and bilateral agreements between states, but there are simultaneously many other sub-national and supra-national organizations, private enterprises and other transactions that are involved (jessop 2002). crossborder cooperation is manifested in linkages between tourism organizations and the authorities, in dispersed politico-economic practices, in relations between public and private organizations and actors and in global-local interconnectedness and networking (jamal & getz 1995: 191). such partnership and cooperation between neighbouring border regions in various economic and sociocultural branches may be seen as indicating that many previously alienated or coexistent border regions are becoming more interdependent or even integrated. as border permeability increases, the development of state-centric tourism can be supplemented or even replaced by transnational cooperation and tourism development. in this new politico-economic situation in which regional cross-border organizations and partnerships are emerging, state borders no longer merely represent barriers to development, but instead they have become resources (o’dowd 2003). 34 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola cross-border programmes and sustainable tourism development former peripheral borderlands find themselves suddenly prospering from valuable tourism revenues and managers and politicians subsequently face questions on weather a border region could be considered as destination itself, how to market it as a competitive destination unit, and what to consider in managing it in a sustainable way (wachowiak 2006: 2). the easing of political divisions, the removal of border restrictions and the eu’s integration policy and economic support for cross-border cooperation have put regional tourism developers, politicians and other representatives in border regions into a new situation, as the citation from wachowiak points out. tourism development has become an intermediary of supra-national spatial policies and politics – the processes of ‘the making of european space’ – that is the implementation of the eu’s new institutional structures and processes to regional and local scales (jensen & richardson 2004). in eu rhetoric and policy it is emphasized that the creation of functional tourism regions across national borders contributes to the integration process and to economically and socially sustainable development. tourism is an economic activity which can reinforce territorial cohesion: sustainable tourism has great potential to support or even drive the convergence process among regions, through competitiveness and territorial co-operation (committee of regions 2006: 100). according to the statement of the committee of regions (2006: 100–101), particular attention should be paid to the sustainability of the industry, in which five goals have been identified: firstly the promotion of environmental protection and sustainable development in general, secondly the redefinition of the place of tourism industry in regional economy through the establishment of specific strategic objectives, thirdly the improvement of cooperation between regions and states on a territorial basis, which can be achieved by contributing to increase the cohesion between the regions within the eu, fourthly to improve collaboration and partnership between actors involved in tourism development and industry at all levels of governance, in which particular attention is paid to the dissemination of partnership among public and private actors, and fifthly to support initiatives which contribute to the operational implementation of sustainable tourism through adequate funding. it has been argued that in order to protect environmental and economic benefits tourism must be developed and managed within a ‘hierarchy of controls’, ranging from the local to the regional, to the national, and even to the international level (woodley 1999: 298). similarly, in the committee of regions (2006) proposal it is emphasized that cross-border cooperation and multi-level partnership contribute to the sustainability of the tourism industry and of environmental protection. it suggests that the best practise for the achievement of sustainability in tourism is to see the linkages that exist with the wider economic and socio-cultural processes in regions. the promotion of publicprivate partnership is a means of extending social responsibility, that is extending the norms created by the eu to the workings of the private tourism sector. the possibility of obtaining financial support should be combined with the acceptance of common standards, which are understood as the prerequisites of sustainable development. cross-border regionalisation and cooperation can contribute to tourism development, but equally well the tourism industry can further cross-border knowledge and identification, without which regional integration cannot emerge (prokkola 2007). one mediator of regional tourism development across national borders is the development of cross-border cooperation programmes (interreg) and initiatives directed at different branches of industry and cultural activities. the objective of this programme policy is to “develop cross-border social and economic centres” and to establish “genuine cross-border zones of economic activity” (european commission 2003: 5). the first interreg i programme was set up in 1989 (1989–1993) and it has been followed by two further programme periods, 1994–1999 and 2000–2006. special interregional cross-border initiatives have been directed to the promotion and steering of the sustainability of the tourism industry and territorial cohesion across borders (in the union’s internal border regions). special targets in the latter crossborder cooperation programme, interreg iii (2000–2006), were sustainable development in tourism and leisure (committee of regions 2006: 103). the programme and initiatives are financed by the european regional development fund (erdf), but national funding is also required. in addition, to gain finance from the programme, initiatives must involve actors from at least two counfennia 186: 1 (2008) 35resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border … tries (european commission’s inforegio 2004; faby 2006). the interreg projects have had a considerable impact on the fact, that european internal border regions have been gradually transforming as international tourism destinations both physically and symbolically, and some have turned into arenas for co-operative tourism development and place-making (see leimgruber 1998; ioannides et al. 2006; wachowiak 2006; prokkola 2007). the finnish-swedish border: cooperation and the building of crossborder destinations the geography of northern finland and sweden the finnish-swedish border municipalities comprise a geographically extensive, rural and sparsely populated area. because of the geographical and environmental circumstances in the finnish and swedish tornio river valley, central villages, population and services in the border municipalities are closer to those of their neighbour across the border than to the closest municipality centre within their own country. their geographical distance from both national and global centres is long, although air traffic, and particularly the high density of technological means of communication such as the internet, compensate for this geographical distance (see ala-rämi 2007). the best way to travel in terms of accessibility is a still a private car, because public transport is infrequent and scattered relative to that in central urban regions. one of the advantages in the region is the existence of focal travel routes to tourist destinations in the north, most notably the e8 highway (council of lapland 2003: 21–22). these northern rural municipalities have faced enormous structural challenges in recent decades because of the migration of young and workingage people to the southern finland and sweden, which also means that the potential for extensive industrial development is low in most branches as compared with central areas. tourism is therefore understood as one of the future industries for this rural and peripheral region (lundmark 2006; saarinen 2006). the development of the tourist industry in finnish lapland is nevertheless closely linked to the success of other industries and regional development in general (saarinen 2004, 2006). tourism development in the border municipalities, however, differs from that in the successful (skiing) destinations in the finnish lapland (with the exception of the tourist centre of ylläs in the municipality of kolari) in that they are “practically outside the great tourist flows” (council of lapland 2003: 16). in swedish lapland the mining industry in kiruna which has brought employment and strengthened regional development, together with the politically disputed geographical location, have perhaps “delayed” tourism development in the border region, but the potential of tourism for assisting regional development has been acknowledged more recently (prokkola 2008). the northern environment and the seasonal and very special borderland culture characterise the finnish-swedish border region as a tourist destination. in terms of natural assets and winter activities the region cannot compete with the mountain areas of the finnish and swedish lapland, and therefore the tourism strategy of the tornio valley region has put its emphasis on eco-tourism, specific events, cultural tourism, cross-border shopping (particularly in tornio-haparanda) and the development of tourism services for special groups such as the disabled (council of lapland 2003: 22; matkailustrategia 2006). attractions in the tornio valley region named in the promotional material issued for swedish lapland are the special religion, the borderland culture and the languages used (swedish lapland 2008). the region is multilingual, as alongside finnish and swedish there is a dialect known as meänkieli which is spoken on both sides of the border and forms a basis for crossborder interaction. in addition, sami is spoken in the northernmost part of the river valley. political and organizational foundations for cross-border cooperation although border permeability, interaction and the degree of collaboration have varied with the prevailing political and historical circumstances, movement and transportation across the finnishswedish border has been relatively unrestricted with the exception of the periods of the first and second world wars (1914–19 and 1939–1945). politically troubled periods and powerful national integration policies have also introduced some mental divisions and hindrances to cross-border relations at times. in sweden a powerful cultural and linguistic assimilation policy was directed at the finnish speaking population in the tornio val36 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola ley region. moreover, it was considered as a threat that finnish nationalists expressed wishes to relocate the border along the kalix river so that it would follow the linguistic border. the finnish nationalist movement evoked a counter-reaction against finland among the tornio valley inhabitants in sweden (klockare 1982; elenius 2001). moreover, during the cold war period the national divide was strengthened since finland was counted as an eastern country whereas sweden belonged to the west, so that the border represented the line between east and west. hence, despite the relative openness of the border which has enabled interact to take place among the local populations, state integration policies directed at this peripheral border region have led to differentiation between the finnish and swedish regions. because of the dominant role of the nordic welfare state in both countries, professional networks and contacts in particular have become highly state-centric. existing public and private networks in the tourism industry are to a great extent state-centric (see council of lapland 2007). on the other hand, the common culture, cross-border marriages and migration – mainly from finland to sweden – have helped to maintain unofficial social networks which have furthered the common borderland culture and formed a basis for cooperation (lundén & zalamans 2001; paasi & prokkola 2008). networking and partnership in tourism has been going on for more than a century, having begun with the establishment of national travel associations in finland and sweden. national organizations also form the basis for development in the peripheral finnish-swedish border region, but in addition there has been a parallel development of regional cross-border organizations from the 1960s onwards (prokkola 2008). at the regional level, institutional cooperation in tourism across the border has been developing under the council for the north calotte region (covering the northern parts of norway, finland and sweden), in the wider setting of the nordic ministry (aalbu 1999). the tourism sector has formed one branch of this development, and a cooperative tourism programme was established by the nordic ministry for the first time in 1978 (pihlström 1983). at the local level, crossborder cooperation between municipalities on both sides was established in an agreement signed between the nordic countries in 1979, and this has served as a means of meeting local needs and minimising the problems caused by the border. together with some western european border regions, the tornio valley has been ranked as one of the most advantageous border regions in europe in terms of cross-border cooperation, due to the many historical and cultural connections between the two sides (westman & ronkainen 2007). attitudes towards cross-border collaboration are positive and motivation for collaboration can be found from the fact that both regions are facing problems that are common to most northern peripheral regions, such as a decline in population density and increased unemployment. cooperation is understood as providing synergetic advantages. the municipalities in northern peripheral regions are facing problems in sustaining basic infrastructure and services because the shift in regional policy has brought with it new demands for economic efficiency and competitiveness in local government. on the other hand, the border had been permanent for two hundred years, which means that the local institutions and public and private tourism networks and organizations have for the most part developed along national lines. on the other hand, the frequency and organization of collaboration networks across the border has increased along with the gradual removal of border restrictions. finland and sweden joined the eu in 1995, and this has introduced new strategies and possibilities for cooperation in what has now become an internal border region. cross-border cooperation is particularly supported by the union’s interregional cooperation programmes (interreg), which are aimed at lowering institutional and cultural hindrances to local cross-border interaction and developing inter-regional networks. in consequence, the increased border permeability that has ensued upon membership of the eu, together with new politicoadministrative instruments providing financial backing for cross-border projects, has increased the number of cross-border cooperation organizations and intensified networking in this northern border region (paasi & prokkola 2008). in the recent open border context there are various overlapping cross-border tourism partnerships and cooperation initiatives, since recent cooperation has been implemented through multi-level partnerships between municipalities, organizations and private enterprises, as is consistent with the goals set up by the committee of regions (2006). then earlier common understanding of the border as a barrier to development and interaction has now been complemented or contested fennia 186: 1 (2008) 37resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border … with the notion of the border as a resource (cf. o’dowd 2003). the nordic interreg iii programme areas are geographically divergent, in that some straddle over larger sea frontiers and others such as the interreg nord area have contiguous land borders (fig. 1). in the most recent programme period the finnish and swedish border municipalities and other public organizations, associations and entrepreneurs received funding for cross-border initiatives from the north calotte sub-programme of interreg iii a, within which there was a separate project grouping to support the development of tourism and leisure activities in the border region, fig. 1. map of cross-border regions in the nordic countries determined by interreg programme areas. many of these cross-border regions have their roots in nordic cooperation. source: nordregio 2008, published with permission. 38 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola the culture and experience tourism sub-programme. altogether around twenty tourism and leisure projects gained funding in the programme period 2000–2006 (see interreg iiia nord 2008). in the interreg ii b programme, which covered geographically wider areas than interreg iii a, the municipalities involved belonged to the baltic sea region and the northern periphery programme areas. this newly developed cross-border interaction, supported and partially funded by the eu and private entrepreneurs, is more strictly organised and requires more intensive cross-border interaction between actors on multiple levels than the previous nordic north calotte collaboration – which, of course, paved the way for a cross-border working culture (see christiansen & joenniemi 1999; prokkola 2007; paasi & prokkola 2008). tourism development and destination building: a review of four cases several overlapping cross-border organizations can be identified in the finnish-swedish border region, of which i will examine four: the council of the tornio valley, provincia bothniensis, the bothnian arc and arctic circle network ab. the foundation for these organizations is based on the perceived need for the municipalities to strengthen collaboration across the border and remove the hindrances caused by it (table 1). the organizations have implemented and co-ordinated cross-border cooperation in tourism, including the specification and commercialization of cross-border destinations (fig. 2). the council of tornio valley the council of the tornio valley was founded in 1987 as a cooperative organization uniting six border municipalities in finland, tornio, ylitornio, pello, kolari, muonio and enontekiö, and four in sweden, haparanda, övertorneå, pajala and kiruna. representatives were appointed equally by the finnish and swedish municipalities and the regional councils. the obtaining of finance for employing staff and implementing cooperative projects was difficult at the beginning by comparison with national organizations, but since 1988 there has been a permanent post of secretary to the organization (alamäki 1997). three new members have joined the council during the present decade, the norwegian mu-ta b le 1 . c ro ss -b o rd er o rg an iz at io n s an d t h e b u il d in g o f to u ri st d es ti n at io n s in t h e co n te xt o f th e fi n n is h -s w ed is h b o rd er . o rg an iz at io n / re gi o n g o ve rn an ce / d ec is io n m ak in g su b st an ti ve f o cu s in t er r eg p ro gr am m e/ e. g. p ro je ct s o b je ct iv es d es ti n at io n c o u n ci l o f t o rn io v al le y/ to rn io r iv er v al le y c o u n ci l/ m u n ic ip al it y re p re se n ta tiv es p ro m o ti n g co o p er at io n b et w ee n b o rd er m u n ic ip al iti es , en tr ep re n eu rs a n d o rg an iz at io n s an d in c iv il s o ci et y in t h e re gi o n a n d in te rn at io n al ly . n o rt h c al o tt e su b -p ro gr am m e, in t er r eg a / c u lt u ra l t o u ri sm n et w o rk ( 1 9 9 7 ), n o rt h er n l ig h ts h ig h w ay ( 2 0 0 3 ) su p p o rt in g to u ri sm e n tr ep re n eu rs h ip . b u il d in g n et w o rk s an d c o n ta ct s am o n g lo ca l as so ci at io n s an d m u se u m s. t h e d ev el o p m en t o f th e to rn io v al le y as a t o u ri st d es ti n at io n . st u dy t o u rs to rn io v al le y a rc ti c c ir cl e n et w o rk a b / m id d le t o rn io v al le y re gi o n p u b li c co rp o ra ti o n p ro m o ti n g in d u st ri al l if e an d to u ri sm d ev el o p m en t in y li to rn io a n d ö ve rt o rn eå . n o rt h c al o tt e su b -p ro gr am m e, in t er r eg a / k u ll e (2 0 0 2 –2 0 0 3 ), q u al it y to p ac ke t an d p ac ke t to i n te rn et (2 0 0 2 –2 0 0 4 ) th e cr ea ti o n o f n et w o rk s am o n g to u ri sm e n tr ep re n eu rs . jo in t m ar ke ti n g st ra te gi es a n d c o m m er ci al iz at io n o f th e re gi o n a s to u ri st d es ti n at io n . jo in t to u ri sm i n fo rm at io n c en tr e. th e la n d o f th e a rc ti c c ir cl e p ro vi n ci a b o th n ie n si s/ to w n o f t o rn io a n d h ap ar an d a p u b li c o rg an iz at io n / w o rk in g co m m it te e p ro m o ti n g an d c o o rd in at in g co o p er at io n b et w ee n t h e to rn io a n d h ap ar an d a ‘t w in ’ to w n s. n o rt h c al o tt e su b -p ro gr am m e, in t er r eg a / m ed ia p o li s (2 0 0 2 –2 0 0 4 ), o n t h e b o u n d ar y (2 0 0 4 –2 0 0 6 ) c o m m o n t o u ri sm s tr at eg y an d j o in t to u ri sm i n fo rm at io n c en tr e. t h e co m m er ci al iz at io n o f th e cr o ss -b o rd er to w n a s to u ri st d es ti n at io n . h ap ar an d ato rn io b o th n ia n a rc / c o as ta l zo n e b es id e th e g u lf o f b o th n ia a ss o ci at io n / p u b li c an d p ri va te re p re se n ta tiv es p ro m o ti n g co o p er at io n a n d n et w o rk in g b et w ee n f in la n d an d s w ed en . t h e cr ea ti o n o f a st ro n g an d c o m p et it iv e re gi o n . b al ti c se a r eg io n , in t er r eg b / to u ri sm a n d e nv ir o n m en t (1 9 9 8 –2 0 0 1 ), th e b o th n ia n a rc – a rc ti c c o as ta l to u ri sm r eg io n ( 2 0 0 2 –2 0 0 5 ) p ro m o ti n g su st ai n ab le t o u ri sm d ev el o p m en t. t h e co m m er ci al iz at io n o f th e re gi o n a s a to u ri st d es ti n at io n . b o th n ia n a rc fennia 186: 1 (2008) 39resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border … fig. 2. map of tourist destinations defined by the administrative districts which are members of the cross-border organization: (1) the council of tornio valley, (2) arctic circle network ab, (3) provincia bothniensis and (4) the bothnian arc. nicipalities of kautokeino, kåfjord, storfjord and nordreisa. the roots of the organization lie in national collaboration between border municipalities, which was officially started up in finland in 1923 and in the swedish tornio valley a couple of decades later, in 1941. these two already had some communication at that time, and several infrastructural initiatives such as the building of bridges over the border river were coordinated between them in 1960s and 1970s. since then cooperation projects have been taking place in several branches of activity: energy, fishing, education, employment, tourism and local resources (alamäki 1997: 225–226). the council serves as the representative organization for the tornio valley in the association of european border regions (aebr), and was responsible for the planning of the first proposal for the interreg iii programme in the tornio valley region (council of tornio valley 2008a) and for the coordination and implementation of several cross40 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola border projects. its tourism and leisure-related initiatives include the “cultural tourism network in the tornio valley” (kulttuurimatkailuverkosto), started in 1997 and the northern lights highway (2003) and northern lights highway – road signs (2005) projects. the objective of the first project was to build up networks of contacts among local cultural associations and museums in the region. one of the motives was that such a network, together with the collection of information on cultural tourist attractions in this cross-border destination could be of particular use to local entrepreneurs (lantto 1998: 44). the homepage studytours tornio valley represents the final product of this project, consisting of a map of tourist destinations and information about attractions in each municipality (see council of tornio valley 2008b). similarly, the construction of the northern lights highway as a tourist road is an attempt to serve tourists and to further the development of the tornio valley region as a tourist destination (see lantto 2003). arctic circle network ab the adjacent border municipalities of ylitornio and övertorneå are located at the latitude of the arctic circle within the tornio river valley and have been engaged in cooperation in various branches such as public health services, education and fire services since the 1970s, and also at the level of sports and culture. one of the cooperation intermediaries for the municipalities is the council of the tornio valley, of which they are founder members. since customs and many border restrictions were removed from the crossing points at ylitornio (aavasaksa) and övertorneå in 1995, cooperation has been developing further in various branches. the available interreg funds, requiring crossborder management, have provided the necessary motivation for creating new forms of cooperation. in tourism, official cooperation began in 1998 with the foundation of the joint corporation arctic circle network ab, which involves local actors and tourism professionals in both countries and is linked to many interest groups in the tourism industry. the first two-year project was started in 1998 – at the same time a joint tourist information centre was established in the old customs building – and involved the creation of joint marketing material and the development of web pages for the project (lapin liiton… 2005). accordingly, the corporation has completed several cross-border projects with the principal purpose of creating sustainability and continuity in regional tourism development (projects that include kulle 2002–2003 and quality to packet and packet to internet 2002–2004). objectives in tourism development and in the projects included the development of joint marketing strategies, the creation of networks among entrepreneurs in the region, the commercialization of tourism brochures and a joint tourist homepage introducing the cross-border region as a harmonious entity. the tourist information homepages include maps, information about the regional culture and history, attractions, accommodation and services in both municipalities, introducing the region as a cross-border destination, the land of the arctic circle (see ylitornio-övertorneå tourism 2008). provincia bothniensis provincia bothniensis is a cooperative organization established between the towns of tornio (finland) and haparanda (sweden) in 1987. the towns have a central geographical location as the southernmost overland border crossing point (typically tourists passengers arrive from the south) and it has been estimated that more than eight million people cross the border here every year (lantto 2003: 77). border shopping is common, mostly involving people coming from finland to haparanda, but it has varied in extent and significance according to the political and economic situations. the close geographical proximity and cultural coherence between the two towns have motivated official cooperation in public services since the 1960s (e.g. joint use of a single swimming baths, a joint district heating plant, educational cooperation) (pietilä 1994) as the political ambivalence between the countries has eased. the objective of the organization provincia bothniensis is to promote and coordinate cooperation between these “twin” towns. in practise, cooperation is implemented through projects in parallel with national and international partners. there is equal representation of both towns in the administration of the organization and on its working committee (provincia bothniensis 2008). provincia bothniensis is a central organization in cross-border project planning and implementation. cross-border initiatives have become perhaps the most visible part of regional planning and image building in this area since finland and sweden fennia 186: 1 (2008) 41resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border … joined the eu, and there have been several interreg projects to back up the construction of a “borderless” city centre, which has given the region much positive publicity (e.g. the mediapolis 2002–2004 and på gränsen – rajalla 2004–2006 projects). the development has been cumulative, with one of the most popular tourist attractions in this border region developing in haparanda in the form of the opening of a branch of ikea in 2006. the tourism strategy is to market the twin towns as a boundless destination (service guide… 2006). they have a joint tourist information centre next to the customs office in the finnish side of the border and a joint homepage, where it is possible to find information on all services, accommodation, attractions and events in the area (see haparandatornio 2008). bothnian arc the bothnian arc association was established in 1998. the members are boden, haparanda, kalix, luleå, piteå, skellefteå and älvsbyn in sweden and the raahe, kemi-tornio, oulu and ylivieska regions in finland. in addition, there are members from industry, commerce and certain universities. it is therefore geographically and organizationally more extensive than provincia bothniensis, arctic circle network ab or the council of the tornio valley. the association places emphasis on the geographically central and strategic location of the bothnian arc between the baltic sea area and the barents region, and stresses that in terms of communication, culture, social structure and economics it is a transit zone between these geographically wider regions. cooperation in the area of the bothnian arc is understood as opening up “new opportunities for creating a strong and competitive region” (bothnian arc 2008). the bothnian arc initiative has been termed an “umbrella project”, the aim of which is to promote cross-border cooperation and networking between finland and sweden in this particular region. regional development has been implemented though three sub-projects (1998–2001): vision, strategy and network, communication systems and tourism and environment, which gained funding from the respective countries and the interreg iii c programme. the objective of the tourism subproject was to examine the conditions for sustainable development in the region and to market the region as a tourist destination in its own right (bothnian arc 2001). this work of developing tourism has been continued in the later programme period under a project entitled the bothnian arc – arctic coastal tourism region (with funding from the baltic sea interreg iii b programme between 2002 and 2005), the objective of which was “to make the bothnian arc a well-known borderless destination with a unique arctic character in the far north europe” (council of oulu region 2008). cross-border initiatives, cooperation and sustainable tourism cross-border cooperation and partnership have been specified as the basis for sustainable tourism development in the eu. recent empirical research in the finnish-swedish border region, however, indicates that there are several “stumbling blocks” in the promotion of cross-border partnership and the establishment of cross-border destinations from the perspective of sustainable tourism development. the review of cross-border initiatives and their accomplishments point out that multi-scalar governance and cross-border partnership do not, in itself, enhance sustainable tourism development economically, socially or environmentally. in many cases it is first and foremost a strategy for regional developers to obtain co-funding from eu programmes and only a secondary means by which to achieve sustainable tourism development. firstly, in their examination of the bothnian arc project, ioannides et al. (2006: 137) observed that the protection of national interests often eliminates the potential regional benefits to be achieved from cross-border cooperation. secondly, the similarity between the tourist attractions on the finnish and swedish sides of the border often leads to competition rather than collaboration. similarly, it has been predicted in the tourism strategy for finnish lapland (council of lapland 2003: 14) that competition between the nordic countries will be even more intense in the future, particularly as far as winter and christmas tourism is concerned. similarly, the municipalities on both sides of the tornio valley are marketed arctic nature and activities and the cultural uniqueness of the regions in much the same way. thus there is an indication of competition between tourism destinations, in which both sides are trying to appeal to tourists with similar services and attractions. entrepreneurs 42 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola have also felt that the implementation of crossborder projects is too bureaucratic (ioannides et al. 2006; see also lähteenmäki-smith 2003). secondly, the case of arctic circle network ab shows that, particularly in the northern rural municipalities, such project-oriented cross-border cooperation can causes problems from the perspective of sustainable tourism development. in the case of the arctic circle network the fact that cross-border tourism development has relied on short-term interreg funding is shown to be particularly problematic. this has caused discontinuities and created a dependence on a few key actors that are in charge of the projects. the bilateral corporation has also faced fundamental problems, for example, with the resignation of one its leading members during the third project to be established. this indicates a certain organizational distance and vulnerability in cross-border initiatives, their dependence on support from both cross-border municipalities and the difficulties encountered in pursuing long-term tourism development strategies – and thus organizational sustainability (haywood 1999). project funding may bring artificial external support for rural border municipalities, but it cannot provide continuity, as the municipalities are not always willing to provide financial support for cooperation themselves. short-term project funding also is in conflict with the principles of permanence and sustainable development within the tourism industry. similarly, financing has created some new thresholds in the case of the council of the tornio valley. because this council is not a governing body (any more than are the other three organizations), it has no executive power and it is highly dependent on political and economic support from the national and regional administrations (hagström 2006). moreover, the importance of public-private partnership and multi-scalar networks is evident in the direction followed by arctic circle network ab, but the efforts to create networks among finnish and swedish entrepreneurs and the private and public sectors have only partly succeeded if perceived only in terms of the quantifiable indicators used in the interreg programme, since the intensity of interaction inside the networks has remained rather low (prokkola 2007). similarly, in the bothnian arc project less than one third of the firm managers in the region (in sweden) were familiar with the initiative (mattsson & pettersson 2005). thirdly, with the exception of the project implemented by the bothnian arc, issues concerning environmental protection have not gained much attention. the primary goal in the projects has been to promote services and attractions which will encourage more tourists from abroad to visit the region. sustainability is therefore evaluated mostly in industrial and economic terms, which perhaps reflects the fact that the number of tourists visiting the region is relatively low compared with many other regions such as the mountain resorts in finnish lapland. moreover, there is a lack of crossborder communication and insufficient transportation services across the border. one of the objectives in cross-border cooperation and in interreg co-funded projects, particularly, has been the development of tourism routes and cross-border transportation. the establishment of a daily coach transportation link between oulu (finland) and luleå (sweden) is one of the few concrete achievements of the bothnian arc cooperation (koivumaa 2008: 209). this link and the coach service between the towns of tornio and haparanda together serve as the main sources of public transportation across the southernmost border crossing point. at the other five permanent border crossing points (bridges) there is no frequent public transportation across the border making it rather difficult to travel from finland to sweden or vice versa, unless by private car. accordingly, the development of tourism routes coordinated by the council of the tornio valley has included the improvement of sanitary and other services in parking places alongside the road (lantto 2003: 78). by this means the development of proper tourism facilities and services alongside the main tourist routes supports environmental protection. fourth, the existence of mental barriers and mistrust create hindrances for cooperation between local stakeholders. for example, it has been argued that cooperation between tornio and haparanda appears less ideal from a socio-cultural perspective, however, as it has not succeeded in removing the mental barriers between the finnish and swedish-speaking populations (jukarainen 2001; zalamans 2001). on the other hand, compared with many other border regions the organization and achievement of cross-border cooperation between the twin towns of tornio and haparanda in the setting of provincia bothniensis has been shown by kosonen and loikkanen (2005) to be progressive in all sectors, including between the public and private sectors, by comparison with other similar cross-border initiatives. in particular, the opening of a branch of ikea has contributed fennia 186: 1 (2008) 43resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border … positively to the development of tourism, multiplying the number of border crossings from finland to haparanda for shopping purposes, although seen from the perspective of some entrepreneurs in tornio the benefits have not been felt on the finnish side (manninen 2007). however, one important principle for the local communities in the region is impartiality and mutual benefit (see paasi & prokkola 2008). the suspicion that this might not be the case could even prevent further cooperation and create barriers to sustainable tourism development. conclusions cross-border tourism development is connected with multi-scalar spatial networks and diverse operational environments. in this paper cross-border tourism development has been discussed in the context of the finnish-swedish border. cooperative tourism development in the finnish-swedish border region is showing how the previously coexistent border regions are now searching for partnership and collaboration. the level of crossborder partnership is relatively high for it has been maintained by stable and institutionalized cooperation since the 1960s (cf. timothy 1999: 185). in this paper the particular focus has been on the four cross-border organizations which have supported continuous cooperation between finnish and swedish municipalities, entrepreneurs and other local interest groups. cross-border tourism development and destination building in the each of four cases has proceeded in the following stages. firstly, municipalities and other instances have established a cross-border organization (in the case of arctic circle network ab and bothnian arc this was motivated by the possibility of obtaining external funding for cooperation projects from the interreg programme). secondly, cross-border projects have been implemented to support tourism development in the area covered by these municipalities. thirdly, tourism development has involved the commercialization and marketing of the area concerned as a single destination. moreover, cross-border tourism can be developed on various overlapping scales, so that one municipality can belong to several tourism destinations, for example. thus the cities of tornio and haparanda are members of three cross-border organizations and tourist destinations. so, in the cases discussed here the foundation and commercialization of cross-border tourist destinations as imaginary tourism regions is bound to organization and financing to a greater extent than in the case of many “authentic” tourist destinations (cf. quack 2006). cooperation, destination building and commercialization have been supported politically and financially by means of cross-border initiatives. there can be several districts along one national border, and also overlapping cross-border tourism destinations created and commercialized by different organizations and associations. strengthening the image of a region as a desirable cross-border tourist destination both reflects and promotes increasing border permeability. this, as well as the commercialization and marketing of the area concerned as a single destination, shows how touristic production of space contributes to the process of giving meaning and identity to the newly “discovered” and established cross-border programme regions in the eu (cf. paasi 2008). on the other hand, the border region is still far from being a functional tourism region. this is manifested, for example, in the fact that frequent public transportation across the border is found only in the southernmost border crossing point in tornio-haparanda. the potential for cross-border tourism development cannot be predicted by any single factor, but a set of factors can be put forward, such as geographical distance, political and economic environments, means of communication and sociocultural cohesion in the regions concerned. the research carried out to date in the finnish-swedish border region supports conclusions drawn from other similar collaborative regions, in that economically and socially sustainable cross-border tourism development has proved to be a challenging undertaking even in regions where border permeability has been high for centuries (see leimgruber 1998; hartman 2006). even though regions on opposite sides of a border are close in terms of geographical distance and frequently have viable systems of communication with their neighbours, the (often long-term) existence of the border creates a degree of differentiation that introduces cultural and organizational distance between them when it comes to the development of cooperation (hartman 2006; quack 2006; prokkola 2007). organizational hindrances and competition are certainly to be found in state-centric tourism development initiatives and partnership, but these are perhaps easier to manage in a socio-culturally coher44 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola ent environment. in cross-border initiatives it is this socio-cultural distance which forms “additional” barriers to cooperation and tourism development. cross-border cooperation and tourism development is supported and co-funded by the eu, but funding is also required from national and regional organizations. however, such politically driven tourism development in a cross-border context can be problematic, particularly from the perspective of economic and social sustainability. the tourism industry in the northern rural regions of finland and sweden is less self-reliant than in the more central city regions, which have more diverse tourist attractions, services and professional tourism personnel. in such rural and peripheral regions, where the development of the tourism industry is linked with overall regional development policies, an open border environment can cause politically motivated and therefore often unsustainable competition. on the other hand, crossborder collaboration can offset this competition and provide a means of creating more sustainable tourism development and synergetic advantages in the long-term. hence, when viewed from a wider societal and cultural perspective, the significance of cross-border partnership and networking in the development of tourism cannot be measured only on pragmatic grounds, in terms of the accumulation of regional income, for example. its substance should be understood and evaluated in the wider european region-building context in which peripheral border regions are redefined as zones of economic activity. acknowledgements the author would like to thank the guest editors jarkko saarinen and c. michael hall, and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. many thanks are also due to anssi paasi, tanja löytynoja and juha ridanpää for their encouragement and comments. this study is related to the research project “crossing borders, building identities: new regionalization, tourism and everyday life in northern europe” funded by the academy of finland (projects no. 1210442). references aalbu e (1999). the north calotte committee. in baltersheim h & k ståhlberg (eds). nordic regionbuilding in a european perspective, 59–68. ashgate, aldershot. alamäki y (1997) tornedalsrådet 10 år. tornionlaakson vuosikirja 1997, 223–236. tornionlaakson maakuntamuseo, tornionlaakson neuvosto. ala-rämi k (2007). networking, communication and proximity in high-technology enterprise collaboration. case of northern finland. nordia geographical publications 36: 2. 43 p. anderson j (1996). the shifting stage of politics: new medieval and postmodern territorialities. environment and planning: society and space 14, 133–153. bothnian arc (2001). bothnian arc: a region of the future in northern europe. 19 p. european community, european regional development fund. bothian arc (2008). bothnian arc. <http://www.bothn i a n a r c . n e t / e n g e l s k a / i n d e x _ e n g . h t m l > . 17.1.2008. chang tc (2001). ‘configuring new tourism space’: exploring singapore’s regional tourism forays. environment and planning a 33, 1597–1619. christansen t & p joenniemi (1999). politics on the edge: on the restructuraing of borders in the north of europe. in eskelinen h, i liikanen & j oksa (eds). curtains of iron and cold: reconstructing borders and scales of interaction, 89–115. ashgate, aldershot. com (2006). a renewed eu tourism policy: towards a stronger partnership for european tourism. commission of the european communities 2006/134, brussels. <http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/services/ t o u r i s m / d o c / c o m m u n i c a t i o n s / com2006_0134en01.pdf>. 21.5.2008. committee of regions (2006). sustainable tourism as a factor of cohesion among european regions. 241 p. office for official publications of the european union, luxemburg. council of lapland (2003). lapland tourism strategy (2003–2006). council of lapland publications a. <http://www.lapinliitto.fi/englanti/matstraeg.pdf>. 21.1.2008. council of lapland (2007). tourism strategy. <http:// www.lapinliitto.fi/matkailu/matkailustrate gia20072010.pdf>. 16.10.2007. council of oulu region (2008). bothnian arc action. <http://www.pohjois-pohjanmaa.fi/index. php?122>. 18.1.2008. council of tornio valley (2008a). interreg iii. <http:// www.tornedalen.org/pdf_filer/interreg%20iii_ fi.pdf>. 16.1.2008. council of tornio valley (2008b). studytours destination tornio valley. <http://www.tornedalen.net/ culture/>. 16.1.2008. deas i & a lord (2006). from a new regionalism to an unusual regionalism? the emergence of nonstandard regional spaces and lessons for the territorial reorganization of the state. urban studies 43: 10, 1847–1877. elenius l (2001) både finsk och svensk modernisering, nationalism och språkförändring i tornefennia 186: 1 (2008) 45resources and barriers in tourism development: cross-border … dalen 1850–1939. kulturens frontlinjer 34. 488 p. european commission (2003). making best use of structural funds. 27 p. office for official publications of the european communities, luxemburg. european commissions inforegio (2004). <http://europa.eu.int/comm/regional_policy/interreg3/ index_en.htm>. 29.9.2004. faby h (2006). tourism policy tools applied by the european union to support tourism. in wachowiak h (ed). tourism and borders. contemporary issues, policies and international research, 19–30. ashgate, aldershot. hagström p (2006). managing director, council of tornio valley. personal interview, haparanda 10.3.2006. hall cm (2000). tourism planning: policies, processes and relationship. 236 p. prentice hall, london. haparandatornio (2008). haparanda-tornio tourist information. <http://www.haparandatornio. com/>. 17.1.2008. hartman k (2006). destination management in crossborder regions. in wachowiak h (ed). tourism and borders. contemporary issues, policies and international research, 89–109. ashgate, aldershot. haywood km (1999). sustainable development for tourism: an organizational perspective. in nelson jg, r butler & g wall (eds). tourism and sustainable development: a civic approach, 311–320. university of waterloo, waterloo, ont. van houtum h (2000). an overview of european geographical research on borders and border regions. journal of borderland studies 15: 1, 57–83. inskeep e (1994). national and regional tourism planning. 249 p. routledge, new york. interreg iiia nord (2008). hyväksytyt hankkeet. <http://www.interregnord.com/scripts/list_approved_projects.asp?ss=fi&no=3>. 15.1.2008. ioannides d, p nielsen & p billing (2006). transboundary collaboration in tourism: the case of the bothian arc. tourism geographies 8: 2, 122–142. jamal t & d getz (1995). collaboration theory and community tourism planning. annals of tourism research 22: 1, 186–204. jensen o & t richardson (2004). making european space: mobility, power and territorial identity. 287 p. routledge, london. jessop b (2002). the political economy of scale. in perkmann m & n sum (eds). globalization, regionalization and cross-border regions, 25–49. palgrave macmillan, hampshire. jones m & g macleod (2004). regional spaces, spaces of regionalism: territory, insurgent politics and the english question. transactions of the institute of british geographers 29, 433–452. jukarainen p (2001). sodan ja rauhan rajoilla: nuorten tilallisja identiteettipoliittisia maailmanjäsennyksiä suomen ja venäjän sekä ruotsin ja suomen rajojen tuntumassa. 285 p. tapri, tampere. keating m (1998). the new regionalism in western europe. 242 p. elgar, cheltenham. klockare s (1982). suomen kieli tornionlaaksossa/ finska språket i tornedalen. 73 p. norden society, stockholm. koivumaa j (2008). geopoliittista kuvittelua pohjoissuomen raja-alueilla. tutkimus perifeerisyyden purkamisesta kylmän sodan jälkeisessä kansainvälisessä järjestelmässä 1995–2004. acta universitatis lapponiensis 131. 319 p. kosonen r & k loikkanen (2005). kaksoiskaupunkeja vai rajakaupunkipareja? kolme tapaustutkimusta suomen rajalta. terra 117: 3, 189–201. lagendijk a (2005). regionalization in europe. stories, institutions and boundaries. in van houtum h, o kramsh & w zierhofer (eds). b/ordering space, 77–91. ashgate, aldershot. lähteenmäki-smith k (2003). regional policy and inter-regional strategic co-operation in the northcalotte: cross-border co-operation as an instrument of regional development. nordregio ep 2. <http://www.nordregio.se/files/ep0302.pdf>. 27.9.2005. lantto r (1998). kulttuurimatkailuverkosto tornionlaaksossa. tornionlaakson vuosikirja 1998, 39–46. tornionlaakson maakuntamuseo, tornionlaakson neuvosto. lantto r (2003). revontultentie – uusi matkailutie. tornionlaakson vuosikirja 2003, 75–79. tornionlaakson maakuntamuseo, tornionlaakson neuvosto. lapin liiton osarahoittaman hankkeen loppuraportti (2005). tavoite 1-ohjelma vuosille 2000–2006. övertorneå 5.4.2005. unpublished document. leimgruber w (1998). defying political boundaries: transborder tourism in a regional context. visions in leisure and business 17: 3, 8–29. lundén t & d zalamans (2001). local co-operation and state territoriality – the case of haparanda and tornio on the sweden – finland border. geojournal 54, 33–42. lundmark l (2006). restructuring and employment change in sparsely populated areas. examples from northern sweden and finland. gerum 2006:2. 182 p. manninen m (2007) kuinka raja kuroutuu umpeen. helsingin sanomat 18.2.2007, e1. martinez o (1994) the dynamics of border interaction: new approaches to border analysis. in scholfield c (ed). global boundaries, 1-15. routlegde, london. matkailustrategia (2006). destination arctic circle 2005. the municipalities of pello, ylitornio and övertorneå. <http://ylitornio.fi/meanpalvelut/elinkeino/matkailustrategia.doc>. 9.9.2005. mattsson m & ö pettersson (2005). cross-border collaboration in the north. viewpoints of municipal representatives and firm managers on the bothnian arc project. fennia 183: 2, 97–107. nordregio (2008). map and figures. co-operation and eligible areas. <http://www.nordregio.se/>. 30.1.2008. 46 fennia 186: 1 (2008)eeva-kaisa prokkola o’dowd l (2003). the changing significance of european borders. in anderson j, l o’dowd & tm wilson (eds). new borders for a changing europe: cross-border cooperation and governance, 13–36. frank cass, london. paasi a (2008). regions and regional dynamics in europe. in rumford c (ed). handbook of european studies. sage, london. (forthcoming.) paasi a & e prokkola (2008). territorial dynamics, cross-border work and everyday life in the finnish-swedish border area. space and polity 15: 1, 13–29. perkmann m & n sum (2002). globalization, regionalization and cross-border regions: scales, discourses and governance. in perkmann m & n sum (eds). globalization, regionalization and cross-border regions, 3–21. palgrave macmillan, hampshire. pietilä s (1994). provincia bothiensis – kommunoch gränsarbetet när det är best. tornionlaakson vuosikirja 1994, 129–137. tornionlaakson maakuntamuseo, tornionlaakson neuvosto. pihlström b (1983). turistpolitik. in linneballe p & k müller (eds). reiseliv i norden, 245–255. 2nd ed. nordisk ministerråd, copenhagen. prokkola e (2007). cross-border regionalization and tourism development at the swedish-finnish border: destination arctic circle. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 7: 2, 120–138. prokkola e (2008). borders in tourism: transformation of the finnish-swedish border landscape. current issues in tourism. (in print.) provincia bothniensis (2008). tornio-haparanda: om provincia bothniensis. <http://provincia.haparanda.se/startsidanse/topplankar/omprovinciabothni ensis.4.63b5035910ad4ad4bf780001061.html>. 28.1.2008. quack h-d (2006). organizing destination management: france and germany compared. in wachowiak h (ed). tourism and borders. contemporary issues, policies and international research, 77–87. ashgate, aldershot. rumley d & j minghi (eds) (1991). geography of border landscapes. 309 p. routlegde, london. saarinen j (2004). viimeinen oljenkorsi? matkailu ja maaseudun aluekehitys. maaseudun uusi aika 12: 3, 26–38. saarinen j (2006). contradictions of rural tourism initiatives in rural development contexts: finnish rural tourism strategy case study. current issues in tourism 10: 1, 96–105. service guide tornio-haparanda (2006). boundless experiences. service guide tornio-haparanda, winter 06/07. <http://212.50.144.81/matkailu/ (uyyksr45w2e1to45bdweej55)/data/happis_ bes%c3%b6ksguide_engelsk.pdf>. 30.1.2008. swedish lapland (2008). tornedalen. <http://www. swedishlapland.com/en-gb/flash/where/destination.aspx?no>. 30.1.2008. timothy d (1999). cross-border partnership in tourism resource management: international parks along the us-canada border. journal of sustainable tourism 7: 3–4, 182–205. timothy d (2001). tourism and political boundaries. 219 p. routledge, london. timothy d & v teye (2004). political boundaries and regional cooperation in tourism. in lew a, m hall & a williams (eds). a companion to tourism, 584–585. blackwell, malden. wachowiak h (2006). introduction. in wachowiak h (ed). tourism and borders. contemporary issues, policies and international research, 1–6. ashgate, aldershot. westman b & r ronkainen (2007). euregio arcticalla uutta vauhtia yhteistyöhön. pohjolan sanomat 28.4.2007, 2. woodley a (1999). tourism and sustainable development: the community perspective. in nelson jg, r butler & g wall (eds). tourism and sustainable development: a civic approach, 295–310. university of waterloo, waterloo, ont. ylitornio-övertorneå tourism (2008). the land of the arctic circle. <www.arctic-circle.net>. 17.1.2008. zalamans d (2001). gränsen mellan grannstäder. in ramìrez j (ed). att forska om gränser, 193–209. nordregio, stockholm. new directions for narrative approaches to urban planning urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa117123 doi: 10.11143/fennia.117123 reflections: author’s response to book review new directions for narrative approaches to urban planning lieven ameel ameel, l. (2021) new directions for narrative approaches to urban planning. fennia 199(2) 291–293. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117123 this reflection reacts to mark tewdwr-jones’s and robert beauregard’s reviews of my book the narrative turn in urban planning. it considers the suggestions made by tewdwr-jones and beauregard, and examines new directions for narrative approaches to urban planning. keywords: narrative planning, narrative, storytelling, urban planning, narrative turn, city lieven ameel (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8072-4970), literary studies, kanslerinrinne 133014, tampere university, finland. e-mail: lieven.ameel@tuni.fi urban planning is fundamentally concerned with storytelling. this is not merely a matter of communication or embellishment – rather, forms of narrative are involved in all stages of planning, from survey to participation, from drafting documents to the interaction between the eventually built environment and new personal or communal narratives of lived place. in my book the narrative turn in urban planning: plotting the helsinki waterfront (ameel 2020), i proposed a number of key concepts for analyzing planning narratives, as well as methods for developing planning practices that take into account narrative features. such concepts and methods included three types of narratives in the context of planning (narratives for, in, and of planning), a focus on metaphor, genre, and plot, and the integration of interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and practicing urban planning. robert beauregard’s (2021) and mark tewdwr-jones’s (2021) reviews of the narrative turn in urban planning show that both scholars share with my book a keen interest in narrative planning, as well as the conviction that forms of storytelling are inherent to urban planning in and of itself. both thinkers have engaged with narrative and planning for years, with notable book-length studies including beauregard’s planning matter (2015), tewdwr-jones’s urban reflections: narratives of place, planning and change (2011) and the more recent urban futures: planning for city foresight and city visions (2021; co-authored by tewdwr-jones with dixon). my own background is in literary studies and narrative theory and – perhaps inevitably – the focus of my work has tended to be on written texts and on applying concepts from narrative theory, such as emplotment, metaphor, or genre conventions. in their reviews of the narrative turn in urban planning, tewdwr-jones and beauregard point to further directions for developing the study of urban planning narratives. first, they foreground the importance of narrative discourses that take shape in the “cloistered world that neither public speech nor planning © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117123 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8072-4970 mailto:lieven.ameel@tuni.fi 292 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections: author's response to book review documents fully acknowledge” (beauregard 2021, 281); second, they are interested in the material aspects of planning practices, as they take shape in increasingly digitalized environments. in what follows, i will briefly respond to these two important suggestions. beauregard (2021, 283) makes an important point when he foregrounds planning practices that involve “storytelling to which the public is not invited”. while beauregard argues that such narratives deserve more attention, i would say that such forms of storytelling are already studied widely, often with the help of interviews with planners; in the context of helsinki planning, examples of such studies are the book sanat kivettyvät kaupungiksi (2000) or othengrafen’s uncovering the unconscious dimensions of planning (2012). what remains relatively understudied, however, is how metaphors and plotlines move from one context to another, from the planners’ “cloistered world” to finalized planning documents and then onward to the lived experience of city dwellers. the three-fold taxonomy of narratives in the context of planning developed in the narrative turn in urban planning (ameel 2020, 28–37) may provide a useful tool for examining such transfers, and also for studying “how far these stories are disseminated” (beauregard 2021, 283), one aspect that, again following beauregard, warrants closer scrutiny. while there are recurring arguments for an “open” approach to planning narratives (see ameel 2020, 118–119), beauregard (2021, 283) has a more cautious position, noting that “[i]t is important that planners be able to tell these stories beyond the gaze of the public; they need safe spaces to think and negotiate.” of course, such a position will depend on whether we see the planner as working independently from the public, or as collaborative or deliberative storyteller working alongside with present and future urban dwellers. beauregard rightly draws attention to the materiality of planning practices, which involves everything “from laptop computers to telephones to conference tables” (ibid., 282), and which also includes “the material presence of documents” (ibid., 282). more needs to be done to examine the ways in which such materiality shapes planning narratives. similarly, new technological and electronic instruments available to planners and stakeholders are important in shaping forms of narrative. in my book (ameel 2020, 113–115), i tentatively pointed out some of the possibilities for developing narrative-oriented ppgis (participatory planning geographic information systems); future research will have to do more to examine technological innovations in planning and planning consultation, and – following tewdwr-jones’s review – their implications for “how the problems of places may be analysed and could be managed”, as well as for “the ability for everyone to create and disseminate their own narratives about urban change” (tewdwr-jones 2021, 288). tewdwr-jones (2021, 286) asserts that for “those of us interested in observing and analysing urban change, narratives – and the stories within them – play a significant role in our understanding of events.” moreover, “narratives of urban planning are not, and should not be, only the preserve of the planning elite, but are much more profound when they are set within wider debates about the future of democracy and the state of politics.” (ibid., 288). it is clear, then, that when studying, reading, and developing planning practices, an awareness of narrative will be crucial. such an awareness of the role of storytelling in planning – a narrative “literacy”, so to speak – would be helpful also for stakeholders and citizens as a way to enable them to let their voice be incorporated within narratives in planning. tewdwr-jones ends his review to the narrative turn in urban planning with questions about the skills available to planners for “assessing the relevance and legitimacy of different narratives” (ibid., 289) and for arbitrating between different narratives. this echoes earlier calls by scholars such as healey, who argued that the key “challenge for planners is to reconstruct their own ways of thinking and acting to provide creative resources for critiquing and facilitating … [the] work of city story-writing” (healey 2000, 527–528). to raise to this challenge, it will be necessary for some degree of narrative theory to find a place in urban planning teaching (see ameel 2020, 120–121). and in actual planning projects, instead of teams that rely too heavily on one or two disciplines (such as engineering or architecture), multidisciplinary teams should be preferred (combining diverse fields including geography, literature, media studies or anthropology). when it comes to teaching planning as well as to developing planning practices, i hope my book the narrative turn in urban planning will offer handson examples, theoretical concepts, and thoughts for new avenues for study. with their focus on narratives developed by planners in their “cloistered world”, and on the materiality of planning practices, the reviews by mark tewdwr-jones and robert beauregard point to important new directions for the narrative turn in urban planning. fennia 199(2) (2021) 293lieven ameel references ameel, l. (2020) the narrative turn in urban planning. plotting the helsinki waterfront. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 beauregard, r. (2015) planning matter. acting with things. chicago university press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226297422.001.0001 beauregard, r. (2021) the stories that documents tell. fennia 199(2) 281–284. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115188 dixon, t. j. & tewdwr-jones, m. (2021) urban futures: planning for city foresight and city visions. policy press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447330936.001.0001 healey, p. (2000) planning in relational space and time: responding to new urban realities. in bridge, g. & watson, s. (eds.) a companion to the city, 517–530. blackwell, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470693414.ch43 mäenpää, p., aniluoto a., manninen, r. & villanne, s. (2000) sanat kivettyvät kaupungiksi. yhdyskuntasuunnittelun tutkimusja koulutuskeskuksen julkaisuja, espoo. othengrafen, f. (2012) uncovering the unconscious dimensions of planning: using culture as a tool to analyse spatial planning practices. routledge, london. tewdwr-jones, m. (2011) urban reflections: narratives of place, planning and change. policy press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1t899b7 tewdwr-jones, m. (2021) narratives of and in urban change and planning: whose narratives and how authentic? fennia 199(2) 285–290. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115636 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226297422.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115188 https://doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447330936.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470693414.ch43 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1t899b7 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115636 untitled mapping the historical sense of finland jouni häkli häkli, jouni (2002). mapping the historical sense of finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 75–81. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the article looks at the development of cartographic representations of finland from a social constructionist perspective. the image of finland, as portrayed on maps, has contributed significantly to the finnish nation-building process. as a medium for the dissemination of information, maps have enabled the broad popularisation of the idea of finland as a unified territory and nation. maps have also helped to build the sense of finnishness by representing the country in exclusively finnish terms, e.g., with finnish place names. finally, maps build the sense of a continuous national history by situating political and cultural events and portraying these in a timeless manner. in all, maps are powerful representations that should be assessed as agents of change rather than passive objects. keywords: cartography, history, national identity, finland jouni häkli, department of regional studies and environmental policy, fin33014 university of tampere, finland. e-mail: jouni.hakli@uta.fi maps as story-tellers maps that describe the european north have portrayed the area long before the finnish territory was established culturally and politically. the best-known examples of these early cartographic images include such masterpieces as jacob ziegler’s (published in 1532), olaus magnus’ (1539), and gerardus mercator’s maps (1595), as well as the one published by andreas bureus in 1626. these maps portray finland as a separate peninsula, but inaccurately in today’s standards (fig. 1). accuracy in depicting the coastline, the surface area, and the spatial dimensions of the finnish peninsula only reached the modern level by the end of the eighteenth century, with the advancement of cartographic methodology. progress in cartographic accuracy is an important, but certainly noò:the only interesting facet in the history of finland on the map. maps have always portrayed the physical world, but, moreover, communicated about cultural realms and political events. maps of kingdoms and states tell stories about history seen in a particular light, one that often considers the national community as the unquestioned starting point (häkli 2001). maps of nation-states, therefore, tend to insert a nationalist tone in the interpretation of history. the history of finland makes no exception in this respect. the image of finland as portrayed on maps has functioned as a symbol that has united the national community and told particular stories about the finns as one people. the rhetorical power of maps originates both in cultural and political imagery. the finnish identity derives from certain lands and landscapes and their cultural representations. in territorial terms maps are significant not only in that they portray a land that the ordinary people can identify with, but also in the sense that they help in disseminating the idea of finland as a unified country and nation. this has been vital to the finnish nationbuilding process that took place in newspapers, books, and school education, as well as through various social practices that ranged from voluntary associations to military training (alapuro 1988; paasi 1996). maps have also been instrumental to the way in which ideas and their discourses have been linked with particular locations. the concept of discursive landscape captures well this interlinkage. the concept points at the symbolic fabric that links the self-understanding of a people with a particular territory, concrete places, everyday practices, and imagination (häkli 1999: 124). the finnish place names, for example, are one con76 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jouni häkli crete historical testimony to the cultural presence of the finns on the finnish peninsula. written on maps these names take on a particular aura of fixity, an almost self-proclaimed physical presence that does not require further proof or justification. as hybrids of textual and pictorial representation maps help in fortifying the idea of a territorially definable ‘finnish’ culture. in addition to their role as cultural signifiers, maps are concrete and visible traces of power politics (häkli 1998b: 134). cartographic representations created in different times illustrate well the history of an emerging state system and changing political power relations in the european north. also the developments that led to finland’s independence have been stored in the form of a series of maps telling the story of the nation as a part of sweden (13th century–1809), then of russia (1809–1917), and, later, as an independent state (since 1917). the shaping of finland on the map finland took shape on the map first as a geographical region and only after that as a political-cultural entity. the mapping of the finnish lands increased significantly during the seventeenth century when the swedish state begun to centralise and consolidate its government and the land survey was institutionalised. in the kingdom of sweden, which consisted of centrally governed provinces, the finns represented a linguistic and culturally distinctive people (fig. 2). during the swedish rule the concept of ‘finland’ was generally associated with the southwestern corner of contemporary finland, that is, the region of varsinais-suomi (‘finland proper’), or sometimes with the entire collection of sweden’s ‘eastern provinces’. the ambiguous use of the concept shows well that finland did not yet form a political-administrative unity, but rather served as a geographical designation of the eastern parts of the swedish kingdom. interpretations that seek to portray finland as a nation and a state before the nineteenth century modernise history by viewing the past through later events. the situation changed in 1809 when finland became the autonomous grand duchy of russia. disconnection from the association with, and dependence of, sweden allowed the formation of separate governmental structures, as well as the fig. 1. olaus magnus: carta marina et descriptio septentrionalium terrarum. venice 1539. the map is unusually detailed and it has influenced the conceptions and images of the european north significantly. (reproduced from fredrikson 1993: 24–25, with permission) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 77mapping the historical sense of finland territorial shaping of finland as a political-administrative whole for the first time. seen from the outside, however, the association of finland with russia signified the relaxation of the scandinavian connection. this was quickly recognised in some maps showing the north of europe (fig. 3). finnish nationalism and the strive for an independent state expanded gradually during the nineteenth century. at this juncture the image of the territory of autonomous finland became a national symbol with a politics of its own. the politics of cartography the map is graphic and effective as a narrator of political history. this has made maps subject to various political uses, from a tool in territorial demarcation to downright vehicles of propaganda. the maps’ enduring status as highly objective representations of space increases their political significance (häkli 1998). it has become abundantly clear, however, that cartographic representation of reality always occurs in a specific societal context and that this affects the selection and interpretation of whatever is mapped (wood 1992; edney 1997). hence, for example, a map that portrays some aspects of the physical environment in a seemingly neutral way may in fact be very politically laden if these aspects are interpreted as belonging to a particular state territory or national landscape (harley 1988, 1989). a major increase in the political significance of maps occurred when national self-determination was adopted as the ruling principle in international justice in early twentieth-century europe. the ideal of “one nation, one state” was both promoted and realised with the aid of maps (herb 1997: 17). from the perspective of congruence between national groups and territorial homelands, however, the ethnic patterns of europe turned out to be tragically confused and mixed. finland is among the countries that were dramatically affected by the geopolitical turmoil of world war i. political history research has identified finland as one of the smaller european polities with a history of economic and political dependency on metropolitan centres. finland also belongs to a group of countries called successor states (e.g., hroch 1985; smith 1991). the term was widely used between the world wars to denote those polities, with similar state structures fig. 2. johann baptist homann: regni sueciae in omnes suas subjacentes provincias accurate divisi tabula generalis. nürnberg 1737. the map from the period of sweden as a great power portrays the kingdom as composed of provinces. finland figures on the map in a form that could today be interpreted as a political-administrative unity. recent historical research does not lend support to such an interpretation, however. (reproduced from fredrikson 1993: 72, with permission) 78 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jouni häkli and internal conflicts, that formed a geographically contiguous area between russia and the other major european powers (alapuro 1988: 2–3). born out of the aftermath of world war i, the successor states became the axiomatic test ground for the principle of national self-determination. the task of recreating the political map of europe was carried out largely according to woodrow wilson’s fourteen points address, which stressed in several occasions that self-determination was a solution to the problems of war-ridden europe. it soon became clear for those who were in charge of defining new national territories that maps on ‘peoples’, ‘nationalities’, ‘languages’, or ‘races’ were absolutely necessary for the task. in the situation where the number of nationalities far exceeded that of existing state territories, maps soon became tools of persuasion and propaganda (herb 1997: 33). all successor states were more or less created by the then-existing ones, but finland is an exceptional case because it gained its independence on a territory that had already been established in the imperial period (engman 1989: 108). when finland became the autonomous grand duchy of russia in 1809 and the province of vyborg was attached to its territory three years later, the finnish nation-building assumed a territorial framework that would remain virtually intact until 1940. therefore, maps did not play a great role in the establishment of the sovereign state of finland, but were of much importance in the process that rooted the sense of finnishness in the population. awareness of finland and finnishness can hardly be imagined without reference to the territorially defined finnish space. hence, as finland had already assumed its territorial shape during the metropolitan rule, nation-building in finland took place as a process of national and territorial unification. the national elite faced the task of producing ‘finland’ as a symbolic landscape in the fig. 3. alexandre delamarche: atlas delamarche, géographie moderne, suède, norvège, danemark. paris 1851. the grand duchy of finland was portrayed as a lost territory that did not merit detailed description. (reproduced from fredrikson 1993: 106, with permission) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 79mapping the historical sense of finland popular realm in order to foster the self-understanding of a coherent ethnic nation. maps were instrumental in this task. maps became the privileged images of the finnish national territory through a process that had two aspects, which only can be distinguished analytically. on one hand, representations of the finnish lands made the finnish territory visible in a popularly appealing manner. for example, the cartographic image of the finnish territory portrays the contours of the ‘maiden of finland’, which personified and embodied the idea of a unified nation and the belonging of the finns to the finnish lands. the rhetorical power of anthropomorphic images is well known (olwig 1987). on the other hand, to point at a more concrete aspect of cartographic communication, maps were increasingly available to the masses. various atlases became common items both in home and at school by the early twentieth century. cartographic images, produced mostly by the educated elite for governmental, academic, and educational purposes, were disseminated over the finnish territory via books, newspapers, education, and such institutions as museums and public offices. in consequence, the sense of finnishness as rooted in a particular soil gradually emerged as an image of the finnish territory and cultural sphere (paasi 1992: 94). finland had become well captured on maps by the end of the inter-war period. they were available practically everywhere. this contributed significantly to the establishment of national identity among the finnish people. yet, it cannot be assumed that the finnish identity had somehow reached its final form at that time. quite the contrary, a continuous search for national identity has been characteristic to finland throughout its independence (e.g., räsänen 1989). for instance, the traumatic experience of world war ii and its aftermath affected both the finnish territory and the self-image of the finns. the mythic lands of karelia, which had figured strongly in the finnish nation-building as the source of the original finnish vernacular culture, had to be ceded to the soviet union (kärkkäinen 1987). the fact that karelia region had been the centre of aspirations toward ”greater finland” before and during world war ii further strengthened the feeling of loss (paasi 1990). the attempt to justify the annexation of eastern karelian areas to the territory of finland represents perhaps the most explicit case of the use of maps for propaganda in finland (kosonen 2000). in 1941, a special issue of the geographical journal terra was dedicated to the mapping of “future finland.” such features as the rock bed, forests, agriculture, and industries were shown on maps portraying areas that extended east from the finnishrussian state border (e.g., eskola 1941; auer 1941). other features, such as the flora and the fauna, language groups, and cultural characteristics, were described textually and photographically (e.g., linkola 1941). conclusion: finland re-joins the nordic countries and europe during the cold war era that followed world war ii, finland was imagined as part of the scandinavian family of nations, largely for the official neutrality policy reasons. more recently the baltic sea region and the european union have again become the foci of identity-building on a wider scale. while the concomitant urbanisation, cultural changes, and increasing globalisation of the post-war era have changed the expressions of finnish identity, the map image of finland continues to convey and inform the national sense of history of the finns. changes in the image of finland communicate historical events: times of war and peace, the drawing of boundaries, and the shifting cultural influences caused by territorial changes. the finns who went to school in the early twentieth century were familiarised with a map that included the petsamo and karelia regions in the northeast and east. the generations born after world war ii have come to know finland in its current shape. hence, throughout the history of finland the country’s cartographic image has reflected not only domestic events, but also finland’s international relations. the separation of finland from russia was internationally recognised by portraying the country among its nordic neighbours on the scandinavian map (fig. 4). the straddle between east and west after world war ii is a finnish episode in the cold war history. and, of course, a more recent event of importance is the joining of finland in the european union (1995), which has set finland firmly on the political map of europe. more than ever before, maps are a natural part of our everyday visual environments through the media, books, advertisement, and the internet. 80 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jouni häkli the nature of maps as representations therefore tends to go unnoticed, while the messages they help to mediate are everywhere. still, maps are much more than mere pictures of the world. they are what latour (1986: 7–11) calls “immutable mobiles,” that is, standardised representations of territory that are movable across distance. the fact that maps are fixed and conventional images that are easily transportable makes them useful for the dissemination of information and ideas. moreover, maps are important constituents of people’s sense of national history, as the case of finland well illustrates. while the stories that maps tell are interesting, they should be listened with due caution. references alapuro r (1988). state and revolution in finland. university of california press, berkeley. auer v (1941). tuleva suomi talousmaantieteellisenä kokonaisuutena. terra 53, 206–215. edney m (1997). mapping an empire: the geographical construction of british india, 1765–1843. university of chicago press, chicago. engman m (1989). finland as a successor-state. in engman m & d kirby (eds). finland: people, nation, state, 102–127. hurst & co, london. eskola p (1941). itä-karjalan kallioperästä. terra 53, 171–189. fredrikson e (1993). finland defined. a nation takes place on the map. gummerus, jyväskylä. häkli j (1998a). discourse in the production of political space: decolonizing the symbolism of provinces in finland. political geography 17, 331–363. häkli j (1998b). manufacturing provinces: theorizing the encounters between governmental and popular geographs in finland. in dalby s & g ó tuathail (eds). rethinking geopolitics, 131–151. routledge, london. häkli j (1999). cultures of demarcation: territory and national identity in finland. in herb, gh & d kaplan (eds). nested identities: identity, territory, and scale, 123–149. rowman & littlefield, lanham. fig. 4. ernst ambrosius: velhagen & klasings kleiner handatlas, skandinavien und finnland, übersicht. bielefeld & leipzig 1930. the territory of finland was the most extensive between the world wars when the petsamo area had been annexed by finland in the peace treaty of tartu in 1920. finland returned to the family of nordic countries in european atlases gradually during this period. (reproduced from fredrikson 1993: 114, with permission) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 81mapping the historical sense of finland häkli j (2001). in the territory of knowledge: statecentered discourses and the construction of society. progress in human geography 25, 403– 422. harley b (1988). maps, knowledge, and power. in cosgrove d & s daniels (eds). the iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments, 277– 312. cambridge university press, cambridge. harley b (1989). deconstructing the map. cartographica 26, 1–20. herb g (1997). under the map of germany: nationalism and propaganda 1918–1945. routledge, london. hroch m (1985). social preconditions of national revival in europe. cambridge university press, cambridge. kärkkäinen l (1987). suomen valtakunnan vanhat rajat ja itärajan käynti 1934. maanmittaushallituksen julkaisu 59. helsinki. kosonen k (2000). kartta ja kansakunta. suomalainen lehdistökartografia sortovuosien protesteista suur-suomen kuviin 1899–1942. sks, helsinki. latour b (1986). visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands. knowledge and society 6, 1–40. linkola k (1941). suomalainen kasvimaailma jatkuu kauas itään. terra 53, 194–203. olwig kr (1987). den forsvundne region. kulturgeografiske haefter 35, 17–24. paasi a (1990). the rise and fall of finnish geopolitics. political geography quarterly 9, 53–65. paasi a (1992). the construction of socio-spatial consciousness. geographical perspectives on the history and contexts of finnish nationalism. nordisk samhällsgeografisk tidskrift 15, 79–100. paasi a (1996). territories, boundaries and consciousness. john wiley, chichester. räsänen m (1989). kansankulttuuri kansakunnan identiteetin rakennuspuuna. in korhonen t & m räsänen (eds). kansa kuvastimessa: etnisyys ja identiteetti, 10–28. sks, helsinki. smith ad (1991). national identity. university of nevada press, reno. wood d (1992). the power of maps. guilford, new york. the urbanization of poverty: rethinking the production of unjust geographies urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa103192 doi: 10.11143/fennia.103192 the urbanization of poverty: rethinking the production of unjust geographies sònia vives-miró vives-miró, s. (2022) the urbanization of poverty: rethinking the production of unjust geographies. fennia 200(1) 41–51. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.103192 hegemonic studies understand urban poverty as a consequence of an uneven distribution of resources differentially distributed throughout the city. in this context, this article aims at further understanding the production of urban inequalities and socio-spatial injustice through a lefebvrian approach, which considers space as an active agent and not merely a physical environment. it proposes the use of the concept “urbanization of poverty”, understood as the trialectic production of poverty through urbanization, leading to unjust geographies through processes of unequal geographic development and accumulation by dispossession. keywords: urbanization of poverty, unjust geographies, uneven development, city, urban inequalities sònia vives-miró (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7142-663x), department of geography, university of the balearic islands, spain. e-mail: so.vives@gmail.com © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction most definitions of poverty associate it with a “lack” or “deficiency” of needs required for human survival and well-being, and use income, consumption, or other indicators to classify social groups. some definitions also include non-material deprivation and social differentiation (wratten 1995). the concept of poverty has generated a broad and deep discussion among social scientists, which has evolved in specific ways throughout time and in different geographical spaces. the concepts of “new poverty” and “new poor” were adopted by sociological theory in western europe in the late 1980s to refer to new impoverished groups (kessler & di virgilio 2008). notions like “social exclusion” and “disaffiliation” emerged in the 1990s, but “new inequality” was considered a https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.103192 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7142-663x mailto:so.vives@gmail.com 42 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays more appropriate expression to characterize the increase in income differences between different social groups (gaffikin & morrisey 1992). with the beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of social exclusion assumed greater intellectual and, above all, political relevance in europe and the united states. in the united states, this category has been used to examine the “declining middle class,” the “new urban poverty,” and the “new second generation” (kessler & di virgilio 2008). specifically related to the category of urban poverty, while the literature has focused on the economic inequalities between the poor rural and the urban populations in the south, the analysis in the north has addressed the problems of peripheral urbanization, unemployment, and lack of income (wratten 1995, 18). urban poverty has been considered as relative poverty, since, according to ziccardi (2008, 11), “in the urban space it is harder for generalized situations of absolute poverty to prevail, if by such is meant lack of food, water, clothing, education, health, a precarious home.” in this regard, mitlin and satterthwaite (2013) estimate that one out of seven people lives in poverty in urban areas worldwide, most in the global south, mainly in overcrowded informal dwellings with inadequate water supply, sanitation, health care, and schools. the surge in urban poverty, aggravated by growing social inequality, has spread to cities in the form of residential and urban segregation. this has led to the concepts of dual city, fragmented city, and divided city. studies on new urban poverty, under the concept of social exclusion, move away from the middle class and examine the so-called underclass. however, studies on urban poverty, new urban poverty, social exclusion in cities, dual cities, and fragmented cities tend to consider space – urban space in this case – as a passive agent. in other words, poverty is understood as a consequence of an uneven distribution of resources in space (throughout the city), either as a consequence of social policies or the capitalist structure. in response, this article argues that social sciences committed to emancipation that understand space as an active agent in social processes and the underlying power should transform this line of discourse and agencies of social construction of poverty. therefore, the objective of the article is to further the understanding of the spatial roots of inequalities in cities, specifically analyzing the production of spaces of poverty as a cause – and not as a consequence – of social injustice. in short, the main contribution of the text is the conceptualization of “poverty capital” and the explanation of its operation and its entry into circulation in cities through devalued built environments, the rentier culture of real estate speculation, working classes and precarious lives, and the discourses of fear and social control. in this sense, the paper focuses, through a lefebvrian approach, on the production of poverty as the production of spaces necessary for the survival of capitalism, spaces of poverty that are built through urbanization. thus, it is about delving into the understanding of the production of inequalities that occur in cities and that generate situations of social injustice, from a perspective in which space is considered an active agent and not a simple physical setting. the works and thoughts of henri lefebvre, david harvey, neil smith, edward soja, and iris marion young, as well as of the intellectuals who have discussed their ideas and texts, are first thoroughly studied in the literature review, followed by a qualitative analysis. first, a review of the discussions of radical and critical theories that have proposed spatiality as a cause – and not as a consequence – of social injustice, approached in terms of inequality, is presented. an overview of the approaches to the concept of spatial justice and the production of unjust geographies is then provided. second, the production of unjust urban geographies is addressed, specifically through urbanization and uneven geographic development. third, the urbanization of poverty is conceptualized as one of the forms of production of unjust and unequal spaces. spatial justice and the production of unjust geographies soja (2016, 104) pointed out that “a geo-historical look at the concept of spatial justice would take us back to the greek polis and the aristotelian idea that the urban individual is the essence of the political individual.” his thinking lies in the idea that early notions of spatial justice focused on “civil” rights based on the city, considering the organization of a public sphere that made decisions on how to maintain equitable access to urban resources for all who qualified as citizens (soja 2014 [2010]). a spatial conceptualization of justice based on the city that was progressively displaced at fennia 200(1) (2022) 43sònia vives-miró the end of the eighteenth century, with the american and french revolutions, and with the “attempts to universalize justice as a ‘natural’ right supported mainly by a legal system [ …] that did not define citizenship in terms of the right to the city, but rather as rights and duties determined by the nation state” (soja 2014 [2010], 117). since the late 1960s, with the so-called “spatial shift,” the debates related to the spatial question have once again been placed at center, especially those related to the urban condition. the work and ideas of lefebvre on the social production of space and the right to the city play a fundamental role here. lefebvre defined the production of space by developing the classical concept of production, which indicated that a “change in production had occurred since there was a shift from production in space to production of space” (lefebvre 1991, 219). his main argument was that space is a social product, and therefore, the production of space is also a political process. consequently, each society and each production model, which also inextricably entails its specific social relations of reproduction, produces a space, its own space (lefebvre 1970, 1991). these ideas represented a turning point in considering spatiality as a cause – and not merely a consequence considered as a (collateral) effect – of social justice or injustice. in this regard, the subsequent discussions on the relationships between space and production of justice or injustice were structured through the publication in 1971 of rawls’s a theory of justice. rawls (2009 [1971]) defined justice as equity, not equality. it was a theory of distributive justice, which aspired to universality, and focused on the individual, not the community. however, theories of distributive justice have long been criticized. marxist critics have pointed out its inability to assess institutional contexts, social structures, and class relations and inequalities, since it only considers the distribution of goods and material resources and does not consider that there are many claims of justice they do not refer primarily to the distribution of income, resources, or jobs (young 2000). therefore, the publication of harvey’s social justice and the city in 1973 was a milestone in the construction of a radical perspective on spatial justice. in this book, harvey (1977) refers to the principles of “territorial social justice” as a form of justly achieved fair distribution. it is the result of a distribution of income that covers the needs within each territory, a distribution of resources that aims at maximizing the multivariate effects between regions, an investment of additional resources that helps to overcome the special difficulties arising from the physical and social environment, and mechanisms (institutional, organizational, political, and economic) that ensure that the prospects for less advantageous territories are as favorable as possible (harvey 1977). harvey’s main criticism of rawls is related to the structure of the capitalist system and its relation to a possible fair distribution. in this line of thought, in the 1970s, and as a result of the urban crises caused by the fordist crisis, lefebvre’s idea of the “right to the city” started gaining strength. to criticize the conversion of the city into a commodity, lefebvre constructed a political discourse to demand the reappropriation of the city. he presented the right to the city “as a claim, as a demand” (lefebvre 2017 [1968], 138). for him, the right to the city “could not be conceived as a simple right to visit or as a return to traditional cities. it could only be formulated as a right to urban life, transformed, renewed” (lefebvre 2017 [1968], 139). in parallel to marxist arguments, feminist critics have pointed out that, in order to expose situations disregarded by the distributive paradigm, theories would have to be defined in terms of specific social processes and relationships (young 2000). in this regard, young (2000) argues that oppression and domination should be the central terms used to conceptualize injustice. therefore, by integrating the five aspects of oppression – exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence – she discusses distributive justice theories by adding three main categories of non-distributive issues that distributive theories tend to ignore (structure and decisionmaking procedures, division of labor, and culture) and proposes a theory of oppression (young 2000). in it, young, renouncing a general theory of justice – and its universality – proposes to identify, in the first place, the injustices of which certain social groups are victims. therefore, she presents social justice as the recognition and acceptance of otherness and encourages a territorial policy attentive to the rights of groups, not communitarian but of affinity (gervais-lambony & dufaux 2016). in other words, for her, “the ‘fair’ decision arises from the negotiation between different social groups” (gervais-lambony & dufaux 2016, 71). 44 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays in conclusion, the ideas of territorial justice, the right to the city, and justice of difference have been the most discussed within marxist, feminist, radical, and critical currents that have sought the causes of social injustice from a spatial perspective. urbanization of injustice and uneven geographical development in the context of the production of unjust geographies, this section focuses on those produced by the urban condition, specifically through the urbanization of capital: the urbanization of injustice. as explained in the previous section, one of the first milestones of thought on the relationships between justice, power, and urban space was the publication of social justice and the city by harvey in 1973. the purpose of this work is to formulate a theory of urbanism that explains how the city and its planning reflects social inequality, but also contributes to reproduce it and, moreover, reinforces and strengthens it. in this regard, harvey defined the city under capitalism as a machine that creates inequality and injustice. therefore, the work presents pioneering explorations of urban land use, ghetto formation, and the circulation of surplus value within urban economies (zimmerman 1998). it also incorporates lefebvre’s ideas on the conversion of “urbanization as a productive force” (lefebvre 1970 in harvey 1977 [1973], 322) and criticizes the idea that the secondary circuit of capital (fixed capital) is replacing the primary circuit (industrial capital). ultimately, this work provided an intellectual basis for thinking on the connections between moral philosophy, notions of justice, social relations, and spatial form (zimmerman 1998). harvey published the urbanization of capital in 1985, and the ideas in this work were later expanded in other essays, such as the consciousness and the urban experience (1985), the urban experience (1989), and, already in 2005, the new imperialism. his objective was to understand the role of the urban space production process (urbanization) in the capital accumulation processes. in this regard, he explains the process of what lefebvre considered crucial when he stated in the urban revolution (1970) that “urbanization is necessary for the survival of capitalism through the concept of space-time fix” (harvey 2005). a process that has suffered a change in scale as a result of globalization, and that, from a spacetime solution for a city, has become a space-time solution at a global level (harvey 2008). merrifield and swyngedouw published the urbanization of injustice in 1997, and, in a context in which debates about social justice were full of new dilemmas, sought, not a return to marxist purity, but a critical rethinking of the relationship between spatiality, power, and justice. their purpose was to promote a “political and intellectual agenda that focuses on the development of socially just urban practices” (merrifield & swyngedouw 1997, 3 in zimmerman 1998). in parallel to this discussion, harvey had also revisited, two decades later, social justice and the city. he published justice, nature and the geography of difference in 1996. here, he pointed out that “in «postmodern» times, «universality» is a word that conjures up doubts and suspicions […] and, as a consequence, any application of the concept of social justice becomes problematic” (harvey 2018 [1996], 441). therefore, it agrees that “there can be no universal concept of justice to which we can refer as a normative concept for assessing an event”, understanding that “there are only particular, competing, fragmented, and heterogeneous concepts and discourses on justice that arise from the specific situations of those involved” (harvey 2018 [1996], 441). consequently, he affirms that “the task of deconstruction and postmodern criticism is to reveal how all discourses on social justice hide power relations” (ibid., 442). however, the first complete theory of uneven geographic development was developed by smith in his book uneven development: nature, capital and the production of space, published in 1984. for smith, uneven geographic development is understood as “a fairly specific process that occurs exclusively in capitalist societies and that is rooted directly in the fundamental social relations of this mode of production” (smith 2012 [1996], 140). his theory is based on three fundamental aspects: tendency toward equalization and differentiation, valuation and devaluation of capital in the built environment, and reinvestment and pace of inequality. since smith published the theory of uneven geographical development, many authors have integrated it into the construction of their thought and have been criticizing and modifying it (hadjimichalis 2011). in this regard, urbanization is the manifestation of uneven geographical development at a certain scale (harvey 2018 [1996], 552). fennia 200(1) (2022) 45sònia vives-miró urbanization of poverty there are many ways of producing uneven and unjust geographies through the urbanization of capital, which are expressed and involve multiple geographic scales. here, i focus on one form of uneven geographic development on an urban scale, which i conceptualize as the urbanization of poverty. therefore, i first conceptualize poverty as a form of trialectic production of space based on lefebvre’s ideas, then frame the urbanization of poverty in uneven geographic development, and finally think of it as a process of accumulation by dispossession. production of spaces of poverty when referring to the urbanization of poverty, i use a concept of poverty that includes four meanings: urban, social, emotional, and symbolic. first, urban poverty is what constitutes the material space and refers to the spaces of disinvestment. these are those urban spaces that have been devalued or are in the process of being devalued and are waiting to be able to absorb investments in fixed capital. in other words, they are profitable spaces, in which the potential rent of the urban area is much higher than the capitalized rent. in the words of smith, these would be the spaces generated by the production of rent gaps. the spaces of urban poverty constitute spatial practices. according to lefebvre (1991), spatial practices result from the way individuals generate, use, and perceive space. a space produced, used, and perceived in everyday reality – everyday life – and urban reality – routes and networks linked to reserved spaces at work, private life, and leisure. therefore, it is in spatial practice that the spaces of production and reproduction are generated (lefebvre 1991). it is about the material dimension of the territory, the concrete space. second, with social poverty, i refer to those spaces that, from an intersectional perspective, constitute spaces without class, race, and gender privileges. that is, the spaces of oppression. paraphrasing young (2000), these would be the spaces of exploitation, marginalization, impotence, cultural imperialism, and violence. according to young, these are the processes through which she defines the production of oppression and difference. in this context, the production of spaces of social poverty is associated mainly, although not only, with spaces of, for example, lower class, racialized, and gendered oppression. since, according to young, oppression is the opposite of justice, by mentioning these ideas, i am referring here to the production of spaces of injustice. it is about the dominated spaces, a structural process in capitalist economies. third, emotional, immaterial, or cultural poverty refers to lack of experience. therefore, it is about the production of empty spaces of experience, of precarious, alienated, unstable, uncertain ways of life. the concept of poverty as lack of experience takes us back to benjamin’s concept of experience, widely discussed especially by the intellectuals of the frankfurt school. benjamin (1973) wanted to repeatedly show his conviction that “we are witnessing the dissolution of a world that, in the hands of a generation that seemed to have settled out of necessity in the poverty of experience, would never repeat itself” (valero 2001, 47). he affirms that “the poverty of our experience is not only poor in private experiences, but in those of humanity in general. it is a kind of new barbarism” (benjamin 1973, 169). the crisis of experience, therefore, was considered a human disaster only comparable to the reification that, as lukács had argued in history and class consciousness in 1923, constituted the essence of capitalist exploitation and the notion of alienation (sepúlveda 2010, 22). both the production of social and emotional-immaterial-cultural poverty refer, in lefebvre’s terms, to spaces of representation. the spaces of representation are the spaces that are lived, produced, and modified throughout time. they represent local and less formal forms of knowledge (connaissances), which are dynamic, symbolic, and saturated with meaning. these constructions are, therefore, rooted in experience and articulated in everyday live (lefebvre 1991). hence, this type of space, according to lefebvre, has the political power of becoming a space of revolution. fourth, symbolic poverty is articulated through the discourses of poverty, which are also part of the social construction of poverty (gutiérrez 2003), and are, in fact, the representation of the space of poverty. the representations of space refer to the conceived spaces, which derive from a particular logic and technical knowledge that serve to establish the bases of the dominant power structures. 46 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays these include “the conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urban planners, and social engineers” (lefebvre 1991, 38). lefebvre argued that spatial practices precede the representations of space in traditional societies, while the opposite applies in post-industrial societies, that is, before space is experienced through spatial practices, it has already been represented. through these discourses, poverty is attributed to the poor and not to the social processes that impoverish them, thus disassociating them from public policies. in summary, the production of spaces through the urbanization of poverty includes, considering this concept of poverty as it has been conceptualized, a) lefebvre’s spatial trialectic between the production of spatial practices, through spaces of material poverty as devalued or devaluing urban areas; b) the spaces of representation, through the production of social poverty as spaces of oppression and of immaterial poverty as spaces empty of experience; and c) the representation of spaces, through discourses of social construction of poverty. this process can be termed spatial trialectic production of poverty through urbanization. urbanization of poverty in uneven geographical development following smith’s (2020 [1984]) theory of geographic development, urbanization of poverty is one of the forms articulated through uneven geographic development. specifically, poverty, as one of the forms of uneven development, occurs as a result of contradictory tendencies toward the differentiation and equalization of levels and conditions of development associated with urbanization. the urbanization of capital, understood as a spatial-temporal solution (harvey 2005), and necessary for the survival of capitalism (lefebvre 1970), develops at different scales. depending on the needs of spatial and temporal movement of capital flows, the production of space a) is centralized in the city (implying the internal differentiation of urban space through the rehabilitation of the center and other depressed urban areas, the gentrification processes); b) is decentralized (leading to suburbanization); or c) is recentralized in the metropolis (in rural-urban migration and leading to new gentrification processes). discussions have subsequently arisen that address the concept of gentrification in rural areas (phillips 1993; phillips et al. 2021). thus, according to smith, in a globalized world, each of these processes demands a scalar analysis of uneven urban development (smith 2020 [1984]). however, global urbanization is a rather contradictory process. on the one hand, urbanization is one of the strongest equalizing forces of uneven development, but, on the other, is one of the most powerful differentiating forces. on the one hand, the tendency to equalize urbanization has been explained through its potential to be a spatial and temporal solution to the need to absorb and fix financial capital that can be reinvested in the secondary circuit to not stop the circulation process. this tendency toward equalization, in a global world, is driven by urban competitiveness led by neoliberal urbanism and the new urban governance. on the other hand, the tendency to differentiate urbanization occurs through a) investment in specific urban spaces and the abandonment of others (which leads to the difference in land rents, production of rent gaps, gentrification); b) the spatialization of class, ethnic, and gender privileges and the hegemony of an urbanism thought mainly by western men of middle or upper class, white, educated, middle-aged, heterosexual, without functional diversity, and with mental health; c) the prioritization of the city’s exchange values as opposed to the values of use; d) the permanent discourses of competitiveness, of winners and losers; e) the urbanization produced without experience; and f) thinking of a rented and profitable city rather than a habitable city – thinking of production and not reproduction. putting profit, and not life, at the center. the differentiated spaces that urbanization creates, those that constitute the articulation of poverty, are a) abandoned, degraded, or underprivileged urban spaces; b) impoverished, lower-class, or marginalized spaces, ghettos, racialized spaces, with gender oppression and violence; c) spaces empty of experience, with precarious, alienated, unstable, uncertain ways of life; and d) are the spaces in which poverty has been constructed with blaming discourses, which have been called spaces of “losers.” in short, these spaces constitute what i have called the spatial trialectic production of poverty. therefore, this spatial trialectic production of poverty is one of the results of the tendency toward differentiation promoted by the urbanization process. 47sònia vives-mirófennia 199(2) (2022) in conclusion, the spatial trialectic production of poverty is necessary for the production of urbanization, and, therefore, necessary for the circulation of capital. in short, it is about the structural production of unjust and uneven spaces through urbanization. urbanization of poverty as a process of accumulation by dispossession harvey (2007, 36) warns that “any theory of uneven geographical development within capitalism must incorporate accumulation and devaluation by dispossession as a fundamental force in order to have general validity.” therefore, he proposes incorporating the analysis of the processes of accumulation by dispossession as strategies of uneven development. accumulation by dispossession has been explained as “a generalization of the marxist concepts of ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ accumulation within which pre-existing goods are assembled – as labor force, money, productive capacity, or as commodities – and put into circulation as capital” (harvey 2007, 21). however, feminist criticism has incorporated into the understanding of the concept of primitive accumulation a series of factors that are absent in the analysis of marx and harvey and that are considered inherent to it. federicci (2004, 23) adds the following: “i) the development of a new gender division of work that subjects female work and the reproductive function of women to the reproduction of the labor force; ii) the construction of a new patriarchal order, based on the exclusion of women from paid work and their subordination to men; iii) the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers.” finally, the processes of accumulation by dispossession are fundamentally about the struggle for the appropriation, control, and use of surplus, since there is not enough surplus to incorporate into circulation without dispossession, a necessary condition for the survival of capitalism. in the case under consideration here, i am going to try to present, as a synthesis and without the intention of further elaborating on each one of them, what are the processes of accumulation by dispossession that specifically integrate or entail the urbanization of poverty. paraphrasing harvey, i can say that, as capital is urbanized through the explained process of “urbanization of capital” (harvey 1977), with the concept of urbanization of poverty, i argue here that poverty is urbanized. but how is poverty urbanized? the fact that poverty is urbanized means that it enters circulation. how can poverty enter circulation? effectively, with this concept, i mean that, poverty – in capitalism – is a type of capital. therefore, it can be urbanized, circulated in the circuits of capital accumulation, and i can also say that poverty is necessary for capitalist reproduction. next, i am are going to try to explain how poverty is introduced into the circulation of capital through the four meanings of poverty that we have previously defined. it is about what, jointly and dialectically, i am going to term here “poverty capital,” based on the four main forms in which capital is presented according to bourdieu’s (1986) distinction of economic capital in a strict sense, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. according to bourdieu (1986), the distribution of these different types of capital determines the structure of the social space and the life opportunities of social agents (fernández 2013). the first type of poverty capital that enters circulation through urbanization is the devalued or devaluing fixed capital. as already explained above, this type of fixed capital involves the production of rent gaps and the mobilization of capital toward this type of devalued built environments, thus causing gentrification processes and the differentiation of urban spaces in terms of production of land rents – and, with it, processes of residential and social segregation. the housing dispossession (vives-miró & rullan 2017; vives-miró et al. 2018) is one of the key and inherent elements of this type of accumulation strategies by dispossession. the accumulation by housing dispossession constitutes managing to preserve the system of accumulation of urban rents – from real estate businesses – through the commercialization of sectors of the real estate activity that until then were closed in the market. this implies the separation of individuals from their means of reproduction, such as housing. therefore, it is a process of class violence (of exploitation) that consists of excluding, prohibiting, separating, or discriminating against the right to housing, the city, and, ultimately, the urban common areas. the housing dispossession is an essential, inseparable, and inherent part of the real estate income accumulation process. thus, without housing dispossession, real estate 48 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays income cannot be produced, appropriated, captured, or accumulated. both processes are the two sides of the same coin. without one, the other cannot exist (vives-miró et al. 2018). the second type of poverty capital that can enter circulation is the cultural capital of real estate speculation. this is what can be understood by a rentier culture as a way of life. according to blanco (2005, 2), the “rentier culture” can be defined as the set of beliefs and attitudes that embody a behavior that privileges the search for profit without taking risks in the process of producing goods and services. in particular, although not exclusively, the search for financial income associated with solely speculative activities (in the pejorative sense of the term) that, when they acquire a certain level, become a brake on the possibility of wealth creation and economic development of society. this rentier culture, which in our case is carried out by valuing housing and urban space not for their good use, but for a good exchange, has led to the social way of understanding the city as a business space rather than a living space. in this regard, the dispossession caused by entering this type of cultural capital into circulation is poverty, understood as the lack of the benjamin’s experience. it concerns the dispossession of the experience of the everyday life, heritage of tradition, popular culture, in this specific case referring to, for example, vernacular architecture, the most emotional space, space lived from a specific type of reproduction relationships. this is what benjamin was referring to when he stated that “we have become poor. we have given away one portion after another of humanity’s heritage, often having to leave it at the pawnshop for a hundred times less than its value so that they advance us a small amount of current money” (valero 2001, 129). this lack of experience entered the market with the entry of post-modernity and could be understood as a process of original or primitive accumulation. the third type of poverty capital that enters circulation through urbanization is precarious social and human capital. bourdieu (2001, 137) defines social capital as “the totality of the potential and current resources associated with the possession of a lasting network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual knowledge and recognition.” in other words, it is “the totality of resources based on belonging to a group” (bourdieu 2001, 148). i think of social capital here as poverty when i refer to a precarious social class based on work (and its gender division) from a model subordinated to urbanization. in this regard, i understand that the working classes have been dispossessed of a life that, as feminists argue, is worth living, and they function under the logic of accumulation as workers forced to live and work in exploitative conditions. finally, the fourth type of poverty capital that enters circulation through urbanization is symbolic capital. symbolic capital is a form of power and symbolic violence, and through this, i have referred to the discourses that promote the social construction of poverty. wacquant, slater and borges pereira (2014) have conceptualized it as negative symbolic capital that contributes to the territorial stigmatization of neighborhoods. the fact that this form of capital enters circulation may imply a certain form of dispossession of social empowerment. this is carried out by controlling lives through domination strategies, such as urbanism of fear (carrión mena & núñez-vega 2006), revenge, and other forms of social construction of guilt of precariousness and vulnerability. in conclusion, “poverty capital” is articulated through devalued built environments (fixed capital), the rentier culture of real estate speculation (cultural capital), working classes and precarious lives (social and human capital), and the discourses of the fear and social control (symbolic capital). its circulation through urbanization is structurally associated with the dispossession of urban space as a) commodity, housing, public space, the right to the city and urban common goods; b) the experience of the everyday live; c) of dignified lives; as well as d) emancipation. all these processes, in a dialectical manner, constitute the processes of accumulation by dispossession through the urbanization of poverty. conclusions this text has sought to further the understanding of the production of inequalities that occur in cities and that generate situations of social injustice. this has been done from a perspective in which space is considered as an active agent, through an approach that can be called lefebvrian. that is, without considering the urban space as a simple physical scenario, in which the inequalities and injustices that fennia 200(1) (2022) 49sònia vives-miró occur are only consequences that have nothing to do with the space itself. thus, the production of poverty is understood as the production of spaces necessary for the survival of capitalism, which are built through urbanization. in this regard, the use of the concept “urbanization of poverty” is proposed to refer to the spatial trialectic production of poverty that occurs through urbanization and that produces unjust geographies primarily through processes of uneven geographical development and processes of accumulation by dispossession (table 1). 1 type of poverty spatial trialectic production differentiation processes accumulation by dispossession spatial trialectic definitions of poverty capital in circulation poverty capital in circulation dispossession spaces urban material spatial practice urban spaces that are devalued or in the process of being devalued. abandoned, degraded, or with substandard housing. investment in specific urban spaces and abandonment of others. difference in land rents, production of rent gaps, gentrification. fixed capital devalued built environments urban space as a commodity. housing, public space, and urban common goods. the right to housing and to the city. social spaces of representation spaces of class, race, and gender oppression. impoverished, lower class, or marginalized spaces, ghettos, racialized spaces and with gender oppression and violence. spatialization of class, ethnic, gender privileges. hegemony of a patriarchal urbanism. social and human capital working classes and precarious lives dignified lives emotional, immaterial, or cultural spaces of representation spaces empty of experience, with precarious, alienated, unstable, uncertain ways of life prioritization of the city’s exchange values as opposed to the values of use, and of production as opposed to reproduction cultural capital rentier culture of real estate speculation the experience of the everyday life and the culture of the value of the use symbolic representations of space discourses of social construction of poverty. stigmatized territories. permanent discourses of competitiveness, of winners and losers symbolic capital discourses of fear and social control social, collective, and individual emancipation the production of poverty through urbanization derives from the trialectic interaction between a) the production of material poverty as devalued or devaluing urban areas – as a spatial practice; b) the production of social poverty as spaces of oppression and immaterial poverty as spaces empty of experience, such as spaces of representation; and c) the production of discourses of social construction of poverty – as a representation of spaces. therefore, it concerns uneven and unjust geographies that are, on the one hand, the product of differentiation processes, such as a) divestment and abandonment of specific urban spaces, the production of rent gaps, gentrification; b) the hegemony of patriarchal urbanism, and the spatialization of class, ethnic, and gender privileges; and c) the prioritization of the city’s exchange values as opposed to the values of use, and of production as opposed to reproduction; as well as the permanent discourses of competitiveness, and of losing territories. on the other hand, table 1. urbanization of poverty through spatial trialectic production, processes of differentiation and accumulation by dispossession. 50 fennia 200(1) (2022)reviews and essays through the processes of dispossession of urban space that means the entry into circulation of “poverty capital” articulated through devalued built environments, the rentier culture of real estate speculation, working classes and precarious lives, and discourses of fear and social control. in conclusion, the concept of ‘urbanization of poverty’ is proposed, to contribute to the understanding that the production of urban inequalities and situations of socio-spatial injustice are not a mere consequence of economic logics, but rooted in the structure and are necessary for the dynamics of the urbanization of capital to continue its course. in this regard, this concept is used to facilitate a clear and critical approach and help unravel, based on critical social sciences and urban social movements for the right to the city, the hegemonic discourses on what has been called ‘urban poverty as collateral damage of the economic growth of cities’. acknowledgements this research was possible thanks to the project “pdr2020/82. financialized gentrifications and postpandemic urban inequalities” funded by the department of education, university and research of the government of the balearic islands. funds from the tourist stay tax law (2021–2024). references benjamin, w. (1973) experiencia y pobreza. discursos interrumpidos i [experience and poverty. interrupted speeches i]. taurus, madrid. blanco, a. (2005) cultura rentista. apostilla sobre la decadencia económica argentina [rentier culture. apostille on argentina's economic decline]. observatorio de la economía latinoamericana 46. bourdieu, p. (1986) the forms of capital. in richardson, j. g. (ed.) handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, 241–258. greenwood press, nueva york. bourdieu, p. (2001) poder, derecho y clases sociales. desclee de brouwer, bilbao. carrión mena, f. & núñez-vega, j. (2006) la inseguridad en la ciudad: hacia una comprensión de la producción social del miedo [insecurity in the city: towards an understanding of the social production of fear]. eure (santiago) 32(97) 7–16. https://doi.org/10.4067/s0250-71612006000300001 federicci, s. (2004) calibán y la bruja: mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria [caliban and the witch: women, body and original accumulation]. traficantes de sueños, madrid. fernández, j. m. (2013) capital simbólico, dominación y legitimidad. las raíces weberianas de la sociología de pierre bourdieu [symbolic capital, domination and legitimacy. the weberian roots of pierre bourdieu's sociology]. papers: revista de sociologia 98(1) 33–60. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/papers/v98n1.342 gaffikin, f. & morrisey, m. (1992) the new unemployed. joblessness and poverty in the market economy. zed books, london. gervais-lambony, p. & dufaux, f. (2016) espacio y justicia: apertura y apertures [space and justice: openness and openings]. justicia e injusticas espaciales 67–76. gutiérrez, a. b. (2003) la construcción social de la pobreza. un análisis desde las categorías de pierre bordieu [the social construction of poverty. an analysis from the categories of pierre bordieu]. anduli 2 29–44. hadjimichalis, c. (2011) uneven geographical development and socio-spatial justice and solidarity: european regions after the 2009 financial crisis. european urban and regional studies 18(3) 254–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776411404873 harvey, d. (1977 [1973]) urbanismo y desigualdad social [social justice and the city]. siglo xxi, españa. harvey, d. (1985) consciousness and the urban experience: studies in the history and theory of capitalist urbanization. johns hopkins university press. harvey, d. (1989) the urban experience. jhu press. harvey, d. (2005) the new imperialism. oxford university press, usa. harvey, d. (2007) spaces of global capitalism. verso, usa. harvey, d. (2008) el derecho a la ciudad [the right to the city]. new left review 53(4) 23–39. harvey, d. (2018 [1996]) justicia, naturaleza y la geografía de la diferencia [justice, nature, and the geography of difference]. traficantes de sueños, madrid. kessler, g. & di virgilio, m. (2008) la nueva pobreza urbana: dinámica global, regional y argentina en las últimas dos dècades [the new urban poverty: global, regional and argentine dynamics in the last two dècades]. revista de la cepal 95 31–50. https://doi.org/10.18356/5a6a14fd-es lefebvre, h. (1970) la révolution urbaine. idées nrf, paris. https://doi.org/10.4067/s0250-71612006000300001 https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/papers/v98n1.342 https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776411404873 https://doi.org/10.18356/5a6a14fd-es fennia 200(1) (2022) 51sònia vives-miró lefebvre, h. (1991) the production of space. blackwell, oxford. lefebvre, h. (2017 [1968]) el derecho a la ciudad [the right to the city]. capitán swing, madrid. merrifield, a. & swyndgedouw, e. (1997) the urbanization of injustice. new york university press, new york. mitlin, d. & satterthwaite, d. (2013) urban poverty in the global south: scale and nature. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203104330 phillips, m. (1993) rural gentrification and the processes of class colonisation. journal of rural studies 9(2) 123–140. https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(93)90026-g phillips, m., smith, d., brooking, h. & duer, m. (2021) re-placing displacement in gentrification studies: temporality and multi-dimensionality in rural gentrification displacement. geoforum 118 66–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.12.003 rawls, j. (2009 [1971]) a theory of justice. harvard university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvkjb25m sepulveda, t. (2010) experiencia y pobreza en el trabajo social: una lectura frankfurteana [experience and poverty in social work: a frankfurtean reading]. o social em questao 13(24) 19–42. smith, n. (2020 [1984]) desarrollo desigual. naturaleza, capital y la producción del espacio [uneven development. nature, capital and the production of space]. traficantes de sueños, madrid. smith, n. (2012 [1996]) la nueva frontera urbana. gentrificación y ciudad revanchista [the new urban frontier. gentrification and revanchist city]. traficantes de sueños, madrid. soja, e. (2016) la ciudad y la justicia espacial [the city and spatial justice]. in bret, b., gervais-lambony, p., & hancock, c. (eds.) justicia e injusticias espaciales, 99–106. unr editora, rosario. soja, e. (2014 [2010]) en busca de la justicia espacial [seeking for spatial justice]. tirant humanidades. universitat de valència, valencia. valero, v. (2001) experiencia y pobreza: walter benjamin en ibiza, 1932–1933 [experience and poverty: walter benjamin in ibiza, 1932–1933]. ediciones península, barcelona. vives-miró, s. & rullan, o. (2017) capturing urban rent through evictions. home dispossessions in the historic centre of palma (majorca). in albet, a. & benach, n. (eds.) gentrification as a global strategy: neil smith and beyond, 152–162. routledge, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315307510-13 vives-miró, s., rullan, o. & gonzález pérez, j. m. (2018) understanding geographies of home dispossession through the crisis. evictions, palma style. icaria editorial, barcelona. wacquant, l., slater, t. & borges pereira, p. (2014) estigmatización territorial en acción [territorial stigmatization in action]. revista invi 29(82) 219–240. https://doi.org/10.4067/s0718-83582014000300008 wratten, e. (1995) conceptualizing urban poverty. environment and urbanization 7(1) 11–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/095624789500700118 young, i. m. (2000) la justicia y la política de la diferencia [justice and the politics of difference]. universitat de valència, valencia. ziccardi, a. (2008) procesos de urbanización de la pobreza y nuevas formas de exclusión social. los retos de las políticas sociales de las ciudades latinoamericanas del siglo xxi [processes of urbanization of poverty and new forms of social exclusion. the challenges of the social policies of the latin american cities of the xxi century]. siglo del hombre editores, clacso-crop, bogotá. zimmerman, j. (1998) review of merrifield, andy; swyngedouw, erik, eds., in the urbanization of injustice. h-urban, h-net reviews. <https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1867> https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203104330 https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(93)90026-g https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.12.003 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvkjb25m https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315307510-13 https://doi.org/10.4067/s0718-83582014000300008 https://doi.org/10.1177/095624789500700118 https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1867 resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in northern finland pekka kauppila kauppila, pekka (2010). resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in northern finland. fennia 188: 2, pp. 163–178. helsinki. issn 00150010. one of the most important factors for the site selection of a second home is the space-time dimension. for example, the popularity of second home tourism in the hinterland of population centres is based on the short distance between second homes and the permanent residence of second home owners. in the case of peripheral resorts, however, the main reason for a large number of second homes is the attractiveness of the area associated with a high level of touristic elements. the study examines the municipalities of residence of the second home owners in four large resorts – levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs – in northern finland. after analysing the geographical distribution of the owners with maps and diagrams the aim of the paper is to present a distance model for the resorts located in a northern periphery from the viewpoint of the regions of destination. generally speaking, the model resembles a u-letter. in this respect, the resorts have three zones – day trip, weekend and vacation – and each of them has their own characteristics based on accessibility and regional structure, the number and structure of population (potential owners) and land ownership. in the planning context, the proposed model can be utilised as a tool for the marketing of resorts as a second home environment as well as for analysing and comparing the overall attractiveness of resorts. keywords: northern finland, second home tourism, distance analysis, resorts, second home owners, distance zones pekka kauppila, department of geography, p.o. box 3000, fin-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: pekka.kauppila@oulu.fi introduction human mobility is an essential part of activities in the contemporary world. it can be divided into two categories, permanent and temporary mobility, by the length of stay and by the motive of mobility into two classes, consumption-oriented and production-oriented (bell & ward 2000). temporary, consumption-oriented mobility encompasses, among other, leisure tourism and related forms of mobility. lately, an interrelationship between both tourism and permanent mobility, migration (hall & williams 2002), has been emphasised, as well as tourism and one form of temporary mobility, that is second home recreational tourism (hall & müller 2004a). williams and hall (2000) have argued that second home tourism presents something of a grey zone in the permanent migrationtourism continuum having elements from both phenomena. generally, tourism, including second home tourism, as one form of temporary mobility is part of a wider human mobility phenomenon of which key concepts are time and space (see hall 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d). the temporal dimension varies from hours to years, whereas the spatial dimension is defined from the viewpoint of different regional levels, that is from the local to the international level. hall (2005a, 2005b, 2005c: 20–25, 2005d) describes different forms of temporary mobility in time and space and integrates the third dimension, the number of trips, into his pattern. to put it briefly, the pattern illustrates the decline in the overall number of trips with time and distance urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2641 164 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila away from a central generating point due to the individual’s limits of time and money. in other words, the space-time dimension has an influence on the number of trips. furthermore, it has to be borne in mind that transport technology and its development have implications for human mobility and the potential to travel at a higher velocity within a given time means space-time compression in general. in terms of space and time, second home tourism is generally considered more of an intra-regional form of mobility than inter-regional. intraregional refers to the distance of the weekend zone defined by ‘the car travel distance’ but along with weekenders, second home tourism extends to the national, even to the international level (see hall 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d). thus, second home tourism is strongly affected by space and time. for example, scholars (hall & müller 2004b: 10–11; müller 2006: 337) argue that there are three primary economic factors influencing the site selection of second homes: the space-time dimension, the attractiveness of an area and the price level of real estate. in terms of the space-time dimension, the majority of second homes are located on the outskirts of large population centres and in coastal and mountain areas (coppock 1977a: 6). müller (2006) states that the popularity of the hinterland of metropolitan areas is accounted for, above all, by their favourable space-time dimension – a short distance between second homes and permanent residences – not necessarily the special attractiveness of the areas. resorts as agglomerations of second homes have been noticed, for example, in sweden (see müller 2002a, 2004, 2005, 2006; lundmark & marjavaara 2005; marjavaara & müller 2007). in the swedish mountain ranges, resorts situated in attractive, peripheral areas are considered accumulations of second homes. in the case of peripheral resorts, the main reason for a large number of second homes is the attractiveness of the area associated with a high level of touristic elements. therefore, it has been recognised that mountain resorts attract second home owners from a wider geographical area than just within the weekend zone (see jansson & müller 2003, 2004; müller 2005). however, it has to be emphasised that those swedish distance studies have focused first and foremost on the perspective of the regions of the origin of second home owners and not the regions of destination. generally speaking, distance studies in tourism have stressed the aspect of the regions of origin (e.g. mckercher & lew 2003; mckercher et al. 2008), although the geographical studies of tourism tend to be destination-based (see hall 2005a). in terms of the space-time dimension, international second home studies have concentrated on the hinterland of large cities and, owing to this, investigations focused on peripheral resorts have been neglected to a large extent. the interpretation is supported by the examples of two classic second home textbooks, namely second homes: curse or blessing? edited by coppock (1977b) and tourism, mobility and second homes edited by hall and müller (2004a). these textbooks have a few articles dealing specially with resorts, and none of them has primarily addressed the distance from the viewpoint of the regions of destination. this perspective provides information on the hinterland of resorts that can be utilised in planning as a tool for the marketing of resorts as a second home environment as well as for analysing and comparing the overall attractiveness of resorts. this paper examines the places of residence of the second home owners of four large, peripheral resorts – levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs – in northern finland. the aim of the article is to present a distance model for the resorts after the location analyses of residences in the context of a northern periphery. the data is based on the summer cottage statistics of statistics finland (2006), but the examination is confined to privately owned second homes only. before the empirical parts of the study, theoretical backgrounds are presented in terms of the space-time dimension and these outcomes are also utilised in the conclusions. the study ends with discussion and some concluding remarks. extent and characteristics of distance zones in principle, the number of second homes can increase in two ways: by converting the original purpose of use or by purpose-building (coppock 1977a: 7–8; müller et al. 2004: 16; müller 2006: 337–338). the former means that the previous use of the property has been a permanent home, but due to out-migration the property has no longer permanent residents and it is necessary to transform the permanent home into the second home. in the latter, the original purpose of the property is a second home. in other words, it is built for this purpose only. fennia 188: 2 (2010) 165resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in … converted and purpose-built second homes appear in different geographical landscape areas. the space-time dimension (weekend-vacation homes) is comprehended in relation to urban demand markets and second home types (convertedpurpose-built homes) in relation to ‘amenity-rich’ areas (see hall et al. 2009: 181). thus, converted second homes are typical for ‘ordinary’ rural landscapes near the cities and for extensively used peripheral landscapes, whereas purpose-built second homes seem to be common for ‘amenity-rich’ hinterlands on the outskirts around the cities and for major vacation areas with a high level of touristic attractions. naturally, peripheral resorts are included in the last group. as müller (2002a, 2004) states, in principle converted dwellings can be found all over the country, because they represent links to childhood landscapes and family roots. müller (2002b) argues that the space-time dimension between second homes and permanent residences has an influence on the frequency of visitation, the length of stay, the form of mobility and the dependence on relative location. generally speaking, on account of the short distance within the weekend zone, it is possible to make many short visits all-year around, whereas in the vacation zone a long distance means fewer opportunities to make visits. as noted earlier, the interrelationship between the number of trips and distance is also underpinned by hall’s (2005a, 2005b, 2005c: 20–25, 2005d) pattern. however on the other hand, the length of visitation seems to be substantially longer (müller 2002b). naturally, weekend homes can be destinations for longer vacations, too. thus, second home owners living in the weekend zone have an opportunity for higher occupation rates in terms of second home nights compared to those living in the vacation zone. the importance of distance for the frequency of visits and the length of stay is supported by the empirical results from swedish and finnish kvarken municipalities (see jansson & müller 2003, 2004: 267– 268). müller’s (2002b) previous study results stress the standpoint of the own use of a second home. however, in the resort environment second home renting is more general than in the case of the rural environment that has been discovered, for example, in studies regarding the tärnaby resort in sweden (jansson & müller 2003, 2004) and the resort of wanaka in new zealand (keen & hall 2004). consequently, a second home can be acquired in respect of investment emphasising an increase in real estate values and renting, and in the case of wanaka a motive to purchase a second home was investment. in finland, too, economic factors, including renting, have been noticed as main motives to acquire a second home from a resort environment (see komppula et al. 2008). in his classic model, mercer (1970) defines the upper limits for the day trip zone as 60–80 km, for the weekend zone less than 400 km and for the vacation zone more than 400 km. in contrast baud-bovy and lawson (1998: 3) suggest that the weekend zone is between 50 and 200 km. distinctions between the presented zone limits can be derived from cultural differences. it is noteworthy that the above-mentioned zone limits are not based on empirical results and thus, they are more or less theoretical in nature. in addition, the weekend zone can also include the day trip zone, as mercer has stated. the former descriptions of distance zones are based on the absolute travel distance (km) by car. alternative models have been suggested, too. lundgren’s (1989) theoretical model, for example, argues that the day trip zone extends to 75 minutes and the weekend zone to three hours at the maximum (a long weekend). comparing lundgren’s viewpoint to the previous models, he stresses the relative distance, the travel-time, although lundgren also interprets time from the standpoint of the car travel distance, or more precisely, from the perspective of the car driving time. jansson and müller (2004), for one, define the upper limits of the day trip zone as 60 minutes and of the weekend zone as five hours. the absolute and relative distances are associated with janelle’s (1969: 351) concept of time-space convergence: as a result of transport innovations, places approach each other in time-space, that is, the travel-time, the relative distance, required between places decreases and the absolute distance declines in significance. jansson and müller (2003: 15–16) and müller (2005) have presented an empirical model for the interrelationship between the number of second homes and distance in the northern swedish context. amenity landscapes, like the tärnaby resort located in the swedish mountain range, constitute an exception in the distance decay curve, because there can be found an agglomeration of second homes in the upper limits of the weekend zone (about 350 km). the model resembles mckercher and lew’s (2003) distance decay curve with a secondary peak. the distance decay curve peaks close 166 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila to the origin and then declines exponentially as the perceived costs of travel distance and time increase. in general, the second home owners of the swedish mountain range live permanently in the cities on the coast of the gulf of bothnia in northern sweden, at a distance of 300–400 km from their second homes (müller 2005). taken together, the cities in northern sweden are situated in the weekend zone, about 300–400 km from the swedish mountain range. in finland, kokki and pitkänen’s (2005) study indicates that the second home owners travel to their second homes during the weekends in particular, if the distance is less than 250 km and the travel-time is three hours at the maximum. to conclude, their results show that the upper limits of the weekend zone would reach 250–400 km. in any case, the crucial point is that the occupation rates of second homes decrease, when the distance, or more precisely the travel-time, between secondary and primary homes exceeds three hours. aho and ilola (2006) found that the critical point for the use of second homes is 200 km. when that distance is exceeded, the occupation rates of second homes seem to decrease. weekend visits are, however, quite popular forms of use from a distance of 300 km. on the whole their investigation suggests that the weekend zone would extend up to 200–300 km. the above-mentioned literature review has outlined distance zones and their limiting values from both the absolute and relative points of view. as a summary, a theoretical zone model for the distance between a second home and permanent home is illustrated in fig. 1. in the present study, the regions of destination are in focus and therefore, the model has to be interpreted from the viewpoint of resorts. in other words, the centre of the model is located in the centre of the resorts under study and as a consequence, the distance zones are constituted surrounding the resorts, not the places of residence. in other words, three zones – day trip, weekend and vacation – form circles around the resorts. kilometres and hours represent the car travel distance and driving time, so the model stresses access by a car. bearing in mind that second home tourism is generally seen from an intra-regional perspective, based on the distance of the weekend zone, rather than inter-regional (see müller 2004, 2006; hall 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d), there is support for the application of ‘the car distance’ in the model. therefore, the model emphasises the absolute distance. in the real world context, the shape of the model is not circular but rather star-like, and the spikes of the star bend according to traffic lanes. of course, roads and their conditions along with congestion have a great influence on the limiting values of the zones. the model is relevant at least in the context of the nordic countries and applied in the empirical part of the study. distance has an effect on the geographical distribution of money flows among second home residents. in sweden, bohlin (1982) has studied the consumption behavior of second home owners who have their primary residence in stockholm. as a result of the study, it was found that the longer the distance between secondary and primary dwellings, the fewer commodities are bought at the permanent place of residence and larger volumes of commodities are purchased in the second home location. furthermore, a long length of stay results in an increase in consumption in the destination region. in finland, aho and ilola’s (2006) investigation supports bohlin’s findings that retail services are used least when there is a short distance from a second home to the permanent home. generally speaking, the above-mentioned literature review has addressed distance and zones from the standpoint of the regions of origin and, therefore, the theoretical framework of the study has to be reversed: the focus is to interpret the distance zones and their characteristics from the view of the regions of destination. to sum up, there exist two different types of peripheral resorts in terms of weekend zone day trip zone under 80–100 km/ under 60–75 min under 250–400 km/ under 3–5 h vacation zone over 250–400 km/ over 3–5 h fig. 1. day trip, weekend and vacation zones absolutely (driving kilometres) and relatively (driving time). fennia 188: 2 (2010) 167resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in … their regional context (table 1). in both cases, the attractiveness of resorts is on a high level, but the distinctive factor between these two types is the characteristics of the hinterland. in other words, the main issue is, whether there are large population centres within the weekend zone or not. a short distance to the cities would make it possible to have a large number of potential second home residents, including renters, and weekend use of dwellings would be easy, too. resorts would attract users both far and near during the vacation periods. hence, the occupation rates of dwellings would be high and on the other hand, seasonal fluctuations low. in terms of distance, it has to be taken into consideration that when the permanent home is situated far enough from a second home, that is on the border of the weekend and vacation zones, purchases would be directed towards resorts. vacations imply a long length of stay and as a consequence of this, purchases would concentrate in resorts. from the viewpoint of renting, the distance between a resort and the places of residence of second home owners is not such an important factor, because at least partly the occupation rates of dwellings are derived from renters. if a second home is located in a peripheral resort with no population centres within the weekend zone, then the use of rented second home concentrates on vacations (low frequency, long length of stay). finnish large resorts as second home environments levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs are situated in northern finland far away from the large population centres of southern finland and represent winter-oriented resorts with attractive northern nature, activities and opportunities for different kinds of sport, versatile (tourism) services and regular air traffic access (fig. 2). the resorts under study are winter-oriented but according to their strategies, one objective is to develop them as destinations for year-round tourism (see kauppila 2008). there exist a few reasons why these four resorts were selected for the case studies. firstly, they are the best examples of peripheral resorts in the finnish context, because they are the four largest (ski) resorts in finland (see vuoristo 2002). secondly, the resorts have a long tourism history including second home tourism. at ruka, the first stages of tourism appeared in the late 1880s, at saariselkä at the beginning of the 1900s and at levi and ylläs in the 1930s. thirdly, along with the long tourism development history, the resorts have been the target areas for massive investments since the 1960s (kauppila 2004: 117–119; kauppila & rusanen 2009: 8). fourthly, development actions seem to be very intensive in the future and lately, the largest investment plans ever has been publicly manifested for the resorts for the next few years. in other words, they will keep their status as the largest (ski) resorts in finland in the future, too. fifthly, the resorts are situated some 20–40 km from the centre of their location municipality in sparsely populated northern finland constituting a functional centre of their own. sixthly, although the resorts are located in a northern periphery, the airports of kittilä (levi, ylläs), ivalo (saariselkä) and kuusamo (ruka) make these resorts quite accessible from the perspective of southern finland, particularly from the helsinki metropolitan area. this table 1. the characteristics of the peripheral resort’s second home tourism. characteristic resorts have population centre(s) in the weekend zone resorts have population centre(s) in the vacation zone attractiveness high high distance to population centre(s) short long number of potential users within the weekend zone large small possible time to use second homes weekends and vacations mainly vacations expected occupation rates of second homes high low seasonal fluctuations low high geographical distribution of users’ spending both regions of destination and regions of origin (depends on the distance) regions of destination 168 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° ° 64 66 68 20 2 2 24 26 30 32 68 66 64 0 50 100 km norway russia sweden n saariselkä inari kittilä kolari ylläs levi ivalo kolari kittilä kuusamo kuusamo ruka arctic circle road municipality centre boundary of province resort airport oulu rovaniemi 20 22 4 4 4 4 4 21 21 80 82 8283 81 79 79 92 93 78 4 4 8 5 5 province of lapland province of oulu fig. 2. the location of levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs in northern finland, which consists of the provinces of oulu and lapland. is an interesting point with respect to the relative distance. from the viewpoint of second home owners, the resorts have adequate public and private services in relation to their residents, and an example of this is a versatile store structure covering retail, as well as special stores (see kauppila 2004, 2008). some basic information on the resorts under study has been collected in table 2. in the finnish context, the location municipalities of the resorts are very significant agglomerations of second homes. in 2004, kuusamo was ‘the cottage-richest municipality’ in finland, and the total number of dwellings were almost 6 100. in kittilä, there were over 2 400 second homes, in inari nearly 2 200 and in kolari more than 1 600. in 1990–2004, kuusamo and kittilä were within the top 15 municipalities in finland in terms of increases in the total number of second homes (statistics finland 2005). it has to be emphasised that in the case of saariselkä, the number of second homes is modest compared to the other resorts under study. within the location municipalities second homes are concentrated in the resorts. as an indicator of this, nearly a fifth of the total number of second homes in kuusamo was situated at ruka in 2004. in the case of kittilä, almost half of the dwellings were located at levi and in kolari nearly 40% at ylläs. saariselkä is the only exception: about a tenth of the total number of second homes in inari was situated at saariselkä. construction of second homes within the municipalities seems to table 2. basic information on levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs (finlandcd 2006; summer cottage statistics by statistics finland 2006; georeferenced data by statistics finland 2008a; statistics finland 2008b; facts and figures on finnish ski resorts 2009). levi ruka saariselkä ylläs location municipality kittilä kuusamo inari kolari commercial accommodation nights (2007) (% international tourists) 688 717 (27) 841 129 (12) 377 012 (32) 419 026 (24) enterprises (2006) 152 80 82 98 jobs (2006) 752 303 355 168 permanent population (2007) 814 347 345 373 second homes (2004) 1 092 1 036 205 591 ski slopes (2009) 44 29 15 61 ski trails (km) (2009) 230 506 230 333 fennia 188: 2 (2010) 169resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in … have accelerated in these resorts at the beginning of the 2000s (kauppila 2006). therefore, it is expected that the role of the resorts within their location municipality as a second home tourism environment will be emphasised in the future. lundmark and marjavaara (2005) have also discovered the polarization process of second homes in the swedish mountain ranges; dwellings are constructed above all in the existing agglomerations of second homes, as in mountain resorts. it has to be taken into consideration that the ownership of second homes in the resorts under study differs from the average of finland to a large extent. in 2004, three equal ownership classes can be distinguished: private persons/heirs, apartment house companies/real estate companies and private companies. generally speaking, private persons/heirs own more than 90% of all second homes in finland (kauppila 2006). data and calculation of distance data based on official summer cottage statistics by statistics finland (2006) were provided for the present study. in finland, the lowest official level data available is usually the municipality level. for the present study, the data was ordered from statistics finland by postal code areas, because the resorts under study are a part of their location municipality (see fig. 2). generally, postal code areas are smaller regional units – in a geographical sense – than municipalities and they cover the resorts quite well. unfortunately, georeferenced data was not available for the present study. there exist, however, some studies in which the resorts are outlined precisely by utilising gis and georeferenced data (see kauppila 2004; kauppila & rusanen 2009). it is noteworthy that the data includes only privately owned second homes. a summer cottage refers to a residential building intended for freetime use that is permanently constructed or erected on its site, or to a residential building that is used as a holiday or free-time dwelling. excluded are rental holiday cottages of enterprises engaged in the accommodation industry, buildings of holiday villages and buildings on garden allotments (statistics finland 2005). furthermore, second homes owned by companies, heirs or jointly are excluded, as are foreign-owned ones. it has to be borne in mind that in the summer cottage statistics the unit of analysis is a building, not a single dwelling. hence, a building can consist of many single dwellings or apartments. generally speaking, semi-detached and terraced houses are typical house forms for resorts in finland. this is supported by the fact that the area of the buildings in the resorts under study is much larger than the average in finland (see kauppila 2006). the distribution of second home owners is investigated by means of maps and distance diagrams. when calculating the distance between the resorts and the place of residence of second home owners, the distance service offered by the finnish road administration (2009) was utilised. by using this service the distance can be calculated in a reliable way. however, the resorts under study are not situated in the centre of their location municipalities and therefore distances, kilometres, have to be manually modified afterwards. after modification of the data some assumptions still exist. firstly, second home owners are presumed to have their primary residence in the centre of a municipality which relates to owners living in the location municipality of the resorts as well. secondly, second homes are assumed to be located in the centre of the resorts (see kauppila 2004; kauppila & rusanen 2009) and actually, nearly all of them are situated just around those centres. as noted earlier, applying gis and georeferenced data provides an opportunity to study geographical areas without administrative boundaries. several examples of gis studies concerning the geography of second homes have been carried out by the department of economic and social geography at the university of umeå in sweden (e.g. jansson & müller 2003; müller 2005, 2006; marjavaara 2007a, 2007b; marjavaara & müller 2007). recently, overvåg (2009) has applied a gis approach in his paper on the second homes and urban growth in the context of norway’s capital area. second home owners by distance and zones the day trip zone (less than 100 km) predominantly covers the location municipalities of the resorts. therefore, nearly all second homes in that zone are owned by the residents of those municipalities (fig. 3, 4, 5, 6). at ruka, the large number of local owners in the day trip zone is accounted for by the population of kuusamo (17 113 inhabitants in 2005) in comparison with kittilä (5 840), kolari (3 828) and inari (7 043) (finlandcd 2006). how170 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila ever, in the case of saariselkä, the proportion is a few percent only. generally, there are three agglomerations in the weekend zone (less than 400 km) apart from the location municipalities: the sub-regions of rovaniemi (rovaseutu) (62 550 inhabitants in 2005), kemi-tornio (61 354) and oulu (206 549, the fourth largest in finland) (finlandcd 2006). more precisely, for levi all these urban areas are important accumulations of second home owners, for ruka the oulu sub-region only, for saariselkä the sub-regions of rovaseutu and oulu and for ylläs the kemi-tornio and oulu sub-regions. the importance of the weekend zone relates first and foremost to ruka. at ruka, the vicinity of the oulu sub-region means that if the weekend zone is extended up to 250 km, then half of the second home owners live in that area. a larger zone (less than 400 km) does not increase the number of owners much, because the oulu subregion is already included in the smaller geographical weekend zone. in the weekend zone as a whole, almost 60% of the second home owners have their permanent home within the area. in the cases of levi and ylläs, the proportion is less than 40% and at saariselkä about 10% only. out0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 distance to levi (km) proportion (%) of second home owners (n=432) kittilä rovaseutu kem itornio oulu tam pere helsinki 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 kittilä rovaseutukemi-tornio oulu tampere helsinki 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 distance to ruka (km) kuusam o oulu helsinki proportion (%) of second home owners (n=340) 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 oulu helsinki kuusamo fig. 3. the places of residence of second home owners by municipalities at the levi resort (upper) and the distance between the places of residence of second home owners to the levi resort (lower) in 2004 (summer cottage statistics by statistics finland 2006). fig. 4. the places of residence of second home owners by municipalities at the ruka resort (upper) and the distance between the places of residence of second home owners to the ruka resort (lower) in 2004 (summer cottage statistics by statistics finland 2006). fennia 188: 2 (2010) 171resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in … side of the above-mentioned areas in northern finland, there are just a few people who own second homes in the resorts under study. this is due to the fact that the number of population living outside the urban areas in northern finland is modest. generally speaking, in the beginning of the vacation zone (more than 400 km) there appears ‘an empty area’ before southern finland. for example, eastern finland is not well represented. the modest representation of that area is accounted for by some resorts which are situated within the province (see vuoristo 2002). thus, from the standpoint of eastern finland, these resorts are located within the weekend zone. two distinct accumulations emerge in southern finland, namely the tampere sub-region (320 280 inhabitants in 2005, the second largest in finland) and the helsinki metropolitan area (1 235 514, the largest in finland) (finlandcd 2006). particularly the helsinki metropolitan area seems to be a significant cluster of second home owners for all resorts under study. furthermore, the tampere urban area is emphasised in the cases of levi and ylläs and the city of pori in the case of saariselkä. although the resorts are located far away from the 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 distance to saariselkä (km) inari rovaseutu oulu pori helsinki proportion (%) of second home owners (n=82) 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 inari rovaseutu oulu pori helsinki 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 distance to ylläs (km) proportion (%) of second home owners (n=250) kolari ke m itornio oulu tam pere helsinki 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 kolari kemi-tornio oulu helsinki tampere fig. 5. the places of residence of second home owners by municipalities at the saariselkä resort (upper) and the distance between the places of residence of second home owners to the saariselkä resort (lower) in 2004 (summer cottage statistics by statistics finland 2006). fig. 6. the places of residence of second home owners by municipalities at the ylläs resort (upper) and the distance between the places of residence of second home owners to the ylläs resort (lower) in 2004 (summer cottage statistics by statistics finland 2006). 172 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila greater helsinki area, a substantial number of second home owners live there. at ruka, there are clearly fewer second home owners from western and southern finland, for example, from the tampere sub-region, than at levi and ylläs. all the above-mentioned resorts are situated several hundreds of kilometres away from tampere and the resorts have no regular direct air connection from the city and thus, air passengers have to travel via helsinki airport. when the second home is located far away from the permanent place of residence, then the absolute distance declines in significance (aho & ilola 2006). in this case, the site selection is emphasised by two other factors, the attractiveness of an area and the price level of real estate (see hall & müller 2004b: 10– 11; müller 2006: 337). there are no substantial differences in the price level of real estate between levi, ylläs and ruka and therefore, levi and ylläs are currently considered a little bit more attractive as second home environments than ruka. the overall attractiveness of levi and ylläs is supported by the fact that in 2009 one finnish privately owned air company opened a new non-stop air route between tampere and kittilä for the spring season. in all, the importance of the vacation zone is underpinned by the average distance between second homes and the place of residence of the owners. at levi, it is 610 km, at saariselkä 778 and at ylläs 616. instead at ruka, the distance between the resort and the permanent home is 398 km on average, that is, in referring to the theoretical model, the upper limits of the weekend zone. furthermore, in contrast to levi, saariselkä and ylläs, all zones are quite equally represented at ruka. in other words, although second home owners have concentrated within the zones, they are, nevertheless, evenly distributed between the zones. generally, the results follow the pyhätunturi resort, located in finnish lapland, where the distance is, on average, 630 km (saarinen & vaara 2002). in the context of finland, this is about 400–500 km longer than the average of other studies (see sievänen & pouta 2002: 183; aho & ilola 2006; nieminen 2009). furthermore, it has to be borne in mind that for half of the second home owners it is less than 50 km (nieminen 2009). compared to sweden, second homes are on average located 87 km from the primary residence (müller 2006: 344), but in the swedish mountain range the average distance between the place of residence and second homes is significantly longer, about 220 km (lundmark & marjavaara 2005: 9). the above-mentioned results are based on the absolute number of second home owners by distance. another way is to investigate the distribution of the owners relatively. in this case, the focus is to compare the number of second home owners to the number of population by distance. the study results of that approach demonstrate that the proportion of second home owners is quite high at levi, ruka and ylläs in the day trip zone. in all those cases, the owners are locals, i.e. they are residents of the location municipalities of the resorts. a common denominator for the resorts is land owning which is in local hands. instead the differences between the weekend and vacation zones are quite insignificant. in the weekend zone, for example, the largest urban areas in northern finland do not emerge as peaks. the same outcome seems also to be relevant in the case of southern finland: no peak can be found there. when comparing the relative approach to the absolute one, not even the helsinki metropolitan area stands out from the other regions of origin. however, due to the low number of inhabitants in some municipalities, one single second home owner appears as a peak in some cases. distance model and zones the main results of the study are summarised in a simplified absolute distance model, which seems to be valid in the context of large resorts in the northern periphery of finland (fig. 7). the number of second home owners decreases towards to the upper limits of the day trip zone, as it does in the case of the weekend zone. in other words, the presented model tends to be descending by distance. the beginning of the vacation zone can nearly be described as ‘an empty area’. at the end of the vacation zone, the curve seems to be ascending. in all, the curve resembles the u-letter. in spite of similarities, the detailed analysis reveals quite clearly the characteristics and differences of the distance zones of the resorts. firstly, in all cases the day trip zone mainly covers the location municipality of the resort. the importance of that municipality was supported by the results of the relative approach in which the number of second home owners was compared to the number of population by distance. at ruka, no less than a third of the second homes are owned by people living permanently in the town of kuusamo owing partly to the fact that the population in kuusamo is fennia 188: 2 (2010) 173resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in … substantially larger compared to the municipalities of kittilä, kolari and inari. in the case of saariselkä, one reason for the low local ownership is obviously landowning conditions: contrary to the other resorts under study, land is owned by the state of finland, not locals. in consequence, land acquisition is a cost factor. furthermore, the saariselkä resort was just founded for a tourism purpose and had no traditional settlement or industries before the tourism era. instead levi, ruka and ylläs are based originally on villages and therefore, they have their own socio-economic history with traditional settlement and industries. in this respect, the development history of saariselkä can be conceptualised as an enclave development process (jenkins 1982; wall 1996) or an integrated development process (pearce 1991). secondly, along with the location municipalities the weekend zone of the resorts consists of three urban areas in northern finland: the sub-regions of rovaniemi (rovaseutu), kemi-tornio and oulu. the nearest urban sub-regions seem to be the most important agglomerations because of the favourable space-time dimension and the large population. in the case of saariselkä, there are no large clusters of second home owners within the weekend zone due to the remote location of the resort with respect to rovaseutu. furthermore, rovaseutu is situated in the hinterland of levi, in other words levi has a competitive advantage compared to saariselkä. thirdly, in the vacation zone the helsinki metropolitan area is an extremely significant accumulation for the resorts and the tampere sub-region for levi and ylläs. the reasons for the strong position of the helsinki metropolitan area is accounted for by accessibility, i.e. the well-developed airline system to the airports close to the resorts, as well as the large population. it is noteworthy that the second home owners of saariselkä are scattered quite evenly all over finland compared to the other resorts under study. from the perspective of eastern finland, which is located in the vacation zone as a whole, the resorts under study are represented very little. the reasons for this are the space-time dimension and traffic connections. in eastern finland, or in the vicinity of it, there are some winter-oriented resorts, which are numbered among the group of the largest resorts in finland, and they are situated within the weekend zone (see vuoristo 2002). hence, there is a shorter distance to those within eastern finland compared to resorts in northern finland, that is they have a competitive advantage compared to those resorts in northern finland. generally speaking, people lose their interest in second homes when the distance between the second home and the primary residence exceeds the upper limits of the weekend zone (müller 2002b). in other words, from the point of view of the resorts situated in northern finland, the above-mentioned resorts in eastern finland can be defined by applying ullman’s (1956) concept of intervening opportunities: a second home destination situated far away must have stronger pull factors to overcome the distance compared with places located closer to the place of residence of second home owners. in addition, traffic connections work better from western and southern finland to northern finland than from eastern finland. in terms of western finland, it has to be borne in mind that there are no large winter-oriented resorts there due to the low relative altitudes and therefore, conditions for downhill skiing, for example, are not so good in that part of the country. fourthly, both in the weekend and vacation zones the central towns and sites of urban sub-regions, i.e. the centres of population, are the accumulations of second home owners, too. actually, the regions of the origin of the second home owners mirror the major finnish urban areas, apart from the cities in eastern finland. it is obvious that the regional structure of the country has a substantial influence on the distribution of second home owners in the resort context. discussion including conclusions the article examines the places of residence of the second home owners of four large, peripheral re0 4 8 12 16 20 distance to the resorts (km) proportion (%) of second homes owners (n=1104) weekend zone vacation zone dtz 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 fig. 7. a distance model for the resorts in the northern periphery of finland. dtz = day trip zone. 174 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila sorts – levi, ruka saariselkä and ylläs – in northern finland aiming at creating a distance model for these resorts from the viewpoint of the regions of destination which seems to be neglected to a large extent in the distance studies of tourism. the present study noticed that the resorts attract second home owners from a substantially wider geographical area than just from the weekend zone, stressing touristic elements in the context of resortoriented second home tourism. this is supported by the fact that, for example, in the case of ruka, second home owners have their permanent home in the same areas which are the main regions of origin for winter tourists, that is, the urban areas of oulu and helsinki (see rämet & kauppila 2001). the previous studies (e.g. saarinen 2001: 31–67, 2003, 2004; kauppila 2004) have discovered a socio-economic link between resorts and the regions of origin of tourists demonstrated in the present examination. this interrelationship can also be interpreted by lundmark’s (2005) investigation in the swedish mountain range where people working in the tourism sector in large resort municipalities permanently reside in the greater stockholm and gothenburg areas to a large extent. as hall (2005b: 86) points out, cottage settlement should be understood as a specific interaction between an urban system (origin) and the adjoining rural hinterland (destination). in the case of peripheral resorts, the rural hinterland (destination) is, however, located far away from the origin. in this respect, peripheral resorts are characterised as ‘the remote branches’ of urban areas. in the presented distance model, zones were constituted by car travel distance as driving kilometres in absolute terms. an alternative approach would be to elaborate the distance simply relatively, that is measure it by time only. as janelle (1969) states, as a result of transport innovations, places approach each other in time-space, that is the travel-time required between places decreases and the absolute distance declines in significance. in a relative distance model, the vacation zone would be defined to begin from a three to five hours oneway trip (see lundgren 1989; jansson & müller 2004; pitkänen & kokki 2005). in this respect, the speed of traffic connection or vehicles would be emphasised (hall 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d). in terms of driving time, the helsinki metropolitan area is located, for example, from the perspectives of all the resorts in the vacation zone, but in terms of flying time the helsinki metropolitan area would ‘move’ into the weekend zone. referring to müller (2002b), this would imply that it would be possible to make numerically many trips from the greater helsinki area to the resorts in northern finland with a short length of stay during the weekends and hence, the characteristics of the vacation zone would be complemented with the features of the weekend zone (see table 1). as a result, this would mean an increase in the occupation rates of second homes as a whole. from the point of view of people living in the helsinki metropolitan area, this requires, of course, a very well functioning air traffic system with reasonable prices to the airports of kittilä, ivalo and kuusamo. lundmark and marjavaara (2005) also stress the role of air traffic, and accessibility in general, when increasing the occupation rates of second homes in the swedish mountain range. air travel has shrunk the world in such a way that a long weekend in an attractive destination can mean hours-long one-way flights (see mckercher & lew 2003). with respect to the relative distance model, the shape of the model would resemble a curve with the highest peak in the weekend zone. along with the largest urban areas in northern finland, the helsinki metropolitan area would locate within the weekend zone, that is, in the hinterland of the resorts. in this case, the model has no peaks at the end of the vacation zone. to conclude, the relative distance model would follow mckercher and lew’s (2003) distance decay curve after the weekend zone. generally, ‘the move’ of the helsinki metropolitan area into the weekend zone would be beneficial for the positive economic impacts of second home tourism at levi, ruka, saariselkä and ylläs, because of the intensive use of dwellings (see table 1). in addition, it is noteworthy that, according to bohlin’s (1982) study, a short distance between a secondary and primary residence has an influence on the geographical distribution of purchases: they are directed to the regions of origin. however, with regard to the relative move of the helsinki metropolitan area, this has nothing to do with a short absolute distance and hence, consumption behaviour would follow the traditional characteristics of the vacation zone. in other words, second home purchases would concentrate in the regions of the destination of second homes, because air passengers do not usually bring daily consumer commodities with them, for example. accessibility and its improvement are highlighted in terms of destination development and an expansion of the market area. accessibility and the fennia 188: 2 (2010) 175resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in … interaction between the regions of origin and the regions of destination can be discussed in the context of multiple origin points as well as the different forms of transport (hall 2005b, 2005c: 119– 121). in theory, it is beneficial for the destination if the regions of origin are located within the relative weekend zone. in this case, those multiple origins points complement each other and different potential transport technologies can be utilised in that zone. if the destination is dependent on one transport form only, then it is very vulnerable to changes in the cost or ‘other malfunction’ of that transport technology. along with accessibility the characteristics of people in the regions of origin have a great influence on the development of the regions of destination as a whole (see hall 2005a, 2005b, 2005c: 81–85, 2005d). for example, individuals with low-incomes travel shorter distances than those ones who have higher incomes, because generally travel costs are higher when the distance increases. to put it briefly, those who have money and time have a greater mobility, too. in other words, people in the regions of origin have a different space-time dimension due to their socio-economic characteristics. for example, flying as a transport form is not available for everyone. therefore, one possible interpretation is to understand the study of tourism intrinsically as a study of the wealthy (hall 2005d: 133). in the context of resorts, müller (2005) has noticed in the case of sweden’s sälen resort that assessed property values are extremely high, as is the socio-economic status and education level of second home owners in that area. very expensive real estate prices of second homes have also been marked in new alpine ski resorts in norway (flognfeldt 2002). referring to the socio-economic characteristics of second home owners, müller conceptualises resorts as an elite space. it is obvious that the potential number of people who can afford to acquire expensive and well-equipped second homes are more likely to reside in urban areas, as in the helsinki metropolitan area, than rural ones. without exception, traffic connections are diversified and well-functioning from urban areas. to sum up, hall (2005b: 98) crystallises that tourism areas’ rise and fall due to the changing patters and networks of accessibility between the regions of origin and destination and the travel time and expenditure budgets of those that live there. the relative approach in terms of the ratio between the number of second home owners and population proved that there are no peaks within the zones except the location municipalities in the day trip zone. in this case, the shape of the curve would underpin mckercher and lew’s (2003) distance decay curve from the standpoint of the regions of destination emphasising, along with accessibility, the importance of local land owning. if land is owned, for example, by the state, then local people do not usually own second homes in the destination. saariselkä is an example of this. it has been proved that renting is one of the main motives to acquire a second home from a resort environment (see jansson & müller 2003, 2004; keen & hall 2004; komppula et al. 2008). if second home owning is challenging for locals due to high land acquisition cost, then the positive economic impacts of renting at the local level are just modest. if renters reside outside of the location municipality of the resorts, then there appear leakages from the local economy. bearing in mind that leakages are an indicator of the enclave development process of resorts and therefore, they imply a weak integration into a wider socio-economic regional development and structure (see jenkins 1982; wall 1996). in consequence, the positive socio-economic effects of resorts do not spread to a wider geographical area at the local level (see kauppila 2004; lundmark 2005; hall et al. 2009; kauppila & rusanen 2009). in the planning context, the model stresses, first and foremost, the importance of the weekend zone, including the day trip zone, in terms of the development of second home tourism and therefore, provides a tool for marketing resorts as a second home tourism environment for potential owners. for the positive socio-economic impacts of the destination, the conclusion is that cities and towns within the relative weekend zone are the most important target areas to attract owners (see table 1). furthermore for owners, a large number of inhabitants in the weekend zone provides an opportunity to have many potential renters. in this respect, the presented model strengthens the outcome of the model created by müller (2002b) from the viewpoint of the regions of origin, that is the importance of the (relative) weekend distance with respect to the number of trips (also see hall 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d). in the case of finland, marketing actions should focus on cities and towns in northern finland, especially the sub-region of oulu, which is one of the fastest growing urban areas in finland, and some regions of origin with well-functioning air connections in southern fin176 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila land. in practice, the latter implies particularly the helsinki capital area as well as the urban areas of tampere and turku. in finland, capitals, enterprises, jobs and people are concentrated in the abovementioned areas, so there will reside many potential owners and renters in those areas, especially in the future. another way to apply the presented model in planning is to use it as an analytic tool for assessing the overall attractiveness of resorts and comparing that attractiveness between other resorts. generally, the further away the resort attracts second home owners, the more attractive that resort is considered among those owners. in other words, if the curve of the resort is ascending towards the vacation zone, then the destination is regarded as an attractive second home environment. of course, the regional structure has an influence on that curve but, generally speaking, the interpretation is relevant. the shape of the curve of the model is not obviously constant with time and therefore, the presented model can be renewed with up-to-date data year after year. in this respect, the model is useful in a planning process: in the beginning of the process it is a tool for analysing the present state of the resort and in the end of that process for assessing the development process of the resort with time in terms of second home tourism. it has to be borne in mind that the presented model is empirical-based and seems to suit the finnish context and its peripheral resorts with a high level of touristic attractions and services as well as good accessibility, including air traffic, from the helsinki metropolitan area. although the model is strongly empirically derived, the study provides an example for other resorts located in different geographical contexts of how to conduct a second home tourism analysis from the viewpoint of the regions of destination with respect to both absolute and relative approaches. for example, the study defines the extent and characteristics of distance zones (see fig. 1, table 1). theoretically, the study can be seen as an attempt to create a distance model for second home tourism concerning peripheral resorts. consequently, it would be interesting to test the presented approach, for example, in the swedish context, because the regional structure of sweden resembles finland: the remote location of winter-oriented resorts in the north and large population centres in the south. some other different testing environments for the model could be found outside of europe, for example in canada, like whistler, and the united state of america, like aspen. those ski resorts are located in the vicinity of a large city – whistlervancouver and aspen-denver – and therefore, second home owners are expected to create a peak within the weekend zone but how about the catchment area of the resorts in terms of the vacation zone. does the size of the country, among others, have an effect on the extent of the zone? it would also be interesting to compare the results of the study in the context of extensively used peripheral landscapes (see hall et al. 2009: 181), because it is obvious that second home tourism in the peripheral resort environment has a larger hinterland than extensively used peripheral landscapes. on the other hand, converted second homes are typical for extensively used peripheral landscapes. due to out-migration the property has no longer permanent residents and therefore, is often necessary to transform the permanent home into a second home (see müller 2002a, 2004). in this case, the owners of those second homes can be found all over the country, that is, the hinterland can be large. all in all, this would be worth studying. owing to the shortcomings of the data, the analysis was focused only on privately owned second homes. therefore, second homes owned by companies, heirs or jointly are excluded, as are foreign-owned ones. in other words, data dealing with the above-mentioned ownership forms are not available, meaning that in 2004 between 58– 67% of the second homes of the resorts under study ‘have no owner’ according to statistics finland. on this account, there is a need for further studies to find out the geographical distribution of jointly and company owned second homes and to compare those distance models with the results of the present study. this requires, however, some changes in the principle of summer cottage statistics by statistics finland in general because, for example, jointly owned buildings often consist of several dwellings (or apartments), and each of them has a owner of their own. thus, the basis for the compilation of statistics should widen from a single building to a single dwelling. references aho s & ilola h 2006. toinen koti maalla? kakkosasuminen ja maaseudun elinvoimaisuus. lapin yliopiston kauppatieteiden ja matkailun tiedekunfennia 188: 2 (2010) 177resorts, second home owners and distance: a case study in … nan julkaisuja b. tutkimusraportteja ja selvityksiä 6. baud-bovy m & lawson f 1998. tourism and recreation. handbook of planning and design. 2nd ed. the architectural press, oxford. bell m & ward g 2000. comparing temporary mobil-2000. ity with permanent migration. tourism geographies 2: 1, 87–107. bohlin m 1982. fritidsboendet i den regionala ekonomin – vart fritidshusägärnas pengar tar vägen. uppsala. coppock jt 1977a. second home in perspective. in coppock jt (ed). second homes: curse of blessing?, 1–15. pergamon, oxford. coppock jt (ed) 1977b. second homes: curse or blessing? pergamon, oxford. facts and figures on finnish ski resorts 2009. <www. ski.fi> 27.1.2009. finlandcd 2006. regional database. statistics finland, helsinki. finnish road administration 2009. distance service. <www.alk.tiehallinto.fi/www2/valimatkat/index. ht> 23.11.2009. flognfeldt t 2002. second-home ownership. a sustainable semi-migration. in hall cm & williams am (eds). tourism and migration. new relationships between production and consumption, 187–203. kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht. hall cm 2005a. time, space, tourism and social physics. tourism recreation research 30: 1, 93– 98. hall cm 2005b. space-time accessibility and the talc: the role of geographies and spatial interaction and mobility in contributing to an improved understanding of tourism. in butler rw (ed). tourism area life cycle, volume 2: conceptual and theoretical issues, 83–100. channel view publications, clevedon. hall cm 2005c. tourism: rethinking the social science of mobility. prentice-hall, harlow. hall cm 2005d. reconsidering the geography of tourism and contemporary mobility. geographical research 43: 2, 125–139. hall cm & müller dk (eds) 2004a. tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite landscape and common ground. channel view publications, clevedon. hall cm & müller dk 2004b. introduction: second homes, curse or blessing? revisited. in hall cm & müller dk (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite landscape and common ground, 3–14. channel view publications, clevedon. hall cm, müller dk & saarinen j 2009. nordic tourism. issues and cases. channel view publications, bristol. hall cm & williams am (eds) 2002. tourism and migration. new relationships between production and consumption. kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht. janelle dg 1969. spatial reorganization: a model and concept. annals of the association of american geographers 59: 2, 348–364. jansson b & müller dk 2003. fritidsboende i kvarken. kvarkenrådet, umeå. jansson b & müller dk 2004. second home plans among second home owners in northern europe’s periphery. in hall cm & müller dk (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite land-scape and common ground, 261–272. channel view publications, clevedon. jenkins cl 1982. the effect of scale in tourism projects in developing countries. annals of tourism research 9: 2, 229–249. kauppila p 2004. matkailukeskusten kehitysprosessi ja rooli aluekehityksessä paikallistasolla: esimerkkeinä levi, ruka, saariselkä ja ylläs. nordia geographical publications 33: 1, 1–260. kauppila p 2006. matkailukeskukset, vapaa-ajanrakennukset ja kehitysprosessi: tarkastelussa levi, ruka, saariselkä ja ylläs. naturpolis kuusamo, koulutusja kehittämispalvelut, tutkimuksia 1/2006, 69–109. kauppila p 2008. pohjois-suomen matkailukeskusten monet toiminnot: asukkaiden ja työllisten näkökulma. terra 120: 1, 22–29. kauppila p & rusanen j 2009. a grid cell viewpoint to resorts: case studies in northern finland. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 9: 1, 1–21. keen d & hall cm 2004. second homes in new zea-land. in hall cm & müller dk (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite landscape and common ground, 174–195. channel view publications, clevedon. komppula r, reijonen h & timonen t 2008. vaca-v tion-home owner’s willingness to lease through an intermediary – a case study in two finnish ski resorts. in keller p & bieger t (eds). real estate and destination development. succesful strategies and instruments. international association of scientific experts in tourism (aiest). international tourism research and concepts, 285–299. erich schmidt verlag, göttingen. lundgren j 1989. patterns. in wall g (ed). outdoor recreation in canada, 135–161. john wiley & sons, toronto. lundmark l 2005. economic restructuring into tourism in the swedish mountain range. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 5: 1, 23–45. lundmark l & marjavaara r 2005. second home localizations in the swedish mountain range. tourism 53: 1, 3–16. marjavaara r 2007a. the displacement myth: second home tourism in the stockholm archipelago. tourism geographies 9: 2, 296–317. marjavaara r 2007b. route to destruction? second home tourism in small island communities. island studies journal 2: 1, 27–46. marjavaara r & müller dk 2007. the development of second homes’ assessed property values in swe178 fennia 188: 2 (2010)pekka kauppila den 1991–2001. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 7: 3, 202–222. mckercher b, chan a & lam c 2008. the impact of distance on international tourist movements. journal of travel research 47: 2, 208–224. mckercher b & lew aa 2003. distance decay and the impact of effective tourism exclusion zones on international travel flows. journal of travel research 42: 2, 159–165. mercer dc 1970. the geography of leisure – a contemporary growth-point. geography 55: 3, 261– 273. müller dk 2002a. second home ownership and sustainable development in northern sweden. tourism and hospitality research 3: 4, 343–355. müller dk 2002b. german second home development in sweden. in hall cm & williams am (eds). tourism and migration. new relationships between production and consumption, 169–185. kluwer academic publishers, dordrecht. müller dk 2004. second homes in sweden: patterns and issues. in hall cm & müller dk (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite landscape and common ground, 244–258. channel view publications, clevedon. müller dk 2005. second home tourism in the swedish mountain range. in hall cm & boyd s (eds). nature-based tourism in peripheral areas. development or disaster?, 133–148. channel view publications, clevedon. müller dk 2006. the attractiveness of second home areas in sweden: a quantitative analysis. current issues in tourism 9: 4–5, 335–350. müller dk, hall cm & keen d 2004. second home tourism impact, planning and management. in hall cm & müller dk (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite landscape and common ground, 15–32. channel view publications, clevedon. nieminen m 2009. kesämökkibarometri 2009. <www.tem.fi/saaristo> 23.11.2009. overvåg k 2009. second homes and urban growth in the oslo area, norway. norwegian journal of geography 63: 3, 154–165. pearce dg 1991. tourist development. 2nd ed. long-longman, harlow. pitkänen k & kokki r 2005. mennäänkö mökille? näkökulmia pääkaupunkiseutulaisten vapaa-ajan asumiseen järvi-suomessa. joensuun yliopisto, savonlinnan koulutusja kehittämiskeskuksen julkaisuja 11. rämet j & kauppila p 2001. kuusamon kevättalvija kesämatkailijat ja heidän rahankäyttönsä vuonna 2000. naturpolis kuusamo, koulutusja kehittämispalvelut, tutkimuksia 1/2001, 1–101. saarinen j 2001. the transformation of a tourist destination. theory and case studies on the production of local geographies in tourism in finnish lap-land. nordia geographical publications 30: 1, 1–105. saarinen j 2003. tourist destinations and the production of representations in tourism. nordia geographical publications 32: 2, 1-9. saarinen j 2004. ’destinations in change’. the transformation process of tourist destinations. tourist studies 4: 2, 161–179. saarinen j & vaara m 2002. mökki kansallispuiston laidalla. loma-asukkaiden näkemyksiä pyhätunturin kansallispuiston käytöstä ja kehittämisestä. metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 845. sievänen t & pouta e 2002. kesämökki – portti luontoon. in saarinen j & järviluoma j (eds). luonto matkailukohteena: virkistystä ja elämyksiä luonnosta, 177–190. metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 866. statistics finland 2005. summer cottages in 2004. housing 2005, 7. statistics finland, helsinki. statistics finland 2006. summer cottage statistics, unpublished. statistics finland 2008a. georeferenced data, unpublished. statistics finland 2008b. tourism statistics in 2008. transport and tourism. statistics finland, helsinki. ullman el 1956. the role of transportation and the bases for interaction. in thomas wl jr. (ed). man’s role in changing the face of the earth, 862–880. the university of chicago press, chicago. vuoristo k-v 2002. regional and structural patterns of tourism in finland. fennia 180: 1–2, 251–259. wall g 1996. integrating integrated resorts. annals of tourism research 23: 3, 713–717. williams am & hall cm 2000. tourism and migration: new relationship between production and consumption. tourism geographies 2: 1, 5–27. extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semi-periphery of the post-neoliberal europe urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa59633 doi: 10.11143/fennia.59633 reflections: extreme geographies extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semiperiphery of the post-neoliberal europe james riding riding, james (2017). extreme geographies: a response from a dependent semi-periphery of the post-neoliberal europe. fennia 195: 1, pp. 106–112. issn 1798-5617. we live in a time of paranoid borderism, a time of intense paranoia of the other, and a time where the privileging of the nation state as the symbolic container of space, our territory, seems to have made a lurid return to the european continent. the consequences of this socio-spatial ordering and othering, the legacy of euclidian thinking, and cartesian models of knowing the world, can become an extreme geography: a form of cartographic cleansing that seriously needs to be addressed. in this short response to the fennia lecture given by professor henk van houtum on extreme geographies, i offer a report from a region that has become a dependent semi-periphery of the new largely neoliberal europe that emerged post1989: a new europe that is now entering a post-neoliberal era and is becoming increasingly neofascist. i draw from this region as a warning from history, and argue that the hopeful politics of the new left in the former yugoslavia provide an answer. the new left, as it has been termed, in the post-yugoslav space, articulates the need for a new radically democratic european project: a project that is no longer neoliberal, but equally a project that does not turn to a nostalgic nationalism, a neofascism, or indeed any other form of authoritarian capitalism. keywords: cartography, borders, territory, nationalism, neofascism, yugoslavia, bosnia-herzegovina james riding, relate centre of excellence, kanslerinrinne 1, university of tampere, tampere, finland fi-33014, e-mail: james.riding@uta.fi at the heart of our disintegrating eu there lies a guilty deceit: a highly political, top-down, opaque decision-making process is presented as ‘apolitical’, ‘technical’, ‘procedural’ and ‘neutral’. its purpose is to prevent europeans from exercising democratic control over their money, communities, working conditions and environment. [...] the more they asphyxiate democracy, the less legitimate their political authority becomes, the stronger the forces of economic recession, and the greater their need for further authoritarianism. [...] this is the unseen process by which europe’s crisis is turning our peoples inwards, against each other, amplifying pre-existing jingoism, xenophobia. the privatisation of anxiety, the fear of the ‘other’, the nationalisation of ambition, and the re-nationalisation of policy threaten a toxic disintegration of common interests from which europe can only suffer. [...] europe’s pitiful reaction to its banking and debt crises, to the refugee crisis, to the need for a coherent foreign, migration and anti-terrorism policy, are all examples of what happens when solidarity loses its meaning. – democracy in europe movement (2015) © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 107james riding introduction in this short response to the fennia lecture given by professor henk van houtum on extreme geographies, at the annual meeting of finnish geographers, in joensuu, finland, 2016, i offer a report from a region that has become a dependent semi-periphery of the new largely neoliberal europe that emerged post-1989: a new europe that is now entering a post-neoliberal era and is becoming increasingly neofascist (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). i draw from this region as a warning from history, and argue that the hopeful politics of the new left in the former yugoslavia provide an answer. the new left, as it has been termed, in the post-yugoslav space, articulates the need for a new radically democratic european project: a project that is no longer neoliberal, but equally a project that does not turn to a nostalgic nationalism, a neofascism, or indeed any other form of authoritarian capitalism. the paper presented by van houtum is timely. we live in a time of paranoid borderism, a time of intense paranoia of the other, and a time where the privileging of the nation state as the symbolic container of space, our territory, seems to have made a lurid return to the european continent (paasi 1999; brenner & elden 2009; elden 2009; painter 2010; murphy 2013; elden 2013). and as van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy write in this issue of fennia, it has resulted in a normalization of extreme politics in europe (see also bueno lacy & van houtum 2013, 2015; ferrer-gallardo & van houtum 2014). for despite globalization, despite the increasing movement of people across national borders, despite the supranational european union, and despite a concerted marketing of multiculturalism in the urban centers of europe, the desire to find comfort in the ‘we’ of the nation, the continuing allure of dwelling in a nostalgic territorial fatherland, and the pre-defined ‘purity’ and singularity of a national identity, paradoxically remain (nancy 2000; van houtum et al. 2005). the consequences of this sociospatial ordering and othering, the legacy of euclidian thinking, and cartesian models of knowing the world, can become, as is reported here, an extreme geography, an ‘apartheid cartography’ (crampton 1996; campbell 1999). a form of cartographic cleansing that, as van houtum, kramsch and zierhofer (2005) have previously stated, seriously needs to be addressed. i have argued in previous work that “going back to a regional geography can be a way of moving forward” (riding 2015, 2016; see also thrift 1983, 1994). regional geography considers the view from below, or the view of social groups marginalized in orthodox political history (agnew 2013). it is precisely through studying regions and writing at a regional scale – which unlike the national scale does not represent a privileging of institutions associated with the interests and outlooks of political elites (agnew 2013) – that an emancipatory struggle can be physically placed in the landscape and an overbearing, often overtly nationalistic cartographic worldview can be deconstructed on-the-ground. similarly, van houtum (2010) argues in his work that geographers need to represent the mobility and dynamics of geography and geopolitics, the moving lines, the moving spaces, the moving minds, rather than focusing on and mapping the fixity. so, rather than merely presenting the dots, arrows and lines in geography and cartography geographers need to think about the choreography of geopolitics (van houtum 2010). as such, van houtum sets geographers the challenge to re-present the world, together with video-artists, photographers, and other imaginators (riding 2017). the void, the semi-periphery, the balkans i looked up at many maps of a europe on slideshows in the concrete rooms of joensuu during the annual meeting of finnish geographers, yet all contained a void, a space that was missing; it was simply not represented in the regional studies of europe. when it was represented, and not cut off the bottom or the side of the map, it appeared as a different color, usually white, meaning empty, noninformative space, lacking any useful comparative data. but this space of the world is also intensively mapped (elden 2005), it is overly-mapped and cartographically constructed in certain places when viewed at a national scale (crampton 1996; campbell 1999), so why is it now avoided, missed, forgotten, or represented as a corridor, a semi-periphery, a difficult region to explain in the largescale multidisciplinary studies of europe? it is now, perhaps, in fact, a symbol of the increased ordering of time-space, and a paranoid desire to create more borders, a precursor of the neofascist ethno-politics 108 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies we are now witnessing on the european continent again, in amongst the death throes of neoliberalism. slobodan milošević may indeed be the most influential politician of our time. down there, always somewhere a little further to the southeast, the balkans are still seemingly viewed as a photographic negative of what was until very recently cast as a tolerant, multicultural, post-political, post-ideological europe. a ‘postmodern racism’ has existed for the past two decades or more, žižek argues, where the balkans are seen as the intolerant other, while the rest of europe has supposedly come to terms with otherness in its much vaunted – indeed marketed – language of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism (žižek 2000, 1–2). yet, perhaps it is now time to return to the balkans, the former yugoslavia, and the cartographically constructed land of bosnia-herzegovina, to remind europe of its own difficult recent history, and to where a newly reemerging nationalism in europe and a carto-politics leads. the war in bosnia, is after all, despite the mythic separating-out of europe, a part of the european story (rieff 1995; riding 2015). the region with which this response is concerned has been forgotten, its history unheeded. and the encircling ‘cosmopolitan’ europeans (nancy 2000), repeating a balkanism (carter 1977; todorova 1997; goldsworthy 1998; glenny 1999; žižek 2000; mazower 2002), have ignored the devastating consequences of the endless post-socialist ‘transition’ in bosnia-herzegovina – after ethnic conflict and genocide – which has meant general impoverishment, mass unemployment and living under the post-democratic governance of divisive and corrupt elites (arsenijević 2011). while, in the neoliberal new europe, the very concept ‘transition’ is unilaterally and dogmatically followed. ‘transition’ though, as horvat and štiks (2015) argue, is an ideological construct based on the narrative of integration of the former socialist european countries into the western core. for horvat and štiks (2015), this actually hides a monumental neo-colonial transformation of this region into a dependent semiperiphery. they continue, arguing that adjunct concepts, such as a ‘failed’ or a ‘weak’ state, conceal the fact that these are not anomalies, they are instead the main products of ‘transition’ (ibid.). and since the ‘new’ liberal capitalist system is beyond questioning, widespread corruption must be related to culture dependent behaviour in the ‘east’ – an orientalist tradition imposed upon this region, understood under the term ‘the balkans’ (see horvat & štiks 2015). a warning from history, after the end of history the war in bosnia was eventually brought to an end in december 1995, when the dayton agreement was signed (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998). ‘peace’ has lasted to this day, although the framework agreement created in dayton, ohio, which divided the country in roughly half along ethnic lines, has prevented bosnia-herzegovina from developing entirely beyond wartime divisions (toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013). preceded by an agreement between bosniaks and bosnian croats signed in washington in 1994, the country was separated into two political entities: the predominantly bosnian serb, republika srpska, and the mainly bosniak and bosnian croat, federation of bosnia and herzegovina, sometimes informally referred to as the bosniak-croat federation. locally, the country is further separated out, as the federation of bosnia and herzegovina has ten autonomous cantons with their own governments. each canton is known as majority bosnian croat, majority bosniak, or ‘mixed’ (nancy 2000). within the cantons are municipalities which further define the individuals living there. while republika srpska is lead more centrally from the de facto capital banja luka, there are still observable geographical divisions between the northern portion and southern portion of the state within a state. this cartographic representational idiosyncrasy, or more precisely ‘apartheid cartography’, enforces a nationalist overhaul of space upon citizens in bosnia-herzegovina (campbell 1999; crampton 1996). cartography has aided a post-socialist era of never-ending ‘transition’ politics, of brutal capitalism and diminished democracy, and the continuation of a nationalist governance that it was hoped would fade away (horvat & štiks 2015). resembling berlin after world war ii, sarajevo is a meeting point of the different lines that were drawn across bosnia-herzegovina and is partly in republika srpska and partly in the federation of bosnia and herzegovina. the de jure capital of republika srpska is sarajevo, the de facto capital of the federation of bosnia and herzegovina is sarajevo, and sarajevo is the capital of the country bosnia-herzegovina, where a weak central government also resides. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 109james riding it is no surprise therefore that mass protests erupted here in february 2014, deconstructing the divisions on the map, as sarajevo is a place that was for jean-luc nancy (2000), a mêlée, due to its long history of multiculturalism in a real and not prescribed sense. a historical regional focus as bridge between east and west and the old power blocs, sarajevo is a non-aligned space, a place where a profoundly anti-capitalist and radically democratic vision of society could form (harvey 2012; arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). entangled within their emancipatory struggle protesters saw a present yugoslavia, which was bit by bit disappearing. and they sought to retain what remains there were of that socialist state, and to reclaim a socialist space in a space of postsocialism. most of all they sought to reclaim the commons, the factories, the museums, everything that the post-socialist ‘transition’ had in their eyes diminished. it is now over a decade since the constitutional charter of the state union of serbia and montenegro was adopted, becoming the successor to the federal republic of yugoslavia, rendering yugoslavia former. yet a socialist yugoslavia of brotherhood and unity, made up of six republics, and two autonomous provinces – bosnia-herzegovina, croatia, macedonia, montenegro, serbia, and slovenia, and vojvodina and kosovo – was destroyed years before 2003, in the days and months leading to ethnic conflict (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998). there are though here on this rebel peninsula (harvey 2012; arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015), material and institutional remnants and lived personal experiences and memories of that bygone yugoslav socialist era (luthar & puznik 2010). the new left in the former yugoslavia organized autonomously, plenum are the most radical experiment in horizontal democracy that can be found across the balkans since the collapse of yugoslavia (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). plenum articulate socialism beyond the state and plenum are not aligned to a single political party. plenum are – in simply existing as they do outside of the traditional governmental and elite spirals and circles – post-nationalist spaces in a region that is heavily influenced by nationalist politics during the post-socialist ‘transition’ era. the political potential of space within a post-socialist country was taken up by those first protesters remembering yugoslavia in the present. in so doing bodies were made political and people were given the opportunity to discuss politics beyond the municipality, the canton, the entity; beyond yet within the lines the dayton agreement drew across the country, and separated citizens along. the following towns and cities now have their own plenum: sarajevo, tuzla, zenica, mostar, travnik, brčko, goražde, konjic, cazin, donji vakuf, fojnica, orašje and bugojno. there are core plenum principles, which translate as openness, transparency, and non-corruption. plenum opened a space, a possibility into which people can jump. almost everybody spoke at the plenum of citizens of sarajevo, as the space enabled a kind of collective therapy (arsenijević 2011). certain performances were demanded from those who attended: no one voice is greater than another and no individual voice is perceived as animal howl. it is, as such, a space for speech beyond prohibition, enabling a disjointed society to collectively mourn a traumatic past and its enduring traces. in the desert of postsocialism, at plenum, those present, imagine a forgotten future, a socialist future beyond the ethnonationalist divisions of the ‘transition’ era (arsenijević 2011; helms 2013; gilbert & mujanović 2015; gordy 2015; hromadžić 2015; jansen 2015; kraft 2015; kurtović 2015; majstorović et al. 2015; mujkić 2015; touquet 2015; murtagh 2016). as i have argued elsewhere, plenum are a eulogy for the mêlée, they are small eulogies for a yugoslavia, a bosnia, a sarajevo of the certain past, before ethnic cleansing (riding 2016; see nancy 2000). they are in a phenomenological sense the spirit of what jean-luc nancy (2000) calls, being singular plural. plenum claim existence is co-existence, they are part of an emancipatory struggle, and they are a vital beingwith, which the delineation of a formerly socialist space into nationalist segregation has denied for twenty years or more (crampton 1996; campbell 1999; toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013). documenting the morphology of regions and the fracturing of states, reveals here a nationalist overhaul of space, which manifests itself locally in the street, the city, the municipality, the canton, the entity, and indeed in the individual (see elden 2013; see also anderson 1983; campbell 1998; nancy 2000; brubaker 2002). 110 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies conclusion instead of division and fragmentation, the common language of balkanist literature, the formerly socialist yugoslav states have entered a new era of resistance after a recent rebirth of radical politics, as individuals forge a trajectory towards a democratic future (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; see bourdieu 1998). there is, as such, a region of the european continent, that part of the continent that has for so long been defined by its radical politics, which is rebelling against the core. embraced, subsumed and made dependently peripheral within the ‘new’ liberal global economy, there are now new reasons to engender a radical politics in this region for a post-cold war generation. beyond the capitalist anarchism associated with other socio-political movements of recent times, the plenum movement openly questions the new europe that emerged post-1989: a new europe that is now entering a post-neoliberal era and is becoming increasingly neofascist (arsenijević 2014; horvat & štiks 2015; riding 2016). in short, this socio-political movement strives for a revolution (smith 2010). with a rebranded fascism on the rise across europe, in what has become a suffocating postdemocratic age, the hopeful politics of the new left in the former yugoslavia provide an answer to the paradox van houtum outlines (see štiks 2015). in a time of globalization, where in which the european union is disintegrating, a paranoid desire to circumscribe the state and reinforce borders is growing, and is leading to less freedom within the states themselves. europe is building walls faster than ever before and reverting back to the nation state as a singular definition of an individual citizen, while europe’s pitiful reaction to its banking and debt crises, to the refugee crisis, to the need for a coherent foreign, migration and anti-terrorism policy, are all examples of what happens when solidarity loses its meaning (democracy in europe movement 2015). in response, the new radical politics in the old yugoslavia, emphasizes the need for a new radically democratic european project, a project that is no longer neoliberal, but equally a project that does not turn to a nostalgic nationalism, a neofascism, or indeed any other form of authoritarian capitalism. decades after the forgotten socialist geographer fred singleton (1985) spoke of a balkan federation of socialist states, as a response to yugoslavia’s fracturing, this region – which has exhausted the radical in many guises – once again provides a manifesto for a radically democratic future (štiks 2015). we must now, over twenty years after the collapse of yugoslavia, at the very least consider the unique position of the bastards of utopia living radical politics after socialism (rasza 2015). for the end of neoliberalism is nearing, perhaps the end of the european union as we know it, yet in its place an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist form of capitalism cannot be allowed to form. this region of europe, the place from where this response emerges out of, knows most of all and deeply understands where carto-politics, border-making, and an ethno-nationalism will lead. acknowledgements i would like to thank the chief editor of fennia, dr. kirsi pauliina kallio, for giving me the opportunity to respond to the first fennia lecture at the annual meeting of finnish geographers, in joensuu, finland, 2016, and professor henk van houtum for providing useful comments. references agnew, j.a. (2013) arguing with regions. regional studies 47(1) 6–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/003434 04.2012.676738 anderson, b. (1983) imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. verso, london. arsenijević, d. (2011) mobilising unbribable life. in mousley, a. (ed.) towards a new literary humanism, 166–181. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297647_13 arsenijević, d. (ed.) (2014) unbribable bosnia and herzegovina: the struggle for the commons. nomos, baden-baden. bourdieu, p. (1998) acts of resistance. polity, cambridge. bueno lacy, r. & van houtum, h. (2013) border studies and the risk of ossification. dialogues in human geography 3 122–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820613487972 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.676738 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2012.676738 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297647_13 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820613487972 fennia 195: 1 (2017) 111james riding bueno lacy, r. & van houtum, h. (2015) lies, damned lies and maps: eu’s cartopolitical invention of europe. journal of contemporary european studies 23 477–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2015.1056727 brenner, n. & elden, s. (2009) henri lefebvre on state, space and territory. international political sociology 3(4) 353–377. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00081.x brubaker, r. (2002) ethnicity without groups. european journal of sociology 43 163–189. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0003975602001066 campbell, d. (1998) national deconstruction: violence, identity, and justice in bosnia. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. campbell, d. (1999) apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in bosnia. political geography 18 395–435. https://doi.org/10.1016/s09626298(98)00110-3 carter, f.w. (ed.) (1977) an historical geography of the balkans. academic, london. crampton, j. (1996) bordering on bosnia. geojournal 39(4) 353–361. https://doi.org/10.1007/ bf02428498 democracy in europe movement (2015) a manifesto for democratizing europe. <https://diem25.org/ manifesto-short-version/> 18.11.2016. elden, s. (2005) missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world. transactions of the institute of british geographers 30(1) 8–19. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00148.x elden, s. (2009) terror and territory: the spatial extent of sovereignty. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. elden, s. (2013) the birth of territory. university of chicago press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.7208/ chicago/9780226041285.001.0001 ferrer-gallardo, x. & van houtum, h. (2014) the deadly eu border control. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 13(2) 295–304. gilbert, a. & mujanović, j. (2015) dayton at twenty: towards new politics in bosnia-herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 605–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1 130359 glenny, m. (1992) the fall of yugoslavia. penguin, london. glenny, m. (1999) the balkans, 1804–1999: nationalism, war and the great powers. granta, london. goldsworthy, v. (1998) inventing ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination. yale university press, london. gordy, e. (2015) dayton’s annex 4 constitution at 20: political stalemate, public dissatisfaction and the rebirth of self-organisation. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 611–622. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1134132 harvey, d. (2012) rebel cities. verso, london. helms, e. (2013) innocence and victimhood: gender, nation, and women’s activism in postwar bosniaherzegovina. university of wisconsin press, madison. horvat, s. & štiks, i. (eds.) (2015) welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after yugoslavia. verso, london. houtum, van h. (2010) human blacklisting: the global apartheid of the eu’s external border regime. environment and planning d: society and space 28(6) 957–976. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1909 houtum, van h., kramsch, o. & zierhofer, w. (eds.) (2005) b/ordering space. routledge, london. hromadžić, a. (2015) citizens of an empty nation: youth and state-making in postwar bosnia-herzegovina. university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. jansen, s. (2015) yearning in the meantime: ‘normal lives’ and the state in a sarajevo apartment complex. berghahn, oxford. jeffrey, a. (2013) the improvised state: sovereignty, performance and agency in dayton bosnia. wiley blackwell, london. kraft, m.g. (2015) insurrections in the balkans: from workers and students to new political subjectivities. in horvat, s. & štiks, i. (eds.) welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after yugoslavia, 216–217. verso, london. kurtović, l. (2015) ‘who sows hunger, reaps rage’: on protest, indignation and redistributive justice in post-dayton bosnia-herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15 (4) 639–659. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126095 little, a. & silber, l. (1996) the death of yugoslavia. penguin, london. luthar, b. & puznik, m. (2010) remembering utopia: the culture of everyday life in socialist yugoslavia. new academia publishing, washington dc. https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2015.1056727 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00081.x https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003975602001066 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003975602001066 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0962-6298(98)00110-3 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0962-6298(98)00110-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02428498 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02428498 https://diem25.org/manifesto-short-version/ https://diem25.org/manifesto-short-version/ https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00148.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00148.x https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226041285.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226041285.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1130359 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1130359 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1134132 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1134132 https://doi.org/10.1068/d1909 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126095 112 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies majstorović, d., vučkovac, z. & pepić, a. (2015) from dayton to brussels via tuzla: post-2014 economic restructuring as europeanization discourse/practice in bosnia and herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 661–682. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126093 mazower, m. (2002) the balkans: from the end of byzantium to the present day. phoenix, london. mujkić, a. (2015) in search of a democratic counter-power in bosnia-herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 623–638. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126094 murphy, a.b. (2013) territory’s continuing allure. annals of the association of american geographers 103(5) 1212–1226. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2012.696232 murtagh, c. (2016) civic mobilization in divided societies and the perils of political engagement: bosnia and herzegovina’s protest and plenum movement. nationalism and ethnic politics 22(2) 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2016.1169060 nancy, j-l. (2000) being singular plural. stanford university press, stanford, ca. paasi, a. (1999) boundaries as social practice and discourse: the finnish-russian border. regional studies 33 669–680. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343409950078701 painter, j. (2010) rethinking territory. antipode 42(5) 1090–1118. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00795.x rasza, m. (2015) bastards of utopia: living radical politics after socialism. indiana university press, bloomington. riding, j. (2015) landscape, memory, and the shifting regional geographies of northwest bosniaherzegovina. geohumanities 1(2) 378–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2015.1093917 riding, j. (2016) a new regional geography of a revolution: bosnia’s plenum movement. territory, politics, governance [online dec 12 2016] https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2016.1260491 riding, j. (2017) representing a divided place: the artistic-military practice of mladen miljanovic. cultural geographies 24(1) 171–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474016647372 rieff, d. (1995) slaughterhouse: bosnia and the failure of the west. vintage random house, london. singleton, f. (1985) a short history of the yugoslav peoples. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511608070 smith, n. (2010) the revolutionary imperative. antipode 41 50–65. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00716.x štiks, i. (2015) ‘new left’ in the post-yugoslav space: issues, sites, and forms. socialism and democracy 29(3) 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2015.1089094 thompson, m. (1992) a paper house: the ending of yugoslavia. vintage, london. thrift, n. (1983) on the determination of social action in space and time. environment and planning d: society and space 1 23–57. https://doi.org/10.1068/d010023 thrift, n. (1994) taking aim at the heart of the region. in gregory, d., martin, r. & smith, g. (eds.) human geography: society, space and social science, 200–231. macmillan, london. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-1-349-23638-1_8 toal, g. & dahlman, c. (2011) bosnia remade: ethnic cleansing and its reversal. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730360.001.0001 todorova, m. (1997) imagining the balkans. oxford university press, oxford. touquet, h. (2015) non-ethnic mobilisation in deeply divided societies: the case of the sarajevo protests. europe-asia studies 67(3) 388–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2015.1019430 žižek, s. (2000) the fragile absolute: or why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? verso, london. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126093 https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126094 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2012.696232 https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2016.1169060 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343409950078701 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00795.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00795.x https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2015.1093917 https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2016.1260491 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474016647372 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00716.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00716.x https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2015.1089094 https://doi.org/10.1068/d010023 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23638-1_8 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23638-1_8 https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730360.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2015.1019430 towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic transformation of statehood in finland, 1965–2005 sami moisio and laura leppänen moisio, sami & laura leppänen (2007). towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic transformation of statehood in finland, 1965–2005. fennia 185: 2, pp. 63–87. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. we live in an era of rapid transformation of the european states, which are taking new forms rather than disappearing or being hollowed out. this transformation inescapably touches upon the question of the interaction between a state and its territory. since there is a growing need to conceptualize this change in statehood from a historical perspective on various margins of europe, this paper aims at providing a context-sensitive theorization of the gradual transformation of the spatiality of the keynesian welfare state in finland. the arguments presented are authenticated by reference to documents on finnish public investment policy as evidence of the changes in state strategies from the 1960s onwards. the paper concludes that the change from “regimes of security political survival” to “regimes of survival in international economic competition” has inevitably influenced the relationship between the finnish state and its territory. it also suggests, however, that inertia caused by the embedded spatial culture of the welfare state has hindered the development of a truly international competition state characterized by economic efficiency rather than territorial and social equalization. we therefore conceptualize the contemporary condition of finnish statehood as spatially promiscuous, in that the finnish state is becoming an increasingly complex combination of the marketplace model (the glocal state) and one nation politics (territorial integrity). sami moisio, academy of finland/department of geography, fi-20014 university of turku, finland. e-mail: sami.moisio@utu.fi. laura leppänen, department of geography, university of turku, fi-20014 university of turku, finland. e-mail: laura.leppanen@utu.fi. ms received 30 april 2007. introduction “the other side of globalization has again spoken: a finnish enterprise has been forced to discover that its competitiveness does not meet up to international standards. our national election campaign cannot ignore the debate on competitiveness … we know the disease, we know the medication for it. why is the patient [the state] refusing to take this medication?” – antti herlin, chairman of the confederation of finnish industries, in the leading finnish newspaper after the sudden announcement by the nokia subcontractor perlos that an industrial plant in joensuu was to be closed down (22.1.2007) the “molecular processes of capital flow”, capital moving left, right and centre, and everywhere, build new geographical spaces and concentrations within states (harvey 2003). globally, there has been a notable rise of regional and within-country differentiation over the past thirty years (see agnew 2005). in addition to the increasing inequality within states, neil brenner (2004b) goes on to propose that the nationally scaled configurations of politico-economic organization upon which industrial growth and the keynesian welfare states were grounded until the late 1970s have now been significantly rearticulated and re-organized in western europe and beyond. this suggests that there has been a fundamental shift from the cohesion policies of the welfare state to the competition and growth policies of the re-worked state. in such a conceptualization, the national territorial states, being both facilitators and mediators of 64 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen capitalist globalization, have been rescaled and reterritorialized as part of global restructuring and increasing economic competition between places. the discourse of international competitiveness and competition, an integral part of the contemporary political condition, has clearly necessitated the formation of specific state configurations, and some of these have been carefully examined from a spatial perspective. most empirical studies touching upon the rise of competition states, the urbanization of neoliberalism, the re-scaling of statehood, or changing city/state relations, for example, have nevertheless focused on the core areas of europe, so that its geographical margins have remained relatively untouched areas of research. as the change in statehood inescapably plays out in a historically constituted social setting based on specific modes of conceiving space, the transformation of the “nordic welfare state” provides a useful context for studying the ways in which the processes and strategies of re-scaling take shape at different speeds, include place-specific strategies, surface in different spatial forms and evoke different responses in different places. we should thus view the state as being constantly transformed and reconstituted through institutional practices that are necessarily place-particular (cf. lynn 1999: 825). state intervention has traditionally been crucial in forming the geographical basis for social equality in the nordic welfare states. it was in these environments that significant state regulation was combined with capitalist imperatives during the cold war epoch and created specific politico-economic practices. during the past twenty years, however, the finnish state, as one representative of the nordic model, has been in the process of undergoing a steady and somewhat hidden transformation instigated by diverse transnational actors such as the eu, the g8 group, the world bank, the international monetary fund, the world economic forum, the wto, the oecd and representatives of the transnational business elite. new forms of economic governance which give markets priority over the state are thus under construction in finland. a number of scholars have argued that both the practices of the state and the frameworks through which its role is understood have changed considerably over the past twenty years (e.g. heiskala 2006; patomäki 2007). the outcomes of these changes surface relatively slowly, however, and are therefore still relatively unclear. in any case, it is notable that within-country differentiation has significantly increased in finland over the past thirty years and that the pace of this differentiation has accelerated significantly during the past fifteen years (table 1). even though the finnish state has been under considerable transnational pressure, and even though differentiation has increased, the global practices of state restructuring have not substantially replaced the politico-economic configurations of the welfare state which originated from the late 1960s. in other words, the change in statehood has been greatly encumbered by historically constructed, persistent state infrastructures, political cultures and institutional practices. this suggests that while some social systems typical of the 1970s and 1980s have now been significantly destabilized in finland, they have not simply been superseded by new ones. as meric s. gertler (2003: 135) aptly puts it, “current decisions are not determined by past ones, but they are conditioned by them”. this is also the case with the restructuring of the finnish state, in which inherited formations have remained important. in other words, the spatiality of the welfare state is embodied in material objects such as the physical infrastructure and in the habits of the people, not to mention the social institutions which structure and shape the attitudes, expectations and practices of both individuals and their political representatives. the social dimension of this path dependence was highly visible in the 2007 national parliamentary election campaign, for example, where the globalization rhetoric of change was strangely associated with the political articulation of one nation and welfare spatiality, even among those who had been most wholeheartedly involved in instigating the notable re-working of the state. this leads us to believe that the process of state transformation is not easily traceable to the political argumentation or campaigning of the political parties, where the notions of an indivisible nation, social equality and equal treatment of the whole territory are still of high value as political arguments among actors who seek to persuade the people to support their politics. the transformation of the state must thus be found by examining other sources. the familiar political rhetoric of one nation and one territory typical of national political campaigning indicates in the finnish context that transnational time has encountered a national space of inertia, the historically embedded spatial culture. fennia 185: 2 (2007) 65towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … table 1. finnish regional dynamics, 1975–2005. gross value added is presented at basic prices in million euros (current prices). the economic dependency ratio represents the ratio of the economically dependent part of the population to the productive part. the table reveals a significant differentiation between the richest and poorest regions of the country over the past thirty years. source: statistics finland 2007. region transactions 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 uusimaa gross value added, basic prices 4316 7622 14,468 23,504 26,188 41,080 48,541 gdp per capita 4778 8255 15,064 23,527 24,460 36,012 40,943 population 997,755 1,033,030 1,090,599 1,147,173 1,224,206 1,304,595 1,359,150 economic dependency ratio 0.8 0.9 0.7 0.6 1.1 0.8 0.8 employment 540,397 551,441 651,725 695,815 584,592 713,075 737,941 southwest finland gross value added, basic prices 1482 2436 4387 6631 7202 9535 11,424 gdp per capita 3974 6564 11,740 17,608 18,626 24,097 28,474 population 402,199 406,360 415,899 425,282 435,119 447,103 455,584 economic dependency ratio 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.4 1.3 1.2 employment 204,025 199,423 206,244 211,061 182,975 197,813 205,925 tampere region gross value added, basic prices 1388 2460 4016 6090 6724 9247 11,835 gdp per capita 3742 6706 10,888 16,418 17,607 23,574 29,135 population 407,303 409,321 417,635 425,808 436,162 448,997 467,313 economic dependency ratio 1.0 1.0 1.1 1.1 1.6 1.4 1.2 employment 206,052 201,674 200,804 200,529 169,938 190,927 209,909 northern ostrobothnia gross value added, basic prices 999 1711 2834 4673 5185 7025 8897 gdp per capita 3585 6024 9648 15,668 16,621 22,055 27,103 population 306,943 317,646 332,853 342,948 356,647 365,358 378,006 economic dependency ratio 1.2 1.2 1.3 1.2 1.8 1.5 1.4 employment 137,326 142,522 144,744 152,907 125,456 148,384 158,865 north karelia gross value added, basic prices 504 933 1502 2133 2141 2789 3210 gdp per capita 3166 5990 9755 14,153 14,045 18,954 22,399 population 177,089 176,650 177,567 176,836 177,271 171,609 168,322 economic dependency ratio 1.3 1.2 1.2 1.3 1.9 1.7 1.5 employment 78,090 79,667 80,740 75,640 61,112 63,991 66 ,523 kainuu gross value added, basic prices 292 522 804 1176 1275 1300 1466 gdp per capita 3367 6030 9417 14,314 15,636 16,865 20,156 population 97,957 99,247 99,288 96,957 95,201 89,777 85,303 economic dependency ratio 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.2 1.8 1.6 1.5 employment 46,855 47,526 47,570 44,812 34,137 34,138 34,134 northern savo gross value added, basic prices 726 1372 2222 3404 3525 4279 5087 gdp per capita 3159 6066 9844 15,304 15,640 19,514 23,697 population 252,668 253,913 257,894 258,633 260,085 253,759 250,064 economic dependency ratio 1.3 1.2 1.2 1.3 1.8 1.7 1.5 employment 107,885 114,523 114,952 113,935 91 ,430 96,003 101,247 lapland gross value added, basic prices 595 1143 1822 2700 3079 3611 3846 gdp per capita 3427 6709 10,544 15,876 17,830 21 ,890 24,266 population 195,757 194,890 200,943 200,674 201,411 191,768 185,800 economic dependency ratio 1.2 1.1 1.2 1.2 1.8 1.7 1.5 employment 87,312 93,157 91,179 91,993 70,831 71,854 75,205 66 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen in order to understand this embeddedness, the construction of the finnish welfare state must be placed in a historical perspective. we claim that this process of construction was inherently spatial in nature and closely connected with the notions of strategy, security, a coherent nation and societal order. it does not come as a revelation that the reworking of the finnish state touches especially upon state/space interaction and that the politics of one nation are inextricably entangled with that interaction. recent developments of the kind usually designated as globalization have been particularly challenging for this geographically remote, export-oriented, sparsely populated and culturally relatively isolated state with no major natural resources such as oil or gas and with internal markets that were opened to international competition less than two decades ago. the challenge posed by global restructuring grows even wider when we consider the fact that there are no prominent metropolitan regions within finland, let alone any deeply rooted metropolitan cultural tradition or metropolitan governance with strong internationalizing tendencies. in short, the finnish state faces the transnational pressure of “competitiveness” in a truly peculiar manner. our aim in this paper is to engage with the aforementioned tension by elucidating the transformation of state/space interactions from the mid1960s up to the present time. more precisely, we focus on the interaction between the state apparatus and state space over the past decades as this is articulated in various sources. we focus especially on the annual national budgets, which are inextricably connected with, and indeed constitutive of, the territorial processes of the state. we argue that the state strategies which unfold in the national budgets blur the distinction between domestic and international politics and are therefore an important focus of attention for politico-economic research. we pose two questions which need to be answered: 1. what are the key dimensions of the changing state strategies from the mid-1960s up to the present time? 2. to what extent do any changes in the finnish state strategies reflect changing state/space relations more generally? the general idea behind these questions is that state governance can itself be conceived of as a problem-solving activity, a form of crisis management that is closely connected with territorial practices. when using the concept of state strategy we are referring to the attempts by the state to mould the geographies of economic development, material and immaterial investments and political struggle into a particular “spatial fix” and are therefore seeking to highlight the plasticity of state territoriality. for this formulation we rely on neil brenner, who argues that specific state strategies “always emerge as attempts to impose particular forms of socio-economic intervention” and that these strategies lead to spatially selective hegemonic projects. he also goes on to suggest that these spatial strategies are not only articulated in “official” regional policies, but rather the state’s spatial strategies which attempt to influence the geography of social and economic relations are articulated through a number of policy instruments such as housing policies, general social policies, urban policies, infrastructure investments and economic development initiatives (brenner 2004b: 91, 93). we treat state annual budgets as political texts which not only disclose the changing spatial strategies of the state but also tell us much about the changing notion of statehood. we look on the changing state strategies found in the research material as providing answers to the questions which are understood as central governmental problems at a given time. in the empirical part of this paper we study in particular whether the strategies of the state are mainly inward-looking (based on a national scale) or outward-looking (beyond the national scale). secondly, we seek to study whether these strategies are based on an attempt to create territorial cohesion or more on policies which lead towards spatial differentiation and specialization. in short, we seek to investigate the current politico-economic processes which potentially challenge the historically constructed spatial configurations of the finnish state. our paper proceeds through four sections. this introduction is followed by a section which reviews the recent literature touching upon the transformation of statehood under the influence of globalization. several concepts are introduced through which we are able to approach the changing interaction between the finnish state and territory. we especially draw on neil brenner’s insightful studies on the changing spatiality of states in the contemporary environment of globalization. in section three we illustrate our theoretical elaboration by taking the public investments records and the argumentation behind the official state budgets fennia 185: 2 (2007) 67towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … from the mid-1960s onwards as our primary sources. the reasons for selecting such material are twofold. firstly, we sought to find a longitudinal yet qualitative set of research data through which it would be possible to trace the historical change in state practices. our assumption was that it is especially in the practices of state governance that various phenomena such as globalization are put into practice. we therefore claim that globalization is by and large “internalized” in state practices: it is shaped by and through local conditions and domestic political objectives (cerny et al. 2005). secondly, state budgets were selected because they presumably contain explicit and widely shared politico-economic articulations of the state strategies prevailing at a given time. we thus believe that the material selected here felicitously discloses the historical changes in finnish statehood from the 1960s onwards. we further assume that the material nicely uncovers the changing rationales – certain meanings which are normalized and accepted as truths – behind the historical evolution of state/territory interaction. the concluding section discusses the regime of accumulation currently under construction and the somewhat unclear role of territory within it. finally, we introduce some research themes which merit scholarly attention as the finnish state adjusts to the intensifying effects of capitalist globalization. changing state spaces the influence of the state on the trajectory of human lives is perhaps more comprehensive and sustained than that of any other organizational construct. the key constituents of the state – population, governmental institutions and territory – are not only material phenomena but exist through practices. this suggests that even though the territorial shape of the state remains seemingly unchanging, the link between a state and its territory is not a static phenomenon. from a historical viewpoint, states are not fixed in a rigid spatiality, since the interaction between a state and its territory is under constant change. even though the consolidation of power on the scale of the state, with its tendency towards territorial integrity, has probably been the most important development within the modern era, the history of the state has not ended. the weberian definition of the state emphasizes the coercive dimension of power. max weber suggested that the state is a “human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory” (weber 1919/1994: 310–311). in such a view, the link between territory and the state apparatus seems unproblematic: there are no modern states without territory and state institutions. however, even though the modern state system developed hand in hand with the emerging capitalist world economy, and even though the notion of sovereignty based on the legitimate use of violence within a given territory seems to characterize the very basis of all states, it is difficult to give a universal definition of the state. states are manifestations of place-specific cultural, economic, political, social and military processes, compartments of space which vary in time and space in terms of functions, forms and essence. also, it is impossible to find any universal definition of the ethic of the state; it should rather be regarded as the bearer and creator of its own ethic (schmitt 1999: 196). we therefore treat the state in this paper as constantly “becoming” something, a conceptualization which refers to the contingency and placespecificity of regional practices (pred 1986). the state as an equalizing entity: the spatiality of the keynesian welfare state among the most innovative contributions to the multidisciplinary debate on state transformation that has evolved in recent years among geographers, sociologists and political scientists are the very useful review of the existing literature on the state by bob jessop (1990), philip cerny’s (1990) structuralist explication of the changing forms of the state, jamie peck’s (2001) analysis of the restructuring of the welfare state, and jessop’s (2002) evaluation of the current re-working of the capitalist state. one of the key ideas in this debate is that a significant sociospatial restructuring of the state has taken place from the late 1970s onwards. this transformation is usually conceptualized as a change from fordist-keynesian welfare states to competition states characterized by a neoliberal economic ideology. neil brenner (2004b: 30), in his useful research agenda for approaching the changing spatiality of the state in the context of global politico-economic restructuring, maintains that capitalism is currently experiencing the transcendence of the nationalized sociospatial arrangements of the welfare state. he therefore points to a need to study the 68 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen production of new sociospatial configurations that cannot be cast on the basis of purely nationally scaled models. the contention is that the geographies of state space are being transformed on various scales under the influence of contemporary capitalist development. behind this form of argumentation lies the assumption that all sociospatial configurations are temporary in a capitalist economy which seeks to expand and which has notable crisis tendencies. the processes of capitalist expansion therefore include a continual restructuring in which social relations and physical infrastructures are incessantly being created, destroyed and reconstructed, thus continuously forming and re-forming geographical landscapes (harvey 1982). the keynesian welfare state was one of the historical landscapes of capitalist development, possessing infrastructures for industrial production, transport and communications. these landscapes developed from the 1930s onwards, aiming at an equal distribution of inhabitants, industry and infrastructure on a national scale (brenner 2003: 198). jessop (2002: 55–65) argues that it was the keynesian national welfare state which ensured the particular phase of capitalist production known as fordism. in the process of building the keynesian welfare state, national states therefore promoted economic development by enhancing the distribution of population, industry and infrastructural investments evenly across the national territory (brenner 2004a: 479). the reason why the state was called keynesian is that it not only aimed at securing full employment in a relatively closed national economy but also tried to do so through demand-side management. in this capacity, the keynesian welfare state deployed a variety of spatial policies designed to influence the spatial division of capital investments in order to govern and manage the process of uneven development within its territory. as such, states operated as major forms of territorialization for capital (brenner 1998a: 465), so that it was very common to channel large public infrastructural investments into the less-developed regions. in finland, for example, this development was based on an emerging ideology that major income transfers would accelerate economic growth (see kuusi 1961). the keynesian states introduced a range of spatial policies with the aim of reducing national regional inequalities and promoting industrial growth and economic renewal with various forms of financial aid, location incentives and transfer payments (brenner 2004a: 460). in many cases the national state adopted the role of an infrastructural constructor by participating substantially in the building of transportation networks, educational structures, housing facilities and utilities supplies, for example (brenner 1998a: 474). the national scale was the principal one in the keynesian state through which the political and economic processes generated and regulated by the government took shape, and this gradually became the principal scale of state operations in finland from the late 1950s onwards, aided by the new state planning authorities, which started to treat the state space as a single entity. in general, industrial decentralization, urban deconcentration and spatial equalization were nationally oriented projects throughout the fordist–keynesian period (brenner 2004a: 460–479). industrialization of the urban centres was seen to create economic growth and well-being across the national state by reducing uneven geographical development (brenner 1998b: 17–18). besides forms of direct state intervention, it was common for welfare states to operate with indirect forms of territorial intervention. these were firstly the reproduction of labour power operating through redistributive social welfare policies, secondly industrial relocation through subsidies and tax concessions, and thirdly the promotion of public expenditure in policy areas such as education, transportation and planning. these actions were justified with arguments such as balanced national development and spatial equalization (brenner 1998b: 15, 2004a: 460–462). the neoliberal competition state and the re-scaling of state spaces the intensive debate on the future of the state has perhaps been one of the major constituents of the discourse of globalization: whether the state is in retreat, being “hollowed out”, or merely been reshaped in order to maintain its power and authority better (keating 2001: 372). what seems central to this debate is that the capacities of the state are being reorganized functionally and territorially on supranational, national and regional levels. as jamie peck (2001: 447) reminds us, it is not analytically fruitful to ask whether the national state has somehow become less powerful in the global neoliberal era. it is more relevant to ask how it has become powerful in a different way. in other words, states continue to act as central players fennia 185: 2 (2007) 69towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … within the era of globalization even though their form and essence are changing. it is therefore crucial to understand the suggestion made by martin jones and rhys jones (2004: 410–411) that we should focus on the ways in which states continue to act, albeit in a modified manner, during an epoch in which their ideological power is being qualitatively re-engineered. there has clearly been a partial loss of sovereignty on the part of national states as decisionmaking power has been transferred upwards to supranational bodies overlapping with regional levels of territorial organization (brenner 1998b: 3; heeg & oßenbrügge 2002: 81). this reorganization of political and social life does not mean, however, that the notion of territory has become meaningless, in spite of the fact that control over networks – of finance, information, raw material flows and cyberspace – is perhaps becoming increasingly important at the expense of physical territorial space (see biersteker 2002: 165). even if globalization becomes the focus of attention at the expense of the state, the question of territory and reterritorialization will remain of paramount importance, as it will become crucial to investigate how the logic of territoriality is being both played out and challenged in the age of globalization (cf. elden 2005: 9). the ir scholars charles w. kegley and gregory a. raymond (2002: 157), for example, suggest that globalization produces a complex network of exchanges which are not solely organized according to any territorial principles typical of modern states. as such, their claim represents the literature which sees globalization as severely undermining territory, a view which is directly connected with the modern state. we are nevertheless inclined to conceptualize globalization as an inherently spatial phenomenon which neither makes space meaningless nor destroys all the territorial processes of the modern state. hobson and ramesh (2002: 8–9) suggest succinctly that states are neither hollowed out by globalization (as passive victims) nor autonomous agents which shape it. instead states and globalization are mutually reflexive and co-constitutive of each other. they also come up with the idea that states are “spatially promiscuous”, in that while they cannot physically move across territory they have a specific ability to dip into the global realm in order to adapt or mitigate the perceived domestic, regional or global political problems. partly following this logic, we regard globalization not as a new reality or an actor which forces states and people into new roles, i.e. a replacement for states, but rather as a question of their destabilization and reorientation (agnew 2007). we therefore treat globalization as a powerful discourse that articulates a specific type of relationship between national and international politics and between national and international economics. in such a view, the globalization imperative has been nationally constituted out of particular political ambitions and social practices (gibson-graham 2003: 104). the keynesian welfare state faced increasing pressure from the 1970s onwards, a crisis that was emerging in the well-developed capitalist economies alongside the crisis affecting fordism and the internationalization of economic relations (cf. brenner et al. 2003: 4). the extensive state intervention of the keynesian period came to be challenged, and it was now the state which was seen as a principal factor in the initiation of the massive malaise afflicting the neoliberal economies: economic stagnation, unemployment and inflation. the need for a radical reduction in public expenditure and the transition from the keynesian welfare state towards more competitive markets are said to have emerged as means of resolving the economic crisis (cf. brenner 2000: 327). brenner (2004a: 468) thus suggests that the crisis of the fordist paradigm in the 1980s began to lead both to a new phase of change in industrial structure and to a spatial restructuring of the national state. this change was also coupled with the significant development of information technologies. philip cerny (1990: 205–231) invented the concept of the competition state to illustrate how the forms of state economic policies were changing in an attempt to respond to and achieve better control over the increasing international interpenetration. he went on to claim that the promotion of international competitiveness had been adopted as the key objective of national state intervention so that it had even come to challenge “national security” as the primary concern of state governments. as tore fougner (2006: 165) suggests, international competitiveness has been constituted both as a central objective in relation to which most state policies should be considered and as a central means of resolving most of the problems that confront the state. it must be pointed out, however, that international competitiveness, understood here as a central governmental problem, has lead to different solutions in different places over the past three decades. 70 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen even though there is no single universal model for a competition state, it seems common within this development that state governments have not only started to act more and more often as market players, shaping their policies to maximize the returns from market forces in an international environment, but they have also started to create policies which aim at improving the climate for both national and multinational business (cerny 1990: 230). the international competitiveness of the state was mainly understood in the keynesian era as the capacity of “national firms” (often industries owned by the state) to compete with foreign companies in an international environment with the help of state governance. in the era of the competition state it is the states which are competing against each other to attract international enterprises by attempting through various policies to create attractive “investment landscapes” for international capital. international competitiveness has therefore become a governmental problem, in the form of “the capacity of a state to compete with other states for shares of so-called footloose investment capital” (fougner 2006: 175). in such a development states can easily adopt a somewhat naturalized attitude towards markets. since the crisis of keynesian accumulation regimes based on state regulation and state planning that took place in western europe in the 1970s, the global market system has become increasingly neoliberalized (brenner & theodore 2002: 342). john agnew (2005) conceptualizes this development as a spread of the american marketplace society: the spread of market practices and values instigated by transnational forces which aim to bring places, including states, into the markets. it is now commonplace to connect the change in state territoriality with the expansion of this neoliberal economic ideology, arguably one of the key constituents of contemporary capitalist globalization. david harvey (2005: 65) gives a very solid definition of the neoliberal state: sectors formerly run or regulated by the state must be turned over to the private sphere and be deregulated (freed from any state interference). competition – between individuals, between firms, between territorial entities (cities, regions, nations, regional groupings) – is held to be a primary virtue. the ground-rules for market competition must be properly observed, of course. in situations where such rules are not clearly laid out or where property rights are hard to define, the state must use its power to impose or invent market systems. privatization and deregulation combined with competition, it is claimed, eliminate bureaucratic red tape, increase efficiency and productivity, improve quality, and reduce costs, both directly to the consumer through cheaper commodities and services and indirectly through reduction of the tax burden. competition state policies often follow the neoliberal political imagination, which promotes free markets (liberalization), opposes state intervention or direct control by the state (deregulation), aims to sell off the state-controlled parts of the public sector (privatization), requires the public sector to operate on a commercial basis, stimulates the pursuit of market forces (internationalization) and supports high-income earners by creating opportunities for entrepreneurial activity (individualization) (brenner & theodore 2002; jones et al. 2004: 68). the primary function of the neoliberal competition state is thus to act as an enabler and facilitator. in other words, an entrepreneurial-like policy is adopted in state governance. the idea is now to enhance the spontaneous development of regions with new means of financing (cf. hudson et al. 1997: 371; heeg & oßenbrügge 2002: 83). in a world where competitive edge is increasingly valued, national states allocate “state-financed capital” to enhance their potential instead of acting strictly to guarantee the services of the welfare state through high state expenditure. in such a context, local governments, with the help of public-private partnerships, seek to attract entrepreneurs to their regions through investments in public facilities, infrastructure and services, thus influencing the operational preconditions for companies (eberts 1990: 15; hudson et al. 1997: 367– 369). it is important to notice that the neoliberalising state is persistently seeking out forms of internal reorganization, both spatial and institutional, that might improve its position in the economic competition with other states in the global market. the keynesian welfare state was less concerned with international competitiveness and the creation of an attractive investment landscape for footloose capital, as it assumed a relatively closed national economy, whereas the schumpeterian understanding of competition typical of neoliberal competition states argues that international competitiveness depends on developing the individual and collective capacities which extend the narrow national economy. in other words, these capacities are seen as crucial in the international competition between nations, regions and cities. it is therefore typical of competition states that public resources fennia 185: 2 (2007) 71towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … are increasingly allocated to the promotion of (technological) innovations that are conceived of as increasing the pace of economic growth (cf. jessop 2002: 121–122). suffice it to point out that capitalist globalization, the neoliberalization of states outlined above and the spatial transformation of states are closely intertwined. this is precisely the reason why the neoliberal economic ideology has arguably led to a re-scaling of the european states (see brenner 1999; brenner & theodore 2002). in other words, the state space is now being re-differentiated and re-scaled to correspond to the imprint of the location preferences of international footloose capital within each national territory. the importance of sub-state regions has increased significantly in the policies of competition states, as the current discourses of competitiveness seem to emphasize the importance of regions as “players” in this global competition (cf. agnew 2000: 103). in western europe it is especially the large-scale metropolitan regions that are nowadays viewed as embodying the most important institutional and political arenas in which the re-scaling of statehood is being forged and new economic growth policies initiated (brenner 2004b: 50–60). that is to say, the transformation of the state has been about the reorientation of state institutions and policies towards subnational regions. in other words, new urban competition policies have been launched all over europe in order to incorporate new competitive spaces (large city regions) into the conceived spaces of competition (the competition between the us, europe and asia). in this process the territorial economy of the state is being challenged by a city-centred economy driven by the main urban conglomerates. thus, if the spatiality of the keynesian welfare state was characterized by a somewhat even territorialization of capital, the rescaled state institutions (metropolitan governance etc.) currently represent what may be called a re-territorialization of capital. in the processes of re-scaling, states are thus acting as important agents for regionalizing economic development capacity to cities, city-regions and industrial regions and in marketing these areas and locations globally (brenner 1998a: 465, 2006: 263). in europe, the re-scaling of the state is therefore closely associated with an intensifying interspatial competition within which regions are forced to compete to attract foreign direct investments, eu funds and state subsidies. changing state strategies, 1965–2005 the interaction between the state and territory is in the process of constant transition. governments use different measures to affect the relationship between the state and its territory at different times, and the institutional structures of the state, such as its legislation, are assuming crucial importance in the process of expanding the state power within its confines. state may use public infrastructural investments such as the construction of roads, railways, airports, seaports and telecommunications systems to intensify state/territory relations. these physical and social infrastructures can thus be seen as capital goods for which users do not pay a market price (cf. rietveld 1989: 256). as such, public investments in social infrastructure such as education belong to these measures through which the state seeks to stretch itself throughout its territory. it is self-evident today that states should provide the basic infrastructure without which capitalist exchange could not operate (cf. dicken 2003: 131). from a spatial point of view, we may consider public investments from two perspectives. it has been common to examine the impacts of public investments on economic growth within a particular state. in such a view, the public infrastructure can be understood as a factor influencing the location of private investments. the provision of a basic infrastructure in a certain region can thus be argued to lead to an increase in the productivity of private production factors (rietveld 1989: 255– 272). it has been common in economic geography to study the role and impacts of public investments in affecting regional divergence (costa-i-font & rodriguez-oreggia 2005: 310). in such a view, the domestic infrastructure is a factor explaining industrial relocation (gramlich 1994: 349). public infrastructure may have a role in attracting industries from other regions in a context where there are negative effects of industrial concentration in the place of departure (costa-i-font & rodriguezoreggia 2005: 310), while haughwouth (1999), for his part, has studied the impact of state infrastructure growth on the interstate distribution of economic activity. we regard state investments in this paper as instruments which tell us something crucial about the changing interaction between a state and its territory. we argue that public investments serve well to characterize changes in the spatial strategies of the state as these are employed in different 72 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen historical contexts. in other words, public investments are practices which always reflect their time. in the ensuing pages the general justification sections of the state budgets of finland from 1965 to 2005 will be used to disclose the changing strategies of the state apparatus as it has sought to manage and steer politico-economic practices. we have chosen the year 1965 as the initial point given the fact that finnish regional policy legislation, which aimed at launching a massive state intervention throughout the territory, dates back to 1966. as indicated in fig. 1, investments (including both public and private investments) have fluctuated significantly in the history of finland, and these fluctuations reflect the changing state strategies that we go on to introduce in the following pages. roughly speaking, three investment eras can be distinguished. the first was before the second world war, when finland was mainly an agricultural society and the investment rate fluctuated between approximately 10% and 20%. investments tripled from the early 1920s to the late 1930s, even though the recession in the early 1930s was a crisis which caused a significant reduction in state investments (hjerppe 1988: 124). world war ii was an interruption during which investments dropped significantly, and the second investment era began shortly after the end of the war and continued until the late 1980s. the investment rate rose gradually over this period from approximately 10% to over 33%. the development that took place from the 1960s onwards therefore exemplifies the more general trend in western europe that had already begun in the 1930s, when states began to interfere directly in the actions of society through subsidies, income transfers, grants, loans, tax advantages, public investments and the state ownership of production facilities. in the finnish context, the latter half of the second investment period is usually considered to mark the creation of the welfare state, thus being characterized by a record of significant public investment in both material and non-material sectors. the severe recession which took place in the early 1990s was coupled with a considerable decline in public investments, to be followed by the third “investment era”, which began in the early 1990s and has continued up to the present time. central to this period is not only that a significant decline in the rate of public investment (to c. 10%), but also a significant increase in the proportion of non-material investments by the state at the expanse of material ones. we will now turn our attention into the changing strategies of the state as these are presented in the annual budgets. we will seek to identify the basic dimensions of these changing strategies with respect to three issues: general investment policies, education policies and regional policies. the reason for making such a distinction is that the spatiality of the state is not moulded only in the context of “official” regional policies but also, and perhaps even more so, in the context of general economic and social policies. fig. 1. the investment rate (gross fixed capital formation / gdp) from 1917 to 2005 indicates that there have been three “investment eras” in the history of finland since gaining independence: 1) c. 1917–1939, 2) c. 1944–1989 and 3) 1990–. source: statistics finland 2006. fennia 185: 2 (2007) 73towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … looking inward: territorial equalization in the 1960s and 1970s centralized state planning was launched in finland in the mid-1950s, but it was only in the mid1960s that the rationale which considered the state to be an indivisible entity could be said to have been in operation in full swing. from that time onwards the state took a decisive role in strengthening and supporting the diffusion of settlement and economic activities into the peripheral areas, with the help of public investments aimed at homogenizing spatial economic development in a manner typical of an equalizing state. the laws and decisions enacted in order to establish an integrated nation caused a considerable growth in state expenditure (hallituksen esitys… 1964). the state made a forceful expansion into its territories in the 1960s and 1970s, and had already started to construct territorial equality and unified welfare systems during the first of these decades (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1967). the same phenomenon continued throughout the 1970s. in general, the state’s distribution of its centralizing power throughout its territory was a crucial strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps surprisingly, included plans to transfer tasks and authority from the central administration to the regional and local level in view of a perceived need to relocate offices and institutions outside the helsinki region (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1974). the argumentation of harmonious and equal territorial development of one nation was highly visible in the state budgets of the early 1970s, coupled with the need to create a well-balanced regional structure with full employment (see tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1968, 1974). far-reaching measures to construct an integrated and well-balanced nation-state based on both regional and social equality were thus highlighted at that time (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1974). in sum, the politics of one nation included a wide range of practices such as development of the educational system and the construction of basic infrastructure throughout the territory. these actions were coupled with the promotion of industrial production and the construction of further transport infrastructure. the development of vocational education and extension of the higher education system played an important role in the budget argumentation of the 1960s. there was an awareness of the need to develop an educational system which would overcome both regional differences and differences between the social classes. as far as basic education was concerned, the network of schools expanded significantly and the preparation of a statewide comprehensive school system started in 1964. a law on the development of the higher education system over the period 1967–1981 was enacted in 1966, and new universities were established in the development regions. in order to fulfil the requirements of equal opportunities to study, the government developed a system of study grants in the late 1960s, and this was coupled with the launching of the state study grants centre in 1969. further work on developing the grant system continued in the 1970s and was presented as one of the key state strategies in the national budgets (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1967, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1974). the argument based on the need to develop the education system further persisted throughout the 1970s, and the focus of state strategies in the early years of the decade in particular was clearly on providing and guaranteeing equal study opportunities on a regional basis. implementation of the comprehensive school system began in northern finland in 1972, the specific aim of this system as explained in the budget documents being to reduce differences between the core areas and the more peripheral parts of the country. all in all, the state increased education opportunities in the development areas at all educational levels from the mid-1960s onwards (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1970, 1972, 1974). as articulated in the state budget for 1973, “in order to equalize the persisting regional differences in vocational education, it is hoped to increase educational opportunities in the development areas by directing a considerable proportion of the student places to these regions” (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1972: 16). the state budgets of the 1960s and 1970s also indicate that the expansion of the entire education system to cover the whole country was considered to be of the utmost importance. given the crucial importance of the education system in the national context, the creation of a unified educational system can be said to be inherently intertwined with an attempt to create societal order throughout the territory. in addition to active education policies, the government began to implement an active public investment policy from the late 1960s onwards. this included large public investments in welfare infrastructures such as local hospitals, office buildings and transportation which increased the visi74 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen bility of the state in peoples’ everyday lives. the construction of transportation infrastructure continued throughout the 1970s with the electrification of the rail network, road investments and automation of the telecommunications network. particularly the transport investments must be seen as crucial attempts to connect the geographical peripheries under the direct influence of the central government. even though investments in infrastructure were not a focal point of the state budgets in the 1970s (contrary to the 1960s, when industrial investments required massive public financing), they nevertheless remained central to them. investments in the state-owned post and telecommunications of finland were already being legitimized in the early 1970s by emphasizing the significance of economic growth especially in less developed areas (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1970, 1972, 1974; valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1976, 1978). in general, extensive public investments and financing were argued to be the key means of promoting balanced regional development and social cohesion. the mining industry in northern finland, for example, together with geological research in those areas, was strongly supported in the state strategies. in other words, the territory of the state was regarded as a fundamental economic and social resource, a type of spatial capital. as a result, industrial and power plants, mines and forest industries were established in less developed areas, largely with public investments. in addition to these investments in infrastructure, large forest improvement strategies were emphasised in the state budgets (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1967). state ownership was the backbone of the welfare state strategies, which aimed not only to improve economic growth but also to foster national integrity. the budgets in the 1960s and 1970s highlighted close linkages between employment, societal order and public investments. in the 1970s, when the argumentation legitimizing large public investments was notably blatant, state strategies were often justified with a reference to poor employment conditions. in fact, in the mid-1970s, when the number of unemployed exceeded 100,000, president urho kekkonen declared a state of national emergency. as late as 1979, the state budget proposal (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1978: 13) still clearly revealed a classical keynesian tone: “weaknesses in domestic investment and consumer demand have been the reason for the high unemployment”. it was argued in the 1960s and 1970s that unemployment was the major threat to societal order and economic growth, and the ability of public investments to smooth over the cyclic variations in employment was often highlighted in state strategies from the mid-1960s up to the mid-1980s (hallituksen esitys… 1964; tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1967, 1968, 1970; valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1976, 1978). public investments were especially directed to areas which suffered from unemployment (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1974). in addition to employment, public investments were also seen as measures designed to avoid production shortages. in 1975, for example, the government argued that “economic policy has especially been directed towards supporting investments in industry in order to create additional export capacity for the needs of the new economic boom” (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1974: 9). arguments also emerged for a need to increase production capacity because of the rapid growth of exports to the soviet union. interestingly, the justifications for public investments gradually altered from employment aspects towards the management of production. the aforementioned educational and investment policies were both remarkably inward-looking in the 1960s and 1970s, and the same applies to the regional policies, which paid special attention to the welfare conditions and economic growth in the less developed areas. concepts such as “development regions” and “balanced regional development” were notably visible in the state budgets of the latter half of the 1970s (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1974; valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1978). various measures and actions took place in the less developed areas in the 1970s to balance out the developing territorial differences. the specific objective was to use public funding to promote entrepreneurship that would later operate in a financially independent manner. one of the most important actions in the 1970s was the establishment of kehitysaluerahasto oy, an organization which started to finance small and medium-sized enterprises in the development areas. the external development potential of companies in the development areas in particular was subsidized through state funds (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1970), and financial subsidies were also allocated directly to the promotion of industry. especially the mining industry, power production, electrification, the construction of hydroelectric power plants, ore prospecting and geological explorafennia 185: 2 (2007) 75towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … tions in the development areas were supported by the state (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1976, 1978). in other words, rational state planning, the material infrastructure, natural resources and an attempt to foster economic growth formed a single entity. education, investments and regional policies in the 1960s and 1970s revealed a strong need to raise the development regions to the same level as the rest of the country. the “policies of one nation”, an attempt to construct a coherent national state with well-balanced economic development throughout its territory coupled with the objective of attaining territorial control both vertically and horizontally, were strategically pursued through education, investments and regional development policies. these interlinked policies were based on an understanding that the state territory was the key constituent of societal order as well as a strategic asset for increasing economic prosperity. these policies also clearly reveal that the state strategies in the 1960s and 1970s were mainly inward-looking and based on equalizing principles. the understanding of national competitiveness in the state budgets changed remarkably from the 1970s to the late 1990s. despite the inward-looking state strategies, the concept of competitiveness had already emerged in the budgets by the early 1970s, but it referred specifically to a need to develop national competitiveness through active labour and education policies. state investments in education were therefore seen as a crucial prerequisite for gaining competitive advantages in international trade. the term competitiveness therefore referred at first mainly to the price competitiveness of the state owned industries (tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1970). some initiatives for launching research and development projects were already being made in the late 1970s, but this form of reasoning remained marginal to the state strategies until 1990s. in the 1970s the concept of national competitiveness was inextricably connected with the promotion of industrial structure and employment (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1978). in this form, the rhetoric of “being competitive” was highly visible in the state budgets of the late 1970s (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1976, 1978). it is also important to note that the concept of national competitiveness in the 1960s and 1970s was inherently spatial in nature, as it referred especially to balanced economic and regional development. understanding the territorialization of state power: inward-looking and equalizing state strategies at a time of internal and external pressures the history of finland is often conceptualized as a continuing attempt to survive on a turbulent world political map (see jakobson 2006). we argue that from the early 1950s up to the late 1980s the logic of survival especially revolved around the issue of securing the territorial state, its membership of the non-communist camp and its political institutions. these formed the basis of state sovereignty from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. we thus go on to propose that power politics in finland had a major impact on the ways in which governments understood the relations between territory, population, security and societal order. keijo korhonen, one of the key political figures in finland during the cold war period, stressed in 1969 that “the foreign policy of every country is a result of both external and internal circumstances, of both existing conditions and the political will” (korhonen 1969: 31). in a similar vein, we may understand the interaction between the finnish state and its territory in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of both internal and external circumstances, of both existing conditions and the political will. in other words, the state space at that time was a manifestation of changing political contexts in which global economic ideologies mattered as well as power politics. the “central political problem for the government” which developed in finland from the 1950s onwards included two inherently intertwined issues: national integrity and economic growth, i.e. it was inherently tied up with security policy concerns. it was in this political context that the idea that the state had the ultimate responsibility to create territorial and social integrity began to develop. this goal was inextricably conditioned by both internal and external pressures, which were connected with the more or less undisputed ideological goal of the leading political groupings. the social democrats, conservatives and agrarian party all shared the view that finnish society should belong ideologically to the non-communist camp. externally, therefore, the rising industrial and military power of the soviet union operated arguably as a significant stimulus for developing national integrity. in the late 1960s president urho kekkonen pointed to a need to create a “uniform pattern of 76 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen behaviour for the finnish nation” (jakobson 2003: 16). even though personal contributions should not be over-estimated in the context of historical development, neither should the actions of powerful individuals be under-estimated. as far as the expansion of the power of the finnish state from the 1960s onwards is concerned, the efforts made by urho kekkonen should especially be taken into account. as prime minister in the early 1950s, kekkonen had already sought to launch a political programme which epitomizes the later keynesian territorial policies of the state. in his important political pamphlet does our country have enough presence of mind to become prosperous? kekkonen (1952) not only required that the government should take an active role in enhancing regional development, but he also argued that strong state regulation should exist throughout the country. kekkonen thus demanded active state participation in the development of the peripheral areas. his idea was that the national state should operate as the key initiator of development, given the lack of private sector investments in the peripheral regions. he therefore introduced a major investment and financing programme especially to promote industrialization in northern finland: the special conditions with regard to industrialization in northern finland, the scarcity of capital and the tendency for private entrepreneurship to support the southern part of the country in particular mean that we cannot construct industry in northern finland – at least not as quickly as the benefits of our national economy demand. if the mission is to be carried out as it has to be, other measures have to be found. the only useful means is that the state should use public investments in northern finland to build up its heavy industry (kekkonen 1952: 118). in order to make the investment programme possible, kekkonen (1952) claimed that the income level of the people should not increase notably in the short term. all these radical political openings were legitimized by reference to the challenges posed by both foreign political and domestic pressures which threatened the societal order within the confines of the state. kekkonen thus conceived the creation of an integrated nation as a means to secure this sovereign political unit in the era of both internal and external uncertainty. as such, the central governmental problem was inherently connected with the strength of a collective body. the increasing power of the centralizing state was considered crucial to providing a territorial basis for social equality and social order. all these actions were clearly aimed at transforming the state into a powerful locale, an unquestionable framework for societal interaction. the politics of one nation were pursued through various processes aimed at producing a regionally and socially homogenized state space. internally, it was the danger of political and social unrest posed by the communists and socialists that was seen to require state interference. in terminology of taylor (2006), the creation of territorial integrity from the 1960s onwards was inextricably connected with guardian practices which were aimed at controlling social relations within the state. the national territory was thus clearly understood as a seat of power and a fundamental resource for securing a sovereign state. the state became an inward-looking, equalizing unit which operated through the creation of both spatial and social capital. in short, the finnish state and its territory began to interact in such a way that they became mutually constitutive (cf. lefebvre 2003: 87). the state constructed what carl schmitt (2003: 67–79) calls nomos: the measure by which the land in a particular order is divided and situated and the form of social and political order determined by this process. moreover, the internal and external pressures led to the development of what michael mann (1984) calls the state’s infrastructural power across its territory: the state possessed infrastructures that penetrated universally throughout the civil society. from the 1950s onwards, economic growth, industrialization and social equalization were conceived of as fundamental prerequisites for containing the communist ideology within the state. indeed, social scientists tailored theories according to which finnish communism was a “spatial disease” which was located not only in the poor neighbourhoods of the major urban centres but especially in the vast peripheries within which the power of the state was poorly developed (cf. koikkalainen 2004). the government thus began in the 1960s to create industrial environments in the less developed areas. in general, the development of the state’s infrastructural power included massive investments in the material infrastructure of the peripheries, significant transfer payments to the less developed areas, development of the social security system and the construction of a unified education system and a nation-wide university network. the principle of equal rights to services across the territory of the state was at the core of the development of the infrastructural power. the fennia 185: 2 (2007) 77towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … state, therefore, took the key sectors of the economy such as health care and education out of the market on the grounds that access to basic human needs should not determined by market forces. as the state budgets clearly disclose, the state sought to foster not only its visibility but also the national consciousness through these interventions which entailed expansions in public expenditure. from the 1960s onwards welfare state policies started to colonize the everyday life of the finns through bureaucratization and discourses of state planning and surveillance (cf. lefebvre 1991). as such, a unique expansion of state infrastructural power across its spaces took place through state regulation, which, it was argued, would increase economic efficiency. the government therefore accepted that the state should focus on full employment, economic growth and the welfare of its citizens, and if necessary intervene in or replace market processes in order to achieve these ends. the expansion of the state’s infrastructural power was further “bolted to the ground” by the regional political legislation, which was aimed at producing societal trust among the different social classes across the regions. looking inwards and outwards: state strategies in the 1980s development of the welfare state in finland reached its culmination in the 1980s, as education, investment and regional policies gradually took on new forms (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1980, 1982), so that investments in social capital, know-how and education increased in state budgets in the early part of the decade and investments in research and innovation towards the end. it was now argued that national competitiveness could be constructed and maintained through research, product development and the promotion of the exports (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1982). the state budget for 1987, for example, emphasizes that “the enhancement of the professional skills of personnel and their motivation towards their work are the factors on which real competitiveness is ultimately based” (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1986: 9). the budgets therefore started to highlight the importance of research in promoting the competitiveness of domestic production. for the first time the universities were explicitly linked to the concept of economic competitiveness, although regional stability in higher education was still highly valued in the state strategies (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1980, 1988). the increasing importance of non-material investments, especially in the form of research and development, indicated a significant change in strategy in the late 1980s. in fact, investments in research and development increased significantly from the 1980s onwards, with the aim of reaching an “international level” (fig. 2). state subsidies were allocated to the development of new applied technology, product development and production fig. 2. gross domestic expenditure on r&d as a percentage of gdp from 1983 to 2003. the figure discloses a significant increase in r&d investments. source: oecd 2005. 78 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen systems (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1980), and it was now conceived that regional policy funding for entrepreneurship would improve the country’s long-term competitiveness (valtion tulo ja menoarvioesitys… 1982, 1988). as a result, public funding was increasingly being diverted away from direct investment assistance and towards research and development subsidies (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1984, 1986) (fig. 3). it is important to note that regional access to research activity was also taken into consideration, and growth in the research sector was channelled outside the helsinki region (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1986). where the construction of the welfare state, especially in the 1970s, had taken place with the help of large public infrastructure and service investments, these basic infrastructure investments had mainly been completed by the early 1980s. it is also important to note that the possibility of using state investments for achieving permanent improvements in the employment situation was questioned for the first time in the state budgets of the early 1980s (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1980, 1982). this criticism took place in a situation in which political interventions by the state had started to be perceived as economically harmful rather than advantageous. it was in this context that the justifications for the use of public investments changed from the improvement of employment to the creation of competitiveness. in 1981, for example, the government emphasized that a rapid and balanced expansion in investment was necessary for regeneration of the production structure and the competitiveness of production. the government also went on, however, to stress that great variations in investment activity could potentially lead to unstable economic development, which would weaken the possibilities for creating favourable preconditions for sustainable economic growth (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1980). where the state-owned companies were heavily subsidized in the 1960s and 1970s, a change in thinking with regard to their productivity of the state-owned companies took place in the early 1980s. it was now argued that state-owned industries should operate as real enterprises with the objective of making an economic profit (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1982, 1986). we consider this as the first step towards the gradual privatization of the state-owned industries that took place especially in the 1990s. moreover, this new principle indicates that the notion of competitiveness was becoming a more central part of government strategy. it was now argued that it was necessary to allocate funds to fields that had the prerequisites to survive in the face of international competition without continuous public sector investments. it must be noted, too, that this policy was launched even though the unemployment rate was high and there were shortages in the supply of skilled labour, in southern finland, especially in the growing branches of industry and in the servfig. 3. rates of investment in the public and private sectors from 1975 to 2004. source: statistics finland 2007. fennia 185: 2 (2007) 79towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … ice sector (see valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1984, 1986, 1988). a distinct need to renew regional policies emerged in the late 1980s in response to increasing regional differentiation. this was argued in the state budget of 1989 with reference to changes in economic structures: “the structural change in industry and the growth in service sector together with the increasing importance of knowledge and research investments in fostering international economic activity have given rise to a need to intensify regional policy measures” (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1988: 32). regional policies were gradually reformulated, with a new emphasis on industrial restructuring and service sector growth, and the increasing importance of knowledge and research investments also surfaced in their reformulation in the late 1980s. it is also striking to note that the idea of internationalization was for the first time added to the previously inward-looking and equalizing regional policies of the mid-1980s. this internationalization was closely connected with the need to increase regional competitiveness through know-how and research activity (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1988). regional policy reform was articulated especially with reference to competitiveness. the decline in economic competitiveness was characterized as a threat that would jeopardize not only economic development and employment but also the growth of foreign trade (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1986). for the first time regional policies were explicitly connected with the improvement of living conditions in the helsinki region. moreover, the balance between economic growth and the autonomous development of the regions surfaced as an important issue in the state budgets. indeed, these new regional policy principles opened up room for decentralizing spatial development. the development activities mentioned in the state strategies began to concentrate especially on southern finland. as a consequence, the role of the development areas in the state budgets diminished in the course of the 1980s (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1984, 1986, 1988). economic competitiveness gained in importance in the state strategies at the expense of employment which had characterized the period from the 1960s up to the late 1970s. this transformation can be taken as an indication of a gradual change from keynesian strategies towards schumpeterian competition strategies. the absolute necessity of economic growth was justified by increasing the requirement for competitiveness, and professional high-tech skills, the development of technology and related r&d activities were already being conceived of by the late 1980s as forming a background to the competitiveness of the state, which sought to bolster economic growth (valtion tulo ja menoarvioesitys… 1982: 29, also 1984, 1986). the concept of competitiveness thus became a ubiquitous formulation in state budgets at the expense of the price competitiveness typical of the 1970s (cf. tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1972). in addition to the increasing demand for competitiveness, the notion of internationalization became central to the state budgets in the late 1980s. all these changes that took place in the 1980s indicate a gradual shift from inward-looking to outward-looking state strategies. this was so even though inward-looking and equalizing policies still played a central role, especially in the fields of education and regional policy. an outward-looking state: emerging competition strategies from the early 1990s onwards by 1990 the economic boom had been continuing for some time and the unemployment rate was at its lowest point since the early 1970s (valtion tulo ja menoarvioesitys… 1990). the boom passed its peak at this point, however, and the national economy fell into a period of deep stagnation, as a result of which both public and private investments decreased markedly (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1992). employment also declined rapidly, the problems of structural and long-term unemployment deepened and the public sector was unable to increase employment with its own activities (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1994). the bottom of the economic depression had been passed by the end of 1992, however, and the government started to seek to restore sustainable economic growth and improve the employment situation. it was now argued that the low rate of inflation would support competitiveness, accelerate investments and increase employment (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1994). it was in the middle of the deep economic recession that profitability and effectiveness were adopted as key principles of public administration (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1990). the growing demands to increase effectiveness led to a number of administrative reforms which it was ar80 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen gued would secure the service basis of the welfare state (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1992). these reforms in all sectors of the administration have continued up to the present. in general, education and research were highly valued in the state budgets throughout the 1990s. new polytechnics were established to increase the instruction in applied technology, and growing demands were expressed to increase the efficiency of the whole education system, which was now being increasingly conceived of as the backbone of economic growth. the new, outward-looking state strategies called for an increase in measures to gauge the effectiveness of the education system (costs per unit, quantitative objectives) (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1990; valtion talousarvioesitys… 1996), and it was now argued, especially internationally, that competitive research and development were essential for the nation to survive in the integrating and expanding world markets (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1992). the emphasis on r&d was coupled with growing demands to create an “information society” based on technological innovations. in fact, the concept of the information society became a key reference point in the state budgets, implying that is was a central role of the state to create the preconditions necessary for the internationalization of finnish science and technology (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1992, 1996). recent state budgets have clearly disclosed that government expenditure on research and development is viewed as crucial in order to increase the country’s international competitiveness of in global markets. this strategy is coupled with a noticeable aim to educate highly skilled workers, who are seen as the sources of technological innovations and economic success. this is to say, the country’s international competitiveness and its very survival has recently been closely connected with technological innovations and the technological skills of the people. given the fact that it is especially the neoliberal theory of technological change which relies on the coercive powers of competition to drive the search for new technologies and new production methods, the budgets reveal a fairly clear change towards strategies typical of competition states. in other words, they disclose a belief that there is a technological solution to each and every problem, so that technological innovations become an integral part of a state which seeks to foster international competitiveness (cf. harvey 2005: 68). from the early 1990s onwards, investments in economic innovations and non-material assets were argued to be important for economic growth. it was now argued that the national economy demanded massive non-material investments in education, research, product development and marketing. as such, the state began to develop new infrastructures for creating an attractive business climate (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1990; valtion talousarvioesitys… 1996). the need to attract foreign direct investments into finland emerged in its rhetoric in the late 1990s in particular, when it was emphasized that economic and industrial policies must ensure that finland provides advantageous conditions for the relocation of both domestic and foreign investments (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1998). the establishment of the centre of expertise programme in the 1990s, coupled with the gradual development of the “national innovation system”, epitomizes the way in which both centralized research and development and technological innovations have become incorporated into contemporary regional policies (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1998). indeed, considerable changes in regional policies took place in the state budgets from the early 1990s onwards. not only have the ways of thinking about regional development changed, but regional policy concepts have also been renewed during the past fifteen years. networks, innovations, clusters, city districts and private-public partnerships have more or less replaced the previous spatial language in which concepts such as development regions, central place hierarchies, regional development and regional stability were often employed. european integration has naturally had a major impact on regional policy practices since 1995, but it is also the emphasis on international competitiveness, high-tech and privatization which has had a significant impact on the changes in these policies. the programme-based regional policies of the eu adopted by finland in the mid-1990s further emphasised the principles of both the autonomous development of regions and their specialization. now urban and rural policies have become increasingly separated from each others and the state has started to act as a provider of the preconditions necessary for entrepreneurship (valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys… 1990; valtion talousarvioesitys… 1992, 1994). regional development became increasingly understood from the 1990s onwards as the responsifennia 185: 2 (2007) 81towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … bility of the regions rather than the central government. in general, the state begun to oblige the regions to strengthen their international economic competitiveness and attractiveness without giving them any notable degree of political self-determination (cf. hautamäki 2001: 44–45). thus the finnish government currently acts as a risk taker which finances “innovative” companies, especially in the high-tech sector (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1992, 1994, 1996). as a consequence, substantial financial resources are now being allocated to the information and communication technology sector in particular (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1996, 1998). the schumpeterian formulation of competitiveness has therefore been clearly visible in the national budgets from the mid-1990s onwards. as jessop (2002: 121) reminds us, it is especially typical of competition state policies that public resources are increasingly allocated to the promotion of technological innovations that are assumed to increase the pace of economic growth. the notions of international competitiveness were already built into all state policies by the late 1990s, and investments were being allocated especially to improve the international competitiveness of private companies and production structures in major urban regions (valtion talousarvioesitys… 1996, 1998). know-how infrastructures and entrepreneurship played a crucial part in these new policies. thus the budget articulations from the early 1990s up to the present reflect the fact that the city-centric and outward-looking approaches to spatial policy have fundamentally challenged, if not entirely superseded, the forms of territorial redistribution that were launched in the 1960s. conclusions and some challenges for future research our analysis suggests that the interaction between the finnish state and its territory has shifted, especially since the early 1990s. the most obvious factor which reduced the central importance of territory as a major resource of the state was the collapse of the soviet union, together with the resultant economic restructuring. quite clearly, economic matters are currently superseding security issues (understood here in a broad sense) as far as the interaction between the state and its territory is concerned. this suggests that contemporary education, investment and regional policies are less firmly based on equalizing principles than was the case from the 1960s up to the 1990s. state strategies have shifted from inward-looking territorial cohesion policies towards outwardlooking policies based on the idea of differentiation and specialization. this is outstandingly visible in the field of education and investment policy, whereas regional policy has continued to be based on both outward-looking and inward-looking principles. the contemporary outward-looking state strategies are clearly informed by neoliberal economic principles. perceived global competition between states is at the core of the contemporary restructuring of the state, which aspires to create investment landscapes that will attract footloose transnational capital. the prevailing state strategies thus highlight a tendency to create conditions for private businesses, particularly export-oriented ones operating in the high-tech sector. our analysis of national budgets reveals that state strategies in finland, which must be understood as responses to the “central political problem for the government” at a given time, have changed markedly over the past forty years. at a general level, the findings emphasize that finland is gradually sliding from a welfare regime of accumulation towards a regime emblematic of competition states. in other words, inward-looking and equalizing welfare state strategies have gradually been superseded by outward-looking strategies associated with decentralizing regional policies. what is obvious is that the significance of territory as a central resource of state power is gradually decreasing. the state is increasingly employing non-material and spatially differentiating policies in its attempts to respond to the central political problem that has existed from the mid-1990s onwards, international competitiveness. roughly speaking, it is possible in the light of the state budgets evaluated hereto distinguish three epochs characterized by different state strategies (table 2). the policies that developed in finland from the 1960s onwards highlighted national integrity and economic growth. the connection between these and security policy concerns is evident in this context. social integrity and equality, including an even distribution of settlement, equal education, full employment and a balanced economy, were conceived as the ultimate guarantors of societal order. the politics of one nation thus characterized 82 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen table 2. the changing strategies of the finnish state, 1965–2005. epoch the changing strategies of the state know-how investments regional policies 1960–1970 creation of the basis for an integrated welfare state • development of the educational infrastructure and equal educational opportunities across the country. • extension of the higher education network to the development regions. • direction of student places into the development regions. • building of the basic infrastructure across the state. • vigorous investments and state activities in the development regions. • major public investments in the production infrastructure. • financial assistance for state-owned companies. • the objective of equal regional development is highlighted. • forceful rhetoric regarding development regions. • state actions are seen as crucial for regional development. c. 1980–1990 increasing emphasis on economic growth, education, research and competitiveness • development of the system of higher education. • increased importance of research. • infrastructure investments: basic infrastructure and supplementary investments. • the incorporation of state-owned companies begins. • the rhetoric of development regions decreases. • the concept of competitiveness is present in the budget rhetoric. • the ideology of welfare state equality is beginning to alter towards the competition state in the late 1980s. c. 1990– towards the competition state • r&d activity and higher education are both highly valued. • the role of innovations is emphasized in the budget argumentation. • effectiveness is implemented in the field of education. • non-material investments become central to budgets. • the role of the state is understood as that of the key provider of preconditions for private businesses. • a programme-based regional policy aimed at providing international competitiveness surfaces in budgets. • urban and rural politics emerge as separate fields in the budgets. • differentiating regional policies are introduced. • regional equality throughout the country is still emphasized. the era from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. during this time the expansion of state infrastructural power across the state space took place through public investments, state planning and transfer payments as the state adopted the role of an infrastructural constructor. the government invested in education, basic infrastructure, production infrastructure and employment with the aim of increasing economic growth, homogenizing the state space and generating social integrity. restructuring of the finnish welfare state has been taking place from the late 1970s onwards, a change in state strategies that was evident by the early 1980s. there was a change from the construction of societal order towards an emphasis on economic growth, competition and specialization, although the policy of one nation was still present in the state budgets throughout the 1980s, especially in the context of regional policies which still remained highly inward-looking, even though the budgets from the 1980s also reveal increasing pressure to renew the principles of the country’s regional policy. the new regime of accumulation that gradually developed in finland from the late 1980s onwards is clearly echoing the logic of the competition state. in other words, the discourse of international competitiveness has gradually found its way to the core of the state’s social and economic policies. the previous modes of reasoning regarding the competitiveness of the state, those which had already emerged in state budgets in the early 1970s, have thus changed fundamentally. it is now the international competitiveness of the state which is emphasized and not the price competitiveness typical of the 1970s and 1980s. as a consequence, state subsidies have gradually been allocated new priorities. in sum, education and investment policies from the 1990s onwards have become increasingly outward-looking, whereas regional policies still include a mixture of outward-looking and inward-looking principles. fennia 185: 2 (2007) 83towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … the imperatives of global competition have become an inseparable part of political parlance dealing with the national community in contemporary finland. indeed, these imperatives are widely accepted throughout the political spectrum, as most of the political parties seem to inhabit the similar kind of intellectual world (consensual competitiveness). the current articulation of international competitiveness especially emphasizes the need to open the national economy to market forces. a highly skilled labour force, knowledge and innovations are now located at the core of the state’s outward-looking strategies. this evolving economy which is viewed as being based on knowledge, technology, innovations and creative class is challenging the previous territorial economy of the state. as a consequence, new state spaces are under construction via the new urban locational policies which were introduced in the late 1990s. it is striking to note, however, that the homogenizing territorial strategies of the state typical of the 1960s and 1970s are interestingly built into the contemporary “national” regional policies. for instance, the regional centre programme and centre of expertise programme epitomize an attempt to extend the new competition policies throughout the country. in other words, welfare spatiality is having an interesting impact on territorial practices which emphasize international competitiveness, innovations, technology, talent, creativity, urbanism and networks. leaning on our observations regarding the transformation of finnish state strategies over a period of forty years, we can go on to suggest that the gradual change from equality regimes to competition regimes not only exemplifies the gradual adoption of the rules of the global marketplace but also potentially changes the ways in which the state territory is perceived in state strategies (see moisio 2007). the state territory was earlier understood not only as a key resource for increasing economic growth, but also as the most important basis for societal order. the contemporary state strategies – in which the “national” is subordinated to the markets – seem to be gradually downgrading both these dimensions. it is on this basis that we would like to point out six issues which will unquestionably merit more attention in regional policy research in the coming years. firstly, the spatial imagination based on neoliberal economic ideology that has been clearly visible in the emerging transnational regional planning discourse of the eu has gradually become institutionalized in finland, too, and has fundamentally reshaped our national regional planning traditions (see, jensen & richardson 2004). in fact, eu-inflected regional policies are generating a peculiar situation in which the discourse and practises of one nation are intertwining with the articulation of international competition on a supranational scale. the re-working of the state, for instance, has been coupled with strengthening insistences upon creating a truly international metropolitan region and a new, metropolitan form of governance. this has proved to be a difficult task, however, as there is no political consensus as to what the metropolitan policies would mean in a finnish context (cf. pelkonen 2005: 692). also, the historically based political tension between the capital region and the national state will clearly hinder the development of metropolitan governance in finland. but even though there is still a considerable political resistance, this metropolitan development is nowadays clearly built into the latest state strategies, which emphasize the need to create attractive landscapes for international capital and for the international “creative class”. indeed, the government platform in 2007 explicitly mentions the aim to launch “metropolitan policy” for the first time in the history of finland, precisely in order to fulfil the aforementioned needs (valtioneuvosto 2007: 28). it is therefore clear that the evolving relationship between the national state and the glocal state (the helsinki region) will require more scholarly attention in the future. secondly, the transformation of the global politico-economic environment, european integration and the contemporary outward-looking regional policies have transformed the relationship between the finnish state and its territory by associating the economies of the regions with the global division of labour more directly than earlier. interestingly, these policies aim at granting regional actors a notable degree of responsibility for promoting regional competitiveness in international markets. given these new requirements, regions and cities seem to be partly obliged to form their own “foreign policies” on various spatial scales, partly in order to secure their activities and financial resources. the formation of these foreign policies is clearly a topic which merits scholarly attention. thirdly, even though contemporary finnish statehood is based on a gradually emerging regime of accumulation which is played out at the level of the eu, the historically constructed spatial struc84 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen tures still have their impact on territorial practices. in other words, not all ideologies of uniform development have been abandoned in the current spatial strategies of the finnish state. the impact of path dependence generated by the historical strategies on the increasing demands for neoliberal state strategies is clearly a topic which should be studied from various angles. the regional centre programme, for example, which aims at creating a network of urban regions throughout the country, unfolds the importance of both cultural and material path dependence in the formation of the new state territoriality. this policy reflects a need to follow in part the attitudes, norms, expectations and practices which were created during the 1960s and 1970s, but it also emphasizes the imperatives of global competition. as a part of the current high valuation of innovations and knowledge, the regional centre programme and centre of expertise programme can be regarded as an interesting combination of nationalism and transnationalism. in other words, the finnish state has developed a mosaic of differentiated spaces of regulation through the ongoing processes of state re-scaling and urban policy reform during the past twenty years. fourthly, various organizations such as the imf, the world bank and the oecd clearly serve as mediating institutions between the neoliberal ideology and state institutions. put differently, these organizations work as pressure groups for transnational governance by employing various techniques – of which perhaps the most obvious examples are peer pressure and state rankings – to market “suitable” political practices among states. these are operations in which the practices of international competitiveness arguably work to reproduce the state as a competitive entity on a continuous basis. it is notable that the institutions connected with neoliberal transnational governance usually emphasize the need to break with “national” or “protective” economic practices and to undertake economic reforms in order to foster competition in the “sheltered” sectors. the impact of these international institutions on finnish regional policy practices should therefore be carefully and critically explicated. fifth, the ways in which societal and regional cohesion could be incorporated into state practices which bolster international economic competitiveness are crucial political issues in contemporary finland. david harvey (2005) has suggested that the neoliberal competition state is crisis-prone, as this competition increases inequality among social classes and regions. he goes on to propose that in order to maintain the stability of such a state, neoliberal competition must be coupled with a strong sense of nationalism. given the fact that territory is arguably one of the key constituents of nationalism and national pride, the competition state era does not mean that territory has become meaningless in the political strategies of the state. in other words, the state and its territory continue to interact in such a way that they can be said to be mutually constitutive. the outcomes of the process in which the principle of social and regional integrity comes to be increasingly challenged by social and regional differentiation are still unclear. what is clear, however, is that the territory of the finnish state is not only social but also cultural. the declining role of territory in state strategies emphasizing international competitiveness through technological development, a few urban nodes and the creation of a real metropolis is therefore a crucial phenomenon which should merit scholarly attention in the future. given the fact that finnish nationalism is not only deeply rooted in the state territory but has also often been played out through it (paasi 1996), the development towards a competition state is particularly challenging. academic research into the changing statehood of finland should therefore engage with the different dimensions of territory. one would like to inquire, for instance, why powerful regional movements are rare in finland even though spatial injustice is increasing rapidly both between and within regions. sixth and finally, the explication of the changing relationship between places and state power requires more scholarly effort in finland, as elsewhere. given the argument of peter j. taylor (2006) that one of the most important geographical attributes of modernity is the subordination of cities (and places in general) to territorial states, the contemporary global condition poses a significant academic challenge to conceptualize the change taking place in the spatiality of modern statehood not only in the core areas of the world economy but also on various geographical margins. taylor suggests that there has been a fairly clear division of labour in the modern era between states and the cities they contain. the state has become responsible for territorial guardianship practices (security, discipline, regulation, orderliness) whereas the cities take care of commercial practices and the creation of wealth through production. in this sense, cities and states are indispensable to each other: fennia 185: 2 (2007) 85towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … states need wealth creation to control social relations and the markets need the guardianship practices of the states for their operation. taylor stresses that modern states are based on “simplification”, implying that the space of places can be imagined in the image of the state itself (e.g. national urban and place hierarchies, as was the case in finland). one of the major questions is whether the relations between different places and the state are fundamentally changing in finland in the climate of neoliberal politico-economic development as some of the places become more attached to the transnational networks than others. acknowledgements we would like to thank vilho harle, anni kangas, pentti yli-jokipii and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. the article is funded by two research projects: logon baltic (interreg iii b) and the transformation of finnish regional policies (academy of finland, no. 118527). references agnew ja (2000). from the political economy of regions to regional political economy. progress in human geography 24: 1, 101–110. agnew ja (2005). hegemony: the new shape of global power. 284 p. temple university press, philadelphia. agnew ja (2007). book review. annals of the association of american geographers 97: 3, 651– 653. biersteker tj (2002). state, sovereignty and territory. in carlnaes w, t risse & ba simmons (eds). handbook of international relations, 157–176. sage, london. brenner n (1998a). between fixity and motion: accumulation, territorial organization and the historical geography of spatial scales. environment and planning d: society and space 16: 4, 459– 481. brenner n (1998b). global cities, glocal states: global city formation and state territorial restructuring in contemporary europe. review of international political economy 5: 1, 1–37. brenner n (1999). globalisation as reterritorialisation: the re-scaling of urban governance in the european union. urban studies 36: 3, 431–451. brenner n (2000). building euro-regions. locational politics and the political geography of neoliberalism in post-unification germany. european urban and regional studies 7: 4, 319–345. brenner n (2003). glocalization as a state spatial strategy: urban entrepreneurialism and the new politics of uneven development in western europe. in peck j & h yeung (eds). remaking the global economy: economic-geographical perspectives, 197–215. sage, london. brenner n (2004a). urban governance and the production of new state spaces in western europe, 1960–2000. review of international political economy 11: 3, 447–488. brenner n (2004b). new state spaces. 351 p. oxford university press, oxford. brenner n (2006). global cities, ‘glocal’ states: global city formation and state territorial restructuring in contemporary europe. in brenner n & r keil (eds). the global cities reader, 259–266. routledge, abingdon. brenner n & n theodore (2002). preface: from the “new localism” to the spaces of neoliberalism. antipode 34: 3, 341–347. brenner n, b jessop, m jones & g macleod (2003). state space in question. in brenner n, b jessop, m jones & g macleod (eds). state/space: a reader, 1–27. blackwell, oxford. cerny pg (1990). the changing architecture of politics. 288 p. sage, london. cerny pg, g menz & s soederberg (2005). different roads to globalization: neoliberalism, the competition state, and politics in a more open world. in soederberg s, g menz & pg cerny (eds). internalizing globalization: the rise of neoliberalism and the decline of national varieties of capitalism, 1–31. palgrave macmillan, new york. costa-i-font j & e rodriguez-oreggia (2005). is the impact of public investment neutral across the regional income distribution? evidence from mexico. economic geography 81: 3, 305–322. dicken p (2003). global shift. reshaping the global economic map in the 21st century. 656 p. sage, london. eberts r (1990). public infrastructure and regional economic development. economic review 26: 1, 15–27. elden s (2005). missing the point: globalization, deterritorialization and the space of the world. transactions of the institute of british geographers ns 30: 1, 8–19. fougner t (2006). the state, international competitiveness and neoliberal globalization: is there a future beyond ‘the competition state’? review of international studies 32: 1, 165–185. gertler ms (2003). a cultural economic geography of production. in anderson k, m domosh, s pile & n thrift (eds). handbook of cultural geography, 131–146. sage, london. gibson-graham jk (2003). poststructural interventions. in sheppard e & tj barnes (eds). a companion to economic geography, 95–109. blackwell, oxford. 86 fennia 185: 2 (2007)sami moisio and laura leppänen gramlich e (1994). infrastructure investment: a review essay. journal of economic literature 32: 3, 1176–1196. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1965 (1964). 728 p. suomen valtio, helsinki. harvey d (1982). the limits to capital. 478 p. blackwell, oxford. harvey d (2003). a geographer’s perspective on the new american imperialism. conversation with david harvey. <http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/ people4/harvey/harvey-con0.html>. 21.3.2007. harvey d (2005). the new imperialism. 288 p. oxford university press, oxford. haughwout a (1999). state infrastructure and the geography of employment. growth and change 30: 4, 549–566. hautamäki l (2001). suomalaisen “suuren” aluepolitiikan vaiheet. in mikkonen k (ed). mies ja alue. juhlakirja professori kauko mikkosen 60-vuotispäivän kunniaksi, 32–47. vaasan yliopisto, vaasa. heeg s & j oßenbrügge (2002). state formation and territoriality in the european union. geopolitics 7: 3, 78–88. heiskala r (2006). kansainvälisen toimintaympäristön muutos ja suomen yhteiskunnallinen muutos. in heiskala r & e luhtakallio (eds). uusi jako: miten suomesta tuli kilpailukyky-yhteiskunta, 14– 42. gaudeamus, helsinki. herlin a (2007). suomella on yhä keinot menestyä. helsingin sanomat 22.1.2007, a2. hjerppe r (1988). suomen talous 1860–1985. kasvu ja rakennemuutos. 314 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. hobson jm & m ramesh (2002). globalisation makes of states what states make of it: between agency and structure in the state/globalisation debate. new political economy 7: 1, 5–22. hudson r, m dunford, d hamilton & r kotter (1997). developing regional strategies for economic success: lessons from europe’s economically successful regions? european urban and regional studies 4: 4, 465–373. jakobson m (2003). tilinpäätös. 415 p. otava, helsinki. jakobson m (2006). finland: a lone wolf. 112 p. wsoy, helsinki. jensen ob & t richardsson (2004). making european space. 287 p. routledge, london. jessop b (1990). state theory. putting the capitalist state in its place. 416 p. polity press, oxford. jessop b (2002). the future of the capitalist state. 344 p. polity press, oxford. jones m & r jones (2004). nation states, ideological power and globalisation: can geographers catch the boat? geoforum 35: 4, 409–424. jones m, r jones & m woods (2004). an introduction to political geography: space, place and politics. 202 p. routledge, london. keating m (2001). governing the cities and regions: territorial restructuring in a global age. in scott a (ed). global city-regions. trends, theory, policy, 371–391. oxford, new york. kegley cw & ga raymond (2002). exorcising the ghost of westphalia. building world order in the new millennium. 298 p. prentice hall, new york. kekkonen u (1952). onko maallamme malttia vaurastua? 129 p. otava, helsinki. koikkalainen p (2004). poliittisesta aluetutkimuksesta konfliktinsäätelyteoriaan. radikalismi suomalaisen valtio-opin tutkimuskohteena 1950-luvulta 1970-luvulle. politiikka 46: 2, 103–120. korhonen k (1969). finland and the soviet union. in heiskanen i, j huopaniemi, k korhonen & k törnudd (eds). essays on finnish foreign policy, 31–40. finnish political science association, helsinki. kuusi p (1961). 60-luvun sosiaalipolitiikka. wsoy, porvoo. lefebvre h (1991). the production of space. 454 p. blackwell, oxford. lefebvre h (2003). space and the state. in brenner n, b jessop, m jones & g macleod (eds). state/space: a reader, 84–101. blackwell, oxford. lynn nj (1999). geography and transition: reconceptualizing systemic change in the former soviet union. slavic review 58: 4, 824–840. mann m (1984). the autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanisms, and results. european journal of sociology 25: 2, 185–213. moisio s (2007). valtiomuutoksen tuottaminen suomessa: poliittisen maantieteen näkökulma. politiikka 49: 4, 229–247. oecd (2005). msti database. main science and technology indicators. <www.research.fi/voimavarat/tk_menot>. 10.2.2007. paasi a (1996). territories, boundaries and consciousness. the changing geographies of the finnishrussian border. 353 p. john wiley, chichester. patomäki h (2007). uusliberalismi suomessa. lyhyt historia ja tulevaisuuden vaihtoehdot. 282 p. wsoy, helsinki. peck j (2001). workfare states. 414 p. the guilford press, new york. pelkonen a (2005). state restructuring, urban competitiveness policies and technopole building in finland: a critical view on the glocal state thesis. european planning studies 13: 5, 685–705. pred a (1986). place, practice and structure: social and spatial transformation in southern sweden 1750–1850. 268 p. barnes & noble books, totowa. rietveld p (1989). infrastructure and regional development. a survey of multiregional economic models. the annals of regional science 23: 4, 255–274. schmitt c (1999). ethic of state and pluralistic state. in mouffe c (ed). the challenge of carl schmitt, 195–208. verso, london. schmitt c (2003). the nomos of the earth in the international law of the jus publicum europaeum (translated by g. l. ulmen). 372 p. telos press, new york. fennia 185: 2 (2007) 87towards a nordic competition state? politico-economic … statistics finland (2006). kansantalouden tilinpito. historialliset sarjat. tilastokeskus, helsinki. statistics finland (2007). px-web statfin data base. <http://www.stat.fi/tup/tilastotietokannat/index. html>. 16.4.2007. taylor pj (2006). problematizing city/state relations: towards a geohistorical understanding of contemporary globalization. gawc research bulletin. < w w w. l b o r o . a c . u k / g a w c / r b / r b 1 9 7 . h t m l > . 22.2.2007. tuloja menoarvioesitys v. 1967. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1967 (1967). 623 p. suomen valtio, helsinki. tuloja menoarvioesitys v. 1969. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1969 (1968). 660 p. suomen valtio, helsinki. tuloja menoarvioesitys v. 1971. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1971 (1970). 824 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. tuloja menoarvioesitys v. 1973. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1973 (1972). 838 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. tuloja menoarvioesitys v. 1975. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1975 (1974). 560 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtioneuvosto (2007). pääministeri matti vanhasen ii hallituksen ohjelma. 86 p. edita prima, helsinki. valtion talousarvioesitys 1993. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion talousarvioksi vuodelle 1993 (1992). 400 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion talousarvioesitys 1995. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion talousarvioksi vuodelle 1995 (1994). 382 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion talousarvioesitys 1997. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion talousarvioksi vuodelle 1997 (1996). 392 p. oy edita ab, helsinki. valtion talousarvioesitys 1999. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion talousarvioksi vuodelle 1999 (1998). 492 p. oy edita ab, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1977. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1977 (1976). 587 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1979. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1979 (1978). 570 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1981. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1981 (1980). 624 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1983. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1983 (1982). 680 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1985. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1985 (1984). 674 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1987. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1987 (1986). 618 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1989. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1989 (1988). 565 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. valtion tuloja menoarvioesitys 1991. hallituksen esitys eduskunnalle valtion tuloja menoarvioksi vuodelle 1991 (1990). 513 p. valtion painatuskeskus, helsinki. weber m (1919/1994). the profession and vocation of politics. in lassman p & r speirs (eds). weber: political writings, 309–369. cambridge university press, cambridge. 24961_04_ketola.pdf foresight strategies and practices based on regional religious values and global virtue ethics tarja ketola ketola, tarja (2006). foresight strategies and practices based on regional religious values and global virtue ethics. fennia 184: 1, pp. 27–36. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. futures research often aims at being value-free in order to be an objective and credible source of information in the eyes of political and business decisionmakers. presenting value-laden alternatives could label futures research as pseudoscience. naturally futures researchers have values of their own, but they present research findings that do not take any ethical stand on the issue in question. however, their clients do not suppress their values – on the contrary, political and business leaders use these research results to advocate such visions, strategies and practices that are based on their own values. human beings are intrinsically value-ridden creatures. furthermore, we are brought up according to the values of our parents, families and societies, which vary in different cultures. religion is one central component of any culture. for example, the presidents of the usa utilize religion for good and evil. even individuals, groups and nations that claim to be atheist, are subconsciously, if not consciously, influenced by the religious past and present of their living environment: e.g., secularized finnish decision-makers make lutheran decisions. wouldn’t it be sensible to intentionally incorporate regional religious values into organizational foresight management? for instance, chinese authorities are turning to confucian values to combat corruption. grameen bank eradicating poverty with micro credits in bangladesh is based on hindu values. international organizations can manage and enjoy the flavours of regional religions because all religions have the same value basis, the natural law (lex naturae), according to which all people in the world share the same sense of morality, irrespective of their religion and other background. virtues exemplify these shared values. maybe even futures researchers could promote virtue ethics? the purpose of this paper is to present the idea that virtue ethics comprises the shared values for all people, and to argue how this principle could be introduced in organizational values. it is not argued that religions per se would contribute to better society but that since humans seem to have an innate need for religions, we are stuck with them and should make the best of them. tarja ketola, department of production, university of vaasa, po box 700, fi65101 vaasa, finland. e-mail: tarja.ketola@uwasa.fi. or department of management, turku school of economics, rehtoripellonkatu 3, fi-20500 turku, finland. e-mail: tarja.ketola@tukkk.fi. introduction: the dilemma of futures research futures researchers often provide scenarios (sets of possible futures) for politicians and businesses on which these build their visions, strategies and practices. futures research aims at being valuefree in order to be an objective and credible source of information in the eyes of political and business decision-makers. presenting value-laden alternatives could label futures research as pseudoscience. twenty years ago futures research was still considered a normative activity in which the role of values was more emphasized than in social sciences in general (mannermaa 1986). a decade ago futures research covered everything from descriptive extrapolation to prescriptive utopia (masini 1994), and visions were seen to integrate ex28 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tarja ketola trapolation and utopia by taking account of the emerging trends from the past and present in their attempt to realize the utopia. thus during the last twenty years the futures research’s normative approach was first diluted into a visionary approach and then starved into an extrapolative approach. futures researchers seem to have reached the dilemma of all endeavours that start from the inspirational ideas of creative individuals and gradually grow into organized institutions: if these endeavours want to survive, prosper and grow, they need more and more funding and cosy relations to political and economic leaders who can provide the money. for that reason, futures researchers must please their powerful partners by producing research results that these defenders of their own position can live with. yet the foundations of futures studies lie in thomas more’s utopia from 1516; hence: if you seek to create a new world you must destroy the old. in their own circles, futures researchers can let their hair down and allow utopias thrive, but in the public eye they must tie their hair up and stick to the rhetoric accepted by the rulers. since most futures researchers see future quite different from the present hegemony, they rather adopt the role of an objective expert than that of an ardent supporter of the status quo. they concentrate on the potential futures, possible futures and probable futures – but ignore the preferable futures. eutopia (where eu is greek for good) is a preferred future: “the best possible real world you can imagine and strive for, always re-evaluating your preferences as you struggle towards it” (jim dator in stevenson 2006: 668). religious value-riddenness vs. the use value of religions present-day futures researchers naturally have values of their own, but they present their clients research findings that do not take any ethical stand on the issue in question. however, their clients do not suppress their values – on the contrary, political and business leaders use these research results to advocate such visions, strategies and practices that are based on their own ambitions and values. human beings are intrinsically value-ridden creatures. furthermore, we are brought up according to the values of our parents, families and societies, which vary in different cultures. religion is one central component of any culture. religions have existed as long as conscious human beings. humans seem to have an innate need for a religion of some kind or the other. maybe it is biological: our selfish gene (cp. dawkins 1976) cannot accept that we are here on earth just for reproduction purposes, and therefore recruits our well-developed brain to search for individual reasons to exist. or are religions memes (cp. blackmore 1999), selfcopying machines since the meaning systems of religions are passed on temporally from generation to generation and many religions wish to spread spatially through mission work (kamppinen 2002)? or maybe the need for religion is psychological: we are so stuck in our childhood need to be protected and cared for by our parents, that even as adults we imagine parent-like gods so that we can fool ourselves to believe that someone is taking care of us, and hence feel more secure. perhaps our fear of death creates these delusions of gods: life must go on after death, and preferably a better life. the religious studies experts, veikko anttonen and teemu taira (2004), say that the locus of religion is the whole formed by human mind and body. another expert of religious studies, ilkka pyysiäinen (2004), thinks that religion is a map of utopia – hence accidentally making it a method for futures research. sociologist émile durkheim (1912) maintained that religion is a social system of sacred issues in the collective conscious of humans. the father of analytical psychology, carl gustav jung (1963) saw religion as an unconscious archetype (see ketola 1997, 1999). for him ‘religioning’ is a universal human capacity to find meaning in one’s life (mathers 2000). atheists believe that religions are superstitions – and think that acceptance of this fact increases satisfaction, as this life is the only chance to get it. in the same way karl marx thought that religion was the opium of the people. we are still addicted to religion irrespective of whichever part of the world we live in. the gradual secularization of western countries after world war ii left a value void in the lives of individuals and organizations, which market economy values have not been able to fill. after experimenting with hippy thoughts, eastern religions and new age movements, western people have started to rediscover their traditional christian religions as a value basis for life. this trend shows also in business life. the increased spiritualization of corporate and managerial values has been spotted by fennia 184: 1 (2006) 29foresight strategies and practices based on regional religious … management research (see e.g., mccormick 1994; nash 1994; cavanagh 1999; nikula 2006). voluntary corporate responsibility policies and practices adopted by an increasing number of companies illustrate both the duty ethical (after kant 1785) and utilitarian (as described in bentham 1789) sides of the coin (see more in ketola 2005, 2006). religion cannot be separated from historical, social and cultural contexts (taira 2004). that is why, even individuals, groups and nations that claim to be atheist or secular, are subconsciously, if not consciously, influenced by the religious past and present of their living environment. religion is not only a private matter but has re-entered politics and business (taira 2006). the 2006 nobel prize winner bangladeshi muhammad yunus and his grameen bank represents its positive side: his idea, based on the hindu values of moderation, generosity, trust and reliability, has since 1974 been to give micro credits to poor women so that they can employ themselves. grameen bank has now nearly seven million customers. this kind of business spread in the 1990s; e.g., an international microcredit summit campaign has currently over 100 million customers – showing how such values are universal. an indian scholar, c.k. prahalad (2005) has been promoting this idea of eradicating poverty by creating opportunities for the poor in his book and gives many examples of these kinds of successful endeavours. tecnosol provides financing arrangements for indian entrepreneurs offering solar, wind and hydro energy solutions to poor rural areas that do not have access to grid. cemex, a mexican cement business multinational, offers a savings and credit scheme for the poor so that they can buy enough building material to complete their building project at once. itc, an indian conglomerate, has connected indian villages with pcs so that farmers can check the best market prices for their products daily. telefonica has enabled proliferation of wireless devices among the poor in brazil. nokia has introduced three new cheap and easyto-use mobile phones for the chinese, indian, south american and african markets. on the other side of the coin, for instance, secularized finnish decision-makers make lutheran decisions – and even appeal to lutheran teachings to explain, justify and excuse their actions. nokia, the most powerful finnish company is a good example of this. mr. pekka ala-pietilä (2004), chief executive officer of nokia, wrote about the need for humility at the time of both success and failure in a book published in honour of bishop eero huovinen. in ala-pietilä’s view, it is important not to deny the reality or devalue what has happened. humility means an ability to be self-critical and a desire to learn. ala-pietilä emphasized the difference between self-esteem and self-satisfaction: a company needs healthy self-esteem in order to be able to meet the future challenges but it must constantly fight against unhealthy self-satisfaction that creates a dangerous feeling of security. nokia’ huge economic power and the accompanying major influence on finnish society predisposes the company to self-satisfaction and hubris. for example, during nokia’s financial information public announcement on 25 january 2005, mr. jorma ollila, nokia’s chairman, concentrated on boasting about the large amounts of taxes and bonuses nokia had paid in finland in order to devalue the accusations against nokia of poor treatment of employees presented in a programme mot on the finnish tv-1 on 17 january 2005. another example of nokia’s hubris was shown by mr. ollila, nokia’s chairman, when the forthcoming ceo, olli-pekka kallasvuo was given a 31,000 euro fine for tax fraud for trying to import his 11,000 euros purchases from switzerland to finland without declaring them at the customs. mr. ollila brought the subject up during nokia’s financial information public announcement and told the media that kallasvuo should be forgiven because the citizen responsibility catechism ollila had received from archbishop jukka paarma taught forgiveness (anttila 2006). with those words nokia’s chairman adopted the role of a spiritual leader or even that of jesus who could forgive sinners. both corporate leaders and politicians often think highly of themselves. they are more likely to be narcissistic than other people. business and political life attract narcissistic, even psychopathic personalities (ollila 2005). charismatic leaders are often narcissists. the charismatic grandiose narcissistic leaders demand idealisation from their subordinates (kets de vries 2001) and may gradually start believing that they are omnipotent and even god-like. some of the grossest cases would be laughable – at least to the outsiders – if their consequences weren’t so tragic: the promotion of the superhuman, god-like, heroic deeds of the great leaders of russia (stalin), china (mao zedong) and north korea (kim il sung). these leaders forbade all known religions in their countries in order to replace the traditional gods with their own 30 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tarja ketola personality cult. such exaltation is possible only in totalitarian countries, closed dictatorial societies with no opportunities for making comparisons. most world leaders are necessarily a grade or two less narcissistic than stalin, mao zedong or kim il sung, as they live in more or less democratic countries. for that reason they have to accept religions. in fact this “necessary evil” may become a “blessing in disguise” for the leaders: they can use religions for their own benefit. through the ages american presidents have utilized religion for good and for evil. on the american dollar bill we can read the ecumenical words: “in god we trust.” yet george bush has labelled certain countries (e.g. former iraq and afghanistan and present iran and north korea) as the axis of evil, as if his country, the usa, belonged to the axis of good, and he personally had the god-given right to split the world into good and evil countries. in this “divine power” of his bush resembles the leaders of iran and former afghanistan. in atheist north korea, the son of kim il sung, kim jong il, has not succeeded in attaining a god-like status, which may be a signal of change. in the islamic countries of iraq, afghanistan and iran people trust in god like in the usa. the god of muslims is in many ways rather similar to the god of christians and the god of jews. president bush wishes to kill these monotheist “cousins in faith” but has not labelled either polytheist india with its spectrum of hindu gods or atheist china with its totalitarian system as a part of the axis of evil. india and china are rapidly developing economies offering great business opportunities for american companies while iraq, afghanistan and iran have major oil wells for the americans to conquer. the rapidly developed american ally, south korea, wants to absorb its northern brother. in other words, bush uses religion to further his political and economic ambitions, just like lincoln, wilson, roosevelt and truman – or the roman emperors, viking kings, ottoman sultans and imperialists, for that matter. hence widely different religious beliefs themselves would not be an obstacle for peaceful cooperation either. old european kingdoms exemplify the former god-like status of rulers. before euro currency their notes and coins were stamped with the heads of their kings and queens. the only european union countries refusing to adopt the joint currency were three kingdoms: denmark, sweden and the united kingdom, all of which kept their royal money. while nowadays the royals are just figureheads, the royal heads on the currency used to show who had the highest political and economic power in the country. despite their narcissistic ambitions and wishes, neither the european royals nor the earlier roman emperors were really regarded as gods. jesus asked: “whose head is this [on the coin]?” “caesar’s”, the pharisees replied. “then pay to caesar what belongs to caesar and to god what belongs to god.” matthew 22: 19–21). in asia things have been different: e.g., the emperor of japan has been worshipped as god until very recently despite the very western division of power between the parliament with its government and the royal family. the leaders of atheist china have also started to realize the potential use value of religions in reaching their political and economic goals. currently, while putting the members of falun gong in prison, the chinese authorities are turning to confucian values to combat corruption and strengthen their grip on power. during the last few years the communist party of china has gradually been giving in to the attractions of the market economy. the triumph of capitalist principles over marxist principles in china’s everyday life has left its political leaders with little power to decide on the present circumstances and future directions of this huge country. because of its emphases on stability, hierarchy and authority confucianism used to be favoured by the chinese rulers for centuries, before mao zedong banned it after his rise to power in 1949. with confucianism the chinese leaders could re-legitimize their right to rule but also promote virtuous, non-corrupt organizational behaviour at all levels of society. many learned chinese would welcome confucian philosophy to avoid the imminent moral and ethical decay of the country. professor kang xiaoguan points out that with the abolishment of the traditional religions – buddhism, taoism and confucianism – half a century ago, china gave up much of its cultural heritance (ådahl 2005). this means that most chinese citizens have lived in a religious and spiritual void for all their lives and do not know how to treat each other. that is why corruption is rife at all levels of society from local and regional decision-makers to governmental officers. confucian ethics are clear to understand and simple to follow for both the leaders and their subordinates. these principles require the rulers to be just and morally impeccable and the subjects to be obedient and respectful at all levels of society from families to the nation. confucianism would allow the chinese citizens to re-discover their cultural fennia 184: 1 (2006) 31foresight strategies and practices based on regional religious … roots and the leaders of china to regain power. the communist party has now allowed confucian philosophy to be taught at schools so that these ethical principles would become rooted in the minds of the future generation of rulers and subordinates who can put pressure on the older generations. many oppressed minority ethnic groups in china would welcome the introduction of a set of ethical values into local, regional and national decision-making, although for example tibetans would prefer the decentralized buddhist value basis over the centralized confucian one. most minority groups all over the world, including aboriginals in western siberia, central asia and southern africa would have a chance to survive and prosper even without independence if their political and corporate masters adopted ethical standards that respected their ethnic values. the above examples illustrate the hugely varied and important role of religions in political and organizational life. with all this in mind wouldn’t it be sensible to intentionally incorporate regional religious values into organizational foresight management? that might be the case in small and medium-sized companies operating locally under one set of religious values as they could strengthen their stakeholder cooperation by adopting trust-inducing values. this would enable the companies to root themselves firmly in society so that their continuity would be more secure and future success more probable. but what about large multinational companies which operate in many countries with varied religious beliefs? should they adopt different ethical standards in different areas? while buddhism and islam or hinduism and christianity are very far from each other in dogmas, they do have some underlining ethics in common: they all preach for instance on moderation, generosity, justness, kindness and loyalty – on virtue ethical values. virtue ethics as a value basis shared by all religions people in politics, business and civil life seem to need absolute values as guidelines for their endeavours although vast cultural differences could make one conclude that values are relative. relativism is one philosophical approach to ethics (wittgenstein 1953; see also johnson 1993). in relativism, ethical values are not regarded as absolute but as changing. on the other hand, already benedictus de spinoza (1677/1959) in his ethics and immanuel kant (1785) in his duty ethics as well as their deontological successors, such as john rawls (1971) in his theory of justice and alan gewirth (1978) in his theory of rights in reason and morality all emphasize that ethics are absolute, thus denying the validity of relativism. they argue that ethics are rational principles shared by everyone (see also ollila 1997). donaldson (1996) divides morality into (a) ethical relativism, which believes that ethical values vary from culture to culture, and (b) ethical universalism, which believes in global ethical values. in fact religions share the same value basis, the natural law (lex naturae), according to which all people in the world have the same sense of morality, irrespective of their religion or other background (ketola 2005). religions are separated by different dogmas but united by the same ethics. philosopher maija-riitta ollila (2006) argues that the essential divisions are within religions rather than between them. all religions have many schools of thought and all religions have their moderate wings as well as fundamentalist extremes. the similarities between the values of the fundamentalists of different religions are just as evident as the similarities between the values of the moderates of different religions. fig. 1 illustrates this reality and the core shared by all religions. the core is virtues. f u n d a m e n t a l i s m judachristianity ism f agnostif u cism u n islam n d d a atheism a m core: m e e n other virtue n t religions ethics hinduism t a a l l i shintoconi s ism futaobuddhism s m cianism m ism f u n d a m e n t a l i s m fig. 1. virtue ethical values that all humans share irrespective of their religious beliefs. 32 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tarja ketola virtues exemplify the values shared by all people. virtue ethics are based on the thoughts of socrates, plato and particularly aristotle (384–322 b.c.). virtue ethics take account of both the motives and the nature of the actors. when evaluating an action and an actor, (a) the intention of doing good should be taken into consideration even when the action has led to evil; and (b) the past immaculate behaviour of the slipped actor should mitigate the punishment. it is easier to forgive a single deed that was done by accident or while of unsound mind than continual, intentional evil deeds. in his classic work ethics from 348 b.c., aristotle (see e.g., barnes 1988) describes a virtue as an attitude that makes a person good and helps them do their work well. according to aristotle, a virtue is a middle road between two evils. one extreme of evil comprises of the seven deadly sins, the other extreme of evil would include the opposites. inbetween the two evil extremes lay the virtues. table 1 illustrates the position of the virtues between the two evils. each of the two excessive evils can often be found in the same person or company, e.g. arrogance and cringing or envy and extolling. they are the extreme, desperate coping mechanisms of situations a person (or organization) cannot control. aristotle said that, in addition to (1) temperance, a virtue requires both (2) consideration and (3) training. in order to (1) find the middle course between too much and too little, the virtue practitioners must (2) find their solutions rationally and not arbitrarily, and they must (3) learn self-discipline to keep their emotions in check. for aristotle the purpose of human life was happiness. in happiness he saw three complementary forms: life of pleasure and enjoyment, life as a free and responsible citizen, and life as a thinker and philosopher. if we find the middle road in life, we can fulfil all three forms of happiness at the same time. aristotelian virtue ethics have been strongly advocated by the famous philosopher georg henrik von wright (1997) who died in 2003 as well as by theologian and islam expert reino e. heinonen (2006). even the sceptical futures research guru, wendell bell (1997), accepts virtues as a prime candidate for universal values. virtue ethics have been adopted e.g. by philosophers amartya sen (1995), who has developed john rawls’ (1971) theory of justice further, and martha nussbaum (1993). eastern philosophies buddhism and taoism, which are also religions, promote these middle way virtues as the basis of good life. carter crockett (2005) has made a very strong business case in favour of the cultural paradigm of virtue: he explains how virtue ethics can make a company a champion for its practical unification of strategic and normative excellence. the empirical research results by robertson and crittenden (2003) show that virtue ethics are the only form of moral philosophy that is suitable for both western and eastern culture and for both capitalist and socialist ideology. hence virtue ethics have the best potential to serve as a value basis in international endeavours. in conclusion, multinational companies and international organizations can manage and enjoy the flavours of regional religions because the virtue ethical values can be found at the core of all religions. foresight strategies based on virtues religions are interconnected with power relationships and can be used as instruments of power. if we focus on the humankind’s inhuman past and table 1. the position of virtues in-between two extremes of evil (developed from ketola 2005: 92, 2006: 58). the seven sins => virtues: the middle road <= the other evil extreme – arrogance => humble pride <= cringing – envy => justness <= extolling – greed => generosity <= exuberance – hostility => kindness <= fawning – gorging => moderation <= anorexia – indulging => loyalty <= puritanism – slackness and falsity => flexibility and reliability <= rigidity and home truth telling fennia 184: 1 (2006) 33foresight strategies and practices based on regional religious … present of continuous wars, genocide and oppression justified by various religious beliefs, we might wish to abolish all religions from this planet. but then we would be looking only at the heads of the coin, where narcissistic ambitions of leaders direct their subjects to destroy each other for temporary egoistic political and economic goals. we would forget the tails of the coin where spectrums of human cultures flourish like ecosystems safeguarding their biodiversity. regional religions belong to this precious cultural diversity as long as they are not exploited to justify opposite goals of uniformity. religions may empower people. it is also worth remembering that even the so-called world religions, such as christianity, islam, buddhism and hinduism have many faces. their contents vary spatially and temporally. bell (1997) discards religions as the value basis for futures strategies on their own but finds them two useful roles in the strategy process: (1) religions are storehouses of value assertions to be tested by other means; and (2) religions are persuasive motivators for people to work for particular futures. in this paper, it is argued that religions can be tested by virtue ethical means – and a common value basis for the futures strategy for all humankind can be found. people with different religious beliefs will be motivated to work together to make this future happen because this strategy meets their own value needs just as well as those of the others. foresight strategy implementation in geographical scales a global futures strategy based on global virtue ethics can be endorsed through worldwide organizations, such as the united nations. in addition, each region and nation can build and implement its own futures strategy in line with the global strategy, in which regional religions can give flavour to the virtue ethical values. we need action now. time is running out. professor markku wilenius (2005: 148), director of finland’s futures research centre, underlines the need for a radical change of direction: “most studies assessing the carrying capacity of the planet indicate that we no longer have even one generation left”. humankind “must adapt its activities to such dimensions as are called for by sustainable development and this must take place in the next 15 years.” wilenius speaks for the age of responsibility. all actors, whether global, regional or local, corporate, institutional or private, should take part in saving the world from destruction. stevenson (2006) advocates a foresight process called anticipatory action learning (aal), which turns visions into actions in a participatory process. aal is a democratic process offering a nonviolent and non-confrontational way to change a preferred future. the stages of aal could be applied to building global, regional and local futures strategies. aal is goal-creating and participatory in contrast to strategic planning which is goalseeking and managerial. brown (2005) sees companies as citizen society members whose task is to carry out the values of society. following his idea, this paper suggests that companies should model their strategies and practices on global, regional and local strategies of our society. small and medium sized companies can build their foresight strategies on the basis of the regional and local strategies. multinational companies can take the global strategy as the basis for their strategies and spice it with regional and local strategies. companies will form networks with intergovernmental organizations, global, regional and local non-governmental organizations, governments and other stakeholders. the views of each actor, whether institutional, corporate or individual will be respected and common ground will be expanded with open and honest ongoing dialogue. there are many ways to approach the foresight corporate strategy issue in practice. collier and wanderley (2005) emphasize that businesses, whether local or global, are global change agents who should commit to the primacy of human rights to secure their future because shareholder value and human rights are the interactive elements of good business. doane (2005: 215) reminds us that instead of simply minimizing the unsustainable impacts of the ‘mammoths’, i.e., big business, we should be supporting the ethical ‘minnows’: “businesses that operate on a sustainable platform and provide a social return on investment, beyond mere financial profit”. stahl (2005) suggests that we should replace our traditional responsibility with reflective responsibility by applying openness, affinity to action and consequentialism. the teleological nature of responsibility and its intrinsic drive for good life leads to modesty: perfection is unattainable – which means that all parties involved must rely on ethical virtues. fuller and tilley (2005) solve the temporal and spatial problems of current business, i.e., the 34 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tarja ketola short-term nature of corporate perspectives and their limited view of responsibilities, by integrating the futures orientation and the ethical orientation in order to build ethical futures strategies. religions have been used also in business to justify the exploitation of humans and nature for centuries. with holistic global, regional and local cooperation the destructive powers of religions can be turned into creative powers. the danger of religions being used for egoistic economic or political purposes by business leaders or world leaders, like presidents george bush, vladimir putin and hu jintao can be avoided if these leaders together combat all fundamentalist religious views, which threaten to tear the consensus of the world apart. in this important role they will be forced to reconsider their own values. for example, president bush with his staff might decide to stop using dichotomies like good and evil when talking about different countries in order not to sound like mahmud ahmadinejad, the fundamentalist president of iran. most muslims are not a threat; they have the same dreams and fears as christians or any other people. many of them dream of transcultural future, which could be achieved through a virtuous spiral vision, which includes: “an alternative economics to world capitalism, cooperation between genders based on dignity and fairness, selfreliant ecological communities, use of advanced technologies to link these communities and a world governance system that is fair, just, representational and guided by wise leadership” (inayatullah 2005: 1198). conclusions there has been friction between science and religion during the history of humankind and the sparks have sometimes kindled great fires. virtue ethics can put out the fires and build solid brick bridges between science and religions without offending the principles of either. religions are based on belief, science on empirical findings. virtue ethics find the recipe for good life both in the core beliefs of religions and in the empirical findings of natural and social science research concerning humans living in their ecosystems. table 2 gives some examples of foresight strategies based on virtues for anyone to follow. table 2. some examples of foresight strategies based on virtues. virtues economic foresight strategies social foresight strategies environmental foresight strategies justness: divide your welfare between all your partners, human or natural, in proportion to their contributions. treat all human beings all over the world according to the same fair play rules. treat nature and its creatures all over the world according to the same fair play rules as the humans. generosity: support disadvantaged and crisisstricken humans and other creatures. help all human beings to have a healthy, safe and happy life. promote local culture. in all activities give priority to biodiversity and invest much time, money and expertise to promote it. kindness: help your fellow human beings and local communities to keep their economy in order. promote an open, friendly and happy atmosphere. treat all people and communities like friends, looking after their wellbeing. treat nature and its creatures like friends, looking after their wellbeing locally, regionally and globally. moderation: see to it that the rich are no more than four times as rich as the poor. find human wellbeing more important than efficiency and adapt working hours and paces accordingly find the wellbeing of nature more important than efficiency, and take this into account in all activities. loyalty: hold on to your employees, partners and locality for better and for worse. defend all people against the abuse and exploitation of others. defend nature and its creatures locally, regionally and globally against the abuse and exploitation of others. flexibility: give people, who have run into financial difficulties, more time to meet their obligations, and help them to conquer their troubles. take account of the individual circumstances of people. take account of the individual circumstances of nature and its creatures. reliability: fulfil your contracts and hold onto your promises. be trustworthy so that all people can believe that you act in their best interests under any circumstances. act in the best interests of nature and its creatures under any circumstances. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 35foresight strategies and practices based on regional religious … futures researchers have a great deal of power in the scenarios and other consultation they provide for political and business leaders. they can influence the views of global, regional and local decision-makers. the question is: could futures researchers promote global virtue ethics to make these foresight strategies for a good life for everyone happen? references ådahl b (2005). kungfutselaisuus tekee paluuta kiinassa. hallitus haluaa opista apuvälineen korruptiota vastaan. turun sanomat 4 december 2005. ala-pietilä p (2004). onnistumisen organisointi. in jolkkonen j, k kopperi & s peura (eds.). näky suomalaisesta hyvästä. piispa eero huovisen juhlakirja, 123–131. wsoy, helsinki. anttila t (2006). ollila haki piispat apuun kallasvuon veropetosasiassa. turun sanomat 27 january 2006. anttonen v & t taira (2004). uskontotiede uskonnollisuuden paikantajana. in fingerroos o & t taira (eds.). uskonnon paikka. kirjoituksia uskontojen ja uskontoteorioiden rajoista, 18–50. sks, helsinki. barnes j (ed) (1988). the complete works of aristotle. princeton university press, princeton. bell w (1997). foundations of futures studies. human science for a new era. volume 2. values, objectivity and good society. 386 p. transaction, new brunswick. bentham j (1789). an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. (reproduced in burns jh & hla hart (eds.). an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation, 1970. 343 p. athlone press, london.) blackmore s (1999). the meme machine. 264 p. oxford university press, oxford. brown mt (2005). corporate integrity. rethinking organizational ethics and leadership. 272 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. cavanagh gf (1999). spirituality for managers: context and critique. journal of organisational change management 12: 3, 186–199. collier j & l wanderley (2005). thinking for the future: global corporate responsibility in the twentyfirst century. futures 37, 169–182. crockett c (2005). the cultural paradigm of virtue. journal of business ethics 62, 191–208. dawkins r (1976). the selfish gene. 224 p. oxford university press, oxford. doane d (2005). beyond corporate responsibility: minnows, mammoths and markets. futures 37, 215–229. donaldson t (1996). values and tension: ethics away from home. harvard business review 74: 5, 48– 58. durkheim é (1912). les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. félix alcan, paris. fuller t & f tilley (2005). corporate ethical futures: responsibility for the shadow on the future of today’s ethical corporations. futures 37, 183–197. gewirth a (1978). reason and morality. 393 p. chicago university press, chicago. heinonen re (2006). globalization needs global ethics for the benefit of all. presentation at the isesco international symposium “human civilizations and cultures: from dialogue to alliance”, tunis, 30 january 2006. inayatullah s (2005). alternative futures for muslims: challenges to linear and cyclic macrohistory. futures 37, 1195–1200. johnson m (1993). moral imagination: implications of cognitive science for ethics. 287 p. university of chicago press, chicago. jung cg (1963). memories, dreams, reflections. collins/routledge & kegan paul, london. kamppinen m (2002). meemit, aika ja ikuisuus – uskontojen ajallinen sitkeys. tieteessä tapahtuu 8, 62–68. kant i (1785). grundlegung zur metaphysik der sitten. (reproduced with commentary in: von höffe o, 1999. grundlegung zur metaphysik der sitten. klostermann, frankfurt am main.) ketola t (1997). premorpheanism: a sustainable value basis for environmental change. international research network on the environment and society (irnes) conference 22–23 september. conference proceedings, 53–89. imperial college, london. ketola t (1999). premorph: conscious and unconscious eco-management. in dobers p & r wolff (eds.). contemporary nordic research in corporate environmental management, 9–39. bas publisher, gothenburg. ketola t (2005). a holistic corporate responsibility model. european academy of management conference, munich, 4–7 may 2005. conference proceedings. track 6: ethics and organizational processes/practices. tum, munich. ketola t (2006). uskonto ja filosofia vastuullisen liiketoiminnan voimavaroina. in ketola t (ed). whatin ketola t (ed). what corporate responsibility research can give to business know-how: values, strategies and practices. publications of the turku school of economics, series kr–1:2006, 47–64. kets de vries mfr (2001). struggling with the demon: perspectives on individual and organizational irrationality. 324 p. psychosocial press, madison. mannermaa m (1986). futures research and social decision-making. futures 18: 5, 658–670. masini eb (1994). why futures studies? second printing. 144 p. grey seal, london. mathers d (2000). spirits and spirituality. in christopher e & hm solomon (eds.). jungian thought in the modern world, 217–232. free association books, london. mccormick dw (1994). spirituality & management. journal of managerial psychology 9: 6, 5–8. 36 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tarja ketola nash l (1994). believers in business. 302 p. thomas nelson publishers, nashville. nikula j (2006). yrittäjyydestä, uskonnollisuudesta ja yritysten yhteiskuntavastuusta. in ketola t (ed).in ketola t (ed). what corporate responsibility research can give to business know-how: values, strategies and practices. publications of the turku school of economics, series kr–1:2006, 35–46. nussbaum m (1993). non-relative virtues: an aristotelian approach. in nussbaum m & a sen (eds.). the quality of life. oxford university press, oxford. ollila mr (1997). moraalin tuolla puolen. 266 p. wsoy, helsinki. ollila mr (2005). persoonan valta. 337 p. wsoy, helsinki. ollila mr (2006). alistamista vai rauhaa? turun sanomat 17 february 2006. prahalad ck (2005). the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. eradicating poverty through profits. 401 p. wharton school of publishing, new york. pyysiäinen i (2004). utopian kartta. in fingerroos o & t taira (eds.). uskonnon paikka. kirjoituksia uskontojen ja uskontoteorioiden rajoista, 53–70. sks, helsinki. rawls j (1971). the theory of justice. 607 p. oxford university press, oxford. robertson cj & wf crittenden (2003). mapping moral philosophies: strategic implications for multinational firms. strategic management journal 24: 4, 385–392. sen a (1995). gender inequality and theories of justice. in nussbaum m & j glover (eds.). women, culture and development: a study of human capabilities. oxford, clarendon press. spinoza b de (1677/1959). ethics. on the correction of the understanding. dent, london. stahl bc (2005). the responsible company of the future: reflective responsibility in business. futures 37, 117–131. stevenson t (2006). from vision into action. futures 38, 667–672. taira t (2004). uskonnolliset käytännöt ja kulttuuriset kontekstit. in fingerroos o & t taira (eds.). uskonnon paikka. kirjoituksia uskontojen ja uskontoteorioiden rajoista, 115–149. sks, helsinki. taira t (2006). uskonto liiketoiminnassa. in ketola tin ketola t (ed). what corporate responsibility research can give to business know-how: values, strategies and practices. publications of the turku school of economics, series kr–1:2006, 17–33. wilenius m (2005). towards the age of corporate responsibility? emerging challenges for the business world. futures 37, 133–150. wittgenstein l (1953). philosophical investigations. cambridge university press, cambridge. wright gh von (1997). the varieties of goodness. reprint. thoemmes press, bristol. (originally: routledge & kegan paul, 1963.) subtle radical moves in scientific publishing urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa63678 doi: 10.11143/fennia.63678 subtle radical moves in scientific publishing over the past 15 years, alternative payment models for the dissemination of research such as author-pays or author’s funder-pays have emerged […] electronic products, such as sciencedirect, scopus and clinicalkey, are generally sold direct to customers through a dedicated sales force […] reference and educational content is sold directly to institutions and individuals […] we expect another year of modest underlying revenue growth, with underlying operating profit growth continuing to exceed underlying revenue growth. (relx 2017, 16–17) the market-driven academic publishing business seems to have gotten a stranglehold on scholars. the dominant publishing houses – known as the ‘big five’1 – play with us as they please. their power has grown exponentially. in the early 90s, their share of social science journal articles was around 15% while now the number is close to 70%, as the splendid analysis by larivière, haustein and mongeon (2015) shows. the companies have extremely good profit margins, estimated to be generally around 20–30% (padula et al. 2017). the largest of the big five, with revenues of 2,320 million pounds in 2016, makes no effort to hide what it stakes in scientific publishing.2 in an annual report, the company proudly presents its success as follows: our largest markets remained resilient during 2016 and we continued to execute against our strategic priorities aimed at achieving more predictable revenues, a higher growth profile and improving returns. as a result, growth of underlying revenues gradually improved to 4% and underlying adjusted operating profits grew 6%, as we continued to grow revenues ahead of costs (relx 2017, 3). these profits are largely generated by the scholarly community. we deliver the substance to the products of the commercial publishers, run a major part of their production as editors, and provide the quality assurance to the processes and end products as peer reviewers. the publishing houses would have nothing to sell without us, yet we find ourselves caught in this production. we submit, edit and provide reviews, thus contributing to the ever-growing hill, like worker-ants. what is more, we also pay for the publications that we produce with them, not once but multiple times. large part of our research is publically funded, which means that governments make huge financial investments in the production of academic publications. then subscriptions to the journals we publish in are sold to our libraries, often with long and unnegotiable embargos protecting the content from being too easily accessible. thereafter the papers are offered for sale to research funders and institutions, as well as individual researchers, who wish to make the results of their research accessible soon after publication through what is called green and golden open access. in some journals this author-pays or author’s funder-pays payment model, as named by the relx company, is the primary way to get published. the institutional, often nationally legitimated, journal ranking systems strongly reinforce this development. respected journals grow ever more important as everyone seeks to publish in them to gain academic merit and acknowledgement, and concurrently, other journals become less and less worthy as publishing in them does not equally promote scholarly careers. in addition to esteem, career development is about bread and butter, as so many of us has witnessed in the past years. thus, scholars keep on carrying straws to the heap, as the finnish saying goes. both young and senior scholars are at pains with the situation. when discussing the topic with colleagues in events such as the annual meeting of the american association of geographers (aag), you often end up first lamenting the corrupt system but then jointly admitting that playing along is the only option. “i just saw your paper published in the journal x, congratulations!” is a common greeting at the corridors, usually referring to one of the journals published by the big five. this genuine joy is an important part of the conduct of conduct that keeps the wheels rolling, to use a foucauldian expression. since i started to edit fennia a year ago, i have become increasingly aware of this problematic in general but also personally. am i asking colleagues to sacrifice their careers when inviting them to write in the journal, especially the young scholars who perhaps benefit the most from the journal’s open access policy? do i act against my institution’s aims by publishing in journals that do not rank © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 2 fennia 195: 1 (2017)editorial high in the finnish journal assessment system, and how will that effect on our research group when assessed with reference to this ranking? is there any credibility in my critique, as my own work can also be found in the big five journals where i regularly publish along with most other geographers? in my despair, i turned to michel de certeau, whose work has been vastly influential in geography. in his book arts de faire, de certeau (1984, xiv–xv) describes “a multitude of ‘tactics’ […] the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’.” how could we mobilise the “networks of an antidiscipline” by the means of the weak in academic publishing where the giants have so skilfully learned to discipline individual scholars, scholarly communities, academic institutions, and governments? it may be the fullness and extensiveness of the problem that tricks us into seeking big answers and thus playing the big game with very little means. perhaps small steps should rather be taken to generate new small games that are harder to rule, from outside and from above. could the radical publishing ethos emerge through subtle moves instead of solemn manifestations? can we find ways to do little things that may gradually change the climate of academic publishing and possibly, in the long term, succeed to change the rules by which this business is run? finding space for such tactical moves requires a closer look at publication processes, and to this end, let me portray a typical trajectory through which a manuscript is processed in a scholarly journal: 1) the manuscript is submitted by the author(s) 2) the manuscript is assessed for fit and basic quality by the editor(s) 3) if seen fit, the responsible editor starts to seek for suitable peer reviewers 4) the manuscript is sent out for external review 5) the reviewers provide comments to the author(s) and the editor(s) 6) a preliminary decision is made by the editor(s), based on the review reports 7) the author(s) receive the decision and, if revisions are requested, decides whether or not to revise the manuscript along the requested lines; in the case of rejection, the process ends in this journal 8) the author(s) resubmit the revised manuscript, sometimes including language editing, together with the response letter 9) the revised version of the manuscript and the response letter are assessed by the editor(s) 10) the manuscript is possibly sent out to external review, for the same or new reviewers 11) the reviewers provide comments on the revised manuscript 12) a final decision is typically made at this point by the editor(s), yet a second revision and third peer review round are also possible (repeating steps 7–12) 13) the author(s) receive the decision and, if minor revisions are requested, revise the manuscript; in the case of rejection, the process ends in this journal 14) the author(s) resubmit the finalised manuscript, perhaps together with a response letter 15) the manuscript is accepted for publication by the editor(s) 16) the accepted manuscript is sent for copyediting, and possibly language editing 17) the author(s) receive the proofs for technical corrections 18) the proofs are assessed and accepted by the copyeditor, perhaps requiring further rounds of corrections 19) the paper is published online 20) the paper is published in an issue. even this minimalistic description shows that the process of publishing a referee journal article contains a significant amount of academic ‘volunteer work’ by authors, editors, and reviewers. it also reveals stages where publication processes may lengthen or become complicated, for various reasons. these steps, not easily controllable by the publisher, may be the most opportune moments for influencing the system. the experience i have gained in journal publishing – as author, reviewer, editor and publisher – points towards peer reviewing as a particularly critical element in the publication process. journals are reliant on external assessment, without which they would be publishing merely learned texts without quality control by peers. this practice relies on a large scientific community with scholars ready to fennia 195: 1 (2017) 3kirsi pauliina kallio provide their expertise for the use of the publishers without payment. even if each commitment to review a manuscript is relatively small, the work tends to pile up: trusted scholars with up-to-date expertise on certain topics are generally requested for reviews. as the merits gained from peer reviewing are minimal, the possibility to influence the research field remains the greatest award from this work. compared to authors and editors, reviewers hence have much less at stake in an individual publication process. herein, i suggest, lies one possibility for radical academic agency. by committing deliberately to peer reviewing in alternative journals, scholarly communities could generate an asset that the big five and other commercial publishers cannot easily conquest. this of course requires collaboration from scholars in their interchanging positions as reviewers, authors, editors and publishers, and perhaps prioritising alternative journals over commercial ones when committing to reviewing to avoid a growing workload. peer reviewing consists of a number of elements that can be enhanced. publishers may improve their policies and practices, to support the work of reviewers and reward them for their work in one way or another. editors have many opportunities to ensure a good quality peer review before, after and during the process. frustrating review work can be reduced by making desk rejections and asking for technical corrections prior to the review process; thus, only carefully written papers with good potential are sent out for review. taking an active stance between the reviewers and the authors, instead of just passing on review reports that sometimes are perplexingly contradictory or unjust to the manuscript, warrants that the reviews serve the process adequately. some reviews may also be invited to the journal as commentaries to published articles. authors, on their behalf, can try to make the best use of the reviews and respond to them in a careful manner, including discussion about the reviews with the editors. and what about the key actors of the process, the reviewers? as i see it, simply providing justified comments in a respectful manner, even when you do not like or agree with the paper, makes a good review report. this is sometimes achieved better in an open review process where the reviewer and the author engage in a dialogue as persons with names and faces – a procedure that journals can actively encourage. those of us regularly writing, editing and reviewing know that what i have suggested above requires special effort and does not always succeed despite the good intentions. however, i believe that this work could pay back. if we are able to generate fast, good quality review processes by working together in alternative journals, this may lead to publishing our work within months rather than years, openly accessible from day one. moreover, retaining all rights to published work – as requested by the creative commons and many genuinely open access journals – provides the authors the option of making their work visible and accessible in a number of other venues as well. the combination of ethical open access policy and community-driven peer reviewing could provide one radical opening through which to break out subtly from the commercial domination that we are collectively experiencing. these thoughts are not mine alone. they have developed in national and international collaboration with colleagues and institutional actors, whom i wish to thank for sharing these concerns and taking some of these ideas further with me. in finland, we are currently seeking new publishing policies, practices and ethics, first, in the kotilava project led by the federation of finnish learned societies and the national library and, second, in the julkea! project bringing together three scientific societies and academic journals. internationally, fennia is engaged in a network of alternative geography journals. we convened in april at the boston aag conference in a panel session introducing and debating the non-commercial alternatives in journal publishing in geography. it was organized and chaired by simon batterbury who edits the journal of political ecology, with panelists from the journals human geography (dick peet, john finn), acme (simon springer, lawrence berg absent) and fennia (myself). another panel will take place in the forthcoming nordic geographers meeting (ngm) in stockholm, organised by fennia and involving an international panel of distinguished scholars: stuart aitken, marianne blidon, sara fregonese, jonathan metzger, katharyne mitchell, pierre mounier and phil steinberg. this panel will focus on the challenges of publishing in the anglo-centred academy, and welcomes everyone from the conference to participate in discussions on publishing also more broadly. both discussions will be published in fennia’s new publication section reflections later this year, which http://www.kotilava.fi/19-elokuu-2016-1247/kotilava-%e2%80%93-finnish-academic-journals-towards-immediate-open-access http://julkea.fi/in-english/ 4 fennia 195: 1 (2017)editorial we hope will continue the discussion on academic publishing within and beyond geography. additional discussion pieces may be suggested to the responsible editor james riding, who joined the editorial team this spring. this issue of fennia includes four research articles, a reflections series based on the keynote lecture by henk van houtum at the 2016 annual meeting of finnish geographers in joensuu, and one book review. it launches reflections as a new publication format that, we hope, will enliven discussions on topical and critical issues in geography and neighbouring research areas. it is dedicated to publishing short critical reflections on any aspect of the discipline of geography, offering a space for empirically grounded as well as theoretically informed research speaking to contemporary geographic concerns. we encourage submissions in alternative, unconventional formats, and pieces that emerge from collaborations between scholars and creative practitioners for instance. moreover, this issue begins the series of fennia lectures that will be organised by and published in the journal regularly, with invited commentaries. in addition to the new publication formats, fennia has accomplished several technical renewals during the spring. we have joint in the new journal management and publishing service of the federation of finnish learned societies (journal.fi). this has meant moving to a new website (fennia. journal.fi) and taking up the ojs 3 open source software from the public knowledge project. on top of these major technical amendments, our managing editor hanna salo has updated the layout of the publication and we have revised our author guidelines. the editorial team hopes that this all will make fennia better accessible to broad audiences and smoothen the publication processes between authors, reviewers, and editors. please enjoy and circulate broadly these fully open access pieces of work, and do not hesitate to contact the editors with your novel and even radical publication ideas. kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief notes 1 the names of these publishers are purposefully not mentioned in this editorial. 2 this includes services related to “scientific, technical and medical markets by organising the review, editing and disseminating of primary research, reference and professional education content, as well as by providing a range of database and decision tools”. references de certeau, m. (1984) the practice of everyday life. university of california press, berkeley. larivière, v., haustein, s. & mongeon, p. (2015) the oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era. plos one 10(6) e0127502. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 padula, d., brembs, b., harnad, s., herb, u., missingham, r., morgan, d. & ortbal, j. (2017) democratizing academic journals: technology, services, and open access. white paper, issued march 2017. <https://t. co/fjaznuzdcu 3.5.2017> 03.05.2017 relx (2017) relx group annual report 2016. relx group company reports. relx group. <http://www.relx. com/investorcentre/reports%202007/documents/2016/relxgroup_ar_2016.pdf> 03.05.2017. https://fennia.journal.fi/about/editorialteam https://journal.fi/index/index http://fennia.journal.fi http://fennia.journal.fi https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 https://t.co/fjaznuzdcu 3.5.2017 https://t.co/fjaznuzdcu 3.5.2017 http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/documents/2016/relxgroup_ar_2016.pdf http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/documents/2016/relxgroup_ar_2016.pdf 24961_07_myllyla.pdf the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels yrjö myllylä myllylä, yrjö (2006). the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels. fennia 184: 1, pp. 59–73. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper evaluates the development of the socio-spatial structures and geoeconomic position of murmansk oblast up the year 2025. the study applies strong prospective trends and industrial cluster approaches in analysis and interpretation and it interprets the results in the context of regional development theories. the delphi method is applied for analysing the potential development paths of murmansk oblast. two delphi panels were set up in 2005. the panel data in this article consist of the answers of 77 persons including pilot interview. the experts in the murmansk panel are from murmansk oblast, the ones in the moscow panel are from moscow and st. petersburg, and those in the international panel come from finland, norway and great britain. the clusters of transportation and energy will be the most probable growth sectors in murmansk oblast during 2005–25. according to the expert panels the three most important strong prospective main trends influencing socio-economic development in murmansk oblast constitute the potential of logistics and transport, the impacts of new technology and globalisation. from the viewpoint of development theories the development of murmansk oblast seems to rely very much on the argumentation of the resources and physical environment and supply-side theories. yrjö myllylä, c/o oy aluekehitys rd, meriusva 5, fi-02320 espoo, finland. email: yrjo.myllyla@rdmarketinfo.net. background after the collapse of the soviet union, the economic integration of murmansk oblast to the global market has created new opportunities not only in relation to the utilisation of natural resources in the region, but also regarding the development of knowledge-based industries, such as information technology, environmental business, tourism and logistical services. developing of murmansk oblast for instance the transport and logistics infrastructure system in a rational manner requires an assessment of the future population development and economic conditions of the region. the futures studies approach provides methods to develop this assessment. murmansk oblast belongs to the northwest russian governmental region. it is also a part of the barents euro-arctic co-operation area. the population is concentrated to murmansk as well as to some resource communities (rautio & andreev 2005) (fig. 1). there are several military bases in the area. during recent years the economical growth has been slower than in the rest of russia. mining and the metal refining are the biggest branches of production. there has been fairly little new production in the area. however there has been an increase in services and lately also in the construction sector (didyk et al. 2005). the opinions concerning the future of murmansk oblast have varied over the years. very different opinions have been presented concerning the development of murmansk oblast seen either as regressing periphery, or as a junction of traffic and industry, as well as an export channel of the northwest russian oil to the world market (kauppala 1998; lausala & valkonen 1999; oldberg 2000; filippov et al. 2003; brunstad et al. 2004). murmansk oblast has to be examined not only as a part of the barents region and northern europe, but also as a part of a global system. russia is integrated in global trade especially through the 60 fennia 184: 1 (2006)yrjö myllylä export of energy over recent years and this fact strengthens the role of the barents sea and murmansk oblast (tykkyläinen 2003b: 172; brunstad et al. 2004). objectives – evaluation of the needs of development of socio-economic development and logistics the objective of this article is based on specialists’ interviews to analyse the development of the murmansk oblast and factors that have an impact on the development during a period extending until the year 2025. the research is based on the utilisation of the methods used in futures studies as well as geographical theory. the aim is to create probable pictures of the future taking into consideration the changing factors possibly that make an impact on the development. in this article the economical, social and logistical development of the future in murmansk oblast is outlined as part of the russian geoeconomy and is based on the interview material of the specialists’ panel consisting of actors in murmansk oblast and the previous analysis of the development of the area as well as on the interview material of the specialists’ panel consisting of the actors in moscow and st. petersburg and the international panel, mainly consisting of finns. the article gives an overall picture of the opinions of these three delphi panels concerning the future development of murmansk oblast and creates starting points to build more exact scenarios for further investigations. taking these premises as starting points this research aims at evaluating the economic structure of the region, particularly in relation to the industrial structure, population, and logistics infrastructure. the point of the analysis is that appropriate planning for future infrastructure in regard to logistical needs is impossible without a well-grounded assessment of the region’s future population structure and economic conditions. theory framework – strong prospective trends and clusters approach the trend approach of the strong prospective trends (spt) belonging to futures studies forms the most important theoretical viewpoint. central to the concept of futures studies is that it is not possible to predict the future only on the basis of past fig. 1. population of murmansk oblast is concentrated in murmansk, mining and industrial localities and localities nearby military bases. data source of urban population: murmansk region in figures 2004. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 61the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels developments. a strong prospective trend is a future trend or way of development which is based on the fact that there is (e.g. statistical time series) showing the existence of a trend and that the experts who evaluate this trend agree that the trend will continue in the future. in practice, the spt concept means the same as the commonly used mega trend concept, but is a more grounded scientific argumentation (slaughter 1996; toivonen 2004: 6–10). strong prospective trends may lead to different kind of futures (fig. 2). prospective trends can relate to phenomena that have a long history or they could be phenomena in which a certain direction of development has been detected only lately. prospective trends can continue in the future along their current direction or the trend may break off and lead to a different kind of future from how it could be deduced from today’s development (toivonen 2004: 10). there are weak signals whose current appearances may be the reason for the discontinuation of the trend. weak signals may with time become stronger, turn out to be significant phenomena and develop into even strong trends. a strong trend can also emerge when several weak signals combine with one another. the most important objective aimed for is to recognise the key spt trends in murmansk oblast because based on these it is possible to later on make other evaluations concerning the development in the area. the trends influence the development of the clusters in the area. the word cluster normally means bunch. in this context it stands for a co-operation network consisting of companies and other actors such as research institutes and schools. there are companies in a cluster who produce their products for the market (e.g., porter 1990). these “locomotive companies” commanding the market are normally big companies – but there may be significant differences between the lines of business activities. in particular the research and educational sector form an important group of actors because the success of the clusters depends more and more on know-how. the finance sector forms an important group of actors in the cluster. clustering in the form described above is called vertical clustering. in horizontal clustering learning and creating of innovations form an important reason for enterprises and other activities to find their ways closer to each other (malmberg & maskell 2002: 438). especially the vertical clusters manifest themselves and materialise in geographical spaces, which require the analysis of transport infrastructure. in this research nine clusters have been selected to be more closely examined (table 1). the objective has been to examine existing strong clusters and so called rising clusters. data on the structure of the economics of the area as well as pilot interviews have been used as instruments. it has been intentional to collect the clusters in sufficiently big groups of industry in order to make data handling and using the method of specialist interviews possible. mining and metal refining, food stuffs, transportation and logistical services form the existing clusters most clearly. particularly tourism, ict clusters, environmental clusters, welfare clusters and partly also security clusters can all be considered as rising clusters. in the energy cluster there are existing activities (as electrical production) as well as rising activities (possibly e.g. gas production). finding key actors, who have a strong influence on the above-mentioned development of murmansk oblast, are the most important challenge. the interview data and a cluster-based approach are used to identify those actors with the greatest influence over the region’s development. fig. 2. model of a strong prospective trend (original source: toivonen 2004: 10). published with the permission of marja toivonen. 62 fennia 184: 1 (2006)yrjö myllylä fig. 3. causality connections. driving force actors have an impact on the creation of the spt trends. the spt trends may be grouped in main trends. spt trends have an impact on the development of the clusters. the cluster appears in geographical space and the logistics play an important role in its development. the actors make the decisions in the development of the clusters and logistics on which the trends also make an impact. the causality between economic and social futures as well as anticipating of the logistical development needs in murmansk oblast are outlined in fig. 3. behind the strong prospective trends (spt sub trends and spt main trends) there are driving forces, i.e. factors, which are making an impact on the development of murmansk oblast; for example the growth of the world economy, the growth of the world population, the unstable situation in the middle east (especially the impact on the oil price), the transition process in russia among others. strong prospective trends have an impact on the clusters. for example the oil price gives a boost to a rising energy cluster based on oil in the area. the clusters on the other hand are geographical phenomena and hence logistical development actions are needed in order to have a favourable development of these. both the development of the clusters and the development of their logistics require decisionmaking on different levels. methodology and data the policy delphi method the delphi-method is the most well-known method used in future research based on interviews with an expert panel. typical features for the method is that there are two or more interview rounds, and in between them a feedback summary directed at the participators in the panel, as well as, anonymity (e.g., sackman 1975: 9; kuusi 1999: 74). by using this method opinions can be expressed without others being able to identify whose opinions they are. in this case the arguments in the answers will play a central role as the participators assess other participators’ answers. this has proven to be the strength of the method. the structure of the material presented in this paper as well as the research is shown in table 1. the delphi method is rather a form of a developed theme interview than an opinion survey (see e.g., kuusi 1999: 77, 80). therefore, the criteria concerning the amount of samples and statistical tests which are assumed for opinion research should not be required for this material and handling of it as assumed by sackman (1975: 26). when analysing the material in the future the so called policy delphi (tyroff 1975) tradition should be emphasised, where the interest groups and the differences between their opinions and causes are recognised instead of trying to reach some common view for the whole panel or the panels in the conventional delphi-application way. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 63the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels table 1. the grouping of specialists participating in the material of the article based on their competence and interest. here ‘competence’ refers to special experience in clustering and ‘interest’ actors in clusters. panels interview rounds and number of respondents: murmansk panel consists of pilot interview (10 persons), delphi-panel’s 1st round (25 persons), delphipanel’s 2nd round (19 respondents); moscow-panel consists of delphi-panel 2nd round interview (6 respondents) and international panel consists of delphi-panel 2nd round interview (17 respondents). interest /actors in cluster competence companies finance and other support service research and training administration other / independent sum m u rm an sk m o sc o w in te rn at io n al m u rm an sk m o sc o w in te rn at io n al m u rm an sk m o sc o w in te rn at io n al m u rm an sk m o sc o w in te rn at io n al m u rm an sk m o sc o w in te rn at io n al m u rm an sk m o sc o w in te rn at io n al energy/cluster 3 1 2 2 3 2 8 2 3 mining and metal processing 3 1 1 1 1 5 10 2 transportation and logistical services 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 5 1 4 food 5 1 1 6 1 tourism 2 1 1 2 3 3 ict 3 1 2 2 2 7 3 environment 2 2 1 4 1 welfare 2 1 1 1 2 6 1 safety 1 1 others 4 2 4 2 sum 23 5 6 6 4 2 12 4 9 6 54 6 17 the interviewees – the interest and competence of the participants of the panel have an impact on the opinions in choosing the participants of the panel the competence and interest of the participants in the theme of the research must be recognised. for example osmo kuusi has stated that the opinions of the participants are bound to these two dimensions (kuusi 1999: 193–205). in the research nine different clusters formed the competence alternatives of the participants of the panel (table 1). enterprise, financing and related supporting services, research, education and administration are points of interest. the so called group of independent forms an important group of their own. for example the representatives of the civic organisation belong to this group. the international group is in its entity independent of its interest because at this moment the income of the participants could not be considered depending on murmansk oblast. in the pilot interview the participants were asked to suggest participants from above interests of competence. scenarios strong prospective trends (spt) based on pilot interviews in the 1st round of the delphi-panel there were 75 different deductively derived strong future trends created as proto trends there. to the 2nd interview round 27 sub trends with strongest for support from the specialists were selected. evaluated sub trends and their grouping into main trends i–v and a tentative driving forces analysis in the delphi-panels 2nd interview round are shown in table 2. in this paper the results are handled on the main trend level. the respondents are grouped in different panels according to their viewpoint. there are three panels: the murmansk panel, the moscow panel, and the international panel. the murmansk 64 fennia 184: 1 (2006)yrjö myllylä table 2. evaluated sub trends and their grouping into main trends i–v and a tentative driving forces analysis in the delphi panels 2nd interview round. driving forces spt sub trends spt main trends connections of the murmansk area 1 development of transportation technology i technological development 2 development of information and communication technology deepening of co-operation with rest of europe 3 development of energy technology 4 increase in number of small enterprises degree of corruption and economic risks 5 increase of information and communication flow ii logistical flows 6 increase of transportation in mining and metal industry development of energy prices 7 increase of oil transit 8 increase of gas transit growth of world economy 9 increase of coal transit 10 increase of container traffic historical factors / traditions of the soviet union and transit process in russia 11 increase of capital and financing flows 12 the expansion of eu and deepening of the integration iii globalisation natural resources of murmansk and barents area 13 increase of traffic and trafficability in the north-west passage 14 increase of domestic electricity price (liberation of energy markets) old fashioned education / anticipation 15 increase of the international oil market price 16 increase of domestic price on oil and oil products policy of small enterprises 17 increase of russian economy 18 increase of political and economical co-operation power politics in russia (e.g. oligarchs in kremlin) 19 increase and westernisation of individual values iv value based development 20 increase in openness role of various forms of energy and eu’s energy policy 21 strengthening of environmental values 22 increase of personal welfare situation in the middle east 23 increased risk of environmental disaster (oil, nuclear) 24 decrease of the population v development of socio-economy of the population time / corrosion / nuclear waste 25 continuation of migration to economical centres 26 change in the structure of population (ageing population) threat of terrorism 27 increase in income level 28 a positive development of world market price on metals and apatite vi other, what? word politics of usa and russia and usa-russia relations 29 increase of importance of the geopolitical position in the murmansk area panel is divided into three councils that represent existing, rising, and independent clusters. the basic assumption is that the information given by the participators of the panel depends on their interests (kuusi 1999: 79, 193). based on the panels and the councils different opinions about main factors influencing development can be created as they are presented in table 3. the most important spt trends influencing in the beginning of the 21th century today the trends that make an impact on the economic development in murmansk oblast are somewhat varying between the respondent group (table 3). the murmansk panel as a whole emphasises in the first place the technological developfennia 184: 1 (2006) 65the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels table 3. the impact of the main trends on the economical development in the murmansk area in the beginning of 2000 and the strengthening of the trends until 2025. the numbers are the mean values of the scores given by the panel members. questions scenario panel /council main trend q 1.2 what is your opinion on the significance of the following trends especially in the economic development of murmansk oblast?1 q 1.3 how do you expect the trend to change by the year 2025?2 scen 1 scen 1 a scen 1 b scen 1 c scen 2 scen 3 murmansk panel: all respondents murmansk panel, council 1., representatives of the existing clusters murmansk panel, council 2., representatives of the rising clusters murmansk panel, council 3., representatives of the independent clusters moscow panel international panel average3 average average average average average q 1.2 q 1.3 q 1.2 q 1.3 q 1.2 q 1.3 q 1.2 q 1.3 q 1.2 q 1.3 q 1.2 q 1.3 2005 2025 2005 2025 2005 2025 2005 2025 2005 2025 2005 2025 i technological development 3.61 3.97 3.45 4.00 3.71 4.04 2.75 4.00 4.01 4.17 3.41 4.38 ii logistical flows 3.61 4.06 3.29 4.00 4.01 3.96 2.07 4.50 3.70 3.69 3.13 4.04 iii globalisation 3.47 4.36 3.19 5.00 3.73 4.28 3.21 4.14 3.79 3.85 3.27 4.16 iv value based trends 3.03 3.35 3.13 3.00 2.96 3.25 3.20 3.80 2.90 3.00 3.09 4.00 v socio-economical development of the population 3.39 3.34 3.48 3.75 3.39 3.60 3.13 2.50 3.44 3.42 3.42 3.61 1 scale for the questions 1.2: impact value of trends 1 = very small, 2 = small, 3 = moderate, 4 = strong, 5 = very strong. 2 scale for the questions 1.3: 1 = decreases significantly, 2 = decreases slightly, 3 = remains unchanged, 4 = increases slightly, 5 = increases significantly. 3 note that average values should be considered with certain reservations as they are based on the answers of only a few sporadically chosen persons especially concerning the council of the murmansk panel. ment, then the logistical flows, and finally globalisation as the acting main trends. the international panel, which in this respect can be considered representing also an independent view, emphasises the socio-economic development of the population together with the technological development and the globalisation trend in the third place. there is a sub trend that belongs to the main trend of globalisation and that is the increase of the international oil market price, which has a big impact on economic development in the murmansk region. according to the murmansk delphi panel this trend will continue and be strengthened in the future. from the answers we can draw the conclusion that the different groups at this moment agree on the importance of the value-based trends and socio-economic development trends. however concerning the other trends the distribution is more widerly dispersed (fig. 4). similarly in the main trends the distribution is also seen in the so called sub trends of the main trends when comparing the responses from the various respondent groups. when interpreting these results one should bear in mind that the number of respondents in the various groups is small. the development of spt trends up to the year 2025 the panels and their councils share the same viewpoint concerning those three trends that are most likely to strengthen by the year 2025: globalisation, logistical flows and technological development are the most strengthening trends. however, there are some differences in how they rank the order of relative importance between these trends (table 3). the average values should be considered with a certain reservation as the amount of re66 fennia 184: 1 (2006)yrjö myllylä 1 2 3 4 5 i technolocal development ii logistical flows iii globalisation iv value based development v development of socio-economy of the population trend im pa ct of tr en d, va lu e 1– 5 scen 1 scen 1 a scen 1 b scen 1 c scen 2 scen 3 fig. 4. impact of the main trends on the development of the murmansk area as surveyed in 2005 per respondent groups / scenarios. (scale 1 = very small, 2 = small, 3 = moderate, 4 = strong, 5 = very strong.) spondents is very small. most attention should be paid to the reasons given for the opinions. in examining the strengthening of the trends by the year 2025 on the main trend level, it seems that the main trend of the technological development has the smallest distribution. concerning globalisation, the opinions are very near to each other among the various respondent groups. the globalisation trend of scenario 1 a (representatives for the existing clusters in the murmansk panel) is emphasised the most, but the response is based on a single response at this point. concerning the main trend of socio-economic development the distribution also is narrow, the responses of the so called independent respondent group make an exception but for the aforementioned group the response is based on a single opinion. the impact on 1 2 3 4 5 i technolocal development ii logistical flows iii globalisation iv value based development v development of socio-economy of the population trend s tr en gt he ni ng of th e m ai n tr en ds ,v al ue 1– 5 scen 1 scen 1 a scen 1 b scen 1 c scen 2 scen 3 fig. 5. strengthening of the main trends that make an impact on the development of the murmansk area by the year 2025 per respondent group/scenario. (scale 1 = decreases significantly, 2 = decreases slightly, 3 = remains unchanged, 4 = increases slightly, 5 = increases significantly.) the future of the value-based trends clearly seems to have the widest variation. the deviation of the sub trends mainly follows the distribution of the main trends (fig. 5). the deviation can most clearly be seen in the responses by the representatives of the existing clusters in the murmansk panel and in the responses of the independents in the murmansk panel. however, the above mentioned responses are based on a single one or the responses of a very few which explains the distribution. in spite of this fact, in the analysis that will follow special attention will be paid to the argumentation of the responses from these groups. the rise of the international oil market price is a central sub trend of the globalisation main trend which has an impact on the economical developfennia 184: 1 (2006) 67the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels ment of murmansk oblast. the oil price has been rising steeply from the beginning of 2000 (british petroleum 2005). specialists explain that the reason is the growth in the world economy, in which china plays a central role, and the unstable situation in the middle east. the impact of trends on the development of clusters the trends or actually the driving forces behind them make an impact on the development of the clusters according to the schematic model shown in fig. 6. certain trends have an impact on certain clusters. the impact of the trends can facilitate the development of the cluster, measured with the turnover of an enterprise or with employment. the development of some trends could be obstructing the development of certain clusters (e.g. the ageing of the population). the figure is schematic and the spt trends illustrate the acting spt main trends. for example if we think that the transportation and logistical cluster forms a growing cluster, following main trends could be picked out which most clearly support the growth of the cluster: stp i = the development of technology (sub trend e.g. development of transportation technology). spt ii = logistical flows (e.g. the growth of oil transit), spt iii = globalisation (sub trend e.g. rise of oil price). globalisation and development of value-based trends (spt iv) or the socio-economic development of the population (spt v) can have an decreasing effect on some other cluster or part of it. in practise there are trends which are supporting and counteracting the development of the same cluster. the total impact of the trends on the development of the clusters can vary between the groups of respondents. the differences could in this case be explained by the interest of the groups of respondents to emphasise certain driving force actors laying behind the trends. in table 4 the views of the participators in each panel are presented in order to describe how the various trends are making an impact on the different clusters. the analysis is based on the answers from the panelists. there the participators were asked to choose, as far as the main trends were concerned, which are the three most important clusters whose development the trends facilitate most. which clusters were then emphasised? when looking at this moment at the acting three main trends by respondent groups, one can make the following statement. according to the murmansk panel the trends have the biggest impact on the clusters of transportation and logistical services as well as mining and metal processing. according to the moscow panel the trends acting at this moment give most support to the develfig. 6. the impact of spt trends on the development of the cluster. 68 fennia 184: 1 (2006)yrjö myllylä table 4. the impact of the main trends on clusters per scenario or respondent group. the clusters which got most, second most and third most mentions are divided with semicolon (;) from each other. if the logistical development object has got only one mention it has been placed within brackets. explanations: en = energy, min = mining and metal processing, log = transportation and logistical services, food = food, tou = tourism, ict = information and communication technology, wel = welfare, env = environment, saf = safety. question 2.4 scenario panel / council main trend /sub trends which cluster development in murmansk oblast area is facilitated by the spt trends the most? choose for each trend the three most important clusters, the development of which are supported by the trend. scen 1 scen 1 a scen 1 b scen 1 c scen 2 scen 3 murmansk panel, all respondents murmansk panel, council 1, representatives of the existing clusters murmansk panel, council 2, representatives of the rising clusters murmansk panel, council 3, independent respondents moscow panel international panel clusters clusters clusters clusters clusters clusters i technological development log;en,ict; min. en,min,log;ict;. log;ict;en. log;.;. en,log;min;. en;min,log;ict. ii logistical flows log;min;wel. (min,log,env;.;.) log;wel; (min, ict.) (en,min,log;.;.) en,min,log; (wel;.) en,log;min;. iii globalisation tou;min;log. min;(en,log, tou;.) tou;min;. (log,ict;.;.) tou, log;. en;log;min. iv value based trends env;tou;ict, wel. (tou,ict,wel;.;.) env;tou;. (tou,ict,wel, env;.;.) food,env,saf;.;. ict,wel.;env;. v the socioeconomical development of the population en;log,wel; min,tou,env, saf. wel;(en,log, saf;.) tou;.;. en;(min,log, env;.) en,min,log,wel, env,saf;.;. wel;food;min, log. the decisionmaking in the clusters federal, regional and international. regional and federal. federal, regional, local. regional, local, federal. federal, regional, local, international. opment of the clusters of transportation and logistical services, then energy, and mining and metal processing. in the future the strengthening trends will also support the above clusters most clearly. according to the international panel the trends that are making the biggest impact at this moment support the clusters of transportation and logistical services mining and metal processing as well as the development of the energy cluster. in the future the trends also support the same clusters most clearly. as a conclusion, it can be stated that all panels and councils share the opinion that the existing and future trends will have the biggest impact on the clusters of transportation and logistical services. also mining and the industry related to metal processing seem to form an important target for the impact of the trends with the exception of the council 3, i.e., the group of independents of the murmansk panel. the impact of the trends on the energy clusters comes up, according to this analysis, most clearly in council 1 of the murmansk panel, i.e., according to the opinion by representatives of the existing clusters, as well as, according to the opinion of the international panel and the moscow panel. the representatives of the rising and independent clusters emphasise most clearly the impact on the itc as being the object of the trends. level of decision making in the clusters the members in the panels evaluated the importance of the various decision-making levels in the development of the clusters. the levels of decision making were the local level, the regional level, the federal level, and the international level. on each level there could be decision makers as well from fennia 184: 1 (2006) 69the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels the public as the enterprise level, of which the most important ones were tried also to be recognised. after all respondent groups and all nine clusters in the study were examined and compared, one could draw the conclusion that decision-making on the federal and regional level is emphasised in the development of the clusters. however, council 3 of the murmansk panel (independent respondents) and the moscow panel emphasise the importance of the local level to some extent in addition to these. if the comparison is made cluster by cluster it appears that on the federal level the decisionmaking is emphasised more strongly in energy than in any of the other levels compared. on the local level the development of especially the welfare cluster as well as the food cluster and security seem to make a big impact. logistical development needs members in the panels evaluate the most important logistical development objects in each cluster. there were all together ten logistical development objects: railway connection and traffic, harbours and harbour activities, roads and road transportation, oil pipe and maintenance services, gas pipe and maintenance services, electricity transfer lines, ict networks and services, air traffic and services, and passenger traffic on road as well as border crossing services (table 5). when those main trends that also make the strongest impact are taken into consideration and the clusters supported by the main trends, i.e. transportation and logistical services cluster, mining and metal processing cluster, and the energy cluster, as a summary for the transportation and logistical services cluster, that the answers from various groups as a whole railway connections and traffic as well as the harbours got most of the mentions followed by road connections to develop. in developing the transportation and logistical services clusters the murmansk panel is of the opinion that the most important object will be railway connections and harbours, roads and the passenger traffic on the roads coming next. according to the moscow panel the railway connections and ict networks are the most important ones after the harbours. the international panel considers for the first the harbours and the railway connections and traffic, and for the second the roads and ict networks as the most important objects of development. in developing of the mining and metal processing clusters, as a summary of the most important logistical development projects in the various panels, the railway connections and harbours are the most emphasised ones and are among the two most important objects of logistical development in all respondent groups. the most important oil and gas fields in northwest russia, present and planned oil and gas pipes as well as harbours are shown in the map (fig. 7). in the map the role of murmansk oblast is seen in the energy transportation and export of the whole northwest russia. murmansk being a not frozen atlantic harbour which can be reached globally from the rest of europe and usa will play a central role in the supply. all panels emphasise an oil pipeline for the development of the energy cluster as belonging to the two most important projects and two panels out of three chose the construction of an electricity transfer net. according to the murmansk panel the development of the electricity transfer network and the oil pipeline are the two most important projects for the development of the energy cluster. the moscow panel as well emphasises the electricity transfer network followed by railway connections and traffic and oil pipeline as the most important objects to be developed. the international panel considers the oil pipeline for the first, and then the harbours and gas pipe as the most important objects to be developed. when it comes to the level of decision-making in logistics, the panels seem to share the same opinion about the development of the three chosen clusters supported by the main trends. they consider the federal level and the regional level to be the two most important levels of decision-making. the importance of the local and international level of decision-making in transportation and logistics is also stated in the murmansk and the international panels’ views. testing of explanatory theories the material produced and analysed in the research can be contextualized with geographical theories according to fig. 8 and at the same time evaluate how well the theories function in the light of the material. according to the figure the driving forces impact on the formation of the strong prospective trends, so called spt trends (e.g. the growth of the world economy and the unstable 70 fennia 184: 1 (2006)yrjö myllylä table 5. logistical development measures per cluster and per scenario and respondent group. the logistical objects of development which got most and second most mentions are divided with semicolon (;) from each other. if the logistical development object has got only one mention it has been placed within brackets. question 4.1 which are the most important logistical development items in developing the clusters? choose from each cluster the two most important logistical development items in order to create the cluster in such a way that you would prefer and consider possible. scenario scen 1 scen 1 a scen 1 b scen 1 c scen 2 scen 3 panel /council cluster murmanskpanel, all answers murmansk panel council1, representatives of the existing clusters murmansk panel council 2, representatives of the rising clusters murmansk panel council 3, independent respondents moscow panel international panel logistical development item1 logistical development item logistical development item logistical development item logistical development item logistical development item 1 energy electr.;oil pipe; railway,ports, gas pipe. oil pipe; (roads,electr.). electr.;railway, ports;gas pipe. (oil pipe,gas pipe,electr.;.) electr.;railway, oil pipe. oil pipe; ports,gas pipe. 2 mining and metal railway,ports;. railway;(ports,oil pipe,gas pipe). ports;railway. (railway, ports;.) railway;ports, electr.. railway;ports, roads. 3 transportation and logistical services railway,ports; roads,pass traff.. ports;(railway). railway,roads, pass traff.;ports. (railway, ports;.) railway,ict netw.;ports. ports;railway; roads, ict netw.. 4 food (railway,ports, roads,ict netw., border:.) (ict netw.). railway,ports, roads,border;. – (pass traff., border;.) ports,roads; railway. 5 ict ict netw.;electr. border. (ict netw.,border;.) ict netw.;ports. (ict netw., border,.) ict netw.;electr.. ict netw.;border; electr.. 6 tourism air traffic; roads,pass traff.. (roads;.) air traffic;pass traff.;roads. – ports,pass traff.; railway,air traffic. pass traff.,border; air traffic. 7 welfare oil pipe;ports. (railway;.) oil pipe;ports. (ports,oil pipe;.) railway,ports, roads;oil pipe, gas pipe, air traffic, pass traff.. pass traff.;ict netw.. 8 environment oil pipe;gas pipe. (border;.) oil pipe;gas pipe. (oil pipe;.) oil pipe,gas pipe; railway, ports,ict netw.. oil pipe;gas pipe. 9 safety roads,oil pipe, border;. (border;.) roads;(oil pipe, gas pipe,air traffic,pass traff.,border) (oil pipe;.) railway;ports, pass traff.. pass traff.,oil pipe; ict netw.; ports,gas pipe. 1 logistical developments items: alternative measures (10 pcs): railway connection and traffic, harbours and harbours activities, roads and road transportation, oil pipe and maintenance services, gas pipe and maintenance service, electricity transfer lines, ict networks and services, air traffic and services, passenger traffic on road, border crossing services. situation in the middle east increase the oil price). on the other hand strong trends create demand conditions and by reacting on these it is possible on various acting levels to create the most suitable conditions for the development of the clusters. the most central regional theories have been collected by hyttinen and rautio (tykkyläinen & neil 1995; hyttinen et al. 2002: 20–21; rautio 2003: 60–61). here i preliminarily discuss the applicability of the theories on the development of the murmansk oblast during 1992–2005. the objective is to find the most explanatory theories for a closer analyse. i make in my applicability evaluation special use of the delphi panel evaluation of fennia 184: 1 (2006) 71the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels fig. 7. the main oil and gas pipe in the north west russia and plans brought up during the last years showing extension of the main pipe and development of the harbour network. reprinted from tykkyläinen (2003a) with permission. which spt trends at this moment have the strongest impact on the development of murmansk oblast. as a conclusion of my tentative analysis and interpretation it can be stated that the following theories give support to the development of murmansk oblast during the last years moderately or much except the following theories: innovative milieu, regulationism, institutionalism and keynesian application. the resources and physical environment and the supply policy theory may explain development best, which is only getting an ”explains much” index. equilibrium seeking, technology and innovation, global capitalism and transition, globalisation and product cycles also reach almost to the same explanatory level. the number of the theories can change in the future. based on the interview material of the delphi panel it can be anticipated that the weight of the globalisation trend would rise the most. there72 fennia 184: 1 (2006)yrjö myllylä fig. 8. the research material in the article has been modelled according to the above figure. later on the explanation of various theories of area development should be tested on the modelled material. fore those theories, where the explanatory element was based on the globalisation trend could explain the future development still better. conclusions strong prospective trends prepare the ground for the economic environment in murmansk oblast. the most important main trends prevailing at this moment are, according to the majority of the respondents, technological development, logistical flows, and globalisation. the respondents of the independent group of the murmansk panel emphasise the globalisation trend, the value-based trends and trends of the socio-economical development of the population. the international panel again considers the trends of technological development, of globalisation, of the socio-economical development of the population as the most important trends at this moment. these three most important trends seem according to the panels to most clearly support the need of the development of transportation and logistical services clusters. the mining and metal processing cluster seems to be the second in importance on the basis of the main trends according to all respondent groups except the group called the three independent persons. the energy cluster is emphasised in particular by the representatives of the existing clusters in the murmansk panel, the international panel, and the moscow panel. the independent respondents of the international panel and murmansk panel also emphasise the development of ict and tourism clusters. federal and regional levels are both important decision-making levels for the development of the clusters and logistics. naturally it depends on the development objects of the clusters and logistics on which level the particular emphasis is placed on the decision-making. based on the results the importance of the co-operation between the regional and the federal level, and to some extent also international co-operation, is emphasised. the analysis gives some hints, how the trends are felt to be acting depends on the interest group that the respondent represents (kuusi 1999: 193– 206). in the future, the analysis scenarios should be created per respondent group by choosing those trends which each respondent group emphasises as their choice for starting point and evaluates the causal relations acting on the trends and on the development of the clusters in the context of regional development theory. the explanation of the regional theories was evaluated based on the implemented development specially impacting the assessment of the specialists. the resources and physical environment and supply policy theories seems to be the most explanatory ones. acknowledgements the author specialises in delphi research and applications and area foresight. this research work is part of the research project ”does the geography of russian northern peripheries really change?”. this project is administrated by the university of joensuu and funded by the academy of finland (contact fennia 184: 1 (2006) 73the future of murmansk oblast assessed by three delphi panels number 208149). in this project there are researchers from finland, russia, germany and australia. the project and this particular part of the project is being done in co-operation with the barents centre for social research and dr. oleg andreev, who is also professor of the baltic institute for ecology, politics and law. the implementation of the research work is part of the preparation of my doctoral thesis in human geography, which is supervised by professor markku tykkyläinen. it is anticipated that the research project will be completed within four years. the completion of the subproject is planned for 2007 when the doctoral dissertation will be defined. references british petroleum (2005). statistical review of world energy 2005. <http://www.bp.com/>. 15.5.2006. brunstad b, e magnus, p swanson, g hønneland & i øverland (2004). big oil playground, russian bear preserve or european periphery? the russian barents sea region towards 2015. 212 p. eburon academic publishers, the netherlands. didyk v, l riabova & j autto (2005). murmanskin lääni vuoden ensimmäisellä puoliskolla. marraskuu 2005. talouden puolivuotiskatsaus. <http:// www.economicmonitoring.com>. 2.5.2006. filippov p, g dudarev & a osipov (2003). energy: raw materials, production, technology. competitive analysis of northwest russian energy cluster. etla b 197. 210 p. hyttinen p, m niskanen, a ottitsch, m tykkyläinen & j väyrynen (2002). forest related perspectives for regional development in europe. european forest institute research report 13. 129 p. kauppala p (1998). the russian north: the rise, evolution and current condition of state settlement policy. studies in the northern dimension 2. 48 p. kuusi o (1999). expertise in the future use of generic technologies – epistemic and methodological considerations concerning delphi studies. government institute for economic research, research reports 59. 268 p. lausala t & l valkonen (eds.) (1999). economic ge-(1999). economic geography and structure of the russian territories of the barents region. university of lapland, arctic centre reports 31. 250 p. malmberg a & p maskell (2002). the elusive concept of localisation economies: towards a knowledgebased theory of spatial clustering. environment and planning a 34, 429–449. murmansk region in figures (2004). state committee of the russian federation on statistics. murmansk region committee of the state statistics. oldberg i (2000). russia’s western border regions and moscow: the roots of regionalism. in oldberg i & j hedenskog (eds.). in dire straits: russia’s western regions between moscow and the west, 11–53. defence research establishment, stockholm. porter em (1990). the competitive advantage of nations. 875 p. free press, new york. rautio v (2003). the potential for community restructuring – mining towns in pechenga. kikimora publications a:9. 168 p. rautio v & o andreev (2005). social restructurisation of mining industry in pechenga district of the murmansk region. 80 p. barents centre for social research and murmansk institute of humanities. sackman h (1975). delphi critique, the rand corporation. 146 p. lexington books, toronto. slaughter r (1996). futures consepts. in slaughter r (ed). the knowledge base of futures studies. vol 1: foundations, 87–126. ddm media group, hawtorn, victoria. toivonen m (2004). expertise as business: long term development and future prospect of knowledgeintensive business services (kibs). helsinki university of technology, department of industrial engineering and management, doctoral dissertation series 2004/2. 287 p. tykkyläinen m (2003a). geographical dimension of russian energy developments. 19 p. paper presented at the european regional science congress 27.–30.8.2003. tykkyläinen m (2003b). north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics. fennia 181: 2, 145–177. tykkyläinen m & c neil (1995). socio-economic restructuring in resource communities: evolving a comparative approach. community development journal 30: 1, 31–47. tyroff m (1975). the policy delphi. in linstone h & m tyroff (eds.). the delphi method: techniques an applications, 84–101. addison-wesley, london. temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of asylum seekers in the city of turku, finland päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström kymäläinen, päivi & paulina nordström (2010). temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of asylum seekers in the city of turku, finland. fennia 188: 1, pp. 76–90. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. temporarity has a significant role in today’s urban spaces and peoples’ experiences of them. the city is often understood through stable material structures, while less attention is paid to such aspects of urban space that are there only for a limited time such as markets, events, manifestations and construction sites, for instance. experiences of momentarity may be related to these kinds of elements of the city, but equally to personal feelings of not belonging to the city. in this paper we discuss, firstly, temporary geographies and their importance in today’s urban studies. debates on relational spaces and moving geographies have directed attention towards the temporary aspects of urban spaces. temporarity itself has mostly been discussed in relation to urban planning while less attention has been paid to other aspects of everyday life. secondly, the theoretical aspects of temporary geographies in this paper will be illustrated with empirical material collected among young asylum seekers in the city of turku in finland in 2008–2009. the asylum seekers were interviewed and they kept photo diaries about their urban experiences. the material demonstrates the feelings of momentarity in urban space as the asylum seekers’ uses of the city were coloured by uncertainty while they were waiting for the decision about permission to stay in the country. keywords: temporary geographies, cities, experiences, asylum seekers päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström, university of turku – department of geography, fi-20014 turku, finland. e-mails: paivi.kymalainen@utu.fi, paulina.nordstrom@utu.fi. introduction temporary events and meanings have a significant role in today’s urban spaces and peoples’ experiences of them. the city is often understood through stable material structures, while less attention is paid to the temporary aspects of urban space. many experiences of the city are characterized by temporarity: cities are filled with markets, street art, manifestations, events, construction sites and other elements that are there only momentarily1. experiences of momentarity may be related to such changing elements of the city, but equally to peoples’ uncertainty about their status. both material and social uncertainty are important aspects in current urban experience. here we discuss such uncertainty with the help of temporary geography by which we mean spatial thinking that concentrates on those aspects of space that are there only for limited time (cf. lehtovuori et al. 2003; kohoutek & kamleithner 2006: 34; misselwitz et al. 2007), or are susceptible to change. given the multiplicity of the changing aspects of the world, it is surprising how little temporarity has been discussed in human geography or in the related fields of study. more than in geography, temporarity has been discussed in the fields of architecture and urban planning which have focused especially on temporary grass roots activities in urban renewal areas and wastelands (e.g. lehtovuori et al. 2003; plan b 2007) or on events in urban space (e.g. hou 2010). these uses and activities have been regarded urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa2546 fennia 188: 1 (2010) 77temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of … as capable of disrupting the established orderings of urban spaces, and they have also been considered as having more permanent effects if they encourage similar functions in the future. in addition to urban planning and the uses of urban spaces, momentarity is more widely present in the various material, social and visual aspects of the everyday life in the city. the theoretical thinking of temporary geography can thus also rely on the debates on relational space (e.g. harvey 1973; massey 2005), moving geographies (e.g. kymäläinen 2005; cresswell 2006) or becoming places (e.g. doel 1999; tryselius 2007; dovey 2010) which have re-directed the attention to the changing aspects of human environment. in this article, we rely on these different theoretical backgrounds when we discuss temporality in the everyday experiential spaces of the asylum seekers. discussions of asylum seekers have concentrated on administrative and legal questions: on the legislation or the differences in the amount of asylum seekers in different countries. the emphasis has been on groups of people, and thereby, the experiences of asylum seekers have been explored from a rather distant and generalizing position. here we want to re-focus attention to the uncertainty that characterizes the urban experience of the asylum seekers as they do not know about their whereabouts in the future and therefore cannot easily develop a sense of belonging to the city. this aspect will be discussed in the empirical part of the article that is concerned with the experiences of young asylum seekers who have been studied in the city of turku in finland in 2008–2009. these unaccompanied minors seeking asylum were interviewed and they kept photo diaries about their urban experiences while they were waiting for progress in their asylum seeking process and information on whether they can stay in finland. the introduction of the paper is followed by a theoretical and conceptual discussion on temporary geography. we review some of the previous studies on temporarity, mobility and relationality in relation to urban studies and the experienced spaces of the asylum seekers. after that, we analyze the empirical material concerning the young asylum seekers in the city of turku. the definitions of the asylum seekers, their temporary settings and the photographed spaces of their daily life will be of interest. at the end of the paper, we will discuss the findings of the lived spaces of the asylum seekers and summarize the connection of such topics on the issues of temporary geography. temporary geography in previous studies moving and relational spaces temporarity per se has not been discussed much in human geography, but many thoughts have still directed attention towards such topics. especially, postmodern and poststructuralist thought has challenged the insights of the world as a stable reality, and has noticed the uncertainty included in people’s everyday spaces and places. such approaches have encouraged, for instance, the thoughts of relational (e.g. massey 2005) and performative (e.g. kaiser & nikiforova 2008) spaces where temporarity is one of the starting points. the relational readings of space bring new elements to the exploration of experiential places which have earlier leaned much on humanistic thought. however, humanistic geography has not regarded places as stable, but rather as dependent on subjective experiences and meanings. still, there has been the assumption that the effort of a singular human being is to turn moving, changing and uncertain space into a permanent, secure and meaningful place (e.g. tuan 1977). there has also been emphasis on everyday life in the humanistic studies of life-world (e.g. buttimer 1976; ley 1977). david ley (1977: 504), for instance, has characterized life-world as the “group-centred world of events, relations and places infused with meanings and often ambiguity”. humanistic thinking resembles some current thoughts of eventful and changing places. ley’s humanistic description of place as a world of events has similarities with poststructuralist thinking in terms of emphasizing spaces and places as events and processes (e.g. doel 1999; kymäläinen 2005; massey 2005; murdoch 2006; olsson 2007; tryselius 2007). in poststructuralist geography, marcus doel (1999: 7, 2000: 125), for instance, has pointed out that the word ‘space’ should not be interpreted as a noun, but rather as a verb spacing that brings the idea of movement and process to the spatial thinking. furthermore, jonathan murdoch (2006: 21) has written about space that is not a container for entities and processes, but is rather “made by entities and processes”. gunnar olsson (2007) instead writes about ‘abysmal’ which is some kind of in-between land that cannot be turned into exact maps, explanations or categories. according to olsson (2007: 87), “the question of identity and existence is the question of 78 fennia 188: 1 (2010)päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström how i recognize something when i encounter it again. boiled down to its essentials the problem splits into two: (1) what i meet again is rarely exactly what i met before; (2) even when i do meet something again, it tends to come with another name and another meaning”. doreen massey (2005: 141) has written about the event of place in which the previously unrelated comes together, and which is “a constellation of processes rather than a thing”. for massey, spaces and places are in a process of always becoming and never completed. according to her, space is rather a story with an open end than a container for ready-made identities (2005: 8–11). in addition, michael dear (1997: 232) has asked if there is a place for authenticity and identity in the forever transforming time-spaces. this is an important question since people are no longer considered as having an in-built and ready-made identity, but many identities that are intersecting, overlapping and throughout developing (hall 1999). the above mentioned examples are links to the poststructuralist critique of categories and binaries that seek to totalize the world and halt its movement (e.g. dixon & jones 2004; cloke & johnston 2005; ellin 2006). in a sense, all these ideas tell about spaces that are characterized by temporarity: they cannot be given final forms as they are produced by movement and change. our starting point in this article is that place is not regarded as one, but rather as many. in a humanistic sense, many people long for a place where they can root themselves and have a home full of meanings, but that is possible only for some. there is an increasing amount of people who do not have one significant place as they want or are forced to move from houses, cities and countries to other ones. thus, sticking to the sense of belonging is rather problematic especially in the case of asylum seekers who live in the city without having a clear status. in a sense, the asylum seekers are there, in the place, without the ability to be fully seen and present (see also hannula 2001: 37–38; kymäläinen 2003: 244–245). moving and relational space are examples of the thoughts that have encouraged the development of the ideas of temporary geographies. relational space (e.g. harvey 1973; massey 2005; murdoch 2006) and moving geographies (e.g. cresswell 2006) are today rather popular thoughts in human geography. relational space was discussed already in the 1970’s by david harvey (1973) in his social space and the city. in relational thinking space is not regarded as static or absolute, but, according to harvey (1973: 168), it is constructed in relation to others that are simultaneously present in the space. later on, the insights of relational spaces have been diversified (e.g. doel 1999; murdoch 2006; see also lefebvre 1991). one of the most important current thinkers in this sense is massey who writes in her book for space about the change from bounded places and isolated identities towards “understanding of the spatial as relational through connections” (2005: 81). according to her, space cannot be seen as a single totalising project as it is incomplete, in production and includes fractures and ruptures (2005: 100). furthermore, she argues that even though place or space is open and internally multiple, people have to make something of it at least temporarily (2005: 141). place or space does not change through belonging or rootedness (as was suggested by humanistic geographers), but rather through practising and negotiating it (2005: 154). thoughts of movement have been included in relational thinking as well as in the various discussions about change. ideas of moving space have been developed within poststructuralist (e.g. gibson-graham 1997; doel 1999; murdoch 2006) and non-representational (thrift 2008) thinking. moreover, there have been debates also on movement itself: tim cresswell has written about geographies on the move. he argues that geography is too often equated with fixity and stasis even though mobility is “just as spatial – as geographical – and just as central to the human experience of the world” (cresswell 2006: 3). nigel thrift (2008), for his part, has written about movementspace by which he means space that is relative, but still relies on absolute space for its existence. moreover, movement-space is context-sensitive, can be described in terms of irregularity, and refocuses attention from the monumental and fixed aspects of space to its unexpected or changing conditions. conceptual and theoretical thoughts like these are just a small part of the thinking that can be related to the issues of temporarity. however, they give hints about the strength of the ideas of temporarity in the conceptual thought in geography – even though the names that are used to call these phenomena may vary. temporary spaces of the refugees the temporary aspects of urban space are experienced in the everyday life of the inhabitants (e.g. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 79temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of … de certeau 1984; lefebvre 2004). also in urban planning the everyday has been seen as an alternative for masterplans which tend to leave the small and temporary aspects of the city unnoticed (see temel 2006: 60). studies concerning planning have given interesting insights into the issue of temporarity (e.g. lehtovuori et al. 2003; misselwitz et al. 2003, 2007; ruoppila 2004; haydn & temel 2006; plan b 2007), but it is peculiar how the theme has not reached studies concerning other aspects of urban space. acknowledging the experiences of temporarity in daily life opens other views and gives room also for understanding the embodied experiences of temporarity. next, we will discuss the earlier studies on temporary geography by concentrating especially on the temporary spaces of the refugees. in his various texts, zygmunt bauman (e.g. 1991, 1993, 1995) has discussed the questions of belonging and not belonging in the context of others and strangers. according to bauman (1993), we do not know strangers as ‘specific humans’, or do not know their personal identities. rather, strangers derive identity from the categories to which they have been assigned (e.g. asylum seekers, refugees, unaccompanied minors seeking asylum). people do not then know these human beings, but only know of them in a roundabout way: through the information about the categories. they are known as types, not as people (bauman 1993: 149; see also bauman 1996: 47–56). whereas natives have the opportunity to be, strangers have to become something else (bauman 1991: 155) in order to be accepted as full human beings. these challenges that bauman mentions are embodied and experienced in the social spaces of cities as the strangers are encountered in the lifeworld. the daily life in the city is constructed when the intersecting trajectories and knowledges meet in the same geometrical spaces when individuals and groups make paths and trajectories through the city (de certeau 1984; crang 2001: 187). in the everyday life, it becomes clear how human beings can be socially distant even though they are physically close (bauman 1993: 152– 153). in addition to social space, the status of the human beings is also set in the planning of physical spaces. bauman (1993: 158) criticizes the organization of urban space as there is a tendency to segregate people and to deny disorder by planning functional spaces, straight lines and pure geometry. in other words, the effort is to plan a rational city that excludes the vagrants, strangers and wanderers (bauman 1996: 32–33). the segregating elements of planning are already noticed when you think about the location of the reception centre of the asylum seekers. in the city of turku, the reception centre is located about 10 kilometres from the city centre, which means that people must make the effort to get to the liveliest social spaces of the city where encounters with the natives are most likely to happen. the city centre includes what augé (1995: 106) calls non-places: anonymous routes, stations, stores and hotels which, paradoxically, can sometimes make foreigners feel at home. taina rajanti (1999: 9) has discussed the city as a form of living or a home, or as a way for human beings to be communal in the world. she also contributes to the discussion about the status of the refugees by pondering the words of inhabitation, coming from somewhere, feeling home and citizenship in her research (1999: 182). rajanti sees inhabitation as the fundamental way of being in the world. if a person has left a place, it is usually possible to return there (1999: 31, 49). but all the refugees do not have the freedom to return to their origins and, thus, being a refugee can be compared with rootlessness; to be withdrawn from the soil. the inhabitation – the fundamental way of being in the world – of the refugees is thus fragile (rajanti 1999: 188). it also takes time to naturalize somewhere or to feel at home (rajanti 1999: 45–46), and because of this the situation of the refugees is complicated. it becomes more complicated when thinking about the rights of the refugees in comparison with citizens. although the declaration of human rights states that all human beings are born free and equal, this right is in context with the citizenship that is granted to the natural persons who are born in a nation-state. as franke (2009) states, the refugee or refugeeness mostly cannot be located as it is handled as an abstract and distant matter. moreover, the refugees are represented in the ways that allow the citizens’ peace of mind in their own locations in the world (franke 2009: 364–365). the encounters with strangers and even their presence can affect the social structure of the city. when the city life is thought of, it is possible that temporary visitors may transform permanent ways of urban life or interrupt the accustomed ways of using social space (cf. lehtovuori et al. 2003: 31). the personal spatial experiences of the refugees are mostly temporary as they stay in the city only for a limited time. however, as they are known rather as an anonymous group than as people, the 80 fennia 188: 1 (2010)päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström inhabitants do not sense the feeling of temporarity. what from the perspective of the refugees or asylum seekers feels like temporary experience, seems from the perspective of the inhabitants as a more permanent increase in the amount of foreigners in the cityscape. it is doubtful whether such anonymous experience can advance the alternative understandings of the city, or the formation of what hille koskela (2009: 356) calls the clay city: a tolerant city which surprises in the everyday life. in the case of asylum seekers, the experiences are coloured by the assumptions regarding who is allowed or hoped to be seen in urban space (cf. mitchell 2003; staeheli & mitchell 2008). the uncertainty about the future whereabouts is embodied (about embodiment: see duncan 1996; nast & pile 1998) in the daily practices and experiences in the city. samu pehkonen and eeva puumala (2008) have studied temporarity through the corporeal choreographies of asylum seekers (see also puumala & pehkonen 2010). they found out that the institutional identity given to the asylum seekers differs significantly from the ways that they see themselves and their bodies. they are marked by the legislation of the country they are staying in. in their stories, the asylum seekers do not explain themselves in relation to the city or region they live in, but rather in relation to the concepts that have been used to define them during the process. in that process, the experiences of the asylum seekers are discounted (pehkonen & puumala 2008: 162−163). next, we will turn to the urban experiences of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. through the material is asked how the asylum seekers’ uses of the city are coloured by the uncertainty about their staying in turku. like in pehkonen’s and puumala’s study, also in this case the experiences are coloured by the status given to the asylum seekers in definitions and restrictions. however, we also try to look beyond them in order to find out some elements of urban experience to which these temporary visitors of the city can relate despite their difficult situation. the experiences of the journey (hopkins & hill 2008), the new physical surroundings (risbeth & finney 2006) and the lived places (spicer 2008), as well as conceptions of home and belonging (sirriyeh 2008) of the refugees and the asylum seekers have been studied in great britain during the past decade (see also healey 2008). to these important findings we add the discussion of temporarity. stories of the unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in the city of turku definitions of asylum seekers an asylum seeker is a person who arrives in a country and applies for international protection. the status of an asylum seeker is marked by uncertainty. when an asylum seeker opens the door of a reception centre s/he can be compared with a tourist. both the tourist and the asylum seeker are visitors in a city. they stay momentarily, leave some footprints in the place, and often depart from the city when the application process is finalized. nevertheless, an asylum seeker is not a tourist. a tourist has freedom to choose a destination and to decide for how long s/he is going to stay in a place (cf. bauman 1993: 240–244). the same does not apply to an asylum seeker. some asylum seekers might have an idea of the destination of their journey, but most of them do not have the possibilities to contribute to the decision about where they are taken. peter e. hopkins and malcom hill (2008: 266) studied young asylum seekers in scotland and found that the unaccompanied minors seeking asylum seldom have a clue of the route or of the country where they are taken. also, the length of their stay varies. in finland, the final decision about the asylum seeking process depends on whether the person can prove that s/he is in need of protection and s/he is irreproachable. the story told to the authorities has to be shown to be true. in the hearing of an asylum seeker, authorities are interested in why and how the person has reached finland. the personal experiences of the asylum seekers are less important (pehkonen & puumala 2008: 160) which indicates the practice that bauman (1993) and franke (2009) describe in that the strangers like refugees are known only as types and through classifications without recognizing their status in the everyday life of the city. the geneva declaration from 1951 defines international conditions for granting refugee status. according to the declaration, refugee status can be given to a person who is in fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his fennia 188: 1 (2010) 81temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of … former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it (unhcr 2007). the legislation of the european union and finland grants international protection according to the geneva declaration (european union 2000a; suomen säädöskokoelma 2004). although finland is trying to put into practice regulations enacted by the european union, and to reach its goals that are set in legislation, there are still some differences between finland and the eu in determining the content of international protection and in permitting residency for some other reasons than refugee status. the legislations in both the european union and finland notice the vulnerable position of minors seeking asylum. there are some minimum requirements that the member states should follow when minors are concerned. these requirements deal with receiving minors and handling their applications. one request is that for each individual young applicant should be appointed a legal representative who is of assistance in the asylum seeking process. the dublin regulation of the european union affects the cross-national moves in europe. the idea of this particular regulation is that only one european union country should be responsible for handling an application for international protection (european union 1997, 2003). in practice this means that the responsible country is that which first receives the application for international protection, or where the applicant first comes across with the authorities and gets her/his fingerprints entered in the system (see european union 2000b). the main reason why some minors seeking asylum in finland in 2008 received a negative answer was that they had already been registered in some other european union country (maa hanmuuttovirasto 2009). in finland, if the terms for international protection are not fulfilled, a person can be given permission to stay in the country for humanitarian reasons or if there is some other need for protection. temporary permission to stay can also be given if it is impossible to remove the applicant from the country at the moment when the decision is made. the asylum seeking process in finland begins when a person applies for international protection at the border of the country or soon after the border crossing. after leaving an application for asylum, the applicants are accommodated in reception centres that are situated around the country. the asylum seeking process itself consists of interviews with the authorities with the aim of finding out if there is persecution, or other trespasses and threats against the applicant in the country of origin. finnish immigration service is mainly responsible for this detection. in the case of unaccompanied minors, there is always a personal representative present to assist the underaged person (suomen säädöskokoelma 2004). temporary settings of the young asylum seekers the research material consists of interviews and photo diaries that the young asylum seekers kept during their stay in turku (see also nordström 2009). photo diaries have previously been used in human geographical research (markwell 2000; latham 2003, 2004; risbeth & finey 2006). clare risbeth and nissa finey (2006) have used photo diaries in their research of the experiences of urban greenspaces of the refugees and asylum seekers. in his studies, alan latham (2003, 2007) has taken the problem of temporality into consideration by asking how the momentarity of the researched could be represented so that the study would simultaneously tell something useful of the world. the answer might lay in the non-representational theory and performative thoughts. thrift (2000: 215, 2008), for instance, has discussed the ways in which events are shaped at the very special moment when they are becoming true. he focuses on daily life which he regards as performative and as developing new practices (thrift 1997: 126−133). of such performative life can only be told partial truths, which should be acknowledged in a research process. pictures, for instance, are not then seen as representations of the world, but rather as the interpreted stories of the momentary events of daily life. the material was collected at pansio reception centre in the city of turku. the participators were chosen with the help of a social worker in the reception centre. the social worker proposed that the study could concentrate on a group that took part in a pilot study program (nutukka) in the city of turku. in addition, the social worker asked a few other asylum seekers to participate as she knew that they would be interested in taking pictures and would conduct the assignment. in the beginning, the group was first met in order to in82 fennia 188: 1 (2010)päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström troduce the study. later on, another meeting was arranged so that the asylum seekers had the chance to ask questions with the help of interpreters. altogether six asylum seekers kept photo diaries and were interviewed. one interviewee was left outside the study because only one photograph came out from his film. in addition, he was interviewed after he had already moved away from the reception centre. moreover, in the interview there was not interpreter even though he would have needed one. this interviewee was also in a slightly distinct situation from the others because he knew the destination of his journey since one of his relatives had arranged his arrival. the person also arrived in finland together with his mother and they travelled a part of the journey together. the person stayed a few days in helsinki in an enclosed reception centre that puts people up whom the police or the border guard has taken into custody. an unclear route or identity, for example, may be a reason for this kind of action. the youngsters kept photo diaries, they were interviewed and also several informal discussions were conducted. an interpreter was of assistance in four of the interviews, but the informal discussions were carried out in finnish. the interviews were stored on a digital tape recorder and informal discussions were written in a field diary after the meetings with the young asylum seekers. in the interviews and discussions, the young asylum seekers were asked about their personal backgrounds, experiences in turku and the photographs they had taken. in addition to the interviews, one of the youngsters wrote down his thoughts over some photographs in arabic. these texts were later translated into finnish. at the moment of the study, all the young asylum seekers lived at a reception centre, or had just moved from there. the reception centre is situated approximately 10 kilometres from the city centre of turku, and consists of three separate buildings which all have their own rules and means. one of the buildings is meant to host unaccompanied minors mainly between ages 15 and 17. this building had earlier been used to accommodate people working in the shipbuilding in the pansio industrial area. now it was the place where all the youngsters stayed at different periods of time during their asylum seeking process. within a short walking distance from this building lies a centre for adults and families who are seeking asylum. in the spring of 2008 a building for people on the threshold of adulthood was also opened. one of the young applicants stayed there for a couple of months in the summer of 2008. in the course of the study, the status and the position of the asylum seekers changed: some left the reception centre, some were given a permit of residence, and in one person’s case the residency was denied and he was sent to another european union country. all the young asylum seekers had distinct and unique stories. these stories were told at a fluid space between the past and the future (cf. doel 1999, 2000). the stories of urban experiences were affected by the different backgrounds, personalities and dreams of the young asylum seekers. what had already been seen, heard and felt played a role when a person interpreted her/his daily surroundings in the city of turku. the young asylum seekers came from five different countries: afghanistan, ethiopia, iran, iraq and russia. they all had different family relations, religious views and reasons why they had left their country of origin. the family backgrounds varied: some did not have any family left, the family members of some lived in a neighbouring country, one person had lost his father, and a girl’s parents were still in the home country, and she heard from them only occasionally. even though these backgrounds were not delicately analysed while studying the asylum seekers, they were acknowledged. each individual young applicant had her/his own paths in the city even though there were also similarities between the youngsters. the places are relational (cf. massey 2005; murdoch 2006; thrift 2008) and momentary in the stories of the young asylum seekers. the relational spaces were constructed in a process where the young asylum seekers lived and interpreted the city in their personal ways. they attended the everyday activities of a young resident: woke up in the morning to go to school, and used public transport and other services. still, they held a special position as city dwellers as many of their activities were mainly targeted to asylum seekers. moreover, their future was open as they did not know what was going to be the result of their asylum seeking process. there are few alternatives: an asylum seeker can be sent back to the country of origin, s/he can be sent to a european union country where s/he has already been registered as an asylum seeker, or s/he can get a permission to stay in the country (suomen säädöskokoelma 2004). even if the answer is favourable to the applicant, the future dwelling place can remain unknown for several months. in the meantime, the person continues her/his daily fennia 188: 1 (2010) 83temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of … activities in the reception centre although it is meant to host applicants, not people with a living allowance. at the end of 2008, the reception centre for young asylum seekers in turku was overloaded as many were waiting for to be settled. temporary spaces through the camera lens a photograph can be compared with a vehicle that has a capacity to carry to past times and places (collier 2001: 36). however, it is never possible to completely reach that which has once taken place. at the moment when the photography is taken, everything is already changing: the sky is turning from blue to grey and the people are taking different positions. the moment of taking a photograph and interpreting it might also take a person to past places. in the pictures of the young asylum seekers’ photo diaries there are everyday surroundings in the temporary setting, small personal pieces of memory and things that have made an impression. altogether 90 pictures were taken. after the first period of taking photographs, three of the youngsters agreed to continue photographing and they took another film of pictures. moreover, one of the youngsters took photographs with his friend’s digital camera. the guidelines for taking photographs were rather free as we did not want to control the photographing too much. the photographing was a process during which the participators were instructed to take photographs of their everyday surroundings and places that evoke positive or negative feelings. the period of taking photographs was planned to last for three weeks, but in the end, the photographing lasted for four months, from may 2008 to september 2008. in the first pictures that we received, the juveniles had mainly photographed a sunny day in the city of naantali where they had visited with the school group. one special day in naantali is not meaningless, as a visit there was clearly a particular event that had made an impression on the youngsters. however, one picture that had been taken from the city centre of turku was of a restaurant boat at the river aura. this photograph created the idea of a research as a process and inspired to encourage the juveniles to continue keeping photo diaries. the processual approach here meant acknowledging that everything cannot be planned in advance, but a researcher has to stay alert for new ideas and paths that might occur during the research. the data was analysed by using narrative analysis. we constructed narratives from the stories that were interpreted from the photo diaries, interviews and discussions. the idea was that the researcher encountered the young asylum seekers in their temporary situations. the story of these encounters was told in the research in an imaginative way. the researcher also wanted to encourage further interaction and arranged together with the young asylum seekers an exhibition of the photographs in a shopping centre. the idea of the exhibition was to leave the research material open for different interpretations in which space could be negotiated (cf. massey 2005: 154). the young asylum seekers had diverse feelings when taking photographs: one felt embarrassed, the second was keen on taking photographs, and the third was not sure what he could store to a film roll: it is a street. it is in the morning. i want to go to school at seven in the morning. there are few cars in the morning. i wait, that the car passes, because i feel ashamed (a boy, 17 years). some similarities can be found in the photo diaries even though all youngsters had a personal way to interpret the city. most of the young asylum seekers photographed the reception centre which offered a shelter for the youngsters in their temporary situation. social workers were there to look after for the unaccompanied minors. despite that, most of the minors that lived at the reception centre were responsible for many daily activities from cooking to laundry. they had different views of the building. it was photographed either from the outside or inside. one of the youngsters took a photograph through a window and described the route along which she sometimes walks (fig. 1). another photographed a trail in a broad-leaved forest near the reception centre and described her feelings. the girl who took this picture had first been afraid when walking along the trail: ...and when i was at the reception centre for adults, when the school was there, i used to walk here (the trail). in the beginning i was afraid of this place… because it is in the woods, i used to think, that might there be some dangerous animals that would eat me… usually in somalia you should not walk in this kind of places, because there are dangerous animals, snakes… and at that time i did not know if it is safe to go there, that is the reason why i took this photograph (a girl, 16 years). 84 fennia 188: 1 (2010)päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström when the girl was a newcomer, she had not known what might be there in the woods, and interpreted the surroundings according to her previous experiences. the third person photographed the reception centre to show that he did not like the building because it was too crowded and noisy there. the reception centre awoke distinct feelings which also, in some cases, changed during the research. one reason why some of the youngsters liked the reception centre was that there were people who spoke the same language. this was the case with a somali girl and afghan boy, whereas a russian boy had no one to whom to speak his own language. however, the main reason why some juveniles were unhappy with the reception centre was the crowdedness: because there are a lot of people here. and when everyone’s friends come, it is so much…everybody is speaking and you cannot live peacefully here (a boy, 15 years). the amount of the residents increased during the study period, but started to decrease again towards the end of the study at the end of the year 2008. also, the school was widely photographed as the young asylum seekers were all very keen about attending the education offered to them (see also sirriyeh 2008). pictures were also taken of routes, special places and surroundings. one youngster described in the interview two encounters at a bus stop: encounter one: one time there was a man. he had not drunken a lot. he spoke with me. first he had thought that i did not speak finnish. he spoke english with me. then i spoke with him. he asks: do you speak finnish? i answer: a bit. and then we speak in finnish. encounter two: … i wait at the bus stop, a women comes. she speaks with me. she first asks: do you speak finnish or english? before, i did not speak fig. 1. a view from the window of the reception centre. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 85temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of … good finnish. i speak english better. and she speaks english with me. she asks: where do you come from? i answer: from russia. she says: with your family? i say: i do not have one… i say: i am from a children’s home. she says: i work there (in some children’s home). then she says: i like you a lot, because you have lived in a children’s home. then she asks: do you believe in god?... i say: no, i don’t (a boy, 15 years). some of the places were photographed because they had become familiar through the school. many of these places are known by the city dwellers of turku and tourists, but some might be unfamiliar also to long-time residents. the details were personal memories mainly from the home country (fig. 2) or beautiful and interesting pieces in the new surroundings (fig. 3). some of these might seem meaningless: what can a single wall with special items, an islamic calendar or a death cap tell of momentarity experiences? still, such photographs tell about a journey between the old and the new as memories are carried to a place where the person encounters the unfamiliar (see also risbeth’s and finney’s (2006) findings in their study of the refugee perspectives of the urban greenspaces in the city of sheffield in britain). one of the youngsters had a very peculiar way to interpret what he saw in the city. we wanted to single out the story of this youngster because seeing through the camera lens was the way for him to interpret what he encountered. in addition, a successful dialogue was reached with him. in his home country, the boy had photographed and videoed weddings and bombings. the stories of his pictures tell something extremely fragile about the temporary spaces of an asylum seeker and how it is very problematic to treat asylum seekers as a homogenous group. the young person had a hard and difficult asylum seeking process because he had already been registered as an applicant in another european union country. in the interview and discussions, the young man explained that he came to finland because at the beginning of his journey to europe he had been told that finland respects human rights and he would probably get protection here. the way to the expected haven was not straightforward, but also included stopovers of varying durations. on the journey to finland there were two meetings with the authorities: first in italy and later in sweden. in italy, the boy was given advice to lie about his age if he wanted fig. 2. in between two countries: an afghanistan flag, the two beijing olympic games representatives of the home country and sports achievements in finland. fig. 3. first time in a gym. 86 fennia 188: 1 (2010)päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström to continue his journey. the boy was sent to the street when he said he was an adult. in sweden, he repeated this practice and was instead taken into a reception centre. in the interview and discussions, the young boy often thought about human rights, differences between the two societies and difficulties he had faced in iraq. once when the boy saw a man and a girl helping an old lady in the city centre, he photographed that happening and afterwards he wrote: in iraq they told me that in europe one person does not help another. as i was walking in the street i saw a girl and an old man helping a lady who had fallen. they took the lady to a pavement and i took a photograph to say: in europe people help one other and respect human rights (a boy, 17 years). later on the same day the boy heard some street musicians’ playing at the market place and this sound took the boy to the street of his home town where the sounds come from exploding bombs: i heard music when walking in the street. as i came closer i saw two youngsters playing music. it is really wonderful to hear music in the street and enjoy the beauty of the world. in my home country, when you walk in the street, you hear bombing, but here you hear music (a boy, 17 years) (fig. 4). the boy also photographed the aura river as well as vessels, birds, seagulls and a bench nearby. when he had arrived in turku, the river had reminded him of his home town with the difference that the home town had been destroyed. at the beginning of the summer, the boy photographed a vessel along the river and wrote: why do people drink alcohol in the streets, parks and everywhere? might it be that they consider it to be the best of all? i wonder why these people do not figure out something better. i took this picture of that which is brown in colour and looks like bee (a boy, 17 years). before the picture was taken, a drunken man had offended the boy with some dirty words. the boy explained during the interview that he does not want to hurt anyone with the words he wrote to the photo diary because not everyone is a problem drinker. the boy also ponders the differences between iraq and finland especially when it goes to relations between young men and women. in the summer, the boy had seen a young couple sitting on the bench on the shores of aura river on a sunny afternoon. that time he had wanted to photograph the couple. however, at the moment when the picture was taken, the bench was empty and the sky was cloudy (fig. 5). conclusions the legislation of the european union and finland defines the position of an asylum seeker in a rather formal way. the findings of this study unmask some feelings that the young asylum seekers encounter in the temporary situations. temporarity was seen in the life of the young asylum seekers in more than one way: firstly, they had to wait for the decision about their future and about the permission to stay in the country. secondly, they were newcomers in the city of turku and had to perform daily activities in unfamiliar surroundings. although there are some similarities in the lives of the asylum seekers, there are also alternatives for fig. 4. two street musicians in a market place in the city centre. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 87temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of … the generalized and typified knowing of them (cf. bauman 1993). with the abstract information of the asylum seekers, they can be distanced from the daily life and social spaces of the city. when explored from a far, their situation seems rather permanent: there is a certain amount of the refugees or asylum seekers staying in the city. at a personal level, the situation of the asylum seekers is temporary: their experiences of the city are coloured with momentarity as they have no certainty of their future in the city, in finland or in europe. even though the city of turku was strange to the asylum seekers, many of them discovered urban elements that were familiar in one way or another (cf. augé 1995). for one of the youngsters, the aura river was a symbol for a river in his home town, and in another case the experiences in the home country helped to interpret the surroundings of the new city. such familiar elements may help in attaching oneself to a new place, but reminders of the past can also make oneself feel afraid or uncomfortable. the past experiences that people carry with them affect how they interpret the unknown places. although the experiences are personal, they are not much acknowledged in the meetings with the authorities during the asylum seeking process. at the beginning of the paper, we stated that temporary geography refers to such geography that is interested in those elements of space that are there only for a limited time. along with this paper it has become apparent that this is a rather limited view and there are several characterizations that could be combined to the idea of temporary geography. temporary geography encourages exploring the moving and changing aspects of fig. 5. an empty bench along the river aura. 88 fennia 188: 1 (2010)päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström places, but yet, it does not claim that places would be moving and changing all the time, and that there would not be the points of references for people. rather, it acknowledges that many experiences and meanings of urban spaces are temporary. as the example of the experiences of asylum seekers shows, temporary geography is at the heart of several topical questions in human geography. the topicality of temporarity has previously been noticed especially in the studies of urban planning. in other fields of urban studies and human geography, temporary elements are often overshadowed by generalizing statistics, legislation, definitions and approaches. experiences such as the ones of the asylum seekers are undoubtedly outside official definitions and legislation. thanks to the various discussions about moving and relational spaces, there are already many conceptual and theoretical tools for bringing the questions of momentarity more prominently to the research on the everyday life of the city. notes 1 the word “momentarity” or “momentary” is used here as a synonym for “temporarity” or “temporary “. according to dictionaries (e.g. the new international webster’s… 1999) there is not significant difference between the words as momentary refers to “lasting but a moment” and temporary to “lasting or intended to be used for a short time only”. references augé m 1995. non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. verso, london. bauman z 1991. modernity and ambivalence. polity press, cambridge. bauman z 1993. postmodern ethics. blackwell publichers, oxford. bauman z 1995. life in fragments: essays in postmodern morality. blackwell publishers, oxford. bauman z 1996. postmodernin lumo. vastapaino, tampere. buttimer a 1976. grasping the dynamism of lifeworld. annals of the association of american geographers 66: 2, 277–292. cloke p & johnston r 2005. spaces of geographical thought: deconstructing human geography’s binaries. sage publications, london. collier m 2001. approaches to analysis in visual anthropology. in van leeuwen t & jewitt c (eds). handbook of visual analysis, 35–60. sage publications, london, thousand oaks & new delhi. crang m 2001. rhythms of the city. temporalised space and motion. in may j & thrift n (eds). timespace: geographies of temporality, 187–207. routledge, london & new york. cresswell t 2006. on the move: mobility in the modern western world. routledge, new york. de certeau m 1984. the practice of everyday life. university of california press, berkeley. dear m 1997. identity, authenticity and memory in place-time. in pile s & keith m (eds). geographies of resistance, 219–235. routledge, london. dixon dp & jones jp 2004. poststructuralism. in duncan js, johnson nc & schein rh (eds). a companion to cultural geography, 79–107. blackwell publishing, new york. doel m 1999. poststructuralist geographies: the diabolical art of spatial science. rowman & littlefield, lanham. doel m 2000. un-glunking geography. spatial science after dr seuss and gilles. in crang m & thrift n (eds). thinking space, 117–135. routledge, new york. dovey k 2010. becoming places: urbanism/ architecture/ identity/ power. routledge, oxon. duncan n 1996. bodyspace. routledge, london. ellin n 2006. integral urbanism. routledge, new york. european union 1997. convention determining the state responsible for examining applications for asylum lodged in one of the member states of the european communities – dublin convention. <http://eur-lex.europa.eu/lexuriserv/lexuriserv. d o ? u r i = c e l e x : 4 1 9 9 7 a 0 8 1 9 ( 0 1 ) : e n : n ot > 2.10.2009. european union 2000a. euroopan unionin perusoikeuskirja. <http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/fi/ lvb/l33501.htm> 2.10.2009. european union 2000b. council regulation no 2725/2000. <http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/justice_freedom_security/free_movement_ of_persons_asylum_immigration/l33081_en. htm> 2.10.2009. european union 2003. council regulation (ec) no 343/2003. <http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/justice_freedom_security/free_movement_of_ persons_asylum_immigration/l33153_en.htm> 2.10.2009. franke fn 2009. refugee registration as foreclosure of the freedom to move: the virtualisation of refugees’ rights within maps of international protection. environment and planning d: society and space 27, 352–369. gibson-graham jk 1997. postmodern becomings: from the space of form to the space of potentiality. in benko g & strohmayer u (eds). space and social theory. interpreting modernity and postmodernity, 306–321. blackwell publishers, oxford. hall s 1999. identiteetti. vastapaino, tampere. hannula m 2001. paikallista politiikkaa, paikallista nykytaidetta. synteesi 2, 33–39. fennia 188: 1 (2010) 89temporary geographies of the city: the experienced spaces of … harvey d 1973. social justice and the city. edwarld arnold, london. haydn f & temel r (eds) 2006. temporäre räume. konzepte zur stadtnutzung. birkhäuser, basel. healey r 2008. asylum-seekers and refugees: a structuration theory analysis of their experiences in the uk. population, space and place 12, 257– 271. hopkins pe & hill m 2008. pre-flight experiences and migration stories: the accounts of unaccompanied asylum seeking children. children’s geographies 6: 3, 257–268. hou j (ed) 2010. insurgent public space: guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of contemporary cities. routledge, london. kaiser r & nikiforova e 2008. the performativity of scale: the social construction of scale effects in narva, estonia. environment and planning d: society and space 26, 537–562. kohoutek r & kamleithner c 2006. temporäre nutzungen, deregulierung und urbanität. in haydn f & temel r (ed) temporäre räume. konzepte zur stadtnutzung, 25–39. birkhäuser, basel. koskela h 2009. pelkokierre. pelon politiikka, turvamarkkinat ja kamppailu kaupunkitilasta. gaudeamus, helsinki. kymäläinen p 2003. topologies of becoming. deferred presences in writing. space and culture 6: 3, 235–248. kymäläinen p 2005. geographies in writing. re-imagining place. nordia geographical publications 34: 3. latham a 2003. research, performance, and doing human geography: some reflections on the diaryphotograph, diary-interview method. environment and planning a 35, 1993–2007. latham a 2004. researching and writing everyday accounts of the city: an introduction to the diaryphoto diary-interview method. in knowles c & sweetman p (eds). picturing the social landscape: visual methods and the sociological imagination, 117–131. routledge, london. lefebvre h 1991. production of space. blackwell publishers, oxford. lefebvre h 2004. rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. continuum, london. lehtovuori p, hentilä h-l & bengs c (2003). temporary uses: the forgotten resource of urban planning. pulications in the centre for urban and regional studies c 58, espoo. ley d 1977. social geography and the taken-forgranted world. transactions of the institute of british geographers 2: 4, 498–512. maahanmuuttovirasto 2009. turvapaikkapäätökset: yksin tulleet alaikäiset lapset 1.1.–31.1.2008 henkilömäärä. <http://www.migri.fi/netcomm/content.asp?article=3127> 5.10.2009. markwell kw 2000. photo-documentation and analyses as research strategies in human geography. australian geographical studies 38: 1, 91–98. massey d 2005. for space. sage publications, london, thousand oaks & new delhi. misselwitz p, oswalt p & overmeyer k 2003. urban catalyst. <http://www.studio-uc-overmeyer.de/ downloads.php> 3.10.2009. misselwitz p, oswalt p, overmeyer k & brodowski n 2007. open-source urbanismus: vom inselurbanismus zur urbanität der zwischenräume. in plan b: kulturwirtschaft in berlin, 99–108. regioverlag, berlin. mitchell d 2003. the right to the city: social justice and the fight for public space. the guilford press, new york. murdoch j 2006. post-structuralist geography. sage publications, london. nast hj & pile s (eds) 1998. places through the body. routledge, london. nordström p 2009. turvapaikanhakijanuorten väliaikaiset tilat: kohtaamisia pykäläsokkelikosta pansioon. pro gradu -thesis, university of turku, department of geography. olsson g 2007. abysmal. a critique of cartographic reason. the university of chicago press, chicago. pehkonen s & puumala e 2008. kehojen koreografia – kamppailu ruumiista vailla turvapaikkaa. terra 120: 3, 159–168. plan b: kulturwirtschaft in berlin 2007. regioverlag, berlin. puumala e & pehkonen s 2010. corporeal choreographies between politics and the political: failed asylum seekers moving from body politics to bodyspaces. international political sociology 4, 50– 65. rajanti t 1999. kaupunki on ihmisen koti. tutkijaliitto, helsinki. risbeth c & finney n 2006. novelty and nostalgia in urban greenspace: refugee perspectives. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 97: 3, 281−295. ruoppila s 2004. eastern european cities in the making – temporary land use as a tool for cultural projects. journal for northeast issues 3, 24–26. sirriyeh a 2008. young asylum seekers’ conceptions of ‘home’ at a time of transition to adulthood. international journal of migration, health and social care 4: 1, 12−27. spicer n 2008. places of exclusion and inclusion: asylum-seeker and refugee experiences of neighbourhoods in the uk. journal of ethnic and migration studies 34: 3, 491–510. staeheli la & mitchell d 2008. the people’s property? power, politics, and the public. routledge, new york. suomen säädöskokoelma 2004. ulkomaalaislaki. <http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2004/ 20040301> 2.10.2009. temel r 2006. das temporäre in der stadt. in haydn f & temel r (eds). temporäre räume. konzepte zur stadtnutzung, 59–67. birkhäuser, basel. 90 fennia 188: 1 (2010)päivi kymäläinen & paulina nordström the new international webster’s comprehensive dictionary of the english language 1999. trident press international, naples. thrift n 1997. the still point. resistance, expressive embodiment and dance. in pile s & keith m (eds). geographies of resistance, 124–151. routledge, london. thrift n 2000. afterwords. environment and planning d: society and space 18, 213–255. thrift n 2008. non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. routledge, london. tryselius k 2007. rum i tillblivelse. karlstad university studies 2007: 28. tuan y-f 1977. space and place. the perspective of experience. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. unhcr 2007. convention and protocol relating to the status of refugees. <http://www.unhcr. org/3b66c2aa10.html> 2.10.2009. 21846_1_gurney.indd mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes in the okstindan area of northern norway, using geomorphic process units as derived from remote sensing and ground survey stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch gurney, stephen d. & annett bartsch (2005). mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes in the okstindan area of northern norway, using geomorphic process units as derived from remote sensing and ground survey. fennia 183: 1, pp. 1–14. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the delineation of geomorphic process units (gpus) aims to quantify past, current and future geomorphological processes and the sediment flux associated with them. five gpus have been identified for the okstindan area of northern norway and these were derived from the combination of landsat satellite imagery (tm and etm+) with stereo aerial photographs (used to construct a digital elevation model) and ground survey. the okstindan study area is sub-arctic and mountainous and is dominated by glacial and periglacial processes. the gpus exclude the glacial system (some 37% of the study area) and hence they are focussed upon periglacial and colluvial processes. the identified gpus are: 1. solifluction and rill erosion; 2. talus creep, slope wash and rill erosion; 3. accumulation of debris by rock and boulder fall; 4. rockwalls; and 5. stable ground with dissolved transport. the gpus have been applied to a ‘test site’ within the study area in order to illustrate their potential for mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes. the test site within the study area is a catchment which is representative of the range of geomorphological processes identified. stephen d. gurney, department of geography, the university of reading, po box 227, whiteknights, reading rg6 6ab, uk. e-mail: s.d.gurney@reading. ac.uk. annett bartsch, institute of photogrammetry and remote sensing, vienna university of technology, gusshausstrasse 27–29, a-1040 vienna, austria. e-mail: ab@ipf.tuwien.ac.at. ms received 26 january 2005. introduction the creation of a semi-automated system for the mapping of geomorphological processes which utilises data from remote sensing and produces output through a geographical information system (gis) has long been an ideal within geomorphology. despite major advances in both remote sensing and gis in recent decades, however, for most areas of the world it is far from being realised. an intermediate step would appear to be the identification of geomorphic signatures related to process domains (e.g. giles 1998) or geomorphic process units (gpus, see gude et al. 2002) using a mixture of spatial data from both remote sensing and ground survey, with all the data being stored and queried in a gis. the geomorphological processes that will be identified by such techniques will clearly vary from region to region and will, in part, be determined by climate, terrain etc. the present paper documents an attempt to map the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes in a sub-arctic, mountainous environment dominated by glacial and periglacial processes using remotely sensed data and field survey. the concept is essentially that of gude et al. (2002), who identified the gpus as representing areas with homogenous process composition. in order to quantify processes, the gpus must be able to identify erosion, transportation and deposition of sediments. the okstindan area was chosen for this study since much geomorphological mapping has already been undertaken here using traditional 2 fennia 183: 1 (2005)stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch means (e.g. harris 1982) and because it contained a site (the rabotsbekken catchment) that could be readily compared with the kärkevagge catchment of northern sweden where bartsch et al. (2002) have already investigated sediment transport processes using the ‘gpu approach’. a further aim of this investigation was to gain additional knowledge about the spatial extent and importance of non-glacial mass movements (largely solifluction) in the rabotsbekken test site of the study area, both at present and during the holocene. okstindan has seen several investigations of solifluction over the last three decades (e.g. harris 1973, 1981; elliott & worsley 1999) and a continuation of this work using recently developed techniques was believed to be worthwhile. study area the mountainous okstindan area is located in the norwegian section of the scandinavian mountain range some 50 km south of the arctic circle and 70 km to the east of the atlantic ocean (fig. 1). it borders sweden in the east and belongs to the hemnes district of nordland county. the area investigated comprises the immediate surroundings of the okstindan ice cap, its outlets and flanking glaciers. the glaciers and perennial snowfields cover an area of approximately 58 km2 as calculated from landsat 7 etm+ imagery acquired in september 1999. the ice cap has two major outlet glaciers, vestre okstindbreen and austre okstindbreen (knudsen & haakensen 1998). the highest summits in the area are oksskolten (1916 m) and okshornet (1901 m) which are located just east of the ice cap. the study area itself ranges from ca. 650 to 1000 m a.s.l. geologically, the study area belongs to the caledonides fold-belt (strand & kulling 1972). the bedrock consists mostly of mica-schists locally rich in garnet, but phyllite, quartzites, hornblende schists, marble and granites are also present. the sedimentary rocks of the area lie within the rødingsfjall nappe (rutland & nicholson 1965) and are part of the cambro-silurian group within the scandinavian pre-devonian caledonides (holtedahl 1960). during the weichselian, the whole area was covered by inland ice with oksskolten forming a nunatak. currently till covers most areas outside the neoglacial maximum of the glaciers. evidence from erratics, striations, roches moutonnées and eskers indicate that ice movement was mainly from the southeast to the northwest (cf. blake & olsen 1999). deglaciation occurred at about the same time as in beiarn to the north at ca. 9300 years bp (see andersen 1975). the extent of the fig. 1. main features of the okstindan study area and its location within norway. glaciers referred to in the text labelled crb (charles rabot-breen) and cb (corneliussen-breen). fennia 183: 1 (2005) 3mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes… local glaciers has varied during the holocene, and the neoglacial maximum was achieved in the little ice age (1550–1850 ad) at a date in the mid18th century (winkler 2003). the little ice age limits are generally around 1 to 2 km in front of the current glacier positions (griffey & worsley 1978). currently the outlet glaciers of the okstindan ice cap are in retreat along with all of the flanking cirque glaciers, with the exception of corneliussen-breen, which has advanced by about 100 m since the early 1970s (knudsen & theakstone 1997). in the absence of a permanent meteorological station in the immediate vicinity, climatological parameters need to be extrapolated from the nearest meteorological station at hattfjelldal (ca. 50 km to the ssw). harris (1982) estimated a mean annual air temperature (maat) of 0°c at about 700 m a.s.l., whilst hall (1985) estimated that the maat is –2 to –4 °c. annual precipitation is around 1500 mm, with snow cover at 180 d yr–1. winter snow cover thickness varies between almost none to over 10 m (gurney & lawrence 2004) due to redistribution by the wind. the dominant wind direction is believed to be from the sw (raben et al. 2000). the maat value indicates that the region is within the area of sporadic permafrost (as defined by king 1986) and on the outer edge of the discontinuous permafrost zone for scandinavia (etzelmüller et al. 1998). nevertheless, only isolated patches of perennially frozen ground have been observed (through excavations in successive years), these in locations which show special micro-topographic properties, like exposure to wind e.g. the crests of moraine ridges (griffey & worsley 1978). the surficial cover of till consists of a frost susceptible, silty, sand matrix with larger clasts, and patterned ground phenomena are commonly developed within it. these comprise of non-sorted polygons and circles (including earth hummocks or thufur), sorted circles and solifluction lobes on slopes (harris 1982). the study area is characterized by arctic-alpine vegetation (körner 1999), and the growing season is very short. four vegetation zones related to altitude (sub-, low, midand high alpine belt) occur. the sub-alpine belt is a transition zone from closed montane forest to the treeless alpine belts where the upper limit corresponds to the current treeline at about 660 m a.s.l. the major tree species in this zone at okstindan is betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa (ellis & ellis 1978). the low alpine belt represents the upper limit for the occurrence of vaccinium myrtillus. within the mid-alpine belt, heath vegetation (ericaceae, grasses and sedges) disappears (ellis & ellis 1978). in the surroundings of glaciers and at higher altitudes only a few pioneer species can be found. this is defined as the high-alpine zone. the extent of the neoglacial zone, which has no vegetation cover, is variable due to glacier advance and retreat. methodology initially, a database was created from existing maps and remotely sensed data. these spatial data were processed to produce first order information on cover type and therefore likely geomorphological process. a digital elevation model (dem) was then created and used to orthorectify the satellite imagery and create additional parameters such as terrain (slope angle and aspect) and topology (the relationships between the process areas from a sediment transport point of view). the results from satellite image analysis and stereo-photogrammetric processing were then combined with the results of the field measurements and observations. finally, process group layers were produced and from these, possible process combinations were identified. it was from these possible process combinations that the gpus were finally formulated. further explanation is given for each of the stages. data sources and spatial data processing the available spatial data included paper maps, aerial photographs, and satellite imagery (table 1). of most importance in the process were the aerial photographs and the satellite imagery. nevertheless, several topographic and geological maps of the region by statens kartverk (norway) and ngu (geological survey of norway) are available at a scale of 1:50,000 and these were scanned and some elements of interest, such as the glacier extent and hydrology, were digitised. when using a variety of spatial data sources the problem of differing projections and datums must be overcome. during the second half of the last century, three different models have been in use (mugnier 1999): the ngo 1948 (oslo observatory datum), european datum 1950 and wgs84. all co-ordinates were converted to wgs84 to enable overlays. 4 fennia 183: 1 (2005)stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch other paper maps used included a geological map (reynolds 1978) and a vegetation map (ellis & ellis 1978) which related to the ne sector on the study area only. the lack of ground control points (gcps) meant that the georeferencing accuracy of these maps was less than 50 m. nevertheless, they formed a useful adjunct to the field survey data. due to the cloudy and largely snow covered nature of the area, suitable landsat satellite imagery were available for 1984 (landsat 5 tm) and 1999 (landsat 7 etm+) only. both images contain information on land cover for the same season when snow coverage is largely limited to the glaciated areas. the landsat 7 image has the benefit of a panchromatic band (band 8) with 15 m x 15 m resolution. distortions and spectral discrepancies within remotely sensed data from mountainous areas are mainly caused by altitude differences, relief orientation concerning the sensor position and illumination effects. in order to combine different spatial data sets and extract new information, it is necessary to remove or minimize any distortions using data provided by a dem – a process known as orthorectification. the resolution of the elevation data must be higher than those of the remotely sensed data, which it is intended to correct. in this case the landsat scenes obtained had a pixel spacing of approximately 30 m. the source for the elevation data are aerial photographs, which were scanned with a pixel spacing of 1 m. since the available maps for georeferencing have a scale of 1:50,000 and the equidistance of the elevation lines is 20 m, the maximum resolution of the final dem is not less than 20 m x 20 m and could therefore be used for orthorectification of the satellite imagery. the generation of the dem used is discussed later. the two landsat images were pre-processed using the orthorectification algorithm provided by erdas imagine software. the photogrammetrically derived dem was used as additional input for the orthorectification. gcps were collected using map co-ordinates which were transformed first to wgs84 where necessary. these utm x, y coordinate pairs were complemented by their associated altitude in metres a.s.l. a landcover classification was created and this was used in part to delimit the entire extent of the glaciers. the chosen approach utilised the maximum likelihood method. a non-topographic normalized image (with no correction of illumination effects) was used as input in order to capture all snow covered areas, including those in shadow. contrary to other landcover types, snow and ice can be identified in shadows and under varying illumination. a further reason for not applying a normalization procedure in this case was that the available algorithm would exclude shadow areas which actually account for much of the snow and ice covered terrain. the resulting classes comprise snow and ice (including areas in shadow), shadow over other landcover types, non-vegetated areas, vegetated regions and water. misclassifications resulting from differing illumination in landcover types other than snow and ice do not effect the further analyses since this information is not used other than as an illustration (fig. 2) and errors were table 1. spatial data sources utilised in the study. data source projection/media comments topographic map 1:50,000 sheet 2027 iii, 1986 utm, wgs84 georeferenced in arcinfotm topographic maps 1:50,000 sheets 1927 ii, 1926 i, 2026 iv, 1984–1986 utm, european datum 1950 georeferenced and transformed in arcinfotm flight record co-ordinates ngo 1948 transformed in envi aerial photographs 1:30,000 acquired 31–08–1998 black & white diapositives (cdrom once scanned) 11 images scanned at 750 dpi landsat 5 tm acquired 30–08–1984 cd-rom level 1r (full coverage) landsat 7 etm+ acquired 07–09–1999 cd-rom level 1r (full coverage) landsat 7 etm+ acquired 07–09–1998 cd-rom level 1 (part coverage) fennia 183: 1 (2005) 5mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes… not assessed. the landsat 5 image from 1984 was chosen for the classification, since it was acquired at the end of the ablation season and shows minimal snow coverage. all bands were used except the thermal band (band 6). classification accuracy was assessed through comparison with the orthophotographs (from 1998) which were acquired at roughly the same time of year and at the same time of day as the landsat image. 150 randomly distributed points were used for the assessment and perennial snow and ice fields showed satisfactory results, as did bare areas and vegetation, although some water surfaces were classified incorrectly. nevertheless, the overall classification accuracy for the reclassified image was 86.49% and this was considered sufficient. ultimately, shaded snow and ice areas could be successfully separated from other shaded regions and landcover classes including vegetated area, bare rock and water. a normalised difference vegetation index (ndvi) was extracted from the landsat 7 etm+ scene, which was acquired during the growing season. ndvi values increase as vegetation cover increases and hence it is a very useful tool in mapping. creating ndvi from etm+ data involves the use of band 3 (red, 0.63–0.69 µm) and band 4 (near infrared, 0.78–0.90 µm), in the form ndvi = (band 4 – band 3)/(band 4 + band 3). such a ratio accounts for most of the illumination effects, since they are equal in all bands. to ensure that all influence is removed, however, a topographic normalisation was applied before ratioing. the calculated values within the area of the dem range from –0.68 to 0.56 with the highest values observed within the low and subalpine vegetation zone and the lowest values observed within the okstindan ice cap. indeed the large area of the ice cap results in a low average ndvi for the entire study area of –0.08. dem creation eleven aerial photographs were available for the study area. these were acquired on two different tracks on 31 august, 1998 by fjellanger widerøe kart as with an rmk top 15. only areas with an overlap of 60% are suitable for the extraction of elevation data of sufficient accuracy, which meant that the overlap between tracks (at only 30%), could not be processed in combination with the within track data. in addition to limitations of coverage, the following problems caused errors in the dem extraction: shadow areas, continuous high albedo (low image content) of snow over large areas and clouds, including the shadows they cast. locations affected by such phenomena were postprocessed. the aerial photographs were scanned (at 750 dpi) and then the elevation data was extracted using the orthomax module in erdas. regions of the dem with anomalies (sinks and peaks) were identified and then post processed through either recalculation using different parameters (see gooch fig. 2. landcover classification of landsat 5 tm, 1984. glacier outlines from 1:50,000 topographic maps. 6 fennia 183: 1 (2005)stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch et al. 1999) or substitution with other elevation information. the first solution is only applicable in the case of artefacts, which are the result of low image content. ultimately it was not possible to remove all errors, which confirms the analysis undertaken by fox and gooch (2001) who were also unable to overcome the problem presented by large areas of featureless snow. an alternative is the use of slightly underexposed colour infra-red photographs (fox & nuttall 1997), which improves the snow surface texture. such photographs, however, were not available for the current research. the final dem was imported into arcinfo. the single images had missing or inaccurate information removed and were combined using the mosaic function, which allows the combination of images with continuous data like elevation models, which overlap each other. abrupt changes along boundaries were prevented through the use of a weighted average method. the georeferenced topographic maps were used to replace any missing information. an accuracy assessment of the dem was undertaken employing ground-based height measurements obtained using a hand-held gps receiver and a digital altimeter (68 points) and spot heights gathered from the topographic maps (85 points). the final dem covers an area of ca. 157 km2 and the elevation ranges from 527 m to 1924 m asl. this exceeds the known maximum altitude of 1916 m at oksskolten and is probably caused by interpolation errors caused by the pronounced peak-shape of this mountain. those areas requiring post-processing totalled 6.2 km2, which represents only 4% of the entire dem and these were mostly confined to glaciated terrain. field data collection the primary aim of the fieldwork, which was conducted in july/august 2001 and 2002, was to create a database of data points which could be used in the formulation of the gpus. a secondary aim was the verification of some of the existing mapping. some 79 data points were obtained in the study area, grouped into three areas around the okstindan ice cap (fig. 3). area i represents the north eastern sector of the okstindan area, area ii is located west of the snout of austre okstindbreen and area iii is just north of the snout of vestre okstindbreen. the data points selected in these areas were chosen to represent both recently geomorphically active and inactive sites. since the glacial environment is and has been dominant, features such as moraines and glacier forelands are present. table 2 lists all site types together with their data point frequency. this classification of sites refers to landform and geomorphic activity. the category ‘slope without other geomorphic feafig. 3. location of the 79 field data points used to verify the image interpretation and gis analysis. fennia 183: 1 (2005) 7mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes… table 2. cover types at the 79 data points obtained during fieldwork for verification of the image interpretation and gis analysis. cover types number of sites bedrock 7 bog 5 braided river 2 glacio-fluvial deposits 3 gletschervorfeld (glacier foreland) 3 earth hummocks (thufur) 3 inactive talus slope 4 moraine 5 nivation – surrounding of perennial snowpatch 2 non-sorted circles and polygons 10 ridge 5 slope without other geomorphic features 12 solifluction slope 15 talus slope (active) 2 valley floor (below treeline) 1 total 79 tures’ comprises currently geomorphically inactive sites but those which might have witnessed slope processes at some stage since deglaciation. the data points of ‘inactive talus slopes’ have certainly been active within the holocene, but show no current mass movement features. in active areas, such as ‘nivation’ (sites in the immediate vicinity of perennial snow patches), ‘solifluction slope’ and ‘talus slope (active)’, a range of sediment transport processes take place. wash denudation was not observed directly, but was assumed to take place in areas with low vegetation coverage and an inclined ground surface. patterned ground as a feature of frost heave, has not been included in this list since material is generally not moved away by the processes responsible. fine material produced by frost action processes, however, might be subsequently relocated by wash denudation. therefore, wash denudation was mapped on inclined areas showing patterned ground. exposed patterned ground on top of ridges is subject to deflation. indeed, this process might even be causative for the formation of patterned ground in such locations (harris 1982). the rockfall areas are located between charles rabot-breen and corneliussen-breen below a free face (for glacier location see fig. 1). table 3 indicates those process types investigated specifically for sediment transport and relationship to vegetation zones. in order to analyse the relationship between vegetation parameters and sediment transport processes, the dominant plant species at each site were identified and total vegetation coverage estimated. the number of mapped sites within the high alpine zone is smaller than that of the low and mid-alpine zones due to limited accessibility in the field. nevertheless, it is apparent that solifluction is confined to the low and mid-alpine vegetation zone. wash denudation on the other hand occurs within all zones. gps measurements were taken at all 79 sites using a garmin etrex handheld gps receiver to determine exact locations in combination with satellite data, and these were also used in the accuracy assessment of the dem. formulation of the gpus the sources for the parameterisation for the gpu formulation were the processed landsat data (30 m x 30 m resolution), the dem (20 m x 20 m resolution) and the field measurements and observations. regolith type (from maps and field survey) and topology (from the dem) were introduced as table 3. process types investigated specifically for assessing sediment transport and their relationship to vegetation zones. process type frequency vegetation alpine zone sub low mid high solifluction 16 0 12 4 0 talus creep only 6 0 0 4 2 wash denudation 33 1 19 8 5 seasonal flooding 3 0 1 1 1 earth slides 2 0 2 0 0 deflation 3 0 3 0 0 rockfall 2 0 0 1 1 nivation 3 0 0 1 1 8 fennia 183: 1 (2005)stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch additional parameters at the final stage. topology defines the relationship between objects, with the objects in this case being the process areas, which are connected to each other from the viewpoint of sediment input and output. all parameters of relevance are listed in table 4. once all the data had been processed it was then combined to create four process group layers. a simple decision tree classification using expert-knowledge based on the literature and on the field observations has been applied. each resulting layer contains process features (source or deposition) with equal parameter specifications (table 5). when these groups are combined, five unique process combinations are possible which represent the gpus at the study site. the final gpus derived (table 6) have a spatial resolution of 30 m x 30 m, the same as the landsat data which served as input. table 4. parameter groups and the information that they have been based upon. parameter group information contained terrain slope angle, curvature, aspect absolute altitude relative altitude (height of objects such as rockwalls) direction of flow landcover regolith type (boulders, fine debris) presence/absence of vegetation ndvi value presence/absence of perennial snow or ice topology relation to neighbouring zone (such as potential source area) e.g. above or below horizontal distance table 5. parameters for the sediment transport groups. process group parameter group specification 1 terrain 11º to 21º slope angle, lower limit elevation 660 m landcover 0.2 to 0.45 ndvi, firn fields excluded 2 terrain 21º to 40º slope angle landcover –0.2 to 0.2 ndvi, firn fields excluded 3 terrain 21º to 40º slope angle landcover –0.2 to 0.2 ndvi topology below rockwalls (i.e. directly adjacent to source area) 4 terrain >40º slope angle landcover no vegetation, firn fields excluded table 6. gpu classification scheme. total area and percentages given are for the rabotsbekken catchment (test site) of the study area. note perennial snow and ice covers ca. 40% of the catchment. gpu description area (km2 [%]) 1 solifluction and rill erosion. found on moderate slopes and rill erosion often occurs between lobes. 0.68 [6.9] 2 talus creep (as defined by rapp 1960), slope wash and rill erosion. found mostly below rockwalls on debris covered slopes and freeze-thaw processes are probably involved. 0.63 [6.4] 3 accumulation of debris by rock and boulder fall on talus slopes characterized by creep, slope wash and rill erosion, mud and debris flow. similar to gpu 2 except these areas lie below their source areas, the rockwalls and disturbance by sediment input is high (so no vegetation cover or pioneer plants only). 0.30 [3.0] 4 rockwalls, source area for debris for rock and boulder fall. the source area for gpu 3. 0.96 [9.8] 5 stable ground with dissolved transport only or a paraglacial environment. 3.35 [34.0] fennia 183: 1 (2005) 9mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes… the parameter groups ‘terrain’ and ‘landcover’ were used to identify gpu 1 (solifluction and rill erosion). the slope gradient value is derived by combining field data with the dem. the dem values differ from the field data because of their ground resolution. since the process area extraction is based on the 20 m x 20 m dem, these values were favoured. the lower limit for the occurrence of solifluction lobes corresponds roughly to the treeline. the calculated minimum and maximum ndvi value for solifluction areas was used as a landcover parameter. gpus 2 (talus creep) and 3 (debris accumulation by rock and boulder fall) feature similar parameter values but the latter includes topology as well, because it requires a source area above. both are confined to slopes between 21° and 40°. the potential source areas for gravity determined mass movements such as pebble fall are expected to show a slope gradient above 40° and little or no vegetation cover. once created, gpus 1, 2 and 3 were evaluated using the field data and all were considered accurate. this data set, however, included only one, albeit extensive, site where active rockfall deposits could be identified which is located between charles rabot-breen and corneliussen-breen (cf. mccarroll et al. 1998). this site was correctly classified by the gpus, although since no further sites could be identified using the orthophotos, a more thorough evaluation was not possible. due to limited accessibility, no field data points were obtained for gpu 4 (rockwalls, source area for debris). these areas are, however, clearly visible on the orthophotographs and can be observed from a distance on the ground. the vegetation coverage estimated during field surveys was compared with the result of the ndvi calculations. a linear relationship between the vegetation coverage estimate and ndvi value was observed (pearson correlation, r2 = 0.795). the relationship between ndvi values and certain geomorphological cover types is clearly of interest. for example, the ndvi value for areas affected by solifluction is positive in all cases. a similar range of ndvi values was extracted for areas with earth slides and deflation. the latter generally does not show dense plant coverage, but is populated by dwarf salix species and other low growing plants which are typical of exposed ridges. talus creep (gpu 2) and rockfall deposit sites (gpu 3), however, show low or even negative ndvi values. compared to the extracted geomorphometric parameters for the different process types, there are considerable differences for the ndvi ranges between processes. the species composition in solifluction areas (gpu 1) depends on the type of solifluction (stoneor turf-banked lobes). major components of the vegetation cover are betula nana and salix ssp. overall coverage exceeds 80% at most sites. typical sites with solifluction lobes are located within the low alpine belt. beside mosses and grasses, empetrum nigrum and vaccinium myrtillus are usually found growing on the upper part of the lobes which are better drained. slopes with talus creep (gpu 2) experience disturbance of the vegetation cover and are generally located at higher altitudes. the coverage by vascular plants is very low (maximum 7%). a cryptogram crust consisting of lichen and mosses covers the ground (at up to 70%). a low head wall is often situated above scree and the slope itself is mostly covered by debris, which has been delivered by processes such as rockfall. no lobes are developed but downslope movements are expected due to frost creep. this site also represents the upper limit of the mid-alpine vegetation zone. the debris is covered by mosses (at up to 30%) and pioneer vascular plants such as ranunculus glacialis. application of the gpus to the rabotsbekken ‘test site’ although the whole of okstindan was used as ‘training’ area for the formulation of the gpus, they have only been applied to the test site of rabotsbekken catchment. this is because gpus are concerned with sediment transport (and if this idea is extended, they could be used to create a sediment budget) which can only be sensibly considered within a catchment context. the okstindan area includes many catchments, although these are either small or were not completely covered by the area of the dem generated. the rabotsbekken catchment was chosen because it is representative of okstindan, in that it contains all of the processes and features found in the area as a whole. rabotsbekken was also amongst those areas of okstindan which had been documented by previous workers and this meant that verification of the gpus could be more thorough. in terms of possible comparison with previous work, the rabotsbekken catchment was large enough (at 10 ha) to be realistically compared with the kärkevagge 10 fennia 183: 1 (2005)stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch catchment considered by bartsch et al. (2002), which is about twice this size. figs. 4 and 5 provide a 3d dem and a 3d gpu map for the rabotsbekken test site. table 6, which lists the gpus, also gives the areal extent of each gpu in this area. with the gpu mapping approach it has been possible to assign all areas of the test site, outside of the glacial realm and those areas in deep shadow on the imagery, to a gpu. in this sense the mapping is far more complete than previous work which has tended to be feature specific (e.g. fig. 4 in harris 1982). in essence this is the advantage of ‘process mapping’ as opposed to ‘feature’ mapping which has been most prevalent in the past. advantages and disadvantages of the gpu approach it can be extremely difficult to compare the results of a gpu type mapping exercise based on remote sensing with those achieved through more traditional means (e.g. harris 1982). the emphasis in most previous mapping exercises has centred on the identification of geomorphological features, rather than geomorphological processes. it is true, of course, that the presence of features often infers one or more processes. however, it is not always clear whether these processes are necessarily active since many features, once established, can be maintained in the absence of one or more of their fig. 4. 3d dem of the rabotsbekken test site, z-factor = 1, view direction e to w. fennia 183: 1 (2005) 11mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes… fig. 5. 3d gpu map of the rabotsbekken test site, z-factor = 1, view direction e to w. for gpu classification see table 6. formative or initiating processes. this is certainly the case with many periglacial features as found in the okstindan area. since the current study aimed to map processes and classify all areas, it is by its very nature, more complete than previous mapping exercises. it also enables areas which have not been visited on the ground to be classified whereas previous mapping, even if it had a remote sensing component (such as the use of aerial photographs), necessitated a ground survey. the greater coverage achieved using the gpu approach means that it is an important step closer to modelling sediment transport through the landscape. countering these obvious advantages, however, there are some disadvantages. there is clearly a greater problem with the possible mis-classification of areas when using the gpu approach than is the case with the feature specific mapping conducted previously. also, some geomorphological features are not identified at all, for example, pronival ramparts (cf. shakesby 1997), although the processes contributing to them are (see later discussion). the labour involved is also not necessarily reduced using the gpu approach over more traditional means, although the processing can be done at any time of year and is not restricted to ‘field seasons’ (at okstindan much of the ground is snow covered for the greater portion of the year which is a considerable restriction to fieldwork). that said, since satellite imagery utilising the visible part of the spectrum is required, there is a restricted number of images available for any one year due to cloudiness and/or snow cover. of specific interest in this research were the processes of solifluction and the landforms created by them. both stone-banked and turf-banked 12 fennia 183: 1 (2005)stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch solifluction lobes can be found in the okstindan area (harris 1982; worsley 1993). they are mostly developed in weichselian till (harrison & macklin 1991; elliott 1996; elliott & worsley 1999). harris (1982) mapped the altitudinal limits of solifluction lobes in the area and reports a wider altitudinal range (660 to ca. 1200 m a.s.l.) than that identified by the current research. the harris data, however, resulted from very detailed mapping and involved a large number of sites (over 400), many of which were smaller than those that could be used in the current research due to the necessity to combine ground survey with satellite data. nevertheless, there is in general very good agreement between the data sets. there are certain features which exist in the area which have not been expressly identified by the gpu mapping of the current research, although the processes which combine to form them largely have. the case of pronival ramparts (formerly termed protalus ramparts, shakesby 1997) being a good example. it could be argued, however, that a number of features such as this are not easy to identify in the field through direct observation and hence in this respect there is an element of subjectivity in all mapping exercises. the existence of a pronival rampart located on a talus slope between corneliussen-breen and charles rabot-breen has been proposed by harris (1986). the ridge has a height of 4.75 m, a width of 10 m and a length of 100 m. it consists of mainly angular clasts and boulders, but a finer matrix also appears to have been incorporated. it is assumed that these fines have been deposited in connection with rockfall events. this rampart is considered to be active (harris 1986). clearly such features are important in the context of the landscape of okstindan. it should be noted, however, that gpu 3 essentially encapsulates the processes involved (admittedly with the exception of the role of the perennial snow) and, therefore, from a sediment transport point of view the mapping remains successful. gpu mapping in the kärkevagge of northern sweden (bartsch et al. 2002), resulted in the formulation of seven gpus (although one of these was further subdivided into three categories). okstindan and the kärkevagge have much in common, in terms of latitude, landscape and climate, and therefore there are considerable similarities between the gpus for these areas. the main difference in terms of the geomorphological processes identified, however, is that dirty avalanches make a substantial contribution to sediment movement rates in the kärkevagge and account for two of the assigned gpus, whereas at okstindan these phenomena have not been directly identified. furthermore, gpu types at kärkevagge are more varied since process areas overlap to a higher degree due to its specific setting and landscape development. despite the differences between the two sites, however, it can be seen that this geoinformatics based approach to the determination of sediment transport process areas is transferable between these two periglacial mountain environments. conclusions mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes through the formulation of geomorphic process units (gpus) is a relatively new approach. in this study it was possible to classify the landscape of the rabotsbekken test site into one of five categories which together represent all the terrain excluding perennial snow/ice. whilst there are significant advantages with this approach over more traditional, often feature specific, mapping, the process is based on extensive expert knowledge and is thus only semi-automated. as a procedure it is time-consuming. further difficulties were encountered due to the nature of the study area which is sub-arctic and mountainous. it has been demonstrated, however, that this approach for gpu derivation is applicable at okstindan and is thus transferable between mountainous periglacial environments. this study is based on the interpretation of digital elevation and satellite data at a particular resolution for a specific environment. the layers used for the derivation of the gpus in the final stage of the process, however, could be replaced by products resulting from a different methodology of process area determination. this would enable the ‘gpu approach’ to be transferred to other environments and at different scales. this technique could, therefore, be applied in other landscapes and climatic zones, although there is still considerable work to be done before such mapping will become routine. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank dan butterfield, vebjørn hansen, kjetil kvitnes and mikhail lamakin for field assistance. tvis knudsen (university of aarhus) provided the aerial photograph transparencies. kevin fennia 183: 1 (2005) 13mapping the spatial distribution of geomorphological processes… white (university of reading) provided much relevant expertise and experience in the remote sensing operations. fieldwork in 2001 was funded by a research grant from the royal society, dudley stamp memorial fund and a leonard sutton scholarship from the university of reading. this work was conducted whilst dr bartsch was in receipt of a studentship at the department of geography, the university of reading. the assistance of two anonymous referees has improved the text substantially and is greatly appreciated. references andersen bg (1975). glacial geology of northern nordland, north norway. norges geologiske undersøkelse 320. 74 p. bartsch a, m gude, c jonasson & d scherer (2002). identification of geomorphic process units in kärkevagge, northern sweden, by remote sensing and digital terrain analysis. geografiska annaler a 84, 171–178. blake kp & l olsen (1999). deglaciation of the svartisen area, northern norway, and isolation of a large ice mass in front of the fennoscandian ice sheet. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 53, 1–16. elliott g (1996). microfabric evidence for podzolic soil inversion by solifluction processes. earth surface processes and landforms 21, 467–476. elliott g & p worsley (1999). the sedimentology, stratigraphy and 14c dating of a turf-banked solifluction lobe: evidence for holocene slope instability at okstindan, northern norway. journal of quaternary science 14, 175–188. ellis s & j ellis (1978). notes on the vegetation of northeast okstindan. in fenwick im (ed). okstindan preliminary report for 1976, okstindan research project, 57–68. unpublished report. etzelmüller b, i berthling & jl sollid (1998). the distribution of permafrost in southern norway – a gis approach. in lewkowicz ag & m allard (eds). permafrost, seventh international conference, june 23–27, yellowknife, canada. collection nordicana 57, 251–257. fox aj & mj gooch (2001). automatic dem generation for antarctic terrain. photogrammetric record 17: 98, 275–290. fox aj & a-m nuttall (1997). photogrammetry as a research tool for glaciology. photogrammetric record 15: 89, 725–737. giles pt (1998). geomorphological signatures: classification of aggregated slope unit objects from digital elevation and remote sensing data. earth surface processes and landforms 23, 581–594. gooch mj, jh chandler & m stojic (1999). accuracy assessment of digital elevation models generated using the erdas imagine orthomax digital photogrammetric system. photogrammetric record 16: 93, 519–531. griffey nj & p worsley (1978). the pattern of neoglacial glacier variations in the okstindan region of northern norway during the last three millennia. boreas 7, 1–17. gude m, g daut, s dietrich, r mäusbacher, c jonasson, a bartsch & d scherer (2002). towards an integration of process measurements, archive analysis and modern geomorphology – the kärkevagge experimental site, abisko area, northern sweden. geografiska annaler a 84, 205–212. gurney sd & ds lawrence (2004). seasonal trends in the stable isotopic composition of snow and meltwater runoff in a subarctic catchment at okstindan, norway. nordic hydrology 35, 119–137. hall kj (1985). some observations on ground temperatures and transport processes at a nivation site in northern norway. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 39, 27–37. harris c (1973). some factors affecting the rates and processes of periglacial mass movements. geografiska annaler a 55, 24–28. harris c (1981). microstructures in solifluction sediments from south wales and north norway. biuletyn peryglacjalny 28, 221–226. harris c (1982). the distribution and altitudinal zonation of periglacial landforms, okstindan, norway. zeitschrift für geomorphologie 26, 283–304. harris c (1986). some observations concerning the morphology and sedimentology of a protalus rampart, okstindan, norway. earth surface processes and landforms 11, 673–676. harrison s & mg macklin (1991). form and size characteristics of clasts on stone-banked solifluction lobes, okstindan, north norway. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 45, 155–160. holtedahl o (ed) (1960). geology of norway. norges geologiske undersøkelse 208. 540 p. king l (1986). zonation and ecology of high mountain permafrost in scandinavia. geografiska annaler a 68, 131–139. knudsen nt & n haakensen (1998). austre okstindbre. in kjøllmoen b (ed). glasiologiske undersøkelser i norge 1996 og 1997, 95–101. norges vassdragsog energiverk, oslo. knudsen nt & wh theakstone (1997). recent changes of the glaciers of svartisen and okstindan, norway. aarhus geoscience 7, 113–128. körner c (1999). alpine plant life: functional plant ecology of high mountain ecosystems. 338 p. springer, berlin. mccarroll d, ra shakesby & ja matthews (1998). spatial and temporal patterns of late holocene rockfall activity on a norwegian talus slope: a lichenometric and simulation-modeling approach. arctic and alpine research 30, 51–60. mugnier cj (1999). grids & datums – the kingdom of norway. photogrammetric engineering & remote sensing 65, 1129–1132. raben p, wh theakstone & k tørseth (2000). relations between winter climate and ionic variations in a seven-meter-deep snowpack at okstindan, 14 fennia 183: 1 (2005)stephen d. gurney and annett bartsch norway. arctic, antarctic and alpine research 32, 189–196. rapp a (1960). recent development of mountain slopes in kärkevagge and surroundings. geografiska annaler 17, 71–200. reynolds jm (1978). the solid geology around okstindsjøen. in fenwick im (ed). okstindan preliminary report for 1976, okstindan research project, 1–16. unpublished report. rutland rwr & r nicholson (1965). tectonics of the caledonides in part of nordland, norway. quarterly journal of the geological society of london 121, 73–109. shakesby ra (1997). pronival (protalus) ramparts: a review of forms, processes, diagnostic criteria and palaeoenvironmental implications. progress in physical geography 21, 394–418. strand t & o kulling (1972). scandinavian caledonides. 302 p. wiley, london. winkler s (2003). a new interpretation of the data of the ‘little ice age’ glacier maximum at svartisen and okstindan, northern norway. the holocene 13, 83–95. worsley p (1993). holocene solifluction at okstindan, northern norway: a reassessment. paläoklimaforschung 11, 49–57. untitled populating finland john westerholm westerholm, john (2002). populating finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 123–140. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the demographic structures and settlement patterns of finland have evolved during the past 10,000 years. during this time the population has grown to its present size of almost 5.2 million through phases of fast and slow increase, and occasional periods of decrease. changes in the settlement pattern have accompanied the population growth. from the twelfth to the middle of the twentieth century, the general trend was a continuous dispersion of settlement from the southern core areas. the most significant twentieth-century redistributions of the population happened in connection with the resettling of over 400,000 refugees after world war ii, and the great move in the 1960s and 1970s from rural to urban areas and to sweden. finland remained a predominantly rural country until the 1960s. structural changes within primary production and an increasingly international economy set into motion a regional concentration of the population. today over 80 percent of the population lives in densely built areas covering only 2.2 percent of the land area. the population’s age structure and the current level of natural reproduction will lead to a fast population decrease beginning in the 2020s. the work force will decrease from 2010 onward. these demographic problems will damage the future economy and competitiveness of finland, unless immigration is encouraged and actively supported. john westerholm, department of geography, p. o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: john.westerholm@helsinki.fi introduction the aim of this article is to give a general overview and cartographic presentation of the population and settlement developments in finland. finland is a very suitable subject for such a presentation, as already in the middle of the sixteenth century, when finland had been a part of the kingdom of sweden for almost 300 years, the swedish crown initiated a detailed settlement survey. this was motivated by a need to map the kingdom’s resources in the context of international competition and armed conflicts. these first surveys contain highly detailed and comprehensive information about individual villages and farmsteads, allowing the drawing of accurate settlement maps of what today’s finland looked like in the 1540s and 1560s (jutikkala 1949: 14–17, atlas of… 1973). a systematic gathering of population statistics began in sweden in 1736, but as early as in 1721 the clergy was obliged to send information concerning births and deaths in their parishes to the central government (koskinen et al. 1994: 15). the statistical office in finland was founded in 1865 and began to publish separate demographic data regularly. it is therefore possible to trace finland’s demographic development and settlement history through several centuries and to identify events and circumstances that have influenced this process. in this article, an overview of the background and growth of the population of finland is presented. secondly, certain important events, periods and patterns concerning the settlement development are discussed. finally, some main characteristics of the present population structure and settlement patterns are analysed against the background of future scenarios. 124 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm origins and growth of population artefacts found in the 1990s – pebble tools, scarred flakes, etc. – in the cave susiluoto in southernmost ostrobothnia, bear witness to a hominid presence in finland over 100,000 years ago, during the interglacial period preceding the last ice age. the weichselian ice sheet, however, ended this palaeolithic settlement. modern man entered the scene that today is the state territory of finland soon after the withdrawal of the ice sheet and in step with the revelation of dry land from the sea as a result of the isostatic land uplift (see maaranen 2002; tikkanen & oksanen 2002). climate variations during the holocene have also played a role in the colonisation and spread of settlement in finland (nunez 1999; solantie 1988, 1992). as late as in the twentieth century, the common view among researchers in finland was that finno-ugric settlers started to arrive in finland about 2,000 years ago. the ancestors of these colonisers had left their original settlement area along the shores of the volga river some 3,000 years earlier and ended up in estonia, finland, and hungary (rikkinen et al. 1999). the proposed original settlement area in russia is, true enough, still today inhabited by ethnic groups speaking finnougric languages (cf. suihkonen 2002: fig. 1). according to this hackman paradigm, finland had lost its earlier population because of – among other things – declining climatic conditions during the subatlantic period (2,500–0 b.c.) (pitkänen 1994: 19; edgren 1999: 311). the land thus lay open for new colonisers who, according to this line of thought, began to cross the gulf of finland from estonia during the first century a.d. the contemporary view is that finland was colonised through a gradual influx of settler groups coming from different directions, and that the genetic history of the present population can possibly be traced all the way back to the initial hunter-gatherers who arrived over 9,000 years ago. the ethnic origin of these first settlers remains unknown, but they were probably not of finno-ugric extraction (jutikkala 1987: 352). after that, genetic and cultural material was added as new groups arrived from the south, west, and east. finno-ugric dominance resulted when significant numbers of speakers from such language groups began to arrive from the east, probably during the fourth millennium b.c., assimilating the original population of unknown ethnic background (pitkänen 1994: 20). recent studies show that 75 percent of the genetic composition of the finns consists of a western heritage and only 25 percent of an eastern component (vilkuna 1999). one could therefore say that the main finno-ugric element of today’s finland is finnish, the majority language. although heavily borrowing words and concepts from indo-european neighbours, the language survived the assimilation of other ethnic groups, while the genetic structure of the original finno-ugric population was gradually “westernised” through this process. archaeological evidence also speaks for closer pre-historic contacts with western indo-european cultures than with eastern finno-ugric ones. the present view is thus that the “main ancestral home” of the finns is to be found in central europe, complemented by several other “minor homes.” when discussing the colonisation of finland and its cultural and genetic impacts, one should always remember that the size of the population inhabiting the territory of contemporary finland has always been very modest. it is estimated that the population of finland at the end of the stone age (second millennium b.c.) was 5,000–10,000 persons. by the time of the first crusade to finland, in the 1150s, the population had grown to 20,000–40,000 persons (pitkänen 1994: 48). when the first taxation-motivated survey was conducted in the mid-sixteenth century, the population was almost 300,000 persons. two hundred years later the number exceeded 420,000 (stv 1998: 49). figure 1 presents the population development and the growth rate from 1750 to 2000. the growth is fairly steady when analysed on the basis of ten-year intervals, while the growth rate varies quite significantly. one-year intervals would show markedly stronger variations in both absolute and relative population growth, including negative growth with a varying frequency throughout the period in question. the variations in the growth rate curve and the gradient of the absolute growth curve indicate that epidemics, famines, wars, and periods of large-scale emigration took their toll and hindered growth on several occasions. furthermore, the influence of some changes in the national borders and administrative decisions, as well as a decline in both mortality and nativity in modern times are reflected in figure 1. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 125populating finland during the eighteenth century, the overall population growth rate in finland was high compared to most of the rest of europe. this was due to a very high nativity, especially in the eastern parts of the country where extended families were common. the high nativity, in turn, was a result of a higher marriage rate among the adult population than in many other parts of europe, although the age of marrying was on the rise also in finland during the eighteenth century (jutikkala 1980: 156, pitkänen 1994: 43). children born out of wedlock were also a common phenomenon in the kingdom of sweden. some 40 percent of the unmarried women, belonging to the rural landless population in 1700–1860, had children (jutikkala 1980: 160). the rapid population growth during the eighteenth century was slowed down somewhat by repeated warfare between sweden and russia. these hostilities culminated in the war of 1808–1809, after which finland became a part of the russian empire. the war of 1808–1809 doubled the mortality rate, up to six percent of the population in both 1808 and 1809, causing a negative population growth (–3%). the slow growth in 1800–1810 was further accentuated by a severe epidemic in 1803. in addition, smallpox, a common disease, endemic in finland at the time, claimed an average of 2,000 lives per year in the beginning of the nineteenth century (pitkänen 1990). in 1812, the areas ceded by sweden to russia in 1721 and 1743 were returned to finland as the province of vyborg (see jukarainen 2002: fig. 1). the 185,000 inhabitants of this province lifted the population numbers and growth rate back to their pre-war level (atlas öfver finland 1899: plate 14; stv 1998: 49). an administrative decision in 1830 to include the greek orthodox population in the census increased the population by 25,000 persons. this increase was countered by cholera epidemics in 1833 and 1836. the epidemic of 1833 was espefig. 1. absolute and relative population development in finland in 1750–2000 (atlas öfver finland 1899: plate 14; stv 2000: 50). 126 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm cially severe and caused a negative population growth that year. the next significant negative impact came in the late 1860s when consecutive crop failures, combined with an undeveloped infrastructure and a restrictive economic policy, caused acute famine in a large part of the country in 1867 and 1868. during the winter and spring of 1867–1868, the population of finland decreased by about 100,000. some eight percent of the population died in 1868, which was three to four times higher than the normal mortality rate. this was the last major peacetime famine in western europe. the impact of the civil war in 1918 on the growth rate can be detected even in an analysis based on decade intervals (fig. 1). according to the latest findings, the war caused over 34,000 deaths in battles and as a result of executions and harsh internment after the war (see <www. narc.fi>). on top of the losses caused by the war, finland was hit by severe flu epidemics, also called the spanish disease, in 1918, 1919, and 1920. these flu epidemics claimed some 25,000 lives. the losses were partially compensated when the newly established soviet union agreed to cede the petsamo area in the northeast and 1,500 people to finland in the peace treaty of tartu in 1920 (see jukarainen 2002: fig. 1). the winter war of 1939–1940 and the continuation war in 1941–1944 seriously tapped the male population of finland. in these wars almost 71,000 finnish soldiers died in combat and over 203,000 were wounded. the death toll comprised about nine percent of the male population aged 15–39 years in 1940 (stv 1946: 39). the heavy war losses are not clearly reflected in figure 1, because they are compensated by the baby boom generations of 1945–1950. during that period, the annual number of newborns exceeded 100,000. the size of these annual age groups was impressive. in 1946, the population of finland was 3,865,000 persons and live births numbered 106,075 (2.7%). by 2000, the population had grown to 5,181,115 persons, but the annual number of newborns had been almost halved, to only 57,577 (1.1%) (stv 2001: 72). the growth rate took a marked downturn during the 1960s, when profound structural changes within primary production and the economy as a whole launched an unprecedented out-migration and depopulation in rural areas (see häkkilä 2002; kortelainen 2002). a significant part of these migratory flows was directed toward sweden. during the peak years of emigration, in 1969 and 1970, altogether 80,000 finns crossed the baltic to sweden, either seeking work or accompanying jobseekers (häggström et al. 1990: 56) (fig. 2). the population growth of finland was negative during those two years because of this migration. more than 500,000 persons have left finland for sweden during the post-war period. about half of them have returned (sandlund 1982: 5; korkiasaari & söderling 1998: 8) (fig. 2). the emigration to sweden had a particularly strong impact on the swedish-speaking population of finland, the finland-swedes (see raento fig. 2. emigration and immigration flows between sweden and finland, 1950–2001 (maahanja maastamuuttaneet… 2002). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 127populating finland & husso 2002). one-fourth (25,000 persons) of the finland-swedes born in 1931–1950 had emigrated to sweden by 1975 (sandlund 1984: 199). particularly the swedish-speaking coastland of ostrobothnia in the west was, and still is, affected by a high propensity to emigrate. this region was also in the forefront during the emigration to north america some one hundred years earlier (herberts 1996: 12). altogether 370,000 finns emigrated across the atlantic between 1860 and world war ii (korkiasaari 2002). this emigration flow peaked between 1899 and 1913 (fig. 3), clearly affecting the population growth rates in finland during that period (fig. 1). spread and patterns of settlement until 1600 population growth or decrease always causes a redistribution of the settlement pattern. population growth can result in a denser settlement pattern or in an expansion, if uninhabited areas remain to be colonised. a decrease can, in turn, lead to a sparser pattern or to a direct contraction, if, for instance, marginally located settlements go under for one reason or another. also other than demographic factors can trigger changes in the settlement pattern. political decisions or a restructuring of the economy can initiate redistributions regardless of demographic trends. all these processes of adaptation can be seen in the settlement development of finland. central basic structures of the contemporary settlement pattern in finland had already evolved in the middle ages, although a large part of the inner and northern regions of the country still remained without permanent settlement at the end of that historical period (orrman 1999: 375). the colonising of finland and the settlement spread during and after the middle ages was initiated and steered by numerous circumstances. one common way to cope with a rising population pressure in economies based on agriculture is to push the agricultural frontier into less favourable areas. solantie (1988, 1992) presents an interesting study concerning the spread of settlement and its relation to the general climate conditions in finland and climate fluctuations since 500 a.d. he uses the risks and expected frequencies of crop failure with field rye in connection with frosts in the vegetative season and problems during wintering. during warmer periods the population in already settled areas grows and the harvest per capita decreases, which builds up a population pressure in relation to the resources. when the climate cools down, the harvest per capita decreases even further. this can lead to a direct population decrease in situ, through famine and disease, or to a push into agriculturally less favourable areas in order to increase the total production, albeit at the cost of a decreasing marginal product. the findings of solantie, presented in figure 4, illustrate the spread of settlement in finland until the mid-sixteenth century. solantie (1988: 9) states fig. 3. transatlantic emigration from finland, 1870–1945 (kaukosiirtolaisuus… 2002). 128 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm that the areas permanently settled already in the merovingian period (600–800 a.d.) and viking times (800–1050 a.d.) had a crop failure risk of less than ten percent. the largest villages were to be found in places with a risk probability below five percent. some exceptions notwithstanding, the overall picture is that settlement based on agriculture gradually spread from these hearth areas, reaching the limits shown in figure 4 by the mid-sixteenth century. naturally, such factors as soil conditions, improvements in production methods, and the crown’s settlement policies had a role to play as well. during the time span presented in figure 4 periods of faster and slower spread occurred. two of these periods deserve closer attention here, as their influence is still clearly present in the population and settlement structures of finland. the arrival and impact of the swedes the ethnic territory, consisting of a number of geographically separate regions along and outside the southern and western coasts of finland, called swedish finland (see raento & husso 2002: cdfig. 1), began to take shape in the twelfth century. the main inflow of settlers evidently occurred during the thirteenth century, probably with a continuation into the fourteenth century in some places. since that time the regional entities comprising this territory have remained surprisingly intact regarding width and borders, although the population living within these borders has undergone major shifts in favour of finnish-speaking finns, especially in the south, during the last fifty years (westerholm 1999a: 283–284). solantie (1999: 87–89) connects the swedish colonisation of the coastlands with a deteriorating climate in scandinavia during the first half of the twelfth century and again in the beginning of the thirteenth century. these climatic downturns would then have initiated an emigration eastward to finland, from regions in sweden that had become overpopulated during an earlier warmer period in 1080–1105. whether the connection between the climate and the swedish colonisation was as direct as solantie suggests is hard to determine, but the fact remains that a population pressure had developed in the central settlement area of svealand already during the late viking and pagan eras, and that this process continued forcefully from the eleventh century onward. this initially led to a colonisation of marginal lands in the mälaren valley. after this interest was turned toward more distant lands suitable for colonisation, for instance in the provinces of västmanland, northern uppland, and dalarna (meinander 1983: 241). fig. 4. effective temperature sum during the growing season 1931–1960 and settlement spread in finland from the beginning to the middle of the sixteenth century. (1) zone with most favourable climate and longest continuous settlement history (except some archipelago areas); (2) zone with favourable climate. received permanent settlement in 1080– 1250; (3) old wilderness hunting lands, colonised in 1250– 1500; (4) oldest settlement area within the middle boreal zone, colonised in 1250–1500; (5) area within the southern boreal zone, colonised in 1400–1540 using burnbeat rye; (6) young wilderness hunting lands on the limit of grain cultivation. hunting remained important for a long time. first colonisers in 1540–1560; (7) area unsuitable for grain cultivation. mainly colonised during a warmer period beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. sporadic colonisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and (8) effective temperature sum (compiled from helminen 1987: 9 and solantie 1992: 91). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 129populating finland the settlement expansion in the beginning of the second millennium coincided with major social changes. the kingdom of sweden was emerging from a long period of unrest and struggles between competing factions aiming for power positions, struggles that with a varying intensity continued into the thirteenth century (gallén 1998: 50). at the same time christianity, in the form promoted by the roman catholic church, was taking an ever-firmer grip on society, changing both old customs and the social fabric. agricultural production based on large holdings using farmhands and slaves fell apart. bondsmen families left and established their own farms. a growing number of freed slaves added to the number of potential colonisers. “forests were cut down and cleared, a mass of new settlements, fields and grazing lands were established between the years 1000 and 1200,” writes maja hagerman (1996: 222; the author’s translation from swedish). obviously a part of this pioneer spirit was directed toward finland. this settlement expansion also included the coastlands of north-western and northern estonia (hoppe 1993; westerholm 2001) certain push factors favouring emigration across the gulf of bothnia and the åland sea can thus be easily identified, but what about the pull factors? what were the circumstances that attracted colonisers and enabled them to settle down on the other side of the sea without running into serious conflicts with the original population? the main reason for this was that the coastal and archipelago areas of finland were more or less void of settlement and population at the time. any finnish settlement was very sparse and much of the coastal zone was used only seasonally, by people from settlements located further inland. the reasons for the sparse finnish presence on the coast have been debated and several explanations have been suggested (kaukiainen 1980: 45; orrman 1999: 380). one reason for the sparseness of settlement could have been harassments caused by plundering seafarers sailing the water routes that ran parallel with the coast during the viking era (meinander 1983: 232). sometime these plunderers even ventured along the lake and river waterways all the way into southern tavastia (häme) (orrman 1990: 210) about one hundred kilometres north of present-day helsinki. southern häme was already a central settlement area during the iron age and was an important fur centre in early medieval times. the existence of sparsely populated areas along the coasts most probably constituted one central pull factor. another pull factor originated from the ongoing land uplift. an increasing amount of available agricultural land rising from the sea must have attracted land-hungry potential colonisers from the overcrowded central districts of sweden. the colonisers were familiar with the light litorina clays and silts of coastal finland, but they could not tackle the heavy glacial clays further inland (tikkanen & oksanen 2002: cd-fig. 4). the litorina clays thus restricted the extent of penetration of the swedish settlement further inland, despite the more fertile inland glacial clays (orrman 1987: 177–188, 1999: 380). the overseas colonisers followed in the footsteps of an expansion of a larger dimension and fundamental meaning, namely that of christianity and the roman catholic church. the first crusade to finland, organised by the swedish crown, took place in the 1150s. one purpose of this military invasion was to consolidate christianity in south-western finland. the swedes undertook two additional crusades during the following century: one in the late 1230s in order pacify the tavastians, who were showing signs of turning back to paganism, and another to karelia in the late 1290s. these swedish military operations in finland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were also a part of an evolving competition for regional hegemony in the north-eastern part of the baltic. this struggle continued in the form of different alliances and constellations well into the twentieth century. in the beginning, mainly sweden, denmark, novgorod, and the german knight orders participated in this struggle (koczy 1936: 15–17). from sweden’s point of view, the novgorodian military expeditions against the tavastians, who in turn frequently went on forays into novgorodian territory in karelia, were especially troublesome (sundberg 1999: 59). swedish supremacy in finland was challenged, which called for countermeasures in the form of military interventions. these events had an immense impact on the future of finland in many ways. by becoming a part of sweden, finland also became a part of the western cultural hemisphere in europe. the significance of this for the political and juridical development of finnish society was enormous. from the point of view of settlement, the crown’s attempts to enhance the economy by broadening 130 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm the tax base and securing the eastern border of the kingdom were important (jutikkala 1963: 97). in order to reach these goals the crown encouraged colonisation, both around existing settlements and into the “wilderness” close to the border. the crown granted tax reductions to colonisers and supported them when they got into conflict with people who for centuries had seasonally used the newly colonised areas for hunting, fishing, and other activities and who thus considered themselves to be owners of these wilderness hunting lands (in finnish, erämaa) (jordan & kaups 1989: 49; pitkänen 1994: 31). this kind of crown-supported settlement expansion in finland began in the fourteenth century and continued in various forms for centuries (jutikkala 1963: 94– 99; jokipii 1992: 5–9). becoming a part of sweden also exposed finland to swedish laws concerning land organisation and division in the villages. these concepts date from the middle ages to the implementation of the first enclosure, or great partition, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. these legal measures had a marked effect on the morphology and land use of the villages and hamlets and, thus, on local settlement structures, especially in the most integrated parts of finland in the south and southwest (helmfrid 1976: 35; roeck hansen 1998, 1999). being a part of the swedish kingdom also guaranteed the existence of free peasants with a voice both in parliament and local jurisdictions. the savonian expansion until the beginning of the fifteenth century the inner parts of finland north of 61o30’n were more or less without permanent agricultural settlement, and even south of that line large areas were very sparsely populated. the major relatively densely populated areas during the middle ages were the shores of lake ladoga and the karelian isthmus (karelians), the coasts in the south and southwest and the river valleys of ostrobothnia (swedes and finns), and southern tavastia (häme) to the eastern shores of lake päijänne (tavastians) (jokipii 1992: 6). in the north, though obviously further south than today, sami families pursued a nomadic life of gathering, fishing, and hunting (magga 1999: 127). during the viking era a few tavastian settlements had already been established far to the east, close to the karelian settlement area. these easternmost tavastian settlements were relatively weak and gave way to the karelians, when they began to enlarge their settlement area westward and northward, probably with the endorsement of novgorod. this expansion began during the eleventh century. solantie (1988: 89) also connects the karelian expansion with periods of deteriorating climate. jordan and kaups (1989: 45) suggest that the lucrative fur trade was behind the expansion. the traditional settlement area around lake ladoga had been overtrapped and in order to continue the trade the karelians had to acquire new lands. be this as it may, the fact remains that during the first century of the second millennium karelians entered lands traditionally used by tavastians as wilderness hunting areas, and in time the karelian culture in the new lands transformed into what today is recognised as savonian culture. the expansion gathered pace and during the sixteenth century the frontier advanced by three hundred linear kilometres in only three quarters of a century. in time the reach of this expansion became very extensive. as jordan and kaups (1989: 46) put it, “on ladoga’s far shore, a pioneer culture that would touch america sprang into motion.” the savonian expansion was steered by the routes of watercourses and the state of affairs along the often quite diffuse and conflict-prone border between the territories of sweden and novgorod/ russia. for example, the settlements around lake oulujärvi were wiped out during the 25-year war in 1570–1595 (rikkinen 1980: 53) (cf. cd-fig. 1a & 1b). the expansion was a complex process based on general governmental settlement policy and personal decisions – for instance, in order to evade rising taxes one could “disappear” into the wilderness (soininen 1961: 212). the tavastians themselves were generally not willing to undertake the colonisation of their wilderness hunting areas, despite support from the swedish crown (jutikkala 1963: 98). the tavastians were field cultivators dependent on the existence of sorted fine sediments, clays, and silts. these become scarce going north and east from the traditional settlement area of the tavastian in southern häme (orrman 1999: 378). the tavastians also practised burnbeat techniques in deciduous or mixed forests, a method called normal kaski (normal burnbeat), but they lacked the knowledge of how to burnbeat in coniferous forests growing in moraine lands. the karelians, the ancestors of the savonians or the savo-karelians, as jordan and kaups (1989) call them, possessed fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 131populating finland this knowledge. they had obviously adopted the huuhtakaski method from neighbours to the east (kaukiainen 1980: 71) (for a description of the method, see jordan & kaups 1989: 40–43 or aarnio 1999: 75–80). this knowledge enabled them to spread further into the taiga clearing shifting plots preferably in spruce forest. it has been verified that karelians were present in the area around today’s city of mikkeli already in the twelfth century (orrman 1999: 378). when the colonisation in the southern parts of the savo region was completed and the settlement became denser, a push northward was launched in the fifteenth century (kaukiainen 1980: 34–35). during the sixteenth century the pioneer front advanced rapidly and even reached the lake district in central ostrobothnia and the coastal zone of northern ostrobothnia. there was also a push to the north and northeast reaching into the region of kainuu. the immensely expansive character of the savonian culture is shown by the fact that finland soon grew too small for these slash-and-burn cultivators (kaukiainen 1980: 37). at the end of the sixteenth century a new savonian frontier was opened in sweden proper when savonians, with the blessings of the crown, in 1580–1680 emigrated to the “virgin” coniferous forests in central and northern sweden (jutikkala 1963: 99, jordan & kaups 1989: 44). in some parts of finnskogen (finnforests) in sweden, the savo-karelian culture and the use of the savo dialect of finnish lived on into the second half of the nineteenth century (bladh 1955: 314). from a settlement point of view the savonian expansion has left a heavy stamp on both the landscape and culture of finland (see raento & husso 2002: cd-fig. 5). the savonians opened up the wilderness and established a structure, albeit a very sparse one, from which a growing population could spring into the adjacent wilderness. the pioneer spirit, an inherent part of the savonian and karelian culture, could still be felt as late as in the 1940s, when a part of the population from the areas ceded to the soviet union after world war ii had to be resettled in forestlands formerly not touched by a plough. settlement consolidation and social reforms the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought many hardships to finland, mainly due to seemingly endless conflicts between russia and sweden. conscriptions took a considerable part of the young male population to the battlefields around europe, from which only a lucky few returned. in the eighteenth century the russians devastatingly occupied finland for several years, in 1714–1721 (great wrath) and 1742–1743 (little wrath). epidemics and famines also took their toll. for instance, a severe famine accompanied by diseases killed a very high proportion of the population in 1695–1697, and many farmsteads were abandoned (jaatinen et al. 1989: 56). these farms, however, soon got new occupants, who came from a steadily growing and landless rural population. in spite of these adversities the population continued to grow. the settlement pattern became denser and the agricultural frontier continued to push slowly northward, a process that continued long into the twentieth century (cd-fig. 1a & 1b). the growing population pressure also called for several administrative decisions in order to enable the rural population to sustain itself. since 1694 some kinds of crofter farms had been established in finland when a new military organisation, based on soldier crofts upheld by the local peasantry, was introduced. by 1740, the government’s decision to allow crofter or tenant holdings on land cleared on mires and other “wastelands” belonging to peasant farmsteads (gylling 1909: 110) would, however, have a marked effect on the local and regional settlement development for a long period of time. before that crofts had only been allowed on manor and other land holdings belonging to the gentry. the crofter reform of 1740 resulted in a settlement dispersion locally and regionally, as formerly landless families established tenant farms on marginal lands. population pressure forced the landless population to carve out an existence in areas earlier considered to be more or less uninhabitable. for instance, in the archipelagos even some of the most remote, almost barren islands and skerries housed tenant fishers during the latter half of the nineteenth century. the number of tenant farms grew rapidly, especially in the southern and central finland (jokipii & rikkinen 1992: 10). in 1738, the total number of tenant farms was only 2,247 (gylling 1909: 72). by 1805 the number of crofters had grown to 25,394 (gylling 1909: 220), from which it grew to 67,083 in 1901 (jutikkala 1963: 514). the last number includes holdings of a miniscule 132 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm size, as does the official number of holdings (96,167) on tenant land in 1910 (stv 1919: 221– 222). the numbers reveal, however, that the number of people not owning the land they tilled was growing fast and began to constitute a severe social problem by the end of the nineteenth century. in fact, the situation of the rural landless population was one cause of the civil war in 1918 (see alapuro 1988; ylikangas 1993). the landless and deprived rural population constituted a problem that the government made efforts to solve during the 1920s and 1930s. a law passed in 1918 gave tenant farmers, or crofters, the right to buy the land (max. 20 hectares arable land) they had been cultivating. the crofters were also given the right to buy up to 20 hectares of forestland. some 90,000 tenants used this right before 1940 (jutikkala 1963: 462). in 1924, lex kallio allowed the acquisition of land for completely new homesteads, even through expropriation. the aim was to place some of the dependent lodgers in the countryside on farms and holdings of their own. this law resulted in 13,553 new homesteads and 8,414 smaller holdings (jutikkala 1963: 466). lex kallio was continued in the settlement laws of 1936 with the aspiration to create economically sustainable farms and in that way improve the living conditions in rural areas. in 1922 a law on the settling of state-owned forestlands was passed in the parliament. the combined result of these settlement laws was a huge number of new, small independent farms. the law granting the right to crofters to buy their land did not change the settlement pattern notably, as these holdings had already existed as tenant farms. the other laws established rural settlements in formerly more or less uninhabited places, making the net of rural settlement denser and wider than earlier. re-settling refugees in the 1940s and 1950s after world war ii finland ceded a large part of karelia and the petsamo corridor to the soviet union. the porkkala peninsula, located thirty kilometres west of helsinki, was leased to the soviet union for fifty years, but was returned to finland in 1956. the population of the ceded areas was evacuated across the new borders. 423,300 refugees, 11 percent of the total population of finland at the time, had to be resettled, and finland lost 15 percent of its cultivated area (talman 1987: 225). of the refugees, 55 percent were farmers and their families. ceded vyborg, with its 72,680 inhabitants, was the second-largest city in finland in 1939 (stv 1941: 15). the urban refugees raised the number of inhabitants in several cities. the rural refugee population was dispersed mainly throughout the southern half of the country. after the war a law on land acquisition was passed in the parliament. according to this law, land was distributed first of all to the refugees and front soldiers. the right to receive land also included war invalids and widows, war orphans, and farmhands who had lost their positions as a consequence of the war. the main part of the land area used for this purpose, 73 percent, was either state-owned or owned by other public or private organisations, such as municipalities, parishes, and foundations. twenty-one percent was taken from independent farmers, mostly from farmsteads with more than 25 hectares of arable land (palomäki 1960: 150). in northern finland state-owned forests were set aside for the establishment of cold farms, that is, farms cleared in areas where fields did not exist prior to the post-war settlers’ arrival (talman 1987: 226; häkkilä 2002). altogether some 16,000 cold farms were cleared in finland during the 1940s and 1950s. different types of holdings were the result of the land acquisition act. not all farms were intended to be self-supporting. on some farms it was intended that the farmer could support his family by working part-time or seasonally outside the farm (cf. kortelainen 2002). altogether 128,434 self-supporting and 15,865 non-self-supporting farmsteads were established before the end of the 1950s. over 2.6 million hectares of land changed owner, including land given for non-agricultural purposes (for instance, to veteran housing in the outskirts of urban settlements) (palomäki 1960: 151). one common feature of the laws between 1918 and 1944 favouring the creation of new independent farmsteads was that they, for the most part, generated farms too small to survive future challenges. the average size of a former crofter farm was only 4.8 hectares of arable land (jutikkala 1963: 462), while a self-supporting farm established after world war ii had an average size of 53.8 hectares (including forest areas). the non-self-supporting farms averaged 20.9 hectares (rikkinen 1992: 16). the numerous new farms of the twentieth century filled still-existing gaps in the net of rural setfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 133populating finland tlement. at the same time a ticking demographic time bomb was set in the countryside. the detonation of this bomb would change finland dramatically during the latter half of the twentieth century. contraction and concentration – settlement change from the 1960s onward freedom of trade, granted in 1879, made possible the emergence of new small-sized trade and manufacturing centres around the country. gradually public service functions dispersed to the rural municipalities. the supporting activities needed by a mechanising agricultural production attracted private services and enterprise to the central nodes of municipalities, which in many places began to grow from the 1920s onward. centres also evolved around larger sawmills and other manufacturing activities using local resources. traffic communities sprang up at intersections in the expanding railway and highway networks. through the development of communications and an economy dominated by various service functions, a settlement pattern based on functional regions surrounding larger population centres slowly evolved. this functionally based regional structure with an uneven population distribution gradually substituted the historical structure formed by a relatively evenly dispersed rural settlement. this process can clearly be seen in the map series of schulman (1999: 135) (cd-fig. 2). the initial phases of the urbanisation process in finland were slow. the urban population surpassed the rural population in numbers as late as in 1960 in finland, while in sweden the urban population already outnumbered the rural inhabitants in the early 1930s. the workforce employed within manufacturing did not surpass the agricultural workforce in finland until 1967 (hustich 1977: 215). from the 1960s onward the pace of urbanisation in finland has, however, been among the fastest in the western industrialised world. today over 80 percent of the population in finland dwells in densely built areas. even in lapland the share of the urban population exceeds 70 percent. several articles in this special issue of fennia touch upon the economic and social restructuring that began in finland in the 1950s and initiated what has come to be called the great move (antikainen & vartiainen 2002; häkkilä 2002; kortelainen 2002; tykkyläinen 2002). in the 1960s, several economic and social trends coincided and resulted in an accelerated concentration of population on all regional levels. the mechanisation of forestry and farming led to a diminishing demand for labour in the countryside at the same time as the baby boom generations reached adulthood, increasing the supply of labour. employment opportunities in the home region were almost nonexistent, so a substantial number of the baby boomers moved away to find work elsewhere. manufacturing in finland was unable to employ all these migrants. the emigration to sweden thus grew significantly. these migration flows depopulated the countryside, but did not initially change the basic structure of the settlement pattern, as the farms were largely still active and inhabited. fairly soon, however, the small farms established during the twentieth century proved economically unviable and many were abandoned. the abandonment was also partly a result of the aging of the initial settlers, many of whom relocated to municipal centres closer to services. in 1959, the number of farms with at least two hectares of arable land was 284,778 (stv 1968: 86). in 1979, this number was 208,080 (stv 1983: 83). this downward trend has continued and in 2000 the number of active farms meeting this criterion was only 78,434 (stv 2001: 101; cf. häkkilä 2002). this development has had a remarkable “thinning effect” on the rural settlement pattern. living close to one another in a vast space the average population density in finland is 17.1 persons per square kilometre if only the land area (304,473 km2) is taken into account. however, only 105,000 square kilometres are inhabited (kauppinen et al. 1997: 8). the average density is thus 49 persons per inhabited square kilometre. furthermore, considering that 82.3 percent of the population lives in densely built areas covering only 2.2 percent of the total land area and with an average population density of 626 persons per square kilometre, one can say that the population distribution of contemporary finland is highly concentrated (stv 2001: 117). this population concentration is nothing new. since the middle ages the population of finland has been concentrated in the south and southwest and the coastal zone along the gulf of bothnia. 134 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm the historical phases described above evened out the general pattern, but the population centre of gravity always remained in the south. even during government efforts to establish new farmsteads, the area covering one half of the population kept on shrinking due to domestic migration (fig. 5 & cd-fig. 3). this development has strongly favoured helsinki and its surroundings, up to a commuting distance of about 70 kilometres. in 1950, the immediate capital region, consisting of the current cities of espoo, helsinki, kauniainen, and vantaa, harboured about ten percent of the total population. this share was 18.5 percent in 2000 (stv 2001: 35). the fast development within information technology and the increasing importance of foreign trade and external relations after finland joined the european union in 1995, have again accelerated domestic migration. a substantial share of these flows is directed toward the capital region, but also toward other university cities or urban districts, such as oulu, jyväskylä, and tampere. the concentration of the population thus continues. this time the flows consist largely of well-educated persons in contrast to the great move period. the know-how needed in an internationally integrated, high-tech economy thus keeps concentrating regionally (havén 2002: 7; see antikainen & vartiainen 2002; husso & raento 2002: cd-fig. 2; mikkonen 2002), a fact that most certainly will affect future population and settlement structures. fig. 5. contraction of the south-western part of finland covering 50 percent of the population from 1880 to 1995 (a) and the area of northern and eastern finland (shaded) with a population equalling the population of the immediate capital region (955,748 inhabitants) in 2000 (b) (hustich 1977: 215; westerholm 1999b: 91; stv 2001: 78–99). for more, see cd-figure 3. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 135populating finland an uncertain future prognoses the population potential and demographic development of finland has been discussed by academics for more than a century. zachris topelius (1818–1898), professor of history at the university of helsinki and one of the great literary icons in finland, suggested that finland could feed a population of 16 million, of which 14.4 million would find their livelihood within the primary sector. johan evert rosberg (1864–1932), the first professor of geography in finland, estimated that the potential field area of finland could sustain between 8 and 9 million people. taking into account all the other sectors of production, rosberg concluded that finland could maintain close to 15 million people in a perspective of two to three hundred years (hustich 1959: 10). both of these calculations were based on the assumption that finland would be unable to compete in the world market of manufactured products with already industrialised larger countries. the population development in finland would therefore continue to depend on agriculture’s capacity to employ and feed. this opinion concerning finland’s inability to industrialise in any foreseeable future was deeply rooted. even as late as in the beginning of the 1930s, a committee appointed by the government recommended a continuation of the colonising activities with a reference to finland’s weak ability to employ people within manufacturing (jutikkala 1963: 466). history has proved this opinion wrong. finland industrialised her economy rapidly after world war ii and soon a considerable part of the population was engaged within manufacturing. in spite of this and the rise of the service sector as an employer, the present estimates of finland’s future population are much gloomier than those presented by topelius and rosberg. the sun will set on the last finn in year 3702 according to statistics finland (karlsson 1992: 46). this prediction is based on decreasing fertility rates and a continuously aging population (fig. 6). when finland became independent in 1917 the mean age of the population was 28 years. today it is 43 years. the general fertility rate [live births per thousand women in childbearing age (age 15–49 years) per year] was 46.6 in 2000. in 1950, it was 92.9 and in 1990, 52.1 (stv 2001: 139). the average number of children born to a finnish woman during her lifetime is now down to 1.7, which is fairly high in a european comparison (stv 2001: 588). the nativity in finland still does not, however, guarantee even a population of the present size in the long run, especially since the average age of women having their first child (today 28 years) continues to rise. this will lead to diminishing numbers of children in the future. today the annual number of live births still exceeds the number of deaths by about 7,500. this is due to a low mortality rate and a rising average life span among both sexes. the situation will most certainly start to change in a not too distant future, when the baby boom generations grow old. in 2000, men born in 1945–1950 had a life expectancy of 23.2–27.3 years while the number of remaining years for women in this age group was between 28.1 and 32.7. according to statistics finland (svt 2001: 9), the number of deaths will consequently exceed the number of childbirths by 715 in 2024 and the gap will widen rapidly after that – to 8,158 in 2030. the population growth will turn negative in 2027, resulting in a population of no more than 5,290,563 persons in 2030, which is only about 100,000 more than today. according to this prognosis the population of finland will reach its maximum in 2025 when the number of inhabitants is estimated to be 5,318,236. a prognosis made by kela (the social insurance institution of finland) in 1993 states that the population size will begin to decrease in the 2020s and will be only 4,988,108 in 2030. this trend will continue and, according to this prognosis, finland will have a population of only 4.5 million inhabitants in 2050 (väestöennuste… 1993: 7). these diverging numbers show how difficult it is to make population prognoses. the prognoses made by statistics finland during the last thirty years have usually proved to be too pessimistic (svt 2001: 13–14). the main reason for this has been the difficulty in estimating future migration flows between finland and the rest of the world. population and settlement structures in the periphery in step with growing foreign trade, finns have become increasingly dependent on foreign resources. imports of raw materials and foodstuff are today a necessity if current living standards are to 136 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm be maintained. the population size and distribution of finland must thus be evaluated in an international context, where national boundaries play only a secondary role. never before has the economy of finland been as integrated internationally as it is today. this fact links the population development and the settlement patterns of the country to the population development and distribution in europe, which in turn is regionally organised around the demographic core in northwestern central europe. southern finland is located some two thousand kilometres away from the demographic, economic, and administrative core of europe. in spite of its peripheral location finland has a well-educated population with a high vocational proficiency. when finland joined the eu in 1995, a large new labour market was opened for the finnish labour force to explore. today finland has to compete in the international labour market, even though in the near future, all things unchanged, the country will suffer from a severe shortage of labour. the share of persons over 65 years old will rise from today’s 15 percent to 26 percent by 2030. this means that there will then be 80 percent more people belonging to this age group than presently (fig. 6). the share of people on the job fig. 6. population age structures in 1950, 1970, and 2000, and a prognosis for 2030 (svt 1956: 49; 1973: 53; 2001: 20– 29). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 137populating finland market (aged 15 to 64 years) will simultaneously decline from 67 percent to 59 percent. the working population will begin to decrease in 2010 when the first baby boom generation reaches the official retirement age of 65 (svt 2001: 10). the common practise of retiring before that will, however, start to decrease the work force even earlier. statistics finland predicts that the work force will be 370,000 persons smaller in 2030 than today’s 3.5 million persons. urbanisation has clearly left a mark in the settlement structure, both regarding the regional pattern and the population composition. many an agricultural village has lost its population almost completely, and small hamlets and towns, earlier serving a more populated countryside, have been losing inhabitants at a rather constant rate for many years. at the same time the remaining population in the depopulating areas has grown older. the share of persons at least 64 years old is over 22 percent in many of the municipalities located in the zones demarcating functional regions of major urban centres. in ostrobothnia and lapland the share drops below this mark in some municipalities because of a traditional, culturally induced (religious) high nativity (cf. raento & husso 2002: cd-fig. 4). in these municipalities a pool of migrants is continuously maintained, while the absolute migrant flows from peripheral areas in other regions will eventually fade out, due to lack of potential migrants. the difficult demographic situation in a large part of the country is clearly reflected also in the gender balance distribution. women are more active migrants than men, which has led to a situation where the number of women aged 20–39 years equals the corresponding number of men in only a few municipalities, in some urban centres, and adjacent rural municipalities (stv 2001: 36). the chances of population recovery through natural reproduction is thus out of the question in most parts of the country. in any given realistic scenario, the population of finland will continue to concentrate regionally and the permanent settlement pattern to thin out in the peripheries. only a major change in the operational environment, affecting considerably larger areas than finland, can in reality turn the development in another direction. one has to remember, however, that there will always be a place for agriculture, albeit most certainly of another structure and character than today, even in the peripheral northern and eastern parts of finland (häkkilä 2002). furthermore, the seasonal population consisting of tourists and summerhouse owners, who in many areas double or triple the population during the vacation seasons, will support a certain amount of permanent settlement and population connected to various service functions. the 456,706 summerhouses in finland (skoglund 2002: 13) make the rural landscape seem inhabited and, in many areas, have turned this landscape from a production landscape into a predominantly leisure landscape (see vuoristo 2002: cd-fig. 6). the fact that finland still to a considerable degree relies on the wood processing industry and the metal industry as engines of prosperity will maintain communities and population centres outside the regionally restricted national core area (cf. kortelainen 2002: cdfig. 2). centres of higher education located outside the national core area will also help to maintain settlement. this does not, however, solve the fundamental demographic problems that will torment finland in coming decades, if decisive measures to solve them are not taken. future challenges the interwar governments of finland had to deal with problems connected to an “overpopulated” countryside. the governments of today and tomorrow face two demographic problems of an acute nature. the first one concerns measures needed to keep well-educated people in the country in order to maintain the competitive edge in the world market of technological products and services. rising numbers of well-educated emigrants were recorded in the latter half of the 1990s (kultalahti & karppi 1999: 170). the second problem has to do with an aging population that will need more and more social and health services. this will require continuously increased employment within these sectors in the future. presently finland suffers from an outflow of medical personnel to countries like britain, norway, and sweden. this emigration is triggered by lower wages and general working conditions within this sector in finland. a solution to both problems lies in an active and partly selective immigration policy. the age structure of the country cannot be corrected, nor the future demand for labour satisfied, without increased immigration. the above-mentioned pessimistic population prognosis of statistics finland assumes that the annual migration balance will 138 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm remain unchanged, generating an annual surplus of only 5,000 persons. the immigration numbers have risen during the last decade, but the skill structure of the immigrants has failed to meet the demand structure on the labour market, causing social problems (see raento & husso 2002: fig. 3, fig. 4 & cd-fig. 11). a more active policy could correct this and ensure stable positive population development. today immigrants and refugees comprise a considerable part of the population growth. in the future they alone will build up the growth potential of the population. increased immigration will certainly strengthen the already densely populated areas of the country, especially the capital region, which is also the part of the country most integrated with international economic and social networks. the prognosis of statistics finland (svt 2001: 32–33) is that the population of the southernmost regions uusimaa and itä-uusimaa, even with an unchanged net migration, will grow by 223,128 persons in 2000–2030. to keep the educated work force in the country and to attract skilled personnel from abroad, environments that favour entrepreneurship (including large international stock exchange companies) and offer high-quality living conditions must be strengthened. there are only a restricted number of localities in finland where these conditions can be met, today or in the future, namely, the larger urban districts. these are able to offer competitive cultural services, housing, and communications of an international standard. to ensure this future regional politics in finland will have to pay even more attention to the operational preconditions of urban centres and districts. the pattern of permanent settlement in present day finland is, after centuries of dispersion, contracting towards a pattern familiar already from the early middle ages. the seasonal influx of tourists and summerhouse occupants during the winter and early spring to lapland, and during the summer to the rural areas in the south, could be compared to the seasonal hunting expeditions of the karelians and the tavastians to the inner wilderness and archipelagos of finland during the middle ages. the future development of this settlement structure of permanency and seasonality largely depends on events and trends in the international environment and finland’s role in this environment. references aarnio j (1999). kaskiviljelystä metsätöihin. tutkimus pielisjärven kruununmetsistä ja kruununmetsätorppareista vuoteen 1910. university of joensuu, department of geography, publications 4. alapuro r (1988). state and revolution in finland. university of california press, berkeley. antikainen j & p vartiainen (2002). finnish districts and regional differentiation. fennia 180, 183– 190. atlas of the settlement in finland in the 1560s (1973). historical society of finland, forssa. atlas öfver finland (1899). sällskapet för finlands geografi, helsingfors. bladh g (1999). finnskogens landskap och människor under fyra sekler – en studie av natur och samhälle i förändring. meddelanden från göteborgs universitets institutioner b 87. edgren t (1999). alkavan rautakauden kulttuurikuva länsi-suomessa. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 311–333. gallén j (1998). finland i medeltidens europa. valda uppsatser. skrifter utgivna av svenska litteratursällskapet i finland 613. gylling e (1909). suomen torpparilaitoksen kehityksen pääpiirteet ruotsinvallan aikana. kf puromies, helsinki. häggström n, l-e borgegård & a rosengren (1990). när finländarna kom. migrationen finlandsverige efter andra världskriget. statens institut för byggnadsforskning, gävle. häkkilä m (2002). farms of northern finland. fennia 180, 199–211. hagerman m (1996). spåren av kungens män. rabén prisma, stockholm. havén h (2002). inhimillinen pääoma keskittyy muutamille harvoille alueille. tietoaika 3, 7–9. helmfrid s (1976). agrarlandskapets former och utveckling. in ahlmann hw (ed). norden i text och kartor, 34–37. generalstabens litografiska anstalt, stockholm. helminen ve (1987).lämpöolot. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 131: climate, 4–10. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. herberts k (1996). svenskösterbottnisk emigration. in herberts k, n jokiaho & s remell (eds). österbotten. resan hemifrån hem, 12–24. svenskösterbottniska samfundet, vasa. hoppe g (1993). jordbruk och landsbygd i estland: ett långtidsperspektiv med särskild tonvikt på landets svenskbygder. ymer 113, 44–68. husso k & p raento (2002). science policy and research in finland. fennia 180, 261–274. hustich i (1959). huru många människor kan finland föda? meddelanden från ekonomisk-geografiska institutionen vid svenska handelshögskola 17. hustich i (1972). finland förvandlas. holger schildt, helsingfors. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 139populating finland hustich i (1977). suomen “kutistumisen” vauhti hiljenee. terra 89, 214–224. jaatinen, s, a peltonen & j westerholm (1989). ålands kulturlandskap – 1700-talet. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 137. jokipii m (1992). historiallinen aika. in winquist s & h ursin (eds). atlas of finland, folio 153: settlement, 5–9. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. jokipii m & k rikkinen (1992). maaseutuasutus. in winquist s & h ursin (eds). atlas of finland, folio 153: settlement, 9–11. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. jordan tg & m kaups (1989). the american backwoods. an ethnic and ecological interpretation. the johns hopkins university press, baltimore. jukarainen p (2002). the boundaries of finland in transition. fennia 180, 83–88. jutikkala e (1949). suomen historian kartasto – atlas of finnish history. wsoy, helsinki. jutikkala e (1963). bonden i finland genom tiderna. lt, stockholm. jutikkala e (1980). suurten sotien ja uuden asutusekspansion kaudet. asutus ja väestö. in jutikkala e, y kaukiainen & s-e åström (eds). suomen taloushistoria 1, 147–170. tammi, helsinki. jutikkala e (1987). finlands befolkning och befolkande. historisk tidskrift för finland 72, 351– 373. karlsson r (1992). viimeinen suomalainen kuolee 3702? hyvästi albina. suomi 75. juhlalehti jokaiseen kotiin, 46. yhtyneet kuvalehdet, helsinki. kaukiainen y (1980). suomen asuttaminen. in jutikkala e, y kaukiainen & s-e åström (eds). suomen taloushistoria 1, 13–145.tammi, helsinki. kaukosiirtolaisuus 1870–1945 (2002). institute of migration. 26 august 2002. <www.utu.fi/erill/instmigr/img/ff_02.gif> kauppinen j, e rissanen, j rusanen, t muilu, a naukkarinen & a colpaert (1997). asutus tiivistyy kaupunkien sisälläkin. tietoaika 11, 8–11. koczy l (1936). the baltic policy of the teutonic order. the baltic institute, torun. korkiasaari j (2002). suomalaiset maailmalla. institute of migration. 5 july 2002. <www.utu.fi/erill/ instmigr/art/joukork1.htm> korkiasaari j & i söderling (1998). finland: from a country of emigration into a country of immigration. in söderling i (ed). a changing pattern of migration in finland and its surroundings. publications of the population research institute d 32, 7–28. kortelainen j (2002). forest industry on the map of finland. fennia 180, 227–235. koskinen s, t martelin, i-l notkola, v notkola & k pitkänen (1994). väestö tutkimuksen kohteena. in koskinen s, t martelin, i-l notkola, v notkola & k pitkänen (eds). suomen väestö, 11–18. gaudeamus, helsinki. kultalahti o & i karppi (1999). kansainvälisen muuton keskusalueet. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 168–171. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. maahanja maastamuuttaneet vuosina 1945–2001 (2002). institute of migration. 26 august 2002. <www.utu.fi/erill/instmigr/fin/f_02.htm> maaranen p (2002). human touch, natural processes: the development of the rural cultural landscape in southern finland from past to present. fennia 180, 99–109. magga t (1999). saamelaiset – vähän totta ja paljon tarua. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 126–129. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. meinander cf (1983). om svenskarnas inflyttningar till finland. historisk tidskrift för finland 68, 229–251. mikkonen k (2002). the competitive advantage of regions and small economic areas: the case of finland. fennia 180, 191–198. nunez m (1999). role of food production in stone age finland. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 133–142. orrman e (1987). om geologiska faktorers inverkan på bebyggelsen i södra finland mot slutet av järnåldern och under tidig medeltid. historisk tidskrift för finland 72, 169–188. orrman e (1990). den svenska bebyggelsens historia. in zilliacus k (ed). “finska skären.” studier i åboländsk kulturhistoria, 197–278. konstsamfundet, helsingfors. orrman e (1999). suomen väestön ja asutuksen kehitys keskiajalla. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 375–384. palomäki m (1960). suomen sodanjälkeisen asutustoiminnan alueellisia piirteitä. terra 72, 149–163. pitkänen k (1994). suomen väestön historialliset kehityslinjat. in koskinen s, t martelin, i-l notkola, v notkola & k pitkänen (eds). suomen väestö, 19–63. gaudeamus, helsinki. pitkänen rl (1990). ortnamn av finskt ursprung. in zilliacus k (ed.). “finska skären.” studier i åboländsk kulturhistoria, 135–193. konstsamfundet, helsingfors. raento p & k husso (2002). cultural diversity in finland. fennia 180, 151–164. rikkinen k (1980). väestö ja asutus. in rikkinen k (ed). suomen maantiede, 53–68. otava, helsinki. rikkinen k (1992). asutus elinkeinovapauden jälkeen. in winquist s & h ursin (eds). atlas of finland, folio 153: settlement, 14–19. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. rikkinen k, p maaranen & p suihkonen (1999). erätaloudesta nyky-yhteiskuntaan. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 48–53. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. roeck hansen b (1998). early agrarian landscapes in finland. geografiska annaler b 80, 187–201. roeck hansen b (1999). land organisation in finnish villages around 1700. fennia 177, 137–156. 140 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)john westerholm sandlund t (1982). social structure and social mobility. a study of the swedish population in finland 1950–1975. mob research reports 10. sandlund t (1984). finlanssvensk social och geografisk rörlighet efter andra världskriget. skrifter utgivna av svenska litteratursällskaper 519, 193–224. schulman h (1999). etelän ydinalue muodostuu. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 134–137. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. skoglund k (2002). mökkirakentaminen hieman vilkastunut. tietoaika 2002: 7, 13–15. smeds h (1960). finland. in sømme a (ed). a geography of norden, 155–203. svenska bokförlaget, stockholm. soininen am (1961). pohjois-savon asuttaminen keskija uuden ajan vaihteessa. forssan kirjapaino, forssa. solantie r (1988). climatic conditions for the cultivation of rye with reference to the history of settlement in finland. fennoscandia archaeologica v, 3–20. solantie r (1992). klimatperioder och finlands kolonisering. historisk tidskrift för finland 77, 86–96. stv 1919 = statistical yearbook of finland 1918 (1919). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1941 = statistical yearbook of finland 1940 (1941). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1946 = statistical yearbook of finland 1944– 45 (1946). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1968 = statistical yearbook of finland 1967 (1968). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1983 = statistical yearbook of finland 1982 (1983). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1998 = statistical yearbook of finland 1998 (1998). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2001 = statistical yearbook of finland 2001 (2001). statistics finland, helsinki. svt 1956 = official statistics of finland, 1950 population census, volume i vi c 102. statistics finland, helsinki. svt 1973 = official statistics of finland, 1970 population census, general demographic data, volume i vi c 104. statistic finland, helsinki. svt 2001 = population projection by municipalities 2001–2030. official statistics of finland, population 2001: 10. statistics finland, helsinki. suihkonen p (2002). the uralic languages. fennia 180, 165–176. sundberg u (1999). sveriges medeltida krig. hjalmarson & högberg, stockholm. talman p (1987). population and settlement in finland. in varjo u & w tietze (eds). norden. man and environment, 225–240. gebr borntraeger, berlin. tikkanen m & j oksanen (2002). late weichselian and holocene shore displacement history of the baltic sea in finland. fennia 180, 9–20. tykkyläinen m (2002). spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970. fennia 180, 213–226. väestöennuste 1992–2050 (1993). kansaneläkelaitoksen julkaisuja t9 48. vahtola j (1983). en gammal germansk invandring till västra finland i bynamnens belysning. historisk tidskrift för finland 68, 252–279. vilkuna j (1999). suomalaisuus – oppihistoriallinen näkökulma. paper presented at the seminar “näkökulmia suomalaisuuden tutkimukseen ja ymmärtämiseen” 8–9 april 1999. 3 july 2002. <www.finnica.fi/seminaari/99/luennot/vilkuna.htm> westerholm j (1999a). kansa ja alue. suomenruotsalaiset osana kansakuntaa ja valtiota. in löytönen m & l kolbe (eds). suomi. maa, kansa, kulttuurit, 278–289. sks, helsinki. westerholm j (1999b). asutus harvenee ja keskittyy. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 90–91. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. westerholm j (2001). svenskestland – kustlandskap i förändring. sphinx 2000–2001, 29–45. ylikangas h (1993). tie tampereelle 1918. wsoy, porvoo. a less-than-human academia: the effect of disembodied encounters a less-than-human academia: the effect of disembodied encounters most academics around the world have been working partly remotely for more than two years now, with two major outcomes. the restrictions assigned by states, local authorities and universities during the pandemic meant that we withdrew from physical social contact in our everyday working environments, scientific events, research sites and collaboration networks. instead, we encountered our colleagues, students, research participants, stakeholders, and practical collaborators in virtual space. while the shift from physical to virtual working spaces has diluted our existing relationships, it has at the same time expanded the opportunities for people to attend conferences, seminars, teaching sessions, workshops, meetings, and other events regardless of where they are organized. in some cases, it is even possible to access these at our chosen time, through recorded and openly shared materials. in result, many annual events have registered record high audiences and the number of students missing from a lecture due to an overlap has dropped to the minimum. paradoxically, the academic world has grown into a less present and a more accessible space. this unintended development has received mixed reception among scholars, teachers, and students, as well as in academic and governmental institutions, as portrayed in our recent collection of short papers guest edited by simon tulumello and kátia favilla (2020). on the one hand, the flexibility offered by the new situation, the diminished need for moving and commuting, potential for the editorial discusses the impacts of the global pandemic to human agency, through the authors self-reflection of academic work during the past two years accompanied by two philosophical perspectives. first, we return to chris philo’s (2017) conception of ‘less-than-human geographies’, and secondly, to helmuth plessner’s (2019) conception of the sociality of human embodiment. what these perspectives have helped us to see is that people, including academic communities, need embodied encounters to fully experience themselves and others as humans – humans whose exceptionality is not about superiority over non-human nature but eccentricity that offers us possibilities to avoid inhumanity. in conclusion we note the value of embodied encounters as a constitutive aspec of humane social life, particularly in the current times of war in europe. keywords: pandemic, embodied encounters, inhumanity, less-than-human, embodied existence, helmuth plessner urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa119757 doi: 10.11143/fennia.119757 © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 199(2) (2021) kirsi pauliina kallio & jouni häkli & james riding 153 enhanced productivity through new technologies, and the ease of communication in virtual space has been found both appealing and enjoyable. benefits are apparent to those scholars and students who were previously short of possibilities to participate in events due to lacking resources or logistical challenges. institutionally, a reduced need for seminar rooms and lecture halls, as well as for personal and group working spaces, seem potential cost-saving features for universities. similarly, when traveling to meetings and scientific events stopped (but attendance in them multiplied!), universities saved money and reduced their carbon footprint. hence it can be expected that pressure to keep working remotely and virtually will outlive the pandemic. the other side of the coin is less bright. physical and mental health issues have increased, especially among students, and working primarily on the laptop is found exhausting and uninspiring by researchers, teachers, students, and administrative personnel alike. the distinction between work and other areas of life has become blurred when working from home, and for many the lack of variation in daily rhythms has dissolved days, weeks and months into an unending routine. reasons and motives for attending events and meetings have grown fewer: what is left is the conference presentation as a performative act. yet it may be difficult to pinpoint what exactly has been missing or amiss. it is possible to start a virtual meeting with relaxed chatting to create a nice atmosphere (and if i don’t feel like chatting, i can leave the camera off). i can easily grab a cup of coffee during the event (and exactly the coffee that i like to make), and even take a walk before the meeting (as if actually going to the place) should that make me feel good. compared to on-site events, virtual space allows quick and flexible moving between lectures, group discussions and individual tasks. participation is available not only through speaking and listening, but also by means of writing and drawing, and the camera transmits at least some aspects of non-verbal communication. what is it, then, that makes remote working in virtual space burdensome and unrewarding? this question reminded us of chris philo’s (2017) short editorial in political geography some years ago, portraying less-than-human geographies as “an approach alert to what diminishes the human, cribs and confines it, curtails or destroys its capacities, silencing its affective grip, banishing its involvements” (ibid., 257). philo’s writing offers an argument to the theoretical discussions where human agency is ‘flattened’ by relativizing it with other agencies. these approaches share the intention to strip down the anthropocentric notion of human exceptionality that links with the idea of superiority, and to emphasize human capacities to act as based on interaction with other species and non-organic actors. to bring in another angle, philo recalls what may follow if human agency loses some of its core dimensions, specifically the humanity that distinguishes us from non-human animals. the theoretical argument is contextualized in a societal state of exception, not pandemic but war, where people become “stripped down; hollowed out, winnowed away; splintered, shattered, smashed; disassembled, dis-located, dis-membered; subtracted from, again, again, again” (ibid., 258). as unbelievable as it may sound, these ideas resonated well before russia started the war in ukraine. while the pandemic experience hardly parallels the “inhumane horror” of war that philo takes up as an example of less-than-human geographies (which we are indeed witnessing in the current war in ukraine), some fundamental lack characterizes the agencies we have come to perform during the pandemic. this lack is perhaps mostly related to embodied presence. helmuth plessner, a central figure of 20th century philosophical anthropology, portrays the centrality of embodiment to human existence as follows: the human being “is body, is in its body, and is outside its body as the point of view, from which it is both. an individual characterized positionally by this threefold structure is called a person. [she] is the subject of [her] lived experience, of [her] perceptions and actions, of [her] initiative. [she] knows and [she] wills. [her] existence is literally based on nothing.” (plessner 2019, 272) the eccentric dimension of our embodied existence, expressed in this minimal definition of humanness, makes it possible for us to relate with each other in spaces virtual as well as physical. unlike non-human animals that form environmental relations directly through the dynamism between the lived and the corporeal body, the environmental relations of humans are mediated by points of view embedded in cultural reality and thus ‘artificially’ created through meaning-making. even a young 154 fennia 199(2) (2021)editorial child can therefore take part in a virtual environment by experiencing it as a reality that she performs with other people, whereas the family dog, however old and wise, cannot escape its actual living environment. we can walk virtual dogs, but dogs have no means of digitizing us. the eccentricity of human existence is inescapably embodied: our only access to mediated realities is through the body that we both are and have. it is this embodied existence, we contend, that is being splintered, shattered, and even smashed by the prolonged existence in virtual space. disembodying isolation curtails our capacities to be and act as humans. we both realized this vividly when giving our first in-person lectures at the university after a two-year break. behind our masks, with several meters of distance in between, we experienced something odd: something said during the lecture evoked a little laughter that spread among the students. and as it happened, before even realizing it, we ended up chuckling along. what the plessnerian perspective helps to see is that we people need embodied encounters to fully experience ourselves and others as humans – humans whose exceptionality is not about superiority over non-human nature but eccentricity that offers us possibilities to avoid inhumanity. the current situation in ukraine surely invites us to consider these thoughts further. perhaps the isolation that people have gone through during the pandemic speaks to the cruelties taking place in ukrainian towns and cities, the corrupt geopolitics behind these events, and the divergent readings in different countries of what is happening in ukraine? on the other hand, when embodied persons are under threat and undergoing exploitation by the soldiers, some of whom seem to be “hollowed out and winnowed away” as philo (2017, 258) describes their inhumanity, do we see the importance of humane solidarity more clearly? we hope that questions like these will encourage further attention to the importance of human social embodiment in critical political geographical scholarship warmly welcomed in fennia. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) fennia editor-in-chief jouni häkli (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3033-2976) tampere university content of the issue this issue of fennia is delayed. to us this disappointing result seems an expected setback. the pandemic time has been particularly harmful to academic work that people do by their own choice and desire; not because they have to but because they want to. in fennia, all work is like that: authors, reviewers, editors, and the publisher alike contribute to the journal because they want to be part of and sustain a non-commercial, open access international journal dedicated to ethical scholarly publishing of high-quality research. unlike in journals with commercial publishers, no-one can request this work from anyone. as the exceptional working conditions and other challenges that academics, among other people, have faced during the past years have narrowed down opportunities to use time and effort for such, fennia accepts the situation as part of our ethical approach to scholarly publishing. looking at the sunny side of things, the pandemic – and perhaps also the present conflict situation in europe – has made it ever more visible that journals like fennia are not machines. instead, they are a joint endeavor of the scientific community that exists only through the voluntary contributions of its members. the diminished activity of the community in the present situation cannot be explained merely rationally, by a lack of time or increased teaching responsibilities for instance. the lack of inspiration and an increased level of stress are also abating our agency. these stem from many elements in the exceptional conditions. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3033-2976 fennia 199(2) (2021) kirsi pauliina kallio & jouni häkli & james riding 155 as the above editorial article indicates, the missing embodied encounters in conferences and seminars are one thing that has made academic communities weaker as human communities. another absent element are the brief shared moments at common rooms and corridors, in our everyday working environments; while a coffee break at the home office can be relaxing, it does not offer similar opportunities to experiencing ourselves as independent academics. even administrative meetings and teaching situations are places where academic freedom is often present; being there, in person, reminds us that our joint work is not merely about administration and teaching but always grounded in research. now that opportunities to these encounters are opening up, their specific value deserves to be recognized, along with the benefits of digitalization that surely also exist. fennia is very much looking forward to the next phase of the pandemic that allows the scientific communities to start working face to face. at first instance, we place our hope in the twice-postponed nordic geographers meeting, taking place in june 2022, in joensuu, finland. there, we hosted the next fennia lecture with dr. josefina syssner as the invited keynote speaker. together with the conference organizers, we are producing a special issue around the theme of her talk, tentatively titled depopulation and shrinkage in a northern context. we invite everyone interested in the topic to participate the discussion, in the different roles that we academics can choose to take, for example by writing a commentary to the special issue in our reflections section. may this great event serve as a new beginning to the geographical scientific community that fennia fully relies on! this issue begins with hilde refstie’s (2021) article based on her fennia lecture 2021 at the finnish geography days in oulu, an event that only the invited lecturers and conference organizers could participate in person. titled reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions, it presents an argument for critical and rooted ‘slow research’ that conjoins explanatory and actionable methods. refstie’s (2021) critique is specifically directed at the fashionable trend of co-productive research that involves citizens and others as co-producers of knowledge, apparently following participatory (action) research (par) traditions yet often failing to meet the fundamental aims of par. in the context of sustainability science, but also in other fields of research, such applied research carries the risk of serving ‘fast policymaking’ with a neoliberal agenda, should the participants of the project (including importantly the researchers) not be critically reflexive about their roles in these societally impactful processes. the article will be followed by commentaries from the conference and the open review process in the next issue of fennia, and we invite others to join in as well, to discuss this topic that has relevance far beyond the discipline of geography. the lecture-based article is followed by another four original research papers. the first one is spaces of the forest-based bioeconomy in finnish lapland and catalonia: practitioners, narratives and forgotten spatialities, by diana morales who analyses european bioeconomies through two case studies, one focusing on a mediterranean context and the other on the northernmost edge of the eu. recognizing that bioeconomy is taking very different formats regionally, she draws attention to the local practitioners who (should) play a crucial role in interpreting eu’s policy narratives and implementing them. morales’ (2021) major conclusion is that, while these narratives tend to resonate strongly with economic growth narratives and thus connect bioeconomy policies with regional economic development policies, they do not work efficiently toward the green transition but may even hinder this development – concurrently overlooking the local knowledge of farmers, indigenous communities, and members of rural communities. the current situation where the eu is forcefully seeking to break off from (russian) fossil fuel dependency toward sustainable energy production and usage, and where also wood imports from russia are suspended, makes the paper extremely topical. edvard huijbens and karl benediktsson’s paper continues the theme of environmental sustainability, yet in a different policy context and geographically in other european locales. in their article earth, wind and fire: island energy landscapes of the anthropocene, the authors introduce the concept of ‘energy landscapes’ in the context of the netherlands and iceland. specifically, the focus is on natural and artificial islands where the countries intend to produce wind energy, to replace their use of fossil fuels. by ‘re-storying’ the anthropocene from a critical geographical perspective, the paper aims at a rupture in how the energy systems of the netherlands and iceland are perceived. based on this reconstruction, a geographically nuanced vision of a future is charted, with which 156 fennia 199(2) (2021)editorial huijbens and benediktsson (2021) offer insight into creating more just and sustainable energy policies and practices in europe and beyond. they propose that the formation of new ‘hybrid’ energy landscapes in the present benefits from bringing together the past and the imagined futures to reveal both what is being thought to matter and what can come to matter. the third research paper in this issue of fennia is by mark rhodes who introduces another landscape analysis, from urban and cultural geography perspectives entwined with memory studies. in cardiff and the contentious landscapes of postindustrial, urban, and transnational memory work, he takes us to butetown, which is a historically multicultural docklands community in the city of cardiff in wales, the uk. moving between the present cultural and political development and the historical landscape, rhodes’ (2021) presents a particular mixed-methods analysis drawing from archives, interviews, performance, and discourse, in the spatial patterns of welsh identity. the analysis reveals that the recent economic development of the city has buried underneath, or caricatured, many of the culturally significant elements of butetown, through which spatial identities are established and maintained, and places continue as lived realities. while he finds that local people are capable of adaptation and change both for and against the capital development and its socioeconomic impacts in places like butetown, rhodes argues that such top-down urban renewal, post-industrial displacement, and racially charged discourse and planning are efficiently changing urbanities in an inequitable manner. our last original article is by taylor garner, nadia mansour and david j. marshall, continuing the memory work theme. intergenerational intimacy geopolitics: family interviewing and generations of memory in occupied palestine is mainly a methodological contribution to the study of intergenerational geographies, bringing new insight into how ethnographic research in the geographies of children, youth and families can be carried out beyond the categorical adult/child binary. the paper can however be found useful by a broader range of scholars, in geography and beyond, who share an interest in deconstructing the social category of age, and who seek novel approaches to studying (post)conflict societies. critical scholarship has thus far focused more on gender, race, class, ethnicity and sexuality, than age, which similarly is part of the power-laden social order that has significant implications to the agency of differently ‘aged’ people. garner, mansour and marshall (2021) present findings from two separate research projects in palestine, both of which examined the relations between older and younger palestinians through multi-generational interviewing. they suggest that facilitating intergenerational dialogue though family interviews and focus groups with age-based cohorts brings to the fore shared experiences, in these cases of national struggle and resistance punctuated by geopolitical moments, however, intertwined with family stories and generational orderings. the method hence provides opportunities for narrating collective memory and organizing generational cohorts, which is a novel approach in generational and memory studies. in the reviews and essays section, we have another methodological contribution by gertrude saxinger, alexis sancho-reinoso and sigrid irene wentzel. in the review article cartographic storytelling: reflecting on maps through an ethnographic application in siberia, they portray an ethnographic mapping method combining quantitative and qualitative elements, developed in a case study at a remote region of northern europe, specifically siberia. the online portal ‘life of bam’ can be used for visualizing the stories that local people and researchers co-produce, which connects this article with the previous two papers through focus on “memories and stories of lifeways and social phenomena that are of concern to local people in their everyday life, and their political practice and positionality” (saxinger et al. 2021, 243). the paper also links with refstie’s (2021) lecture-based paper, yet in this project the empowering elements of participatory co-production are emphasized. the introduced cartographic mixed-methods storytelling approach is embedded in a social justice perspective that acknowledges the views of both indigenous and non-indigenous people. instead of ‘fast policymaking’, it is used for a productive impact on civil society, education, heritage work and policy making, in a socially sustainable manner. the second review article continues the discussion in fennia on the geographical impacts of the covid-19 pandemic (see also kallio et al. 2020; tulumello & favilla 2020). paria valizadeh and aminreza iranmanesh’s critical review of mitigation strategies against the pandemic within urban contexts, titled covid-19: magnifying pre-existing urban problems, focuses on strategies that restrict movement fennia 199(2) (2021) kirsi pauliina kallio & jouni häkli & james riding 157 and interaction, and those concerning digital space. identifying various dimensions of state-led authoritarianism on one hand, and bottom-up social solidarity on the other hand, they consider the impacts of the new governing measures and the citizen practices, to the socio-spatial organization of cities and their long-term planning, design, and policymaking. alongside with obvious risks and inequal developments, valizadeh and iranmanesh (2021) recognize in the present crisis possibilities for constructing more humanized urbanisms through reorganising existing socio-spatial structures – including extant market relations, a return to use-value, collective forms of consumption, and communal ownership of resources. hence in conclusion they suggest using the changes emerging from the pandemic to the democratization of urban space. in the reflections section, we introduce two new ways to publish in fennia. since we began the reflections section in 2017, it has published short interventions that engage with research articles published in the journal. these interventions speak back to research articles in fennia and take them in new directions, and in many cases, they are written by the reviewers of the published article, providing an outlet for the unseen and unpaid academic labor of reviewing articles. the first new concept that will become part of reflections, is to attend to books published in the discipline of geography and related fields. yet rather than creating a book reviews section, in the spirit of dialogical and open processes that retain critical engagement – which the journal has become known for – we are building review forums on a contemporary issue or theme that a book highlights. the second initiative is to reanimate and offer further visibility to an old initiative we had (see niemi 2019), which is for early-career researchers to showcase their work by publishing a written version of the lectio praecursoria (a short presentation given by a doctoral candidate about their research as part of a doctoral defense) in the reflections section of the journal. this publication format is common in finnish scholarly journals, which we hereby wish to internationalize. our first reflections essay in this new issue of the journal is written by a reviewer of a research article published in the previous issue of fennia. this dialogical process continues to be a fruitful and critical exercise, providing new ways to engage with published work and to build caring yet critical dialogue on a particular area of geography. in a commentary to pawliw, berthold, and lasserre’s (2021) article on the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic, which focuses on franklin’s lost expedition, marie mossé highlights the role of inuit knowledges and oral history. she suggests that the franklin myth endows canada with a founding story, a colonial gaze which perpetuates the imperialist representation of perilous arctic exploration. an avenue for future research that mossé (2021) refers to is a “recomplexification” process of arctic myths, through the integration of inuit testimonies and knowledges in political discourses and in cultural, artistic and literary productions, in other arctic or circumpolar countries. in the first book review forum published in fennia, as part of a new initiative, lieven ameel’s (2021) the narrative turn in urban planning: plotting the helsinki waterfront, is the book that provides the starting point for dialogue. in two extended case studies from the planning of the helsinki waterfront, the book applies narrative concepts and theories to a broad range of texts and practices involved in urban planning. robert beauregard (2021) kicks off the forum by adding a material perspective that treats planning documents as actors in planning practice. the vibrant matter of these hidden texts also weaves narratives, as planners produce documents before they tell the public stories. while narratives told and repeated through social media platforms that cannot be subject to procedural and institutional boundaries, are described by mark tewdwr-jones in a second review. these too are examples of narratives of place-change. tewdwr-jones (2021) emphasizes also centers wider democratic and polarizing issues. these issues cannot be separated from narratives of place shaping, planning, and urban growth and decline. in response, ameel (2021) addresses the material aspects of planning practices that take place in increasingly digitalized environments, and storytelling to which the public is not invited, attending to narratives developed by planners in their cloistered world, opening the forum to potential future research. the final reflections essay is also part of a new initiative, which is the publication of written versions of lectio praecursoria. our first of these relates to the anti-mining movement in brazil in the previous decade, presented as part of a doctoral defense at the university of eastern finland on 5 november 2021 by mariana galvão lyra. it sheds light on the key challenges faced by groups fighting for 158 fennia 199(2) (2021)editorial environmental and social justice, focusing on two case studies, and anti-mining activism, mining history, the sociology of mining, and mining policy (galvão lyra 2021). this emphasis upon detailed ethnographic fieldwork with local communities is certainly an inspiring place to end this editorial after the major disruptions experienced by early-career researchers in recent years. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) fennia editor-in-chief james riding (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819) fennia reflections section editor references ameel, l. (2021) the narrative turn in urban planning: plotting the helsinki waterfront. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 ameel, l. (2021) new directions for narrative approaches to urban planning. fennia 199(2) 291–293. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117123 beauregard, r. (2021) the stories that documents tell. fennia 199(2) 281–284. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115188 galvão lyra, m. (2021) the anti-mining movement in brazil in the 2010s. fennia 199(2) 294–298. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115235 garner, t., mansour, n. & marshall, d. j. (2021) intergenerational intimacy geopolitics: family interviewing and generations of memory in occupied palestine. fennia 199(2) 226–241. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.97092 huijbens, e. j. & benediktsson, k. (2021) earth, wind and fire: island energy landscapes of the anthropocene. fennia 199(2)188–202. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.113455 kallio, k. p., de sousa, m. l., mitchell, k., häkli, j., tulumello, s., isabel meier, carastathis, a., spathopoulou, a., tsilimpounidi, m., bird, g., russell beattie, a., obradovic-wochnik, j., rozbicka, p. & riding, j. (2020) covid-19 discloses unequal geographies. fennia 198(1–2) 1–16. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99514 morales, d. (2021) spaces of the forest-based bioeconomy in finnish lapland and catalonia: practitioners, narratives and forgotten spatialities. fennia 199(2) 174–187. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109523 mossé, m. (2021) an overview of inuit perspectives on franklin’s lost expedition (1845–1846): a few avenues for discussion and future research – commentary to pawliw, berthold, and lasserre. fennia 199(2) 273–280. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109784 niemi, s. (2019) lectio praecursoria: theory of control tuning – the processing of control in migrationrelated place coping. fennia 197(1) 163–167. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79471 pawliw, k., berthold, é. & lasserre, f. (2021) the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin’s lost expedition. fennia 199(1) 9–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98496 philo, c. (2017) less-than-human geographies. political geography 60 256–258. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.11.014 plessner, h. (2019) levels of organic life and the human: an introduction to philosophical anthropology. fordham university press, trans. hyatt m. new york. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvk8w01c refstie, h. (2021) reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions. fennia 199(2) 159–173. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 rhodes, m. (2021) cardiff and the contentious landscapes of postindustrial, urban, and transnational memory work. fennia 199(2) 203–225. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.113124 saxinger, g., sancho-reinoso, a. & wentzel, s. i. (2021) cartographic storytelling: reflecting on maps through an ethnographic application in siberia. fennia 199(2) 242–259. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.110918 tewdwr-jones, m. (2021) narratives of and in urban change and planning. whose narratives and how authentic? fennia 199(2) 285–290. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115636 tulumello, s. & favilla, k. (2020) phd research in social sciences amid a pandemic: introduction to a situated and reflexive perspective. fennia 198(1–2) 227–229. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99200 valizadeh, p. & iranmanesh, a. (2021) covid-19: magnifying pre-existing urban problems. fennia 199(2) 260–272. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.111616 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094173 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.117123 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115188 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115235 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.97092 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.113455 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99514 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109523 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109784 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.79471 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98496 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.11.014 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvk8w01c https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.114596 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.113124 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.110918 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.115636 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99200 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.111616 ready for more-than-human? measuring urban residents’ willingness to coexist with animals urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa64182 doi: 10.11143/fennia.64182 ready for more-than-human? measuring urban residents’ willingness to coexist with animals christoph d. d. rupprecht rupprecht, christoph d. d. (2017). ready for more-than-human? measuring urban residents’ willingness to coexist with animals. fennia 195: 2, pp. 142– 160. issn 1798-5617. in the context of rapid urbanisation, geographers are calling for embracing non-humans as urban co-inhabitants. but if animals and plants are seen as ‘out of place’, sharing urban space can lead to wildlife conflicts. we therefore need to better understand residents’ willingness to coexist if we are to work towards more-than-human cities. this study quantitatively compared residents’ preferences toward sharing their neighbourhood, as well as perceptions of belonging across urban green space in two geographically and culturally distinct cities: brisbane, australia, and sapporo, japan. results suggest that geographical and cultural context alongside educational attainment and age influenced respondents’ willingness to coexist, but not sex and income. mapping respondents’ preferences for animals in their neighbourhood revealed four groups of animals along two axes – global-local and wantedunwanted. these arose from the way animals contested the human notions of control over urban space. as spaces where animals belong in cities, most respondents chose informal green space (e.g. vacant lots, brownfields) after forests and bushland. drawing upon recent theoretical and empirical research on liminal urban spaces, i argue that such informal green space can offer ‘provisional arrangements’ which allow for conciliatory engagements with non-humans. i thus propose informal green spaces as territories of encounter – a possible path towards morethan-human cities. finally, i discuss some implications for planning and management of interspecies interactions. keywords: urban geography, belonging, wildlife conflict, informal green space, human-nonhuman relations christoph d. d. rupprecht, feast project, research institute for humanity and nature, 457-4 motoyama, kamigamo, kita-ku, kyoto, 603-8047 japan, e-mail: crupprecht@chikyu.ac.jp introduction: in search of pathways towards more than human cities “recurrent invasions racked the city of theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. when the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. one by one the species incompatible to the city had to © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 143christoph d. d. rupprecht succumb and were extinguished. by dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it. […] man had finally re-established the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts.” (calvino 2013, 49) do we as urban residents want to share our cities? whom do we welcome, whom do we (try to) expel? how do we decide who is out of place, and where they are not? in the face of ongoing global urbanisation, scholars have looked beyond human inhabitants. they have opened their eyes to urban landscapes teeming with micro-organisms, plants and animals, prompting a (second) renaissance of urban ecological studies (gilbert 1989; sukopp 2002). simultaneously, increased interest in animal geography and urban human-nature relations has led to growing calls for cities where non-humans belong (wolch et al., 1995; wolch 1996, 2002; hinchliffe et al. 2005; hinchliffe & whatmore 2006; seymour & wolch 2009; metzger 2014). in this article, i aim to discover what chances and challenges such an embracing approach towards nonhumans might entail. drawing upon theoretical and empirical work in urban human-nature geographies, i test a quantitative approach to learn about people’s willingness to coexist with animals and plants. results of an exploratory mail-back survey in brisbane, australia, and sapporo, japan, suggest that geographic and cultural, and to some degree demographic differences, configure willingness to coexist with wildlife. where residents think non-humans belong in the city, and whether animals contest physical and ideological urban boundaries further influence how space is negotiated. based on these results, i argue that informal urban green spaces (which i discuss in more detail below), where our expectations of human control are weaker, may offer ‘provisional arrangements’ (nohl 1990) as potential territories of encounter – and thus could be a path towards more-than-human cities. our ‘entanglement’ with life around us is nowhere more apparent than in the city (ingold 2008). urban ecosystems provide a plethora of services by filtering our air, reducing noise, draining rainwater that might otherwise sweep away our homes, and treat the sewage we produce (bolund & hunhammar 1999). scholars have described how our urban selves have ‘nature needs’ (matsuoka & kaplan 2008) and have provided growing evidence for a strong link between our health and urban greenspace (brown & cummins 2013; keniger et al. 2013; van den berg et al. 2015). these ecosystem services depend at least partly on a diversity of species we are entangled with (mace et al. 2012). for example, without opportunities for urban residents to interact with nature, this ‘extinction of experience’ (miller 2005; soga et al. 2015) could affect biodiversity beyond cities as conservation efforts depend on public support (dunn et al. 2006). as city dwellers, we also draw upon the (agro) diversity in our community gardens to supply us (and the microorganisms that reside within us (bordenstein & theis 2015)) with the vitamins and minerals we need (guitart et al. 2014). yet sometimes we reject these ties and try to sever them. urban wildlife conflicts are ubiquitous. we struggle with plants over space and belonging (gröning & wolschke-bulmahn 2003; head & atchison 2008; foster & sandberg 2010; rupprecht et al. 2015a) and with animals such as rats, monkeys, bears, deer, birds, bees over space and plants (knight 1999; jerolmack 2008; honda 2009; enari & suzuki 2010; yeo & neo 2010; lemelin 2013; belaire et al. 2015). we are bitten by mosquitos, ants, spiders or coyotes (howell 1982), reduced to helpless sneezing or worse by various plant pollen, subjected to aerial bombardments by defecating birds, and feel offended in various ways by all matter of animals and plants in what have come to be known as ‘ecosystem disservices’ (lyytimäki et al. 2008; von döhren & haase 2015). we retaliate with herbicides, pesticides and ‘management’ of urban wildlife (wolch et al. 1995; jessup 2004; adams 2012; rupprecht et al. 2015a), seeking to establish dominance. what paths then lead to more-than-human cities? wolch, west and gaines (1995, 755) lay out the foundations for a transspecies urban theory to foster creation of “an environmental ethic that recognises the fundamental linkages between human justice and justice for animals”. rather than an uneasy stand-off, they aim for “a city whose residents reincorporate wild animals into everyday human affairs by respecting their dignity and value, by accepting the duty to know their ways of living” (wolch et al. 1995, 746). however, a case study about an intentional community committed to fostering human-animal relations showed that not all animals were equally welcome (seymour & 144 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper wolch 2009). hinchliffe and whatmore (2006, 136) suggest that “attention be paid to the diversity of ecological attachments and heterogeneous associations through which the politics of urban nature is fabricated, rather than reading the political ecology of the city off a priori or abstract social divisions”. this complements wolch (2002, 735), who argues that a major goal in an agenda to reanimate the city would be “to trace how and why attitudes and practices toward animals and patterns of urban human-animal interactions change over time and space”. evidence suggests time and place are not the only things that affect human-animal interactions. the words human-animal or human-plant relationships can hide the multitudes of different entanglements lurking beneath the surface. in his early work among the recent wave of animal geography, philo (1995) encounters the difficulty of fitting different animals into a continuum of inclusion and exclusion, from pets to lions and urban foxes. griffith, wolch and lassiter (2002) show in their study of culturally based animal practices of filipinas in the usa that for humans, too, the way we are entangled can vary widely. how to examine these vast lines of entanglement and complex networks? researchers in a number of different fields have engaged with the questions raised by humannonhuman urban coexistence, including but not limited to literature in animal studies and morethan-human geography (hinchliffe 2003; johnston 2008; van dooren & rose 2012; lorimer 2012; urbanik 2012; buller 2014, 2015), urban political ecology and planning (philo 1995; hard 2001; power 2009; byrne 2011; barua 2014; hillier & byrne 2016; houston et al. 2017), and urban ecology and conservation (mckinney 2008; barua et al. 2013; rupprecht et al. 2015a). the specific context of australia has been the focus of several studies (anderson 1997; instone 2004; power 2005; davison 2006; franklin 2006; instone & sweeney 2014; mckiernan & instone 2016). the new living bibliography (‘animal studies living bibliography’, n.d.) offers a wealth of literature for readers eager to explore this topic in depth. in addition to recent theoretical work on multispecies cities and urban planning (houston et al. 2017), one important remaining task then is to take a step back from studies focused on individual human-nonhuman relationships, and attempt to quantitatively map an overview of the multitude of relations hiding behind the words ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ – a task i take up in this paper. quantitative approaches looking at human-nonhuman encounters remain comparatively rare. nevertheless, they may provide an idea about which non-pet animals feature most prominently in the contestations of space the urban political ecology literature describes, and which factors (e.g. cultural or geographic context, gender, class, race, age) merit further exploration. drawing upon earlier work on attitudes towards animals (kellert & westervelt 1984; kellert 1993) but also geographical literature, bjerke and østdahl (2004) surveyed norwegian residents’ attitudes towards common urban animals. they found clear preferences for some species, and discovered educational level and gender effects. a study by sawaki and kamihogi (1995) in japan included a spatial element by asking respondents to indicate where they would be comfortable with animals living (e.g. everywhere, their garden or veranda, a park within walking distance, a far-away park or forest, or nowhere). using this data, they identified different groups based on preferences for species and spaces of coexistence – ‘animal lovers’, respondents who want to share garden and veranda with preferred animals, those with very strong differences in preferences between animals, and respondents who prefer animals to keep a large distance from them. these studies and an emerging body of similar work show how quantitative approaches may help identify ways towards negotiating more-than-human cities, complementing qualitative research to underpin future theoretical advances in urban human-nature relationships (bjerke et al. 1998a, 1998b, 2003; almeida et al. 2014; borgi & cirulli 2015). additional gaps exist in our knowledge of human nature relationships apart from the limited number of quantitative studies. firstly, existing studies were mostly undertaken in europe, with one study from the usa (kellert & westervelt 1984), one from japan (sawaki & kamihogi 1995) and one cross-national comparison (kellert 1993). how such relationships are influenced by geographic or cultural influence thus remains unclear. secondly, plant-human relationships have not been studied using a quantitative approach, possibly due to our tendency for ‘plant blindness’ (wandersee & schussler 1999). sawaki and kamihogi (1995) further suggest that the spatial aspect, or the question where residents think nature belongs in cities, strongly influences human-nature fennia 195: 2 (2017) 145christoph d. d. rupprecht relationships – yet we know little about it. some urban spaces may be subjected to less human control (e.g. fences, traps, herbicide, or simply less rigid cultural notions of belonging) (franck & stevens 2007). for example, researchers found that informal urban green spaces (igs) (e.g. vacant lots, street and railway verges, brownfields) were closely associated with wild animals and plants, and perceived as ‘neutral ground’ not firmly under human control, while also pointing out issues such as ownership and liability as factors limiting the potential of igs (rupprecht et al. 2015b, 2016). could these be ‘spaces for nonhumans’, spaces where we can engage with them (hinchliffe et al. 2005)? knowing whether residents perceive igs as more of a place of belonging for nature than other urban spaces could inform urban wildlife planning policy. in this paper, i attempt to address some of the gaps outlined above and outline others as directions for future research in the conclusion. the main research questions addressed in this paper thus are: 1) what knowledge of and attitude toward urban nature underlies residents’ encounters with animals?; 2) who are the main nonhuman actors featuring (positively and negatively) in residents’ imagination of their neighbourhood?; 3) how do residents normatively rank urban spaces in terms of where animals and plants should be able to live?; and 4) what factors are influencing residents’ in their perception and preferences? developing a resident survey for sapporo (japan) and brisbane (australia) this study was part of a larger project comparing brisbane (queensland, australia) and sapporo (hokkaidō, japan). as described elsewhere (rupprecht & byrne 2014a), these cities share similarities and differences that lend well to comparison (e.g. similarities in size, morphology, and geography; differences in location, cultural context, population density and growth forecasts; table 1). while sapporo has less greenspace than brisbane, research has shown that residents form their image of sapporo by perceiving its greenspaces in daily life (ueda & rupprecht 2014). a comparison provides overviews of human-nonhuman relations across cultural, geographic and population-trajectory city of brisbane (lga) sapporo founded 1824, city status 1902 1868, city status 1922 population (projected) 1,089,743 (2011) (2031: 1,27 million) 1,936,189 (2013) (2030: 1,87 million) area 1,338 km² 1,121.12 km2 pop. density 814/km² 1,699/km2 peak density >5,000/km² >8,000/km² climate humid subtropical (cfa) humid continental (dfa) industry tourism, resources, retail, financial services, agriculture hub, education tourism, retail, it, agriculture hub, resources, education greenspace local parks: 3,290 ha (32 m²/capita) all parks: 11840ha (115 m²/capita) parks: 2,345 ha (12.3 m²/capita) all greenspace: 5,508 ha (28.9 m²/capita) park area planned 40 m²/capita, minimum 20 m²/capita “no greenspace loss, park renovation” table 1. comparison of cities selected for case study (adopted from rupprecht & byrne 2014a). 146 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper related contexts. however, the comparative research i undertake here does not see the two cities as bounded and given akin to traditional comparative urban studies, but draws loosely upon a relational comparative urban studies approach (ward 2010). the human-nonhuman entanglements and encounters this paper examines exemplify the openness and relations territorialised in place, even though the methods i use depart from the common qualitative approaches. the scale of the sampling grid (see below) should thus be understood as a result of the ecological study conducted in parallel. looking at similarities and differences here is an exercise in examining shared relations, not insisting on mutually exclusive contexts. after all, many non-humans encountered traverse the geographic and cultural distances between both sites. data collection was undertaken as part of a larger study on informal urban green spaces (igs) and urban residents’ use and perception of such spaces (rupprecht & byrne 2014a; rupprecht et al. 2015b, 2016). using a survey served as a way of understanding perceptions, which shape the option space for subsequent planning policies. a postal survey was adopted over door-to-door canvassing due to budget restrictions and to allow respondents to complete the questionnaire at a time convenient for them. a letterbox-drop, reply-paid mail-back questionnaire kit was distributed to a sample of 1,910 households in brisbane and 1,980 in sapporo (the small variation resulted from site accessibility). the households were located within a 400 m radius (easy walking distance) of 121 sampling sites. questionnaires were only distributed at sites where igs was located within a 400 m radius, to maximize potential respondents’ igs interaction. the 121 sampling sites were placed on the intersecting lines of a 10 km by 10 km grid centred on the city centres, using a systematic grid sampling design. there was a one-kilometre distance between any two adjacent sampling sites. this allowed covering most of the densely populated area. additional discussion of survey design is available in prior work (rupprecht & byrne 2014a; rupprecht et al. 2015b). questions asked were part of a larger study on the adult residents’ perception and evaluation of igs (rupprecht et al. 2015b). the full survey instrument is available online (rupprecht & byrne 2016). this study draws upon a previously unreported sub-set of seven questions in addition to demographic data. statements on nature’s value were derived from la trobe and acott’s (2000) version of dunlap’s new environmental paradigm (nep) question set (dunlap et al. 2000), and were modified to specifically address urban nature. following sawaki and kamihogi (1995), respondents wrote down five animals (except pets) they would like to see in their neighbourhood, and five they would not like to see. pets were excluded because humans make a conscious decision to co-inhabit their home with pets. this open-ended list style was chosen over a likert-style preference for a given list of animals to accommodate for differences between cities (bjerke & østdahl 2004). finally, respondents had to balance wildlife protection against possibly necessary restrictions in lifestyle in a question slightly adapted from an earlier survey by sapporo city (sapporo shichō seisakujitsu kōhōbu shimin no koe o kiku ka 2011). the instrument was approved by the human subjects research ethics committee of griffith university (env/28/12/hrec). data was analysed in spss (v. 21 and 22, os x) to perform descriptive and inferential statistical tests following standard procedures (field 2009). initial analyses indicated that the sample data were not normally distributed (p-p plots, skewness and kurtosis tests). following field (2009), i therefore chose non-parametric statistical tests. bonferroni-corrected mann-whitney tests to correct for multiple comparisons were used following kruskal-wallis tests to identify educational levels significantly differing from others. the jonckheere test was used to explore potential trends in effects of different educational attainment levels. finally, an exact approach for significance using a monte carlo simulation was chosen for tests involving age brackets, as this method does not require assuming a normal distribution of the data. data on respondents’ preference to see or not see animals in their neighbourhood were first cleaned to unify the spelling of animal names, then analysed to identify most frequently mentioned animals. as respondents frequently named both individual species (e.g. blue-tongue lizards, sparrows) and species groups (e.g. lizards, birds), individual species were not consolidated into species groups. qualitative comments some respondents added to explain their choices were incorporated into the discussion. preference scores were calculated for animals mentioned more than five times in total by adding up positive mentions (+1) and negative mentions (-1). highly fennia 195: 2 (2017) 147christoph d. d. rupprecht contested animals were defined as those with a difference of more than ten points between preference score and total mentions. counting each space where residents thought animals or plants should be able to live as one point, scores for general willingness to coexist with plants and animals were calculated (minimum score 0, maximum score 6 points). survey results: coming to grips with nature in the neighbourhood a total of 123 valid responses were collected in brisbane, 163 in sapporo (response rate: brisbane 6.4%, sapporo 8.2%). due to the low response rate, the interpretation of the results demands care to avoid overgeneralization, but the sample is sufficient for the exploratory research undertaken in this paper. brisbane and sapporo samples show some differences in respondents’ demographic characteristics (table 2), which have been described in more detail elsewhere (rupprecht et al. 2015b). as reported elsewhere (rupprecht et al. 2015b), respondents valued greenspace in their neighbourhood and generally desired more of it. they did not see themselves as very knowledgeable about local nature (table 3). most respondents had what la trobe and acott (2000) call proenvironmental value orientations. almost all brisbane respondents stated that they knew the meaning of the word ‘biodiversity’ (94%), whereas few had heard the word before but didn’t know the meaning (5%) or didn’t know the meaning at all (1%). in contrast, sapporo respondents were much less confident: 31% stated they knew the meaning of the word ‘biodiversity’, 35% didn’t but had heard the word before, and 33% didn’t know the meaning at all. most respondents stated that ‘to protect urban wildlife and plants, we have to accept restrictions in our lifestyle’ (brisbane 67%, sapporo 54%). in comparison, 16% (brisbane) and 32% (sapporo) thought ‘protecting urban wildlife and plants is important, but not if it means changing our lifestyle’, while 16% and 3%, respectively, stated that ‘to enjoy a pleasant and comfortable lifestyle we can’t avoid losing urban wildlife and plants’. figures 1 (brisbane) and 2 (sapporo) show which animals respondents wanted to see most and least in their neighbourhoods. respondents used the text fields to add information alongside their animal choices that fell largely into two categories, adjectives (in brisbane) and short, explanatory sentences (in sapporo). in brisbane, ‘native’, ‘non-poisonous’ and ‘beneficial’ were used to qualify choices for wanted animals, in contrast to ‘feral’, ‘wild’, ‘poisonous/venomous’, ‘biting/diseasecarrying’, ‘dangerous’, ‘non-native’ and ‘introduced’ for unwanted animals. explanatory sentences were limited to ‘but humans kill them all’ (emphasis by the respondent, talking about tree snakes and other snakes) for wanted animals and ‘any that don’t like me’ for unwanted animals. in sapporo, short explanatory sentences were more common than adjectives. for wanted animals, respondents occasionally excluded certain species (e.g. ‘birds except crows’) and one expressed he would welcome cuckoos which ‘were common in the past’. for unwanted animals, respondents gave descriptions diverging from species categories: ‘animals with no affection for their owners’ (but clarifying ‘though it’s not the animal’s fault’), ‘animals causing harm to humans’ (but clarifying ‘they should still be protected as much as possible’), ‘animals that do not belong/are out of place’, and ‘abandoned pets’. reasons why certain animals were unwanted included: ‘cats are scary’, ‘echinococcus’ (a tapeworm transmitted via fox faeces), ‘they will be killed when found, it’s sad’ (about bears and deer), ‘they destroy the ecosystem of japanese animals’ (about non-native species), and ‘i want them to live a bit more in the mountains’. in addition, the adjectives ‘dangerous’, ‘large’, ‘wild’ and ‘feral’ were used infrequently. figures 3 (animals) and 4 (plants) show to which degree respondents thought urban spaces were most appropriate for non-humans to live in. overall, sapporo respondents ranked spaces lower, with differences between the cities more pronounced for animals. influence of sex, income, education and age as noted above, due to the low response rate, the interpretation of the following results demands care to avoid overgeneralization. all effects and significant differences are reported at a statistical significance level of p < .05. no statistically significant differences were found in either city between 148 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper women and men for biodiversity knowledge, opinion about wildlife-lifestyle balance or score for general willingness to co-exist with animals and plants (the sum of appropriate places to live). wanted, unwanted and contested animals were almost identical in both cities between sexes (not statistically tested). similarly, income had no significant effect on these results. biodiversity knowledge significantly increased with education only in sapporo, while education had no effect on opinion about wildlife-lifestyle balance in either city. in sapporo, general variables brisbane (lga) sapporo p* city sample city sample age median 34 54 45 58 <0.05 sex females (%) 50.7 62.7 53.0 53.2 n. s. education (in %) did not finish high school high school university 10.5 25.1 30.7 2.5 18.6 78.9 11.0 36.6 32.2 3.8 42.5 53.8 <0.001 income** (annual household, in %) less than $25k/¥2 million $25k–$50k/¥2–4 million $50k–$75k/¥4–6 million $75k–$100k/¥6–8 million $100k–$125k/¥8–10 million $125k–$150k/¥10-12.5 million >$150k/¥12.5 million do not wish to answer 18.1 14.7 15.9 13.1 10.4 11.5 16.3 5.8 13.2 13.2 13.2 9.1 13.2 21.5 10.70 21.7 32.2 19.0 9.8 6.2 3.6 3.4 11.2 34.2 15.5 14.3 6.8 2.5 2.5 13.0 <0.001 housing (in %) house (detached, duplex, town/row/terrace house) with garden house (detached, duplex, town/row/terrace house) without garden apartment or unit with shared greenspace apartment or unit without shared greenspace 81.3 2.4 10.6 5.7 54.7 4.3 9.9 31.1 <0.001 * significant difference level between brisbane and sapporo questionnaire sample means using mann-whitney u tests. ** note: brisbane city income categories do not correspond exactly with the categories used in the table (vary between +$600 for lowest category and +$6000 for highest category). sources: australian bureau of statistics, sapporo city statistics department. table 2. sample population characteristics and comparison with census data (adopted from rupprecht et al. 2015b). fennia 195: 2 (2017) 149christoph d. d. rupprecht willingness to coexist with plants was affected by education level (h(3) = 12.228). bonferronicorrected (thus reported at a p < .0167 level of significance) mann-whitney tests showed that respondents who did not complete high school had a significantly lower score than all other respondents. in brisbane, both general willingness to coexist with plants (h(3) = 9.302) and animals (h(3) = 9.285) were significantly affected by education level. jonckheere’s test revealed that with rising education level scores moderately increased for both animals ( j = 2737, z = 2.89, r = .27) and plants ( j = 2761, z = 3.00, r = .28). age had no effect on biodiversity knowledge, but different age brackets showed significantly different opinion regarding wildlife-lifestyle balance in sapporo (p < .01 based on monte carlo simulation with 1,000,000 samples). increasing age (in years) also had a significant, moderate negative effect on willingness to coexist with plants in sapporo (rs = -.29) and willingness to coexist with animals in brisbane (rs = -.37). all three age-related effects exhibited a similar pattern: favouring wildlife protection over lifestyle (sapporo) as well as willingness to coexist with plants (sapporo) and animals (brisbane) peaked in the 30 to 40 and 40 to 50 years age bracket to fall off with increasing age. the 80+ year age bracket in sapporo represented the only exception, as its opinion about wildlife-lifestyle balance was strongly in favour of wildlife protection and more similar to the 30 to 50 years age bracket. pathways to coexistence: moving from conflict to encounters on neutral ground residents’ familiarity with the meaning of the word ‘biodiversity’ in sapporo was similar to levels reported in an earlier survey in sapporo (sapporo shichō seisakujitsu kōhōbu shimin no koe o kiku ka 2011) and slightly lower than the european average of 38% in 2010 (european commission 2010). in comparison, familiarity was extremely high (94%) in brisbane, but no data are available for australia that would allow a direct comparison. the high familiarity could be a result of public debates around wildlife conflicts, in which nativeness plays a prominent role (trigger & head 2010). in contrast, the difference between the cities was far less pronounced in residents’ attitudes towards nature and their opinion about wildlife protection and human lifestyle (rupprecht et al. 2015b). this result is also reflected in a previous analysis of attitudes towards urban nature, where brisbane and sapporo respondents showed only limited differences in the value they attribute to urban nature (rupprecht et al. 2015b). this could suggest that ‘technical’ knowledge about biodiversity is at best a weak mediator of attitudes towards wildlife. moreover, these results do not reflect the pronounced difference in topic questions asked (1=str. agree, 5=str. disagree) brisbane sapporo p* greenspace in neighbourhood there should be more green space in my neighbourhood. 2.11 2.40 <0.01 the green space in my neighbourhood is very important to me. 1.68 1.85 <0.05 knowledge about neighbourhood nature i know a lot about the wild plants in my neighbourhood. 3.18 3.71 <0.001 i know a lot about the wild animals in my neighbourhood. 2.84 3.67 <0.001 i know a lot about the birds in my neighbourhood. 2.75 3.66 <0.001 attitude towards urban nature (derived from nep) urban nature has value within itself, regardless of any value humans may place on it. 1.66 1.76 n.s. we have an obligation to preserve urban nature for future generations. 1.60 1.66 n.s. i would contribute money to preserve urban nature. 2.51 2.92 <0.001 urban animals and plants have as much right as humans to exist. 2.04 2.31 <0.01 * significant difference level between brisbane and sapporo sample means using mann-whitney u tests. table 3. means of residents’ views on close greenspace, their knowledge about nature, and disposition towards urban nature (adopted from rupprecht et al. 2015b). 150 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper fig. 1. brisbane respondents’ preferences for animals in their neighbourhood. fig. 2. sapporo respondents’ preferences for animals in their neighbourhood. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 151christoph d. d. rupprecht attitudes one might expect from previous research by kellert (1991, 1993), who reported less ethical or ecological concern for nature and wildlife among japanese citizens compared to citizens of the united states of america or germany. however, the low response rate in this study limits the degree to which these results can be generalised. sex did not influence opinion about wildlife-lifestyle balance or score for general willingness to coexist. it seemed similarly unimportant for respondents’ attitude toward particular animals. these results diverge from previous studies, which reported gender as a significant influence factor (bjerke et al. 1998a, 1998b; bjerke & østdahl 2004; almeida et al. 2014; borgi & cirulli 2015). fig. 3. brisbane and sapporo respondents’ perceived places of belonging for animals. fig. 4. brisbane and sapporo respondents’ perceived places of belonging for plants. 152 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper education increased willingness to coexist to some degree, as has been shown for species preferences (bjerke & østdahl 2004). this suggests there may be an argument to be made for educational campaigns to foster interspecies relationships. however, for non-charismatic species such efforts may not always produce the desired effect. in a study on students’ perceptions of blacktailed prairie dogs, fox-parrish and jurin (2008, 7) reported students’ thoughts revealed ‘little to no concern for prairie dogs or their well-being’ – despite numerous classroomand field-based educational activities. questions remain about the observed trend towards higher willingness to coexist with younger age. does this result suggest a shift in values over generations? alternatively, do individuals’ attitudes toward animals change over their lifetime? for the latter, bjerke and østdahl (2004) found a significant but minute effect for individual species preferences. yet data in this area remains scarce, and further research could help planners take such aspects into account if necessary. global and local animals, contested urban space as we enter the anthropocene, the animals and plants we encounter in cities are becoming increasingly similar (wittig & becker 2010; lososová et al. 2012), though urbanisation can also drive local increases in species richness (ellis et al. 2012). while the differences in animals named in the two cities in this study were still larger than the similarities, four groups of animals characterised by two distinctions emerged – local and global, wanted and unwanted animals. to understand respondents’ preferences for sharing their neighbourhood with particular species, it helps to look at the species in each group and think about how urban space and its human order is contested by animals. globally wanted animals (birds and especially small birds, butterflies) and locally wanted animals (squirrels) rarely contest our use of cities, even if the reason for this could be their scarcity and endangered status (lizards, koalas). in contrast, globally unwanted animals (e.g. rats, foxes, snakes, crows, feral dogs and cats as well as pigeons) are those who defy our considerable efforts to exterminate them. they do well living alongside us in cities, despite our antipathy (lambert 2016), and prove human claims of dominance and control wrong. locally unwanted animals (e.g. bears, deer, dingos and monkeys) draw our attention to the contested and shifting nature of urban boundaries, especially in the absence of material symbols in the form of city walls. bears visiting sapporo from the surrounding mountain forests are one such example where our dominance over urban space is threatened – occasionally, authorities are forced to declare local parks declared off-limits for residents (sapporo kankyōkyoku midori no suishinbu 2013). their size may also explain why they featured more prominently than insects, which were comparatively underrepresented in residents’ preferences. the smaller the organism, the less powerful to challenge us we may perceive it to be, or else we would be forced to concede defeat to microorganisms immediately. for sapporo, linguistics could provide another clue. the japanese word for animal used in the survey (動物, dōbutsu) can be interpreted not to include insects (虫, mushi). in brisbane, nativeness played a role almost completely absent in sapporo. non-native animals (rabbits, cane toads, feral cats) appear to violate not only a physical, but also a place-specific ideological boundary by trespassing into spaces where they are perceived not to belong. this phenomenon has been reported and discussed previously (trigger & head 2010). yet some nonnative animals enjoy wide acceptance (cattle, sheep, chickens), while others gain little sympathy from their native status (snakes, bats, dingos). the ideological boundaries of nativeness are thus as contested and shifting as their material urban counterparts (trigger et al. 2008). qualifying adjectives (e.g. feral, wild, dangerous, large, scary) in the qualitative comments from respondents further support the idea that respondents’ preferences for animals are related to how animals contest urban space. however, some comments also demonstrate empathy with the plight of urban animals. respondents expressed sadness about interspecies conflict and harm done to animals by humans, or insisted on animals’ protection as a priority alongside preventing harm to humans. others emphasized the concept of animals ‘out of place’, of not-belonging, for example voicing their preference for bears to live ‘a bit more in the mountains’. such comments suggest that urban areas that are less firmly occupied as human space in our imagination may point toward ways for conciliation. fennia 195: 2 (2017) 153christoph d. d. rupprecht spaces of belonging – informal green spaces as territories of encounter? if our conflict with animals and plants arises from contested space and dominance, where in the city do non-humans belong? where are we willing to relax our claims of dominance? after arguably nonurban spaces such as forests or bushlands, respondents chose igs as the urban spaces they thought animals and wild plants should be able to live in. could igs be one potential path leading to morethan-human cities? recently, scholars have begun looking toward such urban wildscapes (jorgensen & keenan 2012) and terrain vague (barron & mariani 2013) as loose spaces (franck & stevens 2007), unclaimed territories (cloke & jones 2005) where normal restrictions and expectations hold less power, as liminal nature that doesn’t ‘belong’ to humans (rupprecht et al., 2015b). neither formally recognized by governing institutions or property owners as greenspace designated for agriculture, forestry, gardening, recreation or environmental protection, the vegetation and fauna in igs is not managed for any of these purposes (rupprecht & byrne 2014a). as a result, igs can provide habitat and support urban biodiversity (rupprecht et al. 2015a), though its ecology as a novel ecosystem is distinct from historic ecosystems or nature reserves (hobbs et al. 2006). unclaimed, igs may provide ‘territories of encounter’1 with an uniquely urban ecosystem of undomesticated plants and animals, an opportunity for a being-together from childhood and teen age (rupprecht et al. 2016) to adulthood (rupprecht & byrne 2014b; rupprecht et al. 2015b). urban residents can perceive these spaces and the lack of control both positively and negatively (rink & emmrich 2005; qviström 2012; rupprecht et al. 2015b). however, a more tolerant, sharing approach of coexistence in the city may require turning away from the bucolic ideal and intent to improve the users’ health and morals that underlie traditional green spaces (rosenzweig & blackmar 1992; baldwin 1999). as nohl (1990, 62) argues: “nature, mostly self-regulating, and self-determinedly acting users are the ones finding their way to a conciliatory coexistence in these dysfunctional-useless spaces. the realization giving extra weight to this utopian moment is that this aesthetic appearance may be a glimpse at a possible future alternative, rather than an unattainable ideal: the aesthetic joy of urban wasteland has its origins in the fact that this wasteland, as a devastated (as everyone can see) part of the contemporary city, is still showing self-organizing life, and is thus able to symbolize a better future. […] because in the interplay [of human use and the developmental processes of nature] the aesthetic-symbolically experienced ‘whole nature’, the partner-relationship between humans and nature, contrasts markedly with the aggressive dominance over nature omnipresent elsewhere in the city. […] the aesthetic joy the observer experiences when looking at such open spaces can be explained by the fact that he has discovered an actually possible image of a more conciliatory world.” (translated from german) in contrast to nature reserves or parks, the rules of our encounter with animals and plants in these territories of encounter are not pre-negotiated, not controlled by park rangers or fences. this can open up possibilities for exploration, renegotiation and possibly even reconfiguration of our mutual entanglement. according to nohl (1990, 65), igs could thus provide the potential for a ‘provisional arrangement’ that leaves room for both emancipated greenspace users and nature, because ‘it disciplines neither people in their actions nor nature in its development’. does igs then undermine the dualism of urban and nature, or on the contrary reinforce it? as previous work shows (rupprecht et al. 2015b), residents seemed to both value the breakdown of clear demarcations between intentional green space and struggle with its informality. on an individual level of engagement, i therefore argue encounters with igs can prompt residents to rethink urban nature. at this point, critical readers might ask: should igs be endorsed simply because it is (sometimes) easy for (some) people to accept? does not shared urban living demand more than this? these questions can be understood as an issue of what is right or ideal versus concrete progress (even if slow). non-violent coexistence is by no means sufficient as a final goal for human-non-human co-inhabitation to strive for. yet at the moment, systematic suppression and institutionalised killing still characterises all too many human-non-human relations (hillier & byrne 2016). establishing of neutral zones where non-violent coexistence is tolerated or even encouraged would therefore be a meaningful and substantial step towards ‘making kin, not cities’ (houston et al. 2017), particularly because the difficulties inherent in even such small advances are something 154 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper urban planning and political ecology scholars have repeatedly documented. that said, the real challenges lie beyond the individual and at the planning and institutional level, as outlined below. igs in planning and management: opportunities and challenges as data from sapporo and brisbane shows, igs can account for 14% of total urban green space of cities (rupprecht & byrne 2014a), making it an important element of the urban landscape. as discussed elsewhere (rupprecht et al. 2015b; rupprecht 2017), planners could help making the territories of encounter more accessible by reducing barriers or mapping such spaces, but a number of constraints (liability issues, private ownership, historical/political/financial constraints) limit planner’s ability for direct interventions. therefore, participative management approaches could help to avoid outcomes like the new york high line, where igs was simply converted into neoliberal green space, demonstrating how the fascination and promise of engaging with ‘wild’ nonhumans can be reduced to its aesthetic appeal in the name of capitalism (millington 2015). in a way, the high line thus presents an extreme case of a carefully landscaped space posing as igs, a space that is precisely so easy to accept (and thus preferred by its visitors) because benches, pathways and design provide clear demarcations. on the high line, contrary to igs, wildness is performed, encounters are pre-negotiated, provisional arrangements are no longer possible, nature is disciplined. to what degree can the urban-nature dualism then be overcome through planning and management? one possible approach is to facilitate participatory management of igs (rupprecht 2017), thereby allowing residents to explore their individual taste for coexistence, rather than planners setting the ground rules in advance. planners can draw upon the results of this study which suggest urban residents’ willingness to coexist with wildlife is influenced by species, geography, cultural factors, education and age (but not income or sex). mapping wanted and unwanted animals (figure 1, 2) could help planners to focus management efforts on locally most prominent species, offering a better insight into residents’ preferences than current contestation-focused wildlife conflict reports. understanding where residents’ preferences overlap or differ from municipal conservation strategies could identify potential synergies or problems. small-scale maps could help tailor management towards individual neighbourhoods. tracking such information over time may also allow planners and wildlife managers to intervene before conflicts escalate. green space design could draw on residents’ species preferences, for example by retrofitting features that attract birds or butterflies (e.g. wildflower meadows). similarly, knowing where residents think animals and wild plants should be able to live (and where not) could allow managing wildlife interactions differently for the city centre, parks or igs. cultural factors such as the different role of nativeness may help planners to understand which points to emphasize in communicating with residents in conservation or wildlife management projects. finally, planners and developers could aim to design projects for particular age groups (e.g. retirement housing or child care centres) by taking into account different age groups’ species preferences and general willingness to coexist with wildlife. recent work by houston and colleagues (2017) further discusses how planning theory might contribute. conclusion and directions for further research in this study, i attempt to answer calls from scholars to look for paths towards more-than-human cities. using a quantitative approach, i reported results from an exploratory survey in brisbane, australia, and sapporo, japan, which asked residents about their willingness to coexist with wildlife, their preferences for undomesticated animals in their neighbourhood, and perceived places of belonging for animals and plants. while the low response rate of the study limits the extent to which these results can be generalised, the sample used was sufficient for this exploratory study. geographical and cultural context alongside respondents’ educational attainment and age influenced their willingness to coexist with wildlife, but not sex and income. mapping respondents’ preferences for animals in their neighbourhood, identified global and local as well as wanted and unwanted groups of animals. these categories differed in the way the animals contested the human notions of control over urban space. most respondents chose igs as the space where animals and wild plants should be living fennia 195: 2 (2017) 155christoph d. d. rupprecht in the city after forests and bushland. drawing upon recent theoretical and empirical work by scholars suggesting that igs is less restricted by expectations for human control, i proposed igs as the territories of encounter and one potential path to more-than-human cities. in particular, i argued with nohl (1990) that these spaces can offer ‘provisional arrangements’ that allow us to engage with nonhumans in a conciliatory way. finally, i discussed some ways planners could work with igs and quantitative methods of understanding interspecies interactions to improve planning and management. this study has helped to identify a number of directions for further research. first, this study has focused on animals, leaving open the question whether plants are similarly perceived as challenging the human control of space. second, recent history has seen a surge in human-animal related literature, catalogued by the excellent animal studies living bibliography (n.d.), which exceeds the space of a review as part of a paper introduction and merits one or more dedicated reviews to complement the two previous ones by buller (2014, 2015). third, researchers should investigate what role factors that fell outside of the scope of this study might play in mediating residents’ willingness to coexist with animals: urban density; the presence of, access to and use of greenspace; if people’s values influenced their decisions about where they live; whether living in a particular place or particular human-animal interactions have altered their views; whether particular animals are viewed as belonging in particular places; and whether observed or perceived animal presence in the neighbourhood influence residents’ answers. fourth, examining pet-mediated human-nonpet relations might shine light on their possible role as either conflict mediators or (as observed in pet-wildlife interactions) a source of additional conflict. fifth, not limiting the number of animals identified by respondents as wanted or unwanted could help identify individual variations in willingness to coexist on the human side, and provide insights into whether the patterns of preference for certain species among ‘animal lovers’ and those less so-inclined. finally, the biggest challenge remains: to turn the direction of inquiry around and find a way to discern how non-human preferences drive where, how, and whom they share or contest spaces. notes 1 the term ‘territories of encounter’ was not included in the survey instrument and is offered here as a provocative reframing of space often seen as derelict or wasted. acknowledgements i am deeply grateful: to yumi nakagawa for invaluable help with data collection, the japanese survey instrument and data entry, to kumiko nakagawa for assistance with the japanese survey instrument and japanese qualitative responses, to jason byrne for guidance and friendship throughout the project, to hirofumi ueda for assistance with the japanese survey instrument and data collection in sapporo, to bill metcalf for advice on research design, to ruth potts for helpful comments on the manuscript, to all respondents for participating and making this study possible, to the association of american geographers urban geography specialty group for awarding an earlier version of this paper the 2016 dissertation award, and to reviewers for their helpful comments. this research was supported by griffith university and by the feast project (no. 14200116), research institute for humanity and nature (rihn). references adams, c. e. (2012) urban wildlife management. 2nd ed. crc press, boca raton. almeida, a., vasconcelos, c. & strecht-ribeiro, o. (2014) attitudes toward animals: a study of portuguese children. anthrozoös 27(2) 173–190. https://doi.org/10.2752/175303714x13903827487403 anderson, k. (1997) a walk on the wild side: a critical geography of domestication. progress in human geography 21(4) 463–485. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297673999021 animal studies living bibliography (n.d.) the living bibliography of animal studies. <http://www.lbanimalstudies.org.uk/index.php?title=main_page>. 27.10.2017. 156 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper baldwin, p. c. (1999) domesticating the street: the reform of public space in hartford, 1850–1930. ohio state university press, columbus, oh. barron, p. & mariani, m. (eds.) (2013) terrain vague. routledge, london. barua, m. (2014) volatile ecologies: towards a material politics of human-animal relations. environment and planning a 46(6) 1462–1478. https://doi.org/10.1068/a46138 barua, m., bhagwat, s.a. & jadhav, s. (2013) the hidden dimensions of human–wildlife conflict: health impacts, opportunity and transaction costs. biological conservation 157 309–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2012.07.014 belaire, j. a., westphal, l. m., whelan, c. j. & minor, e. s. (2015) urban residents’ perceptions of birds in the neighborhood: biodiversity, cultural ecosystem services, and disservices. the condor 117(2) 192–202. https://doi.org/10.1650/condor-14-128.1 van den berg, m., wendel-vos, w., van poppel, m., kemper, h., van mechelen, w. & maas, j. (2015) health benefits of green spaces in the living environment: a systematic review of epidemiological studies. urban forestry & urban greening 14(4) 806–816. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2015.07.008 bjerke, t., ødegårdstuen, t. s. & kaltenborn, b. p. (1998a) attitudes toward animals among norwegian adolescents. anthrozoös 11(2) 79–86. https://doi.org/10.2752/089279398787000742 bjerke, t., ødegårdstuen, t. s. & kaltenborn, b. p. (1998b) attitudes toward animals among norwegian children and adolescents: species preferences. anthrozoös 11(4) 227–235. https://doi.org/10.2752/089279398787000544 bjerke, t. & østdahl, t. (2004) animal-related attitudes and activities in an urban population. anthrozoös 17(2) 109–129. https://doi.org/10.2752/089279304786991783 bjerke, t., østdahl, t. & kleiven, j. (2003) attitudes and activities related to urban wildlife: pet owners and non-owners. anthrozoös 16(3) 252–262. https://doi.org/10.2752/089279303786992125 bolund, p. & hunhammar, s. (1999) ecosystem services in urban areas. ecological economics 29 293– 301. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0921-8009(99)00013-0 bordenstein, s. r. & theis, k. r. (2015) host biology in light of the microbiome: ten principles of holobionts and hologenomes. plos biol 13(8) e1002226. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002226 borgi, m. & cirulli, f. (2015) attitudes toward animals among kindergarten children: species preferences. anthrozoös 28(1) 45–59. https://doi.org/10.2752/089279315x14129350721939 brown, t. & cummins, s. (2013) intervening in health: the place of urban green space. landscape and urban planning 118 59–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2013.06.003 buller, h. (2014) animal geographies i. progress in human geography 38(2) 308–318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513479295 buller, h. (2015) animal geographies ii methods. progress in human geography 39(3) 374–384. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132514527401 byrne, j. (2011) the human relationship with nature: rights of animals and plants in the urban context. in douglas, i., goode, d., houck, m. c. & wang, r. (eds.) the routledge handbook of urban ecology (vols 1–6), 63–73. routledge, london. calvino, i. (2013) invisible cities. houghton mifflin harcourt, boston. cloke, p. & jones, o. (2005) ‘unclaimed territory’: childhood and disordered space(s). social & cultural geography 6(3) 311–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500111154 davison, a. (2006) turbulent times for urban nature: conserving and re-inventing nature in australian cities. australian zoologist 33(3) 306–314. https://doi.org/10.7882/az.2006.004 van dooren, t. & rose, d.b. (2012) storied-places in a multispecies city. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies 3(2) 1–27. dunlap, r. e., van liere, k. d., mertig, a. g. & jones, r. e. (2000) new trends in measuring environmental attitudes: measuring endorsement of the new ecological paradigm: a revised nep scale. journal of social issues 56(3) 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00176 dunn, r. r., gavin, m. c., sanchez, m. c. & solomon, j. n. (2006) the pigeon paradox: dependence of global conservation on urban nature. conservation biology 20(6) 1814–1816. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00533.x von döhren, p. & haase, d. (2015) ecosystem disservices research: a review of the state of the art with a focus on cities. ecological indicators 52 490–497. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2014.12.027 ellis, e. c., antill, e. c. & kreft, h. (2012) all is not loss: plant biodiversity in the anthropocene. plos one 7(1) e30535. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030535 enari, h. & suzuki, t. (2010) risk of agricultural and property damage associated with the recovery of japanese monkey populations. landscape and urban planning 97(2) 83–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2010.04.014 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 157christoph d. d. rupprecht european commission (2010) attitudes of europeans towards the issue of biodiversity, no. 290. <http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_290_en.pdf> 27.10.2017. field, a. (2009) discovering statistics using spss. sage publications, london. foster, j. & sandberg, l.a. (2010) friends or foe? invasive species and public green space in toronto. geographical review 94(2) 178–198. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2004.tb00166.x fox-parrish, l. & jurin, r. r. (2008) students’ perceptions of a highly controversial yet keystone species, the black-tailed prairie dog: a case study. the journal of environmental education 39(4) 3–14. https://doi.org/10.3200/joee.39.4.3-14 franck, k. a. & stevens, q. (eds.) (2007) loose space: possibility and diversity in urban life. routledge, abingdon. franklin, a. (2006) animal nation: the true story of animals and australia. unsw press, kensington. gilbert, o.l. (1989) the ecology of urban habitats. chapman and hall, new york. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0821-5 griffith, m., wolch, j. & lassiter, u. (2002) animal practices and the racialization of filipinas in los angeles. society & animals 10(3) 221–248. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853002320770056 gröning, g. & wolschke-bulmahn, j. (2003) the native plant enthusiasm: ecological panacea or xenophobia? landscape research 28(1) 75. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426390306536 guitart, d. a., pickering, c. m. & byrne, j. a. (2014) color me healthy: food diversity in school community gardens in two rapidly urbanising australian cities. health & place 26 110–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2013.12.014 hard, g. (2001) natur in der stadt? berichte zur deutschen landeskunde 75(2/3) 257–270. head, l. & atchison, j. (2008) cultural ecology: emerging human-plant geographies. progress in human geography 33(2) 236–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508094075 hillier, j. & byrne, j. (2016) is extermination to be the legacy of mary gilberts cat? organization 23(3) 387–406. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508416629455 hinchliffe, s. (2003) inhabiting-landscapes and natures. in anderson, k., domosh, m., pile, s. & thrift, n. (eds.) handbook of cultural geography, 207–225. sage publications, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608252.n14 hinchliffe, s. & whatmore, s. (2006) living cities: towards a politics of conviviality. science as culture 15(2) 123–138. https://doi.org/10.1068/d351t hinchliffe, s., kearnes, m. b., degen, m. & whatmore, s. (2005) urban wild things: a cosmopolitical experiment. environment and planning d: society and space 23(5) 643–658. https://doi.org/10.1068/d351t hobbs, r. j., arico, s., aronson, j., baron, j., bridgewater, p., cramer, v., epstein, p., ewel, j., klink, c., lugo, a., norton, d., ojima, d., richardson, d., sanderson, e., valladares, f., vila, m., zamora, r. & zobel, m. (2006) novel ecosystems: theoretical and management aspects of the new ecological world order. global ecology and biogeography 15(1) 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-822x.2006.00212.x honda, t. (2009) environmental factors affecting the distribution of the wild boar, sika deer, asiatic black bear and japanese macaque in central japan, with implications for human-wildlife conflict. mammal study 34(2) 107–116. https://doi.org/10.3106/041.034.0206 houston, d., hillier, j., maccallum, d., steele, w. & byrne, j. (2017) make kin, not cities! multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory. planning theory 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095216688042 howell, r. g. (1982) the urban coyote problem in los angeles county. in marsh, r. e. (ed.) proceedings of the tenth vertebrate pest conference (1982), paper 22. university of california, davis. ingold, t. (2008) bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world. environment and planning a 40(8) 1796–1810. https://doi.org/10.1068/a40156 instone, l. (2004) situating nature: on doing cultural geographies of australian nature. australian geographer 35(2) 131–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/0004918042000249430 instone, l. & sweeney, j. (2014) dog waste, wasted dogs: the contribution of human–dog relations to the political ecology of australian urban space. geographical research 52(4) 355–364. https://doi.org/10.1080/0004918042000249430 jerolmack, c. (2008) how pigeons became rats: the cultural-spatial logic of problem animals. social problems 55(1) 72–94. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2008.55.1.72 jessup, d. a. (2004) the welfare of feral cats and wildlife. journal-american veterinary medical association 225 1377–1385. https://doi.org/10.2460/javma.2004.225.1377 johnston, c. (2008) beyond the clearing: towards a dwelt animal geography. progress in human geography 32(5) 633–649. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508089825 158 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper jorgensen, a. & keenan, r. (eds.) (2012) urban wildscapes. routledge, abingdon. kellert, s. r. (1991) japanese perceptions of wildlife. conservation biology 5(3) 297–308. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.1991.tb00141.x kellert, s. r. (1993) attitudes, knowledge, and behavior toward wildlife among the industrial superpowers: united states, japan, and germany. journal of social issues 49(1) 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1993.tb00908.x kellert, s. r. & westervelt, m. o. (1984) children’s attitudes, knowledge and behaviors towards animals. children’s environments quarterly 1(3) 8–11. keniger, l., gaston, k., irvine, k. & fuller, r. (2013) what are the benefits of interacting with nature? international journal of environmental research and public health 10(3) 913–935. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph10030913 knight, j. (1999) monkeys on the move: the natural symbolism of people-macaque conflict in japan. the journal of asian studies 58(03) 622–647. https://doi.org/10.2307/2659114 la trobe, h. l. & acott, t. g. (2000) a modified nep/dsp environmental attitudes scale. the journal of environmental education 32(1) 12–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958960009598667 lambert, j. e. (2016) regeneration of human-modified landscapes: the irony of antipathy to resilient animals. envirosociety 19.1.2016. <http://www.envirosociety.org/2016/01/regeneration-of-humanmodified-landscapes-and-the-irony-of-antipathy-toward-resilient-animal-species/> 27.10.2017. lemelin, r. h. (2013) to bee or not to bee: whether ‘tis nobler to revere or to revile those sixlegged creatures during one’s leisure. leisure studies 32(2) 153–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2011.626064 lorimer, j. (2012) multinatural geographies for the anthropocene. progress in human geography 36(5) 593–612. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511435352 lososová, z., chytrý, m., tichý, l., danihelka, j., fajmon, k., hajek, o., kintrova, k., lanikova, d., otypkova, z. & rehorek, v. (2012) biotic homogenization of central european urban floras depends on residence time of alien species and habitat types. biological conservation 145(1) 179– 184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2011.11.003 lyytimäki, j., petersen, l. k., normander, b. & bezák, p. (2008) nature as a nuisance? ecosystem services and disservices to urban lifestyle. environmental sciences 5(3) 161–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/15693430802055524 mace, g.m., norris, k. & fitter, a. h. (2012) biodiversity and ecosystem services: a multilayered relationship. trends in ecology & evolution 27(1) 19–26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2011.08.006 matsuoka, r. h. & kaplan, r. (2008) people needs in the urban landscape: analysis of landscape and urban planning contributions. landscape and urban planning 84(1) 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2007.09.009 mckiernan, s. & instone, l. (2016) from pest to partner: rethinking the australian white ibis in the morethan-human city. cultural geographies 23(3) 475–494. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015609159 mckinney, m. l. (2008) effects of urbanization on species richness: a review of plants and animals. urban ecosystems 11(2) 161–176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-007-0045-4 metzger, j. (2014) spatial planning and/as caring for more-than-human place. environment and planning a 46(5) 1001–1011. https://doi.org/10.1068/a140086c miller, j. r. (2005) biodiversity conservation and the extinction of experience. trends in ecology & evolution 20(8) 430–434. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2005.05.013 millington, n. (2015) from urban scar to ‘park in the sky’: terrain vague, urban design, and the remaking of new york city’s high line park. environment and planning a 47(11) 2324–2338. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x15599294 nohl, w. (1990) gedankenskizze einer naturästhetik der stadt. landschaft und stadt 22(2) 57–67. philo, c. (1995) animals, geography, and the city: notes on inclusions and exclusions. environment and planning d: society and space 13 655–681. https://doi.org/10.1068/d130655 power, e. r. (2005) human–nature relations in suburban gardens. australian geographer 36(1) 39–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049180500050847 power, e. r. (2009) border-processes and homemaking: encounters with possums in suburban australian homes. cultural geographies 16(1) 29–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474008097979 qviström, m. (2012) taming the wild: gyllin’s garden and the urbanization of a wildscape. in jorgensen, a. & keenan, r. (eds.) urban wildscapes, 187–200. routledge, abingdon. rink, d. & emmrich, r. (2005) surrogate nature or wilderness? social perceptions and notions of nature in an urban context. in kowarik, i. & körner, s. (eds.) wild urban woodlands, 67–80. springer, berlin. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26859-6_4 fennia 195: 2 (2017) 159christoph d. d. rupprecht rosenzweig, r. & blackmar, e. (1992) the park and the people: a history of central park. cornell university press, new york. rupprecht, c. d. d. (2017) informal urban green space: residents’ perception, use, and management preferences across four major japanese shrinking cities. land 6(3) 59. https://doi.org/10.3390/land6030059 rupprecht, c. d. d. & byrne, j. a. (2014a) informal urban green-space: comparison of quantity and characteristics in brisbane, australia and sapporo, japan. plos one 9(6) e99784. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0099784 rupprecht, c. d. d. & byrne, j. a. (2014b) informal urban greenspace: a typology and trilingual systematic review of its role for urban residents and trends in the literature. urban forestry & urban greening 13(4) 597–611. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2014.09.002 rupprecht, c. d. d. & byrne, j. a. (2016) informal urban greenspace perception and use: survey instrument. http://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.1.3830.7448 rupprecht, c. d. d., byrne, j. a. & lo, a. y. h. (2016) memories of vacant lots: how and why residents used informal urban greenspace as children and teenagers in brisbane, australia and sapporo, japan. children’s geographies 14(3) 340–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015.1048427 rupprecht, c. d. d., byrne, j. a., garden, j. g. & hero, j-m. (2015a) informal urban green space: a trilingual systematic review of its role for biodiversity and trends in the literature. urban forestry & urban greening 14(4) 883–908. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2015.08.009 rupprecht, c. d. d., byrne, j. a., ueda, h. & lo, a. y. h. (2015b) ‘it’s real, not fake like a park’: residents’ perception and use of informal urban green-space in brisbane, australia and sapporo, japan. landscape and urban planning 143 205–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.07.003 sapporo kankyōkyoku midori no suishinbu (2013) bear sighting information. city of sapporo, sapporo. <http://www.city.sapporo.jp/kurashi/animal/choju/kuma/syutsubotsu/index.html>. 27.10.2017. sapporo shichō seisakujitsu kōhōbu shimin no koe o kiku ka (2011) heisei 23nendo dai1kai shimin anke-to chōsa kekka: te-ma4 seibutsu taiyōsei ni tsuite. city of sapporo, sapporo. <http://www. city.sapporo.jp/somu/shiminnokoe/sakusei/documents/seibutsutayousei.pdf> 27.10.2017. sawaki, m. & kamihogi, a. (1995) study on the residents’ taste for coexisting with nature life in the new town. journal of the japanese institute of landscape architecture 58(5) 133–136. https://doi.org/10.5632/jila.58.5_133 seymour, m. & wolch, j. (2009) toward zoöpolis? innovation and contradiction in a conservation community. journal of urbanism: international research on placemaking and urban sustainability 2(3) 215–236. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549170903466020 soga, m., yamaura, y., aikoh, t., shoji, y., kubo, t. & gaston, k. j. (2015) reducing the extinction of experience: association between urban form and recreational use of public greenspace. landscape and urban planning 143 69–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.06.003 sukopp, h. (2002) on the early history of urban ecology in europe. preslia 74 373–393. trigger, d. s. & head, l. (2010) restored nature, familiar culture: contesting visions for preferred environments in australian cities. nature and culture 5(3) 231–250. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2010.050302 trigger, d., mulcock, j., gaynor, a. & toussaint, y. (2008) ecological restoration, cultural preferences and the negotiation of ‘nativeness’ in australia. geoforum 39 1273–1283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.05.010 ueda, h. & rupprecht, c. d. d. (2014) the role of green spaces in the city image of sapporo. journal of the japanese institute of landscape architecture 77(5) 487–490. https://doi.org/ 10.5632/jila.77.487 urbanik, j. (2012) placing animals: an introduction to the geography of human-animal relations. rowman & littlefield, lanham, md. wandersee, j. h. & schussler, e. e. (1999) preventing plant blindness. the american biology teacher 61(2) 82–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/4450624 ward, k. (2010) towards a relational comparative approach to the study of cities. progress in human geography 34(4) 471–487. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509350239 wittig, r. & becker, u. (2010) the spontaneous flora around street trees in cities—a striking example for the worldwide homogenization of the flora of urban habitats. flora 205(10) 704–709. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.flora.2009.09.001 wolch, j. (1996) zoöpolis. capitalism nature socialism 7(2) 21–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455759609358677 wolch, j. (2002) anima urbis. progress in human geography 26(6) 721–742. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132502ph400oa 160 fennia 195: 2 (2017)research paper wolch, j. r., west, k. & gaines, t. e. (1995) transspecies urban theory. environment and planning d: society and space 13(6) 735–760. https://doi.org/10.1068/d130735 yeo, j-h. & neo, h. (2010) monkey business: human–animal conflicts in urban singapore. social & cultural geography 11(7) 681–699. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2010.508565 untitled the changing landforms of finland matti tikkanen matti tikkanen (2002). the changing landforms of finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 21–30. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper examines briefly the general outlines of the relief in finland, bedrock and surficial landforms, their origins, and the factors that have affected their development. the basic framework for the relief in finland is formed by the highly eroded precambrian bedrock, between 3,000 and 1,500 million years of age. it is covered in most places by a 3–4-metre layer of much younger and clearly distinct surficial deposits. the ancient fold mountains that occupied the area of finland have been worn down by weathering and erosion processes to form a fairly even peneplain with a mean height above sea level of 154 metres and a maximum height of 1,328 metres (halti). about 80 percent of the country’s surface area consists of low-lying land below 200 metres above sea level. the fractured nature of the bedrock is reflected in the existence of elongated fissure valleys and fault cliffs, and rift valleys and erosion-smoothed horsts in places. quartzite deposits, in particular, frequently stand out from their environment to form monadnocks. the remains of nine ancient meteorite craters have also been found in the bedrock. the most common type of surficial deposit is till, characteristically in the form of glaciogenic hummocky moraines, drumlins and end moraines, while glaciofluvial landforms, such as eskers, deltas, kame fields, and large ice-marginal complexes such as the salpausselkä moraines, are also among the basic elements of the topography. the most notable among the landforms dating from after the deglaciation (12,000–9000 years ago) are clay plains, river valleys, beach and dune formations and mires. particularly the glaciofluvial landforms have been badly spoiled by human activity in places, in the form of the large-scale extraction of sand and gravel. matti tikkanen, department of geography, p. o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: matti.tikkanen@helsinki.fi introduction the relief in finland has been substantially evened out in general terms, although its more detailed topography is still highly variable. the topography as a whole is determined by the interaction of two elements, the solid bedrock and the loose surficial deposits. the boundary between the two is usually a very clearly defined one in finland (aartolahti 1990), on account of the fact that the older weathered layers were efficiently removed by glacial erosion. such layers are to be found nowadays only in the ice divide zones of northern finland, where glacial erosion was ineffective. the mean height above sea level in finland is 154 metres (seppälä 1986) and the highest point, the fjeld of halti on the border with norway, 1,328 metres. uplands above a level of 200 metres above sea level account for only 20 percent of the country’s surface area, being located mostly in the east and north. continuous areas of land of 300 metres in altitude are to be found only in north-western lapland (tikkanen 1994). the areas that lie below 100 metres above sea level form a strip some 30–100 kilometres wide along the coast and penetrate further inland along the banks of the main river systems flowing out of the lake region in central finland (cd-fig. 1). the present-day pattern of relief is the result of a long and varied history of geomorphological processes. the basis of the earth’s crust in the area is formed by the ancient bedrock, which has assumed its present shape as a consequence of an22 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen cient folding, tectonic movements, and periods of erosion. the vast majority of the finnish bedrock is aged between 3,000 and 1,500 million years, and there are only very restricted areas of rocks that are younger than this. most of it is composed of granitic igneous rocks and crystalline schists. the area of finland forms part of the fennosarmatian bedrock craton, which borders on the considerably younger caledonian mountain zone of scandinavia in the west and north (korsman & koistinen 1998). younger sedimentary rocks overlay the bedrock to the south and east from finland. the bedrock of finland is either exposed at the surface or covered by younger sedimentary layers. the thickness of these loose deposits is in general no more than 3–4 metres, and it is only in certain places that accumulations of over 100 metres have been observed, in connection with specific glaciofluvial landforms (aartolahti 1990; taipale & saarnisto 1991). the loose deposits mostly date back only to the quaternary glaciation or afterwards, and the country’s glacial topography may be said to have received more or less its present shape during the deglaciation stage, some 12,000–9000 bp (aartolahti 1990; tikkanen 1994; saarnisto & salonen 1995). although the earth’s crust in the area of finland had already been reduced to a peneplain by the end of the precambrian, many changes in the relief have taken place since that time. the last major event in this process was the action of the ice during the last glaciation, which is estimated to have lowered the general relief by 7–25 metres and refashioned the surface topography with new depositional landforms (taipale & saarnisto 1991). the various post-glacial stages in the history of the baltic sea have subsequently given rise to thick clay deposits. the mires that have grown up in the lower-lying depressions have further evened out the irregularities in the post-glacial land surface. the most recent alterations in the surface topography may be ascribed to the action of flowing water, waves, winds, and human activity. the following is a brief review of the stages in the development of the relief in finland and a summary of the principal types of landforms. origins of the bedrock and its influence on relief the oldest parts of the bedrock of finland, located in the eastern and northern parts of the country, date back some 2,800–2,700 million years, having arisen in the course of the late archaean orogeny (simonen 1980, 1990). this folding phase associated with tectonic movements also involved volcanic activity, during which vast masses of molten rock were discharged on the surface. this was followed by a long peaceful period in the course of which the high mountains were gradually reduced to a gently sloping peneplain, the weathering products being deposited as a sedimentary layer on top of the bedrock. the ancient volcanoes have similarly been worn away, so that only their bases are visible on the surface today (fig. 1). the majority of the bedrock nevertheless originates from the next period of folding, the svecofennian orogeny, 1,900–1,800 million years ago (korsman & koistinen 1998). the metamorphic rocks that arose from it were mixed with granitic and granodioritic igneous rocks and the volcanoes again discharged their magma onto the land surface. this gave rise to extensive areas of igneous rocks in southern and central finland and in lapland. this orogeny created chains of mountains several kilometres in height across the country, but these were again eroded away during the precambrian era. the thickness of the earth’s crust in the area of finland is 40–60 kilometres, although erosion has reduced the figure by an estimated 15 kilometres (korsman & koistinen 1998: 102). the rocks that date from after this orogeny include the rapakivi granites of south-eastern and south-western finland, of age around 1,600 million years. their surfaces have been weathered down by as much as 1–2 metres in places. the sedimentary rocks are represented by the 1,400– 1,300-million-year sandstones and claystones of the gulf of bothnia area and of the muhos and satakunta depressions, which were penetrated by large amounts of dark-coloured diabase some 1,270 million years ago. in addition one of the consequences of the caledonian orogeny some 450–400 million years ago was that an overthrust plate extended into the area of finland. its remains are visible in the extreme north-west, in enontekiö (simonen 1980, 1990; lehtovaara 1989; korsman & koistinen 1998). the fjeld schist that forms the top layer of this plate, being a highly resilient rock, has protected the underlying sedimentary rocks from weathering, as may be seen on the fjelds of saana and saivaara, for instance (fig. 2). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 23the changing landforms of finland fig. 1. development of the archipelago in south-western finland (a) the sinking seabed gains deposits of weathering products from the nearby mainland, mainly sand and clay, and volcanoes discharge basaltic lava through these sediments. (b) orogenic processes form these deposits into crystalline schists, gneisses, and amphibolites at the same time as grey granite and dark, silica-poor rocks are introduced. as a consequence of erosion, the granite dome that had formed deep in the crust begins to rise towards the surface. (c) as erosion continues, the mountains resulting from the orogenic processes, often several thousand metres in height, are reduced to a peneplain and the granite dome reaches the surface. (d) the land is submerged beneath the sea from time to time, and sediments accumulate on the eroded bedrock surface, only to be eroded in turn as time goes by. (e) the ice sheet advances over the area a number of times during the quaternary, removing all the deposits of weathered material and replacing it with layers of till, gravel, and sand. (f) the ice sheet has melted and the land surface has risen close to sea level. the bedrock outcrops and the crests of the eskers and till ridges protrude from the sea to form islands. the archipelago has emerged. modified from edelman (1974). 24 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen transport by plate-tectonic movements apart from giving rise to high mountain chains in the area of finland, the tectonic movements also transported the whole of the fennoscandian region on its continental plate from one part of the earth’s surface to another in the course of time. this has been shown by means of latitudinal measurements of the location of the territory of finland at different points in time, as determined from palaeomagnetic measurements performed on radiometrically dated rocks, although the method cannot be used for determining longitude (pesonen & mertanen 1990). the measurements indicate that finland and its continental plate spent long periods in the relatively warm climatic zones close to equator at one stage (fig. 3), which must have accelerated weathering and the erosion of the land surface. at the time of folding of the oldest parts of the finnish bedrock, fennoscandia was nevertheless located just as far north as at present. it was only after that that the continental plate began to drift south, so that at the time of the svecofennian orogeny finland laid south of the tropic of cancer. from this point it continued further south, and by the emergence of the rapakivi granites and diabases it was located in the hot equatorial zone (pesonen et al. 1989; pesonen et al. 1991). the plate movements then carried the fennoscandian land mass still further south, until just under 1,000 million years ago it had reached the antarctic circle. from there its course was reversed, until it reached the equator once more just under 400 million years ago. the fennoscandian land mass has thus travelled to its present northerly location within the last 300 million years (fig. 3). the mean rate of movement of the continental plate has been about two centimetres a year, although at its fastest it has reached almost ten centimetres a year (pesonen & mertanen 1990). reminders of the long migration of the fennoscandian land mass exist in the form of the remains of weathering that took place under tropical climatic conditions and glacial deposits traceable to conditions of extreme cold. there are also signs that numerous meteorites fell in the area of finland during these migrations. nine craters of this origin have been discovered so far. the youngest is the basin of lake lappajärvi in ostrobothnia, created some 77 million years ago and previously thought to be the crater of a former volcano (lehtinen 1976). considerably older than this is the circular area of flat agricultural land south of vaasa that marks the söderfjärden impact crater (fig. 4), the edge of which rises some 20– 40 metres above its surroundings (lehtovaara 1992; tikkanen 1994: 187). the other craters are the lakes sääksjärvi in satakunta, iso-naakkima fig. 2. sedimentary rocks are overlain by the caledonian crystalline schists and gneisses on the hill of saivaara in enontekiö, extreme northwest of finnish lapland. (author’s photo, 06/78) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 25the changing landforms of finland fig. 3. migration of the fennoscandian continental land mass. the diagram depicts its movements over the earth’s surface in a north–south direction from late archaean times up to the present. the time scale is in millions of years. the circular movement of the shield and the new bedrock areas added to fennoscandia at different stages, indicated in black, are shown on the diagram. fig. 4. deeply eroded remnant of the söderfjärden meteorite impact crater, south of vaasa. the diameter of the crater is five kilometres, and it is filled with sedimentary rocks and quaternary clay and silt sediments. (author’s photo, 07/94) 26 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen fig. 5. geomorphological map of finland (modified mainly from kujansuu & niemelä 1984 and fogelberg & seppälä 1986). near pieksämäki, suvasvesi in north savo, karikkoselkä in petäjävesi, saarijärvi in taivalkoski, paasselkä at kerimäki, and the sea area of lumparn on åland. all of the craters are thus located in central and western finland with the exception of lake saarijärvi in taivalkoski (fig. 5). bedrock topography the effects of the ancient tectonic movements in the bedrock are still visible in many places. lake inari in northern finland is located at least in part in a bedrock depression, or graben, and some of fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 27the changing landforms of finland the groups of fjelds surrounding it are horsts rounded off by erosion. the tectonic movements in this area are thought to have taken place in the tertiary, about 25–10 million years ago (aartolahti 1990). similarly the satakunta and muhos areas of sedimentary rocks on the west coast occupy graben formations, which are estimated to reach a depth of 600–1,000 metres (elo et al. 1993). the gullkrona graben in the archipelago sea in southwestern finland still has its surface more than 40 metres below the level of the surrounding areas (tikkanen & westerholm 1992). also as a result of these movements the bedrock is broken up by numerous fault lines and fracture zones (vuorela 1986). the impact of this may be seen in the landscape in the form of long, narrow, straightsided valleys edged by steep rock faces. in some places former sediments obscure these fault lines so that they are scarcely visible in the topography at all. the lakes and rivers nevertheless tend to favour fracture zones of this kind, and particularly lake päijänne and lake näsijärvi among finland’s largest lakes are located in zones of intersecting bedrock faults and fractures. apart from the depressions and protrusions brought about by tectonic forces, the relief also reflects the relative hardness of the various rock types, in that some remain stand out as others are eroded away, giving rise to monadnocks. the quartzite hills of eastern and northern finland rise up several hundred metres above their surroundings, for instance, although the differences in relief attached to the other rock types are by no means so pronounced, e.g., the surfaces of the diabase dykes that cross the sandstones of satakunta are around 50 metres above the surrounding terrain (tikkanen 1981). topography of surficial deposits the surficial deposits of finland date largely from the last glaciation or from post-glacial times. the most common material covering the bedrock surface more or less throughout the country is a glacial till. on account of the active flow that took place in the glaciers, this till was deposited in places as streamlined ridges, or drumlins, that indicate the direction of movement of the ice. individual drumlins can be as much as a hundred metres high and ten kilometres long (tikkanen 1994) and they can occur in extensive fields or swarms in places in the lake region, eastern finland or northern lapland (see glückert 1973). most drumlins have a bedrock core, and some occur in conjunction with shallow flutings, which can differ in orientation from the drumlins themselves (aario et al. 1974; aario 1977; heikkinen & tikkanen 1989). the principal surficial landforms are detailed in figure 5. rogen moraines, which are oriented perpendicular to the direction of ice movement, are usually regarded as glacial accumulation landforms (see aario 1977). as they have sometimes been found to contain glaciofluvial material, their origins have also been linked to melting processes in a passive ice margin that have allowed gravel and sand sorted by the meltwater streams to be deposited in transverse cracks at the ice margin (kurimo 1979). these landforms of height 5–15 metres are to be found in low-lying, flat areas in southern lapland, ostrobothnia and north karelia, and would appear to be connected with the occurrence of drumlins and hummocky moraines. till material released from the ice during deglaciation can accumulate to form hummocky moraines of varying shapes. these are particularly common in southern lapland, on the west coast and in eastern finland. the most extensive area of hummocky moraines in northern finland occupies some 1,600 square kilometres (taipale & saarnisto 1991). individual hummocks are usually between 5 and 20 metres in height and do not normally have any distinct orientation, but elongated radial moraines are sometimes to found in association with them (aartolahti 1995). there are ring-shaped mounds a few metres in height to be found in lapland that have been termed pulju moraines (kujansuu 1967; aartolahti 1974). till that has accumulated at an ice margin or in transverse cracks running parallel to the margin may be interpreted as forming end moraines, the largest of which in finland are 20–30 metres high and located in conjunction with the salpausselkä formations. small end moraines, usually 1– 3 metres high and 50–1,000 metres long and termed de geer moraines, are to be found in swarms of several hundred at a time, especially in the subaquatic coast areas of southern and western finland (zilliacus 1987; aartolahti 1995). reference has been made to de geer moraines when determining positions of the ice margin in western finland (aartolahti 1972). the first and second salpausselkä ice-marginal formations constitute a zone some 20–50 kilometres wide and 600 kilometres long of broad 28 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen glaciofluvial deltas and narrow chains of ridges running parallel to the ice margin stretching from south-western finland well into the eastern part of the country. these formations are predominantly glaciofluvial, but they include some till forms. other large formations of a similar kind are the third salpausselkä in western finland and the central finland ice-marginal formation. these major marginal formations have arisen in front of the reactivated ice margin in the cause of a protracted stagnant phase. the salpausselkä i and ii formations were laid down during the cold climatic period known as the younger dryas stadial, being dated by reference to the varve chronology to 11,300–11,100 years ago and 10,800– 10,600 years ago respectively. the whole deglaciation in finland occupied the period 12,100– 9,300 years ago (saarnisto & salonen 1995). apart from the major ice-marginal formations, large deposits of gravel and sand are to be found in the eskers that run across the country in chains that reach lengths of several hundred kilometres in some cases. the eskers are oriented approximately in the direction of glacial movement, and their examination in combination with the large marginal formations has enabled the flow pattern of a number of ice-lobes to be determined (punkari 1993). the interlobate esker complexes lying between these are particularly prominent landforms (taipale & saarnisto 1991). other smaller landforms that commonly occur in conjunction with the eskers and large glaciofluvial ice-marginal formations are kames, deltas, and sandurs in supra-aquatic areas. the terrain in the southern and western coastal areas in particular is evened out somewhat by the presence of clay and silt deposits, which can be more than 70 metres thick (haavisto et al. 1980). in many places rivers have gouged 20–30 metres deep valleys into these plains of fine-grained sediment in the course of post-glacial times, the slopes of these valleys being subsequently subject to landslip (aartolahti 1975). fluvial erosion has also been pronounced in the glaciofluvial fill material occupying some river valleys in northern finland (koutaniemi 2000). none of the rivers of finland has succeeded in developing an extensive delta, as land uplift has been constantly shifting the river mouths further out to sea. since the majority of the area of finland has been under water at some time or another, there are many places where beach ridges have been built up on slopes by wave action or shores have been eroded to leave cliffs or boulder fields. beach ridges composed of sand are frequently to be found on the sides of eskers, and they are particularly common in the coastal zone bordering on the northern part of the gulf of bothnia (helle 1965). the largest of these can be up to one hundred metres across and more than five metres high (tikkanen 1981). especially large, clearly defined shore landforms were laid down during the transgressive phases of the ancylus lake and litorina sea. active dunes can be found on the present-day sea shores mainly on the west coast (alestalo 1979; heikkinen & tikkanen 1987; hellemaa 1998), but most finnish dunes are nowadays bound by a vegetation cover and exist in the interior of the country, most notably in eastern finland and northern lapland (aartolahti 1980). the largest parabolic dunes in the upland area of rokuanvaara, situated to the south-east of oulu, for instance, are about 25 metres high (aartolahti 1973). in the far north of lapland, however, there are also some dune areas with vegetationless deflation surfaces, amounting to a total area of perhaps 300–400 hectares (tikkanen & heikkinen 1995; käyhkö et al. 1996). mires cover almost a third of finland’s land area (see seppä 2002). the peat in them can be over ten metres deep at its greatest. since the mires are usually located in the lowest depressions, they also help to even out the topography, although raised bogs developing in flat clayey areas can rise as much as seven metres above their surroundings (ikonen 1993). the formation of a mire can usually be traced back to either the paludification of forest land or the filling in of a lake basin with vegetation (korhola 1990). the greatest proliferation of mires is in the aapa fen zones of north ostrobothnia, kainuu and central lapland, while the aapa fens of northern lapland commonly feature palsas, that is, mounds with a permafrost core that can reach heights of five metres or more (seppälä 1979). man-made forms the most rapid changes taking place in the forms of the land surface today are those brought about by human agency. the extraction of stone and loose materials for building and road construction purposes has quickly destroyed or eaten into many landscape elements such as eskers and bedfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 29the changing landforms of finland rock outcrops (fig. 6.), even ones of substantial size. at the same time, human activity has created new landforms such as embankments, cuttings, terraces, pits, and mounds composed of waste or landfill material (tikkanen 1989). human activity also has indirect effects on surficial landforms by enhancing or accelerating natural processes. references aario r (1977). flutings, drumlins and rogen-landforms. nordia 2, 5–14. aario r, l forström & p lahermo (1974). glacial landforms with special reference to drumlins and flutings in koillismaa, finland. geological survey of finland, bulletin 273, 1–30. aartolahti t (1972). on deglaciation in southern and western finland. fennia 114, 1–84. aartolahti t (1973). morphology, vegetation and development of rokuanvaara, an esker and dune complex in finland. fennia 127, 1–53. aartolahti t (1974). ring ridge hummocky moraines in northern finland. fennia 134, 1–22. aartolahti t (1975). the morphology and development of the river valleys in southwestern finland. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 116, 1–72. aartolahti t (1980). periglasiaalisen morfologian tutkimus suomessa (abstract: the research of periglacial morphology in finland). terra 92, 74–87. aartolahti t (1990). suomen maankamaran vaiheet (abstract: the development of the earth’s surface in finland). terra 102, 203–219. aartolahti t (1995). glacial morphology in finland. in ehlers j, s kozarski & p gibbard (eds). glacial deposits in north-east europe, 37–50. aa balkema, rotterdam. alestalo j (1979). land uplift and development of the littoral and aeolian morphology on hailuoto, finland. acta universitatis ouluensis a 82, geologica 3, 109–120. edelman n (1974). berggrund och ytformer. in österholm h (ed). skärgård i omvandling, 15–24. nordenskiöld-samfundet i finland, helsingfors. elo s, t kuivasaari, m lehtinen, o sarapää & a uutela (1993). iso-naakkima, a circular structure filled with neoproterozoic sediments, pieksämäki, southeastern finland. bulletin of the geological society of finland 65, 3–30. fogelberg p & m seppälä (1986). geomorfologinen yleiskartta 1:1 000 000. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 122: geomorphology, 3–4. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. glückert g (1973). two large drumlin fields in central finland. fennia 120, 1–37. haavisto m, t grönlund, p lahermo & c-g stén (1980). someron kartta-alueen maaperä (abstract: quaternary deposits in the somero map-sheet area). suomen geologinen kartta 1:100 000, maaperäkarttojen selitykset, lehti 2024, 1–66. geological survey of finland, helsinki. heikkinen o & m tikkanen (1987). the kalajoki dune field on the west coast of finland. fennia 165, 241–267. heikkinen o & m tikkanen (1989). drumlins and flutings in finland: their relationships to ice movement and to each other. sedimentary geology 62, 349–355. fig. 6. original sharp-crested esker has been obliterated entirely by sand and gravel excavation at raastaharju, enontekiö. (author’s photo, 08/86) 30 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti tikkanen helle r (1965). strandwallbildungen im gebiet am unterlauf des flusses siikajoki. fennia 95, 1–35. hellemaa p (1998) the development of coastal dunes and their vegetation in finland. fennia 176, 111–221. ikonen l (1993). holocene development and peat growth of the raised bog pesäsuo in southwestern finland. geological survey of finland, bulletin 379, 1–58. käyhkö j, k pye & p worsley (1996). quantitave mapping of active aeolian surfaces in northern fennoscandia – landsat tm hybrid classification. proceedings of the fourth symposium on remote sensing of the polar environments, lyngby, denmark, 29 april–1 may 1996 (esa sp-391, july 1996), 147–152. korhola a (1990). suomen soiden synty ja kehitys (abstract: the origin and development of the mires in finland). terra 102, 256–267. korsman k & t koistinen (1998). suomen kallioperän yleispiirteet. in lehtinen m, p nurmi & t rämö (eds). suomen kallioperä – 3000 vuosimiljoonaa, 95–103. geological society of finland & gummerus, jyväskylä. koutaniemi l (2000). meanderointi ja sen yhdentoista vuoden seuranta oulankajoella kuusamossa (abstract: meandering, and eleven years of its monitoring on the river oulankajoki, finland). terra 112, 217–228. kujansuu r (1967). on the deglaciation of western finnish lapland. bulletin de la commission géologique de finlande 232, 1–98. kujansuu r & j niemelä (1990). suomen maaperä 1:1 000 000. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 123–126: geology, map appendix ii. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. kurimo h (1979). deglaciation and early postglacial hydrography in northern kainuu ja peräpohjola, north-east finland. a glacial morphological study. publications of the university of joensuu b ii 10, 1–65. lehtinen m (1976). lake lappajärvi, a meteorite impact site in western finland. geological survey of finland, bulletin 285, 1–92. lehtovaara j (1989). tectonostratigraphic position of the finnish caledonides at the fennoskandian margin of the northern scandes. bulletin of the geological society of finland 61, 189–195. lehtovaara j (1992). söderfjärden: a cambrian impact crater in western finland. tectonophysics 216, 157–161. pesonen lj & s mertanen (1990). fennoskandian mannervaelluksesta. in alalammi, p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 123–126: geology, 125. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. pesonen lj, s mertanen & mah leino (1991). fennoskandian pitkä matka. geologi 43, 107–113. pesonen lj, th torsvik, s-ä elming & g bylund (1989). crustal evolution of fennoskandia – paleomagnetic constraints. tectonophysics 162, 27–49. punkari m (1993). modelling of the dynamics of the scandinavian ice sheet using remote sensing and gis methods. in aber j (ed). glaciotectonics and mapping glacial deposits. proceedings of the inqua commission on formation and properties of glacial deposits, 232–250. canadian plains research center, university of regina. saarnisto m & v-p salonen (1995). glacial history of finland. in ehlers j, s kozarski & p gibbard (eds). glacial deposits in north-east europe, 3– 10. aa balkema, rotterdam. seppä h (2002). mires of finland: regional and local controls of vegetation, landforms, and longterm dynamics. fennia 180, 43–60. seppälä m (1979). recent palsa studies in finland. acta universitatis ouluensis a 82, geologica 3, 81–87. seppälä m (1986). korkeussuhteet. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 121–122: relief and landforms, 1–5. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. simonen a (1980). the precambrian in finland. geological survey of finland, bulletin 304, 1–58. simonen a (1990). suomen kallioperä. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 123–126: geology, 1–4. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. taipale k & m saarnisto (1991). tulivuorista jääkausiin. wsoy, porvoo. tikkanen m (1981). georelief, its origin and development in the coastal area between pori and uusikaupunki, south-western finland. fennia 159, 253–333. tikkanen m (1989). geomorphology of the vantaanjoki drainage basin, southern finland. fennia 167, 19–72. tikkanen m (1994). suomen pinnanmuodot (abstract: the landforms of finland). terra 106, 181– 192. tikkanen m & o heikkinen (1995). aeolian landforms and processes in the timberline region of northern finnish lapland. zeszyty naukowe uniwersytetu jagiellonskiego. pace geograficzne – zeszyt 98, 67–90. tikkanen m & j westerholm (1992). kimitoön – en regional geografisk analys (a regional analysis of kimito – an island in southwestern finland). bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 143, 1–95. vuorela p (1986). kallioperän ruhjevyöhykkeet. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 121–122: relief and landforms, 8. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. zilliacus h (1987). de geer moraines in finland and annual moraine problem. fennia 165, 145–239. 21258_04_hayrynen a periphery lost: the representation of karelia in finnish national landscape imagery maunu häyrynen häyrynen, maunu (2004). a periphery lost: the representation of karelia in finnish national landscape imagery. fennia 182: 1, pp. 23–32. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the article reflects how karelia has been represented as a national periphery in finnish national landscape imagery, understood as a dynamic system of social representations defining finland as national space. karelia may be likened to other national peripheries, analysed among others by robert shields as liminal zones allegedly at the margins of society. the particular aspects of karelian landscape occurring in popular landscape imagery are discussed. it is pointed out how these anchor karelia to a variety of contexts, of which karelianist imagery originating from art constitutes only one. similarly the ideological roles of karelian landscape have varied, starting from the didactic narratives of zachris topelius and ending up in the post-war and post-soviet karelian revivals. however, the present-day karelian landscape is a nostalgic construction, transferring the liminal zone outside history. maunu häyrynen, school of cultural production and landscape studies, university of turku, p.o. box 124, fin-28100 pori, finland. e-mail: maunu.hayrynen@utu.fi. introduction the study of the representations of karelia has traditionally centred on art and literature, especially that of the karelianist period around the turn of the 20th century (see sihvo 1973; sarajas-korte 1989; tarkka 1989; riikonen 1995; valkonen 1995; varpio 1997; waenerberg 2000; konttinen 2001). geographical and geopolitical studies have focused on the construction of the regional and ethnic image of karelia and its role in the finnish nation-building process (paasi 1986, 1996; raivo 1996, 1998; harle & moisio 2000). yet other approaches are offered by the study of the karelian ethnic self-understanding (heikkinen 1989) and the nostalgic relationship to karelia (haataja & lintunen 1990). diverse as these studies are in terms of their source material, methodology and outcomes, one may discern certain interconnecting themes. the construction of the image of karelia has been largely interpreted as a projection of finnish – especially fennoman – cultural identity to the national periphery, leading to an ambiguous situation where karelia and the karelians have been viewed at the same time as essentially finnish and as alien elements. this search of national roots has been compared with contemporary western exoticism at large, similarly combining the artistic quest of original purity with personal escapism. the aim of this article is to examine the specific role of karelia in finnish national landscape imagery. the latter is understood here as a dynamic system of representation defining finland as a national space. the empirical study draws upon illustrated publications presenting finnish landscape between the late 18th century and the 1960s. theoretically one may describe landscape as a social representation that anchors phenomena experienced as new, strange or abstract into the lived world and environment, thus familiarising and neutralising them (moscovici 1984). landscape serves as a means of naturalisation, concealing its social and historical origin (mitchell 1994). the production of visual landscape representations, according to uniform conventions, leads to the establishment of a homogenous landscape imagery, where singular landscapes form 24 fennia 182: 1 (2004)maunu häyrynen hierarchies according to their intertextual relations (duncan & ley 1993). as a landscape representation, landscape imagery in the whole gains ideological momentum from its perceived verisimilitude, the familiarity and physical verifiability of its individual elements (tarasti 1990; palin 1999, 226). stephen daniels argues that imperialist nationalism has had the tendency of incorporating peripheries into its identity myths as ‘others’ in contrast to the ‘cultured’ or ‘civilised’ core areas (e.g. the american frontier or the french orientalism; daniels 1993, 5). a different case of an internal ‘other’ is represented by the canadian north, examined by rob shields as a “masculine-gendered, liminal zone of rite de passage and economic recreative freedom and escape” constituting a cornerstone of the canadian national identity (shields 1991, 162–165 and further). constructed or imagined peripheries of this kind are likely to be found from most nation states and have in the context of the usa, canada and switzerland been referred to as the “naturalisation of the nation” (kaufmann 1998). such natural peripheries may have provided neutral ground for identification in times of national conflict, as has been the case with the american west after the civil war (miller 1992). they have though not necessarily been stable, but may have changed both in terms of location and character, the american frontier being an outstanding example (bowden 1992). several finnish writers have approached karelia as a natural national periphery with a utopic character (sihvo 1973; tarkka 1989; raivo 1998). karelia represented as national periphery i will now look at karelia as a national periphery in the context of national landscape imagery. there my approach will resemble that of shields, who speaks of an “imaginary geography” consisting of spatial stereotypes that define relations between physical places. in such ideologically charged readings of space, the role of periphery is to imply a centre in terms of a liminal zone where the standard norms of society are compromised. national ideological hegemony perpetuates such stereotypical images by repeating them (shields 1991). my intention is not to grasp karelia or its representations from a purely regional point of view, as a part of the national territory or an ethnic milieu relating to others, but also as a part of imagery relating to other visualisations of the national space. in doing this i will put particular emphasis to the implication of distance and movement as an integral part in defining a periphery, as well as to the ambiguity of karelian landscape discussed above and attempts to solve it. similar ambiguity has characterised even the russian view of karelia (see heikkinen 1989, 26–31). several writers have made the reservation that there is no such clearly defined area as “karelia”, rather a number of different and historically changing karelias (sihvo 1973; kirkinen 1998). the stereotypical image of karelia, as it appears in national landscape imagery, has largely ignored this fact, tending to lump the representations linking with the geographical area of karelia – however defined – together regardless of the social or cultural differences. nevertheless, both the relative importance and the characteristics of karelia have varied historically in landscape imagery. in a larger study pertaining to finnish landscape imagery, based on the analysis of altogether fifty landscape publications, i have divided the material into three rather obvious historical periods; that of the autonomy (1809–1917), the pre-war period (1917–1939) and the wartime and the post-war period (1939–1967). during the first period, a tenth of all placeable landscape images represented sites from south karelia, which however was not unambiguously defined: for instance the rapids of imatra were sometimes presented as karelian and sometimes not, if any regional connection was given. on the other hand, north and ladogan karelia were much less depicted, the former hardly recognised at all. the next period marked the heyday of karelian landscape in national landscape imagery: there was a clear overall shift of emphasis to the east, and about a fifth of all landscape images originated from karelia (north and south in equal rations). the disastrous end of the second world war showed not only the disappearance of the ceded areas, but also the remaining parts of karelia were practically wiped out from national landscape imagery until the 1960s (häyrynen 2000, 2002). these differences in the areal emphasis need to be put into a wider context. during the first period, landscape imagery focused on the cultural core area of south finland in general, south karelia making no exception. the eastern emphasis during the second period was paralleled by an equal rise on interest in the north (e.g. the areas fennia 182: 1 (2004) 25a periphery lost: the representation of karelia in finnish… of petsamo, kuusamo and salla and the oulunjoki river route), thus marking a general reorientation to the peripheries rather than just a belated impact of karelianism in popular landscape imagery. during the last period, finnish landscape imagery polarised to the directions of the southern “rush finland” as well as lapland, leaving even the other intermediate areas besides karelia in the shade. when looking at the sites represented, the city of viipuri (now vyborg) (fig. 1) was the karelian landscape the most likely to be represented in a popular landscape publication until the second world war. in the second period, even the rapids of imatra – whether considered karelian or not – were an obligatory sight to be represented, although their popularity was substantially diminished after their harnessing in 1929. other sites salient in terms of the amount of their representation were the canal of saimaa (during the first period since its opening in 1855; fig. 2), lake ladoga and the valamo (valaam) monastery (both during the first two periods since mid-19th century) as well as the town of sortavala with its surfig. 2. the saimaa canal, opened in 1855 to connect the saimaa water system to the baltic sea, was typically depicted in pre-independence imagery. (fyra… 1890). fig. 1. the historic town of viipuri, the regional centre of karelia, was the subject of the first published “realistic” landscape image from finland. it remained a permanent feature of finnish landscape imagery until its cession to soviet union in 1944. (dahlberg 1716). 26 fennia 182: 1 (2004)maunu häyrynen fig. 4. the koli heights were the only karelianist landscape to remain on the finnish side of the border after 1944. their importance was recognised in the 1990s, when they were designated a national park and one among the “national landscapes” of finland. (inha 1898). fig. 3. the rugged cliffs of the ladoga lakeshores represent a region and a landscape type characteristic for the period between the two world wars. (inha 1898). roundings, the koli heights and the island of suursaari (all mainly in the second period; figs. 3 and 4). the picturesque lake tolvajärvi, an intended national park, was typically depicted only in the second period. during the last period, only the imatra rapids still stood out from the karelian landscapes. it is not argued here that the significance or national status of a landscape could be measured simply by the frequency of its appearance in national landscape imagery. the purpose of this part of the study was merely to reveal the hierarchic construction of landscape imagery and its change from a period to another. however, the connotations of the landscapes thus singled out merit a closer inspection. firstly, the strong position of viipuri would correspond to the general urban bias of the first period and the overall prominence of all larger finnish cities in it, apart from which it was presented as a physical site anchoring the national territory to the past. more specifically, viipuri was portrayed as a site of historical and cultural confrontation between finland and russia, a border town, charging it with a particular kind of tension. while the saimaa canal (fig. 2) clearly was a manifestation of finnish economical expansion during the latter half of the 19th century and a technological achievement of its time, the other “karelian” landscapes pointed out above were or involved, except valamo, natural sights, which thematically dominated pre-war landscape imagery. they all also were strongly connected with the touristic development of the area, actually forming two popular travel routes. the images of valamo and tolvajärvi stood for the two exotic aspects of karelia, the eastern orthodox religion and the celebrated karelian folk tradition respectively. as for links with the karelianist artistic movement, koli (fig. 4) would certainly stand fennia 182: 1 (2004) 27a periphery lost: the representation of karelia in finnish… above the others, although suursaari and the sortavala area (fig. 3) attracted wide artistic interest as well. the historical trajectory of the karelian landscapes follows a general pattern: initial recognition at last by the end of the era of autonomy, outright dominance during the second period and falling into oblivion during the last, even for those sites left on the finnish side. this cycle could be described using a model by denis cosgrove (1989), inspired by raymond williams: karelian landscapes in the first period could be termed as emerging alternative landscapes as opposed to the then dominant cultural and historic landscapes of the south. between the two world wars, they would rise in turn to a paradigmatic status along with the other peripheral landscapes. after the war, they ended up as residual landscapes in more than one sense, when the karelian regions became lost or truncated by the land cessions and the national periphery largely shifted to lapland. (this article does not deal with the “neo-karelianist” renaissance of karelian landscape, discussed by several writers, e.g. paasi 1996, 127– 135; raivo 1996, 163–238; 1998, 26–27; petrisalo 2001, as this falls out of its temporal scope.) thus the tide of karelian landscape in popular landscape imagery did not coincide with artistic karelianism but followed it only after the independence. this observation is supported by riitta konttinen, according to whom karelianist landscapes were not generally acknowledged in the 1890s in spite of their artistic appreciation, but were then still outshadowed by the earlier topelian landscape imagery (konttinen 2001, 227– 229). an excellent example is given by the photographer i. k. inha, whose influence in reinterpreting and mediating karelianist imagery was decisive. his picturesque finland (1898) did contain representations of karelian landscape but was nevertheless overwhelmed by the topelian castles, estate buildings, farming villages and townscapes. in the first illustrated version of his suomen maisemia (1925), his photographic renditions of karelianist landscapes were on the contrary the principal subject matter. the diversity of the landscapes described above reveals us one central function of national landscape imagery. they serve to illustrate various aspects of karelia and thus refer to different contexts – often to more than just one. multicontextuality is a typical characteristic for the focal landscapes in the imagery. in this sense they may be likened to works of art, in which the aporic tension between the contexts provides depth for their interpretation. art is indeed an important context for the national symbolic landscapes, yet not the only one: others may be pointed out from history, geography, science, ethnography, religion etc. landscape imagery acts as an inventory, meticulously listing the different aspects of national space; in doing this, it selects and frames certain of them as “typical”, excluding others (cubitt 1998). in this process also the less represented landscapes are necessary; their number being large, they add to the verisimilitude of landscape imagery by increasing the density of its network of references. this entails the presentation of a wider repertoire of contexts, including local, ephemeral or otherwise particular (exemplified in karelia by the granite quarries of pyterlahti or the lowering of the level of the river vuoksi). tourism plays a crucial part in mediating the imagery and corroborating its significance by offering personal enactment of the sites represented. the ideological roles of karelia let us now turn from the external structure of national landscape imagery to its ideological contents. in terms of landscape representations and imagery, karelia has traditionally been considered within a geopolitical rather than social context – that is, national (finnish or russian) or regional i.e. karelian. however, landscape imageries – as any cultural texts or discourses – are produced under specific sociocultural conditions. thus one may discern not only different national imageries about karelian landscape but different social layers in them. my argument is that historically the finnish nationalistic imagery about karelian landscape has varied according to its expected audiences among different sociocultural groups, leading to differences in its reception and interpretation. i shall start my presentation by describing the historical evolving of karelian landscape imagery and its social dynamics in finland, to continue with a discussion about its current state and sociocultural position. the book finland framstäldt i teckningar (1845– 1852) by the writer and historian zachris topelius was principally intended for a narrow cultural elite: the mostly swedish-speaking civil servants, clergy, great landowners and manufacturers, town merchants etc. forming the national ruling class 28 fennia 182: 1 (2004)maunu häyrynen and intelligentsia at the time. practically every prominent estate or manufacture building was portrayed, as well as every important township or settlement. in addition, natural sights were presented as ‘common’ property to be symbolically partaken by every patriotic finn. even some ‘ordinary’ landscapes were picked up in order to show how common people lived in the different parts of the grand duchy, showing it as carefully composed sunday-clad staffage figures amidst geographically representative scenery. in the book karelia was represented by viipuri (accompanied by the castle and the monrepos park in separate entries) and the imatrankoski rapids (together with the entire vuoksi river). other notable sites were, judging by the length of their descriptions, kiviniemi in sakkola (mostly because of the cataclysmic fall of vuoksi in 1818) and the monastery of valamo. other listed sites were the quarries of pyterlahti and ruskeala, the iron works at puhos, the estates of suurlahti and pukinniemi, the town of käkisalmi, the vicarage of jaakkimanvaara, the parishes of kaukola and kurkijoki, the pärnä bridge over vuoksi and the finnish-russian border by the small river rajajoki. thematically one may group these images followingly: depositories of national wealth (towns, quarries, manors, iron works); historic monuments; rural beauty spots; and as unique cases, the sublime monument of nature and the border – the ultimate token of a nation state. in the texts there are relatively few and mild explicit expressions of national ideology, made understandable by the strictness of russian censorship in the revolutionary mid-19th century. among the historical anecdotes and didactic accounts of geographical and economic facts, topelius (1852) tells about monrepos in his usual saccharine style: it is an honour for monrepos not to be an exception, but a truthful picture of the nature of its country; one must pay homage to the founders for the fact that nowhere in finland, so abundant with originally beautiful sites, has the caring hand of art so gently but skilfully known to respect the grace of nature and brought it forth in the right manner. (citations translated by the author.) references to the ‘otherness’ of karelia, such as the orthodox religion, are likewise sparse and matter-of-fact. as for the karelians, in some pictures may be seen traditionally clad figures with the kaftans and brimmed hats typical for the rural inhabitants of the karelian isthmus, but regional peculiarities are not elaborated. with few exceptions, only historical characters or proprietors are referred to by names, the rest being simply ‘peasants’. from topelius’s later productions we get a very different picture, as he then is very consciously creating a national narrative, largely building on regional characteristics and reaching the entire population via the recently introduced elementary school system. in his school reader boken om vårt land (1871), still well known from numerous reprints in finland, he uses a fairy-tale to describe the country as a conglomerate of the different regions. karelia is given the following characterisation: dear sir, do you wish to own the country of the rising sun? would you like to row on the shores of two seas, the gulf of finland and ladoga? if you want to possess hills, lakes, rapids, mills by the hundreds or a noble stream such as vuoksi; if you want to ride fast horses; if you want to listen to old poems; if you want to burn swidden in vast wildernesses or to saw boards in dark pinewoods, then i advise you to pick karelia, because it may be compared with no other country. here karelia is personified as a merchant advertising its regional brands in the marketplace. one hardly needs to recall david harvey’s description of the time-space compression that reduces the localities into images competing for a place in the sun (harvey 1990). further on in the same book, the lowering of vuoksi and lake ladoga are chosen to represent the region. topelius points out the perceived ”weirdness” of the monastery of valamo in the finnish context, but carefully counterbalances it with the holy character of the site. (elsewhere also the two quarries are described.) karelians are now depicted as nothing less than the sunny side of the finnish national character: a karelian is slender, he has brown curly hair and lively blue eyes. compared with the people of häme [the other finnish ”primary tribe”] he is more open, friendly, mobile and active but also more garrulous, boasting, curious and irritable. travel and commerce are his favourite works; he travels long distances in his own country and brings his goods to russia. he is sensitive, easily saddened and easily happy; loves play and beautiful songs, composed by his own poets. therefore have the most beautiful songs been found from his country, kept in his memory from his ancestors. in another passage karelians come even closer to a patronising image of ”primitive people” in 19th-century texts: fennia 182: 1 (2004) 29a periphery lost: the representation of karelia in finnish… karelian is as it were the light side of the finnish people: open, permitting, volatile and frivolous, easily led and easily misled, gullible as a child, however not without finnish stubbornness, but docile and talented, needing only good education to place him among the first of his people. topelius’s stereotype of the lively karelian has defied time and lives on in popular thought and media. the primary school reader, intended to form a body of shared knowledge across the population, gives a simple image of the area, anchored by a couple of geographical references and inhabited by the happy-go-lucky karelians. a more nuanced image arises from the texts of the national romanticism around the turn of the century, such as o. relander’s karjalan kuvia (1893), i. k. inha’s kalevalan laulumailta (1911), kalevalan kansaa katsomassa by louis sparre (1930) and other picturesque travel accounts. together with the artistic exploration of the area, these showed the keen interest the finnish cultural elite had developed in the area. for them karelia – mostly referring to ladogan karelia – was above all a pastoral ”kalevala country”, and traits of primeval finnishness were searched from the people as well as from the landscape. when these failed to fulfil the expectations – people being influenced by russian culture, orthodoxy, and western modernity, landscape by being roadless, poor, godforsaken and mosquito-ridden – the result was ambiguity (cf. sihvo 1973; paasi 1986; heikkinen 1989; tarkka 1989). let us first quote louis sparre about the karelian enthusiasm of the 1890s, where karelia appeared as an idealised liminal zone beyond the sphere of culture: after the dinner the two girls, one of them a perfect beauty, row us back across a small lake. longingly we depart from them, and soon we hear their fresh and youthful voices as they sing a shepherd song on the lake behind the ridge. on our way home the hostess of tarassia sits at the oars and sings a poem with kalevala measure. laying on the bottom of the boat, eyes half closed, one hears the rhythm of the poem as if in a dream, the oars rowing to it, and one is transferred by the imagination to the times centuries ago, to the world of kalevala, gently rocked by the aallottaret, vellamo and other beautiful water goddesses. (sparre 1930) this euphoria is contrasted by i. k. inha’s account of the famous tolvajärvi in border karelia: how empty is the landscape here, how sad its ruggedness, how melancholic the splashing of the waves on these rocky shores, even the pine trunks seemed to suffer the poverty of the land. (inha 1925) inha had used similar choice of words to express the sadness of the landscape of lapland, regretting the absence of culture that otherwise was used to glorify the periphery landscapes. the desolateness of tolvajärvi did not prevent its becoming a popular sight in landscape imagery between the two world wars. the heroic pioneers were followed by the patriotic middle class, who wanted to experience in person the terrain sanctified by art and literature. it seems that the connections between national romanticism and early tourism were almost immediate in karelia (waenerberg 2000, 112), accelerated by the quick reproduction of artistic imagery by means of photographic publications that popularised the landscapes, and facilitated by regular waterway and rail connections by the end of the 19th century. in the early guidebooks particular attention was given to the surroundings of sortavala, often compared with alpine scenery, and to the exotic valamo, not forgetting the cheerful and hospitable kalevala people. apart from tradition, the violent history of the area was presented as an attraction by itself, manifested in castles, fortifications and the ‘mediaeval’ viipuri. the variegated dachas near st. petersburg were marked as another curiosity. although differences in the living standard on either side of the border were routinely explained by russian domination, no anti-russian feeling was evident. apart from national sentiments, the nature was seen to offer recreational opportunities for sport fishing, etc. here karelia would appear as a middle-class landscape of consumption (cf. urry 1990). the class distinctions inherent in landscape tourism at e.g. koli and punkaharju were noted among others by pentti haanpää as late as in 1928 (cit. paasilinna 1990, 296, 301). the results of tourism in the sortavala archipelago are already dismissed with contempt by inha in 1909 (reprinted in 1925): it was travelled through and through, all lookout sites found, all curious earth forms, rarest plants and their habitats; the tourists could move around there as if ‘by notes’, knowing that they would see everything worthwhile by following the instructions. three different kinds of karelian ‘landscapes’ seem to emerge prior to the finnish independence: the high-minded, artistically inclined and 30 fennia 182: 1 (2004)maunu häyrynen ideologically saturated ‘high-brow’ image, the culturally competent but consumption-oriented ‘middle-brow’ image and the rather basic ‘lowbrow’ image deriving from the elementary school. one may pose a further question about the possibility of conflict between dominant national culture and local or regional culture. there is however little evidence of latter in terms of landscape imagery, apart from the study of orthodox symbolic landscapes by petri raivo (1996). in it he shows how the pressure by the dominant culture towards the orthodox increased after the independence, creating confusion among the orthodox who above all saw themselves as loyal finnish citizens. after the independence the tone of travel accounts changes. karelia, especially the isthmus, is now explicitly rendered in terms of finnish-soviet confrontation (see e.g. peltoniemi 1938). russians are discussed in an openly hostile fashion, ridiculing the pre-independence st. petersburg elite in terijoki and the russian immigrants and peasants as its pitiful remainder (karimo 1929, cit. paasilinna 1990, 328): we remember the bygone time, when the so-called cream of st. petersburg lay, danced, flirted, drank and smelled in terijoki. there were then the longbearded ivan ivanoviches with their sons and annushka panfilovnas with their daughters. the beach of terijoki was at the daytime like a well-stocked butcher shop. another change in the attitude to karelian landscape was the sudden visibility of the border pointed out by anssi paasi (1996): having ceased to be a mere formality, it now had become a boundary between two rival power blocks, constituting for the finnish nationalists what they saw as an eternal frontline between east and west. karelianism re-emerged as a militant agenda to free the neighbouring fenno-ugrian peoples from the red russian yoke, rather than a cultural movement. apart from being perceived as a western bulwark, the border also started to be seen as a danger zone, radiating evil influence to the poor periphery on the finnish side (paasi 1996). the wartime advance to east karelia was a reenactment of the karelianist dream, as represented here by the writer olavi paavolainen interpreted enthusiastically the karelian landscape, referring to karelianism (1941): but how startling and pleasing to the artistic eye is the picturesque grey, hundred percent border karelian architecture! these houses are familiar from the childhood books that first told the fascinating history of the discovery of kalevala. they are also familiar from the heyday of finnish art, the end of the century ”karelianism’s” sketches… the lifestyle born within those walls has inspired eino leino and juhani aho; the wilderness poetry of the surrounding landscape has echoed in the early symphonies of sibelius! (cit. riikonen 1995) among the troops, the enthusiasm appears to have been remarkably cooler according to väinö linna’s tuntematon sotilas (the unknown soldier, first published 1954): looks as if there is little to steal around here, even the road turned worse. but the woods are similar... so, lads. we have marched through the karelian songlands, then. wasn’t it here they had those old fellows and women singing poems and all sorts of laments? i must have heard that from somewhere. the karelian landscape had not remained unchanged. in 1942, paavolainen already felt profoundly alienated from his childhood surroundings: at the ruins of kivennapa, decimated by the war, i was caught up by fond memories; but the two wars having rolled over the isthmus had made the landscape as if leprous. its familiar and beloved features had not yet turned totally shapeless, but it already belonged to an isolated atmosphere alien to me. one did not wish to touch it anymore. (cit. riikonen 1995, 134) karelia appeared as lost even before its loss. after the war and the cession of karelia, a new situation arose. the allegedly organic nation state had shrunk and its self-evident borders had been moved. two results followed: an absolute absence of any reference to the ceded area in post-war national imagery and the occurrence of a particular nostalgic imagery primarily intended for the karelians, showing the landscape frozen into its exact pre-war state (see kyytinen & marttila 1940; paavolainen 1941, 1955). concluding remarks in looking at the role of karelia in finnish national landscape imagery it appears that the notions of karelia as a natural national periphery, largely based on karelianist art and texts, do not tell the complete story. the specific role as a national periphery and a liminal zone between culture and nature, exemplified by natural sights, is evident fennia 182: 1 (2004) 31a periphery lost: the representation of karelia in finnish… especially during the second period. they however coexist with other kinds of representations linking with other national discourses. it is as if regional imagery would replicate the structure of national landscape imagery in miniature, similarly claiming representativity and multicontextual truthlikeness. this becomes evident when looking at publications devoted to karelian landscape, which in most cases are not limited to karelianist imagery but also present parallel themes such as history, wood industry, army etc. yet the emphasis is clearly put on natural landscapes and folk culture contrasting to the core areas. this position is underlined by the implications of physical distance and movement between the centre and the periphery as well as in the periphery. karelia is gazed upon and visited from the centre. karelia’s virtual disappearance from the national territory immediately after the war concretely shows how flexible a representational system national landscape imagery is when readjusting itself to the new historical situation. the gaze of the centre has avoided the trauma of the lost national space by redirecting its attention to yet another periphery, returning to the remaining parts of karelia only after their sites and images have been rearranged or reconstructed. in the meanwhile, the lost area has lived on in a ghost imagery of memory, frozen to its pre-war state. after the dissolution of the soviet union in 1991, it has become violently challenged by the squalid images of the present-day ceded karelia. as for national landscape imagery, the heights of koli became a national park in 1991 after a public campaign and, together with the imatra rapids, designated national landscapes by the ministry of the environment in 1993. karelian landscape appears to live on, at least by state intervention, but now as an historic landscape nostalgically referring to the time of nation-building rather than a liminal zone outside history. references bowden mj (1992). the invention of american tradition. journal of historical geography 18: 1, 3– 26. cosgrove d (1989). geography is everywhere: culture and symbolism in human landscapes. in gregory d & r walford (eds). horizons in human geography, 118–135. macmillan, london. cubitt g (1998). introduction. in cubitt g (ed). imagining nations, 1–21. manchester university press, manchester. dahlberg e (1667–1716). suecia antiqua et hodierna. 353 p. stockholm. daniels s (1993). fields of vision: landscape imagery and national identity in england and the united states. 255 p. polity press, cambridge. duncan j & d ley (1993). introduction: representing the place of culture. in duncan j & d ley (eds). place/culture/representation, 1–24. routledge, london. fyra natursköna vyer från finland (1890). s.l. haataja l & m lintunen (1990). karjala-nostalgia. 151 p. wsoy, porvoo. harle v & s moisio (2000). missä on suomi? kansallisen identiteettipolitiikan historia ja geopolitiikka. 304 p. vastapaino, tampere. harvey d (1990). the condition of postmodernity. an inquiry into the origins of cultural change. 378 p. blackwell, oxford. häyrynen m (2000). the kaleidoscopic view: the finnish national landscape imagery. national identities 2: 1, 5–20. häyrynen m (2002). landscape imagery defining the national space. in pitkäranta i & e rahikainen (eds). the finnish landscape: perspectives on landscape research. national library gallery publications 1, 42–49. heikkinen k (1989). karjalaisuus ja etninen itsetajunta, salmin siirtokarjalaisia koskeva tutkimus. joensuun yliopiston humanistisia julkaisuja 9. 402 p. inha ik (1898). picturesque finland. 190 p. w. hagelstam & u. wasastjerna, helsinki. inha ik (1911). kalevalan laulumailta. 96 p. kansanvalistusseura, helsinki. inha ik (1925). suomen maisemia. 2nd ed. 498 p. wsoy, porvoo. kaufmann e (1998). ”naturalizing the nation”: the rise of naturalistic nationalism in the united states and canada. comparative studies in society and history 40: 4, 666–695. kirkinen h (1998). keitä karjalaiset ovat? in nevalainen p & h sihvo (eds). karjala: historia, kansa, kulttuuri, 38–54. sks, helsinki. konttinen r (2001). sammon takojat. nuoren suomen taiteilijat ja suomalaisuuden kuvat. 334 p. otava, helsinki. kyytinen p & v marttila (1940). muistojen karjalaa. 79 p. otava, helsinki. linna v (1954). tuntematon sotilas. 476 p. otava, helsinki. miller a (1992). everywhere and nowhere: the making of the national landscape. american literary theory 4: 2, 207–229. mitchell wjt (1994). introduction. in mitchell wjt (ed). landscape and power. university of chicago press, chicago. moscovici s (1984). the phenomenon of social representations. in farr rm & s moscovici (eds). social representations, 3–70. cambridge university press, cambridge. 32 fennia 182: 1 (2004)maunu häyrynen paasi a (1986). neljä maakuntaa. maantieteellinen tutkimus aluetietoisuuden kehittymisestä (summary: four provinces in finland. a geographical study of the development of regional consciousness). university of joensuu, publications in social sciences 8. 345 p. paasi a (1996). territories, boundaries and consciousness. the changing geographies of the finnish-russian border. 353 p. wiley, chichester. paasilinna e (ed) (1990). matkoja vanhassa suomessa. 464 p. otava, helsinki. paavolainen o (ed) (1941). karjala, muistojen maa. 270 p. wsoy, porvoo. paavolainen o (ed) (1955). rakas entinen karjala. wsoy, porvoo. palin t (1999). kuvissa tuotettu maisema ja kansa. in lehtonen t (ed). suomi, outo pohjoinen maa? näkökulmia euroopan äären historiaan ja kulttuuriin, 208–235. ps-kustannus, jyväskylä. peltoniemi u (1938). itärajan kuvia. 32 p. wsoy, porvoo. petrisalo k (2001). menneisyys matkakohteena. kulttuuriantropologinen ja historiatieteellinen tutkimus perinnekulttuurien hyödyntämisestä matkailuteollisuudessa. sks:n toimituksia 802. 168 p. raivo p (1996). maiseman kulttuurinen transformaatio. ortodoksinen kirkko suomalaisessa kulttuurimaisemassa (transformation of religious landscapes. the finnish orthodox church). nordia geographical publications 25: 1. 370 p. raivo p (1998). karjalan kasvot: näkökulmia karjalan maisemaan. in nevalainen p & h sihvo (eds). karjala: historia, kansa, kulttuuri, 11–27. sks, helsinki. relander o (1893). karjalan kuvia. 61 p. weilin & göös, helsinki. riikonen hk (1995). sota ja maisema. tutkimus olavi paavolaisen 1940-luvun tuotannosta. 248 p. sks, helsinki. sarajas-korte s (1989). maalaustaide 1880-luvulla – ulkoilmarealismi. in sarajas-korte s et al. (eds). ars suomen taide 4, 200–254. shields r (1991). places on the margin. 334 p. routledge, london. sihvo h (1973). karjalan kuva. karelianismin taustaa ja vaiheita autonomian aikana. 470 p. sks, helsinki. sparre l (1930). kalevalan kansaa katsomassa. muistiinpanoja kauko-karjalan retkeltä v. 1892. 154 p. wsoy, porvoo. tarasti e (1990). johdatusta semiotiikkaan. esseitä taiteen ja kulttuurin merkkijärjestelmistä. 317 p. gaudeamus, helsinki. tarkka l (1989). karjalan kuvaus kansallisena retoriikkana. in knuuttila s & p laaksonen (eds). runon ja rajan teillä. kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 68, 217–257. topelius z (1845–1852). finland framstäldt i teckningar. 124 p. friis, helsingfors. topelius z (1871). boken om vårt land. 432 p. edlund, helsingfors. urry j (1990). the tourist gaze. leisure and travel in contemporary societies. 176 p. sage, london. valkonen m (1995). kultakausi. 309 p. wsoy, porvoo. varpio y (1997). matkalla moderniin suomeen. 1800-luvun suomalainen matkakirjallisuus. 289 p. sks, helsinki. waenerberg a (2000). miksi taiteilijat tulivat kolille. in lovén l & h rainio (eds). kolin perintö, kaskisavusta kansallismaisemaan, 104–113. metsäntutkimuslaitos & geologian tutkimuskeskus, helsinki. untitled aids and africa – when will the epidemic level off markku löytönen löytönen, markku (2003). aids and africa – when will the epidemic level off. fennia 181: 1, pp. 1–11. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. presidential address at the annual general assembly of the geographical society of finland, 2002. markku löytönen, department of geography, p.o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: markku.loytonen@helsinki.fi. ms received 15 november 2002. introduction the principle of population dynamics declares that it is environmental factors such as changes in physical conditions, food supplies and the occurrence of natural enemies that determine the population size of any species in existence in a given area at a given point in time. these factors vary all the time, as the organic and inorganic environment is in a constant state of change. every change that takes place in a species’ living conditions is reflected in its numbers. examined over a period of time, this takes the form of a constant search for a state of equilibrium, which in an undisturbed situation would result in a fluctuation around a certain average figure. in the course of its endeavours to create a favourable environment for itself, human society has systematically attempted to prevent the spread of epidemics (mcmichael 1993). even so, the causes of such disasters were still unknown in the early nineteenth century, and it may be said that they were thus the last factors effectively limiting human population growth. many of the advanced cultures of prehistoric times were obliged to carry on a bitter struggle for existence against the repeated threats posed by epidemics. later the serious outbreaks of the plague in europe and elsewhere can be identified in the population curves in form of dips in total population figures (cliff & haggett 1988; epstein 1995; löytönen 1995). at the micro level, an imbalance comparable to the laws of population dynamics prevails between humankind and the microorganisms that bring about diseases. viruses, bacteria and other microbes are constantly altering their genetic make-up in search of new properties that will give them a hold over the human body, which has often become able to resist their attacks by virtue of its immune defence mechanism. one should also bear in mind that the human body for healthy life needs some microbes. and in some cases, the infection by a potentially harmful microbe does not always lead to a clinical disease. tuberculosis bacillus – estimated to be carried by one third of the global human population – develops into a clinical disease in only 10% of the infected population during their lifetime provided no cofactors are present. the discovery in the second half of nineteenth century of the microorganisms responsible for the diseases was a scientific breakthrough that revolutionised our concepts of many human illnesses. it meant that the cause of infectious diseases could be pinpointed and progress could be made in their treatment, in the sense that for the first time in the history of humankind it was known what agent was responsible for the plague, for example. since that time, improved hygiene, antibiotics, inoculations and many other basic techniques of modern medicine have proved effective in combating infections, perhaps the best example of which lies in the total elimination of smallpox as a result of the international vaccination campaign (cliff et al. 1981; cliff et al. 1986; cliff & haggett 1989). the advances in the medical sciences together with increasing economic resources and better 2 fennia 181: 1 (2003)markku löytönen education resulted in improved quality of life and increased life expectancy – but mostly for people living in the industrial world. healthy life and long life expectancy are so dependent on economic and intellectual resources and the organising of the society – health care provision, access to education, and other similar elements – that many countries in the developing world have little to offer to their citizens. in this respect, africa is probably the clearest example of how complex health-related problems can threaten the existence of entire nations (barnett & blaikie 1992; bond et al. 1997). the diffusion of the infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) throughout the world constitutes a formidable example of a process of what has been said above. in just over two decades, it has managed to spread everywhere reminding people in both rich and poor countries that the balance between harmful microbes and the humankind during the second half of the twentieth century was nothing but one transient moment in the continuous search for a balance. while the growth curves of aids cases in most industrial countries are currently beginning to level off (fig. 1), the curves in many developing countries such as india are growing rapidly with no signs of levelling off (chin & mann 1988; smallman-raynor et al. 1992; pan american... 1997; the status... 2000; european centre... 2002; aids epidemic… 2003). recognising that predominant modes of transmission vary by world’s regions and that there is a relationship between health and development, an understanding of the diffusion process, of the future growth, and of the predominant variables involved in it at a particular place are essential for disease intervention and for planning of the provision of health care. such demands are accomplished by modelling and forecasting the spread of any epidemic. in this paper, i will first briefly discuss the hiv pandemic and different approaches to geographical modelling and forecasting. at the end of my paper, i will focus on aids in africa and what will be the final level of prevalence once the growth curves begin to level off. african origin – but human sponsored as far as is known at present, the hi virus originates from east africa where it, or some early prototype of it, first infected humans from three species of monkey found in the area. it was very probably endemic throughout the nineteenth century in the territory inhabited by these monkeys. no epidemic ensued, however, because african society was for a long time sufficiently static, with people’s movements restricted to their own village or tribal community (shannon & pyle 1989; shannon et al. 1991; smallman-raynor & cliff 1990, 1991; gao et al. 1999). the situation altered after the second world war, as the structural changes in the society and the associated urbanisation, trade and industrialisation led to greater mobility in africa. it was at this stage that the hi virus began to spread to wider areas and that the disease assumed the proportions of an epidemic in africa (barnett & blaikie 1992). it is possible that individual travellers visiting the continent in the 1950s may have become infected, but these cases will not have attracted any particular attention from the health authorities, and any deaths that occurred must have simply remained aetiologically unresolved. thus, the hiv pandemic started and developed unnoticed. fig. 1. hiv carriers, aids cases and aids deaths in finland since the beginning of the epidemic. after the initial phase, the number of new hiv carriers oscillated around a broad mean value until the late 1990s. then, largely due to the rapid increase of iv drug users, the number of new hiv carriers jumped to a new, much higher level. this is a typical example of the interaction between the population size and the factors controlling it in a given area. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 3aids and africa – when will the epidemic level off the situation finally came to light in the early 1980s, when the number of cases escalated and the disease came to the attention of the health authorities in the usa (gould 1993; gould & wallace 1994). from the modelling point of view, it is rather essential to ask how it is possible that the hi virus – slow to migrate and easy to avoid with little knowledge of the few of modes transmission – managed to spread beyond africa to cause a pandemic extending over the entire inhabited world. the answer to this question is geographically a very interesting one – and challenging. the biological regularities that maintain a state of equilibrium between a human being and the microbes that threaten him or her have developed to their present state over a period of 100–200 million years, and may be said to have safeguarded the existence and growth of the human populations fairly well under the conditions in which the human species evolved. populations were small, and the density of settlement was not very great, in addition to which the world was for a long time inhabited by isolated human groups with no contact with one another (e.g., gould 1989). during the modern times, however, conditions for the occurrence and spread of epidemics have altered drastically (flahault & valleron 1992; haggett 1994. there has been what can only be described as a population explosion; people have moved to live in agglomerations of tens of millions residents, mobility has increased, and the speed of travel has become such that any point on the globe can be reached in a few hours. it is highly probable that the hiv pandemic would never have come to anything if human society itself had not altered its environment and ways of living as we have seen over the past few centuries. one pandemic – many epidemics from the geographical point of view, the hiv epidemics in the various continents – and in various countries as well – appear to be developing in different ways (arbona & löytönen 1997; lamptey 2002). during the first decade of the hiv epidemic, it was common to characterise the pandemic in terms of four global patterns of hiv transmission. the rapid changes in the epidemiological patterns e.g., in india and vietnam have shown that the earlier classification of four patterns no longer holds true. the more recent view of the pandemic emphasises the multiple patterns of hiv epidemic even in neighbouring countries (stoneburner et al. 1994, 1996; mertens & lowbeer 1996).. because hiv infection in many countries has occurred disproportionately in certain high-risk groups (european centre... 2002; the status... 2000) dramatic differences can be found even within a country or region. significant differences in prevalence can also be observed between rural and urban areas (lam & liu 1994). in addition to these factors, social strata within a population have associated epidemiological characteristics that may facilitate or hinder transmission of hiv. perhaps the most striking difference in the number of aids cases is between the industrial countries and the developing world (fig. 2). at the beginning of the new millennium, the unaids and who estimated that 42 million adults and children are living either with hiv or aids. more than 20 million have already died of the disease. the vast majority – ca. 95% – of the people living with hiv or aids live in the developing countries. this proportion is expected to continue to increase as poverty, poor health systems, and limited resources for prevention and care promote the spread of the virus in these countries (the status... 2000). in north america, western europe, australia, and new zealand the principal modes of transmission are through homosexual and bisexual intercourse, intercourse with a drug user, and intravenous (iv) drug use. heterosexual transmission makes up a small yet growing percentage of the cases. adult males constitute most of the cases while the proportion of women with hiv infection is growing all the time. consequently there is no marked paediatric epidemic. the countries within this pattern have advanced medical facilities to diagnose hiv infection and adequate economic resources to provide palliative care for those infected. control of infection through blood transfusion has been effective since the mid 1980s. in asia, rates of infection are generally at a clearly lower level. they reach two percent or more of the adult population in only three countries: thailand, cambodia and myanmar (the status... 2000). in many of the area’s densely populated countries the current prevalence is less than 1%. there are, however, evidence that our understanding of the hiv epidemic based on currently 4 fennia 181: 1 (2003)markku löytönen available prevalence statistics e.g., in india have little to do with the true situation, and that both incidence and prevalence are much higher than anticipated at least in india’s biggest cities. two of the region’s countries – india and china – together have a population that is over one third of the world’s population and thus the potential for an accelerating epidemic is almost immeasurable (ramasundaran 2002). in eastern europe, russia, and other parts of the former soviet union, the hiv epidemics continue to be mainly concentrated in iv drug users. most hiv infected people are found in the largest cities although cases are increasingly found in all administrative regions in ukraine, russia, belarus, and moldova (löytönen 1995, 1998; the status... 2000). the overall incidence figures have been smaller than in western europe. however, quite recently there have been marked outbreaks in kaliningrad and moscow among several thousand iv drug users suggesting that there exists quite a significant potential for the worsening of the epidemic. the relatively scarce financial resources and the poorly organised health care systems in these countries cannot provide for the majority of the population the quality health care available in the industrial countries. in the middle east and north africa, hiv infection was relatively uncommon in the 1980’s. currently, the number of people infected is increasing but due to lack of reliable data on prevalence very little in known of the epidemics. it can be anticipated that transmission has taken place through sexual relations (homosexual and heterosexual) or intravenous drug use, but the true transmission patterns cannot be defined with confidence. diagnostic capabilities are often but not always poor in this area (the status... 2000). in latin america and the caribbean, the epidemic is currently evolving from predominantly homosexual and bisexual to heterosexual transmission with a rather diverse picture of the epidemic. rates are generally highest in central america and the caribbean where heterosexual spread of hiv is the predominant mode of transmission. in haiti the current rate exceeds 5% – the only country with such a high rate outside africa – and in the bahamas the rate exceeds 4%. in south american countries, the epidemics are generally concentrated in sub-populations at highest risk, such as men having sex with men and iv drug users. the overall trends in the region seem to be similar to patterns of the epidemic in north america with somewhat more variation. for example, the increasing number of heterosexual transmission cases is reflected in a marked paediatric epidemic in puerto rico (löytönen & arbona 1996). as the hiv infection continues to penetrate the poor and less advantaged people of the region, the future epidemic here might soon resemble the situation in sub-saharan africa as regards the predominant modes of transmission – but not necessarily as regards the rates of infected people (pan american... 1997). on the other hand, countries such as brazil, argentina, and fig. 2. global estimate of people living with hiv/aids, cumulative number of hiv/aids deaths and cumulative number of children orphaned by aids, end of 1999. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 5aids and africa – when will the epidemic level off mexico have increased their efforts in providing proper care for those infected and in intervening the epidemic by education. as a consequence, statistics are showing decrease in aids mortality in the aforementioned countries. looking at the world map of the hiv pandemic, one can without doubt state that the situation is clearly the worst of all regions and continents in sub-saharan africa. the unaids and who have estimated that there are currently 29.4 million adolescent and adult people infected with hiv. the geographical distribution of the cases is rather uneven throughout the continent (figs. 3 and 4). while the first major epidemics occurred in central and eastern african countries, the epidemic is now the worst in the southern part of the continent. during the 1990s in south africa, infection rates among the adult population increased from less than 1% to ca. 20% – an increase in its own class. looking at the infection rates on the map, other countries that have equally high rates are namibia, lesotho, swaziland, zambia, and zimbabwe. the situation is almost as bad in ethiopia, uganda, kenya, tanzania, mozambique, central african republic, togo, and fig. 3. estimated number of people living with hiv/aids in africa, end of 1999. fig. 4. estimated hiv/aids prevalence in africa, end of 1999. ivory coast. with two exceptions, the prevalence rates are on a clearly lower level in west africa. in sub-saharan africa the hi virus is spread predominantly by heterosexual intercourse. the male to female ratio is about 1:1. the high incidence of infection among women of reproductive age has created a paediatric epidemic with far-reaching consequences (the status... 2000; matshalaga & powell 2002; morgan et al. 2002). forecasting – how and what epidemiological forecasting and spatial analysis of the diffusion of contagious diseases are essential methods for monitoring and controlling of epidemics. it involves both geographical and mathematical modelling. in addition to different geographic and demographic variables, the data needed in such modelling deals with disease-specific factors providing fundamental information for estimating the necessary parameters. in most diseases these parameters are well known, or can be reliably estimated from existing data or can be obtained by analysing a representative sample of 6 fennia 181: 1 (2003)markku löytönen case histories. based on such data, modelling of the growth curves and the spatial diffusion processes can be done with a high degree of accuracy. when attempting to model the hiv epidemic, however, the situation is somewhat more complicated. while clinical, virological, and immunological research has progressed rapidly, epidemiological research on hiv has been riddled with data-related problems. estimates of the growth of the hiv epidemic have proved to be far less successful than one might wish. the conclusion is practically the same whether one looks at forecasts provided by applying explanatory (multivariate) models or autoregressive (univariate) models. some attempts have been made to estimate the growth curve of aids cases or hiv carriers in a given population by using simulation techniques. although these studies have provided valuable information about the epidemiological parameters needed in the modelling, they have mostly focused on limited geographical areas or strictly defined subgroups of the population and thus not succeeded in providing very reliable forecasts of the future course (geographically or demographically) of the epidemic at large. the problems in forecasting the hiv epidemic are mostly due to the virological features of the virus, and its connection to various forms of human sexual behaviour i.e., to some of the most hidden sides of human life. many of the fundamental disease-specific parameters are still only partly known and understood. these include, among others, the mean and group-specific incubation time, the rate of risk associated with the different ways of transmission, the number of partners and the frequency of sexual intercourse and its variation in the heterosexual population, and the exact role of transmission cofactors such as genital ulcers. the data problem is also due to the fact that in most countries there are no systematically compiled data available about the true hiv prevalence, although the need for such data is generally recognised. as a result, most attempts at forecasting the hiv epidemic are based on data covering only symptomatic aids patients. from the forecasting point of view, the primary focus should always be on analysing the spread of the virus, not merely the statistics of the clinical development of the infection – which again varies much depending on several factors. these include, among others, the availability of clinical treatment, the socio-economic status of the patients, and the quality of the health care system in general. attempts to use the traditional epidemiological models has led us to a dilemma in which the accuracy of the data does not meet the requirements set by the models. this is not to say that work done in this field is not valuable. quite the contrary. every bit of new information brings us closer to the date when we will able to produce reliable forecasts using even the most demanding and complex methods (for a review, please see anderson 1989; bremerman & anderson 1990; löytönen 1991, 1994a, 1994b; thomas 1992, 1996, 1999; low-beer & stoneburner 1997; auvert et al. 2000). when will the growth level off in africa as regards the hiv epidemics in africa, the lack of reliable data is a key problem when planning of modelling and forecasting the detailed geographical diffusion or distribution of hiv/aids cases. the recent estimates on country-level produced by unaids and who (the status and... 2000; aids epidemic... 2003) are without doubt the best and most reliable ones currently available and in my view they should be used as the base for making plans of how to most efficiently intervene the epidemics and of how to best organise the scarce resources available for health care. the numbers are based on several small sets of data obtained from many independent studies and surveys throughout the continent and analysed by experts (the delphi method) to deliver as reliable forecasts on country level as possible given the conditions. geographically speaking the picture is very broad and provides little if any advice of what are the spatial diffusion patterns within these countries not to mention even more detailed spatial units. should such modelling and forecasting be possible, the results would provide one step further planning of how to intervene the epidemics. on the other hand, one could also ask whether it is reasonable even to attempt such modelling and forecasting with the lack of sufficiently good data. even the simplest autoregressive forecasting methods would be based on estimated parameters if applied in sub-saharan african countries. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 7aids and africa – when will the epidemic level off there is, however, one important question that should be addressed from the forecasting point of view. let us return to the opening point of my paper regarding the basic population dynamics. in the industrial countries, there are already clear signs that the growth curves of the hiv epidemics are beginning to level off. in other words, given the socio-economic and other environmental conditions in most industrial countries of the world, a balance between the hiv epidemics and the population seems to be emerging. the key question, thus, is what will be the prevalence rate level once the balance has been achieved in those conditions prevailing in each region or country. if – as it seems – the prevalence rate levels in the industrial countries remain more or less below 1%, the epidemics can be seen to be under control to a certain extent at population level. subgroups of known high risk behaviour such as iv drug users and men who have sex with men without protection will of course demonstrate much higher prevalence rates. but in most countries these subgroups are marginal and will have lesser impact on how the epidemics of the overall population will develop. in sub-saharan africa, we are already hitting prevalence rate levels that are horribly high compared with virtually any other part of the world. there are, furthermore, no significant signs of the growth levelling off in most of the countries. the few exceptions are uganda that has managed to bring down its estimated prevalence rate from 14% to 8% with a strong prevention campaign, and zambia where there are some encouraging signs of alike development. if the growth in subsaharan africa continues with current speed – and this is most likely based on what we know of the predominant modes of transmission, how limited resources are in africa, and by looking at the most recent estimates of the current trends of the epidemics – then the levelling off will happen at a level leaving little if any hope to many of the countries in sub-saharan africa. undoubtedly, there will be great geographical variation in africa from country to country, within countries, and between different groups of people according to their socio-economic, ethnic and behavioural status. but even if some countries and regions succeed in intervening in the epidemic and forcing the growth to level off at lower level, continentwide the level will be much higher than elsewhere (ojo & delaney 1997; gilks et al. 1997; tarantola & schwartlander 1997; bouckenooghe & shandera 1999) (fig. 5). is there hope for sub-saharan africa in industrial countries, the use of highly active anti-retroviral therapies since 1995 have reduced aids mortality significantly (fig. 6). such treatment of hiv infected individuals is very expensive, especially since monitoring and therapy is required throughout the germination period which with currently available drugs may be tens of years. the rich industrial countries may well be able to cope with the costs of the hiv epidemic fig. 5. hiv prevalence by age, south african antenatal clinics, 1993–1999. fig. 6. aids cases and aids deaths in the who european region since the beginning of the epidemic. the use of highly active anti-retroviral therapies since 1995 have significantly reduced aids mortality. 8 fennia 181: 1 (2003)markku löytönen especially now when the growth curves are levelling off at a manageable level. but the situation in africa is far more difficult. the treatment of hiv infected people is already exhausting the limited resources available for health care. little is left for any attempts at controlling of the epidemic by means of educating people. it is already clear that aids mortality in africa will soon rise to measures never seen before (fig. 7). this will not only leave millions of orphans, but strike hard and deep in the societies through loss of work force in their best age (figs. 8 and 9). the gap is enormous between the poor and rich countries of their chances of overcoming the economic and social problems raised by the hiv pandemic (de kock et al. 2002; rankin 2002). the worldwide campaign to eliminate smallpox provides an interesting point of comparison for the hiv pandemic. the campaign was successful because the basic costs were low, the project gained broad international acceptance and the vaccination procedure did not require any advanced professional skills. such a campaign could in principle be mounted against the hi virus once a vaccine has been developed. despite significant efforts such vaccine is still far away in the future. and current information nevertheless suggests that any vaccine that might become available is likely to be an expensive preparation even by the standards of the industrial countries and it may require advanced medical techniques and highly skilled health care staff for its administration. fig. 7. estimated number of aids deaths in africa in 1999. fig. 9. projected population structure with and without the aids epidemic, botswana, 2020. fig. 8. cumulative number of children orphaned by aids, end of 1999. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 9aids and africa – when will the epidemic level off would it be perceivable to think that the industrial countries financed a campaign of the same magnitude as the smallpox campaign? this is hardly the future unless the costs of treatment per individual hiv carrier come down to a manageable level. with currently available highly complex and expensive treatment such a campaign is not a likely option. could the worsening hiv epidemic in africa and perhaps in other developing areas – especially in the densely populated countries such as india – pose a serious threat to the populations in the industrial countries and consequently force the rich countries to launch a campaign? even a cautious evaluation of the situation suggests that it is quite possible that the growing population potential of the developing countries will eventually result in increasing migratory flows exerting pressure on the borders of the industrial countries – indeed there are already many signs of the attractiveness of these countries in the eyes of people living in the developing countries. as long as the costs of the campaign exceed the expected benefits, political will needed for such a campaign is hardly achievable. returning to the simple principle of population dynamics, the hiv epidemics in africa and elsewhere will eventually level off and begin to oscillate around a mean value depending of the socio-economic and other environmental factors. we already now that this mean will be significantly higher in sub-saharan african countries than e.g., in industrial countries. unless significant scientific breakthrough in developing new cheaper drugs or a working easily administered and cheap vaccination materialises or a global political will materialises quickly, no real options for intervening the hiv epidemics in africa can be seen in the near future. this means that most african countries will suffer from colossal human, economic and intellectual losses in the near future (fig. 10). what will happen after that in sub-saharan african countries is beyond all reasonable forecasts and will remain to be seen by the next generation – with or without hope. references aids epidemic update 2002 (2003). <http://www. unaids.org/worldaidsday/2002/press/epiupdate. html> 18.2.2003. anderson rm (1989). mathematical and statistical studies of the epidemiology of hiv. aids 3, 333– 346. arbona si & m löytönen (1997). aids epidemic in puerto rico – ideas for geography teaching. fennia 175, 125–138. auvert b, g buonamico, e lagarde & b william (2000). sexual behavior, heterosexual transmission, and the spread of hiv in sub-saharan africa: a simulation. computers and biomedical research 33, 84–96. barnett t & p blaikie (1992). aids in africa: its present and future impact. 193 p. john wiley & sons, chichester. bond gc, j kreniske, i susser & j vincent (1997). aids in africa and the caribbean. 234 p. westview press, boulder co. bouckenooghe a & w shandera (1999). hiv trends in african blood donors. journal of infection 39, 122–128. bremermann hj & rw anderson (1990). mathematical models of hiv infection. i. threshold conditions for transmission and host survival. journal of acquired immune deficiency syndrome 3, 1129–1134. chin j & jm mann (1988). the global patterns of aids and hiv infection. aids 2, 247–252. cliff ad & p haggett (1988). atlas of disease distributions: analytic approaches to epidemiological data. 300 p. blackwell, oxford. cliff ad & p haggett (1989). spatial aspects of epidemic control. progress in human geography 13, 315–347. fig. 10. projected loss in life expectancy in selected countries due to hiv/aids in children born in 2000. acknowledgements i kindly thank ms. carolyn allsopp of the world health organisation for revising the language. 10 fennia 181: 1 (2003)markku löytönen cliff ad, p haggett & jk ord (1986). spatial aspects of influenza epidemics. 280 p. pion, london. cliff ad, p haggett, jk ord & gr versey (1981). spatial diffusion. an historical geography of epidemics in an island community. 238 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. de kock km, d mbori-ngacha & e marum (2002). shadow on the continent: public health and hiv/ aids in africa in the 21st century. the lancet 360, 67–72. epstein pr (1995). emerging diseases and ecosystem instability: new threats to public health. american journal of public health 85, 168–172. european centre for the epidemiological monitoring of aids (2002). hiv/aids surveillance in europe. report no. 61. saint-maurice. flahault a & a-j valleron (1992). a method for assessing the global spread of hiv-1 infection based on air travel. mathematical population studies 3, 161–171. gao f, e bailes, dl robertson, y chen, cm rodenburg, sf michael, lb cummins, lo arthur, m peeters, gm shaw, pm sharp & bh hahn (1999). origin of hiv-1 in the chimpanzee pan troglodytes troglodytes. nature 397, 385–386. gilks cf, e katabira & km de kock (1997). the challenge of providing effective care for hiv/aids in africa. aids 11 (suppl b), s99-s106. gould p (1989). geographic dimensions of the aids epidemic. the professional geographer 41, 71–78. gould p (1993). the slow plague: a geography of the aids pandemic. 228 p. blackwell, oxford. gould p & r wallace (1994). spatial structures and scientific paradoxes in the aids pandemic. geografiska annaler 76b, 105–116. haggett p (1994). geographical aspects of the emergence of infectious diseases. geografiska annaler 76b, 91–104. lam ns & kb liu (1994). spread of aids in rural america, 1982–1990. journal of acquired immune deficiency syndrome 7, 485–490. lamptey pr (2002). reducing heterosexual transmission of hiv in poor countries. british medical journal 324, 207–211 low-beer d & rl stoneburner (1997). an ageand sex-structured hiv epidemiological model: features and applications. bulletin of the world health organization 75, 213–221. löytönen m & si arbona (1996). forecasting the aids epidemic in puerto rico. social science and medicine 42, 997–1010. löytönen m (1991). spatial diffusion of human immunodeficiency virus type i in finland, 1982– 1997. annals of the association of american geographers 80, 127–151. löytönen m (1994a). growth models and the hiv epidemic in finland. social science and medicine 38, 179–185. löytönen m (1994b). the box-jenkins forecast of hiv-seropositive population in finland, 1991– 1993. geografiska annaler 73b, 121–131. löytönen m (1995). the effects of the hiv epidemic on the population of europe. in hall r & p white (eds). europe’s population – towards the next century, 83–98. ucl press. london. löytönen m (1998). the aids epidemic in russia. in unwin t (ed). a european geography, 306– 309. harlow, longman. matshalaga nr & g powell (2002).mass rophandhood in the era of hiv/aids. british medical journal 324, 185–186. mcmichael aj (1993). planetary overload, global environmental change and the health of the human species. 352 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. mertens te & d low-beer (1996). hiv and aids: where is the epidemic going? bulletin of the world health organization 74, 121–129. morgan d, c mahe, b mayanja & jag whitworth (2002). progression to symptomatic disease in people infected with hiv-1 in rural uganda: prospective cohort study. british medical journal 324, 193–196. ojo k & m delaney (1997). economic and demographic consequences of aids in namibia: rapid assessment of the costs. international journal of health planning and management 12, 315326. pan american health organization (1997). health conditions in the caribbean. paho scientific publication no. 561, washington. ramasundaram s (2002). can india avoid being devastated by aids? british medical journal 324, 182–183. rankin w (2002). aids and global justice. british medical journal 324, 181–182. shannon gw & gf pyle (1989). the origin and diffusion of aids: a view from medical geography. annals of the association of american geographers 79, 1–24. shannon gw, gf pyle & rl bashbur (1991). the geography of aids: origins and course of an epidemic. guilford, new york ny. smallman-raynor mr & ad cliff (1990). acquired immune deficiency syndrome (aids): literature, geographical origins and global patterns. progress in human geography 14, 157–213. smallman-raynor mr & ad cliff (1991). civil war and the spread of aids in central africa. epidemiology and infection 107, 69–80. smallman-raynor mr, ad cliff & p haggett (1992). london international atlas of aids. 430 p. blackwell, oxford. stoneburner rl, d low-beer, gs tembo, te mertens & g asiimwe-okiror (1996). human immunodeficiency virus infection in east africa deduced from surveillance data. american journal of epidemiology 144, 682–695. stoneburner rl, p sato, a burton & te mertens (1994). the global hiv pandemic. acta pediatrica 400 (suppl.), s1–s4. tarantola d & b schwartlander (1997). hiv/aids fennia 181: 1 (2003) 11aids and africa – when will the epidemic level off epidemics in sub-saharan africa: dynamism, diversity and discrete declines. aids 11 (suppl b), s5–s21. the status and trends of the hiv/aids epidemics in the world. xiii international aids conference, durban, south africa, 5–7 july 2000 (2000). < h t t p : / / w w w. u n a i d s . o r g / wh a t s n e w / o t h e r s / map_provisional.doc> 17.7.2000. thomas rw (1992). space–time interactions in multiregion disease modelling. environment and planning a 24, 341–360. thomas rw (1996). alternative population dynamics in selected hiv/aids modeling systems: some cross-national comparisons. geographical analysis 28, 108–125. thomas rw (1999). stability and mixing conditions for hiv/aids models with regional compartments. journal of geographical systems 1, 1–19. untitled the finnish disease heritage reijo norio and markku löytönen norio, reijo & markku löytönen (2002). the finnish disease heritage. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 177–182. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the finnish disease heritage (fdh) is the concept for nearly forty rare hereditary diseases which are overrepresented in finland compared to the size of the population. they are rare diseases in finland as well, because their incidence varies from 1: 10,000 to 1: 100,000. thus, in a population of about 5 million inhabitants and 60,000 newborns per year, the annual number of new patients in one disease is perhaps ten, perhaps not even one. excluded from the fdh are rare hereditary diseases that are as frequent in finland as elsewhere and those common diseases in which genes act as predisposing factors in addition to environmental factors. this article provides an overview of the fdh and examines the connections between hereditary diseases and population history as well as geographic circumstances in finland. reijo norio, the family federation of finland, p. o. box 849, fin-00101 helsinki, finland. markku löytönen, department of geography, p. o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: markku.loytonen@helsinki.fi characteristics of the finnish disease heritage all branches of medicine are represented among the disorders of the finnish disease heritage (fdh). most diseases are severe, many even lethal. some of them can be treated successfully if correctly diagnosed. they may appear as mental retardation, visual handicap, hearing disorders, congenital anomalies, skeletal or metabolic disturbances, neurological or renal diseases, or as many other kinds of symptoms and signs. on the other hand, some diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or phenylketonuria, that can be called common among rare disorders elsewhere, are extremely rare or absent in finland. the finns cannot therefore be regarded as abnormally sick, but the assortment of their diseases is exceptional. most of the finnish diseases show autosomal recessive inheritance. in other words, the affected individual must possess two disease genes, one from both unaffected parents who possess only one gene for the disease. the close relatives of the patients are usually healthy, because both parents in several couples of the kindred very rarely have the same rare gene. on the other hand, all individuals in all populations carry some rare single recessive genes. fortunately, they seldom are the same genes as their spouses have. however, this situation may be more probable than in general if the parents are consanguineous, i.e., they share genes derived from a common ancestor. the vast majority of all recessive disease genes in the population belong to healthy carriers of a single gene, the heterozygotes. the proportion of disease genes transmitted forward through the homozygous patients and their near relatives is minimal. that is why all preventive measures directed towards such individuals would be doomed to fail. the background of the finnish disease heritage two presuppositions are needed for the fact that one population has its own assortment of rare recessive diseases and an overrepresentation of those diseases. firstly, the genes for those disorders must exist in this population. yet bare genes cannot produce diseases. affected individuals will not be born until two similar genes meet each other, first in the parents of one family and then in their child. secondly, an overrepresentation of 178 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)reijo norio and markku löytönen rare recessive diseases in a population presupposes the existence of some factor that easily brings two carriers of the same rare gene into the same union. in finland, the above-defined two presuppositions materialize as the national and regional isolation of the finnish population. the national isolation is due to finland’s geopolitical status. finland is a small country near the northern edge of the inhabited world and between two different linguistic and cultural entities, sweden and russia. the small group of ancestors of the contemporary finns has not brought to finland all possible disease genes but a random assortment of genes. this assortment has remained quite unchanged at least during the historical era. great migrations of peoples have not taken place in the north of europe, contrary to the situation in central or southern europe. the primary conditions for the regional isolation have been finland’s large area and sparse population as well as the character of the terrain: vast forests and almost 190,000 lakes (raatikainen & kuusisto 1990). the most important factor is a strong wave of internal migration in the 1500s, supported and even pushed by the swedish crown. at that time, many individual families from the southern savo region in the southeast moved to central, eastern and northern parts of today’s finland. this changed the way of living in these areas from hunting and fishing to stationary agricultural settlement. the settlers brought their genes from the area of early settlement (fig. 1) to their new domiciles. because of the limited need for continuous migrations some of these genes have remained clustered through generations. it is therefore not unusual in this area of late settlement that both parents, related to each other beyond six, ten, or twenty generations, happen to have the same disease gene and produce affected children (norio 1981, 2000, 2002). genetic phenomena behind the fdh the genetic phenomena that have influenced the development of the finnish disease heritage are the founder effect, genetic drift and bottleneck phenomenon. the founder effect means that when a new population originates from few individuals only, this new population gets no more than a small random sample from the genes of the primary population. the genes of different subpopulations originating from the same primary population thus differ greatly from each other. the genetic drift influences the genetic pools of small subpopulations by chance. the children and grandchildren of a settler do not inherit from him or her the disease gene or its normal counterpart in similar proportions. one disease gene may have better luck in nature’s gamble than the chance one in two and may be transmitted to disproportionally many descendants of an individual settler. another gene, correspondingly, may disappear more or less totally from the new population. this is how chance affects the genetic pool of a new population. fig. 1. the boundary of the stationary settlement in the beginning of the 1500s divides today’s finland into areas of early and late settlement (according to jutikkala 1933). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 179the finnish disease heritage the bottleneck phenomenon is a special case of the founder effect and the genetic drift. a large population may diminish into a small fraction due to a war or an epidemic. in the remaining part of the population that has passed through this bottleneck, founder effect and genetic drift may act as in a freshly-formed small subpopulation. the bottlenecks may have been regional but sometimes more or less ‘national’, at least in the past times. where have the disease genes come from? ancient immigrants have probably brought some of them. perhaps a greater part has originated from new gene mutations in individuals within the finnish population. both alternatives have been greatly dependent on chance, so they do not reveal much about the roots of the finns nor their genetic relationships to other populations (norio 2000, 2002). the geography of finnish diseases according to both the outlined pattern and empirical experience, the finnish diseases are not evenly distributed in finland. investigations into these phenomena have created a geography of finnish disorders. the birthplaces of the patients do not reveal any core areas of the disease genes because of the lively internal migration from the countryside to the cities after world war ii. instead, the birthplaces of the grandparents indicate the origins of the disease genes. the vast majority of the grandparents have been born in the countryside and nearly 80 percent of them in the described area of late settlement. in half of the families, both parents have been born in the same locality. in one-fourth of the families, all four grandparents have been born in the same or neighbouring community (norio 2000, 2002). the disease maps in this article show some distributions of the disease genes (fig. 2). over one half of the maps of 30 investigated recessive diseases (norio 2000, 2002) show a pattern inverse to the population density in finland, whereas the disease genes are few in the densely and early populated southern and southwestern parts of the country. the majority of these disease genes are thus clustered in the area of late settlement since the 1500s. in this area, each map shows a distribution of its own. the distribution patterns of some diseases differ from those described above. in six diseases, the genes are distributed almost everywhere in the country, although local clusters may appear in the area of late settlement. the genes of those diseases must be distinctly older than 500 years. two diseases have maps congruent with finland’s population density. strictly speaking, these diseases should perhaps not be called ‘finnish’, because later on they have been found to be relatively frequent also in some other populations. these genes may descend from ‘indo-european’ immigrants beyond several thousands of years. two diseases, in turn, appear only in a very small area restricted to one historical province. these two are probably caused by a very recent gene mutation in an isolated subpopulation. investigations into particular diseases how have the finnish diseases become known, how have they been studied, and what are the benefits drawn from such investigations? the story of the first detected disease, the congenital nephrosis, may serve as an example (jalanko et al. 2002). in the 1950s, at the university of helsinki children’s hospital, several newborn babies were admitted with an often familial and always fatal renal disease manifesting with edema and proteinuria (hallman et al. 1956). the information on this condition provided in international textbooks was nonexistent. as data of more than 30 patients were sampled, extensive studies on the disease’s clinical features and its finnishness were started. through finnish church records, genealogical and genetic studies revealed recessive transmission of the disease, whereas several extrinsic factors could be excluded (norio 1966). while the conventional treatment of nephrosis remained unsuccessful, renal transplantation – as soon as sufficient preoperative techniques were learnt – saved normal life and development for the patients (holmberg et al. 1995). in the dna-era of the 1990s, the gene of congenital nephrosis was first mapped to chromosome 19 (q13.1) and, subsequently, its structure was characterized (kestilä 1995; lenkkeri 1998). this led to the detection of the protein nephrin, which is encoded by the gene in question and is defective in the patients’ kidneys. nephrin, in turn, is probably a central component in the general filtration properties of the kidney and its faults may explain even many other mechanisms of renal diseases (patrakka 2001). the detection and studies of ‘new’ finnish diseases usually start from observations of alert cli180 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)reijo norio and markku löytönen fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 181the finnish disease heritage nicians. the nationwide sampling of patients and centralization of the studies into few hands has warranted an effective accumulation of knowledge for the physicians and the best possible aid for the patients and their families in the entire country. these investigations also help physicians elsewhere may they confront patients suffering from a ‘finnish’ disease. studying the pathogenesis of rare diseases also helps in understanding the normal mechanisms of the human body that are disturbed in genetic diseases. due to excellent study conditions and some internationally acknowledged research groups, the dna structure of the majority of the finnish disease genes is already known. this has given quick and reliable possibilities for diagnosing these disorders in children and adults as well as in fetuses. population screening of the carriers, i.e., healthy possessors of one disease gene, is technically possible as well, but the practical and ethical problems of these procedures have not been solved yet. the maps of diseases benefit not only genetic and epidemiological research but practicing physicians as well. the maps guide them to be aware of rare disorders that appear in their working areas – no physician can recognize forty rare disorders by heart. only some 60 newborns each year are, or will be, suffering from one of finnish disorders. thus the fdh is just one unique contribution in the whole of the medical genetic task, from the perspective of both the patients and the physicians. in this context it should not be forgotten that the bulk of medical genetics in finland is of international character, i.e., the same conditions are found all over the world. future developments in average one ‘new’ finnish disease has been revealed annually up to these days. now the frequency of new detections seems to be decreasing gradually. all finnish diseases are not yet known, however. the internal migration into cities reduces the size of the isolates although this movement does not intermingle the isolates. as an increasing number of couples will be formed in cities, this should diminish the probability that two similar rare genes meet. due to this migratory shuffling of the rare genes, the incidence of finnish diseases should decrease, although the amount of disease genes remains the same. such a decrease has not yet been detected, not least because of the observation time has been too short so far. what is the effect of today’s foreign immigrants? different migrant groups bring to finland their own rare genes. also some cases of rare recessive diseases not seen heretofore will be found if the immigrants intermarry frequently. theoretically, the newcomers ‘dilute’ the finnish gene pool. the practical diminishing effect of this on the incidence of ‘finnish’ diseases may be imaginary, however, and at least very slow, if the number of foreign immigrants does not increase unexpectedly indeed. acknowledgements we are indebted to doctors christer holmberg, kari launiala, seppo similä, olli laakso, riitta salonen, and aune hirvasniemi for the data needed for figure 2, and the finnish cultural foundation for a grant to the first author of this article. fig. 2. four maps of finnish autosomal recessive diseases depicted by the birthplaces of the patients’ grandparents (one patient/family). (a) congenital chloride diarrhea: a congenital watery diarrhea due to an intestinal resorption defect of chloride. the disease is lethal if not treated properly, but allows normal life when diagnosed and treated with peroral mineral supplementation. the grandparents are concentrated in the area of late settlement populated in the 1500s and thereafter. (b) congenital nephrosis of finnish type: a congenital renal disorder causing severe failure to thrive due to protein leakage in the urine. this otherwise lethal disorder can be successfully treated by renal transplantation. the grandparents spread over most parts of finland forming clusters in the area of late settlement. (c) meckel syndrome: a perinatally lethal multiple malformation syndrome with severe brain anomaly, extra fingers and toes, and large cystic kidneys and liver. the western predomination of grandparents is congruent with finland’s population density. (d) northern epilepsy: an epileptic disorder beginning in childhood with later appearing psychic deterioration. the grandparents originate from a restricted area of one historical province. 182 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)reijo norio and markku löytönen references hallman n, l hjelt & ek ahvenainen (1956). nephrotic syndrome in newborn and young infants. annales paediatriae fenniae 2, 227–241. holmberg c, m antikainen, k rönnholm, m alahouhala & h jalanko (1995). management of the congenital nephrotic syndrome of the finnish type. pediatric nephrology 9, 87–93. jalanko h, h kääriäinen & r norio (2002). nephrotic disorders. in rimoin dl, jm connor, re pyeritz & br korf (eds). emery and rimoin’s principles and practice of medical genetics, 1708– 1719. 4th ed. churchill livingstone, london. jutikkala e (1933). asutuksen leviäminen suomessa 1600-luvun alkuun mennessä. in suolahti g (ed). suomen kulttuurihistoria i, 51–103. gummerus, jyväskylä & helsinki. kestilä m (1995). molecular genetics of congenital nephrotic syndrome of the finnish type (cnf). thesis, university of oulu. acta universitatis ouluensis a 269. lenkkeri u (1998). characterization of the congenital nephrotic syndrome locus; identification of the nphs1 gene and mutations. thesis, university of oulu. acta universitatis ouluensis d 491. norio r (1966). heredity in the congenital nephrotic syndrome; a genetic study of 57 finnish families with a review of reported cases. annales paediatriae fenniae, supplement 27. norio r (1981). diseases of finland and scandinavia. in rothschild h (ed). biocultural aspects of disease, 359–415. academic press, new york. norio r (2000). suomi-neidon geenit. otava, helsinki. norio r (2002). the finnish disease heritage i–iii. human genetics [submitted]. patrakka j (2001). nephrin. role in human glomerulogenesis and nephrotic disorders. <http:// ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/laa/kliin/vk/patrakka/> raatikainen e & e kuusisto (1990). suomen järvien lukumäärä ja pinta-ala (abstract: the number and surface area of the lakes in finland). terra 102, 97–110. 21258_02_lind the politico-religious landscape of medieval karelia john h. lind lind, john h. (2004). the politico-religious landscape of medieval karelia. fennia 182: 1, pp. 3–11. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in historical sources the karelians appear in the 12th century although archaeological excavations suggest that the amalgamation of groups of baltic finns, centered on the karelian isthmus, that came together from east and west respectively to form them originated in the late iron age and early viking age. accordingly they were from the start recipients of impulses from both east and west, a phenomenon that continued throughout the medieval period and ended with their physical division between what became a politico-religious division of europe between east and west, lasting until today. the article concentrates on the role played by the landscape, situated on an important passageway of international trade and close to two growing neighbouring powers, sweden and novgorod, that profited from this trade route but at the same time became ever more opposed to one another as result of the crusading movement of the latin church. john h. lind, center of medieval studies, university of southern denmark, campusvej 55, dk-5230 odense m, denmark. e-mail: john_lind@hist.sdu.dk. introduction the role a landscape has played in the politicoreligious context of a region of course varies according to which period of its history we are looking at. as far as karelia in the middle ages is concerned, we can say that it is determined by these factors at least; the physical features of the landscape, the climate, the pattern of settlement in the region, and the role the region has played in a larger historical context. as regards the physical features of the landscape, the position of the karelian centre on an isthmus, the karelian isthmus, between lake ladoga with its many river connections to russia and beyond to the caspian and black sea regions, is undoubtedly of the utmost importance, linking as it does this vast territory with northern and western europe via the gulf of finland. in the late iron age and well into the middle ages, this isthmus might even have been seen as an island with the neva as its southern coast and the two outlets of the river vuoksi into lake ladoga and the gulf of finland, respectively, as the northern coast. another important feature was that the river vuoksi, before it divided itself into the two outlets, connected this karelian ‘island’ to the large inland lake district of lake saimaa with its easy passages to other more distant lake and river systems. the climate played its role in defining two quite distinct seasons in which these features could be utilised by human settlers; by boat in the summer or sledge in the winter, thus making it possible to cover considerable distances in each season. furthermore, the climate ensured that it was worthwhile taking advantage of these possibilities. some of the finest fur pelts could be obtained in the winter season; berries, wax, and other forest products could be gathered in the summer season; while hunting and fishing could be practised in both seasons. consequently, these were good conditions for the local population to secure its livelihood. at the same time such a location between lake ladoga and the gulf of finland placed the karelian isthmus in a key position in the transit area of one of the major trade routes of medieval europe. indeed this position seems to have been one of the factors that determined the pattern of settlement in the region and the composition its population. 4 fennia 182: 1 (2004)john h. lind the archaeological finds from the karelian isthmus clearly reflect the connections the local population had forged with international trade already from the so-called merovingian period. they include, as noted by pirjo uino, a great number of “multinational prestige objects”, which she quite rightly sees as evidence of the prominent role karelia had played in the merovingian period a role it continued to play throughout the middle ages (uino 1997, 202). the origin of the karelians the identity of the karelians, that is, the ethnic elements, which came together to form a distinct karelian culture, has always been eagerly discussed. to clarify this process many kinds of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic and historical evidence have been advanced. here is not the place to enter this discussion. the present view, however, seems to be that what we can call proto-karelians – perhaps of similar origin to the vepsians – must have inhabited the ladogian shores of the isthmus since the early iron age. the rise of international trade attracted a colonising movement from the west of tavastian (häme) elements. this resulted in an amalgamated population during the merovingian and viking ages that eventually produced a distinct culture, which clearly distinguishes itself in 12th century archaeological finds and which we label karelian (this discussion is summarised in uino 1997). it was approximately at the same time that the term ‘karelians’ first occurs in russian and norse sources. settlement in medieval karelia the pattern of settlement in karelia through out the middle ages is insufficiently known about. the information that archaeological excavations have provided only concerns the early period. still, excavations have so far not been systematically carried out over the whole region thus the picture they present is rather patchy. more informative are the cadastral books (pistsovye knigi) from the period after novgorod’s fall in 1478. the placenames they list are, however, difficult to pinpoint in the landscape as identified settlements. the attempt made by j.v. ronimus in 1906, made on the basis of poorly edited texts, does cast light on the problem (ronimus 1906a, 1906b), but his results can in many respects be disputed. in this context it is a major problem that the edition from 1851 and 1852 (vremennik… 1851, 1852) on which ronimus based his work is in badly need of a contemporary and professional replacement that utilise the possibilities of internal dating of various parts, separating the basic text from later interpolations. the impression we get from these sources is, however, one of fairly evenly dispersed settlements, with a concentration close to – although not exactly along – the shores of lake ladoga and, not least, along river vuoksi. here we also find major settlements like käkisalmi (korela or korel’skii gorodok). they give us a clue both to the location of settlements and regions of political importance, – not least the distribution of fortifications like käkisalmi itself, tiurinlinna on the river vuoksi and the fortifications in kurkijoki and sortavala (see locations on map in uino 1997, 77). the emergence of states in the region in the early stages of the viking age, when the trade route between east and west became of paramount importance in the region, the location of the isthmus in relation to the trade route makes it cogent to suggest that the isthmus and its population could have become the core of an embryonic state formation. however, this did not happen. instead it was other centres along the route, birka in the west and staraia ladoga in the east that took on this function. one reason for this could have been that the population on the karelian isthmus was more centred on the vuoksi link between lake ladoga and the gulf of finland than the neva link: the former we can safely assume was favoured by international trade, since it shortened the route. therefore the political centres from, which the regional states arose were not karelian but swedish in the west and the more multiethnic – but eventually slavonic – russian in the east. since the karelian isthmus retained its importance for the international trade route, – not least because it was possible to control the route from the isthmus – it is not surprising that both emerging and expanding states, sweden and russia, should wish to control the isthmus. fennia 182: 1 (2004) 5the politico-religious landscape of medieval karelia karelia and novgorod the relative proximity to what became the novgorodian city-state meant that karelia became loosely linked to novgorod during a process, for which we have hardly any sources. when karelia does appear in russian sources, from 1143 onwards, this link seems already to have been established. presumably, however, the karelians were a relatively independent agent. this is indicated both by russian sources and by the parallel information in norse sources. in these there is no indication of this link to novgorod. the reason for this may, of course, be that norse sources first of all reflect mutual contacts in regions to the north, far from novgorod. later, in the 14th century, we do have evidence that karelians acted as agents for novgorod also in these northern parts. this early link to novgorod did not substantially influence karelian culture. especially there is little evidence that novgorod (itself christianised from constantinople in the late 10th or early 11th century) attempted or even wanted to attempt to introduce the christian faith to the karelians. the text in the lavrentievskaia chronicle under the year 1227, which does claim that almost all karelians were baptised that year by prince iaroslav, is the result of an interpolation in the original chronicle text, one clearly disproved by later evidence of widespread paganism among the karelians (lind 1994b, 35–46). this does not, of course, mean that christianity and christian culture were unknown to the karelians, but to the extent to which there were christians among the karelians seems to have been the result of individual choice rather than a russian mission. karelia between sweden and novgorod the relationship between karelia and novgorod hardly changed up to the latter part of the 13th century. at that time, however, things began to happen as result of the expansion of the other emerging state, sweden. by the 12th century sweden had become a fairly firmly-knit state. perhaps after having vacillated between east and west – an early orthodox stage in the christening of the swedes was argued by anders sjöberg (1985) –, finally the swedes had fully adopted christianity from rome. soon after, the swedes started to expand eastwards along the ancient trade route. this expansion coincided with the rise of the crusading movement in the baltic region from the mid12th century, which was soon to create a hitherto unknown confessional animosity between scandinavians and russians (lind 2001b). through a succession of campaigns, which took the form of crusades, the southern part of presentday finland was gradually incorporated into sweden. thereby finland also became firmly linked to the western catholic church. apart from a military presence, swedish church organisation in finland may have even, in fact, preceded secular organisation. by the end of the 13th century this expansion had reached the western part of karelia. from 1292 to 1301 the swedes attempted to establish themselves in strongholds on the karelian isthmus. the location of these strongholds clearly indicates at what the swedes were aiming: the control of novgorod’s western trade. thus in 1293 the swedes founded (or conquered) viborg (now vyborg), situated on an island in the western outlet of river vuoksi; in 1294/95 they conquered the fortress, käkisalmi, on an island in the eastern outlet of the river vuoksi, which fortress they were, however, unable to hold more than a year. finally, in 1300, helped by a master of fortifications from rome, they built a fortress in the estuary of the neva with the proud name, landskrone (crown of the land). this, however, they also lost the following year (pipping 1921, 75–104; novgorodskaia… 1950, 91–92, 327–331). had the swedes been able to hold these two outlets they would have been able to win control of karelia in its entirety. after the swedish setbacks in käkisalmi and landskrone, hostility between swedes and novgorodians continued; neither side was, however, able to win a decisive victory. in the course of these wars a growing karelian dissatisfaction with the link to novgorod became apparent. in a document preserved from approximately the same time, a prince whom novgorod had installed in karelia was accused of gross mistreatment of the region (valk 1949). in 1314 the karelians in käkisalmi rose against the novgorodians, inviting the swedes in (novgorodskaia… 1950, 94). 6 fennia 182: 1 (2004)john h. lind the swedish–novgorodian peace treaty of 1323 having more or less exhausted themselves, sweden and novgorod decided put an end to the wars, and concluded the peace treaty of orekhovets (in finnish pähkinäsaari, in swedish nöteborg) in 1323. orekhovets was a fortress the novgorodians had built in 1322 on an island at the inlet leading from lake ladoga to the neva. it was clearly a counter-move to the swedish attempt at establishing themselves in landskrone. thus from orekhovets the novgorodians were able to control navigation at this end of the neva just as much as the swedes would have been able at the other, had they been able to hold landskrone. in the treaty novgorod ceded three pogosts or gislalaghs to sweden – the first indication of an administrative division in karelia, which we find fully developed in the cadastral books at the end of the 15th century. as result of the treaty the two parties established a well-defined territorial border, which cut through the karelian isthmus. thereby it also cut off one part the karelian community from the other, leaving the main inhabited centres with käkisalmi on the russian side. this division took little account of karelian interests, although access to specific novgorod karelian hunting grounds immediately to the west of the new border were safeguarded in the treaty, which also had clauses which, it seems, secured access to their hunting areas to the north of the karelian isthmus (gallén & lind 1991; lind 2000a). this was, however, counterbalanced by a desire on novgorod’s part to impose now stronger control over karelia in order to quell further swedish expansion into karelia. therefore the novgorodians installed the first of a sequence of lithuanian service princes in karelia in the early 1330s, who were enjoined to live off contributions from the karelian population. this novgorodian initiative, however, soon sparked off a new karelian uprising in 1337. according to the novgorod chronicles, the karelians in korel’skii gorodok now slaughtered not only the novgorodian and staro-ladogian merchants in the town but also christians in general, so once more the karelians called the swedes to their aid. after almost two years of war, a preliminary peace was signed between the novgorodians and local swedish authorities on the strength of the 1323 treaty. interestingly enough, however, the novgorodians seem not to have been satisfied with this. therefore, according to the chronicle, the novgorodians explicitly wanted to bind the swedish king to a special agreement concerning the so-called kobylitskie karely. this is the first time this group of karelians appears in the sources. and from the fact that novgorodians demanded a special agreement concerning them, we may assume that they had in some way instigated the uprising. but who were they? the name, possibly derived from russian kobyla, has led to the theory that they were horsebreeders, a theory that is reflected in the finnish and swedish translations of kobylitskaia korela, tamma-karjala and sto-karelen. be that as it may, with regard to the place where these mystical karelians lived, the cadastral books of votskaia piatina from 1494 to 1505 give a clue by listing a number of locations close to the 1323 border at the sources of the two small border rivers, saijanjoki and okhta “on kobylitskie” (vremennik… 1851, 1852). from this we may assume that the kobylitskie karelians lived on both sides of the new border. therefore they were most affected by the establishment of a state border in their midst. whether they were distinguishable from the other karelians in other ways we cannot know. the result of the meeting between the novgorodian envoys and the swedish king was that a further clause concerning the karelians was added to the treaty, which bleakly stated: if our karelians escape to your side, then kill or hang them; if yours escape to us we will do likewise, then they shall not cause enmity between us. those, however, who have been baptised in our faith we shall not hand over, but there are only few of those left, since they are all dead due to the wrath of god. (novgorodskaia… 1950, 348–350) this addition to the treaty clearly shows the extent to which the karelian community had become squeezed as a result of the struggle for control between the swedes and novgorodians over the waterways through their territory. it also shows that they were considered, as it were, expendable. christianity among karelians the additional clause also clearly shows that the karelians on the russian side were on the whole not christians. concerning the swedish karelians of this we have no direct evidence, but when the fennia 182: 1 (2004) 7the politico-religious landscape of medieval karelia later saint birgitta ulfsdotter in the early 1340s urged king magnus eriksson (the same in whose name the 1323 and 1339 treaties had been concluded) to seek out and convert infidels in the east, if necessary by force, the swedish karelians are not mentioned as targets so presumably they were already considered catholic christians. urged on by birgitta, who in a number of revelations claimed to have received directions from the virgin mary for a crusade against the pagans in the east, king magnus in 1346 started planning the so-called fourth crusade. the directions birgitta communicated to the king included plans for setting up a bishopric in the region (pirinen 1987, 41; 1988, 46–53). although magnus, as birgitta had suggested, launched his crusade with an invitation to the russians to discuss their respective confessions, his actual – or at least most important – goal was the same as it had been for his predecessors: to gain control over the waterways between novgorod and the west. king magnus did send out armed detachments to convert ingrians to the south and the karelians around käkisalmi, nevertheless his main thrust was directed against orekhovets, which he was able to take and hold for about half a year before the novgorodians forced him out (see lind 1991, 2000b, 2001a). the beginning of an orthodox mission among the karelians this confessionally motivated campaign from the swedes does not seem to have incited the novgorodians into immediate action on account of the religious affinities of their karelians. rather these were left unattached as far as russian orthodoxy was concerned. this laissez-faire attitude, however, changed at the end of the 14th century, perhaps provoked by a surge in colonisation from the swedish side towards the east as well as northwards into hitherto uninhabited areas bordering on the lake ladoga region. here the novgorod karelians either still had their hunting grounds or where they had to pass through in order to reach them. this colonising movement might easily have put the loyalty of the novgorod karelians in doubt. the karelians who lived on either side of the border did of course talk the same language; they did share a common heritage; they did cooperate in the exploitation of the north. what essentially determined to which state they belonged was to whom they paid taxes. however, to the west the loyalty of the swedish karelians seems now to have been based on a shared catholic faith. a similar link did not bind the eastern karelians to novgorod. in case novgorod was unable through sheer power to keep its hold over its karelians, it would be only a small step for the karelians to swap allegiance from novgorod to sweden, transferring at the same time their landed possessions to sweden – especially if sweden was able to protect them against novgorodian retaliation. if such a change of allegiance, in view of the ongoing swedish colonisation of the north and northeast, also meant that it became easier for the karelians to continue their traditional exploitation of this region, it was even more tempting for them to step over on the swedish side. the danger of losing its northern territories and losing its karelians by leaving them religiously unattached to novgorod finally seems to have dawned upon the novgorodian authorities in the early years of the 15th century. with the discovery some years ago of the tale of the valamo monastery we have unexpectedly come into possession of a detailed account of novgorodian religious countermeasures to the swedish expansion (first published in okhotina 1993 [with english translation] and later in the fundamental study by natalia okhotina-lind in okhotina-lind 1996). sometime towards the end of the 14th century, possibly in 1389, a group of monks from novgorod settled on a small island, the holy island (sviatoi ostrov), in the valamo archipelago in the northern part of lake ladoga and founded the valamo monastery, dedicated to the saviour (sviatyi spas). they were led by one ephrem, later in 1407 founder of the perekomskii monastery to the south of novgorod and venerated as saint under the name ephrem perekomskii. novgorodian authorities do not seem to have been involved in this early monastic foundation. rather it was the result of some new spiritual hesychastic influences in novgorod from greece, urging monks to move into the wilderness away from the cities. approximately at the same time, in 1393, the same influences induced arsenii konevitskii, who had previously lived on mount athos a centre of hesychasm. he launched his monastic foundation, konevitsa monastery, dedicated to the holy trinity (troitskii), on another island in lake ladoga, konev (horse) island. in time this development coincided with the destruction 8 fennia 182: 1 (2004)john h. lind of 24 monasteries around novgorod in 1386 by the novgorodians themselves, who by this measure hoped to stop dmitrii donskoi from using the monasteries in a siege, when he approached the city with his army. consequently, there must have been an abundance of homeless monks in novgorod at the time (lind 1994c). the new monastery on valamo, however, met with hostility from the karelians living on the main island of the archipelago, who in the tale are depicted as savage pagans. therefore ephrem, sometime before 1407, decided to give up and leave the region. one of his companions, however, sergii valaamskii, chose to continue monastic life on valamo; he now turned to archbishop ioann iii of novgorod, asking his support in an attempt to enlighten “the demon-worshipping karelians”. the archbishop’s response was swift. he immediately engaged the civil authorities of novgorod, who turned over full authority on the valamo archipelago to sergii. the authorities supplied sergii with ample means for building a new monastery and also sending military forces that could secure the hand-over of authority on valamo to sergii. when it turned out that the karelians would not voluntarily agree to be expelled, they were overcome by the novgorod forces and driven out after many had been killed: “and there was a great fall among those vile sorcerers and they [the novgorod forces] defeated them and killed many by the hand of the almighty christ and god, and thus the envoys soon drove them out from the island”, as the english translation of the tale reads (okhotina 1993, 127). it is obvious that the transfer and renewal of the valamo monastery on novgorod’s part was now a state affair, and that this initiative from of the novgorodian civil and ecclesiastic authorities virtually amounted to a counter-crusade. the danger now felt in novgorod from western expansion found expression also in the bizarre russian apocryphal text, the testament of the swedish king magnus that was composed soon after 1400, probably in valamo monastery. this text was included in a large number of russian chronicles under the year 1352 (lind 2000b, 2001a). the landscape and the monastic foundations we have already seen how two monasteries around the year 1400 were founded on islands strategically linked to the karelian centre, yet still at a safe distance. they were followed by a third island-monastery almost a century later, the troitskii sennianskii on the island heinäsaari (or heinisenmaa), close to käkisalmi, but still at a distance of some thirty kilometres from the town (okhotina 1993, 129). this happened after the grand prince of moscow had subjugated novgorod, thus it was a muscovite and grand princely sponsored foundation. this location of the early monasteries could perhaps be seen as part of a deliberate strategy utilising features of the karelian landscape to bring orthodoxy close to the karelian centres without exposing it too much to karelian hostility. on the other hand, it must be kept in mind that locating monasteries in such isolated spots, away from inhabited centres, was a common feature of the hesychast movement of the monasticism of the time. a third consideration might, however, have played a part in siting at least the monasteries on the valamo and konevits islands, namely that these islands may have served as centres of karelian paganism. with regard to valamo, this is certainly indicated in the tale of the valamo monastery. while the very name of konevits island has been seen as representing a horse cult in connection with the renowned horse stone (kon’ kamen’) (bermash & ieromonakh arsenii 1993, 4). the fact is, however, that the stone seen from one side looks remarkably like the large head of a horse, which might easily be sufficient reason for the island’s name. christianity in karelia during the late middle ages no contemporary sources indicate to which extent the orthodox church succeeded in combining politico-religious propaganda with the holy war it had inaugurated with the second foundation of valamo monastery. both the pressure and threat from sweden, however, diminished during the 15th century, when sweden was weakened by internal conflicts in connection with its position in the kalmar union with denmark and norway. from the cadastral books, which novgorod’s new muscovite overlords had compiled at the end of the 15th century after ivan iii had finally subjugated novgorod in 1478 and now wished to weaken the old novgorod aristocracy by re-allocating their estates, we learn that the karelians fennia 182: 1 (2004) 9the politico-religious landscape of medieval karelia had by then at least formally been baptised, since all names of the inhabitants of the region are given in russian orthodox form. just the same, a generation later when the pressure from a rejuvenated sweden under gustav vasa (1523–1560) once more made itself felt, church authorities in novgorod again worried over the state of orthodoxy in karelia. the great archbishop of novgorod, makarii, from 1542 metropolitan of moscow, as well as his successor, feodosii, sent out priests to inspect the religious situation in the region in the 1530s and 1540s. as a result both found the situation gloomy from the church’s point of view, although in the meantime monasteries had been founded in both orekhovets and käkisalmi itself – they are recorded in the cadastral books from c. 1500. the karelians still used their pagan altars; they still had their pagan priests (arpas); they did not observe the christian fasts and feasts; and when their women gave birth to children, they first summoned pagan shamans who gave the newly born pagan names before they called upon the orthodox priests (kochkurkina et al. 1990, 60–72; note the misplacement of text on p. 65 line 6 and 66 line 31). according to the two archbishops, the remedy was to reactivate church authorities in the region. now they should seek out centres of paganism and stamp out pagan practices, where they occurred. they should increase the number of church services locally, while elevating their level especially on the great church feasts. particularly they should celebrate liturgies for the saints and great miracle workers, and in order to engage the karelian population, local saints should be created and promoted. while arsenii konevskii was venerated, probably prior to the church councils in 1547 and 1549, aleksandr svirskii was, it seems, canonised in 1547. and before 1552 not only the highest church authorities but even tsar ivan iv himself, later to be known as the terrible, engaged in having the relics of sergii valaamskii sought out and transferred to valamo. here they were translated together with the relics of his igumen-successor, german, thereby instituting a double cult that was to prove the most popular of all karelian cults. in connection with such investigations into karelian paganism, we also learn how features of the landscape and nature played a role in pagan cults among karelian and other finnic peoples along the western border: there people are said to have venerated “everything as god” forests, stones, rivers, swamps, springs, mountains, hills, the sun, the moon, the stars and lakes (kochkurkina et al. 1990, 64–65). thus the central church authorities moved the offensive against karelian paganism from the island monasteries, engaging it wherever it appeared, and mobilising local priesthood in the fight. in contrast, the old christian centres, the island monasteries, were turned into specifically karelian saintly places of worship: konevitsa focused on the veneration of saint arsenii and valamo on the double-saints sergiigerman valaamskie. karelian landscape as seen by medieval russians seen from russia karelia as such did not represent a specific type of landscape. on the other hand medieval russians did see karelia as part of a specific type of landscape different from the russian, a landscape we might label fennoscandian. but let me first quote the russian author of the tale of the valamo monastery, who shortly after 1558 wrote this account of the landscape in which valamo monastery was located. thus, here lived a chud’ [finnic] people, that sat from rus’ along the nemetski-swedish sea, starting from the livonian land and even to kargapol’, in the nemetski land to the polnaia and velikaia reka which they say is 60 versts [verst = 1.067 km] wide. it flows from the gulf of the kaiano sea [gulf of bothnia] to the swedish sea. this chud’ people lives on a multitude of sweet waters in enormous forests and has a multitude of fish and is rich with skin from beautiful animals, but it did not yet recognize its creator and lord... it is said in the tales of the old men that in the ancient time the holy sacred apostles were sent by jesus christ our god to preach among all people. of these one from the twelve, andrei, peter’s brother, was in our russian land and preached the divine words in the well-known great novgorod. and while sailing on the immense nevo lake [lake ladoga] he looked to the north on the karelian side and spoke like this: “as new canaanites, godless people of magi live there, but in the future two torches will shine among them”. this, they say, christ’s apostle spoke about the glorious and great monasteries, valamo and konevits. both these monasteries were erected on islands in that large lake nevo in the karelian land and greatly shone through virtues of fasting, according to the prophecy by the holy christ’s apostle andreas, as it is now known to everybody. now, this land god has enlightened through the holy baptism. 10 fennia 182: 1 (2004)john h. lind this greatest lake nevo is 300 verst long. in width this lake from the greatest river svir’ [syväri] to orekhovets from where the great river neva flows to the white sea, which is also called the swedish sea after the surrounding land, sweden. yes, as said, in width between the aforementioned rivers this lake is 100 versts. the creator’s mighty godly wisdom encircled the northern and deepest side of the lake with the highest stone cliffs like a wall for the waters to run down in a slow and solemn procession: all their decided quantity. the low southern shores of that lake are encircled by sand. such a great lake is filled by 140 rivers and thousands of springs. the great onega lake, which has a length of 300 versts and is replete with much water, falls through the great svir’ river into the great lake nevo. likewise il’men’s water flows through the volkhov into the same lake. from the nemets [i.e. swedish or finnish] sides a lot of water enters the same lake through uusjärvi from the north. being so big and deep the lake is like a sea; its water is sweet and healthy. in it lives an inexhaustible amount of different types of fish and also animals. in the northern end of the lake in the karelian land there is a large island, called valamo, about which we shall now speak. this island is located 30 versts from the northern coast, the distance from both the western and eastern coasts is 40 versts. this big island valamo is by the creator made very beautiful and high; by nature of stone with many forest and waters, creeks and bays are without number. the circumference of the island measures 30 versts. surrounding it are 70 small islands; like chickens around the hen are these small islands placed around the large island and of the same stone, some with forest, others bare. some are extremely small, others big. they are so close to each other that in one verst there are 20 and more of them, lying amazingly like bread. (okhotina 1993, 124–125) the author was obviously fascinated by the landscape he described. it is a type of landscape medieval russian authors even coined a name for, to which our author also refers in the beginning of his text, when describing how the gulf of bothnia, the kaiano sea, was linked to the baltic or swedish sea through a large river labelled polnaia. this is not a river that corresponds to our usual notion of a river, since it is presented as being no less than 60 kilometres wide. and the only geographical locality it can refer to is the finnish archipelago that at åland separates the gulf of bothnia from the baltic sea proper. sailing through such a landscape could give the impression of sailing through a river, always being close to the shores. this understanding of the concept polnaia river (polnaia reka) is confirmed, if we analyse all the contexts in which it appears in russian sources. in these it is never used about landscapes in russia itself. on the contrary, we only find it used in fennoscandian contexts: these include the valamo archipelago itself in the above-mentioned testament of the swedish king magnus; the island landscape at turku twice, first in the novgorod chronicles under the year 1318 and then again in a document from 1441; in russian chronicles it appears once more in connection with the russian raids into finland in 1495– 1496, where the polnaia rivers are used as a contraction of finnish river systems running to the gulf of botnia; from 1559 to 1585 a polnaia is mentioned three times at the arctic sea in the archipelagoes of the varangerfjord. finally it appears as a major border river, polna flu (polna reka), between russia and sweden in the map from 1542 by anton wied, which was based on information he received from the russian aristocrat, ivan liatskii, originating at a place near the white sea and flowing into the gulf of finland. of course such a border river never existed. on the other hand, to the north of the karelian isthmus the island landscape of lake saimaa, through which the border ran, was exactly such a landscape that a medieval russian might label polnaia river. considered in their own right each mention of the polnaia rivers is confusing because it is never possible to identify any one of them with a specific river. only when we view them together, taking into consideration the approximate region where they are located, can we see how this particular russian usage, possibly reflecting the semantic contents of the adjective polnaia (full, powerful, opulent), was formed to describe a type of landscape that was not found in russia but was typical of large parts of fennoscandia (e.g. the archipelago landscape), a landscape that during of the 19th-century romanticism came to be so closely linked to finnish national identity (lind 1994a, 155–170). it is interesting to note that russians became aware of this distinct feature of finnish landscape approximately 500 years before the finns themselves started to use it as a forceful symbol, as part of their national identity. references bermash a & ieromonakh arsenii (1993). shest’ stoletii rozhdestvo-bogorodichnogo konevskogo monastyria. konevskii monastyr. gallén j & j lind (1991). nöteborgsfreden och finfennia 182: 1 (2004) 11the politico-religious landscape of medieval karelia lands medeltida östgräns. skrifter utgivna av svenska litteratursällskapet i finland 427: 2. kochkurkina si, am spiridinov & tn dzhakson (1990). pis’mennye izvestiia o karelakh. petrozavodsk. lind j (1991). magnus eriksson som birgittinsk konge i lyset af russiske kilder. in birgitta, hendes værk og hendes klostre i norden, nordiskt birgitta-symposium i mariager 1990, 103–128. odense university press, odense. lind j (1994a). the polna rivers and russia’s medieval borders with the scandinavian west. in traditions and innovations. papers presented to andreas haarder, 155–170. odense university press, odense. lind j (1994b). de russiske krøniker som kilde til kontakter i østersøområdet. in det 22. nordiske historikermøte oslo 13.–18. august 1994. rapport i: norden og baltikum, 35–46. lind j (1994c). valamon luostarin perustamisen poliittinen tausta. in hirvonen s, h kilpeläinen & l mäkelä (eds). te menitte asumaan meren saareen…: tutkimuksia valamon luostarista. valamon luostarin kirjaston julkaisuja 1, 33–40. lind j (2000a). the russian-swedish border according to the peace treaty of nöteborg (orekhovetspähkinälinna) and the political status of the northern part of fennoscandia. mediaeval scandinavia 13, 100–117. lind j (2000b). the russian testament of king magnus eriksson – a hagiograph text? in bisgaard l (ed). medieval spirituality in scandinavia and europe. a collection of essays in honour of tore nyberg, 195–212. odense university press, odense. lind j (2001a). religiozno-politicheskie predposylki “rukopisaniia korolia sveiskogo magnusha” po shvedskim i russkim istochnikam. in drevneishie gosudarstva vostochnoi evropy 1999, 211–229. moskva. lind j (2001b). consequences of the baltic crusades in target areas. the case of karelia. in murray av (ed). crusade and conversion on the baltic frontier 1150–1500, 133–149. ashgate, aldershot. novgorodskaia pervaia letopis’ starshego i mladshego izvodov (1950). nauka, moskva. okhotina n (1993). the tale of the valamo monastery. ortodoksia 42, 89–135. okhotina-lind na (1996). skazanie o valaamskom monastyre. 246 p. glagol, st. petersburg. pipping r (ed) (1921). erikskrönikan: enligt cod. holm. d2. uppsala. pirinen k (1987). lännen näkemys idän kristityistä. in pulliainen k & h sihvo (eds). carelia rediviva. juhlakirja professori heikki kirkiselle 22.9.1987, 33–48. joensuun yliopisto, joensuu. pirinen k (1988). karjala ja växjö. keskiaikaisen karjalan hiippakunnan perustamishanke. suomen kirkkohistoriallisen seuran vuosikirja – finska kyrkohistoriska samfundets årsskrift 78, 46–53. ronimus jv (1906a). asiakirjoja, jotka valaisevat suomen kameraalisia oloja 1500-luvulla. novgorodin vatjalaisen viidenneksen henkija verokirja v. 1500. todistuskappaleita suomen historiaan 3: 6. ronimus jv (1906b). novgorodin vatjalaisen viidenneksen verokirja v. 1500 ja karjalan silloinen asutus. historiallinen arkisto 20. sjöberg a (1985). orthodoxe mission in schweden im 11. jahrhundert? in lindquist s-o (ed). society and trade in the baltic during the viking age. papers of the viith visby symposium, august 15th–19th, 1983. acta visbyensia 7, 69–78. uino p (1997). ancient karelia: archaeological studies (muinais-karjala: arkeologisia tutkimuksia). suomen muinaismuistoyhdistyksen aikakauskirja 104. 426 p. valk sn (ed) (1949). gramoty velikogo novgoroda i pskova. nauka, moskva. vremennik imperatorskago moskovskago obschestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh 11 (1851). moskva. vremennik imperatorskago moskovskago obschestva istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh 12 (1852). moskva. untitled human touch, natural processes: the development of the rural cultural landscape in southern finland from past to present päivi maaranen maaranen, päivi (2002). human touch, natural processes: the development of the rural cultural landscape in southern finland from past to present. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 99–109. issn 0015-0010. this paper presents a brief study of the rural cultural landscape in southern finland. most rural landscapes in southern finland are produced by traditional agriculture and affected by modern farming. the cultural landscape of the countryside is therefore a human cultural achievement: working the land creates the agrarian landscape. natural processes must be yielded and acknowledged, however. the various periodic layers of the rural landscape derive from its inhabitants and their historical periods. in this way, the landscape is comprised of natural and cultural phenomena, which can be both old and new. this paper is based on a study of the rural cultural landscapes of perniö and karjaa in southern finland. the examination suggests a long-term landscape development from prehistoric to historical periods. päivi maaranen, the national board of antiquities, p. o. box 913, fin-00101 helsinki, finland. e-mail: paivi_maaranen@hotmail.com introduction origins of the present landscape of finland can be traced to the end of the ice age. landforms made by glaciers were moulded by melting and running water, waves, and currents about 12,000 years ago. thick deposits with layers of sand, silt, and clay accumulated in standing water. the changing water levels, shore displacements, and isostatic uplift movements changed the landscape further. forest vegetation covered the open ground surface, first with mixed deciduous forests and later with mixed deciduous and coniferous forests (eronen 1992: 70–73). the first humans appeared in finland’s present territory about 10,000 years ago (carpelan 1999a: 168) (fig. 1). they were fig. 1. the open and bare north lapland gives an impression of the natural landscape in the end of the ice age. the sami ways of life were traditional in the 1930s. (photo courtesy of the national board of antiquities/suk 5065: 21, 34/ erkki mikkola 1934) 100 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)päivi maaranen hunters and gatherers who followed the retreating scandinavian ice sheet margin from southeastern europe. it took thousands of years, however, before a human touch was clearly visible in the landscape. a present cultural landscape is a sum of elements from different prehistoric and historical periods (table 1). by examining these elements and their relationships, it is possible to interpret the whole of the landscape. in this sense, a cultural landscape is a subjective interpretation of the landscape elements. a cultural landscape can also be studied in a broader context that connects landscape development to state-level and international processes. the geographer tarja keisteri (1990: 49) proposes that all visible and invisible material and abstract elements should be taken into consideration. she suggests that all factors concerning the structures, organisation, culture, and material representations of a society affect the cultural landscape. cultural landscapes are subject to change because of the relationship between the natural environment and human society. a society has options in relation to the natural environment, because the effect is reciprocal (storå 1994: 11). a society changes when its natural environment changes, but the changes in society can also cause changes in the natural environment. human adaptability to change varies depending on economic activity, socio-cultural systems, population, and technology (fig. 2). perceptions, myths, ethics, and values are also part of a society’s dialogue with nature (myllyntaus 1994: 33). interaction between social conditions, economy, and the environment produces a large selection of landscape elements, which represent human activity in the natural environment (gísladóttir 1993: 71–72). usually, these elements represent the long-term effects that result from human activity on earth. a study of landscape elements is important in order to analyse what resources societies exploit and how they remould their environments. many elements are visible, which allows their discovery and interpretation. other past human traces are invisible, however, including most archaeological sites and monuments. the traces of prehistoric settlement and inhumation cemeteries, for example, are not recognisable on the ground surface. the archaeological cultural heritage can be difficult to recognise and interpret also because of destructive physical and human processes. prehistoric (8300 calbc–1150/1350 ad) and historical (from 1150/1350 ad) archaeological remains are very important and interesting source material for landscape interpretation (maaranen 2000a: 25–27). the finnish antiquities act (1963/ 295, §1–2) defines the types of ancient monuments and states that it is forbidden to “excavate, cover, alter, damage, or remove” ancient monuments or disturb them in any other way without permission. ancient places can provide useful information about prehistoric times without written sources. most of them are not excavated, however, because of the lack of financial resources. nowadays, there are more than 14,000 prehistoric places in finland, but their number grows constantly (lähdesmäki 1999: 177–180; maaranen 2000b: 137–138). many archaeological remains table 1. a chronology of finland’s history. there are no written sources from the prehistoric era. archaeological cultural heritage is therefore the only source concerning the stone age, the early metal age, and the iron age. historical sources are connected to the historical periods from the middle ages to the present (kuoppamäki 2000). archaeological sites and monuments can also give valuable information of the historical periods. radiocarbon dates (calbc) from carpelan 1999a: 160–161, 1999b. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 101human touch, natural processes survive in environments of traditional land use, which were abandoned after world war ii. a huge number of sites and monuments has been destroyed, however, by agriculture, forestry, and construction (kristiansen 1985; kirkinen 1999). the accurate number of these ancient vanished places is unknown, but it is likely to reach hundreds in finland alone. historical archaeological sites and monuments in finland number more than 100,000. most of them are not listed or known, so studying them can be quite complicated. the study of this archaeological cultural heritage nevertheless helps to understand historical phenomena, because written sources from older historical times are often few or fragmentary. time has destroyed many written sources, because there were no archives to maintain the documents or fire, war, or lack of proper care destroyed the archives. amongst the most important sources are historical maps, which were maintained for military and administrative purposes. many of these maps have been preserved because of their importance: several archives had copies (alanen & kepsu 1989: 6–8). modern maps are also important in landscape studies concerning topography, geomorphology, and soil. in landscape studies, archaeological and historical sources are combined with the data from pollen analyses and vegetation. a cultural landscape retains several different layers of history, which may be reconstructed as historical cross-sections at regular intervals (cdfig. 1). the development of an agrarian landscape is usually characterised by phases of expansion, consolidation, and regression. it is difficult to illustrate a cultural landscape as a continuous process, however, because the cross-sections are in the form of discrete jumps between historical periods. the role of natural processes and human impact in the change thus remains hidden. new information technology has solved these problems to some extent: it is now possible to demonstrate a dynamic landscape change and underline the most important effects and processes (visualizing… 2001). landscape reconstructions describe changes in society and landscape. they can be produced at different scales and for different time slices, depending on the material available and the purpose of the reconstruction (berglund 1997: 35–36). reconstructions can be used to present land use, vegetation, and primary production, or settlement patterns, societies, and communication routes. areas can also be compared to trace similarities and differences. anomalous features are the most interesting in the interpretation of past human activity, because they can provide additional information of the development processes of a cultural landscape. reconstructing the past the examination of southern finland’s rural cultural landscape is based on my previous studies in perniö and karjaa (fig. 3). the long-term landscape study in perniö was part of the sukka project regarding the medieval manor houses in finland (suomen keskiaikainen kartanolaitos) (haggrén et al. 1999). the project was organised fig. 2. a model of a landscape change (adapted from stjernquist 1992: 9, fig. 6). 102 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)päivi maaranen in the 1990s by the university of helsinki and joined by researchers from the national board of antiquities and the university of turku. the reconstruction of the perniö cultural landscape was tested by a similar reconstruction study in karjaa near perniö (maaranen 2000c: 210–214). the change of perniö’s cultural landscape was reconstructed from the stone age to the twentieth century. the study in karjaa was limited to the period from the stone age to the end of the middle ages. the study of the areas’ environmental development was connected to the study of human activity. the aim was to reconstruct the past environment and landscape and to understand their interaction with their inhabitants. a focus of interest was the analysis of variations in human activity in different time periods. both perniö and karjaa were suitable for such a study because of their long settlement history and numerous archaeological sites and historical sources. because of the abundance of source material, it was expected that the case studies could imply a gradual shift from central to peripheral settlement that also applied to prehistoric and historical times (maaranen 1999: 116–118). these archaeological and historical reviews enabled correlations and comparisons in time and space. the examination of the relationships between centre and periphery during different times was also possible. the study of the cultural landscape was found to be a very effective tool in analysing ancient human activity and its changes. first, a regional geographic analysis was carried out to reach an understanding of today’s landscape and its constituents. geomorphological mapping was then undertaken to know the character, development, and origin of the natural environment. vegetation development was reconstructed on the basis of the combined data of soil, geomorphology, and pollen. the human activity areas were marked on these maps. this data formed the basis of the overall landscape reconstruction and interpretations of its development. as a result, the environments inhabited by different prehistoric societies and their spheres of activity could be defined. the study thus increased the understanding of how landscape mirrors past societies. an economic point of view was the basis of the study: the environment was considered primarily an economic resource used according to rational rules. economic aspects of society are quite tangible and the economy is often put forward as the prime explanation of archaeological phenomena (renfrew & bahn 2000: 461–483). the obvious reason for this is the lack of knowledge concerning the cognitions of archaeological societies. environment, and landscape as a part of it, can, however, be seen from an entirely cultural point of view (ersgård & hållans 1996: 22f). that perspective stresses ideological, social, and cultural factors and sees environment as being modified by the society’s worldview in general and by its ideas about the relationship between society and environment in particular. the cultural point of view was abandoned in the study of perniö and karjaa, because pinpointing the social and cultural factors that govern ancient society was found to be very difficult. prehistoric landscape development the development of the cultural landscape in southern finland is characterised by a continuous increase in human activity during the prehistoric fig. 3. the location of the perniö–karjaa research area in southwestern finland. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 103human touch, natural processes fig. 4. a cultivation terrace in brobacka, karjaa, southern finland. these kinds of cultivation terraces are very typical representatives of traditional soil cultivation (gren 1997: 21). (photo courtesy of the national board of antiquities/s-l seppälä 1996) fig. 5. the cultural landscape of the aura river near vanhalinna in lieto is one of the finest in southern finland. prehistoric and historical sites and monuments surround the vanhalinna hillfort. the hillfort dates back to a period from the iron age to the middle ages. (photo courtesy of the university foundation of turku. the picture was taken in the early 1990s.) 104 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)päivi maaranen and historical times. the spatial distribution and size of population vary, however, from one period to another. these variations affect landscape processes in time and space. hunter-gatherers and fishermen dominated the stone age (8300–1900/1700 calbc) in southern finland. the landscape of these maritime huntergatherers was the natural environment. the human impact on this environment was weak and, according to emanuelsson (1988), similar to the effects of big carnivores. the impact of huntergatherers was also remarkably spotty and there was relatively little modification of ecosystems (simmons 1989: 84, fig. 3.3). evidence of a longterm modification includes fire that was used regularly to clear vegetation. natural landscape elements and processes thus dominated the stone age landscape. coastal plains, mouths of rivers, and archipelagos were the most favourable environments to seek sources of livelihood. mesolithic (8300–5100 calbc) hunters had small dwelling places on bay and strait shores and alongside water routes. in the end of the stone age, neolithic (5100–1800/1700 calbc) settlers brought new elements to the natural landscape. these included small grazing meadows and slash-and-burn cultivation plots. some dwelling places were permanently settled and fire was used to clear forests to improve hunting possibilities (thorpe 1996: 75, 93). a transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture occurred at the very end of the stone age. knowledge of agriculture was acquired slowly and agriculture was not fully adopted till the end of the early metal age (1900/1700 calbc–50 ad) (vuorela 1998: 178, 1999; zvelebil 1998: 12). the transition to farming, however, was the most important factor in the development of the cultural landscape. simmons (1989: 87, fig. 4.1) stresses that the effects of cultivators caused a long-term change of vegetation. this change resulted in a more open landscape. agriculture spread slowly but inevitably during the early metal age. the very first cereal plants were barley (hordeum vulgare) and wheat (triticum turgidum and t. aestivum) that were cultivated roughly 3,500 and 2,000 years ago in finland, respectively (rousi 1997: 61, 65, 73; vuorela 1999). thorpe (1996: 97) presents the adoption of agriculture as a shift in thinking rather than as an economic development. this was highly possible also in finland, because there was no pressing need to change the economy from hunting to farming. animal grazing affected the environment most in the beginning of agriculture, and domestic animals maintained an important role as a source of livelihood also in historical times (huldén 1999: 93, 98–99). the landscape carried highly visible marks of human activity from the early metal age because of animal husbandry and small-scale slash-andburn cultivation. thin mixed deciduous forests that domestic animals grazed dominated the early metal age cultural landscape in southern finland. in the nearby semi-permanent dwelling places there were small cultivated plots where fire was used to clear the land before cultivation. animal husbandry was more important than cultivation, and domestic animals strongly modified the landscape in the vicinity of the settlements. during the iron age (50–1150/1350 ad), agriculture spread across southern finland and permanent fields were introduced. agriculture was thus adopted as an important source of livelihood. evidence from pollen analyses shows that cereal cultivation was practised in many places (roeck hansen & nissinaho 1995: 36), although physical traces of ancient cultivation are quite rare nowadays (fig. 4). the first permanent fields were cleared by fire and fertilised with animal manure. at the end of the iron age, there was a small-scale rural cultural landscape, which continued to develop during the middle ages (fig. 5). historical cross-sections the middle ages (1150/1350–1520 ad) were the time of population growth and expanding agricultural settlement. finland was incorporated in the swedish empire under the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the empire’s enabling acts began to influence land use and settlement patterns in finland. these acts regulated the structure of villages, the division of common lands, and ownership of fields, among other things (see roeck hansen 1996). the first villages had been erected already at the end of the iron age, but the village organisation was not established until the middle ages. the first permanent roads began to develop and bind the small villages to each other. the most important of these routes still exist in today’s landscape. by the side of agriculture, hunting and fishing were important sources of livelihood. slashand-burn techniques were practised at the same fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 105human touch, natural processes time with permanent field cultivation. the slashand-burn cultivation was especially important to settlers, who had to live and clear permanent fields in the periphery. animal husbandry also had a very remarkable role because of produce (milk, manure). the christian church erected the first population centres of the middle ages near older centres from the end of the iron age onwards. these prehistoric old centers were important to the church for religious and political reasons. the church sought to adopt places that were of importance to the pagans, and bring them under christian control (nilsson 1992: 10–12; purhonen 1998: 146–147). in this way, the new religion and social hierarchy were introduced to the people. later, some of these important centres (including religious buildings like churches and rectories) moved from one place to another because of changes in the settlement pattern, caused by population growth. the church found it important to be available in the centre of the settlement as a spiritual leader and as an administrative quarter. another important type of centres were the castles and manor houses of the swedish crown. these administrative centres were visible elements of the power of the swedish empire in the cultural landscape of southern finland. the ones with a favourable geographical location and wide settlement around them gained importance and began to develop into towns. the finnish medieval towns were small and few, however. there were only six towns in finland during the middle ages: turku, ulvila, rauma, naantali, porvoo, and viipuri (nikula 1999: 13–14). at the beginning of the modern times (from 1520 ad), early industrialisation and desolation of agrarian settlement affected the rural cultural landscape. the depopulation resulted from problems in agriculture, caused by a hard tax burden on peasants and the loss of farm workers because of the crown’s continuous warfare (oja 1955: 89; säihke 1963). the tax-paying ability of many young medieval villages was reduced and many farms were abandoned. some rural manor houses, in turn, were in quite a good situation. they had options to try new sources of livelihood as manufacturers. the early industrialisation emerged in the form of iron works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. the iron works needed running water, timber, minerals, and workers that were available in the countryside. the iron works changed the rural cultural landscape significantly by cutting forests, channelling water routes, and erecting industrial buildings (fig. 6). until the eighteenth century, the rural landscape in southern finland was still quite unchanged in many respects. land surveying was relatively strictly controlled and the legislation during the eighteenth century carried out many claims concerning land use, structure of villages, utilisation of forests, hunting grounds, cattle grazing, and so on (a law in 1734, see ruotsin… 1997). new land surveys during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries affected village communities and the rural cultural landscape, however. village communities began to become dispersed and fields became larger, replacing traditional fig. 6. mills were numerous in the rural cultural landscape of southern finland. the damming of small rivers and streams was common in order to raise the water level in a millpond and channels. the old dam of brödtorp in pohja is still in good condition. (author’s photo, 05/98) 106 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)päivi maaranen farming with small fields, large meadows, and group villages. finland was incorporated in the russian empire in the early nineteenth century. finland gained autonomy under the russian rulers and much of the old legislation was maintained. the new transportation technology (railroads) helped the russian empire to connect finland and russia more closely to each other, because the gauge in these two countries was different from the rest of europe. railroad centres were built during the nineteenth century in southern finland. they differed from the religious and administrative centres of the middle ages and the later industrial centres. the railroad centres drew people from the countryside to the densely-built and -populated areas during the twentieth century. a significant change in agricultural production occurred in the mid-nineteenth century due to a transition to milk production and haying meadows. gathering hay and grass from natural meadows was no longer necessary. these previously so important lands were now used as pastures or ploughed to fields. another, even more important change was the adoption of artificial fertilisers during world war ii (bernes 1993: 109–110). this change had extremely widespread effects: traditional grazing and grazing grounds were abandoned, because there was no need for animal manure. the traditional, open rural cultural landscape began to overgrow without grazing animals. the finnish state was born in the year 1917 in the aftermath of the revolution in russia. the independence affected the position of crofters. after the civil war in 1918, their weak position was acknowledged and improvements were made. this did not affect the rural landscape, but it began to change rapidly after world war ii. on the one hand, the state established small farming units for the karelian evacuees from the territories ceded to the soviet union after the war. on the other hand, fields for cereal cultivation were expanded. during the post-war period, the displaced karelians were resettled on land parcels according to the land acquisition act of 1945 (luostarinen 1997: 61). the new farms were established on the lands of the big manor houses and estates as well as on the land owned by the state. the size of these farms was connected to the size of arable land, which was allowed to be a maximum of 15 hectares for a single farm. some of the established farms were not suitable for agriculture because of their small size and infertile soil, and were abandoned quite quickly during the transformation of the finnish countryside in the 1950s and 1960s (kupiainen 1985: 95–98). today’s challenges the rural landscape in southern finland is a result of multiple landscape processes from past to present. the roots of today’s cultural landscape can be traced back to the end of the iron age (fig. 7). most medieval villages are preserved and many ancient traffic routes are still in use. the archaeological heritage, valuable heritage landscapes, and built heritage are equal parts of this landscape. the landscape produced by traditional agriculture fades away bit by bit, however, because of the new farming technology and economy. intensified production methods have a strong impact on the landscape. the use of more efficient farming methods leads gradually to uniformity of the environment. one of the most important factors is the mechanisation of agriculture that changes the cultivation methods. traditional agriculture gave rise to a cultural landscape of variety, smallscale features, and a diverse natural environment, which are now disappearing entirely from the rural landscape. there is a demand for large-scale field systems that are easy to cultivate economically and rapidly with machinery. the demand for greater efficiency creates landscapes of large fields, which serve the needs of mechanisation, uniform production quality, and standardisation (sepänmaa 1997: 27). another important thing is the overgrowth of the familiar open landscape. this is not at all unique to southern finland, because the same process has taken place in scandinavia and europe. the problem was not really noticed in finland until the 1960s, when the effects of the changing agriculture had become clearly visible (tikkanen-lindström 1999: 145). abandoned farms and the change from animal husbandry to plant and cereal cultivation are major reasons for the overgrowth. preservation of rural landscapes requires continuous work and maintenance, for nature will reclaim quite rapidly what is left to ‘waste’. in finland, the vanishing rural landscape became a subject of interest to the ministry of the environment. it made an inventory of the country’s traditional landscapes (arvokkaat… 1992) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 107human touch, natural processes and produced a management manual for them in the early 1990s (maisemanhoito 1992). in these publications, nature and landscape are valued as the principal resources of the countryside. in their opinion, it is important to recognize and study the number of valuable pasturelands and heritage landscapes and to understand that landscape conservation can reveal important features of them. these multi-layered rural landscapes are found ever-changing, but society can monitor and guide these changes. alongside sites of national value, the publications acknowledge sites of local historic importance. in the preservation of cultural heritage, environmental values, layers of landscape, and social orientations are emphasised. in the beginning of the twenty-first century, rural landscapes face severe problems. the new legislation of the european union has put farms in a difficult situation from an economic point of view (heikkilä 2000: 35). because of the history of the crofters’ and evacuees’ small holdings, there are still more small farms in finland than in other european countries. the strict eu regulations make it difficult to continue farming on these properties. many farmers are thus opting for a different livelihood. in the future, the decreasing number of farmers and the closure of farms lead to a decreased diversity due to landscape expirations. this is an unwelcome trend for the preservation of cultural landscapes. in order to protect the finnish small-scale and mosaic-like rural landscape, it is essential to maintain permanent population and agriculture in the countryside. without the people and activities that have produced the cultural landscape it is impossible to preserve and maintain it. references alanen t & s kepsu (1989). kuninkaan kartasto suomesta 1776–1805. konungens kartverk från finland. sks, helsinki. arvokkaat maisema-alueet (1992). maisema-aluetyöryhmän mietintö i. ympäristöministeriö, ympäristönsuojeluosasto, mietintö 66/1992. berglund be (1997). methods for reconstructing ancient cultural landscapes: the examples of the viking age landscape at bjäresö, skåne, southern sweden. in miller u & h clarke (eds). environment and vikings: scientific methods and techniques. birka studies 4, 13–30. bernes c (1993). pohjoismaiden ympäristö: tila, kehitys ja uhat. pohjoismainen ministerineuvosto, kööpenhamina. carpelan c (1999a). on the postglacial colonisation of eastern fennoscandia. in huurre m (ed). dig it all. papers dedicated to ari siiriäinen, 151–172. the finnish antiquarian society & the archaeological society of finland, helsinki. carpelan c (1999b). käännekohtia suomen esihistoriassa aikavälillä 5100…1000 ekr. in fogelberg p (ed). pohjan poluilla. suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 153, 249–280. emanuelsson u (1988). a model describing the development of the cultural landscape. in birks hh, fig. 7. there are many traces of past human action in karjaa’s rural cultural landscape. the brobacka area is one of the most interesting ancient sites because of the prehistorical graves and remains of historical cultivation plots. (photo courtesy of the national board of antiquities/päivi maaranen 1998) 108 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)päivi maaranen hbj birks, pe kaland & d moe (eds). the cultural landscape. past, present, and future, 111–122. reprint 1990. cambridge university press, cambridge. eronen m (1992). variations in climate and environments in northern europe in prehistoric times. pact (journal of the european study group on physical, chemical, biological and mathematical techniques applied to archaeology) 36, 67–80. ersgård l & a-m hållans (1996). medeltida landsbygd. en arkeologisk utvärdering. arkeologiska undersöningar, skrifter 15. riksantikvarieämbetet, stockholm. gísladóttir g (1993). geographical analysis of natural and cultural landscape. meddelanden från naturgeografiska institutionen vid stockholms universitet a 289. gren l (1997). fossil åkermark: alder tiders jordbruk – spåren i landskapet och de historiska sammanhangen. fornlämningar i sverige 1. 2nd ed. riksantikvarieämbetet, stockholm. haggrén g, m niukkanen & k peltonen (1999). manor house archaeology: the sukka project (1992–1995). in mattinen m, m häyrynen, m kairamo & t tuomi (eds). monuments and sites – finland, 182–183. international council of monuments and sites, helsinki. heikkilä t (2000). suomalainen kulttuurimaisema. tammi, helsinki. huldén n (1999). husdjuren i sydvästra finland. in tuxen-petersen f (ed). husdyr og landskab. kulturlandskabets husdyr og bevaring af gamle landracer i norden. rapport fra et nordisk seminar om “kulturlandskabets husdyr og bevaring af gamle landracer i norden, 4.–6. juni 1997, 91– 100. dansk landbrugsmuseum, gl estrup. keisteri t (1990). the study of changes in cultural landscapes. fennia 168, 31–115. kirkinen t (1999). the influence of modern land-use on the formation of archaeological record. source critical problems of regional studies. in huurre m (ed). dig it all. papers dedicated to ari siiriäinen, 21–28. the finnish antiquarian society & the archaeological society of finland, helsinki. kristiansen k (1985). economic development in denmark since agrarian reform. in kristiansen k (ed). archaeological formation processes: the presentativity of archaeological remains from danish prehistory, 40–62. nationalmuseet, copenhagen. kuoppamäki p (2000). a web history of finland. 2 march 2000. <http://kyyppari.hkk.fi/~vk21206/ finhist.html> lähdesmäki u (1999). archaeology: an introduction. in mattinen m, m häyrynen, m kairamo & t tuomi (eds). monuments and sites – finland, 177– 179. international council of monuments and sites, helsinki. luostarinen m (1997). maaseudun suuri historia/the great history of the countryside. in luostarinen m & a yli-viikari (eds). maaseudun kulttuurimaisemat/rural landscapes in finland, 59–63. suomen ympäristökeskus, sulkava. maaranen p (1999). landscape development from the stone age to the middle ages in perniö, southern finland. in fabech c & j ringtved (eds). settlement and landscape. proceedings of a conference in århus, denmark, may 4–7, 1998, 116– 118. jutland archaeological society, copenhagen. maaranen p (2000a). arkeologinen kulttuuriperintö osana suomalaista maisemaa. in saarinen j & p raivo (eds). metsä, harju ja järvi: näkökulmia suomalaiseen maisematutkimukseen ja -suunnitteluun. metsäntutkimuslaitoksen tiedonantoja 776, 25–34. maaranen p (2000b). questions of management planning and preventive conservation concerning the site management of the archaeological cultural heritage of finland. in koskivirta r (ed). conservation without limits. ii nordic group, xv congress, 23.–23.8.2000, helsinki, finland, 137– 146. loimaa. maaranen p (2000c). ihmisen toimintaympäristön muutos perniön ja karjaan seudulla esihistoriallisella ja varhaiskeskiajalla. maisematutkimuksen ja luonnonmaantieteellisten ympäristötekijöiden analyysin soveltamisesta arkeologisen lähdeaineiston tarkasteluun. unpublished phil. lic. thesis. university of helsinki institute for cultural research, department of archaeology. maisemanhoito (1992). maisema-aluetyöryhmän mietintö ii. ympäristöministeriö, ympäristönsuojeluosasto, mietintö 66/1992. myllyntaus t (1994). approaches to environmental history. in nissinaho a (ed). cultural ecology: one theory, 25–36. project “changing environment – changing society,” university of turku, turku. nikula r (1999). finland’s built cultural heritage. in mattinen m, m häyrynen, m kairamo & t tuomi (eds). monuments and sites – finland, 13–19. international council of monuments and sites, helsinki. nilsson b (1992). till frågan om kyrkans hållning tillicke-kristna kultfenomen. attityder under tidigt medeltid i europa och norden. in nilsson b (ed). kontinuitet i kult och tro från vikingatid till medeltid. projektet “sveriges kristnande,” publikationer 1, 9–48. lunne böcker, uppsala. oja a (1995). keskiaikaisen “etelä-suomen” asutus ja aluejaot. suomen historiallinen seura, historiallisia tutkimuksia xliv. purhonen p (1998). kristinuskon saapumisesta suomeen. uskontoarkeologinen tutkimus. suomen muinaismuistoyhdistyksen aikakauskirja 106. renfrew c & c bahn (2000). archaeology: theories, methods & practice. rev. 3rd ed. thames & hudson, london. rikkinen k, p maaranen & p suihkonen (1999). erätaloudesta nyky-yhteiskuntaan. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 48–53. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 109human touch, natural processes roeck hansen b (1996). the agrarian landscape in finland circa 1700: with special reference to southwest finland and ostrobothnia. stockholm universitet, stockholm. roeck hansen b & a nissinaho (1995). a fossil landscape in salo, laitila, sw finland. karhunhammas 16, 25–40. rousi a (1997). auringonkukasta viiniköynnökseen. ravintokasvit. wsoy, porvoo. ruotsin valtakunnan vuoden 1734 laki: rakennus caari 1–9 (1997). agricola-projekti historian äärelle. 12 august 1998. <www.utu.fi/agricola/ hist.kktk/lait/1734/1175909.html> säihke i (1963). varsinais-suomen maanviljelys ja karjanhoito 1500-luvulla. varsinais-suomen historia v, 5–6, 7–71. varsinais-suomen historiantutkimusyhdistys, turku. sepänmaa y (1997). maaseutua ei voi tuoda – agraarimaiseman estetiikan lähtökohtia/origins of the landscape aesthetic. in luostarinen m & a yliviikari (eds). maaseudun kulttuurimaisemat/rural landscapes in finland, 23–29. suomen ympäristökeskus, sulkava. simmons ig (1989). changing the face of the earth: culture, environment, history. reprint 1990. basil blackwell, oxford. stjernquist b (1992). introduction. in larsson l, j callmer & b stjernquist (eds). the archaeology of the cultural landscape. field work and research in a south swedish rural region. acta archaeologica lundensia, series 4 19, 9–16. storå n (1994). cultural ecology and the interaction between man and the environment. in nissinaho a (ed). cultural ecology: one theory, 11–24. project “changing environment – changing society,” university of turku, turku. thorpe ij (1996). the origins of agriculture in europe. routledge, surrey. tikkanen-lindström t (1999). cultural landscapes and their maintenance: an introduction. in mattinen m, m häyrynen, m kairamo & t tuomi (eds). monuments and sites – finland, 145–146. international council of monuments and sites, helsinki. visualizing past landscapes (2001). university of oulu, archaeology laboratory. 14 may 2001. <http://arklab.oulu.fi/public/visual.html> vuorela i (1998). the transition of farming in southern finland. in zvelebil m, l dománska & r dennell (eds). harvesting the sea, farming the forest. the emergence of neolithic societies in the baltic region, 175–180. sheffield academic press, somerset. vuorela i (1999). the beginnings of agricultural land use in finland. pact (journal of the european study group on physical, chemical, biological and mathematical techniques applied to archaeology) 57, 339–351. zvelebil m (1998). agricultural frontiers, neolithic origins, and the transition to farming in the baltic basin. in zvelebil m, l dománska & r dennell (eds). harvesting the sea, farming the forest. the emergence of neolithic societies in the baltic region, 9–28. sheffield academic press, somerset. an overview of inuit perspectives on franklin’s lost expedition (1845–1846): a few avenues for discussion and future research – commentary to pawliw, berthold, and lasserre urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa109784 doi: 10.11143/fennia.109784 reflections an overview of inuit perspectives on franklin’s lost expedition (1845–1846): a few avenues for discussion and future research – commentary to pawliw, berthold and lasserre marie mossé mossé, m. (2021) an overview of inuit perspectives on franklin’s lost expedition (1845–1846): a few avenues for discussion and future research – commentary to pawliw, berthold and lasserre. fennia 199(2) 273–280. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109784 this reflection deals with the role inuit knowledges and oral history played in the discovery of franklin expedition’s shipwreck at the turn of the 2010s and, more specifically, with the process through which those knowledges were finally taken into account by canadian political and scientific institutions as well as medias and public opinion. i aim to highlight the fundamental ambivalence of this process and to address the questions whether and how it finds its place in the global context of canadian reconciliation process, and why it contributes to “recomplexify” the canadian and western representation of arctic. keywords: pawliw, franklin, canadian sovereignty, indigenous, goodness marie mossé, laboratoire littératures imaginaire société, université de lorraine, 23, boulevard albert ier, 54 000 nancy, france & laboratoire international de recherche sur l'imaginaire du nord, de l'hiver et de l'arctique, université du québec à montréal, pavillon judith-jasmin, 405, rue sainte-catherine est, montréal (québec), qc h2x 1k1, canada. e-mail: marie.mosse@univ-lorraine.fr introduction the present paper comes as a result of a fruitful and inspiring peer-review process focusing on kim pawliw’s, étienne berthold’s and frédéric lasserre’s paper (2021) entitled “the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin’s lost expedition”. the latter analysis supports the hypothesis that franklin’s lost arctic expedition (1845–1846) is instrumental in harper’s intent to build a new canadian northern identity which would be separate from the american identity and which would bring together anglophones, francophones, first nations and inuit communities in a new foundation myth, in the specific context of the growing importance of the geopolitics of the arctic. the authors display a comparison between stephen harper’s (2006–2015) and justin trudeau’s (2015–present) official discourses concerning franklin’s lost expedition and show how the same discourse – specifically the role of inuit arctic knowledges and the collaboration between canadian searchers and inuit inhabitants of the region – can be interpreted in various ways to suit various political agendas. as it is, discourse analysis is a key tool when it comes to deconstructing the genesis of a foundation myth and its political and ideological motives. this paper aims to give an overview of the increasing importance being given to the inuit perspectives on franklin’s lost expedition as a canadian arctic myth. the starting point of this © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.109784 mailto:marie.mosse@univ-lorraine.fr 274 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections reflection is the co-occurrence of two consequences of the celebration of this early interaction and collaboration between inuit communities and european explorers: the glorification of canada as an arctic nation and the reappropriation of the history of franklin’s lost expedition by inuit communities. it is not intended to be an exhaustive or comprehensive survey of this question, since i am not writing from a specialist’s point of view; the issue here is rather to suggest avenues for a reflection on what indeed this reappropriation of the franklin myth could mean for canada as well as for inuit communities. this paper aims to offer a basis for discussion and exchange. it develops the following hypothesis: the canadian arctic myth of the franklin’s lost expedition such as expressed by harper is the reflection of the truth and reconciliation commission period (2008–2015) and of its ambivalence as well; nevertheless, this myth as well as the discovery of hms erebus (2014) and of hms terror (2016) set the occasion to “recomplexify” (chartier 2018) the north and the arctic through the integration of inuit discourses and knowledges in the representation of the franklin myth. the canadian patrimonialization of the franklin expedition: a (re)conciliation myth? as pawliw, berthold and lasserre (2021) show, the celebration of the diversity of canada through the acknowledgement of the collaboration between canadian technology and inuit oral history when searching for franklin’s wrecks was shared by both prime minister stephen harper and leona aglukkaq, the minister of environment responsible for parks canada (2013–2015) and an inuk woman from nunavut. both politicians made from these searches and, therefore, from franklin’s lost expedition, a symbol for canadian diversity and national unity, in the specific context of canadian arctic sovereignty. inuit land claims are part of a canadian northern strategy, and inuit communities gradually gain their autonomy from federal government while supporting canadian sovereignty over the northwest passage (pawliw et al. 2021). this exchange of services has been thoroughly analysed, as well as its fundamental ambiguity and misunderstandings (quinn duffy 1988; fenge 2007; zellen 2008, 2009; parks 2010; inuit tapiriit kanatami 2013; dobbins 2019). this analysis leads to a question, which might require a long and complicated answer: is the necessity to reaffirm national unity in the context of arctic sovereignty the only factor which could have led harper to such a celebration of the role of inuit communities and first nations in the wrecks search? one cannot actually help noticing that the appropriation of franklin’s lost expedition as a canadian cultural heritage and the integration of the inuit testimonies and oral history in this cultural heritage took place at a very specific period, which extended from 2008 to 2015: the operation of canada’s truth and reconciliation commission, which aimed to address the aftermath of colonialism and which focused on the indian residential schools (government of canada 2020). the truth and reconciliation commission faced strong criticism from glen coulthard because it focused on the very specific problem of residential schools without questioning the colonialism as a system (querengesser 2013), which would allow harper to apologize in 2008 for the residential system (government of canada 2008, 2010; querengesser 2013) while still negating the history of colonialism in canada (querengesser 2013) and omitting a part of the residential school victims, the inuit of labrador (james 2008; michelin 2015). nevertheless, this context of reconciliation also led john duncan, harper’s minister of aboriginal affairs and northern development, federal interlocutor for métis and non-status indians, to offer his full apology on behalf of canada for another traumatic event of canadian colonialism, which was potentially linked to the question of canadian arctic sovereignty: the inuit high arctic relocation in the 1950s (la presse canadienne 2010; weber 2010), leading inuit people from port harrison/inukjuak (in today’s nunavik) and pond inlet/mittimatalik (in today’s nunavut) to endure hardships on the high arctic islands (marcus 1992, 1995; tester & kulchyski 1994; mcgrath 2006). a collection of testimonies about this traumatic event for inuit communities has been gathered and displayed on the iqqaumavara website, recorded through both films and transcripts. politician and founder of nunavut, john amagoalik and novelist, markoosie patsauq, as well as social worker and politician charlie nowkawalk and carver and storyteller lazarussie epoo, took part to this collection (iqqaumavara 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d). one could therefore ask oneself if the upgrading of the role of inuit knowledge and oral history through the search and discovery of franklin’s shipwrecks could be part of the reconciliation context, 275fennia 199(2) (2021) marie mossé particularly since the valorisation of the franklin myth by harper seems to be as ambivalent as this context (james 2008). actually, the franklin myth such as represented and used by harper is ambiguous: on one hand, the official discourse on the search and discovery of the wrecks might set canadian scientists and archaeologists and inuit elders and oral historians on equal terms but, on the other hand, the narration of the scientific endeavour of the 2000s and 2010s brings with itself the memory of the franklin expedition. could the focus on the contemporary scientific endeavour offer the canadian government an acceptable pretext to praise an imperialist and colonialist expedition in the context of the truth and reconciliation commission? one cannot help noticing the similarities between the old-established representation of franklin’s lost expedition, which harper took on board, and the stereotypical myth of the terra incognita and the vanishing explorers which prevail in every manifestation of victorian imperialism (van eeden 2004; youngs 2014; lewis 2018): heroism, individual accomplishment, comparison with the explorers martin frobisher or john davis (pawliw et al. 2021), who were still models for 19th century british arctic explorers – their travel narratives were reedited by the hakluyt society (mcghee 2005; lynam 2010). could therefore the colonial gaze (fanon 2007; bhabha 1994) on the north and its inhabitants find a way to obliquely perpetrate itself? the integration of the inuit perspective: a tool to “recomplexify” the arctic? the second part of this paper is a remark rather than a question. notwithstanding the fundamental ambivalence of the use of the franklin mystery as a cultural heritage and of the archaeological endeavour as a symbol for unification and collaboration between qallunaat (“white people” in inuktitut) and inuit communities, and whatever the point was of this discourse for harper’s government, the real effect of this event on inuit communities is worth analysis. as recorded in paper by pawliw, berthold and lasserre (2021), an important mutation took place through the searches of franklin’s shipwreck from the 1980s to the 2010s: inuit oral history and its guardians were taken into account. before the searches and the discovery of franklin’s shipwrecks in the 2010s, inuit discourses about the mystery of this lost expedition were surely not much of a novelty for scholars and specialists writing on this subject, but they were less known to a broader audience. after the localisation of the sailors’ graves in nunavut by owen beattie and james savelle in 1985 (woodman 1991; atwood 1995; eber 2008), woodman (1991, 2016) gathered traces of those testimonies through both published and unpublished sources, such as travel narratives and expedition accounts of sir john ross, john rae, knud rasmussen or roald amundsen and at the end of the 2000s, eber (2008) then displayed the oral traditions of inuit elders from cambridge bay/iqaluktuuttiaq (nunavut) which were to help in locating franklin’s wrecked ships. before the 1980s, one of the few inuit testimonies eventually known to canadian readers was qaqortingneq’s, one of the major informants of knud rasmussen during his expedition through the territory of the netsilikmiut (pelly bay/arvilikjuaq) (petrone 1988). it was displayed in rasmussen’s travel narrative across arctic america (1927) (petrone 1988) and it was then notably popularised by gwendolyn macewen’s verse drama terror and erebus (1963) (atwood 1995, 2014) as a counterpoint to charles dickens’ diatribe (1854) against inuit narratives about the wreckage and the possible cannibalism of lost englishmen (sandler 2006; beattie & geiger 2014; watson 2017). the valuable help which was brought to american explorer charles francis hall by inuit storytellers and his guides taqilituq and ipirvik on the search for franklin’s expedition in the 1860s was long forgotten (inuit tapiriit kanatami 2018). both woodman and eber thus redressed a long-lost balance regarding the representation of this expedition: the inuit discourse had actually been silenced and had vanished from any public record linked to the victorian celebration of the arctic since they did not fit the heroic imagery of great britain – and canada – as a conquering nation (volmers 2018). there was little trace of inuit presence in the franklin mystery for a canadian reader. nevertheless, as of 1981, a change in scientific landscape through the integration of inuit students, guides and oral historians into the various archaeological research projects in nunavut was a turning point in the available discourse about franklin’s lost expedition: owen beattie’s expedition to gjoa haven (kitikmeot area) included two inuit students – kovic hiqiniq and mike aleekee – among its members (beattie & geiger 2014); inuk oral historian louie kamookak was hired as a consultant for 276 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections robert grenier’s and ryan harris’ expeditions in 2008 and 2010, and he helped locating hms erebus (palin 2018); inuk guide sammy kogvik led the research team of adrian schimnovski’s charitable arctic research foundation to the location of hms terror in 2016 (watson 2017). inuit contributions to the research and findings of franklin’s shipwrecks were brought to light together with the news of successive discoveries, which were immediately shared, for instance, the news of the discovery of hms erebus displayed on the conversation (barr 2014). louie kamookak became known through canadian media and press – global news (the canadian press 2018), national post (o’connor 2018) – as well as on nunatsiaq news, the newspaper of the inuit of the canadian arctic based in iqaluit (nunavut) (potter 2019). a nunatsiaq news article published in 2019 notably highlighted this event of the discovery of hms erebus as a payback for the old-established disregard in which inuit oral history was held (potter 2019), an analysis shared by eschner (2018) and watson (2017, 182): dismissing inuit testimony didn’t require a lot of argument. racial prejudice toward indigenous people made disregard for what they said and thought almost automatic for many europeans certain of their superior moral fiber and intellect. they also regarded as suspect the inuit tradition of recalling history through telling stories instead of books. for people who put great faith in the written word, indigenous people recalling the past from memory were only spinning legends, entertaining perhaps, but unworthy of an educated expert’s time. mistakes, misunderstandings, and contradictions, the unavoidable flaws of any account told and retold over years, even generations, made inuit stories all the more suspect to listeners who either weren’t willing, or didn’t know how, to distill truth from the fog of memory or embellishment. as of 2016, inuit knowledges about franklin’s lost expedition were broadcast at both national and international levels through the exhibition “death in the ice” in greenwich (england) in 2017 and gatineau (québec) in 2018 (ryan 2017; medby & dittmer 2021). sir michael palin, a comedian and traveller who published a book on hms erebus in 2018, paid a tribute to louie kamookak’s work, which was a valuable source of knowledge for his book (palin 2018). at an institutional level, inuit communities were increasingly involved in both historiographical and didactical aspects of the transmission of the story of franklin’s lost expedition (then/hier 2015; know indigenous history 2018) as well as in the conservation of hms erebus and hms terror artefacts (the canadian press 2019; parks canada 2019). as a result of a symposium held in 2015 by the history education network/history et éducation en réseau gathering teachers, historians, archaeologists and inuit cultural advisors (then/hier 2015), a website was launched (the franklin mystery: life and death in the arctic 2015), helping to promote the story of this expedition from an inuit point of view. in 2018, the franklin expedition inuit oral history project brought together the parks canada agency, the nattilik heritage centre and the hamlet of gjoa haven among other partners in order to display inuit perspectives on this event (know indigenous history 2018), and parks canada and inuit heritage trust agreed on keeping the shipwrecks’ artifacts in nunavut museums (the canadian press 2019; parks canada 2019). one is therefore allowed to think that those various events helped “recomplexify” both the franklin myth and the arctic. chartier (2018, 9, 17), whose essay what is the imagined north? shows how the western representations of the north and the arctic were set on the “silencing of cultural and human aspects of cold territories” and essentially took into account discourses from the outside and excluded the representations from the inside and nordic culture. to “recomplexify” the arctic means considering the indigenous cultures and discourses from the north. in a certain way, the revalorization of inuit oral history and testimonies in the historiography of franklin’s lost expedition can be understood as an example of “recomplexification” of the north and of the arctic. craciun (2011, 2012) and mccorristine (2013, 2018) opened avenues for reflections on that specific subject. for instance, inuit oral history gives nuance to the representation of franklin as an arctic hero in two ways. inuit discourse about franklin kept alive for successive generations the memory of a man who brought unhappiness and destruction with him, placed in the inuit mythological landscape as a malevolent creature. as watson (2017, xxix) writes: the winters that finished off franklin and his 128 men were so severe that they became part of inuit legend. they would long lay blame on the qalunaaq, the white men, for unleashing malevolent spirits upon the island. when american charles francis hall gave up small-town newspapering to go north and hunt for the franklin expedition in the 1860s, an inuit mother told him two shamans, 277fennia 199(2) (2021) marie mossé or angakkuit, had cast a spell on the area where the ships were abandoned: “the innuits wished to live near that place (where the ships were) but could not kill anything for their food. they (the innuits) really believed that the presence of koblunas (whites) in that part of the country was the cause of all their (the innuits’) trouble.” inuit communities also remember a stubborn man who would not listen to the elders and who would totally underestimate the hardship of the canadian arctic. still watson (2017, 3, 180) notes that: like many royal navy men before them, franklin and his crew assumed they could beat the arctic on their own, eschewing inuit as irrelevant, godless savages. until it was too late. inuit have always known that the arctic demands collaboration and respect, not only among people but also with the environment that sustains humans, and the spirit world that can destroy them. few franklin expedition searchers heeded that lesson in the nineteenth century. others repeated their mistakes into the twenty-first. according to an inuit perspective, would the franklin myth be a kind of parable for the tragedy that awaits ones who “simplified” the arctic – as chartier (2018) points to – through not listening to the valuable knowledge of the indigenous community? we cannot help but notice that the franklin myth was reappropriated by inuit communities in 2019: potter’s (2019) article in nunatsiaq news joined together the memory of franklin’s lost expedition through inuit oral history and the celebration of the twentieth birthday of nunavut, the newest canadian province. this could be a new representation of franklin myth, more suitable for the present time – according to atwood, “every age has created a franklin suitable to its needs” (atwood 2014, 4; eschner 2018) – and more suitable for the complexity of the arctic and of those living there. the amc television show the terror, created by david kajganish and soo hugh in 2018, is part of this global change in representations and discourses on the franklin subject. conclusion harper’s use of the franklin myth as a way to reaffirm the arctic identity of canada and to bring together all parts of canadian society – anglophones, francophones, first nations and inuit – seems to coincide with the complexification of this myth. i suggested here that the ambivalence of the franklin myth, endows canada with a founding story which perpetuates the imperialist representation of perilous arctic exploration and a “colonial gaze”, but also allows the national and international recognition of inuit knowledges and representations of this event, as well as highlighting major intellectual figures such as louie kamookak. questioning the peculiar context of the reconciliation process in canadian society around the 2000s and 2010s could cast an interesting light on this link and this issue would need to be researched further. another avenue for research would be to compare the “recomplexification” process of arctic myths, through the integration of inuit testimonies and knowledges in political discourses and in cultural, artistic and literary productions, in other arctic or circumpolar countries. for instance, we can think of greenlandic poet and politician lynge (2008), who offered a renewed representation of knud rasmussen’s fifth thule expedition (1921–1924) through his poems by highlighting a forgotten character of this expedition, arnarulunnguaq, an inuk woman who travelled with rasmussen from greenland to alaska (chartier et al. 2021). we can also think of utuqaq (2021), a short film juxtaposing radivojević’s images of a scientific expedition in greenland with the verses of greenlandic poet aviaja lyberth (aeon 2021; radivojević 2021) and thus drawing attention to the encounter between the western representation of the arctic and the inuit discourse in a mesmerizing manner. the reappropriation of the scientific expedition in the high north, highlighting inuit voices and memories, is an interesting research area for literary studies and cultural historians. references aeon (2021) ‘ice has a memory’ – an inuit poem contemplates scientific exploration of greenland 26.4.2021 <https://aeon.co/videos/ice-has-a-memory-an-inuit-poem-contemplates-scientific-explorationof-greenland>. 1.5.2021. https://aeon.co/videos/ice-has-a-memory-an-inuit-poem-contemplates-scientific-exploration-of-greenland https://aeon.co/videos/ice-has-a-memory-an-inuit-poem-contemplates-scientific-exploration-of-greenland 278 reflections fennia 199(2) (2021) atwood, m. (1995) concerning franklin and his gallant crew. in atwood, m. (ed.) strange things. the malevolent north in canadian literature, 7–34. clarendon press, oxford. atwood, m. (2014) introduction. in beattie, o. & geiger, j. (2014) frozen in time. the fate of the franklin expedition. introduction by margaret atwood (1987), 1–8. greystone books, vancouver. barr, w. (2014) inuit folklore kept alive story of missing franklin to north-west passage. the conversation 19.9.2014 <https://theconversation.com/inuit-folklore-kept-alive-story-of-missing-franklin-expedition-tonorth-west-passage-31692>. 25.3.2021. beattie, o. & geiger, j. (2014) frozen in time. the fate of the franklin expedition. introduction by margaret atwood (1987). greystone books, vancouver. bhabha, h. (1994) the location of culture. routledge, london and new york. chartier, d. (2018) what is the imagined north?: ethical principles. presses de l’université du québec, isberg, qc. chartier, d., mossé, m., sylvain, a., perez-gauvreau, l., lamarre, é. & rankin s. (2021) rasmussen, knud. inuit literatures 30.5.2021 <https://inuit.uqam.ca/en/person/rasmussen-knud>. 1.6.2021. craciun, a. (2011) writing the disaster: franklin and frankenstein. nineteenth-century literature 65(4) 433–480. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2011.65.4.433 craciun, a. (2012) the franklin mystery. literary review of canada 20 3–5. dobbins, h. a. (2019) nunavut, a creation story. the inuit movement in canada’s newest territory. doctoral dissertation in social and behavioral sciences, syracuse university. <https://surface.syr. edu/etd/1097>. 26.3.2021. eber, d. (2008) encounters on the passage: inuit meet the explorers. university of toronto press, toronto. van eeden, j. (2004) the colonial gaze: imperialism, myths, and south african popular culture. design issues 20(2) 18–33. https://doi.org/10.1162/074793604871266 eschner, k. (2018) tales of the doomed franklin expedition long ignored the inuit side, but “the terror” flips the script. smithsonian magazine 6.4.2018 <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ a r t s c u l t u r e / h e r e s h o w a m c p r o d u c e r s w o r k e d i n u i t f i c t i o n a l i z e d f r a n k l i n e x p e d i t i o n show-180968643/>. 25.3.2021. fanon, f. (2007) black skin, white masks (1952). grove press and atlantic monthly press, new york. fenge, t. (2007) inuit and the nunavut land claims agreement: supporting canada’s arctic sovereignty. policy options 27(6) 84–88. government of canada (2008) prime minister harper offers full apology on behalf of canadians for the indian residential schools system. government of canada/gouvernement du canada 11.6.2008 <https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2008/06/prime-minister-harper-offers-full-apology-behalfcanadians-indian-residential-schools-system.html>. 1.6.2021. government of canada (2010) statement of apology to former students of indian residential schools. government of canada/gouvernement du canada 15.9.2010 <https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/ 1100100015644/1571589171655>. 1.6.2021. government of canada (2020) truth and reconciliation commission of canada. government of canada/gouvernement du canada 15.12.2020 <https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/145012440559 2/1529106060525>. 1.6.2021. inuit tapiriit kanatami (2013) nilliajut: inuit perspectives on security, patriotism and sovereignty. walter and duncan gordon foundation, toronto. inuit tapiriit kanatami (2018) nilliajut 2: inuit perspectives on the northwest passage shipping and marine issues. walter and duncan gordon foundation, toronto. iqqaumavara [i remember/je m’en souviens/] (2021a) john amagoalik – his story 2011. <http://www. iqqaumavara.com/en/john-amagoalik-his-story/>. 1.6.2021. iqqaumavara [i remember/je m’en souviens] (2021b) markoosie patsauq – his story 2011. <http:// www.iqqaumavara.com/en/familles/entrevues/markoosie-patsauq-son-histoire/>. 1.6.2021. iqqaumavara [i remember/je m’en souviens] (2021c) charlie nowkawalk – his story 2011. <http://www. iqqaumavara.com/en/familles/entrevues/charlie-nowkawalk-his-story/>. 1.6.2021. iqqaumavara [i remember/je m’en souviens] (2021d) lazarussie epoo – his story 2011. <http://www. iqqaumavara.com/en/lazarusie-epoo/>. 1.6.2021. james, m. (2008) wrestling with the past: apologies, quasi-apologies and non-apologies in canada. in gibney, m., howard-hassmann, r. e., coicaud, j-m. & steiner, n. (eds.) the age of apology. facing up to the past, 142–153. university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. know indigenous history (2018) the franklin expedition inuit oral history project 13.6.2018 <https://www.knowhistory.ca/resources/history-hub/the-franklin-expedition-inuit-oral-historyproject>. 26.3.2021. la presse canadienne (2010) ottawa présente ses excuses aux inuits exilés dans l’arctique. le devoir 19.8.2010 <https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/294612/ottawa-presente-ses-excusesaux-inuits-exiles-dans-l-arctique>. 1.6.2021. https://theconversation.com/inuit-folklore-kept-alive-story-of-missing-franklin-expedition-to-north-west-passage-31692 https://theconversation.com/inuit-folklore-kept-alive-story-of-missing-franklin-expedition-to-north-west-passage-31692 https://inuit.uqam.ca/en/person/rasmussen-knud https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2011.65.4.433 https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1097 https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1097 https://doi.org/10.1162/074793604871266 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/heres-how-amc-producers-worked-inuit-fictionalized-franklin-expedition-show-180968643/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/heres-how-amc-producers-worked-inuit-fictionalized-franklin-expedition-show-180968643/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/heres-how-amc-producers-worked-inuit-fictionalized-franklin-expedition-show-180968643/ https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2008/06/prime-minister-harper-offers-full-apology-behalf-canadians-indian-residential-schools-system.html https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2008/06/prime-minister-harper-offers-full-apology-behalf-canadians-indian-residential-schools-system.html https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1571589171655 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1571589171655 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525 https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1450124405592/1529106060525 http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/john-amagoalik-his-story/ http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/john-amagoalik-his-story/ http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/familles/entrevues/markoosie-patsauq-son-histoire/ http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/familles/entrevues/markoosie-patsauq-son-histoire/ http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/familles/entrevues/charlie-nowkawalk-his-story/ http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/familles/entrevues/charlie-nowkawalk-his-story/ http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/lazarusie-epoo/ http://www.iqqaumavara.com/en/lazarusie-epoo/ https://www.knowhistory.ca/resources/history-hub/the-franklin-expedition-inuit-oral-history-project https://www.knowhistory.ca/resources/history-hub/the-franklin-expedition-inuit-oral-history-project https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/294612/ottawa-presente-ses-excuses-aux-inuits-exiles-dans-l-arctique https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/canada/294612/ottawa-presente-ses-excuses-aux-inuits-exiles-dans-l-arctique 279fennia 199(2) (2021) marie mossé lewis, j. (2018) empire of sentiment. the death of livingstone and the myth of victorian imperialism. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108182591 lynam, e. (2010) richard hakluyt and his successors. a volume issued to commemorate the centenary of the hakluyt society. the hakluyt society/routledge, london. lynge, a. (2008) taqqat uummammut aqqutaannut takorluukkat apuuffiannut. the veins of the heart to pinnacle of the mind. international polar institute, montreal and hanover. marcus, a. r. (1992) out in the cold: the legacy of canada's inuit relocation experiment in the high arctic. international work group for indigenous affairs, copenhagen. marcus, a. r. (1995) relocating eden: the image and politics of inuit exile in the canadian arctic. arctic visions series. university of new england press, dartmouth, nh. https://doi.org/10.1349/ddlp.772 mccorristine, s. (2013) searching for franklin: a contemporary canadian ghost story. british journal of canadian studies 26(1) 39–47. https://doi.org/10.3828/bjcs.2013.3 mccorristine, s. (2018) the spectral place of the franklin expedition in contemporary culture in mccorristine, s. (ed.) the spectral arctic. a history of dreams and ghosts in polar exploration, 201–233. ucl press, london. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqhsrj mcghee, r. (2005) the last imaginary place. a human history of the arctic world. oxford university press, oxford. mcgrath, m (2006) the long exile: a tale of inuit betrayal and survival in the high arctic. knopf doubleday publishing group, new york. medby, i. a & dittmer j. (2021) from death in the ice to life in the museum: absence, affect and mystery in the arctic. epd: society and space 39(1) 176–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820953859 michelin, o. (2015) for harper, inuit are ‘those people’. a response to harper’s words at the munk debate. ricochet 1.10.2015 <https://ricochet.media/en/629/for-harper-inuit-are-those-people>. 5.6.2020. o’connor, j. (2018) inuit oral historian had 'critical role' in solving mystery of doomed franklin expedition. national post 29.3.2018 <https://nationalpost.com/news/inuit-oral-historian-had-criticalrole-in-solving-mystery-of-doomed-franklin-expedition>. 26.3.2021. palin, m. (2018) erebus. one ship, two epic voyages, and the greatest naval mystery of all time. random house canada, toronto. parks, j. (2010) canada’s arctic sovereignty: resources, climate and conflict. lone pine publishing, edmonton. parks canada (2019) government of canada releases remarkable images of the wreck of hms terror. government of canada news release 28.8.2019 <https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/ news/2019/08/government-of-canada-releases-remarkable-images-of-the-wreck-of-hms-terror. html>. 1.6.2021. pawliw, k., berthold, e. & lasserre, f. (2021) the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin’s lost expedition. fennia 199(1) 9–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98496 petrone, p. (1988) northern voices. inuit writing in english. university of toronto press, toronto, buffalo and london. potter, r. (2019) after 165 years, inuit knowledge leads to franklin’s wrecks. nunatsiaq news 3.4.2019 <https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/after-165-years-inuit-knowledge-leads-to-franklins-wrecks/>. 26.3.2021. querengesser, t. (2013) profile – glen coulthard & the three rs. northern public affairs (december 2013) 2(2) 59–61. quinn duffy, r. (1988) the road to nunavut. the progress of the eastern arctic inuit since the second world war. mcgill-queen’s university press, kingston and montreal. radivojević, i. (2021) utuqaq (27 min.). field of vision 22.4.2021 <https://fieldofvision.org/utuqaq>. 1.6.2021. ryan, k. (2017) inuit knowledge and the franklin expedition exhibition. canadian museum of history/ musée canadien de l’histoire 11.10.2017 <https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/inuit-knowledge-andthe-franklin-expedition-exhibition/>. 25.3.2021. sandler, m. w. (2006) resolute. the epic search for the northwest passage and john franklin, and the discovery of the queen’s ghost ship. sterling publishing, new york and london. tester, f. j. & kulchyski p. (1994) tammarniit (mistakes): inuit relocation in the eastern arctic 1939–63. ubc press, vancouver. the canadian press (2018) project to highlight inuit role in locating doomed franklin expedition. global news 14.2.2018 <https://globalnews.ca/news/4026192/franklin-expedition-inuit-history-parkscanada/>. 25.3.2021. the canadian press (2019) inuit heritage trust and parks canada ink deal on fate of franklin artifacts. ctv news 16.4.2019 <https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/inuit-heritage-trust-and-parks-canadaink-deal-on-fate-of-franklin-artifacts-1.4382582?cache=?clipid=89750>. 25.3.2021. the franklin mystery: life and death in the arctic (2015) the mysteries of the franklin expedition. <https://www.canadianmysteries.ca/sites/franklin/home/homeintro_en.htm>. 25.3.2021. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108182591 https://doi.org/10.1349/ddlp.772 https://doi.org/10.3828/bjcs.2013.3 https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqhsrj https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820953859 https://ricochet.media/en/629/for-harper-inuit-are-those-people https://nationalpost.com/news/inuit-oral-historian-had-critical-role-in-solving-mystery-of-doomed-franklin-expedition https://nationalpost.com/news/inuit-oral-historian-had-critical-role-in-solving-mystery-of-doomed-franklin-expedition https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2019/08/government-of-canada-releases-remarkable-images-of-the-wreck-of-hms-terror.html https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2019/08/government-of-canada-releases-remarkable-images-of-the-wreck-of-hms-terror.html https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2019/08/government-of-canada-releases-remarkable-images-of-the-wreck-of-hms-terror.html https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98496 https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/after-165-years-inuit-knowledge-leads-to-franklins-wrecks/ https://fieldofvision.org/utuqaq https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/inuit-knowledge-and-the-franklin-expedition-exhibition/ https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/inuit-knowledge-and-the-franklin-expedition-exhibition/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4026192/franklin-expedition-inuit-history-parks-canada/ https://globalnews.ca/news/4026192/franklin-expedition-inuit-history-parks-canada/ https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/inuit-heritage-trust-and-parks-canada-ink-deal-on-fate-of-franklin-artifacts-1.4382582?cache=?clipid=89750 https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/canada/inuit-heritage-trust-and-parks-canada-ink-deal-on-fate-of-franklin-artifacts-1.4382582?cache=?clipid=89750 https://www.canadianmysteries.ca/sites/franklin/home/homeintro_en.htm 280 fennia 199(2) (2021)reflections then/hier [the history education network/histoire et education en réseau] (2015) finding franklin: new approaches to teaching canadian history 4.6.2015 <http://thenhier.ca/en/content/findingfranklin-new-approaches-teaching-canadian-history.html>. 25.3.2021. volmers, e. (2018) when franklin disappeared, the inuit vanished along with him: glenbow exhibit. calgary herald 18.10.2018 <https://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/local-arts/reclaiming-thearctic-glenbow-exhibit-explores-the-north-through-the-eyes-of-19th-century-british-empire-and-theinuit>. 30.3.2021. watson, p. (2017) ice ghosts. the epic hunt for the lost franklin expedition. w. w. norton & company, new york and london. weber, b. (2010) inuits délocalisés dans l’arctique : ottawa s’excuse. la presse 18.8.2010 <https://www. lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/politique-canadienne/201008/18/01-4307667-inuits-delocalises-danslarctique-ottawa-sexcuse.php>. 1.6.2021. woodman, d. c. (1991) unravelling the franklin mystery: inuit testimony. mcgill-queen’s university press, montreal and london. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt813wz woodman, d. c. (2016) inuit tales of terror: the location of franklin’s missing ship. rhode island college. <http://w3.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/woodman/inuittales_terror.pdf> youngs, t. (2014) echoes of empire. british library – discovering literature: romantics & victorians 15.5.2014 <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/echoes-of-empire#> 1.6.2021. zellen, b. s. (2008) breaking the ice. from land claims to tribal sovereignty in the arctic. lexington books, lanham, boulder, new york, toronto and plymouth. zellen, b. s. (2009) on thin ice: the inuit, the state, and the challenge of arctic sovereignty. lexington books, lanham, boulder, new york, toronto and plymouth. http://thenhier.ca/en/content/finding-franklin-new-approaches-teaching-canadian-history.html http://thenhier.ca/en/content/finding-franklin-new-approaches-teaching-canadian-history.html https://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/local-arts/reclaiming-the-arctic-glenbow-exhibit-explores-the-north-through-the-eyes-of-19th-century-british-empire-and-the-inuit https://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/local-arts/reclaiming-the-arctic-glenbow-exhibit-explores-the-north-through-the-eyes-of-19th-century-british-empire-and-the-inuit https://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/local-arts/reclaiming-the-arctic-glenbow-exhibit-explores-the-north-through-the-eyes-of-19th-century-british-empire-and-the-inuit https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/politique-canadienne/201008/18/01-4307667-inuits-delocalises-dans-larctique-ottawa-sexcuse.php https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/politique-canadienne/201008/18/01-4307667-inuits-delocalises-dans-larctique-ottawa-sexcuse.php https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/politique/politique-canadienne/201008/18/01-4307667-inuits-delocalises-dans-larctique-ottawa-sexcuse.php https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt813wz http://w3.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/woodman/inuittales_terror.pdf https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/echoes-of-empire# 21849_1_kullman.indd tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the swedish scandes (dalarna province) – holocene and 20th century perspectives leif kullman kullman, leif (2004). tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the swedish scandes (dalarna province) – holocene and 20th century perspectives. fennia 182: 2, pp. 73–94. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. tree-limit and climate evolution at the southern extremity of the swedish scandes have been reconstructed for the entire holocene and for the past century. the main objective was to test the reproducibility of a similar study further north in the swedish scandes. the long-term history relies mainly on radiocarbondated megafossil tree remains preserved in peat and mineral soil. the more recent perspective was analysed from age distributions in the most marginal, extant tree populations. pinus sylvestris (pine) immigrated to the study region already during the late-glacial, 10,500 14c yr bp, when it grew in the summit areas of fi rst deglaciated mountains. the pine tree-limit peaked ca. 9200 14c yr bp, followed by a 345 m gradual descent (summer cooling + land uplift) until about a century ago. presence of tree species assemblages without modern analogs at high elevations during the early-holocene, pinus sylvestris (dominant), betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa, picea abies, larix sibirica, quercus robur and corylus avellana, strengthens the view of a warm and dry summer climate, although with a different seasonal distribution of incoming radiant energy than today. the longterm natural trend of tree-limit retreat and summer cooling was anomalously broken about a century ago. during the 20th century, the pine tree-limit has shifted 140 m uphill, in congruence with instrumentally recorded summer warming by ca. 1 ºc. in a perspective of the entire holocene tree-limit chronology, the modern tree-limit rise (and climate warming) is anomalous for the past 4000–7000 years. except for tree-limit rise, recent warming has contributed to changes in the alpine plant cover, e.g. vanishing snow-bed communities, expansion of deciduous dwarf-shrubs, graminoids, and invasion of exotic and thermophilic plant species. overall, this study has reproduced processes and patterns previously reported further north in the scandes. leif kullman, physical geography, department of ecology and environmental science, umeå university, s-90187 umeå, sweden. e-mail: leif.kullman@eg. umu.se. ms received 03 december 2003. introduction alpine (upper) tree-limits are potential early indicators of the impact of climate change and variability on ecosystems (hustich 1958; kullman 1979, 1997; meshinev et al. 2000; moiseev & shiyatov 2003; penuelas & boada 2003). in quantitative terms, these adjustments vary with topoclimatic conditions (kullman 1979, 2001a). studies in various parts of the world have used historical tree-limits as proxy paleoclimatic indicators at scales of centuries to millennia (e.g. karlén 1976; kullman 1995; wick & tinner 1997; aas & faarlund 1999; eronen et al. 1999; barnett et al. 2001; payette et al. 2002; ali et al. 2003). as a consequence of this climatic sensitivity, paleotree-limit records offer an opportunity to view and evaluate the magnitude and rate of instrumentally recorded climate change over the past 100–150 years in a perspective of the entire holocene (cf. kullman & 74 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman kjällgren 2000; kullman 2003a). this approach provides indications of the possible anomalous nature of twentieth-century climate warming, in relation to increasing atmospheric loads of anthropogenically introduced “greenhouse gases” (ipcc 2001a). moreover, tree-limit history may contribute to a broader general understanding of mechanisms and rates of vegetation adjustments to altered climatic conditions, i.e. a prerequisite for the generation of realistic models concerning vegetation responses to further warming during the rest of the present century. it is generally recognized that altitudinally-precise (m a.s.l.) tree-limit reconstructions are most reliably achieved from megafossil evidence, i.e. radiocarbon-dated trunks, roots, cones, etc., preserved in peat, lake sediments or on open alpine ground recently vacated by glacier ice and snow (e.g. aas & faarlund 1999; payette et al. 2002). these records provide unambiguous documentation and direct dating of local presence of a tree at a specifi c altitude. however, megafossil tree-limit chronologies may display temporal gaps, which represent local absence, preservation failure or inadequate sampling (kullman 1994; jackson & booth 2002). extensive surveys over wide altitudinal ranges for potentially rewarding sampling sites, and an improving skill to fi nd these, can alleviate this “gap-enigma” by bringing together fairly large sample sizes. in this way, kullman and kjällgren (2000) accomplished a regional tree-limit chronology (pinus sylvestris) in a sub-oceanic part of the central swedish scandes. this chronology is nearly coherent at the centennial-millennial scale and displays a virtually unidirectional descent since the early-holocene. in addition, this extensive pursuit for megafossil pines has revealed remains of other tree species and other features of the postglacial arboreal landscape history that have been virtually undetected by pollen stratigraphical studies (kullman 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 2001b, 2001d, 2002a, 2004b). for example, picea abies immigrated to northern sweden at least 7000 years prior to earlier belief, and it is also clear that larix sibirica was native to this region during the early-holocene. these and other analogous discoveries have fundamentally changed general palynological interpretational paradigms concerning immigration and extinction phases within quaternary vegetation history, i.e. threshold values indicative of local presence (cf. aas & faarlund 1999; segerström & von stedingk 2003). the paleoclimatic inferences emerging from the megafossil analyses cited above are mirrored by independent reconstructions from other types of sources in northwestern europe (jensen et al. 2002; marchal et al. 2002; bigler et al. 2003; väliranta et al. 2003). nevertheless, there is reason to test further the wider consistency and validity of the above-mentioned tree-limit record and the methodology on which it relies. in particular, the early postglacial tree immigration history and tree-limit evolution merit further scrutiny in wider regions as existing paleoenvironmental data for that period (both in scandinavia and elsewhere) are sparse and somewhat contradictory (cf. kullman 2002a; payette et al. 2002; ali et al. 2003). with the above objectives, megafossil tree remains were intensively searched for and retrieved over a wide elevational range in a high-mountain region (dalarna province), 120–130 km south of the study site embraced by kullman and kjällgren (2000). here, the wood preservation conditions are different, due to a more continental and drier regional climate, implying reduced peat formation at high elevations, absence of glaciers and scarcity of semi-perennial snow-patches. as a consequence, subfossil tree remains may lie exposed on the ground for more than a thousand years after their death (kullman 1980, 2000). this regional comparison should reveal whether megafossil results are critically dependent on the preservational system. the following items are specifi cally focused for consistency with previous megafossil results further north (see above): (1) deglaciation and fi rst tree immigration already during the lateglacial. (2) dominance of pinus sylvestris in the forest-alpine tundra ecotone during the early holocene. (3) the highest holocene position of the tree-limit shortly prior to 9000 bp. (4) near-linear descent of the pinus sylvestris treelimit over the past ca. 9000 radiocarbon years. (5) tree species assemblages without present-day analogs (the so-called caledonian forest) durfennia 182: 2 (2004) 75tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … ing the early holocene, within the current tree-limit ecotone and with members such as quercus robur, corylus avellana, betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa, betula pendula, picea abies (henceforth “spruce”), pinus sylvestris (henceforth “pine”) and larix sibirica. (6) 20th century tree-limit rise amounting to > 100 m altitudinally and exceeding the highest level of at least the past 4000 radiocarbon years. if these features could be broadly reproduced in the present study area, previous results (e.g. kullman & kjällgren 2000) and the megafossil approach to paleoclimate reconstruction as such would gain in general relevance and credence. study area the study area, located in dalarna province of central sweden (fig. 1) is one of the, phytogeographically and paleoecologically, least known mountain areas in the swedish scandes. the only comprehensive phytogeographic survey is that by samuelsson (1917). except for some older pollenstratigraphical studies, without radiocarbon dating control (lundqvist 1951) there is a lack of precise vegetation history data on these subalpine and alpine landscapes. the present study embraces the most southerly outposts of alpine tundra on high mountains (fells) in the swedish scandes. four of the highest fells, sites 1–4 below, at this extremity of the mountain range are here examined: (1) mt. storvätteshågna (max. 1204 m a.s.l.; 62° 07’n, 12° 27’e), (2) mt. nipfjället (max. 1192 m a.s.l.; 61° 59’n, 12° 51’e), (3) mt. städjan (max. 1131 m a.s.l.; 61° 55’n, 12° 53’e), and (4) mt. barfredhågna (max. 1022 m a.s.l.; 62° 04’n, 12° 25’e). characteristically, the mountains investigated are smoothly rounded and reach a maximum of 300–400 m above the upper limit of continuous forest. the geological substrate is hard quartzite. extensive frost-shattered boulder fi elds cover the peak plateux of most of the highest mountains. at lower elevations, the slopes are clothed with an undifferentiated cover of glacial till. minor peat accumulations exist near and above the tree-limit, and small lakes, ponds and rivulets are scarce due to early melting of a relatively thin snow cover. in contrast to more northerly parts of the scandes, geomorphic processes such as wind erosion and solifl uction are areally relatively insignifi cant (lundqvist 1949). permafrost has not been recorded in this part of the scandes. this is the part of the swedish scandes that is most distant from the sea. thus, the climate is moderately continental in character and effective humidity is low in comparison with scandinavian standards. temperature norms (1961–90) for january, july and the year are –12.0, 13.0 and 1°c, respectively. mean annual precipitation amounts to ca. 700 mm. in general, wind strengths are weaker and snow cover thinner and less persistent than in alpine regions further north (raab & vedin 1995). during the past 100 years, regional standard metefig. 1. location map showing the position of the study sites (1–4) in the “archipelago” of fells (shaded) at the southern fringe of the swedish scandes (dot on the small map). the dashed line indicates the northern boundary of the dalarna province. modifi ed after samuelsson (1917). 76 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman orological records display distinct warming for all seasons. for two meteorological stations in the region with long-term homogenized data, viz. falun (200 km se, 120 m a.s.l.) and storlien/visjö valen (160 km n, 640 m a.s.l.), the centennial trend for the period june–august is +0.9 and +1.1 ºc (p < 0.01), respectively. precipitation has increased steadily throughout the past century (alexandersson 2002) and particularly for the past few decades a tendency for increasing oceanicity is perceivable (kullman 1997; tuomenvirta et al. 2000). the overall climate warming trend hides a large inter-annual scatter and the process was slightly reversed for some decades after the mid-20th century (kullman 1997; alexandersson 2002). where not covered with sterile boulder fi elds, the highest peaks support a graminoid heath vegetation (carex bigelowii, juncus trifi dus, festuca ovina) with variable proportions of reindeer lichens. at lower elevations, sparse, low-growing dwarf-shrub heaths with a bottom layer of reindeer lichens. locally, with deeper snow cover and moister soil, the heath vegetation is lusher, with a substantial admixture of feather mosses. small patches of bog vegetation, exist up to 1000 m a.s.l. in comparison with the rest of the scandes, the alpine fl ora is strikingly poor in species (almquist 1949). the use of the tree-limit as a paleoclimatic indicator necessitates a reasonably narrow and precise defi nition. thus, the tree-limit is henceforth defi ned, for each tree species, as the uppermost elevation (m a.s.l.) of trees with a minimum height of 2 m. ultimately as a consequence of climatic continentality, the study area comprises the highest tree-limits of pinus sylvestris and picea abies in the swedish scandes, 1005 and 1115 m a.s.l., respectively. the “tree-limit ecotone”, i.e. the transition between closed forest and alpine tundra is relatively broad and indistinct, with sparsely scattered trees in a matrix of oligotrophic heath vegetation. a subalpine birch forest belt, that usually makes up most of the tree-limit ecotone in fennoscandia (kullman 1981b) is lacking or only fragmentarily developed. over wide areas, the forest-alpine tundra interface is dominated by pine. natural resources in the tree-limit ecotone have been used by man during the past millennium, e.g. haymaking, animal husbandry, lichen harvesting and some selective tree-felling (kullman 1979; ljung 2000). in addition, reindeer pastoralism by the sami population has affected wide areas over the past few centuries. however, early botanical and phytogeographical explorers explicitly state that they found no indications that man had lowered the upper tree-limits (e.g. kellgren 1893). likewise, more recent regional studies, based on hundreds of investigated sites, indicate that treelimit altitudes (above defi nition) and magnitudes of recent tree-limit shifts do not in general relate to degrees of past human impacts (kullman 1979; kjällgren & kullman 1998). that is not to say, however, that the general structure of the tree-limit ecotone has remained unaltered by direct or indirect human activities. methods holocene tree-limit evolution extensive areas were systematically searched, from the present-day tree-limit and up to the highest mountain peaks, for the presence of preserved megafossil tree remains. the main fi eld-effort was devoted to the highest elevations as the earliest postglacial tree-limit history is likely to be recorded in this vicinity (kullman & kjällgren 2000). particular focus was on small ponds and erosion scars in peat, raw humus and glacial till. in general, these “archives” are physically disturbed or too thin to allow stratigraphical studies. wood samples were taken to the laboratory for species identifi cation and radiocarbon-dating. in most cases, the species could be ascertained from characteristic wood, bark and branching characteristics. some ambiguous specimens, however, were determined by dr. thomas bartholin. where possible, subfossil wood samples were taken close to the pith and the root/ trunk junction. in this way, the dates obtained approximate to the time of establishment, despite the possibility that the tree may have lived for some further centuries. currently, tree-limit pines rarely attain an age of more than 300 years. all samples were closely inspected for possible signs of logging (axe marks) and fi re. radiocarbon-dating was conducted by beta analytic inc., miami, florida. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 77tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … dates are expressed in the text as conventional radiocarbon years before present (bp), “present” = 1950 ad. calibrated ages are given in table 1, according to stuiver et al. (1998). modern tree-limit evolution the extent of altitudinal tree-limit change over the past century was assessed at sites within the same local drainage areas as those where megafossils were sampled. thus, present and past treelimit dynamics are fully compatible with respect to changes in prevailing climatic conditions. present-day tree-limits (as defi ned above) were determined by gps-measurements (accuracy 1 m) and rounded off to the nearest 5 m. the values obtained were compared with tree-limit positions held in the early-20th century, as deduced from tree age spectra (increment corings) in transects running downhill from the modern tree-limit. table 1. radiocarbon dates from the four study sites. no. lab.no site species radiocarbon age (14c yr bp) 2δ calibrated range (yr cal. bp) midpoint of range (yr cal. bp) source 1 beta-178795 1 pine 9230 ± 50 10,540–10,240 10,390 this study 2 beta-172305 1 pine 9070 ± 70 10,380–10,150 10,265 this study 3 beta-172317 1 pine 8500 ± 60 9550–9440 9445 this study 4 beta-158314 1 pine 8380 ± 50 9500–9280 9390 this study 5 beta-169411 1 pine 8050 ± 70 9120–8660 8890 this study 6 beta-172316 1 pine 8040 ± 60 9050–8710 8880 this study 7 beta-158306 1 pine 6770 ± 60 7700–7560 7630 this study 8 beta-169412 1 pine 6040 ± 60 7010–6730 6870 this study 9 beta-158308 1 pine 5930 ± 80 6940–6560 6750 this study 10 beta-178798 1 pine 5840 ± 50 6750–6510 6630 this study 11 beta-179446 1 pine 4440 ± 70 5310–4850 5080 this study 12 beta-179447 1 pine 4360 ± 50 5050–4840 4945 this study 13 beta-158304 1 pine 4310 ± 70 5040–4710 4875 this study 14 beta-180218 1 pine 3440 ± 70 3870–3490 3680 this study 15 beta-158307 1 pine 1590 ± 50 1570–1360 1465 this study 16 beta-169410 2 pine 8050 ± 70 9120–8660 8890 this study 17 beta-173414 2 pine 7720 ± 80 8630–8380 8505 this study 18 beta-57644 2 pine 1190 ± 90 1170–1070 1120 kullman 2000 19 st-12023 2 pine 1155 ± 110 1230–950 1090 kullman 2000 20 beta-158305 3 pine 10,500 ± 60 12,870–11,980 12,425 this study 21 beta-178794 3 pine 8190 ± 60 9300–9010 9155 this study 22 beta-178797 3 pine 7890 ± 60 8990–8550 8770 this study 23 beta-178793 3 pine 6140 ± 100 7260–6750 7005 this study 24 beta-158302 3 pine 4680 ± 50 5580–5310 5445 this study 25 beta-158303 3 pine 4160 ± 80 4660–4440 4550 this study 26 st-396 4 pine 7330 ± 130 8290–7995 8145 lundqvist 1959 27 st-397 4 pine 6840 ± 140 7800–7580 7690 lundqvist 1959 28 st-398 4 pine 6520 ± 170 7560–7330 7745 lundqvist 1959 29 st-5747 4 pine 910 ± 90 975–765 870 kullman 1980 30 st-5750 4 pine 835 ± 90 935–710 825 kullman 1980 31 beta-179449 3 spruce 3970 ± 50 4540–4280 4410 this study 32 beta-108767 4 spruce 8490 ± 70 9530–9380 9455 kullman 2001d 33 beta-178799 1 birch 8360 ± 60 9500–9250 9375 this study 34 beta-179448 1 birch 4440 ± 70 5310–4850 5080 this study 35 beta-178796 4 larch 8160 ± 70 9290–9000 9145 this study 36 beta-158309 1 hazel 8670 ± 40 9720–9540 9630 this study 37 beta-158310 1 oak 8560 ± 40 9560–9500 9530 this study 78 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman these data were collected in the 1970s (kullman 1979, 1981a, 1986). updates at the same sites were carried out in 2003 (tl-2003). this approach provides site-specifi c quantitative data on 20th century positional tree-limit change, i.e. the width of a vertical “advance zone”, to be compared with the direction and magnitude of the total range of holocene tree-limit displacement, as evidenced by the megafossil record. within the same transects, the positions of the species-limits of birch, pine and spruce, were recorded in the mid-1970s (sl1975) and in 2003 (sl-2003). this limit is defi ned as the altitude of the uppermost specimen of a certain tree species, irrespective of size. on the south-facing slope of mt. storvätteshågna (site 1), the present-day age frequency distribution of pine (estimated dates of establishment) was assessed within 20 plots (100 x 100 m) systematically located in a line parallel with the general contours of the slope and separated by 50 m. this sampling comprised the lower part of the advance zone, about 850–860 m a.s.l. all living pines were bored or sawn off (small individuals) as close to the root-stem junction as possible. for larger individuals, i.e. those that were bored, this implies an underestimate of the true age by a few years. therefore, three years were added to compensate for the growth during the fi rst years. the dates are grouped into age-classes with a width of ten years, which should further alleviate the dating inaccuracy. the age structure of a sparse population of newly emerged birch saplings was assessed within fi ve 10 x 10 m quadrats on the summit plateau of site 2 (1150 m a.s.l.). the spacing was based on randomly selected coordinates, located by gps. all individual birch saplings were up-rooted and cut at the lowest point of the stem, which reasonably implies quite accurate dating of germination. in both the pine and birch “age-subprojects”, tree rings were counted in the laboratory under a stereomicroscope. results holocene tree-limit evolution a suite of 37 radiocarbon datings of megafossil tree remains forms the core of this study (tables 1 and 2). of these, 29 are originally reported here. the dominant species in the total record of dated specimens is pine, with spruce, mountain birch, larix sibirica, quercus robur and corylus avellana as only minor constituents. some pine megafossils were unearthed from mineral soil (table 2). presumably, the relatively dry, continental climate has enabled long-term preservation by this medium. the majority of samples, however, derive from open scars in thin peat deposits. from general observations it would appear that the pine remains reported here represent tree-sized specimens, although many were small. there was no evidence of axe-felling. a few pine logs from the past millennium, found slightly above the modern tree-limit, had charred surfaces (table 2). the pine dates are distributed from 10,500 to 900 14c bp (12,400 to 825 cal yr bp), with some gaps discernible, i.e. 7700–6800 14c yr bp, 5800– 4700 14c yr bp and 3400–1600 14c yr bp. plotted against relative altitude, i.e. the tree-limit position in the early-20th century (tl-1915 in table 3), a clear and conspicuous trend towards gradual and consistent altitudinal tree-limit descent emerges for the entire period 9200 14c bp (10,400 cal yr bp) and until a century ago. the total regression amounts to 345 m (fig. 2). calibration to calendar years does not materially change the general fig. 2. radiocarbon dates of megafossil pines, relative to the early-20th century position of the pine tree-limit at the respective site (zero-level). the horizontal line denotes the maximum pine tree-limit advance of 140 m during the past century. 0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 020004000600080001000012000 14c yr bp r el at iv e al tit ud e (m ) fennia 182: 2 (2004) 79tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … table 2. site and sample characteristics of the dates reported in table 1. no. altitude (m a.s.l.) relation to modern tree-limit (m) material dated setting 1 1180 345 wood peat bank at the shore of a small tarn 2 1180 345 wood exposed by erosion at the shore of a small tarn 3 1180 345 wood peat bank by the shore of a small tarn 4 1070 235 wood small spot with peat mounds 5 1035 285 wood small spot with peat mounds 6 940 105 wood eroding mire 7 1080 245 wood small spot with peat mounds 8 1035 200 wood small spot with peat mounds 9 990 155 wood area with peat hummocks dissected by rivulets 10 1010 175 wood area with peat hummocks dissected by rivulets 11 940 105 wood area with peat hummocks dissected by rivulets 12 950 115 wood area with peat hummocks dissected by rivulets 13 1010 175 wood area with peat hummocks dissected by rivulets 14 945 110 wood transition between mire and morainic hummock 15 920 85 wood exposed in wind-swept heath vegetation 16 1160 285 wood thin peat layer by the shore of a small pool 17 1150 275 wood peat bank by the shore of a small tarn 18 990 115 wood exposed in a sparse birch stand on a steep slope 19 975 100 wood exposed on a steep boulder slope 20 1100 235 wood erosion scar in mineral soil 21 1035 170 wood erosion scar in mineral soil 22 1055 190 wood erosion scar in mineral soil 23 1085 220 wood spot with deep raw humus 24 1045 180 wood thin peat layer 25 1015 150 wood thin peat layer 26 940 60 wood “mire” 27 900 20 wood “mire” 28 915 80 wood thin peat layer 29 910 15 wood exposed in sparse birch forest 30 910 15 wood (charred) exposed in dwarf-shrub heath 31 1000 135 wood raw humus underneath a spruce canopy 32 850 –15 large cone humus deposit in a small lake 33 915 80 wood area with peat hummocks dissected by rivulets 34 920 85 wood area with peat hummocks dissected by rivulets 35 915 40 twig + 1 cone peat erosion scar 36 910 75 acorn peat mound eroded by a rivulet 37 910 75 nutshell peat mound eroded by a rivulet outlines of the postglacial tree-limit retreat (not shown). a notable feature (fig. 3) is that pine was present at high elevations during the fi nal phase of the lateglacial (younger dryas stadial), although dating precision is reduced during this specifi c interval due to plateux of constant radiocarbon age (olsson & possnert 1992). until ca. 8500 14c yr bp, pine remains have been recovered exclusively at the highest relative elevations (fig. 2). interestingly, the three uppermost dates derive from a peat bank right at the shore of a small tarn (sw.“santessons tjärn”) just a few meters below the highest peak of the study region (fig. 4). a reiterated narrative among the local population tells that pine logs could be found at the bottom of this small lake (forsslund 1919). stratigraphical investigations by lundqvist (1951) failed to confi rm these stories and it was concluded that pine had never during the postglacial period grown at this eleva80 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman responsible for active peat erosion, which exposes megaand macrofossils. of course, the macrofossils may have been dispersed to this site by birds or wind. however, if not growing at or very close to the sampling site, the probability of deposition at virtually the same spot seems close to zero. moreover, an early pollen stratigraphical study in a small tarn close to the top of this mountain (see above) suggested that these species actually grew in close proximity to this site at this time (lundqvist 1951). two spruces have been dated within the study area, indicating the presence of this species as early as 8500 14c yr bp. the youngest date, 4000 14c yr bp derives from wood fragments preserved quite superfi cially in the thin raw humus beneath the canopy of a still living tree-sized clonal group (tables 1 and 2, fig. 6). slightly below the present-day tree-limits, a small twig and a perfectly preserved cone, identifi ed as larix sibirica, were recovered close to the surface of a wind-erosion scar in a thin peat layer (915 m a.s.l.). these remains lay very close to each other and it appears that the cone has been attached to this specifi c twig. they were radiocarbon-dated as one entity, yielding 8160 14c year bp (tables 1 and 2). modern tree-limit evolution during the period 1915–2003, altitudinal tree-limit rise, i.e. tl-2003 minus tl-1915, was established for pine, spruce and birch at each of the four investigated sites (table 3). the largest shifts, 140 and 135 m, were achieved by pine (fig. 7) and spruce (fig. 8), respectively. in contrast to these species, birch has not migrated upslope at some of the investigated sites (1 and 4), although its maximum upward shift at other sites compares with that of pine and spruce (table 3). long-term stability of birch distribution in certain settings is further confi rmed at sites 1 and 4 as samuelsson (1914, 1917) and kellgren (1893) report the uppermost small tree groups at 845 and 875 m a.s.l., respectively, which exactly matches the modern situation. lack of a positive birch tree-limit response is characteristic of sites that, for topoclimatic reasons (convex relief), display insignifi cant snow retention into fig. 3. megafossil pine, recently exposed by soil creep and erosion in a boulder slope. radiocarbon age was 10,500 ± 60 14c yr bp. site 3, 1100 m a.s.l. (photo leif kullman, 2002). tion. nonetheless, the present study demonstrates that pine was actually present here for at least 1000 years during the earliest part of the holocene. the remarkable transformation of the mountain landscape during the holocene is evident also from the fi nding that by 8000 14c yr bp pine was growing within the extensive and virtually sterile boulder fi elds that currently cover the summit plateau at site 2, almost 300 m above tl-1915. similar to present-day conditions, megafossil tree birches are sparse. only two samples from widely different parts of the holocene were found, viz. ca. 8400 and 4400 14c bp (tables 1 and 2). these originate from positions slightly above the present-day tree-limit. at virtually the same location as that reported for birch, macrofossil remnants of quercus robur (one acorn) and corylus avellana (one nutshell) were recovered within less than 1 m from each other (fig. 5). radiocarbon-dating by ams-technique gave ca. 8600 and 8700 14c yr, respectively. a characteristic feature of this site at present is the great abundance of snow in winter. meltwater from the only late-lying snow patch in the area is fennia 182: 2 (2004) 81tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … fig. 4. upper: remnant of a pine tree, excavated from a peat mound right on the shore of a small tarn and dating 9230 ± 50 14c yr bp. site 1, 1180 m a.s.l. lower: the present-day alpine landscape surrounding the megafossil pine depicted in detail above. (photo leif kullman, 2002). midor late-summer (see below). on leeward slopes, with more long-lasting snow cover and moderate-high soil moisture, the birch tree-limit has responded similarly to other species. to some extent, tree-limit advance by spruce and birch has been accomplished by phenotypical transformation of old-established, climatically suppressed, low-growing krummholz-forms to 82 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman fig. 5. macrofossil quercus robur (left) and corylus avellana (right), recorded in eroding peat within the present-day tree-limit ecotone. ams-dating yielded 8560 ± 40 14c yr bp and 8670 ± 40 14c yr, respectively. site 1, 910 m a.s.l. (photo leif kullman, 2002). fig. 6. buried in the raw humus layer underneath the canopy of this layering spruce, pieces of spruce wood were dated 3970 ± 50 14c yr bp. the main stem died and broke during the cold 1980s and has subsequently been replaced by several secondary, fast-growing sprouts. site 3, 1000 m a.s.l. (photo leif kullman, 2001). table 3. tree-limit positions at the four study sites in the early-20th and early-21st century, tl-1915 and tl-2003, respectively. tl-1915 (m a.s.l.) tl-2003 (m a.s.l.) change 1915–2003 (m) site no. 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 pinus sylvestris 835 875 865 8751 975 1005 990 975 140 130 125 100 picea abies 830 975 980 925 900 1060 1115 975 90 85 135 50 betula pubescens 875 975 905 930 875 1090 10402 930 0 115 55 0 1 this position was reported as 900 m a.s.l. by kullman (1981a). reassessment by gps in 2003 yielded 875 m a.s.l. 2 this position is represented by a young tree, that was killed by a minor boulder scree just a few years ago. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 83tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … fig. 7. upper: the position of the pine tree-limit in the early-20th century (tl-1915) is marked by this tree, ca. 160 years old. site 1, 835 m a.s.l. lower: at the same locality (altitudinal transect) as above, this pine (975 m a.s.l.), ca. 50 years old, denotes the present tree-limit and a treelimit rise by 140 m during the past century. (photo leif kullman, 2003). erect trees. this testifi es to climate change as the principal driver. furthermore, a total lack of pine stumps with axe marks within the advance zone precludes that current tree-limit rise is merely a re-colonization process following ceasing human impact. concerning shifts of species-limits, i.e. the leading front of elevational expansion (sl-2003 minus sl-1975), all species moved 25–165 m upwards into the alpine tundra (table 4). in some cases, the uppermost specimens (e.g. pine at site 3) are large saplings, established some decades ago, that will 84 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman fig. 8. this spruce, which germinated in the late 1930s, represents an uphill tree-limit shift of 135 m over the past 70 years. site 3, 1115 m a.s.l. (photo leif kullman, 2002). table 4. species-limit positions at the four study sites in 1975 (sl-1975) and 2003 (sl-2003), respectively. sl-1975 (m a.s.l.) sl-2003 (m a.s.l.) change 1975–2003 (m) site no. 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 pinus sylvestris 965 1015 1070 980 1000 1175 1070 1015 35 160 0 35 picea abies 915 1060 1115 980 980 1150 1115 1000 65 90 0 20 betula pubescens 875 1140 920 930 900 1185 980 1010 25 45 60 80 attain tree-size in just a few years, given that current trends of rapid height growth are sustained. in other cases, corresponding individuals are minute and very young seedlings. for example, the birch age structure study (n = 57) at site 2 revealed that all sampled seedlings had germinated during the 1990s and early 2000s. their height was 12.6 ± 4.5 cm and in 2003 they were just about to overtop the matrix of vaccinium myrtillus and nardus stricta. irrespective of species, a majority of the individuals currently making up the advance zone, i.e. between tl-1915 and sl-2003, is strikingly vigorous and has increased rapidly in height during the past decade. this has made pine a much more prominent feature in this landscape. however, some older specimens, spruce in particular, still bear signs of heavy defoliation and branch mortality in response to the cold and ecologically stressing years of the 1980s (cf. kullman 1997) (fig. 6). overall, the recovery from that episode has been remarkable. a temporal view of the evolution of the pine tree-limit ecotone is provided by the static age structure analysis conducted in the lower part of the advance zone at site 1 (fig. 9). all currently living individual pines (n = 317) had become established during the course of the 20th and early 21st century. regeneration “pulses” during some earlier centuries may have occurred, although erect trees were obviously not generated. in this dry, continental and “preservation-friendly” climate at least some stumps or logs from such putative episodes should have been preserved until the present day. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 85tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … fig. 9. composite age frequency distribution in 10-year age classes of pine (all sizes) within 20 quadrats (100 x 100 m), located in the lower part of the advance zone. fig. 10. a sparse belt of 4–5 m high pine trees invades the alpine tundra at site 4. (photo leif kullman, 2003). the size of the individual age classes differs substantially, indicating a pronounced episodic mode of reproduction/survival. particularly strong cohorts derive from the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s, 1990s and early 2000s. pine has consistently become established on the earliest snow-free terrain, in sparse vegetation of dwarf-shrubs and reindeer lichens. winter observations indicate that establishment of these pine trees has reduced the depth of the local snow cover by canopy interception, i.e. a positive feedback loop implying more favourable conditions for further recruitment. this manifests as distinct sapling clustering in early snow-free spots around these trees. practically all pines that germinated prior to the 1970s now comply with the minimum tree defi nition, i.e. a height of at least 2 m. the age class 1970–79 is highly variable in that respect. most of the trees in the advance zone have carried large cone crops in recent years. a total of 22 dead saplings (no trees) were found within the plots, which is only ca. 7% of the sampled population. the landscape level outcome of the reproductional pattern outlined above is the emergence of a sparse belt of pine, ca. 7 trees/ha, that now makes up the tree-limit ecotone almost without admixture of other tree species (fig. 10). at some other sites, the situation is somewhat more complex, with a tree-limit ecotone composed variably of pine, birch and spruce. the fl ora and vegetation in the advance zone have changed conspicuously over the past century. relative to older landscape descriptions (kell gren 1893; samuelsson 1917; forsslund 1919; lundqvist 1949), the cover of reindeer lichens (cladina spp., cetraria spp.) has decreased on dry, windy heaths. summer grazing and trampling by steadily growing reindeer herds seems to be the main reason, although increasing climatic oceanicity may also be involved (kullman 1997; öberg 1999). the grass cover (mainly deschampsia fl exuosa), e.g. at site 2, has increased dramatically over the past few 86 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman decades, which may relate to climate warming in conjunction with atmospheric deposition of nitrogen (kullman 2000, 2003b). on 30 july 1734, the swedish naturalist carl von linné noticed and described a late-lying snow bank at the base of the s-facing slope of site 4 (gullander 1980). even today, large amounts of snow accumulate thereabouts and minor avalanches occur regularly. however, surveillance since the early-1970s has not in any year documented snow remaining after late-june. in 1973, sparse snow bed plant communities (e.g. alchemilla alpina, athyrium distentifolium, nardus stricta, polytrichastrum sexangulare) were recorded in permanent plots established in depressions at this site, 890–920 m a.s.l. a re-survey in 2003, revealed that these communities had virtually vanished, being replaced by luxuriant vaccinium myrtillus, accessory vaccinium uliginosum, deschampsia fl exuosa, birch seedlings and common feather mosses. quite surprisingly, saplings of the exotic lupinus polyphyllos were found in this assemblage (site 4, 890 m a.s.l.). the overall impression, corroborated by comparison of past and present colour photographs, is that the landscape has become greener and lusher over the past 20–30 years. a few vigorously growing saplings of betula pendula, i.e. the most warmth-demanding betula species in fennoscandia (holm 1993), previously unknown in the subalpine belt and above ca. 650 m a.s.l., were recently recorded (site 3) close to the birch tree-limit, 935 m a.s.l. moreover, exotic tree species, possibly fugitives from fairly distant plantations in this region, have recently appeared at some of the study sites: pinus contorta (0.6 m tall) grows on a mire within the upper and very sparse birch forest belt (site 4, 850 m a.s.l.). larix sibirica (0.2–0.3 m tall) has been found at site 3 (1060 m a.s.l.) and site 4 (960 m a.s.l.), in both cases in the alpine tundra. discussion as outlined in detail below, the present study has virtually reproduced the tree-limit chronology from a more northern site in the scandes (kullman & kjällgren 2000) and all the six points raised in the introduction. these circumstances lend more general credence to these results and inferences and to the methodological approaches used. a main result is that the holocene tree-limit history does not differ substantially between continental and more oceanic regions of the swedish scandes, indicating a major importance of the thermal macroclimate. holocene tree-limit evolution (points 1–5) this study proves the existence of deglaciated mountain summit terrain and presence of trees, > 350 m above modern tree-limits, already by 10,500 14c yr bp, i.e. shortly prior to the pleistocene–holocene transition. both with respect to deglaciation and tree immigration chronology, this date is substantially earlier than previously inferred (lundqvist 1951; huntley & birks 1983; fredén 2002), and is also consistent with recent discoveries further north in the scandes (kullman & kjällgren 2000; kullman 2002a). this implies that plants responded virtually directly to the postglacial warming and invaded the initial periglacial “desert” with striking rapidity and without substantial migrational lag. the latter circumstance suggests the presence of proximal glacial refugia (cf. kullman 2002a). notably, plants (and animals) fi rst immigrated to the highest mountain peaks (nunataks). since no megafossils have been recovered at relatively low elevations prior to 8500 14c bp, it is reasonable to infer that these peaks stood out as isolated nunataks until ca. 8500 14c yr bp surrounded by residual ice bodies and melt water lakes in the valleys. this date is inferred from the fi rst appearance of subfossil pine remnants at relatively low elevations in the mountain landscape (fig. 2). this mode of deglaciation within this very specifi c area was suggested on geological evidence, although without absolute dating, by mannerfelt (1938). consequently, the subsequent spread of the mountain fl ora in the landscape has been predominantly downslope as the valley ice gradually disintegrated and vanished. after attaining its highest position ca. 9200 14c yr bp, i.e. 350 m above the late-holocene level, the pine tree-limit has retreated with a virtually constant pace to its lowest position throughout the fennia 182: 2 (2004) 87tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … holocene, i.e. in the late-19th century. thus, the areal extent of alpine tundra was minimal for several millennia during the fi rst part of the holocene and reached its all-time maximum about a century ago. in this respect, the current results mimic megafossil inferences further north in the scandes (kullman & kjällgren 2000; kullman 2003a) and at the eurasian boreal forest–arctic tundra transition (velichko et al. 1998). the total holocene tree-limit recession in the study area is about 150 m smaller than reported by kullman and kjällgren (2000) from a region somewhat farther north. reasonably, this should be understood in terms of the relatively lower mountains in the region concerned here, which were forested and even non-ecotonal for the fi rst millennium or so of the holocene. this implies that a contemporary cooling-driven tree-limit descent (kullman & kjällgren 2000) could not materialize in the study area. hypothetically, the scarcity of early-holocene treeless land, suitable for primary colonization of alpine plants, in conjunction with a poor geological substrate and lack of late-lying snow, has contributed to the fl oristic poverty of these mountains. moreover, lack of extensive alpine tundra for several millennia would have precluded the existence of reindeer populations (cf. barth 1996). pine has dominated the retreating tree-limit ecotone throughout the entire holocene, although scattered birches and spruces seem to have been present for most of the time. notably, the megafossil record does not indicate the presence of a common subalpine birch forest belt above the pine tree-limit for any period. in contrast with parts of the scandes with a less continental climate (cf. kullman 1995), the pine stands have not been replaced by subalpine birch woodlands. in light of modern mountain birch ecology (kullman 1981b), these circumstances bear witness to the particularly dry summers and poor snow conditions at high elevations during much of the holocene (see below). there is apparently nothing in the present data to suggest an oceanic climate during the early holocene, as sometimes argued for northernmost fennoscandia (e.g. seppä & hammarlund 2000). contrasting with most pollen-based studies of vegetation history (e.g. huntley & birks 1983; brewer et al. 2002), the present evidence proves an early-holocene presence of tree species currently absent in the region concerned, i.e. larix sibirica, quercus robur and corylus avellana, right at the modern forest-alpine tundra transitions. larix is currently unknown as native to fenno scandia, although it grows well, reproduces and spreads when sown or planted, even quite close to the scandes (see below). quercus and corylus, which are much more thermophilous, have their closest natural occurrences ca. 200 km to the south and 600–700 m lower. a few discoveries of these species as rare macrofossils at high elevations are paralleled by the outcome of similar studies further north in the scandes (kullman 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). adding to this peculiar species composition was spruce, recorded by macroand megafossils, already by 11,000 14c yr bp (kullman 2001d). the existence of these tree species assemblages, without modern analogs, at high mountainous elevations, the so-called “caledonian forest” appears to be a fairly widespread feature in the scandes during the early-holocene. the transformation to a more boreal-like situation was mostly gradual, although the speed increased after ca. 3000 14c yr bp as the pine tree-limit dropped substantially and spruce expanded regionally in abundance from its old-established sites at high elevations (see below). glacio-isostatic land-uplift by ca. 150 m since the early-holocene (fredén 2002) explains to some extent the pan-holocene tree-limit recession by at least 350 m since about 9200 14c yr bp. nevertheless, a major residual fraction of 200 m (350 minus 150 m) of the descent is compatible with models of climate evolution (growing season) driven by insolation changes related to variations in the earth-sun geometry (“milankovitch forcing”) (cohmap members 1988), translating into gradually decreased seasonality, summer cooling and higher humidity. however, the lack of suffi ciently high mountain peaks (see above) precludes any tree-limit based assessment in absolute terms, relative to the present, concerning early-holocene summer temperatures. further indication for an early postglacial, seasonal insolation pattern substantially different from the present is provided by, although seemingly counter-intuitive, documented 88 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman tree growth at the highest elevations during the younger dryas stadial (cf. kullman 2002a). possibly, this was facilitated at certain strictly local leeward sites due to anomalously strong insolation and mild summers. a somewhat analogous situation has been envisaged for southern greenland (björck et al. 2002) and parts of alaska (elias 2001; ager 2003). regional and even local coexistence of larix sibirica, with continental affi nities and thermophilic species such as quercus robur and corylus avellana enhances the impression of a continental, summer warm climate during the early-holocene. however, the unique species composition cautions against making too precise paleoclimatic inferences, particularly in respect of deviant combinations of seasonal insolation and precipitation patterns. nonetheless, the coarse, long-term paleoclimatic inferences displayed above are paralleled in widely different parts of the world, which enhances the contention of an ultimate celestial cause (ritchie et al. 1983; kremenetski et al. 1998; horrocks & ogden 2000; jensen et al. 2002; marchal et al. 2002; makeyev et al. 2003). the low number of sampled megafossils inhibits any defi nite conclusions as to the existence of high-frequency tree-limit and climatic variations. some of the gaps in the long-term record might be artefactual, at least partly, due to inadequate sampling. for example, the trough between ca. 3400 and 1600 14c yr bp may relate to a relatively small sampling effort in the elevational interval 0–100 m above the late-holocene tree-limit position. on the other hand, a plethora of paleoclimatic information from other regions of northwestern europe suggests a severe cooling episode (or episodes) during this period (neoglacial phase) (karlén 1976; gunnarsdóttir 1996; kullman & kjällgren 2000; nesje & dahl 2000; hantemirov & shiyatov 2002; kullman 2003a). most likely therefore, the continuous process of climate-driven tree-limit descent accelerated somewhere in this interval, with profound and lasting consequences for the subalpine/alpine landscape (kullman 2003a). possibly, this episode was not necessarily triggered by distinct summer cooling beyond the long-term trend. the coeval regional mass expansion of spruce within the mountain taiga of central-north sweden (tallantire 1977) is not readily compatible with a pronounced thermal decline. an ecological threshold relating to increasing effective humidity and snowfall appears more likely as the driving force (cf. tallantire 1977; kullman 2001b). nevertheless, it seems safe to infer that the tree-limit did not exceed a relative level of about 100 m during the period concerned, as interpolated between the closest bracketing dates, i.e. 3400 and 1600 14c yr bp (fig. 2). the gap between 5800 and 4700 14c yr bp embraces a period of climatically-induced vegetation restructuring as inferred from various sources (caseldine & matthews 1987; kullman 1995; väliranta et al. 2003). lack of high-altitude megafossils in the record between 7700 and 6800 14c yr bp coincides with a well-recognized episode of glacier expansion and cooling in nw europe (klitgaard-kristensen et al. 1998; nesje & dahl 2001). notably, however, this gap is not particularly distinct in the record by kullman and kjällgren (2000), which might suggest that it represents a climatic excursion of very short duration. modern tree-limit evolution (point 6) long-term cooling and climate stress over much of the holocene, as outlined above, had brought the tree-limit ecotone into a decadent stage by the onset of the 20th century, with insignifi cant regeneration and dominance of dead and dying trees in the most marginal populations. reasonably, this has been the modal situation over much of the holocene. there are several written (kellgren 1891, 1893; forsslund 1919; lundqvist 1949) and photographic (fig. 11) accounts of these conditions from the study area. dendroecological studies further confi rm this situation (kullman 1987, 2001c). in light of the long-term prevalence of this trend in the past and its putative deterministic, celestial mechanism (see above), there would be little (if any) cause to suspect a substantial present-day or near-future reversal (cf. berger & loutre 1994). nevertheless, this is what has actually happened and an anomalous, abrupt and progressive trend break occurred about 100 years ago. a subsequent centennial tree-limit rise by 135–140 m, for all the fennia 182: 2 (2004) 89tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … studied species, matches factual contemporary summer warming by 1.0 ºc (see above), assuming a standard adiabatic lapse rate of –0.6 ºc/100 m. similar magnitudes of recent tree-limit rise in other parts of the scandes (kullman 2001a, 2001c), on the kola peninsula of nw russia (kremenetski et al. 1999), in bulgaria (meshinev et al. 2000) and in western usa (munroe 2003), support further the contention of global climate warming as the ultimate driving force. this link is evident also at a smaller scale. the age structure analysis within the pine tree-limit advance zone reproduces the result of a similar study at site 2 (kullman 2000). both these studies display a distinct episodic pattern, that usually characterizes marginal tree populations limited by heat defi ciency (whipple & dix 1979; kullman 1996). the most distinct decadal peaks and troughs coincide with relatively warm and cold periods, respectively, according to alexandersson (2002). this course of demographic evolution translates into a new biogeographic pattern, i.e. a sparse belt of pine trees, above existing patches of subalpine birch forest, and invading the alpine tundra. it may be hypothesized that this process will accelerate in a positive feedback loop in the future, as the fi rst wave of trees modifi es and improves the local environment and facilitates further establishment and growth. this seems to be a more general mechanism for tree-limit maintenance and patterning (e.g. germino et al. 2002; alftine & malanson 2004). also the general species-limit advance during the past few decades coincides with documented warming, and is paralleled in other parts of fennoscandia (luoto & seppälä 2000; molau & larsson 2000; kullman 2002b, 2003b). the interspecifi c discrepancies in recent response patterns may have a bearing on the future evolution of the tree-limit ecotone. the inability of mountain birch, contrasting particularly with pine, to expand in altitude in dry and snow-poor environments is a well-established fact also in other parts of the scandes (kullman 1979, 1981a). this circumstance raises some doubt as to the longterm predominance of a discrete subalpine birch belt, wherever it exists today, in a future situation of sustained global warming and with reduced amounts of late-lying snow at high elevations. in such a scenario, pine, a decidedly invasive species at high-altitude and nutrient-poor sites (richardson & bond 1991), appears to be particularly successful. the sparse heath birch woodlands in continental regions of fennoscandia would be suited for transformation to montane pine woodlands. however, if the current trends towards increasing climatic oceanicity proceed much further, the situation would become more complex (crawford et al. 2003). the present results demonstrate that certain cold-marginal tree vegetation responds to climatic change over a period of less than 100 years (cf. kullman 1997, 2002b, 2003b). this insight thwarts some sceptical generalizations in that respect (kupfer & cairns 1996), but agrees with other paleoecological and neoecological records (cf. williams et al. 2002; post 2003). all available evidence suggests that the tree-limit for most of the holocene has been in a dynamic equilibrium fig. 11. until about a century ago, and for most of the preceding holocene, the pine tree-limit ecotone has had the character of a veritable “graveyard” for the victims of more or less steady tree-limit recession. site 1, ca. 900 m a.s.l. (photo karl-erik forsslund, 1912. reproduced by permission of dalarnas museum, falun). 90 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman with climate, a situation that may prevail in the future. the realism of model forecasts of rapid and substantial tree-limit advance in the near future in response to sustained global warming (e.g. peters & darling 1985; kellomäki et al. 1997) is, in principle, supported by this empirical study. however, upward shifts will certainly not occur everywhere in the alpine landscape and at the same pace. this relates to the fact that the tree-limit position is controlled by complex interactions of climatic, topographic and biological factors, the relative strength of which varies within the heterogeneous mountain landscape (cf. kullman 1979; kjällgren & kullman 1998; payette et al. 2001). moreover, a warmer but increasingly oceanic climate may counteract tree-limit advance in certain maritime regions (cf. crawford et al. 2003), although not initially in a region with a continental climate. major aspects of the ground cover evolution during the past century, i.e. grass expansion, decline of snow bed vegetation and invasion of exotic plant species, agree with more theoretical predictions concerning vegetation responses to future climate warming, although the mechanisms may be complex (crawford 1997; dukes & mooney 1999; despain 2001). vanishing or profoundly changing snow bed vegetation is reported also from other regions of europe (grabherr 2003; virtanen et al. 2003; kullman 2004a), which underpins fears that this type of alpine vegetation is particularly endangered in a future warmer world (ipcc 2001b). matching maximum 20th century tree-limit rise (140 m) with the entire holocene pine tree-limit chronology (fig. 2) suggests a tentative interpretation that the former process represents the largest and most rapid warming over at least the past 4000 radiocarbon years in the study region. when the relative altitudes in the chronology are adjusted for glacio-isostatic land uplift, i.e. ca. 100 m over the past 7000 years (fredén 2002), it appears that modern tree-limits and associated summer temperatures are anomalous in context of the past 7000 radiocarbon years. this inference is consistent with more extensive megafossil data sets from similar studies farther north in the scandes (kullman & kjällgren 2000; kullman 2003a). also in other parts of the world, an increasing body of paleoclimatic records have provided broadly similar paleoclimatic inferences as those in the present study (e.g. douglas et al 1994; d’arrigo et al. 1996; haeberli & beniston 1998; luckman & kavanagh 2000; thompson 2000; mann & jones 2003; perren et al. 2003). thus, 20th century warming and associated biological consequences in the study area fi t an extra-regional pattern that is beyond the range of expected late-holocene natural variability in the study region. defi nite conclusions in this respect have to await an even more extensive megafossil record. acknowledgements financial support for this study was provided by the swedish research council. i am most grateful to robert m. m. crawford, lena kjällgren and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on the manuscript and to hans alexandersson (swedish meteorological and hydrological institute) for providing unpublished meteorological data. references aas b & t faarlund (1999). macrofossils versus pollen as evidence of the holocene forest development in fennoscandia. ams-rapport 12b, 307–346. ager ta (2003). late quaternary vegetation and climate history of the central bering land bridge from st. michael island, western alaska. quaternary research 60, 19–32. alexandersson h (2002). temperatur och nederbörd i sverige 1860–2001. smhi meteorologi 104, 1–28. alftine k & gp malanson (2004). directional positive feedback and pattern at an alpine tree line. journal of vegetation science 15, 3–12. ali aa, c carcaillet, jl guendon, y quinif, p roiron & jf terral (2003). the early holocene treeline in the southern french alps: new evidence from travertine formations. global ecology & biogeography 12, 411–419. almquist e (1949). dalarnas fl ora i växtgeografi sk belysning. in forsslund kh & k curry-lindahl (eds). natur i dalarna, 55–73. bokförlaget svensk natur, göteborg. barnett c, l dumayne-peaty & ja matthews (2001). holocene climatic change and tree-line response in leirdalen, central jotunheimen, south central norway. review of palaeobotany and palynology 117, 119–137. barth ek (1996). fangstanlegg for rein, gammel virksomhet og tradisjon i rondane. 119 p. stiftelsen for fennia 182: 2 (2004) 91tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … naturforskning og kulturminnesforskning, trondheim. berger a & mf loutre (1994). the climate of the next 100,000 years. colloque geoprospective, paris, april 18–19, 1–9. bigler c, e grahn, i larocque, a jeziorski & r hall (2003). holocene environmental change at lake njulla (999 m a.s.l.), northern sweden: a comparison with four small nearby lakes along an altitudinal gradient. journal of paleolimnology 29, 13–29. björck s, o bennike, p rosén, cs andresen, s bohncke, e kaas & d conley (2002). anomalously mild younger dryas summer conditions in southern greenland. geology 30, 427–430. brewer s, r cheddadi, jl de beaulie & m reille (2002). the spread of deciduous quercus throughout europe since the last glacial period. forest ecology and management 156, 27–48. caseldine cj & ja matthews (1987). podzol development, vegetation change and glacier variations at haugabreen, southern norway. boreas 16, 215– 230. cohmap members (1988). climatic changes over the last 18000 years: observations and model simulations. science 241, 1043–1052. crawford rmm (1997). consequences of climate warming for plants of the northern and polar regions of europe. flora colonia 5/6, 65–78. crawford rmm, ce jeffree & wg rees (2003). paludifi cation and forest retreat in northern oceanic environments. annals of botany 91, 213–226. d’arrigo rd, er cook, gc jacoby & bm buckley (1996). tree-ring records of subantarctic climate over recent centuries to millennia. in dean js, dm meko & tw swetnam (eds). tree rings, environment and humanity, 171–180. university of arizona press, tucson. despain dg (2001). dispersal ecology of lodgepole pine (pinus contorta dougl.) in its native environment as related to swedish forestry. forest ecology and management 141, 59–68. douglas msv, jp smol & w blake jr. (1994). marked post-18th century environmental change in higharctic ecosystems. science 266, 416–419. dukes js & ha mooney (1999). does global change increase the success of biological invaders? trends in ecology and evolution 14, 135–139. elias sa (2001). mutual climatic range reconstructions of seasonal temperatures based on late pleistocene fossil beetle assemblages in eastern beringia. quaternary science reviews 20, 77–91. eronen m, m lindholm, s saastamoinen & p zetterberg (1999). variable holocene climate, treeline dynamics and changes in natural environments in northern finnish lapland. chemosphere: global change science 1, 377–387. forsslund ke (1919). med dalälven från källorna till havet. bok i storån. 135 p. åhlén & åkerlunds förlag, stockholm. fredén c (ed) (2002). geology. national atlas of sweden. 208 p. bra böcker, höganäs. germino mj, wk smith & ac resor (2002). conifer seedling distribution and survival in an alpinetreeline ecotone. plant ecology 162, 157–168. grabherr g (2003). alpine vegetation dynamics and climate change – a synthesis of long-term studies and observations. in nagy l, g grabherr, l körner & dba thompson (eds). alpine biodiversity in europe, 399–409. springer-verlag, berlin. gullander b (1980). linné i dalarna. 202 p. forum, borås. gunnarsdóttir h (1996). holocene vegetation history and forest-limit fl uctuations in smådalen, eastern jotunheimen, south norway. palaeoclimate research 20, 233–255. haeberli w & m beniston (1998). climate change and its impacts on glaciers and permafrost in the alps. ambio 27, 258–269. hantemirov rm & sg shiyatov (2002). a continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in yamal, northwestern siberia. the holocene 12, 717–726. holm so (1993). regeneration of betula pendula and b. pubescens coll above and below the natural altitudinal distribution limit of b. pendula in south-east norway. oecologia montana 2, 1–6. horrocks m & j ogden (2000). evidence for lateglacial and holocene tree-line fl uctuations from pollen diagrams from the subalpine zone of mt hauhungatahi, tongariro national park, new zealand. the holocene 10, 61–73. huntley b & hjb birks (1983). an atlas of past and present pollen maps for europe 0–13 000 years ago. 667 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. hustich i (1958). on the recent expansion of the scotch pine in northern europe. fennia 82, 1–25. ipcc (2001a). climate change 2001. the scientifi c basis. 881 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. ipcc (2001b). climate change 2001. impacts, adaptation & vulnerability. 1032 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. jackson st & rk booth (2002). the role of late holocene climate variability in the expansion of yellow birch in the western great lakes region. diversity and distributions 8, 275–284. jensen c, jgj kuiper & kd vorren (2002). first post-glacial establishment of forest trees: early holocene vegetation and climate dynamics in central troms, north norway. boreas 31, 285–301. karlén w (1976). lacustrine sediments and tree-limit variations as indicators of holocene climatic fl uctuations. geografi ska annaler 58a, 1–34. kellgren ag (1891). de skogbildande trädens utbredning i dalarnes fjälltrakter. botaniska notiser 1891, 185–192. kellgren ag (1893). några observationer öfver trädgränserna i våra sydliga fjälltrakter. öfversigt af kongl. vetenskaps-akademiens förhandlingar 1893, 249–262. kellomäki s, h väisänen & t kolström (1997). model computations on the effects of elevating tempera92 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman ture and atmospheric co 2 on the regeneration of scots pine at the timber line in finland. climatic change 37, 683–708. kjällgren l & l kullman (1998). spatial patterns and structure of the mountain birch tree-limit in the southern swedish scandes – a regional perspective. geografi ska annaler 80a, 1–16. klitgaard-kristensen d, hp sejrup, h hafl idason, s johnsen & m spurk (1998). a regional 8200 cal. yr bp cooling event in northwest europe, induced by fi nal stages of the larentide ice-sheet glaciation. the holocene 13, 165–169. kremenetski c, l sulerzhitsky & r hantemirov (1998). holocene history of the northern range limits of some trees and shrubs in russia. arctic and alpine research 30, 317–333. kremenetski c, t vaschalova & l sulerzhitsky (1999). the holocene vegetation history of the khibiny mountains: implications for the post-glacial expansion of spruce and alder on the kola peninsula, northwestern russia. journal of quaternary science 14, 29–43. kullman l (1979). change and stability in the altitude of the birch tree-limit in the southern swedish scandes. acta phytogeographica suecica 65, 1–121. kullman l (1980). radiocarbon dating of subfossil scots pine (pinus sylvestris l.) in the southern swedish scandes. boreas 9, 101–106 kullman l (1981a). recent tree-limit dynamics of scots pine (pinus sylvestris l.) in the southern swedish scandes. wahlenbergia 8, 1–67. kullman l (1981b). some aspects of the ecology of the scandinavian subalpine birch forest belt. wahlenbergia 7, 99–112. kullman l (1986). recent tree-limit history of picea abies in the southern swedish scandes. canadian journal of forest research 16, 761–771. kullman l (1987). little ice age decline of a cold marginal pinus sylvestris forest in the swedish scandes. new phytologist 106, 567–584. kullman l (1994). palaeoecology of pine (pinus sylvestris) in the swedish scandes and a review of the analysis of subfossil wood. geografi ska annaler 75a, 247–259. kullman l (1995). holocene tree-limit and climate history from the scandes mountains, sweden. ecology 76, 2490–2502. kullman l (1996). structural population dynamics of pine (pinus sylvestris l.) during the past 500 years close to the tree-limit in northern sweden. palaeoclimate research 20, 75–82. kullman l (1997). tree-limit stress and disturbance. a 25 year survey of geoecological change in the scandes mountains of sweden. geografi ska annaler 79a, 139–165. kullman l (1998a). palaeoecological, biogeographical and palaeoclimatological implications of early holocene immigration of larix sibirica into the scandes mountains, sweden. global ecology and biogeography letters 7, 181–188. kullman l (1998b). the occurrence of thermophilous trees in the scandes mountains during the early holocene: evidence for a diverse tree fl ora from macroscopic remains. journal of ecology 89, 421–428. kullman l (1998c). non-analogous tree fl ora in the scandes mountains, sweden, during the early holocene – macrofossil evidence of rapid geographic spread and response to palaeoclimate. boreas 27, 153–161. kullman l (2000). tree-limit rise and recent warming. a geoecological case study from the swedish scandes. norwegian journal of geography 54, 49–59. kullman l (2001a). 20th century climate warming trend and tree-limit rise in the southern scandes of sweden. ambio 30, 72–80. kullman l (2001b). a new approach to postglacial forest history of northern scandinavia. review of megafossil and macrofossil evidence. recent research developments in ecology 1, 1–19. kullman l (2001c). alpine tree-limits responding to 20th century warming trend in the swedish scandes. world resource review 13, 473–491. kullman l (2001d). immigration of picea abies into north-central sweden. new evidence of regional expansion and tree-limit evolution. nordic journal of botany 21, 39–54. kullman l (2002a). boreal tree taxa in the central scandes during the late-glacial: implications for late-quaternary forest history. journal of biogeography 29, 1117–1124. kullman l (2002b). rapid recent range-margin rise of tree and shrub species in the swedish scandes. journal of ecology 90, 68–77. kullman l (2003a). recent reversal of neoglacial climate cooling trend in the swedish scandes as evidenced by mountain birch tree-limit rise. global and planetary change 36, 77–88. kullman l (2003b). förändringar i fjällens växtvärld – effekter av ett varmare klimat. svensk botanisk tidskrift 97, 210–221. kullman l (2004a). the changing face of the alpine world. global change newsletter 57, 12–14. kullman l (2004b). early holocene appearance of mountain birch (betula pubescens ssp. tortuosa) at unprecedented high elevations in the swedish scandes. megafossil evidence exposed by recent snow and ice recession. arctic, antarctic, and alpine research 36, 172–180. kullman l & l kjällgren (2000). a coherent postglacial tree-limit chronology (pinus sylvestris l.) for the swedish scandes. aspects of paleoclimate and “recent warming”, based on megafossil evidence. arctic, antarctic, and alpine research 32, 419–428. kupfer ja & dm cairns (1996). the suitability of montane ecotones as indicators of global climatic change. progress in physical geography 20, 253–272. ljung t (2000). landet bortom tiden. 340 p. länsstyrelsen i dalarnas län, falun. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 93tree-limit landscape evolution at the southern fringe of the … luckman bh & t kavanagh (2000). impact of climate fl uctuations on mountain environments in the canadian rockies. ambio 29, 371–380. lundqvist g (1949). de svenska fjällens natur. 502 p. svenska turistföreningens förlag, stockholm. lundqvist g (1951). beskrivning till jordartskarta över kopparbergs län. sveriges geologiska undersökning ser. ca. 21, 1–201. lundqvist g (1959). c 14-daterade tallstubbar från fjällen. sveriges geologiska undersökning ser. c. 565, 1–21. luoto m & m seppälä (2000). summit peats (“peat cakes”) on the fells of finnish lapland: continental fragments of blanket mires. the holocene 10, 229–241. makeyev vm, dp ponomarev, vv pitulko, gm chernov & dv solovyeva (2003). vegetation and climate of the new siberian islands for the past 15,000 years. arctic, antarctic, and alpine research 35, 56–66. mann me & pd jones (2003). global surface temperatures over the past two millennia. geophysical research letters 30, doi.10.1029/2003gl017814. mannerfelt c m:son (1938). das hervorschmelzen des städjan-berges aus dem absterbenden inlandseis. geologiska föreningens i stockholm förhandlingar 60, 405–422. marchal o, i cacho, tf stocker, jo grimalt, e calvo, b martrat, n shackleton, m vautravers, e cortijo, s van kreveld and others (2002). apparent longterm cooling of the sea surface in the northeast atlantic and mediterranean during the holocene. quaternary science reviews 21, 455–483. meshinev t, i apostolova & e koleva (2000). infl uence of warming on timberline rising: a case study on pinus peuce griseb. in bulgaria. phytocoenologia 30, 431–438. moiseev pa & sg shiyatov (2003). vegetation dynamics at the treeline ecotone in the ural highlands, russia. in nagy l, g grabher, c körner & dba thompson (eds). alpine biodiversity in europe, 423–435. springer-verlag, berlin. molau u & el larsson (2000). seed rain and seed bank along an alpine altitudinal gradient in swedish lapland. canadian journal of botany 78, 728– 747. munroe js (2003). little ice age climate inferred through historical rephotography, northern uinta mountains, u.s.a. arctic, antarctic, and alpine research 35, 489–498. nesje a & so dahl (2000). glaciers and environmental change. 203 p. arnold, london. nesje a & so dahl (2001). the greenland 8200 cal. yr event detected in loss-on-ignition profi les in norwegian lacustrine sediment sequences. journal of quaternary science 16, 155–166. öberg l (1999). trädgränsoch fjällhedsdynamik i sånfjällsområdet (härjedalen) belyst med upprepad fotografering. 62 p. department of biology and environmental sciences, umeå university, umeå. olsson iu & g possnert (1992). the interpretation of 14c measurements on pre-holocene samples. sveriges geologiska undersökning ser. ca. 81, 201–208. payette s, mj fortin & i gamache (2001). the subarctic forest-tundra: the structure of a biome in a changing climate. bioscience 51, 709–718. payette s, m eronen & jjp jasinski (2002). the circumpolar tundra-taiga interface: late pleistocene and holocene changes. ambio special report 12, 15–22. penuelas j & m boada (2003). a global change-induced biome shift in the montseny mountains (ne spain). global change biology 9, 131–140. perren bb, rs bradley & p francus (2003). rapid lacustrine response to recent high arctic warming: a diatom record from sawtooth lake, ellesmere island, nunavut. arctic, antarctic, and alpine research 35, 271–278. peters rl & jd darling (1985). the greenhouse effect and nature reserves. bioscience 35, 707–717. post e (2003). climate-vegetation dynamics in the fast lane. trends in ecology and evolution 18, 551–553. raab b & h vedin (eds) (1995). climate, lakes and rivers. national atlas of sweden. 176 p. bra böcker, höganäs. richardson dm & wj bond (1991). determinants of plant distributions: evidence from pine invasions. the american naturalist 137, 639–668. ritchie jc, lc cwynar & rw spear (1983). evidence from north-west canada for an early holocene milankovitch thermal maximum. nature 305, 126–129. samuelsson g (1914). om dalafjällen. ymer 1914, 331–345. samuelsson g (1917). studien über die vegetation der hochgebirgsgegenden von dalarne. nova acta regiae societatis scientiarum upsaliensis 4: 8, 1–253. segerström u & h von stedingk (2003). earlyholocene spruce, picea abies (l.) karst., in west central sweden as revealed by pollen analysis. the holocene 13, 897–906. seppä h & d hammarlund (2000). pollen-stratigraphical evidence of holocene hydrological change in northern fennoscandia supported by independent isotopic data. journal of paleolimnology 24, 69–79. stuiver m, pj reimer, e bard, jw beck, gs burr, ka hughen, b kromer, g mccormac, j van der plicht & m spurk (1998). intcal 98 radiocarbon age calibrations, 24,000–0 cal bp. radiocarbon 40, 1041–1083. tallantire pa (1977). a further contribution to the problem of the spread of spruce (picea abies l. karst.) in fennoscandia. journal of biogeography 4, 219–227. thompson lg (2000). ice core evidence for climate change in the tropics: implications for our future. quaternary science reviews 19, 19–35. 94 fennia 182: 2 (2004)leif kullman tuomenvirta h, h alexanderson, a prebs, p frich & pø nordli (2000). trends in nordic and arctic temperature extremes and range. journal of climate 13, 977–990. väliranta m, a kaakinen & p kuhry (2003). holocene climate and landscape evolution east of the pechora delta, east-european russian arctic. quaternary research 59, 335–344. velichko aa, cv kremenetski, ok borisova, em zelikson, vp nechaev & h faure (1998). estimates of methane emission during the last 125,000 years in northern eurasia. global and planetary change 16–17, 159–180. virtanen r, a eskelinen & e gaare (2003). long-term changes in alpine plant communities in norway and finland. in nagy l, g grabher, c körner & dba thompson (eds). alpine biodiversity in europe, 411–422. springer-verlag, berlin. whipple sa & rl dix (1979). age structure and successional dynamics of a colorado subalpine forest. american midland naturalist 101, 142–158. wick l & w tinner (1997). vegetation changes and timberline fl uctuations in the central alps as indicators of holocene climatic oscillations. arctic and alpine research 29, 448–458. williams jw, dm post, lc cwynar & af lotter (2002). rapid and widespread vegetation response to past climate change in the north atlantic region. geology 30, 971–974. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /all /binding /left /calgrayprofile (gray gamma 1.8) /calrgbprofile (colormatch rgb) /calcmykprofile (u.s. sheetfed uncoated v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /warning /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel 0 /emitdscwarnings false /endpage -1 /imagememory 1048576 /lockdistillerparams true /maxsubsetpct 99 /optimize true /opm 1 /parsedsccomments true /parsedsccommentsfordocinfo true /preservecopypage true /preserveepsinfo true /preservehalftoneinfo false /preserveopicomments false /preserveoverprintsettings true /startpage 1 /subsetfonts true /transferfunctioninfo /apply /ucrandbginfo /preserve /useprologue false /colorsettingsfile (color management off) /alwaysembed [ true ] /neverembed [ true ] /antialiascolorimages false /downsamplecolorimages true /colorimagedownsampletype /bicubic /colorimageresolution 300 /colorimagedepth -1 /colorimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodecolorimages true /colorimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltercolorimages true /colorimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /coloracsimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /colorimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /jpeg2000coloracsimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /jpeg2000colorimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /antialiasgrayimages false /downsamplegrayimages true /grayimagedownsampletype /bicubic /grayimageresolution 300 /grayimagedepth -1 /grayimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodegrayimages true /grayimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltergrayimages true /grayimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /grayacsimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /grayimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /jpeg2000grayacsimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /jpeg2000grayimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /antialiasmonoimages false /downsamplemonoimages true /monoimagedownsampletype /bicubic /monoimageresolution 1200 /monoimagedepth -1 /monoimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodemonoimages true /monoimagefilter /ccittfaxencode /monoimagedict << /k -1 >> /allowpsxobjects false /pdfx1acheck false /pdfx3check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (none) /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname (http://www.color.org) /pdfxtrapped /unknown /description << /fra <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> /jpn <feff3053306e8a2d5b9a306f30019ad889e350cf5ea6753b50cf3092542b308000200050004400460020658766f830924f5c62103059308b3068304d306b4f7f75283057307e30593002537052376642306e753b8cea3092670059279650306b4fdd306430533068304c3067304d307e305930023053306e8a2d5b9a30674f5c62103057305f00200050004400460020658766f8306f0020004100630072006f0062006100740020304a30883073002000520065006100640065007200200035002e003000204ee5964d30678868793a3067304d307e30593002> /deu <feff00560065007200770065006e00640065006e0020005300690065002000640069006500730065002000450069006e007300740065006c006c0075006e00670065006e0020007a0075006d002000450072007300740065006c006c0065006e00200076006f006e0020005000440046002d0044006f006b0075006d0065006e00740065006e0020006d00690074002000650069006e006500720020006800f60068006500720065006e002000420069006c0064006100750066006c00f600730075006e0067002c00200075006d002000650069006e0065002000760065007200620065007300730065007200740065002000420069006c0064007100750061006c0069007400e400740020007a0075002000650072007a00690065006c0065006e002e00200044006900650020005000440046002d0044006f006b0075006d0065006e007400650020006b00f6006e006e0065006e0020006d006900740020004100630072006f0062006100740020006f0064006500720020006d00690074002000640065006d002000520065006100640065007200200035002e003000200075006e00640020006800f600680065007200200067006500f600660066006e00650074002000770065007200640065006e002e> /ptb <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> /dan <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> /nld <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> /esp <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> /suo <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> /ita <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> /nor <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> /sve <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> /enu <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> >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [1200 1200] /pagesize [595.276 822.047] >> setpagedevice 21258_07_raivo karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of contested and commemorated memory petri j. raivo raivo, petri j. (2004). karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of contested and commemorated memory. fennia 182: 1, pp. 61–72. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the national memory is often signified by means of monuments erected in the landscape, while commemorative historical sites always carry a story from the past, and it is not a matter of indifference how this story is told. karelia, and particularly the areas of the karelian isthmus, the shores of lake ladoga and the karelian borderlands that were ceded to the soviet union as a consequence of the second world war, are places where the commemorative sites have been objects of dispute for the last 60 years. memories of finnish karelia have been erased, transformed and brought to life again: erased and transformed by the post-war masters of the area, for whom it was ideologically most appropriate to replace the finnish narrative with one telling of victory in the great patriotic war and alluding to new sites commemorating the region’s russian history. the more recent revival of finnish memories has been brought about not only by the finns but also by russians who have wished to tell the presentday inhabitants of karelia about the forgotten and suppressed details of its more recent history. petri j. raivo, academy of finland (project 48572), north karelian polytechnic, tourism, catering and domestic services, niskakatu 17, fin-80100 joensuu, finland. e-mail: petri.raivo@ncp.fi. introduction: the latter-day history of peter the great in vyborg there was a move in imperial russia at the beginning of the 20th century to erect statues throughout the empire to commemorate events in its history, one of the most popular topics being the czar peter the great. even the grand duchy of finland, which had been incorporated into the empire from sweden in 1809, was able to participate in this when the principal city in karelia, vyborg (in finnish viipuri), gained such a statue in 1910 to mark the 200th anniversary of its conquest. apart from the timing of this commemoration, the place had also been chosen with great care, as the statue, three and a half metres high, was located on the hill of tervaniemi, from which it could be seen from a prodigious distance. this was the same hill outside the city from which peter the great had watched the progress of the battle for vyborg in his time. thus the statue immediately became not only a symbol of the historical conquest of vyborg and karelia by the russians but also, by virtue of the timing of its placement there, a symbol of the russification of the region that occurred at the beginning of the century (ahto 1979, 77–82). once finland had gained independence in 1917, the monuments of the russification era were obliged to give way to finnish national symbols, and the statue of peter the great was toppled from its pedestal and removed to the inner courtyard of the national museum in helsinki, from where it was returned to the new municipal art museum in vyborg in 1930. meanwhile a new monument in the form of a huge heraldic lion, created by the sculptor gunnar finne, was put up on the same plinth at tervaniemi in 1927 to mark the tenth anniversary of finland’s declaration of independence (ahto 1979, 77–82). the struggle for symbolic hegemony over vyborg and the whole region of karelia did not end there, however. when the city came under rus62 fennia 182: 1 (2004)petri j. raivo sian control once more in march 1940, under the peace of moscow, which brought the winter war of 1939–1940 to an end, the monument was changed yet again. the new masters decimated not only the image of the heraldic finnish lion but also the plinth on which it stood, originally part of the statue of peter the great, and then transported the latter statue back from the art gallery to stand on the original foundation stone. the czar’s visit to his hill was nevertheless a brief one this time, for in the new war that broke out between finland and the soviet union in june 1941, known in finland as the continuation war (1941– 1944) and in russia as the great patriotic war (1941–1945), vyborg was restored into finnish hands in august 1941 and peter was taken down from his place of honour. the statue was still not destroyed, however, for when the russians recaptured the city in 1944 it was safe and ready to be restored to its original place (tikka et al. 2002, 30). peter the great still stands on the hill of tervaniemi today, confirming not only the conquest that he once made but also the victories gained by the red army in karelia and its principal city. the colourful history of the statue of peter the great serves as a concrete illustration of the symbolic contest between the finns and russians over the past in karelia and the resulting cultural traditions and memories, a discourse that reflects both old battles that took place centuries ago and the events of the second world war and the subsequent changes in the national boundaries. the area known as karelia is a historical territory situated in the border region between these two countries, and may be divided on the grounds of its cultural history into western, or finnish karelia, and eastern, or russian karelia. finnish karelia as a historical entity comprises the karelian isthmus, lying between the gulf of finland, lake ladoga and lake saimaa, the north-western and northern shores of lake ladoga itself, including the area known as the borderlands, and northern karelia, which still belongs to finland today. russian karelia, on the other hand, has traditionally consisted of the viena and olonets regions lying between the white sea, lake onega, the river svir and lake ladoga. karelia has been a contested territory throughout its history, and the frontier has been moved either eastwards or westwards time after time. it has been divided between sweden and russia, then between finland and the soviet union, and today between finland and russia. despite the fact that this area has never totally belonged to finland, the karelian heritage has been represented for more than a hundred years as a constant part of the finnish national imagery (paasi & raivo 1998). the emergence of the karelian territorial myth can be linked to the rise of nationalism and a nationalistic culture in nineteenth century finland, then an autonomous grand duchy of russia. an especially strong boost was given to this process by the publication of the kalevala, the finnish national epic, the folk ballads contained in which were collected in karelia. at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the karelian culture in general and the karelian landscape in particular were the main themes in the thinking of the national romantic movement of finnish artists and intellectuals, which was often referred to as karelianism (raivo 2002). finland’s gaining of independence in 1917 and the subsequent treaty of tartu signed with soviet russia confirmed western karelia as a part of finland, in accordance with the frontier defined by the treaty of stolbova (1607). the second world war altered this situation, however, for after the winter war finland was forced to cede considerable parts of western karelia to the soviet union in 1940. these were recaptured in the course of the continuation war that began in 1941, during which time the finns occupied large areas of eastern karelia as well, but when the war ended in 1944 all these areas had to be relinquished once more, so that the net loss during the second world war corresponded to about 10% of finland’s pre-war territory and included some areas in lapland and most of finnish karelia. this also meant that 420,000 finns had to leave their homes in the ceded areas (laitinen 1995, 86). the parts of karelia that remained in finland after the war were formed into the provinces of southern karelia and northern karelia, while of the areas ceded to russia, the karelian isthmus now belongs administratively to the leningrad region and the surroundings of lake ladoga together with the historical russian karelia to the karelian republic. i will consider in this article the constitution of the national memory in karelia in terms of places and landscapes. the purpose above all is to examine the processes by which the memories and traditions associated with the ceded areas of karelia have been preserved, destroyed or regenerated during the time since the second world war. fennia 182: 1 (2004) 63karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of… one crucial question to be asked throughout is whose narrative a landscape can recount and how. special emphasis will be placed upon the geographical dimension of collective memory, i.e. the concept of loci memoriae. the empirical part of the work is divided into two chronological units, concentrating first on the processes by which the new soviet authorities set about systematically stripping the places and landscapes of the ceded areas of their finnish cultural history and producing a new, russian past for them, and secondly on the ways in which the finnish government and citizens’ organizations have attempted in recent times to restore, re-build and commemorate monuments connected with the finnish-karelian past of these areas. particular attention will be paid to the significance of monuments as part of the collective memory of the region, reflecting on the one hand the custom in the soviet union and modern russia of remembering the great patriotic war as a victory over fascism and on the other hand the desire of the finns to repair the war graves and place monuments at the old battlefields to commemorate those who gave their lives for the preservation of national independence. loci memoriae: places and landscapes of collective memory public monuments, and particularly those devoted to wars and conflicts, have been topics of increasing interest among human geographers in recent times, being regarded as pictorial representations of national sentiments, myths carved in stone or cast in metal which serve to construct and maintain narratives of nationalism, identity and community. in other words, the study of monuments and commemorative sites can give us access to the manners and processes through which nationalist discourses are articulated (till 1999, 252). human geographers have been especially eager to analyse war memorials in this sense, in order to understand the socio-spatial relations between a place and its political significance, and above all the spatial scale on which the cultural identity depicted by a memorial is constructed as a part of the local, regional and national narratives and of the nation’s memory (withers 2000, 521–522). the recalling of past events is by nature a social function, in which the individual’s own memory is linked to, and in part adapted to, the common memory and identity of a larger social group, a family, local community or nation. but the collective memory is not a static store or bank of the memories of the members of the community concerned, but rather an active process which weaves together events of the past and memories of these events, within the framework of which memories, stories and myths concerning the past are created, produced and renewed over and over again in the present (see edensor 1997, 175; osborne 1998, 433; till 1999, 254–255). since the purpose of such a collective memory is to reinforce group identity, it contains memories of past events that fit in with the group’s common narrative of the past. a parallel relation exists between identity and memory, which are interdependent, socially constructed representations of reality. in other words, no collective memory or identity that alludes to the past and gains its strength from the past can exist without social relations in the present, including interpretations of history and policies regarding how these interpretations should be put forward (gillis 1994, 3–5). also, memory and identity almost always have a geographical dimension. the individual, group, community, or nation will remember events, narratives and myths that concern it by binding these to specific places and points in time (foote 1997, 33). memories are revived not only by the physical features of places and landscapes that are linked with the past, but also by placenames and the narratives and meanings associated with them. it is indeed justifiable to speak of a specifically geographical memory, a form of collective, public memory that has acquired a spatial dimension (hague & mercer 1988, 105–107). the french historian pierre nora (1996) employs the term lieu(x) de mémoire, or the latin equivalent loci memoriae, in this connection, although extending the notion somewhat to include: 1) geographical places, 2) historical figures, 3) monuments and buildings, 4) works of art and literature, and 5) emblems, symbols and rituals, while the british scholar simon schama (1996) speaks of the memory of a landscape, referring to the meanings associated with the past and its traditions and history that a geographical space can acquire. in such cases a powerful bond exists between a geographical space and a memory of the past, which is thereby manifested materially, symbolically and functionally. its manifestation is 64 fennia 182: 1 (2004)petri j. raivo material in the sense that it is physically and concretely present, as a visible trace in the landscape or as a spot identifiable as the location of a historical happening, the existence of which renders the memory real, visible and tangible, in the present day. it is also symbolic in the sense that the location has acquired cultural meanings such as national or local values on the grounds of which people wish to remember it, and functional in the sense that there exist rituals, functions and ceremonies by which the memories of the material and symbolic places of the past are perpetuated. the national memory is often marked physically by means of monuments, and the places identified in this way, on historical grounds, constitute a kind of map or narrative of the continuous history of the nation from past to present engraved on the landscape (gruffudd 1995, 60). historical monuments and the rituals associated with them form an important part of the nation’s collective memory and traditions, and serve as places that bind the members of the community to the past of their nation. it is the socially active and constitutive role of memory that endows events in the past with significance for the present (withers 1996, 325). thus a nation’s collective memory may refer back to the past in such a way that it effectively becomes a part of the present, or at least an element of the past that has been revived and interpreted in the present. examples of representations of the past in the present and places associated with such memories include days that commemorate historical events, old buildings, monuments, folk customs, traditional handicrafts, objects exhibited in museums and historical places and landscapes (wright 1985, 145–146). in the landscape of memory it is not so important what precisely happened; more important is what can be remembered and what people want to remember. the meanings acquired by places from the past and the historical interpretations associated with these do not form of their own accord but are constantly being produced, confirmed and projected. in spite of their historical dimension, the essence of these places and landscapes lies in the fact that they are bound to the present. they are with us here and now and the aspects of the past that are associated with them are interpreted via the present. thus a monument, for example, tells us more about the history of remembrance of the past than about the event that it is intended to commemorate. the post-war russification of karelia there were two wars on the isthmus, in which many a contingent of troops and many a commander, officer or general performed with distinction, and we should give them all credit for that. we should set out not from the standpoint of simply translating names from finnish into russian, but we are obliged to record the battle for the karelian isthmus for posterity as a victory in the great patriotic war, and to acknowledge that the isthmus is an inseparable part of the leningrad region and the city of leningrad itself. (excerpt from the shorthand transcript of a speech by comrade bodayev at a meeting of the executive committee of the council for the leningrad region on 10th february 1948, quoted by tikka et al. 2002, 46.) the area of finnish karelia that had to be evacuated at the end of the war and ceded to the soviet union was empty, a void. more that 400,000 inhabitants had been transferred to the remaining part of finland. they were gone, but their cultural landscape persisted. although war had led to the destruction of a large proportion of the finnish buildings in those areas that had been the scene of hostilities in 1939–1940 and in 1941 and 1944, there were many places where no fighting had occurred that were more or less untouched. it was easy for the soviet authorities to attract new inhabitants, as much of russia otherwise had been devastated during the war, whereas large tracts of karelia had survived. not all the people came voluntarily, however, as many were forced to move to the area. the new masters of the ceded area had no respect for visible elements in the landscape that alluded to its finnish past, and it may be said that those features of the finnish village landscapes that had survived the war were eventually destroyed by the subsequent changes that took place in the social order, spurred on by the new ideology and its desire to erase all traces of the finnish history of the area and the associated loci memoriae. particularly harsh treatment was meted out to places of significance for the history of finnish settlement or cultural identity. the systematic destruction of everything in karelia that spoke of the area’s finnish past began just before the conclusion of the treaty of paris between finland and the soviet union in 1947 and the signing of the treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance in 1948. it was in these agreements that the boundary changes were officially ratified and clear targets were laid fennia 182: 1 (2004) 65karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of… down for “an appropriate governmental structure and cultural development” in the areas of karelia, which meant in practice a tight commitment to the soviet union and identification with its aims and notions of history. at the same time, emphasis began to be placed on the nature of karelia as an integral part of the soviet territory, on the grounds of both the russian aspects of its history and the victories achieved by the red army there. every opportunity was taken to destroy and deface the physical, symbolic and ritual loci memoriae of the area’s finnish past, especially its cemeteries and historical monuments, and to install russian monuments and placenames in their place. the erasure of former memories from the landscape in conquered areas was an overt policy in the stalinist era, representing a forcible implementation of the desired interpretation of history for the purposes of achieving a socialization and russification of the cultural history of karelia. placenames the russification of the history of the area began with manipulation of its geographical memory, i.e. its set of placenames. at first the names on signposts and maps were rewritten in cyrillic script, but in 1948 an order was issued from above that the names should be systematically changed for suitable russian ones (tikka et al. 2002, 45). thus the finnish names were wiped out on the karelian isthmus in 1948 and 1949, under a decree of the supreme soviet that declared them to be “unnecessary, impracticable and detrimental”. elsewhere in karelia, however, the original names were preserved or adapted to a russian form of pronunciation. the reason for this discrepancy may well have been that the isthmus belonged to the administrative region and military district of leningrad, so that the finnish placenames would have been an embarrassing reminder of a quite different history, whereas the borderlands and the surroundings of lake ladoga belonged administratively to the karelian republic, so that the finnish and karelian placenames formed a more nature part of its new identity. placenames are an important part of the geographical memory of an area, and names, places and structures that incorporate a historical memory form excellent examples of intersections between ideological structures and everyday spatial structures. their power lies in their ability to fix history as an inseparable element of reality that is constantly being construed, experienced and perceived through the routines of everyday life. it is through placenames that history is woven into a self-evident, unproblematic part of our everyday lives (azaryahu 1996, 321). the decision to exchange the placenames for russian ones served two ideological ends. firstly it enabled emphasis to be laid on the construction of socialism and the victories of the red army, by allowing new names to be given to places in accordance with these themes, and secondly it helped people to forget, or at least neutralize, the finnish history and cultural traditions of the area, by exchanging the finnish names for typical russian ones, which described natural forms of the land or the locations of places (tikka et al. 2002, 9). the names were changed remarkably quickly, especially in the towns, many of the old names being replaced by ones referring to the heroes of socialism, so that practically every town in karelia had streets named after karl marx, lenin, kirov or kalinin, and the victorious red army was commemorated with numerous streets and squares (tikka et al. 2002, 10). the placenames that commemorated heroes and events served in effect to bind the landscape to the immediate past and its myths, and at the same time the past, as remembered and desired, was embodied in the physical environment, as it were, so that the imagined “natural” state of existence of these thing was confirmed (azaryahu 1996, 319–320). thus the changes of name in karelia served to convince the local people gradually that these areas were age-old russian territories. the memory of the great patriotic war it was also important for the new masters of karelia to create memorials and monuments dedicated to events in the russian history of the newly captured area, the construction of socialism and the victories of the red army, and these similarly began to spring up quickly, as soon as the hostilities had come to an end. the first priority was to find sites linked to the russian cultural history of the area, one such candidate being the villa that had belonged to the artist ilya repin at kuokkala, at the eastern end of the isthmus, which had in fact already been made into a museum by the finns, while another one that quickly came to hand was the statue of peter the great in vyborg, as discussed above. some amusing incidents also 66 fennia 182: 1 (2004)petri j. raivo took place in the course of destroying all memories of finnish connections and searching for russian ones. one ancient symbol of finnish culture, the statue of the legendary bard petri shemeikka in the town of sortavala in the present-day karelian republic, was allowed to remain because the local leaders and public employees were not sure whether this hero of the kalevala ballads might not have been a proletarian originally (tikka et al. 2002, 10–11). a new contribution to the karelian landscape was provided by the innumerable memorials to the red army’s victories and to those killed in action. the second world war and related events have done much to shape the collective memory of the former soviet union and modern-day russia, and there can scarcely be any other country that was involved in that war where the myth of war experiences and the associated cult of those who fell in the course of the fighting has lived on so vividly as in the soviet union (mosse 1990, 213). the whole post-war national identity was founded on the myth of the great patriotic war, in which the soviet people, hardened by their sufferings, succeeded in crushing fascism. one comes across this myth and the monumental narrative of it that is carved into the landscape at every turn when visiting russia, for the anti-fascist monuments, the colossal statues of liberators that dominate the towns and the eternal flames in the cemeteries that commemorate those who died in battle are loci memoriae that recur throughout the country. the day of victory, 9th may, is still the most popular of all public holidays after new year’s day, even in modern russia (forest & johnson 2002, 524–538). the soviet union had its own good reasons for commemorating the great patriotic war and the victims of it, just as russia has today, for the soviet union did indeed suffer from the ravages of that war more seriously than any other participating country, and there is much truth in the claims that it fought a solitary battle against fascism. the allies’ victory in europe was determined and sealed very largely by the massive operations on the eastern front, in which it was the soviet union that dealt the blows and the soviet union that received the worst blows. but in spite of these solid facts, the preservation of the memory of the second world war in the soviet union is a textbook example of the “invention of tradition” (see hobsbawm & ranger 1983), a process in which the past is subjugated to the exigencies and objectives of the present by ritualizing its memory and purging it of all embarrassing discords. the cult of the second world war in the soviet union and modern russia has been a conscious attempt to graft meanings onto the present by exploiting a reserve of sufferings accumulated in the past. the outcome, however, is that the memorials to this carefully filtered tradition are as much symbols of oblivion as symbols of memory. it is obvious that they commemorate only those elements of the past that it is felt desirable to commemorate. as far as the soviet narrative of the second world war is concerned, merely the dates on the monuments serve to reveal a lapse of memory, as they begin only in 1941, when germany invaded the soviet union, conveniently ignoring the period from 1939 onwards when the red army invaded eastern poland and attacked finland. it is evident that the purpose of war memorials in soviet times was to help people to forget and not to remember. apart from the incursions into poland and finland, they served equally well to divert attention away from the stalinist oppression and purges, which did much to crush the country’s military and moral backbone. by remaining silent about all this, the memorials have served in a way as a defence for the sacrifices and acts of terrorism, which did not by any means begin in 1941 but were prevalent from 1929 onwards (ignatieff 1984, 158–160). the memorial culture of the great patriotic war made its appearance in karelia in the form of rapidly improvised monuments erected at scenes of battles and the mass graves provided for men of the red army, these monuments often being fashioned out of old gravestones and memorials from finnish cemeteries (tikka et al. 2002, 13). later official war memorials began to be set up in the villages and on the collective farms. in karelia, too, the russian war memorials, with only a few exceptions, apply only to the years 1941–1945, i.e. to the great patriotic war, in which finland was looked on as the “usurper of karelia”, an ally of germany and an invader of the soviet union, while the latter was portrayed as the defender of its karelian territories. the winter war, in which the situation was quite the reverse of this, and which provides the key for understanding the role of finland in the second world war as a whole, is entirely ignored. no other interpretation was ever put forward, certainly not in soviet times. no accurate figures are available on the number of monuments to the great patriotic war fennia 182: 1 (2004) 67karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of… to be found at present in the ceded areas of karelia, but the ministry of culture for the karelian republic reports that there are altogether 415 officially registered monuments located at sites of historical events or war graves in its territory, of which a large proportion, 337, mark mass graves of russian soldiers. the others include monuments marking historical frontlines or scenes of battles, and some that were erected to commemorate distinguished contingents of troops or soviet heroes. in addition, ministry of culture inspectors estimate that there are at least thirty memorials located in villages or on collective farms that are not documented in the official registers (barbashina 2003). no corresponding figures are available at all for the karelian isthmus, which belongs to the leningrad region, but it is probable that the area contains well over a hundred such monuments. it may thus be roughly estimated that some 650 memorials to the great patriotic war were erected in karelia in the post-war period, a large proportion of which were concentrated in the former finnish karelia. the lost karelia: finnish memories and their perpetuation in finland the outcome of the second world war altered the spatial dimensions of the karelian myth once again, leaving images of the ceded areas, of distant nostalgic sites and landscapes, in the collective memory of the finnish evacuees (raivo 2002). the concept arose of a lost, forfeited karelia that no one wished to forget but for which all notions of time and space came to a standstill at the moment of evacuation. the remembrance of everything that was lost has been strengthened with books of photographs, local histories, maps, books of recollections, other publications concerned with local traditions and a wide selection of factual and fictional writing, all of which have been produced prolifically over the last 60 years. the karelians have maintained their identity and their association with their home areas through numerous local societies and organizations, including the national karelian association, founded in 1940. this identity and the people’s nostalgic attachment to their lost homes have also featured prominently in annual summer gatherings of karelians and of families from specific areas or villages, and the same identity has been maintained and emphasized through the use of national costumes, the preparation of traditional foods and the propagation of karelian songs, games and folk dances. various symbols and commemorative objects such as maps, coats of arms, flags and standards that refer to the old political and administrative divisions of karelia have remained in use, the most conspicuous symbol of all being the red and black coat of arms of karelia itself, which depicts a western sword and an eastern scimitar clashing together (raninen 1995). the bitter blow of losing karelia and the nostalgic sense of a distant time and place that remained were perhaps relieved somewhat by the fact that it was not even possible to visit the ceded areas, for the majority of russian karelia and the leningrad region were closed to foreigners until late in the 1980s. it was only under the influence of glasnost around 1989–1990 that the border began to be opened and travel to both the karelian republic and the karelian isthmus, in the leningrad region, became possible. the majority of the visitors in the early days were indeed karelians returning to see their former homes or those of their parents or grandparents, for the first time after almost 50 years, although admittedly there were also some speculative tourists attracted merely by cheap petrol, alcoholic drinks and cigarettes available there on account of the low standard of living in russia. total border crossings by passengers rose from 0.96 million in 1990 to 4.1 million by 1996, while the numbers of russian travelling to finland also increased from 1994 onwards to reach almost two million in 1997 (paasi & raivo 1998). lost homes, desecrated churches and unidentifiable graves the opening of the border soon made it clear to the visitors that there was practically nothing at all left of the old finnish karelia that they had cherished in their imagination for almost 60 years, and that the places that they remembered, their former homes and the churches, monuments and graves, had disappeared almost entirely. the few fragments that were still to be seen were badly neglected or had simply been overlooked completely by the new masters of the area. the people were horrified not only at the destruction of their own homes but also at the fate of their local churches and cemeteries. altogether 57 cemeteries belonging to the parishes of the ceded areas had remained on the oth68 fennia 182: 1 (2004)petri j. raivo er side of the new boundary defined in the treaty of moscow in 1944, and it had been possible to remember those buried there only through commemorative stones erected in the evacuees’ new places of residence. now it transpired that the new inhabitants of karelia had treated the true places of memorial badly. some of the old churches and cemeteries had been used for quite different purposes, and many had been quite deliberately desecrated to a greater or lesser extent. thus, by the early 1990s, there was nothing left of the majority of the old parish churches and cemeteries other than a forested mound where the church had been, perhaps with the old foundations still visible, and next to it a virtually unrecognisable area that had been the cemetery (koponen 1999, 7). almost everywhere the gravestones and memorial stones had been knocked over, broken or taken away for other use, for monuments to the red army, the foundations of buildings or the supports of bridges. in some places the old cemeteries were still in use, but in many instances they had deliberately been taken over for some other purpose, as sites for roads, streets or sewerage systems or for the grazing of cattle. some cemeteries have even been incorporated into military barracks nowadays and are used as football pitches or parking places for tanks (lahikainen 1993; tuomisto 1998, 301; hakala & lipponen 1999). in many places the graves themselves had been opened in the hope of finding money or jewellery buried in them, and this habit appears to be continuing nowadays. soon after the first visitors had returned, voluntary groups of karelians and their relatives began to arrive to clear and renovate the areas of the old churches and cemeteries and put up memorial stones in the old places. although the various karelian societies and organizations had no concerted plans for this, they appear to have carried the work out in more or less the same order everywhere. they usually concentrated first on restoring the war graves and erecting a new war memorial, after which they cleared the ruins or site of the church and put up a memorial there, and thirdly they set about renovating and tidying the civilian parts of the cemeteries and their gravestones (koponen 1999, 8). the work of tending the cemeteries and churchyards was difficult at first, and in many places it met with opposition from the local authorities. the situation altered only after finland and russia had concluded an agreement in 1992 for the honouring of the memory of the finnish soldiers and of the russian soldiers who had been killed in finland (hakala & lipponen 1999, 5). this obliges both parties to respect the graves and memorials of those who died on alien soil in the war and to permit relatives to visit these graves. the outcome in finland has been that the ministry of education has granted sums of money to local karelian societies for this purpose since 1992, primarily for the renovation and management of war graves and the erecting of memorials (koponen 1999, 8). apart for the official monuments financed by the finnish government, the local karelian societies have provided more than 60 memorial stones, mostly beside the war graves in the cemeteries of their former towns and villages. this means that the ceded areas of karelia now possess about 80 memorials altogether that were erected between 1991 and 1999 to honour the memory of past generations and tell the present inhabitants of the finnish aspects of the region’s history. bearing in mind that more than 7600 soldiers who died in the war were buried in the cemeteries of the karelian isthmus, the lake ladoga region and the borderlands in 1941–1944, it is understandable that these war graves should be especially important loci memoriae for the finns and should constitute the most visible aspect of the nation’s collective memory of the second world war. some 93,000 finns died in the wars that took place between 1939 and 1945 and more than 200,000 were injured, which are exceptionally high figures when one remembers that the total population at that time was well under five million. altogether some 83,000 persons killed in action during the wars are buried in 622 cemeteries in present-day finland (tuomisto 1998, 276). unlike most other countries in europe, the experience of war which established finland’s manner of commemorating those killed in action was not the first world war but the civil war of 1918, the idea that the bodies of the fallen should be transported home and buried in a separate area of war graves within their parish cemetery having originated with the victorious white faction. the same tradition was then pursued during the winter war, but with the distinction that it now applied to the whole population and not just to a selected few. indeed the notion that the whole nation was united in arms against the external enemy is one essential aspect of the memory of fennia 182: 1 (2004) 69karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of… the second world war in finland, and the solid rows of crosses and stones are a physical manifestation of this (raivo 2000). these war graves have now become substantial locations of collective memory for the finnish people, of the kind that might be referred to as “memoryscapes”, containing as they do historical strata that cover both the events of 1918 and those of 1939–1945. especially in the case of the memorials erected in the ceded areas of karelia, all these periods in time are comprehended within the same national narrative. in earlier days memories of the civil war were often controversial, but sufficient time has evidently now elapsed for these to be integrated into the general military history of the independence period and the associated memories of the nation’s will to defend itself. one of the old areas of war graves that has now been renovated is located in the old cemetery of ihantala close to vyborg, not far from the finnish border. before the second world war ihantala belonged to the rural district of vyborg, which contained 71 villages and had a population of about 48,000 persons at its peak (jaatinen 1997, 9). although the rural parish of vyborg had traditions going back several hundred years, the history of ihantala as an independent parish was a short one. it was formed only in 1926 and gained a church of its own in 1927. the church, on its hill, survived the winter war undamaged, but was demolished by the russians when peace was declared. ihantala was recaptured by the finns during the continuation war, however, and an area of war graves was established in its cemetery in 1943. this area with its white crosses was completely destroyed a year later, when a fierce battle was waged in the area in summer 1944 and the cemetery itself became part of the battlefield, with trenches and dugouts (koponen 1999, 210). after the war it was used for grazing livestock (tuomisto 1998, 303). as elsewhere in the ceded territories, the situation altered only after the former inhabitants of ihantala and their descendants were allowed to visit there in the early 1990s and saw the lamentable state that their church and cemetery were in. this led them to form a memorial committee in 1991 and to begin negotiations with the local russian authorities to have the surroundings of the church and cemetery marked off as places of remembrance. agreement was reached and a contract was signed in 1992. in the summer of the same year a commemorative ceremony attended by 400 visitors from finland took place in the former churchyard, at which a war memorial was unveiled, consisting of a block of red granite two metres high inscribed with the dates 1939–1944 and the words “to the memory of those members of the parish of ihantala who fell in the wars. former parishioners of ihantala, 1992.” a separate memorial stone was also unveiled on the site of the church itself (koponen 1999, 212). the same group of former inhabitants later marked out the area of the original cemetery and renovated it as a memorial park and separated off the area of war graves with stone posts and iron chains. the finnish government has now leased the area of the ihantala monument from the russians, fenced it in and made provisions for it to be tended regularly (fig. 1). the local people have usually been sympathetic to the finns’ requests to erect monuments, and joint war memorials have been put up in some places such as räisälä, kaukola, suojärvi and salmi (lahikainen 1993, 90; tuomisto 1998, 301). there are also places where the local people help to look after the cemeteries. for others, however, the appearance of finnish monuments has been too much, and they have reacted violently, by breaking or overturning them. the stone erected in 1993 in the yard of the old cathedral in vyborg, for instance, was defaced immediately, and that marking the site of the famous battle of kollaa during the winter war has been overturned. significant buildings surviving from finnish days have also been burned down intentionally, perhaps the most despicable of these acts being the destruction of the church at kurkijoki by fire in 1991. the russians themselves, however, have begun to remember and honour the finnish aspects of the history of karelia in more recent times. this has partly taken place through official co-operation between the russian authorities and instances in finland and partly through groups and individuals operating outside official circles. one of the latter groups is the kareliya association, an entirely unofficial organization which has financed the erection of signs displaying finnish placenames in various parts of the karelian isthmus, often alongside the russian names, and is otherwise attempting to preserve finnish historical monuments. this voluntary action on behalf of the geographical memory of the area has not been without problems, however, and the organization has had many difficulties with the author70 fennia 182: 1 (2004)petri j. raivo fig. 1. the memorial to finnish soldiers killed in the wars in the cemetery of ihantala, near vyborg. the area of war graves set aside in 1943 was destroyed in the hostilities of summer 1944, but it has now been renovated and fenced in. the memorial stone dates from 1992. (photo petri raivo, 2002). ities. some of its signboards have disappeared, presumably because reminders of the area’s finnish past have not been to the liking of all the inhabitants (mikkola 2000). russians interested in preserving memories of the finnish past of the karelian isthmus have also put up unofficial signs commemorating some of the battlefields of the winter war, and these together with finnish commemorative plaques and russian nationalist and anti-nationalist inscriptions form a complicated mixture of interweaving layers of narratives that nowadays mark the memory and loci memoriae of the war (fig. 2). summary: places and landscapes of contested memory there has been a desire on the part of both nations implicated in the recent history of the ceded areas of karelia to engrave the past – real and imaginary – in stone for the benefit of future generations and the present russian population. lying behind these representations and manipulations are not only current needs but also those of the future. the street names, war memorials and battlefields form part of a nostalgically coloured narrative of the karelia of the past, a lost karelia for many people. landscapes and their elements are always an essential part of the field of discourse in which cultural hegemony is produced and renewed, and a historical landscape is thus always someone’s landscape, since it has its makers and its viewers, who both produce and reproduce processes of signification, texts and discourses connected with it. it is always a question of what is seen, who sees it and how, and it is also always a question of power and control – either symbolic or concrete – as one aspect of the values and meanings connected with a landscape. monuments, commemorative plaques and the historical names of streets and places are thus powerful mechanisms of cultural legitimisation, conventional elements in a landscape that link it with the past and its myths. the effect is a two-directional one in fact, in that a landscape is lined with symbolic meanings and at the same time recollections of the past are concretized in the physical environment until they are taken for granted and become part of the natural order of things. it is necessary, however, in connection with monuments and sites of memory to make a distinction between 1) the politicization of memory, and 2) the politicization of presentation. the former refers to how we remember a historical event, what facts are emphasized, how they are fennia 182: 1 (2004) 71karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of… grafted on the present, and what facts may perhaps be forgotten, while the latter refers to the presentation of memory in the present day, how what is past and gone can be made actual at this moment, and in what way and on whose conditions they may be remembered. the commemoration of historical facts at a certain place and in a certain landscape, or the decision to ignore those facts, may be seen as something in the nature of a dynamic process. sometimes places that have been commemorated will disappear, and sometimes people will wish to recall forgotten facts of history. it is very much a question of what events and associated places our geographical memory regards as important parts of our cultural identity at a particular moment. one significant source of historical memory and identity in the nationalistic narrative of a nation is represented by places and landscapes connected with conflicts and wars. battle sites, defence lines dating from different times, statues of heroes and victors and memorials to those who fell in the wars are essential parts of the iconographies of nation-states. frequently these national sites of memory also have a functional role as parts of certain rituals or festivities. war memorials, in which nationalism and patriotism find a powerful means of material, symbolic and functional expression, are the most widespread public use of sculptures all over europe, and their purpose is partly to support and give credibility to a narrative of the existence of a nation’s history and culture extending from the past up to the present day. memorial environments are thus places where the narrative of a nation and the associated myths and teachings are engraved on the landscape. all this can be seen in the ways in which both the russians and the finns remember karelia and its past. especially in present-day discourses of memory, it is not so important who the ceded areas ought to belong to now or in the future as who their past belongs to. in spite of the differences in the collective memories associated with the second world war, these sites of memory have opened up a possibility for adopting a new perspective on this difficult matter and offer prospects of fruitful co-operation at the level of both intergovernmental agreements and concrete local joint action. nowadays at least, both parties to the last war realise that there are two parallel narratives associated with the memory and traditions of the areas of karelia ceded to the soviet union in 1945: a finnish past and a russian present. fig. 2. remains of the finnish command bunker in the village of summa from the winter war. the concrete wall carries a very symbolic dispute over the wartime history of karelia and the strata of interpretations that can be connected with it. there is a plaque fixed to it by veterans of the 15th infantry regiment that served there in the winter war in honour of their fallen colleagues, but there are also the words “long live russia” scrawled on it in russian and “they gave their lives for their country in the war of liberation -39–40” in finnish, both apparently the work of russians. (photo petri raivo, 2002). 72 fennia 182: 1 (2004)petri j. raivo references ahto s (1979). joutselästä ruotsinsalmeen. sotilasmuistomerkkejä vuosien 1555–1790 tapahtumista. 139 p. sotasokeat ry, helsinki. azaryahu m (1996). the power of commemorative street names. environment and planning d 14, 311–330. barbashina r (2003). personal communication 29.05.2003. edensor t (1997). national identity and politics of memory: remembering bruce and wallace in symbolic space. environment and planning d 29, 175–194. foote k (1997). shadowed ground: america’s landscapes of violence and tragedy. 371 p. university of texas press, austin. forest b & j johnson (2002). unraveling the threads of history: soviet-era monuments and post-soviet national identity in moscow. annals of the association of american geographers 92: 3, 524– 547. gillis jr (1994). memory and identity: the history of a relationship. in gillis jr (ed). commemorations: the politics of national identity, 3–24. princeton university press, new jersey. gruffudd p (1995). heritage as national identity: histories and prospects of the national past. in herbert d (ed). heritage, tourism and society, 49– 67. mansell, london. hague e & j mercer (1998). geographical memory and urban identity in scotland: raith rovers fc and kircaldy. geography 83: 359, 105–116. hakala h & r lipponen (1999). luovutettujen alueiden sotilashautausmaat muistomerkkeineen. unpublished memorandum. 61 p. hobsbawm e & t ranger (eds) (1983). the invention of tradition. 322 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. ignatieff m (1984). soviet war memorials. history workshop 17, 157–163. jaatinen mi (1997). karjalan kartat. karjalan liitto, helsinki. koponen p (1999). karjalan kirkkokummut. 242 p. tammi, helsinki. lahikainen k (1993). karjalan opas. 256 p. otava, helsinki. laitinen e (1995). vuoden 1945 maanhankintalain synty, sisältö ja toteutus. in laitinen e (ed). rintamalta raivioille: sodanjälkeinen asutustoiminta 50 vuotta, 52–158. atena, jyväskylä. mikkola p (2000). jevgeni balashov entistää kannasta. kaleva 6.5.2000. mosse gl (1990). fallen soldiers: reshaping the memory of the world wars. 264 p. oxford university press, new york. nora p (1996). general introduction: between memory and history. in kritzman ld (ed). realms of memory: the construction of the french past, volume 1: conflicts and divisions, 1–23. columbia university press, new york. osborne bs (1998). constructing landscapes of power: the george etienne cartier monument, montreal. journal of historical geography, 24: 4, 431– 458. paasi a & pj raivo (1998). boundaries as barriers and promoters: constructing the tourist landscapes of finnish karelia. visions in leisure and business 17: 3, 30–45. raivo pj (2000). ‘this is where they fought’ – finnish war landscapes as a national heritage. in davison g, m roper & t ashplant (eds). the politics of war memory and commemoration, 145–164. routledge, london. raivo pj (2002). the peculiar touch of the east: reading the post-war landscapes of the finnish orthodox church. social & cultural geography 3: 1, 11–24. raninen t (1995). siirtokarjalaisuus muuttuvassa yhteiskunnassa. in laitinen e (ed). rintamalta raivioille: sodanjälkeinen asutustoiminta 50 vuotta, 303–322. atena, jyväskylä. schama s (1996). landscape & memory. 652 p. fontana, london. tikka b, j balasov & v stepakov (2002). karjalan kannas sotien jälkeen v. 1940–1941, 1944–1950. 115 p. karelija-historianja kotiseudun tutkimusyhdistys, pietari. till ke (1999). staging the past: landscape designs, cultural identity and erinnerungspolitik at berlin’s neue wache. ecumene 6: 3, 251–283. tuomisto a (1998). suomalaiset sotamuistomerkit. 352 p. suomen sotilas, jyväskylä. withers cwj (1996). place, memory, monument: memorializing the past in contemporary highland scotland. ecumene 3: 3, 325–344. withers cwj (2000). monuments. in johnston rj, d gregory, g pratt & m watts (eds). the dictionary of human geography, 521–522. blackwell, oxford. wright p (1985). on living in an old country: the national past in contemporary britain. 262 p. verso, london. untitled the boundaries of finland in transition pirjo jukarainen jukarainen, pirjo (2002). the boundaries of finland in transition. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 83–88. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. various types of boundaries crisscross the finnish territory. aside the politicoadministrative boundaries of the finnish state, there are technical-logistical barriers and cultural, socio-spatial, and economic divisions. the main tendency has, however, been the increasing contingency in relation to their location and stability. some of these boundaries may overlap and therefore strengthen each other, others can hardly be mapped due to their fuzziness. this article provides an introduction to the recent changes of the boundaries of finland. pirjo jukarainen, tampere peace research institute (tapri), åkerlundinkatu 3, 4th floor. fin-33014 university of tampere, finland. e-mail: pirjo.jukarainen@uta.fi introduction modernism brought people to believe in clearly demarcated and relatively firm boundary formations (paasi 1996: 25–26; medvedev 1999: 46). this conception has now been challenged, mainly as a result of global interaction and increasing awareness of global interdependence in the fields of economy, social life and culture, ecology, and politics. like natural, physiographic obstacles to human interaction (rivers, mountains, seas, etc.), all man-made boundaries (economic, politico-administrative, cultural, etc.) are in a constant state of flux – though the latter obviously change more rapidly than the former. the borders that delineate the republic of finland and define finnish national culture are also changing, yet the latter at a much slower pace. boundaries vary with respect to how easily they can change (or, rather, how easily they can be changed). according to hans westlund (1999), technical-logistical and politico-administrative boundaries are much less resistant to change than cultural or biological boundaries (table 1). the boundaries of finland are no exception: its politico-administrative borders have seen more dramatic and frequent changes than its economic and cultural boundaries. it is no more than 58 years since the external boundaries of the finnish state were redrawn (in 1944) (fig. 1)1 . intertable 1. barriers grouped by potential for change (westlund 1999: 107). 84 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirjo jukarainen nally the change has been even faster; its has been five years since the regional structure was overhauled (in 1997), and the country’s municipal structure has been reshaped on countless occassions. cultural boundaries, on the other hand, seem to be far more resilient. irrespective of – or perhaps owing to – european integration and globalization, nationalism is very much alive now and new regionalisms are emerging. in addition, along the finnish-russian border the economic gap has widened over the past few decades, whereas along nordic borders the opposite is true and the asymmetries are relatively small. fig. 1. the territorial shape of finland since 1323. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 85the boundaries of finland in transition politico-administrative boundaries today, in the year 2002, finland is surrounded by a 2,700-kilometre-long land border and a 1,250kilometre shoreline of territorial waters (rajavartiolaitoksen… 1996). the republic is divided into 5 provinces (in finnish, lääni), 19 regions (maakunta) and 448 municipalities. in addition, there is the autonomous region of the åland islands (stv 2000). in 1995, when finland joined the european union together with austria and sweden, the country’s border with russia at once became the union’s easternmost border. politico-administrative boundaries have not only been replaced, but also more or less abolished within a very short period of time. transborder regionalisation and networking are among the major tendencies that have recently removed the barrier effects of finland’s internal and external politico-administrative borders. as early as in the 1970s, the nordic council of ministers and its nordic committee of senior officials for regional policy (närp) started to establish and fund trans-border regional organisations. there are now nine nordic regional organisations, many of which overlap spatially with the so-called interreg regions funded by the european union (cdfig. 1). the nordic regions were established in order to surpass border-created barriers for regional development. regions are thus an extension of national regional policies (nilson 1997: 410). if anything, the cross-border cooperation has increased since finland and sweden joined the eu, above all as a result of the funding mechanisms of the interreg community initiative and lace-tap programme, plus the phare-cbc and tacis cbc (cross-border cooperation) programmes targeted at the eu’s external, easternmost borderlands. the interreg initiative has perhaps been the most successful in increasing internal cohesion within the union by means of promoting crossborder co-operation. its problem, however, has been its eu-centricity; actual funding has only been possible in areas inside the union. external partners (i.e., non-eu-members) have to find other ways of matching the interreg contribution on their side of the border. norway, not being a member of the eu, has taken part in interreg-regionbuilding with its own governmental funding. eufunded co-operation – not to mention regionalifig. 2. euregio karelia (euregio karelia… 1998). 86 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirjo jukarainen sation – along the finnish-russian border has been much more problematic, as there have been two separate development programmes (interreg and tacis) for the opposite sides of the border, with divergent principles, decision-making procedures, and strategies. there have been interesting efforts, however, to co-ordinate the phare cross-border co-operation programme, which covers the countries of central and eastern europe (including estonia, latvia, and lithuania) and the tacis cbc programme, which covers the countries and provinces of the former soviet union, with the interreg programme. one interesting initiative designed to overcome the problem of incompatibility is a project called euregio karelia. this projects aims at establishing a joint decision-making mechanism and administrative structure for smoother and better co-ordinated cross-border co-operation between the members of karelia interreg ii region of finland (i.e., the regional councils of northern karelia, kainuu and north ostrobothnia) and the karelian republic in russia (fig. 2) (see euregio karelia… 1998). the euregio or euroregion concept and model – first implemented within the european community – has thus been adopted at the eu’s external boundaries as well, possibly helping to reduce the risk of the development of a ‘fortress europe’. technical-logistical boundaries finland’s technical-logistical boundaries have also transformed rapidly during the past decade or so. following the disintegration of the soviet union, finnish–russian and estonian–finnish borders have been opened for freer international passenger traffic and many new crossing points have been created. this lowering of the politico-administrative border has reduced the barrier effect most of all in a logistical sense. consequently, both passenger traffic and freight transport across finland’s southern and eastern borders have increased dramatically during the past few years (rajavartiolaitoksen… 1996, 2000) (cd-fig. 1), with the volume of traffic flows exceeding all early prognoses (see, e.g., idän… 1990). finland’s southeastern corner has become a major condensation area of cross-border traffic. journeys both start and end mostly in the immediate surroundings of the border, somewhere along the helsinki–st. petersburg axis (leviäkangas et al. 1995). another area of intense trans-border traffic is between the capitals of helsinki in finland and tallinn in estonia. within the past three years, largely due to tax free shopping tourism, the number of crossings has tripled from 2.2 million to 6.1 million passengers a year (cd-fig. 1) (meriliikenne… 1998, 2001). in the northern areas, by contrast, there have been only minor changes in this respect. passenger traffic has shown only a slight increase between finland and norway and has actually begun to decrease between finland and sweden. it is not only the cross-border passenger traffic, but also other traffic flows, including international communications, that are increasing constantly. for instance: in 1980, the number of international calls from finland totalled around 12 million. in 1990, the figure was 41 million and by 1998, it had climbed to 115 million (stv 2000: 285). similar trends were witnessed in the number of mobile phone subscriptions: in 1980, there were no more than 23,000 subscriptions in finland, ten years later almost 258,000, and in 1999, a staggering 2.9 million. this latter figure actually marked an important turning point in that it was the first time that the number of mobile phone subscriptions exceeded the number of land lines in the country (stv 2000: 283). the number of internet subscriptions has also doubled during the past few years. the figure was 283,000 (or 56 per 1,000 people) in 1997 and it had soared to 546,000 (or 107 per 1,000 people) by 1999 (stv 2000: 285). cultural boundaries cultural boundaries, linguistic divisions, and ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ demarcations for constructing identities have been far more resilient than politico-administrative boundaries. state borders, in particular, have still been seen to form an essential symbolic part of daily life and culture (see, e.g., van houtum 1998) even to an extent that we are caught in a “territorial trap” – fixation on statecentric thinking (agnew 1998: 51–52). this was clearly found among the borderlands youth in finland. recent research on the finnish–swedish and finnish–russian borderlands showed that attitudes among young people aged 10–16 were rather nationalistic. the youngsters made rather clear cultural and linguistic demarcations between the nationalities. interestingly enough, this was the fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 87the boundaries of finland in transition case even in the northern twin town of haparanda–tornio, where the politico-administrative boundary between finland and sweden is very permeable, almost non-existent, as a result of intense municipal cross-border co-operation and the nordic boundary-reducing policy (jukarainen 2000). not surprisingly, nationalist sentiments were strongest along the finnish-russian border: the finnish youth showed highly prejudiced and reserved attitudes towards the russians and vice versa, even though it has been almost ten years since the administrative border was opened for freer international traffic and contacts that were severed 50 years earlier during the soviet time were made possible again (jukarainen 2000.) helppikangas et al. (1996) reported similar findings in a study of the attitudes of the young, adult, and elderly populations living in these border regions. both finns and russians regarded each other as co-operative in principle, but as lacking in sense of responsibility. in addition, more than one-third of the finnish respondents thought the opening of the border was a “rather bad” or “very bad” thing; even the long-standing co-operation across the border had not changed their attitudes (helppikangas et al. 1996: 106). increased cross-border traffic and cross-cultural interaction may have paradoxical effects on cultural boundaries: rather than lowering those boundaries, they may actually strengthen them (harle 1993: 11). the spread of foreign cultural influences may give rise to protectionist behaviour among people in the borderlands. this was clearly evident amongst youths living close to the finnish-russian border, where traffic flows have increased dramatically during the past few years. young russians and finns, in particular, were mostly against increasing tourism across the border, not to mention the movement of immigrants from the neighbouring country into their own (jukarainen 2000). on the other hand, politico-administrative decisions and changes related to borders are most concretely felt by the borderlands people (wilson & donnan 1998: 17). metaphorically speaking, borderland is the ‘skin’ of the political society (langer 1996: 62). a border that is loosened politico-administratively may therefore cause an unwanted reaction in the borderland, a process of cultural boundary building, which in a way aims to reconstruct the barrier that existed before. socio-economic boundaries like cultural boundaries, socio-economic boundaries are also more resistant to change than administrative boundaries. according to various statistical indicators, the socio-economic gap between finland and russia has widened since the disintegration of the soviet union and the opening of the administrative border. in fact, asymmetry along this border is one of the widest, if not the widest, in the world when measured in terms of regional gdp per capita in purchasing power parities (alanen & eskelinen 2000). for instance, in 1996, the russian region of st. petersburg received the index value of 23 when compared to the european union average (100), whereas the figure for the finnish region of kymenlaakso was 96 (for more, see alanen & eskelinen 2000: 64). the disparity in living standards has only been accentuated by the fact that finnish border regions are net recipients of public income transfers, whereas in russia the mechanisms of interregional redistribution have been diminished by the economic crisis (alanen & eskelinen 2000: 63). the divisive legacy of the easternmost border thus continues in economic and social terms. in principle the border is open for the free movement of people and goods, but partly due to the economic asymmetry the traffic has still been strictly controlled. statistics of the finnish frontier guard indicate, however, that illegal migration and trade seem to be a relatively minor problem: while almost six million people crossed the finnish-russian border in 2001, only 1,734 individuals were denied access that same year, mainly on account of smuggling (rajavartiolaitoksen… 2001). conclusion the boundaries of finland remain in a constant state of flux. even if the politico-administrative territorial shape of the state of finland were to remain the same, all the networking, regionalisation, and internationalisation that is going on will inevitably challenge the clarity of its borders, making them more like change-over zones than strictly divisive lines. this process is often called de-territorialisation (see, e.g., paasi 1999; ó tuathail 1998). consequently, all of finland’s boundaries (politico-administrative, cultural, economic, and others) become increasingly blurred 88 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pirjo jukarainen and a simplistic cartographical representation of finnish territory becomes more and more difficult. yet, the cultural national and regional boundaries may be the fittest to survive. it is often precisely in situations where peoples’ identities are threatened that efforts are stepped up to strengthen them, potentially giving rise to cultural protectionism and xenophobia. therefore, even in today’s world of wireless communication, networking, and cross-border activity, a completely borderless world and global living may perhaps never become reality. as falah and newman (1995: 690) aptly state, we have learned to understand that only the existence of good boundaries makes good neighbours. hence, some sort of cultural boundaries between the identity groups of ‘us here’ and ‘them there’ are perhaps always needed and reconstructed. notes 1 since the thirteenth century, finland has been the object (or participant) in twelve different peace treaties, nine of which have involved a change of borders (kirkinen 1996: 13). references agnew j (1998). geopolitics: revisioning world politics. routledge, london. alanen a & h eskelinen (2000). economic gap at the finnish-russian border. in ahponen p & p jukarainen (eds). tearing down the curtain, opening the gates. northern boundaries in change, 55–68. sophi, jyväskylä. euregio karelia – part of the northern dimension (1998). regional council of kainuu, regional council of north karelia, regional council of northern ostrobothnia & republic of karelia. unpublished report. falah g & d newman (1995). the spatial manifestation of threat: israelis and palestinians seek a ‘good’ border. political geography 14, 689–706. harle v (1993). toiseuden, identiteetin ja politiikan suhteista. in harle v (ed). erilaisuus, identiteetti ja politiikka. rauhanja konfliktintutkimuslaitos, tutkimustiedote 52, 8–15. tampere. helppikangas p, p kinnunen, a kotomin & k urponen (1996). pohjoinen raja/the northern border. university of lapland, yhteiskuntatieteellisiä julkaisuja b 26. van houtum h (1998). the development of crossborder economic relations. tilburg university, center for economic research, tilburg, dissertation 40. idän portti ja yhteistyön väylä: niiralan ja vartiuksen raja-asemien tarjoamat mahdollisuudet (1990). pohjois-karjalan seutukaavaliitto, julkaisu c 17. jukarainen p (2000). rauhan ja raudan rajoilla. nuorten tilallisja identiteettipoliittisia maailmanjäsennyksiä suomen ja venäjän sekä ruotsin ja suomen rajojen tuntumassa. rauhanja konfliktintutkimuskeskus, tutkimuksia 90. like, helsinki. kirkinen h (1996). karelia the borderland, battlefield and bridge between east and west. in kirkinen h & l westman (eds). on the border of the european union: from the gulf of finland to the arctic ocean, 7–20. joensuu university press, joensuu. langer j (1999). new meanings of the border in central europe. in eger c & j langer (eds). border, region and ethnicity in central europe, 49–67. norea, klagenfurt. leviäkangas p, e ristolainen & s korte (1995). kaakkois-suomen raja-asemien henkilöliikennetutkimus. tielaitos, selvityksiä 28. meriliikenne suomen ja ulkomaiden välillä 1997 (1998). merenkulkulaitoksen tilastoja 4/1998. helsinki. meriliikenne suomen ja ulkomaiden välillä 2000 (2001). merenkulkulaitoksen tilastoja 4/2001. helsinki. nilson hr (1997). nordic regionalization: on how transborder regions work and why they don’t work. cooperation and conflict 32, 399–426. ó tuathail g (1998). political geography iii. dealing with deterritorialization. progress in human geography 22, 81–93. paasi a (1996). territories, boundaries and consciousness. the changing geographies of the finnish–russian border. john wiley, chichester. paasi a (1999). the political geography of boundaries at the end of the millennium: challenges of the de-territorializing world. in eskelinen h, i liikanen & j oksa (eds). curtains of iron and gold. european peripheries and new scales of crossborder interaction, 9–24, aldershot, ashgate. rajavartiolaitoksen toimintakertomus (1996). rajavartiolaitos, helsinki. rajavartiolaitoksen toimintakertomus (2000). rajavartiolaitos, helsinki. rajavartiolaitoksen toimintakertomus (2001). rajavartiolaitos, helsinki. stv 1999 = statistical yearbook of finland 1999 (2000). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2000 = statistical yearbook of finland 2000 (2001). statistics finland, helsinki. westlund, hans (1999). an interaction-cost perspective on networks and territory. the annals of regional science 33, 93–121. wilson t & h donnan (1998). nation, state and identity at international borders. in wilson t & h donnan (eds). border identities, 1–30. cambridge university press, cambridge. participation of second home owners and permanent residents in local decision making: the case of a rural village in finland urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa55485 doi: 10.11143/55485 participation of second home owners and permanent residents in local decision making: the case of a rural village in finland asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi and seija tuulentie kietäväinen, asta, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie (2016). participation of second home owners and permanent residents in local decision making: the case of a rural village in finland. fennia 194: 2, 152–167. issn 1798-5617. in finland, there are almost 500,000 second homes and in some areas the number of second home owners exceeds that of permanent residents. currently, second home owners are also spending more time in their second homes. if second home owners are not permanent residents, administration may exclude them from local institutions, and treat second home owners as only partial members of the community. it has been stated that municipal decision making and the role of the municipality as an actor in the local community should be broadened in order to strengthen democracy and the participation of its residents as a core of municipal self-administration. hence, participating in communal decision making is mainly possible only for permanent residents. the issue is whether it is possible to change this situation via the municipalities’ own reforms and state regulations. new municipal administration experiments have recently emerged in finland. here we study how the new local administrative model, the communal district committee, has affected local participation and local governance in a rural areas by exploring second home owners’ opportunities to participate in local decision making and development processes. the data consists of documents, focus group discussions and a questionnaire. we used qualitative and quantitative methods in the data analysis. we found, on one hand, that permanent residents of villages recognise second home owners’ hesitation to participate in local issues requiring planning and decision making. on the other hand, local-level communal decision making does not promote the participation of second home residents. on the basis of the findings of the study, we suggest that the municipal authorities should recognise the existence and importance of second home owners in the area, acknowledge them better in municipal plans and strategies, and offer them more resources and means to participate. keywords: communal governance, development, finland, participation, rural area, second home owners asta kietäväinen, arctic centre, university of lapland, pob 122, fi-96101 rovaniemi, finland. e-mail: asta.kietavainen@ulapland.fi janne rinne & riikka paloniemi, environmental policy center, finnish environment institute, (syke), pox 140, 00251 helsinki, finland. e-mail: janne.rinne@ ymparisto.fi & riikka.paloniemi@ymparisto.fi seija tuulentie, natural resources institute finland (luke), eteläranta 55, 96300 rovaniemi, finland. e-mail: seija.tuulentie@luke.fi introduction second home tourism is an essential component of peoples’ housing and mobility in modern society (hall & müller 2004). especially in the nordic countries, second home owners are a remarkable group spending time in the countryside (hall et al. 2009; farstad 2013). for example, in 2012 there were about 496,200 vacation homes in finland (osf 2012) alone. second homes are often situ© 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 194: 2 (2016) 153participation of second home owners and permanent residents ated in rural areas which are currently facing rapid changes in rural population structure due to the aging phenomenon as young people are moving to towns contributing to urbanisation. this pushes many rural municipalities, especially those that are small and medium-sized, into a vicious cycle of negative effects. for example, depopulation and increasing dependency ratio may crucially weaken the ability of municipalities to offer their citizens the basic services required by law (kauppinen 2004). municipalities that have many second homes consider second home owners as a source of revitalisation for the communal economy, and providers of income for local enterprises, which helps to maintain public services in less populated areas in finland (rinne et al. 2015). the same phenomenon has been observed in other countries. second home owners are also valued for their diverse know-how and contacts that are beneficial in developing rural areas (müller 2006; nylander & leppänen 2006; marjavaara 2007; müller & marjavaara 2012; nordin & marjavaara 2012; de nazaré oliveira roca et al. 2014; rinne et al. 2014; robertsson & marjavaara 2015). yet the scope and content of economic impacts vary between countries and between regions within each country (rye 2011; barnett 2014). considering the scale of the second home phenomenon, a variety of issues need to be managed and governed in municipalities where there are considerable numbers of second homes. for example, seasonal fluctuations have impacts on the environmental, economic and social dynamics of these communities, leading in some case to conflicts over natural resource usage and other development-related issues (hiltunen 2007; kaltenborn et al. 2008; kelly & hosking 2008; overåg & berg 2011; farstad & rye 2013; hiltunen et al. 2013). second homes are governed through various administrative sectors, jurisdictions, and policies. when policy integration in finland was studied by rinne et al. (2014) it was found that tourism and first homes were visible in many documents, whereas second homes were in many cases absent or mentioned only indirectly as a part of tourism or housing in general. in many cases, the administration and related practices are based on the permanent residence of a person (paris 2008; hall 2015). if second home owners are not permanent residents, the administration may exclude them from local institutions, and treat second home owners as only partial members of the community (hall & müller 2004; marjavaara 2008; van laar et al. 2014). for instance, second home owners are not allowed to vote in communal elections and they cannot be elected as decision-makers or formal representatives in municipal administrations. however, they may be stakeholders in land use planning, give statements on plans and have the right to appeal decisions (nylander & leppänen 2006; rinne et al. 2015). second home owners pay real estate tax, and they are entitled to certain public services such as health care, planning permissions, libraries and rescue and fire services. the idea of the community gaining ground in policymaking has been implemented in areas of services provision, education, policing, transport, regional development, primary industry, and local government (adams & hess 2001). the main findings of salminen (2008) show that the new governance is less hierarchical, more flexible and the service provision is redefined in terms of the interplay between state, municipalities and privateand third-sector actors. participatory governance is based on the interactions of a socio-political system involving the public, private and civil sectors (reddel 2002; reddel & woolcock 2004). citizens are regarded as active participants in their communities and aim to integrate their knowledge into policy processes (hess & adams 2007). the most important relationship is not between different levels of government, but between government and people (goss 2001). however, sullivan et al. (2004) have argued that localities’ capacities to act in their own interests are supported by the opportunities presented in a multi-level governance environment. it has been stated that municipal decision making and the role of the municipality as an actor in the local community should be broadened (ryynänen & uoti 2009). this enables strengthening of democracy and the participation of its residents as a core of municipal self-administration (bifulco & centemeri 2008; haveri et al. 2011). participation is one of the current trend concepts that informs policy making and administrative practices in finland and in other western democracies (kallio & bäcklund 2012). in these new forms of governance the residents’ opportunities to influence policies and opportunities to participate are thus improved (möttönen 2011). direct citizen participation is often more feasible at the local level than the regional or national level, and as such is more common in a community context (jordan et al. 2013). the flat management system associated 154 fennia 194: 2 (2016)asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie with small councils brings decision makers into direct contact with community members (dollery & johnson 2005). these direct methods of participation can both complement and revitalise a representative democracy (sjöblom 2002). municipalities play a central role in local governance in finland. in the constitution of finland (ministry of justice 1999), the country is divided into 317 municipalities (suomen kuntaliitto 2016) whose administration is based on the self-government of their residents. according to the local government act (ministry of finance 1995), the aim of municipalities is to promote the welfare of residents and the sustainable development of the municipality (asikainen 2011). municipalities must arrange public services for residents either alone or in cooperation with other municipalities by providing the services themselves or by buying them from the private or a third sector. halme and kuukasjärvi (2010) have studied means and forms to extend decision making to a local level in cases where municipalities are merged in order to ensure the participation of local people. they suggest that issues suitable for local decision making are local services, sport and recreation facilities and subsidies for associations. in an attempt to bring decision making down to the “grassroots level”, certain municipalities in finland, such as jyväskylä, rovaniemi and sonkajärvi, have set up communal district committees (cdc) (aluelautakunta) (pihlaja & sanberg 2012). the idea of this administrative experiment is to promote the development of communal services in remote rural areas. the official objective of the committees is to enhance the provision of local services and the common development of the local district. committees make decisions within the budget given by the municipal council. the committees should also enhance local people’s participation in planning and decision-making. in this paper, we analyse the ways in which the cdc model facilitates local participation and local governance in a rural area by focusing on the participation of both second home owners and permanent residents in current local decision making and development processes. we ask, how does this new administrative model enhance participation by the residents, part-time and permanent, of rural areas? we are also interested in who are the people involved in decision-making as well as how are different rural residents and their interests in local services and activities represented in municipal decision-making? material and methods case study area rovaniemi is one of the municipalities piloting the local cdc. rovaniemi consists of an urban area and a sparsely populated rural area. recently, in 2006, the rural commune of rovaniemi was merged into rovaniemi. in the newly formed rovaniemi, only a few representatives of the former rural commune of rovaniemi are represented in the municipal council of rovaniemi. the local cdc follows the idea of community governance by enhancing local people’s participation in local decision making. this refills possible participation gaps left by municipal elections. currently, rovaniemi has six official cdcs. our case study area is the village of perunkajärvi, which is represented in the cdc of sodankyläntie (fig. 1). this committee has formal representatives from nine villages such as vikajärvi, misi, and alanampa. it is required that formal representatives must have their permanent residence in the village they represent. hence, second home owners cannot be elected as formal representatives of the cdc, but they can participate as representatives in the parents organisation of villages, called rovatokka in rovaniemi. this is mainly an advising and coordinating organisation, and applies for funding for the development of local projects. almost all villages of the district have more second homes than permanent homes (fig. 2). in perunkajärvi, the second home owners are mainly members of the municipality, as they usually live closer to the city centre of rovaniemi. less than 20% of cottage owners have their permanent address outside rovaniemi municipality. we selected perunkajärvi as a case study area because of the population structure. in particular, there are only a few permanent residents and most villagers are elderly people (rovaniemi 2016). there are five times more second homes than permanent residences. only a few services are provided in perunkajärvi, some of them are private such as ploughing the roads in the winter and selling firewood. the provision of public services consists of, for example, in-home nursing and a mobile library. in several finnish municipalities, residents’ associations and second home committees have been established in order to engage second home owners in local issues such as local development fennia 194: 2 (2016) 155participation of second home owners and permanent residents and outdoor activities. the associations may provide a formal means of having an influence (rinne et al. 2015). in fact, in perunkajärvi, there is no second home committee, but there is a village association that aims to enhance local development and residents’ well-being. the second home owners can be members of the village association, as well as members of other civic organisations and associations that are active in the village (table 1). the second home owners with their permanent address in the rovaniemi municipality are more influential institutionally compared to other second home owners. in fact, they can be nominated for the city council or other official municipal bodies. the village association can nominate one representative for the cdc, but the representative ought to be a permanent resident of the village. the cdcs are in charge of making administrative decisions on facilities in rural areas, and are thus an official part of the municipal decision making structure (fig 3). the city council adjudicates the budgets of district committees and allocates the tasks that committees should manage and make decisions on. the committees have meetings seven to ten times per year. in addition to official decisions, the committees make statements about strategies and plans under preparation in the city council and propose to the city council ways to develop villages. on the one hand, the committee has to take into account municipal strategies and plans and, on the other hand, acquires information from the residents of the area about local needs for services. materials we combine three types of materials in our study: planning, strategy and proceedings documents, a focus group interview in perunkajärvi and a semistructured questionnaire. when analysing the interaction of different levels of administration and decision making, we are using data that consists of the documents from different administrative levels and qualitative data from a focus group interview. the questionnaire reveals villagers’ and second home owners’ perceptions of how to develop the village and their willingness to participate in public activities and need for services. the documents analysed were: i) the development plan for rural areas of rovaniemi 2013–2020 (rovaniemi 2014), ii) the participation and influencing plan of rovaniemi citizens 2013–2016 (rovaniemi 2013), iii) the development plan of the communal district committee of sodankyläntie fig. 1. the area of the communal district committee of sodankyläntie in rovaniemi. 156 fennia 194: 2 (2016)asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie 2013–2016 (sodankyläntie 2013), and iv) the meeting minutes of the local communal district committee of sodankyläntie (22.5.2013–4.6.2014 ten proceedings). a focus group interview was organised in perunkajärvi in september 2013. overall, six permanent residents were represented in the focus group: three were previous second home owners, one second home owner, and one civil servant. in organising the discussions, we employed the semistructured “qualitative attitude approach” (cf. vainio & paloniemi 2012). the method can be called “future-oriented focus groups”. the main themes were: 1) participation in local planning and decision-making in the current situation, 2) local social and ecological changes in the future, and 3) local innovative means of participation in the future. in this focus group, participants were encouraged to reflect on the current situation of second home owner participation in perunkajärvi, as well as their opportunity to develop structures and practices to participate and to develop the village in the future (rinne et al. 2014). when inviting participants, we contacted municipal officials from rovaniemi, and asked the municipality to set their representatives. in perunkajärvi, locals and second home owners were invited by the chair of the village committee and, in addition, a public invitation was posted on the village noticeboard. we also sent a questionnaire to the second home owners and permanent housing estates in perunkajärvi in october 2013. the questionnaire was sent to 24 permanent real estate properties fig. 2. permanent and second homes in the villages of sodankyläntie in 2012. fig. 3. organisation of persons elected to a position of trust in rovaniemi municipality. fennia 194: 2 (2016) 157participation of second home owners and permanent residents within the village and to 132 second home owners. according to the official statistics, there are altogether 40 permanent homes and 198 second homes, but the addresses provided by the municipality were not comprehensive, not up-to-date and they contained errors in owners’ names and their permanent addresses while some people were deceased. some of elderly permanent residents were in nursing homes or in hospital and the questionnaire was not sent to them. in the questionnaire, we asked, among other things, how second home owners and permanent residents take part in local associations, what issues (livelihoods, activities, organisations, village events, roads, etc.) in the village should be developed, what services they hope for. furthermore, we enquired about the influence of second homes for village development. altogether, 54 questionnaires were returned. the response rate was 34.6%. our approach can be characterised as a mixedmethods approach. quantitative questionnaires have been extensively used in previous secondhome research, and they have often focused on second home owner perspectives (wallace et al. 2005). in the other semi-structured interviews participants included also second home and permanent residents as well as one civil servant of the municipality. our exploration of second home owners’ participation has the perspective of both permanent residents and second home owners. analysis documents were analysed using content analysis. the first step was counting mentions of second homes, second home owners, and summer cottages. the second step was analysing the context in which second homes or owners were mentioned. the third step was analysing the meaning of sections in which second home owners were mentioned and finding concepts to categorise these meanings. also, the interaction of documents was analysed, for instance, how the local plans and minutes are considered in municipal plans and how these plans acknowledged second home owners. the focus group discussions were analysed qualitatively (maxwell 2005). we coded the content of the interviews by asking questions such as how interviewers talk about participation in second home contexts, and how they discuss the strengths and weaknesses of formal and informal participation opportunities (rinne et al. 2014). ta b le 1 . a ss o ci at io n s in p er u n ka jä rv i vi ll ag e.   a) a ss oc ia ti on s in p er un ka jä rv i v ill ag e ta sk s v ill ag e as so ci at io n: p er un ka jä rv en k yl äs eu ra fr ee ti m e ac tiv iti es , p ub lic m ee tin gs a nd d ev el op m en t i ni tia tiv es fa rm in g an d do m es tic a ss oc ia tio n: p er un ka jä rv en m aa ja k ot ita lo us se ur a fa rm er s lo ca l a dv is or a nd fr ee ti m e ac tiv iti es , n ow ad ay s fr ee ti m e ac tiv iti es sp or t c lu b: p er un ga n po ja t fr ee ti m e ac tiv iti es a nd c om pe tit iv e sp or ts tw o hu nt in g as so ci at io ns : p ilp as en p yy tö m ie he t, pe ru ng an e rä m ie he t fr ee ti m e ac tiv iti es a nd h un tin g c om m itt ee o f c hu rc h so ci al w or k: p er un ka jä rv en d ia ko ni a a rr an gi ng c hu rc h m ee tin gs , e ve nt s an d ch ar ity w or k b) p er un ka jä rv i r ep re se nt at iv es in m un ic ip al a ss oc ia ti on s or c om m it te es c om m un al d is tr ic t c om m itt ee : s od an ky lä nt ie n su un ta r ov at ok ka a p ar en t o rg an is at io n fo r vi lla ge a nd d is tr ic t a ss oc ia tio ns in r ov an ie m i 158 fennia 194: 2 (2016)asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie the quantitative variables were analysed by conducting descriptive and bivariate statistics. three main categories were reduced from the data: the development of the village, participation and means of participation, and local services. results are represented according to these three main categories and discussed in the context of community governance. results development of village municipal strategies and development plans guide the future actions of municipalities. thus, if, for example, second homes or second home owners are mentioned in the local plans, this indicates that the issue is considered to be notable in the municipality. in the development plan for rural areas of rovaniemi (rovaniemi 2014), the document defines the guidelines for the development of rural areas in the future, second homes (2) and the second home owners (3) are mentioned only five times while the need to plan second home areas was mentioned twice in the context of land use planning (table 2). there are many second homes in the district of sodankyläntie and, with the only exception represented by vikajärvi, all the villages of the district have more second homes than permanent homes. however, second homes are not mentioned in the graph illustrating the most important issues affecting the district. in the development plan for rural areas of rovaniemi (rovaniemi 2014) and the development plan of the communal district committee of sodankyläntie 2013– 2016 (sodankyläntie 2013), it is assumed that improved telecommunications could enhance remote work from second homes in the future, and increasing the time spent in second homes. the development plan of the communal district committee of sodankyläntie 2013–2016 (sodankyläntie 2013) was based on the development plan for rural areas of rovaniemi (rovaniemi 2014). these plans were meant to implement the participation and influencing plan of rovaniemi (rovaniemi 2013). in this latter document, however, it was found that second home owners were not mentioned at all (table 2). the development plan of the district committee and the plan for the development of rural areas had both been prepared in open public workshops. the agenda of the village workshops (vikajärvi 2013) mentioned that second home owners should become involved because they were seen as a part of the participating and innovating community. there are nine villages in the area of sodankyläntie: alanampa, misi, niesi, olkkajärvi, perunkajärvi, tiainen, vika, and vikajärvi. in the development plan of the cdc, second home table 2. mentions of second homes, residents of second homes and second home areas in the communal plans and the minutes of the communal district committee.   second homes second home owners second home area total the development plan for rural areas of rovaniemi 2013–2020 (p. 47) 2 3 2 7 the development plan of the communal district committee of sodankyläntie 2013–2016 (p. 28) 6 2 0 8 the participation and influencing plan of rovaniemi citizens 2013–2016 (p.39) 0 0 0 0 the minutes of local communal district committee of sodankyläntie (10 minutes) 9 9 0 18 total 8 5 2 33 fennia 194: 2 (2016) 159participation of second home owners and permanent residents owners or second homes were mentioned altogether eight times (table 2). it was found that second homes were mentioned six times and second home owners were mentioned once when the villages were described including their potential for recreation and spending free time. second home owners were not mentioned as active actors in the villages, but rather in a background context. it was predicted that more second home owners would come to spend their leisure time and stay longer in the rovaniemi district and also in perunkajärvi in the future. however, second home owners have not been seen as co-operators in local public and business activities. a similar tendency was observed in the minutes of the meetings of the cdc, as second home owners did not appear as active actors. the committee of sodankyläntie had held ten official meetings until the summer of 2014, and second homes and second home residents were mentioned altogether 18 times (table 2) in three of the meeting minutes (two in the autumn of 2013 and one in the summer of 2014). second homes are mostly mentioned in the draft of the cdc development plan. in the focus group discussion, the permanent residents especially were optimistic that the cdc could help to resolve some challenges facing the village, such as promoting funding for development projects, and improving traffic and telecommunications. during the discussion predictions were made regarding the cdc and their consideration of the remoteness and the large proportion of second homes in comparison to all real estate properties. “we have 198 second homes and 40 permanent homes and the location of the village is special. these facts should be taken into account in the development plan of the communal district committee and especially the remoteness of the village.” (id: 7, villager, female) the responses to the questionnaire revealed that the permanent residents wished for development of village activities, for example village events and the actions of associations. the most important development targets for second home owners were fishing and nature-based activities. both permanent residents and second home owners stated that the development of telecommunications and traffic connections are important for the community, and all respondents in the group of permanent residents answered that these issues are very important to them. in the questionnaire, 50% of the second home residents and almost 90% of the permanent residents agreed that the development of second homes in the village should be promoted for several reasons. for instance, the second home owners think that the village road would be better maintained if there were more second homes. in addition, they said that more second homes would support more services. furthermore, an increasing number of second home residents would enliven the daily life of the small village. those people who were against promoting second home housing in the village argued that there are already enough cottages and the village could become noisy. permanent residents and second home owners who wanted to increase the number of second homes thought that it should be easier to get building permits for second homes. on the other hand, in the focus group, the civil servant from rovaniemi mentioned that there will be no new shore plans in perunkajärvi and only case-specific exceptional permits will be allowed. the land use plan of rovaniemi states that areas for the development of new second homes should be located near the largest villages. thus, the development of areas for second homes can be directed toward supporting the development of rural villages. perunkajärvi is not close to any large village. participation and means of participation during the focus group discussion, the villagers hoped that the cdc would help to arrange better public and private services and revitalise entrepreneurship. the only second home owner who took part in the focus group is an active member of the village association. since the second home owners could not be formal representatives of the cdc, the village association was the only place in which they could influence the district committee. according to the survey, the second home owners were not active in any village associations (table 3). permanent residents seemed to be very active. however, it should be kept in mind that only a few permanent residents responded. those who answered were probably the active persons, thus not representing the activity of all permanent residents. one permanent resident of the village said that, despite the high number of second homes in the village, their owners were rarely seen in local meetings. the opinion of the permanent residents 160 fennia 194: 2 (2016)asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie was that second home owners usually come to enjoy the peace of nature and are not eager to participate in communal actions or being members of local associations. “in theory, second home owners have the same opportunities to participate and influence decision making as permanent residents but how is it possible to get them involved in practice?” (id: 4, second home owner, male) the focus group participants mentioned that, when local associations such as fishing and sports associations arrange competitions or events, they are usually for members only. thus the right to participate is exclusive. in order to change the current approach, it was argued that events should instead be open for everyone. openness would enhance communality, and it would be easier for new people to become acquainted with the villagers. this kind of action and working together would increase interaction. second home residents had slightly more contacts with other second home residents than with permanent residents of the village (table 4, fig.4), but the difference was statistically insignificant (paired samples test, sig. 0.291). there was a significant correlation between second home owners’ contacts with permanent residents on the one hand and with other second home owners on the other hand; active second home owners were involved with both groups. the villagers had contact with other villagers and second home residents little more than “now and then” (average 3.25). residents, part-time and permanent home owners who have broader social relations also actively participate in local meetings and decision making. the participation and influencing plan of citizens of rovaniemi 2013–2016 (rovaniemi 2013) aims to activate the residents and involve them in the communal decision making. the document has been formally adopted by the municipality of rovaniemi. it states that cdcs stand for representative direct democracy and enhance the participation and influence of inhabitants. it also notes that residents and village associations represent direct democracy that is the traditional base for the action of residents. still, second home owners are not mentioned in this document. the cdc have had the possibility to make a statement about the draft of the participation and influencing plan, but they had not suggested including second home owners in the plan. although cdcs are a part of the official communal decision making system, representatives of committees are elected by public village meetings. this procedure is different from the elections of other boards of the municipality. this election system will most likely be changed in the future if the experiment of cdcs continues. it is possible that local district committee members will be elected within municipal elections. for the time being, the table 3. the percentage of permanent residents and second home owners participating in village association activities (yes = participating, no = not participating).   permanent residents other second home owners n 44 45 mean 2.98 3.13 std. deviation 1.067 1.014 table 4. means and deviation of second home owners’ contacts with permanent residents and other second home owners in perunkajärvi. the scale is from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very often).   permanent residents second home owners yes 87 18 no 13 82 fennia 194: 2 (2016) 161participation of second home owners and permanent residents representative of a village has to be a permanent resident of that village. therefore, the only opportunity for participation by second home owners is indirectly via the village association. “the communal district committee increases the potential influence of second home owners because the formal representative of the village on the committee can also be their messenger. if there is an important issue concerning the village, we can convene a village meeting and hear villagers’ opinions. after that, we can bring them to the agenda of the communal district committee. but it is very difficult to persuade second home owners to attend village meetings, though we have asked them.” (id: 1, villager, male) the low level of second home owner participation is not entirely rooted in the limited ways for them to influence policy. the focus group revealed that many second home owners had not taken part in association meetings, as they prefer contacts with other second home owners instead. when spending their leisure time, they did not want to be active citizens. second home owners relaxed by eating, reading and spending leisure time in the countryside. local services and activities as mentioned before, the village of perunkajärvi does not provide many local services. in addition to this, the villagers who are active in developing the village were asked whether they know what kind of services might be preferred by the second home owners. it was found that most of the permanent residents do not know what kind of services second home owners prefer to have. during the summer 2014 meeting it was also found that the service needs of second home owners have been recognised by the city council representatives. these needs are presently ascertained in all the villages of rovaniemi. one participant said “second home owners will need, before long, services when they are staying longer and getting older.” (id: 7, villager, female) at once another lady added: “what services? we do not have any here.” (id: 6, villager, female). according to the questionnaire, when second home owners were choosing the area in which to build or to buy a second home, the provision of services was not a very important factor when considering (table 5) to buy real estate in perunkajärvi. the most important factor was nature and also the leisure time activities (fig. 5). there was a discussion in the focus group concerning a future plan to provide a service bus that could provide multi-services such as health care assistance and a library. for instance, the villagers agreed that the bus could also provide services to second home owners. also in the questionnaire, the permanent residents listed a service bus as a service that is needed in all villages. in addition, “a village caretaker” and better internet connection were mentioned. services required by the second home owners included a grocery shop or mobile shop bus, and some of them desired cleaning help and health services. the need for cleaning and health services is likely to increase; this can be related to the fact that 60% of the second home owner respondents are retired and elderly people. fig. 4. second home owners’ contacts with permanent residents and the other second home owners in perunkajärvi. 162 fennia 194: 2 (2016)asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie according to the questionnaire, the second home owners did not use local services very much. the most used services were the snow removal from private roads and the purchasing firewood. a slight interest was shown in local nature destinations and local events. discussion in this article, we have studied how a new communal decision making model can improve resident participation and especially second home owner participation in the development of villages. although the new local decision making level is only represented by the cdc, the entire structure of decision making is difficult to change. moreover, structural policy changes should be developed through inclusive political strategies (pemberton & goodwin 2010). to this end, the municipal strategies of rovaniemi should consider second home owners as being among the actors of the decision making process. at present, they may have indirect influence via village associations. thus, our findings support similar notions by hall and müller (2004) that the committees are not formally promoting second home owners’ participation. in our case, we found that second home owners have not been active in taking part in the actions or meetings of village associations, so that the indirect influence via village association is insufficient to transfer their wishes and needs to the cdc. this challenge has also been identified by lipkina and hall (2014) in their study of second home owners’ willingness to take part in communal decision making or participate in local associations. the perunkajärvi villagers’ hope to have more actively participating second home owners is in contrast to the second homer owners’ own desire on how to spend their leisure time. participation is seen as an indication of social inclusion and engagement; however, the decision of whether or not to participate, based on self-defined limits, is rational (hayward et al. 2004; shortall 2008). nylander and leppänen (2006) stated that the opportunities for second home owners to influ    nature leisure activities services n 42 42 43 mean 4.12 3.24 1.53 std. deviation 0.942 1.322 0.827 table 5. the importance of nature, leisure activities and services for second home owners when choosing perunkajärvi. showing n, mean, and std. deviation. the scale is from 1 (not important) to 5 (very important). fig. 5. second home owners’ evaluation of reasons why they chose the perunkajärvi area: nature, leisure activities and services. fennia 194: 2 (2016) 163participation of second home owners and permanent residents ence the municipality are generally insufficient at this time; however, if second home owners are active, they have the chance to have their opinions heard. moreover, few second home owners, in perunkajärvi, who had actively taken part in local associations, had a key role in building contacts between second home owners and villagers. greater inclusion and participation in local associations might enhance municipal democracy, as nordin and marjavaara (2012) argued that participation in local association life, among locals and second home owners, is particularly important from a democratic perspective. as second home owners can be seen as potential resources for the village, it would also be important to facilitate their participation in the cdc. they can contribute, not only economically, but, also with their knowledge (robertsson & marjavaara 2014). second home owners are frequently elderly people, often near retirement, and they represent the middle class or wealthy component of the population (mottiar & quinn 2003; strandell & hall 2015), so they have time and knowhow. on the other hand, the stereotype of the traditional second home owner is currently being challenged by heterogeneous second home ownership (rinne et al. 2015). this encourages us to consider the wide range of perspectives, opinions and expertise that this diverse group of second home owners may have. our results showed that in order to identify local development issues and needs for both residents and second home owners, it is important to activate the participation and interaction of second home owners and permanent inhabitants. barnett (2014) has suggested that second home owners’ engagement in host communities needs to be active. it has been noted that the interest may; however, increase significantly and rapidly, when issues having a direct impact on the environment surrounding the second home are involved, such as new constructions or changes in land use (mottiar & quinn 2003; rinne et al. 2015). in our case, both villagers and second home owners were not satisfied with the internet connection. therefore, this issue could be such a shared interest that increases interaction between villagers and second home owners. in the municipal development plan of rovaniemi, telecommunications development was seen as important, as it might increase the time spent in second homes. hiltunen and rehunen (2014) have argued that distance work is becoming more popular as, in an increasing number of second homes, the standard of amenities is high and internet access is available. though the municipal plan emphasises the importance of telecommunications, they have not been developed in practice. to satisfy locals’ wants, there is a need to develop interaction with municipal authors and local actors, both residents and second home owners. this might happen if opportunities for participation are opened and if the perspectives of second home owners are constructively integrated into the dialogue with local actors. various models have been used to describe decisional methods. in that of the district committee, attempts to downscale decision making including local rural areas. this model is similar to a multilevel governance in which ‘top-down’ approaches accommodate those that are ‘bottom-up’. the capacities of localities to act in their own interest is supported by the opportunities presented in a multi-level governance structure and can be developed in ways that include all relevant stakeholders taking part in decision making (sullivan et al. 2004). tough village and residents’ associations have been seen to provide formal channels of participation to second home owners (rinne et al. 2015). the associations do not have a formal position in the municipal decision-making process, and therefore, their roles should be made explicit. we noticed that second home owners prefer remote rural areas, as they aim to improve the quality of their everyday life through the amenities of nature and a peaceful environment. overall in finland, it seems that among second home owners and users, free-time spent at the cottage is mainly used for relaxing and placing mental distance from working life (hiltunen & rehunen 2014). therefore, nature is important as a concrete platform for different activities; both use-oriented activities, such as fishing, picking berries and mushrooms, and recreation-oriented activities, such as walking in the forest, swimming, and enjoying a sauna (vepsäläinen & pitkänen 2010; pitkänen et al. 2011). farstad and rye (2013) found that second home owners have a stronger interest in preserving natural amenities than in rural development. in rural areas, such as perunkajärvi, both permanent and second home inhabitants are increasingly elderly people, and second home owners stay in their second homes longer than before. these two trends, together, raise the demand for local services, especially health and recreation services (jauhiainen 2009; müller & marjavaara 2012; osbaldiston et al. 2015). considering the 164 fennia 194: 2 (2016)asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie population structure and the long distances between villages, the major challenge for municipalities is to provide services, whether they are public or private. analysing the implementation of the italian social services reform, bifulco and centemeri (2008) noted the importance of third sector participation in the local welfare system. the use or disuse of services and space can also indicate the extent of involvement in the local community, even though the use of services, by second home owners, is usually viewed from the perspective of economic contribution to the local economy (lipkina & hall 2014). thus, if only the local elite are represented in local government councils, they might not consider wider public needs and prefer decisions favourable to themselves (blair 2000). as reddel and woolcock (2004) stated, the relationship between representative and participatory governance might be problematic and it is important to make the link more explicit and transparent. we consider that this may promote participation by second home owners and help to create a new means of participation. small councils bring decision makers into direct contact with those people affected by their decisions, and thus, reduce the propensity for large bureaucracies to ‘depersonalise’ policy outcomes, with positive results for efficient delivery (dollery & johnson 2005). conclusions in this study, we found that permanent residents of villages perceive second home owners as not being particularly interested in participating in the planning and decision making related to local issues. on the other hand, permanent residents seem to look to second home owners for new ideas concerning how to develop the services that second home owners need, as permanent residents are not aware of second home owners’ needs and priorities. the general perception is that the greater the time people live in the village, the greater the pressure for municipalities to arrange services for all residents. perhaps, it is typical that relatively few vacationers, staying in second homes, are active and involved in local events. it is a major challenge to find inspiring means to encourage second home owners to be active and participatory. the topics that are of interest to both permanent and parttime residents, such as fishing, might be a good starting point for establishing collaboration. collaboration and relationship building may reduce potential conflicts. according to the municipal documents and plans, it seems that second home owners are not seen, at least in this case, to be a significant group of inhabitants, in terms of local decision making. hence, local-level communal decision making does not necessarily promote the participation of second home residents. the experimental phase of decision making follows old decision making structures, which are insufficient at taking into account multi-placed living. thus, the municipal authorities should recognise the existence and importance of second home owners, in their area this can be done by better acknowledging their existence and having their specific needs and priorities reflected in municipal plans and strategies, as well as by offering them more financial resources and employing innovative means to encourage participation. local governance arrangements, which already integrate second home owners in planning and decision making processes, should be further studied in detail and new practices should be developed. acknowledgements this work was supported by the academy of finland [project nr. sa255424]. we would also like to thank vesa nivala for preparing the map of the case study area. references adams d & hess m 2001. community in public policy: fad or foundation. australian journal of public administration 60: 2, 13–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.00205. asikainen j 2011. strateginen päätöksentekokyky ja toimeenpanokyky itsehallinnon toteuttajana erilaisissa toimintaympäristöissä. in haveri a, stenvall j & majoinen k (ed). kunnallisen itsehallinnon peruskivet [cornerstones of municipal self-government], 316–321. acta publications no. 224. the association of finnish local and regional authorities and the finnish association of local government studies, helsinki. (in finnish, introduction in english) barnett j 2014. host community perceptions of the contributions of second homes. annals of leisure research 17: 1, 10–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2014.886156. fennia 194: 2 (2016) 165participation of second home owners and permanent residents bifulco l & centemeri l 2008. governance and participation in local welfare: the case of italian piani di zona. social policy & administration 42: 3, 211–227. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9515.2007.00593.x. blair h 2000. participation and accountability at the periphery: democratic local governance in six countries. world development 28: 1, 212–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0305-750x(99)00109-6. dollery b & johnson a 2005. enhancing efficiency in australian local government: an evaluation of alternative models of municipal governance. urban policy and research 23: 1, 73–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0811114042000335278. farstad m 2013. local residents' valuation of second home owners' presence in a sparsely inhabited area. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 13: 4, 317–331. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250.2013.863062. farstad m & rye jf 2013. second home owners, locals and their perspectives on rural development. journal of rural studies 30, 41–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2012.11.007. goss s 2001. making local governance work. networks, relationships and the management of change. government beyond the centre. palgrave, basingstoke. hall cm 2015. second homes planning, policy and governance. journal of policy research in tourism, leisure and events 7: 1, 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2014.964251. hall cm & müller dk 2004. introduction: second homes, curse or blessing? revisited. in hall cm & müller dk (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes. between elite landscape and common ground, 3–14. channelview, clevedon. hall cm, müller dk & saarinen j 2009. nordic tourism. issues and cases. channelview, bristol. halme e & kuukasjärvi l 2010. uusi kunta vai kuntaliitos – kuntalaisen itsehallinto. kunnallisalan kehittämissäätiön polemia-sarjan julkaisu nro 76. pole-kuntatieto oy, helsinki. (in finnish) haveri a, stenvall j & majoinen k 2011. introduction. in haveri a, stenvall j & majoinen k (eds). kunnallisen itsehallinnon peruskivet [cornerstones of municipal self-government], 26–35. acta publications no. 224, helsinki. hayward c, simpson l & wood l 2004. still left out in the cold: problematising participatory research and development. sociologia ruralis 44: 1, 95–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2004.00264.x. hess m & adams d 2007. innovation in public management: the role and function of community knowledge. the innovation journal: the public sector innovation journal 12: 1, article 2. <http:// www.innovation.cc/volumes-issues/hess_adams_ innovate_public_manage8final.pdf> 15.03.2015. hiltunen mj 2007. environmental impacts of rural second home tourism – case lakedistrict in finland. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 7: 3, 243–265. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250701312335. hiltunen mj, pitkänen k, vepsäläinen m & hall cm 2013. second home tourism in finland: current trends and eco-social impacts. in roca z (ed). second homes in europe: from lifestyle to policy issues, 165–198. ashgate, aldershot, uk. hiltunen m & rehunen a 2014. second home mobility in finland: patterns, practices and relations of leisure oriented mobile lifestyle. fennia 192: 1, 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.11143/8384. jauhiainen js 2009. will the retiring baby boomers return to rural periphery? journal of rural studies 25: 1, 25–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.05.001. jordan ej, vogt ca, kruger le & grewe n 2013. the interplay of governance, power and citizen participation in community tourism planning. journal of policy research in tourism, leisure and events 5: 3, 270–288. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1907963.2013.789354. kallio kp & bäcklund p 2012. oletettu alueellisuus, kuviteltu osallisuus tilalliset sidokset julkishallinnon lapsi ja nuorisopoliittisessa retoriikassa. [expected locality, imagined commitment – spatial situatedness in public administration child and youth policy rhetoric]. terra 123: 4, 245–258. kaltenborn brp, andersen o, nellemann c, bjerke t & thrane c 2008. resident attitudes towards mountain second-home tourism development in norway: the effects of environmental attitudes. journal of sustainable tourism 16: 6, 664–680. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669580802159685. kauppinen m 2004. väestömuutos tulee – onko kuntasi valmis? kunnallistieteellinen aikakauskirja 31: 1, 16–35. (in finnish, abstract in english) kelly g & hosking k 2008. nonpermanent residents, place attachment, and “sea change” communities. environment and behaviour 40: 4, 575–594. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0013916507302246. van laar s, cottyn i, donaldson r, zoomers a & ferreira s 2014. ’living apart together’ in franschhock, south africa. the implications of home development for equitable and sustainable development. in janoschka m & haas h (eds). contested spatialities, lifestyle migration and residential tourism, 190–203. routledge, london. lipkina o & hall cm 2014. russian second home owners in eastern finland: involvement in the local community. in janoschka m & haas h (eds). contested spatialities of lifestyle migration, 158– 173. routledge, london. marjavaara r 2007. the displacement myth: second home tourism in the stockholm archipelago. tourism geographies 9: 3, 296–317. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616680701422848. marjavaara r 2008. second home tourism: the root to displacement in sweden? gerum2008:1. umeå university, umeå. maxwell j a 2005. qualitative research design: an interactive approach. applied social research methods series: 41. sage publications, thousand oaks, ca. 166 fennia 194: 2 (2016)asta kietäväinen, janne rinne, riikka paloniemi & seija tuulentie ministry of finance 1995. local government act (365/1995). <https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/1995/en19950365.pdf> 15.04.2015 ministry of justice 1999. constitution of finland (731/1999). section 121. <http://www.finlex.fi/ en/laki/kaannokset/1999/en19990731.pdf> 15.04.2015 mottiar z & quinn b 2003. shaping leisure/tourism place – the role of holiday home owners: a case study of courtown, co. wexford, ireland. leisure studies 22: 2, 109–127. müller dk 2006. the attractiveness of second home areas in sweden: a quantitative analysis. current issues in tourism 9: 4–5, 335–350. müller dk & marjavaara r 2012. from second home to primary residence: migration towards recreational properties in sweden 1991–2005. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 103: 1, 53–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2011.00674.x. möttönen s 2011. kunnallisen itsehallinnon merkitys ja uudistuminen muuttuvassa toimintaympäristössä. in haveri a, stenvall j & majoinen k (eds). kunnallisen itsehallinnon peruskivet, 63–84. kuntaliitto, helsinki. de nazaré oliveira roca m, roca z, oliveira ja & costa l 2014. second home expansion in portugal. in janoschka m & haas h (eds). contested spatialities, lifestyle migration and residential tourism, 24–142. routledge, london. nordin u & marjavaara r 2012. the local non-locals: second home owners associational engagement in sweden. tourism preliminary communication 60: 3, 293–305. nylander m & leppänen j 2006. vapaa-ajan asukkaiden osallistuminen kuntien päätöksentekoon. sisäasiainministeriön julkaisu 14. saaristoasiain neuvottelukunta, suunnittelukeskus oy, helsinki. osbaldiston n, picken & duffy 2015. characteristics and future intentions of second homeowners: a case study from eastern victoria, australia. journal of policy research in tourism, leisure and events 7: 1, 62–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2014.934689. osf [official statistics of finland] 2012. buildings and free-time residences [e-publication]. statistics finland, helsinki. <http://www.tilastokeskus.fi/ t i l / r a k k e / 2 0 1 2 / r a k k e _ 2 0 1 2 _ 2 0 1 3 0 5 2 4 _ tie_001_en.html> 04.06.2013. overåg k & berg ng 2011. second homes, rurality and contested space in eastern norway. tourism geographies: an international journal of tourism space, place and environment 13: 3, 417–442. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2011.570778. paris c 2008. re‐positioning second homes within housing studies: household investment, gentrification, multiple residence, mobility and hyper‐consumption. housing, theory and society 26, 292–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14036090802300392. pemberton s & goodwin m 2010. rethinking the changing structures of rural local government – statepower, rural politics and local political strategies? journal of rural studies 26, 272–283. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.12.005. pihlaja r & sanberg s 2012. alueellista demokratiaa? lähidemokratian toimintamallit suomen kunnissa. valtiovarainministeriön julkaisuja 27/2012 [ministry of finance publications 27/2012]. suomen yliopistopaino oy – juvenes print, tampere. (in finnish, abstract in english) pitkänen k, puhakka r & sawatzky m 2011. the role of nature in the place meanings and practices of cottage owners in northern environments. norsk geografisk tidsskrift – norwegian journal of geography 65: 3, 175–187. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2011.598236. reddel t 2002. beyond participation, hierarchies, management and markets: ‘new’ governance and place polities. australian journal of public administration 61: 1, 50–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.00258. reddel t & woolcock g 2004. from consultation to participatory governance? acritical review of citizen engagement strategies in queensland. australian journal of public administration 63: 3, 75–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8500.2004.00392.x. rinne j, kietäväinen a, tuulentie s & paloniemi r 2014. governing second-homes¬ – a study of policy coherence of four policy areas in finland. tourism review international 18: 3, 223–236. http://dx.doi.org/10.3727/154427214x14101901317318. rinne j, paloniemi r, tuulentie s & kietäväinen a 2015. participation of second home users in local planning and decision-making. a study of three cottage-rich locations in finland. journal of policy research in tourism, leisure and events 7: 1, 98–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2014.909818. robertsson l & marjavaara r 2015. the seasonal buzz: knowledge transfer in a temporary setting. tourism planning & development 12: 3, 251–265. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2014.947437. rovaniemi 2013. asukkaiden osallisuuden ja vaikuttamisen kehittämisohjelma 2013–2016 [the participation and influence plan of rovaniemi citizens 2013–2016]. <http://www.rovaniemi.fi/ loader.aspx?id=f4a09790-beab-481a-beb615a8682eb469> 15.04.2015. (in finnish) rovaniemi 2014. rovaniemen maaseudun kehittämisohjelam 2013–2020 [the development plan for rural areas of rovaniemi 2013–2020]. <http:// www.rovaniemi.fi/loader.aspx?id=7c392c4bad4e-4d24-9fc2-25ca9fd6488f> 15.04.2015. (in finnish) rovaniemi 2016. rovaniemen toimintaympäristön tilastot 2016. <http://www.rovaniemi.fi/loader. aspx?id=a23e710c-8933-4672-b1e0-c63a45ed7f34> 15.05.2016. (in finnish) rye jf 2011. conflicts and contestations. rural populations’ perspectives on the second homes phenomenon. journal of rural studies 27: 3, 263–274. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2011.03.005. fennia 194: 2 (2016) 167participation of second home owners and permanent residents ryynänen a & uoti a 2009. kunnallinen itsehallinto ja uusi hallintotapa. in karppi i & sinervo l-m (eds). governance: uuden hallintatavan jäsentyminen, 212–236. tampereen yliopisto. kauppaja hallintotieteiden tiedekunta, tampere. (in finnish) salminen a 2008. evaluating the new governance of the welfare state in finland. international journal of public administration 31: 10–11, 1242–1258. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01900690801973352. shortall s 2008. are rural development programme socially inclusive? social inclusion, civic engagement, participation, and social capital: exploring the differences. journal of rural studies 24: 4, 450–457. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.01.001. sjöblom s 2002. kuntalainen vaikuttajana. in pekolasjöblom m, helander v & sjöblom s (eds). kuntalaisen monet roolit, 77–95. suomen kuntaliitto, helsinki. (in finnish) sodankyläntie 2013. sodankyläntien aluelautakunnan kehittämissuunnitelma 2013–2016 [the development plan of the communal district committee of sodankyläntie 2013–2016]. 11.12.2014. (in finnish) strandell a & hall cm 2015. impact of the residential environment on second home use in finland – testing the compensation hypothesis. landscape and urban planning 133, 12–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.09.011. sullivan h, knops a, barnes m & newman j 2004. central-local relations in an era of multi-level governance: the case public participation policy in england, 1997–2001. local government studies 30: 2, 245–265. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0300393042000267263. suomen kuntaliitto 2016. kaupunkien ja kuntien lukumäärä. <http://www.kunnat.net/fi/tietopankit/ tilastot/aluejaot/kuntien-lukumaara/sivut/default. aspx> 02.05.2016. vainio a & paloniemi r 2012. forest owners and power: a foucauldian study on finnish forest policy. forest policy and economics 21, 118–125. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2012.02.008. vepsäläinen m & pitkänen k 2010. second home countryside. representations of the rural in finnish popular discourses. journal of rural studies 26: 2, 194–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.07.002. vikajärvi 2013. maaseudun kehittämisohjelma vikajärvi. maaseudun kehittämisohjelman avoimet kyläkokoukset. sodankyläntien suunta vikajärvi < h t t p : / / w w w . r o v a n i e m i . f i / l o a d e r . aspx?id=5d12dc96-d185-4e57-a55d-e997eab25455> 20.3.2013. (in finnish) wallace a, bevan m, croucher k, jacson k, o’malley l & orton v 2005. the impact of empty, second and holiday homes on the sustainability of rural communities – a systematic literature review. the centre for housing policy, university of york, york. untitled mires of finland: regional and local controls of vegetation, landforms, and long-term dynamics heikki seppä seppä, heikki (2002). mires of finland: regional and local controls of vegetation, landforms, and long-term dynamics. fennia 180: 1–2, 43–60. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in this review i examine the geographical patterns of the finnish mires and the role of regional and local factors that lead to their spatial differentiation. finland can be divided into three roughly latitudinal mire zones (from south to north): the raised bog zone, the aapa mire zone, and the palsa mire zone. the development of the raised bogs is linked to the dominance of sphagnum, leading to the growth of a thick peat layer that rises above the level of the mineral soil. the gross morphology of an aapa mire is typically inclined and concave. here, sphagnum species are less dominant, probably due to spring floods which keep the mire surface minerotrophic. both raised bogs and aapa mires have typically regularly-patterned microtopography. seasonal movements of microtopographical features of the aapa mires reflect the morphological dynamism of the mires. mires are also important sources of information regarding past environmental changes. their growth pattern is affected by environmental conditions and they respond sensitively to the changes in effective humidity and other climatic variables. most of the present microtopographical patterns have formed during the last 3,000 years as a response to gradual cooling of climate. research on finnish peat deposits has shown, however, that not all peat-stratigraphical changes are caused by past climate variations. they can also be due to the natural growth dynamics of the mires, such as the long-term development towards drier conditions on the surface of the raised bogs, the rhythmic growth pattern of the low hummocks, and the local changes in water table resulting from growth of hummocks and hollows. heikki seppä, department of earth sciences, villavägen 16, se-75236 uppsala university, sweden. e-mail: heikki.seppa@geo.uu.se introduction finland is the mire-richest country in western europe (heikurainen 1960). before the extensive drainage of mires especially during the twentieth century, mires covered 30–35 percent of the finnish land area. they are still a major landscapeecological factor, increasing finland’s bioand geodiversity greatly (aapala et al. 1998; vasander 1998). one feature explaining the diversity of mires is the great longitudinal dimension of the country that stretches from the hemiboreal vegetation zone south of 60°n to the subarctic zone in lapland, north of 70°n. there are major regional differences in the nature of mires in finland. apart from the blanket bogs, which are confined to the more oceanic regions (moore & bellamy 1974), all major mire types of the boreal zone are found. raised bogs characterise southern finland, open aapa mires and sloping fens northern finland. in the far north of lapland, palsa mires form the northernmost, periglacial mire complex type (fig. 1). the diversity of mire site types reflects the richness of the mire vegetation: their total number is over one hundred (eurola & kaakinen 1978; aapala et al. 1998). many of them are rare and threatened, largely due to the intensive drainage of the nutrient-rich mire site types for forestry and agriculture. the variation in mire site types is due to numerous edaphic and climatic factors, which can be either of a regional or local nature. simi44 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä fig. 1. the geographical division of finnish mires and the proportion of mires of the land area in different parts of the country (data from ilvessalo 1960; ruuhijärvi 1983). the highest proportions are in southern, central, and northern ostrobothnia and central lapland. these regions are characterised by large, even peneplains and low evaporation, both important for the initiation and spread of mires. the mire percentages are high also in the subaquatic regions of western finland, where thick clay deposits smooth the unevenness of the bedrock. the lowest proportions of mires are on the coast of the gulf of finland, in the lake district, and in the far north of lapland, where small-scale unevenness of the terrain restricts the lateral extension of the mires. larly, there is considerable diversity in terms of gross morphology, microtopography, and peat stratigraphy between and within each mire complex type and their subtypes. regional differences in mires provide the basis for the classification and geographical division of finnish mires, first suggested by cajander (1913). his original classification is still valid and widely used in finland, but the understanding of the environmental factors and processes that lead to the development of different mires increased vastly during the twentieth century. in this article, i defennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 45mires of finland scribe the basic features of finnish mires and review the current status of knowledge of their regional and local patterns and processes. such a comparative geographical approach in mire studies can be of great importance, since regional factors, including climate, geology, and physiography, largely control the development and geographic distribution of mires (foster & glaser 1986). because of the overriding control of climate over the production and decomposition of peat, and because they exhibit vertical and lateral growth, mires also belong to the most dynamic ecosystems in the world. they often respond rapidly to climatic variations and record them as biological, chemical, and physical changes in peat stratigraphy (e.g., barber 1981; blackford & chambers 1991; chambers et al. 1997). consequently, i will focus on aspects of stability and change in finnish mires and on the role of mires in the reconstruction of past environmental conditions. mire ecology and mire site types the most important ecological gradients that affect mire vegetation are ph, nutrient availability, and moisture (heikurainen 1960; ruuhijärvi 1983). variation of these gradients leads to a major ecological division into ombrotrophy and minerotrophy. ombrotrophic mires receive nutrient supply only from the atmosphere and are nutrient-poor and acid (ph usually < 4). ombrotrophic vegetation dominates the central parts of raised bogs. minerotrophic mires are supplied by minerogenic water flow from the surrounding mineral soils or by ground-water from springs and as seepage through peat, which carries additional nutrients to the mire. minerotrophic mires can be divided into oligotrophic, mesotrophic, and eutrophic subtypes according to increasing trophic levels (ruuhijärvi 1983; laine & vasander 1998). areas with relatively similar combinations of ecological gradients give rise to ecological niches with typical plant assemblages. these are termed mire site types and they form the basis of the ecological classification of finnish mires (ruuhijärvi 1983; laine & vasander 1998). the four basic mire site type classes in finland are: (1) pine fens, (2) eutrophic fens, (3) spruce swamps, which are mostly forested mire types, and (4) open fens which are treeless. as no two mire plant communities are identical, the mire site type descriptions are abstract simplifications of all the plant communities that belong to the same site type (heikurainen 1960; eurola et al. 1982; laine & vasander 1998). pine fens are forested mire site types. pine and dwarf shrubs, for example betula nana, calluna vulgaris and ledum palustre, dominate their vegetation. rubus chamaemorus is a characteristic herb. the peat layer is often several metres thick and mostly formed by weakly decomposed sphagnum (s. magellanicum, s. angustifolium, s. russowii, s. fuscum) remains with high lignin content. eutrophic fens represent the richest mire vegetation in finland. their ph and nutrient level are high due to the carbonate content of the soil and bedrock. the most demanding mire species of finland, such as carex dioica, c. flava, saxifraga hirculus, and a number of rare mosses, grow on eutrophic fens. remains of brown mosses and sedges dominate peat stratigraphy. the average depth of the peat layer is circa 150 centimetres (heikurainen 1960). because of their strict edaphic requirements, eutrophic fens are confined to few areas in finland. spruce swamps are forested mire site types, usually dominated by dense spruce forests. other common plants are birch, alder, vaccinium myrtillus, v. vitis-idaea, and several herbs. tall grasses often characterise the field layer. peat layers are thin (usually < 100 cm), and the peat is dark, well decomposed, and rich in lignin and tree remains. open fens dominate the centres of the ombrotrophic raised bogs and minerotrophic aapa mires. they are mostly treeless and wet mire site types, characterised by sphagnum spp., vaccinium oxycoccos, andromeda polifolia, eriophorum vaginatum, carex spp., and tricophorum cespitosa. peat is mostly formed by sphagnum spp. and carex spp. the peat layers in the centre of large raised bogs can reach ten metres in depth. each main mire site type can be divided further into numerous subtypes depending on the degree of homogeneity required of the mire site types. the number of botanical mire site types is over 100, of which circa 30 are common. that there are more mire site types than forest site types is due to the greater gradient of moisture, greater amplitude in nutrient availability, and also to the broad application of the term mire in finland (ruuhijärvi 1983; laine & vasander 1998). 46 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä mire complex types on large mires, the combinations of environmental gradients and corresponding mire site types are different in different parts of the mire. mires are thus formed by a combination of mire site types. such combinations are termed mire complexes (cajander 1913). the two most common mire complex types in finland are raised bogs and aapa mires. they differ from each other by various significant morphological, hydrological, trophic, and vegetational characteristics. the palsa mires are a less common but an equally characteristic mire complex type. raised bogs raised bogs are usually defined on the basis of their gross morphology (grossformen in aario 1932). the term refers to the profile of the complete mire as defined by precise levellings, usually along the longest diameter of the mire. on raised bogs, the centres of the mires typically rise higher than the level of the surrounding mineral soil. the difference from other mire complex types is not, however, only based on gross morphology, but on several other factors, most of which are superimposed on the morphology. in his original papers about the use of the term raised bog (hochmoor in german, keidassuo in finnish), paasio (1933, 1934) referred exclusively to the mires that are more or less dome-shaped and always rise above the level of the surrounding mineral soil. he thus rejected the definitions based on the trophic status of the mire. on numerous bogs in southern finland, however, the centre of the bog is not, or is only very slightly, above the level of the mineral soil, but these bogs fulfil all the other criteria of raised bogs, including ombrotrophy. therefore, such mires can be called horizontal raised bogs. paasio’s (1933) list of nutrientlevel classes did not include the class ’ombrotrophy’. this may have led to the neglect of trophic status in defining what now are called ‘raised bogs’. the gross morphology of a raised bog can be divided into three gross-morphological parts. the centre, which can rise several metres above the level of the surrounding mineral soil, is termed the central plateau. an inclined marginal slope surrounds it, and a narrow, minerotrophic lagg, which delimits the mire against the mineral soil, encircles the whole of the mire. on the basis of the occurrence and morphology of the central plateau, marginal slope, and lagg, raised bogs can be divided into three gross-morphological types. these are plateau bogs, concentric bogs, and eccentric bogs (aario 1932; paasio 1933; eurola 1962). a steep marginal slope and a flat central plateau without higher points or dome-shape characterise plateau bogs (fig. 2a). they correspond with the north-american plateau bogs in their profile, size, and occurrence in relation to the topography of mineral soil (foster & glaser 1986). plateau bogs are mostly found on the fine-sediment plains of the finnish south coast (fig. 1) where such mires as munasuo (in pyhtää), punassuo (in perniö), maisaarensuo (in alastaro), and marjakeidas (in honkajoki) are good examples of plateau bogs. concentric bogs (fig. 2b) are typically domeshaped bogs. their highest point is often close to the centre of the bog, which gives them a symmetrical profile (symmetrische concentric in aartolahti 1965). they are the dominant raised bog type in western finland (fig. 1), especially in northern satakunta and southern ostrobothnia where they delimit the southern boundary of the aapa mires. torronsuo in tammela, which is almost 3,000 hectares in size and the largest raised bog in a natural state in southern finland, is mostly a concentric raised bog, although this large mire complex includes also other morphological types (aartolahti 1965). on eccentric bogs (fig. 2c), the highest point is close to the highest margin of the bog. the bog thus has characteristically an asymmetrical shape (asymmetriche concentric in aartolahti 1965). this is usually due to the uneven, inclined relief of the mineral substratum of the mire (aartolahti 1965; ruuhijärvi 1983). consequently, eccentric bogs are concentrated in areas of uneven topography in eastern and central finland (fig. 1). large, representative eccentric raised bogs are siikaneva (in ruovesi), haapasuo (in leivonmäki), kesonsuo and koivusuo (in ilomantsi) and pilvineva (in veteli). the development of the gross morphology of a raised bog is a result of continuous accumulation of nutrient-poor sphagnum peat. the growth of the peat deposit means that the bog surface and the water table of the mire rise above the level of the mineral soil, inhibiting the flow of mineralrich waters from the soils to the centre. raised bogs have thus been minerotrophic mires until fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 47mires of finland vertical growth has turned them into ombrotrophy. the development of the gross morphology can be reconstructed by defining synchronous levels in peat stratigraphy in different parts of a raised bog. earlier, this was carried out by producing pollen diagrams from various parts of the bog and using some synchronous event, often the late-holocene rise of picea pollen (aario 1932; aartolahti 1965). later, transects of radiocarbon dates have been applied to produce three-dimensional growth models (korhola et al. 1997). in the future, tephrostratigraphy may provide an even more precise tool for this purpose. these reconstructions indicate that finland’s raised bogs reach their gross morphology during the early stage of their raised bog phase and that the vertical growth of the bog tends to enhance the original gross morphology instead of changing it (aartolahti 1965; korhola 1992; ikonen 1993; korhola et al. 1997). as each raised bog undergoes the same main development stages, their general peat stratigraphy is similar. the basal peat varies according the origin of the mire, but is always produced by plants that indicate minerotrophic conditions. the peat often contains remains of trees and large telmatic herbs. above the basal peat is a layer of carex peat, which also originates during a minerotrophic phase of mire development. this is overlain by often a thick bed of sphagnum peat fig. 2. differences in gross morphology between different raised bog types (a–c) and an aapa mire (d). (a) a plateau bog; (b) a concentric raised bog; and (c) an eccentric raised bog (all three according to aartolahti 1965); (d) a typical profile and peatstratigraphy of an aapa mire (tolonen 1967). 48 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä which reflects the ombrotrophic phase in the mire’s history. the shift from the carex to the sphagnum peat layer therefore often – but not always – indicates the initiation of the raised bog phase in mire development. figures 2a, 2b, and 2c illustrate the standard outlines of peat-stratigraphical patterns of finnish raised bogs. microtopography: hummocks and hollows in addition to their typical gross morphology, raised bogs are characterised by their microtopography, i.e., the patterns of the hummocks and hollows on their surfaces (kleinformen in aario 1932). hummocks are higher and drier parts of the bog surface, whereas hollows are wet depressions. they occur often in regular series located perpendicularly in relation to the inclination and direction of the water flow of the bog. microtopography is the most conspicuous on the moist and clearly dome-shaped raised bogs, especially on the concentric bogs in northern satakunta and south ostrobothnia. there, the hummocks can be 50 to 100 centimetres high and several hundreds of metres long (aartolahti 1965, 1966). they run parallel to the contours of the bogs and form a distinct rim around the highest point of the mire. their slopes are usually steeper on the proximal side than on the distal side. on plateau bogs and horizontal bogs, the hummocks are only 10–30 centimetres high and they are either short and discontinuous or form unoriented, low nets on the mire surface (eurola 1962; aartolahti 1966; ruuhijärvi 1983; tolonen & seppä 1994). on the south coast of finland, hummocks and hollows are often the most distinct on hummock–hollow pine bogs, where large hollows separate pine-covered hummocks. the origin, growth pattern, and stability of the microtopography of the raised bogs have been among the major dilemmas of mire research since the nineteenth century. the earliest theories stressed the transient nature of these landforms. according to the regeneration model, initiated by von post and sernander (1910) and further developed by osvald (1923), hummocks and hollows would be characteristically unstable. the peat accumulation was assumed to be faster on hollows than on hummocks. therefore, a hollow would eventually rise above the level of the hummock. this development would lead to a cyclic growth pattern where a hollow would turn into a hummock and, eventually, again into a hollow. investigations of the growth dynamics of sphagnum species in hummocks and hollows would seem to support this model, as measurements show that the sphagnum species of the moist hollows grow faster than the species on dry hummocks and that the annual thickness increment of a living sphagnum cover is also faster in hollows (lindholm & vasander 1991). by analysing the peat stratigraphy of open sections, walker and walker (1961) showed, however, that on the irish raised bogs hummocks and hollows are mostly stable landforms. aartolahti (1965, 1967) made similar conclusions in finland in his detailed analysis of sphagnum leaves of peat cores from hummocks and hollows in the raised bogs of southwest finland. the results (table 1) show that large hummocks and hollows have been stable and permanent and no cyclic replacement has taken place since their initiation at circa 3000–2000 14c yrs bp. tolonen’s (1971) detailed peat-stratigraphical investigations of open sections on a raised bog in southern finland later confirmed this. he stressed that open sections are more reliable in studies of the development of raised bog microtopography and that corings may give false evidence of regeneration. thus, there must be a mechanism that compensates the faster thickness increment of the hollows and prevents cyclic regeneration. apparently, it lies in the distinct floral differences between the hummock and hollow sphagnum species and their biochemical differences. detailed analyses of sphagnum peat macrostructure indicate that the decomposition of sphagnum species in hollows proceeds more rapidly than their decomposition in hummocks (johnson et al. 1990). johnson and damman (1991) carried out a biological transplantation experiment on raised bogs. they transferred plants of sphagnum cuspidatum (a species that grows on moist hollows) into a hummock and plants of sphagnum fuscum (a species that grows on dry hummocks) into a hollow, and recorded the changes in decomposition degree over time. they observed that s. fuscum decomposed significantly more slowly than s. cuspidatum, apparently due to biochemical properties that make s. fuscum resistant to decomposition processes in general. the results therefore suggest that while the growth of sphagnum species in moist hollows is often faster than the growth of hummock sphagnum species, the greater resistance to decomposition may lead to greater accufennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 49mires of finland mulation of peat on hummocks and thus prevent the hollow level from rising above the hummock level (johnson et al. 1990; johnson & damman 1991). hypothetically, the inherent decomposition properties of sphagnum species could also cause the development of the microtopographic patterns so that the greater peat production of s. fuscum dominated microsites would give rise to hummocks (johnson & damman 1991). there are, however, easily observable features in raised bog microtopography which the decomposition theory alone does not explain. these include the regular patterning of the hummocks and hollows and their perpendicular location in relation to the inclination of the mire surface. a factor that can influence the development of these patterns is flowing water. this is indicated by the fact that the regular, rim-shaped hummock and hollow microtopography develops on a slightly inclined mire surface, and on flat raised bogs it is net-like and less distinct. once flowing water has initiated the topographical differentiation and led to differences in moisture conditions on the mire surface, the table 1. stability of the microtopography of raised bogs as indicated by microscopic analysis of sphagnum leaves in peat cores from hummocks and hollows – an example from linturahka, mellilä, sw finland. sphagnum balticum and s. cuspidatum dominate the hollow since its rapid initiation at circa 3200 14c yr bp, whereas s. fuscum is the dominant species of the hummock (aartolahti 1967: 77). 50 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä vegetational differences start to develop and the decompositional difference of sphagnum species begins to influence the peat production. open water pools, apart from hollows and mud-hollows, are often common on finland’s raised bogs. they are roughly 20 metres in diameter on average, but the largest pools can be up to 200–300 metres long and several metres deep. there are over one thousand pools on torronsuo (aartolahti 1965). dating of the pools’ basal peat has shown that the pools are often thousands of years old, but usually younger than the basal peat of the mire. this means that they usually are secondary features on the raised bogs and have developed during the sphagnum-dominated stage of the raised bog from the permanently waterlogged ponds on the mire surface (aartolahti 1965, 1967). under such conditions peat accumulation may cease and degradational processes become dominant. pools are common also elsewhere on the raised bogs. they are believed to be outcomes of the erosion of hollows and the rejoining of several hollows and smaller pools (foster et al. 1983; foster & glaser 1986; foster et al. 1988). aapa mires (patterned fens) aapa mires dominate from central finland to the northern tree line in lapland (fig. 1). their size varies from small to the largest mire complexes in finland. in contrast to most of the raised bogs, aapa mires are not convex, but usually concave and inclined in profile (fig. 2d). mineral-rich runoff waters can thus reach their centres and aapa mires are minerogenic, apart from their high strings. as aapa mires occur in those parts of finland where snow depth is considerable and the snow melts rapidly in late spring, spring floods that inundate the mire surface are of great significance for the mires‘ development and vegetation (ruuhijärvi 1960). aapa mires have a distinct microtopography of higher strings and intermittent lower and moister flarks. these patterns are usually located perpendicularly in relation to the inclination of the aapa mire surface, but they do not form rim-like formations like the hummocks and hollows of the raised bogs. the strings of the aapa mires can be even higher and longer than the hummocks of the raised bogs, being sometimes over a metre in height and several hundreds of metres in length. on strongly inclined aapa mires, the strings are characteristically arch-shaped, their centres pointing in a downhill direction and often damming a large water pool on the uphill side. the string vegetation consists of sphagnum spp., calluna vulgaris, betula nana, and ledum palustre in the north and, to a lesser extent, of other dwarf shrubs. carex spp., eriophorum spp., and sphagnum spp. dominate the flarks. the finnish aapa mires have not been divided into gross-morphological subtypes, but ruuhijärvi (1960) divided the aapa mire zone into three subzones mainly on vegetational and microtopographical criteria (fig. 1). in the southern aapa mire zone, sphagnum papillosum -dominated open fens and weakly developed strings and flarks characterise the mires. in the main aapa mire zone, the mires typically have pronounced microtopography, flarks, and long, continuous strings that form regular patterning on the mire surface. in the northern aapa mire zone, microtopography is less regular and the strings form often discontinuous networks (ruuhijärvi 1960). the origin of the strings and flarks of the aapa mires is still largely unknown, as is the case with the microtopography of the raised bogs. several theories have been put forward to explain the origin of these strikingly regular and clear landforms. moore and bellamy (1974) and seppälä and koutaniemi (1986) reviewed the theories and classified them into three main groups: (1) biological explanations; (2) frost and ice activity theories; and (3) gravity theories. the great variety of proposed theories indicates the difficulty of pointing out one model that would conclusively explain the origin of the microtopography. it is therefore possible that the origin is due to a combination of factors, possibly involving all of the three groups. recent work on an aapa mire in kuusamo, north-eastern finland, has shed light on the instability of the strings and pools and the importance of various processes causing their movements (seppälä & koutaniemi 1986; koutaniemi 2000). a series of measurements during 21 years shows that the strings are highly unstable landforms, moving downhill, sideways, and even uphill, often 2–5 centimetres but sometimes even up to 50 centimetres in a year (fig. 3). seppälä and koutaniemi (1986) stress the importance of hydrostatic pressure as the cause of the movements. according to koutaniemi (2000), iceand frostrelated winter processes are of great importance in causing the movements, and an aapa mire in winter behaves like a frozen lake in that the frofennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 51mires of finland zen mire surface expands horizontally as the temperature rises. the ice thrust can be one of the causes of the strings’ uphill movements (koutaniemi 2000). this process, however, should cause downhill movement of those strings that are located downhill from the mire centre. it should also affect the flarks of an aapa mire. hydrostatic water pressure of the flarks is probably the most important cause of the movement in the summer, but some of the summer movements may actually take place in response to the winter movements, i.e., the strings can return downhill after having been pushed uphill during the previous winter (koutaniemi 2000). all in all, these measurements show the importance of the spring and winter conditions in influencing the microtopography of the aapa mires (seppälä & koutaniemi 1986; koutaniemi 2000), an aspect stressed already by helaakoski (1912), tanttu (1915), and ruuhijärvi (1960). the sloping fens, mostly confined to the hilly regions of kainuu and eastern lapland, are a special variant of the aapa mires. they are common in the kuusamo–salla and puolanka–suomussalmi areas, but there are scattered sloping fens as far as in the pielisjärvi region in the south (havas 1961). they are mostly distributed on hill slopes and, because of this, their surface is exceptionally inclined. the altitudinal difference between the upper and lower ends of the mire is usually circa 20 metres, but sometimes up to 200–300 metres (auer 1922; havas 1961). their general form is often oblong and slightly sinuous. the microtopography is weakly developed and the peat layer is usually thinner than on typical aapa mires, being thicker on moister sloping fens (havas 1961). the occurrence of the sloping fens depends on a plentiful supply of runoff water. it is often produced, in addition to melting snow, by springs or small aapa mires located at the upper end of the sloping fen. if there is no adequate supply of runoff water to keep the sloping fen’s surface wet, the peat layer will become well decomposed and thin, and trees (mostly spruce) will occupy the mire surface (havas 1961). the aapa mires of central and northern lapland are finland’s largest mires. the area of teuravuoma in kolari is circa 7,080 hectares. a very large example of the northernmost variant of the aapa mires is sammuttijänkä in inari, which has also features of a palsa mire (ruuhijärvi 1960). in eastern lapland, there are extensive aapa mires on the lowlands, such as joutsenaapa in salla and sakkala-aapa in pelkosenniemi, part of which is a raised bog. large aapa mires dominate also the upper reaches of the kitinen and luiro rivers. in this area was located the largest mire of finland, posoaapa (in sodankylä), which the lokka reservoir inundated in 1967–1968. palsa mires north of the typical aapa mires is the zone of palsa mires. they can be viewed as the periglacial mire variant in finland, due to the occurrence of permafrost (seppälä 1988). instead of the strings and flarks of the aapa mires, palsa mires are characterised by palsas, high peat mounds with permafrost cores. the core is formed of frozen peat or silt with thinner layers of ice and small ice crystals (seppälä 1988). pounus, small and low (< 50 cm) peat hummocks with a non-permanently frozen core, often surround higher palsas. vegetation of the palsa mires resembles the plant communities of the flarks of the northern aapa mires. typical species of the wet surfaces include sphagnum lindbergii, carex vesicaria, c. rotundata, and c. rostrata. the vegetation of the palsas is totally different because of the dryness of their surfaces. characteristic species are betula nana, empetrum nigrum, rubus chamaemorus, lichens and, on the lower slopes, sphagnum fuscum. birch and wilfig. 3. the movements of the strings on an aapa mire in kuusamo. the sum vector shows the cumulative movements during the study period 1976–1997 (koutaniemi 2000: 528). 52 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä low are also common (ruuhijärvi 1960, 1983). there is considerable variation in palsa morphology. dome-shaped palsas are the most typical morphological palsa type in fennoscandia. they are usually 0.5–7 metres high and 10–30 metres wide (åhman 1977; seppälä 1988). plateau palsas are 1–1.5 metres high, have sharp edges, and a flat central plateau (sollid & sørbel 1998). string-form palsas are narrow, sinuous ridges with a permafrost core. they resemble the strings of the aapa mires, as they run parallel to the contour of the mire. elongated string-like palsas that are located parallel to the gradient of the mire are called ridge-form palsas (seppälä 1988) or esker palsas (åhman 1977). cold climate and the peat’s insulation properties control the initiation and growth of a palsa. on sites where snow accumulation in winter is limited, usually due to wind, the frost penetrates deep in the ground and the summer warmth does not melt it completely. this frozen soil rises above the level of the surrounding soil, leading to an increasingly thin snow cover. this creates small embryonic palsas, which continue their growth as the frozen core attracts water from the surroundings (åhman 1977; seppälä 1986, 1988; matthews et al. 1997). finally, the palsa may reach a height where tensional cracking begins on the surface peat and the palsa starts to degrade through thermokarstic processes (seppälä 1986, 1988). a waterlogged rim-ridge rampart remains as evidence of a degraded dome-shaped palsa (matthews et al. 1997). representative and well-known palsa mires in lapland are located, for example, in iitto and markkina in enontekiö and in suttisjoki in inari. piera-marin jänkä in the municipalities of inari and utsjoki is one of the best-developed palsa mires with tens of high palsas. pies(järven)jänkä in inari is a large, legally protected palsa mire. on the fells of finnish lapland, there are typical small alpine or oroarctic mires with very thin and discontinuous peat layers. carex spp. dominate these mires. they are minerotrophic and moist as they receive great amounts of mineralrich water during the spring snow melt and also during the summer from the melting summer snow beds. because of their occurrence in the vicinity of springs and in the cation-rich bedrock of northwestern lapland, they are often botanically eutrophic fens (ruuhijärvi 1983). in flat depressions, peat layers are thicker (1–2 m) and continuous. boundaries of mire complex types: the role of climate the boundary that separates the raised bog zone and the aapa mire zone is clear and well-established (fig. 1 & fig. 4). it was first determined by cajander (1913) and only minor adjustments have been carried out since then. in the west, the boundary runs southwards along the suomenselkä watershed, turning to the north-east in the lake district, and again slightly to the south-east in eastern finland. these minor wiggles in the boundary probably result from regional climatic differences. the overall location of such a clear boundary between southern and northern finland reflects the influence of climate on geographical differentation of the mire complex types (ruuhijärvi 1983). in figure 4, the boundary is compared against three different climate parameters: duration of thermal winter, mean annual number of days with minimum temperature below –0 degrees centigrade (°c), and annual mean temperature. as all these climate variables are related to winter conditions, the comparison emphasises the importance of frost and snow in influencing the major division of finland into raised bog and aapa mire zones. the lower summer evaporation and resulting summer moisture surplus may also be important factors that favour the development of aapa mires in the north (ruuhijärvi 1960, 1983; solantie 1974). a straightforward comparison of the boundary and the three climatic variables as in figure 4 can be misleading, however. the approximate overlap of subjectively selected boundaries is not necessarily a proof of a simple causal relationship between the selected climatic variables and the boundary, especially in a country where most of the temperature-related climatic variables show similar north-to-south gradients. it is therefore possible that no single climatic factor determines the location of the boundary, but it may be formed as a combination of several covariant factors. in this respect, the azonal occurrences of raised bogs and aapa mires far away from their zonal boundaries are of particular significance. there are individual raised bogs in lapland up to circa 68°n and individual aapa mires in southern finland (ruuhijärvi 1960; atlas of finland 1988). these occurrences may be linked to non-climatic local conditions that favour the development of regionally exceptional mire complexes. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 53mires of finland it is interesting to compare the location of the corresponding boundary and its determinants elsewhere in the boreal zone. in eastern canada, raised bogs occur on the coastal zone where the climate is comparatively oceanic with less extreme seasonal temperature changes, less precipitation, and less snowfall than further inland (foster & glaser 1986). the aapa mire zone (patterned fen zone) is confined to inland where precipitation and snowfall are higher and winters colder because of higher altitude. according to foster and glaser (1986), the critical single climatic feature determining the dominant mire complex type is water surplus, especially the higher amount of spring snow melt inland. the surplus of mineral-rich runoff water will support minerotrophic mire vegetation and inhibit the development of raised bogs in a similar way as the margins of raised bogs remain minerotrophic due to the runoff from the surrounding mineral soil. the outlines of this model are consistent with the traditional finnish view according to which the spring and early summer floods are crucial for the formation of aapa mires. therefore, the azonal occurrence of individual mire complexes can be explained by local hydrological factors. the aapa mires in southern finland are often confined to sites with a local source of water surplus, such as an esker or other elevated topographical features in the vicinity of the mire. the raised bogs in lapland are often located on water divides, riverbanks, lakeshores, and extremely coarse, welldrained soils where the importance of runoff and floodwaters is smaller (ruuhijärvi 1960, 1983). the palsa mires in finland are in northernmost lapland, north of the –0.5 °c or –1.0 °c annual isotherm (fig. 4) (seppälä 1988) and mostly north of the distribution limit of pine. summer temperatures (july mean temperatures) in the palsa mire region are usually below +12.0 °c. palsa mires are also common in finnmarksvidda, northern norway, where summer temperatures are roughly equal to those in northern finland and annual precipitation is very low, circa 350–500 millimetres. there are, however, very few palsa mires on the shores of the barents sea and northern norwegian sea between hammerfest and tromsø, despite lower summer temperatures (åhman 1977; seppälä 1988; sollid & sørbel 1998). this is probably due to the higher precipitation on the fig. 4. boundaries of mire complex types compared against three climate parameters. the climate data are from atlas of finland (1987). 54 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä coastal area (annual precipitation 500–1,000 mm), since summer moisture decreases the insulation properties of peat and enhances the penetration of summer warmth to the permafrost core of a palsa (seppälä 1988; zuidhoff & kolstrup 2000). palsa mires are thus mostly continental in their distribution and a climate change towards moister summer conditions may destroy a palsa (sollid & sørbel 1998). long-term development of the finnish mires mire initiation and peat accumulation mires are formed in areas where precipitation is high and evaporation low. a level substrate enables the lateral spread of the mires. the finnish mires started to develop after the last deglaciation circa 10,000 14c years ago. the oldest ages recorded from basal peat in finland are circa 9500 14c yr bp (tolonen et al. 1994). in finland, mire initiation has taken place in three different ways: forest paludification, lake terrestrialisation, and primary mire formation, referring to the spread of mire vegetation on a recently deglaciated soil or one that has emerged from the water as a consequence of post-glacial isostatic land uplift. locally, river flooding may also have resulted in the initiation of mires. studies of basal peats show that primary mire formation and paludification have been the most common mire initiation pathways in finland (huikari 1956; korhola 1990a). up to 60 percent of the mires have been initiated through primary mire formation in ostrobothnia where the landscape is flat and post-glacial isostatic land uplift fast (huikari 1956; ruuhijärvi 1983). the intensity of paludification is linked to the changes in water table. climatic change or forest fire may cause a rise of the water table. this, in turn, may lead to paludification, but most of the paludification has happened through a lateral extension of already existing mires (aario 1932; lukkala 1933; korhola 1990a). lake terrestrialisation was earlier considered the most common form of mire initiation (heikurainen 1960), but huikari’s (1956) investigations indicated that only 5–10 percent of the finnish mires have been formed through this process. later studies suggest, however, that this may be an underestimate, at least in the southern raised bog area, where the proportions of mires with limnic sediment at the bottom are 30–44 percent (lappalainen & toivonen 1985; korhola 1990a). lake terrestrialisation may have been more common and faster during dry climatic periods when lake levels were low. this may have accelerated the hydroseral succession of lakes (korhola 1990b; tikkanen & korhola 1993). lateral growth of the mires was rapid during the earliest post-glacial period when there were large, flat land areas in finland, suitable for an unrestricted expansion of the mires. the mires may have spread laterally even hundreds of metres in a century (korhola 1992). climatic conditions also regulated the spreading rate (fig. 5). radiocarbon dating of the paludified mires in southern finland indicates that the lateral spread was rapid during moist periods (for example at 7000–6000 14c yr bp and 4000–3000 14c yr bp), but that during drier times (such as 6000–5000 14c yr bp) the spread almost ceased (korhola 1994). these studies show also that during recent millennia very little paludification has occurred in finland (korhola 1994). this may not, however, reflect climatic conditions, but results probably from the fact that during the holocene most of the topographically flat areas have already been paludified and topographical barriers now restrict lateral spread (ruuhijärvi 1983; mäkilä 1997; korhola & tolonen 1998). the slow vertical growth of the mires is based on constant peat accumulation. it results from incomplete decomposition of plant litter, so that 5– 20 percent of the plant biomass produced on the fig. 5. a cumulative frequency curve of the radiocarbon dates for basal peats from the paludified sites in finland (korhola 1994: 54). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 55mires of finland mires does not decompose before it accumulates in the anaerobic peat layer of the mire (clymo 1984; gorham 1991). long-term average vertical growth rates have been studied in finland by means of hundreds of radiocarbon dates. the resulting rates range from 0.2 to over 4.0 millimetres per year, with an average of circa 0.5 mm/ year (tolonen et al. 1994; korhola & tolonen 1998). the considerable variation reflects the highly individual growth conditions and peat production on finnish mires. the rates are generally faster on ombrotrophic raised bogs than on aapa mires. the rates also decrease northwards and with the age of the mires (tolonen et al. 1994). consequently, the thickest peat layers in finland (> 10 m) are found on the raised bogs of southern finland. they are located in geologically old areas, i.e., in supra-aquatic areas or in areas that have emerged from the baltic sea during the early holocene. peat stratigraphy and climate changes one of the most important applications of peatstratigraphical studies is their use as archives of past environmental changes. the dynamic relationship between raised bogs and climate, in particular, results from the sensitive balance between the growth of plants (mainly sphagnum), decomposition of peat, the level of the water table, and the thickness of the aerobic layer on top of the mire. the aerobic layer above the water table is termed the acrotelm in distinction from the catotelm, the anaerobic layer below the water table (ingram 1978). all biological production and most of the decomposition take place in the acrotelm (clymo 1984). as this layer is usually only 0–50 centimetres thick, a change of mean water level by only a few centimetres can drastically affect the rate of peat decomposition (clymo 1984) so that the peat becomes less decomposed as a result of a rise of the water table and more decomposed as a result of its decline. peat production is thus particularly sensitive to changes in effective humidity, which can vary mainly as a function of temperature, precipitation, or both. peat-stratigraphical investigations have had a major role in european climate history research. the classical blytt–sernander model of post-glacial climate changes was predominantly based on peat-stratigraphical studies. it influenced strongly the european palaeoclimatological concepts and research during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (seppä 1995). it is important to keep in mind, however, that mires are inherently dynamic systems. their development includes both low-frequency and high-frequency changes caused by local factors that may be independent of climate or other regional environmental changes (e.g., aario 1932; aartolahti 1965; foster & glaser 1986). it is thus possible that, in the course of its vertical growth, a raised bog develops gradually toward drier surface conditions, even if there is no regional climate change toward dryness. peat stratigraphy often reflects this natural development. consequently, changes that reflect deviations from this development, i.e., upcore changes that indicate increasingly moist conditions, may be interpreted as being caused by climate changes (granlund 1932; aaby 1976). corresponding stratigraphical layers are termed recurrence surfaces (granlund 1932). the best-known recurrence surface in northern europe that can be linked to climate change is the widespread change from underlying well-decomposed dark peat to overlying less-decomposed lighter peat. the boundary horizon between these two layers is termed swk (swarztorf/weisstorf kontakt) or grenzhorizont, as weber (1900) first described it in germany. the grenzhorizont is usually connected to climate cooling after the subboreal chronozone at circa 3000–2500 14c yr bp, and it is associated with the general rejuvenation of the bog, caused by increased water availability on the bog surface (e.g., svensson 1988). peat-stratigraphical research in southern finland (tolonen 1967, 1973, 1987) has shown that many finnish raised bogs and aapa mires contain a similar boundary layer, but that the difference between the underlying well-decomposed peat and overlying less-decomposed peat is usually not distinct and sometimes cannot be detected at all. furthermore, radiocarbon dating of the boundary in finnish mires does not indicate any precise timing for the change, only that is ranges from circa 5000 to 2500 14c yr bp even in the relatively small geographical area (circa 100 km2) of the municipality of lammi in southern finland (tolonen 1987). the diachronity of the grenzhorizont in finnish mires suggests that the climate has cooled gradually as well and that the mires have responded to the changing climate individually. each response has depended on the original individual characteristics of mire hydrology, morphology, and vegetation. in addition to the grenzhorizont, the peat strati56 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä graphies of many european mires contain other recurrence surfaces which are identified as sudden changes from more decomposed layers of darker peat to lighter, less-decomposed peat which again can be overlain by a thinner layer of more decomposed peat. granlund (1932) determined five recurrence surfaces (ryi-v) on swedish raised bogs. one of these was concurrent with weber’s (1900) classical grenzhorizont, dating to the first millennium bc. more recurrence surfaces have been reported later (nilsson 1935; lundqvist 1962; svensson 1988) in fennoscandia, but their link to climate changes is still unclear. critical questions are the synchronicity of recurrence surfaces on one mire, between the mires, and the precision of chronological control. the dating of peat-stratigraphical changes by means of radiocarbon dating is not always precise enough for comparisons with known climate changes during the late holocene (tolonen et al. 1985; tolonen 1987). because of its asynchronous nature, it has been impossible to connect the finnish swk contact to any recurrence surfaces reported in sweden (tolonen 1987). thus, there is no unambiguous evidence of the occurrence of climatically controlled recurrence surfaces in finland, despite the long tradition of peat-stratigraphical studies and a large number of detailed peat-stratigraphical analyses. a further problem complicating the correlation between peat-stratigraphical changes and climate dynamics is the lack of experiments or modern monitoring studies of the influence of rapid climate changes on mire surface and peat. hence, the influence of high-frequency moist or dry periods on peat stratigraphy is understood inadequately. investigations of such events might serve to elucidate the origin of the so-called humification streaks, common in finnish raised bogs (aartolahti 1965; tolonen 1971). these streaks are usually 2–10 millimetres thick and consist of dark, well-decomposed peat with remains of calluna vulgaris, eriophorum vaginatum, and lichens. they have been studied in detail on klaukkalan isosuo, where about 25 dark streaks occur in the peat formed during the last circa 4000 14c yrs (fig. 6) (tolonen 1971). both a high degree of decomposition of the peat and the peat composition clearly indicate that these streaks are produced by vegetation growing in dry sites on the mire surface. two theories can be put forward to explain the sudden occurrence of such dry conditions on the mire surface. in boreal peat bogs, thin, dark humification streaks might represent evidence of sudden drying of the mire surface due to an abrupt dry climate period. alternatively, they may be local features, related to the bog’s natural growth rhythm. the latter explanation seems to be true in finland (aartolahti 1965; tolonen 1971), because the lateral extension of these streaks is usually limited and they seem to be fragmentary and asynchronous even in one mire (fig. 6) (aartolahti, 1965; tolonen 1971). their occurrence seems to be related to the rhythmic changes in sphagnum fuscum growth as the peat above and below is formed by s. fuscum. this kind of regenfig. 6. a schematic picture of the occurrence of dark humification streaks on an open section on klaukkalan isosuo, a raised bog in southern finland (tolonen 1971: 151). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 57mires of finland erative growth pattern can be termed “fuscum-regeneration” or “short-cycle regeneration” (tolonen 1971; tolonen et al. 1985). in fuscum-regeneration, the low s. fuscum hummocks grow vertically beyond the moisture range of s. fuscum and, e.g., calluna vulgaris and lichens colonize the drying hummock top (lindholm 1990). the upward growth of the hummock ceases and decomposition and drying lead to the hummock’s destruction. the detailed manner in which the streaks are formed is still unclear, however. it is possible that very dry summers and low water tables favour their formation (tolonen 1971). the occurrence of the decomposition changes or humification streaks does not bear unambiguous climatic signals in the finnish raised bogs, but it is probable that the formation of microtopography on raised bogs and aapa mires is connected to mid-to-late holocene climate changes. radiocarbon dating of peat from the initiation phase of the raised bog hummock and hollow topography in southern finland has resulted in ages ranging from 3200 to 2100 14c yr bp (aartolahti 1967). dates of 1940 ± 130, 1050 ± 160, and 1020 ± 120 14c yr bp have been reported from the basal peats of plateau bog hollows on the finnish south coast (tolonen & seppä 1994). the origin of the hollows on estonian raised bogs seems to be roughly synchronous with that in finland (karofeld 1998). ages ranging from circa 3000 to 2000 14c yr bp were obtained for the formation of strings on aapa mires in kuusamo (seppälä & koutaniemi 1988). these were connected to an increasing wetness of the mire surface due to regional climate change. these works suggest that the origin of microtopography of the raised bogs and aapa mires may be a late-holocene feature, and probably caused by a large-scale cooling of the climate and a related increase in effective humidity. the number of radiocarbon-dated initiations of hummocks and strings is still very low, but it is apparent that the mires of finland may have been considerably different from the present during the warmer period of the holocene (circa 7000–5000 14c yr bp), with generally more decomposed peat, more forest cover and with weakly developed or missing microtopograpical features. the development of palsa mires may be closely coupled with climate because of their distribution in continental periglacial areas. the initiation of the permafrost core and the initial rise of the palsa can be dated from the contact of hydrophilous and xerophilous peat layers that indicates hydrological change from moist to dry conditions (vorren 1979; zuidhoff & kolstrup 2000). radiocarbon dating and earlier dating based on pollenstratigraphical connections from various parts of fennoscandia have given mainly late-holocene dates for the initiation of the present palsas. most of the dates suggest that the palsas were formed during the last 5000 14c years (åhman 1977), in step with the gradual cooling of climate in the tree line area (seppä & birks 2001). some palsas are much younger, however. dating by vorren (1979) from north norway showed that some palsas were formed at circa ad 1400–1750, while zuidhoff and kolstrup (2000) reported ages as young as ad 1860–1890. the origin of the youngest palsas can therefore be connected to the little ice age cooling, while the reported thermokarstic degradation of some palsas may be due to the rise of annual mean temperatures in the twentieth century (sollid & sørbel 1998; zuidhoff & kolstrup 2000). to some extent, such a climatic explanation contradicts the cyclic growth model, according to which the initiation and degradation can be natural phases in the life cycle of a palsa (seppälä 1986, 1988; matthews et al. 1997) and there is necessarily no connection to climate change. these two models are not exclusive, however, and degradation of a palsa can be due to climate change and/ or increasing cracking that results from increased vertical growth. in a case where there is a general synchronous initiation or degradation of palsas of different size in a certain area, there is evidence of a change in climatic conditions (sollid & sørbel 1998; zuidhoff & kolstrup 2000). acknowledgements i am grateful to frank chambers for comments and linguistic corrections. references aaby b (1976). cyclic climatic variations in climate over the 5500 yr. reflected in raised bogs. nature 263, 281–284. aapala k, r heikkilä & t lindholm (1998). protecting the diversity of finnish mires. in vasander h (ed). mires of finland, 45–57. finnish peatland society, helsinki. aario l (1932). pflanzentopografische und paläogeografische mooruntersuchungen in n-satakunta. fennia 55, 1–179. 58 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä aartolahti t (1965). oberflächenformen von hochmooren und ihre entwicklung in südwest-häme und nord-satakunta. fennia 93, 1–268. aartolahti t (1966). keidassoiden pinnanmuodoista ja niiden kehityksestä. suo 1966/2, 1–7. aartolahti t (1967). on dating the genesis of peat banks and hollows in the raised bogs of southwestern finland. bulletin de la commission de la societe geologie de finlande 34, 71–86. åhman r (1977). palsar in nordnorge. en studie av palsars morfologi, utbredning och klimatiska förutsättningar i finnmarks och troms fylke. meddelanden från lunds universitetets geografiska institution avhandlingar 78, 1–165. atlas of finland, folio 131: climate (1987). national board of survey & geographical society of finland. atlas of finland, folio 141–143: biogeography and nature conservation (1988). map appendix 2. mires (constructed by r ruuhijärvi and v hosiaisluoma). national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. auer v (1922). suotutkimuksia kuusamon ja kuolajärven vaara-alueilta. communicationes ex instituto quaestionum forestalium finlandiae 6, 1– 368. barber ke (1981). peat stratigraphy and climatic change. a palaeoecological test of the theory of cyclic peat bog regeneration. balkema, rotterdam. blackford j & fm chambers (1991). proxy records of climate from blanket mires: evidence for a dark age (1400 bp) climatic deterioration in the british isles. the holocene 1, 63–67. cajander a k (1913). studien über die moore finnlands. acta forestalia fennica 2, 1–208. chambers fm, ke barber, d maddy & j brew (1997). a 5500-year proxy-climate and vegetational record from blanket mire at talla moss, borders, scotland. the holocene 7, 391–400. clymo rs (1984). the limits to peat bog growth. philosophical transactions of the royal society of london b 303, 605–654. eurola s (1962). über die regionale einteilung der südfinnischen moore. annales botanici societatis “vanamo” 33, 1–243. eurola s, s hicks & e kaakinen (1982). key to finnish mire types. in moore pd (ed). european mires, 11–117. academic press, london. eurola s & e kaakinen (1978). suotyyppiopas. wsoy, helsinki. foster dr & ph glaser (1986). the raised bogs of south-eastern labrador, canada: classification, distribution, vegetation and recent dynamics. journal of ecology 74, 47–71. foster dr, ga king, ph glaser & he wright jr (1983). origin of string patterns in boreal peatlands. nature 306, 256–258. foster dr, he wright jr, m thelaus & ga king (1988). bog development and landform dynamics in central sweden and south-eastern labrador, canada. journal of ecology 76, 1164–1185. gorham e (1991). northern peatlands: role in the carbon cycle and probable responses to climatic warming. ecological applications 1, 182–195. granlund e (1932). de svenska högmossarnas geologi. sveriges geologiska undersökning c 373, årsbok 26, 1–193. havas p (1961). vegetation und ökologie der ostfinnischen hangmoore. annales botanici societatis “vanamo” 31, 1–188. heikurainen l (1960). metsäojitus ja sen perusteet. wsoy, helsinki. helaakoski ar (1912). havaintoja jäätymisilmiöiden geomorfologisista vaikutuksista (referat: beobachtungen über die geomorfologischen einflüsse der gefriererscheinungen). meddelanden af geografiska föreningen i finland 9, 1–108. huikari o (1956). primäärisen soistumisen osuudesta suomen soiden synnyssä. (studies on the contribution of primary paludification to the origin of the finnish mires). communicationes instituti forestalia fenniae 46, 1–79. ikonen l (1993). holocene development and peat growth of the raised bog pesänsuo in southwestern finland. bulletin of the geological society of finland 370, 1–58. ingram hap (1978). soil layers in mires: function and terminology. journal of soil sciences 29, 224–227. ilvessalo y (1960). soiden esiintyminen suomessa. suo 11, 55–62. johnson lc & awh damman (1991). species-controlled sphagnum decay on a south swedish raised bog. oikos 61, 234–242. johnson lc, awh damman & n malmer (1990). sphagnum macrostructure as an indicator of decay and compaction in peat cores from an ombrotrophic south swedish peat-bog. journal of ecology 78, 633–647. karofeld e (1998). the dynamics of the formation and development of hollows in raised bogs in estonia. the holocene 8, 697–704. korhola a (1990a). suomen soiden synty ja kehi-tys. terra 102, 256–267. korhola a (1990b). paleolimnology and hydroseral development of the kotasuo bog, southern finland, with special reference to the cladocera. annales academiae scietiarum fennicae a iii, 1– 40. korhola a (1992). mire induction, ecosystem dynamics and lateral extension on raised bogs in the southern coastal area of finland. fennia 170, 25– 94. korhola a (1994). holocene climatic variations in southern finland reconstructed from peat-initiation data. the holocene 5, 43–58. korhola a, j alm, k tolonen, j turunen & h jungner (1997). three-dimensional reconstruction of carbon accumulation and ch 4 emission during nine millennia in a raised bog. journal of quaternary science 11, 161–165. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 59mires of finland korhola a & k tolonen (1998). the natural history of mires in finland and the rate of peat accumulation. in vasander h (ed). mires of finland, 20– 26. finnish peatland society, helsinki. koutaniemi l (2000). twenty-one years of string movements on the liippasuo aapa mire, finland. boreas 28, 521–530. laine j & h vasander (1998). ecology and vegetation gradients of peatlands. in vasander h (ed). mires of finland, 10–19. finnish peatland society, helsinki. lappalainen v & t toivonen (1985). laskelmat suomen turvevaroista. yhteenveto vuosien 1975– 1983 turvetutkimuksista. geologian tutkimuskeskus, tutkimusraportti 72. lindholm t (1990). growth dynamics of peat moss sphagnum fuscum on hummocks and hollows in virgin and drained sites on the raised bog laaviosuo, southern finland. annales botanici fennici 27, 67–78. lindholm t & h vasander (1991). production of eight species of sphagnum at suurisuo mire, southern finland. annales botanici fennici 27, 67–78. lukkala oj (1933). tapahtuuko nykyisin metsämaan soistumista? communicationes instituti forestalia fenniae 19, 1–98. lundqvist j (1962). geological radiocarbon dating from the stockholm station. sveriges geologiska undersökning c 589, 3–22. mäkilä m (1997). holocene lateral expansion, peat growth and carbon accumulation on haukkasuo, a raised bog in southeastern finland. boreas 26, 1–14. matthews ja, so dahl, ms berrisford & a nesje (1997). cyclic development and thermokarstic degradation of palsas in the mid-alpine zone at leiripullan, dovrefjell. permafrost and periglacial processes 8, 107–122. moore, pd & dj bellamy (1974). peatlands. elek science, london. nilsson t (1935). die pollenanalytische zonengliederung der spätund post-glazialen bildungen schonens. geologiska föreningens i stockholm förhandlingar 57, 385–562. osvald h (1923). die vegetation des hochmoores komosse. svenska växtsociologiska sällskapets handlingar 1. uppsala. paasio i (1933). über die vegetation der hochmoore finnland. acta forestalia fennica 39, 1–190. paasio i (1934). soita koskevista morfologis-kasvitopografisista nimityksistä. terra 46, 84–90. von post l & r sernander (1910). pflanzen-physiognomische studien auf torfmooren in närke. extrait du compte rendu du xi:e congrès gèologique international 1, 14. ruuhijärvi r (1960). über die regionale einteilung der nordfinnischen moore. annales botanici societatis “vanamo” 34, 1–360. ruuhijärvi r (1983). the finnish mire types and their regional distribution. in gore ap (ed). mires: swamp, bog, fen and moor, 47–67. ecosystems of the world 4b. elsevier, amsterdam. seppä h (1995). turvestratigrafisen tutkimuksen historiasta ja kvartääritieteellisestä merkityksestä pohjoismaissa. (summary: on the history and quaternary scientific significance of peat stratigraphical research in the nordic countries). suo – mires and peat 46, 39–54. seppä h & hjb birks (2001). july mean temperature and annual precipitation trends during the holocene in the fennoscandian tree-line area: pollen-based climate reconstructions. the holocene 11, 527–539. seppälä m (1986). the origin of palsas. geografiska annaler 68, 141–147. seppälä m (1988). palsas and related forms. in clark mj (ed). advances in periglacial geomorphology, 247–278. john wiley & sons, chichester. seppälä m & l koutaniemi (1986). formation of a string and pool topography as expressed by morphology, stratigraphy and current processes on a mire in kuusamo, finland. boreas 14, 287–309. solantie r (1974). kesän vesitaseen vaikutus metsäja suokasvillisuuteen ja linnustoon sekä lämpötilojen välityksellä maatalouden toimintaedellytyksiin suomessa (abstract: the influence of water balance in summer on forest and peatland vegetation and bird fauna and through the temperature on agricultural conditions in finland). silva fennica 8, 160–184. sollid k-l & l sørbel (1998). palsa bogs as a climate indicator – examples from dovrefjell, southern norway. ambio 27, 287–291. svensson g (1988). bog development and environmental conditions as shown by the stratigraphy of store mosse mire in southern sweden. boreas 17, 89–111. tanttu a (1915). über die enststehung der bülten und stränge der moore. acta forestalia fennica 4, 1–24. tikkanen m & a korhola (1993). divergent succession in two adjacent rocky basins in southern finland: a physiographic and palaeoecological evaluation. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 157, 1–26. tolonen k (1967). über die entwicklung der moore im finnischen nordkarelien. annales botanici fennici 4, 219–416. tolonen k (1971). on the regeneration of northeuropean bogs i. klaukkalan isosuo in s. finland. acta agralia fennica 123, 143–166. tolonen k (1973). soiden kasvunopeuden ja kasvutavan vaihteluista jääkauden jälkeisenä aikana. suo 24, 83–88. tolonen k (1987). natural history of raised bogs and forest vegetation in the lammi area, southern finland studied by stratigraphical methods. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii, 1–46. tolonen k, p huttunen & h jungner (1985). regeneration of two coastal raised bogs in eastern north america. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 139, 1–51. 60 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)heikki seppä tolonen k & h seppä (1994). pyhtään suursoiden kasvillisuudesta, morfologiasta ja kehityspiirteistä (abstract: on the vegetation, morphology and natural history of the large mire complexes in pyhtää, southeastern finland). terra 106, 211–220. tolonen k, j turunen, h vasander & h jungner (1994). rate of carbon accumulation in boreal mires. publications of the academy of finland 1/ 94, 297–302. vasander h (ed) (1998). mires of finland. finnish peatland society, helsinki. vorren k-d (1979). recent palsa datings: a brief survey. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 33, 217–219. walker d & pm walker (1961). stratigraphic evidence of regeneration in some irish bogs. journal of ecology 49, 169–185. weber ca (1900). über die moore mit besondere berücksichtung der zwischen unterweser und unterelbee liegenden. jahresbericht der manner von morgenstern 3, 3–23. zuidhoff fs & e kolstrup (2000). changes in palsa distribution in relation to climate change in laivadalen, northern sweden, especially 1960– 1997. permafrost and periglacial processes 11, 55–69. untitled recent developments in spatial methods and data in biogeographical distribution modelling – advantages and pitfalls miska luoto and risto heikkinen luoto, miska & risto heikkinen (2003). recent developments in spatial methods and data in biogeographical distribution modelling – advantages and pitfalls. fennia 181: 1, pp. 35–48 helsinki. issn 0015-0010. geography has a long tradition in studies of geographical distribution of flora and fauna. detailed mappings of the distributions of biota over wide regions can produce highly valuable biogeographical data, but are extremely laborious. these challenges in biogeographical mapping, as well as the need for mitigation tools for the adverse impacts of human disturbance on the landscape and biodiversity, have stimulated the development of new approaches for assessing biogeographical patterns. particularly, the ability to model distribution patterns of organisms and habitat types has recently increased along with the theoretical and methodological development of biogeography and spatial ecology, and modern spatial techniques and extensive data sets (provided e.g., by earth observation techniques). however, geographical data have characteristics which produce statistical problems and uncertainties in these modelling studies: 1) the data are almost always multivariate and intercorrelated, 2) the data are often spatially autocorrelated, and 3) biogeographical distribution patterns are affected by different factors operating on different spatial and temporal scales. especially remote sensing and geographic information data provide powerful means for studies of environmental change, but also include pitfalls and may generate biased results. quantitative analysis and modelling with correct and strict use of spatial statistics should also receive more attention. the issues discussed in this paper can have relevance in several fields of application of geographical data. miska luoto & risto heikkinen, finnish environment institute, research programme for biodiversity, p.o. box 140, fin-00251 helsinki, finland. e-mail: miska.luoto@ymparisto.fi, risto.heikkinen@ymparisto.fi. ms submitted 8 november 2002. introduction spatial patterning and distribution of organisms has traditionally attracted much interest and has stimulated research in geography. consequently, issues such as which environmental factors explain the distribution of various plants has continuously had a central role in biogeographical research since the pioneering work of alexander von humboldt in the early 19th century (von humboldt 1807; turner 1989). nowadays, the spatial distribution of organisms is also strongly affected by the adverse impacts of human disturbance, particularly habitat loss and fragmentation (tilman et al. 1994; enoksson et al. 1995; huxel & hastings 1999; noss 2001; fahrig 2002; schmielgelow & mönkkönen 2002; see also watson 2002). this development has given rise to increasing concern about the potential loss of important natural values and has inspired a development of new techniques to map and monitor wide areas of land. such techniques are clearly urgently required to analyse and model human-based impacts on landscape and biodiversity (griffiths et al. 1993). the technical tools and theoretical framework needed in the modelling of spatial distribution of species in landscapes have actually improved due to the recent methodological developments in biogeography and spatial ecology, as well as in statistical methods and spa36 fennia 181: 1 (2003)miska luoto and risto heikkinen tial data analysis (scott et al. 1993; stoms & estes 1993; hanski 1998; debinski et al. 1999; guisan & zimmermann 2000; roy & tomar 2000). however, the integration of geographical analysis and modelling and gi (geographic information) technology and spatial data from different sources requires transdisciplinary skills between geography, ecology, statistics and social sciences. thus the pitfalls for the misuse of gis technology with its high calculation capacity are very obvious. several recent papers dealing with spatial data have highlighted the fact that the correct use of spatial statistics with gi and rs (remotely sensed) data is increasingly important (stoms 1992; luoto 2000a; liebhold & gurevitch 2002; perry et al. 2002). geographical data sets have several characteristics which separate them from many other kinds of data sets. these features produce severe statistical problems and uncertainties in the modelling studies of biogeographical distribution data. first, spatial data are almost always multivariate, i.e. there are more than one variate or analyte of interest, which are correlated to some degree. second, the spatial location of each data point can be described by its geographic coordinates. this positional association is often also manifested in another way, namely through some form of spatial correlation (legendre 1993; brito et al. 1999). thirdly, distribution patterns and processes are often affected by different factors operating on different scales. spatial systems generally show characteristic variability on a range of spatial, temporal and organizational scales and therefore, there is no single natural scale on which geographical phenomena should be studied (see wiens 1989; levin 1992; stoms 1994). many of the above-mentioned problems are currently topical in geography, especially in studies with gi and rs data sets (högmander & møller 1995; augustin et al. 1996). this paper does not aim at representing a fully comprehensive review covering all the relevant issues and their backgrounds in contemporary geographical data mining, analysis and modelling. instead, we focus in this commentary paper on some selected key issues in the development of biogeography and landscape ecology, and particularly on the possibilities and potential pitfalls of analysing and modelling spatial data, which are attracting increasing attention. many of the methodological issues and problems touched upon in this paper are those which researchers in biogeography and landscape ecology constantly face, and moreover, similar questions are also of importance in other fields of geography. thus, the ideas presented here are applicable in several other fields of study where geographical data are applied. benchmarks in the development of biogeography and spatial ecology in 1807, von humboldt described the latitudinal and altitudinal distribution of vegetative zones. his work ’ideen zu einer geographie der pflanzen nebst einem naturgemälde der tropenländer’ provided an inspiration to studies of the geographic distribution of plants and animals. throughout the 19th century, botanists and zoologists described and explained the spatial distributions of various taxa mainly by macroclimatic factors such as temperature and precipitation (turner 1989; granö & paasi 1997). the emerging view was that strong interdependencies between climate, biota, and soil lead to long-term stability of the landscape in the absence of climatic changes. the early biogeographical studies also influenced clements’ theory (clements 1936) of successional dynamics, in which the stable endpoint, the climax vegetation, was determined by macroclimate over a broad region. clements stressed temporal dynamics but did not emphasise spatial patterning. the development of gradient analysis (whittaker 1967) allowed description of the continuous distribution of species along environmental gradients. abrupt discontinuities in vegetation patterns were believed to be associated with discontinuities in the physical environment. watt (1947) first linked space and time on a broader scale in biogeography. he described the distribution of the entire temporal progression of successional stages as a pattern of patches across a landscape. the complex spatial pattern across the landscape was constant, but this constancy in the pattern was maintained by temporal changes at each point. the modern concept of the shifting steady-state mosaic, which incorporates natural disturbance process, is related to watt’s conceptualisation (turner 1989). the interest of biogeographers in spatial aspects increased after the introduction of the theory of island biogeography by macarthur & wilson (1967). the new theory explained how distance and area together regulate the balance between fennia 181: 1 (2003) 37recent developments in spatial methods and data in … immigration and extinction in island populations. the three basic characteristics of insular biotas are: 1) the number of species increases with increasing island size, 2) the number of species decreases with increasing distance to the nearest continent or other source of species, and 3) a continual turnover in species composition occurs, owing to recurrent colonisations and extinctions, but the number of species remains approximately the same. macarthur and wilson (1967) proposed that the number of species inhabiting an island represents an equilibrium between opposing rates of colonisation and extinction. the theory of island biogeography was based on simple mathematical models and looked for equilibria in species numbers using the data on species occurrences. the basic assumption of equilibrium in spatially defined ecological systems was later found to be inappropriate (haila 2002). since the 1980s, the theoretical presuppositions of island biogeography have been challenged, and empirical research has become multifaceted. fragments of a particular habitat type are viewed as elements in a heterogeneous landscape rather than as ‘islands’ surrounded by a hostile ‘sea’. as the interest in island biogeography declined, it was replaced by metapopulation (levins 1969) as the paradigm of spatial ecology (hanski 1998, 1999). spatial dynamics has received increasing attention in many areas of biogeography and ecology during recent decades (mooney & godron 1983; turner 1989; wiens 1997; hanski 1999). the role of spatial landscape pattern, i.e. the distribution and structure of different habitats, in influencing species distribution is also increasingly studied by landscape ecologists (naveh & lieberman 1984; turner 1989; forman 1995) and metapopulation ecologists (verboom et al. 1991; thomas et al. 1992; hanski 1999). finally, the influence of spatial locations of individuals, populations and communities on their dynamics has been demonstrated in a number of recent spatial ecological studies (hanski & gilpin 1997; hanski 1999). nowadays, three different approaches in largescale spatial ecology can be distinguished (hanski 1998): 1) theoretical ecology, 2) landscape ecology and 3) metapopulation ecology. theoretical ecologists have investigated a range of models depicting individuals with localized interactions and restricted movement range in uniform space, demonstrating how population dynamics can generate complex dynamics and spatial patterns without any environmental heterogeneity (tilman & kareiva 1997). by contrast, landscape ecologists have been occupied by descriptions of the generally complex physical structure of real environments, distribution of resources in landscapes, and the movements of individuals (forman 1995; wiens 1997). metapopulation ecology makes the simplifying assumption that suitable habitat patches for the focal species occur as a network of idealised habitat patches varying in area, degree of isolation and quality and surrounded by uniformly unsuitable habitat (hanski & gilpin 1997; hanski 1998). potential of remote sensing and gis-based modelling along with the conceptual advances discussed in the previous section, the availability of modern computer software and hardware (e.g., geographical information systems, increased computer speed and memory) has recently expanded our abilities to address many of the most interesting and critical problems in biogeography. prior to the availability of these tools, analysis of many of the important issues associated with spatial data was impossible because of the sheer magnitude of the data sets and the complexity of their analysis (liebhold & gurevitch 2002; nagendra 2001). spatial data on the geographical distribution of habitats and species are often sparse, and factors affecting their distribution patterns are insufficiently known. for modelling and predicting species distribution and location of areas with considerable ecological and nature conservation values, accurate data would be desirable. in reality, such data covering extensive areas is often not available or it is too expensive to be acquired by research projects. as highlighted by several authors (e.g., margules & austin 1991; cherril et al. 1995; debinski et al. 1999; nagendra & gadgil 1999), it is necessary to develop spatial modelling methodologies for rapid and cost-effective mapping of large areas to assess their ecological value for nature conservation. the ability to analyse, model and predict distribution patterns of habitats and species on the basis of landscape variables derived from rs and gi data could mitigate the damage caused by human land use and facilitate the preservation of biodiversity (scott et al. 1993; stoms & estes 1993; debinski & humphrey 1997; gould 2000; 38 fennia 181: 1 (2003)miska luoto and risto heikkinen guisan & zimmermann 2000; roy & tomar 2000; nagendra 2001; suárez-seoane et al. 2002). the growth in the availability of remotely sensed data and the development of gis techniques allows access to an extensive assortment of potential spatial covariates, so that analyses of factors affecting biogeographical distribution patterns can be adapted to different spatial applications. moreover, they enable us to derive predictive models from relations within the data and to spatially extrapolate potential species distribution, abundance and/or habitat preferences from those models to wider areas (stoms & estes 1993; brito et al. 1999). in several studies species distribution patterns for selected taxonomic groups have been modelled using remotely sensed environmental data, for example birds, mammals, plants, reptiles and butterflies (austin et al. 1990; pereira & itami 1991; augustin et al. 1996; brito et al. 1999; gould 2000: luoto et al. 2002a). debinski et al. (1999) suggested that gi and rs data could be employed in modelling of species distribution, because species are often significantly correlated with one or more remotely sensed habitat types, particularly when they are highly specialized in their habitat utilisation. in order to build predictive models of species distribution using remotely sensed data, a species must either be common enough and/or habitat-specific enough to exhibit a significant relationship with remotely sensed data. thus satellite imagery can provide one potential basis for deriving surrogates (see gaston 1996) of species level biodiversity. however, as pointed out by nagendra (2001), the modelling of species-rs relationships can include several pitfalls. the inaccuracies of the prediction models highlight the need to be careful and to avoid applying the models rigidly and uncritically. thus both good biogeographical and ecological knowledge of the predicted species and actual field checking are needed to evaluate the results of the predictive models in unknown terrain. in order to achieve complete assessment of the area concerned, landscape analysis and monitoring must be integrated with confirmatory field studies (heikkinen 1998). rs and gi data and techniques, if carefully applied, can also be used in monitoring shortor longer-term changes in different aspects of biodiversity and land cover (stoms & estes 1993; johnston 1998; nagendra & gadgil 1999). for example, the conversion of forests to urban or intensively managed agricultural areas can be detected, and rates of change measured, by superimposing satellite images taken on different years (iverson et al. 1989). changes in habitat quality can be reflected by the changes in landscape element heterogeneity (stoms & estes 1993). for example, agricultural areas are usually characterised in remotely-sensed images by more regular shapes than natural landscapes. probably the best widely applicable option for developing appropriate rs-gi based monitoring of land cover and biodiversity changes is to focus on landscape analysis on the habitat level (nagendra 2001), and if possible, to identify changes in the cover and distribution in the ecologically most important habitat types, such as oldgrowth forests (stoms & estes 1993; mladenoff et al. 1994; pakkala et al. 2002). from a more applied perspective, the detection and assessment of long-term trends in land use changes can help in the formation of policy in anticipation of the problems, e.g., loss of biodiversity, that result from the changes (campbell 1996). however, it must be stressed that in order to develop truly successful rs-gi based monitoring programmes it is imperative to have intensive ground truth data available, which can be used in identifying landscape elements or habitat types on the basis of supervised classification (nagendra & gadgil 1999; gould 2000; roy & tomar 2000). other critical factors include errors in georeferencing, i.e. even minor differences in the placement of two separate maps derived from imagery acquired on different years, differences in the interpretation techniques, or spectral differences between imagery caused by clouds, haze, or other degrading factors (campbell 1996, p. 576; johnston 1998, p. 121–123). spatial autocorrelation the lack of spatial independence in biogeographical data has typically been viewed as a problem that can obscure the researcher’s ability to understand the geographical patterns being studied. spatial autocorrelation examines the degree of synchrony between variables observed across geographic space and is important for a wide variety of geographical and ecological phenomena (legendre 1993). consequently, spatial autocorrelation is nowadays increasingly incorporated fennia 181: 1 (2003) 39recent developments in spatial methods and data in … into biogeographical models and analyses based on spatial data (see högmander & møller 1995; koenig & knops 1998; guisan & zimmermann 2000; henebry & merchant 2002). a variable is said to be autocorrelated if a measure made at one point supplies information on another measure of that variable recorded at a point located a given distance apart (rossi & queneherve 1998; ferguson & bester 2002). in this case the values are not independent in a statistical sense. if spatial autocorrelation is present, assessing the relationships between variables is complicated by the ineffectiveness of most classical statistical tools such as anova or correlation analysis (legendre 1993). the presence of common patterns between two or more variables may lead to spurious correlations, i.e. variables are apparently related, although in fact they only independently display a common spatial pattern. in such cases, it is necessary to examine the relationships between variables while controlling the effect of the common spatial structure. luoto et al. (2001) studied the occurrence pattern of the clouded apollo butterfly (parnassius mnemosyne) using a spatial grid system in southwestern finland (fig. 1). spatial autocorrelation was statistically highly significant (p < 0.001) in the clouded apollo distribution data and caused some problems in the interpretation of the modelling results. this was because the regression analysis showed clear differences between the explanatory capacity of predictive variables when the modelling procedure was performed with and without an adjusting spatial autocorrelation variable. in a model with no spatial autocorrelation variable, five environmental-topographical variables were included in the logistic regression model. however, when a spatial autocorrelation variable was entered into the model only three of the environmental-topographical variables remained statistically significant. in this example, it appears that the two excluded variables reflected mainly the spatial structure of the data, without any clear significant ecological relevance to the distribution of clouded apollo (see legendre 1993; luoto et al. 2001). various methods have been devised for eliminating or avoiding the effects of spatial dependence in measuring or analysing geographical responses (legendre 1993). for example, sampling of spatial data has typically been carried out by stratifying across space and averaging to infer underlying processes and mechanisms. recently, however, biogeographers and spatial ecologists have begun to acknowledge that there is much important biology and ecology in the spatial dependence of biotic responses, and have become increasingly interested in examining spatial relationships directly. whereas earlier research ignored or sought to remove the effects of spatial patterns of the data, the current approach is explicitly to analyse and model spatial patterns of the data as a fundamental feature of the study (liebhold & gurevitch 2002). most straightforwardly, spatial autocorrelation from the grid square i can be calculated in a spatial grid system as an average of the number of occupied grids among a set of eight neighbour grid squares of the square i (augustin et al. 1996). the significance of spatial dependence of the data can be estimated by entering the spatial autocorfig. 1. (a) distribution of the clouded apollo (parnassius mnemosyne) in the river rekijoki area in southwestern finland. (b) spatial autocorrelation of the clouded apollo observations, measured by moran’s i in relation to distance (see legendre 1993; brito et al. 1999). 40 fennia 181: 1 (2003)miska luoto and risto heikkinen relation variable as an additional explanatory variable in the final model. for more explicit methods see koenig & knops (1998) and brito et al. (1999), in which various techniques to measure and analyse the spatial pattern of the data are described and reviewed. model building and verification several recent papers have criticized automatic stepwise procedures, as they do not necessarily select the most influential variables from a subset of variables (bustamante 1997; mac nally 2000; luoto et al. 2002a). furthermore, the application of stepwise procedures in spatial data sets can give rise to statistically explicit, but ecologically irrelevant results. this may lead to models which agree closely with the observations in the study sites but which give poor predictions when extrapolated to unsurveyed areas (james & mcculloch 1990; buckland & elston 1993). one pitfall in automatic stepwise model-building is the difficulty to produce ecologically and geographically plausible regression models, particularly when the number of candidate explanatory variables is large and the potential causal relationships between them and the response variable are not a priori well-known. strong colinearity among the environmental variables may give rise to spurious regression models. in other words, the ecologically most important variables may well be excluded from the models when using automatic stepwise regression procedures (‘statistically-focused modelling’) (flack & chang 1987; mac nally 2000). several recent papers argue that a more plausible regression model can be produced by the ‘ecologically-focused’ modelling approach, in which the biologically most important variables are forced to enter the model first or are given priority when selecting more or less equally important variables (bustamante 1997; mac nally 2000). this argument is supported, for example, by one modelling study of rare plant species richness in sw finland (luoto et al. 2002b). the overall fit of the ecologically-focused model developed in the study decreased clearly less (from 57.1% to 50.1%) when it was fitted to the test set of grid squares (i.e. a set of squares not used in developing the model), as compared with the corresponding decrease in the statistically-focused model (from 65.6% to 51.8%). another simple example can be considered: the study material includes topographically heterogeneous grid squares in a river valley and squares from gently sloping mountains some 300–500 metres higher. in this case the explanatory variables topographical heterogeneity and mean temperature (or some other energy-related factor) of a grid square would be intercorrelated. most researchers would probably agree that mean temperature has a major impact on species richness in this example (see currie 1991; heikkinen 1998). however, it may well be excluded from a multiple regression model developed with typical automatic stepwise procedures due to colinearity, if simple topographical heterogeneity happens to have slightly better explanatory power in statistical terms. in this example it may be well justified to force more primary environmental variables to enter the model first, and only afterwards consider whether heterogeneity variables explain some further variation in species richness (cf. begon et al. 1996). other examples where automatic stepwise modelling procedures may produce less desirable models are cases where climatic variables such as mean temperature or rainfall are highly correlated with altitude, latitude or longitude, particularly if the latter variables produce a somewhat better statistical fit. in such a case, it may be justified to select a biologically more meaningful variable first into the model, e.g., temperature instead of altitude (see nicholls 1991; bustamante 1997). these examples show that automatic regression model-building procedures can result in less causal relationships and consequently inaccurate predictions, and that the variable-selection process can be improved if the process is based on existing knowledge and theory (cf. mac nally 2000). several studies show that abiotic variables often have considerable statistical power, at least in the model building area. however, when the derived models are extrapolated to wider areas their predictive power can clearly decrease (luoto et al. 2002a). especially in extrapolative, predictive modelling, care should be taken to produce models that are ecologically more realistic than those derived from automatic stepwise regression procedures (milsom et al. 2000, mac nally 2000). these ecologically-focused models may be less powerful than the statistically-focused models in model building, but can be still more appropriately applied over large areas with different topfennia 181: 1 (2003) 41recent developments in spatial methods and data in … ographic and landscape characteristics (luoto et al. 2002a). the importance of model verification is fundamental in predictive modelling (boone and krohn 1999). not only should models be assessed with respect to their ability to explain observed variation, but they should also be validated. this can be done either using ‘leave-one-out’ jack-knife and bootstrap techniques (random sampling with replacement), or by evaluating the quality of the derived model by fitting it to an independent data set (the ‘split-sample’ or ‘training-evaluation data sets’ approach) (guisan & zimmermann 2000; fleishman et al. 2001; henebry & merchant 2002; suárez-seoane 2002). model predictions must be regarded as testable hypotheses. if the hypotheses are largely validated, then the model can be legitimately employed, for example for landscape management or conservation purposes (fleishman et al. 2001). moreover, the derived statistical models must also be tested for their ecological sensibility (austin et al. 1990). it is noteworthy that due to the dynamics and social factors affecting populations, not all suitable sites for a species are necessarily occupied at the same time. however, identification of unoccupied, but nevertheless suitable, sites using species-environment based modelling approaches can be highly important for long-term conservation planning. johnson & krohn (2002) gave examples of dynamically changing seabird colonies, for which carefully applied habitat occupancy models could be used in identifying features associated with suitable, but at a particular time unoccupied islands. one additional problem in the biogeographical model building procedure is the spatial coverage of the model building area. the models should be based geographically and ecologically on an appropriate sample of the area, especially when they are used for spatial extrapolation. the models often produce somewhat inaccurate predictions, especially in those cases where the landscape pattern is different from that of the model building area (luoto et al. 2002a). logistic regression analysis the use of multivariate statistics to model biogeographical distribution patterns has increased in the past two decades and a wide variety of statistical techniques is now available (see walker 1990; mladenoff et al. 1995; bustamante 1997; brito et al. 1999). probabilities of occurrences are generally assessed using the logistic regression methods. logistic regression has been shown to be a powerful tool, capable of analysing the effects of one or several independent variables, discrete or continuous, over a dichotomic (presence/ absence) variable (pereira & itami 1991; augustin et al. 1996; brito et al. 1999). fitting a logistic regression model to distribution data is a straightforward task and algorithms are available in several statistical program packages. multiple logistic regression is an appropriate and widely used method for statistical analysis in different distribution problems in biological and ecological studies (see pereira & itami 1991; carroll et al. 1999). however, logistic regression has not hitherto been very widely employed by geographers or landscape ecologists; rather it is preferred as a practical method for summarising species distributions along environmental gradients (see peeters & gardeniers 1998; hill et al. 1999). a more technical and detailed review of logistic regression was presented by mccullagh & nelder (1989) and collett (1991). logistic regression has the form: π (x ) = exp (α + βx) 1 + exp (α + βx) where α is the constant and βx is the coefficient of the respective independent variables. the probability of presence π (ranging from 0 to 1) is given as a function of the vector of this model and becomes apparent after the logistic transformation, giving the form: ln π (x) = α + βx 1 – π (x) where ln denotes the natural logarithm (rita & ranta 1993; sokahl & rohlf 1995). in a model that attempts to explain the variation in distribution problems, the residuals cannot be normally distributed, as they should be in ordinary regression. this is because there are only two possible values for the response variable in data: 0 for absence and 1 for presence. thus the statistical theory developed for ordinary regression models is not applicable to binomial distribution data. the use of ordinary regressions in probability analysis may lead to estimates without biological or even mathematical realism (hos( ) 42 fennia 181: 1 (2003)miska luoto and risto heikkinen mer & lemeshow 1989; rita & ranta 1993). in logistic regression, the binary nature of the response variable variation is the basis of parameter estimation and thus, the logistic regression models will not produce inappropriate values (π (x) > 1 or π (x) < 0) for the probability of presence (rita & ranta 1993). as mentioned earlier, logistic regression – although the predominant method applied in species-environment modelling exercises – is not the only technique available for the modelling studies of species distribution patterns. other statistical approaches include the following: generalized additive models (gam), environmental envelope techniques, bayesian logistic-based modelling approach and neural networks. the discussion of these techniques is beyond the scope of this paper. however, information concerning these approaches can be found from, for example, guisan & zimmermann (2000), mac nally (2000), fleishman et al. (2001) and suárez-seoane et al. (2002). other critical issues in biogeographical modelling comprehensive species distribution data over large areas and regions rarely exist. frequently, the only data available for spatial modelling studies are herbarium records or museum specimens (margules & austin 1994; austin 2002; johnson & sargeant 2002). however, these records have usually been collected in an opportunistic manner. this has resulted in incomplete and often biased data sets with regard to both the geographical and the taxonomical coverage (margules & austin 1994). thus, regional data sets or atlases based on herbarium and other sources often provide only a limited basis for modelling exercises. such presence-only data sets are hampered by false negatives – cells with no record of a species that really is present (johnson & sargeant 2002). there are empirical methods, such as bioclim (busby 1991), for estimating distribution patterns of species from presence-only types of species data. however, these methods will only provide an overall climatic envelope within which a species occurs, and will tell nothing about where it will be absent within the climatic limits of the envelope (austin 2002). thus modelling studies should preferably be based on true presence/absence records of species derived from geocoded plots of specified size. on the other hand, comprehensive field surveys of species distribution patterns over wide areas are generally too expensive or logistically impossible to carry out. the best solution is to define cost-effective survey designs that will yield unbiased and sufficiently representative species distribution data sets. it is important to ensure that a survey samples the full range of vegetation composition and environmental space defined by the major environmental gradients in the region. in a similar vein, more accurate predictions of species occurrence patterns can generally be attained if the model-building grid squares are located all over the area, covering effectively all biotopes and environmental gradients. more information on the appropriate survey designs and the subsequent statistical modelling of species-environment relationships can be found from walker (1990), austin and heyligers (1991), margules & austin (1994), wessels et al. (1998) and austin (2002). when carrying out the actual modelling exercise, it is imperative to realise that the relationships between species and their environments are often nonlinear and should thus be modelled as such (austin et al. 1990; heglund 2002). one simple way of taking this into account is to incorporate squared terms of the predictor environmental variables into the modelling procedure (i.e. second order polynomial regressions; see bustamante 1997; guisan & zimmermann 2000; fleishman et al. 2001). problems of remote sensing data remote sensing provides an extensive source of relatively cheap, reliable data. however, the use of satellite images and digital aerial photographs in biogeographical and landscape ecological studies includes many potential pitfalls (kalliola & syrjänen 1991; nagendra 2001). ecologically and conservationally important habitat patches, such as deciduous forests and semi-natural grasslands, are often missed in satellite imagery classification (stoms 1992; luoto et al. 2002a). when landsat-tm images are used, small habitat patches inevitably remain below the level of resolution, because only patches larger than one pixel (900 m2) can be discriminated from the image. however, it is possible that even some larger patches are excluded from the classification due fennia 181: 1 (2003) 43recent developments in spatial methods and data in … to the sensor properties or the patch shape, elongation or location in relation to the pixel boundaries (hyppänen 1996; fisher 1997; cracknell 1998). the problem is even more pronounced in undulating topography with small-scale habitat pattern and often with corridor-like patches (cf. guisan & zimmermann 2000: 175). a small patch on a steep slope appears smaller than it really is and may therefore be indistinguishable (lillesand & kiefer 1994). another bias in the classification originates from the fact that the spectral reflectance of a pixel is influenced by the reflectance of its neighbourhood, caused by the movement of the sensor (fisher 1997). moreover, when using multispectral and multitemporal data, the blending between adjacent pixels is pronounced. this is a result of the fact that pixels of different bands of an image do not always overlap and pixels of images from different dates seldom overlap (cracknell 1998). fisher (1997) and cracknell (1998) discussed the problem of rectangular spatial units, because pixels seldom match the true shape or size of natural objects. this is not a problem in large, homogenous areas such as coniferous forests or fields, but in the case of linear habitats, e.g., semi-natural grasslands or riverside forests, it undoubtedly affects the size and detection of patches (cf. nagendra 2001). when using satellite imagery as the source data for the habitat map, some uncertainties must be expected. it would be feasible, however, to improve the habitat classification by using aerial photographs or new high-resolution satellite imagery (e.g., ikonos with 4 m resolution). the areas requiring more detailed data could be selected on the basis of topography and the fragmentation of habitats. scale the problem of pattern and scale is one of the central problems in biogeography and spatial ecology. biogeographical study problems require interfacing of phenomena that occur on very different scales of space, time and organization and therefore, there is no single natural scale on which geographical phenomenon should be studied (see wiens 1989; levin 1992; stoms 1994). the observer imposes a perceptual bias, a filter through which the system is viewed. furthermore, every organism is an ‘observer’ of the environment, and has its own perceptual spatial and temporal scale. this has fundamental significance for the study of biogeographical systems, since the distribution patterns and processes that are unique to any range of scales will have unique causes and ecological consequences (levin 1992; heglund 2002). the pattern detected in any biogeographical mosaic is a function of scale, and the ecological concept of spatial scale encompasses both extent and grain (turner et al. 1989; wiens 1989; forman 1995). extent is the overall area encompassed by an investigation or the area included within the landscape boundary. grain is the size of the individual units of observation. for example, a fine-grained map might structure information into 1 m2 units, whereas a map with a coarser resolution would have information structured into 1 ha units (turner et al. 1989). extent and grain define the upper and lower limits of resolution of study and any inferences about scale-dependence in a system are constrained by the extent and grain of investigation (wiens 1989). from a statistical perspective, it is not reasonable to extrapolate beyond the population sampled or to infer differences between objects smaller than the experimental units. similarly, in the assessment of landscape structure, it is not possible to detect pattern beyond the extent of the landscape or below the resolution of the grain (wiens 1989). as with the concept of landscape and patch, it may be ecologically more meaningful to define the scale from the perspective of the organism or ecological phenomenon under consideration. for example, from an organism-centred perspective, grain and extent may be defined as the degree of acuity of a stationary organism with respect to shortand long-range perceptual ability (kolasa & rollo 1991). thus, grain is the finest component of the environment that can be differentiated close to the organism, whereas extent is the range at which a relevant object can be distinguished from a fixed vantage point by the organism. it has been suggested that information can be transferred across scales if both grain and extent are specified (allen et al. 1987; kunin 1998). however, it is partially unclear how observed landscape patterns vary in response to changes in grain and extent, and whether landscape metrics obtained on different scales can be compared. the limited work on this topic suggests that landscape 44 fennia 181: 1 (2003)miska luoto and risto heikkinen metrics vary in their sensitivity to changes in scale and that quantitative and qualitative changes in measurements across spatial scales will differ depending on how scale is defined (turner et al. 1989). according to wickham & riitters (1995), identical classifications for the same area could be arrived at from sensors with different spatial resolving powers, and the resultant landscape metric values should not be dramatically affected by the difference in spatial resolution. the key to modelling and understanding of biogeographical issues lies in elucidation of the mechanisms underlying the observed patterns (wiens 1989; noss 1992). the difficulties embedded in these attempts are pronounced in the studies using gi or rs data, because spatial data provide information between fine-scale ecological variation and large-scale geographical–spatial gradient, overlapping both. this can lead to the situation described by levin (1992), where the mechanisms underlying the biogeographical patterns operate on different scales from those on which they are observed, producing rather poor fit of the models (see also heglund 2002). recently, gi-based approaches have been used on different scales to analyse and model biogeographical distribution patterns (kunin 1998). however, our understanding of the factors influencing on different scales is limited, and we lack the knowledge of how the different spatial modelling scales affect the performance of biogeographical distribution models. there is an increasing need to evaluate how the analysis and modelling results behave on different spatial scales. conclusions the applicability and employment of spatial data derived from remote sensing and geographic databases to model and monitor biogeographical distribution problems has increased considerably in recent years. if remotely sensed data are to be used effectively for biogeographical research, techniques to integrate observations of landscape pattern and habitat quality with data on biogeographical distribution patterns need to be developed further. there are many national vegetation and land cover maps available with information on potential sites of certain species or of high biodiversity. remote sensing and geographic information systems are uniquely poised to use these data, in conjunction with spatial analysis and modelling, to map and monitor species distribution and biodiversity patterns. furthermore, predictive rs and gi-based modelling can provide a basis for focusing field assessment and allocating conservation resources in areas where the distribution of species is not well known (gould 2000; luoto 2000b). biogeographers and landscape ecologists typically view landscape as a mosaic of land cover elements (habitats, biotopes and ecosystems) and believe that their spatial arrangement controls or affects the ecological processes operating within them. a more holistic perspective in landscape studies, which also takes into account the geomorphological, hydrological and climatological aspects of the landscape, is needed for a comprehensive analysis and modelling of a certain area. acknowledgements we thank r. kalliola for valuable comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. m. bailey improved the english of the manuscript. this study is part of the project ‘use of remote sensing in modelling biodiversity in agricultural landscapes’ (sa80784) funded by the academy of finland. references allen tfh, rvo o’neill & tw hoekstra (1987). interlevel relations in ecological research and management: some working principles from hierarchy theory. journal of applied system analysis 14, 63–79. augustin n, ma mugglestone & st buckland (1996). an autologistic model for spatial distribution of wildlife. journal of applied ecology 33, 339–347. austin mp (2002). case studies of the use of environmental gradients in vegetation and fauna modelling: theory and practice in australia and new zealand. in scott jm, pj heglund, ml morrison, jb haufler, mg raphael, wa wall & fb samson (eds). predicting species occurrences. issues of accuracy and scale, 73–82. island press, washington. austin mp & pc heyligers (1991). new approach to vegetation survey design: gradsect sampling. in margules cr & mp austin (eds). nature conservation: cost effective biological surveys and data analysis, 31–36. csiro, australia. austin mp, ao nicholls & cr margules (1990). measurement of the realized qualitative niche: environmental niches of five eucalyptus species. ecological monographs 60, 161–177. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 45recent developments in spatial methods and data in … begon m, jl harper & cr townsend (1996). ecology. 3rd ed. 1068 p blackwell science, oxford. boone rb & wb krohn. (1999). modeling the occurrence of bird species: are the errors predictable? ecological applications 9, 835–848. brito jc, eg crespo & os paulo (1999). modelling wildlife distributions: logistic multiple regression vs overlap analysis. ecography 22, 251–260. buckland st & da elston (1993). empirical models for spatial distribution of wildlife. journal of applied ecology 30, 478–495. busby jr (1991). bioclim – a bioclimate analysis and prediction system. in margules cr & mp austin (eds). nature conservation: cost effective biological surveys and data analysis, 64–68. csiro, australia. bustamante j (1997). predictive models for lesser kestrel falco naumanni distribution, abundance and extinction in southern spain. biological conservation 80, 153–160. campbell jb (1996). introduction to remote sensing. 2nd ed. 622 p. taylor & francis, london. carroll c, wj zielinski & rf noss (1999). using presence-absence data to build and test spatial habitat models for the fisher in the klamath region, u.s.a. conservation biology 13, 1344–1359. cherril aj, c mcclean, p watson, k tucker, sp rushton & r sanderson (1995). predicting the distributions of plant species at the regional scale: hierarchical matrix model. landscape ecology 4, 197–207. clements fe (1936). nature and structure of the climax. journal of ecology 24, 252–284. collett d (1991). modelling binary data. 369 p. chapman & hall, london. cracknell ap (1998). synergy in remote sensing – what’s in a pixel? international journal of remote sensing 19, 2025–2047. currie dj (1991). energy and large-scale patterns of animaland plant-species richness. american naturalist 137, 27–49. debinski dm & p humphrey (1997). an integrated approach to biological diversity assessment. natural areas journal 17, 355–365. debinski dm, k kindscher & me jakubauskas (1999). a remote sensing and gis-based model of habitats and biodiversity in the greater yellowstone ecosystem. international journal of remote sensing 17, 3281–3291. enoksson b, p angelstam & k larsson (1995). deciduous forest and resident birds: the problem of fragmentation within a coniferous forest landscape. landscape ecology 10, 267–275. fahrig l (2002). effect of habitat fragmentation on the extinction threshold: a synthesis. ecological applications 12, 346–353. ferguson jwh & mn bester (2002). the treatment of spatial autocorrelation in biological surveys: the case of line transect surveys. antarctic science 14, 115–122. fisher p (1997). the pixel: a snare and a delusion. international journal of remote sensing 18, 679– 685. flack vf & pc chang 1987. frequency of selecting noise variables in subset regression analysis: a simulation study. the american statistician 41, 84–86. fleishman e, r mac nally, jp fay & dd murphy (2001). modelling and predicting species occurrence using broad-scale environmental variables: an example with butterflies of the great basin. conservation biology 15, 1674–1685. forman rtt (1995). land mosaics. the ecology of landscapes and regions. 632 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. gaston kj (1996). species richness: measure and measurement. in kj gaston (ed). biodiversity. a biology of numbers and difference, 77–113. blackwell science, oxford. gould wa (2000). remote sensing of vegetation, plant species richness, and regional diversity hotspots. ecological applications 10, 1861– 1870. granö o & a paasi (eds) (1997). j.g. granö: pure geography. 192 p. johns hopkins university press, baltimore. griffiths gh, jm smith, n veitch & r aspinall (1993). the ecological interpretation of satellite imagery with special reference to bird habitats. in hainesyoung r, dr green & sh cousins (eds). landscape ecology and geographic information systems, 255–272. taylor & francis ltd, london. guisan a & ne zimmermann (2000). predictive habitat distribution models in ecology. ecological modelling 135, 147–186. haila y (2002). a conceptual genealogy of fragmentation research: from island biogeography to landscape ecology. ecological applications 12, 321– 334. hanski i (1998). metapopulation dynamics. nature 396, 41–49. hanski i (1999). metapopulation ecology. 324 p. oxford series in ecology and evolution. oxford university press, oxford. hanski i & me gilpin (eds) (1997). metapopulation biology: ecology, genetics, and evolution. academic press, san diego. heglund pj (2002) foundations of species-environment relations. in scott jm, pj heglund, ml morrison, jb haufler, mg raphael, wa wall & fb samson (eds). predicting species occurrences. issues of accuracy and scale, 35–41. island press, washington. heikkinen rk (1998). can richness patterns of rarities be predicted from mesoscale atlas data? a case study of vascular plants in the kevo reserve. biological conservation 83, 133–143. henebry gm & jw merchant (2002). geospatial data in time: limits and prospects for predicting species occurrences. in scott jm, pj heglund, ml morrison, jb haufler, mg raphael, wa wall & fb samson (eds). predicting species occurrenc46 fennia 181: 1 (2003)miska luoto and risto heikkinen es. issues of accuracy and scale, 291–302. island press, washington. hill jk, cd thomas & b huntley (1999). climate and habitat availability determine 20th century changes in a butterfly’s range margin. proceedings of royal society london. b. 266, 1197– 1206. högmander h & j møller (1995). estimating distribution maps. from atlas data using methods of statistical image analysis. biometrics 51, 393– 404. hosmer dw jr & s lemeshow (1989) applied logistic regression. john wiley & sons inc., new york. von humboldt a (1807). ideen zu einer geographie der pflanzen nebst einem naturgemälde der tropenländer. 182 p. cotta, tübingen. huxel gr & a hastings (1999). habitat loss, fragmentation and restoration. restoration ecology 7, 309–315. hyppänen h (1996). spatial autocorrelation and optimal spatial resolution of optical remote sensing data in boreal forest environment. international journal of remote sensing 17, 3441–52 iverson lr, rl graham & ea cook (1989). applications of satellite remote sensing to forested ecosystems. landscape ecology 3, 131–143. james fc & ce mcculloch (1990). multivariate analysis in ecology and systematics: panacea or pandora’s box? annual review of ecology and systematics 21, 129–166. johnson cm & wb krohn (2002). dynamic patterns of associations between environmental factors and island use by breeding seabirds. in scott jm, pj heglund, ml morrison, jb haufler, mg raphael, wa wall & fb samson (eds). predicting species occurrences. issues of accuracy and scale, 171–181. island press, washington. johnson dh & ga sargeant (2002). toward better atlases: improving presence-absence information. in scott jm, pj heglund, ml morrison, jb haufler, mg raphael, wa wall & fb samson (eds). predicting species occurrences. issues of accuracy and scale, 391–397. island press, washington. johnston ca (1998). geographic information systems in ecology. 239 p. blackwell science, oxford. kalliola r & k syrjänen (1991). to what extent are vegetation types visible in satellite imagery. annales botanici fennici 28, 45–57. koenig wd & jmh knops (1998). testing for spatial autocorrelation in ecological studies. ecography 21, 423–429. kolasa j & cd rollo (1991). introduction: the heterogeneity of heterogeneity: a glossary. in: kolasa j & sta pickett (eds). ecological heterogeneity, 1– 23. springer-verlag, new york. kunin we (1998). extrapolating species abundance across spatial scales. science 281, 1513– 1515. legendre p (1993). spatial autocorrelation: trouble or new paradigm? ecology 74, 1055–1067. levins r (1969). some demographic and genetic consequences of environmental heterogeneity for biological control. bulletin of entomological society of america 15, 237–240. levin sa (1992). the problem of pattern and scale in ecology. ecology 73, 1943–1967. liebhold am & j gurevitch (2002). integrating the statistical analysis of spatial data in ecology. ecography 25, 553–557. lillesand tm & rw kiefer (1994). remote sensing and image interpretation. 650 p. john wiley & sons. inc., usa. luoto m (2000a). landscape ecological analysis and modelling of habitat and species diversity in agricultural landscapes using gis (phd thesis). annales universitatis turkuensis a ii, 141p. luoto m (2000b). modelling of rare plant species richness by landscape variables in an agriculture area in finland. plant ecology 149, 157–168. luoto m, m kuussaari, h rita, j salminen & t von bonsdorff (2001). determinants of distribution and abundance in the clouded apollo butterfly: a landscape ecological approach. ecography 24, 601–617. luoto m, m kuussaari & t toivonen (2002a) modelling butterfly distribution based on remote sensing data. journal of biogeography 29, 1027– 1037. luoto m, t toivonen & rk heikkinen (2002b) prediction of total and rare plant species richness from satellite images and gis data in agricultural landscapes. landscape ecology 17, 195–217. macarthur rh & eo wilson (1967). the theory of island biogeography. 224 p. princeton university press. mac nally r (2000). regression and model-building in conservation biology, biogeography and ecology: the distinction between – and reconciliation of – ‘predictive’ and ‘explanatory’ models. biodiversity and conservation 9, 655–671. margules cr & mp austin (1991). nature conservation: cost effective biological surveys and data analysis. 207 p. csiro, australia. margules cr & mp austin (1994). biological models for monitoring species decline: the construction and use of data bases. philosophical transactions of the royal society, london b 344, 69– 75. mccullagh p & ja nelder (1989). generalized linear models. 472 p. chapman & hall, new york. milsom tp, sd langton, wk parkin, s peel, jd bishop, jd hart & np moore (2000). habitat models of bird species’ distribution: an aid to the management of coastal grazing marshes. journal of applied ecology 37, 706–727. mladenoff dj, ma white, tr crow & j pastor (1994). applying principles of landscape design and management to integrate old-growth forest enhancement and commodity use. conservation biology 8, 752–762. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 47recent developments in spatial methods and data in … mladenoff dj, ta sickley, rg haight & ap wydeven (1995). a regional landscape analysis and prediction of favorable gray wolf habitat in the northern great lakes region. conservation biology 9, 279–294. mooney a & m godron (1983). disturbance and ecosystems: components of response. springerverlag, new york. nagendra h (2001). using remote sensing to assess biodiversity. international journal of remote sensing 22, 2377–2400. nagendra h & m gadgil (1999). satellite imagery as a tool for monitoring species diversity: an assessment. journal of applied ecology 36, 388– 397. naveh z & as lieberman (1984). landscape ecology, theory and application. springer verlag, new york. nicholls ao (1991). examples of the use of generalized linear models in analysis of survey data for conservation evaluation. in margules cr & mp austin (eds). nature conservation: cost effective biological surveys and data analysis, 54–63. csiro, australia. noss rf (1992). issues of scale in conservation biology. in fieldler pl & sk jain (eds). conservation biology, 239–250. chapman & hall, new york. noss rf (2001). forest fragmentation in the southern rocky mountains. landscape ecology 16, 371–372. pakkala t, i hanski & e tomppo (2002). spatial ecology of the three-toed woodpecker in managed forest landscapes. silva fennica 36, 279–288. peeters ethm & jjp gardeniers (1998). logistic regression as a tool for defining habitat requirements of two common gammarids. freshwater biology 39, 605–615. pereira jm & rm itami (1991). gis-based habitat modeling using logistic multiple regression: a study of the mt. graham red squirrel. photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing 57, 1475–1486. perry jn, am liebholt, ms rosenberg, j dungan, m miriti, a jakomulska & s citron-pousy (2002). illustrations and guidelines for selecting statistical methods for quantifying spatial patterns in ecological data. ecography 25, 578–600. rita h & h ranta (1993). on analysing species incidence. annales zoologici fennici 30, 173–176. rossi j-p & p queneherve (1998). relating species density to environmental variables in presence of spatial autocorrelation: a study on soil nematodes distribution. ecography 21, 117–123. roy ps & s tomar (2000). biodiversity characterization at landscape level using geospatial modelling technique. biological conservation 95, 95– 109. schmielgelow fka & m mönkkönen (2002). habitat loss and fragmentation in dynamic landscapes: avian perspectives from the boreal forest. ecological applications 12, 375–389. scott jm, f davis, b csuti, r noss, b butterfield, c groves, h anderson, s caicco, f d’erchia, tc edwards jr, j ulliman & rg wright (1993). gap analysis: a geographic approach to protection of biological diversity. wildlife monographs 57, 1– 41. sokal rr & fj rohlf (1995). biometry. 887 p. w. h. freeman, new york. stoms dm (1992). effects of habitat map generalization in biodiversity assessment. photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing 58, 1587– 1591. stoms dm (1994). scale dependence of species richness maps. professional geographer 46, 346– 358. stoms dm & je estes (1993). a remote sensing research agenda for mapping and monitoring biodiversity. international journal of remote sensing 10, 1839–1860. suárez-seoane s, pe osborne & jc alonso (2002). large-scale habitat selection by agricultural steppe birds in spain: identifying species-habitat responses using generalized additive models. journal of applied ecology 39, 755–771. thomas cd, ja thomas & ms warren (1992). distributions of occupied and vacant butterfly habitats in fragmented landscapes. oecologia 92, 563–567. tilman d & p kareiva (1997). spatial ecology. princeton university press. tilman d, rm may, cl lehman & ma nowak (1994). habitat destruction and the extinction debt. nature 371, 65–66. turner mg (1989). landscape ecology: the effect of pattern on process. annual review of ecology and systematics 20, 171–197. turner mg, rvo o’neill, rh gardner & bt milne (1989). effects of changing spatial scale on the analysis of landscape pattern. landscape ecology 3, 153–162. verboom j, a schotman, p opdam & j metz (1991). european nuthatch metapopulations in a fragmented agricultural landscape. oikos 61, 149– 156. walker pa (1990). modelling wildlife distribution using a geographic information system: kangaroos in relation to climate. journal of biogeography 17, 279–289. watson dm (2002). a conceptual framework for studying species composition in fragments, islands and other patchy environments. journal of biogeography 29, 823–834. watt as (1947). pattern and process in the plant community. journal of ecology 35, 1–22. wessels kj, as van jaarsveld, jd grimbeek & mj van der linde (1998). an evaluation of the gradsect biological survey method. biodiversity and conservation 7, 1093–1121. wickham jd & kh riitters (1995). sensitivity of landscape metrics to pixel size. international journal of remote sensing 16, 3585–3594. 48 fennia 181: 1 (2003)miska luoto and risto heikkinen wiens ja (1989). spatial scaling in ecology. functional ecology 3, 385–397. wiens ja (1997). metapopulation dynamics and landscape ecology. in i hanski & me gilpin (eds). metapopulation biology: ecology, genetics, and evolution, 43–62. academic press, london. whittaker rh (1967). gradient analysis of vegetation. biological review 49, 207–264. untitled farms of northern finland matti häkkilä häkkilä, matti (2002). farms of northern finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 199– 211. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper studies the structural development of farms with more than one hectare of arable land in northern finland and explores the reasons behind the development. the paper relies mainly on agricultural census information and farm register statistics, focusing on the period after world war ii. agricultural settlement expanded in northern finland well into the mid1960s due to active policy measures. the period of extensive rural population was short-lived, however. a number of unfavourable factors emerged roughly simultaneously and the number of active farms declined from nearly 60,000 in the 1960s to about 10,000 in 2000. finland’s entry into the eu in the mid-1990s gave further impetus to the development toward fewer but larger farms. today, active farms are several times as large as their predecessors 40–50 years ago. about 50 percent of all active farms in northern finland are dairy farms, whose impact is considerably larger than their mere number would suggest. matti häkkilä, department of geography, fin-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mail: matti.hakkila@oulu.fi introduction being located between the 60th and 70th parallels, finland is the northernmost country in the world alongside iceland (cf. rikkinen 1992: 7). the area of the country is 338,100 square kilometers, but it has a population of only 5.2 million. by european standards, finland is thus a very large country in terms of area, but small in terms of population. with densely built areas amounting to less than three percent of the total area of the country (stv 2000: 99), finland can be characterised as being mostly countryside. finland comes second after norway in the oecd listing of the most rural countries in europe (what future… 1993: table 2). as only eight percent of the country is arable land, rural finland has to be looked upon as a more or less natural landscape with little human influence, particularly in the north and in the east. the population centres are located in southernmost finland and along the western coast, the most fertile areas of the country (alalammi 1982; häkkilä 1984). the north and the east have very little to offer by way of conventional countryside with settlement and farmland, found mostly on riverbanks and lakeshores. agriculture and forestry are the mainstays of rural finland, which is rather exceptional considering the country’s geographical location. the gulf stream, however, raises the temperature by about 3–4 degrees centigrade (°c) above the average in these latitudes (kettunen 1997: 8). in spite of that, climatic conditions vary considerably across the country, because finland extends about 1,100 kilometres from south to north. in southern finland, the growing season is 170–180 days, but only 100 days in the north. there is great variation in the effective temperature sum as well: in the south it is over 1,300 degree days, but only about 500 in the north (cf. kolkki 1966; alalammi 1987: 9). northern finland comprises the provinces of oulu and lapland, constituting 48.5 percent of the country’s area and 12.5 percent of its population. about half of the area lies north of the arctic circle. northern finland includes the present employment and economic development centres of lapland, kainuu, and north ostrobothnia (fig. 1). northern finland comprises 74 municipalities, which amounts to 16.5 percent of the national total. some of these municipalities are exceptionally large. the prime example is inari, in northern lapland, which is larger than most southern regions. in addition to finns, inari and its neighboring municipalities are home for the majority 200 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti häkkilä of the approximately 7,000 indigenous sami people in finland (cf. raento & husso 2002). the natural conditions and therewith the preconditions for human activities vary considerably in northern finland. nowhere are the conditions better than in the western coast with its flat, lowlying landscape furrowed by rivers that empty into the bay of bothnia. toward the east and northeast, the altitude rises from sea level and the relief becomes stronger (see tikkanen 2002: cdfig. 1). settlements tend to follow rivers, other waterways, and main roads leaving large tracts of land completely uninhabited (rusanen et al. 1997). this is reflected in population figures, which reveal that the national population density is 17 persons per square kilometre, while the corresponding figure for northern finland is only 4.3 persons/km2. at 2.1 persons/km2, lapland is even more sparsely populated, with the municipality of savukoski in the northeastern lapland bringing up the rear with 0.2 persons/km2 (stv 2000: 80). only 2.4 percent of the land area of northern finland is arable land (stv 2000: 36). there are great regional differences, however. for example, in north ostrobothnia the proportion is 6.8 percent, but in lapland only 0.73 percent. a considerable proportion of the mineral soils in northern finland are overlaid by peat deposits: in places peat bogs comprise over 60 percent of the land area (ilvessalo 1960: map 13). it thus comes as no surprise that over a quarter of all fields, in some areas over one half, is cleared on peat bogs, the exception being the southernmost part of oulu province (kurki 1972). the most important natural resource, however, are the forests that have played a decisive role in the lives of the rural population (e.g., kuusela 1974; seppälä 1976; häkkilä 1977, 1988). they have influenced town life as well, as great wood processing plants have sprung up, particularly in towns located at the mouths of rivers. during the past few decades, the economic life in northern finland has diversified considerably. regardless, the primary sector still employs a relatively larger amount of people in the north than in the country as a whole. the overall contribution of northern finland to the national gross domestic product was 10.7 percent in 1997. the economic activity in northern finland centres heavily on the west coast, spearheaded by the city of oulu that is known internationally as a stronghold of technology. it is therefore no surprise that the city and the six adjoining municipalities account for more than a third of the gross domestic product of northern finland (stv 2000: 291). the foundation for the rural population of northern finland was laid during centuries by settlers who built their homesteads along the rivers. the abundant fishing waters and hunting grounds, along with the prospect of tar burning, encouraged them to set up farms far from their home villages. these farms were largely established without any direct contribution by the state, but the government has repeatedly exerted an immediate influence on the structure of settlement, as the following discussion will show. the number of farms was on the rise until the mid-1960s, although farms in southern finland experienced a downturn a decade earlier. northfig. 1. northern finland and its division into the employment and economic development centres. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 201farms of northern finland ern finland followed suit in the 1960s. this trend has continued to the present day and appears to do so even as finland has joined the eu. on the other hand, modern farms are much larger than their predecessors. the present paper examines temporal and regional aspects in the development of agricultural settlement in northern finland primarily after world war ii. the research material stems mainly from the general agricultural census carried out at about ten-year intervals. in 1971 these counts were replaced by a farm register, maintained by the national board of agriculture. as keeping the register up-to-date proved difficult, a census was conducted again in 1990 and 2000. farms and active farms in finland, farm originally denoted a homestead with at least one hectare of field (in official statistics from the 1969 agricultural census onward). a growing percentage of farms has gradually become uncultivated, although the farm register still quotes them as independent farms. as a result, since 1990 official agricultural statistics have used two different concepts: farm and active farm. the introduction of the new term has not influenced the definition of the old one; rather, the new one complements it. an active farm is a farm with more than one hectare of arable land that practices agriculture or other entrepreneurial activity (svt 1996: 7). forest is an integral part of the finnish farm and nearly all farms, active or not, have a forest holding, which is often considerably larger than the fields, up to tenfold in the north (häkkilä 1991: 42). in the year 1998, all finnish farms had an average of 16.3 hectares of arable land and 44.3 hectares of forest land, whereas the figures for lapland were 7.8 hectares and 81.8 hectares, respectively (stv 2000: 136–137). the 2000 census registered only active farms, because most of the uncultivated farms could no longer be characterised as farms. agricultural activities had stopped years or even decades ago, and in many cases the fields were overgrown with bushes. on the other hand, a number of farmers had rented their fields to neighbours who still worked the land. the last time both terms appeared in statistics was in 1998, when northern finland boasted 30,944 farms with more than one hectare of arable land, but a mere 11,076 (35.8%) of them qualified as active farms. at that time, northern finland accounted for only 12.9 percent of all active farms in the country, but comprised 20.2 percent of all farms with more than one hectare of arable land. nationally, the average area of cultivation of these farms was, as mentioned above, 16.3 hectares, while the figure for northern finland was 11.5 hectares. the corresponding figures for active farms were 25.0 hectares and 24.0 hectares, respectively (svt 2000c: 46). from settlement to depopulation the majority of farms in northern finland are results of the division of the independent family estates created during the so-called great partition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (e.g., talman 1987: 225; rikkinen 1992: 51). the purpose was to gather the farms that had become dispersed as result of the earlier plot system into a smaller number of integral units (riihinen 1963: 8). for a long time, agriculture provided the basis for the expansion of settlement (talman 1987: 225; westerholm 2002: cd-fig. 1b). at the beginning of the twentieth century, finland was primarily an agricultural country. the population had grown relatively faster than the number of farms, however. large farms had rented allotments to crofters in exchange of labour service, but there was also a recently-emerged new form of labour force, farmhands, who had no farms of their own but hired out to others for a meagre pay. to solve the problems of the crofters and, later, those of other landless workers, the state became increasingly involved in rural settlement following the independence of finland in 1917. the aim was to create family-owned farm properties capable of providing an adequate living (talman 1987: 225). the state was active in increasing the number of farms both before and after world war ii (e.g., jutikkala 1958; palomäki 1960; smeds 1962; v. soosten 1970; varjo 1977; siuruainen 1978; hämynen & lahti 1983; rikkinen 1992). by 1959, the state had contributed to the foundation of 140,802 new farms, 22,506 (16%) of them in northern finland (svt 1962: table 10). not all of these farms fulfilled the current minimum size for a farm, however. the newly independent state first intervened in the formation of farms in 1918 by issuing the leasehold property laws, which allowed tenant farmers to acquire the land they had farmed at a modest price. a host of other laws concerning the 202 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti häkkilä leasing and settlement of land followed. about 7,000 farms sprung up in northern finland in the aftermath of the leasehold property laws, while the actual settlement laws enforced before the outbreak of world war ii resulted in the creation of about 6,000 farms (svt 1962: table 10). after world war ii, farming land was allocated to families that had been evacuated from areas annexed by the soviet union, but veterans, war widows, and orphans also received allotments. some 423,300 people, 11 percent of the total population in 1945, were evacuated from the territories ceded to the soviet union, containing some 12 percent of finland’s cultivated area. the majority of the evacuees, 406,800 persons, came from karelia. 250,000 of all refugees were members of farmer families (talman 1987: 225). the overriding principle in the settlement of the evacuees was that parish and village communities should be maintained as far as possible. in addition, an effort was made to settle people from a particular district in the same area and to maintain the position of the parishes in the north–south direction. this was done to ensure that living conditions in the new home would resemble those in the evacuated areas to the highest degree possible. consequently, the great majority of the evacuees were settled in the south. the majority of the holdings formed in northern finland were established for veterans. the 1959 agricultural census indicates that evacuees were allotted 2,252 farms in northern finland (svt 1962: table 10). the corresponding figure for other groups (veterans, etc.) was 6,705. thus a mere 7.6 percent of all farms established for the evacuees were in the north, while the corresponding figure for other groups was 20.8 percent. all told, at the turn of the 1960s, 63 percent of the over 58,000 farms with more than one hectare of arable land in northern finland were freely created, while 37 percent were formed through settlement policy either before or after world war ii. with a mean arable area of 6.1 hectares (fig. 2), these farms can be characterised as small holdings. the average size of the farms in the whole country in those days was 7.8 hectares or in uusimaa, in southernmost finland, 12.3 hectares (svt 1962: table 10). the state was (and still is) a significant landowner in northern finland and especially in lapland, and so the great majority of the settlement holdings were formed on government lands. rural settlement continued in northern finland throughout the 1960s and in some remote municipalities even at the beginning of the 1970s. this is remarkable at a time when the number of farms had already taken a downturn in southern finland and also in the southern part of northern finland. in the north, rural settlement expanded to previously unpopulated areas. geographically, the post-war settlement programme and the associated setting up of new farms is regarded as the last stage in the conquest of the wild virgin lands in finland (smeds & fogelberg 1967). the holdings formed through post-war settlement policy in northern finland were generally fig. 2. number of farms of over one hectare of arable land and their mean arable areas in northern finland, in 1941–1998 (svt 1954, 1962, 1971, 1983, 1992a, 1996, 2000a). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 203farms of northern finland so-called cold farms, in other words, they had no arable land when established and the farmers themselves had to clear the fields and construct the buildings (mead 1951; palomäki 1960). these farms were set up to compensate for the loss of arable land ceded to the soviet union. at the same time, they provided labour to logging sites. the idea was that the farms would be only partially self-sustaining so that a portion of the farmers’ income would come from secondary sources, such as logging. according to tykkyläinen and kavilo (1991), the settlement policy period after world war ii was the last episode in a long-standing development strategy of national self-sufficiency, which repeated the structural policy outlined in the connection of the liberation of tenant farmers in 1918 and even earlier. social policy aspects and a view of society that emphasized the value of rural life were also involved in this policy, which similarly included the aim of mobilising resources in economic marginal and border areas. the rural transition period occurred fairly late in finland compared with other western countries, such as sweden (häkkilä 1984: 123). determining the exact point of time when the number of farms started to decline is no easy task, for an agricultural census was carried out only every ten years. in 1969, farms with more than one hectare of arable land numbered about 55,000 in northern finland (svt 1971: 12), which is 6.6 percent less than ten years earlier. nationwide, the decline was 10.2 percent (svt 1962, 1971). the reasons behind this trend in the north are manifold. first of all, it had not yet been possible to make the northern finnish farms viable since the development of society had started to take a totally different turn, above all, with the technological progress that contributed to the emptying of the northern finnish countryside (e.g., siuruainen 1984: 60–62). the mechanisation of forest work and the changeover to professional forest labour were particularly fatal, as they deprived the rural population of their most important source of secondary income, seasonal forest work (häkkilä 1988). in the 1960s, agricultural overproduction also became a problem and the restrictive steps taken to cut back this overproduction (häkkilä 1991: 44– 46), as well as the anti-agricultural atmosphere that these measures involved, hastened the abandonment of agriculture and the migration from country to town. the northern finnish countryside began to empty with an ever-increasing speed. regional features of the changes the expansion and retreat of agricultural settlement started late in northern finland compared with the southern parts of the country. neither did the turning point between the increase and the decrease in the number of farms occur at the same time everywhere in the north. as a general rule, it happened earlier in the southern parts of northern finland. the settlement laws went simultaneously into effect in the entire country, but their enforcement in northern finland began first and proceeded most rapidly in the south-western corner of the province of oulu, particularly along the coast. several factors account for this progress. the area was, in conditions of northern finland, relatively densely populated, with an established infrastructure and fields that could be ceded to the newcomers. resettlement was markedly slower in the hinterlands of kainuu and lapland, where it commended more often as cold farming in previously unsettled locations, forcing the settlers to clear the forests and build the farms from scratch. interestingly, the abandonment of agriculture followed the same pattern by starting in the southwest, where distances were short to population centres capable of offering other work. the mechanisation of forestry reached the hinterlands gradually in the 1960s and 1970s, depleting the need for seasonal labour. as a result, also the hinterlands began to empty, as people moved not only to the towns of northern finland, but also to the south of finland and sweden in growing numbers. another step in this direction was taken by the introduction of the field reservation system created in 1968 to restrict agricultural overproduction. recompensing farmers for not cultivating their lands often encouraged them to abandon their occupation altogether (jaatinen & alalammi 1978; häkkilä 1984). these temporal and regional features of the structural development in the countryside of northern finland are presented in a series of maps (cd-fig. 1–3) that depicts the development of the number of agricultural farms on the basis of statistics and other information provided by the general agricultural census and the farm register in 1950–1980. the map for 1950–1959 (cd-fig. 1) shows that 204 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti häkkilä the number of farms was still on the increase in northern finland as a whole. this period represents the fastest progress of settlement practised in accordance with the land acquisition act of 1945 (e.g., palomäki 1960; siuruainen 1978) in most northern finnish municipalities. the map also indicates that in the coastal area to the south of oulu, the number of farms increased only negligibly during this period and in some municipalities not at all more, whereas in kainuu and lapland the number of farms still increased greatly during the given period, 27 percent and 43 percent, respectively. during the period 1959–1969, a remarkable depopulation of the countryside had already started in north ostrobothnia, in most of the municifig. 3. number of farms of over one hectare of arable land and the proportion of active farms in the municipalities of northern finland, in 1995 (svt 1996). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 205farms of northern finland palities of kainuu, and in many parts of lapland (cd-fig. 2). in spite of this, the number of farms still grew in some municipalities in lapland and kainuu. during 1969–1980, however, the figure for farms declined sharply in every municipality in northern finland (cd-fig. 3). the field reservation system and other measures to limit production were in use at the time, migration from country to town and emigration to sweden were intense, and, partly for these reasons, the appreciation of agriculture was at its lowest. after 1980, the downturn has continued throughout northern finland without exception. noteworthy in the delay in the development of agricultural structure in northern finland is that, regardless of the considerable decrease in the number of farms with more than one hectare of arable land, northern finland increased its share of their national number. this trend continued unabated up until the late 1990s. the figure for 1950 was 15.9 percent, while that for 1998 was 20.1 percent. the explanation is that since the 1970s, when farms were falling into disuse even in the north, they were only slowly deleted from the farm register. this is evidenced by the statistics for active farms, which quote much smaller figures, 15 percent for 1990 and 12.8 percent for 2000 (svt 1992a: 1; agricultural census 2000, advance information). effects of the eu membership on rural development finland joined the european union together with sweden and austria at the beginning of 1995. the rural population in finland, by and large, had opposed the idea in advance, and farmers in the north had been particularly doubtful. in the debate that had continued through the first half of the 1990s, particular fears were expressed concerning the union’s ability to appreciate the specific difficulties facing farmers in the harsh nordic conditions, especially as most farms in the area are small relative to those in the eu’s central areas. in the year 1995 the average size of active farms was 21.7 hectares in finland (svt 1996: 31), 31.7 hectares in sweden (sås 2001: 94–95), or, for example, 38.5 hectares in france (stv 1998: 5). in principle, the arable areas of finnish farms should be at least double compared with those in the central eu countries, for the finnish yields per hectare are only about a half of that in those countries (kettunen 1992: 6; häkkilä 1993: 72, 2001: 93). figure 3 shows the number of farms in northern finland in 1995 when the country joined the eu. only a third of the 33,000 farms with more than one hectare of arable land were active. there was a deep concern for the future of agriculture in the area, which was reflected in the decreasing number of active farms during the first half of the 1990s (fig. 4). the decline continues today, but it has slowed down. having recovered from the initial shock, many farmers even in the north of finland have come to realise that the agricultural policy of the eu does not spell the end of finnish farms, provided that they continue to be developed and their sizes enlarged. all told, abandonment of agriculture exceeded the national average in northern finland in the 1990s. the number of active farms dropped by 50 percent in kainuu and lapland and by about 40 percent in north ostrobothnia, but only by 38 percent in the entire country (svt 1992a: 1; agricultural census 2000, advance information). a look at municipal statistics reveals an interesting finding, however: the number of active farms has actually increased in some municipalities in fig. 4. number of active farms and their mean arable areas, in 1990, 1995, and 2000 (svt 1992a, 1996; agricultural census 2000, advance information). 206 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti häkkilä northernmost lapland during the period 1995– 2000 (fig. 5). this is because numerous farmers have started to recultivate their fields to grow hay in order to provide winter fodder for reindeer. they have thus responded to the eu support system based on cultivated arable land area. it must be borne in mind, however, that these municipalities have a negligible effect on agriculture in the region as a whole. while the number of active farms has diminished, their arable areas have grown considerably. having been about 15 hectares in 1990, the size of an average northern finnish field exceeded 26 hectares in 2000. the figure is a mere two hectares smaller than the national average. generally, only the largest farms have remained active, and the owners have purchased and rented fields from those who have abandoned agriculture. in addition, the eu has induced farmers to turn forests into fields. also remote patches of arable land that have been uncultivated for a long time have been recultivated. this is due to the fact that subsidies in the eu’s support system are largely paid according to field area. the eu has exerted little direct influence on the farms’ forest economy. indirect effects, however, include the continued busy restructuring among private forest owners, caused mainly by rural depopulation and discontinuation of farming. as a result, forest ownership has shifted to urban areas, to the south of finland in particular, mainly through inheritance. this phenomenon can be traced back decades (e.g., reunala 1974; häkkilä 1981), but it has shown little signs of abating since finland’s entry in the eu. farm forest holdings tend to be rather large in northern finland. on the other hand, the average growth of forest per hectare in the north is only a third of the mean growth of forests in southern finland (häkkilä 1977: 42–46). according to the ninth national forest inventory, the mean annual increment on forest land was in the southern half of the country 5.3 cubic metres per hectare but 2.0 m3/ha in the northern half. in lapland it was only 1.5 m3/ ha (svt 2000b: 70). hence, their economic significance is smaller than the farms’ forest areas suggest. dairy production as the leading agricultural enterprise the northern location of finland and the resulting climatic conditions limit the agricultural production of northern finland mainly to grass fodder and feed grain. grass fodder crops are utilised first and foremost in dairy farming, which continues to be the dominant branch of agricultural production in northern finland (talman 1978; häkkilä 1984). in addition, beef production is usually associated with dairy farming. agriculture is more diversified in the southernmost part of north ostrobothnia. the area supports sizeable farms specialising, for example, in the production of grain or potatoes. reindeer herding supplements agriculture in many cases in lapland as well as in northern kainuu, although some of those practicing reindeer husbandry do it as their sole source of livelihood. fig. 5. number of active farms in the municipalities of northern finland, in 1995 and 2000 (svt 1996; agricultural census 2000, advance information). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 207farms of northern finland dairy farming was the common line of production throughout the country as late as in the 1950s and 1960s. at the beginning of the 1950s, approximately 95 percent of all farms had dairy cattle (svt 1954). dairy cattle were first abandoned in south-western finland, and the tendency proceeded towards the north and northeast (häkkilä 1987). southern finland sports a great number of large farms in terms of the national average. since distances to towns and cities are generally shorter than in the north, farmers find commuting easy. as a consequence, they have abandoned laborious dairy farming and concentrate on grain farming which enables part-time cultivation. some of the crops suffer from a limited geographical range, but grass can be grown almost equally well in central and northern finland (varjo 1977: 70). as southern farmers have largely abandoned their milk cattle, the focus of dairy farming has shifted northward. today, dairy farming is concentrated in the middle parts of the country. this heartland of dairy farming includes the southernmost parts of the province of oulu. membership in the eu has enlarged the number of cattle per farm to the extent that northern finland in 1998 had caught up with the national average, 13.2 cows per farm (svt 2000c: 77–78). in 2000, the average dairy farm in the area already had 16 cows. at the moment, almost one half of all active farms in the whole of northern finland and more than half in kainuu and parts of lapland are dairy farms. as figure 6 indicates, dairy farming is undeniably the most important production sector even in north ostrobothnia. the significance of dairy farming for northern finland’s agriculture is even greater than the map indicates. according to reports by elintarviketieto oy (food and farm facts ltd., a research institute of food economy and agriculture), income from the production of milk and beef accounts for more than 80 percent of the gross income of the area’s farms. as dairy farms constitute merely 50 percent of all active farms, but produce the majority of the income, other forms of production clearly play a subsidiary role. clean special production from the north the finnish agriculture produces fairly clean foodstuffs. the country’s cool climate is favourable in this respect, because many plant diseases or noxious insects do not thrive in a cool climate. various kinds of pesticides are used in very small amounts as compared with many other eu countries (oecd environmental… 1989). in several central european countries, authorities are, with the help of the union’s environmental subsidies, aiming at methods which are already in use in the regular cultivation in finland (aic 31 march 1994). pesticides or artificial fertilizers are not used at all in organic cultivation. the purpose of organic production, as compared with conventional production, is to produce clean, tasty, and healthy foodstuffs so that environmental considerations have been observed. on the other hand, it demands more work than conventional cultivation fig 6. number of active farms and the proportion of dairy farms in the municipalities of northern finland, in 2000 (agricultural census 2000, advance information). 208 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti häkkilä and the mean yields are smaller (koikkalainen 1999: 72). like in the rest of finland, in northern finland many farmers have changed over to organic production, with the consequence that the country is currently at the forefront of this development (ahvenjärvi & häkkilä 1997). measured in terms of the proportion of arable land under organic cultivation of the whole arable area, finland with its 6.2 percent was the second of the eu countries in 1999, only austria with its 8.4 percent being clearly ahead (svt 2000c: 253). a central reason for this shift has been the extensive debate on the environmental effects of agriculture which pervaded much of the 1990s and changed farmers’ attitudes toward environmental considerations. moreover, the authorities started to subsidise natural production in finland by introducing a new national agricultural policy in 1989. eu membership with the accompanying economic support systems has further prepared the ground for the growth of organic production by reducing the difference in profitability between organic and conventional farming (koikkalainen 1999: 71). that crop or yield volume is no longer decisive for the subsistence of the farmer in the eu support system favours a more extensive method of production. organic cultivation has increased most in north ostrobothnia and kainuu over the past years. in both regions, the proportion of natural farms of active farms was approximately 7.6 percent in 1999, whereas the corresponding figure for the country as a whole was 5.9 percent. organic production area as proportion of the total arable area was 6.2 percent in the entire country, but 10.2 percent in kainuu and 8.8 percent in north ostrobothnia. in lapland it was 6.9 percent (svt 2000c: 153–154). reindeer herding in the nordic countries is practised mainly in those areas that have a sami population (see raento & husso 2002: cd-fig. 1). it is only in finland that this activity extends over a considerably larger area than present-day sami settlement (aikio 1978: 273). reindeer herding is permitted in a designated reindeer husbandry area comprising lapland as well as the northern parts of the province of oulu. nevertheless, in finland as well, reindeer husbandry is most important in the sami areas, where it allows people to earn a living in this vast, sparsely populated terrain. it is also among the strongest pillars of sami culture (rikkinen 1992: 75). the total number of reindeer owners was approximately 6,700 in the reindeer herding year of 1997–1998. the number of reindeer totalled 196,300. of these, 89,700 (45.7%) were slaughtered (svt 2000c: 149). some of those practising reindeer husbandry do it as their sole source of livelihood, but it is generally a subsidiary occupation alongside farming (aikio 1987: 337). reindeer husbandry is the main source of income for about 700 households in finnish lapland, while it is an important secondary occupation in about 1,500 households (ala-orvola 2000: 15). to control the number of reindeer, the finnish ministry of agriculture and forestry imposes restrictions based on the estimated feeding capacity of reindeer pastures. presently, natural pastures provide roughly half of all reindeer food, while the other half must be supplied with hay, especially as pastures are depleted or frozen. the southern parts of the reindeer husbandry area, where the number of active farms is higher, have suffered from occasional conflicts between reindeer owners and farmers, caused mainly by damage inflicted by the freely roaming animals. also fur farming has some significance in northern finland, especially along the coast. the stronghold of this activity, however, lies on the west coast of finland south of the province of oulu. future prospects farming keeps the countryside populated. together with food production, this has to be considered the main purpose of agriculture. the farming area of northern finland is about 14 percent of all the cultivated land in the country. that means that farming in this area, especially in lapland or kainuu, is not particularly important for the national agricultural production. regionally and locally, however, farming is important in several aspects (cf. wiberg 1986: 136) – it helps to maintain employment, landscapes, cultural and economic traditions, and a certain production capacity in order to meet emergency needs in a crisis situation. a rural, agricultural population maintains rural roads, buildings, and other forms of infrastructure, which are also important for other industries, like forestry and tourism. until recently, it has been assumed generally that dairy farming has the greatest chances of survival also under the altered circumstances brought fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 209farms of northern finland about by the eu. from the northern finnish perspective, dairy farming is in a key position, because it offers a means of committing people to their farms. modern dairy farms in the north of finland are fully comparable to their counterparts in the south in terms of cattle size. moreover, they are on equal terms with the rest of the eu as far as production per animal is concerned. as a consequence, there is reason to believe that particularly the southern parts of the province of oulu will remain at the core of milk production in finland. more remote areas may face a grimmer future, however. for example, as the number of farms continues to decline, the collection of milk from farms in sparsely populated areas may prove to be problematic. the preservation of dairy farming also serves the further expansion of organic farming with the promise it holds for the future of farming. the demand for naturally grown products exceeds their supply. organic farming, being a labour-intensive branch, is well suited to northern finland, which suffers from unemployment. in the future, the basis of the competitive ability of northern finnish agriculture may well be foodstuffs that are free from various kinds of pesticide remnants. the chapter on rural policy in the eu’s agenda 2000 communication (agenda… 2001) seems promising from the point of view of northern finland. the communication states that growing demands for a more environmentally sensitive agriculture coinciding with the increasing use of the countryside for recreation create new obligations and opportunities for agriculture. the commission favours giving a more prominent role to agri-environmental measures, especially those which call for an extra effort by farmers such as organic farming, maintenance of semi-natural habitats. other aspects of sustainable rural development will be pursued by a reorganisation to make existing structural policies more targeted. be it a question of conventional agricultural production or organic production, active farms keep growing in size while their number declines. it has been predicted that by 2005, the number of active farms in finland will have been reduced by more than one half from 1995 (niemi & linjakumpu 1996: 134). if this is the case in a few years and if the same reduction applies to the entire country, the number of active farms in northern finland will fall to 5,000–6,000, or to one-tenth of the figure in the 1960s’ culmination period. those farms that continue to be active will be, of course, far larger than their counterparts 40 years ago. the technological development of agriculture and forestry and the expansion of agricultural production units do not guarantee that agriculture and forestry alone will be capable of maintaining countryside’s vitality. they must be complemented with other sources of income, either on farms or elsewhere. references agenda 2000: for a stronger and wider union (2001). european commission. 29 october 2001. <http://europa.eu.int/comm/agenda2000/overview/en/agenda.htm> ahvenjärvi h & m häkkilä (1997). luonnonmukainen maatalous läntisessä euroopassa (abstract: organic farming in western europe). terra 109, 198–207. aic = maatalousalan tiedotuskeskuksen tiedote, 31 march 1994 (agricultural information centre, newsletter). aikio p (1978). reindeer herding in finland, 1975– 76: production and labour. nordia 12, 273–282. aikio p (1987). reindeer herding in norden. in varjo u & w tietze (eds). norden, man and environment, 332–337. gebr borntraeger, berlinstuttgart. ala-orvola l (2000). finnish farm. finnish agriculture and rural industries 1999/2000. agricultural economics research institute, finland, publications 95a, 18–24. alalammi p (ed) (1982). atlas of finland, folio 234: farming. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. alalammi p (ed) (1987). atlas of finland, folio 131: climate. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. häkkilä m (1977). geographical aspects of forest returns on finnish farms. fennia 152, 1–86. häkkilä m (1981). trends in the forest ownership and recent related phenomena in finland. nordia 15, 61–78. häkkilä m (1984). geographical aspects of the development and utilization of arable land area in finland. fennia 162, 217–235. häkkilä m (1986). the expansion and retreat of agricultural settlement in northern finland after world war ii. nordia 20, 27–39. häkkilä m (1987). regional development of dairy farming in finland. nordia 21, 27–38. häkkilä m (1988). agriculture and forestry in rural development of kainuu, finland. nordia 22, 79– 92. häkkilä m (1991). some regional trends in finnish farming with special reference to agricultural policy. fennia 169, 39–56. häkkilä m (1993). perspectives of finnish agriculture in the integrating europe. university of oulu, 210 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)matti häkkilä research institute of northern finland, research reports 114, 51–78. häkkilä m (2001). rural northern finland and eumembership. in jussila h, r majoral & f delgado-cravidáo (eds). globalization and marginality in geographical space, 90–102. ashgate, chippenham. hämynen t & lk lahti (1983). sodanjälkeinen asutustoiminta suomessa. joensuun korkeakoulu, historian, maantieteen ja muiden aluetieteiden osaston julkaisuja 36. ilvessalo y (1960). suomen metsät kartakkeiden valossa. (the forests of finland in the light of maps). communicationes instituti forestalis fenniae 52: 2. jaatinen s & p alalammi (1978). the field reservation scheme of finland 1969–1977. nordia 12, 13–30. jutikkala e (1958). suomen talonpojan historia. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 257. kettunen l (1992). suomen maatalouden sopeutuminen euroopan integraatioon (adaptation of finnish agriculture in european integration). agricultural economics research institute, research reports 178, 5–15. kettunen l (1997). finnish agriculture in 1996. agricultural economics research institute, research publications 82a, 1–64. koikkalainen k (1999). luonnonmukainen maataloustuotanto suomessa. maatalouden taloudellinen tutkimuslaitos, julkaisuja 91, 71–73. kolkki o (1966). taulukoita ja karttoja suomen lämpöoloista kaudelta 1931–1960 (tables and maps of temperature in finland during 1931–1960). supplement to the meteorological yearbook of finland 65: 1a, 1–42. kurki m (1972). suomen peltojen viljavuudesta. viljavuuspalvelu, helsinki. kuusela k (1974). metsätalous teollistuvassa suomessa. suomen itsenäisyyden juhlavuoden 1967 rahasto, sarja b 12. mead wr (1951). the cold farms in finland: resettlement of finland’s displaced farmers. geographical review 41, 529–543. niemi j & h linjakumpu (1996). regional structural development of finnish agriculture until 2005. agricultural economics research institute, research publications 81, 123–142. oecd environmental data compendium 1989 (1989). oecd, paris. palomäki m (1960). suomen sodanjälkeisen asutustoiminnan alueellisia piirteitä. (regional aspects of post war land settlement in finland). terra 72, 149–163. puhakka t (1980). sää ja ilmasto. in rikkinen k (ed). suomen maantiede, 28–36. otava, helsinki. raento p & k husso (2002). cultural diversity in finland. fennia 180, 151–164. reunala a (1974). structural changes of private forest ownership in finland. communicationes instituti forestalis fenniae 82: 2, 1–79. riihinen p (1963). metsänhoidon tason vaihtelu suomen maatilametsälöillä. (variations in the level of silviculture on the finnish farm woodlots). acta forestalia fennica 75: 6. rikkinen k (1992). a geography of finland. university of helsinki, lahti research and training centre, lahti. rusanen j, a naukkarinen, a colpaert & t muilu (1997). differences in the spatial structure of the population between finland and sweden in 1995 – a gis viewpoint. statistics finland, research reports 221. sås = statistisk årsbok för sverige (statistical yearbook of sweden) 2001 (2001). statistics sweden, stockholm. seppälä h (1976). metsäsektorin alueellinen merkitys suomessa. regional importance of the forest sector in finland. folia forestalia 269. siuruainen e (1978). on the history of rural settlement in finland. nordia 12, 67–78. siuruainen e (1984). pohjoisen maaseudun kehittämisestä. (on development in northern rural areas). terra 96, 60–68. smeds h (1962). recent changes in the agricultural geography of finland. fennia 87: 3, 1–19. smeds h & p fogelberg (1967). nyky-suomi kuvin ja kartoin. wsoy, helsinki. v. soosten h-p (1970). finnlands agrarkolonisation in lappland nach dem zweiten weltkrieg. marburger geographische schriften 45, 1–185. stv 1998 = statistical yearbook of finland 1998 (1998). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2000 = statistical yearbook of finland 2000 (2000). statistics finland, helsinki. svt 1945 = official statistics of finland iii 38: i (1945). recensement général agricole de 1941, helsinki. svt 1954= official statistics of finland iii 45: i (1954). the 1950 census of agriculture, helsinki. svt 1962 = official statistics of finland iii 53: i (1962). agriculture. census of agriculture 1959, helsinki. svt 1971 = official statistics of finland iii 66: i (1971). agriculture. census of agriculture 1969, helsinki. svt 1983 = official statistics of finland xliii: i (1983). farm register 1980. national board of agriculture, helsinki svt 1992a = official statistics of finland. agriculture and forestry 1992: 1. agricultural census 1990. part 1: farms. national board of agriculture, helsinki. svt 1992b = official statistics of finland. agriculture and forestry 1992: 6. agricultural census 1990. part 2: the findings by municipality. national board of agriculture, helsinki. svt 1996 = official statistics of finland. farm register 1995. agriculture and forestry 1996: 4. information centre of the ministry of agriculture and forestry, helsinki. svt 2000a = official statistics of finland. farm regfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 211farms of northern finland ister 1998. agriculture, forestry and fishery 2000: 4. information centre of the ministry of agriculture and forestry, helsinki. svt 2000b = official statistics of finland. finnish statistical yearbook of forestry 2000. agriculture, forestry and fishery 2000: 14. finnish forest research institute, helsinki. svt 2000c = official statistics of finland. yearbook of farm statistics 2000. agriculture, forestry and fishery 2000: 15. information centre of the ministry of agriculture and forestry, helsinki. talman p (1978). dairy farming in finland. geographical aspects of the development, typology and economics of finnish dairy farming. acta universitatis ouluensis a 62, geographica 5. talman p (1987). population and settlement in finland. in varjo u & w tietze (eds). norden, man and environment, 225–240. gebr borntraeger, berlin-stuttgart. tikkanen m (2002). the changing landforms of finland. fennia 180, 21–30. tykkyläinen m & s kavilo (1991). maaseudun asuttaminen ja talouden rakennemuutos suomessa. rural settlement and economic restructuring in finland. university of joensuu, research reports, human geography and planning 2. varjo u (1977). finnish farming. typology and economics. geography of world agriculture 6. akadémiai kiadó, budapest. westerholm i (2002). populating finland. fennia 180, 123–140. what future for our countryside? a rural development policy (1993). oecd, paris. wiberg u (1986). structural alternatives for northwestern sweden in the future. nordia 20, 135–142. lesbian nightlife in amsterdam: an explorative study of the shift from 'queer-only' to 'queer-friendly' spaces urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa83696 doi: 10.11143/fennia.83696 lesbian nightlife in amsterdam: an explorative study of the shift from ‘queer-only’ to ‘queer-friendly’ spaces marieke ekenhorst and irina van aalst ekenhorst, m. & van aalst, i. (2019) lesbian nightlife in amsterdam: an explorative study of the shift from ‘queer-only’ to ‘queer-friendly’ spaces. fennia 197(2) 200–214. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.83696 this paper explains the decline of lesbian space in amsterdam through a better understanding of young lesbians' lived experiences of in/exclusion in urban nightlife. the study is situated in amsterdam, a city internationally known as a queer capital. indepth interviews were conducted with young lesbian clubbers, owners of local lesbian bars, and organizers of lesbian-oriented parties. the results show that straight and queer spaces should be understood as fluid since the clientele has become a queer and non-queer blend after a shift towards an ‘inclusive’ and open-minded vibe. that shift goes hand in hand with the commodification of queer venues, which puts pressure on the few women-only spaces left. as the interviews revealed, a commodified open-minded, ‘inclusive’ venue or party is not necessarily a safe space for lesbian clubbers. the interviews also foregrounded the diversity among lesbian clubbers, which partially explains the widening range of venues and party concepts with a concomitant decline in visibility. this paper suggests some ways to create safe lesbian nightlife space, in light of the experiences of interviewed clubbers and information gathered from entrepreneurs within the scene. keywords: nightlife, queer spaces, lesbians, fluidity, commodification, amsterdam marieke (a.h.) ekenhorst, independent researcher. e-mail: marieke_ ekenhorst@hotmail.com irina van aalst, urban geography, department of human geography and planning, utrecht university, princetonlaan 8a, 3584 cb utrecht, the netherlands. e-mail: i.vanaalst@uu.nl introduction the city of amsterdam is known worldwide as a place of sexual freedom and for tolerance of a broad gay and lesbian community. the first same-sex marriage in 2001 set an example for other countries (hekma & duyvendak 2011). while amsterdam remains one of the world's top destinations, particularly for gay travel and the red-light district (van aalst & van liempt 2018), its lesbian nightlife has been under pressure. in 2017, one of the last lesbian venues, vivelavie, closed its doors after 37 years. © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 201kirjoittajafennia 197(2) (2019) meanwhile, the oldest lesbian bar left in amsterdam, sarein ii, has transformed from a lesbian-only space to a place open for “all queer minded people" (saarein 2019). what happened? feminist and queer liberation movements claimed the right to be out at night in the 1960s and 1970s, and ‘pink’ nightlife became increasingly popular (hekma 1992). starting with the first lesbian café tabu in 1970 (ibid. 1992), the 1980s were ‘the golden age’ of lesbian visibility in terms of spatial clusters of commercial spaces, like bars, discos and clubs (e.g. podmore 2006). schuyf (1992) described the social dynamics of lesbian communities in the 1970s and 1980s in the netherlands. lesbian-only cafés were used as spaces for political activities by the second-wave feminist movement. a variety of shifting economic, social, political and geographical factors have contributed to the current invisibility of lesbians and the sharp decline of lesbian space, not only in amsterdam but in other metropolises in north america and europe (podmore 2006; fobear 2012; forstie 2018). due to anti-discrimination legislation and growing acceptance in mainstream society from the 1990s (hubbard et al. 2015), gay enclaves were transformed into queer districts (podmore 2006; brown 2014) and incorporated into the city's tourism and marketing strategies (goh 2018). research explains the loss of women-only bars and the marginalization of lesbians due to gentrification processes (podmore 2006) and to the dominant position of gay men in such enclaves (pritchard et al. 2002; browne 2006). the increased trendiness of these areas attracted a social mix of visitors and tourists, though some queer communities seemed to be excluded (e.g. adamson 2017), based on gender and other asymmetries like race and class (browne 2006). investigating lesbian venues and institutions, forstie (2018) suggest that a post-lesbian era has already arrived (see also mcnaron 2007). young girls do not want to be restricted to socializing in lesbian-specific places. this growing detachment from identity politics could be attributed to an intergenerational tension among lesbian women (fobear 2012). in this paper, lesbians’ position in urban spaces is understood to be not only determined by sexuality but also interrelated with other categories, such as age and gender. there is a wide range of academic literature focused on gay male spaces (nash & gorman-murray 2015) but few studies on young lesbians’ clubbing preferences or on inor exclusion practices in nightlife (pritchard et al. 2002; browne 2007a; fobear 2012). in that light, our aim is to explain the lack of lesbian space in amsterdam’s nightlife through a better understanding of young lesbians' lived experiences of in/exclusion in amsterdam’s queer scene on the basis of qualitative research. the data on which this article is based are derived from in-depth interviews with clubbers and key actors in the lesbian nightlife scene in amsterdam. an extensive body of literature has asserted that space is produced as heterosexual and constructed as heteronormative (e.g. valentine 1993, 1995). human geographers like binnie (1997) and valentine (1995) investigated questions about gender and visibility and how gay men and lesbians marked and claimed urban spaces. in ‘queer geographies’, queer is often seen as an overarching term describing multiple groups of sexual dissidents and referring to the broader lgbti (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) community (browne 2006; oswin 2008). contemporary academic debates challenge conceptualizations of queer space as dissident space or claimed space, instead emphasizing the fluidity of queer spaces (e.g. browne 2006; goh 2018). recent research describes the users of these spaces (queers) not only as sexual identities but “simultaneously as raced, classed, and gendered bodies” (oswin 2008, 91). taking this into account and following maliepaard (2015) we characterize queer spaces as relatively free from the influences of heteronormativity and which thereby provide members of the lgbti community the opportunity to express their multiple identities (goh 2018). the term ‘lesbian space’ refers to nightlife space that is labelled ‘for lesbians’ (cattan & vanolo 2014) while ‘gay male space’ consists of clubs and bars explicitly meant for homosexual men (browne & bakshi 2011). the theoretical framework is outlined in the following, under the headings of urban nightlife developments and lesbian nightlife spaces. after elaborating the research design and the geographical context of amsterdam, the results of the study are reported. these results touch upon struggles of lesbian venues, the increasing popularity of lesbian and women-oriented parties, multiple and fluid lesbian identities, and the complex search for safe and inclusive nightlife spaces. the final section presents the conclusion. 202 fennia 197(2) (2019)research paper urban nightlife developments: regeneration, gentrification, commodification nightlife in large cities operates within an economy-driven framework. the term ‘night-time economy’ (nte) encompasses the obvious links between nightlife, job creation, and inter-urban competitiveness (e.g. shaw 2010; van liempt et al. 2015). increasingly, the term is used for the assemblage of bars, clubs, cinemas, theatres, cultural festivals and parties which are, in a context of urban entrepreneurialism, supposed to contribute to urban regeneration and local economic growth. the promotion of the nte has, in many places, sparked social conflicts between partygoers and (gentrifying) residents in and around city centres (hae 2011), often over noise levels and litter. nonetheless, nightlife venues frequently contribute to gentrification. flourishing clubs make urban areas attractive to wealthy residents with other tastes and rhythms, with the result that nightlife itself becomes gentrified (garcia 2018). according to the academic literature, this uptake partially explains the invisibility of lesbians in nightlife. studying the village in montreal, podmore (2006) analyses the shifting character of lesbian territorial practices and the loss of women-only bars due to gentrification. in the 1990s, this area became the local economic engine for gay and queer commerce, serving as a site for local boosterism and the expansion of the tourist market (podmore 2006). nash and gormanmurray (2015) report a similar transformation in sydney’s and toronto’s former gay villages, where the commodification of gay nightlife and the mainstreaming of lgbti spaces attracts a larger crowd of straight people, partly international visitors (pritchard et al. 2002; nash & gorman-murray 2015). according to brown (2014), the number of exclusively gay and lesbian bars has declined in traditional ‘gayborhoods’. such spaces across the global north are often the territoriality of gay men (and to a lesser extent the lbti community) and pre-dominantly white (see brown 2014 on sexual minorities in gayborhoods). the growing presence of straight clubbers attracted by these cool, exotic and fun places has led to a feeling of displacement among the lgbti community, and also to the loss of spaces with a strong queer identity (pritchard et al. 2002; nash & gorman-murray 2015). this ‘de-gaying process’ can feel threatening; lesbians in particular do not feel welcome anymore in ‘their own space’ and they feel frustration and anger due to their loss of safe space (pritchard et al. 2002; eves 2004). skeggs’ research in the gay village in manchester has shown that while “for straight women the gay space offers a space away from the demands of heterosexuality, specifically men and heteromasculine performances” (skeggs 1999, cited in held 2015, 35), the gay space still prescribes certain gender norms which make lesbians feel uncomfortable. another development that affects lesbian clubbing is the rise of party concepts and themed club nights (boogaarts-de bruin 2011; roberts & townshend 2013). over the past decade, the number of pubs has been declining. meanwhile, clubs have started a new trend of ‘broad programming’ to diversify their clientele by renting the venues out. party organizers and dj collectives have emerged around specific themes and sell their party concepts to clubs throughout the netherlands (boogaartsde bruin 2011). the rise of temporary parties is also affecting the queer scene, as cattan and vanolo (2014, 1163) describe: “a new type of lesbian party is flourishing, which consists of itinerant nights taking place in different parts of the city.” all these trends influence the spatiality and fluidity of lesbian nightlife in amsterdam. lesbian nightlife spaces: paradoxical spaces the queer scene is a setting where people get the opportunity to dance, experiment, and meet their friends without being in a heteronormative world (valentine & skelton 2003). therefore, it is considered to be a safe space. the absence of heterosexual norms and the ‘male gaze’ creates a liberated feeling for lesbians (pritchard et al. 2002; fobear 2012; held 2015) in a space where they can express themselves without the feeling of being judged (myslik 1996; maliepaard 2015). other clubbers can confirm and justify these identities, which can lead to more self-confidence regarding one’s sexual identity (valentine & skelton 2003). queer clubbers have the feeling they are joining an ‘imagined community’ with a shared identity, which creates a sense of belonging (pritchard et al. 2002). however, the ‘community’ is fragmented by “many relations of inequality, exclusion and exploitation between them (…)” (valentine & skelton 2003, 854). this suggests that the queer scene, which appears to be a 203fennia 197(2) (2019) marieke ekenhorst & irina van aalst safe and inclusive setting at first sight, is still marked by divisions and tensions within the community itself. the scene can be intimidating because of its expressive and often sexualized character. queers who join the scene for the first time are at risk of dressing and acting queer in order to conform to the dominant queer culture, while still feeling insecure about their own sexual identity (valentine & skelton 2003). conformity to the dominant queer culture can be experienced as a kind of pressure, especially when there is no space to share insecure feelings and doubts about one’s sexual identity. furthermore, the queer scene seems to be divided along gendered lines. as many feminist geographers have argued, gender differences must be recognized to understand spatial practices and negotiations in public spaces (e.g. pain 2001 about perceptions of fear and vulnerability). pritchard, morgan and sedgley (2002) conducted research on the experiences of lesbians within the gay village of manchester. they argue that men dominate the queer scene there, which causes feelings of displacement among lesbians. their marginalized position within queer space is experienced as problematic because queer space is perceived to be ‘their’ (lesbian) space as well. podmore (2006, 598) argues that “bars have been central to the process of building visibility among lesbians at the urban scale and expanding what lesbians have identified as their territory.” all these dynamics point to the paradoxical nature of queer, and more specifically lesbian, space; while some people experience clubs and bars as safe and inclusive spaces in which they can freely express themselves, a significant number experience this space as pressuring and intimidating. based on research in montreal, podmore (2006) asserts that lesbian nightlife has deterritorialized and become more integrated in former gay-male space. this is partially explained by gentrification but also by a shift in lesbian identification processes. by the early 1990s, queer politics was on the rise, meaning that lesbians and gay men were working together on common projects. as more lesbians identified with queer politics, lesbians and gay men became more integrated in the ‘queer space’. this shift in lesbian identities corresponds to the findings of fobear (2012) in amsterdam where the lesbian scene seems to be divided by age. younger lesbians (in their twenties) feel less need to be ‘visible’ than older women do (those who were active in the feminist/lesbian movements of the 1970s and 1980s). the younger generation perceives lesbian space as excluding, intimidating, hostile to newcomers and even as “a meat market for lesbian hookups” (fobear 2012, 734). they have a stronger desire to mix within queer and heterosexual clubbing scenes, because these environments were considered less pressuring and “the judging circle phenomenon was diminished” (fobear 2012, 734). these judgements would presumably be less prominent within queer or heterosexual space and mixing would enhance the sexual development of the younger lesbian generation. the desire to mix within queer and heterosexual clubbing scenes might also be related to the decline of a strong lesbian identity. hekma and duyvendak (2006, 443) argue that most queer people in the netherlands do not have strong sexual identities, noting that “the absence of strong sexual identities parallels the lack of spatially concentrated gay and lesbian communities.” this is in line with the findings of fobear (2012); younger lesbians do not primarily identify themselves as ‘being lesbian’. although their sexual identity does not appear to be the main concern, lesbian nightlife space has not lost its value. according to fobear (2012), the debates on spaces and visibility should be couched in broader discussions on normativity and lesbian identification processes. lesbian identification processes can be linked to "the construction of social norms that include lesbians and gay men on the condition that they conform to individualist and consumerist economic values and lead sexual lives that mirror the norms of heteronormativity (e.g. long-term, monogamous relationships within specific gender norms)" (browne & bakshi 2011, 181). the assumption is that members of the lbgti community want to be part of the dominant culture. this assertion corresponds to the research of fobear (2012, 736), who finds that young lesbian clubbers do not want to stand out from the rest of society. they feel a strong desire ‘to be normal’ and to not to deviate from the gender norm although it was not seen as hiding their sexual identity. according to browne and bakshi (2011), homonormativity structures the queer community and causes marginalization within the queer scene. young lesbians associate lesbian identity with being overly masculine, ugly, man-hating, crude, and aggressive. this impression of what a lesbian is supposed to be leads younger ‘femme’ lesbians to feel uncomfortable about portraying themselves as a lesbian. at the same time, ‘butches’ feel pressured to ‘act normal’, meaning more feminine, to avoid reinforcing ‘negative’ stereotypes 204 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) (fobear 2012, 738). these identification processes suggest pressure within the queer scene to dress, act and behave according to certain gendered and sexualized norms. if you do not fit the norm, it is difficult to feel welcome within the queer or lesbian nightlife space. to understand their feelings of inand exclusion in urban nightlife, it is thus important to analyse the spatial practices and lived experiences of young lesbians. discovering urban nightlife through the eyes of lesbian clubbers and entrepreneurs this paper draws from an empirical study with a qualitative research design. conducting in-depth interviews was deemed appropriate to gain a better understanding of young lesbians’ lived experiences of in/exclusion in amsterdam’s nightlife (seidman 2006). this study focuses on young lesbians who go clubbing in amsterdam. they form a specific group that cannot be reduced to a simple category of being only women, lesbian, nor youngster (parent et al. 2013; rodo-de-zarate 2015). fobear (2012) highlights generational differences between lesbian clubbers in amsterdam; her findings confirm that nightlife experiences are related to age, but also to gender, sex, and sexuality. since these categories intersect, overlap and interact, the lens of intersectionality is applied throughout this research process (valentine 2007; parent et al. 2013). respondents were recruited through various personal social networks using a snowball sampling technique which helped to gain easy access and initial trust. all of the respondents are women [18–30 years old], self-identified as lesbian or bisexual, and (recently) active within the nightlife (queer) scene of amsterdam. they live in the city, are students or have a job, and their educational background is diverse, ranging from vocational to academic. the clubbers’ views have been combined with the perspectives of entrepreneurs active in amsterdam’s lesbian scene to gain a more thorough understanding about the decline of lesbian space. our findings are based upon interviews conducted during daytime between march and may 2017 with six lesbian clubbers and four key actors in the lesbian nightlife scene: one entrepreneur of a (former) lesbian venue and three organizers of lesbian parties. the entrepreneur was responsible for vivelavie and one organizer had set up the lesbian event lesbique. the other organizers (a team of three women, two of whom were interviewed together) were responsible for the parties yarrr, girldrop and klitty. the lesbian venues and party concepts will be explained in the following section. in addition to these interviews, one expert-interview was conducted with a researcher to provide some context on gender, sexuality and emancipation in the netherlands. before each interview, we obtained verbal informed consent to record the conversation. all recordings, which had an average length of 50 minutes, were transcribed verbatim and analysed through several cycles of coding and categorizing. the analysis started with the “open-ended process called initial coding” (saldaña 2015, 4) and was combined with in vivo coding. during the process of recoding and recategorizing, we used analytic memos to reflect on the data and enhance our analysis. the data was analysed in dutch, the original language of the interviews. the quotes were translated by a native-speaking text editor. pseudonyms are used for all participants, while organizers and entrepreneurs are anonymised. the real location and names of bars and parties are presented to maintain a clear connection with the local context of amsterdam. geographical context: queer spaces in amsterdam amsterdam promotes itself as a queer-friendly capital and uses this image for city marketing purposes (amsterdam info 2016; travel gay europe 2017). whereas some global cities have clearly demarcated queer neighbourhoods (e.g. cattan & vanolo 2014; the castro in san francisco and the marais in paris, see mattson 2015), queer nightlife spaces in amsterdam are scattered throughout the city centre. the streets reguliersdwarsstraat, amstel and kerkstraat are characterized by a high density of queer pubs and clubs (amsterdam info 2016; nighttours 2016; travel gay europe 2017); as shown in figure 1, famous places like club nyx are located in this area (club nyx 2019). another prominent queer bar, de trut, is a bit hidden and only open on sunday nights; it is difficult to trace online but well-known among clubbers within the scene. since the beginning of 2017, heterosexuals are officially 205fennia 197(2) (2019) fennia 197(2) (2019) allowed to enter. almost none of the queer venues have an exclusive character in the sense of being restricted to people with a certain gender or sexual orientation. at the time of our research, the city had only two historically lesbian-oriented bars: vivelavie and saarein. vivelavie is a pub in the main queer district (fig. 1), near the touristic ‘rembrandt square’. the respondents describe vivelavie as a commercialized, more ‘mainstream’ bar, where you can go for a drink or dance late at night. saarein, in contrast, is a bit secluded and situated in a residential area (fig. 1). it is described as a place to talk, hang out and play pool/billiards. saarein is known to attract an older generation of lesbians. two respondents refer to its historically political and feminist character. aside from these two lesbian-oriented venues, there are several lesbian-oriented parties. our respondents mention a wide range of events which emerge and disappear, though some make a comeback over time. these parties are organized in a flexible way, and the sequence mainly depends on the available time of the organizers. periods with regular parties held at specific times of the month alternate with periods without these parties. we will focus here on four parties that were important during the time of the fieldwork. lesbique is a lesbian evening in the queer bar spijkerbar and is usually held once a month on a monday. it is a meeting space where lesbians can gather and hang out. initially, lesbique was part of the queer party flikker but in the form of a theme night meant to attract queerer women to flikker. one of the organizers of flikker decided to develop the idea of lesbique further and started up her own event. the idea of lesbique is to host a “real get-together, where people can have a conversation with each other, to meet like-minded and new people” (organizer lesbique). yarrr, girldrop and klitty are different party concepts, each organized by one group of three women but each with its own character. yarrr has the vibe of a club and is a party where young lesbians can meet and dance. it is held in various venues and has grown over the years from 100 visitors to 300. girldrop is a smaller, low-key bar hang-out organized in the cut throat barber shop at the heart of amsterdam. the shop is temporarily transformed into a small dance floor during these parties. klitty was on hold during the time of interviewing; it used to operate in the winter and it featured live music and jam sessions. fig. 1. amsterdam queer nightlife venues. 206 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) struggles of lesbian venues just a few weeks after the interview with the owner of vivelavie, the bar announced it would close its doors after 37 years in business (telegraaf 2017). the 70-year-old owner had sold it to an external actor; she explained how difficult it is for a lesbian bar to survive in amsterdam: at first, it is all new, and fun, and everyone likes to come. and later on, the question is: can i keep them in? but aside from that, you should also have other guests besides the lesbian women, to keep your business healthy. you can’t carry on by focusing on one group only. (entrepreneur vivelavie) she stressed the entrepreneurial importance of moving away from a lesbian-only crowd, given the high costs of running a bar in the city centre. during the interview, she highlighted the role that tourists and local neighbours play in keeping the business going. interestingly, both clubbers and entrepreneurs had specific ideas on lesbians’ spending behaviour. compared to gay men, lesbian clubbers would drink less alcohol, spend less money, and party less frequently, especially if they are in a relationship. the organizer of lesbique links the lack of lesbian nightlife venues in amsterdam to “a big generalization or opinion about lesbian women that they do not drink, that they are stingy”. this is in line with the vision of the entrepreneur of vivelavie who said that it is not profitable to focus only on lesbians. some clubbers explained their view: well it’s not so strange that clubs focus on gay men. because if they [gay men] are in a relationship, they still party as much as they would without being in a relationship. spend more money, often also have more money, that’s just logic you know. no strange desires to have children or so (laughs) (tiffany, clubber, aged 25) and financially it is really, if you just see what a man spends on an evening, a gay man spends and a woman, then it’s also related to how much money women and men earn. yeah and especially gay men, they work so much and have better jobs in general, higher salaries and that’s what you notice. (anne, clubber, aged 27) interestingly, tiffany and anne relate ideas on how lesbians spend their money to a gendered pay gap. that gap is still present in the netherlands: women earned 15.2% less than men for similar types of jobs in 2019 (european commission 2019). following the clubbers’ reasoning, a lower income might mean that women spend less money on clubbing. while it is beyond the scope of this research to examine whether clubbers have different, gendered spending behaviour, jayne, valentine and holloway (2016) discuss how drinking practices are differentially constructed for men and women. differences in alcohol use often reflect gender roles about appropriate masculinities and femininities and cultural expectations (jayne et al. 2016). we could assume that other factors like cultural background and upbringing also affect drinking and spending behaviours. the desire to have children was also mentioned by tiffany as a possible reason why lesbians would go clubbing less. her idea is underpinned by the assumption that more lesbians would have a child wish compared to gay men and touches upon gendered divisions within the queer scene. these gendered divisions (see also pritchard et al. 2002; fobear 2012) might explain some of the entrepreneurial difficulties of lesbian venues. another struggle faced by lesbian venues is found in the competition among footloose parties. these women-oriented events have gained popularity in amsterdam, which corresponds with a broader shift in urban nightlife from fixed venues to temporary parties (boogaarts-de bruin 2011; roberts & townshend 2013). the organizers of lesbique, yarrr, girldrop and klitty mentioned that they do not face financial problems and therefore feel no need to attract a broader crowd. these organizers do not have monthly fixed costs (e.g. rent, pay checks, electricity bills, salaries) and only need to cover the costs of their party. since their work is mainly non-profit, they need less money to keep their parties going. this fits in with another broader trend in amsterdam: the shortage of innercity space for creative activity and strict regulations lead to a music and clubbing scene characterized by festivals and foot-loose actors (dorst 2015). 207fennia 197(2) (2019) marieke ekenhorst & irina van aalst lesbian and women-oriented parties: a key to success? yarrr, girldrop, klitty and lesbique can be understood as four different events sharing a similar approach to organize a party or bar hang-out specially meant for women within the queer scene of amsterdam’s nightlife. the initial idea of yarrr was to start a creative venue where people can dance, enjoy the music, hook up and make friends. after six years of organizing yarrr, the concept was professionalized and evolved towards a club setting. while yarrr developed as a club venue, the organizers initiated girldrop as a place to hang out with friends. as the organizers describe it: well, yarrr is more of a club venue, so, it’s a higher volume. but it’s just that we also have other programmes in there. girldrop is more a hangout, no entry fees, a lot of start-up djs are coming there. we give them the opportunity and sometimes we give them a short lesson to perform, how you need to dj. yarrr is a bit more professional, on the performing side. (organizers yarrr, girldrop & klitty) an important aspect of yarrr, girldrop and klitty is the flexibility and fluidity of these party concepts. the parties are characterized by a constant turnover of new ideas, varying in time, location, venue, crowd, music (djs), themes and name. the organizers explained that they deliberately chose not to hold yarrr at the same place but to continually change the location, giving thought to the production costs and the need for a good sound system. aside from preventing high monthly costs, changing venues keeps it interesting to themselves and to the clubbers: “and we like to evolve you know. and the reason why we change venues is that we don’t want to bore our people and us also” (organizers yarrr, girldrop & klitty). another example of flexibility can be found in the diversity of music offered at their parties. with yarrr, every hour a different style of music caters for different groups of women. this fits the trend of ‘broad programming’ (boogaarts-de bruin 2011) and hiring various djs with different music styles to attract a broad audience. the party organizers mentioned that they explicitly aim to reach a diverse crowd, which fits the strategy of broad programming. it might also fit the need to accommodate different groups within the internally diverse lesbian community. the fluidity and constant evolution of party concepts seem to be key to the success of lesbian and women-oriented parties (cattan & vanolo 2014). these characteristics might also explain some of the popularity of parties and festivals; if a concept does not work well, it is easier for event organizers to change some of its main elements (venue, location, music, targeted crowd) or to even start from scratch with a completely new concept. this is more difficult for entrepreneurs with a fixed venue. being ‘footloose’ provides high flexibility and reduces costs. fixed venues seem to have less flexibility to experiment with new elements (being tied to the same venue and location) and are locked into fixed costs. these dynamics seem to explain their struggle to keep their business healthy. fluid and multiple lesbian identities during the interviews, the lesbian clubbers stressed the variety of lesbian identities. they associate a ‘lesbian’ identity with short hair, tattoos, piercings, a boyish look, and sometimes with ‘being feminists’. these descriptions are paired with different labels. among others eves (2004) used a more classical distinction between ‘femme’ and ‘butch’, while our respondents mentioned soft-femme (jane, clubber, aged 30), hard-femme (jane, clubber, aged 30), hard-core dyke (rose, clubber, aged 19) and lipstick lesbians (entrepreneur vivelavie; jane, clubber, aged 30). the idea of a feminist, boyish, short-haired lesbian seemed to be derived from the feminist movement of the 1970s (fobear 2012). most of the interviewed clubbers did not recognize themselves in these profiles. as jane explains: “for example if someone asks ‘what, what are you?’ then i say like ‘just gay’. ‘aren’t you a lesbian then?’ well the word lesbian sounds so dirty. les-bi-an, it sounds so owww, i don’t know what it is” (jane, clubber, aged 30). the resistance to having a ‘lesbian’ identity might reflect a strong urge to ‘be normal’. this impression is in line with the findings of fobear (2012), who states that younger lesbians do not like to deviate from the gender norm. jane (clubber, aged 30) states that she “does not like to be seen as different”, and simone (clubber, aged 26) explains that “if someone says: ‘i didn’t expect you to be gay’. then that actually means: ‘because you look straight’. and somehow i feel flattered (…) i actually do not want it to be flattering, but it is. and perhaps sometimes i even try a bit harder to look straighter.” 208 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) this urge to ‘be normal’ seems to represent a sense of homonormativity (browne & bakshi 2011) in which clubbers feel the need to fit in with mainstream society without trying to hide their sexual identity (fobear 2012). this might explain why some lesbians prefer to be invisible in the sense that they do not want to stand out from society (fobear 2012). while there are diverse lesbian identities, our respondents expressed more fluid ideas on gender and sexual identities. jane (clubber, aged 30) states that “i don’t think in masculine and feminine. that is what you [society] are doing. and that’s why i also think about it sometimes. but for myself it is not something i think of.” her comment highlights the important distinction between a self-ascribed identity and an identity ascribed by others. several clubbers expressed discomfort about being confronted with stereotypes of what a lesbian identity would entail without recognizing themselves in these ideas. these clubbers felt they were being placed in a box, as others decide what it means to be lesbian. as lisa (expert) states: in feminist or lesbian research and cultures there exists this strict distinction between ‘femme’ and ‘butch’. well, i am not really in favour, because you clearly separate it in feminine and masculine. while if you do not fit the gender norms, you shouldn’t search for new boxes, to make this [new box] the new norm. and as the organizer of lesbique explains, “it’s not like i have one identification box that i fit and i’m also not looking at other people like: ‘wow, you are really this, or you are only that.’ i think it’s more a scale of different components and that nobody is only one thing.” this fluid approach to both gender and sexuality is increasingly adopted by scholars (e.g. browne 2006; oswin 2008). browne (2006) urges researchers to move beyond the homo/heterosexual and feminine/masculine dualistic framework towards a more comprehensive understanding that explores the complexity and fluidity of sexes, genders, sexualities and desires. three of our interviewed clubbers expanded on how plural and diverse lesbian identities are hypersexualized, especially during their mainstream clubbing experiences in amsterdam. personal examples reveal how two women who show affection are often sexualized in mainstream clubs; the presence of the ‘male gaze’ in these mainstream venues is a reason for some clubbers to prefer the queer scene. sarah (clubber, aged 19) mentions that she is not taken seriously when she is clubbing with her girlfriend and encounters heterosexual men who try to hit on lesbian women: “imagine someone would hit on my girlfriend and i said ‘this is my girlfriend’, they don’t take it seriously and keep on going (...) or if i were kissing with my girlfriend then people would only start sexualizing this: ‘oh really nice lesbian sex and so’.” tiffany and rose have similar experiences of heterosexual men making comments: “you have not tried my dick yet” (tiffany, clubber, aged 25) and “oh, that was horny, could you do that again?” (rose, clubber, aged 19). sarah, tiffany, and rose feel irritated by such behaviour, comments and gazes. they feel more aware of their sexuality because of the heteronormative gender roles which cast young lesbians as ‘different’. the plurality and fluidity of lesbian identities, but also the stereotypical features and urge to meet gendered and sexualized norms might explain why some young lesbian clubbers prefer to stay away from specific lesbianor women-only nightlife spaces. however, the clubbers we interviewed affirmed the need for a safe space where lesbians can freely express their emotions and sexual identities in amsterdam’s nightlife. fluid dynamics of safe space in general, lesbian clubbers describe queer venues as places where they can experiment and express themselves in an open way (in line with valentine & skelton 2003; maliepaard 2015). “it is just really pleasant to merge yourself in a crowd.” (sarah, clubber, aged 19), and simone (clubber, aged 26) states: you just want to celebrate your evening with peers, you just want to party. and ehm, you don’t need to, you don’t want to think about it! (…) and if everyone is gay, you don’t need to think about it [sexuality], since you are just part of a group that does stuff together and when a group of heteros joins, you just immediately feel… so conscious again. 209fennia 197(2) (2019) marieke ekenhorst & irina van aalst both quotes illustrate how these clubbers experience queer space as safe and inclusive due to liberation from the ‘male gaze’ (supporting the findings of pritchard et al. 2002), the ability to merge into a crowd without being aware of your sexual orientation, and the imagined queer community which creates a sense of belonging (see pritchard et al. 2002; valentine & skelton 2003). however, the idea of queer space as safe space is also contested. the idea of having your own space can be underpinned by a feeling of exclusion. jane (clubber, aged 30) stresses the paradox of having your own space: it could create a safe environment in which you can express yourself “for one hundred per cent”, while at the same time the need to have your own space implies that you are being excluded from other places. all clubbers mention how sexual comments and the male gaze make them feel uncomfortable in some mainstream clubs. they do not necessarily feel excluded but are highly aware of their own sexuality. the need for a physical space for lesbian clubbers in amsterdam’s nightlife emphasizes that lesbian sexualities are deviant from the dominant heterosexual norm. as jane (clubber, aged 30) explains: we need to have that space, because it is not safe there [mainstream clubs]. that is what i don’t like about it. that, apparently, i do have some desire for it [queer space], because i do not feel comfortable in another space from time to time. it’s not a nice thought (…) it is very paradoxical. it is interesting how clubbers navigate this paradox of not always being accepted in mainstream clubs, but also being unwilling to separate themselves from other clubbers based on their sexualities and gender. rose and the organizer of lesbique clearly disparage the idea of lesbian-only bars and clubs and say they would feel uncomfortable there. lesbian-only bars are compared to a “snake pit” (organizer lesbique), “a meat market” (organizer lesbique), “where clubbers would come ‘to hunt’” (rose, clubber, aged 19) and “if you enter, all eyes are on you: ‘fresh meat, yes!’” (rose, clubber, aged 19). among others, anne (clubber, aged 27) stresses the tensed vibe in lesbian-only venues; therefore she prefers gendered mixed venues “because lesbians can also make drama out of nothing”. she illustrates this with an example of a night at vivelavie: all these dominant lesbians that are just fighting and so on, screaming towards each other, that i think: yo, this is not my scene you know. yeah, i am not really in the mood to be there. (…) but on the other hand i think, if we are just nearby: hmm, let’s go there for a drink. because then i’m with friends and then it’s fine. i think it’s important that something like this should continue to exist. because you see that it’s just relaxed, well in general. anne’s experiences reveal contradictory and sometimes mixed desires. this messiness reveals complex dynamics of lesbian and queer venues (valentine & skelton 2003). while clubbers might have specific preferences for a night clubbing, these preferences and desires might not necessarily be connected to fixed places. anne prefers other places to vivelavie, but under specific circumstances (being nearby and being with friends) she would still go there. later in the interview she states: everything has become more liberated and open, so you don’t focus any longer on one location. you don’t need any longer one venue to meet people. i also notice it with my own circle of people that even if you’re only with gay friends you don’t necessarily go to a gay party. because if you like a specific music style, you just go to a festival or to this club or that party. (anne, clubber, aged 27) the experiences of places should therefore not be understood as fixed, but rather as fluid and interacting with different factors like the company of clubbers, their music preferences, and their objective of the evening (e.g. to flirt, to dance, or to hang out with friends). these aspects are subject to change and influence how clubbers experience and evaluate the same spaces at different moments in time (malbon 2002). this fluidity does not guarantee that queer and lesbian space can be understood as ‘safe’ space. the queer scene still tends to be male-dominated, leaving less space for lesbians. sarah (clubber, aged 19) and the organizers of yarrr, girldrop and klitty mention the attitude of gay men and their dominant behaviour. tiffany (clubber, aged 25) can feel completely ignored by gay men, in her view because she is a woman. she states that: “you are not really included by that kind of person [gay men]. nasty comments, or meanness you know. it happens.” tensions within the scene arise not only along gendered lines. clubbers described other subgroups within the scene, they spoke of hard-core dykes (rose, aged 19), tinhorn crowd (tiffany, 210 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) aged 25) and feminist lesbians wearing pink dungarees (sarah, aged 19). as the organizer of lesbique mentions: “within such a group [the queer scene] you see different minorities and there is not a high level of tolerance on some points.” these findings show that a queer space is not necessarily inclusive and safe (pritchard et al. 2002; maliepaard 2015). “vulnerable social groups are not just marginalized/oppressed, but can also marginalize and oppress each other” (valentine & skelton 2003, 163). although these internal divisions are partially gendered (e.g. pritchard et al. 2002; fobear 2012), it is of crucial importance to move beyond this gender dichotomy and stress the wide variety of internal differences related to lesbian and queer nightlife (browne 2006). internal exclusion was mentioned by the same lesbian clubbers as those who described the inclusive and open character of the queer scene. inand exclusion can thus occur in the same space, illustrating the fluidity of space (see also browne 2007b). however, while most of the lesbian clubbers prefer mixed queer parties and bars to lesbian venues, they argue that it is important to have some lesbian places available. safe space for lesbians is still important in amsterdam’s nightlife, but this does not necessarily mean that a venue should exclusively focus on a lesbian crowd. lesbian clubbers themselves stress the importance of an inclusive vibe, where open-mindedness seems to be key. the organizers of yarrr, girldrop, klitty, lesbique and the entrepreneur of vivelavie also emphasize the importance of creating and maintaining an inclusive character at queer spaces and parties. being in an ‘open-minded environment’ seems important, but this open-mindedness occurs in different shapes and degrees. a lesbian venue might be perceived as ‘open-minded’ by default, since it moves away from the heterosexual norm and embraces other sexualities. gendered norms do however still occur, which can produce new tensions. all the organizers involved in this research stated that they do not want to exclude people on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender or age, and aim to create ‘open-minded’ parties and venues where everyone is welcome. creating an inclusive space one of the difficulties of responding to this need for a safe and inclusive space is that one venue might feel inclusive to some lesbians while other lesbian subgroups can feel excluded at the same time and place. the enormous diversity among lesbians and the existing internal tensions make it even more difficult to create an inclusive space for everyone. entrepreneurs within the queer scene do have experience with creating open and inclusive places. for example, the organizers of yarrr always explain what kind of party is going on to people at the door. the door policy is that everyone is welcome – regardless of sexuality or gender, as long as they respect each other and do not harass people or show disrespectful behaviour. many clubbers who are unfamiliar with these inclusive parties react as follows: “and most of them [group of guys] are like, okay we’ll get in, have a drink and then leave. and understand that girls are not interested in them. and some of them are like ‘okay, then we’ll go somewhere else. thank you for letting us know.” (organizers yarrr, girldrop & klitty). the entrance fee might raise the threshold for people who are not familiar with the party concept. besides, the organizers describe how the level of inclusiveness depends on the location of the party: it depends on our venue. because like club akhnaton, that is a venue with fewer spontaneous visitors. it is also the geography / location of it. so, a lot of people who attend are attracted by our party and invite their friends. in the past, when we organized our parties in the winston (warmoesstraat) we had a lot of street walk-ins […] that is where it changes. (organizers yarrr, girldrop & klitty) the location of the venue, the advertising, and what you explain to people at the door are examples of how entrepreneurs try to make their event appeal only to people who are really interested. people who could ‘ruin’ a party will either not know about it or will not feel like joining in. these strategies of self-exclusion might be the key to organizing inclusive events. the inclusive vibe that entrepreneurs within the queer scene try to attain is being commodified as former queer spaces are transformed into mainstream places with an increasingly straight crowd. several lesbian clubbers gave examples of how formerly explicitly queer clubs like club nyx are 211fennia 197(2) (2019) marieke ekenhorst & irina van aalst becoming more mainstream, tending to attract a non-queer crowd. while straight clubbers might want to blend in with amsterdam’s queer community, several lesbian clubbers do not feel at ease anymore in these clubs; some say they are even being commented on by straight clubbers for showing affection. this pressure on queer space fits a broader trend of commodification and gentrification of queer venues in cities like sydney and toronto (nash & gorman-murray 2015). in the process of gentrification, traditional queer clubs and bars become increasingly more attractive to a non-queer crowd (doan & higgins 2011; mattson 2015) which can lead to feelings of displacement (pritchard et al. 2002; nash & gorman-murray 2015). while blending in of straight clubbers at (formerly) queer venues is often perceived as a sign of emancipation, it might also increase the pressure on the few ‘safe spaces’ amsterdam has left. conclusion the wide variety of queer venues in amsterdam seems to reflect an open and tolerant city in which diversity can be celebrated. however, the international reputation of amsterdam might explain its declining success. increased commercialization puts pressure on amsterdam’s nightlife spaces, which specifically affects the more creative and experimental (non-profit) initiatives. the 'night mayor' of amsterdam even launched a campaign to fight against the ‘repression of nightlife culture’ in the city (nachtburgemeester amsterdam 2019). this pressure on more experimental, creative and diverse nightlife cultures also affects the queer community. queer venues are seen as hip and trendy, and it becomes ‘cool’ for straight clubbers to go there (notably to the reguliersdwarsstraat). at the same time, it might be an economic strategy for some former queer venues to open up to a broader, non-queer crowd. opening up to a broader crowd also fits in with the philosophy of being ‘inclusive’. many queer venues aim for inclusion and want to be open to everyone regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. the declining lesbian visibility might be explained by a more fluid understanding of gendered and sexualized space, in which people with different sexual orientations, genders and ages interact as elaborated by browne (2006) and oswin (2008). this fluidity among different queer groups and between queer and non-queer clubbers could be a sign of emancipation. however, this fluidity also puts pressure on the existing safe space for lesbian clubbers. ‘blending in’ of straight clubbers often reinforces the ‘male gaze’, which reduces the already limited safe space of lesbian clubbers. although some lesbian clubbers stress the importance of being willing to mingle, and thereby relinquish the idea that it is necessary to have your ‘own’ lesbian space, these clubbers assert that their former safe space is under pressure. lesbian clubbers, entrepreneurs of lesbian venues, and organizers of lesbian and queer parties stress the need for a safe space, a place where lesbians can dance and act freely without feeling judged. all clubbers mention the need for safe places where they can express themselves fully, which is in line with earlier studies of valentine and skelton (2003) and fobear (2012). our participant stress that these safe spaces can also be open to other groups but their main focus should be on women who love women. one of the difficulties in creating spaces that are both safe and inclusive is the internal tension among lesbian clubbers caused by the enormous diversity among them. a fluid understanding of gender, space, and sexuality highlights internal heterogeneity which makes it challenging to create ‘safe’ space for everyone. several subgroups have stereotypical ideas about the others, which leads to a fragmented ‘lesbian’ scene. this internal fragmentation is visible in the underrepresentation of lesbian nightlife venues in amsterdam. the nightlife scene for lesbians lacks diversity, with only one lesbian-oriented bar left. while several party organizers try to fill the gap, lesbian clubbers say that they do not have many places to go to, aside from more general queer venues and some open-minded ‘open to everyone’ parties. these more commodified parties cannot always guarantee a safe environment for lesbian clubbers. according to clubbers and entrepreneurs in our research, a dedicated crew with people who are sensitive to possible tensions and able to take action is needed to create inclusive spaces. also door policies could be crucial to inform clubbers about the kind of party they are entering; an entrance fee might create a threshold for visitors who accidentally run into the party and are not 212 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) looking for a lesbian or queer night out. furthermore, targeted advertising and the marketing of themed parties can lead to self-exclusion. last but not least, balancing the needs for inclusive yet safe nightlife spaces is of key importance to celebrate diversity. acknowledgements first and foremost, we would like to thank all the participants of this study. we would also like to thank the members of the gender & geography reading group affiliated with utrecht university for their useful and insightful comments. thanks to nancy van weesep for the editorial guidance. references van aalst, i. & van liempt, i. (2018) the transformation of amsterdam's red light district and its impact on daily life in the area. in nofre, j. & eldridge, a. (eds.) exploring nightlife – space, society and governance, 177–191. rowman and littlefield, international. adamson, r. (2017) complicating queer space in toronto: how the development of toronto’s lgbtq2l spaces fits within homonormative and homonationalist scripts. master thesis in environmental studies york university, toronto. amsterdam info (2016) gay amsterdam 29.12.2016 <http://www.amsterdam.info/gay/>. 30.12.2016. binnie, j. (1997) coming out of geography: towards a queer epistemology? environment and planning d: society and space 15(2) 223–237. https://doi.org/10.1068/d150223 boogaarts-de bruin, s. (2011) something for everyone? changes and choices in the ethno-party scene in urban nightlife. amsterdam university press, amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.5117/9789056296698 brown, m. (2014) gender and sexuality ii: there goes the gayborhood? progress in human geography 38(3) 457–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513484215 browne, k. (2006) challenging queer geographies. antipode 38(5) 885–893. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2006.00483.x browne, k. (2007a) lesbian geographies. social & cultural geography 8(1) 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360701251486 browne, k. (2007b) (re)making the other, heterosexualising everyday space. environment and planning a 39(4) 996–1014. https://doi.org/10.1068/a38165 browne, k. & bakshi, l. (2011) we are here to party? lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans leisurescapes beyond commercial gay scenes. leisure studies 30(2) 179–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2010.506651 cattan, n. & vanolo, a. (2014) gay and lesbian emotional geographies of clubbing: reflections from paris and turin. gender, place & culture 21(9) 1158–1175. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2013.810603 club nyx (2019) club nyx amsterdam 28.12.2016 <https://clubnyx.nl/>. 21.11.2019. doan, p. l. & higgins, h. (2011) the demise of queer space? resurgent gentrification and the assimilation of lgbt neighborhoods. journal of planning education and research 31(1) 6–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456x10391266 dorst, h. (2015) electronic music scenes: a comparison of the diverging spatial contexts of the electronic dance music scenes of berlin and amsterdam. journal of urban cultural studies 2(1–2) 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs.2.1-2.57_1 eves, a. (2004) queer theory, butch/femme identities and lesbian space. sexualities 7(4) 480–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460704047064 european commission (2019) equal pay? time to close the gap! factsheet on the gender pay gap 2019. <https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/factsheet-gender_pay_gap-2019.pdf> 6.11.2019. fobear, k. (2012) beyond a lesbian space? an investigation on the intergenerational discourse surrounding lesbian public social places in amsterdam. journal of homosexuality 59(5) 721–747. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2012.673942 forstie, c. (2018) ambivalently post-lesbian: lbq friendships in the rural midwest. journal of lesbian studies 22(1) 54–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2017.1309901 garcia, l-m. (2018) agonistic festivities: urban nightlife scenes and the sociability of ‘anti-social’ fun. annals of leisure research 21(4) 462–479. https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2017.1398097 goh, k. (2018) safe cities and queer spaces: the urban politics of radical lgbt activism. annals of the american association of geographers 108(2) 463–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1392286 hae, l. (2011) dilemmas of the nightlife fix: post-industrialisation and the gentrification of nightlife in new york city. urban studies 48(16) 3449–3465. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098011400772 213fennia 197(2) (2019) marieke ekenhorst & irina van aalst hekma, g. (1992) de roze rand van donker amsterdam. de opkomst van een homoseksuele kroegcultuur 1930–1970. van gennep, amsterdam. hekma, g. & duyvendak, j. w. (2006) gay men and lesbians in the netherlands. in seidman, s., fischer, n. & meeks, c. (eds.) handbook of the new sexuality studies, 440–445. routledge, oxon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203963081-65 hekma, g. & duyvendak, j. w. (2011) queer netherlands: a puzzling example. sexualities 14(6) 625– 631. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460711422303 held, n. (2015) comfortable and safe spaces? gender, sexuality and ‘race’ in nighttime leisure spaces. emotion, space and society 14 33–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.12.003 hubbard, p., gorman-murray a. & nash, c. j. (2015) cities and sexualities. in delamater, j. & plante, r. f. (eds.) handbook of the sociology of sexualities, 287–304 springer international, switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17341-2_17 jayne, m., valentine, g. & holloway, s. (2016) (dis)orderly geographies: alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315566559 van liempt, i., van aalst, i. & schwanen, t. (2015) introduction: ‘geographies of the urban night’. special issue on nightlife. urban studies 52(3) 407–421. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014552933 mcnaron, t. a. h. (2007) post-lesbian? journal of lesbian studies 11(1–2) 145–151. https://doi.org/10.1300/j155v11n01_10 malbon, b. (2002) clubbing: dancing, ecstasy, vitality. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203026458 maliepaard, e. (2015) bisexuals in space and geography: more than queer? fennia 193(1) 148–159. https://doi.org/10.11143/46303 mattson, g. (2015) style and the value of gay nightlife: homonormative placemaking in san francisco. urban studies 52(16) 3144–3159. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014555630 myslik, w. d. (1996) gay communities as safe havens or sites of resistance? in duncan, n. (ed.) bodyspace: destabilising geographies of gender and sexuality, 155–169. routledge, london. nachtburgemeester amsterdam (2019) hold the night tight! stichting nachtburgemeester in actie tegen verdringing nachtcultuur <https://nachtburgemeester.amsterdam/hold-the-night-tightstichting-nachtburgemeester-in-actie-tegen>. 22.02.2019. nash, c. j. & gorman-murray, a. (2015) recovering the gay village: a comparative historical geography of urban change and planning in toronto and sydney. historical geography 43 84–105. nighttours (2016) gay bars, pubs and cafes in amsterdam. <http://www.nighttours.com/amsterdam/ gayguide/drink.html>. 30.12.2016. oswin, n. (2008) critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space. progress in human geography 32(1) 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507085213 pain, r. (2001) gender, race, age and fear in the city. urban studies 38(5–6) 899–913. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980120046590 parent, m. c., deblaere, c. & moradi, b. (2013) approaches to research on intersectionality: perspectives on gender, lgbt, and racial/ethnic identities. sex roles 68(11–12) 639–645. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-013-0283-2 podmore, j. a. (2006) gone ‘underground’? lesbian visibility and the consolidation of queer space in montréal. social & cultural geography 7(4) 595–625. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600825737 pritchard, a., morgan, n. & sedgley, d. (2002) in search of lesbian space? the experience of manchester's gay village. leisure studies 21(2) 105–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360110121551 roberts, m. & townshend, t. (2013) young adults and the decline of the urban english pub: issues for planning. planning theory & practice 14(4) 455-469. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2013.845683 rodo-de-zarate, m. (2015) young lesbians negotiating public space: an intersectional approach through places. children's geographies 13(4) 413–434. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.848741 saarein (2019) café saarein. <https://saarein2.nl/> 10.11.2019. saldaña, j. (2015) the coding manual for qualitative researchers. sage, international. schuyf, j. (1992) the company of friends and lovers: lesbian communities in the netherlands. in plummer, k. (ed.) modern homosexualities: fragments of lesbian and gay experience, 53–64. routledge, london and new york. seidman, i. (2006) interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. teachers college press, columbia university, new york and london. shaw, r. (2010) neoliberal subjectivities and the development of the night-time economy in british cities. geography compass 4(7) 893–903. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00345.x telegraaf (2017) vivelavie sluit haar deuren: na 37 jaar houdt mieke het voor gezien 1.6.2017 <http:// eservice-data.solidam.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/publication/telegraaf_autofeed/ native-app/issue/2017/06/01/0001/public/frame/eafdb9214fd8fb956c05f06c161452669f1c5167.html>. 1.6.2017. 214 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) travel gay europe (2017) amsterdam gay bars 25.5.2017 <https://www.travelgayeurope.com/ amsterdam-gay-bars/>. 30.5.2017. valentine, g. (1993) desperately seeking susan: a geography of lesbian friendships. area 25(2) 109–116. valentine, g. (1995) out and about: geographies of lesbian landscapes. international journal of urban and regional research 19(1) 96–111. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1995.tb00492.x valentine, g. & skelton, t. (2003) finding oneself, losing oneself: the lesbian and gay ‘scene’ as a paradoxical space. international journal of urban and regional research 27(4) 849–866. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2003.00487.x valentine, g. (2007) theorizing and researching intersectionality: a challenge for feminist geography. the professional geographer 59(1) 10–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9272.2007.00587.x untitled holocene development of the pennala basin with special reference to the palaeoenvironment of mesoand neolithic dwelling sites, lahti–orimattila, southern finland tommi sirviö and meri kajander sirviö, tommi and meri kajander (2003). holocene development of the pennala basin with special reference to the palaeoenvironment of mesoand neolithic dwelling sites, lahti–orimattila, southern finland. fennia 181:1, pp. 85–101. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the holocene development of the pennala basin, southern finland, was studied using lithostratigraphical and biostratigraphical methods, shore level surveys and radiocarbon dating in the areas adjacent to the i salpausselkä icemarginal formation. the study results give an improved picture of the shoreline displacement and palaeoenvironment of the pennala basin during the period of 10000–2500 14c yr bp (ca. 11400–2600 cal yr bp). the results indicate that the ancylus lake stage in the pennala basin occurred during the preboreal and early boreal chronozones around 9600–8900 14c yr bp (ca. 10900–10 000 cal yr bp). the transgression was followed by a long-term lake phase, which ended, due to overgrowth of the basin, at ca. 2900 14c yr bp (ca. 3000 cal yr bp). the highest ancylus shoreline in the area is located at 71 m a.s.l. the altitude of the ancient pennala lake is located at 68.5 m a.s.l. the pennala basin and adjacent areas were inhabited by stone age dwellers during the middle neolithic period. the dated evidence of the early mesolithic settlement in the area remains scarce. during the early mesolithic period the pennala basin was a sheltered bay of the ancylus lake and during the middle neolithic period of settlement ca. 5500–3500 14c yr bp (ca. 6300–3800 cal yr bp) the basin served neolithic dwellers as a small inland lake. tommi sirviö, department of geography, p.o. box 64, fin-00014, university of helsinki, finland; meri kajander, department of geology, division of geology and palaeontology, p.o. box 64, fin-00014, university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: tommi.sirvio@helsinki.fi, meri.kajander@helsinki.fi. ms received 12 september 2002. introduction shoreline displacement during the ancylus lake stage in southern finland ca. 9500– 8000 14c yr bp the first evidence of a transgression that had occurred at the beginning of the ancylus lake stage was discovered in southern finland and karelian isthmus (hyyppä 1937, 1943). since then the nature, extent and dating of the ancylus transgression in southern finland have been discussed and modified by several authors (e.g., tynni 1966; eronen 1976; eronen & haila 1982; glückert & ristaniemi 1982; ristaniemi & glückert 1987; matiskainen 1989b; glückert 1991). the ancylus transgression in southern finland began 9700–9500 14c yr bp (ca. 11200–10 700 cal yr bp) and reached its maximum level at 9200–9000 14c yr bp (ca. 10300–10200 cal yr bp) (eronen & haila 1982; glückert & ristaniemi 1982; ristaniemi & glückert 1987; glückert 1991). the ancylus transgression was followed by a rapid regressive stage of the lake, which in southern finland occurred around 9000–8000 14c yr bp (ca. 10200–8900 cal yr bp) (e.g., eronen & haila 1982). the altitude of the ancylus shore level (the ancylus limit) at the time of transgression 86 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander maximum has been placed at 64–74 m a.s.l between the helsinki–pukkila and the ii salpausselkä isobases of current land uplift (tynni 1966; eronen & haila 1982; glückert & ristaniemi 1982). the ancylus limit is located approximately at 70 m a.s.l. in lohja (the i salpausselkä), and the amplitude of the transgression in the same area was 4–5 metres (ristaniemi & glückert 1987). the regressive stage of the ancylus lake led to the final isolation of several independent basins. some of these basins have remained as lakes to the present day while others have dried-up during the post-glacial time due to peat overgrowth and sedimentation. finally, in order to increase the area of agricultural land, many lakes in southern finland were destroyed between 18th and 20th centuries by lowering the water level of the lakes or by totally drying them up. layers of gyttja typically indicate the lake stages in the sediments and these layers have been reported from several locations under peat deposits. overgrowth of these presently non-existing lakes have been, in many cases, reported as “side products” from studies that seek isolation contacts and indicators of transgressions under peat bogs (e.g., jantunen 1995). korhola (1990a) has roughly estimated that in the southern zone of raised bogs, at least 20% of the bogs were formed by overgrowth. the development history of such overgrown lakes has been of minor interest of geologists, geographers and archaeologists with few exceptions (e.g., korhola 1990b; tikkanen & korhola 1993). the currently studied pennala basin is one example of an overgrown lake isolated during the ancylus regression. this paper will make a special reference to archaeological data and show the importance of such ancient lakes to stone age dwellers. palaeoenvironments and dating of stone age dwelling sites the dating of mesolithic and neolithic (stone age) dwelling sites in finland has been traditionally based on known shore displacement of the baltic sea, the altitudes of dwelling sites and type of artefact found at excavation sites (e.g., siiriäinen 1973; matiskainen 1989a; hyvärinen 1999). with a few exceptions, most of the mesolithic and neolithic dwelling sites are assumed to have been located very close to the shorelines and the archaeological shoreline displacement chronologies have been based on assumption that the prehistoric site must have been located in close contact with the shoreline of its time (siiriäinen 1982; matiskainen 1989a). the chronology of the mesolithic presented by matiskainen (1989a) is divided into two chronological stages: ancylus mesolithic 9300–8000 14c yr bp (ca. 10450–8900 cal yr bp) and litorina mesolithic 8000–6000 14c yr bp (ca. 8900–6800 cal yr bp) stages. the mesolithic stage was followed by the neolithic period, during which comb ware ceramics was common in finland. the upper limit of the neolithic period has been defined at ca. 2500 14c yr bp (2600 cal yr bp) (siiriäinen 1982). during the holocene (and mesolithic) the palaeoenvironment in finland was unsteady, and the stone age dwelling sites were subject to large scale environmental changes such as deglaciation, land uplift, shore displacement of the baltic and development of vegetation (siiriäinen 1987; matiskainen 1989b). the shore-level fluctuations and overgrowth of small lakes, however, have been widely bypassed by researchers, whereas possible overgrown lakes in porvoonjoki river valley have been found in preliminary studies from several locations including kanteleenjärvi (pukkila) and luhdanjoki (lahti–hollola) areas (sirviö 2000; sirviö et al. 2002). the most comprehensive studies made on palaeoenvironments of stone age dwelling sites in finland have been presented by matiskainen (1989b) who reconstructed the palaeoenvironment of the mesolithic dwelling sites 10000–6000 14c yr bp (ca. 11400–6800 cal yr bp) based on shore displacement, vegetation history, refuse fauna and archaeological artefacts found from askola area 40 km south of the pennala basin. it was concluded that emergence of new land during the rapid ancylus regression forced early mesolithic settlements to move south from the porvoonjoki river valley down to the askola region in order to carry on a subsistence strategy in a similar archipelagic palaeoenvironments. the postglacial vegetation history during the mesolithic and neolithic stages in southern finland is well known (e.g., donner 1971). the research on the vegetation history close to the pennala basin includes studies made on the työtjärvi lake, varrassuo bog (hollola) (donner et al. 1978), joutjärvi and alasenjärvi lakes (lahti) (vuorela 1978). according to the analysed pollen on the työtjärvi core, the first indication of fennia 181: 1 (2003) 87holocene development of the pennala basin with special … forest clearing in the area occurred ca. 5600 14c yr bp (ca. 6400 cal yr bp). pollen analyses on työtjärvi and varrassuo cores have indicated that the slash-and-burn agriculture arrived in the area ca. 3200–2400 14c yr bp (ca. 3400–2400 cal yr bp) (donner et al. 1978). site description the pennala basin the pennala basin (figs. 1 and 2) is located 5 km south of the i salpausselkä, by the border of lahti fig. 1. the location of the study area in southern finland. a) location of the investigated pennala basin south of lahti, and isobases of current land uplift (mmyr–1). b) the extent of the pennala drainage area and the extent of ancylus lake during the transgression maximum at ca. 9100 14c yr bp (ca. 10200 cal yr bp) with reference to the mesolithic ristola dwelling site. c) the extent of the ancient pennala lake at 8900–2900 14c yr bp (ca. 10000–3000 cal yr bp) and the maximum coverage of ancylus lake with reference to the location of mesolithic and neolithic dwelling sites and raised shore formations. 88 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander and orimattila communes (60°55'n, 25°42'e). the altitude of the basin varies from 66.6 m a.s.l. (the threshold) to 130 m a.s.l. (renkomäki hill) and both heights are located in the northern parts of the drainage basin. the rengonjoki river flows gently to the north in the middle of the basin. the middle parts of the pennala basin consist of flat, low-lying and mostly cultivated areas at 67.5–70 m a.s.l. the width of flat and low-lying area varies between 200–600 m and is widest in the middle and northern parts of the basin. the length of the flat area is approximately 3.5 km. the low-lying area consists of 1.3–1.7 m thick layer of carex and sphagnum peat, below which a deposit of gyttja and clay gyttja over 3 m thick is present. another noticeable peat deposit, the pihlajasuo bog (70.5 m a.s.l.), is located in the village of pennala at the southern end of the drainage basin. in general, the areas located slightly over 70 m a.s.l. consist of clayey and silty soils, and are in most cases cultivated. higher altitudes, on the other hand, are dominated by forests and contain till and unevenly distributed sand and gravel deposits of glaciofluvial origin re-worked by wave action (for example the renkomäki, latomäki and pyssymäki hills). the total area of the drainage basin is approximately 24 km2. earlier archaeological studies in the pennala basin a total of 12 stone age dwelling sites and one secondary site (float of bark) have been found in the pennala basin (poutiainen & takala 2001). the altitudes of the dwelling sites vary between 68.5– 75.5 m a.s.l. several other stone age dwelling sites have been found in the adjacent areas, including ristola (e.g., matiskainen 1989b; takala 1999), luhdanjoki (lahti–hollola), puujoki (orimattila) and kanteleenjärvi (pukkila) (e.g., poutiainen 1998). the first archaeological finds in the pennala basin were made in 1948 (itkonen 1949). a wooden sledge-runner was found beneath peat deposits (depth 1.6 m) from the western side of the rengonjoki river, near the alestalo dwelling site. the find resulted in pollen analytical studies (valovirta 1949), based on which the sledge-runner was dated to the stage, typical of comb ware ceramics ca. 5000 14c yr bp. further small excavations were carried out in the same year on the eastern side of the rengonjoki river at maijanoja dwelling site at approximately 70 m a.s.l. (luho 1950). a second period of excavations was carried out during 1959. the most important finds at the alestalo dwelling site contained pieces of comb ware ceramics (at 67.0–67.3 m a.s.l.) and remnants of a hearth (68.6–68.8 m a.s.l.) (meinander 1960). two radiocarbon dates, 5370 ± 140 and 4840 ± 190 14c yr bp (ca. 6200 and 5600 cal yr bp), were obtained from a layer of comb ware ceramic pottery, rich in trapa natans (water chestnut) fruits (meinander 1971). vuorela (1981) carried out pollen stratigraphical studies of the pennala basin in the immediate vicinity of the alestalo and uusitalo dwelling sites (fig. 1). a radiocarbon date 5310 ± 110 14c yr bp (ca. 6100 cal yr bp) was obtained from the previously mentioned level containing the sledge-runner and remnants of trapa natans. despite the presence of several stone age dwelling sites in the vicinity, apophytic evidence in the stratigraphy fig. 2. the pennala basin northwest of pyssymäki hill. the investigated coring site is marked with an arrow and the shore level of the ancient pennala lake with a broken line. (photo: tommi sirviö). fennia 181: 1 (2003) 89holocene development of the pennala basin with special … were too scarce to indicate a clear influence of human activities on vegetation. a distinct change in the upper part of the stratigraphy (including a change from coarse gyttja to peat) was interpreted as indicating the final drying up of the basin (vuorela 1981). layers rich in trapa natans macro remnants were interpreted as cultural layers with fruits crushed by stone age dwellers (aalto 1981). vuorela (1981) concluded that water chestnut was possibly favoured or even intentionally cultivated in the area. the most recent excavations in the pennala basin have been carried out on five dwelling sites (myllyoja, alestalo, uusitalo, metsämäki 1 and metsämäki 2) during 2000–2002. the majority of the finds of the recent excavations were made from the myllyoja dwelling site located in the northern end of pennala basin at 69.0–71.5 m a.s.l. most of these finds consisted of ceramics from the neolithic substages, and possible hearth remnants were found at 69.5–69.6 m a.s.l. (poutiainen 2001). the preliminary results of the radiocarbon dating showed that the oldest date obtained from a burnt bone belonged to the early mesolithic period ca. 9300 14c yr bp (ca.10500 cal yr bp). two other radiocarbon dates were obtained from the neolithic ceramics, ca. 4000 14c yr bp (ca. 4500 cal yr bp), and one from charcoal, ca. 1200 14c yr bp (ca. 1100 cal yr bp) (poutiainen 2002). the excavations carried out at the alestalo and uusitalo dwelling sites consisted of findings that included quartz artefacts, ceramics, and burnt bone. most of the finds were made between 67.8 and 70.6 m a.s.l. (takala 2001). the dwelling sites of metsämäki 1 and 2 are located noticeably above the dominating, low-lying level of the basin to the east of the rengonjoki river at ca. 73–75.5 m a.s.l. (poutiainen & takala 2001). the finds made at the excavations in summer 2002 included quartz and ceramics, which suggest that the sites were inhabited at least during the late neolithic stage (poutiainen 2002; takala 2002). the ristola dwelling site is located adjacent to the porvoonjoki river, approximately 4 km northwest from the pennala basin at 68–75 m a.s.l. the first finds from the ristola site were made in 1966, and preliminary excavations were carried out during 1970–1971. more comprehensive excavations were carried out during 1995– 1999 (takala 1999). the most important finds from the site included flint artefacts and flake fragments, comparable to the kunda culture and pulli site in southern estonia, dating back to the early mesolithic period. the radiocarbon age ca. 9250 14c yr bp (ca. 10500 cal yr bp) of the ristola site gains support also from shore displacement chronology (ristaniemi & glückert 1987; matiskainen 1989b). the radiocarbon dates from the in situ structures found at the site are much younger (from neolithic to recent) than the typology of the artefacts and location of the site would suggest (takala 1999; takala 2002). field and laboratory methods to verify the assumed levels of the ancylus transgression and the ancient pennala lake, the altitudes of the raised shorelines and the threshold (figs. 3 & 4) were surveyed in the area close to the level of ancylus lake (approx. 65–75 m a.s.l.) previously described by ristaniemi & glückert (1987). the altitudes were levelled with a tachymeter (total station), using the fixed points established by the city of lahti and the national land survey of finland as reference. for the purpose of biostratigraphical analyses, successive cores (500 mm, ø 100–150 mm) were taken through 400 cm (110–510 cm) of the sediment using a russian peat sampler (jowsey 1966) at the bottom of the low-lying basin at 67.4 m a.s.l. loss-on-ignition analysis (loi) and mineral magnetic measurements (specific susceptibility) (fig. 5) were carried out to examine the changes in sediment organic content and possible changes in sedimentary environments. both loi and specific susceptibility were analysed at 5 cm intervals. susceptibility measurements were carried out on individual subsamples with ms2b equipment, and the results are presented as specific susceptibility χ (μm–3 kg–1). pollen analysis (fig. 6) was carried out to examine major changes in vegetation history of the area and the results were compared with the dating results of the main pollen zone assemblage boundaries of the area (donner 1971; donner et al. 1978). pollen preparations were made at 10– 20 cm intervals with standard chemical methods (e.g., koh, hf and acetolysis) (e.g., moore et al. 1991). from each preparation at least 200 grains of pollens or spores were counted. the pollen nomenclature follows moore et al. (1991) with the exception of dryopteris-type, which corresponds to the polypodiaceae taxon presented by moore et al. (1991). the pollen zone boundaries presented as a reference in the pollen diagram are based 90 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander fig. 3. an ancient shoreline (a wave-cut scarp) representing the ancylus limit at 70.8– 72.6 m a.s.l. south of renkomäki hill. (photo: tommi sirviö). fig. 4. cross-sectional profile of the current threshold of the pennala basin located at 66.6– 69.4 m a.s.l. the investigated shore levels of ancylus lake (ca. 71.0 m a.s.l.) and the ancient pennala lake (ca. 68.5 m a.s.l.) are also presented. conventional radiocarbon dates (14c yr bp) of the shore level fluctuations are based on the analysed pennala core. the theoretical minimum water level of the yoldia sea in the area and a recent landslide scar with toe formation are presented in the profile with grey dotted line and black broken line, respectively. on holocene regional pollen-assemblage zones of southern finland (donner 1971; tolonen & ruuhijärvi 1976; donner et al. 1978), which in the työtjärvi lake and varrassuo bog have been dated as follows: the upper boundary of the betula zone (p°) at 9000 14c yr bp (ca. 10200 cal yr bp), and the upper boundary of the pinus zone (a°) at 8600 14c yr bp (ca. 9500 cal yr bp). the rise of picea (pc°) at 4200 14c yr bp (ca. 4800 cal yr bp) (donner et al. 1978) and tilia (t°) at ca. 7500– 7000 14c yr bp (ca. 8300–7800 cal yr bp) (e.g., hyvärinen 1980) are also presented in the pollen diagram. in order to identify major shore-level changes in the area the core was subsampled at 10–20 cm intervals for diatom analysis (fig. 7). organic material was dispersed with 10% h 2 o 2 solution, after which the fine mineral fraction was removed by settling. diatoms were separated from the coarse mineral fraction by rotation method (vuorela & eronen 1978). naphrax® was used as the mounting medium (refraction index 1.74). from each preparation 250–300 diatoms were calculated except when the preparations were poor in diatoms. in the two uppermost samples (110 cm and 120 cm) diatoms were too scarce to be included into the diagram. identification of the species was based mainly on krammer & lange-bertalot (1986, 1988, 1991a,b) and forsström (1999). pollen and diatom diagrams were both prepared with the tilia and tilia-graph (version 2.0.b5) software (grimm 1990). fennia 181: 1 (2003) 91holocene development of the pennala basin with special … three radiocarbon dates (table 1) were obtained from selected samples. the ages are given as conventional radiocarbon dates (14c yr bp) and as calibrated to calendar years (cal yr bp and cal yr bc; stuiver & reimer 1993; calib rev 4.3). the two uppermost samples (130 cm and 255–260 cm) consisted of the bulk material and were subjected to conventional dating (hel-4550 & hel4552). the lowest sample consisted of a well-preserved betula catkin scale sieved from the depth 450–455 cm and was dated with ams technique (hela-520). the samples were pre-treated using standard methods and dated in the dating laboratory at the university of helsinki. results raised shores and the threshold of the pennala basin twelve observations of raised shorelines were surveyed for the purpose of defining the extent and maximum limit of the ancylus transgression and the ancient pennala lake in the area (see fig. 1). eight observations provide evidence of the ancylus limit in the area, whereas four shore formations are assumed to be related to the ancient pennala lake. raised shore formations typical for eskers and till formations (e.g., sirviö 2000) were not found in the area. fine soils together with small fetch area at the level of the ancylus limit appear to have effectively suppressed the formation of shore marks, with only few exceptions. agricultural activities have further smoothened and destroyed some of the old shore marks since fields typically extend above the ancylus limit. a remarkable shore formation (fig. 3) related to the ancylus transgression was surveyed at several locations south of renkomäki hill 1–3 km northwest from the pennala threshold. this approximately 3 km long arched wave-cut scarp is highest at the north-western corner of the formation (70.8–72.6 m a.s.l.). three other shore formations (small, partly disturbed wave-cut scarps), also related to the ancylus transgression, were found at the fig. 5. sediment lithostratigraphy of the pennala core: loss-on-ignition analysis and specific susceptibility with radiocarbon dating results and reference to the diatom zones (d.z.) (for further details, see the text). 92 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander fig. 6. core description (symbols as in fig. 5) and pollen stratigraphy of the pennala core with radiocarbon dating results and reference to the pinus (p°) and alnus (a°) pollen assemblage zone boundaries. the rise of tilia (t°) and picea (pc°) limits are also presented. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 93holocene development of the pennala basin with special … fig. 7. core description (symbols as in fig. 5), diatom stratigraphy (selected species) and diatom zones of the pennala core with radiocarbon dating results. 94 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander northern part of the pennala basin at 70.8– 71.5 m a.s.l. the level of the ancient pennala lake was surveyed in the northern part of the basin at four locations with wave-cut scarps. the altitudes of the shore marks varied between 67.9 and 68.4 m a.s.l. some of the shore formations had been partly disturbed by agricultural activities, and the most reliable results were obtained from undisturbed shore marks (68.3–68.4 m a.s.l.) adjacent to the uusitalo and alestalo dwelling sites. the same level of the ancient pennala lake was observed in the form of a clear shift from highly organic soils of peat and gyttja to minerogenic clayish soils throughout the pennala basin below 70 m a.s.l. a cross-sectional profile of the threshold of the basin in the north-west was surveyed (fig. 4). the rengonjoki river has cut a 5 m deep channel through the clayish soil at the threshold, and the narrow channel has been subsequently re-worked by landslides. the altitude of the current threshold varies between 66.6–69.4 m a.s.l., as measured from the current water level of the rengonjoki river to the break of slope at the side of the channel. loi, susceptibility measurements and radiocarbon dates the lithostratigraphy of the pennala basin was described in detail with the aid of loss-on-ignition (loi) analysis, susceptibility measurements, radiocarbon dates and pollen and diatom analysis. the general lithostratigraphy of the pennala core (fig. 5) from the bottom to the top is as follows: 510–210 cm clay gyttja, 210–155 cm fine detritus gyttja, 155–125 cm coarse detritus gyttja and 125–110 cm carex peat (110–0 cm not analysed). together with the increasing loi towards the top of the core, the corresponding susceptibility values show a clear decreasing trend with a few exceptions. in the basal part of the core (510–395 cm), the susceptibility values vary between 0.094–0.133 μm–3kg–1 with the highest value at 455 cm. as the radiocarbon age 9290 ± 125 14c yr bp (10450 cal yr bp) (hela-520) (455–460 cm) suggests, the increase in susceptibility values probably corresponds to a rise in water level due to the ancylus transgression, whereas the subsequent decrease in susceptibility values is connected to the isolated pennala lake phase. these changes in the susceptibility values are not duplicated in the loi values, which vary between 6.3 and 7.9% at same level without showing any significant trend. another clearly defined break in the decreasing trend of susceptibility values is observed at the depth of 320–285 cm, where the susceptibility of the samples increases from 0.038 up to 0.051 μm–3kg–1. the higher susceptibility values are followed by a slight increase (9.8–18.6%) in loi at 290–255 cm. based on the radiocarbon age 6210 ± 70 14c yr bp (7100 cal yr bp) (hel-4552) obtained from the level 255–260 cm, the decrease in susceptibility and the local peak value of loi coincide with the climatic optimum (e.g., eronen 1990) during the atlantic chronozone. towards the top of the core the susceptibility values approach zero together with a sharp increase in loi. this is believed to represent the final overgrowth of the pennala lake, dated at 2930 ± 90 14c yr bp (3120 cal yr bp) (hel-4550) at the depth of 130 cm. pollen stratigraphy the general features in the pollen stratigraphy (fig. 6) can be described in terms of regional pollen assemblage zones for southern finland (donner 1971; donner et al. 1978). references are also made to the flandrian chronozones presented by mangerud et al. (1974). the basal section of the core belongs to the betula zone corresponding closely to the prebotable 1. radiocarbon dating results of the pennala core. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 95holocene development of the pennala basin with special … real chronozone 10000–9000 14c yr bp (ca. 11500–10200 cal yr bp). this is followed by short period of pinus zone corresponding to the boreal chronozone 9000–8000 14c yr bp (ca. 10200– 8900 cal yr bp). except for trees and shrubs, herbs dominate the lowermost section. gramineae, cyperaceae, filipendula and spores of equisetum are abundant. the aquatic pollen in the basal part of the core is dominated by potamogeton, nymphaea and sparganium. the upper boundaries of betula (p°) and betula-alnus-corylus-ulmus (a°) zones are defined by the rational limit for the rise of pinus and alnus, respectively, though in the pennala core the pinus limit (p°) is not very distinct. together with the two other radiocarbon dates, the date obtained from the middle of the pinus zone (9290 ± 190 14c yr bp; hela-520) allowed preparation of an age-depth curve with a 2nd order polynomial line fitting function. based on the curve, the rise of pinus has taken place at ca. 9450 14c yr bp (ca. 10700 cal yr bp) and the rise of alnus at ca. 9150 14c yr bp (ca. 10200 cal yr bp). the uppermost part of the core belongs to betula-alnus-corylus-ulmus zone and the atlantic and subboreal chronozones 8000–2500 14c yr bp (ca. 8900–2600 cal yr bp). pollen of betula, pinus and alnus dominate the zone. relative proportions of corylus and ulmus remain constant and the total proportion of the pollen of trees and shrubs are at their maximum level throughout the zone. two clearly detectable reference points on the diagram for the atlantic and subboreal chronozones include the rise of tilia at 320 cm (t°) ca. 7200 14c yr bp (ca. 8000 cal yr bp) and the rise of picea at 180 cm (pc°) ca. 4300 14c yr bp (ca. 4900 cal yr bp). both of these are in good agreement with the typical radiocarbon dates previously presented for t° (e.g., hyvärinen 1980) and pc° limits (e.g., donner et al. 1978). above the picea limit (pc°) the proportions of both herbs and aquatic plants increase considerably, as shown by the rise of cyperaceae, gramineae and potamogeton curves. at the same time, the relative proportions of tree species show wide fluctuations, such as the abrupt rise of pinus and alnus in the uppermost samples of the core. the radiocarbon date 2930 ± 90 14c yr bp (hel-4550) obtained from the upper limit of aquatic plants indicates the final drying up of the lake directly after the dated level. diatom stratigraphy the sediments were analysed for diatoms in order to determine the main phases of the development of pennala basin, including the possible ancylus transgression, the stages of isolation, and the final overgrowth. the diatom diagram (fig. 7) can be divided into three sections: the small lake/ ancylus lake stage (diatom zones ia & ib), the small lake stage (diatom zone ii) and the overgrowth stage (diatom zone iii). the uppermost part of the core was poor in diatoms and represents terrestric mire environment based on other lithoand biostratigraphic evidence. the flora of the lowermost diatom zone ia (510–470 cm) consists mainly of meroplanctonic aulacoseira granulata (40–60%) and a. ambigua, plus genus epithemia, with lesser proportions of species cymbella aspera, cyclostephanos dubius, cyclotella radiosa, synedra capitata, synedra ulna and genera eunotia, pinnularia and cymbella. at the bottom of the diatom zone ib (470–400 cm), the relative proportions of aulacoseira granulata decline abruptly, while the relative proportions of mainly epiphytic and benthic species begin to increase. these include cymbella aspera and genera epithemia, pinnularia and eunotia. the following diatoms found from this zone belong to the flora typically observed in the ancylus lake sediments (e.g., tynni 1969; eronen 1976; ignatius & tynni 1978; ristaniemi 1984): aulacoseira islandica, cymatopleura elliptica var. hibernica, cymbella aspera, c. prostata, surirella capronii, gyrosigma attenuatum, g. acuminatum, amphora ovalis and genus epithemia. in addition to these typical ancylus lake species the following taxa are also present in the diatom zone ib: cyclostephanos dubius, cyclotella radiosa, synedra capitata, s. ulna, cocconeis pediculus, c. placentula, aulacoseira granulata, a. ambigua, amphora libyca, stauroneis phoenicenteron, rhopalodia gibba, and genera cymbella and surirella. the boundary between diatom zones ib and ii is marked by a sharp increase in aulacoseira granulata and a. ambigua species and a sharp decline in epithemia spp. starting at around 420 cm with a clear indication of the final environmental change at ca. 400 cm. the fresh-water meroplanctonic aulacoseira ambigua and a. granulata have high proportions (20–70%) throughout the diatom zone ii (400–170 cm). other species that occur 96 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander through diatom zone ii, although with rather small proportions, include cyclostephanos dubius, cyclotella radiosa, gyrosigma acuminatum, tabellaria fenestrata, t. flocculosa, nitzschia sigmoidea, n. levidensis var. victoriae, cyclotella meneghiniana, cyclotella stelligera, stauroneis phoenicenteron and navicula americana. contrary to the lower diatom zone, the genera eunotia, surirella and epithemia are poorly presented here. at the top of this zone, genus fragilaria begins to increase simultaneously with the sediment change from clay gyttja to fine gyttja. diatom zone iii (170–130 cm) consists mainly of species aulacoseira italica, a. subarctica, a. pfaffiana, a. lacustris, a. lirata, tabellaria fenestrata, t. flocculosa, tetracyclus glans and genera pinnularia, gomphonema, eunotia and fragilaria, which are typical to small lake conditions (e.g., hyvärinen 1999). diatom fauna found in the uppermost coarse gyttja bed represents the final phase of lowering water level and drying up of the ancient pennala lake. the overlying carex peat (120–110 cm) was too poor in diatoms to be presented in the diagram. the presented results of diatom analysis are in good agreement with the pollen and loi analysis described earlier. discussion and conclusions the current study gives new information on the holocene development of the pennala basin with reference to the ancylus transgression, the ancient pennala lake, and the dated stone age dwelling sites in the area. the main conclusions from the pennala site studied can be summarized as follows (fig. 8): 1) the basal part of the studied core includes a possible small lake phase of the penfig. 8. age-depth distribution curve (2nd order polynomial line fitting) with reference to the development of the pennala basin. also included are summaries of archaeologically relevant dating results in the pennala basin (bold/italic) (meinander 1960, 1971; vuorela 1981; poutiainen 2002) and in the nearby environments (donner et al. 1978; matiskainen 1989b) together with the main cultural stages (siiriäinen 1982; matiskainen 1989a). fennia 181: 1 (2003) 97holocene development of the pennala basin with special … nala basin at the end of regressive stage of yoldia sea, 2) the ancylus transgression started at ca. 9600 yr 14c bp (10900 cal yr bp) and the final isolation occurred around 8900 yr 14c bp (10000 cal yr bp) during the regressive stage of ancylus lake, and 3) the final isolation from the baltic sea was followed by a long-term lake phase which lasted until ca. 2900 yr 14c bp (3000 cal yr bp), when the pennala basin turned to a terrestric mire. the interpretation of the basal part of the core – as representing an isolated, small lake phase of the pennala basin from the yoldia sea until the ancylus transgression – remains questionable. the upper boundary of the lowermost diatom zone ia is marked by a sharp decrease in the proportion of aulacoseira granulata, which may indicate small lake conditions before the transgression. the beginning of the small lake phase, however, is ambiguous, as the horizon of the isolation from the yoldia sea was not represented in the core. the slight increase of typical ancylus lake species at the boundary between diatom zones ia and ib suggests that pennala basin became a part of the ancylus lake. the approximate age for the lower limit of the diatom zone ib (based on the 2nd order polynomial age-depth curve) suggests that the pennala basin became a part of ancylus lake at ca. 9600 14c yr bp (ca. 10900 cal yr bp), which is confirmed by the radiocarbon date 9290 ± 190 14c yr bp (hela-520) obtained from slightly above the maximum occurrence of epithemia spp. at 460 cm. the given radiocarbon date is in good agreement with the dates of the ancylus transgression presented previously (e.g., ristaniemi & glückert 1987). the evidence of the transgression is supported by the fluctuations observed in the magnetic susceptibility (fig. 5) at the level of the assumed transgression. the variation and slight increase in the susceptibility in the diatom zone representing ancylus lake is probably a consequence of increased erosion on the shores of the ancylus lake caused by water level fluctuations during the transgression. a similar susceptibility pattern has been reported from the lake babinskoye (ingermanland, russia) sediments during the litorina transgression and explained by increased erosion on the shores (miettinen 2002). sandgren et al. (1990), however, have presented opposing results from the lake ådran (eastern sweden), where the regressive phase of the ancylus lake is marked by an increase in susceptibility values, whereas the litorina transgression coincided with low susceptibility values. the high susceptibility values during the regressive phase were explained as being induced by increased erosion. low susceptibility values during the litorina transgression were explained by dissolution of ferromagnetic minerals in brackish-marine water (snowball & thompson 1988). the relatively poor diatom evidence of the suggested small lake stage and the following ancylus transgression are most rationally explained by the location of both the pennala basin and its threshold. as shown in fig. 1, the pennala basin formed a sheltered bay during the ancylus transgression, and was connected to more open areas of ancylus lake at näkkimistö by 800 m long and 200 m wide strait. the whole porvoonjoki river valley was connected to the more open ancylus lake by several narrow straits. this might have resulted in ecological conditions typical for small lakes or shallow bays showing diatom diagrams dominated by epithemia spp. with only a slight rise in the curves of other typical ancylus lake species (e.g., aulacoseira islandica and gyrosigma attenuatum). as seen in fig. 4, the pennala threshold has been cut down to clayish soil by several metres whereas the upper value given for the threshold (69.4 m a.s.l.) together with the shoreline measurements suggest only a minor (probably 1.5–2 m) rise in the water level (up to 71–71.5 m a.s.l.) (fig. 4) and small changes in ecological conditions in the area during the ancylus transgression. since the pennala basin is a part of a greater drainage basin, the relatively poor diatom evidence of transgression might be also due to mixing of sediments, and deposition of material derived from the upper pihlajasuo bog area, where the independent small lake might have been isolated during the late regressive stages of the yoldia sea. concurrence of the typical small lake flora of pinnularia and eunotia spp. with typical ancylus lake species at diatom zone ib might be explained by erosion and re-deposition of sediment originally deposited during the small lake phase as the transgression proceeded. discrepancies were observed within the pollen analysis, where the limits of pollen assemblage zones of pinus (p°) and alnus (a°) almost overlap and show distinctively older ages (ca. 450 and 550 14c yr, respectively) than previously presented by donner et al. (1978). however, similar differences have been observed elsewhere (e.g., hyvärinen 1980), and radiocarbon dates obtained 98 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander from the p° and a° limits in southern finland typically show regional differences (e.g., donner et al. 1978; ristaniemi & glückert 1987). the older ages observed here for the limits might be explained by changes in the local palaeoenvironment adjacent to the pennala basin, which would have encouraged the early spread of both pinus (due to proximity to gravelly and sandy fluvioglacial formations) and alnus (due to emergence of new shoreline during the ancylus regression). since the lowermost radiocarbon date (9290 ± 125 14c yr bp) was obtained from a single betula catkin scale, there is always the possibility that this is a secondary deposit and that a dating of the primary deposits of the core would result to younger dates for both the p° and a° limits, and the ancylus transgression. the ancylus lake phase ended in the pennala basin at ca. 8900 14c yr bp (ca. 10000 cal yr bp) leading to the final isolation of the pennala basin from the baltic sea. according to the currently analysed pollen and diatoms and earlier studies (vuorela 1981), the ancient pennala lake can be described as shallow, eutrophic and alkaliphilous lake, as aulacoseira granulata and a. ambigua diatom species have been typically found in small lakes indicating alkaliphilous eutrophic conditions (e.g., korhola 1990b). this interpretation gains support also from the pollen analyses and the well-known presence of trapa natans (aalto 1981; vuorela 1981), which typically favours such ecological conditions. the evidence of possible water level fluctuations in the ancient pennala lake during the middle of the lake phase is scarce. the most distinct piece of evidence of a potential high water level is the clear rise in the susceptibility values during the atlantic period at ca. 7000–6500 14c yr bp (ca. 7800–7400 cal yr bp). the significant variation in the proportions of aulacoseira species remains unexplained and might be related to water level fluctuations as these changes correspond to the changes in the susceptibility measurements (the peak of aulacoseira granulata at 280 cm coincides with high susceptibility). it has to be noted, that high water levels have been observed in many small lakes during humid atlantic period (e.g., donner et al. 1978; donner 1995), and several authors have suggested that the low water level in lakes and mires was due to a cool and dry climate during the following subboreal period (korhola 1990b). in many cases, this might have accelerated the final overgrowth of lakes in southern finland during the early subboreal period (korhola 1990a). the absolute shore levels of possible fluctuations in the ancient pennala lake remain undetermined since only one distinctive ancient shoreline level has been detected at ca. 68.5 m a.s.l. the final phase in the history of the pennala lake is marked by clear changes in both diatom and pollen stratigraphy dated close to the picea limit (pc°) during the early subboreal period at 4000 14c yr bp (ca. 4500 cal yr bp). at this time, the relative proportions of small lake diatom species, and pollen of aquatic plants, increased abruptly. the abrupt increase in loi also marks the change. the open area and the extent of the pennala lake may have decreased significantly during this stage. these observed changes clearly indicate overgrowth, lowering water depth, and decreasing extent of the lake. paludification led to final overgrowth of the ancient pennala lake during the late subboreal period at 2900 14c yr bp (ca. 3000 cal yr bp), after which the basin transformed to a terrestric mire. further development of the pennala basin as a mire was not investigated. the dated archaeological data (fig. 8) demonstrates that specific absolute dates for the early mesolithic dwelling sites in the area – during which the pennala basin was a sheltered bay of the ancylus lake – are still scarce. the dwelling sites in pennala basin have been inhabited mostly during the neolithic period at ca. 5500–3500 14c yr bp (ca. 6300–3800 cal yr bp). in this period, the pennala basin formed a small inland lake as a part of the porvoonjoki river drainage basin. the neolithic stage of the evidence from the dwelling sites, dated with radiocarbon method, starts during the late atlantic period. the potential evidence of forest clearing, observed in the nearby työtjärvi lake (hollola) (donner et al. 1978) and the spread of trapa natans into the pennala lake (vuorela 1981), noticeably concur with the evidence of the neolithic settlement. earlier pollen analyses (vuorela 1981) and analyses of macro remnants from the uppermost layers (aalto 1981) of the core sampled near the shoreline of the pennala lake correspond well with the results presented in this paper on the final stages of the development of the ancient lake. the potential connection between the human impact on vegetation (vuorela 1981) and the eutrophication preceding the final overgrowth of the lake, cannot be ignored. as a conclusion, the overgrowth fennia 181: 1 (2003) 99holocene development of the pennala basin with special … of the lake has probably occurred as a result of several supporting factors, such as the subboreal climate, the human influence and the shallow bathymetry of the lake (tikkanen & korhola 1993). there is still a distinctive gap between the dated early mesolithic and neolithic dwelling sites in the area. it is unjustifiable to use shore displacement of the baltic as the basis for dating of the mesolithic dwelling sites due to long lake phase of the pennala basin. similar limitations have been observed elsewhere while using shore displacement of the baltic as a basis for preliminary dating of stone age dwelling sites e.g., in kanteleenjärvi (pukkila) (sirviö 2000), luhdanjoki (lahti–hollola) (sirviö et al. 2002) and askola areas (matiskainen 1989b). it is, therefore, advisable to take great care while applying shoreline displacement chronology of the baltic to the dating of the mesolithic and neolithic sites around bogs and extensive deposits of peat and gyttja, i.e. areas, where ancient lakes have potentially existed. acknowledgements this research received financial support from the finnish cultural foundation. we thank anonymous referees for their comments, prof. matti eronen, prof. matti tikkanen, prof. hannu hyvärinen and heikki haila, lic.phil., for valuable comments during the research, dr juhani virkanen for help in the laboratory, maija heikkilä, msc, for grouping the pollen diagram and minna väliranta, msc, for help in identification of macro remnants for radiocarbon dating. we also thank hannu poutiainen, ma, hannu takala, ma, lic.phil., and other enthusiastic archaeologists of the city museum of lahti for great help during the study. thanks for the preliminary language corrections belong to dr andrew rebeiro-hargrave. the dating laboratory of the university of helsinki provided the radiocarbon dates. references aalto m (1981). vesipähkinän (trapa natans l.) lämpökautinen esiintyminen pennalassa. lahden kaupungin museoja taidelautakunta, tutkimuksia xix/1981, 20–25. donner j (1971). towards a stratigraphical division of the finnish quaternary. commentationes physico-mathematicae 41, 281–305. donner j (1995). the quaternary history of scandinavia. 200 p. cambridge university press. donner j, p alhonen, m eronen, h jugner & i vuorela (1978). biostratigraphy and radiocarbon dating of the holocene lake sediments of työtjärvi and the peats in the adjoining bog varrassuo west of lahti in southern finland. annales botanici fennici 15, 258–280. eronen m (1976). a radiocarbon dated ancylus transgression site in south-eastern finland. boreas 5, 65–76. eronen m (1990). muuttuva ilmasto. terra 102, 220– 238. eronen m & h haila (1982). shoreline displacement near helsinki, southern finland, during the ancylus lake stage. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 134, 111–129. forsström l (1999). piikuoriset levät. 104 p. oulun yliopiston geotieteiden laitos. glückert g & o ristaniemi (1982). the ancylus transgression west of helsinki, south finland – a preliminary report. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 134, 99–110. glückert g (1991). the ancylus and litorina transgressions of the baltic in southwest finland. quaternary international 9, 27–32. grimm e (1990). tilia and tilia-graph: pc spreadsheet and graphics software for pollen data. inqua working group on data-handling methods newsletter 4. hyvärinen h (1980). relative sea-level changes near helsinki, southern finland, during early litorina times. bulletin of the geological society of finland 52, 207–219. hyvärinen h (1999). shore displacement and stone age dwelling sites near helsinki, southern coast of finland. in huurre h (ed): dig it all – papers dedicated to ari siiriäinen, 79–89. the finnish antiquarian society & archaological society of finland. hyyppä e (1937). post-glacial changes of shore-line in south finland. bulletin de la commission géologique de finlande 120, 1–225. hyyppä e (1943). beiträge zur kenntnis der ladogaund ancylustransgression. bulletin de la commission géologique de finlande 128, 139–178. ignatius h & r tynni (1978). itämeren vaiheet ja piilevätutkimus. publications of the department of quaternary geology 36, 1–26, university of turku. itkonen ti (1949). muinaissuksia ja -jalaksia. suomen museo 1949, 27–40. jantunen t (1995). a late litorina transgression in the district of porvoo in southern finland. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 158, 1–40. jowsey pc (1966). an improved peat sampler. new phytologist 65, 245–248. korhola a (1990a). suomen soiden synty ja kehitys. terra 102, 256–267. korhola a (1990b). paleolimnology and hydroseral development of the kotasuo bog, southern finland, with special reference to the cladocera. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 155, 1–40. 100 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi sirviö and meri kajander krammer k & h lange-bertalot (1986). bacillariophyceae 1. in ettl h, j gerloff, h heynig & d mollenhauer (eds). süsswasserflora von mitteleuropa 2/1. 876 p. gustav fischer verlag, stuttgart, new york. krammer k & h lange-bertalot (1988). bacillariophyceae 2. in ettl h, gerloff j, heynig h & d mollenhauer (eds). süsswasserflora von mitteleuropa 2/2. 596 p. gustav fischer verlag, stuttgart, new york. krammer k & h lange-bertalot (1991a). bacillariophyceae 3. in ettl h, j gerloff, h heynig & d mollenhauer (eds). süsswasserflora von mitteleuropa 2/3. 576 p. gustav fischer verlag, stuttgart, new york. krammer k & h lange-bertalot (1991b). bacillariophyceae 4. in ettl h, j gerloff, h heynig & d mollenhauer (eds). süsswasserflora von mitteleuropa 2/4. 437 p. gustav fischer verlag, stuttgart, new york. luho v (1950). kertomus orimattilan pennalan kivikautisen löytöpaikan kaivauksesta. unpublished excavation report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/päijät-hämeen maakuntamuseo. mangerud j, andersen st, berglund b & j donner (1974). quaternary stratigraphy of norden, proposal for terminology and classification. boreas 3, 109–128. matiskainen h (1989a). the chronology of the finnish mesolithic. iskos 8, 379–390. matiskainen h (1989b). the paleoenvironment of askola, southern finland. mesolithic settlement and subsistence 10000–6000 bp. iskos 8, 1–97. meinander cf (1960). kaivauskertomus – c.f. meinanderin kaivaus orimattilan pennalassa 2.– 4.6.1959. unpublished excavation report. meinander cf (1971). radiokarbondateringar till finlands stenâlder. societas scientiarum fennica årsbok 47 b (5), 1–14. miettinen a (2002). relative sea level changes in the eastern part of the gulf of finland during the last 8000 years. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae, geologica-geographica 162, 1–102. moore p, ja webb & me collinson (1991). pollen analysis. 2nd ed. 216 p. blackwell, cambridge. poutiainen h (1998). porvoonjoen vesistöalueen kivikautisen asutuksen arkeologinen inventointi – hollolan, lahden ja orimattilan alueella. 22 p. inventory report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/päijäthämeen maakuntamuseo. poutiainen h (2001). lahti myllyoja, kivikautisen asuinpaikan arkeologinen koekaivaus. 26 p. excavation report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/päijäthämeen maakuntamuseo. poutiainen h (2002). personal communication 05.09.2002. poutiainen h & h takala (2001). rengonjoen arkeologinen inventointi lahden ja orimattilan rajalla. 15 p. inventory report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/päijät-hämeen maakuntamuseo. ristaniemi o (1984). ancylusjärven aikainen rannansiirtyminen salpausselkä-vyöhykkeessä karjalohjan–kiskon alueella lounais-suomessa. publications of the department of quaternary geology 53. university of turku 75 p. ristaniemi o & g glückert (1987). the ancylus transgression in the area of espoo – the first salpausselkä, southern finland. bulletin of the geological society of finland 59 part i, 45–69. sandgren p, risberg j & r thompson (1990). magnetic susceptibility in sediment records of lake ådran, eastern sweden: correlation among cores and interpretation. journal of paleolimnology 3, 129–141. siiriäinen a (1973). studies relating to shore displacement and stone age chronology in finland. finskt museum 1973, 5–22. siiriäinen a (1982). shore displacement and archaeology in finland. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 134, 173–184. siiriäinen a (1987). on archaeology and land uplift in finland. geological survey of finland, special paper 2, 43–45. sirviö t (2000). kivikautisten asuinpaikkojen sijainti suhteessa itämereen pukkilanharjun, kanteleen ja luhdanjoen alueilla. 40 p. research report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/päijät-hämeen maakuntamuseo. sirviö t, m kajander & m heikkilä (2002). ancylus transgressio ja pienvesistöjen kehitys lahden– orimattilan alueella. 49 p. research report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/ päijät-hämeen maakuntamuseo. snowball i & r thompson (1988). the occurrence of greigite in sediments from loch lomond. journal of quaternary science 3, 121–125. stuiver m & p reimer (1993). extended 14c database and revised calib 3.2 14c age calibration program. radiocarbon 35, 215–230. takala h (1999). arkeologiset tutkimukset lahden ristolassa 1999. excavation report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/päijät-hämeen maakuntamuseo. takala h (2001). lahti, renkomäki, uusitalo ja orimattila, pennala, alestalo – arkeologinen koekaivaus. 26 p. excavation report. lahden kaupunginmuseo/päijät-hämeen maakuntamuseo. takala h (2002). personal communication 01.09. 2002. tikkanen m & a korhola (1993). divergent successions in two adjacent rocky basins in southern finland: a physiographic and palaeoecological evaluation. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 157, 1–26. tolonen k & r ruuhijärvi (1976). standard pollen diagrams from salpausselkä region of southern finland. annales botanici fennici 13, 155–196. tynni r (1966). über spatund postglaziale uferverschiebung in der gegend von askola, südfinnland. bulletin de la commission géologique de finlande 223, 97 p. tynni r (1969). suomen yleisimmät piilevät sekä infennia 181: 1 (2003) 101holocene development of the pennala basin with special … dikaattorilajit. 15 p. turun yliopiston maaperägeologian laitos. valovirta v (1949). orimattilasta löydetyn reenjalaksen ikä. geologi 3–4, 10–11. vuorela i (1978). local settlement history of the lahti area as shown by pollen analysis. bulletin of geological society of finland 50, 45–57. vuorela i (1981). pennalan kivikautisen asuinpaikan siitepölystratigrafia. lahden kaupungin museoja taidelautakunta, tutkimuksia xix/1981, 1–19. vuorela i & m eronen (1978). suomen kvartääripaleontologian yleiset perusteet ja menetelmät. geologian ja paleontologian osasto. helsingin yliopisto. deregulated free-for-all planning, new settlements and the spectre of abandoned building sites in scotland’s crisis-hit oil economy urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa65626 doi: 10.11143/fennia.65626 deregulated free-for-all planning, new settlements and the spectre of abandoned building sites in scotland’s crisis-hit oil economy william walton walton, w. (2018) deregulated free-for-all planning, new settlements and the spectre of abandoned building sites in scotland’s crisis-hit oil economy. fennia 196(1) 58–76. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 the creation of new settlements as a response to the accommodation of household growth was regarded by the scottish government from the 1980s to around 2008 as an option of the last resort. this position changed due to significant legislative and policy changes to the scottish planning system which diluted restrictions on greenfield housing development and removed the right for public hearings into development plan objections in the belief that these procedures hindered economic growth. this paper outlines the evolution of planning policy for new settlements from the 1990s to the present and examines its impact upon proposals for such projects in north-east scotland. it contends that the removal of the right to hearings into major development proposals is symptomatic of both the post-politics condition which seeks to promote neoliberal values by squeezing out dissenting voices and green light administrative law theory which vests important decisions over citizens’ rights in the hands of unaccountable state bureaucrats. finally it considers the implications of the current north sea oil crisis for the development of three new settlements in the area. keywords: planning, development plan examinations, new settlements, scotland, red light/green light, post politics william walton, school of law, northumbria university, cce1, newcastle-upontyne, ne1 8st, united kingdom. e-mail: william.walton@northumbria.ac.uk introduction since the 1990s there has been a consensus across much of the uk that the state and the market have jointly failed to provide sufficient housing for those on medium to low incomes. the problems created by lack of affordability and the steep house price gradients between fast growing and lagging regions have led to rigidities in labour markets and consequential economic inefficiency. in scotland, adopting the same supply side approach as advocated by kate barker in england and wales (barker 2004), the scottish government concluded that to materially reduce house prices there would be a need to increase dwelling output from around 25,000 per year to 35,000 per year by 2020 (scottish government 2007). this requirement for additional housing has cascaded down to the 32 local authorities who have responded through making considerably more land available in their strategic development plans (sdps) and local development plans (ldps). this task has been facilitated by the near contemporaneous programme of deregulatory planning reform. signalled through the white paper ‘modernising the scottish planning system’ and implemented through the planning etc (scotland) act 2006 © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65626 fennia 196(1) (2018) 59william walton and numerous accompanying statutory instruments, this programme has sought to produce a simplified and more responsive land use management system capable of achieving greater social inclusion, stronger environmental protection and, above all, enhanced levels of development and economic growth (peel & lloyd 2006). these policy and legislative changes have led to several development plan allocations and planning approvals across scotland for private new settlements, comprising anywhere from 500 to 5,000 or more houses, with some in train of construction. although the concept of private sector-led new settlements is by no means new in scotland, most previous proposals met with rejection following a process of scrutiny during which the public and other users of the planning system could closely evaluate their compatibility with national and local policy. today, however, in sharp contrast to the 1980s and 1990s, developers have been able to secure approvals relatively easily through the new expedited ‘light touch’ development plan review procedures in which the scope for the public to make meaningful objections has been very heavily circumscribed. this new light touch approach to development plan approval is part and parcel of the scottish government’s desire to affect a so-called ‘cultural change’ to the planning system. whilst not explicitly defined with any great clarity, this cultural change appears to amount to a belief in the need for the planning system to secure more development, more quickly consistent with the protection of critical natural capital. a core component within this strategy was the decision to significantly diminish the opportunity of those individuals and groups objecting to new development plan proposals to ventilate their views in public hearings and test the local authority's/developer's case. explicitly, the change was motivated by a desire to make the system of development plan approval less adversarial and thus fairer to under resourced communities worn down by consultation fatigue. implicitly, it was in large part motivated by a desire to sideline well organised vocal minorities (‘stoppers’) who were generally regarded as being unrepresentative of the wider community (the silent majority) which had a more accommodating and more pragmatic approach to new development and economic prosperity (short et al. 1986). the paper commences through examining the process of planning reform in scotland, specifically in regard to the process of the examination of development plans, through the lens of post-politics theory and red light/green light administrative law theory. it then moves on to review the impact which deregulatory planning reforms in scotland have had on the policy framework relevant to new settlement proposals from the 1990s to the present. the paper then reviews new settlement promotion in the aberdeen area of north-east scotland, first during the 1970s to 2008 when planning policy was more highly regulated, and then from 2009 to the present when the policy became more deregulated. data for housing land supply and construction is sourced from local authority development plans and monitoring reports. this is supplemented by responses from interviews conducted with two former members of scottish parliament (msps), a planning reporter, a civil servant and four community councillors from aberdeen/aberdeenshire1. finally, in the light of the current north sea oil crisis the paper considers whether north-east scotland is heading for a property crash caused through over-production. post-politics and green light public law theory the desire to foreclose the opportunities for parties to express their dissent is consistent with two distinct yet overlapping theoretical stances; first, the post-politics condition as associated in urban planning in particular with oosterlynck and swyngedouw (2010), counsell, haughton and allmendinger (2012), allmendinger and haughton (2012), macleod (2013), and deas (2014) and, second, the ‘red light/green light’ administrative law theory as coined by harlow and rawlings (2009). post-politics is a condition generally associated with an ostensibly shrinking, rather than an expanding, state in which neoliberal values of profit accumulation, economic growth and economic efficiency are hegemonic and taken as normal2. land use planning is legitimate only to the extent that it helps create and sustain the conditions in which these values can best be achieved. to do this it helps to nurture a fake consensus in which the scope for expressions of dissensus, agonism and ‘political’ debate over alternative values by competing interests is highly limited. first order issues – such as the exploitation of land value and the pursuit of developer profit – are taken as being beyond the bounds of legitimate 60 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers debate and thus not open for discussion and disagreement. instead, public debate is essentially confined to second order matters such as where development should take place and what it should look like (although, here again, only as long as it does not prejudice the pursuit of first order principles). increasingly, planning decisions are made within a web of soft spaces in which technocratic experts working within policy networks comprising numerous public and quasi public bodies (such as local economic development agencies) are considered to offer the only legitimate viewpoints whilst those with dissenting voices are increasingly isolated, ignored and squeezed out (haughton et al. 2013). where such soft spaces are less evident, as in the more localised system of government that operates in ireland (and arguably in rural scotland) dissenting voices still invariably fail to be heard, being squeezed out by more established stakeholders such as large house builders and business representative organisations (counsell et al. 2012). within this post politics context, public hearings into development plan objections are only likely to be tolerated if their remit is sufficiently narrow as to preclude members of the public from questioning the fundamental assumptions governing such matters as development targets incorporated within higher order national policy frameworks and if they can be conducted expeditiously without resulting in significant changes likely to cause undue delay to plan preparation. ‘red light’ theory has its intellectual roots in the doctrine of the rule of law associated with the 19th and early 20th century jurist a. v. dicey (dicey 1902). it contends that the primary function of the law is to curb any excesses by the executive in the use of its powers in order to protect private property and private contractual rights. although in the first instance it was no doubt hoped that a vigilant legislature would act as a check on the unbridled powers of the executive it was recognised that the primary safeguard would be provided by (red light) interventionist courts. however, the further expansion of the state in the early 20th century into areas such as education, housing and health and the adoption of keynesian demand management post-1945 necessitated a move away from reliance solely upon fixed rules to the increasing use of statutory instruments, policy statements, best practice guides and circulars. the implementation of this ‘quasi legislation’ (megarry 1944) or ‘soft law’ (sossin & smith 2003) was largely policed through the exercise of discretionary judgment by local and state bureaucrats (davies 1969). it is this more light touch approach at the far end of the regulatory spectrum (ganz 1972) which harlow and rawlings (2009) characterise as ‘green light’. but if discretionary powers were construed too widely by the executive there would be the obvious risk of unjust outcomes arising from their inconsistent application from one bureaucrat to another, from one jurisdiction to another and from case to another. consequently, most of the statutory codes – whether determining people’s rights to build a home or to operate a taxi firm incorporated some form of appeal system whereby an aggrieved party could have his case reconsidered by an inspector acting in a quasi judicial function. we might refer to this as an ‘amber light’ safeguard mechanism occupying an intermediary point along ganz’s regulatory spectrum. despite their arguably very different political-economy contexts, neoliberal post-politics and keynesianism green light administrative law theory seem to be united in the belief that economic or governmental elites are best placed to make decisions on behalf of the ordinary citizenry in many dayto-day policy areas. under the condition of post-politics policy and business elites – acting through the state – seek to deny the majority of citizens the opportunity to challenge higher order policies because they cannot be trusted for fear that this might result in the dismantlement of the underlying neo liberal orthodoxy of economic expansion. similarly, under green light administrative law theory local and central state bureaucrats consider themselves to be best placed to make decisions to advance the general welfare of the wider population. the extent to which these theories explain the rationale for the changes introduced by the scottish government to the development plan examination process will become evident as the paper progresses. planning reform in scotland following the devolution of most domestic powers from westminster to edinburgh in 1998 the labour/liberal democrat coalition administration prioritised the reform of the scottish planning system within its legislative agenda. proceeding from the premise that the existing system was unduly fennia 196(1) (2018) 61william walton complicated – indeed, almost dysfunctional the administration set out to simplify and accelerate the processes of development plan preparation and planning application determination. it contended this would help increase public engagement and trust, and promote both greater social inclusion and sustainable economic growth. to affect this the scottish executive3 called upon all of those engaged in planning to become less entrenched in their views and – through what it called a ‘cultural change’ “...to reassert the collective project of land use planning and development...” (peel & lloyd 2007, 490) – to focus on the delivery of new development in the appropriate locations through, inter alia, the faster preparation of development plans. the problem of delay in plan making had become more acute following the introduction of the planning & compensation (scotland) act 1991. prior to that date the law held that the relevant decision maker (usually the local planning authority) had to have regard to the development plan and to any other ‘material considerations’ such as any shortage of development land when determining a planning application. after 1991, however, the law changed so that planning applications had to be determined in line with the development plan unless material considerations indicated otherwise. because the post-1991 system considerably elevated the legal status of the development plan it became imperative for landowners and developers to try and ensure that the plan allocated their sites for profitable forms of development such as residential and retail uses. to do this these interests would need to be involved at every stage of the plan preparation process including at the public inquiry where they could participate either to object to the council’s failure to include their site(s) for development or, possibly, to try and protect their development allocation being transferred to a rival operator claiming to have a more appropriate site. the development plan framework in scotland comprises a national planning framework (npf) setting out national infrastructure priorities and, in the four city regions (edinburgh; glasgow; dundee; and aberdeen), an upper-tier sdp and, for all 32 lower-tier authorities (and two national parks), an ldp4. housing numbers are set out in the sdps in the four city regions and by the ldps in the rural areas beyond. the sdps identify the broad scale and location of development (e.g. 1,000 houses in town x) across the jurisdiction, which are then translated into site specific proposals in the daughter ldp (e.g. 150 houses at site x). the first stage of plan preparation involves drafting a ‘main issues report’ in which – consistent with a requirement to provide for a specified level of development (the quantum issue is not open for discussion) – the council identifies a range of potential sites for the public to consider and provide feedback to assist in the process of selecting the most appropriate (or the least objectionable). two further versions of the sdp/ldp are produced, with the final one being submitted for formal scrutiny. until 2007 the scrutiny of the upper-tier plan had always been performed by the minister through consideration of written representations. in contrast, the scrutiny of the ldp had, prior to 2007, always included a public inquiry. on conclusion of the inquiry and consideration of written representations the reporter would propose any recommended changes – such as the deletion of a proposal – to the council which could accept or reject his advice (the reporter’s amendments became de facto binding from 2006 onward)5. once the local plan had been adopted it would form the basis for the determination of planning applications. public inquiries are used in a variety of contexts within the uk’s system of administrative justice (wade & forsyth 2000). as previously stated, they can be viewed as an ‘amber light’ mechanism to curb against the possibility of the abuse of administrative discretion. they are routinely used to resolve objections into major projects, largely because the adversarial style is widely regarded as allowing for the competing evidence to be tested to best effect. but whilst public inquiries allow for greater transparency in the planning process they have nevertheless been subject to considerable criticism since their introduction in the 1970s. lay people might find their highly formal, quasi judicial procedures intimidating and exclusionary, or the attitude of professionals as patronising and condescending (rydin 1993). objectors to a development proposal might be frustrated by rules preventing them from challenging the basis of the underlying policy (such as the assumptions underlying the calculations of housing need) (cullingworth & nadin 2002). some might conclude that inquiries are little more than ritualistic shams which provide no more than a superficial appearance of impartiality in order to confer legitimacy on a process which is intrinsically favourable to developers, landowners and the state (tyme 1978). but others adopt a more positive approach to their use. for 62 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers example, owens and cowell (2011) contend that public inquiries have opened up opportunities for conservation interests to challenge notions of sustainability and question the legitimacy of schemes such as roads and mineral workings. there has been little research on the effectiveness of the oral presentation of a case at local plan inquiry, in particular for a local community group although that which there is suggests that it can use the mode materially to its advantage (smith et al. 1986; webster & lavers 1991). however, there is a good data base of statistics for scotland, england and wales as regards the comparative effectiveness of oral against written presentation of cases in appeals against refusal of planning permission. in england and wales, appellants have a considerably greater chance of overturning decisions where a public inquiry is used as against a hearing or written representations. in scotland, the position is more mixed although the small number of public inquiries typically held each year into planning appeals makes it more difficult to draw meaningful conclusions6. the large numbers of objectors combined with the requirements for natural justice – permitting each party the opportunity to cross examine the evidence presented by opposing parties – meant that many local plan inquiries would sometimes run for 12 months or more7. inevitably this contributed seriously to the problem of delay prompting questions over the efficacy of the system. resolving the issue of plan delay was a critical aspect of the scottish executive’s planning reform agenda. it argued a need to move away from public inquiries and adopt less formal, inquisitorial means of eliciting the public’s opinion through roundtable discussions (scottish executive 2003a). these were contended to be in the best interests of overstretched communities whom – it was claimed – only had a very limited understanding of the complexities of the planning system and were worn down by having to attend lengthy, sterile planning inquiries. in fact, analysis of the responses to the scottish executive’s survey failed to reveal any basis for this condescending attitude (poustie 2007) raising wider concerns about the probity of government consultation exercises (bickerstaff & walker 2005). nevertheless, recognising that for some the opportunity to have their voice heard was an important part of the process, the scottish government gave a guarantee that objectors would retain the statutory right to present their case through a public inquiry. however, somewhat confusingly, the same document also proposed that the mode of examination would be determined by the planning reporter. the white paper, ‘modernising the planning system’ (scottish executive 2005), failed to provide clarification as to what the scottish executive’s intentions were with regard to ldp public inquiries. notwithstanding how critical the issue was to the principles of justice and transparency, which the white paper claimed were priorities, the mode of ldp examination was not discussed in the main text but was instead referred to only briefly in the final appendix. it stated that less reliance would be placed upon public inquiries but that there would be a ‘mandatory requirement for a public examination’ of a development plan. although the term ‘public examination’ was not part of the scottish planning lexicon it was reasonable to assume that it was intended to be synonymous with the term ‘public inquiry’. after two rounds of public consultation final clarification on the format for scrutinising development plans was only provided through publication of the planning (scotland) etc bill in december 2005. part 2, s.19(5) stated that the decision on the format of the examination of the objections was to be at the discretion of the planning reporter, not the objector. on the face of it, this might have seemed to be a perfectly reasonable alteration with experienced planning reporters being well placed to judge which form of scrutiny would be most appropriate for resolving specific representations. during questioning by the scottish parliament’s local government & communities committee the chief planner stated: “to avoid doubt, i make it clear that the bill creates a mandatory duty to have a public inquiry on and an examination of strategic development plans” (mackinnon 2006, clmn. 3358). in regard to local development plan examinations he continued: “i suspect that a public inquiry is the more appropriate process when the information is uncertain and needs to be explored in more detail...(t)he three options are written representations, an informal hearing and a public inquiry. i suspect that every local plan will go through a mixture of those processes. i suspect we would like more to be dealt with by written submissions and in hearings, but there is no doubt that in some circumstances, a public local inquiry at which evidence is rigorously tested will be appropriate” (author’s emphasis in italics, ibid., clmn 3359). fennia 196(1) (2018) 63william walton the chief planner’s comment, expressed so adamantly, in regard to strategic development plan examinations is virtually incomprehensible given that the bill specifically did not create any such mandatory duty to hold a public inquiry. instead, as with ldps, the bill left the choice of mode of examination into sdps to the discretion of the planning reporter who, under the proposed legislation, would assume an even more pivotal position in the scottish planning system. nevertheless, on the basis of the chief planner’s submission it was not unreasonable for the msps on the committee to have concluded that whilst the wording in the bill left the examination format indeterminate, de facto all top-tier sdps and all complex issues (such as proposals for new settlements) in lower-tier ldps would be subject to rigorous scrutiny through a public inquiry. the failure of the committee to have properly appreciated the possible implications of the wording of the bill vis-à-vis ldp (and sdp) examinations and to challenge the scottish government came as a surprise to some civil servants. in an interview with the author, one said: ”a number of us didn’t think that clause (withdrawing the right of ldp objectors to a public inquiry) would have a chance before the committee. we thought they’d be all over it immediately given that the proposal hadn’t been floated in consultation....we knew that the clause would enormously disadvantage community councils and other objectors. but the view of some (colleagues), bluntly, was that we needed to have a lot less democracy and a lot more development.....we were astonished to get away with it....the committee just didn’t do its job.” the extent of the ramifications caused by the failure of the committee to identify and appreciate the implications of the withdrawal of the guaranteed amber light public inquiry protections for local communities is becoming very clear. by november 2016 there had been 4 sdps and 25 ldps adopted in scotland under the auspices of the planning etc. (scotland) act 2006. the four sdp examinations considered, in aggregate, 106 ‘issues’. none of these issues were subject to a formal or informal hearing; all were considered through written representation. 1776 separate issues were scrutinised in the 25 ldp examinations, with only 23 (1.3%) being subject to a public inquiry or informal hearing (many of which covered housing land supply). 12 of the ldp examinations were conducted entirely through written representations8. to all intents and purposes, as a result of the planning reforms and the ‘choices’ made by planning reporters, amber light public inquiries have disappeared from the scottish planning landscape and very few policies in the sdps and ldps have been materially amended following examination under the much lighter touch post-reform procedures. a planning reporter suggested that, notwithstanding the wording of the legislation, pressure from government ministers and their advisers was being applied to minimise the likelihood of a public inquiry being used to evaluate objections into a development plan: “we have been told, unequivocally, ‘no public inquiries or hearings into local plans unless it is absolutely unavoidable’. that came from senior civil servants in the government’s planning directorate. so the scottish government tells councils that they’re in charge of the process so long as the local plan has a very generous amount of development land and then tells us (the reporters) not to interfere. there really are very few checks and balances now on new development, however inappropriate it is”. quite how this sits with the long established principle of the separation of powers and the right to a fair trial under the european convention on human rights and fundamental freedoms is, to put it mildly, open to question. the former conservative party spokesman for housing, transport and infrastructure, alex johnstone msp, said: “we have ended up with a very, very, very bad system. but i think that the witnesses were more to blame than the msps on the committee. the msps were completely misled on the development plan examination issue....they were assured by the chief planner that there would be public inquiries into all sdps and into controversial issues in ldps. those assurances have transpired to be 100% false. only the lawyers recognised the dangers inherent within the bill....labour and now the snp have surrounded themselves with a cosy cabal of ‘me too’ so-called experts all too keen to give unconditional endorsement to their ill considered planning proposals. ordinary people have been removed from what is now a near free-for-all system which appears to be council-led but which is really driven by central government with an obsession in meeting absurdly unrealistic development targets. prohibiting local plan inquiries was nonsense. fundamental reforms are needed to restore trust in the scottish planning system...”. 64 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers these scathing remarks suggest that the reforms were motivated by an overwhelming determination to deliver more development but in a way that gives the appearance that electorally accountable local authorities and neutral planning reporters are in charge of the process. the repeated references in the white paper to enhancing citizen involvement were little more than a tempting allurement to seduce unwitting and ill-informed readers into supporting the proposals. support for the reforms was provided by a former snp msp who stated: “the 2006 reforms have considerably loosened the ties that unnecessarily constrained development. of course, some community councils and objectors won’t be too happy but that is a mark of just how successful the reforms have been. i think that parliament said in 2006, ‘ok, people should be able to have a say in what a development should look like but not in whether or not it should go ahead’. previously, that was happening far too much in these lengthy inquiries. now it’s mainly behind closed doors and i’m pretty comfortable with that....we still have some way to go in rolling back the planning system further and making it more developer friendly and that is in hand; but we have more or less neutralised the opportunity for community councillors and objectors to say ‘no’ so often and that has to be good.” the comments almost perfectly reinforce those of allmendinger and haughton (2012) who note, in reference to planning reforms in england, “you can engage in planning at the level of the superficial not the concrete” (ibid., 98). new settlement planning policy in scotland planned settlements have a long history in scotland with around 500 villages having been laid out in the 18th and 19th centuries in line with a master plan drawn up by the landowner (the laird) (lockhart 1980). during the post-1945 period a series of state-led new towns were built as overspill for the central belt conurbation (east kilbride; cumbernauld; glenrothes; livingston; and irvine). generally, though, the post-1947 planning system has incorporated a longstanding presumption in favour of urban containment which remained in place until the end of the millennium. strong household growth pressures from the 1980s onward forced the conservative controlled scottish office to explicitly identify the (very limited) circumstances under which a planning authority might entertain a proposal for the creation of a private sector-led new town but, where possible, councils were to make “....full and effective use...of land within existing built-up areas...” (scottish office 1993, 5). but by 2000, confronted with projections showing further significant increases in the number of households across scotland, the newly elected labour-liberal democrat coalition sought to develop a less rigid approach to greenfield housing development (national record of scotland 2000; pacione 2004). moreover, the scottish executive was beginning to view the unreformed planning system as a significant contributory factor to scotland’s comparatively poor economic performance (mackinnon 2001; lloyd & peel 2009). responding to the concerns of the private sector, new government draft guidance instructed planning authorities to adopt a longer term and more greenfield focused approach to housing land allocation with less reliance upon the contribution from brownfield sites when preparing their development plans (homes for scotland 2002; scottish executive 2003b). in april 2007 the labour/liberal democrat coalition was replaced by a minority snp-led administration. contending that the previous incumbents had failed to deliver on the widening of the north-south a9 through the highlands, the construction of the aberdeen bypass and the borders railway, the snp made progress on major infrastructure projects a priority. in october 2007 it launched a discussion document setting out its proposals to tackle the increasing problem of housing affordability in scotland by increasing output from around 25,000 units per year to 35,000 units by 2015 (+40%) (scottish government 2007). to achieve this objective, planning authorities were advised to release more land in the belief that this would significantly reduce its cost and so bring price rises for housing into line with other goods and services. to place its aspirations in a slightly broader context, the target figure was nearly twice as high as the average output level of 18,600 units per year achieved 1981–1991 (scottish government 2018). accordingly, the snp scottish government introduced a transformational relaxation of planning policy (cuthbert & cuthbert 2009). the presumption against the development of new settlements fennia 196(1) (2018) 65william walton would only apply where there was a strong supply of identifiable brownfield sites which effectively prevented councils from taking into account the expected yield from unidentified windfall sites (scottish government 2008). the need for a more generous supply of housing land was re-emphasised in the new consolidated scottish planning guidance which stated that development plans should be ‘visionary and ambitious‘ (scottish government 2010, 1) and ‘aspirational’ (ibid., 3). in 2011 the snp was returned to government with a majority on a manifesto that included a commitment to ‘...speed up planning decisions, avoid unnecessary delays in new development and act as a boost for the construction industry’ (scottish national party 2011, 11). three years later, it issued new guidance notes advising local authorities to identify a ‘housing supply target’ which would reflect what could be delivered rather than simply what was needed, with the proviso that the supply should be at least 20% above projected demand (scottish government 2014a, 2014b). the scale of possible delivery would depend upon constraints such as the state of the local construction sector as well as protective designations but this policy change considerably weakened the longstanding link between supply and demand and set the stage for the preparation of planning strategies based more on aspiration than on anticipated levels of demand9. indeed, one might argue that through encouraging a substantial over allocation of land central government policy makers were signalling a move towards the ‘sale’ of development rights to the applicant offering the greatest level of planning gain (leunig 2007). aberdeen 1973–2008: from new settlements to brownfield development since its discovery in the late 1960s there has been a virtual umbilical link between the production of north sea oil and proposals for the construction of new settlements around aberdeen. indeed, it is quite possible that north-east scotland was the first area in the uk where a proposal for a private sector-led new settlement was brought forward. the influx of workers into the new industry placed significant pressures on the supply of housing and the existing planning framework anchored by a green belt. in a marked break from the convention of incrementally expanding suburbs a private developer, christian salvesen (properties) ltd, put forward a pioneering proposal in 1973 for a new town comprising 2,750 houses at maryculter to the south west of aberdeen (fig. 1) (smith 2000). although initially supported by kincardinshire council, following local government reorganisation the scheme was dropped by the newly created kincardine & deeside district council and grampian regional council. the primacy of the local authority-led planning framework in determining the development complexion of the area was evident again when a few years later an alternative new settlement proposal was successfully brought forward by the ashdale land and property company ltd, around the village of westhill located 13 km west of the city centre beyond the green belt. other standalone new private housing schemes – which were little more than dormitory suburbs with very few service or employment facilities – such as kingswells and balmedie soon followed (fig. 1). grampian regional council (grc) investigated further possibilities for another new settlement but these were abandoned when oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s (grc 1986a; newlands 2000). the structure plan did, however, identify a green belt location at countesswells, west of the city, as having potential for a new settlement of 1,500 houses (grc 1986b). with the revival of the north sea oil sector grc revisited the possibility of a new settlement as part of the review of the structure plan in 1991. grc incorporated a proposal for 3,300 houses in an area beyond the green belt south west of the city within the draft structure plan. in the absence of any real likelihood of an amber light public inquiry into the upper tier plan, it was only due to an unexpected and last minute change in the political complexion of the council that the proposal was abandoned (grc 1992). nevertheless, in 1994 a local based house builder decided to submit a planning application for a new settlement at banchory-devenick in the area identified in the abandoned plan (fig. 1). notwithstanding the planners’ contention that the proposal was needed to remedy a housing land supply problem the councillors rejected it. following an eight week long public inquiry into an appeal, during which a substantial body of evidence of brownfield/windfall housing yields in the aberdeen housing market area (ahma) was scrutinised in meticulous detail, the minister refused the proposal (scottish office 1998; walton 2000). a proposal for another new settlement at nearby blairs was also 66 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers refused on appeal – following another public inquiry – due to conflict with green belt policy and a demonstrable supply of brownfield land. with the banchory devenick/blairs episode settled the replacement structure plan – north east scotland together (nest) approved in 2000 – abandoned a new settlement strategy and focused nearly 80% of the city’s new housing allocation 2000–2010 on brownfield sites. but in the wake of the less restrictive government guidance issued in 2003 aberdeen city council issued a draft local plan, green spaces: new places, proposing abandonment of the brownfield focused policy (aberdeen city council 2004). concerned about the lack of family-type housing within the city and the increasingly ageing population profile the council identified seven ‘future new communities’ (fncs) in the city’s green belt for development beyond 2010 including one labelled as a ‘new settlement’ at countesswells. unsurprisingly, the proposals were strongly opposed by the suburban community councils who argued that the fncs would diminish the green belt. accordingly, many of the objectors to the plan exercised their statutory amber light right to have their arguments heard at a public inquiry. confronted with evidence disputing the robustness of the council’s long term housing projections and the requirement to release large amounts of land from the city’s greenbelt the reporters found against all of the fncs. of note, they found that the new settlement at countesswells would irreversibly damage the green belt by risking coalescence with neighbouring suburbs (directorate for planning and environmental appeals 2007a). the outcome left aberdeen with a housing strategy focused around brownfield development. aberdeen 2009 onward: from brownfield development to new settlements shortly after the scottish government abandoned its brownfield-first policy and adopted its new panscotland 35,000 homes target, aberdeen city council and aberdeenshire council set about preparing a joint sdp (aberdeen city and shire strategic planning authority 2009). the plan provided 72,000 homes over 24 years (2007–2030), equating to 3,000 units per year (compared to 1,765 units per year in nest), of which 2,300 per year would be in the ahma (compared to 1,200 units per year in nest). fig. 1. major housing development proposals in the aberdeen area. fennia 196(1) (2018) 67william walton as output levels in the ahma 2000–2008 had averaged around 1,625 units per year this apparently significant increased provision actually represented around the 40% increase required by the scottish government to secure affordability. around 40,000 of these 55,600 ahma units were to be sourced from greenfield sites – of which around 21,000 would be from within the city’s green belt. although the newly approved sdp made no provision for a new settlement, several proposals were brought forward by large landowners for inclusion in the two daughter ldps. five of the promoted schemes emerged as serious contenders – two in aberdeenshire (banchory leggart and chapelton of elsick [elsick]) – and three in the city (countesswells, grandhome and clinterty) (fig. 1). notwithstanding the national guidance policy, neither council considered the absence of provision for new settlements within the sdp as a constraint. indeed, whilst aware of the risks associated with infrastructure delivery many of the councillors in both authorities considered that a new settlement was a very attractive proposition capable of providing significant wider economic and social benefits and absorbing household growth for decades to come. following the process of public consultation and deliberation by the councillors of both authorities the developer bids for projects at banchory leggart (3,000 units) and clinterty (circa 1,500 units) were rejected for inclusion within the respective draft ldps, primarily on the grounds of the risk of coalescence and conflict with green belt policy in the case of the former and high infrastructure costs in the latter (aberdeenshire council 2010; aberdeen city council 2010). the new settlement proposal at elsick, about 15 km south of the city and beyond the green belt, was promoted through the use of a charette led by the famed new urbanist, andres duany (as was grandhome in aberdeen) (elsick development company 2011; macleod 2013)10. like clinterty, it also required significant new infrastructure provision but, with a capacity of 9,000 units was considered by aberdeenshire council as having the potential to become a self-sustaining community (rather than simply a dormitory suburb) and so was included within the draft ldp. in addition to the green belt site at countesswells (3,000 units), aberdeen city council also selected for inclusion within its draft ldp the proposal at grandhome (7,000 units) on the north side of the city which had been one of the fncs previously rejected by the reporter in the ill-fated green spaces: new places local plan (aberdeen city council 2009). each of the three schemes selected by the two authorities was subject to significant levels of objection from neighbouring residents and local community councils. but notwithstanding the inevitable complexity of the issues that arise in the context of a proposal for a new town, government guidance stipulates that written submissions must be concise and not exceed 2,000 words (scottish government 2013). none of the three proposed new settlements was subject to a public inquiry and only one (elsick) was subject to a round table discussion in which the evidence could be expanded. in the context of such a democratic deficit there are risks that some arguments will not be properly explored and potentially superior viable alternatives overlooked (cornwall 2008). in each case, adopting a light touch approach, the presiding reporter neatly side stepped making any finding on the compatibility of the proposal with national guidance or the sdp and held that each proposal should be incorporated into the new ldp. unlike his predecessor presiding over green spaces: new places, the reporter made no finding on the possibility of countesswells coalescing with surrounding suburbs notwithstanding that it was double the size of the earlier rejected scheme (directorate of planning and environmental appeals 2011a). one community councillor interviewee said: ”we knew that the developers were going to grab some of the green belt. they have been trying to release land at countesswells for decades....and now another new town....but we said that the development should be much smaller than 3,000 houses....about 1,500 houses with the rest going to clinterty. we would have liked a public inquiry....we could have put our argument thoroughly and challenged the council and the developer....we made comments to the plan but in truth that’s just a waste of time....we’re asked what we think about it but at the same time we’re denied an effective forum to say what we think. how just is that? the 2006 act effectively destroyed the planning system in scotland....it’s now just a developer’s charter.” a community councillor from a neighbouring area expressed similar sentiments: “more or less the same project (countesswells) was put forward some years ago in green spaces: 68 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers new places. then there was an inquiry. the community council gave evidence against the new town. it was right in the middle of the green belt. we said the scheme would cause cults to merge with kingswells....we went into great detail in our evidence....yes, there was cross examination but that wasn’t a concern....we objected this time around but what can you say in just 2,000 words?.... the 2006 act is in need of a complete overhaul.....it’s a disgrace....yes, we will participate again but i doubt it would have much effect.” on grandhome the reporter held that the risk that the scottish government might not provide the funds necessary for strategic transport infrastructure improvements did not warrant removing it from the plan. once again, a local community councillor expressed dismay at the process: “we’d made representations about the grandhome development in the local plan.....the developers had held a charrette to get the community’s input....these are highly manipulative exercises (cf. maccleod 2013)....we were not allowed to question the principle of the development....most opposed the project but the developer produced a fancy document claiming the very opposite..... we thought that it was just far too much development for the area’s road network.....i was told that there would be an ldp inquiry....we submitted short written comments....later we found out that the reporters had already approved the scheme....it’s as if the community voice no longer matters.... if the rules aren’t changed then you have to ask yourself what is the point of making representations since they seem to be just ignored.” finally, on elsick, whilst the reporter noted that there were risks of under delivery caused by high infrastructure costs he concluded that these could be offset if necessary by bringing forward development on other sites (directorate for planning and environmental appeals 2012a). an unimpressed community councillor commented: “we heard there was going to be one of these charrettes for elsick run by some american chap called duany....national planning guidance stated that a new settlement could only be brought forward in the ldp where it was in the sdp – and it wasn’t. so we were more than a little surprised when the chief planner from the scottish government turned up to a public meeting to heap praise on the process by which the scheme was being promoted11....these charrettes just bypass normal planning procedures (cf. maccleod 2013).....the hearing was also a farce....one of the main parties didn’t even turn up....you couldn’t question the applicant or council directly....when the reporter was asked why there wasn’t a proper inquiry he responded ‘well, you’ve had a charrette’.... the reporter was not interested about compliance with the strategic plan or national guidance.... the statutory planning framework appears to be an irrelevance....at a public inquiry a barrister would have torn the council’s case to shreds....just like the objectors did at the banchory-devenick public inquiry....but that can’t happen at these wishy-washy, let’s have a chat informal hearings.... it’s now such a dumbed-down process – pithy written submissions, brief meaningless chats....the abolition of public inquiries has been a disaster for scottish communities, for scottish planning and for scottish democracy.....yes, we’d respond again i suppose but not with any great expectations....i watched many of the planning bill committee hearings....why on earth did they agree to extend a completely ineffective system for scrutinising structure plans to local plans?....it beggars belief.... the debate was dismal....this is planning’s own ‘dangerous dogs act’12....public inquiries for development plan proposals above a certain size threshold should be mandatory.” notwithstanding the very limited size of the survey, what is clear from the consistent and forceful testimony of the community councillors is that – contrary to earlier claims made by the scottish executive – there is no apparent support for the removal of the automatic right to a public inquiry or any apparent fear of appearing before such a forum. instead, there is a deep frustration and sense of anger that they, as members of a statutory body, have been denied the opportunity to challenge what might be a cosy council/developer consensus and properly test the council’s case due to an ill considered change in the law. moreover, these responses appear to be symptomatic of more widely held views concerning a loss of trust in the scottish planning system as suggested by alex johnstone msp. three reports have affirmed this view with the national trust for scotland finding that 60% of the scottish population believe that they have ‘no’ influence at all in affecting planning decisions and another 27% stating that they have ‘very little’ influence (beveridge et al. 2016; national trust for scotland 2017; yellow book ltd 2017). as allmendinger and haughton (2012, 98) note in their analysis of post politics planning; “at worst, planners were complicit in this deceit (circumventing the political), helping alienate the profession from the communities they formerly represented”. fennia 196(1) (2018) 69william walton is north-east scotland poised for an oil-led property crash? the planned new settlements at elsick, grandhome and countesswells are just three components within an expansive greenfield-led housing strategy devised for north-east scotland (aberdeen city and shire strategic planning authority 2014). aberdeen city council has identified ‘masterplan zones’ in its ldp for 550 units at dubford, 3,000 units at newhills, 2,800 units at northfield/greenfearns, 750 units at maidencraig, 550 units at friarsfield and 1,500 units at loch loirston (fig. 1). underpinning this strategy was the assumption that the offshore oil sector would continue to thrive. however, the ink on the new sdp had barely dried when, due to an international glut brought about by fracking in the usa and an increase in output by saudi arabia, oil prices collapsed from around $110 per barrel in june 2014 to just $31 by january 2016. contraction of north sea oil production has led to the direct loss of around 160,000 jobs in the uk since 2014, with the number claiming unemployment benefit increasing in aberdeen and aberdeenshire by 69% and 92% respectively 2015–2016 (scottish parliament 2016; oil and gas uk 2017). house prices have fallen further in aberdeen than in any other local authority in the uk 2015–2016 (the press and journal 2016a). the future for the north sea is likely to be one of declining levels of oil production, increased efficiency, falling employment levels and increased expenditure on platform decommissioning. implicitly, the question arises as to whether there is a real prospect of a property crash in north-east scotland through over production of housing? within the ahma developers are being invited to deliver around 2,300 units per year 2015–2030, during what might be a protracted and possibly irreversible economic decline, compared to a historically high take-up rate of around 1,500 units per year 2000–2014 when the local economy was generally buoyant (aberdeen city council & aberdeenshire council 2005, 2010, 2016). moreover, whereas previously a very large part of the output had been sourced from small brownfield sites with relatively modest infrastructure costs, the large greenfield allocations in the current local plans, and in particular the new settlements, will have high advanced costs due to high planning gain obligations and thus higher commercial risks. although it is too early to answer the above question definitively there are factors which suggest that the spectre of half built estates in north-east scotland – and beyond13 – is a distinct possibility. notwithstanding the oil crisis, most of the developers of large greenfield sites in the city have progressed their proposals through the masterplan stage to planning permission. construction has started at elsick and countesswells. initially the developer at elsick envisaged output of around 250 units per year implying completion of phase-one (4,000 units) within about 16 years (aberdeenshire council 2010). but four years after full planning permission was granted for the first section of the new urbanism project, just 102 houses have been sold or reserved (elsick development company 2017). at countesswells, the developer has announced that the first new homes will soon be ready for purchase in what will eventually be a garden community in harmony with nature (the press and journal 2016b). construction of new access roads has commenced for the new community at grandhome which the developers say will embody the architectural heritage of the medieval precinct of old aberdeen (grandhome trust 2013). the rush by landowners to bring these sites forward despite such dire economic circumstances is a reminder of the inherent lack of collective logic within so-called organised capitalism (offe 1985). landowners and developers inevitably argue for their sites to be released for development during plan reviews in order to enhance their capital value, whilst also opposing land releases elsewhere to protect that enhancement. once a site has been approved developers will be confronted with a form of prisoner’s dilemma as they try to second guess the actions of competitors and calculate the commercial risks between proceeding and not proceeding with the project, with the degree of certainty being broadly in inverse proportion to the number of competitor sites (adams & watkins 2014). there is a perceived inherent contradiction between what is good for the one and what is good for the collective whole, suggesting that tight land use planning regulation is a prerequisite for, rather than a threat to, the successful accumulation of land development capital (dear & scott 1981). in aberdeen, even the option of the imposition of a variant of a phasing condition – permitting only one new settlement to be brought forward at a time – has been overlooked. the protective framework 70 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers that once provided certainty to developers and communities has largely been removed in scotland through the deregulation of the planning system. conclusions planning policy in north-east scotland in regard to the provision of private new settlements has moved almost full circle since commencement of construction of westhill in the 1970s was followed by a succession of rejections for similar proposals during the 1990s and 2000s, through to their reemergence as a preferred form of development following the planning reforms introduced from 2006 onward. what is significant is that during the period of constraint the three principal parties within the planning system – developers/landowners, the public and the local state – were each able to exert their influence on one another within a system that permitted dissenting voices through the use of amber light checks and balances. this state of affairs was, however, completely changed following the introduction of the planning etc (scotland) act 2006 through which automatic amber light checks on the new generation of ‘ambitious’ and ‘aspirational’ development plans were removed. as allmendinger and haughton (2012, 90) note: “...there is a danger that the resulting planning system is not so much an empowering arena for debating wide-ranging societal options for future development, as a system focussed on carefully stage-managed processes with subtly but carefully defined parameters of what is open for debate. the system gives the superficial appearance of engagement and legitimacy whilst focusing on delivering growth expedited through some carefully choreographed processes for participation which minimise the potential for those with conflicting views to be given a meaningful hearing.” the reform proposals set out in the white paper were superficially attractive and thus potentially appealing to msps and many of the parliamentary committee witnesses with little more than a skindeep knowledge and understanding of the planning system. the white paper spoke about the need for greater public engagement, but these statements were firmly within the context of achieving economic growth. a careful reading of the proposals would have revealed the scottish government’s ambivalence and near hostility to local plan inquiries and the obvious implications this would have for meaningful participation. nevertheless, only a small handful of the witnesses identified probably the most anti-democratic measure introduced into any planning system in the uk, removing the right established in the early 1970s to have a development plan objection heard at a public hearing14. it is difficult to recall a time when 35 years’ worth of hard-won community rights were so casually jettisoned by parliament and those advising it. the failure of the parliament to recognise the potential consequences of the changes is symptomatic of the dangers of a non-vigilant (and an ill-informed) legislature and a reminder of the critical role played by the courts as a backstop against the misuse of government power. the evidence available so far suggests that the de facto removal of ldp-public inquiries is perhaps more consistent with a form of post-politics stage-management aimed at securing economic growth, as argued by allmendinger and haughton (2012), than with harlow and rawlings' (2009) green light approach seeking to advance wider collective interests, although further research in the politics surrounding development plan adoption across scotland is required. what we can say is that from its inception, the planning reform project appears to have been motivated by a deep-seated desire of ministers and senior civil servants to lull parliament into heavily diluting longstanding community procedural safeguards in the belief that this would facilitate increased levels of development. planning reform has produced administrative efficiencies but at the marked expense of individual and community rights and amber light scrutiny (pacione 2014)15. or put another way, the need for outputbased legitimacy, described as the “...speedy provision of urban space, new dwellings and more jobs...” (falleth et al. 2010, 748), has subjugated the need for input-based legitimacy (the right of the public to shape plans). paradoxically, however, the reforms have failed to deliver increased output due to changed economic circumstances. annual housing completions for scotland have not exceeded 17,600 units post-2009, barely half of the scottish government’s target of 35,000 units per year by 2015 (scottish government 2017a). fennia 196(1) (2018) 71william walton perhaps because of these shortcomings the scottish government is now intent on diluting further those protections the public have been allowed to cling on to in order to speed up development delivery. following consultation in 2016 on ‘root and branch’ reforms the scottish government has indicated that it is minded to introduce an even lighter form of development plan scrutiny with a draft being ‘gatechecked’ at an early stage in the process by a reporter to ensure that the technical evidence base is sufficiently robust and to obviate any need for detailed examination later on. under this streamlined system it is inevitable that there will be even fewer oral hearings, with the only real recourse for the public being through the use of judicial review16. further, once a site has been allocated for development the scottish government is proposing that there should be less opportunity for commenting on, and objecting to, any subsequent planning application (scottish government 2017b). such a deregulatory approach, whilst intended as a market stimulus, is highly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the local economy, as demonstrated by the case study of aberdeen. with the collapse of international oil prices the policy of seeking to allocate so much greenfield land for development around the city now seems very ill judged. it is a little ironic that the concept of the new settlement, which was first brought forward largely in response to the housing pressures generated by the exploitation of north sea oil, was rejected in virtually all cases only to be embraced some 35 years or so later just when that same resource base appears to have entered a spiral of irreversible decline. advocates of planning liberalisation would argue that an increased land supply will result in greater housing affordability and the satisfaction of previously suppressed demand. however, in aberdeen and elsewhere the policy has been applied uncritically to the point where many communities appear to have lost trust in the planning system. this trust will be restored only once the public are again allowed to voice genuine dissent in a meaningful ‘amber light’ public forum since this will help ensure that the decisions of planning authorities and reporters are made with greater rigor and are more likely to reflect a wider set of concerns. to this effect, it is suggested that automatic public inquiry rights ought to be reinstated to all local plan objectors. and whilst there is certainly no suggestion here that all new settlement proposals are doomed to failure there is a real prospect that some or all of the ambitious development proposals in the north-east so alluringly depicted by the developers will end up as abandoned building sites, and a source of considerable embarrassment to a government committed to creating desirable sustainable communities. notes 1 a community council is a statutory body constituted to represent the views of the citizens of an urban neighbourhood, suburb or rural area to its parent local authority on a range of local issues, including planning. most community councillors volunteer themselves for duty and are unelected. 2 some academics have questioned the validity and usefulness of post-politics as an over-arching theory. whilst acknowledging that the concept should not be abandoned, metzger (2018) contends that there is a need for greater clarity as to what post-politics really is, greater specification to distinguish it from other forms of de-politicising practices and, ultimately, greater opposition from those whom are marginalised by its debilitating effects. 3 prior to 1999 scotland was governed from edinburgh by the scottish office, a uk-government department. following devolution scotland was run by an administration known as the scottish executive until 2007 when the new scottish national party minority administration unilaterally rebadged it as the scottish government. this renaming was formalised under s.12(1) scotland act 2012. 4 sdps and ldps are the new labels given under the planning etc (scotland) act 2006 for what were previously known as structure plans and local plans respectively. 5 a planning reporter is a government civil servant whom is empowered under statute to adjudicate (or make a recommendation to the minister) on a range of planning disputes including appeals against refusal of planning permission and on examinations into development plans. in their role as de facto judges, they are supposed to be at arms length from the scottish government so as to meet the requirements of the right to a fair trial guaranteed by article 6 of the european convention on human rights. 72 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers 6 in england and wales the success rate for parties contesting the total of 10,000 or so planning appeals considered each year 2010–2017 through written representations, hearings and public inquiries has been between 30–33%, 40–47% and 49–63% respectively (uk government 2018). in scotland, the overall success rate for the 300 or so appeals considered each year since 2010 has been around 40–45% with the rate for written representations sometimes being higher than that for public inquiries (directorate for planning and environmental appeals 2010, 2011b, 2012b, 2013, 2014, 2015). however, there are only around 10–20 public inquiries held each year in scotland (compared to over 300 in england and wales). 7 for example, the inquiry into the aberdeen city local plan ‘green spaces; new places’ ran from january 2007 to december 2007, consuming 409 reporter-days. the west lothian, east lothian, scottish borders and angus local plan inquiries consumed 306, 158, 226 and 117 reporter-days respectively during 2006/2007 (directorate for planning and environmental appeals 2007b). 8 data provided by the directorate for planning and environmental appeals to the author under a freedom of information request. 9 it is possible that the scottish government, as part of a policy of seeking to increase the national population, wishes to drive down housing prices to induce demand from those living outside scotland. 10 a charette is the name given to an intensive consultation exercise, usually taking the form of a workshop and lasting several days, during which members of the public inform the drafting of a masterplan for a major new development such as a new town. 11 there was a call by some msps for an investigation into the role of the chief planner in six andres duany charette-led development schemes (the times 2011). 12 the dangerous dogs act 1991 was introduced in response to a number of fatal attacks by dogs on young children. it was widely criticised for being ill-thought out and is frequently cited as shorthand for poorly drafted legislation. 13 a similar greenfield expansionist scenario has played out in perth (part of the dundee city-region) in central scotland where, despite the failure of a developer to deliver any houses at a new settlement (oudenarde) approved in 2006, a new ldp was adopted in 2014 without public examination providing for a further three new settlements at almond valley (1,500 units), perth west (550 units) and bertha park (3,000 units). 14 see s.9(3)(b) and s.13(1) of the town and country planning act 1971 regarding objections to structure plans and local plans respectively. 15 in 2009 a grassroots, community organisation called planning democracy was formed to challenge the dilution of community rights in the planning process across scotland (the sunday herald 2009). surprisingly, it did not make specific reference in its ‘manifesto’ to the de facto withdrawal of ldp inquiries (planning democracy 2012). 16 notwithstanding the deregulatory changes to the scottish planning system, the right to challenge a decision on a point of law through ‘red light’ judicial review remains (although the former first minister, alex salmond, unsuccessfully called for the right to be withdrawn in certain circumstances (the herald 2011)). judicial challenges are financially highly risky although litigants may gain significant cost protection under the convention on access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters signed at aarhus in 1998. acknowledgments i am very grateful to ms emily forster, former geography student at northumbria university, for the production of figure 1. references aberdeen city council & aberdeenshire council (2005) housing land audit 2005. aberdeen city council, aberdeen. aberdeen city council & aberdeenshire council (2010) housing land audit 2010. aberdeen city council, aberdeen. fennia 196(1) (2018) 73william walton aberdeen city council & aberdeenshire council (2016) housing land audit 2016. aberdeen city council, aberdeen. aberdeen city and shire strategic planning authority (2009) aberdeen city and shire structure plan. aberdeen city and shire strategic planning authority, aberdeen. aberdeen city and shire strategic planning authority (2014) aberdeen city and shire strategic development plan 2014. strategic development plan authority, aberdeen. aberdeen city council (2004) green spaces: new places. the finalised aberdeen local plan. aberdeen city council, aberdeen. aberdeen city council (2009) aberdeen local development plan: main issues report. aberdeen city council, aberdeen. aberdeen city council (2010) enterprise, strategic planning and infrastructure committee, 31st may 2010. aberdeen local development plan – main issues report consultation responses – epi/10/150. aberdeen city council, aberdeen <http://committees.aberdeencity.gov.uk/ielistdocuments. aspx?cid=140&mid=1560&ver=4>. 12.08.2017. aberdeenshire council (2010) report to the kincardine and mearns area committee, 26th january. aberdeenshire local development plan. main issues report. issues and responses volume 2. settlement strategy issues. aberdeenshire council, stonehaven. adams, d. & watkins, c. (2014) the value of planning. rtpi research report no. 5. royal town planning institute, london. allmendinger, p. & haughton, g. (2012) post-political spatial planning in england: a crisis of consensus? transactions of the institute of british geographers 37(1) 89–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x barker, k. (2004) review of housing supply. delivering stability: securing our future housing needs. final report – recommendations. h m stationery office, london. beveridge, c., biberbach, p. & hamilton, j. (2016) empowering planning to deliver great places: an independent review of the scottish planning system. scottish government, edinburgh. bickerstaff, k. & walker, g. (2005) shared visions, unholy alliances; power, governance and deliberative processes in local transport planning. urban studies 42(12) 2123–2144. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500332098 cornwall, a. (2008) unpacking participation: models, meanings and practices. community development journal 43(3) 269–283. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsn010 counsell, d., haughton, g. & allmendinger, p. (2012) growth management in cork through boom, bubble and bust. european planning studies 22(1) 46–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.722975 cullingworth, b. & nadin, v. (2002) town and country planning in the u.k. 12th ed. routledge, london. cuthbert, j. & cuthbert, m. (2009) snp economic strategy: neo-liberalism with a heart. in hassan, g. (ed.) the modern snp: from protest to power, 105–119. edinburgh university jim press, edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639908.003.0009 davies, k. c. (1969) discretionary justice: a preliminary inquiry. university of illinois press, urbana. dear, m. & scott, a. (1981) urbanisation and urban planning in a capitalist society. methuen, london. deas, i. (2014) the search for territorial fixes in subnational governance: city-regions and the disputed emergence of post-political consensus in manchester, england. urban studies 5(11) 2285–2314. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013510956 dicey, a. v. (1902) the law of the constitution. macmillan and co limited, london. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2007a) report into objections to aberdeen local plan. dpea, falkirk. <http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog. asp?lid=10974&sid=7762> 04.08.2017. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2007b) review of the year 2006–2007. scottish executive, edinburgh. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2010) scottish government planning and environmental appeals annual review. <http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/ appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews>. 20.02.2018. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2011a) report to aberdeen city council. local development plan examination. aberdeen city local development plan. 22nd december 2011. dpea, falkirk. <http://www.dpea.scotland.gov.uk/casedetails.aspx?id=95373>. 04.08.2017. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2011b) scottish government planning and environmental appeals annual review. <http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/ appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews>. 20.02.2018. http://committees.aberdeencity.gov.uk/ielistdocuments.aspx?cid=140&mid=1560&ver=4 http://committees.aberdeencity.gov.uk/ielistdocuments.aspx?cid=140&mid=1560&ver=4 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500332098 https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsn010 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.722975 https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748639908.003.0009 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013510956 http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lid=10974&sid=7762 http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lid=10974&sid=7762 http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.dpea.scotland.gov.uk/casedetails.aspx?id=95373 http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews 74 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2012a) report to aberdeenshire council. local development plan examination. aberdeenshire local development plan. 9th march 2012. dpea, falkirk. <http://www.dpea.scotland.gov.uk/casedetails.aspx?id=105305>. 04.08.2017. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2012b) scottish government planning and environmental appeals annual review. <http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/ appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews>. 20.02.2018. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2013) scottish government planning and environmental appeals annual review. <http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/ appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews>. 20.02.2018. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2014) scottish government planning and environmental appeals annual review. <http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/ appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews>. 20.02.2018. directorate for planning and environmental appeals (2015) scottish government planning and environmental appeals annual review. <http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/ appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews>. 20.02.2018. elsick development company (2011) chapelton of elsick: post-charrette paper. elsick estate office, a b e r d e e n . < h t t p : / / c h a p e l t o n o f e l s i c k . c o m / w p c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / 2 0 12 / 10 / l a r g e f i l e s / chapeltonpostcharrettepaperfebruary2011.pdf>. 17.07.2017. elsick development company (2017) news update. <http://chapeltonofelsick.com/news/>. 03.11.2016. falleth, e., hanssen, g. & saglie, i. (2010) challenges to democracy in market-oriented urban planning in norway. european planning studies 18(5) 737–752. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654311003607729 ganz, g. (1972) “allocation of decision-making functions”. public law 215, 216. grc (1986a) grampian region (part) structure plan: aberdeen area review. technical report: 3 – new settlement – alternative locations and implementation issues. grc, aberdeen. grc (1986b) grampian region (part) structure plan: aberdeen area review – written statement. grc, aberdeen. grc (1992) grampian structure plan. consultative draft. grc, aberdeen. grandhome trust (2013) grandhome development framework. aberdeen city council, aberdeen. <http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lid=53124&sid=23995>. 22.11.2016. harlow, c. & rawlings, r. (2009) law and administration. cambridge press, cambridge. https://doi. org/10.1017/cbo9780511809941 haughton, g., allmendinger, p. & oosterlynck, s. (2013) spaces of neoliberal experimentation: soft spaces, postpolitics and neoliberal governmentality. environment and planning a 45 217–234. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45121 homes for scotland (2002) response to consultation drafts: nppg3 planning for housing and pan 38 housing land. homes for scotland, edinburgh. <http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ search?q=cache:oi42xzqoqkmj:www.homesforscotland.com/portals/homesforscotland/documents/ text_-_final_submission_to_scottish_executive.doc+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=fi>. leunig, t. (2007) in my back yard: unlocking the planning system. centreforum, london. lloyd, m. & peel, d. (2009) new labour and the planning system in scotland: an overview of a decade. planning, practice and research 24(1) 103–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/02697450902742197 lockhart, d. (1980) scottish village plans: a preliminary analysis. scottish geographical magazine 96(3) 141–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/00369228008736468 maccleod, g. (2013) new urbanism/smar t grow th in the scottish highlands: mobile policies and post-politics in local development planning. urban studies 50(11) 2196–2221. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013491164 mackinnon, j. (2001) oral evidence of chief planner to the transport and environment committee, 12th september 2001. scottish parliament, edinburgh. mackinnon, j. (2006) oral evidence to the scottish parliament communities committee, planning etc (scotland) bill 20015. stage 1. scottish parliament, edinburgh. megarry, r. (1944) administrative quasi-legislation. 60 law quarterly review 125. metzger, j. (2018) ‘postpolitics and planning’. in gunder m., madanipouri, a. & watson, v. (eds.) the routledge handbook of planning theory, 180–193. routledge, abingdon. national record of scotland (2000) 1998-based household projections for scotland. scottish government statistical bulletin housing series: hsg/2000/4. <http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/ statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/housholds/household-projections/archive/1998based-household-projections>. 13.08.2017. http://www.dpea.scotland.gov.uk/casedetails.aspx?id=105305 http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://www.gov.scot/topics/built-environment/planning/appeals/ourperformance/annualreviews http://chapeltonofelsick.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/largefiles/chapeltonpostcharrettepaperfebruary2011.pdf http://chapeltonofelsick.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/largefiles/chapeltonpostcharrettepaperfebruary2011.pdf http://chapeltonofelsick.com/news/ https://doi.org/10.1080/09654311003607729 http://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/nmsruntime/saveasdialog.asp?lid=53124&sid=23995 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511809941 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511809941 https://doi.org/10.1068/a45121 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oi42xzqoqkmj:www.homesforscotland.com/portals/homesforscotland/documents/text_-_final_submission_to_scottish_executive.doc+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=fi http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oi42xzqoqkmj:www.homesforscotland.com/portals/homesforscotland/documents/text_-_final_submission_to_scottish_executive.doc+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=fi http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oi42xzqoqkmj:www.homesforscotland.com/portals/homesforscotland/documents/text_-_final_submission_to_scottish_executive.doc+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=fi https://doi.org/10.1080/02697450902742197 https://doi.org/10.1080/00369228008736468 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098013491164 http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/housholds/household-projections/archive/1998-based-household-projections http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/housholds/household-projections/archive/1998-based-household-projections http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/housholds/household-projections/archive/1998-based-household-projections fennia 196(1) (2018) 75william walton national trust for scotland (2017) planning for scotland – citizen views. heritage observatory briefing note, november 2017. national trust for scotland, edinburgh. newlands, d. (2000) the oil economy. in fraser, w. h. & lee, c. (eds.) aberdeen 1800–2000: a new history, 126–152. tuckwell press, east linton. offe, c. (1985) disorganized capitalism: contemporary transformations of work and politics. polity press, cambridge. oil & gas uk (2017) economic report 2017. oil & gas uk, london. oosterlynck, s. & swyngedouw, e. (2010) noise reduction: the postpolitical quandary of night flights at brussels airport. environment and planning a 42 1577–1594. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42269 owens, s. & cowell, r. (2011) land and limits: interpreting sustainability in the planning process. routledge, london. pacione, m. (2004) household growth, housing demand and new settlements in scotland. european planning studies 12(4) 517–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/0965431042000212768 pacione, m. (2014) the power of public participation in local planning in scotland: the case of conflict over residential development in the metropolitan green belt. geojournal 79 31–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9477-y peel, d. & lloyd, m. (2006) the twisting paths to planning reform in scotland. international planning studies 11(2) 89–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563470601027730 peel, d. & lloyd, m. (2007) neo-traditional planning: towards a new ethos for land use planning? land use policy 24 396–403. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2006.05.003 planning democracy (2012) people, power and planning: the planning democracy manifesto. <http:// www.planningdemocracy.org.uk/resources/pap_summary_finalweb.pdf>. 22.11.2017. poustie, m. (2007) planning reforms in scotland. journal of planning & environment law 2007(7) 489–517. rydin, y. (1993) the british planning system: an introduction. macmillan, basingstoke. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22823-2 scottish executive (2003a) modernising public local inquiries: a consultation paper. scottish executive, edinburgh. scottish executive (2003b) national planning policy guideline no. 3. planning for housing. scottish executive development department, edinburgh. scottish executive (2005) white paper: modernising the planning system. hm stationery office, edinburgh. scottish government (2007) firm foundations: the future of housing in scotland – a discussion document. scottish government, edinburgh. scottish government (2008) scottish planning policy no. 3. planning for homes. scottish government, edinburgh. scottish government (2010) scottish planning policy. scottish government, edinburgh. scottish government (2013) development planning. circular 6/2013. scottish government, edinburgh. scottish government (2014a) housing needs and demand assessment. a manager’s guide 2014. scottish government, edinburgh. scottish government (2014b) scottish planning policy. scottish government, edinburgh. scottish government (2017a) housing statistics for scotland – new build summary. scottish government, edinburgh. <http://www.gov.scot/topics/statistics/browse/housing-regeneration/ hsfs/newbuild>. 01.09.2017. scottish government (2017b) places, people and planning: a consultation on the future of the scottish planning system. scottish government, edinburgh. scottish government (2018) housing statistics for scotland – new build summary. scottish government, e d i n b u r g h .< h t t p: // w w w. g o v. s co t / to p i c s / s t a t i s t i c s / b r o w s e / h o u si n g r e g e n e r a t i o n / h sf s / newbuildsummary>. scottish national party (2011) scottish national party manifesto 2011: re-elect a scottish government working for scotland. snp, edinburgh. scottish office (1993) national planning policy guideline no. 3 land for housing. scottish office, edinburgh. scottish office (1998) report of re-opened public inquiry into proposed new settlement at banchory devenick, aberdeenshire. p/ppa/gd/483 inquiry reporters unit, falkirk. scottish parliament (2016) financial scrutiny unit note: aberdeen and aberdeenshire since the oil price fall. spice briefing 16/20. scottish parliament, edinburgh. short, j., fleming, s. & witt, s. (1986) housebuilding, planning and community action: the production and negotiation of the built environment. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42269 https://doi.org/10.1080/0965431042000212768 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013-9477-y https://doi.org/10.1080/13563470601027730 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2006.05.003 http://www.planningdemocracy.org.uk/resources/pap_summary_finalweb.pdf http://www.planningdemocracy.org.uk/resources/pap_summary_finalweb.pdf http://www.gov.scot/topics/statistics/browse/housing-regeneration/hsfs/newbuild http://www.gov.scot/topics/statistics/browse/housing-regeneration/hsfs/newbuild http://www.gov.scot/topics/statistics/browse/housing-regeneration/hsfs/newbuildsummary http://www.gov.scot/topics/statistics/browse/housing-regeneration/hsfs/newbuildsummary 76 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers smith, a., williams, g. & houlder, m. (1986) community influence on local planning policy. progress in planning 25 1–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-9006(86)90001-2 smith, j. (2000) villages and suburbs. in fraser, w. & lee, c. (eds.) aberdeen 1800–2000: a new history, 466–489. tuckwell press, east linton. sossin, l. & smith, c. (2003) hard choices and soft law: ethical codes, policy guidelines and the role of the courts in regulating government. 40 alberta law review 871. the herald (2011) salmond hits out as by-pass objector files new legal bid. glasgow, 14.09.2011 <http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13036386.salmond_hits_out_as_bypass_objector_ files_new_ legal_bid/>. 19.04.2018. the sunday herald (2009) citizens unite to battle fast-tracked ‘dirty’ developments, glasgow 11.07.2009. the times (2011) call for inquiry into links between us architect and planning chief. london, 08.10.2011. <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/call-for-inquiry-into-links-between-us-architect-andplanning-chief-p5grstbkzvb>. 19.04.2018 the press and journal (2016a) worst price falls in uk as oil downturn hits property hard 19.10.2016 the press and journal (2016b) countesswells – a new place with nature at its heart, your home supplement 16.11.2016 <https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/lifestyle/home/1085889/ countesswells-nature-heart/>. 19.04.2018. ty m e , j . (197 8) m o to r w a y s v e r su s d e m o c ra c y. m a c m i l l a n , l o n d o n . https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15920-8 uk government (2018) official statistics: planning inspectorate statistics. <https://www.gov.uk/ government/statistics/planning-inspectorate-statistics> 20.01.2018. wade, h. & forsyth, c. (2000) administrative law. 8th ed. oxford press, oxford. walton, w. (2000) windfall sites for housing: an underestimated resource. urban studies 37(2) 391– 408. https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098002249 webster & lavers (1991) the effectiveness of public local inquiries as a vehicle for public participation in the plan making process: a case study of the barnet unitary development plan inquiry. journal of planning and environment law 1991 803–813. yellow book ltd (2017) barriers to community engagement in planning: a research study. scottish government, edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-9006(86)90001-2 http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13036386.salmond_hits_out_as_bypass_objector_files_new_legal_bid/ http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13036386.salmond_hits_out_as_bypass_objector_files_new_legal_bid/ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/call-for-inquiry-into-links-between-us-architect-and-planning-chief-p5grstbkzvb https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/call-for-inquiry-into-links-between-us-architect-and-planning-chief-p5grstbkzvb https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/lifestyle/home/1085889/countesswells-nature-heart/ https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/lifestyle/home/1085889/countesswells-nature-heart/ https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15920-8 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/planning-inspectorate-statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/planning-inspectorate-statistics https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098002249 what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa120536 doi: 10.11143/fennia.120536 fennia lecture what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? josefina syssner syssner, s. (2022) what can geographers do for shrinking geographies? fennia 200(2) 98–119. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 for parts of the sparsely populated areas, the trends of globalisation, urbanisation and deindustrialisation constitute difficult circumstances. population decline, escalating dependency ratios, lack of human and financial resources, and diminishing commercial and public services form part of lived experience in many of these areas. this paper discusses what geographers can do for these territories. the paper suggests that geographers can aid in understanding and demonstrating (a) how resources have been distributed in space over time and (b) why patterns of resource distribution take the shape they do. geographers can also illuminate (c) what it means to live, work, and operate in shrinking, rural territories. geographers could also (d) make implicit geographical imaginations explicit, (e) elucidate how shrinkage is dealt with by various policy actors, and (f) point to alternative policy directions. the paper also suggests that geographers in the nordic countries could enrich an international research field of studies of shrinkage by (g) providing case studies or comparative studies from a nordic context. keywords: shrinkage, policy, planning, rural, nordic, periphery josefina syssner (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7607-7029), centre for local government studies, linköping university, sweden. e-mail: josefina.syssner@ liu.se introduction despite ambitious goals on territorial cohesion, all of the nordic countries display great spatial disparities. significant parts of the nordic countries consist of sparsely populated, remote, and rural areas. these territories include highlands and plains, forest landscapes and archipelagos. residents here often congregate in small settlements rooted in former and present agricultural and industrial practices. these settlements form important sources of human identity and sense of belonging. they form important contexts for everyday and working life, for social mobilisation and political action. for parts of the remote and sparsely populated areas, the trends of globalisation, urbanisation, and deindustrialisation constitute difficult circumstances. population decline, escalating dependency © 2022 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120536 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7607-7029 mailto:josefina.syssner@liu.se mailto:josefina.syssner@liu.se fennia 200(2) (2022) 99josefina syssner ratios, lack of human and financial resources, and diminishing commercial and public services form part of lived experience in many of these areas. it is these shrinking, rural territories and the small and mid-size towns found there that will be the focus of this paper. in fact, depopulation has been a planning condition for great parts of the municipal sector in finland, norway, and sweden ever since the mid-1970s. the pandemic of the past few years has defied the trajectories of globalisation and urbanisation. the increased opportunities for an educated, office-working middle class to manage their work from home have been interpreted as a window of opportunity for rural areas. in addition, a state of international insecurity has in some respects revealed the potential of rural areas in terms of food supply, self-sufficiency, and neighbourhood cooperation. nevertheless, to what extent these events really are an impetus for development in rural territories is still uncertain. until recently, a quarter of nordic municipalities were expected to undergo a continued, sustained, and extensive population decline (nordregio 2020). with my contribution to this special issue of fennia, i wish to raise a simple question: what can we – as geographers – do for these territories? the question indeed assumes that we should do something, and here, i would stress that knowledge of shrinking areas is of utmost relevance also for those residing outside of them. shrinking areas are manifestly interdependent with their surroundings, with growing urban areas locally, nationally, and globally. our understanding of these areas, therefore, has implications for social cohesion, political legitimacy, and democratic governance at a larger scale. these are arguments that i will return to by the end of my manuscript. in this article, i will suggest that geographers can do quite a bit, and i will present some examples of what has already been done. in short, i will suggest that geographers can aid in understanding and demonstrating (a) how resources have been distributed in space over time and (b) why patterns of resource distribution take the shape they do. the question of why patterns take the shape they do is ever-present. the answers include references to longstanding historical structures as well as the transformation of such structures; power relations and macro-economic conditions as well as changes in individual preferences and the ways in which human beings understand and conceptualise the world around them. geographers can also help to illuminate (c) what it means to live, work, and operate in shrinking, rural territories. this question, too, is of enduring relevance. earlier studies have acknowledged what rurality, shrinkage, and limited access to human and financial resources mean for children and young people growing up in such areas, as well as for families, workers and employers who want to recruit new talent. previous studies have also demonstrated what rurality and shrinkage mean for patterns of local demand and supply, and the public sector's opportunities to plan for and provide services. throughout, and in parallel with, all these assignments, geographers could contribute by (d) making implicit spatial norms and assumptions explicit. how do geographical imaginations arise, and what implications do they have for decisions made in our daily lives, in businesses or politics? another, related task for the geographer (a favourite of mine, in fact) is to elucidate (e) how the specific conditions of rurality and shrinkage are dealt with by formal policy and planning actors at local, regional, or state levels, and by actors with no formal political mandate. how are rurality and shrinkage interpreted by various policy actors? what is framed as an asset and as a problem, and what solutions are presented to the problems named? following from this, we could also contribute by (f) pointing to alternative policy directions – both in terms of how policies and planning are pursued, and in terms of related planning and policy content. in conclusion and given that i present these arguments in a nordic context, i should also stress that the nordic countries have several characteristics that make them particularly interesting to study. the nordic countries are characterised by long distances and extensive rural areas that in many cases house a sparse, ageing, and declining population. importantly, this appears in the context of a welfare state structure where the state, region, and/or municipality have far-reaching obligations to citizens regardless of where they live. with this in mind, geographers in the nordic countries could (g) contribute with exciting case studies, and/or engage in comparative studies. in this way, we can enrich an international research field of shrinkage that has mainly focused thus far on shrinking in an urban context. 100 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper all of the potential contributions mentioned above are of importance. uneven demographic change is an inherently ‘spatial’ process, and for a geographer, it is fascinating to follow areas in demographic transition, and try to understand how these transitions can be described and understood, why they come about, what consequences they have, how various actors respond to them, and how we as human beings relate to and speak about them. in every aspect, place matters. what scholarly assignment we choose to take up depends on a variety of things. it can depend on what academic environment we belong to and what analytical and methodological skills we have, what funding we have, what data we have access to, and what courses we teach. it also depends on our personal interests and perhaps also our normative standpoints, personal life experiences, feelings, and identities. for geography to make a difference for shrinking areas, we need to embrace this multitude of standpoints, perspectives, and alternatives. it is a richness that we should be proud of. the literature overview below will, no doubt, be full of shortcomings. my search for relevant literature departed from my own knowledge of the field. for the most part, i have searched for texts written in the nordic countries, in a northern european context, or the northern hemisphere during the last two decades. a broader or more systematic literature review would probably reveal a different picture. as kovanen (2022) rightly emphasises in her comments on my text, my overview does not address global resource patterns, global interdependencies, or patterns of depopulation in the global south. my course of action also involves a risk of excluding colleagues who have made important contributions to any one of the fields i identify, or indeed to fields that i have overlooked. yet, i hope that my overview can serve as the beginning of a conversation that will unfold in time and space; a conversation by which we all become a little wiser and by which the world might become a slightly better place to live. how have resources been distributed in space over time? geographers have a long tradition of exposing and explaining (martin 2001) spatial patterns of inequality, as well as disparities in settlement, growth, employment, and productivity. this tradition is of ineffable value to those of us who are trying to increase knowledge about shrinking geographies. thus, before we can engage to any degree with causes, effects, and responses in relation to shrinkage (haase et al. 2017; döringer et al. 2020), we need to know more about how resources are actually distributed in space. here, i will organise the presentation around three interrelated questions, id est what, where, and when. first, what is it that is shrinking, declining, or disappearing when scholars talk about shrinkage? second, where – in what localities or at what scale – can shrinkage be observed; and third – when did it all happen? makkonen, inkinen and rautiainen (2022) dissect these issues meticulously in their contribution to this issue. i strongly recommend the reader to consult their paper for a thorough methodological discussion on how to measure shrinkage. the what question is perhaps the most debated. the implicit starting point for research on shrinkage tends to be the observation of a diminishing population base (even if economic decline and the retrieval of public and private services have also been used to define shrinkage). a shrinking city has been defined in terms of a densely populated urban area which has faced population losses for more than two years (wiechmann & bontje 2015). rural shrinkage, on the other hand, has been defined by grasland and colleagues (2008, 25) as “a region … losing a considerable proportion of its population over a period greater than or equal to one generation”. however, as emphasised in copus and others (2020, 3), what constitutes a “considerable proportion” and “one generation” needs to be more accurately defined. still, many studies have underlined that the fact of there being “fewer people” in an area is far from enough if we seek to “capture the complexity of population loss” (hartt 2019, 1652). population loss, according to beauregard (2009), must be unpacked into the categories of prevalence, severity, persistence, and geographical incidence. these four categories offer a better understanding of the instances and magnitude of population loss, its duration, as well as its spatial distribution (beauregard 2009; hartt 2019). it should also be noted that the composition of the population tends to change with depopulation. selective out-migration and declining birth rates imply that many shrinking places are also ageing fennia 200(2) (2022) 101josefina syssner places (abramsson & hagberg 2018), where a smaller share of the inhabitants have a higher education or are of working age (amcoff & westholm 2007). thus, several studies mention the loss of highly qualified employees as a major problem in shrinking areas (for an overview, see nelle 2016). examples of studies in this area point to municipalities in sweden that have lost 60% of their pupils since the 1970s (syssner 2018a), and localities in germany where the age cohort of 15and 18-year-olds decreased by 57% within a time span of 15 years (meyer et al. 2016). this points to the distinction between active and legacy shrinking. active shrinking is driven by negative net migration, while legacy shrinking is due to unfavourable age structures that in turn are due to out-migration of the past. of course, one could question whether it is really lower numbers of people that bring problems to the table in shrinking areas, or whether it is the surplus of older people and the shortage of tax-paying people of working age that is the main issue. in her commentary on this paper, meijer (2022) rightly asks whether the research community should perhaps abandon the concept of shrinkage, and rather focus on the challenges that come with certain forms of population change. the literature reviewed here encompasses a lively discussion on the definitions of shrinkage, decline, depopulation, and related concepts. one critical question is whether a place that faces a loss of human resources and population numbers always needs to be understood or represented as distressed or in crisis. terms such as “legacy cities” and “cities in transition” have been used to provide a more neutral framing of shrinking cities (haase et al. 2017, 97). in fact, several studies indicate that even if economic decline and demographic shrinkage tend to be lumped together, they must be regarded as two distinct phenomena (hartt 2019). urban growth is often made synonymous or equal with prosperity, and shrinkage with decline and poverty. hirt and beauregard (2021) however use a historical perspective to nuance the tendency to equate shrinkage with distress, and argue that under certain circumstances, shrinkage can be good for cities and their residents. in a study of shrinking cities in the us, hartt (2019) concludes that 27% of 88 shrinking cities in the us have income levels that are greater than their surrounding regions. another study revealed that urban shrinkage in europe and the us is “closely associated with economic decline, while urban shrinkage in japan is closely linked to demographic factors” (döringer et al. 2020, 1694). makkonen, inkinen and rautiainen (2022) suggest that population data can be combined with data on employment and/or housing vacancies to give a more detailed picture of the state of affairs in an area. meijer (2022) points out that because of migration and the post-pandemic situation, we can now observe how formerly shrinking regions have started to grow – without any signs of increases in prosperity. the where question is pivotal, both academically and practically. to begin with, the literature on shrinkage emanates primarily from critical planning studies, rooted in a context of large cities primarily in the us and germany. this means that the focus of international literature on shrinkage initially was devoted to urban environments. in recent years, however, the focus on urban settlements has been questioned by many. hospers and reverda (2015) stress that population decline tends to be more prevalent in rural areas than in urban ones. döringer and colleagues (2020) point to the observation that aside from large cities, small and medium-sized settlements also experience population decline. in this volume, albrecht and kortelainen (2022) point to the fact that small towns, and especially downtown areas in such towns, have received rather limited research interest. cunningham-sabot and fol (2009) state that in france, depopulation can mainly be observed in cities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, something that is later confirmed by béal and others (2019, 195), who stress that shrinkage in france is “mostly concentrated within small and medium-sized towns and cities”. studies carried out in a nordic context stress that due to rapid ongoing urbanisation, rural depopulation has become “a key concern” (niedomysl & amcoff 2011, 275) in many european countries, while at the same time, many remote and rural areas are suffering from an out-migration of young female adults (hedberg & haandrikman 2014; rauhut & littke 2016). indeed, the where question invokes a discussion of urban versus rural shrinkage. however, it also calls for a discussion about the scale at which shrinkage should be measured. makkonen, inkinen and rautiainen (2022) demonstrate how different the world appears to be depending on the scale we use when describing it. measuring demographic change on a larger scale – national, regional, or subregional – may very well mask intra-regional heterogeneity and differences across and within municipalities and postal code areas. a closer look at the municipal level, they show, reveals that 102 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper growing areas quite often contain pockets of shrinkage, whereas it is much rarer that shrinking regions include substantial pockets of growth. in their contribution to this issue, hagen, higdem & overvåg (2022) highlight that their case study does show population growth on a regional scale. the growth is, however, very unevenly distributed; the region they refer to has grown overall in recent years, but 31 of its 46 municipalities still face long-term population decline. this in turn leads us to the question of how dominant the trajectory of shrinkage is in a given society. the consequences of shrinkage for policy and planning and for everyday life are of course determined by the magnitude of the issue, in terms of the intensity of the average annual population change, its duration over time (copus et al. 2020), and its geographical scope. on this point, copus and colleagues (2020, 6) underline that almost 60% of those nuts 3 regions that are “predominantly rural” or “intermediate” display sustained population losses1, whereas batunova and gunko (2018, 1581) point to the fact that “about 70% of russian cities have lost some of their population”. these figures point to shrinkage being an important question for substantial parts of our society. the when question refers to the temporal dimension of shrinkage. if there is a change in size – of population, resources, or whatever – that change must occur within a certain period of time. in a study from portugal, alves and colleagues (2016) make an initial distinction between cities that experience both growth and decline during various time periods on the one hand, and cities facing a continuous decline with no experience of population growth on the other. copus and colleagues (2020) provide a distinction between medium and long-term rural shrinking processes and more dramatic, short-term processes. examples of the latter are periods of rapid industrialisation or political adjustments such as the german unification, post-socialist transformation, and eu enlargement. the above discussion leads us to the question of what timespan we should use when intending to map shrinkage, and at what point in time a place qualifies as a shrinking place. when can we claim to observe shrinkage, and how persistent does shrinkage need to be for a place to deserve the label of a shrinking one? in their contribution to this issue, makkonen, inkinen and rautiainen (2022) go into detail on the question of temporality. they highlight that previous studies on shrinkage have utilised both theory-driven and ad hoc-like analysis periods – the latter often due to data availability. the temporal scale used in research on shrinkage, they point out, can vary from a few years up to several decades. an equally important question is when a place seizes to be a shrinking place. personally, i have experience of interviewing local government representatives from municipalities that had experienced population decline almost every year for several decades – except for the year the interview took place. on these occasions, the interviewees were generally immensely proud to announce that their municipality was no longer a shrinking one. in the nordic context, the migration crisis from 2015 led to a considerable but impermanent influx of migrants in many small and sparsely populated municipalities, leading to growing population figures for some years. the consequences of long-term shrinkage did not, however, dissolve the second the migrants entered the municipality. rather, the consequences of shrinkage seem to be enduring, and take time to fade out after a place has started to grow again. but of course, a place that once had a declining population base is not necessarily doomed to continue on that path. on this point, döringer and colleagues (2020, 1700) stress that “the majority of formerly shrinking cities in the uk have overcome processes of deindustrialisation and are experiencing population increase”. in this issue, lundmark, carson and eimermann (2022) explore how local governments in the swedish arctic that struggled for years to handle demographic decline are now having to adjust to expectations of the growth that will come with giga-investments in green energy along the urbanised north swedish coast. their analysis shows that while such investments are predicted to create a new regional “golden age” (ibid., 157), there are still obstacles preventing local governments from acting fast and taking advantage of the green expansion. despite its importance, the temporal dimension tends to be “rather absent” from many case studies of shrinkage, as döringer and others (2020, 1707) put it. as we have seen, the question of how resources are distributed in space has been asked by many, and with reference to a variety of resource categories, scales, places, and time periods. altogether, these contributions provide us with broad, generalised overviews and common understandings – but fennia 200(2) (2022) 103josefina syssner also with diverse, detailed, nuanced, and multi-faceted representations of how shrinkage can be manifested in space over time. this work is indispensable for other scholars to build on while trying to understand, for example, why resource patterns look the way they look, what the consequences of these patterns are, and how they have been received by a variety of actors. why do resource distribution patterns take the shape they do? the question of why resources are distributed the way they are is of everlasting relevance. attempts to answer it will of course vary across time and space and differ depending on what resource category is being investigated. in the literature, there seems to be consensus that there is no grand explanation as to why some places shrink while others grow. thus, even if shrinkage is global phenomenon, it is clear that its drivers differ across and within continents, as well as across and within states and regions (haase et al. 2017). shrinkage can be understood as a local manifestation, as hospers (2013b) puts it, of a multitude of interrelated and place-specific conditions (see also syssner 2020b). the lack of overarching explanations notwithstanding, the literature tends to include references to both natural environments and location factors as well as to human-made structural conditions, historical patterns, and power relations in the attempt to explain growth and decline (copus et al. 2020). conditions such as structural transformation, deindustrialisation (pallagst et al. 2013), changes in local labour market dynamics, the rise of the service economy, globalisation, and increased general mobility have all been referred to in attempts to explain why some places shrink whereas others grow (reckien & martinez-fernandez 2011; haase et al. 2012; hospers 2013a; hospers & reverda 2015; kotilainen et al. 2015; wiechmann & bontje 2015; németh & hollander 2016). some studies have highlighted changes at the micro level while trying to explain demographic decline. examples are studies of changing preferences and behaviour among the population (reckien & martinez-fernandez 2011), or attempts to understand the factors that are decisive for migration (guimarães et al. 2016). in a meta-analysis of 70 papers on european and japanese urban shrinkage, döringer and colleagues (2020) identify eight causes of urban shrinkage. in the post-socialist, mediterranean, and western regions of europe, deindustrialisation is most often referred to as a cause of shrinkage (32%, 32%, and 46% respectively), while in japan suburbanisation, ageing, and low birth rates are cited as the main causes. when trying to understand why some places shrink, we need to come back to the earlier point on active and legacy shrinkage. active shrinkage implies that more people are moving away from an area than into it. yet, both immigrants and emigrants can be divided into several subcategories: regional, national, and international inand out-migrants, migrants of different genders, ages, and levels of education, as well as return migrants and those who leave a place for good (niedomysl & amcoff 2011). but even if out-migration for whatever reason is one important cause of shrinkage, population decline can also be explained by low fertility rates, ageing, and high mortality rates (hospers & reverda 2015; wiechmann & bontje 2015; copus et al. 2020; döringer et al. 2020). of course, low fertility rates can be interpreted as a consequence of a prior active shrinking, or of an ongoing selective outward migration. thus, if net migration is negative among the young (i.e. the future adults), this will affect fertility rates in the long-term perspective (hospers & reverda 2015). the why question, meanwhile, often points critically towards inequalities and asymmetrical and unequal conditions for societal development in different places. uneven demographic change has then been framed as due to interdependent processes of peripheralisation and centralisation (lang 2012) or as a vivid illustration of inequalities (pallagst et al. 2013). some voices have stressed that the spatial centralisation of human, financial, and other resources in fact determine the peripheralisation of other spaces (cunningham-sabot & fol 2009; lang 2012). in this regard, martinez-fernandez and others (2012, 213) have argued that the new global economic order has clearly benefited some localities, whereas others are experiencing an “outflow of capital and human resources”. to some extent, the reason why resources are distributed the way they are in space has been framed as an effect of policy. here, it should be noted that geography has a rich tradition of explicating how public policy contributes to forming and altering socio-spatial relations (jones et al. 2004). even 104 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper policies that are habitually regarded as “nonspatial” policies prove, as martin (2001, 203) puts it, to have “varying consequences and implications” across space. in closing this section, we can conclude that the explanations for shrinkage and population decline are many, overlapping, and varying. yet, no study has shown, to my knowledge, that shrinkage happens because of bad decisions made by local authorities in shrinking places. this may sound simplistic, but it is an important message to those who seek to develop policy instruments with which the causes and consequences of shrinkage are to be met. the consequences of shrinkage another task for geographers in relation to shrinking territories is to systematically describe the consequences and effects of shrinkage, losses, and decline (haase et al. 2017). scholarly interest in the effects of shrinkage was first aroused in an urban context and in countries outside the nordic region. in these studies, an oversized infrastructure was often recognised as one of the most palpable effects of extensive population decline (wiechmann & pallagst 2012; johnson et al. 2014; sousa & pinho 2015; németh & hollander 2016). these and later studies have demonstrated that depopulation has consequences for housing in terms of “abandonment, vacancies, infrastructural surplus or degradation” (batunova & gunko 2018, 1583; see also dubeaux & cunningham sabot 2018); commercial and public services; water and wastewater management (faust et al. 2016); but also for the capacity for participatory, integrated, and sustainable planning (pallagst et al. 2017) and the prospects for long-term sustainable development (martinez-fernandez et al. 2012; sousa & pinho 2015; syssner 2018a, 2020c; pallagst et al. 2021). thus, fixed assets such as roads, parking spaces, water supplies, and sewage gradually become oversized in shrinking areas (luescher & shetty 2013; hollander 2018; syssner 2020c). many studies have shown how the numbers of pupils in an area decline, while at the same time the costs for school buildings remain the same. houses, dwellings, and business premises become difficult to sell, and the result is less capital for maintenance and reinvestment in physical infrastructure (wiechmann & pallagst 2012; sousa & pinho 2015). recent studies have broadened the understanding of consequences of shrinkage, and regard it as a more multi-dimensional process (pallagst et al. 2017) that brings many challenging issues related to social cohesion and welfare to political agendas in shrinking areas. social cohesion does appear as an objective on policy agendas in many settings, but as pointed out by cortese and colleagues (2013) in a study from central europe, it is even more critical in shrinking areas, where ageing, segregation, and socio-spatial inequalities need to be managed in a situation of job losses and economic constraints. depopulation, as stated by pallagst (2015), tends to correspond with issues such as poverty, segregation, and homelessness – at least in the us and in countries where welfare state structures are weak. issues such as decreasing labour-related tax revenues (hollander 2011), rising per-capita expenditures for social services, and increasing tax rates and fees (fjertorp 2013), as well as emerging pessimism among residents and a loss of trust in local government (matthiesen 2005) have been identified as challenging for shrinking areas. importantly, the effects of shrinkage differ between contexts. as explicated by hartt (2019, 1655), shrinking geographies “can exist on a spectrum between prosperity and decline”. economic decline is not by necessity a consequence of depopulation. in their meta-analysis of 70 papers of european and japanese urban shrinkage, döringer and others (2020) identify the 10 most frequently cited effects of shrinkage. in post-socialist europe, housing vacancies are the most often described effect (in 36% of the papers), while in mediterranean europe, it is unemployment (in 31% of the papers), and in western europe, economic decline (in 33% of the papers). this is in contrast with papers from japan, where urban decay is the most frequently mentioned effect of shrinkage (in 61% of the papers). as noted by meijer (2022) , the consequences of shrinkage are very much context dependent. societies that undergo demographic decline, and that lack social capital or beneficial networks, tend to suffer more from decline than others (meijer 2020). in the nordic countries, shrinkage and depopulation are mainly a concern for small and sparsely populated municipalities. in such territories, the visual manifestations of shrinkage might be dissimilar to those in a shrinking urban core. the labour-related tax bases and revenues decline (amcoff & fennia 200(2) (2022) 105josefina syssner westholm 2007; see also pallagst 2015; hollander 2018) and a smaller share of the population is of working age. at times, unemployment rates are higher (while at the same time there is a need for skilled labour in the private and public sector). as a result, the per-capita expenses for public services and welfare tend to rise (see fjertorp 2013). this, it is often argued, makes the shrinking community an even less attractive place to stay or to settle in. still, shrinkage is not always visually manifested in the main town or city of an area. more often, shrinkage appears on the periphery of the municipalities – in villages and settlements distant from the urban centre. one of the foundations of the nordic welfare model is that the quality of the welfare services should be equal, regardless of where it is provided. that is, citizens in remote and rural areas have the legal right to the same quality of schools or healthcare as those in wealthy urban areas. in all nordic countries, the state government must balance the potential conflict between the similar legal demands and differing financial capacities of the municipalities, by a considerable spatial redistribution of financial means. in any case, the quality and the accessibility of public welfare services in remote, shrinking areas are higher that they would have been without the equalisation system that handles the spatial redistribution of financial means. still, as pointed out by carson and colleagues (2022) in this issue, a large-scale disinvestment in key services can be identified in many rural, depopulating areas. drawing from the case of southern lapland, they demonstrate that these disinvestments are seldom strategically planned, but occur on a case-by-case basis as a response to population loss and increased costs. a consequence of this, it is stressed, is the creation of “resource deserts”, id est “geographic areas without ready access to essential services” (ibid., 212). geographical imaginations the literature on shrinkage has also acknowledged the importance of how shrinking geographies are discursively represented or framed. here, geographical theory helps us understand how geographical imaginations (harvey 1974; tuan 1990; gregory 1994; sligo & massey 2007) are put to work, how they guide policymakers in various policy areas (ward 2007), and what relevance they have for individual strategies. to begin with, shrinkage and demographic decline are often perceived as something tragic and deeply problematic. shrinking areas tend to be framed as less favoured areas (ribeiro & marques 2002), or as the losers of the globalised economy (camarda et al. 2015; sousa & pinho 2015). that depopulation is framed so negatively, it is suggested in the literature, is not only because of its actual disadvantages but also due to growth being such a dominant societal norm (bontje 2004; hospers 2013a, 2013b; luescher & shetty 2013; syssner 2018a; syssner & siebert 2020; halonen 2022). whereas growth constitutes an important signal value in politics, population decline “carries the negative weight of a symptom of an undesirable disease” (sousa & pinho 2015, 2) and has come to be associated with “a certain stigma” (martinez-fernandez et al. 2012, 220; see also hartt 2019). apart from this, representations of shrinking places often take dramatic forms. hartt (2019, 1652) discusses the “sensationalism of extreme decline” and notes that extraordinary cases like detroit have attracted a vast academic and media interest and thus moulded the discourse of shrinkage. makkonen, inkinen and rautiainen (2022, 139) make the observation that shrinkage is quite often framed as a deviation from a norm or as “a temporary downturn in the normal course of growth”. a key concept in the literature is that of territorial stigmatisation. to goffman (1990), stigmatisation is a process by which a negative attribute leads to the whole of what is stigmatised being reduced to what the stigma itself symbolises. the concept of territorial stigmatisation has also been used to help us understand how discrediting differentness and the blemish of place impacts upon various actors – individuals, groups, and political bodies (wacquant et al. 2014; see also wacquant 2007). in the literature, we come across several studies that suggest that peripheralisation as such is connected with stigmatisation (weck & beißwenger 2014), that population decline involves aspects of shame among citizens who “themselves have internalised the perception of failure” (sousa & pinho 2015, 3). several studies suggest that those who reside in stigmatised areas are affected by the stigma in the sense that it influences how they view themselves and their surroundings, how they are viewed by others, and their decisions to out-migrate (meyer et al. 2016). it is also 106 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper suggested that stigmatising discourses can justify controversial top-down policy interventions in the areas concerned (august 2014). furthermore, it is well documented that local policymakers tend to believe that if they talk about their community as a shrinking one, they will contribute to a further decline. if key actors in society talk about a place as being in decline, it will inevitably be recognised as such and thus, less people will choose to move to or invest in that place, the argument goes (haase et al. 2012; syssner 2018a). such discourses, as suggested by haase, nelle and mallach (2017, 99), may be understood as a filter that impacts what subjects are framed as “problems, challenges and opportunities”, what solutions are suggested, and how policy is designed. the study of geographical imaginations also includes critical analyses of how public and private actors try to create, counteract, or reinforce people's images of or notions of a place – for example, through place branding (syssner 2012; ortiz-moya 2015; eriksson 2020). hagen, higdem and overvåg (2022) contribute to the above discussion by concluding that shrinkage certainly is stigmatised in a norwegian context, but that differences can be identified across professional, administrative, and municipal boundaries. policy responses to shrinkage parts of the literature reviewed here have researched the policy-, democracy-, and governance-related aspects of shrinkage. the study of (and involvement in) public policy by geographers has a long tradition (jones et al. 2004), even if the relation between applied policy research (often financed by external partners) and the prospects of maintaining a critical stance within the discipline has been a subject of recurring debate (pain 2006; bell 2011; woods & gardner 2011). in the 1970s, harvey (1974, 18) critically asked whether geographers can at all “contribute successfully, meaningfully and effectively to the formulation of public policy”. the question was grounded in the colonial experience of the discipline, in the tradition of serving the power, and in the ethnocentric and paternalistic tendencies of traditional geographic literature. the tradition of the discipline thus made harvey prevail a critical and sceptical stance in the matter. the question of whether and how geographers should impinge on public policy has been raised many times since (coppock 1974; hoggart 1996). geographers have been proposed for positions as public intellectuals, activists, policymakers, experts, providers of expert knowledge, and evaluators (massey 2004, 2006; ward 2005, 2007, 2011; pain 2006). opinions diverge as to what extent geographers have fulfilled these roles, but in many cases, it is at least expected from research councils and other parts of the research policy system that the knowledge we supply should be accessible and useful for policymakers. in the field of shrinking geographies, many have engaged in the policy and planning responses to shrinkage. the question of how local, regional, and state governments deal with shrinkage has been raised in many contexts. a wide range of studies show that often, demographic decline is very much disregarded in local policy and planning (bontje 2004; martinez-fernandez et al. 2012; wiechmann & pallagst 2012; sousa & pinho 2015; schatz 2017; syssner 2020c). unrealistic and biased ideas about growth and the negative framing of demographic decline have constituted a hindrance to the evolvement of strategies for coping with decline, as several studies have shown (lang 2012; wiechmann & pallagst 2012; hospers 2013b; pallagst et al. 2017; syssner 2020a). studies from several continents demonstrate, as schatz (2017) states, that planners and politicians tend to employ policies with a progrowth orientation, even if the reality they are coping with is clearly one of decline (batunova & gunko 2018). in a comparative study of agenda setting in shrinking cities in various state contexts, however, bernt and colleagues (2014, 1749) point out that even though shrinkage is rarely responded to in a comprehensive manner, this cannot be entirely blamed on policymakers who need to “overcome their growth-oriented cultural perceptions”. rather, it is suggested, the reason must be related to a variety of institutional settings and political dynamics that are very much place-specific (ibid.). the disregard of shrinkage as a planning condition can have various effects. wiechmann and pallagst (2012, 263) have suggested that it deepens the negative consequences of shrinkage, since “planning for shrinking cities does not work if it presupposes urban growth”. another effect is the development of less transparent or explicit strategies for coping with decline (syssner 2020b). a study fennia 200(2) (2022) 107josefina syssner from france suggests, for example, that since there is no national policy framework for how to deal with demographic decline, french local actors have produced a wide variety of local strategies, frameworks, and tools for dealing with the issue (béal et al. 2019). there are strategies for rightsizing in france, the authors suggest, “even if neither academic research nor policymakers qualify them as such” (ibid., 193). this underlines an important point: formal policy response is not necessarily explicit. local strategies dealing with shrinkage have, as béal and others (2019, 193) suggest, “been ‘silently’ implemented in french shrinking cities over the past 15 years”. the swedish case shows the same tendency. local governments do take decisions intended to adapt physical infrastructure, social services, and organisations to new demographic conditions; but the decisions are not communicated as adaptation nor as policy (syssner & siebert 2020). apart from the broad consensus on the tendency to neglect shrinkage in policy and planning, several attempts have been made to define certain phases in policy responses to shrinkage. there are variations in how shrinkage is talked about and debated and how policies are designed and implemented, as haase, nelle and mallach (2017) point out – not only across the globe but also within continents. pallagst and others (2017, 9) distinguish between “expansive strategy; maintenance strategy; and planning for decline”, whereas haase, nelle and mallach (2017, 99) refer to policies designed to “address, mitigate or reverse urban shrinkage”. previously, hospers and reverda (2015) have referred to four stages of reactions to population decline among politicians, planners, citizens, and others. the first stage, according to the model, is to trivialise or even to deny the fact that population numbers are continually shrinking. in the second stage, attempts are made to reverse population trends, counteract decline, and facilitate growth. the third stage in hospers and reverda’s model is when actors learn to cope or to deal with shrinkage. in the fourth stage, actors are prepared to try to use shrinkage as an opportunity. a similar argument is developed by hagen, higdem and overvåg (2022) in this volume. overall, these models demonstrate that the policy response to shrinking can be understood as a continuum where ignorance and denial are found at one end, and active and innovative utilisation of place-specific circumstances at the other. in previous articles, i have made a distinction between growth policy and adaptation policy (syssner 2014). this distinction bears similarities to the distinction made by copus et al. (2020) between mitigation and adaptation policies, where the former seeks to disrupt the trend of demographic decline, whereas the latter accepts continued shrinking and focuses on increasing wellbeing of the residents (ibid.). others have elaborated on concepts such as smart shrinkage or rightsizing. smart decline or smart shrinkage has featured mostly in planning discourse, presented as an alternative to traditional growth-focused planning approaches and as “planning for less – fewer people, fewer buildings, fewer land uses” (hartt 2019, 1653; see also popper & popper 2002). yet, a broader interpretation of what smart decline could be has also been presented. hollander (2011, 132) has suggested that a smart decline strategy should have the capacity to “reduce municipal expenditures to a lower level, concomitant with the city´s new smaller population”, not only in relation to physical planning. one of the earliest and most famous examples of smart shrinkage is the youngstown 2010 plan from the city of youngstown in ohio. the plan intended to enact a controlled management of shrinkage, and received much positive attention. in a critical account, rhodes and russo (2013, 305) however describe the plan as an “exclusionary project” that focused on the redevelopment of downtown areas while neglecting other neighbourhoods that “continue to experience high levels of unemployment, vacancy, and crime”. the concluding argument in that study was a questioning of the usefulness and coherence of the smart shrinkage concept (ibid.). rightsizing is another concept used mostly by planners and within planning research. it has been defined as “urban policies which deal with decline and try to adapt the built environment to a reduced population size” (béal et al. 2019, 193), as efforts towards “diminishing or right-sizing the excess supply of houses, roads, and other infrastructure to reflect a smaller population” (hartt 2019, 1653), or simply as “approaches and tools coping with surpluses” (batunova & gunko 2018, 1581). rightsizing, more concretely, includes policy measures such as the demolition of buildings, the development of land banks, zoning ordinances, and long-term comprehensive plans (béal et al. 2019). both as a concept and as a practice, rightsizing has been met with critique. this is, hackworth (2015, 780) suggests, “not a post-growth epiphany” but an “attempt to reset growth by converting the most 108 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper expensive parts of the territorial social economy into a new investment opportunity”. rightsizing has also been interpreted as mere austerity policies including “downsizing local governments, fiscal retrenchment, public service cuts, reduction of the social housing stock” (béal et al. 2019, 193). in a study from cleveland, us coppola (2019, 237) suggests that right-sizing strategies should be understood as “open, contested, fields of policy experimentation whose transformative potential has to be closely investigated by critical geographers, planners and policymakers”. béal and colleagues (2019, 193) suggests that right-sizing practices seem to have a limited capacity to meet the challenges of shrinkage, and at worst accentuate some the “worst exclusionary tendencies” of contemporary urban planning regimes. for my part, i have suggested that the concept of local adaptation policy must be understood through its three constituent parts. the first part, local, indicates a focus on local levels of government. the second, adaptation, indicates that someone is indeed adapting to something (in this case, depopulation and its financial and organisational consequences). the third part, policy, importantly, suggests that adaptation is far from a value-neutral or bureaucratic issue but a set of ideas that involves value judgements and priorities (syssner 2018a, 2020b). in a continuous elaboration on the concept of local adaptation policy, geographers can assist by elucidating how policy and planning systems adapt to a new demographic situation, characterised by declining birth rates, larger shares of immigrants, ageing, and fluctuating part-time inhabitants. adaptation does not need to be comprised entirely of budget cuts and harsh priorities, but could also be manifested in local governments’ attempts to innovatively reorganise their service provision or altered planning practices – for example, in the form of facilitation of second homes (hidle et al. 2010; overvåg 2011; arnesen et al. 2012). regardless of whether we use the concept of adaptation policy, smart shrinkage, or right-sizing, we may continue by asking how shrinkage becomes politicised in the first place in various contexts (béal et al. 2019) – or what effectiveness various policy responses have (döringer et al. 2020). in any case, the issue of policy evaluation is very much a task for the geographer. thus, as martin (2001, 190) suggests, human geographers have a long tradition of evaluating policies and to “reveal their limitations, biases and effects”. human geography can contribute with a deeper understanding of the implications that place-specific local contexts may have for policy. thus, from a geographical perspective, it is evident that context matters, and that planning, and policy measures need to be sensitive to local, place-specific conditions in order to be effective (martin 2001). to develop a “onesize-fits-all” approach to shrinkage is, as batunova and gunko (2018, 1582) point out, a hard task. we could also continue by asking how shrinkage is dealt with by actors with no formal political mandate. several studies have observed that civic action tends to be regarded a necessity for managing shrinkage while maintaining quality of life for residents. several studies have observed patterns of action among village groups and community organisations engaging in informal planning practices (mcfarlane & waibel 2012; meijer & syssner 2017; syssner & meijer 2017b; abramsson & hagberg 2018). ročak, hospers and reverda (2016) point to examples where shrinkage has led variously to increased, sustained, and reduced civic action. other studies have demonstrated in a similar vein that depopulation can inspire feelings of responsibility and action among residents, but also constitute a hindrance to the capacity for participatory, integrated, and sustainable planning (pallagst et al. 2017). the stigmatisation sometimes associated with shrinkage can lead to opposition or resignation among residents, or fuel existing processes of negotiating identities (meyer et al. 2016). all these processes are highly relevant to study from the perspective of geography. the focus of the above discussion has been on policy interventions on the local and regional scale. hagen, higdem and overvåg (2022) contribute to this literature by investigating in more detail to what extent demographic change is reflected in contemporary policy and planning in the norwegian region innlandet. one argument from them is that the policy and planning response to shrinkage in norway is best described as either varied, incoherent, or as a hybrid between a variety of approaches. albrecht and kortelainen (2022) contribute with an exploration of small-town revitalisation initiatives in six shrinking small towns in finland. they contribute to the on-going discussion of what capability local level governments have to include shrinkage into planning visions on a local policy level, and for whom local level revitalization programmes are initiated. in their contribution to this volume, carson and others (2022) show that contemporary patterns of resource distribution in southern lapland are largely the result of ad-hoc decision making, rather than formal planning. fennia 200(2) (2022) 109josefina syssner so far, i have referred mostly to policy responses observed at the local level of government. but of course, policy responses to shrinkage or to uneven demographic change can be observed at the national and international levels too. one such response is that of administrative reforms or, more precisely, municipal amalgamations. as demonstrated by erlingsson, ödalen and wångmar (2021), a long list of western european democracies have used municipal amalgamation reforms as a means to enhance the capacity of (allegedly too-small) local governments to provide their citizens with services. in this volume, kasemets and nugin (2022) examine one such amalgamation, i.e., the one passed in estonia in 2017. in line with other municipal amalgamations (see erlingsson et al. 2021), the estonian reform aimed at strengthening the municipal level by sparing costs for administration and by improving the local quality of governance (kasemets & nugin 2022). it is still unclear, as pointed out by erlingsson, ödalen and wångmar (2021) and by kasemets and nugin (2022), whether reforms of this kind really have the intended effects. yet, they do seem to have implications for socio-cultural activities, for community activism, and for formal and informal policy making. makkonen, inkinen and rautiainen (2022) stress that a vital role of researchers is to inform policymakers on the national level about the challenges that municipalities and regions face due to demographic change. the rhetoric and policy of regional competitiveness from the early 1990s onwards has, as emphasised by them, resulted in an uneven development between the cores and the peripheries (see also syssner 2006), an unevenness that local, regional, and state governments now have to deal with. alternative perspectives and models so far, i have pointed to those studies that have observed the neglect of shrinkage in policy and planning, as well as the concepts of adaptation policy, smart shrinkage, and rightsizing. an important task for geographers, however, would also be to identify alternative trajectories and policy developments. included in this task is the endeavour to understand how citizens organise themselves in relation to globalisation, centralisation, urbanisation, deindustrialisation, and other factors that are understood to foster uneven demographic development. also included is the study of how citizens meet with the consequences of depopulation and how they engage in acts of both resistance and transition. previous studies demonstrate that rural resistance can be mobilised among communities against the closure of schools or hospitals (taghizadeh 2015; fuglestad & almås 2020), but also against central decisions about the setting up of wind turbines (anshelm & simon 2016) or global trends of rising petrol prices. patterns of resistance include demonstrations for local food sovereignty (ayres & bosia 2011) as well as populist right-wing movements (mamonova & franquesa 2020) and hunting movements seeking to safeguard rural interests against allegedly state-driven nature conservation efforts (von essen et al. 2015). in a discussion of rural resistance, scoones and colleagues (2018, 1) suggest that a new political moment is in progress, partially manifested in “the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism”. more precisely, they refer to nationalist concerns, protectionist politics, a discursive positioning of insiders against outsiders, and pleas for security rather than civil liberties. a related task for geographers may also be to identify and even normatively suggest alternative paths of development for shrinking rural areas. thus, in the literature, several voices call for policies capable of improving the quality of life or well-being of residents rather than pursuing population growth or “simply augment(ing) the value of land and spur(ring) economic growth” (schindler 2016, 3; see also pallagst et al. 2009; hollander 2017; hartt 2019). some have argued that the capacity for “capitalising on the positive aspects of shrinkage” is desperately needed (pallagst et al. 2013), and that it is essential to develop policies showing that a place can lose parts of its population and still offer a high quality of life to its residents (hollander 2011, 2018; hartt 2019). when exploring what these alternative, beneficial pathways could be, a distinction can be made between the processes of policy development, and the contents of policy. in a study from denmark, tietjen and jørgensen (2016, 29) suggest that shrinkage constitutes an example of a “wicked planning problem”. strategic planning is thus suggested as a translation process where key actors need to elaborate both shared understandings of problems and strategic visions that transgress multiple scales. other studies discuss the potential of a design perspective as a means to rethink planning in a 110 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper shrinking context (kempenaar et al. 2016; kim 2019). in the espon escape final report, copus and others (2020) advocate a four-stage process of policy development in shrinking regions. the process, it is suggested, should acknowledge the crucial role of narratives in shaping local and regional strategies, the importance of clear rationales for policy intervention, a focus on good practices, and evaluation of policies as an integral part of the intervention. but what could a positive, forward-looking, and inclusive policy goal for shrinking areas look like content-wise? is the dream of economic and population growth the only dream that can be dreamt there? below, i refer to three main perspectives that are encountered in both academic and public debates: the shrinking place as a digitalised one, as a sustainable one, or as a place for either elderly and/or temporary residents. the digitalised place at times, shrinking rural areas are depicted as potential temporary places of residence for digital nomads, or as more permanent homes for distance-working individuals, utilising a wide range of digitalised public and commercial services. such a development has been anticipated by many and has been repeatedly pointed to following the covid-19 pandemic. hospers and reverda (2015), however, underlined well before the pandemic that due to information and communication technology, rural areas have become gradually ever more included into larger structures. thus, even in the smallest and most remote places of europe, they conclude, residents are informed about events and developments elsewhere. according to hospers and reverda (2015), this could be understood as an emancipatory process, and a silent revolution in the european countryside. today, society has gone through a digital revolution, while at the same time the structuring conditions of globalisation and urbanisation are being rapidly reinterpreted. the idea of a global, integrated economy was put under pressure when governments closed their borders due to covid-19. urbanity has been widely reframed, and distance modes have fundamentally changed the geography of work and education (reuschke & felstead 2020; bergdahl & nouri 2021). despite critical remarks about the social and spatial inequalities embedded in distance work and study (reuschke & felstead 2020), and about rural citizens being older, less resourceful, and thus more vulnerable than urban ones, the popular debate still frames the post-pandemic state as beneficial for the rural environment (boterman 2020; nordregio 2020), and cultivates the idea of shrinking, rural areas as being connected, digital, and innovative. here, empirical results will be needed before we can determine the substance of these ideas. a sustainable place the debate on how to reconstruct society after the coronavirus feeds into a long-standing debate on how to transform society in a more sustainable direction. the economic crisis following from the pandemic has inspired calls for green deals capable of counteracting recession as well as addressing climate change (lahcen et al. 2020). it has also brought radical calls for a “new normal” (benjamin et al. 2020) and for a transition to a sustainable society beyond green growth rhetoric (rees 2019a; trainer 2020). an emerging theoretical approach of resilience stresses the need for societies to develop their capacity to “maintain [their] core functions” when hit by sudden changes (kotilainen et al. 2015, 58; see also döringer et al. 2020). on this matter, the concept of degrowth has been increasingly referred to as potentially promising in a shrinking context. this concept asks, as suggested by latouche (2010, 519), for the abandonment of “the target of growth for the sake of growth […and…] the religion of the economy, growth, progress and development”. the call for resilience and for sustainable transition is reflected in the espon escape final report, suggesting that visions for shrinking rural regions need to link up to the contemporary debate on the need for just transition and a decarbonised economy (copus et al. 2020). the report also points to the need for a broadening of goals – beyond economic growth – in shrinking rural areas, goals that also address issues such as inclusion, spatial justice, and well-being (ibid.). and indeed, a limited but growing number of local communities are aiming towards a transition of socio-economic systems by promoting alternative development trajectories. local examples include fennia 200(2) (2022) 111josefina syssner re-localisation of food production/consumption (rees 2019b), the establishment of autonomous ecovillages, lifestyle choices such as down-shifting, off-grid living (vannini & taggart 2013) and the simpler way perspective (trainer 2020), but also local eco-entrepreneurship and the creation of social currencies (framed as) sustainable (balaguer rasillo 2021). the idea of a circular economy has become quite well-established over the last few years. the idea has been developed without any relationship to shrinking geographies, but attempts have nonetheless been made to link the two together. a circular economy, briefly, can be understood as an economic system based on a combination of reduce, reuse, and recycle activities which challenges linear “endof-life” business-models (kirchherr et al. 2017, 224). whether such a system fundamentally transforms the economy is contested (bradley & persson 2022), but its potential for non-growth territories, where planning for growth does not seem to be an adequate strategy, has been discussed. a study from the baltic states (livina & veliverronena 2019) contributes by theoretically exploring “the potential benefits provided by application of principles of circular economy in shrinking regions”. these studies do indicate that such principles could be applicable to shrinking regions, even if there are challenges as such as “cooperation, philosophy of consumption and values, willingness and availability to pay for services” (livina & veliverronena 2019, 147). by and large, however, ideas of circular economy and sustainable transition seem to operate largely parallel to mainstream rural development, even if there are individuals and groups pushing the integration of these transitions into local and regional policy-making (buhr et al. 2018). in this volume, halonen (2022) refers to a qualitative interview study of directors in regional and subregional development organisations. by paying attention to how the informants understand or conceptualise features such as growth, green growth, sustainable growth, and degrowth, we can discern whether growth tends to be framed as an impossible, possible, or compelling development path for shrinking areas. interestingly, the idea of a green, circular, and sustainable economy is fairly often (and perhaps ironically) interpreted as a window of opportunity for growth for rural peripheries. lundmark, carson and eimermann (2022) stress that governmental agencies in the swedish arctic have high hopes that the massive investments made in green energy in the region will turn years of depopulation into massive in-migration from the swedish south. in other words, green industrialisation is in this context believed to lead to a significant inflow of people and increasing demands for schools and other public services (ibid.). the temporary, ageing, or global place the idea of shrinking rural areas as digitalised and sustainable can be complemented with certain other, if less dominant, ideas. some voices have highlighted the idea of shrinking cities and regions as ageing places, where the contribution of older people to the economy and welfare must be emphasised, sometimes described in terms of the “silver economy” (hospers & reverda 2015, 44). a land use study from berlin suggests that the age structure of inhabitants is relevant for planning practices; an ageing of the population, advanced by shrinkage, does affect land consumption and pushes towards reurbanisation but also towards landscape fragmentation (lauf et al. 2016). other studies discuss the potential of shrinking cities as green retirement cities and suggest active retirement migration and health tourism as parts of revised development strategies in shrinking, ageing areas (nefs et al. 2013). some, however, point to the difficult aspects of being a place primarily for older people. in her commentary on my paper, meijer (2022) refers to arguments made by steinführer and grossmann (2021) and reminds us about the hidden dynamics of old-age immigration. while monitoring the consequences of population change in small towns in germany, they observe that migration balances in those towns were mostly negative, even if the towns – somewhat surprisingly – turned out to be target locations for old-age migration. these trajectories, it is argued, seem to remain “largely out of sight of municipal decision makers” (ibid., 176). this is noteworthy, since re-growth induced by an influx of older people may demand strategies other than those rendered when a town grows to birth surplus or due to an influx of young people. 112 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper in policy, practice, and research, we come across those who stress the importance of shrinking rural areas as locations for recreation, tourism, and leisure. part-time residents and second-home owners are in these contexts pointed out as potentially important for local development in shrinking, rural areas (hidle et al. 2010; overvåg 2011). in other contexts, these areas have been depicted as a meeting place for newly arrived international migrants. from this perspective, the sparsely populated rural municipality has advantages when it comes to introducing and welcoming newly arrived people in our society. in a small municipality, dividing lines between administrative units or between local governments and citizens are less sharp. civil society in such areas is often well developed and displays a strong sense of community. these qualities make shrinking rural places well suited to meet the complex needs of a newly arrived family (syssner 2018b). to summarise, we have an important job to do when it comes to identifying alternative trajectories and policy developments in shrinking areas. included in this task are efforts to understand how and based on what values citizens organise themselves in relation to the drivers and consequences of shrinkage. also included is the attempt to identify promising ways forward. on a critical note, meijer (2022) rightly asks whether attempts to envision futures without growth really have potential. digitalisation, sustainability, temporality, and ageing all have, as meijer argues, serious downsides. will these downsides be outweighed and outplayed by the advantages – or will these pathways (perhaps even worse) remain platitudes and buzzwords without real meaning? nordic perspectives – the comparative approach the lion’s share of the literature referred to here has evolved in contexts outside the nordic countries. it might be that i have overlooked a huge body of nordic literature on shrinkage, but i am more inclined to say that we in the region still have job to do and articles to write. it seems like surprisingly little has been written about shrinkage in a nordic context, despite the fact that depopulation has shaped local societies in the nordic region for decades. several voices stress the fact that research on shrinkage has long remained case study-based (haase et al. 2017; döringer et al. 2020), and also focused mainly on instances of urban shrinkage. many scholars do identify a need for cross-continental debate and discussion, and for comparative studies capable of exploring governance responses in different national contexts (döringer et al. 2020). in calls for a more comparative approach, however, nordic countries are seldom mentioned (e.g. hackworth 2014; haase et al. 2017; batunova & gunko 2018). still, i would suggest that studies from the nordic region could contribute with two things: experiences of sparsity, and experiences of shrinkage in a welfare state context. as indicated above, international research tends to focus on urban shrinkage. there are, however, an increasing number of studies that point to the fact that shrinkage is a planning condition in many small and medium-sized towns too (döringer et al. 2020). that said, the limited importance that these locations are given in the larger planning system makes this kind of shrinkage appear as “a silent process” (béal et al. 2019, 196). studies where the nordic experience of rural shrinkage is in focus would thus be a worthy contribution to the international literature. even more important, perhaps, is the experience of meeting shrinkage within the context of a welfare state. it should be mentioned that the nordic welfare model is undergoing a fundamental transformation (kvist & greve 2011), but for a long period of time, our welfare system has been based on the principle of universalism and on the idea that all citizens should be able to “maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market” (esping-andersen 1990, 21–22). citizens are expected to pay rather high income taxes, and in return, extensive social rights should be offered equally to everyone (syssner 2020d). services such as healthcare, schools, and elderly care are, in the words of esping-andersen (1990, 21–22), at least in theory “rendered as a matter of right”. these principles of the nordic welfare model entail that depopulation and the consequences thereof is an issue that the public sector must address (syssner 2020d). albrecht and kortelainen (2022) point out that despite stable economies and high standards of living, the nordic countries are still very much affected by decline in non-core regions. this constitutes a difference from those states where welfare systems are more reliant on initiatives organised by individuals, families, fennia 200(2) (2022) 113josefina syssner insurance companies, or other private actors. this attribute makes the nordic countries interesting cases in international comparisons. conclusion the question that has guided this text is what we as geographers can do for shrinking geographies. the answer that has been provided – although incomplete and hopefully to be supplemented or modified by colleagues – is that we can assist by showing how resources have been distributed in space over time and why such patterns take the shape they do. we can also contribute by demonstrating what it means to live, work, and operate in shrinking, rural territories by making implicit geographical imaginations explicit, and by pointing to the ways in which shrinkage is dealt with by various policy actors. we could also make alternative policy directions explicit and, not least, enrich an international research field by providing case studies or comparative studies from a nordic context. the question raised and the answers provided indeed assume that we should do something for these areas. this, of course, is an assumption that could be questioned. our assignment, some may argue, is to produce knowledge without concern about who the beneficiaries of that knowledge might be. my response to such a position would be that no knowledge that geographers produce could be neutral towards place. whatever we study – be it areas of growth, entrepreneurs, or those hired by them; border areas, border defences, or migrants; tourism areas, tourism entrepreneurs, and tourists; or any other geography or constellation of actors – we contribute to shaping the world and people's perceptions of it. by lending our time and attention to shrinking areas, we increase our common understanding of a set of circumstances that are relevant for a large part of our world. at the outset, i also asked what relevance the scholarly concern for shrinking geographies could have for others than those facing these issues in their daily lives. here, i would end by saying that shrinking areas – their conditions, trajectories, and challenges – are manifestly interdependent with their surroundings; with growing, urban areas locally, nationally, and globally. for society to understand and deal with contemporary societal challenges – such as social cohesion, political legitimacy, democratic governance, or global climate change and green transition – we as scholars must be able to provide knowledge of geographies with a variety of conditions. at this point, i cannot stress enough the importance of kovanen’s (2022) call for a global perspective. we need to learn more about the differences and similarities between shrinking areas in the west, and in the global south, east, and north. let's make sure the conversation and the exchange around this topic can continue to develop. notes 1 “across europe, almost 60% (687) of predominantly rural or intermediate nuts 3 regions meet the criteria of sustained (past or projected future) demographic decline.” (copus et al. 2020, 6) references abramsson, m. & hagberg, j. e. (2018) what about community sustainability? dilemmas of ageing in shrinking semi-rural areas in sweden. scottish geographical journal 134(3–4) 103–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702541.2018.1527941 albrecht, m. & kortelainen, j. (2022) contested planning efforts for the revitalization of small town centres in finland. fennia 200(2) 191–209. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119852 alves, d., barreira, a. p., guimarães, m. h. & panagopoulos, t. (2016) historical trajectories of currently shrinking portuguese cities: a typology of urban shrinkage. cities 52 20–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.008 amcoff, j. & westholm, e. (2007) understanding rural change-demography as a key to the future. futures 39(4) 363–379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2006.08.009 anshelm, j. & haikola, s. (2016) power production and environmental opinions environmentally motivated resistance to wind power in sweden. renewable and sustainable energy reviews 57 1545–1555. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.211 https://doi.org/10.1080/14702541.2018.1527941 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119852 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2015.11.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2006.08.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2015.12.211 114 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper arnesen, t., overvåg, k., skjeggedal, t. & ericsson, b. (2012) transcending orthodoxy: the multi-house home, leisure and the transformation of core periphery relations. in danson, m. & de souza, p. (eds.) regional development in northern europe, 182–195. routledge, oxon. august, m. (2014) challenging the rhetoric of stigmatization: the benefits of concentrated poverty in toronto’s regent park. environment and planning a 46(6) 1317–1333. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45635 ayres, j. & bosia m. j. (2011) beyond global summitry: food sovereignty as localized resistance to globalization. globalizations 8(1) 47–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2011.544203 balaguer r. x. (2021) alternative economies, digital innovation and commoning in grassroots organisations: analysing degrowth currencies in the spanish region of catalonia. environmental policy and governance 31(3) 175–185. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1910 batunova, e. & gunko, m. (2018) urban shrinkage: an unspoken challenge of spatial planning in russian small and medium-sized cities. european planning studies 26(8) 1580–1597. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1484891 béal, v., fol, s., miot, y. & rousseau, m. (2019) varieties of right-sizing strategies: comparing degrowth coalitions in french shrinking cities. urban geography 40(2) 192–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1332927 beauregard, r. a. (2009) urban population loss in historical perspective: united states, 1820–2000. environment and planning a 41(3) 514–28. https://doi.org/10.1068/a40139a bell, d. (2011) grey area. dialogues in human geography 1(2) 215–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611404489 benjamin, s., dillette, a. & alderman, d. h. (2020) ‘we can’t return to normal’: committing to tourism equity in the post-pandemic age. tourism geographies 22(3) 476–483. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1759130 bergdahl, n. & nouri, j. (2021) covid-19 and crisis-prompted distance education in sweden. technology, knowledge and learning 26(3) 443–459. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-020-09470-6 bernt, m., haase, a., großmann, k., cocks, m., couch, c., cortese, c. & krzysztofik, r. (2014) how does(n’t) urban shrinkage get onto the agenda? experiences from leipzig, liverpool, genoa and bytom. international journal of urban and regional research 38(5) 1749–1766. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12101 bontje, m. (2004) facing the challenge of shrinking cities in east germany: the case of leipzig. geojournal 61(1) 13–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-005-0843-2 boterman, w. r. (2020) urban-rural polarisation in times of the corona outbreak? the early demographic and geographic patterns of the sars-cov-2 epidemic in the netherlands. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 111(3) 513–529. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12437 bradley, k. & persson, o. (2022) community repair in the circular economy – fixing more than stuff. the international journal of justice and sustainability 27(10–11) 1321–1337. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2022.2041580 buhr, k., isaksson, k. & hagbert, p. (2018) local interpretations of degrowth – actors, arenas and attempts to influence policy. sustainability 10(6) 1899. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10061899 camarda, d., rotondo, f. & selicato, f. (2015) strategies for dealing with urban shrinkage: issues and scenarios in taranto. european planning studies 23(1) 126–46. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820099 carson, d. b., carson, d. a., lundmark, l. & hurtig, a-k. (2022) resource deserts, village hierarchies and de-growth in sparsely populated areas: the case of southern lapland, sweden. fennia 200(2) 210–227. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120788 coppock, j. t. (1974) geography and public policy: challenges, opportunities and implications. transactions of the institute of british geographers 63 1–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/621525 coppola, a. (2019) projects of becoming in a right-sizing shrinking city. urban geography 40(2) 237–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1421391 copus, a., dax, t., kovács, k., tagai, g., weber, r., ortega-reig, m., ferrandis, a., piras, s. & meredith, d. (2020) escape european shrinking rural areas: challenges, actions and perspectives for territorial governance. applied research, final report. <www.espon.eu/escape> 26.11.2022. cortese, c., haase, a., grossmann, k. & ticha, i. (2013) governing social cohesion in shrinking cities: the cases of ostrava, genoa and leipzig. european planning studies 22(10) 2050–2066. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.817540 cunningham-sabot, e. & fol, s. (2009) shrinking cities in france and great britain: a silent process. in pallagst, k., aber, j., audirac, i., cunningham-sabot, e., fol, s., martinez-fernandez, c., moraes, s., mulligan, h., vargas-hernandez, j., wiechmann, t., wu, t., & rich, j. (eds.) the future of shrinking cities: problems, patterns and strategies of urban transformation in a global context, 24–35. iurd monograph series. <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288427875_shrinking_cities_in_france_ and_great_britain_a_silent_process> 26.11.2022. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45635 https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2011.544203 https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.1910 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1484891 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1332927 https://doi.org/10.1068/a40139a https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611404489 https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2020.1759130 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-020-09470-6 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12101 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-005-0843-2 https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12437 https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2022.2041580 https://doi.org/10.3390/su10061899 https://doi.org/http http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820099 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120788 https://doi.org/10.2307/621525 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1421391 http://www.espon.eu/escape https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.817540 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288427875_shrinking_cities_in_france_and_great_britain_a_silent_process https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288427875_shrinking_cities_in_france_and_great_britain_a_silent_process fennia 200(2) (2022) 115josefina syssner döringer, s., uchiyama, y., penker, m., kohsaka. r. (2020) a meta-analysis of shrinking cities in europe and japan. towards an integrative research agenda. european planning studies 28(9) 1693–1712. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1604635 dubeaux, s. & sabot e. c. (2018) maximizing the potential of vacant spaces within shrinking cities, a german approach. cities 75 6–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2017.06.015 eriksson, m. (2020) nya bilder av norrland. in stenbacka, s. & heldt cassel, s. (eds.) periferi som process, 73–90. svenska sällskapet för antropologi och geografi. erlingsson, g., ödalen, j. & wångmar, e. (2021) how coerced municipal amalgamations thwart the values of local self-government. urban affairs review 57(5) 1226–1251. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087420921458 esping-andersen, g. (1990) the three political economies of the welfare state. international journal of sociology 20(3) 92–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/15579336.1990.11770001 von essen, e., hansen, h. p., nordström källström, n., peterson, m. n. & peterson, t. r. (2015) the radicalisation of rural resistance: how hunting counterpublics in the nordic countries contribute to illegal hunting. journal of rural studies 39 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.11.001 faust, k. m., abraham, d. m. & mcelmurry, s. p. (2016) water and wastewater infrastructure management in shrinking cities. public works management & policy 21(2) 128–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1087724x15606737 fjertorp, j. (2013) hur påverkas kommunernas ekonomi av pefolkningsförändringar? nationella kommunforskningsprogrammets rapportserie vol. 17. göteborg. fuglestad, e. m. & almås, r. (2020) distriktsopprør: periferien på nytt i sentrum. dreyers forlag. goffman, e. (1990) stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity. penguin books, harmondsworth. graham, l. f., padilla, m. b., lopez, w. d., stern, a. m., peterson, j., & keene, d. e. (2016) spatial stigma and health in postindustrial detroit. international quarterly of community health education 36(2) 105–113. https://doi.org/10.1177/0272684x15627800 grasland, c., corminboeuf, r. y. b., gaubert, n., lambert, n., salmon, i., baron, m., baudet-michel, s., ducom, e., riviere, d., schmoll, c., zanin, c., gensel, j., vincent, j.-m., plumejeaud-perreau, c., van hamme, g., holm, e., strömgren, m., coppola, p., salaris, s., groza, o., muntele, i., turcanasu, g. & stoleriu, o. (2008) shrinking regions: a paradigm shift in demography and territorial development. european parliament’s committee on regional development. gregory, d. (1994) geographical imaginations. blackwell, ma. guimarães, m. h., nunes, l. c., barreira, a. p. & panagopoulos, t. (2016) what makes people stay in or leave shrinking cities? an empirical study from portugal. european planning studies 24(9) 1684–1708. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2016.1177492 haase, a., hospers, g. j., pekelsma, s. & rink, d. (2012) shrinking areas: front-runners in innovative citizen participation. european urban knowledge network. haase, a., nelle, a. & mallach, a. (2017) representing urban shrinkage – the importance of discourse as a frame for understanding conditions and policy. cities 69 95–101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.09.007 hackworth, j. (2014) the limits to market-based strategies for addressing land abandonment in shrinking american cities. progress in planning 90 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2013.03.004 hackworth, j. (2015) rightsizing as spatial austerity in the american rust belt. environment and planning a 47(4) 766–782. https://doi.org/10.1068/a140327p hagen, a., higdem, u. & overvåg, k. (2022) planning to meet challenges in shrinking rural regions. towards innovative approaches to local planning. fennia 200(2) 175–190. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119752 halonen, m. (2022) multiple meanings and boundaries of growth in shrinking regions in east and north finland. fennia 200(2) 120–136. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119537 hartt, m. (2019) the prevalence of prosperous shrinking cities. annals of the american association of geographers 109(5) 1651–1670. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1580132 harvey, d. (1974) what kind of geography for what kind of public policy? transactions of the institute of british geographers 63 18–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/621527 hedberg, c. & haandrikman, k. (2014) repopulation of the swedish countryside: globalisation by international migration. journal of rural studies 34 128–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.01.005 hidle, k., ellingsen, w. & cruickshank, j. (2010) political conceptions of second home mobility. sociologia ruralis 50(2) 139–155. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2010.00508.x hirt, s. & beauregard, r. (2021) must shrinking cities be distressed cities? a historical and conceptual critique. international planning studies 26(1) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2019.1661226 hoggart, k. (1996) all washed up and nowhere to go? public policy and geographical research. progress in human geography 20(1) 110–122. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913259602000108 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1604635 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2017.06.015 https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087420921458 https://doi.org/10.1080/15579336.1990.11770001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.11.001 https://doi.org/10.1177/1087724x15606737 https://doi.org/10.1177/0272684x15627800 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2016.1177492 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.09.007 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2013.03.004 https://doi.org/10.1068/a140327p https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119752 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119537 https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1580132 https://doi.org/10.2307/621527 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.01.005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.2010.00508.x https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2019.1661226 https://doi.org/10.1177/030913259602000108 116 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper hollander, j. b. (2011) can a city successfully shrink? evidence from survey data on neighborhood quality. urban affairs review 47(1) 129–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087410379099 hollander, j. b. (2017) an ordinary city: planning for growth and decline in new bedford, massachusetts. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60705-4 hollander, j. b. (2018) a research agenda for shrinking cities. edward elgar, ma. hospers, g-j. (2013a) coping with shrinkage in europe’s cities and towns. urban design international 18(1) 78–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2012.29 hospers, g-j. (2013b) policy responses to urban shrinkage: from growth thinking to civic engagement. european planning studies 22(7) 1507–1523. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 hospers, g-j. & reverda, n. (2015) managing population decline in europe’s urban and rural areas. springer international, cham. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-319-12412-4 johnson, m. p., hollander, j. & hallulli, a. (2014) maintain, demolish, re-purpose: policy design for vacant land management using decision models. cities 40(b) 151–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2013.05.005 jones, m., jones, r. & woods, m. (2004) an introduction to political geography: space, place and politics. routledge, london. kasemets, k. & nugin, r. (2022) everyday materialities and identity bordering defined by recent administrative reform: reactions from estonian dispersed ruralities. fennia 200(2) 228–244. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116490 kempenaar, a., van lierop, m., westerink, j., van der valk, a. & van den brink, a. (2016) change of thought: findings on planning for shrinkage from a regional design competition. planning practice & research 31(1) 23–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2015.1088242 kim, s. (2019) design strategies to respond to the challenges of shrinking city. journal of urban design 24(1) 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2018.1554345 kirchherr, j., reike, d. & hekkert, m. (2017) conceptualizing the circular economy: an analysis of 114 definitions. resources, conservation and recycling 127 221–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.09.005 kotilainen, j. eisto, i. & vatanen e. (2015) uncovering mechanisms for resilience: strategies to counter shrinkage in a peripheral city in finland. european planning studies 23(1) 53–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820086 kovanen, s. (2022) learning from and with shrinking regions for global transformations – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 255–257. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122756 kvist, j. & greve, b. (2011) has the nordic welfare model been transformed? social policy and administration 45(2) 146–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9515.2010.00761.x lahcen, b., brusselaers, j., vrancken, k., dams, y., da silva paes, c., eyckmans, j. & rousseau, s. (2020) green recovery policies for the covid-19 crisis: modelling the impact on the economy and greenhouse gas emissions. environmental and resource economics 76 731–750. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00454-9 lang, t. (2012) shrinkage, metropolization and peripheralization in east germany. european planning studies 20(10) 1747–1754. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.713336 latouche, s. (2010) degrowth. journal of cleaner production 18(6) 519–522. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.02.003 lauf, s., haase, d. & kleinschmit, b. (2016) the effects of growth, shrinkage, population aging and preference shifts on urban development – a spatial scenario analysis of berlin, germany. land use policy 52 240–254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.12.017 livina, a. & veliverronena, l. (2019) application of circular economy in shrinking regions. vide. tehnologija. resursi – environment, technology, resources. proceedings of the international scientific and practical conference 1 147–153. https://doi.org/10.17770/etr2019vol1.4196 luescher, a. & shetty, s. (2013) an introductory review to the special issue: shrinking cities and towns: challenge and responses. urban design international 18(1) 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2012.36 lundmark, l., carson, d. & eimermann, m. (2022) spillover, sponge or something else? dismantling expectations for rural development resulting from giga-investments in northnern sweden. fennia 200(2) 157–174. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120530 makkonen, t., inkinen, t. & rautiainen, s. (2022) mapping spatio-temporal variations of shrinkage in finland. fennia 200(2) 137–156. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119495 mamonova, n. & franquesa, j. (2020) right-wing populism in rural europe. introduction to the special issue. sociologia ruralis 60(4) 702–709. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12306 martin, r. (2001) geography and public policy: the case of the missing agenda. progress in human geography 25(2) 189–210. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913201678580476 martinez-fernandez, c., audirac, i., fol, s. & cunningham-sabot, e. (2012) shrinking cities: urban challenges of globalization. international journal of urban and regional research 36(2) 213–225. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01092.x https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087410379099 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60705-4 https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2012.29 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.793655 http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-319-12412-4 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2013.05.005 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.116490 https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2015.1088242 https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2018.1554345 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.09.005 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820086 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.122756 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9515.2010.00761.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00454-9 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.713336 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2010.02.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2015.12.017 https://doi.org/10.17770/etr2019vol1.4196 https://doi.org/10.1057/udi.2012.36 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.120530 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.119495 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12306 https://doi.org/10.1191/030913201678580476 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01092.x fennia 200(2) (2022) 117josefina syssner massey, d. (2004) geographies of responsibility. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 86(1) 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00150.x massey, d. (2006) space, time, and political responsibility in the midst of global inequality. erdkunde 60(2) 89–95. https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2006.02.01 matthiesen, u. (2005) gone: human capital in eastern germany. in oswalt, p. (ed.) shrinking cities, 1 172–173. hatje cantz, ostfildern-ruit. mcfarlane, c. & m. waibel, m. (2012) urban informalities: reflections on the formal and informal. ashgate publishing, london. meijer, m. (2020) when it goes wrong … learning from challenged (and revived) community initiatives. journal of rural studies 74 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.11.006 meijer, m. (2022) shrinking geographies or challenged rurality’s? three points of reflection – commentary to syssner. fennia 200(2) 251–254. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121861 meijer, m. & syssner, j. (2017) getting ahead in depopulating areas how linking social capital is used for informal planning practices in sweden and the netherlands. journal of rural studies 55 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.07.014 meyer, f., miggelbrink, j. & schwarzenberg, t. (2016) reflecting on the margins: socio-spatial stigmatisation among adolescents in a peripheralised region. comparative population studies 41(3–4). https://doi.org/10.12765/cpos-2016-10en nefs, m., alves, s., zasada, i. & haase, d. (2013) shrinking cities as retirement cities? opportunities for shrinking cities as green living environments for older individuals. environment and planning a 45(6) 1455–1473. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45302 nelle, a. b. (2016) tackling human capital loss in shrinking cities: urban development and secondary school improvement in eastern germany. european planning studies 24(5) 865–883. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2015.1109611 németh, j. & hollander, j. (2016) right-sizing shrinking cities: a landscape and design strategy for abandoned properties. journal of landscape architecture 11(2) 90–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2016.1188578 niedomysl, t. & amcoff, j. (2011) why return migrants return: survey evidence on motives for internal return migration in sweden. population, space and place 17(5) 656–673. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.644 nordregio (2020) rural housing challenges in the nordic region. <https://www.norden.org/en/ publication/rural-housing-challenges-nordic-region> 25.11.2022. ortiz-moya, f. (2015) coping with shrinkage: rebranding post-industrial manchester. sustainable cities and society 15 33–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2014.11.004 overvåg, k. (2011) second homes: migration or circulation? norsk geografisk tidsskrift – norwegian journal of geography 65(3) 154–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2011.598237 pain, r. (2006) social geography: seven deadly myths in policy research. progress in human geography 30(2) 250–259. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph605pr pallagst, k. (2015) the interdependence of shrinking and growing: processes of urban transformation in the usa in the rust belt and beyond. in pallagast, k., wiechmann, t. & martinez-fernandez, c. (eds.) shrinking cities: international perspectives and policy implications, 59–77. routledge, london and new york. pallagst, k., aber, j., audirac, i., cunningham sabot, e., fol, s., martinez-fernandez, c., moraes, s., mulligan, h., vargas-hernandez, j., wiechmann, t., wu, t., & rich, j. (2009) the future of shrinking cities: problems, patterns and strategies of urban transformation in a global context. institute of urban & regional development, may. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zz6s7bm pallagst, k., fleschurz, r. & trapp, f. (2017) greening the shrinking city – policies and planning approaches in the usa with the example of flint, michigan. landscape research 42(7) 716–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1372398 pallagst, k., fleschurz, r., nothof, s. & uemura, t. (2021) shrinking cities: implications for planning cultures? urban studies 58(1) 164–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019885549 pallagst, k., mulligan, h. cunningham-sabot, e. & fol, s. (2017) the shrinking city awakens: perceptions and strategies on the way to revitalisation? town planning review 88(1) 9–13. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.1 pallagst, k., wiechmann, t. & martinez-fernandez, c. (2013) shrinking cities: international perspectives and policy implications. routledge, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203597255 popper, d.e. & popper, f. j. (2002) small can be beautiful. planning 68(7) 20–23. rauhut, d. & littke, h. (2016) “a one say ticket to the city, please!” on young women leaving the swedish peripheral region västernorrland. journal of rural studies 43 301–310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.05.003 reckien, d. & martinez-fernandez, c. (2011) why do cities shrink? european planning studies 19(8) 1375–1397. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2011.593333 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00150.x https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2006.02.01 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.11.006 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121861 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.07.014 https://doi.org/10.12765/cpos-2016-10en https://doi.org/10.1068/a45302 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2015.1109611 https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2016.1188578 https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.644 https://www.norden.org/en/publication/rural-housing-challenges-nordic-region https://www.norden.org/en/publication/rural-housing-challenges-nordic-region https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2014.11.004 https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2011.598237 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph605pr http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zz6s7bm https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1372398 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019885549 https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.1 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203597255 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.05.003 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2011.593333 118 fennia 200(2) (2022)research paper rees, w. (2019a) end game: the economy as eco-catastrophe and what needs to change. real-world economics review 87 132–148. https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-87/ rees, w. (2019b) why place-based food systems? food security in a chaotic world. journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development 9(a) 5–13. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.091.014 reuschke, d. & felstead, a. (2020) changing workplace geographies in the covid-19 crisis. dialogues in human geography 10(2) 208–212. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934249 rhodes, j. & russo, j. (2013) shrinking smart? urban redevelopment and shrinkage in youngstown, ohio. urban geography 34(3) 305–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2013.778672 ribeiro, m. & marques, c. (2002) rural tourism and the development of less favoured areas? between rhetoric and practice. international journal of tourism research 4(3) 211–220. https://doi.org/10.1002/jtr.377 ročak, m., hospers, g. j. & reverda, n. (2016) civic action and urban shrinkage: exploring the link. journal of urban regeneration and renewal 9(4) 406–418. <https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/306959963_civic_action_and_urban_shrinkage_exploring_the_link> 25.11.2022. schatz, l. (2017) going for growth and managing decline: the complex mix of planning strategies in broken hill, nsw, australia. town planning review 88(1) 43–57. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.5 schindler, s. (2016) detroit after bankruptcy: a case of degrowth machine politics. urban studies 53(4) 818–836. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014563485 scoones, i., edelman, m., borras, s. m., hall, r., wolford, w. & white, b. (2018) emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism. journal of peasant studies 45(1) 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1339693 sligo, f. x. & massey, c. (2007) risk, trust and knowledge networks in farmers’ learning. journal of rural studies 23(2) 170–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.06.001 sousa, s. & pinho, p. (2015) planning for shrinkage: paradox or paradigm. european planning studies 23(1) 12–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820082 steinführer, a. & grossmann, k. (2021) small towns (re)growing old. hidden dynamics of old-age migration in shrinking regions in germany. geografiska annaler, series b: human geography 103(3) 176–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1944817 syssner, j. (2006) what kind of regionalism? regionalism and region building in northern european peripheries. linköping studies in arts and science. peter lang publishing group, frankfurt, tyskland. syssner, j. (2012) världens bästa plats? platsmarknadsföring, makt och medborgarskap. nordic academic press, lund. syssner, j. (2014) politik for kommuner som krymper. cks rapport, linköpings universitet, centrum för kommunstrategiska studier. syssner, j. (2018a) mindre många: om anpassning och utveckling i krympande kommuner. första upp. dokument press, årsta. syssner, j. (2018b) nya visioner för landsbygden. linnefors förlag, boxholm. syssner, j. (2020a) a policy perspective on shrinkage. in syssner, j. (ed.) pathways to demographic adaptation, 11–22. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9_2 syssner, j. (2020b) arguments for a local adaptation policy. in syssner, j. (ed.) pathways to demographic adaptation, 69–86. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9_6 syssner, j. (2020c) pathways to demographic adaptation. springer briefs in geography. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 syssner, j. (2020d) rural shrinkage in a nordic welfare state. in syssner, j. (ed.) pathways to demographic adaptation, 23–35. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9_3 syssner, j. & meijer, m. (2017) informal planning in depopulating rural areas: a resource-based view on informal planning practices. european countryside 9(3) 458–472. https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2017-0027 syssner, j. & siebert, c. (2020) local governments and the communication of demographic decline in sweden and germany: who, what and why? ager 2020(29) 79–105. https://doi.org/10.4422/ager.2020.01 taghizadeh, j. l. (2015) quality over quantity? technical information, interest advocacy and school closures in sweden. interest groups & advocacy 4 101–119. https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2014.17 tietjen, a. & jørgensen, g. (2016) translating a wicked problem: a strategic planning approach to rural shrinkage in denmark. landscape and urban planning 154 29–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.01.009 trainer, t. (2020) de-growth: some suggestions from the simpler way perspective. ecological economics 167 106436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106436 tuan, y. f. (1990) topophilia. a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. columbia university press, new york. vannini, p. & taggart, j. (2013) voluntary simplicity, involuntary complexities, and the pull of remove: the radical ruralities of off-grid lifestyles. environment and planning a 45 295–311. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4564 https://rwer.wordpress.com/comments-on-rwer-issue-no-87/ https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.091.014 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934249 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2013.778672 https://doi.org/10.1002/jtr.377 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306959963_civic_action_and_urban_shrinkage_exploring_the_link https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306959963_civic_action_and_urban_shrinkage_exploring_the_link https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2017.5 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014563485 https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1339693 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.06.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820082 https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1944817 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9_2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9_6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34046-9_3 https://doi.org/10.1515/euco-2017-0027 https://doi.org/10.4422/ager.2020.01 https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2014.17 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.01.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106436 https://doi.org/10.1068/a4564 fennia 200(2) (2022) 119josefina syssner wacquant, l. (2007) territorial stigmatization in the age of advanced marginality. thesis eleven 91(1) 66–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513607082003 wacquant, l., slater, t. & borges pereira, v. (2014) territorial stigmatization in action. environment and planning a 46(6) 1270–1280. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4606ge ward, k. (2005) geography and public policy: a recent history of ‘policy relevance’. progress in human geography 29(3) 310–319. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph551pr ward, k. (2007) "public intellectuals", geography, its representations and its publics. geoforum 38(6) 1058–1064. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.11.021 ward, k. (2011) applied policy research and critical human geography. dialogues in human geography 1(2) 238–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611404496 weck, s. & beißwenger, s. (2014) coping with peripheralization: governance response in two german small cities. european planning studies 22(10) 2156–2171. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.819839 wiechmann, t. & bontje, m. (2015) responding to tough times: policy and planning strategies in shrinking cities. european planning studies 23(1) 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820077 wiechmann, t. & pallagst, k. m. (2012) urban shrinkage in germany and the usa: a comparison of transformation patterns and local strategies. international journal of urban and regional research 36(2) 261–280. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01095.x woods, m. & gardner, g. (2011) applied policy research and critical human geography: some reflections on swimming in murky waters. dialogues in human geography 1(2) 198–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611404488 https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513607082003 https://doi.org/10.1068/a4606ge https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph551pr https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.11.021 https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611404496 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.819839 https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2013.820077 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01095.x https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820611404488 mining conflicts in the european union: environmental and political perspectives urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa87223 doi: 10.11143/fennia.87223 mining conflicts in the european union: environmental and political perspectives sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpula kivinen, s., kotilainen, j. & kumpula, t. (2020) mining conflicts in the european union: environmental and political perspectives. fennia 198(1–2) 163–179. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.87223 comprehensive knowledge on the issues contributing to mining conflicts is crucial in balancing between the exploitation of mineral deposits and local claims. we explore recent mining conflicts in the european union using information derived from the global atlas of environmental justice to improve the understanding of the potential impacts of the intensification of mining activities by the new minerals policies. the variety of causes of conflict is wide and ranges from environmental impacts to socio-economic and health concerns of the populations residing in the vicinity of the mines. while mining conflicts have arisen during all the phases of the life cycle of a mine, new mining projects have been well presented amongst the conflicts. policy makers should increasingly pay attention to the multiple impacts that mining has had on the environment and socially, in order to be able to put the plans for increasing minerals extraction in europe into practice. keywords: global environmental justice atlas, energy minerals, europe, minerals policy, mining conflict, non-energy minerals sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpula, department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, p.o. box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: sonja.kivinen@uef.fi, juha.kotilainen@uef.fi, timo.kumpula@uef.fi introduction europe holds rich mineral resources due to its wide variety of geological terranes and has a long history of extracting minerals for use by european societies. in terms of its impacts, mining has a dual role: it has been considered to be crucial for industrial production and regional development, but also to cause significant landscape and environmental changes (de vos et al. 2005; wirth et al. 2012). there has been a revival of political initiatives to increase mining activities in europe, ranging from the european commission through the member state governments to a number of european regions that consider mining as an important sector of their regional economies. this means that mining will continue to be an important issue on political and environmental agendas in europe (vidal-legaz et al. 2018). the processes of landscape change and the scales on which land use decisions are made have changed rapidly worldwide during the 21th century. global actors interact with local and national actors in ways that often have substantial social and environmental consequences (kotilainen et al. 2015; salo et al. 2016; yakovleva et al. 2017). the economic effects of the mining industry occur at national, © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 164 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) regional, local and company scales, but the direct pressures on the environment and human communities concentrate on the localities in the vicinity of which resource extraction is carried out (kumpula et al. 2011; meyfroidt et al. 2013; schaffartzik et al. 2016; kotilainen 2018; schilling et al. 2018). mining activities and building of associated infrastructures tend to change landscapes considerably and have impacts on local environment and ecosystems, other forms of land use, and people’s living conditions and comfort. the impacts of mining on the environment and local communities can persist long after the mine closure, not only in the mining site but in the surrounding area as well (dudka & adriano 1997; bridge 2004; wirth et al. 2012; kivinen 2017; salom & kivinen 2019). as a response to the various negative environmental impacts caused by land use transitions and the utilization of natural resources, environmental conflicts and environmental justice movements have intensified worldwide during the past decades (martinez-alier 2001; martinez-alier et al. 2011; badera 2014; helwege 2015; conde 2017; wagner 2020). environmental justice is a concept that links environmental problems with social justice (wagner 2020). collaborative spatial databases and maps have become powerful tools to collect, share and publish information on social conflicts around environmental issues (drozdz 2020). an example of such a work is the global atlas of environmental justice (ejatlas) produced by the environmental justice organizations, liabilities, and trade (ejolt) research project (martinez-alier et al. 2011). the ejatlas constitutes the largest existing online database that provides information on socio-environmental conflicts from an environmental justice perspective across the globe (temper et al. 2015, 2018; ejatlas 2019). comprehensive knowledge on the issues contributing to mining conflicts is crucial in balancing between the exploitation of mineral deposits and local claims. in this paper, we explore mining conflicts related to the extraction of non-energy and energy minerals in the european union during the recent decades as they are documented in the ejatlas. the purpose of this exploration is to improve the understanding of the potential impacts of the intensification of mining activities in europe by the new minerals policies. our effort is guided by a characterisation of the environmental and social constraints to the mining industry (prior 2012). the environmental constraints include increased mine waste, the impacts of the size of a mine, energy intensity, and water pollution. the social constraints include land-use conflicts, cumulative impacts of mining activities, as well as the consequences from mine closure to the mining communities and regions. we ask the following questions: 1) which minerals are the ones whose extraction has caused conflicts in europe, and in which phases of mining have the conflicts occurred?, 2) what are the environmental, health and social-economic concerns that have given rise to the conflicts?, and 3) what are the characteristics of the groups which have mobilized and forms of mobilization in the conflicts? the new mining policy of the european union raw materials policy is a relatively new policy field in the european union (tiess 2010, 2011). of the european union institutions, the most significant actor for crafting the raw materials policy has been the european commission. the justification for the raw materials policy is drawn from the future success of the european industries and the employment that the industries provide to the citizens of the eu. raw materials have been seen as having strategic importance for the manufacturing industry in the european union, and hence the european commission has been implementing various actions to ensure supply of raw materials, mainly minerals (european commission 2017a). some member states have designed their own, related minerals policies (e.g. ministry of employment and the economy & geological survey of finland 2010). the raw materials initiative was launched in 2008 (commission of the european communities 2008; tiess 2010). although the raw materials initiative covers in principle more raw materials than those acquired by mining and includes timber, minerals are clearly its most important aspect, demonstrated by the list of critical raw materials (european commission 2017a). the european union raw materials policy rests on three pillars (commission of the european communities 2008): ensuring a fair and sustainable supply of raw materials from global markets; ensuring a sustainable supply of raw materials within the eu; and boosting resource efficiency and increasing the amount of recycling and recovery. the second pillar focusses on provision of minerals from european deposits and 165sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) addresses several issues. there is a need to allocate more land for mining, through an improved consideration of mining in spatial and land use planning (ahwg 2014). as is suggested by the raw materials initiative, a list of critical raw materials has been drawn up three times (european commission 2014, 2017a). this list is a result of analysis on two axes: one that estimates the economic importance of each raw material, and another that focusses on the risk of shortage in its supply. the most recent version of the list dates to 20171. the list includes a large variety of minerals in terms of their purpose in industrial usage. for example, the list includes light and heavy rare earth elements, necessary for the production of modern energy and information technologies, but also phosphorus, raw material for the production of industrial fertilisers, and thus of utmost importance for current industrial-scale food production. overall, as a result of the raw materials policy, it is thus one of the explicit policy goals of the european commission to increase the amount of mining within the european union. in order to highlight the challenges for such a policy aim, we next explore mining conflicts in europe. studying mining conflicts through the environmental justice atlas the ejatlas socio-environmental conflicts, also known as ecological distribution conflicts, arise from the growth and changes in the social metabolism, that is, the flows of energy and materials in the economy (temper et al. 2015, 2018). in the ejatlas, socio-environmental conflicts are defined as “mobilizations by local communities or social movements against particular economic activities, infrastructure construction or waste disposal/pollution, whereby environmental impacts are a key element of their grievances” (ejatlas 2019). these conflicts are a response of structural inequalities of income and power (temper et al. 2015, 2018). while there are other definitions in the literature on conflicts, and distinction is sometimes made to disputes and other forms of clash between actors, in this paper we draw on the definition of conflict by the ejatlas. the ejatlas contained information of a total of 2,699 conflicts across a wide range of topics in different parts of the world (as of february 2019). the individual conflicts in the database have been reported by scholars, environmental non-governmental organizations (ngos), social activists, and journalists. information on the conflicts have been collected through a collaborative online platform and revised and moderated before publication. in the database, conflicts are categorized as unknown, latent, low, medium or high intensity conflicts. latent conflicts include no visible organizing at the moment. the low intensity conflicts have some local organizing, medium intensity conflicts more visible mobilization, and high intensity conflicts widespread mass mobilization. each conflict in the ejatlas contains data about involved groups (activists, scholars etc.), the conflict background, the observed/ potential impacts, the claims, and outcomes for stakeholders (temper et al. 2015, 2018; ejatlas 2019). the coverage of the ejatlas database varies between different countries and regions. as information on the occurrence of conflicts is not exhaustive, the ejatlas is not suitable for rigorous statistical analyses in geographical space. however, it can still provide an important overview of the characteristics of conflicts through the reported cases. the unique open database can contribute to the understandings of the drivers and interconnections for the increasing number of socio-environmental conflicts and the ongoing worldwide sustainability crisis (temper et al. 2015, 2018; ejatlas 2019). on the basis of the material in the ejatlas, we can maintain that even if the data on socio-environmental conflicts is not exhaustive globally, at least the conflicts reported in the database exist, and therefore the information is valuable for surveying the character and causes of socio-environmental conflicts, as well as for evaluating the potential of emergence of similar conflicts in the future. conflict cases in the ejatlas, about 28% of the conflicts were classified into categories ‘mineral ores and building materials extraction’ and ‘coal extraction and processing’ (ejatlas 2019; see also özkaynak et al. 2012, 2015). we extracted data on a total of 44 mining conflicts belonging to these categories within the 166 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)reviews and essays european union. we divided the conflicts as those related to non-energy minerals that is metals and industrial minerals, and those related to energy minerals (fig. 1). the ejatlas database contains the name, geographical location and a general description of a conflict. there is also additional information available, such as references, web links, photographs and videos. we derived the following information from the database for each case: 1) location, 2) commodity, 3) start year of the conflict, 4) project status, 5) environmental, health and socioeconomic impacts (potential and observed), 6) intensity of the conflict at the highest level, 7) groups mobilizing protest actions, and 8) forms of mobilization. in our analysis, we utilized classifications and variable names used in the ejatlas. in the ejatlas, conflicts are generally named by their geographic location or by the name the conflict is known to the international public (özkaynak et al. 2012). for clarity, we refer to the conflict either by the name of the mine or the name of the location, depending on the mining phase and the type of conflict. for some of the mining projects, there was no updated information available on their current status. additional information on mining projects was derived from the mining atlas (mining atlas 2019) and the webpages of the mining companies. fig. 1. mining conflicts related to non-energy and energy minerals reported in the ejatlas within the european union. countries with reported mining conflicts in the ejatlas are marked with dark green shade. see table 1 for the names of the sites and table 2 for conflict details. 167sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) different types of mining conflicts minerals and mining phases related to the conflicts at the time of investigating the ejatlas, the mining conflicts reported took place in fennoscandia, the british isles, iberian peninsula, balkans (the golden quadrilateral) and central europe (fig. 1, table 1). unsurprisingly, the distribution of the mining conflict sites reflected the locations of the most important european mineral deposits, for example in the iberian peninsula, the baltic shield and the alpine-balkan-carpathian-dinaride belt (blundell et al. 2006). most of the reported conflicts had started during the past two decades. in terms of commodities, 46% of the conflicts included in the ejatlas were related to metals, 41% to energy minerals and 13% to industrial minerals (table 2). over half of the metal mining conflicts were related to gold mining. other metals that are mined in the conflictual mining sites included for example copper, silver, nickel, zinc, and lead. energy mineral conflicts were caused most often by lignite or coal mining. uranium mining covered 21% of the energy mineral conflicts. industrial mineral conflicts concerned the extraction of lime, kaolin, potash and stone, sand and gravel. planned or realized openings of new mines dominated the conflicts identified in the atlas, with a half of the conflicts on such projects (the start of the conflicts in 1987–2015). 15% of the conflicts concerned the expansion of an existing mining activity and 13% were protests against operational mining activities. only 7% of the cases were related to post-mining areas, another 7% to environmental accidents, and 2% to mineral exploration (see figure 2 for examples). country mine/site country mine/site metals energy 1 bulgaria ada tepe 26 bulgaria buhovo 2 bulgaria trun 27 czech republic horni jiretin 3 finland talvivaara (terrafame) 28 germany cottbus nord 4 greece halkidiki 29 germany garzweiler i 5 hungary kolontar-devecser (ajka) 30 germany garzweiler ii 6 united kingdom omagh 31 germany hambach 7 romania baia mare 32 germany jaenschwalde 8 romania băiţa-crăciuneşti 33 germany jaenschwalde-nord 9 romania certej 34 germany nochten ii 10 romania deva muncel 35 germany welzow-sued ii 11 romania rosia montana 36 hungary pecs, hungary 12 romania rovina 37 poland gubin brody 13 slovenia mezica valley 38 portugal guarda, viseu, coimbra 14 spain aznalcollar 39 spain laciana valley 15 spain corcoesto 40 spain retortillo 16 spain mina cobre las cruces 41 united kingdom cauldhall 17 sweden gállok/kallak 42 united kingdom douglas valley 18 sweden norra kärr 43 united kingdom ffos-y-fran 19 sweden rönnbäcken 44 united kingdom pont valley industrial 20 belgium la boverie 21 portugal barqueiros 22 spain baix camp 23 spain potasas del llobregat 24 sweden ojnare forest 25 united kingdom harris table 1. mining conflict sites (n = 44) within the european union reported in the ejatlas. 168 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)reviews and essays site commodity conflict start mining status n o n -e n er gy 1 gold, copper, silver new mine 2005 construction 2 gold new mine 2011 cancelled 3 nickel env. accident 2006 in operation 4 gold, lead, zinc, copper new mine 2011 permitting 5 aluminium/bauxite env. accident 2010 in operation 6 gold new mine 2014 under development 7 gold env. accident; new mine 2007 proposed 8 gold new mine 2012 proposed 9 gold new mine 2008 proposed 10 gold, polymetals exploration 2013 11 silver, gold new mine 2002 proposed 12 gold new mine 2015 permitting 13 zinc, lead post-mining (2007) post-mining 14 zinc, lead, copper, silver env. accident; reopening 1998 in operation 15 gold new mine 2011 proposed 16 copper operation 2006 in operation 17 iron new mine 2010 proposed 18 rare minerals, zirconium new mine 2009 proposed 19 nickel, cobalt, magnetite new mine 2010 proposed 20 lime expansion 2007 in operation 21 kaolin operation 1965 in operation 22 sand, gravel operation; several quarries n.d. in operation 23 potash operation 1929 in operation 24 lime new quarry 2012 cancelled 25 stones, sand, gravel new quarry 1988 cancelled en er gy 26 uranium post-mining 1943 27 lignite expansion n.d. cancelled 28 lignite new mine and expansion 1989 post-mining 29 lignite new mine and expansion 1987 in operation 30 lignite expansion n.d. in operation 31 lignite expansion 2012 in operation 32 lignite new mine 1994 in operation 33 lignite expansion 2007 proposed 34 lignite expansion 2005 proposed 35 lignite expansion 2011 proposed 36 uranium reopening 2006 proposed 37 lignite new mine 2009 proposed 38 uranium post-mining; several mines 2001 39 coal expansion 1985 cancelled 40 uranium new mine 2011 proposed 41 coal new mine 2008 cancelled 42 coal new mine and expansion 2007 post-mining 43 coal operation 2003 in operation 44 coal new mine 2007 construction table 2. non-energy and energy mining conflicts within the european union reported in the ejatlas by commodity, mining phase, the start year of the conflict and the current mining status of the site. 169sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) environmental concerns there was a wide diversity of environmental concerns related to the impacts on mining. the most severe environmental concerns included loss of previously existing landscape and aesthetic degradation, surface water and ground water pollution or depletion, air pollution, loss of biodiversity and potential or observed deforestation. these were the concerns that related to more than 80% of the non-energy or energy mining conflicts (fig. 3). concerns on mine tailing spills were mainly related to non-energy mining conflicts, whereas concerns on global warming were associated with energy mining conflicts. other important environmental concerns were for example soil contamination, noise pollution, large-scale disturbance of hydrological and geological systems, soil erosion and reduced ecological/hydrological connectivity. gold was the main commodity in nearly 80% of the planned new mines. among the conflicts related to the planned mines, a cyanide-based process for gold extraction was one important factor mentioned in the ejatlas reports contributing to concerns of environmental pollution. environmental concerns related to operational mines were associated with both sudden environmental accidents and environmental issues that developed over a long period of time as a result of poor technologies, or lack of or inadequate post-mining reclamation. the ejatlas data utilized in this study included four major environmental accidents in spain, romania, hungary and finland, all related to a dam or pond failure. the aznalcollar tailings dam failure at the los frailes mine (spain) in 1998 caused tailings and tailing waters to spill into the nearby river. this resulted in widespread metal and arsenic contamination a. b. c. d. 1 km sentinel-2, 7/2018, google earth engine 1 km sentinel-2, 7/2018, google earth engine sentinel-2, 7/2018, google earth engine sentinel-2, 7/2018, google earth engine 1 km 1 km fig. 2. examples of mines with conflicts: a) the former talvivaara nickel mine (currently terrafame) (3), finland, located in sparsely populated forested area in finland; an environmental accident, b) the aznalcollar zinc-lead-copper mine (14), spain, located north of the doñana national park; an environmental accident, c) the hambach lignite mine (31), germany; the contested hambach forest located on the mine's bottom right corner, and d) the mainshill coal mine, douglas valley (42), scotland, united kingdom; contested coal mining has ceased during the past years in the region. satellite data: sentinel-2, 7/2018, google earth engine (gorelick et al. 2017). 170 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)reviews and essays in the river basin dominated by agricultural land and threatened the doñana national park. a dam failure at the baia mare mine (romania) in 2000 caused cyanide-contaminated water to spill over farmlands and into the river system. the polluted waters also reached hungary and serbia, killing large quantities of fish in the tisza and danube rivers. a dam of a toxic red sludge reservoir in ajka (hungary) ruptured in 2010. red sludge or mud, a by-product of refining bauxite into alumina flooded in the surrounding territory resulting in a significant damage to the ecosystems and social structures of the region. at the talvivaara mine (finland), the leakage of waste water including nickel, uranium and other toxic metals ran into the nearby waterways in 2012, causing increased metal contents in lakes and rivers within several kilometres from the mining site. 0 20 40 60 80 100 global warming desertification/drought floods (river, coastal, mudflow) food insecurity (crop damage) waste overflow reduced ecological/hydrological connectivity soil erosion large-scale disturbance of hydrological and geological systems noise pollution soil contamination biodiversity loss (wildlife, agro-diversity) mine tailing spills air pollution deforestation and loss of vegetation cover surface water pollution/decreasing water quality groundwater pollution or depletion loss of landscape/aesthetic degradation non-energy energy % fig. 3. environmental concerns related to non-energy and energy mining conflicts. the mezica valley in serbia is an example of the area, where a long tradition in mining and processing of lead has caused significant environmental pollution with lead, zinc and cadmium, and a latent environmental conflict during the post-mining phase. also poorly managed radioactive waste and uranium-related hazards were one important factor contributing to mining conflicts. abandoned, non-rehabilitated uranium mines in portugal are a good example of the mining impacts that potentially can continue over extended time during the post-mining period. one distinct conflict-causing group was coal/lignite mines, a vast majority of these conflicts reported in the ejatlas located in germany and the united kingdom. these mines are typically large in size, and cause concern on declined air quality and contribution to global warming in addition to other environmental impacts. socio-economic and health concerns in addition to environmental impacts, mining was also resisted because of its adverse socioeconomic impacts and health concerns (fig. 4). the most important concerns related to more than 60% of the non-energy and energy mining conflicts were land disposession, loss of landscape/sense of place, displacement and loss of (current) livelihood. for example, huge coal/lignite mining projects in germany, the largest lignite producer in the world, have resulted in resettlement of tens of villages and thousands of inhabitants. loss of livelihood is often related to loss of agricultural land and forests, or declined values of the area for tourism (e.g. gold mining in balkan, metals mining in fennoscandia). other concerns were related to, for instance, increase in corruption, loss of 171sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) traditional knowledge, practices and cultures, and various other instabilities arising from major changes in the socio-economic structure regionally. mining resistance was also related to the concerns on health of either mining workers or local inhabitants. exposure to unknown or uncertain complex risks, accidents, occupational diseases and environment-related diseases were mentioned in more than half of the non-energy and/or energy mining conflicts. 0 20 40 60 80 100 impacts on agriculture and tourism other socio-economic impacts increase in violence and crime lack of work security firings unemployment violations of human rights loss of traditional knowledge/practices/cultures increase in corruption/co-optation of different actors loss of livelihood displacement loss of landscape/sense of place land disposession non-energy energy % 0 20 40 60 80 100 other health impacts other environmental related diseases mental problems occupational disease and accidents accidents exposure to unknown or uncertain complex risks non-energy energy % fig. 4. a) socio-economic concerns and b) health concerns related to non-energy and energy mining conflicts. conflict intensity, mobilizing groups and forms of mobilization approximately 14% of the cases were high-intensity conflicts, 54% medium-intensity, and 21% were low-intensity conflicts (fig. 5). high-intensity conflicts were characterized by widespread resistance, mass mobilization, violence and arrests, whereas medium-intensity conflicts included for example street protests and visible mobilization. low-intensity conflicts contained some local organizing. approximately 12% of the conflicts were latent conflicts with no visible organizing at the moment. high-intensity and latent conflicts were more typical in the case of non-energy commodities and medium-intensity conflicts more typical in the case of energy commodities. a. b. 172 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) the most important mobilizing groups were neighbours of the mining sites, citizens and communities, local environmental justice organizations (ejos) and social movements (47–89% of the non-energy and energy mining conflicts) (table 3). local scientists, professionals and farmers were often involved in non-energy conflicts, and local governments and political parties and international environmental justice organizations in energy conflicts. the most important actions that the movements took were the mobilization of national and international ngos into the conflict, lawsuits, court cases, judicial activism, public campaigns, official complaint letters and petitions, and media-based activism/alternative media (53–78 % of the nonenergy and energy mining conflicts) (table 4). 0 20 40 60 80 100 all non-energy energy high-intensity medium-intensity low-intensity latent % fig. 5. the proportion of mining conflicts in the different conflict intensity classes. mobilizing groups non-energy (%) energy (%) neighbours/citizens/communities 86 89 local ejos 73 79 social movements 59 47 local government/political parties 32 68 international ejos 32 47 local scientists/professionals 50 26 farmers 41 32 indigenous groups or traditional communities 23 0 recreational users 18 0 fisher people 14 0 industrial workers 5 11 artisanal miners 5 5 trade unions 5 5 women 5 5 ethnically/racially discriminated groups 5 0 political organizations; grassroots 5 0 landless peasants 5 0 informal workers 5 0 ex-miners 0 5 table 3. mobilizing groups in non-energy and energy conflicts reported in the ejatlas. the most frequently occurring mobilizing groups (≥ 50% of the conflict cases) are marked in bold. 173sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) causes of conflicts and a way forward europe hosts an outstanding diversity of physical and human environments, and mining activities are located in a wide variety of biogeographical, socio-economic and cultural regions. a vast majority of the mining conflicts reported in the ejatlas took place in northern, eastern and southern (border) regions of europe. today, traditional mining is probably untenable in many densely populated european core areas. this has resulted in increasing mining development in peripheral areas, where there is smaller concentration of population. during the recent years, mineral potential exploration in the european union has been carried out especially in sweden and finland, and to a lesser extent also in other countries, such as ireland, portugal, spain and bulgaria (euromines 2012; lusty & gunn 2015). for example, there are regions in sweden and finland which have started to put effort on becoming lucrative targets for investments by mining corporations. according to the fraser institute’s annual survey of mining and exploration companies, finland, ireland, northern ireland and sweden were rated among top 10 ranked jurisdictions based on the policy perception index (ppi), which is a composite index that measures the overall policy attractiveness of the jurisdictions (stedman & green 2018). at the same time, conflicts between local communities and the mining sector are increasing in europe similarly to other parts of the world (andrews et al. 2017; conde & lebillon 2017; velicu 2019; zachrisson & lindahl 2019). globally, mining conflicts are related to the distribution of burdens and benefits of environmental risks, rights related to environmental conservation, preservation of cultural integrity, indigenous rights and moral issues, and participation in decision-making concerning local development and forms of mobilization non-energy (%) energy (%) involvement of national and international ngos 74 63 lawsuits, court cases, judicial activism 78 53 public campaigns 70 63 official complaint letters and petitions 70 53 media based activism/alternative media 70 42 development of a network/collective action 57 47 creation of alternative reports/knowledge 57 42 street protest/marches 30 47 objections to the eia 43 16 development of alternative proposals 22 26 blockades 13 37 referendum other local consultations 13 32 appeals/recourse to economic valuation of the environment 26 16 occupation of buildings/public spaces 9 26 land occupation 4 32 community-based participative research 9 11 artistic and creative actions 4 16 arguments for the rights of mother nature 9 5 strikes 4 5 refusal of compensation 9 0 shareholder/financial activism 9 0 boycotts or non-participation in official processes 0 11 protest camps/tree-housing 0 5 human chain 0 5 sabotage 0 11 table 4. forms of mobilization in non-energy and energy conflicts reported in the ejatlas. the most frequently occurring forms of mobilization (≥ 50% of cases) are marked in bold. 174 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) environmental issues (özkaynak & rodriguez-labajos 2017). our results showed that recent mining conflicts in europe arise from a wide variety of environmental, socio-economic and health concerns. the cases reported in the ejatlas showed that many mining projects in the eu were resisted during the planning phase. this is because communities have learnt through the earlier cases of the impacts mining can cause to their environment and livelihoods, and because of plenty of uncertainties related to the impacts and risks of the projects (conde & le billon 2017; kivinen et al. 2018). resistance to on-going mining projects also occurred when impacts, such as long-term pollution or environmental accidents, were felt. indeed, environmental impacts and hazards can occur during each phase of the life cycle of a mine from exploration to the post-mining phase. some of these impacts are relatively easy to delineate and predict, for example the construction of a new open-pit mine causes local land transformations, such as deforestation, loss of other natural vegetation cover or loss of farmland. instead, the indirect impacts of land transformations for example on ecosystems and biodiversity, and on the other land uses, businesses and livelihoods in the surrounding areas are more difficult to measure or estimate. furthermore, some impacts of mining can be observed only after relatively long time periods, such as accumulation of heavy metals in terrestrial and aquatic environments, and long-term health impacts to miners and surrounding communities (pereira et al. 2014; baeten et al. 2018; salom & kivinen 2019). each mining location, and thus mining conflict, is unique in terms of the physical environment and socio-cultural, historical, political and economic background (badera 2014). the cases reported in the ejatlas showed that there was a great diversity of mobilizing stakeholder groups involved with the conflicts. the actions of local communities and social movements included for instance the mobilization of national and international ngos, legal actions, public campaigns, petitions, demonstrations and media-based activism. the proportion of medium-to-high intensity conflicts including visible mobilization or widespread mass mobilization in the eu countries were slightly smaller compared to the corresponding global proportion reported in the ejatlas (68% and 75%, respectively, see özkaynak et al. 2015). further, the proportion of conflicts related to energy minerals within the european union was notably larger (41%; metals 46%; industrial minerals 13%) compared to the global proportion of energy minerals conflicts (19%; metals 75%; industrial minerals 6%) (özkaynak et al. 2015). a major part of the non-energy metal conflicts was related to gold mining. gold mining activities have expanded particularly in the balkan countries during the past decade. currently about 90% of the significant gold producing operations worldwide utilize cyanide for gold and silver extraction (mudder & botz 2004). cyanide is toxic to many living organisms at very low concentrations, and fish and aquatic invertebrates are particularly sensitive to cyanide exposure (eisler & wiemeyer 2004). dam failures in metal mines resulting in large-scale pollution by toxic substances (grimalt et al. 1999; cunningham 2005; mayes et al. 2011; leppänen et al. 2017; sairinen et al. 2017) have intensified antimining protests and protests against cyanide use in mining in europe (vesalon & creţan 2013). for example, in the case of a planned gold mine ada tepe, the mining company needed to remove a cyanide-based method from the investment proposal because of strong resistance by the local communities and the municipal administration (ejatlas 2019). compared to non-energy mining conflicts, energy mining conflicts were more characterized by concerns on air pollution and related health impacts in the surrounding communities, and global warming. coal has remained a key component in the energy mix of several regions in european countries, while the european union is committed to drastically reducing its carbon emissions. coal (hard coal and lignite) is currently mined in 12 eu countries, of which poland hosts the largest number of coal mines, followed by spain, germany and bulgaria. the declining use of coal has led to mine closures in many regions across europe (johnstone & hielscher 2017; alves dias et al. 2018). coal mine closures have engendered debates on successful mine reclamation practices, future land use and socio-economic development in these areas (wirth et al. 2012; alves dias et al. 2018). earlier, mines were often abandoned in europe and other part of the world without considering potential risks to humans and the environment (fields 2003; kivinen 2017). prior to granting a mining permit, most regulatory agencies today require mine closure and reclamation plans aiming at ensuring 175sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) public safety, minimizing potential negative environmental impacts and allowing alternative land use opportunities (heikkinen et al. 2008; revuelta 2017). the mining waste directive (2006/21/ec) prompted by accidents in spain and romania introduces measures for safe management of waste resulting from the extraction, treatment and storage of mineral resources and the working of quarries. eu member states are currently required to draw up and periodically update an inventory of closed waste facilities on their territory including abandoned facilities, which cause serious negative environmental impacts or have the potential of becoming a threat to human health or the environment. over 3,400 closed and abandoned waste facilities were registered in 18 national inventories (as of july 2017) (european commission 2017b). there is also current research on the eu level how innovation processes in the waste management and mine closure are functioning and how they are supported or inhibited by national and european policy and legislation (politis et al. 2017). however, already closed or abandoned mines remain problematic due to financial and legal liability issues and the need to be addressed predominantly on a national basis. in the case of uranium mines in portugal reported in the ejatlas, emerging concerns of the local populations and the results of the environmental surveys led the government to decide on an public health assessment and environmental remediation of abandoned sites (pereira et al. 2014). resistance to mining in local communities arises often from potential or observed environmental impacts, but also from the lack of representation and participation, lack of monetary compensation and distrust of the mining company and the state (conde 2017; conde & le billon 2017). the results of zachrisson and lindahl (2019) suggest that mining resistance grows at the national level when mining-sceptical actors are offered little or no real access nor influence by the state in either policy formulation or implementation, that is, the actual licensing processes. thus, effective communication with communities and genuine community participation should play a vital role in the governance related to large-scale extractive operations (hilson 2002; schilling et al. 2018). according to peltonen and sairinen (2010), social impact assessment of land use plans can contribute to conflict management, and may acquire features of conflict mediation, depending on the extent and intensity of stakeholder participation. more attention should also be paid to public participation and justice concerns associated with reclamation of mine sites (kivinen et al. 2018; beckett & keeling 2019). beckett and keeling (2019) suggest that mine remediation should not only focus on technical management, but also the contested political, social, and cultural relations generated by the extraction and its legacies. the ejatlas data provides a unique tool for examining socio-environmental conflicts at regional and global scales. the ejatlas is constantly expanding, as new cases are added to the database by activists and collaborators. a major limitation of the ejatlas is the geographically biased distribution of reported conflict cases and lack of data on some regions. however, compared to an examination of conflicts only through case studies, the wider geographical focus can help to achieve a more holistic picture of the conflicts and their drivers (özkaynak & rodriguez-labajos 2017). ultimately, the results may decrease the power imbalances between different stakeholder groups and the mining industry. conclusions by reviewing existing and recent conflicts over mining activities within the territory of the european union, this paper makes an attempt to illustrate the variety of challenges there are at a local scale as the institutions of the european union are putting forth political programmes on increasing mining in europe. the aim of this paper has also been to show that an attempted increase in the number of mining projects at the scale of the european union runs the risk of the projects being faced by strong activism against the increase in mining. the probability for such protests is visible across europe. the variety of causes of conflict is wide and ranges from environmental impacts to socio-economic and health concerns of the populations residing in the vicinity of the mines. a conclusion can be drawn from these findings that when designing the policies on increasing mining, the policy makers should also increasingly pay attention to the multiple impacts that mining has had on the environment and socially, in order to be able to put the plans for increasing minerals extraction in europe into practice. the policies that have been drafted on the level of the european commission have pointed out that it is unlikely that mining could be increased in large quantities in 176 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) the densely populated areas of europe. therefore, it is likely that the intensification in mining in the future would concentrate on the peripheral and more sparsely populates areas in europe, in contrast to many of the earlier mining areas in the highly populated areas. however, the analysis of the data in the database reviewed in this paper proves that protest against mining would probably grow in these peripheral regions as well. furthermore, while mining conflicts have arisen during all the phases of the life cycle of a mine, from the exploration of mineral resources to the post-mining phase of mining, new mining projects have been well presented amongst conflicts against mining. clearly, the plans for increasing mining in europe by starting new mining projects would be faced with this challenge. notes 1the most recent list includes antimony, beryllium, borates, cobalt, coking coal, fluorspar, gallium, germanium, indium, magnesium, natural graphite, niobium, phosphate rock, silicon metal, tungsten, platinum group metals, light rare earths and heavy rare earths, baryte, bismuth, hafnium, helium, natural rubber, phosphorus, scandium, tantalum, and vanadium. acknowledgements we thank the two anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. this study was funded by the maj and tor nessling foundation (sk) and the olvi foundation (jk). references ahwg [ad hoc working group] (2014) recommendations on the framework conditions for the extraction of non-energy raw materials in the european union. report of the ad hoc working group on exchange of best practices on minerals policy and legal framework, information framework, land-use planning and permitting (ahwg). <https://ec.europa.eu/growth/content/recommendations-frameworkconditions-extraction-non-energy-raw-materials-european-union-0_en> alves dias, p., kanellopoulos, k., medarac, h., kapetaki, z., miranda-barbosa, e., shortall, r., czako, v., telsnig, t., vazquez-hernandez, c., lacal arántegui, r., nijs, w., gonzalez aparicio, i., trombetti, m., mandras, g., peteves, e. & tzimas, e. (2018) eu coal regions: opportunities and challenges ahead. eur 29292 en. publications office of the european union, luxembourg. https://doi.org/10.2760/064809 andrews, t., elizalde, b., le billon, p., oh, c. h., reyes, d. & thomson, i. (2017) the rise in conflict associated with mining operations: what lies beneath. canadian international resources and development institute (cirdi), washington, dc. badera, j. (2014) problems of the social non-acceptance of mining projects with particular emphasis on the european union – a literature review. environmental & socio-economic studies 2(1) 27–34. https://doi.org/10.1515/environ-2015-0029 baeten, j., langston, n. & lafreniere, d. (2018) a spatial evaluation of historic iron mining impacts on current impaired waters in lake superior’s mesabi range. ambio 47(2) 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-017-0948-0 beckett, c. & keeling, a. (2019) rethinking remediation: mine reclamation, environmental justice, and relations of care. local environment 24(3) 216–230. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2018.1557127 blundell, d., arndt, n., cobbold, p. r. & heinrich, c. (2006) (eds.) geodynamics and ore deposit evolution in europe. elsevier science. bridge, g. (2004) contested terrain: mining and the environment. annual review of environment and resources 29 205–259. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.energy.28.011503.163434 commission of the european communities (2008) communication from the commission to the european parliament and the council. the raw materials initiative – meeting our critical needs for growth and jobs in europe {sec(2008) 2741}. european commission, brussels. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legalcontent/en/all/?uri=celex%3a52008dc0699> conde, m. (2017) resistance to mining. a review. ecological economics 132 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.08.025 conde, m. & le billon, p. (2017) why do some communities resist mining projects while others do not? the extractive industries and society 4(3) 681–697. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.04.009 177sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) cunningham, s. a. (2005) incident, accident, catastrophe: cyanide on the danube. disasters 29(2) 99– 128. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0361-3666.2005.00276.x de vos, w., batista, m. j., demetriades, a., duris, m. j., lexa, j., lis, j., sina, k., connor, p. j. (2005) metallogenic mineral provinces and world class ore deposits in europe. geochemical research. atlas of europe. part 1. background information, methodology and maps. geological survey of finland, espoo. drozdz, m. (2020) maps and protest. in kobayashi, a. (ed.) international encyclopedia of human geography, 367–378. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-102295-5.10575-x dudka, s. & adriano, d. c. (1997) environmental impacts of metal ore mining and processing: a review. journal of environmental quality 26(3) 590–602. https://doi.org/10.2134/jeq1997.00472425002600030003x eisler, r. & wiemeyer, s. n. (2004) cyanide hazards to plants and animals from gold mining and related water issues. in ware, g. w. (ed.) reviews of environmental contamination and toxicology, 21–54. springer, new york. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9100-3_2 ejatlas (2019) ejatlas global atlas of environmental justice. <https://ejatlas.org/> euromines (2012) european exploration: a record-breaking year. mining journal 23.3.2012. <http:// www.euromines.org/publications/european-exploration-record-breaking-year-23-march-2012>. 5.10.2019. european commission (2014) report on critical raw materials for the eu. report of the ad hoc working group on defining critical raw materials. european commission, brussels. european commission (2017a) communication from the commission to the european parliament, the council, the european economic and social committee and the committee of the regions on the 2017 list of critical raw materials for the eu. european commission, brussels. <https://eur-lex.europa.eu/ legal-content/en/txt/?uri=celex%3a52017dc0490> european commission (2017b) assessment of member states' performance regarding the implementation of the extractive waste directive; appraisal of implementation gaps and their root causes; identification of proposals to improve the implementation of the directive. european commission, brussels. <https:// op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/f39af478-8d2e-11e7-b5c6-01aa75ed71a1/languageen/format-pdf/source-120978373> fields, s. (2003) the earth's open wounds: abandoned and orphaned mines. environmental health perspectives 111(3) a154–a161. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.111-a154 gorelick, n., hancher, m., dixon, m., ilyushchenko, s., thau, d. & moore, r. (2017) google earth engine: planetary-scale geospatial analysis for everyone. remote sensing of environment 202 18–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.031 grimalt, j. o., ferrer, m. & macpherson, e. (1999) the mine tailing accident in aznalcollar. science of the total environment 242(1–3) 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0048-9697(99)00372-1 heikkinen, p. m., noras, p. & salminen, r. (2008) mine closure handbook. environmental techniques for the extractive industries. geological society of finland, espoo. <http://tupa.gtk.fi/julkaisu/ erikoisjulkaisu/ej_074.pdf> helwege, a. (2015) challenges with resolving mining conflicts in latin america. the extractive industries and society 2(1) 73–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2014.10.003 hilson, g. (2002) an overview of land use conflicts in mining communities. land use policy 19(1) 65–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0264-8377(01)00043-6 johnstone, p. & hielscher, s. (2017) phasing out coal, sustaining coal communities? living with technological decline in sustainability pathways. the extractive industries and society 4(3) 457–461. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.06.002 kivinen, s. (2017) sustainable post-mining land use: are closed metal mines abandoned or re-used space? sustainability 9(10) 1705. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9101705 kivinen, s., vartiainen, k. & kumpula, t. (2018) people and post-mining environments: ppgis mapping of landscape values, knowledge needs, and future perspectives in northern finland. land 7(4) 151. https://doi.org/10.3390/land7040151 kotilainen, j. (2018) resilience of resource communities: perspectives and challenges. in marsden, t. (ed.) sage handbook of nature vol. 1, 435-452. sage publications, london. kotilainen, j., prokhorova, e., sairinen, r. & tiainen, h. (2015) corporate social responsibility of mining companies in kyrgyzstan and tajikistan. resources policy 45 202–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2015.06.001 kumpula, t., pajunen, a., kaarlejärvi, e., forbes, b. c. & stammler, f. (2011) land use and land cover change in arctic russia: ecological and social implications of industrial development. global environmental change 21(2) 550–562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.12.010 leppänen, j. j., weckström, j. & korhola, a. (2017) multiple mining impacts induce widespread changes in ecosystem dynamics in a boreal lake. scientific reports 7 10581. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11421-8 178 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) lusty, p. a. j. & gunn, a. g. (2015) challenges to global mineral resource security and options for future supply. geological society, london, special publications 393(1) sp393-12. https://doi.org/10.1144/sp393.13 martinez-alier, j. (2001) mining conflicts, environmental justice, and valuation. journal of hazardous materials 86(1–3) 153–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-3894(01)00252-7 martinez-alier, j., healy, h., temper, l., walter, m., rodriguez-labajos, b., gerber, j. f. & conde, m. (2011) between science and activism: learning and teaching ecological economics with environmental justice organisations. local environment 16(1) 17–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2010.544297 mayes, w.m., jarvis, a. p., burke, i.t., walton, m., feigl, v., klebercz, o. & gruiz, k. (2011) dispersal and attenuation of trace contaminants downstream of the ajka bauxite residue (red mud) depository failure, hungary. environmental science & technology 45(12) 5147–5155. https://doi.org/10.1021/es200850y meyfroidt, p., lambin, e. f., erb, k. h. & hertel, t. w. (2013) globalization of land use: distant drivers of land change and geographic displacement of land use. current opinion in environmental sustainability 5(5) 438–444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2013.04.003 mining atlas (2019) bateleur limited. <https://www.mining-atlas.com/> 19.12.2018. ministry of employment and the economy & geological survey of finland (2010) finland’s minerals strategy. ministry of employment and the economy, vantaa. mudder, t. i. & botz, m. m. (2004) cyanide and society: a critical review. european journal of mineral processing and environmental protection 4(1) 62–74. peltonen, l. & sairinen, r. (2010) integrating impact assessment and conflict management in urban planning: experiences from finland. environmental impact assessment review 30(5) 328–337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2010.04.006 pereira, r., barbosa, s. & carvalho, f. p. (2014) uranium mining in portugal: a review of the environmental legacies of the largest mines and environmental and human health impacts. environmental geochemistry and health 36(2) 285–301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-013-9563-6 politis, a., paspaliaris, i., taxiarchou, m. & tsertou, e. (2017) innovative waste management and mine closure. deliverable 5.1: policy and legislation framework for innovation in waste management and mine closure. minerals policy guidance for europe. prior, t., giurco, d., mudd, g., mason, l. & behrisch, j. (2012) resource depletion, peak minerals and the implications for sustainable resource management. global environmental change 22(3) 577–587. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.08.009 revuelta, m. b. (2017) closure and reclamation: the final stage. in revuelta, m. b. (ed.) mineral resources: from exploration to sustainability assessment, 534–541. springer. sairinen, r., tiainen, h. & mononen, t. (2017) talvivaara mine and water pollution: an analysis of mining conflict in finland. the extractive industries and society 4(3) 640–651. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.05.001 salo, m., hiedanpää, j., karlsson, t., cárcano ávila, l., kotilainen, j., jounela, p. & rumrrill garcía, r. (2016) local perspectives on the formalization of artisanal and small scale mining: lessons from the madre de dios gold fields, peru. the extractive industries and society 3(4) 1058–1066. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2016.10.001 salom, a. t. & kivinen, s. (2019) closed and abandoned mines in namibia: a critical review of environmental impacts and constraints to rehabilitation. south african geographical journal 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/03736245.2019.1698450 schaffartzik, a., mayer, a., eisenmenger, n. & krausmann, f. (2016) global patterns of metal extractivism, 1950–2010: providing the bones for the industrial society's skeleton. ecological economics 122 101–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.12.007 schilling, j., saulich, c. & engwicht, n. (2018) a local to global perspective on resource governance and conflict. conflict, security & development 18(6) 433–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2018.1532641 stedman, a. & green, k. p. (2018) fraser institute annual survey of mining companies 2018. fraser institute. <http://www.fraserinstitute.org> temper, l., del bene, d. & martinez-alier, j. (2015) mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental justice: the ejatlas. journal of political ecology 22(1) 256. https://doi.org/10.2458/v22i1.21108 temper, l., demaria, f., scheidel, a., del bene, d. & martinez-alier, j. (2018) the global environmental justice atlas (ejatlas): ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability. sustainability science 13(3) 573–584. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0563-4 tiess, g. (2010) minerals policy in europe: some recent developments. resources policy 35(3) 190–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2010.05.005 179sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen & timo kumpulafennia 198(1–2) (2020) tiess, g. (2011) general and international mineral policy. focus: europe. springer, wien. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-89005-9 velicu, i. (2019) de-growing environmental justice: reflections from anti-mining movements in eastern europe. ecological economics 159 271–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.01.021 vesalon, l. & creţan, r. (2013) ‘cyanide kills!’ environmental movements and the construction of environmental risk at roşia montană, romania. area 45(4) 443–451. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12049 vidal-legaz, b., blengini, g. a., mathieux, f., latunussa, c., mancini, l., nita, v., hamor, t., ardente, f., nuss, p., torres de matos, c., wittmer, d., talens peiró, l., garbossa, e., pavel, c., alves dias, p., blagoeva, d., bobba, s., huisman, j., eynard, u., di persio, f., dos santos gervasio, h., ciupagea, c. & pennington, d. (2018) raw materials scoreboard. european innovation partnership on raw materials. european commission, luxembourg. wagner, l. (2020) environmental justice. in kaltmeier, o., tittor, a., hawkins, d. & rohland e. (eds.) the routledge handbook to the political economy and governance of the americas, 1–10. routledge, new york. wirth, p., černič mali, b. & fischer, w. (2012) post-mining regions in central europe. problems, potentials, possibilities. oekom verlag, münchen. yakovleva, n., kotilainen, j. & toivakka, m. (2017) reflections on the opportunities for mining companies to contribute to the united nations sustainable development goals in sub-saharan africa. the extractive industries and society 4(3) 426–433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2017.06.010 zachrisson, a. & lindahl, k. b. (2019) political opportunity and mobilization: the evolution of a swedish mining-sceptical movement. resources policy 64 101477. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2019.101477 özkaynak, b. & rodriguez-labajos, b. (2017) mining conflicts. in spash, c. l. (ed.) routledge handbook of ecological economics: nature and society, 1–11. routledge, oxon, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315679747-49 özkaynak, b., rodriguez-labajos, b., aydın, c. i̇., yanez, i. & garibay, c. (2015) towards environmental justice success in mining conflicts: an empirical investigation. ejolt report no. 14. özkaynak, b., rodriguez-labajos, b., arsel, m., avcı, d., carbonell, m. h., chareyron, b., chicaiza, g., conde, m., demaria, f., finamore, r., kohrs, b., krishna, v. v., mahongnao, m., raeva, d., singh, a. a., slavov, t., tkalec, t., yánez, i., walter, m. & živčič, l. (2012) mining conflicts around the world: common grounds from environmental justice perspective. ejolt report no. 7. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa8287 doi: 10.11143/8287 ‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’: the intertwinedness of mobility and stillness in cottage living maja lagerqvist lagerqvist, maja (2013). ‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’: the intertwinedness of mobility and stillness in cottage living. fennia 191: 2, pp. 92−105. issn 1798-5617. along with urbanisation and modernisation, the use of second homes has increased in the western world. this can be seen as part of the increasing mobility of people in society, but also as part of a search for stillness and escape from modern urban society. recently, scholars in geography and other disciplines have argued that mobility and fixity are two sides of the same coin. this paper aims to explore the complex, manifold and often paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility in practices of dwelling and seeking stillness in a highly mobile society. it elaborates on how mobility and stillness, in both space and time, are intertwined and mutually influence each other by analysing second home usage of old cottages that formally were dwelling houses of poor tenant smallholdings in sweden. how do mobility and stillness exist and interact at these cottages and what parts do the cottages themselves have in this? this is studied through interviews with cottage users regarding their daily life practices and encounters with history and materiality at the cottages. these cottages are easily thought of as places of immobility where time has stood still. however, the paper shows that these cottages are places that continuously emerge through entanglements of mobility and stillness and of present and past times. the practices and experiences of mobility and stillness at the cottage are much integrated in and directed by the cottages’ specific geography, history and materiality, and the activities and thinking of their users because of these characteristics. the users go to the cottage to be at a place where they, with the help of the preserved materiality and history of the cottages, can feel rooted and still. at the same time the cottages offer imaginary time travels and experiences of other times and lifestyles. keywords: sweden, mobility, stillness, interviews, second homes, materiality, time-travelling maja lagerqvist, department of human geography, stockholm university, se 106 91 stockholm, sweden. e-mail: maja.lagerqvist@humangeo.su.se introduction picture yourself strolling down a small gravel road in the seemingly uninhabited swedish countryside. further ahead, a small one-story cottage is at the end of the road and you cannot help but appreciate its red painted wooden walls and aged windows. scents from the wild flowering garden, with its roses, lilacs and old gnarly apple trees, fill the air. the cottage is surrounded by old stone walls, a small barn and small-scale fields, and further beyond it, the forest and a few more arable fields and pastures frame the area. it is an old dwelling-place run down by the hand of time, formerly home to the poor family of a tenant smallholder, a home that lacks hot running water. the bone-chilling cold of winter and the dewy mornings of spring and autumn are meekly driven away by the old wood-burning stove in the antiquated kitchen, sparsely aided by one or two small radiators. simple electricity has been installed to make everyday life work. besides that, the interior is kept fennia 191: 2 (2013) 93‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’ old-fashioned and simple, guided by values of simplicity, patina and heritage and a romantic idea of the rural idyll, but also by the assets of money, time and desire. life at the cottage revolves around quality time with family and friends, relaxing from work and urban life and keeping the old, worn and ever decaying, yet still picturesque, cottage and its garden in shape. this picture that you now have in front of you serves as an illustration of the places where many swedes spend, or dream of spending, their summer holidays. today, these cottages have strong idyllic connotations and great symbolic values connected to national identity and dreams of summer holidays, stillness and the “good old days”. along with urbanisation and modernisation, the use of second homes has increased in sweden, as in many other parts of the western world (löfgren 1999). the trend can be seen as part of the increasing mobility of people, things and information in modern society (sheller 2011) but also as part of a search for stillness and an escape from that society (halfacree 2011). this paper aims to provide a much needed engagement with the complex, manifold and often paradoxical interrelationship between mobility and immobility in practices of dwelling and seeking stillness in what is often experienced as a highly mobile and rapidly changing society. this is done by exploring practices connected to movement and stillness at old cottages used as second homes in sweden. two questions guide the analysis. how do mobility and stillness exist and interact at these cottages? what parts do the cottages themselves, with their history and materiality, have in their present users’ practices and experiences of mobility and stillness? the cottages in focus here represent a specific type of secondhome in sweden that originates from the now abolished historical agricultural system of tenant small holdings called torp in swedish. it is in this particular sense the term cottage is used in this paper; as the dwelling house of a former tenant small holding that is now used as a second home. as a consequence of that history, this type of cottage is usually older than most purpose built houses that are used as second homes in sweden. although linked to histories of emigration to north america, local migration and abandonment, these cottages, like many old rural dwellings, are easily though of as immobile and fixed places, as historical places where time has stood still. looking at the cottage described above, there are not many signs of mobility or movement, except the wind in the trees, someone having her morning coffee on the steps in front of the house, the industrious work of someone clearing the land in the garden or re-erecting an old stonewall, and a car parked somewhere nearby. however, while these dwellings can be perceived as immobile or slow places, and are highly valued for those characteristics, their existence is a much more complex configuration of various practices of both mobility and stillness than they might appear at first sight. thus, this paper provides insights on how places such as these cottages emerge through entanglements of mobility and stillness and highlights aspects of materiality and the past in the present in this emergence. mobility, materiality, time travelling and second homes the capacity of built environment and architectural spaces to facilitate, form, constrain, and channel movement has not, until recently, received much focus in research on mobility. now, within what loosely can be termed “the new mobilities paradigm” (sheller & urry 2006), a growing literature concerned with this has emerged among social and cultural geographers and other scholars, as “[m]obility is always located and materialized” (sheller & urry 2004: 2). this growing interest in the spatial groundings and material infrastructure in research on mobility can be seen in the works of adey (2007) and crang (2002) on airports, strohmayer (2011) on bridges, merriman (2005) on motorways, saville (2008) on creativity and movement in architectural spaces and rérat and lees (2011) on gentrification and urban geography. an academic merging of materiality and mobility can also be found in the growing focus on non-representational approaches and how human beings sense and experience places and movements (e.g. crouch 2000; bondi et al. 2005; wylie 2005; mccormack 2008; doughty 2013, see also hannam et al. 2006; sheller 2011). overall, there is a new appreciation of materiality in recent works in the social sciences and humanities. in the history of human geography, material dimensions have often been the focus for both explanations and consequences (jackson 2000). later on, social constructivist perspectives and the cultural turn developed and thus great attention was paid to discourses and representations and how these influenced people and places (as in 94 fennia 191: 2 (2013)maja lagerqvist much work that followed cosgrove & daniels 1988). the role of materiality in this became fairly downplayed, perhaps to break with the earlier academic focus and because such influence in many cases was, and still is, perceived as obvious. responses to this development can be seen in the newer, and quite diverse, attention to materiality, as in the works by mitchell (1996) on landscape morphology and labour struggles, edensor (2005) on industrial ruins and cashman (2006) on how material remains from the past influence present practices and ideas about the past. the importance of materiality is also reflected in research on tourism (haldrup & larsen 2006; ramsey 2009) and human relationships with nature and objects (whatmore 2002). in recent mobility research, this interest in materiality is present in discussions that highlights the importance of also paying attention to immobility, stillness and moorings in the world and to the complex relationships that link mobility and immobility together (crang 2002; urry 2003; sheller 2004; hannam et al. 2006). as a part of this, several scholars have recently argued that mobility/movement and immobility/fixity are two sides of the same coin (see e.g. rérat & lees 2010), recognizing “stability-within-movement and movement-within-stability” (halfacree 2011: 146). this paper takes this as a point of departure and elaborates on some of the different ways mobility and stillness can be seen as intertwined and as mutually influencing and empowering each other. the dwellings in focus in this paper – the cottages – can be seen as spatial, immobile and material moorings. however, while they bring stillness and continuity to life they also configure, enable and require various mobilities. this paper interacts with the increasing amount of literature that places new emphasis on materiality, while not forgetting the importance of the more immaterial dimensions of the world we live in and the togetherness of these two dimensions. in many studies on mobility, the main concern has been the movement of people and goods. this kind of mobility is of course crucial in this paper since the utilisation of second homes comprises human beings travelling from their ordinary, permanent homes to somewhere else. however, the paper is also concerned with another type of mobility, namely the imaginary (even though the imagination has an embodied dimension): that is, the imaginary travelling back in time. time travel, and related concepts like re-enactment and living history, is characteristic of how we approach the past in contemporary society. it has become increasingly significant in tourism, entertainment and education, especially museum and heritage pedagogy (anderson 1984; lowenthal 1985; crang 1996; gustafsson 2002; petersson 2003; agnew 2004; sandström 2005; westergren 2006; holtorf 2009). archaeologist cornelius holtorf defines time travel as “an experience and social practice in the present that evokes a past (or future) reality” (holtorf 2009: 33). the emphasis on experiences reflects the significance of the senses, in mind and body, which govern time travel. importantly, what time travel actually does is that it evokes a pastness (lowenthal 2002: 17; holtorf 2005: 127−129) rather than the past. pastness has little to do with actual age, it is a contemporary quality or condition of being past that comes with the perception of something being past (holtorf 2009: 35). in the words of hannam et al. (2006: 14), imaginative travel, like travelling in time, “involves experiencing or anticipating in one’s imagination the ‘atmosphere of place’. atmosphere is neither reducible to the material infrastructure nor to the discourses of representation”. however, material remains are very effective in providing pastness and evoking life in past periods through the sensual experiences they afford (lowenthal 1985; holtorf 2009). second homes keith halfacree (2012: 216) has stated that “[i]n the era of mobilities, people have not ceased to dwell but as being changes so do ways of dwelling, and the latter can now incorporate consumption (and production) of second homes”. the usage of second homes can be seen as a kind of temporary mobility (hall & müller 2003) and, consequently, most research on second homes touches upon questions of mobility. research on second homes with a specific focus on questions of mobility has for instance paid attention to the bodily performance of movement in second-home tourism (haldrup 2004), how practices and ideas of mobility and land use influence second-home areas (overvåg 2009) and how second-home migration generates new social groups in the countryside (müller 1999). others have dwelled on the ‘home’ aspect, and discussed how the contemporary increase of second homes expresses changes in our cultural attitudes towards ‘home’ (ellingsen & hidle 2012). halfacree (2011) has highlighted that there are different readings of the use of second homes. it can be perceived as an important fennia 191: 2 (2013) 95‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’ dimension for achieving a sense of home in times of frequent house moves and associated uprootedness, but also as a flight from, and challenge to, the busyness of the urban middle-class everyday life. this issue is linked to key questions in secondhome research, namely why people have second homes and what the significance of these homes in people’s lives, and in society today, can be. the phenomenon of second homes is quite complex and diverse. as zoran roca states in the anthology second home tourism in europe: “the complexity of the driving forces across diverse geographic contexts have resulted in countless types of second homes – ranging from old to modern buildings and from modest to opulent dwelling units, from isolated locations to contiguous developments…as well as in numerous motives to own, purposes of use and frequency of occupancy of second homes.“ (roca 2013: ixx). second homes can thus be very different and there are many reasons for having and using a second home. the more commonly known reasons are based on dreams or aspirations for simplicity, tradition, going back to nature, and experiencing continuity, roots and peace and quiet (cohen & taylor 1978; williams & kaltenborn 1999). a second home can be an escape from the hectic life in a city (hall & müller 2004). it can be a way of experiencing other dimensions of life, living life differently and “temporarily disengag[ing] from a deficient mainstream everyday life” (halfacree 2011: 150). it can be used to revitalize life, which makes the second home integrated with, rather than separated from, ordinary life (overvåg 2009; halfacree 2010). williams and kaltenborn (1999: 196−197) write about life at the second home as being an escape from modernity into something more rooted, where the emphasis is on the continuity of time and space and a return to nature and simplicity, “an escape for home, not just from home” (crouch 1994: 96). second-home researchers kaltenborn (1998) and quinn (2004) have argued that people need to attach to a ‘home’ or have a place to return to from time to time in a society marked by a highly mobile lifestyle, and that this need can be served by a second home. on the other hand, a second home can also be seen as an “extension of modernity” (williams & kaltenborn 1999: 197), since modern life and development have made secondhome mobility possible. thus, as williams and patten (2006) highlight, the use of second homes, and the second home itself, can represent both a yearning for mobility and adventure and a nostalgic longing for roots. this double-nature of second homes makes a study of cottages a way to further the elaboration on the now often stated intertwinedness of mobility and stillness, in particular since these old cottages allow for such an analysis to include an extra dimension; the entanglements of present and past times. introducing the cottages: from poor smallholdings to leisure dwellings nowhere in the world is second-home ownership as common as in the nordic countries, and sweden has a long, and widespread, tradition of second homes (müller 2007). the focus here is, as already stated, a particular type of second homes in sweden. this type consists of cottages that formerly were the dwelling houses of tenant small holdings (so-called torp). the study is based on indepth interviews conducted between 2007 and 2009 with users of thirteen cottages located in three different areas (värmland, småland and uppland) in sweden. these users were chosen based on the history (as part of a torp) and the present use (as a second home) of their cottage. the interviews were part of a larger study of the historic transformation of torp in sweden (lagerqvist 2011). most of the interviews were conducted at the cottages and included an almost obligatory cup of coffee and a guided tour of the cottage and its surroundings. this visiting interview provided opportunities to observe, and at the same time talk about, daily life practices and encounters with history and materiality at the specific cottages. for an example of a cottage, see figure 1. these cottages are often associated with rural swedish summer idylls. yet, they also have an older and harsher side to their history, a history of poverty and hard work. before they started being used as second homes, e.g. from the 17th century up until the mid-1900s, they were homes for a group of rural poor, torpare, that rented a piece of land and a small cottage from large farms or estates. in a historical sense, a torp can thus be defined as a small tenant holding, like a small farm, on someone else’s land (bäck 1992). due to industrialisation, urbanisation, changes in agriculture organisation and techniques as well as poor living and working conditions at the torp, they started to be abandoned from the second part of the 19th century, and especially after 1900. interestingly, as 96 fennia 191: 2 (2013)maja lagerqvist the number of various agricultural and industrial workers grew and the number of torp and torpare started to decline, idealised representations of them became visible in a number of novels and political debates. in these works, the torp was portrayed as an idyllic and good, yet poor, home that brought up decent, hardworking, faithful and unsocialistic rural swedish citizens, as opposed to the unreliable and revolting labourers in the industries (lagerqvist 2011).1 this positive view existed among many politicians and landowners. many of the users themselves, however, left these smallholdings for better conditions elsewhere if they had the opportunity (svensson 2002). nonetheless, the narrative of the cottage as an idyllic, ideal swedish home has prevailed. this has been evident in media, in particular in writings on second homes, since the 1960s. following urbanisation and increased mobility, prosperity and leisure time, many torp-cottages have, since the 1950s, been converted into second homes. hence, these dwellings have acquired new economic, functional, social and symbolic values and are in most cases totally separated from the land that provided the livelihood for its former users. they are now associated with leisure, consumption, home-furnishing styles, preservation ideas and national identity; values which one imagines would have astonished the former users of the cottages. the interviewed inhabitants of the cottages were all aged between 40 and 80. the users consisted mostly of families with children, or were older fig. 1. one of the cottages in the study (photo m. lagerqvist 2007). fennia 191: 2 (2013) 97‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’ couples with adult children. they all lived in urban areas, in houses or in apartments, for most of the year, and they mostly used their cottage, whether it was their own or rented, during the summertime. those who lived nearby often travelled to the cottage on the weekends during the rest of the year. in contrast to the former users of the torp, the large and poor families of tenant smallholders, the present-day users in this study show some diversity in regard to socio-economic status, but display much less diversity in terms of ethnicity. they were all white swedes (although there is a general increase in other northern europeans as users/owners of second homes in sweden, see müller 1999). overall, the use of second homes in sweden has been quite common and has not only been an elite phenomenon since the mid-1900s. a large supply of abandoned and unmodern, and therefore accessible and relatively low-priced, cottages or other rural dwellings made a rented or purchased second home an option for large portions of the swedish population as prosperity, leisure time and individual mobility increased during the post-war period (pihl atmer 1998; löfgren 1999). in general, second homes in the nordic countries have been interpreted with a stronger focus on their connections to common traditions and national identity, rather than on elitism and affluence (willams & kaltenborn 1999; hall & müller 2004; periäinen 2006; müller 2007; lagerqvist 2011). however, even in the nordic cases of second home usage, the presence of issues regarding class and elite consumption are hard to reject (see halfacree 2011 for a criticism of the lack of analysis of second homes as elite consumption in the nordic countries). even though the second home phenomenon in the nordic countries might be distinctive in some ways, many issues of the cottages that are brought to light in this paper, such as the entanglements of mobility and stillness and the significance of materiality and history, do have resonance in second home practices elsewhere. going to and being at the cottage this part of the paper discusses the empirical findings from the interviews with the cottage users. it illustrates how the cottage and the practices there are very much produced through both mobility and stillness. stillness, continuity and materiality for many of the users, the cottages contain and provide continuity and stillness and this is partly connected to them being old places with an unmodern appearance, something i will return to later in the paper. the sense of fixity and of the cottage as a place of stillness is also created in other ways. similar to other types of second homes, the interviews revealed the cottage as a place where you can belong, stay rooted, relax and experience different dimensions of life. the users travel to the cottage for peace and quiet, to be rooted. however, the practices there actually do not only entail stillness, but also very much involve movement and bodywork. as with most second homes, life at the cottage seems to revolve around relaxation from urban and work life, meeting or gathering family and friends but also fixing, renovating and doing garden work. most users stated that “there is always something to do at a cottage” (all quotes are translated from swedish by the author). this is a statement that is connected to cottages often being old buildings built during the 19th century, with less than modern standards in regard to heating, sewerage and water supply. they are buildings in “constant decay”, as one user expressed it. at the cottage, relaxation seems for many to come from doing actual bodywork: putting your hands into the soil and working it, removing vegetation and stones in the garden and having to use your body in order to get water and fire wood into the cottage. one user explained: “it is a bit primitive, you can’t take a shower every day and you have to walk over to the water pump to get fresh water. it is slower, and that’s how we want it. these things are what makes it calm and relaxing here.” moreover, a large number of the cottages have been kept within the families for decades. many of the interviewed users considered their cottage as one of the most important places in their lives, while their permanent homes were just somewhere they lived when they had to work. the cottage is thus often really more of a first home than a second one. this has also been highlighted in the second-home literature. marjavaara (2008) and kaltenborn (1998) have both argued that the second home does not necessarily have to be located on a lower level than the permanent ‘first’ home in a dwelling hierarchy. jansson and müller (2003) points out that people may change their permanent homes but seem less likely to change their 98 fennia 191: 2 (2013)maja lagerqvist second home; this is kept throughout the course of life, and also often within a family. thus, second homes provide continuity, across the life course and across generations (williams & kaltenborn 1999: 223, see also müller et al. 2010). beside many of the cottages being kept within families for longer periods than ordinary residences, the sense of continuity at the cottages is also enhanced by their history, in that they were homes in the past. the idea that someone has actually lived there before, and survived, is strong and often articulated. in the kitchen of her cottage, a user explained how she sometimes reflects: “when the lightning strikes, i use to think, well this cottage has stood here since the 19th century, it’s been experiencing this before, it can take this! so you do feel the breath of history, there has been people here for long, living and struggling...and now we’re here.” consequently, many of the users talked about gaining a sense of rootedness from dwelling at the cottage. it is perceived as a fixed point in life and in society. while the rest of life is passing – kids grow up, workplaces change and generations pass – the cottage and life there stay (more or less intentionally) the same. the cottages are thus seen as places of stillness, rootedness, pause and continuity, a continuity that can stem from personal and family histories as well as from the past of the specific cottage or more general national history. these qualities are much appreciated and are often compared to the current, fast-changing modern society. the significance of feeling rooted and connected to the past is, however, not only visible in the interviews. rather, it is also an argument for why modern swedes need, and love, these cottages that has been strongly present in media discourses since the booming of cottages as second homes in the post-war period (lagerqvist 2011). media’s descriptions of the cottage can boost these places with an even more positively charged atmosphere of being fixed and, as described by several users, as being ”something apart from modern society”. the sense of the cottage as an immobile and rooted place is also much connected to its old and worn materiality. much effort is put into decorating cottages genuinely and preserving their old characteristics, and much enjoyment is derived from the simplicity and pastness of them. the original users’ harsh conditions and the respect of the “hard work and poverty that made sweden what it is today”, as one modern user put it, seems to add meaning to the present-day lives there. it makes the stillness of the cottage today even more accentuated, and valued. the old material forms of the cottages and their sense of place generates a fixation of time, a sense of time standing still or slowing down (links between materiality and time will be discussed in more detail later on). furthermore, the users’ practices of preservation and their efforts to keep the cottages simple and old-fashioned reinforce the sense of continuity, stillness and fixity there. this makes the cottages become even more “apart” from the rest of the modern, mobile and fast-changing society. nevertheless, as much else in this world, these cottages are not stable, fixed and durable entities, but are always in processes of morphing and becoming (hannam et al. 2006: 10). movement for stillness and rootedness in one place simply by being second homes the cottages require a certain degree of mobility in space. all interviewees used cars to get to their cottage. some even rented a car for the summer in order to be able to be there. the cottage therefore requires mobility simultaneously as being the material base in a search for stillness and temporal fixity. that the users have to be mobile to be able to get to a place where they can be rooted and still illustrates a very apparent intertwined situation with stillness and movement. this points at the first half of halfacrees (2011: 146) recognition of “stability-withinmovement and movement-within-stability”. however, the mobility of the cottages also encompasses more than spatial and material travelling. imaginative travelling, moving bodies the unmodern materiality of the cottages and the sense of stillness, continuity and pastness that they provide, along with the users’ practices of preservation, provide opportunities for people to make other trips; imaginative travels into the past. as one user explained: “i have no need to travel abroad; i would much rather be still here and travel in time”. however, in contrast to heritage pedagogy or leisure entertainment, the time travelling and re-enactment of the past at the cottages are not always so conscious and intentional. they can happen in a variety of ways and at a variety of intensities, ranging from just thinking of fennia 191: 2 (2013) 99‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’ the past to more or less living as in “the old days”. the following quotations from two users illustrate this: “for me the past is present here, you saw the ruin down there…and when renovating the shed and the barn we thought a lot about how they lived before, how they used these houses and how it all looked. what kind of animal did they have? it is not like we have done research, it is just that these thoughts emerge when we’re here.” “all these small things, they are the cottage life, and it is like the old torp living. to go for water and firewood, that is what we find so cosy.” the interest in the cottage and its history, that someone had lived there before, have for most of the users been triggered by being and living at an old cottage, and practising life and work there themselves. a user explained how just being at the cottage evoked thoughts and emotions; “everything here has a history, a past… . you just walk around in the cottage or the garden and just feel something; it is a lot of emotions and thinking. because you know where it all comes from, its origin, everything has a story to tell us.” the sensual encounters with the materiality of the cottage, its small-scaled characteristics and old, worn forms, the old relics in the surrounding landscape and all the histories embedded in them, influence the feelings and practices of the users. they create gateways for thinking about, and experiencing, past times. as one user said, “it is hard not to think of all the lives that have passed here, when being and living in the same cottage”. the users talked frequently about the significant experiences of actually doing the same things as past users. many spoke of making dinner for several people in an old-fashioned kitchen, fetching firewood and making a fire on a cold summer morning, moving their feet over the old and worn wooden floor, bending their necks when passing through a low doorframe, walking on old and used paths, growing and eating their own potatoes, using old materials and tools when fixing the cottage and repairing or building stonewalls.2 the atmosphere that creates a sense of pastness cannot, as stated by hannam et al. (2006), simply be reduced to either materiality or discourse. yet, the importance of the material infrastructure for thinking about the past (as highlighted by holtorf 2009) is prevalently articulated in the interviews: “well, you always get reminded, it makes you drift. when the flowers come up in spring, we always wonder: who put these into the soil? it is not a dead thing, the cottage, it is like it stands here and waits for you...and it is all part of it: all these old things, its pastness, all that has happened here and how you always wonder about it.” the interviewees often made references to former users of their cottage when they spoke about life there and, more specifically, what they had changed or preserved at the cottage. however, references were also made to more general historic knowledge about torp in the past and to popular novels and movies about torpare, as ways of talking about how life and existence had been, and in some ways still were, at the cottage. one user highlighted the interest in, closeness to and empathy with the past users of her cottage, saying: “living here and seeing all the remains makes you wonder how the families lived and carried on here in the past. all these stones and ditches, such hard work! there are traces of people everywhere here.” likewise, several of the users talked about how they felt the presence of the past, and the passing of time, when being at the cottage. see figure 2 for one example of a user showing the everyday experience of pastness and the closeness of long gone lives of others at her cottage. the closeness to the past makes the contrasts between the modern holiday life and the harsh lives of earlier users very apparent. this seems to add value and meaning to present-day lives on the cottage. the contrast, which fascinates the users a great deal, has become an important part of understanding the history of the cottage as part of an old torp as well as an essential part of its present place identity. as one user put it: “we have been thinking about what 19th century users would think of the modernities we have installed here, and vice versa, how would we cope if we were to go back and live here in the 19th century?” accordingly, living at the cottage, and in various ways going back in time, makes the users think of the present as well as of the past. one user described it this way: “being at the cottage makes us very aware of how lucky we are today, even if there are some parts of life in the past that we in a way long for. the simplicity, the real life...”. perhaps this feeling of what is good but also real and important in life is part of why people are enchanted by these old cottages? they make their users experience past times, while they simultaneously raise the awareness of the advantages, and disadvantages, of the present time. the 100 fennia 191: 2 (2013)maja lagerqvist idyll today gains significance from the awareness of the poverty that existed in the same place not too long ago. following crang (1996), delyser (2003) and cashman (2006), engagement with the past does not have to be counterproductive and conservative. it can also be an avenue for a reflexive and critical interpreting of past, and contemporary, times. having established the recycling and fixing of the past at the cottages, a few words should be said on how this occurs regarding materiality. it is done by both large measures and small details, such as a preserved wall, renovated old windows, and old materials found and kept, including a dog’s leash, keys, maps and photographs. there are strong ideas guiding how a “real cottage” and life there should be. a great deal of time and substantial resources are devoted to saving or reinstating as much as possible of what is seen as the “original” or “real” cottage, decorating it "correctly" and creating an “an old-fashioned cottage style”. if some of the “real cottage” characteristics are missing, these are added in order to make the cottage as it should be (or should have been). many of the cottages are thus being recreated with old, or new-but-old-looking, additions to become more genuine. this resonates with umberto eco’s (1986) term hyper-reality, where the difference between the fake and the original is engulfed and the former sometimes even become more real than the latter. the preserved, or sometimes created, unmodern materiality makes the users think of and adapt to, but also in many ways value, a more simple and unmodern way of living. to introduce modern technology in the heating or water supply would destroy the atmosphere of the place and its pastness, many of the users argue. fig. 2. material traces of older lives at the cottage (photo m. lagerqvist 2007). fennia 191: 2 (2013) 101‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’ the argument for preserving the pastness and the simplicity, and not modernising the cottages, is to a large extent grounded in a respect for past users and for the cottage itself; it “deserves to be treated with respect and be kept as it was”, one user told me. a user described the hard, but important, work with the continuous preservation of the landscape of the cottage by stating “it is a lot of work! i’m trying to keep the landscape open, and it is killing me! …but i think it is important to keep it open as it was.” the practices of preservation and keeping some selected old ways of living reinforce the experience of continuity at the cottage. one user described how he and his partner have tried to keep the past of the cottage while also making it their own: “we have tried to save all of the old things and materials that we have been able to save… although some things have been moved and reused in new places. you can in a way follow the history of the cottage in the traces from the changes that we, and earlier users, have done.” the saving, or creating, of old characteristics can be thought of as influencing what environmental psychologist james gibson (1979) would have called the affordances of the cottage. an affordance, here explained in a fairly basic fashion, of something refers to what this something can offer its user, and by that enable or complicate actions in mind or body. for example, a handle of a tea cup provides an affordance for holding. hence, what can the cottages offer its users, besides being a material shelter for holiday living? one affordance, as pointed out above, is a sense of continuity and rootedness. another of its affordances is how the cottage enables time-travelling. the more effort put into preserving or recreating the pastness of the cottage and the past life there, the more likely it seems to be for the users to get the feeling of the cottage as being part of a different time, and for them to make that trip in time when coming to the cottage. even if the practice of going back in time was not mentioned as such by all the users, most of them have put effort into conserving or creating a certain pastness and keeping the simplicity of the cottage. in this, one can observe a trip into the past and into a seemingly less complicated life. imaginative time-travelling is often based on a longing for times that are considered to have been simpler (anderson 1984: 183ff; petersson 2003: 337). however, the fine thing about imaginative travels is that they can be partial and momentary. most users were very aware of the hard times of the past, in particular for torpare, and appreciated living most of their time in the present and being able to choose what parts of unmodernity and modernity to have and experience at the cottage. here mobility and stillness become very much intertwined and they mutually influence each other. the users go to the cottage to be at a place where they, with the help of the preserved materiality and history, can feel still and rooted. at the same time the cottage makes them think of, travel to and physically experience other times and lifestyles. to deepen this idea, one can actually speak of two types of time-travelling. the first one is looking back and travelling into a non-personal and, in a way, more general swedish history. the past that is travelled into here is often a quite selective swedish history fashioned by collective national memories of these cottages (and of torp) reinforced by education, novels, movies, arts and magazines. this trip is also often connected to the specific cottages of the users, depending on how much information they have on the history of their cottage. while talking to the users, it became evident that most of them could refer to the names of and anecdotes about at least some of the former users. many showed me traces of past users with explanations like “this is where they got their water in the past” and “the path we are walking now is the old path to the cottage”. secondly, the time travels can also be into family or personal history. many of the users have, so to speak, gathered their lives at the cottage, through both objects and memories. thus, the cottage becomes a shrine of private or family memories. “you see, this is our own family tradition”, a user explained to me after giving me a winding tour at the cottage and its garden. the tour was full of stories stretching from the old torpare to his own parents and grandchildren. hence, the cottage enables the users to travel in various periods of the past at the same time, while also being in the present. the stories and remainders that can be embedded in the materiality have also been highlighted by cresswell and hoskins (2008: 395); “the material nature of buildings…means that they endure—not forever perhaps—but for considerable passages of time. endurance provides an anchor for stories that circulate in and around a place. it reminds us of things”. to sum it all up, being or becoming aware of the past takes the users on imaginary trips. the mind slips away back into history for a longer or shorter while, although often with 102 fennia 191: 2 (2013)maja lagerqvist the person’s own body and own experiences at the cottage as a starting point for further thinking. time-travelling at the cottage is therefore imaginative. it is guided and enacted in the mind of the users, but it is also often quite practical and corporeal, guided and enacted by the body and its engagement with the environment as part of actually living at an old cottage. looking back into history: a decrease of mobility at the cottage? historically, as long as these cottages have existed, they have been implicated in contemporary mobility practices. the inhabitants of the cottage when it was the dwelling of a torp were constantly changing. then, users moved to and from the cottages at a much higher rate than contemporary users do. when the cottages were a part of small holdings during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, they were homes for the rural poor sometimes for only a few months, but more commonly for a few years at a time, depending on the tenure contracts. after that, the user family moved away and another family replaced them. a study of the users of over 150 cottages in sweden since the late 17th century to 2010 shows a general increase in the number of years per family, and hence time to, so to speak, grow roots, after the 1950s. this reflects the time when the cottages started to be used as second homes (lagerqvist 2011). so while these cottages may seem like immobile places, dwellings with continuity that stretches through history, they have actually been ever-transforming and quite fluid places. they have had large changes in regard to users and conditions over time, even if the material forms of the cottages in some respects have persisted. this rate of moving and changing users has only slowed down during the second half of the 20th century. it was then replaced with another type of movement: the back-and-forth travelling between first and second homes. hence, the decades around the 1950s were times of change for these dwellings in terms of mobility. in a way, their modern history is an account of a decrease of mobility in an otherwise highly, and increasingly so, mobile society. yet, it is also a story of how they became part of another type of mobility that was enmeshed with strives for stillness and continuity, as second homes. concluding remarks by its history and preserved appearance, a cottage can afford an atmosphere of stillness, fixity, continuity and pastness. simultaneously, as a consequence of these characteristics, it provides several types of mobilities, such as imaginary travelling in time, besides the obvious mobility in travelling between homes. the experiences at the cottage described by the users reflect marcel proust’s argument in swann’s way (2003, first published in french 1913), the first volume of his classic novel in search of lost time, where the human senses open up the contact between the past and the present. proust speaks of how one’s own memories and past come to life through the experiences of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. the pastness of the cottage is different from proust’s writing in that it is not exclusively connected to personal history. knowledge or memories of a more collective kind, created by media, education and popular novels and movies can also be influential. these can work beside or together with personal memories and present sensual encounters in shaping experiences of the cottages and enabling time-travelling or other practices there. furthermore, the imaginary time-travelling at the cottage is seldom a journey taken from a cosy armchair. it is an imaginative trip into the past but, as shown, it is often guided by a very physical engagement with the cottage. this creates bodily experiences and activates thinking and drifting. this points to the significance of practical experiences regarding how places are produced and understood, which also has been argued for in much recent geographical literature (see e.g. crouch 2000; wylie 2005; haldrup & larsen 2006; simonsen 2007; anderson & harrison 2010). drawing on empirical evidence, this paper illuminates the integration and interaction of practices of mobilities and stillness at one specific, but not unique, type of second home. this has been done by highlighting different kinds of mobilities, in space and time, and how these mobilities are linked to stillness and perceived fixity and continuity. the cottages are easily thought of in terms of immobility and fixity, as places of stability and continuity. at the same time as society is becoming more high-tech, mobile and modern, these dwellings are kept very simple and seemingly unchanged. they are valued for being the opposite of the fast-changing urban and modern society and for providing fixity in life: “the journey to the secfennia 191: 2 (2013) 103‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’ ond home is also a journey of nostalgic proportions” (ellingsen & hidle 2012: 15). now, one should not forget that the processes of urbanisation and modernisation and the increasing mobility of people today is the very basis for the possibility of spending all the time and money that people do at these cottages, and thus for being “rooted” and still there and enjoying their unmodern simplicity. this point is also made by williams and kaltenborn (1999) when they highlighted that second homes can be an extension of, as well as an escape from, modern society. the cottage may be perceived as a fixed, immobile, and perhaps even conservative place, yet it offers its user opportunities to come closer to and experience the past and different ways of living. as an old dwelling-place it enables opportunities to reflect upon, and travel to, several different histories while still remaining in the present. echoing doreen massey’s (2005) argument about places being hybrids of several places, these cottages can also very much be hybrids of several different times. an understanding of these places and of the practices of being at them in the here-and-now is very much about the here-and-then-and-now. conclusively, while these cottages can be perceived as immobile places firmly grounded in the soil by stone and timber, and are highly valued for that, the existence of these cottages is a much more complex configuration of requirements and affordances of various practices of mobility. this is also part of why they still exist. these cottages are places that continuously emerge through entanglements of mobility and stillness and of multiple times. the practices of mobility at the cottage are much integrated in and directed by the specific geography, history and materiality of the cottages, and the activities and thinking of their users because of these characteristics. what we see here is the significant role that certain places can themselves play in the construction of practices and experiences of mobility and stillness (a similar conclusion is stated by hoskins and maddern in their study on immigration stations 2011). the cottages, with their materiality and the pastness and symbolic meanings embedded in this, influence the users’ practices and their possibilities for experiencing mobility and stillness in space and in time. as such, these old cottages seem to have become important places in our ever-changing society with needs for being both still and moving, at least for those who can afford not just one home, but two. notes 1 the history of torp and the living and working situations for the torpare in sweden was less affected by politically radical influences and oppositions compared to the history of torp in finland (see peltonen 1992). 2 in connection to this, but outside the scope for this paper, one can certainly see interesting, but not yet fully explored, gender aspects of the activities at the cottages. acknowledgements the work reported in this paper was funded by the faculty of social science at stockholm university. i would like to thank karolina doughty, johan nohrén and the two anonymous reviewers for their time and efforts put into reading earlier drafts and for their invaluable comments. a thank you also goes out to lars meier, university of munich and sybille frank, technical university darmstadt who initiated the session (im)mobilities of dwelling at the aag in new york in 2012 where the idea for this paper started to grow. references adey p 2007. “may i have your attention”: airport geographies of spectatorship, position and (im)mobility. environment and planning d: society and space 25: 3, 515−536. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d69j. agnew v 2004. introduction. what is reenactment? criticism 46: 3, 327−339. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ crt.2005.0001. anderson j 1984. time machines: the world of living history. american association for state and local history, nashville. anderson b & harrison p 2010. taking-place: nonrepresentational theories and geography. ashgate, burlington. bondi l, davidson j & smith m 2005. introduction: geography’s ‘emotional turn’. in davidson j, bondi l & smith m (eds). emotional geographies, 1−16. ashgate, aldershot. bäck k 1992. början till slutet: laga skiftet och torpbebyggelsen i östergötland 1827−65. noteria, borensberg. cashman r 2006. critical nostalgia and material culture in northern ireland. journal of american folklore 119: 472, 137−160. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ jaf.2006.0016. cohen s & taylor l 1978. escape attempts: the theory and practice of resistance to everyday life. penguin, harmondsworth. cosgrove d & daniels s 1988 (eds). the iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representa104 fennia 191: 2 (2013)maja lagerqvist tion, design and use of past environments. cambridge univ. press, cambridge. crang m 1996. magic kingdom or a quixotic quest for authenticity? annals of tourism research 23: 2, 415−431. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-7383(95)00070-4. crang m 2002. commentary. between networks: producing, hubs, flows and networks. environment and planning a 34, 569−574. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/ a34154. cresswell t & hoskins g 2008. place, persistence, and practice: evaluating historical significance at angel island, san francisco, and maxwell street, chicago. annals of the association of american geographers 98: 2, 392−413. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045600701879409. crouch d 1994. home, escape and identity: rural cultures and sustainable tourism. journal of sustainable tourism 2: 1−2, 93−101. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/09669589409510686. crouch d 2000. places around us: embodied lay geographies in leisure and tourism. leisure studies 19, 63−76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/026143600374752. delyser d 2003. ramona memories: fiction, tourist practices, and placing the past in southern california. annals of the association of american geographers 93: 4, 886−908. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2003.09304011.x. doughty k 2013. walking together: the mobile and embodied production of a therapeutic landscape. health and place 24, 140−146. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2013.08.009. eco u 1986. travels in hyperreality. harcourt brace & co, new york. edensor t 2005. industrial ruins: spaces, aesthetics, and materiality. berg, oxford. ellingsen gw & hidle k 2012. performing home in mobility: second homes in norway. tourism geographies, 1−18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1461 6688.2011.647330. gibson j 1979. the ecological approach to visual perception. houghton mifflin, boston. gustafsson l 2002. den förtrollade zonen. lekar med tid, rum och identitet under medeltidsveckan på gotland. nya doxa, nora. haldrup m 2004. laid-back mobilities: second-home holidays in time and space. tourism geographies 6: 4, 434−454. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/146166 8042000280228. haldrup m & larsen j 2006. material cultures of tourism. leisure studies 25: 3, 275−289. halfacree k 2010. reading rural consumption practices for difference: boltholes, castles and liferafts. culture unbound: journal of current cultural research 2, thematic section: rural media spaces, 2 4 1 − 2 6 3 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 3 3 8 4 / cu.2000.1525.10214241. halfacree k 2011. ‘a solid partner in a fluid world’ and/or ‘line of flight’? interpreting second homes in the era of mobilities. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 65, 144−153. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0029195 1.2011.598238. halfacree k 2012. heterolocal identities? counterurbanisation, second homes, and rural consumption in the era of mobilities. population, space and place 18, 209−224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ psp.665. hall c & müller d 2003. second homes and regional population distribution: on administrative practices and failures in sweden. espace, populations, sociétés 21: 2, 251−261. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/ espos.2003.2079. hall c & müller d 2004. introduction: second homes, curse or blessing? revisited. in hall c & müller d (eds). tourism, mobility and second homes, 3−14. channel view, clevedon. hannam k, sheller m & urry j 2006. editorial: mobilities, immobilities and moorings. mobilities 1: 1, 1−22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450100500489189. holtorf c 2005. from stonehenge to las vegas. archaeology as popular culture. altamira press, walnut creek. holtorf c 2009. on the possibility of time travel. lund archaeological review 15, 31−41. hoskins g & maddern jf 2011. immigration stations: the regulation and commemoration of mobility at angel island, san francisco and ellis island, new york. in cresswell t & merriman p (eds). geographies of mobilities: practices, spaces, subjects, 151−166. ashgate, burlington. jackson p 2000. rematerializing social and cultural geography. social & cultural geography 1: 1, 9−14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649369950133449. jansson b & müller dk 2003. fritidsboende i kvarken. kvarkenrådet, umeå. kaltenborn bp 1998. the alternate home – motives of recreation use. norsk geografisk tidsskrift 52: 3, 121−134. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00291959808552393. lagerqvist m 2011. torpets transformationer. materialitet, representation och praktik från 1850 till 2010. doctoral dissertation. stockholms universitet, stockholm. lowenthal d 1985. the past is a foreign country. cambridge university press, cambridge. lowenthal d 2002. the past as theme park. in young t & riley r (eds). theme park landscapes. antecedents and variations, 11−23. dumbarton oaks, washington. löfgren o 1999. on holiday: a history of vacationing. university of california press, berkeley. marjavaara r 2008. second home tourism: the root to displacement in sweden. umeå universitet, umeå. massey db 2005. for space. sage, london. mccormack dp 2008. geographies for moving bodies: thinking, dancing, spaces. geography compass 2, 1822−1836. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00159.x. merriman p 2005. ‘operation motorway’: landscapes of construction on england’s m1 motorway. journal of historical geography 31: 1, 113−133. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2003.06.001. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 105‘i would much rather be still here and travel in time’ mitchell d 1996. the lie of the land: migrant workers and the california landscape. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. müller d 1999. german second home owners in the swedish countryside: on the internationalization of the leisure space. european tourism research institute etour, kulturgeografiska institutionen, umeå universitet, umeå. müller d 2007. second homes in the nordic countries: between common heritage and exclusive commodity. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 7, 193−201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15022250701300272. müller d, nordin u & marjavaara r 2010. fritidsboendes relationer till den svenska landsbygden. kulturgeografiska institutionen, umeå universitet, umeå. overvåg k 2009. second homes in eastern norway. doctoral dissertation. norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim. peltonen m 1992. talolliset ja torpparit: vuosisadan vaihteen maatalouskysymys suomessa. suomen historiallinen seura, helsinki. periäinen k 2006. the summer cottage: a dream in the finnish forest. in mcintyre n, williams d & mchugh k (eds). multiple dwelling and tourism: negotiating pace, home and identity, 103−113. cabi, wallingford. petersson b 2003. föreställningar om det förflutna. arkeologi och rekonstruktion. nordic academic press, lund. pihl atmér ak 1998. livet som leves där måste smaka vildmark: sportstugor och friluftsliv 1900−1945. stockholmia, stockholm. proust m 2003. in search of lost time, vol. 1: swann’s way (the whole volume was published in french in 1913−1927 and first translated into english 1922−1931). viking, new york. quinn b 2004. dwelling through multiple places: a case study of second home ownership in ireland. in hall cm & müller dk (eds). tourism mobility and second homes. between elite landscapes and common ground, 45−59. channel view publications, clevedon. ramsey n 2009. taking-place: refracted enchantment and the habitual spaces of the tourist souvenir. social & cultural geography 10: 2, 197−217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802652111. rérat p & lees l 2011. spatial capital, gentrification and mobility: lessons from swiss core cities. transactions of the institute of british geographers 36: 1, 126−142. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00404.x. roca z 2013. introduction. in roca z (ed). second home tourism in europe: lifestyle issues and policy responses, x-xxv. ashgate pub. limited, burlington. sandström e 2005. på den tiden, i dessa dagar: föreställningar om och bruk av historia vid medeltidsveckan på gotland och jamtli historieland. jamtli, östersund. saville sj 2008. playing with fear: parkour and the mobility of emotion. social & cultural geography 9: 8, 891−914. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802441440. sheller m 2004. demobilising and remobilising the caribbean. in sheller m & urry j (eds). tourism mobilities: places to play, places in play, 13−21. routledge, london. sheller m 2011. mobilities. sociopedia.isa 1−8. sheller m & urry j 2004. places to play, places in play. in sheller m & urry j (eds). tourism mobilities: places to play, places in play, 1−10. routledge, london. sheller m & urry j 2006. the new mobilities paradigm. environment and planning a 38, 207−226. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/a37268. simonsen k 2007. practice, spatiality and embodied emotions: an outline of a geography of practice. human affairs 17: 2, 168−181. http://dx.doi. org/10.2478/v10023-007-0015-8. strohmayer u 2011. bridges: different conditions of mobile possibilities. in cresswell t & merriman p (eds). geographies of mobilities: practices, spaces, subjects, 119−135. ashgate, burlington. svensson h 2002. putting the plebs in place, the swedish croft commissions defence of a feudal landscape. in sundberg k (ed). work and production on manors in the baltic sea region: 1700−1900, 193−224. nordiska museets förlag, stockholm. urry j 2003. social networks, travel and talk. british journal of sociology 54: 2, 155−175. http://dx. doi.org/10.1080/0007131032000080186. westergren e 2006. holy cow – this is great! report from a symposium on historic environment education and time travels in vimmerby, sweden, november 2004. kalmar läns museum, kalmar. whatmore s 2002. hybrid geographies: natures, cultures, spaces. sage, london. williams d & kaltenborn p 1999. leisure places and modernity. in crouch d (ed). leisure/tourism geographies: practices and geographical knowledge, 214−230. routledge, london. williams dr & patten sr 2006. home and away? creating identities and sustaining places in a multi-centered world. in mcintyre n, williams d & mchugh k (eds). multiple dwelling and tourism: negotiating place, home, and identity, 32−50. cabi publishing, wallingford. wylie j 2005. a single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the south west coast path. transactions of the institute of british geographers 30, 234−247. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00163.x. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa8495 doi: 10.11143/8495 something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a bottom-up agenda of the finnish-russian relations jussi laine laine, jussi (2014). something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a bottomup agenda of the finnish-russian relations. fennia 192: 1, pp. 65–78. issn 1798-5617. while the finnish-russian relations of today cannot be fully understood without understanding the past, it is equally important to know how to break away from it. when discussing cross-border interaction, one must be aware of the broader context within which these processes take place. the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state continues to form one of the leading principles upon which international relations are based, yet transnational relations are increasingly run by actors and organisations whose ability to function does not stop at the border. the finnish-russian border provides an illuminating laboratory in which to study border change. this article draws on the experience from this border where cross-border cooperation has reflected both the political and socio-cultural change as well as politically and economically motivated interaction. it argues that the best way to normalise neighbourly relations is through increased people-to-people interaction, and preferable this ought to occur from the bottom-up, not from the top-down. civil society organisations themselves may need to take matters into their own hands and to seek further revenues through social entrepreneurship in order to ensure the continuity of cooperation. much of the work is carried out heedless of individual project and programme frames. in practice, its success depends on individual actors who are able to shoulder the implementation of the agreed programs and to solve emerging problems and disagreements. keywords: finland, russia, european union, border, civil society, interaction jussi laine, karelian institute, university of eastern finland, p.o. box 111 fi80101 joensuu, finland, e-mail: jussi.laine@uef.fi introduction on the face of it, the significance of finland’s borders appears unaffected. the border with russia remains secure and well controlled; younger generations can hardly remember that there would have ever been a ‘real’ border with sweden, and even fewer recall that finland shares some 730 km of borderline with norway somewhere up north. running through nothing but forest and some occasional lakes for almost its entire length, the finnish-russian border does not inevitably appear to be a pressing research object, at first glance. in terms of dynamics, it fades in comparison with other european union (eu) borders as well as with other seemingly asymmetrical borders, such as the border between the united states and mexico. given what was stated above, the scholarly and popular attention the finnish-russian border has attracted, and continues to attract, is astonishing. even though many of these writings discuss not the border per se but what lies beyond it, it is the border that has gained a sizable symbolic load. the lengthy shared border with russia is still commonly put forth as excuse for why various issues are as they are and not necessarily as they could or should be. everybody, even those who have never seen or crossed it, seem to know the meaning of it and what it stands for, and thus many statements on it go unquestioned. alas, quantity does not compensate for quality. it has been customary to 66 fennia 192: 1 (2014)jussi laine assume a rather (banal) nationalist stance and build on uncontroversial acceptance of the historical setting and current state of affairs. their actual merits aside, such writings reproduce a particular image and perspective and in so doing diminish room for alternative views. while historical perspective and context specificity are crucial for understanding a particular border, the finnish-russian one in this case, placing it in the greater european perspective broadens the analytical frame and allows for the interpretations that a more narrow approach might preclude. similarly, the borders of a particular discipline, geography in this case, might also confine the analytical lens. even if disciplinary specialisation has its benefits, a strict immersion in a particular field, as strober (2006: 315) notes, may limit social innovation and the intellectual horizon of researchers. interdisciplinary research, in turn, runs counter to the disciplinary taken-for-grantednesses, thus allowing more holistic, richer understanding of the topic at hand. as baerwald (2010: 494–495) remarks, the drive to study the broad ranging and intertwined problems that encompass a complex mix of phenomena and processes, which taken together lie beyond the margins of existing disciplines, has impelled the conduct of research that necessitates inter-, if not postdisciplinary approach. fortunately for geographers this is not a major cause for concern. while many traditional disciplines are defined by the topics that they study, geography has been inherently interdisciplinary since its establishment as a modern discipline. this article draws from the experience from the border between finland and the russian federation where cross-border cooperation (cbc) has reflected both the political and socio-cultural change as well as politically and economically motivated interaction. the border provides an illuminating laboratory in which to study border change – or the lack thereof. finland’s post-world war ii relationship with the soviet union, and more recently with russia, has been both close and distant – at times both concurrently. it has been shaped by a common history, cold war realities, pragmatism, interdependencies and the lessons learned from devastating armed conflicts. through the analysis of perspectives of civil society actors and those voiced in the media, this study strives to achieve a better understanding of present-day multi-layered finnish-russian relations, especially with respect to the role that civil society plays. the goal is furthermore to introduce new, more nuanced perspectives to the discussion on europeanisation of the institutional and discursive practices of cbc. empirically, this article draws from a mix of material and methods involving the mapping of actors, newspaper screening, basic background and more thorough in-depth interviews (96 in total) and document analysis. while the material at hand has been elaborated in detail elsewhere (see laine 2013), this article focuses on analysing the development of the operational forms of cooperation at the finnish-russian border and suggesting a future trajectory based on the collected empirical material. as o’dowd (2010) argues, by privileging spatial analysis and over-emphasizing the novelty of ongoing forms of globalisation, many contemporary border studies lack an adequate historical analysis, arriving, thus, to a disfigured perspective of the present. after providing a brief overview of the border studies, this article seeks to recognise the past in the present by looking back to the distinctive history of the finnish-russian border and discussing the development of the cross-border relations in the prevailing contexts. it then proceeds to assess the current situation and places the binational setting in the broader european context, to which it is now inherently linked. the article concludes by providing suggestions for the future management of the cross-border relations. border studies as a field of interest borders have long been one of the most central topics to political geography. however, the focus of border studies has gone through substantial changes as it has developed in relation to the predominant geopolitical models and visions – from studying borders as delimiters of territorial control and ideology towards areal differentiation and later towards more dynamic role of borders as bridges rather than barriers. the emergence of globalisation and the rhetoric of a ‘borderless world’ only fuelled interest in borders. the apparent renaissance of border studies that followed acquired an increasingly interdisciplinary take. the significance of borders is doubtlessly in flux, but instead of disappearing altogether, the borders themselves seem to be merely changing their institutional form. the traditional definitions and comprehensions of borders have been challenged primarily because the context in fennia 192: 1 (2014) 67something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a... which they were created and existed has also altered. recently, geographers have delved, inter alia, into the interrogating potentials for a democratic governance of borders (anderson et al. 2003), exclusion and discrimination (van houtum & pijpers 2007; van houtum & boedeltje 2009), the technologisation of borders and visualisation practices (amoore 2009), violence of borders and ‘teichopolitics’ (elden 2009; rosière & jones 2012), the relationships between ‘traditional’ borders and the socalled borderless world of networked, topological space (paasi 2009), external drivers, such as the eu and cbc (popescu 2008; johnson 2009), the conflicting logics of ‘national’ borders and ‘supranational’ unity (sidaway 2001), and the ‘new’ european borders as ‘sharp’ markers of difference (scott & van houtum 2009). however, geography by no means monopolises border studies. borders have spread also not just into international relations, political sociology, and history, but also into cultural studies (rovisco 2010) and philosophy (balibar 2009). the bordering (border-making) perspective not only transcends disciplinary boundaries, but it takes a step further by advocating that scientific knowledge ought not to be privileged over everyday geographical imaginations and popular geopolitics (scott 2009). in the field of border studies, theorising has proven to be quite a challenge. all borders are unique, and each of them is related in different ways to local, regional, state-bound, and supranational processes – the geosociologies of political power (agnew 2005: 47). as a result of this, however, concerns have been raised that during the past decade border studies have been overly focused on case study material, which has been thought to overshadow attempts to develop the discussion of concepts, theories, and common ideas (newman 2012). there is little abstract theorising in border studies, and those who have attempted to theorise on borders have run into unique circumstances that make it impossible to conceptualise broad scale generalisations (kolossov 2005; newman 2006). even so, attempts have been made. van houtum and van naerssen (2002) have sought to understand borders through sociological concepts of ordering and othering. brunet-jailly (2004, 2005) has put forth an attempt to theorise by drawing the general lessons that single case studies can offer. the same logic has been used more recently by moré (2011). newman, who earlier went against the grain by calling for a general border theory (newman 2003a, 2003b, cf. brunet-jailly 2004, 2005; kolossov 2005; paasi 2005a, 2005b; rumford 2006), finally gave up and accepted that “it is futile to seek a single explanatory framework for the study of borders” (newman 2006: 145). border as a research topic is complex, making the study of borders so diverse, both in terms of geographic and spatial scales, that any attempt to create a single analytical metatheory is doomed to failure. even if most scholars have given up on the enterprise, payan (2013: 3) continues to insist that in order to advance the field of border studies beyond purely descriptive work, “[c]ontinued theorising on borders is not only a pending task but necessary today, particularly because the optimistic discourse on a borderless world… has fallen flat and there is in fact a renewed importance assigned to borders both in the political and in the policy world.” he claims that the path to border theorising is not closed but only out of sight because border scholars have been looking in the wrong place. precisely due to the fact that border scholars are spread around the world and are in fact disciplinary and geographical specialists, “often miss the forest for the trees, and need to take the bird’s eye view and find what unites us” (ibid.). what unites us, payan (2013) suggests, is our methods: in order to theorise on borders, scholars need to engage in a dialogue on the methodological strategies as well as the tools used and pick those that can enhance our explanatory power. even though payan is correct in arguing that more comparative work in teams is needed in order to discover the optimal tools to identify what actually gives shape and character to the borders of today, his argumentation postulates that border studies would form its own academic discipline, no different in nature, say, from geography, sociology, history, or anthropology with their own accustomed and well established currents of research. that, border studies is not. this article puts fort that the main contribution of border studies lies in its ability to draw different disciplines together. it is fuelled by the diversity carved out by its eclectic multidisciplinarity. creating a metatheory and naming the variables to be used by all would only restrict the potential that border studies has to offer. it is given that building theories and testing them in practice advances our knowledge. this must not however be done at the expense of context specificity. all the borders are unique and it is this uniqueness that makes border 68 fennia 192: 1 (2014)jussi laine studies so interesting. while there is no need to create a single theory, we need not restrict ourselves to mere case studies either. we can go one step further to establish broader conceptualisations, trajectories, and even a common glossary in order to understand causality and to enhance the explanatory and predictive power of the methods used. while all borders are unique, they are still affected by the same global phenomena; it is their regional implications that differ. despite the forces of globalisation, we remain located somewhere and this has an impact on how we perceive that which surrounds us. even if geographical realities do not change, their meaning for different purposes may. as a result, borders may lose some of their functions while simultaneously obtaining new ones; these functions are seldom stable but rather under continuous change. borders may not disappear completely, but they can become more transparent and permeable in terms of some of their functions. a gradual opening of a previously closed national border enables the formation of new forms of interaction between countries but may also reveal political, cultural, and economic inequalities. all this makes them more tangible for people, especially borderlanddwellers. this is exactly why we need to place people at the center of things: “[p]eople are not only at the center of world politics, but they ‘make’ politics” (warkentin 2001: 14–15). people as agents, as actors and doers, have the ability to make things happen and, secondly, people are also social beings, naturally oriented towards establishing and maintaining social relations and conducting their lives within the context of relational networks (ibid. 17). shifting significance of the finnishrussian border the significance of the finnish-russian border has been highly varied, reflecting not only finnishrussian relations but also changes in global geopolitics (paasi 1999: 669). the border was first drawn as a result of the treaty of nöteborg in 1323 between the then rulers of sweden and novgorod, but was then frequently redrawn according to the changing balance of power. in practice, however, the border did not exist at the regional level and people were free to move back and forth for centuries. while finland then became an autonomous grand duchy within the autocratic russian empire in 1809, it nevertheless maintained a national economy and a customs border with russia. even then, in other respects the border was an open one and very much a formality (paasi 1996; liikanen et al. 2007: 22). be it as it may, for the first time in history, finland formed an administrative unit of its own (katajala 1999). the border became progressively defined in terms of an autonomous nation-state in the course of the nineteenth century, when an active nationbuilding process gained ground in finland (liikanen 1995). broad social and political mobilisation gained momentum at the beginning of the twentieth century depicting the border as a political, social, and cultural dividing line (alapuro 1988). as alapuro and stenius (1989) suggest, such civic popular movements played a crucial role in providing the emerging nation with an intellectual or material maturity to declare independence in 1917, following the bolshevik revolution in russia. the republic of finland and soviet russia signed a peace treaty (treaty of tartu) in 1920 in order to stabilise political relations and settle the borderline between them. in finland, a strong effort was made immediately to secure the border in order to signify the territoriality of an independent state. a heavily guarded, hostile military border was formed and all forms of cooperation interrupted. the border between finland and the soviet union was the longest border between a western capitalist state and a socialist super power (paasi 1999: 670). in addition to its ideological weight, the border was increasingly perceived as playing distinct historical, political, natural, and yet artificial roles (paasi 1996), the influences which are still felt today. within the cold war geopolitical order, finland sought neutrality and became placed into the grey zone between the eastern and western blocs. whereas finland had been a ‘western’ country in the geopolitical literature prior to world war ii, many post-war representations placed it in eastern europe (paasi 1996) as “a semiindependent oddity positioned under the russian sphere of influence” (moisio 2003). the crux of the matter was that the 1948 agreement of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance allowed the soviet union to interfere with finland’s domestic life. even though the new geopolitical regime based on the treaty included more fennia 192: 1 (2014) 69something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a... extensive economic interaction, the border remained heavily guarded and practically closed. the longer it remained closed, the wider the gap between the countries grew. this was hardly helped by the fact that during the cold war the border became increasingly seen as a line divining two competing socio-political systems, the communist and the capitalist, and forming a ‘civilisational’ frontier zone between east and west. the situation changed radically once the soviet union ceased to exist. finland recognised the russian federation as the soviet union’s successor and was quick to draft bilateral treaties with it. the new treaty, named straightforwardly as the “agreement on the foundations of relations between the republic of finland and the russian federation” (finnish treaty series 63/1992) and consisting of 12 compact articles, was signed with a newly formed russia in january 1992. its adaptation nullified the previous friendship treaty and the special relations dictated by it. the treaty also set in motion finland’s neighbouring area cooperation (nac) programme, which then became the key channel for cross-border interaction with russia. perhaps the most significant aspects of the new treaty was that it allowed finland to make the move towards what was consider to be its right reference group (sutela 2001: 6–7); in march 1992, only a few weeks after signing the new treaty, finland applied for eu membership. the european frame when joining the union in 1995, finland jumped onto a moving train. the process of european integration was underway and had been fuelled remarkably, first, by the signing of the single european act in 1986 and, second, by the new enlargement prospects evoked by the collapse of the soviet union and the end of the cold war. by its nature this process necessitated policies aiming to transcend internal borders, perceived in schumanian integrative spirit as products and remainders of former conflicts. borders were depicted as the results of the differentiation of groups in space. keeping ‘us’ apart from ‘them,’ they were perceived to preserve heterogeneity and a lack of coherence, both to be replaced with unity and common europeanness. as integration was assumed to follow from increased interaction, borders as barriers had to be eroded, whereby the role of borderlands as integrators became of high importance. underpinned by a strong regional development and spatial planning rationale, cross-border cooperation became a tool for building cohesion and blurring divides while local cross-border diplomacy enjoyed, first and foremost, a more a symbolic status. with the eu membership, activities formerly administered through bilateral, state-level agreements became a part of the broader dynamics of international politics and eu-russia relations. the binational border was suddenly upgraded to an external eu border, and this necessitated also amendments in political language and rhetoric. as emerson (2001: 29) states, the finnish-russian border served as a prime example of a clean-cut periphery where one empire ended and another began. the finnish domestic debate thus acquired an alternative thread, which depicted finland, having the only eu land border with russia, as a sort of a bridge builder between the two. for this reason and also because of the increased importance of the eu’s borders that was observed in the key eu decision-making bodies, finland now had a unique opportunity to profile itself in the field. given its geographic location, finland became a logical avenue for increasing eu-russian trade. the finnish easterly business expertise stemming from the soviet era was used to market finland both as a gateway to russia and a window to the west. as a new eu member state, finland was also interested in providing the eu with a special agenda towards its russian border, i.e., towards the “challenges and possibilities presented by having russia as a neighbour” (stubb 2009). this then materialised in the form of the northern dimension initiative. the opportunities were not, however, really realised until it became clear that finland’s distinction of being russia’s only eu neighbour would be threatened by the upcoming 2004 enlargement. while the domestic debate remained largely unchanged, at the eu level finland began, wilfully and consistently, to proclaim itself as something of a litigator of russia in all things europe, even if with only occasional success, claiming to possess russian expertise that others did or could not have (laine 2011). the finnish-swedish border became an internal eu border, yet practically nothing changed, as passage had been unrestrained already for decades. thanks to the nordic passport union, also the finnish-norwegian border, now officially an external eu border, remained uncon70 fennia 192: 1 (2014)jussi laine trolled. as of 1996, all nordic countries joined the schengen agreement, which became fully applied from march 25, 2001 onwards. the 2004 enlargement of the eu and the introduction of european neighbourhood policy (enp) policy epitomise a political attempt to extend the ‘de-bordering’ momentum of the late 1980s and 1990s beyond the territory of ‘core europe’ (see e.g. scott 2009). the eu embarked on an ambitions mission to look beyond its internal borders and create a transnational space extending beyond its external borders by engaging neighbouring states in a new process of cross-border regionalisation. despite being marketed as ‘ring of friends,’ this approach embodied an apparent shift whereby the 1989–2003 ‘scars of history’ discourse that had attempted to transcend borders began to be replaced by a securitisation discourse. particularly the external borders re-emerged in practical and discursive/symbolic terms as markers of sharp – to an extent civilisational – difference (van houtum & pijpers 2007). suffering from an acute form of enlargement fatigue, the eu moved to stabilise and consolidate itself as a post-national political community. formal relations with the neighbouring countries were privileged at the expense of local cooperation, which as a consequence became increasingly based on context and need ad hoc. this transformed the integrative role of the borderlands to that of a buffer zone or a filter. while the new forms of regional cooperation were presumably based on mutual interdependence, the eu’s restrictive border and visa regimes gave an unambiguously exclusionary impact, making the eu seem to be a contradictory international actor. following the rise of nationalist populism, sparked by the events of 9/11 and fuelled further by threat scenarios of illegal immigration and a general loss of control over not just borders but domestic issues of all sorts, defining ‘european’ in cultural-civilisational terms became an increasingly mainstream political discourse. this led to a heightened demand for more defensive borders for the eu as a whole. on the level of member states, the reclamation of national identity and sovereignty, often termed as a ‘re-bordering’ (scott 2009; dimitrovova 2012) led the national governments to challenge the eu’s top-down supranational thrust. in finland, the rise of national populism was not directed in any specific way against russia or russians but built on the argument that immigrants in general are threatening finnish jobs and welfare and, in more extreme cases, finnish culture. similar tendencies are apparent in russia, where its leadership has resorted actively to nationalist rhetoric and foreign threat scenarios in order to lead the lower and the upper classes and to control the growing middle class and civil society in between. the consequent juggle between cooperation and security-oriented agendas has led to contradictory bordering practices whereby a considerable gap exists between the projected geopolitical vision and its translation into action. a telling indicator of this is the imbalance in resources allotted to cbc. while the eu’s cohesion and regional policy for 2007–2013 has an operating budget of eur 347 billion (35.7% of the total eu budget for that period), the budget for the european neighbourhood and partnership instrument (enpi) for the same period amounts to some eur 11 billion – only some five per cent of which is allocated for actual cbc programs. ironically, this is less than what the eu is investing in security research under its wider r&d budget for 2007–2013. accordingly, the eu’s promise of a ‘privileged partnership’ is downplayed by the fact that while the enpi does provide limited co-funding also for non-eu members, the sums are much less than what was available through previous programs. russia: so near and yet so far today, the spectrum of finnish-russian relations is unprecedentedly broad and diverse. still, at least the official storyline focuses mainly on interstate relations, fostering in so doing the perception of the finnish-russian border as a traditional binational state border, on the different sides of which finnishness and russianness, respectively, is acted out in the frame of a nation-state. such a collective ‘practice of nation’ affects also political behaviour by relocating the emphasis of understanding away from powerful social actors to the everyday repetition of national ‘rituals’ (githens-mazer 2007). even though the dialogue between the two countries has become more ‘normal,’ at the level of interstate relations finland has sought to continue the ‘special relationship’ and stay among the ‘good countries’. the presidents, the prime ministers, and foreign ministers meet regularly during bilateral visits but also at international and european forums. within the cabinet finland’s relationship with russia is discussed on a regular bafennia 192: 1 (2014) 71something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a... sis. in addition, the aim has been to create direct and effective relations between all ministries and key government bodies with their counterparts in russia. according to alexander rumyantsev (2012), the current russian ambassador to finland, finnish-russian relations are built on mutually beneficial issues. according to him, these include open political dialogue, increasing trade, more than ten million border crossings, a gas pipeline in the baltic sea, the saimaa canal, the helsinki-st. petersburg high-speed railway, and cultural cooperation. even though finnish-russian relations are commonly addressed from a more or less equal footing – in the media and also in academia – it is hard to erase the apparent fact that the relationship is, in the end, quite a typical relationship between a small state and a superpower. russia is not sweden for finland, nor should it be (lounasmeri 2011: 15). such neighbourly relations are always more important for the smaller country – finland needs russia, but russia would quite likely manage just fine without finland. the city of st. petersburg alone has a greater population than finland as a whole. by total area, russia is 50 times larger than finland, and the soviet union was 66 times larger. the two countries share significant overlaps in history, and with the exception of a couple of conflicts, the relationship between the two has remained somehow ‘special.’ with a common border of more than 1,300 km, finland has always been closely tied to its eastern neighbour. despite the physical proximity, the cold war era closure of the border increased the mental distance between the two sides. for a long time, a good fence indeed made good neighbours, but it also made the other side seem increasingly unfamiliar. the resultant ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality sketched in the minds of many has proven to be far more deeply rooted and harder to erase than the border per se. the finnish nation building process in the late nineteenth century and particularly the post-civil war white history writing have projected russia as eternal other to finland. in order to build a coherent nation, it was necessary to define who ‘us’ actually were and what was actually ‘ours’ – and in order to demarcate that, a border was utterly needed. in a way, the finnish identity was built on differences vis-à-vis its neighbours; finns were something that swedes and russian were not. accordingly, the borders have played a key role in the finnish nation and identity building; to remove them would therefore remove part of the finnish identity. balancing at the border of east and west was not taken as a zero–sum game. finnish president paasikivi’s dictum that if one bows to the west one is bound to turn one’s bottom to the east – and vice versa – has never been put to a test. the mutually understood fact that “we cannot do anything for geography, nor can you” has been, contrary to its original connotation, transformed to mean that the two countries now had a lot of potential to utilise the opportunities offered by geographical proximity (see stubb 2008). the overriding question of finnish foreign policy, as finland’s long-serving president (1956– 1981) urho kekkonen (1958) explained, is the relations with her eastern neighbour “upon which our destiny rests” and the “future of our nation depends…” – “[t]his always has been the case and always will be.” kekkonen had co-opted many of his ideas from his predecessor, j. k. paasikivi, whose thinking derived from lord macaulay’s suggestion that the beginning of all wisdom lay in the recognition of facts. paasikivi’s famous foreign policy line maintained that finnish foreign policy should never run counter to the soviet union and our eastern neighbour must be convinced of our determination to prove this. the finnish-soviet relations in aggregate became later personified strongly by kekkonen, who discussed important issues directly with the soviet leadership often with little or no consultation with his own administration or the parliament (saukkonen 2006). the ‘paasikivi line,’ ranking all other issues behind relations with the soviet union, was adhered to for decades. outside the country, the line became dubbed ‘finlandisation,’ a term coined in 1961 by german political scientist richard löwenthal. the pros and cons of this policy are still actively debated. a secret cia intelligence report of august 1972, which was approved for release in may 2007, found that “the finns have ingeniously maintained their independence, but a limited one indeed, heavily influenced by the ussr’s proximate military might, a preconditioned prudence not to offend moscow, and the existence of various soviet capabilities to complicate finland’s domestic life” (central intelligence agency 1972: 3). whereas the right-wing commentators accuse the finnish government of continuing the policy of finlandisation, commentators more towards the left underline that such an approach was, and to a limited degree still is, necessary in order to cope 72 fennia 192: 1 (2014)jussi laine and deal with a culturally and ideologically alien superpower without losing sovereignty. finlandisation has remained a sensitive issue in finnish public discourse to this day. as a grand duchy under russian rule, finland had maintained a custom border with russia. russia had been clearly the most important trade partner for finland for decades until the world war i changed the situation profoundly. with the outbreak of war in 1914, finland's foreign trade grew as a result of increased orders from russia. at the same time, the trade deficit deepened due to the foreclosure of western markets. a couple of years later, the situation changed even more drastically as a result of the russian revolution and civil war in 1917; all forms of trade were terminated (fig. 1). russia’s share of finnish exports and imports fell abruptly from 97% and 68% respectively to zero (finnish customs 2007). the trade between the countries remained at very low levels throughout the entire 1920s and 1930s. after the second world war, trade upticked again, even though otherwise the border remained practically closed, as finland was forced to pay the soviet union’s sizeable war reparations. from the 1950s onwards, finnish-soviet trade was based on a bilateral clearing agreement, which dictated that both finnish imports to and exports from the ussr had to be equal in value. this meant that the more finland purchased supplies from the ussr, the more the ussr was obligated to purchase supplies from finland. this system was often presented, particularly in soviet propaganda, as an example of how a large socialist country and a small capitalist country can engage in mutually beneficial cooperation and trade (laurila 1995: 11). despite the strained relations during the postworld war ii climate, the soviet union was, until its collapse, by far finland’s most important trading partner. even though largely politically determined, the bilateral trade had helped finland to industrialise and contributed to its welfare in several ways. the finnish economy had been structurally dependent on this trade with its eastern neighbour to such an extent that its sudden disappearance contributed to an economic recession in finland, which soon deepened into a depression on a scale not seen since the early 1930s. trade relations have been on the mend from the 1998 russian financial crisis. even though trade and investments have not boomed hand in hand with levels of cross-border traffic, during the last decade trade between the countries grew steadily. a major driver behind the growth of finnish exports to russia was re-exports, i.e., goods that are imported by a purchaser in one country who then exports the product to a third country without processing (ollus & simola 2007). the most recent 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 1 8 6 0 1 8 6 4 1 8 6 8 1 8 7 2 1 8 7 6 1 8 8 0 1 8 8 4 1 8 8 8 1 8 9 2 1 8 9 6 1 9 0 0 1 9 0 4 1 9 0 8 1 9 1 2 1 9 1 6 1 9 2 0 1 9 2 4 1 9 2 8 1 9 3 2 1 9 3 6 1 9 4 0 1 9 4 4 1 9 4 8 1 9 5 2 1 9 5 6 1 9 6 0 1 9 6 4 1 9 6 8 1 9 7 2 1 9 7 6 1 9 8 0 1 9 8 4 1 9 8 8 1 9 9 2 1 9 9 6 2 0 0 0 2 0 0 4 2 0 0 8 2 0 1 1 exports to ussr/russia imports to ussr/russia fig. 1. share of russia/soviet union/russia in finland’s foreign trade 1860–2011. per cent of total exports and imports. data source: bank of finland and the national board of customs, finland. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 73something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a... economic crisis slowed down exports to russia by not less than 47% and imports by 31% respectively between 2008 and 2009 (finnish national board of customs 2009), thought already in 2011 imports (85% of which was energy) rebounded over the pre-crisis figures to more than eur 11 billion and exports more modestly from eur 4 billion in 2009 to eur 5.3 billion in 2011 (finnish national board of customs 2012). as haukkala (2003, 2009) argues, finland has gained russian elite’s trust due to its historically rooted tendency towards pragmatism. he points out that unlike many central and eastern european countries traumatised by communist-era experiences of direct coercion and ideological subjectification, finland’s relationship with russia has always been based on more or less voluntary and down-to-earth interaction. the continuation of this ‘special relationship’ does not imply that problems do not exist. recent bilateral issues include, but are not limited to, persistent truck queues at the border, airspace violations, the pollution of the baltic sea, and an increase in russian duties on wood exported to feed finland’s pulp and paper industry, the latter of which has, however, now been somewhat eased as the wto welcomed the russian federation as its 156th member on august 22, 2012. the so-called karelian question, the debate over finland’s re-acquisition of the ceded territories, and potential borderline adjustment pops up in the public discussion every now and then but cannot be regarded as a political issue as both of the governments in question agree that no open territorial dispute exists between the countries. on the other hand, russia has retained its position as finland’s favourite enemy. as stated by the former minister of defence jyri häkämies (national coalition party) in his (in-)famous speech given at the center for strategic and international studies in washington on september 6, 2007, the three main security challenges for finland are “russia, russia, and russia.” it is unclear whether the uproar that followed was sparked by häkämies being simply wrong or perhaps because his remarks had hit too close to the mark. as the cold war came to end along with the soviet union, academic research devoted to the topic of russia was downscaled in most western countries. in finland, however, the opposite happened. a freer climate allowed for more objective research. even so, most studies have focused on what russia lacks rather than on what it has to offer. few studies explore russia as it was, but instead approach it as being always undergoing some kind of reform or transition into something (smith 2012). as a result, the knowledge and understanding of the current situation in russia as well as the factors behind it remained slim. this, in turn, limited the ability to realistically assess the impact of russia on finland and the rest of europe as well as the extent to which there could be a meaningful debate about what should be done and, in particular, what can be done. while what was stated above has sought to explain the broader context within which cross-border interaction has evolved, more attention needs to be paid on civil society and individuals’ personal networks, which form the very backbone of the relations. while finnish businesses have had clear difficulties adapting to the unfamiliar conditions in russia and the jurisdiction of governments stops at the political border, individual citizens and civil society organisations are less restricted from moving back and forth across the border and entering into cooperative relationships. these connections also provide an alternative avenue for cooperation when interstate relations go sour and eventually play also a vital role in re-establishing relations. the core of the cooperation is heavily based on very few key network actors. a lot of local level work has been and is done, which does not become visible through the analysis of different programs or funding instruments. even if cooperation across the border has been troublesome and even disappointing for many individual actors and organisations, the networks have managed to keep up active cooperation across the border already for a long time – heedless of individual project time frames or funding periods. it is exactly this type of long-term cooperation that is perceived as most beneficial by the actors themselves. the finnish-russian relations and the border in between finnish-russian relations are a broader phenomenon than customary bilateral relations between two states. they are based on common history and those lessons learned from it, geographical proximity and the long common border, cultural linkages and the existence of kindred peoples, and economic development and trade interdependencies, as well as environmental factors that 74 fennia 192: 1 (2014)jussi laine respect no borders. the relations have been both close and distant – at times both at the same time. they cannot be explained by the mere supply and demand factors, but the motivations for cooperation range from a sense of duty to an outright necessity. as a partner in cooperation, russia is perceived at the same time as an opportunity and a drag, with high hopes and frustration. like border regions in general, the finnish-russian border region is characterised by specific forms of living together that entail tolerance, solidarity and special know-how. only by being aware of the fact that the ‘teachings of history’ are open to various interpretations can the right decisions be made today without being blind to the political use of history. what russia signifies to finns has to be viewed through multiple lenses, all of which alter the picture in their own specific way. the era of finland as an autonomous grand duchy in the russian empire, the nation building process in the latter half of the nineteenth century, years of oppression in the early 1900s, the confrontation between the bourgeois and the socialists, gaining independence in 1917, the civil war of 1918, the power struggle between democracy and the right-wing dictatorship from the 1920s until 1936, then the winter and continuation war, after which finland had to live in the shadows of the soviet union for five decades, have all added something to the complexity of these bilateral relations. even though the finnish-soviet/russian relations have been full of twists and turns, public opinion has changed more slowly. the analysis of this level of the relations is also important, as this is where much of the people-to-people interaction takes place. while more general western attitudes towards russia have turned, at times in an instant, from euphoria to outrage and from despair to hope, finns’ underlying attitudes towards russia have been more stable. this can partly be explained by the fact that russia is constantly present in the finnish media and general public debate while elsewhere, further away, its image is formed based on more pointed events. finns remain reserved and ground their stance on past experience. whether this is called russophobia or just realism depends on the angle taken. the finnish debate about russia has certainly evolved during the last two decades, but the process has not been linear, nor has it been uncomplicated. instead, multiple alternative trends have emerged and there is still plenty of room for interpretation. this is to say that the image and meaning of russia has not simply changed from one to another, but it is seen differently in different contexts, at different levels sectors, and by different actors. russia looks very different depending on whether it is approached at the level of everyday life, as a next-door neighbour, or as a global reemerging superpower. the end of the cold war provided a new beginning, but few knew exactly with whom finland was now dealing with. the neighbour that finns had learned to know, in both good and bad, suddenly disappeared. as a result, the previously stable border concept was also transformed into something broader and more complex. all this created uncertainly that downplayed the potential that could have been gained from the freer climate and the more open border. as a neighbour, the soviet union had not been the easiest kind, but at least the risk associated with living next to a sleeping giant could be assessed and managed, and the dangers could be judged. with its successor, the russian federation, the rules of the game changed fundamentally. the probabilities became harder to estimate because there was no longer any clear basis for making such a judgment. freer climate enabled new interpretations of the position of finland, but they also marked deconstructive moments for the finnish nation-state and the presumed unity between the nation and the state. joenniemi (1993: 19) was quick to argue that as the permanent threat the soviet union was perceived to have lost its credibility, the meaning of state sovereignty could be put under scrutiny. the more open conditions allowed for the deconstruction of age-old stereotypes about ‘russianness’ and ‘finnishness’ derived from the past and related to world war ii and the era of a closed border and also cleared the way for the image to be reconstructed in a more truthful manner. eu membership provided further treatment for the long-common-border-syndrome and suggested a move away from the geodeterministic premise whereby the geography of finland predetermined or at least limited its choices with regard to its political development. the increasingly international context necessitated that national unity be redefined once again. this process is evidently still going on today. the external environment has changed radically during the last two decades and so too has finland. increased cooperation has eroded the understanding of the border with russia as a fennia 192: 1 (2014) 75something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a... strict cut-off line shutting-off contacts and retaining, if not generating, the mind-set of repression, injustice, conflict, or even war. while the border is still a state border, the transnational practices that transcend it allow it to be approached as a social practice, situated within an understanding of neighbourliness that recognises and respects the values of the other and the contributions that it makes. the opportunities that would be allowed by more open conditions have not, however, been grasped to their full potential. the mental aspects of the border remain etched into the minds of the people so profoundly that its relevance has not faded even though the actual institutional border has subsided. the border still functions as a barrier, but its partial permeability allows for the relations across it to be now, at last, shaped by dialog rather than by confrontation. this dialog allows both sides of the border to gain more knowledge about their neighbour, which in turn fosters mutual understanding, another important prerequisite for effective cooperation. an unequal border setting, such as the finnish-russia border, is characterized not only by various asymmetries but also complementarities that, in turn, generate a variety of cross-border linkages. increased linkages are not only a result of successful policies and practices, but also an essential prerequisite for future development. thanks to the changes in the governance modes, rescaling of the state, constantly widening and deepening integration processes, strengthening regionalisation, and the raising influence of transand international organisations, the state is no longer the primary actor, nor is the nationstate the only conception of space to be applied in explaining human interaction. the state is not, however, disappearing but merely being organized differently. state sovereignty and authority has been weakened upwards, downwards, and sideways. there are increased negotiations not just among governments at several territorial tiers but also between the various sectors of society. the world politics of today involve many nonstate actors who interact with each other, with states, and with international organizations, at times skipping a level or two in between. when taken together, these revolutionary changes have led to a transition from international (border confirming) to transnational (border eroding) relations, implying, as a result, a clear shift away from state-centeredness. concluding remarks: away from state centricity borders are not fixed or something that must be overcome. they are evolving constructions, which have both merits and problems that must be constantly reweighed. this must be done, as paasi has repeatedly argued, because borders are institutions and symbols that are produced and reproduced in social practices and discourses. as they can be constructed, they can also be deconstructed – should there be will to do so. as a band of border scholars have discovered, borders do not pre-exist, but they are always an outcome of social and political processes; change the process and you change the border. changing the focus from seeing like a state to seeing like a border, as rumford (2008) has advised, would allow us to disaggregate the state and the border, and unveil the potential that various actors of civil society hold in constructing, shifting, or even in erasing borders. if the border is no longer seen in national terms, and if the interaction is deemed not to occur between two states, but among people from these two, or more, states, such borderwork would go beyond issues of national belonging or citizenship as to allow expressions of transnational mobility and sincere actorhood apart from state, or the eu, supported agendas. various organisation of civil society are not only carrying out tasks defined by others. instead, they themselves play a key role in articulating and modifying the objectives and practices of cooperation. while the significance of the interstate relations and great power politics cannot be ignored, they alone are incapable of explaining the multileveled and multiscaled processes that take place today. thanks to the institutionalisation of cooperation (e.g., euregio karelia), the relationships especially between regional level officials and authorities on the two sides of the border have improved. cbc projects and also less-visible personal-level interactions have significantly contributed to a more mutual understanding and interdependence, accumulation of trust, and the breaking down of mental barriers (cf. németh et al. 2012). the relationship may still be far from ideal, or even what could be considered as normal between two countries 76 fennia 192: 1 (2014)jussi laine sharing a long common border. still, at least in comparison with high-level geopolitics, more bottom-up civil society cooperation seems to be developing forward and cultivating varying degrees of interdependence. the enp era brought along a greater emphasis on civil society in cbc across the external eu border but it also included a hidden agenda: an attempt to approach russia through an alternative channel and to create operational basis for bottom-up forces seeking to influence the system. however, the post-lisbon securitisation emphasis along the general new ‘realism’ in eu foreign policy has changed the picture yet again. talks about the ‘ring of friends,’ which underlined the need to create better links with neighbours, now focus increasingly on a ‘secure neighbourhood’ and the need to create a supportive buffer zone. accordingly, the eu seems to have lost some of its faith in cbc and in the transformation process in russia. this has urged the union to retreat precisely to where it should not be – at the level of socio-cultural communication. if the local and regional level cbc is expected to thrive also in the future, all the levels will need to have better understanding of their own role and of the division of labour in this equation. more funding that is better directed, more easily accessible, and more reliable is needed where the practical knowledge and expertise is. it cannot be based on the superficial friendship rhetoric, but careful planning is needed in order to move beyond the formalities and maintain the cooperation successfully. much depends on individual actors who are able to shoulder the implementation of the agreed programs and to solve emerging problems and disagreements. as the eu’s conditionality principle cannot be applied to russia, a country without aspirations of eu membership, the carrot needs to be found elsewhere. certainly, the eu’s role in fuelling cooperation cannot be denied, as it certainly has created a supportive frame and a forum within which cooperation and regional dialogue has developed. it has also brought new impetus and forced the finnish actors to move beyond the old rhetoric based on past experiences. still, the future trajectory whereby binational cooperation would rely entirely on support from brussels sounds very unnatural. especially as long as there are no practical means to distribute eu funds to the local level where much of the work is carried out. the main motives and initiatives for the cooperation have to arise from the local needs and concerns. in the light of current trends towards the decentralisation and privatisation of public services in both finland and russia, it would be prescient to conceptualise a cross-border space for social contracting and social welfare policies through civil society organisations. such a more social economy focused approach would offer alternative ways to generate social and economic welfare and innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems thought social entrepreneurship. new support structures could promote collaborative forms of policy formulation and delivery based on partnerships involving the state, the private sector, foundations, and civil society at large. this is particularly important in peripheral regions with limited prospects for short-term returns on social investment and where multiple support mechanisms are needed in order to nurture entrepreneurial activity. one possible strategy would be to develop international networks between public, private, and nonprofit sector actors that provide assistance to emerging and future social entrepreneurs through a variety of means, including: support in project development, securing grants, and assistance in the acquisition and provision of loans and investment capital, as well as training, advisory, logistical, and informational support. the best way to normalise neighbourly relations is through increased people-to-people interaction, and preferable this ought to occur from the bottom-up, not from the top-down. given that the nac program has been terminated and that the enpi cbc is not properly equipped to deal with the overall context within which finnish-russian cooperation takes place, there is a risk that despite the rhetorical statements suggesting otherwise, the europeanisation of finnish-russian cooperation may well become underfunded and more technocratic. this will put the durability of cross-border contacts to the test, but it also allows cbc to be restructured and redesigned away from predefined funding programs, periods, and priorities. unrestricted people-topeople interaction feeds inspiration and innovation and leads to new solutions – also in terms of financing. there is little reason to expect anything less. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 77something old, new, borrowed, and blue: towards a... references agnew j 2005. hegemony: the new shape of global power. temple university press, philadelphia. alapuro r 1988. state and revolution in finland. university of california press, berkeley. alapuro r & stenius h 1989. kansanliikkeet loivat kansakunnan. in alapuro r, liikanen i, smeds, k & stenius h (eds). kansa liikkeessä, 8–49. kirjayhtymä, vaasa. amoore l 2009. lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures. citizenship studies 13: 1, 17–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621020802586628. anderson j, o’dowd l & wilson tm (eds) 2003. new borders for a changing europe. frank cass, london. baerwald tj 2010. prospects for geography as an interdisciplinary discipline. annals of the association of  american  geographers 100: 3, 493–501. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2010.485443. balibar e 2009. europe as borderland. environment and planning d: society and space 27: 2, 190–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d13008. brunet-jailly e 2004. toward a model of border studies: what do we learn from the study of the canadianamerican border? journal of borderlands studies 19: 1, 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2004. 9695613. brunet-jailly e 2005. theorizing borders: an interdisciplinary perspective. geopolitics 10: 4, 633–649. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650040500318449. central intelligence agency 1972. ‘finlandization’ in action: helsinki’s experience with moscow. rss no. 0059/72. dimitrovova b 2012. imperial re-bordering of europe: the case of the european neighbourhood policy. cambridge review of international affairs 25: 2, 249–267. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.201 2.678298. elden s 2009. terror and territory: the spatial extent of sovereignty. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. emerson m 2001. the elephant and the bear: the european union, russia and their near abroad. centre for european policy studies, brussels. finnish customs 2007. <www.tulli.fi/en/finnish_customs/statistics/> 7.10.2008. finnish national board of customs 2009. <www.tulli.fi/ en/finnish_customs/statistics/statistics/country/> 7.12.2012. finnish national board of customs 2012. <www.tulli.fi/ fi/tiedotteet/ulkomaankauppatilastot/katsaukset/ maat/venaja12/index.html> 11.12.2012. githens-mazer j 2007. ethno-symbolism and the everyday resonance of myths, memories and symbols of the nation. paper presented at conference on everyday life in world politics and economics, 11 may 2007, centre for international studies, lse, london. haukkala h 2003. a problematic ‘strategic partnership’. in lynch d (ed). eu–russia security dimensions, 8–19. european union institute for security studies, paris. haukkala h 2009. lost in translation? why the eu has failed to influence russia’s development. europeasia studies 61: 10, 1757–1775. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668130903278942. houtum van h & boedeltje f 2009. europe's shame: death at the borders of the eu. antipode 41: 2, 226– 230. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00670.x. houtum van h & naerssen van t 2002. bordering, ordering and othering. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 93: 2, 125–136. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/1467-9663.00189. houtum van h & pijpers r 2007. the european union as a gated community of fear: the two-faced border and immigration regime of the eu. antipode 39: 2, 291–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2007.00522.x. joenniemi p 1993. euro-suomi: rajalla, rajojen välissä vai rajaton? in joenniemi p, alapuro r & pekonen k (eds). suomesta euro-suomeen: keitä me olemme ja mihin matkalla, 17–48. tampere peace research institute, tampere. johnson cm 2009. cross-border regions and territorial restructuring in central europe: room for more transboundary space. european urban and regional studies 16: 2, 177–191. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0969776409102190. katajala k 1999. near the metropolis, beyond the border: st petersburg and eastern finland before the october revolution. in eskelinen h, liikanen i & oksa j (eds). curtains of iron and gold: reconstructing borders and scales of integration, 297–315. ashgate, aldershot. kekkonen u 1958. the beginning of cool relations. broadcast on 10 december 1958, in helsinki. < h t t p : / / w w w . d o r i a . f i / b i t s t r e a m / h a n d l e / 1 0 0 2 4 / 1 0 3 7 5 / t m p. o b j r e s . 1 4 5 1 . html?sequence=1> 14.12.2012. kolossov v 2005. border studies: changing perspectives and theoretical approaches. geopolitics 10: 4, 1–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650040500318415. laine j 2011. in search of balance: russia and the eu in the north. polar geography 34: 3, 163–192. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/1088937x.2011.597886. laine j 2013. new civic neighborhood: cross-border cooperation and civil society engagement at the finnish-russian border. publications of the university of eastern finland. dissertations in social sciences and business studies, no 58. laurila j 1995. finnish-soviet clearing trade and payment system: history and lessons. bank of finland, helsinki. liikanen i 1995. fennomania ja kansa: joukkojärjestäytymisen läpimurto ja suomalaisen puolueen synty. finnish historical society, helsinki. liikanen i, zimin d, ruusuvuori j & eskelinen h 2007. karelia – a cross-border region? the eu and cross-border region-building on the finnish-russian border. university of joensuu, joensuu. lounasmeri l 2011. lähellä, mutta niin kaukana? suomalaisen venäjäkuvan äärellä. in lounasmeri l (ed). näin 78 fennia 192: 1 (2014)jussi laine naapurista: median ja kansalaisten venäjä-kuvat, 7–15. vastapaino, tampere. moisio s 2003. back to baltoscandia? european union and geo-conceptual remaking of the european north. geopolitics 8: 1, 72–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/714001004. moré i 2011. the borders of inequality: where wealth and poverty collide. university of arizona press, tucson. németh s, fritsch m, eskelinen h, izotov a, scott jw & zimin d 2012. case study on finland–russia. in terco european territorial cooperation as a factor of growth, jobs and quality of life final report, 213–276. espon & euroreg – centre for european regional and local studies, university of warsaw, warsaw. newman d 2003a. boundaries. in agnew j, mitchell k & toal g (eds). a companion to political geography, 123–137. blackwell, oxford. newman d 2003b. on borders and power: a theoretical framework. journal of borderlands studies 18: 1, 13–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2003.9695598. newman d 2006. the lines that continue to separate us: borders in our ‘borderless’ world. progress in human geography 30: 2, 143–161. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132506ph599xx. newman d 2012. where to in border studies? crossing the disciplinary borders in the search for questions. paper presented at the borderscapes iii conference, 28 june 2012, trieste. o’dowd l 2010. from a ‘borderless world’ to a ‘world of borders’: ‘bringing history back in’. environment and planning d: society and space 28: 6, 1031–1050. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d2009. ollus s-e & simola h 2007. finnish re-exports to russia. bofit online 5. paasi a 1996. territories, boundaries and consciousness: the changing geographies of the finnish-russian border. john wiley & sons, chichester. paasi a 1999. boundaries as social practice and discourse: the finnish-russian border. regional studies 33: 7, 669–680. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343409950078701. paasi a 2005a. the changing discourses on political boundaries: mapping the backgrounds, contexts and contents. in houtum van h, kramsch o & zierhofer w (eds). b/ordering the world, 17–31. ashgate, aldershot. paasi a 2005b. generations and the development of border studies. geopolitics 10: 4, 663–671. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/14650040500318563. paasi a 2009. bounded spaces in a ‘borderless world’: border studies, power and the anatomy of territory. journal of power 2: 2, 213–234. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540290903064275. payan t 2013. theory-building in border studies: the view from north america. eurasia border review 5: 1, 1–18. popescu g 2008. the conflicting logics of cross-border reterritorialization: geopolitics of euroregions in eastern europe. political geography 7: 4, 418–438. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2008.03.002. rosière s & jones r 2012. teichopolitics: reconsidering globalization through the role of walls and fences. geopolitics 17: 1, 217–234. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/14650045.2011.57465. rovisco m 2010. reframing europe and the global: conceptualizing the border in cultural encounters. environment & planning d: society & space 28: 6, 1015–1030. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d0809. rumford c 2006. theorizing borders. european journal of social theory 9: 2, 155–169. http://dx.doi. org/10.1177/1368431006063330. rumford c 2008. citizens and borderwork in contemporary europe. routledge, london. rumyantsev a 2012. <www.rusembassy.fi/openfiles/01.09.2012.pdf> 12.10.2012. saukkonen p 2006. <blogs.helsinki.fi/vol-spj> 29.8.2012. scott jw & houtum van h 2009. reflections on eu territoriality and the ‘bordering’ of europe. political geography 28: 5, 271–273. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.04.002. scott jw 2009. bordering and ordering the european neighbourhood: a critical perspective on eu territoriality and geopolitics. trames 13: 3, 232–247. http://dx.doi.org/10.3176/tr.2009.3.03. sidaway jd 2001. rebuilding bridges: a critical geopolitics of iberian transfrontier cooperation in a european context. environment and planning d: society and space 19: 6, 743–778. http://dx.doi. org/10.1068/d223t. smith j 2012. the problem of succession in russia, 1019-2012. paper presented during the vera day, 4 may 2012, joensuu, finland. strober mh 2006. habits of the mind: challenges for multidisciplinary engagement. social epistemology 20: 3–4, 315–331. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691720600847324. stubb a 2008. venäjään on suhtauduttava ilman komplekseja siitä, mitä neuvostoliitto joskus aikoinaan on ollut. savon sanomat 23.4.2008. stubb a 2009. foreword: northern dimension. publications of the ministry for foreign affairs of finland. ministry for foreign affairs of finland, helsinki. sutela p 2001. finnish relations with russia 1991– 2001: better than ever? paper presented at the norwegian institute for defence studies conference on “living next door to russia – the first ten years seen from the neighbours’ perspective” (bofit online 11/2001), 11 october 2001, oslo. warkentin c 2001. reshaping world politics: ngos, the internet, and global civil society. rowman littlefied publishers, lanham. l degradation, restitution and the elusive culture of rural-urban thinking urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa60462 doi: 10.11143/fennia.60462 degradation, restitution and the elusive culture of rural-urban thinking mirek dymitrow dymitrow, mirek (2017). degradation, restitution and the elusive culture of rural-urban thinking. fennia 195: 1, pp. 36–60. issn 1798-5617. despite fierce criticisms, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ still constitute powerful narratives around which we structure our society. the ‘formal reality’, however, frequently disregards the cultural nature of these concepts, elevating them to the role of objective spaces apt to serve as acceptable guiding perspectives. while the analytical inadequacy of rural-urban ideations is well-documented, the phenomenon of formal-cultural conflation remains much less explored. acknowledging that ideational space of social representations can only exist through the practices of discursive interaction, this paper’s objective is to lay bare the phenomenon of rural-urban thinking when externalized through the little-known practices of ‘degradation’ and ‘restitution’ in poland. using conceptual methods, including discourse analysis and historical deconstruction, this paper assays the hidden architectures of formal-cultural conflation by means of a richly contextualized analysis. the findings, presented in four discursive openings, reveal embedded elements of hierarchy, loss, injustice and self-victimization, which may create a divisive culture spawned by elusive promises of development at the cost of misinterpretations of history, local disappointment and cultural segmentation. in conclusion, formal appropriation of historical concepts is likely to engender a cultural geography of discord spun around a largely insignificant division, especially when development-oriented aspects of urbanization become entwined with emotional issues. keywords: rural-urban, cultural-formal, degradation, restitution, discourse analysis, poland mirek dymitrow, department of economy and society, human geography unit, school of business, economics and law, university of gothenburg, p.o. box 630; se-405 30 göteborg, sweden, e-mail: mirek.dymitrow@geography.gu.se introduction with poland as an example, this paper aims to lay bare the phenomenon of rural-urban thinking when externalized through the little-known practices of ‘degradation’ and ‘restitution’. as scholarly evidence suggests, the concepts ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are increasingly treated as a pair of social constructs rather than as sets of geographically bounded places or facticities (champion & hugo 2004; cloke 2006a; halfacree 2006; scott et al. 2007; hubbard 2006; woods 2010a; bosworth & somerville 2014). steady, fast-paced transformations in the environmental, economic and social dimensions (cf. millward et al. 2003) have rendered simple spatial classifications inadequate to social theory, especially when rooted © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 37mirek dymitrow in a centuries-long dichotomous imaginary that defies contemporary reality of interconnectedness (hoggart 1990; halfacree 1993; little 1999; pile 1999). when external conditions change, older conceptualizations are usually being questioned (jones 2009); the rural-urban dichotomy, however, is one discursive standard that has withstood similar devolution and is more and more in need of critical analysis (cf. dymitrow & stenseke 2016). to reflect this, the last decades have embraced nonessentialist approaches (including actor-network theory, assemblage philosophy, performativity, more-than-human approaches etc.) that eschew notions of a coherent social totality and of various conceptual binaries like human–nonhuman, modern–unmodern, material–immaterial, natural– cultural, or, indeed, rural–urban (law & urry 2004; braun 2005; bennett & joyce 2010; castree et al. 2010; panelli 2010; anderson et al. 2012; latour 2013; dahlberg 2015; bawaka country et al. 2016). this erasure has provided a foundation for more creative combinations that embrace relationality and hybridity more timely ways to approach and understand various concepts (cf. murdoch 2003; cloke & johnston 2005; leyshon 2008; halfacree 2009a; woods 2010b; bukraba-rylska & burszta 2011; gorman-murray et al. 2012; dymitrow & stenseke 2016). this position, however, has not been equally adopted worldwide. in line with the notion that “ideational space of social representations can only exist through the practices of discur-sive interaction” (halfacree 2006, 48), different countries have developed different understandings of the universal rural-urban distinction (mihaylov 2014), leading up to intricate patterns of societal organization (hall 1997; halfacree 2009b). accordingly, half of the world’s countries use administrative definitions of “urban”, 51 use size/density, 39 use functional characteristics, 22 have no such definition, while eight define all or none of their population as “urban” (vlahov & galea 2002, 52). different countries have also very different official definitions of “rural areas”, ranging from population dispersion to agricultural-based economy, distance from major urban centers, or lack of access to various services (european commission 2008). while formalization of domestic understandings of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are implicitly “cultural”, i.e. they are in one way or another thought to reflect the local context – geographies, customs, practices – there are several obstacles standing in the way of obtaining a satisfactory cultural-formal symmetry. here i will only touch upon three: institutional inertia, imposition of standards and ulterior motives. the first problem lies in the fact that the society evolves faster than do institutional structures (kegan & lahey 2009). institutional lock-ins, hence, may be detrimental to society, because not only may old structures no longer reciprocate with a changing world but the concepts upon which those structures are based often give rise to new ill-devised structures (cf. essebo 2013). secondly, formal representations of ‘rural/urban’ may sometimes poorly, if not at all, reflect the local context because of complex histories of occupation, annexation and colonialism, whereupon imposed systems of governance may continue to be cultivated after independence (schaffer 1978). lastly, formal representations are often “expressed by capitalist interests or politicians, which refer to the ways in which the rural [or urban] is framed within capitalist processes of production and exchange” (halfacree 2006, 51), and may have little in common with the real needs of the citizens. while problems inherent of formal-cultural disruption can be found in most countries (cf. szymańska 2013, appendix), they are likely to be the greatest when all of the aforementioned factors interplay. expectedly, in those cultural settings where ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ have historically come to comprise more powerful narratives and conversational realities, they are less likely to be used as neutral classifiers but as expressions of old value systems that have “survived the onslaught of material transformations and philosophical repositioning” (cloke & johnston 2005, 10). however, while uncovering the causes behind such conflations often requires going back in history (gorlach & foryś 2003), those largely historical factors typically remain hidden when ‘rural/urban’ imaginaries are allowed to shape contemporary geographies. since ‘rural/urban’ are seen foremost as historically shaped spatialities (bosworth & somerville 2014, 278), they are likely to become a much overused lens in those contexts (planning, governance, research) which adopt spatially based, rather than problem-based, categorizations for various societal actions. this mode of knowledge production brings forth questions of how spatial characterizations not only create spatialities (‘rural’ and ‘urban’ areas) but spatialities with “expected” problems. when spatial perspectivism – the repeated resorting to synthetic ‘foreground perspective-optics’ (nietzsche [1878] 1996) – is applied a priori to various societal problems, it is likely to distort the results (cf. law 38 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper 2004, 5–6). hence, while ‘spatial thinking’ is not limited to ‘rural-urban thinking’, the mere act of deploying a spatial analysis in certain contexts may be problematic because many phenomena, like deprivation, unemployment or discrimination, occur independently of some overarching spatial matrix. this in turn creates geosophical environments (wright 1947) under the guise of geographic demarcation. what this does is create tacit acknowledgment of the importance of the spatial dimension, when no (or little) such importance is warranted and may smack of the much critiqued spatial fetishism. this then may tacitly reaffirm their implied neutrality and provide justification for governmental bodies, policy makers and planners to use ‘rural/urban’ as if they were spatially neutral categories (cf. hoggart 1990). effectively, when culture is conflated with normative perspectives the outcome becomes internalized as objective truths, which may consolidate an image that is largely disingenuous to a changed reality (cf. freibach-heifetz & stopler 2008). similar reflexivity regarding the articulation of rural-urban ideations is disconcertingly absent in poland (cf. wójcik 2013; krzysztofik & dymitrow 2015a). there, “becoming urban” is considered an exclusive achievement, one that can only be accomplished by a convoluted and heavily bureaucratized process, which may or may not lead to the desired effect (cf. dymitrow 2013; szmytkie 2015). at the same time, any area without urban status is automatically and relentlessly regarded rural. given that poland has not been exempt from sundry urbanization processes that have been going on for decades, such understanding of rurality strikes as vestigial. unfortunately, it both reflects and affects ways in which policy, planning and research on rural-urban issues in poland are done (gorlach & foryś 2003; bukraba-rylska & burszta 2011). when preconceived ideas about how issues associated with certain (labeled) spatialities ought to be handled are allowed to serve as guiding lights, obtaining development goals can prove problematic – if not unachievable (dymitrow & brauer 2016). this is especially true for areas whose anticipated socio-spatial balance, the expected compatibility between conceptualizations of space and the characteristics of that space, is disrupted because of the uneven pace of urbanization observed across different geographical contexts (cf. easterlin et al. 2011). while poland offers a research-friendly setting for watching rural-urban relations ‘in the making’, it is, of course, not an exception. although particularly viable in countries where a rural–urban distinction finds political reflection (krzysztofik et al. 2016), the universality of rural–urban thinking may make problems inherent of rural-urban labeling surface regardless of whether the national rural–urban distinction is political, statistical or both. to uncover these relations, discourse analysis has been used in various culture-spanning geographical studies predicated on exposing hidden structures embedded in various rural-urban portrayals (lees 2004; erjavec & erjavec 2007; barnes & duncan 2013; almstedt et al. 2014; dymitrow & brauer 2014). however, since ‘rural-urban thinking’ (due to its proliferation across many societal domains) is likely to create deep-seated cultural geographies (soja & hooper 1993), its rationale may at times be difficult to penetrate. hence, in order to bring new perspectives to the ‘rural-urban problem’ in general, and – in particular – to those cultural settings where spatial conceptualizations appear to have reached a standstill, the challenge, so it seems, lies in the ability to fuse theoretical frameworks with various syntactic techniques to help make notable moves towards new modes of knowledge-making (cf. franklin & crang 2001). previous studies adopting a fusional approach have brought forth innovative perspectives on ‘rurality’ and ‘urbanity’ by means of auxiliary conceptual lenses (hubbard et al. 2002), i.e. alternative, secondary or derivative ideas (relative to the main one) that can “help put into a new and clearer perspective several aspects of the role which auxiliary concepts play in scientific theories” (hintikka & tuomela 1970, 298). using such an approach, a number of hidden paradoxes inherent of ‘ruralurban thinking’ have been uncovered or at least made more apparent. for instance, discourses of the ‘rural idyll’ in england have been shown to overshadow rurality’s complexity to the point of denying it ‘deprivation’ (woodward 1996); constructions of american poor in ‘rural areas’ as deviant and failing – to obscure failures of pro-market policies (lawson et al. 2008); while the soviet legacy of ‘collective culture’ in russia – to construct a rurality that ignores the increasing role of individualization (shubin 2007). other fusional approaches using auxiliary concepts have been successful in tying together rurality/urbanity with e.g. race (cloke 2006b), gender roles (bryant & pini 2010; stenbacka 2011), popular fiction (eriksson 2010), ‘nature’ (saltzman et al. 2011), religion (bereton et al. 2011) or fennia 195: 1 (2017) 39mirek dymitrow sexuality (williams et al. 2005). their successfulness lies in their ability to supersede conceptual inertias upheld by the ilk of forces such as cognitive internalization, political correctness or cultural taboos (cf. rapport & overing 2014). in this sense, the auxiliary concepts of degradation and restitution explored in this paper can add depth and context to what lies at the heart of rural-urban thinking in contemporary poland. seeing degradation and restitution as cultural spectra of the “rural-urban welter” (see dewey 1960, 63), the aim of this paper is to enrich geographers’ understanding of ‘rural/urban’ in the conceptual dimension through a richly contextualized account of the ubiquitous yet little-known practices of degradation and restitution1. seen more broadly in the tradition of discourse-analytical contributions to rural and urban studies, this paper pinpoints the ambiguity and contentiousness of ‘rural/urban’ as cultural concepts when elevated to formalization (cf. haack 1996). moreover, given that engagement with the constructions of rurality/urbanity in contemporary research has been based predominantly on anglo-saxon accounts from north-western europe and the united states (cf. kurtz & craig 2009; johnston & sidaway 2015), a polish experience adds geographical breadth to the subject matter. methodology and materials departing form a critical-theory outlook on knowledge production, this paper adopts a historicalrealism ontology (what is seen as ‘real’ has been shaped by social, political, cultural, economic, and other values) of rural-urban realities, which, while inaccurately considered ‘true’, are essentially ‘real’ now (cf. lincoln et al. 2011). as such, the paper analyzes the current situation in poland shaped by references to, rather than an investigation into, a ‘historical reality’. the epistemology of critical theory involves forms of transactionalism and subjectivism, while the associated methodology typically discovers findings through the exchange of logical arguments that “transform ignorance and misapprehensions (accepting historically mediated structures as immutable) into more informed consciousness” (guba & lincoln 1994, 110). seeing ‘rural/urban’ as such structures, this paper is crafted as a conceptual – not an empirical – one. ‘conceptual research’, nominally, is the opposite of ‘empirical research’ as it “seeks to undertake a logical clarification of concepts and analysis of the use of a con-cept” (xin et al. 2013, 72). conceptual research is primarily concerned with what is being put into the concept purported to explain a particular phenomenon, by combining theory with more general empirical insights and philosophical commitments (cf. maxwell 2013). as tribe and liburd (2016, 45) contend, “the authors’ expertise, long term engagement with the issues and deep knowledge of the relevant literature”, rather than the systematic evaluation of empirical materials (cf. leuzingerbohleber 2004). hence, while drawing on and combining insights from extensive empirical work, the focus of this paper is on philosophical analysis of the central findings common to much of the underlying empirical material. the employed methodology followed a two-step research process. the first part was concerned with exploring discursive patterns in and across sought-out statements, while in the second part a critical evaluation of the identified discourses was carried out. given that assertions about ‘rural/urban’ are always based on subjective characterizations implicated in the discursive production of places (cresswell 2004; woods 2010a), the first step (not addressed explicitly in this paper) was to identify the dominant discourses shaping rural-urban attitudes in poland today. for this part, discourse analysis was employed, a method “naturally embedded within critical theory” (hidalgo tenorio 2011, 187). this was done by searching for key words and phrases in polish, such as “degraded town”, “urban degradation”, “restituted town” “urban restitution”, “urban status”, “town privileges”, “forfeiting urban status”, “regaining urban status”, “rural to urban”, “urban to rural” etc., and singling out materials according to their source of origin. next, whole texts or relevant chunks of texts were read for context, situatedness and cues of intertextuality with regard to how common-sense understandings of statements regarding degradation/restitution are accepted and articulated as ‘true’ or ‘naturalized’. in line with the paper’s philosophical ambition, it was necessary to take into account a material that was broad enough to warrant ample synthetization. this was done by investigating the discursive 40 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper mindsets suffusing three major societal layers related to the topic of degradation/restitution in poland: a) the political arena, b) the academic community and c) “lay people”. (a) political attitudes were examined by studying all available governmental projects of decrees, and the associated justifications, of the council of ministers (of the polish ministry of interior and administration) regarding granting urban status to rural settlements, issued between 2003 and 2016; such materials were not published officially prior to 2003. for the same years, additional materials associated with these decrees, i.e. for the particular settlements under evaluation, were also examined, mostly petitions, appeals, recommendations and declarations, issued by local and regional administrations (county councils and municipal governments). these materials are time-specific as they cover concrete episodes of prospective restitution along with associated instantiations thereof by recourse to degradation. examples: this application for urban status on behalf of the settlement of radoszyce is based first and foremost on historical factors. radoszyce was a city for over 500 years. in 1869 its town privileges were removed by a czarist law, which was a punishment for the residents’ involvement in the january uprising (radoszyce municipality 2016; my translation). among evidence for a positive evaluation of this application [for urban status] should be noted the following arguments and circumstances: a) infrastructural/spatial: (...) zakliczyn has a classic market square and a clearly demarcated center with compact small-town architecture (...) b) historical: first mentions of zakliczyn are from the 9th/10th century; zakliczyn had town privileges in the years 1557–1934 (council of ministers of the republic of poland 2005; my translation). (b) attitudes in scientific approaches were synthesized by covering most of the existing literature on degradation/restitution set out to capture its state-of-the-art. most of these works (over 50), including a recent comprehensive editorial endeavor (krzysztofik & dymitrow 2015a), are cited throughout this paper. the focus is on conceptualizations of degradation/restitution after the fall of communism in poland in 1989, i.e. when initiatives for restitution were allowed to emerge from the local governments, and particularly after 2000, when current discourses became consolidated (cf. dymitrow 2013). due to their nature, these materials tend to be synthesizing and generalizing longer historical periods. examples: [degraded towns] are part of [polish] history, heritage and culture. they constitute a specific element within poland’s spatial economic structure. they are also an integral part of the country’s settlement system, a component unknown of in other european countries. they linger in poland’s local tradition, and, in spite of many historical storms, they have managed to survive in oblivion. they are a testimony of foreign violence, old injustice and present incomprehension (…) (siemiński 2000, 14; my translation). the most radical changes in urban structure were introduced by the russian government in the kingdom of poland: 338 of 452 cities were degraded (75%). the regulations were introduced after the fall of the january uprising. it was one of many repressions which followed the uprising. the loss of urban status was connected with many social and economic problems imposed on the citizens of degraded cities (…) (miszewska 2007, 36). (c) perspectives of locals were analyzed using mainly web-based materials associated with the subject of degradation/restitution: social media, blog threads, articles covering the local voices, as well as online comments to those articles. important sources of information were websites of local interest groups, cultural associations and opining individuals. due to their unofficial nature, these sources tend to be more spontaneous and colloquial but often emerge alongside a prospective restitution, either official or in-the-making, of the home town or a nearby town. the information was juxtaposed with overarching discursive patterns found in personal, sporadic conversations with residents made during past field visits (2010–2016) to c. 160 degraded and restituted towns. these trips were part of research concerned with evaluating the morphological basis for the studied towns, cf. dymitrow (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015; krzysztofik & dymitrow 2015b). the overall time frame for lay sources is 2010–2017, with particular focus on the most recent cases. examples: [interview with a resident of widuchowa:] our settlement has been a city for years; i don’t understand why we today are treated as a village (…). we want to address the local municipal authorities to do something about it (remont 2016; my translation). fennia 195: 1 (2017) 41mirek dymitrow [interview with a resident of opatówek:] i am very happy that our efforts did not go to waste (…). for almost six centuries, until year 1870, opatówek was a city. it lost town privileges by means of a czarist decree as a consequence of the repercussion following the january uprising. now, after 150 years, it can regain its former status (bielewicz 2016; my translation). for the purposes of this paper, that is ”a more abstract mapping of the discourses that circulate in society at a particular mo-ment in time or within a specific social domain” (winther jørgensen & phillips 2002, 20), the focus of analysis was less on the differences between these dimensions, which were surprisingly few and insignificant, but on the many context-bound and occasioned similarities, which conspicuously overlay each other to eventually consolidate a national psyche of specific attitudes (cf. pennebaker & banasik [1997] 2008). during this step, the following four dominant discourses were identified: 1. the discourse of urban supremacy over rural (‘urban is better than rural’) 2. the discourse of alienable forfeiture (‘becoming rural is a loss’) 3. the discourse of historical injustice (‘becoming rural is unjust’) 4. the discourse of inadvertent self-victimization (the sarajevo rose epiphenomenon) the second step of the research process (explored in detail in this paper) involved unpacking these four discourses in order to provide a fuller picture of the phenomenon and, in extension, an understanding of the rationale underlying current rural-urban conceptualizations in poland. this, however, may prove difficult due to lack of clear method in many conceptual papers. mindful of this, this paper follows the protocols for conceptual research as outlined by xin et al. (2013) and tribe and liburd (2016), which signify “a process of scoping, comparison, reflection and abstraction (…), including defining concepts, comparing them, historical analysis, the construction of conceptual typologies, finding conceptual gaps, deep reflection, synthesising and finally a reconceptualisation of the subject” (tribe & liburd 2016, 45). more specifically, this is done by combining historical deconstruction (cf. munslow 2006) with situational analyses (contemporary examples) and rhetorical techniques (analogies, metaphors, similes), assembled to articulate the (il)logic embedded in the identified discourses. in line with the stipulation that conceptual research should also seek to “avoid any methodological strait-jacketing and remain open and creative in [its] thinking” (tribe & liburd 2016, 45), the here employed analytical framework is deliberately eclectically informed. the reason for this is that cultural concepts are never theoretically hermetic but build on multiple aspects of the noösphere (the sphere of human thought), and since many of these aspects show common features they can be taken to represent a boundary-spanning conceptual nucleus (hansen 2011). likewise, rural-urban conceptualizations as used and implemented by polish researchers, policy-makers and “lay people” alike form a consequential blend of philosophical, psychological, epistemological, sociological, political, and historical contingencies (cf. dymitrow et al. 2017), whereby a meta-theoretical, synthetical method of approaching them allows for a fuller elaboration of the polish notion of 'rural' and ‘urban’. adopting such an analytical scheme, the data underlying the presented arguments and counterarguments on the nature of degradation were acquired from archival documents, including original legislation, and from the most reliable historical studies. contrarily, insights on the tangibles of restitution (current state, predispositions, effects, etc.) were obtained from statistical materials (mainly the central statistical office of poland) and contemporary scholarly analyses. in terms of structure, the discussion is held in four discursive openings, each of which deals with a specific aspect of rural-urban ideation that has not received sufficient attention. a brief introduction to poland and its ‘rural-urban problem’ precedes these openings, while a conclusion finalizes the paper. poland and the rural-urban problem as implied earlier, the rural-urban distinction is “a messy and slippery idea that eludes easy definition and demarcation” (woods 2010a, 1). one of its less known faces is the phenomenon of degraded and restituted towns. this lack of reconnaissance, however, is perhaps less the result of the towns’ scarcity than their specificity of being ‘awarded’ or ‘deprived of’ an urban label by means of strictly sociopolitical actions. 42 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper in poland, all settlements are classified as either “urban” or “rural”. the default state of any one settlement is “rural” while obtaining urban status is granted by legal means, i.e. by the polish government, upon prior application from the local municipalities. there are a number of criteria a formally rural settlement must fulfil in order to meet with a positive governmental decision. these criteria converge in four dimensions: 1) spatial-infrastructural; 2) demographic; 3) social; and 4) historical-administrative (kudra 2014; szmytkie 2015, 300–301). while the first three raise little doubt in view of commonplace understandings of urbanity (sufficient population, relatively large catchment area, modern infrastructure, various social institutions, a pronounced non-agricultural employment sector etc.), the fourth dimension (possession of urban status in the past) forms a vent, through which the cultural dimension is allowed to enter formality. the main problem lies in the fact that the first three sets of criteria are often met with several, often significant, concessions once the historical criterion is fulfilled (dymitrow 2015, 95; cf. also kudra 2014). this in turn forms a loophole for the many “degraded towns” in poland to reclaim urban status by recourses to history – a process known as “restitution”. so what exactly is a degraded town? a degraded town, shortly, is a small, formally rural, settlement that has had urban status in the past, but today may range from being “fully urban” (i.e. fulfilling all stated criteria) to “fully rural” (fulfilling none of the criteria save for the historical). a restituted town, contrarily, is one whose interim rural status has been revoked, making it formally urban again. degraded and restituted towns, hence, are geographical units made ‘rural’ or ‘urban’ instantaneously, irrespective of their de facto state along what is widely considered a gradual path of (de)urbanization. in poland there are currently 832 degraded towns and the number of restituted towns increases every year as the benefits associated with the discourse of restitution proliferate. between the years 1977 and 2017, 122 new towns were ‘created’, of which 76% were restitutions (krzysztofik & dymitrow 2015b). but there is a catch. while degradation and restitution are spontaneous, cultural phenomena that both erupt and self-immolate from circumstances much detached from some “objective” definition of urbanity/rurality respectively, the way they are framed by various institutional processes signals the existence of an objectified yet divisive rural-urban reality. two caveats come to mind. firstly, the addition of the historical-administrative dimension means that the polish definition of ‘urban’ is based on the historical concept of ‘town privileges’ that has gradually segued into a contemporary formal definition of ‘urban area’. this insistence is retained despite rural-urban classification of polish settlements being known to have a long history of chaos and inconsistency, brought on by 123 years (1795–1918) of its territory belonging to three, much different, administrative systems: russian, prussian and austrian (grossman 1925; szturm de sztrem 1925; mazurkiewicz 1967; kołodziejczyk [1961] 1979; spórna et al. 2015a). moreover, the official definition of a ‘rural’ unit in poland is “a compact or dispersed settlement with existing agricultural functions or agriculturerelated service and tourism functions, which lacks town privileges or urban status” (sejm of the republic of poland 2003, 2; emphasis added). effectively, the conceptual core for designating urban and rural areas in poland has remained largely unaltered for the last 100 years, while setting into motion the bureaucratic vehicle of changing a label from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ departs from a functional rationale (cf. sokołowski 2015; krzysztofik et al. 2017a) – an ontological claim that has faced the opprobrium of contemporary scholarship (cf. halfacree 2009b). by mixing historical factors (traditionalism) with contemporary conditions (rural-urban blurring), in poland there are “cities” of less than 900 inhabitants and “villages” of 12,000. still, this way of rural-urban thinking continues to underlay poland’s administrative structure, and inadvertently inform its policies, spatial planning, wage level differences and eligibility for label-specific governmental state subsidies (koter 1999, 26; plucińska 2009)2. secondly, in spite of the latter, poland’s development is starkly associated with a rural-urban perspective, including its allocation of funds (gorlach & foryś 2003, 289). programs supporting innovation and large investments, for instance, are conceptually designed to further a growth-oriented brand of development widely understood as ‘urban’. conversely, so-called ‘rural’ programs revolve around the restructuring of the primary sector, and only to a lesser extent support more general activation schemes (cf. szymańska 2013). even with the more ‘open-ended’ programs (such as those subsidized by the eu), national distribution of resources is likely to be channeled through domestically fennia 195: 1 (2017) 43mirek dymitrow engrained spatial (here: rural-urban) conceptualizations (halamska 2013; dymitrow et al. 2017; krzysztofik et al. 2017b). effectively, when rural-urban labeling is done in a relentlessly dichotomous fashion while relying on a medieval concept in reference to contemporaneity, it is likely to artificially uphold socio-economic and cultural segmentation: there is reason to believe that instead of reducing spatial differences, unreflected approaches to “rural” and “urban” planning may perpetuate a “default” rural–urban divide by ascribing certain (labelled) spatialities special qualities and attuning those to specific areas of priority (krzysztofik et al. 2016, 319). a new generation emerges, one that is neither urban nor rural – just a working one (strzemińska 2011; my translation). we are entering the territory of chaos with appearances of certain stability; referring to myths will not help solve problems (halamska 2014; my translation). indeed, the ‘rural-urban problem’ in poland has been enunciated as “at least as important as the eastwest development dichotomy” (ministry of labour and social policy 2006, 17), and pointed out as “the main factor destabilizing poland’s development and the functioning of democratic institutions in the longer term” (gorlach & foryś 2003, 296; cf. also bukraba-rylska 2011; śpiewak 2012; halamska 2013). however, although the negative effects of rural-urban labeling are beginning to be noticed, the way this rural-urban fissure is construed in the first place is rarely addressed, and almost never critically (but see kubicki 2011; wójcik 2013). because the distinction between formal urbanity and cultural urbanity is neither sufficiently differentiated nor problematized (dymitrow 2014), confusion arises with regard to the purpose of ‘rural/urban’ in poland, making societal actions that depart from such a distinction contentious and difficult to successfully operationalize (feltynowski et al. 2015; biegańska et al. 2016; dymitrow et al. 2017). to conclude, while the definition of rurality/urbanity in poland is relatively “simple”, its conceptualization is much more multilayered. as this complexity is seldom accounted for, a ubiquitous cultural idea becomes reduced to an underconceptualized theme in view of the most recent vicissitudes surrounding the scholarly rural-urban debate. such discursive one-sidedness can then lead to what koch (2005, 5) described as the missing symmetry of constructionism in the relationship of space and society, whereupon the spatial effects of the social construction (here of ‘rural/urban’) may pass unnoticed and eventually induce various pernicious outcomes, including compromised communication, misdirected resources and cultural segmentation. given the immense imbrications of qualities found across the rural-urban range in poland, “polish urbanity” today, for all intents and purposes, could equally well act as a ‘default state’, with ‘rural’ being the status to be applied for. although why this cannot be the case will be elaborated in greater detail in the next section, the sheer construction of a formalized rural-to-urban (and vice versa) transition in a 21st century reality calls for a discursive deconstruction. first discourse: urban is better than rural the first, and most visible discourse i would like to discuss is that of a perceived urban supremacy over rural. having in mind that elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy is key to modern managerial theory (wren & bedeian 2009), the sea of officialdom surrounding the process of changing an area’s label from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ in poland is perplexing. despite this bureaucracy and – what more – the uncertainty and unpredictability of outcome in the process of restitution (sokołowski 2002; drobek 2004; dymitrow 2012), the non-declining number of incoming petitions points to the desirability of the concept of urbanity in poland. ‘urban’ continues to remain an exclusive achievement endorsed by complex procedures and sets of specific criteria. disregarding the fact that the difference between urban warsaw (1,8 million) and “urban” wyśmierzyce of 900 inhabitants is mindboggling, the very fact that everything else is lumped together into one category – ‘rural’ (arable fields, forests, meadows, national parks, mountain ranges, marshes and, indeed, human settlements of up to 12,000 inhabitants) – makes urbanity stand out as something of an indulgence. 44 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper sadly, this is often done amidst crass myth-making and insidious rhetoric. consider the following litany of elusive “benefits” from urban status as enumerated in a leaflet prepared by the local authorities of the degraded town of lanckorona, and distributed to its residents in the lead-up to a local referendum on the town’s possible restitution. greater access to specialist health services (doctors, rehabilitation); local branches of departments in the municipal office, such as communication (driver’s license, registration documents) and construction (permits); greater choice and assortment of cultural events; possibility to study at a secondary school or a local university branch; transport facilities (greater number of buses and minibuses with more frequent plying); eligibility for eu-grants reserved for small towns; ensuring safety in the town by installing a police station [...] (łopata 2016; my translation). unfortunately, little of this is true, as urban status is neither required nor guarantees the envisioned development (cf. krzysztofik & dymitrow 2015a). the fact that a provincial town of 2000 would attract a university branch, or any other branch for that matter, just because it changed its label from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ is an extreme hyperbole; neither are there eu-grants reserved for “small towns”. since installment of most of the presented facilities lies at the discretion of the municipal council, relying on “urban status” to do the job only reveals the council’s level of resourcefulness. of note is that this kind of rhetoric is omnipresent in the discourse of many local authorities and of the lay residents endorsing it; what is more, it is also reiterated in many academic studies on the phenomenon of restitution (cf. dawidejt-drobek & drobek 2015; konecka-szydłowska 2015; zaniewska et al. 2015). however, since the immediate socio-economic gains of urban status are unclear and confusing, the reasons behind the often fervent and persistent struggles for urbanity must be sought elsewhere. acknowledging that ”our ways of talking do not neutrally reflect our world (…) but, rather, play an active role in creating, and changing [it]” (winther jørgensen & phillips 2002, 1), the sheer designation ‘degraded’ assumes the existence of asymmetric power relations. the prepositive ‘degraded’ implies some kind of breaking or wearing, damage or failure, loss of quality, maybe even decomposition or disintegration. degradation may thus either be abstract or concrete, and both can apply to settlement forms. most often, though, the expression ‘degraded town’ refers to a locality bereft of the conceptual casing (“town”) of its putatively essential mode of existence (“urbanity”) in an “unnatural” way (i.e. related to an act, not a process). degradation, hence, seen as a decrease in rank rather than in content, refers to what i would call conceptual degradation. studies on the specifics of towns deprived of their urban status use the term ‘degraded town’ in this way (e.g. adamczewka-wejchert & wejchert 1986; drobek 1999; murzyn & gwosdz 2003; miszewska 2007; borcz et al. 2009; sokołowski 2011; krzysztofik et al. 2015; szmytkie et al. 2015). in other words, the ghost of beaujeu-garnier and chabot’s (1963, 115) aphorism on a town being nothing but a village that has been successful seems to live on. contrarily, no former town has ever been referred to as ‘upgraded’ to rural status in a polish context. in a reality where thinking in rural-urban categories seems incontrovertible, identifying hegemonies is crucial to avert unreflective understandings of these popular concepts from ricocheting into eponymous development strategies. in that vein, attributing a classifier imbued with negative connotations (like ‘degraded’) to a certain concept (‘town’) is indicative of the polish attitudes towards ‘rurality’ and how that knowledge has become consolidated in the first place. understanding this “lock-in” requires a historical detour. beginning in the 13th century, poland’s settlement system has evolved over a long time. the purpose of the earliest cities was to provide for trade, administration and defense, while the countryside supplied food and fiber for the cities. with the onset of industrialization in the late 19th century, small towns devoid of industry slowly declined, what effectively fortified the rural-urban divide (gawryszewski 2005). the two world wars (especially the second) shattered the polish settlement system, while the ensuant imposition of communism saw two tasks: to rebuild the country and to collectivize production. both laid the basis for momentous alterations to the gradual evolution of poland’s topography, hitherto faithful to a rural-urban matrix. focus on heavy industry led to innumerable constructions of huge high-rise block estates for both urban and rural populations. the rural-urban erasure was also visible in the many new monofunctional industrial settlements and military plants that sprung up in the middle of nowhere (krzysztofik 2014). another groundbreaking trademark of this era was the state agricultural farm (pgr). built in the effigy fennia 195: 1 (2017) 45mirek dymitrow of small cities with modern infrastructure galore, the pgrs eradicated all traditional rural-urban difference there was (biegańska et al. 2016; dymitrow et al. 2017). the events of 1989 saw a systemic transformation in the former eastern bloc that affected the whole society (lee 2002). effectively, new values surfaced along aspirations to erase old ones (dębski et al. 2010). resentment towards the tired soviet-style urbanity based on heavy industry and the hubristic belief of being able to manage all aspects of human life gave rise to a return to “polish values” and a reconceptualization of an ‘urban ideal’ based on recourses to the past (dymitrow 2014). this brought about the re-emergence of the city as the nexus of civilizatory progress while downplaying the value of rural areas. reinterpretations of the city as “an outpost in a sea of rurality” (gold 2009, 150), starkly reinforced the discourse of prosperous modernity (cf. berman 1983) despite the fact that ‘rural areas’ have begun to be envisioned through new conceptual developments in their own right (cf. munkejord 2011; corbett 2014; rytkönen 2014). this was particularly interesting in view of the fact that agriculture, the defining characteristic of polish rurality, which in the recent decades had to yield to drastic economic changes. although agriculture – as of 2016 – only employs 10.6% of poland’s working population (compared to 22% in mid-90s) (rynek pracy 2016), the definition of a ‘rural’ settlement in poland still involves the existence of agricultural or agriculture-related functions (sejm of the republic of poland 2003, 2). the fact that poland only has 923 urban units and more than 43,000 rural ones is a revealing ratio. as poland has not formally revised the conceptualization underlying its rural-urban structure (despite numerous administrative reforms) “rural-urban” eventually came to lack a workable contemporary matrix, and is instead reaching back in history for a definition. this ‘reaching back’ has also changed the governmental discourse when evaluating what is to be considered ‘urban’ (szmytkie 2015), alongside many other changes brought on by the ideological shifts: “if something existed before the war but was revoked during communism, it needed to be brought back” (mikołajek 2012; cf. also pavković et al. 1995). by the 1990s, hence, the concept of ‘cultural heritage’ began to be sanctioned as a valid argument for granting urban status to minuscule ‘degraded towns’, and continues to this very day (dymitrow 2013). this created a peculiar situation: contemporary outlooks on ‘urbanity’ became conflated with an expired definition of it, while development-oriented aspects of urbanization became irredeemably entwined with emotional issues. in his comprehensive situational analysis of contemporary poland, zaremba (2016) argues that while “the economic gap between the city and the country has narrowed significantly (the same mental journey into modernity that took sweden 70 years, poles completed in 20), the mental gap has become wider.” contemporary language reflects this grim reality, oozing with class contempt: "if you want to humiliate a pole”, zaremba continues, “you call him a peasant (…) – just as the gentry spoke of their serfs" (cf. also bukraba-rylska 2011). zaremba’s main concern, however, is that the mental ruralurban gap in poland has come to poison the politics, attributing – among others – poland’s vote for a “reactionary government” in 2015 to “the cultural war between the city and the country-side.” this trend, as bukraba-rylska (2011) notes, was created and is maintained by opinion-making elites, which claim that the countryside constitutes developmental ballast for poland, the relinquishment of which is the only way of obtaining current standards of “modernity”. however, as numerous historical accounts show, the rural-urban binary has never been portrayed as a neutral conceptual pair but as a battle of discourses, with one ousting the other at some point in history (williams 1975; woods 2010a). the concepts of degradation and restitution are problematic in this respect in that their deployment cherry-picks stop-images of rural-urban relations from one period and sustains them in a reality of much changed values and perspectives. when historicization of past national memories is not interpreted from the circumstances of their time but is chosen to fit into the contemporary ruling master narrative, it is referred to as a whig history outlook (cf. davies 2011) – an insidious instrument of political manipulation. it is all too often forsaken that the mere usage of a(ny) concept on a systematic basis (rural and urban included) curtails maneuverability to address the complexity of social problems by discursively steering intervention into prepackaged avenues, often with dire consequences (cf. cloke & milbourne 1992; woodward 1996; brauer & dymitrow 2014, 2017). the seemingly innocent concepts of degradation and restitution are tacit reaffirmations of this intricacy. 46 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper second discourse: becoming rural is a loss the second discourse i would like to discuss is that of alienable forfeiture, or transferrable sense of loss. due to the unobtainability of urban status by many degraded towns in light of the bureaucracy surrounding it, the discourse of loss becomes especially expressive. the justification is simple: a degraded town ‘should’ be urban again simply because it was urban in the past (drobek 1999; siemiński 2000). such rhetoric is present directly in many utterances of local politicians and cultural associations who weave it into the discourse of heritage (cf. dymitrow 2013). also, on an academic level, many studies devoted to the issue of degraded towns tend to evaluate them on account of their eligibility for urban status using an armada of more or less sophisticated indices (cf. sokołowski 2015; szmytkie 2015). this is also a premonition – although more indirectly so – of viewing degraded towns in the light of their potential of restitution, which, in turn, is symptomatic of a subtle stress on their ‘wrong state’. the point is that the emotive states of mind underpinning degradation and restitution often tend to alienate the concepts of ‘rural/urban’ from their semantic core towards other aspects, which are clearly secondary to the debate. the discourse of loss is tricky in this respect, and while spotting it is relatively easy, understanding the logical fallacy it entails is philosophically more demanding. because of that, the discourse of loss is probably best illustrated through the use of metaphors and analogies, rather than real-life examples. first of all, the notion of restitution (prefixed re–) implies that something is being recovered or reinstated. in the case of settlements ending an era of certain conceptual designation (‘urban’) (because what lay at the core of that concept has been deemed to no longer correspond with the content subject to urban labeling), however, is not necessarily the same as losing something. such thinking tends to be emotionally laden. a typical example of this is the process of aging, which often is synonymous with ‘losing youth’, ‘losing virility’ or ‘losing beauty’. although we do know that aging is a natural, multidimensional process of accumulated changes of physical, psychological and social nature, we tend to romanticize the superiority of young age (freshness, vigor, spirit) over old age (disease, loneliness, pauperization). in such a perspective the imbalance between positive and negative aspects becomes perturbed, with the imperfections of ‘lost youth’ (insecurity, naïveté, dependence) and advantages of ‘gained maturity’ (wisdom, experience, reflexivity) becoming subdued, if not overlooked. similar intimations can be found in a number of transitional human conditions, such as death (“loss” of life), alopecia (“loss” of hair) or defloration (“loss” of virginity), where loss is understood as the absence of something of value (compare to the corresponding “restitutive” practices of resuscitation, hair transplantation or hymenorrhaphy). conversely, it is not seen as ‘getting rid of something’ (like a tumor, nail/hair clippings or a tattoo) or, perhaps most importantly, it is discursively less framed as a ‘natural’ transition from one phase/state to another. secondly, the discourse of restitution often involves semantic discontinuities. it is difficult to speak of restitution when what is considered “lost” is something very different in its “restituted” rendition. when a couple grieving the death of a child decides to have another one, it does not imply “restitution” of a family member; although the psychology behind their motives may be explained in those terms. hence, filling an apparent gap with totally different content matter may be perceived as an act of restitution, but in fact only manifests an act of desperation, to quite different effect. consider if only the fact that the concept of urban status in poland today is still referred to as ‘urban (town) privileges’ (prawa miejskie). dating back to the middle ages, town privileges, whose original meaning (right to trading, establishment of guilds, etc.) is long gone, have no longer practical importance per se; it is merely a cultural remnant reified in the format of a labeled administrative demarcation. the only common denominator is the sheer term ‘urban’ (miejskie), while its discursive fixture at an unspecified point in history (cf. woods 2010a, 43–44) is never accounted for. in all fairness, at this point it is important to stress that the level of ‘urbanity’ of any one degraded town today may (and, indeed, sometimes does) correlate with its historical ‘urbanity’, but only – and only – if we as a common denominator feel confident accepting the town’s fulfilment of time-specific (past and current) criteria for urbanity. at the same time, many times there is no such correlation (cf. kantor-pietraga 2014). this relation has been captured by halfacree (2009b) in his ideas on how the concept of rurality, and – by contrast – of urbanity, can be positioned today. drawing on jean fennia 195: 1 (2017) 47mirek dymitrow baudrillard’s ideas of the age of simulations “where the map no longer follows on from the territory, seeking to represent it, but in-stead ‘precedes’ and ‘engenders’ it” (ibid., 392), halfacree points to the current tendency to corral assemblages of rurality that go ‘beyond’ the rural. this can happen when a particular quality of life becomes heavily infused with particular representations of rurality so that the existing rurality is reconstituted to resemble more closely what rurality is ‘supposed’ to look like, or even outdo what most people would acknowledge as rural space (see also brauer & dymitrow 2014). in regard to degraded towns, when a town’s constitution of aspects chosen to represent a state commonly understood as ‘contemporary urbanity’ differs excessively from the state the town represented in the past, or, worse, if the current state exceeds its urban historicity, then the argument of loss is merely a contextually random cultural reference. since the discourse of loss is heralded semi-officially by the government (past possession of urban status is considered a merit in the process of granting urban status, cf. szmytkie 2015), several aspiring yet insufficiently ‘urban’ degraded towns have used this argument in their fights for restitution (e.g. gardeja, lubycza królewska, skierbieszów, parzęczew, dobre, etc.), to no avail. in effect, the cultural vs. formal understanding of urbanity is a confusing concoction of perspectives enmeshed in the deontology of degradation when expressed through facile efforts to bring order, objectivity and formality into the culturally burdened rural-urban theme. in any one case, wanting to become urban by pretending to be urban by invoking urban schemata from the past to obtain current benefits of urban status (which are neither clear nor guarantee the expected way of development) entails a problematic perspective, where ‘modernity’ comes across as a false prophecy (cf. murphy 2010). this is particularly visible in the discourse of restitution, the real effects of which are often questionable (konecka-szydłowska 2015; przesmycka 2015). third discourse: becoming rural is unjust derivative of – yet morally different from – the discourse of loss are qualities relating to the unfairness of degradation and the associated discourse of historical injustice. oftentimes these qualities are assembled and expressed through the practice of restitution, which, if used as a medium to channelize feelings of betrayal, become a discourse in themselves. this discourse is particularly visible in cases of degradations enforced by a foreign oppressor or by native communist authorities. it often involves claims that degraded towns should be exempt from the restitution process because degradations (allegedly) enacted by undemocratic means are an act of violation, for example in statements invoking “reversal of historic justice by a free poland” or claiming that “law is law but history is history” (grzegorczyk 2009). since, currently, many restitutory movements are accompanied by a desire to correct a situation that had taken place in the past (cf. dymitrow 2013), it is important to understand the specifics that preluded and accompanied the very act of degradation. this, in turn, calls for a historical deconstruction based on archival documents, which often tend to get “lost” in the process. while this is not the place for a comprehensive review of poland’s history, a minimum of political background (after gawryszewski 2005) is required to grasp the context. until the 17th century poland was a great power and territorially one of europe's largest countries, stretching from the baltics to the black sea. during the 1700s, the country’s stability was severely shaken under a weak monarch. this ultimately led to poland’s division (in 1772, 1793 and 1795) between its neighbors russia, prussia and austria, and subsequent annihilation. poland resurrected after world war 1 as the short-lived second polish republic (1918–1939), only to become occupied 1939–1945 by nazi germany and made a soviet satellite state 1945–1989. because the time of polish annihilation (1772–1918) saw the greatest number of towns made formally rural (483), the concept of degradation is typically discursively attributed to this period. one notable example of this is the infamous administrative reform of 1869–1870 that revoked the urban status of 336 polish towns (journal of law 1869). enforced in a radical manner by imperial russia concurrently with the events of the heroic polish-led january uprising of 1863–1864 (which eventually ended poland’s limited autonomy through its full incorporation into russia), the reform is emotionally charged amongst poles. as such, it is often interpreted as a form of repression for participation in the uprising, both in scientific accounts (cf. koszutski 1915, 5; gajewski 1964, 87; 48 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper siemiński 2000, 16; miszewska 2007, 36; mielcarek 2008, 56; dawidejt-drobek & drobek 2015, 50–51 etc.) and whenever the question of ‘restitution’ becomes topical (cf. dymitrow 2013). in the context of the latter, the exploitation of repression-induced acts of degradation is so widespread that that the discourse of injustice is even being transposed onto reversals of urban status that had absolutely nothing to do with it. for instance, the restituted in 2016 town of siedliszcze had its urban status revoked on 10 april 1821 (kommisyja dla miast 1825; rodecki 1830). however, in its pre-restitutional campaign it was widely heralded that the degradation happened “after the january uprising of 1863– 1864” (e.g. tvp lublin 2015) or – chronologically more correctly, although still vastly exaggeratedly – “slightly before” (by 42 years!) the uprising (e.g. barczyński 2015). in any one case, the very mentions of this uprising – rather than to simply state the exact date of degradation – bring to mind images of crushed polish resistance and works as a way of reproducing the russian repression narrative3. by so doing, degradations are implicitly portrayed as unjust (be it by historical ignorance or by deliberately forging history), which in turn helps prop up restitution, and especially so in questionable cases (such as siedliszcze, the least “urban” of the newly restituted 98 towns (cf. spórna et al. 2015b, 416). notwithstanding factual mistakes, the sheer epitomization of the vast scope of this reform as a uniform machiavellian action overshadows a host of intricate, individualized circumstances that may have been incumbent at the time of the reform’s execution. despite the diffusion of the punishment theory, the arguments used to justify it are inconclusive. if we consider the criteria underlying the reform, none of them strikes as unreasonable in view of the reform’s own assumptions (journal of law 1869): a town predestined to degradation must have had less than 3000 inhabitants, its farmers must have accounted for at least 50% of the population, and the town’s yearly revenue must have been smaller than 1500 rubles. these three criteria, demographic, functional and economic, even today are considered some of the most frequently reiterated denominators of the concept of urbanity (cf. pacione 2009). focusing if only on the most easily verifiable criterion, the demographic one, shows that the demographic requirements of the reform were met by 93.1% of all towns (journal of law 1870), meaning that almost all degraded towns were in fact very small. in her detailed study of this reform, nietyksza (1986, 10–11) contends that by the mid-19th century reinvigoration of the polish concept of urbanity was necessary as many small towns had long lost their urban functions while still retaining urban status. as nietyksza (1986, 93) notes, the actual importance of urban status of many towns subject to ‘degradation’ had been reduced long before the reform. the abolishment of patrimonial relations in private cities and the removal of the towns’ monopoly on trade were some of the measures undertaken immediately prior to the reform to diminish the impact of the rural-urban distinction in practice. moreover, the correlation between punishment and revocation of urban status is not well crystallized as most ‘reform towns’ had not been involved in the polish antirussian uprisings, while many towns that had been involved in them escaped degradation despite not even meeting the postulated criteria (zieliński 1913). there were even instances of voluntary requests for degradation to (pragmatically) avoid the higher costs of urban administration. today, thus, campaigning for a “return to urbanity” by invoking historical events is not uncontroversial. statements depicting degraded towns as “a testimony of foreign violence, old injustice and present incomprehension” (siemiński 2000, 14) may very well be true in ideological terms, but not necessarily in view of some more objective (countable) indicators. in effect, seeing the reform as an act of repression is a largely reconstructed oversimplification (cf. sokołowski 2011; dymitrow 2013), and, as such, may unwittingly pave the way for a reactionary, rather than proactive, way of restitution (cf. bendix 2000). to strengthen this point, let us compare the reform of 1869–1870 to degradations deployed in other parts of poland (i.e. beyond the russian-occupied territory) and in different temporal contexts. in the galician section of poland (seized by the austrians following poland’s partitions), a major reform was conducted in 1784–1785 with the intent to classify all settlements as either towns (städte), market towns (marktflecken) or as villages (dörfer), with the first two considered ‘urban’. however, in his indepth study on the subject, karpiniec (1932) found that the reform was introduced only as a means to compile the index for the official map of galicia, and had little in common with the settlements’ actual character. moreover, the classification varied widely between different sources. as a result, the exact number of urban settlements was never known, and, more alarmingly, a reform conducted for fairly trivial reasons posed serious problems when galicia returned to poland in 1918 and when its chaotic fennia 195: 1 (2017) 49mirek dymitrow urban-rural structure came to assume formal meaning. this created formally urban units without town privileges and rural municipalities with urban status. moreover, both rural and urban communes could comprise settlements with marktflecken status, complicating the situation even more. a necessary reform set out to correct this historical cocktail was executed in the years 1933–1934. it at the same time standardized the equally chaotic situation in other parts of poland. effectively, as a result of the reform of 1933–1934, up to 722 towns were deprived of their urban denominator (dymitrow 2015, 104). however, since the reform was conducted by polish authorities, the issue of historical retribution – so often invoked in the discourse of contemporary restitution campaigns when pertaining to degradations enforced by imperial russia – is disconcertingly silenced, even though the factual circumstances surrounding both reforms may have been very similar (e.g. the towns being too small or too poor). now let us consider the causes. in much of central and eastern europe, russophobia has historically represented the greatest national fear and the most influential one (taras 2010). although outworn stereotypes of different nations abound in popular consciousness, russia, due to its longevity, has attracted more than a fair share of these. in the perception of poles russia is notoriously associated with events such as conquest, occupation, annexation, enforced communism, the iron wall, mass deportations to siberia and gulag labor camps (otok 2009). even currently the polish-russian issue is overwrought as a result of the intensity and ways in which various political events involving russia are being portrayed in the media. poland’s willingness to house a us missile defense complex aimed at russia was one such example. another was the unfortunate 2010 crash of the polish governmental plane at smolensk, which took place prior to a scheduled commemoration of the soviet-executed katyn massacre. the most recent (2014–2017) events in the ukraine – russia’s annexation of crimea, the war in donbass, or even seemingly trivial episodes such as russia’s withdrawal/expulsion from the 2017 eurovision song contest in kiev – are yet another affirmation of context-specific events which are let to envenom the strained polish-russian relations in a much broader sense. the medial image of “russia’s ruthless pursuit of expansionist and imperialist agendas” (taras 2010) is so commonplace that it creates a discursive field whose load is likely to discharge – often subconsciously – to other, thematically more or less unrelated, contexts. in instances where this discursive linkage is not directly apparent (or obscured by years of propagandist monovocality) certain statements, or “facts”, are less likely to be questioned and reflected upon. this, in turn, creates a silent ground for their justification. in regard to the reform of 1869–1870, there are plenty of indications that the overarching discourse of anti-russian sentiment tends to overshadow the true circumstances surrounding it, mainly due to lack of criticism when confronting poorly researched yet ubiquitous information about the nature of this event. if we deconstruct the concept of urbanity to its constitutive parts, this becomes more apparent. a town that has seen a decrease in, say, 500 inhabitants, cannot be blamed on ‘injustice’. it is an objective, countable diminution conditioned by various environmental events (krzysztofik et al. 2015). the same can be said about changes observed in a town’s morphological or functional structure. in other words, observable changes do not trigger spurious reactions of emotional character, but changes transposed onto the conceptual arena do. as such, there is a tendency to imbue the concept of degradation with a sense of imposed injustice because it solidifies an objective reality through a conceptual reshuffle. for this very reason, degradations in poland are no longer deployed, while the established criteria for granting urban status are increasingly geared towards concessions and modifications made to facilitate aspiring degraded towns in fulfilling their restitution (dymitrow & krzysztofik 2015). in summary, all these tendencies suggest that the premises surrounding the time of degradation are often not well understood, as is their connection to the towns’ current situation. as bendix (2000, 38) put it, [w]hat distinguishes heritage is its capacity to hide the complexities of history and politics [and its role as] a beautifying gloss, rendering the specificity of past political, economic, and social experiences into far less complex whole than what socio-historical scrutiny would reveal. we need to be wary of the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘interpretation’, and especially so when ‘fact’ is of historical nature (and unreachable due to poor or unobtainable documentation) and pertains to values of high social interest, such as money, pride, nationalism, and the like. 50 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper fourth discourse: the sarajevo rose epiphenomenon last but not least, i will briefly touch upon a basic idea that undermines the concept of degradation (and – in extension – restitution): the discourse of inadvertent self-victimization. because urban status in poland today is (discursively) widely associated with greater chances of development, it is unclear whether the sudden interest in historical events is used as a method to bypass the law (cf. graham et al. 2000), or whether it is the law that stands in the way of fulfilment of a process based on cultural, non-economic identity (sidorenko 2008)4. in any one case, the notion of degradation unmistakably feeds on a deleterious recourse to the past, whose enmeshment in current administrative constraints may incur undesired developmental effects. this characteristic epitomizes a condition, which i would like to describe as the sarajevo rose epiphenomenon. sarajevo roses are a type of cultural remnant found throughout the bosnian capital of sarajevo, a site of intense urban warfare during the bosnian war of 1992–1995. mortar rounds (more than 300 a day) landing on the concrete created unique fragmentation patterns very similar to roses. these floral scars, instigated by the explosion of mortar shells, were later filled with red resin in the effigy of the blood of those killed in the incident (campbell 1999; schwartz 2005; frawley 2014). today, the roses remain scattered throughout sarajevo as an omnipresent reminder of victimhood (fig. 1). although commendable as an homage to the perished (‘the phenomenon’), their presence, however, entrains a less desirable epiphenomenon: their power to act as frozen film frames and foreboding depressants whose ghost not only hinders the living from finding alternative life solutions but also keeps the seething muslim-serbian conflict ajar. indeed, since 1995, bosnia-herzegovina experiences some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, one of the lowest gdps per capita in europe, drastic emigration, high population aging and many other ongoing problems in the aftermath of the civil war (cia 2015; pobrić & robinson 2015; riding & wake-walker 2017). fig. 1. a “sarajevo rose” (photo: the author). fennia 195: 1 (2017) 51mirek dymitrow although quite different in cause and effect, the concept of degraded town shares a number of similarities with the bosnian case, for which the sarajevo roses may act as an illustrative simile. the concept of degradation inherently invokes historical scars and keeps the rural-urban conflict ablaze through a specific form of ressentiment (a sense of hostility directed at what one identifies as the cause of one's frustration). while “[m]emory is not trash but useful intellectual and emotional knowledge” (lubecka 2010,158), one needs to distinguish between memory as an abstract container of contextually inalienable values and memory as a dispositive through which certain discourses gain material presence (cf. foucault 1977). although invocations to history may involve an array of different stands (appraisal, nostalgia, pride, fear, resentment etc.), the discursive load added to the concept of degradation entreats stories laden with almost exclusively negative connotations. one such outcome, sumptuously exploited by local politicians, is the notion (or tactic?5) of selfvictimization, which may play out to quite the contrary effect (cf. nilsson & lundgren 2015). in regard to degraded towns, the celebration of serfdom and suffering amidst the crass commercialism that often accompanies many pre-restitutional campaigns could thus be regarded as a gratuitous use of the concept, in which relentless nourishing on “historical wrongs” may eventually turn morbid and impede fresh future outlooks that depart from current preconditions for sound development: [rural mayor of szczerców:] while our local community could deal with the historical turmoil, the unjust decree [of degradation] is still in force. don’t we owe to future generations (especially those who, for political reasons, have not had the possibility to change this situation) to rectify these historical wrongs? (…) i, for one, cannot reconcile with the idea that the law established by those who deprived us of sovereignty is still valid (kmita 2014; my translation). this in turn may unwittingly pave the way for damaging concessions on behalf of the legislative bodies (if urban status is unjustifiably granted as a mere token of commiseration) or – if denied – for unrealistic expectations driven by a form of engineered “urban identity”, with demobilizing disappointment as a likely outcome. there is a bottom line to this argument. if a formally rural town is eligible for urban status on account of some objective indicators, and if this status is – realistically – helpful in fulfilling an envisioned line of development, then its current preconditions should suffice to obtain it without resorting to the discourse of victimhood. conclusions culture matters. understanding culture as “the primary source of social progress or regression” (hirsi ali 2016), every cultural idea requires definition and conceptualization. while the definition part is relatively easy – it is merely a matter of choice – conceptualization has a different role: it imbues an idea with values, which make it support certain tasks or the doing of things. conceptual battles, hence, are seldom terminological but are associated with more specific commitments about the philosophy of mind and language (margolis & laurence 1999). embracing the ontology that ‘urbanities’ and ‘ruralities’ today are better understood as social constructs that dictate the human condition rather than as physical environments that necessitate specific actions, this paper has targeted the cultural burden of rural-urban thinking in a formalized polish context, through a discursive lens. adopting a conceptual research design, the aim of this paper was to lay bare some hidden discursive filters underlying the concepts of rurality and urbanity through the auxiliary concepts of degradation and restitution, but also to ignite new discussions on the subject. for one, the polish practice perpetuates the historical concepts of rural and urban, and the false dichotomy they create, as objective truths and as materialities that exist beyond conversational realities. for another, it perpetuates hegemonic relations by hailing the supremacy and desirability of ‘urbanity’ over its historically constructed antonym – ‘rurality’. it also assumes that degradation is a ‘loss’ by making comparisons to a (re)imagined historical state, regardless of the (in)accuracy of that comparison across two temporal contexts. next, given poland’s chequered history due to its location in the ‘shatter belt’ of europe, the discourse of degradation imbues past rural-urban relations with historical events, which may or may not have had direct impact on the development of those relations; put simply, by invoking injustice it creates a culprit. lastly, the incessant invocation to the wounds of the past makes degradation an odd combinatorial legacy of victimhood encased in a contemporary outlook on urbanity. 52 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper understanding how the phenomena of degradation and restitution saturate thinking in rural-urban categories in poland is important if we want to isolate particular subject positions and social effects produced through these constructed relationships between people and places (cf. waitt 2005). numerous studies have affirmed the disjointedness between formal designations and de facto conditions – on the one hand – and between formal designations and their degree of implementation – on the other. what remains much less explored is that these discrepancies often have little in common with the concepts of urbanity/rurality becoming objectively blurred, but may emerge from specific discourses attached a posteriori to these concepts. if we acknowledge that the ontological rationale of employing a rural-urban distinction is “to find out whether or not one can identify any aspects (…) that speak of more substan-tial and significant differences between the qualities of the rural and (…) the urban” (halfacree 2009a, 449), we need to be cautious. this is particularly important whenever the cultural dimension of ‘rural/urban’ sees formalization under the guise of ‘objectified space’, as such a conflation of values is likely to extend the faculty of these concepts. not only can this extension ‘contaminate’ their intended explanatory merit, but it may also create an artificial problem that runs the risk of loosening and infecting social bonds with no or few identifiable gains. if understanding the world is changing it (gibson-graham & roelvink 2010, 342), then thinking about change in new ways must involve questioning the assumptions underlying contemporary societal organization. unpacking the elusiveness involved in the formalization of cultural concepts, and how it is held in place, is a step closer towards that goal. notes 1 the terms ‘degradation’ (degradacja) and ‘restitution’ (restytucja) are widely used in the subject literature and have become established and accepted designations for the specific practices of formally changing a settlement’s historical label, ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ respectively (cf. krzysztofik & dymitrow 2015a). the terms occur in common parlance, academic literature and legislation. 2 for instance, a teacher’s job in ‘rural areas’ decades ago involved lighting a fire in the furnace and shoveling snow outside the school – hence higher salary. today, this no longer applies but differences in rural/urban salaries remain (dymitrow et al. 2017). 3 between the january uprising (1863–1864) and poland’s regained independence (1918) only two cases of degradations were recorded beyond the scope of the reform of 1869–1870 (spórna et al. 2015b). 4 moreover, some restitutions are known to have been granted beyond substantive reasons by means of political lobbying, like in the case of the town of lipsk in 1983, the birthplace of a then prominent politician and militia general (siemiński 2000). 5 the concept of self-victimization has also been identified to involve the fabrication of martyrdom for reasons such as: attention seeking, coping strategy, to manipulate others etc. (meindl & lerner 1983). acknowledgments i would like to thank marie stenseke, robert krzysztofik, therese brolin and corey m. gonzalez, as well as the two anonymous reviewers of fennia for their valuable contributions to the paper. i also extend my appreciation to the swedish society for anthropology and geography for financial support. references adamczewka-wejchert, h. & wejchert, k. (1986) małe miasta. problemy urbanistyczne stale aktualne. arkady, warsaw. almstedt, å., brouder, p., karlsson, s. & lundmark, l. (2014) beyond post-productivism: from rural policy discourse to rural diversity. european countryside 6(4) 297–306. https://doi.org/10.2478/ euco-2014-0016 anderson, b., kearnes, m., mcfarlane, c. & swanton, d. (2012) on assemblages and geography. dialogues in human geography 2(2) 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820612449261 barczyński, a. (2015) siedliszcze było już miastem dwa razy. zostanie po raz trzeci? dziennik wschodni. <http://www.dziennikwschodni.pl/chelm/n,999994471,siedliszcze-bylo-juz-miastem-dwa-razy-zostanie-po-raz-trzeci. html> 06.08.2015. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 53mirek dymitrow barnes, t.j. & duncan, j.s. (eds) (2013) writing worlds: discourse, text, and metaphor in the representation of landscape. routledge, new york. bawaka country, wright, s., suchet-pearson, s., lloyd, k., burarrwanga, l., ganambarr, r., ganambarr-stubbs, m., ganambarr, b., maymuru, d. & sweeney, h. (2016) co-becoming bawaka: towards a relational understanding of place/space. progress in human geography 40(4) 455–475. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515589437 beaujeu-garnier, j. & chabot, g. (1963) traité de géographie urbaine. colin, paris. bendix, r. (2000) heredity, hybridity and heritage from one fin de siècle to the next. in anttonen, p.j., siikala, a-l., mathsien, s.r. & magnusson, l. (eds.) folklore, heritage politics and ethnic diversity, 37–56. multicultural centre, botkyrka. bennett, t. & joyce, p. (2010) material powers: cultural studies, history and the material turn. routledge, london. bereton, f., bullock, c., clinch, j.p. & scott, m. (2011) rural change and individual well-being the case of ireland and rural quality of life. european urban and regional studies 18(2) 203–227. https://doi. org/ 10.1177/0969776411399346 berman, m. (1983) all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. verso, london. biegańska, j., grzelak-kostulska, e., dymitrow, m., chodkowska-miszczuk, j., środa-murawska, s. & rogatka, k. (2016) młodzież z osiedli popegeerowskich a kształtowanie społecznych zasobów lokalnych [youth of former state agricultural farm estates as local human resources]. studia obszarów wiejskich [rural studies] 44 75–92. https://doi.org/ 10.7163/sow.44.5 bielewicz, e. (2016) opatówek znów będzie miastem <http://www.gloswielkopolski.pl/wiadomosci/ wielkopolska/a/opatowek-znow-bedzie-miastem,9748254/> 17.04.2016. borcz, z., niedźwiecka-filipiak, i. & zaniewska, h. (2009) transformacje miasto wieś–wieś miasto. uniwersytet przyrodniczy, wrocław. bosworth, g. & somerville, p. (eds) (2014) interpreting rurality: multidisciplinary approaches. routledge, london and new york. brauer, r. & dymitrow, m. (2014) quality of life in rural areas: a topic for the rural development policy? bulletin of geography. socio-economic series 25 25–54. https://doi.org/10.2478/bog-2014-0028 brauer, r. & dymitrow, m. (2017) human geography and the hinterland: the case of torsten hägerstrand’s ‘belated’ recognition. moravian geographical reports 2. (in press). braun, b. (2005) environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography. progress in human geography 29(5) 635–650. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph574pr bryant, l. & pini, b. (2010) gender and rurality. routledge, new york. bukraba-rylska, i. (2011) czy wieś to „wieśniactwo”? kultura liberalna 128(24). bukraba-rylska, i. & burszta, w. (eds) (2011) stan i zróżnicowanie kultury wsi i małych miast w polsce: kanon i rozproszenie. narodowe centrum kultury, warsaw. campbell, g. (1999) the road to kosovo: a balkan diary. westview press, boulder. castree, n., chatterton, p.a., heynen, n., larner, w. & wright, m.w. (eds.) (2010) the point is to change it: geographies of hope and survival in an age of crisis. wiley-blackwell, oxford. champion, a. & hugo, g. (2004) new forms of urbanization: beyond the urban-rural dichotomy. asghate, hants. [cia] central intelligence agency (2015) the world factbook 2014–15. central intelligence agency, langley. cloke, p. (2006a) conceptualizing rurality. in cloke, p., marsden, t. & mooney, p.h. (eds.) handbook of rural studies, 18–28. sage, london. cloke, p. (2006b) rurality and racialized others: out of place in the countryside? in cloke, p., marsden, t. & mooney, p.h. (eds.) handbook of rural studies, 379–387. sage, london. cloke, p. & johnston, r. (eds.) (2005) deconstructing human geography's binaries, sage, london, thousand oaks and new delhi. cloke, p. & milbourne, p. (1992) deprivation and lifestyles in rural wales. rurality and the cultural dimension. journal of rural studies 8(4) 359–371. https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(92)90050-g corbett, m. (2014) we have never been urban: modernization, small schools and resilient rurality in atlantic canada. the journal of rural and community development 9(3) 186–202. council of ministers of the republic of poland (2005) projekt rozporządzenia rady ministrów z dnia..........2005 r. w sprawie ustalenia granic niektórych gmin i miast oraz nadania miejscowościom statusu miasta. <https://bip.mswia.gov.pl/bip/projekty-aktow-prawnyc/2005/513,dok.html> 16.04.2017. cresswell, t. (2004) discourse. in kitchin, r. & thrift, n. (eds.) international encyclopedia of human geography 1, 211–214. elsevier, london. 54 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper dahlberg, a. (2015) categories are all around us: towards more porous, flexible, and negotiable boundaries in conservation–production landscapes. norsk geografisk tidsskrift [norwegian journal of geography] 69(4) 207–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2015.1060258 davies, n. (2011) vanished kingdoms: the history of half-forgotten europe. penguin, london. dawidejt-drobek, e. & drobek, w. (2015) cultural aspects of urban restitution in poland. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 37–60. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. dębski, m., nowak, a. & popow, m. (2010) poland – a new reality, old problems. in stocker, s. (ed.) european social watch report 2010: time for action – responding to poverty, social exclusion and inequality in europe and beyond, 70–72. eurostop, brussels. dewey, r. (1960) the rural-urban continuum: real but relatively unimportant. american journal of sociology 66(1) 60–66. drobek, w. (1999) rola miast zdegradowanych w sieci osadniczej śląska. państwowy instytut naukowy – instytut śląski w opolu, opole. drobek, w. (2004) zmiany statusu administracyjnego lokalnych jednostek osadniczych. in michałowski, s. & pawłowska, a. (eds.) samorząd lokalny w polsce. społeczno-polityczne aspekty funkcjonowania, 534–545. uniwersytet marii curie-skłodowskiej, lublin. dymitrow, m. (2012) the hidden face of urbanity. morphological differentiation of degraded and restituted towns in poland in the context of the efficacy of the national administrative system. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. dymitrow, m. (2013) degraded towns in poland as cultural heritage. international journal of heritage studies 19(7) 613–631. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2012.681681 dymitrow, m. (2014) the effigy of urbanity or a rural parody? a visual approach to small-town public space. journal of cultural geography 31(1) 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2013.873298 dymitrow, m. (2015) pojęcie miejskości w świetle reformy gminnej w polsce międzywojennej [the concept of urbanity in light of the municipal reform of 1933–34 in interwar poland]. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 61–116. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. dymitrow, m. & brauer, r. (2014) social deprivation and urbanity as the elephant in the room. in efe, r., onay, t.t., sharuho, i. & atasoy, e. (eds.) urban and urbanization, 381–395. st. kliment ohridski university press, sofia. dymitrow, m. & brauer, r. (2016) land or people? on the iatrogenesis of conflation. acta geobalcanica 2(2) 63–75. https://doi.org/10.18509/agb.2016.07 dymitrow, m. & krzysztofik, r. (2015) degradacja i restytucja jako pryzmaty pojęcia miejskości w kontekście jego formalnoprawnej zmienności [degradation and restitution: understanding the concept of urbanity through its oscillations within formal contexts]. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 443–461. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. dymitrow, m. & stenseke, m. (2016) rural-urban blurring and the subjectivity within. rural landscapes: society, environment, history 3(2) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.16993/rl.1 dymitrow, m., biegańska, j. & grzelak-kostulska, e. (2017) deprivation and the rural-urban trap. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie [online feb 27 2017] https://doi.org/10.1111/ tesg.12263 easterlin, r.a., angelescu, l. & zweig, j.s. (2011) the impact of modern economic growth on urbanrural differences in subjective well-being. world development 39(12) 2187–2198. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2011.04.015 eriksson, m. (2010) “people in stockholm are smarter than countryside folks” – reproducing urban and rural imaginaries in film and life. journal of rural studies 26(2) 95–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.09.005 erjavec, k. & erjavec, e. (2007) changing eu agricultural policy discourses? the discourse analysis of commissioner’s speeches 2000–2007. food policy 34(2) 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. foodpol.2008.10.009 essebo, m. (2013) lock-in as make-believe. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. european commission (2008) poverty and social exclusion in rural areas. directorate-general for employment, social affairs and equal opportunities, brussels. feltynowski, m., senetra, a., biegańska, j., grzelak-kostulska, e., dymitrow, m. & środa-murawska, s. (2015) some problems of local development: the example of former state agricultural farms in poland. research for rural development 2 237–243. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 55mirek dymitrow foucault, m. (1977) the confession of the flesh. in gordon, c. (ed.) power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977, 194–228. pantheon, new york. franklin, a. & crang, m. (2001) the trouble with tourism and travel theory. tourist studies 1(1) 5–22. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/146879760100100101 frawley, r. (2014) sarajevo rose. antigonish review 179 47–53. freibach-heifetz, d. & stopler, g. (2008) on conceptual dichotomies and social oppression. philosophy and social criticism 34(5) 515–535. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453708089197 gajewski, m. (1964) zmiany administracyjne miast i osiedli 1918–1963. gus, warsaw. gawryszewski, a. (2005) ludność polski w xx wieku. instytut geografii i przestrzennego zagospodarowania im. stanisława leszczyckiego, warsaw. gibson-graham, j.k. & roelvink, g. (2010) an economic ethics for the anthropocene. in castree, n., chatterton, p.a., heynen, n., larner, w. & wright, m.w. (eds.) the point is to change it: geographies of hope and survival in an age of crisis, 320–346. wiley-blackwell, oxford. gold, j.r. (2009) modern city. in kitchin, r. & thrift, n. (eds.) international encyclopedia of human geography 1, 150–156. elsevier, london. gorlach, k. & foryś, g. (2003) key issues in rural-urban relations in poland: between peasant past and european future. in cristovao, a. & omodei zorini, i. (eds.) farming and rural systems research and extension, 289–298. arsia, florence. gorman-murray, a., waitt, g. & gibson, c. (2012) chilling out in ‘cosmopolitan country’: urban/rural hybridity and the construction of daylesford as a ‘lesbian and gay rural idyll’. journal of rural studies 28(1) 69–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2011.07.001 graham, b., ashworth, g.j. & tunbridge, j.e. (2000) a geography of heritage: power, culture and economy. oxford university press, oxford. grossman, h. (1925) struktura społeczna i gospodarcza ks. warszawskiego na podstawie spisów 1809–1810 roku. kwartalnik statystyczny 2(1) 1–108. grzegorczyk, p. (2009) wąwolnica nie chce już dłużej być wsią. moje miasto puławy. <http://www. mmpulawy.pl/artykul/wawolnica-nie-chce-juz-dluzejbyc-wsia> 14.07.2015. guba, e.g. & lincoln, y.s. (1994) competing paradigms in qualitative research. in denzin, n.k. & lincoln, y.s. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative research, 105–117. sage, thousand oaks (ca). haack, s. (1996) deviant logic, fuzzy logic: beyond the formalism. university of chicago press, chicago. halamska, m. (2013) wiejska polska na początku xxi wieku. rozważania o gospodarce i społeczeństwie. scholar, warsaw. halamska, m. (2014) polska wieś na początku xxi wieku. wszechnica. <http://wszechnica.org. pl/11/120/1007/polska_wies_na_poczatku_xxi_wieku_wywiad_z_prof_maria_halamska> 17.01.2016. halfacree, k.h. (1993) locality and social representation: space, discourse and alternative definitions of the rural. journal of rural studies 9(1) 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(93)90003-3 halfacree, k. (2006) rural space: constructing a three-fold architecture. cloke, p., marsden, t. & mooney, p.h. (eds.) handbook of rural studies, 44–62. sage, london. halfacree, k. (2009a) rurality and post-rurality. in kitchin, r. & thrift, n. (eds.) international encyclopedia of human geography 1, 449–456. elsevier, london. halfacree, k. (2009b) urban-rural continuum. in kitchin, r. & thrift, n. (eds.) international encyclopedia of human geography 1, 119–124. elsevier, london. hall, s. (ed.) (1997) representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. sage, london. hansen, k.p. (2011) kultur und kulturwissenschaft. a. francke verlag utb, tübingen. hidalgo tenorio, e. (2011) critical discourse analysis, an overview. nordic journal of english studies 10(1) 183–210. hintikka, j. & tuomela, r. (1970) towards a general theory of auxiliary concepts and definability in first-order theories. in hintikka, j. & suppes, p. (eds.) information and inference, 298–330. springer, dordrecht. hirsi ali, a. (2016) why don't feminists fight for muslim women? praeger university. <https://www. prageru.com/sites/default /files/courses/transcripts/ali-why_dont _ feminists _ fight _ for_muslim_ women-transcript_0.pdf> hoggart, k. (1990) let's do away with rural. journal of rural studies 6(3) 245–257. https://doi. org/10.1016/0743-0167(90)90079-n hubbard, p. (2006) city. routledge, abingdon and new york. hubbard, p., kitchin, r., bartley, b. & fuller, d. (2002) thinking geographically: space, theory and contemporary human geography. continuum, london. johnston, r.j. (1991) geography and geographers. arnold publishing, london. 56 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper johnston, r. & sidaway, j.d. (2015) have the human geographical can(n)ons fallen silent; or were they never primed? journal of historical geography 49 49–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.04.017 jones, o. (2009) nature-culture. in kitchin, r. & thrift, n. (eds.) international encyclopedia of human geography 1, 309–323. elsevier, london. journal of law [дневникъ законовъ, dziennik praw] (1869) vol. 69, № 235, 243, 244–253, 414–429, 460–473. drukarnia rządowa, warsaw. journal of law [дневникъ законовъ, dziennik praw] (1870) krótka statystyka gubernji królestwa polskiego obejmująca rozległość i ludność tychże gubernji oraz wykaz osad i gmin [przedruk uzupełniony ze skorowidza do dziennika praw, wydanego w połowie 1870 r.] 1870. drukarnia rządowa, warsaw. kantor-pietraga, i. (2014) systematyka procesu depopulacji miast na obszarze polski od xix do xxi wieku. wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego, katowice. karpiniec, j. (1932) ilość osad miejskich byłej galicji i podział ich na miasta i miasteczka. in bujak, f. & rutkowski, j. (eds.) roczniki dziejów społeczno-gospodarczych vol. 2, 1–37. kasa im. rektora j. mianowskiego – instytut popierania polskiej twórczości naukowe, lviv. kegan, r. & lahey, l.l. (2009) immunity to change: how to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization. harvard business press, boston. kmita, g. (2014) prawa miejskie dla szczercowa. twoja okolica. <http://twojaokolica.pl/grzegorzkmita/ index.php/zdaniem-wojta/139-prawa-miejskie-dla-szczercowa> 26.05.2016. koch, a. (2005) autopoietic spatial systems: the significance of actor network theory and system theory for the development of a system theoretical approach of space. social geography 1(1) 5–14. https://doi.org/10.5194/sg-1-5-2005 kołodziejczyk, r. [1961] (1979) zamiana miast na osady w królestwie polskim. in kołodziejczyk, r. (ed.) miasta, mieszczaństwo, burżuazja w polsce w xix w. szkice i rozprawy historyczne, 52–66. państwowe wydawnictwo naukowe, warsaw. kommisyja dla miast (1825) wykaz miast w królstwie polskiem na wieyskie osady zamienionych od dn. 1 lutego 1820 r., to iest od daty ustanowienia kommissyi dla miast 1825. akta komisji rządowej spraw wewnętrznych 201(44). archiwum główne akt dawnych, warsaw. konecka-szydłowska, b. (2015) restituted towns and their socio-economic conditions for development. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 117–138. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. koszutski, s. (1915) nasze miasta a samorząd. życie miast w królestwie polskim i reforma samorządowa. e. wende i spółka, warsaw and lviv. koter, m. (1999) za jakim modelem podziału terytorialnego polski opowiedzieć się? wnioski z doświadczeń z przeszłości oraz wzorców europejskich. acta universitatis lodziensis – folia geographica socio-oeconomica 1 7–29. krzysztofik, r. (2014) geneza aglomeracji miast na obszarze polski. wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego, katowice. krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) (2015a) miasta zdegradowane i restytuowane w polsce. geneza, rozwój, problemy [degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems]. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (2015b) miasta zdegradowane i restytuowane. istota problemu i zakres badań [research on degraded and restituted towns: overview and state-of-the-art]. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 1–36. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. krzysztofik, r., dymitrow, m., kantor-pietraga, i. & spórna, t. (2016) the concept of urban hibernation. european planning studies 24(2) 316–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2015.1078296 krzysztofik, r., dymitrow, m., szmytkie, r., kantor-pietraga, i., pełka-gościniak, j. & spórna, t. (2015) environmental hazards and urban abandonment: case studies and typological issues. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 97(4) 291–308. https://doi.org/10.1111/geob.12082 krzysztofik, r., dymitrow, m., biegańska, j., senetra, a., gavriilidou, e., nadolu, b., kantor-pietraga, i., grzelak-kostulska, e., oureilidou, e., luches, d., spórna, t., teodorescu, d., wasilewiczpszczółkowska, m., holmertz, g. & szczepańska, a. (2017a) landscapes with different logics: a physicalist approach to semantic conflicts in spatial planning. quaestiones geographicae 35(4). (in press). krzysztofik, r., dymitrow, m., grzelak-kostulska, e. & biegańska, j. (2017b) poverty and social exclusion: an alternative spatial explanation. bulletin of geography. socio-economic series 35 45– 64. https://doi.org/10.1515/bog-2017-0004 kubicki, p. (2011) miasto i wieś. krótka historia toksycznej miłości. kultura liberalna 128(24). fennia 195: 1 (2017) 57mirek dymitrow kudra, a. (2014) jak zostać miastem? prawo dla samorządu. 21.07.2014. kurtz, m. & craig, v. (2009) constructing rural geographies in publication. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 8 376–393. latour, b. (2013) an inquiry into modes of existence. harvard university press, cambridge. law, j. (2004) after method: mess in social science research. routledge, abingdon and new york. law, j. & urry, j. (2004) enacting the social. economy and society 33(3) 390–410. https://doi. org/10.1080/0308514042000225716 lawson, v., jarosz, l. & bonds, a. (2008) building economies from the bottom up: (mis)representations of poverty in the rural american northwest. social & cultural geography 9(7) 737–753. https://doi. org/10.1080/14649360802382354 lee, k-y. (2002) system transformation in poland since 1989. research series on international affairs, sogang. lees, l. (2004) urban geography: discourse analysis and urban research. progress in human geography 28(1) 101–107. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph473pr leuzinger-bohleber, m. (2004). what does conceptual research have to offer? international journal of psychoanalysis 85(5) 1477–1478. https://doi.org/10.1516/tabk-e55u-d6j6-ywcy leyshon, m. (2008). the betweenness of being a rural youth: inclusive and exclusive lifestyles. social & cultural geography 9(1) 1–26. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14649360701789535 lincoln, y.s., lynham, s.a. & guba, e.g. (2011) paradigmatic controversies, contradictions, and emerging confluences, revisited. in denzin, n.k. & lincoln, y.s. (eds.) the sage handbook of qualitative research, 97–128. sage, los angeles, london, new delhi, singapore and washington. little, j. (1999) otherness, representation and the cultural construction of rurality. progress in human geography 23(3) 437–442. https://doi.org/10.1177/030913259902300307 łopata, t. (2016) korzyści – czyli co możemy zyskać, będąc miastem. gmina lanckorona. <http://www. lanckorona.pl/> 26.05.2016. lubecka, a. (2010) rewitalizacja/gentryfikacja jako element zmieniający semantykę miasta. in skalski, k. (ed.) o budowie metod rewitalizacji w polsce – aspekty wybrane, 157–173. uniwersytet jagielloński. kraków. margolis, e. & laurence, s. (eds.) (1999) concepts: core readings. mit press, cambridge. maxwell, j.a. (2013) qualitative research design: an interactive approach. sage, los angeles, london, new delhi, singapore and washington. mazurkiewicz, j. (1967) likwidacja ustroju miejskiego mniejszych miast w księstwie warszawskim i królestwie polskim w okresie przed masową zamianą miast na osady (1807–1864). rocznik lubelski 10 211–228. meindl, j.r. & lerner, m.j. (1983) the heroic motive: some experimental demonstrations. journal of experimental social psychology 19(1) 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(83)90002-1 mielcarek, a.j. (2008) podziały terytorialno-administracyjne ii rzeczypospolitej w zakresie administracji zespolonej. neriton, warsaw. mihaylov, v. (2014) consciousness and identity of human communities in a geospatial dimension: an interdisciplinary sphere of developing ideas, approaches and research perspectives. in mihaylov, v. (ed.) territories and identities in central, eastern and southeastern europe, 19–36. instytut geopolityki, częstochowa. mikołajek, n. (2012) część gmin, powiatów i województw do likwidacji? niedługo to konieczność. polityka. 29.11.2012. millward, h., harrington, l., ilbery, b. & beesley, k. (2003) milieux, viewpoints & processes of change in the new countryside. in beesley, k., millward, h. & harrington, l. (eds.) the new countryside, 9–23. brandon university, brandon. ministry of labour and social policy (2006) social exclusion and integration in poland. an indicatorsbased approach. undp, warsaw. miszewska, b. (2007) recovered cities. bulletin of geography. socio-economic series 7 31–42. munkejord, m.c. (2011) reinventing rurality in the north. in viken, a. & nyseth, t. (eds.) place reinvetions, northern perspectives, 203–221. ashgate, surrey. munslow, a. (2006) deconstructing history. routledge, london and new york. murdoch, j. (2003) co-constructing the countryside: hybrid networks and the extensive self. in cloke, p. (ed.) country visions, 263–282. pearson education ltd, harlow. murphy, k. (2010) fears and fantasies: modernity, gender and the rural-urban divide. peter lang, bern. murzyn, m. & gwosdz, k. (2003) dilemmas encountered in the development of tourism in a degraded town. the case of chełmsko ślaskie (schönberg) in lower silesia. in kurek, w. (ed.) issues of tourism and health resort management, 183–200. uniwersytet jagielloński, kraków. 58 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper nietyksza, m. (1986) rozwój miast i aglomeracji miejsko-przemysłowych w królestwie polskim 1865– 1914. państwowe wydawnictwo naukowe, warsaw. nietzsche, f. [1878] (1996) human, all too human: a book for free spirits. translated by r.j. hollingdale. cambridge university press, cambridge. nilsson, b. & lundgren, a.s. (2015) logics of rurality: political rhetoric about the swedish north. journal of rural studies 37 85–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.11.012 otok, s. (2009) geografia polityczna – geopolityka, ekopolityka, globalistyka. wydawnictwo naukowe pwn, warsaw. pacione, m. (2009) urban geography. a global perspective. routledge, london. panelli, r. (2010) more-than-human social geographies: post-human and other possibilities. progress in human geography 34(1) 79–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509105007 pavković, a., koscharsky, h. & czarnota, a. (eds.) (1995) nationalism and post-communism: a collection of essays. dartmouth, aldershot and hants. pennebaker, j.w. & banasik, b.l. [1997] (2008) on the creation and maintenance of collective memories: histor y as social psycholog y. in pennebaker, j.w., paez, d. & rimé, b. (eds.) collective memory of political events: a social psychological perspective, 3–19. psycholog y press, new york. pile, s. (1999) what is a city? in massey, d., allen, j. & pile, s. (eds.) city worlds, 3–53. routledge, new york. plucińska, s. (2009) pawłowice nie chcą być miastem. dziennik zachodni 27.07.2009. <http://www. dziennikzachodni.pl/artykul/146111,pawlowice-nie-chca-byc-miastem,id,t.html> 18.01.2017. pobrić, a. & robinson, g.m. (2015) population ageing and low fertility: recent demographic changes in bosnia and herzegovina. journal of population research 32(1) 23–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12546-014-9141-5 przesmycka, e. (2015) degraded and restituted towns of the lublin region and their spatioarchitectural transformations. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 209–248. universit y of gothenburg, gothenburg. radoszyce municipality (2016) uchwała nr xx/115/2016 rady gminy radoszyce z dnia 27 września 2016 roku w sprawie wystąpienia z wnioskiem o nadanie statusu miasta miejscowości radoszyce <http://www.biuletyn.net/nt-bin/_private/radoszyce/5075.pdf> 15.04.2017. rapport, n. & overing, j. (2014) social and cultural anthropology: the key concepts. routledge, new york. remont, r. (2016) widuchowa nie chce już wójta? rządzić może burmistrz. <http://ono24.info/ widuchowa-nie-chce-juz-wojta-rzadzic-moze-burmistrz,a2033> 16.12.2016. riding, j. & wake-walker, j. (2017) towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentarypoetry film about a post-conflict place. fennia 195(1) 61–84. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.60213 rodecki, f.b. (1830). obraz jeograficzno-statystyczny królestwa polskiego. drukarnia antoniego gałęzowskiego i kompanii, warsaw. rynek pracy (2016) pracujący w rolnictwie, przemyśle i usługach. rynek pracy. <http://rynekpracy. org/x/989321> 17.07.2016. rytkönen, p. (2014) constructing the new rurality – challenges and opportunities (of a recent shift?) in swedish rural policies. international agricultural policy 2 7–19. saltzman, k., head, l. & stenseke, m. (2011) do cows belong in nature? the cultural basis of agriculture in sweden and australia. journal of rural studies 27(1) 54–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jrurstud.2010.09.001 schaffer, b. (1978) administrative legacies and links in the postcolonial state: preparation, training and administrative reform. development and change 9(2) 175–200. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1978.tb00759.x schwartz, s. (2005) sarajevo rose: a balkan jewish notebook. saqi, london. scott, a., gilbert, a. & gelan, a. (2007) the urban-rural divide? myth or reality? macaulay institute, aberdeen. sejm of the republic of poland (2003) ustawa z dnia 29 sierpnia 2003 r. o urzędowych nazwach miejscowości i obiektów fizjograficznych 2003. dziennik ustaw 166(1612) 1–8. shubin, s. (2007) networked poverty in rural russia. europe-asia studies 59(4) 591–620. https://doi. org/10.1080/09668130701289935 sidorenko, e. (2008) which way to poland? re-emerging from romantic unity. in myant, m. & cox, t. (eds.) reinventing poland. economic and political transformation and evolving national identity, 100– 115. routledge, abingdon. siemiński, j. (2000) byłe (zdegradowane) miasteczka w polsce. przestrzeń. informator planowania przestrzennego 11(2) 14–22. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 59mirek dymitrow soja, e. & hooper, b. (1993) the spaces that difference makes: some notes on the geographical margins of the new cultural politics. in keith, m. & pile, s. (eds.) place and the politics of identity, 183–205. routledge, london. sokołowski, d. (2002) nowe nadania praw miejskich w polsce. promocje kujawsko-pomorskie 8(10) 16. sokołowski, d. (2011) miasta zdegradowane w woj. kujawsko-pomorskim. in marciniak, k., sikora, k. & sokołowski, d. (eds.) conceptions and research problems of geography, 363–379. totem, bydgoszcz. sokołowski, d. (2015) functional differentiation of degraded and restituted towns to the background of other similarly sized towns and villages in eastern poland. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 249–271. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. śpiewak, r. (2012) definiowanie kategorii „wieś” na początku xxi wieku, czyli o kłopotach badacza obszarów wiejskich. wieś i rolnictwo 156(3) 30–46. spórna, t., krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (2015a) miasta zdegradowane i restytuowane na mapach [degraded and restituted towns on maps]. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 423–442. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. spórna, t., krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (2015b) miasta zdegradowane i restytuowane w liczbach [degraded and restituted towns in numbers]. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 367–422. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. stenbacka, s. (2011) othering the rural: about the construction of rural masculinities and the unspoken urban hegemonic ideal in swedish media. journal of rural studies 27(3) 235–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2011.05.006 strzemińska, a. (2011) ani miejscy, ani wiejscy. pracujący. kultura liberalna 128(24) szmytkie, r. (2015) degraded towns in poland as potentially new towns. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 295–318. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. szmytkie, r., krzysztofik, r., dymitrow, m., kantor-pietraga, i., pełka-gościniak, j., spórna, t. & brauer, r. (2015) miasta zdegradowane a procesy opustoszania [degraded towns and urban abandonment]. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 185–207. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. szturm de sztrem, e. (1925) charakter prawny miast w województwach wschodnich b. dzielnicy rosyjskiej. kwartalnik statystyczny 2(1) 217–221. szymańska, d. (2013) geografia osadnictwa. wydawnictwo naukowe pwn, warsaw. taras, r. (2010) russophobia in poland? national fears and the effects on eu relations with the russian federation. european international studies association. <http://www.eisa-net.org/bebruga/eisa/files/events/stockholm/taras.sgir.russia.pdf> 14.09.2016 tribe, j. & liburd, j.j. (2016) the tourism knowledge system. annals of tourism research 57 44–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2015.11.011 tvp lublin (2015) czy wieś siedliszcze zostanie miastem? tvp lublin. <http://lublin.tvp.pl/19256808/ czy-wies-siedliszcze-zostanie-miastem> 09.07.2015. vlahov, d. & galea, s. (2002) urbanization, urbanicity, and health. journal of urban health 79(4) s1– s12. https://doi.org/10.1093/jurban/79.suppl_1.s1 waitt, g.r. (2005) doing discourse analysis. in hay, i. (ed.) qualitative research methods in human geography, 163–191. oxford university press, oxford. williams, m.l., bowen, a.m. & horvath, k.j. (2005) the social/sexual environment of gay men residing in a rural frontier state: implications for the development of hiv prevention programs. the journal of rural health 21(1) 48–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0361.2005.tb00061.x williams, r. (1975) the country and the city. oxford university press, oxford. winther jørgensen, m. & phillips, l.j. (2002). discourse analysis as theory and method. sage, london. wójcik, m. (2013) obszary versus miejsca, czyli o przestrzennych formach interpretacji przemian polskiej wsi. studia obszarów wiejskich 34 9–22. woods, m. (2010a) rural. routledge, new york. woods, m. (2010b) performing rurality and practising rural geography. progress in human geography 34(6) 835–846. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509357356 woodward, r. (1996) ‘deprivation’ and ‘the rural’: an investigation into contradictory discourses. journal of rural studies 12(1) 55–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(95)00048-8 60 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper wren, d.a. & bedeian, a.g. (2009) the evolution of management thought. 6th edition. wiley, hoboken. wright, j.k. (1947) terræ incognitæ: the place of imagination in geography. annals of the association of american geographers 37 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045604709351940 xin, s., tribe, j. & chambers, d. (2013) conceptual research in tourism. annals of tourism research 41 66–88. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.annals.2012.12.003 zaniewska, h., thiel, m. & dąbkowski, n. (2015) creating a new identity for small restituted towns – some problems. in krzysztofik, r. & dymitrow, m. (eds.) degraded and restituted towns in poland: origins, development, problems, 319–346. university of gothenburg, gothenburg. zaremba, m. (2016) den uträknade polackens revansch. dagens nyheter. 20.02.2016. zieliński, s. (1913) mapa bitew i potyczek 1863–1864 w królestwie kongresowym z datami starć. fundusz wydawniczy muzeum narodowego, rapperswil. editorial: handing over the baton urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa58526 doi: 10.11143/58526 editorial: handing over the baton farewell editorial this issue is my last one after four exciting years as editor-in-chief of fennia. i have been working within the limits of the reduced resources that a small journal like fennia can have, but with totally free hands, not least because the journal is entirely autonomous and not managed by any publishing house. the principles of independence from corporate publishers and free (non-fee based) open access have been strongly supported by the geographical society of finland, and i have fully endorsed them, even when they have produced heavier workload on the small editorial team. in fact, the entire journal production process, online archiving (including old issues) as well as promotion, are under the joint responsibility and operation of the editor and the manager. we have even internalized the layout work previously done by an external unit. therefore, i sincerely thank the two editorial managers i have had the pleasure to work with: helka kalliomäki until 2014, and then hanna salo. their work is highly professional, though symbolically rewarded, and their competence and commitment have to be fully acknowledged. together, we have introduced some basic improvements in the editorial and proofreading process, and in the journal website. examples are the adoption of cross reference and digital object identifier (doi) numbers supporting citations; the formation of an archive area of old issues, and of another area containing forthcoming articles, which can be accessed before the full issue is published. also, i would like to thank the geographical society, the two presidents who have believed in our journal’s strengthening project, and the secretary of the society maija taka who has closely cooperated with me, being so helpful in raising funds for training and travels and linking us with the society members and other academic bodies. then i would like to recognize the important contribution of the colleagues involved in the editorial advisory board, accepting reviewing tasks, proposing theme issues and giving various sorts of advice. the board of fennia has become truly international, highly experienced in scientific publishing, and with diverse expertise in many geographical fields. this variety of focus is reflected in the multi-thematic issues containing articles in both physical and human geography, reporting work that uses both quantitative and qualitative methods, and also hosting critical scholarship. some of the topics in human geography were for instance on migration and multi-ethnic identities, tourism, borders and relations with russia, academic capitalism, cultural landscapes, gender and queer theory, gentrification, development, and ethnography. all in all, i am satisfied with the important achievements we have reached in these four years, raising international attention, readership, number of submitted papers and overall academic quality. the journal has gained reputation and is now indexed in scopus, thomson reuters emerging sources citation index (esci) and in the directory of open access journals (doaj). moreover, the recognition of ethics performances in peer-reviewing is recognized and certified by the labels of by the federation of finnish learned societies (tsv) and, internationally, by the committee on publication ethics (cope). for this, i am delighted that the journal has gone in excellent hands, those of kirsi pauliina kallio, who has already a lot of expertise and will continue along the same project, with renewed energy, to further strengthening the journal’s positioning within the nordic publishing domain and beyond. i wish kirsi all the best for this important work. paola minoia, university of helsinki, finland. email: paola.minoia@helsinki.fi salute editorial this is the first issue of fennia where i am involved as an editor, or perhaps more rightly as the editorto-be, as i joined the editorial team early this year. most papers included in this issue were already firmly in paola’s hands at that time and they have been finalized under her skilled editorship, which has made it easy for me to start learning more about this journal and my post as its editor-in-chief during the past months. my sincere thanks to paola and hanna for the smooth start. © 2016 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 118 fennia 194: 2 (2016)paola minoia and kirsi pauliina kallio i also wish to present my gratitude to the geographical society of finland for inviting me to this position. as the scope of the journal covers all existing, forthcoming and imaginable human and physical geographical research my competence can be nothing but partial. yet i promise to try my best, to offer high quality publication processes to all scholars who wish to introduce their work to the scientific community through fennia, and thus, continue the journal’s revival. this challenge seems feasible by the help of the editorial board that has agreed on working with me in the coming years – together we 25 geographers will make it fly! i am particularly happy about the broad geographical scope of the board that reflects rightly the agenda of the journal; we aim to be a truly international journal that publishes research from all continents and regions, related to any geographically pertinent topic. this said we are particularly happy to receive contributions with northern dimensions. our second important agenda is openness. fennia is committed to an open access publication policy without embargo and author fees. all texts are made publically available right after acceptance, as forthcoming. our fast publication processes and online format also allow that the forthcoming articles are included in one of the next two issues, released during the following march and september. by these means, we aim to provide an alternative publication channel to journals owned by big publication houses. we hope that geographers will find these opportunities increasingly inviting. in addition to individual papers, fennia welcomes special issues on topical themes as well as special sections that we will start publishing as part of regular issues (e.g. polemic debates, author meets critics, interventions). these may be based on conference panels, seminars and other events, which can also be planned in collaboration with the editorial team to ensure a smooth publication process throughout. we are happy to receive suggestions for these and other creative initiatives by which we can enrich the journals content and create dialogical space for geographers and scholars from related fields. the first initiative i have made as the editor is the establishment of an annual fennia lecture, to be held at the finnish geographers meeting. the event circulates between six universities where the local geographers organize it in collaboration with the geographical society. our first invited speaker is professor henk van houtum who gives his lecture in joensuu, at the university of eastern finland, in october 27 2016. he is an established scholar in border studies, leading the nijmegen centre for border research at the radboud university, and holding professorships at the universities of eastern finland and bergamo. those who are unable to participate the event may read professor houtum’s lecture in the 2017 march issue where it will be published as the lead article, followed by short commentaries by finnish geographers. we want to finish this joined editorial into an invitation. everyone who believes that scientific knowledge should be freely distributed among all people is warmly welcome to join our efforts in fennia. together we can show that alternative publication policies and practices are possible even in this world of citation indexing and research assessment exercises, dominated by commercial publication houses with little genuine interest in scientific progress. scholars can make a difference by thinking and acting differently. kirsi pauliina kallio, university of tampere, finland. e-mail: kirsipauliina.kallio@uta.fi “when will fieldwork open up again?” beginning a project in pandemic times urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99203 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99203 reflections “when will fieldwork open up again?” beginning a project in pandemic times kátia favilla and tatiana pita favilla, k. & pita, t. (2020) “when will fieldwork open up again?” beginning a project in pandemic times. fennia 198(1–2) 230–233. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99203 the entire world population was taken by surprise by the covid-19 pandemic. the pandemic has transformed our lives through its impact on health systems, the economy, on work and the way that we work, and has created feelings of uncertainty about the future. we intend to reflect on how the covid-19 pandemic has transformed academic life in general, but primarily how it has affected our research projects, given the closure of the field of study and the isolation of interlocutors. we reflect on the adoption of digital methods to communicate with our interlocutors and interviewees and its implications and ask ourselves when fieldwork will open up once more. keywords: covid-19, pandemic, digital methodologies, fieldwork, research, phd simone tulumello (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6660-3432) & kátia favilla (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2319-6339), instituto de ciências sociais da universidade de lisboa, av. prof. a de bettencourt 9, 1600-189, lisbon, portugal. e-mail: simone.tulumello@ics.ulisboa.pt, katiacfavilla@gmail.com introduction this reflection introduces a discussion about the field of research in anthropology and sociology in the context of the covid-19 pandemic. it examines how to carry out participant observation and indepth interviews on social distancing and social confinement/isolation situations. are digital methods a possibility for opening up the field or are these methodologies limited in some cases? can the proximity and collaboration generated by dialogue and interpersonal interaction be maintained in virtual contexts? these are challenges to the construction of scientific knowledge and, in particular, to the production of our studies, carried out in different disciplinary contexts. this reflection text presents questions from two doctoral students who are in the early stages of their research. in keeping with the entire world population, we were taken by surprise by the context of the pandemic, which also represented the postponement of fieldwork and the isolation of interlocutors. this situation has hindered the construction of our research projects and has forced us to redesign these projects in order to include objectives, methods and tools that will allow for the continuation of our investigations even with the imposed limitations that clearly distance us from our interlocutors. © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 231kátia favilla & tatiana pitafennia 198(1–2) (2020) we will carry out investigations in portugal and one of us will also study local communities in brazil, with research taking place in both urban and rural contexts. it is interesting how the questions that have arisen, despite our different fields and objects of research, are very similar. therefore, we question the viability of carrying out the research in the current context. the pandemic on march 11, 2020, the world health organization declared the sars-cov-2 (covid-19) a pandemic. in portugal, the government enacted strict population confinement measures as of march 22. in brazil, the federal government have yet to declare quarantine measures, which were instead carried out by local governments and in an uncoordinated way, generating different reactions from the population. as of august 2020, the number of deaths caused by diseases associated with covid-19 surpassed 700 thousand all over the world, and brazil was then ranked as the second worst country in number of cases and deaths. in portugal, numbers appeared to be more controlled, both in terms of cases and deaths. the two countries are now reopening their economies and borders for tourism. it remains to be assessed how this will be reflected in the development of the number of cases and of community or imported transmission. at an economic level, the world is still witnessing the impact and transformation in different sectors of activity, including academia and research. the context of fieldwork the methods we used for data collection are based on direct contact with interlocutors, despite the different approaches of our areas of study. kátia, for her phd in anthropology, will do fieldwork in two different contexts, seeking to address how reforestation processes and the restoration of landscapes impacted by eucalyptus monoculture are under construction. part of the field work will take place with local communities (traditional in the nomenclature of brazil) in the northern region of the state of minas gerais in brazil and in an area in the center of portugal with small rustic properties in the eucalyptus cultivation region. in both cases, access to the field to perform ethnographies has been postponed due to health security issues, both for communities and small rural owners and for the researcher (nogueira 2017; tsing 2019 [2016]). tatiana, enrolled in a phd in sociology, will seek to understand how gender (divide) undergoes construction in the ict sector while taking into consideration both how this sector is expanding economically and already contains a significant gender bias. it will be carried out through the analysis of professional paths of men and women in technological areas, in portugal. doing face-to-face interviews with interlocutors is difficult, given the circumstances and the fact that many workers are working from home. yet here are doubts about the adoption of digital methods, such as online interviews, to collect data in the best possible way with the least possible loss of quality of interaction between researcher and interlocutors. in view of the pandemic scenario in brazil, many traditional communities decided to close their territories, forbidding the entry of outsiders and encouraging the reduction of circulation of its members to urban centers and the minimization of contact with those outside the community. in portugal the population was more protected, with more effective health measures, whether in urban or rural areas, but social distancing remains an active guideline to ensure a decrease in the number of active cases and deaths due to covid-19. the relationship between researchers and interlocutors has been deeply affected by the impossibility at present, of carrying out research with close physical contact. the choice for qualitative research methods, including ethnography and conducting interviews, delimits the field of investigation and, at this moment, restricts access to it, as ‘the field’ is not open for interpersonal interactions. with the new increase in the number of cases in portugal and a contagion curve that has not declined in brazil as expected, we are now reprogramming the beginning of the field research, seeking to guarantee the integrity of our interlocutors. the sociological research also presents important challenges, some imposed by new conditions and family reorganizations in a pandemic context. the question is now how to access men and 232 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) women who already had different professional paths and who now have new tasks within the panorama of the pandemic which could result in the interviewees having reduced availability for interviews. tasks such as caring for children at home with virtual classes, teleworking, increased domestic activities and new family dynamics in a context of restricted life represent new challenges that need to be surmounted by the researcher. the pandemic context presents challenges and demands adaption efforts in the development of the aforementioned research projects. should a move be made towards digital investigation or should the opening of public places and the possibility of greater proximity and interaction with interlocutors be awaited for? this is one of the decisions that we are facing regarding the advancement of the investigation processes presented here. starting a research in a pandemic context – adjustments and new directions when we enter the world of research, we learn about the importance of planning and, at the same time, the importance of flexibility. nowadays, nothing challenges us more in terms of flexibility than the context of the covid-19 pandemic. research around the world has suffered the impact of the pandemic. by looking at the social sciences field and at the researchers and doctoral students who are now starting their research, the impact is evident. as doctoral students, at the beginning of our investigations, we have had to deal with the concern of designing and redesigning a research project and consider different research routes that could effectively fit and be developed and carried out in this context. we do not know when or if everything will return to what it was and whether research will be conducted again as before or be transformed. we faced the challenge of refining our research as our interlocutors had become less available and more difficult to access, given all the concern in times of pandemic. as we know, interviewing is one of the most widely used forms of data collection in qualitative research (creswell 2007). among others, we needed to adapt our research and think of other ways to reach our sample, through online resources. skype and zoom platforms, for instance, encourage interviewees who have place and time limitations for face-to-face interviews, precisely what has happened in this pandemic context, to participate in research in another way (janghorban et al. 2014). however, we cannot forget that the online alternative also has consequences and limitations, given the tendency for reduced willingness on the part of participants and the difficulty in creating a calm, silent and relaxed environment conducive to the development of a collaborative attitude and a relationship of trust between interviewer-interviewee, as well as the usual guarantees concerning anonymity. some studies suggest that the relative lack of anonymity might increase a presentation of self and authenticity when compared to face-to-face interviews (bargh et al. 2002; ellison et al. 2006). thus, we need to consider both the advantages and disadvantages before deciding to engage on online resources. in the case of anthropological research, there is a growing field of digital anthropology (horst & miller 2012; hine 2000), with the use of digital media as tools, methods and even as a field of study. however, when it comes to communities located in brazil, internet access is still far from universal. additionally, the type of research, focused on ruined landscapes (tsing 2019 [2016]; cardoso 2018) and reconstruction of other possible worlds (krenak 2019; kopenawa & albert 2015) through reforestation, do not allow for the use of digital media as a method for data collection, notwithstanding its use as a tool (miller 2020). in this specific case, digital anthropology will be used as a complementary tool, generating data for analysis of land use and coverage in the regions to be analyzed, as well as in the construction of a platform or application for mobility that allows the exchange of experiences between brazil and portugal in the field of reforestation. the fieldwork to be carried out with communities in brazil and owners in portugal requires an important stage of participant observation in locu, with monitoring of reforestation activities and ways of conducting the recovery processes of degraded areas. digital tools do not provide, as yet, an effective way of looking at and participating with the anthropologist in the field. katia’s research, in the planning phase of the fieldwork, needed to be resized. a stage of documentary research, use of satellite images and prospecting for land use and coverage is being added to the work 233kátia favilla & tatiana pitafennia 198(1–2) (2020) plan with the aim of making entry into the field for a post-pandemic period. as a way of maintaining contact with communities and strengthening ties with organizations in brazil, digital media, such as the above-mentioned platforms, have been used for meetings and planning of activities. final considerations although ‘the field’ is closed to conducting research that requires greater interpersonal contact, the activities of fieldwork cannot be interrupted, doctoral programs are seeking ways of adapting to the new realities of a pandemic world. yet time for investigations has not been expanded, requiring the search for new tools, methods and resilience necessary to face momentary adversities. the covid-19 pandemic has hit us unexpectedly. it has changed our lives, health systems, economy, ways of working and interactions with people. phd students and their research are a clear example of that. waiting for fieldwork to once again be possible, accompanied by the high levels of uncertainty that surrounds us all, demand from us a greater flexibility and the ability to look for different alternatives in order to conclude our project. there is no way of knowing when ‘the field’ will be opened again, therefore, it is up to doctoral students to open themselves to new technologies, new ways of conducting research in social sciences and search for readjustments in schedules and activities, seeking to adapt to new world realities and encouraging scientific research to follow as a priority in the search for solutions and cures for the world. references bargh, j. a., mckenna, k. y. a. & fitzsimons, g. m. (2002) can you see the real me? activation and expression of the “true self” on the internet. journal of social issues 58(1) 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-4560.00247 cardoso, t. (2018) paisagens em transe: ecologia da vida e cosmopolítica pataxó no monte pascoal. ieb mil folhas, brasilia. creswell, j. w. (2007) qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches. 2nd ed. sage, thousand oaks. ellison, n., heino, r. & gibbs, j. (2006) managing impressions online: self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. journal of computer-mediated communication 11(2) 415–441. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00020.x hine, c. (2000) virtual ethnography. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020277 horst, h. & miller, d. (2012) digital anthropology. berg, london. janghorban, r., roudsari, r. l. & taghipour, a. (2014) skype interviewing: the new generation of online synchronous interview in qualitative research. international journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being 9(1) 24152. https://doi.org/10.3402/qhw.v9.24152 krenak, a. (2019) ideias para adiar o fim do mundo. companhia das letras, são paulo. kopenawa, d. & albert, b. (2015) a queda do céu. companhia das letras, são paulo. miller, d. (2020) how to conduct an ethnography during social isolation. youtube 3.5.2020 <https://youtu.be/nsitryb-0so>. 15.8.2020. nogueira, m. (2017) gerais a dentro a fora: identidade e territorialidade entre geraizeiros do norte de minas gerais. ieb mil folhas, brasília. tsing, a. l. (2019 [2016]) viver nas ruínas: paisagens multiespécies no antropoceno. ieb mil folhas, brasília. how we have been productive when coronavirus locked us out of university urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99190 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99190 reflections how we have been productive when coronavirus locked us out of university andreia nascimento & hugo ferrinho lopes nascimento, a. & ferrinho lopes, h. (2020) how we have been productive when coronavirus locked us out of university. fennia 198(1–2) 243–246. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99190 in the covid-19 pandemic era researchers and academics worldwide have experienced an unprecedented phenomenon. in this context of uncertainty and instability, academia was not spared the consequences of the new coronavirus that locked everybody out of university. however, research and academic productivity during these unprecedented times may not have adversely affected projects, students, and their supervisors. building on the authors’ personal experience this paper highlights some positive impacts of pursuing a phd during a pandemic, focusing the reflection along two lines: 1) that work during social isolation may be better than ever; and 2) how open science has been crucial in this coronavirus era. keywords: university, phd thesis, coronavirus, academic productivity, open science andreia micaela nascimento (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3615-4768) & hugo ferrinho lopes (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7256-6180), instituto de ciências sociais da universidade de lisboa, avenida prof. aníbal de bettencourt, n. 9. 1600-189 lisboa, portugal. e-mail: andreia.nascimento@ ics.ulisboa.pt, hugo.lopes@ics.ulisboa.pt introduction due to covid-19, the world stopped, and societies have been forced to adapt and reinvent themselves. within hours and without notice, a universal lockdown began, physically and emotionally, and forced people to reorganize routines and see the world only through an offline and an online window (nascimento 2020). societies are still adapting to these new facts with social, cultural and economic implications. services and companies have closed, work started to be performed differently and teaching has been conducted at a distance, through several digital platforms shared by researchers and academics, by parents and students, by teachers and educators, now all specialists in technology (taylor 2018). the rapid spread of the virus, from the beginning of the year, has forced thousands of higher education institutions from around the world to suspend all classroom teaching activity transferring them into the online environment. over the past decades, researchers have shown the importance of technology and digital tools, studying how they can be successfully integrated into curricular activities. nowadays these contributions have acquired a special meaning, since the educational systems have had to adapt to the current context as the school has ended, but the classes have continued (zhou et al. 2020). © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 244 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) despite the negative impact of the new coronavirus on the daily academic lives of doctoral students, the following questions remain: did the isolation resulting from the preventive measures of covid-19 accentuate the process of self-management to which thesis projects are normally condemned? or, did this process benefit from the abrupt halt and consequent adaptation to the pandemic context? building on the personal experience of each author the main purpose of this paper is to highlight the positive impact of the pandemic crisis on their phd thesis, focusing the reflection along two lines: 1) working during social isolation may be better than ever; and 2) an open virtual window helps to minimize the effects of the closure of higher education institutions and the constraints of insularity, especially when the roles of student, professional and mother are brought together. the first part of this reflection presents how isolation and confinement was experienced by a phd student in comparative politics, hugo ferrinho lopes, when writing his doctoral thesis. the second one highlights the opportunities that arose regarding the open access to knowledge and how this has enriched the work developed by andreia micaela nascimento, a phd student in sociology. could the working rhythm during lockdown be better than ever? several researchers have had to face various constraints of being in lockdown during the pandemic era, such as, among other things, being denied access to data, the inability to do field or lab work, increased time spent on childcare, and decreasing working productivity given that home conditions are not equal for all. nonetheless, working in the coronavirus era while pursuing a phd may shed new light on the focused writing of a thesis. in portugal, the national government imposed, among other measures, the suspension of face-toface courses and seminars from all universities. as a result, members of the academic staff and students have been forced to quickly reconfigure their work plans and adapt them to the pandemic context. universities began to use a variety of online tools and digital platforms to try to mitigate the harmful consequences of suspending face-to-face teaching interactions. despite these efforts, recent studies carried out in portugal have shown that distance learning during confinement and quarantine has not achieved the expected results (magalhães et al. 2020). students in higher education experienced, in the first months of 2020, a variety of difficulties during their educational process: teachers with poor digital skills and students facing excessive hours and elements of evaluation, as well as the absence of face-to-face guidance that personal meetings allow, were aspects often emphasized as negative, particularly in undergraduate and master’s courses. with regard to the doctorate, a time when students are primarily absorbed by their concerns about academic work, the pandemic brought about specific dilemmas and constraints. the isolation they experienced during the pandemic, given that the courses, seminars, meetings with colleagues and/or supervisors, which took place mostly in person in an academic environment, were now being held remotely, has meant that the doctorate for many students has become a herculean challenge. regardless of all the benefits – which we do not call into question – of traditional phd education, it implies financial, personal, and time costs that a distance learning doctorate, on equal terms among all students, does not provide. as far as our experience is concerned, lockdown has brought innovation and several advantages to doctoral work. first, there have been substantial decreases in financial expenses such as rent and travel. second, maintaining virtual seminars, conferences, classes, meetings with colleagues, professors, and supervisors aids the spread of knowledge. third, students do not need to waste time travelling inside and outside the university’s city, either to attend sessions or to go home (even if only occasionally), which can lead to improved productivity. our situation is perhaps unique, and we note the complaints registered by colleagues from different areas of study and in different stages of the doctoral process in scientific and discussion meetings that have become virtual as a result of the pandemic. for us, during the coronavirus lockdown, our thesis writing turned out to be a way in which we were able to minimize isolation and confinement. anxiety, uncertainty and insecurity were offset by a writing process that flowed as the coronavirus locked us out of university. a focused work schedule emerged due to minimum distractions that allowed for a significant improvement in the quality of the thesis with new routines for reading and writing, new ideas, better environments for concentration, and more time to make 245fennia 198(1–2) (2020) andreia nascimento & hugo ferrinho lopes decisions. of course, this all relies upon a pleasant homeworking environment, which not all phd candidates have with access to the internet and suitable technology. as such, we can only speak based on our experience, yet we can say that the rhythm of work during the lockdown has in fact been better than ever. for us this has been due to new avenues that have opened up while writing the thesis, for others this has been the result of an unprecedented access to knowledge, which we will discuss in the following section. time for science: open access to knowledge the suspension of face-to-face courses and seminars, despite having put us in an unpleasant, unexpected and unimaginable position, has forced the learning process to be quickly reconfigured and adapted to a new and unknown context. despite the difficulties that the pandemic has imposed on higher education institutions, their teachers and students, the virtual window that opened has helped to minimize the effects of isolation, a struggle that has long been assumed by higher education institutions farther from urban centers and their students. confinement as a measure to combat the pandemic has paradoxically been fundamental to unlocking life abroad, especially in the access to science. although we are facing something new and unexpected, the situation is not unprecedented. the arguments for sharing data and promoting open science, and the consequences of not doing so, had already been emphasized by the ebola and zika outbreaks (oecd). in the context of a public health emergency of international concern like the new coronavirus outbreak, there is an imperative to make any information available that might have value in combating the health, economic and social crises, as: open science efforts can increase the effectiveness and productivity of the research system. increasing transparency and quality in the research validation process, by allowing a greater extent of replication and validation of scientific results. speeding the transfer of knowledge [as] open science can reduce delays in the re-use of the results of scientific research. open science and open data initiatives may promote awareness and trust in science among citizens. (oecd 2015, 18–19) however, open science cannot be reduced to sharing data with the aim that the results of the research are in the hands of as many as possible and the potential benefits are disseminated as widely as possible. we would like to see open science going further by allowing (1) access to all peerreviewed research, freely available at least for the duration of the outbreak, (2) free access to conferences, congresses, webinars and other scientific events normally organized internally and exclusively for its scientific community, and (3) the development of new ways of communicating, sharing and doing science. as a researcher and a phd candidate living in an island region with ultra-peripheral status, the autonomous region of madeira, in portugal, the quarantine and the covid-19 pandemic allowed for easier access to science and knowledge, not only in terms of quantity but essentially in diversity and quality, as never before possible. grappling with the phd, an endeavor that started in 2016, it was possible after the covid-19 outbreak that there would be an assumption that we now have more time to dedicate to the thesis and to its writing: “now we are forced to be at home, we will be able to work like never before.” one of the main difficulties experienced in the last four years as a phd candidate in lisbon but living in madeira, was distance. madeira is 967 km away from the mainland portugal, the equivalent of an hour and a half by plane. this distance has begun to fade away with online participation in meetings, workshops, congresses, conferences, discussion forums, general meetings, training and scientific meetings that have taken on this new hybrid format. this has never before been possible. the new online format allows for the participation of many researchers and specialists spread across the world and has ultimately resulted in this paper. the importance of this annual meeting of doctoral students, which already has six editions, as well as other opportunities available for discussion and sharing has never been so easy for those who are displaced. the need to continue to live, study and work in the context of a pandemic has caused several higher education institutions and research groups to readapt and to very quickly open up in a different 246 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) way. living and working (professionally and as a mother) in the outermost regions – places where often “there are no social sciences” – and doing a phd at a distance has never been so easy. the few face-to-face meetings (always very brief and very expensive) at the university, the limited contact with teachers, colleagues and researchers in the classroom has always made things difficult for a student like myself. however, this was all that was possible before the covid-19 outbreak. living and working abroad has limited the possibilities of contributing to the spirit of sharing, critical dialogue and mutual help that are generated during this kind of scientific event. never before has it been possible for us to listen, although virtually, to experienced researchers, those who face the same challenges and issues, or even to see each other’s faces. we had not previously been given the opportunity to integrate in the way that these online meetings make possible, in such a fruitful research environment that makes us feel like an integral part of the scientific community. the pandemic and open science has enabled us to participate in seminars, workshops, thesis project defenses and even doctoral tests at a distance. moving from lisbon to porto, passing through coimbra, algarve or azores in one day, to travel and get to know, virtually, european and international universities, their research centers and their journals that we now have open access to. as universities begin to use a variety of ad-hoc online tools and digital platforms, it has given access to an endless number of resources that allows for the enrichment of the doctoral thesis as well as professional and personal performances. the covid-19 pandemic was forgotten for a few brief moments. knowing when to stop in the face of all the online opportunities that arose became the difficulty. it is imperative to continue to provide a hybrid format in the access and dissemination of knowledge. the natural rhythm of the thesis writing that we had become accustomed to did not benefit from the coronavirus lockdown, but its quality will certainly benefit as a result of the online meetings and resources that it forced to be created. concluding remarks the main purpose of this paper was to highlight how nationwide lockdowns as a measure to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus has impacted the authors’ doctoral theses. focusing on the increased capacity for writing and access to scientific work, the authors write here a personal testimony of the impact of the pandemic on their phd during the first months of the lockdown. this is a time of trauma, individual and collective, whose consequences are not yet fully visible and/ or measurable. guided by the idea that adversity makes opportunity possible, this paper shows how the pandemic crisis may not have only adversely affected projects, students and their supervisors. the personal testimonies of writing a phd during a pandemic, and the changes to the ways of working that have resulted are perhaps positive, as we have explored here. these may be exceptions, yet they exist. while “this is a time of great challenge to the imagination, it is a time to risk new models and not simply to fold our arms and bow to a fatality,” as the madeiran cardinal, dom josé tolentino mendonça notes, and these new models have been witnessed and experienced by the authors of this reflection paper. references magalhães, p. c., gouveia, r., costa-lopes, r. & silva, p. a. e. (2020) o impacto social da pandemia. estudo ics/iscte covid-19. <https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/docs/relatorioinqueritoicsiscte.pdf>. 30.9.2020. nascimento, a. (2020) uma espécie de diário de campo em tempos de pandemia: a vida continua e vai ficar tudo bem? life research group blog ics-ulisbon 24.6.2020 <https://liferesearchgroup. wordpress.com/2020/06/24/>30.9.2020. oecd (2015) making open science a reality. oecd science, technology and industry policy papers, no. 25. oecd publishing, paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/5jrs2f963zs1-en taylor, z. w. (2018) web accessibility: not just for tech experts anymore. disability compliance for higher education 23(9) 5–5. https://doi.org/10.1002/dhe.30416 zhou, l., wu, s., zhou, m. & li, f. (2020) ‘school’s out, but class’ on, the largest online education in the world today: taking china’s practical exploration during the covid-19 epidemic prevention and control as an example. best evidence in chinese education 4(2) 501–519. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3555520 youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research commentary to bowman urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa91089 doi: 10.11143/fennia.91089 reflections youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research – commentary to bowman bronwyn elisabeth wood wood, b. e. (2020) youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research – commentary to bowman. fennia 198(1–2) 217–222. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.91089 in this commentary i respond to benjamin bowman’s fennia paper by extending upon his central thesis that argues that the prevailing methodological tools and framings used to research youth political participation perpetuate unhelpful and inadequate dichotomies about youth. advancing upon this, i suggest that the youth climate strikes in 2019 highlight three prevalent discourses in youth research relating to climate change: (i) the tendency to view youth as isolated individuals, neglecting the role of adults and communities; (ii) the tendency to focus on individual behavioural change rather than recognise the need for systemic and societal responses to climate change, and (iii) the tendency to overlook structural characteristics of youth such as race, gender and social class. the resulting discourses of youth autonomy, individualism and homogeneity lead to a distorted picture of young activists and perpetuate harmful narratives which lead to stigma, despair and cynicism. the paper concludes by advocating for greater care in the research methodologies and critical frameworks we use to report on youth at public events, such as climate strikes, in order to allow for the complexity of the young political agent, the ambiguity of some of their actions and for opportunities that enable young people themselves to articulate their own participation. keywords: climate strikes, youth, methodology, climate change, individualism bronwyn elisabeth wood (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3560-2194), victoria university of wellington, te herenga waka, faculty of education, p.o. box 600, wellington 6140, new zealand. e-mail: bronwyn.wood@vuw.ac.nz. introduction the scale of youth-led and youth participation in the protests for climate action in 2019 (variously known as studentstrike4climate (ss4c), fridaysforfuture or youth strike4climate) warranted considerable attention with the final global strike amassing more than six million people in countries as diverse as ghana, brazil, samoa and the philippines (taylor et al. 2019). in my country of new zealand, i joined more than 3.5% of the population taking to the streets on september 27 to demand urgent action on the escalating ecological crisis (taylor et al. 2019). yet what does this wide-scale youth activism mean for climate action and for researchers? and what insights can we glean from © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 218 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) the 2019 climate strikes about how young people are represented, researched and discussed? in this commentary i take a lead from bowman’s (2019) paper recently published in fennia to examine the 2019 climate strikes and consider some of the opportunities and challenges they present to researchers of children and young people. as researchers, we have been left somewhat on the backfoot in capturing the youth-led climate strike social movement. bowman’s (2019) paper makes an important early contribution to this emerging field of research. his paper responds to wahlstrom and colleagues’ (2019) report on the march 15, 2019 climate strikes in 13 countries in europe which is, to-date, the most extensive survey of protest participants in europe. whilst recognising the significant contribution of this report, bowman critiques the adult-led and binary framing of the political action of young people used in the report arguing that it overlooks the complexity of youth politics. for example, he argues that the focus on emotions of ‘worry’ and ‘anger’ overlook the joy and sense of fun that characterised many of the protests. in addition, the construction of binaries such as ‘instrumental’ or ‘expressive’ motivations for protesting perpetuate a false dichotomy that centres on older and more traditional notions of politics. bowman (2019) proposes that such narratives overlook the significant work by researchers in youth politics which have pointed to the importance of understanding do-it-ourselves forms of political participation (pickard 2019) and the lived, ‘everyday politics’ of young people how these inform our understanding of young citizens (o'toole et al. 2003; bang 2004; harris et al. 2010; wood 2012, 2014; kallio & häkli 2013). a key argument bowman makes is that the prevailing methodological tools and framings used to research youth political participation perpetuate unhelpful and inadequate dichotomies (active/non-active; formal/informal) about youth. in response, he suggests that we need methodological approaches and theoretical frames that are better equipped to deal with the complexity of the young political agent, the ambiguity of some of their actions and opportunities that enable young people themselves to articulate their own participation. three research challenges research into the climate strikes does present some unique challenges to researchers – not least because of the scale, the spontaneity and the short-term nature of the protest action itself which allows little time for preparation and follow up – but also because of the immediate attention it demanded due to the intense media and adult scrutiny on young people. in my commentary i take up bowman’s challenge and use the climate strikes as a starting point to consider three ongoing challenges for research in this emerging field. these challenges sit at the intersection of our responses to issues of environmental degradation and climate change and how we research youth in general, as well as their involvement in the strikes. from my perspective, these are closely related and as i will argue, deeper understandings of both are required. youth – isolated, alone and angry: where are the adults? one of the most significant elements of the 2019 climate protests is that they were youth-led. this generated considerable interest in how young people, who had no experience of political organising, managed to co-ordinate national and global level protests of such scale (thomas et al. 2019). the novelty of this youth-led focus merited much attention and indeed more research is needed into how this movement was mobilised by young people within and across nations. this focus on youth as political agents is part of a wider growing interest in the past two decades on children and young people as young social agents and political actors (holloway et al. 2010). yet, this attention has at times come at the detriment of a wider awareness of young people’s broader connections in communities and their relationships with others. the focus on youth alone has led to a tendency to celebrate agency and view youth as isolated, bounded, individual subjects. i agree with others who suggest that at times this has had “too sharp and too exclusive a focus on the standpoints of young people” (fielding 2007, 304). this attention has at times overstated the autonomy of youth participation and understated the powerful roles that adults play – especially in the context of families and regulated spaces such as schools (wyness 2013; bartos 2015; wood et al. 2018). 219fennia 198(1–2) (2020) bronwyn elisabeth wood this focus on youth alone was notable in some of the media reporting of youth climate protests. such reporting often used a generational analysis to conclude that the strikes represented an angry young generation – isolated and alone (the guardian 2019) and often in opposition to adults who had created the environmental mess. this was a feature of much media where students were pitted against adults in an oppositional response, such as jemima grimmer, 13, in sydney who stated: “adults are, like, ‘respect your elders.’ and we’re, like, ‘respect our futures. you know, it’s a two-way street, respect, and i’m angry that i have to be here.” (sengupta 2019). such reporting overlooked the intergenerational responses which did exist in all of the protests (carrington 2019) and is essential if issues of climate justice are to be addressed. youth are not isolated individuals and nor does their knowledge, skills and actions stem from a world removed from adults. instead, it is more useful to see the strikes are part of a wider inter-generational globally-connected form of political organising (thomas et al. 2019) that has had a much longer presence than the events of 2019. this is challenging for researchers who struggle to adequately capture the community and intergenerational elements of young people’s lives as this requires a more wholistic vision and significantly more time in the field than a one-off interview with a protesting individual. however, this is more important than it might appear, because the complexity of climate change and its solutions require many people, diverse communities and multiple-pronged approaches. in the same way, we as researchers require a bigger vision to explore the inter-related, networked and relational elements of young people’s lives more accurately (mannion 2007; bartos 2012, 2013; holloway et al. 2019; wood & kallio 2019). in addition, we need to remember the significance that everyday interactions and familiar spatial and social practices hold in creating environmental awareness and a desire to care, protect and nurture places of belonging that may be under threat, and not merely focus on one-off high profile events (bartos & wood 2017). focus on individual behavioural change closely linked to the first challenge is a prevailing tendency in discourses of climate change to focus on the individual and their associated actions to address environmental damage and climate change. known as individual behavioural change (ibc) (or sometimes abc (attitude-behaviourchoice), the responsibility for responding to climate change is thought to lie with individuals whose behavioural change will make the difference (shove 2010). this common approach focuses on an individual’s own actions to reduce environmental and climate impacts – such as recycling, using reusable bags, reducing carbon footprint, eating less meat and so on. while this has some merits, it has been found to be closely associated with growing levels of ‘eco-anxiety’, guilt and despair amongst children, young people and climate activists (christensen 2019; lawton 2019; nairn 2019; thomas et al. 2019). these prevailing and individualising anxieties make their way into how we research, with a good example being the wahlström and colleagues (2019) report which overlooked the joyful and hopeful aspects of the climate strikes, focusing instead on anxiety, fear and hopelessness due to the narrow framing of the methodology (bowman 2019). in the same way, discourses about individual behavioural change heighten feelings of guilt and normalise eco-anxiety as a constant state of inadequacy by placing far too much weight on the individual’s own responses. ibc is highly problematic as a solution as it ignores the structural and systemic political and economic systems responsible for thousands of years of environmental degradation and exploitation and suggests that an individual can address this through their carbon-reducing behavioural change (shove 2010; rice et al. 2015; christensen 2019). as maniates (2001, 33) explains: when responsibility for environmental problems is individualized, there is little room to ponder institutions, the nature and exercise of political power, or ways of collectively changing the distribution of power and influence in society — to, in other words, “think institutionally.”  christensen’s (2019) study of climate activists in auckland, new zealand confirms this pattern. she showed that an ibc approach detracted young people from deeper engagement with the difficult 220 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) work of thinking about the underlying causes of climate change, including the emotional work involved in imagining different and new alternatives to current socio-economic and socio-political realities. another new zealand-based study of climate activists also reported high levels of despair, burnout and eco-anxiety, but found hope through recognising the strength that collective, rather than individual, responses that climate change could bring (nairn 2019). these studies suggest that researchers need to pay far more attention to the imaginations of young activists themselves and allow possibilities to see collective hope and solidarity, not only despair and the need to embed this in theoretical and methodological frameworks. this brings us to a third challenge for researchers engaged in climate change politics – the need to consider the collective rather than individual identities of young protesters. focus on structural and identity politics bowman (2019) highlights the importance of knowing more about the classed, raced and gendered characteristics of climate strike participants. while there was no data on race from the protests in europe (wahlström et al. 2019), the report identified a higher number of female protesters than male and some indication that they were from middle class or well-educated backgrounds with 73% with a parent with at least one university degree (wahlström et al. 2019). this pattern confirms earlier studies of young people interested in environmental issues, which report similar high female and middleclass representation (chawla 2007; kraus et al. 2012; eom et al. 2018). for example, a survey of members of generation zero, a youth-led environmental activist group in new zealand, found a largely homogenous membership made up of middle-class, european-origin young people with green party political affiliations (dodson & papoutsaki 2017). the authors of this study conclude that a wider adoption of pro-environmental attitudes, beliefs and engagement will remain rather limited unless it can expand from this rather narrow and homogenous support base. in addition, while studies suggest climate change holds more interest to higher socio-economic groups, questions are raised about whether this apparent lack of interest may reflect deeper structural barriers – such as limited time and resources – for lower ses people who therefore do not have the luxury (or sense of control over external forces) to act on beliefs (kraus et al. 2012). whilst information about structural forces, social groups, gender, race and class are invaluable, in recent times, youth studies have frequently limited a focus on these variables (france et al. 2018). in fact, some have gone so far as to say that ‘class is dead’ (pakulski & waters 1996) – a ‘zombie category’ (beck & beck-gernsheim 2002) that holds little relevance to youth today, with some advocating for a much greater focus on social generation (woodman 2009). these debates highlight the importance of gathering thorough and careful data about climate strike participants in ways that provide deeper insights into the communities that young people represent and the extent to which they are shaped by broad structural forces which characterise gender, class and race. this may reveal further the limitations of narrow individualist characteristics in explaining why and how young people are involved in environmental climate strikes. conclusion in sum, some incredible opportunities are available for researchers to engage with the climate strikes and the role young citizens played in these. however, building on bowman’s (2019) argument, i have also identified some of the prevailing discourses of youth autonomy, individualism and weak notions of community, social groups and structural forces that were present in the representation of young participants in the climate strikes. such approaches can lead to a distorted picture of young activists and perpetuate harmful narratives which lead to despair and cynicism. these narrow frameworks also give rise to limited notions of youth themselves and the ways they are understood as young citizens. paying attention to the research methodologies we choose, the critical frameworks we use and the unintended consequences of how we report (such as those heightening feelings of helplessness and despair (see thomas et al. 2019 for more on this argument)), is one contribution we can make to 221fennia 198(1–2) (2020) bronwyn elisabeth wood provide more nuanced and accurate representation of youth and climate change justice. as christensen (2019, 85) states: future research in this area should focus on what methods of engagement are useful and productive for channelling young people’s fears and anxieties into resilience and motivation about creating new ways of thinking, operating, organizing and feeling in this time of climate transformation. references bang, h. (2004) everyday makers and expert citizens: building political not social capital. australia national university, school of social science, australia. https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/ bitstream/1885/42117/2/henrik.pdf bartos, a. e. (2012) children caring for their worlds: the politics of care and childhood. political geography 31(3) 157–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.12.003 bartos, a. e. (2013) friendship and environmental politics in childhood. space and polity 17(1) 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780711 bartos, a. e. (2015) children and young people’s political participation: a critical analysis. in kallio, k. p., mills, s. & skelton, t. (eds.) politics, citizenship and rights, 1–15. springer singapore, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-94-1_1-1 bartos, a. e. & wood, b. e. (2017) ecological wellbeing, childhood, and climate change in ergler, c., kearns, r. & witten, k. (eds.) children’s health and wellbeing in urban environments, 234–246. routledge, oxon and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315571560-17 beck, u. & beck-gernsheim, e. (2002) individualization. sage, london. bowman, b. (2019) imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research. fennia 197(2) 295–305. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.85151 carrington, d. (2019) parents around the world mobilise behind youth climate strikes. the guardian 3.4.2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/03/parents-around-the-worldmobilise-behind-youth-climate-strikes>. 5.3.2020. chawla, l. (2007) childhood experiences associated with care for the natural world: a theoretical framework for empirical results. children, youth and environments 17(4) 144–170. christensen, e. (2019) fearful of the future and paranoid about the present: the emotional geographies of young climate activists in auckland, new zealand. master thesis. university of auckland, auckland. dodson, g. & papoutsaki, e. (2017) youth-led activism and political engagement in new zealand: a survey of generation zero. communication research and practice 3(2) 194–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1228994 eom, k., kim, h. s. & sherman, d. k. (2018) social class, control, and action: socioeconomic status differences in antecedents of support for pro-environmental action. journal of experimental social psychology 77 60–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.03.009 fielding, m. (2007) 'beyond voice': new roles, relations and contexts in researching with young people. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 28(3) 301–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596300701458780 france, a., roberts, s. & wood, b. (2018) youth, social class and privilege in the antipodes: towards a new research agenda for youth sociology. journal of sociology 54(3) 362–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783318786580 harris, a., wyn, j. & younes, s. (2010) beyond apathetic or activist youth: 'ordinary' young people and contemporary forms of participation. young 18(1) 9–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/110330880901800103 holloway, s. l., holt, l. & mills, s. (2019) questions of agency: capacity, subjectivity, spatiality and temporality. progress in human geography 43(3) 458–477. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518757654 kallio, k. p. & häkli, j. (2013) children and young people's politics in everyday life. space and polity 17(1) 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780710 kraus, m. w., piff, p. k., mendoza-denton, r., rheinschmidt, m. l. & keltner, d. (2012) social class, solipsism, and contextualism: how the rich are different from the poor. psychological review 119(3) 546–572. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028756 lawton, g. (2019) i have eco-anxiety but that's normal. new scientist 244(3251) 22–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0262-4079(19)31914-1 maniates, m. (2001) individualization: plant a tree, ride a bike, save the world? global environmental politics 1(3) 31–52. https://doi.org/10.1162/152638001316881395 222 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) mannion, g. (2007) going spatial, going relational: why 'listening to children' and children's participation needs reframing. discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education 28(3) 405–420. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596300701458970 nairn, k. (2019) learning from young people engaged in climate activism: the potential of collectivizing despair and hope. young 27(5) 435–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308818817603 o'toole, t., lister, m., marsh, d., jones, s. & mcdonagh, a. (2003) turning out or left out?: participation and non-participation among young people. contemporary politics 9(1) 45–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356977032000072477 pakulski, j. & waters, m. (1996) the death of class. sage, london. pickard, s. (2019) politics, protest and young people: political participation and dissent in 21st century britain. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57788-7 rice, j. l., burke, b. j. & heynen, n. (2015) knowing climate change, embodying climate praxis: experiential knowledge in southern appalachia. annals of the association of american geographers 105(2) 253–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.985628 sengupta, s. (2019) protesting climate change, young people take to the streets in a global strike. the new york times 20.9.2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/climate/global-climate-strike.html>. 6.3.2020. shove, e. (2010) beyond the abc: climate change policy and theories of social change. environment and planning a: economy and space 42(6) 1273–1285. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42282 taylor, m., watts, j. & bartlett, j. (2019) climate crisis: 6 million people join in latest wave of global protests. the guardian 27.9.2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/27/climatecrisis-6-million-people-join-latest-wave-of-worldwide-protests>. 6.3.2020. the guardian (2019) climate change and a betrayed generation 1.3.2019 <https://www.theguardian. com/environment/2019/mar/01/youth-climate-change-strikers-open-letter-to-world-leaders>. 3.2.2019. thomas, a., cretney, r. & hayward, b. (2019) student strike 4 climate: justice, emergency and citizenship. new zealand geographer 75(2) 96–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/nzg.12229 wahlström, m., kocyba, p., de vydt, m. & de moor, j. (2019) protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities. <http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/6571/7/20190709_protest%20for%20a%20 future_gcs%20descriptive%20report.pdf> wood, b. e. (2012) crafted within liminal places: young people's everyday politics. political geography 31(6) 337–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.05.003 wood, b. e. (2014) researching the everyday: young people’s experiences and expressions of citizenship. international journal of qualitative studies in education 27(2) 214–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2012.737047 wood, b. e. & kallio, k. p. (2019) green citizenship: towards spatial and lived perspectives. in divoudi, s., cowell, r., white, i. & blanco, h. (eds.) the routledge companion to environmental planning. routledge, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179780-18 wood, b. e., taylor, r. & atkins, r. (2018) student voice, citizenship and regulated spaces. in bourke, r. & loveridge, j. (eds.) radical collegiality through student voice: educational experience, policy and practice, 179–196. springer singapore, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1858-0_11 woodman, d. (2009) the mysterious case of the pervasive choice biography: ulrich beck, structure/ agency, and the middling state of theory in the sociology of youth. journal of youth studies 12(3) 243–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260902807227 wyness, m. (2013) children’s participation and intergenerational dialogue: bringing adults back into the analysis. childhood 20(4) 429–442. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568212459775 untitled finnish districts and regional differentiation janne antikainen and perttu vartiainen antikainen, janne & perttu vartiainen (2002). finnish districts and regional differentiation. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 183–190. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in this article we chart the emergence of functional region level analysis and policy implementation in finland and attempt to clarify its significance for the analysis of finnish regional development in the latter half of the 1990s. the characteristics of development in terms of regional gross production, employment, and migration at the national level show a propensity towards increasing polarisation: more and more districts are below the national average as economic development agglomerates to fewer growth centres. janne antikainen, nordregio, p. o. box 1658, se-11186, stockholm, sweden. e-mail: janne.antikainen@nordregio.se perttu vartiainen, university of joensuu, p. o. box 111, fin-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: perttu.vartiainen@joensuu.fi introduction regional analysis often draws from statistical material based on conventional administrative units, i.e., municipalities or regions in the finnish case. in 1999 – the date referred to by the statistical material used in this article – there were 452 municipalities in a country of five million people. it is thus obvious that most of the finnish municipalities are simply too small in spatial terms to be used in the comprehensive analysis of regional development trends. on the other hand, the alternative level of spatial unit analysis, namely the 19 regions (in statistical and administrative vocabulary), is too heterogeneous to portray the actual spatial patterns of finnish society. it is for this reason that the more recent concept of district has risen in status to become the significant functional level in the finnish urban and regional system. the concept refers to agglomerations of municipalities that are grouped together according to their functional orientation in order to reflect the actual daily operational conditions of people, enterprises, and community organisations. in the urban context, the concept of district refers to functional urban regions (fur). district is a useful concept also when analysing regional development from a functional viewpoint. using district as the level of analysis makes it possible to distinguish internal development dynamics from the features of external development more explicitly. internal dynamics refers to development conditions and features within the functional urban region, while external development relates to the inter-regional, national, and international levels. the most important quality of the concept of district is thus its capacity to extend beyond administrative boundaries. as a result, the needs of economic activity and service production can be mapped more efficiently. this leads to more coherent strategic planning, visioning, and, for example, to the rationalisation of public service provision. furthermore, some interesting data, such as that on gdp per capita, are not available for public use at the municipal level in finland due to data protection and confidentiality arrangements required by the statistics act. municipal data remains useful in the analysis of the internal dynamics of a district, however – in the study of the dynamics of, and between, core cities and fringes. the ministry of interior inserted a district governance level between the municipal and regional levels in 1994, thus giving shape to the current finnish administrative structure for urban regions and inter-municipal cooperation. in governmental – and also in statistical – terms, the english term “district” has also been referred to as a “subregional unit” (aluekehitysalan…1998). in tandem with the municipal and region-level divisions undertaken in the late 1990s, this drive towards the creation of districts has played a central role 184 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)janne antikainen and perttu vartiainen in the implementation of regional development policy and statistical monitoring. at the operational level, districts are thus utilised in targeting regional policy incentives according to their disparities and characteristics. district units were defined by the ministry of interior in accordance with travel-to-work patterns and volumes as well as by means of an analysis of the existing co-operation structures between municipalities. in 1994, finland was divided into 88 districts, each composed of several municipalities. three years later, the division was slightly modified: three districts were eliminated and individual modifications were made to a further fourteen. thus, the number of districts in 1999 was 85 (note that the analysis in this article is based on this division). yet another round of modifications were made to the district division boundaries in 2001. one new district was created, three districts were merged into one, two districts were eliminated (putting the total number of districts at 82 in 2001) and boundaries were amended in 19 districts (municipalities… 2001). despite this functional delineation of district boundaries, it must be noted that in some cases they have simply been moulded to suit essentially political rather than rational-administrative purposes. for instance, the spatial identity of finland’s swedish-speaking minority of roughly 300,000 individuals has affected administrative boundaries in coastal areas, the minority’s principal zone of residence (see raento & husso 2002: cd-fig. 1). furthermore, the regional policy incentives disbursed to regions and perceived to be lagging behind in development have led some municipalities in the rural–urban fringe areas to seek co-operation partners from amongst those rural municipalities that are less well-off rather than from those urban centres that are economically stronger. moreover, higher-level administrative boundaries, such as those at the regional level, determine district boundaries explicitly in some cases. given this mismatch between functional and administrative boundaries (the latter are political in nature), the need to reassess travel-to-work areas as a concept parallel to a district’s territorial form has become apparent. according to the method introduced by statistics finland, the definition of a travel-to-work area is the following: “a municipality is a travel-to-work area centre if, firstly, no more than 20 percent of its labour force are out-commuters, and, secondly, no more than 7.5 percent of its labour force commutes to a single municipality.” if a municipality is not defined as a centre of a travel-to-work-area, it is attached to the municipality that attracts the largest number of commuters. alternatively, a commuting-flow threshold of 15 percent is used to determine whether a municipality is attached to a particular centre or not (vartiainen & antikainen 1998; summarized in antikainen & vartiainen 1999b). districts and the regionalisation process the feasibility of using the concept of district can also be justified within the context of urban change. districts (or, in a narrower sense, furs) are highlighted by the ongoing global process of regionalisation (in finnish, seutuistuminen), outlined in both swedish and finnish geographical literature (cf. järnegren & ventura 1977; ventura & wärneryd 1983; cf. vartiainen 1992). initially, regionalisation referred to the growth of diversified large and medium-sized urban regions and, intra-regionally, to the branching out of population growth from the centre to the surrounding rural areas. in practice, economic activities and jobs were concentrated in the centre of these urban regions although population grew in the fringe areas, i.e., in the surrounding municipalities. the core (the centre) of the urban region together with its fringe areas thus formed an increasingly interwoven and interactive functional region (cf. van der laan 1998). the process was already prevalent in the 1970s and is now considered to be the most important structural change impacting upon the finnish urban and regional system. regionalisation perhaps originated in the development of urban centres and the surrounding suburban municipalities, originally pertaining to the strengthening of urban centres and furs as nodes in the national regional structure, but the district approach has come to be viewed as important in a rural and peripheral region context. the major reason for the feasibility of districts in finland’s peripheral regions stems from the financial crisis in the public sector in the 1990s. the crisis compelled municipalities to engage in a more efficient pooling of resources through schemes of inter-municipal co-operation. it should also be noted that a further reason for the emergence of this co-operation is that the strucfennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 185finnish districts and regional differentiation tural fund programmes of the european union now actively promote such activities. generally speaking, co-operation at the district level strengthened throughout the 1990s, with the district level now being considered as one of the basic levels of regional and community strategy formulation and planning for both local and national policy-making. in this way, districts have come to attract increased governmental capacity instead of being mere statistical units of analysis. the case of joensuu the joensuu district is one of 82 districts in finland. joensuu is a medium-sized university town with 52,000 inhabitants (91,500 inhabitants in the entire district). the regionalisation process is very visible in the case of joensuu. the engine of local development is the city of joensuu, a relatively strong employment, service, and research and development (r&d) centre at the national level. beginning in the mid-1970s, the district’s population growth has been confined primarily to its fringe areas, however. consequently, the joensuu travel-to-work area is now relatively large, both in terms of population and of physical expanse. in figure 1 we have determined the travel-towork area of joensuu according to sub-municipal units (normally travel-to-work area is defined using municipalities as basic units). the 15-percent commuting threshold used to define areas belonging to the joensuu travel-to-work area is also employed in this analysis. in the case of joensuu, the district and travel-to-work area boundaries match relatively well. the travel-to-work area extends to the southern areas of the municipality of polvijärvi, which is part of the neighbouring district of outokumpu. co-operation in its various forms also crosses district boundaries. as such, in relafig. 1. structure of the joensuu district. the centre of the district is the city of joensuu. the travel-to-work area crosses municipal boundaries. the joensuu district is one of the 82 administrative districts established by finland’s ministry of the interior. the joensuu district co-operation organisation (jyty) includes the neighbouring district of outokumpu. 186 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)janne antikainen and perttu vartiainen vartiainen (1999a) study. the reason is that conceptual modifications were made to the gdp and unemployment statistics for 1999. in what follows, new values for 1995 are presented with regard to gdp. the threshold values describing the situation at the end of the 1990s are presented in table 2. the values for each of these indicators in 1995 and 1999 (per district) are presented in cd-appendixes 1, 2, and 3. cartographic presentations for each variable, and synthesis of each are presented in figures 2–4 and cd-figures 1–7. the definition of functionally significant urban regions used here is based on vartiainen and antikainen (1998) (in english, see antikainen & vartiainen 1999b). analysis of the data suggests that regional growth is at its highest level in export-oriented districts (fig. 2 & cd-fig. 1–2). the economy is booming in information-technology-oriented districts and especially where nokia is located (nokia was the leading international telecommunications firm and the main engine of the finnish knowledge-based economy in the late 1990s). this is particularly so for both the district of salo, nokia’s home base in terms of the electronics industry, and also with regard to the helsinki and oulu districts, where the local boom related to the knowledge-based economy is most visible. in addition, gross domestic product is also rather high in small districts that specialise in the forestry and steel industries. such districts include jämsä and äänekoski in central finland. large and medium-sized districts that are industrialised in the traditional sense and have a strong economic track record (such as kouvola and lappeenranta in south-eastern finland) remain close to the national average, however. a special case in terms of gdp in finland is that of mariehamn, the captable 1. threshold values employed with regard to regional economy, employment, and migration, in 1995. tion to the present case, the joensuu district cooperation organisation (jyty) also includes the entire district of outokumpu (with 13,500 inhabitants). differentiation of districts a comparison of regional growth, employment, and migration describes rather well the state of spatial development at the end of the 1990s in finland. the sixth edition of the finnish-language atlas of finland (suomen kartasto) included an analysis of the characteristics of development in 1995 (antikainen & vartiainen 1999). in what follows, district boundaries correspond to the 1999 classification. we have grouped districts according to three basic indicators of regional development: gross domestic product (gdp) per capita in each district, unemployment rate, and net migration rate. in this grouping, a district’s growth is considered strong if the level of its gdp is ten percent higher than the national average, and weak if it is ten percent lower. the migration rate refers to the number of migrations as a proportion of the population in the target district. migration balance is considered positive if the rate is five per thousand or higher, and negative if it is minus five per thousand or lower. the unemployment rate is compared to the national average. unemployment is considered high if the level is ten percent higher than the national average, and low if it is ten percent lower. the threshold values utilised in the study presented in the 1999 atlas of finland relating to the characteristics of development in 1995 are presented in table 1. these values differ slightly from those actually employed in the antikainen and fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 187finnish districts and regional differentiation ital of the autonomous åland islands, which is an important private service centre for shipping companies and for banking. the gdp per capita level rose significantly in most finnish districts in the late 1990s. this is, however, mainly due to the low starting levels of 1995, which were a consequence of a deep nationwide recession in the early 1990s. gdp per capita growth has been moderate only in a few heavily industrialised districts (kemi–tornio, raahe, and porvoo). this, in turn, is a result of a successful year, 1995, particularly for the steel industry; production is heavily concentrated in kemi– tornio and in raahe in the northern coastal area of the gulf of bothnia, close to the swedish border. as an indicator, gdp is sensitive to economic fluctuations. the market prices of products react instantly to these fluctuations. today a strong regional economy does not necessarily entail anything close to traditional notions of ‘full employment’. this is primarily so because of the ‘jobless growth’ in many traditional manufacturing industries. this phenomenon is especially prevalent in many small and medium-sized industrial districts (e.g., jämsä and äänekoski). in addition, the emerging knowledge-based industries do not usually provide viable employment opportunities to the often elderly local labour force. this is visible also in many growth centres that suffer from high unemployment rates, even though the basis of the local economy is solid (e.g., oulu and tampere). it is obvious that significant north–south and east–west divisions in terms of unemployment exist across finland (fig. 3 & cd-fig. 3–4). these divisions have been rather stable for decades, however, highlighting the inertia inherent to the economic and cultural structures of finland’s macro-regions. with few exceptions, peripheral regions in northern and eastern finland are regions of high unemployment. the lowest unemployment rate is found in coastal, often swedishspeaking districts in western finland. based on the figures in the 1995 and 1999 data comparison, a greater number of districts were below the national average in 1999, despite the sharp fall of the unemployment rate. this perhaps unexpected result is due to two factors. firstly, the unemployment level in 1995 was high across most of the districts. secondly, employment in some of the largest districts, especially in helsinki and its surroundings, improved considerably, thus reducing the average unemployment rate nationally. analysis of the data suggests that at the turn of the millennium, migration was focused on only a few growth centres in finland (fig. 4 & cd-fig. 5–6). the districts of oulu, jyväskylä, tampere, turku, salo, and particularly that of helsinki show strong positive net migration rates. most of these destinations are large or medium-sized university towns, salo being the only exception. migration flows reflect local education and labour market opportunities. the spatial differentiation of education and labour markets was emphasized particularly during the long boom period of the finnish economy starting in the mid-1990s. large university districts are competitive in both of these fields. the growth of helsinki and its surroundings is reflected in the neighbouring districts as well. indeed, migration is increasingly directed towards districts with a good transportation infrastructure to, and from, the helsinki region (e.g., hämeenlinna, porvoo, and lohja). the jyväskylä district has a slightly different profile from the other growth centres. here, gdp is relatively low and unemployment remains high. most of the medium-sized provincial centres (e.g., table 2. threshold values employed with regard to regional economy, employment, and migration, in 1999. 188 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)janne antikainen and perttu vartiainen fig. 2. regional gdp per capita, in 1999 (source: statistics finland). for a comparison with the year 1995, see cdfig. 1. vaasa, seinäjoki, lappeenranta, mikkeli, kuopio, and joensuu) have migration balances near zero. the highest negative migration balance is to be found in peripheral areas of northern and eastern finland (see antikainen 2001). the summary of the examination is presented in cd-figure 7. the two maps show that only the helsinki and salo districts fall in the highest category in all three variables. the oulu district is also strong but its unemployment level remains considerably high. the number of districts in the weakest category was 20 in 1995, but the total number in this category had risen to 30 in 1999. many small and medium-sized districts in peripheral northern and eastern finland also lag behind the national average: in 1995 only the district of kajaani could be placed in the weakest category, but in 1999, it was accompanied by rovaniemi, varkaus, and savonlinna. noteworthy in this respect is the position of two northern regional centres (kajaani and rovaniemi) in this group. furthermore, the trend in small and mediumsized industrial regions in coastal western districts such as raahe and kokkola is not positive either, as they also belong to the weakest category. new conditions for regional development according to the conventional rules of regional development in an industrialised society, local economic growth should lead to employment growth and, consequently, to a positive migration balance. this almost causally perceived connection between local economic growth and employment changed at least somewhat significantly during the 1990s, however: some regions with strong positive economic growth suffered from massive unemployment and out-migration (e.g., kemi–tornio and imatra), and vice versa. in addition, the reorganisation of the service sector challenged the generation of employment in service-based districts in the latter half of the 1990s. currently, the number of winners is decreasing and the number of losers is growing among the finnish districts. the winners are large university districts and centres of the electronics industry, whilst the losers are those districts where the economic structure is derived from primary production, basic industries, and public services. success, however, is often dependent on the chosen variables, indicators, and databases. the dichotomy of “winners” and “losers” should not therefore be exaggerated or dramatised. a significant number of districts in finland are performing adequately: they are not booming nor are they in crisis (menestys… 1999). furthermore, the most interesting up-swingers, oulu and salo, rely on relatively narrow elements of growth and, overall, the actual demographic and economic changes in these now prospering districts are relatively minor. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 189finnish districts and regional differentiation fig. 3. unemployment rate, in 1999 (source: ministry of labour). for a comparison with the year 1995, see cd-fig. 3. regional differences also exist within the districts: very negative development trends characterise some residential areas of helsinki, while prospering villages can be found in peripheral eastern finland. the former case reflects the growth of urban problems that are now a part of the landscape of structural change across society. the latter case, in turn, reflects the growing role of locality-based factors in spatial development. in finland this mosaic-like spatial pattern has been typical of south and central ostrobothnia where micro-entrepreneurship has played a very significant role in the local economy. r&d-intensive institutions, universities, and other research and development units play a decisive role in knowledge-based development. in addition, it is essential that urban regions have a competitive, high-competence-based position in the international economy. only a few urban regions in finland possess these preconditions for development. the future criteria for success will be even more multi-dimensional, however: quantitative growth will not replace qualitative development as socio-cultural elements have a more direct and pronounced impact on the locational preferences of the population and the economy. fig. 4. net migration, in 1999 (source: statistics finland). for a comparison with the year 1995, see cd-fig. 5. 190 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)janne antikainen and perttu vartiainen references aluekehitysalan sanasto: suomi–englanti–ranska (1998). sisäasiainministeriön julkaisu 1/1998. ministry of the interior, helsinki. antikainen j (2001). kaupungit itäja pohjoissuomen aluekehitysdynamiikan solmukohtina (abstract: urban regions as nodes of regional development in eastern and northern finland). terra 113, 89–103. antikainen j & p vartiainen (1999a). alueellinen erilaistuminen ja seutukunnat. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 60–63. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. antikainen j & p vartiainen (1999b). framing the urban network in finland – the urban network study 1998. in a portrait of finnish cities, towns and functional urban regions – the finnish urban indicators system, 15–22. committee for urban policy, ministry of the interior, helsinki. järnegren a & f ventura (1977). tre samhällens förändringshistoria: exploateringen av den fysiska miljön i historisk belysning. stadens råd för byggnadsforskning r55. lund. menestys kasaantuu – alueet erilaistuvat. selvitys aluekehityksen suunnasta 1990-luvulla (1999). association of finnish local and regional authorities, helsinki. municipalities and regional divisions based on municipalities 2001 (2001). statistics finland, helsinki. raento p & k husso (2002). cultural diversity in finland. fennia 180, 151–164. van der laan l (1998). changing urban systems: an empirical analysis at two spatial levels. regional studies 32, 235–248. vartiainen p (1992). seutuistumisen näköalat keskisuomessa. keski-suomen liitto, julkaisu a 6. jyväskylä. vartiainen p & j antikainen (1998). kaupunkiverkkotutkimus 1998. kaupunkipolitiikan yhteistyöryhmän julkaisu 2/98. ministry of the interior, helsinki. ventura f & o wärneryd (1983). differentiation of settlement systems on the basis of population densities and level of development. “regionalisation” now and in the future. geographia polonica 47, 29–37. untitled well-being in finland: a comparison of municipalities and residential differentiation in two cities seppo siirilä, mari vaattovaara and ville viljanen siirilä, seppo, mari vaattovaara & ville viljanen (2002). well-being in finland: a comparison of municipalities and residential differentiation in two cities. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 141–149. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. differences in well-being are examined at two regional levels. first, variations in well-being are studied based on municipal statistics by three indices that represent different aspects of life. the examination shows that the most problematic areas are in eastern and northern finland. second, residential differentiation is examined in two metropolitan areas, helsinki and tampere, through two variables: families with children and residents with university education. metropolitan helsinki is divided into socially distinctive residential areas. low levels of education and the threat of unemployment concentrate in the northern and eastern parts of the city. such clear socio-economic differentiation cannot be found in metropolitan tampere. seppo siirilä & ville viljanen, department of regional studies and environmental policy, fin-33014 university of tampere, finland. mari vaattovaara, department of geography, p. o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. introduction well-being in society refers to the individuals’ needs being met. satisfaction of needs is based on resources for well-being, which may be assessed from the viewpoint of standards of living and quality of life. resources for well-being do not automatically satisfy people’s needs but do provide tools that can be used in numerous ways. satisfaction depends on an individual’s values, lifestyles, and personal experiences. since well-being is a subjective feeling, it is difficult to measure statistically. from the perspective of understanding social dynamics and the steering of regional development policies, it is nevertheless important to find adequate statistical variables and to study insufficient resources and their connection to various spatial structures. in practical research, the spatial pattern of social well-being manifests itself mainly as the presence or absence of resources for well-being. these resources may take different forms in different aspects of life. the lack of well-being is primarily linked to meagre income. well-being is not, however, only a material and quantitative phenomenon, but is also (perhaps foremost) an immaterial and qualitative one except in extreme material deprival. deprivation may occur in social relationships, housing conditions, level of education, insecurity, susceptibility to illness, and self-fulfilment. this article has two objectives. the first is to examine regional variations in well-being in finland based on municipal statistics from the mid1990s. this kind of work falls within what could be called ‘the welfare tradition’ in geography (riihinen 1965; hautamäki 1969; smith 1977; aronen & siirilä 1981; kuitunen & siirilä 1985; siirilä et al. 1990). changes in the regional patterns of well-being and the foundation of regional policy in finland, together with theories of regional imbalance from the late 1950s onwards, triggered the need for systematic statistical studies on regional differences in living conditions. the construction of the finnish welfare society after world war ii significantly improved the standard of living throughout the country. the period of rapid industrialization and urbanization between 1950 and 1970 led, however, to radical changes in regional differences. in response to this situation, the first regional policy law came into 142 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)seppo siirilä, mari vaattovaara and ville viljanen force in 1966 (applicable to the years 1966– 1969). one of the principal tasks of social and regional policy since the mid-1960s has been the reduction of regional inequalities. regional differences in living conditions have, however, been studied in finland even before world war ii. for example, one study addressed the concept of well-being and regional variation in finland already in 1901 (gebhard 1908). the second aim of this article is to investigate urban social differences in the helsinki and tampere metropolitan areas. this draws from the tradition of studying urban segregation processes and factorial ecology (shevky & bell 1955; sweetser 1965; timms 1971). the objective of these studies is to identify regions with distinctive social characteristics within cities. helsinki is the capital of finland and its metropolitan area covers the municipalities of helsinki, espoo, kauniainen, and vantaa. this metropolitan area had about one million inhabitants in 1999. tampere is the second-largest metropolitan area in the country, with approximately 300,000 residents. the tampere metropolitan area consists of tampere, kangasala, lempäälä, nokia, pirkkala, and ylöjärvi. a meaningful analysis of the residential differentiation of an urban population demands the availability of detailed data. thus, social disparities in these two finnish urban regions are studied by 250-metre grid cells. the grid cell data supplied by statistics finland are for the year 1997. the examination of regional differences in the 1990s is interesting for at least two reasons. during the 1990s, finland experienced two major economic upheavals that resulted in new divisions of labour both nationally and locally. at the beginning of the decade, finland faced a recession more severe than in any other oecd country since world war ii. during this economic crisis, labour shortage was replaced by mass unemployment, amounting to about one-fifth of the labour force. on the other hand, the new emphases of production, i.e., the growing importance of information technology and a knowledge-based mode of production, revived some areas faster than others (menestys… 1999). comparison of municipalities the patterns of social well-being are multidimensional, so several indicators are needed to represent spatial differences. the three indices used in this study have been established so that the mean for all municipalities (452) of the country is 100, with a standard deviation of 10. the index values of the municipalities are thus either above or below 100, depending on how they correspond to the mean. the same index includes variables indicating a similar regional divergence. the first index consists of individuals with high incomes (over fim 150,000 or, in current terms, roughly eur 21,200 per year) and a high level of education (university degree). the percentages of those living in overcrowded housing conditions and of the disabled of the total population were used to calculate the second index. a dwelling is considered to be overcrowded if there is more than one person per room. the most common illnesses and conditions leading to disability in finland are mental disorders, cardiovascular diseases, and orthopaedic diseases (statistical… 1997: 145). hospital admissions for narcotics-related illnesses form the third index. we studied the variables describing well-being in closer detail with regard to a typology of municipalities (table 1 & fig. 1). according to the underlying research tradition, well-being is linked to certain factors of regional structure and division of labour (aronen & siirilä 1981; kuitunen & siirilä 1985). this typology illustrates the structural differences between municipalities, but it does not measure the actual level of well-being. the typology used in this study is based on siirilä et al. (1990), who primarily classified municipalities according to such factors as commuting, service equipment (based on a network centre classification), degree of urbanization, and regional division of labour. the regional distribution of municipality types is shown in figure 1. differences between the types are related to the regional division of labour, which manifests itself most clearly in the differences between urban and rural municipalities. the typology distinguishes the urban and rural municipalities as well as those municipalities that are the most urbanized, industrialized, and suburbanized. the urban municipalities include (1) large population centres; (2) industrial centres; and (3) suburban municipalities. large population centres are usually provincial capitals. a high percentage of manufacturing and service industries characterize industrial centres. the level of service equipment in this second category is lower than in large population centres. most industrial centres are purefennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 143well-being in finland fig. 1 & table 1. well-being by type of municipality. index 1 consists of persons of high income and with an advanced level of education (university degree) in 1996. index 2 consists of those living in overcrowded housing and the disabled, in 1995 (data: statistics finland). index 3 was calculated on the basis of drug-related illnesses (mean, in 1995–1997) (data: national research and development centre for welfare and health). 144 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)seppo siirilä, mari vaattovaara and ville viljanen ly industrial towns, characteristically with one large enterprise. suburban municipalities are located near the largest centres, mainly in southern finland. they are characterized by a large number of residents who commute to work to the nearest centre. the municipalities in finland’s rural areas are (1) rural population centres; (2) industrialized rural municipalities; (3) rural commuter municipalities; and (4) primary production municipalities. the first category consists of municipalities that function as service centres for the surrounding rural areas. in these towns, employees of the primary sector account for an average of one-fifth of the employed work force. industrialized rural municipalities typically have one large enterprise. in rural commuter municipalities, a significant share of the labour force is employed in another town. the municipalities in this third category clearly differ from their suburban counterparts in their industrial structure. a high percentage of primary production activity characterizes the municipalities in the fourth category. the first index represents perhaps the most common concept of standard of living, i.e., available income and level of education. the spatial pattern of the first index is clear (table 1 & fig. 2). levels of income and education are linked to urbanization and division of labour. finland’s large population centres, a few other centres, and their neighbouring municipalities show high values on the first index. high values around large cities suggest that these municipalities have become quite urbanized. this phenomenon can be referred to as regionalization: the centre and adjacent municipalities form the functional area of daily activities for its inhabitants and various organizations (vartiainen 1992). municipalities in provincial peripheries fall markedly below the national mean. variations in the first index between types of municipalities are notable. the spatial picture of the first index differs from the zonal map depicting the second index. unlike the first index, variables used to calculate the second index indicate deprivation and the situation of the underprivileged. urban municipalities compare favourably with the national mean. in finland, urban areas are generally better off in terms of employment and poverty. variations between types, however, are smaller than in the first index (table 1). variations are more evident between different parts of finland than between the types of municipalities. in general, the regional divergence of the second index appears in zones (fig. 3). the problems concentrate in the municipalities of central, eastern, and northern finland. rural municipalities in northern and eastern parts of the country are clearly the most problematic areas and, to a large extent, the same is true of central finland. rural areas in the south and in the west have better opportunities for successful farming and shorter distances to large urban communities. the economic structure of towns in eastern and northern finland is also weaker than in the south and the west. measurement of drug-related illnesses sheds a novel light on previously unexamined social problems (cf. aronen & siirilä 1981; kuitunen & siirilä 1985; siirilä et al. 1990). in comparison with the other european countries, drug abuse in finland has only recently become a severe problem. drug experiments and regular use, as well as refig. 2. distribution of population with high income and a university degree in 1996, by municipality (index 1) (data: statistics finland). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 145well-being in finland lated harms, increased steadily during the 1990s (virtanen 2001). by type of municipality, the urban districts on average seem to have more problems than finnish municipalities (table 1). drug use has grown mainly in large towns (virtanen 1999: 125), and its spread into smaller towns and rural areas is only beginning (viljanen 2001). this trend is comparable with the general pattern of spatial diffusion of innovations: new phenomena, fashions and lifestyles are usually adopted first in urban areas. moreover, the supply of drugs is concentrated in the largest towns, where their demand is higher. the regional pattern of drug-related illnesses is a relatively diffuse one (fig. 4). these illnesses also yield higher-than-average values for many rural districts. figure 4 shows that high values are observed especially in lapland and eastern finland, where problems occur both in urban and rural areas. in these areas, such factors as lack of leisure activities and unemployment predispose to the use of drugs and other intoxicants. furthermore, the values for coastal municipalities clearly exceed the national average. drugs are imported into the country mostly via seaports, where they are offered to locals. residential differentiation in metropolitan helsinki and tampere residential differences in metropolitan helsinki and tampere are studied by census data in a 250metre grid cell format. by using detailed data, variations within these two cities can be depicted and visualized, and problems with data analysis based on administrative units can be avoided. the use of administrative units (e. g., municipalities) masks variations within large areas. residential differences are examined through two variables that represent two dimensions of social differentiation: the percentage of persons with a high level of education (socio-economic status) and the percentage of families with children (family status). these dimensions have commonly been identified in factor analysis studies of urban areas (timms 1971). family status the spatial pattern in figure 5 shows that families with children tend to congregate in suburban regions in metropolitan helsinki. these suburban areas populated by families with children are also characterized by large numbers of owner-occupied houses. the zonal-type regional pattern of family status found in metropolitan helsinki has been recognized in previous studies investigating urban segregation processes, and can also be seen in metropolitan tampere (fig. 6). the high scores for the areas located far from the city centre and built in the 1980s and 1990s stand out. this aspect of spatial differentiation primarily represents residents’ differences in lifestyle preferences and life-cycle characteristics. new residential areas located some distance away from the city centre and with lower living costs attract families with young children. the move to the suburbs may also reflect an attempt to find a more congenial environment for family life. fig. 3. distribution of people living in overcrowded housing and the disabled in 1995, by municipality (index 2) (data: statistics finland). 146 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)seppo siirilä, mari vaattovaara and ville viljanen level of education the regional distribution of university-educated residents in metropolitan helsinki is presented in cd-figure 1. level of education is a central element in the formation of life politics and is regarded to influence taste and personal choices (roos 1993). this dimension divides greater helsinki quite sharply. a low level of education characterizes the northern and eastern parts of the metropolis, while the western and seashore neighbourhoods attract those with a high level of education. the image of residential areas and the supply of upscale dwellings are better in the western parts of metropolitan helsinki. the appeal of eastern and northern residential areas is thus lower. differences in unemployment within the examined urban areas were virtually non-existent in the late 1980s, but recent traits of a permanent spatial concentration of unemployment have emerged. kortteinen and vaattovaara (1999) claim that a new phase began in the helsinki region in the 1990s. metropolitan helsinki is becoming increasingly differentiated socially. one interpretation of these observations is to conclude that the current growth of the economy, based on the information sector, emphasizes the role of education as a labour market resource. new growth with innovative technologies breeds professionalization and novel divisions within both the labour market and the city (hamnett 1994). the information sector has been the main engine of economic growth in metropolitan helsinki after the 1990s’ national depression. about two-thirds of the economic growth after 1993 – measured by the number of people employed – is based on the information sector. as a result, the growth revives different areas at different rates, depending mainly on the educational level of the population (kortteinen et al. 1999). despite the growing polarization, residential differentiation in metropolitan helsinki is still quite mosaic-like and the regional dispersion of the underprivileged is relatively diffuse in comparison with europe’s major cities. such factors as narrow income differences between finnish households in general and the distinctive heterogeneity of finnish residential areas (i.e., residential areas include different kinds of dwellings, such as municipal rental apartment blocks and owner-occupied buildings) have so far prevented the formation of areas where the underprivileged are concentrated. the most problematic areas have remained fairly small and scattered in their distribution. it is thus possible to identify local ‘pockets of poverty’ rather than any widespread trends towards polarization. the same kind of spatial division of residents with a high educational level as that found in metropolitan helsinki cannot be seen in tampere (cd-fig. 2). there, the spatial picture depicted by the level of education displays more of a mosaic structure. the impact of the waterfront (in this case, lakeshore) is nevertheless evident in tampere as well. the percentage of university-educated population is high in expensive residential areas near the lake. it is worth noting, however, that the municipalities adjacent to the city of tampere are more rural than the ones surrounding helsinfig. 4. distribution of people suffering from drug-related illnesses (mean) in 1995–1997, by municipality (index 3) (data: national research and development centre for welfare and health). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 147well-being in finland ki. the percentage of the university-educated population is thus clearly lower in the adjacent municipalities than in the city of tampere. conclusions at the municipal level, differences in well-being between rural and urban areas in finland are evident. compared with the situation in the 1980s, however, the regional pattern of economic deprivation became more complex in the 1990s: unemployment and poverty increased in urban areas (see viljanen 2001). the largest finnish cities and the surrounding municipalities grew rapidly in the 1990s. this development aggravated social problems in some urban areas. one may also talk about the strong regionalisation of major cities: their urban structure has spread into several neighbouring municipalities and internal specialization has occurred within the urban area. on the other hand, certain parts of the country, especially remote rural municipalities in northern and eastern finland, clearly fell below the national mean for many variables, with the situation becoming even worse in the 1990s. the remote rural areas lagged behind the rest of the country and differed markedly even from those heartland rural areas that otherwise have a similar social structure. the remote areas lost more inhabitants and recovered more slowly from the depression in terms of job creation and rising income than the rural heartland. it should be noted, however, that extraordinary times, such as the economic depression of the 1990s, can also temporarily slow down or accelerate local trends. such economic conditions make it difficult to tell whether regional differences in well-being are caused by more profound structural factors or whether they are just temporary deviations from a longer trend. on the other hand, the effects of the depression may become visible in the population’s qualitative well-being slowly, following a considerable delay. to reach a conclusion about whether a phenomenon is a lasting trend or merely a temporary condition caused by the depression, a regional inventory of deprivation should cover a time span that includes both economic highs and lows. suitable variables of a depression’s fig. 5. families with children in metropolitan helsinki in 1997, percentage by 250-metre grid cells (data: statistics finland). 148 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)seppo siirilä, mari vaattovaara and ville viljanen qualitative effects could be mortality rates and the number of children taken into custody. the grid cell material of this study shows that the spatial concentration of university-educated residents is quite obvious in metropolitan helsinki. the traditions of the nordic welfare state, together with the policies of social mixing, have nevertheless resulted in a situation where the ‘black holes’ of urban development are relatively small (the size of a block, a house, or a part of a residential building) and scattered about the city. urban inequalities in metropolitan helsinki are based more on the level of education than on impoverishment and are not linked to multi-problem neighbourhoods but, rather, to some multiproblem blocks-of-flats in the middle of average, structurally heterogeneous neighbourhoods. the spatial distribution of the university-educated population seems to be fairly even in metropolitan tampere. because of the lack of longitudinal analyses and detailed studies concerning socio-economic differentiation in this area, it is nevertheless difficult to say whether polarization has grown in recent decades. references aronen k & s siirilä (1981). hyvinvointierot ja alueellinen erilaistuneisuus. tampereen yliopisto, aluetieteen laitos b 27. gebhard h (1908). yhteiskuntatilastollinen kartasto suomen maalaiskunnista v. 1901. helsinki. hamnett c (1994). social polarisation in global cities: theory and evidence. urban studies 31, 537– 556. hautamäki l (1969). kehittyneisyyden alueittaisista eroista maassamme. in hautamäki l, s siirilä & r ylönen (eds). tutkimus kasvupolitiikan perusteiksi suomessa. helsingin yliopiston maantieteen laitoksen julkaisuja b 3, 1–55. kortteinen m, m lankinen & m vaattovaara (1999). pääkaupunkiseudun kehitys 1990-luvulla: kohti uudenlaista eriytymistä. yhteiskuntapolitiikka 64, 411–422. kortteinen m & m vaattovaara (1999). huono-osaisuus pääkaupunkiseudulla 1980ja 1990-luvuilla – käännekohta kaupunkiseudun kehityksessä. terra 111, 133–145. kuitunen j & s siirilä (1985). elinympäristöt – hyvinvointi – aluepolitiikka. tampereen yliopisto, aluetieteen laitos b 36. menestys kasaantuu – alueet erilaistuvat: aluekehifig. 6. families with children in metropolitan tampere in 1997, percentage by 250-metre grid cells (data: statistics finland). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 149well-being in finland tyksen suunta 1990-luvulla (1999). suomen kuntaliitto, helsinki. riihinen o (1965). teollistuvan yhteiskunnan alueellinen erilaistuneisuus. wsoy, porvoo. roos jp (1993). keskiluokka ja hyvinvointivaltio: uusi hyvinvointisopimus? in a karista & e holstila (eds). helsinki avoin kaupunki, 143–158. helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, helsinki. shevky e & w bell (1955). social area analysis. theory, illustrative application, and computational procedures. stanford university press, stanford. siirilä s, l hautamäki, j kuitunen & t keski-petäjä (1990). regional well-being variations in finland. fennia 168, 179–200. smith d (1977). human geography: a welfare approach. edward arnold, london. statistical yearbook of the social insurance institution (1997). a publication by the social insurance institution t1 33. helsinki. sweetser f (1965). factorial ecology: helsinki 1960. demography 2, 372–386. timms d (1971). the urban mosaic. towards a theory of residential differentiation. cambridge university press, cambridge. vartiainen p (1992). seutuistumisen näköalat keskisuomessa. keski-suomen liitto, julkaisu a 6. viljanen v (2001). huono-osaisuuden alueellinen kehitys 1990-luvulla – laman ja sen jälkeisen talouskasvun vaikutukset. kuntaliitto, acta 139. virtanen a (2001). national report on the drugs situation in finland 2001. national research and development centre for welfare and health, statistical report 7/2001. and now what? changing fields and methodologies during the covid-19 pandemic: from international mobilities to education urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99236 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99236 reflections and now what? changing fields and methodologies during the covid-19 pandemic: from international mobilities to education antonio pedro de barros, ana daniela guerreiro, mafalda f. mascarenhas & rita reis de barros, a. p., guerreiro, a. d., mascarenhas, m. f. & reis, r. (2020) and now what? changing fields and methodologies during the covid-19 pandemic: from international mobilities to education. fennia 198(1–2) 234–238. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99236 the covid-19 pandemic and the worldwide lockdown have brought about profound changes to the way in which fieldwork is done. during a time particularly marked by social distancing, how do social scientists cope with the need to alter their methodologies with fields in transition? this essay reflects upon the changes caused by the pandemic, both in the field and in the methodologies adopted by the authors – all in different phases of their phd research. drawing from their research areas, it focuses on two main thematic axes, both deeply affected by the current situation: international mobilities (of commodities and people) and education (in portugal and abroad). keywords: education, commodities, international mobilities, research methodologies, covid-19 antonio pedro de barros (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5091-4589), ana daniela guerreiro (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1241-4764), mafalda f. mascarenhas (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0716-3748) & rita reis (https://orcid.org/00000003-4109-7569) instituto de ciências sociais, universidade de lisboa, av. prof. aníbal bettencourt 9, 1600-189 lisboa, portugal. e-mail: antoniopbarros@ gmail.com, danieelaa.guerreiro@gmail.com, mafalda.mascarenhas@ics.ulisboa. pt, ritamreis@edu.ulisboa.pt introduction dealing with a changing field and overcoming difficulties of many sorts is something social scientists are used to in their long-term research, based on the fluidity of interpersonal relationships and dynamic social contexts. however, the covid-19 pandemic has resulted in an unknown situation for researchers – and human beings in general. by now, it is well known that this pandemic brought about an unprecedented world-scale scenario that has frozen basic daily routines over recent months, and for the foreseeable future. sudden changes in methodologies in social sciences are common for many reasons including political instability and violence (bourgois 1990; kovats bernat 2002), and gender-based issues (golde 1986; isidoros 2015). but researchers must cope with a new set of problems, such as confinement, inability to move and, above all, social distancing. this reframing is valid for both researchers and their interlocutors who, in one way or another, were affected by the situation. © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 235antonio pedro de barros et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) this essay reflects upon the changes brought on by the pandemic, both in the field and the methodologies adopted by us – all in different phases of phd research. reis felt covid-19’s impact during the final weeks of her two-year research with sahrawi students in spain and algeria although these impacts were not significant. instead, the pandemic became an opportunity for her to observe important social dynamics that were being affected and changed by the situation. meanwhile, barros, guerreiro, and mascarenhas were confronted with abrupt changes when their research activities were about to begin. a different kind of methodological consideration was to be made then, mostly regarding the conditions of executing the research plan in relation to expected changes in their prospective research sites. despite these differences, we have all shared the need to deal with sudden modifications in our fieldwork without having – at least so far – to radically change the direction of our intended research. our experiences are presented through two main thematic axes that seem deeply affected by the situation: international mobilities and education. concluding remarks are then presented. staring at border control: the international mobilities of commodities, people, and money during the covid-19 pandemic the covid-19 pandemic came along with the re-strengthening of the role of polities in general, and the nation-state in particular. the closing of national borders and the imposition of confinement measures restricted to national territories emerged as an almost natural response to the rapid spread of the virus and escalation of its disease-inflicted deaths (european commission 2020; fernandes & salvador 2020). these measures ended up causing serious constraints in the mobilities of people and commodities. thus, we reflect on how the pandemic affects the international mobilities of commodities, people, and the fields of research that depend on it, illustrating it through guerreiro’s research focused on the discourses and practices of portuguese ethical fashion brands, and barros’s study seeking to understand the relation between collective academic migration of brazilian phd students to portugal. regarding commodities, the european commission has presented measures to ensure the continuity of cargo transport services by air, sea and land, aiming for the maintenance of the normal functioning of the european internal market (european commission 2020; rangel logistics solutions 2020) and trying to minimize economic losses. however, according to portuguese ethical fashion brand representatives, although it was possible to transport goods between most european countries, some borders were strongly conditioning circulation of materials needed for the manufacture of their garments. these constraints, as guerreiro was told, not only ended up delaying the production process, but also the product delivery, as online sales increased exponentially. this exponential increase in demand, both in international and national stores, paired with an inability to supply the demand, translated into serious economic losses. on the one hand, through social media and direct contacts with ethical fashion brand representatives, guerreiro observed how these brands reacted to the pandemic, especially regarding changes in production, selling and consumers. on the other hand, she rescheduled the participation in neonyt,1 which is central to her research. while guerreiro’s research interests required a focus on how the circulation of commodities is happening, barros’ theme paid special attention to the mobility of people. over the last few years, the presence of brazilian students and researchers in portugal has increased exponentially (amato 2018). even though it is too soon to gather data from universities’ new admissions, there is already a recent report stating that the number of visa applications by brazilian students in portuguese consulates has increased 18% in comparison to the academic year of 2019/2020 (amato 2020). so, the pandemic may not be having a significant impact on the upward trend in brazilian academic mobility to portugal. nonetheless, other dimensions of these mobilities have been affected and should be taken into account. one of the changes identified by barros was the fact that many academic programs are proposing mixed in-person/virtual participation in academic activities. this situation deeply affects his research. having classes and meetings online is a way of participating in the academic environment of a different country, without the experience of international displacement. in this case, not only the 236 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) different modalities of phd attendance need to be considered, but also the fact that research must also privilege other ethnographic methodologies without relying exclusively on university campuses. another aspect that affects the international circulation from brazil to europe is the fall in the value of the brazilian real, accompanied by the strengthening of the euro (elias 2020). considering that access to portuguese scholarships is especially difficult for brazilian students, they depend on brazilian money to finance their studies and lives in portugal. bearing this in mind, it is possible that the experience of these newly arrived students/researchers will be marked by economic deprivation and its yet uncertain consequences, something less common among highly skilled migrants than in those with a lower socioeconomic status (russi & karam brum 2019; togni 2019). given this uncertain scenario, we decided to begin by carrying out the tasks related to research and data collection on digital social networks and only later will we move to physical and social field study. in summary, it is perceptible that for those who are at an early stage of their research, covid-19 ends up being a challenge regarding the re-adjusting and re-scheduling of activities and, most importantly, reconnecting to people. schooling upside down: education paths during a pandemic within the scenario of the pandemic restrictions, education was deeply affected. from kindergartens to universities, the school year ended the same way: home-schooling, online classes, and severe mobility restrictions. several researchers worldwide follow the changes, improvements, and problems in educational access, especially regarding the most vulnerable groups such as migrants, students in rural areas or those from low socio-economic status (ses) backgrounds. we reflect on the consequences of the restrictions through two case studies: international students (sahrawis in spain) and national students (in portugal). like barros, but at the final stage of her research, reis has closely observed the consequences of pandemic restrictions among sahrawi youth and students in extremadura (spain). within the scope of mobilities among refugees, she analyses student migration among sahrawi youth. from a “consolidated” 2 exile context, thousands of youngsters leave the refugee camps, under official programs to study in algeria, spain or cuba. from an educational perspective, like other international students, her interlocutors were prevented from returning to the refugee camps. for those who had already secured work, covid-19 brought about both unemployment and new job opportunities. additionally, it was with concern that her interlocutors saw the closure of camp borders since it left their families without access to humanitarian aid. yet, in view of the debates around humanitarianism and development (harrellbond 2002; mosse 2005), it was very interesting to observe a reversal in the support chain: in march 2020 it was the sahrawis – from the camps – who sent videos and messages to support the spanish in their fight against covid-19. this exemplifies how the pandemic affected her fieldwork and the people she researches, changing dynamics that were thought unalterable. methodologically, and without doing an online ethnography, several online platforms and social media remained fundamental during confinement. it was through whatsapp that reis was able to be present at the eid meeting, which her interlocutors prepared at the end of ramadan. regarding the humanitarian domain, online meetings/events were focused on the combat of the serious impact of closing the refugee camps. even though online tools were very important during confinement, they were already present in reis’ relationships with her interlocutors. despite not having widespread effects on her research, it did affect her fieldwork and interlocutors. at a national level, mascarenhas aims to analyze discrimination in the portuguese educational context, focusing on discipline and the expectations and recommendations that teachers have about students’ future school paths. even before the pandemic, the portuguese educational system has frequently suffered alteration, constantly changing mascarenhas’ research field3. portuguese schools and teachers had to rapidly adapt to a system without on-site classes. attending online classes requires resources that are not always available: not only due to the quality of internet connection and hardware availability (i.e., computers, tablets, or smartphones), but also because of 237antonio pedro de barros et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) the characteristics of the domestic environment (how many people live in the household and how many work/study remotely), students’ age, autonomy and skills available to study remotely, parents’ availability and their ability to support the children, among several other factors. as expected, some students did not have quality internet access, or the necessary hardware for home-schooling. as usual, these problems do not affect all students in the same way (eef 2018; roldão 2015). mascarenhas was at the beginning of her phd when the state of emergency was declared. at that point she was doing the curricular part of her program which moved to online platforms and she had already planned some initial studies, such as a focus group with teachers, which had to be postponed. the focus group will now be conducted online, which has some advantages, such as having teachers from different parts of the country. an upside of the pandemic was that mascarenhas was able to start attending the lab meetings of her international co-supervisor, allowing for his feedback at an earlier stage of her phd than expected. mascarenhas’ fieldwork will all be done in a during/after-covid school environment and her findings will have to take that into consideration. despite sharing similar empirical contexts, the pandemic caught reis and mascarenhas at different stages of their research. reis was ending her fieldwork, mascarenhas had just begun, and experienced big transformations to her program and the field. alternatively, we relied on communication technologies and social media to further develop our research, for keeping in touch with people and for being involved in international host institutions’ activities. furthermore, we had a unique opportunity to observe the changes happening in loco, researching while these changes happened and in the immediate aftermath. conclusion covid-19 has changed the way social scientists organize, conduct their research and experience fieldwork (davies & spencer 2010; martins & mendes 2016). most importantly, it has changed their empirical fields and their interlocutors’ lives, revealing unexplored dimensions. throughout this essay, we reflected on how the pandemic modified both research fields and methodological strategies to collect data. for reis – at the final stage of her fieldwork – the pandemic did not bring about significant constraints, instead it provided an opportunity to better understand her field and interlocutors, through the emergence of new dynamics, especially in the humanitarian and education contexts. conversely, for barros, guerreiro and mascarenhas, all at an early stage of research, covid-19 has raised concerns regarding the beginning of the fieldwork and how it might be carried out in such an unknown situation. thus, as our reflections illustrate, we have ended up in similar situations as our interlocutors, favouring digital social networks to carry out research. but this is only the beginning of a health and social crisis that is far from being over. with such uncertainty surrounding research, and without the ability to predict the future, planning for the coming months will be a complex task. this period of uncertainty is not over and more adjustments will need to be made in the near future. that leads all of us to the question: and now what? notes 1 an international market that takes place annually in copenhagen and berlin and brings together ethical fashion brands. 2 spanish colony between 1884 and 1976, western sahara is the last colony in africa. the mauritanianmoroccan invasion in 1975 triggered the flight of about half of the population (san martín 2010). in the process of decolonization and waiting for a self-determination referendum, thousands of sahrawis live in exile. the refugee camps (tindouf, algeria) became the headquarters of the sahrawi arab democratic republic (sadr), since its proclamation in 1976, through the implementation of the embryonic structure of the future independent state. 3 one example was the change in criteria to university access through professional education (reis 2019). this change was particularly relevant to mascarenhas. initially, her focus was to understand the socio-psychological factors behind the discrepancies in the relative presence of black and white students in professional education (hindering access to university) by studying the recommendations 238 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) that teachers make at ninth-grade. she will now focus on the role of indiscipline on a more general variable measuring teachers’ expectations and recommendations about students’ future school paths. acknowledgments the phd researches of mascarenhas and reis are funded by the foundation for science and technology, portugal (grants ids: sfrh/bd/143843/2019 and sfrh/bd/128517/2017, respectively). references amato, g. (2018) número de estudantes brasileiros em portugal cresceu 540% desde 2005. o globo 13.7.2018 <https://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/numero-de-estudantes-brasileiros-em-portugal-cresceu540-desde-2005-22881554>. 17.8.2020. amato, g. (2020) apesar da pandemia e da crise, aumentam pedidos de brasileiros para estudar em portugal. o globo 14.8.2020 <https://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/apesar-da-pandemia-da-criseaumentam-pedidos-de-brasileiros-para-estudar-em-portugal-24585902>. 18.8.2020. bourgois, p. (1990) confronting anthropological ethics: ethnographic lessons from central america. journal of peace research 27(1) 43–54. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343390027001005 davies, j. & spencer, d. (2010) emotions in the field: the psychology and anthropology of fieldwork experience. 1st ed. stanford university press, palo alto, ca. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804774260 eef (2018) the attainment gap. education endowment foundation (eef) <https:// educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/public/files/annual_reports/eef_attainment_gap_report_2018.pdf>. 19.8.2020. elias, j. (2020) real é a moeda que mais perdeu valor para o dólar em 2020 entre 21 países. cnn brasil 1.4.2020 <https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/business/2020/04/01/real-e-a-moeda-que-mais-perdeu-valorpara-o-dolar-em-2020-entre-21-paises>. 18.8.2020 european commission (2020) viagens e transportes durante a pandemia covid-19 <https://ec.europa. eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/health/coronavirus-response/travel-and-transportation-during-coronaviruspandemic_pt>. 6.8.2020. fernandes, n. & salvador, s. (2020) portugal e espanha vão limitar circulação na fronteira a mercadorias e trabalhadores. diário de notícias 15.3.2020 <https://www.dn.pt/pais/portugal-e-espanha-vaolimitar-circulacao-na-fronteira-a-mercadorias-e-trabalhadores-11933220.html>. 6.8. 2020. golde, p. (1986) women in the field – anthropological experiences. 2nd ed. university of california press, berkeley. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1971.73.6.02a01160 harrell-bond, b. (2002) can humanitarian work with refugees be humane? human rights quarterly 24(1) 51–85. https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2002.0011 isidoros, k. (2015) between purity and danger: fieldwork approaches to movement, protection and legitimacy for a female ethnographer in the sahara desert. journal of the anthropological society of oxford 7(2) 39–54. kovats-bernat, j. c. (2002) negotiating dangerous fields: pragmatic strategies for fieldwork amid violence and terror. american anthropologist, new series 104(1) 208–222. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.1.208 martins, h. & mendes, p. (2016) trabalho de campo: envolvimento e experiências em antropologia. 1st ed. imprensa de ciências sociais, lisbon. mosse, d. (2005) cultivating development – an ethnography of aid policy and practice. 1st ed. pluto press, london. https://doi.org/10.3917/afco.242.0127 rangel logistics solutions (2020) covid-19: impactos logisticos nos principais mercados europeus 27.3.2020 <https://www.rangel.com/pt/blog/impactos-logisticos-mercados/>. 6.8.2020. reis, c. (2019) alunos do profissional vão ter vagas específicas para entrar no superior já em 2020. diário de notícias 29.11.2019 <https://www.dn.pt/pais/portugal-e-espanha-vao-limitar-circulacao-nafronteira-a-mercadorias-e-trabalhadores-11933220.html>. 19.8.2020. roldão, c. (2015) fatores e perfis de sucesso escolar “ inesperado .” iscte instituto universitário, lisboa. <https://repositorio.iscte-iul.pt/handle/10071/9342>. 19.8.2020. russi, a. & karam brum, c. (2019) sob diferentes tetos: etnografando casas e revelando dimensões educativas e patrimoniais. etnográfica 23(3) 693–715. https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.7484 san martín, p. (2010) western sahara – the refugee nation. 1st ed. university of wales press, cardiff. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8129.2012.00546_7.x togni, p. (2019) a europa é o cacém mobilidades, género e sexualidade nos deslocamentos de jovens brasileiros para portugal. 1st ed. etnográfica press, lisbon. 24961_05_alencar.pdf the trends and geography of nanotechnological research maria simone de m. alencar, claudia canongia and adelaide m. s. antunes maria simone de m. alencar, claudia canongia & adelaide m. s. antunes (2006). the trends and geography of nanotechnological research. fennia 184: 1, pp. 37–48. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper presents a study of trends in nanotechnology, indicating regional development efforts, based on analyses of scientific publications from 17 countries, divided in two sets: seven key countries (usa, france, germany, japan, united kingdom, canada and spain) and ten competitor-countries (brazil, india, china, australia, south africa, korea, singapore, malaysia, israel and mexico), from 1994 to 2004. a search in the web of science database was undertaken, utilizing 51 terms selected by experts in nanotechnology. a master dataset with almost 140,000 registers was created and scientific indicators were produced through data and text mining tools and a competitive intelligence approach. in the key countries, it was possible to discern the quantity of publications from the usa (21,769), followed by japan (10,883). within the per-country analysis, in the case of the usa, for example, the most frequently used terms are “nanoparticulates”, “nanotube”, “quantum dot”, “nanocrystal” and/or “nanostructure”. china has the best position in the competitor countries. brazil is the best in the latin america, and represents 5.7% of the competitor-country publications, with 1066 papers, and “quantum dot” is the most frequently term used for the representative brazilian universities. maria simone de m. alencar, school of chemistry, federal university of rio de janeiro (ufrj), brazil. e-mail: salencar@eq.ufrj.br or salencar@pobox.com. claudia canongia, national institute of metrology, standardization and industrial quality (inmetro), brazil. e-mail: ccanongia@inmetro.gov.br. adelaide m. s. antunes, school of chemistry, federal university of rio de janeiro (ufrj), brazil. e-mail: adelaide@eq.ufrj.br. introduction nanotechnology involves the construction and use of functional structures projected on an atomic or molecular scale, with it least one their dimensions measured in nanometers. on this scale, mainly because of quantum1 or superficial2 effects, the behaviour of matter is markedly different from the generally understood and commonly accepted concepts. the laws related to chemical, biological, electrical, magnetic and other properties on the nanoscale are different from those which apply to matter on a macroscale; it is the laws of quantum physics which rule in the “nanoworld”. a number of economic sectors are being affected by nanoscience/nanotechnology, with applications in the areas of health, chemicals and petrochemicals, computers, energy, agriculture, metallurgy, textiles and environmental protection, amongst others. the asia-pacific economic cooperation organization – apec, identifies the business opportunities offered by nanotechnology in three directions: molecular engineering, derived from biotechnology, electronic technology, based on semiconductors, and equipment and processes founded on new materials (tegart 2004). evaluating the potential of nanotechnology up to the year 2020, roco (2004) has affirmed that its development from exploratory concepts to wider applications behaves in a way similar to the transitions in information technology between 1960 and 2000 and in biotechnology between 1980 and 2010. thus, the monitoring and mining of tendencies in scientific advances in this area has become fundamental to the search for opportunities in research, development, innovation potential and future business, both in leading and emerging economies, a fact which underlines the research presented in this article. 38 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. s. de m. alencar, c. canongia and a. m. s. antunes in this context and in order to demonstrate the potentiality of the foresight methodology to support the decision making process in several areas, this paper presents a study of trends in nanotechnology, indicating regional development efforts, based on analyses of scientific publications from 17 countries, divided in two sets: seven key countries (usa, france, germany, japan, united kingdom, canada and spain) and ten competitor-countries (brazil, india, china, australia, south africa, korea, singapore, malaysia, israel and mexico), from 1994 to 2004. the nanoworld – generation of new systems and/or products nanotechnology, according to walsh (2004), may be seen as a disruptive technology, as its use generates products with performance attributes which cannot be evaluated by consumers. according to roco (2004), the first nanotechnology generation – beginning in 2000 – was the discovery and production of relatively simple components with nanometric particles, nanotubes and nanofilms. a major transition was observed most recently, in 2005, heading in the direction of active nanostructures and nanosystems. nanostructures change their states (morphology, form, mechanics, electrical properties, magnetism, etc.) during their operation. examples would be a mechanical activator which could change its dimensions, or nanoparticles for drug delivery which change their morphology and chemical composition. such changes are increasingly more complex the larger the structures and systems, and involve multiple phenomena. this technology has proven to be attractive to a number of economies, a fact which is emphasized when one considers that as early as 2002, a report commissioned by the uk ministry of science and innovation identified 30 countries as then undertaking activities and plans related to nanotechnology (uk advisory… 2002). three years later, roco (2005) presented international benchmarks for r&d in nanotechnology, demonstrating that at least 60 countries have initiatives in this area. the nanoworld is growing rapidly. the potential of technology may be evaluated relative to investments in research, development and innovation, and is currently one of the main focuses of activity in industrialized countries (baker & aston 2005). europe, japan and the usa have invested approximately equal amounts of government funds, estimated to be around us$1 billion for 2005 (foster 2005; schulte 2005). various studies have aimed to estimate the size of the global market for materials, products and processes based on nanotechnology. currently, there appears to be a convergence of estimates in the region of us$1 trillion for the period 2010 to 2015, according to market analysts from the mitsubishi research institute in japan, the deutsche bank in germany and lux research in the usa. the mining – identification of trends in scientific development the research3 took as reference the web of science database. for the purpose of mining scientific production in nanotechnology over an eleven-year period (1994–2004), 51 distinct terms were used, selected by brazilian experts in this area4. the advanced data recovery resources offered by the database were utilized, with the aim of expanding and enriching the results. the search terms were focused on the countries which are the focus of this analysis, divided into two groups: seven key countries (the usa, france, germany, japan, the uk canada and spain) and ten competitor-countries (brazil, india, china, australia, south africa, korea, malaysia, israel and mexico). macro-indicators were generated for each group of countries, using data and text mining resources, furnishing a general and regional view of scientific production of the complete range of nanotechnology. for the leaders of the key countries, the usa and japan, as well as for the leaders of the competitor countries, china (general) and brazil (latin america), the following were identified: • the total number of articles published per year (1994 to 2004) and the trend in publication, relative to the most frequently used nanotechnology terms for each year; • the total number of articles using the top terms, with identification of the authoring institutions with the greatest number of publications on the terms; • the main journals in which the leading authoring institutions with the highest frequency terms publish their articles. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 39the trends and geography of nanotechnological research a global vision of scientific development in nanotechnology for the period 1994 to march 2004, 139,618 articles containing the 51 search terms were found for all the countries involved. with regard to the key countries, this group represents around 40% of the total (55,704 articles), while the competitor-countries group presents a slighter participation, at 14% of the total (19,644 articles). it may be observed that the term “nanocrystal” shows the highest frequency, at 14.28%, followed by “nanoparticle”, which leads to the perception of a high level of diversity of publication in this area. table 1 presents the terms with a frequency of more than 5%. macro-trend of scientific development in key countries the leadership of the united states in publication is evident, with almost double the number of articles compared to the second-placed country, japan. it is also worth noting that the usa and japan together account for 58% of publications among the key countries. fig. 1 shows the participation, by percentages, of nanotechnology publications of the key countries over the ten years covered by the study. it can be observed in fig. 2 that there was exponential growth in the number of articles published in relation to nanotechnology during the period 1994 to 2002, in the order of 650%. the analysis for table 1. frequency of terms. nanoterm % nanocrystal 14.28% nanoparticle 13.51% nanostructures 10.06% quantum dots 9.13% fullerenes 9.02% nanotubes 8.25% nanocomposite 5.02% 20% usa 38% japan germany 17% france 11% uk 7% spain 4% canada 3% fig. 1. nano scientific papers published per key country (1994–2004). 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 fig. 2. historical evolution of nanotechnology publishing in the key countries. 40 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. s. de m. alencar, c. canongia and a. m. s. antunes table 2. highest frequency terms in articles published in the usa by year of publication – 1994/2004. usa – total number of articles = 21,769 year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] 1994 [636] fullerene [113] nanocrystal [59] quantum dot [49] quantum wire [40] nanomaterial [32] 2000 [2723] nanotube [283] nanoparticulate [280] quantum dot [246] nanocrystal [187] nanostructure [166] 1995 [788] fullerene [100] nanocrystal [85] nanostructure [64] nanomaterial [53] quantum dot [41] 2001 [3342] nanoparticulate [432] nanotube [355] quantum dot [266] nanocrystal [241] nanomaterial [208] 1996 [1054] nanocrystal [104] fullerene [103] quantum dot [88] nanostructure [76] nanoparticulate [68] 2002 [4310] nanoparticulate [602] nanotube [527] quantum dot [299] nanocrystal [265] nanostructure [242] 1997 [1213] nanocrystal [146] fullerene [98] nanoparticulate [94] quantum dot [90] nanostructure [83] 2003 [2517] nanoparticulate [731] quantum dot [291] nanocrystal [125] nanofiber [91] nanostructure [90] 1998 [1748] nanocrystal [182] nanotube [156] nanoparticulate [154] nanostructure [121] nanomaterial [98] 2004 [1224] nanotube [184] nanoparticulate [161] nanosize [71] nanocrystal [69] nanostructure [67] 1999 [2214] quantum dot [215] nanocrystal [214] nanoparticulate [203] nanotube [172] nanostructure [135] the last two years, 2003 and 2004, offers a lesser degree of confidence, as the input of data into the database is sometimes delayed for a period of time. the usa – world leader in nanotechnology scientific publication the term “nanocrystals” appears among the five most frequent terms in the articles published between 1994 and 2004, the only such term to appear across the whole period. in table 2, it can be seen that, from 1996 to 2003, the frequency of the term “nanoparticles/ nanoparticulates” demonstrated growth of 930%, appearing in 700 articles in 2003. the term “nanotubes” is amongst the five with the highest frequency in the period 1998 to 2002, with growth of 296%. another term which stands out amongst the five with the highest frequency is “quantum dot”, at 200 articles per year between 1999 and 2003. it is of note that, despite a high frequency of publication per term, there is a degree of dispersion among the institutions authoring the articles. the five top institutions with publications containing the term “nanoparticles / nanoparticulates”, represent only 16% of the total articles published on this topic (2787). looking at the five us institutions with the greatest number of articles by top term, it can be seen that three of these institutions present a greater degree of consistency in terms of scientific production related to the search terms. these are: the university of california, berkeley, illinois university and the massachusetts institute of technology. this data can be observed in table 3. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 41the trends and geography of nanotechnological research table 3. distribution of institutions with the largest number of publications by highest frequency term amongst us articles – 1994/2004. united states – total number of articles = 21,769 top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] nanoparticulate [2787] georgia inst technol [106] northwestern univ [100] univ illinois [87] washington univ [81] univ calif davis [69] nanostructure [1277] univ illinois [56] mit [46] univ connecticut [46] univ calif berkeley [44] arizona state univ [36] nanotube [1913] nasa [130] rice univ [117] univ kentucky [113] univ calif berkeley [95] rensselaer polyt. inst – pittsburgh [93] nanomaterial [1090] cornell univ [53] usaf [50] univ so mississippi [39] michigan state univ [34] univ michigan [33] quantum dot [1687] univ calif sta barbara [193] arizona state univ [105] univ illinois [92] univ texas [86] univ michigan [82] nanosize [1038] univ calif berkeley [39] univ illinois [34] penn state univ [34] mit [30] univ florida [29] nanocrystal [1677] univ calif berkeley [114] mit [81] oak ridge natl labs [69] argonne natl labs [64] georgia inst technol [57] fullerene [1013] univ notre dame [76] rice univ [69] univ calif los angeles [56] univ miami [42] nyu [40] japan – second-place leader in nanotechnology publication articles on “nanocrystals” appear amongst the five highest frequency terms for those published between 1994 and 2004, with an oscillation between 20 and 150 articles per year. this term is the only one which appears throughout the period studied, a tendency also observed in the usa for the same term. it was further observed that from 1997 to 2003 the term “nanoparticles / nanoparticulates”, demonstrated strong growth, on the order of 833%, attaining a total of more than 270 articles in 2003. the term “nanotubes” appears amongst the five highest frequency terms in the period 1994–2004. another term which stands out in the five high frequency terms for the period 1999–2003 is “quantum dot”, which reached its publication peak in 2000, with 189 articles. the term “fullerene” appears amongst the high frequency terms for the period 1994–2002, and also had its publication peak in 2000, with a total of 136. the preceding data is presented in table 4. table 5 shows that the university of tokyo leads in publication related to the term “quantum dot”, with around 22% of the articles on this theme produced in that country. this university is present among the five top authoring institutions for the majority of the higher frequency terms: “nanoparticles/nanoparticulates”, “nanotubes”, “nanostructures”, “quantum wire” and “nanoscale”. the second most frequent term, “nanoparticles/nanoparticulates”, demonstrates the leadership of osaka university, with more than 10% of the articles. it is of interest to observe that the nec corporation ltd. is among the five institutions with the highest frequency of articles on “nanotubes”, contributing 82 of 947 articles. comparative view of the higher frequency terms of the two leading key countries table 6 presents the higher frequency terms for the two leading key countries and the institution with the highest number of articles on that term. it also identifies which journals had the highest frequency of articles on these terms. the two highest frequency terms are “nanoparticles/nanoparticulates” and “quantum dot”, with the two highest publication journals for these two countries being: 42 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. s. de m. alencar, c. canongia and a. m. s. antunes table 4. highest frequency terms in articles published in japan by year of publication – 1994/2004. japan – total number of articles = 10,883 year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] 1994 [275] fullerene [38] quasi-crystal [30] quantum wire [21] nanocrystal [19] quantum dot [12] 2000 [1456] quantum dot [189] fullerene [136] nanotube [126] nanocrystal [126] nanoparticle [105] 1995 [286] fullerene [63] quantum wire [25] nanocrystal [24] quantum dot [18] quasi-crystal [10] 2001 [1766] nanotube [179] nanoparticle [173] nanocrystal [156] quantum dot [156] fullerene [122] 1996 [489] fullerene [76] nanocrystal [67] quantum dot [32] quantum wire [30] nanotube [26] 2002 [2076] nanotube [282] nanoparticle [195] quantum dot [157] nanocrystal [141] fullerene [105] 1997 [585] fullerene [70] quantum dot [65] nanocrystal [54] nanoparticle [33] quantum wire [26] 2003 [974] nanoparticle [275] quantum dot [136] nanotube [47] nanostructure [39] nanocrystal [28] 1998 [1084] quantum dot [154] nanocrystal [95] fullerene [79] quantum wire [66] nanoparticle [61] 2004 [564] nanoparticle [78] nanotube [76] nanocrystal [27] fullerene [25] nanocomposite [24] 1999 [1328] quantum dot [157] fullerene [120] nanotube [113] nanoparticle [105] nanocrystal [92] • applied physics letters – experimental or theoretical articles with applications in physics or contemporary technologies. • journal of physical chemistry b (jpc:b) – articles on materials (nanostructures, macromolecules, bio-physical chemistry and physicschemistry in general), as well as articles on structures and properties of surfaces and interfaces. macro-trend of scientific development in the competitor countries within the group of competitor countries, strong leadership belongs to china, which in the last ten years published 51% of articles. brazil is in fifth place, with 5% of articles published, following korea (14%), india (11%) and israel (7%). account14% china 51% korea india 11% israel 7% mexico 3% brazil 5% australia 4% singapore 4% fig. 3. nano scientific papers published in competitor-countries (1994–2004). fennia 184: 1 (2006) 43the trends and geography of nanotechnological research table 5. distribution of japanese institutions with the highest number of publications by high frequency term – 1994/2004. japan – total number of articles = 10,883 top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] quantum dot [1096] univ tokyo [239] univ tsukuba [134] hokkaido univ [93] riken[1] [88] tohoku univ [79] nanostructure [394] tohoku univ [41] univ tokyo [35] osaka univ [34] japan sci technol corp [23] univ kyoto [21] nanoparticle [1054] osaka univ [111] tohoku univ [72] univ tokyo [63] kyushu univ [62] tokyo inst technol [59] nanocomposite [344] osaka univ [73] tohoku univ [29] natl ind res inst nagoya [27] toyota technol inst [16] natl inst adv ind technol & sci [14] nanotube [947] univ tokyo [103] meijo univ [97] nec corp ltd [82] tohoku univ [78] tokyo inst technol [52] quantum wire [335] univ tokyo [65] hokkaido univ [51] osaka univ [41] electrotech labs[2] [32] japan sci technol corp [24] fullerene [840] nagoya univ [116] tohoku univ [91] tokyo metropolitan univ [76] osaka univ [74] univ kyoto [73] nanoscale [294] tohoku univ [33] osaka univ [30] univ tokyo [29] tokyo inst technol [15] univ kyoto [15] nanocrystal [829] tohoku univ [167] osaka univ [65] univ tsukuba [53] univ tokyo [43] tokyo inst technol [42] nanowire [119] natl inst mat sci [26] hokkaido univ [15] japan sci technol corp [9] electrotech labs [9] osaka univ [8] table 6. leaders of the key countries – usa and japan: top terms versus most-published institutions versus the respective journals. united states top term top institution highest frequency journals of the top institution nanoparticule/ nanoparticulate georgia inst technol abstracts of papers of the american chemical society journal of physical chemistry b japan 2 top terms top institutions highest frequency journals of the top institutions quantum dot univ tokyo applied physics letters physical review b nanoparticule/ nanoparticulate osaka univ journal of physical chemistry b applied physics letters ing for less than 5% of articles are australia, singapore and mexico, as shown in fig. 3. as to follow, fig. 4 demonstrates that there was exponential growth, on the order of more than 1500%, in the number of nanotechnology articles published by the competitor-countries between 1994 and 2002. the analysis for the last two years, 2003 and 2004, offers a lesser degree of confidence, as the input of data into the database is sometimes delayed for a period of time. 44 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. s. de m. alencar, c. canongia and a. m. s. antunes 0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 5000 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 fig. 4. historical evolution of nanotechnology publishing in the competitor countries. table 7. highest frequency terms in chinese articles by year of publication – 1994/2004. china – total number of articles = 10,112 year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] 1994 [141] 1995 [197] nanocrystal [26] fullerene [15] fullerene [31] nanocrystal [30] 2001 [1635] nanocrystal [209] nanoparticulate [185] nanotube [173] nanomaterial [117] nanowire [100] 1996 [270] 1997 [374] nanocrystal [50] fullerene [35] nanocrystal [82] fullerene [53] 2002 [2187] nanotube [298] nanocrystal [271] nanoparticulate [251] nanomaterial [156] nanowire [147] 1998 [642] 1999 [966] nanocrystal [131] nanoparticulate [69] fullerene [57] nanocrystal [179] nanoparticulate [102] 2003 [1457] nanoparticulate [366] nanocrystal [126] quantum dot [107] nanowire [95] nanorod [91] 2000 [1241] nanocrystal [190] nanoparticulate [133] nanotube [106] quantum dot [100] 2004 [1002] nanotube [151] nanoparticulate [133] nanocrystal [102] nanomaterial [85] china – leader in nanotechnology development among the competitor-countries the strong leadership of china among the competitor-countries is evident. in table 7 it can be observed that the term “nanocrystals” is of high frequency in the articles published between 1994 and 2002, with growth of more than 1000% between 1994 and 2002. between 1998 and 2002, the topic “nanoparticles/nanoparticulates” experienced growth of 530%, reaching a total of more than 360 articles in 2003. “nanotubes” appears among the highest frequency terms for 2000–2002, accounting for more than 100 articles per year in this period. it can be seen in table 8 that the chinese academy of sciences is present among the leading institutions with the largest number of articles for all the highest frequency terms, demonstrating this institution’s diversity in areas of nanotechnology research. “quantum dot” represents around 45% of the articles published on this term. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 45the trends and geography of nanotechnological research table 8. distribution of chinese institutions with the highest number of publications by high frequency term – 1994/2004. china – total number of articles = 10,112 top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] nanocrystal [1396] chinese acad sci [348] univ sci & technol china [245] jilin univ [120] nanjing univ [117] acad sinica [111] nanowire [495] chinese acad sci [142] univ hong kong [68] univ sci & technol china [67] nanoparticulate [1291] chinese acad sci [429] jilin univ [109] peking univ [108] fullerene [469] chinese acad sci [110] fudan univ [58] peking univ [58] nanotube [927] chinese acad sci [263] tsing hua univ [170] nanostructure [358] chinese acad sci [116] univ sci & technol china [46] acad sinica [46] nanomaterial [579] chinese acad sci [179] univ sci & technol china [78] univ hong kong [46] nanosize [323] chinese acad sci [101] tsing hua univ [34] quantum dot [565] chinese acad sci [258] univ hong kong [58] nanorod [259] univ sci & technol china [92] chinese acad sci [50] brazil – latin american leader – relative position in nanotechnology development brazilian publication of articles on nanotechnology accounts for only 5.7% of the total number published by the competitor-countries over the last ten years, a statistic which demonstrates the need for a policy of support and effective incentives for research, development and innovation in this area. of note is that “quantum dot” is present among the highest frequency terms for nine of the ten years under study, with its highest degree of publication in 2002, with 37 articles. 2002 saw around 28% of the publications for the ten-year period (table 9). it should be noted that the two brazilian institutions which stand out in the publication of articles with high-frequency terms are the university of são paulo (usp) and state university of campinas (unicamp). in addition, both institutions are leaders in the publication of articles on the highest frequency term, “quantum dot”, with both contributing more than 24% of articles on this topic. with regard to “nanoparticles/ nanoparticulates”, the university of brasília (unb) is the leader, with 24%, followed by the university of são paulo (usp), with 19% of the articles published on this topic (table 10). global view of the highest frequency terms for the leader amongst the competitorcountries table 11 presents, for the leader amongst the competitor countries, the highest frequency terms, along with the institution with the highest number of articles on those terms, and identifies which journals most frequently published articles on the terms. it can be observed that the two terms appearing with the highest frequency in chinese publications: “nanoparticles/ nanoparticulates” and “nanocrystals”, for which the journal with the highest frequency for china is also amongst the journals serving the same function amongst the key countries: applied physics letters – experimental or theoretical articles with applications in physics and contemporary technologies. final considerations the seven key countries (the usa, japan, germany, france, the uk, spain and canada) have demonstrated dynamism in nanotechnology research over the last ten years, with more than 50 thousand articles published. the competitor-countries (china, korea, india, israel, meanwhile, have entered the arena, although in an as yet emerging 46 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. s. de m. alencar, c. canongia and a. m. s. antunes table 9. highest frequency terms in brazilian articles by year of publication – 1994/2004. brazil – total number of articles = 1066 year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] year of publication [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles per term] 1994 [11] nanocrystal [3] nanotube [1] nanosize [1] quantum wire [1] fullerene [1] 2000 [136] quantum dot [19] nanotube [12] nanoparticulate [11] nanomaterial [8] nanocrystal [5] 1995 [18] quantum dot [3] nanotube [2] fullerene [2] nanocrystal [2] quantum wire [1] 2001 [168] quantum dot [13] nanoparticulate [12] nanocrystal [12] nanotube [10] nanomaterial [10] 1996 [28] quantum dot [9] fullerene [3] nanocrystal [3] nanostructure [2] nanotube [1] 2002 [297] quantum dot [37] nanotube [27] nanocrystal [25] nanoparticulate [22] nanostructure [14] 1997 [49] quantum dot [5] nanoparticulate [4] nanocrystal [4] nanosize [3] quantum wire [3] 2003 [127] quantum dot [35] nanoparticulate [34] nanocrystal [6] nanostructure [3] nanomaterial [3] 1998 [62] quantum dot [8] quantum wire [6] nanotube [3] nanoparticulate [3] nanocrystal [3] 2004 [54] nanocrystal [5] nanoparticulate [4] nanotube [4] quantum dot [4] nanostructure [3] 1999 [116] nanocrystal [12] nanoparticulate [9] quantum dot [8] nanomaterial [6] nanostructure [5] manner, with a total of slightly less than 20 thousand articles over the same period. amongst the key countries, the usa stands out, while for the competitor countries the leadership rest with china, whose publications total almost one half of the number produced in the usa. the volume of chinese publications exceeds that of germany, third-ranked among the key countries. also of note is that fact that the combined publications of the competitor-countries korea and india equal those of the sixth-placed key country, spain. in regard to the search terms, “nanoparticles/ nanoparticulates” is among the highest frequency topics for both the key countries and the competitors, with the journal of physical chemistry (jpc-b) of the american chemical society (acs) being the journal with the highest frequency of publication for both groups of countries. “nanocrystals” is the term with the second highest frequency. in the case of brazil, latin american leader, it is of note that the term “quantum dot” is the one which appears most frequently. it is observed that nanotechnology research in brazil is still in its early stages, compared to the other competitor countries. the university of são paulo (usp) and the state university of campinas (unicamp) are the brazilian institutions with the highest profiles in this area. finally, in regard to brazil, it should be noted that, in an effort to generate effective support for the scientific and technological development of nanotechnology, the industrial, technological and foreign trade policy, launched in 2004 by the brazilian government, places nanotechnology, along fennia 184: 1 (2006) 47the trends and geography of nanotechnological research table 10. distribution of the institutions with the highest number of publications by high frequency terms in brazilian articles – 1994/2004. brazil – total number of articles = 1066 top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] top terms [no. of articles] top institutions [no. of articles] quantum dot [141] univ. são paulo [35] univ. estad. campinas [34] univ. fed. são carlos [26] puc – rio de janeiro [20] univ. brasília [12] nanostructure [46] univ. fed. são carlos [12] univ. são paulo [7] univ. fed. riograndesul [6] univ. brasília [5] univ. estad. campinas [4] nanoparticulate [100] univ. brasília [24] univ. são paulo [19] univ. fed. são carlos [14] univ. estad. campinas [13] univ. fed. goias [10] quantum wire [36] univ. são paulo [9] univ. estad. campinas [8] univ sao francisco (1) [5] univ. fed. ceará [3] univ. fed. são carlos [3] nanocrystal [80] univ. estad. campinas [25] univ. são paulo [21] centro bras. pesq. fisicas [9] univ. fed. são carlos [9] lab nacl luz sincrotron [6] nanosize [21] univ. fed. riograndesul [5] univ. fed. rio de janeiro [3] univ. fed. são carlos [2] univ. fed. paraiba [2] centro bras. pesq. fisicas [1] nanotube [67] univ. fed. minas gerais [43] univ. fed. ceará [22] univ. são paulo [9] lab nacl luz sincrotron [5] univ. estad. campinas [5] fullerene [19] univ. estad. campinas [7] univ. fed. minas gerais [3] univ. fed. goias [3] univ. fed. rio de janeiro [2] univ. são paulo [2] nanomaterial [47] univ. são paulo [20] univ. estad. campinas [11] univ. fed. paraná [8] univ. est. paulista [7] univ. fed. são carlos [6] nanowire [13] lab nacl luz sincrotron [8] univ. estad. campinas [6] univ. fed. rio de janeiro [1] univ. fed. minas gerais [1] univ. fed. são carlos [1] table 11. leadership of china amongst the competitor countries: top terms versus most-published institution versus the respective journals. china 2 top terms top institution highest frequency journals of the top institution nanocrystal chinese acad sci journal of applied physics applied physics letters nanoparticule/ nanoparticulate chemical physics letters journal of material chemistry with biotechnology and biomass/renewable energy, amongst those areas considered keys to the future. notes 1 also called quantum confinement, this refers to the effect caused by the small numbers of atoms, which limits the movement of electrons, generating new physical properties in the material. 2 the superficial effects are caused by the larger surface/volume ratio in nanoparticles interfering in chemical properties, as, for example, in reactivity. 3 the research presented here forms part of a study undertaken by the research group under the leadership by titular professor adelaide antunes, of the sistema de informação sobre a indústria química (siquim) laboratory of the eq/ufrj, in response to the demand of the centro de gestão e estudos estratégicos (cgee), a centre connected to the ministry of science and technology (mct) (antunes et al. 2004). 4 the terms were proposed by specialists at the state university of campinas, referred by the cgee/ mct. 48 fennia 184: 1 (2006)m. s. de m. alencar, c. canongia and a. m. s. antunes references antunes a, c canongia, msm alencar, ac mangueira, f tibau & m arnor (2004). prospecção em nanotecnologia: desenvolvimento científico de países-chave e países competidores (study commissioned by the cgee/mct). 56 p. sistema de informação sobre a indústria química/eq/ufrj, rio de janeiro. baker s & a aston (2005). the business of nanotech. business week 14 february 2005, 64. foster le (2005). nanotechnology: science, innovation, and opportunity. 336 p. prentice hall, new jersey. roco mc (2004). nanoscale science and engineering: unifying and transforming tools. aiche journal 50: 5, 890–897. roco mc (2005). international perspective on government nanotechnology funding in 2005. journal of nanoparticle research 7, 707–712. schulte j (2005). nanotechnology: global strategies, industry trends and applications. 194 p. john wiley and sons, sussex. tegart g (2004). nanotechnology: the technology for the twenty-first century. foresight 6: 6, 364–370. uk advisory group on nanotechnology applications (2002). new dimensions for manufacturing: a uk strategy for nanotechnology. 76 p. walsh st (2004). roadmapping a disruptive technology: a case study – the emerging microsystems and top-down nanosystems industry. technological forecasting & social changes 71: 161–185. untitled the climate of northern finland jyrki autio and olavi heikkinen autio, jyrki & olavi heikkinen (2002). the climate of northern finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 61–66. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the north atlantic in the west and the asian continent in the east regulate the general features of the climate in northern finland. especially in the low areas in the west, the smaller amounts of precipitation are largely due to the scandic föhn effect. the weather conditions and microclimate in the fells differ from those in the lower areas. temperature inversion is a common phenomenon on the slopes. heavy snow loads in the crowns of the trees are a prominent feature of the southern fells and the eastern highlands. jyrki autio & olavi heikkinen, department of geography, p. o. box 3000, fin-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mails: jyrki.autio@oulu.fi, olavi.heikkinen@oulu.fi introduction in köppen’s climate classification (köppen 1936: 14), northern finland (here taken to signify roughly the province of lapland and the eastern parts of the province of oulu) belongs almost entirely to the area of a snow and forest climate characterised by moist, cold winters. the northern climate itself, and the influence of the north atlantic in the west and the great asian continent in the east, chiefly regulate its general features. the atlantic, heated by the gulf stream, evens out the temperatures through its oceanic influence and generates low pressure systems which belong to the polar front and often bring grey and drizzly weather to finland. the arctic ocean similarly has a levelling effect on temperatures. this is most prominent in the fell area of northern lapland and around the inari basin. high pressures coming from the east sometimes make the finnish climate more continental for weeks on end, which means sunshine and heat in summer and bitterly cold weather in winter. the scandes also affect the climatic features of northern finland. after crossing these mountains, the atlantic air masses are dry and warm – a föhn effect that can raise the temperature in the tornio river valley by several degrees. internal factors, such as altitude, water bodies, and vegetation, naturally give rise to local variations in climate (heino 1994). thermal climate the degree of continentality and oceanity can affect a climate more than the geographical latitude. one indicator of continentality is the difference between the mean temperatures of the warmest and coldest months of the year, which is small in oceanic areas and increases as the climate becomes more continental (kalliola 1973: 57). by this reckoning, the most oceanic areas of northern finland are situated in the very north, where the presence of the arctic ocean is felt most prominently. the climate is most continental in the east (laaksonen 1977: 88), where this temperature difference can be up to 30 degrees centigrade (ºc). the mean annual temperature varies from –3 ºc in northeastern lapland to 1 ºc on the coast of the gulf of bothnia (fig. 1). the mean temperature of the warmest month, july, is 10–15 ºc and that of the coldest month, january, –13... –17 ºc. the lowest temperature recorded in finland during the twentieth century, –51.5 ºc, was measured in the village of pokka in kittilä in january of 1999 (sää ja ilmasto 2001a). in general, the continental eastern part of northern finland is colder than the west, with the exception of the kilpisjärvi area, where greater altitude reduces the temperatures. 62 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jyrki autio and olavi heikkinen precipitation mainly because of its colder climate, northern finland receives generally less rain than the rest of the country. precipitation is lowest in the inari basin (400 mm) (weather and climate 2001). lapland is more humid than the rest of finland despite its smaller amounts of rain, mainly due to the lower temperatures, which mean less evaporation. especially in the low areas of western finland, the smaller amounts of rain are largely due to the scandic föhn effect. in the eastern parts, with their higher altitudes, the western air masses rise once more, which leads to condensation and more rain. rainfall is estimated to increase by five percent per one hundred kilometres from the west–northwest to the east–southeast (solantie 1974: 86). precipitation is highest in july and august and lowest in march. the mean rainfall in southern finland is between 600 and 700 millimetres except on the coast, where the rainfall is slightly lower. in northern finland the annual rainfall varies between 400 and 600 millimetres (weather and climate 2001; sää ja ilmasto 2001b, 2001c). the percentage of total precipitation that is accounted for by snow increases towards the north as a rule. in northern finland about half of the rainfalls occurs in the form of snow. northwestern lapland receives its permanent snow cover by the end of october and southern lapland by the middle of november (solantie 1987: 18, 20). the average thickness of the snow in march is 65–100 centimetres (sää ja ilmasto 2001d), but it can exceed two metres in the kilpisjärvi area at times. climatic variation after the little ice age climates are not invariable, but show clear fluctuations on many time scales. following the little ice age, a period of colder climate that lasted for roughly 500 years and ended shortly after the midnineteenth century, temperatures rose, as is shown by the forestation of previously treeless areas beyond and above the timberline in lapland. the 1930s were exceptionally warm in the whole of northern europe. it was then that the saplings which later formed the present treeline first appeared on the finnish fells (hustich 1958). the temperature rise is also documented in the statistics on the break-up of the ice on the tornio river. observations since 1693 show that this has begun to take place approximately two weeks earlier (kauppi & kämäri 1996: 148). the climate in northern finland was roughly 0.5 °c colder during the normal meteorological period 1961–1990 than in the period 1931–1960. this cooling is clearly reflected in the 0 °c curve, for example: it had been roughly at the latitude of sodankylä during the previous normal period (fig. 1), but later moved southwards by about one hundred kilometres. this average climatic change based on mean annual temperatures is largely due to the colder winters (solantie 1992; tuhkanen 1996) and, apparently, does not properly indicate how favourable the conditions are for plant life fig. 1. mean annual temperature in northern finland during the normal period 1931–1960 (helminen 1987), the lower line of tree damage caused by frequent snow loads, and the occurrence of palsa mounds. the ‘crown-load line’ is used to represent the altitude above which at least 30 percent of trees are damaged by snow loads in their crowns (solantie 1974). palsas, permafrost formations up to seven metres high, occur in peatland areas where the annual mean temperature is –1 degrees centigrade (ºc) or below. palsas have their own life cycles: after reaching a certain size, they begin to collapse and thaw largely regardless of climatic conditions. it is therefore possible to find palsas at different stages of development in the same bog area (seppälä 1979). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 63the climate of northern finland during the growing season. according to many climate models (gates et al. 1996; holopainen et al. 1996: 53–68), temperatures in northern finland should rise in the coming decades due to the intensification of the greenhouse effect. the fell climate the weather conditions and microclimate in the fells differ from those in the lower areas. the fells are colder on average than the valleys, because in the standard atmosphere, a hundred-metre rise in altitude will bring about a temperature decrease of 0.65 °c. often, however, the fells are actually warmer than the valleys. this meteorological effect is known as ground surface temperature inversion (fig. 2). on clear, calm summer nights, and also during the daytime and in extended periods of extreme cold in the winter, the ground surface and lower air layers lose heat through powerful out-radiation in the absence of solar radiation. in addition, the cold air on the upper slopes, which is heavier than warm air, slowly drains down into the valleys. this creates a state of inversion where the vertical temperature distribution is the opposite of that normally found in the standard atmosphere. the situation lasts until wind or solar radiation disturbs the stability of the atmosphere. ground surface temperature inversion can reach an altitude of 20–30 metres on summer nights, or hundreds of metres during long spells of winter cold. the temperature difference between a valley bottom and the inversion peak on a fell slope can be 10–20 °c or even more (kurula & heikkinen 1996). the heat tracks used by skiers on fell slopes make use of this phenomenon. temperature inversions can last for more than a month at times in winter if a high-pressure system prevails (huovila 1987: 51), but such situations are usually of shorter duration. the longest and most pronounced uninterrupted inversion on the fell of aakenustunturi in kittilä in december of 1995, for example, lasted just over three days, beginning at 8 a.m. on december 18 and ending at 3 p.m. on december 21 (fig. 3). the greatest temperature difference was recorded at 6 a.m. on december 21, when the air at the summit was 11.4 ºc warmer than in the forest.1 the vertical gradient in mean temperatures over a longish period of time, e.g., a whole growing season, is usually close to that for a normal atmosphere (autio et al. 1998: 296), but the pattern for an individual month can deviate markedly from the normal (fig. 4). curve 1 in figure 4 represents a fairly typical situation in early winter, in which inversions have reduced the mean temperatures to the extent that the lowest-lying places are the coldest, the warmest conditions are found part of the way up the slope, and the summit is again colder. in months like this, the vertical pattern of mean temperatures is practically the reverse of the normal. the late spring, on the other hand, is a time when the temperature gradient is steeper than normal, as in curve 2 of figure 4. this is because summer comes to the forested areas far more quickly than to the fell summits or forest limit zones. towards the end of the summer (fig. 4, curve 3), there are scarcely any vertical differences in temperature, i.e., the slight temperature inversions that occur at night cancel out the differences between the summit and the lower-lying forests that arise during the day. it is in fact the forest limit zone on the south-facing slope that receives the most solar radiation of all in the late summer. this area thus has the highest mean temperature of all, creating a clear anomaly in the vertical gradient. this zone represents generally the most extreme temperature conditions to be found in a fell landscape in northern finland (autio 1995: 110). on the fell tops, winds are unhindered by obstacles and are almost always stronger than below. the fells have no trees to stop the wind or to fig. 2. the principle of ground surface temperature inversion on fells in wintertime. t = air temperature; t n = average vertical temperature in the atmosphere (with a gradient of 0.65 ºc/100 m); v = wind velocity (m/s); m a.s.l. = metres above sea level. (mainly after huovila 1987 and tammelin 1992). 64 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jyrki autio and olavi heikkinen fig. 3. hourly variations in temperature on vareslaki (482 m), the westernmost fell summit of aakenustunturi (570 m), and in the forest below (330 m), in december of 1995. measurements were made at a height of two metres above the ground. the most pronounced temperature inversion occurred between december 18 and 21 (see note 1). fig. 4. vertical temperature profiles at four meteorological stations on the aakenustunturi fell: (a) in forest on the northern slope (330 metres above sea level); (b) at the physiognomic forest limit on the northern slope (390 m a.s.l.); (c) on the virtually treeless fell summit (482 m a.s.l.); and (d) at the physiognomic forest limit on the southern slope (430 m a.s.l.) 1 = mean for november, 1996; 2 = mean for may, 1996; 3 = mean for august, 1996; and 4 = vertical gradient in a normal atmosphere (–0.65 ºc/100 m) (see note 1). fig. 5. an example of variation in snow thickness. in fell terrain, the snow is thickest in deep depressions in the timberline area, where drifts of up to 4–5 metres in depth can occur. south-facing slopes lose their thinner snow cover in early summer, whereas the more shaded northern slopes can have drifts of several metres which do not melt until the end of july. the photograph shows asymmetrical snow build-up in a lateral meltwater channel on the fell of aakenustunturi in kittilä. (photo: jyrki autio, 04/95) fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 65the climate of northern finland give shelter from it. the windiest season on the fells of lapland is the winter, when the wind can often exceed 21 metres per second (m/s), which marks the lower limit for a storm. in the winter of 1989, for instance, ten-minute averages of up to 39.1 m/s were measured on the peak of the ylläs fell (lehtonen 1992). efforts have been made in recent years to harness wind energy by constructing wind power plants on some fell tops (tammelin 1999). the snow cover increases in thickness from the valleys up to the treeline (fig. 5), but it is thin on the barren fell tops and non-existent in places, as the wind effectively compresses the snow or blows it away (autio 1997). heavy snow loads in the crowns of trees (fig. 1) are a prominent feature of the fells of southern lapland and the eastern highlands of finland. future prospects for climatic research in northern finland climatic research in northern finland is closely connected with the increased interest in northern regions in general (saarnisto 1998; korhola 1999; seppälä 2000), as reflected by the selection of northern conditions as one of the focal points for research at the university of oulu (summary 2001). the main bodies in finland that are engaged in extensive research into northern climates are the finnish meteorological institute (developing… 2001; research 2001), the department of meteorology at the university of helsinki, and the sodankylä geophysical observatory which belongs to the university of oulu (saarnisto 1998: 21–23). of the current national climatic projects in progress at the meteorological institute, particular mention should be made of finsken (developing consistent global change scenarios for finland), financed by the academy of finland (developing… 2001). international ventures are represented by the global atmosphere watch (gaw) programme and the arctic monitoring and assessment programme (amap), both of which have a monitoring station in the pallas-ounastunturi national park (67°55’–68°20’n, 27°07’e) (loven & kleinhenz 1997: 7–9; saarnisto 1998: 21). this international cooperation is also reflected in the structure of funding for such research, in that the institute’s principal source of external funding is the european union (research 2001). climatic research occupies a key role as far as arctic regions (regions lying north of the arctic circle, 66°32’n) are concerned, as changes are likely to make themselves felt first in this sensitive area. this confers a more general significance on such research, as the changes are soon reflected in tree growth at the timberline, i.e., at the extremes of distribution of the species concerned. the predicted warming of the climate will shift the timberlines up the slopes of the fells and towards the north, to be followed by the other vegetational zones (holten 1990: fig. 1; tuhkanen 1996: 34). research into fell climates is also needed because existing climatic models do not make adequate allowance for altitudinally and topographically determined climatic variability (martin 1996: 3). acknowledgements among the numerous people who have helped to gather the field data, we would especially like to thank pertti vuolteenaho and pekka kauppila. thanks are also due to anja kaunisoja for drawing some of the figures. the work has been financed by the the european union, under project env4-ct95-0063, “forest response to environmental stress at timberlines: sensitivity of northern, alpine and mediterranean forest limits to climate (forest).” notes 1 the results presented in figures 3 and 4 are based on temperature measurements made at aakenustunturi in 1995 and 1996 in the course of a still on-going programme that was initiated in 1994. the measurements were carried out at hourly intervals at a height of two metres above the ground using a km 1420 automatic data acquisition system. jyrki autio gathered and processed the material. the work was conducted as a part of the eu-funded forest project (env4-ct95-0063). in other respects, this paper is largely based on the work by autio and heikkinen (1999). references autio j (1995). local temperature differences and their relation to altitudinal vegetation zones and the location of the timberline: an example from the fell of aakenustunturi in finnish lapland. nordia geographical publications 24: 2, 103–111. autio j (1997). peräpohjolan tuntureiden kasvillisuustyypit, kasvillisuuden korkeusvyöhykkeet ja metsänrajat. unpublished phil. lic. thesis. department of geography, university of oulu. autio j, a colpaert & y hara (1998). vertical summer temperature variation and phytogeographical zonation at the fell of aakenustunturi in finnish lapland. association of japanese geographers 54, 296–297. 66 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)jyrki autio and olavi heikkinen autio j & o heikkinen (1999). pohjois-suomen ilmasto. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 116–117. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. developing consistent global change scenarios for finland (2001). finsken. 9 may 2001. <www. vyh.fi/eng/research/projects/finsken/> gates wl, a henderson-sellers, gj boer, ck folland, a kitoh, bj mcavaney, f semazzi, n smith, aj weaver & qc zeng (1996). climate models – evaluation. in houghton jt, lg meiro filho, ba calender, a kattenberg & k maskell (eds). climate change 1995. the science of climate change, 229–284. cambridge university press, cambridge. heino r (1994). climate in finland during the period of meteorological observations. finnish meteorological institute, contributions 12. helminen v (1987). temperature conditions. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 131: climate, 3–5. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. holopainen e, m heikinheimo & m kulmala (eds) (1996). ilmakehä. in kuusisto e, l kauppi & p heikinheimo (eds). ilmastonmuutos ja suomi, 11–69. yliopistopaino, helsinki. holten ji (1990). biologiske och økologiske konsekvenser av klimaforandringar i norge. norsk institut for naturforskning, utredning 11. huovila s (1987). on temperature inversions in finnish lapland. ungi rapport 65, 43–52. hustich i (1958). on recent expansion of the scots pine in northern europe. fennia 82: 3, 1–25. kalliola r (1973). suomen kasvimaantiede. wsoy, porvoo. kauppi l & j kämäri (eds) (1996). vedet. in kuusisto e, l kauppi & p heikinheimo (eds). ilmastonmuutos ja suomi, 145–178. yliopistopaino, helsinki. köppen w (1936). das geographische system der klimate. in köppen w & r geiger (eds). handbuch der klimatogie 1c, 1–44. verlag von gebrüder bornträger, berlin. korhola a (1999). finland’s arctic research strategy. ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. kurula t & o heikkinen (1996). vertical temperature inversion on the fjell ylläs, northern finland. prace geograficzne – zeszyt 102, 453–458. laaksonen k (1977). the influence of sea areas upon mean air temperatures in fennoscandia (1921– 1950). fennia 151, 57–128. lehtonen p (1992). wind measurements at ylläs broadcasting station 1982–1991. in tammelin j, k säntti, e peltola & h neuvonen (eds). boreas – north wind – pohjatuuli, an international experts’ meeting on wind power in icing conditions, hetta 10.–13.2.1992, 1–10. ilmatieteen laitos/ finnish meteorological institute, helsinki. lovén l & b kleinhenz (1997). national park as research area for monitoring environmental change. finnish forest research institute, research papers 623, 7–12. martin p (1996). regional aspects of climate change. in peter d, a maracchi & a ghazi (eds). climate change impact on agriculture and forestry, 33– 52. european comission, brussels. research (2001). finnish meteorological institute. 9 may 2001. <www.fmi.fi/research_meteorology/ meteorology_2.html> sää ja ilmasto. alimmat lämpötilat kuukausittain (2001a). ilmatieteen laitos. 4 may 2001. <www. fmi.fi/saa/tilastot_11.html> sää ja ilmasto. elokuun tilastokartat (2001b). ilmatieteen laitos. 4 may 2001. <www.fmi.fi/saa/ tilastot_62.html> sää ja ilmasto. heinäkuun tilastokartat (2001c). ilmatieteen laitos. 4 may 2001. <www.fmi.fi/saa/ tilastot_62.html> sää ja ilmasto. milloin lumipeite lähtee? (2001d). ilmatieteen laitos. 4 may 2001. <www.fmi.fi/saa/ tilastot_10.html> saarnisto m (1998). the current state of arctic research in finland. ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. seppälä m (1979). recent palsa studies in finland. acta universitatis ouluensis. series a, scientiae rerum naturalium 82, 81–87. seppälä m (2000). mikä ja millainen on arktinen alue? terra 112, 162–163. solantie r (1974). pohjois-suomen lumipeitteestä. (summary: on snow cover in northern finland). acta lapponica fenniae 8, 74–89. solantie r (1987). snow conditions. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 131: climate, 8. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. solantie r (1992). lämpötilanmuutos suomen ”vanhasta” normaalikaudesta 1931–1960 ”uuteen” 1961–90. (summary: on the change of thermal climate in finland between the ”normal” periods 1931–1960 and 1961–1990). lapin tutkimusseura. vuosikirja xxxiii 1992 (the research society of lapland. year book xxxiii 1992), 33–42. summary. northern systems (2001). thule institute. 28 may 2001. <www.oulu.fi/strategy/pohstrat/ nsys.html> tammelin b (1992). huurrekertymät tunturien lakialueilla. (summary: rime accretion at the top areas of fells). meteorologisia julkaisuja (meteorological publications) 19. tammelin b (1999). wind energy production on cold climate. boreas 4 (proceedings of an international meeting, 31 march–2 april, hetta, finland). tuhkanen s (1996). globaali ilmastomuutos ja fennoskandia. (abstract: global climatic change and fennoscandia). vaasan yliopiston julkaisuja. selvityksiä ja raportteja (proceedings of the university of vaasa. reports) 12, 19–44. weather and climate. rainfall (2001). finnish meteorological institute. 4 may 2001. <www.fmi.fi/weather/climate_3.html> covid-19 and doctoral research in brazil and portugal: who pays the bill for confinement and remote work in research? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99208 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99208 reflections covid-19 and doctoral research in brazil and portugal: who pays the bill for confinement and remote work in research? roseli bregantin barbosa barbosa, r. b. (2020) covid-19 and doctoral research in brazil and portugal: who pays the bill for confinement and remote work in research? fennia 198(1–2) 239–242. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99208 the covid-19 pandemic has brought about several changes to doctoral programs due to the prohibition of face-to-face activities. this situation has generated many difficulties but has also facilitated research activities in sociology in brazil and portugal. this essay discusses the changes introduced in sociological research and the main strategy found to overcome the difficulties – remote work – with the aim of raising questions for a research agenda on the subject. the notes and analyses presented here are produced from participant observation and full participation as an academic linked to three universities, where i had access to remote work data and operational notes issued by these universities during the pandemic. in these observations, i have identified that the professors, technicians and researchers pay the bill for remote work in the doctorate programs, and that the pandemic affects researchers unequally, depending on their gender, the stage of the course they are in, whether the academic relationship is national or foreign, whether they receive a scholarship or not, and whether they are at home or on student mobility. keywords: changes, covid-19, doctoral research, remote work roseli bregantin barbosa (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8573-8869), federal university of paraná-ufpr/capes, rua general carneiro, 460, 9o andar, centro, curitiba/pr, brazil. e-mail: roseli.bregantin@hotmail.com introduction the covid-19 pandemic caused the suspension of classroom (face-to-face) activities at universities, including doctoral courses. within the scope of student mobility, the pandemic has seriously affected international students due to the closure of borders, travel restrictions and suspension of scholarships to support international research. activities were resumed remotely through conference calls and messaging applications. these remote work tools that were already being used in teaching and research activities became the main source of communication in projects and research that had already been started in early 2020. however, the pandemic did not uniformly impact all researchers and academics in doctoral courses. some encountered many difficulties, while others found it easier. i speak in this essay as a student, because i am doing a doctorate at a brazilian university and a doctoral internship (and also a master's degree) in portugal – i am one of the few brazilian researchers © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 240 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) who has managed to do a phd internship in portugal and maintain a research scholarship during the pandemic. these countries were selected according to the location of the educational institutions to which i am linked and because they focus on the field of my doctoral research. i did not experience any loss in the doctoral research routine. this is because my research already involved distance work, with field research carried out in 2018. in addition, i arrived in portugal before the beginning of the first confirmations of covid-19 in brazil and portugal. i did not encounter any major losses especially because my doctoral research was approaching the final stage. for the master’s in law at the university of porto, i did not suffer losses because legal work can be carried out remotely. the implementation of remote work in the universities to which i am linked – federal university of paraná, brazil (phd in sociology), institute of social sciences/ulisboa, portugal (phd internship) and faculty of law, university of porto, portugal (master in law) – facilitated the progress of the research. short trips and live activities in portugal were canceled, without compromising the investigation. the support of the capes scholarship was relevant to continuing the investigation and to remain on portuguese soil. however, my personal experience should not be confused with the reality of most researchers. the covid-19 pandemic introduced many complications to the research, especially for female researchers. difficulties imposed by the pandemic on research the primary challenges faced by researchers in brazil involved cuts to resources and scholarships in research applied by the brazilian government (soares 2020). the sectors that managed to continue their projects with the scarce resources available had to adapt, both as a result of the lack of resources and because of the constraints that had arisen since march 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic in the country. the shift in research, teaching and learning activities took place unexpectedly and lacked financial support from the government to introduce remote work that started to be carried out at the researcher’s home (bridi et al. 2020). the research trips that would have taken place in april were suspended, as well as the respective doctoral internship grants allocated for this purpose. only researchers who were already located outside of brazil on march 26, 2020, when the outbreak began in the country, continued their pending international research through remote work. however, the melding of the academic and domestic space raised several issues, especially for female researchers who took over domestic duties during this period and lost support in the form of cleaning services and fast-food delivery (bridi et al. 2020). the researchers, in addition to bearing the cost, also faced problems adapting to this methodology. some academics are facing difficulties in doing research without the physical structure of the university, this mainly affecting international students and female researchers. the pandemic particularly affected the production of scientific research by female researchers in brazil (candido & campos 2020). an internal survey, by dados magazine, reveals a drop in the submission of scientific articles by women (from 38% to 13%) in the second quarter of 2020 (fig. 1). however, co-authorship emerged as a strategy for women to circumvent the effects of the pandemic, which had prevented them from continuing to produce articles alone (candido & campos 2020). i emphasize that the methodology of gender identification in this research consists of classifying the authors by names common to men and women and assumes a margin of error of 4%. however, gender diversity is not included in this methodology. i also emphasize that the difference in scientific production based on gender was not created by the pandemic but aggravated by it. in portugal, researchers also had to bear the costs of transitioning from the university's face-toface activities to the remote method. however, perhaps the most significant obstacle has occurred in the area of student mobility, with the closure of borders and the suspension of activities at universities. international students have experienced more difficulties because they depend on the support of the physical structure of the universities and have subsequently had to deal with restrictions and uncertainties regarding the alternative of returning to their countries of origin (reis 2020). remaining is difficult but returning also entails costs that not all researchers are able to afford. until august 2020, they had no idea how long classroom activities would be suspended – in august, the resumption of school activities was scheduled for september. 241fennia 198(1–2) (2020) roseli bregantin barbosa being a native of the country where they were doing their doctorate was not exactly easy for researchers during the quarantine in portugal. there were difficulties faced by portuguese researchers, but they had slightly more stability due to the assertive way in which portugal instituted measures to control the pandemic. in brazil, the federal government created more problems than it managed, the divergent approaches that each state government took to control the health generated much anxiety among researchers. facilities introduced by the pandemic in doctoral research activities the most significant advantage that doctoral research obtained with the confinement of a large part of the population based in brazil and portugal was the increased availability of people to answer questionnaires and grant interviews online. research conducted in brazil on remote work reveals that social distancing has triggered the need in people to share their experiences and feelings, which is quite conducive to the approach taken by researchers, especially in sociology (bridi et al. 2020). some researchers report that due to the greater number of live events, they were able to participate in conferences, meetings of research groups and seminars from the educational institution itself, and even with others abroad. they state that they would not have been able to attend these events if they were presented in the traditional way. not having to face traffic and long and tiring journeys to make presentations and debates on scientific work was (and still is) an advantage, saving time and money. this is a facility that especially benefits female researchers with children or those responsible for home care, who may have difficulty in leaving the home. likewise, the extension of deadlines for completing research in some universities can be regarded as a benefit introduced by the pandemic. social distancing and quarantine were not entirely bad either. they allowed some doctoral students to enjoy a period of seclusion, essential to immersing themselves in reading and writing, and encouraging the production of texts and theses, one of the main objectives of doctorates in sociology. conclusion i observed changes in sociological research in brazil and portugal during the covid-19 pandemic period, because these are the research spaces that i have access to, where i do my doctoral research, and because i believe it is important to monitor these changes. from these observations, i note that the pandemic created more challenges than advantages for research. however, further studies on the topic are needed for more solid conclusions. such depth of investigation will be possible when the crisis has been overcome and all the relevant data is mature. so far, i have identified some relevant points: both the obstacles and the facilities linked to the pandemic that existed before the health crisis, were exacerbated by the conditions it imposed (cf. the editorial of this issue); remote work was the main strategy used to overcome the difficulties imposed on research by the pandemic, and researchers, professors and students paid the price for its implementation in doctoral research; fig. 1. relative number of female first authors who signed manuscripts submitted to dados magazine per quarter (2016–2020) (candido & campos 2020). 242 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) women were the most affected, because in this model of work they are expected to perform domestic chores, in addition to doctoral research; co-authorship, an already commonly used method for the scientific inclusion of women, served as a tool to continue the production of articles during this period in which there was a sharp drop in female scientific productivity; the challenges and advantages created by the pandemic have unevenly affected male and female researchers, national and foreign, scholarship and non-scholarship holders, brazilians and portuguese, and phd students in the initial research stage and in the advanced phase of their thesis, at home and in international mobility. analyzing an ongoing phenomenon is always precarious, but the surveys carried out based on this monitoring are essential for research purposes. these changes are still happening and will remain in effect until mass immunizations against covid-19 become a reality. however, some guidelines for a research agenda are already pronounced: such as the need for public education policies to face health crises in educational institutions; gender inequalities in the models adopted to solve the crisis; and the vulnerability of the international student in the health crisis context. references bridi, m. a., bohler, f. r. & zanoni, a. p. (2020) relatório técnico da pesquisa: o trabalho remoto/homeoffice no contexto da pandemia covid-19. part i. curitiba. universidade federal do paraná, curitiba. https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.14052.19842 candido, m. r. & campos, l. a. (2020) pandemia reduz submissões de artigos acadêmicos assinados por mulheres. blog dados 14.5.2020 <http://dados.iesp.uerj.br/pandemia-reduz-submissoes-demulheres>. 1.10.2020. reis, c. (2020) retidos em portugal ou com aulas de madrugada, alunos estrangeiros pedem suspensão das propinas. diário de notícias 22.4.2020 <www.dn.pt/vida-e-futuro/retidos-emp o r t u g a l o u c o m a u l a s d e m a d r u g a d a a l u n o s e s t r a n g e i r o s p e d e m s u s p e n s a o d a s propinas-12101629.html>. 1.10.2020. soares, j. (2020) cortes na ciência comprometem resposta à covid-19 no brasil. tilt 7.4.2020 <www.uol.com.br/tilt/noticias/redacao/2020/04/07/cortes-ciencia-coronavirus-brasil.htm>. 1.10.2020. 21258_03_pashkov.ps the presentation of old finland in the descriptions of russian travellers and observers from the end of 18th to the beginning of the 20th century alexandr m. pashkov pashkov, alexandr m. (2004). the presentation of old finland in the descriptions of russian travellers and observers from the end of 18th to the beginning of the 20th century. fennia 182: 1, pp. 13–22. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper deals with the origin and development of the russian image of the vyborg province or “old finland” (the karelian isthmus and northern ladoga region) from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century. this region aroused the interest of russia from three viewpoints. firstly, the area had a developed economy and it was located not far from st. petersburg. that was why its economic potential attracted russian scientists. secondly, the vyborg province was of interest due to its military-strategic position. the territory was the most important bridgehead close to st. petersburg. that was why the territory was subjected to close scrutiny by the russian military officers. thirdly, from the middle of the 19th century the russian middle class citizens considered its area to be the part of europe located nearest to russia. the ladoga region became an attraction for russian tourists. accordingly, the image of vyborg province in 19th-century russia was not homogeneous. the area aroused interest and was of importance for russia due to various reasons and aspects. the formation of the image underwent considerable deformation after 1917. nonetheless, it should still be stated that the variety of images of vyborg province, which were formed during 19th century, did not disappear but continue to develop even at present. alexandr m. pashkov, department of history, petrozavodsk state university, lenin prospekt 33, 185640 petrozavodsk, karelia, russia. e-mail: pashkov@ mainpgu.karelia.ru. early travel descriptions the history of the karelian isthmus and the northern ladoga region has passed through an excess of tragic upheavals. in 1617 right after the treaty of stolbovo was signed, the territory was detached from russia to profit from the dominance of sweden. the local population – mainly orthodox karelians – moved back to russia and the abandoned lands were gradually populated by finns and swedes. the ancient russian-moulded centre of the korela region was given the new name of kexholm, which later turned into the finnish käkisalmi, present-day priozersk. the year 1643, as well, saw the rise of the swedish-minted settlement sordwalla, which later became officially sortavala in finnish. in 1646 the settlement acquired an urban status. sordwalla became the northern ladoga region’s swedish centre. there appeared during the same period further swedish settlements, salmis (the present-day salmi) and kronoborg (the present-day kurkijoki). after the great northern war (1700–1721), the northern ladoga region and karelian isthmus were brought back under the rule of russia. however, part of the finnish and swedish population chose to remain (swedish people were scarce because they preferred to live in towns) and the russian tsar, as a result, gained new subjects. the policy implemented by the russian government in the newly won territories was quite gentle and resulted in the preservation of swedish legislation, the lutheran church and a system of local self-government. however, legislation could be changed in the case of a local inhabitant being sentenced to death by hanging. under the cir14 fennia 182: 1 (2004)alexandr m. pashkov cumstances, russian laws would come into force and the criminal was first whipped and subsequently sent to siberia. the next war between russia and sweden took place during 1741–1743 and resulted in another three towns, fredrikshamn (hamina), villmanstrand (lappeenranta) and nyslott (savonlinna) and their environs falling under the authority of russia. the necessity of governing the newly won finnish territories brought about the establishment of the viborg (vyborg, in finnish viipuri) province. the present article offers an attempt to restore the perception of the viborg province as viewed by russian public opinion. in doing this greater consideration will essentially be given in the article to the perception of the northern ladoga region as inhabited by finns and karelians. the profile of valamo (valaam) monastery as seen by russian people appears to be a separate and unique subject of research and for this reason it will not be treated in the present article. st. petersburg and scholarly interest in karelia the year of 1725 saw the rise the academy of sciences in st. petersburg; since the middle of 18th century the era of the enlightenment in russia had come into being. the essence of the enlightenment entailed the pre-eminent superiority of scientific knowledge, and for this reason government policy in russia, beginning approximately from the middle of 18th century had been encouraging the development of science and education. in the second half of 18th century, the st. petersburg academy of sciences, influenced by the ideas of the enlightenment, showed great enthusiasm in the study of russian countryside. the first russian scholar to visit the northern ladoga region was the academician n. ozeretskovskiy from the academy of st. petersburg. his visit took place in the summer of 1785 and its aim was to collect general information about the numerical strength and pursuits of the local population, their economy and their degree of productivity. the natural resources of the region and that of the shoreline of russia’s northern lakes were examined with a view to exporting on a wider scale products from the region to the city of st. petersburg. ozeretskovskiy visited and described the chukhon village of taibola, the konevitsa (konevets) and valamo monasteries, and the towns of kexholm and sortavala (serdobol). closely researched were the stone quarries of ruskeala and those on the islands of yven and tulola, the village of pitkäranta, and varashev’s great stone which served as a border marker between russia and sweden. moreover, there were brief reports on the numerous villages and churchyards of the northern ladoga region. the description of his travels was published in the russian language in 1792 (ozeretskovskii 1792) and in 1796 the academician h. storch published in german certain extracts from ozeretskovskiy’s book in his work materialien zur kenntniss des russischen reichs (storch 1796). ozeretskovskiy’s book appeared for the second time in an edition published in 1812. ozeretskovskiy’s work contains such valuable general information about the nature, population and economy of the shoreline region of the ladoga and onega lakes that it has been for many years a source of variegated knowledge on karelia without having once lost its value for a host of researchers up to our own days because it emerges as a paradigm for all scientific descriptions of the region (see ozeretskovskii 1989). the enlightenment was marked by the emergence of local amateur historians. in the northern ladoga region the most notable representative of these local researchers was samuel alopaeus, a pastor from sortavala, who was a descendant of a finnish bond farmhand, thomas kettunen by name. his descendants were given the name from the greek “alopaeus”, meaning “fox”. samuel alopaeus finished school in turku and served as a preacher for the finnish lutherans in st. petersburg between 1751 and 1755. later he was transferred to sortavala where he was promoted to dean (prost). he lived in sortavala until his death in 1794 (bojarinskaja 1997). samuel alopaeus is primarily known for his research in geology and the mining industry. he is credited as a pioneer in uncovering the marble deposits at ruskeala. his book a brief description of the marble deposits and the other stone quarries located in russian karelia (1787) which was published in german (see alopaeus 1787) and russian and enjoyed phenomenal popularity, still remains a well-known source for researchers. it is for the publication of this book that he was elected a member of the free economic society in 1789. one of the enlightenment’s manifestations in russia was the encouragement of current and infennia 182: 1 (2004) 15the presentation of old finland in the descriptions of… cipient research institutions. the year 1765 saw the rise of the free economic society (fes) that united researchers and specialists in their agriculture and peasant-related pursuits. the fes had a wide network of contributors in various parts of the country and was busy issuing its own periodical the works of the fes. as soon as samuel alopaeus was given membership in the fes he became deeply involved in it by publishing several profound works and a number of essays in the works of the fes (see pashkov 1997) among which one can highlight the monograph a description of the location of kexholm province, also known as karelia (trudy… 1792, 185–202) and karelia’s waterways (trudy… 1793, 268–286). in 1804 the academician v. severgin made a trip to the northern ladoga region, including a visit to sortavala. the results of this trip were summed up in his book a survey of russian finland (severgin 1805). his primary interest was likewise connected with the minerals of the region. he gave a detailed description of marble mining, alongside which he drew attention to other natural resources of the region, i.e. to karelian birch “used to produce a variety of refined articles”. v. severgin’s book also contains information about the local populations of the northern ladoga region. after visiting jaakkimanvaara he wrote: “the settlement is located on the western shore of lake ladoga... the residents are karelians.” while in sortavala he reported that “the territory is inhabited by finns and karelians”, attempting to make the distinction between the finns and karelians. it should be carefully pointed out that severgin paid special attention to the local population’s old songs “in which the qualities of iron, steel and their origin are sung about and celebrated etc.” he might have heard karelian and finnish runes but gave them little consideration. all this research work by russian scientists resulted in the publication of the geographical dictionary of the russian state in 7 volumes edited by professor a. schekatov of moscow university (slovar… 1801–1809). the first volume of the dictionary contained articles such as “the valamo monastery”, “valamo, an island in lake ladoga”, “vyborg as the principal fortified town of vyborg province”, “vyborg province, also known as russian finland”. the second volume contains the articles “imatra as a worthy location for observations on the finland province in karelia”, “the parish (pogost) of imbilaksi in the finnish province in northern kexholm district”, and “the joensuu marble quarries in the finnish province, northern kexholm district on the island of ambarsaari on lake ladoga”. the fifth volume includes the article “serdobol, a town newly established in the finnish province” while in the sixth volume are the articles “finland, former swedish lands”, “the finnish province”, “finns or chukhons”, and “the finnish people or ancient russes”. finally, the seventh volume includes the articles “chukhons or finns properly so-called”. it is evident from this short list of articles that by the beginning of the 19th century, the viborg province had been investigated by russian researchers at greater length. it was noted in the articles that the land in the viborg province “is not adapted to arable farming” and the residents buy bread and live from bread mixed with pine bark. their main economic pursuits were cutting timber, cattle breeding, hunting and fishing. among the industries schekatov’s “dictionary” mentions are the iron mines and the quarries in ruskeala where “stone of the best colours” was extracted. the population of the viborg province totalled 185,242. the article “finns or chukhons” contains a curious description of a finnish dwelling: not only settlements but also the yards themselves may be located at a great distance from each other. finnish yards are essentially spacious. the farm usually consists of three houses, one of them is called a winter house, the other a summer one and the third a cooking house. outside in the yard are located the storehouses, hay drying barns, stables, cattle sheds, barns, larders and bathhouses. all constructions are timber-built just as is the case in russia and sweden. (slovar… 1808, 6, 688) the reader’s curiosity may be aroused by descriptions of men’s and women’s clothing and of the religious rites and folk festivities of finns. after the viborg province had been joined to the great duchy of finland in 1812 the trips of russian researchers to the northern ladoga region quite simply came to a standstill. military and statistical surveying of the viborg province around the middle of 19th century there appeared several civil and military-oriented statistical descriptions of various regions of russia, including the viborg province. in the summer of 1856 cap16 fennia 182: 1 (2004)alexandr m. pashkov tain axel alfthan from the general staff was appointed chief of an echelon of officers to be sent to study the communications of finland, and to compile a map of the grand duchy. the group included a field officer called nordenstreng, a lieutenant mozel from army headquarters and captain björn from the school of military cartographers. axel alfthan was chosen to head the group, which during the summer of 1856 crossed the country from viborg to torneå (tornio). the materials axel alfthan collected made up the contents of the book materials for compiling the statistics of finland which appeared in 1859 (alfthan 1859). part of the book was written in helsinki by axel alfthan where, as he remarked, “one could obtain lots of good material”; another part was compiled in st. petersburg where in may 1857 he was dispatched on a service transfer. the entire work was finished in march 1858. parallel to his labours on the manuscript he busily compiled a map of finland. however, the compilation of the map dragged on too long, which is why his book came out in 1859 with a map supplement now drawn up by a. eklund in 1840 with inscriptions in the swedish language. later in 1847 the map was subjected to certain alterations in the military topography depot where it was given inscriptions in the russian language. the scale of the map was 45 versts to one inch or 1:1 890 000. a. alfthan’s map completed by eklund in 1860 was published solely as supplement to a. zolotarev’s military and historical essays of finland (zolotarev 1900). its scale was 30 versts to one inch or 1:1 260 000. the scale of alfthan’s map in the original was 12 versts to one inch or 1:504 000. materials for compiling the statistics of finland by alfthan was based on various and numerous sources. first of all the work, contains the author’s personal observations as an officer who had served in finland for three years. secondly, the book includes the data collected during the officers’ trip around the region in the summer of 1856. finally, the author made use of the materials available in the archives of the senate of finland and institutions subordinated to it. alfthan also availed himself of published works by f. knorring (1833), s. galden, the mining engineer kh. holmberg, s. baranovskiy and many others. he also made use of articles from the periodicals suomi, saima, litteraturbladet, wiborg, finlands allmänna tidning and similar sources. alfthan’s work contains a great deal of information on the northern ladoga region, which at that time formed part of the viborg province. it offers detailed information about the administrative divisions of the territory, including the following districts and parishes: the salmi district (the parish of impilahti with the parish of kitele, the parishes of suistamo and salmi, suojärvi with the parish of korpiselkä), the sortavala district (the parishes of sortavala, uukuniemi and ruskeala with the parish of leppälahti), the core district of kexholm (with the parishes of parikkala, jaakkimanvaara and kurkijoki). thus, in the middle of 19th the century the northern ladoga region (stretching from salmi and suojärvi to the present-day kurkijoki) was part of three districts (uyezds) and 10 parishes. alfthan also remarked that besides the modern administrative division of finland there existed also in “colloquial language a wide use of the old division of finland into regions and provinces (landskap) which nowadays would only have historical or ethnographic meaning.” among the regions he pointed out karelia (in finnish karjala), which, in his words, bore the title of dukedom including “the eastern parts of the kuopio and vyborg provinces”. he added that the lands joined to russia in 1721, 1743 and later in 1744, constituting viborg province, are also called “old finland” (in swedish gamla finland, in finnish vanha voittomaa or vanha suomi). as to the minerals of the northern ladoga regions alfthan names the marble extracted in the parish of ruskeala and in the vicinities of sortavala, near the läskelänjoki river by the village of joensuu, as well as the copper and tin mines near pitkäranta producing a yearly tin extraction of 9000 puds (144 tonnes) and copper extraction to the yearly rate of 1000 puds (16 tonnes) of copper. it is quite natural that alfthan gave so much space to the description of the northern shore of the lake ladoga. he stated that from the kexholm vicinity to the church of kitele, the shore is “extremely hilly and indented with lots of bays and creeks yet here in the valleys between the hills there are quite broad arable fields in the parishes of kronoborg; jakimvaara and serdoboll... the northern part of the lake is quite rich in islands which share the same characteristics with the adjoining countryside.” alfthan pointed out the most significant places in the northern ladoga region: the northern side of the lake is the place where the towns of kexholm and serdoboll are situated of fennia 182: 1 (2004) 17the presentation of old finland in the descriptions of… which the latter enjoys the advantage on account of its industrial output. aside from the above-mentioned towns comment should be made on the following places along the shore region: the settlement near the church of jakimvaara with a landing pier, the marble quarries near the village of joensuu, the mouth of luskellä-joki river as well as the copper mine near pitkäranta. it was also alfthan who pointed out a singular peculiarity of lake ladoga, the instability of the water level of the lake: “it is remarkable that the water level of lake ladoga is rising only at regular intervals of seven years to be going down for another seven years with a periodic difference of six feet.” the information about land use in the viborg province that the book offers arouses considerable interest. according to the data presented in the book, arable land in the province is made up of 2%, meadows 5.1%, forest 51.8%, swampy soil 11.2%, water 27% and rocky soil 2.9%. the cultivated areas (arable land and meadows) making up 7.1% exceeded the average index in finland which was 5.3%. as to the absolute indices of cultivated land (55.7 square miles), the viborg province was rated third in finland after the provinces of åbo (turku; 68.8 square miles) and uleåborg (oulu; 70.5 square miles). in connection with the expansion of arable lands alfthan mentions the extensive development of slash and burn clearing methods in karelia resulting in “a universal destruction of forests” along the shores of lake ladoga. still, he admits that there was a “vast forest space” situated to the northeast of lake ladoga in the parishes of impilahti, suistamo, and suojärvi and further as far as nurmes. furthermore, in the parishes of suistamo and suojärvi half the territory consisted of swampy soil, besides which, as alfthan wrote, “excellent iron ore was extracted” from the bogs at suojärvi. of arable lands alfthan wrote, referring to knorring’s work, the description of old finland (knorring 1833) that “the most excellent arable lands lie in the parishes near lake ladoga: serdoboll, jakimvaara, kronoborg, hiitola and pyhäjärvi”. the final part of alfthan’s composition is entitled “population”, dedicated to the problems of ethnography and demography. in this section he made an attempt to describe the typical physical features of residents from various regions of finland: savolax and karelians are tall calm and quiet, yet light-hearted, inert and wasteful; that is why their sense of well-being as well as their education is lower in comparison with all other finns, although there is no denying the fact that they possess a healthy morality – heavy drinking, particularly in the karelia district, is foreign to them. karelians compared with savolax distinguish themselves by having a higher degree of liveliness, which possibly may be ascribed to the influence from neighbouring russians... morals in their original purity have been preserved only in the inland parts of the region, that is in tavastland, savolax and particularly in karelia. the notable simplicity of clothing, primarily home-made, unpretentious even rather frugal food, sobriety and hospitality distinguish the residents of inland finland from their lake-shore countrymen revealing a contrast in prosperity, love of luxury and tainted morals. in his work a. alfthan gives detailed information about the population of the northern ladoga region in the districts in 1855: middle kexholm district 22,860, sortavala district (including the town of sortavala) 22,068 and salmi district 24,956 peoples. thus the entire population of the three ladoga districts of the viborg province in 1855 made up 69,884 people, including the towns of kexholm (1449 people), and sortavala (573 people). in the same lines alfthan gives information on the density of population in the districts (per square mile): middle kexholm district 558, sortavala district (including the town of sortavala) 479, salmi district 139 peoples and the whole density of population of the three districts was 405. when commenting on the data, alfthan states that the districts of sortavala and kexholm are populated “quite densely” while the district of salmi is populated “rather sparsely”. when describing the residents of the northern ladoga region with reference to religion, alfthan presented data stating that in 1855 of 37,352 orthodox residents of finland, 28,175 of them lived in the viborg province. besides, the orthodox believers inhabited the northeast part of the province, i.e. the ladoga region. in alfthan’s words “a great many pagan superstitions” survived in the provinces of savo and karelia provinces. alfthan noted a gradual growth of orthodox residents in the province during 1830–1850 from 25,212 to 47,144 people, and a sudden fall in 1855 to 37,352 people. thus, alfthan’s work, written with scientific thoroughness and sincere curiosity about subject matter, gives a relatively complete picture of the state of affairs in the northern ladoga region in the 19th century. 18 fennia 182: 1 (2004)alexandr m. pashkov the second half of the 19th century saw the appearance of quite a large number of works devoted to finland. they contained various materials on the northern ladoga region. in 1882 one volume came out in the series picturesque russia, devoted to the great duchy of finland ( vzivopisnaja rossija 1882). the main bulk of the text was compiled by s. baranovskiy, a professor at the alexander university in helsinki. concerning the population of the two largest towns of the northern ladoga region, he gave the following information in 1875: kexholm was inhabited by 1150 people and sortavala by 655 people, and he insisted on calling them “insignificant towns”. yet in addition it was underscored that sortavala owned a 60-horsepower steamboat, besides which there was an established steamship communication route between sortavala and st. petersburg maintained by two ships. during this time, the finnish economy had been on the rise, resulting in russia lagging behind finland remarkably in economic development and living standards. such new phenomena were given space as well in baron n. kaulbars’ book a short survey of the great duchy of finland (kaulbars 1900). the author was a lieutenant general of the general staff of the russian army. prior to this, he had been chief of staff in the finnish military district for eight years, often paying official and private visits to finland. on the basis of his personal experience, which he regularly entered in his log supplemented by statistics, he made up his mind to describe the typical features of the “surface, people and state structure” of finland. it was quite natural that kaulbars’ book revealed information about the northern ladoga region. kaulbars calls sortavala the “most significant settlement” in the finnish lake shore area of the northern ladoga for the reason that the town was connected by steamship communication with pähkinäsaari, salmi, pitkäranta, kexholm, valamo, konevets and other shore settlements. besides, by that time there had been steamship communication between värtsilä and suistamo. another transport communication in kaulbars’ opinion was the railway connecting viipuri, sortavala and joensuu. he also noted that by the end of 19th century viipuri province had profited from 17 telegraph stations and the first telephone switchboards had begun to appear. thus, in sortavala there were 97 telephone subscribers and kexholm had 56 telephone subscribers. a considerable of military-statistical works are evidence of the importance of the karelian isthmus and northern ladoga for the high command of the russian army on account of the territory immediately adjacent to st. petersburg, capital of imperial russia. apart from books of essay-type content there had begun to appear by the end of 19th century the earliest russian statistical reports on finland. in the series statistics of the russian empire the volume a collection of data on the finnish provinces came out in 1892 (statistika…1892) with a collection of data on finland that was coming out in 1900 (statistika… 1900). both collections contain information on the ladoga region. thus, a collection of data on the finnish provinces points out that by january 1st 1890, there were 340,680 inhabitants residing in the viborg province. considerable interest is aroused by the data on the dynamics of town residents in the ladoga region (see table 1). such data allow us to trace the process of gradual decline of kexholm and the rise of sortavala. the statistics represent the viborg province as a multiethnic and multi-confessional region. of the parishes, 44 were lutheran, 16 orthodox (of 23 in general in finland) and one catholic. lutherans were the majority (272,499) and orthodox worshippers constituted 29,317 out of the 38,725 living in finland. it should be added that the majority of orthodox worshippers were residents of rural areas. the data of 1890 give evidence of 836 lutherans and 348 orthodox worshippers living in kexholm whereas in sortavala the figures are accordingly 742 and 148. according to ethnic grouping of the residents of viborg province, the year 1880 data testify to the majority being finns (291,490), apart from whom there were russians (2219), swedes (7382) and germans (842). the finnish statistics in all probability did not take into account karelians considering themselves to be finns. a collection table 1. the dynamics of urban population in kexholm and sortavala in 1840–1890. source: statistika… 1892, 6–7. town year 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 kexholm 1473 1435 1181 1153 1184 1258 sortavala 460 665 589 669 890 1247 fennia 182: 1 (2004) 19the presentation of old finland in the descriptions of… of data on the finnish provinces contains information on the numerical ratio of population in certain rural communities of the viborg province (see table 2). guidebooks for russian middle class since the second half of 19th century finland, including the northern ladoga area, had become a place of attraction for well-to-do russian visitors. various guidebooks were published with a view to giving a boost to tourism. one of the guidebooks, entitled a guidebook to finland compiled by v. mainov, is worth considering (mainov 1887). the choice of the guidebook is justified by the personality of the compiler. mainov (1845–1888) graduated from the aleksander lyceum in st. petersburg. he taught french at the aleksander gymnasium and the university of helsinki for some years. it is known that he knew finnish and even made attempts to translate the kanteletar collection of poems into russian. he spent the last years of his life in st. petersburg where he actively cooperated with the russian geographical society working as a secretary in the ethnography department. for these reasons, mainov can be considered a consummate expert on finland and his guidebook has acquired a special significance. it is worth noting that the first guidebook a guidebook to finland for finns did not appear until 1895 (lintunen et al. 1998). mainov’s guidebook offers several tourist routes along with a presentation of various sights along the route. one of the routes, namely, “from imatra to käkisalmi and sortavala” includes information about the history, population and sights of the northern ladoga region. when describing kexholm, mainov drew attention to the ethnic and religious symbiosis of its residents: the town boasts that clean look typical of all finnish towns, although its population does not exceed 1400 living souls, including the orthodox residents who represent a substantial figure because it is namely from here that the orthodox karelian population takes its origin, thus revealing sharp distinctions in their culture and well-being from lutheran residents... only a few local [orthodox] priests have learned the folk dialect well enough to be able to attend divine service and teach the people; recently the endeavours of the viipuri orthodox archdeacon and of the local orthodox merchants and inhabitants resulted in the founding of a particular fraternity whose members set themselves the goal of raising the education level of finland’s orthodox residents, thus, books, textbooks and grammar books began to be translated. two chapels were built near the mouth of vuoksi river and in one of them thanksgiving service was held each time the ship “valamo” arrived from st. petersburg giving the sign of a happy voyage. mainov took interest in the economic life of kexholm: folk earn their living mainly by fishing; trade on the whole is carried out by russians, whereas karelians are the good travelling salesmen wandering around central finland with their baskets full of goods... there are also porcelain and glazed pottery factories, their production mainly going to russia. finnish folk are engaged in active trade relations with russia, selling timber, willow bark, butter, fish, wild game and furs. mainov, when compiling his guidebook for tourists, could not but make mention of the places of interest in kexholm: there are two sites of ancient settlements with the remainders of fortress about a hundred sazhens [1 sazhen = 2.134 m] from the town, located on the two islands of the vuoksi river which by now has become shallow after joining lake suvanto... the fortresses had constantly been changing hands throughout five centuries until peter the great finally made kexholm part of russia. the walls all the way down table 2. the population of rural communities of the northern ladoga area in 1890. source: statistika… 1892, 182. name of community population name of community population (number of residents) (number of residents) hiitola 6,311 suojärvi 4,269 kurkijoki 6,364 korpiselkä 1,807 rural com. of sortavala 14,599 salmi 9,157 ruskeala 4,598 suistamo 5,884 impilahti 7,318 uukuniemi 5,754 kitele 3,504 jaakkimanvaara 9,471 20 fennia 182: 1 (2004)alexandr m. pashkov to the ground are made of natural quarry stone and flat cobble, while the upper part is turned and covered with soil; some buildings have survived in the fortress nearest to the town, while the other can boast of only a round tower with seven casemates; the building is now occupied by convicts, their guards and the priest. the two gates of the fortress are bound with swedish trophy armour. they say the tower was the place where yemelyan pugachev’s daughters lived as secret convicts until their death. the gates of so-called “new” fortress bound with swedish trophy armour has survived up to the present time. mainov deviates from the truth when stating that the members of pugachev’s family, the leader of the best-known folk uprising of 18th-century russia, were put in prison in kexholm. in one of the towers of the new fortress that later received the name of pugachev, his two wives, two daughters and son from his first marriage languished in captivity. taking into primary account the interests of russian readers, mainov tells of the past of kexholm connected with the russian side of its history, remaining silent about the sights and events from the swedish-finnish period. the last place that he recommends russian tourists to visit en route from viborg, passing imatra and kexholm, is sortavala. the guidebook contains many interesting concrete facts and figures about the town in question. mainov wrote: at present culture has attained great achievements here: there are many schools as well as a teacher’s seminary with finnish as the language of instruction, there are also hotels, the best is société... the town is beautifully located and numbers about 1000 inhabitants. one of the churches is lutheran and the two others are orthodox, of which one, made of timber, is an ancient one devoted to the apostles peter and paul. two versts away from the town on the island of riekkala [“greek”] there is the ancient orthodox church of st. nicholas built at the time of swedish dominance. an interesting ethnographic museum is housed in the building of the new town hall. the quarries eight versts away from the town are famous for their excellent white and greenish marble, for granite of a wonderful grainy structure as well as serdobolit resembling coal, which is usually used for decoration and to build cornices. many of the memorials in st. petersburg have been made of materials from the quarries. mainov’s guidebook contains an explanation of the origin of the place-name sortavala: “... the name of the town receives a curious explanation: they say the monks of valamo drove all devils from the island and the latter founded their own state here” (sorta is finnish transcription of the russian word chort – devil and state is valta in finnish). mainov’s curious explanation is not an exception. the work det gamla finland of franz von knorring (1833) contains a similar explanation: “the name of sortavala comes from russian word tchort, devil and from finnish walta, power, state. in ancient times a place to build a monastery was cleared and thus in so doing evil and the devil were ousted. the devil fled to the closest vicinity which turned out to be sortavala.” most likely this curious explanation is of russian origin and can be accounted for by the desire to find russian roots in any unusual finnish name. the finnish researcher martti jaatinen, a recognized expert in the history of sortavala, explains the origin of the word by tracing it from the finnish sorta (burning off after felling trees). some episodes of sortavala’s history in the guidebook receive a false interpretation: the town was founded in 1617, besides the district was as county donation given to gustav banér who was the son of the famous military leader gustav adolf adam banér. the town was very rich on account of its beneficial trade, but in 1705 it was destroyed by fire and since that time would not recover until the 1870s. it is known that swedes founded the town in 1643 (some works give the wrong date of 1632). in 1651 the town was given as a possession to cavalry general count gustav adam banér. mainov does not inform us that the town was destroyed after it was taken on the 27 january 1705 by p. apraksin’s 2000-man force during the great northern war. it took three days for the russians to burn down the town and the majority of its inhabitants (out of 600 all in all) were taken prisoner. according to jaatinen (1997), these events substantially reduced the number of the town’s inhabitants so that the number of the town residents in 1704 was recovered only by 1857 while the number of town buildings took an even longer time to be restored. the chapter devoted to the northern ladoga region concludes with a description of the vicinity of sortavala: if you go from serdobol by road you cannot but pay attention to the settlement impilaks due to its romantic location, pitkäranta lies to the south and is known for its copper and tin mines. a little further away is jakimvaara which may soon have a railway if one is built between viipuri and joensuu according to plan. kronoborg, an estate of count kushelev-bezborodko, raises a point of a certain interest, too. it is surfennia 182: 1 (2004) 21the presentation of old finland in the descriptions of… rounded by amazing landscapes, extremely picturesque and original wildlife, an excellent place for fishing and hunting elks and deer. at present it is an exemplary prison for women and soon a dairy school will be built. mainov’s a guidebook to finland is evident of the growing interest in the northern ladoga region at the end of the 19th century insofar as russian “middle class citizens” chose the area as a popular area for travel and relaxation, actually as a tourist destination. conclusion from the end of 18th up to the beginning of 20th centuries the karelian isthmus and the northern ladoga region aroused russia’s interest from three points of view. firstly, the area had a developed economy and it was located not far from st. petersburg, capital of the russian empire. that was why its economic potential attracted russian scientists. at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, several expeditions were set up to study the economy of the northern ladoga region. after 1812, the interest of russian scientists in the region grew weaker and travel notes were replaced by statistic publications of various kinds. secondly, the viborg province inspired interest due to its military-strategic position. the territory was the most important bridgehead close to st. petersburg. that was why the territory was subjected to close scrutiny by the officers of the general staff of the russian army and the st. petersburg military district. and, thirdly, well-to-do middle class citizenry began to come into being in russia after the reforms of alexander the second. middle-class citizens considered the karelian isthmus and the northern ladoga region to be part of europe located nearest to russia. they were attracted by convenient means of communication, a european lifestyle, a high level of comfort and beautiful nature. thus, the ladoga region became an attraction for russian tourists. in this connection guidebooks came to be published which gave much space to natural sights and the cultural achievements of the region. thus, the image of the viborg province in 19thcentury russia was not a homogeneous one. the area aroused interest and was of importance in russia for various reasons and various policies. the projection of this image underwent considerable distortion after 1917. but it should still be insisted that the sheer variety of images of viborg province which were formed during the 19th century should not disappear but should continue to develop even in our day. acknowledgements the compilation of the article was sponsored by the russian fund for humanities, project n 01-0149000 a/c. references alfthan a (1859). materialy dlja statistiki finlandii. materialy dlja statistiki i geografii rossii, sobrannye ofitserami generaljnogo shtaba. st. petersburg. alopaeus o (1787). kurze beschreibung der in russisch-kaiserlichen carelien befindlichen marmorund anderen steinbrüchen, bergund steinarten. st. petersburg. bojarinskaja af (1997). udivitelnyi pastor. sever 4, 157–160. jaatinen mj (1997). sortavalan rakentaminen 1643– 1944. 248 p. tkk, espoo. kaulbars n (1900). kratkoe obozrenie velikogo knjazestva finlanskogo. st. petersburg. knorring fp von (1833). gamla finland eller det fordna wiborgska gouvernementet. christian ludvig hjelt, åbo. lintunen p, m hytönen, k ikonen & s kivimäki (1998). laatokan pohjoisrannikon kulttuuriympäristö. suomalainen kulttuuriperintö laatokan pohjoisrannikon maisemassa. suomen ympäristö 236. 230 p. mainov vn (1887). putevoditel po finlandii. st. petersburg. ozeretskovskii n (1792). puteshestvie po ozeram ladozskomu i onezskomu. st. petersburg. ozeretskovskii nya (1989). puteshestvie po ozeram ladozskomu i onezskomu. 207 p. karelia, petrozavodsk. pashkov am (1997). in samuel alopaeus i rossiiskoje prosvestchenije. in xiii konferenchija po izucheniju istorii, ekomoniki, literatury i jazuka skandinavskikh stran i finlandii, 84–87. moskva. severgin vm (1805). obozrenie rossiiskoi finlandii. st. petersburg. slovar geograficheskii gosudarstva rossiiskogo (1801–1809). 1–7. moskva. statistika rossiiskoi imperii (1892). sbornik sbedenii po finlandskim guberniam. statistika rossiiskoi imperii 25. st. petersburg. statistika rossiiskoi imperii (1900). sbornik sbedenii po finlandii. statistika rossiiskoi imperii 52. st. petersburg. 22 fennia 182: 1 (2004)alexandr m. pashkov storch h (1796). materialien zur kenntniss des russischen reichs 1. riga. trudy volnogo ekonomicheskogo obstchestva (1792). trudy volnogo ekonomicheskogo obstchestva 45, 185–202. trudy volnogo ekonomicheskogo obstchestva (1793). trudy volnogo ekonomicheskogo obstchestva 47, 268–286. vzivopisnaja rossija (1882). severo-zadadnyje okrainu rossii. velikoje knjazestvo finlandskoje. moskva. zolotarev am (1900). voenno-istoricheskii ocherk finlandii. st. petersburg. untitled development of forest sector in the arkhangelsk oblast during the transition period of the 1990s albina pashkevich pashkevich albina (2003). development of forest sector in the arkhangelsk oblast during the transition period of the 1990s. fennia 181: 1, pp. 13–24. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the arkhangelsk oblast has long been one of russia’s most important forest industrial regions. this paper analyses the changes in accessibility of forest resources and forest commodity production during the transition period in the 1990s. special attention is given to firm restructuring, active roles of domestic capital and the different survival strategies that have been developed by industries in the region. further analysis deals with signs of economic recovery in the forest sector due to the processes of restructuring, modernisation and self-organisation. albina pashkevich, spatial modelling centre (smc), department of social and economic geography, umeå university, box 839, se-98128 kiruna, sweden. e-mail: albina.pashkevich@smc.kiruna.se. ms received 12 august 2002. introduction the shift from central planning to a market-based economy in russia culminated with the dramatic economic and political reorientation that began in the 1990s. this transition towards a market-oriented and outward-looking economic system led by private sector has created new challenges and opportunities. industries have been affected mostly by changes connected to the process of ‘market economy building’. it has become clear that the transition from one type of economic system to another within forest sector has had a profound impact on its previously designed socio-economic organisation, and has been especially hard on people who are dependent on it as their only means of livelihood. the forest sector may not be the biggest contributor to the economy of the russian federation overall, but it plays a significant role in the economy of many of its regions, particularly in the arkhangelsk oblast1. it employs up to 40–45% of the oblast’s labour force and comprises up to 60% of the region’s industrial output. the analysis of russia’s period of transition in the 1990s illustrates the fact that it has been proceeding with a wide range of variations combining features of the old communist system and the adoption of a new. some suggest that this process has been deeply embedded in the nature of the socialist system (dingsdale 1999; hamilton 1999) and that the legacy of the communism has been only partly removed, and instead has merely been reworked in a complex way (smith 1997). others say that reforms have actually ended the old ‘command economy’ but have instead succeeded in the creation of only a very limited market-based economy, or have not been able to create anything at all (brodin 2000). it is clear that the development of a specific political, institutional and societal system is deeply embedded in the country’s past and is shaped by its historical, cultural, political and economic experiences and legacies. such a radical change as a transition to market economy and democracy cannot immediately alter people’s existing perceptions, structures and behaviour, derived under 74 years of soviet regime. yet, clearly one of the positive outcomes of the transition is the removal of the former domination of the centralised state over its regions and local communities, allowing regional actors to become more independent in establishing networks and connections across the space at all levels (including ‘global-local’ interdependence). the transition has resulted in a tremendous shift in the division of political and eco14 fennia 181: 1 (2003)albina pashkevich nomic power among the state, regional and local governments and other actors (dingsdale 1999). therefore, different types of strategies have been employed by local or regional actors while taking into account the advantageous features of the regional economy and making greater use of established and re-established organisational structures and networks (hamilton 1999). after a decade of transition, the forest sector is still undergoing complex changes. numerous scholars have pursued studies of the economic transition of the russian forest industry. the international institute of applied systems analysis (iiasa) has made one of the most comprehensive european analyses of various aspects within the sustainable boreal forest resources project (carlsson et al. 1999, 2000). the forest sector development of the european north has been reviewed recently in several research attempts (backman 1997; piipponen 1999; layton & pashkevich 1999, 2000; myllynen & saastamoinen 2000; nilsson 2000). despite regional analyses of forest sector development in the european north since the soviet period, very little information exists about the results of recent development in the arkhangelsk oblast’s forest sector, which long served as one of russia’s most important timber exporting regions. this paper analyses changes in the accessibility of forest resources and industrial output, including the spatial organisation of wood-processing industries and their current networks. attention is also paid to the variety of interactions between different economic actors in the process of reshaping the previous structural and spatial organisation of the forest industries. forest industries before and during the soviet period the 17th century can be considered a beginning of commercial logging activities in the region, the main centres being the cities of arkhangelsk and onega. however, the turn of the 19th century was the true starting point for the development of the wood-harvesting2 and sawmilling industries (layton & pashkevich 1999: 34). during the 1930s and 1940s, arkhangelsk oblast began its development as one of russia’s major forest industry regions as its previous sawmilling capacities were complemented by pulp and paper production (fig.1). before the october revolution of 1917, the main sawmills were located at the mouths of the main navigable rivers in four major clusters. there were no sawmilling activities in the timber harvesting areas and all of the logged timber was transported (floated) to the cities of arkhangelsk and onega for further manufacturing. during the soviet period, new export sawmills were also set up at the ports of mezen and narjan-mar at the mouths of the mezen and pechora rivers. traditionally, logging has been practiced along main transport routes, such as rivers and railways, which is why logging activities became increasingly concentrated in the southern and western parts of the oblast. in the 1960s, more than 50% of the total harvested timber was derived from the basin of the northern dvina and most of it was free-floated down the river to the arkhangelsk industrial centre3 (layton & pashkevich 1999: 35). other river basins situated in the south of the oblast (vychegda and viled) supplied timber that was transported through kotlas by rail to the kirov and vologda oblasts, and even to moscow or st. petersburg. this pattern is still evident today, but there is clearly a shift in logging activity towards the northeastern and eastern parts of the region (serebryannyy & zamotayev 1997: 204). the output of the arkhangelsk oblast timber industry became very diversified with the introduction in the early 1930s and again in the 1960s of the ‘upper echelons’ of the forestry sector – i.e., the main branches of the chemical wood-processing industry, such as pulp and paper milling and wood hydrolysis (layton & pashkevich 1999). during the soviet period the main centre of the timber industry was arkhangelsk itself, annually producing some 50–55% of the sawn goods, 55– 56% of the wooden packaging, and about 70– 75% of the oblast’s furniture production (layton & pashkevich 1999: 36). other emerging industry centres in the oblast included the towns of severodvinsk, onega, mezen, and narjan-mar. the expansion of sawmills and wood-processing plants were thus brought closer to the raw material bases during the 1960s. post-soviet changes and forest industries today forest resources for more than 90 years, industries operating in the region were heavily dependent on the forests fennia 181: 1 (2003) 15development of forest sector in the arkhangelsk oblast... fig. 1. administrative map of the arkhangelsk oblast (basis 1999). along the main railroads and waterways. in the 1980s, some 23% of all exploitable coniferous forests had been exhausted, especially in those forest management units located along the arkhangelsk–konosha–kotlas railway (carlsson et al. 1999; departament... 2000a). although the extensive taiga forests in the central and southern parts cover 19 million hectares, potentially exploitable forests are distributed unevenly among the oblast’s districts in areas distant from the previously established road infrastructure (serebryannyy & zamotaev 1997: 204). however, in 2000, the growing stock of the arkhangelsk oblast’s forests was estimated at 2.4 billion cubic meters, which accounted for almost 2% of russia’s growing stock (chuiko 2000: 7). the oblast, together with the republic of komi, contains one-third of the forest resources in the european part of russia (layton and pashkevich 1999: 31). in recent years, the region has also accounted for a quarter of european russia’s total wood harvest. 16 fennia 181: 1 (2003)albina pashkevich one of the problems affecting the present development of forest management in the arkhangelsk oblast (and the russian federation) is lack of stability in terms of its operational structure (carlsson et al. 2000: 24; gubnitsyn 2000: 2). the previous system of forest management has been undergoing reorganisation for several years and is still not complete. this process should theoretically finalise the adoption of the new laws, affecting the speed of transformation of forest management practices, but a great deal of uncertainty still affects the system. nowadays, regeneration of forestland that was previously clear-cut is dependent on the amount of money allocated to the state silvicultural agencies from various sources (federal and local administration budgets, forest management’s own assets, etc.). in the absence of funds for reforestation and other silvicultural measures, the less desirable broad-leaved species will prevail in the oblast’s growing stock (carlsson et al. 1999; 10). forecasts predict that when young stands (with a total share of 4.6 million hectares, or 23% of the forest resources) come into maximum growth in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the total annual forest regrowth in the oblast will increase from 20 million m3 to 25 million m3 (trubin 2000b: 2). this will offer significant potential for industrial use of wood that would become even larger with the reinforcement of the silvicultural measures. federal budget subsidies are, however, not the solution. the forest management units will continue to work towards the adoption of a longer-term sustainable forest policy to secure revenues from their industrial activities. among other debated issues is the question of private forest ownership, which is still an uneasy one. some argue that no forestland should be privatised (carlsson et al. 1999: 8). others suggest, however, that by the first half of the twentyfirst century, loggers will be allowed to own the forests they operate, 15–20% of the total area (trubin 2000b). in general, private ownership will lead to a higher responsibility for the forest use and over the performance of the silvicultural measures. thus, along with the other measures already taken towards more sustainable forest utilization, it should ensure the quality of raw material supply in the near future. the period of development of the forest sector analysed here has been strongly affected by the following factors: 1) a continuous decrease in the availability of exploitable forests located in geographical proximity to the main processing centres, and 2) the impacts of the structural and dynamic organisation of the secondary forests altered by long-term harvest operations in those forests. the physical and economic accessibility of the oblast’s forest resources has been challenged during the transition period also by the fact that they finally regained their market value absent during the soviet period of development (söderholm 2001: 369). clearly, much of the oblast’s potential forest resources are not yet realisable by the forest industry, because of the difficulties experienced by the logging industry and forest management practices. however, recent positive performance of the forest sector will likely lead to an improvement of forest regeneration practices (backman 1999: 466; nilsson & kleinhof 2001: 177). transport networks traditionally, the soviet forest industries (saw, pulp and paper mills) have been built in locations with a relatively well-developed transport infrastructure optimal for sustaining a significant domestic timber supply (a pattern similar to scandinavian forest enterprises (myllynen & saastamoinen 2000). as timber stocks became depleted, logging activities moved from the existing transport routes and transportation costs became a constraint (nilsson 2000). thus, drastic economic changes, resulting in rising costs of raw material production and lack of necessary infrastructure investments to sustain productivity, can be seen as a major negative outcome of the transition period. the prohibition in the 1990s of free flotation due to its negative environmental impact resulted in roads becoming the sole means of transportation for many wood-harvesting enterprises located in the upper parts of the pinega, onega and vychegda rivers. another negative outcome of the transition was the collapse of road building in 1993–1996 when a complete abolition of state funding, which has previously supported loggers, took place. today, logging enterprises must bear the expenses alone, without any state investment (backman 1999: 454). in the former soviet union, some 25–45% of the money invested in logging enterprises was spent on the construction of log haulage roads and purchase of transport equipment. thus, the logging enterprises’ lack of such financial resources led to major losses that fennia 181: 1 (2003) 17development of forest sector in the arkhangelsk oblast... have been estimated at 2.5–3 million cubic metres of timber annually (orlov 2000). future development in the forest industry is heavily dependent on the improvement of existing infrastructure and the creation of new roads. the regional government, the “regional department of road management” (arkhangelskavtodor) and the union of forest industrialists (soyuz lesopromyshlennikov) have together been the main initiators of a program of development in this direction. during the 1990s, forest resources were exploited along the existing road infrastructure, which today has further lengthened the overall mean distance of timber transportation by 60–80 kilometres (over 100 kilometres for some enterprises). in early 1997, the annual programme “on construction, reconstruction and maintenance of the roads”4 was developed, partly financed by means of a regional road fund (orlov 2000). the existing road network generally lacks hard surface, meaning that modern vehicles operating at maximum carrying capacity and potentially high speed cannot be used on the roads year round. most of the roads have not been designed to withstand this increased pressure, as they are often wooden-planked, narrow gauge railway, ice or dirt tracks, very few being of permanent character (trubin 2000a). the most important role in the development of river transport is played by the northern dvina, which connects the administrative centre, arkhangelsk, with settlements along the river. in terms of the volume of forestry goods transported by water, the northern dvina river system is in third position in the russian federation (layton & pashkevich 1999). most of the logging companies that rely on rivers as the main means of transportation have been investing considerable sums of money in deepening the riverbed. however, the complete collapse of the system that previously subsidised this practice has also resulted in the northern dvina becoming ever more shallow through sedimentation (serebryannyy & zamotaev 1997). this hampers the delivery of timber by river ships, its rafting from up-river areas and its handling in the port (brodin 2000). since the beginning of the transition, logging enterprises relied on the existing road and river network due to the lack of funds for introducing new patterns of transportation. as the forest sector recovers, pressure on the existing infrastructure increases. loggers have found themselves in a very difficult position since the economic situation for most of them remains difficult, and only few enterprises are actually able to allocate enough funds for the further improvement of quality and quantity of the infrastructure. therefore, a vital cooperation among regional administration, road-construction firms and industrialists has been established in order to reduce the cost burden on the logging enterprises. better accessibility of the forest resources due to an improved transport infrastructure would lower production costs and thereby stimulate market performance of the forest sector. forest industries today today, the oblast’s forest sector comprises of a total of 1341 enterprises including 582 wood-harvesting units, 728 woodworking enterprises (including sawmills, woodworking factories, furniture factories and a veneer factory), and 31 chemical wood-processing enterprises (3 pulp and paper mills, 2 hydrolysis factories, 1 pulp factory and 25 other plants belonging to the forest chemical industry) (pashkevich 2001: 105). it should be noted that some 43% of the total wood-processing enterprises are located in the regional centre, arkhangelsk. lesser centres are at novodvinsk, onega and kotlas. fig. 2 locates principal logging enterprises, together with major manufacturing facilities, along the two main railways including (n–s) permilovo, plesetsk, shalakysha, konosha, and (w–e) velsk, shangaly, kotlas, koryazhma. taking 1990 as the base year, a decline in the outputs of all major forest commodities is evident and often drastic (table 1 and fig. 3). the whole forest sector is undergoing a deep economic crisis and the financial position of many forest-based industries is unstable (backman 1999). decline in the production of main commodities can be partly explained as a result of the previously designed system, which has been neither economically effective nor sustainable. the environment in which the forest sector operates has been altered by swift introduction of market reforms such as rapidly rising energy prices and transport costs as a result of price liberalisation, and complete and abrupt abolition of state subsidises for logging activities and forest management practices. the type of market economy that has been developed today cannot generate the financial resources needed to compensate for those previously supplied by the state. 18 fennia 181: 1 (2003)albina pashkevich fig. 2. location of the principal forest-based activities in the arkhangelsk oblast in 2000 (departament... 2000a, 2000c; pashkevich 2001). since 1998, the arkhangelsk oblast forest sector has shown signs of recovery. during the period 1997–2000, most of the wood-harvesting enterprises benefited from privatisation and linkages to powerful wood-processing enterprises (grevtsov 2000b; kondratev 2000a, 2000b). considerable amounts of capital have been invested in order to modernise logging machinery, provide firms with fuel and allocate funds for seasonal felling activities. therefore, the harvested volumes began to increase again in 1999. the dynamics of the total oblast timber harvest over the past 10 years reveals that the decline in production began in 1990–1991, falling from 22.6 million cufennia 181: 1 (2003) 19development of forest sector in the arkhangelsk oblast... bic metres to less than one-third of the allowable cut in 1998 (table 1). since then, the harvests in 1999 and 2000 increased slightly. this trend is predicted to continue until the year 2005, with the total wood harvest reaching 14 million cubic metres annually, which still would constitute only about 62% of its 1990 level (departament… 2000a: 5). currently, the arkhangelsk oblast is one of the largest suppliers of timber in russia, with 11% of the total federal timber production and approximately one-third of russian forest exports to western markets (chuiko 2000: 7). the considerable decrease in forest use (from almost 26 million cubic metres in the mid-1980s down to 8-9 million cubic metres in the end of 1990s) did not overthrow the dominant role of the forest industry in the oblast’s economy in general. fig. 3 shows a more considerable decrease in total harvest during the 1990s, compared to a decline in the manufactured goods production volumes. this phenomenon can be explained partly by the fact that major manufacturers have begun to supplement their raw material supply with imports from neighbouring regions, reaching a level of some 3 million cubic metres in 1999 (departament 2000c: 5–6). the volume of wood harvested in the oblast is still not able to fully meet the demands of manufacturers especially for pulpwood and sawn timber. in early 2000, positive performances by most of the oblast’s logging companies led to a surplus of pulpwood as its share in total timber production reached 60–80%. pulp and paper mills had managed to obtain their raw materials for lower prices and were acting as monopolistic buyers, resulting in a considerable fall in prices for the locally produced raw material (both pulpwood and wood chips). the evident overproduction of pulpwood in the oblast affected sawn wood manufacturers unable to meet their requirements for the timber supply. thus, rising prices for the available raw material lowered the profitability of the export of sawn timber, when the price of sawn timber fell under us$100 per cubic metre (grevtsov 2000b: 7). despite the falling export prices, the production of sawn goods increased at a slower pace in the year 2000. however, as most of the large and medium-sized sawmills in the region have already attained rather high volumes of production and table 1. volume of wood harvested and forest industry production in the arkhangelsk oblast during 1990–2000 (goskomstat… 1991; departament… 2000a, 2000b). year total sawn pulp paper cardchipfibreplywood harvest goods 1000 1000 board board board wood million m3 1000 m3 tons tons 1000 tons 1000 m3 million m2 1000 m3 1990 22.6 5011.0 2154.3 396.5 628.1 149.4 22.4 50.4 1991 18.5 4096.9 1881.2 364.4 559.4 171.8 22.1 53.9 1992 18.0 3488.1 1657.0 299.1 460.1 140.8 20.5 44.2 1993 14.1 3200.6 1529.4 304.0 417.3 133.4 21.5 40.4 1994 9.9 2292.1 1211.6 177.1 367.6 40.6 15.1 24.0 1995 9.0 1737.4 1344.4 211.1 399.7 21.2 13.5 25.4 1996 8.1 1605.0 1021.3 208.4 333.0 5.5 13.0 17.0 1997 8.2 1542.3 1279.1 195.0 483.0 2.7 14.5 24.8 1998 7.8 1519.0 1200.0 215.7 459.7 – 12.6 32.5 1999 8.0 1700.0 1505.0 253.0 575.0 – 17.5 47.1 2000 9.5 1850.0 1600.0 270.0 585.0 – 18.8 50.0 fig. 3. forest sector production in the arkhangelsk oblast in 1990–2000 (in percentage of the production volume in 1990) (cf. table 1). 20 fennia 181: 1 (2003)albina pashkevich small-sized sawmills are orientated mostly towards domestic supply, there will be no potential for substantial increase in production of sawn goods (only to reach the volume of 2.5 million cubic metres) (departament... 2000c: 5–6). in order to achieve higher prices for the sawn goods, producers must continue improving the quality of the final product and widen the range of goods produced. in 2000, regional pulp and paper mills had managed to produce some 1.6 million tonnes of pulp reaching still only 74% of the 1990 level. plans exist to increase production to 1.9 million tonnes by the year 2005 (departament... 2000c: 5–6). the graph also reveals that the oblast’s pulp and paper industries have focused mostly on the production of semi-processed commodities such as pulp, only half of which is subsequently refined further into finished commodities (table 1). thus, the outcome of the first ten years of transition can be summarised into three distinct periods (see figure 3): 1) 1990–1993 – beginning of the transition period, with a disruption of the previous economic system causing a gradual decline in production since state subsidies were no longer available, although some still remained within the system; 2) 1993–1997 – period of initial restructuring of the economic units affected by the transition, resulting in a drastic decline in production due to the limited accessibility of forest resources, since state money was no longer available for purchasing new machinery or for road construction; 3) 1998–present – gradual increase in production (expected to continue) followed the devaluation of the rouble during the financial crisis of 1998, making profitability of forest exports higher. however, the process of restructuring within the sector also increased in the rate of forest use and has supported it to start competing within a market economy. the export trade the arkhangelsk oblast plays an important role in russia’s export of forest commodities, comprising some 22% of total sawn timber and 27% of the total export of pulp and paper products (chuiko 2000: 7). several important conclusions can be derived from the latest available statistical data on exports (1993–2000). during the 1990s, the export volumes were relatively stable compared to the industrial output of the sector. although the export of all forest commodities experienced a decline at the beginning of the transition, the late 1990s, and 1997 in particular, can be regarded as the starting point of recovery for the region’s export trade. the volume of forest exports recovered faster than did the production (nilsson 2000). four forest commodities have traditionally accounted for the majority of forest exports from the oblast: pulp, paper, cardboard and sawn goods (departament... 2000b) (fig. 4). it is noticeable, however, that the export values of raw materials and semi-refined commodities such as round wood and sawn wood have fallen, whereas the refined products of the mechanical and chemical wood processing industries, pulp, paper and board, have gained importance. the production of high value-added goods has more capital behind it and has been in a stronger position during the process of economic restructuring, while the raw material suppliers have slipped into a weaker and more dependent role (layton & pashkevich 1999: 63). one of the advantages of the transition to market economy is a widening of the possibilities for the forest producers to supply both domestic and international markets. although russia’s domestic demand decreased over the past decade, it is slowly beginning to recover (tazhun, 2000). regional firms operating in the european markets are experiencing heavy pressure to meet new requirements of quality and environmental control brought about by european union laws. one possible option is a certification of forest goods, which would make it easier to find a niche on the european market and to assure buyers of the environmental safety of the product. some woodfig. 4. changes in the composition of forest exports of the arkhangelsk oblast in 1990 and 2000 (departament… 2000a, 2000b, 2000c; layton & pashkevich 1999). fennia 181: 1 (2003) 21development of forest sector in the arkhangelsk oblast... processing companies have already initiated this process. eventually, it would also enhance the competitiveness of russian forest goods. during the past few years (1998–2001), the overall market behaviour of many russian exporters has changed in order to facilitate secured delivery and better marketing of the firms’ performance. firm restructuring several examples of company restructuring have been examined to illustrate the type of changes that occurred during the period of economic transition in the 1990s. in brief, this restructuring has been achieved through the following activities: • privatising state-owned companies, concentrating shares among fewer owners and tightening controls on bankrupt enterprises (grevtsov 2000a); • modernising all stages of the production chain (e.g., logging equipment, implementation of non-chlorine bleaching techniques in pulp and paper production) (carlsson et al. 2000: 8; severov 2001); • horizontal and vertical integration amongst the forest commodity producers, which brought manufacturing businesses closer to each other and to their raw material bases (pashkevich 2001); • fulfilling the customer requirements better, and increasing productivity (val’kov 2000); • activating partnership amongst the biggest producers in the region to govern (administrate) price policy and lobby forest sector interests at federal level (carlsson et al. 1999; bulatov 2000); • ensuring company credibility by co-operating with the banking system (kalinin 2000; parfenova 2000); • utilising the capacity of the diverse regional educational systems (secondary and professional) and designing a social policy of the enterprise (summer camps for children, sea resort vacations for employees, bonus system for the most efficient workers) (drachev 1999; pashkevich 2001) and different kinds of sponsorship similar to those provided by swedish forestry firms (carlsson et al. 2000), including support of local sport teams or cultural events. the emergence of the new organisational structure within the sector is seen by some as ‘the old pattern of centralisation have been re-institutionalised’ (carlsson et al. 1999: 74). the process of change we have witnessed since the mid 1990s is, however, a different type of structural organisation of the forest sector compared to the old structure. the basis for the formation of larger integrated companies by which loggers are linked to the main processing industries has changed. today, the process is based on competition, coordination and economic co-operation among the partners involved, instead of being imposed by the state. there is certainly a degree of centralisation taking place as well, as the manufacturing capacities located in the biggest cities are often ‘in charge’, not only of buying the shares of the logging enterprises, but also of facilitating the process of their economic restructuring. another feature that many western researchers considered to be strongly connected with the past is the relationship between the forest enterprises and the local population, which continues to be seen by some as a hindrance to companies’ better performance (tykkyläinen & jussila 1998; hamilton 1999; piipponen 1999; pallot & moran 2000). the fact is that most of the harvesting enterprises deliberately choose to take the responsibility for the main social infrastructure – hospitals, schools, clubs, shops, and even power stations – of the forest settlements. in this way, they re-assure employees that their basic needs will be satisfied. eventually, the firm itself benefits from an increase in productivity, as workers are socially secure and have fewer worries about the future. some of the ‘new’ traditions taken into account by most of the forest enterprises were in fact introduced during the soviet times, such as ‘socialist competition’, more widely known as piecework contracts, the only difference being that during soviet times workers were granted medals rather than money. today, this has been accepted again and seems to have become a popular measure of encouraging employees to be productive and concerned with the performance of their own firm. conclusions by the beginning of restructuring, the output and consumption of the principal timber products dwindled to between a half and a third. the decrease in production of main forest products in the region followed a pattern similar to the other russian forest-producing regions, especially in the european part of the country (neighbouring re22 fennia 181: 1 (2003)albina pashkevich public of karelia) (piipponen 1999), even if the forest product output of the siberian regions has declined even more drastically (backman 1999). however, signs of organisational stabilisation have appeared, followed by a higher degree of coordination among the actors within the forest sector. the privatisation of forest industries and the limitation of the state’s role laid the foundation for the development in the oblast’s forest sector. the emerging free market policies helped many regional industrialists to expand even further towards the export markets. it is obvious that forest industrialists have become more active in promoting and lobbying their own interests at various levels of government. to ensure the future development of all branches of the forest sector, the industrialists must carry out the necessary technical and technological modernisation. in order to improve the competitiveness of their products (such as paper, cardboard, plywood, fibreand chipboard) the modernisation of the chemical wood-processing industries must continue with the aim to reduce the negative impacts on the environment. an increased level of wood harvest in the districts further inland (the leshykonskoe, verkhnaya toima, pinega and onega districts) will require constructing new forest roads and improving the quality of the existing ones. the oblast has long served as one of the largest suppliers of forest products to international markets and has most of its trading partners in europe. it is important to keep a high profile of the oblast’s forest products by fulfilling the requirements of sustainable production and customer demands. the sustainable growth based on investment, innovation, technical progress and structural change has already been initiated in the oblast. the 1990s was an extreme decade, judging by the consequences on the overall performance of russian economy. there have, however, been some considerable achievements made, which are reflected in the development of the arkhangelsk oblast’s forest sector. endnotes 1 the arkhangelsk oblast is located in the north of the european part of the russian federation. it covers an area of 587 400 km2, comprising 3.4% of russia’s territory, and is situated between the republic of karelia to the west and the komi republic to the east. the northern boundary consists of the shores of the white, barents and kara seas (arctic ocean). the vologda and kirov oblasts are in the south, the tumen oblast in the northeast. the arkhangelsk oblast also contains the archipelagos of franz josef land and novaya zemlya, and the nenets autonomous okrug (nao). nao has an area of 176 700 km2, which is almost one-third of the oblast (fig.1). in terms of size, the oblast is the fourth largest in the russian federation, after tyumen oblast (1 435 400 km2) in west siberia, magadan oblast (1 199 100 km2) in the far east and irkutsk oblast (767 000 km2) in east siberia. 2 ‘wood harvesting’ and ‘logging activities’ are used in the paper as synonyms. 3 arkhangelsk industrial centre comprises the three largest cities – arkhangelsk (administrative centre of the oblast), novodvinsk and severodvinsk. 4 in russian, “programma stroitelstva, remonta i soderzhanija avtomobilnykh dorog.” acknowledgements this paper is one among a number of studies conducted as a part of the eu-funded ‘barents sea impact study’ (basis). working reports concerning the development of the forest sector within the arkhangelsk oblast have been researched and written together with assistant professor ian layton. financial support enabling the author to work at the department of social and economic geography, umeå university during the spring and part of the summer 2001 from svenska institutet, stockholm, sweden via the visby programme is gratefully acknowledged, as are valuable comments from bruno jansson, heather winder, tim oxley, ludovic dupuis, and two anonymous referees. references brodin a (2000). ports in transition in countries in transition: the changing situation for ports in russia and the baltic states in times of geopolitical transition. 223 p. centre for european research, cergu, university distributor, gothenburg. backman c (1997). the forest sector of european russia. polar geography 21, 272–296 backman c (1999). the siberian forest sector: challenges and prospects. post-soviet geography and economics 40, 453–469. basis database (1999). <http://basis.uni-muenster.de> 01.06.1999. bulatov a (2000). vmeste – spravimsja (all together – we will manage). lesnaja gazeta 2: 2. carlsson l, n lundgren, m olsson & m varakin (1999). institutions and the emergence of markets – transition in the arkhangelsk forest sector. 100 p. iiasa, interim report ir-99-021, laxenburg, austria. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 23development of forest sector in the arkhangelsk oblast... carlsson l, n lundgren, & m olsson (2000). why is the russian bear still asleep after ten years of transition? 35 p. iiasa, interim report ir-00-019, laxenburg, austria. chuiko v (2000). na ‘khrushchevskoi bumage’ pishem do sikh por (we are continuing to write on the khrushchev’s paper). delovaja sreda 30, 2. departament lesopromyshlennogo kompleksa (2000a). programma razvitia lpk arkhangelskoy oblasti do 2005 goda iii.5 (program of the development of the arkhangelsk oblast’s forestry sector). lesnaja gazeta 5, 5. departament lesopromyshlennogo kompleksa (2000b). programma razvitia lpk arkhangelskoy oblasti do 2005 goda iii.6 (program of the development of the arkhangelsk oblast’s forestry sector). lesnaja gazeta 6, 5. departament lesopromyshlennogo kompleksa (2000c). programma razvitia lpk arkhangelskoy oblasti do 2005 goda iii.8 (program of the development of the arkhangelsk oblast’s forestry sector). lesnaja gazeta 9, 6. dingsdale a (1999). new geographies of post-socialist europe. the geographical journal 165, 145–153. drachev y (1999). solombalskii ldk podvodit itogi (solombala sawmill is finalising its results). lesnye novosti 7–8, 6–7. goskomstat rossiiskoi federatsii (1991). narodnoe khozajaistvo arkhangelskoi oblasti v 12 pjatiletke (the economy of the arkhangelsk oblast in 12th five-year plan). goskomstat rossii, arkhangelsk. grevtsov a (2000a). ystjaki ne stojat na meste (the yst’yansky district woodworking enterprises are operating). lesnye novosti 5, 3–4. grevtsov a (2000b). neobkhodimo sravnjat’ rentabelnost’ lesozagotovitel’nykh i lesopererabatyvaushchikh predprijatii (it is crucial to balance the development of wood-harvesting and woodprocessing enterprises). lesnye novosti 6, 2–3. gubnitsyn a (2000). lesnichii zhdet opredelennosti (the forest manager awaits for stability). lesnaja gazeta 8, 1–8. hamilton ife (1999). transformation and space in central and eastern europe. the geographical journal 165, 135–144. kalinin a (2000). nadejas na luchshee, gotovimsja k khudshemu (hoping for the best but better and preparing for the worst). lesnaja gazeta 6, 2–3. kondratev s (2000a). sovet edinomyshlkennikov (the union of forest industrialists). lesnaja gazeta 3, 4. kondratev s (2000b). soveshchanie v arkhangelske (meeting in arkhangelsk). lesnye novosti 9, 2. layton i & a pashkevich (1999). forestry and forest industries in the arkhangelsk oblast: their development and vulnerability to global change. 90 p. gerum: working report, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, umeå. layton i & a pashkevich (2000). forest-sector case studies – comparisons between the northern dvina and the pite river basins. 100p. gerum: working report, department of social and economic geography, umeå university, umeå. myllynen a & o saastamoinen (2000). russia in the baltic sea roundwood trade. in hedegaard l & b lindström (ed). the nebi yearbook 2000. north european and baltic sea integration. nordregio, springer. nilsson m (2000). five essays on forest raw materials use in an international perspective. doctoral thesis, department of business administration and social science, luleå university of technology, luleå. nilsson m & a kleinhof (2001). prospects for the northwestern russian forest raw material harvesting during the transition to a market economy. arctic 54, 174–184. orlov p (2000). u dorozhnikov i lesnikov est’ obshchie problemy (the road constructors and forest industrialists share the same problems). lesnaja gazeta 2, 2. pallot j & d moran (2000). surviving the margins in post-soviet russia: forestry villages in northern perm’ oblast. post-soviet geography and economics 41, 341–364. parfenova i (2000). mikhail kasyanov: “my mozhem vzjat na sebja kompensatsiu protsentov po kreditam (prime minister mikhail kasyanov says: “we could take the responsibility to pay off the interest rates of the loans credits). lesnaja gazeta 8, 4. pashkevich a (2001). designing a geoeconomic strategy for regional development: role of foreign investments in the restructuring of the industrial sector of the arkhangelsk region. doctoral thesis, department of social and economic geography, russian state pedagogical university, st.petersburg. piipponen m (1999). transition in the forest sector of the republic of karelia, russia. fennia 177, 185–233. serebryannyy lr & zamotaev iv (1997). problems of forested regions in arkhangel’sk oblast. polar geography 21, 203–212. severov a (2000). tzbk vnedraut novye tekhnologii (pulp and paper mills are implementing new technologies). delovaya sreda 2, 2. smith a (1997). breaking the old and constructing the new? geographies of uneven development in central and eastern europe. in lee r & j wills (ed). geographies of economies. arnold, london. söderholm p (2001). environmental policy in transition economies: will pollution charges work? journal of environment and development 10, 365–390. tazhun m (2000). ne kazhdyi den premer provodit soveshanie v arkhangelske (the prime minister is a chairman of the meeting in arkhangelsk). lesnye novosti 9, 1–2. trubin d (2000a). forest management in the north 24 fennia 181: 1 (2003)albina pashkevich of european russia. in mälkönen e, na babich, vi krutov & ia markova (ed) forest regeneration in the northern parts of europe. proceedings of the finnish-russian forest regeneration seminar, september 28 – october 2, 1998, vuokatti, finland. trubin d (2000b). severnyi les na ru bezhe vekov (northern forests in the next century). lesnaya gazeta 5, 4. tykkyläinen m & jussila h (1998). potentials for innovative restructuring of industry in northwestern russia. fennia 176, 223–245. val’kov e (2000). vse v zhizni zakanchivaetsya. dazhe vneshnee upravlenie (everything comes to an end, even an external management of the enterprise). lesnye novosti 7, 4–5. doctoral research work and work of care: reflections in times of a pandemic urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99192 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99192 reflections doctoral research work and work of care: reflections in times of a pandemic catarina barata, luísa coutinho, federica manfredi & madelon schamarella barata, c., coutinho, l., manfredi, f. & schamarella, m. (2020) doctoral research work and work of care: reflections in times of a pandemic. fennia 198(1–2) 247–251. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99192 in the face of the pandemic, we have been forced to adopt strategies in order to balance our doctoral work at the same time as caring for our families. as the digital turn has pervaded both social and academic milieus, we consider the potentials and shortcomings of remote interactions and approaches and how they have impacted our work and personal lives. we focus on the challenges of balancing paid work and the unpaid work of care, as well as considering potential changes to the concept of care in terms of building a caring culture. keywords: covid-19, family/work balance, caring, caring masculinities, academia, gender catarina barata (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6478-8007), luísa coutinho (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1938-5006), federica manfredi (https://orcid. org/0000-0002-6981-8367) & madelon schamarella (https://orcid.org/00000002-7356-2050), instituto de ciências sociais da universidade de lisboa, av. prof. aníbal bettencourt, 9. 1600-189 lisboa, portugal. e-mail: catarina. barata@ics.ulisboa.pt, luisa_coutinho@hotmail.com, federicamanfredi@ hotmail.fr, madelon@amarella.pt as lockdown became the new normal, there was a “resurgence of mystificatory images of the heteronormative private household” (kay 2020, 1). the idea that home is neither a material reality nor the safest place for everyone, seemed to be downplayed. the contradictions and inequalities of the social world were clearly revealed by the pandemic, but parents encouraged their children to draw rainbows and stick them on windows, a sign of hope to the outer world together with the collective wishful thinking slogan, “everything will be fine” (vai ficar tudo bem in portugal, andrà tutto bene in italy, the countries where we reside). in a more realistic tone, other voices pointed out that the pandemic was exposing “fallacies and falsehoods everywhere: the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all. the fiction that unpaid care work is not work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world, the myth that we are all in the same boat” (guterres, cited in mcveigh 2020). in the context of the pandemic, with all the psychological distress, paranoia and tiredness due to the lack of downtime between work and family, we struggled to advance in our doctoral research work, as we felt the demands of juggling family and paid work tasks had reached unprecedented levels of hardship. most carers during this time reported feeling overburdened and having to work extra hours © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 248 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) at night to comply with the multiple family/work demands (manzo & minello 2020), and we felt the same way. although the portuguese foundation for science and technology (fct)1 guaranteed a twomonth prorogation of its research grants, which momentarily contributed to easing the feeling of anxiety of the three of us who have such grants, the impact of the pandemic on the lives and work of people extended well beyond that period. madelon, on the contrary, does not have a scholarship and works online as a psychotherapist supporting people in dealing with their suffering during the pandemic, as well as providing online classes for the elderly, helping them to deal with loneliness. in this article we focus on our experiences as female ph.d. candidates in anthropology (catarina, federica and luísa) and sociology (madelon), to discuss the challenges we have faced as doctoral researchers during the pandemic. how did the effects of the pandemic impact our work?  we also consider the fact that new actors, for example, young men, have had to assume the role of carer for their families in the context of the pandemic and have looked at how this can contribute to a change in perspective regarding caring masculinities. research work and the work of care in situ work interrupted... during lockdown, part of the world was brought to a standstill and social distancing became mandatory. this situation posed challenges to our doctoral research. the first reaction to the pandemic was the closing down of institutions. we were forced to cease our regular visits to the university, libraries and archives. confined to our homes, we had to abandon the social interactions that are important contexts of scientific stimulation – conferences, tutor meetings and lunch breaks with colleagues who provide unexpected input and brainstorming opportunities. fieldwork was forcibly interrupted, too, as mobility and social contact were legally constrained and reduced to the family household. anthropological work, the art of presence and proximity, was obviously compromised. lockdown took its toll as we found ourselves deprived of any social contacts except with closest family members (partners and children), the only space for interaction being a computer or mobile screen. ... resumed as online work – the digital turn while the first reaction was to stop research work, this did not last long. disciplinary debates on approaches to fieldwork (lupton 2020) and the role of anthropology in health emergencies2 urged anthropologists to critically engage with the current situation. in some cases, the impact of the pandemic had a direct consequence on our research subjects. the setting proved valuable to catarina’s argument, as it exacerbated and exposed the conditions of obstetric violence and therefore, incorporating the effects of the pandemic in her research seemed inevitable. madelon’s online practice as a psychotherapist at this time, has influenced her perception of how caring practice by young men could impact the construction of a new caring identity. inspired by her experience, she decided to focus on a review in research methodology with young men. when the professional dimension is a pillar of self-perceived identity, carrying on with work can help the person feel balanced. both federica and luísa felt the need to carry on with their work for a sense of continuity. the strategy they found was resorting to online interviews. these internet-mediated communications meant that the interviewees had to be instructed on the optimal conditions for the interaction, avoiding noisy environments and bad internet connections. this implied extra energy and attention compared to standard interviewing settings, due to the need to monitor additional elements that might shape interactions. many database administrators provided their archives for free, offering free access to scientific literature that is usually paid for. an increasing number of activities eventually resumed online. this proved to be advantageous for catarina and federica, who do not live in lisbon where our institute is located, and who are already used to connecting remotely to classes and seminars when such are 249fennia 198(1–2) (2020) catarina barata et al. provided. also, not being the only one connecting remotely when everyone else is attending in person, improved the quality of the experience from a technical point of view. however, it was not long before the enthusiasm vanished. online social interactions have advantages and disadvantages, but they definitely do not replace face-to-face interactions. it is especially tiring because of the extra work the brain is forced to do in order to interpret basic communication cues (jiang 2020). it relies on the ownership of state-of-the-art technological devices and a good internet connection. for catarina, living in a rural area where the internet connection is unstable and having to assist with the schoolwork of a 6-year old child having daily classes on zoom, there was not much energy left for online work. luísa also found it difficult to follow her 12-year old daughter’s articulated learning of music, on multiple digital platforms for classes and exercises. caring for others during confinement feminist social movements have long drawn attention to the value of the “reproductive” work of care, without which other types of “productive” work would not be possible (austin et al. 2020). in this time of crisis, the importance of the work of care has once again become clear. during the pandemic, social scientists and news reports exposed the inequity underlying the work of care, which is gendered (cunha 2020). a facebook post pointing out the issue read, “the economy is not closed. everyone is cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their loved ones. it’s just not valued by economists because it is normally unpaid women’s work” (o’reilly 2020, 22–23). balancing our research work with the work of care was difficult for us all. luísa’s partner worked at a hospital and so she decided to move to her parents’ house to avoid the risk of contagion. the menacing feeling of bringing contagion from the outer world into the home also affected federica. every day, when her husband came home from work, she would have to ensure her small children refrained from jumping onto his lap before he changed clothes and disinfected himself, as the doorstep was a liminal medicalized frontier. catarina’s partner is a freelance musician, and all his work (concerts and music therapy sessions) was cancelled. this meant he stayed at home all day and was able to take on most of the childcare and housework. however, being unemployed was also a source of financial stress for the household. with two children of different ages, catarina wanted to take care of them alongside her partner and reduced her working hours in order to do so. madelon’s partner was working abroad and was not allowed to return to portugal for some months. she did her best to care for herself and her family living abroad. despite being alone with her 12-year old daughter to care for, luísa made a conscious effort to meet writing deadlines to help her remain focused. federica also felt that working contributed to maintaining her mental balance. although she was responsible for all the work of care when her husband was out at work, she managed to be productive by writing when he was off duty. caring masculinities in the context of her psychotherapeutic support work, madelon supported jaime3, a 19-year old man who was responsible for caring for his younger sister, replacing their parents, who were isolated in another house as a result of covid-19 contagion. the representation of caring practice that jaime had experienced as a child brought him a new sense of responsibility and awareness of what he was able to do and what he failed to do because of his moral premises regarding and performing gender norms. this awareness led jaime to review his values, guided by more positive, relational and interdependent emotions, creating the possibility of a new male identity, in the context of “caring masculinities” (elliot 2016, 246; cunha et al. 2018). catarina also involved her 6-year old son in the care for his 2-year old sister, more so than before, and he was very quick to take on this role of carer. our partners/husbands are committed fathers who perform the tasks of care and it is noticeable how having a masculine model of care in the home shapes the predisposition of children to consider the work of care as a male task just as much as a female one. 250 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) closing thoughts amid the digital turn, exacerbated by the setting of the pandemic, the advantages of 21st century technology for privileged people such as ourselves has become evident, but so have the shortcomings of such technology. we were able to advance in our work thanks to digital communication, but at what cost? the three of us, who had completed the bulk of the fieldwork before the outbreak, were relieved, as we found that in-presence interaction could never be replaced by online social interaction. madelon reshaped her research project in order to consider the setting of the pandemic and catarina incorporated it, as it proved valuable data for her research topic. luísa and federica both felt that keeping up the rhythm of work helped them maintain their routines and ensure some feeling of continuity. for catarina, the work deadlines were stressful, as she found it difficult to respond to both her children’s needs and work demands. the three of us who have children, sometimes felt that we were failing at both jobs (research work and the work of care). the moral regime normalized during the pandemic, whereby social contact was redefined as something inherently dangerous, was hard for all of us to witness and experience. the perception of an invisible danger led to a general “othering” of the bodies of others, becoming a source of tension. being with others became an exposure to risks and personal protection devices became part of everyday life. the concept of “cross-contamination”, with which federica was acquainted due to her research on body suspension – the act of rigging a human body to hang from implements that have been placed through temporary perforations in the skin – suddenly became common knowledge, and the main subject of conversations. the pandemic once again made clear the need to reflect upon the climate crisis and to acknowledge our interpersonal and interspecies co-dependence. the student climate strike movement has shown how the younger generations can play an active role in bringing about change and influencing older generations (cf. two reflections in this issue of fennia on youth climate activism). we too felt we have a lot to learn from our children. during lockdown, we reinforced our ties with our children, by spending a great deal of time with them and engaging in multiple tasks together. in some cases, the covid-19 pandemic brought about a reorganization of the distribution of domestic chores and the practice of care into the lives of people who traditionally do not assume the role of carer. could this change in behaviour, resulting from the adaptation to a crisis, contribute to a shift towards the normalization of caring masculinities and a generalized culture of care? notes 1 fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia (fct) of the ministry of science, technology and higher education (mctes). 2 see the anthropological responses to health emergencies (arhe), a special interest group of the society for medical anthropology (http://arhe.medanthro.net/call-to-action/). 3 not his real name, for ethical and privacy reasons. acknowledgments this essay is based on research funded by the european social fund (esf) and the portuguese foundation for science and technology of the ministry of science, technology and higher education (fct/mctes), as part of the authors’ activities as ph.d. candidates (catarina barata, fct grant sfrh/bd/128600/2017; luísa coutinho, fct grant sfrh/bd/144165/2019; federica manfredi, fct grant sfrh/bd/131914/2017) at the institute of social sciences of the university of lisbon (ics-ulisboa), portugal. references austin, a., capper, b. & deutsch, t. (2020) wages for housework and social reproduction: a microsyllabus. the abusable past 27.4.2020 <https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/ 251fennia 198(1–2) (2020) catarina barata et al. wages-for-housework-and-social-reproduction-a-microsyllabus/?fbclid=iwar0qwlptvyec-idbb1cloa1go7saeo2oasokx5-a2fty8d2kxg5tmqb2sa>. 26.6.2020. cunha, a. (2020) “quando o homem deixar de dizer ‘eu ajudo-te’, estará tudo bem”. público 10.7.2020 <https://www.publico.pt/2020/07/10/impar/noticia/homem-deixar-dizer-ajudote-estara-bem1923393?fbclid=iwar2_wta5hqehq8inx2pmtyr79siy-lpqcpepilkg-3kbckjsq6rd77aqz94>. 10.7.2020. cunha, v., rodrigues, l. b., correia, r., atalaia, s. & wall, k. (2018) why are caring masculinities so difficult to achieve? reflections on men and gender equality in portugal. in aboim, s., granjo, p. & ramos, a. (eds.) changing societies: legacies and challenges. vol. i. ambiguous inclusions: inside out, inside in, 303–331. imprensa de ciências sociais, lisbon. https://doi.org/10.31447/ics9789726715030.13 elliott, k. (2016) caring masculinities: theorizing an emerging concept. men and masculinities 19(3) 240–259. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x15576203 jiang, m. (2020) the reason zoom calls drain your energy. bbc 22.4.2020 <https://www.bbc.com/ worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting>. 29.7.2020. kay, j. b. (2020) “stay the fuck at home!”: feminism, family and the private home in a time of coronavirus. feminist media studies 20(6) 883–888. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1765293 lupton, d. (ed.) (2020) doing fieldwork in a pandemic (crowd-sourced document). <https://docs.google. com/document/d/1clgjgabb2h2qbdutgfqribhmog9b6p0nvmgvuihzcl8/edit?ts=5e88ae0a#>. 16.6.2020. manzo, l. & minello, a. (2020) mothers, childcare duties, and remote working under covid-19 lockdown in italy: cultivating communities of care. dialogues in human geography 10(2) 120–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820620934268 mcveigh, k. (2020) un chief slams 'myths, delusions and falsehoods' around inequality. the guardian 18.7.2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/18/un-chief-slams-myths-delusionsand-falsehoods-around-inequality>. 18.7.2020. o’reilly, a. (2020) “trying to function in the unfunctionable”: mothers and covid-19. journal of the motherhood initiative for research and community involvement 11(1) 7–24 <https://jarm.journals. yorku.ca/index.php/jarm/article/view/40601/36772>. 3.8.2020. imagining future worlds alongside young activists: a new framework for research urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa85151 doi: 10.11143/fennia.85151 imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research benjamin bowman bowman, b. (2019) imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research. fennia 197(2) 295–305. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.85151 young people’s climate activism must stand as one of the most remarkable and important mass movements of our age. at levels of organization from the local to the global, young climate activists are coming together in massive mobilizations, and particularly school strikes, under the names of fridays for future, #fridaysforfuture, youth for climate, youth strike for (or 4) climate and school strike for (or 4) climate. this article responds to the most extensive study of young people’s climate action published to date, entitled ‘protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities’. in this significant and provocative article, an analysis is provided of the potential – and the need – for empirical work at local and international levels concerning youth climate activism that recognizes the often complex, liminal nature of young political agency and the diverse, intersecting motives that lead young people to demonstrate for action on climate change. through this analysis, this article contributes to theoretical innovation to get beyond rigid, top-down understandings of young people’s political engagement, and instead build theory from young people’s visions of social, economic and political change in response to climate emergency. keywords: young people, climate change, fridaysforfuture, activism, environmentalism, ecologism, politics, social movements. benjamin bowman, manchester centre for youth studies, geoffrey manton building 14, rosamond st. west, manchester metropolitan university, manchester, m15 6ll, uk. e-mail: b.bowman@mmu.ac.uk. introduction in 2019, an international group of natural scientists co-signed a letter to the journal science stating that ‘the world’s youth have begun to persistently demonstrate for the protection of the climate and other foundations of human well-being’ (hagedorn et al. 2019, 364) at a time of intersecting crises of climate change, ecological collapse, environmental degradation, climate injustice and mass extinction. the letter called for scholars to respect young people for their leadership and to offer full support. our task, to quote the renowned young climate activist greta thunberg, is ‘to act as if the house is on fire, because it is’ (thunberg 2018). for young activists and supportive scientists alike, the fridays for © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 296 reviews and essays fennia 197(2) (2019) future school strikes occur at no less than the end of the world. a new world is imminent: that is to say, a new world sculpted by anthropogenic changes to the environment, and perhaps restructured by social, political, economic and cultural reform. in this article i respond to the research paper, and accompanying country-by-country reports, entitled ‘protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities’ co-authored by an international team of 21 researchers (wahlström et al. 2019). this report is, at the time of writing, the most extensive scientific study of young people’s climate action in publication. it was conducted using an established method developed under the title “caught in the act of protest: contextualizing contestation” (ccc) (walgrave et al. 2016), which is a method that uses teams of researchers to provide a probabilistic sample of a public demonstration, whether static or moving. notably, the research teams employ a ‘pointer’ who identifies participants to the interviewer, to minimize selection bias on the part of researchers who might otherwise interview participants who appear approachable (walgrave & verhulst 2011). the authors of the ‘protest for a future’ report conclude that ‘further research is needed to follow the development of the first massive youth mobilization on climate change’, and they ‘strongly encourage research efforts to continue following this movement as it develops over time’ (wahlström et al. 2019, 17). i contextualize the findings of wahlström and colleagues (2019) within a broader academic literature on young people’s political action in the age of ‘the “precarious generation”… motivated by a strong sense of situated injustice’, by the sense that they are ‘deprived of a decent future and the feeling they had been betrayed by governments’ (pickard & bessant 2018a, 100). i argue that more-or-less binary concepts of political action, such as the framing of instrumental political goals as distinct compared to expressive political goals, are familiar in academic research concerning young people’s politics, but may limit researchers’ ability to understand young people’s complex political subjectivities. this article makes two challenges. first, it challenges binary approaches to young people’s political subjectivities, based on an understanding of the young person as a political agent in hybrid, shifting and complex ways. second, that specifically in the field of geography, existing work on youth-led climate action establishes the need to challenge ‘top down information flows’ (tanner 2010) on climate change and, instead, to explore young people’s imaginations of different worlds, different institutions and different ways of doing and thinking. these challenges, it is argued, should drive the discipline of geography and subfields including political geographies and participatory geographies towards more youth-centred and participatory studies, such as the groundbreaking work of trajber et al. (2019) with young people in brazil. climate action is more than protest: it is also a world-building project, and creative methodologies can aid researchers and young climate activists as we imagine, together, worlds of the future. background: reflecting on young people’s ‘protest for a future’ young people do not only bear witness to the world’s crisis. they are agents in constructing the world, and global youth-led direct action – as seen on the 15th of march, 2019 – forms a critical part of the social construction of the crisis humanity faces. the lion’s share of public discourse about youth-led climate action is taken up by adult-centric calls to ‘listen to science’ (evensen 2019) and for young people to engage with political institutions in order to push adult policymakers to listen to science and to ‘tell the truth about the facts’ (boykoff & yulsman 2013, 363). listening to scientists and speaking truth to power-brokers is part of the fire-fighting portion of climate action, but putting the fire out is surely only one part of the task at hand: for young people motivated to protect the foundations of human well-being on the planet, climate action is also about rebuilding the world so that the causes of the crisis are addressed. although the ‘protest for a future’ project does not explore young people’s perspectives on social, cultural and political changes in great detail, the suggestion that structural change and system change would be among the desires of young climate activists is written between the lines. the authors note that fridays for future activists ‘expressed strong identification with both instrumental goals’ such as putting pressure on politicians, ‘and expressive goals’, expressing personal visions and identities (wahlström et al. 2019, 14). 297benjamin bowmanfennia 197(2) (2019) the ‘protest for a future’ study was conducted by teams of researchers handing out surveys, and carrying out screening interviews, with participants of all ages in fridays for future demonstrations across 13 european towns and cities, from truro in cornwall to warsaw in poland. across the study, 9,162 surveys were distributed of which 1,925 responses were returned, accompanied in the corpus of data by 1,561 short, face-to-face interviews (wahlström et al. 2019, 7). the project did not survey children younger than 14 (other than to record their age) but found 45% of participants across the sample were aged between 14 and 19, and that ‘the protests were strongly dominated by women’ especially among school students (among whom 66.4% were young women) (ibid., 8). other topline findings of the study include the disproportionately high level of education in the sample, including that overall 71.3% of school students surveyed had at least one parent with a university degree (ibid., 9), the characterization of the protests not only including a ‘high number of first-time demonstrators’ but also including demonstrators who had ‘little involvement in conventional politics’ (ibid., 10). the authors of the protest for a future project identify respondents holding ‘a hopeful attitude towards the future’ (wahlström et al. 2019, 4), that at least some respondents are calling for ‘systemic change’ (ibid., 49) at least according to the researchers from the section of the report from belgium, and that there were ‘important differences within the movement’ (ibid., 16) which indicates a global conversation among young climate activists about the world they wish to see, rather than a single vision. these differences are reflected in a wide diversity among the sampled cases, including, for instance, ‘significant age variation with an almost exclusive participation of young activists in the netherlands and poland and a more even distribution of age groups in belgium’. the ‘protest for a future’ study tells the story of a heterogeneous movement with some salient characteristics. who are the young climate activists in ‘protest for a future’? in ‘protest for a future’, the authors profile the participants in the climate strike as – in general terms, and notwithstanding variation between each country in the country reports – much younger than a typical street demonstration. they report an overall median age of 21 years, and the largest age group among the demonstrators being participants aged between 14 and 19, constituting 45% of the total group (wahlström et al. 2019, 8). they draw attention to the gender distribution. in comparative projects undertaken in other street demonstrations, researchers found an average result of 47% female participants. in the fridays for future protests, the ‘protest for a future’ team report 66.4% of the demonstrators across the sample were women, and that women ‘strongly dominated’ among school students (ibid., 8). the researchers point out that ‘street demonstrations in general and climate protests in particular tend to be the domain of the well-educated’ and that, for instance, 71.3% of the school students in their dataset had at least one parent with a university degree (ibid., 9). the fridays for future demonstrators were remarkable, in the conclusion of the research team, because so many were taking action for the first time. 38.1% of the overall sample were first-timers (ibid., 10). the high number of firsttimers, they conclude, is in part ‘a consequence of the young age of the participating population’. another remarkable feature of the fridays for future demonstrators, commented upon by the ‘protest for a future’ study, is that ‘the entire framing of this movement is about young people demanding that adults take responsibility for safeguarding their future’, and that although adults participate, they ‘do so mainly in solidarity with the young’ (wahlström et al. 2019, 10). the report suggests a social network of mobilization arising from homophily (mcpherson et al. 2001), beginning with ‘young front-runners’ who invite like-minded friends and especially school friends. 32.9% of school students indicated to the researchers that they had been personally asked to participate in the demonstration, and that of those 70.5% were asked by one or more friends (wahlström et al. 2019, 11). significantly more respondents told the researchers they had recruited friends. 72.4% of school students ‘personally asked someone else to join them in demonstrating’. of those who had asked someone else to join them, 67.9% had not personally been asked by someone else (ibid., 11). considering pathways of recruitment, 81.1% of demonstrators who had asked someone else to join them had targeted their recruitment attempt at a friend, and 64.9% had tried to recruit a schoolmate (the ‘protest for a future’ team asked respondents to categorize each invited person to one category only, so ‘schoolmates’ and ‘friends’ are mutually exclusive categories for purposes of the study). 298 reviews and essays fennia 197(2) (2019) wahlström and colleagues (2019, 12) conclude that ‘much of the recruiting takes place in the context of schools and shared classes… [creating] a structural environment where social pressure is successfully employed’ by young people announcing they will demonstrate and inviting friends and peers personally to do the same. personal connections appear vital. despite climate protests (at least in western europe) typically being among the type of demonstration where lone protesters are more frequent (wahlström & wennerhag 2014), most demonstrators in the fridays for future case came with friends. on average across the study, 87% of school students indicated they demonstrated along with one or more friends. wahlström and colleagues (2019, 13) also note the relative infrequency among young protesters of attending with a parent or family member (6.7%), a co-member of an organization (6.4%) or a partner (6%). the ‘protest for a future’ study leaves many opportunities open for studying this remarkable group of young people. first, and notably, the study focusses on europe with data generation in the following countries (number of individual sites in brackets): uk (2), sweden (2), germany (2), switzerland (2), netherlands (1), belgium (1), italy (1), austria (1) and poland (1), and the follow-up study, yet to be published, included a site in hungary (wahlström et al. 2019, 4). yet, the movement documented is a global movement (ibid., 5) and this surely requires comparative work from other places. second, although the study measures gender (by male/female) and, in an oblique fashion, class (by the gathering of data on parental education, for instance), the study excludes other vital comparative factors in the identity and belonging of the young protesters. not least, the study does not mention the ethnic background or racialization of young people in the study. indeed, at research sites in the uk, belgium and italy (wahlström et al. 2019, 32, 41, 112) participants in the climate strike are recorded calling for ‘climate justice’, a discursive framing that is historically connected to the relationship between race, poverty, and environmental risk (schlosberg & collins 2014). third, it is understandable that the study measures emotions such as worry, anxiety, ‘despair’ and hopelessness among climate protesters (wahlström et al. 2019, 15) but there is no mention of data generation on positive emotions apart from the statement ‘i feel hopeful about policies being able to address climate change’ (ibid., 15). this is extremely challenging, given that the study concludes participants were ‘more “worried” and “angry” than hopeless’ (ibid., 15). the participants do not come across in the report expressing sadness or negative emotions but, on the contrary, are documented as very happy. in vienna, the study records ‘despite the cloudy weather, the general atmosphere was very joyful and festival-like’ (ibid., 91); in amsterdam, ‘the atmosphere was very friendly and cheerful… the demonstrators were dancing and enjoying themselves’ (ibid., 54); in berlin, also ‘cheerful’ (ibid., 69); in warsaw, ‘the atmosphere was cheerful’ and the rally eventually ‘transformed into a dance party’ (ibid., 81); and in manchester ‘an excited youthful atmosphere – lots of chanting’ (ibid., 32). it is important to reflect on the incongruence between the survey, a top-down mode of data collection authored by adult researchers, which seems to have imposed negative emotional frames on political action that, according to the study, appeared to have been cheerful and positive. it is evident in the study that the protests were places of joy, dancing, excitement and positivity. the researchers ignore this factor almost entirely, despite a rich existing literature on the role of joy in social movements (jasper 1998; shepard 2011; kutz-flamenbaum 2014; ramírez blanco 2018) and suchlike contemporary work indicating that ‘play, laughter, and fun are important elements in any process of resistance’ (crossa 2013, 826). joy is missing, at least in part, because the study relies on a top-down, adult-led and binary framing of the political action of young people. specifically, the ‘protest for a future’ study reproduces an either-or framework for young political action that contrasts instrumental goals with self-expression (wahlström et al. 2019, 14). it is not argued to be the case that the researchers witnessed the joy of young people at the protests and decided to ignore it in their analysis: rather, the research design and underlying methodology were not prepared for the complexity of young people’s politics. for this reason, dancing, cheerfulness and ‘youthful atmosphere’, when encountered, were filtered out as incongruous with a pre-existing definition of the political. in the next section, the processes by which traditional methods for analysis exclude young people’s concerns, sentiments and agency from the realm of the political are examined. the 299benjamin bowmanfennia 197(2) (2019) complexity of young people’s politics challenges studies like ‘protest for a future’ to think differently about what constitutes the political. challenging concepts: the complexity of young people’s politics despite the richness of vision among members of the movement, researchers lack data concerning the ways young people who are leading on global climate action construct and co-construct future worlds. the public imagination of the climate crisis tends to restrict young people to having a voice, as opposed to having power; society tends to perceive young people as subjects of political engagement more than agents of change. the profile of young protesters is likely to present a methodological challenge. for instance, a group of young people who are mostly joined by personal connections between friends and schoolmates, but not, strictly speaking, according to organizational membership, is a challenge to methodological approaches that distinguish between the two – as, indeed, the ‘protest for a future’ study does by conceptualizing political goals according to a dichotomy of ‘instrumental goals… and expressive goals’ (wahlström et al. 2019, 14). for another example of a major methodological challenge, this group of young people are made up, in a significantly large proportion, of women. the dominance of women in an activist group must challenge researchers to recognize the gendered politics of defining politics: as briggs (2008) pointed out, the lifestyles and concerns of young women in particular can be excluded from the realm of the political by traditional approaches. traditional concepts of the political struggle to deal with young people’s politics. in muthoni mwaura’s (2018, 66) study of young participants in student environmental clubs in kenya, she argues that young people developed a hybrid political identity that ‘straddled two seemingly incongruous positions: a commitment to a neoliberal agenda of self-making and a commitment to environmental politics’. one participant in the study, a fourth year student named catherine, claiming to have learned new skills through the club, reported: through [the club], i have been able to gain more skills on issues beyond tree planting. i have been able to do a lot all over the country. it also opens me up to learn many new things and new environmental aspects. it’s not just about planting trees, there are policies and regulations for the conservation of environment, education, green economy; it’s actually how we govern the environment. (muthoni mwaura 2018, 68) young people, like the activists in muthoni mwuara’s work, can be considered ‘political entrepreneurs’ who increasingly operate as do-it-ourselves or dio citizens (pickard 2019, 375). the concept of the do-it-ourselves citizen has a long history, from the work of bang (2010) on ‘everyday makers’ to the more institutional political framing of young people as ‘engaged sceptics’ or ‘committed sceptics’ (wring et al. 1999; o’toole et al. 2003; henn & foard 2014), to the approach to young people as ‘networked citizens’ (loader et al. 2014). in brief, this general approach to young politics theorizes that make up one part of young people’s expanded toolbox for political action, which includes everyday making (bang 2010), lifestyle politics, political consumerism, boycotting/buycotting, issue-based politics and local and global networking. non-institutional participation has not always supplanted institutional participation, of course: for instance, in the uk, the influence of young people in electoral politics can be exemplified both by the recent reversal of the historic decline in youth electoral turnout (sloam & ehsan 2017; allsop et al. 2018) and by the remarkable level of influence that young people have had over the labour party (pickard 2018; young 2018). the recent history of uk politics perhaps lends itself to examples writ in bold, but the shift of young people’s political activity towards a more issue-oriented, standby citizenship will be familiar in the international context. this shift is led by socioeconomic change (harris 2017) that, of course, varies by context but is a generational trend that scholars also address and assess globally (bessant et al. 2017), and in this context they must be considered alongside a decade of antiausterity and democratic deficit protests around the world (della porta 2015). returning to the young protesters in ‘protest for a future’, there is an echo of muthoni mwuara’s (2018) ‘jarring incongruity’ in the ‘instrumental goals… and expressive goals’ (wahlström et al. 2019, 14) of the fridays for future protesters. this is not a criticism of the project – which is a vital and important 300 reviews and essays fennia 197(2) (2019) piece of work – but a reflection on a methodological framing concerning young people’s politics in which the two are rendered separately, as they are in protest participation studies more generally (klandermans 2007). this binary definition of young politics is durable despite the ways young people ‘take up more individualized and everyday practices in efforts to shape society’ (harris et al. 2010, 28). these bridge the public and private, and the institutional political and the everyday political. the jarring nature of the incongruity between ‘instrumental goals… and expressive goals’ arises from the struggle of traditional, binary definitions of politics to conceptualize the young person as a political agent in hybrid, shifting and complex ways. despite the complexity of young people’s political subjectivities, a dis/engagement binary dominates our imaginary of young people’s politics. in particular, great attention is paid to the question of generational or cohort effects leading young people to ‘disengage’ from formal politics: asking why young people are disengaged from formal politics is so ubiquitous in the literature that it has been described as a ‘mantra’ (banaji 2008). when one divides instrumental goals from expressive ones, for instance, one is led by the question of political engagement versus political disengagement, and, accordingly, by epistemologies grounded in binary definitions. this action over here is political, and this is not; this young person is engaging, and this one is disengaged; this action is instrumental because it is aimed at policymakers, and this one is about expressing one’s identity. challenging methods: stepping beyond the binary methodological tools for studying politics in young people’s lives also tend to follow dichotomies: dividing the political from the not political, the formal from the informal, and participation in adultcentric institutions from non-participation in the same. other methods are possible, such as youthled surveys (fine & torre 2019), youth participatory action research (anderson 2017; trajber et al. 2019), participatory focus groups (bagnoli & clark 2010) and place-based creative methods (wood 2012), as well as youth-centred framings that place young people’s political action into a dedicated youth context (holmberg & alvinius 2019). binary concepts of the political and the not political, the engaged and the disengaged, struggle when researchers encounter the diaphanous political consciousness of young people and ‘young people’s own uncertainty and ambiguity in describing what “counts” as political action beyond the formal and adult-centric definitions which they are likely to have been exposed to in their life course’ (wood 2012, 214). that ambiguity leads, in a general sense, to a well-established literature that attempts to bridge the gap. as skelton (2010) writes, researching young people’s politics is both about identifying more formal, public political activity in alignment with adult institutions and practices on the one hand, and less formal, more private, and more everyday young politics on the other. there are big-p, more institutional, formalized politics and there are little-p, more everyday, less formalized politics. in this body of work it is, broadly speaking, considered that formal and institutional political action and more everyday political practices are not separate but are rather like two sides of the same coin (e.g. skelton & valentine 1997; o’toole et al. 2003; philo & smith 2003; bang 2010; wood 2012; kallio & häkli 2013; ekström 2016; percy-smith 2016). it is also considered that young people ‘play active roles in both public large-scale events as well as more private small-scale matters’ and that ‘[more formal, institutional] “politics” and [less formal, more everyday] “politics” do not exist apart from each other but are co-constituted in the socio-spatial practices of everyday life and policy-making’ (kallio & häkli 2011a, 64). as a body of work, in epistemological terms, the big-p/little-p approach tends to take ‘young people’s own uncertainty and ambiguity’ (wood 2012, 214) as an invitation to seek a different sense of the political than, say, literature on electoral engagement (bhatti et al. 2012; phelps 2012) or typological approaches that attempt to distinguish the political from the not political (van deth 2014). taxonomizing young people’s activities into typologies of the political (as in hooghe et al. 2014; van deth 2014; rainsford 2017) remains is a vital and important empirical task in its own way, but one which subjects young people – in their ‘uncertainty and ambiguity’ (wood 2012, 214) – to the interpretative lens of the political scientist. it is not necessary to distinguish between the political and the not-political, nor is it necessary to distinguish between instrumental motivations and expressive ones. 301benjamin bowmanfennia 197(2) (2019) world-imagining exercises in uncertain times young people live, as pickard and bessant (2018b) put it, in time of crises. among these crises, the climate crisis stands out for the dominance of the idea that young people must push adult policymakers to ‘listen to science’ (evensen 2019) and ‘tell the truth about the facts’ (boykoff & yulsman 2013, 363). this must surely impede our ability, as researchers, to work with young people, encountered in states of ‘uncertainty and ambiguity’ as to what counts as within the political realm (wood 2012, 214). it is noteworthy that the ‘protest for a future’ project found the ‘majority of respondents’ in every country ‘stated they were “quite” or “very” interested in politics’ (wahlström et al. 2019, 16), a finding that in itself is worthy of deeper investigation. this framing of the climate crisis places it in a public arena ‘where common issues are deliberated by [adult] representatives and politicians’ (kallio & häkli 2011b, 4). the relatively young age of the protesters in fridays for future demonstrations is likely to be relevant, especially in the case of protesters who are too young to vote in the places where they live (wahlström et al. 2019, 8). the relative dominance of young women in the demonstrations is also likely to influence protesters in terms of their relationship to the public arena, according to the gendered nature of political institutions and processes and their particular effect on young women (briggs 2008, 2016). these factors contribute to ‘the continued dominance of top-down information flows’ in climate change narratives (tanner 2010). yet, i contend the task of researchers who stand in support of young people as leaders on climate action (hagedorn et al. 2019, 364) as well as those researchers who hold a more detached scientific interest in young climate activists and their work, is to work beyond that framing. to explore the sorts of worlds young activists wish to see, it is of critical importance that researchers do not divide instrumental goals from expressive goals, institutional participation from everyday politics, and so on. responding to the ‘protest for a future’ project, which identified the salience of friendship networks and social pressure in schools, the data simply contraindicate such divisions as they unnecessarily divide practices like expressing yourself from recruiting fellow activists. such divisions militate against exploring the political action of many within the age group identified by ‘protest for a future’ as most important because, in most of europe, under-18s are barred by law and/or hindered by hurdles like linguistic norms from many means of instrumental political activity, especially the vote. meanwhile, young people are often understood ‘to be special kinds of human’, at once bridging the gap between the present and future, and also being ‘the material from which the future will be made’ (lee 2013, 1). they ‘are being positioned as future leaders whom the public expects to overcome the legacies of environmental inaction… [but] currently have limited opportunities to cultivate, voice and express their understandings, concerns and imaginings about climate change within their local environments and communities’ (rousell & cutter-mackenzie-knowles 2019, 2). ‘top-down information flows’ about climate change (tanner 2010) prefigure the young person as something of a societal investment in a commodity future, as they are the raw material from which society will reproduce itself and also the bearers of that society. for young people who wish to see a different society, who do not wish to bear the current one, or who simply are not sure what to think, the conceptual burden of what is termed political engagement is problematic. if young people are the material from which future institutions will be made, and if young people will be the leaders of those institutions, what about young activists who neither want to remake nor lead those institutions, but imagine different worlds, different institutions and different ways of doing and thinking? a dichotomous framework of engagement versus disengagement pushes young people who refuse the burden of reconstituting current political institutions (or who are in states of uncertainty and ambiguity, to paraphrase wood (2012, 214)) into conceptual boxes marked ‘expressive’, ‘apolitical’, ‘antipolitical’, ‘disengaged’. the ‘protest for a future’ report (wahlström et al. 2019) identifies young activists standing with one foot in the public arena and one in the private. they demonstrate as a way to take instrumental political action to influence decision-makers and also to express themselves. they build organizing networks of issue-oriented social control and also attend the march with friends. this complexity and in-between-ness is familiar in young people’s politics generally, and in young protest politics specifically. 302 reviews and essays fennia 197(2) (2019) conclusion: what current and future worlds do young activists bear? writing in part on climate change, levitas (2013, xi) claims ‘the reconstitution of society in imagination and in reality is a pressing need’. at least in popular fiction, ‘overwhelmingly, climate change appears… as part of a futuristic dystopian and/or apocalyptic setting’ (johns-putra 2016, 269). for instance, in the sci-fi space exploration game stellaris, one fictional planet available for discover by the player comes with the message: … some of the more radical elements within the scientific community suggest that the dramatic climate shift may have been brought on by the unchecked emission of gaseous industrial byproduct into the atmosphere. this view is confined to the scientific fringe, as it is unlikely that any race intelligent enough to achieve full industrialization would be stupid enough to accidentally wipe themselves out. (stellaris 2016) the dystopian imaginary, regarding climate change, can be argued to play a deciding role in the methodology behind the ‘protest for a future’ study (wahlström et al. 2019) in the survey approach to examining anxiety, fear and hopelessness; but also in the way the survey moves cheerfulness, joy and ‘youthful’-ness in the protest site to the margins of the study. to do so, as this article contends, is part of a general approach to young people’s politics that constrains young agency to dichotomies of political instrumentality versus self-expression. the dystopian and future-oriented vision of the ‘protest for a future’ study, which is evident in its emphasis on affects like anxiety and agency as a process of demanding political elites take a different course, leaves little room for the research to explore young people’s imaginaries concerning the world they live in, nor the future worlds they perceive. exploring young people’s climate action requires a more open, more participatory approach to research. it requires researchers to challenge ‘top-down information flows’ (tanner 2010) concerning climate change. daniels (2011, 182) writes that imagination is somewhere between the realms of fact and fiction, the subjective and objective, the real and representational; and that, in geography, imagination ‘is a way of encompassing the condition of both the known world and the horizons of possible worlds’ (ibid., 183). geographers must encounter young activists somewhere between the realms of the big-p and the little-p of politics in order to understand their imagination of the known world and worlds to come. the ‘protest for a future’ study (wahlström et al. 2019) raises so many questions about the current ‘massive youth mobilization’ and its ‘peculiar characteristics’ (ibid., 17). i identify a lack of knowledge in academic literature and in public discourse concerning one prominent question in particular. in what ways do young activists imagine the world today, and in what ways do they imagine worlds to come, both those they wish to bear and worlds they think should not be borne? as well as calling powerful adults to ‘listen to the science’ (evensen 2019), where are the remarkable young activists of the fridays for future movement headed? there is much work to be done for scientists who wish to listen. acknowledgements the author is grateful to dr. chloé germaine buckley (manchester centre for youth studies, manchester metropolitan university) for her support in discussing the topic of young people’s climate activism. this article developed with the support of dr. bronwyn wood (victoria university of wellington) and dr. catherine walker (university of manchester) as reviewers in an open review process: and the author thanks both reviewers for their advice and constructive criticism, and the journal chief editor, dr. kirsi pauliina kallio, for support through the publication process. the author’s current research project on young activists and the fridays for future movement is ongoing, and is funded by a research accelerator grant from the research and knowledge exchange directorate, manchester metropolitan university. 303benjamin bowmanfennia 197(2) (2019) references allsop, b., briggs, j. & kisby, b. (2018) market values and youth political engagement in the uk: towards an agenda for exploring the psychological impacts of neo-liberalism. societies 8(4) 95. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc8040095 anderson, g. (2017) participatory action research (par) as democratic disruption: new public management and educational research in schools and universities. international journal of qualitative studies in education 30(5) 432–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017.1303211 bagnoli, a. & clark, a. (2010) focus groups with young people: a participatory approach to research planning. journal of youth studies 13(1) 101–119. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260903173504 banaji, s. (2008) the trouble with civic: a snapshot of young people’s civic and political engagements in twenty-first century democracies. journal of youth studies 11(5) 543–561. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260802283008 bang, h. (2010) everyday makers and expert citizens: active participants in the search for a new governance. in fenwick, j. & mcmillan, j. (eds.) public management in the postmodern era: challenges and prospects, 163–191. edward elgar, cheltenham. bessant, j., farthing, r. & watts, r. (2017) the precarious generation: a political economy of young people. routledge, abingdon, oxon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315644493 bhatti, y., hansen, k. m. & wass, h. (2012) the relationship between age and turnout: a roller-coaster ride. electoral studies 31(3) 588–593. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2012.05.007 boykoff, m. t. & yulsman, t. (2013) political economy, media, and climate change: sinews of modern life. wiley interdisciplinary reviews: climate change 4(5) 359–371. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.233 briggs, j. (2008) young women and politics: an oxymoron? journal of youth studies 11(6) 579–592. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676260802193132 briggs, j. (2016) young people and political participation: teen players. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31385-0 crossa, v. (2013) play for protest, protest for play: artisan and vendors’ resistance to displacement in mexico city. antipode 45(4) 826–843. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01043.x daniels, s. (2011) geographical imagination: boundary crossings. transactions of the institute of british geographers 36(2) 182–187. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00440.x della porta, d. (2015) social movements in times of austerity: bringing capitalism back into protest analysis. polity, bristol. van deth, j. w. (2014) a conceptual map of political participation. acta politica 49(3) 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.6 ekström, m. (2016) young people’s everyday political talk: a social achievement of democratic engagement. journal of youth studies 19(1) 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1048207 evensen, d. (2019) the rhetorical limitations of the #fridaysforfuture movement. nature climate change 9(6) 428–430. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0481-1 fine, m. & torre, m. e. (2019) critical participatory action research: a feminist project for validity and solidarity. psychology of women quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684319865255 hagedorn, g., kalmus, p., mann, m., vicca, s., van den berge, j., van ypersele, j.-p., bourg, d., rotmans, j., kaaronen, r., rahmstorf, s., kromp-kolb, h., kirchengast, g., knutti, r., seneviratne, s. i., thalmann, p., cretney, r., green, a., anderson, k., hedberg, m., nilsson, d., kuttner, a. & hayhoe, k. (2019) concerns of young protesters are justified. science 364(6436) 139–140. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax3807 harris, a. (2017) young people, politics and citizenship. in furlong, a. (ed.) routledge handbook of youth and young adulthood, 295–300. routledge, london. harris, a., wyn, j. & younes, s. (2010) beyond apathetic or activist youth: “ordinary” young people and contemporary forms of participation. young 18(1) 9–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/110330880901800103 henn, m. & foard, n. (2014) social differentiation in young people’s political participation: the impact of social and educational factors on youth political engagement in britain. journal of youth studies 17(3) 360–380. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.830704 holmberg, a. & alvinius, a. (2019) children’s protest in relation to the climate emergency: a qualitative study on a new form of resistance promoting political and social change. childhood. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219879970 hooghe, m., hosch-dayican, b. & van deth, j. w. (2014) conceptualizing political participation. acta politica 49(3) 337–348. https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2014.7 jasper, j. m. (1998) the emotions of protest: affective and reactive emotions in and around social movements. sociological forum 13(3) 397–424. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1022175308081 304 reviews and essays fennia 197(2) (2019) johns-putra, a. (2016) climate change in literature and literary studies: from cli-fi, climate change theater and ecopoetry to ecocriticism and climate change criticism. wiley interdisciplinary reviews: climate change 7(2) 266–282. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.385 kallio, k. p. & häkli, j. (2011a) young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space. geojournal 76(1) 63–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-010-9402-6 kallio, k. p. & häkli, j. (2011b) are there politics in childhood? space & polity 15(1) 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2011.567897 kallio, k. p. & häkli, j. (2013) children and young people’s politics in everyday life. space and polity 17(1) 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780710 klandermans, b. (2007) the demand and supply of participation: social-psychological correlates of participation in social movements. in snow, d. a., soule, s. a. & kriesi, h. (eds.) the blackwell companion to social movements, 360–379. blackwell publishing ltd, oxford, uk. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470999103.ch16 kutz-flamenbaum, r. v. (2014) humor and social movements. sociology compass 8(3) 294–304. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12138 lee, n. (2013) childhood and biopolitics: climate change, life processes and human futures. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. levitas, r. (2013) utopia as method. the imaginary reconstitution of society. palgrave macmillan, new york. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314253 loader, b. d., vromen, a. & xenos, m. a. (2014) the networked young citizen: social media, political participation and civic engagement. information, communication & society 17(2) 143–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2013.871571 mcpherson, m., smith-lovin, l. & cook, j. m. (2001) birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. annual review of sociology 27(1) 415–444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415 muthoni mwaura, g. (2018) “professional students do not play politics”: how kenyan students professionalise environmental activism and produce neoliberal subjectivities. in pickard, s. & bessant, j. (eds.) young people re-generating politics in times of crises, 59–76. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58250-4_4 o’toole, t., lister, m., marsh, d., jones, s. & mcdonagh, a. (2003) tuning out or left out? participation and non-participation among young people. contemporary politics 9(1) 45–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356977032000072477 percy-smith, b. (2016) negotiating active citizenship: young people’s participation in everyday spaces. in kallio, k. p. (ed.) politics, citizenship and rights, 401–422. springer reference, heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-57-6_26 phelps, e. (2012) understanding electoral turnout among british young people: a review of the literature. parliamentary affairs 65(1) 281–299. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsr056 philo, c. & smith, f. m. (2003) guest editorial: political geographies of children and young people. space and polity 7(2) 99–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356257032000133883 pickard, s. (2018) momentum and the movementist “corbynistas”: young people regenerating the labour party in britain.’ in pickard, s. & bessant, j. (eds.) young people re-generating politics in times of crises, 115–137. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58250-4_7 pickard, s. (2019) young people and dio politics: do-it-ourselves political participation. in politics, protest and young people, 375–405. palgrave macmillan uk, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57788-7_12 pickard, s. & bessant, j. (2018a) france’s #nuit debout social movement: young people rising up and moral emotions. societies 8(4) 100. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc8040100 pickard, s. & bessant, j. (eds.) (2018b) young people re-generating politics in times of crises. palgrave macmillan, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58250-4 rainsford, e. (2017) exploring youth political activism in the united kingdom: what makes young people politically active in different organisations? the british journal of politics and international relations 19(4) 790–806. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117728666 ramírez blanco, j. (2018) the reclaim the streets protest parties in london. in artistic utopias of revolt, 41–63. springer international publishing, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71422-6_3 rousell, d. & cutter-mackenzie-knowles, a. (2019) a systematic review of climate change education: giving children and young people a “voice” and a “hand” in redressing climate change. children’s geographies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1614532 schlosberg, d. & collins, l. b. (2014) from environmental to climate justice: climate change and the discourse of environmental justice. wiley interdisciplinary reviews: climate change 5(3) 359–374. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.275 shepard, b. h. (2011) play, creativity, and social movements: if i can’t dance, it’s not my revolution. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203831489 305benjamin bowmanfennia 197(2) (2019) skelton, t. & valentine, g. (1997) cool places: geographies of youth cultures. routledge, london. skelton, t. (2010) taking young people as political actors seriously: opening the borders of political geography. area 42(2) 145–151. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00891.x sloam, j. & ehsan, m. r. (2017) youth quake: young people and the 2017 general election. intergenerational foundation research papers. intergenerational foundation, london. stellaris (2016) computer game, version 2.3. paradox interactive, stockholm. tanner, t. (2010) shifting the narrative: child-led responses to climate change and disasters in el salvador and the philippines. children & society 24(4) 339–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2010.00316.x thunberg, g. (2018) greta thunberg full speech at un climate change cop24 conference. youtube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfkqsgyecwg>. 9.7.2019. trajber, r., walker, c., marchezini, v., kraftl, p., olivato, d., hadfield-hill, s., zara, c. & fernandes monteiro, s. (2019) promoting climate change transformation with young people in brazil: participatory action research through a looping approach. action research 17(1) 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476750319829202 wahlström, m. & wennerhag, m. (2014) alone in the crowd: lone protesters in western european demonstrations. international sociology 29(6) 565–583. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580914554117 wahlström, m., kocyba, p., de vydt, m., de moor, j., wouters, r., wennerhag, m., van stekelenburg, j., uba, k., saunders, c., rucht, d., mikecz, d., zamponi, l., lorenzini, j., kołczyńska, m., haunss, s., giugni, m., gaidyte, t., doherty, b. & buzogany, a. (2019) protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities. keele university e-prints, keele, uk. walgrave, s. & verhulst, j. (2011) selection and response bias in protest surveys. mobilization: an international quarterly 16(2) 203–222. walgrave, s., wouters, r. & ketelaars, p. (2016) response problems in the protest survey design: evidence from fifty-one protest events in seven countries. mobilization: an international quarterly 21(1) 83–104. https://doi.org/10.17813/1086/671x-21-1-83 wood, b. e. (2012) researching the everyday: young people’s experiences and expressions of citizenship. international journal of qualitative studies in education 27(2) 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2012.737047 wring, d., henn, m. & weinstein, m. (1999) young people and contemporary politics: committed scepticism or engaged cynicism? british elections and parties review 9(1) 200–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/13689889908413029 young, l. (2018) rise: how jeremy corbyn inspired the young to create a new socialism. simon & schuster, london. the challenges of anthropological research among sex workers and victims of domestic violence in times of the covid-19 pandemic urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99336 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99336 reflections the challenges of anthropological research among sex workers and victims of domestic violence in times of the covid-19 pandemic marcos vinícius moura silva & raphaella pereira dos santos câmara silva, m. v. m. & dos santos câmara, r. p. (2020) the challenges of anthropological research among sex workers and victims of domestic violence in times of the covid-19 pandemic. fennia 198(1–2) 252–255. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99336 this essay reflects our doctoral research experiences at the institute of social sciences, university of lisbon. it aims to understand the new challenges and measures adopted in relation to fieldwork with sex workers and victims of domestic violence in covid-19 times. our work includes ethnography and participant observation in prostitution houses, lgbtqi+ institutions and spaces of support for the victims of domestic violence. we seek to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of conducting anthropological research during the pandemic. keywords: covid-19, trans women, impacts, support measures, methods marcos vinícius moura silva (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7600-787x) and raphaella pereira dos santos câmara (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1118-2439), instituto de ciências sociais da universidade de lisboa, av. prof. aníbal de bettencourt, 9, 1600-189 lisboa, portugal. e-mail: marcos.silva@ics.ulisboa.pt, raphaellacamara@edu.ulisboa.pt introduction in the time of the covid-19 pandemic, many anthropologists have faced the challenge of how to proceed with their ethnographies. the dilemma lies in how to undertake participant observation without putting the research participants and the researcher at risk of contagion. in the classic models of anthropology, contact with the 'other' and being witness to their experiences is considered central to the development of research (evans-pritchard 2013 [1940]). yet it has been known for some time that we do not always have simple access to fieldwork sites. a historical example of this is the chrysanthemum and the sword (benedict 2007 [1946]), a study of japanese society and culture during world war ii published in 1946, which could be considered a classic example of 'distance anthropology'. anthropologist ruth benedict (1887–1948) was among the top cultural anthropologists recruited by the u.s. government to investigate war reports and provide advice after the u.s. entered world war ii. barred from carrying out fieldwork in nazi germany or japan, benedict used other ways that could guarantee access to the research field. researching culture through its literature, newspaper clippings, films, archives, and interviews with immigrants, was fundamental to understanding the cultural patterns that guided world war ii. benedict's work is not only considered a classic in the discipline influencing research methods in anthropology but reiterates the possibility of performing ethnographies at times when access to the field is limited. it is possible to conduct an ethnography as © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 253marcos v. m. silva & raphaella p. dos santos câmarafennia 198(1–2) (2020) original, meaningful and insightful as any that has been known (miller 2020). making changes and finding ways around a problem is a part of scientific and artistic endeavour. finding a way to become useful to the investigated group and realizing how our participants also circumvent the limitations imposed by covid-19 can be understood as a first entry into the field. the possibilities and limitations reflected in this essay are based on our challenges as researchers to carry out fieldwork with transvestites and transsexual women in portugal and brazil. the initial research proposals we produced focused on living for a year in houses of prostitution and accompanying victims of domestic and gender violence (scott 1991 [1990]) in portugal and brazil, yet this has become unviable in times of social distancing. the way in which we will overcome this issue is central to our ongoing research. the points that follow describe how our research participants are facing the pandemic and whether domestic violence has been accentuated or not due to social isolation. it is hoped that this initial exploration will make it possible to rebuild our research design, so that is more effective in responding to or rejecting the research hypotheses. who can protect themselves? sex work and dual violence (domestic and gender) during the covid-19 pandemic, the guidance suggested by the world health organization and followed by most governments was the proposal of social isolation as the main way of reducing the possibility of contagion and of flattening the curve. yet social isolation has revealed social inequalities experienced by different groups in society. these groups include transvestites, women, and transsexuals, and especially those that are involved in sex work, which our phd research is based upon. to address different experiences of social isolation due to covid-19, two interviews were conducted with brazilian transvestites, one who has been a sex worker in lisbon, portugal for 18 years, and one who has worked for more than 20 years as a social activist in salvador, bahia, brazil. at the present time, we argue here that the ways in which sex workers and their clients are dealing with the covid-19 pandemic needs to be investigated with a new urgency. through an interview we conducted with a sex worker who lives in lisbon, it is possible to perceive complex challenges involving the clinical stigmas of a migrant who works as a prostitute (sarró 2007). being undocumented further limits social care available (aboim et al. 2018). while in an interview we conducted with a brazilian transvestite, bianca graça1, 42 years old and 25 years of work as a social activist in the city of salvador, bahia, brazil, she reported that: many transvestites who work as prostitutes had to choose: they either went hungry or were at risk of being contaminated by covid-19. in some cases, it was possible to observe that some of them had to return to the relatives' home, a place from which many were expelled when they assumed their gender identity as a transsexual woman. if social isolation was perceived as a new experience for a large part of society, for transvestites and transsexuals isolation has always existed. for the brazilian transvestite samanta brasil2, 40 years old, who has been working as a prostitute in lisbon, portugal for 18 years: "many transsexual people were already away from social media. throughout their life trajectories, they have been removed from school, the labor market and even from their families." for this reason, the challenge of isolation, imposed on all social groups, was not necessarily considered to be the worst experience of the covid-19 pandemic for transvestites and transsexuals who were active in the sex market (piscitelli 2005). yet it is important to remember that covid-19 and social isolation are having an impact on the lives of the most marginalized sex workers (including transvestites and transsexuals) and this has led to the accentuation of a double violence (of gender and domestic) in brazil and portugal. the united nations and the world health organization (who) foresee an increase in aggression and domestic violence, as well as a greater exclusion of these victims from society, during social isolation. this is an unseen human rights issue in the context of covid-19 and social isolation, due to its legal, health and social dimensions. when we talk about domestic violence and gender violence in different contexts, transvestites and transsexuals can often reveal limitations regarding their recognition, pathways and suffering by 254 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) authorities. in brazil, a country that records the highest number of assaults and murders of lgbtqi+ people (according to the organization transgender europe), violence was accentuated in the period of social isolation with the impact of unemployment and social coexistence, and there were cases where victims were forced to live with the aggressor. portugal, on the other hand, which is considered a reference for innovative projects in the fight against violence of this kind noted a decrease in the country compared to 2019, according to a report in the newspaper público on april 29, 2020. during the pandemic, the portuguese government created a distance service user plan with support structures and a short messaging service reinforced by a telephone line, and created shelters with a total of 100 spaces each. limitations of researchers and new methodologies to conceptualize a researcher’' limitations is to seek to understand the challenges, problems, concerns and feelings that mark ethnographic production and the positions that researchers and research participants occupy in the field. this is the case whether research is in-person or virtual, and in relation to online and offline relationships in the current context of the covid-19 pandemic (miller 2020). the empirical field influences data collection, how we reflect upon data gathered, understand problems and interact with participants which is not entirely possible when conducting research online. yet fieldwork can be gathered and analysed through novel approaches (theoretical, practical and methodological) that permeate the notions of 'the field' and indeed the bonds between the researcher and the research participant in the current locked down landscape (nader 2011). perhaps especially in face of national lockdowns, and in face of the pandemic, novel approaches need to be considered in order to retain contact with vulnerable research participants. the ethnographic process is a relationship of mutuality, communication and interaction, and here we consider our status vis-à-vis our interlocutors thus engaging with positionality (viegas & mapril 2012). conducting fieldwork during the pandemic reframes our work and we need to think carefully about how we interact with our interlocutors, seeking to understand their experiences and how they face the current situation that we are also experiencing. one of the main points for the researcher to consider is to have increased sensitivity towards the varied effects of the situation in different communities (miller 2020). our engagement and interactions with the people we are researching through virtual communities, digital platforms, and webcam interviews are essential when these resources are available and accessible to our interlocutors. in addition to ethnographic research, voluntary work with victims is essential during the covid-19 pandemic. we use digital platforms and disseminate physical and virtual campaigns on social networks such as facebook and instagram, and through whatsapp groups. we seek legal, health, social and psychological support from institutions to create a network of contacts, and as such participate directly or indirectly in the lives of our research participants at a difficult time. the researcher's position can no longer be one that distantly analyses the reality of our research participants, rather we now strive to understand the point of view of our research participants, to empathize and to understand what they are experiencing on a daily basis during the covid-19 pandemic. viegas and mapril (2012) address 'the field' as shaping gender relations, power dynamics, and the experiences of communities. researchers must look for alternative means to connect with research participants, given the limitations that have been experienced as established paths have closed as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. conclusion the covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on sex workers, as they have been forced to alter their usual routines. in addition, researchers have been unable to conduct field research with direct inperson access and participant observation, informal conversations, and face to face interviews, making it difficult to accompany our interlocutors and to understand their new reality during a global pandemic. in the case of the women interviewed in this reflection, they are oppressed by their social practices within a historical-cultural system in which there is failure to implement policies for inclusion. they 255marcos v. m. silva & raphaella p. dos santos câmarafennia 198(1–2) (2020) face difficulties in gaining access to justice, and experience a situation of risk and vulnerability in terms of reduced access to health care, technical and legal support and emergency alert systems due to the covid-19 outbreak. notes 1 fictitious name. interviewed by the zoom platform on 08/09/2020 as part of the phd project in anthropology by the university of lisbon. 2 fictitious name. interviewed by the zoom platform on 02/04/2020 as part of the phd project in anthropology by the university of lisbon. references aboim, s., vasconcelos, p & merlini, s. (2018) trans masculinities: embodiments, performances and the materiality of gender in times of change. in aboim, s., granjo, p. & ramos, a. (eds.) changing societies: legacies and challenges. ambiguous inclusions: inside out, outside in, vol. 1, 333–355. imprensa de ciências sociais, lisboa. https://doi.org/10.31447/ics9789726715030.14 benedict, r. (2007 [1946]) o crisântemo e a espada. perspectiva, são paulo. evans-pritchard, e. e. (2013 [1940]) os nuer: uma descrição do modo de subsistência e das instituições políticas de um povo nilota. perspectiva, são paulo. miller, d. (2020) como conduzir uma etnografia durante o isolamento social. blog do sociofilo 23. 5.2020 <https://blogdolabemus.com/2020/05/23/notas-sobre-a-pandemia-como-conduzir-uma-etnografiadurante-o-isolamento-social-por-daniel-miller>. 25.9.2020. nader, l. (2011) ethnography as theory. hau: journal of ethnographic theory 1(1) 211–219. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau1.1.008 piscitelli, a. (2005) apresentação: gênero no mercado do sexo. cadernos pagu 25 7–23. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-83332005000200001 sarró, r. (2007) órganos vitales y metáforas mortales: un relato sobre hospitales portugueses y diáspora africana. revista de antropologia social 16 325–347. scott, j. (1991 [1990]) gênero: uma categoria útil para análise histórica. sos corpo, recife. viegas, s. m. & mapril, j. (2012) mutualidade e conhecimento etnográfico. etnográfica 16(3) 513–524. https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.2104 untitled spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 markku tykkyläinen tykkyläinen, markku (2002). spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970. fennia 180: 1, pp. 213–226. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in this article, the geographical transformation of the finnish manufacturing sector since the 1970s is analysed. changes in manufacturing employment by municipalities are used as central indicators of the transformation. the urban– rural shift, deindustralisation, and emergence of the new economy have all occurred during the last three decades. a trend surface analysis indicates that manufacturing employment increased all over the country in the 1970s. the growth was higher the more northern and eastern the municipality’s location. this pattern was conformable to the goals of the finnish regional policy of the 1970s. deindustrialisation plagued the economy from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, and its negative labour force impacts were focused especially on the southern mature industrial cities. the industrial policy of the 1980s was without much result. finally, the crisis of the early 1990s ruined a considerable part of industrial performance everywhere in the country. the era of telecommunications-driven economic growth in the 1990s led to the geographical pattern of growing employment in few urban areas and some localities adjacent to cities. the long, vigorous growth period (up to the year 2001), comparable with the growth of the late 1960s and early 1970s, diffused to rural municipalities, but the geographical pattern of this boom was oriented more towards the west and south than in the 1970s. markku tykkyläinen, department of geography, university of joensuu, p. o. box 111, fin-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: markku.tykkylainen@joensuu.fi background external factors, such as export demand, trade agreements, and wars, have strongly regulated the finnish economy. since 1917, finland has been a sovereign actor in europe. until the mid-1990s, the only doctrine of the economic policy was to emphasise the nation-state as the prime regulative actor in the economy. the advantages of the economic integration for the specialised and export-oriented economy led to a search for economic integration after the post-world war ii regulative period. as a corollary, the finnish economy has been integrated gradually into the core of the european economic market area: first as an associated member of the efta in 1961, then as a full member in 1986 and, finally, as a member of the eu in 1995. nowadays finland is part of the euro and the schengen treaty areas. the turbulent eras of europe had radical impacts on the structures and geography of economic activities in finland (hjerppe 1989). forestbased production was the main source of export revenue for long after world war ii. finland was a sparsely populated country where the scattered settlement pattern was maintained by forestry (and agriculture). the logistics of the resource-based sector determined a great deal of the regional structures, especially outside a few industrial centres (tykkyläinen 1988: 343). gradually, transformation from low-value products to high valueadded wood and paper products and diversification to the metal industry began to take place. the nurturing of basic industries was part of the finnish economic policy, leading to the growth of the manufacturing of metals, metal products and machinery, oil refining, and the production of chemicals over decades after world war ii. the investors were largish companies, and many of them were in the state ownership, such as kemira, neste (now fortum), outokumpu, rautaruukki, and valmet (now metso) (see www.kemira.fi; 214 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)markku tykkyläinen www.fortum.com; www.outokumpu.com; www. rautaruukki.com; www.metso.com). the exports to the soviet union and other cmea (council for mutual economic assistance) countries consisted of machines, ships and, later on, many consumer goods. the trade in consumer goods boosted the expansion of the light industry especially in the 1970s and 1980s. the industrial basis became more diversified, but the national economy was more controlled than it is today. for instance, industrial companies were finnish-owned with only a few exceptions until the early 1990s. rationalisation led the spatial restructuring of industry to fewer units and, on the other hand, to the globalisation of finnish industry. the current socio-economic landscape of finland is the result of these economic transformations. finland has traditionally been divided into developed, urban southern and less-developed eastern and northern parts (yli-jokipii & koski 1995). furthermore, the western parts of the country are considered more developed than the eastern forestry-based hinterlands (siirilä et al. 1990). during the period 2000–2006, the vast less-developed areas of northern and eastern finland constitute an eu objective 1 area where gdp per capita is clearly less than the eu average (hedegaard 1999). the aim of this article is to depict the main trends in the sectoral transformation of the finnish economy during the past decades. the study elaborates on the geographical manifestations of regional policy, the deindustrialisation of the 1980s, the economic depression of the early 1990s, and the growth of the information and communication technology (ict) cluster in the 1990s. the patterns of the geographical transformation of the finnish manufacturing employment are analysed by municipality from 1970 through 1998 in terms of the trend surface analysis. employment data in all maps and analyses are extracted from official statistics of finland compiled by the statistics finland in helsinki. part of the data has been used earlier in studying changes in the manufacturing employment in finland in the early 1980s (tykkyläinen 1987). employment data from 1970 through 1990 by municipality are based on the volumes of industrial statistics (official statistics… 1973–1992) and later data on electronic submissions from altika and statfin service by statistics finland. all data are on file (teollisuusaineisto 2001). geographical impacts of regional policy up to 1980 except for a few major industrial centres, the geographical pattern of the finnish industry was for a long time determined by the location of natural resources (tykkyläinen 1988: 343), the impacts of colonisation (1922–1965) (tykkyläinen 1996), and regional policy. the first wave of colonisation took place before world war ii when land was allocated to landless people. the second wave followed after the war when refugees and veterans were resettled. the first regional policy law concerning underdeveloped regions went into effect in 1966 (palomäki 1980: 197). when the first post-war generation entered the labour market and the post-war settlement policy came to an end in the 1960s, the industrialisation of the rural areas and peripheral parts of the country was established as the goal of the industrial policy. the expansion of industry was promoted in regional policy explicitly from 1966 onwards. industrial location to less-developed areas was thus supported by the state (palomäki 1980). the net impact of regional policy on the employment increase in manufacturing in lessdeveloped areas has been estimated to be 18,000 jobs in 1966–1980, or, taking into account the multiplicatory effects, 26,000 jobs (tervo 1983: 170–174). nationally, the growth period of the early 1970s was damaged when the first oil crisis led to the decline of the export demand of the finnish industries; both production and industrial employment declined in the manufacturing sector in 1975 (fig. 1). the finnish economy recovered gradually from the first oil crisis and the growth rate peaked in 1980. the number of personnel in the manufacturing sector reached its culmination, 568,000 people. this remained the record for the twentieth century. proportionally, this number corresponds to 26.3 percent of the economically active population in finland in 1980 (stv 1982: 46). the spatial pattern of the growth of the 1970s comprised the growth of employment in less-developed areas. industrial premises and estates were built in remote localities. the state supported this rural industrialisation with loans, grants, and tax relief. the highest support was directed to the most remote areas, lapland and north karelia (palomäki 1980). the declining localities were industrial cities, such as helsinki, tampere, turku, and lahti. the winners of the 1970s were fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 215spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 provincial centres, towns and rural communities (cd-fig. 1). the explanations for this expansion of rural industrialisation were the opening up of the finnish economy, an abundant young labour force in the peripheries, and the implementation of regional policy. the pattern of rural industrialisation operated partly according to the globally-known production cycle model: advanced industry originated in the core and late-stage, low-wage production was shifted to the periphery (e.g., norton & rees 1979). nevertheless, the finnish data demonstrate that new industries grew in the peripheries and that the shift of existing (and mature-stage) activities from the south was in a minor role (jatila 2001: 149). the spill-over effect took place in the surroundings of most cities. more precisely, the growth of the new industries emerged in new relatively small localities outside the industrial cores. this expansion of the manufacturing sector could not prevent the considerable migration of people to cities and the neighfig. 1. growth of production and employment in the manufacturing sector in finland, 1960–1998 (official statistics… 1973–1992). 216 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)markku tykkyläinen bouring sweden. migration to sweden peaked in 1969–1970, when more than 80,000 people left finland (korkiasaari & söderling 1994: 249). since 1981 net immigration has been positive (stv 2000: 106). rationalisation and deindustrialisation in the 1980s the years from 1981 to 1993 were years of decline in the manufacturing employment (fig. 1). industrial employment declined in almost all localities. only some suburban local districts were expansive, such as espoo and vantaa in the greater helsinki area. in addition, some outlying communities succeeded in attracting new jobs, but the increase was small in absolute numbers. the volume of production grew until 1990, however. the average annual growth of manufacturing output remained below the level of the growth period 1960–1974, but the relatively smaller growth rate does not fully explain the decline in the number of jobs. an additional factor, the growth of productivity, had a negative impact on employment as well. rationalisation in traditional manufacturing industries took place in the 1980s. this rationalisation, combined with moderate growth, maintained the decline of labour in the manufacturing sector. the spatial pattern of the 1980s’ deindustrialisation was not a withdrawal from the new remote emplacements that resulted from the booming growth period of the 1960s and early 1970s. the stronger growth of productivity than that of production reduced employment in major industrial cities and, to a lesser extent, in smaller localities and rural areas (cd-fig. 1). urban areas lost twotenths of their manufacturing jobs and rural areas only one-tenth. the number of manufacturing jobs lost during the 1980s was 102,000, of which 89,000 (87%) were in cities and the rest in rural municipalities (for the urban–rural classification of the municipalities according to the type of municipality, see municipalities… 1998: 22–23, 63– 68). the proportion of the manufacturing sector in gdp declined from 28.1 percent in 1980 to 23.3 percent in 1990 (kansantalouden… 2000: 28–29). this proportion was relatively small compared with other industrialised countries. the competitiveness of the finnish manufacturing sector was low, but credit expansion maintained the growth of domestic demand and import and the increase of asset prices. the opening up of the economy made it possible to increase foreign loans and accelerated speculation. the finnish economy was showing more and more characteristics of casino economy: share prices tripled and housing prices doubled in the second half of the 1980s (kiander & vartia 1998: 69). the crisis of the early 1990s share and housing prices peaked in 1989. inflation dogged the economy. an increasing number of companies could not compete profitably in the market. the economic crisis led to a decline in both production and employment (fig. 1). the proportion of the manufacturing sector in gdp dropped to 20.3 percent in 1991 (kansantalouden… 2000: 29). the number of closed enterprises exceeded the openings by 2,250 in 1991 and by 1,548 in 1992 (stv 2000: 169). bankruptcy proceedings tripled in 1992 compared with the numbers of the late 1980s. the end of barter trade with the soviet union at the end of 1990 exacerbated the economic recession. in the late 1980s the proportion of the finnish foreign trade to the soviet union had been about 15 percent, but suddenly it decreased to around 5 percent in 1991. this brought about the loss of 30,000–40,000 jobs in finland in 1991 (rautava & hukkinen 1992: 5). multiplier effects have been taken into account in this calculation. the devaluation of the finnish mark in 1991 and the decision in 1992 to float the mark improved the competitiveness of the economy, but the decline in the value of the finnish currency led to problems in the financial markets. the foreign debt in finnish marks increased. the state fell deeper and deeper into debt during the economic depression and even after it. central government debt was only eur 9 billion in 1986, but it increased to eur 29 billion in 1992 and peaked to eur 71 billion in 1998 (stv 2000: 304). indebtedness increased for years after the economic depression. nevertheless, public debt is not high in finland compared with other oecd-countries (oecd… 2001: 262). lowered values of assets worsened the economic situation in the early 1990s. the number of bankruptcies was at an all-time high, and employment, real incomes, and demand declined. the economic decline was as deep as the decline fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 217spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 in the countries in east central europe. the industrial output decreased one-tenth, but started to recover from 1992 on. the decline of employment in the manufacturing sector continued in the early years of the 1990s. the number of employed bottomed out to 357,000 in 1993 (in enterprises with a personnel of five or more) (stv 1997: 160). the drop was 24 percent from 1990 through 1993. the economic depression of the early 1990s, “the great depression ii,” was even worse than that of the 1930s in finland, but milder in relative terms than the economic depression of the 1930s in the usa (kiander & vartia 1998: 11). the export recovered in 1992 and manufacturing employment has grown since 1993, bringing about a long growth period until the beginning of 2001. the value of production has increased significantly in the long run in spite of the decline in the manufacturing employment. from 1980 to 1996, the output in the manufacturing sector increased by 60 percent. the recovery of the economy took place in the high-tech sectors. the losers were traditional labour-intensive sectors, such as the manufacturing of wearing apparel, footwear, furniture, some metal products, and transport equipment, many of which exported goods to the cmea countries in the 1970s and 1980s. the fastest-growing sector was the manufacture of electronic equipment, which produces communications equipment, computers, and mobile phones and related equipment (table 1). structural adjustment in manufacturing reflects the loss of the soviet market and the declining demand for some consumer goods and construction materials. the industrial decline was especially severe in labour-intensive sectors that employed low-skilled labour. on the other hand, the impacts of the growing information society are clearly visible in the figures. the geographical pattern of the crisis and the recovery of the early 1990s the spatial outcome of the crisis of the early 1990s was the decline in employment in most localities (cd-fig. 1). the recession hit cities and rural areas hard. the net change in manufacturing jobs was negative both in urban (–12%) and rural (–11%) municipalities. the crisis of the early 1990s spread geographically more evenly than the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. the total net decrease was 52,600 jobs, 41,000 of which in urban areas. the decrease in manufacturing jobs in helsinki, vantaa, lahti, pori, tampere, and turku was to 21,000 from 1990 to 1995. pori suffered most as 24.0 percent of jobs disappeared. the reductions in manufacturing jobs were 21.9 percent in vantaa, 21.1 percent in lahti, 16.7 percent in helsinki, 11.4 percent in tampere, and 11.3 percent in turku. unemployment grew rapidly and real estate prices plunged. manufacturing employment grew only table 1. the change of production in the finnish manufacturing industries in 1990– 1996 and their contribution to employment, total output, and exports in 1990 (stv 1997: 176–177; yearbook… 1992: 74–93, 196–117; tykkyläinen 1999). 218 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)markku tykkyläinen in some localities, such as salo (near turku), by a net increase of 2,375 jobs, and espoo (west of helsinki), by 1,725. the employment growth was much due to the telecommunications-driven recovery. the increase in research and development funding and the establishment of science parks and technopolies were responses to the transformation, but there is no clear evidence of the visible impacts of these inputs in the geographical pattern of industrial employment, as the map of 1990–1995 indicates (cd-fig. 1). the loss of employment in the basic industry was bigger than the positive impacts of the dawn of the new economy that was based on the electronics industry. the profitability of the basic industry improved gradually and the helsinki stock exchange recovered. its annual hex share index exceeded the level of 1990 in 1994 (stv 1995: 245). towards the new economy the transformation of the finnish industry continued towards the end of the 1990s. the number of manufacturing jobs grew, as did the output (fig. 1). the return to the growth rates of the 1960s, early 1970s, and the peak years of 1979–1980 was a fact (fig. 1). the leading growth sectors were the manufacture of electronic equipment and the industries attached to it (table 2). the scope of the growth industries is relatively narrow. the manufacturing of mobile phones and related industries were the growth engine of the economy in the latter half of the 1990s. this information and communication technology (ict) cluster consists of the nokia company and industries supplying semi-finished products, complementary production, and investment goods and services. according to the calculations of aliyrkkö et al. (2000: 10), nokia accounted for a little over 4 percent of the finnish gdp and 23 percent of the total finnish exports in 1999. these calculations do not take into account multiplier effects. thus, the total impacts on gdp are even greater, because nokia engages in a great deal of subcontracting. nokia has specialised in electronics since the early 1980s, but found its success in the telecommunications business as late as in the 1990s. the rapid expansion of nokia lasted the entire decade. in february of 1998, nokia’s proportion of the total shares in the helsinki stock exchange was 34 percent. on march 30, 2000, even after the backslide of ict shares in global stock markets, the proportion of nokia was 62 percent. on august 15, 2001, the total value of nokia shares was still 57 percent in helsinki. nokia has thus become the core asset of industrial capital in finland. this development has a risky side, because the finnish economy is now very dependent on the global demand for ict products (table 2). table 2. changes in industrial output (bulletin… 2001: 18– 20) and the contribution of each industry to output and exports (ennakkotietoja… 2001: 25–34). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 219spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 the success of nokia has boosted attached industries, such as the production of printed circuit boards, manufacturing of mobile phone enclosures, assembling industry and manufacturing services, and suppliers of production automation (see www.nokia.com; www.elcoteq.com; www.perlos.com; www.aspocomp.com; www.elektrobit.com; www.eimo.com). the entire information and communication technology cluster in finland consists of nokia (21,000 employees in 1998), other ict equipment, network and related service producers (30,000 employees), components and contract manufacturers (5,000 employees), and telecom services (18,600 employees). nokia’s contribution to the cluster’s sales was 50 percent in 1998 (aliyrkkö et al. 2000: 27). the ict cluster has been very profitable, but its contribution to investments negligible (ali-yrkkö et al. 2000: 13). the booming economy of the late 1990s increased industrial employment in most localities (cd-fig. 1). urban municipalities, such as espoo, salo, and oulu, have been mentioned often as examples of the telecommunications-driven economic growth. the ict cluster requires r&d inputs. spending on research and development per capita is thus very high in these growth areas (tutkimusja kehittämistoiminta… 1999: 7–9). developers of communications equipment, many subcontractors, and companies providing automation technology and software have been located in advanced metropolitan environments and some localities adjacent to major cities in finland, but having their manufacturing activities dispersed all over the world at the same time. the geographical pattern of the emergence of the new economy in finland in the late 1990s indicates geographical clustering. such a pattern is found in the high-tech sector where industries in their growth or innovative stages remain close to sources of skilled labour and specialised inputs as, for instance, barkley’s 1988 study on the us american economy indicates. moreover, the reason of spatial clustering can also be argued in a simple way: only a rather limited number of companies have expanded greatly, which results in an uneven spatial pattern. both arguments can be supported empirically. the winners during the growth period 1995– 1998 in finland were the city of oulu (with a net increase of 3,896 jobs, or 48 %), the surrounding areas of helsinki (including espoo, vantaa, tuusula, vihti, nurmijärvi, and järvenpää, with a net increase of 4,087 jobs, or 12%), the industrial communities of central finland (jyväskylän maalaiskunta and suolahti, 1,366/63%), ylöjärvi–tampere– pirkkala conurbanisation (1,288/5%), uusikaupunki (731/33%), and salo (584/8%). the first four cases indicate that growth took place in the largest urban areas, which comprise versatile learning environments (e.g., have universities and technical research) and largish travel-to-work areas. the population in these four locations ranges from 134,000 to 1.12 million inhabitants (stv 2000: 82). to generalise, finland has a new, 650-kilometre-long development axis from the south to the north, from helsinki to oulu via tampere and jyväskylä. the state has promoted development in these environments, as the main “centres of excellence” related to ict are located in these cities and their surroundings (osaamiskeskukset 2001). uusikaupunki on the west coast is known for car manufacturing and salo in the southwest for mobile phones. some communities adjacent to the larger urban agglomerations were winners as well, such as nurmo (480 jobs; adjacent to seinäjoki), hollola (422 jobs; adjacent to lahti), mustasaari (356 jobs; adjacent to vaasa), and raisio (387 jobs; adjacent to turku). the industrial growth of hollola is based on the expansion of the ict cluster, but the localities have been boosted by other manufacturing sectors. these smaller growth communities are located in regions outside the traditionally less-developed areas in finland. the spatial expansion of the manufacturing sector, and especially the ict industry, has favoured urban and semi-urban areas in a selective way. this result can be understood in the light of many high-tech industry studies which make it known that the spatial organisation of the ict industry is based on company-specific comparative advantage. this advantage is dependent on each product, production process, corporate purchasing policies, and type of final market. all these factors are unique and thus produce specific locational patterns (e.g., glasmeier 1988). ict production units were located near skilled labour and in areas close to cities and proper communications networks. the vast less-developed objective 1 area did not benefit much from the boom of the ict cluster. the trickling-down effects of the ict cluster are thus geographically limited and network-like. growth takes place in suitable geographical pockets (such as technopolies, industrial estates, and otherwise advantageous places) in multi-faceted environments. 220 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)markku tykkyläinen finland in comparison with other advanced countries compared with other european countries and the oecd countries, finland’s growth has been rapid. the volume of industrial output increased by 41 percent from 1995 to may of 2000, whereas the increase in the usa was 26 percent, in the oecd countries 20 percent, and in the eu, 16 percent (bulletin… 2000: 109). the finnish economy was booming. growth combined with the high rate of automation has not brought about labour-intensive production in manufacturing in finland. the growth of productivity has been stronger in finland than in other advanced countries (table 3), which is largely due to the growth of productivity in telecommunications. furthermore, investment in research and development increased rapidly in the 1990s, which contributed to the increase in productivity, but in the ict industry in the main. the contribution of nokia and other ict companies to the increase in the productivity of the entire economy has been significant. the productivity in the telecommunications equipment industry grew 25 percent annually in the 1990s and, in the ict industry as a whole, about 15 percent annually over the same period (ali-yrkkö et al. 2000: 14). this implies that in some industries growth of productivity remained close to zero and definitely below the long-term average growth. aggregate figures are therefore somewhat misleading. geographical pattern: industrial cities versus rural areas in 1970–1998 economic development and restructuring reshape finland’s economic landscape all the time. the industrialisation of the late nineteenth century took place in towns and industrial communities near the sources of raw materials and energy and along the rivers (palmén j 1899; moberg 1899; palmén k 1899). moreover, this industrialisation resulted in some largish industrial centres in the south, such as helsinki, tampere, and turku. job losses of the late twentieth-century manufacturing took place in these main manufacturing centres (fig. 2). nevertheless, most of these industrial cities are very viable centres attracting population from smaller places inasmuch as the service sector in these cities has grown. the manufacturing sector has many of its central administrative functions in the cities, and the growing post-industrial economy and the positive migration balance have been the engines of metropolitan growth. on the other hand, rural industrialisation, or the urban–rural shift, has taken place in finland as in many other advanced countries (north 1998). the newest wave of industrialisation benefits some metropolitan areas and already developed rural areas. during the examined three decades (from 1970 to 1998), the greatest winners in the competition for manufacturing jobs were espoo (with a net increase of 11,497 jobs/291%), vantaa (5,420/ 62%), salo (4,304/110%), and oulu (3,484/ table 3. productivity of the manufacturing sector, from 1990 to 1998 (stv 2000: 636). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 221spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 41%). the losers were helsinki (with a net loss of 41,874 jobs/–57%), tampere (14,693/–41%), turku (14,024/–46%), lahti (10,526/–53%), pori (7,125/–46%), and kotka (6,128/–55%). unlike the employment data of 1970, the 1998 figures include the enterprises with less than five employees, which represent 5.6 percent of the total manufacturing employment (stv 2000: 171). the growth is thus a little weaker and the decline deeper than the figures indicate. the restructuring of the manufacturing sector hit the industrial core of finland, leading to a decline in manufacturing employment in traditional industrial cities. the main boom of rural industrialisation took place in the very late stage of fordism, in the 1970s. especially during the last years of technologically-driven growth, new industrial spaces were created in dispersed metropolitan-type areas: espoo and vantaa, in the technologically-oriented oulu, and in salo, which has a long tradifig. 2. changes in the number of employees (including owners) in the finnish manufacturing sector, in 1970–1998, by municipality. note that the statistics for 1998 cover all enterprises in the manufacturing sector, whereas the earlier statistics recorded only the establishment of enterprises with a personnel of five or more. these small enterprises represented 5.6 percent of the total manufacturing employment in 1998 (stv 2000: 171) (official statistics… 1973– 1992; teollisuusaineisto 2001). 222 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)markku tykkyläinen tion of the electronics industry. some smaller localities succeeded, which proves that a long growth period impacts positively on employment in semi-remote rural areas. during the entire period 1970–1998, the diversification of the manufacturing sector formed a new economic landscape in finland. this was first based on the new, light industries in the 1970s and, later, on the ict industry. the geographical transformation consisted of various tendencies of industrial restructuring and growth, such as 1) the deindustrialisation of the major industrial cities in 1970–1998; 2) the industrialisation of rural municipalities, especially in the 1970s and late 1990s; 3) the spill-over of manufacturing employment from industrial cities to the neighbouring communities in 1970–1990 and 1995–1998; 4) the industrial decline in the early 1990s and the growth of employment in a few localities; and 5) the growth impacts of the ict industry on the competitive urban areas and localities adjacent to cities in the late 1990s. the mapping of the geographical transformation indicates that the growth pattern of the manufacturing sector became spatially selective in the 1990s. the results suggest that low-cost labour force as such is no longer attractive enough as a locational factor as it was in the 1970s. instead, leading manufacturing branches look for skilled labour and competitive metropolitan environments. how this phenomenon is constructed within the ict industry, and whether it prevails outside the ict industry, calls for further studies. analysis of geographical growth patterns finland is divided into developed, urban southern and less-developed eastern and northern parts, as stated earlier. which parts of the country were winners and which losers in the geographical transformation of the manufacturing sector? public opinion supposes that the spatial concentration of economic activities has shifted towards the south and its urban areas. it has already been proven that the main industrial cities in finland lost jobs in the manufacturing sector during the last three decades. but what about the north–south and east–west dimensions? in which areas have decline and growth taken place? trend surface analysis can be used effectively to remove the local fluctuation that obscures the general spatial trend of the industrial transformation. the x and y coordinates are used in the following way: y indicates the distance from the equator and x indicates the east–west dimension in the way that the parallel of 27 degrees is set to be 3,500 kilometres. the coordinates of the surface are y (min) = 6,646 km and y (max) = 7,730 km and x (min) = 3,089 km and x (max) = 3,703 km. the dependent variable z is the absolute change in numbers of employees in the manufacturing sector during a period. the periods are 1970–1980, 1980–1990, 1990–1995, 1980– 1995, 1995–1998, and 1970–1998. the growth decade of the 1970s favoured peripheral locations. the manufacturing growth diffused to rural peripheries, as happened in many other advanced countries as well (e.g., haynes & machunda 1987). equations 1 and 2 depict the geographical pattern of changes in finland from 1970 through 1980: (1) z = – 545 + 0.056y + 0.097x (1970–1980) (2) z = – 36302 + 5.27y + 10.58x –0.0015xy (1970–1980) the first equation represents the simple planar surface which shows that the further north a place is located the higher was the increase in the number of jobs in the 1970s. similarly, the more eastern the location is the higher was the growth in the manufacturing employment. the surface is steeper towards the east than the north, which indicates that an eastern location was even more beneficial than a northern one. this simple analysis shows that regional development took place in the desired direction. all the z-values of the surface within finland are positive, indicating that there were no areas larger than single localities in decline. the bi-linear saddle surface provides additional information. it is more depictive and shows the pattern of the 1970s (fig. 3). the growth in the manufacturing employment diminishes when approaching the north-eastern corner of the country. in fact, the municipalities in the eastern parts of lapland and kainuu were not the most successful in gaining new jobs. they were too remote. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 223spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 the impacts of the decline of the manufacturing sector in the main industrial cities create a saddle structure that bends up in the northwest and southeast (fig. 3). the deindustrialisation of the 1980s and early 1990s, as illustrated by municipalities on the maps in cd-figure 1, resulted in sharp downward surfaces to the south, depicting job losses in industrial finland. industrial cities in the eastern parts of the country declined as well. the surfaces of 1980–1990 and 1990–1995 thus slope gently to the east. the crisis period of the early 1990s (1990– 1995) produces a north–south slope that is a little smoother than the slope in the 1980s (1980– 1990), indicating that the manufacturing employment degenerated towards the north as well during “the great depression ii” (these equations and figures are not included). in the east–west dimension, the eastern parts of the country suffered more in relative terms during “the great depression ii” than in the 1980s. this indicates that the western parts of the country were more flexible in adapting to new conditions. the information society dawned in the west and south. one planar equation (3) depicts the entire deindustrialisation period of 1980–1995: (3) z = – 5807 + 0.914y – 0.200x (1980–1995) similarly, the bi-linear saddle surface reveals deindustrialisation in the south and southeast (equation 4): (4) z = 60051 – 8.68y – 19.50x + 0.00281xy (1980–1995) many industrial cities are located centrally in the country, which slopes the surface to decline towards the southeast (equation 4; fig. 3). on the other hand, the surface slopes up to the northeast. more clearly than the saddle surface of 1980– 1995 in figure 3, the 1980s’ surface (not included in this article) demonstrates the impacts of the decline in industrial cities – pori, tampere, lahti, and kotka – in the formation of a u-shaped valley. this was the belt of deindustrialisation in the 1980s. the rise of the new economy in the late 1990s favoured southern and western localities as the seedbeds of growth (equation 5). western parts of finland, such as ostrobothnia, south ostrobothfig. 3. bi-linear saddle surface on the employment changes in the manufacturing sector in finland 1970–1980, 1980– 1995, and 1995–1998. 224 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)markku tykkyläinen nia, and north ostrobothnia, grew (cd-fig. 1). a net increase of industrial jobs in rural areas was 12,300 from 1995 through 1998, being 88 percent of the total net increase in the country (calculated from the same data file as cd-fig. 1). the rural re-industrialisation was not necessarily a result of the growth in the ict industry, but rather a result of the rise in incomes and the growth in demand in other sectors. the growth in rural areas has thus been mainly induced due to the long boom in the finnish economy. the industriallydiversified economic areas in the west with many small and medium-sized companies have been responsive to these induced growth impacts. (5) z = – 74 + 0.066y – 0.103x (1995–1998) the trend surface of 1995–1998 is above the zero-level within finland, indicating growth all over the country. nevertheless, z-values are lower than in the 1970s’ surface, but, on the other hand, the period 1995–1998 is short. the surface slopes upwards to the north at an angle similar to that of the 1970s, but in contrast, the surface slopes downwards to the east. the slide toward the east does not differ much from the situation in the 1980s. the bi-linear saddle surface is almost straight and visually is very similar to the planar surface (equation 6; fig. 3). (6) z = – 1535 + 0.279y + 0.325x – 0.0000624xy (1995–1998) although the coefficient of x is positive, the negative xy-component in the equation forces the surface to slope downwards to the east. the growth in manufacturing employment thus declines slightly towards the east. the entire period from 1970 to 1998 is depicted by a planar surface that inclines to the east and climbs to the north (equation 7). the employment change in manufacturing has been negative in the south and southeast of finland. the zero-line runs from central ostrobothia to the northern parts of north karelia, north of kokkola to lieksa. (7) z = – 5881 + 0.980y – 0.302x (1970–1998) the bi-linear saddle surface of the three decades reveals the dominant effect of the decline caused by deindustrialisation but, as one can expect, the surface is at a level higher than during the deindustrialisation period (equation 8; fig. 4): (8) z = 58515 – 8.40y – 19.16x + 0.00275xy (1970–1998) during the period 1970–1998, the urban municipalities lost a total of 90,000 manufacturing jobs. rural municipalities gained a net increase of 26,000 jobs during the same period. if the change in the coverage of the industrial statistics is taken into account, the net loss of jobs was even higher. the strong decline in employment explicates the dominance of the deindustrialisation pattern over the entire period. conclusions the late-fordist boom of the 1970s, deindustrialisation, and the emergence of the new economy brought about the geographical transformations of the finnish manufacturing sector. there are competitive factors which explain the changes. for instance, in the 1970s, the boom resulted largely from the growth of the labour-intensive light industry and the expansion of traditional manufacturing. this spatial diffusion of manufacturing appears to be related to the labour advantage of the peripheries, growth of new industrial activities, and regional policy. it was more profitable, with the help of state support, to expand production in the peripheries than in the industrial cores. there was strong political will to utilise the comparative advantage of the country geographically and, thus, to mobilise the production factors of finland’s remote regions. this was part of the planning doctrine of the time (e.g., jatila 2001: 3–10). deindustrialisation consisted of two types of job losses. first, many industrial cities, especially helsinki, lost their comparative advantage in manufacturing employment to smaller cities, towns and rural municipalities in the late twentieth century. nevertheless, helsinki boomed without any expansion of the manufacturing sector. many structural factors (skills, labour force, rents, congestion, etc.), as well as the economic policy, influenced this decline. the more cyclical deindustrialisation emerged when the global shift to newly industrialised countries (nic) took place and the old fordist industrial infrastructure lost its competitiveness. the collapse of the soviet trade fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 225spatial turns of manufacturing since 1970 delivered the final blow in finland. traditional production suffered and employment declined. restructuring took place, and the state funded research and development to an increasing degree to develop new industrial activities. the growth of output and employment resumed in the late 1990s. the driving forces of growth were different from those in the 1960s and 1970s, however. a relatively narrow section of the economy with specific locational requirements boosted the economy. the late 1990s’ geographical growth pattern of the manufacturing sector was clearly bifurcated into two phenomena: first, the r&d-driven ict-industry which favoured certain urban or semi-urban localities and, second, the growth of the rural manufacturing sector which was a sort of spin-off from the long-lasted industrial growth in finland. to sum up the main trends, the manufacturing growth of the peripheries in the early stage of the regional policy era changed gradually into a spatially more selective development of localities in advanced environments. moreover, the 1970s’ growth of manufacturing employment in the east turned to growth in the west in the 1990s. why it happened and whether this shift is a longer-lasting phenomenon, deserves further research. references ali-yrkkö j, l paija, c reilly & p ylä-anttila (2000). nokia – a big company in a small country. etla b 162. helsinki. barkley dl (1988). the decentralization of high-technology manufacturing to nonmetropolitan areas. growth and change 19, 13–30. bulletin of statistics 2000: iii. statistics finland, helsinki. bulletin of statistics 2001: i. statistics finland, helsinki. ennakkotietoja teollisuudesta 2000 (2001). teollisuus 2001: 7. statistics finland, helsinki. glasmeier a (1988). factors governing the development of high tech industry agglomerations: a tale of three cities. regional studies 22, 287–301. haynes ke & zb machunda (1987). spatial restructuring of manufacturing and employment growth in the rural midwest: an analysis for indiana. economic geography 63, 320–333. hedegaard l (1999). the concentration of the structural funds. north 10: 6, 7–10. hjerppe r (1989). the finnish economy 1960–1985. government printing office, helsinki. jatila u (2001). yritysten sijaintipaikan valinta päätöksenteko-ongelmana. unpublished phil. lic. thesis in economic geography. helsinki school of economics and business administration. kansantalouden tilinpito 1975–1998 (2000). kansantalous 2000: 1. statistics finland, helsinki. fig. 4. bi-linear saddle surface on the employment changes in the manufacturing sector in finland, 1970–1998. 226 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)markku tykkyläinen kiander j & p vartia (1998). suuri lama. etla b 143. helsinki. korkiasaari j & i söderling (1994). muuttoliike. in koskinen s, t martelin, i-l notkola & k pitkänen (eds). suomen väestö, 226–264. gaudeamus, helsinki. moberg k (1899). metallindustri och stenbrott. atlas öfver finland, text 23, 1–30. sällskapet för finlands geografi, helsingfors. municipalities 1998. regional classifications handbook (1998). statistics finland, handbooks 28. north d (1998). rural industrialization. in ilbery b (ed). the geography of rural change, 161–188. longman, essex. norton rd & j rees (1979). the product cycle and the spatial decentralization of american manufacturing. regional studies 13, 141–151. oecd economic outlook 69: 1 (2001). oecd, paris. official statistics of finland xviii. industrial statistics 1970–1990 (1973–1992). statistics finland, helsinki. osaamiskeskukset (2001). 13 august 2001. <www. intermin.fi/suom/oske/fi/osket.html> palmén j (1899). forsar. atlas öfver finland, text 22, 1–30. sällskapet för finlands geografi, helsingfors. palmén k (1899). industrin. atlas öfver finland, text 24, 1–20. sällskapet för finlands geografi, helsingfors. palomäki m (1980). industrial development and regional standard of living in finland. in walker df (ed). planning industrial development, 189–213. john wiley & sons, chichester. rautava j & j hukkinen (1992). russia’s economic reform and trade between finland and russia. bank of finland bulletin 66: 4. siirilä s, l hautamäki, j kuitunen & t keski-petäjä (1990). regional well-being variations in finland. fennia 168, 179–200. stv 1982 = statistical yearbook of finland 1982 (1983). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1995 = statistical yearbook of finland 1995 (1995). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 1997 = statistical yearbook of finland 1997 (1997). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2000 = statistical yearbook of finland 2000 (2000). statistics finland, helsinki. teollisuusaineisto (2001). markku tykkyläisen arkisto, kansio 97. maakunta-arkisto, joensuu. tervo h (1983). tuotantotoimintaan suunnatun aluepolitiikan työllistävä vaikutus kehitysalueilla 1966–1980. jyväskylän yliopisto, taloustieteen laitos, keski-suomen taloudellinen tutkimuskeskus, julkaisuja 57/1983. tutkimusja kehittämistoiminta suomessa 1998 (1999). official statistics of finland. tiede, teknologia ja tutkimus 1999: 2. statistics finland, helsinki. tykkyläinen m (1987). teollisuuden työvoimamuutokset 1980-luvun alkupuoliskolla suomessa. terra 99, 49–56. tykkyläinen m (1988). periphery syndrome – a reinterpretation of regional development theory in a resource periphery. fennia 166, 295–411. tykkyläinen m (1996). the legacy of post-war settlement policy. finnish journal of rural research and policy 3 (english supplement), 85–93. tykkyläinen m (1999). metsästä elektroniikkateollisuuteen. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 96–99. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. yearbook of industrial statistics, volume 1 1992 (1992). official statistics of finland xviii. manufacturing 1992: 7. statistics finland, helsinki. yli-jokipii p & a koski (1995). the changing pattern of finnish regional policies. fennia 173, 53–67. a wilderness treaty for the arctic: svalbard to the inuit nunaat, defining a sovereign wilderness urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa88571 doi: 10.11143/fennia.88571 a wilderness treaty for the arctic: svalbard to the inuit nunaat, defining a sovereign wilderness alexandra carleton carleton, a. (2020) a wilderness treaty for the arctic: svalbard to the inuit nunaat, defining a sovereign wilderness. fennia 198(1–2) 107–120. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.88571 given the inherent endemism of the high arctic and the proclivity of nations to vie over control of its lands and waters, the arrival of a treaty, which places protection of the endemic environment at its core, would be timely. the arctic environment is changing, together with its identity as the home of indigenous peoples that are part of a contemporary reformulation of sovereignty. treaty-formulation, which places the geography of the arctic at its centre, also centralises her regional endemism and interconnectedness, a vital starting point for regional treaty-building. keywords: svalbard treat, inuit declaration, arctic law, sovereign wilderness alexandra carleton, independent researcher, 58 the serpentine bilgola, nsw, australia. e-mail: alexandralcarleton@gmail.com introduction: mapping the arctic in 1606, mercator crafted a map of the greater arctic which showed four suspected bodies lying around a central ocean-bound north pole. perambulating this were the lands asiae pars, americae pars, groenland, iceland, nova zemla, russia, and a mass clearly delineating the high latitudes of scandinavia. the arctic is the north pole and the seas that have a unique system of currents that circumnavigate this centre before reaching out through the chukchi sea, norwegian sea past iceland’s seydisfjordur, and the northern passages past banks and ellesmere islands (mercator, septentrionalium terrarum descriptio). the historical mapping of sovereign claims (regardless of the incentive for the exercise) was responsible for cementing legitimate nationhood and entrenching territorialised sovereignty (branch 2011), and with it delineating and delimiting cultural and political belonging (offen 2003). it has been used to segment territory, as a tool of proscriptive sovereign politics (branch 2011). cartographic representations developed into a more powerful tool for claiming sovereignty than taking possession (macmillan 2003). cartographic treaty-making, designed and premised upon the geographic nature of the region which the resulting maps seek to govern, is the argument of this paper. this may give gravitas to the idea that wilderness is its own sovereign and thus ought to form the basis of treaties, particularly where endemic environments persist. the arctic is, after all, its own endemism, a “vast, circumpolar region of land, sea and ice” from ”inuit nunaat…greenland to canada, alaska and the coastal regions of chukotka, russia” (inuit circumpolar council canada 2009, hereafter inuit declaration 2009). geography is perhaps not a usual place to begin regarding the nature of international law or its accords. however, geography and its disciplinary ally, cartography, are necessary ingredients alongside © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 108 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) law in founding decisions on delineation of space and its boundaries (strandsbjerg 2012), as spatial aspect cannot be underestimated when it comes to understanding both the endemism of the arctic and the specific ways in which it is changing. arctic maps, among them arkgis and armap, are not only coming into vogue in providing information on the arctic but are capable of plotting overlapping interests (for example shipping routes and wildlife corridors, wilson 2016). contestation for access to natural resources incentivises political interest in borders, and mapping those borders has both legitimised and delegitimised claims to and control of various land and resources in places such as bolivia (cronkleton et al. 2010). whilst this may also apply to the arctic, it is possible and hoped that cartography not only provides the basis for conciliatory politics in the arctic (strandsbjerg 2012), but also law and treaty-making. regardless of which ‘line’ or latitudinal marker is best apt to describe the arctic (and perhaps all in dynamic interplay), the use for an arctic accord comes from recognising the endemism of both the waters and coastal regions of the arctic. as such, basing an initial arctic line as either the ten degree isotherm or the treeline makes the most sense (llana et al. 2016). an examination of two arctic documents shows that both of these central factors – the endemic environment and a reformulation of the sovereign – are important for the evolution of the governance of the arctic. the two documents to be discussed, as illustrative of the central role that protection of the endemic wilderness must play in delineating powers over the vast arctic, are the svalbard (or spitsbergen) treaty of 1920 and the circumpolar inuit declaration on arctic sovereignty of 2009. the need for treaties which reserve the wilderness as the central structural frame, (and thus the need to place geography at the centre of a discourse for an arctic treaty), has come to poignancy through the dynamic created between the economic incentives and conservation incentives for the arctic. specifically, the demands of mineral and other natural resource extraction (lesser et al. 2017), population growth and the related need for job creation and the clash such expansion creates with the conservation of endemic species, rare wilderness flora and minority indigenous who continue to live outside the dominant ontology (based on the author’s intensive participant observation in longyearbyen in 2013). such a clash brings to the fore the requirement for new collaborations: collaborations which are relevant, work to include local groups or custodian groups, and include the constant consultation required for a world with an environment full of living, changing entities. embarking on a treaty-process centred on the wilderness places other human concerns and perspectives secondary, including those of the indigenous or extractors who seek development and access to new opportunities. the proposed treaty seeks to centralise a concern not of immediate monetary recompense to humanity. the recognition of an ecosystem as the basis for treaty formulation is arguably the next step in the evolution of international environmental law, hitherto built upon consensus around particular concepts of minimising harm to the environment. such an advancement would require the acceptance of the value of wilderness as its own entity, beyond merely the provision of quantifiable ecosystem services (costanza et al. 1997), which advocates of environmental protection have designed to encourage the more conservative economic minds to give some weight to the value of the environment. principles such as the polluter-pays principle and the formulations around transboundary protocols have helped to develop, and been a necessary and positive step towards, better international environmental legal practice, however much its legitimacy has waned (stevens 1994). in advocating for a treaty based on the endemism of the arctic, this article advocates coincidentally for a greater utilisation of the realities of indigenous trade and livelihood when making international treaty arrangements for the arctic. in so doing, it leaves a further question as to the nature of treaty-making and the value of science in international policy discussion. the arctic as a region delimiting the arctic: the cartographic way delimiting the arctic is primarily a task of dynamism. defined variously by tree line, latitude, isotherm, or habitation, the modern arctic encompasses a changing dynamic between ice, land and water, in 109alexandra carletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) the many forms these take – peninsulas, islands, ice flows, glaciers. it would be easier to divest these pieces of any framing of the necessary boundaries of an arctic treaty yet that defeats the purpose of the proposition. a treaty on and for the arctic must, in the author’s opinion, be based primarily on the geophysical and climatic features that occur in different territories. this overrides historical indigenous claims and modern state claims. it must, because the arctic, as place today, requires a boundary set on which areas bear similar hallmarks of vulnerability/resilience. it is this crossborder similarity that brings a geographic treaty into focus as a more realistic and pragmatic possibility: negotiations may consider the current environmental state of the arctic and likely alterations that a changing climate will bring, taking into consideration state differences in development, natural resource exploitation and indigenous claims. delimiting the arctic for the purpose of the treaty is a subject that would require its own negotiating table, but beginning with the wilderness – as areas of terra nullius or non-permanent human habitation – is the most important for a treaty on the arctic. establishing the beginning and end of such wilderness may be fraught with difficulty. for example, ascribing wilderness the value of non-human habitation either includes or discounts the nomadic indigenous who have an ulterior ontology of land, which places them as part of the land and does so legitimately where their presence has an impact within normal ecodynamic parameters. yet the idea of de-territorialising the sovereignties is the most controversial. a treaty would incorporate sub-regions of diverse states, and request them to adopt some form of collective endeavour or collective sovereignty. a ‘wilderness treaty’ is different to simply an environmental protection regime as environment does not detach from human occupation. such an approach would aim to preserve arctic wilderness at the expense of human endeavour – the negotiating premise thus would change from compromise where, for example, indigenous argue against mineral exploration, to rather negation of national and human interest. this may have a far better chance of protecting the arctic than one that begins with compromise between conflicting human desires. an environmentally-centred treaty may be based on zoning: those which are used for national park delineation. wilderness remains the core of a treaty, grades of human occupation or environmental interference occur peripherally. but given that this periphery may be used to dwindle the core, mapping a treaty where wilderness remains a large percent of the geographic area would be wise. unified geography, arctic identity: acknowledging consensus despite the diverse collectivities, ontologies and variations in the arctic environment, its endemism – as mutually formative from and recognisant of the higher latitudes – can be demarked as a region vis-à-vis the rest of the world. the regional endemism can (and must) be acknowledged as a ‘whole’ for the purposes of a treaty. the ‘arctic’ is recognised in the circumpolar declaration as a vast region that extends from greenland through the heart of northern america and russia to the edge of the sápmi lands in scandinavia (inuit declaration 2009). its variability and transience, the light, the interconnectedness of the seasons, people and animals is starkly apparent. the region’s endemism, including species’ and peoples’ differences, has consistent current documentation: across mammalian (bluhm et al. 2011); invertebrate and plant species (abbott 2008); the movement and moods of water and ice (forbes et al. 2016); unique effects of climate change (rouse et al. 1997; reist et al. 2006; gunderson et al. 2012; linden 2016); geographical boundaries (llana et al. 2016); thermal change (araźny et al. 2016); and shifting sea-ice coverage (bi et al. 2018). species abundance are fragmented and effects of climate patchwork (abbott 2008). rain on snow events make nomadic livelihoods perilous (forbes et al. 2016). in the arctic a “unified response is universally preferable to a patchwork of disjointed efforts” (haas 1990, 38), taking into consideration both the nation-state demand for independence, security and access to the transit highways of the northern arctic and the vocal concerns and demands of the arctic indigenous for absolute inclusion (inuit declaration 2009, art. 3.11). whether the arctic can encourage a collective consensus will depend on the costs to national (ibid.), international and trans-national security and identity. 110 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper indigenous belonging: beginning with ontology the land of inuit nunaat contains a people (art. 1.3) whose identity is bound to the land through a unique knowledge of it and its ecosystems (art. 3.4). the arctic is the foundation for life; “[t]he arctic is…home” (art. 1.1), a home that embodies a claim for sovereignty (art. 3.12) and self-determination. under this declaration, territorial identity is embedded in demands for partnership in resource development (arts. 3.4 and 3.5) and discussion in rights to traverse the arctic (art. 3.6). the inuit declaration (2009) lays emphasis, not on protection and complete abstinence of development, but their absolute inclusion in arriving at sustainable use of the arctic (art. 3.11). the recognition of inuit as stakeholders is closely bound with their unique knowledge (art. 3.4), access rights and ownership rights to land and natural resources, and rights to conserve and protect their environment (arts. 1.4 and 3.9). indigenous difference is due to an ontological difference, that is; at base, a level the spiritual connection, as bound in ancestral kindredness with sacred land. such ontology grants a solidity of place; that we exist in this place in this air surrounded by these lands and waters (kolers 2009). ontology is a question of recognising inherent identity, rather than tracing a path through (divergent) culture (feibleman 1951). one people, a collective various forms of collectivity are found in the terms used to describe arctic indigenes: they are ‘one people’ (saami council 2018), with a collective and inclusive understanding of territory; obshchina in russia (stammler 2005); saami together with its council in scandinavia; and inuit (as asserted in the inuit declaration 2009) and eskimo in northern america. regional or collective indigenous identity defies westphalian legal and political order (stephenson 2017), and continues to exert a sovereignty, not delineated by the territorial sovereignty of the littoral nation-states (lantto 2010), but by an intangible and as yet cartographically-challenged but real coalescent arctic. various forms of collectivity are found in the terms used to describe arctic indigenes: they are ‘one people’ (saami council 2018), with a collective and inclusive understanding of territory; obshchina in russia (stammler 2005); saami together with its council in scandinavia; and inuit (as asserted in the inuit declaration 2009) and eskimo in northern america. regional or collective indigenous identity defies westphalian legal and political order (stephenson 2017), and continues to exert a sovereignty, not delineated by the territorial sovereignty of the littoral nation-states (lantto 2010), but by an intangible and as yet cartographically-challenged but real coalescent arctic. unified politico-geography, which encapsulates unified peoples across a geography, can find bases in autochthony (kolers 2009) and geography (tuan 1979) from a people with a unified political understanding of the world. this includes an understanding that conceives of political evolution as stages in development of an ecocentric (rather than state centric) paradigm (cohen 1994; chaturvedi 2019). paradigm shifts in both geography and politics are needed to create a new geopolitic which responds to the ecological basis of living (chaturvedi 2019). the inuit declaration (2009) ties the sovereign rights of the inuit to their autochthonous origins that “pre-dates recorded history” (art. 1.2). the claims of the indigenous are asserted within the context of the geography and environment of the arctic (art. 1.5) and as part of the self-determination struggle over life, culture and territory (art. 2.1) where the indigenous are ”rooted and have endured” (art. 3.11). claims of ‘rootedness’ and endurance (art. 3.11) are the very words of autochthonous claim. inuit are free to determine their political status, socio-economic and cultural development, government and recognition of treaties and agreements, and land and resource development (art. 1.4). rights over lands and resources underlie many of the articles in the declaration, indeed they are intimately bound with it being the ”building blocks of inuit rights” (art. 2.2). arctic inuit citizenry in the circumpolar declaration articles 1.5–1.8 makes apparent an emerging tale in new sovereignty: that of layered sovereignty. the inuit refer to their threefold citizenry of their nation-states; their sub-state indigeneity, (1.6, 1.7 and 1.8) and their collective citizenry of the arctic (art. 1.5), which reinforces an entitlement to be involved in all decisions involving the use and development of their land as declared in article 1.4. the inuit declaration (2009) defines its sovereignty 111alexandra carletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) as part statehood, part unattached to statehood. supra-state sovereignties, trans-state sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties in the declaration are bound to the use and protection of the land, seas and waters. inuit citizenry of the arctic states – as indigenous citizens of those states and as citizens of political subunits – is reinforced in three separate articles (1.6, 1.7 and 1.8), and their supra-national citizenship as part of the collective indigenous people of the arctic is expressed once (art. 1.5). recognition of supra-, suband trans-state citizenry (art. 2.1) in the inuit declaration (2009) lends itself to a de-territorialising of identity. sovereignty and identity can be subject to boundaries of territory or can be de-territorialised, trans-state or liquid. perhaps a question to be answered is, ‘what defines a sovereign absent territorial boundaries?’ an aristotelian conception of peoples and identity is not defined by boundaries and borders marked out on a map (if ever they could be so). perhaps it could be said that aristotelian conception of peoples and identity is to be found today more in the drafting of a document of sovereignty by a ‘peoples’, where it expresses belonging to an identity with a connection to a space or landscape or passage of rite rather than in the politico-economic division of land, which historically has born more relation to the resources divided than the attachments of the people. using the spatial conception of law, following strandsbjerg (2012), where attachment to land forms a geographical understanding which then founds the basis of boundary delimitation, it can be understood that sovereignty precedes the space – or territory – which it occupies, or mutually forms the territory it occupies (kolers 2009). alternatively, that space may precede sovereignty agrees with tuan’s (1979) idea that space, amorphous and natural, occurs before the human relation to it and, thus, any conjectures placed upon that space by the human. reformulation of the sovereign collective sovereignty seems anathema to sovereignty (kolers 2009).1 although sovereignty continues to evolve, a sovereignty which prefers the collective over the individual is not anti-sovereign (lauderdale 2009). indeed, the sovereign in the inuit declaration (2009) is a collective arctic indigenous citizenry (arts. 1.5-1.8), based on unique knowledge (arts. 3.4, 3.6) and internationally aligned claims to selfdetermination and disposition of mineral wealth (arts. 1.4, 2.2, 2.4, 3.13). in particular, article 3.11 specifies the right to be partners in sustainable development. the declaration claims the right to “freely dispose of our natural wealth and resources” (art. 1.4), a statement that reflects a right articulated in the international covenant on civil and political rights (iccpr) and recalls the undrip “right to conservation and protection of our environment” (art. 1.4, emphasis added). rights over lands and resources: rights to subsistence hunting (art. 2.2), and to fishing, health and sustainable development (art. 3.5) demonstrate deep belonging and possessory belief in indigenous place and being as arctic. arend (1999, 38) notes the “great deal of debate within the academic community about the precise meaning of ’sovereignty’…”. sovereignty has been bound up with selfdetermination in the arctic (inuit declaration 2009, arts. 4.3, 2.2, 2.4, 3,13). the right to selfdetermination in the international covenant on human rights has transformed political geography (thornberry 1989; shadian 2010), and it contributed to changing the geopolitics of regions especially sub-state groups claiming their own governance. while the inuit declaration (2009) admits the existence of the arctic states, the reference to inuit nunaat and to autochthonous claims (the arctic is both ‘home’ (art. 1), and the place where the indigenous ”are rooted and have endured” (art. 3.11)), directly challenges the concept of nation-states (as territorial and juridical entities, rather than nations of peoples), with borders drawn as seen on maps of the world. “sovereignty means that all states are juridically equal; accordingly, they can be bound by law only through their consent. in the absence of a law to which states have consented, they are therefore legally allowed to do as they choose” (arend 1999, 38, emphasis added). altered sovereignty de-territorialises the notion, and the proliferation of documents redefining the nature of sovereignty as indigenous self-determination must be given due weight in the new era of exploration in the arctic.2 territory – bound to the control over and access to land and natural resources, and therefore in the determination of entitlements and even ‘rights’ over these assets – is still important and, so being, important for identity. identity and livelihood make understandable the centrality and steadfast connection of territory to a peoples. that identity is necessarily bound to the 112 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper lands and waters, in which it is heralded, is due its recognition. the very much more than notional (indeed very real) loss of understanding of this inherently shared dynamic in the development of the modern nation-state does not alter its essentiality. consequently, where national politics is responsible for drawing boundaries to constitute the arctic, there are far-reaching implications to the local indigenous. inclusion as an arctic peoples’ is based on national politics and perceptions. geographical work on canadian federal boundary-drawing of the arctic has resulted in de-territorialised, marginalised and ostracised identities (bennett et al. 2016). the prospect of de-territorialised sovereignty affects the relationship between nation-states and self-determining minority groups and changes the understanding of entitlement to land and natural resources. the state sovereign is no longer entitled to access and control absolutely, which has a bearing on the practical meaning of sovereignty. where sovereignty is no longer state-centric, any collaborative framework needs to consider the indigenous and other sovereigns and their desires (szablowski 2010). insertion of prior informed consent is an example, used particularly in conjunctures of indigenous and mining interests. the increasing involvement of transand sub-state arctic indigenous in the arctic world has not so much altered, but reconfigured, the conservative and ethnocentric understanding of what sovereignty is. the layering of citizenry and identity further removes the boundedness of sovereignty from territorial components. contrariwise, sub-, transor multi-state collectives, indigenous or otherwise, are not specifically mentioned in the svalbard treaty (1920). this omission may be understandable given the fact the archipelago has no native inhabitants – at least not in the ‘traditional’ sense, thus no inuit, sami or other eskimo has a sustained autochthonous claim. furthermore, no person is entitled to be born or to die on the island.3 rights to inhabit the land may surface in future years. being or becoming svalbardian involves the same questions of belonging, identity, and landed ontology that are at the heart of indigenous autochthonous claims. altered territoriality and rights of access the connection between sovereignty and territoriality (geographical boundedness) as the foundation of nation-state diplomacy and international law is being nowhere better challenged than in the arctic; specifically due to the increasing geopolitical interest and a shifting climate (gerhardt et al. 2010). altering the nexus between territory and sovereignty will have implications for rights of access yet it may also leave a void where the reformulation of treaty can occur. as the ice melts and shifts, nation-states vie to cement their authority in the push northwards, seeking and claiming spaces to which they can ascribe their sovereignty (knecht & keil 2013), irrespective of the threat of demarked territory becoming physically indeterminate. different sovereignties are already admitted between the svalbard treaty (1920) that acknowledges states as sovereign and the inuit declaration (2009) that, instead, acknowledges the arctic indigenous peoples who have been the custodians of the lands. a treaty for the arctic will have to frame embedded geopolitical interests and the encumbering national interests in a reformulated sovereign. the re-emergence of indigenous sovereignty is breaking the inherent link in international law between territory and state-based sovereignty: the modern nation-state is being made indeterminate through the determined efforts of indigenous peoples to assert their claims for the same. that is, the concept of sovereignty itself is undergoing metamorphosis. for the arctic, should this sovereignty prove more collective, there may be added weight to treaty-making in the region on a geographic basis. the urge for collective thinking would need to overcome adverse pan-arctic thinking of the littoral powers (knecht & keil 2013). as with reisman’s (1990) claim that law must avoid being anachronistic with regards to human rights standards, international law must also remain relevant in its understanding of the sovereign; and, as a result, with who and what can be the central players for designing treaties. this does not avoid the controversies that occur where cartography is used for political ends in deciding sovereignty, in particular where there is tension in the different political spatialities that arise when speaking of sovereignty (strandsbjerg 2012), which may include nonterritorially based identities. yet where we acknowledge that attachment to land (or sea) forms the boundaries of a space and hence that territoriality (or rights to control space) proceeds autochthony, 113alexandra carletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) rights of access to space and resources will be shaped differently. further, where we acknowledge that the sovereign also must avoid being anachronistic, the possibility of recognising the wilderness as sovereign may come into being. a model for governance of the region: the svalbard treaty governance of the arctic as a whole is fraught with difficulties not least of which is the competing political sovereignties of both the littoral states and any observer states who have an interest in the growing economics of the region. a major treaty has attempted to negotiate a path between the economic and political interests of the states in the region whilst still attempting to steer a path for protection of the wilderness in her endemic virtue. this was the svalbard (formerly spitsbergen) treaty (1920).4 geographically, the svalbard treaty governs the archipelago of svalbard, including bear island and all islands between 10 and 35 degrees longitude and 74 and 81 degrees latitude. stated thus in the first article, this region is governed as a whole (art. 1). svalbard has strict regulations surrounding the presence of humans on parts of its wilderness, so the importance of norwegian sovereignty under the treaty cannot be understated for her role as prime custodian. the svalbard treaty (1920) places the sovereignty of the kingdom of norway and her inherent power to make provision for protecting the wilderness of svalbard (art. 2) in alignment. the usa and canada have their own treaty in relation to the arctic, (government of canada 1988) a brief agreement for cooperation on icebreaker-based scientific research. a balance? norwegian sovereignty is expressly maintained in relation to fishing, hunting and private property, shipping and access to marine facilities, levying of duties on mineral exports, and land claims. norwegian sovereignty extends to preservation and reconstitution of the fauna and flora and territorial waters (art. 2). it still grants equitable access rights to the seven high contracting parties and provides that governance of the arctic requires ”an equitable regime, in order to assure [its]… development and peaceful utilisation”. in this the svalbard treaty (1920) appears to strike a remarkably mature balance in protecting norway’s sovereignty and respecting the private interests of sovereign powers through such granting of access to the region. on svalbard, the proximally aligned concerns of endemism, intrinsically valuable, and the securitisation of interests of nations vying for political access rights to the terrain is prominent. yet svalbard itself represents an opportunity for the new geoand eco-politic of an eco-centric rather than state centric model, where there is an understanding of the fluidity and dynamism of the arctic geography and, in turn, the possibility of its altered and de-centralised governance (chaturvedi 2019, 448–449). entitlements and access to the natural resources of the arctic – the realpolitik of the sovereign territory – form the majority of the svalbard accord. land and mineral rights well-defined include the tariffs that can be levied by norway (art. 8) and the aforementioned hunting and fishing rights (art. 2). yet the majority of the accord defines rights to space and what lies within that space to be exploited for economic gain. perhaps this is a weakness of the treaty. in stipulating so quickly, albeit brashly, the protection of the environment, the treaty undoes its hallmark of inventiveness by quickly succumbing to a problem, which belies the stated intentions of preservation of the environment. it grants too much space – arts. 2, 6, 7, 8 and 9 plus considerable annexes, in a document of only 10 articles – to a different issue. it is easy to agree on the protection of the environment as a principle when stated broadly, but much more difficult to agree on the economic and political entitlements bound up in land and resources, giving space in the treaty to codify areas where “territorial disputes arouse extraordinary passions” (malanczuk 1997, 157). a treaty between states also governs a particular geopolitical and environmental region. the svalbard treaty (1920) attempts to govern wisely the polar space, a space which not only evidences the changing nature of stakeholders but also the rise of new ones. based on the geographical region of svalbard, the svalbard treaty (1920) acknowledges territory, and the resources and potential in trade it holds, as more than simply lines on a map: it is antecedent to law. 114 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper national interests, both of the littoral and non-littoral states, may potentially hamper efforts to govern the arctic as a region via collective effort as each protects its own security and economic interests, particularly given the expansion of natural resource and scientific efforts in the region. indeed, governance may require a new politics as well as a new geography (chaturvedi 2019, 449). political strategy to: a) develop the exploration of mineral reserves, primarily oil and liquefied natural gas (lng) (armstrong 1983; masters 2016);5 b) develop the viability of shipping with a focus on four arctic shipping routes (humpert & raspotnik 2012); c) protect national access to shipping routes and mineral exploration sites (masters 2016); d) develop emergency response, search and rescue; and e) explore telecommunications, thwarts national consensus on the region. the security of the arctic are twofold, individual state security or military security (de neve et al. 2015) and collaborative security, “relating to the ‘common security’ of multiple regional states…[including] threats of piracy, terrorism and environmental disasters in the region” (de neve et al. 2015, 1), and is at the behest of the abilities of diplomats to negotiate to the disadvantage of national interests (haas 1990). yet in the arctic, nations are expanding their interests northward (gerhardt et al. 2010). in the svalbard treaty (1920), despite the preference given to norwegian control over environmental matters, there is inherent the clash of environmental ideals with socio-economic and political demands upon space. territoriality is here not only politically fraught with dangers of non-state autonomy and statehood, but also may not suffice to give credit to the current contestations over land, natural resources and eco-space (kuels 1996). governance: the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of arctic treaty-formulation the purpose of treaty formulation is to, prima facie, decide the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of treaty formulation and its balance vis-à-vis states. central to the question is whether the arctic may in fact be governable as a ‘region’, given the competing demands for natural resources claims, shipping route control and increasingly understanding of the complexities surrounding the indigenous arctic. the indigenous/wilderness paradigm is a difficult issue seeing as, where the indigenous claim to be part of the land (and respect for their ontology would be accepting this), their presence could still be part of a wilderness. not so for those who do not share this ontology – though it is not decided on whether one is indigenous or not. where the indigenous no longer live in wilderness areas at a pace and in a way that places them within the rate of change of the ecosystem, then perhaps complete exclusion is justified. then, how does one determine rate of change where their presence is already a fact? other than the need for a form of reduced state sovereignty in preference to a collective sovereignty amongst states, the treaty would clearly need to involve all arctic states with land and seas in the arctic, determined again on where the delineation is. the geographic scope of the treaty is determined on its primary objective of protecting through legal and political means the arctic as a place of nonhuman endeavour. of course, states with resources in the high north are not going to consign their state rights to a treaty where wealth is at stake and so this, rather than nullifying the need for a treaty, may reduce its geographic scope. however, leaving geography as the primary determinant serves another purpose; trade in the region needs to depend on borders being drawn accurately, not just according to political whim, to account for movement of vectors and carriers of disease. disease incursions have been found to be latitudinally or climactically based, and trade needs to take account of this (laaksonen et al. 2010; omazic et al. 2019). finally, addressing the tools of enforcement of an arctic treaty is yet another area of difficulty. as with all collaborative structures, enforcement is also a matter for collaboration and assignation. at the very least, a monitoring body will be needed and such a function may fall to the arctic council or to another body set up with this as its strict mandate. wilderness as the basis for a treaty of the arctic the major concession required in governance over the arctic going forward is the recognition that the remote wilderness requires protection. geographically, designation of wilderness – those areas free of permanent settlements of habitation and the resulting permanent day-to-day human-induced disturbance and retaining some detachment from modern human industrial influence, including 115alexandra carletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) areas once explored for resource potential – specifically exclude the indigenous who have a particular spiritual-geographical-biographical connection to land (allan et al. 2017). part of geographical presence within the framework for wilderness treaty-making would include the mapping of human pressures spatially and temporally in known wildernesses (such as the human footprint map; allan et al. 2017). treaties framed around wilderness values are an important part of protecting the common heritage of humankind. wilderness as the basis for treaty-formation would need to ascribe to wilderness a juridical concept taking into consideration both ‘wilderness values’, which have been discussed socio-economically with difference drawn between the concept of landscape and that of wilderness (brown & alessa 2005, 14–18; brown & raymond 2007; raymond et al. 2009), and build upon international environmental law’s work in delineating categories relating to ecological space (dudley et al. 2012). the work of the iucn may be useful in this regard, in which the wilderness has its own category (1b). the protection of the wilderness has grown internationally out of the need to protect some other value represented by the environment. the distinction from other categories of space or landscape is still taking shape and in this, the history of wilderness protection and its evolution in the national jurisdiction of the united states may be instructive. protection of the wilderness and wilderness areas has been discussed most particularly in the united states, which has a history of judicial (for example, alyeska pipeline serv. co. v. wilderness soc'y, 421 u.s. 240; oregon nat. desert ass'n v. bureau of land mgmt., 625 f.3d 1092) and academic discussion around the spiritual values of the wilderness. the code of federal regulations (usa) (36 c.f.r. § 293.2) ascribes the values of “solitude, physical and mental challenge, scientific study, inspiration, and primitive recreation”, specifically to wilderness. the congressional hearings predating the enactment of the wilderness act 1964 (16 u.s.c. §§ 1131–1136 (2006)), the major piece of legislation governing the designation and protection of wilderness zones in the united states, delineated the spiritual values of the wilderness as: ”preservation of land as it was created by god, wilderness as a place of encountering god, wilderness as a place of spiritual renewal, and wilderness as a place of escape” (nagle 2005, 955). highly pertinent to the arctic in grappling with the struggle between human habitation and the preservation of places of natural wonder, the act states: an area of wilderness is... an underdeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which... generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable (§ 1131(c)). of further importance was that, under the wilderness system set up under the wilderness act, congress has enacted statutes to protect wilderness areas, more than half of which (56 million acres) are in alaska and protected by the alaska national interest lands conservation act (anilca) (nagle 2014). the relevance of the discussions and definitions given to wilderness in its application to arctic and sub-arctic terrain provides some basis for dialogue. recognition of an ecosystem as the basis for treaty-formulation already exists in the protocol on environmental protection to the antarctic treaty (1959), another endemic area which may serve as a model for the arctic, where article 3 addresses the specific “wilderness” of antarctica: the protection of the antarctic environment and dependent and associated ecosystems and the intrinsic value of antarctica, including its wilderness and aesthetic values and its value as an area for the conduct of scientific research, in particular research essential to understanding the global environment, shall be fundamental considerations in the planning and conduct of all activities in the antarctic treaty area. it is a strongly worded article as far as acknowledging the intrinsic value of antarctica’s wilderness is concerned. activity in the treaty area is to take place with consideration of those aspects which comprise an ecosystem, mentioned in article 3(2)(b) including, at final subarticle 3(2)(b)(vi) “degradation of, or substantial risk to, areas of biological, scientific, historic, aesthetic or wilderness significance”. in the author’s opinion, it is an after-thought, seeking to describe in very general and ideal terms that subliminal part of antarctica that, perhaps, ought not to be dressed down to a scientific or environmental quality. 116 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) whilst it is far from certain what consensus is to be had for wilderness value, a geographic premise for international environmental law may simply be a better way to consider the values of the wilderness as its own entity and on its own merit, and to build a consensus. treaty process attempts to build consensus through epistemic development (haas 1990). the development of a consensus based around mutual recognition of wilderness values pertaining to a form of spirituality relevant to the arctic is not the subject of this article, but rather whether an area deserving of wilderness status and common protection can be used to frame a consensus process around geography and the formation of a geographically based treaty. in the antarctic treaty system the overriding issue is whether scientific investigations alter or impede sovereign claims. more importantly, scientific investigations most certainly will affect wilderness status. using codling’s (2001) view, wilderness status ought not be ascribed to any part of the antarctic continent that has permanent habitation nor any other permanent visible evidence of human activity. indeed, in the antarctic treaty (1959) consensus was built upon scientific investigation rather than the protection of the wilderness of antarctica for its own uniqueness. scientific investigation and international scientific cooperation form the basis of the antarctic treaty (1959), the remainder the exclusion of nuclear or military endeavours on the continent and the agreement for observers to monitor the abidance with the treaty. wilderness and sovereign claims over land and natural resource rights appear second concerns to scientific exploration. the antarctic treaty system is an interesting lesson in devising a treaty on the basis of agreed science which made the treaty, in its own distinct way, a geographically-premised treaty. the protection of the arctic wilderness, by comparison, as an entity in itself is not often examined closely and not covered well in international legal documents (jeffery 2009). there are indications that the environment, as distinct from wilderness, has been a key consideration in past deliberations of the peak international body concerning the arctic, the arctic council. however, environment encompasses places even where human habitation occurs, where wilderness distinctively retains some detachment from modern human industrial influence. task forces on arctic marine oil pollution prevention and on black carbon and methane indicate a level of environmental preparedness. for the present, the key considerations for the task forces of the arctic council are on telecommunications infrastructure and scientific cooperation (arctic council 2015) so wilderness concerns seem distant. it may seem duplicitous introducing a treaty system when the idea of conservation management over remote areas might just as well cover the same (literal) terrain. however, a treaty exists to co-opt sovereigns to be part of a system which protects our common heritage. the importance of a geographic treaty lies in the provision of balance: for the common heritage of humankind, the demands of extraction, population, conservation of endemic species, and inclusion of minority indigenes who live under a different guise of being. it is the view of the author that a treaty such as this is not limited by subject-matter and so can address all with equanimity. the development of a code based on wilderness as the central concern, which keeps sustainable use of natural resources and concurrent human presence as an issue to the periphery, will undoubtedly reach across a tension between collaboration and sovereignties which may be where the best environmental and wilderness protection is conferred. collaboration, as codified in the svalbard treaty (1920) through stipulations of state equality and in the inuit declaration (2009) through ownership and responsibility for environmental impacts, might additionally provide a model to achieve a balance on the rate of use of the arctic’s resources. conclusion with far greater access now to the arctic and the likely increasing sovereign interest in its natural resources, the arctic has become a barometer of our ability to protect the last wildernesses and a training-ground for moderating the eyes that look to access the natural resources they hold. for itself, the arctic contains a dynamic endemism where species of flora and fauna only exist in this region and that such endemism is in sensitive flux to changes in use, temperature and geomorphology needs, at the very least, to be respected. the recognition of an ecosystem as the basis for treaty-formulation creates new recognition of the central role of arctic endemism in governance of the geography and is central to the evolution of wilderness as its own sovereign. in the arctic, there is a unique opportunity 117alexandra carletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) to strike a new balance between respect for the wilderness as a central concern and respect for resource development that simultaneously engages the sovereignty claimed by indigenous peoples and the entitlements claimed by nation-states. the arctic has a unique position in which the intersection of environment, industry, commerce and preservation occur, in such a microcosm that issues often seen as geographically disparate are closely and at once seen both in their synchronicity and in their divergence. the presence of permafrost and transport impacts over time; the benefits of local coal mining in the production of energy; the necessity of local management of endemic species; and the realities of ‘belonging’ are seen together. men and women of the arctic live on the peripheral rim of the arctic wilderness; they were once part of economic enclaves which had its own territorial clarity, its own self-determination solidified through devolved governance and some form of economic and political autonomy, or an internationally recognised form of voluntary association. now they are in danger of being increasingly integrated into state-based decision-making. thus the reason and basis for a new treaty framed around the geographical boundaries of wilderness, where the defenders and gatekeepers of the arctic wilderness, may not be as staunch in either their isolation or autonomy to keep the boundary. treaty-making based upon geography would delineate borders differently, ascribe values to wilderness and alternative landscape ontologies, and question the nature of sovereignty. modelling a treaty for the arctic on its wilderness provides a relevant, necessary and stable fulcrum upon which to build a system for cooperation; capable of including multiple sovereignties both local and regional and considering multiple objectives for arctic development, whilst minimizing the risk of ignoring or forgetting the central concern of wilderness protection by placing this concern at the centre. where a treaty recognises prima facie the wilderness, then humankind has a chance to grant this wilderness recognition as a whole and separate entity with being and essence. notes 1 according to kolers (2009), sovereignty is an abstract concept. the power to express sovereignty is born out in one’s control of territory: the idea of boundedness and territory. 2 statements by various indigenous groups, the compelling judicial advancements in awards and acknowledging tribal jurisdiction over certain matters, and the formation of tribal-based collectives such as the arctic athabaskan council; http://www.arcticathabaskancouncil.com/aac/, the aleut international association, the gwich'in council international, the inuit circumpolar council, the russian association of indigenous peoples of the north, and the saami council. these six are the six permanent (indigenous) participants of the arctic council. 3 knowledge gained from participant observation. the author lived on svalbard in 2013. 4 the svalbard treaty (1920) was once known as the treaty of spitsbergen. spitsbergen is but one island in the archipelago, the largest that lies to the southern edge. svalbard is the current name of the entire archipelago. 5 a conference was held as early as 22–24 september 1982 in oslo on arctic energy resources with focus predominantly on oil and gas. even then the environment and social impacts of exploration and exploitation were considered alongside techniques for exploration. acknowledgements the author would like to thank the efforts of kirsi pauliina kallio, the editor-in-chief of fennia, and sebastian knecht and jeremy tasch for the effort, time and comments to this work upon which it was substantially improved. references abbott, r. j. (2008) history, evolution and future of arctic and alpine flora: overview. journal plant ecology & diversity 1(2) 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/17550870802460976 allan, j. r., venter, o. & watson, j. e. m. (2017) temporally inter-comparable maps of terrestrial wilderness and the last of the wild. scientific data 4 170187. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2017.187 118 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) alyeska pipeline serv. co. v. wilderness soc'y, 421 u.s. 240, 285, 95 s. ct. 1612, 1635, 44 l. ed. 2d 141, 10 fair empl. prac. cas. (bna) 826, 7 erc 1849, 11 empl. prac. dec. p 10842, 5 envtl. l. rep. 20286, 1975 wl 350877. araźny, a., przybylak, r. & kejna, m. (2016) ground thermal regime on the kaffiøyra plain (nw spitsbergen) in the period from 1 september 2012 to 31 august 2014. bulletin of geography. physical geography series 10(1) 65–80. https://doi.org/10.1515/bgeo-2016-0005 arctic council (2015) task forces of the arctic council. <www.arctic-council.org/index.php/en/about-us/ subsidiary-bodies/task-forces> 10.3.2018. arend, a. c. (1999) a methodology for determining an international legal rule. in arend, a. c. (ed.) legal rules and international society, 67–110. oup, oxford. reprinted in ku, c. & diehl, p. f. (eds.) (2003) international law classic and contemporary readings, 23–49. 2nd ed. lynne rienner, london. <https:// www.rienner.com/uploads/47d94d3774b6d.pdf> armstrong, t. (1983) arctic energy resources. polar record 21(133) 390. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0032247400019288 bennett, m., greaves, w., riedlsperger, r. & botella, a. (2016) articulating the arctic: contrasting state and inuit maps of the canadian north. polar record 52(6) 630–644. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0032247416000164 bi, h., zhang, j., wang, y., zhang, z., zhang, y. fu, m., huang, h. & xu, x. (2018) arctic sea ice volume changes in terms of age as revealed from satellite observations. ieee journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing 11(7) 2223–2237. https://doi.org/10.1109/jstars.2018.2823735 bluhm, b. a., gebruk, a. v., gradinger, r., hopcroft, r. r., huettmann, f., kosobokova, k. n., sirenko, b. i. & weslawski, j.m. (2011) arctic marine biodiversity: an update of species richness and examples of biodiversity change. oceanography: the changing arctic ocean: special issue on the international polar year 24(3) 232–248. https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2011.75 branch, j. (2011) mapping the sovereign state: technology, authority, and systemic change. international organization 65(1) 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020818310000299 brown, g. & alessa, l. (2005) a gis-based inductive study of wilderness values. international journal of wilderness 11(1) 14–18. brown, g. & raymond, c. (2007) the relationship between place attachment and landscape values: toward mapping place attachment. applied geography 27(2) 89–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2006.11.002 chaturvedi, s. (2019) arctic geopolitics then and now. in callaghan, t. g. & nuttall, m. (eds.) the arctic: environment, people, policy, 441–458. taylor & francis, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429340475 codling, r. (2001) wilderness and aesthetic values in the antarctic. polar record 37(203) 337–352. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0032247400017071 cohen, s. b. (1994) geopolitics in the new world era: a new perspective on an old discipline. in demko, g. & wood, w. (eds.) reordering the world: geopolitical perspectives on the 21st century, 38–46. taylor & francis, boulder. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429494741 costanza, r., d'arge, r., de groot, r., farber, s., grasso, m., hannon, b., limburg, k., naeem, s., o'neill, r. v., paruelo, j., raskin, r. g., sutton p. & van den belt, m. (1997) the value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. nature 387 53–260. https://doi.org/10.1038/387253a0 cronkleton, p., albornoz, m. a., barnes, g., evans, k. & de jong, w. (2010) social geomatics: participatory forest mapping to mediate resource conflict in the bolivian amazon. human ecology 38 65–76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9296-4 de neve, akcayoz, p., heal, a. & lee, h. (2015) security of the arctic as the u.s. takes over the arctic council leadership in 2015. policy brief. harvard kennedy school, belfer center for science and international relations. dudley, n., kormos, c., locke, h. & martin, v. g. (2012) defining wilderness in iucn. international journal of wilderness 18(1) 9. <https://issuu.com/ijwilderness/docs/dec_2016_ijw> feibleman, j. k. (1951) ontology. johns hopkins press, baltimore. forbes, b. c., kumpula, t., laptander, r., meschtyb, n., macias-fauria, m., verdonen, m., skarin, a., kim, k., boisvert, l. n., stroeve, j. c., bartsch, a. & zetterberg, p. (2016) sea ice, rain-on-snow and tundra reindeer nomadism in arctic russia. biology letters 12(11). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0466 gerhardt, h., steinberg, p. e., tasch, j., fabiano, s. j. & shields, r. (2010) contested sovereignty in a changing arctic. annals of the association of american geographers 100(4) 992–1002. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2010.500560 government of canada (1988) agreement between the government of canada and the government of the united states of america on arctic cooperation. e101701 cts no. 1988/29. <https://www. treaty-accord.gc.ca/text-texte.aspx?id=101701>. 119alexandra carletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) gunderson, a. m., lanier, h. c. & olson, l. e. (2012) limited phylogeographic structure and genetic variation in alaska's arctic and alpine endemic, the alaska marmot. journal of mammalogy 93(1) 66–75. https://doi.org/10.1644/10-mamm-a-380.1 haas, p. m. (1990) obtaining international environmental protection through epistemic consensus. millennium: journal of international studies 19(3) 347–363. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298900190030401 humpert, m. & raspotnik, a. (2012) the future of arctic shipping. the arctic institute, center for circumpolar security studies. [inuit declaration] inuit circumpolar council canada (2009) a circumpolar inuit declaration on sovereignty in the arctic. <http://www.inuitcircumpolar.com/sovereignty-in-the-arctic.html> 16.3.2018. jeffery, m. (2009) terrestrial area management in polar regions: applying the eco-system-based approach to the coalface of climate change. the yearbook of polar law online 1(1) 109–119. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116427-91000009 knecht, s. & keil, k. (2013) arctic geopolitics revisited: spatialising governance in the circumpolar north. the polar journal 3(1) 178–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/2154896x.2013.783276 kolers, a. (2009) land, conflict and justice: a political theory of territory. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511575709 kuehls, t. (1996) beyond sovereign territory: the space of ecopolitics. university of minnesota press, minnesota. laaksonen, s., pusenius, j., kumpula, j., venäläinen, a., kortet, r., oksanen, a. & hoberg, e.  (2010) climate change promotes the emergence of serious disease outbreaks of filarioid mematodes. ecohealth 7 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-010-0308-z lantto, p. (2010) borders, citizenship and change: the case of the sami people, 1751–2008. citizenship studies 14(5) 543–556. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2010.506709 lauderdale, p. (2009) collective indigenous rights and global social movements in the face of global development: from resistance to social change. journal of developing societies 25(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/0169796x0902500304 lesser, p., ejdemo, t., suopajӓrvi. l. & petrétei, a. (2017) susminnor, sustainable mining in the northernmost europe – lessons learned and practices developed: synthesis report sustainable mining – nordic advanced knowledge synthesis guidebook good practices and knowledge gaps. synthesis report. <https://www.extractiveshub.org/resource/view/id/9475> linden, o. (2016) impacts and effects of ocean warming on arctic ecosystems and species. in laffoley, d. & baxter, j. m. (eds.) explaining ocean warming: causes, scale, effects and consequences, 321–335. iucn, gland. <https://www.iucn.org/content/explaining-ocean-warming-causes-scale-effects-andconsequences> llana, l. c., ramage, k., law, k. & keckhut, p. (2016) labex l-ipsl arctic metadata portal. data science journal 15 1–11. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2016-002 macmillan, k. (2003) sovereignty ‘more plainly described’: early english maps of north america, 1580– 1625. journal of british studies 42(4) 413–447. https://doi.org/10.1086/376461 malanczuk, p. (1997) akehurst’s modern introduction to international law. 7th ed. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203427712 masters, j. (2016) the thawing arctic: risks and apportunities. cfr backgrounders, council on foreign relations. <http://www.cfr.org/arctic/thawing-arctic-risks-opportunities/p32082> 19.5.2016. nagle, j. c. (2005) the spiritual values of wilderness. environmental law 35 955–1003. nagle, j. c. (2014) wilderness exceptions. environmental law 44(2) 373–414. <https://www.jstor.org/ stable/43267704> offen, k. h. (2003) narrating place and identity, or mapping miskitu land claims in northeastern nicaragua. human organization 62(4) 382–392. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.62.4.f9xgq4cu3ff88he0 omazic, a., bylund, h., boqvist, s. högberg, a., björkman, c., tryland, m., evengård, b., koch, a., berggren, c., malogolovkin, a., kolbasov, d., pavelko, n., thierfelder, t. & albihn, a. (2019) identifying climate-sensitive infectious diseases in animals and humans in northern regions. acta vet scand 61 53. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13028-019-0490-0 oregon nat. desert ass'n v. bureau of land mgmt., 625 f.3d 1092, 1094, 2010 daily journal d.a.r. 13840, 2010 wl 3398386 (9th cir. 2010). raymond, c. m., bryan, b. a., macdonald, d. h., cast, a., strathearn, s., grandgirard, a. & kalivas, t. (2009) mapping community values for natural capital and ecosystem services. ecological economics 68(5) 1301–1315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.12.006 reisman, w. m. (1990) sovereignty and human rights in contemporary international law. the american journal of international law 84 866–876. <https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1866&context=fss_papers> 120 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) reist, j. d., wrona, f. j., prowse, t. d., power, m. j., dempson, b., beamish, r. j., king, j. r., carmichael, t. j. & sawatzky, c. d. (2006) general effects of climate change on arctic fishes and fish populations. a journal of the human environment 35(7) 370–380. https://doi.org/10.1579/0044-7447(2006)35[370:geocco]2.0.co;2 rouse, w. r., douglas, m. s., hecky, r. e., hershey, a. e., kling, g. w., lesack, l., marsh, p., nicholson, b. j., roulet, n. t. & smol, j. p. (1997) effects of climate change on the freshwaters of the arctic and subarctic north america. hydrological processes 11(8) 873–902. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-1085(19970630)11:8<873::aid-hyp510>3.0.co;2-6 saami council (2018) sámiráddi <http://www.saamicouncil.net/en/> 16.3.2018. shadian, j. (2010) from states to polities: reconceptualizing sovereignty through inuit governance. european journal of international relations 16(3) 485–510. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066109346887 stammler, f. (2005) the obshchina movement in yamal: defending territories to build identities. in kasten, e. (ed.) rebuilding identities. pathways to reform in post-soviet siberia, 109–134. dietrich reimer verlag, berlin. <http://www.siberian-studies.org/publications/pdf/ristammler.pdf> 16.3.2018. stephenson, s. r. (2017) confronting borders in the arctic. journal of borderlands studies 33(2) 183–190. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-1085(19970630)11:8<873::aid-hyp510>3.0.co;2-6 stevens, c. (1994) interpreting the polluter pays principle in the trade and environment context. cornell international law journal 27(3) 577–590. http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cilj/vol27/iss3/5 strandsbjerg, j. (2012) cartopolitics, geopolitics and boundaries in the arctic. geopolitics 17(4) 818–842. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2012.660581 szablowski, d. (2010) operationalizing free, prior, and informed consent in the extractive industry sector? examining the challenges of a negotiated model of justice. canadian journal of development studies / revue anadienne d'études du développement 30(1–2) 111–130. https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2010.9669284 the antarctic treaty (1959) 402 u.n.t.s. 71, entered into force june 23, 1961. <http://www.ats.aq/e/ ats.htm> 13.3.2018. the svalbard treaty (1920) in force 14 august 1925. thornberry, p. (1989) self-determination, minorities, human rights: a review of international instruments. international & comparative law quarterly 38(4) 867–869. https://doi.org/10.1093/iclqaj/38.4.867 tuan, y-f. (1979) space and place: humanistic perspective. in gale, s. & olsson, g. (eds.) philosophy in geography. theory and decision library (an international series in the philosophy and methodology of the social and behavioral sciences), vol 20, 387–427. springer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9394-5_19 wilderness act (2006) 16 u.s.c. §§ 1131–1136. wilson, h. (2016) mapping arctic corridors. canadian geographic 6.6.2016 <https://www. canadiangeographic.ca/article/mapping-arctic-corridors>. 3.11.2019. untitled cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps: a finnish perspective niina vuorela, charles burnett and risto kalliola vuorela, niina, charles burnett & risto kalliola (2002). cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps: a finnish perspective. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 111–121. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in this article, we examine changes and trends in finnish cartography using examples from the history of map-making and from our own empirical landscape research. three major issues of data sources, combined uses of spatial data, and interactive spatial information services are emphasised. the finnish map-making tradition illustrates well the close linkage between cartography, society, and surveying techniques. sweden and russia influenced the mapping traditions until the twentieth century. geographers published the world’s first national atlas in 1899. comprehensive state-run mapping has characterised finnish cartography from the early twentieth century onwards. new techniques and data have modernised map-making, but the recent convergence of automated positioning, wireless communication, and digital spatial information handling are currently creating previously non-existing ways of cartographic communication. spatial or geographic information systems enable the collection, management, and analyses of spatial information for a wide variety of uses. the contents and means of delivering cartographic information to the public is broadening and new digital spatial information services are designed for resource management, retailing, and tourism. a critical examination of data quality, visualisation, and the ethical and sociological consequences of these trends are needed to sustain the finnish cartographic tradition in the information age. niina vuorela, department of geography, university of turku, fin-20014 turku, finland. e-mail: niina.vuorela@utu.fi introduction map users in the twenty-first century will witness changes in the visualisation and application of spatial information. the convergence of enabling technologies, such as automated positioning, wireless communication, and digital spatial information handling, will permit the development of previously non-existing implementations of cartographic communication (burnett & kalliola 2000). the adoption of cartographic developments in mainstream society must not, however, be viewed as a simple deterministic cycle of technological wonders begetting societal benefits. much of the public discourse regarding future cartographic tools is filled with uncritical enthusiasm. graham (1998) cautions against such stary-eyed utopianism. the role of the scientific community, including cartographers and those working with the perception of space and the human context, is to critically investigate the interactions between digital spatial information and society (kalliola et al. 2001). the evolution of cartography as spatial information communication is driven by changes in societal need and in the state of measurement and presentation techniques (robinson et al. 1995; keates 1996). throughout their evolution, maps have increased their agency for conveying information and expanded into new societal uses that include – but are not restricted to – teaching, geopolitics, military needs, resource exploitation, logistics, marketing, and tourism. while the necessity to communicate cartographically in these forums will remain, developments in digital cartographic communication will add new rings (socio-technical artefacts) to an already existing chain of past advances in map-making (mellaart 1963; bagrow & skelton 1985; campbell 1993; 112 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)niina vuorela, charles burnett and risto kalliola dorling 1997). in this article, we take the perspective that these new artefacts will draw heavily from conventions established through the history of cartography while adding unforeseen models of cartographic information exchange. undoubtedly, digitalisation has already induced important changes in cartography. in the late twentieth century, the introduction of remote sensing and geographic information systems (gis) were quickly adopted for map production tasks worldwide (morrison 1989; artimo 1994). gis has made it easier to reproduce, update, customise, cross-analyse, and perform a variety of other spatial operations and analyses (aronoff 1991; laurini & thompson 1992; jones 1997; clarke 2001). in the majority of these applications, however, gis only help users gain speed and efficiency in their work. thus, the view of gis as a revolutionary approach to cartography is partly a myth. more specifically, it is a myth, if developments in society are ignored in favour of onesided views of technology ‘impacting’ society. the work of the finnish geographer j. g. granö (1930, 1997) is an illustrative example of a predigital cartography, where a highly organised landscape analysis system was developed half a century before the introduction of the gis technology. it is worthy of note that even with the ‘advanced’ gis tools, good geographic analysis has remained true to the granö tradition. granö’s synthesis was a delicate process of data combination, fulfilled with a careful synthesis and analysis of landscape regions. the presence of this care and attention in contemporary cartography, whether in creating tourist information systems or landscapeecological assessments, lies at the core of balanced use of modern geographic information. in this article, we examine cartography as a coevolutionary process of society and technology. we use examples from the history of cartography in finland and from our own empirical landscape research on the island of ruissalo in southwestern finland (vuorela 2000, 2001; burnett & toivonen 2001). we examine five themes: the history of cartography in finland; new digital data sources; issues arising from data combination; new digital cartographic services; and digital map reliability. landmarks of cartography in finland finland can be considered one of the frontline countries in the evolution of map-making over the past few centuries. this situation results partly from a fruitful mixture of versatile map production efforts and traditions drawn from two neighbouring countries, sweden and russia. they impacted finnish map-making tradition from the late seventeenth to the twentieth century. more precisely, the national trends in map-making illustrate well the close linkage between cartography, society, and surveying techniques. the centuries-long influence of sweden resulted in a strong map-making tradition in finland. the introduction of triangulation and plane table methods to map-making in the seventeenth century improved the accuracy of maps greatly (niemelä 1984: 2). as finland was economically and strategically important to sweden, tax collection and implementation of land reforms were planned with the aid of the early maps. the swedish king initiated mapping in finland during the 1630s. these mappings were targeted to measure the extent and quality of arable land and meadows and became known as geometrical or geographical maps (lönborg 1901; johnsson 1965). during the period when finland was a grand duchy under the russian empire (1809–1917), new trends and styles were adopted in map production and design. the land survey administration still developed along the lines of the swedish system, however. overall, the progress of cartography slowed down during these years, but military mapping was carried out both by finns and russians (niemelä 1984: 2). the previous mapping by the russian topographic service (in eastern finland, part of russia before 1809) was extended to the rest of the country, mainly south and west. between 1870 and 1917, a series of maps was created to cover large parts of finland at scales of 1:21 000 and 1:42 000 (gustafsson 1932, 1933: 86–88). finland thus became topographically described relatively early compared to other european nations (paulaharju 1947; niemelä 1984, 1998). these russian topographic maps constitute important documents of the time, as they include typical features of the present-day basic maps, such as arable land, meadows, roads, and buildings in addition to landforms. maps also became a valuable means of characterising finnish identity and nationality at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. as an effort of geographers, the first edition of the national atlas of finland was published in 1899. this first national atlas in the world fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 113cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps represented finland through a variety of thematic maps showing characteristic features of the country (niemelä 1982: 170). immediately following finland’s independence in 1917, map production developed into an organised, state-run mapping system, where the military topographic service carried out military mapping and the national land survey of finland (nls) other mappings (lyytikäinen 1983: 448). until the 1940s, two main products, the parish map and the topographic map, were produced. production of the former had started already in 1825. by the time the program terminated in 1950, these maps had covered approximately 27 percent of finland (niemelä 1998: 27). due to their long production history the parish maps vary, reflecting changes in printing techniques and visualisation. topographic maps were produced between 1917 and 1947 (niemelä 1998: 40). a significant change in the underlying mapping techniques occurred in the 1930s. instead of the plane table measurements, mapping was now based on aerial photography. the role of remote sensing has been central ever since. as remote sensing gained wider use in map production, the national land survey renewed its maps during the 1940s. the parish map and the topographic map were combined to produce the basic map of finland (1:20 000) (niemelä 1984). basic maps included general information about the landscape and were designed for a large audience of both professional and accustomed users (niemelä 1998: 54). the mapping was based on aerial photography acquired at a scale of 1:10 000 and cartographic visualisation was based on a six-colour printing. the social and technical change that drives cartographic evolution is propelling changes in cartographic models, methods, and maps, and putting pressure on large governmental organisations such as the national land survey of finland. the implementation of computer technology and new storage systems for geographical object locations and attributes have diversified the possibilities of designing and making maps. instead of storing spatial information statically on a printed map, location-related data is increasingly stored in digital geographic information (gi) databases and further visualised in printed form or as computer display maps (artimo 1996). the 50-year-old finnish basic map production system has had to adjust to the new developments (artimo 1996; niemelä 1998). from the 1970s onwards, the map production chain has been changed into a gi-based storage and visualisation system (niemelä 1998). currently, the production of the basic maps relies on digital databases (topographic database, map database) with thematic or attribute information attached to vector format geographic objects. the accuracy of the topographic database varies between 1:5 000 and 1:10 000. they are updated every 5–10 years, except for roads, which are updated every year (niemelä 1998: 134). due to these technical changes, the nls is providing customers with new product types and map visualisation options. the basic map can be purchased either as a printed map (in finnish, maastokartta) that introduces a different set of colours and symbols compared to the previous basic map, or as a digital vector format basic map dataset (maastotietokanta), which can be adjusted to a customer’s needs. these data are available for manipulation in the end-user’s computer system. similarly, basic maps can be purchased in raster format (perus-cd), where different thematic information layers can be explored. new cartographic data sources and processing developments in the technology of new data sources and processing methods tend to be adopted into mainstream use approximately a decade after the first prototypes are built. recent improvements in data collection technology in the fields of surveying and remote sensing are changing cartography. in survey science, satellite-based global positioning systems (gps) and hand-held infra-red (ir) electronic measuring devices have increased the accuracy of traditional surveying methods. expensive ground-based gps survey systems that make use of differential gps with kinematic and ionispheric corrections can claim centimetre accuracies. gps systems are also used in the creation of digital orthophoto mosaics. the accuracy of consumer gps systems improved in may of 2000, when the us government removed the signal accuracy degrading “selective availability.” gps instrument manufacturers now produce instruments that track both the american gps satellites and the russian glonass satellites. future reliance on these foreign systems may decrease at least in europe, where the national governments within the european union have recently pledged 114 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)niina vuorela, charles burnett and risto kalliola support for a european satellite navigation system called galileo (ochieng & chen 2000). in the field of remote sensing, several new digital satellite, airborne, and terrestrial systems have been, or will soon be, deployed. there are tens of satellite-based systems already in operation that can provide useful data for cartographers. these include landsat and spot with nominal ground resolutions between 10 and 30 metres, and ikonos and eros-1 at 1 metre. some 30 satellite launches are planned for 2001. they focus on earth observation missions, most being military or weather satellites. several, however, will collect data of interest to the civilian and governmental mapping markets. these include the first sub-metre resolution satellite-based sensor (quickbird2, 61 cm) and the first satellite-based imaging spectrometer (aries-1). a full summary of space and remote sensing research and industry projects conducted under the recent five-year tekes (national technology agency) globe 2000 and space 2000 programs is given in fabis and gudmandsen (2001). fabis and gudmandsen (2001) estimate that approximately 20 research organisations and groups, as well as several companies, participate in research activities that focus on increasing finnish space-technological capacity and remote sensing expertise. airborne data acquisition systems that are being developed or are in operation in finland include digital cameras/semi-automated image mosaicking (holm et al. 1999), the aisa airborne imaging spectrometer (okkonen et al. 1997; mäkisara et al. 1997), an airborne sar (kallio et al. 2000; martinez et al. 2000), and a number of companies and government agencies that produce digital orthophotos (e.g., fm-kartta oy, nls of finland). in the terrestrial mode, video cameras are being installed and connected via telecommunications networks to provide realtime geographic information via the internet (travel… 2001). the range of data processing tools and methodologies being developed in finland is enormous and only a sample is mentioned here. the modern analogue to the topographic map is the digital elevation model (dem), created either by stereo-photogrammetry (using digitised aerial photography) or, more recently, directly from lidar (light detection and ranging) height measurements and scanning laser (see samberg 1997). dems have many uses, from modelling landscape processes to image drapes, but perhaps the most useful, cartographically, is the creation of geometrically corrected aerial photography, or digital orthophotography. orthophotos can be used like maps, but they contain more information as they have not been generalised. the nls of finland creates its dem from the contour lines and coastline elements of the basic map by triangulated network interpolation into a grid model where the grid cell size is 25 x 25 metres. mosaics of aerial photographs and video or digital camera data are increasingly used as gis base maps. the mosaicking of images and subsequent atmospheric correction procedures are challenging data processing steps, which finnish scientists have explored thoroughly (holm et al. 1999; pellikka 1998; pellikka et al. 2000). holm (1995) has taken the processing of stereo imagery a step further, reconstructing complete image models (buildings and trees as well as the elevation model). elevation models may also be produced by using scanning lidar (scanning laser) data. using a combination of aircraft xy and altitude position (gps) and attitude (gps or attitude sensor), lidar data can be accurately corrected to ground heights above sea level. the difference between the nls dem and the lidar dems is mainly in regard to resolution: the latter is able to provide sub-metre 3d surveys. scanning lidar data has been used in the modelling of buildings, utility line corridors, and trees (ziegler et al. 2000). a great deal of mapping research in finland has focused on delimiting the boundaries and deriving the attributes of trees and forest stands from remotely sensed data. examples of this type of analysis include the k nearest neighbor (knn) method of forest inventory developed at metla (finnish forest research institute) (tomppo 1996, 1998), individual tree crown mapping, and automated stand mapping using segmentation. cdfigure 1 shows two examples of these applications. in the first example, the mapping of individual tree crowns is intended as the first of several semi-automated steps that will take combinations of remotely-sensed and field data and produce forest habitat compartment maps (burnett & toivonen 2001). the second example of forest mapping shows 1.6-metre ground resolution aisa data of a forest scene segmented into polygons in a semi-automated fashion using algorithms developed at metla (haapanen & pekkarinen 2000). in summary, several trends in new data sources and processing can be identified in finland. firstly, improvements in technology (optics, electronics, computers, etc.) are producing new geofennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 115cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps graphic information data sources. depending upon their cost, some of these sources are becoming available to the general public (e.g., terrestrial video data and digital map data from the nls). secondly, remotely-sensed images are used increasingly in combination with vector-form map data. most of these data sets, however, are either too expensive or require a large amount of expert processing. thirdly, development of data processing methods and applications are related to increases in the number and quality of data sources. this development is cyclical in nature: applications create markets (demand), which drive the development of new data sources. these, in turn, create application potential. finnish scientists are leading the way in many processing research themes, especially in those related to mapping. possibilities for flexible data combination and visualisation it would probably have been unimaginable to a seventeenth-century surveyor to see the potential that digital systems give to the usage of old maps or to realise the value of these maps as information sources to present-day researchers. especially for landscape researchers, old maps are the primary representations of the past features and characteristics of the landscape. maps can be used in a broad spectrum of landscape research, from ecological and geomorphological to political, social, and cultural topics (dickinson 1979; sporrong 1990; roeck hansen 1996). maps have been a major source of inspiration to study landscape evolution from the historical times to the present-day. even though maps are widely used in landscape research, in few countries the variety and availability of maps are as good as in finland. due to the rich history of mapmaking in finland, the possibilities for landscape change research are manifold. further, combined uses of maps have expanded, since digital tools enable transformation of old maps into digital spatial data. similarly, demands for a careful assessment of their information contents have increased. most often, the transformation of printed maps into geographic information requires unique solutions that differ from those used in remotely sensed data transformations (vuorela et al. 2002). visualisations in cd-figure 2 illustrate how combinations of multi-temporal gi, originating from different sources (e.g., remotely sensed images, old maps, written records), can reveal interesting links between valuable landscape features and other environmental factors, such as topography, soils, and land uses (see vuorela 2000, 2001). combining landscape information to explain distribution of oaks the current distribution (1998) of old oaks on ruissalo island in southwestern finland (cd-fig. 2a) is fragmented within the woodland areas. this pattern is very difficult to explain unless both land use history and natural edaphic factors are taken into account. most of the oaks seem to be concentrated on slopes (cd-fig. 2b) and near edges of the wooded areas (cd-fig. 2a). the lack of oak both from the upper parts of the hills and from low clay areas can be explained in the following manner: soil conditions affect species distribution profoundly. oaks do not grow on the tops of the hills because they are too rugged and nutrientpoor. edaphic conditions thus determine the upper margin of the oaks. similarly, oaks do not exist in clay areas, because these areas have been in agricultural use (arable land, meadows) continuously after their exposure from the sea (land uplift). therefore, the lower margin of the oaks shows adaptation primarily to land use changes. the key to explaining the distribution patterns of oaks is related to the natural site conditions and land use changes of the slope areas. slopes can be identified both as edaphic and land use transition zones. here, clay deposits change into rugged bedrock areas, but the change is not always abrupt and different types of shallow moraines can be identified within the bedrock areas. these often provide suitable sites for an oak to grow. slope areas have, however, experienced fluctuation and shifts in land uses over time. oak was a typical tree on meadows and pastures that were characteristic to gentle slopes (cd-fig. 2c) (ekqvist 1846). since the end of the animal husbandry agriculture, some of the wooded meadows were cleared for agricultural land. others remained wooded and changed gradually into different types of woodlands, which have been lightly managed over the last century (cd-fig. 2d). altogether, the present-day distribution of ruissalo’s large oak individuals reflects the natural potential of the sites convolved with land use variations at work over hundreds of years. in other words, oak woodlands reflect the diversity of natural and human induced environmental factors 116 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)niina vuorela, charles burnett and risto kalliola that have evolved and changed through time (see vuorela 2000, 2001). the ruissalo example shows how maps provide a unique information source for reconstructing, describing, and understanding the development of landscapes through time (tollin 1991; skånes 1996; cousins 2001). for many applications, there are needs to combine data originating from different sources (e.g., information services). visualisation of cartographic (spatial) information is based on the combination of data within the shared coordinate reference system. the digital data format makes combining data technically relatively easy. many data types (like old maps), however, require specific solutions to data format transfer and spatial adjusting (accuracy). similarly, different digital media (e.g., mobile phones, laptops) require unique solutions to visualise data. further, as information content and its representation are so variable in different data sets, conversion into gi should be a selective process where spatial, temporal, and thematic data properties are evaluated (faiz & boursier 1996; richardson 1996). an illustrative example of the possibilities and restrictions of data combination can be found from vuorela et al. (2002), where a collection of nine maps were evaluated from the perspective of combining them in a gis to perform landscape change analysis. it is possible to improve the usability of gi originating from many data sets, if an attempt is made to control and adjust the spatial, thematic, and temporal accuracy of data sets. only when data combination is properly made, the provision of good services that are based on digital locational multi-source data is possible. expansion of the digital media: interactive spatial information services digital map production has influenced the contents and means of delivering information services to the public. geographic information services are being promoted as ‘useful’ in several fields of the information society, including resource management, retailing, and tourism (kasvio 1997). there is also an increasing demand for flexible access to digital geographic information within finnish government and corporations. as maps often form a backbone to an information system, printed maps have been either accompanied or replaced by digital spatial information accessed through several types of digital interfaces (e.g., mobile phones, the internet, information kiosks). by augmenting or replacing paper versions, the model of map use has changed from static to interactive. this means that geographic attribute data (including spreadsheets, 3d animations, and video) are accessed through a dynamic interface. contemporary developments in finnish mapmaking show an increase in the number and type of digital spatial registers and customised map services. many municipalities and marketing companies have established their respective map databases on the internet, with specifically designed search, query, and multimedia functions. new data is now collected directly into digital form (e.g., high-resolution airborne remotely sensed data) and existing analogue data sets are converted into digital data formats. for example, the seventeenth-century geometric maps of finland were digitised in a shared effort by the department of history of the university of jyväskylä and the center for scientific computing (csc). the result can be accessed through the internet (www.csc.fi/maakirjakartat/). further, the “karttapaikka” searchable internet map database, implemented by the national land survey in 1996 (www.kartta.nls.fi/), enables a user to explore maps from any region in the country up to the scale of 1:50 000. finer-scale maps are available upon a prepaid session fee (niemelä 1998: 92). digital gi is also distributed in form of digital atlases on compact disks and sold to clients with map-reading software. digital atlases are also made gps compatible. among the first products to appear in the market in 1998 and 1999 for digital navigation were two raster-based road maps (gt-suomi, cd-tiekartasto) and two vector-based route planning systems (genimap at and yt). an internet-based search engine for environmental literature in the archipelago sea region, using a map interface, has been established recently (tolvanen 2001). when access to the internet through wireless devices comes into mainstream use, data is not only explored in an interactive manner, as with stationary internet access devices, but the user’s location becomes an input variable. cartographic services that are keyed to this location variable have been dubbed “location based services” (lbs). the key to lbs is then to facilitate the access to selected information contents, appropriate in context (users requirements), location, and time. for example: while the traditional use of city maps is based on reading their information, fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 117cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps future mobile devices can transfer the same message in many different ways. it is often unnecessary to see the information plotted over a map if the same message could be delivered otherwise, for example, by spelling out: “just continue walking along this road.” even in these connections, however, the primary function of the automated system is based on digital gi and coordinates, maps, and algorithms concerning their relations. if lbs systems, such as personal navigation, penetrate into everyday use, future travellers may load their portable communication platforms with map information and, having set their individual content preferences, interact with a four-dimensional data set (geographic dimensions and time) as they move through the physical world. while moving, navigation systems with real-time gps linkages will then activate the relevant information based on the position of the user and the predefined sites of interest. with the eventual introduction of the third-generation (3g) mobile phones and hand-held computers, all the necessary equipment will be carried along easily (kalliola 2000a). working lbs prototypes already exist. much development is still needed on technical issues (such as data, software, and communication standards), but some of the most essential research concerns the sociological, ethical, and legal issues accompanying lbs systems. we outline the following model for a traveller’s information service of the early twenty-first century. the system envisioned is a wireless navigation and information assistant running on a hand-held computer and linked to a gps, using third-generation mobile phone networks for gi data transfer (cd-fig. 3). this concept is based on linking the real-time position of the user with remote dynamic gi databases that contain contextual data on the user’s environment. for the system to function, all relevant data sources relating to the same area (ranging from historical maps to accurate satellite imageries) are first made compatible with each other and stored in a distributed computer environment (krisp 2000; lähde 2001). their substance contents can be linked with each other interactively to fit ideally to the actual needs of information, reaching hundreds of years backwards in some areas. query results can be visualised in a number of ways, including cartographic representations, virtual landscapes, and multimedia solutions. the interface provides access to common mapping queries, such as search, location finding, zoom, pan, and help. in the first example (cd-fig. 3a), our hypothetical guide shows the position of the user vis-à-vis a three-dimensional visualisation of the landscape from 1690 and 1998 data sources. in the second example (cd-fig. 3b), the guide shows three visualisations of park management effects in the forest at the user’s position (tahvanainen et al. 2001). in the light of these trends, the ways that spatially organised geographic information is stored and delivered to the people has expanded during recent years. the traditional cartographic communication model is becoming more dynamic. gi systems that enhance a user’s experience in reality are being developed. in these systems, real-time data from sensors are incorporated into maps (raper 2000) and reality is supplanted by letting a user explore gi-based virtual realities (rakkolainen et al. 1998). digital databases have introduced a multifaceted model of cartographic reality, where information is stored both as locational and non-locational data using either vector or raster data structures (formats). locational data that refers to coordinate information is used in drawing and displaying geographic features, while non-locational information (i.e., attribute data) of the mapped features forms ‘the message’ on the interface (robinson et al. 1995: 169–177). as a result, the three basic map attributes of scale, projection, and symbolisation (monmonier 1996) are being changed and adjusted by the map users when creating their own maps. maps are also becoming not only abstractions of a physical reality, but spaces that the users can explore. as an example, mapping based on remote sensing may employ image and sound (and eventually smell and touch) recorders with real-time links to the map interface. with such a system of sensors connected to a location-aware mapping system, the ‘map’ becomes, in actuality, an image (or sensual representation, if other senses are evoked) of the user in the ‘mapped’ environment (burnett & kalliola 2000). such maps may update in real time and will include over-laid directional and velocity vectors or other data. digital maps – reliable maps? in parallel with the trends of expanding cartographic communication in the digital realm, pressure is increasing for (1) a critical examination of methods for increasing and communicating data quality; (2) an improved understanding of the in118 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)niina vuorela, charles burnett and risto kalliola teractive spatial information exchange model; and (3) ideas on how to address issues of privacy and data ownership. burnett and kalliola (2000) argued that the changes we now engender and witness are so unique that they herald a new era in spatial information communication. these changes relate to how our societal changes are generating demand for digital technologies and to science and technological actors that respond with rapid artefact development. digital maps, created from gi databases, suffer from the same malaise as printed maps: they may be as inaccurate and misleading as any printed map despite being products of the most recent technology. these problems do not necessarily relate to their digital format as such, but, rather, to our weakness in handling and using digital data and – often – lack of product-related information. some fundamental principles in mapping, such as geodesy and survey technique, run through all historic cartographic production modes and have remained unchanged despite the rally of spaceborne remote sensing and automatic positioning techniques. three major causes for inaccuracy and poor quality in digital maps can be addressed. these problems arise with the combination of digital data, the visualisation of geographic data, and the production of digital maps in a market economy. firstly, since gi is increasingly stored in digital and geo-referenced formats, data combinations can be created in a very flexible manner, at times creating poor-quality maps. even though much of the confusion in data properties can be tested, modelled, and documented, there will be increasing heterogeneity and inconsistency between gi datasets. this is due to combining spatial information produced by different disciplines and organisations. thus, there is a need to assess the nature of spatial information in a broader sense to be able to understand spatial and temporal scales and relations of gi. much discussion has been involved around metadata (structured information on the content and format of datasets) standards and gi data structures (iso/tc 211 geographic information/geomatics metadata). welldocumented and described metadata about gi is essential and should provide the user with relevant knowledge of the data characteristics (such as its processing history) and help in the task of evaluating and combining gi from different sources. metadata, however, is not necessarily effective enough to overcome the ontological differences of spatial information coming from different sources (bowker 2000). secondly, a variety of cartographic visualisation techniques, such as the use of colors, is directly applicable in the digital realm. yet, novel solutions are needed to better meet the restrictions and possibilities computer and gsm phone displays and new printing tools bring about (kraak & ormeling 1996). to design a map layout requires knowledge of how colour combinations can best be related to the message the map is supposed to deliver (monmonier 1996; nurmi 1999). as non-professional map makers (who may be unfamiliar with basic visualisation rules) can now access digital data (e.g., from a digital topographic database purchased from the nls), there is a risk that map products will perform poorly. on the other hand, when professionals have access to a digital gi database, incorporation of new information and changes to the visual appearance of the map can be tested and implemented efficiently. of course, society must accept or reject these changes. it was no surprise that when the visualisation of the basic map of the finnish nls was changed during the 1990s, much criticism was presented towards accuracy and usability of these maps compared to the previous map versions. the critics focused especially on cartographic visualisation and applicability of the natural landscape features (e.g., topography, soils, forest cover). for example, no longer was it possible to distinguish pine from a spruce forest, one of the most important tree species indicating differences in soils and moisture (shemeikka 1998; kallio 1999). as these visualisation changes were made simultaneously with digitalisation, much of the blame was put on these production changes. digitalisation generally widened cartographic information, however, since no longer are the printed and the digital product the same. in other words, much ancillary information for each basic map lies in the digital database and only a selection is visualised on a printed map. these differences between digital and analogue maps are not necessarily clear to map users. once a single digital product has been criticised, the criticism is misdirected to digitalisation in general. the third major source of map quality problems is the effect of gi, gi tools, and digital communication modes (internet, cd) on marketed products. some alarmingly unsatisfactory digital map products and freeware base maps have been distributed. they have already damaged the ‘image’ fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 119cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps of, or public trust in, digital products in general. if maps contain obvious location, naming, and content errors, like in the case of some internet map sites, false data get distributed widely. also, many commercial gis packages contain example data sets, which may not be meant for any serious use. they are widely used, however, and also silently accepted (kalliola 2000b). government mapping institutions have traditionally set the standard for cartographic products. partly as a cost-recovery method and partly to control the quality of associated products, these institutions charge significant sums of money for digital data. companies that create new products have access to fewer resources than government agencies and are usually not able to finance purchases of government databases. in addition, these companies are often in a competitive situation, which prioritises rapid development over map quality. this problem is thus a juxtaposition of two broader technology issues set within a digital cartography context: ‘data quality versus cost’ and ‘state versus market-determined standards’. we believe that this quality problem is a part of normal socio-technical artefact development and that the criticism regarding the dubious quality of earlyto-market products and the lack of standards is an important part of this evolution. conclusions for present-day scientists, the finnish cartographic legacy is a windfall as archives burgeon with valuable representations of the country’s landscape. these historical maps reveal important changes in the landscape and document the ways land was used and maps were made at different times. we believe that this cartographic tradition is an important guide to the development of new and innovative, but reliable and sustainable, ways of producing and using gi in the coming decades. new data sources and processing methodology continue to test the skills of gi experts and open up interesting new cartographic ‘views’ on human and natural worlds. geographic information can now be combined to produce a myriad of userdefined thematic maps. this utility only arises, however, with careful attention to the spatial accuracy and thematic content of the created digital data layers. all use of combined data must be conducted with reference to data individuality and intricacy. once digital gi data is combined, new services may be developed quickly, especially when connected to automated locational systems and portable computing devices. the challenge here is to understand the human–computer interaction factors so that larger societal issues of usability, privacy, sustainability, and copyright are accounted for. finally, issues of data quality must be foremost in the minds of cartographers. whereas traditionally the requirements of the government dictated standards, now many parties, both public and private, create maps. the speed with which digital geographic data can be collected, processed, and distributed to the public has increased enormously. changes both in cartographic design and conventions of distribution (including standards of acceptable accuracy for different levels of digital map data) will come about. cartographers and geographers will play an active role in these technical and social changes, helping to guide the future of maps in finland. acknowledgements the authors wish to thank dr. petri pellikka for valuable comments on the manuscript. many thanks also to the university of turku laboratory of computer cartography (utu-lcc) for facilitating the study. the study is part of the project “landscapes of the past, present and future” (sa 37121), funded by the information research programme of the academy of finland. references aronoff s (1991). geographic information systems: a management perspective. 2nd ed. wdl publications, ottawa. artimo k (1994). the bridge between cartographic and geographic information systems. in maceachren am & drf taylor (eds). visualization in modern cartography, 45–61. pergamon, oxford. artimo k (1996). kartta – kulttuurin kuva. maankäyttö 2, 8–11. bagrow l & ra skelton (1985). history of cartography. 2nd ed. precedent, chicago. bowker gc (2000). mapping biodiversity. international journal of geographic information systems 14, 739–754. burnett c & r kalliola (2000). maps in the information society. fennia 178, 81–96. burnett c & t toivonen (2001). applicability of semiautomated stand mapping to ecological mapping. in belward a, e binaghi, pa brivio, ga lanzar120 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)niina vuorela, charles burnett and risto kalliola one & g tosi (eds). proceedings of the international workshop geospatial knowledge processing for natural resource management, varese, italy, june 28–29, 2001, 209–212. european commission joint research centre, ispra. campbell j (1993). map use and analysis. 2nd ed. wm c brown, dubuque. clarke kc (2001). getting started with geographic information systems. prentice hall, new jersey. cousins sao (2001). analysis of land-cover transitions based on 17th and 18th century cadastral maps and aerial photographs. landscape ecology 16, 41–54. dickinson gc (1979). maps and air photographs. 2nd ed. edward arnold, london. dorling d (1997). mapping: ways of representing the world. longman, harlow. ekqvist b (1846). karta öfver runsala med derunder lydande holmar. turun kaupunki, mittausja tonttiososton arkisto, turku. fabis b & p gudmandsen (2001). space technology programmes 1995–2000. tekes evaluation report 11. faiz s & p boursier (1996). geographic data quality: from assessment to exploitation. cartographica 33, 33–40. graham s (1998). the end of geography or the explosion of place? conceptualizing space, place and information technology. progress in human geography 22, 165–185. granö jg (1930). puhdas maantiede. wsoy, porvoo. granö jg (1997). pure geography. eds. o granö & a paasi. the johns hopkins university press, baltimore & london. gustafsson aa (1932). suomen topografiset kartat. maanmittaushallituksen julkaisuja 20. gustafsson aa (1933). maanmittarikunta ja mittaustyöt ruotsinvallan aikana. suomen maanmittauksen historia i. wsoy, porvoo. haapanen r & a pekkarinen (2000). utilising satellite imagery and digital detection of clear cuttings for timber supply management. in international archives of photogrammetry and remote sensing xxxiii, part b7, 481–488. geomatics information & trading centre, amsterdam. holm m (1995). global image matching and surface reconstruction in object space using three aerial images. the photogrammetric journal of finland 14, 9–23. holm m, a lohi, m rantasuo, s väätäinen, t höyhtyä, j puumalainen, j sarkeala & f sedano (1999). creation of large mosaics of airborne digital camera imagery. in proceedings of the 4th international airborne remote sensing conference and exhibition, ii, ottawa, canada, 21–24 june 1999, 520–526. erim international, ann arbor. hyyppä j, u pyysalo, h hyyppä & a samberg (2000). elevation accuracy of laser scanning-derived digital terrain and target models in forest environment. in proceedings of the 4th earsel workshop on lidar remote sensing of land and sea, dresden, 16–17 june 2000. johnsson b (1965). synpunkter på 1600-talets tidiga geometriska kartering. ymer 1–2, 9–84. jones c (1997). geographical information systems and computer cartography. addison wesley longman, london. kallio p (1999). vähemmän karttoja, kunhan on tarkkoja. helsingin sanomat 13 october 1999, a19. kallio k, t kutser, t hannonen, s koponen, j pulliainen, j vepsäläinen & t pyhälahti (2000). retrieval of water quality by airborne imaging spectrometer in various lake types at different seasons. the science of the total environment 268, 59– 77. kalliola r (2000a). quality, information and maps in the information age. foresight 2, 223–229. kalliola r (2000b). digitaalinen paikkatieto – tietoisuus sijainnista muuttaa arkea. reports of the information research programme of the academy of finland 4, 245–251. tietoyhteiskunnan tutkimuskeskus, tampereen yliopisto, tampere. kalliola r, c burnett & n vuorela (2001). needs for critical interdisciplinary research in the use of digital geographic information. in pantzar e, r savolainen & p tynjälä (eds). in search for a humancentered information society, 235–251. tampere university press & the information research programme, tampere. kalliola r, n vuorela & i suojanen (1999). digitaaliset kartat ja paikkatieto. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 26–27. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. kasvio a (1997). digitaalinen kumous, työn murros ja tietoyhteiskunta. in stachon k (ed). näkökulmia tietoyhteiskuntaan, 89–108. gaudeamus, helsinki. keates js (1996). understanding maps. 2nd ed. longman, harlow. kraak m-j & fe ormeling (1996). cartography. visualization of spatial data. addison wesley longman, london. krisp j (2000). multimedia cartography and information kiosks. unpublished master’s thesis. department of geography, ruhr university, bochum. lähde p (2001). henkilökohtainen navigointi ja kartografia matkailusovelluksissa – tutkimusesimerkkeinä ruissalo ja vienan karjala. unpublished master’s thesis. department of geography, university of turku. laurini r & d thompson (1992). fundamentals of spatial information systems. academic press, london. lönborg s (1901). geografiska och kartografiska arbeten i sverige under 1600-talet. ymer 2, 113–144. lyytikäinen he (1983). valtakunnalliset karttatyöt. in maanmittaus suomessa 1633–1983, 448–518. maanmittaushallitus, helsinki. mäkelä h & a pekkarinen (2001). estimation of timber volume at the sample plot level by means of image segmentation and landsat tm imagery. remote sensing of environment 77, 66–75. mäkisara k, j heikkinen, h henttonen, t tuomaifennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 121cartographic traditions and the future of digital maps nen t & e tomppo (1997). experiments with imaging spectrometer data in large-area forest inventory context. in proceedings of the 3rd international airborne remote sensing conference and exhibition ii, copenhagen, denmark, 7–10 july 1997, 420–427. erim international, ann arbor. martínez jm, n floury, t le toan, m hallikainen & m mäkynen (2000). measurements and modelling of vertical backscatter distribution in forest canopy. ieee transactions on geoscience and remote sensing 38, 710–719. mellaart j (1963). excavations of catal hyük. anatolian studies, journal of the british institute at ankara 19, 17–177. monmonier m (1996). how to lie with maps. 2nd ed. the university of chicago press, chicago. morrison j (1989). the revolution in cartography in the 1980s. in rhind, dw & drf taylor (eds). cartography: past present and future, 169–185. elsevier applied science, london. niemelä o (1982). thematic maps – important cartographic products. maankäyttö 4, 169–172. niemelä o (1984). early mapping of finland. in niemelä o (ed). atlas of finland, folio 112: mapping of finland, 2–3. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. niemelä o (1998). suomen karttojen tarina 1633– 1997. maanmittauslaitos, karttakeskus & suomen kartografinen seura, helsinki. nurmi j (1999). kartan suunnittelun muuttujat ja tekijät. teknillinen korkeakoulu, maanmittausosasto, kartografia ja geoinformatiikka 5. ochieng wy & w chen (2000). high level architectural and programmatic issues of the galileo system. journal of geospatial engineering 2: 2, 16–20. okkonen j, t hyvärinen & e herrala (1997). aisa airborne imaging spectrometer – on its way from hyperspectral research to operative use. in proceedings of the 3rd international airborne remote sensing conference and exhibition i, copenhagen, denmark, 7–10 july 1997, 189–196. erim international, ann arbor. paulaharju a (1947). maanpinnan muotojen kuvaaminen sotilastopografisissa kartoissa. maanmittaus 3–4, 71–81. pellikka p (1998). development of correction chain for multispectral airborne video camera data for natural resource assessment. fennia 176, 1–110. pellikka p, dj king & sg leblanc (2000). quantification and reduction of bidirectional effects in deciduous forest in aerial cir imagery using two reference land surface types. remote sensing reviews 19, 259–291. rakkolainen i, s pulkkinen & a heinonen (1998). visualizing real-time gps data with internet’s vrmlworlds. in proceedings of the 6th international symposium on advances in geographic information systems, 52–56. washington dc. raper j (2000). multidimensional geographic information science. taylor & francis, london. richardson de (1996). spatial, semantic and temporal data integration for application in remote sensing and geographic information systems. cartographica 33, 1–2. robinson ah, jl morrison, pc muehrcke, aj kimerling & sc guptill (1995). elements of cartography. 6th ed. john wiley & sons, new york. roeck hansen b (1996). the agrarian landscape in finland circa 1700. stockholm university, department of geography, meddelanden 97. samberg a 1997. what laser scanning can do today? in proceedings of the 3rd earsel workshop on lidar remote sensing of land and sea, tallinn, estonia, 17–19.7.1997, 119–124. shemeikka p (1998). jos metsään haluat mennä nyt: maantieteilijät ja maastokartat. terra 110, 129– 130. skånes h (1996). landscape change and grassland dynamics. naturgeografiska institutionen, stockholms universitet, avhandlingsserie 8. sporrong u (1990). land survey maps as historical sources. in sporrong u & h-f wennström (eds). maps and mapping. national atlas of sweden, 136–145. sna publishing. tahvanainen l, l tyrväinen, m ihalainen, n vuorela & o kolehmainen (2001). forest management and public perceptions – visual versus verbal information. landscape and urban planning 53, 53–70. tollin c (1991). ättebackar och ödegärden. riksantikvarieämbetet, uppsala. tolvanen h (ed) (2001). lounais-suomen paikkatietoyhteistyön kehittämishanke, 2. vaiheen raportti. utu-lcc publications 2. tomppo e (1996). multi-source national forest inventory of finland. new thrusts in forest inventory. european forest institute proceedings 7. tomppo e (1998). standwise forest variate estimation by means of satellite images. iufro research notes 21, 103–111. travel and traffic information (2001). finnish road administration (finra), may 2001. <www.tieh.fi/ alk/english/frames/kelikamerat-frame.html> vuorela n (2000). can data combination help to explain the existence of diverse landscapes? fennia 178, 55–80. vuorela n (2001). combined use of spatial data: implications for landscape dynamics in an oak woodland site in southwest finland. annales universitatis turkuensis aii 150, biologica–geographica–geologica. vuorela n, p alho & r kalliola (2002). systematic assessment of maps as source information in landscape research. landscape research 27, 141–166. ziegler m, h konrad, j hofrichter, a wimmer, g ruppert, m schardt & j hyyppä (2000). assessment of forest attributes and single-tree segmentation by means of laser scanning. laser radar technology and applications v 4035. 21258_05_book border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon a ceded territory netta böök böök, netta (2004). border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon a ceded territory. fennia 182: 1, pp. 33–45. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. border karelia is the former heartland of the finnish-karelian orthodox culture. it has also been regarded, along with viena karelia, as a mythical place, the last reserve of the ‘original finnish’ kalevala culture. after the continuation war ended in 1945, finland was forced to cede border karelia to the soviet union. it was then populated with citizens from other parts of the union, and became for 45 years inaccessible for finns. in post-war finland the ceded karelia gained a new nostalgic aura, while the soviet (russian) attitude towards the territories was largely determined by political constructions and ‘soviet nationalism’. the present border karelia is a rather poor russian territory, characterized by a multifaceted identity and heritage. remnants of prewar cultural landscapes, villages and buildings are still evident. they arouse concern and emotions amongst finns and pre-war inhabitants touring the area, but there’s currently also an increasing interest among the russians in the history and pre-war reality of the territory. the article discusses the concept of built heritage in relation to these different identities, and the uses of the karelian past. the main objective of the research is to find a means to unite presentday finnish and russian interests regarding the maintenance and use of the heritage. netta böök, department of architecture, helsinki university of technology, p.o. box 1300, fin-02130 espoo, finland. e-mail: nettabee@hotmail.com. introduction the article focuses on the built landscape in border karelia, an area which finland ceded to the soviet union in 1944. when the territory was opened for tourism in 1989, the collective representation of the ceded karelia, which finns had nurtured over 45 years without actually inhabiting the territory, could be up-dated. in particular, i shall discuss the concept of built heritage (see icomos 1976) in relation to different identities, primarily that of an architect and researcher, as well as a cultural tourist and an evacuated karelian, but also, moreover, the present inhabitants of the area. i will also discuss the shift from the nationalistic uses of the karelian past during the 19th century to its patriotic and pedagogical uses during the 1920s and 1930s, in order to create a wider historical perception of the “gaze”, a concept explored by john urry in his book the tourist gaze (1990). the central question is, how can one unite present-day finnish and russian interests in determining and protecting the surviving finnish built heritage and landscape in regard to cultural sustainability and tourism? apart from urry’s book, other background sources for this article have been historian david lowenthal’s the past is a foreign country (1985), which provides an insight into a particular mode of using history, namely, heritage; territories, boundaries and consciousness (1995) by geographer anssi paasi and transformation of religious landscapes (1997) by geographer petri j. raivo, which provide bases for analysing the different approaches finns have of karelia; architect martti i. jaatinen’s inventories in border karelia, published in his book karjalan kartat (karelian maps) 34 fennia 182: 1 (2004)netta böök (1997), which have served as a starting point for my own inventories in the region made in 2001– 2002; semiotician henri broms’ paikan hengen semiotiikkaa (the semiotics of the spirit of place) (1998); and french artist sophie calle’s exhibition the detachment (helsinki, 2001) of photographs of the elimination of socialistic monuments in the former east germany. what is border karelia? so-called border karelia is comprised of former finnish parishes north of lake ladoga in presentday russia: soanlahti, suistamo, suojärvi, impilahti, salmi and the eastern parts of korpiselkä and ilomantsi. suojärvi was the largest parish in ceded karelia, with two major settlements: the ancient church village of varpakylä, and the thriving industrial community of suvilahti. suistamo was famed for its living poem-singing tradition. salmi and impilahti, with the major town of pitkäranta, were located in the lush and scenic lake ladoga region. the name border karelia characterises the area in many ways: since the 14th century, several wars have been fought in these territories, first between sweden and russia, then between finland and the soviet union. the first state border, dividing the karelian ethnic area into two, the finnish and russian areas, was delineated in 1323 in the treaty of nöteborg, but has since then shifted six times. thus, for centuries border karelia has been a cross-cultural territory, and as a consequence, the area contains karelian, finnish, swedish and russian heritage, historical landscapes and architecture. until 1944 border karelia was the heartland of the finnish-karelian orthodox culture, where the majority of the population spoke the karelian language and were members of the orthodox church. karelian houses built of round logs, wooden village chapels (tsasounas) and sprucegrowing cemeteries characteristic of orthodox karelian culture were common in korpiselkä, suojärvi, suistamo and salmi. however, the traditional agricultural landscape had started to change already in the 1930s. the growing timber industry absorbed thousands of mainly lutheran workers from other parts of finland and created new, often aesthetically displeasing settlements. the soviet union launched an attack on finland in 1939. in 1944, in the aftermath of the winter war (1939–1940) and the continuation war (1941–1944), in accordance with the treaty of moscow, stalin incorporated the finnish territories of border karelia, ladogan karelia and the karelian isthmus into the soviet republic of karelia. approximately 407,000 karelians and 13,000 finns (raninen-siiskonen 1999, 360; in line with common practice, i shall refer to all the evacuated residents of ceded karelia as “resettled karelians”) from the ceded territories had to be resettled elsewhere in a finland dispossessed of 10% of its pre-war territory. stalin populated the ceded territories with citizens from other parts of the soviet union, but in spite of the arrival of new residents, the remaining finnish heritage gradually declined. this was accelerated in the 1960s under khrushchev’s policy of liquidating “villages with no prospects” and building instead blocks of flats in the new residential “agrocentres”. extensive agriculture came to a halt, and the cultural landscape has been becoming overrun with forests (lintunen et al. 1998, 198). southern karelia and northern karelia are still located within the present boundaries of finland, yet in common speech “karelia“ very often refers to the ceded territories. in finland the politically delicate issue of ceded karelia was played down until the collapse of the soviet union in 1989. tourism to ceded karelia was then initiated by the authorities after it had been out-of-bounds to foreigners for 45 years. non-place my first trip through ceded karelia in 1994 raised no great positive emotions. i saw the derelict neoclassical church of suistamo and the handsome yet decaying pre-war functionalism in sortavala, but they left no great impression. i was passing through on my way to the real karelia, that is, to east karelia. ceded karelia was no longer karelia at all; it had become a non-place, erased from finnish history and deprived of any karelian identity. years later, after studying the traditional karelian houses of east karelia, i started to look more closely at the question of what the area between finland’s present eastern border and east karelia actually is. old photographs of border karelia demonstrate the popularity of the decorative timber dwelling complex, providing shelter for both people and their animals. these traditional dwellfennia 182: 1 (2004) 35border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon … ings had been “discovered” by finns in the 1890s, and had become a symbol of karelianness and an icon of the utopian representation of a great karelian past (petrisalo 2001, 89). in fact, it was the predominant building type across the whole of northern russia, and not particular to this area. consequently, i set off looking for traditional karelian houses in border karelia. i found some, but mostly i found emptiness. this instigated another development, ultimately linked with historical facts and personal stories; the border karelian landscapes began to relate to me personally. for me, they were no longer non-places. the processes behind this development are intriguing, and i will touch upon them here. myth, fiction, projection for a finn, it seems difficult to remain neutral when dealing with the manifold complicity in the question of karelia. karelia, particularly viena (white sea karelia) and border karelia, is for finns a collective, mythical place, loaded with meaning. it is the mythical cradle of finnish culture, connected with the national epic – the kalevala – national independence, as well as the dream of a ‘greater finland’. its relevance also touches upon the myths of nature versus urban life, nature versus culture, the countryside versus the city, and east versus west (broms 1998, 29). the ceding of southeastern karelia in 1944, which also entailed the closure of the region to foreigners, indubitably deepened this mythical dimension. the writer olavi paavolainen mourned that losing karelia was the same as the loss of olympus, the scene of greek mythology, would be for greece (paavolainen 1940). according to semiotician henri broms, myths are the well-spring of national culture (broms 1998, 10). thus, the argument goes, finland needs the myth of karelia to patch up the lost mythical and symbolic dimension in its national existence. karelia is a screen upon which images are projected; images corresponding to relevant political and national aspirations. karelia also fulfils the idea of nostalgia – a longing for something that is presently non-existent in both time and place. according to cultural anthropologist seppo knuuttila, fantasies of a golden age, of a glorious past, as well as its disappearance, not only in time but also in space, are part of the history of human thought; fragments of ‘the golden age’ may sometimes be found in god-forsaken peripheries – here, in karelia (knuuttila 1989). nostalgia seems to gain a particular significance as a culture-moulding factor at times of radical social change. the insecurity caused by the ideological and political dissolution of communism in eastern europe, post-industrial rootlessness, globalisation and the crisis of values have fuelled nostalgia and national movements all across europe. this is reflected on to individuals, both as a national romantic yearning for the past and as a desire for reform. utopian thinking, like myths about better bygone times, acts as recompense when there seems no hope of actually changing one’s circumstances. in the 19th century, the national romantic writers admired exotic ‘original’ cultures from a safe distance, assigning utopian properties to them; and a journey sufficed to fulfil the utopia. today also tourism offers a channel to release the utopian and mythical pressures of a community (petrisalo 2001, 66–68). according to broms, tourism is not only about escaping from the common places of life, but also about pure myth-searching (broms 1998, 36–40). utopian ideas may also include powerful visions and lead to reform. the present-day prokarelia movement has published a platform on the restitution of ceded karelia to finland (reenpää et al. 2001). this view is also clearly advocated by markus lehtipuu, author of karjala – suomalainen matkaopas (2002). “gazes” if karelia is regarded as a screen to project desired images upon, there has nevertheless been a shift from national and, later, educational and patriotic images to commercial images of an imaginary karelian past. the constructed images of karelia initially emerged in connection with the creation of finnish national culture, tradition and identity in the 19th century, when finland had the autonomous status of grand duchy of russia (1809–1917). due to a lack of a glorious national history, the nationalist movement resorted to emphasising the national language, the lake-andforest landscapes and the soil of the recently composed national epic, that is, the borderlands of karelia (häyrynen 2003). according to late 19th century karelianism, karelia, specifically border karelia and viena, was the last reserve of the ‘original finnish’ kalevala culture. particularly be36 fennia 182: 1 (2004)netta böök tween 1890 and 1897, finnish cultural life was imbued with karelianism, a national romantic, ideological tendency. the artist elite roamed border karelia in search of national romantic inspiration; architects, for instance, looked to karelia for a finnish national building style. architect jac. ahrenberg studied the vernacular architecture in korpiselkä in 1880, architects uno ullberg, alarik tavaststjerna and jalmari kekkonen studied numerous villages in suistamo in 1901. the book karjalaisia rakennuksia ja koristemuotoja (karelian buildings and decorative motifs) (1901) by architects yrjö blomstedt and victor sucksdorff, became a kind of architectural kalevala. it is rarely mentioned, however, that in the nationalistic spirit of the 1890s, both the finns and the russians discovered the ‘wellspring’ of their cultures in one and the same peripheral geographical area, karelia. after winning independence in 1917, the new finnish state encouraged tourism in border karelia, to promote nationalism, to spiritually unite the country and to raise the morale for the nation’s defence (raivo 1997, 118). the scenic tolvajärvi area and suojärvi, famous for its romantic lake landscapes and traditional orthodox milieus, became significant tourist attractions in the 1920s. the traditional karelian house complex was the predominant type of dwelling in the area, the most famous of which were the colossal bombin house (1850s) in kuikkaniemi and the menshakoff house in kaipaa. for members of the national finnish culture, the traditional agricultural milieus also symbolised a sense of community and the conservative values of traditional country life. on the other hand, the orthodox religion was problematic, because it was considered a particularly russian phenomenon. therefore, even in the border karelian landscape the visible orthodox elements had to remain within acceptable limits in regard to the prevailing national discourse. for example, for the dominant culture, the traditional onion cupolas of orthodox churches and chapels represented russian culture, and thus were considered alien elements unacceptable within the finnish landscape, and hence were often removed (raivo 1997, 129). an even more nationalistic branch of post-karelianism manifested a platform to integrate all east karelian territories into a greater finland. the idea was revived during the continuation war in 1941–1944, which finland had instigated in an attempt to recover its lost territories. as a result of its political and ideological connections with nazi germany, finland also utilised the idea of lebensraum as a motive to occupy east karelia in order to create a ‘greater finland’ (paasi 1995, 107–108). this launched a new wave of karelianism, as well as motivating a more systematic recording of orthodox karelian heritage. journalists, architects, students and photographers were commissioned in the early 1940s to record the chapels, villages and cultural traditions of both east and border karelia, a task which had already started in border karelia in the 1920s–1930s (mattila 2001). after the second world war, a collective collection of acceptable images of a ‘golden karelia’ was developed and glorified. post-war karelianism eventually turned to a more abstract mixture of cultural and regional consciousness, and finally, in the politically more liberal climate of late 1970s and 1980s, it became commercialised (raninen-siiskonen 1999, 381). the discovery of the marketable values of the karelian myth was first reflected in the practices of the tourist industry within finland itself: a chain of tradition-based, pseudo-karelian tourist attractions was built along the eastern border of finland. among others the bomba congress centre, built in nurmes in 1978, was an attempt to strengthen the karelian identity and heritage in post-war finland. a re-interpretation of the original bombin house in suojärvi, it “speaks the metalanguage of a mythological karelia, but lacks authenticity, ignores historical chronology and the cultural context of time and place” (petrisalo 2001, 91). this has had its equivalents in the housing industry, particularly in the sale of “karelian-style” summer cottages. later there emerged even suburban residential houses built of round timber logs and slightly modernised “karelian” detailing (böök 2000, 72). in short, the ways of relating to the border karelian heritage have varied ever since the ‘invention’ of that heritage, varying in accordance with different identities: john urry’s “tourist gaze” has its subordinate variants amongst different identities. when ceded karelia, east karelia and viena were opened for tourism in 1989, it became evident that karelia had retained its fascination – albeit that it had been transformed. if national, patriotic and romantic motives animated the late 19th century artist elite and the journalists of the young independent finland, today motives such as general enlightenment, education, entertainment, and group solidarity encourage resettled fennia 182: 1 (2004) 37border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon … karelians, general tourists, culture-oriented tourists, and professionals. as john urry (1990, 111) puts it, “there is no sense in the complexity by which different visitors can gaze upon the same set of objects and read them in a quite different way. indeed, it is not at all clear just what understanding of history most people have.” the question is, are they not all looking for the remnants of a ‘lost time’, that is, remnants of unique times and places? the researching gaze in addition to the identity-based approaches to border karelia mentioned above, there may well be overlaps in these ‘identities’. a researcher is expected to have a less emotionally charged, rational attitude to the subject; yet, she or he might be an evacuated karelian or the descendant of one. i myself am neither. on the other hand, the identity of a researcher comes close to that of a cultural tourist – according to the icomos definition, one of the objects of cultural tourism is “the discovery of significant monuments and sites” (icomos 1976) – and despite the need to adapt a neutral standpoint, a romantic undercurrent may be evident. personal motives may, of course, encourage the researcher. my own main objective – as an architect – in researching border karelia has been to study the remnants of pre-war cultural landscapes, villages and buildings and to give suggestions regarding their maintenance and use. the first impression is that there are few actual buildings remaining to study, and one would have to find the material in archives: hundreds of nostalgia-evoking blackand-white photographs. most of the existing settlements were simply razed during the second world war. during the soviet era, a period of determined centralisation, the scattered dwellings, typical of the finnish lifestyle, which had survived, succumbed to negligence or destruction. the post-war layer in the cultural landscape is comprised of five-storey khrushchevkas built of greyish low-quality brick, standardised wooden houses, unpainted hovels, weatherboard fences, ruined kolkhozes, army bases and urban factories built of brick or concrete, and kitchen gardens. however, i would not necessarily classify these as normative russian features. the old russian villages in archangel karelia are as well-kept as any finnish village. being descendants of several successive generations in the region, their inhabitants feel attached to their villages and responsible for them. the lack of proper materials and aesthetic principles in planning has resulted in the terminally unpleasant, chaotic milieus seen prevailing from karelia to vladivostok. the most extreme examples of failed planning are the two major centres of border karelia: the 18th century industrial town of pitkäranta (impilahti) on the shore of lake ladoga and suvilahti (present-day suojärvi), which had been more or less completely destroyed in the second world war. against this background, finnish houses can usually be distinguished by their “erect carriage“ and more harmonious proportions. the wooden houses can be characterised by the weatherboarding, vaguely classicistic window sashes and a ventilated stone foundation – except for traditional karelian houses, which have bare timber walls and no stone foundation. however, the orthodox karelian milieus, with traditional karelian houses and tsasounas, have almost totally disappeared. spirdo makkonen’s karelian house (from the 1880s) from moiseinvaara, suojärvi, is on display in the seurasaari open-air museum in helsinki, where it was providentially moved in 1939 – just in time before the outbreak of the winter war. physically intact, but removed from its original, historical context, it has lost a fundamental quality and become a pure museum exhibit. although no whole settlement milieus survive, there are individual buildings and groups of buildings, which are nevertheless important from the perspective of cultural history. the architecturally most remarkable karelian house in border karelia, the former mertas’ house (fig. 1) from early 20th century, stands alone in a totally transformed context in leppäniemi, suojärvi. it has been declared a historical monument by the local government, being, however, still in its original, residential use. the quiet rural village of hautavaara in suojärvi has preserved a relatively significant portion of its pre-war layout: a number of finnish houses, unpretentious karelian houses and a rundown wooden school building. miinala in salmi is a languishing, idyllic riverside village with a number of finnish and karelian timber houses, whereas orusjärvi is a secluded, partly inhabited village with a church (1905) in a mysterious revival-style and fine “karelian” panoramas over tree-covered hills. the most fascinating milieu to have survived, however, is kirkonkylä in impilahti, 38 fennia 182: 1 (2004)netta böök situated in a charming sloping landscape. it was never a combat zone and thus passed through the wartime relatively undamaged. when driving along the old village street, which curves in line with the lakeshore, one immediately associates the settlement with what it basically is: a finnish church village from the 1930s–1940s – albeit now deprived of its church (lintunen et al. 1998, 198). the pre-war population of border karelia consisted mainly of common people, and the area remained one of the poorest and least developed regions in finland. there were few manor houses in the region – the hosainoff manor house in miinala, and the dobroumoff villa in impilahti, both built from wood in the 19th century in a modified neorenaissance style. one might also mention the handsome residence of apothecary walldén (fig. 2) as a striking rarity: the white-stuccoed 1920s classicistic bourgeois house in pitkäranta now houses a museum of local history. border karelia was generally left without any prominent 20th century architecture. for example, no buildings erected in border karelia between 1903 and 1944 were published in arkkitehti (the finnish architectural review). architects received commissions from the region only in the 1930s, when they introduced the international functionalist style into the major settlements. functionalism here primarily refers to the international-style white-stuccoed, predominantly gefig. 1. the most handsome karelian house in border karelia, the former mertas’ house (early 20th century) stands alone in a totally transformed context in leppäniemi, suojärvi. however, it is still in its original, residential use. the house has been declared a historical monument by the local government. (photo netta böök, 2001). fig. 2. the handsome residence of apothecary walldén is a striking rarity: the white-stuccoed 1920s classicistic bourgeois house in pitkäranta now houses a museum of local history. however, the museum has not always been familiar with the history of the former local apothecary. (photo netta böök, 2001). fennia 182: 1 (2004) 39border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon … ometrical architecture, with freed interior plans and façade compositions and flat roofs, which was taken up throughout the nordic countries from the late 1920s onwards. this style was connected with economic growth and industrialisation, and was mainly utilised in the urban context and in public building. the most outstanding modern building from the finnish era is the communal house and fire station in the former suvilahti, present-day suojärvi (fig. 3). it now accommodates a kindergarten and a youth club. the building complex, built in a mature functionalistic style, with white stuccoed exterior walls, incorporating a semicircular tower, etc., was designed by architect erkki koisokanttila, who was involved with the post-winter war reconstruction, and completed during the continuation war (1943). although nowadays in poor condition, it still makes an impression as a truly “architectural“ element in the chaotic townscape. the orthodox congregational house in suistamo is an individual interpretation of functionalism by architect juhani viiste (1939). it now functions as a low-key guesthouse. the number of finnish houses in border karelia is gradually decreasing – for instance, in manssila, salmi, in 1996 the number of finnish buildings was 16; the present number is seven (koslonen 2001) – and no systematic inventory of what remains of the finnish built heritage has yet been carried out. therefore, even buildings of initially diminishing value attract one’s attention. nevertheless, one should put the destruction and abandonment of finnish buildings in this ceded region in relation to what has happened to the built heritage and cultural landscapes in finland itself during the past six decades. in finland the heritage is threatened with destruction more by the changing social and economic conditions than by decay. as a matter of fact, the traditional milieu of border karelia was already diminishing in the 1930s. in 1939 the finnish journalist olof enckell (1939, 180) described the growing industrial settlement of suvilahti as the “finnish klondyke”, and that “i have never seen a community of such ugliness and parvenu spirit. the broad village street was lined with modern houses, rivalling in lack of taste. i saw no trace of the past karelian culture.” the romantic gaze since the 1940s cultural tourism has increased throughout the world. the tourist industry makes use of ethnic groups, their traditions and their heritage. the orthodox karelian culture has become one of the most appealing attractions for the finnish tourist industry. for the members of the predominant finnish culture, it includes familiar yet exotic elements. it is also still vaguely associated with the karelia of the kalevala. hence, the cultural tourist travels to border karelia in search of what broms terms the “codes” of karelianness (broms 1998, 38). broms, basing his deliberations on the theories of semiotician rebecca kaufmann, suggests that tourists may seek phenomena representative of the fantastic code, connected with the fact-based fantasies or visions they link with fig. 3. the architecturally most remarkable building from the finnish era in border karelia is the communal house and fire station in the former suvilahti (present-day suojärvi) now accommodating a kindergarten and a youth club. the building complex, built in a mature functionalistic style, with white stuccoed exterior walls, incorporating a semicircular tower, etc., was designed by architect erkki koisokanttila, who was involved with the post-winter war reconstruction, and completed during the continuation war (1943). (photo netta böök, 2001). 40 fennia 182: 1 (2004)netta böök border karelia, or of the anthropologic code, referring to real or imaginary karelian elements, such as karelian houses, poem-singers and “ancestors”. finnish place names also convey the former presence of finns; ruins and wartime battlefields, for instance kollaa in suistamo, speak of times past. paradoxically, the traditional karelian culture relevant to the culture-oriented tourist cannot be found in post-soviet border karelia. the non-material heritage of the area was evacuated westwards in 1944, and the surviving material heritage is meagre. the boundaries of the “authentic kalevala heritage” have shifted eastwards and northwards, to olonets and viena; tourist agencies advertise these regions with an emphasis on blue lakes, roaring rapids, wuthering heights, epic poetry, traditional houses, authentic villagers and rituals; in a word, karelia as a unique museum of popular culture. a new object for finnish patriotic heritage-making and tourism are the sites connected with the second world war, attracting finns of all ages (raivo 2000, 139–150). yet even in the line of regular tourism, border karelia is seriously underdeveloped, offering only low-class lodgings and practically no entertainment or artsrelated activities. however, the former finnish towns of vyborg (in finnish viipuri) on the karelian isthmus and sortavala in ladogan karelia, as well as the monastic islands of valaam (valamo), accommodate growing numbers of mainly finnish tourists, which obviously contributes to the regional guidelines of development. even the notorious finnish “vodka tourists”, who since the 1960s provided dramatic headlines for newspapers, appear to have reoriented from leningrad (st. petersburg) to these presently more affordable resorts. at their best, the circumstances in border karelia might be experienced as “something new and different”, compared to the abundance surrounding people in finland. as urry (1990, 134) remarks, “central to tourist objects is some notion of departure, particularly that there are distinct contrasts between what people routinely see and experience and what is extraordinary.” the poverty, decay and low quality of housing and the general backwardness offer a “reversed exoticism”, a counter-world that reveals the true nature of our own quotidian life. the ascetic milieu may subconsciously evoke feelings of safety, as if the bygone times had returned. it also reminds finns of their fortunate fate, serving as a sombre reminder of what we apparently escaped, when finland managed to preserve its independence (åström 1993, 165–173). karelia can also provide for the needs of the adventure-seeking tourist. from the 1990s onwards, the nostalgia, misery and dangers a tourist in ceded karelia is exposed to have been primary topics in the media. there is always a shade of excitement and ultimately even danger in the air. however, travels in karelia differ from organised adventure and survival holidays in one fundamental detail: not even the organisers of the former can foresee the surprises that might come, and beyond the visible reality, there is no other, more comforting reality (böök 1999, 110). the pilgrim’s gaze the resettled karelians, all getting on in age, were the primary group to visit ceded karelia when the border was re-opened in 1989. geographer anssi paasi explains that people usually want to visit their past history and the physical locality with which it is connected. in border karelia the refugees try to find something they can associate to their personal history (paasi 1995, 289), as if they were looking for a lost piece in a puzzle. particularly the oldest evacuated generation in a sense lost their identity along with their homelands, because their identity was rooted in being physically in the place itself. a striking feature is that, almost without exception, in reminiscing about their ceded native localities, the resettled karelians describe them as places of inimitable beauty. in their collective narrative, the karelian cultural landscape is also “complete”: the meaning of the social reality in karelia has faded over the passing decades, whereas the landscapes, buildings and nature have remained as important sources of identification and as principal objects of nostalgia (paasi 1995, 298). the collective and individual memory have suppressed all negative features of the prewar life, as if looking at it through rose-coloured glasses. according to tarja raninen-siiskonen, this suppression may have been a result of the abrupt loss of the native home-land, and of the age of the narrator, but also of the glorified “public narratives” about karelia. furthermore, the everyday life in karelia may have been less complicated and economically more stable than in the new place of residence in finland (raninen-siiskonen 1999, 82–85). paasi remarks that the resettled fennia 182: 1 (2004) 41border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon … karelians often refer to the ceded territories using religious and mythical terms, metaphors like ‘holy land’ or ‘promised land’, and the journey to karelia is described as a “pilgrimage”. interestingly, the nationally-spirited cultural elite of the 1890s used the same terminology (paasi 1995, 295). it is in part upon these personal experiences, stories, reminiscences and utopias that the collective post-war representations of a “golden karelia” were constructed (paasi 1995, 59). the actual journey shatters these utopian images, cherished over 45 years of exile. they bear hardly any resemblance to the present-day reality in border karelia. the evacuees repeatedly compare the emptiness and destruction of the present built heritage with recollections of a romanticised and selectively recalled childhood. absence emphasises the significance of the irretrievably lost elements. the surviving elements, familiar from the pre-war era, can have been modified beyond recognition. the remaining buildings often house functions different from those of the finnish era: their identity is not what it used to be. the most durable elements of the pre-war era are above all the natural landscapes, resisting time and erosion. the whale-like chains of forested hills north of lake ladoga, the romantic lake views around varpajärvi, the lush, undulating terrain of suistamo, the fantastic lake and ridge landscapes in tolvajärvi, and the imposing rock walls and firths of impilahti can still make the nostalgic reminiscences of a “golden karelia” comprehensible. most irrevocable, however, is time. the six decades have not always relieved the emotions of bitterness, anger and nostalgia. some of the evacuated karelians do not even want to visit the place, and prefer not to face the disheartening reality. although lowenthal (1985, 7–8) cites the old man’s dream “to travel back forty years to a time when it was summer all year round”, it is maybe less painful merely to yearn for the past, “collecting its relics and celebrating its virtues – no matter if those days were in fact wretched”. the number of organised busloads of karelians visiting the land of their best adult years or childhood is decreasing as these generations are passing away. the younger generations may still regard these localities as a second “homeland”, and thus find an extension to their identity. nowadays, with extensive migration, people often have several “homelands”, even beyond national borders. in this particular case, their roots are moving even further back, to a more and more romanticised time (kotitie 2002). nonetheless, the built environment is susceptible to gradual destruction, in terms of both substance and meaning. the landscapes of border karelia are likely to gradually lose significance for finns – or, at least, their interpretation keeps changing (see lowenthal 1985, 240). the russian gaze a fourth approach is that of the russians who have inhabited border karelia since 1944. initially, the resettlers were mostly males from the ukraine and central russia (verigin 2002, 34); later, people were recruited from various parts of the soviet union, where massive migrations of labour were customary. their attitude towards the ceded territories has, to a large extent, been determined by political constructions and ‘soviet nationalism’ (see paasi 1995, 51–52), to say nothing of purely personal reasons. firstly, in the sovietisation process, the symbols and monuments with a clear symbolic evocation of finnish power lost their right to existence as such. they had to be damaged, neglected, degraded or reshaped to enhance the new power. thus, the abolition of the visible signs of finnish rule and culture produced both material and spiritual emptiness. subsequently, they were replaced with monuments and symbols enhancing the communist power and ideology (these characteristic elements of the landscape and townscape from the soviet era are also now receding – again, producing emptiness). throughout the soviet union, sacral buildings were most endangered, and as a rule their interiors were torn down. the fate of the orthodox church of st. nicholas in suistamo serves as a typical case. the wooden neoclassical church (1844), designed by the german-born architect carl ludwig engel (1778–1840) – whose main commission in finland was to design the buildings surrounding the senate square, the centre of power of the new grand duchy in helsinki – became host to a soviet workers’ canteen. after the collapse of the soviet union, the finnish suistamo society changed it back to an orthodox church. the society provided the tools, materials and workforce; nonetheless, the present private owner of the church cashed in on the permission to perform the work (lehtipuu 2002, 419). the reconsecration can be seen as a merely symbolic act. for the current locals it will probably remain 42 fennia 182: 1 (2004)netta böök a canteen transformed into a church, and basically not only a product of an alien culture, but also a building void of sacral meaning. then again, without adaptive reuse to then present-day purposes, many sacral buildings in the soviet union would have succumbed to rapid decay or total destruction. however, finns are not always warmly received, if they intend to buy or refurbish a minor building, such as an individual house, in the territory; the building in question may suddenly be destroyed in an arson attack. secondly, the pioneering generation in a new homeland seldom adapts to it, but usually nostalgically looks back to its own native locality. this applies to both the evacuated karelians and the resettled russians. anchored to the present, they lack not only memories, but also the connection with the mystical and mythical dimension, the symbolic qualities of the new “homeland” (lowenthal 1985, 48). this is certainly true in the case of ceded karelia, where the social content of the milieu became void after the evacuation of its former inhabitants. furthermore, many of the soviet resettlers dreamt of returning to their own native localities, which obviously hindered attachment to the new place of residence. broms writes of “human magma”, violently removed from its homeland to a foreign land, and has serious doubts of these people ever restoring alvar aalto’s library in vyborg or having any special relationship to the monrepos park outside vyborg (broms 1998, 81). both of these are presently being restored in co-operation between russians and finns – as long as the financing keeps coming via finland. a strong commitment to an ethnic, political or religious ideology may lead to an inability to see objective historical facts. since the 19th century, both russian and finnish historians have often regarded their own “national“ or ethnic heritage as principally superior to that of the other, and have attempted to appropriate the karelian culture for their own purposes. a community’s attitude to the past is a reflection of the impression it wishes to give of the present (petrisalo 2001, 107): the soviet attitude towards the ceded territories was ignorant and chauvinist, while the neo-karelian movement chauvinistically declared east karelia a self-evident part of finland. paasi remarks, that it appears to be typical of nationstates, that they create a continuity for their existence through stories, which also provide a common past which does not diverge historically or symbolically from the regions or nation-state of the present (paasi 1995, 55). accordingly, the finnish media took advantage of the occasion of the opening of the territory to tourism to evaluate maliciously the consequences of the ceding of the area to the soviet union. the indirect message is that under finnish rule the results would have been different, that is, better. the media continues mainly in the same spirit, discussing mostly negative features in the post-soviet reality. on the other hand, moscow apparently does not assign border karelia – nor any part of ceded karelia – adequate resources to prepare or maintain its infrastructure (paasi 1995, 282–295). the political situation has now changed, and at least some russian archives, which hold information on the ceded finnish territories, have been opened. an issue not yet openly discussed in either finland or russia is the emotions and experiences of the russians who, voluntarily or less voluntarily, settled ceded karelia after 1944. yet, there is a growing tendency amongst the more educated inhabitants of ceded karelia to obtain a wider view of the past, and thus a more adequate picture of the present. serious research and the conservation of sites and buildings dating from the finnish era has got under way. however, the interests of the russian researchers, conservationists and common people diverge from finns. most of the remaining finnish buildings in border karelia are of minor architectural value, often in a miserable condition and, lacking particular significance to the locals, threatened by eradication. its architectural sights from the finnish era, listed in the structure plan for tourism in karelia (international… 2000), are limited to the district of suojärvi, with two or three finnish buildings, and to the remains of the church of st. nicholas in salmi (1814–1825), which was ruined during the continuation war. the heritage industry plays on an unsubstantiated rumour that it was designed by carl ludwig engel (kölhi 1995, 33). the church of st. nicholas in suistamo is mentioned, and tolvajärvi is described as a sight of natural beauty. the list also includes two battlefields connected with war history. the global gaze border karelia has been totally deprived of all heritage of international significance. its heritage consists of minimal fragments of fenno-karelian buildings and landscapes, mixed with a pan-sofennia 182: 1 (2004) 43border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon … viet “heritage”. nonetheless, its landscapes, buildings, prehistoric fortifications, discarded railroads and meadows are fixed points for the mind and memory. they are a means of preserving history, and act as a collective memory. according to the icomos charter on cultural tourism, the particular heritage and collective memory of each locality or community is irreplaceable. it also forms a solid basis for development and cultural diversity at a time of increasing globalisation (icomos 1976). unesco’s first declaration on culture and heritage, from 1972, stressed the significance of cultural assets as the source of a national identity (unesco 1972). unesco’s recommendations imply that a cultural or ethnic community has the right to rule over its heritage, and that “spoils of war” should be restored to the country of origin. if this principle of “cultural ownership” is applied to geographical areas, ceded karelia should be returned to finland. ethnologist katriina petrisalo remarks that this seemingly simple principle becomes delicate when we look at any given area or culture in its historical framework. sites and cultures are not stable, closed units, rejecting or successfully fighting off all alien influence introduced by, for instance, colonialism, not to mention the complete change of population, as in the case of ceded karelia (petrisalo 2001, 131–133). according to these charters, tourism may function as a medium that helps provide a personal experience and understanding of both the present and the past of other cultures. conservation vitally contributes to the value of a site as an object for cultural tourism, which should also provide the means and motivation for host communities to maintain the heritage. according to unesco’s declaration, governments should support the identification, scientific research, protection, conservation, presentation and rehabilitation of [finnish] heritage in the ceded territory, and work out appropriate methods to maintain its most significant parts (unesco 1972). the relatively well-preserved pre-war town of sortavala in ladogan karelia has recognised the value of the finnish heritage, both as a tourist attraction and as a cultural resource, and is investing in its maintenance. the international blue highway association has evaluated seven places along the so-called “blue highway”, which goes from träna in norway through sweden and finland to petrozavodsk in russia, as potentially attractive tourist sights, among which remnants and monuments from the second world war make up the predominating category (international… 2000). however, in order to be marketed as interesting destinations, the sights and their surroundings are in need of urgent repair, restoration and general tidying up. according to a finnish study, also impilahti has tourism potential, provided that the risk of uncontrolled development is prevented through sustainable land use planning and management of the cultural and natural heritage (siirala 2000). collecting the pieces the identity and heritage of the present border karelia is multifaceted. both its physical and mental realities have drastically changed since 1944. its overall appearance has been devastated. the future of the few remnants of finnish settlements does not seem very hopeful. in the prevailing circumstances, their repair seems utopian as long as the general standard of the border karelian settlements and standard of dwellings cannot be improved. it is most important to strive towards a more united attitude to both history and the present by bringing together the different ways of relating to the border karelian landscape and heritage; to make border karelia a place with a more coherent past, present and future. crucial in this process are history, memory and relics. history links us with past generations. memory is crucial for our self-continuity and sense of identity, linking us with our earlier selves (lowenthal 1985, 196– 197). if we restore the memory, we might restore the environment. according to lowenthal (1985, 263), “we need a stable past to validate tradition, to confirm our own identity, and to make sense of the present”, as “relics mean only what history and memory convey.” this holds true just as well for finns as for russians living in border karelia, and buildings – relics – have their singular potential. as lowenthal (1985, 389) puts it: “they are the chief catalyst of collective historical identity because they seem intrinsic to their surroundings and outlast most other relics. relics saved enhance our sense of history and lengthens life’s reach by linking us with events and people prior to ourselves.” he adds, citing from william morris’ restoration from 1877: “… the visible evidence that the monument – like the nation – has weathered centuries of storm and crisis and 44 fennia 182: 1 (2004)netta böök come through battered but unbowed” (lowenthal 1985, 156). tourism in the present border karelia is a very special kind of tourism. the different, identitybased motives for going there feed the tourist industry, but the problem is, where can sufficiently attractive elements or contents be found for the “tourist package”? normally, highbrow culture, traditions, history and the local everyday life attract tourists, but they always entail a historical dimension, which has been discontinued in border karelia (löytynoja 1998, 63–64). yet, for finns ceded karelia is a more or less emotional territory, where any finn can, if she or he so wishes, find something to associate with: the tomb of a rune singer, a battlefield, grandmother’s house, or traces of a finnish inheritance. finnish-russian co-operation, in the form of dealing with the black spots of history, is gradually developing. i find this a necessary basis for finding mutually satisfactory and motivating guidelines in the field of heritage. this process can also start on an individual level; personal acquaintances with russians living in border karelia are a positive, long-term way of intercultural communication. it also decreases the “otherness“ of the “alien nation” inhabiting the area. nonetheless, i presume that we have to accept that the finnish and russian interpretations of history and heritage will never quite perfectly overlap. references åström a-m (1993). suomalaisten turistimatkat itään. in korhonen t (ed). mitä on suomalaisuus, 161– 179. suomen antropologinen seura, helsinki. blomstedt y & sucksdorff v (1901). karjalaisia rakennuksia ja koristemuotoja. 205 p. suomen muinaismuistoyhdistys, helsinki. böök n (1999). särkilahti – venäjänkarjalaisen kylän todellisuus ja myytti (särkilahti – the myth and reality of a russian karelian village). unpublished master’s thesis. department of architecture, helsinki university of technology. 137 p. böök n (2000). exotic logs. the finnish architectural review 2000: 2, 70–75. broms h (1998). paikan hengen semiotiikkaa. 200 p. yliopistopaino, helsinki. calle s (2001). the detachment. photographic exhibition, helsinki city art museum 11.4.– 15.7.2001. enckell o (1939). rajan vartio. jalkamatkoja rajakarjalassa. 275 p. otava, helsinki. häyrynen m (2003). personal communication 02.01.2003. icomos (1976). charter on cultural tourism. <http:/ /www.icomos.org/tourism/>. 11.7.1994. international blue highway association (2000). sights along the blue highway through the republic of karelia. structure plan for natural and cultural tourism. 96 p. international blue highway association, petrozavodsk–umeå. jaatinen mi (1997). karjalan kartat. karjalan liitto, helsinki. knuuttila s (1989). satumaa. in sihvo h & r turunen (eds). rajamailta. studia carelica humanistica 1, 55–98. kölhi k (1995). nikolai undergörarens kyrka i salmis. restaureringen av en ortodox kyrka i den karelska republiken (the nikolaj church in salmi. restoration of a church in the karelian republic). unpublished master’s thesis. department of architecture, helsinki university of technology. 60 p. koslonen k (2001). personal communication 21.04.2001. kotitie k (2002). personal communication 07.06.2002. lehtipuu m (2002). karjala – suomalainen matkaopas. 735 p. suomalainen matkaopas, helsinki. lintunen p, m hytönen, k ikonen & s kivimäki (eds) (1998). laatokan pohjoisrannikon kulttuuriympäristö. suomalainen kulttuuriperintö laatokan pohjoisrannikon maisemassa (the cultural environment of the north coast of lake ladoga. the finnish cultural heritage in the landscape of the north coast of lake ladoga). suomen ympäristö 236. 230 p. lowenthal d (1985). the past is a foreign country. 463 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. löytynoja t (1998). perinteistä matkailuelämyksiä. 143 p. oulun yliopiston koulutusja tutkimuspalvelut, oulu. mattila m (2001). tsasounia ja karjalantaloja – arkkitehtiylioppilaat itä-karjalassa 1942–1944. in antipasto misto: vilhelm helander 60, 107–129. yliopistopaino, helsinki. paasi a (1995). territories, boundaries and consciousness. the changing geographies of the finnish-russian border. 353 p. wiley, chichester. paavolainen o (ed) (1940). karjala, muistojen maa. 270 p. wsoy, porvoo. petrisalo k (2001). menneisyys matkakohteena. kulttuuriantropologinen ja historiatieteellinen tutkimus perinnekulttuurien hyödyntämisestä matkailuteollisuudessa. sks:n toimituksia 802. 168 p. raivo p (1997). maiseman kulttuurinen transformaatio. ortodoksinen kirkko suomalaisessa kulttuurimaisemassa (transformation of religious landscapes. the finnish orthodox church). nordia geographical publications 25: 1. 370 p. raivo p (2000). finnish war landscapes as a national heritage. fennia 178: 1, 139–150. raninen-siiskonen t (1999). vieraana omalla maalla. tutkimus karjalaisen siirtoväen muistelukerronnasta (summary: a foreigner at home. a study fennia 182: 1 (2004) 45border karelia through rose-coloured glasses? gazes upon … of reminiscences of the evacuated karelians). sks:n toimituksia 766. 387 p. reenpää h, v saksi & m valkonen (eds) (2001). karjalan reformi. reforma karelii. return of karelia. 152 p. prokarelia, tampere. siirala m (2000). lake ladoga and lake saimaa areas. land use planning and tourist development. in sinisalo-katajisto p & p fryer (eds). vi world congress for central and east european studies: divergencies, convergencies, uncertainties, 29 july – 3 august 2000, tampere, finland, abstracts, 391. unesco (1972). recommendation on cultural and natural heritage, unesco. <www.ihbc.org.uk/ unesco>. 15.10.2002. urry j (1990). the tourist gaze. leisure and travel in contemporary societies. 176 p. sage publications, london. verigin sg (2002). osvoenie i zaselenie finskih territorii priladozhya posle okonchanya zimney voiny. in tezisy dokladov 1 mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prosvetitelskoy kraevedcheskoy konferentsii k 370-letiyu goroda sortavala, 33–35. sortavala. the unexpected place: brexit referendum and the disruptions to translocal place-making among finns in the uk urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa89199 doi: 10.11143/fennia.89199 the unexpected place: brexit referendum and the disruptions to translocal place-making among finns in the uk evi-carita riikonen riikonen, e-c. (2020) the unexpected place: brexit referendum and the disruptions to translocal place-making among finns in the uk. fennia 198(1–2) 91–106. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.89199 as eu citizens and a ‘middling’ migrant group in the uk, finns have been able to exercise a relatively limitless existence in britain. however, this freedom became threatened after the brexit referendum. through a digital ethnographic approach, this paper shows that the result of the brexit referendum turned finns’ translocal placemaking in the uk from being practiced by social bodies to being negotiated by political bodies and contributes to literature about translocal placemaking as receptive to disruptions. the referendum disrupted finns’ translocal place-making processes on personal and societal levels, cutting through both active, embodied processes in the uk and virtual, imagined processes in finland. the referendum imposed newly experienced otherness and conditionality to the ability to participate in the british society. it did, however, also create translocal attachments towards both the uk and finland. through its disruptive nature, the event of the brexit vote embedded itself in the future place-making orientations and narratives of the finns in the uk, potentially having an impact on their future translocal trajectories and imaginaries. keywords: brexit, place-making, translocal, finland, uk, disruption evi-carita riikonen, geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, p.o. box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: evicr@uef.fi introduction after the 23rd june 2016 referendum that indicated the united kingdom’s decision to leave the european union (eu), a set of uncertainties has emerged, cutting through people’s everyday lives. brexit, as the occurrence has become known as, threw the problematics related to place-making into the epicentres of people’s everyday – for both british citizens and uk’s many migrant groups. thus, brexit “circulates and takes on meaning and force in everyday life” (anderson & wilson 2018, 292). due to the centrality of the notions of place and place-making in the brexit-related discourses, for example, finlay and colleagues (2019) have called for discussion about brexit through the lens of place-making and ethnographic research. scholars (e.g. favell et al. 2017) have also called for more studies into the translocal experiences of middling migrants1 from developed countries. there is also a need for more research into the ways translocal place-making of such groups is subjected to disruptions due to sudden societal changes in one situated locale and the subsequent impact across regional and national, and even global scales. © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 92 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) this paper contributes to these needs by discussing brexit and its disruptive effects on translocal migrants’ everyday by addressing finns, a middling migrant group in the uk. through applying a translocal perspective to place-making and conceptualising the brexit referendum as a disruption to it, this paper addresses the following question: how did the brexit referendum impact finns’ translocal place-making in the uk? the focus of this paper is on the first two weeks in the aftermath of the vote, during which reactions to the referendum were voiced within a facebook discussion group. place-making has been discussed as being the key in “understanding the situation that can motivate and enable a collective response” especially in occurrences of political nature (pierce et al. 2011, 55). the types of reactions people have to major changes in the environmental, societal and political circumstances can also be seen as part of place-making (vanclay 2008). i argue that understanding the locally experienced everydays is the key in understanding the impacts of larger scale phenomena, such as the impact of the brexit vote, and adding a translocal viewpoint to placemaking further enhances this understanding. translocal place-making has gained interest as a way of understanding migrants’ experiences. while transnationalism is a widely applied conceptualisation to migration, it has lacked a more localfocused lens. translocality is seen as a means to introduce a way to offer more insights into the embodied, agency-oriented subjective contexts of migrant place-making (e.g. brickell & datta 2011). in this paper, ‘translocal’ is discussed as co-presences: simultaneously participated, maintained and negotiated socio-economic, cultural and political processes in multiple localities, situated in several countries (e.g. brickell & datta 2011). translocal place-making is, hence, considered as a process where an individual or a group, in managing several co-presences between localities, gains and creates, iteratively, several sets of place-specific understanding(s) and cultural and social capitals and negotiates place-specific everyday positionalities, such as status, rights, citizenship, identity, home and belonging ( e.g. longhurst et al. 2009; thompson 2017). these positionalities are the core of translocal place-making and the development of translocal senses of place. hence, the effects of the brexit vote were felt through these positionalities, as will be discussed later. translocal place-making can be understood through four viewpoints. firstly, it is processual in nature and reflects the time-space trajectories of migrants. massey (2005, 141) describes places “temporary constellations”, arguing that places are, in fact, transient due to the amount of changes that take place in the everyday lives of people. the problematics of continuities and discontinuities of places are, thus, a central theme in translocal place-making (e.g. cloke & conradson 2018; datta 2008; thompson 2017). secondly, it is characterised by negotiations of power that manifests itself within the subjectivities of domestic spaces, everyday activity spaces and the imagined everydays of distantly maintained co-presences (brickell & datta 2011; chacko 2011). hence, translocal place-making is a balancing act between re-enacting one’s culture of origin and creating place-specific, meaningful behaviours. consequently, translocal place-making produces competing narratives of power (brickell & datta 2011) in terms of for instance identity, home, citizenship, and belonging by stretching the everyday positionalities from one place of identification to multiple sites of identifications (oakes & schein 2006). thirdly, translocal place-making is framed by material and symbolic forms of mobility: physical travelling within and between localities across local, regional and national scales, participating in flows and networks (e.g. mckay 2006; luedicke 2015), imaginaries of personal, societal and political links between several places, and the maintenance of these imaginaries through, for example, subjective choices of cultural expressions and consumptions (e.g. main & sandoval 2015). finally, it is an intense form of place-making due to the multiplicities related to it. translocal place-making multiplies the material and symbolic resources that link places together (oakes & schein 2006, 21) and the requirements for negotiating, maintaining and creating of everyday practises, performances, geographical imaginaries and emotional spaces (e.g. daskalaki et al. 2016). i argue that translocal place-making, in its complexity, is exposed to frictions either through migrants’ subjective choices or through the specific place-imposed positionalities that migrants have negotiated and assumed through their place-making practises. oakes and schein (2006, 20) describe translocality as “deliberately confusing” the idea of local. by employing the concept of ‘disruption’ to translocal place-making, this study is able to show the impact of the brexit vote on it. this paper adopts the view that ‘disruption’ is a situated friction in spacetime that triggers a set of re-negotiations within place93evi-carita riikonenfennia 198(1–2) (2020) specific positionalities. however, place-making is not stopped by disruptions, but faced with a shift in power relations between places and people, forcing new behaviours and new imaginaries of places. what emerges from the findings of this study is the complex landscape of shifting power relations between people and place, and the sense of bewilderment towards the uk that will be embedded in the personal and collective narratives and trajectories of people. virdee and mcgeever (2018) have described brexit as an ‘emergency’ – it is, hence, easy to understand how, from translocal migrants’ place-making point of view, the disruptive effects of brexit are vast. the paper begins by discussing translocal place-making and brexit through the conceptualisation of ‘disruption’ and proceeds to introduce the background of finns in the uk and the study’s methodology. i then address the specific disruptions to the finns’ translocal place-making in the context of the referendum. the paper shows how the result caused overall disruption in a multitude of personal, professional and societal positionalities in the finns’ translocal lives. these disruptions emerged through three main discourses in the data: a) positioning self and others, b) stayingleaving, and c) continuity-discontinuity. translocal place-making, brexit and the geographies of disruption through turning points in one’s life, places become markers for changes. some of these defining moments are perceived in such a magnitude that they change one’s perception of and subsequently, the relationship with places. these changes are often interpreted as disruptions: upsetting changes in people’s place attachments due to transformations in people, processes, or place (brown & perkins 1992), the “loss of normal” (fried 1963, 232), and the “impact of change” (devine-wright & howes 2010, 272). changes shatter routines, relationships, expectations and behaviours and impact the sense of continuity (fried 1963). therefore, disruptions threaten self-definitions and the sense of stability and impact multiple scales in peoples’ lives – from domestic to local, regional and global (brown & perkins 1992). disruptions are also tied to temporality – they alter the understanding of the time before, during, and after the change, impacting the interpretations of past, present, and future (fried 1963; brown & perkins 1992). discussion on disruptions to translocal place-making has been conceptually diverse and often approached as representing temporal and emotional changes simultaneously: abrupt alterations in places as a result of, for example, environmental hazards (e.g. call et al. 2017), or as gradually evolving transformations in either the physical or imaginary spaces as the result of affected access to places. disruptions due to, for instance forced or voluntary relocation have been discussed as ‘displacements’ (e.g. milligan 2003), whereas decay to translocal spaces due to their mutability have been conceptualised as ‘discontinuity’ (e.g peth et al. 2018). negotiating the moral economics of several identities and copresences that require balancing between observing old and producing new cultural capitals have been discussed as ‘ruptures’ (e.g. allard & caidi 2018). others have approached disruptions through the concepts of belonging (e.g. ranta & nancheva 2019), discussing the effects of the brexit vote on eu nationals’ sense of belonging, ‘exclusion’, (e.g. landy & bautès 2013), in their piece about being part of social networks that connect translocal spaces, ‘detachment’ (e.g. walsh 2006), discussing a trajectory between the uk and dubai, ‘otherness’ (e.g. datta 2008), in her work about polish workers in the uk, and ‘disconnections’ in the context of brexit and eu-nationals’ encounters of hostility in a previously familiar setting (e.g. guma & dafydd jones 2019). thompson and reynolds (2019, 2) have pointed out that through conceptualising a particular change as a ‘disruption’, it is possible to “accommodate and illuminate the messiness and complexity of reality”. i argue that considering the first two weeks of the reactions to the result of the brexit vote through conceptualising them as ‘disruptive’, where they are understood as interrupting the processes in place-making, enables a deeper “interpretation of situated experiences and sensemaking” (thompson & reynolds 2019, 2). the brexit referendum’s disruptive effects on translocal place-making can be seen in the multitude of the reactions they generated while finding their way through multiple scales in everyday positionalities, power relations, the material and symbolic mobilities and the continuities and discontinuities of places, highlighting the multiplicity of translocal place-making and its receptivity for 94 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper disruptions. firstly, the result cut through everyday lives on different scales: domestic spaces, everyday mundane activity spaces, neighbourhoods, regions, and even nations. brexit forced people to encounter the portrayals of populist movements and the energies that have surfaced from the underlying national narratives of for example (post)colonialism through the prism of belonging, regions and neighbourhoods (e.g. botterill & hancock 2019; guma & dafydd jones 2019; ranta & nancheva 2019). place-making in post-referendum britain has been subjected to questionings through for example the definitions of home (e.g. rzepnikowska 2019), re-evaluations of localities and regions from their voting preferences’ point of view (e.g. finlay et al. 2019), the concepts of ‘race’, ‘foreigner’ and ‘immigrant’, (e.g. rogaly 2019), power divisions (lulle et al. 2019), mobilities and relocations (e.g. burrell & badcock 2017) and division of regional and cultural identities (e.g. hobolt 2016). secondly, the result challenged existing power relations (e.g. anderson & wilson 2018, 291). power relations between migrants and the spaces they operate, both physical and virtual, are simultaneously about power and powerlessness (brickell & datta 2011, 26), as translocal place-making includes migrants both applying agency on their localities through difference, and producing “power, meaning and new identities” (main & sandoval 2015, 73). place-making has become a dividing power in the brexit debate (e.g. anderson & wilson 2018; finlay et al. 2018). the setting echoes massey's (2009) conceptualisation of ‘power-geometry’: several places in the uk could be seen as infused with power – the political and social tapestry in for example areas with the most leave-voters suddenly appeared as having gained enormous influential power. massey’s theorisation (2009, 22) suggests that power has spatiality – it can be seen as spreading unevenly, highlighting inequalities. it can be argued that the brexit debate is producing power as an unequally spreading social capacity that keeps creating divisions across physical and cultural spatialities, creating ‘competing discourses of power’ (brickell & datta 2011) within everyday lives – related to both ‘us and others’ and ‘us as migrants ‘here’ versus us as citizens ‘there’. power-geometries are, hence, “coupled and shaped through migrant subjectivities and migrants' unequal positioning in time and space” (lulle et al. 2019, 9). furthermore, it is important to understand that there are power inequalities between migrants in terms of the abilities to access the place-specific capital, participate in or create meaningful reenactment practises, (im)mobilities or new translocally situated behaviours. those who are less able to maintain physical translocal mobility, for example, rely increasingly on virtual communication and translocal imaginaries. this imbalance between embodied and imagined translocal practises has a strong impact of the translocal place-making orientations between different migrant groups. the brexit vote, in pushing for the re-negotiations of translocal practises, further highlighted these inequalities by presenting questions related to the future ability to be mobile across the eu and having to navigate for instance the practicalities related to residence status. thirdly, the referendum forced translocal migrant groups into re-considering the continuities of their co-presences in several places, shaking their temporal, spatial, material and symbolic continuities. pierce, martin and murphy (2011, 59) point out that the durability of places can be wiped away by for example an evolving political discourse. in the turbulence caused by the brexit referendum, this has become significantly visible: the existing translocal place-making practises of many migrant groups were facing being pushed back by the newly justified practises of other groups, both other migrant groups’ and those of british citizens’. as for example gill (2010) has discussed, new migrants’ entering into the existing translocal spaces of other groups (either physical or imagined) can disrupt other groups’ place-making by ‘pasting over’ the existing, already negotiated practises. peth, sterly and sakdapolrak (2018) note that the continuity of translocal everyday practises that are maintaining their translocal specificity are subjected to decay due to changes in translocal practises, especially related to mobility and subsequent connectedness. in a case of changes in societal atmosphere, new and old migrants’ experiences and preferences related to their translocal practises change, and specific translocal spaces fade away, transforming translocal spaces to reflect different narratives and trajectories. connerton (1989, 6), in his discussion about social memory, speaks about how changes in the status quo could be seen as the everyday being “thrown out of the continuity of the temporal order”. this reflects the aftermath of the brexit referendum. 95evi-carita riikonenfennia 198(1–2) (2020) understanding finns in the uk research on finns in the uk has addressed mainly labour market (especially nurses) and education. recently, focus has been on finnish highly-skilled labour and migrant cultural capital (e.g. koikkalainen 2013a, 2013b; 2019). however, finns remain an under-researched ‘hidden’ population (gawlewicz & sotkasiira 2020). finns' settlement experiences in the uk from place-making point of view is not extensive in scholarly discussion, despite the uk being in the top five of finns’ relocation countries since the 1980s and the second most popular (after sweden) during 2000s (korkiasaari & söderling 2003). in 2014, estonia pushed the uk down to third most popular destinations of finns moving abroad (statistics finland 2020). there are over 21,000 finns living in the uk, the majority residing in the greater london area (eurostat 2020; embassy of finland, london 2020). even before finland joined the european economic area in 1994 and the eu in 1995, it was possible for finns to settle in the uk by obtaining indefinite leave to remain (ilr) as a result of having been working or studying in the uk (for which one needed a work permit/student status) or due to a relationship with a british citizen or someone with a settled status (e.g. hansen 2000). the increased freedom of mobility brought by finland’s eu membership, however, together with studyand work possibilities, intercultural relationships and the sense of adventure have contributed to many finns’ decision to relocate to the uk (e.g. koikkalainen 2019). the majority of finns who have moved to the uk from finland has been women. possible reasons include women being more mobile due to work possibilities in female-dominated fields such as health care and as au pairs (björklund & koivukangas 2008). the gender balance is also visible in the research data, with the majority of the discussants being female. it has to be noted, however, that in many studies related to finns in the uk, females have been the most active to participate (e.g. koikkalainen 2019; gawlewicz & sotkasiira 2020) and are more active to join networks such as facebook groups that attract uk based finns. some of these groups are even aimed at females specifically. table 1. finnish citizens’ mobility between finland and uk 1990-2018 (official statistics of finland 2020). year total men women 1990–1999 3,735 1,415 2,320 2000–2009 9,475 3,530 5,945 2010–2018 10,073 3,692 6,381 table 1. finnish citizens’ mobility between finland and uk 1990–2018 (statistics finland 2020). the essence of finnish identity is often framed through a ‘marginal discourse’, explaining it as having formed in marginalised ‘mindscapes’ between eastern and western powers – russia and sweden (browning & lehti 2007). from this setting, discourses about having ‘sisu’, a finnish national specialty that loosely translates into ‘an embodied fortitude’ (lahti 2019) and the valuation of working morals and ‘holding one’s own’ (ollila 1998) have embedded themselves into the narratives of finns. this mindset is visible also among the discussants in this study. for many finns, settling down in the uk has meant a major commitment to the country, and many finns see their contributions to the british society as a justification for their stay. as a result, perceptions of the uk had not included the idea of not having a say in the continuity of one’s personal narrative in the country. the uk has, thus, been seen as corresponding to people’s self-actualising needs and as a place where the high level of selfgovernance – the ability to be in control of one’s trajectories with places – could be realised. methodology this paper uses data from several brexit-related discussion threads from a uk-based finns’ facebook group, covering the first two weeks after the referendum (23.6. to 8.7.2016). the timeline was 96 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper narrowed to be able to grasp the first signs of disruptions related to the referendum. the group2, the members of which are finns who reside in the uk (including some that have lived in the uk and have since moved elsewhere or returned to finland) was selected due to its large number of users of differing ages and backgrounds (over 3,000 members in june–july 2016) and the interactive atmosphere within it (frequent posts). the group has been active for several years and is a place for finns to exchange experiences about translocal lives. the primary language is finnish or a mix of finnish and english. the raw data consisted of postings (i.e. someone starting a conversation) and comments (someone commenting a started conversation), with over 130 individual discussants. the data was harvested, using the facebook search function, transcribed and analysed using thematic content analysis with atlas.ti software. the researcher assumed a passive positioning – the discussants were not invited to talk about their experiences, nor did the researcher participate in the discussions. this ensured the authenticity and extemporaneousness of the reactions. this act of ‘passive analysis’ (franz et al. 2019) that looks for example into interactions in discussion groups is problematic due to issues related to data protection; not only from the ‘harm-based’ theory’s point of view (zimmer 2010) where anybody able to identify the data source would aim at harming it in some way, but also from the ‘dignity-based’ theory’s point of view, where the information is removed from the “intended sphere of the social networking profile” (zimmer 2010, 321.) for this reason, discussants’ anonymity was given high priority. firstly, all data were combined into one data set with all names of people, places and organisations removed prior to analysis. during this process, all contactable discussants were asked for consent about using the discussion material (individual discussants were also asked for consent for using individual comments). because the collection and analysis were conducted after the discussion had already taken place, some discussants had left the group and/or facebook and could not be contacted – in such cases, no quotations were used. secondly, quotes were translated from finnish into english and re-formulated in places to remove, for instance, any identifiable circumstances in the comments. social media data enables a broader access to data and to research subjects that are hard to reach. to evaluate the validity of the data, however, it has to be noted that it cannot describe the holistic views of finns in the uk due to the limited number of discussants, the narrow time-frame and the inclusion of only one discussion group – it is to be noted, however, that many finns are members of several facebook groups for finns in the uk. the data still provides an intriguing snapshot into the midst of translocal place-making and its receptivity to disruptions through the “socio-spatial relationships that have developed as the result of networking through a common place-frame” (pierce et al. 2011, 54). using social media generated data also poses risks related to data reliability. in ethnographic research using social media, it is important to gain an understanding of the platform from both technical and cultural viewpoints, as knowledge of the setting is mandatory (giglietto et al. 2012, 155). keeping this in mind, it is justified for the researchers to be part of the social media community they are studying. for this study, the researcher did not specifically join this group; but had been a member of it for several years. because the group shares experiences about life in the uk, the researcher had incorporated the interactions in the group as part of her daily life while living there. because several years had passed since the researcher had been an active member in the group, the researcher’s subjectivity was not considered a threat. it was, however, taken into account when analysing the results. discourses of disruption 1: positioning self and others the finns’ reactions to the referendum result highlight the translocal landscape presented by the data. it consists of individual, yet also collective, perceptions originating in several domestic spaces and locales across the uk, touching different regions in the uk and reaching domestic spaces, locales and regions in finland. these perceptions are being negotiated through reflecting the similar and differing experiences in them and the discussants’ everyday ties (social, imaginary and mobile) to these places, demonstrating the multiplicity of situated but connected co-presences in their ‘placemaking portfolios’ (massey 2005; brickell & datta 2011). the disruptive nature of the referendum can be seen in the ways it was perceived as a situated, sudden twinge in the discussants’ everydays: 97evi-carita riikonenfennia 198(1–2) (2020) sorry, [we are] so shocked [about the result] that nothing [makes us] laugh. has everybody suddenly stopped using their brain? this twinge triggered competing discourses of power (brickell & datta 2011) that started to quickly circulate around everyday positionalities of self and others. status and rights while making the place for themselves in the uk, finns had established access to basic societal structures, like public services (health care, banking), job market, housing, the ability to enter into ownerships and education, through which place-making had been enabled. this access was now compromised. some discussants pointed out that the result had already caused landlords to not want to renew leases, or banks reluctant to discuss mortgages. access to society was also discussed via the types of residency. while the discussants had, for the most part, been happy with retaining their finnish citizenship and not been thinking about applying for british citizenship, it was now an option to be addressed. on one hand, it was seen as an insurance that would lift the consequences of brexit in terms of rights to stay, but also almost as an insult; something that was being imposed on as forced. the finns were faced with conditionality: in order for them to continue their place-making in the uk, they would have to fulfil pre-requisites; such as applying for a citizenship. the feeling of having to ‘trade in’ their ability to continue place-making by accepting a ‘forced citizenship’ was clearly a major disruption; echoing for example the observations of pierce et al. (2011) that the durability of places can be destroyed by a political upheaval: […] if you have a citizenship, you are in the same position as a native brit. so now the thing i feared the most happened – have to apply for a citizenship. justifications for one’s right to continue life as it had been were voiced strongly. the discussants felt they had earned the right to be in the uk by contributing to the society by being reliable taxpayers and bringing in one’s professional expertise. the ‘right to belong’ has also been discussed by for example koikkalainen (2019) in the context of nordic migrants in the uk post-referendum, who also saw their contributions to the british society entitling them a say about the situation. the feelings about being unappreciated despite these contributions were visible among the finns, as well: [number of years] working and paying taxes, and we still have to worry about what will happen to us as a result of these negotiations. […]. similar observations have been made by lulle and colleagues (2019) who note that the ‘new’ eu nationals (those who arrived after the 2004 eu enlargement) in the uk consider tax-paying as ‘tactics of belonging’ to justify the continuity of place-making and to show their value to society. for the finns, however, the subtle difference appeared to be that while they also wanted to highlight the fact that their contribution to society should justify their staying, their perception of this ‘worthiness’ appeared to have its roots deeper than for example the ‘new’ eu migrants’. social dynamics the referendum made the discussants reflect the notion of home, with many sharing experiences of having to guard the fact that their home was indeed in the uk and having to protect their voice from being ‘pasted over’ (e.g. gill 2010) by othering viewpoints. the discussion culminated around the ’whose home is this’ problematic, bringing in questions of belonging, with several discussants voicing their feelings of belonging being interrogated: for the first time this country does not feel like home anymore. if someone tells me to ‘go home’, i’ll say i’m going – home to [uk city]. however, the problematics of belonging, interestingly, appeared to be addressed through questioning who belongs, or ‘who gets to decide who belongs’, rather than questioning ‘do we belong’. the 98 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper discussants pointed out that the uk, itself, accommodated different national identities and as such, was not suddenly in a position to claim ‘britishness’ as a single ‘other’ against other groups, as up until now, it had been doing the opposite: ‘britishness’ has provided (im)migrants with a handy umbrella-identity, under which there’s lot of space. the perceived unfamiliarity of the situation continued to cut deeper as the reactions from people’s social networks, namely family, friends, colleagues, neighbours and even random strangers were discussed. many families with members from more than one nationality were presented with a whole new situation. those that were already familiar with dealing with immigration issues related to noneu nationals had to start thinking about the whole family needing to deal with residency issues, and those families with british citizens and other eu-nationals faced dilemmas about family members suddenly not having the same rights to reside in the country. these questions had often been shaking the family dynamics even outside the core family unit. discussants shared opposite experiences of extended family members’ behaviour towards them: [some family members] are so upset, ashamed, disappointed and angry on behalf of the brits. [some family members] are avoiding us. some of them voted to leave. these experiences were voiced also in relation to for example customer service professionals: a nurse asked my friend over and over what they were doing here, how long they had been here etc. and complained that there are so many finns here (on top of everyone else) and that it’s good to now get some control over it. ‘are we immigrants or are we finns?’ the most striking theme related to the main discourse of positioning self and others was related to one’s perceived positioning in the uk as compared to other immigrant or ethnic groups and to british citizens. discussants shared experiences that had already taken place and contemplated on possible situations in the near future (after brexit would have actualised). the experiences of ‘whiteness’ and being a ‘white immigrant’ were addressed. especially during the eu-membership era, finns have been able to perceive themselves as ‘entitled to being in the uk’, as opposed to people who needed a visa or work permit. even if unintentional, finns have viewed themselves as ‘privileged selves’ as opposed to ‘less-privileged others’ (oxfeldt et al. 2017), a mindset that emerged in discussing the problematics of ‘expat’ and ‘immigrant’. it appeared that the idea of being thought of as ‘immigrants’ or ‘expats’ or to go by any other type of categorisation had not been needed before: before brexit, i didn’t feel the need to categorise myself as anything [immigrant or expat or anything else]. if someone asks, i’m from finland. when people especially from poland started moving to the uk after the eastern european countries joined the eu in 2004, some finns wanted to maintain and reclaim their status as the ‘good migrants’. the ‘good migrant’ status, however, was not regarded as gained while other migrant groups would be losing their status in the migrant hierarchy due to not being ‘as good as’ the finns, but rather established via the high level of commitment and reputation: i have always replied [when it came to one’s place of origin] that i am a finn. people’s behaviour changes at once. we have a good reputation even in the uk. this mindset became clear when discussants shared experiences about everyday racist nuances they had been subjected to, heard of or witnessed. facing racism personally – at least continuously or to a harmful extent – has been a relatively foreign, even if not a completely non-existent occurrence for finns in the uk. however, racism towards finns and other eu nationals was seen as being something that ‘happened overnight’: i am totally appalled. overnight, the [closet] racists appear to have become empowered. 99evi-carita riikonenfennia 198(1–2) (2020) several discussants reported racist behaviour towards them, someone they knew, or felt uneasy about the possibility of it happening: earlier somebody told me without hesitation that ‘you foreigners can go to hell’. i feel uneasy about my kids starting school… what will happen when [their classmates] find out that only one of their parents is british? discussion about what terminology and positioning should be applied to finns took distinct turns. some discussants felt that terms like ‘immigrant’ and ‘expat’ were not appropriate because they did not convey the right message about the finns as a minority group, and others were of the opinion that ‘immigrant’ described their status perfectly as permanent residents, while ‘expat’ meant an elitist migrant who had been sent abroad to work for a few years but who did not have a clue about the ‘real life’ in the country. this reflected the inbuilt interpretation of the tense relationship between ‘expat’ and ‘(im)migrant’ and the encoded social images of these concepts, where trajectories are perceived to be entitled differently (kunz 2019): [i am an] immigrant. to me, expats are those who willingly live in fenced-up areas with other foreigners. expat rather than immigrant. immigrant […] sounds more like someone who relocates for low-paid jobs and a better quality of life […]. the discussion continued to evaluate the finns’ position as compared to other white minority groups, especially the poles, with whom several finns have had experiences of being compared to. several discussants shared experiences related to racist behaviour towards the poles, and a need for the finns to stay as a distinctive group emerged. being ‘a western european white immigrant’ as compared to an ‘eastern european white immigrant’ (botterill & burrell 2019) was used as another framework to clarify one’s position. this tactic has been applied by other migrant groups as well, when they place themselves ‘within a hierarchy of europeanness’ (botterill & burrell 2019). some polish guys started to explain that they work here. i feel sorry for the poles [for having to be on their toes]. i wonder if we, too, will have to start introducing ourselves by clarifying our employment status first, just to be safe… the problem appears to be that the majority of the locals don’t even know where finland is in europe. or that the standard of living there is high. we are in the same boat with the poles who nobody understands either. not all of them have it so bad there [poland], either. the familiar discourse of ‘whiteness’ appeared to no longer function as ‘a mask of protection’ (botterill & burrell 2019). this took away the previously held ‘novelty value’ of being a finn – a group that was perceived as having a good reputation in the uk. this suggests a subconsciously performed imaginary of ‘nordic utopia’ as “the best of all possible thinkable worlds” (kangas & palme 2005, 2). the feeling of being the embodied validation of the equality and solidarity that this imaginary represents for example in british media (lister 2009) mirrors the whiteness discourse in botterill and burrell’s (2019) work, where only those who live the discourse are aware of it, and construct subjectively perceived power relations. narratives of ‘us as ‘good’ migrants’, ‘us as immigrants just like others’, ‘them as immigrants, us as finns’ appeared to have lost their power in their previously assumed contexts and had become a rift-driving feature between the situation and the continuity of familiar positionalities in place-making by challenging the previously held perceptions of the ontologies of ‘immigrant’ and ‘expat’. as lulle and colleagues (2019), discussing bhambra (2017) have noted, ‘brexit was turning (european) citizens into immigrants’. discourses of disruption 2: staying-leaving the pre-brexit era with free mobility and right to reside in the uk was the situation where most of the discussants appeared to have moved to (multicultural families with euand non-eu nationals are common among finns living in the uk, keeping the questions related to right to residency important to many finns, too, however). the questions of mobility and immobility frame translocal place-making 100 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) to various degrees and from the variety of them (physical mobilities and imaginaries within and between localities in several regions and countries) it can be understood that they enable experiences and understandings within several positionalities and contribute to the assemblages of identities that need to be re-negotiated across different spatialities (brickell & datta 2011). questions about the ability to maintain (im)mobile practises were now subjected to renegotiations. several distinct lines of opinions emerged from the data related to staying in the uk or leaving it either for finland or elsewhere in the world. the reactions could be categorised under four types of (im) mobilities: anchoring, dwelling, escaping or ‘taking off’ as a more passive-aggressive reaction to the questioned level of self-governance: ‘i’ll leave you to it’. these reflect the ideas of translocal (im) mobilities being understood as “personalised subjective temporalities” (urry 2007, 122) that are parts of one’s personal translocal place-making strategies (brickell & datta 2011). people were either adamant to stay, anchoring themselves tightly to their life as it was; justifying their right to stay with the fact that they saw themselves as having earned the right to stay, and claiming their way back from the sudden displacement of their everyday: they haven’t managed to deport convicted criminals; how would they succeed in deporting taxpayers that are here legally? others started to weight their options, dwelling on ideas about staying or leaving, wanting to see what the time would bring. for them, temporality appeared to be a comforting element: seriously, they can’t just shut up shop. try to calm down. stop panicking, […] there are a lot of eu-citizens here. there were also discussants who had been considering returning to finland and were now clear about their decision; others had not been thinking of leaving but now felt so betrayed or scared that saw returning to finland as an escape route from the situation. others, however, made it clear that leaving the uk would be the main thing, the destination would not matter so much. they emphasised that they would not leave out of fear or by force, but because they would be exercising their right to be in charge of their trajectories. some, on the other hand, held the opinion that leaving the uk would be a likely option, but the destination should be anywhere else than finland: who wants to move back to finland anyway? several discussants expressed that finland should step in for them and clarify the finns’ situation in the uk. finland appeared to be seen as a force behind being able to defend oneself, and something that would ‘always be there’, even if one did not want to ever return there: [i’ve told them] i still have a place to go to, you don't. discussants also trusted finland to negotiate the status of brits residing in finland and in doing so, ensuring the finns could stay in the uk: if they agreed with finland... that the brits living in finland could stay there, it is likely to be a twoway street [and we can stay here as well]. in establishing the position that one wanted to maintain in terms of staying in the uk or leaving it (anchoring, dwelling, escaping or ‘taking off’), the discussants produced power relations that would enable them to continue place-making in a way that would be meaningful for them. this did, however, plant a subconscious element of forced mobility – either physical or symbolic into people’s minds as they negotiated positionality through (im)mobility, highlighting the importance of agency and the disruptive nature of the feeling that the place suddenly had agency over the individual. discourses of disruption 3: continuity-discontinuity the third main discourse was the reflection on the possible outcomes of brexit and their impact on uk’s continuity or discontinuity in the discussant lives. continuities potentially turning into discontinuities were discussed, consisting of a set of evaluations and imaginary geographies of places; both the uk and its regions and finland, and even extending to a global scale. emotional aspects in the 101evi-carita riikonenfennia 198(1–2) (2020) imaginaries, including feelings of loss and displacement were evident, generating questions about the need to start altering one’s behaviour to ‘minimise difference’ (botterill & burrell 2019, 25), and already showing signs of decay of translocal spaces due to changes in translocal practises (e.g. peth 2018): i always speak finnish to my kids. but dare i do that anymore… i have never faced this [e.g. having to listen to racist comments] before. and now somehow, i feel like an immigrant overnight. questioning the uk as a ‘good host country’ emerged, together with the feelings of betrayal by the place that had been, before now, in sync with most discussants’ needs and expectations. while some appeared confident that time would provide everyone with a good outcome, others strongly expressed annoyance about having to wait for information and not being allowed any certainty over important questions related to their lives – again highlighting the importance of being able to control their translocal trajectories. speculations about the implications of any upcoming political decisions were discussed, including concerns over the hostile atmosphere that had already began to take shape. people started to evaluate the uk by comparing its regional differences based on how people had voted. some discussants pointed out that everybody is entitled to vote according to their preferences, but several voiced concerns over the fact that not everybody had voted based on informed decisions and had just seen the referendum as a justification for racism. they compared the leave voters’ behaviour to those finns who saw immigration and especially the 2015 refugee crisis as a problem insinuated by the eu’s liberal mobility rights, and who made immigration the central cause to all the nation’s problems. in finland, the referendum result had been received with general disbelief, but had also caused division between people of differing opinions which appeared to circulate around immigration issues, not helped by the rhetoric used by opposed political parties. this was seen as happening in the uk as well, and the discussants were clearly worried about this type of atmosphere spreading even deeper into the society. some discussants shared experiences from their localities – with staggering differences. while some had had apologetic looks and sympathy in areas with more remain voters, others had faced blunt racist outbursts. it was clear that these experiences had the potential for altering people’s personal narratives with places: [...] many people have been hearing these [hostile] shouts and remarks, after living in peace for years. we have another kind of an experience with some locals [in a club] about the eu, being finnish, and us living here. they welcomed us back there anytime. interestingly, the discussants continued expressing their concern about the uk’s future global reputation. they worried about tourism declining and the uk becoming a ‘country non grata’, and appeared to be taking on an additional stressor of ‘double consciousness’, where they would “look themselves [or the uk] through the eyes of others” (botterill & burrell 2019; discussing dubois 1994, 2): think about [foreign tourists]. nobody dares to come here on holiday anymore. despite all the negative experiences and worries, however, a lot of discussants spoke of the uk with a tone that implied their deep attachment to the place and being committed to it ‘no matter what’: my identity is strongly english nowadays... i belong here, nothing else matters. there was, suddenly, a need to guard one’s meaningful place-making trajectory from decay caused by other groups’ trajectories (e.g. gill 2010; peth 2018). the discussants reflected on how much power one’s narrative in a specific location had as compared to other locations, and indicated finland’s role as the back-up plan where it would always be possible to return, despite planning to do so or not. this imaginary of finland as a producer of translocal power between self and place appeared to be an important coping mechanism in the situation. two over-arching tones in the data: sarcasm and sisu, highlighted the importance of finlandrelated imaginaries as influencing people’s translocal place-making in the background. the temporal aspect between the situation and place-making was seen as both enabling (‘let’s wait and see what happens’) and disabling (‘nothing is clear’). this stretched everyday positionalities within 102 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) specific timeframes (‘for the first time, this does not feel like home’; ‘i feel like an immigrant overnight’; ‘now the time i feared has come, have to apply for a citizenship’). the role of time and temporalities in digesting the implications of brexit is discussed extensively by for example gawlewicz and sotkasiira (2020) in their work about finnish and polish migrants in uk. their findings mirror those of this study in arguing that in making sense of a disruption such as brexit, time is a central element, and that it is crucial to understand the messiness of the responses to it in their particular timespaces. the continuities and discontinuities of multiple places became subjected to forced reflections between maintenance and modification – a subconscious evaluation of the hierarchies and configurations in one’s place-making portfolio (massey 2005). botterill, mccollum and tyrrell (2019, 2) have stated that “brexit is conceptualised as a relational process of continuity and discontinuity”. the multiplicity and intensity of translocal place-making – the characteristics that make it unique but also prone to disruptions – caused the need to start re-evaluating several co-presences, continuities and translocal imaginaries (e.g. oakeas & schein 2006; brickell & datta 2011) simultaneously, intersecting both the active, embodied processes in the uk and the virtual and imagined processes in finland. in doing so, the validity of multiple sets of cultural and social capitals, and the related emotional spaces, had to be considered again – resulting in a situation where several place-making processes were not only maintained, managed and re-negotiated at the same time on several scales (domestic spaces, neighbourhoods, towns or cities and regions in several countries) but also re-organised in terms of priority; causing new inequalities between connections and further intensifying the perceived disruption. conclusions the result of the brexit referendum pushed translocal place-making of a middling migrant group into a crossroad by creating a set of juxtapositionings and friction to existing positionalities that the group had not had to previously address. it displaced them from being social bodies that were making the uk a place for themselves based on exercising control over their personal narratives into political bodies that were, overnight, faced with having to justify their position. the referendum triggered the need to start re-negotiating the ways daily lives were performed. the situation became a balancing act between power and powerlessness: previous and new and forced and voluntary, where the finns were faced with several types of new otherness. this has also been discovered by guma and dafydd jones (2019) in their study about eu-nationals in wales: they argue that brexit creates a continuous process of ‘othering’ by unsettling for example the prenegotiated attachments and connections. the feelings of compromised ability to apply agency to place can be seen as a series of disruptive effects that emerged as competing narratives of power related to previously negotiated positionalities, (im)mobilities, temporalities and multiplicities in one’s place-making trajectories. i argue that these disruptions, through the accumulation of new otherness, fuel the formation of forced translocal imaginaries. for example, in evaluating their perceptions of the uk in terms of its future societal atmosphere, the discussants expressed embarrassment when thinking about how the uk would be perceived negatively by other countries due to brexit. higgins (2019) who, in studying eu-based britons’ reactions to the referendum, found discourses of 'bad britain', consisting of feelings of shame, shock, and loss. these disruptions to emotional spaces could be argued to have extended far beyond the political and societal atmosphere of the uk to reach global levels, and culminating in an overall disappointment of the global social order – forcing not only translocal, but also global geographical imaginaries. in addition to new otherness, however, the discussants appeared to have developed new, or intensified, translocal attachments towards both the uk and finland. it appeared they wanted to carve out the timespace in which they had assumed a position in the uk where the uk was where they belonged to, and wanted to keep this feeling despite all the hostility and political developments. simultaneously, finland’s role as a stabiliser appeared to be gaining space in the discussants’ minds, in addition to the idea of finland as a safety net in their lives. this finding resonates, interestingly, with koikkalainen’s (2013b) study about highly skilled finns’ identity negotiations in europe that found that overall, finns felt strongly attached to finland regardless of where they lived, but among those who 103evi-carita riikonenfennia 198(1–2) (2020) lived in the uk, identification with the uk was the highest. this supports my view that strong identification with the uk was enabled by simultaneous attachment to finland which enabled them to be independent form finland but supported by the imaginary of it always being there for them. these newly evolving translocal imaginaries will develop into new performative discourses in migrants’ translocal place-making trajectories, meaning that previously experienced translocal spaces will have been copy-pasted over (as discussed e.g. by gill 2010) and migrants who arrive in post-brexit britain will not experience a similar kind of continuum of, for example, finnish translocal spaces to those who had arrived before the referendum. the fierce political, societal and cultural discourses that have circulated peoples’ post-referendum everydays have imposed on them a new layer of aggravated, place-specific social imagination related to for instance migration. eventually, these imaginaries will develop into collective, social facts (appadurai 1996) and in doing so, impose specific ways of thinking onto the society and alter translocal spaces. the findings of this study demonstrate that the brexit referendum has created an ‘impression of a major event’, as argued by anderson and wilson (2018). even if focused only on the immediate reactions to the referendum, in a limited timeframe and of a relatively small number of finns, the results indicate that the referendum set translocal place-making to a new path, embedding itself deeply into the individuals’ narratives and the collective memory of disruption. the implications of the brexit vote, like other historically remarkable events, will be manifested through people’s actions for times to come and be featured in their communal memory (e.g. connerton 1989) and performed according to their translocal imaginaries (e.g. oakes & schein 2006). it can be argued that the brexit referendum disrupted existing translocal senses of place and forced new ones to emerge. it is too early to say what the longer-term impacts of brexit will have on translocal place-making of eu nationals in the uk, but it is evident that it will need to be researched further. notes 1 conradson and latham (2005) have defined ‘middling migrants’ as having a middle-class background with a good education level, occupying middling statuses both in their countries of origin and in their destination countries. i retain from using the terms ‘immigrant’ or ‘expat’ when referring to finns in the context of this study, as these appear unfitting, as is explained later. 2 the name of the group has been purposely left out to maintain the discussants’ anonymity. references allard, d. & caidi, n. (2018) imagining winnipeg: the translocal meaning making of filipino migrants to canada. journal of the association for information science and technology 69(10) 1193–1204. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24038 anderson, b. & wilson, h. f. (2018) everyday brexits. area 50(2) 291–295. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12385 appadurai, a. (1996) modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. bhambra, g. k. (2017) brexit, trump, and “methodological whiteness”: on the misrecognition of race and class. british journal of sociology 68(s1) s214–s232. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12317 björklund, k. & koivukangas, o. (2008) suomalaiset euroopassa. siirtolaisuusinstituutti, turku. botterill, k. & burrell, k. (2019) (in)visibility, privilege and the performance of whiteness in brexit britain: polish migrants in britain’s shifting migration regime. environment and planning c: politics and space 37(1) 23–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x18811923e botterill, k. & hancock, j. (2019) rescaling belonging in “brexit britain”: spatial identities and practices of polish nationals in scotland after the u.k. referendum on european union membership. population, space and place 25(1) e2217. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2217 botterill, k., mccollum, d. & tyrrell, n. (2019) negotiating brexit: migrant spatialities and identities in a changing europe. population, space and place 25(1) e2217. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2216 brickell, k. & datta, a. (2011) introduction: translocal geographies. in brickell, k. & datta, a. (eds.) translocal geographies, 3–20. ashgate publishing, ltd. http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_8169.pdf brown, b. b. & perkins, d. d. (1992) disruptions in place attachment. in altman, i. & low, s. m. (eds.) place attachment. human behavior and environment (advances in theory and research) 12, 279–304. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4_13 104 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) browning, c. & lehti, m. (2007) beyond east-west: marginality and national dignity in finnish identity construction. nationalities papers 35(4) 691–716. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905990701475103 burrell, k. & m. badcock (2017) freedom in the skies: secondary mobility and brexit. <https://blogs.lse. ac.uk/brexit/2017/10/02/freedom-in-the-skies-secondary-mobility-and-brexit/>. 29.3.2020. call, m. a., gray, c., yunus, m. & emch, m. (2017) disruption, not displacement: environmental variability and temporary migration in bangladesh. global environmental change 46 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2017.08.008 chacko, e. (2011) translocality in washington, d.c. and addis ababa: spaces and linkages of the ethiopian diaspora in two capital cities. in brickell, k. & datta, a. (eds.) translocal geographies, 163– 178. ashgate publishing, ltd., farnham. http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_8169.pdf cloke, p. & conradson, d. (2018) transitional organisations, affective atmospheres and new forms of being-in-common: post-disaster recovery in christchurch, new zealand. transactions of the institute of british geographers 43(3) 360–376. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12240 connerton, p. (1989) how societies remember. cambridge university press, cambridge. conradson, d. & latham, a. (2005) transnational urbanism: attending to everyday practices and mobilities. journal of ethnic and migration studies 31(2) 227–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183042000339891 daskalaki, m., butler, c. & petrovic, j. (2016) somewhere in-between: narratives of place, identity and translocal work. journal of management inquiry 25(2) 184–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492615592181 datta, a. (2008) building differences: material geographies of home(s) among polish builders in london. transactions of the institute of british geographers 33(4) 518–531. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2008.00320.x devine-wright, p. & howes, y. (2010) disruption to place attachment and the protection of restorative environments: a wind energy case study. journal of environmental psychology 30(3) 271–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.01.008 embassy of finland, london (2020) finland in the uk. <https://finlandabroad.fi/web/gbr/finland-in-uk> 5.4.2020. eurostat (2020) population on 1 january by age group, sex and country of birth. <https://appsso. eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/submitviewtableaction.do>. 29.3.2020. favell, a., feldblum, m. & smith, m. p. (2017) the human face of global mobility: a research agenda. in favell, a. & smith, m. p. (eds.) the human face of global mobility: international highly skilled migration in europe, 1–28. transaction publishers, new brunswick, nj. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315132501 franz, d., marsh, h. e., chen, j. i. & teo, a. r. (2019) using facebook for qualitative research: a brief primer. journal of medical internet research 21(8). https://doi.org/10.2196/13544 fried, m. (1963) grieving for a lost home. in duhl, l. j. (ed.) the urban condition, 151–171. basic books, new york, ny. finlay, r., nayak, a., benwell, m. c., hopkins, p., pande, r. & richardson, m. (2019) race, place and young people in the age of brexit. environment and planning c: politics and space 37(1) 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x18811923d gawlewicz, a. & sotkasiira, t. (2020) revisiting geographies of temporalities: the significance of time in migrant responses to brexit. population, space and place 26(1) e2275. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2275 giglietto, f., rossi, l. & bennato, d. (2012) the open laboratory: limits and possibilities of using facebook, twitter, and youtube as a research data source. journal of technology in human services 30 145–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228835.2012.743797 gill, n. (2010) pathologies of migrant place-making: the case of polish migrants to the uk. environment and planning a 42(5) 1157–1173. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42219 guma, t. & dafydd jones, r. (2019) “where are we going to go now?” european union migrants’ experiences of hostility, anxiety, and (non-)belonging during brexit. population, space and place 25(1) e2198. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2198 hansen, r. (2000) citizenship and immigration in postwar britain. oxford university press, new york. higgins, k. w. (2019) national belonging post-referendum: britons living in other eu member states respond to “brexit”. area 51(2) 277–284. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12472 hobolt, s.b. (2016) the brexit vote: a divided nation, a divided continent. journal of european public policy 23(9) 1259–1277. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2016.1225785 kangas, o. & palme, j. (eds.) (2005) social policy and economic development in the nordic countries. palgrave, basingstoke. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523500 koikkalainen, s. (2013a) making it abroad: experiences of highly skilled finns in the european union labour markets. lapland university press, rovaniemi. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:978-952-484-683-7 koikkalainen, s. (2013b) transnational highly skilled finnish migrants in europe: choosing one’s identity. national identities 15(1) 85–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2012.733156 105evi-carita riikonenfennia 198(1–2) (2020) koikkalainen, s. (2019) nordic ties and british lives? migrant capital and the case of nordic migrants living in london. social inclusion 7(4) 171. https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v7i4.2333 korkiasaari, j. & söderling, i. (2003) finnish emigration and immigration after world war ii. siirtolaisuusinstituutti, turku. <www.migrationinstitute.fi> kunz, s. (2019) expatriate, migrant? the social life of migration categories and the polyvalent mobility of race. journal of ethnic and migration studies 46(11) 2145–2162. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2019.1584525 lahti, e. (2019) embodied fortitude: an introduction to the finnish construct of sisu. international journal of wellbeing 9(1) 61–82. https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v9i1.672 landy, f. & bautès, n. (2013) local and translocal systems of actors. in landy, f. & saglio-yatzimirsky (eds.) megacity slums: social exclusion, space and urban policies i (urban challenges), 257–306. imperial college press, london. https://doi.org/10.1142/9781908979605_0006 lister, r. (2009) a nordic nirvana? gender, citizenship, and social justice in the nordic welfare states. social politics 16(2) 242–278. https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxp007 longhurst, r., johnston, l. & ho, e. (2009) a visceral approach: cooking ‘at home’ with migrant women in hamilton, new zealand. transactions of the institute of british geographers 34(3) 333–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00349.x luedicke, m. k. (2015) indigenes’ responses to immigrants’ consumer acculturation: a relational configuration analysis. journal of consumer research 42(1) 109–129. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucv002 lulle, a., king, r., dvorakova, v. & szkudlarek, a. (2019) between disruptions and connections: “new” european union migrants in the united kingdom before and after the brexit. population, space and place 25(1) e2200. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2200 main, k. & sandoval, g. f. (2015) placemaking in a translocal receiving community: the relevance of place to identity and agency. urban studies 52(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098014522720 massey, d. (2009) concepts of space and power in theory and in political practice. documents d’anàlisi geogràfica 55 15–26. <https://www.raco.cat/index.php/documentsanalisi/article/view/171747> massey, d. (2005) for space. sage, cromwell press ltd., trowbridge. mckay, d. (2006) translocal circulation: place and subjectivity in an extended filipino community. asia pacific journal of anthropology 7(3) 265–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/14442210600979357 milligan, m. j. (2003) displacement and identity discontinuity: the role of nostalgia in establishing new identity categories. symbolic interaction 26(3) 381–403. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2003.26.3.381 oakes, t. & schein, l. (eds.) (2006) translocal china: linkages, identities and the reimagining of space. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203029398 ollila, a. (1998) perspectives to finnish identity. scandinavian journal of history 23(3-4) 127–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/03468759850115918 oxfeldt, e., nestingen, a. & simonsen, p. (2018) the happiest people on earth? scandinavian narratives of guilt and discontent. scandinavian studies 89(4) 429–446. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.89.4.0429 peth, s. a., sterly, h. & sakdapolrak, p. (2018) between the village and the global city: the production and decay of translocal spaces of thai migrant workers in singapore. mobilities 13(4) 455–472. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2018.1449785 pierce, j., martin, d. g. & murphy, j. t. (2011) relational place-making: the networked politics of place. transactions of the institute of british geographers 36(1) 54–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00411.x ranta, r. & nancheva, n. (2019) unsettled: brexit and european union nationals’ sense of belonging. population, space and place 25(1) e2199. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2199 rogaly, b. (2019) brexit writings and the war of position over migration, 'race' and class. environment and planning c: politics and space 37 (1) 3–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774x18811923 rzepnikowska, a. (2019) racism and xenophobia experienced by polish migrants in the uk before and after brexit vote. journal of ethnic and migration studies 45(1) 61–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2018.1451308 statistics finland (2020) migration by country of departure or arrival, year, information and sex 1990– 2018. <http://pxnet2.stat.fi/pxweb/pxweb/fi/statfin/statfin__vrm__muutl/statfin_muutl_pxt_11aa.px/ table/tableviewlayout1/>. 8.6.2020. thompson, c. & reynolds, j. (2019) reflections on the go-along: how “disruptions” can illuminate the relationships of health, place and practice. geographical journal 185(2) 156–167. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12285 thompson, m. (2017) migration decision-making: a geographical imaginations approach. area 49(1) 77–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12292 urry, j. (2007) mobilities. polity, oxford. 106 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) vanclay, f. (2008) place matters. in vanclay, f., higgins, m. & blackshaw, a. (eds.) making sense of place: exploring concepts and expressions of place through different senses and lenses, 3–11. national museum of australia press, acton. <http://www.echocredits.org/downloads/3076768/eres_display. pdf2352525.pdf> virdee, s. & mcgeever, b. (2018) racism, crisis, brexit. ethnic and racial studies 41(10) 1802–1819. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544 walsh, k. (2006) “dad says i’m tied to a shooting star!” grounding (research on) british expatriate belonging. area 38(3) 268–278. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2006.00687.x zimmer, m. (2010) “but the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in facebook. ethics and information technology 12(4) 313–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-010-9227-5 20402_02_rusanen georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the concentration of population in finland in 1970–1998 jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen rusanen, jarmo, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert & arvo naukkarinen (2003). georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the concentration of population in finland in 1970–1998. fennia 181: 2, pp. 129–144. helsinki. issn 00150010. changes in the distribution of population in finland over the period 1970– 1998 are examined in terms of a co-ordinate system of 1 x 1 km grid cells. the results indicate that this system provides suitable areal units for a variety of statistical and gis methods aimed at describing and explaining the spatial distribution of population. the system is capable of yielding more detailed information than heretofore on topics such as the concentration of population in the urban centres of finland – a process that has been going on since the beginning of the last century, but has slowed down noticeably in the recent years. jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert & arvo naukkarinen, department of geography, po box 3000, fin 90014 university of oulu, finland. email: jarmo.rusanen@oulu.fi. ms received 07 january 2003. introduction demographic research has a long tradition within geography and represents a discipline that is eminently suited to the study of the spatial distribution of population and its changes. the results of these studies are required for planning purposes in many sectors of the society, e.g. determination of the capacity and location requirements for various public services at the national, regional or local level. although it is primarily the authorities that have been interested in the direction of demographic trends, it is by no means a matter of indifference for individual citizens or families whether they live in an area of expanding or diminishing population. the general image of an area is to a considerable extent shaped by trends in population, as well as with structural changes of the area. there is thus an obvious need for statistical data that are both up to date and geographically more detailed than earlier, and for precise interpretations of such data. this poses new challenges not only for the producers and users of the statistics but also for those engaged in developing and applying analytical and interpretative methodologies. the geographical examination of population distributions and their temporal changes has typically relied on notions such as spatial concentration and deconcentration (lipshitz 1996; borgegård et al. 1995), or urbanization and counterurbanization (håkansson 2000), while migration research has adopted perspectives such as that of the ‘turnaround’ phenomenon (long & nucci 1997; lewis 2000). the actual terms in use vary not only according to the theoretical basis from which the research sets out but also in relation to the volume of migration concerned and its temporal duration. our picture of the spatial concentration and agglomeration of population in finland has largely been shaped by the publications of hustich (1977) and alestalo (1983). more recently, however, the present authors have discussed changes in the settlement structure and the concentration of population with the aid of georeferenced data and gis methods (see naukkarinen et al. 1993; rusanen et al. 1997). as pointed out by e.g. håkansson (2000), research into the distribution of population can be greatly affected by the employed geographical unit, so that models that apply at one spatial lev130 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen el do not necessarily hold good at another. one particularly difficult problem concerns boundary changes, which indicates that census statistics for different years do not necessarily apply to the same areal units and therefore, cannot be compared easily (howenstine 1993; openshaw 1995; rees 1998). the requirements placed on population statistics and the usefulness of the data available can vary greatly from one group of users to another. public authorities, for instance, are accustomed to using statistical means and definitions expressed in terms of administrative areas and deductions made from these when they require information on which to base their decisions. researchers, in contrast, prefer to go back to the sources of the original raw data in order to test their hypotheses and construct their models. for this reason we will attempt to analyse and examine demographic data using various methods in terms of both administrative and non-administrative areal units, and to evaluate the subsequent results. aims, data and methods we set out here to describe 1) the changes in population that have taken place within the spatial and settlement structure of finland by means of 1 x 1 km grid cell data, 2) the methods available for the analysis of population data, and 3) the factors highlighted by the grid cell method that cannot be identified when using administrative areal units. finally, the usefulness of the resulting information for the purposes of demographic research will be evaluated. georeferenced data on finland are available at many spatial levels. in practice, any individual citizen can be assigned a set of coordinates describing the geographical location of the house in which he or she lives. the resulting data can be aggregated to represent higher-level units, e.g. postal districts, parts of municipalities, whole municipalities, groups of municipalities or the nuts hierarchy as used by the eu. it must be remembered, however, that the above-mentioned problem of comparability over time emerges in the case of these areal units whenever administrative areas are combined or boundaries are altered. on the other hand, the fact that the initial information is available at the individual level is regarded as a significant advantage of gis methods (martin & higgs 1997; see also openshaw & turton 1996). thus, the principal units employed here are the 1 x 1 km grid cells defined in the data produced by statistics finland for the years 1970, 1980 and 1990–1998 (see rusanen et al. 1997). these grid cells are of fixed location and are independent of any changes in administrative boundaries. statistical information on human activities in finland has been available annually since 1987. current methods enable statistics finland to revise their georeferenced population data very quickly, so that figures for the population on 31st december are available by the end of the following february, together with statistics for the individual municipalities. this annual information is based on registers, so that no separate population census is necessary as in the usa, for example (see crews 2000). the second basic areal unit employed here is the municipality, or independent local government district. these districts have numerous rights and obligations that define them as administrative entities, including the right to levy taxes (ministry of the interior 2000). in accordance with the above principle, the populations of the municipalities are calculated here from the grid cell figures, and for this reason the figures differ slightly from those quoted in the official statistics, as for instance in 1998, 1.42% of the national population could not be assigned coordinates on the basis of their place of residence. however, this discrepancy can be assumed not to affect the results. it should be noted that we are not concerned here with studying the potential factors responsible for demographic trends in particular areas, e.g. birth-rates, mortality or migration – topics which have traditionally been to the fore in population geography (ogden 1998; 1999). instead, we focus on describing solely the concentration of population. this is defined here in two ways: as an increase in population density per square kilometre when using grid cell data, and as an increasingly larger proportion of the population living in a progressively smaller number of municipalities. data on population changes in the 1 x 1 km grid cells and municipalities are analysed here by a number of methods, and assessments are made as to whether these methods yield similar or divergent results. the methods tested include the gini coefficient, which is more commonly used for analysing the spatial distribution of income fennia 181: 2 (2003) 131georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the… rates (see chakravorty 1994) rather than population (see bradford & kent 1986; lovell-smith 1993). in addition, the concentration of population is described in terms of mean values and the moran and geary indices used in version 8.0 of the arc/info software. changes in population are also described by reference to deciles and by classification of the ‘spatial demographic structure’. long-term patterns are visualized by means of a rank size model and the kriging interpolation method contained in version 8.0 of arc/info. the hoover index that is frequently used in studies of population concentration (see borgegård et al. 1995; long & nucci 1997) is not employed here, as the emphasis is on analysis at the grid cell level rather than at the municipality level. decile analysis involves ranking the data units in size order from largest to smallest with respect to the studied variable, and dividing them into ten equal groups in terms of population described by the variable, regardless of whether the areal unit is a grid cell or a municipality. population concentration as reflected in the moran and geary indices and the gini coefficient population density in finland in 1998 relative to land area was very low by european standards, only 16.9 inhabitants per square kilometre. if, however, we use the grid cell material to calculate the mean density for inhabited cells only, we see that the density has increased steadily over the period examined here, and is now approaching 50 inhab./km2 (table 1). the moran and geary methods allow a spatial autocorrelation index to be determined for the grid cell material as follows: when the moran index is positive and the geary index varies in the range 0–1 the distribution of population can be described as ‘similar’, ‘regionalized’, ‘smooth’ or ‘clustered’. if the moran index is negative and the geary index greater than 1, the corresponding terms are ‘dissimilar’, ‘contrasting’ and ‘checkerboard’ (for details, see arc/info user manual 2000). in the present case, the gradual increase in the moran index and the simultaneous decrease in the geary index lend further support to the impression gained from the previous table of a process of consolidation of the inhabited area rather than a scattering or dispersal of population (table 2). one typical technique employed to describe evenness or concentration in the distribution of population is the lorenz diagram (alestalo 1983), or its derivative, the gini coefficient (fainstein 1996). regardless of whether we use grid cells or municipalities as the areal units, the obtained gini coefficients indicate a concentration of population (table 3), although the higher value of the grid cell material as compared to the municipality level also indicates the essentially local nature of this concentration. the fact that the majority of the population of finland is located within a relatively small number of grid cells is indicative of the low proportion of built-up areas within the country’s total settled area. measured in both of the above ways, the rate of change was greatest in the 1970’s, an observation that confirms the general impression regarding the concentration of population in finland. it is consistent with the results of the examination by deciles published by alestalo (1983). on the other hand, analysis of the trend over the last two decades in terms of the gini coefficient provides deviant results for the two sets of areal units. the rate of population concentration apparently has slowed down when assessed in terms of the grid table 1. number of inhabited grid cells and mean population density in finland in 1970–1998 (data: statistics finland). 1970 1980 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 number of inhabited grid cells 110477 104540 103242 103020 103036 103045 102873 inhab./km2 41.3 44.1 47.8 48.4 48.9 49.1 49.4 table 2. moran (i) and geary (c) indices in 1970–1998 (data: statistics finland). year 1970 1980 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 i 0.543 0.531 0.568 0.570 0.581 0.590 0.597 c 0.427 0.435 0.400 0.394 0.384 0.377 0.370 132 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen cell data, being only 1.1% in the 1990’s, whereas the figures for the municipalities indicate acceleration with a terminal rate of 3.5%. the result obtained from the grid cell data may indicate a decreasing trend in population concentration in the densest areas, the pattern being attributable to the exclusion of uninhabited grid cells and the concentration of population in a constantly decreasing number of cells and a more restricted geographical area. this trend, which is largely internal to individual municipalities, fails to be reflected in the analyses based on municipalities as the areal units. decile analysis decile analysis employs divisions of the total material into tenth parts. it can be regarded as a flexible, non-given means of classification, and since the boundaries of the deciles tend to vary from one year to the next, the method is well suited to studies of concentration or dispersal, e.g. in population or incomes. according to alestalo (1983), the population of finland was fairly evenly distributed over the deciles at the end of the 19th century, the agrarian society of the time showing little agglomeration of the population into urban centres. from that time onwards, however, the population gradually became concentrated in a smaller number of municipalities (table 4), so that by the 1970’s, half of the country’s population lived in 52 municipalities, 10.1% of their total number. the trend continued so that in 1998, the corresponding figure was 33 municipalities, i.e. 7.3% of the total. part of this effect may be attributed to the amalgamation of municipalities within the system of local government, but the principal factor has without doubt been the actual concentration of population within a progressively smaller number of towns and cities (rusanen et al. 2000). is this concentration visible in the grid cell data? for answering this, a decile analysis comparable to that in table 4 is presented in table 5. the deciles indeed indicate a continuation of the concentration process, so that half of the country’s population (the population of deciles 1–5) occupied a total of 1541 km2 in 1970, 1167 km2 in 1980, 1294 km2 in 1990 and 1284 km2 in 1998. the 1970’s were a period of heavy population concentration, whereas from the end of that decade onwards finland was affected by a ‘turnaround’ phenomenon, as noted by several authors (kauppinen 2000). this process was experienced in many western countries, entailing above all a table 3. concentration of population as shown by the gini coefficients for the years studied and percentage change over the period 1970–1998 (data: statistics finland). year areal unit 1970 1980 1990 1998 grid cell 0.78558 0.83450 0.85365 0.86324 municipality 0.59228 0.62145 0.62962 0.65186 change in gini coefficient (%) 1970–1980 1980–1990 1990–1998 grid cell 6.2 2.3 1.1 municipality 4.9 1.3 3.5 table 4. concentration of population by deciles of municipalities in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 1998 (data: statistics finland). number of municipalities year decile 1970 1980 1990 1998 1 1 1 2 1 2 4 4 3 3 3 6 5 5 4 4 15 10 10 9 5 26 20 18 16 6 38 29 27 23 7 50 42 40 38 8 66 58 57 56 9 97 88 87 88 10 212 204 206 214 total 515 461 455 452 fennia 181: 2 (2003) 133georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the… decline in the popularity of urban areas as living environments for families with children. the inhabited area of finland in 1998 amounted to ca. 30.4% of the total surface area of 338 145 km2, with a consistent decline of this proportion from one decade to the next since 1970. the most pronounced decline, almost 6000 km2, took place during the 1970’s, although it has also been claimed that the material for 1970 contained some errors in the coordinates determined for individual dwellings and that the actual net decrease was not necessarily as great as this. it should also be noted that the trend was a relatively steady over the period 1990–1998 relative to the 1980’s, although data on the final years of the decade are still lacking. changes may also be observed in the population densities for the deciles (table 6). the highest densities of all were recorded in deciles 1 and 2 in 1970, when finland was experiencing a pronounced migration from the countryside into the towns and also abroad, primarily to sweden (see kauppinen 2000). at that time the mean population density in the top decile was around 9700 inhab./km2, whereas the corresponding figure in 1998 was about 6200. the maximum population density was reached in helsinki, the capital. in the 1970 data the density peaked at 29 234 inhab./km2, whereas the figure for 1998 showed a reduction of more than a third, 19 172 inhab./ km2. a number of factors can be identified that contributed to the reduction of population density in finland over the study period. the most significant factor was the transfer in the urban centres from dwellings to other uses, mainly offices and commercial premises. other factors were changes in the structure of households, including reductions in the average family size and the number of families with children and an increase in the number of single-person households. it should be pointed out, however, that the mean population density of the two most densely inhabited deciles began to increase again in the 1990’s, partly on account of the efforts made to fill in the settlement pattern in built-up areas in accordance with the principles of sustainable development. andersson (1988) recognizes four stages in the development of towns in finland: urbanization, suburbanization, disurbanization and reurbanization. urbanization stage refers to the growth of a central urban nucleus, while the suburbanization stage involves a slowing down and eventually cessation of this trend. at the disurbanization stage, table 5. numbers of inhabited grid cells by deciles in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 1998 (data: statistics finland). 1970 1980 1990 1998 inhab. km2 decile n n n n in 1998 1 densest 47 66 84 82 4171–19172 2 settlement 116 133 159 158 2633–4170 3 207 200 234 234 1795–2632 4 384 297 336 334 1257–1794 5 787 471 481 476 881–1256 6 1 856 825 751 721 536–880 7 4 992 1 928 1 420 1 299 267–535 8 11 290 6 816 4 635 3 813 70–266 9 sparsest 22 331 19 590 16 579 14 980 20–36 10 settlement 68 462 74 209 78 561 80 770 1–19 number of grid cells 110 472 104 535 103 240 102 873 table 6. population density by deciles in 1970, 1980, 1990 and 1998 (data: statistics finland). inhab. km2 decile 1970 1980 1990 1998 1 9703 6980 5876 6202 2 3932 3464 3104 3219 3 2203 2303 2109 2173 4 1188 1551 1469 1523 5 579 978 1026 1068 6 246 558 657 705 7 91 239 348 392 8 40 68 106 133 9 20 24 30 34 10 7 6 6 6 134 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen the trend is reversed, until the reurbanization stage marks new growth in the urban nucleus. it is interesting to consider how these stages might be reflected in an empirical decile analysis. the urbanization stage seems to have taken place in finland before 1970, as the population of the most densely inhabited central areas (deciles 1 and 2) began to decline after that time. hence, the 1970’s and 1980’s may be assigned to the suburbanization and disurbanization stages, as these figures in particular declined markedly at first and then levelled out somewhat in the 1980’s, when the changes were less pronounced in other respects, too. the 1990’s represent the reurbanization stage, in which the population of the most densely inhabited areas again started to increase. it is important to bear in mind when evaluating these findings that the stages are distinguished on the strength of only a single variable. a more precise consideration would call for an internal analysis of the structure of the ten largest cities, for example, and also other information relevant to the growth of urban areas, e.g. their development and planning policies. population changes by deciles in 1990–1998 dual trends in population density and in the number of inhabited grid cells are observable during the 1990’s, the cut-off point being reached in 1993. the minimum area occupied by half of the population of finland, i.e. deciles 1–5, increased numerically over that time (table 7a), implying a slight decline in population density in the urban nuclei and suburbs (table 7b). from 1993 onwards, the trend towards denser communities can be observed, although not quite amounting to the figures recorded in 1970 and 1980. the most sparsely populated rural areas (decile 10) increased in number throughout the 1990’s, whereas their mean population density remained more or less stable. the increase may be attributed almost entirely to reductions in the population of some grid cells previously contained in decile 9, representing the rural areas proper, causing their transfer to decile 10. the reversal in the trend in 1993 is probably linked to the fact that this was the worst year of the economic recession in finland, i.e. the peritable 7. changes in the number of grid cells (a) and population density (b) in the 1990’s (data: statistics finland). a. number of grid cells trend decile 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1990– 1994– 1990– 1993 1998 1998 1 84 85 86 86 85 84 83 82 82 + – 2 159 162 164 164 163 161 160 160 158 + – – 3 234 238 241 241 240 239 236 235 234 + – 0 4 336 339 342 344 343 339 338 336 334 + – – 5 481 484 487 488 485 482 480 477 476 + – – 6 751 751 750 751 744 736 728 724 721 0 – – 7 1420 1406 1400 1390 1364 1345 1329 1316 1299 – – – 8 4635 4500 4409 4332 4214 4096 4012 3915 3813 – – – 9 16579 16305 16105 15930 15746 15548 15380 15204 14980 – – – 10 78561 78815 79038 79314 79652 80007 80299 80583 80770 + + + b. population density inhab./km2 1 5876 5840 5802 5831 5923 6015 6100 6191 6202 – + + 2 3104 3064 3043 3058 3089 3138 3165 3173 3219 – + + 3 2109 2086 2071 2081 2098 2114 2145 2160 2173 – + + 4 1469 1464 1459 1458 1468 1491 1498 1511 1522 – + + 5 1026 1026 1025 1028 1038 1048 1055 1064 1068 + + + 6 657 661 665 668 677 687 695 701 705 + + + 7 348 353 356 361 369 376 381 386 391 + + + 8 106 110 113 116 119 123 126 130 133 + + + 9 30 30 31 31 32 32 33 33 34 + + + 10 6,3 6,3 6,3 6,3 6,3 6,3 6,3 6,3 6,3 0 0 0 fennia 181: 2 (2003) 135georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the… od in which the unemployment peaked. similarly, housing production declined steadily, to reach its lowest ebb in 1994. this was followed by a period of economic recovery (svt 1999), with a new stimulation of building activity, especially in the metropolitan area of helsinki and other large municipalities. this trend was accompanied by a rise in population densities, as the housing capacity of the built-up areas increased while the land areas concerned remained more or less constant. the increased housing density was hence reflected in the population density. the above observation demonstrates the usability of the grid cell data as an aid in monitoring changes in spatial structure, and potentially achieving detailed explanation. this method allows, for instance, observing small changes in population within a municipality very easily. the spatial demographic structure in 1970–1998 the repeatability of the decile method allows it to be applied to any country or any areal unit, and any researcher can arrive at the same results. it should be remembered, however, that such accurate geofererenced data are available in selected countries only. we will turn our attention now to structural features of the spatial distribution of population and the changes detected in the distribution in the cross-sectional data for 1970, 1980, 1990 and 1998, with particular reference to developments during the 1990’s. the classification employed may be referred to as the ‘spatial demographic structure’, as it represents an attempt to describe the relation between population density and settlement structure. hence, it does not take into account the functional elements normally implied in the term regional structure, e.g. dwellings, jobs and the aspects of infrastructure that support these. the concept has been used earlier for classification purposes by räisänen et al. (1996) and rusanen et al. (1997). we will first consider the situation over the whole of finland and subsequently concentrate the analysis on one specific region, kainuu. the interpretation provided here is based on the assumption that the character of a grid cell can be deduced from the size of its population. the classification concerned is not necessarily applicable to all areas or to all countries, and it has been constructed knowing well that the distinction between rural and urban is by no means unambiguous (see malinen et al. 1994; berry et al. 2000). it is impossible to build a model that would apply equally well to all countries and under all conditions. the following classification of spatial demographic structure is used: inhab./km2 element of spatial demographic structure 1–5 scattered settlement 6–20 rural areas proper 21–100 rural areas with built-up features 101–1000 build-up areas and suburbs with mostly private housing more than high-rise centres and suburbs of 1000 major cities examination of the situation in the years mentioned above indicates that the most densely populated areas, with over 1000 inhab./km2, grew most rapidly in the 1970’s, the rate of growth diminishing in the 1980’s and reaching its slowest in the 1990’s (fig. 1). the areas of suburban private housing departed from this pattern somewhat, however, as these underwent their greatest population growth in the 1980’s. by contrast, the transitional category between rural and urban conditions, that with densities of 21–100 inhab./ km2, declined in population throughout the period studied here, although most markedly in the 1970’s and least so in the 1990’s. the rural areas proper decreased substantially in extent, while the areas of scattered settlement increased somewhat in both total population and extent, largely as a result of contractions in the population of grid squares previously included in the category of rural areas proper. the trend in population density over the whole country in the 1990’s was polarized. the population of the densely inhabited areas increased steadily throughout the decade, amounting to a total rise of 4.6%, or 110 000 persons, between 1990 and 1998 (fig. 2). the suburban private housing population grew in a similar manner, with the exception of a small decline in 1997. the population of the urban-rural transition zone with densities of 21–100 inhab./km2, declined from 1993 onwards, however, and simultaneously the area contracted slightly. the category of rural areas proper declined in both population and total area throughout the studied period, whereas scattered settlement category increased slightly in both total population and area. 136 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen fig. 1. population changes in different parts of the spatial demographic structure over the whole of finland in 1970–1998 (data: statistics finland). fig. 2. population changes in different parts of the spatial demographic structure over the whole of finland in 1991–1998 (data: statistics finland). the kainuu region in northern finland, selected here for more detailed examination, is characterized by economic and demographic recession. it belongs to the objective 1 eu support areas on account of its low income levels and sparse settlement. its population, which has been on the decline since the 1960, was 93 218 persons in 1998, and the region has consistently been one with pivotal unemployment in the whole country. the demographic trend in kainuu during the 1990’s departed markedly from that obtained for the whole country (fig. 3). the most densely inhabited areas experienced a population decline from 1992 onwards, and the same trend affected the private housing areas from 1996 onwards. correspondingly, the transition zone and the rural areas proper lost population throughout the decade, as in the whole country, and the population increase in the areas of scattered settlement fennia 181: 2 (2003) 137georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the… appears to have come to an end in 1998. this was probably the first occasion during the century when the population of kainuu decreased in every single category of its spatial structure. it is probable that demographic trends in the sparse population density classes in fig. 9 were the same as in kainuu. elsewhere they have resembled those of the whole country. finland became a member of the eu in 1995. kainuu was an objective 6 area in 1995–1999 and is currently an objective 1 area for the period 2000–2006. based on the above results one can argue that the development measures implemented in the region under the eu programmes have failed to improve the negative demographic trend in all elements of the spatial system. detailed analyses of population trends are possible only with the aid of georeferenced data that allow precise location of the population units. a ‘sliding scale’ evaluation of population density based on local level data helps avoiding the fallacies that arise when one examines the whole country or large aggregate areas (martin 1991). the unravelled negative demographic trend in kainuu serves as an example of the use of grid cell data for monitoring regional development. the rank size model rank size models represent a well-established method of geographical research that has been applied to the study of hierarchical structures in various areal units and changes taking place in these structures. the units employed for this purpose are usually towns or other administrative or functional entities (see, e.g. bradford & kent 1986; das & dutt 1993). the method involves arranging the data units in size order and presenting the results in diagrammatic form. we intend to apply the rank size approach to the 1 x 1 km2 grid cells, and use the density classes for describing the types of settlement and any changes in population. for comparison purposes, the approach was done at two levels: the whole country and the kainuu region. the 452 municipalities of finland varied in population from a mere 100 up to 500 000 inhabitants in 1998 (fig. 4). with the municipality level as the areal unit of interest, the rank size model indicates that about one hundred largest municipalities showed an increase in population over the period 1970–1998, while the others experienced population decline. at the grid cell level, the rank size model fails to provide detailed information of spatial demographic structure as efficiently the classification (figs. 5 and 6). it does, however, serve well in highlighting the decline in the total number of inhabited grid cells over the whole country, i.e. the contraction in the area of human settlement. furthermore, it emphasizes certain major turning points such as the beginning of the decline in population in the most densely inhabited areas fig. 3. population changes in different parts of the spatial demographic structure in kainuu in 1991–1998 (data: statistics finland). 138 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen fig. 4. changes in population density over the whole country in 1970–1998 according to the rank size model, areal unit = municipality (data: statistics finland). fig. 5. changes in population density over the whole country in 1970–1998 according to the rank size model, areal unit = grid cell (data: statistics finland). and the subsequent resumption of growth. other well-presented features are the thinning of the population of the rural districts and the continued growth in agglomerations with a population of 80–3000 persons throughout the studied period. the points at which the curves intersect mark population thresholds of various kinds, with contrasting trends on either side. the rank size model for the kainuu region (fig. 6) yields rather similar results to that for the whole country, the greatest difference being in the curve for 1998, which shows a decrease in popfennia 181: 2 (2003) 139georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the… ulation in the most densely inhabited grid squares as opposed to an increase at the national level. according to polls, the most preferred form of living for finns is a detached house on lakeside in the middle of a city. the rank size model for the whole country indeed seems to indicate that apartment blocks in areas with more than 3000 inhab./km2 are not considered attractive as places to live, since the model showed highest population growth in areas with population densities of 80–3000 inhab./km2. it is the grid cells that fall into this category that may be regarded as the most popular and attractive living environments in recent decades, a situation which has been promoted further by contemporary urban planning measures. this impression is confirmed by the result of the residents’ barometer survey carried out by the ministry of the environment in 1998. the survey showed that 57% of finnish population preferred to live in a private house, 22% in an apartment and 20% in a semi-detached or terraced house. in reality, only 30% of the population in that year were living in a private house, 50% in an apartment and 20% in a semi-detached or terraced house (ministry of the environment 2000). in the light of the above figures, however, the observed increase in population in the most densely inhabited areas during the 1990’s would appear to be inconsistent with the realities of the finns’ living habits and with the preferences that they have expressed. the rank size approach also shows a decrease in population in the density class of less than 80 inhab./km2. this must be partly attributable to the decline in the number of active farms, a trend, which has greatly accelerated since finland joined the eu in 1995. this becomes evident from the fact that no fewer than approximately one quarter of the farms closed down between 1995 and 2002. the rural areas can no longer provide good opportunities for making a living. as a consequence their population is declining. on the other hand, silvasti (2002) has examined the changing meanings of the countryside for rural and urban inhabitants, noting that for farmers the countryside is traditionally a space in which production takes place, while for urban dwellers it is becoming more and more a locus of consumption, a source of recreation and beautiful landscapes. in holland, haartsen et al. (2003) have developed an empirical method for measuring the interpretations placed on rural areas by persons of different ages (muilu & rusanen 2003). fig. 6. changes in population density in kainuu in 1970–1998 according to the rank size model (data: statistics finland). 140 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen spatial distribution of population in 1970–1998 the most concrete, often the best and sometimes the only way of depicting spatial information is by means of a map, and a typical and popular way of depicting population data is on a choropleth map (see bachi 1999). on the other hand, it is as well to bear in mind the comment of langford and unwin (1994) that “where the purpose of a population map is to convey an accurate impression of density distribution the conventional choropleth map representation is a poor choice”. the map of the distribution of inhabited areas presented in fig. 7 is derived from a coloured map of finland and sweden first published by rusanen et al. (1997), based on the kriging interpolation method (figs. 8 and 9) and a choropleth map. the information depicted by shading has been converted to a dot-based vector form before interpolation. for the sake of comparison, the population density data are presented on a conventional choropleth map in fig. 10, employing municipalities as the areal units. the pair of maps contained in figs. 8 and 9 indicate detailed locations for the areas of popfig. 7. distribution of inhabited grid cells (at least one person per square kilometre) in finland in 1998 (data: statistics finland). fig. 8. population density (inhab./km2) in finland in 1970 (data: statistics finland). fennia 181: 2 (2003) 141georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the… ulation decline and serve particularly well to depict the pronounced expansion of the areas of scattered settlement. the extreme phenomenon that affects the settlement structure, namely the abandonment of the countryside, took place in finland primarily in areas where habitation at present is sparsest. future abandonment of dwellings and farms is likely to affect these same areas. on account of the scale at which the two maps are reproduced, the concentration of population in the built-up areas does not stand out very clearly. they do, however, highlight relatively well the population growth that has taken place in builtup areas and their environs, the areas in which population concentrated in 1998 and the locations of municipal population centres. the information contained in this pair of maps highlights the situation regarding permanent settlement. it does not, however, tell the whole truth about the potential use being made of the areas concerned for leisure purposes. some of the areas of population decline, even ones that have lost their population entirely, have been transformed into a new kind of resource periphery, which people who have moved to the cities and urban arefig. 9. population density (inhab./km2) in finland in 1998 (data: statistics finland). fig. 10. population density by municipalities in 1998 (data: statistics finland) 142 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen as of the south have begun to exploit for summer cottages and second homes. although the zonal maps in figs. 8 and 9 are easy to interpret, the unfortunate aspect of them is that they give an impression of a wholly inhabited country. in contrast, the grid cell analysis indicates that in reality only 30.4% of its surface area had any permanent settlement in 1998 (fig. 7) and that the focus of this settlement was explicitly in southern finland. the information contained in the zonal maps is nevertheless very detailed in comparison to the choropleth maps. evaluation of the methods used altogether 10 methods were tested in the course of the work at hand. six methods involved numerical interpretation, four methods visual interpretation only. the rank size method yields diagrams, while the maps are descriptive in character. in terms of the hierarchy of potential areal units from the whole country to regions and further to municipalities, the grid cell is the most widely applicable data unit. it permits aggregation to all spatial levels and can be used with all the methods investigated. for reasons of scale, it is obvious that a classification used for the whole country will not necessarily be viable at the local level. the same holds true for classifications used in cartographic presentations, as these, too, have to be altered according to the scale on which one is operating. the statistical mean, gini coefficient and moran and geary indices provided numerical proof of the continuing process of population concentration, hence confirming the conclusions. in the case of the gini coefficient, the employed areal unit influenced the results quite substantially. the data for the municipalities showed continuing concentration at a more pronounced level than did the grid cell data. decile classification proved to be an objective method capable of demonstrating changes in population density on a sliding scale from the sparsest to the densest forms of settlement. the spatial demographic structure proved the most adept at indicating what part of the spatial system is under examination – especially to those who are unfamiliar with the material. the last two classifications complement each other in the sense that the former is objective and the latter subjective. the rank size model and the use of maps both allowed visualization of changes in population equally well over the whole country and at the local level. the methods can be regarded as complementary in population concentration studies. it would be difficult and unnecessary to try to select the best method. each method has its own strengths, and each one brings out some new information on changes in population density. a few recently published papers have pointed to a decline in the use of maps in geographical articles (wheeler 1998; martin 2000), which is somewhat surprising, since gis makes it relatively easy to present material in a map form. this trend may be regarded as an unfortunate one, since the present work and feedback received from the users of spatially analysed data indicate that maps, as a visual presentation technique, are the best means of describing spatial variations in place-bound phenomena. it is true, however, that one cannot visualize all the population changes taking place in a spatial structure by means of just a few maps. the other methods used here should be treated as complementary to visualization and as capable of lending support to each other. in the end it is essential that the available data be as accurate as possible in its location properties, so that gis or potential other methods can be applied freely in accordance with the needs of different user groups. the optimum situation would naturally be the use of coordinate data for individual persons without any spatial aggregation. this, however, is depicted difficult or impossible by the legislation protecting personal privacy. conclusions demographic trends are crucial variables for use in regional policy, regional planning and monitoring of regional development. hence, the aim here was to investigate the distribution of population by a variety of methods. the results indicated that in finland the process of population concentration in the early part of the 20th century, as identified by alestalo (1983), continued up to the very end of the millennium. this finding is consistent with that obtained for sweden, a country with very similar conditions for settlement (borgegård et al. 1995). one significant result of the analysis of the grid cell material, however, was that the concentration trend is now slowing down. this finding became evident also in terms of both the gini coefficient and the classification by spafennia 181: 2 (2003) 143georeferenced data as a tool for monitoring the… tial demographic structure when the data units were grid cells, whereas more or less the opposite result was obtained when municipalities were used as areal units. in any case, the results do not correspond to the modest resurgence of population growth in non-metropolitan areas observed in the united states during the 20th century, a trend that can be regarded in the long term as representing a third decentralization phase (long & nucci 1997). according to the equilibrium theories of regional economics, social structure will react to a disturbance by seeking a new state of equilibrium. in the light of its rates of change during the 20th century, the spatial demographic structure seems to be approaching such a state. at least the rate of population concentration has begun to slow down. the negative demographic trend obtained for the kainuu region during the 1990’s nevertheless demonstrates that various parts of the country are progressing according to quite distinct timetables, not to mention the situation locally, i.e. at the level of the municipality or some smaller areal unit. the results from kainuu are comparable to most parts of finland, especially northern and eastern and central finland, when the total land area is considered. in finland the availability of annual population statistics for 1 x 1 km2 grid cells makes it possible to identify and monitor even quite small changes in different parts of the spatial structure, and thereby to quickly detect any violation of local or regional danger limits that are of importance for decision-makers and planners. it is also possible to use grid cell data for predicting changes in population, whereupon the use of variables representing the age structure of the population or aspects of human activity are expected to add greater depth to such analyses. finnish georeferenced data can be subjected equally well to scrutiny over medium or short time intervals, as information is available from 1970 onwards and since 1987 on an annual basis. grid cell data can provide information on local conditions and can be used to analyse differences within municipalities. the ability to aggregate data to any grid size or areal system adds greatly to the applicability of the method. the permanence of the location of the grid cells is also an important advantage, as administrative boundaries tend to alter with time. georeferenced data are flexible in terms of areal unit, and are well suited to the analysis and visualization of features that are internal to given areas or regions. they bring information to the fore that could easily remain concealed were administrative units such as municipalities used. similarly, georeferenced data allow analyses of spatial structures that cannot be distinguished in material based on municipalities, e.g. the urbanrural continuum. membership of the european union involves a transfer of responsibility for regional development in finland to the local level, where most of the data required for regional policy purposes had previously been compiled nationally. georeferenced data can be of considerable value in these situations, as even quite detailed analysis, monitoring and prediction of demographic trends can be undertaken at any level whatsoever in the spatial hierarchy. references alestalo j (1983). the concentration of population in finland between 1880 and 1980. fennia 161: 2, 263–288. andersson h (1988). eurooppalainen kaupunkiuudistus ja suomalainen kaupunki. terra 100: 3, 353–358. arc/info version 8.0 user manual (2000). <http:// w w w. e s r i . c o m / s o f t w a r e / a r c g i s / a r c i n f o / > 15.12.2000 bachi r (1999). new method of geostatistical analysis and graphic presentation. distribution of populations over territories. 478 p. kluwer academic/plenum publishers, new york. berry ka, nl markee, n fowler & gr giewat (2000). interpreting what is rural and urban for western u.s. counties. professional geographer 52: 1, 93–105. borgegård l-e, j håkansson & g malmberg (1995). population redistribution in sweden – long term trends and contemporary tendencies. geografiska annaler b 77: 1, 31–45. bradford mg & wa kent (1986). human geography: theories and their application. 180 p. oxford university press, oxford. chakravorty s (1994). equity and the big city. economic geography 70: 1, 1–22. crews k (2000). census 2000 and geography education. journal of geography 99: 1, 67–74. das rj & ak dutt (1993). rank-size distribution and primate city characteristics in india – a temporal analysis. geojournal 29: 2, 125–137. fainstein n (1996). a note on interpreting the american poverty. in mingione e (ed). urban poverty and the underclass – a reader, 153–159. oxford, blackwell. 144 fennia 181: 2 (2003)jarmo rusanen, toivo muilu, alfred colpaert and arvo naukkarinen haartsen t, p groote & ppp huigen (2003). measuring age differentials in representations of rurality in the netherlands. journal of rural studies 19, 245–252. håkansson j (2000). changing population distribution in sweden. gerum – kulturgeografi 2000: 1. howenstine e (1993). measuring demographic change: the split tract problem. professional geographer 45: 4, 425–430. hustich i (1977). suomen “kutistumisen” vauhti hiljenee (the speed of the “shrinkage” of finland is slackening). terra 89: 4, 214–221. kauppinen j (2000). muuttoliike suomessa vuosina 1989–1994 koordinaattipohjaisten paikkatietojen perusteella (english summary: migration of population in finland in 1989–1994, examined from coordinate-based gis data). 155 p. siirtolaisuusinstituutin tutkimuksia a 22. langford m & dj unwin (1994). generating and mapping population density surfaces within a geographical information system. the cartographic journal 31, june, 21–26. lewis g (2000). changing places in a rural world. the population turnaround in perspective. geography 85: 2, 157–165. lipshitz g (1996). spatial concentration and deconcentration of population: israel as a case study. geoforum 27: 1, 87–96. long l & a nucci (1997). the hoover index of population concentration: a correction and update. professional geographer 49: 4, 431–440. lowell-smith eg (1993). regional and intrametropolitan differences in the location of freestanding ambulatory surgery centers. professional geographer 45: 4, 398–407. malinen p, r keränen & h keränen (1994). rural area typology in finland – a tool for rural policy. 78 p. university of oulu, research institute of northern finland. research reports 123. martin d (1991). geographic information systems and their socioeconomic applications. 182 p. routledge, new york and london. martin d & g higgs (1997). population georeferencing in england and wales: basic spatial units reconsidered. environment and planning a 29: 2, 333–347. martin r (2000). in memory of maps. transactions of the british geographers, new series 25: 1, 3–5. ministry of the environment (2000). <http://www. v y h . f i / a j a n k o h t / t i e d o t e / y m / t i e d 9 9 / ym12299.htm>. 15.12.2000 ministry of the interior (2000). <http://www: intermin.fi/eng/municipal/municipalities.html>. 15.12.2000 muilu t & j rusanen (2003). rural definitions and short-term dynamics in rural areas of finland in 1989–1997. submitted manuscript. naukkarinen a, j rusanen & a colpaert (1993). the future of rural settlement structure in finland. geography research forum 13, 61–70. ogden pe (1998). population geography. progress in human geography 22: 1, 105–114. ogden pe (1999). population geography. progress in human geography 23: 4, 617–631. openshaw s (1995). the future of the census. in openshaw s (ed). census user’s handbook, 389– 411. geoinformation international, glasgow. openshaw s & i turton (1996). new opportunities for geographical census analysis using individual level data. area 28: 2, 167–176. räisänen s, j rusanen & a naukkarinen (1996). socio-economic grid data and gis for analyzing the changes in the finnish countryside. second joint european conference & exhibition on geographical information, march 27–29, 1996. barcelona, spain. geographical information. from research to application through cooperation vol 1, 651– 660. rees ph (1998). what do you want from the 2001 census? results of an esrc/jisc survey of users views. environment and planning a 30, 1775– 1796. rusanen j, a naukkarinen, a colpert & t muilu (1997). differences in the spatial structure of the population between finland and sweden in 1995 – a gis viewpoint. 46 p. statistics finland research reports 221. rusanen j, t muilu, a colpaert & a naukkarinen (2000). asutun suomen väestömäärä ylittää 50 asukasta neliökilometrillä. tietoaika 5/2000, 14– 17. silvasti t (2002). maaseudun muuttuvat merkitykset – tuotannon tilasta kulutuksen kohteeksi. (changing meanings of the countryside – from a production space to an object of consumption.) yhdyskuntasuunnittelu (community planning) 40, 11–25. wheeler j o (1998). mapphobia in geography? 1980–1996. urban geography 19: 1, 1–5. svt (suomen virallinen tilasto) (osf = official statistics of finland) (1999). rakentaminen ja asuminen. vuosikirja 1999. (construction and housing. yearbook 1999). rakentaminen 1999: 20. 226 p. tilastokeskus. statistics finland. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa8231 doi: 10.11143/8231 “vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown jordi nofre nofre, jordi (2013). “vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown. fennia 191: 2, pp. 106–121. issn 1798-5617. over last two decades, culture has played a very important role in large-scale urban transformations. in that sense, nightlife promotion has become one of the most important strategies for urban regeneration in post-industrial cities. this paper explores the newly emerged vintage-style nightlife in the former harbour quarter of cais do sodré (lisbon downtown). to do this, i focus on a recently renewed hostel building called pensão amor – formerly frequented by sailors and prostitutes, and today considered the coolest nightlife venue in the portuguese capital. after presenting an updated state of the art exploration of gentrification and nightlife, i argue in the second part of my paper that pensão amor is currently playing a key role in the gentrification of the urban nightscape in the cais do sodré neighbourhood, where its traditional nightlife is today being supplanted by a vintage-style nightlife. furthermore, i argue that the consumption of this recently promoted vintage nightlife as a new form of social distinction can be also seen as the (re)production strategy of a socially and morally sanitized nightlife which marginalizes everyone who is seen as inappropriate, or in other words, socially perilous to the city branding of lisbon. keywords: vintage style, nightlife, social distinction, gentrification, cais do sodré lisbon jordi nofre, faculty of social & human sciences, new university of lisbon, avenida de berna, 26-c 1069-061 lisbon, portugal. e-mail: jnofre@fcsh.unl.pt introduction: the rise of the 'ludic' city over the past three decades, many worldwide cities have reshaped their spaces, mainly through culturally-led strategies for urban regeneration. new forms of social organization, leisure, and cultural consumption, among other factors, have recently led to the conversion of many downtowns into urban themed parks (lefebvre 1968; hannigan 1998; baptista 2005). the inner city thus becomes a theatre of consumption that is socially and politically controlled (ritzer 1993, 1998, 2010) formed by hubs of corporative leisure, which plays a key role in the city branding process. these new means of consumption – or, in the terms of george ritzer (2010), these new cathedrals of consumption – have favoured the emergence of leisure as an organizer of contemporary social practices in the greatest post-fordist cities, as it prevails in family, professional, and civic life (baptista 2005). fiesta, fun, and relaxation are therefore synonymous with success in the everyday life of our post-fordist “ludic cities” (baptista 2005). this new kind of leisure aims at promoting citizens as leisure producers, consumers of cultural products, and consumers of leisure spaces (lefebvre 1968). more than 30 years later, the document entitled culture, the engine of the 21st century european cities (approved by the eurocities committee in september 2001) took into account what henri lefebvre then had already pointed out about the consolidation of culture as one of the key strategies of large-scale urban transformations, which aim at converting citizens into consumers and creators of culture. in that sense, nightlife promotion plays a significant role in several processes of culture-led urban renovation and gentrification in today’s european cities (chatterton & hollands 2003; nofre & martin 2009; hael 2011). at the same time, gentrification has become a key process of urban and social transformation in reshapfennia 191: 2 (2013) 107“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown ing contemporary worldwide cities over the last decades. this is the case of lisbon and cais do sodré, one of its former harbour quarters. so in focusing on this case study, this paper will explore how the conversion of an abandoned hostel (called pensão amor), formerly frequented by marginal prostitutes and sailors over the last century, has been playing a key role in the gentrification of cais do sodré through the newly-promoted vintage style where the old, the decadent, and the sordid have been re-signified to become part of a newly-created urban nightscape of social distinction. this paper presents the first results of a 2-year ethnographic fieldwork study of nightlife and urban change in post-industrial lisbon. the presence of many urban processes like nightlife-based gentrification together with outlawed activities like drugs dealing, prostitution, and laundering money through drinks consumption and entrance fees demands the use of methodological eclecticism (hannerz 1980; wynne & o'connor 1998) to explore the cais do sodré’s urban nightscape (fig. 1). hence, after conducting a 15-month participant observation, 32 people were interviewed in loco. the subjects of such informal interviews comprised four bouncers, three policemen, and 25 customers (the venue’s owners rejected being interviewed).1 most of interviews were manually registered in a small field notebook. the following list characterizes the informants used in this paper: • informant 1: male, 29 years, phd student, lisbon; interview carried out on 28 january 2012, at about 2:00 a.m. inside pensão amor and manually registered. • informant 2: male, 37 years, security staff member, lisbon; interview carried out on 15 february 2012, at about 0:30 a.m (his statements were registered in situ for obvious reasons of safety). • informant 3: female, 23 years, undergraduate student, barreiro (lisbon metropolitan area); interview carried out on 14 march 2012, at 10:00 a.m. at her faculty building. • informant 4: male, 24 years, undergraduate student, lisbon; interview carried out on 14 march 2012, at 10:00 a.m. at his faculty building. • informant 5: male, 34 years, software developer, lisbon; interview carried out inside pensão amor, on 12 november 2011, at about 2:15 a.m. • informant 6: female, 38 years, real-estate investor, lisbon; interview carried out inside pensão amor, on 12 november 2011, at about 2:15 a.m. • informant 7: male, 30 years, postdoctoral research fellow, foreigner (spaniard); interview carried out inside pensão amor, on 12 november 2011, at about 2:15 a.m. • informant 8: male, 50 years (approx.), police, lisbon; interview carried out on 6 june 2012, at about 2:30 a.m. together with the ethnographic fieldwork, a first cartography of lisbon’s nightlife was carried out – but not included in this text – to better contextualize the role that cais do sodré has in the nightlife system of the portuguese capital. therefore, this paper does not pretend to discuss what the interviewed people told, but it carries out a first approach to the gentrification of cais do sodré and the rise of a “distinguished” urban nightscape in downtown lisbon based on the promotion of newly-created “vintagestyle” nightlife. this paper uses as its starting point the definitions of “vintage” and “gentrification” appearing in the online version of the american heritage dictionary, which defines the second of these terms as the restoration of deteriorated urban property, especially in working-class neighbourhoods carried out by the middle and upper classes. at first glance, one might distinguish that which is abandoned, derelict, old, or simply vintage. in that sense, the oxford advanced american dictionary refers to the term “vintage” as something typical of a period in the past and of high quality. having in mind such linguistic distinctions and focusing on the case study of cais do sodré, the text below will attempt to show how a new cool nightscape – which is today playing a key role in gentrifying cais do sodré – can be seen as the result of promoting a vintage-style nightlife that is synonymous with a consumption space of social distinction, as has been previously pointed out. when it comes to ethical issues, this research has involved tracking the localization and observation of people, and the personal data of interviewees has been manually recorded in a fieldwork notebook. interviewees were informed about the purpose and the scientific nature of this research and were asked to give oral consent to use their narratives. because interviewees have not had the right to check and emend the final transcription before the storage process, or the right to evidence parts of their narratives, their non-identified status has been strictly maintained, and the complete transcriptions of interviews have been stored in a database only accessible to the author of this manuscript. finally, no participants in this research were underaged. 108 fennia 191: 2 (2013)jordi nofre fig. 1. localization of cais do sodré (lisbon downtown). source: nofre (c) 2013. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 109“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown studying gentrification as cultural consumption and social distinction although the term “gentrification” can be originally found in memoirs and proceedings of the manchester literary & philosophical society written in 1888 (atkinson & bridge 2008), it acquired a contemporary meaning when the british sociologist ruth glass (1964) used it in her book london: aspects of change. according to glass, islington’s population of a low economic class was being replaced by new upper class individuals coming from other wealthier london suburbs. over the decade of the 1970s and early 1980s, some of the first empirical works on gentrification were published. some considered it to be a positive response to the degradation of downtowns (ley 1986), while others theorized about gentrification as a process linked to public and private strategies on housing (hamnett 1973; williams 1976). in fact, the institute of british geographers inaugurated its transactions by paying special attention to gentrification, which demonstrates the importance that it had gained during the 1970s. in parallel, other scholars have argued that gentrification has to do with the existence of urban inequalities as a consequence of the processes of urban regeneration (smith 1979a, 1979b; berry 1980; ley 1980). from the beginning of the 1980s, gentrification began to affect many areas of cities, not only in britain, but also around the world. neil smith (1979b), in his study on gentrification of the society hill borough in philadelphia, pointed out that gentrification had become fundamental in the restructuring of urban space because this particularly depended on the volume of productive capital returning to the gentrified central area. such an explanation of gentrification must be considered as the basis of the so-called rent-gap theory, further developed in many papers published by neil smith himself and by many other authors. after smith’s paper, another two economists’ theories emerged: hamnett and randolph’s (1984, 1986) value-gap explanation, and the consumption-side explanation of gentrification. this latter focused on the key role that consumption and culture played in the process of gentrification in the new york neighbourhood of soho (zukin 1982). by taking culture and consumption into account as key categories for the geographical analysis of gentrification, some scholars have suggested new approaches to answering the “hows”, “whos”, and “whys” of gentrification. in that sense, sharon zukin (1982) mixed both the production and consumption-side models of explanation. in the due course of time, her work has become a new epistemological paradigm for studying recent processes of gentrification in worldwide cities. during the 1990s, many authors have underlined the rapid (re)production of gentrification around the world. however, some have suggested the existence of two kinds of gentrification; on the one hand, “us gentrification”, and on the other hand, “european gentrification” (musterd & van weesep 1991; lees 1994; lees & bondi 1995). in their study based on the inner london borough of islington and on park slope, which is a part of the brooklyn borough of new york city, lees and bondi (1995) noted that in the case of european cities the greatest urban areas were redeveloped due to the interventionist role of the state. however, in the case of the us cities, the role of the state was quasi-noninterventionist. however, there could be a wide discussion about this, taking into account the recent cases of gentrification in uptown brooklyn (new york) and french quarter in post-katrina new orleans. although globalization has led to the homogenization of processes of gentrification in worldwide capitalist cities (especially after the fall of the berlin wall and the communist bloc), many authors continue to agree that gentrification expresses a process of class change in a previously degraded area (smith 1996; butler 2007). in fact, many authors consider that gentrification is best explained if it is considered as the social and spatial manifestation of the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy (butler 1997; ley 1997; lees 2000; hamnett 2003). during recent years, many authors have underlined the relationship between residential market regeneration, housing policies, and gentrification in several cities around the world. such diffusion of gentrification around the world is related to globalization, since (neoliberal) urban governments adopt gentrification as the unique strategy for urban regeneration (atkinson & bridge 2008). actually today's processes of gentrification are densely connected to the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation (smith 2002). more specifically, this includes the promotion of a “distinguished” nightlife, not only as a form of cultural or leisure consumption, but also as a strategy for the social sanitization of the inner city. this new form of nightlife adopts re-signified elements of the local nightscape. the term “social sanitization” is rarely used in social and human sciences, although some authors 110 fennia 191: 2 (2013)jordi nofre from the field of medieval studies, social and cultural history, criminology, and more recently from the field of urban policy have analysed how social sanitization has been executed by several different institutional bodies (weatherly 1926; stearns 1936, and more recently, miraftab 2007; vangby & jensen 2009; welch 2009). the improvement of punishment, the imprisonment of deviants, or even the social sanitization in regenerating a degraded urban area are some examples of this rare, scarce use of the term “social sanitization” among today's scholars. in fact, its roots come from the chicago's criminology school of the first decades of the twentieth century, whose research efforts were mainly focused on how local institutions punished (young) deviant individuals – such as the chicago's streetcorner boys (thrasher 1926; whyte 1943) – to clean the industrial city. however, more than eighty years later, a new gentrification–sanitizing strategy is once again being carried out by the chicago city council in order to support one of the strategies of the capital to restructure its spanish-speaking neighbourhoods (wilson & grammenos 2005). here, social sanitization has to do with that idea of “civilizing a society”, as ulysses g. weatherly (1926) explored in the case of the role of american experts in post-revolutionary haiti. therefore, social sanitization and the fact of civilizing a community or neighbourhood involves its moral sanitation – in the terms of ernest r. groves (1916). so the relationship between gentrification, and social and moral sanitization – that is to say, the promotion of new (christian, bourgeois) values and behavioural ways – should not be disassociated from the institutionallysupported promotion of the (young) neoliberal worker (walker & finchman 2011). coming back to our case study, here social sanitization is conceived in the same sense that john galtung (1958) suggested in his the social functions of a prison, where the author argued that social sanitization had to do with the attempt carried out by institutions to decrease to zero the visibility of selected types of deviants. if we consider here the criminalization of “being young” (castells 2012; nofre & feixa 2013) as part of the recent instauration of the neoliberal penal state (wacquant 2008) in post-industrial countries, the definition provided by galtung acquires great timeliness in these last decades of “zero-tolerance politics” that feature the neoliberal city (garnier 2010). furthermore, i have implicitly used the galtung's definition in some previous publications about nightlife, urban transformations, and social contestations in euro-mediterranean cities such as lisbon, barcelona, and sarajevo (nofre & martín 2009; nofre 2011; nofre & feixa 2013). this paper intends to explore how social sanitization works in the case of the cais do sodré neigbhourhood by focusing on the role of the former prostitution hostel pensão amor. in this process, the original early twentieth decoration of pensão amor plays a key role in the rise of most distinguished nightlife space in today's lisbon, where international djs play what we could call as de-territorialized world music, which is “global and deterritorialized music which although coming from a specific place, ends up ‘speaking to all’ as it reaches the sphere of global culture” (de la barre 2010: 140). here the question which arises, therefore, is: could this kind of “globalized nightlife” be considered to be a kind of the so-called “globalized gentrification” (maeckelbergh 2012)? promoting nightlife as strategy of gentrification culture and consumption have become key issues in explaining how gentrification has evolved in cities worldwide over the last four decades. however, few studies have paid attention to the emergence of a distinguished nightlife – or clubbing, in the terms of sara thornton (1995) – as a consequence of gentrification and the emergence of a distinction-based lifestyle of new middle classes in global cities (savage & butler 1995; butler 1997; wynne & o’connor 1998; chatterton & hollands 2003). one such work is the study by david ley (2003) on the role of artists as agents who contribute to the gentrifying of former working-class neighbourhoods in some canadian cities, such as toronto, montreal, and vancouver. but beyond gentrification, sharon zukin (2009) suggests focusing our attention on how the authentic city is being (re)produced every day. as zukin argues, “these forces of redevelopment have smoothed the uneven layers of grit and glamour, swept away traces of contentious history, cast doubt on the idea that poor people have a right to live and work here too – all that had made the city authentic” (zukin 2009: xi). having in mind the rise of the authentic city suggested by sharon zukin, the aestheticization of the everyday life of our postindustrial cities appear to be a key process in exploring the relationship befennia 191: 2 (2013) 111“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown tween a distinguished and socially sanitized nightlife, and gentrification (nofre & martin 2009; nofre 2011). in fact, the spatial approach to the study of nightlife has gained importance over the last decade, with its emphasis on the close relationship between the strategy of city-securitization led by the inner city’s elites and the promotion of a gentrified nightlife. in that sense, paul chatterton and robert hollands (2003) released a very influential book, in which they explored the continuities and changes of corporate control in the entertainment and nightlife economies, as well as the process of the branding and theming of nightlife. they paid special attention to the emergence of segmented, sanitized, and gentrified consumer markets. in addition, the authors also explored the economic processes governing the nightlife structure in western european cities by focusing on the interaction between youth, central nightlife, marginal nightlife, music tastes, lifestyles, and dress codes (chatterton & hollands 2003). as they argued, gentrification and nightlife are associated with some of these issues, which strongly contribute to the elitization of the social space of the city. however, such a process of nightlife elitization usually involves some spatial displacements of traditional, working-class night-time leisure activities (chatterton & hollands 2003). indeed, many authors have recently explored how nightlife gentrification involves a certain spatial marginalization of working-class night-time leisure activities in today’s western cities. in some cases, such as barcelona (catalonia), this marginalization of old forms of nightlife responds to well-established strategies for the social sanitation and moral sanitation of its working-class suburbs (nofre 2011). however, is all the old actually displaced or even marginalized in the nightlife of post-industrial cities such as lisbon? but before i continue, i will present some geographical notes on cais do sodre and lisbon. brief geographical notes on lisbon and cais do sodré the urban history of the former cais do sodré neighbourhood is closely linked to the urban growth of lisbon waterfront, which has occurred since the sixteenth century (fig. 2). during the reign of the portuguese king manuel i (1495–1521) new waterfront spaces were created to expand its harbour premises, such as the santos quarter and cata-que-farás (today’s cais-do-sodré neighbourhood). these formerly muddy terrains were rapidly landfilled to build warehouses for commercial and port activities, which received loads transported by small boats coming from the big ships anchored about half a mile away from the riverside (durão 2012). in the second half of the twentieth century, the so-called old cais de sodré gave way to the new cais (frança 2013). what over many decades was a neighbourhood that overindulged in food and drinks, peep shows, fado music, drunken sailors, some gun violence, drug trafficking, and prostitution, began to change in the mid-1970s when some traditional bars and native-run groceries were converted into small-sized discotheques (such as jamaica discotheque, europa bar, texas bar, and viking). moreover, numerous bars, then named after some world port cities (philadelphia, shangri-la, tokyo, rotterdam, copenhagen, liverpool, oslo, etc.) also opened. the neighbourhood of cais do sodré was then deeply rooted in its origins as a harbour environment, which featured its own urban morphology, its everyday life, and its appropriation by native-born storekeepers, local and foreigner traders, sailors, prostitutes, and so on, up until today. the popular revolution that occurred on 25 april 1974 – the stepping down of salazar’s fascist regime – brought about the initial “democratization” of lisbon’s nightlife. hence, cais do sodré was re-appropriated by the young middle classes, university students, bohemians, intellectuals, and local journalists once democracy was restored. today these social groups have become key agents in promoting the new cool nightscape that has recently emerged in cais do sodré. however, nothing of the past continues to exist today. as pointed out by the bbc’s journalist kerry christiani: “cais do sodré had upstaged bairro alto as lisbon's most happening nightlife district” (christiani 2012). over recent years, some urban changes have taken place in cais do sodré. its deprivation developed through the twentieth century in terms of building degradation over time and the rise of critical health risks associated with the consumption of alcohol, drugs, and marginal prostitution; but it found a first solution in the late 1970s through the promotion of a bohemian nightlife among university students, liberal professionals such as journalists, writers, singers and musicians, and young politicians, among others. in fact, they felt free of the consuming city after the stepping down of salazar's 112 fennia 191: 2 (2013)jordi nofre fascist regime (1933–1974). however, in the 1990s this bohemian nightlife in cais do sodré was rapidly replaced by a new one, which was much more oriented to global mass tourism. till two years ago, tourists, young local people, and erasmus students had been consuming an urban nightscape in which drugs, marginal prostitution, police, and some few high purchasing power customers had coexisted. in 2010 the city council approved support for new private initiatives to transform cais do sodré into a new hub of cultural production and consumption especially oriented to the new middle classes (florida 2000) and local upper-middle classes, as section 6 accurately depicts. it meant to support gentrification in the former harbour quarter of cais do sodré. however, what has been commented on to date about gentrification, rent-gap, and value-gap theories may not be helpful for highlighting how this area of the portuguese capital is currently being gentrified through a new socially sanitized nightlife based on the newly-emerged vintagestyle decoration of nightlife venues. fig. 2. a sight of the lisbon waterfront in 1903 (top), and a partial sight of cais do sodré in 1900 (bottom). source: skyscrapercity 2013.2 fennia 191: 2 (2013) 113“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown consuming “the vintage” as a new form of social distinction in several south-european cities like lisbon, the consumption of vintage fashion seems to have reemerged as sign of class-based distinction. in the case of the portuguese capital, this process is closely linked to the recent rise of the local pin-up movement as a new form of youthful hedonism. for example, two recently-opened stores of pin-up and vintage furniture, art, goods, clothes, and memorabilia located in the gentrified neighbourhood of bairro alto (mendes 2006) – namely bad luck (closed in autumn 2010) and ás de espadas – have been satisfying this demand for youthful hedonistic consumption (veenhoven 2003; goss 2004; baptista 2005; migone 2007). in fact, le cool magazine lisboa labelled ás de espadas (fig. 3) as one of the best fashion boutiques in lisbon (rosa 2010). on the other hand, the recent re-inauguration of the 1940s-styled hotel flórida in one of the wealthiest area of lisbon (duque de palmela street) is not a mere coincidence. many night-time parties and performances have recently favoured the re-emergence of both the pin-up and vintage movements as an alternative to mainstream nightlife promotion in the portuguese capital. in this alternative (and distinctive) movement, the cais do sodré cabaret association plays a key role: “cais sodré cabaret! aims to celebrate the times when gentlemen wore hats and ladies wore gloves...a celebration of style and glamour of another epoch. in portugal, during the 20s and 30s, there were many clubs and cafes that held writers, artists and intellectuals’ meetings… . we aim to recreate a retro-atmosphere associated with bohemian night life celebration where party and pleasure are priority: music, dancing, drinking and smoking, but also sordid and decadent atmosphere of cais do sodré. it was on its dark and dirty alleys, street corners and sidewalks, illuminated by neon light announcing bars with revered city names, where hooker ladies and their pimps, policemen, dockers and all kinds of clients hungry for emotions walked on by, where sailors brought in the first american rock 'n' roll records. all these spirits are invoked in the party!” (cais do sodré cabaret, general information – facebook account, 2012). at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cais do sodré neighbourhood was characterized by a sordid atmosphere. today, such sordidness has been re-signified into a vintage atmosphere associfig. 3. vintage design and consumption of distinction in the “ás de espadas” store, lisbon. source: loja ás de espadas © 2012. 114 fennia 191: 2 (2013)jordi nofre ated with a socially sanitized bohemian nightlife which is mainly oriented towards the local new middle classes. the next section shows how such a re-signified, distinguished vintage-like atmosphere has elitized a formerly decadent working-class urban nightscape. in doing this, this paper aims to observe how vintage style is socially recognizable and highly valued because of its commitment to a specific distinguished authenticity, which is largely inherited from the one that originated in the early twentieth-century european bohemia. what we could call a bohemianized distinction therefore seeks to be radically differentiated from the mass (and vulgar) leisure consumption. it thus becomes a mechanism for social distinction and the accumulation of cultural capital (bourdieu 1979). in short, josé luís borges’ argument about the task of humanity in turning memory into beauty has become a simulated reality, where the memory of decadence and sordidness seems to have been turned into a vintage-styled good for distinctive consumption. cais do sodré: gentrifying a decadent nightscape in downtown lisbon the democratization of lisbon’s nightlife after the salazar’s fascist regime has also involved a spatial displacement of marginal prostitution. today, this process has been reinforced, as reported by journalist clara silva (2011): “in pensão amor, there are still beds, cabinets, chairs and mirrors of the times when the building housed prostitution. in fact, they then run four hostels which rented rooms per hour to prostitutes and sailors arrived from various parts of the world who had docked for some days at cais do sodré. nowadays rooms can also be rented daily, weekly or monthly, but just to companies – which have nothing to do with prostitution.” in fact, the small bridge of rua do alecrim divides the nightlife area of cais do sodré into two parts (fig. 4). in its western area three newlyopened, vintage-styled venues (pensão amor, bar da velha senhora, and sol e pesca) offer a nightlife almost exclusively for the local and global new upper-middle classes. however, some of the young lower-middle classes (mostly local university students) also frequent these venues to avoid the sordidness that exists in the eastern side (informant 1), where small-sized traditional discotheques that opened in the beginning of the 1970s (jamaica, viking, europa bar, oslo bar, liverpool bar, copenhagen bar, and tokyo) continue to offer cais do sodré’s traditional nightlife: cheap beer, cut-rate liquors, aged prostitutes, drugs traffic (hashish and cocaine), the same classic hits from the 1970s sounding every night, the original indoor design, and so on. however, this decadent atmosphere is re-signified by some (white) upper-middle class adults, many of whom work in the fields of cinema, journalism, and tv serials (informant 2). for some of them, it just means remembering those nights spent there when they were younger; for others, it signifies a degraded nightlife full of drug dealers, aged prostitution, erasmus and local students, sordidness, and so on; all of which have been existing, but these adult riders of the night never interacted with them. they experience a nightlife flooded with controlled emotions in a safe atmosphere guaranteed by the venue’s security staff as well as by a significant number of secret police agents (informant 8). needlessly, nightlife has been a great battlefield in socially sanitizing – even gentrifying – the neighbourhoods of several cities worldwide, as has been previously argued. however, the case of the cais do sodre neighbourhood in downtown lisbon is of great interest in better understanding the hidden strategies carried out by local institutions. one example of this would be the pedestrianization of rua nova de carvalho. in a wide sense, such an intervention in a public space should not result in a great public discussion. however, in the late autumn of 2011 the city council decided to pedestrianize rua nova de carvalho, thus satisfying the demands of venue owners in contrast to the protests of lifelong neighbours who are organized in the association nós lisboetas (sobral 2012). in fact, the neighbours argued that the pedestrianization of rua nova de carvalho responded to the strategy of the city council of keeping and promoting nightlife as a relevant income source for the city. moreover, some informants interviewed in this research agreed by pointing out that the city council decided to paint in pink rua nova de carvalho street, the main street in the nightlife cluster of cais do sodré, to promote some kind of distinguished nightlife. when further asked about some convenient arrangement between the city council and the elitist pensão amor hostel, most informants considered that it seems there is an institutionally supported strategy of creating a new distinguished nightscape in the cais do sodré neighbourhood. it would not be risky to take such statements seriously, as the city counfennia 191: 2 (2013) 115“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown cil recently approved (on 24 april 2013) the urban regeneration plan of cais do sodré's waterfront side. in fact, the term “gentrification” did not appear when nightlife consumers were informally interviewed in loco. but, although such a term seems to be consciously avoided by much of the local media from lisbon, some publications have echoed such a regeneration of the nightscape of cais do sodré, as reported by clara silva (2011): “the bar that once attracted american sailors has given rise to the music box, one of the trendiest nightclubs in the capital which opened three years ago. dj battles, concerts and electronic music often attract a young, fashionable clientele and displaced prostitutes… . texas bar just left a neon cactus, abandoned in the dark wall of the rear of the music box.” however, the reconversion of cais do sodré cannot be completely understood without having in mind the role that the newly-opened pensão amor hostel plays in socially elitizing the urban nightscape of this neighbourhood of downtown lisbon. pensão amor occupies an old five-story building: the walls are painted in red, and there are chandeliers and lamps with trinkets, old pictures of seminaked slightly shy ladies in erotic poses, and wooden nineteenth century styled chairs all lending a vintage-style atmosphere to the whole building. its first floor is a multifunctional space where exhibitions, lectures, and book launches often take place, and it also has a small space to stand up while drinking a cocktail and listening to the dj session. fig. 4. cais do sodré, today. source:<http://blog.benetton. com/portugal/2012/02/01/caisdo-sodre-pink-connection/> (image 1, modified by the author). 116 fennia 191: 2 (2013)jordi nofre on the rest of the floors, rooms have been renovated to host creative artistic initiatives, including the management office of the queer lisbon festival (jerónimo 2011). besides, there is a cabaretstyled room decorated with antique chairs, where clientele can read, talk, and drink distinguishably (see fig. 5) in a socially sanitized space. (white) bouncers carry out the sanitation of the venue by applying discriminatory criteria based on ethnicity, class, and body appearance. in other words, blacks who migrated from the former portuguese colonies, gypsies, and anyone who does not appear to belong to the native born middle-upper classes is prohibited from entering the pensão amor hostel.3 the social sanitization carried out by the pensão amor’s bouncers has strong implications for policing cais do sodré’s nightlife as well as for how security in public spaces is being privatized; in other words, the way privatization and sanitation in public spaces are today gaining importance is an implication of that ecology of fear featured in the nightlife of most of the western cities (chatterton & hollands 2003). the bbc-travel channel recently reported pensão amor as “once a brothel, [it] had been reborn as an art space with a bordello-chic bar” (christiani 2012). the fact of labelling pensão amor as a bordello-chic bar reinforces the hypothesis that this venue is the most important agent in gentrifying nightlife in cais do sodré. furthermore, the use of the term “bordello-chic” suggests some changes in the meaning of the term “bohemia.” such changes refer to two dimensions of the term itself; that is, its spatial and behavioural dimension. first, pensão amor offers an indoor design space reminiscent of the bohemian nightclubs of the most culturally active world cities during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s such as, for example, chicago, paris, and new york. however, most of the changes in the meaning of the term “bohemia” refer to its behavioural dimension, and involve a new sanitized vision about what bohemia means. as argued by the portuguese journalist sancha trindade, “… with warm colours, hanging mirrors, an old piano and flooded with sexy photos of several decades ago, the seductive atmosphere alfig. 5. inside pensão amor: a detail of the first floor (top), and a performance by the pensão amor’s clientele who are quietly talking (3). source images (1, 3 & 4): pensão amor © 2012. source image (2) (top right): jordi nofre © 2012. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 117“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown ready confirms the future success of pensão” (trindade 2011). in that sense, pensão amor offers a socially sanitized menu of night-time elegance, predictable pleasure, and controlled fantasy for its clientele (fig. 6). however, if bohemianism, luxury consumption, new sexual and drugs experimentation, as well as youth culture and social informality have appeared as the most recognized social values during the interwar period in the twentieth century, then today’s meaning of bohemia has been socially sanitized. explicit desires for sexual experimentation shown through dress codes have become a taboo, while dress experimentation is also prohibited. on the other hand, the fact of explicitly belonging to any working-class youth subculture4 makes it very difficult to access pensão amor, which contrasts with the members of any (white) middle-class subculture, such as hipsters (informants 3 & 4). moreover, individual behaviours such as exultation, explicit happiness, laughing loudly, drink quickly, or sensual dancing are seen as inappropriate: “many african and brazilian dances often imply body exposure, and physical contact. it is awful” (informants 5, 6, 7). on the other hand, social informality that once featured at bohemian venues, where writers, journalists, and artists usually gathered, has given way to predictable, scripted de-politicized conversations. in the transformation of the bohemian into the vintage, glasses of wine, cocktails, and cigarettes still continue to decorate tables even after several decades, while political conversation has been eradicated. the vintage nightlife has been de-politicized, socially sanitized, and morally controlled. as argued by mikas, “many people join prostitutes and bars when they think of cais do sodré. we aim to take this popular knowledge that goes from the burlesque to the carbaret and to safely retain the aesthetic nature of the indoor space without it being irreverent” (mikas 2011, cited in silva 2011). final remarks mikas, together with nuno, ricardo, and joão nuno are the owners of bar da velha senhora (silva 2011), the other vintage-style nightclub located just on the ground floor of the pensão amor’s building. at the opening of pensão amor, they had counted on the financial and logistical support of mainside, a real estate company which also participated in the opening of the lx factory – a culfig. 6. some vintage-style flyers of pensão amor. source: pensão amor © 2012. 118 fennia 191: 2 (2013)jordi nofre tural production cluster recently opened in alcântara, one of the harbour neighbourhoods of the lisbon waterfront side such as cais do sodré – as well as in the inauguration of the lx boutique hotel in rua de alecrim, in front of pensao amor itself. the fact that real-estate company mainside owns pensão amor, bar da velha senhora, lx boutique hotel, and lx factory may reinforce the idea of the beginning of the process of gentrification in the cais do sodré neighbourhood, which is mainly characterized at the moment by elite night-time leisure activities. the pensão amor hostel and its popularity among the local upper-middle classes demonstrates the resilience and flexibility of local small-scale nightlife, and its importance in gentrifying and socially sanitizing downtown lisbon. in that sense, this paper has presented the first results of a 2-year ethnographic fieldwork study of urban changes and nightlife promotion in lisbon by describing the case of a newly emerged vintage-style nightlife in the former harbour quarter of cais do sodré (downtown lisbon). this paper has shown how such recentlyemerged nightlife is currently playing a key role in gentrifying the nightscape of this urban area, where the traditional nightlife is today being supplanted by vintage-style nightlife. to exemplify such a transformation, this paper has prioritized a significant place, the pensão amor hostel, which plays a key role in remaking a socially sanitized and morally controlled new nightscape, marginalizing everyone who is seen to be inappropriate, socially perilous, and unfit in the process of the city branding of lisbon: the authentic bohemia in cais do sodré continues to smell of salt and sweat, wine and sex. many authors have explored the different forms that gentrification has recently adopted around the world, by labelling it as post-industrial gentrification, new urban colonialism, and so on. the adjective 'post-industrial' does not matter here, but gentrification itself is a process of social sanitization and a violation of the right to the city as well. in studying the nightlife of cais do sodré, this paper has not pretended to analyse how its gentrification has occurred, but it has explored how customers consume its vintage-style aesthetics as a new form of social distinction, and how such consumption appears to be a mechanism for sanitizing cais do sodré’s nightlife. there are many common aspects of the way gentrification operates across the entire world; however, the social and cultural peculiarities of places involve gentrification adopting different aesthetics according to local distinctiveness. maybe we scholars should take into account again what loretta lees (2000) suggested regarding gentrification as the cure-all for inner-city ills that can verify the dullest natured politicians and technicians governing our cities. in short, here we would support what max haivens (2010) stated: “the financial crisis as a crisis of imagination”. today’s financial and real-estate crisis has provoked a situation where gentrification seems to be much more fragmented than a few years ago (mendes 2011). great urban transformations in downtown areas have given way to marginal gentrification that only takes place in some restricted parts of the city (rose 1984; mendes 2011). this does not mean that gentrification is on its last legs. as this paper has shown, in the case of the pensão amor hostel, some selected buildings have become agents of this newly-emerged marginal gentrification. we scholars should continue to explore how it is re-bordering urban inequalities in our post-industrial cities, where a sanitized nightlife is going to play a key role for a long time. notes 1 for two main reasons, not all of the participants have been quoted in this text. the first reason is obvious, as the editorial board of this journal limits the text length, and not all can be fitted in this paper. the second reason is that the research i present here will be part of a three-paper series on lisbon's nightlife to be published in the near future. 2 please, note that these pictures, which are part of the historical archive fund of lisbon have been downloaded from the forum “skyscrapercity”, one of the most important online forums on urban issues, because of restricted access to the portuguese national library of torre do pombo in 2010 and 2011 due to remodeling works. source (top image): <http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=563620&page=7>. source (bottom image): <http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread. php?t=563620&page=10> (both accessed on 4 january 2013). 3 nightlife segregation in lisbon may also be seen as a reflection of urban segregation in the portuguese capital. black lower-class immigrants who have arrived from former portuguese colonies are housed in poor housing conditions in segregated neighbourhoods (baptista 2011). hence, everyday segmented social practices include night-time leisure activities. 4 this paper does not intend to discuss the tension between youth subcultures, youth nightlife, and middle-class lifestyle, although some studies may consider that it is central to many cases where nightlife is promoted in the gentrification of areas. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 119“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown acknowledgements this work has been supported by the fundação para a ciência e a tecnologia de portugal (fct-sfrh/ bpd/63178/2009) and the centro de estudos de sociologia da universidade nova de lisboa (cesnova). i would like to also thank professor marc oliva (igot-ul) by his support in doing fieldwork as well as his ideas, reflections, discussions and “particular” points of view about nightlife. references atkinson r & brigde g (eds) 2008. gentrification in a global context: a new urban coionialism. routledge, new york. baptista l 2005. territórios lúdicos (e o que se torna lúdico um território): ensaiando um ponto de partida. fórum sociológico 13–14: 47–58. baptista l (ed) 2011. a construção da metrópole: segregação urbana e intervenção pública em lisboa (1950–2011). final project report. lisboa, cesnova, faculty of social sciences and humanities, new university of lisbon. berry bjl 1980. forces reshaping the settlement system. in bryce h (ed). cities and firms. lexington books, lexington. bourdieu p 1979. la distinction. éditions de minuit, parís. butler t 1997. gentrification and the middle classes. ashgate, aldershot. butler t 2007. for gentrification? environment and planning a 39: 1, 162–181. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/ a38472. castells m 2012. networks of outrage and hope. social movements in the internet age. polity press, new york. chatterton p & hollands r 2003. urban nightscapes: youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. routledge, new york. christiani k 2012. the rebirth of lisbon’s cais do sodré. bbc-travel channel. <http://www.bbc. com/travel/feature/20120320-the-rebirth-of-lisbons-cais-do-sodre> 8.3.2013. de la barre j 2010. music, city, ethnicity: exploring musical scenes in lisbon. migrações – special issue music and migration 7: 39–156. durão vcm 2012. reclaimed land: an urban analysis – the landfills in lisbon´s downtown and riverfront. journal of integrated coastal zone management 12: 1, 17−30. eurocities 2001. culture: the engine of the 21st century european cities. european commission, brussels. florida r 2000. the rise of the creative class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. basic books, new york. frança ja 2013. lisboa – historia física e moral. livros horizonte, lisboa. galtung j 1958. the social functions of a prison. social problems 6: 2, 127–140. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/sp.1958.6.2.03a00050. garnier jp 2010. une violence éminentmment contemporaine. essais sur la ville, la petite bourgeoisie intellectuelle & l’effacement des classes populaires. contre-feux agone, parís. glass r 1964. london: aspects of change. centre for urban studies and macgibbon and knee, london. goss j 2004. geography and consumption – i. progress in human geography 28: 3, 369–380. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1191/0309132504ph486pr. groves er 1916. moral sanitation. new york, association press. hael l 2011. dilemmas of the nightlife fix: post-industrialization and the gentrification of nightlife in new york city. urban studies 48: 6, 3449–3465. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0042098011400772. haivens m 2010. the financial crisis as a crisis of imagination. cultural logic: an electronic journal of marxist theory & practice 17. hamnett c 1973. improvement grants as an indicator of gentrification in inner london. area 5, 252–61. hamnett c 2003. gentrification and the middle-class remaking of inner london 1961–2001. urban studies 40: 12, 2401–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.108 0/0042098032000136138. hamnett c & randolph b 1984. the role of landlord disinvestment in housing market transformation: an analysis of the flat break-up market in central london. transactions of the institute of british geographers 9, 259–79. hamnett c & randolph b 1986. tenurial transformation and the flat break-up market in london: the british condo experience. in smith n & williams p (eds.). gentrification of the city, 121–152. allen and unwin, boston. hannerz u 1980. exploring the city. towards an urban anthropology. columbia university press, new york. hannigan j 1998. fantasy city: pleasure and profit in the postmodern metropolis. routledge, new york. jerónimo a 2011. cais do sodré é sexy! pensão amor, bar da velha senhora e o povo: a troika de bares que veio arrasar a noite lisboeta, ruadebaixo 76. <http://www.ruadebaixo.com/cais-do-sodresexy-como-nunca.htmlhttp://www.ruadebaixo. com/cais-do-sodre-sexy-como-nunca.html> 26.3.2012. lees l 1994. gentrification in london and new york: an atlantic gap? housing studies 9: 2, 127–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02673039408720783. lees l 2000. a reappraisal of gentrification: towards a ‘geography of gentrification. progress in human geography 24: 3, 389–408. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/030913200701540483. lees l & bondi l 1995. de/gentrification and economic recession: the case of new york city. urban geography 16, 234–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.16.3.234. 120 fennia 191: 2 (2013)jordi nofre lefebvre h 1968. le droit à la ville. anthropos, paris. ley d 1980. liberal ideology and the postindustrial city. annals of the association of american geographers 70, 238–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1980.tb01310.x. ley d 1986. alternative explanations for inner-city gentrification. annals of the association of american geographers 76, 512–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1986.tb00134.x. ley d 1997. the new middle class and the remaking of the central city. university press, oxford. ley d 2003. artists, aestheticisation and the field of gentrification. urban studies 40: 12, 2527–2544. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0042098032000136192. maeckelbergh m 2012. mobilizing to stay put: housing struggles in new york city. international journal of urban and regional research 36: 4, 653–673.http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01120.x. manchester literary & philosophical society 1888. memoirs and proceedings of the manchester literary & philosophical society. mendes l 2006. a nobilitação urbana do bairro alto: análise de um processo de recomposição sócioespacial. finisterra 41, 57–82. mendes l 2011. cidade pós-moderna, gentrificação e produção social do espaço fragmentado. cadernos metrópole 26, 473–495. migone a 2007. hedonistic consumerism: patterns of consumption in contemporary capitalism. review of radical politics economics 39: 2, 173–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0486613407302482. miraftab f 2007. decentralization and entrepenurial planning. in beard va, miraftab f & silver c (eds.). planning and decentralization: contested spaces for public actions in the global south, 21–35, routledge, new york. musterd s & van weesep j 1991. european gentrification or gentrification in europe. in van weesep j & musterd s (eds.). urban housing for the better-off: gentrification in europe, 11–16. stedelijke netweken, utrecht. nofre j 2011. youth policies, social sanitation, and contested suburban nightscapes. in perrone c, manella g & tripodi l (eds). research in urban sociology 11. emerald group publishing. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1108/s1047-0042(2011)0000011015. nofre j & feixa c 2013. policies of inclusion? some thoughts on the ‘los indignados’ movement, the emerging of the neoliberal penal state and the criminalization of ‘being young’ in southern europe. in rethinking urban inclusion, _cescontexto_/debates 2. university of coimbra press, coimbra (portugal). <http://www.ces.uc.pt/publicacoes/cescontexto/ficheiros/cescontexto_debates_ii.pdf> 5.5.2012. nofre j & martin j 2009. ocio nocturno, gentrificación y distinción social en el centro histórico de sarajevo [nightlife, gentrification, and social distinction in downtown sarajevo]. anales de geografía de la universidad complutense de madrid 29: 1, 91–110. ritzer g 1993. the mcdonaldization of society. pine forge press, thousand oaks, ca. ritzer g 1998. the mcdonaldization thesis: explorations and extensions. sage, london. ritzer g 2010. enchanting a disenchanted world: continuity and change in the cathedrals of consumption. sage, new york. rosa l 2010. loja vintage: ás de espadas. le cool magazine lisboa, october 2010. <http://spoiledmilk.lecool.com/lisboa/pt/2627?show_share_ panel=true> 12.4.2012. rose d 1984. rethinking gentrification: beyond the uneven development of marxist urban theory. environment and planning d: society and space 2: 1, 47–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d020047. savage m & butler t 1995. social change and the middle classes. routledge, london. silva c 2011. cais do sodré. os novos inquilinos chegam à pensão amor e ao bar da velha senhora [cais do sodré. new dwellers arriving at pensão amor and bar da velha senhora]. ionline, 10 november 2011. smith n 1979a. toward a theory of gentrification: a back to the city movement by capital not people. journal of the american planning association 45, 538–548. http.//dx.doi.org/10.1080/01944367908977002. smith n 1979b. gentrification and capital: practice and ideology in society hill. antipode, a radical journal of geography 3: 2, 24–35. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1985.tb00346.x. smith n 1996. the new urban frontier: gentrification and the revanchist city. routledge, new york. smith n 2002. new globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy. antipode 34: 3, 4 2 7 – 4 5 0 . h t t p : / / d x . d o i . o r g / 1 0 . 1 1 1 1 / 1 4 6 7 8330.00249. sobral c 2012. o cais do sodré mudou e os moradores não estão a gostar. público, 7 april 2012. stearms aw 1936. the evolution of punishment. journal of criminal laws and criminology 27: 2, 219–230. thornton s 1995. club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital. polity press, cambridge. thrasher fm 1926. the gang: a study of 1313 gangs in chicago. university of chicago press, chicago. trindade s 2011. hoje, beijo-te lisboa [today, i kiss you, lisbon]. vogue magazine, 17 november 2011. vangby b & jensen ob 2009. from slum clearance to urban policy: discourses and doctrines in dannish inner city redevelopment. housing, theory & society 19: 1, 3–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/140360902317417895. veenhoven r 2003. hedonism and happiness. journal of happiness studies 4, 437–457. http://dx.doi. org/10.1023/b:johs.0000005719.56211.fd. wacquant l 2008. the militarization of urban marginality: lessons from the brazilian metropolis. international political sociology 2, 56–74. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00037.x. fennia 191: 2 (2013) 121“vintage nightlife”: gentrifying lisbon downtown walker c & fincham b 2011.techniques of identity governance and resistance: formulating the neoliberal worker in work and the mental health crisis in britain. john wiley & sons, cichester. weatherly ug 1926. haiti: an experiment in pragmatism. american journal of sociology 32: 3, 353–366. welch m 2009. punishment in america: social control and the ironies of imprisonment. sage, thousand oaks, ca. whyte wf 1943. the street corner society. university of chicago press, chicago. williams p 1976. the role of institutions in the inner london housing market: the case of islington. transactions of the institute of british geographers 1, 72–82. wilson d & grammenos d 2005. gentrification, discourse, and the body: chicago's humboldt park. environment and planning d: society and space 23:2, 295–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/ d0203. wynne d & o’connor j 1998. consumption and the postmodern city. urban studies 35: 5–6, 841– 64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0042098984583. zukin s 1982. loft living: culture and capital in urban change. rutgers university press, new jersey. zukin s 2009. naked city: the death and life of authentic urban places. oxford, new york. untitled landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands and analysing of habitat pattern in an agricultural landscape in south-west finland tuuli toivonen and miska luoto toivonen, tuuli and miska luoto (2003). landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands and analysing of habitat pattern in an agricultural landscape in south-west finland. fennia 181: 1, pp. 49–67. helsinki. issn 00150010. decision-making in land-use and conservation planning requires relevant and good quality information over wide areas, collected in a cost-efficient manner. this study focuses on the use of medium-resolution satellite imagery in landscape level studies of habitat pattern, particularly in fragmented agricultural landscapes. we analysed the suitability of multi-temporal landsat tm images in habitat mapping, in particular for the discrimination of semi-natural grasslands. the results showed that even patchy agricultural mosaics can be coarsely mapped with landsat tm and that the use of multi-temporal imagery notably improves the classification results. the best classification result (total accuracy 89%) was achieved with early spring, midsummer and late summer images combined. the classification accuracy for semi-natural grasslands was relatively low overall (63%), but over 90% of large (> 1 ha) patches were discriminated. furthermore, we compared a set of landscape composition and structure indices calculated from 1) a landsat tm -based habitat classification (25 m resolution) and 2) a habitat map derived from aerial photographs (2 m resolution). the compositional indices, diversity index and patch sizes gave similar results on both scales. finally, the habitat pattern of the study area was described using the calculated compositional, structural and environmental indices, and three main landscape types were identified. tuuli toivonen, department of geography, university of turku, fin-20014 turku, finland; miska luoto, finnish environment institute, research programme for biodiversity, fin-00251, helsinki, finland. e-mail: tuuli.toivonen@utu.fi, miska.luoto@ymparisto.fi. ms received 12 november 2002. introduction european and national environmental regulations frequently necessitate the nation-wide assessment of land cover changes and biodiversity, and monitoring of the effects of political decisions on landscape level. good decision-making from the biodiversity viewpoint inevitably requires reliable environmental, habitat and species data and a rigorous understanding of species-habitat relationships for their interpretation (margules & austin 1991; scott et al. 1993). owing to this, there is an increasing need for novel broad-scale mapping methodologies of diversity at the habitat to the species level, and the related environmental conditions (nagendra & gadgil 1999; gould 2000; griffiths & mather 2000; stoms 2001). the overall landscape pattern influences biotic diversity and the flow of species and energy (turner 1989; turner & gardner 1991; forman 1995). based on this idea, and on the continuous development of computing systems, landscape quantification has become an increasingly popular means of collecting habitat information over wide areas (o’neill et al. 1988; macgarigal & marks 1995; cain et al. 1997; gustafson 1998; tischendorf 2001). the measures of landscape structure and habitat composition have, in addition to abiotic conditions, been shown to be related to species diversity and the occurrence of rare species 50 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto in a certain area as different landscape types support different amounts and differently specialised species (see e.g., hill & keddy 1992; petit & usher 1998; natuhara & imai 1999; luoto 2000a). good examples are available of the use of such surrogate measures in directing research efforts, making conservation plans and modelling species diversity or the occurrence of certain species (mladenoff et al. 1995, duelli & obrist 1998; luoto et al. 2002a, 2002b). the quantification of landscapes for analysis or modelling purposes requires a relevant habitat map as a basis. ready-made land cover products are, however, often either unavailable or do not have a suitable nomenclature or temporal or spatial scale for ecological monitoring. therefore, remote sensing is commonly used to obtain habitat information (see e.g., mladenoff et al. 1997; debinski et al. 1999). in comparison to the use of traditional aerial photographs or new high-resolution satellite imagery, medium-resolution sensors currently provide the most cost-effective data for habitat classifications over wide areas. biodiversity studies put, however, a particular pressure on the land cover classifications: habitats important from the biodiversity viewpoint generally occur as small and complex-shaped patches and are thus difficult to map using medium-resolution sensors. several authors have discussed the use of medium-resolution imagery in biodiversity studies from the habitat to the species level (stoms & estes 1993; debinski et al. 1999; nagendra 2001). examples are available on analysing landscape heterogeneity (riera et al. 1998; pan et al. 2001), species occurrence and richness (de merode et al. 2000; griffiths et al. 2000) and conservation status (scott et al. 1993; gonzales-rebeles et al. 1998), mainly using landsat tm. most of these examples operate, however, at the regional scale, while fewer studies utilise medium-resolution habitat maps in a meso-scale approach (luoto et al. 2002a, 2002b). in the finnish agricultural landscapes, semi-natural grassland is one of the most threatened habitat types but at the same time it is the most essential for maintaining biodiversity (rossi & kuitunen 1996; pykälä 2000; rassi et al. 2001). therefore, reliable spatial information on this habitat type is crucial for attempts to quantify or describe finnish agricultural landscapes from ecological, conservation and land use planning perspectives (see e.g., luoto 2000a; luoto et al. 2002b). although most of the valuable semi-natural grasslands in finland have been mapped for conservation purposes (pykälä et al. 1994; lehtomaa 2000), studies on the distribution of this habitat type as such, and on its occurrence within a habitat mosaic have concentrated on limited study sites only (jutila 1997; kontula et al. 2000), and no methodology have been presented for the collection of landscape level information of this rare habitat type that often occurs in small patches. generally, multi-temporal images, vegetation indices and image transformations are used to improve classification of habitats based on medium-resolution imagery (riera et al. 1998; hardy & burgan 1999; de merode et al. 2000). in the literature, few examples on mapping patchy seminatural grassland habitats using space-borne remote sensing exist (e.g., basham et al. 1997; debinski et al. 1999), and none are available on the use of multi-temporal, medium-resolution imagery for mapping the small semi-natural grasslands of northern europe. this study aims to test whether landsat tm images can be used for mapping fragmented agricultural landscapes of finland. in addition, we aim to provide information on the significance of multi-temporality of images in the classification of habitats and, in particular, semi-natural grasslands. furthermore, the usability of a landsat tm -based habitat map in the quantification of landscape characteristics at the meso-scale (500 by 500 m analysis units) is evaluated by comparison with quantifications of the same characteristics based on more detailed data. additionally, the study aims to provide a characterisation of an agricultural landscape in sw finland using landscape indices and to analyse the distribution pattern of semi-natural grasslands within the study area. more specifically, the study focuses on the following four questions: 1) can the semi-natural grasslands of sw finland be mapped using landsat tm satellite imagery? 2) does the use of multi-temporal imagery notably improve habitat discrimination? 3) how well can the landscape be quantified using landscape indices when a landsat tm based habitat map is used in comparison to a habitat map based on aerial photographs? 4) how are semi-natural grasslands distributed and what is the overall habitat pattern like? fennia 181: 1 (2003) 51landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… study area the study area covers catchment areas of the rivers uskelanjoki and halikonjoki between the towns of salo and somero in sw finland. the total area is approximately 900 km2 and lies at 60°19'–60°39'n and 22°50'–23°4'e (fig. 1). the mean monthly temperature in january is –6.5 °c and in july, 16.7 °c. the mean annual temperature and the mean annual precipitation are 4.8 °c and 645 mm, respectively (climatological statistics… 1991). the landscape is characterised by flat clay plains occupied by agriculture and scattered woodland-covered hills. the bedrock in the area is predominantly granite (simonen 1987) with pronounced ne–sw and nnw–sse orientated fractures. the thickness of superficial deposits reaches 30 m in places and is generally at least 20 m (aartolahti 1975). the rivers have eroded channels into the deposits forming steep-sided (5°–30°) river valleys up to 25 m deep. as the walls of the river valleys are mostly composed of clay, landslides occur frequently along the river. the hydrological system of the area consists of two main rivers, the rivers halikonjoki and uskelanjoki, their catchment areas accounting for 306 km2 and 566 km2 of the study area, respectively (hydrological yearbook 1992). the main courses of the rivers follow the bedrock fracture lines. few lakes of the area are small (ca. 2 km2 in size). according to the division of vegetation zones in finland, the study area is situated on the border between the hemiboreal and southern boreal zones (kalliola 1973). many demanding southern herb and tree species are found only in these regions in finland. generally, south-western finland is agriculturally the most favourable part of the fig. 1. location of the study area in sw finland. the light grey on the main map indicates the area covered by clay deposits. rectangular areas in the northern part of the study area indicate the borders of the rekijoki habitat map used in the study. the northern and southern parts of the maps were used for training the classifier while the middle part was reserved for accuracy assessment of the result. 52 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto country due to its relatively mild climate and fertile soil conditions. therefore, the cultivated areas dominate the landscape. methods the study included four main steps (fig. 2): 1) data pre-processing and calculation of vegetation indices, 2) classification of satellite imagery and testing the effect of using multi-temporal data and vegetation indices, 3) calculation of landscape indices and assessment of their usability, 4) analysis of the geographical location of semi-natural grasslands, characteristics of the study area and structural and compositional habitat diversity. step 1: data pre-processing three landsat tm mini scenes from different dates during the growing season of 1999 were obtained. the scenes were acquired on 18 april, 28 june and 30 july, with the effective temperature sums of 0, 600 and 1000, respectively (finnish meteorological institute 1999a, 1999b, 1999c). the area of the mini scenes (50 km by 50 km) was selected to cover the entire basin of the rivers uskelanjoki and halikonjoki, the centre of the area being at 60°30'n and 23°17'e. the images were obtained from paths 189 and 190 and row 18 in the landsat world reference system. national and local gis data sets were used to support the preprocessing and classification of images (table 1). the most important of these was a detailed habitat map produced over the rekijoki area (see the map limits in fig 1.) digitising of the habitat boundaries in the rekijoki map was made using aerial low altitude photographs at the scale 1:4000 (for more details, see luoto 2000b). the landsat tm images were rectified to each other using a 25 metre pixel size. the june image was used as a reference and after rectification all images were stacked to form an 18 layer image (all landsat tm bands from the three dates excluding the thermal band 6). thereafter, the image stack was georefenced to a universal transverse mercator map projection and to the finnish coordinate system (ykj). the centroids of small lakes and ponds visible in the digital base map were used as ground control points. in both cases the rectification was performed using a first order polynomial transformation and the nearest neighbour resampling method in order to retain the original pixel values. the root mean square error of the first rectification was 0.47 pixels, corresponding to ca. 10–15 metres on the ground. comparison fig. 2. the main processing steps ( ) of the study plus the source and result data sets ( ). numbers 1–4 refer to the processing steps presented in the text. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 53landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… with the digital base map and the rekijoki map proved the quality of the rectification to be satisfactory. three widely recognised vegetation indices were calculated for each image (table 2). furthermore, waters were masked away from the images using the normalised differential vegetation index ndvi for the june image and supervised parallelepiped classifier. step 2: classification tests twelve different classification tests were performed with the landsat tm data (table 3). the tested combinations were chosen to evaluate the importance of multi-temporal satellite imagery and vegetation indices for classification of seminatural grasslands and main habitat types. in order to focus testing to the source data rather than the classification method, the actual classification was always carried out in a standard way: using supervised classification and applying the maximum likelihood classifier (swain & davis 1978). identified habitat classes semi-natural grasslands were the primary targets of the classification tests. however, we also wanted the classification results to be of use in the evaluation of landscape structure and compositable 1. national and local gis data sets used for the image processing. data set format resolution/scale coverage source* base maps vector / raster 1:20 000, 2m entire country nls digital elevation model (dem) raster 25m entire country nls catchment area divisions vector n/a entire country fei soil map raster 25m entire country gsf rekijoki habitat map vector / raster 1:4000, 2m rekijoki, 26.25 km2 luoto 2000b * nls = national land survey, fei = finnish environment institute, gsf = geological survey of finland table 2. vegetation indices calculated for each image with reference information. index name abbrev formula source simple ratio vegetation index sri/svi tm4/tm3 jordan (1969) normalised differential vegetation index ndvi (tm4-tm3)/(tm4+tm3) rouse et al. (1973) optimised soil adjusted vegetation index osavi (tm4-r)/(nir+r+0.16), with the rondeaux et al. (1996) constant 0.16 adjusted for clay soils table 3. classification tests performed with different landsat tm image and band combinations, and vegetation indices. the thermal band 6 was not included in any of the data sets. test data set number of bands in data set test 1 june image, all bands 6 test 2 april and june images, all bands 12 test 3 june and july images, all bands 12 test 4 april and july images, all bands 12 test 5 april, june and july images, all bands 18 test 6 the 3 bands for each image that offer the best separability: 9 april image, bands tm3, tm4, tm5 june image, bands tm2, tm4, tm7 july image, bands tm3, tm5, tm7 test 7 the 3 best bands for all images: april (tm3), june (tm4) and july(tm3) 3 test 8 ndvi of all images 3 test 9 ndvi and april (tm3), june (tm4) and july (tm3) 6 test 10 ndvi + test 5 data set 21 test 11 svi + test 5 data set 21 test 12 osavi + test 5 data set 21 54 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto tion in the area. in other words, the classes needed to be ecologically meaningful in order to allow the distribution and structure of habitats to be evaluated. after consideration, the following 6 habitat classes were selected: 1) arable land, including managed cereal and fodder fields and pastures mostly treated with fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides, as well as fallow fields. 2) semi-natural grasslands, including areas dominated by herbaceous sedge (carex spp.) and grass (poaceae) species. in the finnish classification of traditional biotopes (vainio et al. 2001), these habitats are defined as being natural pastures and meadows maintained by mowing. in this study, we have also included abandoned grasslands to this group on the basis of their similar species composition. 3) deciduous woods, comprising closed woodlands dominated by broad-leaved deciduous tree species, mainly birches (betula pendula and b. pubescens), grey alder (alnus incana) and aspen (populus tremula). 4) other woodlands, comprising several forest types, mainly coniferous forests, where the predominant species are generally norway spruce (picea abies) and scots pine (pinus sylvestris), as well as mixed forests. felled areas, plantations and mires were also included in this class. 5) water class, comprising of aquatic habitats, i.e. sea bays and lakes. 6) built-up area, covering areas with man-made surface materials present, like buildings, roads, etc. training the classifier the ground truth for the classification training and testing was derived from the rekijoki habitat map. to avoid mixed pixels in the training and testing stage caused by the different scales of the training data and landsat tm, only the central areas of habitat patches were used. to separate the patch core areas, a negative buffer of 15 metres was created around each habitat patch. thereafter, the patch core areas of rekijoki map were converted to a raster grid with a pixel size of 2 metres to be used in the training and testing. the 22 original habitat classes were reclassified into the six habitat types used in this study, as presented in table 4. the area covered by the rekijoki map was divided into three parts (fig. 1). the northern and table 4. the final habitat classification with 6 classes (middle column), and the groupings in the rekijoki habitat map (left column) and the 10-classes initially identified in the satellite image classifications (right column). original classes of rekijoki map 6-class system used in this study subclasses used temporarily in classification cultivated field arable land crop cultivation fallow field hay / fodder stock yard set-aside meadow semi-natural grassland semi-natural grassland moist river meadow extensive pasture deciduous forest deciduous woods deciduous woods tree or bush groups coniferous forests other woodlands felled area/plantation mixed forests mixed/coniferous forest plantation mire felling mire stone blocks rock outcrops farmyard built-up area built-up area barn local road farm road electric line water water water fennia 181: 1 (2003) 55landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… southern parts were used for ground truthing the satellite image classification, while the central part provided quality control data. some classes of the selected nomenclature, namely arable land and other forests, contained substantial internal variation in satellite imagery. therefore, these two habitat classes were first each divided into three sub-classes for which ancillary field data was available. the sub-classes were used in the training process and later re-grouped according to the main classification as presented in table 4. additionally, as the rekijoki map contained only small amounts of water surfaces and built-up areas, training areas for these two classes were delineated also outside the map area, using topographical maps for ground truthing (nls 1992, 1998, 1999a, 1999b). before the classification, the separability of the spectral signatures was assessed using jeffriesmatusita distances (erdas 1995; richards 1996) and the contingency using a contingency matrix (erdas 1995). rather than effecting the delineation of training areas, this information was used to define data sets to be used in tests 6 and 7. accuracy assessment the evaluation process used for the classification results is presented in fig. 2. the first evaluation of the classification result was done visually using topographic maps at the scale 1:50 000 scale as a reference (nls 1992, 1998, 1999a, 1999b). since some of the maps were several years old and mapping intentions had been different from ours, more attention was paid to the accuracy of the patterns of the dominant land cover types, agriculture and woodland, than to the minor types, such as grasslands and deciduous woods. most test results were rejected at this stage. accepted results were further evaluated by a pixelwise comparison with the central area of the rekijoki map. error matrices were used to evaluate the omission and commission of different classes. the total classification accuracy, or map accuracy, was determined by dividing the number of correctly classified pixels by the total number of all classified pixels (richards 1996). the classification result to be used in further analyses was selected based on this measure. finally, all semi-natural grassland patches over one hectare in area that were present in the final classified map were checked in the field in order to verify that they had been correctly identified, as well as to compare their extents and shape with the classification result. even the best classification result had individual falsely classified seminatural grassland pixels in the middle of agricultural fields. we used the digital field element of the finnish base maps in scale 1:20,000 to mask these speckles of semi-natural grassland away before further use of the habitat classification. step 3: quantification of the landscape to evaluate the usefulness of the landsat tm based habitat map for quantifying agricultural landscapes in sw finland, 6 compositional and 5 structural indices were used (table 5). as noted by e.g., cain et al. (1997), no simple set of statistical indicators can fully capture the complexity of ecosystems and characterise the landscape. in the selection of structural indices we followed the suggestions of luoto (2000a), while composition was defined as being the amount of each habitat type present in the analysis grid (see e.g., gustafson 1998). as noted by turner (1989), the indices describing spatial pattern are dependent on the extent of the area in which the measurements are made. thus, analysis units of equal size were chosen in order to eliminate error caused by the scale dependence of the spatial variables (see also luoto 2000a, 2000b). the study area was divided into 500 m by 500 m grid squares. a total of 3481 grid squares covered the catchment areas of the rivers uskelanjoki and halikonjoki. 105 of these squares overlapped with the rekijoki habitat map. using these 105 squares we tested how dependent the selected landscape indices were on the source material. all indices were calculated first for all 3481 squares using the landsat tm -based habitat map and then, again, for the 105 overlapping grid squares also using the rekijoki habitat map. the six compositional indices, each representing the total area of a certain habitat type in the classified image, were calculated using arcinfo software. for calculation of the selected structural indices we used fragstats software (macgarigal & marks 1995). similar settings to those used by luoto (2000a) were applied in calculation. the edge area width was set to 0 and the cell size was the same as in the data used (25 m). 56 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto comparison of indices calculated from different source data sets the usefulness and quality of the indices calculated from the landsat tm -based data with a 25 metre pixel size was evaluated by correlating them with indices calculated from the rekijoki habitat map with 2 metre pixels. the correlations were calculated using the 105 grid squares for which both kinds of source data were available using spearman’s rank correlation coefficient, r s . a bivariate correlation coefficient, which compared ordered lists of grid squares, was considered superior to other measures, such as the pearson correlation coefficient, r p , because the aim was to measure the similarity of the high and low values, and not the absolute magnitude of the indices. r s was calculated for the 5 structural indices and 4 of the habitat compositional indices. water and built-up areas were left out from the analyses due to their low occurrence in the rekijoki area. step 4: characterisation of habitat pattern and location of semi-natural grasslands using measures of structure and composition in order to evaluate the relation between the habitat distribution patterns and topographic and soil variation, we derived two topographic and one soil variable (table 5). the topographic variables were calculated for each grid square from the national digital elevation model (nls 1995) using arc/info software. slope was calculated in degrees from the digital elevation model. relative altitude was defined by subtracting the minimum from the maximum elevation within each grid square. the predominant soil type was derived from soil data of the geological survey of finland (gsf 1996). spatial variation in the habitat composition and structure of the landscape was analysed visually using thematic maps. furthermore, in order to evaluate the spatial pattern, including possible corridor-like structures formed by semi-natural grasslands, an additional variable was calculated table 5. indices calculated from classified satellite image and the rekijoki habitat map, together with additional environmental variables. index name description habitat composition arable land the total area of arable land within analysis grid. semi-natural grassland the total area of semi-natural grassland within analysis grid. deciduous woods the total area of deciduous woods within analysis grid. other woodland the total area of other woodland within analysis grid. water the total area of water within analysis grid. built-up area the total area of built-up area within analysis grid. habitat structure mean patch size, mps measures the average patch size within the analysis grid* mean shape index, msi measures the average perimeter-to-area ratio of patches* area weighted msi, awmsi measures the average msi of patches, but weights more large than small patches* nearest-neighbour standard deviation, measure of patch dispersion. the magnitude is function of the mean nnsd nearest-neighbour distance and variation in nearest-neighbour distance among patches* shannon’s diversity index, shdi measures the composition of habitats by combining richness and evenness of habitat types within the analysis grid* environmental variables mean slope maximum slope within the analysis grid. relative altitude the difference between the highest and the lowest altitude. maximum slope maximum slope within the analysis grid. soil type the predominant soil type within the analysis grid * macgarigal & marks (1995). fennia 181: 1 (2003) 57landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… by summing the area of semi-natural grasslands in an 8-neighbourhood around each grid square (see also riitters et al. 1997). this calculation produced a very simple index of the concentration of semi-natural grasslands. ecologically, this kind of measure of concentration reflects the amount of certain important habitat within a certain distance of any grid square (see e.g., verboom et al. 1991; hanski 1999). the proximity of semi-natural grasslands to the river network, as well as their occurrence in relation to topography and soils was analysed using overlay analysis and buffering in gis. for each patch of semi-natural grassland, mean slope angle and dominant soil type were defined using a digital elevation model (nls 1995) and soil data (gsf 1996). furthermore, a buffer zone of 200 metres was built around the rivers to see how commonly patches were found close to the river network. the area of semi-natural grasslands within this zone was compared to its total coverage throughout the study area. results habitat map accuracy most of the classification test results were abandoned after the visual evaluation of quality. the results of tests 2, 5 and 10 were considered good enough for further evaluation rounds. additionally, despite their obviously poorer quality, the results of tests 1, 3, and 4 were selected for quantitative testing to gain insight into the advantages of using multitemporal data for image classification. table 6 shows the classification accuracy for each habitat type using different temporal data combinations. the advantages of multitemporal data are seen when the classification results of tests 1, 2 and 5 are compared. the total accuracy and the discrimination of habitat types were highest in test 5 where all bands of all three images were used. classification accuracy declined when only two images were used (tests 2 to 4). a comparison of these tests indicated that if only two images can be used, the best overall classification accuracy is obtained by using spring and midsummer images. however, the discrimination of semi-natural grasslands is best with combination of midsummer and late summer images. with the latter combination, however, the classification accuracy of deciduous woodland is rather poor (34%). the decline in total accuracy is clear (from 89% to 74%) when only one image is used. the addition of indices calculated from pixel values (ndvi, svi or osavi) did not improve the classification result, and in some cases even impaired it. the overall classification accuracy of the best classification (test 5) was 89 %, as compared with the test areas in the rekijoki habitat map. the results show that the predominant habitat types, arable land and other woodland, are over-represented, while small, and in this case ecologically important habitats, namely semi-natural grasslands and deciduous woodlands, are under-represented (table 7). deciduous forests were mixed up in the classification with other woodlands and also, in places, with semi-natural grasslands. semi-natural grasslands were mixed up to some extent with all other classes, particularly with other woodlands. the accuracy of the built-up area class was poor (27%) and of natural habitats, large rock outcrops, ditched mires and sandpits had been classified as built-up area. field checks based on the results of the classification test 5 showed that the overall classificatable 6. a comparison of the results of classification tests employing different combinations of landsat tm data. the best classification result is indicated in bold. test data set arable semi-natur. dec.woods other woods built-up total test 1 june image 76% 54% 42% 82% 23% 74% test 2 april and june images 86% 57% 50% 87% 24% 85% test 3 june and july images 87% 59% 34% 77% 26% 81% test 4 april and july images 84% 60% 50% 75% 22% 79% test 5 april, june and july img. 91% 63% 47% 87% 27% 89% test 10 test 5 images +ndvi 93% 60% 44% 86% 27% 88% 58 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto tion accuracy of large (> 1 ha) patches of seminatural grassland was satisfactory: of 150 fieldchecked patches of semi-natural grassland, 140 were classified as semi-natural grassland also in situ. within these, however, habitat quality varied from poor fallow-like patches to dry and mesic meadows. in most cases the patch shape and elongation in the classified image corresponded to reality. equivalence of landscape metrics the comparison of landscape metrics calculated from the classified satellite image and the rekijoki map showed significant correlation (fig 3). the correlation coefficients of habitat compositions were significant in all classes, and were particularly high for indices of the dominant classes, arable land and other woodland, and less so for indices of smaller habitat types deciduous forests and semi-natural grassland. the structural indices, however, showed a larger variation in correlations: mean patch size (mps) and the diversity index (shdi) showed significant and high correlations between the two resolution, while the mean shape index (msi) and the neighbourhood index (nnsd) correlated more weakly, the correlation of nnsd being 0.125. since this measure was not statistically significant, it was left out of the characterisation of the habitat pattern within the study area. habitat pattern within the study area the most predominant habitat types in the area were arable land and other woodlands. combined, these classes occupy almost 90% of the study area. the rest, ca. 10%, is divided between the other habitat types. arable lands are concentrated on the flat clay plains, particularly in the central part of the study area along the river uskelanjoki, while forests occupy the topographically higher areas in the east and west (fig. 4). the entire landscape is, however, a mosaic of these land cover types, although areas with agricultural or forest dominance can be identified. deciduous forests have a fragmented distribution across the entire study area and no clear concentrations are found. built-up areas are mostly found in association with the city of salo and villages along the rivers halikonjoki and uskelanjoki. the habitat structure of the study area is presented in fig 5. mean patch size (msp) is largest in the arable areas and near the eastern and western edges of the study area where continuous woods are present. thus, the low values coincide with river valleys and areas where woods and agriculture are evenly distributed. the mean shape indices (msi and awmsi) have their highest values along the river valleys where elongated habitat patches are present. the diversity index, shdi, reflects the richness and evenness of habitat types within the analysis grids. the highest values are concentrated along the rivers, where patches of semi-natural grassland and deciduous woods are present. additionally, the index gives high values in places where other rare habitat types like builtup areas or waters occur. selection of just the 5% of grids with the highest shdi values showed even more clearly that these “hotspots” of habitat diversity are found near the rivers. a particularly high concentration of these high diversity grid squares is found in the region of rekijoki in the northern part of the study area. location of semi-natural grasslands semi-natural grasslands have a corridor-like distribution in the study area (fig. 4). over 40 % of the semi-natural grasslands are located within 200-metres of the main rivers, although these table 7. pixel level classification accuracy of natural and semi-natural habitat types in the classification result of test 5. the central part of the rekijoki habitat map was used as reference data. rererence data arable land semi-nat. gr. deciduous forests other forests total arable land 91% 8% 5% 2% 106% semi-natural grassland 5% 63% 10% 2% 80% deciduous woods 1% 14% 47% 7% 69% other woodland 2% 16% 38% 87% 143% c la ss if ic at io n fennia 181: 1 (2003) 59landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… fig 3. spearman’s rank correlation (r s ) of the structural and compositional indices calculated from 105 grid squares of classified landsat tm imagery (x-axis) and the rekijoki habitat map (y-axis): a) arable land, b) semi-natural grassland, c) deciduous woodland and d) other woods, e) mean patch size in hectares (mps), f) mean shape index (msi), g) area weighted mean shape index (awmsi) and h) shannon’s diversity index (shdi). **p < 0.01. buffer zones cover only 17 percent of the entire study area. the patch level examination showed that there were, altogether, 150 separate patches of semi-natural grassland one hectare or more in size. the largest single patch found was 19 ha in size, and the second largest was 13 ha. in all, only 6 patches were more than 10 ha in size. most of the largest patches are located along the river uskelanjoki or its tributaries, and particularly along the river rekijoki. an overlay of semi-natural grasslands and soil data showed that all large patches (≥ 1 ha) are located in clay areas surrounded by arable lands. in general, semi-natural grasslands are often found on relatively steep 60 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto slopes: 32 percent of the patches are located on slopes with an inclination of 5° or more. this varies, however, between different river valleys: in the upper branches of the river halikonjoki nearly all semi-natural grasslands are situated on flat surfaces, while near the river mouth of uskelanjoki and halikonjoki, steep slope patches are more common. also the neighbourhood analysis revealed that there are more continuous stretches of semi-natural grassland along the length of the river uskelanjoki and the southern part of the river halikonjoki (fig. 6). discussion multitemporal imagery in habitat mapping medium-resolution satellite images have been widely used to obtain habitat maps for landscape fig. 4. distribution of the main habitat types in the study area based on the satellite image classification. a) arable land, b) semi-natural grassland, c) other woodland and d) deciduous woods. note that the range divisions are not equal in all maps. ecological and biogeographical research (riera et al. 1998; debinski et al. 1999; de merode et al. 2000; griffiths et al. 2000; pan et al. 2001). the properties of any habitat map used as the basis for landscape studies strongly affect the landscape quantifications or modelling exercises. generally, the acquisition and processing of remotely sensed material is a significant investment for research projects and thus, the data and acquisition dates need to be carefully considered. the results of this study support the assumption that multitemporal data greatly improve the discrimination of habitat types at least in areas where seasonal changes are apparent. different data combinations seemed, however, to be optimal for the discrimination of different habitat types, depending on the phenological characteristics of vegetation type in question. as can be expected, coniferous and deciduous forests had a higher separability when a spring image from the time before leafing fennia 181: 1 (2003) 61landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… etation, namely osavi, yielded poorer results in this study. in our classification tests, vegetation indices were used together with band-wise reflectance values, which resulted in a high number of variables. if fewer variables, i.e. images or bands, were available, vegetation indices might result in the expected improvement of the classification accuracy. although the summer of 1999 was generally sunny, our analysis was restricted to just three cloud-free images from the same growing season. ideally, in order to collect unambiguous information on the phenological development of the spectral signatures of different habitat types and on the optimal time to acquire remotely sensed images during the growing season, a systematic analysis using a spectrometer should be conducted (see e.g., price 1994). fig. 5. structural patterns of the study area presented by mean patch size in hectares (mps), mean shape index (msi), area weighted mean shape index (awmsi) and shannon’s diversity index (shdi). was introduced. discrimination of arable lands and semi-natural grasslands was largely based on their reflectance differences in the near-infrared area and was facilitated by the inclusion of the late summer image. this seems to be due to the ripening of the cereals, which changes the reflectances more pronouncedly than the coincident drying of semi-natural grasslands. contrary to our expectations, the calculation of the ratio or vegetation indices from the source data did not improve the classification result, although their benefits have widely been acknowledged (jensen 1986; eldvidge & chen 1995; rondeaux et al. 1996). ndvi has been widely criticised for being strongly affected by the background soil properties, especially when the vegetation is low and relatively sparse, as in arable areas and semi-natural grasslands (eldvidge & chen 1995). however, the index designed for low veg62 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto fig 6. the amount of semi-natural grassland within an 8-neighbourhood presented as smoothed contours. the base map shading indicates the dominance of the main habitat types. the cross-section images sketch the variation of shdi (line) and topography in three river valleys marked with a), b) and c). the grey shading indicates clay soil, while the dotted crosssection symbolises higher variation in soil types. accuracy of the produced habitat map when using satellite images as the source data for habitat maps, some uncertainties are to be expected. in our results the misclassification of habitat types was common among habitat types with similar reflectance, as well as those with high internal variation (see e.g., mladenoff et al. 1997). this explains the relatively low classification accuracies for internally highly variable small habitat types, in particular deciduous woods. we had expected from the outset that only patches larger than one pixel (900 m2) in size would be discriminated from the image. however, even larger patches may have been left out of the classification owing to the patch shape, elongation, location in relation to pixel boundaries, or to the sensor properties (stoms 1992; fisher 1997; cracknell 1998). rectangular spatial units seldom match the true shape or size of natural objects (fisher 1997; cracknell 1998). the shape and elongation issue is particularly relevant when mapping corridorlike habitats (kalliola & syrjänen 1991; cracknell 1998), such as the semi-natural grasslands in our study area. if the patch width is constantly smaller than pixel width, the patch may be missing from the classification, or it may appear more fragmented than it is in reality. varying topography of the river valleys even accentuates the problem: when viewed from above, a patch located on a steep slope appears smaller than it really is and may, therefore, be too small to be distinguished. in addition, owing to the movement of the sensor, the reflectances recorded for a certain pixel are influenced by the reflectance of its neighbourhood (fisher 1997), which can be a considerable factor, particularly in the case of small habitat patches. moreover, when using multispectral and multi-temporal data, the blending between adjacent pixels is pronounced because pixels in different bands of an image or several images seldom overlap completely (cracknell 1998). fennia 181: 1 (2003) 63landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… despite the problems related to sensor and pixel properties, almost all large patches of semi-natural grassland in the study area could be correctly classified. from an ecological and conservation viewpoint, large patches of rare habitats are the most valuable (macarthur & wilson 1967; verboom et al. 1991) and thus, the result is encouraging. the introduction of object-orientated classification methods, like segmentation, instead of pixel-based ones, could lead to more reliable classification results of even smaller habitat patches in a fragmented landscape (see e.g., cortijo & perez de la blanca 1998; kilpeläinen & tokola 1999; stuckens et al. 2000; mäkelä & pekkarinen 2001). landscape indices luoto (2000a, 2000b) and hietala-koivu (1999) have used habitat maps based on aerial photos to describe the habitat pattern and diversity of agricultural areas in finland. although recent examples of the use of coarser data exist as well (see e.g., luoto et al. 2002a, luoto 2002b), the scale dependency and the effect of different source data on landscape indices has been unclear. several authors have investigated the effect of scale on landscape structural and compositional metrics by changing the resolution of the same original source data (see e.g., wickham & riitters 1995; cain et al.1997; riitters et al. 1997). in this study, however, data sets were acquired from different sources at different scales and thus represent a more normal situation. as supposed on the basis of other studies (see e.g., wickham & riitters 1995), compositional indices were less sensitive to changes in pixel size than structural indices. they are dependent not only on scale but even more clearly on the classification accuracy, as is demonstrated by the poor correlation of deciduous woods. the results suggest that landscape compositional indices calculated from relatively coarse source data could be used at the mesoscale with analysis units of 500 by 500 metres as well as indices measured from spatially more detailed data. of all the structural indices tested the most general and widely used landscape structure indices (shdi and mps) had the highest bivariate correlation, whereas the correlation between the more specific ones (nnsd, awmsi, msi) was much weaker. shape indices suffered from the inevitable replacement of curvy edges with stepped ones when coarser data were used. shapes and patch lengths are not biased equally, but they vary depending on the patch orientation in relation to that of pixels. in diagonal directions, straight lines are represented as stepped boundaries, whereas in vertical and horizontal directions boundaries remain straight. on the other hand, the poor correlation between nnsd values was expected as patch dispersion changes dramatically when the smallest patches are left out. no such problems are present with compositional indices, mps or shdi, which simply measure the size of areas (macgarigal & marks 1995; wickham & riitters 1995; cain et al. 1997). our results show that the landsat tm data can well capture landscape characteristics on a mesoscale and thus, provide a very useful and costefficient data source for analyses. landscape index values are highly dependent on the habitat classes used in the source data (macgarigal & marks 1995; cain et al. 1997), but they seem to tolerate rather well the changing resolution of the source data. semi-natural grasslands and general habitat pattern in the entire study area the distribution of the predominant habitat types seems to be related to soil types while the habitat diversity is related both to topography and soil conditions. if the results of the landscape pattern analysis are viewed holistically, the study area seems to have three main landscape types. there is a vertical belt of intensive agricultural areas with high habitat diversity following the course of the rivers uskelanjoki and rekijoki (the example area a in fig. 6). the valleys of these rivers are steep and landslides occurring frequently in the clay soils provide new ground for succession (kontula et al. 2000; luoto 2000a). as shown by mean patch size (mps), habitat patches are smaller than on average and their diversity (shdi) is higher. semi-natural grasslands still exist as a remnant of traditional agricultural practices and have been spared mainly because they have been difficult to utilise for present-day cultivation practises. river valley slopes with steep angles, in particular, have been left uncultivated due to the risk of erosion and the inconvenience involved in their management. although the amount of semi-natural grasslands is exceptionally high compared to an average agricultural landscape in finland, they 64 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto are nevertheless fragmented and the distances between the larger patches may be several kilometres. thus, rather than creating a continuous ribbon of “stepping stones”, semi-natural grasslands form several spatially separated concentrations along the rivers. this could eventually lead to isolation and an increasing extinction risk for populations of species specialised to this habitat type (verboom et al. 1991; hanski 1994; hanski 1999). traditional management in the form of grazing and clearing of tall vegetation is needed to maintain the habitat diversity. additionally, with a relatively small management effort it may be possible to restore some recently forested grasslands, and consequently increase the habitat level diversity. landscapes of intensive agriculture with low habitat diversity (the example area b in fig 6) are mainly found in the upper reaches of the river halikonjoki, where on average less steep slopes have made it possible to plough the fields right up to the rivers, as well as in the middle of the agricultural plains further away from the main rivers. owing to the gentle topography, the less steep river valleys and the flat clay plains probably lack the micro-climatological variation and extremes occurring in topographically more heterogeneous landscapes. patches are simple and geometric in shape and large in size. thus, the landscapes are characterised by modern agricultural land uses of high productivity but low ecological value. in these areas, widespread restoration of a more heterogeneous habitat pattern would probably be a time-consuming task. agriculture-woodland mosaics are present near the mouths of the rivers uskelanjoki and halikonjoki (the example area c in fig. 6), as well as in the watershed areas further from the river valleys. in these mosaics woodlands form the predominant habitat type although arable land is well represented. these areas contain most of the settlements of the study area but also considerable areas of semi-natural grassland. the high compositional habitat diversity reflects the mosaic of small patches and the presence of all six habitat types. topography varies strongly, mainly due to the bedrock and moraine formations near watersheds but also because river valleys are steep sloped. the habitat types are more equally represented than in other landscape types. additionally, several soil types are present, which probably contribute to the diversity of these areas. conclusions the study aimed to analyse the usefulness of multi-temporal landsat tm images in the mapping of semi-natural grasslands and habitat patterns in an agricultural landscape in sw finland. our results showed that the general habitat patterns of a fragmented landscape can be mapped using landsat tm imagery. additionally, at least large patches of semi-natural grasslands can be reliably mapped using landsat tm images. multi-temporal images, where available, can significantly improve the classification results. furthermore, the results showed that a landsat tm -based habitat map can be used as a reliable source of landscape quantifications at meso-scale, particularly for habitat composition and general measures of structure that operate with patch sizes rather than with their shape. to conclude, a similar approach using medium-resolution imagery and landscape indices to characterise landscape pattern and identify main landscape types might be useful for planning of more detailed research, in directing of conservation or management efforts, or in monitoring changes in the landscape. acknowledgements we would like to thank risto kalliola for his critical comments concerning the manuscript and mirkka jones for correcting our english. the gis and remote sensing unit of the finnish environment institute provided support and facilities at the analyses stage and during the preparation of the first versions of the manuscript. the finnish biodiversity research programme, fibre, financially supported the study. references aartolahti, t (1975). the morphology and development of the river valleys in southwestern finland. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae 4 a iii. basham mm, aje pinder iii & gc kroh (1997). a comparison of landsat thematic mapper and spot multispectral imagery for the classification of shrub and meadow vegetation in northern california, u.s.a. international journal of remote sensing 18, 3719–3728. cain dh, k riitters & k orvis (1997). a multi-scale analysis of landscape statistics. landscape ecology 12, 199–212. climatological statistics in finland 1961–1990 (1991). supplement of the meteorological yearfennia 181: 1 (2003) 65landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… book of finland. finnish meteorological institute, helsinki. cortijo fj & n perez de la blanca (1998). improving classical contextual classifications. international journal of remote sensing 19, 1591–1613. cracknell ap (1998). synergy in remote sensing – what’s in a pixel? international journal of remote sensing 19, 2025–2047. debinski dm, k kindscher & me jakubauskas (1999). a remote sensing and gis-based model of habitats and biodiversity in the greater yellowstone ecosystem. international journal of remote sensing 17, 3281–3291. de merode e, k hillman-smith, a nicholas, a ndey & m likango (2000). the spatial correlates of wildlife distribution around garamba national park, democratic republic of congo. international journal of remote sensing 21, 2665–2683. duelli p & mk obrist (1998). in search for the best correlates for local organismal biodiversity in cultivated areas. biodiversity and conservation 7, 297–309. eldvidge cd & z chen (1995). comparison of broad-band and narrow-band red and near-infrared vegetation indices. remote sensing of environment 54, 38–48. erdas (1995). erdas imagine field guide. 3rd edition. erdas, usa. finnish meteorological institute (1999a). huhtikuun 1999 sää. ilmastokatsaus 4/96. ilmatieteen laitos, helsinki, finland. finnish meteorological institute (1999b) kesäkuun 1999 sää. ilmastokatsaus 6/96. ilmatieteen laitos, helsinki, finland. finnish meteorological institute (1999c) heinäkuun 1999 sää. ilmastokatsaus 7/96. ilmatieteen laitos, helsinki, finland. fisher p (1997). the pixel: a snare and a delusion. international journal of remote sensing 18, 679– 685. forman rtt (1995). land mosaics: the ecology of landscapes and regions. cambridge university press. gonzales-rebeles c, vj burke, md jennings, g ceballos, & nc parker (1998). transnational gap analysis of the rio bravo/rio grande region. photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing 64, 1115–1118. gould wa (2000). remote sensing of vegetation, plant species and regional diversity hotspots. ecological applications 10, 1861–1870. griffiths gh & pm mather (2000). remote sensing and landscape ecology: patterns and landscape change. international journal of remote sensing 21, 2537–2540. griffits gh, j lee & bc eversham (2000). landscape pattern and species richness; regional scale analysis from remote sensing. international journal of remote sensing 21, 2685–2708. gsf (1996). digital soil data with 25 meter resolution. geological survey of finland. gustafson ej (1998). quantifying landscape spatial pattern: what is the state of the art? ecosystems 1, 143–156. hanski i (1994). a practical model of metapopulation dynamics. journal of animal ecology 63, 151–162. hanski, i. (1999). metapopulation ecology. oxford series in ecology and evolution. oxford university press, oxford. hardy cc & re burgan (1999). evaluation of ndvi for monitoring live moisture in three vegetation types of the western u.s. photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing, 65, 603–610. hietala-koivu r (1999). agricultural landscape change: a case study in yläne, southwest finland. landscape and urban planning 46, 103–108. hill nm & pa keddy (1992). prediction of rarities from habitat variables. ecology 73, 1852–1859. hydrological yearbook 1992 (1995). vesi-ja ympäristöhallitus, helsinki jensen jr (1986). introductory digital image processing: a remote sensing perspective. prentice hall. englewood cliffs, new jersey. jutila h (1997). vascular plant species richness in grazed and ungrazed coastal meadows, sw finland. annales botanici fennici 34, 245–263. kalliola r (1973). suomen kasvimaantiede. 308 p. wsoy, helsinki. kalliola r & k syrjänen (1991). to what extent are vegetation types visible in satellite imagery? annales botanici fennici 28, 45–57. kilpeläinen p & t tokola (1999). gain to be achieved from stand delineation in landsat tm imagebased estimates of stand volume. forest ecology and management 124, 105–111. kontula t, l lehtomaa & j pykälä (2000). someron rekijokilaakson maankäytön historia, kasvillisuus ja kasvisto. suomen ympäristö 306. lehtomaa l (2000). rural biotopes of sw finland. regional environmental series 160. southwest finland regional environment centre, turku. luoto, m (2000a). modelling of rare plant species richness by landscape variables in an agriculture area in finland. plant ecology 149, 157–168. luoto, m (2000b). spatial analysis of landscape ecological characteristics of five agricultural areas in finland by using gis. fennia 178, 15–54. luoto m, m kuussaari & t toivonen (2002a) modelling butterfly distribution based on remote sensing data. journal of biogeography 29, 1027– 1038. luoto m, t toivonen, & r heikkinen (2002b). prediction of total and rare plant species richness from satellite images and gis data in agricultural landscapes. landscape ecology 17, 195–217. macarthur rh & oe wilson (1967). the theory of island biogeography. princeton university press, princeton. maccarigal k & b marks (1995). fragstats: spatial pattern analysis program for quantifying landscape structure. fragstats * arc manual. 66 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tuuli toivonen and miska luoto mäkelä h & pekkarinen a (2001). estimation of timber volume at the sample plot level by means of image segmentation and landsat tm imagery. remote sensing of environment 77, 66–75. margules cr & mp austin (1991). nature conservation: cost effective biology surveys and data analysis. csiro, canberra, australia. mladenoff dj, ta sickley, rg haight & ap wydewen (1995). a regional landscape analysis and prediction of favorable gray wolf habitat in the norther great lakes region. conservation biology 9, 279–294. mladenoff dj, gj niemi & ma white (1997). effects of changing landscape pattern and usgs land cover data variability on ecoregion discrimination across a woodland-agriculture gradient. landscape ecology 12, 379–396. nagendra h (2001). using remote sensing to assess biodiversity. international journal of remote sensing 22, 2377–2400. nagendra h & m gadgil (1999). satellite imagery as a tool for monitoring species diversity: an assessment. journal of applied ecology 36, 388– 397. natuhara y & c imai (1999). prediction of species richness of breeding birds by landscape-level factors of urban woods in osaka prefecture, japan. biodiversity and conservation 8, 239–253. nls (1992). topographic map 1:50 000, sheet 2024. national land survey, helsinki. nls (1995). digital elevation model. national land survey, helsinki. nls (1998). topographic map 1:50 000, sheet 2022. national land survey, helsinki. nls (1999a). topographic map 1:50 000, sheet 2021. national land survey, helsinki. nls (1999b). topographic map 1:50 000, sheet 2023. national land survey, helsinki. o’neill rv, jr krummel, rh gardner, g sugihara, b jackson, dl deangelis, bt milne, mg turner, b zygmunt, sw christensen, vh dale & rl graham (1988). indices of landscape pattern. landscape ecology 1, 153–162. pan d, g domon, d marceau, & a bouchard (2001). spatial pattern of coniferous and deciduous forest patches in eastern north america agricultural landscape: the influence of land use and physical attributes. landscape ecology 16, 99–110. petit s & mb usher (1998). biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: the ground beetle communities of woody uncultivated habitats. biodiversity and conservation 7,1549–1561. price jc (1994). how unique are spectral signatures? remote sensing of the environment 49, 181–186. pykälä j, a alanen, m vainio & a leivo (1994). perinnemaisemien inventointiohjeet. vesija ympäristöhallituksen monistesarja 559. vesija ympäristöhallitus, helsinki. pykälä, j (2000). mitigating human effects on european biodiversity through traditional animal husbandry. conservation biology 14, 705–712. rassi, p, a alanen, t kanerva & i mannerkoski. (eds) (2001). suomen lajien uhanalaisuus 2000. ympäristöministeriö & suomen ympäristökeskus, helsinki. richards ja (1996). classifier performance and map accuracy. remote sensing of environment 57, 1616–166. riera, j. l., j. j. magnuson, j. r. vande castle and m. d. mackenzie (1998). analysis of large-scale spatial heterogeneity in vegetation indices among north american landscapes. ecosystems 1, 268– 282. riitters kh, rv o’neill & kb jones (1997). assessing habitat suitability at multiple scales: a landscape level approach. biological conservation 81, 191–202. rondeaux g, s michael & f baret (1996). optimization of soil adjusted vegetation indices. remote sensing of environment 55, 95–107. rossi e & m kuitunen (1996). ranking of habitats for the assessment of ecological impact in land use planning. biological conservation 77, 227– 234. rouse jw, rh haas, ja schell & dw deering (1973). monitoring vegetation systems in the great plain with erts. nasa sp-351 1, 309–317. scott mj, fdb csuti, r noss, b butterfield, c groves, h anderson, s caicco, f d’erchia, tc edwards, j ulliman & rg wright (1993). gap analysis: a geographic approach to protection of biological diversity. wildlife monographs 123, 1–41. simonen a (1987). pre-quarternary rocks. 1:1 000 000. atlas of finland 123–126 (1990) geology, map appendix 1. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. stoms dm (1992). effects of habitat map generalization in biodiversity assessment. photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing 58, 1587– 1591. stoms dm & je estes (1993). a remote sensing research agenda for mapping and monitoring biodiversity. international journal of remote sensing 14, 1939–1860. stoms dm (2001). gap management status and regional indicators of threats to biodiversity. landscape ecology 16, 235–254. stuckens j, pr coppin & me bauer (2000). integrating contextual information with per-pixel classification for improved land-cover classification. remote sensing of environment 71, 282–296. tischendorf l (2001). can landscape indices predict ecological processes consistently? landscape ecology 16, 235–254 swain ph & sm davis (1978). remote sensing: the quantitative approach. mcgraw-hill. turner mg (1989). landscape ecology: the effect of pattern on process. annual review of ecology and systematics 20, 171–197. turner mg & rh gardner (1991). quantitative methods in landscape ecology: an introduction. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 67landsat tm images in mapping of semi-natural grasslands… in turner mg & rh gardner (eds). quantitative methods in landscape ecology, 3–13. ecological studies 82. springer-verlag, new york. vainio m, h kekäläinen, a alanen & j pykälä (2001): suomen perinnebiotoopit. perinnemaisemaprojektin valtakunnallinen loppuraportti. suomen ympäristö 527, 1–165. verboom j, k lankester & jaj metz (1991). linking local and and regional dynamics in stochastic metapopulation models. in gilpin me & i hanski (eds). metapopulation dynamics, 149–156. academic press, london. wickham jd & kh riitters (1995) sensitivity of landscape metrics to pixel size. international journal of remote sensing 16, 3585–3594. temporal injustice and re-orientations in asylum reception centres in norway: towards critical geographies of architecture in the institution urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa84758 doi: 10.11143/fennia.84758 temporal injustice and re-orientations in asylum reception centres in norway: towards critical geographies of architecture in the institution ragne øwre thorshaug and cathrine brun1 thorshaug, r. ø. & brun, c. (2019) temporal injustice and re-orientations in asylum reception centres in norway: towards critical geographies of architecture in the institution. fennia 197(2) 232–248. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.84758 a temporal injustice is inherently built into the asylum-seeking system. asylum seekers lack control over their biographical and their everyday time. in norway, most asylum seekers live in reception centres while their applications are processed. this article develops a conceptual framework for understanding the asylum centre by drawing on geographical literature on architecture and contributions from migration studies on temporality. it analyses the ways in which the reception centre becomes a focal point in the asylum seekers’ lives and how people’s lived experiences, the asylum institution and the materiality of the buildings housing the centres come together in the particular temporalities produced by the asylum-seeking process. people’s agentic capacities within institutional and material structures are conceptualised as ‘orientations’. the paper analyses the lived experience of residents in three different reception centres in norway. the temporal frames operating in the reception centres are expressions of power that produce blurred, uncertain and clashing temporalities. in this context, the reception centre operates as a material disorientation device where institutional durability, temporary dwelling and decaying as well as sub-standard materialities are significant aspects of the asylum seekers’ experience. however, some residents are able to re-orient their perspective and find ways of coping with the uncertainty and waiting. these strategies are identified as ‘reorientations’ to show how the governance and the inhabitation in the centres come together and how people engage with the reception centre through stubborn everyday strategies of inhabiting the centre. in conclusion, the paper reflects on the limited possibility that improving the material conditions may have for a better experience of the asylum-seeking process: it is the interaction between the material, the institution and the lived experience that creates the temporal injustice. keywords: asylum seekers, temporal, material, institutional, orientations, norway ragne øwre thorshaug, department of architecture and planning, norwegian university of science and technology, alfred getz veg 3, 7492 trondheim, norway. e-mail: ragne.thorshaug@ntnu.no cathrine brun, centre for development and emergency practice (cendep), school of architecture, oxford brookes university, headington campus, oxford ox3 0bp, united kingdom. e-mail: cbrun@brookes.ac.uk © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 233fennia 197(2) (2019) ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brun introduction asylum seekers’ experiences are distinguished by uncertainty and lack of control over own time. their lives are largely put on hold while the asylum application is processed. in norway, while waiting for the outcome of the application, people are housed in reception centres, buildings generally not built for long-term living, often overcrowded and substandard and where people mostly share bedrooms and facilities with other residents. the centres range from former institutional buildings such as hospitals or educational institutions, hotels, apartment buildings or bedsits and an extensive use of residential buildings termed ‘decentralized accommodation’ (strumse et al. 2016). inspired by work within the geographies of architecture we seek to conceptualise and develop a framework for how to understand the role of the reception centres by exploring how people’s lived experiences, the institution and the materiality of the buildings come together in the particular temporalities that are produced by the asylum-seeking process. time and temporality have received increased attention in social sciences and geography. migration studies, especially focusing on asylum seekers, advanced this academic discussion considerably (cwerner 2001, 2004; griffiths 2014; fontanari 2017; bas & yeoh 2019; khosravi 2019). the article brings together the critical geographies of architecture and studies on temporality in the asylumseeking process through an exploration of the different and largely clashing temporalities that the asylum seekers’ experience and that the institution as well as the physical structures of that institution represent. our work is positioned within the field of geographical research on architecture and contributes to expand the field in a number of ways (lees 2001; kraftl & adey 2008; kraftl 2010; rose et al. 2010; lees & baxter 2011; moran et al. 2016). first, the geographies of architecture have only to a limited extent addressed the institutionalised and politicised dimensions of buildings such as reception centres. by bringing in the asylum-seeking experience as an interaction between the nature of the institution and the buildings housing it, the article contributes to a discussion of the critical and political potential in geographical research on architecture as called for by kraftl (2010). we do this by providing a more explicit understanding of the power, control and justice embedded in the types of buildings and the accompanying institution. our second contribution is to introduce a nuanced notion of temporality into the geographies of architecture by unpacking “the active and embodied engagement with the lived experience” of the reception centres (lees & baxter 2011, 108). existing debates on theorising the role of the subject in experiencing architecture has focused on the role of emotion and affect (kraftl & adey 2008) and on the capacity of the subject to contextualise their experiences (rose et al. 2010). these insights help to explore how asylum seekers’ lived experiences in buildings are shaped by the precarious temporalities produced in the interaction between the material and social spaces in the reception centre. people’s active engagements are conceptualised as ‘orientations’ (ahmed 2006, 2010) that people make in order to navigate the spatial, temporal, material and institutional dimensions of the reception centres. inspired by fontanari’s (2017) notion of ‘temporal injustice’ we consider how the times experienced in the material, institutional and lived architecture of the reception centres disrupt people’s temporal perspectives in both everyday and biographical time. at the same time, asylum-seekers resist and negotiate these forms of governance by employing material and temporal strategies in their efforts to re-orient within the centre. the article analyses ethnographic material gathered by the lead author through case studies in three different asylum centres from may 2014 to august 2015. fieldwork was conducted over three to four weeks in each centre and focused on the residents’ experiences of living in a reception centre using participatory observation, auto-photography and qualitative in-depth interviews with asylum seekers and staff. the ethnographically inspired approach involved daily visits to the centres, and in one of them, living in a decentralised apartment next to two asylum-seeking families. visiting people where they lived, being invited into their rooms, drinking coffee, cooking, eating and chatting were important engagements which helped to get a sense of everyday life in the reception centres. the project was approved by the norwegian centre for research data (nsd). careful considerations were made regarding how to relate to the asylum seekers in order to negotiate practical ethical concerns such as power imbalances, the role of the researcher and the purpose of the research, making sure 234 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) that people were comfortable participating, and that people did not feel abandoned when the researcher left. observations were documented in extensive field notes. some interviews were recorded and transcribed but most were conducted without a recorder, with notes from the interviews written out at full length shortly after they took place. the next sections first set out how to integrate a temporal frame with the critical geographies of architecture to conceptualise the asylum seekers’ experiences with and orientations from the material environment and asylum institution. ‘orientations’ is conceptualised as the analytical device to understand the agentic capacities that may develop in the centres. the asylum centres where we worked and the norwegian context are then described before we analyse the various ways in which residents experience and negotiate institutional, material and temporal dimensions through disorientations and reorientations. in conclusion, we reflect on the consequences of integrating a time dimension into the geographies of architecture for a more just asylum system. orientations in the reception centre: conceptualising the critical geographies of architecture in the institution this section develops an analytical framework by conceptualising the institution, the material buildings and its temporality within a wider discussion of the geographies of architecture. we suggest adopting ‘orientations’ as our main analytical device to place the agentive capacities of the individuals at the centre of our approach. the asylum reception centres are both an institution and a material space performing the country’s asylum policy (szczepanikova 2012): they are socio-spatial formations enabling processes of governance and bordering through the everyday lives they engender (fontanari 2015; nettelbladt & boano 2019). the centres constitute an internal national border (fassin 2011) and the experience of the centres becomes an ‘arrival in-between’ (thorshaug 2018) where people are prevented from entering the norwegian society fully before their asylum application has been processed and a decision made. academic literature captures the nature of institutions for asylum seekers in a variety of contexts (solheim 1990; seeberg et al. 2009; conlon 2010; valenta & berg 2010; mountz 2011; bosworth 2014; griffiths 2014; fontanari 2015). reception centres for asylum seekers represents a diverse category owing to their spatial, material and institutional differences (zill et al. 2019). common sources of inspiration, however, contribute to analyse the centres as states of exception (agamben 1998), detention-like camps and liminal places (vitus 2011; bosworth 2014). countering this is an increasing academic body of work that shows the importance of the particularities of national and local asylum policies for the ways that asylum accommodation materialises on the ground across europe (hinger et al. 2016). similarly, work on carceral geography has emphasised the potential for agency within constraining environments (mountz 2011; gill et al. 2013) and emerging scholarship within critical migration studies reflects the regulation of migration as a constellation by both state and non-state actors and how migration is not just a dependent variable but a social force in itself (tsianos & karakayali 2010). hence, the norwegian asylum centres may be better understood as accomplishments rather than pre-given entities (philo & parr 2000) in which there is a focus on migrant agency in constituting the asylum regime: seeing the asylum-seeking process as co-produced in the relations between various actors and processes without letting go of the power asymmetries involved. with this ‘constellar’ approach and the emphasis on the migrants and asylum seekers role in coproducing the experience of reception centre, we turn to a critical geography of architecture. this strand of work emphasises how buildings and human experiences of them are produced through a coming together or ‘assemblage’ of several forces such as political institutions, materiality, discourses and lived experiences (rose et al. 2010). rather than taking ‘assemblage’ as our ontological starting point (brenner et al. 2011), we position our work in the humanistic tradition of understanding the reception centres as “meeting points, moments or conjunctures, where social practices and trajectories, spatial narratives and moving or fixed materialities meet up and form configurations that are continuously under transformation and negotiation” (simonsen 2008, 22). we suggest that the ‘throwntogetherness’ of the reception centre is represented through the interactions of materiality, the institution and people’s lived experiences, and the particular temporalities 235fennia 197(2) (2019) ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brun produced in this meeting point (massey 2005; kraftl & adey 2008). the reception centre is then a relational space in which its materiality is porous (kaika 2004), where different temporalities meet and people negotiate and contribute to constitute the asylum institute and border practices through the multiple and diverse ways in which they experience, negotiate and inhabit the conditions of the centres. temporality emerges as a fundamental dimension through which the power of the centre acts and imposes itself on subjects (sharma 2014; fontanari 2015). temporal forms present in the centres may be conceptualised as ‘durational time’ (measured by clocks and calendars) that affect people’s everyday time and practices; ‘biographical time’ connecting an individual’s past, present and possible futures; and, ‘institutional time’ focusing on the particular enduring and changing practices of governance and the durability and intentions embedded in the material building (browne 2014; brun 2015). the ways in which these different temporalities come together may be understood as a clashing of temporalities due to the incommensurability of the different temporal forms which often lead to an experience of ‘suspended temporality’ reproduced in two registers (ramadan 2013): external processes related to the juridical-political order of the state, and internal cultural, social and political orders formed in the centre. the suspended temporality is a consequence of a particular way of governing and a particular way of negotiating the experience of the asylum institute which leads to an unequal temporal access to resources and power (khosravi 2019) resulting in asylum seekers living in a situation characterized by uncertainty and waiting where several, often contradictory experiences of time come together (cwerner 2001, 2004; brekke 2004; conlon 2011; mountz 2011; vitus 2011; griffiths 2014; brun 2015; fontanari 2017). ways of forcing people into prolonged waiting is eloquently described by khosravi (2019) as 'stolen time' and by fontanari (2017) as 'temporal injustice'. we define this temporal injustice as an injustice that deprives individuals of control over and access to decisions that influence their everyday time and their future lives and at the same time render their biographies invisible (fontanari 2017). we consider the temporal injustice of everyday time, biographical time and institutional time central to the spatio-temporal experience and practice of being an asylum seeker in relation to the physical structures of the asylum reception centres in norway. the everyday experiences of asylum seekers are embodied encounters with the migration regime. in sketching out a research agenda for a critical geography of architecture, lees (2001, 56) calls for geographers to explore how the built environment is both shaped and given meaning through active, embodied and socially negotiated “practices through which architecture is actually used, appropriated and inhabited”. this involves addressing how people think about and interpret buildings as well as exploring the practices that people perform within and around buildings as part of their everyday life and as political-economic imperatives (kraftl 2010; lees & baxter 2011; moran et al. 2016). recent approaches to theorising the relation between people and the built environment through actornetwork approaches and affect have been criticised for expressing an uninterest in the human and to have largely omitted the agentive capacities and reflexivity that people can bring to bear on buildings (rose et al. 2010). with a human-centred approach to our understanding of materiality “the experiential dimensions of social life” becomes “a precondition for critical analysis” (simonsen 2013, 23), emphasising how affects and emotions are expressed and performed and actively mobilised in people’s orientations in relation to the buildings and the institutions they house (simonsen 2008; ahmed 2010; rose et al. 2010; lees & baxter 2011). bringing in a broader temporal perspective helps us see the institutional temporalities in the asylum context as mentioned above and how people’s orientations is about creating pasts and futures through inhabiting the grounds of the present (ahmed et al. 2003). the active envisioning involved in the subjects’ projective agency may be termed 'agencyin-waiting' (brun 2015) to denote the capacity to act in the present – in everyday-time: an indication of how people live and manage to orient themselves when the past and the future are hard to reach. people are actively and intentionally oriented towards certain objects – physical objects, “but also objects of thought, feeling, and judgment, or objects in the sense of aims, aspirations and objectives” (ahmed 2010, 246). these orientations shape people’s experiences: ‘orientations’ is our analytical device in this endeavour to allow for further theorisation of the role of the subject in experiences of buildings (ahmed 2006). orientations represent a wider appreciation of agentic capacities by emphasising the experiences people have in, of and about buildings (rose et al. 2010). it is a way of 236 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) showing how people actively engage with feelings and ideas while at the same time maintaining materiality within the explanatory frame (lees & baxter 2011). by analysing the interactions between the ‘structuring forces’ that govern asylum seekers and how people navigate the institution and materiality through their orientations, we can then “give agency a fuller place alongside structure in the analysis of state effects” (gill 2010, 638). ‘orientations’ is a tool for analysing how subjects interact with objects, spaces and temporalities that direct subject’s orientations in particular ways. to a certain extent we can choose what we orient ourselves towards. however, we are all differently positioned in “the political economy of attention” and not all orientations are available to everyone (ahmed 2006, 547). there are institutional rules, social norms and expectations connected to where people may place their orientations and there are material and physical constraints that channel the possibilities of making orientations. it is by analysing how asylum seekers in the centres navigate the institution, the material space and the temporal frame through their stubborn everyday strategies that we can make sense of the asylum centre in norway. the temporality and materiality of the institution: the norwegian asylum reception centres the governance of the reception centre is an entangled and diffuse process of overlapping commercial interests and a national border regime (darling 2016) where the asylum seekers’ spatial location and social position as not quite yet in norway and therefore not quite included are closely linked (seeberg et al. 2009). conflicting temporal logics also come together in how the asylum institute materialises on the ground at different locations. the asylum centres have become a rather permanent institution in the norwegian society since it was established in 1987 with the aim to provide “plain but adequate temporary accommodation securing the residents’ basic needs and the individual’s need for safety” (udi 2008, our translation). multiple and precarious temporalities meet in the buildings and materialise as experiences of clashing time in the asylum seekers’ lives. these clashes can be identified by juxtaposing the durability of the institution and the aim of temporariness that it operates. the temporariness of the housing offered is premised on a short stay of ideally six months as set out in the asylum procedure. however, while the waiting times varies substantially between different groups, between 2005 and 2010 the average time of residing in asylum centres for people who were granted asylum and who were later settled in norway was 625 days (weiss et al. 2017). the conflicting temporal logics and its temporariness is also reflected in the reception centres’ material structures since centres are opened and closed based on the demand for places, and residents are moved if the centre closes. at the time of fieldwork in 2014 and 2015 there were around 100 centres spread out across the country, altogether housing around 15,000 asylum seekers (strumse et al. 2016). the number increased to around 30,000 over the winter of 2015, before decreasing over the next year returning to around 15,000 at the end of 2016. by mid-2019, further decreases resulted in around 3,000 people living in asylum reception centres in norway (udi 2019). in 2001, a public tendering regime was introduced and the operation of the centres has become a fully commercial activity (karlsen et al. 2014). contracts are given by the norwegian directorate of immigration to private, humanitarian or local government actors for a period of three years with the possibility to operate for another three years. all contracts may, however, be terminated at any time with a three months’ notice. the individual reception centre is run on the premise that it may be short lived which is reflected in the materiality of the building. in contrast, the centres under consideration here had been in operation for between 15 to 25 years with the continuous renegotiation of their contracts, indicating a permanent temporary solution. most buildings used as reception centres are rented and the private owners are not directly involved in the operation of the centre. responsibilities for maintenance and upgrading is very unclear and buildings are operated at minimum standards with no incentives to make any long-term investments in the buildings (hauge et al. 2017). within the institutional frames of short-term contracts and the unclear division of responsibility for maintenance of the buildings, a rather distinctive type of 'building event' (jacobs 2006; moran et al. 2016) emerges where asylum seekers continue to live in crowded and substandard surplus buildings generally not built for inhabitation or used by more people than they were originally built for and where upkeep of 237ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brunfennia 197(2) (2019) the buildings are continuously put off. in the remainder of this section, we turn to describe the three reception centres analysed. the reception centres with the fictious names, vestfjord, elvestad and solheim, are situated in different parts of norway in or close to medium-sized towns. the centres varied in size from accommodating around 120 people, a standard size for an ordinary reception centre, to approximately 300 people in one of the largest centres in the country. they were all structured around one centralised location with staff offices as well as accommodation for up to 100 residents, and a variety of decentralised accommodations at different locations in town (fig. 1). decentralised accommodations included residential houses with apartments and bedsits and relatively large buildings such as apartment blocks or smaller institutional buildings that could house up to 40 people. while buildings varied in standard, all living spaces were experienced as cramped. elvestad and vestfjord were former hospital buildings from the 1940s and 1950s: neglected and worn buildings with a general lack of upkeep. the managers referred to the maintenance of buildings as a constant battle. the long straight corridors indicated a strong institutional character with their bare walls and floors in concrete. few adaptations had been made, apart from installing sprinkler systems for fire safety, painting the walls and rearranging some rooms into communal kitchens and bathrooms (fig. 2). the residents’ rooms were simply furnished with beds, lockers and perhaps some chairs and tables, and mostly shared among two to four people (fig 3). in elvestad, up to 15 people could be sharing the same kitchen and one of the shower rooms was used by 25 people. a few rooms had been fitted with a private kitchenette and a shower. some rooms in vestfjord had a private kitchen, although most of the residents were sharing these facilities with residents in other rooms. shared spaces such as these mostly seemed rather neglected with random furniture scattered around and dirt from years of poor cleaning on the surfaces and walls. in both vestfjord and elvestad one of the shared shower rooms was covered with black mould on walls and ceiling. in both centres separate housing for single women was provided in a ‘women’s corridor’ created by a partition wall dividing part of the corridor from the rest of the building, although the doors remained unlocked. in the rest of the building, men and families lived in separate but adjoining rooms. solheim asylum reception centre consisted of five two-floor high barracks set up in the 1990’s to accommodate asylum seekers. quite the exception in norway, it offered single rooms for its residents. each room was approximately seven square metres and furnished with a bed, table and chair. at the fig. 1. centralised centre elvestad (left) and decentralised accommodation (right). (photos by thorshaug) 238 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) fig. 2. corridor elvestad (left), shared kitchen vestfjord (right). (photos by thorshaug) fig. 3. shared shower room vestfjord (left), shared bedroom vestfjord (right). (photos by thorshaug) 239ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brunfennia 197(2) (2019) end of each floor was a communal kitchen and living room as well as bathrooms to be shared by seven residents. each floor included a small family apartment with a separate kitchen and bathroom for four people. one building was for single women and families only. although the walls had been painted and a sprinkler system installed, both the interior and exterior of the building looked rather old and unkempt. these buildings were not designed to last, instead the temporary structures constantly kept undergoing small scale repairs whenever budgets allowed. clashing temporalities: the centre as a disorientation device at some points in time while staying in the asylum centre, the centre is the horizon, and the possibilities, hope and plans come in the background when the centre takes the foreground and creates a sense of disorientation. contributing to the disorientation is the materiality of the centres and the asylum process, both distinguished by unclear time perspective beyond asylum seekers’ control. the process of ‘temporal bordering’ (khosravi 2019) does not provide any information on how their case is progressing until the day a letter arrives from the directorate with a decision: ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. the meaninglessness of waiting in the reception centre was described by farideh in elvestad as a tunnel-like feeling where there are no distractions, no detours, no possibilities of controlling when to leave the current path. similar to griffith’s (2014) ‘sticky time’, farideh’s metaphor of “living in a tunnel” illustrates how materiality, the institution and the lived experiences come together in the feeling of waiting and uncertainty: where the unknown temporal frame of the future is only a question between negative or positive expressed through lack of control over the future and biographical time. making the asylum seekers wait becomes a technique of power that frames the experience of living in the reception centre, particularly related to the inability to control one’s own temporal orientation (sharma 2011; griffiths 2014). this temporal injustice creates a feeling of uncertainty that is further emphasised by the materiality of the reception centres as temporary and substandard structures which interacts strongly with their everyday time. everyday time in the centre is controlled by the institutions’ set of general rules and regulations. living in the reception centres is voluntary but a requirement for receiving allowances, so most people have little choice but to stay. asylum seekers have no control over which centre they will be allocated or who to share rooms with and must move whenever they are given a new place. to the same extent that waiting becomes an expression of power, the possibility of controlling one’s own everyday time is subject to the 'power chronography' (sharma 2011) that comes out of the particular temporalities produced in the reception centres. institutional time materialises in how residents are governed in particular ways through regulations and control: the centres are open, people can come and go but must report to the office with regular intervals. more importantly, their time is regulated by the general 'politics of discomfort' (darling 2011) induced by the embodied experiences of the buildings’ materiality. residents frequently described the queueing in the mornings, waiting for the bathroom and the kitchen, being late for the bus to the norwegian course when several people were leaving at the same time as stressful and tiring, adding to the frustrations of not knowing what will happen to their lives next. as such there are emotional and affectual experiences of the built environment but also of the institutional structures operating in the centres. research on social interaction in reception centres shows that there are few arenas for identity work within the centre (valenta 2012). withdrawal and selection of frames of interaction in this constrained environment is amplified by the materiality: the old hospital buildings, for example, are designed for surveillance to enable monitoring of all parts of the building. there is a constant exposure to other people with whom residents may not be familiar. shewit a single female in her early 20s explained: “i feel so much stress from this…feeling that you have to put on a mask, pretend that you smile, but on the inside you are not happy. i am so tired!” food and all needed kitchen utensils are carried back and forth between the kitchen and the residents’ room each time food is being prepared. clothes, soap and towels similarly have to be carried to the shower room or for laundry. everyday time is biopolitical in the sense that the temporal is a form of social power, a relation of difference and a material struggle, as argued by sharma (2011, 441): “sleep, rest, bathroom breaks, rushing, staying awake, waiting and waiting on are differentially experienced depending on where one fits within the 240 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) biopolitical economy of time”. the friction between the built environment and the everyday life becomes evident in the exhausting labour that enters into existing and not being able to organise day to day activities in a meaningful way (thorshaug 2018). adding to the stress and constant pressure is the ways in which the residents’ status and temporal frames differ: some residents are waiting for the decision on their asylum application to be recognised as refugees in norway; some have had their application rejected (negative) and they are waiting for the decision of their appeal; while some have had their appeal rejected and are facing imminent removal. finally, some have had their application approved (positive) and are waiting to be settled. several people mentioned that having to relate to other people’s constant arrival and departure from the centre added to the stress of living there, whether it was experienced through the sudden loud bangs on the doors for a deportation in the early morning or through the passing down of furniture and other personal items before a planned departure. the state governs through the different time frames that shape the experience of residing in the reception centre. hence, the reception centre may be described as a ‘myopticon’: a device with blurred vision that governs through uncertainty and short-sightedness instead of the clear-sighted and deliberate governing of the panopticon (whyte 2011). this mode of governance influences agency and produces a temporal injustice expressed through the material practices and institutional structures where people are kept on the move: “we stand by to move again”, explains samir (vestfjord). people were initially quite reluctant to complain about the conditions in the centres due to their precarious status, media attention on the deserving asylum seeker, a general feeling of not being entitled an opinion, but also because the institution was presented as a temporary solution that people just have to cope with. aron lived with his wife and two children in a room on the former hospital corridor in vestfjord asylum centre with a separate bedroom and kitchen facilities, but a shared bathroom on the corridor. he stated: “well, i am happy for everything the norwegian state is providing me.” however, later in the conversation he elaborated on how the conditions in the reception centre affected their everyday life while waiting: his children were kept awake at night by noise from other residents. the family felt uncomfortable when using the shared bathroom on the corridor at night, and, as a family they had little privacy among themselves because they all shared one bedroom with bunk beds. living on a long corridor with several other residents who all knew who they were, their application status and had opinions on the likely outcome of the application, added to the feeling of vulnerability and created tension and uncertainty. these multiple experiences of temporal injustice affect people’s capacity to act, reduces their agentive register as their biographies and potential futures are harder to reach, and more of their lives and practices take place in the present tense, in their everyday time. aron and his family had been in norway for six months and had so far heard nothing about their prospects of staying. having arrived in norway, was like “looking at the hamburger you cannot eat”, he said, and continued: “we are moving up and down in hope (miming with his hands, like waves) … always up… and then down ... just waiting waiting waiting ... the hardest thing about living here is that you don’t know when you will be getting an answer.” aron’s experience of the centre is shaped by the conflicting temporal frames that his family encounters. people actively relate to the housing conditions by strategizing in everyday time, but as a consequence, the different temporal perspectives clashes and become incompatible. an orientation requires a background and a forward-looking side: orientations are about how we begin, how we proceed from here (ahmed 2006, 2010). in these cases, we can understand the centre as a disorientation device, following ahmed (2010), which produces the temporal injustices through its material and institutional structures. ‘moments of disorientation’ constitute substantial changes in a person’s life world, moments where the world is turned upside down and where we once again try to regain the ground beneath our feet through re-orientations (ahmed 2006, 2010; simonsen 2012). re-orientations: negotiating temporariness and materialities differing positions and changing statuses modify people’s orientation in time. from disorientations which can be destabilising, debilitating and undermining, residents reach out for support, search for a place to reground and re-orientate their relation to the world. reorientations are productive moments 241ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brunfennia 197(2) (2019) leading to new hopes and directions and with the potential to reorganise horizons and perspectives where certain things and not others may be put within reach (ahmed 2006; simonsen 2012). ‘reorientation’ is an active and situated process in which people engage with the material structures and institutional features in specific ways to cope with the conditions and temporal injustice in the centre. in this section, we analyse how the material and institutional conditions in the centre are encountered through affect and emotions mobilised in this process of reorientations. people are differently positioned to negotiate understandings of temporariness, uncertainty, the materiality, relations and routines, but are in various ways actively engaging in temporal and spatial strategies of their own (allsopp et al. 2014). reorientations represent these stubborn everyday acts where political subjectivities arise in everyday experience through employing agentic capacities (häkli & kallio 2018). we emphasise four strategies: accommodating; timepass; escape; and reorienting through the future. the reorientation strategies are not mutually exclusive. people may adopt several strategies at the same time or go through stages where those strategies are being adopted at different times to navigate the changing spatial, temporal, material and institutional dimensions in the centres. as we now move on to show, people’s reorientation strategies take place through different temporal orientations by making use of the material surroundings and institutional features in varying ways. accommodating aron’s expression, above, of gratitude with what the norwegian state provides, illustrates the tension many people experience in the centres. the control and constraint produced in the asylum institution rely on the co-performance of the institution by its residents (gill 2009, 2010). 'waiting meekly' (griffiths 2014) is a strategy that indicates how institutional structures influence people’s experiences and practices in the centre and gives an idea of the power of the institution in keeping people in place: being told to cope with poor conditions because it is only temporary. one centre-director stated that the management benefitted from residents’ belief that their behaviour could influence the outcome of their application and hence reluctant to be critical of the conditions. in brekke’s (2004) typology of waiting, 'the ideal asylum seeker' stays oriented towards both integration and return, and seeks to prepare for both outcomes while waiting. similarly, the ideal resident in the reception centre would be the one who just lives in the present, accepts the situation and the conditions in which they live. they wait and subsume to the institutional demands, ready to move on at any point. while this may initially seem to be a passive acceptance of the conditions, we also find traces of how people are actively negotiating their experiences. people adapt in multiple ways by organising their everyday lives. a common example in crowded locations is to avoid encounters with other residents by strategically using the material environment: doing most of the food preparation inside their rooms before cooking in the shared kitchen, waiting to use the kitchen or other shared spaces until they are vacant, or staying awake at night to get some time to themselves. hazim (vestfjord) states that: the privacy thing is a big issue, and i am really suffering from it now… and that is why most times i sleep during the day and work during the night when it is not so noisy… well most of the others are also awake in the night, but it is more comfortable. so, i stay up in the night and sleep in the morning instead. residents inhabit the centres by accommodating and working around the materiality of the centres in their everyday time rather than resisting it. tolerating the poor conditions due to its temporariness helps to survive in the institution but is a demanding re-orientation to keep over time. living in and accepting the present tense is a very precarious temporality when you cannot envision a future or connect the present with the past. timepass the first month or two months you don’t care what it looks like, but after that you start thinking like it looks like you are here for a long duration, maybe i should do something. and then little by little you prepare the things to be more comfortable around you to feel it like normal. you start to manage and you start to organise the things around you the way you like thinking like ‘maybe you 242 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) will be here for a long time’. maybe the thought about ‘am i here temporary or am i here for long time’ that is the difference between normal life and un-normal life. (hazim, vestfjord) everyday activities in the reception centres revolve mainly around waiting that materialises in the passing of time. 'timepass' (jeffrey 2010) is an everyday practice closely associated with living in the present tense, and affected by the dual temporal uncertainty produced in the reception centre: not knowing how long you have to wait and what will happen with your life afterwards (griffiths 2014). while people are generally reluctant to appropriate their surroundings and do not want to become too attached to the living space, as time goes by, the need to make it more comfortable triggers some modifications of the room in which they live. people may engage in small scale adjustments to their living space as a form of timepass – or active waiting – where the effort is to ‘waste’ time by creating temporal markers. it is a strategy in reach when more meaningful ways of engagement were unavailable (jeffrey 2010). similar to the ‘accommodating’ strategy discussed above, the timepass represents an orientation towards everyday time while broader temporal perspectives (such as biographical time) are inhibited. dabir received ‘positive’ after six years in the country. he has moved through four different reception centres and lived the past eight months in a room he shares with one other person. there is a sofa and a table standing between the two beds on each side of the room. he has decorated his room with plants that he propagated himself and gives plants to other residents as gifts: “it is a kind of hobby that i have” he says first, but then later comments it is only a timepass: “it’s just to kill time, you know” he answers. most people consider their appropriations temporary because they know they will move on. the investments people do are constrained by the limited benefits for the future: they will lose them. timepass is a way of orienting towards and engaging with the physical surroundings to make the days pass, to make everyday life somewhat coherent. it is a reorientation directed towards the material structures, but can also be a way of building relations with other residents as we see in the case of dabir, reaching out to his neighbours with plants as a way of sustaining the here and now. escape people negotiate ideas of homeliness, belonging and recognition in relation to the material conditions. some residents stated that they felt more at ease with having made the surroundings more home-like by decorating the walls or acquiring pieces of furniture from other residents or with the help of staff. there is also a gender dimension to this. in all three cases studied, women are more concerned with their own spaces while the men often used common areas at the centre such as tv-rooms. the bigger adaptations and appropriations are made by parents with children, trying to make everyday life as ‘ordinary’ as possible. similarly, people in slightly better and more private conditions felt more ownership to their spaces and worked more on making improvements. samir (vestfjord) asked to have a desk installed in the room he shares with three others (fig. 4). he wanted to continue everyday practices resembling his former work. he imagined sitting there and being able to work like he used to do, as a way of forgetting and escaping the current conditions by imagining being elsewhere: when i sit by this desk i remember when i worked… i make a big pot of tea, maybe i can drink one or two big pots, like 15 cups of tea... and cigarettes. if i want to work, in syria, maybe i burn like ten cigarettes, sitting for two or three hours, just to see ‘how will i solve this?’ so when i sit here i (think)...okay.. ‘you are out of norway… you are in a new place in this world’ …and you can enjoy in this corner. however, efforts to create places for themselves are often constrained in the cramped spaces and with the limited material resources at hand. samir did not use the desk as he got into a conflict with the others in the room, the attempt to re-orient away from the current uncertain situation and back to normality, to the life he had been forced to leave behind, became a moment of disorientation where the orientations did not extend its reach. most residents stressed the highly ambiguous nature of engaging in these practices and most would contest any reference to the asylum centres as home due to the interaction of the material and 243ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brunfennia 197(2) (2019) fig. 4. family room, elvestad (left, photo by thorshaug), samir’s desk (right, photo by samir). institutional conditions that caused so much friction between biographical and everyday time. however, we find that the ambivalence surrounding people’s engagement with the physical structures is also a political resource that people negotiate with in reconstituting themselves as subjects (kallio et al. 2019). sara, whose application was rejected, has lived in a single room in the same asylum centre for four years. she has made the room a personal space by decorating the walls with pictures of her friends and several self-made drawings. she is careful not to get too comfortable and emphasises the temporariness to the appropriations by holding on to her restlessness and refusing to make larger investments. she has bought a laptop and a mobile phone, but not much else because she hopes her status will change and that she can move out of the reception centre. investing in more material things now, would be “the same as giving up the hope for settlement and a future in norway”. she is creating a temporary space for herself within her private room where she can find a limited sense of support from the surroundings, but she is also careful to emphasise that she does not see the centre as a space of identification. she refuses to settle in temporariness and her engagements with the physical surroundings does not mean surrendering to the situation or simply accepting it: “it is not because i am happy (…). all i do, i do it for now” she states. her strategy engages with small-scale personal items that help her to imagine herself outside the centre and keeps within reach biographical temporalities. in sara’s story we find seeds of political life in her actively choosing to live in the present but maintaining her orientation towards the future. by unpacking the affectual and emotional experiences mobilised through her reorientation strategies, we come to see her ambivalence as a political resource (kallio et al. 2019) in which her determination to live in the present is a relief from the spatial and temporal conditions in the centre.2 it allows her to escape the conditions by maintaining a self that is continued in a future that lies outside the asylum institution. when visiting the same centre for follow-up interviews a few months later, she had left the centre and gone underground, taking with her only clothes and a few belongings, leaving most things behind. facing forced return at any moment and with no future to be found in the centre, she decided to escape when the living conditions were unbearable. reorienting towards the future i like the house but, like i told you, it is just a station, it is not a home… home is when you live in peace. when you are in your place to be with yourself. you can get a place to yourself, one room. not argue about anything. you focus on your future. you make a future. return to make a future. that is why i 244 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) say that this is just a station. …it is a station to bring our pain to a next level! (samir, vestfjord) samir has been granted asylum and knows that he will leave the centre but does not know when. he relates to the reception centre as a station. the housing situation along with the context makes people feel like they are still on the move, not allowed to settle. this situation creates a constant restlessness and one strategy is to plan for the future they know, which might be the near future, or to continue to think of an imagined future outside the centre. jumana, in her late 20s, had lived in elvestad reception centre for around nine months. her asylum status was positive and she was waiting to be settled in a municipality. she had not made any substantial adaptations to her room in which she currently stayed alone. the decorative items on her shelves were just things from a former resident. she stated “you know, it is only a temporary situation… so it’s okay, really, to live like this.” instead, as she was preparing dinner with a crooked knife and with the food crammed together on a wobbly shelf next to the cooker, she was dreaming about the kitchen equipment she would buy once she had been settled. “oh, when i get ‘kommune’ (settlement in a municipality) … all the things i want to buy! proper things. like a better knife. all things my own. like i want it.” her strategy is one of putting the reception centre’s physical surroundings in the background and focusing on the future place of residence. while clearly stating that she copes well with the housing conditions as “only a temporary situation”, her strategy differs from those whose strategy is to accommodate the conditions: it is not one of living in the present only. rather it is dependent on the way she can relate to the future as something tangible, she has concrete plans for that future away from the centre. the orientation is available to her because she has received positive asylum status and a timeframe: her settlement would take place within the next two months. people who perceived the conditions in the centre in a more positive manner were often able to simultaneously re-orient in the sense of using a more extensive horizon away from the centre and imagine a future somewhere else. people’s orientations may change over time as their context or future prospects change. nasrin lived in a small and cramped room at the centralised part of elvestad reception centre with her two children. their asylum claim was rejected and she was angry and frustrated the first time we met her. the centre became for her a disorientation device and she criticised the old and worn building for being both cramped and unhealthy. when we met her a year later, however, she was more optimistic because the government had just signed a new agreement concerning children asylum seekers. the institutional time was suddenly available to her to navigate and re-orient with. she was still critical towards the conditions in the centre and considered them prisonlike, but she could cope with the present because she could imagine a way out. people’s asylum status influences their ability to reorient: it is about how residents may imagine a life outside the centre and how their lives are governed in the institution. knowing that you will leave, and that you will be granted asylum may make it easier to cope with the current situation. however, it does not take away the immediate frustrations that arise from the lack of privacy and the substandard conditions. conclusion: understanding re-orientations in the critical geographies of architecture in the institution for its inhabitants, the modes of relating to the centre are tied to their experiences of the inherent temporal injustice of the asylum institution. this article has shown how this injustice is expressed in the ‘throwntogetherness’ of the material conditions, institutional governance and the experiences and practices of inhabiting the centres. we have suggested a conceptual framework for understanding the experience of the asylum centre that contributes to the geographies of architecture by engaging more actively with temporality, power, politics and institutional dimensions. ‘orientations’ is applied as the analytical device to recognize the agentic capacities of residents in their experience and engagement with the centre’s temporariness, the level of uncertainty and lack of control that the institution brings. sometimes, disorientation dominates the residents’ experiences. however, at other times and for other people, there are potentials to re-orient. reorientations can change and overlap but are shaped within the institutional and material structures that operate in the asylum 245ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brunfennia 197(2) (2019) reception centres. the reorientations depend on how the asylum seekers can imagine and reconnect their everyday and biographical time thereby making this both a temporal and a material struggle. the uncertainty mobilised through the tensions of clashing time-perspectives becomes the hidden temporal realities that asylum seekers have to navigate when the centre is experienced as a disorientation device. by engaging in reorientation strategies, however, people challenge the temporal injustices. our analysis points to how asylum seekers’ stubborn everyday practices of inhabiting the reception centres help to make “spaces of struggle, action and political possibility” (conlon 2011). asylum seekers express ambivalent emotions towards the way they are reorienting within the material and institutional environment they inhabit. they place limits on how much they want to invest and their ambivalence foregrounds a political subjectivity where we can find the potential for change (kallio et al. 2019). the asylum seekers actively pursue more control over their everyday time and their biographical time. by adding a temporal dimension to the critical geographies of architecture in the institution, we have shown that we may find responses to improving asylum seekers’ lives in their reorientation strategies. it is not just about improving material conditions. the border politics and the temporal injustices that are acted out in the institutions must also be taken into consideration. there is thus a limited potential in architecture alone because the temporal injustice is not resolved with better and more comfortable housing. it is the intersections enabled by the throwntogetherness of the material, the institutional and temporal that must be taken into account. our contribution is to show that the affectual and emotional experiences of the reception centre are actively mobilised in people’s reorientation strategies in order to re-appropriate time. people seek to reconnect their everyday and biographical time, and to find ways to take back control of these times and make them compatible in a way that sustains a sense of self. re-appropriation of time may increase resilience (griffiths 2014). thus, we suggest that bringing in a better understanding of the interaction between temporality and materiality is a first step forward. notes 1 equal authorship 2 we are grateful to isabel meier for pointing this out. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank residents and staff in the three reception centres where the first author conducted her fieldwork. many thanks to our generous and friendly readers anita h. fábos, tina mathisen, hilde nymoen rørtveit and eli støa; and the four reviewers, eveliina lyytinen, anna marie steigemann, elisa pascucci, isabel meier and chief editor kirsi paulina kallio for a helpful open review process. references agamben, g. (1998) homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. stanford university press, stanford, ca. ahmed, s., castaneda, c., fortier, a-m. & sheller, m. (2003) introduction: uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration. in ahmed, s., castaneda, c., anne-marie, f. & sheller, m. (eds.) uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration, 1–19. berg publishers, oxford. ahmed, s. (2006) orientations: toward a queer phenomenology. glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 12(4) 543–574. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2006-002 ahmed, s. (2010) orientations matter. in coole, d. & frost, s. (eds.) new materialisms: ontology, agency and politics, 234–257. duke university press, durham and london. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822392996-011 allsopp, j., chase, e. & mitchell, m. (2014) the tactics of time and status: young people’s experiences of building futures while subject to immigration control in britain. journal of refugee studies 28(2) 163–182. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feu031 baas, m. & yeoh, b. s. (2019) introduction: migration studies and critical temporalities. current sociology 67(2) 161–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392118792924 246 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) bosworth, m. (2014) inside immigration detention. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199675470.001.0001 brekke, j-p. (2004) while we are waiting. uncertainty and empowerment among asylum-seekers in sweden. institute for social research. <http://www.temaasyl.se/documents/forskning/ntg/while%20we%20 are%20waiting.pdf> brenner, n., madden, d. j. & wachsmuth, d. (2011) assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory. city 15(2) 225–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.568717 browne, v. (2014) feminism, time, and nonlinear history. palgrave macmillan, houndsmill. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413161 brun, c. (2015) active waiting and changing hopes: toward a time perspective on protracted displacement. social analysis 59(1) 19–37. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590102 conlon, d. (2010) ties that bind: governmentality, the state, and asylum in contemporary ireland. environment and planning d society and space 28(1) 95–111. https://doi.org/10.1068/d11507 conlon, d. (2011) waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility. gender, place & culture 18(3) 353–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2011.566320 cwerner, s. b. (2001) the times of migration. journal of ethnic and migration studies 27(1) 7–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691830125283 cwerner, s. b. (2004) faster, faster and faster: the time politics of asylum in the uk. time & society 13(1) 71–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x04040747 darling, j. (2011) domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation. political geography 30(5) 263–271. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.04.011 darling, j. (2014) another letter from the home office. reading the material politics of asylum. environment and planning d: society and space 32(3) 484–500. https://doi.org/10.1068/d13067p darling, j. (2016). privatising asylum: neoliberalisation, depoliticisation and the governance of forced migration. transactions of the institute of british geographers 41(3) 230–243. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12118 fassin, d. (2011) policing borders, producing boundaries. the governmentality of immigration in dark times. annual review of anthropology 40 213–226. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145847 fontanari, e. (2015) confined to the threshold: the experiences of asylum seekers in germany. city 19(5) 714–726. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1071112 fontanari, e. (2017) it's my life. the temporalities of refugees and asylum-seekers within the european border regime. etnografia e ricerca qualitativa 10(1) 25–54. <https://www.rivisteweb.it/ doi/10.3240/86886> gill, n. (2009) presentational state power: temporal and spatial influences over asylum s ector decisionmakers. transactions of the institute of british geographers 34(2) 215–233. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00337.x gill, n. (2010) new state-theoretic approaches to asylum and refugee geographies. progress in human geography 34(5) 626–645. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509354629 gill, n., conlon, d., tyler, i. & oeppen, c. (2013) the tactics of asylum and irregular migrant support groups: disrupting bodily, technological, and neoliberal strategies of control. annals of the association of american geographers 104(2) 373–381. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2013.857544 griffiths, m. b. e. (2014) out of time: the temporal uncertainties of refused asylum seekers and immigration detainees. journal of ethnic and migration studies 40(12) 1991–2009. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2014.907737 hauge, å. l., støa, e. & denizou, k. (2017) framing outsidedness – aspects of housing quality in decentralized reception centres for asylum seekers in norway. housing, theory and society 34(1) 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036096.2016.1200668 hinger, s., schäfer, p. & pott, a. (2016) the local production of asylum. journal of refugee studies 29(4) 440–463. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/few029 häkli, j. & kallio, k. p. (2018) on becoming political: the political in subjectivity. subjectivity 11(1) 57–73. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-017-0040-z jacobs, j. m. (2006) a geography of big things. cultural geographies 13(1) 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474006eu354oa jeffrey, c. (2010) timepass: youth, class, and time among unemployed young men in india. american ethnologist 37(3) 465–481. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01266.x kallio, k. p., häkli, j. & pascucci, e. (2019) refugees as political subjectivity: experiencing the humanitarian border. epc: politics and space 37(7) 1258–1276. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654418820915 kaika, m. (2004) interrogating the geographies of the familiar: domesticating nature and constructing the autonomy of the modern home. international journal of urban and regional research 28(2) 265–286. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2004.00519.x 247fennia 197(2) (2019) ragne øwre thorshaug & cathrine brun karlsen, m-a., drangsland, k. a. k. & hidle, k. (2014) the conditions for hospitality in the norwegian asylum reception system. in overland, g. j., guribye, e. & lie, b. (eds.) nordic work with traumatised refugees: do we really care, 284–299. cambridge scholars publishing, newcastle upon tyne. khosravi, s. (2019) what do we see if we look at the border from the other side? social anthropology 27(3) 409–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12685 kraftl, p. (2010) geographies of architecture: the multiple lives of buildings. geography compass 4(5) 402–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2010.00332.x kraftl, p. & adey, p. (2008) architecture/affect/inhabitation: geographies of being-in buildings. annals of the association of american geographers 98(1) 213–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045600701734687 lees, l. (2001) towards a critical geography of architecture: the case of an ersatz colosseum. cultural geographies 8(1) 51–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/096746080100800103 lees, l. & baxter, r. (2011) a ‘building event’ of fear: thinking through the geography of architecture. social & cultural geography 12(2) 107–122. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2011.545138 massey, d. (2005) for space. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.12968/sece.2005.1.361 moran, d., turner, j. & jewkes, y. (2016) becoming big things: building events and the architectural geographies of incarceration in england and wales. transactions of the institute of british geographers 41(4) 416–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12140 mountz, a. (2011) where asylum-seekers wait: feminist counter-topographies of sites between states. gender, place & culture 18(3) 381–399. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2011.566370 nettelbladt, g. & boano, c. (2019) infrastructures of reception: the spatial politics of refuge in mannheim, germany. political geography 71(1) 78–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.02.007 philo, c. & parr, h. (2000) institutional geographies: introductory remarks. geoforum 31(4) 513–521. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-7185(00)00018-x ramadan, a. (2013) spatialising the refugee camp. transactions of the institute of british geographers 38(1) 65–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00509.x rose, g., degen, m. & basdas, b. (2010) more on ‘big things’: building events and feelings. transactions of the institute of british geographers 35(3) 334–349. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00388.x seeberg, m. l., bagge, c. & enger, t. a. (2009) no place small children in norwegian asylum seeker reception centres. childhood – a global journal of child research 16(3) 395–411. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0907568209335318 sharma, s. (2011) the biopolitical economy of time. journal of communication inquiry 35(4) 439–444. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859911417999 sharma, s. (2014) in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. duke university press, durham. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822378334 simonsen, k. (2008) place as encounters: practice, conjunction and co-existence. in barenholdt, j. o. & granas, b. (eds.) mobility and place: enacting northern european peripheries, 13–25. ashgate, aldershot. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315595757 simonsen, k. (2012) in quest of a new humanism embodiment, experience and phenomenology as critical geography. progress in human geography 37(1) 10–26. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0309132512467573 solheim, j. (1990) "her har du ditt liv": asylsøkermottaket som sosialt system. arbeidsforskningsinstituttet, oslo. strumse, e., grønseth, a. s. & støa, e. (2016) fysiske omgivelsers virkning på trivsel og konfliktnivå: spørreundersøkelse om boforhold på asylmottak i norge. hil report 170/2016, lillehammer. <https:// www.ntnu.no/documents/10310/1269826659/170_2016_forskrapport_hil.pdf/0973ab87-134d-46638f41-27d770a0c1c1> 12.12.2019. szczepanikova, a. (2012) between control and assistance: the problem of european accommodation centres for asylum seekers. international migration 51(4) 130–143. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12031 thorshaug, r. o. (2018) arrival in-between: analyzing the lived experiences of different forms of accommodation for asylum seekers in norway. in meeus, b., arnaut, k. & van heur, b. (eds.) arrival infrastructures, 207–227. springer international publishing, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91167-0_9 tsianos, v. & karakayali, s. (2010) transnational migration and the emergence of the european border regime: an ethnographic analysis. european journal of social theory 13(3) 373–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431010371761 udi [norwegian directorate of immigration] (2008) krav til innkvarteringstilbud i ordinære mottak. udi rs 2008-31, oslo. <https://www.udiregelverk.no/no/rettskilder/udi-rundskriv/rs-2008-031/> 30.3.2017. udi (2019) beboere i mottak etter uke (2019). <https://www.udi.no/statistikk-og-analyse/statistikk/ beboere-i-asylmottak-etter-uke-2018/> 12.12.2019. 248 research paper valenta, m. & berg, b. (2010) user involvement and empowerment among asylum seekers in norwegian reception centres. european journal of social work 13(4) 483–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691451003603406 valenta, m. (2012) hvordan kan vi analysere asylfeltet med hjelp av sosiologisk teori? in valenta, m. & berg, b. (eds.) asylsøker – i velferdsstatens venterom, 17–34. universitetsforlaget, oslo. vitus, k. (2011) zones of indistinction: family life in danish asylum centres. distinktion: scandinavian journal of social theory 12(1) 95–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2011.549349 weiss, n. djuve, a. b. & zhang, h. (2017) opphold i asylmottak. konsekvenser for levekår og integrering. fafo-rapport 2017:07, oslo. <https://www.fafo.no/index.php/zoo-publikasjoner/fafo-rapporter/item/ opphold-i-asylmottak> 12.12.2019. whyte, z. (2011) enter the myopticon: uncertain surveillance in the danish asylum system. anthropology today 27(3) 18–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00808.x zill, m., van liempt, i., spierings, b. & hooimeijer, p. (2019) uneven geographies of asylum accommodation: conceptualizing the impact of spatial, material, and institutional differences on (un)familiarity between asylum seekers and local residents. migration studies mny049 https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mny049 to crash on the bus (or sit on needles and pins)? buses and subways in teenage everyday geographies urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa83665 doi: 10.11143/fennia.83665 to crash on the bus (or sit on needles and pins)? – buses and subways in teenage everyday geographies maja lagerqvist lagerqvist, m. (2019) to crash on the bus (or sit on needles and pins?) – buses and subways in teenage everyday geographies. fennia 197(2) 280–294. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.83665 when young people travel, they are often very dependent on public transport or parents. this study uses interviews with 16– 19 years old teenagers in stockholm to investigate their everyday experiences of public transit. the paper explores the experiences of buses and subways, here conceptualized as mobile places, to understand how they shape teenagers’ daily life. understanding teenagers’ experiences of public transportation is part of understanding their everyday life, struggles, and possibilities to be mobile and participate in society. it is also a step towards ensuring that they find public transportation inclusive, safe, and worth traveling with today and in the future. conceptually, the analysis focuses on how these mobile places are experienced as providing weights or reliefs to the everyday and if, how and when they may be places of interaction or retreat, addressing two needs in teenagers’ personal being and development. the study shows how various experiences of traveling with buses and subways shape how the teenagers feel, and how they make strategic choices in relation to this. a quite manifold, varying, and complex picture of public transportation arises, with stories of wellbeing, comfort, discomfort, and exclusion, and with sharp differences between girls and boys, and between buses and subways. these nuances are essential in planning and evaluation of transport systems in regard to how, when, where, or for whom public transport can be a part of social sustainability, as public policies often assume. keywords: teenagers, public transportation, experiences, stockholm, mobile places maja lagerqvist, department of social and economic geography, uppsala university, box 513, 75120 uppsala, sweden. e-mail: maja.lagerqvist@ kultgeog.uu.se introduction i enjoy the bus because i like to sit for a while. and it's just quiet. […] after school, when i am tired, i just want to sit for a quarter and rest. (girl, 17 years old)1 eh well, it has happened a few times that men have groped me. since then there is a discomfort to travel by subway. i don't dare. (girl, 16 years old) © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. fennia 197(2) (2019) 281maja lagerqvist most of us spend time on travels each day, on getting from one place to another. it is often said that traveling is part of the fabric of everyday life and of being able to take part in society (jarvis et al. 2001). if traveling is all of that, it is crucial to understand how various people and groups in society, with different backgrounds, conditions, and needs and in different contexts, can and do travel, and how they experience it. young people are largely dependent on parents and well-functioning public transport for their everyday travel and participation in society (barker et al. 2009). they may, therefore, be severely affected by public transportation and how it works (or does not work) for them. nevertheless, what well-functioning public transport is may vary between people, and the experiences of traveling can be very different and shifting. this paper focuses on public transportation and the various experiences of it for young people, or, more specifically, teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19. it uses stockholm, sweden, as a case. official travel surveys show that young people (in the ages of 16–24 years) travel more by public transportation, and less by car than any other age group in stockholm. 59% of their travels are done by public transportation, compared to 36% for 25–39-year-olds and 28% for 40 to 64 year-olds (stockholm county administration 2016). how teenagers experience public transportation, and the differences in this is, therefore, a crucial part of understanding their everyday life, struggles, and possibilities to participate in society. to explore this, the paper asks the following questions: in what various ways are buses and subways experienced by teenagers? how do they, as places, shape how teenagers move and feel? what reliefs and weights do these places present to the everyday life? what may they be and mean to teenagers, and importantly, what differences are there, in terms of various users, vehicles, and contexts? the paper lies at the nexus of mobility and place, as it explores places of mobility. travel is a way of inhabiting space and constructing places. mobility, adey (2010, 73) argues, "does not necessarily serve to threaten an attachment to place. for a route well-traveled may over time turn into a meaningful place, just like the places or the nodes at either end of the route". in the last decades, the need to go beyond perceiving traveling time as dead time, and instead engaging in the corporeal and social experiences of mobility and to conceptualize buses and trains as places than only modes of traveling, has been emphasized in some literature dealing with mobility (see for example symes 2007; jiron 2009; jensen 2009; bissell 2016; holton & finn 2018). this article follows and adds to these thoughts by exploring and showing various experiences of mobile places and how they shape how teenagers move and feel. it is an engagement with buses and subways as places to uncover the diversity of what they can be and do. this includes exploring variations in terms of different users, modes of transportation, and various social, temporal and spatial contexts, and how that shapes mobile places, and what they may provide to their users. the analysis focuses mainly on how mobile places, such as buses and subways, and situations in the public transportation system are experienced, in terms of putting weights or reliefs on everyday life (friberg et al. 2004). this is studied to understand how mobile places influence and are influenced by everyday experiences, which may range from wellbeing, comfort, and inclusion to malaise, discomfort, and exclusion. moreover, the paper analyzes this to explore if, when, and how the public transportation system provides its users with places for social interaction and retreat, two vital needs in teenagers’ personal development and wellbeing (lieberg 1995). in being such everyday places, the characteristics and functioning of public transportation modes can both help and hinder daily life. studying this, and the places of public transportation as part of that, is particularly important in regard to young people. as a group, they are not only more dependent on this mode of transport compared to grown-ups. they also rarely own or have power over places to socialize in or withdraw to and are less free and uncontrolled in both private and public spaces (lieberg 1995; childress 2004). showing how teenagers experience mobile places, and the consequences of that, tap into two important matters that nairn and kraftl (2016, 20) argue need more recognition, namely young peoples' right to space and to mobility. it is also about the present and the future. understanding teenagers' experiences of traveling is a way to engage in their wellbeing and needs in the here and now. there are several benefits of public transportation for teenagers, and society. besides enabling travel and participation in school and activities, public transportation, if working, can support socialization, identity formation, encounters of difference, more equal opportunities, independence, 282 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays and wellbeing (barker et al. 2009; devaux & oppenchaim 2013; skelton 2013; goodman et al. 2014). however, understanding teenagers’ experiences of public transportation may also create insights regarding how to work towards increased use of collective modes of mobility, instead of the use of individual and space consuming cars, today and in the future. the teenagers of today are the adults of tomorrow. as grimsrud and el-geneidy (2014) argue, people who use public transportation early in life seem to be more inclined to keep doing it as adults. public transport and the mobility of teenagers research shows a growing interest in young people, up to around 25 years old, and in their geographies (skelton & valentine 1998; evans 2008; hopkins 2013) and mobilities (barker et al. 2009; skelton 2013; hurni 2015; ni laoire et al. 2017). literature that specifies in teenagers, often defined as those who fall within the ages of 13 and 19, is only a smaller part of this growing interest (weller 2006). i will therefore take a somewhat larger grip in this literature section. like much work on mobility, studies on mobility of young people are often based on quantitative methods focusing on mobility patterns. moreover, many studies have shown barriers for travelling, and variations in terms of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic factors, urban/rural location, corporal ability et cetera (van vliet 1983; tyrrell & harmer 2015; cope & lee 2016; pyer & tucker 2017). overall, the literature has made apparent that young people tend to be dependent on the resources of the parents and a functioning public transportation system to travel to and take part in essential spheres of society, from school to social activities. studies have put less focus on teenagers' own traveling experiences and to dig deeper, with more qualitative approaches, into why they travel as they do. however, some studies have analyzed young peoples' experiences of safety, risk, and other obstacles in traveling (cops 2013; currie et al. 2013; ocejo & tonnelat 2014). this research reflects investigations into how young people experience risk in public space in general, showing young women experiencing (or at least expressing) more risk and fear in public space compared to young men (watt & stenson 1998; johansson et al. 2012). studies on public transport and women (but not specifically teenagers) show that women experience more fear and risk compared to men and that they tend to change their behavior more because of that (koskela 1999; yavuz & welch 2010; gardner et al. 2017). fewer studies have analyzed more positive or constructive experiences of public transportation for young people, but some studies have shown or pointed towards the importance of public transit for socializing, freedom and development of identity and independence (symes 2007; jones et al. 2012; skelton 2013; goodman et al. 2014; holton & finn 2018). for example, young people may experience mobility as providing opportunities and freedom, as “a means of opening up interstitial spaces beyond surveillance and possibly outside conventional norms of behavior (as perceived by parents and authority)” (porter et al. 2010, 803). the journey to and from school can be a breathing space and somewhere where young people can try out identities and their autonomy beyond parents or teachers watchful gaze (symes 2007; valentine 2000). devaux and oppenchaim (2013) write about mobility as an essential part of teenagers' encounters with the public domain and of the socialization of teenagers where they as individuals test and learn behaviors and ways of being (also cops 2013). this paper follows that line of research and extends it as it also takes experiences like stress, fear, and other barriers into account. it does this to grasp the complexities of what public transportation places may be in everyday life of teenagers. what these works open up for, although rarely focus on or mainly analyze, is the possible crucial functions of mobile places for teenagers in terms of being places of interaction and retreat. places of interaction and retreat in an exploration of teenagers’ appropriation of space, lieberg (1995) analyzes this in regard to their needs for places of interaction and retreat. social interaction and retreat are often considered two primary needs in the personal being and development of adolescents. in enabling social interaction, specific environments can support identity formation and well-being and provide essential learning experiences for adolescents' social competence and how to interact with people and the surrounding fennia 197(2) (2019) 283maja lagerqvist (spencer & woolley 2000; l’aoustet & griffet 2004; pyyry & tani 2015). furthermore, studies have shown the importance of using specific environments as a retreat. such restorative places may enable individuals to be alone, get away from the overwhelm of everyday life, organize thoughts and feelings, and reduce stress (korpela 1992; clark & uzzell 2005). lieberg (1995) pinpoints two purposes for places of interaction; they enable the teenager to withdraw from the adult world and to be with peers, and they allow the teenager to encounter the adult world through social involvement. in contrast, places of retreat are used for avoiding other people, adults but sometimes also other teenagers, to unwind. furthermore, he explains places of interaction by goffman’s (1963) concept of the front stage, where teenagers can show themselves off to a passing audience and also try out different behaviors. places of retreat relate to more of a backstage where teenagers can withdraw when they have had enough of being on show. most studies on young people and their considered crucial places focus on four types of spaces; the home, school, the neighborhood (with parks/green areas, sports facilities and other meetingplaces) and the town (korpela 1992; matthews et al. 2000; clark & uzzell 2005; pyyry & tani 2015). although many of these studies have an urban population and setting, we should not forget rural youth who also use these kinds of spaces and out of necessity may create other meeting places (haartsen & strijker 2010; leyshon 2011). however, several researchers point to the need to focus on young people's lives beyond the more 'taken-for-granted' places (matthews et al. 1998; nairn et al. 2003). vanderstede (2011), for example, shows the importance of bus and railway stations for teenagers as supralocal meeting points that reach beyond their school. by focusing on places of teenagers' everyday mobility, i want to contribute to that going beyond the 'taken-for-granted'. everyday mobile places a bus or a train needs to be treated as ”a place in and of itself” (letherby & reynolds 2005, 7). in grasping buses and subways as mobile places, as places on the move, the paper ties into the attention of the intertwinedness of mobility and immobility. more and more studies on mobility have turned the focus to places, mooring, stillness, and relative immobility (adey 2010; bissell & fuller 2010; hannam et al. 2006). because mobility is a “situated event“ taking place somewhere (jarvis et al. 2001, 10). it is much more and does much more than only transportation. as we travel, we shape, inhabit, and are shaped by, the places we travel in. they become sites of work, interaction, relaxation, and shelter (jensen 2009; benediktsson et al. 2018). for example, a growing number of studies have argued for seeing public transportation as sites of public engagement in and of themselves, positioning them as crucial places for encounters with difference that can result in both conviviality and dialogue and in differentiation, intolerance and exclusion (jiron 2009; wilson 2011; purifoye 2015, bissell 2016; koefoed et al. 2017). a place can be regarded as a specific configuration of certain social practices, meanings, and material dimensions. places are relational and contextual, situated in contexts and related to other places and times, and they are forever in processes of being (re)shaped by people and shaping people (lefebvre 1991; massey 2005; simonsen 2008). buses and subways are stimulating to think about as places. in some ways, they are quite static and similar, in some parts of their materiality. nevertheless, they are also changing and dynamic in terms of their social interior and their spatial contexts. that movement is part of their function and characteristics. this, together with the dynamic setting of users and contexts and the continuous and tangible opening and shutting of outer boundaries (the doors), sets this kind of place a bit apart from other places. benediktsson and colleagues (2018, 14) conceptualize the particular type of places that subways and other mobile places of public transportation are by sharing traits like "prolonged co-presence with a multitude of strangers; lengthy periods of unscripted and unstructured time; and a shared purpose that requires a degree of behavior coordination". whereas most studies that analyze placeness of mobility do this in regard to grown-ups or in general, less focus has been given to such places in younger peoples' everyday life (but see symes 2007; jackson 2012; goodman et al. 2014; ocejo & tonnelat 2014; ponto 2017). this paper tries to bring more attention to this by exploring what such places actually can be and mean for teenagers. 284 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays conceptualizing them as places is a way to move beyond seeing them as insignificant, meaningless points or empty vessels transporting human beings from a to b. it is a way to get further into how they may shape our experiences in the everyday. this means focusing on what they can provide, set up, and change, in terms of social and corporeal experiences of interaction and retreat, comfort and discomfort. and in terms of experiences of inclusion and exclusion, safety and fear, harassment and joy, independence and dependence. the paper focuses on the lived experiences of teenagers in the mobile places of public transportation. this points us to what lefebvre (1991, 39, 42) in his emphasis on the importance of everyday termed “lived” spaces. the term captures the world as human beings in their everyday life experience it, a lived situation that embraces emotions, thoughts, and actions of a user of a place. weight and relief so, this paper deals with public transportation with a focus on the lived experiences of the places where the traveler is more or less still while traveling. it does so by investigating how teenagers experience these mobile places and if/when they provide retreat and social interaction (and not). however, social interaction may not always be experienced as something positive, and the experiences of these mobile places include more than these two dimensions. thus, two other concepts have influenced my analysis. in a study of mobility practices and experiences from a gender perspective, friberg, brusman and nilsson (2004) use the concepts of weight (sw. tyngd) and relief (sw. avlastning), instead of the more commonly used terminology of constraints and enablement, to analyze how built infrastructure influences everyday life. these concepts can be used to grasp how characteristics of mobile places (material as well as social and emotional) can be experienced as putting weight onto and limiting everyday life and as helping, freeing, and relieving it. they give openness and richness in nuances that are needed to understand the experiences. compared to concepts of barriers and enablers, or something being negative or positive, weight and relief give a more open-ended, gradated, and diverse way of understanding experiences and situations. one can experience something as putting weight onto the everyday even though it does not make it uncrossable, which the term barrier points to. to experience something as a relief does not necessarily mean that it is fully enabled or possible, just that there is some ease to a situation. there is also a fluidity to the concepts. one can experience something (a person, a solitude) as both adding weight and relief, or as shifting between. being in one place can be partly weight and partly relief at the same time. they are not automatically exclusive. while lieberg's (1995) notions of places of interaction and retreat is a way to analyze the mobile places in terms of what they may provide or be to their users, using weight and relief is a way to juggle and explore the experiences of these mobile places, which adds to the understanding of what these places are or can be. thus, combining these concepts is, for me, a way to understand weights and reliefs as well as interaction and retreat in more ways. together they open up possibilities to see nuances and ambiguities of mobile places and a way to cut the material in different ways, like lifting how one can experience a place of social interaction as providing weight as well as relief. the paper will contribute to how we think about teenagers' everyday mobilities. it does so by providing a qualitative analysis of experiences of public transportation where existences of weights as well as of reliefs are taken into account and analyzed through exploring buses and subways as multifaceted and varying places of retreat and social interaction. this has rarely been studied together before, and in particular not regarding teenagers. exploring teenage experiences of mobile places in stockholm the analysis builds on 47 interviews with teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 from four upper secondary schools in stockholm county. in 2016, i conducted 27 interviews with teenagers from two schools in the southern suburbs of stockholm. they came mainly from residential areas that can be classified as more socio-economically vulnerable than average, with a high percentage of low-income families (penje & wimark 2017). in 2017, i conducted 20 interviews at two other schools with teenagers fennia 197(2) (2019) 285maja lagerqvist living mainly in more average or affluent residential areas, around the city center and in nearby suburbs south and west of inner stockholm. there was a relatively even gender distribution within the material. of 47 individuals, nine were born abroad and 38 in sweden. 24 of the respondents have at least one parent who is born abroad. while i have discussed mobility patterns and variation in terms of geographical and socioeconomic factors based on this material elsewhere (lagerqvist & forsberg 2017; lagerqvist in progress), this paper has another focus. it digs much more into understanding the experiences of buses and subways as mobile places and how they shape teenagers' lives. in this, mainly gender differences have stood out and will therefore be discussed. therefore, ethnicity and socioeconomic position are not specific dimensions in the analysis, besides being part of constructing a diverse group of respondents. however, it should be noted here that ticket prices may affect teenagers' mobility (goodman et al. 2014). the price never came up as an explanation to how the respondents were traveling. however, about half of the teenagers have more than six kilometers to school and receive a free ticket for the public transportation system. the rest have a reduced cost as non-adults. the cost of traveling is the same within the whole system. all in all, the analysis covers teenagers living in a range of different residential areas with variations in terms of socioeconomics, location, and public transport structure. teenagers are not a homogenous group, neither worldwide nor within stockholm, but a group with various identities, interests, and experiences (matthews et al. 2000; weller 2006). however, some commonalities frame the lives of the teenagers in this study. all of them are still in school, live with a parent/parents in stockholm and use the same public transportation system. the semi-structured interviews focused on how they move in the everyday and the experiences of different modes of traveling. as part of this, the respondents constructed maps. these maps opened up the dialogue and gave it a stronger spatial dimension but were not used in the analysis for this paper. the analysis and knowledge production are grounded in how the respondents themselves describe and interpret their experiences. this is a way to give voice to individuals within an age group that often becomes hidden between what is seen as children and as adults (weller 2006). it is a group “whose experiences, behaviors and attitudes are usually misrepresented, often demonised and frequently distorted." (hopkins 2013, 2). specifically, the paper tries to show the teenagers' own words and explanations through quotations. in the paper, the term experience refers to sensed events as well as to the accumulation of knowledge or wisdom gained from those events. by using interviews, i rely on the respondents’ mediation of their experiences of mobile places. another way of studying this would have been to use mobile methods, like traveling along, combined with interviews (e.g. jiron et al. 2016). this would have provided ways into both aspects of the experiences. for practical reasons, only interviews at school were possible. the interviews were set up after contact with teachers. i got a chance to meet several classes and interview quite large sections of them during lecture time and many wanted to participate. the interviews were voluntary, anonymous, and the teenagers were allowed to terminate whenever they wanted, but no one did.2 the case of stockholm provides an example of how urban teenagers relate to public transportation in a nordic city, which is a less examined geographical context in the field of young people and public transport (but see honkatukia & svynarenkob 2019). it provides an example of a context where the social status and use of public transportation, and specifically the bus, is not being regarded as low social status. it is commonly used throughout larger parts of the social strata of society. this differs from the use and position portrayed in many of the internationally disseminated studies on public transportation, which often come from the us, uk, and australia (e.g. hutchinson 2000). the transportation service in stockholm is accessible and developed compared to more rural public transportation services. a study on rural teenagers would possibly bring other weights and reliefs of public transportation. 286 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays ”watch the doors, doors are closing”: entering into the empirical material the following sections will show both relieving and weight burdening, and both pausing and interacting, experiences of travel and mobile places, and how this differs between different places, contexts, and travelers. importantly, most of the respondents use public transportation on an everyday basis to get to school and to move about in the city. these mobile places are thus everyday places, and for many of the respondents also places difficult to avoid altogether, even if they sometimes can make some choices regarding the mode of transportation. to crash on the bus: places of retreat and experiences of relief it's great to sit there [on the bus] and just be. it is much less stressful than the subway. you can sit and be on your own. i enjoy looking out the window. (girl, 18 years old) ok, so, it depends. if i'm tired, then i’ll take the bus. but if i just want to get everything over with quickly and i’m not tired but have energy, then i can take the train. (boy, 17 years old) in the narrative of the bus, the respondents clearly express the relieving nature of public transport in terms of providing places of retreat. they describe the relief of the bus as that it offers calm. many talk about the bus being particularly preferred when they are tired. the bus is also deemed a place of retreat and as giving relief as or when it provides an opportunity for a less divided traveling, and therefore a lengthier period of calm. fragmentation is one aspect of the experiences of how public transport can put weight on the everyday (friberg et al. 2004). respondents talk about choosing the bus or certain buses, even when the ride will be longer if it means fewer changes: for me, it is easier to sit on the bus for a longer distance, like 50 minutes, than change and run between trains […]. i can relax. (boy, 18 years old) the bus is also reinforced as a calmer place by how the teenagers choose to travel further by bus instead of a faster, but fragmented, travel by subway. furthermore, almost all respondents listen to music on their phones while traveling. they describe it as a way of escaping the sounds of people and the city that surrounds them. the intensive use of phones, combined with headphones, can be understood as a way to maintain an integrity and bodily autonomy during the journey. it provides some relief, and retreat, from the rather stressed existence that young people may live in and travel in public transport can be. doing things with the phone, listening to music. i unplug the various sounds around, as well. people are yelling and screaming. everything is so loud. (boy, 18 years old) it is so great to sit on a bus by a window and listen to music. (girl, 19 years old) the calmness of the bus seems to be created by the smaller number of people in and around buses, which, however, is time dependent. several respondents emphasize that buses at times are overcrowded, and hence provide less or no relief. the respondents also say that the bus offers a small-scale environment that feels protected and cozy. it is easier to keep track of what is happening and the others traveling there. this gives a sense of security, a relief that is also enhanced by knowing that there is a present, contactable driver within the same place. i feel safe on the bus. it's narrow, or kind of tight […] and you can see everything. in the subway, it is difficult to see what’s happening. it is wider and a lot of people. so the bus is nice. (girl, 17 years old) i like to go by bus, even though it is not at all the most efficient. you have to take into account queues and… well, the subway is the fastest. but the bus is much more comfortable, you can sit alone, and it is cozy. (girl, 18 years old) the bus is the mode of transport that is the most popular in general. over half of the respondents prefer the bus, especially the girls. but this group is broad and diverse and includes boys and girls living centrally and far away and from socio-economically disadvantaged areas as well as more affluent ones. fennia 197(2) (2019) 287maja lagerqvist the subway, on the other hand, is highlighted as relieving in totally different ways, mainly because of its speed, convenience, and reliability. it makes the traveler part of a more extensive interconnected system where many locations are accessible, and often and easily reached: i think the subway is the best. it’s the fastest way to go. and there is order, regular departures, and arrivals. (boy, 18 years old) with the bus, you can get stuck in traffic for hours. with the subway, there are fewer problems. it rolls all the time. and it is much faster. it just feels more harmonious. (boy, 18 years old) thus, mobile places construct or enable immobility within their mobility, some more than others. above all, the bus appears as a distinct place of retreat. it is a place where you can think and listen to music, read, or stare out the window. it is also a place for being on your own, to sit alone, and to be able to use your cell phone without anyone watching over you. these backstage aspects of the bus are often put in contrast to the subway or school, where the respondents find that they cannot relax or be in the same way. just by being a place away from school and parents, mobile places can be places of retreat. several also raise the relief in not depending on parents to travel within the city. the highlighting of mobile places as places for independence, solitude and being away from parents or others should not be read as a move or strive towards, or idealization of, total individual travelling or independence from everyone (see the critique of the idea of youth as a linear transition into adult independence, evans 2008). the mode of traveling here is collective and frequently done in company with friends (as will be shown later). so, the bus seems to be able to provide pauses in everyday life. however, this depends on the prevalence of crowding, stress, discomfort, and fear. riding a bus or subway during peak hours is something different from doing it on a monday evening. riding it in the middle of the city is different from doing it on the outskirts of the system. in the stories of the respondents, the bus as a place of retreat and intense relief where one may actually rest, is tied to travels mainly outside the city center. descriptions of the bus as a place of retreat with reliefs related to listening to music or just being alone, is less connected to a specific context and time, and something that can happen on subways as well. weights and the non-retreatness of mobile places however, others perceive the small-scaleness of the bus as a weight, and consequently, less of a place that provides a pause. they experience that the bus easily gets crowded and hot, a place where you feel trapped. some perceive the bus as altogether slow, that it takes a lot of time and can get stuck in traffic. the quote below illustrates the subway as much more helping or relieving while the bus is considered putting weight onto the everyday travel. the subway is the fastest. the bus travels by lots of buildings and streets where you don't need to go. the subway goes directly to the center. that's why it's better. smoother. (boy, 17 years old) here the bus induces feelings of limited freedom of movement. it takes time from you. it takes you on redundant paths and gets you caught. delays are a heavy weight of buses. this affects the efficiency of transportation but also the experience of it. moreover, it affects schoolwork. several describe difficulties in getting to school in time and difficulties in planning the rest of their lives. the bus is often late. or, it always comes too late. it's odd when it arrives on time! and sometimes it does not come at all. (girl, 17 years old) however, the subway is the mode of travel that is most intensely described as unfavorable and avoided. this relates to experiences of bodily restraints and disturbances because many people use the subway. therefore, it is often crowded, warm, dirty, and stressing. sometimes it is crowded. sometimes it is smelly. sometimes the seats are dirty. you just don’t feel very good there. (boy, 17 years old) the overarching portrayal regarding the subway as weight is that (or when) it is a crowded place filled with stressed people, or with people you would like to avoid. thus, it may be a place where one 288 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays barely can stand or breathe, but also a way too social place. i will get back to the latter soon. one thing to add here is that despite the negative experiences of the subway and the individual preference for the bus, it is still the mode of transport that many of the respondents pinpoint as the best to have to in neighborhood generally. places of social interaction none of the respondents portray the subway as a quiet retreat. however, they describe it as a social place, a place for friends to travel together, like an extended party, which also can provide relief and restoration in life. subways, as well as buses, are experienced as places for social interaction. the respondents often refer to them as places where they socialize, virtually or physically, with friends. i’m just sitting [on the subways] and thinking about stuff, or doing things on my phone, writing to friends. (boy, 16 years old) sometimes i take the bus to the subway. not because i need it, it is just one stop, but i do it to catch up with some friends that take that bus. (girl, 18 years old) while traveling with public transport, the surroundings may be encountered directly, like talking to the person next to you on the bus. it can also be encountered more indirectly or passively, like not talking but rather taking in what is happening on the bus or subway, or outside the window. this may offer different kinds of socializing, as well as various types of pauses or retreats. similarly to how l'aoustet and griffet (2004) describe how teenagers are hanging out in a park in marseille, the places of public transport seem to provide opportunities for meeting or gazing at new people as well as intense moments with friends. mobile places can be, similar to cele’s (2013) interpretation of parks in young girls' lives, places of social life as well as solitude. it can range and oscillate between front and backstage. here i am also reminded of benediktsson and colleagues (2018, 14) conceptualization of subways as offering "a passive form of flânerie – a mild and reflective form of curiosity about fellow passengers". a public place like the subway or the bus may be a place where one can be alone together with others. in a way, riding on a bus or a subway might make one dispatched from the outside world, distanced by glass, metal, and movement. however, the interviews expose that being inside a mobile place makes the traveler very much part of other, more or less fleeting, social situations, for better or worse. to sit on needles and pins: places of problematic social interaction so, the bus and the subway are described as social places where young people interact with friends and keep up with social life. thus, these mobile places seem to be able to function as enabling places that can provide social interaction as well as a refuge, where the teenagers can exist in a relatively undisturbed and independent manner with themselves or others. nevertheless, here we must dig a bit further into what has been hinted at earlier in the material. because occasionally, sometimes and for some more than others, these are places lined with frictions. there is stress, disturbance, and anxiety coming from sounds, smells and dirt as well as from public flows and unpleasant and threatening people. but not only from the streams of people. many respondents also speak of being edgy by the emptiness or near emptiness of mobile places. in particular, it becomes clear that the reliability of the subway, which stands out as a relief regarding geography and time, does not apply to the subway as a social place. the reliability and effectiveness of the subway open it for the use of the great mass, which also can turn it possibly more fearsome. many of the respondents describe the subway as rowdy and unpleasant because of some of its users and how they behave, especially during nights and weekends. the subway is just too loud. people are just shouting and making a lot of noise. especially if you go during evenings and nights when everyone is drunk. (girl, 17 years old) a severe burden that emerges in the material is tied to men (sole or in groups) and alcohol, and to foremost sexual but also racist harassments. several teenagers describe experiences that have fennia 197(2) (2019) 289maja lagerqvist affected their sense of security, integrity, and willingness to travel during specific times or with particular parts of the system of public transport: sometimes there are like older guys who are drunk and they are like…you know, saying and doing things. so it is not the subway's fault, but in my position, it is kind of scary. and i do think a lot of people are feeling like that. (girl, 17 years old) the subway is the main place in the accounts of physical and social discomfort and harassment. it is also a place that is avoided, in particular at certain times and situations. as these experiences show, traveling becomes a heavy weight in the everyday of the teenagers. here, places like the subway become a constraint in and to their mobility and being in space. mobile places are places that are sometimes open, sometimes shut, in the sense that actual doors are closing the place for a certain time. this makes the internal material setting of the place quite robust for a while, although the social atmosphere can change within seconds depending on events and tensions. one can be stuck with the seats, the air, and the neighbors, and one minute later one can be off and somewhere else. moreover, just as the experiences of the bus as a place of retreat differ some in terms of when and where the trip is taken, there are variations regarding mobile places as places of interaction. the social composition of riders is unsurprisingly the most substantial component, although this often also is tied to the time of the day. also, distance from home or known places were sometimes mentioned as shaping the experience of the mobile place and its crowd, or indeed emptiness, of travelers. the continuation of something we already knew the interviews show gendered differences regarding how different mobile places are perceived. for example, most girls appreciate the bus more than the subway, while the benefits of the subway are almost only lifted by boys. when the boys talk about discomfort, it has to do with experiences of congestion, disgust, dirt, and smells. the girls express, over and over again, bodily vulnerability and discomfort from other travelers, especially in the subway. they say that they choose to travel by bus to a much greater extent, although it takes more time because it feels safer. most of the girls i talked to, regardless of where they live and their socioeconomic position, feel uncomfortable and unsafe at public transport places occasionally and adopt their mobility practices because of that. this is not new. women's fear and adaptations in public space and transportation are something that research and official reports have pointed out for several years and harassments are widely reported in the literature, particularly for women and members of marginalized groups (yavuz & welch 2010; gardner et al. 2017; söderström et al. 2019). it is important to acknowledge that it continues to be like that. however, it is also crucial to point out that the experiences do vary in terms of the type of mobile place, location, and time. there is always that thought in the back of my mind, what if someone groped me? more specifically, it is in connection to soccer games…that’s when i feel discomfort. i don’t like being around then, after a game. then i definitely avoid going with public transportation. (girl, 17 years old) sometimes during the evenings, i feel uncomfortable with riding buses and the subway, as people are drunk and loud. especially, i try to be careful about not riding the subway then (girl, 16 years old) feelings of discomfort and insecurity may lead to what church, frost and sullivan (2000) term fearbased exclusion, a type of exclusion that women and people of minorities in particular often are affected by. experiences of fear affect how and where people travel and stay, as individuals tend to try, when possible, to avoid risks (koskela 1999). in the end, this shapes what kind of public places we are left with. also worth emphasizing here is that young people, as well as minorities and women, are groups that have been identified as more dependent on public transportation, making all forms and tendencies of exclusion, avoidance and discomfort even more problematic (carter 2005; mccray & brais 2007). however, there is another aspect to raise here. goodey (1997, 411) argues that men seem to be less likely to show weakness and to talk about being afraid or feeling insecure. a few of the respondents acknowledged at first that they felt unsafe. it was only girls who admitted it from the 290 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays start. however, as the interviews continued, it became apparent that both girls (to a large extent) and boys (to a somewhat lesser extent) had experienced discomfort and insecurity during their travels. so, while teenagers often are seen as unwanted and as one of the causes of fear and crime in public spaces (matthews et al. 2000), this study shows a lot of experiences and feelings of insecurity and fear among teenagers, predominantly related to what they see as "older men". as cresswell (2006, 199) puts it "the way people are enabled or constrained in terms of their mobile practices differs markedly according to their position in social hierarchies". age, as well as gender and other positions play roles in these hierarchies. however, i also want to highlight that the teenagers do make active and reflective choices regarding how to travel. here we see their agency and ability to influence their movement through, and being in, space. how they travel can be understood in terms of that they developed what kesselring (2006, 270) terms ”mobility strategies”, which shows how individuals “navigate through social, material, and virtual worlds”. while several of the respondents state that they adjust their ways of traveling, like avoiding the subway during nighttime, others challenge their fears and travel anyway. as hurni (2015, 22) has pointed out, “young people are negotiating their everyday mobilities in more complex ways and at multiple scales than is often attributed to them”. concluding remarks this study has attempted to dig deeper into teenagers’ experiences of public transport to understand how its places matter for this group of passengers. what can we learn from this study? the specificity of teenage mobile place-making does not so much lie in a very uniqueness of how they use or create places. what makes it significant to study specifically is that we need to acknowledge teenagers as worthy of attention instead of ignoring them or assuming that they are entirely different from, or the same as, adults. also, there is the extra layer to the meanings and influences these everyday places can have for teenagers because they, in general, and compared to adults, have fewer other places of their own. and because they are more dependent on public transportation to be part of society. insights of their experiences provide us with possibilities to work towards ensuring that teenagers find public transportation inclusive, safe and worth traveling, and keep on using it in the future. however, studies on young people should be not be seen as an isolated debate (skelton & valentine 1998; weller 2006). this paper shows teenagers´ experiences of public transportation places, but it can also offer broader insights. insights that point to how or what these public mobile places may be for other groups in society, to those who have more access to places they can call their own and, more importantly, to those who lack that (like lacking a home, see jackson 2012). a contribution of the study is that it highlights the different values or meanings of public transport by showing when and how it enables and improves life, as in creating well-being, pauses, interaction and feelings of accessibility, flow and security. and when and how it turns into providing weight, discomfort, and barriers. many research articles focus on one or the other (such as risk or social interaction), an either/or perspective that might be a result of a press and need of generating many publications. but i think there is a strength in showing the ambiguity, nuances, and variability that these places seem to hold. i have been intrigued to try to grasp a fuller complexity, a both/and perspective, in one paper, and the concepts of weight and relief, retreat and interaction, has helped me do that. interviews, as a method, in contrast to more quantitative surveys, have the opportunity to capture that. it can show both positive and negative dimensions and social consequences of public transport and identify that, how, when, and where these places can comprise of diversities and inconsistencies in themselves. as in showing that the subway can be experienced as both the best and the worst, as enabling wanted and unwanted interaction; that the small-scaleness of the bus can be why it is valued, and why it is disliked; that people in these places can provide both security and discomfort; that experiences of limitations and freedoms can be accommodated, and shift, within the same place as it moves through space or when users change. this complexity is essential to the planning and evaluation of transport systems and in how, when, where or for whom public transport can be socially beneficial and a part of social sustainability, as often assumed and argued for in public fennia 197(2) (2019) 291maja lagerqvist policies and reports (e.g. review in wimark et al. 2017). this is, of course, dependent on how well the system actually work in, for example, providing safe and accessible transportation for all. the participants of this study seem to like the bus the most. the bus appears almost like an extended living room, or perhaps from a youth perspective, an extension of one's own (bed)room (a significant place in teenagers' lives, see lincoln 2015). the subway, on the other hand, appears more like an anonymous public space, a broader road to travel, with more unknown people and connections to the rest of the city. above all, the bus is preferred overwhelmingly by the girls, lifting the bus as a relief and a place of retreat, safety, and less unwelcomed social interaction. the subway was more often talked about as a weight in everyday life because of its uninvited social interactions. in connection to this, it is important to acknowledge that young women are a group in stockholm that is experiencing increasing insecurity in public spaces, such as their neighborhood (söderström et al. 2019). this makes the result of the variations within the experiences of mobile places interesting. because next to the discomforting result that girls (still) experience harassment, fear, and unease in foremost the subway, they also tell stories of how buses are experienced as safe and calm, or at least safer and calmer than the subway. furthermore, national and local politicians and planners of today mainly dream and invest in rail-based public transport in sweden, as part of developing more ecologically sustainable mobilities, and such future visions often include driverless vehicles (stjernborg & mattisson 2016; swedish government offices 2018). thus, it is worth thinking about what conditions and places we are creating in future public transportation systems, and who the winners and losers are in this. notes 1 all quotes from respondents are translated from swedish by the author. 2 in sweden, interviews with individuals from 15 years and older are permitted without parents' consent (http://www.codex.vr.se/en/manniska1.shtml). acknowledgements i want to thank the department of human geography at stockholm university and region stockholm for funding this project, erik hansson at uppsala university and the three reviewers for engaging in the work with reading and comments. references adey, p. (2010) mobility. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203875483 barker, j., kraftl, p., horton, j. & tucker, f. (2009) the road less travelled: new directions in children and young people’s mobility. mobilities 4(1) 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100802657939 bissell, d. (2016) micropolitics of mobility: public transport commuting and everyday encounters with forces of enablement and constraint. annals of the american association of geographers 106(2) 394–403. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315266336-17 bissell, d. & fuller g. (eds.) (2010) stillness in a mobile world. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203855898 carter, m. (2005) gender differences in experience with and fear of crime in relation to public transport. in research on women’s issues in transportation 2, conference proceedings 35, 100. transportation research board, washington, dc. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009359033 cele, s. (2013) performing the political through public space: teenage girls' everyday use of a city park. space and polity 17(1) 74-87. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780714 childress, h. (2004) teenagers, territory and the appropriation of space. childhood 11(2) 195–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568204043056 church, a., frost, m. & sullivan, k. (2000) transport and social exclusion in london. transport policy 7(3) 195–205. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0967-070x(00)00024-x clark, c. & uzzell, d. l. (2005) the socio-environmental affordances of adolescents’ environments. in spencer, c. & blades, m. (eds.) children and their environments, 176–198. cambridge university press, cambridge. 292 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays cope, m. & lee, b. (2016) mobility, communication, and place: navigating the landscapes of suburban u.s. teens. annals of the american association of geographers 106(2) 311–320. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315266336-8 cops, d. (2013) the role of autonomous mobility in public space on fear of crime among adolescents. journal of youth studies 16(8) 1105–1122. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.793790 cresswell, t. (2006) on the move: mobility in the modern western world. routledge, london. currie, g., delbosc, a. & mahmoud, s. (2013) factors influencing young peoples’ perceptions of personal safety on public transport. journal of public transportation 16(1) 1–19. https://doi.org/10.5038/2375-0901.16.1.1 devaux, j. & oppenchaim, n. (2013) teenage mobility: a socialised and socialising practice. metropolitics 27.3.2013. <https://www.metropolitiques.eu/teenage-mobility-a-socialised-and.html>. 21.12.2019. evans, b. (2008) geographies of youth/young people. geography compass 2(5) 1659–1680. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00147.x friberg, t., brusman, m. & nilsson, m. (2004) persontransporternas "vita fläckar": om arbetspendling med kollektivtrafik ur ett jämställdhetsperspektiv. cks, linköping. gardner, n., cui, j. & coiacetto, e. (2017) harassment on public transport and its impacts on women’s travel behavior. australian planner 54(1) 8–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/07293682.2017.1299189 goffman, e. (1963) behavior in public places. free press, new york. goodey, j. (1997) boys don´t cry: masculinities, fear of crime and fearlessness. british journal of crimonology 37(3) 401–418. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.a014177 goodman, a., jones, a, roberts, h., steinbach, r. & green, j. (2014) ‘we can all just get on a bus and go’: rethinking independent mobility in the context of the universal provision of free bus travel to young londoners. mobilities 9(2) 275–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2013.782848 grimsrud, m. & el-geneidy, a. (2014) transit to eternal youth: lifecycle and generational trends in greater montreal public transport mode share. transportation 41(1) 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-013-9454-9 haartsen, t. & strijker, d. (2010) rural youth culture: keten in the netherlands. journal of rural studies 26(2) 163–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.11.001 hannam, k., sheller, m. & urry, j. (2006) editorial. mobilities, immobilities and moorings. mobilities 1(1) 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100500489189 holton, m. & finn, k. (2018) being-in-motion: the everyday (gendered and classed) embodied mobilities for uk university students who commute. mobilities 13(3) 426–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1331018 honkatukia, p. & svynarenkob, a. (2019) intergenerational encounters on the metro: young people's perspectives on social control in the media city. emotion, space and society 32 100545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.10.001 hopkins, p. (2013) young people, place and identity. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203852323 hurni, a. (2015) moving on: the role of transport in the everyday mobilities of children and young people in urban australia. dissertations in university of western sydney. https://researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:34543 hutchinson, s. (2000) waiting for the bus. social text 18(2) 107–120. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-18-2_63-107 jackson, e. (2012) fixed in mobility: young homeless people and the city. international journal of urban and regional research 36(4) 725–741. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011.562379 jarvis, h., pratt, a. & cheng-chong wu, p. (2001) the secret life of cities. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315847665 jensen, o. b. (2009) flows of meaning, cultures of movements. urban mobility as meaningful everyday life practice. mobilities 4(1) 139–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100802658002 jiron, p. (2009) mobility on the move: examining urban daily mobility practices in santiago de chile. dissertations in london school of economics and political science. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2325/ jirón, p. a, imilán, w. a. & iturra, l. (2016) relearning to travel in santiago: the importance of mobile place-making and travelling know-how. cultural geographies 23(4) 599–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015622141 johansson, k., laflamme, l. & eliasson, m. (2012) adolescents’ perceived safety and security in public space – a swedish focus group study with a gender perspective. young 20(1) 69–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/110330881102000104 jones, a., steinbach, r., roberts, h., goodman, a. & green, j. (2012) rethinking passive transport: bus fare exemptions and young people's wellbeing. health & place 18(3) 605–612. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2012.01.003 fennia 197(2) (2019) 293maja lagerqvist kesselring, s. (2006) pioneering mobilities: new patterns of movement and motility in a mobile world. environment and planning a: economy and space 38(2) 269–279. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37279 koefoed, l., christensen, m. d. & simonsen, k. (2017) mobile encounters: bus 5a as a cross-cultural meeting place. mobilities 12(5) 726–739. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2016.1181487 korpela, k. (1992) adolescents’ favourite places and environmental self-regulation. journal of environmental psychology 12(3) 249–258. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0272-4944(05)80139-2 koskela, h. (1999) ’gendered exclusions’: women’s fear of violence and changing relations to space. geografiska annaler 81b(2) 111–124. l’aoustet, o. & griffet, j. (2004) sharing public space: youth experience and socialization in marseille’s borely park. space and culture 7(2) 173–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331203254041 lagerqvist (in progress) ungdomars resandevärld. in henriksson, m. & lindkvist scholten, c. (eds.) mobilitet och mångfald –resande på lika villkor? arkiv förlag, lund. lagerqvist, m. & forsberg, g. (2017) resmönster, resvanor och reseupplevelser bland ungdomar i stockholms län. in wimark, t. (ed.) metoder och verktyg för sociala nyttoberäkningar i kollektivtrafiken, 87–113. department of human geography, stockholm university, stockholm. lefebvre, h. (1991) the production of space. basil blackwell, oxford. letherby, g. & reynolds, g. (2005) train tracks: work, play, and politics on the railways. berg, london. leyshon, m. (2011) the struggle to belong: young people on the move in the countryside. population, space and place 17(4) 304–325. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.580 lieberg, m. (1995) teenagers and public space. communication research 22(6) 720–744. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365095022006008 lincon, s. (2015) bedroom culture: a review of research. in nairn, k., kraftl, p. & skelton, t. (eds.) space, place and environment. geographies of children and young people 3, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-90-3_7-1 massey, d. (2005) for space. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.12968/sece.2005.1.361 matthews, h., limb, m. & percy-smith, b. (1998) changing worlds: the microgeographies of young teenagers. tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 89(2) 193–202. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9663.00018 matthews, h., taylor, m., percy-smith, b. & limb, m. (2000) the unacceptable flaneur – the shopping mall as a teenage hangout. childhood. a global journal of child research 7(3) 279–294. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568200007003003 mccray, t. & brais, n. (2007) exploring the role of transportation in fostering social exclusion: the use of gis to support qualitative data. networks & spatial economics 7(4) 397–412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-007-9031-x nairn, k. & kraftl, p. (2016) introduction to children and young people, space, place, and environment. in skelton t., nairn k. & kraftl, p. (eds.) space, place, and environment. geographies of children and young people 3, 1–24. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-044-5_33 nairn, k., panelli, r. & mccormack, j. (2003) destabilizing dualisms: young people’s experiences of rural and urban environments. childhood 10(1) 9–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568203010001002 ni laoire, c., white, a. & skelton, t. (eds.) (2017) movement, mobilities, and journeys. springer singapore, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-029-2 ocejo, r. & tonnelat, s. (2014) subway diaries: how people experience and practice riding the train. ethnography 15(4) 493–515. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138113491171 penje, o. & wimark, t. (2017) social hållbarhet och segregation: kvantitativ tillgänglighetsmodellering för rumsliga analyser av kollektivtrafik. in wimark, t. (ed.) metoder och verktyg för sociala nyttoberäkningar i kollektivtrafiken, 55–86. department of human geography, stockholm university, stockholm. ponto, h. (2017) young people’s everyday lives in the city: living and experiencing daily places. dissertations in department of geosciences and geography a52. university of helsinki, helsinki. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:isbn%20978-951-51-2928-4 porter, g., hampshire, k., abane, a., robson, e., munthali, a., mashiri, m. & tanle, a. (2010) moving young lives: mobility, immobility and inter-generational tensions in urban africa. geoforum 41(5) 796–804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.05.001 purifoye, g. y. (2015) nice-nastiness and other raced social interactions on public transport systems. city & community 14(3) 286–310. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12116 pyer, m. & tucker, f. (2017) ‘with us, we, like, physically can’t’: transport, mobility and the leisure experiences of teenage wheelchair users. mobilities 12(1) 36–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2014.970390 294 fennia 197(2) (2019)reviews and essays pyyry, n. & tani, s. (2015) geographies of hanging out: approaching young people’s play with urban public space. in horton, j. & evans, b. (eds.) geographies of children and young people, 193–210. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-96-5_8-1 simonsen, k. (2008) place as encounters: practice, conjunction and coexistence. in bærenholdt, j. o. & granås, b. (eds.) mobility and place: enacting northern european peripheries, 13–25. ashgate, aldershot. skelton, t. (2013) young people’s urban im/mobilities: relationality and identity formation. urban studies 50(3) 467–483. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098012468893 skelton, t. & valentine, g. (eds.) (1998) cool places: geographies of youth cultures. routledge, london. spencer, c. & woolley, h. (2000) children and the city: a summary of recent environmental psychology research. child: care, health and development 26(3) 181–197. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2214.2000.00125.x stjernborg, v. & mattisson, o. (2016) the role of public transport in society – a case study of general policy documents in sweden. sustainability 8(11) 1120. https://doi.org/10.3390/su8111120 stockholm county administration (2016) resvanor i stockholms län 2015. trafikförvaltningen, stockholm. swedish government offices (2018) nationell planering för transportinfrastrukturen 2018–2029. <http://www.regeringen.se/rattsliga-dokument/skrivelse/2018/06/skr.-201718278/>. 21.12.2019. symes, c. (2007) coaching and training: an ethnography of student commuting on sydney’s suburban trains. mobilities 2(3) 443–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100701597434 söderström, m., lifvin, m. & viberg, j. (2019). nationella trygghetsundersökningen 2018: om utsatthet, otrygghet och förtroende. brå, stockholm. tyrrell, n. & harmer, n. (2015) a good move? young people’s comparisons of rural and urban living in britain. childhood 22(4) 551–565. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568214566822 valentine, g. (2000) exploring children and young people’s narratives of identity. geoforum 31(2) 257–267. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-7185(99)00047-0 vanderstede, w. (2011) ‘chilling’and ‘hopping’in the ‘teenage space network’: explorations in teenagers’ geographies in the city of mechelen. children's geographies 9(2) 167–184. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011.562379 van vliet, w. (1983) exploring the fourth environment: an examination of the home range of city and suburban teenagers. environment and behavior 15(5) 567–588. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916583155002 watt, p. & stenson, k. (1998) the street: 'it's a bit dodgy around there': safety, danger, ethnicity and young people's use of public space. in skelton, t. & valentine, g. (eds.) cool places: geographies of youth culture, 249–265. routledge, london and new york. weller, s. (2006) situating (young) teenagers in geographies of children and youth. children's geographies 4(01) 97–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280600577517 wilson, h. f. (2011) passing propinquities in the multicultural city: the everyday encounters of bus passengering. environment and planning a: economy and space 43(3) 634–649. https://doi.org/10.1068/a43354 wimark, t. (ed.) (2017) metoder och verktyg för sociala nyttoberäkningar i kollektivtrafiken. department of human geography, stockholm university, stockholm. yavuz, n. & welch, e. (2010) addressing fear of crime in public space: gender differences in reaction to safety measures in train transit. urban studies 47(12) 2491–2515. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009359033 intergenerational intimacy geopolitics: family interviewing and generations of memory in occupied palestine urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa97092 doi: 10.11143/fennia.97092 intergenerational intimacy geopolitics: family interviewing and generations of memory in occupied palestine taylor garner, nadia mansour and david j. marshall garner, t., mansour, n. & marshall, d. j. (2021) intergenerational intimacy geopolitics: family interviewing and generations of memory in occupied palestine. fennia 199(2) 226–241. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.97092 critiquing the state-centrism of mainstream geopolitical scholarship, feminist geopolitics has long emphasized the need to attend to how embodied and emotional experiences of everyday life are also bound up within geopolitical processes such as conflict and displacement. similarly, the subfield of geographies of children, youth, and families has emphasized the ways in which the everyday lives and spaces of young people are implicated within broader scale geopolitical and economic processes. in both of these interrelated strands of research, the intimacy of home and family have emerged as seemingly unlikely sites of geopolitics. although the gendered power dynamics of the family have received attention, less often considered is the way that intergenerational interactions within and outwith the family are also intertwined within and constitute a form of geopolitics. this paper examines generational encounters, differences, and gaps, as sites of geopolitics, where resistance, resilience, and political subjectivities are formed, performed, and negotiated. to do so we draw upon two separate but related research projects examining the spaces of intergenerational memory in occupied palestine, one examining palestinian women’s intergenerational memories of the occupation and resistance, and the other exploring intergenerational memories of a contested religious heritage site. these empirical case studies demonstrate how intergenerational relations are constrained and enlivened by differences in life-course vis-à-vis historical geopolitical events. examining how memory and meaning are negotiated across generations injects temporality into the concept of intimacy geopolitics, defined as a set of distant and proximate spatial relations, emotional attachments, and embodied encounters through which geopolitics is performed. alongside this conceptual contribution, we seek to advance a secondary methodological contribution to the geographies of children, youth, and families by reflecting upon the benefits and challenges to conducting intergenerational interviews in family homes and elsewhere. keywords: intergenerationality, family, gender, youth, palestine taylor garner, independent scholar, 2765 tamarac street, denver, colorado, usa 80238. e-mail: tgarner3@elon.edu nadia mansour, independent scholar, nablus, palestine. e-mail: nadiamans36@ gmail.com david j. marshall (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7460-7898), department of history and geography, lindner hall arts & sciences, 2335 campus box, elon, nc, usa 27244. e-mail: dmarshall8@elon.edu © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.97092 mailto:tgarner3@elon.edu mailto:nadiamans36@gmail.com mailto:nadiamans36@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7460-7898 mailto:dmarshall8@elon.edu fennia 199(2) (2021) 227taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall introduction critiquing the state-centrism of geopolitical analysis, feminist geopolitics emphasizes how embodied and emotional experiences of everyday life are bound up within broader-scaled processes including conflict and displacement (massaro & williams 2013; hyndman 2019). similarly, the subfield of children’s geographies emphasizes how the everyday lives and spaces of young people are implicated within geopolitical and economic processes (katz 2004; kallio & häkli 2011; skelton & gough 2013; woon 2017). in both of these interrelated strands of research, the intimates spaces of home and family have emerged as sites of geopolitics (harker 2011; harker & martin 2012). although the gendered constructions of home have received attention in feminist geography (blunt & dowling 2006; brickell 2012), the age-related dynamics of family, and how these intergenerational relations are intertwined within and constitute a form of geopolitics, have received less attention (kallio 2016). this paper probes generational encounters as sites of geopolitics where political subjectivities are formed and negotiated. we draw upon related research projects examining the spaces of intergenerational memory in occupied palestine: one examining women’s intergenerational memories of political struggle, and the other exploring intergenerational memories of a contested religious heritage site. by attending to the sites, silences, and practices of intergenerational memory, these empirical cases demonstrate how intergenerational relations are constrained and enlivened by differences in life-course relative to historical geopolitical events. in this discussion of intergenerational memory, our aim is to inject a temporal element into the concept of intimacy geopolitics, defined as a set of intense distant and proximate spatial relations, emotional attachments, and embodied encounters through which geopolitics is performed. in our rendering, intimacy geopolitics is understood not only as multi-scalar (pain & staeheli 2014), but also multi-temporal, stretching from contemporary interactions to past traumas and memories as well as future fears and hopes. alongside this conceptual contribution, we advance a secondary methodological contribution by reflecting upon the benefits and challenges of intergenerational family interviewing. most research on youth in palestine emphasizes political agency and activism vis-à-vis the national struggle (habashi 2019). meanwhile, palestinian elders typically appear as keepers of memory (sa’di & lila abu-lughod 2007; kassem 2011). rather than centering youth perspectives on the present, or privileging elder memories of the past, we examine the exchanges and gaps between these perspectives. following this introduction, we situate our research at the intersection of intimacy geopolitics and intergenerational geographies. from here, we move to a methodological discussion about the challenges and benefits of family interviewing. a brief overview of the study site precedes the two empirical cases. through these cases we note how intimacy geopolitics is performed through narrative, embodied, emotional, and material forms of intergenerational memory and how these practices and sites of memory evoke different meanings and emotions for different genders and generations. finally, we discuss how a focus on collective memory and intergenerational encounters helps widen the scale of geopolitical analysis beyond a focus on contemporary crises. intimacy geopolitics and the family although feminist geographers have analyzed the reproduction of capitalist/patriarchal social relations within the family (holloway 1998; katz 2004; katz & monk 1993), and although family decision-making appears in research on the geopolitics of immigration (smith & bailey 2006; giralt & bailey 2010), the family remains under-researched in geography. this reluctance to confront family spaces is perhaps due to concerns about naturalizing normative assumptions regarding “the” family as a socio-biological given, rather than geographically and historically contingent (harker & martin 2012). similar concerns have held back engagement with the concept of generation in geography (punch 2020). valentine (2008) argues, however, that a shared concern for the multi-scalar politics of intimacy embedded in children’s and feminist geographies brings about the potential for a “family turn”. geographers have increasingly come to recognize how geopolitical events and processes are experienced and negotiated within the family home (harker 2009; brickell & yeoh 2014; pimlottwilson & hall 2017). as such, botterill, hopkins and sanghera (2018, 4) advocate for “understanding 228 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper families as sites of geopolitics” and “sociopolitical change,” rather than sites of static normativity. specifically, they investigate family histories as a source of “ontological security” that young people draw upon to make sense of and advocate for political change. similarly, benwell (2019, 492) examines how young people in the falklands are “influenced by memories of past geopolitical events […] contextualised within the dynamics of contemporary international relations,” providing a unique example of intergenerational geopolitics. as a site where (in)security is experienced, where political subjectivity is formed, where agency is enacted, and where the wider historical arc of geopolitical events is given meaning, we can understand families as sites of intimacy geopolitics (kallio 2019). here, intimacy refers specifically to “intense emotional attachments” that are “typically relegated to the ostensibly ‘private’ domain of sexuality, family, and household,” but in fact work to “shape and are contoured by historical residues, sociocultural norms, state-centric policies and global economic dynamics” (barabantseva et al. 2021, 347). as such, the concept of intimacy geopolitics examines not just how intimate spaces and relationships are acted upon by geopolitical events but how intimacy is already “wrapped up in national, global and geopolitical processes and [...] territorial claims” (pain & staeheli 2014, 345). by examining the ways that geopolitics entwines everyday sites and encounters, the concept of intimacy geopolitics works to challenge binary hierarchies of local/global, family/state, safety/security, and belonging/ citizenship (jeffrey et al. 2018; botterill et al. 2019). although this concept emphasizes intimacy as a “set of spatial relationships” and a “mode of interaction” that stretches from personal/proximate to distant/global, we argue that such relationships also stretch from present experiences to future hopes and past memories. recent work by straughan, bissell and gorman-murray (2020) has examined the routines of resource extraction workers and their families, and how these temporalities are embedded within broader affective economies of exhaustion. less attention, however, has been paid to how the rhythms of everyday life take place within wider collectively remembered and imagined intergenerational temporalities. existing research on generational relations has tended to foreground conflict and crisis, to the detriment of understanding other affective and agential forms of intergenerational relations, including hope and inspiration (hopkins & pain 2007). research on young peoples’ religiosity (hopkins et al. 2011), morals (hall 2016), and political identities (habashi 2017), complicates top-down models of socialization and conflict, instead emphasizing intergenerationality as a relational process. going beyond the adult/child dichotomy, intergenerationality invites a holistic approach to age-based geographies, which has tended to bifurcate between a focus on either the elderly or children and “problem youth” (tarrant 2010; schwanen et al. 2012; valentine 2019). the following section discusses the methodological challenges and opportunities of intergenerational research methods. intergenerational family interviewing for researchers concerned with centering the voices of youth, the intergenerational turn in children’s geographies raises methodological questions. as vanderbeck (2007) observes, the connections and disconnections that constitute generational positionalities are not only temporal but also spatial, constituting what holloway, holt, and mills (2019) refer to as “sites of encounter,” which are traversed by power relations unique to distinct geographical contexts (kallio & thomas 2019). earlier work in children’s geographies grappled with questions of how to address the problem of adult power in research with children, though less consideration has been given to researching intergenerational encounters between younger and older people. geographers have begun to develop creative methods that allow children to trace their generational positionalities within wider spatial-temporal processes including oral history mapping (mitchell & elwood 2013) and narrative biography mapping (kallio 2018). for the most part, though, the methodological focus remains centered on youth perspectives rather than intergenerational inter-subjectivity. the existent literature on family interviewing in geography highlights the practical pitfalls of conducting research in the home, where adults may exert undue influence on young people. valentine (1999) suggests that family members may be reluctant to share freely in interviews due to family tension and may instead provide an “official” generic version of family history, glossing over fennia 199(2) (2021) 229taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall differences in how individual family members experienced events. bushin (2007) observes that although the chaos and lack of privacy of the family home is not always conducive to interviewing, spontaneous moments of family interaction nevertheless provide beneficial glimpses into family dynamics. as valentine (1999, 68) finds, such glimpses produce “richer, more detailed and validated accounts than those generated by interviews with individuals." similarly, punch (2007) finds that, when interviewed together, siblings think more reflectively about issues related to family dynamics like birth order. given these constraints and benefits, punch (2007) recommends combining individual and sibling/family interviews, an approach we took in our research. beyond their potential advantages to researchers, family interviews may also serve as meaningful intergenerational encounters. friedensohn (1997), for example, found that intergenerational interviews create space for intersubjective learning, including opportunities for younger women to learn from female elders. as such, intergenerational interviews can be a space of solidarity and consciousness raising (la porte 2000). however, such practices may also produce romantic readings of the past and reproduce notions of elders as “repositories” of knowledge and youth as “receptacles” (kuyken 2012; mcquaid et al. 2017, 393). in the sections that follow, we describe our experience conducting intergenerational interviews within and outside the family. first we turn to a description of our study site. generational geopolitics in palestine intergenerational familial cohabitation is common in palestine, where broader kinship networks linked to clan (hamula) are especially significant given the dispersal and division caused by the israeli occupation (robinson 2008). though family configurations vary, many palestinian children grow up in multigenerational environments characterized by interactions with parents, grandparents, aunts/ uncles, cousins, and siblings. following patrilineal naming practices, children are identified as the son (ibn) or daughter (bint) of their father and by their family home (dar), usually derived from their paternal grandfather’s name. most adults are known by their kunya, an honorific denoting that they are the father (abu) or mother (umm) of their eldest (typically male) child (e.g. abu ahmed). neighbors and close friends are often also afforded honorary family status, being called uncle (‘amo) or aunty (khalto). these family relations influence personal identity, business connections, and political affiliations. shifting geopolitical dynamics makes any attempt to generalize about “typical” palestinian families difficult, and we should be suspicious of orientalist generalities about “the” arab/muslim family (sheriftrask 2006). nevertheless, an archetypical family form in palestine resembles family patterns found in other arab countries throughout the region, often consisting of an elder patriarch living with his adult sons and their wives and children in a multi-family dwelling (gregg 2005, 57). this family practice is patrilocal, in that a wife often goes to live with her husband’s family. it is also patriarchal, in that family authority is vested in an adult male, though women share in household management and decision-making. this patriarchal gerontocracy, wherein women and youth accede to the authority of male elders, has its roots in pre-industrial agricultural economies and has taken on entrenched forms in its inscription into legal systems of landownership and state formation (gregg 2005). today, young people often begin contributing economically to their family early in life and stay in the family home later until marriage. marriage is a milestone achieved with significant family influence and support, though one that is increasingly difficult for palestinian men to achieve due to high rates of unemployment and rising living costs, and one that many palestinian women increasingly delay for work and education (jarallah 2008; harker et al. 2019). it is important to remember that actual family forms emerge dialectically in relation to discourses, values, norms, economies, and policies, and are not static or monolithic constructions (harker 2011, 2012). diverse family forms have resulted from the diverse techniques of power imposed by the occupation on different segments of the palestinian population, including palestinians living in the west bank, gaza, jerusalem, israel, and refugees. the traumatic loss of family homes and land incurred by palestinians during the 1948 nakba constituted a dramatic shift in family and social structure, transforming a largely agrarian society into an urban/refugee proletariat (kuttab 1988, 2009). the creation of charitable associations to sustain the nation in exile after 1948 and the outlawing of 230 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper political parties under the israeli occupation after 1967, combined with expansion of universal education for palestinians in un schools, created new roles and spaces for women and youth to engage in grassroots social and political activism. palestinian women increasingly took active roles in the struggle for independence during the 1960s and 1970s, with youth coming to the fore during the first intifada beginning in 1987. though the palestinian nationalist movement often relegated women to the natal-nationalist role of ‘mothers of the martyrs,’ the intifada served as both a political uprising and a revolt against existing age and gender hierarchies (peteet 1986, 1994). as a result, women achieved greater political visibility and youth garnered more respect from their elders, although this social revolution provoked backlash (fronk et al. 1999; amireh 2003). despite women’s high educational attainment and social mobility, high unemployment and restricted physical mobility imposed by the occupation have resulted in low participation in the formal labor sector. continued confiscation of land has also reduced women’s opportunities for family-based agricultural work, thereby reducing women’s economic influence and independence. our research on intergenerational memory in palestine is situated within these intertwining geopolitical and familial processes. women’s intergenerational mobilization of memory garner’s research examines the spaces and practices through which women in palestine mobilize memories of past and ongoing political struggle, and how younger generations of women receive, understand, and act upon such memories. to understand how women who have lived through political struggle pass down their memories in ways that might mobilize younger generations of women, the research design sought a demographic balance in the make-up of research participants. likewise, in addition to interviewing individual women about their experiences, garner facilitated conversations between different generations of women – and, sometimes, their male relatives – to understand the gaps and continuities in how different generations narrate and understand memories of political struggle. to do this, individual narrative interviews, multi-generational family-based interviews, and female-only focus groups were used. generational ordering within the family (grandparents, parents, and children) was used as a way of conceptualizing intergenerational relations, correlating this ordering to pertinent political periods (e.g. the nakba of 1948, invasion of 1967, and uprisings of 1987–1993 and 2000–2005). in garner’s research, the family home emerged as a central site of memory, both where memories were formed and where they are transmitted through narrative, material, emotional, and embodied forms of memory. interviewees in garner’s research frequently described the family home as a site of geopolitical struggle and women as key actors in that struggle. this was especially true during times of upheaval such as the first intifada from 1987–1993 and subsequent al-aqsa intifada from 2000–2005. in interviews, women mostly described their role at the time as supporting their families and trying to create a sense of stability in the household. no passive role, though, women described this works as an almost miraculous form of resistance, rooted in palestinian notions of samud (steadfastness). as nakia, who was a small child during the first intifada, put it: palestinian women could “make food out of nothing.” other women described the strength of palestinian women to take on multiple roles in the family and “act both as father and mother,” as described by nasira, who was married with children during the first intifada. as sabah recalls from the perspective of a child at the time: “when the father was arrested, the mother had to be the mother and the father.” far from being confined to the physical family home, this active support role often involved breaking curfew to get food or medical supplies for their families, or making the difficult journey to visit sons and husbands in israeli prisons. although nakia describes the lack of public acknowledgement of this active role of resistance within the family as an “injustice,” the example of palestinian mothers reverberates down through generations within families. as mahmoud, a man who grew up during the intifada recalls, without women, there would be no resistance, because “mothers taught us to fight back and to own our land,” a sentiment repeated by omar, another man from this generation. these embodied experiences of resistance are now verbally transmitted to the younger generation as lessons in perseverance. indeed, today, many older women are intentional about sharing their memories with the young generation, usually within the mundane setting of the home and the weekly rhythms of family fennia 199(2) (2021) 231taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall gatherings. nasira, now a grandmother, describes how lessons for living in the present are passed down through stories of past struggles: i tell my daughter about our history before and through the occupation. i tell her everything. i tell them about how to act like a good person in their society, how to be deeper in everything in your life, your thoughts, your feelings. to feel with others. i told them from when they were so young. we made a circle every day for two hours, for example. and we discussed as many things happened in the society. omar similarly reported that his mother “tells her children and grandchildren every friday about her past.” omar expressed a sense of urgency to make sure that his children grow up hearing the stories he heard or experienced growing up. this kind of intentional storytelling is especially important to refugee families, for whom intergenerational memories of the homeland and displacement are central to their identity and right of return. as sabah shared during an informal intergenerational gathering of women: “here in the refugee camps in palestine when you ask the children where they are from, they will say that they’re from akko, ashdod, or jaffa, because that’s what they teach them growing up. where they are originally from, so they do not forget.” as another older woman who recalled the 1948 nakba added, “we should not forget about returning,” to which her daughter-in-law replied, “and that is what we teach the younger generations.” these memories and identities are not only handed down through storytelling, but through material memories, including the embroidery tradition of tatreez. during this gathering, two older women, sabah and zaina, displayed the traditional thobe gowns that they had stitched using an embroidery pattern specific to their home in ashdod, a coastal city in historic palestine, now israel, remarking that this refusal to forget through material, embroidered memory, was their form of resistance. although palestinian women intentionally pass down their memories from one generation to next through oral tradition and material culture, very often, stories and memories arise spontaneously during gatherings with families, often eliciting a range of emotional responses. at one such family gathering in nablus, three sisters told stories of growing up during the first intifada. one remembered a time when israeli soldiers fired tear gas into the courtyard of their school and all the students were forced to run. though laughing now, one of the sisters remembered being terrified because she lost her youngest sister in the crowd. similarly, ayman, the grandson of a woman named itaf, recalled a time when his grandmother’s neighbors ran out of food: when her neighbors had no bread, she threw some of hers out the window to them because the curfew didn’t allow them to leave their apartment. when they couldn’t buy food, the neighbors would share everything. she would not eat if her neighbors could not also. remembered as a humorous anecdote rather than a tragic tale, this story nevertheless memorializes the hardships imposed by the occupation and the resilience of palestinian women. jamila, a palestinian university student, shared a similar story of humor and resilience, one that her grandmother frequently told her growing up and one that she now shares with friends. jamila’s grandmother was a young girl during the 1948 nabka. when zionist paramilitaries came to their house to force them to flee, she and her sisters hid in pots in her kitchen. when the soldiers came to the house, they found nobody there. it is thanks to her grandmother’s cleverness that the family kept their home. such stories engender intergenerational solidarity and steadfastness. though expressed as humor now, many other memories of terror and grief are too painful to recall, and instead take on forms of embodied trauma that affects the whole family. in an interview with itaf, a grandmother whose son was martyred and who had several children arrested during both intifadas, her grandson ayman explained that his grandmother became very sick after the loss of her son, and that her body stopped working due to the heartbreak she endured. as abia, another grandmother, put it, the grief of mourning martyred children and worrying about their children in jail is not just a passing emotion, but an embodied state of being: “the women in palestine embody the pain they feel [...] you can’t imagine the suffering of palestinian women waiting for their children to be released.” itaf, like many other mothers in palestine, wears a locket with the picture of her martyred son, frequently clasping it and showing his picture when talking about him. from tetreez, to the keys and household deeds of homes destroyed or seized during the nakba, lockets are another form of material memory intended to commemorate past loss and inform the present generation. 232 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper though jamila and ayman like to hear the stories of their grandparents and parents, not all their peers share this sentimentality. in a focus group interview, abeer, a university student, explained that she and her group of friends avoid talking with their parents about the intifadas. doing so causes too much pain, as they are forced to think of the tragedies that could have befallen their parents, like so many others. indeed, many young women garner spoke with actively avoided the topic of politics and expressed no desire to learn or hear about earlier generation of women activists. when asked about this topic, gharam, like many young women, deflected by saying: “i think older women like my grandma would know more.” this lack of interest or awareness among younger women came up in a conversation with adult women who came of age during the intifada and are now mothers. nakia explained, “in the past, we used to know, for example, the names of women who were active. but now, women go to the classroom and none of them know – it was a shock for me.” her friend nasira blamed consumer culture, saying, “they [the young girls] concentrate more on their looks outside, and inside there’s nothing so deep as before.” another woman, sama, suggested that the circumstances are simply different now, saying “i cannot judge the younger generation because i think they have a different life than mine.” similarly, abia admitted that although her own generation represented the women of the revolution, “we don’t pass down the same mentality.” indeed, while some members of the older generation actively try to pass down the stories of previous generations of struggle, many parents try to shield their children from these memories and attempt to provide their children with the carefree childhood they were denied. as for the young women themselves, many of the college-age women in nablus that garner interviewed stated that they had given up hope on a political solution to the occupation of palestine, and instead just wanted to forget politics and move on with their own lives. though seen as acquiescence in the eyes of older women, this insistence to live life on their own terms is itself a form of youthful resistance perhaps gleaned from the previous generations. for example, shereen, a university student who participated in a focus-group interview inverted the common understanding of apathetic youth and heroic older generations, declaring that “in the past, they weren't as brave as now,” to live independently. her friend layla agreed adding, “yeah, the woman now has a great character and she's strong. she has resistance.” although there may be disagreement between (and within) generations about what constitutes resistance, it is clear that through forms of intergenerational memory and storytelling, the family is fertile ground for sowing the seeds of resistance, be it against the israeli occupation or traditional age and gender norms. intergenerational place-based memory the previous section demonstrates how intergenerational memory is transmitted in the family home through narrative, emotional, embodied, and material forms of intergenerational memory. younger generations actively retain or avoid such stories, making their own meaning out of these memories and applying them to new social and political realities. while garner’s research showed how different generations find new meaning in old stories in different places, mansour and marshall’s research examines the divergent meanings and emotions that different generations attach to a particular place, namely joseph’s tomb, a contested religious heritage site in the northern west bank. historically, samaritans, jews, christians, and muslims revered the site due to its connection with the prophet joseph. following israel’s invasion of the west bank in 1967, jewish settlers established a school at the site and the israeli military set up a checkpoint forbidding access to palestinians. the site became a flashpoint between palestinian youths and israeli soldiers, especially during the first and second intifadas. although the site remains off-limits to palestinians today, the palestinian authority maintains the responsibility of securing the site and facilitating access by jewish settlers, who regularly visit the site under israeli army-imposed curfew, provoking clashes and attacks. to local youths, joseph’s tomb is a site of confrontation with israeli soldiers. however, older residents remember the tomb as a site of social celebrations and religious ceremonies. the purpose of our research is to trace the memories of this site as it shifted from being a site of religious and social significance to a site of geopolitical conflict and territorial contestation. mansour and marshall’s research examines how different generations understand and narrate that site in relation to their own lived experience. fennia 199(2) (2021) 233taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall inspiration for this research came from a pilot project on place-based intergenerational digital storytelling run in cooperation with a local youth organization in nablus in 2016. in this project, participants produced their own autobiographical digital story combining voice, visuals, and sounds to tell the story of a place of significance in their community and how it relates to their everyday lives. participants conducted inter-generational interviews with their elders about these and other significant places in their communities in order to explore differing inter-generational perspectives of place. mansour, then a participant in this pilot project, chose to narrate a story about joseph’s tomb, located close to her home in balata al balad, a village that now forms part of the greater nablus conurbation. israeli soldiers killed her neighbor during a confrontation at the tomb and she wanted to relate his story, while seeking to avoid asserting a sense of personal propriety over this story or subsiding it into a straightforward nationalist narrative. her story was about the anxiety this place causes people in her community, in particular mothers who fear that their children will fall victim to the violence that erupts there. the story also highlights the inequality of mobility and access to holy sites that palestinians experience relative to israelis. in order to widen the historical frame of reference beyond her own vantage point, mansour interviewed her parents and grandparents to hear their stories and learn about the history of the tomb before it was enclosed. she was surprised to learn about traditions associated with the tomb that she had never heard of. she learned about weddings and eid ceremonies, as well as how women would pray for fertility at the tomb and would give their children their first haircuts there in ceremonial thanksgiving. marshall and mansour both became interested in how the site’s association with youthful male resistance supplanted memories of women’s religious practice. just as a physical barrier now surrounds the tomb, a mental barrier seemed to surround these memories. in the summer of 2018 and 2019, marshall and mansour conducted narrative interviews with multiple generations of palestinians residents. while the creative methods that inspired this research were a useful way of enabling young people to speak about their relationship to places in their community and a way of initiating inter-generational dialogue, this method was unsuited to the task of examining the specific site of joseph’s tomb. the politically sensitive nature of this site made it so that most young people we spoke to were reluctant to be interviewed, let alone produce a digital story about a site that is forbidden to enter or photograph. mansour and marshall wanted to reassure people that they did not intend for their research to determine the exclusive legitimacy of any historical or religious claim on the tomb. rather, their aim was to document the memories of this site as recalled by different generations and explore the divergences and discontinuities in the way different generations transmit or omit memories about this site. to do so requires sufficient time and space to allow multi-generational narratives to unfold and intertwine in intergenerational conversation. starting with personal contacts, mansour and marshall sought out members of an older generation who remembered the tomb as adults before the 1967 invasion and as early as the time of the 1948 nakba. interviewing a local elder often turned into a family affair. thus, mansour and marshall began conducting multigenerational interviews in family homes and land. in most cases, they would arrive at a family home to interview an elderly grandfather or grandmother living with one of their sons and his wife and children. that son would serve as host, helping with the consent process and helping to clarify questions and responses, while the grandsons and granddaughters would serve refreshments while listening quietly, offering observations after the elders had spoken or in quiet moments when one of the older interviewees would step out of the room. sometimes, neighbors and extended relatives would also drop by to join in. on a number of occasions, an elder male would interweave his own memories within the broader temporalities of religious memory. one older man recounted the story of joseph, intertwining it with his own memories: joseph, was jacob’s son. i remember, he used to tend to his sheep. he would water his sheep at jacob’s well, then graze them here in this valley. his brothers left him in a well, maybe this well, god knows. another older gentleman recounted the same story in a similar manner. “the prophet jacob, peace be upon him, became very sad about his lost son. he would go to a cave, which is now the green mosque 234 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper in the old city of nablus, it was built around this cave.” he continued: “we kept these memories of jacob’s family alive until the present. we called the field below jacob’s field.” when prompted, men from this older generation would shift from religious memory to their personal memories of joseph’s tomb: for us, joseph’s tomb was a mosque and a school. it was where we had all our occasions. wedding parties, haircuts, circumcisions, mawlid celebrations, and eids. the wedding parties would stretch from jacob’s well down to joseph’s tomb. it is with these embodied memories of those celebration, in which women played a central role, that most of the older women we interviewed began their recollections. as one grandmother recalled: “on friday, the procession would come from nablus to joseph’s tomb, they would bring their children, and food and drinks and go to see prophet joseph.” adult women who were children at the time share similarly sentimental memories. as one woman recalled: we lived in balata. all of us young kids, every friday, we’d see the women come, bringing their children, bringing their supper, coming from nablus and from askar, from balata, from balata camp, they would come from all around and the neighborhood would be full. they would pray friday noon prayers there. they would eat breakfast there, drink, have supper there, and at the end of the day they would go home. we were kids and we would go up and see, what they are doing. we would go out and see the ladies. just like that. it was freedom. in these recollections by older women and their adult children, the feeling of peace, freedom, safety, and joy are emphasized, in contrast with the feelings of fear and sadness that mark the space for most parents and young people today. in the course of a family interview, once the narrative arrived at the 1967 invasion and occupation of the west bank, very often the adult male son in the family would often begin steering the conversation and explaining how the current political situation came to be. as one adult male recalled, after the occupation, the situation of the tomb changed: “at first, [israelis] started visiting it normally. like visitors. [...] then suddenly it was a jewish tomb! then a jewish school! the settlers were using the shrine as a foundation to establish themselves in the land. [...] they turned it into a conflict point.” as another respondent elaborated: the problems started after ‘67 [...] the settlers started to come, every week at first, on their sabbath. the army would come and guard the tomb. in 1982, the settlers established their own school in the shrine. then the army stayed permanently there, twenty-four hours a day. clashes took place after school between the army and the boys from the village. they would forbid us from coming close to the shrine. once, they arrested me for questioning and took me to the police barracks. in this man’s interview, in contrast with older generations, he downplayed any religious significance of the site insisting that folk traditions associating the shrine with the prophet joseph were being used as an excuse by the israelis “...to establish a foothold in our land.” while most adult men and some of the elder generation shared this perspective, many nevertheless regret the loss of connection to this and other heritage sites the conflict has caused. as one man from nablus put it: “since the occupation began in 1967, each generation has been cut off from this place and have forgotten its meaning and importance.” as he expounded: if generations do not learn from one another, then there is no continuity, no meaning. you don’t know anything about where you are or where you are going if you don’t know where you’ve been. people walk down the street and only think about what is immediately in front of them, they don’t look up or around... people are disconnected. they want to spread out. have their own home and their own space. no one is connected with where they live any more. two years i have lived in my building, and i don’t know who lives above me. we are disconnected, becoming more individualized. here, the loss of connection to joseph’s tomb due to the occupation is generalized to include a broader loss of connection to collective memory and a general trend toward ever increasing isolation, underscoring the social importance of intergenerational connections. during family interviews, the natural rhythm of home life would allow for different voices to come to the fore at different times. the adult son might step out to pray, allowing space to speak more directly with his parent or with his older children. we would ask the younger members of the family whether fennia 199(2) (2021) 235taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall they had heard their grandparents’ stories about the tomb before. many would have heard their fathers’ stories of confrontation and conflict and would have their own harrowing encounters with soldiers to share, but most admitted to having heard very little from their grandparents about the cultural traditions associated with the shrine. some expressed shock, surprise, sadness, and even anger having not heard these stories before. as one male youth stated one-on-one, “no one told me, even my grandmother who told me a lot of things from her past, she never mentioned these things.” seeking to create space for more youth perspectives on the shrine, mansour and marshall reached out to youth in the area but received a tepid response. many young women responded by saying they had no comment about a site that they had nothing to do with, whereas many young men said they wanted to avoid talking about politics, expressing understandable trepidation about discussing such a politically fraught topic. through personal contacts with close associates, though, one-on-one interviews were conducted with youth who felt comfortable sharing their views and experiences. one male youth recalled that, although he would walk by joseph’s tomb every day after school, he was “too scared to go in there.” as he explains: “i heard terrible stories. like, scary stories. like horror movies. they said that settlers come here and light candles that float up and move around. childish things like that.” today though, he says the shrine plays no particular role in his life and that it is “just a place to avoid.” as he puts it: for me, i don’t care about this place. i don’t feel like it’s a symbolic place. you know, when you go to a symbolic place, you have a feeling in your soul? but i don’t feel this, so i don’t care about it, whatever happens. [...] personally, i tried to avoid it. as a kid, it was a scary place. as a young man, it is a political place. i tried to avoid it. different reason, same result. until now, i’m still trying to avoid it. i want nothing to do with it. while this young man has successfully avoided the shrine in his daily life, for others who live next to joseph’s tomb, avoidance is not an option. for them, the shrine is a site of tragedy and trauma. as one young man explained: i always have problems there because i live by the location. when the israelis come there, always there are clashes, you know, they throw tear gas, they shoot. i have an especially bad memory from 2015. a friend of mine was killed near joseph’s tomb. his friend went out to confront the soldiers one evening during an israeli incursion into the area. an israeli soldier shot and killed him. like other interviewees, this young man had conflicted feeling about this form of resistance saying he does not think throwing stones is the best way to resist the occupation, but also that the israelis should not feel free to seize this site without a struggle. in some of the inter-generational interviews with adults and youth, these conflicting feelings came uneasily to the surface. some adults blamed the stone-throwing youths for causing all the trouble, while others said there was no choice but to resist. one adult woman, expressed admiration for the youth: the older generation was more afraid than the new generation. because the new generation, like these young ones [gesturing to her grandchildren], since the first time they opened their eyes all they have seen is the occupation. they lived in harsh conditions, you know. the older generation, we were living differently. so, we were more afraid, the older generation. the young generation came out bold and faced them, more than the older generation. this is what i’ve understood from life. in this quote, this grandmother indicates how the young generation are positioned differently than her generation vis-à-vis the occupation, suggesting that older generations could learn from the boldness of the youth. still, she laments the fact that the young generations have not known the carefree enjoyment of the shrine, saying “i really want to go in again. just let us go in. but they don't let us. forbidden. if it were open, of course we’d go. the young kids, they don’t know it.” on this, there was intergenerational agreement. despite differences in opinion regarding the shrine’s status as a folk relic or holy site, younger and older interviewees agreed that the site should be open to everyone, regardless of religion, so long as visitors came “in peace” and not “like an army of occupation,” as one adult male put it. discussion memory is not solely the domain of personal experience, but is rather undergirded by social structures including families and religious communities (halbwachs 1992). individual memories only become 236 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper whole when situated in their particular social and geographical contexts (hutton 1988). though memory becomes spatialized in what nora (1989) refers to as lieux de mémoire (places of memory), site-memory is in a constant state of flux, with subsequent generations renegotiating the meaning of these sites and reworking narratives of the past to fit present circumstances. mannheim’s (1952) definition of generational positioning informs understandings of collective memory by emphasizing diversity of experience and positionality within an age cohort, as well as the interactions and continuities between generational groupings. existing symbolic and material surroundings provides a sense of identity, stability, and continuity to the generation that comes into this readymade word. however, members of this generation may also reinterpret, repurpose, and reject the meaning of their inherited symbolic surroundings. intergenerational encounters can help bring to the surface changes in place and place meaning. this is particularly relevant in contexts of geopolitical conflict over land and territory like israel/palestine where, as hammad (2011) argues, it is often wrongly assumed that a sense of place and place attachment remains stubbornly static. an intergenerational perspective is crucial to understanding how sites in such contexts undergo “significant geopolitical reconfiguration” resulting in “shifting” experiences and interpretations of place across generations (hammad 2011, 556). intergenerational interviewing brings these shifts to the fore. in garner’s research, family interviews provided a glimpse into how memories are transmitted intergenerationally in the intimate space of the family home. however, domestic distractions inevitably arose, including clearing dishes or attending to a fussy child. most often, women in the family attend to such matters, disrupting their participation. when the focus is on the older matriarch of the family, her son, as host and head of household, often took on the role of interpreter of his mother’s story, often adding his own memories and interpretation of events. while this added depth to the story and clarified some historical points, it also sometimes drowned out the female voices. as such, it was beneficial to spend time in intergenerational female-only spaces where women spoke more openly and without interruption. for example, after the blessing ceremony at a housewarming party, the event transformed as women brought out food and argileh to share. despite the festive nature of the occasion, topics such as domestic abuse and women’s rights were more freely discussed in this intergenerational female space. similarly, while conducting a focus group with women of different ages at a quran study group held at a local community organization, women felt free to discuss intimate topics like moral growth and overcoming personal challenges posed by the occupation including the death or imprisonment of a husband. however, even in an exclusively female environment there were instances when age hierarchies dominated the narrative. in many intergenerational interviews, the women from the younger generation often sat quietly listening to their elders without response, raising the need to hold focus groups with young women in cafes and female dorms. in these interviews with young women, they sometimes interwove their personal stories with the stories and memories handed down to them from their parents and grandparents. moving between these different spaces and settings enables different forms of intergenerational exchange. similarly, in marshall and mansour’s research, the organic unfolding of the household interview brought with it many benefits. first, the domestic and familial setting of the interview helped move beyond narratives of the shrine that only highlighted its geopolitical significance as a flashpoint. instead, more personal and nuanced memories emerged of celebration as well as confrontation. likewise, the family setting created an atmosphere of trust and rapport and led to conversational interviews in which members of the family could add important details, refine points, and correct information. conducting interviews in the family home provided greater access to the perspectives of different generations and allowed us to participate in intergenerational dialogue that laid bare the differences in perception and experience between generational cohorts. although younger members of the family were often quiet at first, a pause in the conversation would allow us to ask about their perspectives and experiences. many would recount their own encounters with soldiers during incursions into the village, but most also admitted to having heard very little about women’s cultural traditions associated with the shrine. at a certain point as well, the formality of hosting a guest and conducting an interview would give way to a more relaxed atmosphere. often, once the recorder was turned off, mother, daughters, neighbors or other extended relatives who were not previously participating, would speak up. while young people and some women’s groups had been reluctant to fennia 199(2) (2021) 237taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall respond to an invitation to a focus group interview, these informal “off-the-record” conversations allowed women and their children to discuss the contemporary challenges they faced living in proximity to the shrine. within the context of a family conversation, the focus shifted away from the big-p politics of the site and toward personal memory and family history, attracting the participation of elders and youth alike. despite the natural pauses and the informal spaces of dialogue these created, family-based interviewing nevertheless also came with challenges. while the family home setting afforded rapport and intergenerational dialogue, it also imposed a formal guest/host relationship between interviewer and interviewees along with age and gender hierarchies that limited participation of wives, daughters and sons. during the interview, wives busied themselves fulfilling social expectations of preparing refreshments. likewise, young people, rather than sharing their views, helped to host the guests. in some cases, it was necessary to follow up with young people from the families to invite them to oneon-one interviews in a local café where they could more freely discuss their experiences, including their views on more sensitive subjects like the confrontations with soldiers. similarly, some of the gendered limitations of the family-home interview were overcome by conducting interviews with mothers and their younger children at local cafes. here, too, though, the informal atmosphere (sitting in the family section of a cafe) allowed for a more conversational interview and allowed for exchanges with the younger members of the family, as well. in fostering intergenerational dialogue through family interviews and focus groups with age/ gender-based cohorts, the authors found that memories of struggle punctuated by key geopolitical moments provide a powerful framing for narrating collective memory and organizing generational cohorts. stories of national struggle and resistance intertwine with family stories and generational orderings. while a powerful form of social solidarity, stories of past conflict, whether told as funny anecdotes or tragic tales, serve as a form of unresolvable traumatic post-memory that occupies the psychic terrain, making the transmission of other forms of memory more difficult. the structure of settler-colonialism imposed on palestine reduces the space for commemorating other forms of social and cultural memory outside of national struggle. this present absence is apparent in the way that narratives of joseph’s tomb downplay the cultural and religious importance of this site to women, reducing it to a conflict “flashpoint.” it is also apparent in the relative invisibility of older women’s domestic contributions to the palestinian struggle, and of younger women’s struggle for gender equality. by examining the ways that memories of political violence and struggle are not only enshrined within particular public places, but also remembered and retold within the intimate settings of the family home this research problematizes the conceptual division between public sites of memory and private family stories. research on generational relations has tended to focus either on internal familial decision-making or on intergenerational issues at a national policy level (hopkins & pain 2007), with a bias toward the research and policy interests of families in the global north. geographers have given less attention to the relevance of familial and extra-familial forms of intergenerationality and their relation to geopolitical issues (hopkins 2006). similarly, research on the geographies of memory has tended to focus on the spectacular sites of memory and counter-memorial contestations that take place within public space in the context of national memory related to geopolitical conflict. there has been less focus on mundane sites of memory such as the family home, where personal, familial, and collective memory intertwine and fray. till (2012, 7) refers to memory work as an “intergenerational placebased ethics of care” honoring past struggles, calling for justice for past injuries, and imagining different futures. research on geographies of memory regards artists, activists, planners, and designers as the primary practitioners of memory work, with museums, monuments, and other public places serving as key sites of memory. the politics of memory has thus mainly been concerned with the political contestation over these places and the contested historical narratives spatialized therein (dwyer & alderman 2008), and less concerned with how such memories are received, renegotiated, or forgotten or in everyday life. despite research revealing how memories of home are situated within wider (post)colonial geographies (blunt 2003; legg 2003; tolia-kelly 2004), private memories of the family home have largely been dismissed as regressively nostalgic. in contrast, meah and jackson (2016) offer the private space of the kitchen as an important site of memory, where 238 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper personal and familial identities are formed and curated, and where these memories are contextualized within, and often complicate, broader historical narratives. as vãran and creţan (2018, 511) observe, “personal recollections of place and connection or attachment to place serve as the basis of memory and intergenerational memory transmission.” for young people, this intergenerational transmission of memory plays a central role in their socialization and formation of political subjectivities and thus is deserving of greater scrutiny and attention (mitchell & elwood 2013). if memory is shifting rather than static (till & kuusisto-arponen 2015) and “communicated across spaces through shared affects and emotions” (vãran & creţan 2018, 511), then more attention should be paid to the affective and emotional processes of intergenerational sharing of memory across public and private places. in sharing these experiences through intergenerational family interviews, the authors join calls for greater inclusion of multiple age cohorts within the geographies of children, youth, and families. such intergenerational encounters can make valuable contributions toward understanding the (geo)politics of memory and how the spectacular sites and events narrated in collective public memory are interwoven, reproduced, and contested within the intimate spaces and stories of the family. acknowledgements first and foremost, the authors wish to thank the families and individuals in nablus, balata al balad, and other nearby villages and refugee camps who generously shared their time, their homes, and their stories with us. we also wish to thank an-najah university and project hope in nablus for their assistance with our research, as well as other women’s organizations, youth groups, and community centers, and individuals, who will remain unnamed but not unappreciated. finally, we acknowledge the palestinian american research center and elon university, including the global education center, center for global engagement, the honors program, the undergraduate research program, faculty research and development, and the department of history and geography, for their past and ongoing support of this research. references amireh, a. (2003) between complicity and subversion: body politics in palestinian national narrative. south atlantic quarterly 102(4) 747–772. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-102-4-747 barabantseva, e., mhurchú, a. n. & peterson v. s. (2021) introduction: engaging geopolitics through the lens of the intimate. geopolitics 26(2) 343–356. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1636558 benwell, m. c. (2019) connecting ontological (in)securities and generation through the everyday and emotional geopolitics of falkland islanders. social & cultural geography 20(4) 485–506. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1290819 blunt, a. (2003) collective memory and productive nostalgia: anglo-indian homemaking at mccluskieganj. environment and planning d: society and space 21(6) 717–738. https://doi.org/10.1068/d327 blunt, a. & dowling, r. (2006) home. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401354 botterill, k., hopkins, p. & sanghera, g. (2018) familial geopolitics and ontological security: intergenerational relations, migration and minority youth (in)securities in scotland. geopolitics 25(5) 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1512098 botterill, k., hopkins, p. & sanghera, g. s. (2019) young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in scotland. social & cultural geography 20(4) 465–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1346197 brickell, k. (2012) ‘mapping’ and ‘doing’ critical geographies of home. progress in human geography 36(2) 225–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511418708 brickell, k. & yeoh, b. s. a. (2014) geographies of domestic life: “householding” in transition in east and southeast asia. geoforum 51 259–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.007 bushin, n. (2007) interviewing with children in their homes: putting ethical principles into practice and developing flexible techniques. children’s geographies 5(3) 235–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280701445796 dwyer, o. j. & alderman, d. h. (2008) memorial landscapes: analytic questions and metaphors. geojournal 73(3) 165–178. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9201-5 https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-102-4-747 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1636558 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1290819 https://doi.org/10.1068/d327 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401354 https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1512098 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1346197 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511418708 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.10.007 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280701445796 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-008-9201-5 fennia 199(2) (2021) 239taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall friedensohn, d. (1997) women’s lives, 1945–1995: personal narratives and the pedagogy of intergenerational interviewing. american studies 38(3) 119–127. fronk, c., huntington, r. l. & chadwick, b. a. (1999) expectations for traditional family roles: palestinian adolescents in the west bank and gaza. sex roles 41(9) 705–735. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1018868010058 giralt, r. m. & bailey, a. j. (2010) transnational familyhood and the liquid life paths of south americans in the uk. global networks 10(3) 383–400. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2010.00294.x gregg, g. s. (2005) the middle east: a cultural psychology. oxford university press, oxford. habashi, j. (2017) political socialization of youth: a palestinian case study. palgrave macmillan, new york. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47523-7 habashi, j. (2019) palestinian children: a transformation of national identity in the abbas era. fennia 197(1) 77–93. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 halbwachs, m. (1992) on collective memory. translated by l. a. coser. university of chicago press, chicago. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226774497.001.0001 hall, s. m. (2016) moral geographies of family: articulating, forming and transmitting moralities in everyday life. social & cultural geography 17(8) 1017–1039. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1147063 hammad, s. h. (2011) senses of place in flux: a generational approach. international journal of sociology and social policy 31(9/10) 555–568. https://doi.org/10.1108/01443331111164142 harker, c. (2009) spacing palestine through the home. transactions of the institute of british geographers 34(3) 320–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00352.x harker, c. (2011) geopolitics and family in palestine. geoforum 42(3) 306–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.06.007 harker, c. (2012) precariousness, precarity, and family: notes from palestine. environment and planning a economy and space 44(4) 849–865. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4478 harker, c. & martin, l. l. (2012) familial relations: spaces, subjects, and politics. environment and planning a: economy and space 44(4) 768–775. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4513 harker, c., sayyad, d. & shebeitah, r. (2019) the gender of debt and space: notes from ramallah-al bireh, palestine. geoforum 98 277–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.04.018 holloway, s. l. (1998) “she lets me go out once a week”: mothers’ strategies for obtaining “personal” time and space. area 30(4) 321–330. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.1998.tb00077.x holloway, s. l., holt, l. & mills, s. (2019) questions of agency: capacity, subjectivity, spatiality and temporality. progress in human geography 43(3) 458–477. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518757654 hopkins, p., olson, e., pain, r. & vincett, g. (2011) mapping intergenerationalities: the formation of youthful religiosities. transactions of the institute of british geographers 36(2) 314–327. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00419.x hopkins, p. e. (2006) youthful muslim masculinities: gender and generational relations. transactions of the institute of british geographers 31(3) 337–352. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2006.00206.x hopkins, p. & pain, r. (2007) geographies of age: thinking relationally. area 39(3) 287–294. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00750.x hutton, p. h. (1988) collective memory and collective mentalities: the halbwachs-ariés connection. historical reflections/réflexions historiques 15(2) 311–322. berghahn books, new york. hyndman, j. (2019) unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement. gender, place & culture 26(1) 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2018.1561427 jarallah, y. (2008) marriage patterns in palestine. age 25(29) 30–34. jeffrey, a., staeheli, l. a., buire, c. & čelebičić, v. (2018) drinking coffee, rehearsing civility, making subjects. political geography 67 125–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.013 kallio, k. p. (2016) becoming geopolitical in the everyday world. in benwell & hopkins (eds.) children, young people and critical geopolitics, 169–186. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315562827-11 kallio, k. p. (2018) citizen-subject formation as geosocialization: a methodological approach on “learning to be citizens”. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 100(2) 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2017.1390776 kallio, k. p. (2019) leading refugee lives together: familial agency as a political capacity. emotion, space and society 32 100541. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.08.002 kallio, k. p. & häkli, j. (2011) are there politics in childhood? space and polity 15(1) 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2011.567897 kallio, k. p. & thomas, m. e. (2019) editorial: intergenerational encounters, intersubjective age relations. emotion, space and society 32 100575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2019.04.004 kassem, f. (2011) palestinian women: narrative histories and gendered memory. zed books ltd, london. katz, c. (2004) growing up global: economic restructuring and children’s everyday lives. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.1023/a https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2010.00294.x https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47523-7 https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.71009 https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226774497.001.0001 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1147063 https://doi.org/10.1108/01443331111164142 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00352.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.06.007 https://doi.org/10.1068/a4478 https://doi.org/10.1068/a4513 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.04.018 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.1998.tb00077.x https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518757654 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00419.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2006.00206.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00750.x https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2018.1561427 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.09.013 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315562827-11 https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2017.1390776 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2018.08.002 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2011.567897 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2019.04.004 240 fennia 199(2) (2021)research paper katz, c. & monk, j. (1993) full circles: geographies of women over the life course. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315832258 kuttab, d. (1988) a profile of the stonethrowers. journal of palestine studies 17(3) 14–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/2537456 kuttab, e. (2009) the palestinian women’s movement: from resistance and liberation to accommodation and globalization. in vents d'est, vents d'ouest: mouvements de femmes et féminismes anticoloniaux, 101–116. graduate institute publications, genève. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.iheid.6310 kuyken, k. (2012) knowledge communities: towards a re-thinking of intergenerational knowledge transfer. vine 42(3/4) 365–381. https://doi.org/10.1108/03055721211267495 la porte, a. m. (2000) oral history as intergenerational dialogue in art education. art education 53(4) 39. https://doi.org/10.2307/3193827 legg, s. (2003) gendered politics and nationalised homes: women and the anti-colonial struggle in delhi, 1930–47. gender, place & culture 10(1) 7–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369032000052630 mannheim, k. (1952) the problem of generations. in kecskemeti, p. (ed.) essays on the sociology of knowledge: collected works, 276–322. routledge, new york. massaro, v. a. & williams, j. (2013) feminist geopolitics. geography compass 7(8) 567–577. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12054 mcquaid, k., vanderbeck, r., plastow, j., valentine, g. liu, c. chen, l. zhang, m. & diprose, k. (2017) intergenerational community-based research and creative practice: promoting environmental sustainability in jinja, uganda. journal of intergenerational relationships 15(4) 389–410. https://doi.org/10.1080/15350770.2017.1368357 meah, a. & jackson, p. (2016) re-imagining the kitchen as a site of memory. social & cultural geography 17(4) 511–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2015.1089587 mitchell, k. & elwood, s. (2013) intergenerational mapping and the cultural politics of memory. space and polity 17(1) 33–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780712 nora, p. (1989) between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire. representations 26 7–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520 pain, r. & staeheli, l. (2014) introduction: intimacy-geopolitics and violence. area 46(4) 344–347. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12138 peteet, j. (1986) women and the palestinian movement: no going back? merip middle east report 138 20–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/3011906 peteet, j. (1994) male gender and rituals of resistance in the palestinian “intifada”: a cultural politics of violence. american ethnologist 21(1) 31–49. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1994.21.1.02a00020 pimlott-wilson, h. & hall, s. m. (2017) everyday experiences of economic change: repositioning geographies of children, youth and families. area 49(3) 258–265. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12348 punch, s. (2007) “i felt they were ganging up on me”: interviewing siblings at home. children’s geographies 5(3) 219–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280701445770 punch, s. (2020) why have generational orderings been marginalised in the social sciences including childhood studies? children’s geographies 18(2) 128–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1630716 robinson, g. e. (2008) palestinian tribes, clans, and notable families. strategic insights 7(4) september 2008. <https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/36704726.pdf>. 29.6.2022. sa'di, a. h. & abu-lughod, l. (eds.) (2007) nakba: palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory. columbia university press, new york. schwanen, t., hardill, i. & lucas, s. (2012) spatialities of ageing: the co-construction and co-evolution of old age and space. geoforum 43(6) 1291–1295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.07.002 sherif-trask, b. (2006) families in the islamic middle east. in ingolsby, b. b. & smith, s. s. (eds.) families in global and multicultural perspective, 231–246. sage publications, thousand oaks, ca. skelton, t. & gough, k. v. (2013) introduction: young people’s im/mobile urban geographies. urban studies 50(3) 455–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098012468900 smith, d. p. & bailey, a. j. (2006) international family migration and differential labour-market participation in great britain: is there a “gender gap”? environment and planning a: economy and space 38(7) 1327–1343. https://doi.org/10.1068/a36295 straughan, e. r., bissell, d. & gorman-murray, a. (2020) exhausting rhythms: the intimate geopolitics of resource extraction. cultural geographies 27(2) 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019879108 tarrant, a. (2010) constructing a social geography of grandparenthood: a new focus for intergenerationality. area 42(2) 190–197. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00920.x till, k. e. (2012) wounded cities: memory-work and a place-based ethics of care. political geography 31(1) 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.008 till, k. e. & kuusisto-arponen, a-k. (2015) towards responsible geographies of memory: complexities of place and the ethics of remembering. erdkunde 69(4) 291–306. https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2015.04.01 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315832258 https://doi.org/10.2307/2537456 https://doi.org/10.4000/books.iheid.6310 https://doi.org/10.1108/03055721211267495 https://doi.org/10.2307/3193827 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369032000052630 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12054 https://doi.org/10.1080/15350770.2017.1368357 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2015.1089587 https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.780712 https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520 https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12138 https://doi.org/10.2307/3011906 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1994.21.1.02a00020 https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12348 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280701445770 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1630716 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/36704726.pdf https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.07.002 https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098012468900 https://doi.org/10.1068/a36295 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019879108 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2009.00920.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.10.008 https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2015.04.01 fennia 199(2) (2021) 241taylor garner & nadia mansour & david j. marshall tolia-kelly, d. (2004) locating processes of identification: studying the precipitates of re-memory through artefacts in the british asian home. transactions of the institute of british geographers 29(3) 314–329. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.2004.00303.x valentine, g. (1999) doing household research: interviewing couples together and apart. area 31(1) 67–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.1999.tb00172.x valentine, g. (2008) the ties that bind: towards geographies of intimacy. geography compass 2(6) 2097–2110. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00158.x valentine, g. (2019) geographies of youth – a generational perspective. children’s geographies 17(1) 28–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1535697 vanderbeck, r. m. (2007) intergenerational geographies: age relations, segregation and reengagements. geography compass 1(2) 200–221. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00012.x vãran, c. & creţan, r. (2018) place and the spatial politics of intergenerational remembrance of the iron gates displacements in romania, 1966–1972. area 50(4) 509–519. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12387 woon, c.y. (2017) children, critical geopolitics, and peace: mapping and mobilizing children’s hopes for peace in the philippines. annals of the american association of geographers 107(1) 200–217. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1218268 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.2004.00303.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.1999.tb00172.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00158.x https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1535697 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00012.x https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12387 https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2016.1218268 land for agriculture? conflicts and synergies between land use in two parts of scandinavia urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa63074 doi: 10.11143/fennia.63074 land for agriculture? conflicts and synergies between land use in two parts of scandinavia elin slätmo slätmo, e. (2019) land for agriculture? conflicts and synergies between land use in two parts of scandinavia. fennia 197(1) 25–39. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63074 when space is limited, there is often conflict over land use such as agriculture, nature conservation, housing, business and commercial enterprise. more knowledge is needed about the substance of such conflicts and the way the various uses are handled and spatially organised. using empirical material collected in hållnäs, sweden, and sandnes, norway, between 2009 and 2012, this paper addresses the potential conflicts and synergies between the different uses of land, with agriculture as a reference point. in combining and comparing the results from hållnäs and sandnes, the way in which relations differ between them are also scrutinised. through planning documents, interviews with officials in public authorities, active farmers, non-governmental organisations (ngo) and field visits, case-specific land uses are identified in the two areas. the conflicting and synergetic relations between agriculture and other ways the land is used are identified and illustrated by schematic models. the results indicate that agriculture is both in synergy and in conflict with other land uses. in the cases investigated in this study, the primary areas of conflict are between agriculture and biodiversity, between agriculture and cultural heritage, and between agriculture and climate-smart initiatives in terms of dense building structures. keywords: agriculture, land use, spatial planning, context, spatial relations, conflict, synergies elin slätmo, nordregio, box 1658, se-111 86 stockholm, sweden. e-mail: elin. slatmo@nordregio.org introduction since the beginning of the 1900s, the use of land in scandinavian and other western european rural areas has been undergoing great change, caused to a large degree by changing flows of food, goods and services (kristensen et al. 2009; woods 2011). although the land is not now characterised by economic activities and uses such as farming and forestry alone, agriculture today is still a key vehicle for communities and economic development in rural areas (marsden & morley 2014). given current concerns about food security and food sovereignty, it is problematic that land that was once agricultural is now being used for other purposes, and the ongoing sealing of soil alerts us to the need to take precautions with land that is in use for agricultural production (slätmo 2017). this paper takes as its starting point the shared situatedness of agriculture, which implies that land is a limited resource and thus the object of struggle between a range of different land uses (smith et al. 2010). previous studies on conflicting uses of land in europe have taken different approaches, primarily focusing on conflict resolution (niemelä et al. 2005; de groot 2006; von der dunk et al. 2011; tudor et © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.63074 26 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers al. 2014). these studies show that it is not certain that it is possible to maintain all diverse land uses, and their respective social functions, in synergy at the same place at the same time. instead, conflicts are the rule rather than the exception (olwig & mitchell 2007; smith et al. 2010; elden 2013). in a review article, henle and colleagues (2008) address conflicts between agriculture and biodiversity but do not fully take into account the sharing of space and non-functional relations between land uses. to address this point, this study contributes an understanding of how conflicts over land, as well as synergies, can be further understood in relation to agriculture, as it investigates the ways in which agriculture is in conflict with other land uses by applying a contextual approach. in addressing agriculture and the conflicts between it and other interests in terms of land use, the fundamental desire is to further discussions in order to find democratic solutions to these conflicts. this paper is based on the understanding that more clearly acknowledging the diverse conflict situations between different land uses can bring forth solutions and possible changes to planning practices. european studies of conflict around land use that focus on agriculture and farming report that the conflicts are chiefly characterised by the social and environmental effects of an increasingly industrialised, corporately owned and capital-intense farm sector (henle et al. 2008; ribeiro et al. 2018). indeed, agriculture is characterised by fewer and larger farms, and many farmers are leaving the agricultural sector (hansson et al. 2010; raggi et al. 2013). parallel to this dominant trend, research shows an increase in organic farming as well as farm diversification (hansson et al. 2010, 2013; weltin et al. 2017); this is sometimes discussed in terms of amenity farming (gill et al. 2010) or the different roles of farmers (primdahl et al. 2013). there are tendencies towards heterogeneity and growing diversity of farming in the european context (busck 2002; sutherland 2013). this implies a diverse farmer habitus, concerned with environmental and ethical aspects in addition to economic returns from agriculture production (setten 2004; saunders 2016). in other words, not all farmers put economic gains first. other activities associated with the land and farmsteads include, for instance, on-farm processing and sales, marketing, cultural events, tourism and green projects (barbieri & mahoney 2009; hansson et al. 2013). these are reported as strategies used by farmers to open up a more diverse income stream, enabling them to stay on their land and continue farming (morgan et al. 2010; elgåker 2011) and can be considered a concrete expression of the post-production transition of the use of rural areas (wilson 2001; boonstra 2006; eusébio et al. 2017). such a transition results in heterogenic rural landscapes with diverse functions (woods 2011; hedlund 2016). the diverse outcomes and functions of agricultural activities reported above make it interesting to analyse the way in which agriculture is not only in conflict but also in synergy with other human activities (e.g. the uses of land). the diverse societal functions of agriculture have previously been discussed under the umbrella concept of multifunctionality, in which agricultural values of production, consumption, recreation and preservation are highlighted (bills & gross 2005; bjørkhaug & richards 2008; morgan et al. 2010). from an environmental perspective, the concept of multifunctionality has positive normative underpinnings as it includes the aim of enhancing agricultural activities that operate multiple functions on the same field, pasture or farm. multifunctional agriculture is one of the priorities in terms of policy, both in the scandinavian countries and the european common agricultural policy (cap) (yrjölä & kola 2004; almås 2005; potter & tilzey 2007; hodge et al. 2015; grashof-bokdam et al. 2017). the aim of this paper is to investigate potential conflicts and synergies between different uses of land, with agriculture as a focus. based on two scandinavian cases in hållnäs in sweden and sandnes in norway between 2009 and 2012, and with a focus on agriculture, the analysis explores two questions: 1) to what degree are particular land uses commensurable with agriculture in the two cases?, and 2) in what way do the relations differ between the two cases? through these questions, the paper reveals the case-specific conflicting and synergetic relations between different agriculture and other land uses. following the introduction, the next sections portray the studies, including methods and the analytic approach. the results are then presented, focusing primarily on how public authorities in spatial planning and nature resource management value agricultural lands in relation to other land uses, in hållnäs and sandnes. the next section discusses the results, highlighting the identified conflicts, policy approaches and conflict resolution strategies used by officials in spatial planning. the concluding remarks consider the insights from the analysis. fennia 197(1) (2019) 27elin slätmo studying synergies and conflicts in nordic agriculture the studies: hållnäs and sandnes it should first be noted that taking the perspective of agriculture as a starting point for the analysis in this paper does not indicate a belief that agriculture should be prioritised over all other land uses. decisions about land use are political decisions, for which land-owners and politicians are primarily responsible. further, the study and discussion of conflicts and synergies over land is temporal-specific. this means that the results presented in this study reflect the situation in the areas of the study during the years 2009–2012. based on interviews, document studies and field visits in the two case areas, the spatial relations between agriculture and other land uses have been analysed with consideration to context. the study is deductive. this means that the investigation began by collecting empirical material in order to get a broad view of processes around land-use conflicts and synergies regarding agriculture, including the type of management methods in use from the perspective of the public authorities. the material collected with the deductive research approach has been scrutinised in this study in order to answer the research questions. the swedish case is the parish of hållnäs, located on the south-east baltic coast in the municipality of tierp and the county of uppland. hållnäs is sparsely populated, with few active farmers. most of the inhabitants (including most of the farmers) commute to nearby conurbations, such as tierp, skutskär, forsmark, to work and to access services. the norwegian case is the peri-urban area of sandnes, located in south-west norway close to the north sea. sandnes is administratively affiliated with the county of rogaland and is positioned in close proximity to the city of stavanger. as will be presented, the cases reflect the variety of geographies within which agricultural activities are performed, in two similar scandinavian countries. documents relating to spatial planning and nature resource management were studied for both areas, with the aim of identifying and analysing the official authorities’ designation and valuation of land use over time. in the case of hållnäs, the documents studied were primarily three comprehensive spatial plans from the municipality of tierp, from 1977, 1991 and 2009/2011. the documents studied in the case of sandnes were three comprehensive spatial plans from 1995, 2002 and 2007. regional plans, the basis for decisions and comments about the plans from public hearings and consultation processes were also studied. furthermore, to understand the relations between the identified land uses, farmers and officials involved in nature resource management and planning were interviewed and took part in seminar discussions on land-use planning during 2009–2012. results based largely on the interviews have previously been published (stenseke et al. 2012; beilin et al. 2014; slätmo 2014, 2016). the actors interviewed were local and regional officials, farmers, and farmers’ representatives from swedish and norwegian farmers’ organisations. in the case of hållnäs, interviews were conducted with 9 farmers, 2 local authority officials, 2 regional officials and 2 people from civil society organisations between 2009 and 2010. in the case of sandnes, 13 farmers and 9 local authority and regional officials were interviewed in 2011. in addition, 12 local authority and regional officials took part in a one-day discussion seminar in sandnes in 2012. the interviews have facilitated knowledge around the casespecific situation for farming and spatial planning, how land-use conflicts are solved and how synergetic relations can be enhanced. field visits to different agricultural sites in the case study areas have provided insight around the practicalities of conflicting and synergetic land uses. although not presented in this paper, statistics and press material in the media have also been important in understanding the case-specific relations between agriculture and other land uses. analysing agriculture and land use contextually based on geographical theory, this paper draws on a contextual perspective that implies that geophysical processes, things, organisms and human activities are physically entwined, and that they affect one another through this material proximity without necessarily having a functional relation 28 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers (törnqvist 1981; woods 2009). the contextual perspective therefore makes it possible to analyse the physical coordination, struggle over and sharing of space (hägerstrand 1970, 2009; stenseke et al. 2012); in other words, the conflicts and synergies over land. importantly, such a contextual approach is not necessarily innovative. rather, it draws on the basic tenets from the early days of the subject of geography, when descriptive studies based on case studies were used to understand and make sense of the physical and social relations that constitute the world (sauer 1965; olwig 2002; mels & setten, 2007). while acknowledging the history of geography, the study is also informed by newer geographical scholars such as widgren (2004), cosgrove (2006), clark and munroe (2013) and wästfelt and zhang (2016), who call for contextualising studies on agriculture and land use, for example by studying agriculture by placing it in its social and geographical contexts. for this paper, this situated or contextual perspective has been applied to identify the possible synergies, conflicts and priorities between agriculture and other human activities (such as land use, in this case). to be able to make sense of these relations (to analyse the conflicts and synergies, in this case) it is necessary to ‘know’ the societal context and integrate a perspective in which humans are active in the changes of the physical environment (head 2012; slätmo 2016). as mentioned above, the results in this study build on a range of different empirical materials collected during a period of three years. to identify the most prominent land uses in the two cases, and their relations to agriculture, the collected material has been read, sorted, re-read, presented and discussed with stakeholders (including other researchers with and without case-specific knowledge). the land uses presented in this study are the ones most prominent in the empirical materials. this approach has also enabled the relations between the identified land uses and agricultural lands to become apparent. in communicating the results, these relations are presented using case-based schematic models, and discussed in terms of conflict and synergy with agriculture. importantly, as the models do not display nuances, they should be interpreted with care and the description of the conflicting and synergetic relations is as important as the figures themselves. agriculture and conflicting and synergetic land uses a number of land uses and their societal functions and values have been identified in the empirical material from each of the two cases. these designated land uses are based on different logic, have different routes for decision-making and have different regulations tied to them, which makes it appropriate to think of them as categories that are theoretically and functionally separated from each other (boonstra 2006; stenseke et al. 2012). but at the same time, from a contextual geographic perspective, they are searching for and claiming space in the same territory and are therefore in conflict over space in the material sense of the word. the land uses presented in the sections below are based on the most prominent arguments, priorities and motives found in the empirical material. this approach has also enabled the relations between the identified land uses and agricultural lands to become clear. conflicting and synergetic land uses in hållnäs, sweden agriculture is both in synergy and in conflict with other appointed land uses on the peninsula. four categories of land use have been identified in the analysis of the planning documents: agriculture; natural environments and biodiversity; cultural environments and cultural heritage; and tourism and summer residents. based on interviews and other stakeholder interactions, the relations between the identified land uses have been elaborated as a schematic model (fig. 1). in the next sections, these relations are presented and discussed in relation to agriculture. local authority planning highlights tourism and summer residents as a societal interest that is important for the hållnäs area. in the comprehensive plan from 1977, the local authority stated that a general decrease in work hours in swedish society would increase the amount of holiday time for the population. it was assumed that this increase in non-working hours implied there would be an increase in demand for land to build houses and premises for summer residents and tourist activities, especially along the coast where hållnäs is located. the coastal area is also the district that saw the fennia 197(1) (2019) 29elin slätmo largest decrease in numbers of permanent residents in the 1970s, and an increase in tourism was seen as desirable for securing service levels. to ensure such a development, the municipality appointed 1,200 plots for building summer cottages along the coast and expressed the view that, as the demand for plots was so high, they would all be bought and developed by the year 1990. interviews, field visits and planning documents show that the assumed high demand for plots for summer cottages in the 1977 plan was not entirely realised. the municipal spatial plan from 1991 stated that rural development was an overarching goal for the development for the whole locality including the hållnäs area. this goal was not explained or elaborated in the documents (therefore it is included in ‘tourism’ in the schematic model in figure 1). in the planning documents from 2009, the local authority once again appointed areas for the development of tourism and plots for building summer cottages along the coast in hållnäs.1 through these proactive initiatives, the local authority sought to steer the development of housing and set up clearer boundaries between different land uses and societal interests. along the coast, three land areas were appointed as ‘development areas’ to ensure development and growth in the hållnäs community. outside these areas, the local authority restricted the issue of permits for summer housing; because of its unique environmental features, especially the eastern part of the coast, it was considered important to protect the hållnäs peninsula from housing and other developments. the local authority’s designation of land for tourism and housing for summer residents can be a promising strategy for rural development while at the same time preserving desirable natural and cultural heritage values. in their study of european and swedish rural policies between 2000 and 2013, almstedt, lundmark and pettersson (2015) state that tourism is important for restructuring the rural economy. however, this importance is foremost expressed as political rhetoric and has limited impact if related to the spending of public funds. almstedt and colleagues (2015) therefore argue that it is questionable whether such initiatives will contribute to a restructuring of the rural economy to any significant degree. in the case of hållnäs, tourism and summer residents can indeed be in synergy with agriculture, as they can have positive effects on securing service levels and maintaining the vibrant rural area. indirectly, therefore, they can enable maintained farming. importantly, public authorities cannot create such developments single-handedly, but by directing public funds and zoning land use, they can enable (and/or restrict) such initiatives. at the same time, prioritising land fig. 1. identified land uses in the spatial planning of hållnäs, with dominant relations to agriculture 30 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers for new establishments for the purposes of tourism comes with the risk of not prioritising ongoing agricultural activities, so these initiatives can therefore also conflict with agriculture. maintaining agriculture for food production or from a business perspective does not feature prominently in the empirical material studied for hållnäs. in all the planning documents studied and in interviews with officials, agriculture in hållnäs is instead stated to be closely related to natural environments and biodiversity values as well as cultural environments and cultural heritage values. due to strict national agricultural and land-use policies during the 1970s, each swedish local authority was obliged to develop policy programmes to show how the agricultural lands within the municipal territory were to be ensured.2 in tierp, the administrative body of which hållnäs is part, the programme was created together with the comprehensive spatial plan in 1977. in this agricultural programme, it was stated that maintaining agriculture was important for the community of hållnäs, as it was related to the importance of maintaining population levels and protecting natural and cultural heritage values. this evaluation of agriculture as a prominent element in maintaining biodiversity and cultural heritage is also apparent in later official documents and in interviews with both farmers and officials. in the 1991 plan, the whole of the hållnäs peninsula was designated as being under legal conservation protection due to its ecological and cultural heritage values. its diversified landscape, with forests, wet lands and agricultural lands, was described as one of the reasons the area was so interesting and in need of protection. since then, any development that could threaten the character of this diversified landscape has been forbidden on the peninsula. although the specific legal paragraphs that relate to it are certainly no longer in force, the valuations still affect hållnäs in policy documents, management by public authorities and the ongoing use of land. today, a large part of the land area has also been put under various forms of legal conservation. besides its extraordinary biodiversity (e.g. red-listed species in the forest and wet lands), some small-scale agriculture lands (e.g. pastures and fields) also have high natural and cultural values and have therefore been designated as conservation areas of various types (lindborg et al. 2008). for instance, based on cultural heritage and biodiversity arguments, the area of lingnåre has been earmarked for farm management initiatives that aim to ensure the farming methods and the ‘old ways of living’ maintain high-value biotopes and biodiversity. these initiatives have been supported by officials at the local and regional level, and by nongovernmental organisations (ngo) at the regional and local hållnäs level. although decisions and processes to implement conservation areas for nature and cultural heritage were reported to have improved during the 1990s and 2000s, land-owners and inhabitants in hållnäs have been active in the hearing processes for all the plans studied here, and there are similarities in their criticisms of the management methods used by official authorities. chief among these are protests about the appointment of land areas for nature and cultural heritage conservation, due to the restrictions that these conservation areas create for agriculture and other developments. this criticism goes back at least to the 1970s. in the hearing process for the plan in 1977, around 60 landowners in hållnäs lodged written statements to the local authority, criticising the establishment of conservation areas based on their right to continue to use their lands. one of the letters, written by 15 landowners in may 1976, ended: regarding the proposition to make hållen and its agricultural lands a cultural village, we are of the certain opinion that any restrictions and regulations that might negatively affect the community need to be removed. we are unanimous in our undertaking to care for our own community in the future. in the written material from the hearing processes in the 1990s and 2000s, the local agricultural organisation took a more positive view concerning the protection of natural and cultural values in the area, but claimed there was a need for higher financial compensation if lands continued to be assigned as protected for biodiversity and cultural heritage values. it was claimed that this was needed in order to avoid the risk of income deficit for single land-owners. concerns of this kind were also raised during the interviews with farmers and officials. at the same time, other organisations and inhabitants in the area argued for the need for stronger and expanded protection of the natural and cultural heritage values in hållnäs. this is indeed an ongoing struggle over the use of land. fennia 197(1) (2019) 31elin slätmo conflicting and synergetic land uses in sandnes, norway sandnes, located along the north sea coast, is in close proximity to stavanger, which results in high demand for land for new housing and business developments. the planning documents, especially the ones from after 2000, state that sandnes has a regional responsibility to ensure infrastructure in the form of roads, as well as areas for housing, businesses and outdoor recreation. moreover, according to regional and state authorities, the area is regarded as having some of the best quality soil for food production in the whole of norway. the effect of this is that the valuation of land and decisions about how best to use it is a more of an explicit struggle than in hållnäs. the analyses of the planning documents in sandnes for this study have identified eight categories of land use: business and commercial development; infrastructure; housing and public services; soil preservation; natural environments and biodiversity; cultural environments and cultural heritage; outdoor recreation; and ‘climate smart’ planning strategies (e.g. dense development). based on interviews and other stakeholder interactions, the relations between agriculture and the other seven land uses are illustrated in figure 2. the relations are presented and discussed in the following sections. the land-use category of business and commercial development is strongly emphasised in the spatial planning. with high demand for land, this interest is in conflict with ongoing agriculture. in the later plans, from 2002 onwards, there are strict descriptions of goals, strategies and measures for businesses and commercial organisations, an expression of the ‘municipal will’ to try to steer the development of land use towards certain areas. it should be noted that the officials interviewed in sandnes stated that it was a struggle to separate some farming activities from businesses and commercial organisations. this was especially true in the case of intensive farming, which is industrial in character and uses greenhouses, large stables and/or sheds for food production and processing. if the spatial planning incorporated these agricultural activities in the land-use category of business and commercial development, it would, of course, be in synergy for this type of farming. sandnes is described in the planning documents as an important hub for land and water transport in the region, and infrastructure is therefore an important part of the politics of land use. the synergetic relations between infrastructures, businesses and commercial development and environmental issues are prominent in all the policies and plans that were investigated. the category of land use is here presented as being in conflict with agriculture in sandnes, as the establishment of new roads and transportation routes would exploit land. in all the documents studied for sandnes, housing and public needs is expressed as the main category of interests in need of space. this is based on a strong increase in population, which is fig. 2. identified land uses in the spatial planning of sandnes, with dominant relations to agriculture. 32 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers projected to be particularly large in the coming decades. schools, childcare facilities and homes for the elderly are needed in addition to housing, in order to meet this anticipated development. the regional spatial plans from 2000 onwards have designated the eastern part of the sandnes area as the next location for regional development. during interviews, officials in sandnes pointed out that to improve the transparency of the local authority’s goals of building new facilities for business, housing and public needs while at the same time preserving soil for food production, land that had been allotted for housing but was not in line with this regional planning decision had been re-categorised ‘back to’ agriculture land. the analyses have not included an investigation of this specific land but it should be noted that, judging from interviews with farmers in sandnes, this land might already have been abandoned for farming and/or sold for other purposes, as political decisions to categorise areas as ‘for development’ in spatial planning affect farmers’ willingness to continue farming and their motives for doing so. this is especially the case in peri-urban areas where farmers seem aware of the policy situation regarding the land (slätmo 2016). soil preservation has high priority in sandnes. the local authority states that it follows regional and national decisions on the issue.3 due to high demand for land for business, commercial, infrastructure and housing purposes in sandnes, specific areas have been designated for agriculture. in both local and regional spatial plans, a ‘long-term border’ for agriculture is drawn on the maps accompanying the written material. this border aims to emphasise that soil preservation should be prioritised within this zone. soil preservation is therefore foremost in the synergy of maintained agriculture. farmers in the area, however, report that the establishment of buildings and roads that they perceive as fundamental to developing their agricultural businesses have been denied permits due to the strict preservation policy. it is of stated importance for the local authority to maintain and enhance the land-use category of natural environments and biodiversity, not least for its relation to outdoor recreation. cultural environments and cultural heritage is not strongly emphasised in the arguments for preserving existing land uses. however, the 2007 plan states that cultural symbols and elements for creating value and strengthening local identity should be considered. in the municipal plans, cultural heritage and symbols are chiefly seen in terms of architecture and art in the built-up areas. in interviews with officials in public authorities, the categories of cultural environments and cultural heritage, and natural environments and biodiversity are stated to be most in synergy with maintained agriculture in sandnes. biodiversity and cultural heritage can co-exist with extensive agriculture, and this can strengthen the arguments for preserving agricultural lands in relation to other land uses, such as businesses, commercial and public properties, housing and infrastructure. but importantly, agriculture is more often in conflict with the preservation of natural environments, biodiversity, cultural environments and cultural heritage interests. research has found that in sandnes, conventional agricultural activities such as the spraying of manure on old semi-natural pastures (due to water directive regulations) are degrading the biodiversity on this land, and initiatives for making fields more effective to farm have been reported as damaging cultural heritage sites and monuments dating back to 1537 (sollund bøe 2013; amundsen et al. 2013; norderhaug & thorvaldsen 2013). outdoor recreation is considered a central land-use interest for spatial planning in sandnes, and areas for recreation were acknowledged as being important in regional and local development. in line with this, officials in rogaland regional authority and sandnes local authority have been working towards establishing walking paths on privately owned agricultural lands. land-owners can apply for annual economic supplements in return for allowing others to use their land. the relations between the land-use categories of agriculture and outdoor recreation can thus be seen as synergetic. several recreational areas are maintained through traditional farming practices such as grazing and haymaking, as well as more modern activities such as shops and cafés on the farms. this is a positive move for maintained farming but some sandnes-located farmers also point out that an increase in numbers of people (and their accompanying dogs) in the landscape can disturb some of their farming practices. the strong prioritisation of outdoor recreation as a land-use interest can nonetheless be in conflict with agriculture in the struggle over land for other purposes. this conflict is ongoing in the choice and prioritisation of which land areas should be used for new housing, commercial and public properties, roads and other infrastructural purposes in the eastern part of the sandnes area. the soil fennia 197(1) (2019) 33elin slätmo here is not considered as fertile as in the rest of the region and officials acknowledge that the agricultural lands are more attractive for housing than the mountain region, as these areas are relatively flat and already ‘prepared for housing’ due to the farmers’ clearance of stones. the land-use categories of business and commercial development, infrastructure, and housing and public needs are here categorised as conflicting with agriculture land, as new establishments can interfere with the farming that is ongoing. to solve this struggle over land, an overall national strategy of climate smart initiatives has been established in norwegian national planning policy since the 1990s, and spatial planning in sandnes has adapted to this since then. this land-use category is a bit different from the other identified interests as it does not have the same direct physical relation to the land. instead it is a strategy for how to place and organise the other land-use interests in space. during interviews and seminar discussions and in planning documents, it is argued that prioritising a dense building structure and using land that is already built up more efficiently will ensure low carbon emissions and preserve resources. as such, this type of climate smart initiative is in synergy with maintained agriculture. conversely, it should be noted that in the case of sandnes, such strategies are not necessarily that ‘smart’ for preserving soil, especially in the peri-urban areas. for instance, the struggles for land to build on in the eastern part of the locality draw on climate-smart arguments. interviewed officials clarified the ‘attractiveness’ of choosing agricultural land in preference to using land that is already built up or brown field sites for housing development; agriculture lands are perceived as attractive for housing due to their convenience in terms of land ownership (often there is only one owner of a large area of land compared to many owners of small areas in urban settings) and because arable lands are often flat and already cleared of stones. in turn, agriculture land has a relatively low risk of contamination compared to land formerly used for industry, commercial organisations or parking. these three aspects influence the costs of making land ‘ready for development’ and, combined with climate-smart arguments for dense housing structures, cities and built up areas constantly expand on fertile soil. a visit to a struggling pig and cabbage farmer on the outskirts of eastern sandnes in 2011 made it clear that one effect of urban expansion is that farm land that was not considered to be in the periurban area in municipal plans from the 1990s are most certainly urban today. this farmer’s land was in the middle of a housing area with urban characteristics; for example, there was a network of asphalt roads between two-storey villas, each with its own garage and garden, within biking distance to the train station and city centre. during our talk the farmer said that he now more or less accepted the higher valuation of his lands for purposes other than farming. he saw himself as being forced to give up the farmstead he had inherited from his father’s side. although sad and a little ashamed about this, he was not completely devastated or worried about carrying on as a farmer as he also ran a farm he had inherited from his mother’s side in a more rural location. two main areas of conflict, and the case-based solutions as presented above, the shared situatedness of agriculture in hållnäs and sandnes reflects two differing geographies within which agricultural activities are performed. in hållnäs, agriculture has conflicting relations with three other land uses. in sandnes, agriculture has conflicting relations with five other land uses. synergetic relations – that is, win-win or enabling relations – also exist. based on the results of the interviews, two of the most prominent conflicting relations between agriculture and other land uses are: 1) maintained agriculture and preserved biodiversity and cultural heritage in hållnäs, sweden; and 2) maintained agriculture and the adaptation of cities to climate change by means of dense building structures in sandnes, norway. drawing on the cases of hållnäs and sandnes respectively, these two respective conflicts, and how they are handled by the public authorities, are elaborated in the sections below. maintained agriculture and the preservation of biodiversity and cultural heritage the foremost non-explicit strategy for spatial planning in the hållnäs area has been to prioritise nature conservation and cultural heritage. in the planning documents and in an interview with the 34 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers planning department covering the hållnäs area, the extensive agriculture was valued for its contribution to hållnäs’ natural environments and biodiversity, as well as the cultural environment and cultural heritage. it is remarkable, however, that agriculture in hållnäs was not clearly valued for the food production to which it contributed or the business perspective that enabled inhabitants to stay in the area (and bring in tax revenues).4 acknowledging that extensive agricultural activities contribute to a multiplicity of landscape values, as the official authorities do in the hållnäs area, can enhance the perceived importance of maintaining agriculture. research on multifunctional agriculture (bills & gross 2005; bjørkhaug & richards 2008; morgan et al. 2010; grashof-bokdam et al. 2017), however, shows that for such synergies to appear, it is important that general criteria and policy schemes are adapted to the specific context and that farmers are enabled to use their competence and expertise (lindborg et al. 2008; burton & paragahawewa 2011; slätmo et al. 2017). this is necessary for it to be perceived as desirable to maintain or develop such farming activities. as in many other geographical areas, the dominant planning strategy for the area of hållnäs has been to establish different conservation areas to preserve desirable biodiversity and cultural heritage values (hovik et al. 2010). although such strategies can be fruitful in maintaining natural and cultural heritage values, they are restricting farmers in their search for new income possibilities (cf. dahlberg 2015). to solve this conflict over the use of land, it is here suggested that a possible way forward might be to establish conservation areas combined with nature-based tourism via ongoing agricultural and forest activities through long-term management contracts. this would also be suitable for a maintained, vibrant hållnäs area, especially if such long-term contracts were to consider the restrictions on smaller agricultural businesses. preservation and conservation as a spatial planning strategy were also identified in the norwegian case, but not in quite the same way. besides protecting areas for outdoor recreation, biodiversity and cultural heritage, protecting soil for food produce was also prominent in the land-use governance of sandnes (and in regional and state policy). the acknowledgement of soil as a fundamental resource for food is positive in terms of maintained agriculture, as it clarifies that agriculture needs physical space (e.g. fields and pastures) to be realised. this acknowledgment gives farmers and agricultural land a more pronounced role in the spatial planning processes. such a strategy does not directly solve any conflicts over land use, but at least the farmers, and their divergent roles and perspectives, are considered as a group of actors in the official authorities’ land-use decisions. soil preservation and climate smart planning in terms of dense building structures in the case of sandnes, the land-use categories of business and commercial development, infrastructure, and housing and public needs were in conflict with agriculture, as new establishments can interfere with ongoing farming. to solve this struggle over land, an overall national strategy of ‘climate smart’ (e.g. dense) development has been established in norwegian spatial planning policies (slätmo 2014). during interviews with officials working with spatial planning in sandnes, the view was expressed that the nation-state is like a ‘troll with many heads’; that is, the many and divergent political goals are not always possible to realise at the same time in the physical landscape. from the perspective of local authority officials, the use of strict borders (e.g. land-use zones) as a planning strategy enables them to show state authorities that they are considering the range of different, and sometimes opposing, state goals. the troll metaphor, which is probably not unique to this case, was used in reference to the high-priority state goal of preserving norwegian soil while at the same time assigning land for housing, infrastructure, outdoor recreation and so on. what in planning rhetoric is called ‘the climate smart strategy’ or ‘area economising’ (e.g. only allowing new housing and commercial properties near an already built-up area) was viewed by the officials as a constructive model to handle the trolls’ many heads. the use of dense building strategies as a land-use strategy is also in line with international expertise on how to mitigate climate change and develop more sustainable societies. in a report from the intergovernmental panel on climate change, this is mainly discussed as a transitoriented development (seto et al. 2014). from the perspective of the interviewed farmers in sandnes, however, maintained agriculture also needs new housing and premises to develop. in such development, some soil might need to be fennia 197(1) (2019) 35elin slätmo withdrawn from production, and the preservation logic outside non-built-up areas is not fully appreciated. moreover, as illustrated by the pig and cabbage farmer in sandnes above, the land areas that are viewed as being within the (peri-)urban area are changing over time, and therefore there is a risk that such general solutions for land-use governance will lead to productive soil being built on. this is especially the case when we consider what officials in sandnes state as the ‘attractiveness’ of using agricultural land for other types of development (because agricultural land often has one owner, is relatively flat and free from stones, and has a lower risk of contamination). ‘climate smart’ planning strategies were not mentioned in relation to the hållnäs area. the rhetoric used in norway regarding a willingness to promote dense building structures in order to decrease dependence on cars and allow for joint energy solutions is also dominant in sweden (borges et al. 2017); but the public authorities do not view such strategies as being directly applicable in hållnäs, probably because hållnäs is sparsely populated. nevertheless, in practice the same principle of dense building structure was used for the hållnäs area, as the planning authority uses zonation and designates non-built up areas ‘for development’ in order to direct any requests for new summer or other residences to the appointed areas. concluding remarks in this paper, the presentation of the conflicting and synergetic relations between different land uses has been communicated by contextand temporal-specific schematic models. the results from the cases presented in this study reveal that agriculture is both in synergy and in conflict with other land uses. the above discussion on the conflicting relations shows that the planning authorities in the case studies of hållnäs and sandnes deal with the situations in different ways. the results therefore reflect that relations between agriculture and other land uses differ depending on the temporal and geographical context (widgren 2004; cosgrove 2006; clark & munroe 2013; wästfelt & zhang 2016). in the cases studied here, the conflicting relations have different expressions and therefore different strategies (or lack of strategies) from public authorities. the results are not generalisable; they illustrate the situation of land-use relations in hållnäs and sandnes during the studied years. casestudy-based studies can, however, indicate aspects of importance for other geographies (niemelä et al. 2005; de groot 2006; von der dunk 2011; tudor et al. 2014). some aspects of importance that are to be learned from this study are that strictly focusing on conservation (as in hållnäs) or on climate smart dense developments of housing (as in sandnes) in spatial planning can spur land-use conflicts with agriculture. to solve these conflicts, the official authorities involved in spatial planning at local and regional levels need to further acknowledge that agricultural lands are positively related – that is, are in synergy – to a range of desirable values (e.g. protection of soil, biodiversity, cultural heritage and outdoor recreation). this can work as a strategy to enhance protection from soil-sealing (slätmo 2014), and also to further the integration of urban and rural areas. this speaks for the continued and enhanced use of multifunctionality in relation to agriculture and nature conservation. in turn, the ‘attractiveness’ of choosing agricultural land in preference to using land that is already built up or brown field sites for housing development speaks for the need for a proactive planning procedure and assessing different alternatives in decision making. notes 1this local authority policy initiative was in line with changes in the national policies concerning coastal protection, inscribed in the environmental code, which opened up new built-up areas in certain coastal areas in order to promote the development of rural areas. 2since the 1970s, agricultural and land policies at swedish state level have not had this type of candid focus on soil preservation for agriculture. however, several policy measures to halt agricultural landuse change are in place (slätmo 2017). 3since the 1950s, norwegian state politics have highlighted soil preservation as fundamental to securing self-sufficiency in food, preserving cultural heritage and securing income for individual 36 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers farmers. through different policy measures, soil preservation in norway has been strengthened since the 1990s (grimstad 2013; slätmo 2014). 4forestry is another issue about which the policies are remarkably silent. this is probably in some way related to the fact that forest companies own most of the forest land – approximately 70% of the total hållnäs land area. acknowledgements the warmest thank you to the interviewed stakeholders, and to the anonymous reviewers and the editor of the journal for helpful comments on earlier drafts. a special thank you to my former supervisor of my phd; professor marie stenseke, who introduced me to the field of human geography and societal governance of the physical environment. the author is also grateful for the post-doctoral years at the swedish agricultural university, and for the opportunity for now being in a nordic research environment that focus on planning and development beyond any urban or rural divides. references almstedt, å., lundmark, l. & pettersson, ö. (2015) public spending on rural tourism in sweden. fennia 194(1) 18–31. https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/46265 almås, r. (2005) how can multifunctional agriculture be secured in norway? paper presented at the sociology of agriculture research interest group. rural sociological society meetings, tampa, florida. amundsen, h. r., nesbakken, a. & sollund bøe, m-l. (2013) arealendringer og deres innvirkning på tag og skade av kulturminner i bynære landbruksområder, sandnes, rogaland. delrapport i forskningsprosjektet land use changes in urban pressure areas – threats to food production and landscape qualities 2009–2012. barbieri, c. & mahoney, e. (2009) why is diversification an attractive farm adjustment strategy? insights from texas farmers and ranchers. journal of rural studies 25(1) 58–66. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.06.001 beilin, r., lindborg, r., stenseke, m., pereira, h. m., llausàs, a., slätmo, e., cerqueira, y. navarro, l. , rodrigues, p., reichelt, n., munro, n. & queiroz, c. (2014) analysing how drivers of agricultural land abandonment affect biodiversity and cultural landscapes using case studies from scandinavia, iberia and oceania. land use policy 36(0) 60–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. landusepol.2013.07.003 bills, n. & gross, d. (2005) sustaining multifunctional agricultural landscapes: comparing stakeholder perspectives in new york (us) and england (uk). land use policy 22(4) 313–321. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2004.06.001 bjørkhaug, h. & richards, c. a. (2008) multifunctional agriculture in policy and practice? a comparative analysis of norway and australia. journal of rural studies 24(1) 98–111. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2007.06.003 boonstra, w. (2006) polder limits: a case study of value-conflicts on dutch rural land use. phd thesis. wageningen universiteit, wageningen. borges, l. a., nilsson, k., tunström, m., dis, a. t., perjo, l., berlina, a., costa, s. o., fredricsson, c., grunfelder, j., johnsen, i., kristensen, i., randall, l., smas, l. & weber, r. (2017) white paper on nordic sustainable cities. nordregio report. <http://www.nordregio.org/publications/white-paperon-nordic-sustainable-cities/> burton, r.j. & paragahawewa, u. h. (2011) creating culturally sustainable agri-environmental schemes. journal of rural studies 27(1) 95–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2010.11.001 busck, a. g. (2002) farmers' landscape decisions: relationships between farmers' values and landscape practices. sociologia ruralis 42(3) 233–249. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9523.00213 clark, j. k. & munroe, d. k. (2013) the relational geography of peri-urban farmer adaptation. journal of rural and community development 8(3). cosgrove, d. (2006) modernity, community and the landscape idea. journal of material culture 11(1–2) 49–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506062992 dahlberg, a. (2015) categories are all around us: towards more porous, flexible, and negotiable boundaries in conservation-production landscapes. norsk geografisk tidsskrift – norwegian journal of geography 69(4) 207–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2015.1060258 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.06.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.06.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2013.07.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2013.07.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2004.06.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2004.06.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2007.06.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2007.06.003 http://www.nordregio.org/publications/white-paper-on-nordic-sustainable-cities/ http://www.nordregio.org/publications/white-paper-on-nordic-sustainable-cities/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2010.11.001 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9523.00213 https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506062992 https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2015.1060258 fennia 197(1) (2019) 37elin slätmo von der dunk, a., grêt-regamey, a., dalang, t. & hersperger, a. m. (2011) defining a typology of periurban land-use conflicts – a case study from switzerland. landscape and urban planning 101(2) 149–156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.02.007 elden, s. (2013) the birth of territory. university of chicago press, chicago, usa. elgåker, h. (2011) horse keeping in peri-urban areas. changing land use with possibilities and conflicts. doctoral thesis in department of rural buildings and animal husbandry 2011:7. swedish university of agricultural sciences, alnarp. eusébio, c., carneiro, m. j., kastenholz, e., figueiredo, e. & soares da silva, d. (2017) who is consuming the countryside? an activity-based segmentation analysis of the domestic rural tourism market in portugal. journal of hospitality and tourism management 31 197–210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jhtm.2016.12.006 gill, n., klepeis, p. & chisholm, l. (2010) stewardship among lifestyle oriented rural landowners. journal of environmental planning and management 53(3) 317–334. https://doi. org/10.1080/09640561003612890 grashof-bokdam, c. j., cormont, a., polman, n. b. p., westerhof, e. j. g. m., franke, j. g. j. & opdam, p. f. m. (2017) modelling shifts between monoand multifunctional farming systems: the importance of social and economic drivers. landscape ecology 32(3) 595–607. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10980-016-0458-7 grimstad, s. (2013) business driven environmental action in agricultural based tourism micro-clusters in norway and australia. higher degree thesis. university of newcastle, faculty of business & law. newcastle, australia. de groot, r. (2006) function-analysis and valuation as a tool to assess land use conflicts in planning for sustainable, multi-functional landscapes. landscape and urban planning 75(3–4) 175–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2005.02.016 hansson, h., ferguson, r. & olofsson, c. (2010) understanding the diversification and specialization of farm businesses. agricultural and food science 19(4) 269–283. https://doi. org/10.2137/145960610794197605 hansson, h., ferguson, r., olofsson, c. & rantamäki-lahtinen, l. (2013) farmers' motives for diversifying their farm business – the influence of family. journal of rural studies 32 240–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.07.002 head, l. (2012) conceptualising the human in cultural landscapes and resilience thinking. in c. bieling & t. plieninger (eds.) resilience and the cultural landscape: understanding and managing change in human-shaped environments, 65–79. cambridge university press, cambridge. https:// doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139107778.006 hedlund, m. (2016) mapping the socioeconomic landscape of rural sweden: towards a typology of rural areas. regional studies 50(3) 460–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.924618 henle, k., alard, d., clitherow, j., cobb, p., firbank, l., kull, t., mccracken, d., moritz, r.f.a, niemelä, j., rebane, m. wascher, d., watt, a. & young, j. (2008) identifying and managing the conflicts between agriculture and biodiversity conservation in europe – a review. agriculture, ecosystems & environment 124(1–2) 60–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2007.09.005 hodge, i., hauck, j. & bonn, a. (2015) the alignment of agricultural and nature conservation policies in the european union. conservation biology 29(4) 996–1005. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12531 hovik, s., sandström, c. & zachrisson, a. (2010) management of protected areas in norway and sweden: challenges in combining central governance and local participation. journal of environmental policy & planning 12(2) 159–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/15239081003719219 hägerstrand, t. (1970) what about people in regional science? papers in regional science 24(1) 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1435-5597.1970.tb01464.x hägerstrand, t. (2009) tillvaroväven. formas, stockholm. kristensen, s. b. p., reenberg, a. & peña j. d. j. (2009) exploring local rural landscape changes in denmark: a human-environmental timeline perspective. geografisk tidsskrift – danish journal of geography 109(1) 47–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/00167223.2009.10649595 lindborg, r., bengtsson, j., berg, å., cousins, s. a. o., eriksson, o., gustafsson, t., hasund, k. p., lenoir, l., pihlgren, a., sjödin, e. & stenseke, m. (2008) a landscape perspective on conservation of semi-natural grasslands. agriculture, ecosystems & environment 125(1–4) 213–222. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.agee.2008.01.006 marsden, t. & morley, a. (2014) sustainable food systems: building a new paradigm. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203083499 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.02.007 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhtm.2016.12.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhtm.2016.12.006 https://doi.org/10.1080/09640561003612890 https://doi.org/10.1080/09640561003612890 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-016-0458-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-016-0458-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2005.02.016 https://doi.org/10.2137/145960610794197605 https://doi.org/10.2137/145960610794197605 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.07.002 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139107778.006 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139107778.006 https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.924618 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2007.09.005 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12531 https://doi.org/10.1080/15239081003719219 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1435-5597.1970.tb01464.x https://doi.org/10.1080/00167223.2009.10649595 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2008.01.006 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2008.01.006 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203083499 38 fennia 197(1) (2019)research papers mels, t. & setten, g. (2007) romance, practice and substantiveness: what do landscapes do? geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 89(3) 197–202. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2007.00248.x morgan, s. l., marsden, t., miele, m. & morley, a. (2010) agricultural multifunctionality and farmers' entrepreneurial skills: a study of tuscan and welsh farmers. journal of rural studies 26(2) 116–129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.09.002 niemelä, j., young, j., alard, d., askasibar, m., henle, k., johnson, r., kurttila, m., larsson, t-b., matouch, s., nowicki, p., paiva, r., portoghesi, l., smulders, r., stevenson, a., tartes, u. & watt, a. (2005) identifying, managing and monitoring conflicts between forest biodiversity conservation and other human interests in europe. forest policy and economics 7(6) 877–890. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.forpol.2004.04.005 norderhaug, a. & thorvaldsen, p. (2013) biomangfold og arealbruk ved urbant press (8). bioforsk midtnorge, kvithamar. olwig, k. r. (2002) landscape, nature, and the body politic: from britain's renaissance to america's new world. university of wisconsin press, madison. olwig, k. r. & mitchell, d. (2007) justice, power and the political landscape: from american space to the european landscape convention. landscape research 32(5) 525–531. https://doi. org/10.1080/01426390701552688 potter, c. & tilzey, m. (2007) agricultural multifunctionality, environmental sustainability and the wto: resistance or accommodation to the neoliberal project for agriculture? geoforum 38(6) 1290–1303. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.05.001 primdahl, j., kristensen, l. s. & busck, a. g. (2013) the farmer and landscape management: different roles, different policy approaches. geography compass 7(4) 300–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/ gec3.12040 raggi, m., sardonini, l. & viaggi, d. (2013) the effects of the common agricultural policy on exit strategies and land re-allocation. land use policy 31 114–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. landusepol.2011.12.009 ribeiro, p. f., nunes, l. c., beja, p., reino, l., santana, j., moreira, f. & santos, j. l. (2018) a spatially explicit choice model to assess the impact of conservation policy on high nature value farming systems. ecological economics 145 331–338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.11.011 sauer, c. (1965). the morphology of landscape (1925). in leighley, j. (ed.) land and life: a selection from the writings of carl ortwin sauer, 315–350. university of california press. berkeley, los angeles and london. saunders, f. p. (2016) complex shades of green: gradually changing notions of the ‘good farmer’ in a swedish context. sociologia ruralis 56(3) 391–407. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12115 seto k. c., dhakal, s., bigio, a., blanco, h., delgado, g. c., dewar, d., huang, l., inaba, a., kansal, a., lwasa, s., mcmahon, j. e., müller, d. b., murakami, j., nagendra, h. & ramaswami, a. (2014) human settlements, infrastructure and spatial planning. in edenhofer, o., pichs-madruga, r., sokona, y., farahani, e., kadner, s., seyboth, k., adler, a., baum, i., brunner, s., eickemeier, p., kriemann, b., savolainen, j., schlömer, s., von stechow, c., zwickel, t. & minx, j.c. (eds.) climate change 2014: mitigation of climate change. contribution of working group iii to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, 923–1000. cambridge university press, cambridge, uk, and new york, ny. setten, g. (2004) the habitus, the rule and the moral landscape. cultural geographies 11(4) 389–415. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474004eu309oa slätmo, e. (2014) jordbruksmark i förändring. drivkrafter bakom och förutsättningar för offentlig styrning i sverige och norge. meddelanden från göteborgs universitets geografiska institutioner. avhandlingar. serie b, nr 125, göteborg. slätmo, e. (2016) challenges in agricultural land management – a scandinavian perspective on contextual variations and farmers’ room to manoeuvre. in head, l., saltzman, k., setten, g. & stenseke, m. (eds.) nature, temporality and environmental management: scandinavian and australian perspectives on peoples and landscapes, 169–185. routledge, abingdon, oxon. slätmo, e. (2017) preservation of agricultural land as an issue of societal importance. rural landscapes: society, environment, history 40(1) 1–12. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.16993/ rl.39 slätmo, e., fischer, k. & röös, e. (2017) the framing of sustainability in sustainability assessment frameworks for agriculture. sociologia ruralis 57(3) 378–395. https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12156 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2007.00248.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2007.00248.x https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2009.09.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2004.04.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2004.04.005 https://doi.org/10.1080/01426390701552688 https://doi.org/10.1080/01426390701552688 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.05.001 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12040 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12040 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2011.12.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2011.12.009 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.11.011 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12115 https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474004eu309oa https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.16993/rl.39 https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.16993/rl.39 https://doi.org/10.1111/soru.12156 fennia 197(1) (2019) 39elin slätmo smith, p., gregory, p. j., van vuuren, d., obersteiner, m., havlík, p., rounsevell, m., woods, j., stehfest, e. & bellarby, j. (2010) competition for land. philosophical transactions of the royal society b 365(1554) 2941–2957. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0127 sollund bøe, m-l. (2013) fortidens minner i dagens landskap. status for automatisk fredete kulturminner i sandnes kommune, rogaland 2012. stiftelsen norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, niku. tema; 44. oslo. stenseke, m., lindborg, r., dahlberg, a. & slätmo, e. (2012) system or arena? conceptual concerns around the analysis of landscape dynamics. in bieling, c. & plieninger, t. (eds.) resilience and the cultural landscape: understanding and managing change in human-shaped environments, 80–94. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139107778.007 sutherland, l-a. (2013) can organic farmers be ‘good farmers’? adding the ‘taste of necessity’ to the conventionalization debate. agriculture and human values 30(3) 429–441. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10460-013-9424-z tudor, c. a., iojă, i. c., pătru-stupariu, i., nită, m. r. & hersperger, a. m. (2014) how successful is the resolution of land-use conflicts? a comparison of cases from switzerland and romania. applied geography 47 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.12.008 törnqvist, g. (1981) on arenas and systems. in pred, a. (ed.) space and time in geography: essays dedicated to torsten hägerstrand, 109–120. liberläromedel and gleerup, lund. weltin, m., zasada, i., franke, c., piorr, a., raggi, m. & viaggi, d. (2017) analysing behavioural differences of farm households: an example of income diversification strategies based on european farm survey data. land use policy 62 172–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. landusepol.2016.11.041 widgren, m. (2004) can landscapes be read? in palang, h., sooväli, h., antrop, m. & setten, g. (eds.), european rural landscapes: persistence and change in a globalizing environment, 455–465. kluwer academic publishers, boston. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48512-1_28 wilson, g. a. (2001) from productivism to post-productivism … and back again? exploring the (un) changed natural and mental landscapes of european agriculture. transactions of the institute of british geographers 26(1) 77–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00007 woods, m. (2009) rural geography: blurring boundaries and making connections. progress in human geography 33(6) 849–858. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508105001 woods, m. (2011) rural. routledge, abingdon. wästfelt, a. & zhang, q. (2016) reclaiming localisation for revitalising agriculture: a case study of peri-urban agricultural change in gothenburg, sweden. journal of rural studies 47(part a) 172– 185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.07.013 yrjölä, t. & kola, j. (2004) consumer preferences regarding multifunctional agriculture. international food and agribusiness management review 7(1) 78–90. http://purl.umn.edu/8117 https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0127 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139107778.007 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9424-z https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9424-z https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.12.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.11.041 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.11.041 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48512-1_28 https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00007 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508105001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.07.013 http://purl.umn.edu/8117 24961_08_krawczyk.pdf application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe krawczyk, elzbieta & john ratcliffe (2006). application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin. fennia 184: 1, pp. 75–89. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. in recent years, cities and urban regions have been increasingly applying various forms of strategic planning and future-oriented approaches in order to respond to the challenges posed by contemporary change, competition between cities, a sustainability agenda, the transformation of urban governance and others. exercises employing futures methods usually vary as they are set in specific contexts, are driven by different motivations and objectives and use diverse methodological approaches. despite the differences, many of these projects are faced by similar problems arising from the innovativeness and fragility of the procedures used. this paper presents three exercises undertaken in dublin, in which futures approaches were employed at the urban region, municipal authority and local community level. through the demonstration and examination of these projects, the authors aim to contribute to the ongoing conversation about a more effective use of futures methods in urban planning processes. the exercises are discussed in regard to their origins, methodologies, participation, and outcomes and outputs. the authors attempt to critically review the exercises, and building upon the lessons learned, to draw together a range of practical recommendations for the application of futures methods in the urban planning process. elzbieta krawczyk & john ratcliffe, the futures academy, dublin institute of technology, bolton st., dublin 1, ireland. e-mails: elzbieta.krawczyk@dit.ie, john.ratcliffe@dit.ie. introduction over recent decades, cities and urban regions have been undergoing rapid and extensive transformations (oecd 1994). a range of fresh challenges and opportunities has emerged as a consequence of expanding globalisation, the accelerating pace of technological progress, profound social and cultural shifts and the emergence of new economic trends. urban planners and decisionmakers have come to the realisation that existing approaches and methods for planning the future are quickly becoming inadequate in addressing these prevailing transformations (oecd 1994; hall & pfeiffer 2000), and, therefore, they have been searching for new, more effective and innovative ways of thinking and acting about the future (myers & kitsuse 2000). as a result, in recent years, cities and urban regions have been increasingly applying various forms of strategic planning and future-oriented approaches in order to respond to the challenges posed by these transformations (albrechts et al. 2003). futures, prospective, foresight, scenario planning and urban visioning are successfully being used to foster the sustainable development of prosperous cities and towns in a manner that favours a more holistic, inclusive, integrative and creative approach (krawczyk & ratcliffe 2004). they assist in the development of a widely agreed vision of where the place in question wants to be in twenty, fifty or a hundred years time (gaffikin & morrissey 1999), and they help to set a path towards this desired future. cities such lyon (edurc 2000; ec 2002), barcelona (ec 2002), bilbao (edurc 1999; transland 1999), and 76 fennia 184: 1 (2006)elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe vancouver (cities plus 2004), became a flagship examples of how the futures approaches can be used, not only to examine the possible, probable and desirable future options, but also to motivate and facilitate a collaborative action for the future. according to parrad (2004), the shift towards various future-oriented approaches has been stimulated by three main motivations. first, cities and urban regions, more than ever, recognise a need to foster their competitiveness and attractiveness, so they can successfully compete for investment and labour at local, regional and global level (brotchie et al. 1995; cheshire & gordon 1995; kresl 1995; ec 1999; van der berg et al. 2004). second, increasing fragmentation of urban governance and the growth in the number of actors influencing the development of cities has created a need for greater communication and collaboration by them in shaping the future, as well as a need for rethinking urban fiscal and other regulatory policies (albrechts et al. 2003). third, due to extensive urbanisation processes, the quality of life in many cities has been deteriorating. in order to reverse this trend greater care for the environment, an improvement in urban infrastructure, and greater social cohesion need to be achieved (hall & pfeiffer 2000). although the use of future-oriented approaches is driven by similar concerns around the world, individual projects, nevertheless, vary as they are: undertaken by different stakeholders; set in unique individual contexts; driven by different local aspirations; use diverse methodological frameworks; and involve differing actors in their implementation. yet, though, each exercise is unique, project managers are challenged by similar problems arising from the innovativeness and fragility of the approaches used (parrad 2004). in a number of studies, various organisations involved in the urban and regional planning processes pointed to the lack of specific skills within the organisations, both in terms of expertise in the use of futures methods and approaches, but even more so the lack of capacity to adopt new approaches and learning fresh ways of thinking, acting and collaborating (puglisi & marvin 2002). there is a strong demand for better connections between academic research and the practice, especially in developing more practice oriented approaches to urban and regional futures. puglisi and marvin (2002) argue that an important challenge for the field of futures studies is building a stronger engagement with urban and regional policy practices. they propose three streams of work in addressing this challenge: • the examination of the prospective work that is currently being undertaken and the analysis of different approaches to futures thinking; • the development of an in-depth understanding of the specific context within which policy-makers are carrying out the futures work, and how political and structural circumstances are reflected in requirements and needs for territorial foresight; and, • comparative analysis of the processes used to generate futures, the independent context of the visions that are produced, and the impacts they have on policies and decisions. this paper presents three exercises undertaken in dublin, in which futures approaches were employed at the urban region, municipal authority and local community level. through the demonstration and examination of these projects, the authors aim to contribute to the ongoing conversation about the use of futures methods in urban planning processes and add to not very large, although growing, range of examples of practice. the exercises are discussed in regard to their origins, methodologies, participation, and outcomes and outputs. the authors attempt to critically review the exercises, and building upon the lessons learned, to draw together a range of general recommendations that could be of benefit for practitioners in their tasks ahead. it needs to be emphasised that the recommendation section draws upon the doctoral thesis (“futures thinking in urban planning processes – the case of dublin”) completed recently by one of the authors (ela krawczyk), the consultancy work of the other (john ratcliffe) and on the general work of the futures academy in the field1. case studies this paper specifically examines three projects carried out in dublin in which future-oriented methods were employed: dublin 2020 vision, dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012, and development of community indicators in ballymun. each project is discussed in regard to its origins, methodology, participation and outcomes and outputs. the main overall characteristics of each exercise are presented in table 1. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 77application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin table 1. future-oriented projects for dublin: the main characteristics. dublin 2020 vision dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012 development of community indicators in ballymun initiative / leadership internal initiative of the dublin chamber of commerce effect of legislation prepared by the department of environment and local governance ballymun regeneration limited (brl) and “it takes two” group methodology prospective approach strategic visioning visioning method design of the process one workshop followed by a series of working meetings and work done in small groups set out by the legislation two workshops and a series of preparatory meetings participation business community, people invited by the initiators of the process bodies represented on dcdb, local authorities, state agencies, social partners, community groups, third level educational institutions, business groups, citizens global action plan action teams1, dublin city council, ballymun regeneration ltd. and local community groups and organisations time frame spring 2003 – april 2004 approx. two years, starting january 2000 and finishing in april 2002 started in late 2001 and is ongoing time horizon 2020 (17 years) 2012 (10 years) 2017 (17 years) project management project managed internally within the dublin chamber of commerce, facilitated by the futures academy dublin city development board brl and gap outcomes and outputs document with the vision for dublin 2020 proposal for the creation of a forum for discussing the future of dublin “dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012” strategy, a number of different local actions a set of future scenarios and a set of environmental, economic and social indicators 1 action teams are consist of groups of local residents interested in environmental issues as well as sustainability, with the purpose to decrease the negative impact on the environment on their own individual level. dublin 2020 vision origins of the project the dublin 2020 vision project was initiated and conducted by the dublin chamber of commerce (dcc) with the facilitation of the futures academy at dit. dcc is a networking organisation representing the interests of the business community in dublin. understandably, the chamber holds a belief that if the city is working well it is a good place for business, and, correspondingly, if the business climate is healthy this is beneficial for the city. consequently, for many years the chamber has been an active promoter of policies and projects that would enhance the city’s economic and social base. in this context, the dublin 2020 vision project was undertaken in order to set a new direction for the future development of the city. over recent years (late 1990s and beginning of the 2000s) dublin has been greatly transformed as a result of the economic boom popularly known as the ‘celtic tiger’ era. the dcc felt that after a period of unprecedented growth, the city had reached a ‘plateau’ stage, and that a new direction for its future development needed to be set. the lack of a suitable governance structure that would provide a long-term strategic view for the future of ‘dublin greater region’ prompted the chamber to show some leadership in stimulating strategic thinking. the organisation aimed to explore future possibilities and identify the most desirable path for the future development of the city. as one of the initiators of the project said: “we needed to know where the city is going in the future. we wanted to know how dublin could look and what we wanted it to look like” (pierce 2004). process and methodology the project started at the beginning of 2003. it was initiated internally by the president and the coun78 fennia 184: 1 (2006)elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe cil of the chamber. three main phases can be discerned in the overall process: 1. preparation. 2. exploration of possible and desirable futures. 3. networking with other actors and stakeholders and the launch of the vision. the first preparatory phase involved discussions on a number of issues. among them were: consideration of the existing documents and projects which looked strategically at the future of dublin, (e.g. dublin – a city of possibilities 2002– 2012), and their relation to the chamber’s initiative; determination of the time horizon for looking into the future; clarification of the aims of the exercise and the expected outcomes; selection of the appropriate methodology for the project. at this stage the ‘vision group’ was also formed and the contact and cooperation with the futures academy at dublin institute of technology was initiated. the futures academy prepared the methodology for the second phase of the project – the exploration of possible and desirable futures. the second stage, in which the preferred vision for dublin in 2020 was developed, was key to the whole process. the exploration of the future commenced with the swot analysis for dublin in the year 2015 prepared by the futures academy in april 2003. the next step was the ‘prospective workshop’, which took place on 11th of june 2003. 14 people from the ‘vision group’ took part in the event, which was facilitated by three members of the futures academy. the structure of the workshop was based on the modified “prospective through scenarios” process developed by the futures academy. the workshop began with agreeing the strategic question, which was used as a ‘guiding question’ throughout the workshop. the question was formulated into: “what set of policy themes and key priority measures should be formulated to create a preferred vision for the dublin city region in 2020?” the first step in the exploration of the future was the identification of driving forces of change within six categories: economy, society, environment, governance, technology and demography. the main group was divided into smaller subgroups, within which members brainstormed on the driving forces of change within categories assigned to them. next, among the same subgroups and within the same six categories, the specific issues and trends arising from the driving forces of change were identified. the whole group subsequently clustered the identified issues and trends into relevant themes. initially 17 clusters were created. then, the group brainstormed on the clusters formed in the previous phase and developed five policy themes: • the knowledge city, • the great european city, • infrastructure, • sustaining business competitiveness, and • governance and leadership. these themes then became the ‘scaffolding’ for the final vision. the last step in the workshop involved proposing action agenda that should be pursued in order to achieve the desired vision. the policy themes developed during the workshop provided the basis for further elaboration of the vision. the main ‘vision group’ was divided into five subgroups. each of these subgroups was working on one policy theme. the results of work of each subgroup were subsequently presented to the main group during three short meetings (approximately two hours duration) taking place on a monthly basis. elaborated policy themes were discussed by the main group to ensure that they are stretched-out and elaborated as far as possible. the final step in the phase of exploration of possible and desirable futures was the development of a scenario illustrating a pessimistic future for dublin in 2020. the scenario was created during a short brainstorming session attended by members of the futures academy and one member of the ‘vision group’. the information collected during the prospective workshop was recorded by the futures academy in the document “dublin chamber of commerce: scenario workshop”. this document was later communicated to the ‘vision group’. during the process one member of the academy took on a secretarial role and was responsible for drafting the vision document, bringing together working documents produced by the subgroups and recording comments on the policy themes generated by the main group. the last phase of the process involved networking with key stakeholders in the dublin region and launching and promoting the vision. the networking with various actors in the region was parallel to the process of exploration of the future and development of the vision. the chamber understood that in order to achieve the desired future state it was necessary to bring the main actors into the process. the organisation was seeking support for their initiative from the dublin city manager, the fennia 184: 1 (2006) 79application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin tánaiste (ireland’s deputy prime minister), dublin city lord mayor, chambers of commerce in the dublin region, ibec and other business organisations. another activity in this phase was the identification of the channels for communicating and promoting the vision. television and newspapers were recognised as possible means for making the vision known to majority of citizens. the vision document was launched on the 10th of may 2004 at the dublin city council meeting. the executive team of the chamber made a presentation to the councillors and the city manager. they described the vision as a starting point for a debate on the future of the city and called for the establishment of a forum that would facilitate discussions on the future of dublin and be responsible for the implementation of a shared vision for the city. although the chamber’s initiative was warmly welcomed by the council, a number of concerns were raised. the councillors feared that this vision, as many others, would never be realised, and that the forum could become another ‘talking shop’, which would not bring any real change. participation participants comprising the ‘vision group’ were selected mainly from within the chamber’s membership by the project initiators. they were chosen because they: represented different sectors; had some experience in forecasting and strategic thinking; and, most of all, had a reputation for visionary ideas and were able to stand back and think ‘outside the box’. the ‘vision group’ had 14, out of which 12 represented the business community. the two remaining members came from the academic and international relations areas. initially the chamber considered inviting to the project representatives of all sectors, recognising that if the vision was to be realised it needed the involvement of all groups within the city. this idea was abandoned because a ‘widely inclusive’ process seemed likely to be too slow. instead, the chamber decided to start the process with a small group and try to engage other sectors at a later stage. outcomes and outputs the main output of the process was the imagine dublin 2020: our vision for the future of the city document. the desired vision which portrays the city as: • “a knowledge city”: in which life-long learning and personal and civic development are on the daily agenda; where civic and environmental attitudes are formed at the beginning of the learning cycle; and teaching how to think creatively and independently is a part of the curriculum. • “a great european city”: which is well-known in europe for its distinct cultural identity and trademarks; where citizens feel and act as stakeholders; and where living is safe, comfortable and convivial. • “a city that works”: because growth is planned and managed, resources are utilised in an efficient way and public services, such as transportation, waste management, energy and water supply, meet the highest standards. • “a highly competitive city”: which attracts highly qualified labour and encourages r&d; where enterprise and entrepreneurial culture are promoted; and a fiscal regime and regulations support business and innovation. • “a city wisely governed”: by a directly elected mayor, who ensures implementation of plans and enforcement of policies; a city with its own transparent financial system, in which central and local government powers are in balance; and where the business community and public authorities work together to ensure its optimal development. the document also includes the chamber’s proposals of key policy measures and actions that need to be introduced in order for the vision to be realised. to date no further developments arising from the process were observed. although the document itself has been cited at many occasions by the chamber representatives and in the media (e.g. the irish times, 8th may 2006, in article dublin’s rising) no further actions were undertaken to create the city forum or develop a shared vision for dublin-region. dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012 origins of the project dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012 is a strategy for the economic, social and cultural development of dublin city (the area governed by the dublin city council). the strategy was developed by the dublin city development board (dcdb) over approximately a two year period, 80 fennia 184: 1 (2006)elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe from january 2000 to april 2002. city/county development boards (cdbs) were created by the department of the environment and local government (doelg) in order to address the challenge of integrating local services at the county and city level. in ireland, as in many other countries, there is a large number of different agencies and bodies responsible for different sectors of activity. the levels of ‘horizontal’ integration of these bodies, and the degree of their cooperation with other interest groups operating at a local level, such as business, local development and local community groups, is rather low. the establishment of cdbs, which brought together, in a mandatory manner, representatives of local government, local development, relevant state agencies functioning at the local level and the social partners (including the community and voluntary sector), created a platform for greater integration of different services and enhanced cooperation between various sectors (doelg 2000). the main purpose of cdbs is to prepare and manage the implementation of economic, social, and cultural development strategies. such strategies should provide a ‘shared vision’ for the development of the city or county for the next 10 years. the legislation set out that the strategies would be implemented by the constituent members of the cdbs (state agencies, local authorities and local groups). each of these bodies would deliver different elements of strategy through their own operational plans and services (doelg 2000). process and methodology the doelg prepared relatively detailed guidelines for the development of cdb strategies (doelg 2000). the guidelines specified the background, concepts and scope of the strategies; outlined a general approach, process and timetable, which should be used for their development; described how the written strategy statements should appear, what should they contain and what potential pitfalls should be avoided; they also portrayed how these strategies should be implemented in practice (doelg 2000). despite a rather specific directions for the development of strategies, city/county development boards were still left with a fairly large degree of freedom as to the practical application of these guidelines. as a result, the final strategy documents and the approaches and methods used for their development vary greatly from county to county. the dcdb employed an approach which was described by its director as ‘strategic visioning’. the focus of that approach was placed on change and improvements of current ways in which things were done and services were delivered, rather than, as in the case of other counties, on specific capital projects. the ‘strategic visioning’ approach was underpinned by a philosophical model embracing relationships between the past, present and future – the future has to be built upon the understanding of the past and rooted in the present reality. such an approach aimed to encourage people involved in the development of the strategy to seek how things could be done differently, in a more effective and efficient manner, and to identify gaps that needed to be filled. this model placed equal emphases on the process and the final product. the guidelines document outlined the recommended approach which should be used for the development of city and county economic, social and cultural strategies. the recommended conceptual framework of the process involved eight main steps: 1. setting and agreeing the aims of process, its philosophy and values, detailed format and methods for research, consultation and consensus. 2. identification and assessment of the relevant service provision, both public and other, in the city/county area. 3. analysis of the present economic, social and cultural circumstances and trends in the city/ county. 4. examination of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (swot analysis) facing a city or county. 5. development of the ‘shared vision’ for the city or county and establishment of goals and objectives arising from the vision. 6. identification of options and the establishment of operational strategies. 7. establishment of quantified targets and identification of key result areas, which would reflect the goals and objectives determined in earlier phases. 8. development of monitoring, feedback and evaluation arrangements, which would enable to follow the progress being made towards achievement of the vision (doelg 2000). the overall process, in which the strategy for dublin city was developed, comprised three main phases. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 81application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin 1. assessment of the current situation. this involved desktop research aiming to collect information on relevant policy and strategy documents that would effect the future development of dublin, and also to learn from the past experiences – positive and negative. 2. development of the vision. this phase, a key to the whole process, consisted of two main steps: (a) creating a platform for participation that would raise awareness among the stakeholders about the work carried out by dcdb, facilitate development of the strategy and also encourage the sharing of ideas, solutions and joint decision-making in the future; (b) carrying out a ‘sustainability proofing’ exercise that would help to ensure that the strategy is in accordance with the basic principles of sustainability. 3. implementation of the strategy. this stage of the process involved the preparation of implementation plans by the dcdb with the assistance of the office of the director of community and enterprise. the implementation plans, covering periods of two years up to the year 2012, include: setting objectives, developing delivery plan, identifying resource commitments, linking commitments to ndp, identifying time-related qualitative and quantitative targets, committing to reporting progress and proofing the delivery plan against the sustainability-proofing criteria of the strategy (dcdb 2002). participation the legislation that established city and county development boards was created in order to address the fragmentation of agencies and organisations responsible for local development and the lack of effective collaboration between community groups and other stakeholders at the local level. as stated earlier, “guidelines on the cdb strategies” emphasised that the visions developed by cdbs should represent a common agreed view of the future, and, therefore, the active participation of a wide range of stakeholders, community groups and citizens was recognised as key to the whole process. it was also recognised that “participation in the early stages of the strategy development is desirable, as it is often the outcome of decisions made at this stage that have the greatest effect on peoples needs and chances to benefit” (dcdb 2002: 18). one of the major problems faced by the dublin city development board in relation to participation was the size of the city. the relevant area of dublin city is inhabited by approximately 500,000 people and, according to dcdb, is used by about 1.7 million people on a daily basis. there is also a complex array of agencies operating in the area (for example, three health boards and four fás regions). dcdb was faced with a very difficult task of creating participation mechanisms, which would enable as many stakeholders, community groups and individual citizens as possible to take part in the process. seven main mechanisms for participation were developed: 1. city community forum. the forum consists of 750 community and voluntary organisations. it is directly represented on the dcdb. 2. five strategy development working groups. 90 individuals and organisations were involved in the groups including dcdb members, community forum members, main stakeholders and experts. 3. consultation brochure. the brochure was sent to over 70,000 households, businesses, schools, libraries, organisations and agencies around the city. people were asked to complete a survey included in the brochure and when they finished reading it to pass it on to their neighbours and friends. dcdb received around 1000 replies to the survey. 4. ‘let’s talk circles’. there were 10 sessions organised under the ‘let’s talk circle’ name. they were attended by over 300 participants representing staff of different agencies and specific interest groups, such as the city council, fás, health boards, third level institutions (students), ethnic minority groups, and economic focus groups. 5. civic forums. five civic forums were held within five different areas of the operational area of dublin city council. they were attended by 198 people including councillors, public servants, community organisations, local businesses and residents. 6. consultation seminars. there were three consultation seminars organised. they brought together 250 participants representing voluntary groups, businesses, statutory organisations, councillors and citizens. 7. meetings of stakeholders. twenty three meetings of stakeholders involved the participation of 140 people (mainly holding senior positions within their organisations) from nearly 82 fennia 184: 1 (2006)elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe 60 agencies and organisations, such as the city council, fás, department of justice, garda síochána, department of education, department of tourism, sport and recreation, department of enterprise trade and employment, department of health and city councillors. outcomes and outputs the main output of the process was the cultural, economic and social strategy (vision) for dublin city published in the document dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012. the strategy is based upon a unique structure, which incorporates fifteen themes (fig. 1). the whole strategy is built around its central theme – ‘a city of neighbourhoods’. the ultimate objective of the strategy is to reconstruct or deconstruct the city into 14 to 15 neighbourhoods. the next four themes are the so called ‘enabling themes’: ‘a diverse and inclusive city’, ‘connected and informed city’, ‘an integrated city’ and ‘a democratic and participative city’. they underpin the whole strategy as they represent cross-cutting principles. the remaining ten themes are the outcome themes, which influence how and where people live in the city. the concept underlying the vision was based on the belief that a sustainable city of the future would need to be built upon four pillars of development: economic, human, cultural and societal. the vision was constructed in a way that would ensure a balance between these four pillars. the strategy attempts to look at the wider area, not only at the operational area of dublin city council. it takes into consideration the fact that dublin is a capital city, and, therefore, tries to consider how the changes in the city could influence other parts of the country and national policy as a whole. the strategy identified a number of issues for the national agenda, over which regional and local agencies do not have control, for example income differentials. one of the main outputs of the project was the creation of the website www.dublin.ie – an information portal about the community, cultural, political, and business life in dublin. also a number of projects at local scale are now being realised for each theme of the vision (dcdb 2004). development of community indicators in ballymun origins of the project the project development of community indicators in ballymun was carried out by the ballymun neighbourhoods integration connected and informed diverse and inclusive democratic and participative a safe city a learning city a cultural and enjoyable city a family friendly city a community friendly city a healthy and active a city of homes an enterprising city a greener city a moving and accessible city fig. 1. the structure of the vision “dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012” (dcdb 2002: 5–6). fennia 184: 1 (2006) 83application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin regeneration limited (brl) in association with the global action plan (gap ballymun) as a part of the large-scale regeneration of ballymun in dublin. the exercise is also a part of the european project “it-takes-two”. the project aimed to develop a set of community indicators that could be used to monitor the progress of ballymun towards sustainability. the visioning method was used to identify the wishes and fears of the community regarding the future of ballymun, to create a shared vision of the future and to engage local citizens in the process of change. ballymun, which is irish for town of shrubs, was built between 1966 and 1974 as a response to the housing crisis in dublin. the development consisted of a mix of over 2800 flats in 4-, 8and 15storey blocks and 2400 houses concentrated in an area of 1.5 square miles (community action programme ballymun 2000). three decades later, the area was designated for a regeneration programme, the biggest in ireland. the decision of the irish government in march 1997 to launch the regeneration scheme was a response to the accumulation of a broad range of severe social, economic, infrastructural and environmental problems. the regeneration scheme has been carried out by a special agency, ballymun regeneration limited (brl), which was set up by dublin city council. the project aims at the overall regeneration of the area with the extensive participation of local residents. their involvement and support was recognised as crucial for the success of the programme. the master plan for ballymun’s regeneration was developed in close consultation and partnership with ballymun residents (ballymun regeneration 1998). it addresses social, economic, infrastructural and environmental problems collectively. a variety of social, economic and environmental projects conducted within the regeneration programme is hoped to create linkages in the area, and build a healthy, viable community in the new town of ballymun. process and methodology the visioning method was chosen to be used for the development of community indicators from a whole range of methods and techniques recommended by the “it-takes-two” project. this choice arose from the need to assess the community’s values and preferences, to encourage and involve residents of ballymun in building a sustainable society, and to create a feeling of responsibility for change towards a better future, based on residents wishes and values. visioning was a tool applied in order to identify the most severe areas of concern and the value systems characteristic for ballymun’s community, and further, to develop a set of community indicators that would reflect residents’ concerns. the indicators developed through the process were to be used to monitor the progress of the town towards sustainability. the process of development of the community indicators for ballymun started in the second half of the year 2001. it involved the following phases: 1. the first workshop under the name visioning day; 2. the second workshop to develop community indicators; and 3. development of an action plan. the first workshop, the visioning day, was aimed at the development of a shared, common vision of the future of ballymun that would be underpinned by the community values, wishes and needs. such a vision incorporated goals and targets for the future which needed to be accomplished in order to create the desired future state. during the first part of the workshop the participants were asked to write their ideas about how ballymun might be like in twenty years time. these thoughts were subsequently collected and clustered, and led to the emergence of five themes. at the next stage, the participants were divided into five groups, which developed these five themes into five future scenarios. then each group brainstormed around the goals that would help to avoid an unwanted future and to build the desired one. the last part of the workshop involved the identification of key benchmarks within scenarios that would indicate whether ballymun was heading towards the desired future. these benchmarks became a foundation for the establishment of the initial community indicators (scully 2002). the purpose of the second workshop was to develop twelve indicators representing the most important issues for the ballymun’s residents, and which would be measured to monitor the change over time in these areas. at the beginning of the workshop, the continuity of the project was emphasised through presentation of the scenarios developed during the visioning day. the scenarios were demonstrated in a form of a local newspaper set in 2017. the articles in the local paper illustrated the trends that emerged in the scenarios and showed what ballymun might be like in the year 2017. next, the concept of an indicator was ex84 fennia 184: 1 (2006)elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe plained in detail. then, the main group was divided into three subgroups discussing indicators under three main headings: social, economic and environmental. the task of each group was to choose three indicators for each of the four subheadings from the indicators shown in grids. the grids with indicators, selected from three different sources (the ballymun masterplan, scenarios developed during the first workshop and the experts’ indicators), were prepared in advance. the participants working in groups were also allowed to propose their own indicators, if they thought of better ones than the ones presented in the grids. at the end of this stage of the process, each group presented three indicators they had chosen for each subheading and the justification for their selection. the last phase of the workshop involved choosing one indicator from the three selected for each subheading. the next stage in the process was intended to be the development of an action plan, which would specify the actions that needed to be undertaken in order to ensure the sustainable development of ballymun. the first step at this stage would be the identification of stakeholders responsible for change in the areas covered by the chosen indicators. then a number of workshops would be carried out in order to target all bodies responsible for change, to choose the ways of monitoring and communicating the progress, and to set up the goals, which should be achieved in the future. these workshops would bring together the local community and stakeholders. initially, they were planned for the period of spring and summer 2003. however, due to organisational and management changes, work on the project was stopped for a period of approximately a year and a half. the first action, which was taken after the project resumed last year, was checking whether the indicators met the relevant criteria and identifying the ways in which these indicators could be measured. this was the last action undertaken within this project up to date. participation the project was prepared and managed by the members of gap ballymun and brl, who also took part in the two workshops organised as a part of the project. the participants of the workshops came from four different groups: ballymun residents, who completed action team training, dublin city council, brl and local community groups. the first workshop gathered 30 participants from: action team (18), gap (5), dublin city council (2), brl (1), housing task force (1), agenda 21 group (cafta) (1), balcurris forum (1) and the national college of ireland (1). it is necessary to stress that some people, who were classified as the members of action teams were also representing brl or local community groups. in the second workshop, 29 people participated. the numbers of participants from each of the four groups were not recorded. outcomes and outputs to date, the main outputs from this project are: the set of five scenarios portraying the future of ballymun in twenty years time; and a list of indicators chosen by the community, to be measured by brl, in order to monitor ballymun’s progress towards sustainability. the scenario stories describe ballymun as: characterless suburb, learning centre, successful small-business centre, great community spirit, and common goals, safe place. four out of the five scenarios showed a positive vision of ballymun’s future. only one scenario, the characterless suburb, had a negative character. this vision emerged as a result of the fear that the strong community spirit existing in ballymun at present might be lost during the regeneration process. the following sustainability indicators were chosen to be measured: 1. economic: number of childcare places and jobs with a liveable wage; development of improved management and maintenance arrangements and the role of residents and local organisations; number of jobs (with liveable wages) available in the area; and number of sites available for economic/social use and their availability and use. 2. social: increase in school attendance; percentage of pupils completing the post primary cycle; number of voters in local and national elections; reduction in anti-social behaviour measured by number of broken trees, broken street lamps, fires started, dumped furniture/ appliances, incidents of graffiti, and animals abandoned. 3. environmental: number of people buying ecoproducts; number of facilities available for recycling, including composting, in ballymun; number of homes with better insulation features and improved energy conservation awareness; and ease of access to key services, fennia 184: 1 (2006) 85application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin such as number of public transport routes that serve ballymun and link ballymun to the rest of the city. the range of indicators selected by participants enabled the identification of the most important issues for ballymun’s community, and the problems that should be addressed initially. disinterested observation of the discussions around the choice of indicators allowed the capturing of the emotional weight put on the various concerns. for instance, one of the issues very passionately debated was the provision of a sufficient number of miscellaneous childcare places, which are crucial for enabling mothers to re-enter employment and education. this issue was debated in two groups: economic and social, even though the indictor was recognised as belonging to the economic category. lessons learned and general recommendations for practice the projects discussed in this paper differ significantly; therefore, a direct comparison between their respective elements and characteristics features would not be really meaningful. instead, this section aims to derive a number of lessons that could be learned from each project. the ‘lessons’ were derived on the basis of the analysis of the exercises, the observations conducted by the authors (actively involved in two out of three exercises) and conversations with the organisers of these projects. recommendations for practice, presented in the next section are developed through combining lessons learned from the exercises presented in this paper with the authors overall experience in this field. lessons learned the lessons learned are discussed under five categories: initiative and leadership, scope, methodology and the process design, project management, and participation. initiative and leadership and its impact on the project the initiatives from which the projects originated varied significantly. the dublin 2020 vision was initiated by the dublin chamber of commerce, a business organisation with limited resources, but more importantly, with no executive powers to implement the vision. the lack of participation of other actors with implementation powers has significantly reduced the chances of the vision being realised. the dublin – a city of possibilities 2002– 2012 project was a consequence of a governmental policy. therefore, it received a full political support, as well as adequate time and resources were committed for the development and implementation of the strategy. in the case of development of community indicators in ballymun the exercise was initiated and conducted by the regeneration company, which had both resources and executive powers to influence the future change. scope an important issue for the impact of futures work in urban planning context is agreeing the geographical and sectoral scope of a study. the dublin 2020 vision project explored the future of an entire city-region in geographical sense. also all aspects of the urban development were examined: society/culture, demography, economy, environment, technology and governance. similarly, the dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012 exercise looked at all aspects of the city, with an emphasis on social, cultural and economic issues. however, its geographical scope was limited to one part of dublin – the dublin city council area. this was dictated by the legislation. dublin metropolitan area is divided between four local authorities. according to the legislation, each of these local authorities established its own city/county development board, which then was responsible for the development of a strategy for the area belonging to that local authority. this resulted in four different strategies that were developed and are being implemented in dublin metropolitan region. the fact that the study does not look at the whole city, but its one part is being seen as its major shortcoming. methodology and the process design in all three studies the methodological framework was clearly designed and suited appropriately to the tasks that needed to be achieved. however, it could be seen as limitation that in the dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012 study there was no phase dedicated to the exploration of alternative futures. such exploration is an important part of futures approach as it helps to broaden up the 86 fennia 184: 1 (2006)elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe thinking about the future before developing a vision of desired future. similar comment can be made about the dublin 2020 vision project, where the process did not put enough emphasis on the exploration of alternative futures. no scenarios of alternative futures, for example, were created, but most attention was directed at the development of the preferred vision and identification of actions needed to achieve it. this begs a basic question of whether the examination of what is possible, probable and finally desirable was sufficient. another important part of the project design is incorporating mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating the progress. in the case of dublin 2020 vision there were no mechanisms included in the process that would encourage and provide for the evaluation of the vision and establishment of indicators that could be used for measuring progress. the dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012 incorporated well designed mechanisms for evaluating and future-proofing the strategy. project management both projects, dublin 2020 vision and dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012, had an established coordinating team that oversaw its completion. the major problem in regard to project management was observed in the development of community indicators in ballymun study. there was a lack of continuation of the process, which was a direct consequence of an absence of a somewhat coordinating team. such lack of project continuation can undermine the trust of the local community and undermine their confidence in similar processes in the future. participation broad participation of stakeholders and community is one of the key requirements for future-oriented processes in urban planning. in the dublin 2020 vision exercise it was recognised that a vision produced for any city has to be a shared vision developed through a process, in which the various sectors of the society and multiplicity of actors within the city are represented. but, the vision was developed by the representatives of only one sector – business. although the participants were trying to incorporate different points of view, it is likely that their views could be biased as they represented only one sector. also the process could easily be perceived by third parties as “business-oriented”. the very limited participation was the main weakness of the project. in the case of dublin – a city of possibilities 2002–2012 all actors and sectors within the city were represented in the process. this created a feeling of ownership and enabled the development of a shared vision. also, an active and extensive participation of citizens in the development of community indicators in ballymun exercise was ensured. it resulted in developing of a better understanding of community values, wishes, needs and fears, and led to the development of the vision based upon them. an active engagement of all actors responsible for making the change at local level, such as the ballymun regeneration ltd. and dublin city council, provides some guarantee that the proposed actions will eventually be implemented. general recommendations for practice building upon the lessons learned from the projects discussed above and the overall experiences of the authors in applying futures methods in urban planning processes elsewhere the following set of recommendations has been developed: 1. establishment of a project team. any project, regardless of scale and formal status, should have an appropriate team coordinating the process. the size of such a team would, of course, depend on the scale and complexity of the exercise. naturally, it is important that this team would be adequately resourced. its functions should include organisational matters, promotion of the exercise, secretariat duties, channelling communications between actors involved and the collection of all documents, reports and files produced during the project. 2. provision of sufficient resources. the required resources usually involve funding, human capital, time and space. quite obviously, the lack of adequate means can put pressure on people coordinating the exercise, and, the outcomes can seriously be compromised or the continuity of the project disrupted. 3. leadership. the leadership of a prominent individual or organisation has an important role to play in initiating and the conducting of future-oriented exercises. having a popular local champion on board helps to generate greater interest in the project and to gain the trust of those who have reservations towards new approaches. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 87application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin 4. identification of individuals and agencies involved. one of the key issues for projects aiming to develop visions and strategies for the future development of cities is securing the inclusion of all relevant groups and significant sectors within the city in the process. this is required to ensure that a vision or strategy is as unbiased as possible, to create a feeling of ownership of such a vision/strategy, and also generate commitment towards its implementation. it is recommended that some formal method of selection such as ‘concertation’ is used in the preparatory phase of the project to identify and recruit the appropriate participants. 5. design of the process. time devoted at the outset of any project to ensure that the process is transparent, well structured and has an adequate time-frame is never wasted. the plan of each phase of the process should include the following elements: a clear explanation of aims and expected outcomes; a detailed description of the methods and techniques to be used and the tasks to be performed; and a timetable, and follow-up arrangements. apart from identifying possible difficulties that can arise during the exercise, it creates space for participants to meet and to get to know each other, as well as making the whole process more familiar and understandable to them. 6. pilot studies. it is worthwhile rehearsing different aspects of the process with a smaller group of participants in advance. this helps to prepare for unexpected turns of event and familiarise participants with the conceptual framework and methodology. the experience gained from the project conducted by the futures academy for the city of lincoln2 reinforced the importance of such pilot studies. 7. promotion of the project. an important issue for all urban future-oriented projects is the dissemination of information about the initiative to as broad an audience as possible in order to encourage people to take part. as stated earlier, public participation is one of the key elements in projects aiming to develop visions of a desired future. the promotion should spread awareness about the process, define its aims and expected outcomes, and emphasise the importance of citizens’ involvement. this process can be promoted through a wide range of channels, including the media (newspapers, television, radio), brochures delivered to door (mailing lists, electoral register) and distributed in public places like libraries and community centres, as well as through the internet, outdoor advertisement, and public events. 8. continuation issues. the projects discussed in this paper varied in terms of continuity. one of them was a once-off activity, and the other two had a continuous character. the authors believe that in order to be most effective such projects should be ongoing. once a vision or strategy is developed, and its implementation has started, it is invaluable to monitor progress towards the desired future. ongoing futureoriented activity allows the detection of new threats and opportunities and creates a space for revisions of the strategy when necessary. continuation can be also considered in relation to a single exercise. organisers are often faced with problems arising from a loss of project momentum and motivation, staff changes, withdrawal of partners, resources and so on. the issues related to continuation should be considered at the exercise planning stage and, if possible, addressed in the project design. 9. the choice of individual methods and techniques. in order to be most effective, particular methods and techniques should be chosen according to the aim that is to be achieved and the level of expertise of the people who would be using them. among the techniques that are often used in future-oriented exercises are: scenario method, visioning workshops, strategic conversations, environmental scanning, futures surveys, brainstorming, and mind-mapping. 10. engagement of national government in regional or local projects. it has been recognised that the engagement of national government representatives in the future-oriented exercises would invariably be very valuable. often, the problems identified in the process require solutions that can be only introduced at the national level. it is hoped that involvement of national government representatives in the process would develop a better understanding of the issues on the ground. it would certainly also result in the communication of these problems to the appropriate institutions at a central level so that they could subsequently be addressed. 88 fennia 184: 1 (2006)elzbieta krawczyk and john ratcliffe 11. communication issue – a common language. an important aspect of future-oriented exercises related to participation is the communication between different groups involved in the process. it is necessary to ensure that participants have a good understanding of the terminology and theories used in the process as well as a familiarity with each others ‘jargon’ or ‘vernacular’. a fairly common phenomenon is that during the exercise, collective intelligence and language develops, which then is recognised and widely used by actors within the city. 12. importance of the process itself. the examination of various future-oriented exercises has shown that the process in which visions and strategies for future development are created is as important as its outcomes. it helps to: develop a greater understanding of how the future can unfold; create stronger awareness about the existing and possible threats and opportunities; reveal stakeholders and communities aspirations and wishes for the future; clarify the main aims and principles of urban development; establish new partnerships and networks at local, regional and national level; and develop ownership and commitment to the solutions so they can more readily be implemented. 13. ‘hard facts’ and ‘soft emotions’. the information collected during future-oriented exercises should have an appropriate balance between factual information, often of a quantitative character, and information leading to the understanding of the ‘emotional’ side of urban life, community values, wishes, hopes and fears. this balance should especially be ensured at the phase when the understanding of the past and present is being developed. frequently, the present situation is described mainly by factual information, while the more subjective ‘emotional’ side is far less explored. 14. innovativeness, creativity and imagination. innovativeness, creativity and imagination should be encouraged and fostered throughout to ensure that images of possible, probable and desirable futures are explored and ‘fleshed-out’ as far as it is possible. fresh creative thinking allows the identification of innovative and effective solutions to many difficult problems. any futures methodology should encourage the questioning of well-established ways of thinking and acting, and try to look at a given issue from many different perspectives. a more detailed general evaluation of lessons learned from scenario planning exercises is provided elsewhere (ratcliffe 2003). conclusions the increased interest of urban planners and policy-makers in various future-oriented approaches that has been observed in recent years has created the need for a systematic examination of the issues related to the application of futures methods in urban and regional planning processes. despite the fact that the use of futures methods in urban planning processes is driven by similar motivations in cities around the world, many of these exercises are unique as they are set in different contexts, conducted by differing actors and use diverse methodologies. the one thing, however, that many of these projects have in common is in the problems arising from the innovativeness and fragility of the approaches used. in order to address these problems, the development of a ‘methodological knowledge base’ for the application of futures methods in urban planning is required. such a ‘knowledge base’ should provide information for practitioners about the available methodological approaches, such as strategic planning, territorial prospective, and regional foresight; present various futures methods and techniques with practical examples of how they can be applied; demonstrate projects in which futures methods were employed; discuss mechanisms for encouraging the collaboration of stakeholders and public participation; and address various aspects of projects organisation and implementation. through the examination of three future-oriented projects carried out in dublin, this paper has attempted to contribute to the general knowledge about these types of ventures, and to develop a better understanding of various issues involved in conducting future-oriented projects. we recognise that a much deeper and wider exploration of the scope for the application of futures methods in urban and regional planning is needed to encourage and facilitate a greater number of future-oriented projects, but even more importantly, to promote a shift in the urban planners and decision-makers mindset towards a more future-oriented perspective. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 89application of futures methods in urban planning processes in dublin notes 1 imagine lincoln 2020 (2005), dublin 2020 vision for the dublin chamber of commerce (2004), development of future scenarios for dublin-belfast economic corridor (2003), the bratislava raca prospective – towards a preferred future (2004). 2 “imagine lincoln 2020: a vision for the future of our city” – the development of future vision for city of lincoln carried out by the futures academy in cooperation with the university of lincoln in 2004 and 2005. references albrechts l, p healey & kr kunzmann (2003). strategic spatial planning and regional governance in europe. apa journal 69: 2, 113–129. ballymun regeneration (1998). masterplan for the new ballymun. 72 p. brl, dublin. brotchie j, m batty, e blakely, p hall & p netwon (1995). cities in competition. 532 p. longman, melbourne. cheshire p & i gordon (eds.) (1995). territorial competition in an integrating europe: local impact and public policy. 317 p. avebury, aldershot. cities plus (2004). a sustainable urban system: the long-term plan for greater vancouver. <http:// www.sheltair.com/library_usp.html>. 26.2.2004. community action programme ballymun (2000). on the balcony of a new millennium; regenerating ballymun: building on 30 years of community experience, expertise and energy. 74 p. cap, dublin. dcdb (2002). dublin – a city of possibilities 2002– 2012. 149 p. dublin, dcdb. dcdb (2004). action for dublin: annual report 2004. 63 p. dublin, dcdb. doelg (2000). county/city development board: a new vision for our counties and cities. 83 p. stationery office, dublin. ec (1999). esdp. european spatial development perspective: towards balanced and sustainable development of the territory of the european union. 224 p. office for official publications of the european communities, luxembourg. ec (2002). practical guide to regional foresight in ireland. 190 p. office for official publications of the european communities, luxembourg. edurc (1999). bilbao. european cities in the making. newsletter of the working group “development strategies in major european cities” 1, 4. edurc (2000). lyon. european cities in the making. newsletter of the working group “development strategies in major european cities” 15, 4. gaffikin f & m morrissey (eds.) (1999). city visions: imagining place, enfranchising people. 250 p. pluto press, london. hall p & u pfeiffer (2000). urban future 21: a global agenda for twenty-first century cities. 363 p. spon, london. krawczyk e & j ratcliffe (2004). imagineering cities – creating liveable urban futures in the 21st century. in didsbury hf jnr (ed). thinking creatively in turbulent times, 107–116. wfs, bethesda, maryland. kresl pk (1995). the determinants of urban competition: a survey. in kresl p & g gappert (eds.). north american cities and the global economy, 45–68. sage, thousand oaks ca. myers d & a kitsuse (2000). constructing the future in planning: a survey of theories and tools. journal of planning education and research 19: 3, 221– 231. oecd (1994). cities for the 21st century. 178 p. organisation for economic co-operation and development, paris. parrad f (2004). future thinking in european cities: evolution of strategic urban planning across europe. synthesis of a study for the french ministry of urban development. 13 p. unpublished. pierce d (2004). personal communication. 21.7.2004. puglisi m & s marvin (2002). developing urban and regional foresight: exploring capacities and identifying needs in the north west. futures 34: 8, 761–777. ratcliffe j (2003). scenario planning: an evaluation of practice. futures research quarterly 19: 4, 5–25. scully f (2002). the development of sustainability indicators for ballymun. paper presented at european summer course, 9–14 june, delft, netherlands. transland (1999). metropolitan bilbao, spain: strategic plan for the revitalisation of metropolitan bilbao. <http://www.inro.tno.nl/transland/cases_ nonprio/bilbao.pdf>. 23.9.2003. van den berg l, e braun & j van der meer (2004). national urban policies in the european union. 129 p. ministry of the interior and kingdom relations/euricur. phd research in social sciences amid a pandemic: introduction to a situated and reflexive perspective urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99200 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99200 reflections phd research in social sciences amid a pandemic: introduction to a situated and reflexive perspective simone tulumello and kátia favilla tulumello, s. & favilla, k. (2020) phd research in social sciences amid a pandemic: introduction to a situated and reflexive perspective. fennia 198(1–2) 227–229. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99200 this short essay introduces a forum made up of six reflection pieces on what it means to carry on a phd research in the social sciences amid a pandemic. sparked by discussions held during the 2020 edition of the "open day" of the institute of social sciences of the university of lisbon, this forum collects solo-authored and collective texts that focus on a number of dimensions along two main threads: the problems, uncertainties and potentialities of researching in these times; and similar reflections with specific focus on gendered dimensions. together, though situated (all these researchers work in or about portugal and brazil), we hope these experiences will speak to peers around the world that are dealing with the pains and challenges of these times. keywords: social research, covid-19, coronavirus, academic reflexivity, portugal, brazil simone tulumello (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6660-3432) & kátia favilla (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2319-6339), instituto de ciências sociais da universidade de lisboa, av. prof. a de bettencourt 9, 1600-189, lisbon, portugal. e-mail: simone.tulumello@ics.ulisboa.pt, katiacfavilla@gmail.com a situated perspective maybe the greatest difficulty, and at the same time advantage, of working in a multi-disciplinary center like the institute of social sciences of the university of lisbon (instituto de ciências sociais da universidade de lisboa; ics-ulisboa) is that of being perennially exposed to epistemological and methodological approaches that differ from your own, and this is particularly true while one is carrying out their phd research. this is one of the reasons why, during the last few years, ics-ulisboa has been organizing a yearly "open day", where the phd candidates from its ten doctoral courses1 can discuss their projects in a beautiful “organized chaos” of conceptual and research perspectives. the 2020 edition, that took place on june 17, had to deal – much like all researchers around the world – with yet another dimension of organized chaos, the direct and indirect consequences of the covid-19 pandemic. focusing on the impact that the pandemic and the measures put in place in response to it had on phd research seemed natural to the organizers – after all, the meeting itself had to be organized completely online. © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 228 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) this reflection section collects six essays that stem from that day of discussion and deal with many facets of what it means to carry on a phd in social sciences during a pandemic. with the goal of providing as many perspectives as possible and, at the same time, of creating a collaborative learning environment, in most cases we challenged the authors to write collective texts, dialoguing on common threads of their presentations. the 6 essays we present here were authored by 15 phd candidates, enrolled in 4 different courses: anthropology (9), sociology (4), social psychology (1) and comparative politics (1). though most of the authors are based at ics-ulisboa, some of them were or are currently visiting from brazilian institutions. this collection therefore offers a broad set of perspectives, which is however situated in and around a specific research institution and geographic space: most of the authors do fieldwork either in portugal or brazil. indeed, this situatedness plays a role in the collection of reflections: some essays engage comparatively with two contexts where the responses and impacts of the pandemic have been very different; others reflect on the experience of travelling students and researchers. in this sense, we also hope that this section will contribute to enriching the reflection on social research amid the pandemic through the experiences of places that are not so often at the core of mainstream social and geographic theorization.2 the essays and their main threads let us move to summarizing the main themes and ideas emerging from the seven essays. the first four engage head on with the problems, uncertainties and potentialities of researching in these times. kátia favilla and tatiana pita deal with the impact of the pandemic in two phd research projects in their start up stage, particularly focusing on the question of whether to wait for the field to “open up” again or rather transform the field itself through digital instruments. antonio de barros, ana guerreiro, mafalda mascarenhas and rita reis focus on the changes in the field due to the pandemic, in the arena of mobilities and in that of education. next, roseli barbosa takes advantage of her multiple affiliations in brazil and portugal to reflect on how the impacts of the pandemic are differentiated among geographies, gender and individual conditions – mobile or not-mobile researchers, phd candidates with or without funding. andreia nascimento and hugo lopes reflect on the positive ways the pandemic situation has affected their own research experience: how the lockdown has helped them to focus better on their research and how digital tools made available by academic institutions made life easier for phd candidates who do not reside in the city of their host institutions. the following two essays, while still engaging with the same general issues, provide focused insights on gendered dimensions therein – a topic that appears, if in passing, in other essays. catarina barata, luísa coutinho, federica manfredi and madelon schamarella reflect on care, which they frame as an object of research and, together, a crucial dimension of their own life/research, dissecting how the pandemic has both deepened pre-existing inequalities and opened up to a shared understanding of the importance of care – also reflecting on the possibilities for “caring masculinities”. in the following and final essay, marcos silva and raphaella câmara build on their research on topics – sex work and domestic violence – where gendered inequalities and violence, and also mutual care among their participants, are central issues. this allows them to reflect on how the pandemic has heightened the importance for researchers to develop sensitivity towards their participants; but at the same time the importance of researching together with these individuals and groups. concluding remarks this collection of essays gives us a wide set of perspectives on how the covid-19 pandemic has affected social sciences and phd research in particular. though situated, these experiences speak, we believe, to many people around the world, dealing with the pains and challenges of these times. in a way, the seven essays give us more evidence of something we already suspected: much like any major disruptive event amid global capitalism, the pandemic and the responses to it have basically deepened pre-existing problems and inequalities (see also the editorial of this issue). and yet, claiming “nothing new under the sun” would be a mistake, for two reasons: first, because the peculiar scale and speed of this disruptive event has brought about impacts – including those in terms of individual and 229fennia 198(1–2) (2020) simone tulumello & kátia favilla collective suffering – that are somehow quantitatively unprecedented, and whose scars will last for some time to come; second, because these same scale and speed have also forced humankind to stare in the face of what may well be a future that is just about to come as the temperatures rise and environments start to collapse, as barata, coutinho, manfredi and schamarella remind us. this has quite concrete implications for our research work. focusing on the positive aspects, as nascimento and lopes suggest, is important, but with a caveat. many of the issues that the pandemic context has helped to address were not “natural” problems (e.g. logistical problems for non-resident phd candidates), but those of undertaking research in contexts where research is underfunded – like in portugal, brazil and, increasingly so, the world around us. this is to say, if science – and social sciences – are crucial pieces to charting a path into the future to come, we are at the same time responsible for fighting for better conditions for researchers and phd candidates, wherever they are. in this sense, we believe social researchers have the responsibility to become activists against the deep injustices that this pandemic has made visible. and we believe that this collection of essays points toward dimensions of hope, be it in the opening toward politics of care or in the possibility of reframing digital technology toward a more inclusive space. in the words of indigenous leader, environmental activist and intellectual ailton krenak, these may be “ideas that help postponing the end of the world”3: they point toward the possibility of building up an “us” – a caring humankind – that is always aware of the deep social fractures that exist and are to be relentlessly mended. notes 1 see www.ics.ulisboa.pt/en/post-graduation/phd/openning. 2 some words on how we managed the process. simone was firstly invited by fennia’s editors – who had heard of the open day on a geography forum – to produce this section. he made the first steps of taking notes during the open day and proposing the writing collaborations. since we did not want an assistant research professor to manage alone a collection of texts produced by phd candidates, the participants to the open day were encouraged to volunteer as co-editors: this is how kátia joined in. since then, we managed the process together of reviewing the texts, giving feedbacks to the authors (except, of course, in the case of the text co-authored by kátia), collecting the final versions, dealing with proof-reading (done by katy pugh) and writing this introduction. finally, the editorial team of fennia provided a final review and copyedit. 3 “ideias para adiar o fim do mundo”, as in the title of his 2019 book (são paulo: companhias de letras). acknowledgements we are grateful to the members of the pedagogic council of ics-ulisboa, who organized the open day: joana rebelo morais, joão baía, rodrigo domenech de souza, edalina rodrigues sanches, vítor sérgio ferreira and especially joão vasconcelos, who supported us throughout the process; to the managing board of the institute, that provided funds for the proof-reading of the texts (fundação para a ciência e tecnologia: uidp/50013/2020; uidp/50013/2020); and to the editorial team of fennia for the kind invitation and editorial accompaniment. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa8825 doi: 10.11143/8825 history of natural resource use and environmental impacts in an interfluvial upland forest area in western amazonia anders siren siren, anders (2014). history of natural resource use and environmental impacts in an interfluvial upland forest area in western amazonia. fennia 192: 1, pp. 36–53. issn 1798-5617. much of the research done on environmental impacts by amazonian indigenous peoples in the past focus on certain areas where archaeological remains are particularly abundant, such as the amazon river estuary, the seasonally inundated floodplain of the lower amazon, and various sites in the forest-savannah mosaic of the southern amazon. the environmental history of interfluvial upland areas has received less attention. this study reconstructed the history of human use of natural resources in an upland area of 1400 km2 surrounding the indigenous kichwa community of sarayaku in the ecuadorian amazon, based on oral history elicited from local elders as well as historical source documents and some modern scientific studies. although data is scarce, one can conclude that the impacts of humans on the environment have varied in time and space in quite intricate ways. hunting has affected, and continues affecting, basically the whole study area, but it is now more concentrated in space than what it has probably ever been before. also forest clearing has become more concentrated in space but, in addition, it has gone from affecting only hilltops forests to affecting alluvial plains as well as hilltops and, lately, also the slopes of the hills. keywords: amazonia; ecuador; environmental history; forest clearing; hunting; indigenous peoples anders siren, division of geography, p.o. box 64, fi-00014 university of helsinki. e-mail: anders.siren@helsinki.fi introduction to what extent the amazonian forests are ‘wilderness’, and what legacies past generations of indigenous peoples have left on the forest ecosystem, are questions that have been intriguing researchers over the last few decades. amazonian forests were long thought a pristine wilderness, but since the late 1980’s a series of studies using a wide variety of approaches, including studies of historical source documents and archaeological artefacts, as well as biological methods based on dendrochronology and paleobotany, and even remote sensing, have challenged this view (e.g. balée 1989, 1992; denevan 1992; gómez-pompa & kaus 1992; bush & colinvaux 1994; cleary 2001; pärssinen et al. 2009; levis et al. 2012). such studies have shown that forests that previously were thought to be pristine, in reality have been subject to disturbance and modifications by humans during thousands of years, leaving behind traces such as forests with elevated concentrations of useful tree species, earth works, and anthropogenic black-earth deposits. such evidence led some authors to make quite radical conclusions, claiming that the amazonian forests were ‘anthropogenic’ (gómez-pompa & kaus 1992) and that the idea of the forests of amazonia being pristine was nothing but a ‘myth’ (denevan 1992, 2011). other authors, however, argue that although there is evidence of heavy pre-columbian human influence on the environment at certain sites, these sites are not representative of amazonia as a whole. such authors call for a more considered assessment of the spatial distribution of the ecological impacts of pre-columbian peoples, and argue that most of amazonia was sparsely populated and subject to relatively minor environmental impacts, as forest clearing and dispersal of useful plants affected only very limited areas, whereas the rest was subject only to the much milder impacts of hunting and gathering (bush & fennia 192: 1 (2014) 37history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... silman 2007; barlow et al. 2012; mcmichael et al. 2012a, 2012b). even though hunting and gathering obviously have much milder impacts than the outright removal of the entire forest cover, one should, however, be careful not to underestimate their potential ecological impacts. in many different ecosystems around the world, it has been shown that even harvest of just one or a few species may have cascade effects on entire ecosystems, and may have so even if harvest levels are relatively modest (redford & feinsinger 2001; milner-gulland 2008; salo et al. 2014: 225−241). in tropical forests, a multitude of species are hunted, and many of them perform important functions as herbivores, seed predators and seed dispersers. experimental studies and case studies in small areas indicate that hunting in tropical forests may harm recruitment of trees whose seeds are dispersed by large animals, and instead favor lianas and such trees whose seeds are dispersed by bats and wind (stoner et al 2007; wright et al. 2007; terborgh et al. 2008). although such studies often discuss the potential impacts current hunting may have on the future structure and composition of the forest, they much less often discuss the legacies that potentially may have already been left on the forest by millennia of hunting by humans in the past. an exception is schüle (1992a, 1992b) who suggested that the closed forests of amazonia as we know them today actually may be a result of pleistocene overhunting that exterminated giant sloths and other megafaunal elements whose feeding kept the landscape relatively open. in spite of the potentially very important implications of this idea, these works have been relatively rarely cited − not even to put forward counterarguments − and have had little impact on conservation science and practice in neotropical rainforests. the intensity of hunting is typically highly variable in space (peres & lake 2003; sirén et al. 2004), implying that areas near human settlements, roads, and navigable rivers, are currently subject to very intense impacts, whereas areas at a distance of above some 9−15 km from settlements and transport routes are almost unaffected by hunting. any ecological legacies of hunting, in the form of changed species composition or structure of the forest, must, in the same manner, largely depend on the spatial patterns of hunting in the past, but this has rarely been examined. although the environmental impact caused by indigenous amazonians in pre-columbian times is an issue that has been intensively debated, it should not be forgotten that it is also highly relevant to study such impacts − or the absence thereof − after the arrival of europeans to the continent. writings on environmental history of amazonia since the 16th century tend, however, to focus narrowly on the impacts caused by nonindigenous settlers and ‘western’ society, particularly on areas subject to large-scale deforestation (e.g. sponsel 1992), thus missing what has been going on in rest of amazonia, where the environment has been subject to more subtle impacts, or even been recovering from previous impacts. much of the research done on environmental impacts by amazonian and neotropical indigenous peoples in the past focus on pre-columbian times and on certain areas where archaeological remains are particularly abundant, such as the yucatán (foster & turner 2004), the amazon river estuary (e.g. roosevelt 1999), the seasonally inundated floodplain of the lower amazon (e.g. denevan 1996), and various sites in the forestsavannah mosaic of the southern amazon (e.g. balée 1989, 1992; mayle et al. 2007). the environmental history of interfluvial upland areas, near the andes mountains, has received less attention. this research focuses on such an interfluvial upland area in western amazonia, and primarily on post-columbian times up to the turn of the millennium. the objective is to reconstruct, to the extent possible given the availability of data, the character, intensity, and spatial distribution of human impacts on the environment during the last five centuries. this study responds, in two ways, to a call made for more attention to the spatial distribution of the ecological impacts of indigenous peoples (cf. bush & silman 2007; barlow et al. 2012; mcmichael et al. 2012a, 2012b). first, the study area lies in a type of natural environment that has seldom been subject to this kind of study, and, second, the study itself has an explicitly spatial approach, focusing on how environmental impacts have been distributed in space within the study area. by providing historical depth as well as a view of the spatial variability of resource use in the particular area studied, this paper contributes to the ongoing quest for better understanding past interactions between humans and nature in amazonia, including how human activities may have left lasting – although not always readily visible − traces on the forest composition. 38 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren study area: the lands of the sarayaku community sarayaku is a community located along the middle stretches of the bobonaza river, in the pastaza province, in ecuadorian amazonia (fig. 1). the nearest road is about 30 km upriver. the landscape consists of old fluvial deposits that have been uplifted by the eastward movement of the andes and heavily dissected by erosion (räsänen et al. 1990). thus, the topography is rugged and characterized by ridges separated by deep valleys, where there typically are small creeks. the bobonaza river is a sinous river running in the bottom of a confined valley. it has a winding course and stony rapids alternating with stretches of slow-flowing water. at most it reaches some forty meters width within the sarayaku lands. the surrounding alluvial plains occasionally get flooded for a day or two after heavy rains, but there is no seasonal flooding, so the forests on these plains are very distinct from the seasonally flooded varzea forests of lower amazonia. annual rainfall is about 3000−3500 mm, and the elevation in the area is 330−640 m a. s. l. natural environmental variability in the area has been discussed by sirén et al. (2013). a catholic mission was established at the site around 1830 (jerves 1930; espinosa 1943b) or possibly already in 1817 (reeve 1988: 67). after this, various ethnic groups gradually merged in order to form what today is the sarayaku kichwa. these groups were in particular the záparo, from north of the bobonaza river, the achuar from the south, as well as some kichwa-speaking indians from canelos, a mission 35 km upriver on the bobfig. 1. location of the study area. dashed gray line indicates approximate limits of the study area. the history and current use of the secondary homes, or purinas, is further discussed in the text. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 39history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... onaza which had been established already in the 17th century. the boom of collection of wild rubber in amazonia, caused by the increased international demand, apparently reached sarayaku in the late 1880’s. local elders tell that the rubber was shipped downriver to the city of iquitos in peru, and that this led to markedly increased economic and cultural interactions in downriver direction. it also led to further ethnic mixture, as mestizo rubber traders, andoas indians from downriver (currently peru), as well as napo kichwa refugees fleeing from slavery-like debt bondage, arrived to sarayaku, married and stayed. today sarayaku has about a thousand inhabitants living in five separate hamlets, but during school vacations most families disperse out to secondary homes called purinas at some distance away from the main settlement (fig. 1). shifting cultivation, hunting, and fishing form the basis for what is largely a subsistence economy. poultry is a minor complementary food source, and governmental salaries, cattle, fibers of the aphandria natalia palm, handicrafts, tourism, and migratory work provide some cash income. since 1992 sarayaku and surrounding communities possess communal land titles, but the limits between communities are a desk product that neither reflects current land use, nor the previously existing customary or mutually agreed limits (sawyer 1997; sirén 2004: ch. 5). the study area is defined as the area that the community currently claims as their property. this covers approximately 1400 km2, although the limits with adjacent communities are in many cases fuzzy or disputed. in practice, the area used exclusively by people from sarayaku decreased during the 20th century, as several new communities were established within or on the fringes of sarayaku lands, starting around 1960. at that time, the shaimi village was formed by dispersed groups of achuar who settled down to live in a permanent village, the teresa mama village was formed by a family from sarayaku who settled permanently in their secondary home and got many children, whereas the villages of yatapi and muritikucha were formed mainly by people from nearby communities. in 1983, about a tenth of the sarayaku households left to create a new community called jatun molino some 15 km downstream of sarayaku, since then forming an enclave within sarayaku lands. in the 1990’s a few families budded off from the llanchamakucha community to form a new community called masaramu. although there were no fixed limits between communities, in practice the foundation of all these new villages (fig. 1) implied a reduction in the area available for the sarayaku people. the direct impact of the sarayaku people on the forest cover is modest; about 0.2% of the study area is under current cultivation, and about 4% consists of fallows younger than 65 years (sirén 2007). on the other hand, practically the whole area suffers an impact from hunting. in particular, spider monkey (ateles belzebuth), woolly monkey (lagothrix lagotricha and l. poeppigii), tapir (tapirus terrestris) and salvin’s currassow (mitu salvini) are severely depleted and even locally extinct over a large part of the community’s hunting grounds, and also several other species have strongly reduced populations (sirén et al. 2004). methods this study is largely based on information provided by local people (for similar approaches to the study of the history of amazonian peoples see muratorio 1991, cabodevilla 1999, and stanfield 1998), but also draws on historical source documents, grey literature, and scientific publications. in the first place, the study relies on compilation, i.e. the accumulation of data and information from written or oral, primary or secondary sources, specifically about the study area. when information about the study area itself has not been available, the study instead relies on extrapolation in space and time, assuming that the study area has undergone similar change processes as other similar areas have done. such extrapolation is risky, as one easily may underestimate the ecological and cultural variability in amazonia and make too sweeping generalizations. therefore, such extrapolation was made based only on information about areas near the study area and known to be similar to it, culturally as well as ecologically. when neither compilation nor extrapolation was possible, instead deduction was used, i.e. logical reasoning based on known principles about the relations between humans and the environment. in order to record oral history a number of workshops were organized with local community members. during a first workshop, a historical line was constructed, which identified, and located in time, the main historical events recognized by the community members. based on this, eight distinct epochs were defined (table 1), which formed the basis for the subsequent group interviews. 40 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren group interviews had a semi-structured character and were based on a scheme where a list of questions had been defined for each one out of six broad themes, namely 1) demography and settlement pattern, 2) agriculture and domestic animals, 3) hunting, 4) fishing, 5) trade, and finally, 6) social organization and power relations. although the focus of this article corresponds primarily to the three first of these themes, also the other three themes were important in order to get a fairly complete picture of the context. the interviews were organized as one workshop in each hamlet, where each workshop focused primarily on two or three out of the six themes. all elders approximately above the age of 60 and living in the hamlet were invited, and sometimes also a few from some adjacent hamlet. the oldest participants were born in the 1920’s. also secondary school students or, in one case, primary school students, were invited. most of the workshops were held in a private home of some resident in the respective hamlet, where the hostess served drinks of asua (a locally made brew made of cassava) to create a comfortable setting for the elders. a local assistant opened the discussion and directed it, but the elders were encouraged to talk freely, without much concern about strictly following the pre-elaborated question scheme. also the students were encouraged to ask questions to the elders. myself and an additional assistant took notes and i also made followup questions. often several discussions took place simultaneously, and therefore the three of us always were seated spread out so that we together would catch everything that was said during the session. the following morning the three of us would meet in order to transcribe our notes on the computer. after having done three such workshops, the resulting transcribed material was coditable 1. major events in the history of the community which were used in order to structure discussions at workshops with local elders. event year comments first arrival of missionaries 1817-1833 the mission was abandoned in 1867 and re-established four or five years later (pierre 1983: 8, 99). some accounts by the elders about the arrival of the missionaries seem to refer to that re-establishment of the mission in the 1870’s. onset of the rubber boom 1887-1890 an exhaustive traveler’s account from sarayaku in 1887 makes no mention of any rubber trade going on (pierre 1983: 175−182), but another account only three years later mentions an intense activity of collecting and trading rubber (vargas 1976: 44, 82). demise of the rubber boom approx. 1910-1920 no elders had own memories of the rubber boom going on, and the oldest were born around 1920. there was a short resurgence of rubber trade in the 1940’s, and some elders seemed to refer to this epoch instead, when talking about the rubber boom. beginning of war between ecuador and peru 1941 arrival of protestant missionaries around 1960 timing estimated based on elders remembering which of their children were born, or not born, at the time. creation of centro alama sarayacu, the first community organization 1976 footmarch to quito in order to demand land titles 1992 fennia 192: 1 (2014) 41history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... fied and restructured according to the time epochs and themes previously defined. the material was analyzed in order to identify what particular pieces of information were missing, and a corresponding list of specific questions was elaborated. during the fourth and fifth workshop, this list was used in addition to the original interview scheme. reconstructing the demographic history of the community was done based on various additional sources, including previously published regional estimates of pre-columbian population density, historical source documents from the study area, population data published in el oriente dominicano, the news bulletin of the dominican mission in the town of puyo, (1929: 8; 1929: 9; 1930: 17; 1937: 70−71; 1943: 118; 1947: 172), official censuses (inec 1974, 1982, 1990, 2001), and retrospective mapping (cf. sadomba 1996) at separate community workshops in each hamlet, where the local participants made maps indicating all households present in the years 1941, 1960, 1978, and 2001 (fig. 2). recent population numbers and trends were estimated based, in addition, on unofficial censuses made by edeli et al. (1998) and sirén (2004), as well as unpublished 2001 pre-census data of the national ecuadorian institute for censuses (inec), and inspection, for quality assessment purposes, of the filled-in census forms for of the 2001 official census. this latter revealed that the quality was very poor and very many residents omitted. this was probably because, different from the pre-census that was carried out by inec staff, the census itself was carried out by local teachers with little training and little motivation for this additional work task imposed upon them. the utility of official census reports is limited also because they do not provide numbers for the population at the level of the sarayaku community, but only for the parish center, which is just one of the five hamlets in the community, and for the entire parish, which includes also several neighboring communities. for further details on methodology, see sirén (2004: 67−71). the findings are presented in the following order. first, demography, then settlement pattern and agriculture, and, finally, hunting. the reason for using this order is that although quantitative and spatially explicit data on hunting in the past is virtually absent, one can make some deductions about it based on what is known about demography and spatial patterns of settlement. and although quantitative data is scarce also on past agriculture, one can draw conclusions about it using deduction based on known demographic changes. fig. 2. participatory mapping of demographic changes in the community. the youngest generation of participants at a workshop in the hamlet of sarayakillu make a map of the present. subsequently, participants representing progressively older generations made similar maps of the past. 42 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren demography population density in the americas before 1492 can only be very crudely estimated, due to the scarcity of data. newson (1996) estimated the pre-columbian population density to 0,34−0,43 persons/km2 for a huge area including our study area and stretching from the base of the andes in the west to the marañon river in the south and the putumayo river in the northeast. after the arrival of europeans to the american continent in 1492, the population decreased, and is believed to have reached its nadir around 1760 (taylor 1986). some contemporary accounts from the study area seem to confirm that population density was indeed very low in the area in the mid-18th century. in 1737, finding footsteps some 40 km downriver from the site of the current sarayaku village was a curiosity for a party of missionaries travelling up the bobonaza (tobar-donoso 1960: 132). in 1769, the only survivor of a shipwrecked party on the lower bobonaza, mrs. isabel goudin, had to walk for nine days – apparently without finding any trails or other signs of human presence until she met two indians travelling on the river, who saved her life (whittaker 2005). an estimate, which appears to be trustworthy, of the population of sarayaku was provided for the years 1888−1889 by a missionary who travelled widely in the region and recorded the number of inhabitants of over 20 settlements or forest areas, in some of which he even distinguished between ‘infidels’ and ‘christians’ (magali 1978: 45). according to this source, the sarayaku mission community had about 460 innhabitants, and in an addition, approximately 50 persons were living in the surrounding forests of the study area, such that this would altogether correspond to a population density of 0.39 inhabitants/km2, suggesting that by then the population might have recovered to a level similar to that of pre-columbian times. available population data published by the dominican mission from 1928−1947 show highly fluctuating numbers, inconsistent with recorded numbers of baptisms and deaths, but suggest on the whole that the population had remained relatively stagnant since the late 19th century, something which is supported also by a testimony of a missionary in sarayaku in the 1930’s: “the marriages of the indians are in general very fecund: ten or twelve children is the fruit of a union. nevertheless, the population remains stagnant, because of the death of almost all of the children that succumb, victims of diseases and lack of food and disgraces of an abrupt nature.” (vargas 1931, translation by the author) since the 1940’s, in any case, population growth has been rapid, although mitigated by high rates of emigration. a pre-census carried out in 2001 by governmental staff showed a population of 961 inhabitants in sarayaku (inec, unpublished data), a figure almost equal to a population count done by myself soon before. taking into account that by then the territory effectively available to the sarayaku people had shrinked somewhat due to the establishment of some new communities, the population density in 2001 can be estimated to 0.96 inhabitants/km2, i.e. between two and three times higher than the regional pre-columbian population density estimated by newson (1996). the annual rate of population growth during the latter part of the 20th century was estimated to 1.6% (sirén 2004: 144). settlement pattern and agriculture the demographic trends are also reflected in the need for food and thus, the land area under cultivation, although this is also affected by various other factors. phytolithic records reveal that agriculture has been practiced in ecuadorian amazonia at least since 5300 b. p. intensification of maize cultivation then seems to have occurred from about 2400 b.p. until 800 b.p., when maize disappears from the pollen record. nevertheless, the amount of pollen from species typical of secondary forests indicates that cultivation of other crops probably continued to increase, although not resulting in massive deforestation as in other neotropical regions outside amazonia (piperno 1990). in the sarayaku area, the earliest evidence – found so far – for human occupation dates from about 500 a.d., consisting of pieces of pottery found during archeological excavations at the muritikucha-1 exploratory oil well site. the site, situated on the crest of a ridge, has been repeatedly occupied up to the late 19th century (p. netherly, pers. comm). elders in sarayaku tell, with considerable detail, about a people they call the ‘tayak’, which fennia 192: 1 (2014) 43history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... they consider the original people of the sarayaku area. historical source material from the region mentions a large number of different ethnic groups, but none with this name. nevertheless, the tayak mentioned by the sarayaku elders do not seem to be a mythical people as suggested by reeve (1988: 109), but a historical reality. the sarayaku people recognize certain sites in the forest that they call tayak purun, the sites that used to be farmed by the tayak people but that now are covered by high forest, and recognized based on the presence of pottery fragments or, much more seldom, stone axes on the forest floor, as well as sometimes a somewhat reddish color of the soil, a slightly different forest structure with absence of giant trees, or, sometimes, oral history alone. it is unclear, however, whether ‘tayak’ originally was a generic term describing any nonmission indians (similar to e.g. ‘nomads’ or ‘savages’), or whether it referred to a particular ethnic group. for example, the záparo people are in the local kichwa dialect referred to as ‘taway’, and possibly these two similar terms may have the same origin and refer to the same people. the tayak are said to have used stone axes and knives made of bamboo, and to have lived only on the crests of the ridges, or hilltops, where they farmed mostly maize. these latter affirmations are supported also by other evidence. archeological excavations in the yasuní area in northeastern ecuadorian amazonia have shown that, in some interfluvial areas, pre-columbian human settlements were indeed found primarily on the ridges (netherly 1997). sediment cores taken from this area, however, seem to lack evidence of human landscape disturbance during the last 9,500 years (weng et al. 2002). in sum, studies from relatively nearby sites suggest that, in precolumbian times, people practiced agriculture, but that the extent of deforestation was relatively small, and mostly limited to the crests of the ridges. an historical account from the lower bobonaza in 1707 indicates that maize was the dominant crop in those times (tobar-donoso 1960: 239), similar to what the sarayaku elders claim regarding the tayak people. the travel account of isabel goudin in 1769, mentioned above, furthermore, indicates not only that the population density was low, but also that the few people who existed in the region did not have any settlements near the riverside (whittaker 2005). in any case, the sarayaku people simultaneously consider the tayak to be both their own ancestors and a group of ‘others’ that to some extent was antagonistic to the ancestors who lived in the early mission community. although this may appear paradoxical, it becomes much less to when considering that the settling in the mission community was a process spanning over several generations and involving the gradual adoption of the kichwa language first as lingua franca and then as mother tongue and marker of a common ethnical identity. the last reference made to the tayaks in oral history is that, in addition to that some gradually became settled in the mission community, the rest, who remained out in the forest, got virtually wiped out by a devastating smallpox epidemic. this probably occurred sometime in the mid-19th century, as the elders make no more references to the tayak when talking about epochs later than this. in addition to population density, also the kind of technology available can have profound implications for agricultural practices. in particular, metal tools most likely revolutionized the way agriculture was carried out. the adoption of metal tools in the bobonaza region seems to have been a gradual process. in the late 18th century, non-mission indians acquired metal tools through trade with the indians of the canelos mission, 35 km upriver from sarayaku, but metal tools continued to be in short supply, so that the non-mission indians still had to rely partly on stone tools (rumazo 1970: 124, 160). when the sarayaku mission was founded in the early 19th century, access to metal tools most probably improved significantly, as the christianized indians typically even became middlemen who traded industrial goods to the non-mission indians, who in exchange provided blowguns and other traditional crafts that the christianized indians ceased to manufacture themselves (spruce 1996: 435). metal tools must have made it easier to make canoes, facilitating fishing as well as river transport. probably they also made it much easier than before to have farm on the alluvial plains, which before may have been far too laborious to make it worthwhile. clearing the forest on hilltops is still today easier than felling trees on alluvial plains, because the trees tend to have a larger crown on the downside slope, and the momentum of the fall often makes them come loose from the stump and fly several additional meters. thus the crown lands outside the field area, and this saves much work of chopping up branches and twigs. when clearing for a field on a hilltop, the trees can be 44 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren felled in this way to both sides of the ridge. moreover, setting fire to big trees has previously been used as an auxiliary technique (carneiro 1979) and this was probably easier on the crests where the forest tends to be drier. also weeding is easier on the crests than on the alluvial plains, where weeds grow faster and often form a thick mat, which would be very hard to weed without metal knives. since the early 19th century, thus, people increasingly came to settle and took up farming of the alluvial plains of the bobonaza river. one may easily think that the change from dispersed settlement and farming on ridgetops to nucleated settlement and farming on alluvial plains was a direct effect of the establishment of the mission. however, some sarayaku elders claim a few families already had settled along the river before the mission was established. accounts from some nearby areas provide evidence for that the change of settlement from hilltops to riverside habitats at least in some cases did predate the establishment of mission communities. this was the case for the záparos further downriver the bobonaza in the mid-19th century (de vernazza 1849) as well as for the huaorani people further north in the 1950’s (cabodevilla 1999: 320−326). whereas the establishment of the mission community implied a change from disperse to nucleated settlement, this did not imply that the surrounding forests immediately got emptied of people. many people continued to farm the ridges in the surrounding forest, including the achuar people in the south and the záparo to the north. also, to avoid the domination by the priests, some people left the mission community and went to the forest to ‘become záparos’, as local elders put it. ecuadorian geographer villavicencio (1858) indicated that “only some [záparos] have small fields of maize, manioc and plantains, others live by hunting, fishing and wild fruits. they are almost nomads, following the ripening of the fruits.” similarly, oral tradition indicates that the záparos in the sarayaku area in the mid19th century relied heavily on forest fruits, game and fish, and that agriculture was limited to small fields of maize. however, the people who settled in the mission community probably never completely abandoned the areas where they had come from which, after all, were not further away than that they could be reached by foot or canoe in a few days at the most. when passing the rutunu river in 1857, the famous english botanist and explorer richard spruce noted that people from sarayaku, pakayaku and canelos all along this river had purinas, i.e. secondary homes, where they went to wash gold (spruce 1996: 125). similarly, it has been described for the canelos mission, 35 km upriver and established almost two centuries before the mission station in sarayaku, that the people who settled in the mission community also continued having houses in their areas of origin, leading to the system of alternating residence in the village and in remote secondary homes, respectively, which is still in force (guzmán-gallegos 1997: 147). local elders in sarayaku tell that these remote purinas had an important role in the 19th century, when the sarayaku mission community at various occasions was abandoned due to smallpox epidemics, as the people dispersed out to their secondary homes in order to escape contagion. some of the more distant purinas (fig. 1), however, have a somewhat more recent origin, according to the sarayaku elders. during the rubber boom, which reached sarayaku around 1890, almost all men as well as many women in sarayaku worked collecting rubber. different from many other areas, however, they never became subject to slavery or debt-bondage. they felled the rubber trees instead of tapping the rubber from standing trees, as was done in many other places. as the stands of rubber trees got depleted near the village, people had to go further away to collect rubber. thus, they expanded their area of resource use and established new secondary homes in distant locations, which are still today used by their descendants. for a long time, people spent as much time in their purinas as in the mission community. the missionaries never had a permanent presence in sarayaku. still in the 1940’s, the priest came and went in intervals of a few months, and most people lived dispersed in the secondary homes when the priest was not present (un excronista misionero 1946; sarayaku elders, pers. comm). in the 1940’s the missionaries opened a school, which in 1943 had 18 pupils out of which 14 were native indians (sarayaku elders, pers. comm; espinosa 1943a). the increasing importance in formal schooling would later have important repercussions for the spatial and temporal patterns of resource use in the area. up to the 1930’s, land for agriculture was abundant, and almost all fields were made by clearing old-growth forest on good sites such as fennia 192: 1 (2014) 45history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... hilltops and alluvial plains. also, land formed by recent river sedimentation was highly preferred sites for agriculture. most fields were established by clearing primary forest. during world war ii there was a boom in the farming of barbasco (lonchocarpus nicou), which went to export for production of the insecticide rotenone, but very soon the demand ceased again (sarayaku elders, pers. comm; muñoz 1942). beginning in the 1940’s, old-growth forest near the village became scarce, so that people increasingly began to re-clear fallows instead. towards the 1970’s land scarcity around the village led to a shortening of the fallow times. the community decided that secondary forests belong to the people that first cleared it, and must not be cleared by others without the permission of the owner. this had long been the custom in one part of the village, downriver along the bobonaza river, but now it became a rule in the whole community (sarayaku elders, pers. comm; see also sirén 2006, 2007). in the 1970’s, people increasingly engaged in harvesting fibers from the aphandria natalia palms, typically felling trees found in the primary forest. the wild stands then started to get depleted, and this led to that many people began to plant these palms. the total area of plantations of a. natalia is, however small, the largest individual holding being only 0.6 ha. the planted palms began to become productive some 15 years after planting. however, as prices decreased towards the turn of the century, the interest in planting this palm has dropped and some of the plantations do nowadays not even get harvested. in the 1980’s, participation in formal schooling became basically universal, forcing most people to live in the permanent settlement during all year except school vacations, i.e. each year one short vacation of one month, and one longer of three months. old-growth forest was becoming scarce in the vicinity of human settlements, and the proportion of fields made by clearing old-growth forest had decreased to around 30% of the total cleared area per annum (sirén 2007). in 1984, about half of the households in sarayaku cleared forest and sowed pasture, funded by loans from the government channeled through the fund for development of marginal rural areas (foderuma). however, cattle rising did not turn out to be very profitable, and by 1998, most of the pastures had returned to fallow. in the late 1990’s the duration of school vacations decreased to just one month twice a year. thus, people now spend less time in the secondary homes than they used to do. in the 1990’s, lack of good farmland in the vicinity of the settlements forced people to start to clear even steep slopes and stony soils, which previously were considered unapt for agriculture. by the turn of the century, about 18 hectares of old-growth forest was cleared annually, corresponding to a rate of expansion of the area of fields and fallows of 0.4% per year, considerably lower than the annual rate of population growth of 1.6%, and corresponding to a deforestation rate of only 0.015% per year (sirén 2004: ch. 8; sirén 2007). in sum, agriculture has always been primarily for subsistence. cultivation of crops for commercialization has occurred on a small scale, often limited in time to short-lived booms, and has not affected the forest cover very much. the location of settlement and cultivated land has undergone considerable changes (fig. 3). first, agriculture took place scattered on the hilltops, then cultivation started also on the alluvial plains, and settlement and agriculture became more concentrated around the mission site, although people also lived in their distant secondary homes part of the year. in recent decades, an increasingly nucleated settlement pattern, population growth, and increased sedentarism due to universalized participation in formal schooling have led to land scarcity and quite intensive land use in a limited area around the village. since some century ago, on the other hand, forests on remote ridges have recovered or continue recovering from the impacts of previous repeated clearing during several hundred or perhaps thousands of years. in contrast to the dominating pattern up to the 19th century, human settlement and agriculture are today quite concentrated in space, most agriculture taking place within a few kilometers from the five permanent hamlets (fig. 4a). the current impact of agriculture on the forest cover in this area is probably greater than ever before in any part of the study area. nevertheless, even here there are places where people do not clear the forest, particularly on steep slopes and in deep gorges (fig. 4b). the largest of these pockets of apparently untouched forest within the intensively used zone is about 500 meters wide, and located in an area of heavily intersected terrain with deep gorges alternating with knife-edge ridges (fig. 4c, 4d). such habitats have probably never ever been cleared, but, as discussed in the next section, they have been subject to the impacts of hunting. 46 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren hunting data on past hunting is very scarce, but some conclusions can be drawn by deduction, based on what is known about changes in population density and settlement pattern. thus, overall hunting pressure must have decreased sharply as the population density decreased from the 16th to the late 18th century, and then hunting must also have increased when human the population started to increased again. on the other hand, the spatial distribution of hunting is also likely to have changed. up to the early 19th century, hunting effort must have been rather evenly distributed in space, but as people increasingly settled around the mission during the 19th century, hunting effort must have become more concentrated in space, and even more so towards the latter part of the 20th century when participation in formal schooling became universal. the marked spatial gradients in hunting effort and abundance of game animals observed today (sirén et al. 2004) are thus probably a relatively recent phenomenon. in addition, also changes in hunting technology can potentially have large impacts on what species are targeted by hunters. sarayaku elders claim that the tayak used bow and arrow as well as spears to hunt, but they disagree among themselves upon whether the tayak also used blowguns or whether these were a later introduction. in the literature, stirling (1938) and metraux (1949), mention that the nearby jívaro people at the time of first contact used bow and arrow, but metraux (1949) also mentions that the záparo, on the other hand, used blowguns but not bow and arrow. as high-quality dart poison was acquired through long-distance trade (cipoletti 1988), disruptions and (re-)establishment of trade routes may have been one fig. 3. schematic representation of the changes over time in the spatial pattern of agricultural land use, in a northsouth cross-section of the sarayaku territory. the tall black “trees” represent old-growth forest, while the small white “trees” represent cultivated areas and fallows. the figure is not to scale, and the width of the plains is exaggerated. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 47history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... cause behind changes in hunting technology. the blowgun is more apt for hunting canopyliving animals, whereas the bow and arrow is more apt for hunting ground-living animals (sarayaku elders, pers. comm; see also e.g. chagnon 1997: 51) and these shifts of hunting technology may therefore have caused corresponding changes in the animal community structure. in the 1940’s, the blowgun was still the dominating hunting weapon (un ex-cronista misionero 1946) but already in the 1950’s, they were gradually being replaced by muzzle-loaded shotguns (sarayaku elders, pers. comm; maya 1959), ammunition was however expensive, so still in the 1960’s people used to carry both a blowgun and a shotgun when hunting, and they loaded just 3−5 shots, which they then carefully refigure 4. current location of agricultural fields and fallows, based on remote sensing analysis. black color indicates areas identified as fields or fallows younger than 20 years, on landsat tm and etm+ images from 1987 and 2001. extent rectangles on each map indicates the location of the subsequent map. a: location of agricultural fields and fallows in the study area. light gray color indicates the extent of the study area. dark gray lines represent rivers. b: the intensively used zone around the hamlets. c close-up with 20-meter contour lines. d: close-up with 10-meter contour lines. note 500-meter wide strip of forest unaffected by clearing and farming. for details about the image interpretation procedure, see sirén (2004, 2007) and sirén & brondizio (2009). 48 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren trieved from the carcass in order to reuse them. later, cartridge shotguns gradually replaced the muzzle-loaded ones. by the turn of the 20th century, both types of guns were about equally common, whereas blowguns were by then used just for playing or as a training tool for young boys. another important change of hunting technology was the introduction of dogs, as the use of dogs greatly facilitates hunting of several groundliving species, such as pacas (seniculus paca), collared peccaries (pecari tajacu) and tapirs (tapirus terrestris). hunting dogs have been used in the area for such a long time that local elders consider them to have existed “always”. it has also been documented that they were common in the mission communities in the region as early as in the mid-19th century (spruce 1996). however, hunting dogs in fact seem to have been absent in much of amazonia until the last few centuries. the huaorani people, living a couple of hundred kilometers to the north, adopted hunting dogs just towards the latter part of the 20th century, after contact and settlement in permanent villages (yost & kelley 1983). apparently, the use of hunting dogs among amazonian indigenous peoples becomes common only when there is enough contact with urban centres such that new dogs can continuously be brought in order to replace those that succumb due to disease, parasites, snake bites, or other calamities (cf. koster 2009). in the 1960’s, sarayaku hunters began to hunt with flashlights. the flashlights facilitated hunting of pacas, armadillos and caimans, and the shotguns facilitated hunting of all species, although particularly ground-living ones. whereas population density is one important determinant of hunting intensity, this also depends on any commercial demand for wildlife products, in addition to the local demand for subsistence needs. from the 1940’s up to the 1960’s, ecuadorian merchants visited regularly sarayaku in order to buy furs from spotted cats, otters (lontra longicaudis), giant otters (pteronura brasiliensis) and collared peccaries (p. tajacu), as well as the feathers of toucans (ramphastos spp.), and live monkeys (sarayaku elders pers. comm, blomberg 1964: 19). contrary to what has been documented for many other places, however, local elders claim that this trade did not affect the abundance of the species in question in the sarayaku area. towards the turn of the 20th century, a resurgence of ethnic pride among indigenous communities near the towns of puyo and tena, caused an increased demand for wild game meat which could not be satisfied locally because game habitats had long since been converted to farmlands and pasture. thus, a few times sarayaku hunters were paid to hunt to provide wild meat for such events, but the community soon decided to prohibit such ‘export’. the demand for wildlife products also depends on the availability of other sources of food of similar nutritional value that could act as substitutes for wild meat. in this sense, the reliance on fish probably has increased over time, and it was estimated in 2001 that the amount of fish caught in the community was about 2.5 times larger than the amount of wild game hunted. other sources of food of animal origin were of very minor importance all the way up to the end of the 20th century (sirén & machoa 2008). it is to expect that the rapid demographic increase during the latter part of the 20th century would lead to a decline of, at least, the most vulnerable game species, and the testimonies of the sarayaku people confirm that this has happened. local elders tell that in the 1930’s, for example, spider monkeys and wooly monkeys were still common at a distance of just some four kilometers from the village. in the 1960’s people typically travelled just 6−15 km downriver in order to hunt wooly monkeys for the annual community festival, whereas today these areas are extirpated of this species. the forests around the wiuyaku creek (fig. 1) are located in one of the remotest corners of the sarayaku lands, at a distance from the main settlement of over 40 km by canoe followed by some 10 km by foot. up to the mid 1990’s there was no trail leading to this area and it had not been visited by humans for several decades. a few intrepid hunters, however, went there in the early 1990’s and were followed by others, such that a few years later there was already a trail leading to the area. towards the turn of the 20th century, festival hunters each year travelled to this area to hunt wooly monkeys, which by now had become very rare everywhere else. in addition, the area also became subject to hunting by hunters from the recently formed masaramu community, such that this safe haven for wooly monkeys is now disappearing. for spider monkeys the situation is even worse as family groups have not been observed for decades, and only occasionally single individuals are observed. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 49history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... the people have over time come to hunt a wider variety of species than before, not only because of improved hunting technology that have facilitated hunting of species that before were difficult or impossible to hunt, but also as an adaptation to increasing scarcity of the most preferred game species. sarayaku elders tell that their forefathers during the 19th century “...ate only good meat. in those days they did not eat capuchin mokey (cebus albifrons), saki monkey (pithecia monachus) or deer (mazama spp.).” today these species, especially deer, are quite commonly hunted and eaten, although still not held in very high esteem. the white-lipped peccary (tayassu pecari) disappeared completely in 1992 perhaps due to disease outbreak (cf. fragoso 1997), but reappeared in 2001, and is now again abundant (sirén 2012). in 2003 the community set aside a wildlife reserve where all hunting became prohibited, and another reserve was set aside in the same way in 2005. these reserves are patrolled by forest guards appointed by the community and paid with funds provided from germany. these reserves cover about 40 km2 each. the intensity of hunting has decreased in the reserves, as evidenced by the disappearance of the hunting trails that previously crisscrossed the areas. occasional incursions by hunters unwilling to obey to community decisions nevertheless still occur. in sum, hunting has been taking place basically everywhere. however, its overall intensity has varied with human demographic changes, decreasing from the 16th or 17th century up to the late 19th century, then to increase again. its spatial pattern has also changed, being increasingly concentrated in space since the mid 19th century. in the immediate vicinity of the sarayaku community, hunting intensity has thus increased continuously ever since the early 19th century. in remoter areas, however, hunting intensity may have decreased as settlement became more sedentarized and nucleated. during the last couple of decades, however, hunting intensity in these remote areas seems to have increased again, as human populations have grown, new villages have been founded, and as depletion of game around settlements forces hunters to travel ever further away in order to find prey. ultimately, the establishment of wildlife reserves has decreased the hunting pressure, although only in two limited areas. discussion and conclusions some 96% of the sarayaku area consists of oldgrowth forest (sirén 2007), but some of it has, at some point in history, been cleared for agriculture. until recently, however, such forest clearing was limited to the crests of the ridges. only since early 19th century have people cleared forests on alluvial plains of the major rivers, and only since a few decades back on steep slopes. still they do not clear the forest in deep gorges, and rarely on alluvial plains of smaller forest creeks. thus, much of the study area has probably never been deforested. hunting, on the other hand, has affected the study area in its totality. whether extinction of megafauna caused by early humans has changed forest structure, as suggested by schüle (1992) cannot be confirmed, but for sure recent hunting has decimated populations of primates, as well as of large birds and ungulates (sirén et al. 2004), and this without doubt causes cascade effects that affect the whole ecosystem, although much less drastically than does outright forest clearing. the intensity of hunting has, however, also been changing, and so has also its spatial pattern. in spite of growing population and improvements in hunting technology, the changes in settlement pattern during the 19th and 20th century also created almost unhunted refuges in those areas that became remote from nucleated settlements. these refuge areas have recently come under threat to disappear as new communities are founded and hunters reach further and further into the forest. the changes over time in the intensity of human resource use and corresponding ecological impacts have varied in space depending on, in particular, topographical location and distance from the village (table 2). the historical developments described in this paper are not all unique to the sarayaku area. on the contrary, demographic decline followed by recovery, and dispersed settlement gradually being replaced by nucleated settlements around christian missions, are processes that have affected vast expanses of the non-flooded upland areas of western amazonia (e.g. taylor 1986). thus, much of the conclusions reached here may be generalizable for large areas outside the study area itself, although such extrapolation always must be done with great care, considering possible differences in human history as well as in the natural environment. 50 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren explaining the reasons behind the observed changes in settlement pattern and resource use is challenging, and attempting to do so inevitably gives rise to several new questions. one important question is why the people used to live only on the ridges and why they then moved down to the alluvial plains. defense from tribal enemies (as well as spaniards) was probably one reason for choosing to live on the ridges. the need for defense, however, continued also after people settled around the missions, as the missions sometimes were attacked by antagonistic indians as well as slave raiders. obviously bearing this danger in account, the missions were preferably established on high bluffs near the bobonaza river, surrounded as much as possible by water or deep gorges, and such attacks were often successfully fended off, indicating that strategic sites for defense were available also near the large rivers (casewitz et al. 1988: 136; reeve 1988: 64; spruce 1996: 439; steward & metraux 1948: 632). as there are also cases where people settled at the river side before the establishment of missions, defense reasons or religion are hardly enough to explain this shift. technological changes such as improved access to metal tools may have played a role. again, one must note, however, that on the alluvial plains of larger rivers such as the napo, the lack of metal tools did not hinder the development of agriculture practiced by densely populated complex societies (evans & meggers 1968, 1973), and this highlights the importance of recognizing that the subsistence strategies may have varied from place to place due to different environmental preconditions. the forest of the sarayaku area is not completely ‘pristine’, but nor is it ‘anthropogenic’. it is a mosaic of forest subject to impacts of varying intensity and character, which during different epochs in the past have followed very distinct spatial patterns. this is probably true also for many other parts of amazonia. only detailed ecological field study can reveal what legacies this has left in terms of corresponding spatial patterns in the structure and species composition of the forest. table 2. a stylized summary of how the historical changes in impacts of forest clearing and hunting have varied in space, depending on topographical location and distance from the village. note that the word “never” here is used as an abbreviated form for “most likely never during the last five centuries and, according to currently available data, perhaps not before that either”. plains slopes hilltops nearby forest clearing clearing began around year 1800. almost all land has by now been cleared at least once. forest has been increasingly cleared since various decades back. some forest remains that has never been cleared clearing began around year 1800 or earlier. almost all land has by now been cleared at least once. hunting hunting intensity decreased from 16th to 18th century. it has then drastically increased since the mid-19th century remote forest clearing forest has never been cleared after centuries or millennia of repeated clearing the forest is now recovering since the mid 20-th century or, in many places, much earlier hunting hunting intensity decreased from 16th to 18th century, then increased again. it may have decreased during part of the 19th and 20th century but during the last few decades it has probably increased again. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 51history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... acknowledgements i feel deep gratitude to the elders who kindly shared their knowledge about the history of sarayaku; delia aranda, ingracia aranda, virginia dahua, lucia gayas, alicia gualinga, ambrosia gualinga, basilio gualinga, camila gualinga, delfina gualinga, eloisa gualinga, imelda gualinga, sabino gualinga, sarita gualinga, delacio guerra, amelia imunda, atanacio imunda, salvador imunda, alfredo malaver, gonzalo malaver, rafael malaver, antonio manya, erlinda manya, corina montalvo, aurora santi, luzmila santi and rito santi, and in particular to those of them who have, since then, already passed away; hugo aranda, isilinda cisneros, hilda gualinga, ricardo gualinga, serafina illanes, felipe machoa, francisco machoa, jacinto machoa, luperta machoa, marcia machoa, belisario malaver, ignasia malaver, plutarco malaver, basilio santi, belisario santi, and miguel santi. thanks also to the staff at the vicariato apostólico de puyo for providing access to their library, and likewise to father antonio cabrejas of the dominican convent in quito. thanks to patricia netherly for sharing unpublished information from archeological excavations at the moretecocha-1 well site, and to emilio moran for inspiring discussions. thanks to josé machoa and reinaldo guerra for assistance with field work, and to jan bengtsson, eduardo brondizio, david gibbon, tekeste negash, noemi gualinga, anders öckerman, and matti salo for reviewing early versions of the manuscript, as well as to two anonymous referees who provided valuable suggestion for improvements. field work was funded by the swedish international development authority (sida) and the final writing was funded by a grant from the kone foundation to prof. risto kalliola under its program for research on biodiversity. references balée w 1989. the culture of amazonian forests. advances in economic botany 7, 1−21. balée wc 1992. indigenous history and amazonian biodiversity. in steen hk & tucker rp (eds). changing tropical forests: historical perspectives on today's challenges in central & south america, 233−251. forest history society / iufro forest history group. barlow j, gardner ta, lees ac, parry lp & peres ca 2012. how pristine are tropical forests? an ecological perspective on the pre-columbian human footprint in amazonia and implications for contemporary conservation. biological conservation 151: 1, 45−49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2011.10.013. blomberg r 1964. människor i djungeln. almqvist & wiksell, stockholm. bush mb & colinvaux pa 1994. tropical forest disturbance: paleoecological records from darien, panama. ecology 75: 6, 1761−1768. http://dx.doi. org/10.2307/1939635. bush mb & silman mr 2007. amazonian exploitation revisited: ecological assymetry and the policy pendulum. paleoecology 5: 9, 457−465. http:// dx.doi.org/10.2307/1939635. cabodevilla ma 1999. los huaorani en la historia de los pueblos del oriente. cicame, coca. carneiro rl 1979. tree felling with the stone ax: an experiment carried out among the yanomamö indians of southern venezuela. in kramer c (ed). ethnoarchaeology: implications of ethnography for archaeology, 21−58. columbia university press, new york. casewitz r 1988. al este de los andes : relaciones entre las sociedades amazónicas y andinas entre los siglos xv y xvii. abya-yala, quito. cipoletti ms 1988. el tráfico de curare en la cuenca amazónica (siglos xviii y xix). anthropos 83, 527−540. chagnon na 1997. yanomamö. harcourt brace college publishers, london. cleary d 2001. towards an environmental history of the amazon: from prehistory to the nineteenth century. latin american research review 36: 2, 64−96. denevan wm 1992. the pristine myth: the landscape of the americas in 1492. annals of the association of american geographers 82, 369–385. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1992. tb01965.x. denevan wm 1996. a bluff model of riverine settlement in prehistoric amazonia. annals of the association of american geographers 86: 4, 654−681. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01771.x. denevan wm 2011. the “pristine myth” revisited. geographical review 101: 4, 576−591. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2011.00118.x. edeli d, gualinga b, malaver m, viteri f, viteri r & viteri s 1998. censo y estudio comunitario de sarayacu. colegio técnico agropecuario sarayacu, sarayacu. espinosa bm 1943a. cronica misional. el oriente dominicano 118, 27. espinosa b 1943b. san antonio de sarayacu. el oriente dominicano 122, 145−148. evans c & meggers bj 1968. archeological investigations on the río napo, eastern ecuador. smithsonian institution press, washington. evans c & meggers bj 1973. la reconstrucción de la prehistoria amazónica. amazonia peruana iv: 7. foster dr & turner ii bl 2004. the long view: human-environment relationships in the region 1000 bc – ad 1900. in turner ii bl, geoghega j & foster dr (eds). integrated land-change science and tropical deforestation in the southern yucatán, 23−38. final frontiers, oxford. fragoso jmv 1997. desapariciones locales del baquiro labiado (tayassu pecari) en la amazonía: migración, sobre-cosecha, o epidemia? in fang 52 fennia 192: 1 (2014)anders siren tg, bodmer re, aquino r & valqui m (eds). manejo de fauna silvestre en la amazonía, 309−312. instituto de ecología, la paz. gómez-pompa g & kaus a 1992. taming the wilderness myth. bioscience 42: 4, 271−279. http://dx. doi.org/10.2307/1311675. guzmán-gallegos ma 1997. para que la yuca beba nuestra sangre. abya-yala, quto. inec 1974. iii censo nacional de población y ii de vivienda. instituto nacional de estadísticas y censos de ecuador, quito. inec 1982. iv censo nacional de población y iii de vivienda. instituto nacional de estadísticas y censos de ecuador, quito. inec 1990. v censo nacional de población y iv de vivienda. instituto nacional de estadísticas y censos de ecuador, quito. inec 2001. vi censo nacional de población y v de vivienda. instituto nacional de estadísticas y censos de ecuador, quito. jerves p 1930. las misiones dominicanas en el oriente ecuatoriano (continucación). el oriente dominicano 13, 51−57. koster j 2009. hunting dogs in the lowland neotropics. journal of anthropological research 65: 4, 575−610. levis c, de souza pf, schietti j, emilio t, da veiga pinto jlp, clement cr & costa fr 2012. historical human footprint on modern tree species composition in the purus-madeira interfluve, central amazonia. plos one 7: 11, e48559. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048559. magali jm 1978. colección de cartas sobre las misiones dominicanas del oriente. mundo shuar, quito. maya v 1959. relación del recorrido misional efectuado por el r. valentín maya, o. p., por los pueblos de la m. dominicana. el oriente dominicano 311, 94. mayle fe, langstroth rp, fisher ra & meir p 2007. long-term forest-savannah dynamics in the bolivian amazon: implications for conservation. philosophical transactions of the royal society of london biological sciences 362: 1478, 291−307. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2006.1987. mcmichael ch, piperno dr, bush md, silman mr, zimmerman ar, raczka mr & lobato lc 2012. sparse pre-columbian human habitation in western amazonia. science 336: 6087, 1429−1431. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1219982. mcmichael ch, bush mb, piperno dr, silman mr, zimmerman ar & anderson c 2012. spatial and temporal scales of pre-columbian disturbance associated with western amazonian lakes. the holocene 22: 2, 131−141. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959683611414932. metraux jh 1949. weapons. in steward jh (ed). handbook of south american indians, 229−263. vol. 5. smithsonian institution, bureau of american ethnology, washington, dc. milner-gulland ej 2008. new perspectives on harvesting as one driver of ecosystem dynamics. journal of applied ecology 45, 1–3. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1365-2664.2007.01455.x. muñoz je 1942. la planta denominada barbasco. oriente dominicano 109, 98. muratorio b 1991. the life and times of grandfather alonso. culture and history in the upper amazon. new brunswicks rutgers university press. newson la 1996. the population of the amazon basin in 1492: a view from the ecuadorian headwaters. transactions of the institute of british geographers 21: 1, 5−26. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/622921. netherly p 1997. loma y ribera: patrones de asentamiento prehistóricos en la amazonía ecuatoriana. fronteras de investigación 1, 33−54. peres ca & lake ir 2003. extent of nontimber resource extraction in tropical forests: accessibility to game vertebrates by hunters in the amazon basin. conservation biology 17: 2, 521−535. http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1523-1739.2003.01413.x. pierre f 1983. viaje de exploración al oriente ecuatoriano. abya-yala, quito. piperno dr 1990. aboriginal agriculture and land usage in the amazon basin, ecuador. journal of archaeological science 17, 665−677. http://dx. doi.org/10.1016/0305-4403(90)90048-a. pärssinen m, schaan d & ranzi a. 2009. pre-columbian geometric earthworks in the upper purúes: a complex society in western amazonia. antiquity 83, 1084−1095. redford k & feinsinger p 2001. the half empty forest: sustainable use and the ecology of interactions. in reynolds j, mace g, redford k & robinson j (eds). conservation of exploited populations, 370−400. cambridge university press, cambridge. reeve me 1988. los quichuas del curaray: el proceso de formación de la identidad. abya-yala, quito. roosevelt ac 1999. the development of prehistoric complex societies: amazonia, a tropical forest. archeological papers of the american anthropological association 9: 1, 13−33. http://dx.doi. org/10.1525/ap3a.1999.9.1.13. rumazo j (ed) 1970. documentos para la historia de la audienca de quito. tomo viii. afrosidio aguado, madrid. räsänen me, salo js, jungner h & romero pittman l 1990. evolution of the western amazon lowland relief: impact of andean foreland dynamics. terra nova 2, 320−332. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3121.1990. tb00084.x. sadomba wz 1996. retrospective community mapping: a tool for community education. pla notes, 9−13. salo m, sirén a & kalliola r 2014. diagnosing wild species harvest: resource use and conservation in the tropics. academic press, london. fennia 192: 1 (2014) 53history of natural resource use and environmental impacts... sawyer s 1997. the 1992 indian mobilization in lowland ecuador. latin american perspectives 24: 3, 65−82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0094582x9702400305. schüle w 1992a. anthropogenic trigger effects on pleistocene climate? global ecology and biogeography letters 2, 33−36. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2997668. schüle w 1992b.vegetation, megaherbivores, man and climate in the quaternary and the genesis of closed forests. in goldhammer jg (ed). tropical forests in transition: ecology of natural and anthropogenic disturbances and processes, 45−76. birkhäuser verlag, basel. sirén a 2004. changing interactions between humans and nature in sarayaku, ecuadorian amazon. acta universitatis agriculturae sueciae: agraria 447. sirén ah 2006. natural resources in indigenous peoples’ land in amazonia: a tragedy of the commons? the international journal of sustainable development and world ecology 13, 363−374. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504500609469686. sirén a 2007. population growth and land-use intensification in a subsistence-based indigenous community in the amazon. human ecology 35, 669−680. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10745-0069089-y. sirén ah 2012. festival hunting by the kichwa people in the ecuadorean amazon. journal of ethnobiology 32: 1, 30−50. http://dx.doi.org/10.2993/02780771-32.1.30. sirén ah & brondizio es 2009. detecting subtle land use change in tropical forests. applied geography 29: 2, 201−211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2008.08.006. sirén a, hambäck p & machoa j 2004. including spatial heterogeneity and animal dispersal when evaluating hunting: a model analysis and an empirical assessment in an amazonian community. conservation biology 18: 5, 1315−1329. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2004.00024.x. sirén ah & machoa jd 2008. fish, wildlife, and human nutrition in tropical forests: a fat gap? interciencia 33: 3, 186−193. sirén a, tuomisto h & navarrete h 2013. mapping environmental variation in lowland amazonian rainforests using remote sensing and floristic data. international journal of remote sensing 34: 5, 1561−1575. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01431161 .2012.723148. sponsel le 1992. the environmental history of amazonia: natural and human disturbances, and the ecological transition. in steen hk & tucker rp (eds). changing tropical forests: historical perspectives on today's challenges in central & south america, 233−251. forest history society / iufro forest history group. spruce r 1996. notas de un botánico en el amazonas y en los andes. abya-yala, quito. stanfield me 1998. red rubber, bleeding trees: violence, slavery, and empire in northwest amazonia, 1850−1933. university of new mexico press. steward jh & metraux a 1948. tribes of the peruvian and ecuadorian montaña. in steward jh & metraux a (eds). handbook of south american indians, 535−656. vol. 3. smithsonian institution, bureau of american ethnology, washington, dc. stirling mw 1938. historical and ethnographical material on the jivaro indians. washington, dc. stoner ke, riba-hernández p, vulinec k & lambert je 2007. the role of mammals in creating and modifying seedshadows in tropical forests and some possible consequences of their elimination. biotropica 39, 316–327. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-7429.2007.00292.x. taylor ac 1986. la evolución demográfica de las poblaciones indígenas de la alta amazonia del siglo xvi al xx. cultura 8:507-518. terborgh j, nuñez-iturri g, pitman n, cornejo-valverde fh, alvarez p, swamy v, pringle eg & paine cet 2008. tree recruitment in an empty forest. ecology 89: 6, 1757−1768. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/07-0479.1. tobar-donoso j 1960. historiadores y cronistas de las misiones. jose m. cajica, mexico. un ex-cronista misionero 1946. vivir de los indígenas misionados desde antaño. el oriente dominicano 160, 135−139. vargas jm 1931. impresiones de un viaje a canelos. el oriente dominicano 23, 161−168. vargas jm 1976. aportes para la historia de macas, 44, 82. mundo shuar, sucua. devernazza c 1849. viaje practicado desde el callao hasta las misiones de las dos tribus de infieles záparos y givaros. imprenta de justo montoya, lima. villavicencio m 1858. geografia de la república del ecuador. r. craigshead, new york. weng c, bush mb & athens js 2002. holocene climate change and hydrarch succession in lowland amazonian ecuador. review of palaeobotany and palynology 120: 1, 73−90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0034-6667(01)00148-8. whittaker r 2005. the mapmaker’s wife: a true tale of love, murder, and survival in the amazon. bantam books, london. wright j, hernandéz a & condit r 2007. the bushmeat harvest alters seedling banks by favoring lianas, large seeds, and seeds dispersed by bats, birds, and wind. biotropica 39, 363–371. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-7429.2007.00289.x. yost j & kelley pm 1983. shotguns, blowguns, and spears: the analysis of technological efficiency. in hames rb & vickers wt (eds). adaptive responses of native amazonians, 189−224. academic press, new york. the political extreme as the new normal: the cases of brexit, the french state of emergency and dutch islamophobia reflections: extreme geographies the political extreme as the new normal: the cases of brexit, the french state of emergency and dutch islamophobia henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy van houtum, henk & rodrigo bueno lacy (2017). the political extreme as the new normal: the cases of brexit, the french state of emergency and dutch islamophobia. fennia 195: 1, pp. 85–101. issn 1798-5617. in this article we carry out a geopolitical analysis of the turbulent breeze driving the eu into uncharted extremes. to do this we zoom in on three cases that we deem both a response to political extremism and a source of political extremism in themselves: france’s state of emergency, brexit and the pyrrhic victory over the far-right in the dutch elections of 2017 . our analysis suggests that even though the political forces behind these events have praised their policies or electoral victories as bulwarks to keep extremism in check, the sort of extremism that they try to keep at bay is not as worrying as the counter-productive realpolitik of the traditional establishment they represent. by surreptitiously adopting precisely the kind of extremist political preferences that they claim to set themselves against, these politics show how the establishment in the eu is normalising the extreme geopolitics of exclusion that are structurally undermining the very principles of rule of law, liberal democracy and overall openness on which the eu is based. the result: what used to be easily dismissed as irrational or evil has become the everyday normal. the extremism we so much fear has become the new normality. keywords: state of emergency, far-right extrememism, terrorism, brexit, borders, migration henk van houtum, nijmegen centre for border research, radboud university, thomas van aquinostraat 3, p.o. box 9108, 6500 hk nijmegen, the netherlands and university of eastern finland, p.o. box 111, fi-80101 joensuu, finland, e-mail: h.vanhoutum@fm.ru.nl rodrigo bueno lacy, nijmegen centre for border research, radboud university, thomas van aquinostraat 3, p.o. box 9108, 6500 hk nijmegen, the netherlands, e-mail: rodrigo.bueno.lacy@gmail.com never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it. – simone weil introduction a specter that seemed burried under the ruins of the second world war has returned to haunt europe once again: the specter of fear itself. across the eu, a bulging concert of political forces is normalising a politics of fear while ever more assertively promoting an essentially monocultural, unapologetically dominant and nationally homogeneous community which they imagine europe once © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa64568 doi: 10.11143/fennia.64568 86 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies was. they find their inspiration in the purity of a europe they construct with cherry-picked distortions of an idealized past – whose troubling chapters have been erased or simply omitted. these purified imaginations are then contrasted with the threatening representations of besiegement, infiltration, pollution and extermination on which their message draws its political force: doctored images, exaggerated statistics and panic-striking narratives portraying the eu as being overrun by ‘terrorist fighters’, ‘fortune seekers’ and other unassimilable immigrants. call it ‘great-again politics’: this anachronic glorification of a racially homogenous past traces a more or less implicit connection between europe’s recent multicultural societies and whatever challenges the eu is facing today– immigration, terrorism, asylum, climate change, economic and political instability, military threats and a reorganization of power around the world. great-again politics is wishing a painful past away while focusing on its good things, the equivalent of narrative morphine injected into history: ‘we used to be great. never mind the blemishes. focus on the big picture: we were great, let’s focus on that.’ the implications of these evocations are of course grim: they conjure up a lost glory that was predicated on the subjugation of what were considered lesser races and which not only led to the brutality of imperialism, colonization and slavery but whose culmination was the self-inflicted civilisational suicide of the second world war and its holocaust (bauman 1989). although on this paper we focus on the eu, this great-again politics is shaping politics not only here but also in places like trump’s us, putin’s russia and erdogan’s turkey. overtones of imperial high-handedness, racialized colonial hierarchization and nationalist hubris that seemed confined to the safe boundaries of history books are being tootled again by european politicians, not to warn us from the past but as nostalgia for a future worth striving for. unthinkable some years ago, the policies and rhetoric of great-again political parties have become ever more extreme across the eu: the dog-whistle anti-semitism of the french national front;1 the police harassment of muslims normalised by france’s prolonged state of emergency (safdar 2016); the virulent islamophobia of the dutch freedom party of wilders (darroch 2016); the stark racism behind eastern european member states’ refusals to admit non-christian asylum seekers (bbc 2015; cienski 2017); the fanatic isolationism and delusional imperial nostalgia evoked by the rhetoric and policies favoured by british eurosceptics – who want to cut ties with the eu against the wishes of half their population and defying the judgement of an army of experts warning against it (olusonga 2017); the immoral bordering regime of the eu, dependant on refugee deals that outsource eu’s international responsibilities to regimes known for their poor record on human rights (van houtum 2010). examples of extreme and isolationist politics abound and are quickly multiplying. even as they keep failing to get hold of public office in most eu member states, these phobic voices have been gaining influence in the political debate and policymaking across the eu for over a decade. a crucial component of their success – and this is the central argument of our paper – is that the establishment of traditional political parties and coalitions that has been preventing xenophobes from seizing power, either through strategic electoral alliances or by refusing to enter into coalitions with them, has unwittingly become a valuable convenience in their political strategy and propaganda. first, by increasingly normalising and co-opting their phobic policies, a significant portion of establishment parties have not only allowed populists to effectively set the agenda but they have also shielded them from the accountability of its implementation and consequences. second, the xenophobes’ detachment from government has allowed them to keep branding themselves as political outsiders challenging the establishment.2 the populists’ consistent underdog status has rendered credibility to the conspiratorial nature of their rhetoric: they fancy themselves as champions of a free speech stifled by political correctness, speaking out for an aggravated ‘silent majority’ – ‘the people’ – whose political preferences the so-called establishment keeps betraying. ironically, the establishment that is considered the best hope against their radical politics has been able to keep xenophobes at bay not by opposing but by mimicking their rhetoric and by implementing their preferred policies.3 and so we argue that the most extreme political geographies threatening the eu are not found in the menacing openness denounced by phobic eurosceptics or in the lands and cultures beyond the borders of either the eu or its member states. rather, we locate the most extreme geographies threatening the eu within europe itself and, particularly, within the politicians who, having the power fennia 195: 1 (2017) 87henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy to counter the imaginations fuelling euroscepticism, nationalism and xenophobia, have been normalising, internalising and hence further enabling them instead. they do not reduce the fear in society, but capitalise on it and further legitimise it under the pretense of ‘normality’.4 this is what hannah arendt referred to as ‘the banality of evil’: humanity’s greatest tragedies are patiently shaped neither mainly nor mostly by grandiose displays of monstrosity but by a thousand everyday rituals of mundane acquiescence with evil (arendt 1963). although the recent victories of seemingly moderate parties in the netherlands and france have been hailed for putting a stop to the ominous romanticism of eurosceptic nationalists, it would not be prudent to get too complacent. if their victories have sparked so much relief is only because they have averted a relapse into the catastrophical politics from whose catharsis today’s european prosperity first arose. hence, it would not be good judgement to take lightly the foreboding sight of the french national front – an antisemitic, holocaust-denialist political party with links to the nazi collaborationist vichy regime – and the dutch freedom party – which has called for the indiscriminate expulsion of a racially-defined social group – competing on equal footing with centrist parties. there is little to celebrate in seeing the politics of racial authoritarianism and nationalist bigotry competing as acceptable contenders against the politics of liberal democracy and openness. it is worth keeping in mind that even though the french national front and the dutch freedom party lost the elections, their respective electoral shares have never been bulkier and, most disturbingly, their formerly ostracised message has been rehabilitated: previously relegated to the fringes of the political spectrum, today it has become an acceptable political alternative. in what follows, we will first provide a discussion on the meaning of ‘extreme political geographies’. and we will discuss the tensions between normality and liberal democracy. then we will offer an analysis of three case studies in three western european countries that show how the european establishment’s policies and normalisation responses reinforce the very extreme politics they attempt to tame. our first case is france. the paris attacks of november 2015 heightened the fear of insecurity in france and the eu, yet the french state responded with a state of emergency that has opened the door to a more systematic and widespread insecurity perpetrated not by terrorist attacks but by abuses of the state. our second case is brexit. even though the uk’s departure from the eu was motivated by both an anxiety over loss of prosperity and by a nostalgia for former imperial greatness, the prospect of brexit now threatens to leave the uk poorer, perhaps disintegrated, more isolated and geopolitically less relevant. our last case is the ‘normality politics’ in the netherlands. the recent victory of the dutch people’s party for freedom and democracy (vvd) over the eurosceptic and islamophobic freedom party (pvv) in the dutch general elections of march 2017 was praised as timely obstruction to the rise of xenophobic eurosceptics. and yet, the vvd’s victory was a pyrrhic one: it was achieved by promoting a platform that embraces the xenophobia of the party it succeeded in keeping away from power. the autocratic construction of normality who defines what is ‘normal’, on which grounds and with which legitimacy? in a democracy, this is and should be an open question. for, unlike laws, which are enforced by the state, the enforcement of norms derives from an (inter)subjective internalisation of their inherent value. what is considered to be the norm and thus ‘normal’ is crucially dependent on the notion of normality and thus on the incompatibility against which normality necessarily defines itself. making pleas for normality presupposes an assumption about the opposites that define it: the extremes of abnormality. to be sure, there are very basic, commonsensical, perhaps universal norms whose intrinsic value could hardly be disputed regardless of context, such as those promoting good will or preventing harm among people. yet, we should hear some alarms ringing whenever governments of liberal democracies start to advocate normality. unlike liberal laws, which derive from principles that assume universal preference – for example, murder is illegal because presumably pretty much everyone detests getting killed and freedom of speech is enshrined as a sacrosanct principle because presumably everyone enjoys speaking up their mind –, norms stem not from an assumption of universal individual preference – the main referent of liberal philosophies – but are the expression of collective convention: the tyranny of the majority that liberal democracies try to prevent. 88 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies this is where the tension between pleas for normality and liberal values lies: collective conventions of what is normal have been traditionally used to oppress rather than to emancipate the individual. accusations of abnormality have been the basis to discriminate against minorities, disadvantaged groups and political opponents. hence, whenever the government of a liberal democracy starts making appeals to normality, it might be subverting the very principles of its political regime by asking people to conform not to laws drafted through mechanisms that ensure the respect for minorities and political liberties and which ultimately have an abstract best interest in mind but to the subjective social expectations of either an oppressive majority or an authoritarian minority. such a government might be dismissing legality in favour of the tyranny of tradition such as religion or romantic political myths like nationalism. for a society to define and enforce ‘normality’ is hence principally illiberal. taken to its extreme consequence, absolute normality presupposes absolute subjugation: only totalitarian dictatorships can enforce a complete homogenization of preferences, thoughts and actions or, in other words: a total normality.5 one could anticipate this claim (i.e., that total normality leads to totalitarianism) to be dismissed as a paranoid exaggeration. surely, a critical mind could plausibly counter, the appeals to normality from today’s moderate political parties across the eu need to be contextualized as a reaction against the resurrection of national socialism across the eu.6 thus, appeals to normality within the eu’s current geopolitical context are not aimed at a homogenization of preferences or at the promotion of an illiberal autocracy but rather the opposite: a return to the moderation and liberal values that national socialist parties shun. this counterargument would be persuasive if the rhetoric and policy-making did not contradict it so blatantly. although establishment parties across the eu are making appeals to normality while seemingly rejecting populist rhetoric, a closer look into their words and policies reveals that they are not rejecting the national socialist approach but merely sugar-coating it, making it politically acceptable, morally digestible or, in other words: normal. against this deceitfully reassuring aspiration for normality, it is however worth remembering that throughout most of history those who have been considered abnormal are precisely those whose protection liberal democracies consider their most ennobling historical triumphs: the formerly stigmatized as ‘sexually deviant’, ‘racially corrupted’, ‘morally aberrant’ (foucault 1965). that is why it should awaken some suspicion to see self-styled moderate and liberal political parties across the eu making pleas for normality, when it is precisely in the defense of diversity – and what is diversity if not a collection of abnormalities? – that liberal democracies have philosophically and historically cut their teeth (e.g. mill 1859, 89). this is one of the most defining characteristics of the post-war project of european integration: a cautiousness about the slippery slope of allowing power to define what is normal and what is not on the basis of phenotypical and cultural ideals. hence, the ‘normalisation-of-the-extreme’ agenda that we are seeing in today’s eu politics is arguably no less than perhaps the most self-harming political movement since the second world war. to illustrate our argument, in the following sections we train our eyes to perceive the hidden radicalisation behind three cases of normalisation of the extreme in france, the uk and the netherlands. the french state of emergency as the new normal the eu’s political centre has shifted so sharply to an illiberal right that seeing a socialist president, francois hollande, implementing policies otherwise evocative of far-right right political inclinations, was considered an appropriate response to the terrorist attacks on paris in november of 2015. the french president ordered the bombing of raqqa, a city four thousand kilometres away, a state of emergency to justify searches without warrants, and a reinstatement of france’s border controls. all this to avenge crimes committed by mostly french and belgian gunmen. we should be alarmed to see such illogical measures finding widespread support and unquestioned imitation across the eu (der spiegel 2015; sparrow 2015), for the geopolitical reasoning that justifies them is morally nefarious: the policies it advocates are dislocated from the geography that caused the problems they are intended to address. the significance of the french response is that it was by no means atypical. like france, the eu as a whole has been basically following france in its response to terrorist crimes. the mechanism of this response typically follows the following faulty yet recurrent reasoning. first, the attack is grounded on fennia 195: 1 (2017) 89henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy an essential ideological and cultural incompatibility: as an assault on ‘our values’ and ‘us’, which in turn leads to the perception of terrorists not merely as individual criminals or as militants of a terrorist network but rather as the undifferentiated members of a civilisational clash (huntington 1996). the hardening of the borders between ‘us’ and ‘the terrorists’, who are assumed to be ‘muslims’ in terms of both identity and motivations, in turn justifies the scapegoating and harassment of the already stigmatized muslim minority in the eu (roy 2006, 2017). second, although most terrorists are the eu’s own citizens, the response aims at avenging victims at home by carrying out military attacks that inevitably end murdering more innocent people in the middle east – for there is no such thing as “surgical bombings” – and sowing the suffering that legitimises the grievances fuelling islamist terrorist attacks against the eu (bueno lacy et al. 2016). third, the biopolitical response of the eu implies tightening its borders through a harder border management. this border reconfiguration is premised upon the structural breach of the eu’s international obligations to protect refugees and thus threatens the very foundations of the eu by promoting policies that run against both the humanism that the eu is supposed to take its inspiration from and the liberal principles it is supposed to champion. in the discourse about the causes of islamist terrorism in france or the eu, there is an absolute lack of awareness about france or the eu’s own responsibility. to the contrary: eu member states together with the us are targeting muslims, closing their borders to refugees and bombing isis in syria as if that would put an end to what is at least partially a secular home-grown threat. a telling contrast is found in the way the eu deals with extreme-nationalist terrorists, whose crimes are not only treated as individual crimes rather than as structural threats but whose ideologies find in the xenophobic and autocratic discourses and policies of the eu increasing legitimisation and motivation (europol 2016, 5). in the case of extreme-nationalist terrorism, often no ideology is exposed and problematised. in order to grasp the absurdity of the different approaches to islamist and extreme-nationalist terrorism, it is useful to imagine, as a counterfactual exercise, the eu implementing the same policies to address nationalist extremism as it uses to address islamist terrorism. imagine eu member states dropping bombs on the terrorists’ ‘hometowns’ and afterwards dismissing the many murdered civilians as mere ‘collateral casualties’. imagine media outlets and political leaders across the eu demanding christians, their churches and religious communities to expressly distance themselves from the right-wing extremists that claim christianity as a source of either inspiration or concern. imagine police forces across the eu breaking into the homes of christian families without warrants to harass and intimidate them on grounds of national security. imagine eu member states demanding that the borders be selectively closed to all christian refugees. it sounds as sensible as using a butcher’s knife to heal a broken bone. as argued above, the absurdity of the eu’s geopolitical narrative about islamic terrorism also lies exposed in the striking mismatch between the geography of the crimes carried out in paris and the geography charted by the french president’s response. “la france est en guerre”, françois hollande ventured in the aftermath of the attacks. yet, the perpetrators were by no stretch of the definition an “army” but a handful of mostly eu citizens. by framing these attacks as threats stemming from outside of france and from outside of europe, hollande – like george w. bush before him – justified the unjustifiable to give support for airstrikes bound to kill innocent people outside their own country in order to avenge compatriots killed by other compatriots. hollande further speculated that the attacks were directed “against the values we defend”. this is questionable. the ‘against-our-values’ rhetoric implies that muslims, for isis pretends to embody the purest version of islam and the french and belgian gunmen of paris claimed to be acting in its name, in general rather than isis in particular endorse such violence. plus, what we see happening is the targeting of places where the highest number of french people can be killed. the idea seems to be to kill random numbers of people in order to spread fear, not attack values per se. to turn this into a conflict between antagonistic value systems, which in the debate on islamist terrorism are always assumed but never specified, is only fuelling the unnecessary fear that justifies islamophobia and hence the dividing of eu societies along ethno-religious lines, which is precisely the aim of the psychopolitical strategy of islamist terrorists. what is more, the terrorist attacks, hollande advanced, were directed “against who we are”. this is even more unsound: as far as we know, the terrorists were all eu citizens; people who grew up in 90 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies france or belgium and spoke fluent french or flemish. we should be aware that islamic terrorism in the eu is not a foreign import but a homemade recipe. contrary to what the mainstream narrative suggests, islamic terrorism is not set against “the west” but it is by and large a product of the west itself. the terrorists that carried out the paris attacks should not be seen as either a product of islam or as isolated incidents, but rather as the most violent manifestation of a structural problem: the kind of westernisation that takes place through the spatial, economic and socio-political marginalisation of entire ethnic groups with a migratory background in the eu and through the european-assisted bombing that has fashioned the relentlessly violent tragedy of the middle east over the past decades. in this vein, the terrorist attacks on paris can also be seen as part of a longstanding tit-for-tat: isis’ response to france’s opération chammal, the french government’s military operation against isis (graham 2015). it is understandable that hollande was wary to admit such a link and thus that the terrorist attacks in paris were the price france paid for his government’s foreign policy in the middle east, which could confront him with the critique that he may have used military intervention in the past less to foster french strategic interests than to boost his plummeting popularity. the “againstour-values and against who we are” rationale seems to imply not merely a troubling prejudice but a convenient excuse for the fallout of failed imperial recklessness. eu member states’ military adventurism in africa and the middle east is thus coming back to the eu in the form of islamist terrorism. and this in turn is tapping on the resentment that some eu citizens with a migratory background have for a longstanding orientalist segregation in europe’s neighbourhoods as well as in its educational and labour markets – a discrimination worsened by memories of colonialism and the islamophobia unleashed since ‘the war on terror’ was declared in 2001. isis is targeting european muslims’ resentment by inserting their personal struggles into a greater epic of muslim martyrdom. what is more, we need to reflect upon the role that the memories of colonialism might play in the contexts of stigmatisation experienced by the french of maghrebi descent and how islamic terrorism offers them a tool to express their dissatisfaction. after all, terrorism was a tool of national liberation in algeria and the marginalisation faced by french of algerian descent in the land of their parents’ former colonial oppressor could beguile some of them – the most frustrated, the most unstable, the most aggravated – to compare their situation with their parents’ and dignify terrorism as a timehonoured roar of defiance against their own oppression. it is not a mere coincidence that the front national, a political family clan founded by jean-marie le pen – a blatant anti-semite, holocaust-denier and former torturer during the war of algeria (beaugé 2012) – has gained so much in popularity in a time when france is threatened by the islamic terrorism committed by its youth of maghrebi descent. so rather than a civilisational clash (à la huntington) between “the west” and “the islamic world”, what seems to be more helpful in explaining the conflict is a longstanding and unresolved clash between france and its former maghrebi colonies as well as within france itself. all this means that neither continuous military operations in the middle east nor more soldiers patrolling the streets of europe will address any of islamist terrorism’s structural causes. indeed, militarization might only create a bigger problem, for whenever the next terrorist attack strikes among soldier-patrolled streets, both people and politicians might call for ever stronger measures: more militarization, more profiling and more repression, which will lead to a more closed, more fearful, more authoritarian and less free society. to prevent this from unfolding it is urgent to question the geography that hollande and the eu are making accountable for islamist terrorist attacks. the people they point to as culprits as well as the places they want to bomb and the culture they frame as threatening have the goal to convince their electorates about the wisdom of their policies against terrorism. yet, there is no wisdom but petty recklessness behind them. the debate has turned into a well-rehearsed circus of banal representations of a civilisational war between islam and the west. misrepresentations have taken most of the political foreground and pushed alternative, more truthful representations, to the background. it is the same foolish response as the “war on terror” that was conceived by george w. bush’s administration. george bush’s “war on terror” was supposed to make ‘us’ safer. instead, this geopolitical rhetoric and the devastation it has inspired over the last 16 years has been intimately linked to the worst 16 years of islamic terrorism that europe has ever seen. the new normality is creating a ban-opticon: the disciplining of normality and the expelling or banishment of what is seen as ‘deviant’. it is the kind of governmentality that has been dominating fennia 195: 1 (2017) 91henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy geopolitical thinking around big swathes of the world, particularly the us and europe, since the attacks on new york in 2001 (bigo 2006a). the policies related to this new normality share two main characteristics: normalisation of a permanent state of emergency and violence on the one hand and practices of exceptionalism (agamben 2003), profiling practices and containing foreigners on the other. the concern is that there is “an orwellian society in the making, through a ‘liberal’ agenda” (bigo 2006b, 46). although a literary work of political fiction, orwell’s 1984 prescient description of the function that permanent war served to preserve the power of the dystopian totalitarian government he imagined is a useful analysis of how today’s violent normality operates (orwell 1949, 243): “it does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. all that is needed is that a state of war should exist.” migrants, asylum seekers, and political dissidents have been conflated with terrorists while the ceaseless outcries denouncing the erosion of the rights of marginalized and vulnerable groups as well as of the institutions intended to uphold them have been drowned in a sea of hysteria about terrorism. political speech and policies which long ago would have been immediately lambasted as inconceivably authoritarian are leading to the securitization and militarization of life across the eu. procedures of exclusion that seemed to have been relegated to the darkest and ever faintest memories of the european psyche are making a grand return to the fore of european politics and allowing us to envision the advent of a dystopian future. we should not be shy to ask: how is bombing the middle east a sensible answer to islamic terrorism when military intervention is responsible for the creation of isis in the first place? how are eu citizens becoming safer by states of emergency that allow the further stigmatisation of muslim minorities in europe while legitimising fears against syrian refugees and intra-communitarian eu migrants? how is killing indiscriminate numbers of muslims going to quench the hatred and determination that keeps fuelling islamist terrorism in the eu and beyond? how would stricter border controls have helped prevent french and belgian citizens from entering their own countries and causing the mayhem they did? brexit and the extreme geographies of imperial nostalgia our second case in point here regarding the normalisation of the extreme is brexit: the process spanning the decision to hold a referendum on britain’s membership to the eu to the uk’s formal notification to leave the eu until today. so far, brexit is perhaps the most dramatic consequence of the nostalgia for normality that europe is experiencing. like france, where the new normal is a state of emergency and a state increasingly alienated from parts of its own citizenry, the case of brexit constitutes an enlightening case study to cast light upon the extreme imaginary geographies being charted by the establishment. the same as france’s course, the british is leading to equally dramatic destinations. at the core of the brexit narrative we can find the same extraordinary rarity that has been fuelling populist insurgencies all across liberal democracies: a curious blend of postcolonial grievance and imperial nostalgia. the post-colonial grievance was recurrently evoked through the repetitive discourse of political emancipation. nigel farage – perhaps the uk’s most famous exponent of xenophobia and euroscepticism – and boris johnson – london’s previous major turned prominent eurosceptic – referred to the referendum’s date as ‘our independence day’ (bbc 2016; stone 2016). this is an unexpected metaphor. narratives of unjust oppression redressed through independence constitute the central trope of former colonies’ national mythologies as well as the historical outrage fuelling decolonial theories (see e.g. fanon 1961; mignolo 1992). hence, it is surprising to find the same postcolonial grievances in the mainstream discourse of a country that is perhaps the epitome of european imperialism.7 the british discourse of emancipation from the eu’s ‘oppression’ is, in turn, based on the two accusations most recurrently denounced by the figureheads of the uk’s campaign to leave the eu: freeing the uk from brussels’ dictates and “taking back control of our borders” (ross 2016). although it goes without saying that the uk joined and can leave the eu voluntarily, what gives this discourse – and any other – its strength to shape people’s minds and actions is its repetition and thus its ability 92 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies to contest or silence alternatives. although misguided – for neither is the eu a dictatorship nor is the uk by any stretch of the definition its colony – the domination that these discourses acquired through their sustained replication endowed them with the status of plausible claims to truth: they portrayed the project of european integration that has achieved the most opulent prosperity europe has ever seen as a dictatorship and the open borders that have allowed such prosperity as its main threat. the deleterious effects of the eu’s open borders were evoked by theresa may’s insistence on the uk leaving both the european convention on human rights and the european court of justice (ashtana & mason 2016). she denounced the european convention on human rights as a threat to british security because it prevented the deportation of terrorists. these denunciations not only exaggerated the islamist threat (for they did not prevent the uk from punishing terrorists) but they conflated islamist terrorism with migration from muslim countries. overall, the anxieties about the echr and the ecj uttered by may suggest that the particular kind of immigrant that brexiteers have as their concern is, more than any abstract immigrant, ‘the muslim immigrant’. this cuts to the core of brexit: not only has it been a process obsessed with immigration but particularly preoccupied with muslim immigration in particular (jeory 2016; wadsworth 2017). the famous ukip poster reading “breaking point” showed this strikingly: in its visual composition, the main slogan championed by the campaign for the uk to leave the eu, “to take back control of our borders”, is reinforced by an image picturing a thick long line of dark-skinned refugees (fig. 1; stewart & mason 2016). several media outlets pointed out that the image of this poster is a reminiscent of nazi propaganda film warning about the jewish threat (fig. 2; stewart & mason 2016). the poster of farage’s party ukip promotes anxiety not only about immigrants but, by contextual association with the refugee crisis that has been grabbing headlines since the summer of 2015, also for the many asylum seekers from muslim-majority countries that have been seeking refuge in the eu ever since. the discursive thread of subjugation to a project of self-destructive miscegenation unscrupulously imposed by a treacherous elite is a common trope traditionally found in the discourses of the european and american far right (ferber & kimmel 2000). for example, anders breivik’s manifesto, fig. 1. nigel farage, one of the main advocates for the uk to leave the eu, posing in front of a poster whose visual composition conflates high numbers of refugees from muslim countries with the eu’s failure to its member states. this poster was part of the campaign aimed at persuading british voters to cast their ballots in favour of the proposal for the uk to renounce its eu membership ahead of the referendum that decided this question. fig. 2. comparison of the poster ‘breaking point’, used by the campaign aimed at persuading the british electorate to vote in favour of the uk to leave the eu, and a nazi propaganda film picturing large streams of jewish refugees as a threat (source: indy100). https://www.indy100.com/article/people-are-calling-out-ukips-new-antieu-poster-for-resembling-outright-nazi-propaganda--wktyub18ew fennia 195: 1 (2017) 93henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy 2083: a european declaration of independence, espouses the emancipation from this yoke as its title and motivation: “more than 90% of the eu and national parliamentarians and more than 95% of journalists are supporters of european multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing islamic colonisation of europe; yet, they do not have the permission of the european peoples to implement these doctrines” (breivik 2011, 4). through this narrative wizardry, the project of political integration that has created unseen prosperity in europe is turned into betrayal, while muslim immigrants and refugees are turned into colonizers. this is not only historically nonsensical but morally devious: by turning the vulnerable into the powerful and the powerful into the vulnerable, this misrepresentation of power relations legitimizes the exploitation of the weak by the strong. brexiteers have adopted this very apocryphal narrative, an affinity that has revealed yet another thing (williams & law 2012): it is not so much immigration brexiteers are against, but rather a certain kind of immigration; theirs is a selective xenophobia, an islamophobic and illiberal phobia, a fear of a muslim geography that cannot be fended off using the tools of liberal legal frameworks, for it is the liberal principles of the rule of law, equality before the law, non-discrimination and respect for human rights that prevents taking the necessary measures to exclude ‘the muslim’’. “we are back to being a normal country, in charge of our own laws and able to start making our own relationships with the rest of the world. maybe even reengaging with the commonwealth”, was the statement uttered by nigel farage the day after the referendum on brexit. although much of the enthusiasm for the uk’s drive to leave the eu was the desire to curb immigration, brexiteers have consistently expressed an odd enthusiasm for an open-borders agreement with the commonwealth after leaving the eu. this project is known as the canzuk union (bennett 2016): a confederation of commonwealth countries – canada, australia, new zealand and britain – allowing free trade, the free movement of people and mutual defence. the rough brushstroke of this grand scheme paints not so much an aversion for open borders as an aversion for the kind of open borders that the eu stands for. in contrast to the eu, this ‘empire 2.0’ envisions a mostly white union of english-speaking peoples based on the symbolic legacy of the british empire, a structure in which the uk acquires the privileged association with ‘the motherland’. what the discourses and allusions surrounding the references to the commonwealth suggest is that it might not have been open borders and immigration what angered british voters as much as an anxiety over a notion of diluting english-speaking whiteness, which reminded them of homogeneity and dominance they had lost. the anxiety over open borders expressed by the proponents of brexit might be understood as a fear to be mixed with the very subjects fig. 2. comparison of the poster ‘breaking point’, used by the campaign aimed at persuading the british electorate to vote in favour of the uk to leave the eu, and a nazi propaganda film picturing large streams of jewish refugees as a threat (source: indy100). https://www.indy100.com/article/people-are-calling-out-ukips-new-antieu-poster-for-resembling-outright-nazi-propaganda--wktyub18ew 94 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies that the british empire colonized mixed with a desire to recover the british empire’s unapologetical domination over its former subjects in order to overcome the burthensome constraints of the rule of law and simply get rid of them. it is imperialism coated with the politically correct nuance of anticolonialism. it is a perversion of history, geography and language. it is newspeak. under this light, brexit may appear to be a quixotic attempt to revive british imperialism. and yet, like we have seen in the case of france, it is not the extremists of ukip or the english defence league who are carrying out brexit but the elites of the british conservative establishment. theresa may’s government approach to brexit as business as usual and a normal political course disguises an uncomfortable truth: the establishment tories are not only the true radicals but very efficient ones, for they are able to take traditional politics by assault while sailing under the flag of normality. they are the trojan horse that a certain kind of mild authoritarianism is employing to infiltrate liberal democracies, whose gullible electorates are receiving it as the gift it purports to be rather than as the threat it may turn out to be. the nostalgia for the ‘normality’ associated to the commonwealth constitutes a fascinating geographical imagination revolving around the debate on brexit. mentions of the commonwealth have been plentiful in the debate surrounding brexit, as if this reminiscence of the british empire hid the key for its resurgence (tomlinson & dorling 2016). so much of this geopolitical imagination points to a desire to go back to the unequal power relation of empire, where the uk got “to have its cake and eat it” (elgot & rankin 2016). as theresa may put it (batchelor 2017), “we want to make sure that we are ending the jurisdiction of the european court of justice and that we are able to control movement of people coming from the eu,” a desire that taken together with the nostalgia for the commonwealth suggests that the loss of empire may have misled the british to soften and refrain from dealing with the non-native with the force or violence they would otherwise deserve; as if the eu was emasculating for repressing the british empire’s virtuous sense of righteous violence. moreover, it is important to remember that it was not fringe politicians like ukip’s nigel farage who set in motion the process that has led to britain’s exit from the eu. the referendum was started by david cameron, a liberal pro-eu prime minister who, by his own choice, decided to put the uk’s eu membership to a referendum whose validity he did not even take the care of condition to either a representative voter turnout or a qualified majority. cameron’s promises to reduce immigration and to hold a referendum on the uk’s permanence in the eu were his ways of appeasing populist xenophobes as well as eurosceptics within his own party. david cameron should have known – as well as may must know – that that the promise of more border controls and a better future is at best dubious. brexit is like a “leap of faith” attempting to bridge an abyss of warnings so wide that no rational government would be expected to have even considered it. not only does the economic outlook loom devastating but the integrity and even the peace of the country are at peril. spain has acquired a veto over brexit negotiations due to the british enclave of gibraltar; the conflict in northern ireland could break out again or northern ireland could break away and join ireland; and scotland seems in course to push for a new referendum of independence. whatever this normality might bring, it seems that it will be anything but the easiness and comfort it that its proponents promised. instead, it looks as if a rather extreme path littered with perils and uncertainties lied ahead. how is that taking back control? and at what price for the uk and the eu? the disconnection between policy and interests in the strategy pursued by the british governments that have led to brexit and are in charge of its negotiation with the eu should make us rethink the way we speak about traditional european parties. perhaps, rather than conceptualising them as establishment parties, it would be more analytically useful to regard them as not so different from the radical, deeply ideological and irrational political parties of the fringes or perhaps even as dangerous extremists. ‘act normal or go away’: extreme dutch normality perhaps no other political discourse condenses the hypocrisy of the political centre’s pleas for normality as roundly as that of the biggest party in the recent dutch election, the dutch vvd (the people’s party for freedom and democracy) (wittenberg 2017). ahead of the elections of 2017, the vvd’s political programme charted a geographical imagination of a threatening ‘outside’ that matched fennia 195: 1 (2017) 95henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy the tone of the populist rhetoric of the stridently xenophobe and islamophobe party of wilders, the pvv (wijnberg 2016). in short, the vvd´s programme depicts the dutch as a peace-loving people “who simply want to get along with everyone”; helpful people “who will give each other a hand in case of need”. the contrast are the destitute immigrants taking away the comfort of the well-natured, hardworking dutch, threatening the prosperity of “dutchmen who worry about the international misery they see replicated in their own neighbourhood”, migrants who are also insinuated to be irrationally unfriendly and violent, unlike the people which the vvd stands for: “people who want to live a comfortable life. people who find it logical that you have to do your best to achieve it”.8 in a letter9 printed in the national newspapers that openly flirted with the islamophobic right, mark rutte, the dutch prime minister, in a thinly veiled attempt at political opportunism, crafted the slogan “normaal. doen.” (act.normal.) his message was “doe normaal of ga weg” (act normal or go away). the subtext is clear: those who do not behave according to what he assumes as the norm. those deviating from the norm clearly did not presuppose misbehaved white, unhyphenated dutch, but rather muslims and immigrants overall: those with an insecure footing on dutch society, the ones holding two nationalities or the naturalized dutch, the immigrants and their ‘half-dutch’ children, the refugees. this subtext becomes evident if one is familiar with the dutch context, where criminality has long been wrongly associated with moroccan immigrants and their offspring (driessen et al. 2014), and thus where the formulation ‘act normal or go away’ carries the unambiguous prejudice about moroccans’ overrepresentation in criminality as well as a veiled threat of expulsion from dutch society predicated on their implicit second-class citizenship: ‘act normal or go away’ within the dutch political context is equivalent to ‘act dutch or go back to your country’. neither a very reassuringly liberal message nor a policy that could reasonably be applied without breaking the dutch rule of law. how would it be possible to expel dutch-moroccan citizens otherwise? these few words ‘act normal or go away’ perhaps best capture the political strategy that not only the vvd but all the centre political parties in europe have been following over the past years. the ‘actnormal’ politics has become the new extreme. it is the conservative and centre parties who have shifted to the right: a right that not so long ago would most definitely have been considered extreme, yet is now seen as the new normal. illustratively, a wave of international relief flooded international news outlets after the vvd – and not the pvv – came out as the biggest party in the dutch elections of march 2017 (henley 2017). the headlines the next day were a parade of renewed confidence in normality. in his victory speech, rutte declared that the netherlands had put a stop to the rise of populism (e.g. henley 2017; wildman 2017). most of the press closely followed his enthusiasm. after trump’s victory, brexit and a year of looming populist victories in the dutch and french elections, these were good news. however, the enthusiasm seems to be unjustified. an analysis made by the “nederlandse orde van advocaten’’ (dutch order of barristers) published before the dutch elections of march of 2017 assessed how the different political programmes of the dutch political parties might fall into three categories: 1) improve the rule of law; 2) be potentially in conflict with the rule of law or; 3) endanger the rule of law. according to this classification, after the pvv – the dutch far-right party of the islamophobic geert wilders – the vvd, which declared itself as defender of normality and the party of law and order, was evaluated as the party whose programme most endangered the dutch rule of law as well as international treaties and human rights. this reveals the gravity that the autoimmune disorder in the eu has reached: one of the most egalitarian and liberal countries in the eu has adopted the rhetoric and policies of the very far-right party it is now been praised for having kept at bay. the new freedom across the eu is being framed in narrow, exclusionary terms: the freedom to close borders and put locks to keep away those we irrationally dislike. conclusion over the last years, political discourse in the eu has painted a picture of openness ever more defaced by increasing outside threats. yet, what this painting fails to show is that the reality inside the eu is more threatening to the eu than the outside threat we are supposed to fear. the eu is suffering from a politics of autoimmunity. the eu’s policies to address islamic terrorism are doing more harm than 96 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies terrorism itself. states of exception are encroaching on the liberties of the eu’s vulnerable muslim minority. the bombing of isis is causing the murder of innocent people and thus breeding further islamist radicalisation (roberts 2017). letting military forces patrol european metropoles and thus paving the way for the militarization of civilian life and the establishment of ever more permanent states of emergency is doing more to undermine eu citizens rights than the threat of terrorism. the ever more paranoid borderism (van houtum & bueno lacy 2015) and inhumane biopolitical practices to keep refugees from trespassing the eu’s borders is legitimising the overall closing of internal eu borders and thus threatening schengen and the openness on which the eu fundamentally depends. the cooperation with authoritarian countries characterised by a disregard for life in order to keep terrorists and refugees at bay is doing more to radicalise islamist and right-wing extremists than any ideologue could. yet, instead of addressing the prosaic roots of the problem, the eu has made it normal to address the perceptions of the problem. in consequence, the eu’s responses are not capable of solving the problem which they are supposed to mend; rather, they are merely intended to assuage people’s fears by giving them the impression they address their concerns. our thesis here is that, by increasingly allying themselves with the forces of xenophobic national socialism, the centre parties that used to dominate the eu’s political landscape have sold out their liberal and social democratic principles – principles which have led every single eu member state to top the human development index’s rankings and to experience the longest, most prosperous lapse of peace europeans have ever seen. the depth of radicalisation among traditional eu political parties is of such magnitude that the problem is not even an ideological contest between the merits of either socialism or liberalism or between conservative and progressive ideologies. we tend to focus on the most inflaming speeches, the most impressive acts and the most entertaining circus through which media and politicians keep mutually constituting one another and making each other mutually relevant. people like marine le pen, geert wilders, boris johnson and nigel farage in europe – and further afield autocratic and narcissistic leaders like putin, erdogan and trump – are nothing but the most recent refinement, the grotesque excess of a political theatre put in place and normalised by the establishment itself. we are too focused on all their theatrical grandiloquent gestures, apocalyptical depictions, impressive military operations, handshakes and overacting. the unmeasured amount of attention that both media and the political debate overall give to the antics of our political parties is precisely what makes them relevant regardless of the senselessness of either their statements or policies. the irrationality of their policies is beside the point, what counts is the aesthetic appeal of their words and policies and the ability that these give them to reach the news and remain a constant topic of discussion in social media. the banality of irrational repetition creates purely discursive, non-existent realities that nonetheless exist by the mere act of being ceaselessly repeated and thus normalised. politics thus becomes a daily reality show of aesthetically impressive dramas, in which politicians themselves are the key scriptwriters as well as their main acts and performers (wijnberg 2017). furthermore, our obsession with the most melodramatic extremists might be clouding our sight, preventing us to see that the main threat to freedom and liberal democracy are not necessarily them, but us, who sustain them by either supporting the political parties that surreptitiously imitate them or by resisting too little the small but cumulative and thus significant steps leading towards more surveillance, fear and exclusion. a society that not only allows this normality to be acceptable but successful and which encumbers their advocates to the leading positions of its political apparatuses has no one else to blame for its problems but itself. the low-key banality of evil is at work: it is the moderate middle classes voting for self-fashioned centrist parties what is dismantling the system on which the prosperity of these very middle classes depends. in spite of all their theatrically impressive spectacles, it is not the neonazis or the islamic terrorists who we should be most concerned about. they are terrible symptoms of a much larger, much more structural problem. they are the excuses. the ones with the power to change the system and the ones indeed steering the system to the right are the middle classes; the voters so obsessed with luxury, celebrity and so unconcerned with inequality, climate change, and the violence promoted by massive military apparatuses which operate with impunity and unaccountability at the border and all around them. perhaps the epitome of the moral hypocrisy upon which this extreme normality has fennia 195: 1 (2017) 97henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy been built is manifested in the deals between turkey, libya and other autocratic states that the eu has been reaching out to in order to contain refugees. as if there was no other way for the richest countries, some of the most efficient bureaucracies and some of the most educated liberal democracies in the world to deal with refugees and migration than to act like thugs, abetting torture, death, rape, mass graves and the worst kind of racism (dearden 2017). the sophistication of the eu’s border system lies in its ability to endow all the abuses that it directly or indirectly causes (rape, torture, kidnapping, murder, robbery, enslavement, etc.) with the appearance of morality. we want to believe it is others who abuse them or cause their demise. we want to believe it is them who are reckless or stupid enough to cross the mediterranean and kill themselves. we want to believe that the eu exists in a geopolitical void where its historical and contemporary responsibility in the dramas of africa and the middle east in no way affect politics and life in europe. this is the banality of evil of our time: those who define themselves as the normal legitimise the manufacturing of an abundance of geographical imaginations that present the outside, the beyond europe as a threatening geopolitical geography – terrorists, hordes of destitute and culturally incompatible migrants – to promote what ultimately are their egoistic interests. the problem with these extreme geographies is not only that they hide the true people, places and cultures that are responsible for the threats that afflict european societies, but by blaming the wrong geographies this inaccurate ‘cartography’ keeps in place policies that sustain these threats through a vicious circle, always blaming the consequences without ever being aware of the causes. it is the establishment, the eu institutions and the center political parties who are yielding ground to all those who threaten the eu, its peace and its prosperity. at least populists are either honest or obvious about their dislike for liberalism, human rights, equality and open borders. that is what makes the deception of mainstream parties the most troubling: they present themselves as the standard bearers of morality, common sense, practicality, level headedness and yet they are the ones cunningly undermining the system. their political programmes make pleas to return to normality, and yet, once one examines what this normality implies, one notices that it is perhaps them who constitute the biggest threat to the very normality they claim to want to preserve. after the respite provided by the results of the french and dutch elections of 2017, emmanuel macron and angela merkel are being urged to take the staff of liberal democracy and preserve what is left of a ‘free world’ and an eu that seem to be crumbling (the economist 2017a). however, if they are to be successful their efforts will demand more than cosmetic changes or a different tune of gestures and speech (the economist 2017b). it will require addressing the structural causes that are increasingly and relentlessly legitimizing the circular violence that keeps turning both the eu’s territory and its surrounding neighbourhood into ever more insecure geographies. this includes stopping the shameful deaths in the mediterranean once and for all (bueno lacy & van houtum 2013; ferrergallardo & van houtum 2014; van houtum & bueno lacy 2016; unhcr 2016), which in turn requires legal pathways to the eu and a comprehensive eu-wide asylum system. and it requires the eu’s taking responsibility for its commitments not only to international refugee law but also to the very ethos enshrined in its foundational documents and thus no more deals with authoritarian states to outsource the asylum procedures and the eu’s border controls (ec 2006; bialasiewicz 2012). these extreme measures sold under the pretense of normality are creating dangers far bigger than the extremism they are trying to mend. we need self-reflection. we cannot fall into the easy anthropocentric trap of believing that those who attack us hate ‘our values and who we are’ even though they grow up in the same countries as we do and live among us. it is eu member states and eu societies which are producing people that feel alienated from society and discriminated to such a degree that they can be persuaded to kill in order to exact their vengeance or let out their frustration. this episode in the history of the eu is perhaps the most serious threat the eu has ever faced, not because of terrorism but because eu leaders seem readier to deface the very ethos upon which the eu has been built than confront how eu member states’ bigotry towards its muslims as well as their unscrupulous foreign policies in the middle east are as responsible for terrorism as isis. surely, criminal and terrorist acts need to be properly addressed by the police, but that will not be enough. 98 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies europe can only defeat isis with an equally appealing counter-narrative. the eu needs to provide its citizens of arab-muslim heritage with a narrative that allows them to simultaneously identify as both muslims and europeans. such narrative should allow them to claim a proud historical place in european history that they can use to claim the space that xenophobic ethno-nationalists try to deny them whenever they talk about a europe that is essentially christian, white or an anti-muslim. as long as western values keep including the indiscriminate marginalisation and stigmatisation of european muslims and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians in the middle east, the eu should not be surprised to find some of that hate knocking at its door at some point or another. moreover, the eu should also address terrorism by avoiding taking part in military invasions in africa and the middle east; by dismantling their ethnically segregated neighbourhoods, educational systems and labour markets; by creating a historiography of europe and a symbolism of the eu that gives both a geographical, historical, political and emotional recognition to an almost entire millennium of arab-muslim influences that paved the way for europe’s renaissance (brotton 2002); and by promoting more compassionate, rational and sustainable policies for the reception and integration of muslim migrants and asylum seekers through the creation of a border management adapted to the unavoidable mobility of today’s globalized world. a specter is haunting europe, the ghost of europe’s own shadow, leading to panicked reactions that are seriously self-inflicting. there is nothing normal about that. notes 1 although formally the national front has renounced the overt anti-semitism of jean-marie le pen, telling disclosures by marine le pen suggest that this is a mere electoral convenience and politically-correct formality (mcauley 2017). 2 geert wilders has been a representative in the dutch lower chamber since 1998 and marine le pen grew up involved in the politics of her father’s party (of which she has been an active member since 1986). 3 for an insight into this phenomenon, which can been categorized under the umbrella term of euroscepticism, see brack and startin (2015). 4 to illustrate, the prime-minister of the netherlands, mark rutte, gave an interview in which he stated that normality should be the new norm. later, in the election campaign of 2017, his party vvd, focused its entire campaign on normality. their main slogan was: doe. normal. vvd (‘’act. normal. vvd’’). likewise in his plea for a brexit, nigel farage repeatedly argued that britain should be a normal, independent country again. similarly, in france, after the terror attacks in 2016, the state of emergency, which is an exceptional measure, has become the new normal. 5 arrow’s impossibility theorem postulates that individual preferences can be all the same only when they are enforced by a dictator to be so. 6 although the nomenclature for national socialist parties across the eu has prefered the term ‘populist’, ‘eurosceptic’ or ‘nationalist’, calling them national socialist is far from a hysteria. today’s insurgent parties across the eu are reviving the nationalist symbols of ethnic and racial homogeneity while promoting socialist policies as the privileges of ‘the people’ contained within their racialized boundaries. 7 see stuart laycock (2012) all the countries we've ever invaded: and the few we never got round to. although a rather sensationalist account based on a liberal definition of invasion (it claims britain has invaded the territories of 171 out of 193 un member states), its larger point is revealing: an overwhelming proportion of the world has been touched by british imperialism in one way or another. 8 the quote in the original reads: “we weten voor wie we het doen: optimistische en nuchtere nederlanders die van aanpakken weten en waarde hechten aan onze typisch nederlandse manier van leven. nederlanders die zich zorgen maken over de internationale ellende die ze terugzien in hun eigen buurt. nederlanders die gewoon goed contact willen hebben met iedereen, maar de nederlandse gewoonten niet willen inleveren. wij staan voor al die mensen die een prettig leven willen leiden. mensen die het logisch vinden dat je daar zelf je best voor moet doen. mensen die dat ook van anderen verwachten. en mensen die elkaar een handje helpen als het niet lukt ” (vvd 2017, 7). 9 <https://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/> https://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/ fennia 195: 1 (2017) 99henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy references agamben, g. (2003) state of exception. the university of chicago press, chicago and london. arendt, h. (1963) eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. penguin classics, new york. ashtana, a. & mason, r. (2016) uk must leave european convention on human rights, says theresa may. the guardian 25.04.2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/25/uk-must-leaveeuropean-convention-on-human-rights-theresa-may-eu-referendum> batchelor, t. (2017) theresa may admits freedom of movement could continue after brexit. independent 29.03.2017. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/article-50-brexit-latesttheresa-may-freedom-of-movement-after-leave-eu-a7657111.html> bauman, z. (1989) modernity and the holocaust. cornell university press, new york. bbc (2015) migrants crisis: slovakia 'will only accept christians'. bbc news 19.08.2015. <http://www. bbc.com/news/world-europe-33986738> bbc (2016) eu referendum: farage declares “independence day”. bbc 24.06.2016. <http://www.bbc. com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36613295> beaugé, f. (2012) guerre d'algérie : le poignard de le pen. le monde afrique 16.03.2012. <http://www. lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2012/03/16/le-grand-blond-au-poignard_1669337_3212.html> bennett, j. (2016) a time for audacity: how brexit has created the canzuk option. pole to pole publishing. bialasiewicz, l. (2012) off-shoring and out-sourcing the borders of europe: libya and eu border work in the mediterranean. geopolitics 17(4) 843–866. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2012.660579 bigo, d. (2006a) globalized (in)security: the field and the ban-opticon. in bigo, d. (ed.) terror, insecurity and liberty. illiberal practices of liberal regimes after 9/11, 10–48. routledge, london and new york. bigo, d. (2006b) security, exception, ban and surveillance. in lyon, d. (ed.) theorizing surveillance: the panopticon and beyond, 46–47.routledge, london and new york. brack, n. & startin, n. (2015) introduction: euroscepticism, from the margins to the mainstream. international political science review 36(3) 239–249. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512115577231 breivik, a. (2011) 2083: a european manifesto of independence. brotton, j. (2002) the renaissance bazaar: from the silk road to michelangelo. oxford university press, oxford. bueno lacy, r., van houtum, h. & raaphorst, k. (2016) recycling violence: how maps about terrorism fail to round up the argument. compass to cartopolitics 17.06.2016. <https://compasstocartopolitics. wordpress.com/2016/06/17/recycling-violence-how-maps-about-terrorism-fail-to-round-up-theargument/> bueno lacy,r. & van houtum, h. (2013) europe’s border disorder. e-international relations. <http:// www.e-ir.info/2013/12/05/europes-border-disorder/> cienski, j. (2017) why poland doesn’t want refugees. politico 05.02.2017 <http://www.politico.eu/article/ politics-nationalism-and-religion-explain-why-poland-doesnt-want-refugees/> darroch, g. (2016) geert wilders found guilty of inciting discrimination. the guardian 09.12.2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/09/geert-wilders-found-guilty-in-hate-speech-trial-butno-sentence-imposed> dearden, l. (2017) harrowing footage exposes 'inhuman' treatment of refugees trapped in libya’. the independent 20.02.2017. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ross-kemp-libya-migranthell-video-documentary-sky-refugees-torture-rape-detention-mediterranean-a7587811.html> der spiegel (2015) merkels kabinett beschließt syrien-einsatz der bundeswehr. spiegel online 01.12.2015. <http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundesregierung-beschliesst-syrien-einsatzder-bundeswehr-a-1065382.html> driessen, f.m.h.m., duursma, f. & broekhuizen, j. (2014) de ontwikkeling van de criminaliteit van rotterdamse autochtone en allochtone jongeren van 12 tot 18 jaar. politie & wetenschap, apeldoorn and bureau driessen, utrecht. <https://www.piresearch.nl/files/1683/ driessen+e.a.+(2014)+de+ontwikkeling+van+de+criminaliteit+van.pdf> [ec] european commision (2006) communication from the commission to the european parliament, the european council, the council and the european investment bank on establishing a new partnership framework with third countries under the european agenda on migration. european commission/com(2016) 385 07.06.2006. <http://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/docs_ autres_institutions/commission_europeenne/com/2016/0385/com_com(2016)0385_en.pdf> elgot, j. & j. rankin (2016) minister dismisses 'have cake and eat it' brexit note. the guardian 29.11.2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/29/greg-clark-minister-dismisses-having-cake-andeating-it-brexit-notes> europol (2016) european union terrorism situation and trend report 2016. europol, the hague. <https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/211-terrorist-attacks-carried-out-in-eu-memberstates-in-2015-new-europol-report-reveals> https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/25/uk-must-leave-european-convention-on-human-rights-theresa-may-eu-referendum https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/25/uk-must-leave-european-convention-on-human-rights-theresa-may-eu-referendum http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/article-50-brexit-latest-theresa-may-freedom-of-movement-after-leave-eu-a7657111.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/article-50-brexit-latest-theresa-may-freedom-of-movement-after-leave-eu-a7657111.html http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33986738 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33986738 http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2012/03/16/le-grand-blond-au-poignard_1669337_3212.html http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2012/03/16/le-grand-blond-au-poignard_1669337_3212.html https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2012.660579 https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512115577231 https://compasstocartopolitics.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/recycling-violence-how-maps-about-terrorism-fail-to-round-up-the-argument/ https://compasstocartopolitics.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/recycling-violence-how-maps-about-terrorism-fail-to-round-up-the-argument/ https://compasstocartopolitics.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/recycling-violence-how-maps-about-terrorism-fail-to-round-up-the-argument/ http://www.e-ir.info/2013/12/05/europes-border-disorder/ http://www.e-ir.info/2013/12/05/europes-border-disorder/ http://www.politico.eu/article/politics-nationalism-and-religion-explain-why-poland-doesnt-want-refugees/ http://www.politico.eu/article/politics-nationalism-and-religion-explain-why-poland-doesnt-want-refugees/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/09/geert-wilders-found-guilty-in-hate-speech-trial-but-no-sentence-imposed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/09/geert-wilders-found-guilty-in-hate-speech-trial-but-no-sentence-imposed http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ross-kemp-libya-migrant-hell-video-documentary-sky-refugees-torture-rape-detention-mediterranean-a7587811.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ross-kemp-libya-migrant-hell-video-documentary-sky-refugees-torture-rape-detention-mediterranean-a7587811.html http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundesregierung-beschliesst-syrien-einsatz-der-bundeswehr-a-1065382.html http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundesregierung-beschliesst-syrien-einsatz-der-bundeswehr-a-1065382.html https://www.piresearch.nl/files/1683/driessen+e.a.+(2014)+de+ontwikkeling+van+de+criminaliteit+van.pdf https://www.piresearch.nl/files/1683/driessen+e.a.+(2014)+de+ontwikkeling+van+de+criminaliteit+van.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/docs_autres_institutions/commission_europeenne/com/2016/0385/com_com(2016)0385_en.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/docs_autres_institutions/commission_europeenne/com/2016/0385/com_com(2016)0385_en.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/29/greg-clark-minister-dismisses-having-cake-and-eating-it-brexit-notes https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/29/greg-clark-minister-dismisses-having-cake-and-eating-it-brexit-notes https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/211-terrorist-attacks-carried-out-in-eu-member-states-in-2015-new-europol-report-reveals https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/211-terrorist-attacks-carried-out-in-eu-member-states-in-2015-new-europol-report-reveals 100 fennia 195: 1 (2017)reflections: extreme geographies fanon, f. (2017) the wretched of the earth. la découverte/poche, paris. ferber, a.l. & kimmel, m. (2000) reading right: the western tradition in white supremacist discourse. sociological focus 33(2) 193–213. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380237.2000.10571165 ferrer-gallardo, x. & van houtum, h. (2014) the deadly eu border control. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 13(2) 295–304. foucault, m. (1965) madness and civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason. vintage, new york. graham, d.a. (2015) what is france doing in syria? the atlantic 15.11.2015. <https://www.theatlantic. com/author/david-a-graham/> henley, j. (2017) dutch pm mark rutte sees off election threat of geert wilders. the guardian 16.03.2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/15/pm-mark-rutte-set-to-beat-geertwilders-in-dutch-election> henley, j. (2017) europe's governments signal relief after dutch election defeats far right. the guardian 16.03.2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/europes-governments-signal-relief-asdutch-election-defeats-far-right> huntington, s. (1996) the clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. simon & schuster uk ltd., london. jeory, t. (2016) uk entering 'unchartered territory' of islamophobia after brexit vote. the independent 27.06.2016. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-muslim-racism-hate-crimeislamophobia-eu-referendum-leave-latest-a7106326.html> laycock, s. (2012) all the countries we've ever invaded: and the few we never got round to. the history press, gloucestershire, uk. mcauley, j. (2017) marine le pen: france “not responsible” for deporting jews during holocaust. the washington post 10.04.2017. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/10/ marine-le-pen-doesnt-deny-that-french-jews-were-handed-over-to-nazis-but-she-claims-france-is-notto-blame/?utm_term=.374d844338f0> mignolo, w. (1992) the darker side of the renaissance: literacy, territoriality, & colonization. university of michigan press, ann arbor, mi. mill, j.s. (1859) on liberty. the walter scott publishing co., ltd., london, new york and melbourne. <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm> olusonga, d. (2017) empire 2.0 is dangerous nostalgia for something that never existed. the guardian 19.03.2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/empire-20-is-dangerousnostalgia-for-something-that-never-existed> orwell, g. (1949) 1984. planet ebbook. <https://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf> roberts, r. (2017) us-led coalition killed more syrian civilians than isis or russia in march, figures show. the independent 03.04.2017. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-coalitionair-strikes-isis-russia-kill-more-civilians-march-middle-east-iraq-syria-network-for-a7663881.html> ross, t. (2016) boris johnson interview: we can be the 'heroes of europe' by voting to leave. the telegraph 14.05.2016. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-interview-wecan-be-the-heroes-of-europe-by-voting/> roy, o. (2006) france’s oedipal islamist complex. foreign policy 07.01.2006. <http://foreignpolicy. com/2016/01/07/frances-oedipal-islamist-complex-charlie-hebdo-islamic-state-isis/> roy, o. (2017) who are the new jihadis? the guardian 13.04.2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/ news/2017/apr/13/who-are-the-new-jihadis> safdar, a. (2016) french police 'abuse' muslims under emergency laws. al jazeera 04.02.2016. <http://www. aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/french-police-abuse-muslims-emergency-laws-160204035243925.html> sparrow, a. (2015) cameron wins syria airstrikes vote by majority of 174 – as it happened. the guardian 03.12.2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2015/dec/02/syria-airstrikesmps-debate-vote-cameron-action-against-isis-live> stewart, h. & mason, r. (2016) nigel farage's anti-migrant poster reported to police. the guardian 16.06.2016. <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breakingpoint-poster-queue-of-migrants> stone, j. (2016) eu referendum: boris johnson says thursday could become britain's 'independence day'. independent 21.06.2016. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-borisjohnson-independence-day-live-debate-bbc-vote-leave-brexit-remain-a7094531.html> the economist (2017a) if macron fails, germany fails: angela merkel should seize this chance to remake europe. the economist 08.05.2017. <http://www.economist.com/blogs/kaffeeklatsch/2017/05/ if-macron-fails-germany-fails> the economist (2017b) prince charming plays tough guy: emmanuel macron confronts vladimir putin. the economist 30.05.2017. <http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21722741-contours-newfrench-presidents-foreign-diplomacy-are-beginning-emerge-emmanuel> https://doi.org/10.1080/00380237.2000.10571165 https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-a-graham/ https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-a-graham/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/15/pm-mark-rutte-set-to-beat-geert-wilders-in-dutch-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/15/pm-mark-rutte-set-to-beat-geert-wilders-in-dutch-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/europes-governments-signal-relief-as-dutch-election-defeats-far-right https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16/europes-governments-signal-relief-as-dutch-election-defeats-far-right http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-muslim-racism-hate-crime-islamophobia-eu-referendum-leave-latest-a7106326.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-muslim-racism-hate-crime-islamophobia-eu-referendum-leave-latest-a7106326.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/10/marine-le-pen-doesnt-deny-that-french-jews-were-handed-over-to-nazis-but-she-claims-france-is-not-to-blame/?utm_term=.374d844338f0 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/10/marine-le-pen-doesnt-deny-that-french-jews-were-handed-over-to-nazis-but-she-claims-france-is-not-to-blame/?utm_term=.374d844338f0 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/10/marine-le-pen-doesnt-deny-that-french-jews-were-handed-over-to-nazis-but-she-claims-france-is-not-to-blame/?utm_term=.374d844338f0 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/empire-20-is-dangerous-nostalgia-for-something-that-never-existed https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/19/empire-20-is-dangerous-nostalgia-for-something-that-never-existed https://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/1984.pdf http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-coalition-air-strikes-isis-russia-kill-more-civilians-march-middle-east-iraq-syria-network-for-a7663881.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-coalition-air-strikes-isis-russia-kill-more-civilians-march-middle-east-iraq-syria-network-for-a7663881.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-interview-we-can-be-the-heroes-of-europe-by-voting/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/14/boris-johnson-interview-we-can-be-the-heroes-of-europe-by-voting/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/07/frances-oedipal-islamist-complex-charlie-hebdo-islamic-state-isis/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/07/frances-oedipal-islamist-complex-charlie-hebdo-islamic-state-isis/ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/apr/13/who-are-the-new-jihadis https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/apr/13/who-are-the-new-jihadis http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/french-police-abuse-muslims-emergency-laws-160204035243925.html http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/french-police-abuse-muslims-emergency-laws-160204035243925.html http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2015/dec/02/syria-airstrikes-mps-debate-vote-cameron-action-against-isis-live http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2015/dec/02/syria-airstrikes-mps-debate-vote-cameron-action-against-isis-live https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-boris-johnson-independence-day-live-debate-bbc-vote-leave-brexit-remain-a7094531.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-boris-johnson-independence-day-live-debate-bbc-vote-leave-brexit-remain-a7094531.html http://www.economist.com/blogs/kaffeeklatsch/2017/05/if-macron-fails-germany-fails http://www.economist.com/blogs/kaffeeklatsch/2017/05/if-macron-fails-germany-fails http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21722741-contours-new-french-presidents-foreign-diplomacy-are-beginning-emerge-emmanuel http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21722741-contours-new-french-presidents-foreign-diplomacy-are-beginning-emerge-emmanuel fennia 195: 1 (2017) 101henk van houtum and rodrigo bueno lacy tomlinson, s. & dorling, d. brexit has its roots in the british empire – so how do we explain it to the young? new statesman 09.05.2016. <http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/ brexit-has-its-roots-british-empire-so-how-do-we-explain-it-young> unhcr (2016) mediterranean death toll soars, 2016 is deadliest year yet. unhcr 25.10.2016. <http:// www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2016/10/580f3e684/mediterranean-death-toll-soars-2016-deadliestyear.html> van houtum, h. & bueno lacy, r. (2015) the eu’s self-threatening border regime. the broker online 26.11.2015. <http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/blogs/inclusive-economy-europe/the-eu-s-selfthreatening-border-regime> van houtum, h. (2010) human blacklisting: the global apartheid of the eu's external border regime. environment and planning d: society and space 28(6) 957–976. https://doi.org/10.1068/d1909 vvd (xx) zeker nederland: concept verkiezingsprogramma 2017–2021. <http://energeia.nl/ nieuws/604463-1610/verkiezingsprogramma/binary/verkiezingsprogramma> wadsworth, j. (2017) immigration and the uk economy. paper ea039. the centre for economic performance at the london school of economics and political science, london. <http://cep.lse.ac. uk/pubs/download/ea039.pdf> wijnberg, r. (2016) met het liberalisme heeft de vvd niets meer te maken. de correspondent 13.10.2016. <https://decorrespondent.nl/5409/met-het-liberalisme-heeft-de-vvd-niets-meer-temaken/138632670-0314eb25> wijnberg, r. (2017) hoe de media premier baudet creëren. de correspondent 04.06.2017. <https:// decorrespondent.nl/6849/hoe-de-media-premier-baudet-creeren/2373983647893-9da5ed96> wildman, s. (2017) dutch populist geert wilders lost. europe's leaders are publicly breathing sighs of relief. vox 16.03.2017. <http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/16/14944988/geert-wilders-populismislam-immigration-election-netherlands-rutte> williams, s. & law, i. (2012) legitimising racism: an exploration of the challenges posed by the use of indigeneity discourses by the far right. sociological research online 17(2) 1360–7804. https://doi. org/10.5153/sro.2554 wittenberg, d. (2017) in daden is de vvd juist tégen betere opvang in de regio (en andere migratiebeloften onder de loep). de correspondent 09.03.2017. <https://decorrespondent.nl/6359/ in-daden-is-de-v vd-juist-tegen-betere-opvang-in-de-regio-en-andere-migratiebeloften-onder-deloep/423751042-70c84322> http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/brexit-has-its-roots-british-empire-so-how-do-we-explain-it-young http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/brexit-has-its-roots-british-empire-so-how-do-we-explain-it-young http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2016/10/580f3e684/mediterranean-death-toll-soars-2016-deadliest-year.html http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2016/10/580f3e684/mediterranean-death-toll-soars-2016-deadliest-year.html http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/2016/10/580f3e684/mediterranean-death-toll-soars-2016-deadliest-year.html http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/blogs/inclusive-economy-europe/the-eu-s-self-threatening-border-regime http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/blogs/inclusive-economy-europe/the-eu-s-self-threatening-border-regime https://doi.org/10.1068/d1909 http://energeia.nl/nieuws/604463-1610/verkiezingsprogramma/binary/verkiezingsprogramma http://energeia.nl/nieuws/604463-1610/verkiezingsprogramma/binary/verkiezingsprogramma http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/ea039.pdf http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/ea039.pdf https://decorrespondent.nl/5409/met-het-liberalisme-heeft-de-vvd-niets-meer-te-maken/138632670-0314eb25 https://decorrespondent.nl/5409/met-het-liberalisme-heeft-de-vvd-niets-meer-te-maken/138632670-0314eb25 https://decorrespondent.nl/6849/hoe-de-media-premier-baudet-creeren/2373983647893-9da5ed96 https://decorrespondent.nl/6849/hoe-de-media-premier-baudet-creeren/2373983647893-9da5ed96 http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/16/14944988/geert-wilders-populism-islam-immigration-election-netherlands-rutte http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/16/14944988/geert-wilders-populism-islam-immigration-election-netherlands-rutte https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2554 https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2554 https://decorrespondent.nl/6359/in-daden-is-de-vvd-juist-tegen-betere-opvang-in-de-regio-en-andere-migratiebeloften-onder-de-loep/423751042-70c84322 https://decorrespondent.nl/6359/in-daden-is-de-vvd-juist-tegen-betere-opvang-in-de-regio-en-andere-migratiebeloften-onder-de-loep/423751042-70c84322 https://decorrespondent.nl/6359/in-daden-is-de-vvd-juist-tegen-betere-opvang-in-de-regio-en-andere-migratiebeloften-onder-de-loep/423751042-70c84322 21846_3_kivinen.indd regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish grasslands sonja kivinen kivinen, sonja (2005). regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish grasslands. fennia 183: 1, pp. 37–56. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the preservation of viable agricultural landscapes is essential in finland and throughout europe, because a considerable proportion of threatened species are associated with rural habitats, particularly various grasslands. in this study, the regional distribution of finnish grasslands was studied using an existing nationwide digital land-use database. further, the occurrence of traditional rural biotopes and selected butterfly and bird species living in different grassland habitats was investigated in relation to agricultural landscape mosaic. the results showed that grasslands were typically abundant in versatile agricultural regions, land uplift shores as well as in agriculturally marginal landscapes experiencing decrease of agricultural activities. grasslands were generally scarce in intensively cultivated agricultural landscapes. the occurrence and siting of traditional rural biotopes in grassland networks vary greatly regionally, abundant and wellconnected traditional rural biotopes being found e.g. in river valleys and few isolated biotopes in intensively cultivated or agriculturally marginal, forested regions. furthermore, the nationwide occurrence of selected butterfly and bird species was positively related to the abundance of grasslands. overall, grasslands enrich the finnish agricultural landscape both at the habitat and species level. in addition to species-rich semi-natural grasslands, other low-productive grasslands also hold significant potential in the maintenance of diverse agricultural environments. sonja kivinen, finnish environment institute, research programme for biodiversity, po box 140, fi-00251 helsinki, finland. e-mail: sonja.kivinen@ymparisto. fi. ms submitted 05 november 2004. introduction agricultural practices and land use have changed rapidly during recent decades throughout europe. intensification and marginalization introduce imbalance to the agriculture-environment relationship and diminishing diversity in agricultural environments has been widely reported (matson et al. 1997; krebs et al. 1999; robinson & sutherland 2002). species diversity is threatened mainly by habitat loss, increasing isolation of remaining habitat fragments and decline of habitat quality (e.g. waldhart 2003). species-rich semi-natural grasslands were widespread in europe at the time of low-intensity farming systems. these non-cultivated communities result from forest clearances and their persistence requires human management by grazing, mowing or burning (briggs & courtney 1989). natural disturbances, such as fires and floods also creating grassland habitats in the forested landscape, are nowadays largely suppressed by humans (pykälä 2000). today, only remnants of semi-natural grasslands are found in europe owing to fertilization, cultivation, abandonment and afforestation of these habitats. artificially planted and fertilized cultivated grasslands have largely replaced seminatural grasslands in agricultural landscapes (alanen 1997; pärtel et al. 1999; ihse & lindahl 2000; poschlod & wallisdevries 2002). because a significant part of european biodiversity is associated with semi-natural grasslands, their rapid decline is recognized as a serious threat to high numbers of rare or decreasing plant and animal species (norderhaug et al. 2000; luoto et al. 2001; söderström et al. 2001; kiviniemi & eriks38 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen son 2002; van swaay 2002; cousins et al. 2003; duelli & obrist 2003). in finland, one quarter of all known species live in agricultural environments (pykälä & lappalainen 1998). a considerable proportion, 28% of endangered species live primarily in traditional rural biotopes or other cultural environments and 39% of disappeared species used primarily these habitats (rassi et al. 2001). traditional rural biotopes are habitats created by traditional practices of animal husbandry, including the most valuable species-rich grasslands in finnish agricultural landscapes. the area of these semi-natural grasslands has decreased to less than 1% of that registered one century ago (vainio et al. 2001). nowadays it is also essential to identify other rural habitats that may increase the capacity of agricultural landscapes to sustain biodiversity, in addition to semi-natural grasslands (krebs et al. 1999; fahrig 2001; robinson & sutherland 2002; benton et al. 2003). different kinds of non-cropped habitats, such as old cultivated fields and pastures, setaside land as well as field margins and grassy edge zones between fields and forests have been found to have significant value for plants (corbet 1995; freemark et al. 2002; waldhart et al. 2003), butterflies and other invertebrates (di giulio et al. 2001; lee et al. 2001; steffan-dewenter & tscharntke 2001; jeanneret et al. 2003b; haysom et al. 2004; pöyry et al. 2004; pywell et al. 2004), birds (pain et al. 1997; vickery et al. 2001; peach et al. 2004; virkkala et al. 2004), and small mammals (de la peña et al. 2003). these habitats can be considered as an intermediate, biodiversity-supporting level between intensively managed, species-poor arable land and species-rich, but scarce semi-natural grasslands. the quality of an individual grassland patch is mainly determined by its size, management history and physical conditions (e.g. climate, bedrock and soil properties) as well as its relation to the surrounding landscape mosaic (dauber et al. 2003; opdam et al. 2003). small and isolated patches are expected to have an increased risk of population extinction (macarthur & wilson 1967; levins 1969; hanski & gilpin 1991). in other words, a comprehensive network of habitat patches of sufficient size enables species dispersal and reduces the local extinction risk (saunders et al. 1991; bender et al. 2003; jordán et al. 2003). a prerequisite for monitoring and conservation of biodiversity is widespread and up-to-date information concerning the distribution of habitats and species. during recent decades new nationwide databases containing information of land use, land cover and species occurrences have been created both on the national and eu level (mikkola et al. 1999; fei 2003; weiers et al. 2004). these digital datasets provide new possibilities for biogeographical research and maintenance of diversity. here, the distribution of finnish grasslands was studied and grassland patterns were further examined from the biodiversity viewpoint by means of case studies. a database containing grassland habitats in 10 m resolution was created using digital land use data and the nationwide abundance of grasslands was studied in 100 km2 grid squares. the occurrence of traditional rural biotopes in the regional grassland networks and their relation to general land cover was studied within six drainage basins. using species atlas data recorded in the 100 km2 grid system, the relationships between the nationwide occurrences of two butterfly and four bird species and agricultural land use were examined. the main questions of the study were: (1) how are grassland habitats distributed in finland and what factors are correlated with the observed patterns? (2) what is the occurrence and spatial location of traditional rural biotopes in regional grassland networks in various agricultural landscapes? (3) is there a spatial relationship between the occurrences of the studied species and the abundance of grasslands and arable land? background characteristics of the finnish landscape although finland is generally a low-lying region, the topography varies widely in a small scale. the main part of the relief results directly from the crystalline ancient bedrock (seppälä 1986; simonen 1990). the most common deposit type is compact basal till that often forms a basis for other deposits. hummocky moraines, eskers, deltas, and ice marginal and interlobate formations impart unique characteristics to the landscapes. extensive fine-sediment deposits are found mainly in southern and western finland (fig. 1). peat deposits are abundant particularly in western and northern finland. land uplift continually exposes new land in coastal areas, especially in the bothnian bay (kujansuu & niemelä 1990). fennia 183: 1 (2005) 39regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… fig. 1. a) the location of the study area in finland (shaded in grey) and b) the distribution of fine sediment soils (silt and clay). finland belongs to the cold temperate climate zone with cool summers (tuhkanen 1984). the mean annual temperature is highest in southwestern finland, decreasing towards the northeast. the length of the growing season (mean daily temperature > 5 °c) varies from 180 days in south-western finland to 100 days in northern lapland (helminen 1987). rainfall is rather evenly distributed throughout the seasons. the mean annual precipitation ranges from 400–450 mm along the western coast and northern finland to 700– 750 mm in parts of southern and eastern finland (solantie 1987). finland is located mainly in the boreal coniferous vegetation zone. only the most south-western part of the country is situated in the hemi-boreal zone. the southern boreal zone covers southern and central finland and parts of eastern finland and the western coast. the middle boreal zone includes most of western finland and parts of eastern finland, whereas northern parts of finland are mainly situated in the northern boreal zone (ahti et al. 1968). finnish landscape is largely dominated by forests and mires (hämet-ahti 1988; ruuhijärvi 1988). agricultural and horticultural land cover 7.3% of the total area of finland (maf 2004b). the history of grasslands in finland the first signs of cultivation and livestock husbandry in finland date back to the neolithic stone age (5100−1500 b.c.) (carpelan 1999). the significance of agriculture increased during the bronze age (1500−500 b.c.) and slash-and-burn cultivation was practiced over wide areas of southern and western finland in the iron age (500 b.c.−1300 a.d.). arable cultivation was started probably before the end of iron age in south-western finland (huurre 1995; vuorela 1999). the period of old traditional agriculture in finland extended from the historical era until the 1870s (soininen 1974). in the beginning of the 19th century, arable cultivation was practiced generally in southern and western finland, whereas most of eastern finland was largely dependent on slash-and-burn cultivation. agriculture was based on crop cultivation and livestock was kept primarily for manure to fertilize fields (grotenfelt 1922; soininen 1974). the availability of fodder during the long winter feeding period was a crucial factor for cattle numbers and thus also for crop cultivation. fodder was collected on natural meadows and the meadow area was increased through forest clearances and lake drainages. in summertime, cattle grazed in forests and fallows and after mowing also in meadows (linkola 1922; soininen 1974). cultivation and grazing opened up and diversified landscape structure and created new habitat types, whereas before the establishment of agriculture the boreal landscape was altered mainly by natural disturbances, such as fires and storms. different physical conditions regulating agricultural intensity led to varying regional landscape mosa40 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen ics, ranging from more open agricultural regions to enclosed forested landscapes (ihse 1995; pykälä 2000). the traditional grazing system carried nutrients from meadows to arable land and created unique nutrient-scarce semi-natural grasslands associated with high species richness and a great number of specialized species (alanen 1997). a revolution in finnish agriculture took place at the end of the 19th century. resulting from the rapid population growth, continuous crop failures and the decreasing world market prices of cereals, the basis of agriculture was changed from crop production to stock-raising. as a major renewal, hay-making in arable land became common and sustained higher cattle numbers (soininen 1974). in addition to forest clearances, new areas for fodder production were obtained by including the most productive meadows in the cultivation cycle. as a consequence, the area of semi-natural grasslands started to decrease rapidly (linkola 1922; valle 1951; oksanen 2001). the modernization of finnish agriculture starting in the 1950s almost completely terminated traditional farming. agricultural production intensified as a consequence of new machines, fertilizers and techniques. agricultural policies favoured large farms specialized in crop cultivation, whereas traditional small holdings were paid compensation for fallowing and livestock slaughter. a marked change was the regional specialization of agriculture in southern and western finland into crop production and in eastern finland into dairy farming (granberg 1989; luostarinen 1997). the role of cultivated, artificially fertilized grasslands in dairy farming increased at the expense of seminatural grasslands. semi-natural grasslands situated in the most favourable agricultural areas were converted to arable land, and meadows of poorer regions became wooded by natural succession, or were afforested (alanen 1997; pykälä 2001). in general, the total number of dairy cows and the area under hay and grasses has declined drastically since the 1960’s (tiainen 2004). further, only the remnants of semi-natural grasslands created by traditional practices of animal husbandry are left in finland (vainio et al. 2001). during the time of finland’s eu membership, the agri-environmental support of eu has provided opportunities for biodiversity and landscape management on farms (luoto et al. 2003b). management of the remaining semi-natural grasslands is included in the national eu agri-environment program. moreover, furthering and management of other open noncropped rural habitats are considered as important measures sustaining agricultural biodiversity (maf 2004a). material and methods creation of the grassland database the grassland data was derived from the land use database of slices (separated land use/land cover information system) (mikkola et al. 1999). slices is based on the joint use of geographic information of several organizations and the source data for the land use classes has been derived from various existing land use registers. the raster format slices land use database with 10 m resolution covering the whole of finland was completed in 2000. the combination of various source datasets into a single database had required reclassification of data into slices land use classes, coordinate transformations and conversion of polygon format data into raster format (mikkola et al. 1999). overlapping problems of the land use classes resulting from the disagreement of different source data sets had generally been resolved so that geometrically more accurate data overrode more inaccurate data and newer data overrode older data. the grassland database of this study was based on two slices classes, ‘perennial grasses and meadows’ and ‘long-term fallows’ derived from the finnish land parcel identification system and the topographic database, updated in 1998–1999. perennial grasses and meadows consist of over five years old grasses, meadows and pastures used for agricultural purposes. long-term fallows are classified in the system as arable land that has not been cultivated or utilized in other ways for at least five years and has not become wooded. the grassland database was built using the arcinfo 8.1 software (esri 1992) and it covered mainland finland and the inner archipelago south of 67° latitude (fig. 1a). northernmost regions and åland were excluded from the analysis due to deficiencies in the data. in order to facilitate faster data processing, the data was generalized by eliminating all grassland patches less than 0.1 hectares. the grassland database was compared to digital 1:20,000 base maps and distinctively misclassified patches, such as forest patches classified as grassland were removed. in order to distinguish ecologically the most valuable semi-natural grasslands, an existing spafennia 183: 1 (2005) 41regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… tial database containing traditional rural biotopes found in a nationwide inventory in 1992−1998 (vainio et al. 2001) was used to complete the slices grassland data. inventoried traditional rural biotopes consist mainly of various meadows, wooded pastures and grazed forests. wooded pastures are biotopes characterized by a mosaic of tree groups and meadow patches. grazed forests, excluded here from the analysis, were differentiated from wooded pastures in the inventory on the basis of ground vegetation characterized by forest species and denser tree cover (>35%) (pykälä et al. 1994). traditional rural biotopes had been classified in the inventory on the basis of their recent status into nationally, regionally and locally valuable traditional rural biotopes (pykälä et al. 1994) and these value classes were used in this study. in general, nationally valuable biotopes have been managed continuously mainly by mowing or grazing at least for the last 50 years and have particularly diverse species assemblages, often including nationally endangered and rare plant species. regionally valuable biotopes are characterized by long-continued traditional or near-traditional land use, typical vegetation created by traditional agricultural practices and diverse species assemblage. in locally valuable biotopes, land use has ceased to be traditional and typical vegetation for traditional rural biotopes occurs often in small patches. national, regional and local biotopes can also include nonmanaged, partially overgrown areas where diverse vegetation has still been preserved. in order to obtain a picture of the validity of slices grassland data, a field check of 401 grassland patches (other than inventoried traditional rural biotopes) was carried out in the summer of 2004. grassland patches were selected randomly within southern, western, eastern and northern parts of finland. grasslands were checked for actual classification errors in slices data (for example misclassified forest and field areas). moreover, the proportion of bush cover in grassland patches was estimated. other datasets a spatial database of arable land was built similarly to the grassland database from slices land use data with 10 m resolution. the source data for arable land was based on the finnish land parcel identification system. arable land is defined in the slices system as continually cultivated ground, including fields and not more than five years old fallows and cultivated grasslands (mikkola et al. 1999). furthermore, general land cover information was derived from a nationwide corine land cover database in 100 m resolution. the corine land cover data is based on satellite image interpretation completed with digital databases (fei 2003). studied species the reflections of grassland and arable land abundances on species distributions were studied using two butterfly species and four bird species. the species data were derived from the butterfly atlas (huldén et al. 2000) and the bird atlas (väisänen et al. 1998), in which the occurrence of both species groups were presented in 100 km2 squares. species data were digitized using arcview software (version 3.2, esri, redlands, ca, usa). both studied butterflies, coenonympha pamphilus (small heath) and lycaena hippothoe (purple-edged copper) are meadow species. c. pamphilus is a grassland generalist, living in all kinds of grassland areas, such as dry and mesic meadows, road verges and clear fellings. larvae feed on grasses (poaceae). l. hippothoe occurs in forest-sheltered, especially dry flower-rich meadows and also in river shore meadows and grassy slopes in the north. larvae feed on rumex acetosa and rumex acetosella. both species are common in southern and central finland and occur more scarcely in northern finland. species abundances vary annually, but c. pamphilus appears to have declined especially in parts of western and eastern finland and l. hippothoe in parts of southern and western finland (marttila et al. 1990). acrocephalus palustris (marsh warbler) and locustella naevia (grasshopper warbler) represent farmland bird species feeding and breeding in successional semi-open agricultural land. the habitat selection of a. palustris contains lush bush vegetation in meadows, abandoned land and neglected gardens, and particularly moist brookside bushes. l. naevia breeds in meadows and abandoned arable land in bushes with dense grass undergrowth and is particularly abundant in cultivated areas located near coastal bays and lakes. a. palustris and l. naevia occur in southern and central finland. l. naevia has bred in finland already since the 19th century. a. palustris arrived in finland in the mid-20th century from the south and southeast and has become more abundant and spread northwards ever since (väisänen et al. 1998). 42 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen the occurrence of two bird species, crex crex (corn crake) and perdix perdix (gray partridge) living in open agricultural land was also studied in relation to grassland abundance. c. crex lives in open hay fields, fallow fields and dry shore meadows in southern and central finland. p. perdix breeds in bushy and weedy edges of large field areas and midfield islets in southern finland and along the western coast. intensification of agriculture has led to rapid decline of the populations of both species throughout europe. c. crex has been particularly affected by nest-destroying harvest machines and the decline of meadows surrounding cereal fields. p. perdix is also affected by modern cropping practices as well as the by the decreased habitat quality of production fields (väisänen et al. 1998; meyer-aurich et al. 2003). both species have been classified as near-threatened species in finland (rassi et al. 2001). spatial analyses on the national scale the spatial distribution of grasslands was studied in 100 km2 grid squares and within drainage basin units. grid squares were created using the arcin fo generate function. drainage basin units were based on the first level partition of finland’s water system areas (ekholm 1993) and this gis data was taken from a database of the finnish environment institute. the proportion of grassland in grid squares and drainage basin units was calculated using the arcinfo intersect function. the proportion of arable land derived from the slices database was also calculated in the grid squares. the amounts of grassland and arable land in 100 km2 squares were compared to the occurrences of butterfly and bird species. the coordinates of land use grids coincided with the grids of animals observed. the quantity and quality of butterfly observations collected in different parts of finland varied considerably and there were no proper estimates of the survey activity in atlas squares. therefore only observations after the year 1988 and observation squares included in the butterfly monitoring scheme (see huldén et al. 2000) were taken into account in order to reduce inaccuracies of data. by contrast, survey activity and nesting probabilities in squares were available for the bird atlas data. well and satisfactorily surveyed atlas squares and the squares with certain, probable, or possible nesting were chosen for analyses. the northern limits of species distributions were taken into account in the calculations. the spatial analyses were carried out using arcinfo intersect functions and the statistical relationships between species and habitat distributions were analysed using the spss-program (spss 2002). spatial analyses on the regional scale the number, connectivity and type of traditional rural biotopes as well as land cover in four grassland-rich and two grassland-poor drainage basins were studied. corine land cover data was reclassified as 1) grassland, 2) arable land, 3) urban area, 4) forest, 5) mire, 6) bare ground and 7) water and was further complemented by the slices grassland database. land cover proportions for drainage basins were calculated using arcinfo intersect functions. landscape connectivity is determined by interactions between landscape spatial structure and the movement behaviour of species (e.g. the review of tischendorf & fahrig 2000). for connectivity analyses, a total of 11 traditional rural biotopes (meadows and wooded pastures), including 1 nationally, 3 regionally and 7 locally valuable biotopes were selected within drainage basins. nationally valuable biotopes were not found in grassland-poor drainage basins, and therefore the total number of biotopes was 10 in these regions. connectivity for selected traditional rural biotopes was measured using a distance-weighting scheme, in which the amount of grassland area was calculated within a user-specified threshold distance from a biotope patch. following hanski (1994), connectivity s is given by the sum of contributions of all grassland patches: s i = ∑exp(–αd ij )a j where a j is the area of grassland (in ares), d ij is the distance between grassland patches i and j (in km*10). connectivity was calculated for each traditional rural biotope patch up to five kilometres from the centre point using the si program (moilanen 2000). because no specific species was studied, the parameter α was given a value 1. the exponential function gives more weight for the patches, which are close to the focal patch. results the validity of grassland data field checks showed that classification of the slices data was relatively accurate. out of 401 fennia 183: 1 (2005) 43regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… grassland patches 1.7% turned out to be urban green cover, 1.6% grassy clear cuttings and 0.7% former grazed forests. moreover, 2.7% of grassland patches carried planted young trees and 0.5% of patches were ploughed. otherwise, field checked grassland patches consisted mainly of old, cultivated grasslands and long-term fallows in accordance with slices classification. over half of the visited grassland patches were open habitats. one third of the patches had bush cover up to ten percent and approximately one tenth of patches had bush cover between 11 and 60% of the total area. bushes were often found by the side of ditches, whereas the core of the patch was typically open habitat. the characteristics of distribution patterns of grasslands the proportion of grassland varied noticeably in different parts of finland, and several grassland belts could be distinguished in 100 km2 squares (fig. 2a). grasslands formed an almost continuous zone running from western lapland through coastal areas to south-eastern finland. another wide grassland belt extended from northern finland southwards along the eastern border. furthermore, a noticeable grassland zone covered parts of southern and central finland, and a diagonal grassland belt extended from eastern finland to the western coast. fig. 2. the distribution of grasslands in finland in 100 km2 squares. a) the amount of grassland in hectares. b) the mean size of grassland patches in hectares. c) the proportion of grassland of all agricultural land in percentages. d) the occurrence of nationally valuable traditional rural biotopes (grazed forests excluded) (see vainio et al. 2001) and the amount of arable land in hectares. 44 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen over three quarters of the studied grid squares had 50 hectares or less grassland, and 3.5% of squares had no grassland. grassland areas greater than 100 hectares were found in 5.7% of the squares and the maximum value was 1044 hectares in the northern bothnian bay region. in comparison, three quarters of the squares had arable land more than 100 hectares, and arable land was absent in 7.4% of the squares. grassland patches were generally larger in northern finland than in the south (fig. 2b). inventoried traditional rural biotopes (meadows and wooded pastures) (vainio et al. 2001) accounted for approximately one tenth of the total grassland area. grasslands were found both in the main agricultural regions and in regions where agriculture has only a minor role. the spearman rank correlation coefficient (r) between grassland area and arable land area calculated for 100 km2 grid squares was 0.299 (p < 0.001). the proportion of grassland of all agricultural land was greatest in northern finland and in coastal areas (fig. 2c). a general absence of most valuable semi-natural grasslands (traditional rural biotopes of national value) was found in the most intensively cultivated regions of southern and western finland (fig. 2d). traditional rural biotopes and landscape properties the grassland networks in six drainage basins located in different parts of finland (fig. 3) varied considerably in terms of the number and type of traditional rural biotopes, patch sizes, connectivity and surrounding land cover. a northern drainage basin including the lower course of tornionjoki and kaakamajoki (fig. 4a) was generally characterized by extensive forest areas (table 1). grasslands covered 1.5% of the total area and were generally found in river valleys. traditional rural biotopes, with flood meadows as the most common type (fig. 5a), were rather abundant, but mainly of local value. the studied traditional rural biotopes were located in the wellconnected network of generally large grassland patches (fig. 6a). a drainage basin including the upper courses of vienan kemi and iijoki, also located in northern finland (fig. 4b), was dominated by forests, mires and numerous watercourses and grasslands covered 0.8% of the area (table 1). the characteristic traditional rural biotope type was fen meadows (fig. 5b). the number of traditional rural biotopes was small compared to the area of the drainage basin. the grassland patches were large, but had a rather scattered location (fig. 6b). thus, traditional rural biotopes of the region were significantly isolated. the kyrönjoki drainage basin located in western finland (fig. 4c) was characterized by arable land and forested areas (table 1). grasslands covered 0.2% of the total area and were located mainly by rivers. traditional rural biotopes, nearly all of local value, were rather few compared to the area of drainage basin and no nationally valuable biotopes were found in the region. the most typical biotope types were mesic meadows, shore meadows and wooded pastures (fig. 5c). selected traditional rural biotopes were poorly connected with the other, relatively small grassland patches (fig. 6c). the eastern koitajoki drainage basin (fig. 4d) was dominated by forests and mires and grassfig. 3. the grassland proportions within drainage basins (in percentages) and the locations of six study areas. a) the lower course of tornionjoki–kaakamajoki, b) the upper courses of vienan kemi and iijoki, c) kyrönjoki, d) koitajoki, e) vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi and f) uskelanjoki–halikonjoki (see ekholm 1993). fennia 183: 1 (2005) 45regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… fig. 4. the distribution of grasslands presented in 1 km2 grid squares and the occurrence of traditional rural biotopes within six studied drainage basins. a) the lower course of tornionjoki– kaakamajoki, b) the upper courses of vienan kemi and iijoki, c) kyrönjoki, d) koitajoki, e) vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi and f) uskelanjoki–halikonjoki. table 1. land use statistics for the studied six drainage basins. mps = mean patch size of grassland, grass = grassland, arable = arable land, urban = urban area, bare = bare ground. drainage basin area km2 mps ha grass % arable % urban % forest % mire % bare % water % total % tornionjoki–kaakamajoki 1416 2.1 1.5 7.2 3.8 76.1 7.9 0.2 3.3 100.0 vienan kemi–iijoki 3122 2.0 0.8 1.5 1.8 69.2 10.9 0.0 15.8 100.0 kyrönjoki 4923 1.2 0.2 24.6 5.1 61.0 7.5 0.2 1.4 100.0 koitajoki 3741 1.0 0.2 0.9 1.2 71.8 14.0 0.0 11.9 100.0 vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi 2759 1.1 0.8 17.7 11.2 55.2 1.2 0.1 13.8 100.0 uskelanjoki–halikonjoki 873 1.9 1.6 40.5 8.2 48.0 0.9 0.2 0.6 100.0 46 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen erate amounts of arable and urban land, forests and large watercourses (table 1). grasslands covered 0.8% of the total area and were concentrated near to lakes. compared to the area, the number of traditional rural biotopes was highest of all studied drainage basins and a considerable number of the biotopes were of national or regional value. the main biotope types were wooded pastures and mesic meadows (fig. 5e). traditional rural biotopes were located in the dense network of rather small grassland patches (fig. 6e). a drainage basin including uskelanjoki and halikonjoki (fig. 4f) in south-western finland was characterized by wide arable land areas (table 1). grasslands covered 1.6% of the total area and were located mainly by rivers. a high number of traditional rural biotopes were found in the region, over half of them classified as semi-natural grasslands of national or regional value. mesic meadows and shore meadows were the most common biotope types (fig. 5f). selected traditional rural biotopes were highly connected with the other relatively large grassland patches (fig. 6f). the area and connectivity of traditional rural biotopes varied notably between drainage basins (fig. 6g, table 2), but less distinctively between value classes (national, regional, local) within drainage basins (fig. 6). some differences between value classes were found in tornionjoki–kaakamajoki and vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi, where the most valuable patches were the biggest ones. however, their connectivity was not generally greater than that of less valuable patches. furthermore, in the koitajoki drainage basin and partially in uskelanjoki–halikonjoki the most valuable traditional rural biotopes were either biggest in size or had the highest connectivity values. fig. 5. the proportions of traditional rural biotope types in six studied drainage basins (grazed forests excluded). a) the lower course of tornionjoki–kaakamajoki, b) the upper courses of vienan kemi and iijoki, c) kyrönjoki d) koitajoki, e) vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi and f) uskelanjoki–halikonjoki. lands covered 0.2% of the total area (table 1). few traditional biotopes, with mesic meadows as the dominant type, were found in the region (fig. 5d). most of these biotopes were of local value and no nationally valuable traditional rural biotopes occurred in the region. the studied traditional rural biotopes were located in the disconnected network of small grassland patches (fig. 6d). the landscape of a southern vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi drainage basin (fig. 4e) consisted of modtable 2. connectivity statistics for the selected 10 or 11 traditional rural biotopes. fps = focal patch size, nn = mean distance between the focal patch and the nearest neighbouring grassland patch, conn = connectivity value of focal patches. drainage basin fps (ha) nn (km) conn mean st dev mean mean st dev tornionjoki–kaakamajoki 11.8 23.2 0.4 20.9 25.1 vienan kemi–iijoki 14.3 16.3 1.4 4.5 11.0 kyrönjoki 2.2 1.5 0.5 7.3 7.5 koitajoki 1.8 1.8 1.0 6.8 10.4 vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi 1.1 0.8 0.4 16.1 23.9 uskelanjoki–halikonjoki 4.3 6.5 0.3 29.6 29.3 fennia 183: 1 (2005) 47regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… 806040200 a re a (h a) 80 60 40 20 0 a) 403020100 50 40 30 20 10 0 b) connectivity 3020100 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 d) connectivity 806040200 a re a (h a) 25 20 15 10 5 0 f) connectivity 35302520151050 a re a (h a) 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 d c e f b a g) national regional local value classes of traditional rural biotopes c onnectivity 20151050 a re a (h a) 5 4 3 2 1 0 c) connectivity 100806040200-20 a re a (h a) 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1.0 .5 0.0 e) fig. 6. the patch size and connectivity of traditional rural biotopes in six studied drainage basins. a) the lower course of tornionjoki– kaakamajoki, b) the upper courses of vienan kemi and iijoki, c) kyrönjoki d) koitajoki, e) vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi and f) uskelanjoki–halikonjoki and g) the mean values of traditional rural biotopes for drainage basins. note that the axes have different scales. studied species in relation to grassland and arable land butterflies c. pamphilus and l. hippothoe were present in 32.3% and 28.4% of 776 investigated grid squares, respectively. occupied squares had significantly higher amounts of grassland than unoccupied squares (fig. 7a & b, table 3). the occurrence of l. hippothoe was also significantly positively related with arable land area, in contrast to c. pamphilus. both species occurred densely in grassland-rich areas of southern, central and eastern finland. in the north, c. pamphilus occurred in the regions of bothnian bay with abundant grasslands. both species were absent in several squares with high proportions of arable land in southern and western finland (fig. 8a, c & d). 48 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen fig. 7. the relationship between species presence and absence and grassland area in 100 km2 squares. a) c. pamphilus, b) l. hippothoe, c) a. palustris, d) l. naevia, e) c. crex and f) p. perdix. the box represents the inter-quartile range, the line within the box shows the median, and the whiskers extend to the smallest and largest observations that are not suspected outliers. table 3. statistics for the relationship between butterfly and bird species occurrences and agricultural land use based on 100 km2 grid-square analysis. p-values derived from the mann-whitney u-test designate the significance of the differences between presence (1) and absence (0) squares. p-values were corrected using the bonferroni method. n.s. = not significant, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001. species grassland (ha) arable land (ha) n mean st dev p mean st dev p c. pamphilus 0 525 36.8 60.9 *** 1046.6 1105.1 n.s. 1 251 54.1 57.6 1124.1 1027.9 l. hippothoe 0 556 40.9 65.4 ** 1007.7 1080.3 *** 1 220 46.1 45.3 1233.4 1066.9 a. palustris 0 1008 32.9 60.0 *** 933.4 1117.1 *** 1 449 51.2 52.1 1389.4 1202.2 l. naevia 0 1106 32.6 41.1 *** 717.1 1029.4 *** 1 547 54.9 80.6 1446.7 1193.9 c. crex 0 1087 35.0 59.6 *** 1021.1 1163.9 *** 1 314 47.0 46.2 1428.9 1145.7 p. perdix 0 1383 36.5 43.8 n.s. 848.2 975.5 *** 1 156 56.3 119.3 2599.4 1416.9 birds the farmland edge species a. palustris and l. naevia were the most common of the studied bird species found in 30.8% and 33.1% of the grid squares, respectively. both grassland and arable land were significantly more abundant in occupied than in unoccupied squares (fig. 7c & d, table 3). a. palustris and l. naevia occurred densely in southern finland and in coastal regions with abundant grasslands. the densest occurrences of the species in central and eastern finland coincided largely with grassland patterns. the species occurred sporadically or were absent in forest-dominated regions of western and eastern finland. moreover, they occurred scarcely in intensively cultivated regions of western finland as well as in parts of agricultural areas in southern finland. in northern finland, species were found mainly in grasslandrich regions of the bothnian bay (fig. 8b, e & f). the distributions of c. crex and p. perdix, the species breeding in fields, differed greatly from each other. c. crex was present in 22.4% and p. perdix only in 10.1% of the studied squares. the occurrence of c. crex was significantly positively related to the amount of grasslands and arable land, whereas the occurrence of p. perdix was significantly positively associated only with arable land (fig. 7e & f, table 3). the spatial distribution pattern of c. crex in relation to grasslands and arable land resembled largely that of a. palustris and l. naevia. p. perdix was mainly present in squares with a great amount of arable land located in the main agricultural regions of southern and western fennia 183: 1 (2005) 49regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… fig. 8. the spatial relationships between studied species and agricultural land use patterns. a) observation squares for butterfly species and b) bird species. the occurrence of c) c. pamphilus, d) l. hippothoe, e) a. palustris, f) l. naevia and g) c. crex in relation to grassland area (ha/100 km2) and h) p. perdix in relation to arable land area (ha/100 km2). finland and in the bothnian bay region (fig. 8b, g & h). discussion regional distribution of grasslands in the finnish landscape the abundance of grasslands varied greatly in different parts of finland. grasslands were generally scarce in parts of southern and western finland. in these regions, favourable physical conditions, such as mild climate, flat topography and fine-sediment soils have promoted intensification of agriculture (see alalammi 1994; palomäki & mikkonen 1999). regions with high cover of grasslands were generally characterized by varied topography, which has led to smaller field sizes and more mosaic agricultural landscapes compared to easily cultivated fine-sediment plains (e.g. luoto 2000). as a special case, land uplift processes have created a unique 50 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen grassland pattern in western coastal areas. land uplift is particularly rapid in the bothnian bay region, as much as 8 mm per year (kakkuri 1990). as the land rises, the bottoms of long, sheltered reedy bays gradually turn into coastal grasslands. however, the expansion of reeds due to eutrophication and natural succession makes these grasslands rather instable habitats (vainio et al. 2001). physical conditions have traditionally determined the interactions between nature and agricultural land and have created the traditional landscape structure of europe (jongman 2002). however, agricultural land use today, and thus the present distribution of grasslands, is determined to a growing degree by economic conditions, cultural and social aspects and agricultural policies (ihse 1995; jongman 2002). agricultural landscapes of southern and western finland, characterized by relatively monotonous field plains, share similar biodiversity problems with western european agricultural regions. large crop cultivation areas often have only few grasslands. moreover, in the western regions characterized by effective dairy farming, grasslands are continually renewed. in other words, rural habitats of different age and structure are generally lacking. agricultural subsidies directed to such favourable cultivation regions further intensify the development (jongman 2002; robinson & sutherland 2002; waldhart & otte 2003). the number of dairy farms grows eastwards and northwards, which is naturally reflected in the occurrence of various grassland habitats. further, the occurrence of non-renewed grasslands may partially reflect the decrease of agricultural activities. small-scale dairy farming is diminishing to a growing degree as production is concentrated on economically more profitable larger farms and as the current farmer population ages (e.g. pyykkönen 2001). for example, between 1990 and 2000 the number of dairy farms decreased by about 50% (tike 2002). agricultural marginalization, affecting in a larger context mainly northern and eastern europe, does not have a positive effect on biodiversity in the long run (pärtel et al 1999; norderhaug et al. 2000). although the area of non-renewed grasslands first increases in the landscape, the grasslands will eventually revert to forest if they are not adequately managed (luoto et al. 2003a; waldhart et al. 2003). in other words, semi-open mixed farm landscape will become more enclosed, forested landscape at the expense of the diversity of agricultural habitats and species (ihse 1995). traditional rural biotopes in the agricultural landscape mosaic the occurrence of traditional rural biotopes as a part of grassland networks varied considerably in different parts of finland. traditional rural biotopes can be considered as diversity “hot spots” in the grassland network (see vainio et al. 2001). they contribute regional biodiversity, providing essential habitats for specialised species and act as essential source populations in depleted agricultural landscapes (duelli & obrist 2003). further, other grasslands enlarge the non-crop habitat selection and can provide important dispersal routes in the landscape (steffan-dewenter & tscharntke 1997). well-connected grassland networks containing abundant traditional rural biotopes were found in three studied drainage basins located in northern and southern finland. in tornionjoki–kaakamajoki previously widely mowed and grazed flood meadows, once cleared from bushes and grassy flood forests (cajander 1909; kalliola 1973), have been partially preserved in the landscape along with cultivated grasslands. the vanajavesi–pyhäjärvi region has long traditions of successful, versatile agriculture (maisema-aluetyöryhmä 1993), and rather numerous wooded pastures and meadows are still found in the landscape. the uskelanjoki– halikonjoki drainage basin represents a special case in finland. agri-environmental support and successful restoration projects have increased the area of various semi-natural grasslands located in topographically steep, economically marginal river valleys surrounded by intensively cultivated fine sediment plains (luoto et al. 2003b). from the metapopulation point of view, these regions represent landscape mosaics with high biodiversity values (hanski 1998). disconnected grassland networks including few traditional rural biotopes occurred in three drainage basins in northern, eastern and western finland. vienan kemi–iijoki and koitajoki were both forested, sparsely settled drainage basins affected by agricultural marginalization. in vienan kemi–iijoki, half of the traditional rural biotopes were fen meadows that are typically less species-rich than drier meadows, and the relatively high proportion of grasslands in the region results from the large and scattered non-renewed cultivated grasslands (see maisema-aluetyöryhmä 1993). in koitajoki, scarce, but species-rich dry and mesic meadows have been preserved in the rather enclosed forested landscape. in the kyrönjoki drainage basin fennia 183: 1 (2005) 51regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… the intensification of agriculture in fine-sediment river valleys has resulted in a scarcity of traditional rural biotopes and grassland habitats in general (see alalammi 1994). on the basis of metapopulation theory (hanski 1998) these landscapes cannot maintain a diversity of agricultural nature as high as landscapes with well-connected grassland networks including several patches of semi-natural grasslands. the number of traditional rural biotopes is rapidly decreasing and their quality has largely declined. the most valuable semi-natural grasslands are typically located in small-holdings owned by elderly farmers and are thus threatened by the end of management in the near future (pykälä 2001). the maintenance of biodiversity in finland requires the management and restoring of traditional rural biotopes on a large scale. however, this is naturally cost-demanding and can be difficult to accomplish. as mosaic agricultural landscapes with diverse habitat selection are crucial for the maintenance of biodiversity, it would be more preferable to direct the limited resources to traditional rural biotopes located in well-connected grassland networks than to isolated grassland patches (e.g. dunning et al. 1992). grassland patterns and the distribution of species the distributions of the studied butterfly and bird species were generally related to the grassland patterns. moreover, a general absence of the studied species excluding p. perdix favouring large field areas was observed in the most intensively cultivated regions in southern and western finland. these results are in accordance with other studies that have pointed out the impoverishing impact of agricultural intensification on diversity (robinson & sutherland 2002; jeanneret et al. 2003a; steiner & köhler 2003). the location and dispersal of butterfly populations strongly depend on flowering plants, and various meadows have been found to be the richest habitats for butterflies (kuussaari et al. 2001). further, butterflies need an appropriate landscape structure in order to be able to move between the habitat patches, and often require several habitats to complete their life-cycles (jeanneret et al. 2003b). in general, the widespread decline of butterfly species in finland and throughout europe has been associated with the decrease of open, uncultivated land (pitkänen et al. 2001). it has been noted that old, abandoned fields may partially compensate the scarcity of meadows for butterflies (e.g. heliölä et al. 2000). farmland birds have in many cases been affected by the loss of the mosaic of pastures and field in agricultural landscapes (tiainen & pakkala 2001). the habitat requirements of birds are wider compared to several other species groups and birds use various open and semi-open grasslands as feeding and breeding habitats (söderström et al. 2001; barnett et al. 2004; peach et al. 2004; virkkala et al. 2004). farmland birds breeding in bushes, such as a. palustris and l. naevia studied here, have benefited from the increase of abandoned successional agricultural land (väisänen et al. 1998). further, c. crex has recently recovered slightly in finland, possibly due to the decreased intensity of agriculture in the neighbouring baltic countries and in russia and the establishment of non-cropped shelter zones on finnish fields (tiainen & pakkala 2001). it has also been observed that c. crex is nowadays found more often on low-productive grasslands than on fields (kunttu & laine 2002). in contrast, p. perdix has been noted to benefit particularly from short-term rotated set-aside (tiainen & pakkala 2001), which was included in arable land in the classification system of this study. the distribution of plant species was not examined in this study. the highest diversity of plant species is generally found in traditionally managed dry and mesic meadows in boreal agricultural landscapes (pykälä 2000). a large part of grasslands studied here had earlier been subject to a rotation cycle and the development of vegetation in these areas strongly depends on the intensity of former arable management, which in turn affects the nutrient balance and seed bank (hansson & fogelfors 1998; pärtel et al. 1999; perner & malt 2003; waldhart & otte 2003). the signs of former cultivation can be seen in a grassland patch even one century after cultivation has ended (skånes 1991; gibson & brown 1992). common plant species for meadows may disperse rapidly on grassland patches, but rarer ones are often missing. the proximity of well-preserved species-rich meadows enhances species dispersal (dunning et al. 1992; norderhaug et al. 2000; pykälä 2001; duelli & obrist 2003). maps of the studied agricultural landscapes reflect the different dispersal potentials of plant species from species-rich “hot spots” of semi-natural grasslands in the network of grassland patches (fig. 4). 52 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen the main limitations of the species data were the large number of uninvestigated squares of the butterfly atlas and the lack of estimation of species abundance in the atlas squares. furthermore, species distribution is driven by multiple factors acting on multiple spatial and temporal scales (wiens 1989; levin 1992). for example, the impact of climate on species distribution is particularly pronounced in large scale studies (thuiller et al. 2004). thus, the multivariate analysis including both climatic and habitat variables, as well as species abundances instead of presence/absence data would provide interesting information concerning the relationship between species distributions and environmental factors. advantages and limitations in using large spatial databases technical advantages and recent production of nationwide spatial databases have made significant contributions to biogeographical research (johnson 1990; goodchild 1994; burnett & kalliola 2000; weiers et al. 2004). in this study, new information on the distribution of grasslands was produced by combining large databases with relatively high spatial resolution and detailed land use information. from a biodiversity point of view, these methods can provide effective tools and new insights for management and monitoring of finnish agricultural landscapes. however, the use of large databases does cause some problems. because nationwide databases are usually created by combining different kinds of source data, they can be variable by quality and age, and even include classification errors. thus, gis users should be aware of these potential pitfalls and their influence on the studied distributions (e.g. berry 1987). here, the slices grassland data was based on two continually updated vector databases, the finnish land parcel identification system administered by the ministry of agriculture and forestry and the topographic database produced by the national land survey of finland. these databases include the most accurate information of the finnish agricultural land use and terrain. however, the production of slices database naturally required compromises in resolving spatially overlapping land use classes of source data (see mikkola et al. 1999) and these decisions are largely out of reach of the ordinary database user. the field check of the grassland database carried out here showed that actual classification errors (e.g. clear-cuttings classified as grassland) were rather few. thus, the data can be considered to represent rather reliably the distribution of grasslands in finland. a more crucial potential problem in extracting habitats from land use databases is the disagreement between the desired habitat properties and the classification criteria of land use in the database. in this study, the slices classification system was suitable for the mapping of low-intensity grassy habitats, i.e. old grasslands and long-term fallows. however, in order to distinguish ecologically the most valuable semi-natural grasslands from other grassland habitats, it was necessary to use the database containing inventoried traditional rural biotopes. furthermore, low intensity grasslands habitats are continually threatened by bush encroachment if not adequately managed and the information of open grassland habitats in the database may become obsolete rather rapidly especially in agriculturally marginal regions. in this study the main part of the grasslands were open or nearly open habitats. however, clear signs of bush encroachment were also observed, and so the correspondence between the information in the database and the real state of grasslands is continuously changing. conclusions the distribution of grasslands in finland was effectively mapped using a nationwide land use database. the increased production and availability of large digital spatial databases provide powerful possibilities for research and biodiversity management. however, classification errors, the age of data and particularly classification criteria of land use classes compared to aspired habitat properties may limit the usability of the databases and must be taken into account in habitat mapping. the results showed great variation in the regional abundance of grasslands, due to physical conditions and various social-economical and historical as well as political factors. the results also indicated the positive effect of grassland abundance and the negative effect of intensified land use on the occurrence of the studied species living in various grassland habitats. agricultural intensification in the most advantageous farming regions and the end of dairy farming in small-holdings in the near future threaten the existence of versatile agricultural landscapes with a diverse selection of grassland habitats and associated species. thus, fennia 183: 1 (2005) 53regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… the maintenance of well-connected grassland networks including diversity “hot spots” of semi-natural grasslands is an essential, but demanding challenge in the management of finnish agricultural biodiversity. acknowledgements i thank dr. m. luoto, prof. r. kalliola and two referees for their valuable comments on the manuscript. i am grateful to dr. r. heikkinen for contributions to the collection of field data. i also thank m. bailey for language checking of the english manuscript. this study was supported by the lumottu program funded by the ministry of agriculture and forestry, the ministry of the environment and the finnish cultural foundation. references ahti t, l hämet-ahti & j jalas (1968). vegetation zones and their sections in northwestern europe. annales botanici fennici 5, 169−210. alalammi p (ed) (1994). finland’s landscapes, and urban and rural milieus. atlas of finland 350. 234 p. national land survey of finland & geographical society of finland, helsinki. alanen a (1997). perinnemaisemat. in luostarinen m & a yli-viikari (eds). maaseudun kulttuurimaisemat. the finnish environment 87, 71−78. barnett pr, mj whittingham, rb bradbury & jd wilson (2004). use of unimproved and improved lowland grassland by wintering birds in the uk. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 102, 49−60. bender dj, l tischendorf & l fahrig (2003). using patch isolation metrics to predict animal binary movement in binary landscapes. landscape ecology 18, 17−39. benton tg, ja vickery & jd wilson (2003). farmland biodiversity: is habitat heterogeneity the key? trends in ecology and evolution 18, 182−188. berry jk (1987). computer-assisted map analysis: potential and pitfalls. photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing 53, 1405−1410. briggs d & f courtney (1989). agriculture and environment. the physical geography of temperate agricultural systems. 442 p. longman scientific and technical, singapore. burnett c & r kalliola (2000). maps in the information society. fennia 178, 81−96. cajander ak (1909). niityt ja viljelysmaat. in palmén eg, e hjelt, j gummerrus, g melander, ja palmen, k krohn & j jantti (eds). oma maa iv. tietokirja suomen kodeille, 41−50. wsoy, porvoo. carpelan c (1999). käännekohtia suomen esihistoriassa aikavälillä 5100−1000 ekr. in fogelberg p (ed). pohjan poluilla. suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan, 249−280. suomen tiedeseura, helsinki. corbet sa (1995). insects, plants and succession: advantages of long-term set-aside. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 53, 201−217. cousins sao, s lavorel & i davies (2003). modelling the effects of landscape pattern and grazing regimes on the persistence of plant species with high conservation value in grasslands in south-eastern sweden. landscape ecology 18, 315−332. dauber j, m hirsch, d simmering, r waldhardt, a otte & v wolters (2003). landscape structure as an indicator of biodiversity: matrix effects on species richness. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 321−329. de la peña nm, a butet, y delettre, g paillat, p morant, l le du & f burel (2003). response of the small mammal community to changes in western french agricultural landscapes. landscape ecology 18, 265−278. di giulio m, pj edwards & e meister (2001). enhancing insect diversity in agricultural grasslands: the roles of management and landscape structure. journal of applied ecology 38, 310−319. duelli p & mk obrist (2003). regional biodiversity in an agricultural landscape: the contribution of seminatural habitat islands. basic and applied ecology 4, 129−138. dunning jb, bj danielson & hr pulliam (1992). ecological processes that affect populations in complex landscapes. oikos 65, 169−175. ekholm m (1993). suomen vesistöalueet. publications of the water and environment administration a 126. 163 p. esri (1992). understanding gis. the arc/info method. environmental systems research institute, inc., redlands, ca, usa. fahrig l (2001). how much habitat is enough? biological conservation 100, 65−74. fei (2003). final report of the first part of the project corine land cover 2000 finland (clc2000). finnish environment institute. unpublished report. freemark ke, c boutin & cj keddy (2002). importance of farmland habitats for conservation of plant species. conservation biology 16, 399−412. gibson cwd & vk brown (1992). grazing and vegetation change: deflected or modified succession? journal of applied ecology 29, 120−131. goodchild mf (1994). integrating gis and remote sensing for vegetation analysis and modeling: methodological issues. journal of vegetation science 5, 615−626. granberg l (1989). valtio maataloustulojen tasaajana ja takaajana. bidrag till kännedom av finlands natur och folk 138, 1−214. grotenfelt g (1922). alkuperäiset viljelystavat suomessa. in krohn k, ko lindeqvist, g melander & k grotenfelt (eds). oma maa iii. tietokirja suomen kodeille, 24−41. wsoy, porvoo. hämet-ahti l (1988). suomen kasvillisuuden pääpiirteet. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 54 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen 141: vegetation and flora, 1−2. national board of survey and geographical society of finland, helsinki. hanski i (1994). a practical model of metapopulation dynamics. journal of animal ecology 63, 151−162. hanski i (1998). metapopulation dynamics. nature 396, 41−49. hanski i & m gilpin (1991). metapopulation dynamics: brief history and conceptual domain. biological journal of the linnean society 42, 3−16. hansson m & h fogelfors (1998). management of permanent set-aside on arable land in sweden. journal of applied ecology 35, 758−771. haysom ka, di mccracken, gn foster & nw sotherton (2004). developing grassland conservation headlands: response of carabid assemblage to different cutting regimes in a silage field edge. agriculture, ecosystems & environment 102, 263−277. heliölä j, o-p liinalaakso, r martikainen & t schultz (2000). tummaverkkoperhonen pirkanmaalla. pirkanmaan ympäristökeskuksen monistesarja 6. 39 p. helminen va (1987). lämpöolot. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 131: climate, 4−10. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. huldén l, a albrecht, j itämies, p malinen & j wettenhovi (2000). suomen suurperhosatlas. 328 p. suomen perhostutkijain seura & luonnontieteellinen keskusmuseo, helsinki. huurre m (1995). 9000 vuotta suomen esihistoriaa. 271 p. otava, helsinki. ihse m (1995). swedish agricultural landscapes – patterns and changes during the last 50 years, studied by aerial photos. landscape and urban planning 31, 21−37. ihse m & c lindahl (2000). a holistic model for landscape ecology in practice: the swedish survey and management of ancient meadows and pastures. landscape and urban planning 50, 59−84. jeanneret ph, b schüpbach & h luka (2003a). quantifying the impact of landscape and habitat features on biodiversity in cultivated landscapes. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 311−320. jeanneret ph, b schüpbach, l pfiffner & th walter (2003b). arthropod reaction to landscape and habitat features in agricultural landscapes. landscape ecology 18, 253−263. johnson lb (1990). analyzing spatial and temporal phenomena using geographical information system. a review of ecological applications. landscape ecology 4, 31−43. jongman rhg (2002). homogenisation and fragmentation of the european landscape: ecological consequences and solutions. landscape and urban planning 58, 211−221. jordán f, a báldi, k-m orci, i rácz & z varga (2003). characterizing the importance of habitat patches and corridors in maintaining the landscape connectivity of a pholidoptera transsylvanica (orthoptera) metapopulation. landscape ecology 18, 83−92. kakkuri j (1990). fennoskandian maankohoaminen. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 125: geophysics of the solid earth crust, 35−36. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. kalliola r (1973). suomen kasvimaantiede. 308 p. wsoy, porvoo. kiviniemi k & o eriksson (2002). size-related deterioration of semi-natural grassland fragments in sweden. diversity and distributions 8, 21−29. krebs jr, jd wilson, rb bradbury & gm siriwardena (1999). the second silent spring? nature 400, 611−612. kujansuu r & j niemelä (1990). maaperämuodostumat. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 124: surficial deposits, 9−11. national board of survey and geographical society of finland, helsinki. kunttu p & j laine (2002). turun pesimälinnuston muutokset vuosina 1951−2001. 60 p. turun kaupungin ympäristönsuojelutoimisto, turku. kuussaari m, j heliölä, j salminen & i niininen (2001). results of the butterfly monitoring scheme in finnish agricultural landscapes for the year 2000. baptria 26, 69−80. lee jc, fd menalled & da landis (2001). refuge habitats modify impact of insecticide disturbance on carabid beetle communities. journal of applied ecology 38, 472−483. levin sa (1992). the problem of pattern and scale in ecology. ecology 73, 1943−1967. levins r (1969). some demographic and genetic consequences of environmental heterogeneity for biological control. bulletin of the entomological society america 15, 237−240. linkola k (1922). niityt ja viljelysmaat. in krohn k, ko lindeqvist, g melander & k grotenfelt (eds). oma maa iii. tietokirja suomen kodeille, 1012−1032. wsoy, porvoo. luostarinen m (1997). maaseudun suuri historia. in luostarinen m & a yli-viikari (eds). maaseudun kulttuurimaisemat. the finnish environment 87, 59−63. luoto m (2000). spatial analysis of landscape ecological characteristics of five agricultural areas in finland by gis. fennia 178, 15−54. luoto m, m kuussaari, h rita, j salminen & t von bonsdorff (2001). determinants of distribution and abundance in the clouded apollo butterfly: a landscape ecological approach. ecography 24, 601−617. luoto m, j pykälä & m kuussaari (2003a). decline of landscape-scale habitat and species diversity after the end of cattle grazing. journal for nature conservation 11, 171−178. luoto m, s rekolainen, j aakkula & j pykälä (2003b). loss of plant species richness and habitat confennia 183: 1 (2005) 55regional distribution and biodiversity perspectives of finnish… nectivity in grasslands associated with agricultural change in finland. ambio 32, 447−451. macarthur rh & eo wilson (1967). the theory of island biogeography. 203 p. princeton university press, princeton. maf (2004a). maisemanhoito. luonnon monimuotoisuus. perinnebiotoopit. maatalouden ympäristötuen erityistuet v. 2000−2006. 20 p. ministry of agriculture and forestry. maf (2004b). matilda. information service of agricultural statistics in finland. ministry of agriculture and forestry. <http://matilda.mmm.fi>. 17.5.2004. maisema-aluetyöryhmä (1993). arvokkaat maisema-alueet. maisema-aluetyöryhmän mietintö ii. 204 p. ympäristöministeriö, mietintö 66/1992. marttila o, t haahtela, h aarnio & p ojalainen (1990). suomen päiväperhoset. 362 p. karisto oy, hämeenlinna. matson pa, wj parton, ag power & mj swift (1997). agricultural intensification and ecosystem properties. science 277, 504−509. meyer-aurich a, p zander & m hermann (2003). consideration of biotic nature conservation targets in agricultural land use – a case study from the biosphere reserve schorfheide-chorin. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 529−539. mikkola a, o jaakkola & y sucksdorff (1999). valtakunnallisten maankäyttö-, peitteisyysja maaperäaineistojen muodostaminen. the finnish environment 342. 86 p. moilanen a (2000). the si program. metapopulation research group, university of helsinki. norderhaug a, m ihse & o pedersen (2000). biotope patterns and abundance of meadow plant species in a norwegian rural landscape. landscape ecology 15, 201−218. oksanen m (2001). vihreät laitumet. laidunyhdistys 1927−1970. 112 p. karisto oy, hämeenlinna. opdam p, j verboom & r pouwels (2003). landscape cohesion: an index for the conservation potential of landscapes for biodiversity. landscape ecology 18, 113−126. pain dj, d hilla & di mccracken (1997). impact of agricultural intensification of pastoral systems on bird distributions in britain 1970−1990. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 64, 19−32. palomäki m & k mikkonen (1999). talousalueet ja menestymisen edellytykset. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 68−69. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. pärtel m, r mändla & m zobel (1999). landscape history of calcareous (alvar) grasslands in hanila, western estonia, during the last three hundred years. landscape ecology 14, 187−196. peach wj, m denny, pa cotton, if hill, d gruar, d barritt, a impey & j mallord (2004). habitat selection by song thrushes in stable and declining farmland populations. journal of applied ecology 41, 275−293. perner j & s malt (2003). assessment of changing agricultural land use: response of vegetation, ground-dwelling spiders and beetles to the conversion of arable land into grassland. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 169−181. pitkänen m, m kuussaari & j pöyry (2001). butterflies. in pitkänen m & j tiainen (eds). biodiversity of agricultural landscapes in finland. birdlife finland conservation series 3, 51−68. poschlod p & mf wallisdevries (2002). the historical and socioeconomic perspective of calcareous grasslands − lessons from the distant and recent past. biological conservation 104, 361−376. pöyry j, s lindgren, j salminen & m kuussaari (2004). restoration of butterfly and moth communities in semi-natural grasslands by cattle grazing. ecological applications 14, 1656−1670. pykälä j (2000). mitigating human effects on european biodiversity through traditional animal husbandry. conservation biology 14, 705−712. pykälä j (2001). perinteinen karjatalous luonnon monimuotoisuuden ylläpitäjänä. the finnish environment 495. 205 p. pykälä j, a alanen, m vainio & a leivo (1994). perinnemaisemien inventointiohjeet. vesija ympäristöhallituksen monistesarja 559. 106 p. pykälä j & i lappalainen (1998). nykyaika näkyy maatalousympäristöissä. in lappalainen i (ed). suomen luonnon monimuotoisuus, 184−195. finnish environment institute, helsinki. pywell rf, ea warman, th sparks, jn greatorexdavies, kj walker, wr meek, c carvell, s petit & lg firbank (2004). assessing habitat quality for butterflies on intensively managed arable farmland. biological conservation 118, 313−325. pyykkönen p (2001). maatalouden rakennemuutos eri alueilla. pellervon taloudellisen tutkimuslaitoksen raportteja 180. 61 p. rassi p, a alanen, t kanerva & i mannerkoski (eds) (2001). suomen lajien uhanalaisuus 2000. 432 p. ministry of environment & finnish environment institute, helsinki. robinson ra & wj sutherland (2002). post-war changes in arable farming and biodiversity in great britain. journal of applied ecology 39, 157−176. ruuhijärvi r (1988). suomen kasvillisuuden pääpiirteet. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 141: vegetation and flora, 2−6. national board of survey and geographical society of finland, helsinki. saunders da, rj hobbs & cr margules (1991). biological consequences of ecosystem fragmentation: a review. conservation biology 5, 18−32. seppälä m (1986). maanpinnan muodot. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 122: geomorphology, 1−8. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. simonen a (1990). suomen kallioperä. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 123: bedrock, 1−4. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. 56 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sonja kivinen skånes h (1991). förändringar i odlingslandskapet och dess konsekvenser för gräsmarksfloran. stockholms universitet naturgeografiska institutionen rapport 86, 1−70. söderström b, b svensson, k vessby & a glimskär (2001). plants, insects and birds in semi-natural pastures in relation to local habitat and landscape factors. biodiversity and conservation 10, 1839−1863. soininen am (1974). vanha maataloutemme. maatalous ja maatalousväestö suomessa perinnäisen maatalouden loppukaudella 1720-luvulta 1870luvulle. journal of the scientific agricultural society in finland 46, 1−459. helsinki. solantie r (1987). sadeja lumiolot. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 131: climate, 18−22. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. spss (2002). spss. release 11.5.1. spss, inc. steffan-dewenter i & t tscharntke (1997). early succession of butterflies and plant communities on set-aside fields. oecologia 109, 294−302. steffan-dewenter i & t tscharntke (2001). succession of bee communities on fallows. ecography 24, 83−93. steiner nc & w köhler (2003). effects of landscape patterns on species richness – a modelling approach. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 353−361. thuiller w, mb araújo & s lavorel (2004). do we need land-cover data to model species distributions in europe? journal of biogeography 31, 353−361. tiainen j (2004). maatalousympäristön historia. in tiainen j, m kuussaari, ip laurila & t toivonen (eds). elämää pellossa. suomen maatalousympäristön monimuotoisuus, 26−42. edita, helsinki. tiainen j & t pakkala (2001). birds. in pitkänen m & j tiainen (eds). biodiversity of agricultural landscapes in finland. birdlife finland conservation series 3, 33−50. tike (2002). agricultural census 2000. 275 p. maa ja metsätalousministeriön tietopalvelukeskus – information centre of the ministry of agriculture and forestry, helsinki. tischendorf l & l fahrig (2000). on the use and measurement of landscape connectivity. oikos 90, 7−19. tuhkanen s (1984). a circumboreal system of climatic-phytogeographical regions. acta botanica fennica 127, 1−50. vainio m, h kekäläinen, a alanen & j pykälä (2001). suomen perinnebiotoopit. perinnemaisemaprojektin valtakunnallinen loppuraportti. the finnish environment 527. 163 p. väisänen ra, e lammi & p koskimies (1998). muuttuva pesimälinnustomme. 567 p. otava, keuruu. valle o (1951). maatalous. in granö jg, r jurva, j keränen, v kujala, a laitakari, u pesonen, p kalaja & e kanervo (eds). suomen maantieteen käsikirja, 404−427. geographical society of finland & otava, helsinki. van swaay cam (2002). the importance of calcareous grasslands for butterflies in europe. biological conservation 104, 315−318. vickery ja, jr tallowin, r feber, ej asteraki, pw atkinson, rj fuller & vk brown (2001). the management of lowland neutral grasslands in britain: effects of agricultural practices on birds and their food resources. journal of applied ecology 38, 647−664. virkkala r, m luoto & k rainio (2004). effects of landscape composition on farmland and red-listed birds in agricultural-forest mosaics. ecography 27, 1−12. vuorela i (1999). viljelytoiminnan alku suomessa paleoekologisen tutkimuksen kohteena. in fogelberg p (ed). pohjan poluilla. suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan, 143−151. suomen tiedeseura, helsinki. waldhart r (2003). biodiversity and landscape − summary, conclusions and perspectives. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 305−309. waldhart r & a otte (2003). indicators of plant species and community diversity in grasslands. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 339−351. waldhart r, d simmering & h albrecht (2003). floristic diversity at the habitat scale in agricultural landscapes of central europe − summary, conclusions and perspectives. agriculture, ecosystems and environment 98, 79−85. weiers s, m boch, m wissen & g rossner (2004). mapping and indicator approaches for the assessment of habitats at different scales using remote sensing and gis methods. landscape and urban planning 67, 43−65. wiens ja (1989). spatial scaling in ecology. functional ecology 3, 385−397. educating ‘surplus population’: uses and abuses of aspiration in the rural peripheries of a globalising world urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa90756 doi: 10.11143/fennia.90756 educating 'surplus population': uses and abuses of aspiration in the rural peripheries of a globalising world nicola ansell, peggy froerer, roy huijsmans, claire elisabeth dungey, arshima champa dost & piti a ansell, n., froerer, p., huijsmans, r., dungey, c. e., dost, a. c. & piti (2020) educating 'surplus population': uses and abuses of aspiration in the rural peripheries of a globalising world. fennia 198(1–2) 17–38. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.90756 increasing school enrolment has been a focus of investment, even in remote rural areas whose populations are surplus to the requirements of the global economy. drawing on ethnographic research conducted in primary schools and their neighbouring communities in rural areas of lesotho, india and laos, we explore how young people, their parents and teachers experience schooling in places where the prospects of incorporation into professional employment (or any well rewarded economic activity) are slim. we show how schooling uses aspiration, holding out a promise of a 'better future' remote from the lives of rural children. however, children’s attachment to such promises is tenuous, boosted yet troubled by the small minority who defy the odds and succeed. we question why education systems continue to promote occupational aspirations that are unattainable by most, and why donors and governments invest so heavily in increasing human capital that cannot be absorbed. keywords: schooling, aspiration, surplus population, lesotho, india, laos nicola ansell (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6129-7413) and peggy froerer (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1605-3564) social and political sciences, brunel university london, kingston lane, uxbridge, ub8 3ph, uk. e-mail: nicola. ansell@brunel.ac.uk, peggy.froerer@brunel.ac.uk roy huijsmans (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1684-2694), international institute of social studies of erasmus university, kortenaerkade 12, 2518 ax the hague, the netherlands. e-mail: huijsmans@iss.nl claire elisabeth dungey (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1432-9096), department of anthropology, durham university, south rd, durham, dh1 3le, uk. e-mail: claire.e.dungey@durham.ac.uk arshima champa dost (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4046-194x), independent researcher. e-mail: arshima@gmail.com piti, independent researcher © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 18 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) this paper is situated in relation to two trends that are shaping the lives of people in remote rural areas of the global south. firstly, rural areas are increasingly home to 'surplus population': people superfluous to the requirements of the global economy (li 2010). many rural people are unable to sustain themselves in environments rendered hostile by climate change or alienated from land that is claimed for other purposes by governments or put to 'more productive' – but low labour intensity – use by global corporations. capital has little alternative use for them, and many face lives of unemployment or underemployment. policy responses to surplus populations differ. depending on social forces, they may, in li's terms, be 'let die' under governments that have little concern, or 'made live' through, for instance, investment in social safety nets and universal health care. the second global trend is the dramatic expansion of basic education. even in the remotest places, most children now spend a few years attending school. the provision of education to 'surplus populations' cannot be explained in the same way as the provision of health care or social protection. schooling is not primarily about sustaining life in the present but preparing children for a future. the actors funding free primary education (notably the world bank) speak of investing in human capital. moreover, they use the promise of a 'better future' to inspire and mobilise children, families and national governments, despite little evidence that the futures they propose are attainable (jakimow 2016). the paper focuses on the contradictions between the promises that increasingly globalised education ostensibly offers to rural youth and the constrained yet dynamic contexts in which they are growing up. drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in rural schools and their neighbouring communities, we explore how education is delivered to and experienced by children in remote rural areas of three very different lower middle-income countries: india, laos and lesotho. in all three, children are encouraged at school to aspire to a future in formal employment. they express the ‘correct’ motivations, but few appear to believe the promise held out to them. we begin by outlining how rural populations are being rendered 'surplus' through economic and political change, and ways in which policy communities are responding. we explore contemporary global processes through which education increasingly figures in future making for rural youth, and the role played in this by promoting aspiration. we introduce our three research settings and the research that was undertaken and then focus on three aspects: the ways in which education in these settings puts forward promises of particular futures; the limited conviction with which most children and their teachers subscribe to these promised futures; and the effects of the confounding complication that a small minority of rural children do secure the futures held out by education. the paper concludes by considering why it is that education systems push aspiration and why governments and donors support education in contexts where its overt aims are largely unattainable. the global periphery and surplus population remote rural areas are important frontiers of the global economy and are transforming rapidly. mobile connectivity is offering new exposure to modern lifestyles, while opportunities to pursue viable agrarian livelihoods are in many places diminishing. environmental change is challenging the sustainability of traditional rural livelihoods. where rural areas are incorporated into national, regional and global economies, rural dwellers are often alienated from land and resources. land is put to ‘more productive’ use, but rural labour is surplus to requirement. the idea of a growing worldwide 'surplus population' has been advanced by, among others, li (2017, 1249) who refers to "about a billion people whose tiny incomes and low life expectancy1 confirm their limited relevance to capital at any scale". the global capitalist economy functions without making use of the labour of those in marginalised places. in some cases, "places (or their resources) are useful, but the people are not" (li 2010, 69). people are dispossessed from land which governments, seduced by the prospect of economic growth, transfer to corporations trading in world markets. commoditisation of land through tenure reforms raises its value and makes it less accessible to the young, offering fewer possibilities of land-based livelihoods (rigg et al. 2016). yet the economic growth generated through such measures seldom leads to employment for the people displaced, as capital seeks 'efficiencies' through labour-saving technologies. apart from direct dispossession by capital, much agricultural land is rendered unproductive by climate change or other ecological challenges. rural 19nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) people are increasingly surplus not only to the needs of the modern sector, but also the transforming rural economy. deprived of rural resources, populations are pushed into migration, "swelling the cities where they try to squeeze yet one more tray of goods for sale onto a crowded pavement"(li 2017, 1249). such activities may bring people a small share of income but are not productive: no one really benefits from there being a choice of vendors selling the same mobile phone credit within metres of one another. contemporary global capitalism may have produced abundant work opportunities in the past but, with mechanisation and digitisation is increasingly incapable of absorbing expanding supplies of labour and in a post-productivist future, jobs will become scarcer globally (ferguson 2015). the rural surplus population includes both those left behind by global capitalism and those actively impoverished by it (rigg 2018). rigg suggests that policy focuses on those he terms the residual poor – those who have missed out on development – who are assumed to need incorporating into a development strategy. however, he also draws attention to the 'produced poor', who have been impoverished through the processes that generated growth, including mainstream development interventions. elsewhere rigg and colleagues (2016) examine how integration into global markets exposes some livelihoods to shocks and stresses. the removal of barriers to international trade, for instance, undermines the livelihoods of local producers who cannot compete with cheap imports. both market and policy can contribute to 'immiserising growth', inducing precarity for some (see also standing 2011) while enriching others. the dominant narrative of a linear agrarian transition in which agricultural peasants become industrial or service sector workers is flawed (li 2010). partly this is due to a failure to recognise the spatial logic of capitalism (massey 1984; smith 1984). it is assumed that economic growth will lead to job creation within the nation state. yet capitalism is inherently spatially uneven and new spatial divisions of labour produce mismatches between population and labour demand. hence while rural land is progressively accumulated by global capital, the jobs produced are likely to be elsewhere. consequently, the technical fixes to rural dispossession and unemployment proposed by, for instance, the ilo and world bank – job training, investments in human capital, attempts to connect people with jobs through provision of information, or the promotion of micro-credit and entrepreneurial attitudes – cannot work because capital simply does not require these people’s labour in these locations (li 2017). some may access jobs through transnational migration, but this option is not available to all, and some can only migrate on adverse terms, dependent on labour brokers and susceptible to cheating or indebtedness (li 2010). while surplus population can be a direct effect of capital (and not simply the effect of its lack of penetration), li (2010) argues that the production of surplus population is not a deliberate strategy of global capital. whereas in the nineteenth century, pauperisation (the use of workhouses for instance) served to keep european industrial wages low, and dispossession of land created african labour reserve economies dependent on migrant wage labour, li (2010) argues that today’s surplus populations simply have no relevance to capital at any scale. as a result, and in contrast to earlier eras of capitalist accumulation, there is no market incentive to keep people alive day to day or from generation to generation. in this situation, it is unsurprising that investment in social reproduction often diminishes (katz 2011). children commonly bear the brunt of this. katz (2011) has described how boys in rural sudan are displaced from meaningful, survivable futures in agriculture, and thereby cast as 'waste', the effort invested in their upbringing failing to bring rewards to them or their communities because the livelihood skills they have developed cannot be profitably employed. the global south today is characterised by "a large and burgeoning population that is chronically under-reproduced, and precariously employed" (li 2017, 1249). not everywhere are surplus populations entirely abandoned – 'let die' by the state or wider society (li 2010). li cites india’s ‘right to food’ programme as indicative of its government’s willingness to try to keep people alive, and explores the role of activism in achieving this. where significant populations lack either direct access to the means of production or a living wage, interventions become necessary to enable people to live (li 2010). recent investments by governments and other agencies in social cash transfers and universal health care arguably represent efforts to sustain those superfluous to economic requirements. a desire to keep people alive cannot, however, explain the concomitant growth in investment in education which appears to focus on preparing a future workforce in an environment where labour absorption is no longer possible. 20 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper the global expansion of schooling and production of aspiration educational enrolment has expanded dramatically worldwide over the past two decades. donor agencies (notably the world bank) and national governments invested heavily in basic education in response to the millennium development goals (mdgs). free primary education programmes, in particular, helped reduce the number of out-of-school children of primary school age from 100 million in 2000 to 57 million in 2015 (un 2015). in lower middle-income countries, 91% of children now complete primary school (world bank 2019). the scale of investment by international agencies reflects a view that education promotes 'international development', understood in terms of human rights, gender equality and poverty reduction. among governments, education is viewed as instrumental in instilling a sense of nationhood, promoting a national language and controlling potentially troublesome youth (boyden 1990). international agencies are inspired partly by the work of scholars including sen (2000) who claim that education is intrinsically valuable and also plays a role in enabling participation in democratic politics, empowering women and supporting decision making on health and fertility (see dyson 2019). but dominating the reasoning of both national and international actors is an implicit association between education and economic growth. in the past, schooling contributed to the productivity of labour largely by instilling habits of discipline, punctuality and obedience (bowles & gintis 1976; apple 1982). with mechanisation, digitisation and deindustrialisation, such traits are no longer in such demand. today, prosperity within the global economy is said to rely increasingly on knowledge-based activities and, with globalisation, human capital growth through education is considered crucial to gaining economic advantage, not only in the more affluent parts of the world, but globally (brown et al. 2012). world bank investment is explicitly aimed at increasing the competitiveness of labour in the global economy (tarabini 2010). the human capital argument underlay investment in free education in the mdg era. today, it is apparent that increasing enrolment alone is not delivering workers for a knowledge economy. unesco (2012) reported that although only 57 million children worldwide were out-of-school, 250 million could not read and write by the time they should reach grade 4. this is partly attributed to curricula and pedagogy which have changed little across asia and africa since colonial times. schooling then was designed to select and prepare a minority to become teachers, nurses and administrators, students of weaker aptitude being eliminated through frequent testing. didactic teaching and academic tests persist despite the massification of schooling. today’s knowledge economy is said to demand not memorisation skills but flexibility, entrepreneurship and self-responsibility. this is inspiring some reforms to curricula and pedagogy. in a quest to produce neoliberal subjects, suited to knowledge work, constructivist approaches to learning are being introduced, which shape how young people view themselves and their future lives (vavrus 2009). a neoliberal subjectivity is aspirational. the neoliberal turn in several countries’ education systems has inspired a deliberate focus on producing aspirational actors who actively plan for their individualised futures (cf. gooptu 2013). radcliffe and webb (2014) describe how chile’s neoliberal education shapes indigenous mapuche teenagers' views of their future lives. they may not fully embrace the futures mapped out for them, but do respond to efforts to turn them into responsible entrepreneurs, producers and consumers. to some extent schooling has always relied on and sought to instil aspiration. those who attend any kind of school see themselves differently and have different expectations from those who do not (nieuwenhuys 1996). through schooling, the future becomes an important focus in life, suffused with alternative possibilities and worth expending effort on. intentionally, or inadvertently, schooling prompts children to engage in aspiration, defined by quaglia and cobb (1996) as a process of identifying, setting and being inspired to work towards future goals. among education policymakers, aspiration is often viewed instrumentally. children may enrol in school due to legislation, but regular attendance and effective learning require commitment and motivation. the widespread view that schooling is the primary means of accessing available opportunities and escaping poverty and the hard labour of agriculture (ames 2013; boyden 2013) is actively encouraged by governments and other organisations. malaysia’s ministry of education has 21nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) recommended that rural indigenous parents “must be persuaded to realise the importance of education” (suhakam 2009, 9). young people in most rural communities already aspire to ever higher levels of education (white 2012), many believing it will transform their lives (posti-ahokas & palojoki 2014). oxford university's young lives project, for instance, found 75% of poor ethiopian 14–15-yearolds would like a university degree, and 90% of these expected to achieve it (abrahams 2014). beyond driving educational engagement, aspiration is considered a force for good, with the power both to transform individual lives (harper et al. 2003) and enable collective action and social change. appadurai (2004, 59) argues that with a greater 'capacity to aspire' "the poor could … contest and alter the conditions of their own poverty". from a more neoliberal perspective, instilling aspiration is often about promising people that they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and create their own jobs (li 2017). the 2015 world development report (world bank 2014a) repeatedly emphasises how 'raising aspiration' (desire for social advancement and material wealth in particular) could serve to reduce poverty. more widely, 'raising aspirations' has become a mantra among agencies and governments, including the uk, keen to secure a knowledge-based competitive edge in the global economy (st clair et al. 2013; kintrea et al. 2015). education’s economic role today is not simply to supply skilled or compliant workers, but aspirational individuals. the notion that expanding school enrolment, or raising children’s aspirations, will grow human capital and thereby contribute to economic growth is hard to square with the experience of school leavers in remote rural areas. numbers of young people aspiring to higher education or professional employment far exceed the opportunities available even in urban environments (jeffrey et al. 2008). despite their expectations, only 3% of ethiopian youth actually go to college (abrahams 2014). education systems penetrate rural areas and incorporate children into a new relation with the future, but for most the promise is illusory. aspirations, which derive both from education and increasing media penetration, often entail out-migration. if, as in the nepali terai, youth have few local opportunities for anything 'better' than farming, they can only cash in their education through migration, either to the city or overseas (rigg et al. 2016). this, however, is not possible for all, and girls face particular constraints. education cannot deliver for most rural youth the futures it encourages them to aspire to in a world of surplus population, but neither does it prepare them for conventional rural livelihoods. in natural resource dependent upland regions of vietnam and china, increasing emphasis on education and out-migration is reducing young people’s labour contributions (punch & sugden 2013). in nepal's terai, once agricultural families invest in their children’s education, 'wasting' this on farming makes little sense (rigg et al. 2016). however, diverting their learning away from natural resource-based livelihoods means ecological knowledge is lost (punch & sugden 2013). thus, in rural areas, education may actually deskill young people for traditional livelihoods (rival 1996; camfield 2011).2 since the 1990s, education has been written about as a 'contradictory resource' (levinson & holland 1996). research in some contexts has found young people to be relatively satisfied with the lives their education has led to. jones (2020), for instance, observes that young men in eastern uganda felt some sense of an educated identity, despite school’s very limited impact on their fortunes, and dyson (2019) finds girls in north india appreciated the new opportunities they had to study, albeit having to negotiate new forms of patriarchy. in many cases, however, even if it sometimes produces some of the benefits suggested by sen (2000), education leads to adverse consequences. these include the reproduction of social inequalities associated with class, caste and religion (e.g. froerer 2015) and gender (marrow 2013; ansell 2016). considerable attention has been given to the failure of schooling to deliver salaried work and the questions this raises for the value of education (mains 2012; newell 2012). education’s failure to bring the expected rewards breeds resentment and loss of hope. here, jeffrey's (2010) study of educated unemployed youth in india and mains' (2012) research with young men in urban ethiopia stand out. explanations of the failure of education to secure social mobility, and its role in perpetuating and even producing new forms of social separation commonly draw on bourdieu’s (1990) theorisation of social reproduction through education (e.g. froerer 2011) or ideas of governmentality (e.g. morarji 2014). these explanations focus on schooling itself and the ways in which it is delivered. in this paper, we look beyond the education system itself to explore its role within a wider economy that cannot absorb the labour of those who pass through it. 22 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper schooling, of course, has always functioned as part of economic structures (see mitchell 2017), differentiating between children, directing them into different positions in the economy according to their relative achievements (bowles & gintis 1976; bourdieu & passeron 1977). desirable jobs are 'positional resources' that were never available to all, and increasing access to education will not change this (brown et al. 2012), but in the past school leavers could expect to be allocated to some productive role. katz (2018, 733) observes, "this sorting mechanism worked beautifully when factory or farm work was widely available, but now when those conditions no longer obtain (or, more accurately, their geographies are stretched globally), the grounds of education are changed". education in areas of surplus population cannot assign young people to a spectrum of active positions; many are left with no clear contribution to make. yet political concerns generally focus on the perceived productive sectors of the economy, neglecting the needs of those who remain distant from these (gupta 2009). numerous accounts have observed that rural young people leave school disillusioned and with a sense of failure (ansell 2004; froerer 2011, 2012; morrow 2013). if the economy cannot make meaningful use of rural people's labour, 'aspiration raising', even if it improves learning outcomes, could be considered cruel (cf. berlant 2011). the remainder of this paper details research that sought to understand how aspiration raising through rural education intersects with changing rural contexts to produce experiences of schooling. the research settings the two-year project that generated the data for this paper involved ethnographic research in remote rural areas of three very different lower-middle-income countries: lesotho, india and laos. a comparative case study approach was adopted in order to attain insights into how global dimensions of education systems and of rural economic change intersect with more localised phenomena to shape aspiration and experiences of schooling. in lesotho, we worked in the maluti mountains and the senqu valley. rural lesotho from the late nineteenth century served as a labour reserve for the south african mining industry. dispossessed of its agricultural land (the 'conquered territories' lost to the boers), the mountain environment could not sustain a population, and teenage boys and men found waged employment as migrant workers. meanwhile women, children and elderly people were confined to lesotho where they engaged in subsistence agriculture and livestock rearing. this not only subsidised the social reproduction of mine labour, it signalled the south african authorities' refusal of any obligation towards those not directly employed on its territory. missionary schools were introduced across lesotho in the nineteenth century and female literacy rates have long been high, but until this century a significant proportion of boys herded livestock rather than attending school, only basic education being required for mine work. since apartheid formally ended in the 1990s, however, employment in mining has become much more elusive. rural employment opportunities are negligible, and other livelihood options are declining as climate change reduces the reliability of agriculture while wool and mohair prices are subject to unstable commodity prices and unfavourable trading arrangements. the absence of barriers to trade between lesotho and south africa has also undermined local livelihoods. chinese traders with greater capital buy wholesale in south africa to stock shops that sell more products more cheaply than local businesses while the low cost of imported maize deters farmers from investing in planting their own fields. some rural people (women particularly) migrate to work in garment factories in the lowlands, and others cross the border, sometimes illegally, to find domestic or seasonal agricultural work. free primary education was introduced from 2000 and became compulsory for 6–13-year-olds in 2010, funded in part through the world bank education for all fast track initiative. despite spending an exceptionally high proportion of national income on education, quality is a concern. the 2007 sacmeq survey found 25% of grade 6 students in rural schools were functionally illiterate and 47% functionally innumerate (spaull 2012), with attainment lower in rural areas. in response, and under world bank influence (nhlapo & maharajh 2017), lesotho has gone further than india3 or laos in reforming its curriculum to address the needs of a wider cross-section of children, focusing on skills, 23nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) values, child-centred pedagogy and the integration of 'creativity and entrepreneurship' as a subject area (moet 2009; dungey & ansell 2020a). our research in laos took place in a rural district in the mountainous north-west of the country. this area, populated largely by non-lao ethnic groups (hmong and khmu), has only recently been encroached on by the state and as such belongs to what scott (2009, after van schendel 2002) has termed 'zomia'. by southeast asian standards, laos is a poor, sparsely populated agrarian society and 70% of workers are employed mainly in small-scale agriculture (world bank 2014b). yet, large scale concession of farmland to (foreign) investors over recent years has interrupted both the generational transfer of farmland to the young and family cultivation of uncleared land (barney 2012). li (2010) classes the enforced movement by the state of ethnic groups from upland areas of cultivation, purportedly to conserve forest, to roadside and lowland settlements as an instance of surplus populations being actively 'let die', arguing that in lowland resettlement sites "arable land is extremely scarce, there is little work, and hunger and disease prove fatal for many" (li 2010, 76). while high (2008) suggests a more nuanced picture, dispossession of land has led many young people to migrate for work in urban areas and especially neighbouring thailand (sentíes portilla 2017). the communities with which we worked had been required to move to roadside locations and were also experiencing other rapid change. one village was adjacent to a construction site for a major new railway – part of china’s 'belt and road' initiative. while villagers were temporarily employed in construction and also providing services to the many chinese workers, completion of the railway will result in permanent loss of land but few new opportunities away from the line’s widely spaced stations. another relative innovation in these communities is schooling. under french colonial rule, education was minimal beyond the temple-based schooling of buddhist boys (bilodeau et al. 1955). during the 1960/1970s civil war and beyond, schooling remained limited, although the revolutionary pathet lao set up adult education in the 'liberated zones' and sent promising youngsters to north vietnam for schooling (brown & zasloff 1986; pholsena 2012). education campaigns continued following the 1975 establishment of the lao pdr. primary education became compulsory for 6–14-year-olds in 1996, reiterated in the 2006 children’s law. laos has made impressive progress in school provision, but the 2012 early grade reading assessment revealed 18% of 4th graders unable to comprehend written text (world bank 2014b). moreover, in the study district, where mass schooling is very new, and at least in part aimed at state-building, 35.1% of children drop out from primary school within the first year and only 42.1% of girls survive to grade 5 (moes 2014). the india research took place in korba district, in the central-eastern state of chhattisgarh. over one third of chhattisgarh's 25 million-strong population is categorized as adivasi, or scheduled tribe (st), most of whom live in rural areas, relying on subsistence agriculture and the sale of forest produce for their livelihoods. some households now supplement their agricultural yields by selling poultry, vegetables or small goods, or by tailoring; others participate in government schemes like the mahatma gandhi national rural employment guarantee act (mgnrega), which guarantees 100 days of paid labour to adults from poor rural households. most are classified as living 'below the poverty line' ('bpl'), despite the economic liberalisation processes, initiated nationwide in the early 1990s, which catapulted india to the ranks of a global economic powerhouse and resulted in dramatic increases in wealth and opportunity, especially amongst educated urban middle classes (cf. brosius 2010; gupta & sivaramakrishnan 2011). the areas we worked in had no formal schools until the mid-1970s, and few individuals availed of education until the 1980s–1990s as its utility was questionable and it was not compulsory. across india, formal schooling was mooted under colonial rule as early as 1835 and written into law in the 1930s, but was not implemented (bajpai 2006). nonetheless, the idea that education is intrinsically beneficial and should be compulsory influenced the modernization agendas of postcolonial leaders (kumar 1994). article 45 of india’s 1949 constitution embraced free and compulsory education as a 'directive principle'. this was not achieved within a decade, as intended, but a constitutional amendment in 2002 made education legally free and compulsory for 6–14-year-olds (bajpai 2006). alongside growing pressure from international agencies and campaigns (rose & dyer 2008), this provoked a campaign to universalize primary schooling. in 2010 the government passed the right to education (rte) act, guaranteeing free primary education. rte has increased both primary and 24 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper secondary enrolment nationally (tilak 2005), but provision remains far from universal and educational achievement remains extremely poor, particularly amongst rural, marginalized populations. the 2012 annual status of education report, for instance, reveals how post-rte increases in chhattisgarh’s rural school enrolment were accompanied by dramatic decreases in attendance and literacy. the research aspirations are not easy to research: they are socially produced, contextual, normative, fluid and difficult to articulate (huijsmans et al. 2021). young people may simply reproduce the dominant narrative or find direct questions about their futures impossible to answer. consequently, a substantial period of ethnographic fieldwork was necessary to explore how young people encounter ideas of the future and construct their own narratives. this intensive and sustained approach helped reveal contradictions and inconsistencies in the views expressed, as well as apparently more longterm and firmly held aspirations. in each country nine months of ethnographic research was conducted in two communities and their local primary schools. some research was also undertaken at the local middle or secondary schools, though these were up to 20 km from the villages. 'remote rural' is not easily defined and the communities were remote in rather different ways. one of the lesotho villages was only about a 3-hour drive from the capital, but lacked amenities such as electricity and running water, and the closest secondary school was a 2–3 hour walk away. the indian villages were comparatively near to a main road, 6 km from the block capital and only 40 km from the district capital, but also lacked amenities. the lao villages were larger and had more amenities but were much further from any large settlement. authors dungey, dost and piti each deployed a range of ethnographic methods in one of the three case study countries. dost and piti both have close relationships with the countries in which they undertook the research (india and laos) whereas dungey had not previously visited lesotho but had undertaken doctoral research elsewhere in rural africa. none of the three was entirely proficient in the language or dialect of the children, owing to differences of ethnicity; all three could communicate at a simple level but required assistance for a more nuanced understanding of their research participants. the three field researchers used participant observation, interviews, group discussions and participatory activities (drawings, drama, job ranking exercises) with children of different ages, both in and out of school, and their families, teachers and other community members. the combination of methods differed with the aptitudes and experiences of the researchers. dungey lived in her two villages for the duration of the fieldwork, whereas dost stayed in a nearby small town and piti made lengthy visits and stayed with teachers. this influenced their interactions and how they were perceived. the researchers' positionality also doubtless shaped the findings. the entire team embodied the perceived benefits of education. piti, for instance, displayed his educational capital in everyday ways, such as speaking correct lao in village meetings and in the classroom, quoting laws and legal regulations in response to villagers' queries. his larger body and toyota hilux represented the 'good life' often held out as the promise of education. the team has also undertaken thematic textual analysis of school textbooks, curricula and exams, and interviews and workshops with national and local policymakers and other key informants. between 4 and 6 months after the completion of the main fieldwork, team members returned to the villages and ran feedback and dissemination workshops with children, teachers, communities and policymakers. the promise of education in all three national settings, aspiration is part of the discourse of education, used to varying degrees to motivate engagement. it exists in the practice of schooling, both implicitly and explicitly. orientation to the future is, for instance, institutionalised in the progression children are expected to make through a series of hierarchically ordered classes. children are expected to 'move forward' (aage badhna in hindi), completing stages, always with a view to the future (dost & froerer in press). life is presented as a trajectory along which to travel in a forward direction. when 14-year-old irregular 25nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) school-going boys in chhattisgarh were asked what happens when you study, they explained that your "future increases" (literally) and you can do anything. a 17-year-old girl in secondary school said: "a successful person thinks about the future, and goes to school to prepare for that future". similarly, mohatu4, a secondary school student in lesotho, explained why he attends school: "you know what, i want to end up seeing what kind of future i can have in life, you see? … a bright future." the extent to which the link between education and a 'bright future' is explicitly promoted in school differs somewhat between the three contexts. in lesotho, where the future figures prominently across school life, children read moralistic short novels about those who pursue the wrong goals in life. a crooked path (bhembe 1995), read in grades 6 and 7, recounts the story of sandile who explains: school has always been very important to me, right from the very first day. i got a first class pass at the end of standard 5 and again at the end of form 3. i know that my parents are very proud of me. and so are my school mates. although to be honest, some of them are jealous and think that it is sheer luck that i pass so well. no way! i study hard. i listen to my parents and read the newspaper each day from front to back. i am always eager to increase my knowledge and improve my mind. i have plans for the future you see. i’ve had them a long time, and i want to make sure that they work out. (bhembe 1995, 9) sandile is soon befriended by michael who entices sandile to stray from his good habits. the boys engage in a sequence of drinking, crime and exam cheating and are both expelled from school. a remorseful sandile is readmitted, but michael disappears, never to return. aspirations encouraged relate to the type of person one should become and the lifestyles that are desirable. aspiring to pursue education in preference to other goals is presented as virtuous in all three settings. for most young people, however, education is not simply an end in itself but a route to a higher status. when rural basotho say 'education is life' (thuto ke bophelo), they are valuing it instrumentally5. young people said that education would enable them to fend for themselves (ho iphelisa) (dungey & ansell 2020b), get beautiful houses and cars, or have an easy life where they can be ‘fat’ and eat well. indian children felt that education would enable them to gain the confidence and income to travel, see new sights, eat novel foods, buy more clothes, marry better off spouses, and take care of their family and community. children in laos also said they wanted to make their village a better place but their drawings and other evidence hinted at aspirations to consumer goods such as smartphones, motorcycles or even cars, and wearing fashionable clothes and jewellery. figure 1, a drawing found on a classroom wall in laos, suggests its author imagines a life where she wears her hair loose and chats on a mobile phone. fig. 1. child’s drawing from classroom wall, laos. 26 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) figures 2a and b are typical of what class 4 girls in the chhattisgarh schools drew when asked to depict their futures: a big cement house, a garden with flowers, and practical (but expensive) household items (gas cylinder and gas stove, household items, motor scooters and mobile phones) and even a helicopter6. boys' drawings (fig. 2c and d) were dominated by technology – tractors, agricultural and construction equipment, mobile phones (old and new) and helicopters. a b c d fig. 2. drawings by class 4, chhattisgarh. these images partly reflect the lives of more prosperous villagers, but affluent lifestyles are also encountered through the media. ethnic hmong children in laos, for instance, sometimes access smartphones and watch hmong videos produced in thailand or the us. children in india are exposed to modernity through television soaps. even in the lesotho villages, where smartphones were scarce 27nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) and television unavailable, children cut pictures of consumer goods (sofas, smartphones) from magazines that friends or siblings had brought from town or from south africa. however, textbooks and the living examples of their teachers also illustrate materially more affluent lives. schooling is understood to give access to material assets and status through providing access to employment. mamello, principal of one lesotho primary school, explained that her purpose was that children should have a bright future, by which she meant: "if they are married they will work for themselves, they seek for jobs and find it akere [right?]. because they have enough education to have good work, they will not suffer in their life." four occupations – teacher, nurse, soldier and police officer – feature with remarkable consistency across the otherwise very different textbooks in use in india, laos and lesotho (fig. 3). a laos textbook's lesson on 'asip' (occupations) states: "there are many kinds of occupations, which are very different, these include: labourer, farmer, employee (teacher, nurse, soldier, police), trader..." (fig. 4). these four occupations (teacher, nurse, soldier, police) dominated young people’s own expressions of their aspirations. a small survey was conducted in villages neighbouring the fieldsites following the ethnographic fieldwork. of approximately 100 primary school-going children per country asked about their first choice of job, 92% in laos, 77% in lesotho and 74% in india named one of these four fig. 3. grade 5 textbook (chaplin et al. 2017), lesotho. fig. 4. primary 4 textbook the world around us, laos. 28 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) occupations. figure 5 illustrates some typical drawings by chhattisgarh children. 5a was painted by a girl who aspired to attend college and become a nurse, drawing herself in a white nurse’s uniform. 5b and c are by boys who aspired for careers with the police or as a doctor. it is notable that these are socially valued roles.7 children talk about them not only as means to a salary or an 'easy life', but because they want to make their remote rural village a healthier, safer, and better educated place. in all three settings they talked of becoming a nurse to care for ill relatives, a teacher for the village, or a police officer to catch thieves within the community.8 this emotional attachment to their communities existed in tension with a sense that the future lay elsewhere. education in these rural places is generally associated with a future beyond the village. progress through education is structured spatially as well as temporally and for children in four of the six villages, progress beyond primary school necessarily entails relocating to larger villages. even where a secondary school existed within walking distance, more distant schools were generally regarded as preferable. post-secondary (and often upper secondary) might require another onward move. as corbett (2007) notes in relation to rural canada, schooling is associated with mobility. even within the village, schooling differentiates itself from rural life. in lesotho, for instance, teachers prohibit boys from wearing blankets or gumboots – the attire of a shepherd – to school. perhaps an inevitable corollary is an association of the remote rural with 'backwardness'. certainly some young people in both india and lesotho wanted to continue living in rural areas, albeit with the jobs and consumer goods of the city, there were others who insisted life was too boring in the village. young people in lesotho said that life happens in towns and they hoped to leave the village, whether for a nearby rural service centre, maseru or south africa to access better services and shops. whether focused on career or lifestyle, aspiration was at times used instrumentally in schools to motivate children to engage with education. in laos, teachers said they did not encourage primary school children to plan for the future (they are not yet in a position to), but they did "give children a dream" – such as becoming a nurse – which helps to keep them attending school. in lesotho, reference to aspiration is used to discipline: children are told "if you keep on behaving the way that you are doing, you will never become a teacher/policeman/soldier". aspiration is used to place demands on individual young people. they must work for their futures. while teachers in the chhattisgarh primary schools did not directly use aspiration instrumentally in these ways, figure 6 is taken from the wall of a classroom. although children themselves could not read the english text, the words (and associated depiction of books) epitomise how schooling casts children as agents in securing their own destinies (see also frye 2019). asked in the survey what could help them succeed in their aspirations, over 70% of school-going children in each country gave an answer that the enumerators coded as 'hard work'.9 a b c fig. 5. drawings from chhattisgarh. 29nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) the tenuity of aspiration despite schools' promotion of particular futures, and their apparent embrace by children, evidence from all three settings suggests that belief in these promised futures is tenuous (see also jakimow 2016). while most children when asked say they want to be a teacher, nurse, soldier or police officer, few demonstrate much conviction that these futures will materialise. moreover, when outside school, children sometimes speak of alternative (more local) livelihoods. they also express a desire for future lifestyles that are incompatible with their chosen salaried career, such as being self-employed and continuing to stay in the village. often they put forward different views on different occasions or even in the same conversation. a girl in grade 5 in lesotho wrote: "i want to be a teacher when i have studied correctly. i want to work in the factories in maseru." in some respects, children are encouraged in school to attach themselves to a label rather than to envisage a tangible future. textbook illustrations present occupations as static points of arrival. rural children may see soldiers and nurses, in textbooks and real life, but acquire very little knowledge of what these jobs involve, the qualifications and processes required to secure them, or how much competition they would face. the abstract treatment of jobs reflects how schooling connects only minimally with rural life. textbook content is presented as familiar but, for rural children, can be hard to relate to. a lao textbook illustration of a funfair, for instance, was interpreted by rural children as a picture of parents bringing their offspring to school, funfairs not featuring in their lives. in lesotho, primary school textbooks explain how to use computer applications such as powerpoint. not only do most rural schools lack computers (or electricity), few rural children have even seen one. in these circumstances, schooling can be very abstract, and unrelated to children’s daily lives. fig. 6. painting from a primary school classroom wall, india. 30 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) where rural activities are depicted, particularly those of more marginalised populations, they are often represented as problematic. in laos, textbook exercises ask students to explain how swidden cultivation – the main agricultural activity in our fieldsites – is environmentally destructive. such exercises imply students' parents are enemies of the environment and fail to teach students how to practise swidden cultivation sustainably. similarly, a lesotho textbook image of a rural environment is used to elicit causes of soil damage, doubtless anticipating that children will focus on harmful pastoral activities. such messages risk stigmatising rural livelihoods and suggest that schooling’s purpose is something other than preparation for rural life. lesotho’s new primary curriculum (kingdom of lesotho 2008) includes 'creativity and entrepreneurship' as a key learning area, to inspire and prepare children to develop their own businesses in the absence of widespread employment opportunities. however, even this is taught in an abstract way. children found it impossible to articulate how the subject might benefit them. a group of children in lesotho was invited to role-play a situation in which a school principal announced creativity and entrepreneurship would no longer be taught. the boy who took the principal’s role explained his decision thus: "here in primary is it ended, the primary school students don’t understand it at all; they are like a brown-swiss cow which doesn’t understand." children have been told that education is for a future in formal employment, and entrepreneurship lessons connected neither with this narrative nor with the many forms of entrepreneurship that children saw happening in the village (dungey & ansell 2020a). the new curriculum may insinuate hope for children rendered ‘surplus’, but in a context where opportunities for entrepreneurial futures are almost as scarce as professional jobs, it offers a future no more grounded in reality than more conventional schooling. few children in any of the schools demonstrated a convincing commitment to the futures they said they wanted. despite the promise that hard work would be rewarded with a government job, children frequently skipped classes and many ultimately opted to marry, migrate or take on informal work, even where this cut short their schooling. two girls dropped out from one of the lesotho primary schools during the fieldwork. khothatso became pregnant and got married. limpho moved away having been accused of stealing in the village and subsequently married. 20-year-old tun from laos reported he had to leave secondary school because his parents were poor, and he, too, quickly married. while causes varied, decisions often appeared to reflect a lack of conviction that education would pay off as depicted. there were some students who appeared genuinely committed to their goals but, as jakimow (2016) describes based on her research in telangana, india, most young people are (or quite quickly become) resigned to the likelihood of failure. significantly, teachers were also unconvinced that their students would achieve the careers set out for them. most subscribed to the narrative that schooling’s purpose is to enable children to pass exams that eventually give access to formal sector careers. however, they believed the rural students they taught would fail those exams, and be unable to progress to salaried jobs.10 mamello, who spoke of children going to school to get good jobs (cited above), was typical of the lesotho teachers: i: but what kinds of jobs do people from ha mabana in this area get? r: ache, it’s not good work because they do not go to school akere [do they]? to have good job needs you to be educated, so they drop out even before they are even in standard 7 so what kind of job will be good for them? nothing. teachers both recognise that structural constraints limit children's prospects and accuse rural families of failing to support their children's education. while they may encourage children to ‘dream’ in order to keep them focused on schooling, teachers' own frequent absences and lack of preparation attest to a sense that however much they invest in their teaching, they are unlikely to enable rural children to attain the futures they talk about. because of their narrow view of the purpose of schooling, many lack conviction that they can make a difference in children's lives. in all three settings, teachers often lacked enthusiasm about their roles. in lesotho, teaching was often a career of last resort (attractive, perhaps, to rural primary school children but less so to urban high school graduates). places in teacher training colleges were relatively plentiful and entry requirements lower than for other government jobs, although actual teaching posts were limited. when asked why he became a teacher, one lesotho teacher responded "because there was a shortage 31nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) of jobs. there was nothing i could do." in india and (more so) laos teaching had a higher status but even here the poor infrastructure (electricity, running water, mobile phone signal, roads) added to the sense of futility to make rural schools unpopular. this manifested most clearly in absenteeism. teachers from most of the schools spent considerable time travelling to meetings, collecting their pay and maintaining contact with distant family. their lives often revolved around distant places, some spending their time seeking work elsewhere. in laos, the schools typically started each new term a few days late when teachers arrived back from family visits. teachers also often left the village on friday and returned on monday, shortening the teaching week. those who stayed in the rural environment commonly devoted energies elsewhere than teaching. some set up alternative, more desirable and/or more profitable parallel livelihoods. the indian research encountered one teacher who provided rooms for rent, managed a road-side hotel, and operated a taxi service. yet the teachers did not actively acquaint children with the practicalities of establishing such livelihoods. the teachers were not only sceptical of the prospects of the children they taught, they also had little belief in the quality of the schools. in india, most teachers in rural schools sent their own children to private schools. in lesotho, community members commented critically: “all the teachers teaching there, none of them has their children attending there, they have all taken them to other schools,” a practice that reinforced a sense that a better life is to be gained elsewhere. the distinction between teachers' and students' performance of education as an aspirational endeavour and the scepticism apparent in their everyday engagement is not unique to these contexts. zipin and colleagues (2015, 236) distinguish doxic aspirations – "dominant norms about worthy futures" circulating through media and policy discourse – from habituated aspirations – a "felt sense … of situated possibility" (ibid., 234) grounded in biographic–historical conditions (drawing on bourdieu’s notion of habitus). while doxic aspirations are seen as universally desirable futures that can be achieved through hard work, zipin and colleagues (2015) argue that disadvantaged youth generally recognise tacitly, or subconsciously, that for them these futures are actually impossible. life made visible in remote rural places, in the context of surplus population, tends to be far removed from the commonsense doxa. despite the promise expressed on classroom walls, in textbooks and in the exhortations of teachers, the evidence of older siblings and acquaintances suggests that becoming a teacher, nurse, soldier or police officer is almost certainly a fiction to play along with, rather than a concrete future. success for the few and disillusionment for the many an account of educational aspirations in remote rural places would be incomplete without acknowledging that the promise of a formal sector career becomes a reality for some.11 a small minority of young people in each of the villages attained such jobs. in one of the lesotho villages, people spoke of a local girl who had become a nurse and visited from time to time. 17-year-old tona in laos said she was inspired by mr sonphet, the only hmong teacher at the local primary school who grew up in the village. younger children may believe with conviction that they will be among those who succeed, albeit they are unclear what is required. over time, many children recognise that their school performance is unlikely to be adequate, but a few high achievers hang on to the possibility that they will defeat the odds. and as they grow older, their awareness of those odds solidifies. an indian male youth in college cited 3,000 applicants for one job. in laos, teaching positions are regulated through a quota system, with large numbers working as unsalaried ‘volunteers’ in anticipation of eventually finding employment. the odds of securing jobs are never evenly distributed. apart from academic success, social connections are important, and these may require bribery. in the laos case, volunteer teachers seeking quota positions require evaluation reports from their schools and the village officials which can make them vulnerable to exploitation. the fact that a small minority achieve salaried employment sustains some plausibility in the narrative of aspiration and success put forward through education (what jakimow (2016, 11) refers to as "the almost impossibility of getting ahead through education"). those who succeed feed the aspirations of the next generation as they progress through schooling. but beyond this, it hints at a functional purpose for mass schooling within the global economy. prior to recent expansion, the purpose of schooling in all three countries was to select a minority for formal sector employment. many children 32 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) failed exams and were screened out, with just a small elite reaching the level of education required for entry into government careers. today the number of children persisting through education is much larger, but the availability of employment has not increased commensurably. perhaps the intended beneficiaries of education are the small minority whose human capital will be of value within a global economy. the remainder who persist in education despite learning little cannot achieve the promise of education but – as surplus population – may be of minimal concern to policymakers. while we have shown that a large share of rural youth in all three countries expect little to come of their education, this does not mean that schooling is irrelevant in their lives. for some, pursuing education involves significant commitment. often, the longer they are able to stay in school, the more they vest in its promise. in laos, for instance, going to secondary school requires commuting or staying in another village. at this stage students cease to imagine themselves pursuing farming futures (an educated person may become an agriculturalist, but not a farmer). when parents complained about poor labour market prospects, this was typically in relation to a young person who had finished (most of) secondary school. their expectation was that the state should provide jobs (through a quota system). such parents perhaps regarded this as a sort of social contract: they had played their part in supporting their children through secondary education and the state should in return deliver secure employment. in the other settings, by contrast, children became more aware over time of their limited prospects of securing formal sector work. growing older, they became conscious of the distance (physical, social, in status) between themselves and the urban/foreign other. what seemed an attractive future in childhood, would appear more, rather than less, distant as they grew older. in india, particularly, young people clearly revised their job aspirations as they came to recognise the limits of their own abilities in relation to their classmates. gradually, they came to aspire to local artisanal livelihoods or resigned to futures as labourers rather than anticipating urban professions, and consequently education seemed less vital to their lives. upon realising that academic challenges and increasing costs (of fees or relocation) make it unlikely they will secure the level of education required for a formal sector job, young people see little value in pursuing education further. they do not view education as something that will help them to pursue a rural livelihood more effectively in a changing world. in part this reflects the entrenched discourse about the role of schooling. even where (as in lesotho) 'entrepreneurship' appears on the curriculum, children fail to associate it with their own futures. rural livelihoods are understood to be learned in other ways than through schooling. ultimately, many young people saw two possible futures: salaried work as a teacher, nurse, soldier or a police officer, or the rural struggle of their parents’ generation, perhaps in more challenging circumstances.12 for those few indian youth who reach the end of 10+2 years of education, their learning seldom materialises into opportunities. young people experience 'udasinta' (deep sadness) and refer to shattered dreams. education’s main purpose is understood to be securing a salaried job, and when such prospects recede, young people both cease to engage with schooling and cannot conceive of applying their education in their rural context. conclusions our research revealed a broadly common pattern across the three case study countries. there were some differences. the future and the importance of aspiration figured more prominently in lesotho, which is partly attributable to its new world bank-inspired curriculum. teachers were less clearly demotivated in laos and lesotho, where they were better paid and (particularly in laos) had higher status. the specifics of education policy, as well as cultural differences, undoubtedly play a role. they do not, however, disguise a general pattern. children in all of our fieldsites, as doubtless in remote rural areas of many middle-income countries, attend school where they are encouraged to envisage lives that have no direct relation to their rural environment – as employees of a formal service sector. however, few are destined for such futures. schooling mostly fails to deliver its ostensible purpose of equipping children for salaried professional jobs. this does not mean that it has no impacts. it introduces routine into young people’s lives, acquaints them with professionals (in the form of teachers) who are often from elsewhere and have 33nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) very different backgrounds, and it extends the presence of national and global agendas into rural areas. it is one institution through which marginalised areas are increasingly touched by global processes. nor is it the case that no children educated in rural schools gain formal employment. however, most rural children do not achieve what education promises and, despite attesting their desire to be a teacher, nurse, soldier or police officer, it seems that few really expect to. moreover, schooling also fails to connect in meaningful ways with children’s rural lives and as such offers little preparation for rural livelihoods (prospects of which are also diminishing). two major issues are raised by these research findings. first is the question of why young people are encouraged to aspire to futures that are out of reach to most. this is doubtless partly to persuade children and their families to engage with schooling. aspiration, to a greater or lesser extent, motivates effort. schools promote the idea that what one does today affects one’s future, the idea that the future can be planned and controlled. aspiration then justifies a sacrifice of time, effort and money for future reward. children are encouraged to work hard in school to secure a better future. the corollary of this is that success and failure both tend to be explained in relation to 'hard work'. an education system focused around working toward an aspirational future is one that enables failure to be attributed to inadequacy of effort. the fact that a small minority are successful serves to reinforce this message. in line with the analysis of bourdieu and passeron (1977), failure is individualised in a supposed meritocracy that masks the fact that most are destined for sub-optimal futures. neoliberal education renders a class of people responsible for their own failure (vavrus 2009). from this perspective it is less surprising that education systems promote a vision of an unattainable future. as katz (2018, 733) observes: "if everyone’s aspiration and capacity for employment were ratcheted upward … the whole system of capital accumulation as we know it would collapse even further". schooling does not reveal directly to children that the economy does not require them; rather it tells them they do not merit well-rewarded or respected roles in that economy. the second question – perhaps a larger one – is why so much is invested in providing rural children with an education that appears unable to achieve its proclaimed objectives. donors such as the world bank as well as national governments of diverse persuasions, as illustrated by our three-country study, fund the expansion of education based to a large degree on a human capital argument (investment in future workers for a more productive economy), yet across our very diverse rural fieldsites, children learn relatively little and few will make a significant economic contribution. the school leavers most engaged in the global economy are probably the basotho youth who pick fruit in south africa, but it is unclear how schooling contributes to their productivity in this activity, particularly given that it is very much disapproved of in school. a small minority from lesotho and laos may find work in urban garment factories, but urban areas are not short of labour with the requisite basic skills. while neoliberal donors and governments might be expected to invest in human capital development, to do so in places of surplus population, where human capital has little potential seems dysfunctional. the answer here is perhaps partly that schools are complex institutions that represent diverse interests. as li (2005) observes in relation to development interventions, these do not emerge fully formed from a single source, but express objectives and practices of diverse provenance and are not wholly coherent. they do, however, "work on and through the practices and desires of their target populations" (ibid., 383). schooling has features, associated with its largely european origins and colonial and postcolonial histories, that are intransigent and perhaps responsible for the enduring emphasis on formal sector employment. more profoundly, education is fundamental to the liberal worldview embraced by most global institutions and many governments and populations. education's promise of social mobility is part of a myth that possibilities are open to all, that something worthwhile is on offer, even if it lies in the future. legitimacy is conferred on the provider – alleviating them of the need to deliver a radical redistribution of resources. in effect, a focus on expanding education covers up the urgent need for structural change. donors and states embrace the notion that girls' education will lower fertility rates (moeller 2013), while government interests may also be furthered through the role schooling plays in nation building, particularly in rural areas, irrespective of whether children find employment. ultimately, those designing and delivering education are perhaps not primarily concerned with rural children. rural youth are marginal to the interests of those in power. schools help recruit a small 34 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) minority into skilled productive roles or entrepreneurialism, but most are not viewed as key economic or political actors. in line with the arguments of gidwani and reddy (2011) or katz (2018), such children are 'waste' – superfluous or residual. they are surplus to the needs of the modern economy – unusable, unwanted, excess. but they are "waste that must be managed and contained" (katz 2018, 726), and schooling plays a role in this. there are clear implications. marginalised children are not, as education experts often suggest, failing to engage with schooling because they are constrained by their limited aspirations; rather they have a grasp of reality but are constrained by their limited options. the challenge, then, is less about raising children's aspirations (or providing better curricula or teachers) than about the structure of a globalising economy which cannot absorb school leavers' labour and, to some degree, actively deprives them of rural livelihood opportunities. education cannot – and will not – solve this. it cannot deliver its doxic promise in rural places for most children. neither will encouragement of entrepreneurship resolve the lack of available opportunities (dungey & ansell 2020a). schooling might be made more relevant to rural children, but ultimately increasing human capital will do little for rural communities. schooling in remote rural areas does not (and is not there to) integrate young people into a changing global economy; it also fails to equip them for life in remote but transforming rural places. schooling is about the future. it is not about 'making live' surplus populations in the way that health or social policy might. but can a different future be made through education? if "promises of universal prosperity cannot be met in an economy organized on capitalist lines" (li 2017, 1253), can schooling be delinked from the requirements of the capitalist economy (rather than just seeking to fix this connection)? is it possible to re-envisage the purpose of education outside the neoliberal paradigm? schooling has at various times in history in different societies been a key site of social struggle. while surplus populations do not have the political leverage of workers (they cannot threaten to withdraw their labour (li 2017)), there is perhaps scope for education to activate a politics that attaches intrinsic value to life and does not just value people as workers (li 2010). civil society in india was effective in securing the right to education act. perhaps a struggle is now needed for rights in education. notes 1 increases in life expectancy should be acknowledged (in part due to the 'make live' policies described by li – see below), but wide discrepancies remain between more affluent and poorer parts of the world. 2 in some contexts, young people do aspire to engage in rural and agricultural livelihoods, though due to the processes outlined above, the options available are very limited (deuchar & dyson 2020; white 2020). 3 india has introduced a new national education policy in 2020 which moves in a somewhat similar direction to lesotho's. 4 pseudonyms are used for all research participants and villages. 5 this is not to say that they see no intrinsic value in school going. children in india, for instance, said they found school more interesting than staying at home and talked about their enjoyment of learning, play and socialising. 6 the chhattisgarh chief minister had recently visited a nearby village by helicopter. 7 education, healthcare, the military and the police force are also key to the project of national development. 8 this might partially explain why few young people talked of factory work or even other forms of formal or informal employment. in all three settings, migration for factory work or seasonal farm work is not unusual, but these options were not considered attractive. moreover, they were not viewed as outcomes of education and were barely mentioned in school. 9 other answers differed more between the contexts, with children in india talking of luck or good fortune (26%), laos mentioning help from people or organisations (39%) and lesotho referring to faith (11%). these differences partly reflect religious traditions. 10 in laos, we observed teachers 'helping' students pass the exams, not because this would give them access to jobs but because they were mandated to achieve 100% primary school completion (see huijsmans & piti in press). 11 jakimow (2016) suggests this is key to understanding it. 35nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 12 while in laos, children's parents grew up amid war and the extreme impoverishment produced by the communist experiment, in india and lesotho livelihoods have become more precarious with the loss of mining remittances and climate change. acknowledgements this paper was first presented as the fennia lecture at the 8th nordic geographers meeting in trondheim in 2019. we would like to thank tatek abebe and ragnhild lund for their insightful comments delivered as part of the conference session and the four reviewers (jonathan rigg, katharyne mitchell, craig jeffrey and robert barratt) for their very constructive engagement with the paper. we have drawn on suggestions from all six in revising the paper but all deficiencies of course remain our own. thanks also to kirsi pauliina kallio for coordinating the process. we must also thank those who helped us in the field. we worked in partnership with pulane lefoka at the national university of lesotho, jodie fonseca and her team at plan laos and muniv shukla at gramm mitra in chhattisgarh, all of whom provided invaluable support. we were also helpfully assisted by a large number of individuals in the fieldsites and with the transcription of interviews. finally, we are grateful to the many individuals in the six schools and neighbouring communities for giving their time to participate in the research. references abrahams, s. (2014) aspiring to understand aspirations. <http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/ aspiring-understand-aspirations> 13.5.2015. ames, p. (2013) constructing new identities? the role of gender and education in rural girls' life aspirations in peru. gender and education 25(3) 267–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2012.740448 ansell, n. (2004) secondary schooling and rural youth transitions in lesotho and zimbabwe. youth and society 36(2) 183–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/0044118x04268376 ansell, n. (2016) achieving gender parity in education: achievements and limitations of millennium development goal 3. in abebe, t. & waters, j. (eds.) labouring and learning. geographies of children and young people, vol. 10. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-97-2_23-1 appadurai, a. (2004) the capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition. in rao, v. & walton, m. (eds.) culture and public action, 59–84. stanford university press, stanford. apple, m. w. (1982) education and power. routledge & kegan paul, boston. bajpai, a. (2006) child rights in india: law, policy and practice. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195670820.001.0001 barney, k. (2012) land, livelihoods and remittances: a political ecology of youth out migration across the lao-thai mekong border. critical asian studies 44(1) 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2012.644887 berlant, l. (2011) cruel optimism. duke university press, durham and london. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822394716 bhembe, c. (1995) a crooked path. macmillan boleswa, lesotho. bilodeau, c., pathammavong, s. & lê quang hông (1955) compulsory education in cambodia, laos and vietnam. unesco, paris. bourdieu, p. & passeron, j. (1977) reproduction in education, society and culture. sage, london. bourdieu, p. (1990) distinction. routledge, london. bowles, s. & gintis, h. (1976) schooling in capitalist america: educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. routledge and kegan paul, london. boyden, j. (1990) childhood and the policy makers: a comparative perspective on the globalization of childhood. in james, a. & prout, a. (eds.) constructing and reconstructing childhood: contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood, 184–215. falmer press, london. boyden, j. (2013) 'we're not going to suffer like this in the mud': educational aspirations, social mobility and independent child migration among populations living in poverty. compare: a journal of comparative and international education 43(5) 580–600. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2013.821317 brosius, c. (2010) india’s new middle class: urban forms of leisure, consumption and prosperity. routledge, delhi. brown, m. & zasloff, j. j. (1986) apprentice revolutionaries: the communist movement in laos, 1930– 1985. hoover institution press, stanford university, stanford. 36 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) brown, p., lauder, h. & ashton, d. (2012) the global auction: the broken promises of education, jobs, and incomes. oup, oxford. camfield, (2011) 'from school to adulthood'? young people’s pathways through schooling in urban ethiopia. european journal of development research 23 679–694. https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2011.33 chaplin, c., chaplin, c. & moshabesha, m. (2017) personal, spiritual and social. pearson, cape town. corbett, m. (2007) learning to leave: the irony of schooling in a coastal community. fernwood, nova scotia. deuchar, a. & dyson, j. (2020) between unemployment and enterprise in neoliberal india: educated youth creating work in the private education sector. transactions of the institute of british geographers [online dec 06 2019] https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12364 dost, a. & froerer, p. (in press) education, aspiration and aage badhna: the role of schooling in facilitating ‘forward movement’ in rural chhattisgarh, india. european journal of development research. dungey, c. & ansell, n. (2020a) 'not all of us can be nurses': proposing and resisting entrepreneurship education in rural lesotho. sociological research online [online august 10 2020] https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780420944967 dungey, c. & ansell, n. (2020b) 'i go to school to survive': facing physical, moral and economic uncertainties in rural lesotho. children's geographies [online sep 18 2020] https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2020.1822514 dyson, j. (2019) rethinking education as a contradictory resource: girls' education in the indian himalayas. geoforum 103 66–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.03.021 ferguson, j. (2015) give a man a fish. duke university press, durham, nc. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822375524 froerer, p. (2011) education, aspiration and inequality in central india. european journal of development research 23(5) 695–711. https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2011.43 froerer, p. (2012) learning, livelihoods and social mobility: valuing girls’ education in central india. anthropology and education quarterly 43(4) 344–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1492.2012.01189.x froerer, p. (2015) adivasi young people and the risk of education in rural chhattisgarh. south asian history and culture 6(3) 365–379. https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2015.1030873 frye, m. (2019) the myth of agency and the misattribution of blame in collective imaginaries of the future. the british journal of sociology 70(3) 721–730. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12662 gidwani, v. & reddy, r. n. (2011) the afterlives of "waste": notes from india for a minor history of capitalist surplus. antipode 43(5) 1625–1658. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00902.x gooptu, n. (ed.) (2013) enterprise culture in neoliberal india: youth, class and media. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315889795 gupta, d. (2009) the caged phoenix: can india fly? stanford university press, stanford. gupta, a. & sivaramakrishnan, k. (eds.) (2011) the state in india after liberalization: interdisciplinary perspectives. routledge, abingdon. harper, c., marcus, r. & moore, k. (2003) enduring poverty and the conditions of childhood: lifecourse and intergenerational poverty transmissions. world development 31(3) 535–554. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0305-750x(03)00010-x high, h. (2008) the implications of aspirations: reconsidering resettlement in laos. critical asian studies 40(4) 531–550. https://doi.org/10.1080/14672710802505257 huijsmans, r. & piti (in press) rural schooling and good life in late socialist laos: articulations, sketches and moments of 'good time'. european journal of east asian studies. huijsmans, r., ansell, n. & froerer, p. (2021) editorial introduction: development, young people, and the social production of aspirations. european journal of development research 33(1). jakimow, t. (2016) clinging to hope through education: the consequences of hope for rural laborers in telangana, india. ethos 44(1) 11–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12110 jeffrey, c. (2010) timepass: youth, class and the politics of waiting. stanford university press, stanford, california. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804775137 jeffrey, c., jeffery, p. & jeffery, r. (2008) degrees without freedom. stanford university press, stanford. jones, b. (2020) we are passing our leisure time: moving on from education in eastern uganda. africa 90(2) 252–272. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972019001104 katz, c. (2011) accumulation, excess, childhood: toward a countertopography of risk and waste. documents d'anàlisi geogràfica 57(1) 47–60. katz, c. (2018) the angel of geography: superman, tiger mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste. progress in human geography 42(5) 723–740. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517708844 37nicola ansell et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) kingdom of lesotho (2008) curriculum and assessment framework: education for individual and social development. ministry of education and training, maseru. kintrea, k., st clair, r. & houston, m. (2015) shaped by place? young people's aspirations in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. journal of youth studies 18(5) 666–684. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2014.992315 kumar, k. (1994) democracy and education in india. sangam books, london. levinson, b. a. & holland, d. c. (1996) the cultural production of the educated person: an introduction. in levinson, b. a., foley, d. e. & holland, d. c. (eds.) the cultural production of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice, 1–56. state university of new york press, albany. li, t. m. (2005) beyond "the state" and failed schemes. american anthropologist 107(3) 383–39. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.3.383 li, t. m. (2010) to make live or let die? rural dispossession and the protection of surplus populations. antipode 41(s1) 66–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00717.x li, t. m. (2017) after development: surplus population and the politics of entitlement. development and change 48(6) 1247–1261. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12344 mains, d. (2012) hope is cut: youth, unemployment, and the future in urban ethiopia. temple university press, philadelphia, pennsylvania. marrow, j. (2013) feminine power or feminine weakness? north indian girls struggles with aspirations, agency, and psychosomatic illness. american ethnologist 40(2) 347–361. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12026 massey, d. (1984) spatial divisions of labour: social structures and the geography of production. macmillan, london. mitchell, k. (2017) making workers: radical geographies of education. pluto, london. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1xp3nf1 moeller, k. (2013) proving "the girl effect": corporate knowledge production and educational intervention. international journal of educational development 33(6) 612–621. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2013.08.001 moes (2014) basic education quality and access in lao pdr (bequal), vientiane. moet (2009) curriculum and assessment policy: education for individual and social development. ministry of education and training, lesotho. morarji, k. (2014) subjects of development: teachers, parents and youth negotiating education in rural north india. european journal of development research 26(2) 175–189. https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2013.55 morrow, v. (2013) whose values? young people's aspirations and experiences of schooling in andhra pradesh, india. children and society 27(4) 258–269. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12036 newell, s. (2012) the modernity bluff: crime, consumption, and citizenship in côte d’ivoire. university of chicago press, chicago, illinois. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226575216.001.0001 nhlapo, m. d. & maharajh, l. r. (2017) engaging foreign curriculum experts in curriculum design: a case study of primary school curriculum change in lesotho. universal journal of educational research 5(10) 1741–1747. https://doi.org/10.13189/ujer.2017.051011 nieuwenhuys, o. (1996) the paradox of child labor and anthropology. annual review of anthropology 25 237–251. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.237 pholsena, v. (2012) the (transformative) impacts of the vietnam war and the communist revolution in a border region in southeastern laos. war and society 31(2) 163–183. https://doi.org/10.1179/0729247312z.0000000008 posti-ahokas, h. & palojoki, p. (2014) navigating transitions to adulthood through secondary education: aspirations and the value of education for tanzanian girls. journal of youth studies 17(5) 664–681. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2013.853871 punch, s. & sugden, f. (2013) work, education and out-migration among children and youth in upland asia: changing patterns of labour and ecological knowledge in an era of globalisation. local environment 18(3) 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.716410 quaglia, r. & cobb, c. (1996) toward a theory of student aspirations. journal of research in rural education 12(3) 127–132. radcliffe, s. & webb, a. (2014) mapuche youth between exclusion and the future: protest, civic society and participation in chile. children's geographies 14(1) 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2014.964667 rigg, j. (2018) rethinking asian poverty in a time of asian prosperity. asia pacific viewpoint 59(2) 159–172. https://doi.org/10.1111/apv.12189 rigg, j., oven, k. j., basyal, g. k. & lamichhane, r. (2016) between a rock and a hard place: vulnerability and precarity in rural nepal. geoforum 76 63–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.08.014 38 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) rival, l. (1996) formal schooling and the production of modern citizens in the ecuadorian amazon. in levinson, b. a., foley, d. e. & holland, d. c. (eds.) the cultural production of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice, 153–168. suny press, new york. rose, p. & dyer, c. (2008) chronic poverty and education: a review of the literature. working paper no. 131, chronic poverty research centre. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1537105 van schendel, w. (2002) geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: southeast asia from the fringes. environment and planning d: society and space 20(6) 647–668. https://doi.org/10.1068/d16s scott, j. c. (2009) the art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland southeast asia. yale university press, new haven. sen, a. (2000) development as freedom. oxford university press, delhi. sentíes portilla, g. (2017) land concessions and rural youth in southern laos. the journal of peasant studies 44(6) 1255–1274. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1396450 smith, n. (1984) uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. university of georgia press, athens, georgia. spaull, n. (2012) lesotho at a glance. sacmeq series, stellenbosch economic working papers. <http://resep.sun.ac.za/index.php/projects/> 13.5.2015. st clair, r., kintrea, k. & houston, m. (2013) silver bullet or red herring? new evidence on the place of aspirations in education. oxford review of education 39(6) 719–738. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2013.854201 standing, g. (2011) the precariat – the new dangerous class. bloomsbury, london. suhakam (2009) annual report 2009. suhakam, human rights commission of malaysia, kuala lumpur. <http://www.suhakam.org.my/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/annual-report2009.pdf>13.5.2015. tarabini, a. (2010) education and poverty in the global development agenda: emergence, evolution and consolidation. international journal of educational development 30(2) 204–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2009.04.009 tilak, j. b. g. (2005) post-elementary education, poverty and development in india. working paper series no. 6. national institute of educational planning and administration, new delhi. un (2015) the millennium development goals report 2015. <https://www.un.org/ millenniumgoals/2015_mdg_report/pdf/mdg%202015%20pr%20key%20facts%20global.pdf>. un department of public information. unesco (2012) efa global monitoring report: youth and skills: putting education to work. unesco, paris. <http://www.ungei.org/files/218569e.pdf> vavrus, f. (2009) the cultural politics of constructivist pedagogies: teacher education reform in the united republic of tanzania. international journal of educational development 29(3) 303–311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2008.05.002 white, b. (2012) agriculture and the generation problem: rural youth, employment and the future of farming. ids bulletin 43(6) 9–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2012.00375.x white, b. (2020) human capital theory rural youth and the defectology of aspirations in policy research on rural youth. european journal of development research [online nov 6 2020] https://doi.org/10.1057/s41287-020-00300-0 world bank (2014a) world development report 2015: mind, society, and behavior. world bank, washington, dc. world bank (2014b) lao development report 2014: expanding productive employment for broadbased growth. world bank group, vientiane. world bank (2019) primary completion rate, total (% of relevant age group). <https://data.worldbank. org/indicator/se.prm.cmpt.zs> 30.12.2019. zipin, l., sellar, s., brennan, m. & gale, t. (2015) educating for futures in marginalized regions: a sociological framework for rethinking and researching aspirations. educational philosophy and theory: incorporating access 47(3) 227–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.839376 performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the airbnb experience in sofia, bulgaria. urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa66259 doi: 10.11143/fennia.66259 performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the airbnb experience in sofia, bulgaria maartje roelofsen roelofsen, m. (2018) performing “home” in the sharing economies of tourism: the airbnb experience in sofia, bulgaria. fennia 196(1) 24–42. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66259 this article explores how “home” is performed in the emerging sharing economies of tourism, drawing on the example of airbnb in sofia, bulgaria. based on an (auto)ethnographic approach, this article analyses the sometimes contested ways in which both hosts and guests engage in the everyday embodied practices of home-making. in doing so, it challenges airbnb’s essentialized idea of home as a site of belonging, “authenticity” or “localness”. it also shows how the political and historical specificities, as well as the materialities of people’s homes significantly shape the ways in which ordinary practices of homemaking play out and consequently affect feelings of (un)homeliness as part of the airbnb experience. by using performance theory as an analytical framework, this article seeks to contribute to a critical understanding of the contemporary geographies of home in relation to the global sharing economies of tourism, one that is attuned to openness, interrelatedness, and a constant mode of becoming. keywords: home, commodification, performance, autoethnography, tourism maartje roelofsen, department of geography and regional science, university of graz, heinrichstrasse 36, 8010, graz, austria & department of geography and planning, macquarie university, building w3a room 433, sydney, nsw 2109 australia. e-mail: maartje.roelofsen@mq.edu.au introduction in the past decade, tourism has witnessed the rise of a “sharing economy”, a digitally based economy that putatively grants “consumers” temporary access to each other’s “under-utilized” assets (frenken & schor 2017). the platforms that act as intermediaries in this economy provide the online structures that enable a wide range of value-creating activities (for a recent critique of the “platform” metaphor, see gillespie 2017). perhaps one of the most cited and contested examples of tourism’s sharing economy platforms is airbnb, which facilitates the exchange of peer-to-peer accommodation and hospitality. the platform currently lists over 4 million homes worldwide and has assisted over 260 million guest arrivals since 2008 (airbnb 2017). with the choreographing power of its networking technologies, contact is established between hosts and guests around the globe. airbnb enables hosts to monetize their personal space (bedrooms or entire homes) and their labour of care in a bid for (supplementary) income. conversely, airbnb guests may book and pay through the platform for staying and being hosted in these spaces for a particular period of time. the airbnb platform claims that travellers can supposedly experience what it means to “live a local life” by staying in people’s homes, and – in so doing – “belong” to distant places (chesky 2014). this suggests that the platform is © 2018 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66259 fennia 196(1) (2018) 25maartje roelofsen both enabled by and productive of certain imaginaries and spatialities of home, rooted in an idea of collective global belonging. by tapping into everyday lives at the level of the household, travellers may supposedly experience “authentic” local cultures away from the “beaten track”, signifying a “reflexive and daring traveller identity in opposition to that of the mass tourist” (gyimóthy 2017, 66). as “locals” become the intermediaries who interpret the places they live in for tourists, such tourism experiences ostensibly center on the relationships between hosts and guests in place (richards 2017). accommodation exchange platforms like airbnb have contributed to a profound social transformation of many places around the world (russo & richards 2016; dredge & gyimóthy 2017). in recent years, civil society and grassroots movements and housing advocates have raised serious concerns over airbnb’s role in accelerating gentrification and the disruption of housing markets. in line with these developments, scholars have started to take stock of the “airbnb effect” in/on cities (arias sans & quaglieri domínguez 2016; cocola-gant 2016; cocola-gant & pardo 2017; wachsmuth et al. 2018) while other studies aim at informing future urban policy and planning in response of these recent trends (lee 2016; gurran & phibbs 2017). these interventions have provided important evidence of the growing impact of the platform on a local, national and global scale. however, the fundamental site that is essentially commodified in this economy – the home – is of lesser concern in the body of literature that examines airbnb’s socio-spatial impacts. little consideration has been given to, for example, the everyday practices, social relations and emotions that intersect in these places, and simultaneously contribute to constituting homes as public as well as political worlds (blunt & dowling 2006, 26; but also, marston 2000 on the inter-relation between the household and other scales). another contentious and relatively unchallenged aspect is that platforms like airbnb promote home as a site of belonging, “authenticity” or “localness” in an increasingly globalizing and alienating world. such accounts emphasize the normative association of home with positive values. so far, little attention has been paid to how the processes of commodification of everyday lives may be disruptive and contribute to the emergence of entirely new ways of being at home. taking into account that people’s sense of self and “feeling at home” rely on the social and emotional relationships in these spaces (blunt & dowling 2006), one may question how home is made and unmade when relative “strangers” move in and out of home with each new transaction. the main objective of this paper is to examine how home is performed through everyday homemaking and hosting practices of both hosts and guests in the airbnb economy. it intends to capture the ways in which “co-performing home” morphs along with subjective understandings of home. it also takes into consideration the materialities of people’s homes and how they shape the ordinary practices of homemaking. in doing so, i have relied on a combination of ethnographic and autoethnographic research, which took place in sofia, bulgaria over a period of three months in 2015. in the following section, i start by questioning how home has been conceptualized from a variety of theoretical perspectives, and consequently, what role home has played in the (re-)production of capitalist and late-capitalist values. after presenting my methodology, i provide an empirical account of how home is enacted through “home-making” practices in the airbnb economy in sofia, bulgaria. through the perspectives of my hosts and myself, i illustrate the diverse and sometimes contested meaning of home and how myriad performances bring home into being. shifting meanings of home in the disciplines of sociology, geography, and anthropology, as well as housing, migration, and cultural studies, scholars have been committed to a critical study of home for several decades now (e.g. hooks 1991; massey 1992; ahmed 1999; blunt 2005; blunt & dowling 2006; duyvendak 2011; brickell 2012; lloyd & vasta 2017). in these debates, home has been re-conceptualised as a political space where identities are produced and sustained through power relations, reinforcing structures of inclusion and exclusion. in the paragraphs that follow, i first selectively engage with a literature that discusses the changing role of home in (re-)production of capitalism and late-capitalism. after briefly discussing the meaning of home in the sharing economy and tourism, i then expand on the idea of home as being practised and “performed”. 26 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers home and capitalism in marxist accounts home has been conceptualized as a site for the reproduction of the social relations that maintain capitalism and of the material bases upon which social life rests (gregson & lowe 1995; blunt & dowling 2006). home, here, is described as a site where workers recover in order to continue their work; a place that serves to maintain individual productivity under capitalism. in these accounts, the caring and affective labour taking place at home is generally not considered to produce “value” and is therefore accordingly not considered as (waged) work. at the same time, “home” ownership is seen as instrumental to the success of capitalism and to forward an ideological agenda aimed at economic efficiency and growth (mallett 2004, 66). in many western countries, home-ownership is supported by governments through state policies, and heavily promoted by the real estate industry (knox & pinch 2014). it supposedly stimulates workers to remain committed to their jobs in order to pay off their mortgages, and signals identification with and the incorporation of capitalist values (harvey 2008). in the last two decades, the global struggles over housing and associated practices of displacement and dispossession are also testimonies of the un-making of home spaces (brickell et al. 2017). on-going external pressures such as the affordability of housing, housing instability, and lack of autonomy may also affect whether or not one feels at home (bate 2017; lloyd & vasta 2017). for example, under the pressure of tourist investors, long-term tenants in barcelona have dealt with expulsions, harassment, rent increase, and affordability problems (cocolagant 2016). feminist scholars have problematized and challenged the earlier conceptual separation of the production and reproduction spheres. the manifold everyday practices people engage in complicate and pervade the supposed borders between “work” and “nonwork” (mitchell et al. 2004). moreover, feminist scholars have highlighted the gendered nature of the separation between “work” and “nonwork”. historically, cultures have equated women with home where they serve, maintain and nurture men and children (young 1997, 134). women remain, until today, the primary “homemakers” around the globe (bowlby et al. 1997; duyvendak 2011). the unwaged caring and affective labour that takes place outside the factory walls and offices is in fact value-(re)producing and should be understood as work (mcdowell 2004; mitchell et al. 2004). the household as the primary site where labour power is regenerated is thus “as inextricably bound up with the operations of capitalism as are capital and the state” (marston 2004, 176). home in late capitalist economies under the impact of globalization and related information and communication technologies, a profound qualitative transformation in the nature, form and organisation of labour has taken place (gill & pratt 2008). in late capitalist economies, workers are often expected to be temporally flexible and spatially boundless. by ways of encouraging this work ethos, the spheres of work and home are progressively and oftentimes deliberately defused (see hochschild 1997 on the decline of “home-athome”). with the “extensification of work”, or, the exporting of work across different spaces and time, people increasingly work from home leading to an “overflow of work into wider social life” (jarvis & pratt 2006, 338). yet another trait of this transformation is the working spaces that purposely resemble home and/ or should make workers “feel at home”. googleplex (google’s headquarter) for example, incorporates an array of facilities, services and activities previously associated with the private sphere. here, workers are incentivised to bring their children and pets along to work, get in-office haircuts and massages, use on-site sports facilities, play games, get their clothes dry cleaned and take up classes in personal and spiritual development. while such “home-like” work environments may provide workers the comfort and ease of having certain necessities available within arms-length, another objective of these defused spatialities is to incentivise, control and enhance the productivity of the employees. they engender what mitchell, marston and katz (2004, 3, italics in the original) define as “the interpellation of subjects as life workers – the rendering of permanently mobilized bodies in new kinds of technologies of power”. fennia 196(1) (2018) 27maartje roelofsen the labour performed in late capitalism also increasingly resembles the labour previously associated with the affective and caring spheres of home. the production and delivery of services, information and experiences, through activities such as entertainment, advertising, health care and finance, are realized through labour that produces immaterial products, knowledge, information, ideas, images and affect (hardt 1999; hardt & negri 2000). this form of labour, again, continues to blur distinctions between what is work and what is not, when one works and when not, and where one works and where not, allowing for an identification of both the work sphere and home with economic activities, whether these activities are waged or not. the blurring of these distinctions is further encouraged by current neoliberal agendas in order to produce insecurity in the absence of fixed contracts and the proliferation of cheap unprotected labour. this echoes a “feminization of work” by which workers, male or female, are increasingly precarious and in a constant state of insecurity, and therefore easily subject to exploitation (see e.g. adkins & jokinen 2008). home in the sharing economy and tourism the labour that is enabled through peer-to-peer accommodation platforms like airbnb, appears not much different from, if not an exacerbated form of, the aforementioned precarious labour under late capitalism. what is crucially different, however, is that these platforms explicitly mark out people’s private spaces – homes – as sites for and of production and consumption; a potential incomegenerating sphere. botsman and rogers (2010) in their conceptualization of the sharing economy, optimistically conceive of the home as an “underused good”, or, an asset that sits “idle” that could be made available to others who want to use it on a temporary basis. in the “sharing” economies of tourism, home is not merely the site where (household) labour is carried out, but in its entire materiality and imaginary is conceived of as a commodity – whether paid for or not. unlike quasi-commercial and commercial home enterprises such as homestays, guesthouses and bed & breakfasts, both hosts and guests are reviewed and rated for their performances in their respective roles. as such, responsibilities for and expectations of “homely” experiences rest on the shoulders of both “consumer” and “producer” in this sharing economy. whereas peer-to-peer accommodation platforms may be a relatively new phenomenon, quasicommercial and commercial home enterprises such as homestays, guesthouses and bed & breakfasts have long been contentious sites of study (lynch et al. 2009). in such forms of tourism accommodation, intimacy may also have commercial value. depending on the demands and behaviour of guests, the hosts constantly (re)draw the lines between the public and private spheres in those sites (andersson cederholm & hultman 2010) whilst employing different strategies for making guests “feel at home” (sweeney & lynch 2007). this work challenges the previous notions of home, in particular those commonly proposed in the tourism literature. in tourism studies, home and tourism have been for long theorized as opposite ontological worlds (larsen 2008). it is the ordinary and mundane home one escapes from or returns to after having fulfilled one’s desires in places elsewhere in the world, through travel. as such, home is treated as a separate sphere, a point of the departure or return, or is explicitly left out in the conceptualization of social life (ibid.). in an age of high mobility and changing local contexts, the realities and practices that constitute home in the 21st century have ostensibly changed. they have arguably spurred an increased sense of translocalor transnational belonging (lloyd & vasta 2017). tourism enables “different modes of attachment to and detachment from places, cultures and people; different modes of belonging in the world; hence we may conceive of tourism as a way of positioning oneself in the world” (haldrup 2009, 54). tourist performances and experiences, haldrup (ibid.) argues, are also an important vehicle for the emergence of cosmopolitan orientations in everyday life. in the past decade, platforms like airbnb and couchsurfing, have (quite successfully) tapped into a cosmopolitan fantasy of “being at home in the world” (see germann molz 2007). through social networking technologies, such platforms have connected millions of strangers all over the globe in their desires for more individuated encounters. by enabling peer-produced-hospitality in everyday and homely environments, these platforms ostensibly centre on experiences in rather than of place (russo & richards 2016). as such, they have also inspired new forms of sociality (e.g., germann molz 28 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers 2012, 2014) and have refuelled debates on cosmopolitanism (picard & buchberger 2013; zuev 2013). these accounts also suggest that travel may open up new territories where people feel at home. in an analysis of accounts of round-the-world travelers, germann molz (2008) contends that – in their privileged positions – travelers may also feel at home in mobility (also ellingsen & hidle 2013). by engaging in “small acts, embodied practices, and familiar routines” travellers make themselves at home “online, on the road, and in the world as a whole” (germann molz 2008, 337). the sense of “being at home”, accarigi (2017, 192) argues, can be disassociated from a geographical location and “replaced by belonging through specific everyday practices”. to take on a perspective of home as “practiced” or “made” rather than to “be at home”, lloyd and vasta (2017, 4) argue, offers “a new set of possibilities to make ourselves at home in relation to others”. however, home is not merely “made” through the interrelation of social relationships, spaces, and materialities. home may also be understood through “unmaking”, a “precarious process by which material and/or imaginary components of home are unintentionally or deliberately, temporarily or permanently, divested, damaged or even destroyed” (baxter & brickell 2014, 134; but also, brickell 2014). what is said, done and “acted-out” – our performances – transform spaces and places into what they come to be or what we want them to become (gregson & rose 2000). these performances are embodied and give way to a corporeal approach to an understanding of home in tourism’s sharing economy. in the following paragraph, i briefly expand on the performative approach that i have taken in this research, and how consequently this approach has influenced my choice to employ a set of qualitative methods. approaching the home through performance the arguments presented in this paper are informed by the theories of performance and the role of performance in bringing social life into being. here, i rely predominantly on the work of erving goffman and judith butler, recognized as two of the most influential “performance” theorists in the geographical literature (gregson & rose 2000). while their conceptualizations of performance differ, the aspects of both conceptualizations have been key in the interpretation of home in this paper. firstly, i rely on goffman’s (1956) dramaturgical approach, which argues that social life may be thought of as “staged” by conscious actors who perform for an audience according to the scripts and codes of conduct. by distinguishing between a frontand backstage, goffman suggests that the self performs various roles according to the different stages one finds oneself on. the “frontstage” signifying those spaces (un) intentionally employed for (routine) performances that require a certain setting, décor, and/or appearance. the “backstage”, on the other hand, signifying those spaces that are relative to the given performance; reserved for preparation, practice, recovery and retreat. i employ goffman’s notion of performance in this paper to analyse the possible structural divisions of social establishments within the context of the airbnb “home”. in particular, i examine how home (both materially and symbolically) is produced, maintained and regulated as a “tourist stage” (maccannell 2013). secondly, i employ butler’s (1986, 1988, 1990, 2004) conceptualization of performance. in butler’s theory of performance, which refers predominantly to the questions of sexuality and gender, identity is not so much a construct; rather, it relates to what we do or what we “perform” (butler 2004). as such, performance is imbued with an ability to destabilize and transform social identities that are all too often considered stable. like gofmann’s “codes of conduct”, butler argues that norms serve as guidelines in social intercourse throughout life, consequently guiding one’s performances. for norms to come into effect, embodied practices need to be repeated. however, the repetitions of embodied practices are never entirely the same; “bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled” (ibid., xii). in fact, they are reinterpretations of what is assumed must be performed, calling the absolute force of the norm into question. moreover, performances, can also offer “an opportunity to mark subjectivity” by rebelling against the codes of conducts, scripts and norms (edensor 2001, 75). in the work of butler, the notion of performance thus allows thinking beyond what one is, and focuses instead on what one becomes. employing butler’s notion of performance in this paper allows considering those performances that deviate from a template of home. fennia 196(1) (2018) 29maartje roelofsen an (auto)ethnography of home the present study relies (in part) on autoethnography. in performing autoethnography, the living and embodied subjective self of the researcher is considered an active agent and a constitutive part of the research process; the researcher is the “epistemological and ontological nexus upon which the research process turns” (spry 2001, 711). in my capacity as a guest, i thus considered myself an active agent in making-home rather than a passive observer who sits on the receiving end of the airbnb experience. an autoethnographic approach allowed me to focus on my embodied and affectual encounters in place. as a researcher-guest, i self-witnessed and committed my body to the intimacies of experiential encounters. in doing so, caroline scarles argues, we become witness to a place for ourselves (2010, 911). as a relational approach, autoethnography enables a variety of ways to engage with the self in relation to others, to culture, to politics, and other aspects (allen-collinsion 2013). my autoethnographic accounts of the day were either recorded in writing (in a diary) or on video (via my smart phone). these accounts reflected the practices and interactions that made an impression on me during my stay. at the same time, i took note of the materiality and sensory richness of the home as these played a crucial role in enacting interactions (haldrup & larsen 2006; haldrup 2017). i took care to observe how things relate and through what practices, rather than what they essentially are, in a static form. adopting an autoethnographic approach allowed me to directly explore how our “homely” performances, like touristic performances, “involve, and are made possible and pleasurable by, objects, machines and technologies” (haldrup & larsen 2006, 276, but also accarigi 2017). analysing my diary entries and videos eventually allowed me to trace how “feeling at home” shifted according to an amalgam of materialities, experiences and embodied practices as well as the changing relationship to my hosts over time. to study how home was (un)made through the performances of both the host and guest, i stayed in 11 different airbnb homes in sofia, bulgaria for respectively two to five nights each. during these stays, i was hosted by anne, nico, eva, lisa, pia, jeny, maria, tina, adrian, ria, iordan, and vera. indepth interviews were held with each of these hosts and i refer to these interviews directly and indirectly in this paper. the interviews took place according to the hosts’ preferences. on most occasions this meant at home, several other interviews were conducted in bars and restaurants in sofia. the interviews were taken individually and lasted between 15 minutes to approximately 2.5 hours; however, casual conversations that also informed my research took place throughout my stay and were taken note of in a notebook. all interviews were taped with the hosts’ consent with the exception of ria’s interview. prior to this interview ria expressed her worries for possibly being exposed and sanctioned by the authorities and hotel industry for using the airbnb platform. ria asked me to take notes during the interview instead. the interviews were transcribed verbatim and, together with other data, were analysed through qualitative data analysis software maxqda. the textual accounts of the interviews were searched for common themes related to the research objective. in this study, i have used pseudonyms to guarantee my hosts’ anonymity. selecting airbnb homes in sofia, bulgaria the hosts and their homes were first and foremost selected based on their set overnight rates (between €10 and €20) as i relied on a limited budget. secondly, hosts who received ratings and reviews indicating recurring unacceptable behaviour or homes that were considered unfit by previous guests were not taken into consideration for safety reasons. an additional condition in the selection process was that the homes had to be available for the requested days during the months in which the “fieldwork” took place. as i took on an active participant role, my hosts were provided with a full explanation of my position as a researcher and what my research was about. when making booking inquiries, i informed the hosts that my stay in sofia was tied up to my research and asked if they were interested in sharing their experiences with me. the large majority replied positively to my inquiries whether or not they were able to host me. when i stayed in sofia, i had already been using airbnb for personal travel for over a year. in consolidating my booking requests in sofia i was thus able to rely on 30 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers numerous positive reviews and ratings that i received from my previous airbnb hosts. this form of “digital social capital” has arguably aided me in getting access to the “field”; moreover, the positive reviews that i received after each new stay in sofia arguably aided my access to other airbnb homes. during these 11 stays, nine out of 12 self-identified “hosts” were present on the premises most of the time throughout my stay. during the other stays my hosts sometimes spent time with me during the day or evening, but slept elsewhere (referred to as pia, maria and ria in the findings). during five of my stays, other people (tenants, family members, partners and friends) were sleeping on the premises too but rarely engaged with me throughout my stay. some introduced themselves to me but took little or no responsibility in the hosting activities. with few exceptions, my hosts were white, middle-class highly educated bulgarians who resided in sofia and used the platform for their own travel endeavours. except for anne, all of my hosts spoke english, were (highly) mobile and to (some degree) open to cultural difference. they also used the platform to increase their earnings rather than relying on airbnb for a sole income. this attests to other studies on the sharing economies of tourism as exclusive marketplaces for cosmopolitan citizens; a community marked by privileges such as the political right to mobility and the means to travel as a requirement to “be at home in the world” (see germann molz 2007, 2008; picard & buchberger 2013; zuev 2013; schor 2017). unlike other cities in europe, the municipality of sofia has not yet imposed specific rules and regulations on the airbnb platform and it users. at present, short-term rental platforms are not treated any differently from other commercial short-term rental agencies. however, under the bulgaria tourism law, homeowners are officially obliged to register their apartments with the municipality in order to obtain a license to rent them out to tourists (ministry of tourism bulgaria 2018). although no official numbers exist, it has been speculated that a large majority of the hosts on the platform currently do not possess such a license (kapital 2017). researching the airbnb home while this study is situated in academic literature focussed on the global political economy of airbnb, the aim of this (auto)ethnography is not to generalize or to explain the experiences of a wider universe of airbnb hosts. rather, it depicts a series of the case studies of homes and encounters between myself and the hosts, each detailing the specific culture and micropolitics of the related context (see mohanty 2003). it is important to state that being a white, able-bodied, middle-class woman with a privileged northern european upbringing makes my knowledge necessarily partial, contingent, and situated (haraway 1991). on many occasions i found myself wondering what gave me the right to write about the lives and homes of eastern european “others”? there is of course no straight-forward or easy answer to this question. i have, however, attempted to closely listen to my participants and tried to detail their stories, worldviews and social realities in a way that hopefully shows their inherent multiplicity and plurality. my positionality has indeed also affected my access to the field. some of my hosts expressed that they were positively inclined to accept my booking request based on their judgement about my online airbnb profile. this profile included a picture and details on my profession, education and other biographic details. several hosts explicitly mentioned that they only accepted booking requests from people who reflected their preferences in terms of gender, class, age, sexuality, religion and ‘race’ (see also karlsson et al. 2017). ria, for example, declared that she would not accept bookings from non-white and/or muslim guests. various cases in my research confirmed the explicit and implicit practices of discrimination that occur on the platform (as shown in edelman et al. 2017). in other words, the processes of inclusions and exclusions shape airbnb homes – like they do other non-commoditised homes (see also blunt & varley 2004). setting the “stage”. material accounts of (post-) socialist homes with some exceptions, most of my hosts live in a one-family (high-rise) apartment, which were built between the 1960s and 1980s. bearing concrete constructions, these apartments were marked by a fennia 196(1) (2018) 31maartje roelofsen single coherent architectural style, a result of the socialist regime’s embrace of a specific strand of modernist architecture in a context based on anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeoisie ideologies and driven by the political objective to provide everyone with a home (hirt 2006). the materialities of these homes carry with them significant historical and political meaning. at the same time, and to speak with haldrup and larsen (2006), such materialities crucially condition the practices of home-making and the feelings of homeliness in several ways even today. by fleshing out some of these “inherited” socialist materialities i firstly show how specific objects and home spatialities both enable, constrain and guide performances of airbnb homes in sofia. secondly, i reflect on how some of these socialist material legacies have become part of new touristic values and are purposely marketed as such. energy monopolies and the visceral home most of the apartments i stayed in are still powered by centralized heating and power systems that were initially installed and operated under the socialist regime. since bulgaria’s transition to a socalled “free market regime” and to liberal democracy, these systems have been predominantly operated and owned by private (foreign) companies after the state sold off its majority stake, creating true energy monopolies in this way (minchev 2013). these companies are occasionally termed “the mafia” in the accounts of my hosts; a name arguably earned for their practice of charging sofia’s residents constantly fluctuating and highly inflated fees while providing unreliable services. high electricity bills, together with low wages and pervasive employment insecurity, have been at the root of the nationwide anti-government protests in 2013 (tsvetelia 2013; koycheva 2016); protests that several of my hosts have actively participated in (and mentioned in the interviews). two years after the revolt in 2013, the owners of these centrally operated heating systems still shape how homes are felt, lived and experienced in sofia. on numerous occasions, and for extensive periods of time, there was no central heating flowing into the homes where i was staying, bringing indoor temperatures closer to outdoor temperatures, which averaged between 0 and +15 degrees celsius at that time of year. the enduring cold that i experienced in some of these homes came with a constant sense of unease and eventually brought about illness on my part. home, throughout my airbnb experience in sofia, inadvertently became a profound affective, sensuous and visceral experience; an experience that made me long to be “elsewhere” on many occasions. it led to the enduring feelings of non-belonging, paradoxically running contrary to what the airbnb commercials would like guests to believe. as the cold conditioned and significantly restricted my embodied practices, i found myself leaving the apartments in search for better-heated public spaces during the day. consequently, the time to form (potentially) affective relations of belonging with my hosts became limited as i stayed away from their homes until the late evenings. once back, i would promptly retreat to the solitude of the bedroom where i could stay under the covers fully dressed. this echoes haldrup’s (2017, 53) account of the important role materialities play in enacting relationships between people, as well as “reinforcing bonds as well as boundaries between the home and the world outside”. although i tried to make up for my absence by inviting my hosts along for walks and meals outside, my alienating habits eventually left me feeling inadequate as a guest. a guest who – in the political economy of airbnb – also gets rewarded (or disciplined) for their (un)homely performances through review and rating systems, and the algorithms that the platform operates to ensure “quality control” (see roelofsen & minca 2018, for a critical discussion of these systems of measurement). the constant cold due to the lack of adequate heating systems thus became a mere obstacle to me feeling at home. it also showed that the materiality of the intimate and personal spaces of home in sofia is deeply interwoven with wider national politics and power relations. home, indeed, was not “a secluded ‘private’ space but a space in which outside forces make their entry” (haldrup 2017, 53). the materialities that underlie post-socialist housing in sofia came to determine the conditions by which bodies are both enabled and restricted to engage in the ordinary practices of homemaking, particularly during the colder months of the year. several hosts shared with me during their stay how they dealt with the insecurity of not being able to pay their energy bills and consequently being unsure if they could provide their guests with the warm and “homely” environment they might be 32 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers used to in their own homes. however, at the same time, an additional airbnb income enabled them to continue paying some of their household bills, thus appropriating the platform to fulfil their own homely needs. although this allusive interdependence on the platform was never easy, it also opened up a space for alternatives. home heritage home and place identities come about through the creative expressions of hosts and their display of symbols and artefacts in hospitality practices (see also di domenico & lynch 2007). pia, one of my hosts, shared with me how she created value out of the historicity and materialities that are so specific to the multiple homes she puts on display through airbnb platform. as an intermediary, pia takes on the work of representing several airbnb home-owners in sofia, receiving a small commission for welcoming guests and being available to assist them throughout their stay. the home-owners she represents either only speak bulgarian or do not have the time nor interest to engage in the hosting labour but are interested in earning the related income. these particular homeowners do not live in their homes permanently when guests are present. they often outsource the labour of cleaning their homes to others, making their presence around the home limited or non-existent. although pia does not spend a lot of time with guests at these homes during their stay, she takes on an important role in framing and (re-)distributing socialist values through the homes under her umbrella on the airbnb platform. pia argued that she has perceived among airbnb guests a certain interest for everyday life under socialism, a desire for the supposed “authentic” socialist other and their spaces. pia’s observation mirrors maccannell’s (2013) critical account of tourism, according to which the tourist alienation of their own life has led them to search for “reality” and “authenticity” in the purer lifestyles of other cultures. the tourist, here, can be conceived as an emblematic modern subject that seeks to escape the humdrum of ordinary life and attempts to find “an outlet for existential anxiety over the precariousness of the modern condition” in tourism (minca & oakes 2011, 6). however, such desires are often not well understood by pia’s clients who actually used to live such lives under socialism in the homes they now rent out. they find it hard to think of marketing an essentialized socialist identity and culture through their homes on the platform. the materiality of home evoked involuntary memories of otherness (morgan & pritchard 2005, 42); a socialist past they no longer identified with and tried to dissociate from (see also kaneva & popescu 2011). notwithstanding, pia shared with me that she continues to recommend her “clients” to conserve their homes in “original” and uniform socialist character and refrain from polishing the interiors into a “uniform” globalized and capitalist “ikea jacket”. pia suggests to the homeowners not to replace their domestic material objects acquired under socialism with “modern” ones, as socialist life and decor has recovered its value under tourism. they had the potential to authenticate the guest’s experience. what her clients consider “bad taste” or backward – furniture, household equipment and technologies, and decorative items from the socialist era – was picked up by pia as potentially value-generating. in their absence at home, such items referred to the life histories of their owners, and, like souvenirs, had “the effect of bringing the past into the present and making past experience live” (morgan & pritchard 2005, 41). such artefacts had the potential to contribute to a lived experience of socialism, a multi-sensory experience by which home could be seen, felt, heard, and smelled. this gives way to thinking of the airbnb home as an “exhibit of itself”. a home as “heritage” by which some hosts or host-representatives like pia give their “ways of life” and homes a second life (kirshenblatt-gimblett 1998, 150). as certain materialities and historicities have different meaning and significance under tourist consumption, it goes to show that they can also give renewed purpose to homes that were once conceived as less valuable and in need of improvement. being perceived as “exotic”, everyday objects connected the contexts of “home” and “away” into a setting for the tourist performances (haldrup 2009, 55). pia and the other homeowners feel they exert a certain level of control over the ways in which their homes get commodified through airbnb – together they determine themselves the extent and ways in which their homes get absorbed in the platform economy and for what they put it to use. fennia 196(1) (2018) 33maartje roelofsen this echoes mary louise pratt’s (2008) concept of the contact zone, meaning the spaces where cultures intersect and grapple with each other. emerging from this zone is the phenomenon of “transculturation”, which challenges viewing encounters from one cultural perspective or from opposition (ibid.). rather than assuming it is the airbnb guests who “consume” the culture and homes of their hosts during her visit, some hosts purposively select those materials and practices that are deemed valuable by their visitors. employing the contact zone as a tool then becomes a more affirmative way of describing the complex transformation of airbnb homes. sharing home with strangers in the airbnb experience, everyday practices that are usually done alone or between people in an intimate relationship are given value by practicing them with strangers “in the home.” they include socializing and eating together, commuting, taking a shower, walking around in pyjamas, relaxing on the couch, and sleeping, amongst others. this suggests that contemporary tourism (and society more broadly) increasingly relies on affective capacities and practices marking out people’s private spheres (veijola et al. 2014). having strangers under the same roof also gave my hosts a different lived experience of home, which positioned them differently in relation to their home. eva shares: “in a way, [airbnb] is always a dangerous thing. that you go to someone’s house and you live there, you sleep there. at the same time, i am hosting somebody i do not know. you will use my apartment, my flat, my toilet, my everything. i am leaving all my stuff there, my expensive belongings. there is always this dangerous part in the whole experience. [and] many times the guest is too cold [referring to their ways of interacting]. you will be like: ‘this is your key, if you need something this is the map, this is where i have my coffee, this is a good restaurant. thank you. this is it.’ and sometimes it is totally the opposite: ‘come have breakfast with me, tell me something, walk with me while i go to work.’ and the experience is totally different because [that person] changes your entire experience.” sharing home with strangers, as eva’s account suggests, is a symbiotic process of unmaking and remaking home (baxter & brickell 2014, 135). it changes along with the different social and emotional relationships that are formed between hosts and guests. what eva’s account also points out, is that sharing home may challenge home as a source of “ontological security” (dupuis & thorns 1998) and feeling ontologically safe. in the airbnb experience, where lockable bedroom doors often lack, sleeping is drawn into a sticky negotiation with every new stay. veijola and valtonen (2007, 23–24) in their analysis of sleep in tourism, contend that sleeping, today, is one of the most private and intimate acts: “you either sleep alone or with someone you know well, [the] dormant body is not visible to strangers”. my sense of home and ontological safety was severely disrupted when i rented maria’s entire home. i had rented it in its entirety precisely to get a break from sleeping in the presence of strangers. hours after having checked into maria’s apartment somebody repeatedly and forcefully knocked on the front door. after a minute of being startled and not knowing what to do, i finally opened the door. an intoxicated man introduced himself as maria’s husband. he was the owner of the apartment and demonstrated a set of keys in his hands. without asking permission to come in, maria’s husband passed me in the hallway, and made himself comfortable at the kitchen table. in the minutes that followed he subjected me to an interview about my stay whilst giving me a slurred speech about the state of tourism in bulgaria. he had been informed about my position as a tourism researcher by maria, which i had also detailed in my profile. after half an hour he left, and i realized he had trespassed what was at least temporarily “my” home. i was left in a considerable state of uncertainty as his set of keys allowed him or anybody else to enter the apartment at any given time. my imagined sense of privacy and safety in that space had been wiped out in an instance. as my corporeal vulnerability was brought to “the forefront of my consciousness” along came several embodied consequences (allen-collinson 2013, 295). in the days to follow, i had my ears on full alert to listen if anybody was wandering around the front door. at night i left the lights on so i could see better if anybody came in. after two consecutive sleepless nights i decided it was time to move out – this home had been forcefully unmade. 34 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers airbnb homes in both my own experience as well as my hosts’ experience thus became ambiguous sites of, at the same time, belonging and non-belonging. places where various practices of trustmaking were by default part of the “homely” experience and the mutual endeavour of “makinghome”. during my airbnb stays with hosts present, such trust consolidated around an understanding and respecting of each other’s emotional and bodily needs. in doing so, i continuously tuned into my hosts’ daily intimate routines and to what i perceived as their “hygienic standards”. i would make sure not to come home after 11 pm; not to use the shower in the morning before they did; or, waking up and moving around the living room and kitchen not too early but also not too late. along with becoming overly concerned with keeping my bedroom in order (by making my bed every day and keeping my clothes and personal belongings stowed away), i disciplined and controlled my body in order to meet, what i thought, were socially accepted standards of being a “clean guest”. i was careful not to make any loud or awkward sounds in any spaces of the home. each time i visited the bathroom, i double-checked if i did not leave any bodily products behind that might socially or culturally be deemed as “dirt” or “waste” (isaksen 2002). through these embodied practices, i aimed to avoid provoking disgust in my hosts. such practices ostensibly subscribed to my own ideas of “appropriateness”, and to “culturally-validated values of ‘proper’ bodies and ‘proper’ femininity” (fahs 2017, 192). besides relying on my social skills in bonding with my hosts, i thus engaged in various forms of affective and embodied labour in a greater endeavour of making each other “feel at home” throughout our stay. during everyday encounters with my hosts, i continuously smiled – an “embodied display and an act of amiable hospitality” (veijola & valtonen 2007, 20–21). and in being overtly but not insincerely appreciative for things like a clean towel and a spontaneously offered cup of tea, i attempted to operate on my hosts’ bodies as to “provoke a state beyond what can be cognitively communicated” (dowling 2012, 5). paradoxically, such practices ran counter to what i associated with being at home-at-home; a place where i could be emotionally unrestrained and enjoyed a (literally) embodied freedom. a place where i could be grumpy, loud, late, early, messy and above all dirty (veijola et al. 2014, 1). instead, i fully engaged in co-providing my hosts with a clean home as a mutual act of hospitality and a way to slowly rid my “strangeness” from their own home. in a home that was not even mine, i “stage-managed”, ordered, and disciplined myself, intuitively tuning in to the rhythm of my hosts’ day. a tiring process that, in producing fatigue, drew me even further away from “home” but at the same time felt like a more ethical way to relate to these unknown others. contrary to what veijola and colleagues (2014, 3) suggest, stranger/guests may no longer be as messy as they have been theorized, especially in a reputation economy like airbnb where hosting and guesting bodies are monitored, controlled and disciplined through its ranking modalities (roelofsen & minca 2018). instead, they may have become increasingly complicit in reproducing that same old “tidiness” paradigm that tourism theorists, planners, activists and tourists have become so fixated on. bordering the private and intimate spatialities of home after our brief introduction, anne instantly leads the tour of the two-bedroom apartment as part of her performance as host. the tour proceeds in moderate silence, as we both seem uneasy to express ourselves in a language we do not control very well. anne leads, entering the different doors in the house. she first guides me to her son nico’s former bedroom, which is adjacent to her own bedroom and has access to a balcony facing the inner courtyard, which is now covered in snow. this is where i will sleep the next couple of nights. the 15-square meter room features a double bed, a desk, a chair and a couple of empty cupboards. anne continues the tour through the kitchen and living room and shows me the workings of the toilet, which has some particularities to it. as she concludes the tour in the hallway, it becomes apparent that her bedroom is the only one that she will not show to me: the place where her body lays to rest will not be on display today. in my airbnb-stays, “home-tours” like anne’s were commonplace and served as an implicit bordering practice (see also andersson cederholm & hultman 2010) to negotiate the separation – or lack of separation – between shared private spatialities (e.g., the living room and kitchen) and the remaining fennia 196(1) (2018) 35maartje roelofsen intimate spatialities (e.g., the bedroom). in a similar vein, when eva and lisa toured me around their apartments, they made clear that i would be sleeping in their bedrooms while they would be sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room throughout my stay. in an interview lisa recalls the importance of her bordering practice, “i try not to bother at all the people who stay with me. but i am always saying ‘this is it – [pointing at the couch] – i will also stay here’ so the guests have it in mind”. in this respect, goffman’s conceptualizations of the frontstage/backstage interplay in tourism seem to be implicitly operationalized in the first encounters with my hosts. however, while there seems to be a common understanding of “back-staging” – that is, defining spaces in the house where both my hosts and i would be able to retreat and rest – the act of deliberately delineating the “backstage” on part of the host implied that certain borders were already transgressed by the airbnb guest’s presence and/or needed to be respected by the guest’s presence. what this shows, i would like to suggest, is that goffman’s sharp separation between frontand backstage in the framing of social relations is here put into question by the “literally” embodied negotiations between host and guest, and the related establishment of constantly blurred borderings in the home context. the experiences i had during my fieldwork are perhaps more in line with a butlerian understanding about the embodied performance of home. the presumed and/or aspired radical separation between frontand backstage was, on the one hand, endlessly challenged by the constant possibility of trespassing the related (in)visible borders making the “airbnb-ed” spatialities of home. on the other hand, the hosts openly discussed the existence of a presumed backstage that the guest should not penetrate. these very spatial practices reflect in many ways the fluidity of the literally embodied experience of hosts hosting in their own home. such fluidity and complexities clearly emerged on multiple occasions and in multiple forms during my fieldwork. for example, host iordan set out to literally and figuratively “erase” himself/his body from his apartment by retreating to his own bedroom throughout most of his guests’ stays. he would only make use of the newly constituted “common” spaces when he was sure the guests had left the apartment. iordan explains he does so in order “to leave the most possible space to my guests”, implying his own presence would stand in his guests’ way of feeling at home. iordan is not alone in performing such empty and silenced spatialities; when airbnb guests stay over, anne and nico discipline themselves by “trying to be calmer”, and try not to argue with each other in order “not to disturb guests”. in a similar vein jeny contends, “[when hosting] i leave more time [in my daily routine] to interact with [guests] and not to somehow interrupt them when using the kitchen or the bathroom. i try to get into the rhythm of the guests somehow [...]. also the whole family, like, we are coordinating our actions more, like, when everyone is going out and coming back. if the guests want something, this means somebody has to be [at home], always.” these practices give to think about the complexities inherent to the promoted and displayed intimacy that is produced by the platform’s core travel philosophy. at the same time, the coordinated practices of care and hospitality hint at changing dynamics between the people who make home, and the changing relationship between them. changing relationalities of home “[in the beginning] my girlfriend did not feel safe in the house while we were hosting beautiful women.” adrian “[hosting] empowers my mother, because she gets to see the world just by sitting in her room. airbnb is empowering, this [economy] wouldn’t be possible twenty years ago. just like with one click creating a... i don’t know... put some photos online and people come here from everywhere. so yeah, i think it is very powerful and this experience is changing her life. because she is getting in touch with different cultures, different people.” nico the unfixed and dynamic nature of home is reflected in the two different accounts of airbnb hosts adrian and nico. when relative strangers temporarily move in, it is not just the dynamic between hosts and guests that challenge the meaning of home, similarly those already “at home” may start 36 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers relating differently to one another and to their homes. adrian had to “work hard” to convince his partner that these “beautiful” airbnb guests who had entered the safe haven of their relationship, their home, posed no threat to its fidelity. this particular case illustrates that ideas of home are defined in comparison with what is not a home: a place of sexual promiscuity or infidelity. it attests of a relational understanding of home, in which material and imaginative geographies of home are forged in relation to “foreign” or “unhomely” practices (blunt & dowling 2006, 142). adrian’s account further reveals a normative understanding of home as a heterosexual place that facilitates everyday heterosexual practices and intimacies (e.g., gorman-murray 2006; johnston & longhurst 2009, chapter 3; morrison 2012). home, here, is supposedly a monogamously “safe” location that is unsettled by the arrival of the sexualized and supposedly “predatory” stranger-guests. the presence of stranger-guests, however, can similarly destabilize home as a space of alienation and oppression, which is mirrored in nico’s account. while home in early feminist accounts has been described as a place that removes women from politics and business (see blunt & dowling 2006), the airbnb-home-as-work-and-travel-destination also empowered anne and brought renewed self-fulfilment. throughout her adult life, anne had expressed her sense of self as a mother through home-making practices in her apartment. after nico left home to work abroad – and anne was consequently left with nico’s empty room – it was nico (a fervent airbnb-traveller himself) who proposed to rent out his old bedroom on the airbnb platform. in this way, the empty bedroom could temporarily bring new life to their home and the derived income could cover the basic costs of living of anne, who had been unemployed for some time. with nico’s bedroom taking on a different purpose and becoming imbued with monetary and symbolic values on the airbnb platform, anne began feeling validated for her home-making practices that had sometimes gone unrewarded or taken for granted throughout her life. anne has progressively started to relate differently to her home and nico’s empty bedroom, which throughout her life had been marked by her role as mother and home-maker. she also began to take on a different sense of herself as an entrepreneur in this newfound economy and came to identify herself as a knowledgeable “local” vis-à-vis the airbnb guests. this echoes that the relation between individual subjects and places gives places, like home, meaning and their identity (massey 1991, 1994). in analysing nico’s and anne’s account, i also recalled massey’s progressive sense of place (1991, 25) by giving account of the shift in the power-geometry that began to take place in anne’s home. the initial social relations that made up home before nico left the house to work abroad began to alter and changed what home came to mean. besides being mother and son, anne and nico have now also become “professional” partners and both take up different roles in commodifying their home through airbnb. this is to say that the new sharing economy is not merely about the experiences and the evolving relations between hosts and guests: with renting out home come new divisions of labour, new value-generating activities and materialities, and revalorization of social relations that have long existed within the household. while the increasing presence of “others” may challenge a comfortable sense of belonging (lloyd & vasta 2017, 1), as was the case with adrian and his partner, it may also challenge the naturalized meanings of home as a place of constraint and oppression. before starting their airbnb, anne’s home-making practices never really put her much on the receiving-end of the values those practices generated. the beds she made, the meals she cooked, the bathroom she cleaned, these were all naturalized and normalized practices associated with her role as a mother. now, her guests oftentimes showed appreciation and paid her for her efforts and explicitly acknowledged her efforts in written testimonies online. in their newfound economy, nico and anne made an arrangement on how to organize and divide the labour it entails to make-home for their guests; an arrangement that is equally gendered. nico takes care of the written online communication with (potential) guests. he “pre-selects” the guests he would like to stay with his mother by checking their credentials. he takes on bookings, manages the accounting, and does “quality-control” by monitoring and relaying the reviews and ratings of anne’s performances as a host. nico carries out the administrative and managerial work behind his desk, somewhere away from home. anne, on the other hand, takes on the preparatory work, cleans the rooms, welcomes the guests upon arrival and carries out the emotional and caring labour when fennia 196(1) (2018) 37maartje roelofsen guests are around. she also advises her guests on which places to visit when they are in sofia, if they speak the same language that is. after transactions have taken place, it is anne who receives the monetary compensation for their joint efforts. importantly, while the commodification of home may (re)valorise and (re)signify home-making practices, it does not necessarily eliminate the presence of the broader gender inequality in the airbnb household, especially considering the aforementioned division of labour between nico and anne. like meah and jackson (2013, 592) in their study on middle-class households, making-home in the airbnb economy is mostly a lifestyle choice for the men whom i interviewed and stayed with during my fieldwork. the “new and cool” rhetoric espoused by the technologically advanced airbnb platform has, to some extent, de-stigmatized domestic chores both as low-status work (schor 2017, 275) as well as inherently feminine work. however, several hosts expressed that household chores and the work associated with hosting are still seen as a “nuisance” and in some cases are therefore outsourced to “other” women. future studies may thus consider shedding light on the possibly gendered, racialized and classed labour that currently takes place in the sharing economies of tourism and tell us more about the power relations that these economies bring forth, or, perpetuate. conclusion in this paper, i have reflected on the situated and embodied everyday performances of home taking place within the airbnb context. while the platform seemingly rotates around a relatively essentialized idea of home as a place of “belonging”, this study has hopefully demonstrated the inherent contested nature of home in the sharing economy. in doing so, this paper contributes to the existing literature on the critical geographies of home (brickell 2012). like lloyd and vasta (2017), who propose to move away from home as a static location and instead employ an understanding home as “practiced”, i have suggested to explore home as “performed”. drawing on butler’s conceptualization of performance, i have tried to show that while home is often considered a stable construct, home is continuously “done” or “undone” in relation to something or someone other (butler 2004). foregrounding performance as an analytical approach, this paper has attempted to stimulate thinking beyond what home is, and to reflect instead on how home becomes (un)homely (blunt & dowling 2006, 26). in the case discussed here, the political and historical specificities, as well as the materialities of the visited homes have significantly shaped the ways in which the ordinary practices of homemaking unfolded. during my fieldwork, the materialities of home shaped the conditions that led to a deeply embodied sensation of “unhomeliness” on my part – while, at the same time, strongly shaped my appreciation of the hosts’ everyday lives. similarly, a variety of apparently trivial and undervalued objects in the home were (re-)engaged with in order to stage, in the words of goffman (1956) and maccannell (2013), an experience of “real life” under socialism. these objects thus imbued significant use-value as well as a symbolic value in the performance of home (haldrup & larsen 2006): while satisfying the guests desires for an “authentic” experience of home, the materialities of home were also crucial in making homely geographies performable. throughout my stays, a complex mix of corporeal and affective practices continuously reconstituted home as an intimate spatiality; one in which it was never quite clear who was the guest and who was the host. the performances of airbnb homes in this paper capture the ambiguity of the often taken-for-granted opposition between host and guest. moreover, such performances challenge home as a place of belonging or non-belonging (blunt & dowling 2006, 255). some of my hosts, for instance, admitted being self-disciplined into silent bodies or deliberately discounted their own intimate practices around the house to avoid the disruption of their guests’ sense of home. by means of “giving more space to the guests” some of my hosts went so far as to (temporarily) “erase” themselves from the shared spaces of their apartments and provided the visitors with a sense of being in a “private” home of their own. other hosts (implicitly) bordered certain intimate spaces, such as their bedroom, or, alternatively shared certain intimate practices only with some guests, but not with others. by performing imaginary “insides” and “outsides” within the home, they attempted to maintain or protect their own sense of “homeliness” while having guests around. 38 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers similarly, i engaged in various embodied practices that i sensed pertained to the norms of “appropriateness” and “hygiene” in those specific contexts. as such, home does not come into being through one singular act but through reiterative and citational practices (butler 2011) that are guided by normative understandings of home. finally, what my experience in sofia has shown is that the homes involved in the airbnb platform economy represented a key site through which social relations took on a new direction and meaning. importantly, this study has proposed to move away from the emphasis on encounters and relations between “strangers” (e.g., bialski 2012; germann molz 2007, 2014; picard & buchberger 2013) and to detail instead how the arrival of a stranger-guest unsettles and reshapes the relations between those already at home. through airbnb, relationships may expand from being merely familial to becoming also entrepreneurial, bringing about a whole new set of responsibilities towards each other. moreover, in some cases, renting out home through airbnb has provoked in some households a re-division of labour in “making-home” amongst each other. commodifying home has also changed the ways in which people relate to each other and their home. home, here, produces its identity and continuously constructs its past through shifting social relations. this echoes massey’s (1992, 14) critique of the dominant notions of home as an “internally produced, essential past”; a place to which we supposedly “belong”. while a place like home may have a character of its own, this is not a unified identity which everyone shares (massey 1994, 169). this raises important questions about how “homes”, in the sharing economy of airbnb, are conceived, presented, performed and put into circulation, including the related value production. the platform rhetoric, and the calculative rationalities that underlie its review and rating systems, is supposed to provide a set of objective information concerning the “qualities” of individual homes and of those who perform them locally. such rather a-historical and a-politicized understanding of home fails to take into consideration that “home” is constituted through the everyday practices of those who inhabit them and, in the case of airbnb, also through each new encounter between hosts and guests, at times leading to contested and difficult relations generated by the very fact of sharing some of the most intimate spaces. the everyday “becoming” of home, thus, does not lend itself well to sharp categorizations or essentialised qualifications, as the ones provided by airbnb’s review and rating systems. the homes where i stayed in sofia did not share a singular element of “local” identity; on the contrary, their meaning and the related performances were continuously redefined through the changing social relations and practices that the encounters between airbnb hosts and guests produced on a daily basis. in line with butler’s account of the emancipatory potential of thinking through “becoming”, home in this project has emerged less as a “local” object to qualify and rank, and more like a negotiated and sometimes contested process: not a place to return to or a point of arrival, rather a point of departure for both hosts and guests. acknowledgements i want to thank rené van der duim and ulrich ermann for their guidance and for their comments on the earlier drafts of this article. for the comments on the following drafts of this article i want to thank the two anonymous referees of fennia as well as kirsi pauliina kallio and hanna salo. this work was supported by the university of graz through the urbi faculty’s doctoral stipend. the 2015 rudi roth grant supported travel and accommodation expenses made during the fieldwork. references accarigi, i. v. (2017) transcultural objects, transcultural homes. in lloyd, j. & vasta, e. (eds.) reimagining home in the 21st century, 192–206. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786432933.00022 adkins, l. & jokinen, e. (2008) introduction: gender, living and labour in the fourth shift. nora nordic journal of feminist and gender research 16(3) 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740802300947 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786432933.00022 https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740802300947 fennia 196(1) (2018) 39maartje roelofsen ahmed, s. (1999) home and away: narratives of migration and estrangement. international journal of cultural studies 2(3) 329–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799900200303 airbnb (2017) fast facts. <https://press.atairbnb.com/fast-facts/>. 17.01.2018. allen-collinson, j. (2013) autoethnography as the engagement of self/other, self/culture, self/politics, selves/futures. in holman jones, s., adams, t. & ellis, c. (eds.) handbook of autoethnography, 281– 299. routledge, new york. andersson cederholm, e. & hultman, j. (2010) the value of intimacy – negotiating commercial relationships in lifestyle entrepreneurship. scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 10(1) 16–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250903442096 arias sans, a. & quaglieri domínguez, a. (2016) unravelling airbnb. urban perspectives from barcelona. in russo, p. & richards, g. (eds.) reinventing the local in tourism, 209–228. channel view publications, bristol. bate, b. (2017) understanding the influence tenure has on meanings of home and homemaking practices. geography compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12354 baxter, r., & brickell, k. (2014) for home unmaking. home cultures 11(2) 133–143. https://doi.org/10.2752/175174214x13891916944553 bialski, p. (2012) becoming intimately mobile. peter l ang , frank fur t am main. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-01584-3 blunt, a. (2005) cultural geography: cultural geographies of home. progress in human geography 29(4) 505–515. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph564pr blunt, a. & dowling, r. (2006) home. routledge, london and new york. blunt , a ., & varley, a . (20 0 4) geographies of home. cultural geographies 11 3 – 6. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474004eu289xx botsman, r. & rogers, r. (2010) what’s mine is yours: the rise of collaborative consumption. harpercollins, new york. bowlby, s., gregory, s. & mckie, l. (1997) ‘doing home’: patriarchy, caring, and space. women’s studies international forum 20(3) 343–350. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(97)00018-6 brickell, k. (2012) ‘mapping’and ‘doing’critical geographies of home. progress in human geography 36(2) 225–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511418708 brickell, k. (2014) ‘plates in a basket will rattle’: marital dissolution and home ‘unmaking’ in contemporary cambodia. geoforum 51 262–272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.12.005 brickell, k., fernández arrigoitia, m. & vasudevan, a. (2017) geographies of forced eviction: dispossession, violence, resistance. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51127-0 butler, j. (1986) sex and gender in simone de beauvoir’s second sex. yale french studies 72 35–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/2930225 butler, j. (1988) performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. theatre journal 40(4) 519–531. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893 butler, j. (1990) gender trouble. routledge, new york and london. butler, j. (2004) undoing gender. routledge, new york and london. butler, j. (2011) bodies that matter. on the discursive limits of sex. routledge, new york and london. chesky, b. (2014) belong anywhere. airbnb 16.07.2014 <http://blog.atairbnb.com/belong-anywhere/>. 07.10.2017. cocola-gant, a. (2016) holiday rentals: the new gentrification battlefront. sociological research online 21(3) 1–9. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.4071 cocola-gant, a. & pardo, d. (2017) resisting tourism gentrification: the experience of grassroots movements in barcelona. urbanistica tre, giornale online di urbanistica 5(13) 39-47. di domenico, m. & lynch, p. a. (2007) host/guest encounters in the commercial home. leisure studies 26(3) 321–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360600898110 dowling, e. (2012) the waitress: on affect, method and (re)presentation. cultural studies critical methodologies 12(2) 109–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708611435215 dredge, d. & gyimóthy, s. (2017) collaborative economy and tourism perspectives, politics, policies and prospects. springer, cham. dupuis, a. & thorns, d. c. (1998) home, home ownership and the search for ontological security. the sociological review 46(1) 24–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.00088 duyvendak, j. (2011) the politics of home. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. edelman, b., luca, m. & svirsky, d. (2017) racial discrimination in the sharing economy: evidence from a field experiment. american economic journal: applied economics 9(2) 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20160213 https://doi.org/10.1177/136787799900200303 https://press.atairbnb.com/fast-facts/ https://doi.org/10.1080/15022250903442096 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12354 https://doi.org/10.2752/175174214x13891916944553 https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-01584-3 https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph564pr https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474004eu289xx https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-5395(97)00018-6 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511418708 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2012.12.005 https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51127-0 https://doi.org/10.2307/2930225 https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893 http://blog.atairbnb.com/belong-anywhere/ https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.4071 https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360600898110 https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708611435215 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.00088 https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20160213 40 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers edensor, t. (2001) per forming tourism, staging tourism. tourist studies 1(1) 59–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/146879760100100104 ellingsen, w. g. & hidle, k. (2013) performing home in mobility: second homes in norway. tourism geographies 15(2) 250–267. http://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2011.647330 fahs, b. (2017) the dreaded body: disgust and the production of ‘appropriate’ femininity. journal of gender studies 26(2) 184–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2015.1095081 frenken, k. & schor, j. (2017) putting the sharing economy into perspective. environmental innovation and societal transitions 23 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2017.01.003 germann molz, j. (2007) cosmopolitans on the couch: mobile hospitality and the internet. in germann molz, j. & gibson, s. (eds.) mobilizing hospitality: the ethics of social relations in a mobile world, 65–83. ashgate, aldershot uk. germann molz, j. (2008) global abode: home and mobility in narratives of round-the-world travel. space and culture 11(4) 325–342. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331207308333 germann molz, j. (2012) social net working technologies and the moral economy of alternative tourism: the case of couchsur f ing.org. annals of tourism research 43 210 –230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2013.08.001 germann molz, j. (2014) toward a net work hospit alit y. first monday 19 (3). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i3.4824 gill, r. & pratt, a. (2008) in the social factory? immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. theory, culture & society 25(7–8) 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408097794 gillespie, t. (2017) the platform metaphor revisited. hiig science blog 24.08.2017 <https://www.hiig. de/en/blog/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/>. 05.10.2017. goffman, e. (1956) the presentation of self in everyday life. university of edinburgh, edinburgh. gorman-murray, a. (2006) gay and lesbian couples at home: identity work in domestic space. home cultures 3(2) 145–167. https://doi.org/10.2752/174063106778053200 gregson, n. & lowe, m. (1995) ‘home’-making: on the spatiality of daily social reproduction in contemporary middle-class britain. transactions of the institute of british geographers 20(2) 224– 235. https://doi.org/10.2307/622433 gregson, n. & rose, g. (2000) taking butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. environment and planning d 18(4) 433–452. https://doi.org/10.1068/d232 gurran, n., phibbs, p. (2017) when tourists move in: how should urban planners respond to airbnb? journal of the american planning association 83(1) 80–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2016.1249011 gyimóthy, s. (2017) networked cultures in the collaborative economy. in dredge, d. & gyimóthy, s. (eds.) collaborative economy and tourism: perspectives, politics, policies and prospects, 59–74. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51799-5_5 haldrup, m. (2009) banal tourism? between cosmopolitanism and orientalism. in pons, p. o., crang, m. & travlou, p. (eds.) cultures of mass tourism: doing the mediterranean in the age of banal mobilities, 53–74. routledge, london and new york. haldrup, m. (2017) souvenirs: magical objects in everyday life. emotion, space and society 22 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.12.004 haldrup, m. & larsen, j. (2006) material cultures of tourism. leisure studies 25(3) 275–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360600661179 hardt, m. (1999) affective labor. boundary 2 26(2) 89–100. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/303793> hardt, m. & negri, a. (2000) empire. harvard university press, cambridge ma. haraway, d. j. (1991) simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. free association books, london. harvey, d. (2008) the right to the city. new left review 53 23–40. hirt, s. (2006) post-socialist urban forms: notes from sofia. urban geography 27(5) 464–488. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.27.5.464 hochschild, a. r. (1997) the time bind: when home becomes work and work becomes home. henry holt, new york. hooks, b. (1991) yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. turnaround, london. isak sen, l. (20 02) toward a sociolog y of ( gendered) disgus t: images of bodily decay and the social organization of care work . journal of family issues 23 ( 7 ) 791– 811. https://doi.org/10.1177/019251302236595 jar vis, h. & pratt, a. c. (2006) bringing it all back home: the extensification and ‘over flowing’of work: the case of san francisco’s new media households. geoforum 37(3) 331–339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.06.002 https://doi.org/10.1177/146879760100100104 http://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2011.647330 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2015.1095081 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2017.01.003 https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331207308333 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2013.08.001 https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v19i3.4824 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408097794 https://www.hiig.de/en/blog/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/ https://www.hiig.de/en/blog/the-platform-metaphor-revisited/ https://doi.org/10.2752/174063106778053200 https://doi.org/10.2307/622433 https://doi.org/10.1068/d232 https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2016.1249011 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51799-5_5 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.12.004 https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360600661179 http://www.jstor.org/stable/303793 https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.27.5.464 https://doi.org/10.1177/019251302236595 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.06.002 fennia 196(1) (2018) 41maartje roelofsen johnston, l., & longhurst, r. (2009) space, place, and sex: geographies of sexualities. rowman & littlefield, boulder co. kaneva, n. & popescu, d. (2011) national identit y lite: nation branding in post-communist romania and bulgaria. international journal of cultural studies 14(2) 191–207. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877910382181 kapital (2017) airbnb or long-term rent? 08.04.2017 <https://www.capital.bg/biznes/moiat_ kapital/2017/04/08/2949437_airbnb_ili_dulgosrochen_naem/>. 12.01.2018 karlsson, l., kemperman, a., & dolnicar, s. (2017) may i sleep in your bed? getting permission to book. annals of tourism research 62 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2016.10.002 kirshenblatt-gimblett, b. (1998) destination culture: tourism, museums, and heritage. university of california press, berkeley and los angeles. knox, p. & pinch, s. (2014) urban social geography: an introduction. routledge, london and new york. koycheva, l. (2016) when the radical is ordinar y: ridicule, per formance and the ever yday in bulgaria’s protests of 2013. journal of contemporary european studies 24(2) 240–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2016.1170002 larsen, j. (2008) de-exoticizing tourist travel: everyday life and sociality on the move. leisure studies 27(1) 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360701198030 lee, d. (2016) how airbnb short-term rentals exacerbate los angeles’s affordable housing crisis: analysis and policy recommendations. harvard law & policy review 10(1) 229–254. lloyd, j. & vasta, e. (2017) reimagining home in the 21st century. edward elgar publishing, cheltenham. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786432933 lynch, p., mcintosh, a. j., & tucker, h. (eds.) (2009) commercial homes in tourism: an international perspective. routledge, london and new york. maccannell, d. (2013) the tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. university of california press, berkeley and los angeles. mallett, s. (2004) understanding home: a critical review of the literature. the sociological review 52(1) 62–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2004.00442.x marston, s. a. (2000) the social construction of scale. progress in human geography 24(2) 219–242. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913200674086272 marston, s. a. (2004) a long way from home: domesticating the social production of scale. in sheppard, e. & mcmaster, r. (eds.) scale and geographic inquiry: nature, society and method, 170– 191. blackwell, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470999141.ch9 massey, d. (1991) a global sense of place. marxism today 38 24–29. massey, d. (1992) a place called home. formations 17 3–15. massey, d. (1994) space, place and gender. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. mcdowell, l. (2004) gender, identity and place: understanding feminist geographies. polity press, cambridge. meah, a. & jackson, p. (2013) crowded kitchens: the “democratisation” of domesticity? gender, place & culture 20(5) 578–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2012.701202 minca, c. & oakes, t. (2011) real tourism: practice, care, and politics in contemporary travel culture. routledge, london and new york. minchev, o. (2013) russia’s energy monopoly topples the bulgarian government. gmf 04.03.2013 <http://www.gmfus.org/blog/2013/03/04/russia%e2%80%99s-energy-monopoly-topples-bulgariangovernment>. 05.10.2017. ministry of tourism bulgaria (2018) bulgarian tourism law. <http://www.tourism.government.bg/bg/ kategorii/zakoni>.18.01.2018 mitchell, k., marston, s. a. & katz, c. (2004) life’s work: an introduction, review and critique. in mitchell, k., marston, s. a. & katz, c. (eds.) life’s work. geographies of social reproduction, 1–26. wiley-blackwell, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444397468.ch mohanty, c. t. (2003) feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. duke university press, durham and london. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384649 morgan, n., & pritchard, a. (2005) on souvenirs and metonymy: narratives of memory, metaphor and materiality. tourist studies 5(1) 29–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797605062714 morrison, c.-a. (2012) heterosexuality and home: intimacies of space and spaces of touch. emotion, space and society 5(1) 10–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.09.001 picard, d., & buchberger, s. (eds.) (2013) couchsurfing cosmopolitanisms: can tourism make a better world? transcript verlag, bielefeld. https://doi.org/10.14361/transcript.9783839422557 pratt, m. l. (2008) imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. routledge, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877910382181 https://www.capital.bg/biznes/moiat_kapital/2017/04/08/2949437_airbnb_ili_dulgosrochen_naem/ https://www.capital.bg/biznes/moiat_kapital/2017/04/08/2949437_airbnb_ili_dulgosrochen_naem/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2016.10.002 https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2016.1170002 https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360701198030 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781786432933 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2004.00442.x https://doi.org/10.1191/030913200674086272 https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470999141.ch9 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2012.701202 http://www.gmfus.org/blog/2013/03/04/russia%e2%80%99s-energy-monopoly-topples-bulgarian-government http://www.gmfus.org/blog/2013/03/04/russia%e2%80%99s-energy-monopoly-topples-bulgarian-government http://www.tourism.government.bg/bg/kategorii/zakoni http://www.tourism.government.bg/bg/kategorii/zakoni https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444397468.ch https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384649 https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797605062714 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.09.001 https://doi.org/10.14361/transcript.9783839422557 42 fennia 196(1) (2018)research papers richards, g. (2017) sharing the new localities of tourism. in dredge, d. & gyimóthy, s. (eds.) collaborative economy and tourism: perspectives, politics, policies and prospects, 169–184. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51799-5_10 roelofsen, m. & minca, c. (2018) the superhost. biopolitics, home and community in the airbnb dreamworld of global hospitality. geoforum 91 170–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.02.021 russo, a. p. & richards, g. (2016) reinventing the local in tourism: producing, consuming and negotiating place. channel view publications, bristol. scarles, c. (2010) where words fail, visuals ignite. opportunities for visual autoethnography in tourism research. annals of tourism research 37 905–926. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2010.02.001 schor, j. b. (2017) does the sharing economy increase inequality within the eighty percent? findings from a qualitative study of platform providers. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 10 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsw047 spry, t. (2001) performing autoethnography: an embodied methodological praxis. qualitative inquiry 7(6) 706–732. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780040100700605 sweeney, m., & lynch, p. (2007) explorations of the host’s relationship with the commercial home. tourism and hospitality research 7(2) 100–108. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.thr.6050042 tsvetelia, t. (2013) bulgarian protests for cheaper energy intensify. reuters world news 24.02.2013. <http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-government-protests/bulgarian-protests-for-cheaperenergy-intensify-idusbre91n06d20130224>. 05.10.2017. veijola, s. & valtonen, a. (2007) the body in tourism industry. in pritchard, a., morgan, n., ateljevic, i., & harris, c. (eds.) tourism and gender: embodiment, sensuality and experience, 13–31. cabi, oxfordshire. https://doi.org/10.1079/9781845932718.0013 veijola, s., germann molz, j., pyyhtinen, o., hockert, e., grit, a. & höckert, e. (2014) disruptive tourism and its untidy guests: alternative ontologies for future hospitalities. palgrave macmillan uk, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399502 wachsmuth, d., chaney, d., kerrigan, d., shillolo, a. & basalaev-binder, r. (2018) the high cost of short-term rentals in new york city. a report from the urban politics and governance research group, school of urban planning, mcgill university. <http://www.sharebetter.org/wp-content/ uploads/2018/01/high-cost-short-term-rentals.pdf>. 02.02.2018. young, i. m. (1997) intersecting voices: dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. princeton university press, princeton nj. zuev, d. (2013) couchsurfing along the trans-siberian railway and beyond: cosmopolitan learning through hospitality in siberia. sibirica: interdisciplinary journal of siberian studies 12(1) 56–82. https://doi.org/10.3167/sib.2013.120103 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51799-5_10 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.02.021 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2010.02.001 https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsw047 https://doi.org/10.1177/107780040100700605 https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.thr.6050042 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-government-protests/bulgarian-protests-for-cheaper-energy http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-government-protests/bulgarian-protests-for-cheaper-energy https://doi.org/10.1079/9781845932718.0013 https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137399502 http://www.sharebetter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/high-cost-short-term-rentals.pdf http://www.sharebetter.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/high-cost-short-term-rentals.pdf https://doi.org/10.3167/sib.2013.120103 24961_06_uotila.pdf a method for assessing absorptive capacity of a regional innovation system tuomo uotila, vesa harmaakorpi and helinä melkas uotila, tuomo, vesa harmaakorpi & helinä melkas (2006). a method for assessing absorptive capacity of a regional innovation system. fennia 184: 1, pp. 49– 58. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the present study focuses on two important dynamic capabilities in regional innovation systems: visionary capability and innovative capability. visionary capability is based on the ability to acquire and assimilate future-oriented knowledge, and innovative capability on the ability to transform and exploit the acquired knowledge in the actual innovation processes. in the regional innovation system, innovation processes often take place in heterogeneous multi-actor innovation networks that set special demands for the absorptive capacity of the entire system. the present article sheds light on the aggregate process of generating and using foresight knowledge in regional innovation processes. experiences gained by resource-based futures research and an “innovation session method” in the lahti region in finland are described in a case study. tuomo uotila, helsinki university of technology, lahti center, saimaankatu 11, fi-15140 lahti, finland. e-mail: tuomo.uotila@tkk.fi. vesa harmaakorpi, lappeenranta university of technology, lahti unit, saimaankatu 11, fi-15140 lahti, finland. e-mail: vesa.harmaakorpi@lut.fi. helinä melkas, helsinki university of technology, lahti center, saimaankatu 11, fi-15140 lahti, finland. e-mail: helina.melkas@tkk.fi. introduction according to the resource-based view, an actor’s performance depends on its resources and capabilities (see e.g., wernerfelt 1984). valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resource configurations lay the basis for the competitiveness of an actor. this leads to strong path-dependency. the world is in continuous change, and the actors encounter the risk that the old resource-base becomes uncompetitive, which again leads to a declining performance. therefore, the resource configurations need to be continuously renewed. the framework of dynamic capabilities (see teece et al. 1997) offers a good basis to assess the capabilities needed in the transformation processes of an actor. an actor’s dynamic capabilities can be defined as the actor’s processes that use resources – specially the processes that integrate, reconfigure, gain and release resources – to match and even create market change. dynamic capabilities are thus the organisational and strategic routines by which actors achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve and die (eisenhardt & martin 2000). actually, it is basically a question of an actor’s capability to innovate, since “the production and use of knowledge is at the core of value-added activities, and innovation is at the core of firms’ and nations’ strategies for growth” (archibugi & michie 1995). innovative capability can be defined as actor’s ability to exploit and renew existing resource configurations in order to create sustainable competitive advantage by innovation activities (harmaakorpi 2004). the success of economic actors is strongly related to their adaptability to the emerging technoeconomic environment. decisions have to be made in a great insecurity. the insecurity can be reduced by the creation of future-oriented knowledge. future-oriented knowledge is often very challenging to use in an actor’s renewal process, since i) the possible futures are hard to outline, ii) future-oriented knowledge is even more abstract than tacit knowledge and iii) due to its nature, fu50 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tuomo uotila, vesa harmaakorpi and helinä melkas ture-oriented knowledge is hard to adopt in an actor’s organisational and strategic routines. to make use of future-oriented knowledge, economic actors need a special dynamic capability: visionary capability. in this context, visionary capability refers to an actor’s ability to outline the potential development directions based on paths travelled − utilising the opportunities emerging from the changing techno-economic paradigm. in this present study, we aim to clarify, following zahra and george (2002), the role of absorptive capacity as an important dynamic capability for an actor's success. absorptive capacity includes features of both visionary and innovation capabilities. in order to use and absorb knowledge, an actor needs to be able both to explore future-oriented knowledge and exploit it in practical innovation processes. thus, this present article takes a resource-based viewpoint of departure. as a change to the earlier research focusing on the internal resources, there is an increasing interest on the external resources and capabilities available to the actor through networks (zaheer & bell 2005). accordingly, and following the teachings of non-linear multi-actor innovation processes, economic actors are not seen as isolated islands, but entities being parts of regional and interregional innovating networks. therefore, the competitiveness securing resource configurations have to be considered at the level of innovation networks, individual actors being embedded in these networks. absorptive capacity of future-oriented knowledge as a dynamic capability is seen as a crucial competitiveness factor of the individual actors and innovation networks. this article attempts to outline the principles and practical means for how absorptive capacity concerning future-oriented knowledge could be enhanced in the multi-actor innovation networks. measures taken in the lahti region, finland, are used as a case study. futures research in regional contexts the future is a central challenge in developing competitive advantage based on technology and knowledge. according to the results in a report for the futures committee of the finnish parliament, one of the main factors behind the ability to innovate is the ability to foresee technology development. technology foresight has received growing attention among those involved in the shaping and implementation of science and technology (s&t) policies (salmenkaita & salo 2004). earlier, more focus was laid on an approach that stressed outside objectivism during the foresight process, but nowadays those who will utilise or produce emerging technologies are also more involved in the technology foresight process in order to influence the shaping of those technologies (eerola & väyrynen 2002). despite this development, a common finding in several recent studies has been that the foresight activities at national, regional and institutional levels ought to be better coordinated and that foresight activities at each level should be further strengthened. besides the methodological competence, the importance of a problem-based approach is stressed (eerola & väyrynen 2002). when discussing technology foresight at the regional level, an important basic problem is that when the process is not rooted deeply enough in already existing structures and competences, or more generally, existing resource configurations of a region, there is a danger that the results are not absorbed into the regional strategy making and development processes. this problematic phenomenon can be called “the black hole of regional strategy making”. the birth of a black hole can be avoided by developing both the technological competencies and co-operative abilities of the potential users of new technology (companies and/or other organisations) and paying enough attention to communicating and managing the foresight process (sotarauta et al. 2002). thus, technology foresight processes cannot be treated separately from regional learning processes (ronde 2003; gertler & wolfe 2004; list & metcalfe 2004). gertler and wolfe (2004) even see learning dynamics as being fundamental to the ability of regional economies to achieve and sustain knowledgebased dynamism over the long run. they regard regional foresight processes to be, at their most fundamental level, socially organised learning processes involving learning by individuals, firms and institutions. the key question for policymakers at the regional and local level is thus how to provide the right conditions for generating growth of more knowledge-intensive forms of economic activity within the context of dynamic innovation systems or learning regions. the concepts of path dependency and lock-in imply that the technological development directions of specific regions and localities are historically determined by the research and innovation capabilities developed by individuals fennia 184: 1 (2006) 51a method for assessing absorptive capacity of a regional … and organisations over time (gertler & wolfe 2004). according to ronde (2003), the development of a certain technological course is the outcome of the cumulative nature of learning processes, and hence, the generation of new knowledge builds upon what has been learned in the past. regional multi-actor innovation processes analysts in the field of innovation systems have abandoned simplistic models of how innovation and innovation processes work. it is increasingly recognized that the dynamics of innovation systems are complex and difficult to understand and that scientific and technological communities, not to mention the “users” of their products, face a number of challenges, both now and in the future (kuhlman et al. 1999). characterising innovation as a socially and economically embedded process raises the question of the socio-institutional environment, where the innovation processes are taking place. in a regional context, innovation is seen as a process embedded in a regional innovation system (ris) (see e.g., cooke et al. 1997; storper 1997; braczyk et al. 1998; de la mothe & paquet 1998; doloreux 2002). according to autio, a ris is composed of two subsystems: a knowledge generation and diffusion subsystem and a knowledge application and exploitation subsystem (see fig. 1). the former consists of four main types of institutions, and all of them participate in the production and dissemination of both codified and tacit (technological) knowledge and (technical) skills. key elements include public research institutions, technology mediating organizations, educational institutions and workforce mediating organizations. the knowledge application and exploitation subsystem, again, consists of four c’s: companies, clients, contractors and competitors. ideally, there should be horizontal and vertical linkages among the firms. also dialogue and interactions between subsystems and actors within subsystems are a necessary prerequisite for ris to operate sufficiently (autio 1998; tödtling & trippl 2005). fig. 1. main structure of regional innovation systems (ris) (autio 1998; tödtling & trippl 2005). 52 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tuomo uotila, vesa harmaakorpi and helinä melkas regional innovation system consists thus of innovative networks with different kinds of social relationships. social structure, especially in the form of social networks, affects economical outcomes, since the networks affect the flow and the quality of the information (granovetter 2005). granovetter (1973) defines the concepts of strong ties and weak ties in social networks. the strength of a tie is a combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie (granovetter 1973). strong ties are characterized by common norms and high network density. these strong ties are easier for innovation, since they include normally a relatively high amount of trust, common aims and the same kind of language to communicate. however, weak ties are reported be more fruitful for innovations, because more novel information flows to the individuals through weak ties than through strong ties (granovetter 2005). people in the same strong networks tend to share the same knowledge basis preventing the schumpeterian knowledge-combining innovation processes to emerge (see schumpeter 1942). burt (2004) has developed the “strength of weak ties” argument further by arguing that innovations are most likely to be found in the structural holes between the dense network structures (see also burt 1992; walker et al. 1997; zaheer & bell 2005). an actor able to span across the structural holes in a social structure is at a higher “risk” of having good ideas: new ideas emerge from selection and synthesis across the structural holes between groups (burt 2004). a regional innovation system rich in structural holes offers a lot of opportunities for new networked innovation processes. the weak links or structural holes enabling the biggest innovation potential are somewhat problematic for innovation processes. in order to be able to utilise the innovation potential in these structural holes, information should often be transferred between very research-oriented and practise-oriented partners – as well as partners of totally different horizontal knowledge interest (interdisciplinarity). the potential innovating partners in different sub-systems might not be able even to begin the processes, as the common rules for communication are lacking. even in the same technological field, the language in basic research is so different from practice-based innovation processes that an innovation process could end before it has started, even if the innovation potential in the structural hole is obvious. the situation is the same between different technological disciplines. the situation is most complicated when there is a desire to span the structural hole between a partner with research-oriented knowledge interest in one technological field and a partner with practice-oriented knowledge interest in another technological field. a remarkable part of difficulties between the potential innovating partners stems from the information asymmetry on the different sides of a structural hole (see e.g., montgomery 1991). the partners on the opposite sides of the structural hole have information of different quality and achieved for their own purposes. the difference is often so big that a special interpretation function is needed. burt writes about this special function as information brokerage in the structural hole. a structural hole is an opportunity to broker the flow of information between people and control the form of co-operation that brings together people from opposite sides of the hole (burt 1997). absorptive capacity in multi-actor innovation networks absorptive capacity was originally defined by cohen and levinthal (1990) as an organisation’s ability to value, assimilate and apply new knowledge. kim (1998) argues that absorptive capacity requires learning capability and develops problemsolving skills; learning capability, again, is the capacity to assimilate the knowledge for imitation and problem-solving skills to create new knowledge for innovation. moreover, zahra and george (2002) define two different types of absorptive capacity giving good point of departure for this study: potential absorptive capacity that is important in acquiring and assimilating external knowledge, whereas realized absorptive capacity refers to the functions of transformation and exploitation of the knowledge collected. both are, naturally, important in regional innovation processes: potential absorptive capacity enables the exploration of knowledge (often) over the weak ties of the innovation system, and realized absorptive capacity secures the exploitation (often) in the strong ties of the networks. absorptive capacity is crucial when pondering questions about future-oriented knowledge adaptation in regional innovation networks; higher absorptive capacity enables the easier crossing of structural holes in the innovation system. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 53a method for assessing absorptive capacity of a regional … to understand better the characteristics of absorptive capacity as a dynamic capability we have to take a closer look at its different parts: acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation. acquisition refers to an actor’s capability to identify and acquire externally generated knowledge that is critical to its operations. assimilation refers to the actor’s routines and processes that allow it to analyse, process, interpret and understand the information obtained from external sources. transformation denotes an actor’s capability to develop and refine the routines that facilitate combining existing knowledge and the newly acquired and assimilated knowledge. exploitation as a capability is based on the routines that allow actors to refine, extend and leverage existing competencies or to create new ones by incorporating acquired and transformed knowledge to their operations (zahra & george 2002). according to these definitions, absorptive capacity is like a funnel, where potential absorptive capacity (visionary capability) secures the newness and diversity of the knowledge needed, whereas realised absorptive capacity (innovative capability) stands for operationalization of the new knowledge in the existing processes in order to make the actual innovation processes to take place. however, the difference between potential (pacap) and realised (racap) absorptive capacity is blurry. according to zahra and george (2000), pacap could theoretically be equal with racap, but in most cases pacap is larger than racap. zahra and george (2002) also suggest that there is a special need for a social interaction mechanism between assimilation and transformation processes. in the following case study, we focus on these phases of the absorptive capacity in regional innovation networks. assessment includes both potential and realised absorptive capacity; however, exploitation is left for further research. the key question in the case study is: how could acquisition, assimilation and transformation processes (absorptive capacity) be aided in regional innovation networks? the research focus is depicted in fig. 2. the case study thus aims to outline the principles and practical means for how absorptive capacity concerning future-oriented knowledge could be enhanced in multi-actor innovation networks by looking into measures taken in the lahti region, finland. our underlying hypothesis is that absorptive capacity is crucial when pondering questions about future-oriented knowledge adaptation in regional innovation networks; with successful operationalization of new knowledge in the existing processes, actual innovation processes are aided. the method to address this is to take a closer look at the different parts of absorptive capacity within the case study environment – and by doing this, a “test” of the validity of our theoretical considerations is also undertaken. the case study: a resource-based foresight process in the lahti region innovation system the lahti region has set a goal to be the leading area in practice-based innovation activities in finland, and the framework of network-facilitating innovation policy has been adopted in the region in order to promote innovation activities. the lahti region’s future competitiveness is seen to be greatly dependent on its ability to promote practicebased innovations, due to the absence of a whole university and very low research inputs in the region. the yearly research input in 2004 in the lahti region was only 255 euros per capita compared to 1800 euros in the helsinki region and 2530 euros in the tampere region. this tells something of the knowledge-intensity of the region. however, acquisition assimilation transformation exploitation social integration mechanisms knowledge management collective creativity tools future-oriented knowledge potential absorptive capacity realised absorptive capacity fig. 2. absorptive capacity of future-oriented knowledge in innovation processes (following zahra & george 2002). 54 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tuomo uotila, vesa harmaakorpi and helinä melkas the lahti region has a favourable logistic setting: it lies only 100 km from two remarkable research centres, helsinki and tampere, enabling the relatively easy transfer of scientific knowledge to the practice-based innovation processes. the situation in the lahti region has forced it to develop new tools to trigger innovation processes. one aim of the network-facilitating innovation policy is to search for structural holes between the regional knowledge-base and the future-oriented knowledge-base found in the surrounding research centres; that is, to absorb the surrounding futureoriented knowledge to the regional innovation system. therefore, as part of the regional innovation policy, a resource-based technology foresight process was carried out in 2005 (the results of which will be reported on later, in other articles). in general, the existing resource configurations in a region set the basis for future development, and, therefore, regional foresight processes have to be tightly connected with an audit of the region’s resource base (harmaakorpi & uotila 2006). bearing this in mind, the technology foresight process was planned to be carried out in three phases: • phase 1: defining the regional development platforms and clusters to be assessed and identifying the related technologies • phase 2: exploring the future opportunities for the clusters and technologies using the delphi process • phase 3: organising future-oriented innovation sessions in order to disseminate the results of the delphi process within the clusters in the lahti region, the cluster-based development strategy was adopted during 2004–2005. strong current clusters in the region are mechatronics, environmental, grain, wood, furniture and plastics clusters. the development resources during the coming years will mainly be allocated to the development of these clusters, and especially the environmental cluster. the aim of our regional technology foresight was to create an open, exploratory foresight process, the limits of which are drawn on the basis of the regional cluster strategy. the focus was on mechatronics, environmental and plastics clusters. the actual process is depicted in fig. 3. fig. 3. technology foresight process in the lahti region (ahlqvist et al., forthcoming). more detailed results of that research process will be reported on later in other articles by ahlqvist, uotila, harmaakorpi & melkas. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 55a method for assessing absorptive capacity of a regional … the idea of the regional technology foresight process in this case was to identify and evaluate technology signals related to nano-, bioand ict technologies that may have significance for the three clusters focused on in this foresight process. the definition of technology signal is analogical to that of weak signal (see e.g., vapaavuori & von bruun 2003; mannermaa 2004), but implicating that the content of the signal is related to technology (hence the name technology signal). potential technology signals were identified from several sources, out of which the mit technology review was the most important. around 200 potential signals were ”muddled through”, grouped and preevaluated. finally around 30 signals were selected to the delphi process, one selection criteria being the potential link to the cluster strategy in the lahti region. after the selection, the signals were written in the form of “technology theses” (for example, as follows: “silicon-based nanosensors that detect atomic motion. silicon-based nanosensors can be utilized as highly precise measurement devices, for example in measuring the smoothness of a surface.”). the purpose of this reformulation was to indicate the possible use of a certain technology signal so that the experts could more easily evaluate the potentiality and application areas of that technology signal. delphi relies on the “informed intuitive opinions of specialists” (helmer 1983). this collective judgement of experts, although made up of subjective opinions, is considered to be more reliable than individual statements – and thus more objective in its outcomes (johnson & king 1988; masini 1993). one of the most challenging phases of the delphi process is building up the expert panel (see kuusi 1999; european commission 2002). it is of critical importance that the panel members really are experts in the subject areas. in this research, the panel was build up by muddling through web-pages of those organizations − mainly universities or other research organizations − that are doing research in the area of the selected technology signals and by choosing the potential respondents from those pages. the composition of this panel is thus very research and science oriented. all in all 300 potential respondents were selected to participate in the panel, from finland and abroad. this kind of a procedure serves also the purpose of mobilizing expertise from outside of the region into the regional foresight process, which is of vital importance, since outside expertise is important in breaking possible mental lockins existing in a region (harmaakorpi & uotila 2006). the first round of the delphi process was carried out in april 2005, and the second round in july–august 2005. the main purpose of the first round was to collect expert opinions concerning the issue of which of the technology signals are so-called emerging technologies. the second round was somewhat more focused, and it concentrated on five technology signals, which were found to be the most promising during the first round. the main idea was to deepen the understanding of those product, process or business innovations that could utilize the technology signals focused on. altogether 63 experts responded to the first round and 49 to the second round questionnaire. using delphi in this context is, however, not enough. the results of the delphi process must be again rooted back into the clusters to support practical innovation processes in companies. this is done in part three of the foresight process. the opportunities emerging from the delphi assessment should take a practical form in regional development activities. it is also important to form creative social capital to exploit the resource configurations effectively (tura & harmaakorpi 2005). this can be done by organising future-oriented thematic innovation sessions. the aim is to organize altogether 60 sessions in the lahti region during the period 2005–2006, out of which 40 sessions have already been held. thus, in the future-oriented innovation sessions, the aim is to assimilate and transform the foresight information gained during the delphi process to future-oriented innovation knowledge to be exploited by companies (see fig. 4). this task is not easy to fulfil. it has often been seen how difficult it is to reach a fruitful dialogue between the participants of the innovation sessions, since the knowledge interests are too far from each other, which threatens the spanning of the structural hole. the innovation potential is clear, but the innovation processes are inadequate due to the lack of communication. normally, we conceptualise three archetypes of participants in an innovation session: (i) future-oriented knowledge producers, (ii) practical knowledge exploiters (usually representing a company, but sometimes also its customers/suppliers) and (iii) intermediators. reaching a common understanding of the problem by the efforts of knowledge producers and knowledge exploiters has proven to be problematic in many cases. the rela56 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tuomo uotila, vesa harmaakorpi and helinä melkas tionship between future-oriented nanotechnology knowledge and practical innovation processes in the plastics industry can be given as an example of that. the innovation potential is clear, but the innovation processes are inadequate due to the lacking ways of communication. the adoption of future-oriented knowledge in the practical innovation processes is difficult but crucial in this kind of an environment. the role of information brokers has proven to be essential in making the participants innovate. the task of these intermediators is very challenging, since they need to understand the processed substance knowledge, as well as have the social abilities to work in very diverse groups. to secure a successful innovation session, intermediators need to be able to set questions and deliberative arguments that, for example, enable (i) the people on both sides of the structural hole to become aware of the interests and difficulties of the other group, (ii) transferring the best practices between the groups, (iii) drawing analogies between groups ostensibly irrelevant to one another, and (iv) making a synthesis of the knowledge interests (burt 2004). in order to do this, each session must be prepared very carefully. although the session usually lasts for one day, the preparation time can last for up to two months or even longer. during that time, the intermediators try to learn as much as possible about business logics in the industry the company is operating in, about technology used, current knowledge base of the company and also knowledge needs for the future, etc. the brokers need new methodology in order to succeed in their challenging task. the experiences gained in innovation sessions show that the familiar brain-storming methods, for example, do not suit very well to such sessions. the knowledge interests of the innovating partners often remain too distant to enable an active multi-actor innovation network to emerge. after many experiments, it became clear that the right questions set in the group work in the innovation sessions could open up the way for successful innovation processes. this development course led us to find the interrogative model of inquiry, i.e., a general method to generate knowledge and skills by question-answer-processes (see sintonen 2006) as a possible methodological approach to use in the networked innovation processes that aim at spanning the structural holes (see harmaakorpi & mutanen, forthcoming). the model being developed in the field of theoretical philosophy poses a fascinating intellectual challenge − to apply the model in the context of innovation systems. conclusions the present article took a resource-based view of regional development. the resource-based view emphasizes the renewal of existing resource configurations by dynamic capabilities. two important dynamic capabilities in promoting regional innovation systems were defined: visionary capability and innovative capability. visionary capability refers to the regional innovation systems’ ability to explore diverse future-oriented knowledge, and innovative capability to the systems’ ability to use the knowledge in the actual networked multi-actor innovation processes. the main question in this research is: how can these capabilities be promoted in a regional innofig. 4. absorptive capacity in the context of a regional innovation system. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 57a method for assessing absorptive capacity of a regional … vation system? the question was assessed with the concept of absorptive capacity. absorptive capacity was defined to be a dynamic capability including two elements: potential absorptive capacity and realized absorptive capacity. potential absorptive capacity is strongly related to visionary capability, and realized absorptive capacity to innovative capability. the article reported on the approach used in the lahti region in finland. experiences gained from a regional technology foresight process to identify and evaluate technology signals related to nano-, bioand ict technologies were introduced. the article also sheds light on the so-called innovation sessions that are used to root future-oriented information and knowledge back into the region. innovation sessions methodologies are under development, as described in the article. this article concentrated on a thorough description of the background and probably raises more questions than it answers, as the research is in progress. in further research, important issues to be taken into account are, at least: • the re-rooting of the results of the foresight process described in the article was characterized by the inclusion of smes with limited resources for (futures) research, in mostly traditional and usually less research intensive industries, in a region without major research organizations supporting smes. this is one case, interesting and challenging, but not enough for “universal” conclusions. • how could absorptive capacity be measured in innovation networks? in the lahti region, the direction is towards using the interrogative model of inquiry in regional innovation promotion activities. although application of the model is still in its embryonic phase, it has proven to have potential for further development. the first experiences emphasize heavily the role of intermediate organizations – information brokers – in a successful questioning process. so far, the actors in these organizations seem to lack the qualifications needed to process questions and deliberative arguments in the inquiry process (see harmaakorpi & mutanen, forthcoming). therefore, the next steps in making the interrogative model of inquiry really work in the innovation processes in the region are (i) to develop the model to better suit to the practical work by trying different kinds of inquiry scenarios in the innovation sessions and (ii) to educate the actors in the intermediate organizations to use the interrogative model of inquiry in the information brokerage of the innovation sessions. acknowledgements the authors wish to thank the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments. references ahlqvist t, t uotila & v harmaakorpi (forthcoming). teknologiasignaalit, alueellinen teknologiaennakointi ja päijät-hämeen klusteristrategia (technology signals, regional technology foresight and cluster strategy in the region of päijät-häme, finland). unpublished manuscript. archibugi d & j michie (1995). technology and innovation: an introduction. cambridge journal of economics 19: 1–4. autio e (1998). evaluation of rtd in regional systems of innovation. european planning studies 6: 2, 131–140. braczyk h-j, p cooke & m heidenreich (eds.) (1998). regional innovation systems. 499 p. routledge, london. burt rs (1992). structural holes: the social structure of competition. 313 p. harvard university press, boston. burt rs (1997). the contingent value of social capital. administrative science quarterly 42, 339–365. burt rs (2004). structural holes and good ideas. american journal of sociology 110: 2, 349–399. cohen w & l levinthal (1990). absorptive capacity: a new perspective on learning and innovation. administrative science quarterly 35, 128–152. cooke p, m uranga & g etxebarria (1997). regional innovation systems: institutional and organisational dimensions. research policy 26, 475–491. doloreux d (2002). what should we know about regional systems of innovation. technology in society 24, 243–263. eerola a & e väyrynen (2002). teknologian ennakointija arviointikäytäntöjen kehittäminen eurooppalaisen kokemuksen pohjalta (developing technol-(developing technology foresight and technology assessment procedures based on european experience). vtt tiedotteita – research notes 2174. 151 p. eisenhardt km & ja martin (2000). dynamic capabilities: what are they? strategic management journal 21: 1105–1121. european commission (2002). practical guide to regional foresight in the united kingdom. 196 p. office for official publications of the european communities, luxembourg. gertler m & d wolfe (2004). local social knowledge management: community actors, institutions and 58 fennia 184: 1 (2006)tuomo uotila, vesa harmaakorpi and helinä melkas multilevel governance in regional foresight exercises. futures 36, 45–65. granovetter m (1973). the strength of weak ties. american journal of sociology 78, 1360–1380. granovetter m (2005). the impact of social structure on economic outcomes. journal of economic perspectives 19: 1, 33–50. harmaakorpi v (2004). building a competitive regional innovation environment – the regional development platform method as a tool for regional innovation policy. helsinki university of technology lahti center, doctoral dissertation series 2004/1. 235 p. harmaakorpi v & a mutanen (forthcoming). knowl-forthcoming). knowl-). knowl-knowledge production in networked practice -based innovation processes – interrogative model as a methodological approach. article submitted to journal of applied philosophy. harmaakorpi v & t uotila (2006). building regional visionary capability. futures research in resourcebased regional development. technological forecasting & social change 73, 778–792. helmer o (1983). looking forward. a guide to futures research. 376 p. sage, beverly hills. johnson d & m king (1988). basic forecasting techniques. 144 p. butterworths, london. kim l (1998). crisis construction and organisational learning: capability building in catching-up at huyndai motor. organization science 9, 506– 521. kuhlman s, p boekholt, l georghiou, k guy, j-a héraud , p laredo, t lemola, d loveridge, t luukkonen, w polt, a rip, l sanz-menendez & r smits (1999). improving distributed intelligence in complex innovation systems. final report of the advanced science & technology policy planning network (astpp). a thematic network of the european targeted socio-economic research programme (tser). 89 p. office for official publications of the european communities, brussels. kuusi o (1999). expertise in the future use of generic technologies. valtion taloudellinen tutkimuskeskus, tutkimuksia 59. 268 p. list d & m metcalfe (2004). sourcing forecast knowledge through argumentative inquiry. technological forecasting and social change 71, 525–535. mannermaa m (2004). heikoista signaaleista vahva tulevaisuus. 249 p. wsoy, helsinki. masini e (1993). why futures studies? 144 p. grey seal, london. montgomery j (1991). social networks and labor market outcomes: toward an economic analysis. american economic review 81, 1408–1418. de la mothe j & g paquet (eds.) (1998). local and regional systems of innovation. 341 p. kluwer academic publishers, boston. ronde p (2003). delphi analysis of national specificities in selected innovative areas in germany and france. technological forecasting and social change 70, 419–448. salmenkaita j-p & a salo (2004). emergent foresight processes: industrial activities in wireless communications. technological forecasting & social change 71, 897–912. schumpeter ja (1942). the theory of economic development. 255 p. oxford university press, london. sintonen m (2006). from the logic of questions to the logic of inquiry. in auxier re & le hahn (eds.). the philosophy of jaakko hintikka. the library of living philosophers 30, 825–850. sotarauta m, m kautonen & t lähteenmäki (2002). tulevaisuustiedosta kilpailuetua: teknologian ennakointikonsepti pirkanmaalla. sente-julkaisuja 14/2002. 82 p. storper m (1997). the regional world: territorial development in a global economy. 338 p. the guilford press, new york. teece dj, g pisano & a shuen (1997). dynamic capabilities and strategic management. strategic management journal 18: 7, 509–533. tödtling f & m trippl (2005). one size fits all? towards a differentiated regional innovation policy approach. research policy 34, 1203–1219. tura t & v harmaakorpi (2005). social capital in building regional innovative capability. theoretical and conceptual assessment. regional studies 39: 8, 1111–1125. walker g, b kogut & w shan (1997). social capital, structural holes and formation of an industry network. organization science 8: 2, 109–125. vapaavuori m & s von bruun (eds.) (2003). miten tut-(2003). miten tutkimme tulevaisuutta? 2nd ed. acta futura fennica 5. 328 p. wernerfelt b (1984). a resource-based view of the firm. strategic management journal 5: 2, 171– 180. zaheer a & gg bell (2005). benefiting from network position: firm capabilities, structural holes, and performance. strategic management journal 26, 809–825. zahra sa & g george (2000). absorptive capacity: a review and reconceptualization. academy of management proceedings 2000. zahra az & g george (2002). absorptive capacity: a review, reconceptualization and extension. academy of management review 27: 2, 185–203. towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentary-poetry film about a post-conflict place urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa60213 doi: 10.11143/fennia.60213 towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentarypoetry film about a post-conflict place james riding and jack wake-walker riding, james & jack wake-walker (2017). towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentary-poetry film about a post-conflict place. fennia 195: 1, pp. 61–84. issn 1798-5617. made in collaboration with an independent filmmaker and two poets, the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20> presents life in post-conflict bosnia-herzegovina, and delivers a clear message: the war in bosnia is not yet firmly located in the past. shot through a computer screen, bridges <bosnia 20> forces the viewer to witness the war in bosnia and its aftermath via-the-gaze of an unknown spectator, sitting on an apple mac laptop. through this modern technological distancing, we re-present here images of war in a digital age, question how war is usually packaged and represented on television, and in turn interrogate, through poetry, how war is traditionally remembered and memorialised. in so doing, bridges <bosnia 20> leads us to a conclusion, in srebrenica, in 2015: in order to invest in the possibility of a just future after conflict, it is necessary to acknowledge the unthinkable realities to which traumatic experience bears witness. watch the film bridges <bosnia 20> here and visit the bridges <bosnia 20> website for more information keywords: cultural geography, geopolitics, film, poetry, conflict, memory james riding, relate centre of excellence, kanslerinrinne 1, university of tampere, tampere, finland fi-33014, e-mail: james.riding@uta.fi jack wake-walker, independent filmmaker, website: http://www. jackwakewalker.com/, copenhagen, denmark, e-mail: jack@wake-walker.com i spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. at the end of the war i was just one year old, so i can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. yet to this day, when i see photographs or documentary films dating from the war i feel as if i were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors i did not experience cast a shadow over me… i see pictures merging before my mind’s eye – paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction – and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if i were coming home… ― w.g. sebald (1999, 71) only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honour afterward. ― aleksandar hemon (2013, 114) in order to know, we must imagine for ourselves. ― georges didi-huberman (2008, 3) © 2017 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 62 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper introduction: watching war autumn 1994, mostar [raw documentary footage, stuart laycock] there is a boy in a hospital bed who must be younger than ten years old. two doctors are standing over him on the right of the screen. their arms are reaching out towards the boy. a pillow is propping up the boy’s leg, his right leg. in the background is a man also in a bed. his stomach is out and he is laid on his back. a doctor is attempting to place something into his mouth. the boy has two bandages on his eyes, big circular bandages. his chest also has a bandage strapped to it. a sound is heard from the man in the background. it is the sound of a deep breath and a retch, a gulp of air mixed with a cough. the noise you make when emerging from the sea after swimming, having swallowed some water. a tube makes its way down his throat. the camera zooms in on the boy. we are closer to his face now. he has blood around his nose. the bandages almost cover his face. circles of white bandage over his eyes. his small hand is bloody, wrapped and wrapped in bandages. he is breathing heavily, hyperventilating. the boy begins to speak, yet does not move. his head remains in the same position, on the pillow, facing the ceiling. “dada.” “dada.” “dada.” “dada.” the camera zooms in on the heavily bandaged hand, shakes about and zooms out again. the boy swallows. “dada.” “dada.” “da…da.” “dada.” “dada.” a disembodied, emotionless voice says, “this little boy was playing with a hand grenade… it went off and it has taken his hand with it… he was also blinded… they are doing the best that they can… he will live but.” a feeling persisted as we sat and watched previously unseen documentary footage, snatched short fragments of film, taken during the war in bosnia. the appetite for such images is of a vulgar or low appetite; that this article, and this small rescuing of lost videotapes depicting the bosnian conflict is in some way implicated in a trauma-spectacle, a ‘commercial ghoulishness’ (sontag 2004, 100). a ‘commercial ghoulishness’, which we felt we were in some way wound up in after watching images of a war that ended twenty years ago, and that all of this creative effort was perhaps a ‘re-traumatising’ of survivors (sontag 2004, 100; see felman & laub 1992; felman 2002; jeffrey & jakala 2014). and speaking to this uneasy feeling that we had on watching conflict, in watching war, jan mieszkowski (2012) – echoing jean baudrillard (1994) – asked us to once again look at war as a spectacle unfolding before a mass audience. mieszkowski (2012) implored us, as we sat in front of an apple mac laptop watching fragments of traumatic film, to ask what it means to be a spectator to war in an era where the boundaries between witnessing and perpetrating violence have become profoundly blurred. death lends storytellers all their authority, as walter benjamin once wrote, and death sanctions this story (arsenijević 2010, 2011; benjamin 2016). yet perhaps, as damir arsenijević (2011, 166) has written, such sanctioning is not enough. if we borrow from death, here, we also want to borrow from the life that is left after genocide, to evoke the unpleasant corporeal remainder, and to bear witness to genocide. it is for this reason that we return poetry to geopolitical writing, as a romantic antidote to the spectacle of war. for fennia 195: 1 (2017) 63james riding & jack wake-walker “poetry bears, powerful and politically productive witness to what the dominant politics in a society after genocide wants to foreclose” (arsenijević 2011, 168). and we aim here, through the suturing together of poetry and traumatic images, to speak for those whom violence has deprived expression, historically reduced to silence; those citizens deprived of their human face (felman 2002). while throughout the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20> – crafted from the traumatic images described in the opening of this article – we seek to represent and deconstruct our watching of these snatched fragments of footage, taken during the war in bosnia, and to resist and yet emphasise the spectacle that war, trauma, and violence has become (fig. 1). as such, we remember certain concepts and descriptions put forward fifty years ago by guy debord (1967) in la société du spectacle (society of the spectacle), which are now more relevant than ever before in a digital age (see boal et al. 2005). shot through a computer screen – simulating the way in which we first encountered these traumatic images – bridges <bosnia 20> forces the viewer to witness the war in bosnia and its aftermath via-the-gaze of an unknown spectator, watching war on a laptop screen. through this modern technological distancing, bridges <bosnia 20> re-presents images of war in the new age of digital film, and it questions and deconstructs the usual packaging and representation of a war. for never before has conflict depended so much on a struggle for hegemony in the world of images, never before has the dominant world power been subject to real catastrophe in the realm of the spectacle (boal et al. 2005). we live in a time – as boal, clark, matthews and watts (2005) in afflicted powers: capital and spectacle in a new age of war and mieskowski (2012) in watching war remind us – in which violence is presented as a spectacle. violence is the very thing which characterises our age; it feels disrespectful to be captivated by its strange charisma, and almost taboo to talk of an ‘other’, yet equally real narrative of the ‘triumphant’ past (see väyrynen 2014). and perhaps, as david rieff (2016) has written recently in a book on the cult of memory called in praise of forgetting: historical memory and its ironies – which argues collective remembrance can be toxic – it is indeed moral to stop remembering, to stop glorifying war, to stop circulating traumatic images (see also rieff 2011). or, at least now, it may be time to question how we consume images of trauma; how we watch war; how we understand geopolitics through a feedback loop of traumatic images – and to work with these geopolitical images sensitively and constructively in order to make a positive change in post-conflict places (ingram 2009, 2011, 2012, 2016). for we could not ignore or forget these images after first seeing them. and today, being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience; wars are also living room sights and sounds (sontag 2004, 16). a new ‘tele-intimacy’ has occurred, during which “the understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images” (sontag 2004, 19). this intimacy has only increased as images are now shared fig. 1. still from the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20>. 64 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper widely on the internet, capturing in film distant war-torn places. and while the cumulative diffusion of such violent images can sap our capacity to respond to horrific images with compassion, without their existence, the devastation of people and places would be unknown to others. for as we can ‘see’ now daily in aleppo, a place under siege like sarajevo was, “forgetting extermination is part of extermination”, as journalists are increasingly prevented from entering conflict zones (baudrillard 1994, 49; jergović 2016). indeed, the war in bosnia was perhaps, the final war that was understood chiefly through the images captured and portrayed on television screens, and packaged by journalists reporting from a war zone: it was the last ‘television war’ (baudrillard 1995; toal 1996). so we tell ourselves again and again that an unwillingness to engage with traumatic and violent images is worse; to ignore their existence is to sanction a history, and to turn away from the screen is to enter into a secret complicity with the aggressor. it is to collude in the plight and pain of others, in the instant of their trauma and its enduring aftermath (sontag 2004). for a historic traumatic reaction to past violent events is well-known (caruth 1995). as such, the previously unseen short films made by an aid-worker that fell into our hands – snatched moments between the delivery of medical aid – are worthy of contemplation for this reason alone. to retell a story of the war in bosnia for survivors, for the people in the films, for the dead, and for a future for this post-conflict place beyond ethnic division (bieber 2006; belloni 2009; toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013). and furthermore, in the place with which this article is concerned, bosnia-herzegovina, it is common to consider representations of the world (crampton 1996; campbell 1999). it is common to deconstruct meaning and symbolism (campbell 1998), and it is common to consider via landscapes of meaning, the symbolic landscape (cosgrove 1983, 1985, 2001, 2008; cosgrove & daniels 1988). for there remains a persistent imaginary of this place, an imagined balkans that is still seemingly pervasive. this imagined balkans can be found in the opening lines of misha glenny’s (1999) magnum opus, the balkans, 1804–1999, where bram stoker’s (1897) dracula is said to be representative of an almost gothic region. in the old orientalist tradition, it seems as if the balkans occupies the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool, where every known superstition in the world is gathered (glenny 1999). echoing the well-established literature on representations of the balkans in literary studies and geography (e.g. todorova 1997; goldsworthy 1998), mark mazower (2002) details how this has come to be the case. mazower (2002) argues that representations of the balkans loaded the balkans with negative connotations: inharmonious conditions, small antagonistic states, and hostile nationalities, all of which conspired to form the intractable balkan or eastern question (carter 1977; todorova 1997; goldsworthy 1998; glenny 1999; horvat & štiks 2015). writing of the balkans as europe’s ghost, slavoj žižek (2000, 1–2) goes further. down there, always somewhere a little further to the southeast, the balkans are a photographic negative of what was until recently cast as a tolerant, multicultural, post-political, post-ideological europe. a ‘postmodern racism’ exists, žižek argues, where the balkans are seen as the intolerant other, while the rest of europe has supposedly come to terms with otherness in its much vaunted – indeed marketed – language of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism (žižek 2000, 1–2). the task for us, as such, was always to travel outside of and beyond an ever-present ethnic and identitarian civic discourse, and to somehow craft, engrave, but not entomb a new identity for this place post-conflict (campbell 1998, 15). and also, to build upon the aesthetic geopolitics forcefully brought forth by alan ingram (2009, 2011, 2012, 2016), and to speak back to gerard toal’s (1996) feminist and post-colonial re-positioning of an ‘anti-geopolitical eye’, torn between anger and academia. with this in mind, the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20> – which this article goes on to describe the making of – sought to demonstrate that it is often the small, discrete, and apparently unimportant things that bear the most psychic weight, that imprison most pain (sontag 2004; riding 2017a). humans live, and survive, in stories, in fragments of stories, and not the grand narratives of the historic record. when retelling and locating the trivial and ostensibly irrelevant details and moments of a traumatic past, a therapeutic intervention becomes meaningful. via the transference of traumatic stories through art, it is possible to ease intense personal suffering and offer new possibilities for change in post-conflict communities (riding 2017b). a change that would, as this article speaks of, acknowledge the unthinkable realities to which traumatic experience bears witness, in order to invest in the possibility of a just future after conflict (arsenijević 2010, 2011). fennia 195: 1 (2017) 65james riding & jack wake-walker cultural geopolitics spring 1995, mostar [raw documentary footage, stuart laycock] the snatched fragment of footage begins in a lorry about to cross a bridge. not the old bridge, a bridge that looks temporary. it is made up of crisscrossing metal and has a wooden slatted floor. as the lorry approaches the bridge, a large concrete tower block can be seen on the opposite bank of the river. it is totally ruined, with no windows and bits hanging off. the bridge creaks as the wheels of the lorry crunch the wood. to the right is an old building, generally weathered by bullets and shells, its surface eroded. a steering wheel and the dashboard are briefly visible, along with the windscreen wipers, and two men can be seen at the end of the bridge. filming stops suddenly… down the road, buildings no longer have a façade – squat walls remain giving a brief outline of what it once was. a white car is parked up and two people get out. standing still, they look at a mosque. its roof is half gone, and the entrance is a hole. in the background, beyond the decapitated minaret, we can see a mountain with poplar trees dotted about. the camera is then put away, but is still recording… as is conveyed in the following article, through a ‘creative’ geographical practice, it is possible to offer a critically oriented and intentionally disruptive perspective (hawkins 2013a, 2013b, 2015a, 2015b). here via a critical-creative practice, an attempt is made to re-define and under-cut the stubborn regional schema associated with the implicit identitarian and ethnic territorial geopolitics of a particular region of the world (toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013; horvat & štiks 2015). a region of the world where a simplistic tracing between state and territory, and politics and governance, undergirds the processes involved in the making and unmaking of political subjects and the attachments and detachments of space, politics, and citizens (latour 2007; brenner & elden 2009; elden 2013; agnew 2016). informing and developing an ontopological account, which david campbell (1998, 1999) identified in bosnia-herzegovina nearly twenty years ago, this article seeks to understand the situated geopolitics of a place, and via the merging of poetry and images, we seek to deconstruct and expand what is traditionally considered geopolitical research (toal 1996). in so doing, we return the more obviously political to cultural geography, and also produce a cultural geography of the geopolitical, through advancing the notion of a ‘cultural geopolitics’ (ingram 2009, 2011, 2012, 2016). a situated ontopological account, the article specifically seeks, here in postconflict bosnia-herzegovina, to represent those formerly yugoslav citizens, who seek to deconstruct a fixed identitarian politics, and remove from below and within ethno-nationalist borders (crampton 1996; campbell 1999). read against campbell’s (1998) derridean analysis of the war in bosnia – eschewing the goal of an ethical theory in favour of an ethos of political criticism – this article is concerned to question and go beyond assumptions and limits of a traditional geopolitical theory, borrowing from phenomenological accounts of landscapes of conflict, trauma and memory (taussig 2006; riding 2015a, 2015b). it does this via a critical-creative response, a documentary-poetry film called bridges <bosnia 20>, which is positioned as a way of returning cultural geography to the vital socio-political agenda of the unfinished compositional project, ‘new cultural geography’ (cosgrove & jackson 1987; cosgrove & daniels 1988). a project, which drew upon a humanistic geography of tuan, relph, and buttimer, and combined this humanism with derridean and deconstructive work on representation, as can be seen in berger’s (1972) ways of seeing (cresswell 2010; cosgrove 1983, 1985, 2001, 2008). bringing a representational ‘new cultural geography’ concerned with images, maps and text, back into view in this article, is situated as an important task, in a place defined and fixed by its traumatic past, in order to think through arrangements of power and its affects (cosgrove & jackson 1987; cosgrove & daniels 1988). it is argued that the understanding and explanation of ‘maps of meaning’ remains an important task in bosnia-herzegovina, twenty years after ethnic conflict (cresswell 2010). yet we remember here, when in the face of war in europe, the ‘new cultural geography’ did not act upon its initial revolutionary agenda (cosgrove & jackson 1987; cosgrove & daniels 1988). it neglected to write a ‘new cultural geography’, which considered ethnic conflict as it was taking place, and a war which was brought to an end through a geographical international relations theory (campbell 1998). indeed, there was a noticeable lack of research on the war in bosnia in cultural geography during the 1990s 66 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper (toal 1996). as such, with this absence of other cultural geography on the collapse of yugoslavia, this article writes now what could have been written decades earlier. it was december 1995 when the war in bosnia was brought to an end, and the dayton agreement was signed in paris (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998). a ‘peace’ time has lasted to this day, although the framework agreement, which divided the country in roughly half along ethnic lines, has prevented bosnia-herzegovina from developing entirely beyond wartime divisions (crampton 1996; campbell 1999; bieber 2006; belloni 2009; toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013). preceded by an agreement between bosniaks and bosnian croats signed in washington in 1994, the country was separated into two political entities: the predominantly bosnian serb, republika srpska, and the mainly bosniak and bosnian croat, federation of bosnia and herzegovina, sometimes informally referred to as the bosniak-croat federation. locally, the country is further separated out, as the federation of bosnia and herzegovina has ten autonomous cantons with their own governments. each canton is known as majority bosnian croat, majority bosniak, or ‘mixed’ (nancy 2000). within the cantons are municipalities and homogenous enclaves, which further ‘define’ the individuals living there (anderson 1983; campbell 1998; nancy 2000; brubaker 2002). and while republika srpska is led more centrally from the de facto capital banja luka, there are still observable geographical divisions between the northern portion and southern portion of the state within a state. which is often said to be under threat of being wiped off the map, acting in-place as a nationalising of civic discourse, nullifying any post-ethnic activism (touquet 2012, 2015). as such, there remains twenty years after the end of the war in bosnia, a lack, a loss of a national imaginary beyond the lines drawn across the country by the dayton agreement, which was designed to be replaced (gordy 2015). indeed the idea of creating a prosperous post-conflict period was not factored into the discussions that took place in dayton, ohio; rather ending the war in bosnia was the sole goal of the accords. today each entity remains a state in-itself, as each entity of bosnia-herzegovina has its own government, flag, coat of arms, police force, customs, postal service, president and parliament or assembly. while a 2-km zone of separation runs on either side of the inter-entity border, making a 4-km zone in total stretching into both entities (fig. 2). the border is not determined by geographical features, or an existing regional imaginary, rather it traces the front lines during the war fig. 2. map of the inter-entity border. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 67james riding & jack wake-walker in bosnia. the dayton agreement is as such, a political agreement based on a wartime ethnic division, causing many people to migrate from one entity to the other, or to never return home after being displaced during the war in bosnia (riding 2015a). this cartographic representational idiosyncrasy, or more precisely ‘apartheid cartography’, enforces an ethno-nationalist overhaul of space upon individuals in bosnia-herzegovina (crampton 1996; campbell 1999). cartography has aided a post-socialist era of never-ending ‘transition’, of brutal capitalism and diminished democracy, and the continuation of a nationalist governance that it was hoped would fade away (gordy 2015). twenty years after the end of the war in bosnia, it is now evident – yet underreported by the ‘cosmopolitan’ europeans guilty of balkanism (carter 1977; todorova 1997; goldsworthy 1998; glenny 1999; žižek 2000; mazower 2002) – that the endless postconflict, post-socialist, ‘transition’ era of bosnia-herzegovina, has meant for citizens general impoverishment, de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, and a non-democratic rule of divisive and corrupt elites (helms 2013; arsenijević 2014; gilbert & mujanović 2015; hromadžić 2015; jansen 2015; kraft 2015; kurtović 2015; majstorović et al. 2015; mujkić 2015; murtagh 2016; riding 2016a, 2017a). amidst this fractured geopolitical landscape, a cultural geographer in collaboration with an independent filmmaker and two poets created a film. this article accompanies, narrates, and deconstructs the making of that film. the aim of the film, called bridges <bosnia 20>, is to confront a traumatic past in order to contemplate a forgotten future (arsenijević 2010, 2011). in the process, an attempt is made through the creation of a film, to deconstruct ever-present ethnic and identitarian debates in bosnia-herzegovina (riding 2017b). for there is within this documentary-poetry film and in the work of other artists in the first two decades of this century, working out of bosnia-herzegovina, a clear intention to be a human rights activist and an artist, enfolding art and activism to produce a form of art-activism (riding 2017b). as such, the documentary-poetry film created has been publicised and mobilised in spaces across bosnia-herzegovina. a representation, it acts in-place as a public disavowal of the ethno-nationalist state(s), and a singular or ‘pure’ collective identity (nancy 2000). in so doing, the documentary-poetry film reveals a need to work through bosnia’s past, yet also through this vital shared public mourning of a traumatic past, it conversely aims to affect the present (arsenijević 2010, 2011). this is a radical undertaking in a society still under the heavy influence of ethno-nationalist politics in the post-conflict, post-socialist, ‘transition’ era, where a reduction or flattening of identity is a part of the state rhetoric (arsenijević 2014; horvat & stiks 2015). for the bosnia-herzegovina created post-conflict, demands, sets up and confirms ethnic division, and as such, we aim to deconstruct and breach this division, mourning in the process the loss of a multiethnic socialist yugoslavia (luthar & puznik 2010). images in spite of all autumn 1993, mostar [raw documentary footage, stuart laycock] stuart laycock is standing on a corner, in the open, facing a mountain. the camera is pointing into the distance. a road is turning away to the left from where he stands on the pavement. two poplar trees reach up in the centre of shot, and two further poplars are on the very left hand edge of the image. in the distance a mountain with a quarry hacked into it covers the background. above the rocky expanse, a dull sky is overcast. rolling down the mountainside are the mists of an early morning, and a town is just about visible at the base of the jagged hills. the footage is shaky but remains focused on the same outcrop far ahead. we hear a voice, stuart’s mother. four seconds into the film she says, “it is difficult to tell where the shelling is coming from isn’t it... little bursts and it seems to echo... that’s somewhere over on the left... that’s single machine gun fire.” stuart is now turned slightly more to the left, aiming roughly at where the noise is coming from. in shot is a sign with some writing on, indecipherable due to the angle we are looking from. after seventeen seconds, a louder and more piercing sound is heard above the talking. “yeah come on,” stuart’s mother shouts. “fucking hell that was a bullet,” shouts stuart back. 68 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper the camera twists quickly to the floor and we see a blur of long grass, then the lines in the middle of the road at an odd angle, then the pavement as the camera is pointed to the floor, then stuart’s arm and shirt, as the camera is pulled close to stuart’s chest, jumping about as he runs. “keep that running and move,” stuart’s mother tells her son. a button on a stripy shirt is all that is now visible and a laugh is overheard. the camera is less jumpy as the pace slows to a walk. after forty-three seconds a car can be overheard driving by, but is not seen. in autumn 1992, stuart laycock travelled to bosnia-herzegovina for the first time. after crossing the english channel on the car ferry, he drove across europe, down the coast of croatia, and entered bosniaherzegovina near tomislavgrad. the van he was driving was full of high-value medicine, new antibiotics and anaesthetics, including insulin and the vital blood-clotting agent, factor eight. on this trip he took some photographs. after autumn 1992, laycock realised that he needed a video camera to document the war that was taking place, and to reveal what was happening to others, in the form of moving images. so twice a year, for the next three years, he carried a video camera when he delivered aid. over twenty years later, feeling that enough time had passed, laycock took the videotapes that he had made on these trips out of the attic. he did not really want to watch them but at the same time, he did not want them to be lost. inevitably, as he got the boxes out of the attic, he watched what was on the videotapes. these videotapes, cherished possessions, captured and portrayed events that shaped his life, and a war. he began the task of going through each tape, getting them out of their boxes and putting them into the machine. it did not matter that they had been left in a box for years and that they remained there, unwatched. they were there, and so was a link to his past, and a visual history of the collapse of yugoslavia was safe. the intense condensing of the past into a series of moving images became a kind of witnessing, in the moment of watching his younger self and memories came flooding back. some memories had been forgotten, some suppressed, and others became newly shaped by what he was now seeing on screen. these forgotten tapes are some of the last videotapes of yugoslavia, taken in the last days, depicting its collapse (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998). as an archive of fragmentary footage, the chronological and geographical reach of the films is immediately apparent. laycock was in the north, south, east and west of the country, he was there only a few months after the war in bosnia began, and the last films are shot weeks after the dayton agreement (gordy 2015). yet, as becomes apparent when watching these snatched images, it is his amateur eye, capturing his everyday existence in a war zone, which is vital to the films created. the films display in their entirety the seemingly inconsequential and inadmissible, the apparently irrelevant things in and stories from a country at war. “in our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible”, writes georges perec (2008: 209) in an essay called approaches to what?. it matters to perec that the questions he asks, barely indicative of a method, let alone a project, seem trivial and futile. this is precisely what makes them essential, this is precisely why they matter more than so many of the other kinds of questions we have tried to ask, or been trained to ask. in place saint-sulpice, a square in paris, he sits in one cafe, then another, for three days, recording everything that passed his field of vision (perec 2010). as such perec’s attempt at exhausting a place in paris, aims to describe all the things that usually go unnoticed (perec 2010). it is an attempt to document what he had previously called l’infra-ordinaire – the infra-ordinary – the background noise, the habitual, the stuff that is looked over, missed when gazing at a scene (perec 2008). and is, as such, a critical examination of what draws and escapes our attention. we take georges perec seriously here in a region that has slipped off the radar of geographical endeavour since the end of the war in bosnia. and we borrow his ‘way of seeing’ when watching the films stuart laycock made in bosnia-herzegovina, recording the minor details of the scene and the ‘small stories’ of the ordinary people present within them (berger 1972; lorimer 2003). we do this for an important reason. in the process of attempting to represent a traumatic past, speaking of seemingly incidental moments, and remembering the little details of a place – a location, an apartment, or a bus journey – enables a series of associative memories to occur. in freud’s early fennia 195: 1 (2017) 69james riding & jack wake-walker writings on trauma, this form of testimony is specifically seen as a way to allow a traumatic event to be ‘forgotten’ (riding 2017a). for this reason, telling and re-telling a life-story may be a part of the cure, the giving-up of an important reality, or for a psychoanalyst, “the dilution of a special truth into the reassuring terms of therapy” (caruth 1995: vii). present within the short films that stuart laycock captured are bosnian croats, bosniaks, and bosnian serbs, all receiving aid and speaking on camera at different points during the war, and on the films are bits of bosnia-herzegovina that rarely appeared on the nightly news broadcasts from 1992 to 1995. there are scenes that seem to linger and last too long, witnessing the traumatised people of a war-torn country, made all the more vital and essential, because they are taken by someone who is not a trained cameraman. shaky, oddly framed, unedited, they have an almost intolerable quality. nothing mediates the obvious trauma of those filmed, and nothing directs or ‘guides’ our viewing of them. the fragments of footage are for this reason more real and shocking, more disturbing and far more proximate than the packaged moving images often seen in the filming of distant war-torn regions on television. here are ‘snatched images’ from a country at war, images squeezed between or snatched either side of the task-at-hand, the delivery of medical aid (didi-huberman 2008). it is from these ‘snatched images’ that we began the task of making a film about a place twenty years after ethnic conflict (didi-huberman 2008). the documentary-poetry film created, bridges <bosnia 20>, delivers a clear message: the war in bosnia is not yet firmly located in the past (toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013; horvat & štiks 2015). shot through a computer screen, the very images stuart laycock gathered during the war in bosnia are re-presented in bridges <bosnia 20>. and the viewer is forced to witness the war in bosnia and its aftermath via-the-gaze of an unknown spectator, sitting on a laptop in the comfort of their home. we initially see the mouse cursor on the laptop screen moved between two files: bosnia 1995 and bosnia 2015 (fig. 3). this is from where the opening scene of the film begins, as a click on the former file, bosnia 1995, opens a video-box to reveal never-before-seen footage of the war in bosnia taken by stuart laycock over twenty years ago. and we see the bullets fired from a mountain in mostar, while standing on a corner filming in the valley below. after seeing the short films again, twenty years after the traumatic events that took place, stuart laycock decided to write a book of poetry about his experiences in bosnia-herzegovina during the war (laycock 2015). bridges <bosnia 20> begins with the short film described above, capturing a divided mostar, which is seen after a click on the video-box, bosnia 1995, and quickly moves to a journey through a landscape of half-destroyed houses which fill the screen. matter-of-fact poetry, written by the very author of this footage, stuart laycock, describes and soundtracks the images re-presented. the words are cold and deliberate, as if almost factually reporting the scenes that are unfolding. while the images are harsh, emotional, and desperate. fig. 3. still from the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20>. 70 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper the poem, gone (laycock 2015), reflects back upon the delivery of medical aid to bosnian serb refugees who had reached the town of prijedor in northwest bosnia-herzegovina. on his way, he passed through the typical rolling green hills of the region, now eerie, uncanny, desolate landscapes, or ‘deathscapes’, as each house that slid by through the window had been systematically targeted and destroyed (maddrell & sidaway 2010). the poem begins, “the speed sign still warns us to slow down for a village where no village exists anymore”, and ends with, “if one single house, just one, still lived, big or small (it wouldn’t matter which) then death would not be absolute, the pain not half so dark” real sounds, real cries, and real interviews from the time taken by stuart laycock make this poetic narration all-the-more real, yet our imaginary viewer still clicks and views the devastation through the grainy pixels of their smart laptop. and through this modern technological distancing, bridges <bosnia 20> aims to re-present images of war in a digital age, deconstructing these images on the screen. in turn, borrowing from poets who attempted to rob war of its last shred of glory, bridges <bosnia 20> interrogates through the use of poetry, the way in which we have traditionally remembered and memorialised war (baudrillard 1994; sontag 2004; mieszkowski 2012; rieff 2016). another poem by stuart laycock follows, called don’t mean, and asks the question, what was all this slaughter was for? the poem reveals the struggle faced for a poet to make sense of what he witnessed during the war in bosnia. and it reveals the futility of war, subverting the grand narratives of the dominant politics in a society after genocide – the fixed historic record – ending with, could we cope if grimy suspicion grabbed us grubby with frontline dirt, reaching from the soil like a bony hand partly skin-covered, that death don’t mean anything? i declare this poem a safe zone winter 1995, prijedor [raw documentary footage, stuart laycock] the war in bosnia had just ended. the film begins with ruined houses passing by one after the other, roof missing, windows gone, as stuart drives food and supplies for refugees north. he stops at a refugee camp and begins filming again as boxes are unloaded from a van. “it was bitterly cold, it was snowing, many of the houses had no glass in them, this horse was being stabled in what used to be a shop, and the refugees were queuing in the snow,” stuart’s mother says over the images. the camera is pointed at a young girl. she is wearing a red jumper and is visibly cold, hunching her shoulders and pushing her arms into her pockets and close to her body. she has a dark brown bob of hair. she looks into the distance beyond the camera. “they’ve lost absolutely everything... they’ve lost their friends,” says a voice. the girl looks into the camera. her mouth is clenched together, her eyes sad, knowing. “but they’ve lost more than that... they’ve lost their childhood... their childhood has been lost,” says the same voice again. the girl looks up and speaks. “this little girl is fourteen years old... she says her childhood is gone,” the voice translates. the girl speaks again. “in 1992 she left the house in bihać and she has been a refugee since then,” we hear, as the moment stuart captured on film ends. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 71james riding & jack wake-walker it is common to construct a certain geopolitical narrative in order to write of the former yugoslavia. work draws on either ethnographic data collected to explore state-building and post-conflict reconstruction (jeffrey 2006), or, through a form of discourse analysis work interrogates the loss or dispossession of identity, deconstructing the internal skirmishes of ethnic and identitarian debate (campbell 1998). borrowing from a non-representational (thrift 2008), embodied (ingold 1993), landscape geography (wylie 2007), and extending the ‘new cultural geography’ (cosgrove & jackson 1987; cosgrove & daniels 1988), this poetic article drifts somewhat against the more established geopolitical discourses associated with research on the collapse of yugoslavia (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998), the post-socialist ‘transition’ era after yugoslavia (toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013; horvat & štiks, 2015), and the balkans more widely (carter 1977; todorova 1997; goldsworthy 1998; glenny 1999; žižek 2000; mazower 2002). and in so doing, we follow instead the trail of another, more grounded, descriptive, ‘everyday’, or ‘cultural’ version of the geopolitical (bunge 1971; de certeau 1984; holloway & hubbard 2000; bennett & watson 2002; scott 2009). to travel and write outside of and beyond these more ‘spectacular’ or established geopolitical discourses – “discourses through which the representation, conduct and resolution of the war were sought” (campbell 1998, 15) – is as georges perec (2010) notes, to follow the trail of another, more ‘essential’ history (riding 2017a). a great number, if not the majority, of the things in stuart laycock’s films of bosnia-herzegovina have been “described, inventoried, photographed, talked-about, or registered” (perec 2010, 3). if possible, our intention, following in the footsteps of perec was to “describe the rest instead” (ibid., 3). so we began to film ourselves in bosnia-herzegovina, in the locations that were represented in the snatched fragments stuart laycock captured, during the war in bosnia. and the film bridges <bosnia 20> jumps forward twenty years. a click on the latter file, bosnia 2015, and we see the aftermath of the war: memorials to children who never made adulthood, the remains of corpses in srebrenica – still being interred so long after genocide. and around all of these images, a more emotional, lamentable, and humanistic poetic narration from the poet simon barraclough rises to a crescendo, as a mother weeps for a child she should never have survived (barraclough 2008, 2010, 2011, 2015; barraclough et al. 2013). the poem, i declare this poem a safe zone, speaks to the uneasy feeling we had on first watching these traumatic snatched fragments of film. the ‘commercial ghoulishness’, which we felt we were in some way wound up in after watching images of a war that ended twenty years ago, and the worry that we were in some way involved in a ‘re-traumatising’ of survivors (sontag 2004, 100; felman & laub 1992; felman 2002; jeffrey & jakala 2014). reaching a high point, the speed at which the poem is delivered increases as the poet repeats and repeats, would you mind if i used, would you mind if i used your death as exemplum – your pelvis as my virtual reality headset – your shinbone as the spine for my thesis – your dried tears for endnote indicators – your dental records as my isbn – your ribs as my sergeant’s stripes – your howls in a bombed-out home as my ringtone? yet by the end of the poem barraclough still seems to hold on to some hope, believing in the redemptive qualities of poetry after conflict, put one thing on another, create a tidy pile, draw things you love together, rehang a door, reglaze a shattered stare, it may well be enough. in the final scene of the documentary-poetry film, the past is shown to be enfolded within the present created, as any attempts to historicise the war in bosnia, to consider it the past, have proved difficult, 72 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper whilst a time of continuing unease persists (baillie 2013). it is here that we realise the motives behind making a film about this place, as trauma necessarily yet persists and bridges <bosnia 20> delivers a clear message: the war in bosnia is not yet firmly located in the past (toal & dahlman 2011; jeffrey 2013; horvat & štiks 2015). the video-box then freezes and all of what we have previously viewed shuttles by, time seems to stop and what is past and present is unclear – the viewer is now back in their pixelated reality, yet perhaps a human fire is now burning. humanism from a mass grave spring 1994, near gornji vakuf [raw documentary footage, stuart laycock] 7. 3. 94. 12:55. the road is a muddy track. a convoy is winding through the densely wooded hills of central bosnia. it appears to be coming up to what was a checkpoint. the barrier is up and a little hut, looking like a kiosk where someone might sell sandwiches, or cigarettes, is unmanned. there is a turn ahead. a sign is visible in the background with an arrow on it. taking up most of the screen is the vehicle ahead. it is a tractor pulling a large gun. the gun is being removed from the frontline, withdrawing troops. bosniak soldiers sit on the back of the tractor and hang on to the giant gun. two soldiers are standing on the back of the tractor, and three soldiers are sitting on the gun itself. “peace, etc., etc.,” stuart says. the corner is approaching, and the soldiers start to wave at the camera as they turn. we can now see the side of the vehicle and the gun. a soldier leans backwards in his seat lifting his legs up, as he waves. he looks young. another soldier, who was previously looking away, turns to look at the camera for the first time. “peace is breaking out all over,” stuart’s mother says. the camera then shifts to the right, away from the soldiers. looking at a sign, the scene is shaky as the lorry bumps along the track. the sign has the bosnian lily on it, an arrow pointing right and the names of some places. sarajevo tuzla zenica travnik novi travnik bugojno fifteen seconds have passed in early march 1994 on the roads of bosnia-herzegovina. croats and bosniaks had stopped fighting only days earlier, agreeing to a ceasefire. soldiers and weapons are being pulled back from the frontline. the war would continue for another year and a half after this moment in time and place. it was early 2014 before we finally reached the border of bosnia-herzegovina. yet it seemed to hold some sort of connection to our own pasts, having growing up with the country on television, over two decades ago (glenny 1992; thompson 1992; rieff 1995; little & silber 1996; campbell 1998). images of emaciated inmates on the nightly news reached england where we sat in front of little television screens, watching what british journalists had revealed to the world (vulliamy 1994, 2013). the memory from childhood contained moving images of what we later found out to be detention camps: trnopolje, omarska, and keraterm. first unveiled in august 1992, they soon lit up televisions thousands of miles away, in all corners of the globe (campbell 1998). images of concentration camps again in the rural hinterlands of europe shocked viewers and shook their conscience. being so young, we fennia 195: 1 (2017) 73james riding & jack wake-walker understood little of why people were behind barbed wire, why they were starving, or who these people were. we recently rediscovered these films, and we remembered the moment of our first seeing these snatched images on television. while preparing for our own journey through bosniaherzegovina, we were constantly asked: why does it concern you? you are not from there. we have, perhaps, become so desensitised to images of suffering and trauma in distant regions on rolling news that it seems strange to say that as children, we were affected by what we witnessed on television in 1992 (sontag 2004; butler 2010). taking our childhood memories of a war-torn country as a starting point, we traced the line that now divides the country roughly in half. passing by monumental memorials built to collectively mourn world war ii, bridges <bosnia 20> eventually reaches and remembers the mostly unmarked sites of detention camps in use during the war in bosnia, seen on television as children years earlier. these camps – omarska, trnopolje, and keraterm – have since been cleared away and evidence of war crimes covered up; a simultaneous politics of denial and a cultivated remembering has taken place in this regionally altered land (riding 2015a). commemorative practices, of course, often reflect and consolidate the interests of power, in so far as the past becomes leashed to the services of new state and nation building (hung 1991; young 1993; esbenshade 1995). such power is revealed in discrete parts of bosnia-herzegovina through the absence of monuments; what is absented from sight here reveals an official narrative, reflecting the interests of those in power. yet, as is witnessed in bridges <bosnia 20>, these sites of non-remembrance, lacking any official state monument, have become sites of intervention where memory is a means to promote change and challenge the current political system. this dissident form of remembering has been explored elsewhere by jenny edkins (2003). in an attempt to escape the context in which they occur, a country that has been separated along ethnic lines since the series of secessionist wars that occurred in the final decade of the previous century, these acts of remembering are freed from their collective and nation-building capacities. and remembering conflict is instead reclaimed by the more discrete, idiosyncratic valences of the individual voice. in the process, the body – dehumanised by the traumatic event – has been recuperated by individuals who see it as necessary to the work of mourning (butler 2010). a vulnerability and susceptibility to violence and abuse is precisely why using the body to commemorate is a vital and powerful counter-narrative to the material representations reinforcing nationhood. specifically, the bodily act of commemoration becomes a counterpoint to the tendency in post-conflict regions to constantly collectivise the individual voice, a voice that was perceived as animal howl for those that reside in the mass grave (arsenijević 2011). as the twentieth anniversary of the genocide in srebrenica passes, sites of mass murder remain unmarked to this day. it is in srebrenica, amongst the lines and lines of pristine white gravestones, where the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20> ends, in 2015 (fig. 4). here we see that returning to the site of a traumatic event on a commemoration day is not only an act of remembrance. commemorative events are gatherings of the wounded; they are insistent re-enactments of the past, where mourners bear witness to the testimony of survivors (caruth 1995). in his memoir postcards from the grave, srebrenica survivor emir suljagić (2005) argued for the existence of a new europe, a new european imaginary, where auschwitz and srebrenica are a part of the same human – or inhuman – story. and as guido snel (2014) observed – in his examination of spatial metaphor and the persistence of imaginary european geographies post-1989 – suljagić was at pains to associate his experience in srebrenica with the events that took place in the third reich’s extermination camps. the holocaust – a moral touchstone for inhumanity and banal evil – influenced the way suljagić interpreted ethnic persecution, and the failure of the european world to identify with his personal position revealed to him the persistence of a separate balkan regional imaginary: the war in bosnia is not a part of the european story. for susan sontag (2004, 101) though, it was intolerable, for to set the sufferings of the people of bosnia alongside the sufferings of others is to ‘compare’ them, denigrating human life; this might well lead to a kind of competition between mere comparables. though we argue, here, suljagić’s memoir was a targeted questioning of ‘what is deemed necessary’ to commemorate as part of the european story. for the ‘cosmopolitan’ europeans, bosnia was not their tragedy (nancy 2000). emir suljagić was evacuated from srebrenica in 1995, before the spa town was overrun. almost every man he had ever known subsequently lost their lives in the genocidal massacre. 74 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper the ground of the image spring 1994, mostar [raw documentary footage, stuart laycock] the scene begins with a man in a bed covered with a black and grey woollen blanket. his head is towards the left of the screen, his feet towards the right. he is wearing a blue hat and has a big moustache. behind him is a wall of what looks like cupboards. the camera moves down the bed towards his foot, which is attached to a makeshift frame. the assemblage of metal and bandages woven through discs enables the leg to be elevated. despite hearing the word “no,” the man lifts up the covers to slowly reveal his leg. as the blanket is pulled back, stuart asks, “what has happened to him?” “grenade,” replies the doctor. his leg is slowly shown to stuart. a doctor comes over to help the man lift the black and grey cover. stuart zooms in on the leg, so that all that is now visible is a leg. protruding from the shin of the man is a metal object, screwed into the skin and bone. “those are external fixations, there is shrapnel in the knee,” says stuart’s mother. a doctor walks in front of the man and his leg as stuart zooms out. he sees the foot of the man poking out from behind her. stuart begins to slowly zoom in on the bruised foot. the footage becomes shaky as the doctor walks out of shot. the video camera is turned off after thirty-eight seconds. the scene begins with a woman in a bed wearing a cheque shirt and looking towards the camera. there are some tubes winding around her. a plastic shopping bag, with the letters ‘p’ and ‘o’ written on it is also sat on the bed. a brown blanket is pulled up to the woman’s chest. she has thick brown hair and eyebrows. her expression is dismal, just completely dragged down. “sniper,” says the doctor. stuart asks, “where was she hit?” “in the chest, chest wound,” replies stuart’s mother. the woman blinks a few times and looks away from the camera, uncomfortable being filmed. a fig. 4. still from the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20>. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 75james riding & jack wake-walker doctor walks between stuart, the camera, and the woman we are focused upon. the woman looks down towards her chest, bringing her chin downwards. the doctor begins to reach under the brown cover and lifts up the cheque shirt that the woman is wearing. with her hand the doctor points with a finger at a square bandage on the woman’s chest. “metak,” the pointing doctor says. there is/was a danger that in re-presenting the films that stuart laycock made in bosnia-herzegovina, we reproduce a balkanism, a voyeuristic, unreflective and distanciated gaze – a gaze which has for centuries worked to create a european ‘other’ (riding 2015a, 2016a). these concerns are attentive to a visual and cartographic discipline – geography – with an uncomfortable imperial and military history, “littered with the skeletons of murderous neglects and encounter” (robinson 2003, 277). both postcolonial and feminist perspectives on the situatedness of knowledge and the concomitant relational nature of researcher positionality have done much to avoid replicating these sorts of colonial-era power relations (england 1994; rose 1997). and attentive to this work, we aim here to avoid such a balkanist account, voyeuristic, unreflective and distanciated, by grounding these images. we retell and visualise the story of our watching of them in bridges <bosnia 20>, and describe here something of their production, their maker, as well as the places in which the films were made, looking again and again at the moving images on the screen (didi-huberman 2008). images continuously pass our field of vision, as georges perec (2010) witnessed in place saintsulpice. images confront and proliferate in the places humans inhabit. they capture, represent and define distant places and people; they travel and seem ubiquitous, ungrounded. yet the way images are made is a situated knowledge, a product of a particular time and place. drawing upon michel foucault’s (1975) studies on the connections between knowledge and power, geographers have revealed that images have a certain geography and images create a certain geography (rose 2012; cosgrove & daniels 1988; cosgrove 1983, 1985, 2001, 2008), as can be seen in the power of maps (harley 1989; wood 1992). the key to working with images for the visual anthropologist sarah pink (2001, 76) is “an understanding of the social relations and subjective agendas through which they are produced and the discourses through which they are made meaningful.” moving beyond a ‘representational’ understanding of images common in the ‘new cultural geography’ (cosgrove & daniels 1988), here we consider the ground of the image, from where jean-luc nancy (2005) describes images as groundless, flat but receding spaces: if anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. what hides in the depths and recesses of images? what secrets are concealed within the images? (fig. 5). of video nancy (2005, 74) writes, we must not even speak any longer of a screen: video is not of the order of the screen, but of penetration... video means “i see”... thus, in video, there is absorption in vision, with a tendency toward making absent what is seen... the seer and the viewer come before the visible. as such, in bridges <bosnia 20>, we would like to present what is seen – re-present what is seen – and we play upon the oddity of technological images, and digital film, by speaking of and displaying the screen that we are watching the short snatched fragments of film on. for video “is embedded into the material of the screen, it is not placed upon it as in cinema, nor is it physically joined with a canvas as in painting” (nancy 2005, 73). in so doing, we look at these moving images today “in terms of their phenomenology, even if it can only be restored incompletely”, as the art theorist georges didi-huberman (2008, 41) writes when looking at four photographs from auschwitz. we are undertaking a kind of visual criticism, but not one ‘disciplined’ by any nameable theory or methodology, treating the films as a site of research in which we are situated and implicated after watching. as in much other phenomenological landscape geography (dubow 2001, 2011; wylie 2002, 2005, 2007; lorimer 2003, 2006, 2012; edensor 2005, 2008; daniels 2006, 2012; pearson 2006; desilvey 2007, 2010, 2012; matless 2008, 2010, 2014; lorimer & wylie 2010; rose 2012; riding 2015a, 2015b, 2016b, 2017b), the films analysed here, are treated not as a spatial gaze or a representational schema, overarching and constructing the traumatised landscape, rather they are considered as presentations that are ‘in and of the world’ (dewsbury et al. 2002). for the films stuart laycock made, demand us to simultaneously tighten our point of view and widen our point of view (didi-huberman 2008, 41). we must tighten our point of view and attempt to 76 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper omit nothing of what is captured in the original films, even when facing something that seems empty of informative value, and there is seemingly nothing to see or nothing happens. symmetrically they demand us to widen our point of view, to restore the anthropological value of the films, as films which reveal within themselves “a dilution of a special truth”, a giving up of stories, or more precisely, testimony (caruth 1995: vii). in short, we suggest here that in retaining the impulse of phenomenological investigation – as the snatched fragments of film themselves, and the traumatised landscapes of bosnia-herzegovina demand – we are performing a more discrete, small, and intimate version of the political (and geopolitical) (toal 1996). for the wider geopolitical landscape is inseparable from the scenes described here and the footage that is re-presented in the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20>. in so doing, this article obliquely attends to the more obviously political (and geopolitical), which some critics of the embodied, phenomenological, or non-representational geography that emerged after the ‘new cultural geography’ (cosgrove & jackson 1987; cosgrove & daniels 1988), have cautioned, can be glossed (castree & macmillan 2004; van dyke 2013). this paper, as such, speaks to and argues for a ‘new’ form of geopolitics through an ‘opening up’ of methodological approaches, and it also contributes a different way of writing and performing geopolitics imaginatively (ingram 2009, 2011, 2012, 2016; mitchell & kallio 2017). for remembering conflict, writing a geopolitical account, is often presented as a definitive, official narrative of the past, a record of the history of a place and conflict. in contrast, we argue that any account of a place and a conflict can never be truly complete. the figure of parrhesiastes – the one who speaks the truth – haunts what we write and re-present in film, as we can present only fragments of a past, put together only in part: captured moments of human experience during conflict (väyrynen 2013). and bridges <bosnia 20> informs and develops the kinds of ontopological accounts that campbell (1998, 1999) identified nearly twenty years ago, by presenting images of place during conflict and post-conflict as a series of impressions, which re-present conflict not as a linear easily represented historical or geographical narrative. in contradistinction to a traditional geopolitical account, we re-present a fragmentary human history, for humans live and survive in stories, and not the grand narratives of the historic record. conclusion: regarding the pain of others autumn 1994, travnik [raw documentary footage, stuart laycock] a young man is sat in the passenger seat of stuart’s lorry. behind the young man, through the windscreen of the lorry, is a street in travnik with trees flanking it on the far side. behind the right fig. 5. still from the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20>. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 77james riding & jack wake-walker shoulder of the young man, through the side window of the lorry, the clean stone wall of a building and a volkswagen camper van is just about visible. a little car passes, driving along the street on the right of the screen. it looks like a little old fiat, but it isn’t. the young man has short dark brown hair, and is wearing a wooly jumper with three stripes around the chest. it is dark in the cab of the lorry, so his face is in shadow, though we can see the outline of his face, ears, and he has a fringe. he is probably in his late teens. “i tell you about situation in travnik… situation in travnik, it’s very difficult… erm...” he shrugs his shoulders and shifts about on the seat, and looks down in thought at nothing in particular, though seems to concentrate on a particular spot. “… every second we expect a grenade… because…” he pauses, takes a breath, and swallows, and again shrugs his shoulders, this time stretching his mouth as he does so, almost grimacing. “… grenade it kill the people… and…” he is now looking directly into the camera. “… it killed two of my friends.” he looks down, and up again quickly, back towards the camera. “… and people be afraid of grenades...” a woman and a man walk into shot. they are walking down the opposite side of the street. the woman is wearing a brightly coloured top. “… people keep the shelter, or something like that…” the people walk out of shot on the right. two elderly women walk from behind the right shoulder of the young man, to the left of the screen. “… and we hear just one noise, a grenade, we stay twenty-four hours in shelter.” remnants of the past remain embedded in, buried beneath, strewn amongst, enfolded within, and are dimly recognisable in the present (dymitrow 2017). wartime – a time of continuing unease (baillie 2013) – persists in the cartographic idiosyncrasy of the dayton agreement, imposed on the citizens of a small nation in europe twenty years ago (gordy 2015). as such, the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20> makes a second clear statement: in order to ease personal suffering and to open new possibilities for change in individuals and communities who have experienced psychic trauma, there is a need to tell others of that traumatic history (riding 2017a). if the traumatic past is not fully interrogated, the traumatic event itself cannot become a ‘narrative memory’ and be integrated into a story of the past. the speaking of trauma, giving voice to the incidents and accidents of the everyday and representing a traumatic life may well be a form of recovery. telling someone about the past seems to be – and is certainly – for many survivors a way of stilling and surviving the recurrence of traumatic haunting (caruth 1995). as laub (1995, 63) notes, “survivors do not only need to survive to tell their stories; they also need to tell their stories in order to survive.” likewise, “our memory repeats to us what we have not yet come to terms with; what still haunts us” (erikson 1995, 184). for this reason, bridges <bosnia 20> places, describes and reflects upon the use of testimony – informing, grounding, and locating a nascent psychoanalytic geography (pile 1991, 1996; bondi 1999; nast 2000; callard 2003; philo & parr 2003; kingsbury 2004; kingsbury & pile 2014) – positioning testimony as an inherently geographic psychoanalytic technique, which not only eases suffering in individuals and communities, but offers new possibilities for societal change and transitional justice in post-conflict places. since the collapse of yugoslavia, research in post-conflict places has begun to recognise the necessity of testimony – listening to and responding to traumatic stories – as a means to alleviate 78 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper suffering for individuals and communities (caruth 1995; riding 2017a). yet when undergoing psychoanalysis there is always a certain inaccessibility – the inaccessibility of trauma to be simply located, dated, or even understood by those who were not there. though through different modes of encounter, and in learning more about the traumatic reaction to past violent events, it is possible to open in the individual and the community new possibilities for change. and it is possible through the psychoanalytic practice, testimony, to speak out about a crisis in the former yugoslavia that, as trauma necessarily yet persists, is not over (riding 2017a). twenty years after the srebrenica genocide, as the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20> contends, there is still a necessity for art that aims to understand and alleviate psychic trauma in the former yugoslavia. though “the difficulty of listening to and responding to traumatic stories in a way that does not lose their impact, that does not reduce them to clichés or turn them all into versions of the same story, remains a problem” (caruth 1995, vii). and indeed to avoid repeating the same story, bridges <bosnia 20> acts in contradistinction to the sites of commemoration, cemeteries and monuments present in the landscape, which often remember only a single ethnic group – reinforcing the geopolitical categories that the murderers imposed on their victims (bieber 2006). people are remembered as bosnian serb, bosnian croat, or bosniak, as orthodox, catholic, or muslim. not as fathers, mothers, daughters, or sons. there are few common sites of commemoration or collective spaces to remember the victims of war. what is more, remembering has become a political statement, as those mourning are categorised and enfolded within persistent ethnic and identitarian narratives (riding 2015a). commemorative practices, of course, often reflect and consolidate the interests of power, in so far as the past becomes leashed to the services of new state and nation building (hung 1991; young 1993; esbenshade 1995). as such, in bridges <bosnia 20> we evoke poets who have in their work attempted to rob war of its last shred of glory, from wilfred owen during world war i to the poets of present-day bosnia-herzegovina (arsenijević 2010, 2011). for unlike the poems that are written during and after conflict, most monuments shamefully lack the nerve to project the awful purpose of themselves (sebald 1999). they are a betrayal of the dead: victims of an incapacity, century just past, to devise a commemorative mode – a century that, more than any other, needed such a mode (riding 2015b, 2016b). most memorials are inimical to meditative remembrance (riding 2015a). bridges <bosnia 20> for this reason contends that there is a poetics that can be harnessed in post-conflict regions, as poems can create an affective response in the individual: the shock of the poetic (jergović 2004; hemon 2013). this affective response, is ultimately what this article and the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20> attend to within the discipline of geography, through an opening up of geographic methodology to include artistic responses to a place and landscape: what could be viewed as a cultural form of performing, enacting, or indeed deconstructing geopolitics (hawkins 2013a, 2013b, 2015a, 2015b). this opening up, of what a geographer does in-place via ethnographic research, as such, enables a giving back to place after conflict: an ‘appropriate gesture’ (taussig 2006). recent geographical work, post non-representational theory (thrift 2008), on landscape, perception, embodiment (ingold 1993; tilley 1994; edensor 2000; wylie 2002, 2005), memory (lorimer & mcdonald 2002; pile 2002; lorimer 2003, 2006; jones 2005; pearson 2006), material culture, and the spectral (cook et al. 2004; edensor 2005; till 2005; de silvey 2006, 2007), has pointed towards the use of art in geographic explorations of landscapes, cities, and places (see also for work on filmic geographies, jacobs 2013, 2016). this article reconsiders this work, and argues that these ‘new’ artistic responses to place and landscape could be refashioned into a broader ‘cultural geopolitics’, a ‘radical cultural geography’ incorporating a material and sensuous attentiveness as a method of critical socio-political analysis (ingram 2009, 2011, 2012, 2016; cosgrove 1983, 1985, 2001, 2008). and as such, in this article we necessarily reposition research which is concerned with aesthetics, affect, and performance, arguing that it is/was an inevitable progression of a more deconstructive, textual and visual ‘new cultural geography’, which had left some of its humanistic roots behind (cosgrove & jackson 1987; cosgrove & daniels 1988). the accompanying narrative to the documentarypoetry film produced here, is for this reason reminiscent of a form of a non-representational (thrift 2008), embodied (ingold 1993), landscape geography (wylie 2007), which has emerged in the past decade and a half. yet it relocates this work to a region of the world where, in which, it perhaps seems to some to be out-of-place. for importantly here, the more recent non-representational, embodied, fennia 195: 1 (2017) 79james riding & jack wake-walker landscape geography, which emerged after the ‘new cultural geography’, enables a disruptive literary approach. drawing from the raw and immediate qualities of memoir, it transfers an affective moment in the lived landscape, other to the emotionless analytical expository writing common in much geographical research (sebald 1999; jergović 2004; hemon 2013). indeed, conveying directly, descriptive impressions, flattens the gaze of the geographer (toal 1996; perec 2008, 2010), transferring in the process an affective moment to the reader, appropriate for documenting a ‘post-conflict place’ because they are situated words. they are contextual, and add a dense weight to the fact that placing and describing conflict and trauma matters (caruth 1995). reembracing a situated, embodied, expressive form of geographical inquiry, allows for a writing of place, citizens, politics, and as such it reveals the patterns that led to conflict occurring here (merrifield 1995). the words themselves on-the-page and the films re-presented here, are defiantly ‘in and of the world’, in order to demonstrate the significant affective power of representational acts post-conflict (dewsbury et al. 2002). furthermore, these relatively under-processed and under-used impressions ask wider political questions of how geopolitical conflicts are written of, represented, and transferred across political borders, in the realm of the spectacle. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank the leverhulme trust for funding this research. stuart laycock for sharing his films with us, and for recording his poetry to include in the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20>. simon barraclough, for recording his poem i declare this poem a safe zone to use as part of the documentary-poetry film bridges <bosnia 20>. dr. kirsi pauliina kallio, for encouraging us to write this piece and to send it to fennia. dr. alex jeffrey and professor tarja väyrynen for reading the article and suggesting some further reading. and most of all, we would like to acknowledge all of the people who appear in bridges <bosnia 20>. references agnew, j.a. (2016) spatializing politics. territory, politics, governance 4(3) 265–268. https://doi.org/10.1 080/21622671.2016.1155874 anderson, b. (1983) imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. verso, london. arsenijević, d. (2010) forgotten future: the politics of poetry in bosnia and herzegovina. nomos, badenbaden. arsenijević, d. (2011) mobilising unbribable life. in mousley, a. (ed.) towards a new literary humanism, 166–181. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. arsenijević, d. (ed.) (2014) unbribable bosnia and herzegovina: the struggle for the commons. nomos, baden-baden. baillie, b. (2013) capturing facades in “conflict-time”: structural violence and the (re)construction of vukovar’s churches. space and polity 17(3) 300–319. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.854996 barraclough, s. (2008) los alamos mon amour. salt, london. barraclough, s. (2010) bonjour tetris. penned in the margins, london. barraclough, s. (2011) neptune blue. salt, london. barraclough, s. (2015) sunspots. penned in the margins, london. barraclough, s., dixon, i. & mccabe, c. (2013) the debris field. sidekick books, london. baudrillard, j. (1994) simulacra and simulation. university of michigan press, michigan. baudrillard, j. (1995) the gulf war did not take place. indiana university press, bloomington. belloni, r. (2009) bosnia: dayton is dead! long live dayton!. nationalism and ethnic politics 15(3) 355– 375. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537110903372367 benjamin, w. (2016) the storyteller. london, verso. bennett, t. & watson, d. (eds.) (2002) understanding everyday life. wiley blackwell, oxford. berger, j. (1972). ways of seeing. london, penguin. bieber, f. (2006) post-war bosnia: ethnicity, inequality and public sector governance. palgrave macmillan, hampshire. boal, i.a., clark, t.j, matthews, j. & watts, m. (2005) afflicted powers: capital and spectacle in a new age of war. verso, london. 80 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper bondi, l. (1999) stages on journeys: some remarks about human geography and psychotherapeutic practice. the professional geographer 51 11–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/0033-0124.00141 brenner, n. & elden, s. (2009) henri lefebvre on state, space and territory. international political sociology 3(4) 353–377. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00081.x brubaker, r. (2002) ethnicity without groups. european journal of sociology 43 163 –189. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0003975602001066 bunge, w. (1971) fitzgerald: geography of a revolution. schenkman pub. co., cambridge, ma. butler, j. (2010) frames of war: when is life grievable? verso, london. callard, f. (2003) the taming of psychoanalysis in geography. social and cultural geography 4 295–312. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360309071 campbell, d. (1998) national deconstruction: violence, identity, and justice in bosnia. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. campbell, d. (1999) apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in bosnia. political geography 18 395–435. https://doi.org/10.1016/s09626298(98)00110-3 carter, f.w. (ed.) (1977) an historical geography of the balkans. academic, london. caruth, c. (ed.) (1995) trauma: explorations in memory. baltimore, md, johns hopkins university press. castree, n. & macmillan, t. (2004) old news: representation and academic novelty. environment and planning a 36(3) 469–480. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3656 cook, i. (2004) follow the thing: papaya. antipode 36 642–664. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2004.00441.x cosgrove, d. (1983) towards a radical cultural geography: problems of theory. antipode 15(1) 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1983.tb00318.x cosgrove, d. (1985) social formation and the symbolic landscape. university of wisconsin press, madison. cosgrove, d. (2001) apollo’s eye: a cartographic genealogy of the earth in the western imagination. john hopkins university press, baltimore. cosgrove, d. (2008) geography and vision: seeing, imagining and representing the world. ib taurus, london. cosgrove, d. & daniels, s. (1988) the iconography of landscape. cambridge university press, cambridge. cosgrove, d. & jackson, p. (1987) new directions in cultural geography. area 19(2) 95–101. http://www. jstor.org/stable/20002425 crampton, j. (1996) bordering on bosnia. geojournal 39(4) 353–361. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02428498 cresswell, t. (2010) new cultural geography – an unfinished project? cultural geographies 17(2) 169– 174. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474010363845 daniels, s. (2006) suburban pastoral: strawberry fields forever and sixties memory. cultural geographies 13(1) 28–54. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474005eu349oa daniels, s. (2012) until the end of days: narrating landscape and environment. cultural geographies 19(1) 3–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474011432520 debord, g. (1967) la société du spectacle. buchet-chastel, paris. de certeau, m. (1984) the practice of everyday life. university of california press, berkeley. desilvey, c. (2006) observed decay: telling stories with mutable things. journal of material culture 11(3) 318–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068808 desilvey, c. (2007) salvage memory: constellating material histories on a hardscrabble homestead. cultural geographies 14(3) 401–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474007078206 desilvey, c. (2010) memory in motion: soundings from milltown, montana. social and cultural geography 11(5) 491–510. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2010.488750 desilvey, c. (2012) making sense of transience: an anticipatory history. cultural geographies 19(1) 30– 53. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474010397599 dewsbury, j.d., harrison, p., rose, m. & wylie, j. (2002) enacting geographies. geoforum 33(4) 437–440. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-7185(02)00029-5 didi-huberman, g. (2008) images in spite of all: four photographs from auschwitz. university of chicago press, chicago. dubow, j. (2001) rites of passage: travel and the materiality of vision at the cape of good hope. in bender b. & winer m. (eds.) contested landscapes: movement, exile and place, 241–255. berg, oxford and new york. dubow, j. (2011) still-life, after-life: w.g. sebald and the demands of landscape. in daniels s., delyser, d., entrikin, j.n. & richardson, d. (eds.) envisioning landscapes, making worlds: geography and the humanities, 188–198. routledge, london dymitrow, m. (2017) degradation, restitution and the elusive culture of rural-urban thinking. fennia 195(1) 36–60. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.60462 edensor, t. (2000) walking in the british countryside: reflexivity, embodied practices and ways to escape. body and society 6(3–4) 81–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x00006003005 fennia 195: 1 (2017) 81james riding & jack wake-walker edensor, t. (2005) the ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space. environment and planning d: society and space 23 829–849. https://doi.org/10.1068/d58j edensor, t. (2008) mundane hauntings: commuting through the phantasmagoric working class spaces of manchester, england. cultural geographies 15 313–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474008091330 edkins, j. (2003) trauma and the memory of politics. cambridge university press, cambridge. elden, s. (2013) the birth of territory. university of chicago press, chicago. england, k. (1994) getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research. the professional geographer 46(1) 80–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1994.00080.x erikson, k. (1995) notes on trauma and community. in caruth, c. (ed.) trauma: explorations in memory, 183–199. johns hopkins university press, baltimore, md. esbenshade, r.s. (1995) remembering to forget: memory, history, national identity in postwar eastcentral europe. representations 49 72–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.1995.49.1.99p0265t felman, s. & laub, d. (1992) testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis and history. routledge, london. felman, s. (2002) the juridical unconscious: trials and traumas in the twentieth century. harvard university press, cambridge, massachusetts. foucault, m. (1975) discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. random house, new york, ny. gilbert, a. & mujanović, j. (2015) dayton at twenty: towards new politics in bosnia-herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 605–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1130359 glenny, m. (1992) the fall of yugoslavia. penguin, london. glenny, m. (1999) the balkans, 1804–1999: nationalism, war and the great powers. granta, london. goldsworthy, v. (1998) inventing ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination. yale university press, london. gordy, e. (2015) dayton’s annex 4 constitution at 20: political stalemate, public dissatisfaction and the rebirth of self-organisation. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 611–622. https://doi.or g/10.1080/14683857.2015.1134132 harley, j.b. (1989) deconstructing the map. cartographica 26(2) 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3138/e6357827-1757-9t53 hawkins, h. (2013a) geography and art, an expanding field: site, the body and practice. progress in human geography 37(1) 52–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512442865 hawkins, h. (2013b) for creative geographies: geography, visual arts and the making of worlds. routlegde, london. hawkins, h. (2015a) creative geographic methods: knowing, representing, intervening. cultural geographies 22(2) 247–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015569995 hawkins, h. (2015b) creativity. routledge, london. helms, e. (2013) innocence and victimhood: gender, nation, and women’s activism in postwar bosniaherzegovina. university of wisconsin press, madison. hemon, a. (2013) the book of my lives. farrar, straus and giroux, new york, ny. holloway, l. & hubbard, p. (2000) people and place: the extraordinary geography of everyday life. prentice hall, new york, ny. horvat, s. & štiks, i. (eds.) (2015) welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after yugoslavia. verso, london. hromadžić, a. (2015) citizens of an empty nation: youth and state-making in postwar bosnia-herzegovina. university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia. hung, w. (1991) tiananmen square: a political history of monuments. representations 35 84–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.1991.35.1.99p00662 ingold, t. (1993) the temporality of the landscape. world archaeology 25 152–174. https://doi.org/10.1 080/00438243.1993.9980235 ingram, a. (2009) art and the geopolitical: remapping security at green zone/red zone. in ingram, a. & dodds, k. (eds.) spaces of security and insecurity: geographies of the war on terror, 257–277. ashgate, farnham. ingram, a. (2011) making geopolitics otherwise: artistic interventions in global political space. geographical journal 177(3) 218–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00415.x ingram, a. (2012) experimental geopolitics: wafaa bilal’s domestic tension. geographical journal 178(2) 123–133. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00455.x ingram, a. (2016) rethinking art and geopolitics through aesthetics: artist responses to the iraq war. transactions of the institute of british geographers 41(1) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12099 jacobs, j. (2013) listen with your eyes; towards a filmic geography. geography compass 7(10) 714–728. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12073 jacobs, j. (2016) filmic geographies: the rise of digital film as a research method and output. area 48(4) 452–454. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12309 82 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper jansen, s. (2015) yearning in the meantime: ‘normal lives’ and the state in a sarajevo apartment complex. berghahn, oxford. jeffrey, a. (2006) building state capacity in post-conflict bosnia and herzegovina: the case of brčko district. political geography 25 203–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2005.11.003 jeffrey, a. (2013) the improvised state: sovereignty, performance and agency in dayton bosnia. wiley blackwell, london. jeffrey, a. & jakala, m. (2014) the hybrid legal geographies of a war crimes court. annals of the association of american geographers 104(3) 652–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.892365 jergović, m. (2004) sarajevo marlboro. archipelago books, brooklyn, ny. jergović, m. (2016) the siege starts without warning. new york times 21.10.2016. <http://www.nytimes. com/2016/10/23/opinion/the-siege-starts-without-warning.html?_r=0> 01.12.2016. jones, o. (2005) an emotional ecology of memory, self and landscape. in davidson, j., bondi, l. & smith, m. (eds.) emotional geographies, 205–218. ashgate, oxford. kingsbury, p. (2004) psychoanalytic approaches. in duncan, j.s. johnson, n.c. & schein, r.h. (eds.) a companion to cultural geography, 108–120. blackwell, oxford. kingsbury, p. & pile, s. (eds.) (2014) psychoanalytic geographies. ashgate, farnham. kraft, m.g. (2015) insurrections in the balkans: from workers and students to new political subjectivities. in horvat, s. & štiks, i. (eds.) welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after yugoslavia, 216–217. verso, london. kurtović, l. (2015) ‘who sows hunger, reaps rage’: on protest, indignation and redistributive justice in post-dayton bosnia-herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15 (4) 639–659. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126095 latour, b. (2007) reassembling the social. oxford university press, new york. laub, d. (1995) truth and testimony: the process and the struggle. in caruth, c. (ed.) trauma: explorations in memory, 61–75. johns hopkins university press, baltimore, md. laycock, s. (2015) zone: poems of the bosnian war. mica press, colchester. little, a. & silber, l. (1996) the death of yugoslavia. penguin, london. lorimer, h. (2003) telling small stories: spaces of knowledge and the practice of geography. transactions of the institute of british geographers 28(2) 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00087 lorimer, h. (2006) herding memories of humans and animals. environment and planning d: society and space 24 497–518. https://doi.org/10.1068/d381t lorimer, h. (2012) memoirs for the earth: jacquetta hawkes’s literary experiments in deep time. cultural geographies 19(1) 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474011432377 lorimer, h. & macdonald, f. (2002) rescue archaeology, taransay, scotland. cultural geographies 9 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1191/1474474002eu235oa lorimer, h. & wylie, j. (2010) loop (a geography). performance research 15(4) 6–13. https://doi.org/10. 1080/13528165.2010.539872 luthar, b. & puznik, m. (2010) remembering utopia: the culture of everyday life in socialist yugoslavia. new academia publishing, washington dc. maddrell, a. & sidaway, j. (2010) deathscapes: spaces for death, dying, mourning and remembrance. routledge, london. majstorović, d., vučkovac, z. & pepić, a. (2015) from dayton to brussels via tuzla: post-2014 economic restructuring as europeanization discourse/practice in bosnia and herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 661–682. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126093 matless, d. (2008) a geography of ghosts: the spectral landscapes of mary butts. cultural geographies 15(3) 335–358. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474008091331 matless, d. (2010) describing landscape: regional sites. performance research 15(4) 72–82. https://doi. org/10.1080/13528165.2010.539882 matless, d. (2014) in the nature of landscape: cultural geography on the norfolk broads. wiley blackwell, london. mazower, m. (2002) the balkans: from the end of byzantium to the present day. phoenix, london. merrifield, a. (1995) situated knowledge through exploration: reflections on bunge’s “geographical expeditions”. antipode 27(1) 49–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1995.tb00261.x mieszkowski, j. (2012) watching war. stanford university press, palo alto, ca. mitchell, k. & kallio, k.p. (2017) spaces of the geosocial: exploring transnational topologies. geopolitics 22(1) 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 mujkić, a. (2015) in search of a democratic counter-power in bosnia-herzegovina. southeast european and black sea studies 15(4) 623–638. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2015.1126094 murtagh, c. (2016) civic mobilization in divided societies and the perils of political engagement: bosnia and herzegovina’s protest and plenum movement. nationalism and ethnic politics 22(2) 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13537113.2016.1169060 nancy, j-l. (2000) being singular plural. stanford university press, palo alto, ca. fennia 195: 1 (2017) 83james riding & jack wake-walker nancy, j-l. (2005) the ground of the image. fordham university press, new york, ny. nast, h. (2000) mapping the ‘unconscious’: racism and the oedipal family. annals of the association of american geographers 90 215–255. https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00194 pearson, m. (2006) “in comes i”: performance, memory, and landscape. university of exeter press, exeter. perec, g. (2008) species of spaces and other essays. penguin classics, london. perec, g. (2010) an attempt at exhausting a place in paris. wakefield press, new york. philo, c. & parr, h. (2003) introducing psychoanalytic geographies. social and cultural geography 4 283–293. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360309074 pile, s. (1991) practising interpretive geography. transactions of the institute of british geographers 16 458–469. https://www.jstor.org/stable/623030 pile, s. (1996) the body and the city: psychoanalysis, space and subjectivity. routledge, new york. pile, s. (2002) memory and the city. in campbell, j. & harbord, j. (eds.) temporalities, autobiography and everyday life. manchester university press, manchester. pink, s. (2001) doing visual ethnography. sage, london. riding, j. (2015a) landscape, memory, and the shifting regional geographies of northwest bosniaherzegovina. geohumanities 1(2) 378–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2015.1093917 riding, j. (2015b) death drive: final tracings. in hawkins, h. & straughan, e. (eds.) geographical aesthetics: imagining space, staging encounters, 181–196. ashgate, farnham. riding, j. (2016a) a new regional geography of a revolution: bosnia’s plenum movement. territory, politics, governance [online dec 07 2016] https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2016.1260491 riding, j. (2016b) a geographical biography of a nature writer. cultural geographies 23(3) 387–399. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015591124 riding, j. (2017a) geographical testimony: a short history of a yugoslav family. journal of cultural geography 34(2) 250–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873631.2016.1237609 riding, j. (2017b) representing a divided place: the artistic-military practice of mladen miljanović. cultural geographies 24(1) 171–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474016647372 rieff, d. (1995) slaughterhouse: bosnia and the failure of the west. vintage random house, london. rieff, d. (2011) against remembrance. melbourne university press, melbourne. rieff, d. (2016) in praise of forgetting: historical memory and its ironies. yale university press, new haven, ct. robinson, j. (2003) political geography in a postcolonial context. political geography 22(6) 647–651. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0962-6298(03)00072-6 rose, g. (1997) situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities, and other tactics. progress in human geography 21(2) 305–320. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297673302122 rose, g. (2012) visual methodologies: an introduction to researching with visual materials. sage, london. rose, m. (2012) dwelling as marking and claiming. environment and planning d: society and space 30 (5) 757–771. https://doi.org/10.1068/d6809 scott, s. (2009) making sense of everyday life. polity, cambridge, uk. sebald, w.g. (1999) on the natural history of destruction. hamish hamilton, london. snel, g. (2014) the past is always in the present: aether and the returns of history and europe’s new post-1989 peripheries. the cases of mihail sebastian’s diary and emir suljagić’s srebrenica memoir. neohelicon 41(1) 241–246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0212-y sontag, s. (2004) regarding the pain of others. penguin books, london. stoker, b. (1897) dracula. archibald constable and company, westminster. suljagić, e. (2005) postcards from the grave. saqi books, london. taussig, m. (2006) walter benjamin’s grave. university of chicago press, chicago. thompson, m. (1992) a paper house: the ending of yugoslavia. vintage, london. thrift, n. (2008) non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. routledge, oxford. till, k. (2005) the new berlin: memory, politics, place. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. tilley, c. (1994) a phenomenology of landscape: places, paths, and monuments. berg, oxford. toal, g. (1996) an anti-geopolitical eye: maggie o’kane in bosnia, 1992–93. gender, place and culture 3(2) 171–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663699650021873 toal, g. & dahlman, c. (2011) bosnia remade: ethnic cleansing and its reversal. oxford university press, oxford. todorova, m. (1997) imagining the balkans. oxford university press, oxford. touquet, h. (2012) the republika srpska as a strong nationalizing state and the consequences for postethnic activism. nationalities papers: the journal of nationalism and ethnicity 40(2) 203–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2011.652609 touquet, h. (2015) non-ethnic mobilisation in deeply divided societies: the case of the sarajevo protests. europe-asia studies 67(3) 388–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2015.1019430 van dyke, c. (2013) plastic eternities and the mosaic of landscape. environment and planning d: society and space 31(3) 400–415. https://doi.org/10.1068/d15010 84 fennia 195: 1 (2017)research paper väyrynen, t. (2013) re-thinking peace through the figure of parrhesiastes: creating agonistic political space. international journal of conflict engagement and resolution 2 147–162. väyrynen, t. (2014) muted national memory: when the hitler’s brides speak the truth. international feminist journal of politics 16(2) 218–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.773155 vulliamy, e. (1994) seasons in hell: understanding bosnia’s war. st. martin’s press, new york. vulliamy, e. (2013) the war is dead, long live the war: bosnia: the reckoning. vintage, london. wood, d. (1992) the power of maps. the guildford press, new york, ny. wylie, j. (2002) an essay on ascending glastonbury tor. geoforum 33 441–454. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0016-7185(02)00033-7 wylie, j. (2005) a single days walking: narrating self and landscape on the south west coast path. transactions of the institute of british geographers 30 37–51. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00163.x wylie, j. (2007) landscape. routledge, london. young, j.e. (1993) the texture of memory: holocaust memorials and meaning. yale university press, new haven, ct. žižek, s. (2000) the fragile absolute: or why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? verso, london. russia’s waste policy and rural waste management in the karelian republic: building up a ruin to come? urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa95519 doi: 10.11143/fennia.95519 russia’s waste policy and rural waste management in the karelian republic: building up a ruin to come? moritz albrecht, gleb yarovoy & valentina karginova-gubinova albrecht, m., yarovoy, g. & karginova-gubinova, v. (2020) russia’s waste policy and rural waste management in the karelian republic: building up a ruin to come? fennia 198(1–2) 135–150. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.95519 russia’s waste management system and legislative framework have undergone an ambitious revision process to fix russia’s pending waste crisis and push waste management towards the levels of its western neighbours. while the reforms aim to tackle russia’s insufficient waste management, the local implementation realities of these central policy strategies, particularly in rural areas, are largely neglected. rural communities throughout russia are to implement a waste policy system which is not only unsuitable in its current form, but wherein local realities are in stark contrast to their representations in the realms of policy design. obliged to implement nonetheless, these mismatches seem destined in building up a ruin to come of a waste management system that will be dysfunctional and locally contested, particularly in relation to its environmental impact. to scrutinise these developments, the paper is framed by a conceptualisation of policy mobility and translation, with an in-depth focus on localised assembling processes that implement russian waste legislation in three local communities in the karelian republic. it analyses rural waste management in russia through the regional waste management programme of the karelian republic and their processes of implementation. based on qualitative analysis, the core focus is on local perceptions, waste management infrastructure and local spatial components that highlight the incompatibility between the current institutionalised planning documents and visions of waste policy in russia and the geographical realities in the places of materialisation. keywords: waste management, rural municipalities, russia, karelian republic, policy mobility moritz albrecht (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5784-7793) & gleb yarovoy (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7010-425x), department of geographical and historical studies, university of eastern finland, yliopistokatu 7, 80101 joensuu, finland. e-mail: moritz.albrecht@uef.fi, gleb.iarovoi@uef.fi valentina karginova-gubinova, institute of economics, karelian research centre of the russian academy of sciences; pushkinskaya street 11, 185910 petrozavodsk, republic of karelia, russia. e-mail: vkarginowa@yandex.ru © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 136 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) introduction while the eu and its member states are on their, although variegated, way to implement an ambitious, reduction focused waste policy framed within a circular economy package (com 2020), the situation in neighbouring russia can be described as a ground zero. currently only a handful of larger urban centres are equipped with modern waste facilities and a functional waste sorting and recycling system (un 2018; greenpeace 2020). whereas the state controlled economy was often plagued by resource scarcity at the end of the soviet period, it achieved recycling rates of up to 70% for materials like scrap metal and separate collection of glass and paper were wide spread (alabaeva et al. 2019; plastinina et al. 2019; riki 2019). yet, the last 30 years have eroded this reuse culture and the lack of waste management systems and policies have had and continue to have devastating impacts for the environment and public health in russia. there have been improvements in the past years and grass roots recycling schemes have gained some popularity in russian cities (yarovaya 2018), but official statistics estimate a recycling rate of only 7% for russia’s municipal solid waste (msw) (tass 2019). approximately 2% of msw is utilised as an energy source in one of russia’s ten waste incineration plants. consequently, most of the 60 m tonnes of annually collected msw are transported and disposed of in one of russia’s over 15,000 officially registered landfills and management centres (polygons) or in one of its estimated 60,000 illegal landfills (tass 2017; drg 2018a). while landfills are widely considered an unsustainable practice with immense negative effects on the environment in russia, these impacts are multiplied by the fact that most landfills are insufficiently equipped, filled beyond maximum capacity and lack most modern off-flow prevention measures such as methane recuperation or even basic protection against the leaching of harmful substances in the surrounding environment (ifc 2012; greenpeace 2016; ivantsova 2016). the problem of insufficient waste management is not particularly russian but appears in many developing economies (e.g. mihai 2017), and is common among post-soviet and eastern european countries (e.g. skryhan et al. 2018; mihai & grozavu 2019; ladychenko et al. 2020). the situation in eastern eu member states is improving due to the eu’s waste legislative framework and access to related funding instruments such as regional development funds (eprs 2017; eea 2019). on the contrary, and despite a general orientation towards eu legislative approaches, non-eu eastern states struggle to implement functional legislation (skryhan et al. 2018). additionally, current developments to modernise waste management and introduce sorting systems are reserved mainly for larger cities and regional centres while the situation in rural areas remains critical. this ruralurban paradigm in waste management is particularly common in regions with low population density but has also been noted for eu members and other high-income countries such as canada (keske et al. 2018; mihai & grozavu 2019). in russia, this gap is clearly visible in basic figures on access to waste services with deteriorating numbers for smaller settlements (greenpeace 2020). yet, with a bulk of literature accessing eu waste directive and management (e.g. marin et al. 2017; reggiani & silvestri 2018), studies that evaluate waste management in russia, and particularly the rural situation beyond the use of official statistics, are currently missing. the waste situation in many russian towns and villages, and their direct negative effects on the environment and health, have sparked a wave of protests throughout russia, making waste management a key topic of today’s societal debate (digges 2019). the russian government has realised the implication of its massive waste problem for the environment but also its significance in societal debate. consequently, examples from western neighbours have been adopted, and novel amendments to update its outdated waste legislation have been prepared. the new legislation entered into force in 2019 (fl 1998/20181) and has led to a variety of progressively revised territorial waste management schemes in 77 russian regions since 2017. borrowing from eu waste policy approaches (garkusha 2018), the russian legislation is designed as a policy transfer system (e.g. dolowitz & marsh 2000), open to certain adjustments, and consequently resulting in a multiplicity of regional governance approaches that guide territorial waste management schemes (fl 1998/2018). yet, the believe in functional policy transfer systems moving policy trajectories smoothly from a to b without a proper integration of the localized translations and mutation processes has been questioned (mccann & ward 2012a). 137moritz albrecht et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) while some of the solutions to implement the new waste management policy, such as moscow’s plans to transport waste to archangelsk region, have sparked mass protests (mt 2018), others entered into force with less public attention but with equally important problems in their local implementation. aside from generally neglecting rural communities, the legislation’s and regional approaches’ reliance on weak (statistical) local waste background data increases the challenges for implementation. to understand these challenges and their alternatives, we need to examine the processes of policy mobility, implementation and the local spatial characteristics that affect them (albrecht 2019). the policy mobility concept provides a conceptual and methodological approach to assess the travel and mutations of policies on their continuous journeys between nodes of design and implementation, and is a further well-suited analytical tool for this endeavor (mccann & ward 2012a; peck & theodore 2015; baker & mcguirk 2017). to evaluate this policy mismatch and assess the current situation of the legislative reform for rural areas, the paper follows the policy (cf. mccann & ward 2012b), and analyses the situation in three villages obliged to implement the legislation under the territorial waste management scheme of the karelian republic in operation since 2018. to assess the challenging policy materialization processes of waste reform in rural areas, the case studies allow the paper to answer the following research questions: 1) how are rural communities prepared to implement the new waste legislation; 2) how are rural communities integrated in the new legislation; and 3) what are the key challenges and potentials to implementing a functioning waste management system in rural russia? these questions enable a detailed discussion of the (un-) suitability of the current legislation to provide geographically balanced delivery of its policy and provides some avenues with the potential to counter these mismatches. they also contribute to understanding the complex processes of policy mobility and the devastating effects of ill-informed or misguided policy translations. the next section provides an introduction to the conceptualisation of russian waste policy and rural implementation in a policy mobility framework, followed by a methodology section including a description of the case study sites. then the paper introduces the current russian waste policy reform, the karelian republic’s regional translation of it and discusses the processes of policy implementation in the three villages. finally, the discussion and conclusion wrap up the findings, provide conceptual implications and suggests avenues for future research and alternative solutions. rural places and waste policy mobility and translation the russian waste legislation, with its regional schemata, is designed as a system of policy transfer that transports policy aims through place-based adjustments from the nodes of design towards local implementation (e.g. dolowitz & marsh 2000). regional adjustment takes place largely through the creation of regional programmes and territorial schemes while local entities predominantly play the role of practitioners. yet, such deceivingly well-structured approaches and conceptualisations of policy transfer, as described in policy studies by dolowitz and marsh (2000), have been strongly criticised for their linear and positivist characteristics as well as for their negligence of locally embedded heterogeneous spatial processes, which affect and reproduce policy mobility, translation and implementation (peck 2011; mccann & ward 2012a). instead, the policy processes argued for in policy mobility literature urges scholars to examine, among other things, the ‘localisations’ of policies that enable a shift of the policy’s trajectories and outcomes, and that neglect to do so may result in policy failure (peck & theodore 2015; albrecht & rytteri 2017). geographers have predominantly employed the policy mobility concept to study the mobilities of urban development and planning related policies (mcfarlane 2011a; baker & temenos 2015; baker et al. 2016), yet it has proven valuable for other fields such as energy, health, and policy expertise/ knowledge in general (e.g. temenos 2015; wood 2016; albrecht et al. 2017). while the general focus is on the mobility and accompanying translation processes of policies themselves with the dominant perspective on policy making circles (mccann 2013; baker et al. 2016), for this paper the concept holds much to offer in its ability as a methodological–analytical framework (e.g. baker & mcguirk 2017). it further highlights the role of rural translation and materialization processes as “learning machines” (see mcfarlane 2011b, 360), to be employed by policy makers to design mobile and just policy. its 138 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper relational ontology and conceptualization through assembling processes (prince 2017) thereby provide key values that enable: first, to scrutinize the relational processes of policies when hitting the ground; second, to integrate the relational and multiple assembling of places themselves (massey 2005; woods 2016), hence the locations where policy is implemented; and third, to assess processes related to the mobility of knowledge and expertise employed to design policies (wood 2016). these socio-spatially reproduced processes are key features to understand the heterogeneous realities of mobile policies contrary to their institutional design framed in and to be operationalised in places represented as assumptive, indicator based socio-economic containers (albrecht 2019). thus, when studying the locally rooted translations of a policy, assemblage approach promotes a focus on multiplicity, emergence, relations of exteriority and power (savage 2019). this has guided the empirical analysis and data collection for this paper towards a qualitative, in-depth evaluation of a policy’s resting place to understand its implementation but also the effects of a relational place on the policy itself (baker & mcguirk 2017). for the latter, the circulation of policy ideas or related expertise has been a core focus of policy mobility studies (see wood 2016) with much attention being paid to the diffusion of “success stories” in expert circles (e.g. mccann 2013; wood 2014; baker at al. 2016). policy mobility and translation is thus tied to flows of policy learning and expertise that intentionally or unintentionally affect policy design, translation, mutation and implementation. on the other side, evaluating the ‘localisations’ of policies allows us to grasp the assumptive narratives of policy making, its policy knowledge that frames policy rationalities (peck & theodore 2015), and compare them with the processes of heterogeneous assemblages at the places of policy implementation. policy mobility conceptualisation hereafter is less about learning from models and ‘best practices’ (e.g. mccann 2013; temenos & mccann 2013) than an analytical tool to study the incompatibility of policy knowledge and expertise, in this case russian federal and regional waste policy documentation and strategy, due to the negligence of local assembling processes in policy making. in this way the paper, similar to mcfarlane’s (2011b) view of the city as a machine for learning, promotes the role of rural communities as a currently marginalised yet paramount place for policy learning. while this paper does not fully unpack the assumed singularity of russian waste policy in a wider sense, it scrutinises the resting places and their social-spatial assembling processes as important nodes of policy translation, mutation and failure (e.g. clarke et al. 2015; albrecht & lukkarinen 2020). it thereby evaluates a critical aspect of wider waste related governance structures in russia and provides insights into the potentials and challenges of the revised waste policy as well as matters of environmental justice for peripheral areas. a case study of three karelian villages the empirical data is linked to three case studies in the karelian republic: vedlozero, naistenjärvi and tolvuja (fig. 1). the three villages differ in their peripheral locations, yet they all contain a population of roughly 1,000 inhabitants, have multiple small grocery shops and a school offering education from grades 1–11. they are located in three different districts and are subject to different translations and possibilities for implementation of the regional territorial scheme. while naistenjärvi is a declining former industrial community, tolvuja and vedlozero developed largely as agriculture-based settlements in the soviet kolkhoz system. based on the assemblage approach, the study uses a qualitative leaning mixed methods approach and follows policy in a rather exploratory fashion to its localisations (e.g. peck & theodore 2015). hence, empirical data collection engages with local waste policy implementation and translation practices through a rather unstructured and self-unfolding series of observations, conversations and engagements in the case study localities, but also related to the regional waste policy sphere. the three villages are employed as exemplifying case studies rather than for comparison. the qualitative, in-depth case studies are framed by an assemblage approach incorporating multiplicity, processuality and the labours of assembling (baker & mcguirk 2017). following baker and mcguirk (2017), these commitments have particular practical implications for data collection: multiplicity encourages a focus on the heterogeneous contexts and agendas that reproduce localized assembling processes and require rich empirical data. processuality demands focus on the mix of localized and exterior practices 139moritz albrecht et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) and events including their temporal developments that have created current capacities. labours of assembling requires a focus on the conscious and unconscious workings of entities to enroll in, change or maintain ongoing assembling processes. data collection targeted these heterogeneous ongoing and open processes of waste management and policy implementation within the villages and their relations of exteriority (woods 2016). empirical data was collected within the cross-border cooperation project wasteless karelias, which aims at improving waste management in rural karelian villages in finland and russia. the study includes strong features of action research (e.g. kindon et al. 2007) as researchers are directly involved with improving the current situation in collaboration with local authorities and residents as they collect data. this affects the positionalities of the researchers as actors directly involved in the subject of study (e.g. rose 1997). it allowed us to collect empirical rich, heterogeneous and open empirical material required for the studies’ aim to display the assembling of local processes and particularly the challenges of transforming rural waste management. intensive case studies were conducted in the three municipalities. empirical data was gathered during multiple site visits lasting from several hours to several days in all municipalities from 2017–2020. the key content of empirical data stems from personal encounters with local administrations and residents in the form of open-ended interviews and personal communications carried out in russian language. this included individual and group interviews/discussions, informal communication with local residents on the street or in their yards and communication from joint planning meetings with local administrators (e.g. village heads) and schools (teachers & pupils). in the villages, eight formal interviews were conducted with officials, four at local schools and three with villagers between 2018–2020 in addition to the numerous informal encounters and observations. additionally, data collection included a survey on waste perceptions fig. 1. location of case study villages. 140 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper with 100 households per village and a shorter school survey of local pupils which generated 372 responses. the paper does not contain an in-depth analysis of the quantitative empirical materials but employs some key findings to support its qualitative analysis. data were also collected through interviews and personal communications with regional waste management officials and experts. four interviews were conducted with directors and deputy directors of the karelian regional operator avtospetstrans, two interviews with experts from a regional recycling company, and one with a municipal sub-operator. additional data are derived from a roundtable discussion organised in autumn 2019 in petrozavodsk and a waste management study tour to finland in 2020, which included russian waste experts from regional authorities, nongovernmental organisation’s (ngo), local administrations and companies. finally, a document analysis focusing on legal and statistical sources contributed to data collection. karelian territorial schemes within the russian waste reform major amendments to the russian law “on production and consumption of waste” (fl 1998/2018) was signed by president putin in december 2017. the revised waste legislation is monitored by the newly established federal “russian environmental operator” (reo) and brought major changes to the system of waste management in russia. the amendment shifted responsibilities for waste management from the municipal to the regional institutional level with regions obliged to choose and contract a regional operator, adopt regional waste management programmes, and establish territorial waste management schemes to be carried out by regional waste management operators (fl 1998/2018). as of september 2019, 77 of 85 regional subjects of the russian federation have launched progressively revised territorial waste management schemes based on their translations of the generic federal targets (kommersant 2019). within the reform, the collection of waste management fees has been moved from management companies to the regional operators, and the calculative basis has shifted from living space to a per person flat rate. furthermore, regional operators are charged with the task of developing separate garbage collection and eliminating unauthorised dumps and landfills. in addition to shifting these tasks to the regional level, the reform introduced a producer responsibility scheme, standards for waste recycling and requires technical standards to collect waste statistics, such as scales at landfills and vehicles to be equipped with the glonass system (e.g. fl 1998/2018; plastinina et al. 2019). the last aspect is of key importance to the planning of future russian waste management as current russian waste statistics are unreliable and considered to be of poor quality (plastinina et al. 2019). from a wider policy perspective, the waste reform is embedded in the national project “ecology”, one of 13 vitally important projects under “the future of russia” framework aiming at wide transformations to increase welfare and the standard of life in russia (future russia 2020). the waste section subproject “integrated management system for solid municipal waste” in the ecology framework is of key importance for the waste reform as it structures its financing and budget. the required 6-year budget for the subproject (2019–2024) is 4.3 b€ and follows ambitious aims to increase the recycling rate from 3% (2018) to 36% (2024). while this appears a voluminous budget at first sight, it is not a reserved and readily available sum but predominantly based on extrabudgetary funds (private investment), to be potentially acquired with 37% covered by equally potentially to be acquired federal funds, and 2% by regional funds (mnr 2020). according to ministerial and reo officials, russia is on track to reach its recycling and private investment aims (tass 2019). yet the crux of these figures goes beyond the fact that the statements are based on questionable waste statistics. the main problem lies with the financing of the federal funds envisioned through the extended producer responsibility (epr) scheme. the russian epr provides producers and importers with different solutions to fulfil their responsibility (fig 2). based on the low costs compared to the alternative options, most have chosen to pay the so-called environmental fee (option 3) instead of investing in their own systems (option 1), or contracting a licensed waste handling company or joining an association that establishes recycling systems (option 2). in addition, the environmental fee is paid only for a progressively rising percentage of the producers’ product; for instance, 20% of polymers in 2020 and not for the whole production (dgr 2017). the multiple 141moritz albrecht et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) employed recycling ratios for different products, the vaguely defined and largely unprofitable alternative options, and the low environmental fee have created a system that not only prevents company driven investments in recycling infrastructure but also diminishes the revenue for the federal funds intended to finance the recycling infrastructure by more than half (ovsyannikova 2019). additionally, the original intent of these funds in the law is for processing collected materials and not for local sorting infrastructures suffering from high investment debt, particularly in rural areas. despite these flaws, the waste reform has created a new umbrella policy framework that aims to be geographically adjusted in different regions through regional schemes. following federal legislation, the karelian republic’s regional programme and territorial scheme of waste management of the karelian republic (tskr) entered into force in 2018 (drg 2018a). a state-owned enterprise, avtospetstrans, was chosen as the regional operator and is responsible for the implementation of the reform in the karelian republic. avtospetstrans is entrusted with key responsibilities to manage and implement the system, like arranging subcontractor agreements, building, restoring and remediating sorting stations and landfills, monitoring progress, and communicating with municipal stakeholders as well as reporting to the regional government (agreement 2018). the reform in the karelian republic is based on the establishment of a central state-of-the-art waste complex near the republic’s capital of petrozavodsk and waste transfer/sorting stations in each of the 14 municipal districts. it includes the closure of all landfills with negative environmental impacts (almost all current landfills), ill equipped local dumps/landfills as well as a stepwise increase of different sorted waste fractions. contrary to other regional schemes, it rejects incineration as a solution and emphasises sorting and recycling. initially, a regional government decree portrayed the tskr pathway as commencing separate mixed waste and plastic collection from 2019, organic waste by 2020 and glass, paper and cardboard by 2021 (drg 2018b). nevertheless, the current version of the tskr emphasises the initial separation of organic and other mixed wastes to move forward (tskr 2019, 12). the problem for both tskr related strategies is tied to the shaky financial foundation of the reform in general, which also restricts possibilities elsewhere in russia. hence, as pointed out by a representative of avtospetstrans, “the federal budget helps in no way to develop a separate waste collection system…” (interviewee 1), and that without a substantial private investment in such sorting systems it is unlikely that any of them will become widely distributed in the near future. currently, sorting remains marginal even in the regional capital of petrozavodsk with no stable publicly available system in place (greenpeace 2020). aside from the problematic federal financing of waste sorting and processing facilities, activities in the tskr are financed by the household-based collection fee of 85–94 rub (1.1–1.2€) per person per month (rrc 2019). currently, the only fully implemented part of the waste reform, the non-disclosed fig. 2. overview of russian extended producer responsibility (epr) scheme. 142 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper sum of the fee collected are destined to finance costs related to the collection, transport and landfilling of mixed msw as well as the administrative costs of the regional operator. hence, it is envisioned as financing the costs of waste collection, transport and disposal systems while the collection and disposal infrastructure is currently insufficient or even non-existent in many municipalities, resulting in that residents pay the new fee with no change in their waste management. this challenge is directly linked to the responsibilities of the municipalities, which remains largely placing and maintaining local collection points (fl 1998/2018) with no structured financial support within the tskr. given the weak financial situation of most rural municipalities in the karelian republic and russia in general, this amounts not only to challenges for the municipalities but for waste management in rural russia in general. finally, the envisioned msw system in the tskr relies on a specifically developed regional database. while municipal administrations were asked to provide supplemental information on their own situation, it seems that, at least in our case study villages, this failed to create accurate data. hence, regional authorities and subcontractors are confronted with a situation where the planning and financing of waste management is based on a fairy tale of existing rural waste infrastructure which quickly leads to the neglect of rural sites in general. on paper the revised waste legislation has created a well-structured policy system that aims to transfer the overall target of “improving the waste situation” (fl 1998/2018) throughout various administrative levels towards local implementation. yet as indicated above, there are not only flaws in the policy design, but the current situation raises serious doubts about the suitability of this emerging system for implementation, particularly in rural settlements. waste policy hits the ground: processes of implementation in three karelian villages it has been repeatedly said by various experts that the federal law no. 89 ‘on production and consumption of waste’ was based on european legislation and should in principle work. (garkusha 2018, 8, translation by author). this perspective by russian waste policy experts clearly portrays the policy transfer rooted attitude towards the travel of policy objectives. a policy movement that is expected to deliver planned outcomes through geographical adjustments provided in territorial schemes. this, however, is largely wishful thinking, particularly when imposing a system that neglects local peculiarities or leaves little room to address those peculiarities, as becomes evident when examining the current situation in the three case study villages. the waste management systems in the three villages differ substantially (table 1). while none of the systems fulfil any standards whatsoever, the general aim is to get the waste out of the central village environment with limited success. littering in all villages is a large problem and, according to the survey, 69% of households consider it a serious problem. mapping of the litter situation in 2019 supported the residents’ opinions and aside from the usual suspects, such as beer and vodka bottles or food and candy wrappers, the villages contain multiple dump sites entailing large amount of waste including a hazardous waste such as batteries, oils and medical waste. while there are several socio-economic reasons for this situation, such as abandoned housing, low education and income levels of many residents and high rates of alcohol abuse, the insufficient waste system is a major contributing factor to the problem. the current collection infrastructure observed in the villages also differ. vedlozero is the only village that has an open metal container system, some with homemade lids to prevent the spread of waste by birds and animals. in naistenjärvi waste is collected in homemade wood framed waste pits and disintegrating containers. tolvuja uses old wooden milk churn stands as collection points which means garbage bags are unprotected and their contents are quickly spread by animals and wind turning the collection points into badly littered places. generally, the management systems and infrastructure observed in these places differ substantially from the statistics and location of systems portrayed for these villages in the tskr annexes and are not compatible with its envisioned waste management system, let alone the employment of modern waste collection equipment (table 1). the poor condition of the collection points strongly affects the residents’ willingness to utilise them, which consequently has negative effects on littering and illegal waste disposal in all villages. 143moritz albrecht et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) waste disposal following collection is another critical point that highlights the enormous challenges for rural communities to transform their waste management systems within the tskr or similar schemes. in vedlozero, waste is transported to the district landfill since the local landfill was closed and stabilised in 2018. stabilisation in this case included covering the landfill with pressed soil and the installation of drainage ditches. no measures to prevent leachates seeping into the environment have been made and a small rivulet is freely making its course through the “remediated” site. additionally, as there are no access restrictions, the site is used as an illegal dump and piles of new waste have accumulated since its closure. yet, the situations in naistenjärvi and tolvuja are even more catastrophic due to the completely open and unprotected landfills/dumps. in both cases waste from the villages is dumped in specific open sites and is consequently widely spread by wind, water and animals. in tolvuja, the landfill is officially ranked as a temporal waste storage site to be cleared each year, yet the last partial remediation was said to occur several years back by municipal officials (interviewee 2). the use of temporal storage sites as permanent landfills is a common approach throughout russia (ivantsova 2016). in naistenjärvi, the landfill is not an official waste disposal site hence it is illegal. in the three villages, only vedlozero has experienced changes to its waste management system following the introduction of tskr and the new waste fee. yet, it has mainly been transferred from one insufficient site to another. local administrations in the villages are well aware of the problems and the harmful effects on the environment but they feel restricted by their financial capabilities, lack of expertise and insufficient support from the regional authorities. as one head of village put it, “the only change we feel is that everybody must now pay the fee […] nothing changed in the system. we have the same homemade containers, the same tractor comes and brings it to the forest dump” (interviewee 3). the concerns of and challenges facing administrations are centred on how to afford and implement a suitable update of their local infrastructure. yet, a mere update of the local collection point infrastructure faces additional problems. first, installations of modern metal containers do not solve the landfill problems, as exemplified by happenings in a neighbouring village where “there is progress, they put metal containers everywhere and the garbage truck picks up waste. but then the truck brings the waste to the same forest dump. so the only difference is that it’s more automated…” (interviewee 4). hence, there is not much improvement in environmental terms or fulfilling the tskr objectives. second, the restructuring of local waste collection points is confronted with multiple challenges. budgetary restrictions largely reduce the amount of official collection points which leads to increased illegal dumping or other waste disposal forms such as burning. as a resident in vedlozero explained, “the collection points are, in many cases, in places which are not reachable by the elderly. my parents cannot bring their waste for half a kilometre, so they don’t use the containers” (interviewee 5). on the contrary, russian sanitary norms (snr 2019, art. 2.2) prescribe a minimum distance of 20 metres and a maximum distance of 100 metres for all residential areas, which renders current potentials to restructure rural waste management legally impossible. as a representative of avtospetstrans pointed out, “we are in big trouble, especially in the villages […]. in the cities it is mostly possible, in the countryside mostly not. […] we would need hundreds of collection points per village which is not possible” (interviewee 6). village collection infrastructure collection sites/containers in core village (observed) collection sites/containers in core village (tksr) landfill disposal vedlozero metal containers for mixed waste & garbage truck for collection 17/22 4/8 transport to priazha district landfill naistenjärvi homemade wood framed pits/containers & excavator/tractor for emptying and transport 42/42 47/nd non-official/illegal landfill/dump in nearby forest & swampland tolvuja open collection points & garbage tractor twice a week 10/0 14/70 temporary waste storage site used as landfill table 1. waste management systems in case study villages (nd = no data). 144 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) from the perspective of local administrators, a major problem is the insufficient, imprecise and nontransparent communication with higher authorities, like regional operator and district administrators. as there is no official roll-out plan communicated, the establishment of modern collection points by district administration in other settlements raises questions about the equal distribution of funds. accounts about landfill remediation present similar situations, as the head of tolvuja stressed, “i will try to find money to clean it up, but it’s a lot of money for our budget. i try to convince the regional operator and district administration to allocate money but who knows”. aside from financial restraints, these problems are linked to the unclear task sharing in the tskr and who is responsible for the provision of equipment and clean ups if municipalities cannot afford them? lack of communication is not only from the top down but vice versa as stated by a representative of avtospetstrans that “…the situation is different in every district.[…] some are capable and responsible, others are irresponsible”. as an example of the latter, medvezhegorsky district, in which tolvuja is situated, was mentioned as being beyond regional administrative reach as “we have no idea what is going on there, and we do not collect the waste handling fee there, it is all done by the local operator established by the district administration” (interviewee 6). this is a stunning revelation considering the structured approach in the revised russian waste legislation and the tskr. it illustrates a level of mistrust and functional disconnect between administrative levels that jeopardises the general aims of the reform and leaves, particularly, rural communities as places to bear the consequences of an ill-functioning system. taking the village as a policy learning machine, in contrast to mcfarlane’s (2011b) employment of urban environments, helps to look further at local residents’ perspectives to add another feature of the multiple relations that affect waste policy translation and implementation (baker & mcguirk 2017). similar to local administrators, residents expressed strong concerns about the waste situation in their own village but also claimed structural and cultural problems for the current situation. generally, the situation was described as having deteriorated since the end of soviet period, as this also ended the soviet style environmental education and waste collection system that had created a rather strong reuse culture (e.g. alabaeva et al. 2019). the deteriorated waste management systems known to all residents and their distrust in the responsible authorities strongly affects their willingness to engage in more progressive approaches like sorting. common statements such as “…in the end it all goes to the same dump…” or “…the regional waste operator lies [about dump management]…” express the local discontent that derives from the current situation and the implementation of the reform currently limited to collecting the fee with little other improvements in most rural communities. a recurring demand from local residents in the survey was not only the improvement of the local collection infrastructure but also the ability of the new waste system and its authorities to establish a sufficient amount of trust to ensure that waste is handled and recycled properly following its collection. both are rather challenging elements considering the financial, organisational and communication challenges described above in the russian waste reform and the tskr. finally, moving beyond the financial restrictions, responsibilities and infrastructure, we need to examine knowledge production and dissemination as an important part of environmental behaviour and conduct (olofsson 2020). here we separate knowledge into two key aspects: 1) knowledge about waste sorting, recycling and waste prevention, and 2) knowledge in relation to the waste reform implementation, including a transparent account of how future development is intended to be implemented. while the latter was considered completely insufficient throughout the case villages and was heavily criticised by other waste related stakeholders, like the recycling companies and ngos approached for this study, the former requires some additional attention in relation to its role in potentially improving local waste management. with the sorting experience of residents stemming predominantly from soviet times, in the villages only the people older than 40 years remember directly the presence of available recycling systems, such as for waste papers and scrap metal. hence, knowledge of recycling and waste management is distorted and requires scrutiny when planning and assessing residents’ practices. the village survey indicated a waste sorting level of 64% in households despite the lack of local sorting facilities. on the surface this presents localities with an actively sorting population that should facilitate separate collection for recycling. nevertheless, qualitative data from the interviews and informal communications revealed that sorting in most of these cases refers to burning paper and plastic in stoves or backyards, 145moritz albrecht et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) and organic waste composting. while organic waste composting is in line with progressive waste management and recycling practices, the direct burning of waste portrays a rather different understanding of waste sorting than implied in most modern waste management systems or policy narratives. local understanding of sorting is therefore not linked to current recycling practices and, as “many of us burn everything that is possible…” (interviewee 5), it is tied to an understanding of heating one’s house or ‘neutralize’ waste in the backyard instead of adding it to local landfills/dumps. that this creates other sources of environmental pollution and health hazards is seldom considered. aside from mistrust in the official waste management system, this environmentally harmful behaviour by villagers is also related to environmental education, or rather the lack thereof. the official reuse/recycling and intensive local clean-up campaigns common in soviet times are marginal in today’s rural villages. while there remains a culture of spring clean-up week, this has been confined largely to schools or to provide small jobs for the locally unemployed and merely scratches the surface of local littering by cleaning up school yards and roadsides. there is currently no specific environmental education that addresses waste management in the village schools. additionally, adult residents receive little or no information about waste management or waste handling practices. considering the role of residents as environmental citizens to engage in waste management (olofsson 2020), this is a major problem that further challenges tskr implementation. as one interviewee noted, “… educating people is the most important part of this reform. nobody takes care of this now. there is a need for good, understandable lectures in the villages […]. ordinary people are very far from these developments, especially in the countryside” (interviewee 5). this lack of knowledge dissemination not only increases mistrust of the responsible authorities but creates a lethargy among residents instead of introducing them to potentials, future outlooks and alternative solutions. the combination of ill-structured waste reform, its translations within the tskr including the misrepresentation of local infrastructure, inappropriate financing instruments, and the lack of local knowledge and expertise are enhanced by challenges derived from the villages’ peripheral locations. for example, the economic feasibility of transporting waste to the planned regional waste collection centres envisioned in the tskr is questionable even when we ignore the fact that they do not currently exist. the final section connects the implications of the heterogeneous process linked to the villages and their relations of exteriority described above, hence the role of localized assembling with the policy reform as a currently incompatible transfer system. it further provides some key aspects on the lessons learned by approaching rural waste reform implementation through a policy mobility analyses and the value of rural implementation sites as learning machines for policy adjustment. discussion this paper has assessed russian waste policy reform and its mobility from national nodes of design via regional translation towards local implementation processes, with a particular focus to assess the interrelations of generic policy capacities to integrate localized assembling processes (e.g. mccann 2013; peck & theodore 2015). it has compiled key components that (re-)produce and help understand the localised assemblages that result in variegated policy implementations (savage 2019), or rather implementation potentials and challenges of rural waste management transformation. to employ the full potential of the village as a policy learning machine for rural waste policy development (e.g. mcfarlane 2011b), the remainder of the paper is structured twofold. first, we wrap up the practical implications that derive from the mismatch between policy features and localized assembling processes and provide key suggestion to address the current situation. second, we conclude on the value and potential that derive from the conceptual approach on waste policy mobility and translation research. the main objectives of the waste reform aim to establish a functional system of waste management, raise the recycling rate to 36% by 2024 and remediate environmentally harmful landfills and provide a cleaner living environment (mnr 2020). urban centres, confronted with multiple challenges that go beyond the scope of this paper, play the key role in the reform while rural areas are largely marginalised and not understood to require special attention in the revised legislation (dgr 2018). looking at the socio-spatial features in the case study villages and at peripheral rural dwellings throughout russia, the implementation of policy trajectories seems like a mission heading towards failure. regarding the 146 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tskr, there are not only mismatches between the policy planning foundations (e.g. statistical data) and local realities, but the policy structures of the regional translation leave no room to tackle local peculiarities due to its non-transparent design, unclear responsibilities and task sharing, and the communicative incapability of involved entities. additionally, communities lack the expertise, infrastructure and (financial) support to act despite their willingness to do so. hence, considering the importance for mobile policies to be responsive to the socio-spatial processes at the policies’ resting places and the role of knowledge on these localizations in policy learning (clarke et al. 2015; peck & theodore 2015; wood 2016), the study clearly shows that the black boxing apparent in the current russian policy system is destined to contestation, if not failure. the short timeframe to reach objectives, while ambitious, leads to insecurity and quick fixes such as installing a couple of containers somewhere rather than carefully establishing a well-planned and structured system. as the head of avtospetstrans pointed out comparing the finnish and russian waste systems: “what finns have achieved in the last 25 years our policy intends to do in 5 years…”. considering the rudimentary situation in many rural communities, it is doubtful that a policy with an urban focus, limited and largely dysfunctional financial framework, and a poorly expressed responsibility structure can deliver any of its objectives for rural areas on an evenly distributed basis. the cases present the problematic aspects of policy transfer systems and policy-makers’ believe in their conceptualizations and, consequently, their integration to policy instruments, such as the tskr (e.g. dolowitz & marsh 2000). this too, often results in policy systems based on biased numerical indicators that treat localities as quantifiable containers instead of integrating instruments or support mechanisms suitable for their multiple needs and multiple socio-spatial features (e.g. peck & theodore 2015; albrecht & lukkarinen 2020), which would be a key feature to improve the mobility of russian waste reform for rural localities. another key aspect is the lack of processual integration in the policy design, hence the failure or unwillingness to understand the connectivity of complex local processes and characteristics of material flows and the policy requirements deriving thereof. for instance, even though the current system succeeds in installing proper waste collection points in the villages, its recent financial and structural composition is not suited to address the multiple pending problems, such as illegal and insufficient landfill remediation, littering, and lack of sorting – not even to speak of the socio-cultural changes required for this transformation. on the contrary, the reduction of collection points due to municipal financial restraints when installing state of the art containers, for instance, is likely to lead to illegal dumping if people consider them beyond their reach. this will be particularly true if authorities are not able to create a system of trust that convincingly manages and disseminates knowledge about solving the challenges related to downstream waste streams such as harmful/illegal landfilling as opposed to recycling. furthermore, while envisioned in the tskr and the russian waste policy, there are no functional supportive instruments such as educational programmes for household sorting and separate waste collection as it is designed to be established through private investments and entrepreneurs. this is problematic in urban environments in relation to the active engagement of citizen (e.g. olofsson 2020), but even more so in rural municipalities due to the socio-economic limitations described above. the issues mentioned above provide a core bundle of aspects that must be integrated to remediate some of the mismatches between policy aims and rural implementation realities. finally, this bundle of potential improvements need to be accompanied by secure and clearly marked funds for rural waste management, as the naïve vision of self-financing waste reform is not supported by any of our findings. in practice the current system, due to its unstructured, non-transparent approach and its policy instrument misalignment with local realities, is prone to create a self-undermining system that fosters a business as usual (illegal) disposal reaction rather than encouraging and facilitating waste management based on sorting and recycling. compounding this issue is the fact that local residents, and sometimes local administrations, are neither informed nor allowed to participate in most waste related decision making beyond their village's territorial limits. hence, even if a village establishes its own sorting and collection system, it is confronted with a largely dysfunctional transport and waste processing system, and the waste is likely to end up in an environmentally harmful landfill. turning to the conceptual implications of the paper, we have highlighted and exemplified the academic value of policy mobility assemblages as a methodological-analytical instrument (baker & 147moritz albrecht et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) mcguirk 2017; savage 2019) for the study of rural policy processes beyond expert circles. this, to assess not merely best practice travel of policy ideas (mccann 2013) but as a scientific tool to evaluate socio-spatial processes and rural policy translation. by including every day realities that reproduce contestation and marginalization it entails the potential to highlight the misfits related to indifferently designed policy trajectories. studying local implementation and translation processes through assemblage methodology enabled us to employ the village as a learning machine (mcfarlane 2011b), contrary to its representation as socio-economic fixed container employed in many networks of policy design, including the russian waste reform. yet, this requires more than following the policy and its networks (mccann & ward 2012b). it expects a serious integration of the methodological commitments portrayed by baker and mcguirk (2017) into in-depth empirical work employing a mix of policy assemblage evaluation with assemblage based locality studies (e.g. woods 2016). additionally, it unveiled many incoherent features of the current reform with the needs of rural waste management (e.g. responsibility structure, communication, finance), and thereby opens up questions to be scrutinized in the spheres of policy design non-accessible without such localized analysis. consequently, it encourages a more grounded policy mobility research approach that, in combination with an analysis as performed in this paper, follows policy additionally in a revised fashion from implementation localities to places of design rather than to move with the direction of policy implementation only (e.g. from design to locality). this is particularly so when studying policy mobility failures, contrary to studying the boosting of “successful” policies (e.g. mccann 2013). aside its benefits for policy mobility research such a revised assessment would also help policy learning networks, such as the institutional entities involved in the tskr, to understand its own insufficiencies that have resulted in the current dysfunctional system. conclusion the current approach to transform waste management in rural communities through the revised russian waste legislation and in this case the tskr is heading towards building up a ruin to come. looking at the policy translation and implementation through an assemblage perspective has revealed a dysfunctional and contested waste management system since its origin. it not only lacks supportive tools for rural communities, but creates institutional and individual resistance based on neglect, misrepresentation and unequal treatment of rural communities. finally, while waste and recycling entrepreneurs can fill the gap left by the state in urban areas to some degree, our research has shown that extending their reach and potentials into rural communities requires external support. thus, current potentials to establish alternative waste management solutions that include household sorting and directing waste streams to recycling rather than landfills in rural russian communities have to be created entirely from locally embedded initiatives. unfortunately, due to the challenging socio-economic situation in most rural villages, this remains largely utopic without external support. this paper has presented an array of localised processes that affect the mobility and translation of policy instruments, such as the tskr and the russian waste legislation, in their potential to deliver or rather fail to deliver their policy objectives. in the case of the russian waste reform, the findings highlight the urgent need for policy makers to employ localities and their socio-spatial characteristics as policy learning tools to amend the currently insufficient policy design and frameworks rather than trying to find blueprints from elsewhere. while this study has been framed as an in depth and empirical rooted case study the findings nonetheless contain much value for generalization on waste policy mobility and its current inability to integrate socio-spatial localization processes in russia but also elsewhere. this further stresses the crucial role of accurate (geographical) knowledge provision and use, transparent communication and acceptance of local realities to encourage local trust in a potential future system. notes 1key legislative reform components of this policy package have been amended in 2018. while the legislation is constantly amended in bit and pieces the analysis rests predominantly on the core amendments of 2018 why the reference fl 1998/2018 is employed throughout the article. 148 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) acknowledgements data collection for the research has been co-funded by the karelia cbc project wasteless karelias (ka5013). the authors like to express their gratitude to the village residents and other informants to share their knowledge and time for this research endeavour. references agreement (2018) agreement on the solid communal waste management between the government of karelian republic and avtospetstrans ltd. <http://rotko10.ru/media/docs/ob-organizatsii-deiatelnostipo-obrashcheniiu-s-tverdymi-kommunalnymi-otkhodami.pdf>. 20.2.2020. alabaeva, n. s., velickaya, s. v. & malahova o. s. (2019) принципы экономики замкнутого цикла в ссср [principles of circular economy in the ussr]. mezhdunarodny zhurnal gumanitarnykh i estestvennykh nauk 6–1 92–95. albrecht, m. (2019) (re-)producing bioassemblages: positionalities of regional bioeconomy development in finland. local environment 24(4) 342–357. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2019.1567482 albrecht, m. & lukkarinen, j. (2020) blue bioeconomy localities at the margins: reconnecting norwegian seaweed farming and finnish small-scale lake fisheries with blue policies. environment and planning c 38(7–8). https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420932572 albrecht, m. & rytteri, t. (2017) policy failures in mobile and complex contexts: translating eu energy policy in finland. alue & ympäristö 46(2) 18–31. albrecht, m., kortelainen, j., sawatzky, m., lukkarinen, j. & rytteri, t. (2017) translating bioenergy policy in europe: mutation, aims and boosterism in eu energy governance. geoforum 87 73–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.10.003 baker, t. & mcguirk, p. (2017) assemblage thinking as methodology: commitments and practices for political policy research. territory, politics, governance 5(4) 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2016.1231631 baker, t. & temenos, c. (2015) urban policy mobilities research: introduction to a debate. international journal of urban and regional research 39(4) 824–827. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12252 baker, t., cook, i. r., mccann, e., temenos, c. & ward, k. (2016) policies on the move: the transatlantic travels of tax increment financing. annals of the american association of geographers 106(2) 459–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2015.1113111 clarke, j., bainton, d., lendvai, n. & stubbs, p. (2015) making policy move: towards a politics of translation and assemblage. policy press, bristol. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2016.1195084 com (2020) circular economy action plan: for a cleaner and more competitive europe. <https:// ec.europa.eu/environment/circular-economy/pdf/new_circular_economy_action_plan.pdf>. 5.8.2020. european commission, brussels. digges, c. (2019) russia’s garbage protests raise central questions about the right to a clean environment. <https://bellona.org/news/russian-human-rights-issues/2019-06-russias-garbage-protests-raise-centralquestions-about-the-right-to-a-clean-environment>. 20.4.2020. dolowitz, d. p. & marsh, d. (2000) learning from abroad: the role of policy transfer in contemporary policy making. governance 13(1) 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/0952-1895.00121 dgr (2017) decree 2971-r of the government of russia “on adopting the utilisation normatives for the waste created by using of goods for 2018–2020”. dgr (2018) decree 84-r of the government of russia adopting the strategy of the industrial and communal waste processing, utilisation and disposal industry development until 2030. drg (2018a) decree 555r-p of the regional government of karelian republic on the introduction of the regional programme of industrial and consumer waste. drg (2018b) decree 328-p of the regional government of karelian republic scheduling waste sorting. eea (2019) municipal waste management across european countries. <https://www.eea.europa.eu/ themes/waste/waste-management/municipal-waste-management-across-european-countries>. 28.4.2020. eprs (2017) towards a circular economy – waste management in the eu. european parliamentary research service, scientific foresight unit. future russia (2020) nation projects. <https://futurerussia.gov.ru/about> 18.4.2020. fl (1998/2018) federal law no. 89 of the russian federation “on industrial and consumer waste”. garkusha, a. (2018) кому не нужен раздельный сбор [who doesn’t want the sorting]. tverdye bytovye othody 9 8–9. greenpeace (2016) что делать с мусором в россии? [what to do with russian waste?]. <http://www. greenpeace.org/russia/global/russia/report/toxics/recycle/russia-garbage.pdf>. 20.5.2020. 149moritz albrecht et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) greenpeace (2020) рейтинг доступности раздельного сбора в крупных городах [rating of the waste sorting facilities availability in russian cities]. <https://greenpeace.ru/wp-content/ uploads/2020/03/rating-rso-2019-greenpeace.pdf>. 10.10.2020. ifc (2012) municipal solid waste management: opportunities for russia. international finance cooperation, moscow. ivantsova, е. а. (2016) проблемы и перспективы управления твердыми бытовыми отходами [problems and perspectives of municipal solid waste management]. vestnik volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, seriya 3. ekonomika i ecologiya 2(35) 148–159. keske, c., mills, m., godfrey, t., tanguay, t. & dicker, j. (2018) waste management in remote rural communities across the canadian north: challenges and opportunities. detritus 2 63–77. https://doi.org/10.31025/2611-4135/2018.13641 kindon, s., pain, r. & kesby, m. (2007) participatory action research apporaches and methods: connecting people, participation and place. routledge, abingdon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203933671 kommersant (2019) у твердых отходов посыпались сроки [solid waste doesn’t meet the deadline]. 10.9.2019 <https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4087835>. 20.5.2020. ladychenko, v., melnychuk, o., golovko, l. & burmak, o. (2020) waste management at the local level in the eu and ukraine. european journal of sustainable development 9(1) 329–338. https://doi.org/10.14207/ejsd.2020.v9n1p329 marin, g., nicolli, f. & zoboli, r. (2017) catching-up in waste management. evidence from the eu. journal of environmental planning and management 61(11) 1861–1882. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2017.1333952 massey, d. (2005) for space. sage, london. mccann, e. (2013) policy boosterism, policy mobilities, and the extrospective city. urban geography 34(1) 5–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2013.778627 mccann, e. & ward, k. (2012a) policy assemblages, mobilities and mutations: toward a multidisciplinary conversation. political studies review 10(3) 325–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-9302.2012.00276.x mccann, e. & ward, k. (2012b) assembling urbanism: following policies and ‘studying through’ the sites and situations of policy making. environment and planning a 44 42–51. https://doi.org/10.1068/a44178 mcfarlane, c. (2011a) the city as assemblage: dwelling and urban space. environment and planning d 29(4) 649–671. https://doi.org/10.1068%2fd4710 mcfarlane, c. (2011b) the city as a machine for learning. transactions of the institute of british geographers 36(3) 360–376. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00430.x mihai, f-c. (2017) solid waste management in rural areas. intech, rijeka. https://doi.org/10.1068/a44178 mihai, f-c. & grozavu, a. (2019) role of waste collection efficiency in providing a cleaner rural environment. sustainability 11(23) 6855. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11236855 mnr (2020) passport of the “integrated management system for solid municipal waste” project provided by the ministry of natural resources of russia. <https://нацпроектэкология.рф/proekt/ infrastruktura-dlya-obrashheniya-s-othodami-i/>. 20.5.2020. mt (2018) how russia’s attempt to solve its trash crisis is backfiring. the moscow times 12.12.2018 <https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/12/12/how-russias-attempt-to-solve-its-trash-crisis-isbackfiring-a63795>. 15.5.2020. olofsson, j. (2020) the biggest challenge is that we have to tell people how to sort. waste manangement and the process of negotiation of environmental citizenship in slovenia. journal of environmental policy and planning 22(2) 256–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908x.2020.1721274 ovsyannikova, d. k. (2019) проблемы внедрения системы расширенной ответственности производителей в государственной политике в сфере обращения с отходами [problems of introducing the system of advanced producers responsibility in state policy in the field of waste management]. vestnik akademii znaniya 6(35) 226–229. peck, j. (2011). geographies of policy. from transfer-diffusion to mobility-mutation. progress in human geography 35(6) 773–797. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510394010 peck, j. & theodore, n. (2015) fast policy: experimental statecraft at the threshold of neoliberalism. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816677306.001.0001 plastinina, i., teslyuk, l., dukmasova, n. & pikalova, e. (2019) implementation of circular economy principles in regional solid municipal waste management: the case of sverdlovskaya oblast. resources 8(2) 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/resources8020090 prince, r. (2017) local or global policy? thinking about policy mobility with assemblage and topology. area 49(3) 335–341. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12319 riggiani, c. & silvestri, f. (2018) municipal solid waste, market competition and the eu policy. environmental and resource economics 71 457–474. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0165-0 riki, a. (2019) “mikä järki lajitella jätteitä?”; tapaustutkimus viipurin piirin kotitalouksien lajittelukäyttäytymisestä. pro gradu -tutkielma, johtamisen ja talouden tiedekunta. tampereen 150 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) yliopisto, tampere. https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/115342/rikialeksandra2019. pdf?sequence=2&isallowed=y rose, g. (1997) situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. progress in human geography 21(3) 305–320. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297673302122 rrc (2019) resolution 217 of the regional prices and fees committee of the karelian republic. <http:// rotko10.ru/media/docs/o-vnesenii-izmenenii-v-postanovlenie-gosudarstvennogo-komiteta-respubliki-kareliia-_ hwzbruv.pdf>. 20.5.2020. savage, g. c. (2019) what is policy assemblage? territory, politics, governance 8(3) 319–335. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2018.1559760 skryhan, h., shilova, i., khandogina, o., abashyna, k. & chernikova, o. (2018) waste management in post-soviet countries: how far from the eu. detritus 3 193–203. https://doi.org/10.31025/2611-4135/2018.13657 snr (2019) sanitary norms and rules 2.1.7.3550-19. tass (2017) в россии действует 60 тыс. нелегальных свалок [sixty thousand illegal dumps exist in russia] 16.12.2017 <https://tass.ru/obschestvo/4818817> 20.5.2020. tass (2019) первый год мусорной реформы. переработка растет, платежи уменьшаются [first year of the waste reform. recycling goes up, fees go down] 26.12.2019 <https://tass.ru/nacionalnyeproekty/7429235>. 20.5.2020. temenos, c. (2015) mobilizing drug policy activism: conferences, convergence spaces and ephemeral fixtures in social movement mobilization. space & polity 20(1) 124–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2015.1072913 temenos, c. & mccann, e. (2013) geographies of policy mobilities. geography compass 7(5) 344–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12063 tskr (2019) territorial scheme of waste management of the karelian republic adopted by the decree 494-p the of karelian government. un (2018) country report russian federation. eighth regional 3r forum in asia and the pacific, indore, madhya pradesh, india, 9-12 april 2018. <http://www.uncrd.or.jp/content/documents/6273country%20 report_russian%20federation.pdf>. 20.5.2020. wood, a. (2014) learning through policy tourism: circulating bus rapid transit from south america to south africa. environment and planning a 46(11) 2654–2669. https://doi.org/10.1068/a140016p wood, a. (2016) tracing policy movements: methods for studying learning and policy circulation. environment and planning a 48(2) 391–406. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x15605329 woods, m. (2016) territorialisation and the assemblage of rural place: examples from canada and new zealand. in dessein, j., battaglini, e. & horlings, l. (eds.) cultural sustainability and regional development: theories and practices of territorialism, 29–42. routledge, abingdon. yarovaya, a. (2018) один процент сознательных [one percent is responsible]. 7x7-journal.ru 31.5.2018 <https://7x7-journal.ru/articles/2018/05/31/odin-procent-soznatelnyh-kak-v-petrozavodskerabotaet-sistema-razdelnogo-sbora-musora>. 20.5.2020. 21849_2_santana.indd the geography of hiv/aids in portugal paula santana and helena nogueira santana, paula & helena nogueira (2004). the geography of hiv/aids in portugal. fennia 182: 2, pp. 95–108. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. portugal has some geographical similarities with finland: both are small and rather peripherical countries. however, the infection with the human immunodefi ciency virus (hiv) has different patterns in portugal from those in finland. at the beginning of the 21st century, portugal is in the fi rst place of the infection with the hiv, with an incidence rate of 105.8 cases per one million inhabitants. the main objective of this paper is to present and explain the geographical diffusion of hiv in portugal at sub-region level with altogether 28 geographical areas. we were able to identify some geographic hot spot areas with smr signifi cantly higher than 100. some areas with aids mortality rates signifi cantly above the national standardized rates were identifi ed in the metropolitan area of lisbon. it was found that the urban/rural dichotomy is the most important factor, explaining 47% and 32% of the variance for male and female aids mortality, respectively. this factor identifi es a clear opposition between the variables, with a geographical signifi cance. paula santana & helena nogueira, department of geography, university of coimbra, 3000 coimbra, portugal. e-mails: paulasantana@mail.telepac.pt., helenamarquesnogueira@hotmail.com. ms received 24 february 2004. introduction after slightly more than twenty years of hiv/aids research, we can conclude that some advances, both in the identifi cation of risk behaviours and in therapeutics, have resulted in very positive outcome, mainly in developed countries, where the epidemic has been controlled and the number of new cases has been decreasing (moatti 2000). however, the persistence of hiv/aids is linked, not only to poverty, social exclusion and new (behavioural) problems (atlani et al. 2000) but also to the increase of old health problems such as, for instance, tuberculosis (antunes & waldman 2001). this paper’s main goal is to identify the geographical variations in hiv/aids and tb mortality in mainland portugal and to identify possible interrelationships between this mortality and some social, economic and demographic factors. in accordance with these objectives, this paper is essentially divided into four parts. in the fi rst part we present the background of this problem. secondly, we highlight some problems associated with the incidence of these causes of death (hiv/aids and tb) in portugal. the third part is dedicated to risk areas for hiv/aids and tb in mainland portugal. here, we used factor analysis in order to summarize economic, social, demographic and health variables. factor analysis was complemented with cluster analysis, leading to the identifi cation of risk behaviours related to gender, age, geographical area, etc. in the last part we present some suggestions that might reduce the non-diminishing tendency that has been observed. background in 1997, the world health organisation (who) undertook a survey in portugal identifying the pathologies that had been diagnosed in 71,025 people (men, women and children) infected with hiv since 1994. pulmonary tuberculosis was detected as one of the most frequent causes of death 96 fennia 182: 2 (2004)paula santana and helena nogueira found in adults. the proportion of deaths due to this cause was about 11%. similar results have been observed in africa, where in parallel to the terrible growth of the aids epidemic, a concurrent growth in the tuberculosis rates has been recorded, and in the usa, where the infection by hiv has been linked to the growth of notifi cations of cases of tuberculosis among young adults (elender et al. 1998). while analysing the results for the city of são paulo for a period of fi ve years (1994–1998) antunes and waldman (2001) concluded that the percentage of deaths by pulmonary tuberculosis, explained by hiv co-infection, showed a level that was much higher than the literature suggested up to that time, approaching 22.4%. nevertheless, despite the fact that an important association has been shown between hiv and tuberculosis elsewhere, some ecological studies undertaken in the united kingdom conclude that there is no clear evidence for the afore-mentioned interaction. some authors believe that the persistence of hiv/aids may be related to negative consequences, although in an indirect form, that the antiretroviral treatments may have in the disease. in other words, the medicines that started being used in 1987 (e.g., azt), and which became the fi rst victory over the virus, may become, paradoxically, a risk for their users. the risks are related to the negative effects of their prolonged use, infl uencing the increase in the resistance to these drugs and, on another level, to the negative effects induced by their high toxicity. adding to this is the possibility that using these drugs immediately after being subjected to risk situations could lead to considering them as a sort of “day-after pill” (moatti 2000). this peculiarity may have consequences in the attitudes and behaviours which are likely to increase risk situations, for instance, in the growth of confi dence, negligence and consequently in the possibility of an increase in the number of new cases of the disease. these behaviours have been pointed out as causes for the epidemic’s fresh outbreak in groups that were practically under control, such as homosexuals. other authors explain the rise in the epidemic by problems associated with social exclusion to which groups are subjected. in this context, atlani et al. (2000) present the inadequacy and the ineffi cacy of health systems in responding to these issues as the cause for the disease. this translates into an increase in inequality of access to services and in the coverage of the infected population, even in countries where the health system guarantees free or very low cost coverage, and also in the attitudes and behaviour of health professionals when confronted with hiv infections. it is in countries where the epidemic takes more lives that the fi ght against the disease seems to be more diffi cult, as governments lack the fi nancial capability to distribute drugs and to improve people’s standard of living. as a consequence, there are high rates of premature deaths and this fact constitutes another cause for the ever-increasing impoverishment of these regions and countries. even though hiv/aids is more frequent in certain groups or geographical areas, it does not restrict itself to these groups or geographical areas. the literature confi rms that “vulnerability” increases in geometric progression, mainly in the urban and suburban areas of developing countries. it is, however, a problem that arises also in rich countries as a result of increased mobility (immigration from countries of high incidence) and of non-sustained development (santana et al. 2001). in other words, the problem is greater where economic growth has not taken into account some fundamental components of the standard of living, wellbeing and universal and timely access to health care for all inhabitants, including immigrants. situation in portugal hiv/aids the fi rst aids case in portugal dates back to 1983. even though the incidence of aids in western europe has been decreasing, portugal has been registering a rapid growth in the epidemic in recent years1. according to unaids/who (2000), the incidence of aids in portugal, in comparison to other western european countries, confi rms the unfavourable position in which the country is positioned – topping the european ranking for the disease’s rate of incidence, followed by spain, a situation that was maintained in 2002. paixão (2003) indicates that the rate of incidence of aids cases, fennia 182: 2 (2004) 97the geography of hiv/aids in portugal in 2001, was 105.8 per million inhabitants (257.5 per million inhabitants, hiv non-symptomatic). still from the total of diagnosed cases in portugal – 8232 since the beginning of the epidemic until june 2001 – 16% occurred among homo/bisexuals, 50% among intravenous drug users (idu), 27% among heterosexuals and 0.8% among children, these being infected by their mother; the remaining cases (around 6% of the total) were transmitted either by blood transfusions or by undetermined ways. over the years, only the homo/bisexuals group has registered a decrease: in 1992 it presented 557 accumulated cases and in 1999 only 74. idu’s and heterosexuals are responsible for the persistence in the increasing tendency, being simultaneously the behavioural risk-groups in portugal. in 2000, heterosexuals contributed to 33% of the new cases. according to the instituto português da droga e da toxicodependência (ipdt 2001, portuguese institute for drugs and drug addiction), more than 50% of the new cases of aids registered in 2000 have occurred among drug addicts. the majority of those cases were males (87%) and young adults (aged 25–34; 60%). in 2000, 318 drug-related deaths were registered and of these 53% in the lisbon healthcare legal area. this fi gure is smaller than in previous years. it is estimated that almost 72% were suspected overdose cases. between 1983 and 2001, 2210 drug addicts died of aids (47% in the lisbon district), representing 50% of the total of aids deaths. the responsible agents for aids are human immunodefi ciency virus type 1 and type 2, that is hiv-1 and hiv-2. while the fi rst type is the origin of the most frequent type of aids on a global scale, the second type is responsible for more regional cases, basically in western africa. one of the issues that differentiate the portuguese case is the prevalence of infections by hiv-2. cazein et al. (1996) mention the results of a study carried out in france, between 1989 and 1995, by the european centre for the epidemiological monitoring of aids. 22 countries participated in the scheme whose aim was to determine the prevalence of infection by hiv-2 in european countries, comparing it with the infection by hiv-1. despite the constraints associated with the gathering of the information, this study reveals that hiv-2 is less frequent in europe, corresponding to only 1% of the total of infections by hiv. the exceptions are spain, where the second highest fi gure for infections by hiv-2 was found (3.5% of all positive cases for hiv) and portugal, where the highest fi gure was registered, representing 13% of all infected patients that sought sexually transmitted diseases (std) counselling. in patients co-infected by hiv and tuberculosis, this percentage is higher (29% registered positive for hiv-2); among idu’s, the fi gure for hiv-2 infections was only 0.5%. since hiv-2 is historically a typical virus of western africa (ewold 1994), the higher prevalence of these infections in portugal may be explained by the mobility of the population, specifi cally the return of ex-colonies’ residents and the immigration from african countries. as referred to by gomes et al. (2003), in 2002, 45% of the people infected with hiv-2 lived in lisbon, which is the main area for the immigrant population. from the total of cases notifi ed infected with hiv-2 (342), 78.4% were aged between 25 and 54, which constitutes an older age group than the infection caused by hiv-1 (86.2% aged between 20 and 49). gomes et al. (2003) suggest that the high age apex may refl ect several aspects of the hiv-2 epidemiology, with an emphasis on low heterosexual transmission and low mortality. in other words, despite opportunistic infections and tumours, the hiv-2 infection being similar to the hiv-1 infection, aids patients infected with hiv-2 live, generally, longer when compared with aids patients infected with hiv-1. maybe for some of these reasons, in the last ten years, a decrease has been observed: the number of aids cases motivated by hiv-2 was between 10% and 12% in the fi rst years of the 90’s, whereas in early 2001 this number was only 3.9% of the total number of aids cases. in regard to the aforementioned relationship between hiv and tuberculosis, portugal is an example of a strong link between these two diseases. antunes and antunes (1996) note that in 1994 tuberculosis was evident in 54% of diagnosed aids cases, a situation that seems more serious in more urban coastal districts, mainly in lisbon and oporto. in lisbon, 15% of the total of tb cases (1256) were associated with hiv infection; of these, 82% 98 fennia 182: 2 (2004)paula santana and helena nogueira were among patients aged between 25 and 44 years old, of which 52% were idu’s, 24% homosexuals and 21% homo/bisexuals. according to isabel portugal (2003), in the time period april 2000–december 2001, 9% of the 4164 cases of tb were hiv positive. one relevant fact is that hiv infected patients have an increased risk of acquiring anti-bacillary resistance. tuberculosis (tb) in spite of the remarkable progress in prevention, assessment (screening) and treatment of tuberculosis, the number of cases increased after 1974, when all forecasts indicated the continuation of the decline (9% per year) registered since the late sixties. 1975 is the year for the inversion of this tendency. this is probably one of the consequences of the profound changes that occurred in the aftermath of the april 1974 portuguese revolution, in particular the return of hundreds of thousands of people from the african ex-colonies, some of them coming from areas with a high prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis. immigrants started to concentrate in the metropolitan areas of lisbon and oporto, or in other costal sub-regions, worsening the pre-existing situation. despite some positive structural aspects such as the high rate of vaccinal coverage, the remarkable progress in the country’s healthcare coverage and the improvement in the standard of living (housing, nutrition, education, etc.), portugal still registers worrying levels of pulmonary tuberculosis. in 1994, incidence of tb was the highest in europe (51/100,000 in adults and 21/100,000 in younger than 15 years). the rate of new cases in 2002 was 39.5/100,000 inhabitants. antunes and antunes (1996) state that in 1994, 75% of the 5619 notifi ed cases in portugal were among residents of the urban and coastal areas of lisbon and oporto, where 50% of the cases were concentrated. there was a higher incidence among male and young adults. these authors identify oporto as the area having the worst epidemiological situation, mainly detected in poor communities based on fi shing and industrial economies. notwithstanding the decreasing tendency of the last decades, it is the more urbanised districts that present higher levels of incidence. according to paixão (2003), tuberculosis is the main opportunistic infection associated with aids cases, with relevance for drug addicts, in which over 60% of notifi ed pathologies were tb. according to portuguese health authorities, the percentage of tb cases linked with hiv infections in 2002 was 15% (669 cases). the groups with a higher concentration of cases were male, aged between 25 and 34. the risk of dying in portugal of hiv/ aids and tb sources and methods the study of hiv/aids and tb in mainland portugal is based on disaggregated death records at the sub-region level (nut iii). these data are not available for higher detail scales on account of the confi dentiality associated with this information. the number of deaths was analysed according to sex and age group2 for a period of fi ve years – 1994 to 1999. because mortality varies according to age and sex we used an indirect standardised method that eliminates this variation. as a result we reached a value – standardised mortality rate (smr) – that shows variations in the sub-regions (nut’s iii) in relation to a reference value from mainland portugal corresponding to one hundred. to calculate the smrs we followed three steps: 1) we established, for mainland portugal, the death-rate for each age group, considered as reference rates or standard rates3; 2) we calculated the number of expected cases in each nut iii and in each age group4; and 3) we calculated the smrs in groups of municipalities in mainland portugal, by the relation between expected deaths and observed deaths5. taking into account potential problems resulting from the infl uence of chance in the considered sample, we calculated a confi dence interval (ci) of 95%, according to the method proposed by jones and moon (1987)6. the maps of smr values are in accordance with the values for each rate and the limits of the corresponding cis. the nut’s iii were classifi ed into four categories: 1) smr value greater than 100, fennia 182: 2 (2004) 99the geography of hiv/aids in portugal with the ci limits also above 100 (smr signifi cantly increased); 2) smr value less than 100, as are the limits for the ci (smr signifi cantly decreased); 3) smr value less than 100 but ci’s include the value 100 (smr decreased, but not signifi cantly); and 4) smr value greater than 100, but ci’s include the value 100 (smr increased, but not signifi cantly). after calculating the smr’s for hiv/aids and tb, we selected 18 variables that can be grouped in four categories: 1) variables connected to mortality (two); 2) variables connected to the age structure of the population (six); 3) variables connected to socio-economic structure (eight); and 4) morphofunctional variables (two) (see table 1). all information was obtained from instituto nacional de estatística (portuguese institute for statistics). the institute worked on the mortality data specifi cally for this study. results hiv/aids smr spatial distribution following the pattern in the rest of the eu, aids deaths in portugal affect predominantly male individuals. between 1994 and 1999, 3739 and 752 deaths by hiv/aids were reported in the male and female population, respectively. by age group, in both sexes, the 25–34 age group has the most deaths, followed by the 35–44 age group. in some geographical areas hiv/aids constitutes one of the main causes of death in these age groups. this fact is more relevant in the metropolitan area of lisbon where 42% (male) and 28% (female) of reported deaths between 1994 and 1999 in the 25 and 34 age group were caused by hiv/aids. the geographical distribution of aids smr is high in the metropolitan areas. in greater lisbon (grande lisboa), for example, almost three times more deaths occur than the reference value for mainland portugal (299.4 vs. 100), followed by the península de setúbal (172.1). all other regions of mainland portugal present values signifi cantly lower than the standard value for mainland portugal (fig. 1). the pattern for women is similar to that for men (fig. 2). greater lisbon (300.5) and the península de setúbal (177.1) are risk areas also for women, the fi rst being a sub-region where female mortality was three times greater than the reference value for mainland portugal. although there are a smaller number of deaths for women, the deaths have a greater geographical dispersion when compared to men. in addition to the metropolitan area of lisbon (greater lisbon) and the península de setúbal, the female population is registering aids deaths in the interior, chiefl y along the main routes to spain (fig. 2). geographical distribution for tb from the joint analysis of the fi ve year investigation period we can notice that the number of deaths fig. 1. smr hiv-aids, males (all ages), 1994–1999. subregions: 1 = alentejo central; 2 = alentejo litoral; 3 = algarve; 4 = alto alentejo; 5 = alto trás-os-montes; 6 = ave; 7 = baixo alentejo; 8 = baixo mondego; 9 = baixo vouga; 10 = beira interior norte; 11 = beira interior sul; 12 = cávado; 13 = cova da beira; 14 = dão-lafões; 15 = douro; 16 = entre douro e vouga; 17 = grande lisboa (greater lisbon); 18 = grande porto (greater oporto); 19 = lezíria do tejo; 20 = médio tejo; 21 = minho-lima; 22 = oeste; 23 = península de setúbal; 24 = pinhal interior norte; 25 = pinhal interior sul; 26 = pinhal litoral; 27 = serra da estrela; 28 = tâmega. 100 fennia 182: 2 (2004)paula santana and helena nogueira caused by tb is four times higher for males than for females (1509 and 466 deaths between 1994 and 1999, respectively for males and females). deaths are more frequent after 55 years of age. the geographical distribution for this cause of death, in a joint analysis for both sexes, shows greater lisbon (grande lisboa) as having 1.5 times higher fi gure than the standard for mainland portugal. when considering men, the highest and statistically most signifi cant smr, occurred in the regions of greater lisbon (163.5), alentejo litoral (146.7) and greater oporto (grande porto) (119.4). we should point out that there are other values observed which are slightly higher than the standard value in other coastal urban areas, but which are not statistically signifi cant (fig. 3). the analysis for the reported female deaths shows that greater lisbon has a signifi cantly higher smr (107.8). other areas have a higher value than the mainland, but the differences are not signifi cant statistically, which means that there is not such a strong concentration for females as there is for males (fig. 4). fig. 2. smr hiv-aids, females (all ages), 1994–1999. fig. 3. smr tuberculosis, males (all ages), 1994–1998. fig. 4. smr tuberculosis, females (all ages), 1994–1998. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 101the geography of hiv/aids in portugal cluster and main principal component analysis for males for the analysis of the main components we took four non-rotated factors, taking into account that the percentage of the variance explained by each one of them must not be lower than the percentage of the variance theoretically explained by each of the 18 initial variables, i.e. 5.6% (table 1). we can see that the four factors have almost 86% of the variance in the initial matrix (table 2). the value for the factor loadings and factor scores are presented in tables 3 and 4, respectively. the fi rst factor has about 47% of the variance in the initial matrix, which means that it explains 47% of the total information comprised in the 18 variables initially used. this is the factorial axis of higher explanatory capacity, putting in evidence the structure that most clearly differentiates the sub-regions in mainland portugal and therefore, it is stressed in the analysis. attending to the marked set of variables, this factor can be expressed as the urbanity/rurality factor (see tables 3 and 4). the factor is defi ned, positively, by a set of variables that differentiate it, highlighting the following: the majority of the resident population being young/adult and adult (aged between 35 and 54 years), predominantly urban, with high purchasing power, mostly in non-manual professions (with an emphasis on professionals, employers and managers) and where aids and tb standardised mortality rates are high, specially aids smr. at the other extreme, we show rural areas with aged resident populations, involved in an activity that is predominantly agricultural, with high rates of illiteracy. after analysing the factor scores we can see that there is a geographical opposition between urban and rural areas. so, areas with positive factor scores include the metropolitan areas of greater lisbon and greater oporto, and the península de setúbal with the highest aids and tb smr’s in the country. further areas with positive factor scores, although with less expression, are the coastal urban areas. regions with strong negative factor scores include the interior rural areas in the north and centre of portugal, where the lowest values for aids and tb smr were recorded. the other three factors have less explanatory value, showing only very subtle differences between the sub-regions, and therefore, will not be examined. after characterizing the fi rst factor extracted, we established a hierarchical ascending classifi cation, in order to identify similar identity geographical groups (“clusters”), which give rise to fig. 5. the classifi cation suggests the formation of four geographical groups, in which some sub-groups stand out. the fi rst geographical set (recent industrial) is composed of sub-regions in the industrialised north of portugal. these areas have young industrial population who have shown low values for tb smr, and especially for aids smr. the second group (rural) is formed of rural areas mostly in the northern and central parts of portugal. the highly rural population has low purchasing power, high illiteracy and works manually predominantly in agriculture. they do not show any risk of dying of hiv/aids, but show some probability of dying of tb. the third group (transition rural/urban) includes urban population with medium purchasing power, medium and high educational level, working in non-manual professions. the fourth group (urban) is composed of urban areas, with a special emphasis on greater lisbon, with high purchasing power, high educational level, working in nonmanual professions. the highest value for aids and tb smr was registered here. previously, we saw that hiv/aids and tb smr’s were infl uenced by the urbanity/rurality factor (increasing proportionally). the most positive factor scores are the metropolitan areas of lisbon and oporto. cluster and main principal component analysis for females following the same approach taken with the analysis of males (table 5 presents the 18 initial variables), we can see that the three factors sum up to almost 83% of the variance in the initial matrix (table 6). the values for the factor loadings and factor scores are presented in tables 7 and 8, respectively. the fi rst factor explains almost 48% of the total information comprised in the 18 variables initially used, and is the factorial axis of higher explanatory capacity. similar to what was observed for men, the fi rst factor is defi ned negatively, by a set of variables that differentiate population ar102 fennia 182: 2 (2004)paula santana and helena nogueira t ab le 1 . v ar ia b le s u se d i n p ri n ci p al c o m p o n en t an al ys is ( m al es ). s o u rc e: i n e 1 9 9 6 , 1 9 9 7 , 1 9 9 8 ; in e 1 9 9 7 . c o d e su b re gi o n % a p r a % a p u b p p ic t x. a n al d em d / sp e g 1 /2 f g 3 /4 /5 g g 6 h g 7 /8 i g 9 j % p 0 –2 4 k % p 2 5 –3 4 l % p 3 5 –4 4 m % p 4 5 –5 4 n % p 6 5 –7 4 o % p > = 7 5 p a id s sm r q t b sm r r 1 a le n te jo c en tr al 3 6 .0 0 5 1 .0 0 7 5 .0 2 1 6 .2 9 5 .2 1 6 .9 7 2 3 .0 1 1 0 .1 7 3 8 .8 5 1 9 .1 0 3 0 .6 8 1 4 .1 2 1 3 .0 7 1 0 .9 3 1 1 .8 0 6 .9 9 3 8 .8 2 4 4 .2 3 2 a le n te jo l ito ra l 3 4 .0 0 5 3 .0 0 6 9 .1 7 2 0 .5 9 3 .4 2 4 .8 8 1 9 .7 6 1 6 .3 2 3 8 .3 5 2 0 .0 7 3 0 .4 9 1 2 .4 0 1 4 .3 5 1 2 .4 5 1 1 .2 8 6 .1 6 2 8 .1 1 1 4 6 .7 0 3 a lg ar ve 1 7 .0 0 7 1 .0 0 1 0 6 .4 7 1 2 .8 3 5 .2 1 8 .9 4 2 8 .4 5 1 5 .3 6 3 4 .6 2 1 1 .8 5 3 1 .7 4 1 3 .7 1 1 3 .8 5 1 2 .9 4 1 0 .1 7 6 .2 3 8 2 .6 2 1 2 0 .1 8 4 a lto a le n te jo 4 3 .0 0 3 8 .0 0 6 5 .3 1 1 7 .2 2 4 .3 1 6 .1 5 2 5 .5 8 1 1 .6 0 3 4 .4 7 2 0 .4 9 3 0 .0 7 1 3 .6 3 1 2 .8 5 1 0 .8 2 1 2 .4 5 8 .3 1 4 1 .7 6 5 8 .4 1 5 a lto t rá so sm o n te s 6 9 .0 0 1 8 .0 0 5 4 .8 2 1 4 .3 4 4 .1 2 6 .9 3 1 7 .5 8 3 9 .3 1 2 2 .8 3 1 2 .5 7 3 4 .4 1 1 4 .4 0 1 1 .9 4 1 0 .4 7 1 0 .9 0 6 .3 8 1 5 .3 2 8 2 .3 9 6 a ve 4 .0 0 7 2 .0 0 6 2 .4 0 6 .1 5 3 .7 0 7 .5 0 1 8 .7 0 4 .2 5 5 6 .7 3 1 2 .2 0 4 0 .0 9 1 8 .1 2 1 4 .7 0 1 0 .7 4 5 .7 5 2 .6 9 1 3 .1 7 7 0 .6 6 7 b ai xo a le n te jo 4 .0 0 3 4 .0 0 6 1 .0 1 1 9 .8 5 3 .3 8 8 .3 3 2 1 .3 2 2 8 .5 2 2 9 .6 9 1 1 .5 1 3 0 .6 6 1 4 .4 1 1 3 .1 8 1 0 .7 0 1 1 .8 2 7 .1 2 2 7 .6 5 9 6 .9 7 8 b ai xo m o n d eg o 1 7 .0 0 6 4 .0 0 8 5 .7 4 6 .0 2 1 0 .6 5 8 .9 5 2 6 .4 1 1 1 .2 7 3 6 .1 9 1 5 .9 2 3 2 .3 2 1 5 .5 2 1 4 .0 6 1 2 .6 4 9 .3 9 4 .7 6 2 0 .6 9 6 2 .2 4 9 b ai xo v o u ga 7 .0 0 7 5 .0 0 7 5 .4 6 5 .0 1 6 .4 9 5 .2 1 2 1 .7 1 1 5 .0 3 3 4 .5 7 2 2 .1 7 3 5 .9 5 1 6 .0 9 1 4 .0 8 1 1 .9 3 7 .9 1 4 .0 5 3 0 .9 4 5 7 .0 9 1 0 b ei ra in te ri o r n o rt e 6 3 .0 0 1 6 .0 0 6 0 .5 7 1 4 .4 2 4 .6 2 1 1 .8 7 2 7 .0 8 9 .7 3 3 7 .5 3 1 2 .2 4 3 0 .8 1 1 3 .5 3 1 2 .4 3 1 0 .3 4 1 2 .1 1 9 .6 6 2 4 .1 8 1 0 1 .5 1 1 1 b ei ra in te ri o r su l 4 9 .0 0 3 3 .0 0 7 1 .4 3 1 7 .1 4 5 .7 2 9 .2 6 2 1 .0 3 9 .9 8 4 8 .3 5 1 0 .3 6 2 7 .8 1 1 2 .8 6 1 2 .4 3 1 1 .5 1 1 3 .5 8 1 0 .3 8 4 7 .2 6 1 2 9 .7 2 1 2 c áv ad o 3 .0 0 6 1 .0 0 7 1 .2 1 5 .3 9 5 .8 9 9 .7 7 2 1 .1 3 8 .5 6 4 9 .1 9 1 0 .4 8 4 1 .7 4 1 7 .6 5 1 3 .9 6 1 0 .5 0 5 .8 1 2 .7 5 1 6 .6 7 8 4 .0 9 1 3 c ov a d a b ei ra 4 8 .0 0 4 0 .0 0 6 7 .0 0 1 3 .6 4 5 .0 1 8 .4 9 2 2 .8 7 1 1 .5 4 4 0 .5 1 1 5 .9 4 3 2 .5 4 1 4 .3 4 1 4 .2 7 1 1 .6 0 1 0 .4 3 6 .2 7 2 2 .8 1 4 7 .6 4 1 4 d ão -l af õ es 4 4 .0 0 2 8 .0 0 5 9 .9 8 9 .1 8 4 .6 1 7 .7 3 1 9 .8 5 2 3 .3 7 3 6 .3 8 1 1 .7 5 3 6 .7 1 1 4 .5 1 1 1 .8 9 1 1 .2 0 9 .4 8 5 .6 6 2 7 .9 5 1 7 .9 4 1 5 d o u ro 4 5 .0 0 2 2 .0 0 5 0 .8 7 1 1 .9 1 4 .3 8 6 .3 8 1 8 .5 0 2 4 .4 4 2 6 .5 7 2 2 .8 9 3 6 .9 1 1 6 .4 7 1 2 .4 6 9 .7 7 9 .4 7 5 .1 5 1 6 .8 2 9 9 .1 6 1 6 en tr e d o u ro e v o u ga 6 .0 0 6 9 .0 0 6 9 .9 6 5 .0 5 4 .0 3 9 .2 6 1 7 .5 7 4 .4 3 6 2 .4 8 5 .7 2 3 7 .5 6 1 7 .4 9 1 4 .8 4 1 1 .3 8 6 .5 1 3 .5 0 2 0 .7 4 7 9 .8 1 17 g ra nd e li sb oa (g re at er l is bo n) 0. 00 99 .0 0 18 5. 63 3. 02 1 6 .8 7 1 7 .0 7 3 8 .0 6 0 .8 3 3 1 .5 2 9 .9 6 3 2 .7 3 1 5 .3 2 1 3 .9 2 1 4 .3 0 8 .1 9 3 .8 4 2 9 9 .4 3 1 6 3 .5 4 1 8 g ra n d e po rt o (g re at er o p o rt o ) 0 .0 0 9 8 .0 0 1 3 1 .1 8 3 .0 4 1 1 .0 6 1 3 .1 6 3 1 .8 3 2 .8 6 4 2 .9 2 8 .2 8 3 5 .6 5 1 7 .0 7 1 5 .1 9 1 3 .1 3 6 .6 3 2 .9 4 8 9 .2 5 1 1 9 .3 6 1 9 le zí ri a d o t ej o 3 1 .0 0 4 9 .0 0 7 2 .1 4 1 1 .6 7 4 .6 1 6 .7 7 2 0 .9 3 1 0 .8 4 4 0 .8 5 1 8 .8 9 3 1 .3 8 1 4 .8 1 1 3 .3 6 1 2 .7 1 1 0 .3 2 5 .5 1 4 8 .4 6 5 6 .9 5 2 0 m éd io t ej o 3 6 .0 0 4 4 .0 0 7 2 .2 5 8 .2 2 5 .3 7 7 .7 3 2 2 .0 7 6 .0 0 4 5 .7 1 1 4 .8 5 3 1 .7 9 1 5 .0 7 1 3 .4 3 1 1 .0 7 1 0 .7 9 6 .4 5 3 6 .5 8 3 8 .7 6 2 1 m in h o -l im a 2 5 .0 0 2 5 .0 0 5 8 .0 4 7 .5 6 4 .3 0 8 .1 8 1 9 .2 4 1 9 .4 6 4 3 .1 6 9 .0 5 3 7 .1 2 1 4 .6 1 1 2 .8 5 1 0 .2 7 9 .3 9 5 .9 4 1 8 .0 2 1 0 7 .2 4 2 2 o es te 1 6 .0 0 5 2 .0 0 7 3 .3 9 1 1 .7 8 3 .7 6 6 .9 2 1 8 .3 9 1 7 .9 1 4 1 .2 1 1 4 .2 3 3 3 .0 2 1 5 .0 1 1 3 .7 1 1 2 .3 3 9 .6 4 4 .8 5 5 4 .5 8 7 7 .0 3 2 3 pe n ín su la d e se tú b al 2 .0 0 9 5 .0 0 1 1 1 .2 6 5 .2 9 8 .3 1 9 .0 1 3 1 .1 0 3 .5 1 4 1 .5 9 1 0 .6 1 3 4 .1 1 1 4 .4 3 1 4 .3 7 1 4 .8 0 7 .6 2 3 .2 6 1 7 2 .1 4 1 0 5 .7 2 2 4 p in h al in te ri o r n o rt e 5 1 .0 0 1 5 .0 0 5 4 .0 5 1 0 .2 8 2 .6 8 6 .5 6 1 8 .3 7 1 3 .3 2 4 5 .2 3 1 5 .7 3 3 2 .1 6 1 4 .1 5 1 2 .4 3 1 0 .6 0 1 1 .0 4 8 .2 9 2 2 .1 3 7 8 .0 3 2 5 p in h al in te ri o r su l 6 5 .0 0 1 0 .0 0 4 6 .2 7 1 5 .5 7 2 .2 3 4 .1 5 1 4 .5 1 2 5 .7 1 3 7 .4 8 1 6 .8 9 2 8 .4 1 1 4 .5 1 1 2 .5 2 9 .2 3 1 4 .2 9 9 .5 4 1 1 .4 9 2 8 .0 0 2 6 p in h al l ito ra l 2 1 .0 0 6 3 .0 0 8 3 .0 1 7 .9 1 4 .4 2 8 .6 6 1 9 .7 0 8 .2 3 4 9 .3 3 1 2 .8 6 3 4 .6 6 1 5 .5 3 1 4 .0 2 1 2 .1 6 8 .5 8 4 .0 7 2 4 .6 5 3 0 .1 0 2 7 se rr a d a es tr el a 5 1 .0 0 1 2 .0 0 5 2 .7 0 1 1 .0 8 3 .9 5 7 .5 1 1 7 .8 2 1 4 .8 6 4 2 .7 4 1 6 .2 8 3 2 .8 6 1 4 .2 3 1 2 .6 4 1 1 .0 2 1 0 .5 8 7 .6 1 1 5 .8 0 1 1 2 .7 0 2 8 t âm eg a 9 .0 0 4 0 .0 0 4 7 .1 5 8 .6 2 2 .2 2 5 .5 3 1 4 .0 7 1 0 .4 2 5 8 .9 9 1 0 .2 4 4 2 .1 5 1 8 .4 9 1 3 .8 2 9 .1 9 5 .9 1 3 .0 1 1 9 .9 7 8 6 .3 1 m ea n 2 8 .4 3 4 8 .1 1 7 4 .7 7 1 0 .6 8 5 .3 8 8 .1 4 2 2 .0 2 1 3 .4 9 4 1 .0 0 1 4 .0 4 3 3 .8 0 1 5 .0 9 1 3 .4 5 1 1 .4 5 9 .7 1 5 .7 6 4 6 .0 0 8 2 .2 3 st .d ev ia tio n 2 1 .8 3 2 6 .0 4 2 9 .0 2 5 .0 1 3 .0 7 2 .6 2 5 .4 1 8 .7 0 9 .1 0 4 .3 8 3 .6 8 1 .5 5 0 .9 0 1 .3 6 2 .3 0 2 .1 9 5 9 .4 5 3 6 .3 0 c v 7 6 .7 8 5 4 .1 3 3 8 .8 2 4 6 .8 8 5 7 .0 7 3 2 .1 8 2 4 .5 6 6 4 .4 9 2 2 .2 0 3 1 .2 1 1 0 .9 0 1 0 .2 4 6 .7 2 1 1 .8 9 2 3 .7 3 3 7 .9 6 1 2 9 .2 3 4 4 .1 5 n o te s: m o rp h o -f u n ct io n al v ar ia b le s (t w o ): a p er ce n ta ge o f th e p o p u la ti o n l iv in g in p re d o m in an tl y ru ra l ar ea s; b p er ce n ta ge o f th e p o p u la ti o n l iv in g in p re d o m in an tl y u rb an a re as . v ar ia b le s co n n ec te d t o s o ci o -e co n o m ic s tr u ct u re ( ei gh t) : c “ p er c ap it a” p u rc h as in g p o w er i n d ic at o r (p p i) ; d p er ce n ta ge o f m al e/ fe m al e p o p u la ti o n a ge d 1 0 a n d o ve r th at ca n ’t re ad a n d w ri te ( il li te ra cy r at e) ; e p er ce n ta ge o f m al e/ fe m al e p o p u la ti o n a ge d 1 5 a n d o ve r th at g ra d u at ed f ro m o r st u d ie s at i n te rm ed ia te o r h ig h er e d u ca ti o n l ev el ; f p er ce n ta ge o f t h e m al e/ fe m al e p o p u la ti o n in n o n -m an u al p ro fe ss io n al g ro u p s – h ig h s ta tu s; g p er ce n ta ge o f t h e m al e/ fe m al e p o p u la ti o n in n o n -m an u al p ro fe ss io n al g ro u p s – m ed iu m a n d n o n q u al ifi e d c o m m er ce a n d s er vi ce s; h p er ce n ta ge o f th e m al e/ fe m al e p o p u la ti o n w o rk in g in a gr ic u lt u re ; i p er ce n ta ge o f th e m al e/ fe m al e p o p u la ti o n i n m an u al p ro fe ss io n al g ro u p s; j p er ce n ta ge o f th e p o p u la ti o n i n m an u al a n d n o n -q u al ifi e d p ro fe ss io n al g ro u p s. v ar ia b le s co n n ec te d t o t h e ag e st ru ct u re o f th e p o p u la ti o n (s ix ): k p er ce n ta ge o f t h e p o p u la ti o n , m al e/ fe m al e, in th e ag e gr o u p s 0 –2 4 ; l p er ce n ta ge o f t h e p o p u la ti o n , m al e/ fe m al e, i n t h e ag e gr o u p s 2 5 –3 4 ; m p er ce n ta ge o f th e p o p u la ti o n , m al e/ fe m al e, i n t h e ag e gr o u p s 3 5 –4 4 ; n p er ce n ta ge o f th e p o p u la ti o n , m al e/ fe m al e, i n t h e ag e gr o u p s 4 5 –5 4 ; o p er ce n ta ge o f th e p o p u la ti o n , m al e/ fe m al e, i n t h e ag e gr o u p s 6 5 –7 4 ; p p er ce n ta ge o f th e p o p u la ti o n , m al e/ fe m al e, i n t h e ag e gr o u p s > = 7 5 . v ar ia b le s co n n ec te d t o m o rt al it y (t w o ): q a id s sm r ; r t b s m r . fennia 182: 2 (2004) 103the geography of hiv/aids in portugal table 2. eigenvalues (males). factor eigenvalue % total variance cumulative % 1 8.4 46.6 46.6 2 4.4 24.6 71.2 3 1.4 7.5 78.7 4 1.3 7.0 85.7 table 3. factor loadings (males). variable factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 factor 4 % apr –0.83 0.26 –0.16 0.03 % apu 0.92 0.06 0.30 –0.11 ppi 0.83 0.52 0.02 0.06 tx.anal –0.77 0.35 0.06 –0.19 emd/sp 0.76 0.49 0.00 0.21 g 1/2 0.70 0.41 –0.47 0.08 g 3/4/5 0.67 0.66 0.02 0.04 g 6 –0.71 0.03 0.02 0.58 g 7/8 0.28 –0.65 –0.27 –0.63 g 9 –0.48 0.15 0.73 0.08 %p 0–24 0.40 –0.80 –0.13 0.35 %p 25–34 0.50 –0.77 –0.03 0.21 %p 35–44 0.76 –0.24 0.31 –0.34 %p 45–54 0.69 0.50 0.29 –0.14 %p 65–74 –0.75 0.61 –0.01 –0.18 %p >=75 –0.77 0.51 –0.24 –0.24 aidssmr 0.69 0.58 –0.06 0.12 tbsmr 0.37 0.41 –0.37 0.06 table 4. factor scores (males). code subregion factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 factor 4 1 alentejo central –0.53 0.48 0.96 –0.66 2 alentejo litoral –0.54 0.72 1.33 –1.10 3 algarve 0.43 1.01 0.13 –0.15 4 alto alentejo –0.84 0.80 0.93 –0.53 5 alto trás-os-montes –1.23 0.25 –0.60 2.56 6 ave 0.81 –1.91 0.14 –0.57 7 baixo alentejo –0.67 0.48 –0.29 0.57 8 baixo mondego 0.59 0.29 1.03 0.31 9 baixo vouga 0.36 –0.54 2.35 0.86 10 beira interior norte –0.72 1.00 –1.86 –0.45 11 beira interior sul –0.69 1.22 –1.78 –1.71 12 cávado 0.87 –1.51 –0.65 0.64 13 cova da beira –0.28 0.15 0.55 –0.71 14 dão-lafões –0.57 –0.32 –0.38 1.34 15 douro –0.79 –0.39 0.68 2.29 16 entre douro e vouga 0.94 –1.62 –1.00 –1.32 17 grande lisboa 2.67 2.38 –0.93 1.28 18 grande porto 2.05 0.21 –0.33 0.11 19 lezíria do tejo –0.17 0.17 1.23 –0.51 20 médio tejo –0.14 –0.08 0.20 –0.88 21 minho-lima –0.25 –0.50 –1.48 0.66 22 oeste –0.03 –0.16 0.62 –0.10 23 península de setúbal 1.60 0.73 0.67 –0.36 24 pinhal interior norte –0.90 –0.03 –0.60 –0.51 25 pinhal interior sul –1.78 0.12 0.14 –0.21 26 pinhal litoral 0.38 –0.65 0.51 –0.77 27 serra da estrela –0.77 0.07 –0.72 –0.12 28 tâmega 0.22 –2.37 –0.85 0.04 eas that are illiterate, predominantly rural, aged, and involved in agricultural activities, with a low probability of dying of hiv/aids. in the opposite extreme, the factor distinguishes variables that show resident population areas that are urban, consisting of young adults (aged between 25 and 54 years) with high purchasing power, high level of education and where smr’s for aids and tb are high. this pattern seems to demonstrate the urbanity/rurality opposition. after analysing the factor scores we can see that there is a geographical opposition, with more developed coastal areas (higher purchasing power, younger population, higher level of education, non-manual activities) presenting higher smr’s for aids and tb. this association emerges mainly in sub-regions with stronger positive factor scores, such as the metropolitan areas of lisbon and oporto. besides these, there are other coastal urban areas that also present high smr’s for tb (but not for aids). all rural areas, especially in the north and centre of portugal occupy the opposite position. we are only taking this factor into account because of its explanatory capacity, in contrast to the other two. after characterizing the three factors, we create a hierarchical ascending classifi cation, in order to identify similar identity geographical groups (“clusters”) (fig. 6). the classifi cation suggests the formation of four geographical groups, in which some sub-groups are formed. the fi rst spatial set (recent industrial) is made up of spread out industrial implantation areas in the north of portugal, characterized by with young persons in manual jobs associated with industry. it was established that these areas did not present smr’s for hiv/aids and tb 104 fennia 182: 2 (2004)paula santana and helena nogueira fig. 5. hierarchical ascending classifi cation. clusters, males. the four geographical categories are: 1) recent industrial (composed of sub-regions in the industrialised north of portugal); 2) rural (formed of rural areas mostly in the northern and central parts of portugal); 3) transition rural/urban; 4) urban (composed of urban areas, with a special emphasis on greater lisbon). that can make us regard them as risk areas. the second group (rural) is formed by rural areas, mostly in the north and centre of portugal. they are rural areas with low purchasing power, high illiteracy, high numbers of manual workers predominantly in agriculture and aged populations. they are not considered to be risk areas for tb nor hiv/aids, although some of them have fi gures that deserve some attention, especially in interior rural areas, near the spanish border. the third group (transition rural/urban) is composed of transition areas. it is a wide group of heterogeneous sub-regions. however, one of the common qualities is the low aids smr, although with a tendency to increase in the south (algarve). in some areas, especially in the south of portugal, tb smrs have higher values, exceeding the standard value. finally, the last group (urban) is composed of the metropolitan areas of lisbon and oporto. these sub-regions can be identifi ed as highly urbanised, with populations with high purchasing power and high levels of education. a high percentage of the population is in the non-manual professions groups, where white-collar workers, professionals and managers are predominant. in these areas we registered the highest fi gures for hiv/aids and tb smr’s. greater lisbon stands out as a region where hiv/aids smr is three times higher than the standard value for mainland portugal. it is therefore a risk area for this disease. discussion of results and conclusions in 2001, portugal had the highest rate of incidence of aids and tb cases in the eu, which is, undoubtedly, worrying. equally worrying is the fact that the development in the number of diagnosed cases does not follow the western european pattern, of a decrease in the period between 1992 and 1997. that is, in the beginning of the 21st century, the tendency for a decline observed in the eu is not seen in portugal. regarding the number of people infected with hiv, portugal has 17,858 diagnosed cases, and evidence makes us to believe that this fi gure is considerably underestimated. tuberculosis seems to be associated with hiv/aids, as is shown in the literature. the set of factors we studied in this paper (four for men and three for women), explained about 82% and 78% of hiv/aids smr variance, respectively, for men and women7. the fi rst factor (urbanity/rurality) explains 47% for males and 32% for females, of hiv/aids smr. these same factors have lower explanatory capacity when considering tb, registering 14% and 32% in males and females8. this implies that the connection between hiv/aids and social, economic and demographic characteristics is stronger, presenting a more signifi cant geographical concentration than tb. factorial and cluster analyses show that there is a positive association between high educational levels, non-manual jobs and signifi cantly high values for aids and tuberculosis smr’s among the resident fennia 182: 2 (2004) 105the geography of hiv/aids in portugal ta b le 5 . v ar ia b le s u se d i n p ri n ci p al c o m p o n en t an al ys is ( fe m al es ). s ee n o te s o f t ab le 1 f o r an e xp la n at io n a b o u t th e va ri ab le s. c o d e su b re gi o n % a pr a % a pu b pp ic tx . a na ld em d/ sp e g 1 /2 f g 3/ 4/ 5g g 6 h g 7 /8 i g 9 j % p 0– 24 k % p 25 –3 4l % p 35 –4 4m % p 45 –5 4n % p 65 –7 4o % p > = 75 p a id s sm r q tb sm r r 1 a le n te jo c en tr al 36 .0 0 51 .0 0 75 .0 2 22 .2 9 5. 90 8. 11 38 .9 9 3. 70 11 .8 9 37 .1 7 27 .7 4 12 .6 6 12 .1 9 11 .4 2 13 .1 9 9. 30 24 .7 2 11 6. 09 2 a le n te jo l it o ra l 34 .0 0 53 .0 0 69 .1 7 27 .7 1 4. 19 6. 79 45 .7 2 7. 17 5. 26 34 .9 1 29 .0 1 11 .7 7 13 .6 3 11 .8 1 12 .2 3 8. 34 14 .9 5 12 8. 71 3 a lg ar ve 17 .0 0 71 .0 0 10 6. 47 15 .5 8 5. 75 8. 48 56 .0 1 4. 38 5. 05 26 .0 2 29 .5 2 13 .0 3 13 .3 5 12 .2 2 11 .4 0 8. 70 70 .8 1 12 2. 19 4 a lt o a le n te jo 43 .0 0 38 .0 0 65 .3 1 25 .5 7 4. 88 7. 32 42 .7 8 4. 82 9. 14 35 .7 6 26 .5 9 12 .3 5 12 .0 2 10 .9 1 13 .8 7 11 .1 5 33 .5 9 94 .0 4 5 a lt o t rá so sm o n te s 69 .0 0 18 .0 0 54 .8 2 21 .9 6 5. 77 7. 12 34 .2 0 27 .7 4 3. 26 27 .4 7 31 .3 2 12 .1 2 11 .5 7 11 .1 8 12 .5 6 8. 77 12 .4 4 30 .8 7 6 a ve 4. 00 72 .0 0 62 .4 0 12 .5 6 4. 44 4. 27 19 .9 3 3. 06 55 .6 8 16 .9 6 36 .8 8 17 .4 5 14 .5 2 10 .8 8 7. 10 4. 37 17 .0 1 38 .8 6 7 b ai xo a le n te jo 4. 00 34 .0 0 61 .0 1 26 .6 5 4. 92 6. 45 33 .3 2 22 .1 2 14 .6 7 23 .2 8 28 .3 3 12 .5 7 11 .6 7 10 .6 2 13 .3 0 10 .5 8 53 .2 2 11 8. 05 8 b ai xo m o n d eg o 17 .0 0 64 .0 0 85 .7 4 15 .8 5 10 .5 4 8. 54 38 .8 4 6. 97 19 .8 9 25 .6 7 28 .5 7 14 .3 7 13 .5 8 12 .7 6 11 .0 6 7. 64 19 .1 8 10 8. 11 9 b ai xo v o u ga 7. 00 75 .0 0 75 .4 6 12 .5 0 6. 85 8. 68 49 .8 4 3. 13 5. 52 32 .7 4 32 .4 2 15 .2 6 13 .8 4 11 .9 7 9. 43 6. 38 13 .8 4 57 .1 6 1 0 b ei ra i n te ri o r n o rt e 63 .0 0 16 .0 0 60 .5 7 21 .2 8 6. 47 12 .5 6 36 .9 0 14 .3 5 10 .6 1 25 .2 8 27 .3 7 12 .1 6 11 .3 0 10 .4 0 13 .7 6 12 .9 0 36 .3 8 76 .6 0 1 1 b ei ra i n te ri o r su l 49 .0 0 33 .0 0 71 .4 3 27 .6 1 6. 41 7. 15 32 .0 4 14 .7 6 22 .8 2 23 .1 3 24 .2 9 11 .7 6 11 .4 6 10 .7 1 15 .1 2 13 .6 8 72 .2 9 85 .5 2 1 2 c áv ad o 3. 00 61 .0 0 71 .2 1 13 .1 3 6. 68 6. 95 23 .2 8 9. 59 37 .3 7 22 .6 1 38 .3 6 17 .0 5 13 .8 2 10 .3 4 7. 25 4. 75 22 .4 4 56 .4 6 1 3 c ov a d a b ei ra 48 .0 0 40 .0 0 67 .0 0 23 .3 9 5. 39 6. 11 29 .1 4 5. 53 38 .2 2 20 .9 3 28 .2 8 12 .9 0 12 .8 6 11 .7 0 12 .5 8 9. 67 14 .5 1 71 .6 2 1 4 d ão -l af õ es 44 .0 0 28 .0 0 59 .9 8 19 .7 7 5. 46 6. 38 27 .3 0 31 .1 8 10 .4 0 24 .5 8 32 .2 4 12 .9 8 11 .9 9 11 .5 4 11 .1 3 8. 54 9. 79 6. 28 1 5 d o u ro 45 .0 0 22 .0 0 50 .8 7 18 .8 6 5. 53 6. 71 33 .6 9 17 .7 5 5. 46 36 .0 6 33 .1 4 14 .0 4 11 .7 3 10 .2 5 11 .5 6 8. 29 52 .4 2 73 .2 1 1 6 en tr e d o u ro e v o u ga 6. 00 69 .0 0 69 .9 6 12 .1 8 4. 85 4. 91 22 .8 3 7. 31 49 .7 4 15 .1 1 34 .4 1 16 .8 3 14 .4 6 11 .6 2 7. 70 5. 36 36 .2 6 10 4. 40 1 7 g ra nd e li sb oa (g re at er l is bo n) 0. 00 99 .0 0 18 5. 63 7. 55 14 .0 5 14 .3 3 54 .4 9 0. 44 7. 38 23 .1 2 28 .4 6 14 .2 8 13 .7 9 14 .4 6 10 .1 4 6. 81 30 0. 48 17 0. 75 1 8 g ra n d e po rt o (g re at er o p o rt o ) 0. 00 98 .0 0 13 1. 18 8. 43 10 .3 9 10 .9 8 39 .6 3 1. 39 28 .4 2 19 .3 8 31 .6 2 16 .1 2 15 .1 3 13 .0 2 8. 59 5. 44 80 .0 0 10 5. 47 1 9 le zí ri a d o t ej o 31 .0 0 49 .0 0 72 .1 4 20 .7 4 5. 15 6. 77 36 .3 5 7. 36 9. 78 39 .5 5 28 .2 7 13 .5 0 12 .7 5 12 .4 3 12 .0 4 8. 31 33 .8 3 73 .4 3 2 0 m éd io t ej o 36 .0 0 44 .0 0 72 .2 5 18 .3 2 6. 12 9. 54 41 .9 5 6. 57 13 .8 2 27 .9 2 27 .9 3 13 .4 0 12 .4 6 11 .4 9 12 .5 0 9. 77 30 .1 0 51 .9 5 2 1 m in h o -l im a 25 .0 0 25 .0 0 58 .0 4 19 .0 9 4. 76 5. 15 23 .8 4 36 .6 8 13 .6 9 20 .5 3 30 .9 3 13 .7 8 12 .3 0 11 .1 6 11 .3 3 8. 93 20 .5 2 69 .9 3 2 2 o es te 16 .0 0 52 .0 0 73 .3 9 16 .3 6 4. 49 6. 71 38 .1 1 8. 33 17 .4 2 29 .3 1 30 .4 4 14 .1 8 13 .3 5 12 .3 2 11 .0 4 6. 90 56 .0 6 98 .3 3 2 3 pe n ín su la d e se tú b al 2. 00 95 .0 0 11 1. 26 10 .6 6 7. 99 9. 31 54 .3 6 1. 60 13 .1 3 21 .4 2 31 .0 9 14 .0 4 14 .9 3 14 .6 3 8. 90 5. 03 17 7. 10 11 5. 62 2 4 p in h al i n te ri o r n o rt e 51 .0 0 15 .0 0 54 .0 5 22 .5 1 3. 13 4. 62 27 .7 3 14 .8 7 20 .9 7 31 .7 4 27 .7 5 12 .2 2 11 .3 3 10 .4 9 13 .5 0 12 .2 7 10 .2 4 32 .3 4 2 5 p in h al i n te ri o r su l 65 .0 0 10 .0 0 46 .2 7 32 .9 5 2. 99 4. 55 27 .6 6 33 .9 5 6. 85 26 .5 5 24 .9 8 11 .2 2 9. 95 9. 65 17 .0 2 13 .1 7 32 .0 8 0. 00 2 6 p in h al l it o ra l 21 .0 0 63 .0 0 83 .0 1 18 .1 1 5. 62 7. 38 39 .5 1 7. 17 18 .1 3 27 .6 8 31 .7 3 14 .9 9 13 .8 4 12 .2 9 9. 77 5. 96 33 .1 6 61 .4 7 2 7 se rr a d a es tr el a 51 .0 0 12 .0 0 52 .7 0 20 .0 7 5. 08 6. 48 28 .4 5 9. 88 28 .1 7 26 .9 2 28 .9 6 11 .9 9 11 .9 5 11 .3 2 12 .0 6 11 .5 5 80 .2 0 92 .2 3 2 8 t âm eg a 9. 00 40 .0 0 47 .1 5 15 .7 2 3. 09 3. 51 19 .4 3 13 .5 7 42 .8 8 20 .4 3 39 .5 5 17 .5 2 13 .3 1 9. 49 7. 10 4. 67 9. 19 56 .8 3 m ea n 28 .4 3 48 .1 1 74 .7 7 18 .8 4 5. 96 7. 35 35 .5 8 11 .6 2 18 .7 7 26 .5 1 30 .3 6 13 .8 1 12 .8 2 11 .5 4 11 .3 3 8. 47 48 .8 1 79 .1 6 st .d ev ia ti o n 21 .8 3 26 .0 4 29 .0 2 6. 16 2. 37 2. 42 10 .2 8 10 .1 2 14 .3 1 6. 28 3. 66 1. 83 1. 26 1. 22 2. 47 2. 73 60 .2 3 38 .6 6 c v 76 .7 8 54 .1 3 38 .8 2 32 .7 0 39 .8 0 32 .9 8 28 .9 0 87 .0 7 76 .2 1 23 .7 1 12 .0 4 13 .2 3 9. 84 10 .6 0 21 .7 7 32 .2 0 12 3. 38 48 .8 4 106 fennia 182: 2 (2004)paula santana and helena nogueira table 6. eigenvalues (females). factor eigenvalue % total variance cumulative % 1 8.56 47.6 47.6 2 5.09 28.3 75.9 3 1.28 7.1 83.0 table 7. factor loadings (females). variable factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 % apr –0.85 0.24 0.06 % apu 0.95 0.09 –0.11 ppi 0.79 0.52 0.20 tx.anal –0.90 0.18 –0.06 emd/sp 0.69 0.50 0.31 g 1/2 0.48 0.72 0.15 g 3/4/5 0.41 0.79 –0.32 g 6 –0.69 –0.18 0.36 g 7/8 0.27 –0.76 0.27 g 9 –0.37 0.44 –0.74 %p 0–24 0.44 –0.80 –0.11 %p 25–34 0.69 –0.68 –0.03 %p 35–44 0.92 –0.23 –0.18 %p 45–54 0.74 0.50 –0.03 %p 65–74 –0.78 0.58 0.08 %p >=75 –0.80 0.47 0.22 aidssmr 0.57 0.55 0.39 tbsmr 0.57 0.51 –0.02 table 8. factor scores (females). code subregion factor 1 factor 2 factor 3 1 alentejo central –0.28 0.75 –1.25 2 alentejo litoral –0.25 0.67 –1.86 3 algarve 0.58 0.90 –0.67 4 alto alentejo –0.69 0.81 –1.13 5 alto trás-os-montes –0.99 0.07 0.23 6 ave 0.84 –2.24 0.21 7 baixo alentejo –0.58 0.18 0.70 8 baixo mondego 0.65 0.39 0.11 9 baixo vouga 0.72 0.05 –1.83 10 beira interior norte –0.85 0.87 1.00 11 beira interior sul –0.95 0.73 1.49 12 cávado 0.76 –1.65 0.06 13 cova da beira –0.37 –0.23 0.66 14 dão-lafões –0.70 –0.49 0.60 15 douro –0.59 –0.10 –0.84 16 entre douro e vouga 0.92 –1.62 0.68 17 grande lisboa 2.32 2.26 1.93 18 grande porto 1.81 0.11 0.71 19 lezíria do tejo –0.20 0.41 –1.62 20 médio tejo –0.19 0.46 –0.22 21 minho-lima –0.58 –0.64 1.15 22 oeste 0.28 –0.03 –0.80 23 península de setúbal 1.71 0.78 0.01 24 pinhal interior norte –1.26 –0.14 –0.15 25 pinhal interior sul –2.16 0.24 1.07 26 pinhal litoral 0.48 –0.25 –0.84 27 serra da estrela –0.66 0.11 0.67 28 tâmega 0.23 –2.39 –0.08 fig. 6. hierarchical ascending classifi cation. clusters, females (geographical categories as in males). population in metropolitan areas, especially in lisbon. these are areas with high purchasing power, where young and adult populations live (aged between 25 and 54 years). geographical distribution for hiv/aids varies with gender. that is, for men, death is almost entirely concentrated in highly urbanised coastal areas, specifi cally in the metropolitan areas of lisbon and oporto. for women, we can observe some dispersion, which becomes a problem given the characteristics of the spreading of this type of disease. the increase in the number of heterofennia 182: 2 (2004) 107the geography of hiv/aids in portugal sexuals infected might produce an increase in the number of registered cases in the interior of portugal, chiefl y in women. lack of prevention and low investment in preventive health schemes may pay their highest toll here. if the disease’s existing tendency is maintained, we can predict that portugal will be confronted, in the short and medium term, with an unavoidable increase in mortality, a considerable increase in the number of years lost (taking into account the most affected age groups), a decrease in productivity (caused by the incapacity of the diseased population) and a signifi cant increase in health expenditure, not only because of the increase in the number of patients, but also because of the high number of days hiv patients in portugal spend in hospital. not surprisingly, portugal is the eu country that registers the highest number of days of hospitalisation per year for aids patients – 20.7, according to oecd (2000). we saw that these diseases are concentrated in some urban and suburban areas. however, if we had data on smaller areas, this concentration would probably be still more visible. but the use of small areas could lead to another problem, connected with the stability of the smrs. some authors who have studied the agglomeration effects, mainly of hiv/aids (gould 1993; wood et al. 2000), have concluded that when the disease is detected there might be some migration to areas where the health care may be better or more accessible in geographic and organizational terms. this might partially explain the high level of concentration for both causes of death in coastal areas, especially in lisbon and oporto. we have, however, no knowledge of any geographic mobility studies that might test this assumption in the case of portugal, as was carried out in canada by wood et al. (2000). taking all these issues into account, the main characteristics and dynamics for the disease emphasize the need, fundamentally, for preventive policies, directed above all to groups/areas of higher risk and vulnerability: • people aged between 25 and 44 years • drug addicts of both sexes • heterosexuals • metropolitan areas of lisbon, oporto and península de setúbal • poverty and delinquency sources • immigrants from high risk areas (african and eastern european countries) preventive policies should aim at a change in risk behaviour and allow for the access to screening and treatment of these diseases in a timely manner and as close as possible to the patient’s home. the success of preventive policies depends, essentially, on the involvement and participation of different organizations and social groups which include family, community, health services, schools, cultural organizations, etc. an increase in aids screening, especially in rural areas of the interior, might help to prevent the spreading of the disease. treatment would profi t from the closeness to the family environment, which can diminish the effects of loss of sociability, feelings of stigmatisation as well as decrease the concentration of patients in big cities. the magnitude of the disease in portugal and the high number of days of hospitalisation also demonstrate that there is a lack of organizations providing assistance to aids patients, a defi ciency that should be addressed urgently. it is necessary to choose care over cure, with foreseeable consequences for a better cost/benefi t ratio. finally, attention should be paid to the urgent improvement in the quality of the data. only with systematic gathering of reliable information can we improve knowledge of the disease and hence, guide subsequent activities at different levels of intervention: prevention, care and treatment of the disease. notes 1 the data that have been published about this subject differ, according to the sources. the centro de vigilância epidemiológica das doenças transmissíveis (centre for epidemiologic vigilance of transmissible diseases) refers that between january 1st 1983 and september 18th 2002, 9558 cases of aids were reported, 1893 cases with complexes related to aids and 9475 cases of non-symptomatic carriers, which amounts to 20,926 infected individuals. in 2000 unaids/who already reported the double of that fi gure of aids cases in portugal. 2 seven age groups were considered: 0–24; 25–34; 35–44; 45–54; 55–64; 65–74; >= 75. 108 fennia 182: 2 (2004)paula santana and helena nogueira 3 reference rrrates = total of observed cases in mainland portugal, during the considered period by age group number of inhabitants in mainland portugal (estimates from 1996) per age group 4 expected cases = reference rate * number of people in each nut iii, per age group. it is the number of expected deaths if the reference rates in each age group were applied to the population in each nut. 5 smr = number of cases observed in each nut iii * 100 total of expected cases in each nut iii 6 ci = observed cases – 2√ ⎯e⎯x⎯p⎯e⎯c⎯t⎯e⎯d⎯ ⎯c⎯a⎯s⎯e⎯s * 100 expected cases to observed cases + 2√ ⎯e⎯x⎯p⎯e⎯c⎯t⎯e⎯d⎯ ⎯c⎯a⎯s⎯e⎯s * 100 expected cases 7 these percentages are given by communalities. the communality of a variable is the proportion of variance explained by the factors that were extracted and used in the analysis. 8 again, these proportions are given by communalities. references antunes ml & af antunes (1996). la tuberculose au portugal: l’evolution jusqu’en 1994. eurosurveillance 1: 3, 3–5. antunes jlf & ea waldman (2001). the impact of aids, immigration and housing overcrowding on tuberculosis death in são paulo, brazil, 1994–1998. social science and medicine 52, 1071–1080. atlani l, m carael, j brunet, t frasca & n chaika (2000). social change and hiv in the former ussr: the making of a new epidemic. social science and medicine 50, 1547–1556. cazein f, f hamers, j alix & j brunet (1996). prevalência da infecção por hiv-2 na europa. eurosintese 1: 3, 1–4. elender f, g bentahm & i langford (1998). tuberculosis mortality in england and wales during 1982–1992: its association with poverty, ethnicity and aids. social science and medicine 46: 6, 73–681. ewold pw (1994). evolution of infectious disease. 298 p. oxford university press, oxford. gomes p, mj arroz, m freire, a abecasis, l pinto, m almeida, p carvalho, mf gonçalves, i diogo, j cabanas, mc lobo, mr matos & r camacho (2003). a replicação do vih-2 é igual no sexo masculino e no sexo feminino. iv congresso virtual – a mulher e a infecção pelo hiv/sida. <www. aidscongress.net/4congresso.php>. 12.1.2004. gould p (1993). the slow plague: a geography of the aids pandemic. 228 p. blackwell, london. ine (1996, 1997, 1998). informação disponível e não publicada de óbitos por vih/sida e tuberculose pulmonar. lisboa. ine (1997). estimativas da população residente por grupos de idade e sexo, segundo os agrupamentos de concelhos. lisboa. instituto português da droga e da toxicodependência (ipdt) (2001). sumários de informação e estatísticas. lisboa. jones k & g moon (1987). health, disease and society: an introduction to medical geography. 376 p. routledge & kegan paul, london. moatti jp (2000). hiv/aids social and behavioural research: past advances and thoughts about the future. social science and medicine 50, 1519– 1532. oecd (2000). health data. oecd. paixão m (2003). epidemiologia da infecção vih/ sida. o impacto em portugal. iii congresso virtual. <www.aidscongress.net/article.php?id_comunicacao=106>. 28.9.2003. portugal i (2003). o binômio hiv/tuberculose multiresistente. iii congresso virtual. <www.aidscongress.net/article.php?id_comunicacao=136>. 28.9.2003. santana p, h nogueira & o ribeiro (2001). a geografi a do sida em portugal. cadernos de geografi a 20, 15–28. unaids/who (2000). care and support for people living with hiv/aids. report on global hiv/aids epidemic. wood e, b yip, n gataric, jsg montaner, mv o’saughnessy, mt schechter & rs hogg (2000). determinants of geographic mobility among participants in a population-based hiv/aids drug treatment program. health & place 6: 1, 33–40. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /all /binding /left /calgrayprofile (gray gamma 1.8) /calrgbprofile (colormatch rgb) /calcmykprofile (u.s. sheetfed uncoated v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /warning /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel 0 /emitdscwarnings false /endpage -1 /imagememory 1048576 /lockdistillerparams true /maxsubsetpct 99 /optimize true /opm 1 /parsedsccomments true /parsedsccommentsfordocinfo true /preservecopypage true /preserveepsinfo true /preservehalftoneinfo false /preserveopicomments false /preserveoverprintsettings true /startpage 1 /subsetfonts true /transferfunctioninfo /apply /ucrandbginfo /preserve /useprologue false /colorsettingsfile (color management off) /alwaysembed [ true ] /neverembed [ true ] /antialiascolorimages false /downsamplecolorimages true /colorimagedownsampletype /bicubic /colorimageresolution 300 /colorimagedepth -1 /colorimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodecolorimages true /colorimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltercolorimages true /colorimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /coloracsimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /colorimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /jpeg2000coloracsimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /jpeg2000colorimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /antialiasgrayimages false /downsamplegrayimages true /grayimagedownsampletype /bicubic /grayimageresolution 300 /grayimagedepth -1 /grayimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodegrayimages true /grayimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltergrayimages true /grayimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /grayacsimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /grayimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /jpeg2000grayacsimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /jpeg2000grayimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /antialiasmonoimages false /downsamplemonoimages true /monoimagedownsampletype /bicubic /monoimageresolution 1200 /monoimagedepth -1 /monoimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodemonoimages true /monoimagefilter /ccittfaxencode /monoimagedict << /k -1 >> /allowpsxobjects false /pdfx1acheck false /pdfx3check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (none) /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname (http://www.color.org) /pdfxtrapped /unknown /description << /fra <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> /jpn <feff3053306e8a2d5b9a306f30019ad889e350cf5ea6753b50cf3092542b308000200050004400460020658766f830924f5c62103059308b3068304d306b4f7f75283057307e30593002537052376642306e753b8cea3092670059279650306b4fdd306430533068304c3067304d307e305930023053306e8a2d5b9a30674f5c62103057305f00200050004400460020658766f8306f0020004100630072006f0062006100740020304a30883073002000520065006100640065007200200035002e003000204ee5964d30678868793a3067304d307e30593002> /deu <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> /ptb <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> /dan <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> /nld <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> /esp <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> /suo <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> /ita <feff00550073006100720065002000710075006500730074006500200069006d0070006f007300740061007a0069006f006e00690020007000650072002000630072006500610072006500200064006f00630075006d0065006e00740069002000500044004600200063006f006e00200075006e00610020007200690073006f006c0075007a0069006f006e00650020006d0061006700670069006f00720065002000700065007200200075006e00610020007100750061006c0069007400e00020006400690020007300740061006d007000610020006d00690067006c0069006f00720065002e0020004900200064006f00630075006d0065006e00740069002000500044004600200070006f00730073006f006e006f0020006500730073006500720065002000610070006500720074006900200063006f006e0020004100630072006f00620061007400200065002000520065006100640065007200200035002e003000200065002000760065007200730069006f006e006900200073007500630063006500730073006900760065002e> /nor <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> /sve <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> /enu <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> >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [1200 1200] /pagesize [595.276 822.047] >> setpagedevice untitled cultural diversity in finland pauliina raento and kai husso raento, pauliina & kai husso (2001). cultural diversity in finland. fennia 180: 1–2, pp. 151–164. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the image of finland as a culturally and ethnically homogeneous nation is erroneous. the country’s ‘old minorities’ include the swedish-speakers, the indigenous sami, and the romani. several smaller ethno-cultural and religious groups have resided in finland since the nineteenth century. increasing immigration is now further diversifying finland. many of the old and new minorities have clearly-defined regional hearths, as do many distinctive segments of the majority culture. this article provides an overview of finland’s three largest minorities, religions, foodways, the new immigration, and the recent english-language sources available on these topics. the discussion emphasizes the new understanding of the country’s ethno-cultural make-up and political, legal, and social challenges that have followed the recent change. pauliina raento, department of geography, p. o. box 64, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: pauliina.raento@helsinki.fi kai husso, academy of finland, p. o. box 99, fin-00501 helsinki, finland. e-mail: kai.husso@cec.eu.int introduction the finns have been taught to think of finland as a culturally homogeneous nation. there are, however, several ethnic and cultural minorities within the boundaries of the finnish state. these groups consist of numerically fewer members than the majority population, are not in a dominant position in society, have distinctive linguistic, ethnic, or religious characteristics, and wish to maintain this distinctiveness. many of these groups have clearly-defined regional hearths, as do several distinctive forms of the majority culture. the status of finland’s ‘old minorities’ has not been uniform. the swedish-speaking finns are a ‘strong minority’ with a clearly-defined institutional status and considerable weight in the economy, politics, and culture. the romani, the sami, and other minority populations have suffered from social, political, cultural, and economic marginalization. their linguistic and cultural rights have been recognized only recently. new national policies have also been created to address immigration that has grown considerably since the 1990s (see liebkind 1994, 2000; korkiasaari & söderling 1998). the conventional understanding of finland’s cultural make-up is thus changing rapidly. this article outlines the newly-recognized, increasing diversity in finnish society and some related political, social, and economic challenges. the visible change, the authorities’ new responsibilities, and the lively public debate have produced a growing body of literature, especially since the 1990s. several introductory texts and essay collections of finland’s cultural landscape or its constituents have been published recently. the living conditions, identity, and traditions of particular minority groups, experiences of newcomers, and the majority population’s attitudes have attracted particular attention (e.g., westerholm 1993, 1996; lounela 1994; liebkind 1994, 2000; pentikäinen & hiltunen 1995; dahlgren 1996; paulus 1996; seppälä 1996; jasinskaja-lahti & liebkind 1997; raivo 1997; matinheikki-kokko 1997; pitkänen & jaakkola 1997; seurujärvikari 1997, 2000; söderling 1997, 1998; jaakkola 1999, 2000; löytönen & kolbe 1999; oinonen 1999; virolainen 1999; pirttilahti 2000). regional cultural distinctiveness and the transformation of the finnish state in relation to cultural minorities have also become popular topics for graduate theses (in geography, e.g., raivo 1996; karppi 2000). regional cuisine and foodways, and the dialects of finnish dominate the parallel upsurge 152 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pauliina raento and kai husso of popular writing on the majority culture’s traditions and folkways (e.g., kettunen 1999; languages… 2001; raento & raento 2001). much of this material is written in finnish, but the number of publications available in english is increasing. the swedish-speakers in finland swedish has been spoken within the contemporary territory of finland at least since the thirteenth century, possibly even earlier (see languages… 2001). finland formed a part of the swedish empire until 1809, receiving considerable cultural, political, and economic influence. the swedishspeaking population in finland formed two separate groups: the urban upper classes (administrators, bankers, and entrepreneurs) and the farmers, fishermen, and seafarers of the southern and western coasts. their language was in a dominant position in finnish society until the end of the nineteenth century, when the importance of finnish began to increase. this was due to the decline of sweden’s regional hegemony, the language’s new official status granted by the russian authorities in 1863, and the subsequent finnish nationalist aspirations for independence. many of the movement’s leaders were native swedish-speakers, but a separate swedish-language national movement emerged to counter this development. this united the minority society’s two groups for the first time. finland gained independence from russia in 1917. soon afterwards, finnish and swedish earned constitutional equality as the country’s “national languages.” the practical application was the 1922 legislation on language and its amendments in 1935, 1962, and 1975. a broad reform of the legislation is currently in process and scheduled to be implemented in 2004. the law regards the finns as “finnish-speakers,” “swedish-speakers,” and “speakers of other languages.” municipalities can also be defined as bilingual. this is the case when a minimum of eight percent of the residents, or 3,000 people, speak one of the two official languages. the status can be revoked only if the proportion of the minority declines below six percent. 21 of finland’s 452 municipalities are currently defined as monolingually swedish-speaking (stv 2000: 98). these include the 16 municipalities of the autonomous åland islands in the southwest (see dressler et al. 1994). here, swedish is the only official language, as defined in the 1921, 1951, and 1993 legislation regarding the status of the islands. the islands form a demilitarized zone, and their 25,700 (1999) residents have an autonomous provincial government. its authority extends to cultural and educational affairs, health care, law enforcement, postal service, and economic development, under its own annual budget. the legislation limits the rights of outsiders to own property on the islands, thus guaranteeing the linguistic and cultural integrity of the autonomous population. on the mainland, 42 municipalities are regarded as bilingual. swedish is the majority language in 22 of these settlements. finnish dominates in all others (stv 2000: 98). overall, the 300,000 swedish-speaking finns comprise 5.7 percent of the total population of 5.17 million (in 1999) (stv 2000: 98). their regional distribution is strongly clustered in the coastal ostrobothia region to the west and in the southwestern and southern coastal areas (cd-fig. 1). many of the swedish-speakers in the rural communities of the west are monolingual, whereas bilingualism is typical of the southern coast. the capital city helsinki–helsingfors is the largest concentration of this minority in the country, with a swedish-speaking population of 36,300 (6.6% of the city’s residents) (stv 2000: 60). here, as elsewhere, the formal bilingualism is visible in street and road signs and other official markers that are bilingual in order of commonality (cd-fig. 2). all official matters are accessible in two languages, as is required by law. in many areas, this has not been met in practice, however (westerholm 1993: 186–187, 1996: 125; jansson 1994: 57). the linguistic boundary between swedish and finnish is not as clear and definite as it appears in the statistics. nor has the legal status prevented the decline of the minority language both absolutely and relatively (fig. 1). industrialization and migration into urban centers after world war ii brought an increasing number of finnish-speakers into predominantly swedish-speaking areas, upheaving their linguistic structure. the linguistic boundary became particularly blurred in the urban uusimaa–nyland region in the south, and the trend continues today (aitamurto 2001). as a result, many swedish-speaking finns are fluently bilingual and a growing number of native swedish-speakers live in a finnish-speaking environment. many residents of the rural and monolingually swedish-speaking coast have found their language and traditional forms of livelihood fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 153cultural diversity in finland threatened, and local conflicts have emerged (oksanen 2001). particularly in the 1960s, some opted for emigration to sweden. many of these emigrants were young, which directed the age structure of the minority towards older cohorts and lowered the birth rate (the latter trend has since been reversed). local differences in economic and linguistic history thus led to territorially different strategies of accommodation in the context of change and highlighted the minority’s historic division into two communities (sandlund 1985; westerholm 1993: 180–182, 1996: 122– 124). the vitality and significance of swedish in finnish society rests largely on the minority’s own political and cultural activity despite the legal support. since 1907, through the time of general suffrage in finland, three quarters of the swedishspeakers have voted for the swedish national party (svenska folkpartiet – ruotsalainen kansanpuolue), established in 1906. the language of the political party unites the minority across ideological boundaries, although working-class affiliations are more diverse (liebkind 1994: 76). education is available in swedish from the kindergarten to the university, and the lutheran national church and the finnish military have special segments for the minority. the swedish-language media and numerous cultural organizations further enhance the vitality of the language. swedish continues to be an important language in the economy. swedish is, nevertheless, clearly a minority language in today’s finland. bilingualism amongst the native swedish-speakers is increasing. fewer and fewer finnish-speakers can communicate in swedish, despite the requirement that the language be studied for at least three years in school. exposure to swedish in everyday life is nonexistent in many parts of the country. an old image of swedish as a language of the elite also adds to the reluctance of many native finnish-speakers to learn and use it, leading to demands for the elimination of the swedish-language requirement in schools. doing so would certainly marginalize the language in finnish society (westerholm 1993: 185–193). other minorities statistical comparisons of the indigenous sami, the romani, and other ‘old’ minority populations in finland are considerably more difficult. instead of legal and institutional arrangements, their minority status and identity has been determined until recently by individual feelings of belonging or descent. furthermore, the majority of these people are native finnish-speakers or they lack an unambiguous mother tongue. as the national record-keeping is based on language, much of the available information is incomplete or varies greatly. the following discussion focuses on the sami and the romani, but similar issues apply to the other minorities as well. these include the russians, the karelians, the ingrians, the turkotatars, and the jews, who have all resided in finland through the time of its independence (see pentikäinen & hiltunen 1995). the sami the number of sami, the nordic countries’ indigenous people, is roughly 6,500 in finland (the sami in finland 2000; cf. stv 2000: 96). the definition of a sami is based on self-identification and linguistic ancestry: a minimum of one parent or grandparent who spoke sami as the first language is required. the number of sami-speakers is considerably lower: less than one half of the finnish sami speak one of the three sami languages spoken in finland. this points to the long-lasting dominance of finnish among the sami. until recently, education in sami was not available, and fig. 1. swedish-speakers in finland and in the capital city helsinki–helsingfors, 1900–1999 (stv 2000: 60; helsinki tilastoina… 2000: 26). 154 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pauliina raento and kai husso entire generations learned to consider the language(s) inferior to finnish. the sami are divided into several linguistically, territorially, and culturally distinctive groups. the sami territory (sápmi) extends across the national boundaries of several countries, from central scandinavia to the kola peninsula. the total sami population is 60,000–100,000 (depending on definition), most of whom live in norway. the finnish sami are speakers of north sami (over 2,000 speakers), inari sami (350), and skolt sami (400) (languages… 2001). they have also been grouped geographically and anthropologically into eastern and western sami, and, according to livehood, into farmers and foresters, and reindeer herders (see yli-kuha 1998; seurujärvi-kari 1997, 2000; tanner 2000; susiluoto 2000; cf. the sami homeland 1998). the current sami territory in finland covers only a fraction of the historical sami hunting and settlement areas that extended to the southern parts of the country in the medieval period. a territory defined as the sami domicile area consists of finland’s three northernmost municipalities (inari, enontekiö, and utsjoki) and the lappi reindeer herding district of sodankylä municipality, covering 35,000 square kilometers (cd-fig. 1). roughly 4,000 sami live within this area. they form the majority in utsjoki, but are in minority elsewhere. an estimated 40 percent of the sami within the domicile area get their income from traditional livelihoods that include reindeer herding, fishing, hunting, gathering, and traditional craftwork. tourism and other services employ most of the rest. an estimated 100,000 reindeer, or about one half of the entire stock in finland, live within the domicile area. 85 percent of these are under sami ownership (stv 2000: 147; the sami in finland 2000). the status and rights of the sami in finnish society improved considerably in the 1990s. the sami language awaited official recognition until 1991. recognition improved its status in education (see languages… 2001). sami cultural autonomy went into effect in the domicile area in the mid-1990s as an outcome of constitutional reforms that guaranteed the minorities’ rights “to maintain and develop their own language and culture” (§14.3, cit. virolainen 1999: 11; see karppi 2000). official announcements, administrative documents, and street and road signs are bilingual in finnish and sami within the domicile area, where sami also serves as a conference language and in religious ceremonies. the ongoing reform of the 1991 legislation regarding language is expected to make finnish and the three sami languages equal within the sami domicile area. the implementation of the new law is scheduled for 2004 (hs 2001c). the sami have elected their own parliament at four-year intervals since 1973. since 1991, the sami representatives have been heard in the finnish parliament over matters that concern them directly. the sami parliament’s visibility and influence have increased. international links of cooperation of the finnish sami include the sami council of the indigenous people in sweden, norway, russia, and finland; the world council of indigenous peoples (wcip); the nordic council; the barents euro-arctic region; and the united nations human rights committee (the sami in finland 2000). the latest addition to nordic cooperation in sami matters is the joining of finland’s national broadcasting company yleisradio to the nordic network of sami-language television news (pohjanpalo 2002). despite the diversification of channels for cultural expression, education, and international cooperation, the de facto rights and equality of the sami remain to be fulfilled (land rights 1997; forrest 1997; karppi 2000). the sami languages are still far from being equal with finnish and swedish. instruction given in sami has increased fivefold since the 1970s, and classes are available throughout the domicile area and in helsinki. the universities of helsinki and oulu and the university of lapland in rovaniemi offer classes as well. the number of pupils who receive their basic education in sami has yet to exceed 600, however (the sami in finland 2000). despite the new opportunities, it is still impossible to receive full education in sami, and instruction suffers from a constant lack of qualified teachers and teaching material (see land rights… 1997). disagreements over land ownership between the sami and the central government have created conflicts, especially since the 1960s, and remain unresolved (harju 2001; tahkolahti 2001). the sami claim that they have historic rights to land, water, and traditional livelihoods that the state’s legal system does not recognize – at the core of the conflict is a disagreement over the definition of territoriality and ownership (forrest 1997; karppi 2000). currently, 90 percent of the lands within the sami domicile area are defined as “public” and only one tenth is privately owned. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 155cultural diversity in finland the situation allows free economic competition and imposes certain restrictions without granting any special rights to the sami within their territory, unlike in sweden and norway where only the sami are allowed to herd reindeer. also contested is the central government’s right to the natural resources within the sami territory. particularly, mining and logging have led to conflict and sami complaints to the un human rights committee, which has taken the minority’s side. currently, then, “the rights of the sami as an indigenous people are not fully realized in conformity with international human rights agreements” (the sami in finland 2000). the romani most of the estimated 10,000 romani in finland live in southern finland (cd-fig. 3). many of them migrated to urban centers in the 1960s, when their traditional sources of income were becoming obsolete in the structural transition of the finnish countryside. during the past couple of decades, the romani population in helsinki and its immediate vicinity has increased significantly so that roughly one-fifth of the entire romani population now lives in the capital city. another 3,000 finnish-speaking romani live in sweden (grönfors 1981, 1995; välimäki 1995; paulus 1996; finland’s romani… 2000; cf. karjalainen 1981: 25). the romani have been at the bottom of the social pecking order of finnish society since their arrival in the country in the sixteenth century. the finnish nation-building aspirations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deepened the minority’s centuries-long marginalization. the first governmental attempt to address the poverty and social ill-being of this group was the advisory board on gipsy affairs in 1956 under the ministry of social affairs and health. its impact was limited or even negative, as it saw “the problem children of finnish society” (waris 1952: 24, cit. virolainen 1999: 7) as a burden and their problems as self-induced. the 1960s brought new publicity and representative organizations to the romani in the context of international social and political awareness and the emerging welfare state in finland. new concerns regarding equality and social justice informed the 1968 reorganization of the notorious board, now called the advisory board on romani affairs in finland (finland’s romani… 2000). the new climate was reflected in the 1970s’ legislation that included a ban on discrimination (1970) and improvements of the living conditions of the minority (1975). these measures were passive in nature, however, and opened no channels to increase romani participation in matters that concerned them directly. the large structural problems thus remained intact (paulus 1996; virolainen 1999: 7–10). only in the 1990s did the romani voice begin to be heard in decision-making, emphasizing the focus on education, employment, cultural awareness, and tolerance in the context of legal progress. an education unit for the romani people was established under the national board of education in 1994 (languages… 2001). the most important legislative reform was the 1995 constitutional amendment that also gave the romani “the right to maintain and develop their own language and culture” (§14.3, cit. virolainen 1999: 11; see finland’s romani… 2000). among the first steps of implementation was the creation of four regional romani councils to promote regional and local cooperation between the population groups (cd-fig. 3). other significant legal arrangements included the decision to work towards tolerance and prevention of racism (1997) and the 1998 implementation of the european resolution regarding the protection of national minorities. the romani language was included in the responsibilities of the research institute for the languages of finland regarding linguistic research, maintenance, and development, in 1997 (virolainen 1999: 11; finland’s romani… 2000; languages… 2001). these measures have not had an equal impact across the romani population. the initial results vary from one region to another, reflecting local conditions and characteristics of the minority’s sub-segments. marginalization has even accelerated outside the southern urban areas. increasing competition in the housing markets in the city of oulu, for example, has left entire romani families homeless. this has contributed to the circle of marginalization by complicating the schooling of children. overall, school attendance of romani children has not improved as expected (see pihlaja 2001). gaps in education narrow these children’s future employment opportunities, already limited by the difficult context of prejudice and discrimination. criminal activity by some members of the minority has further enhanced stereotypes and prejudices, often labeling the entire group (virolainen 1999: 5; pirttilahti 2000). in 156 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pauliina raento and kai husso fact, the status of the romani as the “most hated” population group in finland was replaced only recently – by the somalis (lanas cavada 1998: 13). in absolute terms, the romani remain among the groups looked upon most negatively in finnish society. discrimination still forms a part of the romani everyday in finland, and support from finnish law enforcement has often not been forthcoming (grönfors 1979; finland’s romani… 2000). another challenge regarding schooling is the role of the romani language in education. the language was a central element of cohesion among the minority community in the nineteenth century (grönfors 1981). without recognition and due to the romani marginalization in finnish society, the language’s vitality declined rapidly in the context of finnish nation-building. it became impoverished, as it was not learned as the first language. in the end of the 1980s, the increased concern regarding the future of the language brought romani to elementary schools in helsinki and kuopio. the pupils numbered roughly 250 in 1995. instruction is now available in romani, but it suffers from a chronic lack of textbooks and other material. an estimated one third of the adult romani knows the language. the improved legal status of the language has enhanced romani identity. a further emphasis on the welfare of the language in education is seen as a way to improve the relationship between the minority and the majority-dominated educational institutions (suonoja & lindberg 1999; finland’s romani… 2000; languages… 2001). the legacy of longterm structural violence is difficult to overcome, however. regional and religious variety the finnish majority culture contains several regionally distinctive patterns, the most notable of which are the contrasts between the east and the west and the urban and rural areas (vuorela 1976; talve 1990: 395–412; virtanen 1991: 61–65). much of this variation owes to different local conditions and to external influences and contacts. the finnish language is divided between dialectic hearths, each of which is easily recognizable in everyday speech (cd-fig. 1) (see kettunen 1999). in fact, the finnish language was not normalized and unified into a standard literary language until the 1950s. recently, regional differences of the vernacular finnish, together with foodways, have been highlighted in the (re)construction of provincial identities and traditions. dozens of cookbooks and ‘translations’ of popular comic books into regional dialects illustrate this revival (languages… 2001; raento & raento 2001). religion christian influence first arrived in finland roughly one thousand years ago through the commercial route between novgorod in the east and sweden in the west. the lutheran reformation in the swedish empire brought the state into union with the church. during russian rule, the lutheran church maintained its status in finland despite the orthodox czar. the orthodox church was the only other congregation in the country at that time. protestant minorities (baptists, methodists, and adventists, among others) were allowed to organize in 1889. since then, finland’s religious landscape has continued to diversify. the first jewish and islamic congregations were formed in the late nineteenth century, and pentecostals, jehova’s witnesses, and mormons followed in the early twentieth century. liberty of faith in independent finland was guaranteed by law in 1923. the state became non-affiliated, but the lutheran and the orthodox churches maintained their special status within the state and their right to taxation. the number of congregations has increased rapidly since the 1960s, particularly among urban populations and the youth (heino 1991: 17–19). today’s finland is a secular country. religion is usually considered a private matter and confined to the ceremonies of the life course, but its institutional role is maintained in the military and schools. in schools, christianity forms a part of the curriculum of those children who are members of the lutheran national church. 85 percent of the population belongs to this church, but secularization is on the rise: the national church membership has declined from 90 percent in 1980. the population not registered in any religious community increased from 8 percent in 1980 to almost 13 percent in 1999 (stv 2000: 93). the religious landscape varies regionally. the historic core area of finland’s largest religious minority, the 55,300 greek orthodox (1999), is in eastern finland, particularly karelia (fig. 2) (raivo 1996, 1997; stv 2000: 93). this population has become increasingly urban, however, and one third of the entire congregation now lives fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 157cultural diversity in finland in the helsinki parish (suomen ortodoksinen… 2000; cf. helsingin väestö… 2000: 20). the largest protestant minority in the country is the free church in finland, with 13,400 members in 1999 (stv 2000: 93). the most extreme example of regional concentration is supplicationism in a small area on the west coast (cd-fig. 4). the urban centers in the south represent the most diverse religious landscape, although religion’s visibility in daily landscapes remains low fig. 2. the orthodox church in finland (ortodoksisiin… 1999; suomen ortodoksinen… 2000; väestönmuutostietoja… 2000). 158 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pauliina raento and kai husso here as well. the roman catholic (7,000), jewish (1,200), and islamic (1,100) parishes are located in helsinki, turku, and tampere (stv 2000: 93). the practitioners of eastern and ‘new’ religions are notably urban as well. the growing number of foreign citizens adds to the heterogeneity. particularly the number of muslims has grown considerably in recent years. the southern urban centers are also more secular than the rest of the country. secularization and privatization of religion are particularly notable in helsinki. one-fourth of the capital city’s population is not affiliated with any religious community (helsingin väestö… 2000: 20). food and foodways regional differences of food and foodways are notable on the map of finnish culture (cd-fig. 5). the climatic and topographic conditions between different parts of the country and historical external influences have given several regions a distinct cuisine that employs different ingredients and cooking methods. physical geography has contributed to a north–south division of cuisine by determining what can be cultivated. on the coast and in the lake region, fish has been a particularly prominent ingredient of meals. in the climatically harsh north, reindeer meat has accompanied fish in the diet, whereas many still consider reindeer a specialty elsewhere in the country. cultural influences from russia and sweden dominate the differences between the east and the west. development of distinct oven types, for example, encouraged a diverse baking culture in the east, whereas the westerners favored grilling over open fire. the eastern and the western tastes also stand apart: the former is considerably more sour than the sweeter west. the texture and flavor of rye bread and buttermilk exemplify the differences (uusivirta 1998: 6–16). recently, food and foodways have gained considerable prominence in regional and local identity construction and maintenance across the country. the culinary landscape of helsinki and other urban centers is changing rapidly due to immigration and the increasingly frequent world travel of the finns. the growing number of ‘ethnic’ food markets and the broadening selection of fruit and other ingredients in the supermarkets reflect the increasing diversity (cd-fig. 6a & 6b). most of helsinki’s ‘ethnic’ restaurants are located in the downtown area and along the main arteries in its vicinity. the most popular are chinese restaurants and diverse lunch establishments that serve pizza, kebab, and salads (cd-fig. 7a & 7b). the definition and content of ethnicity remains complicated, as menus have been modified strongly to meet the finnish mainstream taste, and as some establishments are merely themed along ethno-regional lines. whereas many ‘mexican’ restaurants serve globally acknowledged, simplistic mexicanstyle fast food, some of helsinki’s russian restaurants, for example, approach their selection more ‘seriously’. when compared to the size of each cultural group, the somali and vietnamese kitchens are underrepresented. ‘ethnic’ restaurants are also notably absent from those eastern suburbs where foreign nationals represent the highest proportion of the residents. the patterns suggest that whereas the urban natives are gradually expanding their culinary experiences, many immigrants regard the home as the primary space of identity maintenance (raento & raento 2001: 26–29). immigration finland remained relatively isolated from international immigration until recently (korkiasaari & söderling 1998: 14). the reasons included the country’s geographical location and its non-colonialist history. its labor pool was relatively selfsufficient due to the settlement of over half a million people from the territories ceded over to the soviet union after world war ii. finland’s cautious relationship with this powerful neighbor shaped the country’s immigration and refugee policies during the post-war decades. the approach was passive and ad hoc in nature and seen as strictly a national matter, which kept the issue outside of the otherwise intimate sphere of nordic cooperation (salmio 2000: 43–46). the number of foreign citizens in finland remained low until the 1990s and the country lacked clearly defined immigration and refugee policies. the number of foreigners in finland began to grow towards the end of the 1980s (fig. 3). the figures that had remained around 10,000 since the 1950s had risen to over 20,000 by 1989 (svt 1996: 7, 34). the growth accelerated significantly in the early 1990s, when finland began to adopt more receptive and coherent policies. behind this change were the considerable changes in international political and economic environment: the collapse of the soviet union, finland’s membership in the european union (1995), and fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 159cultural diversity in finland accelerated migration and communication worldwide had a marked impact at the national level. in the end of 1999, the 87,700 foreign citizens in finland comprised 1.7 percent of the total population (stv 2000: 86). the foreign nationals were centered in the southern parts of the country, urban centers, and border regions (cd-fig. 8). 16,400 individuals had immigrated to the country as refugees (stv 1999: 88, 130). by the end of 2000, the total number of foreigners had reached 91,000 (1.8%) and the number of refugees had risen to 18,500 (valtavaara 2001). despite the notable growth in the finnish context, these figures remain among the lowest in the european union. most of the foreign nationals in finland originate from europe (67%) (1999). 18 percent are from asia and 9 percent from africa. the 32,200 citizens of the former soviet republics form the largest single group. almost 60 percent of them are from russia and one-third from estonia. other significant groups include the swedes (7,800), the somalis (4,400), the germans, and the british (both at 2,200). refugees from former yugoslavia number 3,400 (stv 2000: 86). the most common foreign languages spoken in finland are russian (25,700 native speakers), estonian (10,000), english (6,800), somali (6,300), and arabic (4,600) (stv 2000: 94). in the case of some groups, a comparison of the citizenship statistics with those of native language portrays a more comprehensive image of each community. this is clearly the case of the somalis. another illustrative example is the vietnamese, the first of whom arrived in finland as refugees in 1979. in the end of 1999, there were roughly 1,800 citizens of vietnam in finland, but almost 3,500 vietnamese-speakers (stv 2000: 86, 94). this shows that many foreign-born individuals have obtained a finnish passport (fig. 4). it suggests also that language is a key element in the maintenance of a sense of community and distinct identity in finnish society (oinonen 1999). that the number of finnish citizens who have been born abroad has risen from less than 40,000 in 1980 to over 131,000 in 1999 reflects both the increasing immigration and the increased mobility of the finns born in finland (stv 2000: 90; cf. svt 1996). diversifying helsinki helsinki is the most diverse city in finland linguistically, culturally, and ethnically. in the late nineteenth century, 15 percent of the city’s residents had been born abroad, but their proportion had declined to 2 percent by the 1960s and did not exceed this figure until the 1990s. in 1900, the largest group of foreign citizens in helsinki was the russians (75% of all foreigners), many of whom were soldiers or merchants. sixty years later, the swedes had become the largest single group (30% in 1960 and 15% in 1985) (helsinki tilastoina… 2000: 26–28). today’s helsinki is the capital city of all the discussed immigrant groups in absolute numbers. the new diversity owes to both international and fig. 3. foreigners in finland, 1976–2000 (stv 1999: 88, 2000: 86; valtavaara 2001). fig. 4. new finnish citizens, 1965–1999 (stv 1999: 127, 2000: 131). 160 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pauliina raento and kai husso domestic migration. the number of foreign citizens had risen to roughly 5,600 by 1990 (1.2% of the city’s population), compared to 3,500 (0.7%) ten years earlier. by 2000, this number had increased to almost 26,000, or 4.7 percent of the city’s population. these people carried 144 different passports (helsingin väestö… 2000). roughly one half of the foreigners who reside in helsinki are eastern european or former soviet nationals. westerners comprise one-fifth of the population. the rest are primarily from africa and asia. the largest single groups are russians (4,600 in the beginning of 2000), estonians (4,000), somalis (2,100), swedes (1,100), and u. s. americans (800). in addition, there are roughly 10,000 foreign-born finnish citizens in helsinki. the most frequently spoken foreign languages are russian, estonian, somali, english, and arabic (helsingin väestö… 2000: 114, 117–119, 129) (cd-fig. 9). the largest concentration of both foreign nationals and speakers of foreign languages is in the eastern neighborhoods of helsinki (fig. 5). some demographic characteristics of the immigrant population in helsinki stand in sharp contrast to the finnishand swedish-speakers, reflecting similar trends nationwide. the gender division is relatively even in each of the three groups (cdfig. 10). overall, women dominate slightly. a comparison of the immigrants by continent reveals a slight dominance of men among africans (58%) and north americans (62%). extending the examination to the national level shows notable fig. 5. finnish-speakers, swedish-speakers, and speakers of other languages in helsinki, in 1999 (helsinki alueittain 2000; cf. raento & husso 1999: 188). fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 161cultural diversity in finland contrasts between the groups. whereas women dominate among the estonians and the russians (58%), they are clearly underrepresented among the european union nationals, of whom only onethird is female. explanations of the differences may include differences in motives for migration, cultural backgrounds, and employment patterns in finnish society. the immigrant population is considerably younger than the rest of helsinki residents (cdfig. 9 & 10). this reflects immigrant history, cultural and religious values, and available employment opportunities – especially given that many recent immigrants from the western countries have come to finland to work. the immigrants differ notably from the swedish-speakers, of whom over 18 percent have reached their sixtyfifth birthday. at the other extreme are the somalis, among whom this age cohort represents less than one percent of the population (cd-fig. 9). almost one half of the somali population is 15 years of age or younger, whereas this age group represents less than 15 percent of the swedishspeakers in helsinki (helsingin väestö… 2000: 129). these differences of age and gender can also be interpreted as indicators of success or hardship in the light of employment statistics (cd-fig. 11). the unemployment rate of the foreign nationals in finland decreased throughout the 1990s, being over one half in 1994 and one-third in 2001. there were considerable differences between population groups. whereas unemployment among the western europeans and the north americans is below 10 percent and thus close to the national average, the rate still reaches 60 percent among the iraqi, the irani, the somalis, and the vietnamese (nieminen 1999: 17; stv 1999: 59; valtavaara 2001; tervola 2001). behind these differences are differences in education and linguistic skills, both related to the type of employment (in high-tech companies command of english may be enough) and the attitudes and linguistic skills of the majority society. employment opportunities are more abundant in the helsinki area, but the same trends apply in the capital as elsewhere. the differences suggest that a dual labor market is emerging among finland’s immigrant population. at one end are the highly educated westerners that are often invited to join the finnish work force because of their special skills. at the other end, there is a growing group of people with limited educational background, linguistic skills, and work experience who have emigrated from eastern europe or the third world, often as refugees (jaakkola 2000). because many of these people are young – either at school or in the prime working age – the difficulty of integration is underscored further. conclusion the cultural geography of finland is being reshuffled. the increasing cultural and demographic exchange and internationalization in the 1990s have led to recognition of finland’s cultural heterogeneity. a new sensitivity and new policy measures, aimed at accommodating an increasingly heterogeneous population and at taking into account considerable differences among the groups, have emerged. there has been a notable upsurge of new policies towards both the old and the new minorities at the national, regional, and local levels. particular foci have been the cultural and linguistic rights of the neglected ‘old’ minority groups, immigration and refugee policy, and housing, education, employment, and cultural accommodation that apply to all minorities in finland. simultaneously, there has been a revived interest in the majority culture’s folk traditions. for centuries, the country has been more heterogeneous than the finnish nation-builders have admitted, but the old, state-promoted perception of homogeneity and subsequent attitudes are difficult to overcome. recognition and respect of cultural difference and international exchange continue to be a novelty for much of the finnishspeaking, lutheran, and white majority population. whereas the majority culture’s regional differences are approached as colorful and harmless curiosities, more ‘exotic’ difference is often treated with suspicion. as a counter-reaction to new developments, signs of negative attitudes towards diversification have emerged among the majority population (dahlgren 1996; hs 2001a, 2001b), making discrimination, racism, and cultural conflict topics of public debate. attitudes towards minorities and immigration and refugee policies seem to vary regionally according to such elements as political worldview, degree of urbanization, age, level of education, and exposure and experience regarding different cultures and lifestyles (jaakkola 1999). many continue to be isolated from the cultural change in their quotidian life. integration and assimilation between the ma162 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pauliina raento and kai husso jority population and the old and the new minorities therefore vary considerably in degree from place to place. much of the cross-cultural interaction and the change of demographic and ethno-cultural landscapes remain urban phenomena that mostly attract the educated and the young. also complicating the minorities’ integration into the mainstream society and the implementation of the new policies are disagreements within the minority groups themselves. these disagreements vary from political worldviews to generational, gender-related, and cultural differences in relation to the integration process. in some cases, the internal fragmentation of the groups has weakened their possibilities to influence the society (see lanas cavada 1998), which may lead to new forms and patterns of marginalization. this poses an additional challenge to the authorities who need to recognize the heterogeneity within their ‘minority subjects’ themselves. it is thus clear that finnish society is currently facing a rapid, significant, and perhaps somewhat unpredictable change of demographics, culture, and value structures that is only taking its first steps. references aitamurto m (2001). ruotsinkieliset kunnat suomenkielistyvät. helsingin sanomat 12 august 2001, a6. dahlgren t (ed) (1996). vähemmistöt ja niiden syrjintä suomessa. ihmisoikeusliiton julkaisuja 4. die verteilung der schwedischsprechenden und der finnishsprechenden bevölkerung in schwedishösterbotten 1950 1:400 000. national board of survey, helsinki 1960. die verteilung der schwedischsprechenden und der finnishsprechenden bevölkerung im südlichen finnland 1950 1:400 000. national board of survey, helsinki 1960. dressler f, r schröder & b bock-schröder (1994). ahvenanmaa. otava, helsinki. finland’s romani people (2000). ministry of social affairs and health. 15 march 2001. <www.vn.fi/ stm/english/pao/publicat/roma> forrest s (1997). territoriality and state-sami relations. 15 march 2001. <http://borealis.lib/ uconn.edu/arcticcircle/historyculture/sami/ samisf.html> grönfors m (1979). ethnic minorities and deviance: the relationship between finnish gypsies and the police. university of helsinki sociology of law series 1. grönfors m (1981). suomen mustalaiskansa. wsoy, porvoo. grönfors m (1995). finnish rom. a forgotten cultural group. in pentikäinen j & m hiltunen (eds). cultural minorities in finland, 147–162. 2nd rev. ed. finnish national commission for unesco, helsinki. harju j (2001). saamelaisten oikeus käyttömaihin oli virallista vielä 1700-luvulla. helsingin sanomat 9 august 2001, a9. heino h (1991). uskonnolliset yhteisöt. in sairinen r (ed). atlas of finland, folio 312–323: organizations and civic activities, 17–20. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. helin e (ed) (1981). atlas of finland, folio 210: population. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. helsingin väestö vuodenvaihteessa 1999/2000 ja väestönmuutokset vuonna 1999 (2000). helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, tilastoja 2000: 13. helsinki alueittain (2000). helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus. 14 january 2001. <www.hel.fi/tietokeskus/helsinkialueittain2000/peruspiirit.htm> helsinki tilastoina 1800-luvulta nykypäivään (2000). helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, tilastoja 2000: 15. hs 2001a = pitserian ikkunat kivitettiin hajalle joensuussa. helsingin sanomat 12 august 2001, a6. hs 2001b = tietämättömyys ja sosiaalinen paine lisäävät nuorten rasistisia asenteita. helsingin sanomat 15 september 2001, a11. hs 2001c = uusi saamen kielilaki takaa virkavapaan kieliopintoihin. helsingin sanomat 16 december 2001, a10. jaakkola m (1999). maahanmuutto ja etniset asenteet. suomalaisten suhtautuminen maahanmuuttajiin 1987–1999. työministeriö, työpoliittinen tutkimus 213. jaakkola t (2000). maahanmuuttajat ja etniset vähemmistöt työhönotossa ja työelämässä. työministeriö, työpoliittinen tutkimus 218. jansson j-m (1994). helsingfors: tre perspektiv. in adress: helsingfors, 47–62. schildts, helsingfors. jasinskaja-lahti i & k liebkind (1997). maahanmuuttajien sopeutuminen pääkaupunkiseudulla: sosiaalipsykologinen näkökulma (summary: the adaptation of immigrants in the helsinki area). helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus 1997: 9. karjalainen p (1981). etniset vähemmistöt. in helin e (ed). atlas of finland, folio 210: population, 24–26. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. karppi k (2000). articulated spaces. acta universitatis tamperensis 721. kettunen l (1999). suomen murteet. murrekartasto. 5th ed. suomen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 188. korkiasaari j & i söderling (1998). finland: from a country of emigration into a country of immigration. in söderling i (ed). a changing pattern of migration in finland and its surroundings. publications of the population research institute, series d 32/1998, 7–28. fennia 180: 1–2 (2002) 163cultural diversity in finland lanas cavada s (1998). kesä kaikilla. suomen kuvalehti 29/98, 12–17. land rights, linguistic rights, and cultural autonomy for the finnish sami people (1997). the finnish sami parliament. 15 march 2001. <http:// b o r e a l i s . l i b . u c o n n . e d u / a rc t i c c i r c l e / s e e j / sami1.html> reprinted from indigenous affairs 33: 4 (1997). languages of finland (2001). research institute for the languages of finland. 19 march 2001. <http:/ /kotus.fi/inenglish> liebkind k (1994). maahanmuuttajat. gaudeamus, helsinki. liebkind k (2000). monikulttuurinen suomi. gaudeamus, helsinki. lounela p (1994). finland’s romani people. ministry of social affairs and health, brochures 1994: 2. löytönen m & l kolbe (eds) (1999). suomi: maa, kansa, kulttuurit. sks, helsinki. matinheikki-kokko k (1997). challenges of working in a cross-cultural environment: principles and practice of refugee settlement in finland. jyväskylä studies in education, psychology and social research 131. nieminen m (1999). ulkomaalaiset suomessa. tietoaika 7/99, 16–17. oinonen l (1999). vietnamilaisia, suomalaisia vai suomenvietnamilaisia? pääkaupunkiseudun vietnamilaisten etnisyys ja identiteetti 1990-luvulla. väestöliitto, väestöntutkimuslaitos, katsauksia e 6. oksanen k (2001). koulukiista kuumentaa kieliryhmien välejä sipoossa. helsingin sanomat 12 november 2001, b3. ortodoksisiin yhdyskuntiin kuuluvat kunnittain 31.12.1999 (1999). unpublished statistics on finland’s orthodox population in 1999, by municipality. statistics finland, helsinki. paulus i (1996). romaniväestön asuntotilanne 1990luvun puolivälissä. suomen ympäristö 46. pentikäinen j & m hiltunen (1995). cultural minorities in finland. 2nd rev. ed. finnish national commission for unesco, helsinki. pihlaja j (2001). kulttuurierot haittaavat romanien koulunkäyntiä. helsingin sanomat 22 march 2001, a13. pirttilahti m (2000). romanikulttuurin erityispiirteet asumisessa. ympäristöopas 77. pitkänen m & a jaakkola (eds) (1997). ingrians in municipalities. association of finnish local authorities, helsinki. pohjanpalo o (2002). saamenkieliset tv-uutiset vihdoin suomen televisioon. helsingin sanomat 8 january 2002, a9. raento p & k husso (1999). kohti monikulttuurista yhteiskuntaa. in westerholm j & p raento (eds). suomen kartasto, 184–189. suomen maantieteellinen seura & wsoy, helsinki. raento t & p raento (2001). johdatus ruoan maantieteeseen (abstract: the geography of food: an introduction). terra 113, 17–33. raivo pj (1996). maiseman kulttuurinen transformaatio. ortodoksinen kirkko suomalaisessa kulttuurimaisemassa. nordia geographical publications 25: 1. raivo pj (1997). the limits of tolerance: the orthodox milieu as an element in the finnish landscape. journal of historical geography 23, 327– 339. sairinen r (1991). atlas of finland, folio 321–323: organizations and civic activities. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. salmio t (2000). kansainvälisen järjestelmän muutokset heijastuvat suomen maahanmuuttoja pakolaispolitiikkaan. työpoliittinen aikakauskirja 2/ 2000, 42–49. the sami homeland (1998). boreale. 15 march 2001. <http://www.itv.se/boreale/laante.htm> the sami in finland (2000). virtual finland. 15 march 2001. <http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/saameng.html> sandlund t (1985). suomenruotsalaiset. in valkonen t (ed). suomalaiset, 271–290. wsoy, juva. seppälä m (1996). inkerinsuomalaisten paluumuuttajien sopeutuminen. helsingin kaupunki, sosiaalivirasto, sarja a 1996: 6. seurujärvi-kari i (1997). the sámi: the indigenous people of northernmost europe. european languages 5. seurujärvi-kari i (ed) (2000). beaivvi mánát: saamelaisten juuret ja nykyaika. sks, helsinki. söderling i (1997). maahanmuuttoasenteet ja elämänhallinta. väestöntutkimuslaitos, väestöliitto d 30. söderling i (ed) (1998). a changing pattern of migration in finland and its surroundings. publications of the population research institute, series d 32/1998. stv 1999 = statistical yearbook of finland 1999 (1999). statistics finland, helsinki. stv 2000 = statistical yearbook of finland 2000 (2000). statistics finland, helsinki. suomen ortodoksinen kirkko (2000). the orthodox church in finland. 9 march 2001. <www.ort.fi> suonoja k & v lindberg (1999). romanipolitiikan strategiat. sosiaalija terveysministeriön selvityksiä 1999: 9. susiluoto p (2000). suomen ajan ihmismaantiedettä petsamosta. in tanner v: ihmismaantieteellisiä tutkimuksia petsamon seudulta. i kolttalappalaiset. ed. p susiluoto. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 780, 9–31. svt 1996 = aliens and international migration 1994. official statistics of finland, population 1996: 6. statistics finland, helsinki. tahkolahti j (2001). saamelaiset peräävät edelleen valtion maiden isännyyttä. helsingin sanomat 4 december 2001, a7. talve i (1990). suomen kansankulttuuri. 3rd rev. ed. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 514. 164 fennia 180: 1–2 (2002)pauliina raento and kai husso tanner v (2000). ihmismaantieteellisiä tutkimuksia petsamon seudulta. i kolttalappalaiset. ed. p susiluoto. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 780. tervola m (2001). ikääntyvä suomi tarvitsee siirtolaisia. helsingin sanomat 12 august 2001, e1. uusivirta h (1998). suomalaisen ruokaperinteen keittokirja. 4th ed. wsoy, porvoo. väestönmuutostietoja ja väestötietoja alueittain 1980–1999 (2000). statistics finland. 13 march 2001. <http://statfin.stat.fi/statweb/> välimäki s (1995). romanivanhusten elinolot suomessa -projektin väliraportti 1.3.–31.12.1995. keski-suomen lääninhallitus, jyväskylä. valtavaara m (2001). maahanmuuttajien työttömyys laski jo 33,5 prosenttiin. helsingin sanomat 22 april 2001, a6. virolainen k (1999). romaniväestön osallistumisen mahdollisuudet aluehallinnossa. sosiaalija terveysministeriö, monisteita 1999: 1. virtanen l (1991). suomalainen kansanperinne. 2nd ed. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran toimituksia 471. vuorela t (ed) (1976). suomen kansankulttuurin kartasto 1. sks, porvoo. waris h (1952). suomalaisen yhteiskunnan rakenne. 2nd ed. otava, helsinki. westerholm j (1993). onko suomessa regionalismia? in raento p (ed). yhdessä erikseen, 177–196. gaudeamus, helsinki. westerholm j (1996). suomenruotsalaisten pääkaupunki (abstract: the capital of the swedish-speaking population in finland). terra 108, 120–130. yli-kuha k (1998). the sámi. 15 march 2001. <http:/ /sq.sqc.fi/~ylikuka/scnordic/sami/> untitled information society, citizens and everyday life: does the internet make a difference in spatial practices? tommi inkinen inkinen, tommi (2003). information society, citizens and everyday life: does the internet make a difference in spatial practices? fennia 181: 1, pp. 25–33, helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the essence of the information society has been under a considerable debate during the last decade. the argumentation concerns the critique of technological determinism and the recognition of political, economic, social and cultural factors that underlie the development. in academic discourse, there has been a noticeable change from engineering based rhetoric towards more humanistic themes and a more qualitative way of speaking about the issue. also geographical dimensions, mainly related to the urban research and applied urban planning, have emerged. in this paper the essence of the information society is analysed from a perspective of human and cultural geography. the concept of information society is being treated as a subjective construction and it can be conceptualised as a triad. firstly, it is a tool as such, and the reference is on material symbols representing the tech-sphere of today. this includes actual devices such as computers and mobile telephones and their integrated applications. secondly, the information society is a set of practices. this refers to everyday routines that are rarely questioned or critically explored. the most common examples of this are e-banking and e-shopping. finally, the information society is an experience. this theme is characterised by subjective histories, individual contexts and cultural backgrounds. all these dimensions have implications on environment and social conditions of human life. this framework is being used as a tool to evaluate empirical data based on extensive survey conducted in finland in the year 2001. the sample size was 2750 questionnaires of which 1176 were received back. tommi inkinen, information society institute, university of tampere, fin-33014 finland. e-mail: tommi.inkinen@uta.fi. ms received 9 january 2003. introduction computerisation is a symbol of the informational society. computer systems comprise one of the most distinctive and complex technologies of the late 20th century. many of our transactions with organisations are mediated by computers as reflected in payments, rents, bank transfers, etc. however, not only has the economic side of the society been transformed, but also social interaction and mental travelling through enhanced mediated network systems. the debates about the social and environmental implications of information and communication technologies (icts) are scattered throughout diverse fields and can be found in texts ranging from humanistic geography (e.g., turkle 1995; morse 1998; crang et al. 1999) to economic decision-making and business (e.g., kalling 1999; shapiro & varian 1999). the purpose of this article is to evaluate some ideas and issues through which the computerised information society can be assessed. these ideas will finally have effects on visible reality: thus, they are spatial (spatiality is conceptualised broadly here). it includes the recognition of human-nature interaction and the aspect of lived social interaction. there are three essential questions. first, is there a “common” experience of the information society among the respondents? second, will different forms of “mobile media” and the internet change practices in physical movement? third, are these technologies having an im26 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi inkinen pact on the everyday life of citizens? the questions are explored with the data obtained from an extensive survey study conducted in finland 2001. a brief outlook of issues analyses regarding the information society the information society is a concept of a variety of meanings. in academic discourse, the information society has commonly been discussed with reference to economic activity and the significance of knowledge in production processes (e.g., crang 2000; wilson & corey 2000; karvonen 2001; castells & himanen 2002; kellerman 2002; may 2002). during the 1990s, mainly due to the commercialisation of the internet and the mass production of mobile phones, the information society became associated with information and communication technologies. however, ordinary citizens are often forgotten in the discourse concerning the information society. information society should, after all, be a concept used to describe present time and thus contemporary society – and should not be treated as particular setting or segment of a society. the information society has also gained the interest of geographers. kellerman (2002) has extensively analysed concepts related to information and communication technologies and geographical dimensions of the information society. kellerman discusses the geographies and geographical studies assessing the dimensions of information, knowledge, icts and the internet in particular. according to him (2002: 30): “information is viewed as an abstract object… as an object it has its own geography. cyberspace constitutes a phenomenon of virtual space, consisting of internet information and its users. information, on the other hand, enjoys geographical dimensions, spaces and aspects beyond cyberspace. electronic information is produced in real places, and used in real places as well… information is an economic as well as social product, produced and manipulated in a similar way to other resources and products… this seemingly non-spatial dimension of information has received a spatial accent with the emergence of the world wide web, in which geographical language has become a major tool for the structuring, organization and use of cyberspace.” the citation comprises essential points of the geography of the information society. especially networking has been adopted as one of the lead processes made possible by the new innovations in communication technologies. in this regard, manuel castells has presented so far the most extensive theoretical synthesis about the character of the ongoing societal transformation. castells’ approach is founded on macro-level analyses and is strongly associated with the economic activities in the global context. the essential argument is that in the current situation, networked societies are interacting with others through global city nodes (also graham & marvin 1996). this characterises the development in which (post)modern capitalist societies are moving towards a new “informational” mode of production. this transition has had its origins in the crisis of fordist accumulation, and it has become possible because of major technological breakthroughs in the processing of information. economic globalisation has ensured that the new trends will be spreading fast all over the world and profits will increasingly be based upon the production of a new knowledge. modern firms turn into knowledge-producing organisations that operate and establish networks on a worldwide scale (see castells 1996; 1997; 1998; 2001). the core essence of the “informational mode of development”, as presented by castells (1996), can be characterised through five factors. first, information has to be seen as a product and a resource. information is something with value and thus a commodity. second, the technology is allpervasive in its essence. we all are living our lives with technologies and technology is an essential part of all segments of society and the future developments. the third characteristic is the logic of networking, which is an essential feature of modern information technology. the fourth factor is the further growing flexibility in the societal structures. hierarchical organisations are losing ground to flexible models of management and production. this takes place not only in corporations but also in everyday life: work and leisure time are intertwining and fragmented modes of performing actions are becoming increasingly popular. finally, technological systems are convergent and integrative. already existing systems are integrated into the new ones and finally their separation will be impossible (ahlqvist 1999:3). for the purpose of this paper, castells’ fourth characterisation is the most interesting. however, fennia 181: 1 (2003) 27information society, citizens and everyday life:… components from all definitions are to be found in the opinions written by the respondents. simultaneously with the “informationalisation” process modern societies are undergoing other important changes. new developments can be seen, for instance, in the area of work, in the spatial organisation of modern societies, in the everyday lives of citizens and in the role and functioning of governments. significant changes are experienced also in the ways in which individuals are building their own personal identities and mobilising themselves politically (holmes 1997; may 2002). common to all these definitions is the emphasis on the role of information and knowledge and its role as resource or product. this includes the central role of information and communication technologies and the growing flexibility in the structures of economy with the growth of the service sector and proportion of “knowledge workers”. the changing role of work and the concept of knowledge as its main component are crucial when the conceptualisation of the information society evolves. as a matter of fact, the most important transformation deals with the increasing the knowledge-intensiveness of human life. in this process, the development of the new icts provides only the necessary tools for the change, and in this respect it might be appropriate to use the concept “knowledge society” (webster 2002: 29). electronic communications and experienced spaces the theorisation related to space is one of the major intellectual challenges in the evaluation of electronic representations. i will assess these in relation to the use of public spaces and experienced notions of represented environments. the following themes present arguments studied with the structured questions in the empirical part. many authors have explored the dualistic notion that the e-space has both public and private tendencies (virilio 1994: 64; jones 1995: 13; fernback 1997: 39; poster 1997: 217). for example, actions related to privacy, intimacy and personal desires, such as personal email communication, seeking a potential life-mate on the net and chat communications are generally regarded as private. conversely, the internet is often regarded as a freely accessible realm and, due to this characteristic, as a public space. however, the internet is an “information super highway” only in the wealthy and highly industrialised countries in terms of transaction volumes and concentration of hosts (e.g., www.mids.org). in addition, the electronic or digital divide within industrialised countries is also evident. this is noticeable on the socio-economic scale between both humans and regions. the virtual space is clearly not a space for all inhabitants even in nordic information societies. the experience of space refers to the feeling generated through the virtual representation. interaction, on the other hand, refers to the social interaction within the network. this interactivity, based on social communication, is thus interwoven with the conception of difference, referring to the space of otherness – what and where we are not. the construction of internet chat identity, for example, can be argued to be a subjective experience of space and is always a contextualised process involving cultural, environmental, and educational implications. negative and unwanted processes of harassment and oppression can also be identified in the network environment (e.g., mackinnon 1997). people similar to each other tend to communicate more eagerly with each other than with those who are misfits. new and reproduced patterns of social relations are evident in cyberspace as the different tendencies to experience virtual space result in the formation of internet or cyber-behaviour. the connection can be established between the real-world essence of the usage location, resulting from the special characteristics of the location (material) and personal desires and the goals of the end-user (social), and internet forums of communication such as chat-rooms and irc. the public–private theorisation is essential in the consideration of interactions between the real world context and the internet usage content. they are interwoven, and this leads to the recognition of the fact that change in one has consequences for the other (jensen 1990: 71–72). in this regard public control over the internet is important, as pointed out by jones (1995). public interests in the form of control and jurisdiction are experiencing both convergence and divergence with private interests, in areas such as, freedom of speech, intellectual property, copyrights and self-expression. in terms of the internet policy and control, the balance between individual, public and corporate interests is in still an open question. the experience of space and, in broader sense, reality is essentially contextual. linguistic narra28 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi inkinen tives and construction processes of reality through language always include a major intellectual and philosophical challenge. this applies also to the studies of the internet and other new ways of communication. the purpose of this paper is to evaluate some key arguments widely presented in theories of cyber-life or “new forms of electric being”. in the following empirical section, issues rising from these theoretical perspectives are discussed and analysed based on empirical data. empirical evidence and results the data were collected in a mail survey in march 2001. it included three regions, namely, the urban area of the city of turku, the archipelago, and the rural area (fig. 1). this stratification was made to assure the general nature of the data. the total sample size was 2750 questionnaires of which 1176 were returned. the response rate was 42.8 percent. the questionnaire was sent to individuals with the principle of one questionnaire per household. this procedure broadened the dispersion of the sample set. the form contained a total of 52 questions. six of these questions are discussed and analysed in the following. the questions are related to the use of public spaces and changes in everyday practices and movement. they will be referenced later in the text with their prefix number. (1) do you consider yourself as a part of the information society? (yes/no) and open lines (2) do you think that the internet has changed your daily movement? (yes/no) and open lines (3) do you think that the internet has made your life easier in your living environment? (yes/no) and open lines (4) it has been said that the internet makes distance meaningless. do you agree? (yes/no) and open lines (5) do you think that the internet services providing representations of real world locations (e.g., virtual cities) are able to fulfil the experience of the subject? (yes/no) and open lines (6) how would you define the concept of “virtual travelling”? (nominal variable with 5 alternatives) the open questions dealt with the significance of the information society, the benefits and weaknesses of internet services and any change of their everyday lives that has occurred as the result of the computerisation and mobilisation of communication. the goal of these open questions was to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the perceived significance of technological development in ordinary life. these open questions were analysed through a classification procedure. for each open question three to six broad categories were constructed. these can be described as discourses even though the method is not related to qualitative discourse analysis (e.g., silverman 1994). the survey was conducted using a systematic random sampling method. the survey was targeted to persons of work age (from 18 to 60). the methods used are common statistical tests including chi-square based tests (phi, cramer’s v and contingency coefficient) and log-linear models. three essential independent variables (numerical) and their properties are displayed in table 1. three categorical variables such as gender are also grouped into separate section with percentages and absolute numbers. these independent variables were tested with official statistics provided by statistics finland. there are no significant disparities between the data sets, and therefore the most important independent variables (age, education and gender) are not biased in relation to the larger sample of finnish population. fig. 1. the three research areas in sw finland. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 29information society, citizens and everyday life:… all categories in table 1 are evenly distributed. the coverage of the sample is relatively good even though the response rate among the unemployed (6.6%) is lower than the figure provided by statistics finland (10.3% in april–july 2001). a general feature of the data is that they represent well the working and studying population but not the unemployed. the bias of the survey is towards those with high income and education. this is a general problem related to all survey data (e.g., de vaus 1996). the household income level in table 1 perhaps requires an explanation. in finland the average income level (for an individual) is 2141 € per month. considering gender division the males have an average income level of 2354 € and females 1924 € per month. the division into displayed four income groups in table 1 is based on the figures provided by statistics finland (29.8.2002). the experience of the information society and general facts it is useful to clarify some facts about the usage of the internet, computers and mobile phones in the data. first, 69% (811 cases) of the respondents use a personal computer. the usage level is higher than the ownership level of 54% (642 cases). the official percentage of households owning a pc provided by the statistics finland in march 2002 is 49.2. the survey data are somewhat biased in this respect. regardless of the bias, the data are adequate to give a general picture of the usage of the technology on a broader scale. second, 39.5% (465 cases) of the sample population have an internet connection at home. this figure is lower than expected. the average usage time of the internet is a little over one hour per day for those individuals who are using the internet daily. in these data the most important internet service is online banking. over 50% of internet users in the data use different banking services at least twice a week. however, if the whole data are considered including those who are not using the internet, the relative amount of persons doing banking via the internet diminishes to 19.2%. other services such as internet shopping, are at a considerably lower level. only 7.5% of the sample population uses the internet for shopping occasionally (once or twice a year). question (1) dealt with the general experience and significance of the term “information society” from the viewpoint of ordinary citizens. in dichotomous form 702 individuals (59.7%) regarded themselves to be part of the contemporary information society. it is noticeable however, that 444 persons (37.8%) experienced that they are outside of it. the latter figure must be considered high. from the open-ended definitions (totalling 568 expressions) three categories were created on the basis of the written contents. in table 2 these classes are presented with three sample answers with gender and age information provided. the first category has 131 (23.1%) answers. in these answers, the information society was experienced through work and expanding possibilities to career progress. in some answers the technology was evaluated as a significant transformer of life. the general attitude of the respondents in this first category is on the optimistic side and in some cases, over-optimistic, regarding their attitudes towards the effects of new information technologies. the second category contains the answers related to practical experience of technology. a total of 312 answers (54.9%) were classified in this group. the common feature in these answers was that the essence of the information society constitutes mainly as devices or their explicit ustable 1. essential independent variables and their properties/proportions in the survey data. age in years mean: median: n = 1172 42.7 44.0 number of persons mean: median: living in the house2.5 2.0 hold n = 1170 time (yr) lived in mean: median: the municipality 16.6 14.0 n = 879 gender male: female: 48.3% 51.7% (n = 568) (n = 607) education acapolysecondelemendemic: technic: ary: tary: 16.5% 23.5% 39.8% 20.2% (n = 194) (n = 276) (n = 467) (n = 236) household highest: upper lower lowest: income 18.4% quarter: quarter: 19.3% (n = 211) 31.0 % 31.2% (n = 221) (n = 355) (n = 357) owns a car yes: no: 81.9% 18.1 % (n = 968) (n = 212) 30 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi inkinen age. in 16% of all the answers the information society was described as a society of mobile phones and computers. this reflects a common way of evaluating technological innovations and their daily significance through practices. the answers grouped into the third category were negative in their attitude. there were in total 125 (22.0%) answers in this group, which makes it roughly the same size as category 1. the amount of people experiencing the information society as a hostile or unpleasant development is surprisingly high. the negative answers were more common among the older (over 50 yr) respondents. devices are experienced as difficult to use and personal incapability of learning was commonly stated as the most important issue. the information technologies, movement and the end of distance questions (2), (3) and (4) dealt with the argument that the advent of computer mediated communication will transform earlier communication practices and eventually make distance or physical movement obsolete. if physical movement is considered, the internet has had a little effect. only 8.9% of those using the internet feel that they have changed their ways of movement in the physical environment. the most common references were made to banking practices and library book renewals. it seems that the internet is not changing the actual practices in movement except in the case of these specific services (e.g., banking). the experience of an “easier life” through network technologies is interesting. less than half (43.7%) of the persons using the internet stated that it had significantly improved their lives. the main contribution that the internet has in the pursuit of a better life derives from easy access to timetable information and library services. the diminished significance of distance is commonly acknowledged. 70.9% of the internet users feel that the tyranny of the distance is defeated through technological advancements. 75% of the open-ended answers include statements related to the social communication with the internet and e-mail. distance is meaningless because individuals are able to connect to same services and persons regardless of their physical location. based on the results, it seems that the advertised information revolution has clearly made itself known but the actual effect on physical reality is limited. in other words, people tend to think that there are some changes going on but these changes have no discernible consequences on movement and physical acts. the open-ended definitions show that distance is mainly understood as a social construction. the old conception of time-space compression has therefore been upgraded to the sphere of social communication. the experience of virtuality questions (5) and (6) dealt with the claim of “transforming life practices from the street and public places to the private sphere”. the concept of virtual experience was analysed with a nominal variable with five alternatives. also, the significance of virtual cities was assessed with dichotomous variable and open-ended definitions. these questions have a deep philosophical background, involving the idea of separating visual knowledge from actual knowledge. in other words, the phrase “i know that there are no more twin towers in ny” can be justified via direct experience (i have been there) or indirect assumption (i saw a picture/broadcast about it). this relates the computer presentation to the essence of ontology. “i know what this city looks like – i visited the place” or “i know what the city looks like table 2. the mental construction of the information society according to generalised opinions. category 1: positive benefits and technological utopianism – the information society is a society with no borders and distances (male, 43) – easy services and access to various information resources (female, 27) – the adoption of new information technologies and their usage (male, 37) category 2: devices, communications and everyday practices – i have a computer, mobile phone and fax – isn’t that an information society (female, 25) – a society with a lot of information and data (female, 29) – a computer as an essential part of everyday work (male, 51) category 3: threats and uneven development – information society is a society of unfairness (male, 38) – destruction (male, 48) – a nightmare of humans living their lives through a computer screen (female, 52) fennia 181: 1 (2003) 31information society, citizens and everyday life:… – i saw a 3d version of it on the internet”. the empirical evidence shows that the public takes the question very much for granted in a negative sense. only 5.1% of the internet users consider the knowledge obtained through virtual modelling to be satisfactory substitute for the real world experience. the open-ended answers emphasised the limitations of the two dimensional screen to provide a comprehensive experience of a city. respondents considered the concept of “virtual travelling” mainly as marketing rhetoric (35.2%) and pre-knowledge gathering (53.8%). in this sense, the virtual experience diminishes to an alternative to traditional paper travel guides. less than 4% regarded that the virtual models to be acceptable as a substitute to actual travelling to the city. the virtual models and representations were mainly described as technically proficient abstractions but lacking in content value. two important findings can be addressed. firstly, there is the learned presumption of technological change and secondly, there is the practical routine of everyday life. this division illustrates the fact that the belief in technological change is adapted from advertising or literature. however, it rarely has an impact on physical movement and the person’s environment. the way of life seems to stay the same, even though time-space compression in movement and communication is evident. the concepts of knowledge and assumption are also of importance. the change is a construction that can be deconstructed into the tangibility of technological devices, the daily practice (with the technologies) and knowledge achieved through these actions. a description of the independent and dependent variable relations in the following i will discuss some brief notions concerning the results of the covariance and regression analyses. the usage of the new information technology is connected mainly to age and education. observed income level was also a significant explanative variable, but as commonly acknowledged, it is highly multicollinear with several other independent variables (e.g., education). the data were also analysed in relation to urban-rural residence. the urban-rural dimension was characterised by a more critical attitude in the countryside. this means that rural dwellers do not use technologies as much as city dwellers do. however, there were no statistical differences in the levels of ownership (computers, home internet access and mobile phones) in different areas. the significance of local cultures and local ways of life gain importance. the access to technology is not a regional issue, but the cultural and social construction of the experience and feeling related to these technologies is. an interesting finding in the data was the nonsignificant role of gender in the usage of the internet and mobile phones. in the data both sexes used similar services with similar usage levels. however, a significant relationship was established in leisure usage. women tend to use communicative technologies more for social activities than men do. however, for both groups work related usage is the most important. this illustrates the nature of innovation to even out between sexes. a commonly held belief is that men are more active in the use of technologies than women are. this survey suggests this is a (false) stereotype in the finnish context. the use of one technology supports the use of other technologies. there are clear covariation patterns with the dependent variables meaning that a person using one technology is likely to adopt the usage of other technologies. people using a variety of internet services tend to use also a variety of mobile-phone services. combined solutions, such as a laptop with cell phone creating wireless internet connectivity, were also evaluated as a means to gain efficiency. however, the number of persons taking advantage of these services is very limited. less than 4% of the cell phone users are using their phones for payment procedures and banking services. conclusions and future prospects one way to interpret the results obtained is to conclude that the most essential changes taking place in the information society development are not happening solely at the level of technology. beliefs, values and, most importantly, contextual local cultures and ways of living are essential determinants underlying the actualising reality. the construction of the information society is always dependent on the contextual setting in which the societal changes are taking place. in these settings various societal actors participating the process have their specific goals and strategies, which finally determine the realised form of the development. 32 fennia 181: 1 (2003)tommi inkinen at the empirical level, the concept of the “information society” is experienced mainly through devices as indicated by the results of question (1). theoretical reviews and thoughts concerning the effect of icts and particularly the internet on masses of citizens often overestimate the shortterm impact of these new innovations. moreover, estimates also have a tendency to underestimate change on a long-term period. the fuzziness of the “information society” and its conceptual content require empirical understanding to support theoretical arguments. the essential question of the information society of the future is how to include individuals who now are excluded both on the levels of practical skill (cannot) and mental experiencing (will not). in geographical sense, the most essential theoretical arguments since the early 1990s have been trying to assess the significance of distance in the information age (e.g., brunn & leinbach 1991; mitchell 1995; castells 2001). these impacts were analysed in questions (2) and (4). in the light of the empirical results, it is evident that the respondents distanced themselves from the naive “technological bliss” rhetoric according to which the information technology revolution and the development of the information society would automatically lead us towards a “spatially nonsignificant” and highly multi-lateral boundlessness society. observed levels of the web content usage also indicate the same. the most important service having impacts on movement is ebanking. people do not visit physical bank locations as frequently as before, but it remains unclear whether this has significant implications for the total amount of movement. moreover, if the whole sample is concerned, only 37% of the respondents are using the internet bank services. this figure is of course increasing as time passes but in the contemporary situation the usage level must be regarded low. the potential substitution that virtual systems or interactive computer applications have is concentrated on issues related to leisure and information collection as indicated by question (6) and open-ended definitions from questions (3) and (5). human life and particularly the lived everyday geography is still very much real world based (bound). there are, however, certain subgroups within the society who have serious problems with the internet addiction, for example, but in the data the relative amount of these respondents is marginal. in the broad sense, internet usage is mainly pragmatic and the penetration of the more advanced services in the usage cultures is still rather limited. the contemporary status of the information society is an important challenge for researchers. the academics have only recently started to receive reliable empirical evidence about the societal impacts of icts, but now it has become an open question whether we should at all speak about the spatial changes or the transformations of the society. if there are transformations, what is their extent and significance in the broader and, inevitably, global development scheme? researchers still have a limited amount of data regarding the citizens thinking about the new icts and the information society – particularly after the burst of the .com bubble in 2000 and 2001. three essential themes of future research are addressed in the geographical sense. first, to obtain more comprehensive data sets within industrialised countries. even though there is a considerable amount of theoretical literature regarding the contemporary information technology and human relations, empirical data sets are limited and are often too superficial. second, the international aspect of computerisation is important. how are the information technologies used in different cultures, and, are there significant differences in these practices? this relates to the third theme, on what scale do traditional cultural manners and beliefs affect the usage of the new information technologies? by addressing these questions, the essence of the information technologies in computerised societies can be evaluated with more depth. references ahlqvist t (1999). it is all about relations: exploring the geographies of networks. in alhqvist t, t inkinen & s tuhkanen (eds). towards doctoral dissertation. publicationes instituti geographici universitatis turkuensis 161, 1–15. brunn sd & tr leinbach (eds) (1991). collapsing space and time. 404 p. harper collins, london. castells m (1996). the rise of the network society. 556 p. blackwell, oxford. castells m (1997). the power of identity. 461 p. blackwell, london. castells m (1998). the end of millennium. 418 p. blackwell, london. castells m (2001). the internet galaxy: reflections on the internet, business, and society. 292 p. oxford university press, oxford. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 33information society, citizens and everyday life:… castells m & p himanen (2002). the information society and the welfare state. the finnish model. 200 p. oxford university press, oxford. crang m (2000). public space, urban space and electronic space: would the real city please stand up? urban studies 37: 301–318. crang m, p crang & j may (eds) (1999). virtual geographies. bodies, space and relations. 322 p. routledge, london. fernback j (1997). the individual within the collective: virtual ideology and the realization of collective principles. in jones s (ed). virtual culture. identity & communication in cybersociety, 36– 54. sage, london. graham s & s marvin (1996). telecommunications and the city. 434 p. routledge, london. holmes d (ed) (1997). virtual politics. identity & community in cyberspace. 248 p. sage, london. jensen j (1990). redeeming modernity: contradictions in media criticism. 221 p. sage, london. jones sg (1995). understanding community in the information age. in jones sg (ed). cybersociety: computer-mediated communication and community, 10–35. sage, london. kalling t (1999). gaining competitive advantage through information technology. a resourcebased approach to the creation and employment of strategic it resources. 336 p. lund university press, lund. karvonen e (ed) (2001). informational societies: understanding the third industrial revolution. 284 p. tampere university press, tampere. kellerman a (2002). the internet on earth. a geography of information. 265 p. wiley, new york. mackinnon rc (1997). punishing the persona: correctional strategies for the virtual offender. in jones sg (ed). virtual culture. identity & communication in cybersociety, 206–235. sage, london. may c (2002). information society. a sceptical view. 189 p. polity, london. mitchell w (1995). city of bits: space, place, and the infobahn. 225 p. mit press, cambridge. morse m (1998). virtualities. television, media, art, and cyberculture. 266 p. indiana university press, bloomington. poster m (1997). cyberdemocracy: the internet and the public sphere. in holmes d (ed). virtual politics. identity & community in cyberspace, 212– 228. london, sage. shapiro c & hr varian (1999). information rules a strategic guide to the network economy. 352 p. harvard business school press, boston. silverman d (1994). interpreting qualitative data: methods for analysing talk, text and interaction. 325 p. sage, london. turkle s (1995). life on the screen. identity in the age of the internet. 347 p. simon & schuster, new york. virilio p (1994). the vision machine. translated by julie rose. 81 p. indiana university press, bloomington. de vaus da (1996). surveys in social research. 411 p. ucl press, london. webster f (2002). theories of information society. 257 p. routledge, london. wilson mi & ke corey (eds) (2000). information tectonics. space, place and technology in an electronic age. 272 p. wiley, chichester. reinvigorating a political ecology of the global agri-food system urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99209 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99209 reinvigorating a political ecology of the global agri-food system sören köpke köpke, s. (2021) reinvigorating a political ecology of the global agri-food system. fennia 199(1) 89–103. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.99209 this contribution is a critical review of research on the global agrifood system directly or indirectly identified as political ecology (pe). it shows how food, famine and agricultural production were important topics to early proponents of pe, especially with regards to a critique of neo-malthusian thought. it then traces further developments in the field and highlights the productive tension between materialist and poststructuralist streams, as well as the influence of actor-network theory. further on, the paper discusses three neighbouring theories and frameworks with a potential to stimulate current political ecologies of food and agriculture, namely critical agrarian studies, food regime theory and world-ecology. finally, seven clusters of potential research topics for a political ecology of the global agri-food system are identified. in conclusion, the relevance of pe as a theoretical lens is reiterated and the need for fruitful application of political ecology and related approaches is expressed. keywords: political ecology, global agri-food system, world hunger, food studies sören köpke (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8647-2639), section of international agricultural policy and environmental governance, university of kassel, steinstr. 19 (kloster), 37213 witzenhausen, germany. e-mail: soeren.koepke@web.de introduction the global agri-food system appears to be fragile and dysfunctional. it allows one in nine people to go hungry every day (fao et al. 2019), it contributes greatly to biodiversity loss, soil depletion, water stress, and greenhouse gas emissions (gladek et al. 2017). while food production and food consumption are tied to the household, underlying power structures and social-ecological relations are not confined to the domain of individuals or families. food insecurity is always local and householdlevel first and foremost (misselhorn 2005; bartfeld & wang 2006), yet connected to the agri-food system on higher scales, through national economies, trade, food policies, global environmental change, and a host of other factors. it is a challenge for scholars of development studies, geography, and anthropology to theorize the different factors shaping the current global agri-food system. agri-food system is a term derived from insights on the systemic, interconnected and multi-scalar character of food and agriculture; rogers, castree and kitchin (2013, 11) define agri-food systems as the “totality of actors involved in the production, distribution and consumption of food, the relations © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 90 reviews and essays fennia 199(1) (2021) between them, and the regulatory apparatus governing these arrangements”. talking about “agrifood systems” suggests looking at the whole of the food value chain by investigating the effects of globalization on local production system, taking into account food policies and political economies of food, and suggests researching interdependencies, for example with ecological processes, political structures, and developments in science and technology. the question that this review is concerned with is how different approaches of political ecology (pe) describe and analyse the complexity of the global agri-food system. specifically, it will shed light on the different building blocks of a political ecology of the agri-food system, and scrutinize their respective explanatory powers as well as blind spots. to acknowledge the contribution of political ecology to the understanding of the global agri-food system, the paper continues as follows: it first presents a review of the intellectual origins and theoretical concepts of the approach, then discusses central theoretical strains outside of “political ecology proper” that could provide a stimulus for theoretical advancement within pe, and finally points to a number of key topics that the paper suggests pe research should take on. global food production is highly contested (lang & heasman 2015). this contribution argues that the political ecology could improve the understanding of power structures permeating the global-agrifood-system, and, vice versa, that increasing focus on the agri-food system would heighten the approach’s continued relevance to questions of nature-society relations. defining and rooting political ecology as a theory of food systems it is a broad approach to questions regarding the politics of natural resource use, and nature-society relations in general. this being said, it branches out into different areas of concern, including gender (feminist political ecology – see rocheleau et al. 1996) and cities (urban political ecology), and heterogeneous fields of research like biodiversity conservation, land use, mining, water management, forestry, climate adaptation and so on. despite the eclecticism, there are a number of shared core features. one is the focus on remote, historic, complex causes as opposed to proximate and reductionist causation; another one is the interest in power (in other words, the political) and its impact on natural resource use and ownership, including an interest in central actors like the state, capital, and subaltern people; a third one is critical thinking about the political character of ideas and knowledge production on “the environment”. a fourth general characteristic is an interor even trans-disciplinary research strategy, reflected in the methodology used for research (zimmerer & bassett 2003). pe, which originally emerged from geography and anthropology, has become an “interdiscipline” (kull & rangan 2016). these four core qualities are almost all present in works under the political ecology header. here and there is an overlap with other, neighbouring (and sometimes rivalling) approaches such as environmental justice studies, science and technology studies (sts), social-ecological systems research, environmental humanities, or human-animal studies. my key argument here is that political ecology, over the last decade, has lost ground in efforts to describe and scrutinize the global agri-food system; in other words, the approach has not made use of its full potential to critically analyse essential issues like persisting malnutrition, trade in agricultural commodities, climate change and farming, rural water politics, land acquisitions, and capitalist modernization of agri-food systems. i am not saying that there is not enough research on these topics, only that political ecologists are often missing a voice in the debate. curiously, scholars of pe, vocal on food and agriculture in the early years of the research agenda, appear to have now lost interest in some of these topics – leaving us puzzled with the question why this may be so. it is not if there is nothing left to say anymore? the political ecology research tradition had its point of departure in the 1970s from an interest in peasant agriculture and rural development. its roots lay in anthropology and, most notably, geography, in a tendency of academic marxism in the 1970s1. among the earliest exponents, many (but not all) were positioned firmly in the theoretical tradition of dialectical historical materialism. louis althusser’s structural marxism, dependency theory brought forth by gunder frank and others, and immanuel wallerstein’s world systems theory were highly influential intellectual currents (bryant & bailey 1997, 12–13; paulson et al. 2003, 207). the genesis of political ecology was therefore very much part of a general zeitgeist. 91fennia 199(1) (2021) sören köpke since the late 1960s, there was a decline in modernization-fuelled progress optimism; the constraints to human development imposed by natural resource use and environmental degradation now appeared to be urgent. with a rise in environmental consciousness in developed countries, there began a feverish search for answers to questions posed by famine, desertification, deforestation and dwindling energy reserves2. among these questions, maybe the most crucial, existential is this: why is there hunger and famine? there are many answers to this question. in the conventional view, the root causes of the scourge of famine were made out: scarce food due to droughts, lack of technological development, but mostly: overpopulation in the “third world” (ehrlich 1971). political ecology took shape as an explanatory framework opposed to these conceived wisdoms, these “apolitical ecologies” (robbins 2019, 8–21). it insisted that environmental change, as well as hunger and poverty, had a political economy, were permeated by power relations and shaped by historical processes. development of a political ecology of food and agriculture against malthus political ecology first emerged as anti-malthusianism, and therefore it is necessary to devote a few paragraphs to malthus and his ideas – ideas which continue their influence until today, if in “zombified”3 versions (de waal 2016). malthus ideas are persistent because they provide a consistent, logically elegant, yet false explanation for hunger. thomas robert malthus (1766–1834) was a british cleric and founding father of political economy; his work (2015[1798]) an essay on the principle of population established his call to fame as a pioneer of political economy. his pessimistic assumption was as follows: the growth in available food would always be less than the growth in human population, thus leading to an inescapable food scarcity crisis. since “negative checks” – chastity and sexual restraint – were unlikely, only so-called “positive checks” could hold population growth at bay: famine, disease, war. in other words, hunger and misery were inevitable facts. malthus has been criticized sharply in development studies, economics and famine history. his theory proved to be empirically problematic and was debunked by history. for instance, malthus did not account for increase in productivity through technological development. supply-side scarcity was long thought to be a cause for hunger crises; this was the so-called “food availability decline” (fad) hypothesis (devereux 2009, 26). sen’s (1981) poverty and famines elaborated upon an altogether different explanation of famine, the so-called entitlement approach. entitlements are the base of economic food security and could appear in different forms: income, subsistence production, from heritage or gifts, or from selling one’s own property. accordingly, sen found lack of entitlements (not lack of food!) to be responsible when parts of the population went hungry. this was a structural explanation to hunger that saw crass socio-economic differences and persistent poverty as root causes of hunger, and therefore resonated well with the interest in power relations pursued by political ecologists (batterbury & fernando 2011[2004], 362). sen’s political economy of famine, combined with a marxist critique of malthus, guided pe’s perspective on the genesis of hunger4. political ecology of food crises drought as an agricultural disaster, alongside devastating floods, has driven food crises for centuries, if not millennia (ó gráda 2009, 14–18). however, in modern times, there were more factors that together caused famine than just failing rains. two ground-breaking studies have co-founded the political ecology of drought-famine: watts’ (2013[1983]) silent violence and davis’ (2002) late victorian holocausts. the former explores the political economy of northern nigeria, frequently stricken by famine, and traces it back to colonial history. in a similar manner, but on a grander scale, davis (2002) investigates the misdemeanour of british colonial rulers in india in the face of the ravaging droughts of the late 19th century. these droughts were most likely brought about by the climatic phenomenon called el niño southern oscillation (enso), but the neglect of british rulers played a significant role in escalating the food crises, as davis meticulously explains. the british imperialists, influenced by 92 reviews and essays fennia 199(1) (2021) malthusian thought (davis 2002, 32), believed food aid to be an ineffective and even counterproductive way of handling food crises. davis (2002, 279–310) argues that the result was not only a short-term peak in excess mortality from famine among the colonial subjects, but also enduring patterns of underdevelopment. both watts and davis were inspired by materialist accounts of imperial history and highlighted the structural causes, as well as the political economy, of drought-famines. apart from drought, there are other immediate factors to low productivity and resulting poverty and food insecurity among peasant farmers. blaikie (1985) researched structural and social causes of soil erosion and tried to deconstruct the image of peasants as ignorant, poor land managers, pointing towards nested scales of environmental change. subsequently, blaikie and brookfield (1987) addressed the more overarching question of social, political-economic and historic root causes of land degradation. kull (2004) wrote a critical study of fire use in local shifting cultivation practices in madagascar. all the authors discussed here are marked by their intention to contribute to a historically informed, materialist social science of food and agriculture. the constructivist turn most scholars agree that in the 1980s to 1990s, there was a paradigmatic shift that can be described as a waning of marxian influences, and an increase of poststructuralist thought, associated mainly with the work of michel foucault. foucault’s work had garnered considerable intellectual resonance in western academia by the time of his death in 1984, and continued its triumphal ascendance within critical social science and humanities throughout the 1990s. the french poststructuralist developed his extremely idiosyncratic method in his “archaeology” of ideas and practices, with a main interest in the “power-knowledge” nexus and the notion of “governmentality” (foucault 2007). governmentality describes a mode of rule permeating human bodily existence and thus internalizing power through the subject with the means of “technologies of the self”. foucault was, without a doubt, a highly original and complex intellectual. the different concepts he brought forth have proven to be as adaptable as initially provocative. one of the most prominent applications (or permutations) of the foucaultian concept of governmentality can be found in agrawal’s (2005, 216–217) environmentality. in his case study of villagers/subsistence farmers in kumaon, north india, agrawal traces how the practice of burning the forest transformed from anticolonial resistance in the 1920s to an undesirable action in the 1990s, when villages actively pursued reforestation instead. in agrawal’s analysis, processes of decentralization had profoundly changed the relations between the spheres of the local and the state, between local-level decision-makers and villagers. technologies of “intimate government” lead to an internalization of environmental consciousness and direct actions regarded “environment-friendly” (agrawal 2005, 164–200). here, the analysis of agrienvironmental processes has shifted from matters of political economy to more subtle questions of discourse, ideology and social control. in a similar way, escobar (1995, 1996) was among those who exemplified a move away from research on the political economy of peasant production in developing countries, and towards a critique of development as a concept, and the discursive construction of development. the postmodernist/poststructuralist/constructivist reorientation (biersack 2006, 22; peet et al. 2010, 32–33) has diversified the research agenda of political ecology. the question here is whether materialism (derived from marx) or poststructuralism (inspired by foucault and his intellectual peers) are two forms of political ecology, as tetreault (2017) suggests, or merely two phases, as bryant and bailey (1997, 12–15) argued earlier. i would suggest that there is a spectrum, not an ontological divide, within a unified yet heterogeneous epistemic community. self-identified political ecologists are unified by their emphasis on power and inequality within social-ecological interactions; whether the flows of power and inequality are traced through knowledge, language and discourses or through political economies, physical geographies, or environmental histories is a matter of emphasis and method, but not so much of a difference in political outlook. the approach remains fundamentally critical, and hence normative, in its evaluation of received wisdoms. a third thread, however, might add a new quality in broadening the scope of themes that should be exposed to critical inquiry. bassett and peimer (2017) propose a threefold typology of pe research, 93fennia 199(1) (2021) sören köpke consisting of society/nature dialectics (what i here call “materialist” approaches), the environmentalist constructivist approach (more or less identic with a poststructuralist-influenced approaches), and a third strand, the “co-production of socionature”, which can be linked to actor-network theory. actor networks actor-network-theory (ant) was first developed in science and technology studies (sts) by authors like michel callon, john law, and bruno latour, who became its most noticed proponent. ant undermines the foundations of more traditional social sciences by declaring structures and dichotomies non-existent. ant intends to overcome the object-subject divide (latour 2005). human and non-human beings, animate and non-animate objects, together called “actants”, form networks of relations and act together as assemblages. this fundamentally non-anthropocentric perspective attributes agency to other beings, or even non-beings, which work together with humans. the farmer works in an assemblage with the hoe, the tractor, the soil and the seed, for instance. ant insists that non-human and human “actants” have symmetric relations, and in other words, that we cannot understand anything without acknowledging the networks it is embedded in. from this insight comes a need for a new language to accompany the new sets of concepts. however, the unclear political implications of ant, mostly associated with its staunch rejection of dualisms, have presented grave irritations to scholars of critical or marxian political economy (castree 2002; fine 2005). since it refuses to recognize any notions of power structures or inequality, ant has been accused of catering to neo-liberalism; therefore, that it should be discarded as a theoretical influence to pe (lave 2015). other scholars have incorporated its language and theoretical assumptions into political ecology research. it appears that ant’s perspective on symmetry between subjects/objects/ beings/actants has resonated most widely with feminist political ecology (rocheleau 2015), in particular with haraway (1991). among the most original, and perhaps widely read, inquiries into networks and agencies is tsing‘s (2015) the mushroom at the end of the world, an anthropology of food, a fusion of feminist political ecology and ant, which explores the value chain of the matsutake mushroom. the question whether ant is a diversion from, or a useful addition to more dialectical versions of pe remains unanswered. yet, more in general, ant’s influence on thinking about social-ecological dynamics remains strong. political ecology and its neighbours the newer theoretical developments in political ecology admittedly broadened the perspective, but also diverted attention from questions of agricultural production and rural development. as if political ecology had exhausted its theoretical fervour on the topic, it was overtaken. increasingly other, neighbouring schools of thought produced critical stances on modern food and agriculture. here, in turn i discuss critical agrarian studies, food regime theory, and world-ecology, three theoretical approaches related to pe, which transcend some aspects of received theory. the nuances of theoretical debates within and between these schools, and their varying degree of engagement and overlap with pe, sometimes appear to be puzzling. all three approaches are marked by attachment to marxian thought. yet at a closer look the topical focus is either more narrow than in pe (food regime theory), the ontological position more rigid (world-ecology), or the epistemic community defined mainly by group affiliations and concepts differing from pe (critical agrarian studies). critical agrarian studies critical agrarian studies are not a discipline or an approach, but rather a field of interest and an epistemic community. it is a moniker for a decade-long tradition rooted in peasant studies, freshly coined in 2009 with the establishment of the critical agrarian study group in the hague (akram lodhi 2018). critical agrarian studies are centred on a number of key publishing outlets, institutions of higher education, and key authors. the journal of peasant studies, and the journal of agrarian change are the academic journals mostly associated with critical agrarian studies, and the research 94 reviews and essays fennia 199(1) (2021) agenda strives at the international institute of social studies (iis) of the erasmus university rotterdam, situated in the hague. among the key actors, one finds saturnino m. borras, jr., who is professor at iis, henry bernstein, who held a chair at the university of london’s school of asian and african studies (soas), and a. haroon akram-lodhi, wendy wolfort, marc edelman. notably, there is a dominant focus on the global south, corresponding with movements on the critical edge of the humanities, such as subaltern studies or post-colonialism (sajadian 2020, 20). methodologically, critical agrarian studies emphasize qualitative social science over large-n studies based on statistical analysis. topically, the research agenda is somewhat narrow, and focuses on land acquisitions, financialization of food and agriculture, de-peasantization and de-agrarianisation, and finally, environmental degradation and its consequences on peasant agriculture (akram-lodhi 2018). the last topic clearly overlaps with the core concern of political ecology: the question of winners and losers in environmental change. however, there are differences in the way both research agendas conceptualize power, social-ecological dialectics, and production of knowledge on “nature”/“the environment”. critical agrarian studies are more overtly linked to marxian political economy and the pursuit of the “agrarian question” inherited from peasant studies; in contrast to political ecology, which has become considerably heterodox, as mentioned above. pe is less interested in the exact functioning of the modern capitalist world economy, and more invested in researching the workings of capitalism-state alliances on ecosystems and social formations. hence, political ecology’s conceptualization of capital/state actors often appears quite schematic, while other critical social sciences (including critical agrarian studies) are utilized as sources of inspiration and providers of critical tools. one has to acknowledge that political ecology and critical agrarian studies have not only converging research agendas and theoretical roots, but there are also some authors oscillating between one and the other perspective, or seeking ways to integrate them seamlessly. in particular, critical agrarian studies have popularized and advanced the political economy of the phenomenon called landgrabbing, which had become virulent since 2009: “the emphasis on land, especially in the matters of green grabbing, increasingly blurs an already thin line between critical agrarian studies and political ecology“ (dunlap & jakobsen 2020, 52). critical agrarian studies and political ecology also share an interest in remote effects and global connections, which are converging in food regime theory as a historical, macro-level mode of explanation of structural change in food production, trade and consumption. food regime theory friedmann and mcmichael (1989) were the first to introduce food regime theory. it is derived from regulation theory, a marxist political economy approach of french origin, and has a perspective on the longue durée of change in patterns of food production and consumption, by connecting food regimes to shifting modes of production within capitalist development. according to friedmann and mcmichael, the first global food regime (1870s–1930s) coincided with the emerging hegemony of british colonialism and was characterized by imports of tropical food commodities from the colonies in the global south to europe, and provision of grain stables from settler colonies. the second food regime (circa 1950–1970s) began roughly after the second world war and was marked by large-scale food exports from the us to developing countries in order to stabilize us hegemony in the cold war context (mcmichael 2009, 141). national development programs and particularly adoption of “green revolution” technologies were designed to improve food security and dampen social conflicts in many of the post-colonial, newly independent countries. there are debates on the manifestation of a third food regime (burch & lawrence 2009; mcmichael 2013), the “corporate food regime”, in which neo-liberal globalization has led to a hegemonic role of oligopolistic corporations on the world market. accordingly, this food regime is associated with the rise of corporations controlling bottlenecks in the agribusiness value chain (inputs like fertilizers and pesticides; grain trade; food processing; also retail). friedmann (2005) theorizes the emergent food regime as a corporate-environmental food regime characterized by a “greening” 95fennia 199(1) (2021) sören köpke of capitalism and a progressive capture of “alternative” niches, created by social movements, through large enterprises. as mentioned above, food regime theory is a macro-level theory. its merits can be found in the ability to connect overarching developments within the global agri-food systems to the changing character of world capitalism. however, this grand perspective is not helpful to some of the more microor meso-level research question that political ecology seeks to answer. tilzey (2018) has undertaken the attempt of integrating food regime theory with political ecology through concepts of food sovereignty and agro-ecology. he focuses on expressions of resistance and counter-hegemony emerging within the historical moments shaped, amongst other factors, by food regimes. through a dialectic perspective and a critical realist ontology he tries to solve the apparent contradictions between discourse-oriented and materialist strands of pe. this, however, leads him to a rejection of more overtly constructivist approaches he calls “ontologically flat” (tilzey 2018, 26), like the one we will discuss now, namely world-ecology. world-ecology world-ecology is a theoretically complex post-marxist intellectual project mainly brought forth by jason w. moore, an american historical geographer. world-ecology is influenced by classical marxism, as well as by world-system theory – an approach mainly associated with immanuel wallerstein – and by latourian actor-network-theory. moore’s main argument, presented in his seminal capitalism in the web of life (moore 2015), is the rejection of the cartesian dualism between nature and humanity. over and over again, moore explains human beings as part of, not in opposition to nature (the web of life, which he calls “oikeos”) and hence describes capitalism as a historical force that has sprung from the web of life, depends on it, and is tightly interwoven with it: (…) capitalism becomes not only a producer of environmental changes, but a product of the web of life and involved in a historically and geographically cascading and uneven mosaic of changes (…). (entitle 2016) consequentially, moore criticizes classical environmentalism, which he sees as charged with cartesian thought: this environmentalism objectifies nature as it talks about human destruction of the environment, a misconception, as exploitation of “nature” and “fellow humans” are basically the same, intertwined process of accumulation. moore has therefore engaged in a debate on the agency of nonhuman entities, and taken the sides of those who want to appoint non-human actors a greater role in shaping historical, evolutionary and geopolitical processes (see also lave 2015; robbins 2019, 223– 235). moore himself believes that world-ecology has the potential to shift political ecology debates into a more decisively “non-cartesian” direction (entitle 2016), that is, to dissolve the socially constructed barriers between human/society and nature/resource. as can be imagined, moore’s approach is not always well received, for instance by contemporary marxists, who accuse him of theoretical vagueness and post-modern fallacies (e.g. foster & clark 2016). a particular aspect of moore’s theory is of importance to a political ecology of the global agri-food system, namely the concept of “cheap food”, elaborated in the book a history of the world in seven cheap things, co-written with patel (patel & moore 2018; for critique of the work see: angus 2018; hornburg 2020). in their chapter on cheap food (patel & moore 2018, 138–160), they sketch the history of the modern food system since columbian times, stating: “capitalist agriculture changed the world” (ibid., 140). they claim that the efficiency of modern agriculture in increasing labour productivity and creating agricultural surplus is the fundament of the capitalist mode of production. urbanized industrial workers need access to cheap food so that capitalists could keep wages low and extract even more surplus value from labour (ibid., 143–144); patel and moore see this process repeated in contemporary times with the production of cheap animal protein for consumption (ibid., 155–157). this stance has the merit of embedding agri-food production under capitalist conditions in a wider perspective on global power relations, as well as historicizing the current agrifood system, yet one cannot help but ask how the concept of cheap food is different from the central insights of food regime theory. 96 reviews and essays fennia 199(1) (2021) with a nod to historical materialism, the authors propose that every historic mode of production must end: “with climate change, that food system will break in the coming century” (patel & moore 2018, 160). however, one must ask, is this not an ecological reformulation of the food availability decline, a version of neo-malthusianism and its obsession with scarcity-induced conflicts and disasters? here, moore and patel’s world-ecology project might have departed from pe’s antimalthusian consensus. emerging issues in the global agri-food system if pe is to regain its cutting edge with critical inquiry of the global agri-food system, then it will have to engage with concrete and urgent empirical questions. taking real-world problems, not theoretical puzzles at a point of departure offers the potential to dissolve tensions between constructivist and material perspectives. depending on each topic, the pe toolkit (robbins 2019, 47) can provide fitting theoretical and methodological instruments for the analysis of complex empirical problems. a host of research questions springs up from the real-life conditions in the different realms and provinces of food and agriculture. here, based on my own research, reading, and teaching, i introduce a non-exhaustive list of seven research agendas for pe with continued or growing importance in relation to the global agri-food system, as a starting ground for more detailed or crosscutting inquiries. for each research agenda, i present contemporary contributions, acknowledging that not all of the authors mentioned here would be comfortable to be labelled under “political ecology”. big food one central feature of the global agri-food system is the hegemonic presence of few players (reardon 2007; howard 2016), in short: “big food”. for instance, international trade in agricultural commodities is dependent on five large players: archer daniels midlands, bunge, cargill, louis dreyfus, and more recently, cofco of china (heinrich böll foundation et al. 2017, 26). also, the market in processed food is a multi-billion dollar industry shaped and controlled by transnational corporations (tnc) like nestlé, mondelez international, mars, coca-cola, danone, pepsico, kellogg, unilever and abf, who possess immediately recognizable house brands marketed all over the world. looking at the downstream parts of global value chains, we find massive concentration in food retail. in any given developed country, a few supermarket or megastore chains control the food retail market: auchan and carrefour in france, walmart, kroger and costco in the us, tesco in the uk, aldi and rewe in germany, and so on – oligopoly structures in retail gives the large chains a dramatic leverage on pricing, which is responsible for a price squeeze on producers which extends through global value chains, and ultimately, effects agri-ecological relations in producing regions. symbolic commodities such as coffee (tucker 2008; jimenez-soto 2020) and vanilla (osterhoudt 2017), or monoculture flexcrops like palm oil (pichler 2015), are subject to price volatilities, boom-andbust cycles, and expansion drives in commodity frontiers that impact people and landscapes. vandermeer and perfecto (2013 [1995]), for instance, have done research along these lines, connecting rainforest destruction in latin america to consumer’s love of bananas. political ecologies of big food corporations and commodity chains might converge with food regime theory and critical agrarian studies by highlighting global interconnections across long distances. for hall (2015), this focus on high-value export commodities is what ought to be the central focus of a pe of international agri-food systems. however, there is certainly more to the overall theme then this rather narrow, yet important, focus. again, there is a possibility here to “ground” food regime theory in more localized accounts. modernized agricultural production the so-called “green revolution”, a technology-driven transformation in agricultural production, has swept many countries of the global south since the 1960s. however, it is still underway in regions with the least productive agricultural production systems, hence the talk of “a new green revolution” in sub-saharan africa (for a critique, see holt-giménez & altieri 2013; ignatova 2017). shiva, the 97fennia 199(1) (2021) sören köpke indian scholar-activist and a political ecologist in everything but in name, is the most prolific and vocal critic of the “green revolution” and agri-business expansion in india and the global south (shiva 2000, 2008). the socio-technological and environmental disruptions associated with modernized, and constantly modernizing, agricultural production systems are fruitful (but often also frightening) material for case studies. for instance, the study colleagues and i have conducted on sri lanka’s dry zone (köpke et al. 2019) was an attempt to examine the social-ecological problems brought forth by those “modern” agricultural production systems under the vulnerable conditions of peasant paddy farming. bezner kerr, with her collaborators, has published instructive case work on agricultural inputs in malawi and ghana (bezner kerr 2013; nyantak-frimpong & bezner kerr 2015). given the profound and often very complex transformations associated with the changes in agricultural production systems in many countries, this topic is certainly apt to produce numerous empirical cases for years to come. hunger, nutrition, health and obesity a pressing question remains what pe has to say about the continuing hunger crisis. as a normative approach, the topic of hunger and malnutrition is surprisingly out of focus in modern pe. famine studies appear to come to the conclusion that ”modern” famines, that is those that have been experienced within intensifying waves of globalisation since the 19th century, are primarily political of origin and often connected to armed conflict and genocidal activities of state actors. in the words of de waal (2018, 6), people have not been starving from lack of food, they are actively starved by powerful people. although most calamitous famines have occurred before 1980 (de waal 2018, 5), the intimate connection between armed conflict and hunger persists. around two third of people experiencing acute hunger live under conditions of armed conflict; yemen, the democratic republic of kongo, and afghanistan are the three countries with the highest rates of conflict-related food insecurity (fao & wfp 2019; fsin 2019). another “hot topic” is the nexus between the climate crisis and food insecurity. while climate change has undeniable negative impacts on food systems, there is amble room to challenge received wisdom on interconnections between the climate crisis, food insecurity, and social conflict (dalby 2009; taylor 2015). this space for critical inquiry also extends to questions related to climate mobility and food security (mcmichael 2014). a political ecology of hunger must put up resistance against attempts to naturalize hunger and famine and continue to point to the geopolitical and political-economic roots of contemporary hunger crises, and to counter the reemergence of neo-malthusian narratives incorporating climate change as a new factor. at the same time, it is important to broaden the perspective, addressing chronic malnutrition throughout the world. many developing countries are in the process of nutrition transition (qaim 2017); a global crisis of malnutrition here unrolls in the form of obesity, a condition with severe health implications driven by expanding retail chains, and the marketing of cheap (processed) food rich in saturated fats, sugar and salt contents. meat and alternatives part of the transformation in food practice is the increase of meat intake in many parts of the world. most of the time the meat industry is taken as a given, as a hyper-efficient way of providing affordable meat to consumers. however, during the covid-19 pandemic, slaughterhouses and meat packaging factories were suddenly in focus of public interest, working conditions obviously so bad that sarscov2 was spreading fast in this environment. a political ecology of meat looks at power dynamics and environmental consequences throughout the value chain; neo and emel (2017)’s take on the “geographies of meat” might be a point of departure for such an inquiry. there are also possibilities to draw connections to a political ecology of the post-human (margulies & bersaglio 2018), as influenced by ant and related approaches. animal rights activists like peta and celebrities like exbeatle paul mccartney advocate for vegetarian lifestyles and “compassionate” consumption. ethical questions and consumer choices have altered the market in peculiar ways. finally, lab-grown (in vitro) meat emerges as a field of inquiry for critical political ecology (mouat et al. 2019). 98 reviews and essays fennia 199(1) (2021) green consumerism and claims to sustainability vegetarianism and veganism have become accepted lifestyle choices of ethical consumption in developed countries, but they are just a part of a larger obsession with “green”, sustainable, and healthy food. lifestyle food commodities are subject to boom cycles like any other commodity – with serious repercussions for subsistence in developing countries. quinoa, an andean crop that has been promoted as “superfood” to consumers in the west, is a case in point (kerssen 2015; andrews 2017). almonds are another popular “superfood” (reisman 2020), one that been debated for its water footprint in the face of the californian megadrought (gonzalez 2015). while organic food, superfood and health food all make a claim to more eco-friendly and bodyconscious consumer decisions, they also represent multi-billion dollar economies. especially the market in organic foods has grown considerably over the last decades, but has also undergone large structural changes. the boomand bust cycles of organic and superfood, contrasted with the “health fads” of the global urban middle classes, are prone to highlight the remote effects of allegedly “sustainable” food trends. fish, fisheries and seafood the extraction of animal protein (fish, crustaceans, molluscs) from the world’s waters, be it oceans, lakes, streams or aquaculture, is an important and under-researched topic. fisheries and fisherfolk are side-lined within pe research, despite the fact that seafood and fish protein is an essential foodstuff for many, primarily marginalized communities the world over. there are some excellent contributions tackling salmon in aquacultures (barton & fløysand 2010) and in the wild (swanson 2015). salmon owes its prominence, again, to its role as a symbolic and valuable commodity. the journal of political ecology published a virtual special issue on the “blue economy in africa” in 2019 (childs & hicks 2019) that dealt, among other sectors, with fishing, but it was focused on extractivist activities like deep sea mining. fisheries have an explicitly geopolitical dimension: in the indian ocean piracy crisis on the somalian coast, driven by a decline in fishing as a livelihood strategy; and a number of other interstate disputes over fishing rights, with the historic “cod wars” between the uk and iceland (steinsson 2017) as a prime example. the practice of industrial fishing (yagishita 2018) deserved to be understood from a political ecology angle rather than more positivist game-theoretic analysis (for an example of the latter, see munro 2009; for a critique, mansfield 2010). beyond the regional bias: addressing geographical blind spot finally, if political ecology as a theoretical approach strives to expand its impact, it should also extend its regional focus. while the western hemisphere (and latin america in particular), larger parts of subsaharan africa, parts of south and south east asia are amply covered in research on agri-food systems, there remain many blank spaces on a pe world map, despite the claims to “global political ecology“ (peet et al. 2010). china, for instance, is sparsely covered (yeh 2015); not to mention central asia, which does not seem to draw much interest. there certainly should be pe research on china’s belt and road initiative (bri), the gigantic infrastructure and trade initiative, yet there is hardly anything (matthias schmidt, personal communication, march 1, 2019). certainly, the bri will have consequences on agri-food systems in the participating countries, given china’s outstanding role as both a food consuming and food producing country (for a starting point, see mcmichael 2020). a climatic zone that has not figured prominently in pe research is comprised of the nordic regions5 – scandinavia, greenland, the siberian north, alaska or the north of canada. these vast regions have potential for research agendas on indigenous livelihoods and traditional ecological knowledge (tek), studying, for example, indigenous food production and food knowledge (of the samí or the inuit, to name just two), pastoralism and fishing, and conflicts between rural livelihood strategies and resource extractivism. although some inroads have been made into the new terrain of nordic political ecology (heikkinen & robbins 2006; benjaminsen & robbins 2015), there are highly relevant 99fennia 199(1) (2021) sören köpke and emerging research questions to be found centred on the nordic regions, also for food and agriculture, especially in the context of climate change. conclusion in today’s political ecology scholarship, there is a marked presence of four very large issues: extractivism, energy production, water, and conservation. this becomes clear when looking at recent conferences, journals and academic books. political ecologists undertake excellent research in all four fields, and they merit high relevance. yet it is not comprehensible why the equally important issue of food and agricultural production systems should take a backseat, or should be left to other schools and approaches. although, as argued elsewhere (köpke 2018), there may be an intimate connection between food, water, extractivism and energy production, i hope to have shown that a political ecology of the agri-food system should carry enough weight in its own right to comprise a relevant research agenda. notes 1 although he is not a marxist, james c. scott has been a constant influence on pe from the early days on (robbins 2019, 59–60). scott has consistently applied “academic” anarchism as a critical lens to peasant studies (scott 1998, 2009, 2012). hence, the study of the political economies of peasants, smallscale agricultural production, and rural unrest has a decidedly anti-authoritarian streak, and the domain of peasant life appears as perpetually in conflict with representatives of the state and capital alike. concepts like “moral economy” and “everyday resistance” retain their importance to pe approaches. 2 the biafran famine (1967–1970), the sahel drought (1968–1972) and the early 1970s ethiopian famine, among others, alerted many people in developed countries of the need for humanitarian food relief, and helped shaping ideas of “third world” disasters. for instance, oxfam was founded in response to the biafran famine (o’sullivan 2014). the un conference on the human environment in stockholm, sweden in 1972 was highly influential in establishing environmental problems on the agenda of international institutions. the 1972 club of rome report the limits to growth (meadows & club of rome 1972) ushered in the age of scarcity, as resource abundance appeared to be a feature of the past. the oil price crisis, albeit triggered by middle east geopolitics in the context of the 1973 yom kippur war, lend some credibility to these notions (dalby 2009, 14). 3 kallis (2019) challenges the original malthusian thought on its own terrain, questioning malthus’ inner logic and motivations to the text. while kallis’ book limits is a major intellectual achievement, it is rather connected to the political philosophy underpinning the degrowth movement than a text of political ecology. what is more, it does not apply itself overtly to questions of food production and consumption, as it aims for a much broader argument on the limits to growth and the emancipatory potential of self-limiting. 4 woo-cummings (2002) in her essay “the political ecology of famine” is highly critical of sen, but her definition of political ecology is unrelated to what this article, and the overall science community, understands as political ecology by now. 5 i owe gratitude to my students in “critical perspectives on the global food system”, summer term 2018, for pointing me towards this. acknowledgements this article has a heavy debt to andreas thiel, who let me teach the module “critical perspectives on the global food system” in summer term 2018, a master level course of students of organic agricultural sciences at the university of kassel. through teaching the course, i was able to sharpen my understanding of some key issues, and i was likewise exposed to a number of new ideas and theoretical approaches. the lively debates with my students made this process enjoyable and pointed me towards my own blind spots. ariane götz has critically read a draft of the paper and 100 reviews and essays fennia 199(1) (2021) provided extremely helpful comments. i am also very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the chief editor of fennia for their great support in improving this paper. references agrawal, a. (2005) environmentality. technologies of government and the making of subjects. duke university press, durham and london. akram-lodhi, h. a. (2018) what is critical agrarian studies? review of african political economy blog 28.3.2018 <http://roape.net/2018/03/28/what-is-critical-agrarian-studies/>. 15.6.2020. andrews, d. (2017) race, status, and biodiversity; the social climbing of quinoa. culture, agriculture, food and environment 39(1) 15–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuag.12084 angus, i. (2018) illusions of word-ecology. international socialism 157. <https://isj.org.uk/illusions-ofworld-ecology/>. 30.6.2020. bartfeld, j. & wang, l. (2006) local-level predictors of household food insecurity. institute for research on poverty discussion paper 1317–06. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.925245 barton, j. r. & fløysand, a. (2010) the political ecology of chilean salmon aquaculture, 1982–2010: a trajectory from economic development to global sustainability. global environmental change 20 739–752. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.04.001 bassett, t. j. & peimer, a. w. (2015) political ecological perspectives on socioecological relations. natures sciences sociétés 23(2) 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1051/nss/2015029 batterbury, s. p.j & fernando, j. l. (2011[2004]) amartya sen. in hubbard, p., kitchin, r. & valentine. g. (eds.) key thinkers on space and place, 359–366. sage, london. benjaminsen, t. a. & robbins, p. (2015) nordic political ecologies. norsk geografisk tidsskrift – norwegian journal of geography 69(4) 191–196. https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2015.1059879 bezner kerr, r. (2013) seed struggles and food sovereignty in northern malawi. the journal of peasant studies 40(5) 867–897. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.848428 biersack, a. (2006) reimaging political ecology: culture/power/history/nature. in biersack, a. & greenberg, j. b. (eds.) reimagining political ecology, 3–40. duke university press, durham and london. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388142-001 blaikie, p. (1985) the political economy of soil erosion in developing countries. longman, harlow. blaikie, p. & brookfield, h. (1987) land degradation and society. methuen, london. bryant, r. l. & bailey, s. (1997) third world political ecology. routledge, london and new york. burch, d. & lawrence, g. (2009) towards a third food regime: behind the transformation. agriculture & human values 26 267–279. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-009-9219-4 castree, n. (2002) false antitheses? marxism, nature and actor-networks. antipode 34(1) 111–146. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00228 childs, j. & hicks, c. c. (2019) securing the blue: political ecologies of the blue economy in africa. journal of political ecology 26(1). https://doi.org/10.2458/v26i1.23162 dalby, s. (2009) security and environmental change. polity, cambridge. davis, m. (2002) late victorian holocausts. el niño famines and the making of the third world. verso, london. devereux, s. (2009) why does famine persist in africa? food security 1 25–35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-008-0005-8 dunlap, a. & jakobsen, j. (2020) the violent technologies of extraction. political ecology, critical agrarian studies and the capitalist worldeater. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26852-7 ehrlich, p. (1971) the population bomb. the pan/ballantine, new york. escobar, a. (1995) encountering development: the making and unmaking of the third world. princeton university press, princeton. escobar, a. (1996) constructing nature: elements for a poststructural political ecology. in peet, r. & watts, m. (eds.) liberation ecologies: environment, development, social movements, 46–68. routledge, london. entitle (2016) jason w. moore: political ecology or world-ecology? video interview. entitle blog youtube channel 5.1.2016 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fwaw51s9gs>. 23.1.2021. fao, ifad, unicef, wfp & who (2019) the state of food security and nutrition in the world 2019. safeguarding against economic slowdowns and downturns. fao, rome. fao & wfp (2019) monitoring food security in countries with conflict situations. <http://www.fao.org/3/ ca3113en/ca3113en.pdf>. 5.7.2020. fine, b. (2005) from actor-network theory to political economy. capitalism nature socialism 16(4) 91–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455750500376057 101fennia 199(1) (2021) sören köpke foster, j. b. & clark, b. (2016) marx’s ecology and the left. monthly review 68(2) 1–25. https://doi.org/10.14452/mr-068-02-2016-06_1 foucault, m. (2007) security, territory, population. lectures at the collège de france, 1977–78. translated by g. burchell. palgrave macmillan, london. friedmann, h. (2005) from colonialism to green capitalism: social movements and emergence of food regimes. in buttel, f. h. & mcmichael, p. (eds.) new directions in the sociology of global development (research in rural sociology and development, vol. 11), 227–264. emerald group publishing, bingley. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1057-1922(05)11009-9 friedmann, h. & mcmichael, p. (1989) agriculture and the state system: the rise and fall of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. sociologia ruralis 29(2) 93–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9523.1989.tb00360.x fsin (2019) global report on food crises. report. food security information network, wfp, fao and ifpri. gladek, e., fraser, m., roemers, g., sabag muñoz, o., kennedy, e. & hirsch, p. (2017) the global food system: an analysis. report. metabolic and wwf netherlands, amsterdam. gonzalez, r. (2015) how almonds became a scapegoat for california’s megadrought. npr 16.4.2015 <https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/16/399958203/how-almonds-became-a-scapegoat-forcalifornias-drought>. 3.7.2020. hall, d. (2015) the political ecology of international agri-food systems. in perreault, t., bridge, g. & mccarty, j. (eds.) the routledge handbook of political ecology, 406–417. routledge, london and new york. haraway, d. (1991) simians, cyborgs, and women. the reinvention of nature. routledge, new york. heikkinen, h. & robbins, p. (2006) new applications of political ecology for the nordic context. nordia geographical publications 35(2) 3–8. <https://nordia.journal.fi/article/view/76189>. heinrich böll foundation, rosa luxemburg foundation & foee (2017) agrifood atlas. english translation. heinrich böll foundation, rosa luxemburg foundation and friends of the earth europe, berlin and brussels. holt-giménez, e. & altieri, m. a. (2013) agroecology, food sovereignty, and the new green revolution. agroecology and sustainable food systems 37(1) 90–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/10440046.2012.716388 hornburg, a. (2020) dialectical confusion: on jason moore’s posthumanist marxism. historical materialism blog 25.6.2020 <http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/dialectical-confusion-jasonmoores-posthumanist-marxism>. 23.1.2021. howard, p. h. (2016) concentration and power in the food system: who controls what we eat? bloomsbury, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474264365 ignatova, j. a. (2017) the ‘philanthropic’ gene: biocapital and the new green revolution in africa. third world quarterly 38(10) 2258–2275. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1322463 jimenez-soto, e. (2020) the political ecology of shaded coffee plantations: conservation narratives and the everyday-lived-experience of farmworkers. the journal of peasant studies [online mar 12 2020] https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1713109 kallis, g. (2019) limits. why malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. stanford university press, stanford, ca. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503611566 kerssen, t. m. (2015) food sovereignty and the quinoa boom: challenges to sustainable repeasantisation in the souther altiplano of bolivia. third world quarterly 36(3) 489–507. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1002992 kull, c. (2004) isle of fire. the political ecology of landscape burning in madagascar. the university of chicago press, chicago and london. kull, c. a. & rangan, h. (2016) political ecology and resilience: competing interdisciplinarities? in hubert, b. & mathieu, n. (eds.) interdisciplinarités entre natures et sociétés, 71–87. pie peter lang, brussels. köpke, s. (2018) new pieces to the puzzle: the food-water-energy-mining nexus in environmental conflicts. resources and conflicts blog 20.3.2018 <http://resources-and-conflict.org/2018/03/foodwater-energy-mining-nexus/>. 23.1.2021. köpke, s., withanachchi, s. s., pathiranage, r., withanachchi, c. r. & ploeger, a. (2019) social–ecological dynamics in irrigated agriculture in dry zone sri lanka: a political ecology. sustainable water resource management 5 629–637. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40899-018-0220-1 lang t. & heasman, m. (2015) food wars. 2nd ed. routledge, oxon and new york. latour, b. (2005) reassembling the social. an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford university press, oxford and new york. lave, r. (2015) reassembling the structural: political ecology and actor-network theory. in perreault, t., bridge, g. & mccarty, j. (eds.) the routledge handbook of political ecology, 213–223. routledge, london and new york. 102 reviews and essays fennia 199(1) (2021) malthus, t. r. (2015 [1798]) an essay on the principle of population and other writings. penguin, london. mansfield, b. (2010) “modern” industrial fisheries and the crisis of overfishing. in peet, r., robbins, p. & watts, m. (eds.) global political ecology, 84–99. routledge, london and new york. margulies, j. d. & bersaglio, b. (2018) furthering post-human political ecologies, geoforum 94 103–106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.03.017 mcmichael, c. (2014) climate change and migration: food insecurity as a driver and outcome of climate change-related migration. in malik, a., grohmann, e. & akhtar, r. (eds.) environmental deterioration and human health, 291–313. springer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7890-0_12 mcmichael, p. (2009) a food regime genealogy. the journal of peasant studies 36(1) 139–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150902820354 mcmichael, p. (2013) food regimes and agrarian questions. fernwood publishing, halfiax & winnipeg. https://doi.org/10.3362/9781780448794.000 mcmichael, p. (2020) does china's ‘going out’ strategy prefigure a new food regime? the journal of peasant studies 47(1) 116–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1693368 meadows, d. h. & club of rome (1972) the limits to growth: a report for the club of rome's project on the predicament of mankind. universe books, new york. https://doi.org/10.1349/ddlp.1 misselhorn, a. a. (2005) what drives food insecurity in southern africa? a meta-analysis of household economy studies. global environmental change 15(1) 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2004.11.003 moore, j. w. (2015) capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital. verso, london. mouat, m. j., prince, r. & roche, m. m. (2019) making value out of ethics: the emerging economic geography of lab-grown meat and other animal-free food products. economic geography 95(2) 136–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2018.1508994 munro, g. (2009) game theory and the development of resource management policy: the case of international fisheries. environment and development economics 14(1) 7–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355770x08004671 neo, h. & emel, j. (2017) the geographies of meat. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315584386 nyantakyi-frimpong, h. & bezner kerr, r. (2015) a political ecology of high-input agriculture in northern ghana. african geographical review 34(1) 13–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/19376812.2014.929971 ó gráda, c. (2009) famine. a short history. princeton university press, princeton. o'sullivan, k. (2014) humanitarian encounters: biafra, ngos and imaginings of the third world in britain and ireland, 1967–70. journal of genocide research 16(2–3) 299–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2014.936706 osterhoudt, s. (2017) vanilla landscapes: meaning, memory, and the cultivation of place in madagascar. nybg press, bronx, ny. patel, r. & moore, j. w. (2018) a history of the world in seven cheap things. verso, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520966376 paulson, s., gezon, l. l. & watts, m. (2003) locating the political in political ecology: an introduction. human organization 62(3) 205–217. https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.62.3.e5xcjnd6y8v09n6b peet, r., robbins, p. & watts, m. (2010) global nature. in peet, r., robbins, p. & watts, m. (eds.) global political ecology, 1–47. routledge, london and new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203842249 pichler, m. (2015) legal dispossession: state strategies and selectivities in the expansion of indonesian palm oil and agrofuel production. development and change 46(3) 508–533. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12162 qaim, m. (2017) globalisation of agrifood systems and sustainable nutrition. proceedings of the nutrition society 76(2017) 12–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0029665116000598 reardon, t. (2007) global food industry consolidation and rural agroindustrialization in developing economies. in haggblade, s., hazell, p. b. r. & reardon, t. (eds.) transforming the rural nonfarm economy: opportunities and threats in the developing world, 199–215. johns hopkins university press, baltimore. reisman, e. (2020) superfood as spatial fix: the ascent of the almond. agriculture and human values 37 337–351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-019-09993-4 robbins, p. (2019) political ecology. a critical introduction. 3rd ed. wiley-blackwell, malden, ma and oxford. rocheleau, d. (2015) roots, rhizomes, networks and territories: reimagining pattern and power in political ecologies. in bryant, r. (ed.) the international handbook of political ecology, 70–89. edward elgar, cheltenham and northampton, ma. https://doi.org/10.4337/9780857936172.00013 rocheleau, d., thomas-slayter, b. & wangari, e. (eds.) (1996) feminist political ecology: global issues and local experience. routledge, london. 103fennia 199(1) (2021) sören köpke rogers, a., castree, n. & kitchin, r. (eds.) (2013) the oxford dictionary of human geography. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780199599868.001.0001 sajadian, c. (2020) critical agrarian studies. in kobayashi, a. (ed.) the encyclopedia of human geography, second edition, vol. 3, 17–24. elsevier, amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-102295-5.10456-1 scapegoat (2015) the political economy of soil. interview with piers blaikie. scapegoat journal 8 144–149. scott, j. c. (1998) seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. yale university press, new haven. scott, j. c. (2009) the art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland southeast asia. yale university press, new haven. scott, j. c. (2012) two cheers for anarchism: six easy pieces on autonomy, dignity, and meaningful work and play. princeton university press, princeton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400844623 sen, a. (1981) poverty and famines. an essay on entitlement. oxford university press, oxford. shiva, v. (2000) stolen harvest: the hijacking of the global food supply. south end press, cambridge, ma. shiva, v. (2008) soil not oil. climate change, peak oil and food insecurity. zed books, london. steinsson, s. (2017) do liberal ties pacify? a study of the cod wars. cooperation and conflict 53(3) 339–355. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836717712293 swanson, h. a. (2015) shadow ecologies of conservation: co-production of salmon landscapes in hokkaido, japan, and southern chile. geoforum 61 101–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.02.018 taylor, m. (2015) the political ecology of climate change adaptation: livelihoods, agrarian change and the conflicts of development. routledge and earthscan, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203762486 tetreault, d. (2017) three forms of political ecology. ethics and the environment 22(2) 1. https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.22.2.01 tilzey, m. (2018) political ecology, food regimes, and food sovereignty: crisis, resistance, resilience. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64556-8 tsing, a. l. (2015) the mushroom at the end of the world. princeton university press, princeton. tucker, c. m. (2008) changing forests: collective action, common property, and coffee in honduras. springer, cham. vandermeer, j. & perfecto, i. (2013[1995]) breakfast of biodiversity. the political ecology of rain forest destruction. food first, oakland, ca. de waal, a. (2016) malthus’s zombie: why are we still scared by stories about scarcity causing atrocities? world peace foundation blog 3.2.2016 <https://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2016/02/03/ malthuss-zombie-why-are-we-still-scared-by-stories-about-scarcity-causing-atrocities/>. 17.6.2020. de waal, a. (2018) mass starvation. the history and future of famine. polity, cambridge. watts, m. (2013[1983]) silent violence. food, famine, and peasantry in northern nigeria. university of georgia press, athens and london. woo-cummings, m. (2002) the political ecology of famine: the north korean catastrophe and its lessons. adb institute research paper series 31. yagishita, y. (2018) no more tuna for japan’s sushi. le monde diplomatique february 2018 <https:// mondediplo.com/2018/02/13fishing-japan>. 1.7.2020. yeh, e. t. (2015) political ecology in and of china. in bryant, r. (ed.) the international handbook of political ecology, 619–632. edward elgar, cheltenham and northampton, ma. https://doi.org/10.4337/9780857936172.00055 zimmerer, k. s. & bassett, t. j. (eds.) (2003) political ecology. an integrative approach to geography and environment-development studies. the guilford press, new york and london. 21258_06_isachenko the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery since 1944 gregory a. isachenko isachenko, gregory a. (2004). the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery since 1944. fennia 182: 1, pp. 47–59. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper traces the correlation between the functions of landscape, its dynamics under its human influences and the dominant images of its terrain. a great deal of attention is given to vyborg karelia – the part of the karelian isthmus ceded by finland to the soviet union in 1940. the author considers the consequences on the landscape of population exchange and settlement after 1944, alterations in landscape due to increased recreation, forest protection, the abandonment of agricultural lands, bog drainage and open-cut mining. the conclusions reached concerning the landscape imagery of the region are based chiefly on an analysis of texts and pictures from between the 1950s and the 1980s, and the author’s observations and research data. predominantly examined is the perception of the residents of leningrad (now st. petersburg) as being the widest human cross-section vis-à-vis vyborg karelia at the period under examination. the radical changes in its imagery during the postwar period were wrought by: 1) great alterations in landscape functions and land use; 2) the loss of historical recollection of past landscapes in the present population; and 3) the strong ideologization of landscape perception during the soviet period. an integral image, dominating up to now, embodies the principally “recreational model” of landscape development, one which is not completely adequate to the present state of the landscape. during the postsoviet period, regional imagery becomes more complex and contradictory in regard to the increased transitional function of the isthmus as a bridge between russia and the european union. gregory a. isachenko, department of geography & geoecology, university of st. petersburg, 10 line 33, v.o., 199178 st. petersburg, russia. e-mail: greg@gi1395.spb.edu. introduction the karelian isthmus is a territory between the gulf of finland and lake ladoga, lying to the north of the neva river. for one thousand years at least, the interests of different countries, nations, confessions, landowners and administrative units were focused right here. therefore, the actual landscape of the isthmus is quite saturated with the accumulated heritage of different historical epochs. among the peculiarities of the territory that have exercised the most important effects on landscape development one could mention: 1) outstanding opportunities for using water routes such as the gulf of finland, lake ladoga, and the neva and vuoksi lake river systems; 2) the contact zone between the baltic crystalline shield and the east european plain that is responsible for dividing the isthmus respectively into rocky and sandy parts; and 3) the shortage of land suitable for agriculture owing to the broad spread of glacial and fluvio-glacial sands containing a great deal of cobbles and boulders, plus granite ridges and an abundance of lakes. the karelian isthmus also presents a prominent example of terrain where the role of landscape function is quite crucial in the creation of dominant landscape images. in turn, landscape function changes in the course of time, conforming to the consecutive periods of the regional development. every change of function will leave appreciable traces in the landscape, giving rise to a new landscape profile, forming a new visible land48 fennia 182: 1 (2004)gregory a. isachenko scape and correspondingly fresh enduring images of the countryside. this paper deals with the main changes in the karelian isthmus landscape during the latter half of the 20th century and their reflection in the imagery of the territory. the main attention is given to the territory of vyborg karelia by which is meant the part of the karelian isthmus ceded to the soviet union in 1940. actually it includes both the vyborg and priozersk administrative rayons (districts) of the leningrad oblast, and part of the kurortnyi rayon of st. petersburg. the total area is slightly more than 11,000 km2. conclusions concerning landscape imagery in this region are based chiefly on an analysis of descriptions (newspaper and magazine articles, local lore pamphlets, guidebooks, itineraries, popular songs) and pictures (book illustrations, emblems, advertising images). alongside all this, distinct images of the territory continue to penetrate daily communication and can even affect the behaviour of people in their concrete milieu. the author uses his personal observations made in the course of an over 20-year study of the region. chiefly examined are the perceptions of st. petersburg (or leningrad, before 1991) populace as the broad totality of people in relation to vyborg karelia during the period following 1944. a short excursion into the past for the best understanding of the specificity of vyborg karelia development during the soviet and post-soviet periods it is necessary to point out the most crucial events in the previous history of the region, events which had influenced the perception of the area by st. petersburgers as well. in a more detailed fashion such questions have been examined in certain other works (isachenko 1997, 1998). at the beginning of the 18th century, when the isthmus and ladogan karelia were turned over to russian jurisdiction, and just when st. petersburg was founded (1703), the territory became practically a capital-city zone. nevertheless, despite the proliferation of landscape functions such as largescale timber cutting, building-material excavation and the establishment of country estates by russian noblemen, in the consciousness of newly settled russian population (and in different social groups), the environs of the new capital were known for a long while as a shelter for wretched chukhna. chukhna was the common russian name for ingermanland finns (äyrämöiset and savakot) and broadly applied to the finnish people. until the mid-19th century, this image, expressed by a. pushkin, had prevailed in the minds of the majority of petersburgers when considering this territory. furthermore, vyborg karelia (and to a greater extent ingermanland, which surrounded the new northern capital) were perceived by the townsfolk as the curators of the most ancient strata of the regional history, strata evoking the finnish past of this northern russian capital. numerous legends about finnish shamans and miracles, which for many years cropped up in petersburgian folklore, were also abundantly embodied in russian fiction over the first part of 19th century (spivak 1998). the perception of vyborg karelia essentially changed over the last third of the 19th century. now it was connected with the economic growth of the grand duchy of finland, the strengthening of finnish national consciousness, and the intensification of regional agriculture, oriented predominantly to the st. petersburg market. the last important influence was railway construction and the consequent large-scale recreational development of the area. by the end of the 19th century the living standards of the rural population in the region had distinctly improved: the average karelian-finnish peasant was no longer so poor and wretched as he looked during the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century. the first russian guidebooks and itineraries devoted to finland underscored the cleanliness and prosperity of the finnish villages along the isthmus. the establishment of the railway line st. petersburg–vyborg–riihimäki (1870) and also vyborg– antrea–sortavala (serdobol) (1893), plus mass dacha (villa) construction along these railways led to the discovery of so-called old finland by members of st. petersburg’s upper and middle classes. vyborg karelia became the visiting card for the whole of finland for the inhabitants of the russian capital and other great cities. the absorbing reality of finland began at that time right at the finland station in st. petersburg, where all the staff were finnish. this was also the case along all the railway line, where station buildings had been designed by finnish architects and engineers in the national romantic style. some of these buildings can still be seen today. at the end of 19th and at the beginning of the 20th centuries, this fennomania was strongly exfennia 182: 1 (2004) 49the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery … pressed amidst a russian (notably petersburgian) creative intelligentsia that was also being stimulated by the national renaissance current in finnish artistic life. but it should be stressed that this vyborg karelia landscape was being perceived not only as a pattern of wild (or pure) nature, but also in its intimate connections with the unhurried, cyclical way of life of its back-to-nature inhabitants. these feelings were aptly depicted by the very relevant russian poet osip mandelshtam (1971) who wrote: “i always vaguely felt the special significance of finland for the petersburgian: here he could ponder over the questions that he could not think about in st. petersburg.” such immersion in finland’s imagery was one manifestation of the way to the north, idealized by russian artistic intellectuals of the so-called silver age. in a more realistic context autonomous finland was a european threshold for russian democrats and revolutionaries – implanted here were the democratic traditions and the casual police surveillance that were not to be seen in any other territory of the russian empire. after the proclamation of independence of finland (1917) and the consequent civil war, which affected vyborg karelia as well, the state frontier between finland and soviet russia (subsequently the ussr) became one of the sectors of the iron curtain. concurrently with the creation of defensive zones on either side of the border across the karelian isthmus, and under the influence of the dominant ideological lines, the fruitful interrelation between finnish and russian culture almost completely ceased. in the pre-war period, the leading agricultural function of the area peaked. in the creation of new arable lands, large areas of forest were felled, marshes and bogs were drained, and even the level of some lakes was lowered. by 1939, the total extent of cultivated land in vyborg karelia had increased by 17–18% (according to some calculations, by even more than 20%). it was just then the proportion of agricultural activity was at it greatest in the history of the region. the forest area of vyborg karelia correspondingly decreased to its minimum extent, namely less than 50%. prewar industrial development, however, could not essentially alter the dominant agricultural profile of the region. population and settlement change after 1944 the ceding of vyborg karelia to the soviet union in 1940, and the cessation of hostilities in the war between the ussr and finland in 1944 have marked the most crucial changes in the destiny of the region over last millennium. the population has been transformed totally: over the course of a few months in 1944 more than 200,000 finnish inhabitants of vyborg karelia were evacuated to finland. people originating from the central and northern oblasts of european russia, byelorussia and ukraine became the new settlers of the region. this great ethnic change of 1944 has brought about an ensuing disruption of the settlement system that had developed over centuries. from the end of the 1940s until the 1970s this process was planned and realized under such ideological slogans as “enlarge the kolkhozes”, “liquidate isolated farms (khutors)” and “liquidate unpromising villages”. by 1955, newly created collective farms (kolkhoz) in vyborg karelia had 50–100 houses and a respective population of 200–500 people each. the isolated houses whose transfer to farm centres had been considered inexpedient, were systematically destroyed. what is more, the fate of a great number of villages was predetermined by such factors as their proximity to the new state frontier and the establishment of new military units and artillery ranges. the liquidation of small villages has resulted in serious toponymic changes as well. a new russian name was generally assigned to a group of neighbouring houses (thus small villages) with their distinguishing finnish names; therefore the total number of names assigned during the renaming of the 1940s–1950s villages decreased 3 to 4 -fold. for example, to the south of vyborg, the villages of nuoraa, tamminiemi, niemelä, pukkila and hortana have been united under the common name of sokolinskoje. inspection of the data from table 1 shows that over the course of 50 years the number of settlements in three volosts (parishes) of vyborg karelia decreased by 2.5–4 times. if we try to take into account not only the settlements officially registered by 1939, but also their isolated sectors bearing their proper names, the total decrease in rural settlements could be 10 times estimated by the 1980s. 50 fennia 182: 1 (2004)gregory a. isachenko throughout the post-war period such “spontaneous” migration took place from the villages (particularly from those where there were no schools, shops or reliable communications) into the cities and new urban settlements. since 1940, the number of towns in vyborg karelia has increased from two (vyborg and käkisalmi) to seven. urban status has been given to the settlements with reconstructed or newly created industrial enterprises: pulp and paper mills (svetogorsk – former enso, kamennogorsk – antrea, sovetskiy – johannes), hydroelectric power stations (lesogorskiy – jääski), and war industries or similar features. over the same period numerous “agrotowns” (formally rural settlements with multi-storey houses and more than 1000 people) have been constructed: pervomayskoe (former kivennapa), melnikovo (räisälä), sosnovo (rautu), gromovo (sakkola) and others. table 2 demonstrates the transformation of vyborg karelia from a rural into an urbanized area over the course of forty post-war years. the rural population of this region has decreased more than twice over during this same period. clearly this process could not have proceeded without serious consequences for the landscape. the new functions of territory and landscape alterations the new settlers in vyborg karelia had land-management experience (notably an agricultural one), not quite suitable for local environmental conditions. the inheritance of the agricultural traditions of karelian finns was not altogether possible due to the kolkhoz-sovkhoz system based on such cornerstones as the enlargement of fields and remaking of the old drainage network. landscape structure, characterized by high local contrasts and a modest average size of arable plots, opposed such a method of land utilization development and agriculture on its own. therefore, vyborg karelia lost quickly its former agricultural imagery (figs. 1 and 2). the culture of rural life proper to “old russia” has not emerged here so far. by 1991 the total proportion of agricultural land had fallen to between 11–12% of the entire vyborg karelia territory. this process was terminated in the 1970s and 1980s, when around 300 km2 of desolate land were cleared and drained for cultivation as a result of the campaign of “complex melioration”. table 1. the decrease of the number of rural settlements in certain volosts (parishes) of vyborg karelia, 1939–1989. the name of the parish present name of the volost administrative rayon number of number of (volost) in 1939 (district) 1989 settlements 1939 settlements 1989 kaukola sevastyanovo priozersk 30 10 sakkola gromovo priozersk 29 13 kivennapa pervomaiskoe vyborg 47 12 table 2. the dynamics of population (in thousands) and numbers of settlements in vyborg karelia, 1938–1989. characteristic year 1938 1947 1953 1989 rural population 210.0 35.0 76.4 95.8 urban population 79.4 45.4* 59.6* 179.8 total population 289.4 80.4* 136.0* 275.6 number of rural settlements c. 1000 522 – 103 number of towns 2 6 6 7** number of urban settlements 0 3 3 4 * excluding the population of zelenogorsk (former terijoki), which was incorporated in leningrad (st. petersburg), along with nearby settlements. ** including zelenogorsk, which now is part of the kurortnyi rayon of st. petersburg. fennia 182: 1 (2004) 51the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery … fig. 1. the landscape of the northwestern ladoga coast near kaarlahti in 1939: (1) forest, open woodlands, nondrained peat bogs; (2) fire sites and clearings (predominantly on granite hills); (3) meadows and arable lands (predominantly on limnetic terraces); (4) first stage of meadows overgrowing; (5) second stage of meadows overgrowing; (6) third stage of meadows overgrowing (small-leaved forest); (7) paludification of meadows; (8) artificially stimulated peat overgrowth; (9) stone industrial development; (10) stone residential development. anthropogenic sites: (11) granite quarries; (12) sand pits; (13) dumps (overgrowing parts are indicated by point hatching); (14) artificial reservoirs. borders (15) of landscape sites; (16) of vegetation units. (17) railways; (18) main roads; (19) houses. fig. 2. the landscape of the northwestern ladoga coast near kuznechnoye (former kaarlahti) at the end of the 1980s. legend as in fig. 1. during the soviet period the forestry of vyborg karelia was greatly changed. approximately 80% of the forest-covered area had been included in the first group, where industrial tree cutting was strictly forbidden. the forest estimate depended on the priority given to recreation. the reforestation of areas subjected to cutting and fires during the war was carried out. a system of fire prevention using aeroplanes has been developed. in the near surrounds of leningrad several recreational 52 fennia 182: 1 (2004)gregory a. isachenko forest parks (lesopark) have been established. as a result, total forest cover in vyborg karelia increased and reached 60–65% by the beginning of the 1990s; in certain areas it approached 80%. the increase of forest area is due to forest regeneration in abandoned arable lands; the percentage of the loss of cultivated land is estimated in different parts of the region to be from 30 to 60%. the establishment of a regime of forest protection on the karelian isthmus has been instrumental in the active manifestation of natural dynamic trends in forest vegetation. thus, forest regeneration, stimulated by the wartime fires, has now resulted in a predominance of 40–50 year pine stands on broad areas of sandy plain. in the absence of fire and in conjunction with pine, spruce regenerates most actively, subsequently supplanting the pine in timber stand. in consequence of this process, the share of spruce forest in the total forest-covered area of the karelian isthmus increased from 21% in 1948 to 29% in 1983 and actually continues to rise. the share of the pine woods, on the other hand, fell from 63 to 51% during the same period. the presence of alder groves has been somewhat greater in recent decades due to forest growth on abandoned fields and meadows. bog drainage has also been a significant factor in landscape change in vyborg karelia after 1944. by the end of the 1980s, the total area of drained bogs and mires (completely or partially) had extended to about 75 km2. whereas the main goal of bog drainage before 1940 had been the enlargement of agricultural area, drained bogs and mires were mainly intended for forest growth and peat excavation during the soviet period. the current aspect of the vyborg karelia landscape cannot be visualized without a great number of granite quarries and sand pits. using topographic maps of the territory (issued in the 1970s), we counted more than 30 operating open pits within a square of over 10 hectares each. only few of them were inherited from the finnish period, but were subsequently extended (e.g. kavantsaari and antrea to the northeast of vyborg). every large quarry or sand pit with its attendant dumps, precipitation tanks, logistical roads, and crusher enterprises modifies irreversibly and unrecognizably the nearby landscape to the several square kilometres or even more (see figs. 1 and 2). without exaggeration, we can determine recreation as being the prevailing function of vyborg karelia over the last 50 years. in 1946 a governmental decision concerning the creation of a health-resort zone around leningrad was issued. at the beginning of the 1960s the total area of this zone was approximately 150 km2, thus transforming the region into one of the largest recreational territories of ussr-wide significance. the health-resort zone included in particular the coastal area of the gulf of finland between solnechnoje (former ollila) and smolyachkovo (lautaranta), i.e. the recreational core of the region at the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th centuries. one former settlement, terijoki, was transformed into the town of zelenogorsk, now the unofficial health-resort capital of the region. the soviet recreational development of vyborg karelia followed a fast pace and was not limited only to the gulf of finland coastal area. from the beginning of 1950s to the end of 1980s, the total number of recreational institutions had increased by more than 10 times. by the end of 1980s, there were 175 sanatoriums, rest homes, guest houses, tourist centres, 55 camps for hunting and fishing, and approximately 130 pioneer camps and summer kindergartens in vyborg karelia. establishments, enterprises, and high schools preferred to construct their resort facilities directly in vyborg karelia. the shores of the vuoksi and other large lakes in the isthmus have become dotted with recreational institutions. simultaneously hiking, skiing, boating and bicycle tourism have been actively promoted. along with the building of state recreational institutions (so-called organized recreation) from the beginning of 1950s, a great number of land plots have been allotted for individual dachas (especially for gardening). since the 1970s a wave of townsfolk-gardeners has accompanied the flood of genuine leisure-seekers or tourists. the cultivation of individual gardens became compensation of a kind for the partial loss of the agricultural functions in the karelian isthmus. it is no exaggeration to say that for hundreds thousands of leningrad (st. petersburg) residents of the ages of 40–80, the older generation, the image of the area is intimately connected with their activity on the famed 600 square meters (the standard size of the individual land plot). in the middle of 1990s, the total area of collective gardens along the karelian isthmus was estimated at about 200 km2, including about 100 km2 in vyborg karelia. the largest concentration of gardens, possessing an area of more than fennia 182: 1 (2004) 53the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery … 5 km2 each, is located near roshchino (former raivola), gor’kovskoye (mustamäki), and sosnovo (rautu). over the summer period each large collective garden concentrates a population comparable to that of a small town. on the one hand, the cumulative effect of such collective gardening in the landscape results in the transformation of unproductive forest and bog sites into cultivated and drained lands, bringing about a change in the local hydrographic network. on the other hand, this mode of land use leads to the fragmentation of the landscape into numerous identical cells and, in general, an increases the monotony of the area. recreational needs on the karelian isthmus come into conflict with the goals of nature conservation. the network of protected areas is represented by six regional complex reserves (zakaznik), two hydrological reserves, one botanical reserve, one zoological reserve and eight natural monuments. most of them are located in vyborg karelia, occupying less than 5% of its territory. the low status of the existing protected areas cannot provide any real control over activities carried out in their territory, and correspondingly to attain the goals of nature protection. it is notable that during the soviet period not less than one third of vyborg karelia was included in the frontier zone, and thus limited access to this territory proved to be indirectly beneficial for natural landscape conservation. ideological influence on imagery how have such essentially altered functions of the landscape influenced the imagery of vyborg karelia during the last half of the 20th century? undoubtedly, influences until to the beginning of 1990s were brought about under greatest pressure from soviet communist ideology. these main points of ideological pressure concerning landscape imagery formation should be noted: 1) inculcation of the idea of vyborg karelia as primordial russian countryside. of course, the ancient settlement of the region by karelians was acknowledged, but in so doing the peaceful coexistence of karelians and slavic people (not always supported by historical data) was nonetheless strongly underlined. vyborg, founded by the swedes in 1293, and priozersk (former korela, kexholm, käkisalmi – also was established by the swedes, soon to be taken over by novgorodians) were regarded as “ancient russian towns”. the role of sweden in the development of the karelian isthmus was at least briefly covered by popular publications, but the finnish past of vyborg karelia was passed over in silence, particularly concerning the events of the 20th century. for example, the texts of certain popular books and brochures did not even make it clear with whom the ussr was at war with on the karelian isthmus in the years 1939–1940 and 1941–1944. such vagueness was clearly dictated by the special character of post-war soviet-finnish relations. the impact of geographical names on the imagery of the territory is difficult to overestimate. from 1948 to the middle of 1950s the total transformation of the toponymy of vyborg karelia was completed. its aim was to eradicate the finnish provenance of the names of settlements, rivers, lakes, bays and even bogs and mires. only about ten finnish names of railway stations have survived (kanneljärvi, myllypelto among others). the new geographic names in vyborg karelia belong to three main categories: 1) in memory of soldiers and officers of soviet army killed on the karelian isthmus during 1941–1944: simagino (former joutselkä), larionovo (norsjoki), tsvelodubovo (kauko-lempiälä) etc.; 2) ideologically coloured names: lake komsomolskoje (former kiimajärvi), lake pionerskoje (kuolemajärvi), leninskoje (haapala) etc.; and 3) neutral “landscape” names such as berezovo (former pukinniemi, from russian bereza – birch), lugovoje (saapro, from russian lug – meadow), ozerki (seivästö, from russian ozerko – little lake) etc. it is interesting to note that many toponyms of the third type present a calque from finnish names: sosnovyi island on lake ladoga (former mäntysaari, both meaning ’pine island’), bolshoi berezovyi, an island on the gulf of finland (koivistonsaari, meaning ’birch island’) and numerous others. such manipulations of geographic names, along with the absence of guardians of historical memory, the scarcity of reliable information concerning the history of the region and the falsification of the overview of certain periods, have enhanced the fairly easy inculcation of ideological clichés among the core of the present inhabitants of vyborg karelia and leningrad residents as well. to a large extent the image of “a landscape without previous population and culture” was adopted, where only local peculiarities might be of interest. these notions were no obstacle to the pre54 fennia 182: 1 (2004)gregory a. isachenko dominantly recreational and touristic development of the territory. on the other hand, the preceding centuries-old experience of land cultivation was not only ignored but was employed to explain away “failures” in post-war agriculture along the karelian isthmus. 2) the sacralization of memorial sites of v. lenin on the karelian isthmus. a section entitled “lenin sites” was obligatory in all guidebooks concerning the region and, as a rule, was the prime subject of appropriate publications. the places where lenin “hid from the bourgeois provisional government of russia in 1917” (e.g. jalkala near terijoki, present iljitchevo) were in the 1960s–1970s transformed into monumental memorial ensembles with exhibition pavilions, conference-halls, bus parks etc. such hypertrophied accentuation of “lenin’s sites, dear to all progressive mankind” (a typical cliché from soviet publications of 1960s–1980s) determines the overall perversion of the cultural heritage of the karelian isthmus, and vyborg karelia in particular. places connected with finnish figures (writers, artists, composers etc.) practically remained without mention. 3) the creation of a virtual sphere of ussr-wide health resorts replete with the propaganda of the communist party’s care of the soviet working people’s health. thus, pictures of newly constructed sanatoria and guest houses, happy health-resort visitors, tourists with backpacks and kayaks figured prominently in the publications from the end of the 1950s to the 1970s. 4) the promotion of soviet economic achievements in the region, especially those of reorganized socialist agriculture. the itineraries of the 1950s–1960s abound with recommendations to visit collective and soviet farms (kolkhoz and sovkhoz), fur farms, machine and tractor stations, new hydroelectric power stations, plants and factories. every adjustment to communist party policy was peculiarly reflected. for example, a guidebook edited in 1962 (ippo et al. 1962), focuses much attention on the cultivation of maize (!) in the sovkhoz fields of the karelian isthmus. the idea of maize growing in every region of the ussr was advocated by nikita khrushchev, the soviet leader in 1953–1964. since the 1970s, however, descriptions of subjects of this kind have occupied an increasingly modest position due to their lack of attractiveness. dominant images and their correlation with the actual landscape now we can point out the outstanding elements of landscape, employing the image of the landscape of vyborg karelia of the 1950s–1980s, based in the analysis of the appropriate texts and recent toponyms of the area. the majority of epithets are related to forest, indicating its prime role in the actual landscape: “enormous”, “stretching to the horizon”, “evergreen”, “dark-green necklace”, “picturesque”, “majestic”, “sublime”, “mighty”, “powerful”, “dense”, “thick”, “difficult to traverse”, “venerable” (age-old), “primordial”, “virgin”, “severe”, “thoughtful”, “misty”, “wonderful”. the most mentioned tree is pine: “powerful pines”, “gigantic pines”, “rustle of pines”. spruce, birch and larch (the latter is artificially grown) appear in texts much more rarely, and aspen and alder are almost never mentioned. no less important place in the creation of the landscape imagery belongs seemingly to the features of inland lakes of the isthmus: “extremely picturesque”; “blue spots”; “light, quiet wood lakes”; “mirror-like, calm surface of boundless lakes”; “endless extent of lakes”; “small but very beautiful lakes”; “lake krasavitsa” (means “beauty”, there are several expressions for such toponyms); “countless islands and islets”; “labyrinths of islands”; “chains of islands”; “woody islands”; “rocky islands”; “little bays overgrown by tendergreen reeds”. such integrated definitions such as “the land of lakes” and “land of blue lakes” appear very often. the coasts of lake ladoga, which is the largest lake in europe, are depicted in a more severe tone: “long and narrow bays (gulfs), resembling norwegian fjords”; “granite cliffs”; “coasts, reared over by granite hills”; “sheer walls”. the shore of the gulf of finland is described as a contrast to the lake ladoga coast: “sea surf”, “sparkling surface”, “laskovyi (‘caressing’) beach”. the texts pay attention to other bodies of water, mainly rivers and streams: “impetuous”, “quick”, “vigorous”, “dodging in stony river-beds”, “thundering”, “whimsically twisting”, “quiet-water”, “green tunnels”, finally – “the beauty of vuoksi”. the climate of the karelian isthmus is characterized as being “mild”, “salubrious” or “temperate”. the air is “wonderfully clear” or “saturated with the aroma of warmed pine pitch”. among the different forms of relief most often are named hills, valleys, narrow and steep river fennia 182: 1 (2004) 55the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery … and lake shores, terraces, crests, rocky ridges, steep granite rocks, granite islands, stony or sandy cliffs, corridors made from granite rocks, enormous granite massifs, conglomerations of granite. such geomorphological terms as kames and eskers are also used. it is notable that bedrocks are cited only as the crystalline rocks of the baltic shield along with sand. the terms “clayey and loamy lacustrine terraces” (which is a “gold reserve” of agricultural land on the isthmus) are practically absent. glacial boulders, a very important landscape element, are always depicted as “enormous”; “as though thrown about by somebody’s huge hand”; “covered with moss”, “of whimsical forms”. as to the works of man, the most varied set of images was specific to the town of zelenogorsk (former terijoki, at present a district of st. petersburg): “garden-town”, “northern health-resort”, “northern riviera” (also the name of a guest house). considering the correlation between the abovelisted definitions (epithets) and the real (objectively observed) features of landscape, it should be remembered that the quoted features, as a rule, do not bear epithets of negative value, expressing unattractive aspects of the described landscape. nevertheless we cannot ignore the influence of information of this kind on the “image array” available to the general public. for understandable reasons, guidebooks and itineraries do not concern themselves with landscapes generally considered unattractive or desolate, such as bogs and wooded peatlands, which occupy more than one third of the area of the isthmus. agricultural lands (fields, meadows, pastures) that take up more than 10% of the territory, would be mentioned only as featureless “kolkhoz (sovkhoz) fields”. as to their stand composition, the imagery of forests of the karelian isthmus, while reflecting correctly the actual dominance of pine, nevertheless can distort the total picture. the foregoing indicates the increase in area covered by spruce taiga forest, along with its proper features: gloominess, high moisture content, poverty of plant composition etc. at the same time the karelian isthmus has a large coverage of small-leaved woods (mainly consisting of birch and aspen), occupying about 20% of the forest area. this proportion may rise due to the overgrowth of desolate fields and meadows. with regard to the “virginity” of the “age-old” woods of vyborg karelia, the forest inventory data of 1983 expressively demonstrates that the total area of woods with a median age over 180 years on the karelian isthmus can in measured by tens of hectares. could, however, the “primordial taiga” (more precisely, the term taiga is not even mentioned in the itineraries) be maintained on the isthmus if its forest area was reduced to a minimum by 1939, while protected woods were not in existence? at the moment, the region is characterized by the dominance of stands of post-war generations, i.e. 50–60 years old. according to the research data (table 3), respectively 71% to 72% of the respondents estimate that forest and particularly pinewoods to be the “most expressive features” of the karelian isthmus, 20% of respondents affirm the same with respect to spruce forest, and only 3% distinguish birch woods. as to the agricultural peculiarities of the isthmus, 83% of respondents regard them as insignificant or not even present. hence, such above-cited traits of the karelian isthmus landscape perceived by peterburgians in 2000 do not very much differ from the image created by the itineraries of the 1950s–1980s. table 3. the results of a survey of the residents of st. petersburg regarding their perception of the karelian isthmus (2000), % of the total number of respondents (50). qualities (features) of the karelian isthmus degree of expression (prevalence in the territory) high moderate weak absent forest coverage 71 29 0 0 agricultural land 2 15 66 17 pine wood 72 26 2 0 spruce wood 20 46 32 2 birch wood 3 34 56 7 collective gardening 37 51 7 5 56 fennia 182: 1 (2004)gregory a. isachenko the present imagery perhaps most adequately reflects the abundance of lakes on the isthmus. in this case, however, an enormous number of lakes with inaccessible shorelines, surrounded by floating bog, will be passed over in silence. interestingly enough, the descriptions of tourist routes generally concern the great physical-geographic border between the baltic crystalline shield (or fennoscandia) and the east european (russian) plain; this border divides the isthmus into the rocky and sandy parts respectively. such graphic representations of the post-war landscape of the karelian isthmus generally correspond to its textual images. the above-cited guidebook (ippo et al. 1962) has ten graphic illuminations, seven of which present “pristine nature” (with tourists and children in two illustrations). only three pictures contain clear evidence of human activity: vyborg castle, a house in a forest and a road with a car. similar relationships between illustrations are characteristic of other tourist outlines of the isthmus edited in the 1960s and 1970. besides the predominant “natural” views (usually with tourists), there are the monuments of vyborg and priozersk, penaty (the estate of the russian artist ilya repin in former kuokkala) and the pier at vuoksi. by such means and owing to mass recreation, the “romantic-touristic” image of vyborg karelia as a “realm of sandy plains, rocky hills, thousands of lakes and pine woods between the gulf of finland and lake ladoga” has been formed over the last 50 years. at present the landscape that can be represented by such an image takes up no more than half the area of the isthmus. moreover, traces of human activity can be discovered everywhere: from the former meadows, now covered by dense forest, to the forest fire areas, caused by excursionists of the beginning of the 21st century. we might even say that the post-war period was a time when the myth of primordiality (or virginity) of nature in vyborg karelia was created and promoted. the ideological background of this myth is quite evident: it allowed the denial of the cultural heritage of the “finnish period” in the landscape thereby confirming the “russian primordiality” of the territory. the notions of the wilderness present in the karelian isthmus in particular might serve as the basis for the agenda of extremists of the green movement, and even certain biologists, who insist on making the greater part of the isthmus into a nature preserve. it is agreed, by following such a mode of thought, that any economic development of the region is not only valueless, but also bad for the landscape. the cultural icons of the karelian isthmus that were inherited from previous ages are not particularly numerous. primarily there are vyborg castle, the main stronghold of swedes in the region until the beginning of 18th century, and the monrepos landscape park, created on an island near vyborg by the duke of württemberg and the nikolai family – germans active in russian service. finally, repin’s penaty symbolize the affection felt by the russian artistic intelligentsia towards the lonely coastline around the gulf of finland. this tradition was to some extent preserved in the soviet period when in repino, komarovo (former kellomäki), zelenogorsk there appeared the summer cottages (dachas) of leningrad cultural workers, and the “academic settlement”, guest houses for writers and composers. we should point out that the above-named cultural symbols are not strongly connected to finnish history proper. not one of the finnish churches (some ten of which are still preserved, chiefly the most representative ones) was incorporated into the current imagery of vyborg karelia due to the reasons cited above. the post-war mythology of vyborg karelia perhaps received the greatest input from tourists, fishers and mushroom-pickers, penetrating into the most desolate places and generally having quite wild ideas about local history. when coming across numerous building foundations, made from big granite blocks, quite often in the middle of the forest, travellers used to take them for the “remnants of the mannerheim line”. the figure of the marshal of finland and former general in the russian army embodied for them all military and political figures of finland before 1945. “mannerheim’s dachas” appeared here and there. a large selection of prominent “finnish” constructions were reckoned to be in this category (in fact mannerheim never had his own villa in vyborg karelia). “finnish origin” was even attributed to buildings that were newly constructed during the postwar years. for example, one long wooden house, built in the 1950s in the area of the field study station of st. petersburg university (near kuznechnoje, former kaarlahti), was believed to be a “finnish spy school” by the local people. over the past decade, finns – natives of vyborg karefennia 182: 1 (2004) 57the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery … lia before 1944 – have had the opportunity to visit their birthplaces and to contact present-day inhabitants, among whom were those who actively developed highly mythologized views relating to the “ happy life of finns before the war”. accordingly, such myth creation might be considered for a variety of “lost history”. tourists and other categories of travellers played the role of discoverers of vyborg karelia during the soviet period. this rediscovery of the region by inhabitants of leningrad – st. petersburg (and visitors from other parts of the ussr as well) had a more mass popular character than it did at the end of the 19th and the beginning of 20th century. one of its results, apart from the above-mention, has been an entire system of “tourist toponymy” which does not agree at all with official geographic names (i.e. those indicated on the topographic maps): the cape of friendship on lake balakhanovskoe (former torhonjärvi), numerous bays of tourists, forgotten lake, cheery river, etc. the toponymical establishment of a new imagery of the karelian isthmus thus took shape. tourism and recreation in the region have continuously evolved through the post-war decades. the tourists of the 1950s, on foot, skiing and in boats, “explored” vyborg karelia as exotic mysterious ruins, left by previous inhabitants of the country, with overgrown roads and place-names in a misunderstood language – in addition to freely abounding in closed areas. in the 1960s and 1970s kayaking and bicycle tourism became very popular, more and more private cars appeared on the roads, and the karelian isthmus (except the frontier zone) began to be considered as a “home training ground” for tourist-debutants. by the end of the 1980s, with the construction of numerous rest houses, the improvement of roads, the organizing of bus traffic, and a certain facilitation of access to the frontier zone, the extent of recreational development of the territory had been raised to its maximum. in many popular places along the main railway lines, leningrad–vyborg and leningrad–priozersk, the recreational digression of the landscape has been appreciable. on the other hand, among “serious” tourists the isthmus was not really highly regarded, and it was usually seen as a place for country walks and picnics. this recreational stereotype was in particular expressed in a well-known song of the 1980s with the words: “ i’ll go to komarovo for a week…”. at the same time, other kinds of sport connected with nature have been developed on the isthmus, all with their non-official centres: slalom (toksovo–kavgolovo, korobitsino, jukki–mistolovo), rock-climbing (lake jastrebinoje near the border with republic of karelia), water slalom (the losevskaja stream, former kiviniemi), and snowboarding (orehovo–sosnovo) etc. new tendencies in the post-soviet period the post-soviet development of the karelian isthmus is extremely contradictory, and even conflicting. the significant change in the geopolitical situation of russia after the collapse of the ussr caused a need for new seaports on the gulf of finland. one of these ports, devoted to oil and oil products exports was taken into use in 2001 near primorsk (former koivisto). this new seaport is connected to the centres of oil extraction and oil processing by a pipeline, traversing the karelian isthmus (the so-called bts, or baltic pipeline system). the construction of this project and other schemes of creating new communications through the isthmus not only affect the interests of different stakeholders and land-users in the territory, but also open up serious economic contradictions between the leningrad oblast and st. petersburg. moreover, new port and bts construction is being seriously attacked by the greens and other adherents of nature conservation. since the latter half of the 1980s, with the growth and strengthening of the environmental movement in the postcommunist ussr and russia, the imagery of the karelian isthmus has been penetrated by environmental notions of its serving as a kind of “lungs of st. petersburg”. stark images of lake ladoga perishing from water pollution, and the gulf of finland being lost due to the “leningrad dam” were being actively inculcated into mass consciousness. the other process transforming the landscape of the karelian isthmus over the last 10–15 years is the secondary development of abandoned villages and arable lands, termed the reconquista (isachenko 1997). since the end of 1980s, mass building of country cottages has spread everywhere over the area. as a rule, the new cottage settlements occupy the sites of desolated villages and nearby fields and meadows. the appearance of these cottages and especially the scale of re58 fennia 182: 1 (2004)gregory a. isachenko lated investments serve to form an enduring image of a “new russians settlement”. it is notable that this form of settlement is temporary (generally over the summer period) and, what is important, it hardly involves inheriting the agricultural functions of the landscape. in view of this background, the landscape input of such newly created farms, following, within certain limits, from the land-use system of the “finnish period” has thus far remained quite modest. due to the post-soviet economic crisis, the karelian isthmus almost lost its function as a “ussr-wide” or all-russian health resort area. the recreational use of the territory, nevertheless, does actively continue, being transferred from the state sphere to the private sector. for practical purposes, hiking is no longer seen. total motorization of the population and the opening up of formerly closed areas (military sites, sections of frontier zones etc.) have made the region almost completely penetrable. under post-soviet conditions, the system of forest preservation (see above) does not function in any full measure. moreover, certain large forest areas were officially excluded from the most protected premier group. the operation of numerous temporal forest companies in the absence of any effective state control of felling provokes serious damage to the forests of the region. nowadays, every visitor to the forest of the isthmus has a chance to see quite recent open clearings (i.e. under the rubric of “landscape clearings”). however, despite clearly increasing press reports of anthropogenic impact on the landscape, it will be a long way to the utter demolition of the image of primordial nature firmly imprinted in the minds of generations of tourists and leisureseekers. it seems that for a long period the natural priorities in perceptions of the area will dominate the cultural values. nevertheless, the first signs of animation or historical memory have now appeared. we mean here the publication of russian periodicals referring to the forgotten past of vyborg karelia, the publishing of guidebooks, reconstructing the lacunae of the history of the “finnish period” (balashov 1996–2002), above all the activities of local heritage societies and associations. these processes are not at all one-sided because of the opportunity for contact with finns were born in vyborg karelia, or who are now actively investigating its history. it is not out of passing interest that a survey of the residents of st. petersburg (in 2000) showed that 66% of respondents regard the karelian isthmus to be “cultivated” (lived-in) rather than a “wild” area, but only 49% think that the isthmus “has been settled since ancient times”. the fall of the iron curtain has provided for the transformation of the russian-finnish border from semi-penetrated (i.e. penetrated mainly by finnish citizens) to being accessible from both sides. now a weekend trip to lappeenranta or helsinki is not such an outstanding event for an average petersburgian. these circumstances together with geopolitical changes – the narrowing of the russian “window to europe” and finland joining the eu – make for the creation of a new image of the karelian isthmus. many residents of st. petersburg and other big cities of russia now perceive the isthmus as a bridge between st. petersburg and finland, and the shortest land route from both russian capitals to the eu countries. using the new “scandinavia” motorway, one can traverse the isthmus from st. petersburg to the finnish border at torfyanovka or brusnichnoye in two hours. taking into consideration that the north-western margin of present-day “greater st. petersburg” has penetrated into vyborg karelia for a distance of more than 30 km (now reaching former lautaranta), the sense of crossing a bridge will be scarcely noticeable in the near future. concluding remarks we have thus followed the correlation between functions of the landscape of the karelian isthmus over the period after 1944, its dynamic under different human influences and the dominant (enduring) images of the territory. it was established that while conserving several stable dominant perceptions, the images of the region have radically changed over the last 50 years. accordingly, essential substitution of regional imagery was influenced by: 1) change in landscape functions and land-use systems; 2) the lack of a historical memory of landscape of the past possessed by the present population of vyborg karelia; 3) the strong ideologization of landscape perception during the soviet period (up until the middle of the 1980s). the previous integral image, dominating up to now, principally embodied a recreational model of territorial development and is not quite adefennia 182: 1 (2004) 59the landscape of the karelian isthmus and its imagery … quate for the present state of the landscape. in the near future, as the inertial pressure of the previous ideological toolbox is decreased, the array of landscape images should become more complex, and even more contradictory. these processes will be stressed in the post-soviet development of the region, including the conflicts of interests between different kinds of stakeholders and land users as well as the revival of historical memory through the elimination of lacunae in the history of the karelian isthmus. finally, the extension of the transition function of the isthmus serving as a bridge between russia and the european union should play a key role in the future development of the territory and its imagery. references balashov ea (1996–2002). karelskiy peresheek. zemlya neizvedannaya. part 1, 2, 3, 5. novoe vremya, st. petersburg. ippo bb, nn turchaninov & an shtin (1962). karelskiy peresheek. 422 p. lenizdat, leningrad. isachenko ga (1997). the karelian isthmus and the ladogan area: function and image of landscapes in changing political conditions. in landgrén l-f & m häyrynen (eds). the dividing line. borders and national peripheries. renvall institute publications 9, 113–121. isachenko ga (1998). “okno v evropu”: istoriya i landshafty. 476 p. st. petersburg university press, st. petersburg. mandelshtam o (1971). finlandia. in collected works. mezhdunarodnoe literaturnoe sodruzhestvo, new york. spivak dl (1998). severnaya stolitsa. metafizika peterburga. 427 p. tema, st. petersburg. historical tools and current societal challenges: reflections on a collection of environmental migration cases urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa86020 doi: 10.11143/fennia.86020 historical tools and current societal challenges: reflections on a collection of environmental migration cases roberta biasillo biasillo, r. (2020) historical tools and current societal challenges: reflections on a collection of environmental migration cases. fennia 198(1–2) 151–162. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.86020 through considering a "geo archive" as a tool of history, this paper explores several conundrums concerning environmental migration in social sciences. it demonstrates how historical perspectives can problematize and unsettle various automatisms that are widely present in journalistic, public, and policy discourses. through examples from the geo archive, the article illustrates how unavoidable historical dimensions can enrich our understandings on the interaction between environmental issues and migration flows. this paper engages with an open access "archive in-the-making". this geo archive includes case studies of migration flows and puts those flows in conversation with environmental transformations and climatic changes. the analysed collection presents high-profile stories which are representative samples of different approaches, temporalities, geographies, sources of information, narratives, and scales. this endeavour encompasses different disciplines and fields of expertise: environmental humanities, it and communication experts, and political ecology. the archive places itself within the realms of public history, environmental history, and history of the present and aims to reach out to wider audiences. this digital humanities project stemmed from a support action funded by the eu initiative horizon 2020 titled clisel whose overarching goal was to analyse and better inform institutional responses and policies addressing climate refugees and migrants. keywords: climate change, storytelling, history of the present, environmental migration, environmental humanities, digital humanities roberta biasillo, division of history of science, technology and environment, kth royal institute of technology, teknikringen 74d, se-100 44 stockholm, sweden. e-mail: roberta.biasillo@abe.kth.se an experiment in context: the clisel geo archive this article reflects upon a digital humanities project, a geo archive, as a means to make a case for historical analysis to better understand emerging societal challenges at the confluence of migration and environment. it considers both the implications of different interpretations of socio-environmental phenomena and the way in which specific narratives can be produced, disseminated, used, and for what purposes. conceived as a freely available database and accessible since 2019, this geo archive presents not only historic cases, whose trajectories started and ended in the past, but it includes also © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 152 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) current high profile examples representing “environmental migration history” in the making in contemporary imaginations. particularly, the online resource serves as a geo archive of environmental and climate driven migration case studies and argues that an emphasis on the historical dimension can contribute to the wider understanding of “environmental migration history”. the geo archive is one output of the horizon 2020 coordination and support action clisel. clisel stands for climate security with local authorities. from insecurity takers to security makers: mobilizing local authorities to secure the eu against the impacts of climate change in third countries. this archival output straddles the overlapping spheres of scholars’ and policymakers’ expertise and at the confluence of a particularly fertile academic and public debate. rather than a traditional research project, clisel is an action project intended to support local authorities’ ability to deal with climate change migration through training, networking, policy advising, and it tools, such as the geo archive (european commission 2018). clisel’s action project includes as partners the universities of cagliari (italy), bern (switzerland), and lancaster (uk), the kth royal institute of technology in stockholm (sweden), and the centre for local authorities of sardinia (italy). as table 1 shows, each of these institutions brings a different disciplinary and societal perspective to the project. the desire for the catalogue to be ideologically located between digital humanities and public environmental humanities is reflected in the choice of curating editors, comprising of two environmental historians, two digital experts, and a political ecologist. researchers at the kth environmental humanities laboratory in stockholm – marco armiero, ethemcan turhan and, at a later stage, myself – have looked specifically at the historical component of environmental risks. the online platform has been designed by pierre vanhulst and francesco de fino, both from the world trade institute at the university of bern (armiero et al. 2019). the geo archive’s approach enables not only cross-disciplinarian academic uses, as i will demonstrate further in the article, but also opens these issues to wider audiences by popularising the topic. by illustrating varied examples of environmental and climate (a distinction i expand in the article) based migration but also the varied institutional responses to it, users are invited to widen their understandings and are encouraged to critically examine history’s influence on politics and the politics of ongoing narratives. the geo archive (https://geoarchive.clisel.eu/geoarchive) is an evolving pilot catalogue of climate change and environmental migration cases in different areas of the globe, spanning the 18th to 21st centuries, authored mainly by scholars in the early stages of their careers. it presents high-profile stories which are representative samples of different approaches, temporalities, sources of information, narratives and scales. the geo archive aims to offer a concise, jargon-free, but accurate historical perspective on migration flows. it denaturalizes environmental risks and questions the alleged automatism between environmental changes and societal responses. it indicates and contextualizes best and worst practices, traces historical trends by catalyzing episodes in public awareness and mobilization concerning these topics. the achievement of those goals demands a combination of historical documents, audio-visual sources, literary and artistic representations, and legal texts. to date, it includes thirty entries and is available online with open access. this collection will be regularly updated and expanded. each entry is articulated using a template of paragraphs: table 1. consortium partners’ expertise. project partners fields of expertise university of cagliari (italy) multiculturalism and multilevel governance university of bern (switzerland) labour mobility and migration university of lancaster (uk) global climate politics kth royal institute of technology (sweden) environmental history centre for local authorities of sardinia (italy) local authorities 153roberta biasillofennia 198(1–2) (2020) description and timeframe, actors involved, type(s) of environmental change, type(s) of migration and sources. it is important to note that the entries included so far were not chosen randomly. social and political scientist goertz has defined this process as “purposive selection” adopting a descriptivecausal approach based on previous information and selecting cases for a purpose (goertz 2005). moreover, in line with case-study research design and methods, each story represents “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon [environmental and climate migration] in depth and within its real-world context” (yin 2014, 16). firstly, from a theoretical perspective, this collection roots into the realm of the history of the present. it commits to a practice of history as a form of critique based mainly on evidence from archives, texts, and other sources, rather than writing about history from an abstract philosophical or historiographical perspective (introducing history of the present 2011, 1). collected cases create spaces in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural, or culturally necessary. secondly, the clisel digital tool locates itself within the emerging trend of “historicizing climate change”, which implies that the cases all serve as examples of intellectual, political, and social responses to climate-related phenomena and their consequences. they are not simply about past climates, although climate change itself is always directly or indirectly present in the story, but rather about history as the social space where encounters take place and where new conditions for humans and societies, their companion species, and their life worlds in natures and environments are unfolding and negotiated. in agreement with sörlin and lane, i argue and demonstrate that “with climate change as a growing phenomenon historicizing climate change in this version will become increasingly relevant” (sörlin & lane 2018, 1). thirdly, the following reflections align themselves with the call for “a new research agenda on ‘climate mobilities’ that moves beyond simplistic assumptions and more accurately advances knowledge of the nexus between human mobility and climate change” (boas et al. 2019, 901). the geo archive has the ambition to contribute to challenge misleading claims about mass migration induced by climate change that continue to surface in both academia and policy. similar endeavours have been recently conducted. in the early 2000s, a new field of climate science research emerged, to explore the human fingerprint on extreme weather, such as floods, heatwaves, droughts and storms. the number of events studied each year has grown rapidly over time: from 8 in 2012 to 59 in 2018. a uk-based team of researchers processed more than 230 peerreviewed studies of weather events around the world published over the last 20 years and translated them into an interactive map, which can be explored using specific filters (carbon brief n.d.). last year, 23 million people were forced from their homes by disasters linked to the weather and climate change. inevitably, as the planet warms, this number is likely to rise. this risk has led many international agencies such as the un migration agency and even the world bank to promote the idea of “migration as adaptation.” another uk-based project gathered informative resources for governments and civil society. they are organized around types of disasters, issues and places, and intended to influence policy, law and international relations (the climate and migration coalition n.d.). the two databases are born out of these two seemingly insoluble problems: climate change effects and environmental driven migration and displacement. climate change and its impacts are generally spoken of in the future or present tenses, and they are generally coupled with current emergencies, desirable propositions for upcoming times and less desirable scenarios (bbc 2018; european union 2018; ipcc 2018; the guardian 2019a; the new york times 2019). yet people moving as a result of disasters, environmental transformation or degradation is hardly a new phenomenon. disasters have always forced people to move, long before climate change became a pressing issue. some stories of environmental migration are now common knowledge and provide us with a lens for reading the present. in 2009, the uk based newspaper the guardian revisited john steinbeck’s best-known novel, the grapes of wrath (1939), which portrays the harshness of the great depression and the struggles of migrant farmworkers. the series of articles, videos and photo galleries compared past and present migrants who made precarious journeys across the united states (mcgreal 2009). nowadays, the guardian (2019b) is documenting “america’s era of mass migration” due to climate change anew, both showing the transformations that have already occurred and predicting how fire, floods, and temperature rises will gradually force millions of 154 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)reviews and essays americans to move. in a recent piece, columnist milman made explicit room for history. he compared the current us population shift to both the 1930s dust bowl upheaval in which 2.5 million people moved from the dusty, drought-ridden plains to california and to the great migration (united states census bureau 2012), a period spanning a large chunk of the 20th century when about 6 million black people departed the south for cities in the north, mid-west and west (milman 2018). in this age of climatic change, we are called on as historians and social scientists to think about the potential societal function of our knowledge as a means to contribute to the development of a more critical “culture of risk” that stresses responsibilities, injustice, loss and damage, and the cultural legacies embedded in catastrophic events. furthermore, tracing the common roots of modern migration and environmental transformation, and highlighting the structures of power hidden in environmental risks and vulnerabilities, are not only societal tools for reading and acting in our own present, but also methodological and theoretical enquiries. climate change, along with an increase in extreme events and societal stresses, offers an unmissable window of opportunity to question the separation between levels and spheres of governance, and to pry open cracks in the theory of history and the humanities in general. fig. 1. geographical distribution of the geo archive’s cases. designed by elisa privitera. lessons from history the geo archive explores the empirical phenomenon of environmental migration. one of its products is the use of ‘histories’ to test social science theories (victor 1995), or, as stated in the project description, to “criticize the alleged automatism between environmental changes and societal response” in the context of climate change and migration (clisel 2015, 22). an in-depth reading of the cases allows us to challenge and show the limits of some policy discourses and media engagement. automatism #1. it is widely assumed by journalists and institutional actors that environment overlaps with extreme climatic events (benko 2017; mixed migration platform 2017; apap 2019; international organization for migration n.d.; wikipedia n.d.). people are expected to be on the move as weatherrelated disasters such as extreme precipitations and temperatures become more frequent and intense (pachauri & meyer 2014), and changes to climate conditions impact on livelihoods. this assumption has the remarkable corollary that environment represents a determinant and clearly confined factor (climate refugees project 2016; national geographic n.d.; unhcr the un refugee agency n.d.). studies have examined the effects on migration of environmental causes limited to climate variability (henry et al. 2004; dillon et al. 2011; gray & mueller 2012a, 2012b), large-scale natural disasters (smith & mccarty 1996, 2009; halliday 2006; groen & polivka 2010), and local environmental conditions, such as soil quality and fuel-wood availability (massey et al. 2010; gray 155roberta biasillofennia 198(1–2) (2020) 2011; leyk et al. 2012). however, those elements have been analysed mostly in isolation and in a specific point in time; insights have been limited by the lack observations of multiple phenomena obtained over multiple time periods for the same actors and places involved. although these two premises are valid, they require a more critical engagement. the environment acts as a determinant in cases of phenomena generally labelled as climate-induced migration, when extensive climate risk is associated with high frequency or persistent weather and climate events such as drought or recurrent local flooding. a clear and stated connection between climate-change effects and mobility can be observed, for example, in the development of the village of vunidogoloa in fiji, a pacific country made up of 333 small islands. starting in late 2006, the relocation stretched over a period of seven years and was completed in 2014. it was the first community relocation plan in the world managed entirely by the government and framed as an adaptation strategy. a similar top-down strategy was used in the village of dhe in nepal. this case of planned relocation began in 2009 on the climate frontline of high altitudes in the himalayas. it demonstrates that, even if this kind of intervention tends to involve coastal communities and small island developing states, relocation also occurs in the context of other hazards (drought and water insecurity) and other climate frontlines (high altitudes). similarly, in cases of disaster-induced migration, when human mobility happens in the aftermath of a disaster, it is not problematic to infer causal effects between societal and natural changes. typhoons threaten the philippines each year. in particular, typhoon yolanda (internationally known as haiyan), which hit the central philippines on november 8, 2013, clearly illustrates the causal link between disaster and displacement. haiyan affected 171 municipalities in 14 provinces, leading to an estimated 6,300 deaths, over 1,000 people missing, around 1.5 million families (around 7.5 million individuals) displaced, in all affecting 3.4 million families (about 16 million people), and damaging or destroying 1.1 million houses. in the previous cases environment, nature and climate emerge are readable and well-defined, while in other cases these factors are embedded – and partially disappear – in socio-ecological formations. exactly when “the sharp separation between environmental and social or cultural becomes blurry,” to use armiero’s (2017, 49) words, historical analysis becomes instrumental in the development and implementation of policies. the archive includes examples of “slow violence,” longlasting and hardly visible environmental transformations spanning over decades and expressing uneven socio-economic relationships (nixon 2011, 2). these examples show how inequalities affect the residential planning of areas and relative mobility patterns. since the 1960s, the building of an industrial plant has unexpectedly turned the coastal city of gela, sicily from a pole of attraction to an area to avoid or even escape. its huge oil refinery brought a high incidence of cancers, prenatal deaths, malformations and other health problems that the local population and organizations are still confronting. elsewhere, in the carteret islands, an atoll with a 24 kilometer diameter in papua new guinea, a 60-year sequence of long relocation attempts carried out during the colonial and postcolonial periods led to failures. exponential population growth, coastal erosion, sea level rise and intense rainfall, damaged its agricultural system, making the population no longer self-sustainable but dependent on imports from the nearby island of bougainville. these two models of interaction between environment and migration combine and coexist. a wellknown example of how societal structural dynamics generate ‘natural’ disasters is the so-called dust bowl, a period of prolonged drought and deadly dust storms that took place in the 1930s in the midwestern us. one of the most dramatic effects was indeed the migration of hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers who left their land to relocate mainly to california. the data are not precise, but several sources speak of 300 or 400 thousand dust bowl refugees. an in-depth analysis of this history shows that environmental changes always involve social and economic changes, and that those farmers were climate and economic refugees, escaping the harshness of the drought and that of the banks to which they were indebted. a contemporary example of how the political and the ecological are not easily demarcated is the migration flow across the mexico-united states border (morrissey 2018). in december 2018, the us supreme court ruled that the trump administration could bypass the endangered species act and the clean air act to construct a border wall through a butterfly sanctuary near the rio grande river in southern texas. in the early decades of the 21st century, us sanctuary cities and wildlife sanctuaries 156 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)reviews and essays came under siege. as xenophobia and fears of racial diversity weakened federal legislation designed to preserve ecological diversity, people and butterflies traversing the southern border of the united states confronted common challenges. during this period, the monarch butterfly emerged as a symbol of the immigrant rights movement. against a backdrop of critical literature (reuveny 2007, 656–673; clark 2008; dun & gemenne 2008, 10–11), the geo archive conveys the need for a relational and comprehensive definition of the environment. many changes in the environment cannot simply be blamed on the climate. sociopolitical factors such as misguided development strategies, unequal distribution of power and resources, conflict and lack of rights are part of the explanation for why people have been victims of drought and famine. climate is only one aspect of the environment. the concept of ‘the environment’ includes both the natural, built and social surroundings (jónsson 2010, 4). if humans have always migrated in response to a complex array of elements, a broader notion of environmental migration less tailored to circumstances unique to climate change is required. going back to the very first attempt to define the term ‘environmental refugees’, the 1985 united nation environment program highlighted the high degree of complexity and interconnectedness of all aspects of life on earth. in this document, researcher essam el-hinnawi defined environmental refugees as individuals who are “forced to leave their habitat, temporarily or permanently because of a marked environmental disruption that jeopardised their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life” (white 2011, 21). certainly, nowadays climate change dominates debates related to environmental concerns, and climate refugees are emerging characters of global transformation, but what climate encompasses in contemporary discourse and practice is not self-explanatory. automatism #2. the state is the most eligible actor for taking action against climate/environmental disruption and the architecture of the global environmental governance assumes that environmental problems can be tackled and somewhat ‘contained’ within individual nation states. the conference of the parties (cop) is the supreme decision-making body of the united nations framework convention on climate change (unfccc) (united nation n.d.) and was designed to take the crucial steps in the un climate change process. this top-down global approach within un and eu climate policy prioritizes the national scale at the expense of local climate actions, which now represent the lion´s share of the total ongoing policy experiments. international climate negotiations consistently highlight that countries are diverse and have different interests, which complicates reaching international agreements and passing national laws (bulkeley 2010; bulkeley & castán broto 2013; castán broto & bulkeley 2013; vanhala & hestbaek 2016, 111–112). in this critical vein, some cases reflect upon the problematic role of national institutions due to either a lack of intervention or excessive centralization. for example, despite having experienced the very same emergency a few years earlier, there was no evacuation plan in greece when a series of wildfires raged in july and august 2018, causing a humanitarian and ecological tragedy, furthermore, the government, proactively ‘un-declared’ the protection of greek forests. on the other hand, resettlement plans in the aftermath of the april 6, 2009 earthquake in central italy, illustrated that strongly centralized policy responses, rather than assuring a return to a certain kind of public order, can trigger speculation of corruption by the establishment during a state of emergency. as dawson (2017) argues in extreme cities: the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change, state actors do not have a monopoly on policy interventions. especially in emergencies, non-governmental actors can play a decisive role in collecting and distributing first aid. sometimes, their interventions go beyond the first aid mission by engaging in wider debates on the causes of emergencies and the possible solutions. the geo archive provides several cases in which non-state actors have acted both in emergencies and in their aftermath. exploring this path entails asking questions about the short and long-term results of such interventions, about the conditions under which solidarity practices can flourish and about the policies they foster. the planned relocation of the village of dhe in nepal was supported by international aid, by a swiss ngo (kam for sud) and a french ngo (du bessin au népal) in particular. in 2009, the local council concluded that relocation was the adaptation option best suited to the needs of the community and with support from swiss ngo kam for sud and the lo mustang foundation, a relocation site was identified on the thangchung plain to which almost all the village’s families were in the process of 157roberta biasillofennia 198(1–2) (2020) moving. after many struggles, gela in sicily was recognized at the national level as a dangerous and fragile territory in the 1990s. more specifically, in 1998, the italian ministry of the environment included gela on its list of highly contaminated areas. in 2006, the grassroots movement families of the victims of chlorine soda of gela was established. its constituents decided to fight for environmental justice by mean of civil and criminal lawsuits, and in 2011 for the first time, the pollution generated by the plant was recognised as a determinant factor for the death of a worker. automatism #3. political and social science scholarship argues that climate denial stems from the strong ideological commitment of authoritarian regimes, government conservatives and libertarians, and their strong opposition to regulation and their endorsement of the status quo (collomb 2014; krange et al. 2019). climate change denial is deemed a latecomer to neoliberal antienvironmentalism (antonio & brulle 2011, 197) and “there is now a well-recognized right-wing counter-movement challenging the trend, attribution, impact, and civic implications of orthodox climate change science” (jacques 2012, 9). automatism #3 is widely proven (michaels 2017; forchtner et al. 2018; huges 2018; lockwood 2018). in a similar vein, resistance to changes, defence of privileges and acceptance of inequalities have provided fertile terrain for the ideological roots of climate change denial (jylhä 2016; mandell 2008). like the first two, automatism #3 also relies on an oversimplification of the picture that can be rectified by considering studies of the east and middle east. researcher in international and comparative climate policy, schreurs, has analyzed the case of china. on the one hand, china’s leaders have used its status as the world’s second largest economy to demand greater voice in international climate negotiations, and on the other hand, they have exploited its status as a transition economy with millions who still live at various levels of poverty to resist international demands that china take on binding climate mitigation goals. schreurs (2011) proposed the concept of “environmental authoritarianism” because, despite this ambivalence, the country has taken a few steps to strengthen institutional capacity. plans, laws and programs that have been introduced to combat climate change, such as developing renewable energies and improve energy efficiency. moreover, to some extent chinese authorities are permitting critical voices, and specifically environmental groups, to be established and active. the acknowledgment that anthropogenic climate change is occurring does not always imply a more socio-environmentally just approach. the geo archive includes an analysis of the environmental causes of the eastern mediterranean migration route from 2011 to the present. before the syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater fertile crescent experienced the most severe drought in instrumental record. for syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest (kelley et al. 2015). the decade-long syrian conflict and the effects of climate change represent key push factors motivating people to move. despite the assad family having promoted unsustainable rural initiatives to boost productivity at the expense of the country’s limited water resources (gleick 2014, 334), the syrian regime used the climate change argument to downplay its own responsibilities (de châtel 2014), and as a geopolitical instrument. in november 2017, syria decided to sign the paris agreement on climate change, as the world’s last functioning state to do so. the surprise decision, made during a brutal civil war, left the us as the only country outside the agreement. according to the guardian, this decision was intended to isolate the us on the world stage (harvey 2017). the environmental issue was not new in the propaganda of the syrian regime and its allies, especially in messages intended for latin america, africa and the european environmental left. from the first moments of the syrian revolution, it was rumoured that one of the reasons for “the war against syria” was the refusal of “the syrian government” to allow the cultivation and trade of genetically modified food, which represented a threat to the economic interests of large us corporations (portocarrero valda 2016). in the syrian case, environmental issues offered bashar assad the ability to ‘embarrass’ other nations (swehat 2017). thus, taking action against climate change cannot be considered an univocal sign of democracy and a just society. automatism #4. “there are currently 64 million forced migrants in the world fleeing wars, hunger, persecution and a growing force: climate change. un forecasts estimate that there could be anywhere between 25 million and 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050” (bassetti 2019). this 158 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)reviews and essays extract exemplifies the way in which official documents and conventions issued by international bodies have framed and addressed both the general threat of climate change and the impact of climate change on migration: in quantitative terms and through science-based description, prediction and understanding (raleigh et al. 2008; european environmental agency 2016; australian government 2017; nature 2019). such quantitative interpretations have permeated the everyday and public debate imposing a global scale single narrative echoing institutional actors and top-down responses. although this approach is extremely relevant and has grounded all the initiatives that address global warming so far, growing bodies of literature are emerging in different areas of the knowledge production realm and are enhancing a more complex reading of the ongoing transformations. recent social scientists’ and humanities scholars’ works are unsettling the objective and quantitative account of environmental transformations (imagination and climate futures initiative n.d.). climate fiction is helping us to indirectly face our most intimidating challenges and to dramatize our hopes and offer us different visions of the future (sayler 2019). scientists themselves have taken up the autobiographical genre and are narrating the demise of the ecosystems they have spent their lifetimes studying (kolbert 2018). the effects of climate change are more apparent than ever. individual and collective stories open a space for everyone – not only scholars and professional writers – to relate and make sense of the current socio-ecological crisis, to imagine alternatives and to contribute to their interpretation. the entire geo archive has a clear narrative approach to the nexus of the environment, climate change, and migration. in its very essence, it is a narrative device offering stories from the past to make sense of the present and discuss the future. all the cases trace storytelling paths. the novel, while the gods were sleeping: a journey through love and rebellion in nepal by elizabeth enslin (2014), is an entry point for engaging with human resilience against increased political turmoil and environmental change in the himalayas, including the disastrous flood in terai in 1954. the disaster provoked by that flooding was the inspiration for a rubin museum exhibition that took place in new york from may 6, 2016 to march 27, 2017, named nepalese seasons: rain and ritual. the documentary, sun come up (2011), directed by jennifer redfearn, tells the story of some of the world’s first environmental refugees, the carteret islanders. the film portrays the relocation of the community leader, ursula rakova, and of a group of young families as they search for new homes in war-torn bougainville, an autonomous region of papua new guinea. paintings are also powerful tools for storytelling. the colours of pollution have captured artists’ imagination. an appropriate example from the geo archive are the visual sources used to describe migration to and from europe occurring in the aftermath of the so-called ‘year without summer’ in 1816. a global decrease of temperature, probably linked to volcanic eruptions in asia, resulted in failed harvests in europe and disrupted global climatic phenomena. in same parts of europe in the spring and summer, a persistent “dry fog” reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye (oppenheimer 2003). in that very year british artist william turner (1775–1851) captured yellow skies and sunsets in his artworks that are said to have been inspired by the typical effects of the sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere he observed over london in 1815 and 1816. conclusions human migration and displacement is just one facet of the manifold ecological crises that the earth system is experiencing under the umbrella term of climate change. if our lifestyle is no longer sustainable even in the short term, humanity finds itself in the position of needing to invent new ways of living with and on the earth. the search for other possible ecological relationships has been clearly expressed in the prominence of science and climate fiction, and their ability to describe both utopian and dystopian futures. the importance of fictional accounts has opened a space for other words and called the clear-cut distinction between reality and imagination into question. likewise, history aims at reconstructing other pasts as much as sci-fi constructs other futures, both merge realism and expectations. historical and fictional accounts are critical tools for responding to an unprecedented crisis. unbearable and irreversible human-made transformations and disasters require us to rewrite 159roberta biasillofennia 198(1–2) (2020) our futures under unrealistic circumstances and, in the midst of apocalyptic scenarios, the role of history is to rebalance the equilibrium between reality and imagination. unquestionably, climate change has become a major concern for the international community. among its consequences, the impact on migration is the object of increasing attention from both policy-makers and researchers (piguet et al. 2011). in relation to the purpose of the clisel action and to the different areas of expertise included in it, this paper has explored potential directions that a conversation between history, policy-making strategies and media coverage could take. through reflecting on the geo archive, i explored the weight of environmental and climatic factors in migration and their relationship to other push or pull factors, whether social, political, or economic. through considering divergent approaches, i illustrated the necessity to integrate institutional levels of governance with the informal and mutualistic infrastructures of non-state organizations. i wanted to acknowledge non-science based forms of knowledge production and dissemination; the power of story-telling to engage people and make them aware of the catastrophe that we produce and feel every day. furthermore, i wanted to illustrate how these are a few of the lessons history is teaching us and the fact that climate change arguments serve as powerful political instruments. acknowledgements this article contributes to clisel project (climate security with local authorities, horizon 2020 grant agreement no. 700385 and the swiss state secretariat for education, research and innovation contract no 16.0038) and was supported by the svenska forskningsrådet formas [2017-01962_3]. references antonio, r. j. & brulle, r. j. (2011) the unbearable lightness of politics: climate change denial and political polarization. the sociological quarterly 52(2) 195–202. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2011.01199.x apap, j. (2019) the concept of ‘climate refugee’. towards a possible definition. european parliament research service. <http://www.europarl.europa.eu/regdata/etudes/brie/2018/621893/eprs_ bri(2018)621893_en.pdf>. 26.3.2020. armiero, m. (2017) environmental history between institutionalization and revolution. a short commentary with two sites and one experiment. in oppermann, s. & iovino, s. (eds.) environmental humanities. voices from the anthropocene, 45–59. rowman & littlefield international, london and new york. armiero, m., turhan, e., biasillo, r., de fino, f. & vanhulst, p. (eds.) (2019) clisel geo archive. <https://geoarchive.clisel.eu/geoarchive>. 26.3.2020. australian government (2017) 2017 review of climate change policies. department of the environment and energy. <https://www.energy-transition-hub.org/files/article/attachment/2017-review-climatechange-policies1.pdf>. 26.3.2020. bassetti, f. (2019) environmental migrants: up to 1 billion by 2050. foresight 22.5.2019 <https:// www.climateforesight.eu/migrations/environmental-migrants-up-to-1-billion-by-2050/>. 26.3.2020. bbc (2018) what is climate change? 3.12.2018 <https://www.bbc.com/news/scienceenvironment-24021772>. 26.3.2020. benko, j. (2017) how a warming planet drives human migration. the new york times magazine 19.4.2017 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/magazine/how-a-warming-planet-drives-humanmigration.html>. 26.3.2020. boas, i., farbotko, c., adams, h., sterly, h., bush, s., van der geest, k., wiegel, h., ashraf, h., baldwin, a., bettini, g., blondin, s., de bruijin, m., durand-declare, d., fröhlich, c., gioli, g., guaita, l., hut, e., jarawura, f. x., lamers, m., lietaer, s., nash, s. l., piguet, e. rothe, d., sakdapolrak, p., smith, l., furlong, b. t., warner, j., zickgraf, c., black, r. & hulme, m. (2019) climate migration myths. nature climate change 9 901–903. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0633-3 bulkeley, h. (2010) cities and the governing of climate change. annual review of environment and resources 35 229–253. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-072809-101747 bulkeley, h. & castán broto, v. (2013) government by experiment? global cities and the governing of climate change. transactions of the institute of british geographers 38(3) 361–375. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00535.x 160 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) carbon brief (n.d.) mapped: how climate change affects extreme weather around the world. <https:// www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world>. 26.3.2020. castán broto, v. & bulkeley, h. (2013) a survey of urban climate change experiments in 100 cities. global environmental change 23(1) 92–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.07.005 clark, w. (2008) environmentally induced migration and conflict. springer-verlag, berlin and heidelberg. climate refugees project (2016) <http://www.climate-refugees.org/our-work-1>. 26.3.2020. clisel (2015) grant agreement number 700385 – clisel – h2020-drs-2014-2015/h2020-drs-2015. collomb, j. (2014) the ideology of climate change denial in the united states. european journal of american studies 9(1). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.10305 dawson, a. (2017) extreme cities: the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change. verso, new york. de châtel, f. (2014) the role of drought and climate change in the syrian uprising: untangling the triggers of the revolution. middle eastern studies 50(4) 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2013.850076 dillon, a., mueller, v. & salau, s. (2011) migratory responses to agricultural risk in northern nigeria. american journal of agricultural economics 93(4) 1048–1061. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajae/aar033 dun, o. & gemenne, f. (2008) defining 'environmental migration'. forced migration review 31. <https://www.fmreview.org/climatechange/dun-gemenne>. 26.3.2020. european commission (2018) coordination and support action <http://ec.europa.eu/research/ participants/data/ref/h2020/other/wp/2018-2020/annexes/h2020-wp1820-annex-d-csa_en.pdf>. 26.3.2020. european environment agency (2016) climate change policies 13.12.2016 <https://www.eea.europa.eu/ themes/climate/policy-context>. 26.3.2020. european union (2018) eu climate action <https://ec.europa.eu/clima/citizens/eu_en>. 26.3.2020. forchtner, b., kroneder, a. & wetzel, d. (2018) being skeptical? exploring far-right climate-change communication in germany. environmental communication 12(5) 589–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1470546 gleick, p. h. (2014) water, drought, climate change, and conflict in syria. weather, climate, and society 6(3) 331–340. https://doi.org/10.1175/wcas-d-13-00059.1 goertz, g. (2005) choosing cases for case studies: a qualitative logic. newsletter of the american political science association 6(2) 11–14. gray, c. (2011) soil quality and human migration in kenya and uganda. global environmental change 21(2) 421–430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.02.004 gray, c. & mueller, v. (2012a) drought and population mobility in rural ethiopia. world development 40(1) 134–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2011.05.023 gray, c. & mueller, v. (2012b) natural disasters and population mobility in bangladesh. proceedings of the national academy of sciences 109(16) 6000–6005. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1115944109 groen, j. & polivka, a. (2010) going home after hurricane katrina: determinants of return migration and changes in affected areas. demography 47 821–844. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03214587 halliday, t. (2006) migration, risk, and liquidity constraints in el salvador. economic development and cultural change 54(4) 893–925. http://doi.org/10.1086/503584 harvey, f. (2017) syria signs paris climate agreement and leaves us isolated. the guardian 7.11.2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/07/syria-signs-paris-climate-agreement-andleaves-us-isolated>. 26.3.2020. henry, s., schoumaker, b. & beauchemin, c. (2004) the impact of rainfall on the first out-migration: a multi-level event-history analysis in burkina faso. population and environment 25 423–460. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:poen.0000036928.17696.e8 huges, m. a. (2018) beating the authoritarian playbook on climate change. kleinman center for energy policy blog 15.8.2018 <https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/blog/2018/08/15/beating-authoritarianplaybook-climate-change>. 26.3.2020. imagination and climate futures initiative (n.d.) <https://climateimagination.asu.edu/>. 26.3.2020. international organization for migration (n.d.) <https://www.iom.int/migration-and-climate-change-0>. 26.3.2020. introducing history of the present (2011) history of the present 1(1) 1–4. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.1.1.0001 pachauri, r. k. & meyer l. a. (eds.) (2014) ipcc, 2014: climate change 2014: synthesis report. contribution of working groups i, ii and iii to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. ipcc, geneva. <www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml>. 26.3.2020. ipcc (2018) global warming of 1.5°c. an ipcc special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°c above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of 161roberta biasillofennia 198(1–2) (2020) strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. <https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/>. 26.3.2020. jylhä, k. m (2016) ideological roots of climate change denial: resistance to change, acceptance of inequality, or both? doctoral thesis in disciplinary domain of humanities and social sciences. uppsala university, uppsala. http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:945529/fulltext01.pdf jacques, p. j. (2012) a general theory of climate denial. global environmental politics 12(2) 9–17. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00105 jónsson, g. (2010) the environmental factor in migration dynamics – a review of african case studies. international migration institute, university of oxford. <https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/ downloads/wp21%20the%20environmental%20factor%20in%20migration%20dynamics.pdf>. 26.3.2020. kelley, c. p., mohtadi, s., cane, m. a., seager, r. & kushnir, y. (2015) climate change in the fertile crescent and implications of the recent syrian drought. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 112(11) 3241–3246. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1421533112 krange, o., kaltenborn b. p. & hultman, m. (2019) cool dudes in norway: climate change denial among conservative norwegian men. environmental sociology 5(1) 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2018.1488516 kolbert, e. (2018) how to write about a vanishing world. the new yorker 8.10.2018 <https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/how-to-write-about-a-vanishing-world?fbclid=iwar0zuk1vy0lk bnlhauihecsnpem3yrlhv6sqa9o3hwross4j-ocf1iygvsc>. 26.3.2020. leyk, s., maclaurin, g., hunter, l., nawrotzki, r., twine, w., collinson, m. & erasmus, b. (2012) spatially and temporally varying associations between temporary outmigration and natural resource availability in resource-dependent rural communities in south africa: a modeling framework. applied geography 34 559–568. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2012.02.009 lockwood, m. (2018) right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages. environmental politics 27(4) 712–732. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2018.1458411 mandell, b. (2008) racial reification and global warming: a truly inconvenient truth. boston college third world law journal 28(2) 289–343. <http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/twlj/vol28/iss2/3> massey, d., axinn, w. & ghimire, d. (2010) environmental change and out-migration: evidence from nepal. population and environment 32(2–3) 109–136. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-010-0119-8 mcgreal, c. (2009) the grapes of wrath revisited. the guardian august–september 2009 <https://www. theguardian.com/world/series/grapes-of-wrath-revisited>. 26.3.2020. michaels, r. (2017) climate change denial and the rise of authoritarianism. huffpost 11.12.2017 <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-denial-and_b_13547636>. 26.3.2019. milman, o. (2018) we´re moving to higher ground: america´s era of climate mass migration is here. the guardian environment 4.9.2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/24/ americas-era-of-climate-mass-migration-is-here>. 26.3.2020. mixed migration platform (2017) migration, displacement, and the environment. a perspective from the middle east <http://www.mixedmigration.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/032_migrationdisplacement-environment.pdf>. 26.3.2020. morrissey, k. (2018) visual legacies along the us-mexico border. rachel carson center lunchtime colloquium series 17.5.2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc8xch-gdz4>. 26.3.2020. national geographic (n.d.) climate refugees. <https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/ climate-refugees/>. 26.3.2020. nature (2019) climate-change policy <https://www.nature.com/subjects/climate-change-policy>. 26.3.2020. nixon, r. (2011) slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. harvard university press, cambridge, ma. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061194 oppenheimer, c. (2003) climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: tambora volcano (indonesia) 1815. progress in physical geography 27(2) 230– 259. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309133303pp379ra piguet, e., pécoud, a. & de guchteneire, p. (2011) migration and climate change: an overview. refugee survey quarterly 30(3) 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdr006 portocarrero valda, g. (2016) siria: despiadada guerra y miserable espectáculo ambiental. resumen medio oriente 16.1.2016 <http://www.resumenmediooriente.org/2016/01/19/siria-despiadadaguerra-y-miserable-espectaculo-ambiental/>. 26.3.2020. raleigh, c., jordan, l. & salehyan, i. (2008) assessing the impact of climate change migration and conflict. the social development department – the world bank group <http://siteresources. worldbank.org/extsocialdevelopment/resources/sdccworkingpaper_migrationandconflict.pdf>. 26.3.2020. 162 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) reuveny r. (2007) climate change-induced migration and violent conflict. political geography 26 656–673. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.05.001 sayler, z. (2019) how sci-fi could help solve climate change. grist 18.2.2019 <https://grist.org/article/ how-sci-fi-could-help-solve-climate-change/?fbclid=iwar1wyvqfqddqwuu8eikiubjbvdm0957cwyul_ ghfyzbs9mb3_8dgq2kvljq>. 26.3.2020. schreurs, m. a. (2011) climate change politics in an authoritarian state: the ambivalent case of china. in dryzek, j. s., norgaard, r. b. & schlosberg, d. (eds.) the oxford handbook of climate change and society, 449–463. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199566600.001.0001 smith, s. & mccarty, c. (1996) demographic effects of natural disasters: a case study of hurricane andrew. demography 33 265–275. https://doi.org/10.2307/2061876 smith, s. & mccarty, c. (2009) fleeing the storm(s): an examination of evacuation behavior during florida’s 2004 hurricane season. demography 46 127–145. https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.0.0048 swehat, y. (2017) a climate change for assad. <https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/climate-changeassad>. 26.3.2020. sörlin, s. & lane, m. (2018) historicizing climate change – engaging new approaches to climate and history. climatic change 151 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2285-0 the climate and migration coalition (n.d.) <http://climatemigration.org.uk/>. 26.3.2020. the guardian (2019a) climate change section. <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climatechange>. 26.3.2020. the guardian (2019b) americans: the next climate migrants. the guardian environment september–october 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/americans-the-nextclimate-migrants>. 26.3.2020. the new york times (2019) climate and environment section. <https://www.nytimes.com/section/ climate>. 26.3.2020. united nation (n.d.) climate change. conference of the parties (cop) <https://unfccc.int/process/bodies/ supreme-bodies/conference-of-the-parties-cop>. 26.3.2020. unhcr the un refugee agency (n.d.) climate change and disaster displacement. <https://www.unhcr. org/climate-change-and-disasters.html>. 26.3.2020. united states census bureau (2012) the great migration, 1910 to 1970. <https://www.census.gov/ dataviz/visualizations/020/>. 26.3.2020. vanhala, l. & hestbaek, c. (2016) framing climate change loss and damage in unfccc negotiations. global environmental politics 16(4) 111–129. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00379 victor, d. g. (1995) on writing good histories of climate change and testing social science theories: an editorial comment. climatic change 29 363–369. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01092423 white, g. (2011) climate change and migration. security and borders in a warming world. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199794829.001.0001 wikipedia (n.d.) definition of environmental migrant. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/environmental_ migrant>. 26.3.2020. yin, k. r. (2014) case study research design and methods. sage, thousand oaks, ca. collective editorial on the neoliberal university urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa 88578 doi: 10.11143/fennia. 88578 collective editorial on the neoliberal university opening statement on collective action in the immediate aftermath of eight days of strike action at sixty uk universities concerning legal disputes regarding pensions, pay and working conditions, we offer a collective editorial on the fight for the soul of the university campus. pay, equality, casualization and workloads are key battlegrounds and talking points on the picket line, and beyond the uk we hear from voices railing against the increasing marketization and neoliberalization of universities, staff and students, which is affecting collegiality, and collaborative and collective endeavor. for in the neoliberal university, the academic subject is an individual profile with a portfolio of research, highly mobile and online, rendering the place in which one resides and the people one shares a corridor with redundant as the platform university comes into view. anticipating the recent collective action after previous industrial disputes about the decimation of pensions for staff at uk universities in 2018, the work included here emanates from two dialogues at the nordic geographers meeting in 2019 (ngm). one was arranged around a public meeting called protest pub, and was organized by local scholars and students involved in the initiative of new university norway (responsible organizers hilde refstie and thomas sætre jakobsen). the collective invited four panelists – conference participants at the ngm in 2019 – to discuss the market bureaucratization of universities from a grassroots perspective (lawrence d. berg, eli smeplass, don mitchell and kirsi pauliina kallio). the other discussion was organized by lawrence d. berg as part of the conference program on the theme of the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal academy, with six invited panelists (david butz, mike evans, henrik gutzon larsen, edward huijbens, kirsi pauliina kallio, noora pyyry). as part of the session, panelists and audience members were asked to relay their ideas and experiences in the form of this collective editorial in order to continue a critical debate on the neoliberal academy and academic publishing. we welcome further contributions to our reflections section from anyone willing to participate in this discussion on the neoliberalization of academia, and to reflect upon industrial action at uk universities and the changes to working conditions and knowledge production at universities globally. © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. this collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at sixty uk universities called by the university and college union (ucu) in two separate legal disputes, one on pensions and one on pay and working conditions. anticipating the recent labor strike after previous industrial disputes in 2018 at uk universities, the work included here emanates from two dialogues at the nordic geographers meeting (ngm) in summer 2019, a public meeting called protest pub and a conference session on the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal academy. after an opening statement by the editors, this collective endeavor begins with the urgent collaborative action of graduate students and early-career academics and is followed by reflections on life in the neoliberal academy from those involved in the dialogues at the ngm 2019 in trondheim. additionally, the editorial introduces the content of the present issue. keywords: collective action, neoliberalism, university, academia, knowledge, industrial dispute, casualization, labor strike, trade union http://www.newuniversitynorway.org http://www.newuniversitynorway.org https://fennia.journal.fi/issue/view/4566 172 editorial fennia 197(2) (2019) to begin, we prioritize those who are the most precarious, those who are expected to work parttime, hourly-paid, short-term contracts, and to relocate leaving behind family and friends at the drop of a hat, and indeed those who are about to embark on a career in a working environment unrecognizable to some of the tenured senior staff of universities past. those for whom the university provides a comfortable and secure working life, those who entered this working landscape on a permanent contract while completing their thesis, and those who may not always grasp the fundamental systemic changes that their early-career colleagues face on a daily basis. to compare conventional academic positions with the profile of an early-career academic today is largely a pointless exercise – so much has changed, not only in academic working life but also more broadly in labor and working conditions. while appearing in somewhat specific forms in different countries, the developments follow a similar neoliberal pattern where people from different generational positions are increasingly juxtaposed, regarding workers’ rights and employers’ obligations, dividing younger and older generations in terms of (in)security – not to mention parallel unequal developments related to class and race for example. and yet the cycle continues: the lack of secure jobs persists for highly-skilled often widely-published academics while concurrently a desire for speed and quantity is leading to the homogenization of research outputs with certain disciplines, themes, regions and academics marginalized as perhaps obscure and unfashionable yet nevertheless significant academic knowledge – small, singular, slow and quiet – is underappreciated. the urgent and timely collective action of graduate students and early-career academics leads here, followed by reflections on life in the neoliberal academy from those involved in the dialogues at the ngm 2019 in trondheim. may these discussions continue on various forums and at forthcoming events. kirjoittaja james riding fennia reflections section editor kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief homo academicus: the graduate student experience in the neoliberal academy originally an economic philosophy defined by free market capitalism and competition, neoliberalism has left the realm of the purely economic and has permeated all layers of society. it has, in the famous words of wendy brown, created “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms” (brown 2015, 17). unsurprisingly, universities have not been spared from neoliberalism’s economizing mindset, and competition has become a defining factor within the academic experience. many of the effects of neoliberalism on academia have been studied, including the creation of precarity among academic staff and the reformulation of time (e.g. castree et al. 2006; meyerhoff et al. 2011; berg et al. 2016). as graduate students within a neoliberalizing university, we have chosen to focus on our experience at the university of british columbia’s okanagan campus (ubco), in canada. specifically, we use the concept of homo academicus (the student as human capital) to explore how competition defines this experience, and how perpetual competition has detrimental implications for students and their mental health (cf. on issues of mental health, see also taylor 2019 in this issue). contrary to liberalism’s laissez-faire approach to market regulation, neoliberalism actively regulates the market by creating competition (larner 2000). just as neoliberalism reduces people to mere human capital (berg et al. 2016), the neoliberalizing university transforms students into a specific type of human capital – homo academicus. unlike homo economicus – the theoretical concept of a purely james riding et al. 173fennia 197(2) (2019) rational economic actor (yamagishi et al. 2014) – homo academicus is the concept of an entirely capitalized graduate student, one who has been transformed from autonomous actor into a unit of capital for the service of the university. following the neoliberal rationale, ubco inserts competition into the graduate student experience in a variety of ways. the graduate student’s first experience of competition occurs during the application process, where they are evaluated on the basis of grades, reference letters, extra-curricular achievements and voluntary work. once accepted, students compete against each other for grades, paid positions, publication opportunities and funding – which for many graduate students constitutes a substantial source of indispensable income. in addition, resources within the university such as supervisors, technical equipment, and course openings are equally competitive. this confers real academic advantages to students who excel in outdoing their peers. at the same time, this form of near-constant competition negatively affects student relationships as it impedes collaboration and cooperation, which are beneficial for producing good scholarship and a positive work environment (henriksen 2018). some academics have begun to protest the demand for constant publication by establishing the “slow scholarship” movement (mountz et al. 2015), but students are rarely in a position to challenge the university’s demands regarding their academic output. additionally, the graduate student has been recognized by the university as a primary source of capital. through tuition fees, residence fees, mandatory meal plans, or even simply through universitybranded merchandise and clothing, students have become a source of income. limited funding as well as increasing costs associated with attending universities force students into financially vulnerable situations. this reality is especially problematic for international students, whom the university exploits for a substantial portion of its capital; tuition for international graduate students at ubco is (depending on the degree program) as much as several multiples higher than for domestic students (the university of british columbia 2019). it comes as little surprise that the pressure of competition coupled with financial precarity has a detrimental effect on students’ mental health. in a 2019 survey of over 55,000 canadian students, 68.9% stated they had “felt overwhelming anxiety” and 51.6% “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function” (american college health association 2019, 15). these numbers are even more concerning when considering the limited nature of counselling services – effectively creating yet another layer of competition. combined, the effects of competition reconfigure the student experience from one of personal and academic growth, social formation, and societal benefit, to one where success is the only merit for homo academicus. the central irony within the neoliberalization of universities – and the creation of homo academicus – is that a highly competitive environment does not produce better results. student performances deteriorate as a consequence of stress and anxiety and the extensive amounts of time spent competing for resources instead of studying or researching. furthermore, academic knowledge production suffers as competition impedes the collaboration and mutual assistance processes necessary for academic projects. the supposed role of the university – as a site of knowledge production and social betterment – is therefore undermined by the capitalist drive for profit and the neoliberal production of the competitive student. the university thus replicates the central irony of capitalism; that it endlessly creates the means for its own destruction, yet obstinately persists. ubco urban and regional dynamics collective1 young scholars as neoliberal subjects young scholars are often on the receiving end of the most brutal consequences of the neoliberal university. according to a survey conducted by the young academy of norway (2016), only half of today’s young researchers in norway would recommend a research career to young people, and 174 editorial fennia 197(2) (2019) women to a lesser extent than men. uncertainty, stress, loneliness, the inability to combine work and family life features as some of the reasons why. in a situation of job uncertainty, the pressure to perform according to set indicators is intense. this reduces the space for so-called ‘slow scholarship’ as the neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames (mountz et al. 2015). our response to this pressure, representing a new generation in academia, has been to organize ourselves as a collective, challenging the form and pace of the neoliberal academy. through new university norway based at ntnu in trondheim, we are mobilizing against the market bureaucratization of our universities. we do this through writing, engaging, and organizing public meetings called protest pubs. we champion principles in academia such as solidarity between staff groups and a generous work environment. by generosity, we refer to the "non-competitive and collaborative investment in the success of many" (phillips 2018). such principles resonates with inclusive values in the welfare states, including university democracy and worker rights but are increasingly being regarded as noncompetitive, and therefore ignored as universities are thought of as generic economical organizations. in our work we want to bring awareness to how individualizing structures within academia arise within particular political and institutional frameworks, and lift the challenges we experience up to a collective and political level to address the conditions under which universities are operating. the slogan for our protest pubs is “make noise”. we separate here ‘voice’, as having a say within existing structures and frameworks, and ‘noise’, which refers to challenging discourses and the status quo. it is a form of behavior interpreted as ‘noise’ by decision makers since it tends to be loud, unpleasant, and causing disturbance (marchart 2007; swyngedouw 2014). our aim is to take the discussions on what a good university is, back to the grassroots. through this work, we have come to appreciate the power of community, and the collective that authors of this editorial in fennia represent. hilde refstie ida marie henriksen thomas sætre jakobsen eli smeplass ragne øwre thorshaug comments on the neoliberal university the panel presenters argue that critique of the neoliberal university needs to be combined with work by scholars to change the everyday practices that maintain it. one problem is that in the neoliberal university protest and critique tend to be internalized. employees are allowed to express their criticism and to protest (up to a point). this allows managers to claim that procedures of consultation and participation have been adhered to. however, there is no guarantee that the points of criticism will be followed up. it is important that solutions are not sought that result in an extension of neoliberal practices rather than leading to radical reform. this can be illustrated by the system of publication points that has been instituted in the norwegian university system and copied by other countries. publication points are awarded for peer-reviewed articles in international journals. this is unfair in relation to other http://www.newuniversitynorway.org https://www.facebook.com/protestpub/ james riding et al. 175fennia 197(2) (2019) types of scholarly activity that are essential for the publication of articles, such as peer reviewing and editing, which are not awarded points. furthermore, other types of publication, such as book reviews, popular science, commentaries, translations, and textbooks, are not awarded points. however, the solution is not to extend the points system to these types of work. an administrative argument against doing this is that this would demand resources that are in short supply. yet a more fundamental argument is that it would perpetuate a practice whereby it is assumed that quality can be assessed by quantitative measures. it is illogical and contradictory to assess quality through quantitative indicators. quality can in its essence only be assessed by qualitative, discursive reasoning (jones 2017). as opposed to top-down consultation and quasi-market numerical indicators premised on individualized academic competition, a radical retreat from the neoliberal university requires a functioning university workplace democracy. one important aspect of this workplace democracy is academic freedom, in which scholars influence their work situation by determining the content of their research and teaching through discussion and collaboration within their closest collegial unit – a form of participatory democracy. a second important aspect of workplace democracy is for scholars to influence their work situation through the election of organs and leaders at all levels of the university – a representative democracy in which the elected organs should have decision-making power and are not just consultative organs merely serving to ‘rubber-stamp’ decisions made by managers at higher levels. a third important aspect of workplace democracy is the promotion of collective activity that is infused with a care ethic (ethics of care also taken up in taylor 2019, this issue). this involves finding ways of ensuring high-quality research and teaching through mutual discussion and inclusivity. this discourse requires that all groups in the collective are given a say regardless of gender, ethnicity or social status, while paying particular care and attention to the inclusion of those who for various reasons are at risk of being excluded or discriminated against (andresen et al. 2019). scholarly activities such as teaching, research, different types of publishing, reviewing, editing, and popular-scientific communication are in their essence discursive. discursive practices and deliberations informed by the care ethic may be time-consuming but are potentially a productive means of seeking attainment of academic quality without resorting to the number-based, individualistic, competitive and hegemonic characteristics of the neoliberal university. michael jones enchantment and academia in the past few years, i have done research with teenagers on hanging out. i bring this up because i want to use this opportunity to promote what could be labeled as ‘academic hanging out’: playful openness with ideas, with colleagues, with scholarly life (pyyry, forthcoming). the potential of hanging out lies in its non-instrumentality and openness toward the world that encourages dwelling and thinking with whatever is going on, there and then. this potential connects to the ever-fleeting, difficult-to-verbalize, sudden event of enchantment (bennett 2001). enchantment is a highly affectual, surprising experience of being moved by the world: a felt disruption that opens up space for new perspectives. in this unspecific transitory moment, everything becomes the most unusual. enchantment is then not about curiosity of the new, but wonder in front of the very ordinary (pyyry 2019). it is worthwhile to ask whether the speed, constant competition and instrumentality linked to our contemporary academic system allows for the moment of hesitation that lies at the core of enchantment. this uncertainty before the already-known is crucial, as there erupts, in this temporary ‘freeze’, a capacity for a rearrangement of possibilities. this links to what massumi (2015) refers to as thinking-feeling or dewsbury (2010) as thinking as experience, and what i have somewhat playfully, yet purposefully, come to call hanging-out-knowing in the context of young people’s urban life (pyyry 2015). 176 editorial fennia 197(2) (2019) in the current system, it often seems that we are supposed to be sure of what we are doing: to know where the research is going and to get the results out quickly, or better yet to make them applicable to the world of business. this pushes us to re-produce (and publish) the same outputs in a desperate attempt to stay in the game. while i am encouraging an attitude of openness here, any change surely needs to be a systemic one, because in the current academic climate it has become a luxury to read a whole book, to have a full conversation, to be genuinely open toward the other, let alone to just hang out and wonder. often practices of relaxation, such as mindfulness or quiet retreats, function to make us more productive and turn attention towards the self-optimizing individual. instead i hope for an academic community that does not ‘just do it’ but hesitates, is unsure, and takes pleasure in notknowing. it is from this creative space that new thinking can emerge. noora pyyry collective editorial on the neoliberal academy a bad day: we are in a pickle! not only in academia, but in workplaces more generally. our gadgets, software and technologies are working wonders, but are used to squeeze ever more from each passing minute. we are bombarded by e-mails, hundreds a day. we have to fill in any number of forms online in a range of different systems, all of which we have to log in to separately. each form is supposed to make life easier but ever more forms are made and ever more boxes are created to tick. an endless procession of e-mails and forms, tasks to complete, a review of a review, and a review of the process of the review process and a review of that, and each review has a form attached. each form is regularly changed, because those making the forms always find new ways to improve them and to address issues that remain obscure to the end user. the form changes for no apparent reason just like when microsoft moves buttons around in the latest version of office, a program we all have to use of course. i sit in my office chair and i feel like i am playing the famous arcade game whac-a-mole. i desperately try to keep the moles in their holes in order to have an unobstructed view of the horizon for some thinking time and creative work. but the e-mails keep appearing, the requests to fill, tick, stamp, confirm all needs to carry on, or someone else on the ‘flow line’ gets stuck. so my clear crisp horizon is pushed into the evenings, the weekends. and all of a sudden you find yourself on a sunday morning sat at a computer, attempting to put together a coherent thought for an approaching deadline for the next paper, chapter or contribution which i had to promise to deliver because we are all comrades trying to advance science. a science we have devoted so much energy to and so much of ourselves to through our postgraduate training and work, that we have long since moved beyond the point of no return. this is all we want to do, know how to do, and therefore sunday mornings at the computer have become normalized and make for a sense of relief and satisfaction, a respite from whacking moles. a good day: finally some balance, a rested mind and all of the projects, deadlines, writing and e-mails have been lined up or taken care of. i see the crisp clear horizon and it is a little brighter. all of the moles have been whacked. i am in control and i foresee the time to take care of all of the things which i have promised to do and to deliver. i even have time for a casual conversation with a colleague, a coffee break and a lunch break that is not simply eating a sandwich and staring blankly at a wall trying to calm your mind. today i can taste my sandwich. reading an article, reviewing a thesis and reviewing some of my own writing i can embroider my arguments and examples. i have time to think! was that not the initial plan when building the academy, as a bastion of creativity and critical thought? should thinking not be our primary role and what occupies most of our time? the sense of satisfaction derived from putting together a coherent thought is wonderful, the trick is not to look too far ahead to e-mails and instantaneous work assignments. to ensure a good day: it is hard to ensure these good days. more and more things that dictate our time are moving beyond our control. management is taking over so many aspects of my work. we james riding et al. 177fennia 197(2) (2019) attend team building exercises and reflection sessions on generalized topics and issues that are deemed by someone else of relevance to you and your research. you have to sit in a chair in your office, otherwise the next office occupancy survey might lead you to lose it, thereby becoming a mobile worker. we need to regain control of our own time. as experts in the research we undertake and the teaching we deliver, we should reclaim our say in what needs to be done and how by returning power to the faculty units. a decentralised democracy running the university is a necessity and this remains a large structural issue in the current neoliberal academy. added to this structural issue there are individual issues, such as how to manage your time in an academic world that resembles a game of whac-a-mole. it will not be achieved by a new gadget, or adding to already packed calendars. we have to take control of ourselves. i do not go into work at the evenings or the weekends, no matter what. home is supposed to be home. i do not send e-mails at the weekends. i incorporate physical exercise into my working day. one hour of exercise in the morning to have time to think. no music, nothing in my ears, simply an hour reserved for thinking about the day ahead whilst breathing, stretching, bending and making sure that my body does not collapse under the weight of stress. the challenge is to build a daily routine that includes exercise and a healthy social life. to be able to establish that routine, we have to take control and collectively refuse to work beyond our contracted hours. edward h. huijbens academic knowledge production, neoliberalization and the falling rate of use values in the academy it is now commonly accepted that university systems around the world are being deeply affected by processes of neoliberalization (castree et al. 2006; gill 2009; brown 2015; berg et al. 2016; cupples 2019). the impacts have been widespread and significant, but mostly they involve transforming the university to a space that is understood through “a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of [academic] existence in economic terms” (brown 2015, 17). configured according to such neoliberal economic rationality, universities have become more competitive; academic scholarship is valued according to market metrics; the academy is subjected to audit and accounting systems to ensure ‘value-for-money’; policy gets transferred from ‘centers’ to ‘margins’ in ever faster vectors of circulation; and local, national and international scales of knowledge production get reconfigured according to economic rationalities (see castree et al. 2006; berg et al. 2016). as me and my colleagues have argued elsewhere (berg et al. 2016), these wider shifts have been accompanied by the instantiation of audit and assessment systems that both index and produce three key shifts in working lives in the academy: 1. the shift from exchange to competition; 2. the shift from equality to inequality; and 3. the shift from labor to human capital. i want to argue in this short intervention that these three shifts can be seen as a distillation of what debord (1967 [1983], thesis #47) in the society of the spectacle called “the tendency of use values to fall”. use value is not a thing, but rather a rate, and thus a force (mitchell 2018). the falling rate of use value is a necessity for capital, but exists as only a tendency, and thus “it sometimes doesn’t fall fast enough and has to be helped along” (mitchell 2018, 5). we can see the tendency for the rate of use value to fall operating in the academy, which has under neoliberalization, begun to operate just like capital. in this regard, the neoliberal university also needs, often times, to help along the falling rate of use value in knowledge production. it does so in order to ensure that the competition that operates as a proxy for a ‘market’ under neoliberalism is maintained, and indeed, intensified. it operationalizes this falling rate of use values through a wide range of processes designed to ensure competition between scholars: merit reviews, ‘output’ audits, research assessments (both mock and ‘real’), the economic valuation of scholarship, and the quantitative understanding of value and ‘impact’ of research. 178 editorial fennia 197(2) (2019) debord (1967 [1983], thesis #34) argued that “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”. i want to suggest that we are seeing similar kinds of spectacularization of academic knowledge. what i mean is that processes of competition in the academy designed to make us operate like capitalism have forced us to produce more and more outputs (papers, books, reports, etc.) to the point where the use values of such outputs are no longer found in the ideas presented by any particular scholar (e.g. a better understanding of the world). instead, the real use value of contemporary academic knowledge has become mere image. that image is both a complex combination and distillation of a number of processes that have been reified as numbers: number of papers, number of citations, h-index, i10-index, et cetera. moreover, once the use values of academic knowledge become number-commodities like the h-index and/or citation counts, with very few exceptions (such as the slow scholarship movement, see mountz et al. 2015), there is always pressure for these numbers to increase. eventually, this pressure to always increase outputs, citations, h-indexes, et cetera reaches the point of saturation — that point when images are fully commodified in debord’s (1967 [1983]) terms. riffing on debord, mitchell (2018, 5; emphasis added) argues: “when the phenomenal form of capital is image — when images are fully commodified — the use value of other commodities… are their images, whose own use value also continues to fall. more and more commodity-images must be produced, endlessly”. this corresponds to the spectacle, that “moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world” (debord 1967 [1983], thesis #42). i want to argue that we are entering a phase of academic knowledge production that looks an awful lot like the society of the spectacle. this is a phase where academic knowledge has been completely colonized by the commodity and the knowledge we thus produce has no value beyond (re)producing commodity relations in the academy. what evidence is there for such a contention? perhaps we need look no further than the rise of what ionedes, klavans and boyack (2018) have called ‘hyperprolific’ authors in the academy. they searched the scopus database for authors that had published more than 72 ‘full papers’ (not comments, editorials, or letters to the editor) in a calendar year during the period 2000 to 2016; they found 9000 such individuals (ionedes et al. 2018, 167). in other words, more than 9,000 academics have published an article every five days (for at least one year). moreover, after tightening some parameters as part of their analysis (e.g. excluding high energy and particle physicists, who tend to publish at exceptionally high rates in very large teams of researchers), ionedes and his colleagues found that the number of hyperprolific authors “grew about 20-fold between 2001 and 2014” (ionedes et al. 2018, 168). the total number of scholarly authors grew 2.5-fold during this same period. surely this is indicative of the falling rate of use values of scholarly publications. at the same time it is indicative of the upward pressures on rates of publication being exerted by neoliberalization of the academy. surely there is a relationship between these two forces. indeed, the falling rates of use values and rising rates of publication are directly linked, each reinforcing the other. the falling rate of use values means more publication-commodities must be produced whilst the resultant increasing rate of publication ensures the falling rate of use values. of course, there are few (if any) hyperprolific publishers in geography, but that is not the point. the fact that over 9,000 of these authors exist in the academy is enough to put pressure on all the other disciplines to produce more outputs, thus increasing the falling rate of use values even more, and putting ever greater pressures on academics to produce more (almost meaningless) knowledge. lawrence d. berg james riding et al. 179fennia 197(2) (2019) content of the issue this issue of fennia includes eight articles; five original research papers and three review articles. as most of them are ‘fruits of the summer’ and were processed during the autumn, the commentaries from open review processes (taylor, lilius and hewidy, thorshaug and brun, lagerqvist, bowman) will be published over the winter in our forthcoming section and included in the next issue. this opens the opportunity for the readers of fennia to participate in the discussions: if you would like to publish a commentary on any of the articles in the present issue (also thematic commentaries on more than one paper are welcome), or as continuation of the discussion in the collective editorial, please get in touch with the editors. the first original article is by stephen taylor (2019), titled the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher. it connects directly with the theme of the collective editorial, focusing on ethics of fieldwork and particularly the precarity of young scholars carrying out ethnographic research in hazardous and unpredictable empirical contexts with insufficient training and support. drawing from his personal experience – based on a phd study in a uk university including fieldwork in underserved urban areas of cape town, south africa – taylor describes a research process far too demanding for a young scholar to deal with (if not for anyone), involving heightened emotional and psychological burden and leading to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (mental health issues raised also by the ubco urban and regional dynamics collective, see above). the article calls for the promotion of an ethic of collective care for field researchers, including practical and financial support from universities for training and professional debriefing (care ethic discussed by michael jones as well, see above). taylor’s article went through a double-blind review process that was opened upon acceptance. we are expecting to publish commentaries from the reviewers over the next months, to open a debate on the issues raised in the paper. in the second research paper, lesbian nightlife in amsterdam: an explorative study of the shift from ‘queer-only’ to ‘queer-friendly’ spaces, marieke ekenhorst and irina van aalst (2019) shed light on why lesbian space has gradually declined in amsterdam – the queer capital – by exploring young lesbians' lived experiences of inclusion and exclusion in the city’s urban nightlife. two findings grew central in their study. on one hand, straight and queer spaces have become fluidly mixed as a result of increasing open-mindedness towards sexual plurality among (young) urban europeans. at the same time, the growing diversity among lesbian clubbers has led to a widening range of nightlife venues and ways of enjoying free time. together these developments – involving cultural but also strong economic elements – have produced new kinds of urban spaces, some of which are not found safe by lesbian clubbers, a notion many of the service providers confirm. hence, ekenhorst and van aalst argue that, along with mixed spaces, lesbian venues continue to have an important place in urban nightlife. the third original article in this issue, by johanna lilius and hossam hewidy (2019), is titled serving whom? immigrant entrepreneurs in a new local context. the paper focuses on ethnic retail in helsinki, finland, where entrepreneurship is not as commonplace among immigrants as in many other urban contexts. approaching it from the perspective of people who experience their entrepreneurship rather positively, lilius and hewidy find that both maintenance of cultural practices and integration can be productively supported by entrepreneurial opportunities. through identifying different strategies from their participants’ working lives (growth orientation, investment interests, status building, aspirations for freedom and stability), the authors conclude that by acknowledging such different perspectives to entrepreneurship, cities can provide better opportunities for immigrants to establish their own business in ways beneficial to themselves as well as to the development of more equal multicultural cities. the paper went through an open review process based on which we are hoping to publish commentaries later this winter. the fourth full article continues with the theme of migration, specifically asylum seeking and refugeeness, in the context of norwegian asylum centers. in their contribution temporal injustice and re-orientations in asylum reception centres in norway: towards a critical geographies of architecture in the institution, ragne øwre thorshaug and cathrine brun (2019) set out to develop a conceptual framework, drawing from geographies of architecture and migration studies, for understanding the temporalities of asylum in this particular spatial site. grounded in humanistic methodology, they adopt the idea of 180 editorial fennia 197(2) (2019) ‘orientation’ to explore the reception centre as a coming together of asylum seekers’ lived experiences, institutional governance and the buildings as material constellations. the paper argues that while temporal strategies are used by the migration governance, asylum seekers too are able to make use of certain temporal tactics that allow them to reorient themselves towards meaningful life. the last research paper, gis and land cover-based assessment of ecosystem services in the north karelia biosphere reserve, finland, co-authored by laura poikolainen, guilherme pinto, petteri vihervaara, benjamin burkhard, franziska wolff, reima hyytiäinen and timo kumpula (2019), provides results from a study assessing and mapping ecosystem services in the north karelia biosphere reserve, in eastern finland, with the aim of producing knowledge for sustainable land use planning. highlighting ambiguity in the use of ecosystem services, from both stakeholder and substantial expert perspectives, the paper present as results from a matrix method analysis two major outcomes: first, old-growth forests and undrained open and forested mires have potential to provide different ecosystem services where water and urban areas form important cultural services, second, areas with high capacity for ecosystem services provision include high biodiversity. of the three review articles included, the one by katarina haugen and kerstin westin (2019), from pragmatism to meritocracy? views on in-house family ties on the swedish labour market, introduces insights from a study that set out to identify human resource management strategies and practices in the swedish labor market, concerning specifically familial relations. they found two opposing approaches, one more traditional emphasizing acceptance of familial connections and the other more meritocratic with a disapproving view towards such affiliations. while the previous is, at large, being challenged by the latter in the current swedish society, differences between large-scale urban settings and smaller communities and rural areas are notable. familial ties thus remain a contested issue in the discussed labour market. the second article in the reviews and essays section by maja lagerqvist (2019), to crash on the bus (or sit on needles and pins)? – buses and subways in teenage everyday geographies, presents results from a study in urban sweden, focusing on young people’s experiences and use of public transportation. approached as ‘mobile places’, the bus and the subway are explored from the perspective of the everyday, giving space to the young mobile subjects’ own interpretations regarding their urban lives. when successful, these places can offer what she calls ‘relieving’ urban spaces for youths, yet as well as enabling interaction and retreat, in the opposite case stress, fear and other barriers to the use of public transport occurs – especially among girls and young women. based on her findings lagerqvist argues for inclusive and safe public transportation that values young people as particular and equal urban dwellers. the final review article focuses on young people’s climate activism, building on a recent research report ‘protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities’, by mattias wahlström and 20 colleagues from a variety of countries (wahlström et al. 2019). in imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research, benjamin bowman (2019) presents an appreciative yet critical reading of the survey and interview findings, with the purpose of making visible the complexity and plurality of young climate activists’ agency. such political agency has recently gained plenty of attention in transnational media and in policy agendas, however bowman suggests, often from too narrow a perspective that could (and should!) be widened through scholarly understanding of youthful political agency. the article was processed through open peer review and a discussion based on it will be published in fennia and on the versus forum in the upcoming months. kirsi pauliina kallio fennia editor-in-chief https://www.versuslehti.fi james riding et al. 181fennia 197(2) (2019) notes 1 to contest the atomization of neoliberal academia, we have chosen to collectively author this paper. members of the collective include heather magusin, alexander brackebusch, pegah behroozi, jodine ducs, murray derksen, ariele parker, adriane peak, and hongyang tao. references american college health association (2019) canadian consortium executive summary spring 2019. <https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/ncha-ii_spring_2019_canadian_reference_group_ executive_summary.pdf> andresen, s. a., henriksen, i. m., jakobsen, t. s., jones, m. & røkkum, n. h. a. (2019) medvirkning, makt og avmakt – hva betyr et svekket universitetsdemokrati? in tjora, a. (ed.) universitetskamp, 261–291. scandinavian academic press and spartacus forlag as, oslo. bennett, j. (2001) the enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics. princeton university press, princeton, nj. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400884537 berg, l. d., huijbens, e. h. & larsen, h. g. (2016) producing anxiety in the neoliberal university. the canadian geographer / le géographe canadien 60(2) 168–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12261 bowman, b. (2019) imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research. fennia 197(2) 295–305. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.85151 brown, w. (2015) undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. zone books, new york, ny. castree, n., aspinall, r., berg, l. d., bohle, h-g., hoggart, k., kitchin, r., kleine, d., kulke, e., munton, r., pawson, e., powell, j., sheppard, e. & van weesep, j. (2006) research assessment and the production of geographical knowledge. progress in human geography 30(6) 747–782. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132506071518 cupples, j. (2019) no sense of place: geoscientisation and the epistemic erasure of human geography. new zealand geographer [online nov 11 2019] https://doi.org/10.1111/nzg.12231 debord, g. (1967 [1983]) the society of the spectacle. black and red books, detroit. dewsbury, j-d. (2010) language and the event: the unthought of appearing worlds. in anderson, b. & harrison, p. (eds.) taking-place: non-representational theories and geography, 147–160. farnham, ashgate. ekenhorst, m. & van aalst, i. (2019) lesbian nightlife in amsterdam: an explorative study of the shift from ‘queer-only’ to ‘queer-friendly’ spaces. fennia 197(2) 200–214. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.83696 gill, r. (2009) breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. in flood, r. & gill, r. (eds.) secrecy and silence in the research process: feminist reflections, 228–244. routledge, london. haugen, k. & westin, k. (2019) from pragmatism to meritocracy? views on in-house family ties on the swedish labour market. fennia 197(2) 268–279. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.73001 henriksen, d. (2018) research collaboration and co-authorship in the social sciences. dissertations in department of political science, aarhus university. <https://politica.dk/fileadmin/politica/ dokumenter/ph.d.-afhandlinger/dorte_henriksen.pdf> ionedes, j. p., klavans, r. & boyack, k. w. (2018) the scientists who publish a paper every five days. nature 561(7772) 167–169. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06185-8 jones, m. (2017) can research quality be measured quantitatively? on quality of scholarship, numerical research indicators and academic publishing – experiences from norway. fennia 195(2) 164–174. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.66602 lagerqvist, m. (2019) to crash on the bus (or sit on needles and pins?) – buses and subways in teenage everyday geographies. fennia 197(2) 280–294. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.83665 larner, w. (2000) neo-liberalism: policy, ideology, governmentality. studies in political economy 63(1) 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/19187033.2000.11675231 lilius, j. & hewidy, h. (2019) serving whom? immigrant entrepreneurs in a new local context. fennia 197(2) 215–231. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.82821 marchart, o. (2007) post-foundational political thought. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748624973.001.0001 massumi, b. (2015) politics of affect. polity press, cambridge, uk. meyerhoff, e., johnson, e. & braun, b. (2011) time and the university. acme: an international journal for critical geographies 10(3) 483–507. <https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/908> mitchell, d. (2018) revolution and the critique of human geography: prospects for the right to the city after 50 years. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 100(1) 2–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2018.1445478 182 editorial fennia 197(2) (2019) mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j., walton-roberts, m., basu, r., whitson, r., hawkins, r., hamilton, t. & curran, w. (2015) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 14 1235–1259. <https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058> phillips, m. j. (2018) toward a more generous future. <https://connect.mla.hcommons.org/toward-amore-generous-future/> 29.10.2019. poikolainen, l., pinto, g., vihervaara, p., burkhard, b., wolff, f., hyytiäinen, r. & kumpula, t. (2019) gis and land cover-based assessment of ecosystem services in the north karelia biosphere reserve, finland. fennia 197(2) 249–267. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.80331 pyyry, n. (2015) hanging out with young people, urban spaces and ideas: openings to dwelling, participation and thinking. research report 374. university of helsinki, department of teacher education. pyyry, n. (2019) from psychogeography to hanging-out-knowing: situationist dérive in nonrepresentational urban research. area 51(2) 315–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12466 pyyry, n. (2019) akateeminen hengailu: lumoutumisen tiloja ja radikaalin ajattelun mahdollisuuksia [academic hanging out: spaces of enchantment and openings for radical thinking]. terra 131(4) 223-233. swyngedouw, e. (2014) where is the political? insurgent mobilisations and the incipient ‘return of the political’. space and polity 18(2) 122–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2013.879774 taylor, s. (2019) the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher. fennia 197(2) 183–199. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.84792 the university of british columbia (2019) ubc okanagan tuition fees. <http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/ okanagan/index.cfm?tree=14,339,1032,1272>. 24.11.2019. thorshaug, r. ø. & brun, c. (2019) temporal injustice and re-orientations in asylum reception centres in norway: towards critical geographies of architecture in the institution. fennia 197(2) 232–248. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.84758 wahlström, m., kocyba, p., de vydt, m., de moor, j., wouters, r., wennerhag, m., van stekelenburg, j., uba, k., saunders, c., rucht, d., mikecz, d., zamponi, l., lorenzini, j., kołczyńska, m., haunss, s., giugni, m., gaidyte, t., doherty, b. & buzogany, a. (2019) protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities. keele university e-prints, keele, uk. yamagishi, t., li, y. & takagishi, h. (2014) in search of homo economicus. psychological science 25(9) 1699–1711. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614538065 young academy of norway (2016) når usikkerheten rår – forskningsledelse og karriereveier for yngre forskere. <https://akademietforyngreforskere.no/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/na%cc%8arusikkerheten-ra%cc%8ar-et-oppspill-til-debatt-av-akademiet-for-yngre-forskere-2016.pdf >. 29.10.2019. covid-19 discloses unequal geographies covid-19 discloses unequal geographies introduction the covid-19 pandemic is, and is not, presently the primary challenge in the world. it deserves the attention of critical scholars who have competence to consider the virus and its political implications from reasoned academic perspectives, with scientific and societal impact in mind. yet, these concerns should not push aside other issues, those that scholars were working on prior to the pandemic situation. with these concerns in mind, fennia invited brief observations from scholars who have witnessed the intertwinement of the pandemic with other pressing issues in the societies and communities where they work and live. twelve colleagues accepted the invitation, shedding light on the situation in brazil, california/us, finland, portugal/italy, the uk, and greece. in its attempt to draw attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the ongoing pandemic, the collective editorial includes an invitation to other scholars in different parts of the world to offer further contributions to the journal, in the form of research papers, review articles, essays and reflections. the seven pieces included in the editorial reveal a common pattern across different geographical locations. the authors have seen that, as the attention of people, states and the media is drawn excessively toward new inequalities created in/by the pandemic situation, previous and lingering problems may be downplayed by these emerging concerns (cf. findings by phd students during the pandemic, in the reflections section). yet, unsurprisingly, the pandemic is hitting hardest the vulnerable and the underprivileged. the poor who did not receive adequate state support before, migrants placed in in-between spaces where they rely on transnational and translocal aid, people living in the midst of armed conflicts, laborers whose rights have been long neglected, and communities facing unexpected natural hazards are among those whose situation has worsened notably due to national restrictions and the hindrance of daily activities. concurrently, the rise of nationalistic, even patriotic or racist, attitudes is apparent. as states struggle with national health and economy, transnational solidarities weaken. distinctions between 'us' and 'them' have started to gain ground as the collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in europe and the americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. the critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. the pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic. keywords: covid-19, pandemic, geographical inequalities, racism, precarious labor, populism urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa99514 doi: 10.11143/fennia.99514 © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 2 editorial fennia 198(1–2) (2020) legitimate justifications to bordering policies, economic strategies and health measures, including in countries that manifest themselves as open multicultural societies. this dangerously supports populist race-based agendas by implicitly recognizing their xenophobic core values. further, the downside of the emerging intimate caring relations among close communities and families – which maintain well-being in them and is highly important in itself – is that people become less attentive toward issues beyond their immediate vicinity. this is another mechanism through which the implications of the pandemic to previous difficulties hide from the view. our journey in the covid-19 diseased world begins from brazil where the spread of the virus has been quick, broad and particularly imbalanced (and so continues), due to the 'viral state' as marcelo lopes de souza describes the country where the political regime continues its 'irrationalistic' politics regardless of the devastating consequences, in a bizarre relationship with its own past, positioning itself peculiarly in the international comparison (see also phd student experiences of working in brazil during the pandemic, in the reflections section). continuing to north america, katharyne mitchell introduces how the situation has increased existing inequalities in a county that divides into two contrary socio-economic realities, in clear resonance with souza's description of the divided cities of brazil. in northern california, where persistent wildfires, racial unrest and the contested presidential elections are taking place concurrently with the increasing pandemic, the results are catastrophic in the largely latinx farmworker communities. questions of labor already raised in the first two interventions are further discussed in the finnish context by jouni häkli who shows how the strict state-authored mobility restrictions at the national borders during the first months of the pandemic made visible the socially unsustainable condition of agriculture in finland, reliant on foreign cheap labor. as such unsustainable structures are incompatible with the responsible and brisk image of domestic food, a country that profiles as a model nation of sustainability has been caught by surprise: what is to become of the finnish (ukrainian-bulgarian-rumanian-russian-baltic) strawberry? next, we are offered a personal reflection from a south european 'limbo' where simone tulumello has found himself, between and within lisbon and some italian cities where current changes in urban life have made him attentive to, on one hand, dangers embedded in the normalization of selfand state-control measures, and secondly, to the unpredictability of social and economic consequences in the cities (see also phd student experiences of working in portugal during the pandemic, in the reflections section). the contemplation sets the question of what will political life be like in the post-covid city? the third european viewpoint comes from the uk, based on isabel meier's remarks regarding the coronavirus act and the related increase in racist practices by the state, which have become explicitly evident during the past months in various forms of police activities, how the national health care system is run, and through the alarming situations of homelessness persons in the streets of london. the last two pieces focus on the eastern border of the european union, greece. first, anna carastathis, aila spathopoulou and myrto tsilimpounidi provide a critique of the crisis landscape in greece, from the economic crisis in 2011 to the so-called refugee crisis since 2015 to the current pandemic. they argue that the continuous state of emergency is used to intensify racist migration policies and practices, in greece, but also more broadly in the eu, by naturalising and medicalising 'race'. second, gemma bird, amanda russell beattie, jelena obradovic-wochnik and patrycja rozbicka take a specific approach, through the eyes of refugee children, on the border islands where large asylum seeker populations are being held on behalf of the european union under the greek government. adding eyewitness evidence to the previous arguments, they show how the pandemic has enabled the state to turn the hardly viable camps into detention centers and refugees into prisoners, including thousands of lone children and youth without families, whose rights are completely overlooked by the eu countries that – under the convention on the rights of the child that they all have ratified – are committed to taking specific care of all persons under the age of 18 within their territorial governance. this seven-fold glimpse to the unequal geographies of covid-19 is followed by the introduction of the volume 198 of fennia, including both yearly issues. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) fennia editor-in-chief kirsi pauliina kallio et al. 3fennia 198(1–2) (2020) the two viruses: the covid-19 pandemic and the neo-fascist necropolitics in brazil it has become commonplace on the part of the brazilian left to recognise that brazil has been plagued not by one, but by two viruses: the coronavirus and the 'virus' of (neo-)fascism. the latter has greatly aggravated the problems arising from the former, in addition to bringing its own challenges in terms of political, behavioural and cultural problems, and increasing economic inequalities. although the growing weight of the far right has been a worldwide phenomenon since the 1990s, brazil presents some peculiarities. in comparison with other countries affected by a new type of authoritarian resurgence in recent years, it seems to be a kind of 'vanguard of backwardness'. also, peculiarities with the country's own past exist, especially the military regime between 1964 and 1985 for which the current brazilian far right is stridently nostalgic. the current brazilian political regime – which formally emerged with the inauguration of jair bolsonaro as president of the republic on january 1, 2019 – is 'irrationalistic' and contradictory, meaning: contempt for universities (seen as thoroughly infested with communists) and to some extent science in general (potentially subversive or not trustful enough, due to values such as universalism and laicism); and a destructive urge, characterised by an anachronistic and paranoid 'communist hunting' without any project other than the centralisation of power in the hands of a small group of rightists bringing together military, businesspeople, neo-pentecostal religious leaders, a hard core of neo-fascist activists and ideologues, and an increasing number of traditional, centreright politicians. as for the contradictions, three can be highlighted: first, an exacerbated 'nationalist' discourse in whose context, however, manifestations of unconditional political alignment with trump's united states, and a quasi-worship for us-american symbols (like the us-american flag) and values (such as the 'sacred right to bear arms'), are frequent; second, ideological attacks and insults on china, a country on which brazil is increasingly economically dependent; third, an unrelenting persecution of the left in the name of 'democracy' and 'freedom', while – as never before since the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s – the press is persecuted, environmental and human rights activists are threatened, and freedoms and rights suffer intense attack. compared to its own past, the current regime corresponds to an interesting case, too. while the military sought in the past to build a 'brasil grande' based on industrialisation largely supported by state companies and guided by government interventionism, bolsonaro's neo-liberal government seems to have accommodated itself to a role for brazil as an exporter of agricultural and mineral commodities. all this has produced a bizarre situation, with two aspects intertwined. on the one hand, a kind of 'back to the past' syndrome, but in a particularly caricatural and not only tragic way (as marx would say, history repeats itself, now as farce). yet at the same time, contemporary brazil is the 'laboratory' of a new form of fascism and, in this sense, a key to the future, perhaps not only of the global south. an 'incomplete' (neo-)fascism in terms of mass mobilisation, depending mainly on networks of virtual supporters and sympathisers, where the state apparatus does not intend to have a prominent and pro-active economic role. the ultra-centralised control of state power is enough as the constant threat of violence, physical and symbolic, helps to make the structural violence of neo-liberalism politically viable. such a regime contributes to the situation we are currently experiencing in brazil. the covid-19 tragedy gets out of control more and more, week by week, in the middle of daily tensions between the executive and the other two powers (legislature and judiciary), between the government and the press, between the government and civil society and – last but not least – between the federal government and the state and municipal levels of the executive. an increasing presence of military personnel in the federal government, occupying technical positions even in the ministry of health, has not collaborated to stabilise the political situation, on the contrary. at the time of writing (mid-october 2020), the number of deaths increases steadily, and the curve of deaths and new cases is far from 'flattening'. due to an irresponsible and premature easing of social isolation measures, brazil is experiencing a terrible 'second wave' of the epidemic. occupying the second position in the world in terms of total cases and deaths, behind only the united states, brazil is probably close to an unprecedent catastrophe: 'inspired' by examples of inconsistency given by the government itself, many people have gradually started to flock to the streets and even to the beaches, without paying attention to the prescriptions regarding physical distancing and the use of protective masks. 4 editorial fennia 198(1–2) (2020) as the tragedy progresses, the social asymmetry that it reveals (but which has always existed) is becoming more and more evident. above all, it is the poor workers who depend on mass transportation and live crowded in favelas that are being and will be increasingly affected. among them, especially in the southeast and northeast regions of the country, most of the poor are afrobrazilians, historically victims of racism. the tragedy of the pandemic in brazil is surely general. but at the same time, in its most characteristically 'genocidal' dimension, it affects mainly the working class and the afro-descendant population. favelas and poor peripheries of large cities are already being hit disproportionately, and this trend is likely to become more and more accentuated over time. in addition to aspects valid for the whole world, such as the effects of the pandemic in terms of socio-spatial control and economic crisis, there is a specific spatiality of the covid-19 pandemic in a country such as brazil, which points to the mortality rate of enormous magnitude that is gradually taking place in the segregated spaces of large cities, in a country where almost 90% of the population is considered urban. this is the 'geographicity’' of today’s genuine neo-fascist necropolitics in brazil, in the context of the ongoing pandemic. marcelo lopes de souza (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7398-3170) federal university of rio de janeiro local inequities during the pandemic: santa cruz, california the university of california at santa cruz is located in a part of the county of santa cruz that most people would probably recognize from popular media images, with beautiful sand beaches, worldclass surfers, giant redwoods, and hordes of summer tourists. but the county also encompasses watsonville and the nearby pajaro valley, a farming town and community about 29 kilometers to the south. this part of the county supplies nearby cities such as san jose, castroville and santa cruz – and indeed much of the world – with fresh fruit and vegetables, especially strawberries, mushrooms, cauliflower, broccoli, raspberries and lettuce. what the pandemic has brought forward and rendered more painfully obvious is the extreme uneven development of these two parts of the same county, and how populations situated by geography and employment in each region have fared quite differently as a result. the labor force in the watsonville area is comprised of 75% latino workers, who work predominantly in agriculture. a large percentage of this group are immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. for this particular segment of the labor force, the impact of covid-19 has been catastrophic for the reasons laid out below. employment: despite the arduous labor involved in farm work, the average salary for farm laborers is $12.60 per hour (hansen 2019). berry picking in california is usually paid as piecework, with workers compensated by the weight of berries picked. to maintain an already inadequate salary, it is impossible to rest or slow down during the day, despite illness or fatigue. most workers in california receive overtime pay after working 8 hour days or 40 hour weeks, but for farm laborers it is 10 hour days and 60 hour weeks. many workers never receive overtime at all no matter how many hours are worked. a vast majority of farmworkers are not eligible for unemployment benefits despite working seasonally, nor do they receive any public benefits such as health or disability. while the pandemic has disproportionately impacted this group with respect to both employment and health (see below), federal covid-19 relief programs are largely unavailable to them (faber 2020). racism and xenophobia: despite being labeled essential workers, farmworkers in watsonville – as elsewhere in the country – have experienced considerable racism and xenophobia during the pandemic, exacerbated by the ongoing denigration of mexicans as criminals and "illegal aliens" by president trump as well as continued blame by other politicians for the virus itself. in june, for example, florida governor rick de santis attributed the rise of covid-19 cases to "overwhelmingly hispanic farmworkers" and day laborers (sessin 2020), and south dakota governor kristi noem said that the high numbers of covid-19 cases in meatpacking plants was attributable to immigrant culture kirsi pauliina kallio et al. 5fennia 198(1–2) (2020) (philpott 2020). these types of attacks have worked to dehumanize farmworkers, justifying their ill treatment, bad pay, and increasingly hazardous working conditions during the pandemic. housing: housing in all of california is notoriously expensive and this is true for santa cruz county. over the past decade house prices and rents have increased dramatically with the entry of wealthier workers from the nearby silicon valley and upper bay area. this has forced lower income groups, including farmworkers, into increasingly crowded, substandard accommodations. many of these lack basic washing and sanitation facilities. additionally, the housing is some distance from the farms, requiring transportation in crowded trucks, often without adequate personal protective equipment. during the pandemic, these conditions have greatly exacerbated the risks of contracting covid-19, leading to higher cases of infection and more public opprobrium and racist and xenophobic political attacks in a vicious cycle. health: in comparison with northern santa cruz the number of covid-19 cases is higher among south county residents where there are 62% of all cases; half of these cases are in watsonville, which is 82% latino. in the state of california as a whole, latinos comprise 39% of the population but make up 56% of the positive covid-19 cases. particularly concerning for farmworkers, who are predominantly latino immigrants, one quarter of this group are over 50 years of age, and thus at higher levels of risk from the virus. with the added danger of unhealthy air quality stemming from recent and ongoing california wildfires, farmworkers, who have "co-morbidities for covid-19, such as asthma, diabetes, obesity (and ironically hunger and malnutrition), heart disease and stress" face extremely dire and inequitable health effects from the pandemic (paramo & diringer 2020). in summary, while both the north and the south parts of the county of santa cruz have been hit hard by the pandemic and the recent california wildfires, the already existing inequities between the two regions have led to far worse outcomes for the majority of workers living in the watsonville area. the brutal combination of existing employment and housing disparities, coupled with increasing racism and xenophobia, has meant that the most vulnerable communities have largely borne the brunt of the pandemic's devastation in my county. as häkli notes similarly for finland (see next section), the inequitable yet yoked-together geographies of food production and food consumption normally go unseen and unspoken in most regional and national narratives. covid19's brutal path of devastation in farmworker communities in santa cruz spotlights this chronic uneven development and associated forms of immigrant exploitation that have been rendered largely invisible for decades. katharyne mitchell (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0314-4598) university of california, santa cruz covid-19 and migrant laborers in finland in fall 2020, finland boasts as a country that has pursued successful policies and measures to curb the pandemic. finnish government's decisions to restrict travel through border closure have been among the strictest in europe, with a system in place that is based on a 'traffic light model' allowing quarantine-free entry to the country only from a few 'green' countries. for those who arrive in finland from a country classified 'orange' or 'red', a self-quarantine for two weeks is recommended by the finnish institute for health and welfare. moreover, the health status of those arriving in finland from these countries may be assessed at the border. travelers with a verified covid-19 infection may be subject to an involuntary isolation ordered by a physician according to the communicable diseases act (1227/2016). the traffic light model is a governance mechanism that in itself creates inequalities between travelers who need to cross borders for work or family-related reasons. however, at an earlier stage of the pandemic, in april 2020, the border closure banning the entry to finland for a group of people travelling for work was a veritable eye-opener about inequalities slowly built into the finnish agricultural labor 6 editorial fennia 198(1–2) (2020) market. while finland is keen to highlight the virtues of domestic food and berries, including safe and sustainable production methods, and clean and healthy products, few finns would know how dependent many labor-intensive segments of the finnish agriculture had become of foreign seasonal workers. suddenly, the pandemic brought into relief this dependency as well as the low wages and poor working conditions that migrant laborers were subject to when working in the finnish agribusiness. troubled farmers, lacking seasonal workers banned from entering the country, were suddenly the target of extensive media attention. also many migrant laborers, facing the loss of much-needed income, were interviewed in their home countries. in consequence, a highly structured and unequal but hidden and silenced system of exploitation of cheap labor was brought into light in a way that took most finns by surprise. in a country where trade union membership rate is among the highest in the world, and where the rights of employees are well-guarded by legislation and collective agreements, the fact that seasonal migrant laborers regularly work under poor conditions for meager pay and outside collective labor contracts was embarrassing news to many. all the more so, as the products commonly marketed as 'hundred percent domestic' were thus revealed partly ukrainian, bulgarian, rumanian, russian and baltic. before the pandemic, construction workers from estonia and filipino nurses had dominated the finnish media coverage on migrant laborers. while some problems related to working conditions and exploitation occurred among both groups, the overall image of finland as a host for migrant laborers was good and orderly. only the sudden and surprising break in the seemingly endless supply for cheap and docile work force, caused by the covid-19 induced 'emergency', laid bare the inconvenient truth about patterns of labor exploitation in finland. according to the natural resources institute finland, in 2016 there were more than 16,000 foreign nationals working in the finnish agriculture and horticulture, which over the past two decades has grown into more industrial and business-oriented with fewer and bigger farms (luke 2018). migrant laborers' contribution is significant as they account for approximately half of the wage laborers in the sector. yet, according to the industrial union many seasonal workers face problems in their work. among common issues are too low wages and the omission of wage segments due to working extra time or on sundays, overly long work hours and weeks without any days off, intimidation and threat of being laid off or having work permit discontinued, inappropriate language and yelling by the employer, and lack of appropriate introduction to work practices (ignatius 2019). many of these problems persist to date but the increased media coverage prompted by the covid-19 crisis hopefully leads to further attention to seasonal workers’ working conditions and due measures to improve their protection in finland. jouni häkli (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3033-2976) tampere university what is to be of this pandemic: a tale of two limbos, between lisbon and italy lisbon, portugal, early september 2020. just back from a month in italy (some time spent between my hometown palermo and sardinia), being in lisbon feels like being in a limbo, in two senses: what remains in place of lockdown measures and what is to be of this pandemic socially and economically. it is from the place of this twofold feeling that i would like to share some thoughts. i am aware that, in the face of my co-authors' necropolitical images from the european borders and american metropolises, my reflections on public space, nightlife and youths may sound frivolous; and yet, please, bear with me, for two reasons: first, because i promise i will later on, if briefly, touch on some political economic implications; and, second, because i truly believe that the normalization of measures of selfand state-control, especially when they seem to be adopted with some degree of randomness, is part and parcel of our collective incapacity to resist and fight back. italy was the first european country to be hit by the pandemic and one of those that suffered the strongest impacts. from march to may, it has dealt with the virus with some of the strictest lockdown kirsi pauliina kallio et al. 7fennia 198(1–2) (2020) measures around, including, in many cities, allowing to get out of home only to go to work or buy groceries. the enforcement of the measures has been extremely strict, with police issuing penal orders and fines; contributing to a climate of fear and paranoia, whereas many have witnessed angry people at the balconies shouting 'go home!' to bystanders, while media reportages were showing drones and police in quads arresting lone runners in the beach. fast forward to august, the state of emergency has been extended to the end of 2020, and yet measures have been loosened to the point that discotheques had reopened; and new moral panics emerged against the youths, now pointed as the responsible for a new growth in cases – and, toward the end of august, discotheques have been closed again and a national order to use masks in public space at night issued. back to lisbon, everything was more or less the same as they were when i left in late july. here, the lockdown has never been as strict as in italy – for instance, taking a stroll or running has never been prohibited, and my morning run has been among the things that helped keep my brain (more or less) sane. and yet, despite the abrogation of the state of emergency in late may, several measures have remained in place, like the prohibition of gatherings of more than 10 people and the closure of bars at 8 pm – after that, you can have that last drink(s) over dinner only. in a month or so, i travelled from the emptiness of lisbon’s public spaces at night to southern italy’s streets vibrant of 'movida' – which felt, especially at first, almost scary! – and back to a less empty, but still quiet, lisbon; fostering this feeling of limbo that kicks back every time i see videos or photos from italy at night. a limbo that speaks of my – but, i believe, not only mine – new way of feeling crowds in public spaces, something that was once so natural for a guy that has lived almost all his life in southern european cities. but there is more, especially a growing feeling that many of the adopted measures stem from a moral economy of fear of youths and public life rather than health considerations. how to explain, otherwise, such different approaches in the two countries that, after the first months of total panic in italy, have more or less performed the same? let us be clear, i am anything but an anti-masker or whatnot. i am feeling increasing uneasiness with the way the spectacle of nightlife and gatherings in public space has covered up for other, more structural, voids in the responses to the pandemic: where are the necessary investments in overcrowded public transports? where are more stringent regulations over labour? where is the rethinking of economic models that made us – southern european countries – so vulnerable? this brings me to the second, and maybe more relevant for this collective editorial, dimension of feeling in a limbo. in 2019, tourism accounted for about 15% of portuguese gdp. despite a small rebound in september, this will be a devastating year for that 15% – and for the many whose lives are dependent on it. the government’s response? pure denial. in june, when lisbon was selected to host the finals of the champions league, the expectation was to have the stadiums and the city full of fans. later on, when cases had a spike in lisbon, the prime minister went as far as to declare that players and tourists should not be concerned, since the cases were limited to peripheral neighbourhoods. that those neighbourhoods are the metro’s poor and racially diverse, he did not say. everything is as it used to be; except it is not, as many believe that only in autumn or winter will the economic effects hit the societal fabric – after the end of the halt of evictions (scheduled on september 30 as i am writing, but likely to be extended to the end of the year), once financial markets will start to bet again on the debts of peripheral countries that have skyrocketed in the meanwhile. when she gently invited us to be part of this editorial, kirsi pauliina kallio asked us to reflect on what inequalities had been made visible during, or produced by, the pandemic. i am afraid that, being stuck in this limbo, i could only offer some glimpses of inequalities to be and of how unprepared we seem to be to deal with their real causes and impacts. at this point, you, reader, would expect me to offer you that glimpse of hope every (critical) social scientist concludes their essays, no matter how gloomy, with. and, yes, i do have witnessed many, many bits and pieces of a politics of care and solidarity, in lisbon and italy, during these months; but i will let you look around for resistances and struggles where you are, and remain stuck in this limbo, for this time being. simone tulumello (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6660-3432) instituto de ciências sociais da universidade de lisboa 8 editorial fennia 198(1–2) (2020) police power, racial profiling, access to healthcare and homelessness in the uk in times of covid-19 the uk´s response to the coronavirus was famously one of the worst, leading to a higher excess mortality than in any other european country (office for national statistics 2020). in march 2020, emergency powers to respond to the pandemic became law, after the coronavirus act 2020 was rushed through the parliament in one day, leading to an extension of the power of questioning and detention, an increase in police presence as well as the power to close borders indefinitely (department of health and social care 2020). shortly after its introduction, media attention was drawn to its racialised implementation: statistics released by the metropolitan police in march show that more than 25% of fines for lockdown violations were issued to black people, who make up 12% of london´s population. a further 23% were given to asian people, as the report states, who are 18% of london residents. additionally, black and asian people were disproportionately often arrested under both the health protection regulations and separate coronavirus act. the first person fined under the coronavirus act was a black woman: marie dinou was fined £660 for failing to provide her identity or reason to travel to the police. considering the long history of racial profiling (delsol 2015), as well as statistics revealing that black people in the uk are 40 times more likely to be stopped and searched (parmar 2011), the racialised implementation of the coronavirus act is no surprise. while lockdown regulations and the act amplified these racist police practices, most people really struggled to follow what behaviour was criminalised. boris johnson's lockdown rules were widely perceived as confusing and vague. access to healthcare: the uk's national healthcare service (nhs) was founded on the principle of universal healthcare: that everyone could access it for free, regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. over successive governments, but escalating within the past decade, changes in legislation have increasingly restricted healthcare access to the nhs for people not born in the uk. in 2012 an announcement called for a "really hostile environment" targeted at anyone living in the uk illegally (kirkup & winett 2012). thereafter followed changes in law, accompanied by policies and practices requiring nhs trusts to undertake id checks for all patients accessing non-emergency care. next to id checks, most non-eea nationals applying for temporary leave to remain in the uk must pay an 'immigration health surcharge' of £400 a year. in may 2020, the government decided to waive the fee for a very small group of migrants – nhs and care workers – further risking the health of large groups of other migrants whose lives are rendered disposable. this was due to a lot pressure from unions, campaigners and activist groups, who were raising awareness about the barriers to healthcare that many migrants face during these critical times. homelessness and no recourse to public funds: the covid-19 pandemic and consequent job losses in the uk further intensified systemic inequalities, leading to an unprecedented number of people applying for benefits. however, not everyone who lost their job was able to apply; this includes eu migrants who have been in britain for less than five years and those staying in the uk with a temporary immigration status with no recourse to public funds. no recourse to public funds is a condition applied to many migrants, meaning that a person has no entitlement to welfare benefits, to asylum support or public housing, which puts many people and families at high risk of homelessness and destitution. recent figures reveal the step increase in rough sleeping in london. despite the claim that more than 90% of all rough sleepers had been placed in hostels, figures reported by different homeless charities in london reveal that the number of people sleeping rough during lockdown rose by more than 30% when compared to the same period last year. isabel meier (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7539-1104) university of northampton kirsi pauliina kallio et al. 9fennia 198(1–2) (2020) crisis goes viral: containment in the age of contagion in greece we live in the era of crises. in the past decade, greece has been the epicentre of multiple, overlapping, 'nesting' and intersecting crises. the financial crisis in 2011 through which the country was constructed as the disobedient pariah of europe, reinforcing the polarity between the european centre and the periphery, was followed in 2015 by the european refugee crisis represented by myriad photographs of people in boats arriving at the island of lesvos. the latest crisis to arrive on the scene is the global covid-19 pandemic that has exacerbated the negative effects of the previous declared crises. a chronically underfunded medical system subject to austerity cuts is collapsing. the warehousing of asylum seekers in camps has primed the conditions for the rapid and deadly transmission of the virus. yet, it has also had – at least discursively – redemptive effects on the construction of greece as a crisis-ridden country, politically or culturally responsible for the mismanagement of the previous two crises; the coronavirus pandemic is a global crisis and it is naturalised as a medical phenomenon. as prime minister konstantinos mitsotakis proclaimed, "the consolation … is that today we are no longer a 'special case'. we are not the 'black sheep'" of europe. medical metaphors are among the favourite rhetorical schemas in the construction of crisis narratives: "europe will keep giving medicine to greece", "crisis is a disease that needs to be quarantined and contained". etymologically, 'crisis' suggests the necessary climax to a natural process, like the turning point in a disease. medical metaphors treat crises as natural processes; as something inevitable that was meant to happen. such naturalising leaves no room for questioning the structures, decisions, and value systems that brought us to this state of (really) late capitalism, of profits over human lives, corruption, and mismanagement. when the coronavirus appeared in greece, mitsotakis referred to the "double crisis" that greece was facing: the border crisis and the pandemic crisis. ιn protest over the eu's failure to uphold the terms of the eu-turkey deal and the lack of support for turkey's imperialist military campaign in syria, recep tayyip erdoğan threatened to open the turkish border to refugees. this racist threat was expedient to mitsotakis' equally racist, broader political agenda, as well as that of fortress europe. the 'state of emergency' declared in march, suspending asylum processes for newly arriving people for one month, invoking article 78.3 of the treaty on the functioning of the european union, was an attempt by the far-right new democracy government to find international support for its previously devised, and already partially implemented designs to undermine the right to seek asylum in greece: to detain asylum seekers and undocumented people in 'closed centres' (i.e. prisons), accelerate deportations, and criminalise solidarians with people on the move. on february 27, exploiting the widespread fear of the coronavirus outbreak in greece, mitsotakis justified the containment of refugees, conflating them with carriers of the virus. this is not the first time that a racist regime in europe has equated a minority group with the fear of spreading a virus or an illness to the 'pure' and 'healthy' social body comprised of citizens of the nation-state. the intersection between the refugee and the pandemic crises reveals how the global pandemic has been used to intensify racist migration policies in greece (and globally) by naturalising and medicalising 'race'. just as the individual body needs to be protected from the invasion of the virus, so too the national body needs to be protected from the 'influx' of migrants and refugees. borders are fenced and quarantines enforced for the national body to remain 'safe' and 'protected'. as mitropoulos (2020) points out, "[i]mmigration detention emerged from the intertwined histories and techniques of quarantine confinement and prisons". we see the protraction of lockdown for asylum seekers in camps on the hotspot islands and the mainland – still ongoing, while, at the time of writing, citizens are (relatively) free to move since may 4 and greece opened its borders to international tourists on june 15 – as the necropolitical use of quarantine; not to ensure life but to bring about mass death. asylum seekers are spatially confined in camps and represented visually as a 'crowd'. they are forced to form endless queues to secure food, water, and health care. they are constructed as the antithesis of the physical distancing measures meant to protect 'us' from transmitting the virus. what emerged in the coronavirus crisis was a renewed apartheid system whereby quarantine’s intertwined biopolitical and necropolitical logic came into harsh relief. refugee family reunification flights were cancelled while european citizens 10 editorial fennia 198(1–2) (2020) were repatriated. the police intensified its racial profiling stop-and-search operations in athens and other urban centres during the lockdown. the medicalisation of the crises invested borders with renewed legitimacy, despite warnings from the world health organisation that closing borders is not an effective means to stop the transmission of a virus. the logic of quarantine is already at the heart of the hotspot as a technology of the border: the segregation and containment of so-called ‘mixed migration flows’ from citizens and tourists; the separation of potential 'refugees' (due protection) from illicit 'migrants' (to be detained and deported), which increasingly relies on the medicalised criteria of 'vulnerability'. ultimately, the management of the coronavirus crisis – ostensibly the prevention of contagion – has facilitated the naturalisation of containment. simultaneously, the coronavirus crisis reveals the dichotomy between 'open' and 'closed' camps: how easily the camp’s gates from one moment to the other are locked under the pretext of a pandemic. spatially confined and administratively suspended in time, people are thus made unable to apply for asylum, renew their documents, attend their asylum interview, or seek legal support. immediately following the fire at moria on 9 september, mitsotakis accused asylum seekers who tested positive for the virus and who allegedly refused to follow the quarantine measures within moria, as having started the fire. the government’s response to this 'new crisis' is the creation of the new, closed, and highly policed hotspot on the former shooting range at kara tepe, currently under quarantine. in the age of contagion, crises are being contained through the pandemic of prisons. anna carastathis myrto tsilimpounidi feminist autonomous centre for research aila spathopoulou (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6563-5232) goldsmiths university of london & feminist autonomous centre for research inequalities faced by unaccompanied minors in greece during covid-19 in november 2019 as winter began in greece, and before the first known cases of covid-19 were found in europe, the greek minister for citizen protection was summoned to the committee for civil liberties, justice and home affairs of the european parliament. at the time "the minister admitted that over 4000 unaccompanied minors live in unsuitable conditions in greece…but suggested that when he had contacted his counterparts in the 27 other member states to ask for support, he had only had a reply from 1, and that solidarity was sorely missing!" (cicoli & bird 2019). we hear regularly that covid-19 is unprecedented, that we are all suffering, and that it has been the great equaliser. yet we know this not to be the case, that the treatment of some has been far worse than the treatment of others, that some inequalities have been exacerbated by the pandemic but they are not new. the treatment of unaccompanied minors and lone children in europe is one such example. in april, at the height of the pandemic in europe, the member states of the european union patted themselves on the back as the first 12 unaccompanied children from the aegean islands were offered a new home in luxembourg (cossé 2020). margaritis schinas (vice-president for promoting our european way of life) stated that, "this scheme is europe at its best. in times where coronavirus is taking its toll on everyday life, it is commendable to see member states honouring their commitments and working together to help vulnerable migrants on the greek islands" (schinas 2020, in european commission 2020). yet in april 2020 when these first children were relocated from the islands, 12 to luxembourg and a further 47 to germany, 1,600 unaccompanied minors resided in reception and identification centres (rics) on the five aegean islands of lesvos, chios, samos, leros and kos (cossé 2020) and the daily reality for those remaining children had not improved, in fact, for many, it had gotten worse as a result of the covid-19 lockdown restrictions. kirsi pauliina kallio et al. 11fennia 198(1–2) (2020) as refugee rights europe (2020) have pointed out, "the general lack of medical and hygiene facilities available in hotspots, detention centres and police detention cells highlight the difficulties faced by detained and movement restricted refugees during the covid-19 pandemic. social distancing is simply not possible in an overcrowded space" and quarantines have often taken place on a camp by camp rather than an individual by individual basis (bbc 2020). some unaccompanied minors are indeed housed in what are referred to as 'safe-areas' in the rics, often overcrowded containers with dirty and sometimes broken facilities. the rest, however, are expected to survive in the informal areas of the ric, relying on makeshift shelters – tents, tarpaulins, pallets – to protect them from the weather, the rats and the snakes. prior to the pandemic we were told the story of a 16 year old on the island of samos who spent 10 months sleeping in a tent with no mattress. it was only when he mentioned his back ache to a non-governmental organization (ngo) he was supported by that they were able to find him a mattress (anonymous author interview 2019). there are other stories we have been told about outbreaks of scabies, dehydration, bed bugs, chicken pox. stories of adults breaking into the containers in which unaccompanied minors sleep, violence faced by them when joining a food queue of 5 hours to receive each meal (anonymous author interview 2019). prior to the pandemic unaccompanied minors, like other refugees trapped on the islands, were often supported by ngos and volunteers who filled the gaps left by the state and the international community. they offer laundry services, access to education, hot tea, a space to charge a mobile phone, support with illness, and someone to listen when things get too much. yet as the lockdown restrictions came in to place in greece on the march 22, 2020, many of those organisations were forced to close their doors and strict restrictions were placed on freedom of movement (of both the local and the refugee populations). for those living in camps this meant no opportunities to visit ngos and social centres offering support, no access to laundry and even lengthier than normal queues for food, water and showers inside rics. it also meant trying to follow social distancing regulations in spaces where that was nearly impossible, and attempting regular handwashing in a situation where, in moria ric on lesvos, 1,300 people share the use of 1 tap (international rescue committee 2020). whilst greece relaxed restrictions on freedom of movement for its general population on the may 4, opening cafes and restaurants on the may 25, and the borders for international travel on the june 15, freedom of movement restrictions for those in the rics on the five islands remain in place in october 2020. these restrictions force people to remain stuck inside overcrowded, unclean spaces, with little protection from the soaring summer temperatures and have led to an increase in protests and now, tragically another fire on the island of lesvos, this one which has destroyed moria ric (bird 2020). this is not the solidarity that europe celebrated in april, this is not an example of 'europe at its best'. unaccompanied minors and lone children remain on the islands, the overall population of those seeking asylum stuck in the aegean remains in the region of 30,000. on the island of leros, for example, refugees and asylum seekers account for 20% of the population (refugee rights europe 2020) and the greek government's solution to reducing overcrowding on the islands in summer led to increased homelessness on the mainland, particularly in athens (smith 2020). coronavirus has indeed effected all of us, but it is not the great leveller that it has been made out to be. it has exacerbated ongoing inequalities and injustices faced by refugees, and particularly unaccompanied minors and lone children, who find themselves stuck in unsafe conditions with limited access to support and education, still unsure of when the restrictions on their movements will be lifted and they will be able to access the small amount of support available to them again. gemma bird (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6527-3195) university of liverpool amanda russell beattie (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5952-2554) jelena obradovic-wochnik (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0850-2737) patrycja rozbicka (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0092-955x) aston university 12 editorial fennia 198(1–2) (2020) content of the issues 1–2 as the pandemic started to pose various challenges to academics during the last spring, related to work as well as personal life, fennia decided to slow down all publication processes. on one hand, we felt that scholars should have more time for peer reviewing, revisions and editorial work. yet concurrently we wanted to ensure that people are not blocked from publishing their work, which seemed particularly important from the perspectives of young scholars in unsecure positions, whose career development and publishing record are often closely linked. in result, we are publishing the whole volume at once. the present issues 1–2 contain eight original articles, including the fennia lecture 2019, four papers in the reviews and essays section, four commentaries on previously published articles in the reflections section, and a series of reflections connected directly to the collective editorial theme, taking a phd research perspective to the pandemic. we hope that the large amount of voluntary work put into this volume, which we particularly appreciate during these exceptional months, will be broadly influential through the open access publications. the issue begins with a co-authored article by nicola ansell, peggy froerer, roy huijsmans, claire dungey and arshima dost, based on ansell's fennia lecture 2019 at the nordic geographers meeting in trondheim, norway. in educating surplus population: uses and abuses of aspiration in the rural peripheries of a globalising world they explore schooling in three empirical contexts where the likelihood for young people to successfully enter the formal economy after school are reduced: at the rural areas of lesotho, india and laos. taking the perspectives of the young people themselves, as well as their parents and teachers, the authors make visible the legacy of colonialism in the education that poorly recognizes the everyday life of local communities or the prospects of the youth on a wider scale. they conclude that such schooling fails in two ways: in preparing young generations to the rural livelihoods available to them and in equipping them for attainable salaried jobs. the article will be accompanied by commentaries in the reflections section later this winter. the article by tina mathisen and sofia cele, "doing belonging": young former refugees and their active engagement with norwegian local communities, explores how young people with refugee background create and maintain a sense of belonging in their everyday lives. focusing on youths in small norwegian towns, the paper emphasizes the significance of embodiment in the generation of knowledge and active agency in the place-based 'performative work' of belonging, that is, the negotiations through which young refugees seek comfortable roles and positions in local communities. the authors argue that the ‘right to belong’ should be further emphasized in policies and practices through which a pluralist society is enforced, in norway and beyond. continuing the integration theme in the swedish context, benedict singleton’s article seeing the wood and the trees: assessing swedish nature-based integration utilising the theory of socio-cultural viability offers a narrative analysis of a nature-based immigrant integration process carried out in sweden, specifically örebro county. with particular attention on group dynamics and the related narratives, singleton has organized the analysis according to socio-cultural viability typologies of social solidarities, namely egalitarianism, hierarchy, individualism and fatalism. finding that egalitarianism and hierarchy dominated the group dynamics in the studied case, he concludes that, in the further development of nature-based integration methods, especially immigrants' experiential relations with nature require better acknowledgement as they may differ notably from those commonplace in the host society. henrik dorf nielsen’s article perception of danger in the southern arizona borderlands moves into a bit different direction within the theme of international mobility, with focus on the us-mexico borderlands where tensioned relations between border guarding, local communities, undocumented migrants and grassroots organizations working with and for them are tangible. joining in a humanitarian aid group as a volunteer, nielsen conducted in-depth participatory research where questions of 'danger' started to draw his attention: who, or what, actually are in danger at the borderlands, and what are the dangers emerging in this particular border context? in response, his analysis reveals a plurality of dangers experienced and expressed differently by the people involved, whose perceptions are strongly influenced by the political cultures through which they understand the borderlands. 13kirsi pauliina kallio et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) focusing on rather different kinds of migrant experiences in the uk, evi-carita riikonen's article the unexpected place: brexit referendum and the disruptions to translocal place-making among finns in the uk is utmost topical as the brexit transition period is ending within a couple of months. to the eu citizens living in the uk – including finns discussed in this paper – the consequences of the withdrawal agreement between britain and the eu, signed early 2020, have already started to actualize. riikonen's analysis traces the translocal relations, experiences and practices of finnish migrants who found their social positions suddenly politicized by the brexit referendum. she argues that the various disruptions in people’s everyday lives have encouraged translocal imaginaries though which the migrants re-position themselves in the changing social and political landscape. in her article a wilderness treaty for the arctic: svalbard to the inuit nunaat, defining a sovereign wilderness, alexandra carleton provides an in-depth exploration of two key treaties regarding the governance of the arctic, in respect to the protection of the endemic wilderness: svalbard treaty of 1920 and circumpolar inuit declaration on arctic sovereignty of 2009. based on their analysis, she identifies opportunities in the future treaty-formulation for seeking a balance between, first, respect for the wilderness and resource development, and second, for the sovereignty claimed by indigenous peoples and the entitlements claimed by nation-states. for creating sustainable development in the arctic, the paper argues that the acceptance of the value of wilderness as its own entity, reaching beyond the provision of quantifiable ecosystem services, is essential. virve repo's paper introduces a conceptual idea of 'carceral riskscapes' that working communities in institutional premises may face, with empirical focus on a geropsychiatric ward in turku, finland. in carceral riskscapes and working in the spaces of mental health care she portrays, through documentary analysis, mechanisms that lead to the creation of such spaces where inequalities between people typically increase, the well-being of the staff is hindered, and the quality of their care work decreases. her findings include the important notion that, in closed institutional spaces such as psychiatric wards and prisons – but also reform schools, refugee (detention) camps and other places that confine people’s agency notably – 'the carceral' and 'the risk' are strongly interrelated: risks easily lead to carceral measures and carceral measures may similarly create risks. to avoid this vicious circle, the openness of such spaces to external assessment, including research on them, is vital. the final research paper is by moritz albrecht, gleb yarovoy and valentina karginova-gubinova. their article russia's waste policy and rural waste management in the karelian republic: building up a ruin to come? presents a critical assessment of russia’s recent waste management reforms that largely ignore local realities where, especially in rural areas, the implementation of national policies and plans would require local interpretation and contextualized practices. with focus on three communities in the karelian republic, the paper analyzes rural waste management through the regional waste management programme of the karelian republic, from local perspectives. taking a policy mobility and translation approach, the analysis reveals a dysfunctional waste management system that generates institutional and individual resistance in the unequally treated rural communities. based on this the authors argue that, to succeed, the much needed reform ought to employ more local knowledge and seek contextual solutions, backed up by adequate resources and external support that enable gradual change. in the reviews and essays section we have four papers. the first one links with the articles focusing on migration, by introducing a digital humanities database called 'geo archive'. it has been built to serve the historical analysis of emerging societal challenges where migration and the environment intertwine, including climate change induced migration. in historical tools and current societal challenges: reflections on a collection of environmental migration cases roberta biasillo portrays how such free, openly accessible database allows the creation of long-term understanding on environmental migration, as a collective process that anyone can join in, including scholars, policy-makers and the media. the second review article mining conflicts in the european union: environmental and political perspectives also introduces a database – the environmental justice atlas – through which sonja kivinen, juha kotilainen and timo kumpula shed light on the multiple negative impacts of mining to communities in the vicinity of the mines, often generating local conflicts. in the current situation where the eu and many european states are encouraging mining activities through policy changes, the paper portrays policy-relevant knowledge on a topic being increasingly politicized in many parts of the world, editorial14 fennia 198(1–2) (2020) not least in finland; the country is europe's leading producer of nickel while cobalt and lithium are gaining increasing interest due to their growing demand in the electric vehicle battery production. the third review article presents results from empirical research in north-west romania, the city of cluj-napoca that is among the leading nightlife centers in eastern europe. the aim of the co-authors emanuel cristian adorean, jordi nofre, oana-ramona ilovan and viorel gligor in exploring nightlife in the student city of cluj-napoca (romania): a quantitative and policy-oriented research is, on one hand, to expose the change from the fall of socialism to the present, in the city currently developing along the state-led progressive neoliberal political economy. secondly, they want to bring non-western perspective to the ‘study of the night’ that the authors see geographically strongly biased. the final review article, environmental citizenship in geography and beyond, provides a conceptual review of the environmental citizenship literature with specific focus on geographical and related research. from the mid-1970s until today, suvi huttunen, miikka salo, riikka aro and anni turunen go through various strands of the scholarship where the related ideas of green, sustainable and ecological citizenship are contested. the review exposes how the traditional liberal and republican traditions have diversified during the 2000s, influenced on one hand by the multidisciplinary citizenship theorization where conceptions of citizenship have broadened beyond formal status and practices, as well as the state-based territorial reality, and secondly, by the social scientific environmental research that draws attention on different kinds of connections between people, and human and non-human actors, in the relational world where phenomena such as climate change require new forms of environmental citizenship. the reflections section engages with three issues, including two reflections on 'researcher trauma' and 'youth climate activism' before ending with a forum on doing a phd during a pandemic. firstly, the reflections on 'researcher trauma' speak to an article by stephen taylor published in the previous issue of fennia called the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher. the first one, mental health, coloniality, and fieldwork in the european university: a reflection in three challenges by lioba hirsch, is made more pertinent due to the reemergence of the black lives matter movement after an unarmed george floyd was killed by police in minneapolis earlier this year. hirsch challenges colonial whiteness in the university and suggests that the practice of northern (predominantly white, heterosexual and male) researchers conducting ethnographies in formerly colonized countries and regions has a tendency to imagine and reify those regions as violent and unstable. the second reflection on 'researcher trauma' by shenika mcfarlane-morris is called combating the shocks of the 'unplayful' field. alone!, where mcfarlane-morris similarly writes that the developing world is often represented as places of violence, impoverishment, oppression and in some cases, resentment. the reflection ends with a proposal that universities and geography departments implement and/or strengthen the support network for their students going overseas to conduct fieldwork. the second pair of reflections relate to 'youth climate activism' and a paper published in the previous issue of fennia by benjamin bowman called imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research. the third reflection in this issue is called youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research and is by bronwyn elisabeth wood. it takes up bowman's challenge and uses the climate strikes as a starting point to consider three ongoing challenges for research in this emerging field. wood identifies the prevailing discourses of youth autonomy, individualism and weak notions of community, social groups and structural forces that were present in the representation of young participants in the climate strikes, which lead to a distorted picture of young activists and perpetuate harmful narratives. the second reflection on 'youth climate activism' is by raichael lock, called beyond imagining: enacting intergenerational response-ability as world-building, explored through the notion of mutual responseability and drawing on the author's experience working with the manchester environmental education network (meen). lock focuses on the importance of our creative imaginings becoming methodologies that can also enact the building of the new world as it is being imagined, a process that can unfold through processes of mutual response-ability. this double issue of fennia ends where it began, as we engage with covid-19 through reflections on doing a phd during a pandemic. we hope this final section provides some useful insights for phd 15kirsi pauliina kallio et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) candidates working on their thesis, sharing some of the issues faced when working within the constraints of lockdowns and the inability to conduct fieldwork. simone tulumello and kátia favilla introduce the forum entitled phd research in social sciences amid a pandemic: introduction to a situated and reflexive perspective, which is followed by six reflections by fifteen phd candidates based in portugal and/or brazil, enrolled in five different subject areas. the contributions are: kátia favilla and tatiana pita, "when will fieldwork open up again?" beginning a project in pandemic times; antonio pedro de barros, ana daniela guerreiro, mafalda f. mascarenhas and rita reis, and now what? changing fields and methodologies during the covid-19 pandemic: from international mobilities to education; roseli bregantin barbosa, covid-19 and doctoral research in brazil and portugal: who pays the bill for confinement and remote work in research?; andreia nascimento and hugo ferrinho lopes, how we have been productive when coronavirus locked us out of university; catarina barata, luísa coutinho, federica manfredi and madelon schamarella, doctoral research work and work of care: reflections in times of a pandemic; marcos silva & raphaella câmara, the challenges of anthropological research among sex workers and victims of domestic violence in times of the covid-19 pandemic. kirsi pauliina kallio (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-1159) james riding (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7632-5819) fennia editor-in-chief & fennia reflections section editor references bbc (2020) coronavirus crisis: europe’s migrant camps 23.5.2020 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ m000jcsw>. 6.7.2020. bird, g. (2020) fire destroys moria refugee camp: another tragic wake-up call for the eu’s asylum policy. the conversation 10.9.2020 <https://theconversation.com/fire-destroys-moria-refugee-campanother-tragic-wake-up-call-for-the-eus-asylum-policy-145899>. 18.9.2020. cicoli, g. & bird, g. (2019) children alone amongst 6.000 refugees on samos. pressenza 11.12.2019 <https://www.pressenza.com/2019/12/children-alone-amongst-6-000-refugees-on-samos/>. 6.7.2020. communicable diseases act (1227/2016) communicable diseases act. <https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/ kaannokset/2016/en20161227> 18.9.2020. cossé, e. (2020) eu solidarity on migrant children in greece could change lives. human rights watch 23.4.2020 <https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/23/eu-solidarity-migrant-children-greece-could-changelives>. 6.7.2020. delsol, r. (2015). racial profiling. criminal justice matters 101(1) 34–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/09627251.2015.1080944 department of health and social care (2020) coronavirus act 2020. <https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/coronavirus-act-2020-status> european commission (2020) migration: first unaccompanied children relocated from greece to luxembourg 15.4.2020 <https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_668>. 6.7.2020. faber, s. (2020) trump’s farm relief won’t protect essential farmworkers from covid-19. ewg news and analysis 23.4.2020 <https://www.ewg.org/news-and-analysis/2020/04/trump-s-farm-relief-won-tprotect-essential-farmworkers-covid-19>. 17.11.2020. hansen, l. (2019) california’s farmworker housing crisis has people sleeping in dining rooms. santa cruz sentinel 24.12.2019 <https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2019/12/24/bay-area-housing-crisisfarmworker-families-doubling-up/>. 17.11.2020. ignatius, a. (2019) kotimaisten kasvisten synkkä puoli. iso numero 1.7.2019 <https://www.isonumero. fi/kausityontekijat-suomessa/>. 18.9.2020. international rescue committee (2020) 5 reasons why it’s near-impossible for refugees to follow guidance on coronavirus 9.4.2020 <https://www.rescue-uk.org/article/5-reasons-why-its-nearimpossible-refugees-follow-guidance-coronavirus>. 6.7.2020. kirkup, j. & winnett, r. (2012) theresa may interview: 'we're going to give illegal migrants a really hostile reception'. the telegraph 25.5.2012 <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/theresa-mayinterview-going-give-illegal-migrants-really-hostile/>. 17.11.2020. luke (2018) agricultural and horticultural labour force. <https://stat.luke.fi/en/labour-force>. 18.9.2020. 16 editorial fennia 198(1–2) (2020) mitropoulos, a. (2020) against quarantine: how responses to the new corona virus territorialize disease and capitalise on a virus. the new inquiry 13.2.2020 <https://thenewinquiry.com/againstquarantine/>. 17.11.2020. office for national statistics (2020) deaths registered weekly in england and wales, provisional: week ending 24 july 2020. <https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/ birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/ weekending24july2020> paramo, n. & diringer, j. (2020) we have to get serious about protecting california farmworkers during covid-19. calmatters 26.6.2020 <https://calmatters.org/commentary/my-turn/2020/06/wehave-to-get-serious-about-protecting-california-farmworkers-during-covid-19/>. 17.11.2020. parmar, a. (2011) stop and search in london: counter-terrorist or counter-productive? policing and society 21(4) 369–382. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2011.617984 philpott, t. (2020) republicans keep blaming workers for coronavirus outbreaks at meat plants. mother jones 8.5.2020 <https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/05/republicans-keep-blamingworkers-for-coronavirus-outbreaks-at-meat-plants/>. 17.11.2020. prime minister of greece (2020) interview of the prime minister kyriakos mitsotakis to alexis papahelas in kathimerini [in greek]. hellenic republic, office of the prime minister, 18.4.2020 <https://primeminister.gr/2020/04/18/23809>. 17.11.2020. refugee rights europe (2020) the invisible islands: covid-19 restrictions and the future of detention on kos and leros. <https://refugee-rights.eu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/rre_theinvisibleislands. pdf>. 6.7.2020. sessin, c. (2020) latino leaders demand florida governor apologize for linking 'hispanic farmworkers' to covid-19 rise. nbc news 22.6.2020 <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latino-leadersdemand-gov-desantis-apologize-linking-hispanic-farmworkers-covid-n1231785>. 17.11.2020. smith, h. (2020) 'we want to stay': refugees struggle to integrate in greece after camp life. the guardian 25.6.2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jun/25/we-want-tostay-refugees-struggle-to-integrate-in-greece-after-camp-life>. 6.7.2020. seeing the wood and the trees. assessing swedish nature-based integration utilising the theory of socio-cultural viability urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa89965 doi: 10.11143/fennia.89965 seeing the wood and the trees. assessing swedish nature-based integration utilising the theory of socio-cultural viability benedict e. singleton singleton, b. e. (2020) seeing the wood and the trees. assessing swedish nature-based integration utilising the theory of socio-cultural viability. fennia 198(1–2) 57–73. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.89965 migration is a prominent topic in many european societies, spawning numerous initiatives aiming to help 'integrate' newcomers. one subsection of these initiatives in nordic countries is 'nature-based integration' (nbi). varied in scope, nbi involve activities where newcomers engage in activities in local natural environments. this article analyses nbi in örebro county, central sweden. it utilises the mary douglas derived theory of socio-cultural viability (cultural theory) in order to examine the group dynamics and related narratives found within observed activities. utilising cultural theory's fourfold typology of social solidarities, the nbi observed were characterised as a combination of egalitarianism and hierarchy, with the other two, individualism and fatalism, considerably less prominent. this has consequences for the relevance of nbi to newcomers' lives – the initiatives' 'success' as far as participants are concerned will relate to whether nbi compliment or conflict with institutional narratives in the other, much larger, parts of their lives. the collected data suggest that narratives of individualism are arguably not as prominent in nbi as in the lives of newcomers and swedes using nature. this article thus represents a first step in understanding nbi's impact in the complex situations newcomers find themselves. keywords: integration, sweden, mary douglas, cultural theory, migration benedict singleton (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1038-2412), school of global studies, university of gothenburg, gothenburg, sweden & swedish biodiversity centre, swedish university of agricultural sciences, uppsala, sweden. e-mail: benedict.singleton@gu.se introduction migration is one of the political topics of the moment in many western countries; often framed as problematic for welfare states and national identities (schierup et al. 2006). this is certainly the case in sweden, where large numbers have sought asylum. in 2015, there were 163,000 applicants, the highest ever (salmonsson & hedlund 2018, 526). in sweden, as elsewhere, populist parties have arisen and been influential in shaping migration policy with migrants subject to physical and cultural violence (hirvonen 2013; arora-jonsson 2017). in common with other countries, swedish public discussion has focused on the perceived otherness of newcomers and the need for ‘integration’ of newcomers with the host population. there has been a concomitant surge in programmes aimed at © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 58 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) assisting this integration. this article focuses upon one group of projects: several nature-based integration (nbi) schemes in örebro county, central sweden. nbi are a diverse group of projects that have emerged in various nordic countries (pitkänen et al. 2017; gentin et al. 2018). they vary in focus, some encouraging migrant employment (johnson et al. 2017), whereas others encourage various forms of ‘nature-based outdoor recreation’ (friluftsliv) (gentin et al. 2018). broadly, nbi is defined as a “process in which an immigrant gets familiarized with the local environment, through activities that take place in a natural environment…” (ibid., 17). at present, there is a paucity of precise data on the prevalence of nbi but it appears increasingly popular. the projects examined in this paper have been the subject of various news articles and enquiries to the swedish centre for nature interpretation reported that a majority of sweden’s 33 naturum (visitor centres in nature) are involved in some form of nbi (personal communication). the data for this article comprise ethnographic observations built upon guided walks in nature and 'nature interpretation' (naturvägledning) as well as interviews with nature guides and examination of successful funding applications. while increasingly of interest to policy makers and academics (e.g. pitkänen et al. 2017; gentin et al. 2018), there is, at present, little research on the extent that nbi work as integration within host societies. as such, this research aims to fill the gap. in this paper, i present a qualitative case study of several nbi projects in örebro county, central sweden. located between gothenburg and stockholm, örebro is a medium-sized city with 153,367 inhabitants in 2018, approximately half of örebro county’s population of 302,252. within the county, official statistics list 50,033 inhabitants as foreignborn (statistics sweden 2019). the örebro municipality (kommun) emphasises development of the local area’s outdoor recreation potential. this has been recognised nationally, with örebro awarded the annual title of sweden’s ‘outdoor municipality’ four times in the last eight years (svennebäck 2017). the city itself has twenty areas classified as nature reserves, with two more classified as cultural reserves. it is within these reserves and others around the nearby towns of nora and laxå that observations took place. i collected data through interviews, observations and documentary analysis, from which i assess the extent that nbi contribute to the integration of different societal groups. this assessment utilises the mary douglas originated theory of socio-cultural viability (cultural theory, for short). cultural theory is a theory of constrained relativism in dynamic contexts and is a way to examine different understandings of what integration means within nbi activities. i thus apply cultural theory’s typology of social solidarities to the empirical material, highlighting how activities embody particular narratives. through this analysis, i raise concerns that the nbi need to be adapted to fit the broader pressures inherent to the contexts of newcomers’ daily lives. this is then a first step in beginning to assess the relevance of nbi within the social contexts migrants to sweden find themselves. theory: integration and the theory of socio-cultural viability integration is a much-utilised and much-discussed subject within the field of migration studies. “the term commonly refers to both the socio-economic incorporation of immigrants in the host society, and to their socio-cultural adaptation to that society… successful integration is usually considered dependent on characteristics of the immigrant and of the receiving society.” (saharso 2019, 1). such a definition can clearly encompass a range of different things and has tendency to adopt certain normative positions. in other words, whilst there is recognition that integration experiences change both hosts and immigrants, there is arguably a tendency to measure immigrant adaptation of various essentialised attributes of the host society. this has been criticised as based on a false image of countries as homogenous entities with social life neatly limited by national borders. this links to the racist othering of migrants (schinkel 2018); and is inherently coercive (favell 2019). as such, ‘integration’ is often something only migrants do (grip 2010; klarenbeek 2019). whilst some scholars call for the abandonment of the term integration itself (schinkel 2018), others argue that as integration thinking informs the lived lives of migrants (who find themselves the subject of integration initiatives) the concept retains analytical value. such researchers argue for a focus on integration as a field of governance – part of the ‘factual architecture’ – within which immigrants lives are experienced (hadj abdou 2019). there is thus a need to examine integration in relational 59benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) fashion, investigating people and institutions in specific immigration contexts (klarenbeek 2019). to do this, in this article cultural theory is applied. the theory of socio-cultural viability (cultural theory) originated in the work of anthropologist mary douglas. originally, cultural theory was a heuristic aid douglas developed after she noticed certain patterns in the ways that disparate peoples organised themselves and their world-view (douglas 1970 [2003]). cultural theorists employ two axes: the extent of incorporation into bounded units and the extent that an individual is bound by the scope of external prescriptions. from this, a typology of four different, ideal-type social solidarities emerges: egalitarianism, hierarchy, individualism and fatalism (thompson et al. 1990, 5). each social solidarity generates a discourse with a particular, distinctive narrative on 'nature', 'humanity', time, styles of learning, material and political distribution within society (table 1), with an associated "behavioural strategy" (thompson et al. 1999, 1). each social solidarity likewise demonstrates a different pattern of social relations and political relations. those in egalitarian or hierarchical relations form a group pattern for collective undertaking, with those in egalitarian groups retaining more autonomy than hierarchs. thus, egalitarian groups are characterised by equal relations and collective decision-making whereas those with demarcated authority predominantly make hierarchical groups’ decisions. the relations of individualism are fluid, personal networks characterised by individual choice. fatalistic relations are those of atomised individuals with tenuous and unreliable links to others (thompson 2008, 72–78; swedlow 2012, 157–159). within cultural theory, each of these social solidarities exist at every level of social organisation from ‘dividual’ (since individuals exist within dynamic social and material contexts) to the international level (thompson 1998, 200; 2008, 70). indeed, solidarities (and concomitant discourses on the world) may coexist within institutions, often in pairwise fashion (6 and mars 2008, xviii-xviiv; verweij et al. 2011a). it thus becomes possible to analyse any given institution – understood broadly within cultural theory as "any non-randomness in behaviour (or … in the beliefs and values that are used to justify that behaviour)" (thompson 2008, 51) – using cultural theory’s typology at different times and social scales.1 table 1. the social solidarities (adapted from thompson et al. 1990; thompson 1998, 2003). egalitarianism hierarchy individualism fatalism type of social order high (group) incorporation, low external prescription: unranked groups high incorporation, high external prescription: ranked groups low incorporation, low external prescription: egofocused networks low incorporation, high external prescription: margins of organised patterns nature intricately connected and fragile controllable benign and will ‘bounce back’ capricious humanity essentially caring and sharing malleable: deeply flawed but redeemable self-seeking and atomistic fickle and untrustworthy distribution equality of result is key distribution should be by need (based on rank or station) it is fair that those who put most in get most out fairness is impossible i should state several things at this point. firstly, the particular knowledge of the world each social solidarity is partial and irreducible to that of the other social solidarities – no social solidarity is ‘wrong’. cultural theory is thus not a means to push people towards ‘correct’ understanding of a situation. secondly, cultural theory is not a theory of personality types. all people move between different social solidarities as they go about their lives. indeed, many will move multiple times during a single day. as such, thirdly, cultural theory is above all a dynamic theory. individuals are attracted towards one of the solidarities at any given time as a way of making "transactional sense" of their situations (thompson 2008, 147). as situations change (due to the action of people or otherwise), particular world-views become increasingly difficult to sustain. this is the 'viability' mentioned in the theory’s full title. this is rooted in the imperfect picture of the world each solidarity generates – the uncomfortable knowledge of the other solidarities has a tendency to make itself heard (verweij et al. 2011b). as such, social solidarities are not deterministic, rather as discourses they constrain and enable particular behaviours (tansey & rayner 2009). furthermore, each solidarity will always exist 60 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper in some form (tansey & o'riordan 1999). people constantly organise and disorganise themselves in groups with concomitant outlooks on the world, their preferences emerge through their involvements with others (thompson et al. 1990, 56–59). cultural theory is a strong candidate for examining integration projects. from the beginning, focus has been on processes of classification and boundary-maintenance (douglas 1966 [2002]) and how this structures the information institutions can process, fuelling or defusing trajectories towards violence (6 & richards 2017). this focus has led to papers focusing on the dynamics of egalitarian political systems among closed, dissident minorities (richards 1999; douglas & mars 2003), the emergence of tyranny (mars 2008), migrant integration (olli 2012), as well as efforts to theorise and effect conciliation and peace-making (richards 2009). within cultural theory, difference and differencemaking are integral to human life and what matters is how difference is accommodated (richards 2009, 7). cultural theorists are thus interested in the dynamics of institutions dominated by the outlooks of particular social solidarities and actions that mediate interactions between them (richards 2010). an advantage of the typology is that it allows a degree of prediction within research. the way that these predictions are made is through assessing the extent that any given action or sets of actions is performed in the appropriate style and scale. in cultural theory, style relates to the dominant social solidarity of a given institution and the extent that an action matches that solidarity’s dominant narrative of the world. for example, an individualistic free market solution to an issue is unlikely to be popular or successful in a context where the egalitarian solidarity is dominant. however, as noted earlier, situations are not static and indeed institutional contexts change with people and even whole groups moving between social solidarities and changing their social organisation concomitantly (mars 2008). furthermore, with each social solidarity only able to appreciate part of reality, institutions that incorporate only a ‘pure’ set of views are integrally unstable – the amount of anomalous phenomena challenging the dominant framing of a situation will mount up. different institutions have different strategies for dealing with anomalies; however, one response involves alliances between different groups. thus, the individualists’ free-market requires hierarchs for its maintenance. in such circumstances, tensions between contradictory worldviews may be managed ritually (richards 2010; 6 & richards 2017) but also by predominating at different social scales – egalitarianism could be dominant at the community level, while hierarchy is the stronger at national and international scales, for example. as such, in assessing nbi in örebro county this article looks at what social scales the narratives of different social solidarities emerge. it thus becomes possible to make cautious assessment of the extent that the nbi activities observed are ‘appropriate’ to the integration-contexts within which they are practiced in terms of style and scale. methods and material the nbi that comprise the focus of this study began in 2015, around the work of two local environmental non-governmental organisations: the swedish society for nature conservation, örebro county (naturskyddsförening örebro län) and hopajola. the initial phase of the project involved training newcomers as nature guides, with two (originating from syria and kosovo respectively), subsequently employed by the municipality. since then, these guides state they have guided 2,300 people in various languages. this has included a series of “nature experiences in several languages” (naturupplevelser på flera språk, nfs) aimed generally at all members of local society. similar to nfs is “chat between the pines” (språka mellan tallarna, smt). smt excursions were conceived as language-cafes in nature. the previous guides helped out with smt, but many activities were organised by a person specifically hired for the project, who had come to örebro from afghanistan. smt continue at the time of writing around örebro county, at times organised by the participants of a third nbi project; “education for nature interpretation in several languages in örebro region” (utbildning naturvägledning på andra språk i örebro län, eni). eni comprised four three-day courses various in the towns of örebro, nora, karlskoga and kopparberg in total. attendance at nbi activities was extremely variable. one smt session was attended only by myself and the guide, whereas several days of the eni course involved 21 people, guides included. newcomers generally outnumbered swedes with the exception of one smt excursion (a snowshoe expedition). the largest 61benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) group of newcomers came from syria. in general, the proportion of men to women varied considerably. the data collection period was between december 2017 and february 2019. while the different projects had different objectives, they shared a basic activity template – guided walks in nature reserves. in general, ‘participants’ would be led by ‘guides’ through a nature reserve, stopping periodically to carry out pre-planned activities. the activities varied considerably but recurrent features of the activities were collective or cooperative action, entertainment, learning and the utilisation of a variety of different senses to build a picture of the local nature. typically, guided walks were organised around one or two of the "universal access laws" (allemansrätt, naturvårdsverket n.d.), which accord considerable rights to roam and collect resources in the countryside. one of the challenges of performing a cultural theory analysis is avoiding tautology. the best way to do this is to work in a detailed fashion, trying to get information on the empirical object from a variety of perspectives with several methods, notably participant observation and interviews, supplemented by documentary analysis (verweij et al. 2011a). participant observation as nature based integration activities comprise episodic, repeated, multiphasic experiences with an inherently embodied component, it seemed relevant to seek to attend as many nbi sessions as possible (stewart 1998; bolger et al. 2003). as such, data were collected in situ, with the intention of experiencing nbi as any other participant (kusenbach 2003). table 2 lists all nbi activities attended. i recorded observations utilising a notebook, camera and portable voice recorder. i collated this material in the form of a field diary, which was then used as the basis for coding alongside other data materials. as a regular participant in nbi activities, i was able to build social relationships, mostly with guides, which led me attending related events outside of nbi activities such as work seminars and meetings. these helped me to understand better the context within which nbi projects were planned and executed, providing opportunities for discussion of the strategic aims of the various activities as well as an awareness of where information was gathered for planning nbi activities. table 2. observations collected. activity type number of activities attended notes språka mellan tallarna (smt, chat between the pines) 7 conceived as a ‘language-cafe’ in nature. highly variable attendance (2–17 including a guide and a researcher). most activities took place around örebro city. organised by swedish society for nature conservation, örebro county. naturupplevelser på flera språk (nfs, nature experiences in several languages) 3 provided guiding experiences aimed at groups of diverse language background. included an open day at örebro nature school. guided walks attended by 4 people each including guides and a researcher. took place around örebro city. utbildning naturvägledning på andra språk i örebro län (eni, education for nature interpretation in örebro county) 7 comprised several three-day courses in several towns around örebro county. researcher completed the course twice plus one extra session. 109 participants over the seven attended sessions including guides and a researcher. organised by swedish society for nature conservation, örebro county. other 1 activity organised by a swedish teacher to a group of medical workers learning swedish in order to work within the medical system. 7 attendees including guides, a teacher and a researcher. took place in örebro city. 62 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper interviews nine semi-structured interviews were organised (table 3), with respondents purposively selected for their relationship to nbi in örebro county. these comprised two groups. 1) those who worked as nbi guides (interviews 1–5). these were selected for their role as organisers of nbi activities, with several involved in project planning and successful funding applications. 2) a mixed group. these included swedish-language teachers who have availed themselves of the pedagogical opportunities of nbi (interviews 6–7), the project leader of an environmental ngo (hopojola) involved in the planning and application processes for these nbi projects (interview 8); and finally a municipality-employed ecologist who maintains online information on local nature and culture reserves (interview 9). this information was a resource advertised and utilised by nbi guides. interviews took place in the language of the respondent’s choosing (eight swedish, one english) and were transcribed. table 3. list of interviews. interview no. newcomer or swede role 1 newcomer nature guide 2 newcomer nature guide 3 newcomer nature guide 4 swede nature guide 5 swede nature guide/project leader at swedish society for nature conservation 6 swede swedish-language teacher 7 swede swedish-language teacher 8 swede project leader at hopajola 9 swede local authority ecologist further information and coding i also draw upon the successful project application documents for eni. this allowed for comparison between the official (regarding funding) and the stated aims of the activities produced by respondents while performing different activities. i used nvivo to manage these combined data, allowing juxtaposition, analysis and consistent coding (paulus et al. 2014). utilising cultural theory’s typology, i coded data in abductive fashion, paying attention to the different contexts within which different social solidarities were articulated. ethical concerns as a field researcher, i was enmeshed in a web of social relationships, affecting and affected by the data collection context. it was thus essential that i was reflexive about my own impact on both results and respondents (agar 2008; ortbals & rinker 2009). regarding nbi activities, as a newcomer to sweden, i did not feel my presence was disruptive as i tried to act as any other participant. at the beginning of each session/course i would identify myself and explain what i was doing. i also assured participants of their anonymity within the research. however, as a white, swedish-speaking, male, european i was periodically misidentified by other participants as a swede. in order to ameliorate this i thus sought to distance myself from guides and other authority figures by announcing myself to respondents and also by physically distancing myself from guides during activities, taking up a place in the group of participants. a concern to avoid appearing overly prying was also a factor in decisions around interviewing group participants. immigration and immigration status are sensitive topics and as such i have rendered respondents anonymous in the text, with data collected regarded as 63benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) confidential. this is to minimise any risk of harm to respondents (european sociological association n.d.). finally, in an effort to ensure that the results of this research did not simply become another output, i endeavoured to share and discuss results with respondents both in public and in private, with the aim of constructive action around nbi (cf. ybarra 2014). utilising predetermined demarcations between social groups risks concealing the heterogeneity (background, mobility, culture, legal status) among both 'hosts' and 'newcomers' (schinkel 2018). however, throughout the research process respondents of all stripes would tend to essentialise on some level. for the purposes of this paper 'newcomers' is used to refer to peoples called invandrare ("immigrants"), nysvenskar ("new-swedes"), personer med utländsk bakgrund (people with foreign backgrounds) and nyanlända ("new-arrivals") by respondents or in documents. similarly, i refer to newcomers’ counterparts, variously called svenskar ("swedes"), svensktalande ("swedish-speakers") and ursvenskar ("original-swedes"), as 'swedes' in this paper. the categories as used here do not make any sort of claim about residency status or rights to live in sweden. the social solidarities of nbi this section is in four parts, each of which discusses one of cultural theory’s social solidarities. the two social solidarities most prominent are egalitarianism and hierarchy, although individualism and fatalism are also present. discussion then turns to the extent that the dominant orderings of nbi are appropriate to many immigrants’ lives. egalitarianism – bringing newcomers into the group within these collated data, the discourse of the egalitarian solidarity appeared repeatedly. to members of the egalitarian solidarity, equality of outcome is key and there is considerable concern about iniquities within society and concomitant action to change institutions that distribute unequally (thompson 2008, 24). the funding application for the eni project illustrated this. the stated outcomes of the project assert that it is expected that "new citizens appreciate and use nature as a source of knowledge, recreation and relaxation". likewise, the smt funding application specifically seeks to address lack of knowledge among participants about safely accessing nature during wintertime. similarly, different interview respondents regularly voiced concerns that newcomers to sweden were unable to access the same rights to nature, with newcomers described as scared, unaware of the possibilities and ignorant of their rights to roam (singleton 2020a). this concern also partially explained the emphases upon sweden’s universal access laws. these laws are popular among many swedes (sandell 2006) and accorded with symbolic importance (cf. beery 2013), embodying societal egalitarianism (dahl 1998, 300–301). nbi activities thus chime with other actions to allow all inhabitants of sweden to access nature (fig. 1). during guided walks in several reserves, we passed facilities designed to allow disabled access to nature, provision of information for the blind as well as information for people of all ages to familiarise themselves with different natural environments. likewise, through providing equipment for exploring the natural environment, many of the nbi activities aimed to reduce inequities of access. thus at one smt session, participants were allowed to borrow and experiment with nature photography using a good camera. at other sessions, loaned binoculars or clothing allowed people to see things and experience conditions that would previously have been less accessible. as the egalitarian solidarity is characterised by high group incorporation the maintenance of group boundaries is often important with egalitarian groups often defining themselves against the mainstream (douglas & mars 2003, 772). as such, egalitarian groups are simultaneously opposed to mainstream society whilst sometimes wishing to 'convert' members of wider society to their cause (thompson et al. 1990, 65). this emphasis on creating and maintaining group boundaries is visible at several levels in the data. linking to the above-mentioned desire to remove obstacles to newcomers’ access to nature vis-à-vis swedes was also a desire to create situations where newcomers and swedes could mingle. reflecting egalitarianisms caring and sharing view of humanity, several respondents asserting that walking together will naturally lead to bonding: 64 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper because i myself feel happiest out in nature it is best to meet me in nature [laughs], or so i think… and [in nature] i have knowledge that i want to share. it is not better or worse than meeting in a church or at a library but it is still important… and it is also an important part of our [swedish] cultural history. (interview 5) while out in nature we are both on neutral ground. i can say "now i must go home" and i can go home. i don't need to say to someone "you must leave my house now" … for me [nature] is a good place to meet. and one can find different things to talk about that can unite people and find similarities and differences. (interview 8) as this last statement suggests, simply spending time with people and doing shared activities was hoped to lead to a shared body of experiences (cf. singleton 2020b), making conversation and enjoyment easier. nbi activities endeavoured to create a shared space for the creation of social bonds. in effect a group space. similarly, the egalitarian nature of the social space allowed for people to learn from one another as equals. thus, one respondent expressed a strong desire to share her love for and knowledge of nature: it doesn’t matter where one comes from or what one’s background is or what god one believes in or what sexual orientation or anything at all, everyone can enjoy nature and do it together with others, and that’s what i want to highlight. you can hang out with me in nature as well. i think it’s cool and will share. and i want to hear about your nature and thoughts. (interview 5) fig. 1. multilingual welcome sign for a nature reserve in örebro. 65benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) this desire to create an egalitarian group space and consequent identity clearly emerged within nbi activities themselves (singleton 2020b). guide training also hammered home to participants that they need to involve people and build cohesion. many activities had an active group-building component, encouraging cooperation and active learning, with usually everyone (or each subgroup at least) accorded an equal chance to speak. an example of this is a game where participants answered questions on either swedish nature laws or vocabulary. divided into groups, participants roll a die to identify which question to answer. participants scatter the questions (36 of them) around the immediate (usually forested) area on bits of card. groups should then work together to find the questions and to answer the questions, ensuring that everyone understands. thus whilst it was possible to be competitive in this game with groups trying to be the first, the central thrust was on ensuring the group as a whole were able to learn. no rewards were ever given for finishing first in any case. there was a strong emphasis on equality and concern for maintenance of the group as a whole (although certain hierarchies did emerge as the next section shows). indeed, dealing with people who chose to leave the group could be problematic. as one respondent put it: a single group member should not influence the whole, so the excursion should proceed as planned. if a person doesn’t want to be with us, we shall try to encourage them and then show them the way back … [or] take them to a place they can wait for us so we are free to ensure the others enjoy themselves. (interview 1) likewise, the reasons respondents gave for people not attending activities resonated with egalitarian discourses. attendance was quite variable, particularly for smt. respondents depicted newcomers as stuck in the fatalistic category – as passive, afraid and unable to access the opportunities of swedes. thus, a big challenge for nbi was to overcome this passivity. the assumed key to this was gaining access to extant newcomer groups as well as to inform them of the opportunities that were available. indeed, the guides of newcomer background were envisaged as providing a way towards those felt to be excluded: "i believe the key is to find key-people in the municipalities that have the confidence of [newcomer groups]… so actually i don’t believe it’s because people don’t want to come it’s that they haven’t received the information in the right form." (interview 8). with desire to bring people into the egalitarian group also came concomitant articulations of the egalitarian discourse on reality. several respondents argued that something has gone wrong regarding people’s relationship to nature and they have become cut off. "to egalitarians, who reject authority, it is the system … that is held to blame" (thompson et al. 1990, 59). these respondents argued that there was a need to educate and sensitise people to the environmental impacts of their activities and inculcate an awareness of society’s connectedness with and dependence upon nature. furthermore, this was not unique to newcomers, it also affected swedes. it is not just people who come to sweden. it's also similar with our children, and it relates to adults today – they must become nearer [to nature] … we are dependent upon [nature] and we are a part of it and we need to feel like we are a part of it in order to protect it. (interview 4) [w]e have begun to lose contact, the nature contact. people don’t go out. children eat fish fingers and believe that it is fish…. so it is a problem in sweden too, that swedes have distanced themselves from nature. (interview 8) as such, nbi organisers aspired to form a wider movement within swedish society and indeed globally, since environmental issues are global in scope and effect. this was integral to their work on migration issues: “it is quite obvious to us that much of this whole refugee stream [is very much linked] to the pursuit of profits and to extract natural resources in an unsustainable way” (interview 8). elsewhere, cultural theorists have discussed the similarities between environmentalists and certain religious movements (douglas & wildavsky 1983). within the collected data, this similarity also appears pertinent. nbi can be understood (at least in part) as an attempt to convert participants of all stripes to a particular worldview of nature as a delicate-balance. as one respondent stated that nature was simply and obviously "life" (interview 5). in sum, the discourse of the egalitarian solidarity is particularly prominent within these nbi. built on the idea of society on a path to environmental destruction, the mantra 'do not disturb, do not destroy' (stör inte, förstör inte) is spread as the appropriate way for people to enjoy nature. furthermore, 66 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) nature is important for people to enjoy and many activities may be simultaneously interpreted as an attempt to address iniquities in environmental justice and as an attempt to build an egalitarian group both on individual walks and within society more broadly (singleton 2020a). hierarchy – ensuring everyone gets the right info hierarchy is also clearly present alongside egalitarianism within nbi. within the hierarchical solidarity’s perspective, the world is very much knowable and people are malleable. it thus becomes possible to manage the world in an efficient, rational manner. resources should be distributed by rank, station or (measurable and clearly defined) need, often through recourse to expert, dispassionate authority (thompson 2008, 24). the approach of hierarchs to integration has a certain amount of overlap with egalitarianism. both wish to incorporate people into groups, however hierarchy differs with a preference for clearly demarcated roles and specialism. within this discourse, integration is about bringing people into the extant institutional order. thus, integration is about both accessing nature and acquiring requisite knowledge to function within the hierarchy. in terms of social security, it thus becomes an exercise in identifying the 'deserving poor' and helping them (thompson et al. 1990, 94–95). the hierarchical outlook emerged in several situations during data collection. firstly, it manifested on group activities in the separate roles of guides and participants (singleton 2020b). whilst there was a clear desire to reduce hierarchies through group exercises, guides still needed to organise people. as such, a hierarchy physically manifested with guides taking a visible position surrounded by participants. similarly, when participants did not act as instructed, hierarchical authority would often emerge reflecting concerns that people need to be ordered. on several occasions, guides would take participants to task for example over lateness. for example, on one occasion a (newcomer) guide lambasted a young female participant: "in sweden time is so important. ... one must start on time… that is a key rule – respect it!" (field notes). at other times, participants were criticised for failing to bring lunch to the forest (thus necessitating a trip away), which can be interpreted as breaking up the group but also as a resistance to guides’ control of the day’s timetable. this reflects an argument that to integrate newcomers need to do three things: firstly to become aware of and obedient of the law. within the activities observed this usually meant respecting the universal access rules. secondly, it also entailed the absorption of the information required to utilise nature safely. this could be orienting oneself but also knowing that some mushrooms, for instance, can be lethal if eaten. finally, it also entailed learning and respecting norms of swedish society and nature use. as one respondent pointed out: "…in sweden … we have many laws. but we also have many rules. including unwritten rules" (interview 7). the same respondent then went on to give the example of the need to clean up after oneself using the example of family barbecues. it has been suggested that newcomers tend to practice different activities to swedes, with the former preferring large social gatherings in comparison to 'swedish' "values such as silence, solitude, hardiness and amateur scientific interest in flora and fauna" (lisberg jensen & ouis 2008, 179). thus while there is space for variety of practice, dominant norms and rules are expected to be obeyed ensuring facilities are available to others. this world of norms, rules and laws implicitly entailed swedes and guides claiming authority to correct those seen breaking the rules. for example, one swedish respondent described her difficult decision to confront several newcomer youths who were littering, in the end deciding that she must make a stand. decisions about what nbi participants needed to know reflected this teacher-student relationship. when asked about the incorporation of newcomers' views into planning it was stated that guides’ experiences of previous activities and, in particular, the viewpoints of newcomers who had become guides were key. thus, they identified the twin foci of biological knowledge and the universal access laws as likely to be most interesting/relevant to newcomer groups. similarly, for newcomers looking to carry out specific roles in swedish society, different bodies of knowledge could distinguished. as such, one swedish-language teacher of medical workers argued for the importance of her students gaining an understanding of the lifestyles swedes have. after all, to understand how an injury occurred and suggest a treatment requires knowledge of what activities people may do. 67benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) as such, hierarchy also often manifested on nbi guided walks. integration entailed taking on the attributes ascribed to ordinary people within swedish society and respecting the governing order, ultimately embodied by the swedish state and its laws. within this hierarchical ordering of integration, newcomers take a junior role in a teacher-student relationship, with concomitant levels of authority. guides (and sometimes swedes) decide what newcomers need to know and learn. this order was measured and kept track of in the form of reports that guides would produce, recording how many people they had guided, where they went and what occurred. nbi are thus positioned to appeal to those tasked with rationally deciding how resources are utilised (in other words, local authorities and funding bodies). nbi can thus also be interpreted as an attempt to order society following a hierarchical logic – an attempt to integrate newcomers and swedes on a cost-effective and expert-led basis. individualism – earning one’s place in contrast to group-oriented members of the egalitarian and hierarchical social solidarities, members of individualistic solidarity actively seek to build ego-focused networks. individualists, rather than joining bounded organisations, strive to make personal connections and to manipulate their networks. individualistic actions are conceived as taking place within a competitive market, with the victors naturally accruing success (thompson 2008, 23). with hierarchy and egalitarianism prominent within nbi group work, individualism only manifested episodically as people sought to build networks. for example, on one occasion on an smt excursion a participant, an experienced lebanese doctor, upon hearing i was associated with a university, immediately asked for my email address with the hope that i could somehow help him to find work within his field. the discourse of individualism appeared most commonly around possibilities for paid employment. this was most obvious on the courses in nature interpretation. on several occasions, guides suggested that participation on the course (and the certificate awarded on successful completion) would be of value regarding future employment opportunities. for example, at the end of the first day of the course in nora, over coffee and biscuits, the swedish leader of the project clearly stated the value of the course and certificates – there is a growing need for more nature guides who can speak multiple languages, in part because interest in nbi is growing around sweden. furthermore, these particular certificates will have value because speaker herself is experienced and prominent in the field. the certificates thus have "a little power behind them" (field notes). this is very suggestive of an individualistic logic: the certificates have value in the swedish job market. furthermore, much of this value depends on the speaker’s personal influence. the speaker is a ‘big man’ at the centre of a wider network, within which they are influential. course participants themselves also seemed to endorse an individualistic narrative of integration. several were persistent in demanding what they saw as having earned; outside of sessions, several guides complained about participants pestering them for certificates, including those who had not fulfilled the completion criteria. the course participants were behaving in an individualistic manner – seeking to get their deserved outcome in their eyes, and with it a tool for use in the job market. likewise, when participants took a competitive approach to nbi exercises, concerns for nature’s sensitivity sometimes went out the window as people rushed to be first to finish (singleton 2020b). finally, periodically the guides themselves would articulate the individualistic discourse. one guide would sometimes talk about the unwillingness of certain newcomers to make the necessary lifestyle changes to allow them to integrate into swedish society: “it depends on how much [an immigrant] makes an effort. they are victims of their own backgrounds. sometimes from my perspective one can say there are those who do not want to integrate themselves… sometimes it helps those people to force them” (interview 2). at other times, on guided walks, the stories guides would tell would also endorse this picture. this was most obvious at oset och rynningeviken reserve, which has an unusual history as land claimed from lake hjälmaren, then as a rubbish tip, then as reserve. i heard this story on at least four occasions used as a parable highlighting that sweden was not built in a day. sweden’s welfare system and rich society are the product of swedish struggle. the message for newcomers is: they need to work hard themselves. these different responses in many ways resemble classic individualistic reasoning. members of the individualistic social solidarity 68 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) typically "attribute personal failure to bad luck or personal incompetence or some combination thereof" (thompson et al. 1990, 60). in this framing, the two newcomer guides are an example to others; they have successfully learnt swedish and found work. fatalism – there is no such thing as integration the fatalistic solidarity is of a different nature to the other three, tending to be most obvious by their absence in policy debates, for example. individuals may find themselves in the fatalistic solidarity through being frozen out of the other three. within the perspective of fatalism, fairness is an impossibility and this will never change (thompson 2008, 24–25). as such, fatalism only made sporadic appearances in the nbi activities observed. indeed, the voluntary nature of many activities meant that fatalists, characterised by apathy, keeping one’s head down and risk avoidance (thompson et al. 1990, 63), were unlikely to even show up. however, whilst many people attended the nature interpretation courses voluntarily, on several occasions in nora, several people appeared on the second and third days of the nature interpretation course on the back of a local employment scheme. whilst some of these participants participated fully, others seemed to have only a desultory interest, often doing as little as possible within the constraints of various exercises and it seemed that they had been pushed to attend. the presence of these people (who appeared without warning) was a source of frustration to guides as it disrupted the hierarchical planning of activities. finally, the existence of the fatalistic solidarity was integral and implicit to the planning of all the nbi activities. during research, there were also periodic comments about some newcomers having a ‘bad culture’ that needed to change to integrate into swedish society. for example, one eni participant, from uganda, complained “especially in africa, we don’t totally give a shit about the nature. it’s because how we grow up …” (field notes). on another occasion, i spoke with a newcomer representative of a women’s group in karlskoga, which has adopted guided walks as one of their regular activities after completing the eni course. this woman felt it was terrible that newcomer women could become isolated from society “because of culture” (field notes). some groups of newcomers were conceived as existing in a fatalistic state and planned activities aimed to move them into other solidarities: "powerless and exploited, fatalists, in egalitarian eyes, are prime candidates for missionary work. since fatalists are the meek who, one day, will inherit the earth, the egalitarians' task is to "empower" them so that the glorious day is not postponed indefinitely." (thompson et al. 1990, 95). thus, the dominant egalitarian framing of newcomers as isolated and unable to access nature and make contact with swedes depends on the (perceived) existence of the fatalistic solidarity. the appropriateness of nbi this section discusses the presence of the different social solidarities, with particular regard for the social scales within which they emerge. it concludes with discussion of the ‘appropriateness’ of nbi interventions within swedish immigration contexts. within the collated data, the perspective of the egalitarian solidarity is prominent. respondents regularly articulated a discourse based on bringing people into subgroups and wider society as equals. however, within the organisation of nbi, hierarchy also repeatedly appeared, notably in the organisation and conduct of nbi activities. likewise, there was evidence of the remaining social solidarities despite the hegemony of egalitarianism and hierarchy. as an egalitarian-hierarchy institution, i interpret the nbi activities observed as attempts to enact swedish nature (or parts of it) as a ‘common-pool resource’ or a ‘commons’. within cultural theory, definitive of the commons is cooperation of those involved for the greater good (singleton 2017, 1009). the repeated motto of the universal access rules to neither disturb others nor damage nature is emblematic of this perspective. nbi invite newcomers to share both nature and the swedish commons. as an alliance between egalitarianism and hierarchy, nbi are responding to a problem within egalitarian institutions – true consensus decision-making becomes increasingly challenging as the size of a group increases. there are two common solutions to this issue: to splinter or to acquire some sort of hierarchical decision-making mechanism (douglas & mars 2003). within the nbi observed, hierarchy and egalitarianism are often separate. hierarchy largely manifests in preparation, including decisions 69benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) over activity choice and content. in this nbi also link to the hierarchical governance structures of the swedish state – both as an 'efficient' solution to the 'problem' of integration but also in outlining what a newcomer needs to know. in the practice of nbi activities however, egalitarianism is the order of the day. there is a preference for consensus and guides expressed frustration at having to badger people to participate in things. after all, one of the key aims of the activities is to have fun and it is seldom fun to berate or be berated. this recourse to hierarchical coercion when consensus-approaches failed at times led to uncomfortable moments during observed activities. likewise the awkwardness of 'swedes' being tasked with 'teaching' and 'disciplining' newcomers was generated because it infringed the norms of the commons as an institution of equals. however, the need for egalitarian approaches to maintain the commons remains: while there are numerous swedish laws about what one can and cannot do in nature, enforcement in a big, sparsely-populated country presents great challenges. as such, the commons system can only continue if people adhere to the norms of use. this point was made on an eni course. i asked the guide what happens if the laws of a nature reserve are ignored. the subtext to her response was that in practice, often very little, as she reiterated that guiding in nature "is built on really respecting [the rules]" (field notes). diagnosing nbi activities as an egalitarian-hierarchy makes it possible to consider the extent that such practices fit into participants' lives. the appropriateness of any particular social institution (such as nbi) depends on the extent that it matches the contexts within which it occurs. this means it should fit predominant social solidarities at the various social scales (thompson 1998; singleton 2017). the nbi observed here manifest on two different social scales at the level of local governance and at the level of the guided activities themselves. different social solidarities dominate at these scales and thus different narratives about what success constitutes success will be in place. in sweden, at the level of local governance, municipality (kommun) or county (region) bodies predominate, organisations often with a largely hierarchal outlook. nbi activities at this scale appear as a rational, measured response to the societal issue of integration. it involves experts (guides) providing newcomers with the tools to access nature and society. the observed nbi appear a rational response to integration issues from the hierarchical perspective. the success of the observed nbi projects and subsequent ones (which have also garnered local funding) reflects this. the organisers of nbi in örebro county are able to present their activities in such a way that satisfies members of the hierarchical social solidarity. the documented activities with the numbers of people involved serve to measure the success of the work. as such, this form of nbi will likely continue to appeal to hierarchical actors at a higher social scale as long as the activities are measurably a success. at the scale of the individual, however, the egalitarian solidarity is dominant. in this case, success is likely to be considered in terms of the extent that newcomers are incorporated into each activity and ‘converted’ into both wider society and a wider egalitarian, environmental movement (singleton 2020a). within the nbi activities themselves, this was largely successful. while there were periodic examples of resistance and conflict to nbi (singleton 2020a, 2020b), for the most part activities passed without a hitch. beyond the observed activities however, it is harder to gauge how successful nbi were on their own terms. for example, difficulties in attracting people to smt sessions may not just demonstrate a failure to access local social groups, as respondents suggested, but also indicate that the types of activities themselves (and the underlying egalitarian logic) were part of the problem. this is the subject of the next paragraphs. respondents provided several examples of nbi success, like a karlskoga women’s group utilising guiding technique (field notes). in another case, a columbian newcomer and her sweden-finnish husband joining a branch of the swedish society of nature conservation was seen as demonstrating nbi’s potential (interview 4). similarly, the only regular attendees of smt guided walks, apart from myself and the guide, where the guides’ siblings. this suggests that the egalitarian nature of nbi activities is most appealing when participants are drawn from extant social organisations (families, groups), and it is possible that these already matched the narratives of egalitarian and hierarchical social solidarities. this point is incomplete; it was beyond the scope of this research to explore the impacts of nbi activities. it does suggest that future nbi activities may profitably garner support by targeting extant social groupings within swedish society. however, such groups need to be open to incorporation within nbi – in groups where the maintenance of boundaries and the retention of members in the 70 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) face of outside threats (as in the case of heavily enclaved organisations) then nbi activities may simply be another thing to be resisted (douglas & mars 2003; richards 2009). it also suggests that newcomers who find themselves in the individualistic or fatalistic social solidarities may be less receptive to nbi as a path to integration. nbi advocates will hope that the enjoyable nbi success will convert fatalists to their group, but accessing them remains challenging. members of the individualistic solidarity present a different challenge, the nbi observed here present only limited and sporadic opportunities for networking and the building of social capital. as such, if many newcomers are in individualistic contexts and/or are acting/being pushed to act in an individualistic way in other parts of their lives, this will affect their responsiveness to nbi activities. it is tempting to see participants’ demands for eni course certificates and framings of the course as advantageous for employment as reflective of this. there is thus a need to thoroughly situate nbi activities in the daily lives of participants and their families (olli 2012). the nbi observed in this study are episodic and will be a small part of participants’ lives. hypothetically, if newcomers and swedes are pushed to behave in an individualistic manner within the greater institutional contexts of their lives, then one would expect nbi similar to the ones described here to have limited impact. if newcomers are often in individualistic contexts, nbi-based employment schemes may prove more successful. there is also a need to further interrogate nbi's place in the lives of swedes. swedes constitute the group with which integration is to take place and as such are an integral part of nbi activities. however, swedes were rare on many smt and nfs activities, perhaps reflecting that they did not match many swedes’ preferences for outdoor recreation. one respondent stated that the swedes that come along on guided walks (not just nbi) tend to already have an interest in outdoor recreation and may well have already 'converted' to nbi's implicit green social movement (interview 4). thus, the basic level of nbi information needed to bring newcomers in may be relatively uninteresting to swedes. the one smt session where large numbers of swedes participated was the snowshoe expedition, with several participants saying they were eager to try out something new. as such, future nbi that seek to bring swedes and newcomers together perhaps need to think harder on what activities might appeal to both groups. there is thus a need for greater investigation of different practices in nature. indeed, this is where insights from cultural theory may have further value. research suggests that many swedes endorse the model of nature as a commons and the egalitarian symbolic values these entail. however, if many swedes express preferences for solitude in nature in 'wilderness' (lisberg jensen & ouis 2008, 179), this may reflect more individualistic approaches to nature in private lives – nature is a boundless landscape to be ‘conquered’ by bold 'explorers'. as such, while the right to access swedish nature is a common good, its exploration is a product of the investments one makes (time, money for equipment, etc.). if this is the case, then this may explain difficulties in integrating swedes into nbi – egalitarian group exploration is counter to individualistic preferences. likewise, if newcomers choose to access nature in different ways to swedes there may be potential for conflict as has been the case over usage of other shared physical spaces (mack 2017). as such, there is a need to analyse nbi’s place in swedish immigration contexts alongside cultural theory investigations of different forms of nature use. this would generate knowledge useful in the planning and conduct of nbi but also contribute to cultural theory investigations of the commons. this is of importance because, as cultural theory research elsewhere has shown, the dominance of particular narratives can have counter-intuitive and sometimes pernicious effects. for example, anti-discrimination legislation has been implicated in the de facto increased segregation of dutch society (bovens & trappenburg 2006). conclusion this paper has examined nature-based integration activities in örebro county utilising the theory of socio-cultural viability. within cultural theory's typology the observed activities can be understood as products of an alliance between egalitarianism and hierarchy. egalitarianism predominates at the level of the activities themselves with the activities’ purpose interpreted as an effort to bring newcomers into shared group spaces with swedes as equals and provide them equal access to the commons of swedish nature. hierarchy manifests in the role guides play in planning and coordinating 71benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) guided activities and in the way that the observed activities are framed to appeal to hierarchical actors higher up the social scale. tensions between the different social solidarities appear at moments where guides are compelled to try to discipline participants. this interpretation is a first step to thoroughly interrogating nbi and other integration initiatives’ place in swedish society. put simply, if the egalitarian-hierarchy framings of nbi do not match the socio-material contexts that newcomers and swedes go through in their daily lives then this will affect their impact. this article suggests that the variable levels of attendance by both newcomers and swedes may reflect that the framing logics of nbi are not always appropriate to participants. it argues that there is a need for further research to explore this. notably individualism around broader integration activities of newcomers (for example, in job hunting) and in the nature use of swedes should be investigated further. doing so will increase the possibilities for different forms of nbi as well as helping ensure that the good intentions of the different activities have the desired effect. notes 1 as with any theory, cultural theory has its critics, notably around the potential for misunderstanding it as static and deterministic of human behaviour. in many cases, people raise criticisms to misapplications of the theory. in the interest of brevity readers are guided towards 6 and mars (2008, xxiii) who compile and address a list of criticisms. acknowledgements this paper was initially drafted at the institute for social science (ics), university of lisbon. i would like to thank all respondents and mike thompson and paul richards for their help and encouragement. i would also like to thank the reviewers anja byg and anna maría pálsdóttir. references 6, p. & mars, g. (2008) introduction. in 6, p. & mars, g. (eds.) the institutional dynamics of culture volume i, xv–xli.farnham, ashgate. 6, p. & richards, p. (2017) mary douglas. understanding social thought and conflict. berghahn, oxford. agar, m. h. (2008) the professional stranger: an informal introduction to ethnography. emerald publishing, bingley. arora-jonsson, s. (2017) development and integration at a crossroads: culture, race and ethnicity in rural sweden. environment and planning a 49(7) 1594–1612. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x17701130 beery, t. h. (2013) nordic in nature: friluftsliv and environmental connectedness. environmental education research 19(1) 94–117. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2012.688799 bolger, n., davis, a. & rafaeli, e. (2003) diary methods: capturing life as it is lived. annual review of psychology 54(1) 579–616. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145030 bovens, m. & trappenburg, m. (2006) segregation through anti-discrimination: how the netherlands got divided again. in verweij, m. & thompson, m. (eds.) clumsy solutions for a complex world, 86–104. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. http://doi.org/10.1057/9780230624887_4 dahl, g. (1998) wildflowers, nationalism and the swedish law of the commons. worldviews: global religions, culture and ecology 2(3) 281–302. http://doi.org/10.1163/156853598x00262 douglas, m. (1966 [2002]) purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of polution and taboo. routledge, abingdon. douglas, m. (1970 [2003]) natural symbols. routledge, abingdon. douglas, m. & mars, g. (2003) terrorism: a positive feedback game. human relations 56(7) 763–786. http://doi.org/10.1177/00187267030567001 douglas, m. & wildavsky, a. (1983) risk and culture. university of california press, berkeley. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520907393 european sociological association (n.d.) statement of the ethical guidelines of the european sociological association. <https://www.europeansociology.org/about-esa/governance/ethical-guidelines> 16.7.2020. favell, a. (2019) integration: twelve propositions after schinkel. comparative migration studies 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0125-7 72 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) gentin, s., chondromatidou, a. m., pitkänen, k., dolling, a., præstholm, s. & pálsdóttir, a. m. (2018) defining nature-based integration. perspectives and practices from the nordic countries. finnish environment institute, helsinki. grip, l. (2010) likhetens rum olikhetens praktik. om produktion av integration i fyra svenska kommuner. dissertations in cultural geography. karlstad university, karlstad. http://kau.diva-portal.org/ smash/get/diva2:288534/fulltext01.pdf hadj abdou, l. (2019) immigrant integration: the governance of ethno-cultural differences. comparative migration studies 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0124-8 hirvonen, k. (2013) sweden: when hate becomes the norm. race & class 55(1) 78–86. http://doi.org/10.1177/0306396813486604 johnson, s., eklund, a., karlsson, m., tönnberg, v. & yrjas, c. (2017) grön arbetsförmedling – beskrivning och handledning. hushållningssällskapet skåne, bjärred. klarenbeek, l. m. (2019) relational integration: a response to willem schinkel. comparative migration studies 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0126-6 kusenbach, m. (2003) street phenomenology: the go-along as ethnographic research tool. ethnography 4(3) 455–485. https://doi.org/10.1177/146613810343007 lisberg jensen, e. & ouis, p. (2008) contested construction of nature for city fringe outdoor recreation in southern sweden: the arrie case. urban forestry & urban greening 7(3) 171–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2008.02.003 mack, j. (2017) the construction of equality. syriac immigration and the swedish city. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816698691.001.0001 mars, g. (2008) from the enclave to hierarchy – and on to tyranny: the micro-political organisation of a consultant’s group. culture and organization 14(4) 365–378. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759550802489755 naturvårdsverket (n.d.) allemansrätten. <https://www.naturvardsverket.se/allemansratten> 11.3.2019. olli, e. (2012) rejected cultural biases shape our political views. a migrant household study and two largescale surveys. dissertations in comparative politics. university of bergen, bergen. http://bora.uib. no/bitstream/handle/1956/6103/dr.thesis_eero%20olli.pdf?sequence=5&isallowed=y ortbals, c. d. & rincker, m. e. (2009) fieldwork, identities, and intersectionality: negotiating gender, race, class, religion, nationality, and age in the research field abroad: editors' introduction. ps: political science & politics 42(02) 287–290. https://doi.org/10.1017/s104909650909057x paulus, t. m., lester, j. n. & dempster, p. g. (2014) digital tools for qualitative research. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473957671 pitkänen, k., oratuomi, j., hellgren, d., furman, e., gentin, s., sandberg, e., øian, h. & krange, o. (2017) nature-based integration. nordic council of ministers, denmark. https://doi.org/10.6027/tn2017-517 richards, p. (1999) new political violence in africa. secular sectarianism in sierra leone. geojournal 47 433–442. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1007022508582 richards, p. (2009) against ethnicity: ring composition and conflict resolution. focaal – journal of global and historical anthropology 54 3–15. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2009.540101 richards, p. (2010) ritual dynamics in humanitarian assistance. disasters 34(s2) s138–s146. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7717.2010.01150.x saharso, s. (2019) who needs integration? debating a central, yet increasingly contested concept in migration studies. comparative migration studies 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0123-9 salmonsson, l. & hedlund, d. (2018) where do we go from here? challenges and strategies following additional asylum policy restrictions in sweden. journal of human rights practice 10(3) 524–535. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huy029 sandell, k. (2006) the right of public access: potentials and challenges for ecotourism. in gössling, s. & hultman, j. (eds.) ecotourism in scandinavia: lessons in theory and practice, 98 –112. cabi, wallingford. http://doi.org/10.1079/9781845931346.0098 schierup, c.-e., hansen, p. & castles, s. (2006) migration, citizenship, and the european welfare state. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198280521.001.0001 schinkel, w. (2018) against 'immigrant integration': for an end to neocolonial knowledge production. comparative migration studies 6(1) 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-018-0095-1 singleton, b. e. (2017) what’s missing from ostrom? combining design principles with the theory of sociocultural viability. environmental politics 26(6) 994–1014. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2017.1364150 singleton, b. e. (2020a) go to the forest! exploring the ordering of swedish nature-based integration. environment and planning e: nature and space [online sep 30 2020] https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620962420 73benedict e. singletonfennia 198(1–2) (2020) singleton, b. e. (2020b) interpreting taskscapes: the rituals of guided nature-based (dis)integration in sweden. innovation: the european journal of social science research [online jun 6 2020] https://doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2020.1775560 stewart, w. p. (1998) leisure as multiphase experiences: challenging traditions. journal of leisure research 30(4) 391–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222216.1998.11949840 statistics sweden (2019) population by region, region of birth and year. <http://www.statistikdatabasen. s c b . s e / p x w e b / e n / s s d / s t a r t _ _ b e _ _ b e 0 1 0 1 _ _ b e 0 1 0 1 e / i n r u t r f o d d a r e g a l k o n / t a b l e / tableviewlayout1/?rxid=5565ac7a-412f-4b8b-8d9e-99f122e65982>. 10.6.2019. swedlow, b. (2012) cultural coproduction of four states of knowledge. science, technology, & human values 37(3) 151–179. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243911405345 svennebäck, å. (2017) örebro är årets friluftskommun igen. svt 5.4.2017 <https://www.svt.se/nyheter/ lokalt/orebro/orebro-ar-arets-friluftskommun>. 29.3.2019. tansey, j. & o'riordan, t. (1999) cultural theory and risk: a review. health, risk & society 1(1) 71–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698579908407008 tansey, j. & rayner, s. (2009) cultural theory and risk. in heath, r. l. & o'hair, h. d. (eds.) handbook of risk and crisis communication, 53–79. routledge, new york. thompson, m. (1998) style and scale: two sources of institutional approaches. in goldman, m. (ed.) privatizing nature, 198–228. pluto press, london. thompson, m. (2008) organising and disorganising. triarchy press limited, axminster. thompson, m., ellis, r. & wildavsky, a. (1990) cultural theory. westview press, oxford. thompson, m., grendstad, g. & selle, p. (1999) cultural theory as political science. in thompson, m., grendstad, g. & selle, p. (eds.) cultural theory as political science, 1–23. routledge, london. http://doi.org/10.4324/9780203197646_chapter_1 verweij, m., thompson, m. & engel, c. (2011a) clumsy conclusions: how to do policy and research in a complex world. in verweij, m. & thompson, m. (eds.) clumsy solutions for a complex world, 241–249. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. http://doi.org/10.1057/9780230624887_11 verweij, m., douglas, m., ellis, r., engel, c., hendriks, f., lohmann, s., ney, s., rayner, s. & thompson, m. (2011b) the case for clumsiness. in verweij, m. & thompson, m. (eds.) clumsy solutions for a complex world, 1–27. palgrave macmillan, basingstoke. http://doi.org/10.1057/9780230624887_1 ybarra, m. (2014) don’t just pay it back, pay it forward: from accountability to reciprocity in research relationships. journal of research practice 10(2). <http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/ view/407/358> https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.8853 beyond imagining: enacting intergenerational response-ability as world-building – commentary to bowman urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa98008 doi: 10.11143/fennia.98008 reflections beyond imagining: enacting intergenerational response-ability as world-building – commentary to bowman raichael lock lock, r. (2020) beyond imagining: enacting intergenerational responseability as world-building – commentary to bowman. fennia 198(1–2) 223–226. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98008 this reflection considers bowman’s call to researchers to respond to young peoples’ concerns about the climate crisis as a "world-building project" suggesting that researchers can support young people by helping them imagine the future. drawing on the work of barad and haraway, i want to widen the call by suggesting that researchers need to respond to the climate crisis through enactments of mutual response-ability. the challenge is how adults concerned with the climate crisis can work alongside young people to promote and create effective change. but more than that it is about researchers, universities, and others making change. young people are protesting because they want adults to secure their future: the important question is how we best do this. keywords: climate change, intergenerational education, mutual responseability, action raichael lock (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3393-1680), manchester institute of education, university of manchester, ellen wilkinson building, manchester, m15 6j. e-mail: raichael.lock@manchester.ac.uk in response to bowman’s (2019) “imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research” i want to focus on three themes which thread through the paper. i will touch on the notion of imagining futures, explore young people’s agency and, most importantly, grapple with the urgent need for taking action on climate change. this need for action will be explored through the notion of mutual response-ability (barad, as quoted by dolphijn, r. & van der tuin, i. 2013; haraway 2016) and draw on my experience working with the manchester environmental education network (meen). bowman’s paper is itself a response to the research of wahlström and colleagues (2019) where researchers handed out surveys and ran screening interviews at fridays for future demonstrations to understand the rise of the climate youth movement. the wahlström data is useful as it captures a specific moment in the movement by informing us about who is demonstrating and their reasons for doing so and, as i was one of the volunteers collecting data at the manchester demonstration, i found wahlström and colleagues’ data fascinating. however, i also agree with bowman’s point that, “climate action is more than protest: it is also a world-building project, and creative methodologies can aid researchers and young climate activists as we imagine, together, worlds’ of the future” (bowman 2019, 197). © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 224 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) as an environmental educator working with meen and young people on climate change it is clear the imagination is a powerful tool for exploring how we want our collective future to be. there are many examples of pedagogical tools that facilitate the imagination as a means for building future worlds: one of meen’s rather unusual examples includes the building of a cardboard time machine for families to imagine the potential impacts of climate change in relation to current behaviours. however, rather than citing examples of our future imaginings – for which i have no evidence in relation to making tangible changes – i want to focus on the importance of our creative imaginings becoming methodologies that can also enact the building of the new world as it is being imagined. furthermore, i want to stress that this is a process that can unfold through processes of mutual response-ability (barad 2012; haraway 2016). firstly though, i want to discuss what is meant by mutual response-ability. in barad’s theory of agential realism agency does not belong to subjects but is rather an enactment formed through our mutual responses as they are performed through the on-going dynamism of the world. agential realism is therefore relational in the sense that the world unfolds through processes of continual “intra-action” which contain “the possibilities of mutual response, which is not to deny, but to attend to power imbalances” (barad, as quoted by dolphijn and var der tuin 2013). attending to our worldly relations is essential when addressing an issue like climate change, including how we can relate and work with young people. as haraway (2016, 29) writes, “we are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories… but we are not all response-able in the same ways. the differences matter.” returning to bowman’s (2019, 295) discussion about greta thunberg it is necessary to keep such differences in mind. he states that it is “our task” to respond to thunberg’s call, “to act as if the house is on fire”, and i concur. in full thunberg states: i do not want your hope. i want you to panic, i want you to feel the fear i feel everyday and then i want you to act. i want you to act as if you would in a crisis. i want you to act as if the house is on fire because it is. (thunberg 2018) thunberg is very clear that her imagining is not a metaphor: it is reality. our house is our world. she has read the science and imagined the future science is conveying and her skill is her ability to share this imagined future without compromise. she is afraid and anyone who has read the science should be afraid with her. i am afraid. this fear is based on the rationale that we are not doing enough, quickly enough, to address the problems and that there is a gulf between what we know and what we do. in light of this, exercising our imagination to create worlds of the future is valuable but it is also necessary to take mutually response-able action otherwise the gap between what we know and how we act in relation to the climate crisis is only exacerbated (kollmus & agyeman 2002). the young people i meet and work with through my role in meen express concern about not being able to do enough to meet the challenges we face and, because of this gap, express a mixture of emotions on climate change including negative emotions such as saying they are confused why we have not addressed the problem yet, or that they feel sad or even terrified that climate change is out of control, or even guilty because of their own lifestyles and such emotions echo the findings of wahlström and others (2019) report “protest for a future”. bowman’s (2019, 301) summary of this research states that young activists stand, “with one foot in the public arena and one in the private” in that the fridays for future participants are able to express their emotions whilst also pushing to exert pressure on politicians. this knowledge has value yet, the crucial point of the demonstrations is that young people are demanding that adults take effective action to prevent extreme climate change so, as thunberg would state, young people can go back to school. researching the voices of young people is important however, i am arguing that responding to the issues raised by them through enacting mutual response-ability is the most crucial response. if we can assume we are at the juncture where action is critical then the next question is how to enact mutual response-ability especially given its complexity as an open-ended process which occurs spontaneously and through specific relations. as barad (2010, 265) states, response-ability is not a “calculation to be performed” but a state to be practised. this means that to perform mutually response-able actions in relation to the demands of young people we must listen with care because 225fennia 198(1–2) (2020) raichael lock as haraway (2016, 29) puts it, “the details matter. the details link actual beings to actual responseabilities.” having listened to young peoples’ responses as they watched an adult jump into a taxi outside their school after having rewarded the pupils for their actions on climate change it is easy to understand how young people might come to feel disillusioned. returning to meen’s activities there is the strong intention to act with response-ability when working with young people, however, meeting their demands and those of the adults in school needs to be negotiated. young people may be keen to go on demonstrations, or even to organise their own, as they want their voices to be heard and, although some schools hear this and respond by supporting their demands, others do not. but there are multiple methods for supporting youth voice. meen projects, for example, ask pupils if they would like to become community educators on climate change. if they agree we work with a range of partners to organise intergenerational conferences or climate classrooms where young people talk to the public or a set audience, sharing learning activities or ideas around climate change (brown & lock 2017; lock 2019). most recently a group of high school pupils ran a session on climate change for trainee stem teachers at the university of manchester, which not only boosted young people’s confidence and voice but also raised questions around trainee teacher’s curriculum plans (meen 2020). giving young people the opportunities to do such activities helps them voice issues around climate change, expand their confidence for intergenerational communication and exert pressure on adults to take action. however, as bowman (2019, 299) states, “the public imagination of the climate crisis tends to restrict young people to having a voice, as opposed to having power” and he suggests that “society tends to perceive young people as subjects of political engagement more than agents of change.” yet, gaining knowledge and finding a voice, enables increased power and influence. through the experience of raising their voices and through being heard by peers, family, teachers and sometimes those in greater power, young people, working with others, are responding to the climate emergency with increased agency. a good example is the teach the future campaign which, led by young people, is demanding action on improving climate change education in england in line with the demands of the emergency and for all educational buildings to be net-zero by 2030. yet, for formal changes to be made to the education system acts of mutual response-ability need to occur and this means the secretary of state for education must enact changes that align school activities with the climate emergency declaration. returning to thunberg, when she demands that adults read the science she also demands that adults take appropriate action in light of the science. young people involved in meen activities share this view and often reach a point when they state their eco group is not doing enough to stop climate change. this sticky point in the intra-action (barad 2007) between meen and young people is vital as it provokes an enactment of mutual response-ability whereby the team need to decide what they want to do with meen responding by co-ordinating the means to do it. one recurring activity is tree planting which has become a core part of meen’s climate related activities. in feedback pupils have cited it as one of the most significant parts of a meen climate project and have repeatedly made requests to plant more trees. trees may not hold all the answers to solving the climate crisis but they do make a positive difference in our climate relations; they clean our air and can form valuable habitat. organising tree planting can be a response-able action that makes a material difference. bowman’s (2019, 302) article concludes that, “there is much work to be done for scientists who wish to listen,” however, i would suggest that if we are listening to what young people are saying our work needs to be much more than listening: we really do need to “act as if our house is on fire” (thunberg 2018). barad (2007, 817) states that the world is an “ongoing open process of mattering through which ‘mattering’ itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities.” this states that we are a part of the world’s dynamic and, if life on earth is to survive, we must attend to our actions and the agential possibilities they manifest. this is not suggesting a move towards “the privatization of responsibility” (puig de la bellacasa 2017, 139) but rather “engaging ordinary personal practices as collective and pushing toward a decentring of ethical subjectivity” (ibid., 138). how can we do this? as academics we can respond to young peoples’ voices through addressing our “ordinary personal practices” and although we may imagine these are private matters, our practices are involved in the “knots of relations” (barad 2007) involving humans such as climate scientists, institutions such as our universities, alongside the multiple physical entanglements of our 226 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) human/non-human collective activities. however, as puig de la bellacasa (2017, 142) writes, “if the ethical is complex and emerging, this also involves chances to contribute to its shaping” so whether we are able to challenge and support our universities to act on climate issues or as citizens make ethical and sustainable choices in our travel, purchases and leisure; or politically develop our collective voice by enacting response-able leadership in our communities we are helping to build an imagined future through mutual response-ability. in addition, universities have the means to work with young people not only through protest but also through the provision of intergenerational world-building activities that can generate hope through making a difference now. thinking with mutual response-ability in mind, i am also concluding that meen’s response must be to support whole school communities so they are better able to respond to young peoples’ urgent demands for building and retrofitting zero carbon schools. such activities are urgent. in conclusion therefore, i would state that as researchers we need to both listen to young people and respond to what they are saying and we can do this not only through being response-able in relation to our collective actions but also through generating intergenerational opportunities to help all our collective imaginings come into being. references barad, k. (2007) meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke university press, durham and london. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388128 barad, k. (2010) quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. derrida today 3(2) 240–268. bowman, b. (2019) imagining future worlds alongside young climate activists: a new framework for research. fennia 197(2) 295–305. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.85151 brown, s. & lock, r. (2017) enhancing intergenerational communication around climate change. in leal, w. (ed.) handbook of climate change communication, 385–398. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32898-6_19 dolphijn, r. & van der tuin, i. (2013) new materialism: interviews & cartographies. open humanities. http://doi.org/10.3998/ohp.11515701.0001.001 haraway. d. (2016) staying with the trouble. duke university press, durham and london. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780 kollmuss, a. & agyeman, j. (2002) mind the gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior? environmental education research 8(3) 239–260. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620220145401 lock, r. (2019) from academia to response-ability. in leal filho, w. & hemstock, s. (eds.) climate change and the role of education. climate change management, 349–362. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32898-6_19 meen (2020) st peter’s case study. <https://www.meen.org.uk/assets/documents/st-peters-case-study.pdf> 7.9.2020. puig de la bellacasa, m. (2017) matters of care speculative ethics in more than human worlds. the university of minnesota press, minneapolis. thunberg, g. (2018) greta thunberg full speech at un climate change cop24 conference. youtube 15.12.2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfkqsgyecwg> 9.7.2019. wahlström, m., kocyba, p., de vydt, m., de moor, j., wouters, r., wennerhag, m., van stekelenburg, j., uba, k., saunders, c., rucht, d., mikecz, d., zamponi, l., lorenzini, j., kołczyńska, m., haunss, s., giugni, m., gaidyte, t., doherty, b. & buzogany, a. (2019) protest for a future: composition, mobilization and motives of the participants in fridays for future climate protests on 15 march, 2019 in 13 european cities. keele university e-prints, keele. <https://protestinstitut.eu/wp-content/ uploads/2019/07/20190709_protest-for-a-future_gcs-descriptive-report.pdf> mental health, coloniality and fieldwork in the european university: a reflection in three challenges commentary to taylor urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa90763 doi: 10.11143/fennia.90763 reflections mental health, coloniality and fieldwork in the european university: a reflection in three challenges – commentary to taylor lioba hirsch hirsch, l. (2020) mental health, coloniality and fieldwork in the european university: a reflection in three challenges – commentary to taylor. fennia 198(1–2) 210–213. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.90763 in this reflection piece, i discuss three challenges to the way we think about fieldwork and mental health in the context of european universities. these challenges emerged out of reading and reflecting on stephen taylor’s paper “the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma and the ethnographic researcher”. specifically i reflect on coloniality and whiteness and the ways in which i consider them to be entangled in both the problem and the discussion around universities’ handling of the mental health of their staff and students. in doing so i rely on decolonial and critical whiteness literature to argue that universities’ disregard for the (mental health) risks associated with conducting ethnographic fieldwork as well as the academic culture which fuels this disregard, reveal the ways in which universities and the knowledge they produce privilege whiteness. keywords: fieldwork, ptsd, white empiricism, european universities, trauma lioba hirsch, centre for history in public health, london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, 15–17 tavistock place, london wc1h 9sh, uk. e-mail: lioba.hirsch@lshtm.ac.uk i enjoyed reviewing stephen taylor’s (2019) paper “the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma and the ethnographic researcher”. this is a piece of academic scholarship that has the potential to empower not just the writer, through a process of reflection and, hopefully, therapeutic processing, but also the reader. the paper offers reassurance to researchers with shared or similar experiences of witnessing (and/or experiencing) violence during fieldwork and suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd). it confirms that our struggles are not unique. taylor’s (2019) paper acknowledges the spatial and temporal unboundedness of trauma and experiences of violence that originated in fieldwork but stay with the researcher, physically, mentally and intellectually after a return to one’s home institution. it also offers an honest reflection on the ways in which research and academic knowledge production thrive on the supposed spatial, embodied and mental separation of the researcher and the research context. i would argue that this separation relies on and is reflective of academia’s longstanding reliance on the trope of the objective, dispassionate observer who is seen as the pinnacle of scientific neutrality and research. in other words, it relies on the idea that the world can be studied without getting involved in it and that this is what constitutes good research. more geographically speaking, violence in much ethnographic fieldwork © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 211lioba hirschfennia 198(1–2) (2020) seems to be a sign of the ‘over there’ (e.g. smith 1999), something the (mostly white and often male) ethnographic researcher goes out to explore and which is brought back, analysed, processed and turned into knowledge to then be distributed by academic journals in the global north, but does not involve the researcher emotionally. in this commentary, i want to reflect on the inherent coloniality in academia’s failure to take the mental health of its students and staff seriously. i do so by focussing on three challenges which underlie taylor’s (2019) paper and the critiques of academic culture therein. firstly, i focus on the coloniality of conducting (ethnographic) research and the unequal power geographies that this relies on and perpetuates. here i suggest that the practice of northern (predominantly white, heterosexual and male) researchers conducting ethnographies in formerly colonised countries and regions has a tendency to imagine and reify those regions as violent and unstable. i do not argue that this is what taylor’s (2019) paper sets out to do, however i think it important to be alert to the prevalence of this dynamic in ethnographic and geographical research. secondly, i focus on the trope of the dispassionate (male), objective (white) researcher, who studies, but is unaffected by violence. i argue that a continued academic and scientific desire for objectivity and emotional detachment, as evidenced in the academic culture described in taylor’s paper, further undermines the progression of self-identifying women researchers of colour, who are always already seen as less objective and dispassionate (prescodweinstein 2020). this trope is damaging to all researchers and its authoritativeness is what allows universities to not invest in the mental health of their researchers. finally i will conclude by arguing that for socio-economically marginalised, disabled, genderqueer and non-genderqueer researchers of colour trauma has always been embodied, that we have carried it with us through our academic careers, where it has weighed us down, into fieldwork and back again. i suggest that we have become too good at ignoring it and tucking it away so as not to further distance ourselves from the aforementioned ideals of objectivity and emotional detachment. by failing to make space for trauma, ptsd and experiences of embodied violence, universities continue to be hostile environments to those researchers they proclaim to so desperately want to attract and support. i write this commentary and i read taylor’s (2019) paper as a black cis-heterosexual woman early career researcher who has struggled with ptsd for a number of years. contrary to taylor, i carried my ptsd into my phd work, where it affected my ability to conduct the fieldwork i had initially set out to do. i am thankful for this paper; however, i also think it necessary to carefully reflect on the predominance of what de leeuw and hunt (2018, 3) call “re-centering the feelings and emotions of (often white) settler non-indigenous subjects […] who despite (or perhaps in part because of) critical self-reflexivity continue to maintain discursive and material power in myriad spaces.” hopefully this paper will be a useful starting point for more (and more diverse) discussions around trauma, ethnographic research and mental health in academia. challenging the coloniality of ethnographic research: from ‘over here’ to ‘over there’ several authors have pointed to the coloniality inherent in ethnographic fieldwork (e.g. thobani 2015; soares dos santos 2019). although a majority of these analyses are located in the field of anthropology, geographers too have pointed to the colonial legacies of geography as an academic discipline (e.g. noxolo et al. 2012; esson et al. 2017). as taylor’s (2019) paper shows, european universities often see the risks that come with ethnographic research as outside their remit and responsibility. i would argue that, given the extent to which university culture has been shaped by white, socio-economically advantaged men of european origin, this dynamic is amplified when the risks concern non-white european cis-male researchers. issues of safety and security, having to deal with microaggressions and harassment at the university and on fieldwork disproportionately affects women, people of colour, genderqueer and disabled researchers. universities’ denial of responsibility for the risks of fieldwork is facilitated through the imagined distance between the university and the field. the former is presented as a stable, rational place of knowledge production and management, whereas the latter is, in the case of formerly colonised countries, a place of knowledge extraction, often perceived as unstable, violent and irrational. the physical distance between ethnographic field site and prestigious university is heightened through an imagined distance between the place of 212 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) study and the place to be studied. this binary, which universities wittingly or unwittingly subscribe to by not investing time, energy or financial resources into making sure that students and staff enjoy the same protections from violence, harassment and discrimination when on fieldwork than they purportedly do at university, reinforces the idea of the ‘over there’ as a place of risk, and the over here as a place of safety. smith (1999) and said (2003) are only two of a number of authors writing about how knowledge and research contribute to the othering of africa, asia, south america and the pacific. what this binary also hides, however, is the fact that for women, people of colour and religious and sexual minorities alongside them, the university, and european societies more broadly, have seldom been places of rationality, stability or safety. at the university as much as in society our experiences of racism and discrimination have been marginalised and brushed aside (prescodweinstein 2020). we continue to live and work at the margins of (academic) society and our mental health attests to it (jones 2017; davies 2020). challenging the trope of the dispassionate (male), objective (white) researcher as prescod-weinstein (2020) has eloquently argued, ideas of objectivity and emotional detachment are firmly intertwined with white supremacy. introducing the concept of white empiricism she argues (2020, 421) that ”white empiricism is the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read as having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and black people (particularly black women) are produced as an ontological other.” i argue that universities’ inadequate response to the mental health of their students and staff reveals the extent to which universities are built on white empiricism. as taylor’s (2019) paper reveals, universities make little room for the trauma that staff and students carry with them, especially since, as i have discussed above, the idea is prevalent that this trauma is brought in from outside academia. in taylor’s paper, and in the lived experiences of many, universities’ expectations are that researchers be dispassionate and objective and that they observe, not feel. this is damaging and needs to change. as prescod-weinstein (2020) argues, this trope is especially damaging to black women working in research, because it posits us as positioned other, a far distance from science’s claim to objectivity. as such, leaving one’s trauma at the door also maintains the university as a space that benefits white straight men above all others, furthering the problematic notion that their experiences are what constitutes or comes closest to the elusive idea of scientific objectivity. however, positioning oneself, as is increasingly done in social sciences, is not a bad thing. as de leeuw and hunt (2018) write, not acknowledging our authorial position obscures how the identities we straddle and the places we write from and about are bound up with colonialism. not being able to acknowledge and share the trauma we experience on fieldwork or at university as students, early career researchers or professors upholds the idea that being a dispassionate, objective researcher is possible and that it is desirable. ‘our trauma has always been here’: challenging colonial whiteness in the university i would like to conclude my brief commentary with a challenge based on the preceding two sections: advocating for an expansion of counselling and psychological support services and greater awareness of the possibly long-lasting trauma induced by fieldwork is not enough to change european universities’ attitudes towards experiences of violence and trauma. we need to challenge the underlying beliefs and dynamics, steeped in white empiricism and a colonial geography of violence, that make current attitudes possible and normal. as long as we fail to acknowledge that thinking of trauma as always originating outside the university – on fieldwork in formerly colonised countries especially – silences the ways in which european universities allow racism, sexism, homo-, transphobia and ableism to stand unchallenged, we will continue to perpetuate it for marginalised researchers. we also continue to perpetuate the idea that some places (those we study) are inherently more violent than others (those where we study). as long as we fail to acknowledge that the expectation that researchers at any stage in their careers deal with their mental health privately or in the small enclaves that universities have created for such purpose, we continue to uphold an idea of knowledge production that benefits white men, who have for so long constituted the standard on which we measure scientific objectivity. 213lioba hirschfennia 198(1–2) (2020) in his (2019) piece, taylor is very self-reflective on his own positionality and the often obscured dynamics that allow white male researchers to conduct research in areas unfamiliar to them. violence here, although not unexpected, caught the researcher off guard and destabilised his understanding of what is and what is not part of the research process. the violence that we know as people and especially as women of colour sometimes, but not always, means that we are already too used to carrying the experience of violence around with us to be thus caught off guard. this is not a good thing. i do not write this to in any way minimise our respective experiences of violence and the individual and collective struggles we fight to make space for us in the academic world. i write this because things need to change. i want taylor’s (2019) piece to take up space. but even more than that i want it to pave the way for researchers working and writing at the margins of academia, battling their own private and societal battles to read this piece and feel validated that they, and their trauma, should take up lots of space too. references davies, c. (2020) bame millennials have less stable working lives than their white peers. the guardian 2.3.2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/mar/02/bame-millennials-less-stable-work-livesthan-white-peers> 10.3.2020. esson, j., noxolo, p., baxter, r., daley, p. & byron, m. (2017) the 2017 rgsibg chair’s theme: decolonising geographical knowledges, or reproducing coloniality? area 49(3) 384–388. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12371 jones, c. (2017) black and minority ethnic postgraduates and mental health. pubs and publications. the phd experience. <https://www.blogs.hss.ed.ac.uk/pubs-and-publications/2017/12/01/blackminority-ethnic-postgraduates-mental-health/> 10.3.2020. de leeuw, s. & hunt, s. (2018) unsettling decolonizing geographies. geography compass 12(7) e12376. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12376 noxolo, p., raghuram, p. & madge, c. (2012) unsettling responsibility: postcolonial interventions. transactions of the institute of british geographers 37(3) 418–429. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00474.x prescod-weinstein, c. (2020) making black women scientists under white empiricism: the racialization of epistemology in physics. signs: journal of women in culture and society 45(2) 421–447. https://doi.org/10.1086/704991 said, e. w. (2003) orientalism. penguin books, london & new york. smith, l. t. (1999) decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed books, university of otago press. soares dos santos, a. m. (2019) on the colonial past of anthropology: teaching race and coloniality in the global south. humanities 8(2) 88. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020088 taylor, s. (2019) the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher. fennia 197(2) 183–199. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.84792 thobani, s. (2015) living history, performing coloniality: towards a postcolonial ethnography. anthropology in action 22(3) 43–51. https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2015.220306 smart cities and innovative governance systems: a reflection on urban living labs and action research urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa97054 doi: 10.11143/fennia.97054 smart cities and innovative governance systems: a reflection on urban living labs and action research diana soeiro soeiro, d. (2021) smart cities and innovative governance systems: a reflection on urban living labs and action research. fennia 199(1) 104–112. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.97054 urban living labs (ull) are sites that allow different urban actors to design, test and learn from socio-technical innovations. in this article, i investigate the epistemological roots of ull, claiming that this new instrument in the realm of urban planning strongly relies on action research, a methodology designed in the 1940s. i explore to what extent ull and action research are different, identifying past obstacles of action research to design more successful ull. this paper establishes that ull are a key element to implement social innovation and that social innovation should lead technological innovation and the recent smart city model to promote smart sustainable cities. the article was prepared in the aftermath of the project “rock” (2017–2020) on cultural heritage as a driver for urban regeneration, where ull played a central role being highly relevant in the context of urban regeneration policies. key findings support that ull can contribute to finding a balance between top-down and bottom-up strategies and its comparative qualitative analysis would improve the methodology. moreover, public and private cooperation should be encouraged and government should lead and act as a key player in innovation strategies. lastly, geography can contribute to these new challenges by framing past approaches, projecting the future of cities, and finding ways to make them become a reality. keywords: sustainable development, urban regeneration, technology, general systems theory, future studies, social innovation, urban living labs diana soeiro (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6238-8042), instituto de ciências sociais, universidade de lisboa (ics-ul), av. prof. aníbal bettencourt 9, 1600-189 lisboa, portugal. e-mail: dianasoeiro.drphil@gmail.com introduction technological innovation is at the forefront of the smart city concept, impacting the dynamics of cities as we know them, from planning to managing, to daily livability. however, is technological innovation enough to propel the smart city concept? my main claim is that the biggest challenge to successful implementation of the smart city concept is the design of innovative governance systems. the assumption behind this claim is that technological innovation should not be pursued for its own sake, but ultimately to promote and propel social, cultural, economic and ecological innovation. otherwise, © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 105fennia 199(1) (2021) diana soeiro we may have cities that are smart but not sustainable. this process calls for an all-encompassing vision and this can be challenging. here i will assess a recent methodological approach, urban living labs (ull). these are sites that allow different urban actors to design, test and learn from sociotechnical innovations (von wirth et al. 2019). to better grasp what is at stake in the ull methodology, i conduct an epistemological investigation in order to identify its roots. i argue that ull stem from general systems theory (from now on: systems theory) – a theory that also encompasses ‘action research’, which encourages research to be conducted in close connection with a given area and its inhabitants. particularly celebrated in the 1970s and 1980s, it became heavily criticised for its lack of results and impractically due to its (too) wide trans-/interdisciplinary scope. the aim is to learn if ull will be faced with similar impracticalities. in addition, i aim to explore whether the smart city concept with an emphasis on existing technologies and new governance systems can contribute to overcoming past obstacles posed by systems theory through ull. i conclude by identifying how ull can encourage the exploration of innovative governance systems; claiming a balance between bottom-up initiatives and top-down policies and reflecting on what role geography will play in this. background this article stems from an active partnership with the project “rock – regeneration and optimisation of cultural heritage in creative and knowledge cities” (2017–2020), funded by the european union under the horizon 2020 (rock 2020) programme. the project involved seven role model cities (athens, cluj-napoca, eindhoven, liverpool, lyon, turin and vilnius) and three replicator cities (bologna, lisbon and skopje) relying on action research, innovative governance strategies and urban living labs (ull) as methodology. lisbon aimed to promote innovative cultural initiatives and to attract new talents from the creative industries by developing an ict infrastructure using the ull approach. in its aftermath, the project sparked in-depth reflection on its methodological foundations and this is what it is presented here, while attempting to frame it within current literature. the above-mentioned project took an interdisciplinary approach and this article will have an interdisciplinary nature. as much as interdisciplinarity is praised in academic circles, when put into action to tackle a given subject, it is often perceived as “confusing” or “lacking a rationale”. it can therefore be helpful to state beforehand that my academic background encompasses philosophy, urban studies and economics and public policy. the subject of ull is itself multi-/interdisciplinary and its heterogeneous nature brings advantages and disadvantages, as assessed recently by hossain, leminen and westerlund (2018) in a comprehensive literature review. however, in an increasingly complex world, interdisciplinary approaches become increasingly necessary. therefore, it is important to learn to establish a dialogue across disciplines, respecting each person’s area of expertise and broad-mindedly listening to what others have to say, being available to bridge any gap. it is highly relevant to bear interdisciplinarity in mind, as ull stem from urban planning and i claim that their foundations are grounded in a previous approach, systems theory. this theory quickly spread its influence, stressing the importance of adopting a trans-/interdisciplinary methodology to formulate solutions that can effectively solve practical societal problems. part of this theory is ‘action research’, with its origins in social psychology (lewin 1946), which aimed at closing the gap between theory and practice. ull call for a similar holistic disciplinary approach, having the potential to become a significant research element in several disciplines (geography, economics, public policy, psychology, sociology, anthropology and several others) articulating actors, knowledge and processes. the future of the future city is interdisciplinary (keith et al. 2020). how to implement ull successfully? are we now in a better position than before to overcome the well-known obstacles faced by systems theory? in line with jones’ (2019) recent plea, i agree that geography has a significant contribution to make when it comes to identifying new strategies that allow us to better govern the future, aiming at contributing to more effective spatial justice. for example, roux and marron (2016) have demonstrated the role of urban geography in mapping living labs' geographical distribution. this close observation revealed the resolutely urban nature of these open-innovation systems that play an increasingly important role for metropolises, going hand-in-hand with economic growth and innovation. 106 fennia 199(1) (2021)reviews and essays the sustainable ‘smart city’, beyond technology smart cities lay their foundations on data and it is crucial to design infrastructures to effectively sort, store and analyse them. in this context, connectivity, security and privacy issues are closely related topics that have also been receiving a lot of attention. a significant part of contemporary issues in global contemporary society are consistently related to the future of cities. in a scenario of growing complexity, a variety of disciplines feel called to contribute towards better urban environments. urban geography renovates its relevance as the discipline that embodies research’s gravitational centre on cities and urban processes (walker 2012; wiig & wyly 2016). ull deeply impact interactions within cities, translating into structural and behavioural changes that it is relevant to further investigate in the context of urban geography, in particular in what concerns governance (caprotti & cowley 2017; kronsell & mukhtar-landgren 2018). technological innovation is at the centre stage of the smart city concept (sc) (yigitcanlar et al. 2019). concomitantly, it has been argued that the sc cannot rely on the potential of technology alone, but should deploy a well-designed policy framework (lam & ma 2019). the origins and definition of the sc concept confirm this, revealing that the true challenge resides not in technology, but governance. yigitcanlar and colleagues (2018) state that the smart city concept originated in the mid-1800s to describe new cities in the american west that were efficient and self-governed. this concept resurged in the 1990s under the concept of smart growth, referring mainly to sustainable urbanisation. since then, the sc concept has evolved to encompass any form of technological innovation in the planning, development, operation and management of cities. the term sc does not have a consensual definition, but up until recently, it seemed to focus on how to utilise information technology in the urban realm (goodspeed 2015). since then, no matter which definition we are dealing with, there seems to be a growing body of literature that points to the multidimensional character of the sc concept as encompassing other realms that go beyond technology (see literature review by yigitcanlar and others (2018), which presents and discusses twenty sc definitions, differentiating it from other concepts such as sustainable city, digital city, intelligent city, ubiquitous city, techno-centric city, creative city and knowledge city). smart cities are highly complex sociotechnical systems. information technology artefacts can play a role in social change, but they do not eliminate the social and political dimensions of cities (lara et al. 2016; almeida et al. 2018). moreover, when it comes to ‘innovation’, a concept frequently associated with the sc, it has been proved that, alone, it is not the sole ingredient for success in smart cities (gaffney & robertson 2016). nevertheless, innovation in the scope of sc tends to be understood exclusively in conjunction with knowledge and economic growth, which are linked as follows: the more sc policies stimulate the innovation that increases a city’s stock of knowledge, the greater the contribution to economic growth (as innovation is acknowledged to be one of its main drivers). this correlation, when measured, for example, through an increase of patents, meaning knowledge (caragliu & del bo 2018), reveals a very poor understanding of the concept of innovation. nowadays, the concept of innovation needs to be expanded and acknowledged as relevant beyond economics, as was the case with the concept of sustainability. for many centuries, the concept of innovation was perceived as disruptive and was not welcomed. however, during the 19th century, it became associated with mainstream economics and the idea of progress, and its success or failure was measured through the gross domestic product (gdp) (godin 2015). the concept of sustainable development had a decisive moment with the brundtland report (brundtland commission 1987) when it was claimed that it encompassed three pillars: environmental, social and economic, representing a significant turning point in public policies around the world, culminating more recently in the united nations 2030 sustainable development goals agenda (soeiro 2020a). this is why the emergence of the concept of ‘sustainable innovation’ is relevant (boons & mcmeekin 2019). it is still, somehow, a paradox because although sustainability has opened up its scope, innovation seems reluctant to. up until now, in heterodox economics (all the branches of which are against a neoliberal approach), the social and ecological realms have proved to be a concern under the concept of ‘social innovation’ (godin & gaglio 2019) – which is discussed below. 107fennia 199(1) (2021) diana soeiro in the last couple of years, recent literature has shown that technology and innovation concerning the sc lack the ecological and social realm. the recent concept of ‘smart urbanism’ (mcfarlane & söderström 2017) indicates a need to find alternative models beyond mainstream economics and technology. following the rationale of reference geographers like david harvey and edward w. soja, ull, in particular, were claimed to be recent contemporary elements that contribute to the neoliberal city (cardullo et al. 2018). goodspeed (2015, 11) argues for the need for a “sociotechnical theory of action that encompasses assumptions about the nature of urban problems and how they should be solved”. this is done by developing local municipal innovation and the incorporation of information technology into cooperative urban planning. and also by empirically investigating the role of contextual factors and their potential influence on sc governance components and outcomes. ull and social innovation: the foundations of ‘the future of cities’ a relevant methodology that aims to foster local governance innovation is ull, an open user-centred environment for networked innovation development (leminen & westerlund 2012) centred around a city or a given territory. ull are an open system but the methodology and definition are not consensual. according to schuurman, de marez and ballon (2017), the european living labs movement started in 2006 when the european commission officially declared its support by encouraging projects to advance, coordinate and promote a common european innovation system based on living labs. that same year, it established the european network of living labs (enoll) to foster innovation (ec 2016; enoll 2020). there are five contexts associated with living labs (schuurman et al. 2017): 1) an innovation system consisting of organised and structured multidisciplinary networks fostering interaction and collaboration, 2) real-life or in vivo monitoring of a social setting generally involving experimentation of a technology, 3) an approach for involving users in the product development process, 4) organisations facilitating the network, maintaining and developing its technological infrastructure and offering relevant services, and 5) the european movement itself. are ull an adequate methodology for promoting social innovation?1 to answer, i first investigate the theoretical origins of living labs. this takes us beyond the realm of governance and policy and leads us towards the dominion of system change, where innovation is perceived as a system that comprises technologies, social media (of innovation organisations) and institutions (both formal and informal) (boons & mcmeekin 2019, 19–20). to explore this connection, i start briefly by addressing the main references in systems theory (von bertalanffy, parsons, luhmann and agazzi), aiming at identifying its fundamentals and how it can contribute to a better understanding of the foundations of ull. furthermore, i look into the advantages and disadvantages of these foundations. second, at a more practical level, i reflect on the tension between government and governance, arguing along with economist mazzucato (2013, 2018) for a renewed understanding of government in innovation. i argue that cities and urban centres are key to understanding the relationship between both and are a powerful element for encouraging, in particular, social innovation. last, i assess whether ull methodology is adequate to promote social innovation. as a reference, i use lewin’s concept of ‘action research’, which, within systems theory, represents the complexity systems approach, which i identify as being the one that is closest to ull methodology. i analyse the advantages and disadvantages of ‘action research’ and ull at several stages: design, implementation, management, outputs and outcome phases. in this paper, i call for an encompassing vision so that urban innovation can move forward, beyond governance and technology, putting sustainability (economic, ecological and social) at the centre stage. we are interested to know if ‘action research’ and ull are the way to achieve this. can ull and ‘action research’ promote sustainable cities? innovation is no longer undertaken solely by research & development organisations or academic institutions. users are increasingly participating in all stages of innovation processes (leminen et al. 108 fennia 199(1) (2021)reviews and essays 2013). more importantly, innovation does not originally refer to technological innovation. rather, innovation is primarily a political concept (godin 2015, 101). to explore whether ull and ‘action research’ can promote sustainable cities, we begin by clarifying the concept of living labs and then proceed to address ‘action research’. living labs can be thematic or have a more territorial/regional basis (like ull). it is expected that ull become a more common methodology in the future (macrorie et al. 2019) and it has recently been acknowledged the ull play a significant role on sustainability transitions (von wirth et al. 2019). it is therefore important to understand its potential. bulkeley and colleagues (2019) propose a taxonomy of ull in order to facilitate implementation. this can be helpful because it can contribute to mitigate the link between ull and the perpetuation of a neoliberal governance that confines ull within traditional governance systems (perng & maalsen 2019). the integration of users into product development as co-producers is imperative for success in the living labs model because it reveals their latent needs and enables unforeseen outcomes (leminen & westerlund 2012). creating real-life test and experimentation environments, co-producers can co-create innovations in a trusted, open ecosystem that enables business and societal innovation. these are user-driven and human-centric events that employ four main activities: 1) co-creation: co-design by users and producers, 2) exploration: discovering emerging usages, behaviours and market opportunities, 3) experimentation: implementing live scenarios within communities of users, and 4) evaluation: assessment of concepts, products and services according to socio-ergonomic, socio-cognitive and socio-economic criteria (europeana 2020). i also use as a reference the concept of ‘action research’ created by psychologist lewin (1890–1947). burnes (2004) provides an in-depth analysis of the relationship between this concept and lewin’s work. here, i focus on the concept of ‘action research’, in line with lewin’s 1946 paper. the context in which the concept of ‘action research’ emerges can be found in lewin’s work, where he describes the beginning of a new stage of development in social sciences as one of the by-products of world war ii. he identifies three main tendencies that, having started before the war, gained new ground to quickly develop afterwards: 1) integrating social sciences, 2) moving from the description of social bodies to the dynamic problems of changing group life, and 3) developing new social research instruments and techniques. in general, this represents a change in attitude and, unlike the previous situation, there is a call for “a relatively widespread recognition of the necessity of developing better concepts and higher levels of theory” (lewin 1946, 5). this was the context that allowed for the growth of systems theory. in his 1946 paper, lewin reveals that the concept of ‘action research’ is created as a response to progress made by minority groups that have been having difficulty finding ways to maintain it and use it as a counterpressure, strong enough to reverse a trend. ‘action research’ is the concept that aims to respond to this challenge, facilitating intergroup relations and providing research that helps the practitioner: “research that produces nothing but books will not suffice” (lewin 1946, 35). lewin argues that (1946, 42–43) a strategy needs to be put in place to implement ‘action research’. in turn, to design a strategy, the dangers involved need to be taken into account, distinguishing between outside adversities and barriers to social science and the inner dangers of research procedures. the first refers to people who claim that we do not need any more social science to solve any problems. one can only attempt to answer this with better science. the second threat refers to “groups in power” (management, labour leaders, politicians, some branches of government, etc.). in lewin’s (1946, 43) own words: “somehow or other they all seem to be possessed by the fear that they could not do what they want to do if they, and others, would really know [sic] the facts”. to this he replies that it is necessary to identify fears that are legitimate, recognising the difference “between fact-finding and policy setting to carefully study the procedures by which fact-finding should be fed into the social machinery of legislation to produce a democratic effect” (ibid., 43). he identifies a third perceived threat held by practitioners that expresses the fear they have that researchers, in the end, will tell the community what to do and what not to do. the point lewin makes is that the researcher’s job is to provide information that provides the practitioner with better diagnosis and treatment options. but it is up to the practitioner to decide how or whether to use it – and it is important that the researcher is also aware of this (lewin 1946, 44). most immediately, what social scientists can do (apart from writing books) is find ways to empower minority groups elevating their sense of “group esteem and group loyalty” which are essential for all groups in society. 109fennia 199(1) (2021) diana soeiro in this paper, we find an outline that permits identification of the main concerns to bear in mind concerning ull at any stage: design, implementation, management, outputs and outcome phases. when it comes to creating new tools that promote interaction between different actors and stakeholders, these will depend on imagination and available new technologies. however, the threats identified by lewin remarkably remain the same to the present day. can these be overcome more effectively using ull methodology, which could be said to be an instrument situated beyond governance, but not coinciding with government either? as it is both an upper hierarchy institution above government in some respects and also a supporter of bottom-up initiatives in some others, can the european union, as a supranational entity, be an adequate framework for facilitating ull and leading us to sustainability? as proposed by frantzeskaki and van steenbergen (2018, 242), ull are an embedded methodology. this means that “a lab can be “dropped” in a certain place […] but then the actual design practices and processes are context-dependent”. ull always imply to create mechanisms that generate a social dynamic that slowly stands on its own. this can be a lengthy process, but to conceive successful solutions that address future challenges, it is a necessary one. conclusion technological innovation is at the centre of urban development and smart cities. however, i claim that the biggest challenge is at governance level in the social realm. smart cities favour technology, translating innovation into knowledge and the number of patents registered. but how can social innovation be designed, managed and assessed? are ull an effective methodology? i have demonstrated that ull stem from systems theory. this is important to establish that to effectively promote sustainable cities, which can find a balance between the economic, ecological and social realm, not only is it necessary to go beyond technology, but also to go beyond governance. mazzucato (2013) shows us that governments should not be expended and that they should actively assume a leadership role when it comes to innovation. i go back to the question that motivated lewin (1946, 1947) to create ‘action research’: can ull promote positive change that lasts? at the time, lewin answered that social scientists can only contribute to formulating better diagnoses and treatments, informing practitioners. what happens next and how the information is used will be there for the taking. nowadays, we are one step further along and the gap between those who perform the diagnoses and treatments and those who design and implement public polices has shrunk. therefore, any strategy concerning the realm of cities should strive for a balance between bottom-up initiatives and top-down policies in its conceptual approach and implementation plan. this encompasses identifying relevant stakeholders, acknowledging each stakeholder’s interests and conceptual language and carefully designing communication strategies. a mechanism should be put in place to constantly adapt, before, during and after the project, in order to effectively manage emerging tensions and assure a long-lasting impact. as we have seen, the four main activities of living labs are: co-creation, exploration, experimentation and evaluation. however, these just focus on implementation as a process while dismissing established systems. ull can only become a successful methodology if it can find a balance between “process and system”, between experimentation and pre-existing systems. otherwise, the somewhat ethereal, temporary nature of ull, combined with its experimental nature, will fail to deliver when it comes to concrete outputs and long-term outcomes. following its experimental phase, it should follow a strategy that incorporates part of its results into the system, contributing to the system’s renewal and improvement. only then will the process of ull be concluded. ideally, ull should be constantly active, working closely in parallel with existing systems and using action research methodology able to accurately inform future public policies. in this sense, i claim that the biggest challenge to the successful implementation of the sc concept is the design of innovative governance systems. this is what will allow us to have sustainable sc. ull can be a relevant methodology that allows us to transition between an old governance paradigm (torn between government and governance) to a new governance paradigm. so that ull can be efficient and effective in leading us in this direction: 1) along with ruhlandt (2018) and van geenhuizen (2018), i call for comparative qualitative analysis to better assess the 110 fennia 199(1) (2021)reviews and essays results of the implementation of living labs across all stages – there is a wide-ranging difference of perspectives when it comes to smart cities governance and studies are more focused on one city and qualitative in nature, and 2) the public sector and public administration need to be subjected to the living labs methodology (gascó 2017) so it can implement new open social innovation strategies that lead the way for other actors and stakeholders. as for the contribution of geography to this, it is very positive to see that research is beginning to emerge concerning this subject. i highlight two main directions that i think have high potential to be developed further: 1) the impact of the use of technology in urban environments (macrorie et al. 2019), and 2) the contribution of geography to future studies to anticipate challenges and better prepare the future (jones 2019). notes 1 a mapping of the concept is provided by van der have and rubalcaba (2016): social innovation is grounded in four distinct intellectual communities arising through a somewhat organised diffusion process: 1) community psychology, 2) creativity research, 3) social and societal challenges, and 4) local development. acknowledgements i would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and dr. kirsi pauliina kallio, the editor-in-chief of fennia, for their valuable comments and suggestions. this research was supported by the h2020 european funding on the project “rock: regeneration and optimization of cultural heritage in creative and knowledge cities”, hosted by instituto de ciências sociais, universidade de lisboa, under the grant agreement number 730280. references agazzi, e. (1978) theory and the problem of reductionism. erkenntnis (1975–) 12(3) 339–358. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20010611 agazzi, e. (2014) scientific objectivity and its contexts. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04660-0 almeida, v. a., doneda, d. & costa, e. m. (2018) humane smart cities: the need for governance. ieee internet computing 22 91–95. https://doi.org/10.1109/mic.2018.022021671 von bertalanffy, l. (1968) general system theory: foundations, development, applications. george brazziler, new york. boons, f. & mcmeekin, a. (eds.) (2019) handbook of sustainable innovation. edward elgar, cheltenham and northampton, ma. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788112574 brundtland commission (1987) our common future. oxford university press, oxford. bulkeley, h., marvin s., palgan y.v., mccormick, k., breitfuss-loidi, m., mai, l., von wirth, t. & frantzeskaki, n. (2019) urban living laboratories: conducting the experimental city? european urban and regional studies 26(4) 317–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776418787222 burnes, b. (2004) kurt lewin and complexity theories: back to the future? journal of change management 4(4) 309–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/1469701042000303811 caprotti, f. & cowley, r. (2017) interrogating urban experiments. urban geography 38(9) 1441–1450. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1265870 caragliu, a. & del bo, c. f. (2018) smart innovative cities: the impact of smart city policies on urban innovation. technological forecasting and social change 142 373–383. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2018.07.022 cardullo, p., kitchin, r. & di feliciantonio, c. (2018) living labs and vacancy in the neoliberal city. cities 73 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2017.10.008 chronéer, d., ståhlbröst, a. & habibipour, a. (2018) towards a unified definition of urban living labs. presented at the ispim innovation conference – innovation, the name of the game, stockholm, sweden on 17–20 june 2018, international society for professional innovation management (ispim). <http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3a1230360&dswid=4491>. 17.6.2020. ec (2016) the european network of living labs (enoll) explained. european commission. <https:// ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/european-network-living-labs-enoll-explained>. 17.6.2020. enoll (2020) european network of living labs (enoll) official website. <https://enoll.org/>. 17.6.2020. 111fennia 199(1) (2021) diana soeiro europeana (2020) introducing enoll, the european network of living labs. europeana. <https://pro. europeana.eu/post/introducing-enoll-the-european-network-of-living-labs>. 17.6.2020. frantzeskaki, n. & van steenbergen, f. (2018) the importance of place for urban transition experiments: understanding the embeddedness of urban living labs. in marvin, s., bulkeley, h., mai, l., mccormick, k. & palgan, y. v. (eds.) urban living labs: experimenting with city futures, 231–247. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315230641 gaffney, c. & robertson, c. (2016) smarter than smart: rio de janeiro’s flawed emergence as a smart city. journal of urban technology 25(3) 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2015.1102423 gascó, m. (2017) living labs: implementing open innovation in the public sector. government information quarterly 34(1) 90–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2016.09.003 van geenhuizen, m. (2018) a framework for the evaluation of living labs as boundary spanners in innovation. environment and planning c: politics and space 36(7) 1280–1298. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654417753623 godin, b. (2015) innovation contested: the idea of innovation over the centuries. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315855608 godin, b. & gaglio, g. (2019) how does innovation sustain ‘sustainable innovation’? in boons, f. & mcmeekin, a. (eds.) handbook of sustainable innovation, 27–37. edward elgar, cheltenham, uk, and northampton, ma. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788112574.00007 goodspeed, r. (2015) smart cities: moving beyond urban cybernetics to tackle wicked problems. cambridge journal of regions, economy and society 8(1) 79–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu013 van der have, r. p. & rubalcaba, l. (2016) social innovation research: an emerging area of innovation studies? research policy 45(9) 1923–1935. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.06.010 hobsbawm, e. j. (2012) nations and nationalism since 1780. cambridge university press, cambridge. hossain, m., leminen, s. & westerlund, m. (2018) a systematic review of living lab literature. journal of cleaner production [online jan 9 2019]. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3307055 jones, r. (2019) governing the future and the search for spatial justice: wales’ well-being of future generations act. fennia 197(1) 8–24. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.77781 keith, m., o'clery, n., parnell, s. & revi, a. (2020) the future of the future city? the new urban sciences and a peak urban interdisciplinary disposition. cities 105 102820. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102820 kronsell, a. & mukhtar-landgren, d. (2018) experimental governance: the role of municipalities in urban living labs. european planning studies 26(5) 988–1007. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1435631 lara, a. p., moreira da costa, e., furlani, t. z. & yigitcanlar, t. (2016) smartness that matters: towards a comprehensive and human-centred characterisation of smart cities. journal of open innovation: technology, market, and complexity 2(8). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40852-016-0034-z lam, p. t. i. & ma, r. (2019) potential pitfalls in the development of smart cities and mitigation measures: an exploratory study. cities 91 146–156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.11.014 leminen, s. & westerlund, m. (2012) towards innovation in living labs networks. international journal of product development 17 (1–2). https://doi.org/10.1504/ijpd.2012.051161 leminen, s., westerlund, m. & nyström, a-g. (2013) on becoming creative consumers – user roles in living labs networks. international journal of technology marketing 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1504/ijtmkt.2014.058082 lewin, k. (1946) action research and minority problems. journal of social issues 2(4) 34–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x lewin, k. (1947) frontiers in group dynamics: concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change. human relations 1(1) 5–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100103 luhmann, n. (2013) introduction to systems theory. translated by peter gilgen. polity press, uk. lupova-henry, e. & dotti, n. f. (2019) governance of sustainable innovation: moving beyond the hierarchy-market-network trichotomy? a systematic literature review using the ‘who-how-what’ framework. journal of cleaner production 210 738–748. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.11.068 macrorie, r., marvin, s. & while, a. (2019) robotics and automation in the city: a research agenda. urban geography [online dec 31 2019] https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2019.1698868 mazzucato, m. (2013) the entrepreneurial state: debunking public vs. private sector myths. anthem press, london. mazzucato, m. (2018) the value of everything: making and taking in the global economy. public affairs, new york. mcfarlane, c. & söderström, o. (2017) on alternative smart cities. city 21(3–4) 312–328. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1327166 112 fennia 199(1) (2021)reviews and essays mukhtar-landgren, d., kronsell, a., palgan, y. v. & von wirth, t. (2019) municipalities as enablers in urban experimentation. journal of environmental policy & planning 21(6) 718–733. https://doi.org/10.1080/1523908x.2019.1672525 parsons, t. (1991) the social system. routledge, london. perng, s.-y. & maalsen, s. (2019) civic infrastructure and the appropriation of the corporate smart city. annals of the american association of geographers 110(2) 507–515. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1674629 pol, e. & ville, s. (2009) social innovation: buzz word or enduring term? the journal of socio-economic 38(6) 878–885. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2009.02.011 porter, t., & córdoba, j. (2008) three views of systems theories and their implications for sustainability education. journal of management education 33(3) 323–347. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562908323192 rock (2020) <https://rockproject.eu/>. 17.6.2020. roux, e. & marron, q. (2016) observing living labs to imagine tomorrow's metropolises. open livinglab days 2016, european network of living labs, aug 2016, montréal, canada. <https://hal.archivesouvertes.fr/hal-01551405>. 17.6.2020. ruhlandt, r. w. s. (2018) the governance of smart cities: a systematic literature review. cities 81 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.02.014 sabatier, p. a. (1986) top-down and bottom-up approaches to implementation research: a critical analysis and suggested synthesis. journal of public policy 6(01) 21–48. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0143814x00003846 schuurman, d., de marez, l. & ballon, p. (2017) living labs: a systematic literature review. university of ghent. <https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/7026155/file/7026171>. 17.6.2020. soeiro, d. (2020a) smart cities, well-being and good business: the 2030 agenda and the role of knowledge in the era of industry 4.0. in matos, f., vilarinhos, v., salavisa, i., edvinsson, l. & massaro, m. (eds.) knowledge, people and digital transformation: approaches for a sustainable future, 41–53. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40390-4_5 soeiro, d. (2020b) the concept of atmosphere: from goethe to bratton – how atmosphere is key to create smart cities. in abusaada, h., salama, a. m. & elshater, a. (eds.) reconstructing urban ambiance in smart public places, 23–40. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-3856-2.ch002 taylor, l. (2020) exploitation as innovation: research ethics and the governance of experimentation in the urban living lab. regional studies [online] https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2020.1826421 tomor, z., meijer, a., michels, a. & geertman, s. (2019) smart governance for sustainable cities: findings from a systematic literature review. journal of urban technology 26(4) 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2019.1651178 un (2020a) united nations agenda 2030 website. <https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org>. 17.6.2020. un (2020b) united nations – department of economic and social affairs. participation and accountability. <https://publicadministration.un.org/en/developmentmgt>. 17.6.2020. walker, d. m. (2012) urban geography. in stoltman, j. p. (ed.) 21st century geography: a reference handbook, 289–300. sage, los angeles, ca. wiig, a. & wyly, e. (2016) introduction: thinking through the politics of the smart city. urban geography 37 (4) 485–493. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1178479 von wirth, t., fuenfschilling, l., frantzeskaki, n. & coenen, l. (2019) impacts of urban living labs on sustainability transitions: mechanisms and strategies for systemic change through experimentation. european planning studies 27(2) 229–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1504895 yigitcanlar, t. (2016) technology and the city: systems, applications and implications. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315739090 yigitcanlar, t., kamruzzaman, m., buys, l., ioppolo, g., sabatini-marques, j., da costa, e. m. & yun, j. j. (2018) understanding “smart cities”: intertwining development drivers with desired outcomes in a multidimensional framework. cities 81 145–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.04.003 yigitcanlar, t., kamruzzaman, m., foth, m., sabatini, j., da costa, e., & ioppolo, g. (2019) can cities become smart without being sustainable? a systematic review of the literature. sustainable cities and society 45 348–365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.11.033 combating the shocks of the 'unplayful' field. alone! – commentary to taylor urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa91074 doi: 10.11143/fennia.91074 reflections combating the shocks of the 'unplayful' field. alone! – commentary to taylor shenika mcfarlane-morris mcfarlane-morris, s. (2020) combating the shocks of the 'unplayful' field. alone! – commentary to taylor. fennia 198(1–2) 214–216. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.91074 this brief reflection is centered on the article, “the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher.” the author, stephen taylor, should be commended for his bold move to detail his experiences with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) which were subsequent to the commencement of his doctoral fieldwork in a violent location of south africa. the work of taylor is stark evidence of the kaleidoscope of challenges surrounding fieldwork that the early career geographer oftentimes bear on their own, which potentially compromise their mental and physical well-being. compounding these challenges is the cursoriness of preparedness of fledgling geographers for immersed fieldwork, and secondly, the availability of organized support systems for such individuals, once they are in the field. on these premises, i call for action amongst universities to improve the manner in which they prepare ethnographic researchers for fieldwork, particularly those to be conducted in developing countries. keywords: fieldwork, qualitative research, ethnography, immersion, early career geographer, field shenika mcfarlane-morris, school of humanities, church teachers’ college: mandeville, 40 manchester road, p.o. box 41, mandeville, jamaica. e-mail: smcfar5@gmail.com it is inevitable that “qualitative research that seeks to explore, understand, and explain the social world…brings researchers into contact with people” (clark 2008, 953). i have never conducted qualitative fieldwork outside the country of my birth and upbringing – jamaica. yet, even within my own country i have had encounters in the field which compromised my sense of safety (mcfarlanemorris 2019). my earliest days of fieldwork were in high school and college, but much of these activities were group-based. advancing to graduate studies in geography, gave me the experience of solo fieldwork, which proved to be very different from what i was previously accustomed to. i can clearly recall my days of collecting data for my master’s thesis on cultural tourism in the inner city community of trench town, home of the ‘king of reggae music’, bob marley, located in kingston. during this time, there were spates of gun violence, which of course threatened my safety as a lone female researcher. although there were no personal encounters with violence on the days i spent there, this was by far © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 215shenika mcfarlane-morrisfennia 198(1–2) (2020) the field in which i have felt the most vulnerable. thankfully, it remained a feeling as the residents were quite welcoming and co-operative during my data collection. reading taylor’s (2019) bold account of the anxieties and traumas he experienced while conducting doctoral fieldwork in south africa, brought back memories of my time in this inner-city community. taylor’s (2019) description of his experiences illustrates that ‘immersive’ fieldwork can bring more bitter than sweet to a young researcher. as i will expound on later in this discussion, geography departments and universities in the developed world should consider taking more meaningful roles in the preparation of graduate students before the commencement of fieldwork. indeed, the young ethnographic researcher can be “emotionally disturbed by … unexpected awkward situations” that unfold during data collection (li 2008, 106). yet, many researchers typically remain silent about such disturbances and traumas. taylor’s bravery in breaking this general hush, especially from the perspective of a male, is particularly relevant and timely, as it has been predominantly females who open up about their fieldwork challenges. one such female is ross (2015, 183), a caucasian canadian female who did ethnographic fieldwork in the caribbean. she explains that “ultimately, the combination of harassment and perpetrated assaults forced me to develop a number of defensive strategies that stood in seeming contrast to feminist concerns with reducing distance and power in the course of effective qualitative research.” it is clear from the qualitative research literature that the experiences of both male and female graduates vary but there are also common threads connecting many of the reports, particularly concerns of safety and distress. there are a few considerations that can be used to combat the shocks of fieldwork. the first point to note is that researchers from developed countries should recognize that the social, political and economic landscapes of the developing world have glaring contrast to those of the developed world. the developing world is often represented as places of violence, impoverishment, oppression and in some cases, resentment against caucasians which could potentially have adverse consequences for acceptance of and interaction with researchers. this matter is summed up in the words of koen, wassenaar and mamotte (2017, 5), who studied clinical trials in africa, that in south africa in particular, for a long time, black people have felt very exploited as the subjects of research. so, very often, when the subject, the community, is a black one, the community itself will say: ‘why aren't you studying whites? why is it now that these bloody researchers are continually studying us, black people?’ therefore, it should not be surprising if some natives in this and similar contexts display negative attitudes towards research and researchers of other races. in the case of taylor (2019, 189), he “considered [his] (white) body to now be a source of vulnerability, or a marker that [he] was unwelcome” in these predominantly black neighborhoods. although this was not a primary focus of his article, it would have been interesting for him to shed some light about how his traumatic encounters impacted the data collection process itself and the bearing it had on the research, by extension. secondly, and relating to my first point, is that graduate researchers are generally unprepared to face fieldwork, particularly in the developing world. this paucity in preparedness largely stems from the cursory approach of many universities and departments in preparing graduate students for fieldwork. there might be instances of fieldwork workshops as well as field risk assessments, but these generally fall short in increasing the graduate researcher’s readiness for the field, particularly along the lines of responding to dangerous or mentally deteriorating situations. as taylor (2019, 187) indicates in reference to his risk assessment, “the form did not encourage reflection on risks likely to impact mental health or well-being, and these were not raised as concerns by the scrutiny panel.” he further maintains that “following news of the risk assessment approval, a member of the faculty recommended via email that i should ‘drop everything, get onto the first plane you can, and move into the townships; going immediately is the only way to finish the phd and a couple of publications in three years.’” it is pertinent that, at the end of the day, the young researcher takes full responsibility for every decision he or she makes in the field, as rightly mentioned by taylor (2019). however, greater responsibility can be taken by academic institutions to prepare their students for qualitative fieldwork. a significant degree of care and time is inputted into ensuring that no harm is done to human subjects 216 reflections fennia 198(1–2) (2020) by boards of ethics within universities. but what are the ways in which these academic institutions can militate against possibilities of harm being done to their ethnographic researchers in the field? i am therefore proposing that more experienced geographers within and even outside of the various geography departments be recruited to share their field experiences at field workshops. these narratives should enrichen the information being disbursed with the hope of increasing the preparedness of students. additionally, considerable amount of time should be spent in carefully assessing the risk of the fieldwork and at the same time offer some recommendations to the students. another possibility is that students could be encouraged to invest some time to read up publications of early career geographers’ experiences in the field in the developing world, such as mandiyanike (2009), ross (2015) and zhao (2017). these readings should help to prepare the young geographer at least mentally for some of the realities of conducting fieldwork in the developing world. next, i am proposing that universities and geography departments implement and/or strengthen the support network for their students going overseas to conduct fieldwork. students who are conducting research in their native land, are more likely to be able to access the support of their families and friends who live there. but those who are new to the country or region, are often left on their own, with the exception of minor support from nearby universities or in some cases, nongovernmental organizations (ngos). i am suggesting that universities consider implementing a helpline through their office of graduate studies or research, in collaboration with universities’ counsellors which fieldworkers should be able to call or email in case they are overwhelmed or faced with uncertainties. thesis supervisors play significant roles in assisting graduate students in the field, but they cannot provide the relevant support single-handedly. moreover, in many cases, and as revealed by taylor (2019, 192), graduate students typically do not divulge ‘personal’ field experiences freely to their supervisors as “emotional and psychological issues are still considered to be a purely personal matter, with their place in the professionalized space of research remaining unwelcome.” but since “the best long-term treatment is talking” (taylor 2019, 193), i suggest that the talking starts sooner than later through the encouragement of the use of professional counselling services and mental assessments post-fieldwork. waiting until it is later could mean that the emotional issues become entrenched and may lead to more serious behavioural and mental challenges. acknowledgements i would sincerely like to thank editors of fennia, kirsi pauliina kallio and james riding, for the opportunity to reflect on this eye-opening paper by stephen taylor. references clark, t. (2008) were over-researched here! sociology 42(5) 953–970. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038508094573 koen, j., wassenaar, d. & mamotte, n. (2017) the 'over-researched community': an ethics analysis of stakeholder views at two south african hiv prevention research sites. social science & medicine 194 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.10.005 li, j. (2008) ethical challenges in participant observation: a reflection on ethnographic fieldwork. the qualitative report 13(1) 100–115. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol13/iss1/8 mandiyanike, d. (2009) the dilemma of conducting research back in your own country as a returning student – reflections of research fieldwork in zimbabwe. area 41(1) 64–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2008.00843.x mcfarlane-morris, s. (2019) “home sweet home?” struggles of intracultural “betweenness” of doctoral fieldwork in my home country of jamaica. area 52(2) 394–400. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12580 ross, k. (2015) “no sir, she was not a fool in the field”: gendered risks and sexual violence in immersed cross-cultural fieldwork. the professional geographer 67(2) 180–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2014.907705 taylor, s. (2019) the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher. fennia 197(2) 183–199. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.84792 zhao, y. (2017) doing fieldwork the chinese way: a returning researcher’s insider/outsider status in her home town. area 49(2) 185–191. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12314 untitled origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of the river vantaanjoki, southern finland, as indicated by fluvial sediments matti tikkanen and olli ruth tikkanen, matti and olli ruth (2003). origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of the river vantaanjoki, southern finland, as indicated by fluvial sediments. fennia 181:1, pp. 69–83. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the city of helsinki was founded in 1550 at the mouth of the river vantaanjoki on the gulf of finland. there is a clearly distinguishable overgrown river bed located to the west of the present channel which would seem far too large for the minor stream flowing through it nowadays. the aim here was to determine whether this stream and its valley do in fact represent an ancient channel of the larger river, for how long this channel functioned and how and when it ceased to do so. the problem was approached by means of morphological surveys, corings, stratigraphic analyses and radiocarbon datings. it may be concluded from the shoreline displacement data and the topography of the area that the threshold of the ancient channel emerged from beneath the sea around 4500 bp (5100 cal. bp). subsequently two shallow lakes developed at approximately the same altitude around 4000–3500 bp (4500–3800 cal. bp), later drying up as the thresholds that retained them were eroded away. a channel some 50–70 m broad, 5–8 m deep and 8 km in length was created in the valley of the river. the channel began to fill rapidly with fluvial sediment around 2200 bp (2200 cal. bp), however, once the present course of the river was opened up over a low glaciofluvial ridge which had previously restrained its waters in the east. as the new channel gained in depth, the flow in the old one came to an end around 2000 bp (1900 cal. bp), by which time substantial quantities of fluvial sediment had accumulated in it. matti tikkanen and olli ruth: laboratory of physical geography. department of geography. p.o. box 64. fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: matti.tikkanen@helsinki.fi, olli.ruth@helsinki.fi. ms received 5th february 2003. introduction rivers are constantly eroding, transporting and depositing sediments, thereby shaping their channels and drainage basins, although there are numerous interfering factors such as tectonic effects, mass movements and glacial activity that force them to perform these actions under radically altered circumstances. tectonic movements have led to changes in the courses of rivers on the upper reaches of the rhine and danube in central europe, for instance (becker-haumann 2001), while the creation of the andes mountains in south america during the late miocene eventually prevented the waters of the amazon and orinoco from flowing north into the caribbean sea and diverted them to their present routes eastwards into the atlantic ocean (hoorn et al. 1995). the rivers of finland are young by comparison, having arisen since the last glaciation, so that they have not in general had time to erode very deep channels for themselves. thus many of them are still flowing in preglacial valleys, on top of thick layers of glacial and postglacial sediment (koutaniemi 1979, 1987). the largest river valleys that have been cut down into clay sediments are located in southwestern finland and are about 30 m deep (aartolahti 1975). changes in river channels have nevertheless taken place here, too, in response to tilting of the terrain as a consequence of land uplift. 70 fennia 181: 1 (2003)matti tikkanen and olli ruth the greatest alterations in the courses of rivers were nevertheless those that took place in the icefree areas during the pleistocene, when the vast glaciers prevented them from flowing north in accordance with the slope of the terrain. icedammed lakes arose in northern eurasia and in front of the glacial margin in north america, where periodic disastrous discharges from the missoula ice lake towards the valley of the columbia river eroded the now dry channelled scabland terrain (bretz 1923; baker & nummedal 1978; baker & bunker 1985; eronen 1991; grosswald 1998; baker 2002). there were also numerous ice lakes in the supra-aquatic areas of finland during the deglaciation, and the discharge channels of these differed greatly from the present-day river systems (miettinen 1996; saarelainen & vanne 1997; tikkanen & oksanen 2002). the tilting of the land surface that took place during the holocene is clearly reflected in features such as the differences in the heights of the highest markers of ancient shorelines, which are located around 220 m a.s.l. in the area north of the bothnian bay (saarnisto 1981) but only at about 100 m a.s.l. in south-eastern finland in spite of the greater age of the latter (tikkanen & oksanen 2002). these major changes in height have meant that the major waterway systems of the inland parts of finland have changed their outflow routes in the course of the post-glacial period, many of them several times (saarnisto 1971; tikkanen 1990, 2002). their original outflow rivers were located in the north-west, but as tilting of the land surface proceeded, new routes opened up to the south, mostly in the interval 8000–4500 bp (tikkanen 1995; tikkanen & seppä 2001). the most recent natural change in an outlet channel was that affecting lake längelmävesi in south-western finland, in ad 1640 (blomqvist 1926; jones 1977). not all alterations in outlet channels have caused far-reaching changes in the watercourses themselves, however, and some have taken place only as a consequence of gradual developments in river valleys (koutaniemi 1987). also, there are many rivers in finland that have multiple outlets or bifurcations in their course at various points. the most devious watercourse in the country is probably the karvianjoki river system, which flows into the gulf of finland through three rivers of different names and has at least five internal bifurcations (kuusisto 1984). it has also been proposed that the river vantaanjoki, which flows into the gulf of finland at helsinki, may have had a second outflow branch at one time that has subsequently dried up (petterson 1925; hyyppä 1935, 1950a, 1950b; roos 1950). the channel in question is located in the western part of helsinki, in the valley now occupied by the river mätäjoki. the size of the valley, at least, is out of proportion with the small stream currently flowing through it and is suggestive of the ancient course of a large river, but no research has been carried out to date to establish whether this was really another branch of the river vantaanjoki and when it functioned as such. the aims of the present work were therefore to determine 1) whether the valley of the present-day river mätäjoki once served as a second channel of the river vantaanjoki, or possibly as its only channel, 2) when the channel was formed and for how long it functioned in this capacity, 3) what length of the present mätäjoki valley served as an outflow channel for the larger river, and 4) what factors caused that channel to dry up. material and methods for the above purposes, precise levellings and corings were carried out both in the valley of the present-day stream known as mätäjoki and on both sides of the threshold dividing the two basins. some reference measurements and corings were also made in the present-day channel of the river vantaanjoki. altogether about an 8 km stretch of the ancient channel was examined. the measurements were aimed at determining how wide and deep the assumed ancient channel must have been and what types of sediments were deposited on its bed. a longitudinal section of the river mätäjoki and several cross-sections were constructed on the basis of the measurements and by reference to cartographic data. the thickness of the sediments and depth of the river bed were determined using a russian corer (jowsey 1966) with a chamber of length 0.5 m and diameter 10 cm. the measurements were also used to calculate the water throughput in different parts of the channel. the nature of the sediment was also examined while taking the cores, and the depths of clearly distinguishable boundaries between horizons were measured. a total of five long sequences were taken for more detailed analyses in the laboratory, including loss-on-ignition (loi), to deterfennia 181: 1 (2003) 71origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of… mine the organic content of the sediment (bengtsson & enell 1986). the cores, of which the longest was 560 cm in length and the shortest 190 cm, were sampled at five centimetre intervals for analytical purposes, and a total of five samples were taken from two of them for radiocarbon dating. the dates were obtained at the helsinki university dating laboratory and calibrated with the calib 4.3 program (stuiver et al. 1998). the timing of the origins of the ancient channel was assessed with the aid of shoreline displacement curves constructed for nearby areas (ristaniemi & glückert 1987; seppä & tikkanen 1998; seppä et al. 2000). the area and its emergence from the sea the valley of the river mätäjoki is located in the western part of the city of helsinki and the southern part of the urban district of vantaa (fig. 1). it begins north of kaivoksela and the small stream that occupies it flows into the gulf of finland at fig. 1. the area studied and its emergence from the sea. 1. areas that emerged before 4000 bp (4500 cal. bp), 2. areas that emerged 4000–2000 bp (4500–1900 cal. bp), 3. areas that emerged after 2000 bp (1900 cal. bp), 4. presentday water bodies, 5. presentday rivers and streams, 6. dried-up djupbäck channel, 7. boundary of the mätäjoki drainage basin, 8. prehistoric dwelling sites. 72 fennia 181: 1 (2003)matti tikkanen and olli ruth the head of the bay of iso-huopalahti. the present-day river vantaanjoki turns eastwards at kaivoksela and enters the gulf of finland in the northern part of vanhankaupunginlahti, the “bay of the old city”, the point at which the city of helsinki was founded in 1550. the river vantaanjoki is almost 100 km long and its upper branches derive from the area north of the first salpausselkä ice marginal formation (tikkanen 1989). its largest tributary is the river keravanjoki, which enters it at a point east of kaivoksela. the present channel of the river mätäjoki is about nine kilometres long and has a total drop of 17.6 m, of which 13 m is covered in the last two kilometres of its length (ruth 1998), largely on account of a waterfall and stretch of rapids at pitäjänmäki. the river above that point has a gradient of only 0.6 m km–1, so that the water in the stream flows very slowly. the mätäjoki valley above the rapids is largely peatland and broadens out and increases in depth towards the headwaters. at the uppermost point there is a further broadening of the valley that is again covered by a peat horizon, although it also features a number of pools. above the wetlands is the rocky threshold of djupbäck, at an altitude of about 21 metres. it is difficult to define the true altitude any more precisely because the majority of the threshold area is now buried beneath roads. east of this threshold, however, lies an approximately 400 m stretch of dried-up river bed which connects the mätäjoki valley with the present-day river vantaanjoki (fig. 2). the southern part of this channel has been filled in, so that it is no longer possible to determine its original width, but its full extent can be appreciated from old photographs (cf. petterson 1925; hyyppä 1935). the threshold is about five metres higher than the present-day surface of the river vantaanjoki at this point and three metres fig. 2. topography and surficial deposits of the bifurcation area. 1. till and exposed bedrock, 2. sand and gravel, 3. clay and silt, 4. water, 5. ancient channel, 6. threshold and its altitude, 7. embankment of retained water basin, 8. rapids, 9. road. contours are drawn at 5 m intervals. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 73origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of… above the surface of the wetlands from which the river mätäjoki rises. it may be deduced from shoreline displacement data (ristaniemi & glückert 1987; seppä & tikkanen 1998; seppä et al. 2000) that there was still a long, narrow bay of the sea extending inland as far north as the djupbäck threshold around 4000 bp (4500 cal. bp) (fig. 1), although the surrounding area was already in a supraaquatic position and the beginnings of the mätäjoki channel had formed. by around 2000 bp (1900 cal. bp) the shoreline in the mätäjoki valley had retreated to the point of the waterfall at pitäjänmäki and that on the lower reaches of the present-day river vantaanjoki was also close to the current estuary (fig. 1). some signs of the oldest known human settlement in the area have been encountered in the surroundings of the mätäjoki valley and the bay to which it led. the oldest comb-ceramic culture dwelling sites to be found here, dated to around 4300 bp (erä-esko 1980; huuhka 1990), were located close to the shoreline of that time (fig. 1). it is particularly significant, however, that the ancient settlement was grouped around the mätäjoki valley, while few signs of early human presence have been detected in the present-day eastward outflow branch of the river vantaanjoki. permanent agriculture commenced in the area in the 14th century and continued at an intensive level until the 1960s. the majority of the forests had been cleared for arable land by the beginning of the 20th century and there were three villages and a number of large estates in the vicinity (sundman 1980). suburban building connected with the helsinki conurbation began during the 1960s, and the mätäjoki basin now has a population of around 70 000 people (ruth 1998; ruth & tikkanen 2001). results we will now consider the results of the fieldwork and laboratory investigations focussed on an area about 8 km in length that begins at the presentday course of the river vantaanjoki and continues to a point just north of the pitäjänmäki waterfall on the lower reaches of the river mätäjoki. the locations of the surveying and coring sites are indicated in fig. 3. profile 1. a cross-section of the river vantaanjoki was constructed for a point below the bifurcation of the dried-up djupbäck channel and the present-day channel of the river. the maximum depth of the channel on this section is about seven metres, of which the water depth accounts for three metres. the current width of the river at the water surface is about 40 metres and that of the channel at its upper edges about 75 m (fig. 3, profile 1). the deepest point in the channel is close to its eastern bank, and the bed is mostly covered by coarse sand and gravel containing some small stones, a material that is evidently associated with a n–s-oriented glaciofluvial deposit, the highest crests of which rise above the clay plain at a number of points close to the river (fig. 2). this material is so coarse that it could scarcely have been transported to the site by the river itself, which has a slow rate of flow in this area. profile 2. the dried-up djupbäck channel becomes steadily shallower from the bank of the river vantaanjoki towards the bedrock threshold at kaivoksela, being initially 4–5 metres deep. its original width cannot be determined, as it has been filled in along its southern edge, but the survey by petterson (1925) suggested that it must have been about 60–70 metres across in a natural state, i.e. practically as broad as the presentday channel of the river vantaanjoki. the form of the channel at the threshold can similarly no longer be determined with accuracy, as a large part of it has been filled in in connection with road construction work, although again we can refer to the measurements reported by petterson (1925), which indicate a total width of at least 55 metres and a maximum depth of 1–2 metres (fig. 3, profile 2). given a flow rate of 1–2 m s–1, this could easily mean a discharge of 100–200 m3 s–1 over the threshold. coring site 3. the old channel opens out below the threshold to form a partially open mire about 200 m in diameter and with its surface more or less at the level of the surrounding terrain, so that it is difficult to perceive any true river channel. there are a few small pools in the eastern part of this mire area (figs. 2 and 4) with their water surface at an altitude of 17.6 m (ruth 1998). cores taken in the mire indicate that the surface of the mineral soil lies at a depth of 7–8 metres and that the base of the basin varies in quality from bedrock or stones to sand or a bluish-grey marine clay. there is also an extensive area over which the surface peat is found to be in effect floating on water, so that it subsides under foot. the whole mire area thus obviously rep74 fennia 181: 1 (2003)matti tikkanen and olli ruth fig. 3. the profiles and their locations. 1. water, 2. built area, 3. green area, 4. sampling site, 5. profile, 6. profile and sampling site, 7. main road, 8. railway, 9. stream and dried-up channel, 10. coring site, 11. present-day channel of the river mätäjoki, 12. sediment-filled ancient channel, 13 landfill, 14. levée, 15. bedrock. profile 2 is based on survey details published by petterson (1925). resents a broad pool of standing water that once existed below the rapids that marked the threshold, similar to the pools to be found today below the stretches of rapids on the river vantaanjoki. a core obtained from the sediment below one of the pools on the mire, with a water depth of four metres, showed the total thickness of sediment to be 370 cm, with coring interrupted by fennia 181: 1 (2003) 75origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of… fig. 4. a small pool below the djupbäck threshold in the headwaters of the present-day river mätäjoki. the samples representing coring site 3 were taken from this lake. (photographs by the authors.) the bedrock or a loose boulder at a depth of 770 cm from the water surface. this hard substrate was overlain by an approx. 40 cm horizon of sandy sediment containing large amounts of ligneous material, giving loss-on-ignition readings of 60– 70% (figs. 5 and 6a). numerous further cores confirmed that this same sediment horizon, the ligneous material in which gave a radiocarbon date of 2220 ± 110 bp (2200 cal. bp), exists at the bottom of the stratigraphy throughout the mire basin. above it in the core described here is a layer of clay gyttja (depths 320–160 cm) with a losson-ignition varying in the range 6–20%, and beyond this (160–12 cm) a sediment composed chiefly of gyttja with highly variable loss-on-ignition values in the range 20–45%. the surface sediment was black in colour and had a loss-on-ignition of only 10%, suggesting that emissions arising from human activities in the area had caused an oxygen deficiency in the basin, so that the youngest sediments were a sulphide clay-gyttja. profile and coring site 4. the mire area narrows once the basin that had been located below the threshold comes to an end and the infilled river channel itself is again clearly visible, although its surface is only about a metre below that of the surrounding terrain. a further core taken about 500 m downstream from that representing the mire basin (fig. 3, site 4) indicates a thick layer of sediments that vary greatly in character down to a depth of 540 cm, at which point a blue-grey clay is encountered (figs. 5 and 6b). immediately overlying the clay is a 10 cm sand horizon (540–530 cm) and above this a horizon of sandy gyttja (530–502 cm). the layer between 502 and 244 cm is then occupied by a thick deposit of gyttja and clay-gyttja with loss-on-ignition values in the range 6–33% and varying particularly markedly in the lower part, those in the upper part being more stable and somewhat lower. the lower part of this layer gave a radiocarbon date of 2220 ± 70 bp (2200 cal. bp), i.e. the same as for the ligneous material at the base of the previous core, and a very similar date, 2270 ± 70 bp (2330 cal. bp), was obtained for a point 2.5m higher in the stratigraphy, in the upper part of the same layer. the nature of this sediment and the dates obtained for it suggest that it was deposited very rapidly by flowing water. on top of the clay gyttja layer was a 12 cm horizon of gyttja clay (244–232 cm) with a loss-onignition of only 4–6%, and above this a horizon of peat and gyttja extending to the surface (232– 0 cm) and having loss-on-ignition values reaching as high as 86% in places, although entering a distinct decline from 70 cm upwards and being no more than 15% at a depth of 10 cm. a date of 1540 ± 70 bp (1410 cal. bp) was obtained for the lower part of this peaty layer, and one of 330 ± 70 bp (380 cal. bp) for a depth of 70–65 cm. the core results indicated that a deep channel had also existed at this point at one time, and that 76 fennia 181: 1 (2003)matti tikkanen and olli ruth it had later been filled in with sediment. profile 4 in fig. 3 shows a reconstruction of the form of this ancient channel, based admittedly on only one core, as coring by hand proved especially laborious at that site. the profile may thus be regarded as representing a minimum depth for the channel, since it is quite possible that deeper points could be found elsewhere. in any event, it is clear that the channel, which is nowadays virtually filled in with sediment, was once some 70 m broad and at least 5.4 m deep. profile 5. this profile has been constructed for a site located close to malminkartano where there is nowadays a minor stretch of rapids on the river mätäjoki. the valley is at its largest in this area, with a width of at least 60 m and a maximum depth of 8 m (fig. 3, profile 5), thus corresponding well to the size of the channel of the river vantaanjoki at the site of profile 1. the profile is fig. 5. stratigraphies and losson-ignition curves for coring sites 3 and 4. for locations of the sites, see fig. 3. based on three cores, so that the depth of the channel and form of its bottom may be regarded as fairly reliable. no loss-on-ignition determinations were performed, but visual observation suggests the following stratigraphy for the core: 0– 25 cm peat 25–55 cm silty gyttja or clay gyttja 55–80 cm sandy gyttja or clay gyttja 80–100 cm homogeneous gyttja or clay gyttja 100–270 cm gyttja containing ligneous or other organic material 270–310 cm gyttja with silt bands 310–320 cm gravel it is significant that the surficial peat horizon is considerably thinner here than at the previous coring site, but that the majority of the sediment depth is again taken up by deposits laid down by fennia 181: 1 (2003) 77origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of… flowing water and containing large amounts of ligneous material and other plant remains. the gravel layer at the base indicates that there was probably a large, swiftly flowing river here at one time, capable of transporting coarse material and depositing it on the channel bed. at the site of the profile the channel occupies the bottom of a narrow valley, the original surface level of which is difficult to determine. it would seem from the present-day topography, however, that a threshold at a height of at least 20 m a.s.l. had existed at this point at first, i.e. it had been very close to the level of the djupbäck threshold. this would have meant the creation of a lake basin some 1–2 metres deep between these two thresholds at that early stage and its subsequent draining as the lower threshold was eroded. profile and coring site 6. the next cross-section was surveyed across a level field and parkland fig. 6. sediment samples from the bed of the old channel. a. the sample from the djupbäck basin (coring site 3) has a clay gyttja horizon above the layer that is rich in ligneous material. b. the core from site 4 has marine clay at its base, overlain by sand and then clay gyttja and gyttja. c. the base of core 6 consists of clay, overlain by clay gyttja. area (fig. 3, profile 6). the channel is narrower at this point than at the previous coring site, but it is difficult to estimate its original width precisely as cultivation has been extended right up to its edge and the old river bank has been rendered less steep as a consequence of ploughing. the span between the upper edges of the channel is at least 50 m, however, and signs of low levées deposited by floodwater are to be detected beyond these. the core indicated that the basal clay was covered by 205 cm of sediment, implying that the total depth of the channel had been about five metres. although fluctuating considerably, the organic content of the sediment overlying the clay increased in general terms until a depth of 75 cm, where the loss-on-ignition value was 77% (figs. 7 and 6c). this lower part of the sediment horizon was composed of a clay gyttja, which graded to gyttja at a depth of 180 cm and contained an abundant admixture of peat from 125 cm upwards. the surface horizon of about 50 cm contained a silty mineral material that reduced its loss-on-ignition values to 10–25%. profile and coring site 7. the channel at this point was more or less of the same width as at the previous site, but it was edged with somewhat larger outward sloping levées (fig. 3, profile 7). it also proved to have been deeper than at site 6, as a 390 cm bed of sediment had accumulated on top of the basal clay. the difference in altitude between the levée and the bottom of the channel at the coring site was about 7 m. immediately overlying the basal marine clay was an approximately 30 cm horizon of sand containing large amounts of ligneous material in places (fig. 7), while above this the sediment was composed of clay gyttja and gyttja. a horizon occupying the interval 198–83 cm contained an abundance of peat, reaching a maximum loss-onignition of 72% at a depth of just over 120 cm, from which point the values declined as the deposition of silty material increased. loss-on-ignition fluctuated markedly throughout the sediment sequence, however, pointing to constant variations in deposition conditions. profile and coring site 8. the last coring site was located close to the rapids and waterfall of pitäjänmäki (fig. 3, profile 8), where the channel was both deeper and broader than at the previous two sites. this is partly due to the fact that the terrain outside the channel lies at about 17 m a.s.l., or 1–2 m higher than in the previous cases. 78 fennia 181: 1 (2003)matti tikkanen and olli ruth fig. 7. stratigraphies and losson-ignition curves for coring sites 6, 7 and 8. for locations of the sites, see fig. 3. it is also probable that here, too, a shallow lake existed above the threshold initially, possibly extending upstream as far as sites 6 and 5. the total thickness of the sediment deposited in the bottom of the channel was 190 cm at this point (fig. 7), the corer then encountering either the bedrock or a loose boulder. the bottommost sediment was gyttja, above which an admixture of peat and ligneous material started to accumulate from a depth of 165 cm upwards. the maximum loss-on-ignition value, 89%, was recorded at 95 cm, but readings dropped sharply to around 20% at the 60 cm level with the appearance of silty material. as the flow rate in the area close to the threshold was presumably high, around 1 m s–1, the channel would have been capable of supporting a discharge of at least 150 m3 s–1. discussion and conclusions there have been a number of suggestions in the literature that the mätäjoki valley may have served as the outflow channel for the river vantaanjoki at one time, or at least as a second branch of its outflow (petterson 1925; hyyppä 1935, 1950a, 1950b; roos 1950; tikkanen 1989; ruth 1998; ruth & tikkanen 2001). these have been based mostly on the considerable size of the mätäjoki valley in its upper reaches and the existence of a dried-up channel joining this to the present river vantaanjoki via the djupbäck threshold. it is obvious that a valley of those proportions could not have been created by the small stream that occupies it at present, especially since the shallow gradient in the area means that the flow rate is exfennia 181: 1 (2003) 79origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of… tremely slow. in addition, the stretch of the channel east of the djupbäck threshold no longer has any permanent flow of water, so that an erosional factor of the magnitude of the waters of the river vantaanjoki would have been necessary for its creation. the sedimentology of the channel serves to confirm that the waters of a major river must have flowed through the mätäjoki valley at some time, for otherwise it would be difficult to explain why the present-day stream first eroded a channel several metres deep and several tens of metres broad through the area, only for it to be filled in with fluvial sediments and peat deposits. the presentday river mätäjoki occupies a small channel in the bottom of this valley which has scarcely been eroded to any depth into the fluvial sediments of the original formation. a further indication of the action of a major river is the broad, deep depression to be found below the djupbäck threshold, the creation of which would have required powerful fluvial erosion forces. the present cores indicated that the deep basin below the rapids and the broad river valley that served as a continuation of it had been eroded several metres down into the clay horizons, and that as the rate of flow in the channel subsequently declined, fluvial sediments rapidly came to be deposited in it. once the flow from the river vantaanjoki ceased altogether, the long, narrow body of water that occupied the channel gradually became filled in by vegetation. this process was accelerated by the very shallow gradient of the river mätäjoki, which has been shown by ruth (1998) to be 0.6 m km–1 in the stretch studied here (see also fig. 8). in view of the beds of sediment several metres deep that line the present-day channel of the river mätäjoki, the river valley may be said to have been of such proportions that it would correspond well to that of the modern river vantaanjoki in terms of size, especially in its upper reaches. thus it is possible that the waters of the ancient river vantaanjoki could have flowed into the gulf of finland exclusively via the mätäjoki valley at first. the 55 m wide channel at the djupbäck threshold would have been capable of supporting a discharge of some 100–200 m3 s–1, given a water depth of 1–2 m and a mean flow rate of 1–2 m s–1. admittedly the maximum discharge of the presentday river vantaanjoki at its mouth is 317 m3 s–1, but the mean discharge is no more than 16.9 m3 s–1 and the minimum 1.4 m3 s–1 (ekholm 1999). of these figures, only the maximum would have been too high for the mätäjoki channel, but it is also too high for the river’s channel nowadays, for it floods over into the surrounding area even at lower discharge rates than this. also the channel at profiles 4 and 5 could easily have been capable of supporting a discharge of over 100 m3 s–1 and at the profile 8 close to the present-day pitäjänmäki waterfall channel would have been capable of supporting a discharge of at least 150 m3 s–1. peaks in discharge are short-lived in the river vantaanjoki and they have always involved flooding beyond the banks of the channel proper. it should also be remembered that the flood peaks were very much less acute in earlier times, when the drainage basin was in a natural state and had a continuous cover of forest. nowadays it contains extensive built-up areas and 30% of its surfig. 8. longitudinal profile of the stream mätäjoki channel from the gulf of finland to its intersection with the presentday river vantaanjoki. numbers (1–8) refer to the coring and profile sites (see fig. 3). 1. sea level 2000 bp (1900 cal. bp), 2. thresholds of the ancient river vantaanjoki, 3. longitudinal profile of the present-day mätäjoki channel and dried-up djupbäck channel, 4. longitudinal profile of the ancient river vantaanjoki channel bed. the depths of the old channel are estimated from the coring results. 80 fennia 181: 1 (2003)matti tikkanen and olli ruth face area consists of arable land, whereas only 2.6% is occupied by lakes (tikkanen 1989), all of which features have served to exaggerate the flood peaks. the drainage basin lying above the bifurcation at djupbäck was also very much smaller than that of the modern river vantaanjoki, as the river keravanjoki, for instance, the drainage basin of which accounts for 24% of the latter, does not join it until below djupbäck. when we consider as well the size of the drainage basin surrounding the lower reaches of the river vantaanjoki, it may be calculated that the basin that drained into the mätäjoki valley in earlier times was less than three-fourths of the area of the basin of the present river vantaanjoki. it is also significant that the old channel was narrower in the middle and lower reaches of the river mätäjoki than in the upper reaches, its development there having presumably been retarded by the till threshold at pitäjänmäki, as the lake that formed behind it in the early stages will have prevented any channel from developing for some time. in any case, mean discharge rates in the ancient river vantaanjoki will have been so low that the volumes of water involved could have been contained many times over in this channel. even so, flood waters evidently accumulated on the banks of the channel at times of maximum discharge, as indicated by the presence of levées beyond the confines of the channel proper in many places. however, as the channel is deep, and as it is covered by fluvial sediments and peat in precisely the same manner as on the upper reaches, this stretch, too, as far downstream as the pitäjänmäki waterfall, must have served as a channel for the river vantaanjoki. the basal level of the old channel lies below the altitude of the threshold at pitäjänmäki for practically the whole of its length (fig. 8). when the waters of the river vantaanjoki ceased to flow into the mätäjoki valley, the old channel was occupied by a long, narrow body of water. it had nevertheless been filled to a considerable extent with fluvial sediments from the river vantaanjoki and the streams acting as its tributaries at the stage during which the flow from that river into the old channel was in the process of declining. at the final stage, water presumably flowed from the river into the old channel only at times of flooding. finally the channel will have been filled in almost entirely by vegetation growth and the deposition of further sediment washed into it from the basin of the river mätäjoki. the mean discharge of the present-day river mätäjoki is only 0.2 m3 s–1 and the maximum about 3 m3 s–1 (ruth 1998), so that it has not succeeded in eroding its present-day channel to any appreciable extent. instead it has deposited more sediment on the paludified banks, as reflected in the decline in loss-on-ignition values towards the surface observed in the sediment sequences described here. this is a consequence of erosion brought about by agriculture and building, activities that gained in impact around 330 bp (380 cal. bp) at the latest. but when did the mätäjoki outflow channel develop and for how long did it function as a branch of the river vantaanjoki? it may be estimated from the shoreline displacement history of the area that the djupbäck threshold, at an altitude of 21 m a.s.l., must have emerged from the sea by 4500 bp (5100 cal. bp) at the latest (hyvärinen 1980; ristaniemi & glückert 1987; seppä & tikkanen 1998; seppä et al. 2000), and similarly it may be concluded that the banks of the mätäjoki channel, at levels of 16–18 m a.s.l. as far downstream as pitäjänmäki, must have been dry land by 4000–3500 bp (4500–3800 cal. bp). as shoreline displacement proceeded, at least two shallow lake basins in the mätäjoki valley must have been isolated from the sea, only to dry up later as the channel was eroded at the thresholds. it was suggested by hyyppä (1935, 1950a) that the channel ceased to function as such at some time in the interval 3000–2000 bp, while roos (1950) mentioned that the mätäjoki valley must have still been serving as an outlet channel for the river vantaanjoki around 1500 bp. these timescales were all conjectures, however, and were not based on research backed up by dating. the dates obtained here indicate that organic material began to accumulate on the bed of the mätäjoki channel around 2200 bp (2200 cal. bp), and that up to that time the flow of water in the channel was of such a magnitude that the prevailing process was fluvial erosion, so that sand and gravel was deposited only at some points on the bed of the channel that had been cut down into the marine clay layer. the above timing would appear to be reliable in that the same date was obtained for two points on the bed of the channel (see fig. 4). this date probably also marks the point at which the present outflow channel of the river vantaanjoki was opened up, after which the volume of water flowing through the mätäjoki channel began to decrease and it began to fill with flufennia 181: 1 (2003) 81origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of… vial sediments. one indication of the rapid filling of this channel is the fact that approximately the same date was obtained for the surface of the sediment bed as for its base, 2270 ± 70 bp (2330 cal. bp), (fig. 4). the corresponding date for the base of the peat horizon deposited after the end of the river phase was 1540 ± 70 bp (1410 cal. bp), and there was still about 10 cm of gyttja clay below the sampling level that had been deposited under conditions in which no water from the river vantaanjoki was flowing in the channel. in other words, the separation of the mätäjoki channel from its connection with the river vantaanjoki had taken place well before the earliest date obtained from the peat-rich sediment. it can thus be estimated that the passage of water from the river into the mätäjoki channel came to an end around 2000 bp (1900 cal. bp), from which time onwards the present outlet channel of the river vantaanjoki has been the only one. at the time when the change took place the mouth of the mätäjoki channel was located at the present-day pitäjänmäki waterfall (see fig. 8). contrary to the suggestion of hyyppä (1935, 1950a), it is highly probable that the present channel of the river vantaanjoki did not arise at the same time as the mätäjoki channel but considerably later. otherwise is would be difficult to imagine why it should have taken more than 2000 years for it to be eroded down to a level below that of the djupbäck threshold, given that the surficial deposits in the area were largely easily erodible clay, silt and sand. since the altitude of the clay deposits bordering on the river at the bifurcation between the old channel and the present-day one is only 22–23 metres, even quite a minor deepening of the present channel would have sufficed to cause the djupbäck threshold to dry up. the surface of the present-day river vantaanjoki lies about 5 metres below the threshold, and deepening of the channel has come to an end at the level of the bedrock threshold of pitkäkoski, located a kilometre away from the bifurcation (see fig. 2). it is probable that the present-day channel of the river vantaanjoki was opened up suddenly as a consequence of particularly serious flooding around 2200 bp (2200 cal. bp), the floodwaters breaking through the low ridge to the east of the bifurcation of the channels. the core of this ridge is a glaciofluvial formation, the highest points on which still protrude from beneath the clays (fig. 2). the bend in the river that arose at the bifurcation has subsequently shifted southwards, so that the original ridge that retained the waters of the river has been eroded away entirely. altogether the following stages may be recognized in the sequence of events: 1) the djupbäck threshold emerged from the sea around 4500 bp (5100 cal. bp) and the waters of the river vantaanjoki began to flow over it in the direction of the mätäjoki valley, so that a stretch of rapids existed at this point. a basin of still water began to form below the rapids, but its development was retarded at first by the presence of a shallow lake that formed at almost the same altitude, behind the malminkartano threshold. this lake dried up in the course of time as the latter threshold began to be eroded away. 2) the plains of fine sediment that lined the mätäjoki channel as far downstream as the pitäjänmäki threshold emerged from beneath the sea in the interval 4000–3500 bp (4500–3800 cal bp). a shallow lake also accumulated above the pitäjänmäki threshold initially, and deepening of the middle and lower reaches of the mätäjoki channel was only able to go ahead after this till threshold had been eroded down to the level of the lake bottom. since there was insufficient time for the channel on the lower reaches of the river to be eroded to the same extent as that on the upper reaches, it remained susceptible to flooding, but even so it was capable of carrying an amount of water that was many times greater than the mean discharge of the ancient river vantaanjoki. 3) the present outflow channel of the river vantaanjoki was opened up around 2200 bp (2200 cal. bp), after which the flow in the mätäjoki channel weakened and the channel rapidly filled with fluvial sediment. the new channel was created by the water forcing its way through a glaciofluvial ridge lying east of the djupbäck bifurcation. 4) the connection between the river vantaanjoki and the mätäjoki channel was finally severed around 2000 bp (1900 cal. bp), at which point the latter began to fill in with sediments and vegetation. the sea level at that stage was about 8 m above what it is nowadays, and the mouth of the mätäjoki channel was located at the point marked by the pitäjänmäki waterfall. 82 fennia 181: 1 (2003)matti tikkanen and olli ruth acknowledgements the radiocarbon dates were produced at the helsinki university dating laboratory, under the direction of högne jungner, and the final versions of the figures were drawn by kirsti lehto and pirkko numminen at the department of geography, university of helsinki. the manuscript was translated into english by malcolm hicks, and valuable assistance with the taking of samples in the field was provided by christina ruth. two anonymous referees made valuable comments and improvements to the manuscript. we wish to express our grateful thanks to all these people. references aartolahti t (1975). the morphology and development of the river valleys in southwestern finland. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 116, 72 p. baker v (2002). high-energy megafloods: planetary settings and sedimentary dynamics. in martini ip, vr baker & g garzón (eds). flood and megaflood processes and deposits: recent and ancient examples. special publication number 32 of the international association of sedimentologists, 3–15. blackwell science ltd, cornwall. baker v & r bunker (1985). cataclysmic late pleistocene flooding from glacial lake missoula: a review. quaternary science reviews 4, 1–41 p. baker v & d nummedal (eds.) (1978). the channeled scabland – a guide to the geomorphology of the columbia basin. 186 p. national aeronautics and space administration, washington. becker-haumann ra (2001). the depositional history of the bavarian algäu area at the turn of the tertiary/quaternary, northern alpine foreland, germany – a set of paleogeological maps. quaternary international 79, 55–64. bengtsson l & m enell (1986). chemical analysis. in berglund b (ed). handbook of holocene palaeoecology and palaeohydrology, 423–451. john wiley, chichester. blomqvist e (1926). vanttenståndförändringar och strandförskjutningar i pälkänevesi, joutenselkä, längelmävesi och vesijärvi sjöar sedan början av 1600-talet. svenska tekniska vetenskapsakademien i finland, acta 4, 72–79. bretz jh (1923). the channeled scabland of the columbia plateau. journal of geology 31, 617–649. ekholm m (1999). virtaama. in hyvärinen v (ed). hydrologinen vuosikirja 1995 (hydrological yearbook 1995). suomen ympäristö 280, 53–80. erä-esko l (1980). helsingin seudun esihistorialliset muinaisjäännökset. helsingin seutukaavaliiton julkaisuja c 2, 97 p. eronen m (1991). jääkausien jäljillä. ursan julkaisuja 43. 271 p. tähtitieteellinen yhdistys ursa, helsinki. grosswald m (1998). new approach to the ice age paleohydrology of northern eurasia. in benito g, vr baker & kj gregory (eds). palaeohydrology and environmental change, 199–214. john wiley & sons, chichester. hoorn c, j guerrero, g sarmiento & m lorente (1995). andean tectonics as a cause for changing drainage patterns in miocene northern south america. geology 25, 237–240. huuhka m (1990). kaarela, neliapila. helsingin kaupungin julkaisusarja. helsingin kaupunginosat. 115 p. multiprint, helsinki. hyvärinen h (1980). relative sea-level changes near helsinki, southern finland, during early litorina times. bulletin of the geological society of finland 52, 207–219. hyyppä e (1935). kivikautinen asutus ja rannan siirtyminen helsingin seudulla. terra 47, 31–47. hyyppä e (1950a). helsingin ympäristö. maaperäkartan selitys 40. geologinen tutkimuslaitos, helsinki. hyyppä e (1950b). helsingin seudun geologiaa. helsingin kaupungin historia i, 13–53. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran kirjapaino oy, helsinki. jones m (1977). finland. daughter of the sea. 247 p. dawson & archon books, chatham. jowsey pc (1966). an improved peat sampler. new phytologist 65, 245–248. koutaniemi l (1979). late-glacial and post-glacial development of the valleys of the oulanka river basin, northern finland. fennia 157, 13–73. koutaniemi l (1987). palaeohydrology of the rivers ivalonjoki and oulankajoki, finland. fennia 165, 89–132. kuusisto e (1984). suomen vesistöjen bifurkaatiot (the bifurcations of finnish watercourses). terra 96, 253–261. miettinen a (1996). pielisen jääjärven kehityshistoria (abstract: the history of the pielinen ice lake). terra 108, 14–19. petterson eg (1925). har vanda å tidigare utmynnat i stor hoplax viken? terra 37, 29–34. ristaniemi o & g glückert (1987). the ancylus transgression in the area of espoo – the first salpausselkä, southern finland. bulletin of the geological society of finland 59, 45–69. roos j (1950). haagan kauppalan historia. 226 p. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran kirjapaino oy, helsinki. ruth o (1998). mätäjoki – nimeään parempi. kaupunkipuron virtaama, aineskuljetus ja veden laatu sekä valuma-alueen virkistyskäyttö (abstract: river mätäjoki – better than its reputation). helsingin kaupungin ympäristökeskuksen julkaisuja 6/98. 113 p. ruth o & m tikkanen (2001). purojen helsinki – virtaava vesi kaupungin kahleissa. in laakkonen s, s laurila, p kansanen & h schulman (eds). näkökulmia helsingin ympäristöhistoriaan. kaupungin ja ympäristön muutos 1800ja 1900-luvuilla, 164–179. edita, helsinki. fennia 181: 1 (2003) 83origins and development of the ancient outflow channel of… saarelainen j & j vanne (1997). sotkamon jääjärvi (abstract: sotkamo ice lake). terra 109, 25–38. saarnisto m (1971). history of finnish lakes and lake ladoga. commentationes physico-mathematicae, societas scientiarum fennicae 41, 371–388. saarnisto m (1981). holocene emergence history and stratigraphy in the area north of the gulf of bothnia. annales academiae scientiarum fennicae a iii 130, 42 p. seppä h & m tikkanen (1998). the isolation of kruunuvuorenlampi, southern finland, and implications for holocene shore displacement models of the finnish south coast. journal of paleolimnology 19, 385–398. seppä h, m tikkanen & p shemeikka (2000). lateholocene shore displacement of the finnish south coast: diatom, lithoand chemostratigraphical evidence from three isolation basins. boreas 29, 219–231. stuiver m, pj reimer, e bard, jw beck, gs burr, ka hughen, b kromer, g mccormac, j van der plicht & m spurk (1998). intcal98 radiocarbon age calibration, 24000–0 cal bp. radiocarbon 40, 1041–1083. sundman m (1980). kaupungin rakentumisen vaiheet. helsingin kaupunginsuunnitteluvirasto yb 1/80. 41 s. helsingin kaupunki. tikkanen m (1989). geomorphology of the vantaanjoki drainage basin, southern finland. fennia 167, 19–72. tikkanen m (1990). suomen vesistöjen jääkauden jälkeinen kehitys (abstract: postglacial history of finnish watercourses). terra 102, 239–255. tikkanen m (1995). history of the puula lake complex, central finland, and shifts in its outlet. fennia 173, 1–32. tikkanen m (2002). long-term changes in lake and river systems in finland. in raento p & j westerholm (eds.). finland – nature, society, and regions. fennia 180 (special issue, with cd-rom), 31–42. tikkanen m & j oksanen (2002). late weichselian and holocene shore displacement history of the baltic sea in finland. in raento p & j westerholm (eds.). finland – nature, society, and regions. fennia 180 (special issue, with cd-rom), 9–20. tikkanen m & h seppä (2001). post-glacial history of lake näsijärvi, finland, and the origin of the tammerkoski rapids. fennia 179, 129–141. 24961_09_heinonen.pdf slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss heinonen, sirkka, minna halonen & lorenzo daldoss (2006). slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments. fennia 184: 1, pp. 91–104. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. a new concept for housing foresight is introduced as a hypothesis in analogy to slow food, and as a contrast to hectic urban life. the idea of slow housing is proposed for discussion on the basis of preliminary results from a project carried out at vtt in 2004–2006 studying experimental and innovative models of housing, working/production and transport. the aim of this eco-regions project was to identify best practices in eco-efficient development of regions, linked with socio-culturally sustainable patterns of living. the theoretical framework was deduced from the urban and regional theory of patrick geddes (1854–1932). this scottish urbanist and biologist developed various interesting concepts, which have proved to be useful for modern urban studies as well. in the present paper we utilise the concept of analytical triad – place, work and folk, corresponding to the geographical, historical and spiritual aspects of the city or the region – to explore innovative housing and living environments. traditionally it is considered that innovations take place in cities, where the speed life and concentration of people create the necessary ‘buzz’ for the innovations to come up. but the hectic urban life is found alienating by more and more people and an emergence of slow and long-term-orientated lifestyle can be noticed in many western countries. the interest in slow movement (slow food, slow cities and slow design) is a clear sign of that. in this study we discuss the concept of slow housing as one element contributing to pleasant living environments and with a specific connection to innovation creation. we argue that a slow, i.e. balanced, way of life increases well-being, which has a positive impact on creativity and thus on overall productivity. meaningful life is a fertile ground for innovations. sirkka heinonen, minna halonen & lorenzo daldoss, vtt, po box 1000, fi02044 vtt, finland. e-mails: sirkka.heinonen@vtt.fi, minna.halonen@vtt.fi, ldaldoss80@yahoo.it. introduction a new concept for housing and for housing foresight is introduced to discussion as a hypothesis in analogy to slow food, and as a contrast to hectic urban life. the idea of slow housing as enabler of innovations is based on preliminary results of a project carried out at vtt (technical research centre of finland) in 2004–2006 studying experimental and innovative models of housing, working/production and transport (see www.vtt.fi/ekoseutu). the aim of this eco-regions project is to identify best practices in eco-efficient development of regions, linked with socio-culturally sustainable patterns of living. in this paper we discuss the concept of slow housing as one element contributing to pleasant living environments and with a specific connection to innovation creation. a holistic framework for living environments when assessing living environments a holistic analysis of places, temporal rhythms, and lifestyles is appropriate. therefore, geographically seen, whole regions – rural regions consisting of small villages and small towns, as well as city regions – 92 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss consisting of a major city with surrounding localities, become interesting. they provide a complex setting for people to live and work in, and for companies to benefit from human and social capital. patrick geddes (1854–1932), the scottish “father” of regional planning, emphasised interconnections between city and the countryside. we argue that as people may successfully change their living environment from rural to urban and vice versa, it is equally important for creativity and innovations to be able to combine periods of slow and fast living. moreover, in modern times of globalisation, regionalism is giving people strength (see e.g., bakas 2006: 218). geddesian thoughts on complex living environments the theoretical framework of our eco-regions project is deduced from the urban and regional theory of patrick geddes. this scottish urbanist, biologist and uomo universale developed various interesting concepts, which have proved to be useful for modern urban studies as well, and for evaluating living environments. geddes named emerging groups of cities as ‘conurbations’ referring to “extended geographical areas characterized by a network of settlements ranging from villages to towns, cities, and region-cities” (welter 2002: 74). geddes also developed a theory of ‘biopolis’, which in a way anticipates eco-efficient cities and regions. biopolis theory rests on two bearer feet: 1) ecological approach (biology), in which city is seen as organic entity, and 2) greek idea of ‘polis’ (welter 2002: 2). furthermore, geddes aimed at linking science, morality and aesthetics in regional planning. these three fields can be roughly interpreted to present the scope of modern eco-efficient regions and towns: science representing today facts and using new technologies; morality representing values and ensuring that the wellbeing of people will be achieved in socially equitable and ecologically appropriate ways; and aesthetics representing experiences of pleasant living environments (fig. 1). poor living environments can also be enjoyed if only aesthetic experience is conveyed from them. science, in the geddesian ‘tripolis’, embodies devices and applications of different technologies such as ict, biotechnology, nanotechnology or genetic engineering, which are utilised to increase the eco-efficiency. science is based on objectively stated facts. morality stands for the social dimension of sustainable development including justice, equality and well-being (welfare of humans and quality of the environment). it means also that ecoefficient innovations, products and working methods are ethically acceptable and highly qualified. morality is largely based on the shared values of a community. significance of aesthetics for a pleasant and enjoyable living environment is undeniable. in addition, when linked to the rest of the socio-cultural diversity, it improves the competitiveness of communities in urban and rural regions (heinonen 2006). in the present paper we also refig. 1. geddes’ ideas set in a tripolis combining science, morality and aesthetics as central aims for urban planning (modified, welter 2002: xvii). fennia 184: 1 (2006) 93slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments fer to geddes’ concept of analytical triad – place, work and folk or in other words environment, function, and organism, corresponding to the geographical, historical and spiritual aspects of the city or the region – to explore innovative housing and living environments (welter 2002). geddes’ triad is an analogy with the social theory of the french sociologist frédéric le play. le play’s social theory was based on the triad of lieu, travail, and famille (welter 2002: 11). besides work itself, both place and people can inspire innovation. in the geddesian way of thinking any human settlement, whether big or small, urban or rural, can be understood by applying the triad placework-folk. a town occupies a certain location i.e. place, where the inhabitants are engaged in all kinds of activities i.e. their work. life is structured by work and influenced by the conditions of place. the residents themselves form thus a folk with a common superstructure of shared believes, traditions, and customs (welter 2002: 33–34). in addition to these three main categories six subcategories can be formed by the interrelations of the main categories (table 1). a picture of the “every day world of action” can be achieved by applying the nine categories to any town in the world (welter 2002: 34). a city can accordingly be perceived as a superstructure erected on the basis of place, work, and folk. it is a cultural reflection of a given environment (welter 2002: 68). how well a given living environment can nourish creativity and inspire innovation in these nine categories, determines to a great degree its attractiveness and also the competitiveness of the region in question. continuing changes in the living environment the living environments change as the pace of change in society at large is accelerated. change is rapid and it pervades all activities in communities. how we work is changing, how we live is changing, and how we spend our leisure moments is changing. technology is a major driver in all areas of life. in work, ict not only provides tools for work but enables mobile and decentralised working modes (e.g., heinonen 2004; himanen 2004; virtanen et al. 2004). thus not only “how” but also “where” we work is changing. in the home, technology is applied to make living more easy, safe and healthy. in leisure, lifestyles vary based on the increasing individualisation. this means a demand both for technology-heavy activities and for technology-free choices. because of the certainty of rapid changes and of the uncertainty and variations in the outcome of changes we can construct major community activities – work, housing and leisure – as “the bermudan triangle” of urban planning (heinonen 2006). this triangle is full of turbulent changes within each of its sectors and within their interconnections. here work represents “work”, housing represents “place”, and leisure represents “folk” in geddes’ triad (see fig. 2). the bermudan triangle of living environments emphasises rapid change and uncertainties involved in the processes of changing communities. it is the task of foresight and futures studies to alleviate uncertainties by anticipating change and by providing future visions and alternative strategies to cope with the changes (heinonen & daltable 1. the geddes’ triad place-work-folk (welter 2002: 34). place-folk (“natives”) work-folk (“producers”) folk place-work work folk-work place work-place folk-place housing leisure mobility workhousing leisure mobility work fig. 2. the bermudan triangle of urban planning (heinonen 2006). 94 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss doss 2006: 25–26). here a vision of a good living environment could be constructed based on aristotle’s ideal of good life. instead of opposition to change, advantage can be gained from turning changes into opportunities for improving the living environment – for providing elements and conditions that encourage both welfare and creativity. an until-now-neglected or rather unnoticed goal in creating innovative living environments is to enable meaningful life through slow housing. slow philosophy in the western countries we are living in the speed society where the cult of speed is dominating our lives and efficiency highlighted as a common virtue. according to thackara (2005) there are signs, however, that speed is a cultural paradigm whose time is up. economic growth and a constant acceleration in production, have run up against the carrying capacity of the planet. many of us want faster computers, but we also want to live more balanced lives – lives lived at speeds we determine, not at speeds dictated by the logic of systems beyond our control (thackara 2005). even though there is much scientific work ongoing for human life extension, philosophically taken, a fast or long life should not be a goal in itself. objective time extension, however, is not an option – we only have 24 hours per day to fill in with meaningful or not so meaningful activities. it is more the question of what you do in your life, how you do it and in which surroundings you do it (cf. geddesian axes of science, morality and aesthetics in fig. 1). questioning speed and acceleration raises interesting design and innovation questions. is it worth continuing to design only to make things faster? can selective slowness be consistent with growth and innovation (thackara 2005)? in the same way as we can problematise the modern myth of progress (von wright 1992: 143; heinonen 2000: 14) that expresses belief in limitless and neverending progress as natural and necessary, the modern myth of speed can be seriously questioned. for innovative living environments slow movements may add considerable value. we can talk about slow philosophy as comprising several key slow movements such as slow food, slow housing, slow design and slow life (see fig. 3). the slow time movement is not, however, institutionalised like e.g. the labour movement. there is no counterpart for negotiations and no official time policy in public policy (jalas 2006: 72). time-activism and voluntary simplicity as expressions in line with sustainable development are ideological. in the following we aim at opening up slow housing in this context of other “slows”. key arenas and definitions of slow philosophy the theme of slow refers to a balanced, calm and stress-free way of living (see e.g., thackara 2005; bakas 2006; honoré 2004; jalas 2006). it means quality of life. moreover, we argue that slow may be a source for innovation. this is because slow does not always literally mean slow. it does not mean a lazy, negligent or dull attitude toward work, free-time or social life. slow does not mean stupid, speed does not mean smart. slow means control and consciousness of your own life, listening to your own rhythm and resulting in ideas, insights and innovations that otherwise could have been left unnoticed in the hectic treadmill of modern life. slow housing and other slow movements can be seen as part of “slow life” way of living, originated in analogy to slow food. slow housing in our analogy of using the comparison between fast and slow food to fast and slow housing, we define fast housing and slow housing, respectively, as follows. fast housing means home as a family and work life nerve centre for carrying out multiple activities in an efficient way. fast housing refers also to home as a hectic “24/7 active life control” slow housing within the chain of other slow movements (slow food -> slow housing -> slow design -> slow cities -> slow life = slow philosophy) fig. 3. slow housing inside the chain of various movements as key arenas of slow philosophy. fennia 184: 1 (2006) 95slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments tower, leaving little space for relaxation. slow housing means home as a haven for relaxation and socialising. it also refers to non-standardised construction methods and traditional materials. artisan work, carefully conducted on the special needs of the families, can realise savings and economies of scale that come from prefabrication and largescale planning for infrastructure and construction (jennings 2005: 12). a concept related to slow housing is the idea of stress-free area in living environments. the concept is based on conditions in neurophysiology. the environment is conceived as having a huge impact on vitality and well-being of people. especially in cities we are overloaded by stimuli coming from near and far. stress free -concept can be adapted for homes, office buildings as well as for shopping centres. with a conscious use of lights, colors, geometry and materials, new and existing buildings turn into stressless places for living and working. slow housing is not only a kind of lifestyle-based housing preference, but it can also be a different way to design a house. so designing of a house has to follow people’s needs. many architects, from the second half of the 20th century, studied the organisation of space; one of the most important french architects le courbusier designed his buildings following the physical measures of human beings. buildings should be designed not only considering how much physical space people need, but also what they need emotionally; so a house is not only considered a place to pass a few hours after work. slow housing is connected to a residential area designed with sufficient green space or space for leisure time. so starting from a new slow housing building process it is possible to arrive to the requalification of entire neighbourhoods and cities. slow food slow housing means that the house itself has been constructed with a view to a well and peacefully planned building process, using perhaps local traditions in terms of form, orientation or materials. residents in slow housing buildings prefer slow food as part of their lifestyle. the slow food movement was founded in italy in 1986 by carlo petrini. the initial aim was to promote declining food and wine culture. so far the slow food movement has multiplied its mission: 1) to defend the need of customer information on food, 2) to protect cultural identities tied to gastronomic traditions, 3) to safeguard food, cultivation and processing techniques, and 4) to defend domestic and wild animals and vegetable species. the official manifesto of international movement for the defense of and the right to pleasure (official manifesto… 2006) speaks out clearly against rushed way of living: “we are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: fast life, which disrupts our habits, pervades our privacy and forces us to eat fast food. to be worthy of the name, home sapiens, should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.” fast food means something that can be consumed in a few minutes. the concept of “fast” does not involve only the way of eating it, but also the way of cooking and selling it. fast food restaurants are present everywhere from cities’ centres, shopping centres, airports, train stations to outskirts, stadiums, college campuses and so on. they are a symbol of globalisation, but they can also bring to a homogenisation and standardisation of taste. slow food means a rediscovery of the pleasure of eating around a table with other people, enjoying this time forgetting the speed that regulate people’s life. it opposes the great diffusion of fast food restaurants in the whole world, they are seen as symbols of fast life, virus of the modern society. slow food means also the promotion of culture of a country through its food and its culinary traditions, knowledge of diversity against the homogenization of taste. slow design slow housing is based on slow design principles. the concept of slow design is a functional approach to slow life. its aim is to slow human, economic and resource use metabolism, encouraging the long view. thus, it is related to long-term thinking as adopted as an essential element in futures studies. slow housing based on slow design takes into consideration the dimensions of sustainable development. it repositions the focus of design on individual, socio-cultural and environmental wellbeing. slow cities slow housing as a multiplied and agglomerating concept can lead to creating slow cities. slow cit96 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss ies is another slow movement founded in italy in 2000. the movement aims to improve living conditions with the use of new technological devices without forgetting the heritage of the past. slowcity model concerns urban planning, environment, energy, transport, tourism, agriculture and education. there is also a strong emphasis on the bound between citizens, city and environment. slow cities philosophy is manifested by the movement (official manifesto… 2006) as “looking for towns brought to life by people who make time to enjoy a quality of life.” according to the manifesto “living in a slow city, but also administrating it, is a kind of being slowed down, less frenetic and fast, but without doubt more careful to human beings and nature, more solidly behind actual and the next generations, respectful to local characteristics. it is a model that does not deal only with food, tourism, agriculture, but also with young people’s education. thus both living in a slow city, and also administrating it means taking the right time to achieve the quality in all sectors, slowing down living rhythms and fighting the paradoxes of our society.” slow life slow housing – in its widest scope – opens up to a comprehensive slow life approach. in our analogy of using the comparison between fast and slow food to fast and slow housing and, in a wider perspective fast and slow life, we define fast life and slow life, respectively, as follows. fast life means to be active all the day, having only little time to relaxing, having fun or enjoying leisure time. many modern societies are characterised by this fast life, in which speed = more efficiency = more productivity = more money. we can compare this to the futurism movement in early 1900s which advocated the cult of speed and saw the world enrichened by the beauty of speed. this chain brings to follow fast rules; on one side this can improve efficiency and productivity bringing benefits to economy, society and so on. on the other hand, this can generate frenzy that causes stress and health problems to a lot of people, thus decreasing efficiency in the longer term. slow life means to take some time to dedicate to oneself, to own private life, to own leisure time. it is a life system more attentive to people’s needs than to the search of money and success. slow life includes living in a different way social life and cities as places where to have fun and socialize. the most important thing is to not mistake slow life with unproductiveness, laziness. a better quality of life means i.a. one can decide own speed. according to honoré (2004) the slow movement offers a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. he emphasises that technology and improved methods and patterns of behaviour should do the busy and routine parts, leaving quality time for more creative activities. the importance of chronobiology should not be underestimated. we can solve problems better during certain times in our daily rhythm and we absorb information better in specific times. people who feel in control of their time are more relaxed, creative and productive. however, certain rules and frameworks are necessary for creative and innovative working methods and way of life, in general. concept thinking is a well-known working method among designers and other creative people. choreographers and musicians call it a ‘theme’. a concept or a theme offers a necessary framework for creative work, which would otherwise risk losing its sharpness and scope. pros and cons of fast and slow positive and negative aspects of fast and slow are being compared in the following tables 2, 3 and 4. it must, however, be born in mind that the slow thematique is highly dependent on personal values and priorities, also varying at different stages of life of an individual. evolution of different societal phases slow thinking perceives long-term developments. what then is the position of slow philosophy and slow thinking in the present information society? society can be seen as evolving in a process of transformation from one dominant societal phase to another. it is much debated whether, when and by which criteria such a transition could quantifiably be made (see e.g., webster 1995). humankind has lived through gathering and hunting societies to nomad and agricultural societies, from industrial society to information society, at least in industrialised countries. the transition is never abrupt or fast, but gradual and slowly building up based on changes in the structure of industry, economy, technology, and culture. economic and technological advances are faster than, for example, changes in legislation or attitudes. we can alfennia 184: 1 (2006) 97slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments table 2. comparison of fast and slow food. positive aspects & impacts negative aspects & impacts fast food • time savings • possibility to have a relatively low-cost meal • available everywhere, in every country • safe and solid brand (you know what you get) • social meeting place (especially for young people, and for families) • open almost 24 hours a day and 7 days a week • largely unhealthy (causing overweight problems) • lack of local traditions • monotonous and homogeneous brand • staff in strenuous conditions (low income, temporarily employed, long opening hours) • sometimes crowded = not-so-fast food slow food • emphasis on local traditions • locally produced • whole life cycle for meals: producing, purchasing, making, consuming food • (what, how and where produced, with whom) • way of thinking, lifestyle • cultural & social experience • connecting people (around table), socialising • time consuming • sometimes unpleasant surprises about quality and origin of food • lack of information • good quality ingredients may be expensive or hard to get throughout the year table 3. comparison of fast and slow housing. positive aspects & impacts negative aspects & impacts fast housing • home as a family and work life nerve centre for carrying out multiple activities in an efficient way • home as a hectic “24/7 active life control” tower, leaving little space for relaxation slow housing • home as a haven for relaxation and socialising • possible inefficiency when work and private life not flexibly connected table 4. comparison of fast and slow life. positive aspects & impacts negative aspects & impacts fast life • action and buzz almost 24 hours a day and 7 days a week • efficiency at work • difficulties in reconciling work and family • stress, healthy problems slow life • no stress • time to spend with your family and friends • time for your own hobbies • not enough stimulus • working career also slow? (unless slowness means high quality work, owing to fewer mistakes) • slowness = laziness = unproductiveness ready anticipate what the next societal phase after the information society will be. however, it must be born in mind that all the previous phases still remain to some extent and contribute to the outcome of a new phase. the information society may turn into a bio-society (as advocated by e.g., rifkin 1998), or into an experience society (as suggested by the term dream society by jensen 1999). a common all-pervasive feature for any subsequent societal phase will be digitalisation. thus, some might prefer to call the coming phase digital society. it is, however, only instrumental depiction and does not reveal enough of the contents and dynamics of the new phase. therefore, we discuss here the transition to the experience society where the role of slow thinking may gain more prominence. experience society may also be seen to evolve as culture society where humans on one hand seek for identity and meaningful life from culture, and where on the other hand art and culture will become important factors of production and prosperity. here creativity and innovations are necessary fuel and foundation of citizens’ welfare. slow thinking goes hand in hand with the aphorism “vita brevis, ars longa”. experience society will 98 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss construct itself on the emerging experience economy (pine ii & gilmore 1999). the experience society or culture society is also said to form a creative economy. florida (2002) even sees a creative class emerging, adamantly focusing on quality of life and seeking for high-quality and innovative living environments. creative economy flourishes in a creative living environment. experience or culture society means that new culture products and services will be diffused in homes, and residential areas through increasing number of media (tv, internet, multimedia services), interactive and spontaneous local culture products, housing becomes a culture product instead of a staple commodity (heinonen et al. 2005). individuality rules in experience society (culture society). individual ways of life and lifestyles are more and more expressions of one’s identity. branded homes, social status related housing solutions, housing and living environment expressing the way of living and the identity are an increasing phenomenon. new subcultures of housing sprout out on a set of values and ethnical diversity. the footprint of experience society is both ecological and cultural (heinonen et al. 2005; bakas 2006). as reflected upon slow thinking, the experience society can be roughly characterised as follows: on one hand, people seek for experiences from speed: experiences and identity from adventures, tourism, games, sports, entertainment, technology etc. on the other hand, people seek for experiences from “slowness”: experiences and identity from nature, religion, retreats, silence, relaxation, etc. time time as a crucial element for quality of life time is regarded in this paper as a crucial element for the welfare (quality of life) of humans in their living environments as well as for innovativeness, and thus for the productivity. everything in this world happens in time and space. time can be defined from different aspects such as at least from the physical, psychological, social, cultural, economic and historical point of view. there is a subjective and an objective side of it. time is discussed here as a resource and a quality of life factor. paradoxically, many of us are being pressed with the lack of time especially in working life, while others can have too much time – with feelings of loneliness or uselessness in life. as thackara (2005) reminds us the greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. kairos, however, means qualitative time – the time of opportunity, chance and mischance – the event time. if you go to sleep because the clock says say 11.30 pm, you are adhering to a chronological time system. if you go to sleep because you are tired, you are following kairological or event time. we are all born with a sense of event time. before they shifted to a more clock-based way of doing things, people listened to their bodies to tell them when to do things. the clash between personal time flow (e.g. getting food, going home) and the public time flow (e.g. standing in a queue) is experienced as disturbing. excessive social speed degrades social quality. the more the speed, the less the time (thackara 2005). time knowledge time is our most precious commodity. lack of time is a bigger problem than lack of money for many people of the western countries (robinson & godbey, ref. florida 2002: 150). florida (robinson & godbey, ref. florida 2002: 150–151) argues that the continuous sense of lack of time, the time famine, is a considerable problem especially for workers, who do project-oriented, time-consuming and stressful creative work. besides having long workdays, households have usually two working parents or a working single parent. the coupling of work and private life is getting increasingly laborious. time knowledge is an important feature of information society, knowledge society or experience society. time knowledge covers three dimensions that are embedded in time knowledge: availability, applications, and attitude. in other words, the time knowledge is based on the capacity to make time resources available, the allotment of time resources, and the cognitive and psychological approach to the concept of time. time knowledge is in our thinking composed of the following four elements: 1) allocation of time; 2) utilisation of global on-line society (real time, universal connectivity); 3) utilisation of desynchronisation of society or the flexibile schedules (maximum mobility, maximum immobility); 4) futures thinking (foresight, proactivity). bakas (2006: 101–102) points out that the technological revolution has changed the way we fennia 184: 1 (2006) 99slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments manage time. the non-stop supply of experiences keeps us awake late in the night. during the last hundred years the average sleeping time has decreased from twelve hours per night to six hours per night. probably it will drop to six hours a night in a century’s time. another human adaptation to the modern times is the capability of multitasking, which is required and desired both in work and free time. according to jalas (2006: 42), some researhers have observed that being busy means the constant collection of experiences and active leisure, but only as a mask to boredom, which is the prevalent condition of our time. he concludes that business and boredom coexist in the same time. bakas (2006: 102) also states that we have to stay busy, and entertained. this evokes a metaphor of world and work as a theatre (see also pine ii & gilmore 1999), bakas (2006) further reports on research findings made by the european research agency motivaction. people seem to be in search of a good combination of work, care tasks and free time. the constant time pressure makes people deal with time more rationally than ever before. ever growing demands of work makes people desire for more “domesticity”, for the security of the home environment. time stress and overall feeling of insecurity is leading to the rise of “cocooning”. thus the home will regain its status as an oasis of rest in our hectic and complex society. this is in line with slow housing thinking. innovation and innovative living environments the committee for the future of the finnish parliament (2005: 3) defines innovation as a process comprising many factors, to which the customer yields essential features. an innovation can be a novel product, service, process, working method or strategic approach etc. (ståhle et al. 2004: 11): innovation = realisation + new idea + implementation + creating value the austrian economist joseph schumpeter (1939) was among the first to define innovation and entrepreneuship. he showed that entrepreneurs innovate, not just by figuring out how to use inventions, but also by introducing new means of production, new products, and new forms of organisation. an economic impact is explicit in the traditional definition of innovation. however, tuomi (2002: 2) argues that in the era of internet this definition is problematic and possibly misleading. he refers especially to the flourishing open source development work (e.g. linux) done by a large community of volunteers without any concern for intellectual property rights or economic profit. on the other hand, tuomi (2002: 3) emphasises the indirect economic importance of the open source phenomenon. the success of many new companies is based on the productive activities of open source communities such as linux. he (2002) points out that innovation is always a collaborative networked effort, even when co-operation and networking is informal and not fully acknowledged. moreover, the users of a technology are often contributing the most interesting innovations instead of the original developers. innovation is usually associated with proactiveness, inspiration and energy. innovation is also about originality. thus, innovation can also be defined as an opposite to imitation. innovators are proactive and energetic. they set out to create, to experiment, to inspire, to build on new ideas. kelley (2005: 6) reminds us that all good definitions of innovation pair ideas with action, and the spark of fire. innovators have their heads in the clouds and at the same time their feet on the ground. innovation can be forced out with speed when facing obstacles or problems to be solved. innovative solutions emerge out of necessity. innovation can also blossom in another type of context – surrounded with ample time, idleness, and relaxating ambience. this is a less frequently discussed soil for innovation, but can be nurtured through the slow housing concept. an innovation can also have a social purpose. social innovation is a solution to a problem which concerns a community (committee for the future 2005: 4). paternity leave, school catering and safephone for elderly are examples of social innovations (ståhle et al. 2004: 11). tax deductions for commissioned household work, mobile telework e.g. while commuting on train and resulting diminished work hours at office end (heinonen 2004), as well as car share pools are further examples. innovation is not an “externality”, nor a deus ex machina. it evolves within our societies (conger 2005) and inside our living environments. innovative environment is an essential platform for realisation of novel ideas and their implementation. committee of the future (2005: 4) has defined it as follows: 100 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss good innovative environment = information flows + networks + buzz + action + trust when considering innovative environments it is important to study both working environments and housing environments in the framework of living environments. innovations evolve within our living environments i.e. encompassing both working and housing environments. a good innovative environment sets the scene for novel ideas and their implementation. people create the innovations and therefore innovating is always a human and social process (committee for the future 2005). tuomi (2002: 23) points out that innovation occurs when social practice changes. therefore, drivers for innovation can often be detected by looking for tensions and contradictions in existing social practice. tuomi (2002) underlines that social practices form a complex network of interlinked practices and this network is continuously evolving. technology addresses a need when it reduces some of the tensions created in this process. innovation arises in all corners of society: in public sector, industry, science and culture (conger 2005). cultural flows, due to globalisation as well as to transnational and domestic migration, influence lifestyles, knowledge and innovation. these forces of change create complex dynamics of interaction generating further novelty in all sectors of life (conger 2005). flow and creativity hungarian born psychologist mihaly csikszentmihalyi (1990) suggests another source of innovation – individual exploration and optimal experiences of “flow”. he claims that a generic feature of the human psyche is that humans feel happy when they succesfully perform at the edge of their capabilities. tuomi (2002: 23) takes this as an example of how individual creativity often drives change in social practices, also creating tensions in the process. by flow csikszentmihalyi means a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterised by a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. the experienced flow distorts the sense of time when our subjective experience of time is altered. a sense of personal control over the situation or activity is also typical of flow. an important condition for getting into flow, is the non-disturbing environment. every disturbance, such as a phone call, or a new person entering the room, will probably pull a person out from flow experience back to the reflecting mode. flow means intensive concentration and immersion in what you are doing. csikszentmihalyi (1990) emphasises that by controlling our consciousness, sense of time evaporates. flow equals optimal experiences and they can be interpreted as giving meaning to life. can slow life through slow housing create such environments for optimal experiences (flow)? flow may be an outcome of exercising one’s creativity and vice versa – flow regenerates creativity – a virtuous circle of flow, resulting in innovations and personal wellbeing. in finland, the prime minister’s council recently renewed the national strategy for information society. the strategy is aimed at creating a common national vision for the kind of information society that we want for finland. based on a preliminary survey of the preferences for developing the finnish information society, the following attributes were chosen as goals for national efforts: creative/ innovative, human-centered and competitive finland. the need for time and innovative environment was identified as one of the quintessential prerequisites for creativity (fig. 4). innovations in our living environment optimal living environments are like cornucopia or wishing wells, comprising all good qualities simultaneously at the same setting. buildings, spaces, and surroundings in optimal living environment should be functional, safe, healthy, pleasant, stimulating, peaceful, silent, aesthetic, accessible, communal, individual, and ecological. as stated earlier, innovations evolve within our living environments: both working and housing environments. meaningful life should be achieved in both (working + housing). a necessary prerequisite for this is balance between work and family. the opportunity to follow a more humane working rhythm and to be more able to balance work and family life is a motivating prize in our increasingly stressful times (himanen 2004: 15). bakas (2006: 132) also pays attention to this need and sees the “rushhour family” as becoming the cornerstone of society. a clear shift from the emphasis on the role of the work to the role of the housing as a center of people’s life can be detected. already le corbusier thought was that home should be a site for comfort and relaxation (jayne 2006). according to renzo piano et al. (2004) the new language (of architecfennia 184: 1 (2006) 101slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments fig. 4. the mind map of creativity (modified, hietanen et al. 2006). ture) has to respond to changing needs with a greater attention to the quality of life and work, and an awareness that the inadequacy of housing is the source of much of the malaise in contemporary society (http://www.rpbw.com/). the importance of place has not decreased in the digital era (kotkin 2000: 6). on the contrary place matters more than ever. thanks to technology, locational choices have become more elastic. traditional physical factors of a place – such as access to raw materials – are less important compared to the concentration of human skills. in order to thrive, individual localities have to appeal to the workers of the new economy – highly educated, creative people. quality of life is a feature of great attractiveness. it is an asset for small localities also in rural environment competing against bigger cities and towns. location underpins innovativeness in many ways. the location or living environment effects on creativity, which is one component of innovativeness. at the same time, creative and potentially innovative people are looking for a better quality of life. they are seeking their way to an unhurried living environment such as countryside. when they bring out their creative ideas into a new living environment, totally new ideas can come up from the impact between new forms of business and traditional sources of livelihood as well as form the impact between the new comers and the native people of the place. this “collision” presents a fertile soil for innovative enterprises. himanen (2004: 16) argues that in order to maintain (and improve, develop) the welfare society, we need new ways of promoting a socially, mentally, physically and culturally balanced development. he (2004: 19) stresses that the cultural balance of development also requires self-fulfilment outside work. this means an active approach to life that is realised in the private sector (entrepreneurship) as well as in the public sector (innovativeness) and non-governmental organisations (caring, art, hobbies etc.) (himanen 2004: 19). honoré argues that there is a direct correlation between cars and community: the less traffic that flows through an area, and the more slowly it flows, the more social contact there is among the residents (honoré 2004: 99). for himanen (2004: 6) communality means openness, belongingness, willingness to include other people and to do things together. it is a fundamental value of the welfare state. communality is one of the most energising experiences of life – being part of a larger community that shares your interests. it means living together (himanen 2004: 6). rural environments in big cities and their suburbs long distances between home and work have created urban sprawl and a strong car-dependency. this has effected negatively on the quality of life, social relationships, and on the living environment in general (see e.g., kotkin 2000; honoré 2004; jayne 2006). 102 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss kotkin (2000: 38–39) sees that core cities and their suburbs are not anymore found attractive by knowlegde industry and its workers. smog, traffic jams and soaring dwelling prices are pushing the old suburbs into decline. a more lifestyle-driven second wave of development has emerged. these new urban regions, nerdistans, are able to attract the rising technological elite. they might lack social diversity, but they seek to eliminate crime, traffic and commercial blight, considered endemic harms of cities and suburbs. nerdistans invest in parks, schools, and amenities in order to attract science-based industries and their workers. in their physical aspect, nerdistans favour a campus-like environment, “with landscaped walkways and access to bikeways and other recreational facilities”. often these communities are located near major universities. honoré (2004: 251) writes about the effects a speedy life can have on children, who suffer from upset stomachs, headaches, insomnia, depression and eating disorders brought on stress. as a result more and more people are looking for a better quality of life for themselves and for their children. countryside outside the hectic cities presents an attractive solution for stressed people. there they can find a pleasant, stress-free living environment, which offers them a possibility to relax and enjoy the life and the company of their closed ones as well as the neighbouring community. however, paradoxically a car is especially needed when living in countryside due to low service levels of public transport. also kotkin (2000) sees that rural hinterlands are involved by the new dynamics of place. kotkin (2000: 11) calls these places valhallas: rural areas, with amenities and pleasant landscape, “where knowlegde workers can enjoy pastoral paradise yet remain plugged into the burgeoning information economy.” kotkin probably overestimates the paradisiacal effect of the rural environment. in rural finland long distances, decreasing level of public services and the long period of darkness define strict frames to the rural in-migrants and their new lifestyle. as a consequence more and more people are buying second homes in the country or conditioning summer cottages into all-year second houses. finland is already the promised land of summer cottages (almost 500,000, for a population of 5 million). in great britain there are approximately 150,000 second homes and a rise to at least 340,000 is predicted within 20 years (franks 2004: 16). bakas (2006: 83) foresees the rise of “parttime living”, where people live different periods in different places during the year. this gives more opportunities to incorporate periods of slow housing in your life. the finnish committee for the future (2005: 1– 2) stresses the importance of strengthening the local and regional innovative environments in order to realise the world’s best innovative environment in finland. the present threat is that the innovativeness decreases substantially outside the metropolitan areas or their proximity. innovative sources of livelihood are needed to replace the farming in decline. slow housing enabled in rural environments may become a new attractor for rural in-migration. information society turned into an experience society means that experiences will be sought, for example, from slow housing (silence and peaceful milieu), also from clean environment and clean food. locally produced food is a related concept to slow food: slow food emphasises making food in no hurry and as a holistic process – from fetching the raw materials (growing) to making a meal and enjoying it in good company. slow housing in rural living environment can include efficiency and the countryside can be considered a “natural” environment for slow housing. however, slow housing “islands” can also be incorporated within larger city complexes. for example, shiodome complex designed in tokyo according to slow philosophy aims at attracting people by creating cultural and entertainment facilities in the urban texture. according to the committee for the future (2005: 7) the innovativeness must be considered as the centre of the development of the finnish working life and finnish society as whole. one of the most important challenges, when developing regional innovative environments, is to identify development targets, to which the great majority of the local innovators are willing to commit themselves (committee for the future 2005: 6). regional innovation can be strenghtened. factors of regional innovation vary from creative tension and competition among local actors, to developer networks and culture of collaboration, and to the image of the locality. the importance of innovation leadership and management as well as inspiring leadership is especially stressed by the committee. in order to foster regional entrepreneurship, new business development and small business growth, reforms in the finnish education and incentive system as well as risk financing should be done (comfennia 184: 1 (2006) 103slow housing – competitive edge for innovative living environments mittee for the future 2005: 13). according to the committee (2005: 14) “…breaking free from the traditional modi operandi and preconceptions as well as crossing borders create the foundation of regional success stories”. solutions for creating slow housing environments would be such a challenging new development target. conclusions the slow philosophy and slow thinking means a balance between different dichotomies, which should not be treated as intrinsically contradictory aspects of life, but as complementary and alternating elements: work + leisure, quantity + quality, material + immaterial, science + art, mobility + immobility, urban + rural, and people + places. due to the high novelty of the subject, empirical data on slow housing is not much available. therefore the conclusions are naturally largely tentative by nature. we also underline the balance between slow and speed. certain ideas and creativity flourish in slow moments, free from time pressures, but their implementation and commercialization necessitate fast responses. we maintain that slowing down does not mean less productivity. on the contrary, productivity could increase on the basis of positive and energising experiences from relaxation and flow. we therefore conclude that slowing down does not mean less innovativeness. by stopping to think you might come up with various innovations that would not otherwise have been generated in the prison of tight schedules. slow life and slow housing thus provide a chance to improve your quality of life, to better balance your work and private life, and to approach self-fulfillment. the optimal experience flow may be better achieved through slow. this process can take place both in cities, which usually are associated with speed and energy, as well as in rural areas, where quality of the living environment may in return encourage the residents to better self-fulfillment. therefore, we came to the conclusion that the concept of slow housing is not directed exclusively to the new global urban elite, to the new working poor serving them nor to the middle class fleeing the city. it is primarily an open concept for people seeking for meaningful life. slower lifestyle will also become a healthy trend for humans. there is social demand for innovations to facilitate slow life and slow housing, which in themselves make room for creativity as people become liberated from the chains of objective clock time. the employers and planning authorities of regions that can offer people with milieus for slow housing will gain in competitiveness. in the planning process of such environments, geddes’ concepts of conurbation in a meaningful scene for combining people, place and their activities (cf. analytical triad) could be successfully adapted. if “slow” can generate “flow”, who will be fast in a healthy way and first pick up the challenge of developing a slow region? references bakas a (2006). megatrends europe. the future of a continent and its impact on the world. 270 p. cyan-marshall cavendish. committee for the future (2005). regional innovative environments. technology assessment 23. 27 p. parliament of finland, helsinki. conger t (2005). globalization and the diversity of identity choices – emerging values. in gabrielsson u (ed). yksilö, identiteetti ja globalisaatio – miten elämäntapamme muuttuvat? global and local lifestyles, 6–11. tutkas, helsinki. csikszentmihalyi m (1990). flow. the psychology of optimal experiences. 303 p. harper & row, new york. florida r (2002). the rise of the creative class. 434 p. basic books, new york. franks l (2004). this is your life. the economist. intelligent life. new trends for smart life, summer 2004, 13–16. heinonen s (2000). prometheus revisited. human interaction with nature through technology in seneca. commentationes humanarum litterarum 115. 232 p. heinonen s (2004). mobile telework of the crossroads of social, environmental and cultural challenges. presentation at the 9th international telework workshop, international telework academy ita, crete, greece, 6–9 september 2004. heinonen s (2006). ekotehokkaan maaseudun ja kaupunkiseudun kokeilumalleja. teoriaa ja käytännön innovaatioita. vtt research report vtt-r-vtt research report vtt-r11771-06. 98 p. <http://virtual.vtt.fi/ekoseutu/ ekoseutumallit_raportti1.pdf>. heinonen s & l daldoss (2006). on the importance of developing foresight in a complex world. in heinonen s & a tuominen (eds.). matkalla tulevaisuuteen. vtt research report vtt-r-0939806, 25–27. <http://virtual.vtt.fi/tulevaisuusseminaari/tutkimusraportti_09398-06.pdf>. heinonen s, p lahti, k rönkä & j suominen (2005). asumisen kehitysnäkymät 2010–2030. 48 p. vtt, espoo. 104 fennia 184: 1 (2006)sirkka heinonen, minna halonen and lorenzo daldoss hietanen o, j kaivo-oja, v lauttamäki & t nurmi (2006). kansallinen tietoyhteiskuntastrategia. tulevaisuusverstaat. 34 p. finland futures researchfinland futures research centre, turku. himanen p (2004). challenges of the global information society. 29 p. committee for the future, helsinki. honoré c (2004). in praise of slowness. challenging the cult of speed. 321 p. harper collins, new york. jalas m (2006). busy, wise and idle time. a study of the temporalities of consumption in the environmental debate. acta universitatis oeconomicae helsingiensis a 275. 197 p. jayne m (2006). cities and consumption. critical introductions to urbanism and the city. 244 p. routledge, new york. jennings l (2005). slow is beautiful: living as if life really mattered. a worldwide movement challenges the cult of speed. the futurist 39: 2, 12–13. jensen r (1999). the dream society. 242 p. mcgrawhill, new york. kelley t (2005). the ten faces of innovation. ideo’s strategies for beating the devil’s advocate & driving creativity throughout your organisation. 284 p. doubleday, new york. kotkin j (2000). the new geography. how the digital revolution is reshaping the american landscape. 242 p. random house, new york. official manifesto of international movement for the defense of and the right to pleasure 1989 (2006). <http://www.slowfood.com/eng/sf_cose/sf_ cose_statuto.lasso>. 5.6.2006. piano r, mj holm & a lorente (2004). renzo piano: building workshop. lousiana museum of modern art. pine ii bj & jh gilmore (1999). the experience economy. work is theatre & every business a stage. 254 p. harvard business school press, boston. rifkin j (1998). the biotech century. 271 p. tarcher/ putnam books, new york. schumpeter j (1939). business cycles: a theoretical, historical, and statistical analysis of the capitalist process. 2 vols. 1095 p. mcgraw hill, new york. ståhle p, m sotarauta & a pöyhönen (2004). innovatiivisten ympäristöjen ja organisaatioiden johtaminen. tulevaisuusvaliokunta. teknologian arviointeja 19. eduskunnan kanslian julkaisu 6/2004. 154 p. thackara j (2005). in the bubble. designing in a complex world. 321 p. the mit press, cambridge. tuomi i (2002). networks of innovation. change and meaning in the age of the internet. 251 p. oxford university press, new york. virtanen k, t mattelmäki & s heinonen (2004). visiting eworkers’ homes – three stories for designing ework homes and furniture. paper presented at the 14th annual conference “the echallenges – e-2004”, 27–29 october 2004, vienna, austria. <http://smart.uiah.fi/luotain/pdf/visiting_eworkers_homes_echallenges.pdf>. webster f (1995). theories of the information society. 257 p. routledge, london. welter vm (2002). biopolis. patrick geddes and the city of life. 355 p. the mit press, cambridge. von wright gh (1992). minervan pöllö. 208 p. otava, helsinki. environmental citizenship in geography and beyond urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa90715 doi: 10.11143/fennia.90715 environmental citizenship in geography and beyond suvi huttunen, miikka salo, riikka aro & anni turunen huttunen, s., salo, m., aro, r. & turunen, a. (2020) environmental citizenship in geography and beyond. fennia 198(1–2) 196–209. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.90715 the need for wider action against environmental problems such as climate change has brought the debate about the role of citizen to the political, practical, and scientific domains. environmental citizenship provides a useful tool to conceptualize the relation between citizenship and the environment. however, there exists considerable variation in the ways environmental citizenship is understood regarding both the aspect of citizenship and the relationship to the environment. in this article, we review the literature on environmental citizenship and investigate the evolution of the concept. the article is based on a literature search with an emphasis on geographical research. the concept of environmental citizenship has moved relatively far from the ancient greek or marshallian conceptualizations of citizenship as rights and responsibilities bearing membership of a nation state. environmental citizenship literature has been influenced by the relational approach to space, focus on citizenship as acts and processes rather than a status and the broad spectrum of post-human thinking. however, conceptual clarification between different approaches to environmental citizenship is needed especially in relation to post-human approaches. geographical thinking can provide fruitful ways to develop the understanding of environmental citizenship towards a more inclusive, less individualized, globally responsible, and plural citizenship. keywords: environmental citizenship, climate citizenship, sustainable consumption, new materialism suvi huttunen (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8484-9014), department of social sciences and philosophy, faculty of humanities and social sciences, and school of resource wisdom, university of jyväskylä, seminaarinkatu 15, po box 35, fi-40014, university of jyväskylä, finland, and environmental policy center, finnish environment institute, latokartanonkaari 11, 00790 helsinki, finland. e-mail: suvi.m.huttunen@jyu.fi miikka salo, riikka aro (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3028-844x) and anni turunen (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3704-2955), department of social sciences and philosophy, faculty of humanities and social sciences, and school of resource wisdom, university of jyväskylä, seminaarinkatu 15, po box 35, fi-40014, university of jyväskylä, finland. e-mail: miikka.a.o.salo@jyu.fi, riikka.aro@jyu.fi, anni.e.turunen@jyu.fi © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 197suvi huttunen et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) introduction in the quest to find functioning solutions to the great environmental challenges that humanity is facing, the roles of citizens are actively debated in political, practical, and scientific domains. in the academic domain, environmental citizenship represents the core concept with which the role of citizens has been developed (e.g. dobson 2003; latta 2007; bell 2013). however, there exists considerable variation in the ways environmental citizenship is understood regarding both the aspect of citizenship and the relationship to the environment. furthermore, while citizenship and civil society are highly relevant concepts in political geography (e.g. desforges et al. 2005; staeheli 2011), the concept of environmental citizenship has gained relatively little attention amongst geographers. this review contributes to this gap by providing an overview of the environmental citizenship and related concepts from the perspective of geography. the concept of environmental citizenship emerged in environmental governance practices and related debates well before academic environmental policy research or political theory (bell 2005). it can be originated to the canadian environment agency in the 1990s, but the un environment program (unep) has also adopted the concept in the early 1990s (bell 2013). both in academic and practical contexts, environmental citizenship is discussed using different terms. dobson (2003) makes a distinction between an environmental citizen and an ecological citizen. in addition, the terms green citizen and sustainable or sustainability citizen are common (bullen & whitehead 2005; mason 2014). these concepts are often used interchangeably, and their distinctions are not well established (gabrielson 2008; scoville 2016). in this article, we use the term environmental citizenship as encompassing ecological, sustainable, and green citizenship. parallel to the environmental citizenship concepts, the utilization of more focused citizenship concepts, such as energy, food or climate citizenship is emerging (baker 2004; vihersalo 2017). traditionally, citizenship has been connected to the public sphere – as the right of ancient greek free adult men to join in the debate on city affairs (delanty 2000). in the last two centuries, citizenship has been defined mainly in the context of the nation state, but the global nature of environmental degradation calls into question whether nation states, and citizenship bounded by the borders of a nation state, are adequate as the basis of citizen rights and responsibilities. in this context, a new kind of citizenship that is supranational, over-generational, and addresses the private sphere along with the public one, has become a central part of the debate (dobson 2003). in wider citizenship studies, the static view of citizenship is challenged by viewing it as formed in the practices and acts of citizenship (isin 2008). practices involve the formal and semi-formal actions in which citizenship becomes visible, such as voting or participation in demonstrations. acts of citizenship broaden the understanding further to include action beyond the status of citizen or established practices of citizenship (wood & kallio 2019). in the context of the environmental citizen, the 'acts of citizenship' perspective shows how environmental citizenship does not exist as such, prior to the "politics of nature" or actual environmental struggles but emerges in the conflicts and concrete environmental action (latta 2007). thus, in the context of the environment, citizenship is increasingly understood as unbound in time and space. besides the global perspective, also a more general spatial focus on local spaces of acting environmental citizenship is explored with clear geographical interest. paradoxically, the common understanding of environmental citizenship refers to all kinds of environmentally friendly activities in private and public arenas, making environmental citizenship simply about the everyday practices of environmentally concerned people and voluntary care for the environment. this very practical utilization of the concept has blurred the theoretical roots of citizenship and there is a need for more theoretically subtle interpretation of what citizenship means in the context of the environment (bell 2005). both clarifying the roots and exploring the new directions of environmental citizenship in relation to space are called for. geographical research could play a key role in this. environmental citizenship in the web of science to identify the use of the concept of environmental citizenship in english research literature, we searched the web of science database in september 2020 with the terms "environmental citizen*", 198 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) "ecological citizen*", "green citizen*", and "sustainable citizen*". we restricted the results to all document types written in english in 1945–2020. the result was 370 hits. we complemented the search with terms: "food citizen*", "energy citizen*" and "climate citizen*". of these, food citizen was the most common with 42 hits since 2004. energy citizenship generated 23 hits starting from 2008 while the concept of climate citizenship was used only 6 times since 2015. the first result of the combined search was from 1974, but the term was used in the context of a lawsuit on citizens' claims regarding the environment. the next hit was from 1987 and the third from 1993, after which the concepts have been used every year. the utilization of the concepts has considerably increased in the 21st century, especially after 2015 (fig. 1). based on the literature review, the academic work regarding environmental citizenship and related concepts occurs mainly in north america and in europe. a quarter of the articles are written in the united states of america, 18% in england and 10% in australia. looking into the geographical divide, we can see that environmental studies is the most common discipline in europe, north america, asia, and oceania. in south america, the concept is most commonly used in environmental sciences and sociology, and in africa in geography. articles related to political science as well as geography are common in both north america and in europe. in north america, oceania, and asia the concept is also widely used in educational research. our focus is on the discussion about environmental citizenship within geography. web of science classified 45 of the search results under geography and 20 articles used the term "geography". from these, we excluded articles in which environmental citizenship or related concepts were only mentioned without any elaboration on the meaning of the concept. this left us with 30 articles. all the geography articles could be categorized under human geography and they mainly fell under the fields of political and social geography. the research on environmental citizenship has been widely published in various journals, but especially in environmental politics and sustainability. the core theoretical discussions have been written around the mid-2000s. these include dobson's (2003) citizenship and the environment, environmental politics' citizenship theme issue (dobson & sáiz 2005), and dobson's and bell's (2006) environmental citizenship. however, many empirical articles refer only loosely to the discussions of fig. 1. the occurrence of the environmental citizen and related concepts from 1993 to september 2020 in the web of science database. 199suvi huttunen et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) environmental citizenship within political theory, if at all. therefore, it is useful to examine the concept in a broader framework. in our analysis, we use the core theoretical articles as well as other widely referred and conceptually important ones, to gain a general understanding of the development of the concept. to reflect these developments in relation to the geographical literature, we analyzed all the geography-related articles in detail. what follows is an account of the evolvement of environmental citizenship with a particular focus on its use in the geographic literature. the core questions we examined were: what is environmental citizenship about?, who is an environmental citizen?, and how, and on what scales and sites, should she/he act? roots of environmental citizenship the concept of citizenship originates from ancient greece and rome and the foundation of western political theory. there emerged the basic ideas of the two distinct views of citizenship existing today, liberal and republican. their modern conceptualizations have developed in the evolvement of modern democracies and market society. the liberal model emphasizes citizenship as a public statute, which secures political, social, and civil rights as a member of a political community. the republican model, in turn, highlights public responsibilities and political agency for the common good (dagger 2002). this division is still important in contemporary political theorizing on environmental citizenship, in which environmental citizenship brings new (ecological) content to citizenship, such as new rights and obligations (bell 2005; hayward 2006; barry 2008). at the center of republican political thinking is an active virtuous citizen working for the common good, which is generally seen as a fruitful starting point for environmental citizenship. construction of a sustainable society is easier if based on environmental duties (such as nature conservation or recycling) performed by citizens striving towards sustainability rather than those demanding their rights (barry 2005; dobson 2007). the republican idea of citizen duties involves civic virtues that enable fulfilling the duties. environmental citizenship, especially as political activity, reflects traditional republican virtues such as self-discipline, loyalty, or commitment to principles (barry 2005, 27). via cultivating the virtues related to environmental citizenship, citizens become active and willing to perform their duties (barry 2005). the state can facilitate this cultivation of the virtues via education for example, as emphasized in the agenda 21, which presented citizen participation as central in dealing with environmental issues. in geography literature, republican thinking is visible for instance in examining attempts to create responsible citizens for forest conservation (bell & evans 1997), and in studies that emphasize the role of education in enhancing environmental citizenship. ideally, sustainability education produces environmental citizens by changing attitudes, developing skills, fostering responsibility, and improving knowledge (hawthorne & alabaster 1999). however, the duties set by the state or virtues cultivated via education seem to proceed slowly, which stresses the importance to assess the potential of environmental citizenship in the context of rights and individual freedom. in modern liberal thinking, the justification of civic obligations related to environmental citizenship poses challenges. one of the key elements of liberalism is what rawls (2001) calls the "fact of reasonable pluralism" (see bell 2005, 184), according to which there exist multiple reasonable moral doctrines and political justice cannot be based on just one of them. from the viewpoint of environmental citizenship, this means that sustainability is not seen as more important a moral doctrine than for example property rights. however, some researchers have interpreted environmental citizenship further within a liberal framework. hailwood (2005, 198) argues that the non-instrumental value of nature, in accordance to sustainability, can be accommodated to the framework of liberalism by respecting the "otherness view" of nature's value which involves a kind of self-restrained attitude for not identifying nature with human purposes only. this, according to hailwood (2005), does not require the interpretation of nature as intrinsically valuable but recognizes nature also as independent of the roles we humans grant it in our cultural and economic projects. thus, the respect for nature’s otherness and the ability to acknowledge a non-human reality "should be a virtue of political liberal citizenship" (hailwood 2005, 195). 200 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) bell (2005), in turn, argues that liberal theory should be complemented by the requirement of a right for the environment, not primarily as a property, but as a satisfier of basic needs. although liberalism emphasizes rights, the liberal framework also includes obligations. it is the task of the democratic process (the state) to choose from justified differences of opinion (reasonable disagreements), those opinions that protect the environmental rights of citizens. on that basis, the state can impose obligations, such as environmental laws, on everyone. in the liberal view, compliance with the obligations created by a just democratic process is compulsory for the citizen. however, all other environmental activities are voluntary; they may or may not be undertaken by the citizen (bell 2005). the disadvantage of the democratic process, to which the liberal political tradition is fundamentally committed, is its slowness in achieving concrete results in preventing the rapidly progressing ecological degradation (latta 2007). waiting for the general approval through a just democratic process may be too slow to prevent climate change. in the geography literature on environmental citizenship, rights and responsibilities continue to be highly relevant especially when discussing their division between people in the global north and south, in the context of global environmental governance and in culturally different and shifting understandings on environmental responsibilities (clarke & agyeman 2011; arora-jonsson et al. 2016). however, both republican and liberal conceptualizations of citizenship see the citizen as a membership of a political community, essentially the nation state, within which the rights and responsibilities are defined (humphreys 2009). the current literature usually rejects this confining of environmental rights and responsibilities inside national borders. rather, citizens are seen as "citizens of the environment" because the causes and impacts of ecological degradation are global. the idea of global or cosmopolitan citizenship is not new but derives also from ancient greece. beyond the environment, also the rise of economic and social transnational networks and flows makes it more relevant in modern conceptualizations on citizenship (linklater 2002). from the political theory perspective, the problem in global environmental citizenship is the ambiguity of membership towards a polity: in which political community the citizen has membership?, to whom is she obliged to?, and who sets duties and rights, who controls them, and are those duties and rights only moral by nature, not political, as the concept of citizenship would seem to require? in the environmental citizenship context, dobson's (2003) solution to the polity problem is post-cosmopolitan citizenship, the conceptualization that actually launched the current discussions around environmental citizenship. in post-cosmopolitanism, people are bound together by the material conditions of everyday life, in a globalized world with unequally distributed power and resources. instead of the nation state, "ecological footprint" serves as the political space of ecological citizenship (ibid., 99). according to dobson, the ecological footprint based on material relationships is of a political nature. in a globalized world, power and its effects are distributed asymmetrically, indicating that also responsibilities should distribute asymmetrically (dobson 2003, 2007). this asymmetry is evident between the poor and the rich, roughly global north and south, and it manifests itself, for example, in uneven negotiating positions on the rules of international trade and burden bearing. dobson claims (ibid.) that the obligations laid via ecological footprint represent a kind of social contract between people in the north and south and does not need political authority. dobson's post-cosmopolitan citizen shares the idea of civic virtues present in republicanism. however, in post-cosmopolitanism, justice is the most central virtue, and it is examined in relation to the environment and the ecological footprint of an individual. thus, the global environmental duties broaden the scope of duties beyond republican virtues, including also care, compassion, and responsibility for the vulnerable (dobson 2003, 63; see also macgregor 2014). for dobson (2003, 61– 62), the motivation behind environmental action lies in the virtue of social and environmental justice leading to care for the environment. the post-cosmopolitan idea of citizenship formed via individual's ecological footprint and related action, to reduce the footprint, paves the way to understanding environmental citizenship in the private sphere, as evolving in action, in relation to space and even challenging the human/nature dualism. connected to wider developments in relation to citizenship studies, both within and beyond geography, this has meant significant diversification of the liberal and republican notions of citizenship. 201suvi huttunen et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) evolving concept sustainable consumption and its problems while citizenship has traditionally been mainly understood as (political) action in the public sphere, dobson's post-cosmopolitan environmental citizenship opened the private to the public sphere, making also private consumption and lifestyle choices a matter of environmental citizenship and the political. the emphasis on environmental justice legitimizes the idea of a post-cosmopolitan good environmental citizen primarily as a citizen who lives sustainably and minimizes his/her environmental impact (dobson 2003, 132). despite the original intentions, this has partially led to loose interpretations of environmental citizenship in terms of sustainable consumption with relatively little attention to political theory and conceptual definitions of (environmental) citizenship. in this context, environmental citizenship is understood as sustainable practices and consumption choices, and the virtue of environmental justice can be enhanced by different attitude and awareness influencing means, such as environmental education creating environmentally conscious citizens (robinson 2015). studies on environmental behavior are often based on attitude surveys (e.g. howell 2013; asilsoy & oktay 2018), providing a rather limited view on environmental citizenship by assuming a set of attitudes or values to produce environmental citizenship. the perspective in which sustainable consumers (as environmental citizens) are assumed to be freely acting human subjects ignores the underlying political, economic, and social structures that condition the choices, that is, make them im/possible in the first place (barry 2005, 23). from the perspective of geographic research, the sustainable consumer aspect of environmental citizenship has encountered criticism especially from the perspectives of communitarianism and neoliberal governmentality (e.g. barr 2014; eli et al. 2016; hatanaka 2020). in this context, the concepts of energy citizenship and food citizenship are particularly relevant. they are often developed in connection to community-oriented projects and movements focusing on renewable energy or local food production (e.g. baker 2004; jhagroe 2019; hatanaka 2020). both highlight the importance of increasing civic activity beyond consuming and see consumption as political, collective activity in the markets. these movements and projects create possibilities for consuming differently, for example in the context of community gardening or other local food projects (e.g. seyfang 2005; crossan et al. 2016). while doing so, they form new modes of (economic and) environmental activism embedded in the community and challenge the material flows in the capitalist market economy (barr & pollard 2017; jhagroe 2019). this focus on community action as political borrows ideas from communitarian citizenship (kenis 2016). the communitarian approach to citizenship is diverse and internally incoherent with different strands that can be traced to liberal and republican ideas (delanty 2002; eckersley 2006). central in all communitarian thinking are social bonds and loyalty (eckersley 2006). in the environmental citizenship context, this means collective, community-based local action in creating change towards sustainable development by finding and utilizing sustainable solutions that resonate with the everyday lives of a community of local people (kenis 2016). in order to be environmental citizenship, the sustainable action needs to be performed in the context of (political) community action (crossan et al. 2016; gabrielson 2016). however, despite the community-centered developments, also these forms of sustainable consumption can be seen as representing neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality. this concerns the emphasis on citizen responsibility and action in the private sphere as well as public influencing through market action (be it collective or individual) combined to minimizing the role of the state in environmental governance. seen from this perspective, citizens are reduced to individualized consumers defined by market relations (rose & miller 2010), and the responsibility for environmental degradation is placed on individuals and local communities instead of the state or industry (gabrielson 2016). this kind of citizenship reduces citizens as actors focused on their own behavior: environmental citizens are governing themselves to create a sustainable society and the community projects are means for this governance. critically then, wider questions regarding 202 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) societal structures behind environmental degradation may remain untouched and unreachable for citizens and local communities (rutherford 2007). in geography literature on environmental citizenship connected to community action, it has also been pointed out how community action opens the potential for resistance and political citizenship by creating new relations between people, local spaces, and institutions, including the state (crossan et al. 2016). according to these studies, while important, the neoliberal governmentality critique represents only a partial picture of the community-based citizen action and leaves unnoticed the diverse ways the local action functions to enact citizenship (jhagroe 2019). this highlights the need to examine citizenship in more detail in relation to space and in action, which is the focus of an important part of the geography literature on environmental citizenship. citizenship in relational space and action within geography, the traditional territorial definition of space has been accompanied by relational reading of space. in this context, space is seen as produced via networks and relations that evolve beyond the actual local qualities of the place (amin 2004; desforges et al. 2005). in this relational space, citizenship is less about status with rights and responsibilities and more about processual negotiations of becoming a citizen and what it could entail (bullen & whitehead 2005; isin 2008; spinney et al. 2015). in the context of the environmental citizen, this relational understanding of space also means shifting the attention towards diverse acts of citizenship. the relational space can be examined within the acts by focusing on how environmental citizenship emerges in action and what kind of relations work to construct it (bullen & whitehead 2005). arora-jonsson and colleagues (2016) illustrate the relationality of space in the context of global climate governance. forest conservation in africa as a means for northern countries to reduce their emissions creates new relational political space, in which citizen rights and responsibilities are redefined as the governance is practiced. in the case study (ibid.), villagers in burkina faso and tanzania become part of a global carbon assemblage as responsible environmental citizens who look after global commons. citizen subjectivities are shaped in action via the influence of different relations between people, and between people and things. environmental citizenship “becomes” in multiple mundane actions (not only in relation to the state), and citizenship and the subjectivity it entails are both constrained and enabled in relation to a particular time and space. action represents moments that create new spaces and ways of being political – being a citizen. from this perspective pre-existing citizen virtues, such as environmental justice, become less relevant, as the virtues are negotiated in the action alongside the environmental citizenship itself (mason 2014; roe & buser 2016). this openness and negotiability of citizenship has made it possible to diversify the understanding of citizenship in research. in general citizenship literature, attempts towards diversification have been made especially from the feminist perspective (lister 1997) and translated to environmental citizenship via ecofeminism (macgregor 2004, 2014). this highlights particularly the role of care as a core constituent of citizenship. beyond gender, geographic environmental citizenship literature is interested in wider questions of inclusion and exclusion, as well as related alternative conceptualizations on what environmental citizenship means, and how it is narrated, imagined, and acted in different places (baldwin 2012; harris 2014; fadaee 2017). the action-focused and relational understandings of environmental citizenship can enable wider inclusivity and a more diverse understanding of what citizenship is about (fadaee 2017). the current ideas of environmental citizenship mainly come from the global north and, thus, risk excluding cultural diversity, which can provide important perspectives for tackling future environmental challenges. this diversification has meant exploring citizenship from the perspective of marginalized groups such as black and minority ethnic groups in britain (clarke & agyeman 2011), australians of asian ancestry (waitt et al. 2020), indigenous people in south america (latta 2013), or racialized climate change migrants (baldwin 2012). similar questions related to inclusivity and belonging are also tackled within the global north. the normative demands to live sustainably and to be a good environmental citizen can create even new 203suvi huttunen et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) excluding categories. environmental citizen practices, such as cycling, can position practitioners as barely or less citizens when the proper citizen uses his/her car (spinney et al. 2015). this way environmental citizen practices can also conflict with what is generally understood as a good citizen. the focus on acts of citizenship makes these kinds of differentiations visible as citizenship (painter & philo 1995; isin 2008), as ways of doing political work and defining what is citizenship (crossan et al. 2016). environmental citizen practices can articulate and form collective identities, as well as create and claim rights to space and decision-making, and thus contest marginalization (sinreich & cupples 2014; crossan et al. 2016). the inclusion to and exclusion from citizenship often takes the relations between people, and those between people and things, as their core focus. waitt, voyer and fontaine (2020) explored the creation of citizen subjectivities in recreational fishing as affective intensities in relations between people, matter, and place. they showed how the circulation of these affects both reinforced and challenged the mobilization of the environmental citizen. based on their racialized bodies, fishers with asian ancestry were excluded from citizenship, but they themselves aligned with the obligations with sensitivity to specific fishing sites and formulated identities as citizens in the context of recreational fishing. in turkey, according to harris (2014), the relationship to environmentalism was ambivalent and raised emotions. while turkish people imagined environmental citizenship as something to strive for and related to europeans, the europeanism raised feelings of colonialism and suppression of turkish culture and ways of living with the environment. thus, environmental citizenship is not isolated but emerges in the context of time and place, and in emotional and affective relations that shape citizen subjectivities. the role of the post-human in environmental citizenship when environmental citizenship is discussed in terms of action and relations, the influence of the nonhuman world in the formation of citizenship becomes relevant. roe and buser (2016) examine the emergence of food citizenship via the materiality of food. they argue that food becomes a political agent, which supports sustainable human engagement and exchange in the food system. thus, nonhuman matter is seen as a part of citizenship. for geographers, the relationship between humans and nature has been particularly interesting. this research has been influenced by the post-human and new materialist thinking, which have evolved within social sciences and geography since bruno latour's actor network theory and gilles deleuze's and félix guattari's assemblage thinking. in the context of environmental citizenship, the inclusion of non-humans varies from the citizenship of non-humans (latta 2014), to seeing them as influencing the citizenship of humans (bullen & whitehead 2005). bullen and whitehead (2005, 504) see environmental citizenship involving "a trans-human community of being, which crosses time, space and substance". besides past (in the form of responsibility for historical legacies) and future generations, and global space, citizenship extends to involve non-humans. this means human care for the environment in the form of co-joining the rights and responsibilities of humans with non-humans. the idea of giving legal rights to non-human beings dates back to at least the 1970s, to the seminal article should trees have standing? by stone (1972). in the 21st century, it has gained new impetus through the granting of legal rights to nonhuman entities in the constitution of ecuador (gudynas 2011). in legal systems, the rights of forests, mountains or rivers are claimed by humans and political agency is reserved for them. for bullen and whitehead (2005, 507), the political agency of humans is also influenced by non-humans as citizenship is formed in "myriad networks of socio-ecological flow". however, if political agency in the form of environmental citizenship is constituted in acts of citizenship, in which matter and things play a role, the non-humans can also be seen as to have agency along with humans (latta 2014). from this perspective, environmental citizens are hybrids or assemblages and agency is distributed among humans and non-humans (latta 2014). moving beyond nature-culture binaries, this also means that neither humans nor non-humans can be citizens on their own. in roe and buser’s study (2016), new sensory experiences related to food and a space for performing food in unusual manners for the participants, such as baking or cultivating, made the invisible connections between people and food visible. for the participants, this concretized issues such as food poverty and environmental damage caused by food production, and aligned them with ecological citizenship. without the action of non-humans together with humans in gardening and baking, this citizenship 204 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) would not have emerged. similarly, water (latta 2014) and trees (sinreich & cupples 2014) have been interpreted to work with humans to oppose or influence new forms of governance. corporeal, sensory, and emotional dimensions are important in the construction of human–nonhuman entanglements that result in environmental citizenship. lorimer (2010) explains how working with rare animal species, such as elephants and jaguars, provides affective encounters for international conservation volunteers. these encounters construct environmental citizenship, in which the charismatic animals become "active participants in global networks of ethical concern and economic activity" (ibid., 319). as a side effect, the global volunteering assemblage reinforces marginalisation of other animals, places, and citizens already in disadvantaged positions. the inclusion of non-humans to the sphere of (environmental) citizenship can help clarify and highlight the interconnectedness and inseparability of the human and the non-human. the recognition of the role played by non-humans reinforces collective responsibility for environmental problems: instead of a focus on individual responsibility, seeing environmental citizenship as enacted in assemblages enables placing responsibility in these collectives (gabrielson 2016). however, this includes also a risk of losing human responsibility altogether (see next section). problematic environmental citizenships our review revealed different interconnected ways of understanding and utilizing the concept of environmental citizenship (fig. 2). liberal and republican forms center around rights and responsibilities within the nation state, while post-cosmopolitan citizenship provides a more nuanced way of conceptualizing environmental citizenship as it broadens the realm, sphere, and virtues related to citizen action. the acknowledgement of action in the private sphere and everyday life as part of environmental citizenship and related interest in the relations within which citizenship emerges has lifted even post-human approaches as relevant for discussion. however, the developments contain two important problems that merit further discussion. the first concerns the potential dilution of the political in environmental citizenship, and the other the inclusion of non-humans. fig. 2. different ways of understanding and using the concept of environmental citizenship in geographical literature. 205suvi huttunen et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) the danger in thinking environmental citizenship via diverse acts of citizenship is that everything and consequently nothing becomes political. there is a need to draw at least some kind of a line between what is considered as acts of citizenship and what is not. one approach for clarifying the political in acts of citizenship is to include only motivated, intentional, or oriented action towards shaping the society, as producing citizenship (kallio et al. 2020). in the context of environmental citizenship this means, for instance, that participation in community food production with an aim of creating a more sustainable food system produces environmental citizenship. a slightly different perspective is provided by staeheli and colleagues (2012, 630), who see the political arising from the processes and relationships that "provide the basis for political struggles". thus, intentionality or orientation is not required. this includes different kind of action in daily life yet not just any – only action that contributes to struggles is relevant for citizenship. thus, environmental citizenship is also constructed in relations; as a child of the community food activist eats a lunch prepared with ingredients from the community farm, it is a political act, even though the child herself is "just eating". when political struggles, and the political space that enables the struggles, are seen as constituted in relations, these relations can be extended to include those between humans and non-humans. this, especially in the environmental context, contributes to the emergence of matters of concern (latta 2013). the role of non-humans can be seen as passive properties that influence human actors, but they can also be seen parallel to humans, as part of the political becoming of citizenship. from this perspective, environmental citizenship is not just about the politically intentional human, participating in community food production for instance. instead, environmental citizenship emerges in the intraaction of human(s) and field, seeds, climatic patterns, and so on. thus, the political emerges in processes with agencies that are distributed. even this last perspective does not collapse everything into citizenship. the key in all the versions is the matter of concern, political struggle, or shaping the society, which implies the necessity of a process that contributes to the development of a more environmentally sustainable society. however, the inclusion of non-humans to the sphere of citizenship in assemblages of humans and non-humans is not widely embraced in citizenship studies. particularly, this relates to the discussion on duties and responsibilities of citizens and a perspective that only humans can have (political) agency (e.g. häkli 2018). citizenship can be seen as a category reserved for humans, with an emphasis on the subject of citizenship (yeatman 2007), and via acts of citizenship through which humans construct themselves as citizens. non-human entities can passively influence this process, but political agency of the moral citizen-subject needs to be reflexive and intentional. else, there is a risk of losing human responsibility of the acts that, for example, cause environmental degradation. if environmental degradation is caused by human–non-human assemblages, consequently, these assemblages (not just humans) should carry the responsibility of their actions. however, as the distributed agency in these assemblages is not intentional, this would entail that no-one is responsible. without responsibility, a core meaning of citizenship is lost. thus, to be able to include non-human nature in citizenship, the assemblages should carry responsibility. this would require some kind of shared responsibility and an ability to account for different degrees of intentionalism and reflexivity as well as different capacities. as haraway (2016, 116) puts it: "we are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, but not in the same ways. the differences matter – in ecologies, economies, species, lives." the post-human claim of the inseparability of humans and nature is convincing. from the perspective of environmental citizenship, closely attached to ecological processes, the separation is difficult to maintain. however, to be able to understand citizenship in these terms requires more conceptual work on the subject. thus, the environmental citizenship theorizing could benefit from similar refinements as the concept of lived citizenship (kallio et al. 2020), which clarifies the differences between observing citizenship in space, action, relations and affects. while this particular refinement is not related to the non-human agency problem, these kinds of refining attempts within the current, empirically focused, and relatively muddy discussions on environmental citizenship would be needed. 206 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) past and future of geography for environmental citizenship the geographical debate on environmental citizenship reflects more general trends in social sciences and human geography, such as post-colonialism, relational perspective on space, focus on mundane practices and everyday life and the growing interest in post-humanism (bullen & whitehead 2005; latta 2013, 2014; harris 2014; roe & buser 2016). in particular, the focus on the relationships between humans and non-humans has been central and an important contribution of geographic thinking in environmental citizenship. this involves the potential ways to include non-humans in the assemblages of citizenship, as having agential qualities, or at least figuring out the role of matter and other non-humans in influencing human agency. another core area of geography in environmental citizenship concerns the examination of cultural differences, racialization, and colonial aspects of environmental citizenship as primarily a western concept. while usually examined in the context of relational space, these issues have territorial roots, and they are strongly linked to national and international policies and power structures, and formal citizenship status. there is room for developing an understanding of the linkages between national citizenship and the different understandings and acts of environmental citizenship. however, the geographic literature on environmental citizenship is overall relatively small and often not oriented towards conceptual development. corresponding to wider development in citizenship studies and the important role of geography, geographers could take a more active interest in the concept of environmental citizenship. geographical thinking could help in clarifying differences between different perspectives of environmental citizenship, particularly, related to the more recent developments in relational and post-human thinking. acknowledgements the study was financially supported by the academy of finland, strategic research council (grant numbers 313013, 313015 and 335965). references amin, a. (2004) regions unbound: towards a new politics of place. geografiska annaler series b: human geography 86(1) 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-3684.2004.00152.x arora-jonsson, s., westholm, l., temu, b. j. & petitt, a. (2016) carbon and cash in climate assemblages: the making of a new global citizenship. antipode 48(1) 74–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12170 asilsoy, b. & oktay, d. (2018) exploring environmental behaviour as the major determinant of ecological citizenship. sustainable cities and society 39 765–771. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2018.02.036 baker, l. e. (2004) tending cultural landscapes and food citizenship in toronto’s community gardens. geographical review 94(3) 305–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2004.tb00175.x baldwin, a. (2012) orientalising environmental citizenship: climate change, migration and the potentiality of race. citizenship studies 16(5–6) 625–640. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2012.698485 barr, s. (2014) practicing the cultural green economy: where now for environmental social science? geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 96(3) 231–243. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/geob.12048 barr, s. & pollard, j. (2017) geographies of transition: narrating environmental activism in an age of climate change and 'peak oil'. environment and planning a: economy and space 49(1) 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x16663205 barry, j. (2005) resistance is fertile: from environmental to sustainability citizenship. in dobson, a. & bell, d. (eds.) environmental citizenship, 21–48. mit press, cambridge. barry, j. (2008) towards a green republicanism: constitutionalism, political economy, and the green state. the good society 17(2) 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1353/gso.0.0040 bell, d. r. (2005) liberal environmental citizenship. environmental politics 14(2) 179–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010500054863 bell, d. r. (2013) environmental citizenship: global, local and individual. in harris, p. (ed.) routledge handbook of global environmental politics, 347–358. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203799055 bell, m. & evans, d. m. (1997) greening “the heart of england”— redemptive science, citizenship, and "symbol of hope for the nation". environment and planning d: society and space 15(3) 157–279. https://doi.org/10.1068/d150257 207suvi huttunen et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) bullen, a. & whitehead, m. (2005) negotiating the networks of space, time and substance: a geographical perspective on the sustainable citizen. citizenship studies 9(5) 499–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020500301270 clarke, l. & agyeman, j. (2011) shifting the balance in environmental governance: ethnicity, environmental citizenship and discourses of responsibility. antipode 43(5) 1773–1800. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00832.x crossan, j., cumbers, a., mcmaster, r. & shaw, d. (2016) contesting neoliberal urbanism in glasgow’s community gardens: the practice of diy citizenship. antipode 48(4) 937–955. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12220 dagger, r. (2002) republican citizenship. in isin, e. f. & turner, b. s. (eds.) handbook of citizenship studies, 145–158. sage publications ltd, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608276.n9 delanty, g. (2000) citizenship in a global age: society, culture, politics. open university press, buckingham and philadelphia. delanty, g. (2002) communitarianism and citizenship. in isin, e. f. & turner, b. s. (eds.) handbook of citizenship studies, 159–174. sage publications ltd, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608276.n10 desforges, l., jones, r. & woods, m. (2005) new geographies of citizenship. citizenship studies 9(5) 439–451. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020500301213 dobson, a. (2003) citizenship and the environment. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199258449.001.0001 dobson, a. (2007) environmental citizenship: towards sustainable development. sustainable development 15 276–285. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.344 dobson, a. & bell, d. (eds.) (2006) environmental citizenship. mit press, cambridge. dobson, a. & sáiz, a. v. (2005) introduction. environmental politics 14(2) 157–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010500054822 eckersley, r. (2006) communitarianism. in dobson, a. & eckersley, r. (eds.) political theory and the ecological challenge, 91–108. cambridge university press, cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511617805.007 eli, k., dolan, c., schneider, t. & ulijaszek, s. (2016) mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible: framing political engagement through the buycott app. geoforum 74 63–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.04.002 fadaee, s. (2017) environmentally friendly food initiatives in iran: between environmental citizenship and pluralizing the public sphere. citizenship studies 21(3) 344–358. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2016.1277979 gabrielson, t. (2008) green citizenship: a review and critique. citizenship studies 12(4) 429–446. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020802184275 gabrielson, t. (2016) bodies, environments and agency. in gabrielson, t., hall, c., meyer, j. m. & schlosberg, d. (eds.) the oxford handbook of environmental political theory, 399–412. oxford university press, oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199685271.001.0001 gudynas, e. (2011) buen vivir: today's tomorrow. development 54 (4) 441–447. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.86 hailwood, s. (2005) environmental citizenship as reasonable citizenship. environmental politics 14(2) 195–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010500054921 haraway, d. j. (2016) staying with the trouble. making kin in the chthulucene. duke university press, durham and london. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780 harris, l. m. (2014) imaginative geographies of green: difference, postcoloniality, and affect in environmental narratives in contemporary turkey. annals of the association of american geographers 104(4) 801–815. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.892356 hatanaka, m. (2020) beyond consuming ethically? food citizens, governance, and sustainability. journal of rural studies 77 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2020.04.006 hawthorne, m. & alabaster, t. (1999) citizen 2000: development of a model of environmental citizenship. global environmental change 9(1) 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0959-3780(98)00022-3 hayward, t. (2006) ecological citizenship: justice, rights and the virtue of resourcefulness. environmental politics 15(3) 435–446. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010600627741 howell, r. a. (2013) it’s not (just) "the environment, stupid!" values, motivations, and routes to engagement of people adopting lower-carbon lifestyles. global environmental change 23(1) 281–290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.10.015 humphreys, d. (2009) environmental and ecological citizenship in civil society. the international spectator 44(1) 171–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/03932720802693101 häkli, j. (2018) the subject of citizenship – can there be a posthuman civil society? political geography 67 166–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.08.006 208 reviews and essays fennia 198(1–2) (2020) isin, e. f. (2008) theorizing acts of citizenship. in isin, e. f. & nielsen, g. m. (eds.) acts of citizenship, 15–43. palgrave macmillan, london. jhagroe, s. (2019) food citizenship and governmentality: neo-communitarian food governance in the hague. politics and governance 7(4) 190–201. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v7i4.2192 kallio, k. p., wood, b. e. & häkli, j. (2020) lived citizenship: conceptualising an emerging field. citizenship studies 24(6) 713–729. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2020.1739227 kenis, a. (2016) ecological citizenship and democracy: communitarian versus agonistic perspectives. environmental politics 25(6) 949–970. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2016.1203524 latta, a. (2007) locating democratic politics in ecological citizenship. environmental politics 16(3) 377–393. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010701251631 latta, a. (2013) locating nature's citizens: latin american ecologies of political space. citizenship studies 17(5) 566–580. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2013.818372 latta, a. (2014) matter, politics and the sacred: insurgent ecologies of citizenship. cultural geographies 21(3) 323–341. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013495642 linklater, a. (2002) cosmopolitan citizenship. in isin, e. f. & turner, b.s. (eds.) handbook of citizenship studies, 317–331. sage, london. lister, r. (1997) citizenship: towards a feminist synthesis. feminist review 57 28–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/014177897339641 lorimer, j. (2010) international conservation ‘volunteering’ and the geographies of global environmental citizenship. political geography 29(6) 311–322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2010.06.004 macgregor, s. (2004) from care to citizenship: calling ecofeminism back to politics. ethics and the environment 9(1) 56–84. https://doi.org/10.1353/een.2004.0007 macgregor, s. (2014) only resist: feminist ecological citizenship and the post-politics of climate change. hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 29(3) 617–633. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12065 mason, k. (2014) becoming citizen green: prefigurative politics, autonomous geographies, and hoping against hope. environmental politics 23(1) 140–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2013.775725 painter, j. & philo, c. (1995) spaces of citizenship: an introduction. political geography 14(2) 107–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/0962-6298(95)91659-r rawls, j. (2001) justice as fairness: a restatement. harvard university press, cambridge. robinson, z. p. (2015) are geography students good "environmental citizens?" a comparison between year of study and over time. journal of geography in higher education 39(2) 245–259. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2014.936312 roe, e. & buser, m. (2016) becoming ecological citizens: connecting people through performance art, food matter and practices. cultural geographies 23(4) 581–598. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015624243 rose, n. & miller, p. (2010) political power beyond the state: problematics of government. british journal of sociology 61(s1) 271–303. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01247.x rutherford, s. (2007) green governmentality: insights and opportunities in the study of nature’s rule. progress in human geography 31(3) 291–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507077080 scoville, c. (2016) george orwell and ecological citizenship: moral agency and modern estrangement. citizenship studies 20(6–7) 830–845. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2016.1192105 seyfang, g. (2005) ecological citizenship and sustainable consumption: examining local organic food networks. journal of rural studies 22(4) 383–395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.01.003 sinreich, l. & cupples, j. (2014) collaborating with a muddy road and an ailing forest: the construction of ecological citizenship in san francisco libre, nicaragua. journal of latin american geography 13(3) 65–85. https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2014.0044 spinney, j., aldred, r. & brown, k. (2015) geographies of citizenship and everyday (im)mobility. geoforum 64 325–332. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.04.013 staeheli, l. a. (2011) political geography: where's citizenship? progress in human geography 35(3) 393–400. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510370671 staeheli, l. a., ehrkamp, p., leitner, h. & nagel, c. r. (2012) dreaming the ordinary: daily life and the complex geographies of citizenship. progress in human geography 36(5) 628–644. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132511435001 stone, c. d. (1972) should trees have standing? towards legal rights for natural objects. southern california law review 45 450–501. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315094427-13 vihersalo, m. (2017) climate citizenship in the european union: environmental citizenship as an analytical concept. environmental politics 26(2) 343–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2014.1000640 waitt, g., voyer, m. & fontaine, c. (2020) recreational fishing and citizenship: a sensory ethnography of fishermen with asian ancestry, sydney, australia. gender, place & culture [online apr 5 2020] https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2020.1734541 209suvi huttunen et al.fennia 198(1–2) (2020) wood, b. e. & kallio, k. p. (2019) green citizenship. towards spatial and lived perspectives. in davoudi, s., cowell, r., white, i. & blanco, h. (eds.) the routledge companion to environmental planning, 171–180. routledge, abingdon. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179780 yeatman, a. (2007) the subject of citizenship. citizenship studies 11(1) 105–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621020601099948 carceral riskscapes and working in the spaces of mental health care urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa88950 doi: 10.11143/fennia.88950 carceral riskscapes and working in the spaces of mental health care virve repo repo, v. (2020) carceral riskscapes and working in the spaces of mental health care. fennia 198(1–2) 121–134. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.88950 this study participates in the discussion on risks and carceral spaces, and furthermore, introduces the concept of carceral riskscape. since there is a strong, but less studied connection between risk and the carceral, this study combines these concepts to provide a new viewpoint on the mechanisms that create carceral spaces. riskscapes represent spaces embedded with risk and they are usually referred to in connection with health or environmental hazards. the emphasis in this study is on the carceral riskscapes that working communities face in institutional premises. the study analyses the working culture of a geropsychiatric ward in turku, finland. some of the staff members allegedly mistreated the patients and some of the carceral practices were also targeted at co-workers. the research is qualitative in nature and analyses documents from the inner reports to the trial documents. the findings of the study suggest that the relationships between staff members are significant in the context of carceral riskscapes. furthermore, the carceral riskscapes cause inequalities and have influence on the well-being of the staff members as well as the quality of care. keywords: carceral geography, work, psychiatric ward, risk, carceral riskscape, institution virve repo (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2166-8221), department of geography and geology, 20014 university of turku, finland. e-mail: vtrepo@utu.fi introduction this paper analyses alleged misconduct in a geropsychiatric ward, g1, of kupittaa psychiatric hospital in turku, finland during the years 2009–2016. the ward was a closed unit for patients over 65 years of age, who were treated either voluntarily or involuntarily. most of the patients were in need of mental health care, but there were also cognitively impaired patients waiting to be transferred to dementia care units. because of the lack of suitable care units, they sometimes had to stay in the ward for extended periods. there were claims that in this ward the patients were being mistreated, and that the staff members were either causing the mistreatment, allowing it or too afraid to report it. furthermore, those who tried to intervene, were bullied1 or ignored. after the journalist of a local newspaper started to investigate the ward in 2016, police implemented investigations which finally led to trials. two of the four prosecuted staff members were found guilty of abuse yet both of the sentences were disallowed by the court of appeal, mainly because there was no solid evidence of a deliberate intent to mistreatment. © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 122 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) in this article, i introduce the concept of carceral riskscape to illustrate how riskscapes operate in the context of carceral spaces. the concept of riskscape has been used in geography in studies concerning environmental risks (müller-mahn & everts 2013) and their influence on social aspects (morello-frosch et al. 2001; morello-frosch & lopez 2006; morello-frosch & shenassa 2006), as well as in studies of border crossings (lundgren 2018). there are some health-related studies that concern, for example, studies of hiv/aids (krüger 2013; duncan et al. 2018) and pandemics (everts 2013; gee & skovdal 2017). the concept of riskscape was chosen since it illustrates the scene (or view, see salazar 2013) of the risks that appear in people’s everyday life. furthermore, the concept connects risk and spatio-temporalities together with other dimension of power relations, practices and social relations. the riskscape thus represents a multi-dimensional view of risks. the specific nature of spaces of confinement, such as strict control, regulations and isolation from society, requires that the concept is adjusted concerning these spaces. consequently, i have combined the work of carceral geographers with the conceptualisation of riskscape by müller-mahn, everts and stephan (2018) to acknowledge how carceral riskscapes are formed in spaces of confinement. the connection between risks and carceral spaces has been the subject of considerably less research, although they are linked together through the practices that confine people seen as a risk to themselves, to others or to society. risk is also present for those who work in psychiatric institutions. i ask: how are carceral riskscapes formed in a psychiatric ward? what effects do they have on life in institutions? the emphasis is on the carceral riskscapes that a working community has to face in everyday life while practicing their duties; in this particular case, in an institution of care. since risk and carceral spaces are so strongly linked together, i find it worthwhile to analyse carceral riskscapes in institutional premises. furthermore, while new care forms are constantly under development, it is essential that institutions are studied from various perspectives in order to develop the care given and the institutions of care themselves. the contribution of the paper is to widen the knowledge of how carceral spaces are constructed and lived, especially in institutions of care. in the first part of the paper, i will introduce the data and methods used, along with some ethical contemplations. next i will introduce the theoretical background followed by an introduction to the concept of carceral riskscape. subsequently, i use the concept of carceral riskscape to analyse the data from the viewpoint of the work community. specific emphasis is placed on how the riskscapes were formed on the geropsychiatric ward, especially among the staff members. finally, i conclude the paper by reflecting on carceral riskscapes and their effects on people’s lives inside institutions. studying carceral riskscapes through critical documentary analysis this paper concentrates on how this working community created carceral riskscapes on the psychiatric ward. although there were staff members with various duties on the ward, the data enabled a focus on certain staff members, such as: the superiors, who were mostly head nurses or doctors and the mental, psychiatric, and substitute nurses (the substitute nurses were mostly nursing students). because of the nature of empirical data, it was not possible to include the patient’s perspective in this article. the material for this paper is purely documental. as a researcher, i was intrigued by what official documents can reveal about the risks and riskscapes of psychiatric care. furthermore, before writing this article, the ward in question was closed so visiting was not possible. i have analysed the material by using theory-oriented content analysis through the concept of carceral riskscape. the data in this paper consists of one internal report made concerning the ward, one official record prepared by the city of turku, reports from the national supervisory authority for welfare and health, valvira (valvira inspected the premises three times between years 2016 and 2017 and reports were made each time), the pre-examination records of the police, and three trial documents, two from the local court and one from the court of appeal. the pre-examination records of the police included personal statements from the four accused staff members and the eight witnesses. in addition, the police had interviewed approximately 50 nursing students by phone and chosen one statement to represent these interviews. this data was gathered by different police officers through official protocols. the police use questioning techniques that differ from the interviewing methods that researchers use and this might have an effect on the statements. the witness statements represent 123virve repofennia 198(1–2) (2020) individual perspectives on the events, thus the witness statements can be treated in a similar way to any interview conducted in qualitative research (dunn 2010). it is useful to keep in mind for whom and for what purposes the interviews were made and the documents written (see black 2010). people may feel nervous when interviewed by the police and therefore do not necessarily describe their emotions or opinions as they would to a researcher. some of the material (official records and trial documents) are in the public domain and anyone can find them via the internet or request them from the authorities. the valvira reports and the material from the police were made available to the researcher for a small fee. however, certain other information was not available as it had been omitted from the material by the authorities due to the personal data act (ministry of justice 1999), for example, information concerning a plaintiff’s health or information concerning patients. there are some ethical issues when this kind of material is used. first of all, i was aware of the pressure that was targeted on the staff members by the media attention and did not want to increase their anxiety any further; hence, i decided to anonymise the people related to the study, even though their names can be found in public records. furthermore, because of the personal data act (ministry of justice 1999), the authorities have removed the information and statements made by the alleged victims, thus their voice cannot be heard from the material. this has been taken into consideration when the research questions were formed. conceptualising the carceral riskscape first, i will briefly explain the different parts of the concept: carceral, risk and scape. the carceral was mentioned in the work of foucault (1995[1977]), who argued that a carceral system was something that reached beyond the actual place of punishment (prison) and influenced the whole of society. for gill, conlon and moran (2013) carceral spaces are not only prison spaces, but all varieties and grades of spaces of confinement outside the prison system. indeed, several geographers have situated the carceral outside the prison premises ( conlon 2013; disney 2015, 2017; schliehe 2016; rannila & repo 2018; villanueva 2018; repo 2019a) and in institutions of care (disney 2015; schliehe 2016; repo 2019a, 2019b). carceral spaces are usually heavily controlled and regulated. nevertheless, they are not static and include dynamics that alter and affect peoples’ lives (philo & parr 2000; moran 2015). the infiltration of the carceral into social systems has led to the question of whether everything can be carceral. this question has been asked previously by carceral geographers and inspired moran, turner and schliehe (2018) to conceptualise the carceral into three conditions: these conditions are detriment, intention and spatiality. detriment indicates experienced harm, intention relates to agency and the implementation of the carceral, and spatiality describes the space where the detriment is implemented (moran et al. 2018). in order to be carceral, these three conditions should be fulfilled. however, morin (2018) in her study uses “carceral logic” to describe spaces that do not necessarily fall into all three categories, for example, if the carceral space is not experienced as such. through carceral logics certain people can be targeted by carceral practices, since they are seen as dangerous and risky. there is a vast literature concerning risk in several social sciences and the concept of risk has been contemplated over decades. beck (2000) states that when trust in security ends, the discourse of risk starts, thus he sees risk as a state between security and destruction. tierney (2014) compressed the conceptualisation of risk into three questions: “what can go wrong? how likely is it? and what are the consequences?”. the concept is, nonetheless, fluid and changes over time and space. people must confront risks in everyday life (mythen & walklate 2006), in situations when something valued is at stake (tierney 2014). in such situations, the potentiality of harm, damage and loss has to be balanced against the potential gain and benefit (furedi 2006; tierney 2014). risks are socially constructed and depend on individual choices (kasperson 1992; beck 1995; lupton 2006; tierney 2014; müller-mahn et al. 2018), which suggests that the concept of risk has to be considered in relation to societies and contexts (furedi 2006). the possibility of harm is not seen as equal for all people, but depends on various aspects, such as age, gender and geographical location. hence, the perception of risk varies between societies, groups, and even individually. risk can be understood as being a multiple context as risks are entwined with each other because of causalities (müller-mahn & everts 2013). 124 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper scapes as a concept describe the dynamics of global processes (salazar 2013). for appadurai (1990) they are manifold and can be constructed from different perspectives. scapes can be called “imagined worlds” constituted through the historical and cultural imagination of groups and individuals (appadurai 1990). “as a scape refers to both a scene and a "view," the notion lends itself expediently to analysing the way people experience and understand their world(s), thereby superseding standard geographical thinking in social cultural analysis” (salazar 2013, 754). scapes are given meaning and material shape by human action, thus, they are a result of processes but not the processes themselves (salazar 2013). in a way, scape represents a similar “imagined world” to risks, which also represent something that is imagined, but not yet happened. there has been a call for geographers to study the spatial dimensions of risk to understand their spatiotemporal aspects (lupton 2006). the concept of riskscape was developed to answer this call (müller-mahn & everts 2013). concerning riskscape the -scape suffix connects spatial and temporal dimensions to the risk, and illustrates the scene where the possible risks occur (milligan & wiles 2010; bowlby 2012). i see riskscapes being relational, since they are made and re-made through actions, practices and interactions between individuals, objects and space. in my previous study, i have recognized the formation of carceral spaces on psychiatric wards (repo 2019a). these carceralities are formed through regimes, power relationships and spatio-temporality (repo 2019a). carceral space and risk are in many ways related to each other. first of all, carceral spaces are usually established for those who are seen as a risk to themselves, to others or to society. what can be considered as risk varies at different times and in different areas. poverty and homelessness may have led to confinement (ahonen 2019; foucault (2001[1967]) and these aspects are still present in contemporary confinement through for example carceral logics (morin 2018; story 2019). the finnish mental health act (ministry of social affairs and health 1990) stipulates that a person can be ordered into psychiatric hospital care against their will if it is felt that their condition would deteriorate without treatment or if they are a danger to their own or other’s safety and health. consequently, staff members often have to confront aggression and violent behaviour in their everyday life. secondly, these spaces both employ multiple risk assessment methods and practices to, for example, decrease violent behaviour (almvik et al. 2007) and use various therapeutic measures and techniques in challenging situations (kuivalainen et al. 2017). thirdly, the carceral and the risk interact with each other through spatiality. risks are minimised for example when putting risky “inmates” into specific spaces, such as seclusion rooms, which might in turn create risks both to the “inmates” and staff members. the risks are usually well acknowledged in the physical environment of carceral spaces such as in the design of the wards and surveillance (curtis et al. 2013). however, the spatiality of the risks is not limited to physical premises, but is a complicated combination of physical premises, care, control, regulations and human relationships (see also parr 2003). these different spatial aspects are very much linked to temporality, since in closed institutions regimes, schedules and surveillance may be linked to a diurnal rhythm (repo 2019b; thorshaug & brun 2019). the dimensions of carceral riskscape the six dimensions of riskscapes are practice, power relations, plurality, spatiality, subjectivities and social groups, and temporalities. because of the spatial features of the carceral, i will not discuss spatiality as a separate dimension, instead i recognise that all the dimensions are related to spatiality, as are temporalities. first of all, the connection between temporalities and spatialities is acknowledged in geography and often not easy to separate. for example, carceral space affects how the passing of time is experienced (moran 2015). furthermore, regimes have both a temporal and spatial meaning in institutions (repo 2019b). for the residents of the institutions especially, temporalities may cause injustice, causing them to lose control over their everyday life. these temporalities are strongly connected to the architecture, politics and institutional elements (thorshaug & brun 2019). the riskscapes are constituted through social practices, reflecting what is said and done. one might add that riskscapes reflect upon what is unsaid and undone, since ignorance and neglect create riskscapes through exclusion and punitive ignorance. practices within carceral spaces, especially in institutions, are strongly linked to the regime, legal requirements and regulations. although such 125virve repofennia 198(1–2) (2020) practices are created to reduce risks they do not always succeed, especially if the supervision fails and the subsequent methods used to control and coerce patients become exaggerated. these practices can transfer outwards from carceral spaces causing several risks, such as stigmatisation, which may cause detriment to people long after the confinement (turner 2016; gill et al. 2018). furthermore, practices may mutate and develop into policies used beyond carceral spaces (gill et al. 2018). secondly, riskscapes are formed and effected by subjectivities and social groups. not all riskscapes are similarly significant: the influence of experts and their ideas of risks may dominate political agendas and public perception. due to the relative features of the carceral, some may experience carceral riskscapes while others do not. the riskscapes can be separated depending on the group that share the same perspectives and/or practices (see müller-mahn & everts 2013). these social groups are spatio-temporally divided: when and where people are free to be and move. thirdly, power relations have a considerable effect on everyday life in institutions (milligan 2003; foucault 2003; repo 2019a) and they are especially connected to carceral spaces, which involve various forms relationships and relations of power (moran 2015; story 2019). a typical concern in power relations and risk is that a small number of people have the ability to make decisions that affect a large number of people (tierney 2014). this is particularly relevant in the context of carceral riskscapes where the law strictly defines the hierarchy, power relations, and responsibilities (e.g. mental health act (ministry of social affairs and health 1990)). furthermore, risk plays a significant role in directing power towards groups of people who are considered risky (hörnqvist 2010) but also affects power relations between staff members. the power relations of riskscapes are not equal but depend on people’s ability to fight, cope with or live with risks (müller-mahn et al. 2018). this suggests that through inequality in power relations some groups are more exposed to risks than others. this finding resonates with foucault’s (2003) idea about the imbalanced power relations inside (psychiatric) institutions. fourthly, plurality means that people are constantly under the influence of several riskscapes. in addition, riskscapes may overlap and cause new risks instead of a reduction of risks. this makes some spaces “hot spots”, and riskier than others, suggesting that these overlapping riskscapes accumulate spatially and temporally. this kind of accumulation affects people’s perception of risk and their ability to cope. this plurality can cause inequality, since riskscapes are not distributed equally between people due to their socio-spatial aspects. as a result, some of the groups seem to be more vulnerable to risks than others. working in a psychiatric hospital in a psychiatric hospital, the staff members must make constant risk analyses of various situations. curtis and colleagues (2013, 202) note that “risk management in psychiatric hospitals involves decision-making, risk reduction, monitoring, and evaluating the effectiveness of a hospital’s management plan.” if one or more of these elements fails, the possibilities for risks increases. the work in psychiatric units is demanding and the staff members are familiar with the restlessness, aggression and even violence of some patients (mitchell 2000; holmes et al. 2004). this is especially the situation in the case of psychogeriatric patients with memory disorders (e.g. pisani & walsh 2012). on a psychiatric ward entering risky areas and situations is part of the responsibilities of the staff members and as such they are obliged to “do” the riskscapes in order to prevent risky situations escalating (see lundgren 2018). risky situations also create carceral riskscapes through, for instance, coercive measures. the geropsychiatric ward represents a riskscape where various risks are present in everyday life, and in my previous study i found that the ward can be seen as a carceral space (repo 2019a). in the following, i present a geropsychiatric ward as workplace and as a carceral riskscape or rather how through different practices it may become one. the material used in this paper provided good information about the workplace and the social relationships inside the ward. furthermore, studying the ward from the chosen aspect reveals how risks are embedded in work communities in carceral spaces. thus, the emphasis is on the relationships between the staff members and the authorities and their effect on the carceral riskscapes. 126 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper work and workplaces have intrigued researchers in many disciplines. in geography, some research attention has been given to carceral spaces and work, especially studies concentrating on inmate labour (nowakowski 2003; morin 2018; cassidy et al. 2020; richardson & thieme 2020). the significance of the relationships between staff members has been acknowledged in care work (emmerson 2019) as well as the value of staff members in risk governance in psychiatric wards (curtis et al. 2013). nonetheless, the formation and effects of riskscapes in the workplace have received less attention in research literature. i find the study of a working community particularly relevant, since the influence of the relationships between staff members to the quality of health care has not been the subject of sufficient research (connell & walton-roberts 2016; gee & skovdal 2017; emmerson 2019). for most people, work plays a central position in their life, as it not only provides a livelihood, but also has significance concerning social relationships, identity, and well-being (delaney 2014). if considered from the perspective of risk, work (or a lack of it) can be connected with economic risks as well as risks concerning health and well-being (tombs & whyte 2006). the workplace itself can be seen as a lifeworld “constituted through the specificities of relationships and lived dynamics that characterize them” (delaney 2014, 245–246). hence, not only do people have an effect on the constitution of the workplace, but the workplace has an effect on the people and the relationships between them. the importance of work in people’s lives may sometimes explain their behaviour in situations where, for instance, they are afraid of losing their jobs. as delaney (2014) has noted, sometimes people choose to work in almost intolerable conditions rather than choose the risk of being dismissed from the working community. an example of this kind of condition can be constant bullying, which causes detriment to people in their workplace and can be described as a carceral measure. other such measures include, for example, people trying to make the work of others more difficult or excluding their co-workers from the working community. “state inside the state” – carceral riskscapes and working community there were several practices that caused g1 ward to become a carceral riskscape. according to some witness statements, a group of the regular staff members used old fashioned and even morally questionable working methods on the ward, such as rough handling and overmedication. these practices created risks for the patients and the co-workers. when certain staff members tried to intervene and discuss the problems on the ward, they were bullied and/or treated inappropriately (southwestern finland police department 2017) targeting whistle-blowers, those people who report misconduct (mcdonald & ahern 2000) is not rare. whistle-blowers are considered a risk to those who are keen to maintain current practices. hence, the whistle-blowers were targeted and punished through bullying and excluding, causing detriment and harm and transforming the workplace into a carceral riskscape. the risk of being bullied influenced other potential whistle-blowers and very few had the courage to intervene in the situation. on many occasions the old and new practices collided and different opinions about the working culture caused schisms between co-workers, especially between junior and senior staff members. it has been noted that education is in a central position in the prevention of mistreatment of older patients (pisani & walsh 2012). the junior staff may have had a higher level of education but less working experience than the senior staff members. it was mentioned that on the ward experience was valued over education (southwestern finland hospital district 2013); thus enabling the old practices, favouring carceral actions, to continue on the ward. furthermore, it is acknowledged in research that sometimes staff continue to use old practices despite new regulations, because they are not prepared to accept the workload that new regulations cause. they then feel stress as a result of working in a situation where they are at risk of “getting caught” for not doing their jobs properly (deforge et al. 2011). this might explain some of the behaviour of the senior staff members. remaining entrenched in the former routines may have eased their fear of the future, which was seen as a risk. these staff members wanted to maintain their working culture, although it was characterised by one witness as “medieval”. it is revealing that after g1 ward was merged with another geropsychiatric ward, it was noted at the inspection that the difference in working cultures negatively affected the working atmosphere on the newly combined 127virve repofennia 198(1–2) (2020) ward (valvira 2017). in this example of a poor working culture, risk operated at different levels throughout the practices. firstly, the senior staff members considered junior staff members as a risk to the working culture they wanted to maintain. secondly, junior staff members were at risk of being bullied or being drawn into the poor working culture. thirdly, patients were at risk of being mistreated. the two latter situations escalated into the carceral practices of exclusion and punishment for the wrong kind of behaviour, and thus created overlapping carceral riskscapes on the ward. the social relationships between staff members in care-work employment are complex and there are several contexts that affect the working culture inside institutions of care, for example, people make friends with each other, some have arguments and some remain neutral (emmerson 2019). working with others creates complex social spatialities (delaney 2014); therefore when staff members form different kind of cliques it has spatial significance (emmerson 2019). working with staff members considered friends may be enjoyable for people that are included in that clique (ibid. 2019) and relatively boring tasks may be made tolerable within a friendly working environment (delaney 2014). however, the situation is different for those who do not belong to the clique. for example, some of the staff members were said to come to work only to hang around, staying mostly in the office, on the internet, in the coffee room or in the smoking area (southwestern finland police department 2017) “especially during the morning shift all smokers would go out [to smoke] at the same time and there were 1–2 nurses left on the ward. what if something happened during that time?” (ibid. 2017, 61). it seems that some of the staff members occupied certain spaces on the ward, such as the office and the smoking area, creating their own territories and excluding their co-workers. some of the staff members were said to sleep during the nightshift, in which case their co-worker was left alone with all the duties (ibid. 2017) even though the ward had a full complement of manpower the tasks were left to only a few staff members. this affected their coping skills, they became tired and made mistakes (southwestern finland police department 2017). it is to be noted that people who work in institutions of care use different spaces to have a moment of privacy or escape from the work to relieve the monotony or stress connected to the work (andrews & shaw 2008). however, if some of the staff members were constantly not present where they should be, this would have increased the formation of risky situations and affected the well-being of their co-workers. the differences in working cultures formed various social groups inside the ward. one witness stated that some of the staff members adhered to the distorted working culture while working on the same shift with the group of regular staff members, even though they did not act that way when alone (southwestern finland police department 2017). the example illustrates how carceral riskscapes form in different ways depending on the social relationships and spatio-temporalities, such as work shifts on the ward. the situation was described by one of the witnesses as a “collective psychosis”. when she “woke up” she understood that the practices were wrong (southwestern finland district court 2017, 13). the risk of being excluded from the social group gave some of the staff members a motive to support the carceral practices. the relationships between some of the staff members can only be described as very poor or incompatible. words like hate, nerve-racking, inappropriate behaviour and bullying were used to describe the relationships between staff members (southwestern finland police department 2017). one bullied staff member stated: “quitting my job was purely because of workplace harassment […] my superior encouraged me to remove to another unit for my own safety” (ibid. 2017, 40). in an interview for a magazine she added that she did not want to leave the ward because she had done nothing wrong (lahdenmäki 2016). the spatial significance of the bullying can be seen when the bullied staff member had to change workplaces “for her own safety”, which implicates an existing risk of being in danger on the ward. the finnish law about security at work (ministry of social affairs and health 2002) states that authorities have to intervene in cases of bullying. in this case, however, it might have been seen as easier to remove the problem by transferring the target instead of intervening in the distorted working culture. moving people as a punishment for the “wrong kind of behaviour” has all the signs of what can be called coercive mobility and can be seen as a carceral action. coercive mobility is quite commonly used in institutions of care (disney 2017) but it is usually targeted at the residents of the institutions. in this case, the person who did not approve of the working culture and tried to change it was removed from the ward. 128 fennia 198(1–2) (2020)research paper one of the accused staff members stated that some co-workers “were clearly against long-term staff members” (southwestern finland police department 2017, 12). in the court hearing, one of the witnesses stated that the caring culture must have been different when the senior staff members started (southwestern finland district court 2017). the statements illustrate the juxtaposition between senior and junior staff members. if the social groups are in contention with each other, then this will eventually affect the quality of care (emmerson 2019). for example, one of the whistleblowers was harassed by one of her co-workers by going close to her and deliberately shouting when she was talking to the relative of a patient on the phone. furthermore, co-workers stopped talking to her at all (southwestern finland police department 2017). this kind of activity not only creates carceral riskscapes in the workplace, but will produce immediate effects on the quality of care. furthermore, these carceral actions disturbed the relatives and their perception of risk concerning the care of their family members. a characteristic of riskscapes is that different social groups, or even individuals, have different perceptions of risk. it seems that the senior workers were worried about having to change their working culture more than any risks this might cause to patients or co-workers. whereas the junior staff members were grappling with both their ethics and the risk of being bullied or/and excluded from the working community. they were also worried whether their temporary employment contracts would continue if they drew attention to any misconduct. trust between co-workers and the certainty that you are not being put at risk by your co-workers creates a functioning working community in health care (gee & skovdal 2017). it seems that there was no such trust between the social groups on g1 ward, which led to several problems such as staff members not being able to rely on being helped in risky situations. power relations have significance for carceral riskscapes. many of the staff members said that they did not dare to approach their superiors or that the superiors did not care about the problems on the ward (southwestern finland police department 2017). it was said that there were “unwritten laws” (ibid. 2017) on the ward implying that any occurrences should not be spoken about outside the ward. in the court hearing one of the witnesses stated that the culture on the ward was that new staff members did not defy the long-term staff members (southwestern finland district court 2017). in the inner inspection (southwestern finland hospital district 2013) only two permanent employees and two substitutes spoke about the problems on the ward. the local court stated that it was a credible fact that short-term employees do not have the courage to confront long-term staff for fear of being discharged (southwestern finland district court 2017). indeed, one witness who spoke about the problems in the pre-examination, seemed to have completely forgotten these actions at the court hearing. hence, the carceral riskscape created in the working community shifted to the court room and beyond. power relations can cause fear in staff members and trigger the feeling that they will put themselves at risk if they talk about any misconduct. the flaws in the management presented a possibility for the accused staff members to put the blame on the authorities. “i want to emphasize […] that if the employer would have intervened years ago and given proper instructions, these kinds of faults would never have happened” (southwestern finland police department 2017, 18). although the risk can be seen as being dependent on individual choices (lupton 2006; mythen & walklate 2006), in this case, the responsibility was put on the shoulders of the employer and management for not giving proper instructions. one of the reasons for the formation of the distorted working culture was the frequent turnover of nurse managers on the ward and the absence of a doctor (valvira 2016). the finnish law stipulates that the doctor has the highest position in the hierarchy of psychiatric treatment (ministry of social affairs and health 1990). when the doctor on our ward had to take a long sick leave, [the staff] was not informed properly about any substitutes. we did not even have a proper substitute. perhaps some doctor quickly visited the ward once a week. in the worst case, the doctor did not speak finnish, and did not know how to report and interview, because s/he was not trained to do that. staff members had to instruct the doctor and the situation became one which was too difficult for the staff members and one in which they had too much responsibility (southwestern finland police department 2017, 12). 129virve repofennia 198(1–2) (2020) without proper supervision, the situation that is described in the inspection report was that a “state inside the state” (valvira 2016) had been created, meaning that some of the staff members took the power into their own hands and handled situations in their own way. the management was not aware of the working culture and if they were, no actions were made to improve it until 2013 when an internal report was made. it was thus possible for the skewed working culture to evolve over time and continue without disruption. additionally, the authorities used their power to ignore the complaints, which caused the formation of carceral riskscapes that affected both staff members and patients. furthermore, power relations have significance for the social relationships that develop between staff members. the work on the ward was done in three shifts, with most of the misconduct being connected to the nightshift, when there were only two nurses working; usually one female and one male. it has been acknowledged that senior staff members wanted to work on the night shifts so as to avoid the workload and stress of the day shifts (deforge et al. 2011). when particular staff members were on the nightshift, it was claimed that they performed illegal seclusions (without telling the doctor) and overmedicated the restless patients (southwestern finland police department 2017), apparently to keep the patients quiet and calm, so that they could themselves sleep during the shift. various staff members stated that some of the male nurses slept many hours during the nightshifts and left a female nurse or even a nursing student to cope alone throughout the shift (southwestern finland hospital district 2013). as noted, time passes differently in different spaces (moran 2015). for those who slept through their shift the night passed quicker than for those who stayed awake. hence the night shifts were quite popular among the people who slept during the shifts. nevertheless, these actions created unequal carceral riskscapes in the workplace, as some of co-workers where obliged to carry out the workload alone and left to face situations that caused them detriment. it seems apparent that during the nightshifts the staff were taking more risks by performing practices that were morally or/and legally dubious. through their actions they were creating a riskscape that could possibly include dismissal or even illegal actions. any of the examples above can be connected to several dimensions of riskscapes, which illustrates in a way the plurality of riskscapes. for instance, sleeping during the night shift could be connected to power relations although it also has spatio-temporal meanings. however, the plurality of the riskscapes was originally meant to describe the multiple risks that people have to face in their everyday landscapes (müller-mahn et al. 2018). while risks differ between people, they do have an effect on how individuals cope and what kind of decisions they make in their everyday lives. in this context, the risk of being bullied, excluded from social groups, and left alone in risky situations were common everyday experiences especially for the whistle-blowers. the most vulnerable group among the staff members were the substitute workers, the temporary workers and the nursing students. impeding the dominant working culture put them at risk of losing their jobs (lahdenmäki 2016). according to one interviewee, the new workers had to comply with the dominant working culture, or their contracts were not renewed (southwestern finland hospital district 2013). accepting the working culture, however, put them at risk of being part of the mistreatment, and even illegal conduct; furthermore, it put them at risk of suffering from moral dilemmas that might have affected their well-being. one of the nurses stopped doing night shifts, because she found them too morally demanding (southwestern finland police department 2017). ignorance of the situation was seen at every level of the hierarchy from the head nurses upwards to the municipal authorities. the intervention of the media and different institutional supervisory authorities was necessary in this case, nevertheless this further exposed the staff members to inspections and tightened regulations which might have proved risky to their well-being. concluding remarks risks have an influence on our everyday life, for example, on how we make our mundane choices, use spaces and how we construct social spaces. this study contributes to the discussion of risks related to carceral spaces, improves and aids an understanding of how carceral spaces and risk are connected and introduces the concept of carceral riskscape. to a great extent risk is a part of the interior environment of closed institutions such as psychiatric wards and prisons, since people who are 130 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) thought to be a risk to themselves, to others or to society are confined in these spaces for cure or/and correction. however, by entering these spaces of confinement people are entering a setting that is under the influence of different risks and further carceral riskscapes. the carceral and risk interrelate, since risk can lead to carceral measures whereas carceral measures create risks. the interactive relationship between carceral and risk can be seen when some of the carceral actions are caused because of the perception of risk, and, moreover, some risks manifests because of carceral actions. when these risks actualise spatially, it creates carceral riskscapes, within which people experience being at risk or are such that they seem to include risks. furthermore, carceral riskscapes are created when the perception of risk leads to confinement. they can be created, for example, in certain urban areas where the control, surveillance and power of authorities may lead to (exceeded) carceral actions. thus, carceral riskscapes are linked to wider societal challenges and inequalities (morello-frosch & shenassa 2006; story 2019). in this paper, i examine how carceral riskscapes are formed in institutional mental health care. institutions as such are under constant debate and development and many of them have been closed during the de-institutionalisation. closed institutions cannot, nevertheless, “magically wished away” (philo & parr 2019, 246) and they are still operating and needed in some cases. it is important that life inside these institutions is studied from different viewpoints to gain as much knowledge as possible that might improve this institutional care. the emphasis in the paper is on people working inside institutions and how carceral riskscapes are formed by and through them; thus, the study offers a new perspective on the research into carceral spaces from the viewpoint of risk. the relationships between the staff members on the psychiatric ward and their effect on the riskscapes has previously been a field that has received little attention in research. the findings illustrate how the working community and spatialities linked to the work create and maintain riskscapes. the concept of carceral riskscape offers a tool to study the complex spatialities in mental health care and to study more extensively working practices in carceral spaces. the study highlights several points which affected the working culture on this particular ward and led to the distorted practices. one of the features that is a characteristic of carceral riskscapes is inequality, which strongly affects everyday life in carceral spaces. the distorted working culture favouring rough handling and disparagement of the patients and the staff members became divided because of these practices. the staff members formed cliques and these social groups favoured the “insiders” and excluded the “outsiders”, which was illustrated by the example of the unequal distribution of the workload. these inequalities had an effect on how and when the staff members could use different spaces inside the ward. the authorities used their power to ignore any complaints and thus supported the dominant working culture, increasing the inequalities between the staff members. the tasks were shared unequally during the nightshift and injustice was also seen in how time was spent during the shifts in general (e.g. dodgshon 2008). the nightshift created temporally as well as spatially unequal carceral riskscapes. if one staff member sleeps during the night shift, thus spending time in an inappropriate way, the other staff member will be left on the ward alone with potential risky situations during the shift. some groups were more vulnerable to risks than others; in this case, the junior staff members and those with temporary contracts were in a difficult situation. basically, they understood that the practices used were morally dubious, but lacked the courage to intervene for fear of losing their jobs. one of the unequal features that cannot be studied in this paper, but would be interesting to research in the future, is gender. there were small hints about gender based inequalities, but this would need more specific data. although the concept of risk has been used in feministic studies (koskela 2009) and riskscapes have been studied for example in matters concerning maternal and child health (morello-frosch & shenassa 2006), gender has gained very little attention in riskscape studies. the concept of riskscape adds a spatial dimension to the concept of risk. furthermore, the concept of carceral riskscape raises the opportunity of utilising spatial studies in relation to carceral spaces and adds the insights from these studies to the studies of riskscapes. the concept of carceral riskscape provides a way of acknowledging the mechanisms behind riskscapes and those inequalities that affect everyday life in spaces of confinement by using the knowledge gained from studies concerning carceral spaces. 131virve repofennia 198(1–2) (2020) notes 1 there were several bullying practices used at the ward. the bullied person was ignored, complained about to the higher authorities, salt was put in her coffee, and she was harassed while talking to patient’s relatives. acknowledgements i would like to thank päivi rannila for constant support and constructive comments as well as two anonymous referees and fennia’s chief editor kirsi pauliina kallio for their valuable comments. this paper is part of the project funded by academy of finland, grant number: 308616. references ahonen, k. (2019) suomalainen mielenterveyspolitiikka: julkisen vallan ohjaus mielenterveyden häiriöön sairastuneiden ihmisoikeuksien turvaamiseksi. university of helsinki, helsinki. <http://urn.fi/ urn:isbn:isbn 978-isbn 978-951-51-5671-6> almvik, r., woods, p. & rasmussen, k. (2007) assessing risk for imminent violence in the elderly: the broset violence checklist. international journal of geriatric psychiatry 22(9)  862–867. https://doi.org/10.1002/gps.1753 andrews, g. j. & shaw, d. (2008) clinical geography: nursing practice and the (re)making of institutional space. journal of nursing management 16(4) 463–473. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2834.2008.00866.x appadurai, a. (1990) disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. theory, culture & society 7(2–3) 295–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327690007002017 beck, u. (1995) international high-risk society – political-dynamics of global threats. internationale politik 50 13–20. beck, u. (2000) risk society revisited: theory, politics and research programmes. in barbara, a., beck, u. & van loon, j. (eds.) the risk society and beyond: critical issues for social theory, 211–230. sage, london. black, i. s. (2010) analysing historical and archival sources. in clifford, n., french, s. & valentine, g. (eds.) key methods in geography, 466–484. sage, london. bowlby, s. (2012) recognising the time-space dimensions of care: caringscapes and carescapes. environment and planning a: economy and space 44(9) 2101–2118. https://doi.org/10.1068/a44492 cassidy, k., griffin, p. & wray, f. (2020) labour, carcerality and punishment: "less-than human" labour landscapes. progress in human geography 44(6) 1081–1102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132519869454 conlon, d. (2013) hungering for freedom: asylum seekers' hunger strikes – rethinking resistance as counter-conduct. in moran, d., gill, n. & conlon, d. (eds.) carceral spaces: mobility and agency in imprisonment and migrant detention, 133–148. ashgate, surrey. connel, j. & walton-roberts, m. (2016) what about the workers? the missing geographies of health care. progress in human geography 40(2) 158–176. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515570513 curtis, s., gesler, w., wood, v., spencer, i., mason, j., close, h. & reilly, j. (2013) compassionate containment? balancing technical safety and therapy in the design of psychiatric wards. social science & medicine 97 201–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.06.015 deforge, r., van wyk, p., hall, j. & salmoni, a. (2011) afraid to care; unable to care: a critical ethnography within a long-term care home. journal of aging studies 25(4) 415–426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2011.04.001 delaney, d. (2014) at work in nomosphere. the spatiolegal production of emotions at work. in braverman, i., blomley, n., delaney, d. & kedar, a. (eds.) the expanding spaces of law. a timely legal geography. stanford law books, stanford. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvqsdzbj.15 disney, t. (2015) complex spaces of orphan care – a russian therapeutic children's community. childrens geographies 13(1) 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.827874 disney, t. (2017) the orphanage as an institution of coercive mobility. environment and planning a 49(8) 1905–1921. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x17711181 dodgshon, r. a. (2008) geography's place in time. geografiska annaler series b: human geography 90b(1) 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0467.2008.00272.x duncan, d. t., chaix, b., regan, s. d., park, s. h., draper, c., goedel, w. c., gipson, j. a., guilamoramos, v., halkitis, p. n., brewer, r. & hickson, d. a. (2018) collecting mobility data with gps 132 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) methods to understand the hiv environmental riskscape among young black men who have sex with men: a multi-city feasibility study in the deep south. aids and behavior 22(9) 3057–3070. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-018-2163-9 dunn, k. (2010) interviewing. in hay, i. (ed.) qualitative research methods in human geography. oxford university press, oxford. emmerson, p. (2019) more-than-therapeutic landscapes. area [online jun 2 2019] https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12557 everts, j. (2013) anxiety and risk: pandemics in the twenty-first century. in müller-mahn, d. (ed.) the spatial dimension of risk. how geography shapes the emergence of riskscapes, 82–96. routledge, oxfordshire. foucault, m. (1995 [1977]) discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. translated by a. allen lane. vintage books, new york. foucault, m. (2001[1967]) madness and civilization. translated by r. howard. routledge, new york. foucault, m. (2003) psychiatric power. lectures at the collegé de france 1973–1974. translated by g. burchell. picador, new york. furedi, f. (2006) culture of fear revisited. risk-taking and the morality of low expectation. continuum, london. gee, s. & skovdal, m. (2017) navigating 'riskscapes': the experiences of international health care workers responding to the ebola outbreak in west africa. health & place 45 173–180. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2017.03.016 gill, n., conlon, d. & moran, d. (2013) dialogues across carceral space: migration, mobility, space and agency. in moran, d., gill, n. & conlon, d. (eds.) carceral spaces: mobility and agency in imprisonment and migrant detention, 239–247. ashgate, surrey. gill, n., conlon, d., moran, d. & burridge, a. (2018) carceral circuitry: new directions in carceral geography. progress in human geography 42(2) 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516671823 holmes, d., kennedy l., s. & perron, a. (2004) the mentally ill and social exclusion: a critical examination of the use of seclusion from the patient's perspective. issues in mental health nursing 25(6) 559–578. https://doi.org/10.1080/01612840490472101 hörnqvist, m. (2010) risk, power and state after foucault. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203857052 kasperson, r. e. (1992) the social amplification of risk – progress in developing an integrative framework. in krimsky, s. & golding, d. (eds.) social theories of risk, 153–178. praeger publ, westport. koskela, h. (2009) pelkokierre: pelon politiikka, turvamarkkinat ja kamppailu kaupunkitilasta. gaudeamus helsinki university press, helsinki. krüger, f. (2013) spaces of risk and cultures of resilience. hiv/aids and adherence in botswana. in müller-mahn, d. (ed.) the spatial dimension of risk. how geography shapes the emergence of riskscapes, 109–123. routledge, oxfordshire. kuivalainen, s., vehviläinen-julkunen, k., louheranta, o., putkonen, a., repo-tiihonen, e. & tiihonen, j. (2017) de-escalation techniques used, and reasons for seclusion and restraint, in a forensic psychiatric hospital. international journal of mental health nursing 26(5) 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12389 lahdenmäki, a. (2016) osasto g1. long play 47 1–27. long play media oy, helsinki. <https://www. longplay.fi/jutut/osasto-g1> lundgren, m. (2018) riskscapes: strategies and practices along the georgian-abkhazian boundary line and inside abkhazia. journal of borderlands studies 33(4) 637–654. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2017.1300778 lupton, d. (2006) sociology and risk. in mythen, g. & walklate, s. (eds.) beyond the risk society: on risk and human security, 11–24. open university press, berkshire. mcdonald, s. & ahern, k. (2000) the professional consequences of whistleblowing by nurses. journal of professional nursing 16(6) 313–321. https://doi.org/10.1053/jpnu.2000.18178 milligan, c. (2003) location or dis-location? towards a conceptualization of people and place in the care-giving experience. social & cultural geography 4(4) 455–470. https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936032000137902 milligan, c. & wiles, j. (2010) landscapes of care. progress in human geography 34(6) 736–754. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510364556 ministry of justice (1999) personal data act (523/1999). ministry of justice, helsinki. <https://www. finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/1999/en19990523_20000986.pdf>. 28.10.2020. ministry of social affairs and health (1990) mental health act (1116, 1990). ministry of social affairs and health, helsinki. <https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/kaannokset/1990/en19901116_20101338.pdf>. 28.10.2020. 133virve repofennia 198(1–2) (2020) ministry of social affairs and health (2002) työturvallisuuslaki (738/2002). ministry of social affairs and health, helsinki. <https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2002/20020738>. 28.10.2020. mitchell, d. (2000) dead labor: the geography of workplace violence in america and beyond. environment and planning a 32 761–768. https://doi.org/10.1068/a3205com moran, d. (2015) carceral geography: spaces and practices of incarceration. routledge, new york. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315570853 moran, d., turner, j. & schliehe, a. k. (2018) conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography. progress in human geography 42(5) 666–686. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517710352 morello-frosch, r. & lopez, r. (2006) the riskscape and the color line: examining the role of segregation in environmental health disparities. environmental research 102(2) 181–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2006.05.007 morello-frosch, r. & shenassa, e. d. (2006) the environmental "riskscape" and social inequality: implications for explaining maternal and child health disparities. environmental health perspectives 114(8) 1150–1153. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.8930 morello-frosch, r., pastor, m. & sadd, j. (2001) environmental justice and southern california's "riskscape" – the distribution of air toxics exposures and health risks among diverse communities. urban affairs review 36(4) 551–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/10780870122184993 morin, k. m. (2018) carceral space, prisoners and animals. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315636986 müller-mahn, d., everts, j. & stephan, c. (2018), riskscapes revisited – exploring the relationship between risk, space and practice. erdkunde 72(3) 197–213. https://doi.org/10.3112/erdkunde.2018.02.09 müller-mahn, d. & everts, j. (2013) riskscapes. the spatial dimensions of risk. in müller-mahn, d. (ed.) the spatial dimension of risk. how geography shapes the emergence of riskscapes, 22–36. 1st ed. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203109595 mythen, g. & walklate, s. (2006) introduction. in mythen, g. & walklate, s. (eds.) beyond the risk society: critical reflections on risk and human security. open university press, berkshire. nowakowski, k. (2003) landscapes of toxic exclusion: inmate labour and electronics recycling in the united states. in moran, d., gill, n. & conlon, d. (eds.) carceral spaces: mobility and agency in imprisonment and migrant detention, 93–108. ashgate, farnham. parr, h. (2003) medical geography: care and caring. medical geography 27(2) 212–221. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132503ph423pr philo, c. & parr, h. (2019) staying with the trouble of institutions. area 51(2) 241–248. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12531 philo, c. & parr, h. (2000) institutional geographies: introductory remarks. geoforum 31(4) 513–521. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-7185(00)00018-x pisani, l. d. & walsh, c. a. (2012) screening for elder abuse in hospitalized older adults with dementia. journal of elder abuse & neglect 24(3) 195–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/08946566.2011.652919 rannila, p. & repo, v. (2018) property and carceral spaces in christiania, copenhagen. urban studies 55(13) 2996–3011. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017713447 repo, v. (2019a) carceral layers in a geropsychiatric ward in finland. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 101(3) 187–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2019.1627852 repo, v. (2019b) spatial control and care in finnish nursing homes. area 51(2)  233–240. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12443 richardson, l. & thieme, t. a. (2020) planning working futures: precarious work through carceral space. social & cultural geography 21(1) 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1446216 salazar, n. b. (2013) scapes. in mcgee, r. j. & warms, r. l. (eds.) theory in social and cultural anthropology: an encyclopedia, 754–754. sage, thousand oaks, ca. schliehe, a. k. (2016) locking up children and young people: secure care in scotland. play and recreation, health and wellbeing 9 601–619. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-51-4_19 southwestern finland district court (2017) sentence 17/136623, r17/1725 19.9.2017. unpublished material. southwestern finland hospital district (2013) sisäisen tarkastuksen raportti vanhuspsykiatrian osastosta g1. unpublished report. southwestern finland police department (2017) pre-examination record 5650/r/13450/16. unpublished material. story, b. (2019) prison land. mapping carceral power across neoliberal america. university of minnesota press, minneapolis. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvdjrphr thorshaug, r. o. & brun, c. (2019) temporal injustice and re-orientations in asylum reception centres in norway: towards critical geographies of architecture in the institution. fennia 197(2) 232–248. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.84758 134 research paper fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tierney, k. j. (2014) the social roots of risk: producing disasters, promoting resilience. high reliability and crisis management. stanford university press, palo alto. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804791403 tombs, s. & whyte, d. (2006) work and risk. in mythen, g. & walklate, s. (eds.) beyond the risk society: on risk and human security, 169–193. open university press, berkshire. turner, j. (2016) prison boundary: between society and carceral space. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53242-8_1 valvira (2016) kupittaan psykiatrisen sairaalan osastojen a1, a2, a3, a6, g1 ja g2 tarkastuskertomus. valvira, sosiaalija terveysalan lupaja valvontavirasto. unpublished report. valvira (2017) varsinais-suomen sairaanhoitopiirin, psykiatrian tulosalueen, turun psykiatrian tulosyksikön osastojen a6 ja a9 osastotoimintojen tarkastus. valvira, sosiaalija terveysalan lupaja valvontavirasto. unpublished report. villanueva, j. (2018) pathways of confinement: the legal constitution of carceral spaces in france's social housing estates. social & cultural geography 19(8) 963–983. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1328526 the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa84792 doi: 10.11143/fennia.84792 the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher stephen taylor taylor, s. (2019) the long shadows cast by the field: violence, trauma, and the ethnographic researcher. fennia 197(2) 183–199. https://doi. org/10.11143/fennia.84792 as more geographers utilise ethnographic methods to explore pressing contemporary issues such as abandonment, precarity, and resilience, they enter into research environments often defined by social marginality and violence. there are emotional and psychological risks associated with embedded research in such contexts, however these challenges have largely been ignored in existing methodological literatures. a frank debate is needed about the emotional and psychological burden that ethnographic research can exact upon lone researchers and how these burdens interface with researcher identity and positionality. drawing on a reflexive analysis of the author’s experience of fieldwork in south africa, this paper highlights the emotional consequences of conducting ethnographic research with marginal groups in dangerous contexts. it specifically examines the ripple effect of exposure to traumatic events that culminated in the author’s diagnosis with posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd). in so doing, the paper draws attention to the acute emotional and psychological consequences of ethnographic research, while also challenging prevalent professional attitudes within the neoliberal university that promote the downplaying or silencing of such repercussions. the paper concludes with a series of suggestions for how (early career) researchers, our discipline, and institutions might better promote and realise an ethic of collective care for field researchers. keywords: ethnography, emotions, mental health, subjectivity, posttraumatic stress disorder, south africa stephen taylor, school of geography, faculty of humanities and social sciences, queen mary university of london, mile end road, london, e1 4ns. united kingdom. e-mail: stephen.taylor@qmul.ac.uk our fear, doubt, grief, rage, horror, and detachment, our shivers and shakes, and our paralysis and frenzy lay bare our humanity when we are confronted with the cruelty, despair, and suffering that humans can inflict on each other. (markowitz 2019, 2) © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 184 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) introduction in out of our minds: reason and madness in the exploration of central africa, fabian (2000) brings to the fore the many people, objects, and emotions stifled in the “heroic” travelogues and ethnographies of the nineteenth century. significant in these journeys, fabian (2000, 9) uncovers, were “the effects of alcohol, drugs, illness, sex, brutality, and terror.” in documenting the often chaotic and panicked nature of early ethnographic knowledge production, fabian exposes how the silencing of trials and tribulations was a fundamental part of the discursive production of peoples and places as objects of knowledge (clifford & marcus 1986). it is testament to fabian’s contrapuntal acuity that it has now become something of a truism to begin reflexive accounts of fieldwork with an assessment of similar methodological silences within extant accounts of the field. this has become a common refrain for multiple generations of early career geographers frustrated by what they see as a long-standing inattentiveness to the practical and intellectual challenges of fieldwork (mandel 2003; billo & hiemstra 2013). it is encouraging, then, to see how researchers from across the discipline of geography increasingly respond to these provocations with detailed and constructive accounts of (overcoming) the multifarious challenges posed by fieldwork, including negotiating “access” to closed institutions, managing the dynamics of cross-cultural interviews, and defending the study of illicit spatial practices (belcher & martin 2013; turner 2013; zhao 2017; dekeyser & garrett 2018). despite this clamour for greater methodological transparency in the discipline, the emotional challenges of geographical fieldwork have historically received less attention (widdowfield 2000; punch 2012; warden 2013; drozdzewski & dominey-howes 2015). “geography,” davidson, bondi and smith (2005, 1) contend, “has often had trouble expressing feelings” and has consequently “tended to deny, avoid, suppress or downplay its emotional entanglements.” despite an “emotional turn” within the discipline, researchers’ emotions and anxieties often remain buried, underacknowledged, or repressed in accounts of fieldwork in particular (anderson & smith 2001; davidson et al. 2005; pile 2010). in this paper, i reflexively examine my experiences – as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, european, male researcher – of conducting ethnographic doctoral research in urban south africa. i begin by bringing to the fore my own experiences of the many forms of emotional investment that ethnographic research necessitates. emotions, after all, draw us to certain topics, flow through our research relationships, and “define the contours of the multiple worlds that are inhabited by different subjects” (ahmed 2004, 25). i then explore the feelings of vulnerability and insecurity that affected my fieldwork by interrogating how acts of violence directed at both research participants and myself undercut my sense of self and assuredness. finally, i turn to the lasting impact of this fieldwork on my personal and professional lives. i examine my post-fieldwork experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd), the burden of mental ill-health on an ethnographer, and the emotional silences that i perpetuated to stand out from peers and further my career. i conclude with recommendations on how individuals, our discipline, and institutions can better prepare and care for field researchers. emotions silenced, traumas downplayed the current and ongoing silencing of emotion within geographical accounts of field research, identified as a concern by davidson, bondi and smith (2005), can be traced back to two key influences. first, the pressurised and antagonistic neoliberal university is considered to be hostile to emotion. attempts by geographers to “write vulnerably” (behar 1997, 16), for example, have been decried or dismissed by colleagues for demonstrating an “excessive emotionality” (mehta & bondi 1999, 75). the prevailing view of emotionality is as a symptom of powerlessness: “to be emotional is to have one’s judgment affected … it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous” (ahmed 2004, 3). the dismissal of emotion is typified for many in the use of managerialist research assessments that deride reflexive ethnographic writing as little more than “annotated fieldnotes” (jeffrey 2012, 505). consequently, the emotional dimensions of field experiences are downplayed by those reluctant to have their peers, managers, or assessors “penalising emotion” (ratnam 2019, 24; dominey-howes 2015; caretta et al. 2018). beckett (2019) suggests that this marginalisation and rejection of researcher personhood is a form of “cruelty that masquerades as intellectual rigour.” as such, there remains much 185stephen taylorfennia 197(2) (2019) to be done to raise awareness of the emotional impacts of ethnographic research within an increasingly neoliberal university system that does not reward – and, often, actively penalises – such emotionality. a second, and undoubtedly linked, reason for the silencing of emotion in accounts of the field is the prevalent masculinist epistemology of the discipline. geographers are frequently encouraged to overcome personal anxieties around fieldwork, sometimes in potentially violent settings, by heroically and intrepidly embracing the “throwntogetherness” of research (fraser 2012). such a hubristic stance promotes the silencing of researchers’ concerns about safety, avoids questions of disability/ impairment, and does not challenge the presumption that stoic determination in the face of adversity is a hallmark of good research. in comparison, non-academic professionals working in such contexts receive well-defined training on how to manage the high emotional cost of their work with traumatised individuals in times of “crisis ordinariness” (berlant 2011, 10).1 the preparedness of ethnographers entering similarly unpredictable settings ought to be a significant professional concern, particularly as data points to an increasing incidence of mental health issues in this group, but disciplinary preparation for the emotional impacts of fieldwork remains uneven (woon 2013; calgaro 2015; loyle & simoni 2017; mcgarrol 2017; markowitz 2019). it is also important that we foreground attempts to challenge such limited preparation by acknowledging the continued prevalence of a masculinist epistemology within the discipline (as well as the university more broadly) that frames discussion of emotion as a “feminine” form of weakness. the field researcher is too often assumed to be an emotion-less witness, akin to the output-maximising researcher lauded by the neoliberal university. this masculinist conception of the stoic geographer normalises certain experiences of the field, mockingly dismisses those who could not “cut it,” and leaves researchers inadequately prepared for differentiated field experiences (pollard 2009; billo & hiemstra 2013; coddington 2015). against such a disciplinary and institutional backdrop, one could question how far the discipline has come from the deadened accounts of exploration unpacked by fabian. there are, thankfully, exceptions to the tendencies outlined above, particularly from a growing number of women geographers breaking the silence around the emotional challenges of the field (drozdzewski 2015; klocker 2015; coddington 2017; eriksen 2017). calgaro (2015), for instance, reflects upon the feelings of disorientation and horror that accompanied her longitudinal research on thailand's unfolding traumascapes in the wake of the 2004 indian ocean tsunami. jokinen and caretta (2016) reflexively examine their experiences as young women postgraduate researchers with (invisible) disabilities and discuss how isolation, fear, ableism, and gender-based violence encountered in the field undermine disciplinary assumptions about researcher mobility and well-being. sundberg (2005) explores how the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality shape researcher vulnerabilities and responses to tensions arising in the field. these accounts, rooted in a critical feminist epistemology, acknowledge the differentiated emotional effects of fieldwork. however, with notable exceptions (e.g. dominey-howes 2015) and acknowledging the importance of gay, queer, and trans fieldwork perspectives (e.g. browne & nash; kedley 2019), the intersection of gender, masculinity, and emotion remains relatively underexplored in accounts of fieldwork. as england (1994, 85) notes, “the researcher cannot conveniently tuck away the personal behind the professional, because fieldwork is personal.” i use this statement as a provocation to discuss the personal consequences of my own fieldwork and, importantly, to counter male geographers’ emotional silences to date. my intention in the rest of this paper is to contribute my own autoethnographic reflections on doctoral research within the neoliberal university to the burgeoning interdisciplinary and geographical literature on emotion, violence, and researcher positionality outlined above. before i continue, however, it is important to emphasise that all researchers encounter the field differently. i am cognisant here of efforts to deconstruct the unproblematised euroamerican “we” of critical human geography (jazeel 2016). while i discuss my experiences in what follows, i do not claim authority to speak definitively for others who – owing to their own positionality – may have had similar or different experiences. instead, the aim of the following discussion is to promote an appreciation of the often underestimated emotional and psychological toll that research can exact upon all researchers, and to identify lacunae in guidance and practice that could be addressed to better prepare those conducting ethnographic research in the future. 186 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) the research project my doctoral study was the first major research project that i conducted as a lone researcher. the project, funded by a competitive studentship, focused on the globalisation of clinical trials and the challenges posed to trial recruiters of making pharmaceutical knowledge in and between new national jurisdictions (petryna 2009). in january 2010, i relocated to south africa from the united kingdom for 15 months to study efforts to enrol marginal urban populations into first-in-human clinical trials. this was my first time in south africa. the field location was chosen because of the burgeoning rate of trial recruitment rather than any familiarity with the country on my part. that i received competitive funding to do research in a country that i was entirely unfamiliar with is reflective of the ways in which our discipline disproportionately rewards doctoral studentships to white, male candidates from “prestigious” euroamerican institutions with often “edgy” but untested field ideas (desai 2017). in south africa, i based myself in cape town’s peripheral townships where i examined the tactics used by recruiters – known as “body hunters” (shah 2007) – to enrol the precarious urban poor into trials. i conducted ethnographic research alongside recruiters and human subjects in a key recruitment hotspot: the khayelitsha township. khayelitsha, meaning “our new home” in the xhosa language, is located 35 kilometres south-east of the centre of cape town and is a sprawling mix of formal and informal housing with high levels of unemployment and poverty (see fig. 1). the township was established in 1985 through the forced relocation by the apartheid regime of black residents from other overcrowded areas of the city. physical and social mobility was severely restricted through the operation of the segregationist 1950 group areas act and successive pass laws requiring “non-white” south africans to present official documentation when entering “white” areas. the township has grown rapidly since the end of apartheid as a result of migration to urban areas by those in search of work and better opportunities. fig. 1. a khayelitsha street scene with informal corrugated iron shacks densely packed together on the sandy dunes of the cape flats. photo by author. 187stephen taylorfennia 197(2) (2019) violence is an everyday reality for many khayelitsha residents and shapes a local politics of fear (meth 2009). recorded incidences of murder, rape, and aggravated robbery in the khayelitsha police precinct were ranked within the five highest reporting precincts nationally during my time in the area (south african police service 2012, 11). against this backdrop, local residents have often been excluded and silenced within popular and academic discourse through epistemologically violent subject positionings that have categorised the entire township as an irredeemable space. investing in the field “the field,” as sharp and dowler (2011, 151) have argued, “is part of a much bigger institution.” in particular, universities play a significant role in preparing graduate students for field research through the provision of intellectual support, mentorship, and access to insurance protections. despite requests to both my academic department and the broader university, however, no specific training to prepare pre-fieldwork students for the physical and emotional demands of time away from the university was made available. instead, i was encouraged to reflect on and anticipate risks via my health and safety risk assessment and to discuss this with members of the departmental panel. a risk assessment was undertaken at the commencement of the project, in consultation with the generic university safety guidance, and was accepted without amendment within the department. the majority of the thousand words or so of text that i contributed focused on likely risks to my physical health, including natural disasters, exposure to disease vectors, and travel at night. the form did not encourage reflection on risks likely to impact mental health or well-being, and these were not raised as concerns by the scrutiny panel (eriksen 2017). while the bureaucratic assessment was necessary to gain insurance cover and to have the work signed-off within the department, the risk assessment form was never discussed again. following news of the risk assessment approval, a member of the faculty recommended via email that i should “drop everything, get onto the first plane you can, and move into the townships; going immediately is the only way to finish the phd and a couple of publications in three years.” here, at an early point in my graduate studies, career and publication considerations were introduced as factors that senior colleagues felt should shape the field decisions made by a young researcher. these considerations shaped my initial framing of the field arguably more than the anticipation of dynamic, contingent, and uncertain risks (houghton & bass 2012; berg 2015; webster & caretta 2019). i moved to south africa two months after the risk assessment and i set aside several weeks in my initial fieldwork schedule for acclimatisation. ethnographic research that moves beyond mere participant observation necessitates a prolonged, personal, and proactive investment in people and places. i had cursorily considered the initial stresses likely to be experienced by any individual plunged into a milieu with which they are unacquainted. i attempted to reduce the impact of this “culture shock” by registering on a xhosa language course at a local university, and i also used the university as a base from which to contact potential research participants in the clinical trials industry. my initial attempts at accessing researchers and companies involved fraught negotiations, compounded by the secretive nature of much pharmaceutical research, and i appreciated having a familiar classroom environment to retreat to after long mornings of frustrated emails, unanswered calls, and denials of access. as part of my research into trial recruitment strategies, i sought to examine the everyday lives of those living in areas being targeted by “body hunters.” despite my colleague’s suggestion of bravado in approaching cape town’s townships, i knew that accessing these communities would be demanding. developing contacts made on my language course, i became affiliated with a community health non-governmental organisation (ngo) in khayelitsha and this became a valuable space to acclimatise to living and working in the area. the organisation was also a vocal critic of trial recruiters operating in the township, many of whom recruited individuals out of support groups and health clinics organised by the ngo. i participated in many ngo activities, including co-facilitating safe sex workshops and helping to organise several actions against local government underinvestment in community health services. later, at the request of several local young men who had attended the workshops and heard me speaking about my interests, i hosted a series of informal drop-in 188 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) photography classes in the ngo office’s meeting room. the men saw photography as a potential employment opportunity, and we spent several afternoons and evenings photographing scenes across khayelitsha (fig. 2 and 3). these classes allowed me to scope the local environment and practice my xhosa click consonants and phonemic tones with a group of unofficial guides who identified places of interest. investing in dialogueand rapport-building initiatives was an emotionally draining, time-consuming, and yet ultimately rewarding process, as it allowed me to explore a wider area and access a larger number of research contacts. fig. 2. a discarded tourniquet – eerily similar in shape to the red hiv/aids international awareness ribbon – found in a shack frequented by intravenous drug users. photo by author. fig. 3. assorted pieces of wood and cardboard make up the wall of an informal shack in qq section (tambo park), khayelitsha. photo by author. 189fennia 197(2) (2019) stephen taylor the personal emotional investment necessary for meaningful ethnographic access was undoubtedly more challenging because of my position as a white, male, european researcher in a partially informal, black-majority south african township. a sizeable body of work within geography and allied disciplines has explored the intersections of gender, masculinity, and researcher positionality (meth 2009; evans 2012). the gender of male researchers, this work suggests, influences the power dynamics of a research situation and this distortion is amplified further by other axes of difference. despite the petty frustrations and occasional embarrassment stemming from my far-from-perfect command of xhosa, i was considered to occupy a position of privilege by my research participants owing to the colour of my skin as well as my perceived wealth (exemplified, for instance, by my digital camera). for rose (1997, 307), this privilege entails “greater access both to material resources and to the power inherent in the production of knowledges about others.” cognizant of these unsettling aspects of privilege, i embraced my position as a reverent learner who was keen to hear more about everyday khayelitsha. the dynamics of these relationships evolved as research participants chose to disclose more of their experiences of township life with me. my time with the ngo was helpful in introducing me to the sites and spaces frequented by trial recruiters. however, i understood that basing myself in the relative safety of their compound risked distorting my view of trial recruitment by focusing solely on those companies seeking to recruit through extant public health programmes (le marcis 2004). to gain a broader perspective on the spectrum of sites and methods used by recruiters, i had to access more marginal sections of khayelitsha. i rented a room in the house of a church pastor within the qq (tambo park) section of khayelitsha’s site b neighbourhood. tambo park is one of the most underserved areas in the city, built on squatted land underneath high-voltage electricity pylons owned by eskom (the national electricity utility), with few toilets and limited access to piped drinking water. this move was part of a conscious strategy aimed at understanding the processes of violence and poverty in underserved areas that drove many to consider high-risk trial participation as a rare source of sizeable remuneration. from this location, i was able to explore the vitality of township life that had largely been ignored in extant accounts of khayelitsha. the pursuit of such valuable perspectives was frequently hindered by acute localised violence. for example, i made regular trips into sections where released members of cape town’s feared number prison-gangs (“26s,” “27s,” and “28s”) exert control through terror, extortion, and brutality: i’ve had lots of nightmares after yesterday’s visits. one of the guys that i know from [the ngo] told me that a young girl’s body was found near his house. she would not accept r30 (€2) for sex, so she was slashed with a panga knife and pelted with stones. apparently, that is the accepted rate for a life. (excerpt from field diary, 16 august 2010) as i visited with respondents in these remoter sections of khayelitsha, black male gang members – suspicious of unknown white people asking questions on their territory – often grinned at me and slowly drew their index fingers across their necks to mimic the cutting of my throat that, they intimated, might be my fate. while this may be explained away as part of a “theatrics of intimidation” (pratt 2008, 767) that deliberately accentuated colonial configurations of racialised threat, it was now clear that my affiliation with the ngo was no protection against the threat of a knife attack. i considered my (white) body to now be a source of vulnerability, or a marker that i was unwelcome and – in some way – out of place (parr 2001; sharp 2005). shocks to self negotiating the shifting terrains of violence in places like tambo park is a significant emotional challenge for those ethnographers struggling to make sense of violent social worlds. while objectivity and emotional distance are important in research, they should not be a pretext for inertia when confronted with distress nor used as an absolution for silent acquiescence in the face of oppression (hart 2006; markowitz 2019). listening to research participants recounting incidences of violence reminded me that life is a fragile thing, and i became more aware of this reality through frequent contact with incidences of lives being cut short around me. once on a short car journey around the 190 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) outskirts of khayelitsha, i passed the horrific scene of a collision between several overloaded taxi-vans and a fuel tanker. in a bewildered state of fear and anxiety, it took all the emotional strength that i could muster to pull my vehicle to the curb so that i could vomit out of the window. nordstrom and robben (1995, 13) note that the emotional numbness and bewilderment that follow the witnessing or documenting of death and violence by embedded researchers are rooted in “the confrontation of the ethnographer’s own sense of being with lives constructed on haphazard grounds.” where i had set out to study clinical trials in cape town, i was increasingly researching – and, therefore, experiencing – forms of everyday violence that unsettled the stoicism of my own emotional autobiography. in light of the tanker crash and the increased reporting of emotional traumas by my research participants in our discussions of trial participation, i found documenting violence in my field notes to be an increasingly draining and demoralising task (punch 2012). the leather-bound notebooks that had once been updated every evening with vibrant memories, character-full stories, and sketches, became erratic repositories of conflict, violence, and terror. writing was a difficult task, and the “transfers of medium” (hearn 1998, 56) required in the translation from notes or voice memos to written text were emotionally charged moments of recollection. retreating from these notes for several hours, days, and even weeks, became a way of escaping the realities of day-to-day life in the field – while, of course, neglecting the documentation and retention of potentially significant research encounters over these timescales. it was the only way i could preserve the strength to wake up the following morning and listen to similar tales of violence yet again. the murder of two of my research participants – both former trial subjects – in gang violence related to control of the local drug trade, shattered my increasingly fragile resilience to accounts of violence. in december 2010, sizakele2 – a crystal meth (tik) dealer – was bludgeoned to death with an iron bar outside his shack. in january 2011, qhamani – whose brother was a prominent gang lieutenant – was stabbed 16 times as he opened the door of his house; he bled to death on the dusty doorstep where we had spent many afternoons conversing about his life in the townships and his motivations for doing first-in-human clinical trials. these were not the murders of distant strangers, whose deaths were partly sanitised by the broadcast media, but the bloody and targeted killings of two men who had welcomed me during my first months in khayelitsha and shared their life stories. it would be paternalistic of me to claim that i, as a privileged white european researcher, could have ever truly shared their struggles with poverty and unemployment, but my research was designed to be mindful of their well-being and also invested in positively documenting their experiences of trial recruitment and participation. instead, they were now dead and there was nothing in my commitments to engaged research that would bring them back. when i was able to open my field diary again and document my thoughts about these killings, i began to narrate a disconnection that i saw emerging between my university colleagues, research participants, and myself: everyone likes the ‘product’ when i email updates back to university, but they do not want to hear about how much this is costing me personally. i have shared the news about participant deaths and attending their funerals. the response? ‘three more months, you are nearly finished!’ ‘do not stop now – you are doing great!’ i feel as if i am staying here because of the guilt that will come if or when i run away home. (excerpt from field diary, 24 january 2011) in reflections such as this, i began to question my own competency to conduct ethnographic research, mainly as a result of the growing sense of fear and insecurity that i perceived to be constraining my movements and clouding my observations. how reliable, for instance, were my increasingly panicked reflections on khayelitsha life? could i claim to be an ethnographer if i was retreating from certain aspects of everyday life? i felt a sense of guilt about the intensity of my personal reactions to the violence that my research participants were seemingly surmounting on a routine basis. reflecting on her own experiences of the field, katz (1994, 67) recognises that “social scientists inhabit a difficult and inherently unstable space of betweenness,” partly at home in the field and partly remaining an alien to everyday experiences. like a tourist, i knew that i would leave my research participants, or “run away” as i labelled it above, to complete my degree at home. mobility and the ability to extract oneself (and one’s data) from violence is a mark of privilege against the researcher, particularly in a south african context in which race continues to dictate everyday mobility opportunities 191fennia 197(2) (2019) stephen taylor and restrictions (crankshaw 2008; caretta & jokinen 2017). indeed, hammett and hoogendoorn (2012, 285) note that south africa has, for too long, been treated as “a site of knowledge production and extraction.” aware of potentially being labelled as yet another extractive researcher profiting from the suffering of others, i felt unable to discuss my fear and insecurity with south african colleagues, and i rarely discussed these issues with south african friends – both inside and outside khayelitsha – to protect them from the rawest manifestations of my fear and guilt. exposure to situations of emotional duress reveals both the paralysis and productivity of researchers struggling to cope with their surroundings. interlocutors have since questioned how valid or reliable my ethnographic work was in light of such reactions. an unspoken assumption behind these queries is that data quality must be compromised when researcher objectivity is in doubt. such assertions, i contend, are symptomatic of the masculinist epistemologies of our discipline. it is presumed that an objective account is one that conforms to disciplinary norms, but the fact that these norms are premised on the covert denial of researcher personhood – an epistemological sleight of hand exposed by fabian – is rarely discussed. the emotional consequences of extended ethnographic research can, instead, be an important source of critical understanding (lund 2012; punch 2012). leetreweek (2000, 12), for example, argues that “ignoring or repressing feelings about research is more likely to produce distortion of data, rather than clarity.” as i have reflected on my experiences of the field cursorily outlined above, i have come to recognise – admittedly over a distance of several years – that the guilt i narrated above was often an unexpected way of maintaining a dialogue about my own position within the research (de nardi 2015; caretta & jokinen 2017). emotions related to loss and fear were, likewise, useful indicators to compare my own emotional responses to those of my research participants (hume 2007; dominey-howes 2015). finally, empathy facilitated my own farfrom-perfect attempts at understanding the participants’ everyday experiences (ratnam 2019). while researcher safety is paramount, to suggest that emotional responses are not valid or are likely to compromise critical work is to malign certain field experiences and disqualify forms of personhood from the field of knowledge production. it is important, in light of the above, to return to the question of my positionality. there is value in exploring the emotional experiences of male researchers who encounter violence in the field, as these intersections are still relatively limited within geography (dominey-howes 2015). as feminist geographers have noted, men occupy positions of relative power inside and outside the field; this leads to the assumed ability to dominate and control the field encounter. mehta and bondi (1999, 77), for instance, state that men – here assumed to be heterosexual and cisgender – “take for granted their capacity to move through a variety of urban spaces.” as i spent more time in khayelitsha following the murders, however, i found that my taken-for-granted ability to traverse urban terrain started to falter. i became increasingly wary of leaving my home, conscious of different individuals and unknown risks in public spaces, and often ended my days fearful of noises outside my house. i tragically believed that as “a man” i ought to be master of my own field experience – a masculine confidence and emotional indifference that had been reinforced through my university career to date – even when i was, like fabian’s arrogant colonial ethnographers, in a place that i had no previous experience of before commencing the research. my growing fear started to throw this identity into doubt. i spent the evenings wrestling with the growing discordance between what i felt i should be doing and what i physically and mentally could do (caretta & jokinen 2017). i repressed my doubts, however, as i was wary of revealing this emotional distress to my predominantly male peer group and colleagues out of a concern that they would question my masculinity and interpret these anxieties as a sign of weakness (see dominey-howes 2015). where some have felt wary of being labelled a “thrill seeker” while in the field, in many respects i was reluctant to be positioned as risk averse. leaving the field? ethnographers most often return from fieldwork alone. for the researcher, the thought of finally leaving the field can be a motivating factor to endure stressful conditions. however, the transformations that begin in the field do not always end at the point of departure. for all the methodological concern 192 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) with “getting in” and “getting on” in the field, there remains a noticeable silence on the challenges and repercussions of “getting out” (irvine & gaffikin 2006). when i returned to the united kingdom at the scheduled end of my fieldwork, i was inundated with requests from friends and colleagues alike, ranging from dinner invitations to projected dissertation drafting schedules. there was a belief that i would slip back seamlessly into life at home and everyone, understandably, wanted to do their best to facilitate this. in reality, i struggled to communicate with those who had seen none of the emotional transformation that i had undergone in another hemisphere (theidon 2014). i felt that i had so little to say and, like anyone who has spent a significant time away from social groups, my friends’ lives had carried on without me; i had missed these moments – new jobs, new partners, new hangouts – and, honestly, it all seemed so insignificant in contrast to the memories and nightmares that clouded my waking moments. close friends asked about the bags under my eyes and the noticeable weight loss; i explained it away as a side-effect of the stress brought about from return to thesis deadlines, not wanting to burden them with the full story. often, researchers who are suffering from emotional and psychological trauma do so in silence, giving rise to a perception that such issues are absent from research and that there is little need for post-fieldwork institutional support or formal redress (bloor et al. 2010). this lack of recognition further reinforces a broader personal/professional divide in which emotional and psychological issues are still considered to be a purely personal matter, with their place in the professionalised space of research remaining unwelcome. fieldwork, too, is often seen as a distinct phase in a researcher’s personal or professional life that is disconnected from normal rhythms and routines. the fallacy of such divides is exposed when emotional and psychological distresses arise as a direct consequence of professional fieldwork activity. in those first few weeks back at work, i suffered from panic attacks, bouts of uncontrollable anger, periods of depression, teary outbursts, and recurrent nightmares; these problems did not respect any flimsy boundary intended to parse my personal and professional lives. i remember attending a university reception at which i broke down in the toilets, unable to keep up appearances around colleagues and their partners. i also found it difficult to stay in contact with my south african research participants; i felt that i had abandoned them and worried that the next social media update would contain more news of violence directed towards them. i feared, paraphrasing sontag’s (2003, 17) work on the visceral power of images, an assault by email. on the days when i could force myself to work, i began to dedicate myself to helping raise the profile of the khayelitsha ngo as this was the only forum where i could confront and raise awareness of the poverty and violence that i had seen. focusing on these tasks helped me delay the transcription of interviews and having to play and replay audio recordings dealing with the subject of violence. i shared little of this with my supervisor. throughout my time in south africa, i would email an update each month on where progress was being made. i mentioned little of the emotional problems that i was having – aside from the death of interviewees – and i maintained this silence when i returned too. we debriefed my time away mainly in terms of work done and how this would be translated into the thesis and publications. i felt comfortable narrowing our conversation around work, as i could at least present a veneer of being a research productive individual worthy of the recognition and affirmation i craved. i had field stories to tell, all of which skirted over the sleepless nights and the teary moments. i also successfully avoided the issue of my mental health and yet i came to realise that this selfishly undermined my own desire to help my respondents. how, for instance, could i claim to be supporting the work of the ngo and practising a care-full geography when i was neglecting to share the reality of my respondents’ everyday lives and the ways in which this had deeply affected me? these were questions that i was too reluctant to pose to my supervisor, fearing that this would cross a line into the therapeutic and make them uncomfortable, but these are issues that i now feel i would have appreciated their advice and support on most of all. at the suggestion of a friend who had begun to be concerned about my increasingly erratic behaviour, i reluctantly spoke with a professional counsellor about my experiences three months after returning from south africa. at first, i am now ashamed to say, i was dismissive of the enterprise and put forth intellectual resistance to the idea of therapy and even discussing emotions. all i wanted was to sleep better and to work efficiently. slowly, however, i opened up about experiences in khayelitsha – the 193fennia 197(2) (2019) stephen taylor dead girl, the tanker crash, the gang threats, the murders – and, following further consultations over the course of several weeks, i was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). ptsd, i learned, involves the re-experiencing of actual or threatened traumatic events such as death, serious injury, or sexual violation. the exposure must result from direct experience of a traumatic event, witnessing of an event, recounting of an event by a close associate, or repeated exposure to distressing details of a traumatic event (friedman 2013). a significant number of ethnographic research projects could expose researchers to such traumas, and ethnographers may be vulnerable to secondary or vicarious trauma as they conduct interviews with individuals detailing traumatic or harrowing events (calgaro 2015; markowitz 2019). lerias and byrne (2003, 130) define secondary traumatic stress as “the response of those persons who have witnessed, been subject to explicit knowledge of or, had the responsibility to intervene in a seriously distressing or tragic event.” in my case, the death of research participants and repeated secondary exposure to accounts of trauma – rather than a single catastrophic event – were found to be significant contributors to my complex ptsd. at night, i would lay my head on my pillow and my mind would immediately cast itself back to the steps where i had conversed with qhamani, except this time the concrete steps were smeared in his blood. i would lay there for hours, unable to close my eyes, often leaping out of bed at the slightest of noises coming from the shared house beyond my bedroom door. my flashbacks occurred thousands of miles from khayelitsha, but they repeatedly refocused my thoughts back to a time and a place that i could not return to, while – at the same time – the trauma colonised new spaces at home (coddington & micieli-voutsinas 2017). ptsd is a treatable condition and treatment can be relatively short if it is diagnosed promptly. if there is a delay in the diagnosis and treatment of ptsd, the experiences of trauma risk becoming firmly rooted within the sufferer. diagnostic guidelines for ptsd include four distinct behavioural symptom diagnostic clusters: re-experiencing, avoidance, negative cognitions and arousal (american psychiatric association 2013). the number of symptoms that must be identified for diagnosis depends on the cluster, but disturbances must continue for more than one month. in my case, these symptoms were everyday realities over the course of three months after my return before i sought help, and were further amplified when i was exposed to stimuli that triggered violent memories, such as violence in films, in the media, and even as i tentatively returned to my field notes. in one memorable incident while driving to the supermarket, a driver behind me beeped his horn as i switched lanes suddenly. rather than let this go, i uncharacteristically leaped out of my car at the next intersection and loudly remonstrated at the driver for daring to affront me in this way. my own treatment only began after i had already lost the ability to moderate my own anxiety levels, as the driving incident demonstrates, to the point that i was worried about the need to pause my doctoral studies and thereby publicly disclose my suffering. while some medications have shown immediate benefit in treating the symptoms of ptsd, the best long-term treatment is talking. through cognitive behavioural therapy, ptsd sufferers are encouraged to discuss the traumatic events that are responsible for their negative emotions. the aim of this therapy is to normalise speaking about trauma in such a way that feelings of panic and anxiety are no longer triggered. again, i initially found sharing to be a difficult experience. i avoided certain topics and refused to use certain words that i believed were labels for an emasculating emotionality (crying, anger, fear), instead falling back on intellectualising violence and witnessing. i was encouraged to practice humility – something quite alien to the more prideful, assertive, and defensive posturing of masculinist academic circles – and this took the form of examining and meditating on my own capacities and limits (eriksen & ditrich 2015). the veneer of pride and busyness that i sought to project to others, i came to understand, allowed me to avoid considering my own shortcomings. practicing humility, in other words, gave me the confidence to show colleagues my own flaws in the solidaric spirit of “confessional intimacy” (harrowell et al. 2018, 236). a key part of practising humility has been acknowledging that my experience of the field, trauma, and ptsd is informed by my position as a white, male researcher from a university and country capable of dedicating significant resources to facilitating researcher support and treatment. i do not want to “grade” my ptsd as an exceptional experience. trauma talk, berlant (2001, 46) suggests, is too often captured by interests that seek to “flatten out trauma’s bumpy terrain” in order to deny or 194 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) downplay historically sedimented forms of epistemic violence. researchers identifying at the intersections of axes of difference – notably gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, age, and nationality – are vulnerable to traumas arising from targeted identity-based violence, discrimination, silencing, and exclusion in the field and at home (malam 2004; hume 2007; ross 2015; jokinen & caretta 2016; hawthorne & heitz 2018). it is essential that the discipline makes more space to acknowledge these researcher perspectives and differentiated experiences to make sense of power relations shaping the field. reflexive humility for me, in this instance, involved recognising the humanising function of fieldwork and seeking solidarity with fellow researchers in the interconnected struggles against forms of power that reproduce violence and exclusion against research subjects and researchers alike. after many sessions with trained counsellors, i am now in a position to better manage my own emotions through a clearer prioritisation of care. “care,” mountz and colleagues (2015, 1238) argue, “is not self-indulgent; it is radical and necessary.” despite my successful treatment, which i was able to complete alongside my studies rather than through interruption, i still have difficulty controlling my response to certain triggers and this is a necessary task that i will have to contend with indefinitely. now when i hear a car horn behind me, i still occasionally feel rage, but i control the emotions much better by counting down in my head and considering my breathing: ten, nine, eight, they are probably having a bad day, seven, six, five, ignore the horn, four, three, breathe, two, one. the neurological and hormonal changes brought about by ptsd have necessitated radical changes to my social and professional routines. the physical transformations that accompanied my case of ptsd – significant weight loss, propensity to severe fatigue, episodic irritability around loud noises – mean that i will never be the same person that boarded the plane for south africa in january 2010. i now take these visible and invisible forms of chronic impairment into the field with me and, as i seek to adjust my body within the field, i encounter the unseen barriers in fieldwork that my prideful self previously chose to ignore (kitchin 1998; anderson 2001). conclusions my experiences of negotiating the field and transitioning out of fieldwork highlight an acute need for greater recognition of the emotional and psychological challenges of ethnographic research, and also underline the necessity of comprehensive guidance and training for early career ethnographic researchers entering the field (billo & hiemstra 2013; loyle & simoni 2017). too often the emotional consequences of professional activity have been marginalised within methodological accounts of the field (pollard 2009; caretta & jokinen 2017; ratnam 2019). in turning a critical gaze onto my own experiences in the field and with ptsd, i have introduced some of the consequences for early career researchers of disciplinary and institutional cultures that valorise emotionally opaque accounts of the field. i have also sought to counter the silencing masculinist traditions of our discipline by examining my preand post-fieldwork experiences through the lens of my own positionality as a male geographer with a mental disorder. it has not been my intention to abrogate personal responsibility for my own choices in the field, as i hope has been clear through discussion of mistakes and shortfalls, or to apportion blame to anyone involved in the oversight of my research. in a spirit of humility and confessional intimacy, it is difficult to disagree with delyser and starr’s (2001, 6) characterisation that we are all “fallible field workers negotiating challenging circumstances, not always with equal success and grace.” a number of professional silences and expectations, however, did have a significant and complicating impact upon that decision. these included a silence surrounding the emotional and psychological challenges of ethnographic research in methodological literatures, and the lack of adequate professional information and training about the potential emotional traumas of research (evans 2012; warden 2013; eriksen 2017). while these expectations may now be taken for granted as the emerging contours upon which contemporary academic research is conducted, change is urgently required in the administration of fieldwork and the professional training of researchers to prepare them to confront some of the emotional and psychological challenges of the field (mountz et al. 2015; mullings et al. 2016). first, at an individual level, is a call to prioritise self-care both in the field and after. working constantly risks burnout, as mountz and colleagues (2015) remind us. before i leave, i now schedule a 195fennia 197(2) (2019) stephen taylor period of local furlough part way through extended fieldwork for rest and recuperation. this feels radical, especially as time in the field is often pressurised for many reasons, but allows me to reframe difficult experiences outside of the immediate context of the field and humbly reflect on my own actions (eriksen & ditrich 2015). likewise, i would encourage early career ethnographers to consider engagement with professional counselling services after return from extended periods in the field (beckett 2019). while many might see such appointments as an unnecessary diversion from the pressures to begin data analysis, talking can identify causes for concern at an early stage and can also be a helpful initial stage in reflexively examining and narrating time in the field. second, as a broader discipline with responsibilities for the safety and well-being of early career researchers, we must acknowledge that self-care alone cannot solve field traumas or structural dilemmas linked to over-work (theidon 2014; eriksen 2017). our learned societies must prioritise developing accessible guidance relating to mental distress in the field. funded professional development courses on dealing with emotions and mental health in the field, akin to those offered in other sectors, must be developed and promoted as a disciplinary priority (pearlman & mac ian 1995; bloor et al. 2010). this support could be made available to early-career researchers and their supervisory teams to ensure broad uptake of key messages and principles of support. however, our disciplinary reflection must also extend to differentiated experiences of the field (anderson 2001; sundberg 2005; jokinen & caretta 2016). if the masculinist and colonialist underpinnings of fieldwork are to be challenged, there must be clearer channels of advice, mentoring/sponsorship, and peer support, for researchers whose gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or disability makes them more vulnerable to traumatic experiences in certain field settings (malam 2004; ross 2015; webster & caretta 2019). it is also incumbent upon all geographers to cultivate “thick” forms of solidarity that take an anticipatory stance towards trauma and support colleagues before, during, and after fieldwork through radical forms of collective care (mullings et al. 2016; dombrowski et al. 2018). third, and finally, universities hosting ethnographic researchers must prioritise practical and financial support for training and (professional) debriefing (caretta et al. 2018). this could include developing care curricula for doctoral researchers, updating and mandating regular review of institutional risk assessments to have researchers identify likely emotional stressors and their consequences for mental health, and the development of clearer, judgement-free procedures around if, how, and when researchers (and even their supervisory teams) can pause time in the field on the grounds of safety or well-being. notes 1 exposure of clinical staff to the traumatic experiences of patients, for example, is acknowledged and – to some extent – anticipated through professional training (pearlman & mac ian 1995). likewise, bloor and colleagues (2010) document the specialist preand post-trip intensive security briefings that international humanitarian organisations provide for their staff travelling to high-risk countries. 2 all names used in this paper are pseudonyms. acknowledgements i thank chief editor kirsi pauliina kallio and the six peer reviewers for their extensive and generous comments that have significantly strengthened this article. i also acknowledge the support that colleagues at queen mary university of london have offered as i have come to terms with the experiences discussed in this piece. this research was funded by the economic and social research council (es/go19061/1). 196 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) references ahmed, s. (2004) the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh university press, edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700372 american psychiatric association (2013) diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (fifth edition). american psychiatric publishing, arlington, va. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596 anderson, c. a. (2001) claiming disability in the field of geography: access, recognition, and integration. social & cultural geography 2(1) 87–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360020028294 anderson, k. & smith, s. j. (2001) emotional geographies. transactions of the institute of british geographers 26(1) 7–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00002 beckett, g. (2019) staying with the feeling: trauma, humility, and care in ethnographic fieldwork. anthro{dendum} 22.06.2019 <https://anthrodendum.org/2019/06/22/staying-with-the-feeling-traumahumility-and-care-in-ethnographic-fieldwork/> 23.08.2019. behar, r. (1997) the vulnerable observer. beacon press, boston, ma. belcher, o. & martin, l. (2013) ethnographies of closed doors: conceptualizing openness and closure in us immigration and military institutions. area 45(4) 403–410. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12048 berg, l. (2015) rethinking the phd in an age of neoliberalization. geojournal 80(2) 219–224. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-014-9574-6 berlant, l. (2001) trauma and ineloquence. cultural values 5(1) 41–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367220 berlant, l. (2011) cruel optimism. duke university press, durham, nc. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394716 billo, e. & hiemstra, n. (2013) mediating messiness: expanding ideas of flexibility, reflexivity, and embodiment in fieldwork. gender, place & culture 20(3) 313–328. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2012.674929 bloor, m., fincham, b. & sampson, h. (2010) unprepared for the worst: risks for harm for qualitative researchers. methodological innovations online 5(1) 45–55. https://doi.org/10.4256/mio.2010.0009 browne, k. & nash, c. j. (eds.) (2010) queer methods and methodologies: intersecting queer theories and social science research. ashgate, hampshire. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315603223 calgaro, e. (2015) if you are vulnerable and you know it raise your hand: experiences from working in post-tsunami thailand. emotion, space & society 17 45–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.09.003 caretta, m. a. & jokinen, j. c. (2017) conflating privilege and vulnerability: a reflexive analysis of emotions and positionality in postgraduate fieldwork. the professional geographer 69(2) 275–283. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2016.1252268 caretta, m. a., drozdewski, d., jokinen, j. c. & falconer, e. (2018) ‘who can play this game?’ the lived experiences of doctoral candidates and early career women in the neoliberal university. journal of geography in higher education 42(2) 261–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2018.1434762 clifford, j. & marcus, g. (1986) writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. university of california press, berkeley, ca. coddington, k. (2015) feminist geographies ‘beyond’ gender: de-coupling feminist research and the gendered subject. geography compass 9(4) 214–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12207 coddington, k. (2017) contagious trauma: reframing the spatial mobility of trauma within advocacy work. emotion, space & society 24 66–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.02.002 coddington, k. & micieli-voutsinas, j. (2017) on trauma, geography, and mobility: towards geographies of trauma. emotion, space & society 24 52–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2017.03.005 crankshaw, o. (2008) race, space and the post-fordist spatial order of johannesburg. urban studies 45(8) 1692–1711. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098008091497 davidson, j., bondi, l. & smith m. (2005) emotional geographies. ashgate, hampshire. dekeyser, t. & garrett, b. (2018) ethics ≠ law. area 50(3) 410–417. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12411 delyser, d. & starrs, p. f. (2001) doing fieldwork: editors’ introduction. geographical review 91(1–2) iv–viii. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2001.tb00450.x de nardi, s. (2015) when family and research clash: the role of autobiographical emotion in the production of stories of the italian civil war, 1943–1945. emotion, space & society 17 22–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.005 desai, v. (2017) black and minority ethnic (bme) student and staff in contemporary british geography. area 49(3) 320–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12372 dombrowski, k., watkins, a. f., fitt, h., frater, j., banwell, k., mackenzie, k., mutambo, l., hawke, k., persendt, f., turković, j., ko, s. y. & hart, d. (2018) journeying from ‘i’ to ‘we’: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars. journal of geography in higher education 42(1) 80–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2017.1335295 197fennia 197(2) (2019) stephen taylor dominey-howes, d. (2015) seeing ‘the dark passenger’ – reflections on the emotional trauma of conducting post-disaster research. emotion, space & society 17 55–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.008 drozdzewski, d. (2015) retrospective reflexivity: the residual and subliminal repercussions of researching war. emotion, space & society 17 30–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.03.004 drozdzewski, d. & dominey-howes, d. (2015) research and trauma understanding the impact of traumatic content and places on the researcher. emotion, space & society 17 17–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.09.001 england, k. (1994) getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research. professional geographer 46(1) 80–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1994.00080.x eriksen, c. (2017) research ethics, trauma and self-care: reflections on disaster geographies. australian geographer 48(2) 273–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049182.2016.1230001 eriksen, c. & ditrich, t. (2015) the relevance of mindfulness practice for trauma-exposed disaster researchers. emotion, space & society 17 63–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.07.004 evans, m. (2012) feeling my way: emotions and empathy in geographic research with fathers in valparaiso, chile. area 44(4) 503–509. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01104.x fabian, j. (2000) out of our minds: reason and madness in the exploration of central africa. university of california press, berkeley, ca. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520221222.001.0001 fraser, a. (2012) the ‘throwntogetherness’ of research: reflections on conducting research in south africa. singapore journal of tropical geography 33(3) 291–295. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12005_3 friedman, m. (2013) finalizing ptsd in dsm-5: getting here from there and where to go next. journal of traumatic stress 26(5) 548–556. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.21840 hammett, d. & hoogendoorn, g. (2012) reflections on the politics and practices of knowledge production beyond the anglo-american core: an introductory note. singapore journal of tropical geography 33(3) 283–286. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12005 harrowell, e., davies, t. & disney, t. (2018) making space for failure in geographic research. the professional geographer 70(2) 230–238. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2017.1347799 hart, g. (2006) denaturalizing dispossession: critical ethnography in the age of resurgent imperialism. antipode 38(5) 975–1001. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2006.00489.x hawthorne, c. & heitz, k. (2018) a seat at the table? reflections on black geographies and the limits of dialogue. dialogues in human geography 8(2) 148–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820618780578 hearn, j. (1998) the violences of men: how men talk about and how agencies respond to men’s violence to women. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446279069 houghton, j. & bass, o. (2012) routes through the academy: critical reflections on the experiences of young geographers in south africa. singapore journal of tropical geography 33(3) 308–313. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12005_7 hume, m. (2007) unpicking the threads: emotion as central to the theory and practice of researching violence. women’s studies international forum 30(2) 147–157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2007.01.002 irvine, h. & gaffikin, m. (2006) getting in, getting on and getting out: reflections on a qualitative research project. accounting, auditing & accountability journal 19(1) 115–145. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513570610651920 jazeel, t. (2016) between area and discipline: progress, knowledge production and the geographies of geography. progress in human geography 40(5) 649–667. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132515609713 jeffrey, c. (2012) comparing across contexts. annals of the association of american geographers 102(2) 505-507. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.650540 jokinen, j. c. & caretta, m. a. (2016) when bodies do not fit: an analysis of postgraduate fieldwork. gender, place & culture 23(12) 1665–1676. https://doi.org/10.1080.0966369x.2016.1249343 katz, c. (1994) playing the field: questions of fieldwork in geography. professional geographer 46(1) 67–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-0124.1994.00067.x kedley, k. e. (2019) el gringuito, mr. kate: transnational ethnographic fieldwork as a gender-nonconforming queer. journal of lesbian studies [online oct 21 2019] https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2019.1675396 kitchin, r. (1998) ‘out of place’, ‘knowing one’s place’: space, power and the exclusion of disabled people. disability & society 13(3) 343–356. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599826678 klocker, n. (2015) participatory action research: the distress of (not) making a difference. emotion, space & society 17 37–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.06.006 le marcis, f. (2004) the suffering body of the city. public culture 16(3) 453–477. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-453 198 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) lee-treweek, g. (2000) the insight of emotional danger: research experiences in a home for older people. in lee-treweek, g. & linkogle, s. (eds.) danger in the field: ethics and risk in social research, 114–131. routledge, london. lerias, d. & byrne, m. k. (2003) vicarious traumatization: symptoms and predictors. stress & health 19(3) 129–138. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.969 loyle, c. e. & simoni, a. (2017) researching under fire: political science and researcher trauma. ps: political science & politics 50(1) 141–145. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1049096516002328 lund, r. (2012) researching crisis – recognizing the unsettling experiences of emotions. emotion, space & society 5(2) 94–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.09.003 malam, l. (2004) embodiment and sexuality in cross-cultural research. australian geographer 35(2) 177–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/0004918042000249485 mandel, j. (2003) negotiating expectations in the field: gatekeepers, researcher fatigue and cultural biases. singapore journal of tropical geography 24(2) 198–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9493.00152 markowitz, a. (2019) the better to break and bleed with: research, violence, and trauma. geopolitics [online may 9 2019] https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1612880 mcgarrol, s. (2017) the emotional challenges of conducting in-depth research into significant health issues in health geography: reflections on emotional labour, fieldwork and life course. area 49(4) 436–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12347 mehta, a. & bondi, l. (1999) embodied discourse: on gender and fear of violence. gender, place & culture 6(1) 67–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.07.002 meth, p. (2009) marginalised men’s emotions: politics and place. geoforum 40(5) 853–863. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.07.002 mountz, a., bonds, a., mansfield, b., loyd, j., hyndman, j., walton-roberts, m., basu, r., whitson, r., hawkins, r., hamilton, t. & curran, w. (2015) for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 14 1235–1259. <https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058> mullings, b., peake, l. & parizeau, k. (2016) cultivating an ethic of wellness in geography. the canadian geographer / le géographe canadien 60(2) 161-167. https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12275 nordstrom, c. & robben, a. (1995) fieldwork under fire: contemporary studies of violence and survival. university of california press, berkeley, ca. parr, h. (2001) feeling, reading and making bodies in space. geographical review 91(1–2) 158–167. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2001.tb00469.x pearlman, l. & mac ian, p. (1995) vicarious traumatization: an empirical study of the effects of trauma work on trauma therapists. professional psychology: research and practice 26(6) 558–565. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.26.6.558 petryna, a. (2009) when experiments travel: clinical trials and the global search for human subjects. princeton university press, princeton, nj. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830824 pile, s. (2010) emotions and affect in recent human geography. transactions of the institute of british geographers 35(1) 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00368.x pollard, a. (2009) field of screams: difficulty and ethnographic fieldwork. anthropology matters 11(2) <https://anthropologymatters.com/index.php/anth_matters/article/view/10/20>. pratt, g. (2008) international accompaniment and witnessing state violence in the philippines. antipode 40(5) 751–779. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2008.00636.x punch, s. (2012) hidden struggles of fieldwork: exploring the role and use of field diaries. emotion, space and society 5(2) 86–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.09.005 ratnam, c. (2019) listening to difficult stories: listening as a research methodology. emotion, space & society 31 18–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2019.03.003 rose, g. (1997) situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. progress in human geography 21(3) 305–320. https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297673302122 ross, k. (2015) ‘no sir, she was not a fool in the field’: gendered risks and sexual violence in immersed cross-cultural fieldwork. the professional geographer 67(2) 180–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2014.907705 shah, s. (2007) the body hunters: how the drug industry tests its products on the world’s poorest patients. the new press, new york, ny. sharp, j. (2005) geography and gender: feminist methodologies in collaboration and in the field. progress in human geography 29(3) 304–309. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph550pr sharp, j. & dowler, l. (2011) framing the field. in del casino jr, v., thomas, m., cloke, p. & panelli, r. (eds.) a companion to social geography, 146–160. wile-blackwell, chichester, uk. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444395211.ch9 sontag, s. (2003) regarding the pain of others. farrar, strauss and giroux, new york, ny. https://doi.org/10.3917/dio.201.0127 199fennia 197(2) (2019) stephen taylor south african police service (2012) serious crime in khayelitsha and surrounding areas. saps, pretoria. sundberg, j. (2005) looking for the critical geographer, or why bodies and geographies matter to the emergence of critical geographies of latin america. geoforum 36(1) 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.03.006 theidon, k. (2014) ‘how was your trip?’ self-care for researchers working and writing on violence. social science research council: dsd working papers on research security <http://webarchive.ssrc.org/ working-papers/dsd_researchsecurity_02_theidon.pdf> turner, s. (2013) red stamps and green tea: fieldwork negotiations and dilemmas in the sinovietnamese borderlands. area 45(4) 396–402. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12017 warden, t. (2013) feet of clay: confronting emotional challenges in ethnographic experience. journal of organizational ethnography 2(2) 150–172. https://doi.org/10.1108/joe-09-2012-0037 webster, n. a. & caretta, m. a. (2019) early-career women in geography: practical pathways to advancement in the neoliberal university. geografiska annaler: series b, human geography 101(1) 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2019.1571868 widdowfield, r. (2000) the place of emotions in academic research. area 32(2) 199-208. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2000.tb00130.x woon, c. y. (2013) for ‘emotional fieldwork’ in critical geopolitical research on violence and terrorism. political geography 33 31–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.11.007 zhao, y. (2017) doing fieldwork the chinese way: a returning researcher's insider/outsider status in her home town. area 49(2) 185–101. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12314 "doing belonging": young former refugees and their active engagement with norwegian local communities urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa83695 doi: 10.11143/fennia.83695 "doing belonging": young former refugees and their active engagement with norwegian local communities1 tina mathisen & sofia cele mathisen, t. & cele, s. (2020) "doing belonging": young former refugees and their active engagement with norwegian local communities. fennia 198(1–2) 39–56. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.83695 this article explores the everyday lives of young former refugees in small norwegian towns and considers how a focus on "doing belonging" can help us understand the processes of place attachment and social inclusion/exclusion in a time of increasing diversity and social division. by looking at these youths' everyday activities and social networks using a range of participatory methods, this article describes how former refugee youths actively work to create and maintain a sense of belonging. the study shows that the youths simultaneously draw on shared knowledge from their social networks and on embodied knowledge gained through the habitual use of place to perform belonging. it is argued that embodiment, as in being a particular type of body interacting with people and place, matters; other crucial aspects are freedom to move and experience the materiality of place, and that former refugees' belonging needs to be understood as relating to other people’s understandings of their right to belong. the study shows that particular structural conditions for doing belonging should be considered by policy makers. keywords: refugee youth; belonging; place attachment; embodied politics; activity diaries; auto-photography tina mathisen and sofia cele, department of social and economic geography, uppsala university, box 513, 751 20 uppsala, sweden. e-mail: tina.mathisen@ kultgeog.uu.se, sofia.cele@kultgeog.uu.se introduction how children and young people create a sense of belonging and attachment to place has been studied in various geographical contexts (cele 2006; cuervo & wyn 2017; kuller & farley 2019). simultaneously, there has been interest in the concepts of ‘placelessness’, and ‘displacement’ in a more ‘fragmented world’ (casey 1993), particularly as concerns forced migration (boyden & hart 2007; ní laoire et al. 2010; archambault 2011). the wellbeing of former refugee youths has been shown to be strongly influenced by their perceived sense of belonging and their experiences of inclusion in or exclusion from the local community (correa-velez et al. 2010; chen & schweitzer 2019). here, we focus on young former refugees’ (aged 13–18 years) lived experiences of settling in a new home place and how they negotiate and perform belonging2. the paper draws on a qualitative © 2020 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. 40 research paper fieldwork together with 40 youth growing up in norwegian small towns, paying particular attention to those who have lived in norway less than five years. studies of migrant youth have largely focused on metropolitan areas and multicultural neighbourhoods. although there has been a growing interest in migration to rural areas in scandinavia (hedberg & do carmo 2012; stenbacka 2013; søholt et al. 2018), the focus on migrant children and youths’ experiences of belonging in rural areas has been sparse with some exceptions (wernesjö 2015; rye 2016). this lack of knowledge affects how former refugee youths are understood, which, in turn, has consequences for the political and social structures enabling them to participate in their local communities. the paper examines how the participants create a sense of belonging to social and material aspects of place through their everyday practices. a specific focus on everyday life practices, on where and how youths actually spend their time, and on the shape and meaning of their social networks, reveals the constant and embodied work that the youths’ put into creating and maintaining a sense of belonging, and what structural constraints they might face. we realize that attention to children’s places is necessarily multi-faceted (gardner & mand 2012), and explore belonging by focusing on how different aspects of place facilitate or hinder their sense of belonging. as expressed by ottosson, eastmond, and cederborg (2016), former refugee youths are deeply involved in creating a place for themselves and in constructing a “normal life” through their everyday practices. viewing youths' place attachment and belonging as multifaceted entails focusing on both social and material aspects of belonging. the social dimension builds on an understanding of belonging as relational and created in negotiations with others. the social dimension is imbued with power, as there are those who claim belonging and those who have the power to grant belonging (antonsich 2010). the materiality of the environment surrounding former refugee youths might also affect their attachment processes, both as a context for social interaction and in itself, for example, through experiences of nature as a therapeutic environment (sampson & gifford 2010). we argue that understanding how former refugee youths “do” belonging can provide key information about what is important for them in the settlement process. youth, place attachment, and belonging the concept belonging has many meanings depending on the purpose of its use. we understand belonging both as a personal, emotional attachment to people and places (antonsich 2010; yuval-davis 2011), and as a social matter related to discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion (yuval-davis 2011). likewise, belonging has been associated with feeling safe in that one feels accepted as part of the local community and shares its social networks and practices (anthias 2008; yuval-davis 2011). the doing of belonging that we refer to draws on the notion of performativity developed by butler (1990) vis-à-vis the performativity of gender. gender is described as the stylized repetition of acts of gender that create the idea of gender (butler 1990, 140). butler developed her theory as an argument against essentialist notions of identity, claiming that it is our actions and not our biological bodies that constitute gender. just as gender can be performed, belonging – we believe – is something that can be detached from ideas of territorial rootedness, instead building on the performativity of place norms (savage et al. 2005), which are continually changing and, following butler, can be subverted. connecting butler’s theory of performativity to belonging, bell (1999) argued that belonging can be viewed as the everyday performance of ordinary practices and a replication of such performances. hence, by doing ordinary activities like playground football or walking to and from school, place knowledge can be created that contributes to a sense of belonging. drawing on massey's understanding of place as "constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time", including relations to other places, places can be described both as ‘distinct places’ and as porous and meaning different things to different people (massey 1995, 188). however, knowing, repeating, and performing place norms call for time and negotiation. as de certau (1984) pointed out, belonging is a sense that stems from how everyday activities are performed over time. he means that people make sense of space through everyday practices fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 41fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tina mathisen & sofia cele and that repeating these practices can be a means to overcome alienation. seamon (1980) understands place attachment as produced through people’s habitual everyday movements, which he calls time–space routines, that, when they overlap, gives an impression of how place is performed in everyday life (cresswell 2004, 35). research has shown that children’s and youth’s sense of belonging to place is gained through everyday place encounters that generate embodied knowledge (cele 2006; bourke 2017). during childhood, the social and material aspects of place are particularly integrated (christensen 2003), embedded in physical and political ecologies (gardner & mand 2012, 970). by performing and doing belonging through everyday practices, youth produce and reproduce place norms and are involved in place making (cuervo & wyn 2017). for former refugee youth, being able to create meaningful social relations and being recognized and valued by the local community are crucial for a sense of belonging (correa-velez et al. 2010). the materiality of place has been identified as important for recreational purposes and for feelings of wellbeing and safety (sampson & gifford 2010). chen and schweitzer (2019), for example, found that belonging was closely tied to social bonds manifested through kinship and friendship, and to sharing positive experiences as well as norms and interests. social bonds were often represented through physical space and materials. studies have however shown that experiences of racial discrimination and exclusion from public space are frequently reported, contributing to a sense of non-belonging (caxaj & berman 2010; correa-velez et al. 2010). youth, place, and the political youths’ everyday lives and the process of creating belonging is affected by various structural and mundane politics. children’s lives are highly institutionalized, and as gardner and mand (2012, 972– 973) have pointed out, as youths physically move into different locations, such as school or afterschool activities, they are placed in different relationships relative to one another and to wider society. as the young former refugees expand their social worlds, their claims to belonging might become a question of negotiation in relation to intersectional subject positions such as, gender, ethnicity, race, and class (yuval-davis 2011). youths life worlds, spatial patterns, and social spaces are interwoven with political discourses and behaviours through which they learn that there is a politics of injustice in society (kallio & häkli 2011; cele & van der burgt 2015). in a study of somali refugees in denmark, valentine, sporton and nielsen (2009), found that the youths, did not feel that they belonged in denmark even though they had adopted “danish norms” in terms of language and clothing. faced with a narrow definition of danishness that was strongly connected to secularism and whiteness, the former refugee youths were constantly constructed as strangers, making it difficult for them to “find their place” in society. although youth have little official control over their placement, they are generally very active in participating in different forms and levels of compliance, resistance, and subversion (gardner & mand 2012, 972). in youth culture, protest as well as belonging is often communicated through various styles of clothing and music (back 1996; vestel 2004; cele & van der burgt 2015), which are consumed, also outside of metropolitan areas, through the global consumer market and social media. this notion is important, as massey (1998) has claimed that all youth cultures, not only those of diaspora youths, are hybrids, because they involve active importation and adaptation. still, it is not a neutral matter what cultural influences become predominant. how nations are positioned relative to one another regarding global dimensions of power affects the ascriptions and racialization of actors based on their country of origin (anthias 2012, 103). migration to rural areas in norway norway has experienced growing ethnic diversity through immigration since the 1960s. today 14 % of the norwegian population is of migrant background and 3 % of norwegian citizens have migrant parents. today, migrants are settled in all norwegian municipalities, although most live in urban areas (imdi 2018). 42 research paper people of refugee background make up 4 % of the total norwegian population and 30 % of the population of migrant background. the largest groups of refugees come from somalia, iraq, eritrea, syria, and afghanistan (imdi 2018). refugees with permission to stay are settled across the country based on collaboration between the central government and the municipalities. the dispersal policy corresponds with national district policy and is intended to contribute to preserve the regional settlement pattern (søholt et al. 2018, 221). the study was undertaken in four towns each with approximately 5,000–30,000 inhabitants. three of these towns are situated in two counties in eastern norway and one in northern norway. two of the counties are among those that settle the fewest refugees, according to the integration authorities (imdi 2018). in western europe the rural is often represented as “withe space”, and “ethnicity” as something possessed by others who are seen as “out of place” in the rural (holloway 2006; søholt et al. 2018). although this representation is contested and rural areas are being re-shaped by multifaceted immigration (hedberg & do carmo 2012; stenbacka 2013; søholt et al. 2018), such discourses might influence the youths’ experiences of belonging and render them vulnerable to racialization. while the municipalities are obliged to provide adult refugees with a two-year introduction program, no active measures are taken by the government to help children become participating members of their local communities. this has lead researchers to claim that the national settlement plan for refugees is primarily adult centred (archambault 2011). schools are described as the main arena for integration of children and youth. it is the municipalities who independently decide how to arrange the language training of recently arrived students. the schools in this study all handled this differently, depending on their size, resources, and number of minority students. the studied schools in eastern norway reported having approximately 10–15 % minority language-speaking students. in the town of 5,000 inhabitants, only a handful of minority students were enrolled in the school. the school in northern norway reported having approximately 20 % minority language-speaking students. two of the schools offered introduction classes in their ordinary premises, while one school only provided individual lessons in basic norwegian language. in one municipality, all newly settled students were placed in a centralized school together with adult migrants. they were later to start education in an ordinary school when they had reached a basic level of language proficiency. besides education, the national sports organization (norges idrettsforbund) is viewed as the main driver of youth integration, and participation in sports clubs and other after-school activities is described as central to building social capital and community participation (kulturdepartementet 2012). researchers have criticized this (rafoss & tangen 2017), noting the increasing class differences, costs, and demands for parental involvement in sports (strandbu et al. 2017). our research indicate that organized activities are indeed important for finding ways to connect these youths with other youths’ and society. however, we argue that to understand former refugee youths’ experiences of place attachment and belonging, it is necessary to gain knowledge of how they participate independently in their local environments also outside mainstream institutions. likewise, it is important to listen to what the youths themselves say about these processes, and to recognize their efforts to belong, and not only what they have not yet achieved. methods the study employs a qualitative approach using interviews, observations, auto-photography, and activity diaries. punch (2012) has advocated using a multi-methods approach with former refugee children, as this makes it possible to take account of the different places of the children’s everyday lives. further benefits are that the participants are given various choices in how to express themselves, to overcome language barriers, and that ethical questions can be addressed more dynamically (block et al. 2012). the youths and their parents were given written and oral information about the project, and the youths were given information about consent, voluntary participation, and confidentiality at several stages of the project. the names of the participants and towns have been changed to pseudonyms to ensure their confidentiality. the study has been approved by uppsala university’s ethics committee.3 fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 43fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tina mathisen & sofia cele the material was collected during autumn 2012, spring 2014, and winter/spring 2015 by one author.4 all except four participants were recruited through the five schools where participant observations were conducted. in total, 40 youths participated in the project (26 girls and 14 boys): 30 were interviewed, 30 completed activity diaries, and 10 contributed by taking photos. most participants were between 13 and 16 years old, while two were 17 and 18 years old. the participants have backgrounds from 13 countries, but the majority were from somalia, afghanistan, eritrea, and ethiopia. the youths have in common that they all have a residency permit and are settled in a municipality together with their families. the activity diaries provided a tool to map the participants’ use of space, activities, and social networks. a strength of activity diaries is that they provide information about ordinary activities, such as watching a movie or hanging out, which are seldom asked about in other methods, and thus provides insights into where and how the participants actually spend their time (van der burgt 2006). we used the activity diaries of 26 participants, that is, 17 girls and 9 boys. we divided the participants into two groups: those who had lived in norway for 0–2 years (17 participants) and those who had lived in norway for 3–5 years (9 participants). the first two years is the settlement phase, when most participants are attending separate language training classes in school. the participants in the 3–5year category were attending ordinary classes and had established a life in norway; at the same time, they often remembered the process of becoming acquainted with a new place. the participants were also grouped according to place of residence. these were coded according to respective counties, here called nordby (nine participants), fjellby (nine participants), and vikby (eight participants). in nordby, all the participants came from the same school and lived near one another. in fjellby, the participants went to a centralized school exclusively for students of migrant background located in the outskirts of the town centre. in vikby, they came either from a mid sized town where they went to a preparatory class, or from a small town where they attended a regular class. one participant came from the rural area outside the mid sized town. the participants were given a booklet in a4 format and were asked to record what they did from the time they finished school until they fell asleep in the evenings. they also recorded where and with whom the activities took place. the diaries were completed over a one-week period. the booklet included a social network map in which the participants mapped their family relations, closest friends, friends from school and after-school activities, and friends from other places in their migration history. talking about the social network maps with the participants facilitated analysis of the activity diaries. the participants were given time during school hours to fill in the diary. in total 879 activities were counted. the participants registered approximately 105 different types of activities grouped into 22 main categories. the frequency of activities registered varied from 6 to 67 during the studied week. how many activities the participants actually registered varied greatly depending both on the actual number of activities undertaken and on the participants’ commitment to filling in the diary, but all diaries contained useful information. the diaries are presented in tables, however, they should not be read as a statistical measurement, but rather as a qualitative overview, that provides information about the youth’s everyday lives. the descriptive presentation of the diaries will be “thickened” by the following analysis of interviews and observations. 30 interviews were conducted and all except 4 took place in the schools. one participant was interviewed in the local library and three were interviewed in their family homes. most of the interviews were conducted individually in norwegian, but in some cases, because of language issues and for comfort, participants were interviewed together. during the interviews, the participants were asked about their new homes and to describe the town, their school experience, what they liked to do with family and friends, how they felt about the town in relation to other places they had lived earlier, transnational contact with family and friends, and experiences of belonging and non-belonging. participant observation was carried out in the schools, during class and during recess, to understand how the youths interacted socially and used the school’s spaces, and to understand aspects that were difficult to verbalize in interview. informal conversations were held with students and teachers. in addition, observations were conducted in town centres, sometimes with students and teachers during school hours, but also after school, when the researcher met with participants. walking was part of the observations: some walks were formally planned as walking interviews, but in the north, the researcher 44 research paper stayed in the same neighbourhood as some of the participants, and it became a routine to walk to and from school together. lee and ingold (2006, 68) argued that walking can provide an insight into people’s social engagement between the self and the environment they experience while walking. in this case, the walks fostered understanding of the research participants’ embodied relations to place, in terms of both the material, concrete use of place and abstract memories of other places (cele 2006). participants in the north also invited the researcher to handball practice and dance class. in addition, the researcher visited ten participants in their family homes and met with parents and siblings, who contributed valuable information about the settlement process, the local community, and transnational family life. ten youths participated by using auto-photography to present places where they spent a lot of time and/or places that meant something special to them. the photos also included images of people and material items. by using auto-photography, participants could document their daily lives without the presence of the researcher. the participants produced a total of 86 images. a photo elicitation interview was either part of the in-depth interview or was conducted independently, focusing only on the images. photo elicitation interviews are particularly suitable for exploring everyday taken-forgranted things (rose 2012) and visual methods are helpful in overcoming language barriers when working with newly arrived youths (boyden & ennew 1997). the analysis was conducted in two steps: one was based on the individuals’ self-narratives about the photos, and the other was a content analysis in which the photos were divided, based on their content, into four categories: everyday places, social relations, nature, and identity markers. this was done to gain a visual understanding of the youths’ activities and movements, and of what places and relations were important to them during the settlement process. local embeddedness: mapping everyday routines we will now focus more specifically on how belonging was created through place-based activities and social relations. as we will show, it was through how the mundane activities of everyday life were performed that belonging was created, through a process structured by time, gender, and socio–economic differences. home-based activities and family relations the results from the activity diaries indicate that much of the youths’ free time was spent at home (bakken 2017; nordbakke 2019). table 1 shows the overview of the counted activities by gender and years spent in norway,5 and table 2 shows the locations of the activities. in general, the newly settled (0–2 years) youths spent more time at home in activities with their families while the youths in the 3–5-year category spent considerably more time hanging out or visiting friends. the youths in the 0–2-year category for example reported watching tv at home with family members twice as often as did the youths in the 3–5-year category. a lot of time was spent on homework, which the youths usually did at home with their siblings. the girls reported doing schoolwork twice as often as did the boys. the same goes for household chores, which the girls reported doing more than twice as often as did the boys. the family was seen as the primary source of support and comfort during the settlement phase (see also chen & schweitzer 2019). many, especially those who had come through family reunification, said that they had gotten to know the local environment through parents or siblings who had lived in the area longer. the youths in the 3–5-year category to a larger degree seemed to have adapted to local youth activities as they spent more time in activities outside the family realm. also, the amount of housework decreased among the youths in this category. this can be seen as indicating that parental demands and restrictions might have eased over time (friberg & bjørnset 2019), but nevertheless after a relatively short time in norway. the studied youths followed a general pattern in socializing with friends via online games and social media (bakken 2017), as 20 of 26 participants reported doing this. almost all participants used social media to communicate with friends and family, not only in the norwegian local communities, but also in their former home places (see mathisen & stenbacka 2015). fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 45fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tina mathisen & sofia cele activity overall boys girls 0–2 years 3–5 years n % n % n % n % n % eating meals 181 20.6 39 15.2 142 22.8 117 21.5 64 19.0 tv/movie viewing 99 11.3 24 9.3 75 12.1 77 14.2 22 6.5 studies 84 9.6 15 5.8 69 11.1 54 9.9 30 8.9 household chores 72 8.2 10 3.9 62 10.0 53 9.8 19 5.7 gaming 58 6.6 29 11.3 29 4.7 40 7.4 18 5.4 communication/social media 53 6.0 11 4.3 42 6.8 37 6.8 16 4.8 transport 50 5.7 16 6.2 34 5.5 22 4.1 28 8.3 hanging out 45 5.1 17 6.6 28 4.5 17 3.1 28 8.3 sports 45 5.1 26 10.1 19 3.1 26 4.8 19 5.7 reading, music/radio 34 3.9 10 3.9 24 3.9 20 3.7 14 4.2 exercising 33 3.8 15 5.8 18 2.9 21 3.9 12 3.6 visiting friends/family 28 3.2 7 2.7 21 3.4 6 1.1 22 6.5 family activities 26 3.0 10 3.9 16 2.6 23 4.2 3 0.9 cultural activities 16 1.8 2 0.8 14 2.3 3 0.6 13 3.9 surfing/youtube 13 1.5 6 2.3 7 1.1 4 0.7 9 2.7 shopping with family 11 1.3 3 1.2 8 1.3 8 1.5 3 0.9 health (going to the doctor) 7 0.8 3 1.1 4 0.6 6 1.1 1 0.3 board games 6 0.7 6 2.3 0 0.0 0 0.0 6 1.8 working 6 0.7 6 2.3 0 0.0 0 0.0 6 1.8 cafe/restaurant/cinema 4 0.5 0 0 4 0.6 2 0.4 2 0.6 other studies 4 0.5 1 0.4 3 0.5 3 0.6 1 0.3 travelling 4 0.5 1 0.4 3 0.5 4 0.7 0 0.0 total 879 100.0 257 100.0 622 100.0 543 100.0 336 100.0 table 1. the amount of activities by gender and years spent in norway. location n % home 609 69.3 sports arena 55 6.3 stores 50 5.7 local area transport 44 5.0 neighbourhood 27 3.1 friends' or family's home 25 2.8 city/town centre 14 1.6 playground 9 1.0 youth centre 8 0.9 library 8 0.9 place of worship 7 0.8 other cities 7 0.8 bus station/stop 5 0.6 health centre 4 0.5 undefined 2 0.2 school playground 2 0.2 in the mountains 2 0.2 fast food restaurant 1 0.1 total 879 100.0 table 2. the amount of activities by location. 46 research paper the youths usually met with friends outside the home, though nine youths reported spending time with friends either in their own or at their friends’ homes. why most preferred to meet elsewhere can be seen in relation to young people’s wish to avoid parental control, but overcrowding also played a role. as articulated in interviews, it was easier to play out "youthfulness", that is, being loud and outgoing with friends, outside the home, and several said that there was nothing to do at home. organized activities and informal meeting places from the activity diaries, we can see that 12 of 26 youths were engaged in organized activities, such as sports and cultural activities. 7 of 17 girls and 5 of 9 boys were engaged in such organized activities. while the girls were more varied in their activities, the boys all played football. however, if we include unorganized outdoor activities and exercise, the picture changes. then, 12 of 17 girls and 8 of 9 boys reported doing activities in their local environments. this could be taking walks in the neighbourhood or in the mountains with their families, and bicycling or jogging. in addition, five participants registered exercising at a local gym. seven participants (three girls and four boys) reported playing unorganized football with their friends, in either playgrounds or outdoor football arenas. in the interviews, playgrounds and football fields were described as places where the youths could go to find others to hang out with in a more casual way. in contrast to organized activities, which are often structured along age and gender lines, unorganized playground football offered opportunities to meet youths of different ages and of both sexes. for some of the girls, joining an organized girls’ team seemed like too much of a challenge, as the perceived level of skill served as a threshold for entry. at the playground, the point was just to hang out and play around without the element of competition. nevertheless, even participating in unorganized activities entailed challenges to be overcome, which can be illustrated by sobia’s photo, shown in figure 1. sobia attended a preparatory class and often played football in the field during school hours, but never during after-school hours when she mostly spent time at home with her family. she explained that this was what she had always been used to, underscoring the effort it takes to create new routines in a new place with differing norms and expectations of (gendered) youth behaviour. sobia had taken the photo from the school window, illustrating both distance from and longing to enter the football field. fig. 1. football field outside the classroom window (source: sobia, age 14 years). fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 47fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tina mathisen & sofia cele football fields were recurrent objects in the youths’ photos, particularly those taken by the boys, and they would explain how much of their time they spent playing football, both organized and informally while hanging out with friends. the norwegian national survey ungdata has identified a decrease in time spent hanging out because of youths’ increasingly organized everyday routines (bakken 2017). in this study, hanging out was found to be a frequent activity, as 20 of 26 participants reported hanging out at least once a week. in particular, the youths in the 3–5-year category would hang out outside stores, in the town centre, at bus stations, in the library, or outside mcdonalds, while the youths in the 0–2-year category would hang out in the library or the town centre either alone or with friends of refugee background. that the youths reported hanging out frequently might be connected to socio–economic factors, as organized activities required capital that these youths often lacked. school placement and place characteristics we can see that the type and level of activity as well as the density of the participants’ social networks depended on the time spent in norway and on where they lived. for most, the network of friends consisted of youths of migrant background, although some also had majority norwegians as friends. in the 0–2-year category however, 7 of 17 did not report doing any activities with friends. in both vikby and fjellby, the towns had centralized preparatory schools for newly settled students, which meant that the students lived in different areas of the towns and the surrounding villages. in fjellby, some of the newly settled students played football together in the evenings, but others said it was too far to take the bus to and from the town. in the town in vikby, none of the youths in the 0–2year category reported participating in organized activities, undertaking any informal sports activities, or hanging out with friends in the evening. as has been reported in other studies of former refugee youths, making friends with majority youth is challenging when attending preparatory classes because of the physical separation and lack of natural meeting points (wernesjö 2015). particularly for those who lived outside of town, the travelling distance made it difficult to cultivate social ties in school that reinforced social networks where they lived. although living and attending school in different places can increase one’s overall knowledge of place and sense of belonging, here it seemed to weaken the possibilities to create ties in the local neighbourhood. in nordby the situation was different, as all of the participants in the 0–2-year category reported doing activities with friends. even though the school in nordby also had a preparatory class, there was only one junior high school and the participants lived within walking distance of the school and other facilities in town. nordby has been settling a large number of refugees over the past decade, and local civil society is engaged in initiating social activities for families of refugee background. there were activities such as handball and hip-hop class that were free of charge and intended for girls.6 these initiatives were successful, seeing that even girls who had been living in nordby for only a few months were involved in the activities. this was also due to the fact that girls of refugee background who had lived in the town for a longer time period, functioned as social brokers for the newly settled and introduced them to these activities. however, the initiatives risked constructing divisions between minority and majority girls as well as between minority girls. the classes were advertised as for "immigrant girls", and some girls did not want to define themselves as such, even though they might have wanted to dance hip-hop. “doing belonging”: narratives of place attachment the analysis of the activity diaries illustrates how the participants were active in doing belonging and finding means of connecting themselves to place and its subjects and practices. how this was done varied between the participants, and their intersecting subject positions were important in relation to both place and time. in the following, we will discuss more specifically the youths’ narratives regarding the social and material aspects of place attachment. 48 research paper the social aspects of place attachment the youths described their neighbourhoods as safe and calm. for many, living in these towns was their first experience of being in a safe place. during the settlement process, a sense of safety was connected to learning the language, finding friends, and finding one’s way in the local area. for rhoda and fana, two sisters from ethiopia who had lived in norway for six months, moving from the big city of addis ababa to a small village in norway had meant a sense of freedom, as their family was threatened in ethiopia because of their father’s political activities. fana described her exhilarating experience of freedom to move around and to express herself without fear: "when i lived in a big city, i couldn’t go out, i couldn’t speak my language or say my real name. [here] it is so nice. if i want to run i run, if i want to speak i speak … it’s just wonderful". the experience of being in a safe place enables the youths to start planning for a future and establish everyday routines (see sampson & gifford 2010). now, both sisters are eager to learn new activities such as football and basketball, and are currently learning how to ride bikes. however, as they attend a preparatory school in another town, they do not know any youths in their village and it is difficult to meet friends from class. while many girls had experiences similar to that of rhoda and fana regarding their newfound ability to move around freely on their own, the boys instead described a lack of opportunities to hang out on the street with friends as they used to do. the brothers feysal and geedi, who had come from kenya nine months earlier, explained that the difference between nairobi and their new hometown was palpable. they found the small town quiet and homogeneous compared with nairobi. in kenya, they used to spend their after-school hours outdoors hanging out with friends and playing football whenever they wanted, while in norway ”we just go to school, stay at home, and go to football practice”. the organized and institutionalized life young people lead in norway was a change for them, and even though they attended ordinary school and played football on the local team, it was challenging to make friends. as there were few former refugee youths in the town, no structural support was provided. geedi and feysal have been left to themselves to negotiate their belonging according to the dominant group’s language, culture, and values (yuval-davis 2011). as lidén (2016) has highlighted, even though policy emphasizes football as an arena for integration, there is no automatic transfer of the sense of belonging one can feel on the football field to other arenas outside the field. sports can be seen as exemplifying a cultural activity with global–local interconnections (massey 1991) that make doing belonging possible without a rootedness to place. simon, who had lived in norway for two years, described playing football just as he did in addis ababa: "i don’t do things differently here than in addis. … after school i have football practice almost every day. i practice five or six days a week". the difference, he pointed out, is that in norway activities are often expensive: "norway is … when you want to go for a swim, right, in addis ababa there are places for swimming, right, but here you have to pay – it’s expensive you know. we cannot pay money, because we don’t have any". as cele and van der burgt (2015) have discussed, children and youth are aware of social and economic differences in society, and sennett (2012) pointed out how such socio–economic differences are quickly absorbed into children’s sense of self. even if the youths can recognize local youth norms, it can be questioned whether they have the economic ability to adapt to them. what we can see is that making connections demands more than simply finding arenas in which to meet other youths. even when the participants did so, they could find it challenging to make meaningful social connections. yasmeen, for example, who had lived in norway for about four years, invested a lot of time in becoming involved in local social life. she regularly visited the youth centre where she studied guitar and took photography lessons without charge. in addition, she joined a badminton club where she played twice a week. however, although yasmeen was actively engaged in many activities in a broad range of areas, she still spoke of missing close friends. in the area where she lived, there were few other youths of migrant background and she had trouble getting to know non-migrant youths in her school, relating this to experiences of racialization and exclusion. what is important to underscore is that attaching oneself to a place is an interactive process that requires recognition by others, who will react by extending an invitation to connect. being recognized by others and recognizing oneself in others not only generates a sense of belonging fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 49fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tina mathisen & sofia cele (ahmed 2000), but has even been described as a prerequisite for the social integration of former refugee youth (eide 2005, 152). feven, who had lived in norway for three years, was not engaged in any organized activities; however, her activity diary was filled with activities with friends in the local community, illustrating her active engagement. her school had about 15 % students of migrant background and feven had a close group of friends with a mix of migrant backgrounds. together they would hang out at the football stadium, go to mcdonalds, hang out at the town mall, and go to the gym to exercise. in the evening, she would chat via social media. being athletic and going to the gym was described as particularly important among the girls at feven’s school, as was the style of clothing, through which identity and group belonging are expressed. being able to perform belonging demanded investment in youth norms such as being involved in the "right" activities and following fashion trends. belonging could thus be created through the reproduction of behaviour and bodily representations (butler 1990). the girls distanced themselves from the “cool kids” who were into brands, but still followed the popular styles of clothing, such as tight jeans, hoodies, long knitted jackets, and converse shoes. as discussed by rysst (2017, 190), acting and dressing according to majority norms is a pragmatic strategy for performing belonging when one is in a minority and the majority values dominate. some of the girls combined this style with wearing a hijab and long skirts in a hybrid clothing practice through which different styles were mixed and matched, though with the mainstream style as the ideal (massey 1998), thereby distancing themselves from the parental generation by reinventing how to wear “traditional” clothing. in the case of feven and her friends, having a mix of backgrounds and experiences with different cultures made the group a safe space to sport one’s own style, navigating the gendered clothing norms of both their parents and their peers. accordingly, what one wears can signal whether one is newly arrived or has lived in an area long enough to know the social norms and has the means to follow current trends. several participants described how they were met with more openness and a sense that "we can relate to one another" after adapting to mainstream clothing styles. as articulated by sennett (2012, 8), shared consumption patterns express a neutral, exploratory view of the world, reducing the anxieties that differences can inspire. social minoritization and economic marginalization serve to hinder such confirmation. we can see that the youths strove continuously to create belonging and ties of attachment, and that it was necessary for other youths to facilitate this process. making connections with other youth of migrant background was clearly a key to finding belonging in this case. this has also been identified in earlier research into former refugee children and youth in norway (archambault 2011; brekke 2015). in many cases, adults, such as teachers, helped the newly settled to find after-school activities. however, the findings suggest that when other youths functioned as social brokers, the migrant youths learned social codes faster and more easily found their place. the material aspect of place attachment although social concerns largely occupy the youths’ narratives, materiality is also important, constituting the framework and backdrop for everyday life. the mundane routines of getting to and from various locations and activities are important ways in which belonging is created. the repetition of time–space routines is crucial for creating meaning and a sense of safety in people’s existence (seamon 1980). walking to school, libraries, and sporting activities permits one to learn and identify with various places and subjects. everyday observations and actions provide knowledge of the local, while repetition and routine create connections and familiarity (de certeau 1984). this was apparent when walking with the youths in the local environment. for example, when walking with some of the girls to school, the girls guided the researcher across previously trodden shortcuts, reminding her to watch her step at the same time as talking about homework with one another. farther down the road, they pointed out where the small cinema and the sports hall were located, and said that there had been a football tournament there at the weekend. particularly when walking to and from school, it was common for the students to describe how and where things happened, and who and what were located where. these reflections might seem trivial, but it is their triviality that reveal the girls’ intimate knowledge of the place. walking routines provided the youths with their own subjective experiences 50 research paper of place, which in turn connected them to place in various ways. leaning on a psychoanalytical understanding, identification with place can be perceived as a process of "mirroring" in which one gradually comes to recognize oneself in the environment. the habitual repetition of certain acts in a place can serve to make people recognize themselves in objects that have become familiar to them, consolidating the process of identification with place (leach 2002, 290). gradually getting to know an environment, then, is connected to material aspects of place such as finding one’s way and knowing where one is. yasmeen described how when she first arrived where she now lives, her father took her on walks through the neighbourhood and countryside, so that she would become familiar with the area. as he showed her his favourite places, they also became her favourite places. she described how she enjoyed “the beautiful nature”, and how these walks provided her with “good memories” of her first period in norway. as she had been separated from her father for a long time, the walks they took together became loaded with positive meaning that was transferred to the places visited. the physical environment became transformed from locations into lived places, as they were experienced with emotion. yasmeen also mentioned that her interest in photography made her sensitive to the beauty of nature and to where she could find good spots to take pictures, such as "places perfect for photographing beautiful sunsets". fig. 2. yasmeen’s photo of a sunset at one of her favourite places. in yasmeen’s narrative, and in others, we see examples of aesthetic–affective openness to the environment (rautio 2015). the youths spoke of this in various ways, and the increasingly independent mobility they experienced since coming to norway, noted particularly by the girls, was connected to this openness, as freedom facilitates contemplation. greenness, for example, of trees, is mentioned and connected to positive feelings of safety, beauty, and freedom: it’s like when you are out on your bike and listening to music … and you look around and everything is like a fantasy … there is no one on the street … there's only trees with leaves that are falling down … and little bit of wind … it’s like a fantasy … very pretty. yasmeen described her experience of freedom and being able to move around on her own, and how this feeling merges with her green and pretty surroundings. other studies have likewise found that former refugee youth connect the aesthetics of place to calmness and a healthy, supportive environment, which they see as a key quality supporting their sense of belonging (sampson & gifford 2010). it has also been found that the ability to notice beauty is an important sign of a restored sense of normalcy in everyday life (keyes & kane 2004). fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 51tina mathisen & sofia celefennia 198(1–2) (2020) nila, who was living in northern norway, connected gradually getting to know her new home with both the environment and social relations: nila: [i started to feel at home] about two years ago. it was because i had lived here for a long time, about three years. and i had become familiar with the town. and suddenly i started to like the nature here. tina: what was it that made you like the nature? nila: i don’t know, i just thought it was beautiful here. and then … then i got friends, so i wanted to live here and not move anywhere else. i have fun here. nila connected becoming familiar with the town to suddenly seeing the area’s nature as beautiful, relating this to finding friends at around the same time. earlier in the interview, nila had described how she and her two best friends have a friday ritual in which they, after school, go into town to buy food and then go to one of their homes to make dinner and watch a movie. such a ritual can be described as a performance of friendship and belonging in which the spaces where such friendship rituals are enacted become places of belonging. in addition to mundane everyday habits, such rituals help create positive memories that imbue the environment with meaning, allowing a process of "mirroring" to take place, in which one comes to recognize oneself in one’s environment (leach 2002). experiences of racialization as we have shown so far, the social and material aspects of place are brought together through the everyday habits and routines of the participants, something that allows for a recognition of the self in both the surrounding environment and in other people. however, place is imbued with competing discourses and how the individual sees herself and is perceived by others to fit within these discourses is central for processes of belonging. intersecting power relations form social space (molina 2007), and social imaginations shape how bodies can be in the world (ahmed 2006, 2010). ahmed writes that some spaces extend certain bodies and do not leave room for others. if orientation is about making the strange familiar through the extension of certain bodies into space, then disorientation occurs when that extension fails (ahmed 2006, 11). during a group interview the participants compared experiences of encounters on the street, particularly with elderly people who would stare at them, refuse to smile back or refuse to engage in conversation. james told a story that clearly had stuck with him: it was me and a friend, we were working on our junior enterprise project for school. we were going to ask people to sponsor us. my friend went ahead of me and was talking to an old man, who took out his wallet and was going to give my friend some money, but when he saw me coming, he put his money back … the other participants responded to this story by laughing and commenting that james had a bad sense of timing, confirming that they recognized the experience. what this illustrates is how being visibly different is equated with not belonging to that place. the local man’s active gesture of discomfort and hostility is a clear example of a social encounter where race is made active in the construction of difference. the place james normally feels belonging to, is turned into an exclusionary space where one could say that the process of “mirroring” gets stopped, and james is prohibited from recognizing himself as one who belongs. the participants narrated such experiences of everyday racism and also connected their experiences to larger societal discourses about belonging and race. thus, during our group discussion the participants were asked how they perceived the way immigrants were portrayed in the media. on this question, one of the participants immediately responded by connecting this to the terror attack on the 22 of july 2011, saying that at the time he had been hoping that the perpetrator would not be an immigrant. the other participants agreed explaining that if that would have been the case, it could have lead majority norwegians to think of all immigrants as potential terrorists and that they all would have been frowned upon. 52 research paper james: we saw that when ... that guy, bering breivik, did what he did. the first thing they thought was that they were terrorists. alexandra: they thought about foreigners.7 james: foreigners! alexandra: and then it turned out it wasn’t... james: but i was afraid it would be. i said to myself "oh, please, i hope it’s not a foreigner!" alexandra: i hope it’s not a foreigner because... james: because, if it would have been a foreigner, it would have been… everyone. alexandra: then everyone would have blamed us and looked down on us. tina: are there many negativities about migrants in the news? james: [confirms by nodding his head] tina: how does that make you feel? james: not good. alexandra: i don’t really care. james: but i ... i don’t give a damn, it’s their country, do as you please... i don't care. tina: what do you mean by their country, do you mean norway? james: yes. tina: okay, so they can say what they want, but...? james: i don’t care. they can do what they want. it’s my life. i live [my life]. tina: but, isn’t norway your country too? james: yes. i feel excluded when that happens, you know. throughout this conversation james and alexandra shift between being apprehensive about the terrorist being a foreigner and how this would affect the everyday encounters they would face, with performing the role of "the foreigner" "who does not care" about what "the norwegians" think of them. the conversation reveals how discourses of race and belonging are intertwined and how the participants safeguard against and negotiate these discourses in their everyday lives. belonging is not something that can be taken for granted. rather, an individual’s inner feeling of belonging can at all times be questioned by societal discourses or social encounters through which race becomes the reason as to why you do not belong. conclusions our research illustrates how young former refugees work actively to connect to their local communities in various ways through performing everyday activities, and relating to and creating place norms. it is mainly through everyday routines that they make sense of space and overcome alienation, as de certeau (1984) suggested, and the mundane practices of everyday life contribute to shaping how belonging is created and negotiated. this process is simultaneously habitual as in participating in various local practices (e.g., adopting routines and activities popular in the local context), and reflexive, in that actively relating to a new place and the social practices played out there is an active choice. fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 53fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tina mathisen & sofia cele as has been illustrated, intersecting subject positions such as gender, and socio–economic disadvantages can serve to hinder participation, depending on contextual variations such as time spent in norway and place of residence. the small scale of the towns did not seem to be a hindrance to creating belonging; on the contrary, the closeness to nature and calmness experienced there contributed to a sense of safety and freedom to move around and explore the local surroundings. what seemed important was the presence of other youth of migrant background, both for finding friends and learning social norms, and for what kind of structural support the youths were provided with, both in school and in after-school activities. "doing belonging" was continuous work that the youth performed, doing so on several levels at once in relation to the material and social aspects of place. these aspects are entangled at various scales and through multiple practices in everyday life. the particular ways in which the material and social come together in feelings of place attachment are central to understanding how former refugee youth form bonds of belonging to place. place attachment is an interactive process, and a basic criterion for achieving it is that one is able to interact. regarding the material aspects of belonging, the youths need physical access to places to be able to find their way around their neighbourhoods. regarding the social aspects, the youths need to be given access to social spheres where other youths can confirm them as well as introduce them to the mundane practices and codes central to understanding and performing place. such an introduction, followed by interpreting and performing the socio–spatial routines of a place, is crucial to how the youths do belonging. drawing on these insights, we can conclude that structural constraints affect how belonging is created. these constraints can be where the youths live, what type of school they attend and where, as well as whether they can access various social spheres, such as after-school activities and informal social gatherings. where the youths spend time and the shape and meaning of their social networks reveal the character of these constraints, and these need to be considered politically as they greatly affect how former refugee youths' lives are organized. as ahmed (2000) has pointed out, the youths’ experiences reflect the fact that a migrant body is a body that can feel out of place. it is necessary for others to recognize the youths as being in place, as belonging to where they are, for a genuine sense of belonging to grow. as was illustrated, the youth’s possibilities to "mirror" themselves in their surroundings could suddenly be "stopped" due to encounters with race. the youth’s strategy to counter this was through performing the role of "the foreigner". following butler (1990) one could say that the identity category "foreigner" was then constructed through the youths “doing” of already established discourses of what it means to be a "foreigner", hence disciplining them into specific subject positions. attachment to a place does not necessarily entail close-knit networks with the majority population; rather, the experiences of the studied youths show that a sense of belonging to the local community can be created through mundane everyday practices within the social and material frameworks and delimitations of being a young former refugee in a small town. in this process, we maintain that embodiment, as in being a particular type of body who interacts with people and places, is of particular importance, as is freedom to move and experience the materiality of place. it is a central understanding that belonging is not simply the work of people who seek belonging; rather, it is equally dependent on other people’s understandings of their bodies and their right to belong. notes 1 an earlier version of this article has been published in mathisen (2020). 2 the study uses a broad definition of the refugee status including quota refugees, people being granted refugee status for humanitarian reasons and family reunification with a person who has been granted status as refugee. internationally the term re-settlement is commonly used, particularly when describing the situation for quota refugees who are chosen to be brought from a refugee camp and settled in a new country. here, we use the term ‘settlement phase’ to highlight the time when refugees or other migrants are trying to adjust to a new situation and create new connections to people and place, without focusing on the youth’s particular status. 54 research paper 3 regionala etikprövningsnämden uppsala. 4 the fieldwork was conducted by tina mathisen as part of her phd research. 5 it is important to note that it is the frequency of the activities that is being counted, not the time spent on each activity. 6 these services were provided by a company and based on the idea of social entrepreneurship, catering to municipalities and providing activities for social groups such as elders, disabled, and refugees. the initiative was based on the assumption that female refugees are not physically active and have few opportunities to participate in activities outside the home. 7 before it was announced that the terrorist was a white christian norwegian, a researcher on terrorism suggested that islamic terrorists were behind the 22 july 2011 attacks in oslo and utøya. many muslims in oslo reported having been verbally and physically abused on the streets during the first few days after the attack (andersson 2012). acknowledgements thanks to all the research participants who have generously shared their time, thoughts and knowledge to enable this research project. this research was funded by the faculty of social sciences at uppsala university. thanks also to sederholms nordic travel grant fund and anna maria lundins foundation at småland nation for economically supporting the fieldwork. finally, we would like to thank the three referees, jacob lind, lena opfermann and malte philipp gembus, as well as roger andersson, irene molina and micheline van riemsdijk for their helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. references ahmed, s. (2000) strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. routledge, london. ahmed, s. (2006) queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. duke university press, durham, n.c. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388074 ahmed, s. (2010) vithetens fenomenologi. tidskrift för genusvetenskap 1–2, pp. 48–69. translated to swedish by: amelie bjørck. andersson, m. (2012) the debate about multicultural norway before and after 22 july 2011. identities 19(4) 418–427. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2012.684442 anthias, f. (2008) thinking through the lens of translocational positionality: an intersectionality frame for understanding identity and belonging. translocations: migration and change 4(1) 5–20. anthias, f. (2012) transnational mobilities, migration research and intersectionality. nordic journal of migration research 2(2) 102–110. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10202-011-0032-y antonsich, m. (2010) searching for belonging – an analytical framework. geography compass 4(6) 644–659. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00317.x archambault, j. (2011) refugee children, citizenship and ‘the best interests’ of the child. experiencing settlement as new citizens in norway. norwegian centre for child research, ntnu, trondheim. back, l. (1996) new ethnicities and urban culture. racism and multiculture in young lives. ucl press, london. bakken, a. (2017) ungdata. nasjonale resultater 2017. nova rapport 10/17. nova, oslo. https://doi.org/10.7577/nova/rapporter/2016/8 bell, v. (1999) performativity and belonging: an introduction. theory, culture & society 16(2) 1–10. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446219607.n1 block, k., warr, d., gibbs, l. & riggs, e. (2012) addressing ethical and methodological challenges in research with refugee-background young people: reflections from the field. journal of refugee studies 26(1) 69–87. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fes002 bourke, j. (2017) children’s experiences of their everyday walks through a complex urban landscape of belonging. children’s geographies 15(1) 93–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1192582 boyden, j. & ennew, j. (1997) children in focus: a manual for participatory research with children. swedish save the children, stockholm. boyden, j. & hart, j. (2007) the statelessness of the world’s children. children & society 21(4) 237–248. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00105.x fennia 198(1–2) (2020) 55fennia 198(1–2) (2020) tina mathisen & sofia cele brekke, m. (2015) samtidig men midlertidig. en etnografisk studie av unge med flyktningbakgrunn i tromsö. institutt for sosiologi, statsvitenskap og samfunnsplanlegging, the arctic university of norway, tromsö. van der burgt, d. (2006) “där man bor tycker man det är bra.” barns geografier i en segregerad statsmiljö. geografiska regionsstudier 71, uppsala university, uppsala. dissertations in kulturgeografiska institutionen. http://swepub.kb.se/bib/swepub:oai:diva.org:uu-7414?tab2=subj butler, j. (1990) gender trouble. routledge, new york. casey, e. (1993) getting back into place: toward a renewed understanding of the place-world. indiana university press, bloomington. caxaj, c.s. & berman, h. (2010) belonging among newcomer youths. intersecting experiences of inclusion and exclusion. advances in nursing science 33(4) e17–e30. https://doi.org/10.1097/ans.0b013e3181fb2f0f cele, s. (2006) communicating place. methods for understanding children’s experience of place. almquist & wiksell international, stockholm. cele, s. & van der burgt, d. (2015) children’s embodied politics of exclusion and belonging in public space. in kallio, k. p., mills, s. & skelton, t. (eds.) politics, citizenship and rights. geographies of children and young people 7, 189–205. springer, singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-57-6_4 de certeau, m. (1984) the practice of everyday life. university of california press, berkley. chen, s. & schweitzer, r. d. (2019) the experience of belonging in youth from refugee backgrounds: a narrative perspective. journal of child and family studies 28(7) 1977–1990. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-019-01425-5 christensen, p. (2003) place, space and knowledge: children in the village and the city. in christensen, p. & o’brien, m. (eds.) children in the city. home, neighbourhood and community, 69–84. routledge falmer, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203167236 correa-velez, i., gifford, s. m. & barnett, a. g. (2010) longing to belong: social inclusion and wellbeing among youth with refugee backgrounds in the first three years in melbourne, australia. social science & medicine 71(8) 1399–1408. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.07.018 cuervo, h. & wyn, j. (2017) a longitudinal analysis of belonging: temporal, performative and relational practices by young people in rural australia. young 25(3) 219–234. https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308816669463 cresswell, t. (2004) place: a short introduction. blackwell, malden, ma. eide, k. (2005) tvetydige barn. om barnemigranter i et historisk komparativt perspektiv. sosiologisk institutt, university of bergen, bergen. friberg, j. h. & bjørnset, m. (2019) migrasjon, foreldreskap og sosial kontroll. rapport 2019:01. fafo, oslo. gardner, k. & mand, k. (2012) ‘my away is here’: place, emplacement and mobility amongst british bengali children. journal of ethnic and migration studies 38(6) 969–986. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2012.677177 hedberg, c. & do carmo, r. m. (2012) translocal ruralism. mobility and connectivity in european rural spaces. springer, dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2315-3 holloway, s. (2006) burning issues: whiteness, rurality and the politics of difference. geoforum 38(1) 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.01.004 imdi [the directorate of integration and diversity] (2018) innvandrerbefolkningen i norge. <https:// www.imdi.no/om-integrering-i-norge/innvandrere-og-integrering/innvandrerbefolkningen-i-norge> 10.9.2018. kallio, k. p. & häkli, j. (2011) young people’s voiceless politics in the struggle over urban space. geojournal 76(1) 63–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10708-010-9402-6 keyes, e. f. & kane, c. f. (2004) belonging and adapting: mental health of bosnian refugees living in the united stated. issues in mental health nursing 25(8) 809–831. https://doi.org/10.1080/01612840490506392 kuller, d. & farley, m. (2019) examining elements of children’s place attachment. children’s geographies 17(4) 491–500. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1574336 kulturdepartementet (2012) den norske idrettsmodellen 2011–2012. stortingsmelding nr. 26. norwegian government. <https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/meld-st-26-20112012/id684356/ sec1> 24.03.2020 leach, n. (2002) belonging: towards a theory of identification with space. in hillier, j. & rooksby, e. (eds.) habitus: a sense of place, 297–314. ashgate, farnham. https://doi.org/10.2307/1567305 lee, j. & ingold, t. (2006) fieldwork on foot: perceiving, routing, socializing. in coleman, s. & collins, p. (eds.) locating the field: space, place and context in antrophology, 67–85. berg, oxford. lidén, h. (2016) “det er bare moro å spille her rett og slett.” fotball som integreringsarena. in seippel, ø., sisjord, m. k. & strandbu, å. (eds) ungdom og idrett, 213–231. cappelen damm akademisk, oslo. massey, d. (1991) a global sense of place. marxism today (6) 24–29. 56 research paper massey, d. (1995) places and their pasts. history workshop journal 39(1) 182–193. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/39.1.182 massey, d. (1998) the spatial construction of youth culture. in skelton, t. & valentine, g. (eds.) cool places: geographies of youth cultures, 121–129. routledge, london. mathisen, t. (2020) between being and longing: young former refugees’ experiences of place attachment and multiple belongings. geographica 27, department of social and economic geography, uppsala university. dissertations in social and economic geography. http://uu.divaportal.org/smash/get/ diva2:1384106/fulltext01.pdf mathisen, t. & stenbacka, s. (2015) unge migranter skaper steder: translokale og locale praksisert i rurale områder i norge og sverige. in aure, m., gunnerud berg, n., cruicshank, j. & dale, b. (eds.) med sans for sted. nyere teorier, 213–229. fagbokforlaget, bergen. molina, i. (2007) intersektionella rumsligheter. tidskrift för genusvetenskap 3 6–21. ní laoire, c., carpena-méndez, f., tyrrell, n. & white, a. (2010) introduction: childhood and migration-mobilities, homes and belongings. childhood 17(2) 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568210365463 nordbakke, s. (2019) children’s out-of-home leisure activities: changes during the last decade in norway. children’s geographies 17(3) 347–360. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1510114 ottosson, l., eastmond, m. & cederborg, a. c. (2016) assertions and aspirations: agency among accompanied asylum-seeking children in sweden. children’s geographies 15(4) 426–438. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1271941 punch, s. (2012) studying transnational children: a multi-sited, longitudinal, ethnographic approach. journal of ethnic and migration studies 38(6) 1007–1023. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2012.677181 rafoss, k. & tangen, j. o. (2017) den norske idrettsmodellen – i utakt med tiden? norsk sosiologisk tidsskrift 1(2) 152–170. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2535-2512-2017-02-04 rautio, p. (2015) children who carry stones in their pockets: on autotelic material practices in everyday life. children’s geographies 11(4) 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.812278 rose, g. (2012) visual methodologies. an introduction to researching with visual materials. sage, london. rye, j. f. (2016) transnationale hverdagliv: østeuropeisk innvandrerungdom i distrikts-norge. tidsskrift for ungdomsforskning 16(1) 3–39. rysst, m. (2017) always a foreigner? ethnic identity construction and belonging among youth of immigrant origin in norway. in espinoza-herold, m. & contini, r. m. (eds.) living in two homes: integration, identity and education of transnational migrants in a globalized world, 167–199. emerald publishing limited, bingley. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78635-781-620171007 sampson, r. & gifford, s. m. (2010) place-making, settlement and well-being: the therapeutic landscapes of recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds. health & place 16(1) 116–131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2009.09.004 savage, m., bagnall, g. & longhurst, b. (2005) globalization and belonging. sage, london. seamon, d. (1980) body-subject, time-space routines, and place-ballets. in buttimer, a. & seamon, d. (eds.) the human experience of space and place, 148–165. st. martin’s press, new york. sennett, r. (2012) together. the rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. yale university press, new haven. søholt, s., stenbacka, s. & nørgaard (2018) conditioned receptiveness: nordic rural elite perceptions of immigrant contributions to local resilience. journal of rural studies 64 220–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2018.05.004 stenbacka, s. (2013) international migration and resilience – rural introductory spaces and refugee immigration as a resource. in tamasy, c. & diez, j. r. (eds.) regional resilience, economy and society – globalising rural places, 75–93. routledge, london. strandbu, å., gulløy, e., andersen, p. l., seippel, ø. & bergesen dalen, h. (2017) ungdom, idrett og klasse: fortid, samtid og framtid. norsk sosiologisk tidsskrift 1(02) 132–151. https://doi.org/10.18261/issn.2535-2512-2017-02-03 valentine, g., sporton, d., & nielsen, k. b. (2009) identities and belonging: a study of somali refugee and asylum seekers living in the uk and denmark. environment and planning d: society and space 27(2) 234–250. https://doi.org/10.1068/d3407 vestel, v. (2004) a community of difference: hybridization, popular culture and the making of social relations among multicultural youngsters in “rudenga”, east side oslo. nova report 2004:15. norwegian social research, oslo. https://doi.org/10.7577/nova/rapporter/2004/15 wernesjö, u. (2015) landing in a rural village: home and belonging from the perspectives of unaccompanied young refugees. identities 22(4) 451–467. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2014.962028 yuval-davis, n. (2011) the politics of belonging: intersectional contestations. sage, london. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446251041 fennia 198(1–2) (2020) serving whom? immigrant entrepreneurs in a new local context urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa82821 doi: 10.11143/fennia.82821 serving whom? immigrant entrepreneurs in a new local context johanna lilius and hossam hewidy lilius, j. & hewidy, h. (2019) serving whom? immigrant entrepreneurs in a new local context. fennia 197(2) 215–231. https://doi.org/10.11143/ fennia.82821 in helsinki, the current number of immigrants is quickly rising. ethnic retail has emerged as a new, but visible, part of the city landscape. compared to other european countries, becoming an entrepreneur is typically not very popular in finland. therefore, in this paper, we seek to comprehend this phenomenon and more specifically discover: what motivates immigrants to become entrepreneurs; what is the impact of their background and culture on the phenomenon; and finally, is the help provided by the city useful for them? based on interviews and observations, we conclude that immigrant entrepreneurship facilitates in fluid ways the maintenance of cultural practices, while simultaneously enhancing meaningful encounters between immigrants and mainstream society. in our sample, we identify three types of entrepreneurs: growth-oriented, investors and status builders, as well as freedom and stability seekers. although the groups are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive, they display differences in certain aspects, which include their ways of entering into entrepreneurship, how their business is run, who their main clientele is, as well as in the future prospects for their businesses. we further infer that immigrant entrepreneurs, via their practices, also participate in making immigrant needs visible to politicians and policy-makers, thus also adding a layer to the local context within which they operate. however, we surmise that more effort is needed in addressing the freedom and stability seeker entrepreneurs if the aim of the city is to anchor immigrant retail in the city. keywords: helsinki, immigrant entrepreneurs, ethnic retail, mobility, cultural approach johanna lilius & hossam hewidy, department of architecture aalto university, school of arts, design and architecture, p.o. box 31000, fi-00076 aalto finland. e-mail: johanna.lilius@aalto.fi, hossam.hewidy@aalto.fi © 2019 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. introduction as the number of immigrants in helsinki has recently and rapidly increased, ethnic retail has emerged as a new part of the city landscape. immigrants are seeking income opportunities through entrepreneurship. this is in stark contrast to the low popularity of entrepreneurship in finland compared to other european countries (e.g. suomalainen et al. 2016). in this paper, we seek to reconcile these differences by examining specific questions including what motivates immigrants to 216 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) become entrepreneurs, what role does their background play in the phenomenon, and to what extent do they benefit from city support? according to volery (2007, 30), immigrant entrepreneurs “include the individuals who have actually immigrated over the past few decades”. several studies have argued that one important reason for entrepreneurialism being typically higher among immigrants than natives is the poor employment opportunities of immigrants. this is the structural approach to the phenomenon, suggesting that external factors in the host society, be it discrimination, the availability of cheap labour, or barriers to the labour market, may explain the higher tendency for self-employment (e.g. nee & wong 1985; barrett et al. 1996; razin 2002). however, we aim to fill a gap in current knowledge, also noted by fornaro (2018), which in fact reveals that there are other, non-structural drivers existing behind immigrant self-employment, which have hitherto been poorly analysed. in other words, our concern is more with the cultural approach towards immigrant entrepreneurship. according to this view, immigrants may have culturally-determined characteristics, thus explaining their motivation for selfemployment (nee & wong 1985; masurel et al. 2004). we understand the term ‘cultural practices’ as frese (2015, 1327) has suggested to mean the “shared perceptions of how people routinely behave in a culture”. in particular, we are interested in the means by which immigrant entrepreneurs, through their entrepreneurial activities, manifest these cultural practices and habits within the finnish context. nonetheless, large scale immigration is a relatively new phenomenon in finland (e.g. wessel et al. 2017, 815). as immigrant entrepreneurs become a commercially active part of the city, planners and civil servants of the city have been faced with unexpected challenges. therefore, we also address the question of services for immigrant entrepreneurs with our secondary aim being to add to the literature by emphasizing the role of the local context as being mutually dependent for supporting success, as well as creating more stable conditions for immigrant entrepreneurship in the long run. hence, this paper explores individual pathways towards entrepreneurship, as well as the multiple cultural contexts surrounding the entrepreneur. our interest is in the ways by which networks in both local and global contexts play a part in motivating and contesting entrepreneurship within the finnish context. as argued by kalandides and vaiou (2012), transnational migrants often hold familial, economic, social, and cultural ties across countries, sustaining relationships with a variety of national, ethnic and religious communities. leitner and ehrkamp (2006) refer to the negotiation of relationships of belonging at different geographical scales. we are likewise interested both in discovering the ways entrepreneurs build their way into the finnish context, as well as in identifying which ways are acknowledged by the services provided by the city. in our analysis, we draw loosely on the concept of multi-locality, which means working and living in multiple places. rolshoven (2008, 22) has defined this concept as being potentially “interpreted as a cultural technique, at times even as a subversive strategy, as it grants leeway within the nation-state’s efforts to bind the individual”. nevertheless, it can also be seen as an act of connecting different places, rather than distancing them from each other (rolshoven 2008, 17). multi-locality for immigrants could be understood through structural assimilation, meaning that immigrants are embedded in networks within both the host society and their original society (vacca et al. 2016). transnationalism has been introduced to refer to “the process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-strand social relations that link their societies of origin and settlement” (bilecen et al. 2018, 1). furthermore, yu (2018, 564) argues that immigrant communities are neither isolated islands nor simply nodes “in the network of circulation” in which the locale loses its meaning. rather, she proposes the concept of mobilocality “where mobility and immobility at both transnational and local scales are mutually constituted, paradoxically embedded in the locality, simultaneously weaved in everyday lives of (im) migrants, and complicate their sense of place and identities”. these concepts are used as a framework through which we study immigrant entrepreneurs in helsinki due to our interest in the local and global relationships sustained, built, and reworked through immigrant entrepreneurship. our other focus of research is to trace the paths through which the local context adapts to changing practices in urban spaces, in this case, the ones of immigrant entrepreneurs. as kloosterman, van der leun and rath (1999) suggested, the concept of mixed embeddedness not only draws on immigrants’ embeddedness in their own circles, but also takes into account the local settings on many different levels, including economic, political and institutional structures. 217fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy typologies of entrepreneurship there is a body of literature on ethnic entrepreneurship from studies within the us, but research has also been done within asia and europe. typically, a differentiation is made between two sorts of ethnic entrepreneurs: middleman minorities and enclave entrepreneurs (waldinger et al. 1990; light & gold 2000). blalock (1967) coined the term ‘middleman minorities’, which refers to entrepreneurs of a minority background who mediate between the dominant and subordinate groups. bonacich (1973) explained the business development of this group of entrepreneurs as those who play an intermediary role between the majority group and the segregated minority ones. middlemen tend to be sojourners temporarily living in the hosting society. their migration is economically driven, and they remain detached from the host society, but retain ties with their country of origin and own ethnic group. furthermore, they prioritize the sort of businesses in which assets are quickly accumulated and quickly liquidated. middleman minorities typically have access to human capital from their families as well as access to cheap labour within their minority. bonacich (1973, 588) further notes that the country of origin is significant in the development of middleman minority. drori, honig and wright (2009, 1004) describe the middleman minorities as “those entrepreneurs who take advantage of ethnic resources such as language, networks, and skills to trade between their host and origin societies, while retaining their ethnic identity and non-assimilation stance as an integral part of their business strategy”. the middleman entrepreneurship model has been further developed by saxenian and sabel (2008), who argue that “argonauts” operating abroad significantly contribute to their home countries in terms of developing the context for entrepreneurial development. they use the example of first-generation, highly-skilled immigrant professionals in the u.s. technology industries, who held close ties to taiwan, their home country. with the resources they gained in the us, the argonauts were able to promote entrepreneurship in taiwan. similarly, transnational diaspora entrepreneurship describes the initiation of expanded trade by immigrant entrepreneurs between their home countries and their current location (osaghae & cooney 2019). when studying immigrant enclaves, specifically cubans in miami, wilson and portes (1980) noted that social capital plays an important role in immigrant entrepreneurship. the immigrant entrepreneur “makes use of language and cultural barriers and of ethnic affinities to gain privileged access to markets and sources of labor” (ibid., 315). such circumstances might provide them with a decided advantage over similar businesses or activities in the main stream market of “the open economy”. ethnic community ties are a form of social capital based on trust and solidarity, and they maintain access to resources such as labour, financial support, and sharing information about the market. accordingly, in immigrants’ enclaves, there is a tendency to maintain the business as self-enclosed. social capital as a resource for migrant entrepreneurship has been explored by many scholars (light 1972; wilson & portes 1980; waldinger 1986; bonacich & light 1988; aldrich & waldinger 1990). light and gold (2000, 4) introduced enclave entrepreneurship activities as “bounded by a certain location and are usually populated by co-ethnics”. we draw on light and gold (2000) to elucidate the significance of location to the ethnic enclave economies. a major difference between ethnic enterprise and ethnic enclave enterprise is the location. the former is evenly distributed between neighbourhoods and the latter is clustered close to a territorial core. such clusters create ethnic economies that consist of the co-ethnic self-employed, their co-ethnic employees, and a high footfall of co-ethnic clientele. as stated, ethnic enclave businesses tend to maintain a self-enclosed status. wilson and martin (1982, 183) defined enclaves as a composition of “relatively independent firms which compete with each other for supplies and minority consumers, or minority firms”. both types of migrant entrepreneurial activities, middleman minorities and enclaves, are devices used to overcome the restraints of integration in the host society, or unequal access to the labour market. however, both terms have been recognized as problematic, not least because they deny the importance of the local host society (rafiq 1992; van dongen 2019). the conception of enclaveentrepreneurs has led to the breaking-out (ram & jones 1998), and, lately, the breaking-through (basu 218 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) 2011) models, which describe the modes of an ethnic business to situate itself wider than within the enclave. ram and hillin (1994) state that ethnic retail could be converted to be a mainstream business. parzer and czingon (2013, 55) describe the breaking-out entrepreneurial model as “the process by which immigrant entrepreneurs leave their ethnic enclave economy by gaining consumers beyond their own community”. ram and jones (1998) introduce the “breaking-out” market strategy by means of two dimensions: local versus non-local, and ethnic versus non-ethnic customers. basu (2011) proposes “breaking-through” which means stepping into “more promising markets with greater opportunities”. considering the market, substituting the co-ethnic clientele by the main stream clientele is not conditional for breaking-through, an example of such is elaborating the market from the geographical boundaries to access ethnic markets at a non-local location. as for the labour force, basu (2011) mentions that a successful business model tends to be less reliant on co-ethnic labour, and solely oriented at skilled and professional labor. nevertheless, basu (2011) states that many of the market barriers facing ethnic entrepreneurs are similar to those facing small businesses in general. in political discussions in finland, entrepreneurship is considered important for economic growth and to decrease structural unemployment (hyytinen & pajarinen 2005). however, as mentioned, becoming an entrepreneur is not very popular in finland compared to other european countries (e.g. suomalainen et al. 2016). therefore, municipalities often intervene to support entrepreneurialism. at the same time, as finland is not generally understood as a particularly entrepreneur-friendly country, we are also interested in the reactions of the city of helsinki to the new framework. the case: immigrant entrepreneurship in helsinki helsinki poses a rather different case from those of global cities, such as london or new york, or even other capitals in the nordic countries. first, it has been exposed to large-scale immigration only very recently – not until the 1990s. in helsinki, the number of inhabitants with a foreign background in 2000 was still only 6%, but in 2016, the number had already increased to 14% (hiekkavuo 2017). however, compared to the other nordic countries, the number of inhabitants with immigrant backgrounds is still very low. moreover, compared to, for example, stockholm and copenhagen, people with ethnic backgrounds still live in relatively mixed neighbourhoods due to the mixing policy in the city (wessel et al. 2017). this is part of the contextual particularity (balampanidis & polyzos 2016) of helsinki, even within the nordic context. the prevention of segregation is an important goal in the helsinki city strategy 2017–2021, and the social mixing policy is continuously considered necessary in order to avoid the overrepresentation of ethnicities, unemployment, and low incomes in particular neighbourhoods (city of helsinki 2018). currently, in helsinki, there are no neighbourhoods in which the number of residents with an immigrant background would be more than 38.5% (statistics finland 2018). despite this relatively low figure, there have been signs of “white flight” in some neighbourhoods in which the number of immigrants is high. this “white flight” is mainly connected to families with children whose parents do not want them to attend schools with an overrepresentation of immigrant children (vilkama et al. 2013). helsinki has had its share of ethnic restaurants for years, namely, russian, italian, and greek restaurants opening already decades ago. kurdishand turkish-owned pizza/kebab restaurants, which often also sell beer, opened in almost every neighbourhood in the 1990s. furthermore, indian and nepalese restaurants also became common in the 1990s and have remained so. the 1990s also saw the opening of the first asian grocery shops owned by chinese and indian retailers in the city centre by the hämeentie road. however, during the last 10 years, there has been a strong clustering of ethnic retail into three suburbs, namely itäkeskus, malmi, and kontula. what is also particular for this clustering is that the majority of the new business owners descend from the middle east. in the same neighbourhoods in which these shops are opening, the growth of immigrant populations, particularly from the middle east and africa, has been growing in the last 10–15 years (city of helsinki 2019). 219fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy research design as aldrich and waldinger (1990) have pointed out, knowledge of ethnic enterprise derives from government census, survey research, and fieldwork. here, we deploy observation and semi-structured interviews with immigrant entrepreneurs, civil servants and planners, as well as government reports and guidelines. as we are particularly interested in understanding the motivations for becoming an entrepreneur in terms of lived experience, we chose interviews and field work as our methods. the interviews allow us “an insight into respondents’ memories and explanations of why things have come to be what they are, as well as descriptions of current problems and aspirations” (stark & torrance 2005, 35). to guide our study, our key research questions were: • what motivates immigrants primarily from the middle-east to become entrepreneurs in helsinki? • what kind of networks involving the homeland cultural sphere are sustained in the entrepreneurial activities? • what kind of help in becoming an entrepreneur does the city of helsinki offer, and how is it perceived by the immigrants? the research was conducted in three neighbourhoods in helsinki, namely, kontula, itäkeskus and malmi, which have all seen an increase in ethnic retail over the last five years. to ensure that data collection from each site would be comparable, the interviews with respondents and field observation schedules were carefully planned. in addition to the interviews, observation was conducted by taking images, sketching, and taking notes at several times and dates for each case. the observation documentation also included audio-recording and video-recording. in addition to those actions, we observed verbal and nonverbal expressions, particularly when subjects would simultaneously use eight different languages at the same retail premises. when choosing whom to interview, we concentrated mainly on immigrants from the middle east due to it being the fastest growing immigrant group in helsinki, and, based on our observation, it also provides the most services. we asked initial questions which were as short as possible, and followed up on respondents’ answers with additional questions. all interviews except one were tape-recorded, in addition to being recorded in note-form taken by the author. the respondents are presented in table 1. at the analysis stage, we conducted both a vertical and horizontal analysis. the vertical analysis was completed by combining all collected observations relevant to the same respondent (transcription, our personal notes and audio-visual material) and summarizing it. the horizontal analysis combined all the summaries concluded in the vertical analysis and compared it to all other respondents. the interviewers consisted of an ethnic female finn just under 40, and a middle-eastern 55 years old male migrant. this created the opportunity to hold the interviews in finnish, arabic, and english. interviews were held through the businesses and on the retail premises. when there was a preplanned time for an interview or a field visit, we acted as outsiders. the arabic-speaking author acted several times as a participant observer, in situ, during personal shopping visits. according to manderson, bennett and andajani-sutjahjo (2006), the path of an interview and its content is influenced by its setting and contextual facts, such as place and time. garton and copland (2010) clarify that when the participants of an interview have a prior relationship, the collected data might not be obtainable by a researcher who does not share a similar background with their respondents. on the other hand, jacobsson and åkerström (2013, 717) suggest that researchers often impose their own framing and definition to the research subject, which explains the importance of using neutral probes, so as to avoid leading the participant to form an “acceptable” response. we believe that our contrasting backgrounds partly worked against this skew related to our individual backgrounds. we also interviewed five planners and one civil servant about the context of immigrant entrepreneurship: what they know about the entrepreneurs, and in which ways they contact and collaborate with immigrant entrepreneurs. further, we also spent time in the neighbourhoods talking casually with many ethnic entrepreneurs as well as a few finnish entrepreneurs. during these chats, we mainly talked generally about the location of their businesses. we also observed customers, listened to different languages spoken, and sometimes also talked to some customers and asked them about the services they used. 220 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) r es p on d en t c o u n tr y of b ir th g en d er a ge ed u ca ti o n a rr iv al t o fi n la n d fi rs t b u si n es s c u rr en t b u si n es s c u rr en t b u si n es s la n gu ag e sk ill s en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 22 u p p er h ig h s ch o ol 20 16 c af é an d r es ta u ra n t 20 18 a ra b ic , e n gl is h , f in n is h w o rk er ir aq m al e 33 b as ic e d u ca ti on 20 10 v eg et ab le s st al l 20 02 a ra b ic , f in n is h en tr ep re n eu r g h an a m al e 50 m ed ic al e d u ca ti on it ed u ca to r 19 92 20 12 (i t tr ai n in g ce n tr e) el ec tr o n ic s fl ea m ar ke t 20 19 en gl is h , f in n is h en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 30 u p p er h ig h s ch o ol 20 15 g ro ce ry & h al al m ea t 20 18 a ra b ic en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 30 v o ca ti o n al in c o n st ru ct io n 20 12 r es ta u ra n t 20 18 a ra b ic , e n gl is h en tr ep re n eu r sy ri a m al e 39 u p p er h ig h s ch o ol 20 03 20 07 (c le an in g se rv ic es ) o ri en ta l s w ee t 20 18 a ra b ic , e n gl is h , f in n is h en tr ep re n eu r m o ro cc o m al e 50 fi n ed in in g ch ef 19 89 20 02 (r es ta u ra n t) r es ta u ra n t 20 16 a ra b ic , e n gl is h , fr en ch , fi n n is h en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 62 in st it u te o f a gr ic u lt u re 19 97 19 99 (v eg et ab le s) o ri en ta l g ro ce ry 20 01 k u rd is h , a ra b ic , f in n is h en tr ep re n eu r b an gl ad es h m al e 51 ec o n o m y o f ag ri cu lt u re 19 91 19 94 (r es ta u ra n t) tr av el a ge n cy & m on ey tr an sf er 20 18 o rd o , h in d i, b an gl a, e n gl is h , fi n n is h en tr ep re n eu r ir aq fe m al e 35 b ak er v o ca ti o n al e d uc at io n 20 06 sw ee t an d b ak er y 20 19 a ra b ic , f in n is h en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 56 ec o n om y an d ad m in is tr at io n 19 93 19 93 (m o b ile v en d o r) h al al m ea t 20 10 tu rk is h , a ra b ic , fi n n is h en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 32 b as ic e d u ca ti on 20 09 b ar b er 20 16 k u rd is h , f in n is h en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 41 u n kn o w n 20 05 20 13 (b ak er y) h al al m ea t & r es ta u ra n t 20 14 tu rk is h , a ra b ic , fi n n is h w o rk er ir aq m al e 26 b as ic e d u ca ti on 20 16 b ak er y 20 17 a ra b ic en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 33 u p p er h ig h s ch o ol 20 15 o ri en ta l s w ee t an d b ak er y 20 19 a ra b ic , fi n n is h en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 41 h ig h in st it u te 20 09 20 12 c af é (e ls ew h er e) c af é 20 16 k u rd i, fi n n is h (b as ic ), a ra b ic en tr ep re n eu r ir aq m al e 28 st u d en t/ vo ca ti o n al ed u ca ti on 20 15 sh is h a c af é 20 18 a ra b ic , f in n is h , e n gl is h ta b le 1 . t h e re sp o n d en ts o f th e st u d y. 221fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy three groups of entrepreneurs in our sample of interviews, the main reason highlighted for becoming an entrepreneur was the freedom provided by entrepreneurship. some respondents had tried working for someone else and it did not satisfy them. instead of working for someone else, the ideal was to have a business of one’s own. however, to better grasp further differences and similarities between the respondents, we identified three groups of entrepreneurs based on their motivations and future prospects for entrepreneurialism (table 2). we would like to highlight that these groups are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive. nevertheless, they provide us with a framework to understand the motivation and different contexts that immigrant retailers from the middle east in three neighbourhoods in helsinki operate. these categories provided a frame through which we can also glimpse into the future, specifically by understanding the kind of support each group might need. growth-oriented entrepreneurs we characterized growth-oriented entrepreneurs as those who were closely integrated with finnish society, either through having finnish partners, or seeking to grow by expanding their services particularly to attract finnish customers, often in cooperation with finnish companies (e.g. such as large grocery chains). we also note in this group a professionalisation of entrepreneurialism. the growth-oriented entrepreneurs were ambitious, but also resourceful. their businesses were not developed haphazardly, but were a consequence of serious consideration and often analysis of the market. a common feature among the respondents in this group was that they were also serial entrepreneurs; in other words, they found business opportunities in many different fields, both within mainstream society and within ethnic enclaves. within this group, we also included those entrepreneurs who had businesses in different fields in order to attract many different consumer groups, and those who wished to grow to be the largest within their field, such as one halal meat butcher. we recognize within this group a mutual dependence on the country of origin and destination, where trade between the countries is not as important as drawing on the country of origin as a source of advantage and opportunity in order to offer something different to the country of destination. the growth-oriented group had neither the clear characteristics of the middleman or enclave entrepreneurs. however, they did have some of the characteristics of breaking-through (basu 2011). therefore, we place in this group those entrepreneurs who had businesses in different fields – a “diverse portfolio of business” – those who plan to expand their business to grow to be the largest in their industry, and those who founded their business as a break-through business from their start-up phase. here is an example of a break-through entrepreneur. a highly educated bangladeshi respondent runs two different businesses: a popular indian restaurant at a prestigious location in the city centre since 1994, and a travel agency and money transfer at puhos shopping centre since 2018. the popular restaurant attracts natives, and tourists whereas the labour force is mainly of asian backgrounds, “bangladeshi and pakistani” to reflect the specialty of the cuisine. as for the travel agency and money transfer, the services by their nature are built on a complex network of services providers, among others, airlines, travel agencies and banks. the latter business is conducted by the entrepreneur, a partner (who is the same partner in the restaurant business), and a trainee. the clientele in this business is a large, mainly muslim, multi-ethnic group, as the entrepreneur argued this group is not so accustomed to independently using the internet to book their own trips. part of the services is organizing a pilgrimage trip to mecca. the two businesses are currently expanding outside the enclave to a wider market. economy and administration is another interesting example concerning both growth and diversity in a business profile. an iraqi respondent ran the following businesses: a kebab restaurant (1998); a van business driving between finnish cities for selling sportswear (2001); a bakery (2005–2009); and a halal meat grocery (2009–2019) which was sold in early 2019. the entrepreneur plans to trade as a halal meat wholesaler, having left to qatar and founded a construction company for civil work. halal meat, by nature, is mainly targeting a muslim clientele and, for religious reasons, it also requires muslim labor. however, being a muslim already extends the background of both the labor and 222 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) m ot iv at io n s fo r b ec om in g an en tr ep re n eu r g ro w th -o ri en te d e n tr ep re n eu rs in ve st or s an d s ta tu s b u ild er s fr ee d om a n d s ta b ili ty s ee k er s in d ep en de n ce im p or ta n t im p o rt an t, b u t se e th em se lv es a ls o w or ki n g in a n o th er p ro fe ss io n a n d fo r so m eo n e el se im p o rt an t im p o rt an ce o f c u ltu ra l b ac kg ro un d fo r en tr ep re n eu ri al a ct iv it ie s n o t so im p or ta n t n ot s o im p or ta n t st ro n g tr ad it io n in t ra d e re fle ct ed in t h e re as o n f o r b ec o m in g an e n tr ep re n eu r im p o rt an ce o f s u p p or tin g h om e co u n tr y/ m em b er f ro m t h e h om e co u n tr y in te re st in b ri n gi n g th e cu lt u re o f th e h o m e co u n tr y in to t he f in n is h c on te xt su p p or t re ce iv ed fr o m t h e h om e co u n tr y im p o rt an ce o f em p lo yi n g re si de n ts f ro m t h e h om e co u n tr y su b ve rs iv e st ra te gy ? p ar tl y st ro n g em p h as is o n in te gr at in g an d u si n g th e co u n tr y o f or ig in a s an a ss et in th e h os t cu ltu re . n o t su bv er si ve st ru ct u ra l a ss im ila ti o n em p h as is o n t h e w ill t o in te gr at e al so w it h in f in n is h co n te xt t h ro u gh s er vi ng f in n is h c u st o m er s, o r ge tt in g ed u ca ti on t h at w ill e n h an ce in te gr at io n st ru ct u ra l a ss im ila ti o n p oo r ev id en ce o f en tr ep re n eu ri al is m le ad in g to a c lo se r re la ti on sh ip t o th e fi n n is h c o n te xt , t h o u gh s o m e in te re st a ls o to w ar d s se rv in g fi n n is h c u st o m er s st at e an d f u tu re en tr ep re n eu rs h ip c on n ec ti o n t o m u lt ip le p la ce s to s o m e ex te n t m u lt ilo ca l tr an sn at io n al to s o m e ex te n t m u lt i-l oc al , t ra n sn at io n al a n d m o b ilo ca l st at e o f en tr ep re n eu rs h ip li fe st yl e, s er ia l en tr ep re n eu rs po ss ib ly a p h as e in li fe li fe st yl e fu tu re p la n s g ro w th a n d e xp an d k ee p t h e b u si n es s, b u t al so g et fu rt h er e d uc at io n in an o th er fi el d b u si n es s as u su al , s ta b le t ab le 2 . t h re e gr o u p s o f en tr ep re n eu rs . 223fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy clientele behind certain ethnic groups, as the muslim community in helsinki is superdiverse in its ethnic structure. another interesting note in this example is that the entrepreneur had never gained professional experience in the business he intended to start. yet, we observe that the managerial skills are to his advantage. we also interviewed a moroccan entrepreneur who graduated and trained as a chef, who has participated in many competitions, and worked at several hotels besides catering groups before founding own business. he did not imitate in his business the traditional mediterranean cuisine, but has developed a trendy, modernized concept. he went into the business first with two experienced restaurant owners, located in central neighbourhoods with mainly (upper) middle-class finnish background residents. most of the clientele were natives who seek an exotic experience. later, his restaurant won a customers’ award for being the best branch and best ethnic restaurant. he more recently founded another restaurant chain; one of its branches is located in the malmi area. furthermore, he upgraded the restaurant business as a franchise. he caters to mainstream supermarkets and events through a central kitchen. the latest service added to his business portfolio is a travel agency which combines gastronomy, travelling, and fair-trade products from morocco and vice versa. another way of expanding existing businesses was to think of selling products in finnish supermarkets, as emphasized by a baker. within the growth-oriented entrepreneurs, there were good opportunities for meaningful interaction between immigrants and native finns. several of the entrepreneurs were using their homeland culture to attract finnish customers. this meant, in the first place, that the entrepreneurs had to look for facilities in neighbourhoods with mainly finnish customers. but, in order to offer something different, there was also an emphasis on the design of the spaces, in such ways that they would show the homeland culture, as described here in the planning of a new shop for sweets: we need to make an interior decoration that reflects the oriental atmosphere and design a staff uniform to match with it. i would like to give the same atmosphere of a space from the middle east. we will try to give an experience not only sell our delights. we want the customers to enjoy and seek to us to make memories, take selfies and enjoy. (male 39 y, syria) another way of reaching outside of their own cultural sphere and location was by advertising their services in finnish and english through their own facebook page. communicating on facebook was also a way to keep customers up to date with the restaurant’s offerings and opening times. finnish restaurants typically have fixed opening hours; therefore, in this case, we recognized a different solution: holding flexible opening hours, but providing accurate information for clients on those changing hours. investors and status builders this group consisted of newly arrived immigrants hoping to improve and secure their position, often strongly connected to networks from their country of origin. in our sample, they consisted of young iraqis for whom entrepreneurship was partly a secondary activity, the first activity being social climbing through education. they had typically bought their businesses with resources from elsewhere than the finnish context. their object of purchase was often a business, typically a restaurant or café developed by fellow countrymen. none reported that they would have had previous experience of running a business. furthermore, they also ought, were currently, or planning to study something completely different than the business they were in. the business was understood by the entrepreneurs as a way of maintaining status in finland. although their experience of doing business and of entrepreneurship was limited, many had plans to expand their businesses. it remained unclear to us whether the entrepreneurs would keep their businesses if they succeeded in climbing the social ladder, and, if not, whether the businesses would in this way become yet another opportunity for a newly arrived immigrant with the financial means to establish an economic position in finland. yet, it was through entrepreneurship that they were currently in the first place seeking social rewards and recognition. this was highlighted particularly by a young iraqi: “if i go to buy a car, i am a credible and admirable person in the society, who pays taxes and runs his own businesses”. for him, it seemed particularly important to be seen as credible in the eyes of finns. on the other hand, 224 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) this young entrepreneur had been able to buy his business in helsinki, and he also had businesses in iraq through family networks. he was further planning to go to law school, so we assumed he had financial support from iraq making this trajectory possible. however, as he lacked any formal education, finding work in any other sector than low-paid jobs would probably be difficult. within this group, we also noted the interest in extending the customer base to finns. for example, although one of the restaurants serving food from the middle east was mostly frequented by people from this region, the owner was planning to expand his business to the city centre. he was also planning to stop providing tobacco water-pipes (shishas) and concentrate only on restaurant services. he felt that the water-pipes gave the restaurant a profile that was “too ethnic” and prevented finns from visiting it. another iraqi restaurant owner was also planning to expand his business to the city centre, since his business had been a success among finns. in this group, we also found a genuine interest in learning finnish among the respondents. during the interviews, it also became clear that the entrepreneurs had been able to establish connections to finnish society through relationships with people, such as girlfriends and schoolmates. interestingly, it was also within this group that the only frustration towards finnish authorities was expressed. one respondent had had problems with the authorities considering how he handled the smoking of the water-pipe in his shisha café. at the same time, he often repeated during the interview how thankful he was to finland for the opportunity to be in the country. although he speaks arabic and english and has recently learnt finnish very well in a short period, he insisted to carry the interview in finnish. to us, it appeared that he was very accustomed to finnish manners; thus, he may have felt more comfortable criticizing those parts of the finnish system with which he was unsatisfied in finnish. a similar dissatisfaction, as expressed by him, is also commonly repeated by finnish entrepreneurs in the newspapers (e.g. larsen 2015; harju & vähäsarja 2018). however, this respondent also revealed that the ways in which he had become acquainted with the finnish language and finn people was not through entrepreneurship, but through people he met in the finnish school system. this contrasts with the claim by the authorities in helsinki that entrepreneurship is the route to integration. nevertheless, in this group, we would position also those entrepreneurs who brought up that they did not wish for their own children to go into entrepreneurship, but were encouraging them to get a university degree. this meant, for example, that their children were not helping out in the businesses. a 62-year-old iraqi male, who had three daughters and a son, said “i preferred to choose for them the academic qualification, and none of them can help me with the business”. this could be interpreted as a way of adapting to the local context, and in particular to finnish middle-class ideals. according to siltala (2017, 7), being middle-class in finland means seeking “social rising”. freedom and stability seekers the largest group we identified among our respondents were the freedom and stability seekers. they are mainly longor longer-term residents who chose entrepreneurship over employment and who served mainly their own and other ethnic minorities in finland. this group could be characterized as enclave-entrepreneurs; however, we saw in this group also a growing interest in serving finnish customers. this group had a higher tendency to cluster and situate their premises at locations that were well used by ethnic groups. typically, many of the freedom and stability seekers saw opportunities in businesses that they had been working in before in the home country. for example, a 33-year-old iraqi had worked as a barber in his father’s shop in iraq since he was a child. after arriving in helsinki as a refugee, he saw the opportunity for providing cheap barbering services. he started looking for a retail premise and, by chance, found a vacant one in his own neighbourhood, where there is some other ethnic retail too. his services mainly attract immigrants from the middle east, and some from russia, as well as some finns. his business grew quickly, and in three years he was able to employ four people. a large number of the respondents had also been, or were still, entrepreneurs in their country of origin. many also had a family member who was an entrepreneur (often the father) in their country of origin. the same phenomenon has also been reported by swedish immigrant entrepreneurs by 225fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy andersson and wadensjö (2004). this indicated the multi-local nature of the lives of several respondents. they adopted their way of making a living from their home country in the new context. there were also some implications among the respondents that cultural background has an impact on why they chose to become entrepreneurs. this was related to being able to support oneself and the family in the long run: our countries in the middle east don’t guarantee pensions nor protect salaries stabilities for an employee. it’s a tradition that when a person finishes the school, he starts to think about founding a self-employment entrepreneurship. (male 39 y, syria) andersson and wadensjö (2004, 3) concluded that, in denmark and sweden too, immigrants that “come from a cultural (religious) background that is supportive of self-employment more often are self-employed”. similarly, martín-montaner, serrano-domingo and requena-silvente (2018, 737) also noted that one explanation of the tendency of migrants towards self-employment is the “existence of a sort of self-employment culture transferred from the home country to the host one”. in other words, there was a mobility of customs and traditions that had not been overwritten by the local social welfare framework. this could be interpreted as a subversive strategy (rolshoven 2008), in the sense that immigrants offset in the leeway provided by their own cultural context, and apply it in a new societal context. in addition to the tendency of immigrants towards self-employment, such cultural factors as the ability support oneself in the long run include, devotion to hard work, membership of a strong ethnic group, and the acceptance of risk have been recognized (masurel et al. 2004). cultural reasons also emphasized the reliance on family instead of local institutions. for muslims, taking a loan to run a business may be problematic for religious reasons. this was emphasized by a female entrepreneur: “my relatives in sweden supported me by lending me some money as i don’t like to take a loan from a bank and to thus avoid paying any interest”. hence, financial help had to be obtained from personal networks rather than through an institutional agency. the help that these entrepreneurs accessed in order to start a business, as noted also by jelena and vesna (2018), often came from networks abroad. furthermore, advice on how to start and run a business was typically obtained through personal networks rather than the societal services. to quote the female entrepreneur again: “i didn’t get any advisory assistance. in my family, i have my husband who helps me somehow”. help was also sought by the entrepreneurs from “those who have similar businesses”. an important reason for these entrepreneurs being closely engaged within their own communities was also the availability of raw materials and wholesale markets. first of all, for restaurants, the availability of halal meat was scarce and distributed through ethnic networks. very often, the entrepreneurs had networks in their country of origin who could sustain them with products: i got the raw material with the help of my friends and contacts who live in any of these places [turkey, jordan and earlier syria]. it is more a sort of social and personal network. shopping online is not quite efficient in these countries, especially for the products i need. (male 39 y, syria) many of the entrepreneurs also used their networks in sweden to buy products in wholesale. sweden has several wholesalers of products from the middle east. however, as the business developed, some started to increasingly seek products within the finnish context: i buy the raw material from turkey to get them halal, in addition to the different taste of decoration items. but gradually i started to open new doors for cooperation with others in the field who know how to get these items from finland. (female 35 y, iraq) although this group typically had strong bonds to their compatriots, they often made an effort also to serve co-ethnic groups in the finnish context. to be able to serve many different language groups, we observed that, particularly at halal meat and oriental grocery shops entrepreneurs and workers communicate in somali language with somali clienteles. arabs, kurds and turkmens gained basic vocabulary to communicate with a somali speaker, especially women and elderly. none of the respondents, however, reported it as spoken language. in this way, the multilocality of their lives was materialized in the service they provided and in the languages they used. different cultures were also blended in the quest to find new business opportunities. 226 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) interestingly, we also found “chinese” uyghur muslim who owns a furniture shop that imports many items from china for sale to customers mostly from a middle east background, which would imply that religion plays a part in knowing the style and tastes of certain ethnic groups in domains other than the provision of halal meat. the city of helsinki and immigrant entrepreneurs in finland, it is typically considered difficult to be an entrepreneur, and entrepreneurs are not supported by the same social benefits as employees. currently, immigrants establish more businesses in helsinki than the rest of the population (newco helsinki 2017). to promote entrepreneurship, the city of helsinki offers services for those thinking of starting a new business through newco helsinki. the service is provided in english, and the official languages are finnish and swedish. newco helsinki offers, among other things, information sessions on how to establish a company, courses in entrepreneurialism, networking events and personal guidance. in 2017, they launched a pdf-guide, available online, called immigrant entrepreneurs. how to become an entrepreneur in finland? the reason for developing such a guide is connected to the importance of entrepreneurship for the working part of the immigrant population. furthermore, immigrant entrepreneurship is seen as “an excellent way of gaining access to finnish society” (newco helsinki (2017, 3). as mentioned earlier, for the immigrants interviewed, the attitude towards entrepreneurship was very different than reported finnish attitudes (hyytinen & pajarinen 2005). many of the respondents emphasized that it is not so difficult to work within the finnish context, as long as entrepreneurs took care, especially in relation to paying taxes. however, all of the interviewees except one reported that they did not get any advisory assistance from finnish authorities before or during their entrepreneurship foundation. nevertheless, one of our respondents, a newly arrived refugee from iraq, had used the services of newco helsinki. interestingly, he emphasized that the information he received from his compatriots differed from the information provided by newco helsinki: newco helsinki’ guided me about how to issue a new entrepreneurship. i had already asked about that from a few of our entrepreneurs’ friends, using my own network, and they didn’t advise me in the same way as newco helsinki. (male 22 y, iraq) the perceived differences were not clarified. others claimed they were not satisfied with the provided services. what they would have needed was simple instruction in their native language as emphasized by these extracts: concerning the training and mentoring for the new start-up, there are already many courses and workshops by the city. however, all of which is held in finnish language, and the level of language is too high for most of the attendees, so many of them join but ended empty-handed. in the finnish system, the concept of giving simplified services is absent. at least a simplified legal instruction during the first year of running a business. if you didn’t understand the law you can’t issue a successful business. (male 39 y, syria) it is important to emphasize here that many of the entrepreneurs did not know the finnish language at all, or knew only the very basics, while only a minority spoke finnish well. apart from being a barrier to the finnish work market, naturally, language also acts as a barrier to obtaining information about finnish entrepreneur practices. apart from newco helsinki, the city has also employed three so-called “business pilots”, who help entrepreneurs, collect information about entrepreneurs, and work to encourage entrepreneurialism in helsinki. our interview with one of the “business pilots” who has been responsible specifically for immigrant retailers in connection to regeneration of their premises, admitted that the city has not particularly prepared them for working with immigrants, and that some kind of cultural education would be beneficial. this may be due to immigrant retail still being a fairly new phenomenon in the city. on the other hand, she had a very unprejudiced approach towards immigrants, and in many cases felt that her message had been received by the entrepreneurs. however, language remained an issue; our interpretation based on our observations was that information was also needed in the native languages 227fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy of the entrepreneurs. another observation was that the everyday reality of immigrant retail is not very well understood by the city. for example, in malmi area, the ethnic entrepreneurs were invited to a meeting with the authorities at 8.00 in the morning, which is not an hour likely to encourage many entrepreneurs to attend. this schedule might have been planned with good intentions of including the ethnic enterpreurs in public participation, but it was not realistic in its implementation. entrepreneurial practices within the finnish context newco helsinki (2017) claims that 80% of the companies established through their services still exist and are still operating after five years of establishment. however, several of our respondents had stopped or sold their businesses after the interviews. this was particularly evident within the group of stability and freedom seekers. during the interviews, particularly in this group, many entrepreneurs mentioned that competition between the entrepreneurs was high. based on our interviews, we note that this has consequences for the local context in two ways. first of all, it would suggest that more information is needed at the founding phase of the business. kloosterman, van der leun and rath (1999) have emphasized that cut-throat competition is typical within some branches of immigrant retail, such as the sale of halal-meat. this would imply that, particularly among the freedom and stability seekers, realistic information about the prospects for businesses in arabic would be helpful. this would mean, for example, providing help in analysing the current market for specific products and services. prospective entrepreneurs might also benefit from ideas on entrepreneurial activities other than those primarily serving solely their own community. the other consequence due to the saturation of the market is related to an earlier made observation, namely, that high competition sometimes leads to circumventing the national legal framework (rath & kloosterman 2002). during interviews and observation, we encountered several unclear situations which confused us, especially about the way employment was organized. for example, in one of the restaurants, we were told that there were no employers, although there were two men cleaning the restaurant. in another similar place on the opposite side of the street, the owner told us he had sixteen employees that he can call in when needed. at the time of the interview, many people were on the premises who we identified as either being employees or family members, or both. aldrich and waldinger (1990) have emphasized the importance of family and co-ethnic labour, as it is largely unpaid, and typically organized into long hours. on the other hand, other entrepreneurs told us that many workers would like to work informally and without registration. this was very problematic for the owners: i understand that competition is high, however many times my neighbour [grocery store] sells some goods at a too-low price, lower than the lowest price in the market, it’s really a questionable matter. (male 62 y, iraqi) this has also been emphasized by the finnish media: cheating on taxes and leaving salaries unpaid also skews competition in immigrant businesses (tammi 2019). another problem put forward by one respondent was the finnish social benefit system, which makes a low-wage job disposable income unprofitable: the same sum of money gained from working could be collected as a social benefit. at the same time, it seemed impossible for the entrepreneurs to pay a larger wage, which would have exceeded social benefits. simultaneously, the exploitation of immigrant workers is constantly reported in the local media. asylum seekers and other foreign workers are exploited in construction sites, restaurants, the forest industry, and recently also in the hairdressing industry (yle 2019). in 2018, the police carried out what they characterized as a routine shopping centre check in itäkeskus (puhos) in helsinki, where a cluster of immigrant retail is located. in their bulletin, the police stated that they found two people working illegally, found problems with fire safety in a couple of places, and immediately closed down one shop because of illegal activities (poliisi 2018). clearly, there had also been id checks, because the police statement further reported finding two wanted persons and two persons staying illegally in finland. according to the police, the check was carried out with mutual respect, and similar checks will be done in other shopping centres across helsinki (poliisi 2018). however, these checks have not been similarly 228 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) reported. this would suggest that more preventive work would be needed. again, a key to this is to provide information in native languages. nevertheless, the results from the “shopping centre check” confirms the market place of immigrants as a place of colliding customs, where non-local and local ways of working are reworked and challenged. our results confirm that immigrant entrepreneurship often stems from a non-finnish background, and is then adopted in the more regulated finnish context. discussion we began this paper by emphasizing immigrant entrepreneurs as a new phenomenon in helsinki, and our interest in understanding the motivations of immigrants to become entrepreneurs in a context in which becoming an entrepreneur is typically not very attractive. we have concluded that, through their entrepreneurial activities, immigrants bring their own cultural context, in material terms, typically the food and, as a practice, a truism attitude towards entrepreneurship as a way to financially support oneself, into the finnish local context. in this last section of the paper, we wish to shortly address some issues which we believe to be important regarding the future of immigrant entrepreneurs in helsinki. an important takeaway from this paper is that, although the number of immigrant companies has grown remarkably during the last 10 years in finland, their impact on the economy has been minimal. this has to do particularly with the low salaries that are paid in the jobs created within the companies (malinen & nurmi 2019, 22). we conclude that this is true in particular for the freedom and stability seeker entrepreneurs. moreover, many of the entrepreneurs within the freedom and stability-seekers emphasized that the market has become saturated: there may not be room for many more businesses within the current framework. this would imply a contrast to the optimism shown towards immigrant entrepreneurship by finnish politicians and institutions. on the other hand, jones, ram and villaresvarela (2019, 961) argue in relation to the uk, that even the most marginal business owners create employment for their locality, cater to community needs, and “cushion the social incorporation of new communities into british society”. they thus underline that immigrant entrepreneurship cannot be evaluated only from an economic perspective, but needs to be understood as an impactful social process. for example, despite the high number of iraqis among our respondents, iraqis are part of the ethnic groups with the highest rates of unemployment in finland (sarvimäki 2017). when considering entrepreneurship as a way of gaining access to finnish society, as proposed by the city of helsinki, we noted some variations between the different groups of entrepreneurs identified. within the growthoriented entrepreneurs, it was noted that success can be achieved even when the entrepreneur focuses on “ethnic” products, such as mediterranean cuisine. however, it demands the recognition of the importance of (also) catering to a finnish clientele. the transnational character of immigrant entrepreneurship was used as an asset to find a niche for commercial activities that attract mainstream society. we would argue in line with basu (2011), that being less reliant on co-ethnic labor and prioritizing professional skills over the membership of the ethnic group explained the success of the growth-oriented entrepreneurs. even within the freedom and stability seeker entrepreneurs, we noted an interest towards also expanding services for finnish customers. however, it is perhaps in this context that help from finnish institutions would be most needed in guiding entrepreneurs. to conclude, we would also like to emphasize that helsinki differs from many other european and even nordic cities in terms of being successful in the prevention of segregation (wessel et al. 2017). therefore, the clustering of immigrant retail is an interesting new phenomenon which needs to be addressed by local institutions. in this paper, we argued that it is particularly the freedom and stability seekers that open their businesses where they know they can find a large immigrant clientele. the over-representation of immigrants which the city wants to avoid, is, in other words, seen as an asset by the entrepreneurs. hence, we conclude that immigrant retail is a significant factor which needs to be considered in the further planning of immigrant dense neighbourhoods. 229fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy acknowledgements this study is part of a multidisciplinary project bemine: beyond malpe coordination, integrative envisioning, carried out at the department of architecture, aalto university school of arts, design and architecture. references aldrich, e. & waldinger, r. (1990) ethnicity and entrepreneurship. annual review of sociology 16 111–135. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.16.080190.000551 andersson, p. & wadensjö, e. (2004) self-employed immigrants in denmark and sweden: a way to economic self-reliance? iza discussion paper series no 1130. balampanidis, d. & i. polyzos (2016) migrants´ settlement in two central neighborhoods of athens. city 20(1) 75–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1096052 barrett, g. a, jones, t. p. & mcevoy, d. (1996) ethnic minority business: theoretical discourse in britain and north america. urban studies 33(4–5) 783–809. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420989650011825 basu, a. (2011) from 'break out' to 'breakthrough': successful market strategies of immigrant entrepreneurs in the uk. international journal of entrepreneurship 15 1–23. bilecen, b. gamper, m. & lubbers, m. j. (2018) the missing link: social network analysis in migration and transnationalism. social networks 52(2018) 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2017.07.001 blalock, h. m. (1967) toward a theory of minority-group relations. wiley, new york. bonacich, e. (1973) a theory of middleman minorities. american sociological review 38(5) 583–594. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094409 bonacich, e. & light, i. (1988) immigrant entrepreneurs: koreans in los angeles 1965–1982. university of california press, berkeley and los angeles, ca. city of helsinki (2018) the most functional city in the world. helsinki city strategy 2017–2021. city of helsinki, helsinki. city of helsinki (2019) greater helsinki’s foreign-language population to double by year 2035. <https:// www.hel.fi/uutiset/en/kaupunginkanslia/greater-helsinkis-foreign-language-population-to-double-byyear-2035>. 30.5.2019. van dongen, e. (2019) localizing ethnic entrepreneurship: “chinese” chips shops in belgium, “traditional” food culture, and transnational migration in europe. ethnic and racial studies 42(15) 2566–2584. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2018.1540788 drori, i., honig, b. & wright, m. (2009) transnational entrepreneurship: an emergent field of study. entrepreneurship theory and practice 33(5) 1001–1022. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6520.2009.00332.x fornaro, p. (2018) immigrant entrepreneurship in finland. etla report no 83. <https://pub.etla.fi/ etlaraportit-reports-83.pdf>. 25.4.2019. frese, m. (2015) cultural practices, norms, and values. journal of cross-cultural psychology 46(10) 1327–1330. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022115600267 garton, s. & copland, f. (2010) ‘i like this interview; i get cakes and cats!’: the effect of prior relationships on interview talk. qualitative research 10(5) 533–551. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794110375231 harju, h-m. & vähäsarja, s. (2018) kun kahvila ei saanut toimia kahvilassa, yrittäjä siirsi sen telttakatokseen – porsaanreiät ovat yrittäjille tuttuja, mutta mieluummin purettaisiin normeja. yle 14.5.2018 <https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10200075>. 20.4.2019. hiekkavuo, a. (2017) helsingin ulkomaalaistaustainen väestö vuonna 2016. tilastoja 2017:1. helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus, helsinki. <https://www.hel.fi/hel2/tietokeskus/julkaisut/pdf/17_01_13_ tilastoja_1_hiekkavuo.pdf>. 26.3.2018. hyytinen, a. & pajarinen, m. (2005) yrittäjäksi ryhtyminen ja yrittäjyysasenteet suomessa: havaintoja kyselytutkimuksesta. discussion papers no. 990. the research institute of the finnish economy, helsinki. jacobsson, k. & åkerström, m. (2013) interviewees with an agenda: learning from a ‘failed’ interview. qualitative research 13(6) 717–734. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794112465631 jelena, p. & vesna, l. (2018) entrepreneurship as a mode of integration: experiences of former refugees in belgrade, serbia. glasnik etnografskog instituta sanu 66(3) 641–655. https://doi.org/10.2298/gei1803641p jones, t., ram, m. & villares-varela, m. (2019) diversity, economic development and new migrant entrepreneurs. urban studies 56(5) 960–976. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018765382 kalandides, a. & vaiou, d. (2012) ‘ethnic’ neighbourhoods? practices of belonging and claims to the city. european urban and regional studies 19(3) 254–266. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776412438328 230 research paper fennia 197(2) (2019) kloosterman, r., van der leun, j. & rath, j. (1999) mixed embeddedness: (in)formal economic activities and immigrant businesses in the netherlands. international journal of urban and regional research 23(2) 253–267. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00194 larsen, s. (2015) kymmenen hengen kahvila, sadan tonnin putket. kauppalehti 22.6.2015 <https:// www.kauppalehti.fi/uutiset/kymmenen-hengen-kahvila-sadan-tonnin-putket/35de355f-bec9-3fbc-a59f1a120a7b52b9>. 12.1.2019. leitner, h. & ehrkamp, p. (2006) transnationalism and migrants’ imaginings of citizenship. environment and planning a: economy and space 38(9) 1615–1632. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37409 light, i. h. (1972) ethnic enterprise in america: business and welfare among chinese, japanese, and blacks. university of california, berkeley, ca. light, i. & gold, s. (2000) ethnic economies. academic press, bingley, united kingdom malinen, m. & nurmi, s. (2019) maahanmuuttajataustaiset, paikalliset ja globaalit yritykset suomen työpaikkaja tuotantorakenteiden muutoksessa. etla raportit – reports 91. <https://pub.etla.fi/ etla-raportit-reports-91.pdf> 5.5.2019. manderson, l., bennett, e. & andajani-sutjahjo, s. (2006) the social dynamics of the interview: age, class, and gender. qualitative health research 16(10) 1317–1334. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732306294512 martín-montaner, j., serrano-domingo, g. & requena-silvente, f. (2018) networks and self-employed migrants. small business economics 51(3) 735–755. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-017-9962-7 masurel, e., nijkamp, p. & vindigni, g. (2004) breeding places for ethnic entrepreneurs: a comparative marketing approach. entrepreneurship & regional development 16(1) 77–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/0898562042000205045 nee, v. & wong, h. y. (1985) asian american socioeconomic achievement: the strength of the family bond. sociological perspectives 28(3) 281–306. https://doi.org/10.2307/1389149 newco helsinki (2017) immigrant entrepreneurs. how to become an entrepreneur in finland? <https:// newcohelsinki.fi/lupamateriaali/immigrantentrepreneurs_how_to_become_an_entrepreneur_in_ finland.pdf>. 2.7.2019. osaghae, o. & cooney, t. (2019) exploring the relationship between immigrant enclave theory and transnational diaspora entrepreneurial opportunity formation. journal of ethnic and migration studies [online feb 7 2019] https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2018.1560001 parzer, m. & czingon, c. (2013) break-out in turkish food retailing – new perspectives on the social embeddedness of immigrant economies. österreichische zeitschrift für soziologie 38(1) 55–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-013-0069-3 poliisi (2018) puotinharjun ostoskeskuksen valvonnan aikana kirjattiin kaksi rikosilmoitusta: "operaatio sujui kaiken kaikkiaan rauhallisesti ja kaikkien osapuolten osalta erittäin hyvässä hengessä". <https://www.poliisi.fi/helsinki/tiedotteet/1/0/puotinharjun_ostoskeskuksen_valvonnan_aikana_ kirjattiin_kaksi_rikosilmoitusta_operaatio_sujui_kaiken_kaikkiaan_rauhallisesti_ja_kaikkien_osapuolten_ osalta_erittain_hyvassa_hengessa_67912>. 20.4.2019. rafiq, m. (1992) ethnicity and enterprice: a comparison of muslim and non-muslim owned asian businesses in britain. new community 19(1) 43–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.1992.9976341 ram, m. & hillin, g. (1994) achieving ‘break-out’: developing mainstream ethnic minority businesses. journal of small business and enterprise development 1(2) 15–21. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb020936 ram, m. & jones, t. (1998) ethnic minorities in business. small business research trust, milton keynes. ram, m. & jones, t. (2008) ethnic minorities in business. the small enterprise research team, open university business school, walton hall, milton keyes. <http://www.open.ac.uk/business-school/sites/ www.open.ac.uk.business-school/files/file/publications/download/ethnic%20minorities%20in%20 business%202008.pdf>. 15.5.2019. rath, j. & kloosterman, r. (2002) the economic context, embeddedness and immigrant entrepreneurs. international journal of entrepreneurial behavior & research 8(1/2) https://doi.org/10.1108/ijebr.2002.16008aaa.001 razin, e. (2002) conclusion the economic context, embeddedness and immigrant entrepreneurs. international journal of entrepreneurial behavior & research 8(1/2) 162–167. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552550210428061 rolshoven, j. (2008) the temptations of the provisional. multilocality as a way of life. in ethnologia europaea: journal of european ethnology 37(1–2) 17–25. sarvimäki, m. (2017) labor market integration of refugees in finland. vatt research reports 185. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2921095 saxenian, a. & sabel, c. (2008) roepke lecture in economic geography venture capital in the “periphery”: the new argonauts, global search, and local institution building. economic geography 84(4) 379–394. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1944-8287.2008.00001.x siltala, j. (2017) keskiluokan nousu, lasku ja pelot. otava, helsinki. 231fennia 197(2) (2019) johanna lilius & hossam hewidy stark, s. & torrance, h. (2005) part ii, chapter 3. in somekh, b. & lewin, c. (eds.) research methods in the social sciences london, 41–48. sage publications (uk) statistics finland (2018) population with foreign background in helsinki. <https:// ulkomaalaistaustaisethelsingissa.fi/en/content/population-foreign-background-helsinki>. 24.5.2019. suomalainen, s., stenholm, p. kovalainen, a., heinonen, j. & pukkinen, t. (2016) global entrepreneurship monitor. finnish 2015 report, series a research reports a1/2016. global entrepreneurship research association, turku. <https://tem.fi/documents/1410877/2132284/gem+2015/272cebde1b2c-4fef-949e-f3609f0fbfa3>. 20.12.2019. tammi, s. (2019) järjestöt: ravintoloiden hyväksikäyttötapaukset uhkaavat tuoda suomeen kahdet työmarkkinat, mutta kaikkia etnisiä ravintoloita ei pidä leimata. helsingin sanomat 30.3.2019 <https://www.hs.fi/talous/art-2000006053789.html>. 1.2.2019. vacca, r., solano, g., lubbers, m. j., molina, j. l. & mccarty, c. (2016) a personal network approach to the study of immigrant structural assimilation and transnationalism. social networks 53 72–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2016.08.007 vilkama, k., vaattovaara, m. & dhalmann, h. (2013) kantaväestön pakoa? miksi maahanmuuttajakeskittymistä muutetaan pois? yhteiskuntapolitiikka 78(5) 485–497. waldinger, r. (1986) through the eye of the needle: immigrants and enterprise in new york's garment trades. new york university press, new york. waldinger, r., ward, r., howard, a. & stanfield, j. (1990) ethnic entrepreneurs: immigrant business in industrial societies. university of illinois at urbana-champaign’s academy for entrepreneurial leadership historical research reference in entrepreneurship. wessel, t., andersson, r., kauppinen, t. & skifter andersen, h. (2017) spatial integration of immigrants in nordic cities: the relevance of spatial assimilation theory in a welfare state context. urban affairs review 53(5) 812–842. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087416638448 wilson, k. l. & martin, w. a. (1982) ethnic enclaves: a comparison of the cuban and black economies in miami. american journal of sociology 88(1) 135–160. https://doi.org/10.1086/227637 wilson, k. l. & portes, a. (1980) immigrant enclaves: an analysis of the labor market experiences of cubans in miami. american journal of sociology 86(2) 295–319. https://doi.org/10.1086/227240 volery, t. (2007) ethnic entrepreneurship: a theoretical framework. in dana, l. p. (ed.) handbook of research on ethnic minority entrepreneurship, 30–41. edgar publishing, uk & usa. yle (2019) police investigate the long days and low pay of undocumented hairdressers. mot 11.8.2019 <https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/mot_police_investigate_the_long_days_and_low_pay_of_ undocumented_hairdressers/10917738>. 5.11.2019. yu, s. (2018) mobilocality. urban geography 39(4) 563–586. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1375825 21846_4_partanen.indd changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large boreal lakes in finland with special reference to water level regulation sari partanen and seppo hellsten partanen, sari & seppo hellsten (2005). changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large boreal lakes in finland with special reference to water level regulation. fennia 183: 1, pp. 57–79. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. the latest studies on the development of aquatic vegetation in finland have mainly focused on relatively small lakes. research on emergent macrophytes in large lakes poses challenges as the habitats as well as the conditions of the lakes vary. black and white aerial photographs from 1947–1963 and colour, mainly infrared aerial photographs from 1996–2000 were used to study quantitative vegetation changes in seven large (80–1116 km2) lakes in finland: kemijärvi, unnukka, kallavesi, päijänne, näsijärvi, pyhäjärvi and vanajavesi. vegetation changes were evaluated by comparing the situation before large-scale water level regulation and eutrophication to the current situation. quantitative changes in emergent vegetation were frequently noticeable. vegetation had decreased by 31–93% in three study lakes due to the mean water level rise and increased by 49–73% in three study lakes due to the spring flood reduction and suitable surrounding soils. the cover changes were in general relatively uniform between different study sites in each of the study lakes. the regulated and unregulated situations differed statistically from each other. the results point out the crucial impact of changing water levels and the significance of the surrounding soils to the cover of emergent aquatic vegetation. sari partanen & seppo hellsten, finnish environment institute, research department, research programme for integrated river basin management, po box 413, fi-90014 university of oulu, finland. e-mails: sari.partanen@ymparisto.fi, seppo.hellsten@ymparisto.fi. ms submitted 08 october 2004. introduction many large lakes in finland have now been reported to be in improved condition after the era of industrial, agricultural and human effluents during the 1960s–1970s and the start of water level regulation in the 1950s (sarvala 1996; granberg 1998; riihimäki et al. 2003). despite favourable development, a significant increase in emergent macrophytes has been observed and sheltered bays in large lakes have started to overgrow (e.g. rintanen 1996; hellsten 2000). aquatic vegetation reflects the local conditions of the littoral zone while those of open lake areas can differ greatly from the state of a sheltered shore (toivonen 1984). eutrophication has been commonly seen as an important factor for the vegetation increase (suominen 1968; kurimo 1970; uotila 1971; mäkirinta 1978a) as well as the lowering of the water level (anttonenheikkilä 1983; rørslett 1991). on the other hand, totally opposite observations have also been reported, especially related to increased erosion due to regulation (hellsten & riihimäki 1996; hellsten 2001). earlier studies on aquatic macrophyte changes in lacustrine littoral environments in finland have been mostly conducted in smaller eutrophicated lakes (hinneri 1965; meriläinen & toivonen 1979; toivonen 1983; toivonen & bäck 1989; toivonen & nybom 1989; rintanen 1996; leka et al. 2003). with inadequate historic field data the actual longterm changes of emergent macrophyte communities in large lakes has not been researched with the exception of the floristic studies of rintanen (1996). most studies are based on a comparison between reference lakes (hellsten & riihimäki 1996; hellsten 2001) and seldom on data before regulation (hellsten 2002). aerial photographs 58 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten have been utilized in emergent macrophyte studies for decades in finland (jussilainen & eloranta 1976; mäkirinta 1991; valta-hulkkonen et al. 2003b). as the usual method for large lakes studies is the transect or square method, the lack of both spatial and temporal data for larger boreal lakes in finland is evident. the value of historical data and aerial photographs on emergent macrophyte changes over time is well acknowledged. the subject, as well as the method, has been studied lately vividly (dömötörfy et al. 2003; valta-hulkkonen et al. 2003a; fredriksen et al. 2004) also due to the need of geographic data for the eu water framework directive (jäger et al. 2004). the actual cover changes of emergent aquatic vegetation in large boreal lakes have been previously researched by andersson (1972, 2001). in this study we included the main factors affecting on the coverage of emergent aquatic macrophyte vegetation in large boreal lakes. historical aerial photographs and visual aerial photograph interpretation were used to enable a comparison of the emergent macrophyte cover changes over the time period of approximately 50 years. the following questions and aims were addressed: 1) is there a measurable change in the cover of emergent macrophytes in large lake environments? and 2) which are the major environmental lake specific factors causing the change? theoretical background aquatic macrophytes phytogeographical research focuses on the past and present distribution and occurrence of vegetation. it studies vegetation changes in different habitats and the components affecting that. vegetation species form the prerequisites of botanic geography, certain species form the local flora, and species growing with each other form communities and finally the vegetation of the area. vegetation communities can be further classified according to their physiognomic-ecological structural features of environmental adaptation (kalliola 1973). aquatic vegetation can be divided according to structure and environmental adaptation into life forms (mäkirinta 1978b). the classification is based on three morphological basic criteria consisting of the occurrence of emergent, floating and submergent leaves. the main life forms are thus helophytes, nymphaeids, isoetids, lemnids, elodeids, ceratophyllids, charids and bryids. aquatic vegetation plays an important role in many littoral functions of the aquatic ecosystem in boreal lakes. a well-developed vegetation zone protects the shoreline from erosion, impedes nutrients flowing from the shore and affects the quality and quantity of bottom sediment (pearsall 1920; spence 1982). it provides a habitat for epiphytic algae and benthic fauna as well as prey and reproduction areas for fish (tikkanen et al. 1988). macrophytes work as indicators of the general ecological status of waters. the recent eu water framework directive emphasizes the littoral zone of lakes as an indicator of the ecological status of the entire lake (e.g. janauer 2003). certain environmental and biological factors determine the quality and quantity of the vegetation at a given location. the main geographical factors affecting the growth of aquatic vegetation locally are water level fluctuation (rørslett 1989), exposure (segal 1971; keddy 1983; weisner 1991), bottom quality (barko & smart 1983), the amount of light (spence 1982) and water quality (ilmavirta & toivonen 1986). water level regulation most of the largest lakes in finland are regulated and one third of the total area of lakes is regulated. lake regulation originates in finland mainly from the 1950s and the main purposes for it are flood protection and hydropower energy production as well as acquiring suitable conditions for ship traffic, industry, agriculture and recreation (marttunen et al. 2001). in a natural lake the water level variation follows a certain natural yearly rhythm. the water stored in snow and ice during the winter results in diminished flow and water level lowering towards the spring. melting snow increases the water volume and this causes the spring flood. the spring flood goes down through increased evaporation and when the snow has melted. at the end of the summer, the water level is slightly raised by the autumn rains and decreased evaporation. in the natural situation, the mean and lowest water levels are relatively stable from year to year, but the highest water level can alternate largely depending on the weather conditions during the spring (keränen 1980). with regulation the natural variation is altered and water levels are either lowered or raised according to human benefits (quennerstedt 1958; hejny 1971). in the northern part of the europe the water levels are raised at the beginning of the fennia 183: 1 (2005) 59changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … regulation to increase the storage capacity of the lake (nilsson 1981; rørslett 1988; hellsten 1997). the water level is lowered during the winter to maximize the production of electricity when it is most needed. during the early spring the water level is lower compared to its natural state and the spring flood is delayed towards the summer or is cut down totally. the summer water level is held fairly high. water level fluctuation is an important factor in the ecology of macrophytes and it usually determines the plant zonation in the littoral zone (quennerstedt 1958; hejny 1971; hellsten 2001). the vegetation is distributed in accordance to the depth, amount of light and life forms into zones along with the summer water level (mäkirinta 1978a). over a long period of time the water level fluctuation affects the selection of different species and ecotypes (hejny 1971). the ability of different species to tolerate flooding and drought becomes a significant selective factor (anttonen-heikkilä 1983). the intense continuous fluctuation of water levels during the different growing seasons results in the fracture of the developed vegetation zones and the nature of the lake can totally change with an unnatural water level fluctuation (quennerstedt 1958). many research works related to water level regulation and aquatic macrophytes have been done only concerning submergent vegetation (rørslett 1989). the responses to water level regulation, and their ecology and physiology are very much different for emergent helophytes and nymphaeids (rørslett 1989). the helophytes are primarily affected by the water level changes whereas the large isoetids and some nymphaeids are more exposed to the ice (hellsten 2001). study areas the study lakes kemijärvi, unnukka, näsijärvi, kallavesi, päijänne, vanajavesi and pyhäjärvi are situated in north-eastern europe in finland (fig. 1). seven boreal and regulated lakes were chosen, as the study material was collected during the years 1998–2003 in connection with the following projects: the development of regulation of lake päijänne 1995–1999 (hellsten 2000), the development of regulation of kallavesi and unnukka 1999–2001 (hellsten et al. 2002a), the development of regulation of näsijärvi, pyhäjärvi and vanajavesi (riihimäki et al. 2003) and the lake kemijärvi case study of designation of a lake as heavily modified (marttunen & hellsten 2003). the study lakes form the head basins of almost all major drainage basins in finland (fig. 1). lake kemijärvi is the central basin of the kemijoki drainage basin, which is the second biggest drainage basin in finland. it empties its waters to the bothnian bay. lake unnukka and lake kallavesi belong to the drainage basin of vuoksi, which is the biggest drainage basin in finland with its waters running through russia to the gulf of finland. lake näsijärvi, lake pyhäjärvi and lake vanajavesi belong to the kokemäenjoki drainage basin area, which is the fourth biggest drainage basin in finland and its waters run through the river kokemäenjoki to the gulf of bothnia. lake päijänne belongs to the kymijoki drainage basin, the third largest in finland, which discharges into the gulf of finland through the river kymijoki. the seven study lakes can be regarded to be large on a finnish scale (maristo 1941) as they all exceed 80–90 km2 in size. the kemijärvi kallavesi unnukka päijänne näsijärvi pyhäjärvi vanajavesi sweden russia finland norway bothnian bay gulf of bothnia gulf of finland 32º 60º n 0 50 100 km fig. 1. geographical location of the lakes kemijärvi, unnukka, näsijärvi, kallavesi, päijänne, vanajavesi and pyhäjärvi and their location in the major drainage basins in finland. 60 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten table 1. the main hydrogeographical properties of the research lakes from the finnish environment institute database. the length of the lake is measured from the map. total nitrogen (n-tot), total phosphorous (p-tot), water colour and chlorophyll-a median values of the surface water (0–2 m) from long term measurement stations during june–august 1990–1997 (pietiläinen & räike 1999). lake variables kemijärvi unnukka näsijärvi kallavesi päijänne vanajavesi pyhäjärvi surface area (km2) 231 80 256 473 1116 160 122 length of the shoreline (km) 572 478 595 1700 2706 395 450 mean depth (m) 5.2 7.5 13.0 12.1 18.1 5.5 6.2 volume of the water (km3) 1.45 0.61 2.76 4.86 15.32 1.03 0.83 river basin area above the lake in outlet (km2) 27,424 17,338 7672 17,338 26,459 2739 17,073 duration of the ice free period (d) 173 195 220 202 208 222 217 mean water level (m) 147.28 81.16 95.02 81.58 78.24 79.15 76.84 length of the lake (km) 36 24 44 60 120 38 27 n-tot (µg/l) 318 510 510 600 490 980 630 p-tot (µg/l) 16.0 15.0 14.0 17.0 13.0 36.0 25.0 colour (mg pt/l) 80 40 40 50 35 48 35 chlorophyll-a (µg/l) 6.7 7.8 4.4 6.4 4.4 9.2 10.0 table 2. study sites and their characteristics with the dominant shore use and the soil type based on base maps of the national land survey of finland and soil maps of the geological survey of finland. *exact information not available due to incomplete mapping. study lake study site study site characteristics dominant shore use dominant soil type näsijärvi pengonpohja large deep and open bay forest recreational sandy moraine pöllöselkä large and open bay forest agriculture rock and clay siivikkala small sheltered shallow bay settlement sandy moraine aitolahti large and open bay forest agriculture sandy moraine vanajavesi uskilanlahti shallow sheltered bay agriculture settlement clay heinunlahti open and large bay forest agriculture settlement peat and sandy moraine kapeikko narrow shallow sheltered settlement agriculture clay pyhäjärvi saviselkä open shores and minor bays agriculture settlement clay and sandy moraine vakkalanselkä open shores sheltered bays forest agriculture sandy moraine and clay vesilahti open shores sheltered bays agriculture sandy moraine and clay päijänne vähä-äiniö open shores forest sand vähäniemi shallow bay and small peninsulas forest settlement agriculture sandy moraine and sand mustalahti open and deep bay forest sandy moraine virmaila deep and open shore forest sandy moraine kankarniemi deep and sheltered forest agriculture sandy moraine kuhmalahti shallow and sheltered agriculture settlement sandy moraine and clay säynätlahti open deep and shallow forest agriculture settlement sandy moraine pihlajalahti sheltered deep and shallow forest settlement sandy moraine and rock viisti variable settlement agriculture * ruolahti sheltered forest sandy moraine and clay rutalahti shallow agriculture settlement sandy moraine and clay unnukka leveäsaari shallow island group surrounded by sub-basin forest settlement rock and sandy moraine varkaus shallow and sheltered settlement agriculture sandy moraine and clay kallavesi lamperila open forest agriculture settlement sandy moraine autioranta open forest agriculture settlement * vaajasalo variable settlement forest agriculture * puutossalmi open settlement agriculture sandy moraine sotkanniemi mainly shallow agriculture forest sandy moraine and clay koirusvesi open and deep forest sandy moraine and rock kemijärvi kokkoselkä open islands and mainland forest * termusniemi open and deep forest agriculture settlement * kaippiosaari former flood islands varying 0.5–2.2 km in size, now under water due inundation none * ollinsaari none * koivusaari none * lammassaari none * fennia 183: 1 (2005) 61changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … n kankarniemi virmaila lamperila lake unnukkalake päijännelake vanajavesi lake kallavesi lake kemijärvi lake pyhäjärvi lake näsijärvi varkaus leveäsaari koirusvesi sotkanniemi puutosselkä vaajasalo autioranta rutalahti ruolahti viistipihlajalahti säynätlahti kuhmalahti mustalahti vähäniemi vähä-äiniökapeikko heinunlahti uskilanlahti vesilahti vakkalanselkä saviselkä kokkoselkä kaippiosaari ollinsaari koivusaari lammassaari termusniemi aitolahtisiivikkala pöllöselkäpengonpohja 0 5 10 km 0 5 10 km 0 5 10 km 0 5 10 km 0 7 14 km 0 5 10 15 20 km 0 5 10 km fig. 2. study lakes and the location of the study sites. refer to table 4 for details in aerial photography. shoreline of the lakes is alternating, and the lake basins are characteristically relatively shallow, but vary in size and depth (table 1). larger bays and numerous islands are typical and the open waters usually remain relatively limited in size which is characteristic for large finnish lakes (vaarama 1961). study lakes are divided into study sites (see fig. 2) and detailed description of study lakes and study sites is found in tables 1 and 2. climate all the other study lakes belong to the south boreal region and are situated in the lake district except lake kemijärvi, which belongs to the north boreal climate region. the duration of the growing season (>5 ºc) is 160–175 days in the south boreal and 100–140 days in the north boreal (hämetahti 1988). the effective temperature sum during 62 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten the growing season varies approximately between 1100–1250 ºc in the south boreal region and stays under 900 ºc in the north boreal. the duration of the ice free period in every lake is in table 1. the annual precipitation varies between 600–750 mm a year in the study area. the duration of snow cover on open ground varies between 130–160 days in the south boreal region and 180–200 days in the north boreal (solantie 1987). the mean monthly temperatures in each study year during may, june, july and august in hattula, tampere and kuopio are in table 3. soil geology the majority of the lake shores of the study lakes are covered with moraine formations. the drainage basin of lake kemijärvi consists of moraine (nenonen 1987). the soils in the unnukka research area are mainly sandy moraines, more moraines and outcrops are found from northern unnukka, compared to the clay rich areas in the south (kejonen 1989; huttunen 1990). a uniform moraine layer largely covers the kallavesi study area. sandy areas are most common in central kallavesi, whereas clay areas form a notable part of the shoreline in the north and south (vaarama 1938). the surroundings around näsijärvi are largely formed of uncovered bedrock or thin soils with an influence of moraine deposits along the whole shoreline. rocky shores are more common in the open lake areas. sheltered bays occasionally have considerable silt and clay occurrence (virkkala 1959; kejonen 1985). lake päijänne is bordered in the south by the glacial end-formation salpausselkä, which contains assorted material and moraine. päijänne is well known for eskers, which are most dominant in south. the widest and most continuous clay areas are situated on bay shores in central päijänne (teräsvirta 1978). lake vanajavesi and pyhäjärvi are dominated with more clayey soils. the bedrock along the vanajavesi is covered with thick moraine deposits or eskers, specially along the vanajanselkä. silty clay is most common of mineral soils of finer texture, which are restricted to the edges of the bays. organic soils are most prevalent on the shores of large bays (virkkala 1961; uotila 1971; kae 1980). the soils in the pyhäjärvi region are principally dominated by silt and clay but uncovered bedrock and moraine formations are generally prevailing as well (virkkala 1959; perttunen 1976). limnological properties in the limnological classification of lakes, järnefelt (1952) divided finnish lakes into three main categories: oligotrophic, eutrophic and dystrophic. the lakes kemijärvi, päijänne, kallavesi, unnukka and näsijärvi belong to the dystrophic type characterized by the water of yellowish or brownish colour resulting from dissolved or colloidal humic material. the southern end of päijänne is in the limits of dystrophic and oligotrophic. pyhäjärvi and vanajavesi belong to the eutrophic limnological lake classification, and are classified as rich in nutrients (järnefelt 1952). the current general water quality classification in finland divides waters into five classes: excellent, good, satisfactory, passable and poor according to different physical and chemical variables (see vuoristo 1998 for details). the latest water quality classification covers the period of 2000–2003. lakes päijänne and näsijärvi belong to the classes excellent and good and lake unnukka to the class good. lakes kallavesi and kemijärvi belong to the classes good and satisfactory. lakes pyhäjärvi and vanajavesi are only reaching the status of satisfactory, with some parts of the lake representing the status of passable. the present general water quality of all study lakes is shown in table 1. table 3. the mean monthly temperatures in hattula leteensuo (61º04’, 24º15’) representing lake vanajavesi and lake päijänne, in tampere (61º30’, 23º46’, during the year 1998 location 61º28’, 23º45’ and year 2000 location 61º25’, 23º35’) representing lake näsijärvi and lake pyhäjärvi and in kuopio rissala (63º01’/00’, 27º48’) representing lake kallavesi and lake unnukka during the study years. station year may june july august hattula 1950 9.5 14.8 14.9 15.1 1952 7.7 13.5 15.5 13.1 1953 9.4 16.9 16.2 14.6 1999 7.7 17.6 18.0 14.4 1961–1991 9.8 14.7 16.2 14.5 tampere 1947 9.9 16.1 17.5 15.7 1949 11.1 13.0 16.1 13.9 1950 9.0 14.5 15.0 15.3 1998 9.2 14.0 15.8 13.5 2000 10.3 13.9 16.0 14.2 1961–1990 9.5 14.6 16.3 14.5 kuopio 1951 5.0 13.0 14.7 17.3 1952 5.9 13.5 15.8 13.2 1963 12.4 13.0 16.1 15.6 1996 – – – – 1999 6.4 18.4 17.8 13.9 1961–1990 8.8 14.6 16.8 14.5 fennia 183: 1 (2005) 63changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … vegetation phytogeographically finland is divided into four different major regions (hämet-ahti 1988). all study lakes besides kemijärvi are in the second southernmost category, the south boreal region. kemijärvi belongs to the northernmost category, the north boreal region (hämet-ahti 1988). on a floristic-ecological basis finland can be divided into botanical lake type areas (maristo 1941). based on this classification, lake pyhäjärvi and lake vanajavesi are categorized as eutrophic typha–alisma and schoenoplectus lacustris type. lakes näsijärvi, päijänne, kallavesi and unnukka are furthermore classified into the oligotrophic phragmites type and lake kemijärvi into the oligotrophic carex type. the present flora of the lakes has been researched previously by hellsten (2000), hellsten (2002), hellsten et al. (2002a) and riihimäki et al. (2003). most frequent and abundant from present helophytes on lakes are water horsetail (equisetum fluviatile), common reed (phragmites australis), slender tufted-sedge (carex acuta), reed sweetgrass (glyceria maxima) and common club-rush (schoenoplectus lacustris), and from nymphaeids yellow water-lily (nuphar lutea) and amphibious bistort (persicaria amphibia). lake kemijärvi the river kemijoki and two artificial reservoirs bring their waters to lake kemijärvi (66º45’– 66º29’) and it empties its waters to the river kemijoki via a power plant. the lake is characterized by vast open sub-basins and extreme water level regulation. the water levels in lake kemijärvi are regulated mostly for hydroelectric power production but also for flood protection purposes. the regulation interval is almost 7 m being the most intensive in finland (marttunen & hellsten 2003). from point source pollution the biggest wastewater producer is a cellulose factory established in 1965. compared to the industrial wastes, human effluents are not significant in kemijärvi (nenonen 1987). the artificial basins lokka and porttipahta built in 1967–1970 affect the nutrient load. lake unnukka lake unnukka (62º30’–62º18’) receives its waters north from lake kallavesi and empties its waters to the south. lake unnukka is characterized by numerous large and small islands filling the lake and having a few smaller sub-basins in-between the islands. the current regulation started benefiting water traffic, hydropower energy production, recreation and farming. the yearly water level interval has been only 0.2 m, which is the smallest regulation interval in finland (marttunen et al. 2002). in lake unnukka the human impact to the waters can be distinguished from the 1960s onwards. kurimo (1970) classified the waters in southern unnukka affected by domestic sewage and farming while northern unnukka remained uncontaminated. the water quality surveyed from 1965 onwards shows slight improvements, these days being mesotrophic (hellsten et al. 2002a). lake näsijärvi the waters in lake näsijärvi (61º30’–61º53’) run south towards lake pyhäjärvi. typical for lake näsijärvi are the large sub-basins and many large bays situated in an east-west direction. water level regulation has been mainly planned to benefit hydropower production. the water quality in lake näsijärvi varies between good and excellent with only a few minor bay areas being satisfactory. the wastewater loading to lake näsijärvi peaked at the turn of the 1970s when purification was just starting. the essential turning point was also the ceasing of the pulp and paper industry in southwestern näsijärvi in 1985. the current non-point source loading to lake näsijärvi is insignificant (oravainen 2002). lake kallavesi two large watercourses empty their waters into lake kallavesi (62º30’–63º06’). the lake is divided into various sub-basins and islands of diverse nature. the water level regulation started in lake kallavesi together with lake unnukka and its benefits are equally directed. in kallavesi the water level regulation has been very mild and possibilities for the regulation are also limited (marttunen et al. 2002). the water quality coming to lake kallavesi has been surveyed from the beginning of the 1960s. however no clear trends for change has been found and there are large differences in the water quality and nutrient content between areas. northern kallavesi is strongly mesotrophic, but the water quality changes towards having fewer nutrients in the south (hellsten et al. 2002a). according to the classification, the water quality in lake kallavesi is mainly good, but in 64 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten northern kallavesi and in many bay areas it is satisfactory. lake päijänne lake päijänne (61º10’–62º15’) is the third largest lake in finland and the deepest point of 95 m in finnish inland waters is located in päijänne. lake päijänne receives its waters from 6 different drainage basins in the north, east and west, and they flow towards the south. characteristic to päijänne are the several east to west directed large bay areas and numerous sub-basins. to prevent rare but harmful floods lake päijänne has been regulated and regulation is also beneficial to industry, log floating and water traffic. lake päijänne is widely known for its almost pristine water quality and the waters in southern päijänne belong to the excellent classification. waters in northern päijänne are classified as good and in a few bay areas good and satisfactory. generally the water quality improves towards the south. as a consequence of the location of bigger cities and industrial areas in the north and west, northern päijänne has been an object for greater effluent loads during history, especially in 1960–1985. even if the water quality remains excellent in open lake areas, sheltered bays and bottom areas suffer from eutrophication and its side-effects (granberg 1998). lake vanajavesi the waters from lake vanajavesi (61º14’–60º57’) run towards lake pyhäjärvi. major parts of the lake are the narrow and shallow straits and the larger, deeper and more open sub-basin with few smaller bays. the water levels are regulated with the purpose to help farming, log floating and hydropower energy (marttunen et al. 2000). lake vanajavesi is a nutrient rich and turbid lake. the nutrient levels in loaded areas have had a descending trend lately (hakaste 1999) and the water quality has been improving. the agricultural load is substantial and the lake receives wastewaters from the cities. the water quality in the 1970s was classified partly as heavily polluted. at the turn of 1960–1970 many factories, villages and the city of hämeenlinna discharged their almost untreated wastes to lake vanajavesi. the pulp factory and city of tervakoski also affected the water quality flowing from the south-east to lake vanajavesi (uotila 1971). lake pyhäjärvi lake pyhäjärvi (61º30’–61º14’) receives its waters from the direction of lake vanajavesi through a canal. lake pyhäjärvi is a long, partly narrow and sheltered lake with a chain of the larger sub-basins. the water levels have been regulated mainly to help farming, log floating and hydropower energy (marttunen et al. 2000). the water quality in lake pyhäjärvi resembles lake vanajavesi being nutrient rich and turbid (hakaste 1999). the development of the water quality has been most affected by the era of extensive human activities including industrial and wastewaters from the 1950s to 1960s. after the 1970s the water quality has been improved dramatically with the start of water purification practices for both industrial and human effluents. materials and methods vegetation cover aerial photographs are the most applied method for aquatic macrophyte mapping (lillesand & kiefer 1994). the main materials used in this study have been black and white aerial photographs from 1947 to 1963 and colour, mainly infrared, aerial photographs from 1996 to 2000 (table 4). only photographs from the later summer months, july to september, have been primarily used due to the nature of the growing season of aquatic vegetation. the scale of the photos varied between 1:7000 and 1:30,000. digital base maps and the digital coastline of 1:20,000 from the digital finnish base map has been used. the methods used in this study restrict the interpretation mainly to visible aquatic macrophytes, helophytes and nymphaeids, as they outnumber the two biggest macrophyte cover classes in larger boreal lakes (andersson 2001; valta-hulkkonen et al. 2003a). the visual aerial photo interpretation was carried out using the gis softwares arcview and mapinfo. the aerial photographs were scanned with an accuracy of 400 dpi. the obtained digital image was geo-referenced with the digital finnish base map with common reference points. the vegetation was digitized using the digital coastline 1:20,000 as a reference layer. stereo glasses were used to obtain a three-dimensional view from the fennia 183: 1 (2005) 65changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … table 4. the date, map scale, quality and the place of acquisition of the aerial photographs, and the length of the studied shoreline. *unable to calculate the present shoreline due to inundation of the studied islands. lake study area date of photography map scale and the type of the aerial photographs photographer length of the studied shoreline (km) kemijärvi kokkoselkä 16.7.1959 1:30,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 14.0 11.7.1997 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy termusniemi 16.7.1957 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces 9.0 25.7.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy kaippiosaari 16.7.1957 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces * 25.7.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy ollinsaari 16.7.1957 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces * 25.7.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy koivusaari 16.7.1957 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces * 25.7.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy lammassaari 16.7.1957 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces * 25.7.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy unnukka leveäsaari 23.7.1963 1:25,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 37.1 14.8.1999 1:22,432 color slide jari venetvaara oy varkaus 23.7.1963 1:25,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 21.7 14.8.1999 1:22,432 color slide jari venetvaara oy näsijärvi pengonpohja 29.8.1949 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 15.5 15.9.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy pöllöselkä 4.8.1950 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 18.6 26.6.1998 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy siivikkala 21.6.1947 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 6.7 26.6.1998 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy aitolahti 21–22.6.1947 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 32.7 26.6.1998 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy kallavesi lamperila 14.7.1951 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces 10.2 3.8.1999 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy autioranta 14.7.1951 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces 8.1 4.8.1999 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy vaajasalo 14.7.1951 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces 6.1 19.7.1999 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy puutossalmi 24.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces 20.0 2.8.1999 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy sotkanniemi 24.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces 19.8 20.8.1996 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy koirusvesi 19.6.1952 1:20,000 bw paper the finnish defence forces 13.2 18.8.1996 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy päijänne vähä-äiniö 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 2.8 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy vähäniemi 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 8.2 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy mustalahti 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 5.3 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy virmaila 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 5.5 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy kankarniemi 9.7.1952 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 3.2 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy kuhmalahti 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 5.0 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy säynätlahti 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 5.6 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy pihlajalahti 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 5.3 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy viisti 5.8.1951 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 3.8 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy ruolahti 13.8.1953 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 1.3 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy rutalahti 13.8.1953 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 6.3 21–25.7.1996 1: 7000 color slide jari venetvaara oy vanajavesi uskilanlahti 21–23.6.1953 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 9.1 14.8.1999 1:22,432 color slide jari venetvaara oy heinunlahti 11.8.1950 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 16.8 14.8.1999 1:22,432 color slide jari venetvaara oy kapeikko 9.7.1952 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 42.3 21–23.6.1953 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 14.8.1999 1:22,432 color slide jari venetvaara oy pyhäjärvi saviselkä 22.6.1947 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 21.5 26.6.1998 1:30,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy vakkalanselkä 23.6.1947 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 11.6 16.9.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy vesilahti 23.6.1947 1:20,000 bw paper national land survey of finland 16.1 16.9.2000 1:20,000 cir paper fm-kartta oy 66 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten former material when necessary. similar methodology has been used in the macrophyte study by valta-hulkkonen et al. (2003a). study sites were outlined to be the same sections of the shoreline of the former and the current aerial data. the length of the researched shoreline was measured. no aerial interpretation has been carried out without personally surveying the study site in the field except päijänne, which was reinterpreted, from a previous study. the length of the investigated shoreline varied from lake to lake according to the availability of the aerial photography material and the current project funding and needs. unfortunately the later aerial photographs from lake vanajavesi, lake päijänne and lake unnukka were only available in slide format with a large map scale and were transferred into gis manually. hydrological analysis the analysis of actual measured daily water level fluctuation (fig. 3) is based on regulated and natural water levels over a certain period of time (marttunen et al. 2000; hellsten et al. 2002b). the time series varied from lake to lake, but in principle a 20 years period before the aerial photography was used. a general water level analysis is shown in table 5. this water level analysis is based on the regcel-application (hellsten et al. 2002b). the regcel water level analysis tool was developed in the finnish environment institute (syke) between the years 1999–2000. it calculates more than thirty parameters of daily water level values. the water levels are based on regulated and natural water levels. the natural water levels are re-calculated from the regulated water levels. the identification of water level characteristics as indicators was made in several research projects published in a review by marttunen et al. (2001). water level duration of the open-water period was determined according to hellsten (1997). the fluctuation range is bound to the finnish metric altitude levels (nn+ or n43+). statistical analysis the number of lakes was low and the length of the shoreline of different study sites varied such that the statistical analysis for the previous and current situation was not performed on actual coverage per study site, but on vegetation coverage in hectares per studied shore kilometre in each study site. all study lakes except lake kemijärvi were included as the shoreline is under water due to the regulation. total vegetation coverage per studied shore kilometre was calculated in previous (1947–1963) and in current (1996–2000) situations and this data was used in the statistical analyses. the normality of the data was tested with the shapiro-wilk test. the data was not normally distributed, consequently the wilcoxon test was used to analyse the difference between the natural and regulated situation comparing the vegetation per shore kilometre in all study sites in natural and regulated states (29 sites). the previous and the current amount of vegetation between the 6 lakes were tested with the kruskall-wallis test to see whether there is more vegetation in some of the lakes. the differences within the study sites in the individual lakes was tested with the wilcoxon test. as the amount of different study sites was very low per each lake, the regional differences in each lake were not relevant for testing. results changes in the water level fluctuation regime the water levels in lake kemijärvi in its natural and regulated state differ considerably from the rest of the studied lakes (see table 5 and fig. 3 for all lakes). the water level regulation has more than doubled the annual water level fluctuation and the water level remains almost 2 m higher after the spring flood during the open water period. the regulation practice also includes an extensive winter draw down of more than 6 m. in lake unnukka the regulation amplitude is very limited. more than 0.3 m higher water levels prevail throughout the year compared to the natural state and the water level remains stable the whole year. in lake näsijärvi, the water level fluctuation amplitude has remained almost constant. during the open water period, water levels have increased by 0.4 m. water level regulation also includes a cut of the spring flood by 0.55 m. water level changes in lake kallavesi are very moderate, and neither the amplitude nor the frequency has been altered much. the regulation practice includes only a slight decrease in the spring flood and higher water levels during dry summers. water level regulation during the open water period in lake vanajavesi, pyhäjärvi and päijänne includes a cut-down of spring floods and stabilized summer time water levels. the regfennia 183: 1 (2005) 67changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … lake päijänne 77.0 77.5 78.0 78.5 79.0 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 n n +( m ) lake kemijärvi 141.5 142.5 143.5 144.5 145.5 146.5 147.5 148.5 149.5 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 n 43 +( m ) lake unnukka 80.0 80.5 81.0 81.5 82.0 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 n n +( m ) lake kallavesi 80.5 81.0 81.5 82.0 82.5 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 n n +( m ) lake näsijärvi 94.0 94.5 95.0 95.5 96.0 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 n n +( m ) lake vanajavesi 78.25 78.75 79.25 79.75 80.25 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 n n +( m ) lake pyhäjärvi 75.5 76.0 76.5 77.0 77.5 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 n n +( m ) fig. 3. water level fluctuation in the research lakes in natural (grey) and regulated (black) stages. all water levels are actual measured water levels presented in median, upper quartile (75%) and lower quartile (25%) for years 1939–1958 and 1980– 2000 in lake kemijärvi, 1943–1963 and 1979–1999 in unnukka, 1927–1947 and 1975–1995 in näsijärvi, 1931–1951 and 1979–1999 in kallavesi, 1933–1951 and 1976–1996 in päijänne, 1930–1950 and 1975–1995 in vanajavesi and 1927–1947 and 1975–1995 in pyhäjärvi (syke database). table 5. water level regulation indicators calculated by regcel during the years 1980–1999. annual water level fluctuation (mhw – mnw), decrease in spring flood (w (breakup of the ice) – mw 50% (open water period)), mean water level rise (mwregul 50% (open water period) – mwnatur 50% (open water period)). natural water levels are re-calculated from the regulated water levels. current regulation started annual water level fluctuation (m) decrease in spring flood (m) mean water level rise (m) water level fluctuation during the summer (m) natural regulated natural regulated kemijärvi 1965 3.19 6.96 –1.66 2.05 2.75 2.07 unnukka 1972 – 0.20 0.01 0.32 – 0.14 näsijärvi 1923/80 1.02 1.18 –0.55 0.40 0.84 0.74 kallavesi 1972 1.02 0.87 0.13 0.03 0.91 0.77 päijänne 1964 0.82 0.89 –0.26 0.02 0.69 0.65 vanajavesi 1962 1.07 1.00 –0.33 –0.02 0.90 0.53 pyhäjärvi 1962 1.33 0.93 –0.16 0.26 1.17 0.35 68 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten ulation of lake pyhäjärvi also included a slight increase of the water level by 0.26 m during the open water period. vegetation cover changes between the study lakes the macrophyte vegetation cover changes in seven study lakes during the study period varied considerably. the percentage change of the vegetation cover is shown in fig. 4. a clear vegetation decrease took place in three lakes. in lake kemijärvi the vegetation decreased by 93%, in lake unnukka by 37% and in lake näsijärvi by 31%. in lake kallavesi the vegetation almost stayed the same with a slight vegetation cover increase of 5%. in contrast, a clear vegetation increase took place in three lakes. the vegetation increase was 49% in lake päijänne, 67% in lake vanajavesi and 73% in lake pyhäjärvi. vegetation cover changes between the study sites the changes between different study sites (fig. 5) in the study lakes also varied a great amount, however a certain convergent trend was definite. in the lakes where the vegetation coverage had generally decreased, the decrease also took place in all study sites and the same situation occurred in lakes with increasing vegetation. the changes between the study sites are relatively uniform among lakes, except lake kallavesi. lake kallavesi was the only lake having both increasing and decreasing vegetation changes. fig. 4. the average percentage cover change of emergent aquatic vegetation in all seven study lakes during the study years of 1947–1963 and 1996–2000. a vegetation decrease took place in lake kemijärvi, lake unnukka and lake näsijärvi. the vegetation decrease was the most uniform in kemijärvi. in six study sites the change varied from 87% to 98%. the amount of sedge vegetation out of the whole flooded research area in kemijärvi was 49% during the years 1957–1959. during the study period of 1997–2000 the amount of sedge vegetation was only 2–12% of the former situation. in unnukka and in näsijärvi the vegetation decrease was less uniform. the vegetation had decreased by 29% in the leveäsaari area in the north and by 42% in the south at the varkaus area. in näsijärvi the vegetation decrease varied from 12% to 56%. vegetation area changes were of a dual nature in lake kallavesi. the amount of vegetation had increased in study sites in northern kallavesi and at the koirusvesi. on the other hand, vegetation cover has decreased in southern central kallavesi. a general vegetation increase took place in lake pyhäjärvi, lake vanajavesi and in lake päijänne. it was most uniform in lake pyhäjärvi and in lake vanajavesi. in lake pyhäjärvi the vegetation increased in three study sites from 58% to 83%. in vanajavesi the vegetation increase in three study sites varied from 61% to 104%. in päijänne the increase varied from 11% to 1491% in 11 study sites. the vegetation had increased mostly in the north and south and somewhat in central päijänne. some examples of the increasing and decreasing vegetation changes are presented in fig. 6. vegetation coverage per shore kilometre there were no statistical differences between the lakes in the natural (1947–1963) situation regarding vegetation coverage per studied shore kilometre, but with the regulation (1996–2000) a change had occurred. the former natural situation and the present regulated situation differ from each others (z = –2.303, p = 0.21). the lakes did not differ statistically from each other in the amount of vegetation neither in the former (p = 0.688) nor in the present (p = 0.193) situation. among the 6 study lakes there were not any statistical differences in the amount of vegetation between different study sites (p = 0.068–0.600) except in lake päijänne (p = 0.003). the vegetation coverage per studied shore kilometre was calculated for each study site in fig. 7 for the former and the present situation. the four most vegetation rich study sites for the former and fennia 183: 1 (2005) 69changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … lake study site 1947– 1963 (ha) 1996– 2000 (ha) kemijärvi kokkoselkä 69.0 9.0 termusniemi 37.0 1.5 kaippiosaari 55.0 1.9 ollinsaari 5.3 0.2 koivusaari 14.4 0.3 lammassaari 1.9 0.2 unnukka leveäsaari 25.6 18.2 varkaus 40.3 23.4 näsijärvi pengonpohja 40.6 33.7 pöllöselkä 41.7 18.5 siivikkala 12.9 11.3 aitolahti 19.5 15.3 kallavesi lamperila 17.4 23.8 autioranta 5.8 27.4 vaajasalo 32.1 27.8 puutossalmi 53.5 44.1 sotkanniemi 116.2 105.3 koirusvesi 10.8 18.9 päijänne vähä-äiniö 0.9 13.7 vähäniemi 13.8 21.8 mustalahti 3.0 4.3 virmaila 2.6 3.6 kankarniemi 10.6 12.5 kuhmalahti 14.2 15.9 säynätlahti 5.2 5.8 pihlajalahti 4.8 5.9 viisti 3.5 5.8 ruolahti 3.1 4.4 rutalahti 29.2 41.5 vanajavesi uskilanlahti 19.7 32.5 heinunlahti 8.9 18.2 kapeikko 49.1 79.3 pyhäjärvi saviselkä 10.9 20.0 vakkalanselkä 8.9 14.1 vesilahti 32.3 56.0 % 46 38 12 11 24 68 43 42 65 61 83 58 73 -98 -13 -17 -17 -9 19 59 1491 75 373 36 -12 -42 -97 -97 -21 -92 -96 -87 -56 -29 104 -100 -80 -60 -40 -20 0 20 40 60 80 100 kokkoselkä termusniemi kaippiosaari ollinsaari koivusaari lammassaari leveäsaari varkaus pengonpohja pöllöselkä siivikkala aitolahti lamperila autioranta vaajasalo puutossalmi sotkanniemi koirusvesi vähä-äiniö vähäniemi mustalahti virmaila kankarniemi kuhmalahti säynätlahti pihlajalahti viisti ruolahti rutalahti uskilanlahti heinunlahti kapeikko saviselkä vakkalanselkä vesilahti fig. 5. vegetation cover changes in different study sites in study lakes during the years 1947–1963 and 1996–2000. the percentage change is shown on the left and different lakes are separated with shading. the actual cover in hectares is in the table on the right. the present situation were found from lake päijänne and lake kallavesi. the most vegetation poor study sites were in the former situation in lake päijänne and lake pyhäjärvi and in the present situation in lake näsijärvi and lake unnukka. discussion water level regulation as the occurrence of vegetation on the shore is a mixture of many variables (spence 1982), the separation of different factors can be hard due to the confounding effect. the results of this study give however new information about the effects of water level changes on emergent aquatic vegetation over a period of half a century. it was statistically shown, that the amount of vegetation cover in study lakes changed along with the water level regulation. the vegetation clearly increased, decreased or nearly stayed the same during the study period in seven large lakes. changes in the vegetation are not merely due to the yearly water level changes but the regulation dynamics. even if the regulation limits do not differ much from the natu70 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten fig. 6. changes in the vegetation coverage of three study sites. a) part of the study site vesilahti in lake pyhäjärvi, with increased vegetation of the lake. b) part of the study site pengonpohja in lake näsijärvi with decreased total vegetation. c) part of a study site kokkoselkä in lake kemijärvi with decreased vegetation. the picture above is taken on 16.7.1959 (© national land survey of finland 49/myy/04) and the picture below is taken on 11.7.1997 (© fm-kartta oy). ral limits, the dynamics of the fluctuation has been greatly altered. the open water period water levels have been raised at the beginning of the regulation in kemijärvi, näsijärvi and unnukka, in which lakes a vegetation decrease took place in each study site. the vegetation decrease was greatest in kemijärvi, which suffered from the greatest level rise. the mean water level rise in lake unnukka and näsijärvi resulted in a fall in vegetation coverage as well. similar observations exist also in other lakes of fennoscandia. sjörs and nilsson (1976), wallsten and forsgren (1989) and hellsten (2001, 2002) have reported a decrease in vegetation with raised water levels. in lakes where water levels exceed the natural levels, the littoral zone is reported to be less uniform and species rich (quennerstedt 1958; jonasson 1976; hellsten 2001). according to sjörs and nilsson (1976) the harmful effects of water level regulation are directly proportional to the regulation amplitude, which usually correlates in finnish lakes with a water level rise during the open water period. the production of the littoral zone is furthermore lower in lakes with higher amplitudes (quennerstedt 1958). the aquatic vegetation of lake kemijärvi has been previously studied by raitala et al. (1984) and hellsten (2002), with a report of aquatic vegetation suffering from the c fennia 183: 1 (2005) 71changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … heikkilä 1983; hellsten et al. 2002b). the spring flood peak is cut down and delayed by 2–4 weeks in päijänne, vanajavesi and pyhäjärvi where the vegetation had increased in each study site in each lake. the effect of the spring flood is based on the different preferences of the emergent vegetation (e.g. quennerstedt 1958). some species tolerate the flooding, some species are severely damaged and some benefit from the flooding. the spring flood also removes the decayed material upwards from the shores and when the spring flood is lowered this material will remain in the shore (hellsten 2000). the changes in the water level dynamics of the study lakes will explain the major vegetation changes. in the majority of the lakes the changes were uniform between the study sites even if the study sites did differ in the trophy level and other characteristics. the inconsistent vegetation changes in lake kallavesi can be explained by the water level dynamics in the lake. both increased and decreased vegetation changes among the study sites only took place in lake kallavesi, which had the mildest water level regulation. thus the water level regulation is not the major factor affecting the emergent macrophyte changes in lake kallavesi. the corresponding regulation studies done abroad are not often comparable with the finnish studies, because in finland the regulation interval in usually less than 5 m whereas in norway and in sweden it can be up to 20 m. the relatively limited regulation amplitude can be explained by the abundance of lakes in finland, low terrain altitudes and densely inhabited lakeshores (see sjörs & nilsson 1976). eutrophication the pollution effects on aquatic macrophytes have been investigated in finland from the 1930s onwards (maristo 1935; perttula 1952; kurimo 1970; uotila 1971). according to uotila (1971) pollution became the most important factor affecting the vegetation of finnish lakes during the 1950s and 1960s. as the primary cause of the nutrient enrichment is the local occurrence of clay and clay-like fine deposits, the occurrence of eutrophy as a primary and purely limnological character is exceptional in the finnish lake district (järnefelt 1958; vaarama 1961). the secondary eutrophy is likely to develop anywhere as a results of intensive farming or dense population (järnefelt 1952). due to the improvement of wastewater treatment the profig. 7. the amount of vegetation in hectares per studied kilometre of shoreline. regulation (hellsten 2002). as the regulation was most intensive in lake kemijärvi and the decrease between different study sites of all study lakes was most uniform in lake kemijärvi, the proportion of the regulation out of the total vegetation change was biggest in lake kemijärvi. the adjustment of the water levels will narrow the belt of the littoral vegetation as well (riihimäki & hellsten 1997; andersson 2001). several other studies show that a mean water level decrease from the natural state will result in a vegetation increase (quennerstedt 1958; meriläinen & toivonen 1979; anttonen-heikkilä 1983; toivonen & bäck 1989; keränen et al. 1992). the most significant influence on the vegetation compared to the natural state is the change in the spring water levels (hejny 1971; juola 1975; anttonen72 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten portion of non-point source pollution, mainly agriculture, has increased (vuorenmaa et al. 2001). general eutrophication is mostly reflected on the species composition and abundance of submergent species such as elodeids and ceratophyllids, which are directly taking nutrients via leaves (e.g. toivonen 1984). emergent species such as helophytes and nymphaeids are mainly using roots the for same purpose and are therefore not so sensitive for rapid changes in the nutrient level. they are instead reflecting the slow changes in the nutrient content of sediments, which is partly a consequence of eutrophication and partly related to a higher sedimentation rate (weisner 1991; coops et al. 1996). according to kurimo (1970) most taller helophytes and nymphaeids concerned in this study are indifferent to pollution effects or suffering from wastes. it is also well known that increasing eutrophication will lead to a decrease of some common helophytes such as common reed (e.g. weisner 1991). on the other hand valta-hulkkonen et al. (2005) found a clear positive relationship between the colonization degree of helophytes and nymphaeids and the water quality in small finnish lakes. when the eutrophication or pollution goes further a decline in vegetation can also occur at least in a smaller lake (pieczynska et al. 1988). the general water quality trend in large lakes appears to be evident; slightly improved water quality over the past half a century. unfortunately water quality data does not cover the investigated period and the evaluation of the trends is mainly based on literature. the most significant vegetation increase was observed in lakes pyhäjärvi and vanajavesi, where the water quality was most eutrophic. in lake vanajavesi the water quality has been improving moderately since the 1960s but there are clear regional differences between different parts of the lake (riihimäki et al. 2003). lake vanajavesi is also situated in nutrient rich areas, which means that background values have also been relatively high (uotila 1971). uotila (1971) described the number of aquatic species in vanajavesi as rather high with a note about most oligotrophic species being missing due to the strong human influence with pollution before. the same previous low status in the water quality and an improvement since the 1970s can be seen in lake pyhäjärvi as well (riihimäki et al. 2003). it is evident that vegetation change might have been enhanced by the eutrophication trend. today both lake vanajavesi and lake pyhäjärvi are in general intensively populated and farmed. the effect of the increased nutrient content to the vegetation increase was researched by wallsten (1981). her reinvestigations show an enlargement of the vegetation areas in the main part of the lakes, surrounded by arable land. the increased nutrient content had encouraged and increased vegetation in nearly all lakes in 40 years. in contrast, a vegetation increase took place also in lake päijänne, which seems together with lake näsijärvi to be by all variables, the most oligotrophic of the study lakes. the investigations of the previous state of lake päijänne based on zoobenthos (särkkä 1979; sarvala 1996) show a slight decline in the condition already after the 1940s. the state was lower in 1960s–1970s and has been fundamentally improving during the past two decades (sarvala 1996; granberg 1998). the water quality also differs at different ends of the lake. it has been most eutrophic in the northern part and oligotrophic in the southern part of päijänne (hellsten 2000). inconsistently the largest change was observed in the southern part of the lake. also in lake näsijärvi the water quality has been improving clearly since the 1960s (riihimäki et al. 2003). contradictory vegetation changes of these two lakes with similar water quality status show the importance of water level fluctuation; relatively small changes in the summer time water level have significantly affected emergent vegetation. the vegetation decrease in lake näsijärvi and a vegetation increase in lake päijänne found in our study were largely supported by the observations of rintanen (1996). the effect of a rise in water levels has been reported also in raised eutrophicated lakes, where the water level has just been raised once due to restoration purposes; in many cases the helophytes have disappeared almost totally (rintanen 1996). no special long term trend was observed in kal lavesi, but the water quality in northern kallavesi differs greatly from the oligotrophic waters in the south, being close to the upper limits of mesotrophy (hellsten et al. 2002a). it could partly explain the increase of vegetation in the north and decrease in the southern part of the lake. the water quality in this study has referred to the existing water quality classification in finland. the classification has been done according to the usability of the waters for human benefits, and environmental conditions such as naturally nutrient rich soils are not included in the classification. water quality samples have been taken from the pelagial areas of the lakes and this does fennia 183: 1 (2005) 73changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … not represent the water quality of sheltered bays. the water quality data available in this form is insufficient to assist spatiotemporal changes from the 1950s onwards covering all study lakes, since large-scale water monitoring has been effected with accepted criteria only from the early 1970s (vuoristo 1998). as a conclusion the water quality of the studied lakes has improved during the years but the studied vegetation has still increased in many lakes. many decades of nutrient loading has increased the nutrient availability in the littoral zone and relatively quick changes in the water quality do not affect the nutrient status of plants taking the nutrients with their roots from the bottom sediments. in spite of these obvious patterns the cover changes of emergent vegetation in studied lakes are not explained by eutrophication history. especially the opposite trend of vegetation development in lakes with a similar history of nutrient loading emphasizes the importance of the water level fluctuation regime and other factors. effect of geology the physico-chemical conditions of the bottom sediments are very significant factors affecting macrophytes (keddy 1983). the occurrence of clay and clay associated deposits were found to explain vegetation changes. according to järnefelt (1952, 1958), eutrophic lakes are situated mainly in south-western finland in the south of salpausselkä due to submergence during the glacial period particularly in the region of hämeenlinna– tampere. soils along the shores in lake pyhäjärvi and lake vanajavesi are especially dominated by silt and clay and the vegetation increase was biggest among those study lakes. lake pyhäjärvi is in many ways an exception among research lakes; there is a notable increase in vegetation, although a significant water level rise should reduce the vegetated area. it seems that relatively nutrient rich waters and suitable soil quality keep the production of emergent macrophytes high and the vegetation is more resistant against water level fluctuation. the soil type differences applied also between the study sites. the vegetation increase was quite equal between the two sheltered and soft bottom study sites in lake vanajavesi but slightly larger in the open lake hard bottom study site. despite the dual changes, the study sites in kallavesi have always been abundant with vegetation as the vegetated area per kilometre shows. at lake unnukka even if the vegetation had diminished in both sites the varkaus study site rich in clay, compared to the leveäsaari study site, had more vegetation in both the former and present situation. the occurrence of clay does not explain all the vegetation changes. the vegetation increase in päijänne is not in connection with clay deposits, as the dominant soil is moraine and major clay areas are outside the study sites. the biggest vegetation increase took place in southern päijänne, where the dominant soil is sand. open, sandy shores with oxygen rich waters are favoured by vegetation compared to muddy sheltered shores lacking oxygen (weisner 1991). the invasion of the common reed (phragmites australis) could be the main reason for the expansion of vegetation cover as noted by keto et al. (2002). the fastest change in the topographical factors group is the land uplift. the isostatic uplift after the glacial period has affected the normal development of the lakes (vaarama 1961). the isostatic uplift affects the slope of the lake basin especially in long lakes situated transversely against isoclines (renqvist 1952). the difference in the vertical height of lake ends of the longest study lake päijänne has resulted in several metres of new shore in northern päijänne during the study period (hellsten 2000). the land uplift works correspondingly in lake kallavesi as well due to the north-south direction. if the land uplift would be the determining factor for macrophyte changes, north sides of both lakes should be more vegetation rich. the results do not support the theory, because an increase was observed also in the southern parts of the lakes. when considering large lakes, the lake size plays an important role. the exposure is one of the most important factors affecting aquatic macrophytes (segal 1971; keddy 1983; weisner 1991). very open study sites such as mustalahti, virmaila and säynätlahti carried less vegetation both in hectares and compared to the rest of the study sites. from the 25 lakes studied by wallsten (1981), the vegetation cover increase did not occur in the largest lakes having the longest shoreline and a low percentage of the lake area covered by the vegetation. naturally the depth limits the maximum extent of the vegetation (spence 1982), and according to wallsten (1981) longer shorelines give a larger range of different habitats and this reduces the competition and increases the species diversity. in this study, lake päijänne showed the biggest differences in the coverage between different study 74 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten sites and this was shown statistically. even if the study sites were relatively short in päijänne, the size of the lake compared to the other lakes was considerable. different habitat characteristics differ very much between each site as would not be in a smaller lake. other human induced factors the littoral zone has been commonly used as animal pasture in finland and taller helophytes were cut for winter-feeding purposed from the shore (vaheri 1932). shore pasture practices were still common in finland in the 1950s, but ceased largely during the turn of the 1960–1970 with intensified farming. evidence of this practice has been reported at least from näsijärvi (maristo 1935) and vanajavesi (uotila 1971). in päijänne evidences of large scale animal pastures on shores are until the mid 1970s, but in some places pasturing is still in use (hellsten 2000). it was estimated that in vanajavesi of all the shores, which were not too steep or rocky, the majority of the shores have been pastured in this century. at the end of the 1960s the proportion of pastured shores was only a fraction of the previous proportion (uotila 1971). the effect of pasturing varies and mostly taller helophytes suffer from it (vaheri 1932; meriläinen & toivonen 1979; uotila 1997), which are soon replaced by vascular grasses (maristo 1935). the effect of pasture almost ceases after 1 m of depth (maristo 1935). the end of this practice naturally had an impact on vegetation increase. it may partly explain the increase of vegetation in the shallow parts of lake vanajavesi. even if invasive species are not usually a problem in finland, uotila (1971) mentioned the most important factor responsible for the changes during the first half on this century being the invasion of reed sweet-grass (glyceria maxima). this relatively rapidly spreading grass is extremely tolerant against water level fluctuation and forms floating islands. studies by riihimäki et al. (2003) show that it was one of the most common species in lake pyhäjärvi and vanajavesi. the relatively clear increase of vegetation in spite of the raised water level in lake pyhäjärvi might be explained by the invasion of it (andersson 2001). geomorphologic characteristics such as not having exposed shores will diminish the degradation of vegetation by wave erosion. vegetation removal by cutting can also be counted as a human induced factor affecting vegetation (uotila 1971). restoration activities are mainly concentrated on shores under recreational use, which are not so common on shallow vegetation rich shores in large lakes. according to hellsten (2000) only 7% of the shoreline of lake päijänne was affected by dredging or other restoration activities although the overgrowth of vegetation was one of the main problems of the lake. methodological aspects and error sources a visual aerial interpretation of emergent aquatic macrophytes, mainly helophyte and floating leaved vegetation in large boreal lakes, was found to be successful in this study. methodology based on manual mapping means is still used in the latest macrophyte studies (fredriksen et al. 2004) and it allows the acquisition of species specific data and the combination of older and newer aerial photography sets which are often problematic. the use of aerial photographs provided a method for studying the water level regulation impacts before and after the regulation on the same lakes as the impact assessment is often based on regulated and non-regulated reference lakes (alasaarela et al. 1989). the methodology includes however several error sources due to the diverse set of primary data. there are study lakes where all the photographs are not taken during the same year either from the newer material or from the older. a year difference in the vegetation coverage can be considerable (anttonen-heikkilä 1983) as the temperature, water level fluctuation etc. vary between years. a general interpretation key is hard to develop (wallsten 1974; valta-hulkkonen et al. 2003a), as photographs taken at different times of the year and in different years result in varying conditions (andersson 1972). acquiring the same photograph sets from different decades was a compromise. the economical resources of the projects defined the limits for the amount of study sites and the quality and amount of aerial photographs. the aerial photographs were not all taken during the best season from july to august, due to the limited availability of the photographs. the photographs have been taken during different periods of the growing season and in a few cases early summer photographs were compared with later summer months and vice versa. for example the study site pöllöselkä was the only study site in lake näsijärvi were the later summer situation from 1950 and early summer situation from 1998 were compared and the vegetation decrease was noticeably largest in pöllöselkä. the study site saviselkä was the only fennia 183: 1 (2005) 75changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … site in lake pyhäjärvi where photographs from the same time of the growing season were compared, but the vegetation increase was generally even in all study sites. clearly defined and dense macrophyte populations were easily separated from the older black and white material, but sparse populations turned out to be more problematic (andersson 1972). in clear water bottom sand can easily be mixed with vegetation, shallows or sun reflectance, and algae blooms or such turbidity can complicate the interpretation. the quality of the older photographs varied. stereo glasses were used to obtain a threedimensional view enabling the differentiation between vegetation and non-vegetation. errors in data collection resulting from the interpretation of older and newer photographs are possible. the shore line has changed either due to human influence by dredging and construction or by natural overgrowth or isostatic uplift, and this makes it hard to distinguish the boundary of the shore. the shadows of the shore trees produced problems in a few newer photographs. unnatural vegetation boundaries in some current photographs gave evidence of restorations and this has an effect on the interpretation result. the number of study sites per lake should have been equal and the length of the study sites should have been comparable between the lakes. the study sites should have been geographically distributed more evenly. having the emphasis only on quantitative changes can obscure the fact that some species have been increasing and some decreasing, or expanding landward (andersson 2001) resulting in a zero effect. furthermore, in this study the vegetation change was only measured at the beginning and at the end of the study period and there might have been situations where the vegetation had been peaking and coming down to the same point. by using historical data the fact that it represents one certain moment and not a long period of time (dömötörfy et al. 2003) has to be acknowledged. vegetation change was also measured to the extent of emergent macrophytes as the life forms other than helophytes and nymphaeids are often poorly or not at all detected from the aerial photographs (andersson 2001; jäger et al. 2004; valta-hulkkonen et al. 2003a). the majority of the study areas have been in sheltered bays. they do not naturally represent the situation of the entire lake but often open sections lack vegetation to be researched (andersson 1972). as this study was conducted in large lakes, there are vast regional differences firstly between the study lakes and secondly between the different study sites in the lakes. environmental factors such as water quality or soil type vary in the different parts of the lake. large lakes consist of a vast number of different habitats among the parts of the lake and different environmental factors such as slope angle, exposure or land use vary strongly. these important factors have not been considered here and will be left for future purposes. conclusions the visual aerial photo interpretation proved to be a useful tool in distinguishing the changes in the coverage of emergent aquatic vegetation. it allowed the comparison of the situation before and after regulation without using reference lakes. it showed, that the total vegetation coverage had clearly decreased in three lakes, stayed almost the same in one lake and increased clearly in three lakes. using several study sites per lake resulted in finding that the coverage in different study sites in study lakes varied from a majority of quite uniform change over the whole lake to increased and decreased coverages in adjacent sites. from the geographical features affecting the coverage of emergent macrophytes in large lakes in finland, the geological aspects in general were found to be the most important. geology defines the occurrence and magnitude of many other factors which affect macrophyte growth: the size and the depth of the lake, the slope and the exposure of the shore, soil type and bottom quality. geology contributes to the nutrient content of the lake and primary eutrophication. indirectly the geology affects the type and magnitude of human settlement in the area and further has an impact on the secondary eutrophication. from the anthropogenic features water level regulation has most significantly affected the coverage in study lakes and this was shown statistically. regardless of the different physical properties of the lakes, such as geology, size, depth or location, the study lakes were easily separated according to the vegetation coverage change and the water level variation. a water level rise during the open water period at the beginning of the regulation decreased the cover of the vegetation in several lakes. on the contrary the lowering of the water level during the open water period increased the vegetation. the change in the spring water levels 76 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten compared to the natural state increased the cover of emergent macrophytes. despite the fact that certain trends were distinguished in this study there is a need to acquire more site specific data of different factors. the differences within the study lakes in vegetation coverage were partly extensive so there is a need to separate in more detail the affecting factors including local water quality and for example variation in exposure. the use of the shore areas in finland has dramatically changed from the 1950s with the change of society and communities in many places. animal pasture was widely in use still in the 1950s along with unregulated water levels both decreasing the amount of vegetation. urbanization along with industrial development has brought many changes to the littoral zone not least the water level regulation. even if the water quality seems to have improved, the environmental changes have been strong and they work with a delay. acknowledgements warmest thanks to mika visuri for successfully assisting the authors in the field in all studied lakes during the summers of 1998–2002 and in the office during the winters. thanks to juha riihimäki and anne tarvainen for their comments and help with statistical problems and for miska luoto and antton keto for valuable comments on the manuscript. comments by two anonymous reviewers greatly improved the manuscript. this study was supported by the research programme on the sustainable use of natural resources (sunare) of the academy of finland (project 52793 “primereg – sustainable regulation of large watercourses: principles, indicators and methods”), finnish cultural foundation north ostrobothnian fund and the graduate school in environmental issues of the university of oulu and the nornet cooperation. the english of this manuscript was revised by zach shelby. references alasaarela e, s hellsten & p tikkanen (1989). ecological aspects of lake regulation in northern finland. in laikari h (ed). river basin management 5, 247–255. pergamon press, oxford. andersson b (1972). vattenvegetation i norra mälären 1969–1971 (summary: aquatic macrophytes in the north part of lake mälaren). vatten 28: 1, 40–48. andersson b (2001). macrophyte development and habitat characteristics in sweden’s large lakes. ambio 30: 8, 503–513. anttonen-heikkilä k (1983). säännöstelyn vaikutuksista oulujärven rantaja vesikasvillisuuteen. vesihallituksen tiedotuksia 231. 75 p. barko jw & rm smart (1983). effects of organic matter additions to sediment on the growth of aquatic plants. journal of ecology 71, 161–175. coops h, n geilen & g van der velde (1996). helophyte zonation in two regulated estuarine areas in the netherlands: vegetation analysis and relationships with hydrodynamic factors. estuaries 22, 657–668. dömötörfy z, d reeder & p pomogyi (2003). changes in the macro-vegetation of the lis-balaton wetlands over the last two centuries: a gis perspective. hydrobiologia 506–509: 1–3, 671–679. fredriksen m, d krause-jensen, m holmer & js laursen (2004). long-term changes in area distribution of eelgrass (zostera marina) in danish coastal waters. aquatic botany 78, 167–181. granberg k (1998). päijänteen veden laadun kehitys. in hakkari l & s saukkonen (ed). päijänne – suomalainen suurjärvi, 100–107. gummerus kirjapaino oy, jyväskylä. hakaste t (1999). vanajaveden reitin alaosan kalataloudellinen velvoitetarkkailu 1997. kokemäenjoen vesiensuojeluyhdistys ry, julkaisu 383. 93 p. hämet-ahti l (1988). suomen kasvimaantieteellinen sijainti. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 141: vegetation and flora, 1. national board of survey and geographical society of finland, helsinki. hejny s (1971). the dynamic characteristic of littoral vegetation with respect to changes of water. hidrobiologia 12, 71–85. hellsten s (1997). environmental factors related to water level regulation – a comparative study in northern finland. boreal environmental research 2, 345–367. hellsten s (ed) (2000). päijänteen säännöstelyn kehittäminen – rantavyöhykkeen tila ja siihen vaikuttavat tekijät (abstract: development of regulation of lake päijänne – present state of littoral zone and effects of different environmental factors). suomen ympäristö 394. 167 p. hellsten s (2001). effects of lake water level regulation on aquatic macrophyte stands in northern finland and options to predict these impacts under varying conditions. acta botanica fennica 171, 1–47. hellsten s (2002). aquatic macrophytes as indicators of water-level regulation in northern finland. verhandlungen internationale vereinigung fuer theoretische und angewandte limnologie 28, 601–606. hellsten s, m marttunen, m visuri, a keto, s partanen, & ea järvinen (2002b). indicators of sustainable water level regulation in northern river basins: a case study from the river paatsjoki water system in northern lapland. archiv fuer hydrobiologie (supplementband) 141: 3–4, 353–370. fennia 183: 1 (2005) 77changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … hellsten s, s partanen, m visuri, t björnström & a keto (2002a). vedenkorkeuden säännöstelyn vaikutus kallaveden ja unnukan rantavyöhykkeeseen ja elinympäristöihin. kallavesi-unnukan säännöstelyn kehittämisselvitys (abstract: the effect of water level regulation on the littoral zone of lake kallavesi and lake unnukka – development of regulation of lake kallavesi and lake unnukka). alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 227. 63 p. hellsten s & j riihimäki (1996). effects of lake water level regulation on the dynamics of aquatic macrophytes in northern finland. hydrobiologia 340, 85–92. hinneri s (1965). tutkimuksia sääksmäen saarioisjärven umpeenkasvusta. luonnon tutkija 69, 64–73. huttunen t (1990). map of quaternary deposits 1:20,000, sheet 3243 01 unnukka. geological survey of finland. ilmavirta v & h toivonen (1986). comparative studies on macrophytes and phytoplankton in ten small, brownwater lakes of different trophic status. aqua fennica 16: 2, 125–142. jäger p, k pall & e dumfarth (2004). a method of mapping macrophytes in large lakes with regard to the requirements of the water framework directive. limnologica 34, 140–146. janauer ga (2003). aquatic macrophytes in freshwaters: the assessment of ecological quality. in ruoppa m, p heinonen, a pilke, s rekolainen, h toivonen & h vuoristo (eds). how to assess and monitor ecological quality in freshwaters, 24–28. temanord, nordic council of ministers, copenhagen. järnefelt h (1952). limnological classification of lakes. fennia 72, 202–208. järnefelt h (1958). on the typology of the northern lakes. verhandlungen internationale vereinigung fuer theoretische und angewandte limnologie 13, 228–235. jonasson s-e (1976). inverkan på växtvärlden av vattenutbyggnad i hårkan, översta ljungan och lofsen. meddelanden från växtbiologiska institutionen, uppsala 1, 1–47. juola m (1975). eräiden kainuun järvien säännöstelystä ja sen aiheuttamista muutoksista litoraalin kasvillisuudessa ja pohjaeläimistössä. ympäristö ja yhteiskunta 6, 276–283. jussilainen m & p eloranta (1976). ilmakuviin perustuva tutkimus konneveden ja peurunkajärven vesikasvillisuudesta. jyväskylän yliopiston biologian laitoksen tiedonantoja 6. 31 p. kae e (1980). geologic map of finland, quaternary deposits 1:100,000, sheet 2132 valkeakoski. geological survey of finland. kalliola r (1973). suomen kasvimaantiede. 308 p. wsoy, porvoo. keddy pa (1983). shoreline vegetation in axe lake, ontario: effects of exposure on zonation patterns. ecology 64, 331–334. kejonen a (1985). geologic map of finland, quaternary deposits 1:100,000, sheet 2124 teisko. geological survey of finland. kejonen a (1989). map of quaternary deposits 1:20,000, sheet 3234 03 varkaus. geological survey of finland. keränen r (1980). säännöstelyn vaikutuksesta oulujärven rantoihin. nordia tiedonantoja 5. 55 p. keränen r, j riihimäki, a asunmaa, o madekivi, s hellsten, e alasaarela & e seppänen (1992). oulujärven rantojen kasvillisuuden kehittyminen ja käyttöedellytysten parantaminen. vesija ympäristöhallituksen monistesarja 382. 100 p. keto a, s hellsten & p eloranta (2002). notes on the ecology of common reed in lake päijänne, finland. verhandlungen internationale vereinigung fuer theoretische und angewandte limnologie 28, 586–590. kurimo u (1970). effect of pollution on the aquatic macroflora of the varkaus area, finnish lake district. annales botanici fennici 7, 213–254. leka j, k valta-hulkkonen, a kanninen, s partanen, s hellsten, a ustinov, r ilvonen & o airaksinen (2003). vesimakrofyytit järvien ekologisen tilan arvioinnissa ja seurannassa – maastomenetelmien ja ilmakuvatulkinnan käyttökelpoisuuden arviointi life vuoksi -projektissa (abstract: use of aquatic macrophytes for asessing and monitoring the ecological status of lakes – evaluation of field survey and aerial photography methods used in the life vuoksi project). alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 312. 96 p. lillesand tm & rw kiefer (1994). remote sensing and image interpretation. 750 p. john wiley & sons inc., new york. mäkirinta u (1978a). die pflantzensosiologishe gliederung der wasserwegetation im see kukkia, südfinnland. acta universitatis ouluensis a 5. 157 p. mäkirinta u (1978b). ein neues ökomorphologisches lebensformen-system der aquatischen makrophyten. phytocoenologia 4, 446–470. mäkirinta u (1991). a lake vegetation mapping at different levels of classification. phytocoenosis 3, 169–174. maristo l (1935). näsijärven aitolahden vesikasvillisuus (referat: die wasservegetation der aitolahti-bucht im see näsijärvi). annales botanici societatis zoologicae-botanicae fennicae vanamo 6: 4, 1–55 maristo l (1941). die seetypen finnlands auf floristischer und vegetationsphysiognomischer grundlage. annales botanici societatis zoologicae-botanicae fennicae vanamo 15: 5, 1–312. marttunen m & s hellsten (2003). heavily modified waters in europe – a case study of lake kemijärvi, finland. the finnish environment 630. 60 p. marttunen m, s hellsten & a keto (2001). sustainable development of lake regulation in finnish lakes. vatten 57, 29–37. marttunen m, l-l kiuru & s hellsten (2000). pirkanmaan järvisäännöstelyn kehittäminen – vedenkorkeuksien analyysiin perustuva arvio näsijärven, pyhäjärven, vanajaveden ja iso-kuloveden sään78 fennia 183: 1 (2005)sari partanen and seppo hellsten nöstelyjen vaikutuksista (abstract: development of the regulated lakes of pirkanmaa – assessment of the impacts of regulation of lakes näsijärvi, pyhäjärvi, vanajavesi and iso-kulovesi based on water level analysis). alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 179. 54 p. marttunen m, l-l kiuru, a keto, t miettinen, v voutilainen, ea järvinen, s hellsten & p rotko (2002). kallaveden ja unnukan säännöstelyn kehittämistarpeet ja -mahdollisuudet (abstract: the needs and possibilities to improve regulation of lake kallavesi and lake unnukka). alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 130. 111 p. meriläinen j & h toivonen (1979). lake keskimmäinen, dynamics of vegetation in a small shallow lake. annales botanici fennici 16, 123–139. nenonen m (ed) (1987). kemijärven tila ja kalatalous (summary: the state and fisheries of lake kemijärvi. final report and proposals for future action). vesija ympäristöhallinnon julkaisuja 13. 134 p. nilsson c (1981). dynamics of the shore vegetation of a north swedish hydro-electric reservoir during a 5-year period. acta phytogeographica suecica 69, 1–94. oravainen r (2002). vuosiyhteenveto tampereen seudun yhteistarkkailusta vuodelta 2002. kokemäenjoen vesiensuojeluyhdistys ry, julkaisu 480. 57 p. pearsall wh (1920). the aquatic vegetation of the english lakes. journal of ecology 8, 164–201. perttula u (1952). jätevesien vaikutuksesta valkeakosken lähivesien kasvillisuuteen ja kasvistoon. archivum societatis zoologicae-botanicae fennicae vanamo 7, 16–113. perttunen m (1976). geologic map of finland, quaternary deposits 1:100,000, sheet 2114 toijala. geological survey of finland. pieczynska e, t ozimek & ji rybak (1988). long-term changes in littoral habitats and communities in lake mikolajskie (poland). internationale revue der gesamten hydrobiologie 73: 4, 361–378. pietiläinen o-p & a räike (1999). typpi ja fosfori suomen sisävesien minimiravinteina (abstract: nitrogen and phosphorus as algal growth limiting nutrients in finnish inland waters). suomen ympäristö 313. 64 p. quennerstedt n (1958). effect of water level fluctuation on lake vegetation. verhandlungen internationale vereinigung fuer theoretische und angewandte limnologie 13, 901–906. raitala j, h jantunen & s hellsten (1984). a landsat-assisted study of the aquatic areas of the lake kemijärvi region, northern finland. earth, moon, and planets 31, 183–216. renqvist h (1952). the inlands waters. fennia 52, 161–201. riihimäki j & s hellsten (1997). konnivesi-ruotsalaisen säännöstelyn vaikutukset rantavyöhykkeessä. suomen ympäristö 153. 39 p. riihimäki j, s partanen, m visuri, k kerätär, t björnström & p uotila (2003). pirkanmaan keskeisten järvien säännöstelyjen kehittäminen – vanajaveden, näsijärven, pyhäjärven sekä kulo-, rautaja liekoveden kasvillisuustutkimusten yhteenveto. alueelliset ympäristöjulkaisut 317. 94 p. rintanen t (1996). changes in the flora and vegetation of 113 finnish lakes during 40 years. annales botanici fennici 33, 101–122. rørslett b (1988). an integrated approach to hydropower impact assessment. i. environmental features of some norwegian hydro-electric lakes. hydrobiologia 164, 39–66. rørslett b (1989). an integrated approach to hydropower impact assessment. ii. submerged macrophytes in some norwegian hydro-electric lakes. hydrobiologia 175, 65–82. rørslett b (1991). principal determinants of aquatic macrophyte richness in northern european lakes. aquatic botany 39, 173–193. särkkä j (1979). the zoobenthos of lake päijänne and its relations to some environmental factors. acta zoologica fennica 160, 1–46. sarvala j (1996). limalevä, valkokatka, raakku ja rapu – miten sisävesien eliöstö on muuttunut. luonnon tutkija 5, 29–47. segal s (1971). principles on structure, zonation and succession of aquatic macrophytes. hidrobiologia 12, 89–95. sjörs h & c nilsson (1976). vattenutbyggnadens effekter på levande natur. en faktaredovisning övervägande från umeälven. växtekologiska studier 8, 1–120. solantie r (1987). sadeja lumiolot. in alalammi p (ed). atlas of finland, folio 131: climate, 18–22. national board of survey & geographical society of finland, helsinki. spence dhn (1982). the zonation of plants in freshwater lakes. advances in ecological research 12, 37–125. suominen j (1968). changes in the aquatic macroflora of the polluted lake rautavesi sw finland. annales botanici fennici 5, 65–81. teräsvirta h (1978). päijänteen alueen vesien käytön kokonaissuunnitelma: vesihallituksen asettaman työryhmän ehdotus. vesihallituksen tiedotus 164. 358 p. tikkanen p, t niva, t yrjänä, k kuusela, s hellsten, l kantola & e alasaarela (1988). effects of regulation on the ecology of the littoral zone and the feeding of whitefish, coregonus spp., in lakes in northern finland. finnish fisheries research 9, 457–465. toivonen h (1983). changes in the dominant macrophytes of 54 small finnish lakes in 30 years. in proceedings of the international symposium of aquatic macrophytes 18.–23.9.1983, nijmegen, netherlands, 220–224. toivonen h (1984). makrofyyttien käyttökelpoisuus vesien tilan seurannassa. luonnon tutkija 88, 92–95. toivonen h & s bäck (1989). changes in vegetation of a small eutrophicated and lowered lake (southern finland). annales botanici fennici 26, 27–38. toivonen h & c nybom (1989). aquatic vegetation and its recent succession in the waterfowl wetland fennia 183: 1 (2005) 79changes of emergent aquatic macrophyte cover in seven large … koijärvi, s finland. annales botanici fennici 26, 1–14. uotila p (1971). distribution and ecological features of hydrophytes in the polluted lake vanajavesi, s finland. annales botanici fennici 8, 257–295. uotila p (1997). hattulan lehijärvivesikasvijärviemme parhaimmistoa. lutukka 13, 35–50. vaarama a (1938). wasservegetationstudien am grossee kallavesi. annales botanici societatis zoologicae-botanicae fennicae vanamo 13: 1, 1–314. vaarama a (1961). lake finland and its lake types. archivum societatis zoologicae-botanicae fennicae vanamo 16, 33–49. vaheri e (1932). jyväsjärven kasvillisuus. annales botanici societatis zoologicae-botanicae fennicae vanamo 3: 1, 1–47. valta-hulkkonen k, a kanninen, r ilvonen & j leka (2005). assessment of aerial photography as a method for monitoring aquatic vegetation in lakes of varying trophic status. boreal environment research 10, 57–66. valta-hulkkonen k, s partanen & a kanninen (2003a). remote sensing as a tool in the aquatic macrophyte mapping of a eutrophic lake: a comparison between visual interpretation and spectral sorting. in virrantaus k & h tveite (ed). scangis’2003: proceedings of the 9th scandinavian research conference on geographical information science, 4.–6.6.2003, espoo, finland, 79–90. helsinki university of technology, espoo. valta-hulkkonen k, p pellikka, h tanskanen, a ustinov & o sandman (2003b). digital false colour aerial photographs for discrimination of aquatic macrophyte species. aquatic botany 75: 1, 71–88. virkkala k (1959). geologic map of finland, quaternary deposits 1:100,000, sheet 2123 tampere. geological survey of finland. virkkala k (1961). geologic map of finland, quaternary deposits 1:100,000, sheet 2131 hämeenlinna. geological survey of finland. vuorenmaa j, s rekolainen, a lepistö, k kenttämies & p kauppila (2001). losses of nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural and forest areas in finland during the 1980s and 1990s. environmental monitoring and assessment 76: 2, 213–248. vuoristo h (1998). water quality classification of finnish inland waters. european water management 1: 6, 35–41. wallsten m (1974). flygbildstolkning och beskrivning av tämnarens vegetation. svensk botanisk tidskrift 68, 431–440. wallsten m (1981). changes of lakes in uppland central sweden during 40 years. symbolae botanicae upsaliensis 23: 3, 1–84. wallsten m & p-o forsgren (1989). the effects of increased water level on aquatic macrophytes. journal of aquatic plant management 27, 32–37. weisner seb (1991). within-lake patterns in depth penetration of emergent vegetation. freshwater biology 26, 133–142. 21849_3_ylhaisi.indd indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of ethnic forests for conservation in the north pare, the eastern arc mountains, tanzania jussi ylhäisi ylhäisi, jussi (2004). indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of ethnic forests for conservation in the north pare, the eastern arc mountains, tanzania. fennia 182: 2, pp. 109–132. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this study evaluates the extent and effects of fragmentation of the forests in the eastern arc mountains, and particularly in the north pare mountains (npm). the data have been collected using participatory methods. the vegetation cover analysis is based on comparison of air photos, satellite images and maps. in the npm, the forest fragmentation is more substantial than presented in previous studies. the loss of indigenous forests in the npm during 1982–1997 was 31%, and the loss of all types of forest was about 37%. during the same period, the cultivated land area increased by 68%. in 1997, the total area of the closed forests was no more than 5% of the land area. they have, however, a high endemism and a rich biodiversity. only about a fi fth of the government forest reserves (frs) are closed forests at present. outside the frs traditionally protected forests (tpfs) and riverine forests are the last indigenous forest remnants, both of which have been protected by local gweno ethnic communities “forever”. the total area of the tpfs is considerable, about 1/3 of the size of closed forests inside the frs. in that sense, the importance of the tpfs for biodiversity conservation becomes evident. these forests can act as corridors or stepping stones in connecting the frs. also, about 77% of the tpfs are located in the most fertile altitudes between 1200–1400 meters where no frs exist. they are ideal for biodiversity conservation as their management is based on local caretakers and customs. jussi ylhäisi, institute of development studies and department of geography, university of helsinki, p. o. box 59, fin-00014 university of helsinki, finland. e-mail: jussi.ylhaisi@helsinki.fi . ms received 27 april 2004. introduction the north pare mountains (npm) are part of the eastern arc mountains (eam) which stretch from south-eastern kenya through central tanzania. the eastern arc mountains with the coastal forests of tanzania and kenya are the richest in endemic vascular plant and vertebrate species per unit area of the 17 globally most endangered tropical forest ecosystems (myers et al. 2000). it also forms one of the world’s 25 biodiversity hotspots. the eam consist of 13 large mountains (fig. 1). taita hills are in kenya while the rest are located in tanzania. because of high altitude the mountains catch moisture. the vicinity of the indian ocean allows rainfall in some areas as high as 3000 mm per year. in some western rain shadow slopes, however, rainfall is as low as 600 mm. the eam were formed 100 million years ago and the eastern arc forests may have persisted for up to 30 million years, representing one of the oldest and most stable terrestrial ecosystems on the continent. in comparison, kilimanjaro is situated 40 km northeast of the north pare mountains (see fig. 1) and does not belong to the eam because it is volcanic and its lava deposits are only one million years old. the age of the eam, their geologic origin as crystalline basement block mountains, thick series 110 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi of highly metamorphosed sediments, and proximity to the ocean are features, which separate them from other highland regions in east africa. these same features have also contributed to their very diverse and unique biota which is quite distinct from the adjacent savannah and woodland habitats in east africa (kingdon 1989). rainforests existed all over central and eastern africa before the latest glacial period. the time when the latest glacial period reached its maximum (ca. 20,000–12,000 bp) was also a period of maximum aridity in tropical and subtropical areas. evergreen forest virtually disappeared, even from uganda, and receded to the kongo basin, but the eam stayed phytogeographically distinct and constituted a refuge for rainforest plants and animals like birds, nocturnal arboreal mammals, nocturnal forest amphibians and reptiles. the rainfall of the eam is closely tied to the indian ocean, which is more important than the temperature for the continued existence of evergreen forests. the coastal forests of tanzania and kenya normally extend ca. 50 km inland from the coast of the indian ocean (burgess et al. 1992). only a few of them still exist, and some which are situated between handeni, mkata and tanga are marked in fig. 1. the smallest ones have not been marked as their size is sometimes even less than 1–2 ha. they are normally sacred sites (mwihomeke et al. 1998; mwihomeke et al. 2000). evergreen lowland forests also exist near dar es salaam with a traditional sacred site e.g. in pugu hills. also, near mombasa there are evergreen forests with sacred sites (spear 1978). in 1999, the fao reported that 10.5% of africa’s forests had been lost between 1980 and 1995, the highest rate in the developing world and in sharp contrast to the net afforestation seen in developed countries. forest loss between 1990 and 2000 was over 50 million hectares, representing an average deforestation rate of nearly 0.8% per year over this period. as a consequence, availability of forest resources per capita declined from 1.22 ha/person in 1980 to 0.74 ha/person in 1995 (unep 2003). according to the report, the annual deforestation rate in tanzania is about 1.2%, 50% higher that the average of africa. the average annual loss of forests in tanzania does not explain the quality differences in the forest cover. indigenous forests in the eam are closed canopy mountain forests. this forest type covers only 0.2% of the area of tanzania (newmark 2002: 10–11). during this study in the npm it was established that the loss of the closed canopy mountain forest between 1982–1997 was 31%, and the loss in the total forest area in the mountains was about 37%. unfortunately, the situation in other parts of the eam is not necessarily much better. extremely serious illegal timber logging has recently been identifi ed in the south pare mountains (persha 2003). charcoal burning also threatens to reduce by half the catchment forests by the year 2020 (musendo 2002). this will cause many environmental problems, like problems in water supply in cities along the rivers and on the coast. for example, the eastern arc mountains form a catchment area for rivers supplying hydropower that represents 61.5% of tanzania’s total electricity generation capacity (iddi & sjöholm 1997). objectives in this study the aim is to assess the extent of fragmentation of the forests in the eam and the npm as part of it. another aim is to identify the indigenous forest remnants. all remaining indigenous forests outside the forest reserves in the npm have been traditionally protected. traditionally protected forests, (tpfs) have been protected by local communities “forever”; many of them even before the gweno and pare ethnic groups arrived in the npm. present problems of the existence of the tpfs are explained and new methods such as by-laws are described. in addition to sacred sites, the possibility of using riverine forests as ecological corridors is being evaluated. riverine forests and springs have been traditionally respected and protected. in a place like the npm where the forest habitat degradation has developed far, the existence of small indigenous traditionally protected closed forest patches (tpf) may be the reason why so many species still exist. previous studies about the survival of species in fragmented forest habitats with different size, time, and edge effect are assessed. these will be used to assess how ecology and spatial theories and previous studies of fragmentation, connectivity, patch fennia 182: 2 (2004) 111indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… fig. 1. forests of the eastern arc mountains (eam) and surrounding lowland forests. source: burgess et al. 1992; tfcg 1998; persha 2003. 112 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi size, and altitude can be used for conservation purposes. these theories are being used to make an assessment of whether traditionally protected forests can act as corridors or stepping stones to connect government forest reserves, where the biggest indigenous forest areas are situated. also in situ and ex situ conservation possibilities are assessed. also, some management-plan ideas are given for site selection for indigenous species conservation strategies. finally, conservation successes and failures are compared between the central government managed forest reserves and the community managed traditionally protected forests. materials and methods the most detailed data presented in the study have been collected in the two most northern villages, simbomu and vuchama-ngofi (fig. 2). these two villages differ from other villages in the sense that there are more traditionally protected forests in them and they are in different condition in these two case-study villages. in vuchama-ngofi the traditional forests grow stately and intact and they are a dominant feature in the landscape. in simbomu traditional forests have been badly degraded. these were the main reasons to select them as case study villages. for more information about the villages, see ylhäisi (2000: 205–207). data have been collected during the years 1997 –2003. data collection methods have been participatory, including village maps, transect walks, matrix valuation, village meetings, group discussions, as well personal open discussions (chambers 1983, 1997; laitinen et al. 1995; ulvila 1995). the vegetation cover analysis is based on air photos from 1982 (tn 4 172 and tn 032), a spot-pan 141/357 satellite image from 1996, a landsat-tm 167/63 image from 1997, fi eld work in 1997–2003, maps gaf (1998a, 1998b, 1998c) made by a german company (gaf 1998d), and a biodiversity study generated using sampling plots. the biodiversity study was made during the 1997– 2000 period in co-operation with the tanzania forest research institute (tafori). the assessment of the recent situation in january 2003 is based only on visual observations by the author. more details about the data collection of traditionally protected forests are presented in mwihomeke et al. (1998) and ylhäisi (2000). the north pare mountains the study area of the north pare mountains is situated in mwanga district, kilimanjaro region, at an altitude of 800–2000 m a.s.l. with slope gradients often exceeding 40 degrees. mwanga district covers about 2640 km2 of which the mountain area covers about 365 km2. on the surrounding dry savanna plains vegetation is very different as compared to mountain evergreen closed forests. rock outcrops and cliffs are a common feature of the landscape of the mountain slopes, which start from 800 m and end as high as 1400 m a.s.l. in a highland plateau. the npm have three high peaks: kindoroko (2112 m), ngofi in minja fr (1810 m) and mramba (1720 m). fig. 2. forests in the north pare mountains according to a 1:250 000 map. notice the small cultivated area and the two case study village centres. source: hunting technical service 1996. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 113indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… the climate around the npm is generally semiarid. in the npm the annual precipitation is about 700–1300 mm on the eastern slopes on the windward side. in contrast, the northern and western slopes and lowlands are on the leeward side and receive less precipitation, about 500–650 mm per year, with occurrences of droughts. there is a bimodal distribution of rainfall. there are signs that rains are becoming less, and more unreliable, due to the destruction of natural resources. this is also an opinion expressed by the locals. farms in the region are small with average size less than 1 ha. the main crops are maize mixedcropped with beans and cassava or sweet potatoes for subsistence production. coffee is normally intercropped with banana (musa paradisiaca) or shade and fruit tree species such as grevillea robusta, albizzia schimperiana, cordia africana, persea americana and artocarpus heterophyllus (mvungi 1998). sometimes food crops are intercropped with leguminous shrubs such as peas. the soils are generally well drained, mainly reddish and of medium texture, characterized by low to moderate fertility with ph values 4.5–6. grazing is practiced by more than 95% of the households in the npm (mvungi 1998: 163). currently, there is hardly any area left for grazing and already in 1994 msangi and mwihomeke wrote that farmers are forced to keep their animals in stalls and feed them by a cut-and-carry system. the total population of the district is 115,600 people (urt 2003: 47) growing at an average of 1.6% per annum, which is much less than the growth of the previous census period (urt 1988: 48). according to omar (1998), only about 20% of the district population live on the plain. this means that the population density in the mountains can exceed 400 inhabitants/km2. when areas unsuitable for settlement and cultivation (slopes and forest reserves) are included, the density is about 210 inhabitants/km2. in the lowlands of the district the population density is only about 11 inhabitants/ km2. the main ethnic groups are pare and gweno, and the average household size is about 5 persons in the mountain area. the lowlands were mainly unoccupied before 1940. the latest wave of migration came after the shortage of land in the mountains and low world market price of coffee. rivers and ravines, especially in slopes, are numerous in the npm. formerly, river and stream banks were given due respect and inhabitants were not allowed to cultivate up to the river and stream banks. there have been indigenous irrigation systems but in ugweno in the most northern part of the npm, the irrigation canals are no longer functioning according to mshana (1992) and mvungi (1998: 163), because water sources have dried up due to forest cover depletion or farming activities that have blocked the canals. at present, due to population pressure and insuffi cient law enforcement, the farmers are cultivating up to the river/stream banks and are also trying to recover old traditional irrigation systems. indigenous forest habitat fragmentation and degradation it must be noted that the indigenous forests in mountains are highly heterogeneous. reasons for differentiation can be due to variations in altitude, rainfall, geographical location, the amount of light, humidity, temperature, sun, evaporation, wind, clouds, shadow, soil depth, ph, etc. there are also some general rules: wetter forest types contain more endemic plant species than drier forests. each forest type has a different species composition, and the endemic plants have their own narrow ecological ranges. the dry forest endemic species do not occur in wet forest and vice versa (lovett 1998: 65). floristic composition correlates highly with altitude. there are various reasons for this. the temperature decreases by six degrees per 1000 metres. there are clouds hanging around upper slopes, especially during rainy seasons. the temperature and humidity affect the topsoil down to 10 cm below the litter. acidity is lower where the altitude is higher and where the humus layer is also deeper (hamilton 1998: 86, 87). there are already marked changes in topsoil at an altitude of about 850 m, with a sharp fall in ph and the presence of a thick mor-humus layer at higher altitudes. according to hamilton (1998), forest degradation has caused the upward movement of vegetation zones and a warmer and less misty climate over the last 25 years. also, the humus layer has 114 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi suffered in forest clearings, and under exotic tree in the npm the invasive tree maesopsis eminii, the topsoil ph acidity seems to be over a ph point higher than normally. reduction of habitat size and duration of the decline in species diversity in forest fragments have been diffi cult to establish and are still very much unknown. this is one reason why fragments of tropical rainforest have a high priority as conservation areas since they could form the pool of origin for the regeneration of larger forest areas (unep 2003). there is a species-area relationship model: log s = log k + z log a, where s is the number of species, a is area, k and z are constants. the relationship is a linear equation, and therefore the constants are frequently estimated through simple linear regression. the constant z is an exponent that defi nes the slope of the species-area curve. the most common value for z is approximately 0.25 although values from 0.12–0.5 are reported. according to the model, a loss of 95% of habitat, for example, can mean a 53% loss in species number (newmark 2002: 71–73). another interesting theory relating to size, formation and fragmentation is presented forman’s (1995: 72–73) comprehensive study, which indicates that several patches have a higher avian species richness than one patch with a larger size than the smaller forests’ total area. forman (1995: 406–409) divides the degradation of a habitat into fi ve steps: 1) perforation, 2) dissection, 3) fragmentation, 4) shrinkage and 5) attrition. perforation (making holes) in a habitat or land type is a typical beginning of land transformation. another common form is dissection, subdividing an area in two or more pieces. in perforation the connectivity is not a problem. fragmentation means the breaking up of a habitat or land type into smaller parcels. shrinkage is the decrease in size of parcels such as forest patches. attrition is the disappearance of patches and corridors. usually small patches disappear, although the occasional disappearance of large patches is especially signifi cant ecologically (forman 1995: 408). deforestation and forest fragmentation, i.e. the reduction of large continuous forests to small isolated remnants, affect the survival of natural populations in complex ways. the above model about fragmentation does not take into account quality changes in the remaining habitats. in the model, the quality of the habitat remains the same. this is normally not the case because edge effects increase during the fragmentation (fimbel et al. 2001). studies have also been made about the size effect for the existence of species (forman 1995: 43–80; newmark 2002: 69–127). all of these models still consider the habitat quality itself unchanged, although the latest step in the fragmentation model is attrition. attrition could be understood also as the loss of the original quality of the habitat. selective logging can also pose a great threat to the original site specifi c indigenous forest habitat. for example, diffusion of exotic species from plantations presents a threat to the biodiversity (mshana 1992). these factors reduce and isolate indigenous populations in forest habitats. species vary as to their vulnerability to extinction. the rarity of a species, or its small population size, is an important predictor of extinction. small populations are more adversely affected than large ones by demographic, genetic, and environmental random events and social dysfunction. other reasons for vulnerability are temporal variations in population size and poor dispersal/colonization capacity (newmark 2002: 112–114). forests, for example, have distinct ‘edge species’ and ‘interior species’. edge species are those that are suited to conditions at the edge of the forest (where there is typically more exposure to light, wind, and predation), whereas interior species are more suited to conditions inside the forest. forest fragmentation poses a substantial threat to many interior species, they are often very sensitive to forest degradation. too much edge threatens interior species, natural forest dynamics can collapse and dramatic changes may take place in the species composition (saunders et al. 1991; murcia 1995; fagan et al. 1999; siitonen 2003: 10; unep 2003). the response of species to the edge-effect over time is unclear. on the basis of the few available studies, edge effect appears to be strongly dynamic over time (murcia 1995; siitonen 2003). there is evidence that forest interior species and island species are also more vulnerable because they have fennia 182: 2 (2004) 115indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… often evolved in the absence of predators (newmark 2002: 114). even species living in metapopulations may persist in fragmented landscapes over time by establishing themselves in new empty suitable habitat patches to replace local “extinctions” (hanski 1999). fragmentation of habitats decreases the size of distinct habitat patches and increases interpatch distances. if the site network is highly fragmented, this restricts opportunities for dispersal between sites leading to a poor capacity of forests to maintain species in the long term (hanski & ovaskainen 2002). it is necessary to keep the habitat network in good condition when poorly dispersing species with discrete habitat requirements are threatened by habitat fragmentation. habitats should be located so close to each other that species can effi ciently re-colonize locally extinct habitat patches to ensure persistence of a metapopulation (hanski 1999; hanski & ovaskainen 2002; siitonen 2003). indigenous forest fragmentation and degradation in the eastern arc mountains and the north pare mountains habitat loss is identifi ed as a main threat to 85% of all species described in the iucn red lists. over the last 2000 years, the eam have lost over threequarters of their original forest, which was estimated at around 23,300 km2. in newmark’s (2002: 10, 11) comprehensive publication about the area and its conservation, the total forest cover of the natural forest is estimated to be about 5708 km2. he also estimates that the total closed forest area, where the canopy is generally intact and continuous, is more than 1452 km2. the rest 4256 km2 of the natural forest is open forest, the canopy of which is broken and non-continuous mainly due to human disturbance and fi re events. much of this loss has taken place during the past 200 years due to a dramatic increase in human pressure and technological change. among the eam forests suffering the highest proportional losses of original forest cover are the taita hills (98.1%), ukaguru (90%), mahenge (89.3%), west usambara (84%) and nguru mountains (82%), uzungwa (76%), south pare (73%), uluguru (65%), east usambara (57%), north pare (56.2%), and rubeho (37%) (newmark 1998: 32; 2002: 10). even the remaining indigenous forests have suffered, and only a part of them are closed forests and undisturbed. they are also highly fragmented, as according to newmark (1998, 2002), the median and mean patch sizes are 10.2 km2 and 58.0 km2, respectively. according to the situation described above the total loss of the forest cover in the npm is 56.2%. the remaining forests and woodland as well cultivated land areas are presented in fig. 2. in actual fact the situation is even worse because the resolution used for is very rough in fig. 2. estimation of the other mountains’ forest sizes, as given above, were derived utilising the same methods. in the npm, when comparing fig. 2 with the reality, those areas which have been marked as forest areas are mainly woodland in reality. the area marked as woodland is mainly cultivated. in the more detailed presentation (fig. 3) it is not possible to fi nd continuous large forests. the remaining closed forests and riverine forests together covered no more than 5% of the land area in 1997 (see fig. 3). according to the species-area relationship model, a 53% loss in species numbers can be presumed. in the npm, there are only about 15 km2 of indigenous forests left. the largest ones are kindoroko (5.9 km2), mramba (1.9 km2), minja (1.3 km2) and minja north patch (0.1 km2) (see fig. 3). the distance between the two minjas is about 100 metres. the forest between them burned in january– march 1997 during a long and severe dry season when the short rains failed. the same fi re burned about half of the original vegetation (fig. 3). kilambeni forest is one of the big forests (0.75 km2). this forest is locally protected and it includes a major traditional training forest. also the riverine forests are traditionally protected indigenous forests. the npm map of 1982 indicates how almost all cultivation was located in valleys. ridges in mountain plains were uncultivated but the lowest and most fertile lands beside rivers were mainly in cultivation. in the middle of the mountain plain there was a patch of about two times fi ve kilometres in size, which was entirely cultivated. the biggest 116 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi fig. 3. indigenous closed forests in 1982 and in 1997 in the north pare mountains, tanzania. the government forest reserves, riverine forests, burnt closed forests, cultivated lands, and the largest traditionally protected forests (named sacred site) are presented in the map. also the highest altitudes a.s.l. of the peaks in the reserves are marked. land use maps from years 1982 and 1997 have been compiled using air photo pictures from 1985, a spot satellite image from 1995, a landsat image from 1997, and fi eld work in 1997. source: mgd 1982; smd 1982; urt 1990a; urt 1990b; kiwelu 1997; swala 1997; gaf 1998a; gaf 1998b; gaf 1998c. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 117indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… closed mountain forests were located apart from each other but they still had connections which were not cut by cultivated lands. the connection from kindoroko f.r. via kamwala f.r. to mramba f.r. and toni (number 21 in fig. 5) was very important. similarly important were connections from kindoroko f.r. to hweni and mukundani rives and to kiverenge. there were very few cultivated gaps wider than 1 km in the year 1982. the map describing the situation of forests in 1997 gives alarming information about the forest degradation and fragmentation (fig. 3). the total area of cultivated land from 1982 to 1997 has increased from 73 km2 to 123 km2 giving a 68% increase in only 15 years. this means that the deforestation rate in the future will decrease simply because there is no more uncultivated land left except in forest reserves and on slopes, which are impossible to use without massive terrace construction. however, labour intensive terracing exercises are very unlikely to start. the border of the mountain slope and mountain plane is marked in figs. 3 and 7. the slope gradient is very steep between the marked line and the lowland. the slopes are also very often rocky. inside the borderline there are very few uncultivated larger areas except government forest reserves. about 70% of land inside the borderline in the highland was cultivated. during the drought in 1996–1997, just before the severe el niño event, a total of 7.5 km2 of forest burned in the npm. the losses were dramatic, especially in minja where almost half of the indigenous evergreen forests burned. a smaller percentage, but larger area, burned around kindoroko. for the biodiversity such a big loss of forests in these fi res must have been extremely dramatic, and it happened in a very short time. this was also a warning about the risks which will be more common when the total size of closed forest area becomes smaller and climate and vegetation becomes drier. also, in kirumwi and in some adjacent areas, almost half of the area of the forest burned. these forests were secondary or planted forests, but not intact. these burnt areas are not marked on fig. 3, instead the burned indigenous closed forests are marked. there have been treeplanting projects and woodlots. their total size is around 2 km2 in the npm, but on the slopes many of them have unfortunately been unsuccessful mainly because of fi res (anspach 1999). kamwala, kirumwi and even kindoroko forest reserves are now like uncultivated islands in the middle of cultivations, in spite of still being connected to each other. it is important to maintain this connection. there are no vertical (east–west) connections between the forests any more except via the hweni and mkundani rivers to kindoroko and to the west from there. however, even here some slopes are being taken for cultivation. this is a reaction to the shortage of land and raises fears that in the future even the last riverbanks will be taken for cultivation. forman’s (1995: 406–409) model of habitat degradation can be used to describe the situation in npm. in 1982, there were 16 bigger “perforations” with smaller ones plus some “dissections” (see fig. 3). the overall situation in 1982 was a mixture of the stage of perforation and fragmentation. fifteen years later in 1997 there were only 5 “perforations” left plus some very small ones and no “dissections” (fig. 3). the 1997 situation could be described by using forman’s categorization as somewhere between shrinkage and attrition. in the npm, there is a high number of forest patches with natural and indigenous vegetation. the reason seems to be the local culture and religion, which are retarding the process of diminishing and eliminating of these small forest patches. in the npm, the traditionally protected forests are small closed forest areas outside forest reserves, but as lovett (1998: 67) and mwihomeke et al. (2000: 191) mention they can also be rich in endemic species and important even globally. even relatively small patches of forest can contain many regionally highly specialized endemic species, especially when the quality of the forest patch is high, as mentioned before. in 1997 inside the borderline in the highland, the closed forest covered 8% of the area, but without the tpf the coverage was only 6%. protection of indigenous forests in the eastern arc mountains conservation areas cover large parts of tanzania. according to newmark (2002: 11, 13), approxi118 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi mately 7000 km2 of land in the eams is protected in national parks, nature reserves, forest reserves, or local authority forest reserves, and about 80– 90% of the remaining natural forests are offi cially protected. unfortunately there are some problems with the protection of government forest reserves and parks. already in 1952, during the british colonial period, much of the forest reserves were secondary forests (lind & morrison 1974: 209). according to the fairly recent report of the vice president’s offi ce (1998: 50), only 9% of the protected ‘low rain forests’ and 33% ‘afro-montane/alpine shrub’ areas are covered by natural vegetation at present. according to newmark (2002: 11), most of the borders of reserves are poorly defi ned. in the fi eld beacons have disappeared, and even border tree lines have been illegally cut down (persha 2003). vegetation growth has obscured marked boundaries, and demarcation is often incomplete. large non-forested areas inside the reserves bring about even more confusion. the most common reasons for the destruction of these areas are human encroachment and fi res. there are many reasons for peoples’ behaviour which originate from the history of forest reserves since their establishment during the colonial period (see mshana 1992; conte 1994; koponen 1994: 530–536; ylhäisi 2003). also, the forest plantations of exotic tree species – about 115 km2 in the eam – are in the former natural forest areas and threaten the survival of indigenous species. this organized invasion into government reserves is very serious. in chome fr, in the south pare mountains, this is very well documented by persha (2003). in one day of aerial survey it was possible to identify 310 pitsaw sites and cutting down of over 1000 endangered indigenous trees, mainly endemic ocotea usambarensis. the traditional forest protection by ethnic groups is very poorly studied in the eam. however, there is some information on the existence of sacred forests and sites in at least 11 out of 13 eastern arc mountains. the sacred sites’ size, location, and ways of ritual performances vary by ethnic groups and there are differences even between clans. amani national park in east usambara, which is the fl agship of rainforest conservation in the eam, seems to have been created around sacred sites. in the taita hills all remaining indigenous forests have been traditionally protected. protection of indigenous forests in the north pare mountains areas protected by the government are essential for the conservation of biodiversity in the eam and the npm. the government protected forests in the npm cover 75 km2, 20% of the total mountain area. the problems in the protection of frs are the same in the npm as elsewhere in the eam. the effects of fi re have increased partly because of the relatively small size of the forests. in the npm, fi re has damaged over a fourth of the closed forests just in recent years, mainly inside the forests reserves (see fig. 3). only about 12% (9.2 km2) of the government forests are still closed forests (see fig. 3). the mwanga district council has enacted bylaws dividing the land into prohibited, reserved and restricted areas. restricted areas refer to any area which forms part of a hill, slope or valley. no one can graze, cultivate or cut trees in these areas without the permission of the district council. any area around rivers, gullies and springs (a radius of 15 metres) is considered a prohibited area. preserved areas are determined by the discretion of the district council. there are very strict laws in district as well in government forest reserves prohibiting any use of the forest for locals. offi cially, the protection is well organized, but the reality is different (mvungi 1998: 164, 165). in the npm, the local authority forests are under the jurisdiction of village and district governments. the forest cover of local authority forest reserves is only 3.7 km2 (mwihomeke et al. 1998; newmark 2002: 12). the local authority forests are mostly traditionally protected forests and therefore without legal rights until an agreement (tfap 1997) made between traditionalists and village governments in the north pare mountains. the main altitude of the tpfs location is different compared to the altitudes of government forest reserves. tpfs are in areas where people have been living the longest and the human activities are the most intensive (an exception are the sacred sites on mountain tops which are unoccupied). although the sizes of the tpfs are small, the forest fennia 182: 2 (2004) 119indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… coverage in tpfs is high. the total size of the tpfs is about 1/3 of the size of closed forests inside government forest reserves. traditional protection, village by-laws and conservation in the north pare mountains there are 276 identifi ed sacred tpfs in the npm (mwihomeke et al. 1998). in fig. 7, only the 136 largest tpfs are marked (sacred sites). there are, in total, more than 100 indigenous forest patches, the size of which is about one hectare. the biggest of them are kena 10 ha (it is smaller than originally), toni about 6 ha (plus about 30 ha badly disturbed forest land), kilambeni 20 ha (in good condition), mbachi 6 ha (partly disturbed) and chela 8 ha. furthermore, there are 32 other traditionally protected forests of almost one hectare in size. these do not, however, give the grand total number of traditionally protected forests. there are three divisions in the npm and the most southernmost and smallest division of lembeni was left out of the survey, although there are some well known tpfs there which have been marked in figs. 3 and 7. at present, with the exception of a few national forest reserves, the tpfs are the only natural forests where one can fi nd remnants of important indigenous tree species. common tree species found in sacred forests in the north pare mountains are syzygium cordaturm, albizia schimperiana, croton microstachys, bridelia micrantha, and ficus spp. in the npm, the 136 largest traditionally protected sacred forests, in fig. 4, are especially important because of their altitudinal distribution. these forests are mainly in the elevations where the deforestation has been the most profound. the reason for the destruction is that the most fertile lands are in altitudes between 1200–1400 meters. this is where most of the traditionally protected forests are also located (77%). it can even be presumed that they are central for the existence of some species because closed forests do not exist in government forest reserves at these elevations. there are only two tfps on the outer side of the borderline of the slope marked in fig. 7. however, slopes are the main location for tfps, almost 40% of them are located on slopes, and in addition 7% on gentle slopes. all of these are inside the borderline. a second common location is on small hills (18%) and a third most common location is on mountain ridges (14%). there are still 6 tpfs on plains and 12 in valleys. together they form 13% all forests. in the valleys beside the rivers there are still 11 forests (8%). in 1982, only 18% of the tpfs were surrounded by cultivation, but in 1997 already 69% of them were surrounded by cultivation and only nine were without a contact to cultivated lands. in 1982, there were still 38 such forests. this shows the special character of the forests – they have remained untouched, although forests around them have changed to cultivation. traditionally there have been prohibitions in the npm to enter the sacred sites without sacrifi ce. the general prohibition which concerns, for example, the use of fallen trees and twigs for fi rewood, is ecologically very important. the fact that the volume of dead fallen trees and snags appears to refl ect the fig. 4. the number of the traditionally protected forests (sacred sites) in different altitudes above the sea level in the north pare mountains (in fig. 7) (mgd 1982; urt 1990a, 1990b; gaf 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). 120 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi richness of polypores, liverworts and epiphytic lichens is documented by several studies (khiewtam & ramakrishnan 1993; siitonen 2003: 17). also the prohibition of hunting animals in these forests is signifi cant. there are information about animal populations in different countries which have survived because their habitat is sacred (e.g. schaaf 1999; trakarnsuphakorn 2003). unfortunately for the tpfs, customs are changing. elders told in many places that their traditions have ceased and sanction mechanisms are not functional any more. also performing rituals and initiation training have stopped. christianity and islam are the main reasons for the situation. furthermore, some clans do not have enough land for agriculture because of population growth and they have started to clear their traditional forests (mvungi 1998: 165). the average farm size has dropped from 2 ha in 1960 (kimambo 1969) to less than 1 ha in 1995 (tfap 1995) due to a continuous subdividing of the plots under clans. the land tenure system in the north pare mountains is customary and clans own the land. possible expansion areas have been mpungi (family forest) and mishitu (training forests). some of the owners of the forests have received traditional compensation, mbuta, to allow people to clear their mpungi for buildings and farms. “traditionalists” categorized even themselves in history, but actually there are activities, values, respect, prohibitions, organization and interests to manage these forests. in the npm, there are in total seven different types of tpf (see mwihomeke et al. 1998; ylhäisi 2000). mbungi and mishitu by-law agreement in the north pare mountains it seems that colonial foresters did not realize the local forest and environment management and its ecological importance, and the mistake continued until recent times. tpfs were not as evident and visible as today because they were earlier surrounded by other forests, as mentioned above. there have been court cases where the locals’ rights have been nullifi ed and caretakers have been told to cease appealing to the court (ylhäisi 2000). in the npm, the department of national resources in mwanga district, tanzania forestry action plan the npm (tfap the npm) and mpungi and mishitu divisions of usangi and ugweno have made a local agreement consisting of a new by-laws (see appendix 1) to continue and support traditional protection of these forests. it allows for caretakers of the tpfs to protect their forests. in the agreement, a solution is also given for sacred sites which have lost caretakers due to various reasons. the most common reason is that the caretaker has adopted christianity or islam. in such a case the village government will take the responsibility for protecting the forest. a positive feature in the agreement is also a mechanism where the caretaker can leave an unsettled case to be dealt with by the village government. there are several reasons why this helps protection. caretakers are normally elders and for them, because of their age and poor health, it is diffi cult to wait outside the courtroom for their case to be handled. the case can be complicated also, when near relatives have made the disturbance. the agreement creates a mechanism to replant disturbed tpfs with the aid of foresters. furthermore, it gives a recommendation to use indigenous tree species when replanting (see appendix 1). although it is stated in the agreement that replanted trees should not be for timber, one of the mentioned tree species is mvinje (casuarina), which is fi rewood and even exotic in africa. other recommended tree species include respected trees even outside the npm. mkuyu (ficus sycomorus) is a common ceremonial tree in tanzania (mbuya et al. 1994), in zimbabwe (mandondo 1997: 359) and a rainmaking tree in kangata village in handeni district. mvumo (boraccus aethiopum) is a traditionally protected tree in nguru mountains (oppen 1992: 38). mzambarau mwitu (syzygium guineense) is a home of the lion spirit in zimbabwe (mandondo 1997: 361). mwira (bridelia micrantha) is an over-exploited tree in tanzania. it is not planted near homesteads because it attracts caterpillars and birds. it is, however, termite resistant and its fruits are used as medicine. mringaringa (cordia africana) is commonly used as a boundary demarcation tree in moist and warm areas at 1200–2000 m a.s.l. (mbuya et al. 1994). the agreement also sees traditions as a rational way of life and explains the history of the forests, fennia 182: 2 (2004) 121indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… which is very important for the communities. it also serves as a good example for other regions of tanzania. traditionally protected forests in the case study villages simbomu and vuchama-ngofi simbomu is a village with about 2200 inhabitants and six traditional clans. simbomu is located in the northwestern part of npm and east of mramba f.r (see fig. 2). a majority of the inhabitants are muslims and christians. the sacred forests of simbomu were not in a good condition in 1997 and 1999, but in january 2003 these forests were seemingly healthier and recovering. according to the village leader the reason for this was the comprehension of the uniqueness of the forests during the survey made between 1998–2000 and the legal instrument given to the village council by the tfap agreement in 1997. also precipitation at that time was good for vegetation recovery. according to the study, the share of people of simbomu who valued “sacred” forests was the smallest in comparison with the other villages in the study. still, a little less than 50% of the participants in simbomu valued these forests, but rituals were valued by less than 25% only (see ylhäisi 2000). in simbomu there are 27 traditionally protected forests (fig. 5). simbomu meeting forest (number 22 in fig. 5) is in original condition except for the edge of the cultivation which seems to migrate slowly inward into the forest. the size of the meeting forest is 0.8 ha. the biggest forest, toni (about 6 ha), is the ritual part of the former bigger tpf between three clans. in toni forest (number 21 in fig. 5) there is now a large deforested area which is planned to be reforested. there are already two small reforestation patches as well as in the neighbouring mruma village connected to the toni forest. the toni ridge is now surrounded by cultivation. in 1982, there was still a connection to mramba forest reserve and to kindoroko forest reserve. the gap is now about 500–700 metres from the nearest secondary forest to mramba forest. in simbomu, cultivated areas are in the valleys as usual. slopes on the northern and northeastern side decline steeply to the lowland plain about 400 metres in one kilometre, and rise up on the west side 500 metres in one kilometre to the peak in mramba forest reserve, which is still covered by closed forest. fig. 5 demonstrates how the sacred sites have been surrounded by cultivation. forests 27 and 23 are important as “stepping stones” (more about “stepping stones” below) between mramba f.r. and sacred sites 21 (toni), 22 (simbomu) and 12, and furthermore to riverine forest between mangio and simbomu all the way to the next riverine forest in the north. after this, stepping stones will continue to forests 42, 40, 16, 14, 21, 20, 19, on the way to minja f.r. in vuchama-ngofi village (fig. 6). birds are the animals most probably using the stepping stones, totalling 13 in their number. the fragmented chain of stepping stones demonstrates, however, how desperate the situation of habitat degradation in the area is for indigenous animals. instead of an animal migrating all the way between mramba and minja forests, it is more probable that populations migrate shorter distances to and from the surrounding forests. in this way there can still be a slow genetic fl ow between the separated main populations. the classifi cation of vegetation used in the figs. 5 and 6 is explained in appendix 2. vuchama-ngofi is a village with 7000 people and 11 traditional clans located in the northeastern part of npm (see fig. 2). the majority of the population are muslims and christians. there are 43 traditionally protected forests in the region (see fig. 6) and their condition is in many cases excellent. there are, however, tpfs in some clans’ areas, which have suffered or shrunk to only one sacred tree. tpfs are respected by most of the villagers. almost 80% of participants in the village meetings valued tpfs somehow and even the involved rituals were valued by more than 50% of the participants in the survey (ylhäisi 2000). in 1982, most of the land was in mixed-use cultivation with scattered trees. the oldest open fi elds were located at about an altitude of 1400 m a.s.l. but now they have reached even 1700 m in the highest places, while also slopes as low as 1000 m are being cultivated. village lands surrounding minja f.r. are located mainly above 1500 m with the highest peak ngofi at 1810 m. in the for122 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi fig. 5. traditionally protected forests (named sacred sites) and the vegetation of simbomu village in the north pare mountains in tanzania. source: mgd 1982; urt 1990b; kiwelu 1997; gaf 1998a; gaf 1998b; gaf 1998c. est there was a large fi re before the el niño rains in 1996 and the biggest part of the indigenous closed forest was burnt. the tree cover was very sparse and totally disappeared from many parts in 1997. especially in the eastern parts of the village, there is a large area under cultivation, which is relatively green around the year because of perennial crops. the western side of the mountain slopes are too steep for trees to grow, or for economic land use. management alternatives for biodiversity conservation in the north pare mountains it is of importance that the largest indigenous forest patches are not totally isolated from each other. also dependency only on large forest reserves can have disadvantages; natural catastrophes like fi re, storm, and diseases can cause local extinction by destroying entire populations. one large reserve fennia 182: 2 (2004) 123indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… fig. 6. traditionally protected forests (named as sacred sites) and the vegetation of vuchama ngofi village in the north pare mountains in tanzania. source: mgd 1982; urt 1990b; kiwelu 1997; gaf 1998a; gaf 1998b; gaf 1998c. will probably not represent all of the habitats occurring in the region (saunders et al. 1991; forman 1995). for example, in 1996, the third largest closed forest (minja f.r.) lost 50% of its vegetation cover. at the same time almost 50% of the biggest closed forest kindoroko was lost due to fi re. therefore, it is less risky to have separate areas of target features, in this case indigenous closed forests, conserved (siitonen 2003: 11, 15). thinking about a maximum number of species protected in a minimum area, there are studies which underline the importance of sacred sites as indicators of high biodiversity areas (for example gadgil & vartak 1976; gerdén & mtallo 1990; okafor & ladipo 1992; khiewtam & ramakrishnan 1993; aiah et al. 1995; lebbie & guries 1995; sinha 1995; bennet et al. 1997; debal et al. 1997; decher 1997; tiwari et al. 1998; mwihomeke et 124 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi al. 2000; biggeli et al. 2003). in general, an assessment of the structural elements of a forest stand has proved to be a fast and relatively easy method to estimate the conservation value of forests (lindenmayer et al. 2000; siitonen 2003). also, minor water bodies like riverine forests or moist depressions are areas of rich biodiversity, especially for vascular plants and mosses (siitonen 2003: 17). when the ancient forest habitats are located in “island type” mountains like the npm (which is in the stage of attrition), there is a need for an active counterattack to protect the habitats of high biodiversity in the remaining forest remnants. for the counterattack, various instruments could be used such as corridors, stepping stone forests, in situ and ex situ conservation, education, information, mitigation and co-operation with local communities to protect, develop and help connectivity between indigenous habitat sites. corridors a corridor is a strip of a particular type that differs from the adjacent land on both sides. corridors have several important functions, including conduit, barrier and habitat. they are also used specifi cally in species-poor sites when one wants to help some species to return or survive (forman 1995: 149–150; williams et al. 1996; burgess et al. 2003: 58–59). there is ample evidence worldwide showing that many animals use wooded strips as conduits in crossing portions of a landscape (forman 1995: 149–151). animals that are known to use the conduits include small birds, large game birds, nocturnal arboreal mammals, many other mammals, amphibians and reptiles. newmark (1991) has made the longest continuous study of a tropical bird community in a fragmented landscape, in the forests of the east usambara mountains (eum) in the eam (see fig. 1). he discovered that most understory bird species will not cross gaps in the forest wider than one kilometre. this fi nding has led to the creation of wildlife corridors to link the amani nature park in the eum to the remaining large blocks of forest. in the npm, the distances between the biggest indigenous closed forests in the frs are much longer (see fig. 7): the distance between mramba and minja forests is about 9 km, between mramba and kindoroko about 12.5 km, between kindoroko and kilambeni 10.5 km, between kilambeni and minja 5.5 km, and between kilambeni and mramba 9.5 km. in other words, the closed forests are too far from each other to support migration of understory bird species, according to newmark (2002). in fig. 7, “ecological corridors” in the npm for two time windows, 1982 and 1997, are presented. the corridors present a simple model of possible paths for animals, based on an idea that species need not cross cultivated areas. the vegetation in the corridors can be woodland, grassland, burned forest or planted forest. this means that they are not necessarily ideal corridors for example for closed forest species. corridors consist mainly of hill and ridge tops and riverine forests. in the npm, there have been projects to create continuous catchment forests using tpfs partly as starting points for the schemes. it seems, according to msangi and mwihomeke (1994: 27–28), that in gentle terrain farmers are not willing to withdraw from their land because these areas are suitable for agriculture and settlement, and in some of them there are also old irrigation canals. due to these reasons, it is more realistic to concentrate on existing resources in uncultivated areas (marked in fig. 7) for corridor construction. in the npm, there are natural corridors such as riverine forests, which are indigenous strips of woody vegetation enclosing river or stream courses. unfortunately, these riverine forests are also disappearing due to human activities. those forests still existing are shown in fig. 7. traditionally, rivers and stream banks were given due respect, and inhabitants were not allowed to cultivate up to rivers/stream banks. traditionally, strips of about 5 metres were left uncultivated on both sides. according to the national forest ordinance, a strip of 15 metres on both sides of the riverbank should be left untouched. unfortunately, river banks are currently being narrowed by farmers due to the problem of land scarcity. a special feature of the riverine forests in the npm is that the remaining forests are on the outer slopes. they rise from the surrounding plains at about 900 m to the highland plateau at an altitude fennia 182: 2 (2004) 125indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… fig. 7. the map of corridors and disappeared corridors between indigenous closed forests, riverine forests, rivers without forests, and sacred sites in 1982 and 1997 in npm. source: mgd 1982; urt 1990a; urt 1990b; gaf 1998a; gaf 1998b; gaf 1998c. of 1200–1400 metres, and create a closed wood cover between different ecological areas which have differences in e.g. temperature and precipitation. they form gateways for many animals; some birds, for example, may survive by moving up and down the slope as climate warms or cools. there are still some riverine forests like those mentioned above, one of which is the hweni river about 5 km in length and located east of kindoroko forest reserve. another one is mukundani riverine forest south-east of kindoroko, although it has lost its natural forests from a stretch of about 2 km near kindoroko. stepping stones, in situ and ex situ conservation a stepping stone is an ecologically suitable patch where an organism, such as an animal, lives or temporarily stops while moving along a heteroge126 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi neous route. a stepping stone can also be a habitat for a plant population which can receive seeds from outside or send them outside. they are important elements in corridors and enhance a network of habitat patches. traditionally protected forests are good examples of stepping stones for forest species because they exist where the evergreen vegetation has disappeared either recently or a long time ago. as mentioned before, newmark (1991; 1998: 34) has found that understory birds do not cross gaps wider than one kilometre. this is one reason for protecting closed forest sacred sites to enhance connectivity of the type of forests. most tpfs are located within 1 km distance from a nearest neighbour. according to the iucn, in situ conservation – the conservation of species in their natural habitats – is the most appropriate way of conserving biodiversity. a protected area is a geographically defi ned area that is designated or regulated and managed to achieve specifi c conservation objectives. ex situ conservation measures can be complementary to in situ methods as they provide an “insurance policy” against extinction, which is a real threat in the eam (lulandala 1998). ex situ conservation is the preservation of components of biological diversity outside their natural habitats: in zoos, aquaria, botanical gardens and gene banks. these measures also have a valuable role to play in recovery programmes for endangered species. buffer zones and the edge effect the term buffer zone means, in the case of the npm, planted indigenous trees around closed indigenous forest and riverine forests. with buffers it is possible to defend indigenous forest habitat from future attrition, and also diminish the edge effect. tpfs are relatively well equipped against edge effects. the reasons for this are the fertile and moist soils in the sacred sites which keep them evergreen and less susceptible to fi re during the dry seasons (also mwihomeke et al. 2000: 191). the edge effect is more pronounced the smaller or more fragmented the habitat is. edge effects are complicated and they change with time due to complex interactions between several factors (murcia 1995) such as changes in microclimate – increased solar radiation, wind and decreased moisture – within forest margins, which affect species composition directly and indirectly (murcia 1995; burgess et al. 2003). the site conservation planning and conclusions it is important that the government and the international community concerned with the conservation issues start their efforts from the context of local peoples. the destruction of the environment and forests may soon reach a stage of no return, even with any reconstruction programs and plans, since the equilibrium balance of the ecosystem has changed and the succession leads not towards a forest ecosystem but towards poor scrub and grassland. historical, cultural, environmental, and land scenery values will be lost, animal and plant species will become extinct, and biodiversity in general will suffer. this means that the process in tanzania is not a problem of tanzania only. tanzania needs urgent assistance from the international community to implement its laws and development goals. but it is also time for the people of pare to realise that the environment in which they live is a unique one, and that this uniqueness is in danger of being lost. the new village land and forest laws enacted recently in tanzania give the local people extensive decision making rights. this does not mean that the government is a bystander in the process, especially since the new laws are not yet even known by local village representatives, and less by average villagers. this became apparent in discussions in january 2003 in simbomu and vuchama-ngofi . all parties, traditionalists, muslims, christians, government foresters, farmers, landless young men, women etc. should be part of planning, decision making and implementation. the remaining forests in the npm are highly heterogeneous and make the conservation of biodiversity more complicated than in many other places. even a small indigenous forest habitat tpf can be important, and they can fulfi l all criteria to be added to the offi cial protected network defi ned in the vice president’s offi ce (1998: 51). fennia 182: 2 (2004) 127indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… tpfs could be a new type of conservation model where the actors could be local communities with the educational support of the central government about ecology, biodiversity, conservation and perhaps ecotourism, and other income-generating activities (burgess et al. 2003: 56). tpfs can also be categorized as heritage sites, not only as hotspots for biodiversity and endemic species, but also as culturally important localities. the still existing riverine forests should have a special management plan by the government and district offi cials and local villagers to ensure their existence and connectivity between different areas. riverine forests east of kilambeni should be saved from isolation. also, recovering traditional protection practices such as a 4–5 metre wide buffer zone beside the river banks is important, not only for animals, but to prevent soil erosion from the fi elds and subsequent silting of rivers. introduction of exotic tree species should be avoided not only in the buffer zones, but also in catchment forests and corridors, when the aim is the recovery of indigenous habitats. buffer areas could be used selectively by local communities for their needs of forest products. in the near future, forest products will have a higher value and demand due to increasing economic activities and simultaneously diminishing forest area. nearly all investments made in the forests of the eam until the 1970s had been to plantations using mainly exotic tree species. in the npm, there are also plantation type forests which have not been established in order to increase biodiversity, although they will hopefully ease the pressure to use indigenous forests. there is a need to support the use of indigenous local tree seeds and seedlings more than what has been the practice so far. in some cases the caretakers are actively supporting replanting of the degraded area or an area which has been taken for cultivation without their permission. in these types of reforestation activities possible confl icts with neighbours should be avoided. it is important to notice that locals are willing to do the replanting by themselves and hence, external support is needed only for making the plan, and purchasing plants. traditionally protected forests in the npm are ideal for in situ conservation as culture, customs, by-laws, institutions, organizations of local communities and indigenous habitat sites for very specifi c plant and animal species support this idea. in the case of ex situ conservation, a tpf could be a refuge for plants and animals which have lost their habitat for some reason. alternatively, they can be new habitat areas when species populations need to be increased in number or size. ex situ conservation could also create new income for the local people. at the same time, transport costs of species could be saved, and it would not be necessary to create an artifi cial environment for conservation somewhere else. the locals should be assured that the income from the frs does not go to wrong hands. the maintenance needs in frs could create work opportunities for locals. it is also important to restore the large burnt areas. this will take decades, however. there is a need to study the situation of the burned forests and make a plan for implementation. it is more than obvious that locals are collecting as many burned tree trunks as possible and the collection will soon have a signifi cant ecological impact, unless done in a planned way. it is also necessary to make a plan with the locals on how to prevent fi res. a fi re as extensive as the one in 1996 would destroy the remaining closed evergreen forests from the government reserves in the npm. in the npm, the conservation situation is easier than in areas without the tpfs. the stepping stones, in situ areas and part of corridors are already protected, but not because of their biodiversity. they are protected due to their cultural and religious values. in reserve design, there is a need for a cost-effi cient network and synergy activities. the locally conserved tpfs are also ideal because of local caretakers and customs, which makes it possible to organise conservation with relatively low economic expenditures in numerous compact small indigenous areas. acknowledgements this study is based on fi eld work undertaken during 1997–2000 in co-operation with the tanzania forest research institute in the research project on “popular participation in the management of local natural resources: the role of endogenous institutions in tan128 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi zania, zimbabwe and mozambique”, and in 2003 as part of the research project on “community-based natural resource management systems in tanzania conditions and impediments” conducted by the institute of development studies in co-operation with the department of geography, university of helsinki. i am grateful to these projects; for the co-operation of villagers in vuchama-ngofi and simbomu and the tanzania forestry action program in mwanga; the academy of finland; the tanzania forestry research institute for the fi nancial support and facilities; and the comments of dr. matti nummelin, and professors john westerholm and juhani koponen; the editors and anonymous referees; and the language corrections of mr. barnaby clark, and the map work of ms. kirsti lehto, milla lanne and mr. antero keskinen. references aiah r, a lebbie & rp guries (1995). ethnobotanical value and conservation of sacred groves of the kpaa mende in sierra leone. economic botany 49: 3, 297–308. anspach p (1999). personal communication 03.10.1999. bennet el, aj nyaoi & j sompud (1997). hornbills buceros ssp. and culture in northern borneo: can they continue to co-exist? biological conservation 82, 41–46. biggeli p, d desalegn, j healey, m painton, j smith & z teklehaimanot (2003). conservation of ethiopian sacred groves. etfrn news 38, 37–38. burgess nd, lb mwasumbi, wj hawthorne, a dickinson & ra doggett (1992). preliminary assessment of the distribution, status and biological importance of coastal forests in tanzania. biological conservation 62, 205–218. burgess n, t butynski, i gordon, q luke, p sumbi & j watkin (2003). eastern arc mountains & coastal forests of tanzania & kenya. biodiversity hotspots. 70 p. conservation international, international centre of insect physiology and ecology, nairobi. chambers r (1983). rural development, putting the last fi rst. 246 p. intermediate technology publications, london. chambers r (1997). whose reality counts? putting the fi rst last. 297 p. intermediate technology publications, london. conte ca (1994). transformations along the gradient: ecological change in the mountains and plains of northeastern tanzania’s west usambara mountians, c. 1860–1970. 266 p. michigan state university, department of history, michigan. debal d, d kausik & kc malhotra (1997). sacred grove relics as bird refugia. current science 73, 815–817. decher j (1997). conservation, small mammals, and the future of sacred groves in west africa. biodiversity and conservation 7, 1007–1026. fagan wf, rs cantrell & c cosner (1999). how habitat edges change species interactions. american naturalist 153, 165–182. fimbel ra, a grajal & jg robinson (eds) (2001). the cutting edge: conserving wildlife in logged tropical forests. 695 p. columbia university press, new york. forman r (1995). land mosaics: the ecology of landscapes and regions. 632 p. cambridge university press, cambridge. gadgil m & vd vartak (1976). the sacred groves of western ghats in india. economic botany 30, 152–160. gaf (1998a). land capability 1:25 000 tfap north pare mountains, sheets 73-1-b, 73-1-d and 73-3b. the united republic of tanzania, ministry of natural resources and tourism, forestry and beekeeping division, munich. gaf (1998b). land cover changes 1:25 000 tfap north pare mountains, sheets 73-1-b, 73-1-d and 73-3-b. the united republic of tanzania, ministry of natural resources and tourism, forestry and beekeeping division, munich. gaf (1998c). vegetation and land use 1:50 000 tfap north pare mountains, sheets 73-1-b, 73-1-d and 73-3-b. the united republic of tanzania, ministry of natural resources and tourism, forestry and beekeeping division, munich. gaf (1998d). explanatory notes to thematic maps for the tanzanian forestry action plan (tfap) – north pare mountains. 10 p. the united republic of tanzania, ministry of natural resources and tourism, forestry and beekeeping division, munich. gerdén ca & s mtallo (1990). traditional forest reserves in babati district, tanzania: a study in human ecology. swedish university of agricultural sciences, international rural development centre, working paper 128. 51 p. hamilton a (1998). vegetation, climate and soil: altitudinal relationships on the east usambara mountains, tanzania. journal of eastern african natural history 87, 85–90. hanski i (1999). metapopulation ecology. 313 p. oxford university press, oxford. hanski i & o ovaskainen (2002). extinction debt and extinction threshold. conservation biology 16, 666–673. hunting technical service (1996). land cover and land use, sheet sa-37-14. ministry of natural resources and tourism, the united republic of tanzania, hemel hemstead. iddi s & h sjöholm (1997). managing natural forests at the village level: reaching the ultimate development goal. 6 p. xi world forestry congress, antalya. khiewtam rs & ps ramakrishnan (1993). litter and fi ne root dynamics of a relict sacred grove forest at cherrapunji in north-eastern india. forest ecology and management 60: 3–4, 327–344. kimambo in (1969). a political history of the pare of tanzania 1500–1900. 253 p. east african publishing house, nairobi. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 129indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… kingdon j (1989). island africa: the evolution of africa’s rare animals and plants. 287 p. princeton university press, princeton. kiwelu o (1997). usangi division land use map, 1:12 500. tfap/tip, mwanga. koponen j (1994). development for exploitation, german colonial policies in mainland tanzania, 1884–1914. finnish historical society studia historica 49. 740 p. laitinen h, t voipio & m grönqvist (1995). yhteisön ääni: osallistavien menetelmien opas. 123 p. kehitysyhteistyön palvelukeskus kepa ry, helsinki. lebbie ar & rp guries (1995). ethnobotanical value and conservation of sacred groves of the kaa mende in sierra leone. economic botany 49, 297–308. lind em & mes morrison (1974). east african vegetation. 257 p. longman, bristol. lindenmayer db, cr margules & db botkin (2000). indicators of biodiversity for ecologically sustainable forest management. conservation biology 14, 941–950. lovett jc (1998). importance of the eastern arc mountains for vascular plants. journal of eastern african natural history 87, 59–74. lulandala lll (1998). meeting the needs of the people through species domestication: a basis for effective conservation of the eastern arc mountain forest biodiversity. journal of eastern african natural history 87, 243–252. mandondo a (1997). trees and spaces as emotion and norm laden components of local ecosystems in nyamaropa communal land, nyanga district, zimbabwe. agriculture and human values 14, 353–372. mbuya lp, hp msanga, ck ruffo, a birnie & b tengnäs (1994). useful trees and shurbs for tanzania: identifi cation, propagation and management for agricultural and pastoral communities. 542 p. sida, regional soil conservation unit., nairobi. mgd (1982). north pare mountains black and white air photos 1982, tn 4 172 & tn 6 032. department of map and geodetical survey, dar es salaam. msangi th & st mwihomeke (1994). ethnobotanical survey to recommend and identity suitable tree species for afforestation and agroforestry in mwanga district – north pare. 31 p. tafori, lushoto. mshana r (1992). insisting upon people’s knowledge to resist developmentalism; peasant communities as producers knowledge for social transformation in tanzania. erziehung und gesellschaft im internationalen kontext 9. 330 p. murcia c (1995). edge effects in fragmented forests: implications for conservation. trends in ecology and evolution 10, 58–62. musendo z (2002). destroying cheap forests to buy expensive water. <http://www.newsfromafrica.org/newsfromafrica/articles/art_866.html>. 18.7.2003. mvungi a (1998). local actors in development: people’s sustenance and environment. in omari ck (ed). local actors in developmet: the case of mwanga district, 155–177. educational publishers and distributors ltd., dar es salaam. mwihomeke s, t msangi, c mabula, j ylhäisi & k mndeme (1998). traditionally protected forests and nature conservation in the northern pare mountains and handeni district, tanzania. journal of eastern african natural history 87, 279–290. mwihomeke s, c mabula & m nummelin (2000). plant species richness in the traditionally protected forests of the zigua, handeni district, tanzania. silva carelica 34, 178–193. myers n, ra mittermeier, cg mittermeier, ab da fonseca & j kent (2000). biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. nature 403, 853–858. newmark wd (1991). tropical forest fragmentation and the local extinction of understory birds in the eastern usambara mountains, tanzania. conservation biology 5, 67–78. newmark wd (1998). forest area, fragmentation, and loss in the eastern arc mountains: implications for the conservation of biological diversity. journal of eastern african natural history 87, 29–36. newmark wd (2002). conserving biodiversity in east african forests: a study of the eastern arc mountains. ecological studies 155. 195 p. springer, heidelberg. okafor jc & do ladipo (1992). fetish groves in the conservation of threatened fl ora in southern nigeria. in bennun la, ra aman & sa crafter (eds). conservation of biodiversity in africa. local initiatives and institutional roles, 167–179. national museums of kenya, nairobi. omar ck (1998). mwanga district in perspective. in omar ck (ed). local actors in developmet: the case of mwanga district, 10–15. educational publishers and distributors ltd., dar es salaam. oppen a (1992). land rights and their impact on individual and communal forms of land use in the project area of the handeni integrated agroforestry project: consultanzy study for the gtz. 85 p. german agency for technical cooperation, berlin. persha l (2003). undp-gef east african gross borders biodiversity project april 2003 chome aerial survey summary of results. <http://www.xborderbiodiversity.org/dcforum/user_fi les/chome_airsurvey_fi nalreport.pdf>. 15.11.2003. saunders da, rj hobbs & cr margules (1991). biological consequences of ecosystem fragmentation: a review. conservation biology 5, 18–32. schaaf t (1999). environmental conservation based on sacred forests. in posey da (ed). cultural and spiritual values of biodiversity, 341–342. unep, intermediate technology publications, london. siitonen p (2003). reserve network design in fragmented forest landscapes. 101 p. department of ecology and systematics, division of population biology, university of helsinki, helsinki. 130 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi sinha rk (1995). biodiversity conservation through faith and tradition in india: some case studies. international journal of sustainable development and world ecology 2: 4, 278–284. smd (1982). mwanga district 1:100 000. surveys and mapping division, ministry of lands, housing and urban development, dar es salaam. spear tt (1978). the kay complex: a history of the mijikenda peoples of the kenya coast to 1900. 172 p. kenya literature bureau, nairobi. swala o (1997). ugweno division land use map, 1:50 000. tfap/tip, mwanga. tfap (1995). a report on socio-economic survey in north pare mountains. 20 p. tanzania forestry action plan, agroforestry section, mwanga. tfap (1997). mpango wa ulinzi, utunzaji na uendelezaji mbungi na mishitu tarafa ya usangi na ugweno. 4 p. tanzania forestry action programme, mwanga. tfcg (1998). the eastern arc mountains: a forest cover map. tanzania forest conservation group, dar es salaam. tiwari b, s barik & r tripathi (1998). biodiversity value, status and strategies for conservation of sacred groves of meghalaya, india. ecosystem health 4, 20–32. trakarnsuphakorn p (2003). local wisdom in the management of bio-diversity. watershed 8, 26–32. ulvila m (1995). learning with the villagers: an account of participatory reseach in the uluguru mountains, tanzania. sosiologian ja sosiaalipsykologian tutkimuksia a 26. 87 p. unep (2003). africa environment outlook, past, present and future perspectives. 147 p. united nations environment program, nairobi. urt (1988). 1988 population census: preliminary report. 201 p. bureau of statistics, ministry of finance, economic affairs and planning, dar es salaam. urt (1990a). east africa 1:50 000 (united republic of tanzania) lembeni, sheet 73/3, edition 1989. directorate of overseas surveys for the united republic of tanzania. urt (1990b). east africa 1:50 000 (united republic of tanzania) mwanga, sheet 73/1, edition 1989. directorate of overseas surveys for the united republic of tanzania. urt (2003). 2002 population and housing census: general report. government printers, dar es salaam. vice president’s offi ce (1998). tanzania country study on biological diversity. 163 p. united nations environment program, nairobi. williams p, d gibbons, d margules, a rebelo, c humpries & r pressey (1996). a comparison of richness hotspots, rarity hotspots, and complementary areas for conserving diversity of british birds. conservation biology 9, 1518–1527. ylhäisi j (2000). the signifi cance of the traditional forests and rituals in tanzania, a case study of zigua, gweno and nyamwezi ethnic groups. silva carelica 34, 194–219. ylhäisi j (2003). forest privatisation and the role of community in forest and nature protection in tanzania. environmental science & policy 6, 279– 290. fennia 182: 2 (2004) 131indigenous forests fragmentation and the signifi cance of… the agreement to protect mishitu and mpungi forests between the caretakers of traditionally protected forests, the village governments in usangi and ugweno divisions, and the department of national resources in mwanga district (tfap 1997). names of the trees are in kiswahili. the traditional rules for protection of the forests need to be taken back into use, and the caretakers of every forest must continue to protect their forests. the owners of the forests who will not protect their forests because of e.g. adopted new religious beliefs have to hand over the duty of forest protection to the village government. serious destruction of the forests must be reported to the village offi ce and even to the court, if necessary. forests which have been disturbed will be planted with masale (the boundary marking plant in the npm). the caretakers of mpungis and mishitus in co-operation with village governments and the department of forests are responsible for the planting. all traditional forests must be visited by the village government and a forester to mark the boundaries by painted marks before planting masales. all destroyed traditional forests must be replanted with trees which are good for the environment and not for timber, like mkuyu, mvumo, mzambarau mwitu, mvinje, mwira, mringaringa etc. the forest department must provide seedling for the work. foresters will co-operate with the planters. ritual performing must continue and there is a need to renovate the local culture. some owners of the forests had stopped ritual performing due the fear that village government do not allow it (however this is not the case). to give land for cultivation which is a part of the traditional forests is not allowed, and according to the agreement strong action must be taken to avoid this. the rules specifi ed in the agreement are: 1) it is prohibited for everyone to enter the mpungi or mishitu without permission of the owner of the forest. 2) women are not allowed inside these forests (mpungi/mishitu). 3) cutting trees or grass, making fi re, collecting medicine or grazing inside the forests is not allowed. 4) burning the forests is not allowed. 5) it is prohibited to hang bee hives inside the forests and 6) hunting. the meaning of mpungi and mishitu forests: mpungi is a small traditional forest for rituals. there are skulls of ancestors who have died after a long time ago and they have a place in the forests. anyone found in a mpungi will be prosecuted; one black goat or sheep and two debe (pots) and two tins (18 l) of dengelua (traditional beer), one tin is to be consumed outside and one tin inside the forest in the penalty ritual. mishitu is a forest which has traditionally been used as a training forest for the youth to learn the traditions and culture. the youth stayed in the forest between 2 and 6 months. anyone who wants to go inside a mishitu needs one cow and two tins of beer made out of honey. the cow will be sacrifi ced and eaten and the beer drunk inside the mishitu. this ritual offering is made to settle and please ancestors, not to make harm to the owner, caretaker or his family. people who break against the rules and do not participate in penalty rituals must be reported to the village government which will take them to the court. the agreement will be distributed to all leaders of the justice in primary courts in usangi and ugweno divisions and forest offi cers of the mwanga district. appendix 1. mbungi and mishitu by-law agreement. 132 fennia 182: 2 (2004)jussi ylhäisi closed forests consist mainly of moist evergreen and deciduous species: canopy closure is over 70%. forests usually consist of several layers and tree height is normally more than 15 metres. forests which have been exploited or utilised and where the canopy closure is less than 70% are not closed forests. burnt forests are natural forests which have been burnt before the year 1997. other land cover types in the npm are: 1) woodland: tree height with 5–15 meters with open stand of trees; 2) dense woodland: canopy closure over 50%; 3) open woodland: canopy closure under 50%; and 4) forest plantations: young and old planted forests. only closed moist evergreen forests are marked on the map. uncultivated land in the maps includes woodlands, thickets, shrublands, grasslands and areas permanently without vegetation. thickets are areas of densely interlaced trees and shrub species which often form an impenetrable vegetation community. plants are multi-stemmed with no layers with interlocking canopies. canopy closure is over 70%. shrubland is composed of woody single and multi-stemmed plants (branching at or nearly at the ground). canopy cover is over 20% and height between 1–5 m. grasslands are areas with less than 2% trees and shrub canopy cover and dominated by grass-like, non-woody, herbaceous plants. they may also be promoted by the frequent crossing of fi res in the dry season. woodedgrassland is land with clumped or scattered trees or shrubs with a canopy cover between 2–20%. cultivated lands are ploughed for crops. these areas include areas currently under crop, fallow lands and land being prepared for plantation. there are perennial crops like banana, which can be intercropped with coffee or maize, and cassava. annual crop lands are mainly maize and beans, both with scattered trees. (the source of the classifi cation is from gaf (1998d). appendix 2. the classifi cation of vegetation used in the figs. 5 and 6. << /ascii85encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /all /binding /left /calgrayprofile (gray gamma 1.8) /calrgbprofile (colormatch rgb) /calcmykprofile (u.s. sheetfed uncoated v2) /srgbprofile (srgb iec61966-2.1) /cannotembedfontpolicy /warning /compatibilitylevel 1.4 /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjdffile false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel 0 /emitdscwarnings false /endpage -1 /imagememory 1048576 /lockdistillerparams true /maxsubsetpct 99 /optimize true /opm 1 /parsedsccomments true /parsedsccommentsfordocinfo true /preservecopypage true /preserveepsinfo true /preservehalftoneinfo false /preserveopicomments false /preserveoverprintsettings true /startpage 1 /subsetfonts true /transferfunctioninfo /apply /ucrandbginfo /preserve /useprologue false /colorsettingsfile (color management off) /alwaysembed [ true ] /neverembed [ true ] /antialiascolorimages false /downsamplecolorimages true /colorimagedownsampletype /bicubic /colorimageresolution 300 /colorimagedepth -1 /colorimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodecolorimages true /colorimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltercolorimages true /colorimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /coloracsimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /colorimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /jpeg2000coloracsimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /jpeg2000colorimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /antialiasgrayimages false /downsamplegrayimages true /grayimagedownsampletype /bicubic /grayimageresolution 300 /grayimagedepth -1 /grayimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodegrayimages true /grayimagefilter /dctencode /autofiltergrayimages true /grayimageautofilterstrategy /jpeg /grayacsimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /grayimagedict << /qfactor 0.15 /hsamples [1 1 1 1] /vsamples [1 1 1 1] >> /jpeg2000grayacsimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /jpeg2000grayimagedict << /tilewidth 256 /tileheight 256 /quality 30 >> /antialiasmonoimages false /downsamplemonoimages true /monoimagedownsampletype /bicubic /monoimageresolution 1200 /monoimagedepth -1 /monoimagedownsamplethreshold 1.50000 /encodemonoimages true /monoimagefilter /ccittfaxencode /monoimagedict << /k -1 >> /allowpsxobjects false /pdfx1acheck false /pdfx3check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (none) /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname (http://www.color.org) /pdfxtrapped /unknown /description << /fra <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> /jpn <feff3053306e8a2d5b9a306f30019ad889e350cf5ea6753b50cf3092542b308000200050004400460020658766f830924f5c62103059308b3068304d306b4f7f75283057307e30593002537052376642306e753b8cea3092670059279650306b4fdd306430533068304c3067304d307e305930023053306e8a2d5b9a30674f5c62103057305f00200050004400460020658766f8306f0020004100630072006f0062006100740020304a30883073002000520065006100640065007200200035002e003000204ee5964d30678868793a3067304d307e30593002> /deu <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> /ptb <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> /dan <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> /nld <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> /esp <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> /suo <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> /ita <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> /nor <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> /sve <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> /enu <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> >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [1200 1200] /pagesize [595.276 822.047] >> setpagedevice the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin's lost expedition urn:nbn:fi:tsv-oa98496 doi: 10.11143/fennia.98496 the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin’s lost expedition kim pawliw, étienne berthold and frédéric lasserre pawliw, k, berthold, e. & lasserre, f. (2021) the role of cultural heritage in the geopolitics of the arctic: the example of franklin’s lost expedition. fennia 199(1) 9–24. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98496 sir john franklin’s ships departed from greenhithe port in great britain (1845) with the aim of discovering the northwest passage in what is now canada. during their journey, both ships got stuck in ice near king william island and eventually sank. over time, searches were held in order to find both wrecks. more recently, under the conservative government of stephen harper (2006–2015) there was renewed interest regarding what is now referred to as franklin’s lost expedition. searches resumed and narratives were formed regarding the importance of this expedition for canadian identity. this article is embedded in a sociocultural perspective and will examine the role that cultural heritage can play in the geopolitics of the arctic while highlighting the process of ‘patrimonialization’ that the franklin’s lost expedition has undergone during harper’s term in office. based on discourse analysis, it brings out the main narratives that surrounded the modern searches of franklin’s wrecks which are related to history, national historic sites, mystery, diversity, importance of inuit knowledge and information gathering. this article demonstrates that these narratives were intended to form a new canadian northern identity and to assert canada’s sovereignty over the arctic. keywords: cultural heritage, arctic, identity, sovereignty, franklin’s lost expedition, stephen harper kim pawliw (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7962-4339), étienne berthold (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6524-8125) & frédéric lasserre (https://orcid. org/0000-0001-5220-9787), geography dept, 2405, terrasse st, université laval, québec (québec) g1v 0a6, canada. e-mail : kim.pawliw.1@ulaval.ca, etienne.berthold@ggr.ulaval.ca, frederic.lasserre@ggr.ulaval.ca introduction in an era of climate change which led to the retreat of polar sea ice, sovereignty questions, such as the status of the northwest passage in the canadian arctic archipelago, have become prominent among circumpolar states in the arctic region. given the potential of the arctic (hydrocarbon on the seabed, shorter transit routes), various approaches were used by canadian politicians to promote sovereignty over this region, be it a legal approach with the application of the law of the sea, or an approach that highlights the importance of identity, with the emphasis put on canada being a northern nation (byers © 2021 by the author. this open access article is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. https://dx.doi.org/10.11143/fennia.65443 10 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) 2009; bartenstein 2010; dupré 2010; guy & pelletier 2010; lasserre 2010a; burke 2018; têtu et al. 2019). regarding this identity approach, burke (2018) gave the examples of the adoption of the inuksuk (inuit landmark) as the emblem of the 2010 vancouver winter olympics or the 50$ cad bill which portrays the amundsen vessel (canadian coast guard) in frozen waters. another example would be the tremendous importance given to the franklin’s lost expedition, a 19th century expedition in the arctic archipelago, in official narratives. by analyzing these narratives, this article is embedded in a sociocultural perspective and will examine the role that cultural heritage can play in the geopolitics of the arctic while highlighting the process of ‘patrimonialization’ that the franklin’s lost expedition has undergone for more than a decade in canada. franklin’s lost expedition refers to sir john franklin’s ill-fated expedition of 1845–1848. in 1845, franklin’s two ships, hms erebus and hms terror, departed from greenhithe port, great britain. this expedition’s goal aimed at discovering the northwest passage in what is now canada (at the time a british colony), across the arctic archipelago, then loosely controlled – with an uncertain title – by the united kingdom (franklin 1910; smith 1961). during their journey, both ships got stuck in ice off king william island, resulting in the death of some of the 129 crew members including franklin himself. later, in 1848, the remaining crew members abandoned the ships and left by foot, which also led them to a certain death. eventually, both ships sank. many searches occurred in the 19th century to locate franklin’s ships but only skeleton remains, graves and some relics were found (mcdiarmid 2014; neatby & mercier 2018; têtu et al. 2019). according to lackenbauer and dean (2016), the expedition became a figure embodying british, and then canadian sovereignty over the arctic. during his term in office, canadian sovereignty over the arctic became a priority for canada’s prime minister stephen harper (2006–2015). in line with his “use it or lose it” approach, he tried to affirm canada’s sovereignty in several ways, such as the construction of an icebreaker and of six icestrengthened patrol vessels (mccorristine 2013; lackenbauer & dean 2016). the canadian government has also been trying to show that canadians do occupy this territory and that their sovereignty is indeed inherited from past events, here rooted in tragedy and in the old narrative of a canadian history forged on the fight against nature (lasserre 1998). in this vein, searches sought to find the wrecks of the franklin’s lost expedition were conducted by parks canada, a governmental agency responsible for protecting and managing canada’s natural and cultural heritage. starting from 2008, search ships surveyed the arctic region from late august to the beginning of september almost every year. in september 2014, following the victoria strait expedition, the hms erebus was found south of king william island. this discovery was followed, two years later (september 2016), by that of the hms terror in terror bay, near the shore of king william island (government of canada 2014a, 2014b; canadian geographic 2015; marsh & beattie 2018; parks canada 2019a, 2019b). researchers and authors have investigated franklin’s lost expedition according to several cultural perspectives: from the viewpoint of popular imagination (craciun 2014), from the viewpoint of folklore and supernatural beliefs (mccorristine 2013), from the viewpoint of literary imagery of the canadian north (atwood 1995), from the viewpoint of arctic archeological discoveries management in relation to local inuit populations (hodgetts 2012) and from the viewpoint of the international legal framework regarding submerged cultural heritage with the examples of hms erebus and hms terror wrecks (têtu et al. 2019). this article proposes to investigate the impact of franklin’s lost expedition from another perspective, that of heritage studies. we will focus on the role heritage may play in the geopolitics of the arctic. our purpose is to highlight that, in the 21st century’s context, the politically-driven narratives related to the franklin’s lost expedition took shape in a geopolitics in which the interpretation of heritage is sustained by a will to assert the state’s sovereignty over the arctic as well as a wish to rewrite a new chapter of canada’s history, thus forming a new canadian northern identity. the article is divided in three sections. first, we will look at heritage and geopolitics from a theoretical point of view, and will expose our methodological foundations which are based on discourse analysis. second, in order to implement our approach to discourse analysis, we will examine canadian prime minister harper’s heritage policy, with the example of the commemoration of the war of 1812. finally, we will concentrate on heritage narratives regarding the franklin’s lost expedition to underscore the role played by heritage to affirm canada’s sovereignty over the arctic. we will also compare harper’s 11fennia 199(1) (2021) kim pawliw, étienne berthold & frédéric lasserre narratives to those of the previous and subsequent governments, respectively the liberal governments of jean chrétien (1993–2003) and paul martin (2003–2006) as well as the liberal government of justin trudeau (2015–present). to conclude, we will demonstrate that the narratives regarding the franklin’s lost expedition, mostly used during harper’s term in office, aimed at forming a new canadian northern identity and at asserting canada’s sovereignty over the arctic. theoretical framework and methodology: heritage and geopolitics cultural heritage can be defined as an object or an intangible heritage that has been judged worthy to be preserved and passed on. in recent years, research has emphasized the fact that heritage conservation is also the offspring of social values. thus, according to the philosopher lucier (2011, 64) “to patrimonialize [means] to make decisions [about heritage], to want to make suggestions, sometimes to impose”. heritage may thus be spoken of in political terms, often in ways that seek to legitimize power. as such, studying the ‘construction’ of heritage necessarily involves ideologies (berthold 2012) and underlying socio-economic contexts (narwold et al. 2008). in another light, the ‘construction’ of heritage is clearly a search for a form of meaning. the poststructuralist approach sees patrimonialization as part of a system defined by its capacity to create signs (graham et al. 2000), a system upheld by institutions, practices and values and symbols. what is considered heritage, therefore worthy of preservation, conservation or commemoration, can change depending on the interests of the various actors, such as governments or lobbies. indeed, heritage is ‘constructed’ according to the present time interests of various actors. these interests can be perceived through actors’ speeches and narratives. heritage can be embodied in policies. policies are an essential part of heritage conservation, because they give an impetus to conservation efforts and help to concretize their implementation. through heritage policies, a specific group may try to promote its interests and its ideologies, and to seek domination over another group. from a geopolitical point of view, heritage and heritage policies may carry a cultural narrative whose role is to legitimize a political agenda. these narratives may be materialized by statues, commemorative plaques and the cultural promotion of specific places that become “places of memory” (nora 1984, 1986, 1992). whether actively supported by public authorities or that they may gradually emerge in popular representations, places of memory confer a historic and political meaning to specific locations. these places thus bear the political values both of those that agree with this reading of history, and of those that reject it, a phenomenon epitomized in 2020 through the destruction of statues of confederate generals in the united states. because of these narratives associated with them, these places are thus the object of power rivalries that can be analyzed as geopolitical discourse. geopolitics is a geographical approach aimed at analyzing power rivalries over territories and places (subra 2012; lasserre et al. 2020), suited for the analysis of power rivalries and stakes over memory places (lasserre & stan 2019). the method of data collecting and processing consists of discourse analysis. the concept of discourse will be understood according to foucault’s (2002) definition. in foucauldian theory, the statements expressed by individuals feed a social discourse. the theory considers that each statement “as it emerges in its materiality, appears with a status, enters various networks and various fields of use, is subjected to transferences or modifications, is integrated into operations and strategies in which its identity is maintained or effaced” (foucault 2002, 118). in other words, a discourse is made of statements which belong to the same discursive formation, that are in a specific spatiotemporal context and that express specific interests. seignour (2011), for her part, perceived discourses as acts of influence which depend on a certain context. according to her, discourses do not only portray reality as demonstrated by facts. instead, they are constituted of representations that speakers have of this reality and representations that they want to inculcate to their audience. thus, speakers aim at influencing their audience with their speeches. taking into account these definitions, some elements were identified in speeches to facilitate their analysis: the speakers who stated the discourses, the relations between various speakers, the speakers’ interests, the context in which discourses were stated and the speakers’ arguments. it has to be noted that in the present article, we will focus on narratives, which embody discourses from an empirical viewpoint. 12 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) discourse analysis aims at studying the enunciation of discourses. this method is similar to content analysis which is defined by krippendorff (1980, 21) as “a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from data in their context”. content analysis aims at identifying and characterizing themes that emerge from a text, a transcribed interview, an article or any other medium. discourse analysis is different from content analysis in the way it does not only take into account the content of discourses, but also their ‘container’, the way speeches were expressed. therefore, instead of just attempting to describe speeches, it also tries to interpret them. this interpretation must be done according to the speakers’ (or actors) intentions and interests at the present time (paillé & mucchielli 2009; seignour 2011). for the purpose of the present research, we have identified, collected and processed all major speeches by the actors involved in franklin’s searches from 2006 to 2015, such as conservative government representatives, mostly stephen harper (canadian conservative prime minister) and leona aglukkaq (environment minister and minister responsible for parks canada). other actors included ryan harris, marc-andré bernier, jonathan moore, charles dagneau (members of parks canada’s underwater archeological team, uat) as well as john geiger (royal geographical society). to access their speeches, news releases, newspaper articles and websites (mostly parks canada and government of canada official websites) were consulted. other speeches came from videos (which we transcribed), such as short documentaries or harper’s filmed speeches. to contextualize these speeches, we put them in relation with policy documents concerning the arctic region. stephen harper’s heritage policy: the example of the war of 1812 franklin’s lost expedition was not the first attempt made by the conservative government of stephen harper (2006–2015) to form a new canadian identity; this identity formation is inscribed in a broader context of heritage policy. thus, we will examine canada’s prime minister harper heritage policy, with the example of the commemoration of the war of 1812. first of all, the war of 1812 was taken to refer to a military conflict between the united states and great britain, when canada was a british colony. it was commemorated in 2012 through exhibitions, documentaries, historical re-enactments, new stamps and coins, ipad apps as well as the erection of the monument triumph through diversity on ottawa’s parliament hill (dorion-soulié & roussel 2013; tiro 2013; frenette 2014). the generous spending in commemorating the war may be justified by harper’s priority of rewriting history while forming a new canadian identity through a narrative representing canada as being a victorious warrior nation, born out of conflicts and proud of its british past. according to sjolander (2014) and tremblay (2017), this prime minister tried to demonstrate that canada found its origin in the war of 1812; this war was credited for forming the canadian nation and its armed forces. indeed, the commemoration efforts tended to show that canada would not have existed if the american invasion had not been repelled, and that these events led to the confederation of 1867. dorion-soulié and roussel (2013), frenette (2014) and sjolander (2014) underscored three main characteristics of this new identity formation: distinguish the conservative government from previous liberal governments, differentiate the canadian identity from the american identity and unite anglophones, francophones and first nations under the term that they all participated in the war. the first characteristic stressed the fact that the conservative government is distinct from previous liberal governments which are often characterized as promoting international institutions, multilateral processes, and multiculturalism, thus representing canada as a peacekeeping nation. as pointed by sjolander (2014), instead of associating canada with peacekeeping ideas as was the case under the liberal government, it became associated with military conflicts and its attachment to the british crown, recalling the british colonial period of 1812. regarding the second characteristic, meaning the differentiation between canadian identity and american identity, it concerned the fact that canada is different from the united states because it won the war. as mentioned by sjolander (2014), this differentiation was intensified by the reminder of canada’s british past with the significance given to monarchy and loyalty to queen elizabeth ii. as for the third characteristic, meaning the unity between anglophones, francophones as well as first nations, it showed the importance of the 13fennia 199(1) (2021) kim pawliw, étienne berthold & frédéric lasserre alliance of these three founding people in repelling the american invasion. for frenette (2014), this amounts to an attempt to unify canadians using a common myth – the importance of the war in canada’s history. the war of 1812 was shown as being the unifying factor that allowed canada to become an independent country respectful of all its people. according to sjolander (2014, 159), a “true canadian national identity” was formed in the context of the bicentenary of the war of 1812. burke’s (2018) research highlighted that this war narrative was used to demonstrate canadian unity in the face of adversity as well as a positive relation among settlers and indigenous people. this narrative is similar to other narratives regarding franklin’s lost expedition, such as one that underscores the relevance of inuit knowledge. thus, during stephen harper’s term in office, canada was portrayed as a warrior nation in relation to the war of 1812 and as a northern nation in relation to the franklin’s lost expedition. franklin’s lost expedition: arctic policy and heritage narratives arctic policy and narratives under liberal governments of jean chrétien (1993–2003) and paul martin (2003–2006) even if the arctic region was mentioned more frequently and became more significant under its term in office, the conservative government of stephen harper was not the first to form an arctic policy referring to a canadian northern identity and to canada’s sovereignty over this region. britain transferred the northwest territories to canada in 1870, and the arctic archipelago in 1880. however, for several decades this remote region attracted little attention from the canadian government (lasserre 2010b). the main federal concerns were the enforcement of the canadian sovereignty, against poaching by american whalers at the turn of the 20th century, or against american claims on ellesmere island or norwegian claims about the sverdrup islands, land claims settled respectively by abandonment by washington in about 1910 and in 1930 (lasserre & lalonde 2010). the construction of the alaska highway during ww2 and of the dew line during the 1950s underlined again this unease about canadian sovereignty in the high north. the idea that canada should claim sovereignty over not only land, but also arctic maritime expanses, was first mentioned in 1946, and considered during the 1960s (lasserre & lalonde 2010). assertion was refrained because of the complete lack, at the time, of legal concepts canada could mobilize to support its nascent claim (lajeunesse 2016). it is the transit of the oil tanker manhattan that triggered the formal assertion of sovereignty over the waters of the archipelago in 1973 (lasserre & lalonde 2010). following the unwelcome transit of the american icebreaker polar sea in 1985 across the northwest passage, the canadian government further asserted its claim by proclaiming straight baselines around the archipelago in 1986, to explicit a sovereignty officially based on historic inuit title (byers & lalonde 2009; government of canada 2010; lajeunesse 2018). it is thus apparent that canadian claims to the northwest passage are constructed on the mobilization of inuit title. from the 1990s onward emerged a gradual movement towards the use of the inuit title in canada’s claim; a central role played in domestic canadian politics by native and northern issues, as well as in canadian foreign policy notably with the arctic council (scrivener 1996; exner-pirot 2020); and a gradual devolution of autonomy to inuit territories, embodied in the creation of nunavik in 1986 (in northern quebec) and nunavut in 1999 (a federal territory) (loukacheva 2007). this movement was reciprocated by a strong support from inuit community leaders for the canadian sovereignty claim over the northwest passage (fenge 2007). following the end of the cold war, canada’s arctic policy shifted from a militarization approach toward a more cooperative approach (lackenbauer & dean 2016). it was in this context that the northern dimension of canada’s foreign policy (government of canada 2000) was released under the liberal government of jean chrétien. this document underscored four objectives in the arctic region. they concerned the strengthening of security and economic development of northerners and aboriginal peoples, the assertion of canadian sovereignty over the arctic, the establishment of this region in an international system which must be rules-based as well as the promotion of human 14 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) security and sustainable development. other than these objectives, the document highlighted the importance of the north in canadian identity asserting that “a sense of northerness has long been central to the canadian identity” (government of canada 2000, 2). some years after, under the liberal government of paul martin, canada’s northern strategy (unreleased – 2004) was announced and underscored seven objectives in the arctic region, one of which consisted in reinforcing canada’s sovereignty, security and cooperation in the north (canadian arctic resources committee 2006). some time later, with evidence of global warming, more challenges were perceived in this region such as the possibility to transit through the arctic waters (thus raising the question of the status of the northwest passage) which was seen as threatening international recognition of canada’s sovereignty. it was in these circumstances that the international policy statement (2005) was formed and which stated that the arctic became a priority, underscoring the need to assert canada’s sovereignty in this region (government of canada 2005; lackenbauer & dean 2016). thus, even if less prominent, statements promoting the canadian northern identity and canada’s sovereignty over the arctic were established before harper’s conservative government. regarding specifically the franklin’s lost expedition, if one considers the difficulty to find statements about this expedition, it did not have as high a priority as during stephen harper’s term. heritage narratives under the conservative government of stephen harper (2006–2015): franklin’s lost expedition since the very beginning of stephen harper’s conservative government term in office on 6th february 2006, the arctic became a priority. at the time, as stated by harper himself, the need to protect “our national sovereignty” in the arctic was addressed. indeed, in 2007, during the speech from the throne were highlighted four priorities regarding this region: “strengthening canada’s sovereignty,” “protecting our environmental heritage,” “promoting economic and social development” and “improving and devolving governance” (lackenbauer & dean 2016, xxxv–xlv). this was followed later in 2009 when canada’s northern strategy. our north, our heritage, our future was revealed (government of canada 2009). in addition to bolstering the aforementioned priorities, it also underscored the need for cooperation in the north while highlighting the significant importance of this region for canadians. in fact, it is stated that the north is part of canadian national identity and of canada’s nation building (government of canada 2009, 1–39; lackenbauer & dean 2016, xxxv–xlv). later still, in august 2010, in its statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy. exercising sovereignty and promoting canada’s northern strategy abroad (government of canada 2010), the conservative government linked together these four priorities; this means that the protection of environmental heritage, the promotion of economic and social development as well as the improvement of governance were all ways of bolstering canadian sovereignty in the arctic. the inclusion of the north in canadian identity is also recalled (government of canada 2010). it was in this context where tremendous importance was given to the arctic region that narratives involving franklin’s lost expedition were formed, which became related to canadian northern identity and canadian sovereignty over the arctic. from 2007 to 2015, on various occasions stephen harper reiterated the importance of franklin’s lost expedition in canadian identity. as he stated during the ceremony on the discovery of the hms erebus wreck at the royal ontario museum on 4th march 2015 “[the franklin expedition is] part of our concrete broader northern narrative and northern identity” (canadian geographic 2015). thus, he seemed to use franklin’s lost expedition in order to form a new canadian northern identity. this can also be perceived through four specific narratives promoted by harper himself as well as by other actors such as government representatives and governmental agency representatives, mostly parks canada: the importance of franklin in canada’s history, the promotion of an undiscovered national historic site, the need to solve a great canadian mystery and the diversity of partners during searches, which seemed to represent canadian diversity. as mentioned above, the canadian northern identity formation can be perceived through four specific narratives. first of all, the importance of the franklin’s lost expedition in canada’s history was often mentioned by stephen harper and leona aglukkaq, environment minister and minister responsible for parks canada. for harper, both franklin expedition and franklin’s modern searches 15fennia 199(1) (2021) kim pawliw, étienne berthold & frédéric lasserre are important in canada’s history and contribute in uniting all canadians. the former is related to canadian heritage whereas the latter, mostly the hms erebus discovery following the 2014 victoria strait expedition, is perceived as a “great historic event” (global news 2014). having participated in searches, harper mentioned during the 2014 expedition that “sir franklin’s exploration and discovery of parts of canada’s north are an important part of our history and contributed to canada becoming the wonderful country we enjoy today” (prime minister of canada 2014). this statement demonstrated the importance of franklin in the discovery and the formation of canada while positioning him as a great explorer and as a significant canadian figure. indeed, later the same year, harper even compared franklin to john cabot, martin frobisher and john davis, all great explorers who discovered parts of north america (geiger 2014). in addition to underlining what he considered franklin’s impressive journey and discovery, harper qualified him as a “hero” and as an “incredible individual” (geiger 2014; canadian geographic 2015). on some occasions, other than highlighting franklin’s accomplishments and “heroic successes”, harper also stressed his importance for canadians throughout the years by demonstrating that even songs or essays were written about his expedition. in the same vein, he qualified stan roger’s song that mentioned franklin expedition as being “our unofficial national anthem” (windsor star 2013; geiger 2014). for example, harper stated during the announcement of the finding of the hms erebus following the 2014 expedition that “[franklin expedition] has been the subject of scientists and historians, writers and signers and hum… so i think we have really hum, a really important day mapping together the history of our country” (global news 2014). aglukkaq shared harper’s view on the significance of franklin’s lost expedition in canada’s history and as a factor of unity while specifying that it may contribute to the connection between all canadians. during a book release on the finding of the hms investigator wreck on 19th november 2013, while talking about the franklin expedition, she also accentuated the commitment of the canadian government to promote “canada’s northern history by preserving the heritage which unites us as canadians” (parks canada 2013a). another narrative regarding identity formation concerns the promotion of the franklin’s wrecks being a national historic site. from a historical perspective, in 1992, hms erebus and hms terror wrecks were considered at the time the only undiscovered national historic site in canada. they became a historic site under the historic sites and monuments acts, designated so by the historic sites and monuments board of canada. this designation resulted from the fact that the franklin’s lost expedition was perceived as a part of canada’s history, of canadian northern exploration and of the formation of a canadian nation. for these reasons, it became important to protect both wrecks should they be discovered. in 1997, a non-legally binding agreement referred to as the memorandum of understanding was reached between the united kingdom and canada, whereby the uk was supposed to transfer the wrecks’ ownership to the latter. in the 21st century, national historic sites are still important and are designated as sites that help to uncover canada’s history, cultural traditions and identity. thus, during modern franklin searches that began in 2008, the significance of hms erebus and hms terror as a national historic site has been recalled (government of canada 2014c, 2017; beeby 2018; parks canada 2019c, 2019d). because the wrecks had long been an undiscovered national historic site, stephen harper said he felt an obligation to discover them while ryan harris of the uat directly linked them to the northwest passage and to canada’s history (parks canada 2013b; windsor star 2013). when the hms erebus was finally discovered in 2014, during a statement on 9th september of the same year, harper added that “our government has been deeply committed to finding hms erebus and hms terror, which were canada’s only undiscovered national historic site” (cbc 2014). other than the inclusion of franklin’s lost expedition in canadian identity, one can really wonder if the promotion of this historic site was also a manner to bolster canada’s sovereignty over the arctic. indeed, in the statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy of 2010 (government of canada 2010), protection of environmental heritage, such as the establishment of national parks, is directly linked to arctic sovereignty. we may think the same logic can apply to the protection of cultural heritage and to national historic sites that also guarantee the wrecks a legal protection (government of canada 2010; harris 2018). other than the history narrative and the national historic site narrative, stephen harper frequently used a mystery narrative, meaning that franklin’s lost expedition was a great canadian mystery, 16 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) and that it was a canadian duty to solve it. used on several occasions, harper highlighted the importance of the franklin expedition as being “one of canada’s great mysteries” (cbc 2014; geiger 2014; government of canada 2014d). this narrative seems to have been used mostly to underscore the relevance of the franklin expedition for canadians, which can be perceived through the use of superlatives such as “great” or “greatest.” also, the simple fact that this expedition is presented as a mystery seems to bolster its importance, comparatively to similar known events such as the sinking of the titanic. during an interview with john geiger of the royal canadian geographical society some months after the discovery of hms erebus, on 1st december 2014, harper mentioned that “the franklin expedition is part of that broader story [the northwest passage] – the most tragic, and most mysterious part, to be sure. for almost 200-years canadians – not just canadians, people around the world – have wondered what happened to the franklin expedition. now that we’ve found the first of the two ships, we can begin unlocking the mystery of what happened to them” (geiger 2014). geiger, for his part, compared the hms erebus and the hms terror to the titanic or the bismarck. for him, the former are bigger than the latter because of the mystery that surrounded them as told in september 2014 following the discovery of hms erebus “no journals, no logs, no survivors to tell the story…” (rannie 2014). finally, the last narrative of the formation of a canadian northern identity concerned the diversity of partners during franklin’s wrecks searches, which was mentioned by stephen harper, leona aglukkaq and ryan harris. indeed, a wide range of partners was involved in modern searches, such as “governmental, non-governmental, community, profit-seeking-businesses”, and inuit colleagues (canadian geographic 2015). harper seemed to use this diversity in order to make the search more canadian, meaning more representative of canada’s history, with references to the british colonial period and modern canada. concerning the british colonial period, harper and aglukkaq pointed out that these searches would not have been possible without the relation between state-of-the art canadian technology and inuit oral history. this seemed to refer to the period of first encounter between europeans and inuit that is part of canada’s early history. for harper, this represented a “great metaphor” for the country. in keeping with the same stance, ryan harris considered that both wrecks “speak to a very early period of interaction between hum, the inuit and europeans” (parks canada 2013b). concerning modern canada, harper underscored that the diversity of partners represents canada’s diversity, which contributes to its actual prosperity. during the ceremony on the discovery of the hms erebus at the royal ontario museum on 4th march 2015, after enumerating all the people, agencies and organizations having taken part in the searches ranging from parks canada to “friends in nunavut,” harper stated that “when you look at such a broad diverse group of partners, governmental, non-governmental, community, profit-seeking businesses working hand-in-hand as partners, that is really a metaphor for this country itself, what makes it as successful as we are” (canadian geographic 2015). with this narrative, it seemed that it is not just franklin’s lost expedition that is important for canada’s history, but the searches themselves that, by the diversity of partners, well represent canada. following the discovery of the hms erebus, harper addressed the people who took part in the searches and stated that “by uncovering this piece of canadian-british global history, you made history yourself” (canadian geographic 2015). other than through these narratives, canadian identity formation can also be perceived by the semantic fields that were often used in stephen harper’s speeches regarding franklin expedition and the hms erebus discovery; a semantic field associated with canadian pride and another associated with canadian unity. they stand out through the use of certain words such as “proud” (3 times), “unique,” (1 time), “iconic” (2 times), “wonderful” (3 times), “monumental” (1 time), “great1” (15 times), “big” (2 times) and “heroes” (2 times) for the former and “unites us” (1 time), “all2” (6 times), and “our3” (14 times) for the latter4,5 (heritage daily 2012; stephen harper northern tour 2013; windsor star 2013; cbc 2014; geiger 2014; global news 2014; government of canada 2014a, 2014d; prime minister of canada 2014; canada free press 2015; canadian geographic 2015; ). indeed, franklin is depicted as being important for canada’s history and as a great canadian mystery while the hms erebus discovery, which involved a diversity of partners, is something all canadians should be proud of. so, it is not only narratives about canadian history, national historic site, mystery and diversity, but also about the need to be proud and united towards a shared northern past, thus 17fennia 199(1) (2021) kim pawliw, étienne berthold & frédéric lasserre forming a northern identity. in fact, franklin seemed to be another means to unite canadians towards a shared northern identity; an identity that was even mentioned in some policy documents such as canada’s northern strategy (government of canada 2009) and the statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy (government of canada 2010). moreover, as previously seen with the commemoration of the bicentenary of the war of 1812, the franklin’s lost expedition is not the only example where harper tried to rewrite canada’s history and tried to form a new canadian identity which aimed at the unity of all canadians and the development of their pride over a shared past. heroes, be it franklin and his crew or isaac brock, irumberry de salaberry, tecumseh and laura secord (war of 1812) became more glorified while both events showed unity between canadians. other than forming a canadian northern identity, the franklin’s lost expedition was also used to bolster canada’s sovereignty over the arctic. from 2007 to 2015, on various occasions stephen harper reiterated the importance of franklin’s lost expedition regarding canada’s sovereignty over the arctic, while stressing that the maintenance of the country’s ownership over this region will advantage all canadians. with global warming and its consequences, for example the retreat of arctic sea ice, he perceived canada’s sovereignty at stake over the waters of this region. as harper stated during an interview with john geiger on 1st december 2014 “[…] at a time when international interest in the arctic region is growing, finding this franklin ship [hms erebus] bolsters canada’s claim to arctic sovereignty – clearly something that directly benefits all canadians” (geiger 2014). this use of the franklin expedition as an instrument to demonstrate canadian sovereignty over the arctic can be inscribed in the “use it or lose it” approach, meaning that if canadians don’t use the north, they run the risk of losing it. other than military occupation of the north as mentioned earlier, other techniques can be used to occupy this region such as the establishment of protected areas, the devolution of governance to canada’s northern governments and the strengthening of research activities. this was mentioned in an address to the house of commons on 17th october 2007 when harper also added that: …as stan roger once sang, franklin’s dream of tracing ‘one warm line through a land so wild and savage’ to ‘make a northwest passage to the sea’ seems about to be realized […]. we have to use the north, or we will risk losing it […]. we have taken strong measures to strengthen the ability of our territorial governments to deliver services to northerners, with particular emphasis on northern housing for first nations and inuit […]. we are stepping up our environmental activities and increasing the number of protected areas […]. we are enhancing research in the high arctic […]. (government of canada 2007a) this demonstration of sovereignty in the arctic can be perceived through two specific narratives promoted by government representatives and governmental agency representatives, such as parks canada: the importance given to the inuit who live in the region and the information gathering regarding the arctic. one narrative used by stephen harper, leona aglukkaq as well as members of the uat (ryan harris, marc-andré bernier and charles dagneau) regarding canada’s sovereignty over the arctic concerns the importance given to inuit knowledge and inuit oral history in franklin’s wreck searches. compared to early searches where northerners were ignored, inuit were involved in modern ones. the government of nunavut as well as the historian louie kamookak, who collected elders’ stories concerning franklin’s wrecks, were often mentioned as having played a great role in the searches. john geiger even argued that kamookak’s knowledge played a “critical role” in the discovery of both wrecks (o’connor 2018). in the same vein, harper underscored the relevance of “age old inuit history” in the finding of the hms erebus while aglukkaq also talking about this wreck said that she was “proud of the important role that inuit oral history played in its discovery” (canadian geographic 2015; government of canada 2015). this importance given to inuit knowledge can be related to the statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy of 2010 (government of canada 2010) where canadian sovereignty over the arctic is partly based on the devolving of governance to northern governments. this sovereignty demonstration can also be linked to harper understanding that canadian sovereignty over the arctic is based on historical titles, meaning the longstanding occupancy by canadian inuit and indigenous people, as written a year earlier in canada’s northern strategy 18 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) (government of canada 2009). in fact, the importance given to the inuit and their frequent mention can be linked to canadian arctic sovereignty; harper and aglukkaq recalled that people have been living there for a long time and that the canadian government does consider them. other than government representatives, parks canada uat members also acknowledged the importance of inuit oral history, such as marc-andré bernier for whom searches were inspired by inuit testimony, both ancient and recent (parks canada 2014). finally, the last narrative regarding arctic sovereignty, meaning information gathering about the arctic, concerned the fact that franklin’s searches allowed data collection in an understudied region. to find both wrecks, searchers were mapping vast sections of the seabed while learning to better understand how to navigate through the arctic waters. they also took the opportunity to collect water column samples and sea floor sediments. as mentioned by ryan harris in 2013, during their journey through the alexandra strait, they succeeded in establishing a navigable route, which can benefit not only the delimitation of northern maritime routes, but also the field of search and rescue (parks canada 2013b). the same year, leona aglukkaq added that the search team already covered 800 km2 and that this gain of knowledge will help the scientific understanding of the history and geography of canada, as well as its development as a nation (parks canada 2013c). hence, the data collected during the modern searches for franklin can be associated to canada’s sovereignty over the arctic. in fact, in his 2007 statement in the house of commons, stephen harper stressed that canadian sovereignty over the arctic can be asserted in part by enhancing research in the region (government of canada 2007a). along the same lines, the day before this statement, during the speech from the throne, it was mentioned that “as part of asserting sovereignty in the arctic, our government will complete comprehensive mapping of canada’s arctic seabed” (government of canada 2007b). later, in 2010, the government of canada explains in its statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy, that the exercise of canadian sovereignty in the north can be asserted through several means, including “arctic science and research” (government of canada 2010). thus, there seemed to be a direct relation between information gathering in the arctic, particularly mapping activities, and sovereignty over this region. this relation was mentioned more recently in harper’s statement of the discovery of the hms erebus at the royal ontario museum on 4th march 2015: …we are also mapping vast areas of undersea territory in the north that have never before been documented, we’re expanding the possibilities for navigation, and maritime safety and security. we’re studying the land and the seas to learn more about our north, its challenges and its possibilities and indeed, all the while of course, we are demonstrating our absolute sovereignty over this piece of iconic territory. (canadian geographic 2015) changes in arctic policy and narratives under the liberal government of justin trudeau (2015–present) since the election of the liberal government of justin trudeau at the end of the year 2015, canada’s policy toward the arctic region began to change. there were discussions to replace canada’s northern strategy of 2009 (government of canada 2009) and the statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy of 2010 (government of canada 2010) by the arctic policy framework. several priorities are highlighted in this document, such as: “strong arctic people and communities,” “strong, sustainable and diversified arctic economies,” “arctic science and indigenous knowledge,” and “protecting the environment” (bell 2019; government of canada 2019). according to everett (2018), one of the main changes in this policy is the fact that there is no section about “exercising our arctic sovereignty” compared to the two former documents. however, sovereignty can be indirectly included in other sections. furthermore, the new policy seems to put the needs of the northerners first and to explore new means of governing canada’s arctic. in this context of the changing approach toward the arctic region, narratives regarding franklin also began to change. what is most noticeable is perhaps the fact that justin trudeau barely mentioned franklin, even though the hms terror was found during his term in office. however, he did mention on his twitter account that “the second ship lost in the franklin expedition has been found! #hmsterror lying off king william island” (trudeau 2016). in recent years, speeches were mostly pronounced by 19fennia 199(1) (2021) kim pawliw, étienne berthold & frédéric lasserre catherine mckenna, minister of environment and climate change and minister responsible for parks canada. most of the time, franklin expedition and franklin’s wrecks had been mentioned according to two issues: who between canada and great britain6 will own the ships, and how will the inuit living in the region be involved in the wrecks management? (kyle 2017; harris 2018). even if mckenna sometimes mobilized narratives about history and the mystery shrouding the fate of the expedition, she mostly underscored the narratives regarding the importance of inuit knowledge in the finding of the wrecks and the promotion of franklin’s wrecks being a national historic site. since the finding of both wrecks, efforts were made to include the inuit in the management of this national historic site. on 2nd december 2017, plaques were unveiled during the umiyaqtutt festival (shipwreck festival) in gjoa haven (nunavut), which intended to commemorate both the new historic site and the inuit that helped finding the hms erebus and the hms terror. on this occasion, canadian minister of the environment catherine mckenna mentioned the importance of inuit knowledge in modern searches as well as the government’s commitment to work closely with northern communities in some areas, ranging from environmental protection to economic development. the year before, while talking about investments in the new national historic site, she also highlighted the importance of the inuit and of these sites in canada’s history: “our national historic sites tell the stories of who we are, including the history, cultures and contributions of indigenous peoples. the government is committed to working respectfully with inuit and honouring their contributions to canada’s protected places” (government of canada 2016). thus, narratives regarding the franklin expedition under the liberal government concerns mostly the management of the wrecks of hms erebus and hms terror national historic site and the need to involve inuit. conclusion few papers tackle with the connection between identity narratives and political agendas in arctic geopolitics. this article is related to the research that investigates franklin’s lost expedition from the viewpoint of sociocultural studies. it contributes to the development of research perspectives that consider the role cultural heritage can play in the geopolitics of the arctic. to analyze the narratives concerning this expedition, we opted for an approach of discourse analysis by paying attention to speeches by various actors in a position of power, foremostly, prime minister stephen harper (conservative government, 2006–2015). through this method, this article demonstrates that cultural heritage has been used to promote a geopolitical agenda, in this case, to foster the arctic dimension in the canadian identity and to assert canadian sovereignty over the arctic – and then of course reap the political benefits of presenting the conservative government as the defender of the very canadian sovereignty. due to the tremendous importance given to the arctic during the conservative government of stephen harper’s term in office, emphasis has often been put on the formation of a canadian northern identity and of canada’s sovereignty over this region as stated in canada’s northern strategy (government of canada 2009) and in the statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy (government of canada 2010). in this context, the franklin’s lost expedition has been used as a means to promote these two objectives. regarding the formation of a canadian northern identity, it was observed through four specific narratives: a history narrative, a national historic site narrative, a mystery narrative and a diversity narrative. thus, franklin became a canadian figure intimately linked to canada’s discovery, history and mystery, which was emphasized by the establishment of a national historic site (wrecks of hms erebus and hms terror national historic site). relevant to canada’s history were his expedition as well as modern searches for the wrecks. on account of all the actors involved, it was said to represent canada’s diversity, both past and present. thus, the inclusion of franklin’s lost expedition in canadian northern identity should unite all canadians toward a shared past. these narratives were consistent with harper’s heritage policy meaning that he wanted to reform canadian identity and to rewrite a new chapter of canada’s history as seen with the example of the war of 1812. now, regarding franklin’s lost expedition as a representation of canada’s sovereignty over the arctic, it was observed through two specific narratives: the importance of inuit narrative and the research narrative. according to the statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy (government of canada 2010), 20 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) canada tried to affirm its sovereignty by other means than military among which can be listed the longstanding occupancy of inuit and aboriginal people in the region and the increase in the knowledge about the arctic. thus, the important role of the inuit during the searches as well as the information gathering (mapping, navigating, and safety) were often mentioned in statements. moreover, we should mention that the narratives used to demonstrate canadian northern identity and canada’s sovereignty over the arctic may be related. on the one hand, according to genest and lasserre (2015)7, one way canada may have served its claim on sovereignty is by demonstrating that canadian identity is intimately linked to the north, which by the same occasion, can also fulfill electoral and domestic policy objectives (rallying canadian public opinion). however, even if identity is mobilised in political narratives, it does not have any legal value. on the other hand, according to dolata (2015), sovereignty can be used to bolster canadian identity, uniting canadians toward a perceived threat. finally, narratives regarding the franklin’s lost expedition formed under the conservative government were also compared to narratives under the previous and subsequent liberal governments. the previous governments of jean chrétien and paul martin barely mentioned franklin while the actual liberal government of justin trudeau did not mention him as much as the conservative government of stephen harper. in a context of reforming canada’s arctic policy (canada’s arctic policy framework, 2015 – unreleased) narratives regarding franklin are now mostly linked to the management of the wrecks of hms erebus and hms terror national historic site. therefore, we can conclude that the franklin’s narratives were formed and disseminated by the conservative government of stephen harper in a context of tremendous importance given to the arctic; the perceived need to assert canada’s sovereignty in this region and the desire to form a new canadian northern identity. notes 1 meaning of a certain significance, such as “great historic event” (global news 2014). 2 meaning the inclusion of all the canadian population, such as “the discovery of the wreck is something all canadians can be proud of” (geiger 2014). 3 for example, “our north” (geiger 2014; canadian geographic 2015). 4 it must be noted that these words are found in harper’s speeches regarding directly the franklin’s lost expedition. 5 the translation of a word in french as well as the word’s derivatives are considered as being equivalent. for example, our/notre and great/greatest. 6 according to international law, great britain owns both wrecks (the agreement of 1997 was nonlegally binding). however, each sides agreed to transfer the wrecks’ ownership to canada (harris 2018). 7 canada’s sovereignty over the arctic can be justified by legal, geographical, historical and identity reasons (genest & lasserre 2015). references atwood, m. (1995) concerning franklin and his gallant crew. in atwood, m. (ed.) strange things. the malevolent north in canadian literature, 7–34. clarendon press, oxford. bartenstein, k. (2010) le fond marin arctique: convoitises et confusions. in lasserre, f. (ed.) passages et mers arctiques. géopolitique d’une région en mutation, 292–318. puq, quebec. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18pgt18 beeby, d. (2018) ottawa ended up giving the u.k. far more of the franklin artifacts than expected. cbc 12.6.2018 <https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/franklin-artifacts-arctic-uk-1.4700861>. 2.7.2019. bell, j. (2019) canada’s new arctic policy could be done by june, minister says. nunatsiaq news 12.2.2019 <https://nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/canadas-new-arctic-policy-could-be-done-by-juneminister-says/>. 2.7.2019. berthold, e. (2012) patrimoine, culture et récit. l’île d’orléans et la place royale de québec. pul, québec. burke, d. c. (2018) international disputes and cultural ideas in the canadian arctic. palgrave macmillan, london. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61917-0 byers, m. (2009) who owns the arctic? understanding sovereignty disputes in the north. douglas & mcintyre publishers, vancouver. 21fennia 199(1) (2021) kim pawliw, étienne berthold & frédéric lasserre byers, m. & lalonde, s. (2009) who controls the northwest passage. vanderbildt journal of transnational law 42 1133. canada free press (2015) prime minister stephen harper announces winter dives of the hms erebus wreck 5.3.2015 <https://canadafreepress.com/article/prime-minister-stephen-harper-announceswinter-dives-of-the-hms-erebus-wrec>. 2.7.2019. canadian arctic resources committee (2006) renewing the northern strategy. northern perspectives 30(1) 1–24. <https://carc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2006-np-renewing-the-northern-strategy.pdf>. canadian geographic (2015) prime minister stephen harper talks at rcgs erebus reception. youtube 4.3.2015 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sur4gdm0hk>. 2.7.2019. cbc (2014) franklin ship discovery: stephen harper’s full statement 9.9.2014 <https://www.cbc.ca/ news/politics/franklin-ship-discovery-stephen-harper-s-full-statement-1.2760566>. 1.10.2019. craciun, a. (2014) the franklin relics in the arctic archive. victorian literature and culture 42(1) 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1060150313000235 dorion-soulié, m. & roussel, s. (2013) réinterprétation de l’histoire militaire et redéfinition de l’identité nationale. les commémorations de la guerre de 1812 au canada. études internationales 44(3) 387–408. https://doi.org/10.7202/1021128ar dolata, p. (2015) a new canada in the arctic? arctic policies under harper. canadian studies 78(1) 131–154. https://doi.org/10.4000/eccs.521 dupré, s. (2010) risques, vulnérabilités et enjeux environnementaux induits par la navigation dans l’arctique canadien. in lasserre, f. (ed.) passages et mers arctiques. géopolitique d’une région en mutation, 223–241. puq, quebec. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18pgt18 everett, k. (2018) canada’s arctic policy framework: a new approach to northern governance. the polar connection 18.5.2018 <https://polarconnection.org/canada-arctic-policy-framework/>. 2.7.2019. exner-pirot, h. (2020) development or bust: canada’s arctic council chairmanship 2013–2015. in nord, d. (ed.) leadership of the north. the influence and impact of arctic council chairs, 89–106. springer, cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03107-7_6 fenge, t. (2007) inuit and the nunavut land claims agreement: supporting canada’s arctic sovereignty. policy options 27(6) 84–88. foucault, m. (2002) the archaeology of knowledge. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203604168 franklin, j. (1910) narrative of a journey to the shores of polar sea in the years 1819–20–21–22. j.m. dent, london and e.p. dutton, new york. https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.46471 frenette, y. (2014) l’embrigadement du passé canadien: les politiques mémorielles du gouvernement harper. canadian journal of history 49(1) 31–47. https://doi.org/10.3138/cjh.49.1.31 genest, p. & lasserre, f. (2015) souveraineté, sécurité, identité: éléments-clés du discours du gouvernement canadien sur l’arctique. canadian foreign policy journal 21(1) 64–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/11926422.2014.934853 geiger, j. (2014) prime minister stephen harper on the franklin find. canadian geographic 1.12.2014 <https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/prime-minister-stephen-harper-franklin-find>. 2.7.2019. global news (2014) emotional stephen harper announces ship from franklin expedition <https:// globalnews.ca/video/1552702/emotional-stephen-harper-announces-ship-from-franklin-expeditionhas-been-found>. 9.9.2019. government of canada (2000) the northern dimension of canada’s foreign policy. department of foreign affairs and international trade <http://library.arcticportal.org/1255/1/the_northern_ dimension_canada.pdf>. government of canada (2005) canada’s international policy statement. a role of pride and influence in the world. government of canada <http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection/fr4-3-2005e. pdf>. government of canada (2007a) prime minister stephen harper addresses the house of commons in a reply to the speech from the throne 17.10.2007 <https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2007/10/ prime-minister-stephen-harper-addresses-house-commons-reply-speech-throne.html>. 4.7.2019. government of canada (2007b) speech from the throne. strong leadership. a better canada. house of commons <https://www.ourcommons.ca/content/house/392/debates/001/han001-e.pdf>. government of canada (2009) canada’s northern strategy. our north, our heritage, our future. government of canada <http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2009/ainc-inac/r3-72-2008. pdf>. government of canada (2010) statement on canada’s arctic foreign policy. exercising sovereignty and promoting canada’s northern strategy abroad. government of canada <https://www.international. gc.ca/world-monde/assets/pdfs/canada_arctic_foreign_policy-eng.pdf>. government of canada (2014a) 2014 victoria strait expedition – partners 25.8.2014 <https://www. canada.ca/en/news/archive/2014/08/2014-victoria-strait-expedition-partners.html>. 4.7.2019. 22 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) government of canada (2014b) the government of canada highlights the success of this year’s franklin expedition 21.11.2014 <https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2014/11/governmentcanada-highlights-success-this-year-franklin-expedition.html>. 4.7.2019. government of canada (2014c) history of the 1845 franklin expedition and his lost ships her majesty’s ship erebus and her majesty’s ship terror 1.10.2014 <https://www.canada.ca/en/news/ archive/2014/10/history-1845-franklin-expedition-his-lost-ships-her-majesty-ship-erebus-her-majestyship-terror.html>. 4.7.2019. government of canada (2014d) pm announces hms erebus as the discovered franklin expedition ship 1.10.2014 <https://www.canada.ca/en/news/archive/2014/10/pm-announces-hms-erebus-asdiscovered-franklin-expedition-ship.html>. 4.7.2019. government of canada (2015) harper government uses cutting edge canadian technology to provide first-ever live video feed and tour of hms erebus 16.4.2015 <https://www.canada.ca/en/news/ archive/2015/04/harper-government-uses-cutting-edge-canadian-technology-provide-first-ever-livevideo-feed-tour-hms-erebus.html>. 4.7.2019. government of canada (2016) parks canada announces funding for the wrecks of hms erebus and hms terror national historic site 17.3.2016 <https://www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2016/03/ parks-canada-announces-funding-for-the-wrecks-of-hms-erebus-and-hms-terror-national-historic-site. html>. 4.7.2019. government of canada (2017) parks canada’s underwater archaeology team visit hms terror with government of nunavut and gjoa haven support team 28.4.2017 <https://www.canada.ca/en/ parks-canada/news/2017/04/parks_canada_s_underwaterarchaeologyteamvisithmsterrorwithgovern1. html>. 2.7.2019. government of canada (2019) toward a new arctic policy framework 14.5.2019 <https://www.rcaanccirnac.gc.ca/eng/1499951681722/1537884604444>. 5.7.2019. graham, b., ashworth, g. j. & tunbridge, j. e. (2000) a geography of heritage: power, culture and economy. routledge, london. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315824895 guy, e. & pelletier, j. f. (2010) développement du transport maritime en arctique: quelles perspectives pour l’industrie maritime canadienne? in lasserre, f. (ed.) passages et mers arctiques. géopolitique d’une région en mutation, 427–447. puq, quebec. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv18pgt18 harris, k. (2018) canada, britain formalize agreement on franklin expedition wrecks. cbc 26.4.2018 <https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/franklin-expedition-hms-erebus-terror-1.4636222>. 2.7.2019. heritage daily (2012) pm announces new project to continue search for sir john franklin’s lost ship 29.8.2012 <https://www.heritagedaily.com/2012/08/pm-announces-new-project-to-continue-searchfor-sir-john-franklins-lost-ships/53528>. 4.7.2019. hodgetts, l. m. (2012) the rediscovery of hms investigator: archeology, sovereignty and the colonial legacy in canada’s arctic. journal of social archeology 13(1) 80–100. https://doi. org/10.1177/1469605312458735 kyle, k. (2017) inuit guardians ‘happy and proud’ to protect franklin’s ships. cbc 8.9.2017 <https:// w w w . c b c . c a / n e w s / c a n a d a / n o r t h / i n u i t g u a r d i a n s h a p p y a n d p r o u d t o p r o t e c t f r a n k l i n s ships-1.4279482>. 4.7.2019. krippendorff, k. (1980) content analysis. an introduction to its methodology. sage, london. lackenbauer, w. p. & dean, r. (2016) canada’s northern strategy under prime minister stephen harper. documents on canadian arctic sovereignty and security. centre for military, security and strategic studies, centre on foreign policy and federalism and arctic institute of north america, calgary and waterloo. lajeunesse, a. (2016) lock, stock, and icebergs: a history of canada’s arctic maritime sovereignty. ubc press, vancouver. lajeunesse, a. (2018) canada’s sovereignty in the arctic. brief to the standing committee on foreign affairs and international development. house of commons, ottawa. <https://www.ourcommons.ca/ content/committee/421/faae/brief/br10003044/br-external/lajeunesseadam-e.pdf>. lasserre, f. (1998) le canada d'un mythe à l'autre: territoire et images du territoire. presses universitaires de lyon and hmh, lyon and montréal. lasserre, f. (2010a) mines et pétrole: vers une rapide exploitation des ressources naturelles du soussol dans l’arctique ? in lasserre, f. (ed.) passages et mers arctiques. géopolitique d’une région en mutation, 373–409. puq, quebec. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18pgt18 lasserre, f. (2010b) l’arctique, zone de confrontation ou de coopération? genèse de relations complexes et anciennes. in lasserre, f. (ed.) passages et mers arctiques. géopolitique d’une région en mutation, 57–73. puq, quebec. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18pgt18 lasserre, f. & lalonde, s. (2010) droit de la mer et souveraineté sur les passages arctiques. in lasserre, f. (ed.) passages et mers arctiques. géopolitique d’une région en mutation, 245–267. puq, quebec. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv18pgt18 23fennia 199(1) (2021) kim pawliw, étienne berthold & frédéric lasserre lasserre, f. & stan, c. a. (2019) guerres coloniales et commémoration: le cas des défaites occidentales. enjeux de pouvoir sur des lieux de mémoire. l’espace politique 36(3) https://doi.org/10.4000/ espacepolitique.5591 lasserre, f., gonon, e. & mottet, e. (2020) manuel de géopolitique. enjeux de pouvoir sur des territoires. 3rd ed. armand colin, paris. https://doi.org/10.3917/arco.lasse.2020.01 loukacheva, n. (2007) the arctic promise: legal and political autonomy of greenland and nunavut. university of toronto press, toronto and london. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442684874 lucier, p. (2011) la patrimonialisation comme stratégie volontariste: pistes et questions. in berthold, b. (ed.) patrimoine et histoire de l’art au québec: enjeux et perspectives, 63–76. pul, quebec. marsh, j. h. & beattie, o. (2018) franklin search. the canadian encyclopedia 8.3.2018 <https://www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/franklin-search>. 4.7.2019. mccorristine, s. (2013) searching for franklin: a contemporary canadian ghost story. british journal of canadian studies 26(1) 39–47. https://doi.org/10.3828/bjcs.2013.3 mcdiarmid, m. (2014) stephen harper and the obsession with franklin. cbc 3.9.2014 <https://www. cbc.ca/news/politics/stephen-harper-and-the-obsession-with-franklin-1.2754180>. 31.1.2019. narwold, a., sandy, j. & tu. c. c. (2008) historic designation and residential property values. international real estate review 11(1) 83–95. neatby, l. h. & mercer, k. (2018) sir john franklin. canadian encyclopedia 8.3.2018 <https://www. thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-john-franklin>. 4.7.2019. nora, p. (ed.) (1984, 1986, 1992) les lieux de mémoire: t. 1 la république (1984); t. 2 la nation; (1986); t. 3 les france (1992). gallimard, paris. o’connor, j. (2018) inuit oral historian had ‘critical role’ in solving mystery of doomed franklin expedition. national post 30.3.2018 <https://nationalpost.com/news/inuit-oral-historian-had-criticalrole-in-solving-mystery-of-doomed-franklin-expedition>. 4.7.2019. paillé, p. & mucchielli, a. (2009) l’analyse qualitative en sciences humaines et sociales. armand colin, paris. parks canada (2013a) on the hunt for a missing piece of canadian history – parks canada continues search for lost franklin ship. newswire 9.8.2013 <https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/on-thehunt-for-a-missing-piece-of-canadian-history---parks-canada-continues-search-for-lost-franklinships-512790201.html>. 20.1.2019. parks canada (2013b) hunt for franklin ship. youtube 12.8.2013 <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hh-rlmeguka&list=ploe6xx2wbaizb9iin4-dhdutrzj31pld7&index=9>. 20.1.2019. parks canada (2013c) harper government launching one of canada’s most fascinating stories on the canadian arctic. newswire 19.11.2013 <https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/harper-governmentlaunching-one-of-canadas-most-fascinating-stories-on-the-canadian-arctic-513264181.html>. 20.1.2019. parks canada (2014) harper government announces the recovery of the hms erebus bell. newswire 6.11.2014 <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/harper-government-announces-the-recoveryof-the-hms-erebus-bell-281799571.html>. 20.1.2019. parks canada (2019a) finding hms erebus. parks canada 27.5.2019 <https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/ nu/epaveswrecks/culture/archeologie-archeology/decouvertes-discoveries/erebus>. 5.7.2019. parks canada (2019b) searching for franklin’s lost ships. parks canada 7.10.2019 <https://www.pc.gc. ca/en/lhn-nhs/nu/epaveswrecks/culture/archeologie-archeology/recherche-search>. 2.12.2019. parks canada (2019c) searching for franklin. parks canada 27.5.2019 <https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhnnhs/nu/epaveswrecks/culture/histoire-history/suivant-next>. 10.7.2019. parks canada (2019d) introduction. parks canada 25.4.2019 <https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/ introduction>. 2.7.2019. prime minister of canada (2014) pm sails the northwest passage with the franklin expedition search team 25.8.2014 <https://web.archive.org/web/20141118082735/http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/ news/2014/08/25/pm-sails-northwest-passage-franklin-expedition-search-team>. 15.9.2019. rannie, s. (2014) long-lost ship from franklin expedition found. global news 9.9.2014 <https:// globalnews.ca/news/1552518/long-lost-ship-from-franklin-expedition-found/>. 2.7.2019. scrivener, d. (1996) environmental cooperation in the arctic: from strategy to council. north atlantic committee, oslo. seignour, a. (2011) méthode d’analyse des discours. l’exemple de l’allocution d’un dirigeant d’entreprise publique. revue française de gestion 2(211) 29–45. https://doi.org/10.3166/rfg.211.29-45 sjolander, c. t. (2014) through the looking glass: canadian identity and the war of 1812. international journal 69(2) 152–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020702014527892 smith, g. w. (1961) the transfer of arctic territories from great britain to canada in 1880, and some related matters, as seen in official correspondence. arctic 14(1) 53–73. https://doi.org/10.14430/arctic3660 24 research paper fennia 199(1) (2021) stephen harper northern tour (2013) franklin expedition. youtube 22.8.2013 <https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=kzzeci9n42w>. 2.7.2019. subra, p. (2012). la géopolitique, une ou plurielle? place, enjeux et outils d'une géopolitique locale. hérodote 146–147 45–70. https://doi.org/10.3917/her.146.0045 têtu, p., lasserre, f., pelletier, s. & dawson, j. (2019) ‘sovereignty’ over submerged cultural heritage in the canadian arctic waters: case study from the franklin expedition wrecks (1845–48). polar geography 42(2) 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937x.2019.1578288 tremblay, y. (2017) histoire d’une commémoration: la mémoire de 1812 du xixe au xxie siècle. bulletin d’histoire politique 25(2) 36–62. https://doi.org/10.7202/1038792ar trudeau, j. (2016) the second ship lost in the franklin expedition has been found! twitter 15.9.2016 <https://twitter.com/search?l=&q=franklin%20from%3ajustintrudeau&src=typd&lang=en>. 2.7.2019. tiro, k. m. (2013) now you see it, now you don’t: the war of 1812 in canada and the united states in 2012. the public historian 35(1) 89–97. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2013.35.1.87 windsor star (2013) ottawa contributing to the search for two ships of the franklin expedition. youtube 10.7.2013 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1zokmcv3xm>. 10.7.2019. untitled-1 north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics markku tykkyläinen tykkyläinen, markku (2003). north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics. fennia 181: 2, pp. 145–177. helsinki. issn 0015-0010. this paper examines russian energy development and plans and their geopolitical implications around the turn of the new millennium. argumentation is founded on the interpretation of the impacts of stakeholders’ interests on geopolitics under new societal conditions and the legacy of past energy production and logistics. empirical evidence consists of material from the projects of russian companies and the plans and politics of the russian government for developing the energy sector. the redefined borders and the geographical shifts of energy production have brought about the orientation of russia’s energy development and interests towards the north. the former empire’s parts bordering on russia in the west, belarus and first of all ukraine, have become problematic due to transit payment conflicts. consequently, russian companies develop ports in north-west russia as well as plan the construction of new oil and gas pipelines through the baltic sea region. on the other hand, the northern location of the infrastructure plans is a geographical necessity, in the way that new oil and gas deposits lie in northern high-latitude zones. energy stakeholders’ market-oriented interests greatly influence the country’s economic orientation to the advanced economies and the global economy. thus, russia’s new energy geopolitics means economic integration and networking with partners (companies, nations and economic areas) that are able to co-operate successfully in the economic sector. in all, the energy projects and plans in russia are derived from these restructured, pragmatic and market-led economic interests, which have led to the growing significance of gateways in north-west russia. markku tykkyläinen, department of geography, university of joensuu, p.o. box 111, fin-80101 joensuu. e-mail: markku.tykkylainen@joensuu.fi. ms received 11 september 2003. aims and research area tracing new energy geopolitics this paper analyses russian energy development and its geopolitical implications in the recent past, from soviet times to the post-1998 growth period. the geographical focus of the paper is on north-west russia and its adjacent areas in the european north. the hypotheses of this study are that the current energy development is explained both by the past soviet legacy, including its geographical dissolution, and the interests of the stakeholders in the new russian market-oriented economy. furthermore, these corollaries have bearing on russian geopolitics. first, there have been locational changes in energy production and changes in accessibility to the export market that influence russian business and power interests, as well as current geopolitics in russia. the study shows the geographical shifts in energy production and the changing importance of regions and logistic gateways in russia. secondly, the marketled interests of the export sectors influence the new geopolitics of russia. for instance, energy producers may have considerable influence in policy-making. furthermore, this paper evaluates russian energy plans and trends up to 2030 and aims at assessing their repercussions on russian energy integration with advanced countries. this article looks more closely at the new configurations of the russian energy system and the geopolitical aspirations boosted by energy interests. the study consists of 1) scrutinising the main 146 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen locational developments in energy production, 2) elaborating on the new market-led economic environment and foreign trade relations in the energy sector, and 3) examining the changes in russian geopolitical thinking, partly as the result of points 1 and 2. all these factors bring about a new geopolitical situation in north-west russia and the baltic sea region. from a practical viewpoint, this paper helps to understand the significance of the baltic sea transport routes for russia, the question of baltic oil transport safety in the contexts of russian oil transport, the development of northern gas pipeline systems as a part of the russian energy apparatus, and the nature of the linkages of the russian economy to the world geo-economy. north-west russia’s position the major research area is north-west russia. to present north-west russian energy development as part of the russian energy system, which consists of the country’s energy production and energy transport, this paper refers in many cases to energy production, logistical solutions, plans and projects elsewhere in russia and in the former soviet union. there are many definitions of north-west russia or north-western russia (e.g. blakkisrud and hønnesland 2001, 9). in 2000, all russian regions were grouped to form new macro-regions, federal okrugs. the north-west federal okrug consists of the northern and northwestern economic regions and the enclave of kaliningrad oblast (andreev & olsson 2002, 1, 5). the northern economic region includes the republic of karelia, murmansk oblast, arkhangelsk oblast (including the nenets autonomous okrug), the republic of komi and vologda oblast. five million people reside in this region, and the area of the territory is equal to the five nordic countries and the baltic states together. this region stretches as a 800 kilometre-wide belt from the borders of finland to the ural mountains. the significant oil, gas and coal producers of the northern region are located in arkhangelsk’s nenets okrug, bordering on the barents and the kara seas, and in the republic of komi. the north-western economic region includes st. petersburg, leningrad oblast, pskov oblast and novgorod oblast. more than half of the region’s eight million residents live in st. petersburg. there are several important ports in st. petersburg and leningrad oblast. north-west russia’s location relative to the centre has changed. the dissolution of the soviet union led to the russian energy sector being allowed to operate in part under the rules of international business. furthermore, when the soviet union shrank and became just russia, both the geographical centre and population centre shifted northwards, 333 and 389 km respectively (lynch 2002, 41). large energy production and infrastructure systems have been constructed during the last decades. coal, gas and oil have been extracted from various locations, and considerable shifts in the geography of energy production have taken place in the past few decades. the changes in the expanse of territory and the development of energy production (based on the location of reserves) are physical factors, and they have impacts on geopolitics in addition to new actors, technology and institutions. theoretical and methodological arguments formation of geopolitics and geo-economic competition geopolitics considers that the constitution of international relations is bound to geographical space. it is also bound to time. theories based on a static world-view or the perpetual fundamentals of geopolitics are hardly explanatory because institutional restructuring occurs at all times. many events, such as the collapse of the soviet bloc, the socio-economic integration of many nation-states into larger economic areas, the growing dominance of global economic relations, the emergence of regionalism and separatism, the rise of multinational business and communities and the global war against terrorist organisations, show that the everyday geopolitics can change rapidly. there are new contents and new reasoning why conflicts emerge. the actors are changing as well. it is no longer self-evident and valid that the premise of geopolitics (denoting a fundamental actor and its borders) is a nation-state where the political elite of the state alone determines international relations based on a national ideology. the world has become more complex, networked, interdependent and fragmented. new interests and coalitions emerge. agnew (2001, 13) says that world politics “is the outcome of sociological praxis based on rules, practices, and idefennia 181: 2 (2003) 147north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics as that are not set for all time but change as a result of the contingencies of world history.” contents and actors change. political turns, tensions and controversies in russian geopolitics give rise to new interpretations. it is relevant to say that the geopolitical elite in russia – and in many other countries – is a formation of diverse actors situated in various economic, political, ethnic and ideological networks, and geopolitical decision-making consists of a sequence of time-bound decisions made in evolving economic, societal and political contexts. thus, to understand the decision-making and geopolitics dealing with russian energy, the analysis is justifiably based on historical development and the influence of the new power structures in russia. if energy is the main source of foreign currency, as it is in russia, it is certainly in a central role in geopolitics. energy commodities constitute a geopolitical instrument. under monopolistic circumstances an energy-producing country can use energy as a regulative instrument, as happened during soviet times. in market-economy conditions the abundant supply of energy leads to a situation where customers can, to a great extent, select from whom they buy, which kind of commodities and which quantities. under the global market economy, suppliers have to compete in the market, and russia is clearly a partaker in this respect. it is in the interest of a russia recovering economically that domestic companies earn more foreign currency by selling energy. to boost economic growth, the russian government is eager to improve the institutional framework for promoting investments and benefits obtained from production sharing and joint ventures. the importance of institutional modernisation has increased, because it has become clear that many energy projects have not progressed as fast as expected. for instance, during the 1980s and 1990s norway succeeded in developing its offshore hydrocarbon production and logistics to europe and the world market more efficiently than russia. investments did not flow to the russian energy sector in the 1990s, and now the country attempts to attract investments more actively. russian energy companies are also anxious to develop their production chains by investing abroad. the country must compete and have good relations with customer countries. russia has lost its power, former soviet states, and ideological and political arguments for carrying out the old politics of supremacy, but it strives to operate as a part of the integrating global and sub-global trade systems. geo-economic competition on markets amidst companies and governments prevails. russia’s future geopolitical status is challenged by various political groups and movements. the main divide is between atlanticists and eurasianists. yeltsin adopted western principles and sought to make russia a part of the west (huntington 1993, 43). putin’s regime is more pragmatic in searching for russia’s economic interests, but the geopolitical outcome is similar. a new and emerging factor is the war against terrorism that unites many russian and western politicians. for the russians, the fundamental ideological issue is whether russia should be a eurasian power with its own mixed identity between the east and the west, or should it be a european nation amalgamated to european culture and traditions (tsygankov 2003). both opinions have support in russia, although the eurasian superpower concept appears to be more unrealistic due to economic and cultural reasons (cf. huntington 1993). as seems apparent, the new semi-capitalist order will prevail in russia for a long time. that clearly means new economism in russia, in the sense that economic interests steer the development of society. it is evident that the energy business, as the most important source of foreign currency, will influence the contents of geopolitics. geopolitical thinking and boundaries are socially constructed. thus, if taking into account this fact and its implications, the russian geopolitical orientation can be explained and anticipated as a function of the interests of energy companies and russian energy apparatus. nevertheless, the course of geopolitics is the result of political decisions. tsygankov (2003, 103) says, “the postsoviet geography [russia’s spatial thinking] is being reconstituted as a result of discursive strategies chosen by russian intellectual and political elites, rather than of some fixed or ‘natural’ geopolitical interest.” this paper does not go into indepth discussion of russian geopolitical thinking, but attempts to analyse the geographical interests of the stakeholders of the energy (and export) sector and transmit this viewpoint into academic geopolitical discourse. methodology: unravelling the key structures, processes and actors the methodological principles of this study are based on a holistic approach applying different 148 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen methods and data material. the starting point is very much inspired by findings that a proper analysis of essential geo-economic phenomena demands process-based analysis grounded in the multifaceted mix of methods and tracing important actors involved in the process (yeung 2003). the empirical study attempts to trace the geo-economic structures, processes and actors that resulted in the late-transitional (post-1998) energy development and geopolitics based on energy interests. it is clear that russian geopolitics as a whole is a much broader and more complex issue than the outcome of the nation’s energy interests, but at least in order to understand geopolitics rooted in energy interests, it is important to unravel the linkages between geopolitics and energy. on the other hand, energy practices, programmes and plans represent more than just the policy of the energy sector, because of the country’s resourcebased economic structure. the russian economy is largely based on the processing of natural resources, the production of which is operating in a world market comparable to that of energy commodities. nevertheless, in a strict sense, the validity of this research is restricted to energy geopolitics. the process-based approach has given the freedom to design tailored in-depth inquiries into various data sources. the flexibility of methods is a necessity because of the complexity of the web of causal powers, liabilities, contingent conditions, structures and human choices. this study is primarily based on secondary data focusing on the historical development of the energy sector and energy plans and outlooks. furthermore, the study utilises the databases, reports and pages published on the internet. most large companies publish their reports and plans on the internet, and these data sources have been used to apply data triangulation. the pages published in printed form have been considered reliable as such, and the data of unprinted sources have been confirmed through several sources. energy and russia’s transition in the 1990s decline, recovery and global geography in the economy of russia, as well as in that of the former soviet union, energy production has been of primary importance. this is not unique when compared with other parts of the world, but russia’s low population density, long distances, energy exports and challenging natural conditions add to the importance of the energy sector (i.e. industries producing energy). the vast expanse of territory and the principles of economic development inherited from the post-revolution years caused energy production and its logistics to become large-scale projects already during the socialist era (eronen 1999). the significance of north-west russia as a gateway has increased since the dissolution of the soviet union. much of the energy is conveyed through north-west russia via pipes and ports and much of it is consumed in the region’s large industrial enterprises and in st. petersburg. the soviet economy collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, after which the economic situation deteriorated year after year through 1998. the question whether russia is changing from a modern society to an anti-modern one was raised when russian economic development and material welfare were observed to decline, barter exchange to replace trade and the economy to disintegrate (rose 1998). as for the energy sector, however, the issue is more ambiguous. part of the energy production rests solely on outdated industrial capital, i.e. worn-out machinery and equipment and obsolete transport networks. many actors of the economy were being left in a disintegrating and redundant state. on the other hand, part of the energy sector was capable of being developed, and its top companies strove to invest in new businesses, modernise the old industrial capital and explore for energy resources. russia was ranked third in the world after the usa and china in energy production in 2000 (iea 2003a, 48–57). russia’s standing as a big energy producer rests on its abundant natural resources, e.g. gas, oil, coal, hydroelectric power, and uranium. in addition, there are great quantities of wood and peat in the coniferous forest zone in the north, though they are not utilised to any significant extent as sources of energy. until recently power production based on bio-fuels (such as wood and peat) has not been competitive under russian conditions. large-scale production and specialisation explain the technical and commercial properties of the energy system. russia’s energy consumption can be explained by the country’s degree of industrialisation, specialisation in processing natural resources, and its northern and continental location. energy is greatly needed fennia 181: 2 (2003) 149north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics both for production and the maintenance of transport, housing and communal services. after the late 1980s, russia’s importance as an energy consumer weakened. the collapse of the soviet economy deteriorated the entire energy system. energy consumption1 fell at the same rate as the activities of the energy-utilising sectors slowed down. by country comparison as of 1990, the united states was the world’s largest energy consumer. still in 1990, the economic area of the present russian federation was the world’s second-largest energy consumer (table 1). all the russian figures in table 1 refer to the present area of the russian federation. the rapidly growing asian economy has changed the global division of energy consumption. nowadays china is the world’s second-largest energy consumer. russia’s declined energy consumption has primarily been caused by the economic transition in the 1990s, when production fell to half of the level of production at the beginning of the decade. in the majority of countries, however, economic activities increased, thus also increasing energy demand. the comparison of energy consumption changes taking place in 1990–97 illustrates the deep economic recession in russia (table 1). despite this, russia is still a very large energy consumer. if the country will be hit by economic turmoil again and india’s and japan’s energy consumption continue grow as in the 1990s, russia may end up behind these countries in energy consumption. by 2000, energy consumption in russia had grown by 3.7% from 1997 indicating economic recovery. the respective figures for the usa were 6.4%, china 2.6, japan 1.9% and india 8.9%. russia’s production structure, regional energy demand and transport needs determine energy consumption. measured by energy intensity (tonnes of oil equivalent per capita), energy consumption in russia is not particularly high and has even decreased during the economic transition. consumption per capita, i.e. the energy intensity, in russia decreased from 6.1 toe per capita in 1990 to 4.0 in 1997 (world bank 2000, 293) and recovered slightly to 4.2 toe per capita in 2000 (iea 2003a, 55). the level of carbon dioxide emissions also decreased. the energy consumption per capita in the usa (8.4 in 2000) and canada (8.2) was clearly higher than that in russia (fig. 1). in 2000, northern europe’s energy consumption was also higher, being 5.4 toe per capita in sweden and 5.7 toe per capita in norway. finland’s energy consumption was also higher than russia’s and it grew from 5.8 toe per capita to 6.4 toe per capita during 1990–2000. at the turn of the millennium russia’s energy consumption per capita matched europe’s average level, and was lower than that in north america and northern europe but higher than that in southern europe. the environmental pollution caused by the energy sector in russia was reduced due to the reduction in energy consumption and structural changes in the 1990s (fig. 1). in china, the energy intensity was much lower, 0.9 toe per capita, than in russia in 2000 (iea 2003a, 51). the comparison of countries roughly speaking reveals that the higher the energy consumption the better the standard of living. on the other hand, high figures indicate that such economies are largely based on material consumption or are hubs of resource-processing industries. such economies also can be inefficient and poorly sustainable. thus, the welfare impacts of high energy consumption are not self-evident. although the volume of energy consumption in russia is at the european level, the living standard of the population clearly falls behind that of the developed industrial countries (iea 1995, 44–45). in this regard the russian economy could be more efficient, sustainable and post-industrial. the share of energy exports from the total russian exports increased in the 1990s (european commission 2001, 164), and over one-third of all russian energy production was exported in 2000 (iea 2003a, 54). energy became more important than ever as a source of hard currency, because out of all the production of the soviet empire, mainly oil and gas production remained competitive. the dissolution of the control of the command economy enabled the russian companies that had become prosperous through energy extable 1. energy consumption in million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe)2. source: world bank 2000, 292-293; iea 2003a, 50, 52, 54, 56. 1990 1997 2000 change in %, 1990–2000 russia 906 592 614 –32 usa 1926 2162 2300 19 china 867 1113 1142 32 japan 439 515 525 20 india 360 461 502 39 finland 29 33 33 14 150 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen ports to consolidate their positions in the economy. although the losses suffered during the recession of the transition period are still clearly visible in the energy sector, energy production has increased during the past few years and the development prospects in the energy system rest on its anticipated growth. russia is a leading energy exporter. at the beginning of the millennium it was the largest gas exporter, third-largest crude oil exporter and sixthlargest coal and electricity exporter in the world (iea 2003a, 13, 11, 15, 27). whereas many other industrial countries are net importers of energy, russia is a net exporter of energy. in this regard russia is a developing country rather than an industrial one, because its own industrial production is only partly able to utilise the energy supply. thus energy is being sold abroad. russia produces especially natural gas for the european market. around the turn of the millennium the country produced 20% of the gas utilised in the european union and 15% of the oil imported by the european union (liuhto 2002, 4). according to the import statistics of the european union, russia was the largest natural gas supplier and the second-largest oil supplier (after norway) to eu countries. on the other hand, russia’s hard currency income, as well as citizens’ welfare, depends greatly on revenues coming from energy exports (rautava 2002). the positive talks in russia and the eu about the economic co-operation between each other are very understandable in this context. the spatial configuration of the russian energy cluster (i.e. energy-producing industries, supporting industries and services, energy transport, enterprise structures and institutions), distances and borders, the size of the european market and built infrastructure bring about favourable conditions for exporting energy to europe. the pipeline and power cable networks enhance the dependence on european exports. the former cmea’s3 oil and gas pipelines transport energy westwards to the eu-integrating east central europe and further to the core of europe. the production of oil and gas for export was significantly invested in already during the soviet period. while the geopolitical circumstances have changed, this legacy still matters. the impacts of the growth and decline of the russian energy cluster are geographically uneven, being very scattered and creating pockets of development or decline. lynch (2002) warns that without state intervention the russian geo-economy is not competitive and refers to poor accessibility and huge distances. many will agree that there are numerous declining localities and uncompetitive plants and factories, but there are signs of long-term growth and development as well. investments take place under liberal economic auspices, but their geography is less anticipated than in the former command economy. population growth in the khanty-mansi autonomous okrug beyond the ural mountains in the 1990s (when other northern regions of russia suffered population losses) is a good example of the spin-offs from successful energy companies (helefigure 1. the dynamics of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in 1990–2000. source: world bank 2000, 292–293; iea 2003a, 48–57. fennia 181: 2 (2003) 151north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics niak 1999, 172). energy companies operating in the export markets have been able to modernise their production and utilise foreign technology and capital, as well as be competitive in world markets. this restructuring in production is not in any way unexceptional: companies have to adapt during economic transition, and only the most competitive sections of the economy will grow and develop. the rouble devaluation of 1998 (and the high price of energy) brought economic growth and new wealth to russian export companies. these funds were transformed into investment in equipment, pipelines and transport facilities at the beginning of the millennium. the outcome is geographically uneven but the total sum of investments has grown. russian energy decline in comparison table 2 presents the main developments of the russian energy sector in the 1990s’ declining phase in a comparative setting. energy production declined, and russia’s share in global primary energy production decreased from 14 to 11 per cent (table 2). energy production bottomed out in 1997. in the subsequent years energy production grew slightly; in 1998 it was 0.7% higher than in 1997, and production in 1999 was 2.4% higher than the previous year (iea 2002a, 275). natural gas is clearly the most important energy resource in russia, and it became even more significant over the 1990s. it has not always been that way: the russian gas sector has been develtable 2. russia’s energy sector during the 1990s’ transition. primary energy production in russia, the usa, china and finland; the countries’ share in global primary energy production and consumption. source: united nations 1996; united nations 2000; united nations 2001. country primary energy country’s share proportion of proportion of – year production, in global primary natural gas energy million tonnes of energy production of consumption of oil equivalents, production, primary energy primary energy (mtoe) % production, production, % % russia 1992 1107.0 13.8 44.5 64.9 1993 1036.0 12.9 46.7 67.3 1994 945.0 11.3 50.3 63.0 1995 999.0 11.6 54.3 64.6 1996 978.0 11.1 54.1 61.7 1997 956.0 10.7 53.1 60.9 1998 965.0 10.8 54.5 60.2 usa 1992 1604.0 19.9 28.9 119.6 1993 1555.0 19.3 30.2 124.6 1994 1708.0 20.5 29.1 121.7 1995 1720.0 20.0 29.2 122.6 1996 1753.0 19.8 29.2 123.8 1997 1755.0 19.7 29.3 124.6 china 1992 726.0 9.0 2.0 93.8 1993 749.0 9.3 2.1 94.5 1994 800.0 9.6 2.0 95.6 1995 866.0 10.1 1.9 94.6 1996 896.0 10.1 2.3 95.8 1997 890.0 10.0 2.6 95.1 finland 1992 7.6 0.09 0.0 303.9 1993 7.1 0.09 0.0 335.3 1994 8.2 0.10 0.0 318.9 1995 8.2 0.09 0.0 317.1 1996 8.3 0.09 0.0 333.4 1997 9.1 0.10 0.0 291.3 152 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen oped during the past few decades. the stagnation of the soviet union’s economy in the 1980s did not affect the energy sector greatly; on the contrary, energy production grew year by year in the 1980s. primary energy production in the soviet union was 1590 million toe (converted from russian fuel equivalents to oil equivalents) in 1989 (bater 1996, 224). industrial development during the socialist period expanded the oil and gas production networks to siberia and northern russia, and also made gazprom the most important company in russia. the role of the economic elite, such as the leaders of gazprom, in russian politics of the 1990s was significant, reflecting that which was considered important in society. the network of the gas pipelines is of the same importance for russia as the autobahn motorways are for germany. as seen in table 2, russia and china are selfsufficient in energy use whereas the usa is a net importer of energy. china is dependent on coal, and it was a growing economy in terms of primary energy production during the russian transition of the 1990s. china’s oil demand outstripped production in the 1990s and the same will happen to natural gas. china will become a large energy buyer in the coming decades as strong economic growth drives up energy demand and imports, which impacts on russian energy plans (iea 2002b, 237–268). russia’s strengths in energy production are clearly visible when energy figures are compared with finnish ones, and the 1990s transition did not alter this relation between russia and finland significantly. finland is dependent on imported energy, because its domestic energy production compared to energy consumption is very small. nevertheless, finland’s location near to russian energy reserves and energy transport routes is advantageous. finland can buy russian energy produced relatively close to finnish consumption sites. for russia, finland’s energy market is not very large, but finland’s location along the energy routes is notable in a geopolitical sense. energy production and consumption coal coal was the backbone of russian energy production until the 1950s. at that time the share of coal in all fuels utilised in russia accounted for 60% (bater 1996, 224). by 1980, the share of coal as a primary source of energy decreased to 25% (sagers & green 1986, 91), and it continued to fall until the latter part of the 1990s. production volumes started to decrease significantly already in the early 1980s, and continued to decrease in the early and mid-1990s and by 1998 it was only 56% of the production of 1990 (iea 2002a, 153). inefficient mines have been closed. for instance, 140 coalmines were closed by 2000 (iea 2002a, 154). loss-making and marginal mines still exist. the coal exports of 1990 (59 million tonnes) decreased by half in 1993 (27 million tonnes; iea 2002a, 167). since 1998, export activity has recovered significantly. coal export has grown strongly at least up to 2002 (hernesniemi & dudarev 2003, 52). the share of coal in russian energy exports is negligible. the share of solid fuels (in this case, coal) in the energy consumption (tpes) of russia accounted for 17% in 1997 (iea 2002a, 183), and even less in the total primary energy production. brown coal (lignite)4, which is not as valuable as anthracite, makes up onethird of coal production. the majority of the mines (65%) are open-pit mines (iea 2002a, 183). as a result of the collapse of socialism, almost half of the former soviet union’s coalmines were lost to the newly-formed independent republics. this loss concerned mainly coal production, and oil and natural gas production only marginally. in 1992, russia’s coal production yielded 337 million tonnes, while ukraine produced 134 million tonnes and kazakhstan 127 million tonnes (bater 1996, 228). according to the data for the coal production of 1992, only 56% of the former soviet union’s coal production remained in russia (bater 1996, 228). in the early 1970s, the donets basin of ukraine was the largest coal-producing area where, in 1970, one-third (216 million tonnes, i.e. 34.6%) of the soviet union’s coal was extracted (sagers & green 1986, 92). since the beginning of the nineteenth century this region has played the main role in coal and steel production. anthracite and other coals have been extracted from underground mines. when the reserves in the urals and the european part (the moscow region and the eastern parts of the donets basin) had run low, coal production was increasingly developed in siberia. as a result of the soviet union’s collapse, the coal-producing regions of kazakhstan and central asia were lost. in the european part fennia 181: 2 (2003) 153north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics of russia, only in the coal-producing pechora region (inta and vorkuta) coal production was increased in the 1970s and 1980s. the kuznetsk basin (kuzbass) of western siberia is the most important coal-producing area and the mines there produce most of russia’s coal (44.6 per cent in 2000; iea 2002a, 151). these coal reserves and production areas are situated southeast of novosibirsk (south of 55˚n) and stretch towards the northern parts of the altai mountains along the border with china and mongolia. the growth of coal production in the kuznetsk basin was initiated in the period of railway construction in siberia and continued during stalin’s industrialisation period. in the 1970s, siberian coal production left the donets basin’s production behind. coal is transported by rail, and the largest volumes of coal move towards the production plants in the urals and the european part of russia. the volumes of transported coal are significant and the transport distances long. during the soviet period, the average distance of coal transport was 800 km. coal fields to the east of the urals, the kuznetsk basin together with kansk-achinsk in central siberia (15.7% in 2000), the coal fields of eastern siberia (14.2%) and the fields in the russian far east (11.1%) produced 85.6% of russian coal in 2000. out of these production areas, kanskachinsk, also known as katek, lies closest to europe. brown coal, or lignite, is extracted in quarries and open mines around krasnoyarsk situated 500 km northeast of the kuznetsk basin. the most significant resources and reserves of coal are located in siberia and the highest consumption potential is on the european side. the most efficient mines are located in southern yakutia (the republic of sakha-yakutia) and in kansk-achinsk. out of the most important coal-producing areas, only the pechora coal basin (7.2% of the country’s total coal production in 2000) lies in the european part of russia. coal lost its former significance for the country’s economy as gas production, with its network of gas pipelines, expanded, and the russian economy has had to adapt to the current situation. gazprom has been attempting to persuade the russian government to change the relative prices of gas and coal in the way that coal would become more utilised in domestic power stations (iea 2000, 184; moe & jørgensen 2000, 125). in such an eventuality, more natural gas could be exported. however, the problems of coal production and logistics and the poor ability of the coal sector to attract investments prevent the implementation of such plans. similar aims to increase coal production with a view to decrease crude oil consumption emerged in the 1970s, but with meagre results (sagers & green 1986, 91). although there are some efforts to increase the utilisation of coal as a primary source of energy, its usage has clearly declined. coal production bottomed out in 1998. in 1999, the share of coal in the energy consumption of russia reached 19% (iea 2002a, 275), having left the production figures of the previous year behind. new mine constructions are planned for siberia and the russian far east. more cost-efficient quarry-type open mines are planned. if the russian economy developed more intensively in the direction of siberia and the russian far east, which abound with coal, the growth of coal consumption would be possible and even probable. the future of coal utilisation is highly dependent on the price development of not only coal but also other primary energy commodities and on the logistics of supplying the commodities to the market. oil crude oil production is clearly more dynamic than coal production. oil production has increased over the last decades. it played a growing and increasingly central role in the soviet economy as the source of hard currency from the early 1970s onwards (considine & kerr 2002, 138). the geography of the oil industry has greatly changed over the last thirty years. at the same time as oil production in the european part of russia decreased, in western siberia it increased tenfold. the khanty-mansi autonomous okrug has become the main oil production area. the khanty-mansi autonomous okrug5, lying on the eastern side of the urals (523,000 km2; 1,358,000 inhabitants in 1998; heleniak 1999, 172), is situated on the same latitude as southern finland. the capital of the okrug, khanty-mansiysk, lies at the junction of two rivers: the ob and the irtysh. the geographical co-ordinates of the city are 61˚00’n and 69˚06’e, and the great circle distance from the easternmost point of the eu border is 1943 km. the estuary of the river ob is on the arctic circle, and the journey along the ob from khanty-mansiysk to the arctic ocean is about one thousand kilometres. the most important cities, 154 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen besides the capital, are nefteyugansk, surgut and nizhnevartovsk. during the post-socialist economic crisis, russian oil production remained a significant source of foreign income for the country. since the late 1990s, the high price of oil and the devalued exchange rate of the rouble brought high profits to companies and benefits to communities where oil production took place. in 2000, the russian companies lukoil and yukos yielded the largest profits in russia, 3400 and 3200 million us dollars respectively (statistics finland 2001, 98). russian oil production came into being in the caucasus. baku and grozny in the south were the centres of oil production before the second world war. in the 1950s, oil production rapidly increased, expanding from the caucasus to the volga-urals regions; the latter area is known as the second baku (considine & kerr 2002, 311–313). in the 1960s, the soviet union was the world’s second-largest oil producer after the usa. in the 1990s, as a result of the soviet union’s collapse, russia lost the oil production of baku (azerbaijan). in the 1960s, oil production was rapidly developing on the river ob and its tributaries in western siberia (considine & kerr 2002, 95–100). transport was problematic but gradually the potential of production was significantly enhanced by the construction of oil pipelines. first, the crude oil of the west siberian plain was converted into fuel products at siberian refineries in omsk and angarsk, to where oil from russia’s european areas was being pumped earlier. at the beginning of the 1970s the direction of the oil flows reversed; siberia became a large production area providing the volga area’s refineries with oil. besides siberia and the caucasus, oil production exists in the north in the komi republic and in the nenets autonomous okrug, as well as in the urals and in the russian far east. compared with western siberia, these areas are of relatively minor importance. as the units of oil production, refining and consumption are spread across the country, construction of long pipelines has been necessary. pipelines stretch from the caucasus towards the arctic circle on the western side of the urals, and from lake baikal towards the borders of western europe. the construction of pipelines connecting oilfields with refineries has been a precondition for cost-efficient oil deliveries and exports. the only practical way to transport the large volumes of oil from the oilfields of the west siberian plain, being russia’s main oil-production area but lying in the backwoods of the country, is by pipeline. crude oil transport to the cmea counties of east central europe was arranged in the same way, by pipelines. the druzhba/friendship pipeline carries oil westwards via brest (belarus) and uzhgorod (ukraine) (fig. 2). the soviet union’s oil production, in comparison with coal production, was developed more in russian territory than on the union’s fringe. consequently, the collapse of the soviet empire did not take away from russia as many oil enterprises as those of coal. in 1996, russia produced 89.6% of all cis, while only one-tenth by the former soviet republics. already during socialist times the focus of oil production was directed to western siberia, along the river ob, in particular. the oil production of the soviet period peaked in 1987, reaching 569.5 million tonnes (sagers 2001, 153). oil production dropped drastically in russia at the beginning of the transition. production bottomed out at 301.2 million oil tonnes in 1996 (sagers 2001, 153). at that time only saudi arabia and the usa were bigger producers than russia. thus, even during the crisis of the transition when production figures had fallen to half of the 1980s figures, russia still was a significant oil producer. in the late 1990s, the county’s oil production grew rapidly. in 1999 it reached 305.2 million tonnes and in 2000 increased to 323.2 million tonnes (sagers 2001, 162), with growth continuing in 2001–2003 (iea 2002b, 274; iea 2003b, 146). russia exports a significant part of its oil output. in the late 1990s, the share of oil exports varied from 55 to 62 per cent of the total oil production (iea 2002a, 275), and since 1995 oil exports have steadily increased. russia has an extensive – and according to many, efficient – network of crude oil transport pipelines (sagers & green 1986, 143), but the pipes are partly worn out because of insufficient replacement investments. however, the basic transport infrastructure from the fields to refineries, harbours and markets abroad has been constructed. on the other hand, the distribution of petroleum products takes place by land conveyance. the refineries are large and distances are long. condensates and some refined products can be transported by pipelines between industrial centres in the central, volga-vyatka, urals and northern caucasus economic regions, as well as to some export harbours, but otherwise products have to be transported by rail or tank lorries. fennia 181: 2 (2003) 155north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics figure 2. oil export flows and oil-exporting ports. source: bellona 1997; sagers 2001; iea 2002a; khodorkovsky 2003. russian oil production (including refining and distribution) has been mostly privatised and it has expanded into the international market. the oil industry almost entirely rests on seven large vertically integrated companies (vics). the verticality of production can be described by the motto of lukoil’s production philosophy: “from the oilfield to the petrol station.” out of all these companies only rosneft is a purely state-owned enterprise (table 3). in 2000, the 11 largest oil companies of russia produced 88.2% of the oil, and their refineries received 78.8% of the country’s total oil deliveries (sagers 2001, 156). at the beginning of the millennium the number of companies decreased due to takeovers and mergers. at the beginning of the millennium, the rapidly developed yukos company was the secondlargest amalgamation including yuganskneftegaz, 156 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen samaraneftegaz, tomskneft, vsnk (vostochnosibirskaya neftyegazovaya kompaniya/eastern-siberian oil-gas co.) and manoil. as the result of the merger agreement with sibneft in 2003 (sibneft 2003), the company is the largest in russia. priobskoye, lying 65 km east of khanty-mansiysk, is the largest oilfield of yukos as well as the main target of the company’s investments. yukos participates in joint-venture projects in western siberia and is developing eastern siberia’s production so that crude oil can be transported to the chinese market by pipelines. together with the hungarian company mol, yukos organised a joint venture for developing the zapadno-malobalykskoye (western malobalykskoye) oilfield on the ob in the eastern part of the priobskoye oilfield (yukos 2001). oil reserves are located near nefteyugansk, from where oil is transported into other parts of the country. the conglomerate’s samaraneftegaz is the only oil company acting mainly in the european part of the country. the yukos company has international projects in areas of the caspian and the black seas, as well as in africa. acting in western siberia, lukoil was the largest joint enterprise out of the oil companies at the turn of the millennium. langepasneftegaz, ukrainaneftegaz and kogalymneftegaz were incorporated into lukoil in 1991. in the late 1990s, lukoil had 120,000 employees and the company’s share in russian crude oil production accounted for 24 per cent (lukoil 2001a). the production capacity of lukoil is comparable to that of many large western companies. in the late 1990s, shell, bp and exxon left lukoil behind in oil production, but chevron, texaco, mobil and elf fell behind lukoil (lukoil 1999). lukoil also acts outside russia, mainly in the independent states of the former soviet union and east central europe. it has developed its downstream business actively, and according to this business strategy, it has acquired refineries and petrol stations abroad. at the end of 2000, it purchased getty petroleum marketing inc, a north american company running 1260 petrol stations in 13 north-eastern states of the usa. the number of lukoil’s petrol stations grew to 3544 at the end of 2001, of which 1384 were in russia (lukoil 2002, 18). tnk-bp was established in 2000–2003. tnk (tyumen oil co.) bought onako (orenburg oil co.) in 2000. the company received a loan of 700 million us dollars from international banks to fitable 3. the most important oil companies of russia in 2003. state ownership share, oil and gas production and refined oil production in 2000, and the number of petrol stations in 2000 and 2003. source: sagers 2001, 155 and 156. company state oil gas refined oil, petrol petrol ownership production, production, in million stations stations share, in million in thousand tonnes 2000e 2003e in % tonnes million m3 yukossibnefta 2500f – yukos 0b 50b 1.6b 23b 1278b – sibneft 0b 17b 1.4b 13b 859b – slavneftb 75b 6b 0.4b 5b 9b lukoil 14b 62b 3.6b 23b 850b 1691f tnk-bp 1216f – tnk 0b 36b 2.9b 12b 200b – sidanco 0b 11b 1.3b 4b 40b – onako 0b 7b 1.5b 4b 70b – slavneftb 75b 6b 0.4b 5b 93b surgutneftegaz 1b 41b 11.1b 16b 470b 302f rosneft 100b 13b 5.6b 7b 1087b 610f tatneft 31c 24b 0.7b 6b 100b 362f bashneft 100d 12b 0.4b 19b 90b 90f notes: ayukos and sibneft announced on 22 april 2003 that they were merging (sibneft 2003); bthe state’s shares in slavneft were auctioned off on 18 december 2002 and transferred to sibneft and tnk (tnk-bp 2003a) in the proportion of 50:50, accordingly, the figures that appear in the above table have been divided in half; the owners are the governments of ctatarstan and dbashkortostan, autonomous republics that are members of the russian federation (liuhto 2002, 10); epetrol station figures are from: lukoil 2003, 9; misamore 2003, 20; rosneft 2003a; sidanco 2003; surgutneftegas 2003, 14; tatneft 2003, 11; fno new data obtained. fennia 181: 2 (2003) 157north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics nance the cash acquisition of onako at 1100 million us dollars (tnk 2002, 19). slavneft became part of the company when the share the state had in slavneft was auctioned 18 december 2002 and transferred to sibneft and tnk (tnk-bp 2003a). as a result, tnk and sibneft each own 48.5% of slavneft. tnk-bp is a joint venture owned by british petroleum and the russian alfa and access/renova groups in the proportion of 50:50, and it comprises the assets of tnk, sidanco, onako and half of slavneft (tnkbp 2003b; tnk-bp 2003a). bp paid 6150 million us dollars for a 50% stake in the new company (tnk-bp 2003c). so far, it is the largest investment of foreign capital in the russia economy and the merger has been fully supported by putin’s regime. surgutneftgaz acts mainly in western siberia. the production facilities of the company have been constructed on the river ob for exploiting oilfields near the town of surgut. the company’s oil refinery is located in leningrad oblast in kirishi, 140 km from st. petersburg. this kinef refinery is the largest refinery in north-west russia, refining 10% of crude oil in russia and exporting 60–70% of its production (filippov et al. 2003, 48). like many other russian oil companies, surgutneftegaz is attempting to act everywhere in russian territory. the company’s oil production has been steadily increasing, and its share in the total crude oil production of russia reached 13% at the turn of the millennium (surgutneftegaz 2001). the restructuring arrangements in 2000–2003 resulted in four large private companies that are increasingly integrating into the global economy. rosneft remains under the control of the federal government, and two smaller companies, tatneft and bashneft, are regionally controlled companies. tatneft and bashneft operate also in the export market. the 1990s transition hindered development. by the mid-1990s, investments in oil production had decreased to fewer than 50% of the 1990 figures and drilling to a third. exploratory drilling dropped even to one-fifth of the 1990 level in 1999 (lynch 2002, 35). despite the positive outlook presented by the oil companies at the turn of the millennium, there were still many problems such as insufficient investment activity and decreased exploratory drilling. these were the longlasting consequences of fallen domestic energy demand, institutional uncertainty and adaptation to the open markets. although the recovery of oil deposit exploration and oil production development began in 1999 and 2000 (sagers 2001, 163), the process of oil production growth is rather laborious because of exhausted oilfields, obsolete facilities and transport bottlenecks. however, russian companies have many plans and strive to invest. according to company reports, investment activity recovered at the turn of the millennium (lukoil 2003; surgutneftegas 2003; yukos 2003). western siberian oilfields comprise the primary oil production area. companies acting in the area have been created on the basis of large production organisations that remained as part of the inheritance of the socialist period. american and european companies have participated in oil production by establishing joint ventures with russian companies, but russian oil production as a whole has been able to attract very little foreign capital. the formation of tnk-bp is one of the first signs of the growing attractiveness of the russian investment climate. the misappropriation crisis around the largest oil conglomerate yukossibneft in late 2003 put this development on hold for a while. joint ventures operating in hydrocarbon fields demonstrate the possibility of co-operation and technological transfers at a grassroots level. the russian federation approves licences for oil companies, as well as for domestic and foreign oil companies’ consortiums, to explore oil layers, develop oilfields and make investments. in practice, being a shareholder means that the company has become an actor and investor in a consortium. in the 1990s, foreign companies faced many legal, fiscal and institutional problems in collaboration despite the russian authorities’ attempts to develop proper legislation and a system of production-sharing agreements (sagers 2001, 164). joint ventures have been realised to a greater extent in the northern european parts of russia and in the russian far east than in the other parts of the country. the far east is attracting business to satisfy the increasing crude oil demand of the asian market. in the barents sea region, production could be based in part on joint ventures and production sharing, because multinational companies possess offshore technologies as well as offshore work experience in the north sea, the norwegian sea and the caspian sea. it would be reasonable to utilise this experience, knowledge and know-how in regards to the barents sea. 158 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen granting the licences for exploration and development to national companies, such as to rosshelf in the north, has not brought about the anticipated development (moe & jørgensen 2000, 105–119). the oilfields of the southern and central parts of the timan-pechora basin are located in the republic of komi, and the oilfields of the northern part of the basin are in the nenets autonomous okrug, which itself is within the administrative jurisdiction of arkhangelsk oblast. the okrug of 176,700 km2 had a sparse population in 1998 of 47,000 inhabitants (heleniak 1999, 172). out of all russia’s oil production areas, the timan-pechora fields are geographically nearest to finland. the closest distance from the usinsk oilfields to the border between the eu and russia is 1205 km. the finland-based fortum energy company has a shareholding interest in the area. in the 1990s, the finnish construction company yit built communities and infrastructure in this area. the significance of timan-pechora on the federal scale is not great, because it yields only from three to four per cent of the total russian oil production. the geological sediment formation6 of timanpechora containing oil deposits runs from the slopes of the ural mountains towards the barents sea and covers about 320,000 km2. the continuation of the sediment formation containing oil layers extends under the barents sea and covers about 800,000 km2. timan-pechora’s sediment formation lies north of latitude 60˚n, and the richest oil and gas fields are located above the arctic circle. this area is rather difficult for oil production as the largest part of it is covered with marshy forests and the northernmost parts are sub-arctic tundra with permafrost in places. as a result of this, oil layers in western siberia in the coniferous forest zone were exploited earlier than those in the northern parts of timan-pechora. in the southern part of timan-pechora (in the komi republic), oil production has already existed for decades. during the soviet era, the main actor in the area was komineft, which became a part of komi-tek in 1994. both were incorporated into lukoil in 1999. oil production has decreased in the timan-pechora oilfields in the komi republic since 1983, thus increasing the pressure to develop the more northern oil deposits to production stage. oil production was initiated in the oilfields near the town of ukhta (63˚33’n, 53˚41’e) already in the 1930s, and afterwards production expanded to small fields south of the rivers pechora and usa. in the 1960s, oil drilling moved 300 km north of ukhta, and the oilfields of usinsk and vozey were put into production. these two oilfields yielded more than 60% of oil produced in komi. in 1991, usinsk produced 44% and vozey 32% of komi’s oil (sagers 2001, 194). the next step farther north took place in the 1980s when, in 1987, kharyaga’s oil deposits were developed. the oil deposits of kharyaga are located north of the komi republic in the nenets autonomous okrug (fig. 2). from kharyaga, oil runs 80 km along pipelines to vozey in komi, continues along pipes to usinsk, and then through the usinskukhta-yaroslavl pipeline to refineries and to markets. the oil spillages of 1994 and resultant pollution reported widely in the press concerned the vozey-usinsk part of the pipeline. numerous oil companies compete for the resources of the timan-pechora area. while in 1990 komineft produced 96% of the timan-pechora basin’s oil, in 2000 its successor’s share of production decreased to 31.6%. oil production has expanded to the north of komi to the nenets district. there are ten joint enterprises in the area, out of which the polar lights company, established by the american oil company conoco (now conocophillips) and the russian companies arkhangelskgeodobycha and rosneft, is the most significant in the area. polar lights is divided amongst conocophillips, arkhangelskdobycha and rosneft in the proportion of 50:30:20 (conocophillips 2002, 22). lukoil is a partner, owning 74.1% of arkhangelskgeodobycha (filippov et al. 2003, 42). the licence area, which is under the control of the joint venture, includes numerous oil deposits in the nenets autonomous okrug north of vozey and northeast of the oilfields of kharyaga. the most significant oilfields of the licence area are ardalinskoye, vostochnaya/east kolvinskoye, dyusushevskoye and oshkotynskoye (sagers 2001, 194); ardalinskoye is the bestknown field. the finnish construction company yit has carried out building projects in the area. conocophillips operates in ardalinskoye. originally, conoco aimed to open 24 oil wells and build a refinery, but the production target reached was just fifteen oil wells. the first borehole was drilled in 1993, production amounted to 346,400 tonnes of oil in 1994, and in the subsequent year oil production increased to 1,213,300 tonnes (sagers 2001, 195). since 1997, oil production has fluctuated between 1.7 and 1.8 million fennia 181: 2 (2003) 159north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics tonnes, which is clearly higher than anticipated. conocophillips achieved the initial aims of the project, and it is now developing satellite fields. the first is oskotynskoye and it was put into production in 2002 (conocophillips 2002). in finland, conocophillips is known for its jet petrol stations. however, conocophillips has more ambitious plans. the company is negotiating about production in a licence area that is known as the severnaya oblast/northern region, north of the company’s present oil production area. to realise the project, an investment of 5000 million us dollars is envisaged (sagers 2001, 195). the project is dealing with four oil deposits: inzyreyskoye, yareyuskoye, yuzhnyy/southern khylchuyuskoye and khylchuyuskoye (fig. 2). the estimated volume of these oil deposits is 440,000 million tonnes. the oil deposits stretch in strips northwards from kharyaga, and the northernmost deposit is khylchuyu, situated on the very shore of the pechora sea. lukoil is conocophillips’s partner in this project. the development of the four deposits will bring a pipeline from usinsk via vozey and kharyaga to the coast of the arctic ocean, 120 km west of the oil port of varandey (fig. 2). besides conocophillips, another significant company developing the area is the french company totalfina-elf that, in late 1995, signed a business co-operation contract with komi-tek, the predecessor of lukoil-komi, and the russian federation on the development of kharyaga’s oil deposit and the division of oil production amongst the participants of the contract. the kharyaga oil deposit was put into production already during the soviet period. in the oilfields of kharyaga, the joint venture produced 72,300 tonnes of oil in 1999 and 525,4800 tonnes in 2000, and the 2001 production was estimated to be 600,000 tonnes (sagers 2001, 195). the total estimated oil production of this project is 45 million tonnes over 33 years with investments of 700–1000 million us dollars. numerous foreign companies are exploring and searching for oil in timan-pechora (jumppanen 1999, 103). the areas licensed for oil exploration, as well as areas planned for licensing, cover the distance of 250 km eastwards from the gulf of pechora to the ural mountains. for instance, the finland-based fortum energy company participates in the development of the yuzhnoye/south shapkino oil deposit that is situated 85 km from the kharyaga deposit. the decision to bring the oil field into production was made in 2001. severtek constructed and now operates the field’s production facilities (fig. 3). fortum oil and gas oy and lukoil own severtek in the proportion of 50:50. the hydrocarbon reserves of the barents sea were explored in the 1970s and 1980s. according to the explorations up to 1997, the estimated gas and oil resources in the russian sector of the barents sea and the pechora sea are 4500 milfigure 3. oil production facilities, storage halls, heliport in front and accommodation complexes in south shapkino. crude oil production is estimated to reach 6800 tonnes per day by the end of 2004. photo: fortum oil and gas oy. 160 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen lion tonnes of oil equivalent (moe & jørgesen 2000, 100). the results were partly based on the utilisation of technology developed and built in the west. drilling vessels (the valentin shashin and viktor muravlenko) and jack-up rigs (the kolskaya and murmanskaya) built in finland explored the reserves in the seabed of the barents sea (moe 2001, 134). three rigs built in vyborg also took part in the exploration. the largest oil deposits are located near the shore of the pechora sea – two oilfields are a little over 20 km and one field 57 km from the coastline – while gas fields are farther north. all of the deposits belong to the russian federation, because they lie over 12 nautical miles from the coast. the reserves of 400 million tonnes of oil available for production give the potential for 15–20 million tonnes per year. ten years ago, great expectations were placed upon the oil and gas of the barents sea. nevertheless, the large oil reserves so far discovered have not been brought into production, and development projects have advanced slowly. offshore oil production is developed only on kolguyev island. lake peschanoye oilfield was put into production in 1987 and it produces less than 50,000 tonnes of oil annually (sagers 2001, 196). in 1998, production yielded 22,000 tonnes. russian oil production was in crisis during the transition when domestic oil demand decreased and enterprises experienced payment problems. the network of pipelines, built during the socialist period, is still in use and is the most important system of crude oil transport in russia. the combined length of the pipelines is 46,700 km, and 294.6 million tonnes of crude oil and 23.1 million tonnes of refined oil products were transported by this pipeline system in 2000 (iea 2002a, 88). the pipeline network could not have been built under the conditions of the transition economy. since the late 1990s russia has been attempting to set up a system of more direct access to the western market. an example of such pursuit is the development of the baltic pipeline system. the oil port of primorsk (known in finnish as koivisto) was constructed as part of this plan and put into operation in late 2001. the port and the pipelines leading to it are meant to serve the exports from the timan-pechora fields. the oil port of primorsk is being developed with the view of it becoming a very large port that can handle more than the annual exports of 20 million tonnes that previously went via the harbours of the baltic states. in this way it will be possible to avoid the high transit and port payments, including amongst others those of ventspils (latvia) and butinge (lithuania), and to decrease logistic dependence on the baltic states (iea 2002a, 97). the pipeline built from kirishi to primorsk annually transports 12 million tonnes of oil exports. the expansion of the capacity of this pipeline network (via usinsk) from the kharyaga oilfields to primorsk will allow the export of 30 million tonnes of oil annually. oil is also shipped from the barents sea. in august 2000, the first ship left the oil harbour of varandey. this port was founded to compete with pipeline transport. the hinterland of the port constitutes a licence area where there are several deposits. the polar lights company’s oil production area lies to the south of it. the target of this transport system known as the northern gateway is to annually export 5–6.5 million tonnes of oil, possibly even 15 million tonnes, to the international market (iea 2002a, 97). other transport projects are also planned. the port of vysotsk (in finnish: uuras) on vyborg bay is also being converted to an oil harbour, and the port of murmansk has been considered for oil transport. the port of murmansk can tranship oil that is first conveyed by smaller tankers from the prirazlomnoye field in the pechora sea. a more significant plan proposes a pipeline from nefteyugansk in western siberia via the republic of komi to murmansk. known as the murmansk pipeline project, this yukossibneft pipeline may be routed either across the white sea, or may circumvent it via a longer route through the republic of karelia. a viable proposal is to construct a new port in the estuary of the indiga, where ice-conditions are much more tolerable than in varandey (bellona 1997; alekseyev 2002, 2). indiga is located 320 km west of varandey. the geographical positions of the arctic ports are more advantageous than those on the black sea when oil and gas condensate are shipped outside europe, especially to the united states. the oil production of russia brings welfare mostly to the oil cities of western siberia, especially to khanty-mansi. siberian production is situated in a strategically secure area, far from russia’s borders and in almost inaccessible locations. the oil reserves of russia’s northern european areas play an important role for the economic development of north-west russia. until recently, the export of those resources directly influenced the baltic states, especially because the producfennia 181: 2 (2003) 161north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics tion of the timan-pechora oilfields was exported via ventspils and butinge. the stoppage of oil transport via ventspils in winter 2003 caused by the disagreements between russia and latvia about the privatisation of the port is indicative of the politico-economic fragility of the situation. the alternative route via primorsk is not unproblematic; oil transport via primorsk has been criticised by finland because of the environmental risks, especially under icy winter conditions, and because the largest oil tankers are too big for primorsk. in as much as russian companies are increasing their oil-refining capacity, the export harbours will increasingly ship petroleum products as the proportion of crude oil decreases. the petroleum product terminal of batareinaya bay located southwest of st. petersburg is under construction. the annual export capacity of this port is planned to be 15 million tonnes, expanding from an initial 5 tonnes per year (filippov et al. 2003, 46). furthermore, there are plans to construct refineries to murmansk and primorsk. the growth of oil transport and environmental risks in the gulf of finland were the main concern in finland in the winter of 2003. for russia, this traffic is of vital importance, as is transport through finnish harbours, a viewpoint that was not much considered in the media. along with risks, oil production and transport may produce positive effects on the finnish economy by increasing demand for construction projects, investment goods, transport services and environmental know-how, as has already happened in the sakhalin projects, for which parts of oilrigs and two icebreaking vessels were ordered from finnish companies (quattrogemini 2003; kvaerner masa-yards 2003). many western companies take part in northern russian oil projects. the viability of russian oil production is important for many european countries consuming russian oil. it is anticipated that in the future russian oil companies will become more integrated into the global market. russians would like to develop petroleum production and to increase the distribution of refined products transnationally. lukoil’s investments in the west are good examples. reciprocally, euand us-based companies have opportunities to act in russia. the integration of russia into the european market is undoubtedly considered positive: arab and african oil production is a more risky alternative for supplementing the eu’s own production. natural gas measured by energy content, natural gas production became the most important source of primary energy during the 1990s transition. throughout the economic decline, the natural gas consumption of the country stayed at a relatively high level. as a result, the significance of natural gas to the russian economy has grown (see table 2). moreover, natural gas exports did not plunge as badly as oil exports in the 1990s transition, and gas exports gradually increased in the period 1993–99 (iea 2002a, 275). the gas supply of the country is monopolistic. gazprom controls 90% of gas production in russia. the four western siberian companies under gazprom’s control are urengoygazprom, yamburggazdobycha, nadymgazprom and surgutgazprom, and together they produce most of russia’s natural gas. for example, in 2000, the gas production of gazprom in western siberia comprised 83% of the total russian gas production (iea 2002a, 112). in addition to gazprom, itera, established in 1992, operates mainly in cis countries and near its production area in yekaterinburg (iea 2002a, 116–117). the most significant gas fields are in urengoy, yamburg and medvezhye near the arctic circle, on the yamal peninsula in the yamal-nenets autonomous okrug (750,3000 km2; 497,000 inhabitants in 1998; heleniak 1999, 172) (fig. 4). in late 2001, gas production in the zapolyarnoye gas field was initiated. natural gas is tapped also in eastern siberia and in the european part of russia in orenburg. in addition, natural gas is obtained as a side product from oil production. the length of gazprom’s gas pipelines is 150,000 km. the share of gas production in primary energy production is more than half (table 2). in the manufacturing system of russia, natural gas is of primary importance. if pipelines running from western siberia were cut or gas pipes closed, it would cripple the russian economy as well as affect much of the eu’s economy. the gas fields of the west siberian plain are located far from the centres of consumption and the european market. the gas fields lying along the ob and the lower reaches of the taz and the pur rivers are situated on the same parallel as oulu and southern lapland, but the winters are colder than in the european north. india is 4000 km south of this area. in the early 1970s, two cities – novyy urengoy (90,000 inhabitants) and nadym (50,000) – arose in the centre of the siberian gas 162 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen figure 4. gas pipelines westwards. source: finnbarents 1996; wingas 2000; iea 2002a; gasum 2003. fields. both cities have modern infrastructure and housing, and there is an international airport in novyy urengoy (66˚05’n, 76˚31’e), 80 km south of the arctic circle. another site, yamburg, is not a centre of permanent settlement. the city’s apartments and vast infrastructure are intended for the temporary accommodation of almost 10,000 employees. the distance from novyy urengoy to the finnish border is around 2000 km, equal to distance from the finnish border to the main oil-producing area in khanty-mansi. the history of western siberia’s gas fields is short. in 1970, the west siberian plain yielded only five per cent of the total gas output of the soviet union, and the total production of siberia did not account for more than six per cent of the country’s gas production (sagers & green 1986, 18). the northern caucasus, the volga region and komi produced 35% of the natural gas. the remaining share of the gas was produced outside the present russian federation in ukraine (31%), uzbekistan (16%), turkmenistan (7%), azerbaijan and kazakhstan (sagers & green 1986, 18). in the 1970s and 1980s, the gas production of western siberia rapidly increased. gas production commenced in the urengoy gas field in 1978, and in 1984 it accounted for 36% of the total gas production of the soviet union. the development of the area was rapid. at the same time the distances that gas was transported grew; from 1975 to 1983 the average distance of transport doubled from 1200 km to 2400 km (sagers & green 1986, 16). the pipeline that runs via perm and kazan became the main transport route. the other, more northernly one, transports gas to the west via ukhta (fig. 4). russia’s dependence on natural gas increased in the 1990s (table 2). at the turn of the century, gas generated almost half of the electric power and more than half of the heat. it is difficult to satisfy the seasonally oscillating fuel demand of power stations only by gas without an extra fuel fennia 181: 2 (2003) 163north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics supply. the fuel demand of power and heat-generating plants is supplemented by oil during wintertime. in the 1990s, the capacity of gas storage was increased in order to flexibly react to the fluctuating energy demand. russia’s domestic gas prices and payment system create problems for gazprom, which is striving to increase its profits in the export market. natural gas is delivered to europe by two main routes consisting of several parallel pipes. the northern pipeline comes to ukhta, from where gas is pumped along the northern lights/severnoye siyaniye pipeline to yaroslavl located north of moscow. in yaroslavl the gas pipeline bifurcates west to st. petersburg (and further to finland and petrozavodsk) and southwest via belarus to central europe. the other gas pipeline traverses the urals south of the northern route, crosses the upper reaches of the river kama and continues via perm and kazan towards moscow, and further via kiev (ukraine) to slovakia. the decades-old main production areas of the south are joined to the main network by pipelines. although there are a great many pipelines, in its present state the natural gas trunk pipe network is vulnerable; production is virtually dependent on western siberia’s production and the pipelines reaching europe run through former soviet republics that, naturally, endeavour to improve their own economic standing by transit fees. in addition to a 90% market share in gas production, gazprom in practice oversees all gas transport along the large-diameter high-pressure pipes. gazprom is completely responsible for russian gas exports to europe and thus has almost monopoly rights over russian gas production, transport and exports. gazprom plays a significant role in the russian economy, and it accounts for 20% of incomes to the federal budget and 20% of hard currency revenues (iea 2002a, 111). the russian federation owns 38% of the company, other russian organisations 34%, the russian private sector 18% and foreign investors 10%. the largest foreign owner is ruhrgas, which has 3.5% of the shares (iea 2002a, 111). germany is the most important purchaser of russian natural gas (table 4). gazprom has jointly-owned marketing and distribution companies in the gas importing countries. examples of such joint ventures are: wingas in germany, gasum in finland, promgas in italy and panrusgas in hungary. gasum imports gas to finland and then distributes it. natural gas is transported via vyborg to south-eastern finland, from where gas goes southwards to helsinki as well as northwards to tampere. in finland there are 1000 km of highpressure trunk pipes and 1000 km of distribution pipes. the pipeline is being expanded westwards, via forssa to turku. as table 4 shows, gas exports to europe increased by four per cent from 1996 to 2000. the reason for this relatively slow growth of exports is due to the decreased gas consumption in the former cmea countries. in western europe, on the contrary, gas purchases increased by one-fifth. norwegian gas competes with russian gas. from the eu’s perspective, the problem with the gas market has been the high dependence on the producer-owned gas pipeline. on the one hand the eu is striving to open the european gas market to business competition (kom 2001), and on the other hand to increase joint projects with russia to ensure the availability of natural gas. in russia, gazprom is ready to develop and expand natural gas production. in the future the shtokmanovskoye gas field in the barents sea will be put into production, an investment that will also affect finland. a murmansk-petrozavodsk-petersburg trunk pipeline would transport gas to consumers. for the natural gas infrastructure of northern europe, the more significant project is the construction of a new gas pipeline across the bottom of the baltic sea to the centres of consumptable 4. the most important purchasers of russian natural gas. exports in thousand million cubic metres. source: iea 2002a, 137. 2000 1996 change in % germany 34.1 32.9 4 italy 21.8 14.0 56 france 12.9 12.4 4 turkey 10.3 5.6 84 austria 5.1 6.0 –15 finland 4.3 3.7 16 other western europe 1.8 0.4 350 western europe, total 90.3 75.0 20 slovakia 7.9 7.0 13 hungary 7.8 7.7 1 the czech republic 7.5 9.4 –20 poland 6.9 7.1 -3 romania 3.2 7.2 –56 bulgaria 3.2 6.0 –47 ex-yugoslavia 2.2 4.1 –46 east central europe 38.7 48.5 –20 europe, total 129.0 123.5 4 164 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen tion in europe. russia strives to remain an important actor in the gas market of the european union. nuclear energy in the late 1990s, russia was the world’s fourthlargest producer of electricity, after the usa, china and japan, although russian electricity generation decreased by one-fifth in the 1990s (iea 2002a, 191). russia is divided into seven regional grids, also called energy systems (es). the seven regional grids are central, north-west, volga, north caucasus, urals, siberia and far east (fig. 5). rao ues operates the electricity production and grids, with the exception of nuclear power plants, which are under the control of a separate authority, the ministry for atomic energy of the russian federation. in russia, nuclear energy is the fourth most important energy source after natural gas, coal and hydropower, important in the generation of electricity. nuclear energy is not utilised for heat-generation or steam production in russia. the principle of the nuclear power plant is simple: when the nuclei of an atom are split, the binding energy of the atomic nuclei transforms into heat and is then converted into steam, which rotates the turbines of electrical generators. in russia, there are four types of reactors for power generation (iea 2002a, 174). in a rbmk (reaktor bolshoy moshchnosti kipyashchiy/high power boiling reactor), graphite is used as a moderator. the vver (vodo-vodyanoy energeticheskiy reaktor/watercooled and water-moderated energy reactor) is a pressurised water reactor, in which water is used as a moderator. there exists one bn reactor (na bystrykh neytronakh), which is a breeder reactor. the working principle of bilibino’s very small egr reactors is the same as in rbmk-type reactors. russia is well known for its nuclear power plants (npps). however, the share of nuclear energy in the country’s electricity generation is lower figure 5. russia’s nuclear power plants (npps) in 2002. anticipated completion dates of new reactors by location until 2010 and the seven regional grids (energy systems). the types of reactors are explained in the text. source: bater 1996, 223; iea 2002a; minatom 2002. fennia 181: 2 (2003) 165north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics table 5. electricity generation in 1998 in selected countries. source: european commission 2001, 69–167; iaea 2003; bassan 2003, 1, 3. country electricity generation nuclear electricity nuclear electricity’s nuclear electricity’s in twh, 1998 in twh, 1998 share in %, 1998 share in %, 2002 russia 833 109 13 16 eu 2490 854 34 34 france 510 388 76 78 germany 557 162 29 30 japan 1036 332 32 35 usa 3804 714 19 20 finland 70 22 31 30 than that of many other industrial countries (table 5). in 2000, the share of nuclear electricity accounted for 15% of the country’s total electricity generation. this is clearly less than in finland, where in 2000 the share of nuclear electricity accounted for 32%, matching the average western european level (ktm 2001, 27). the first reactors for power production were connected to the grid near saratov (beloyarsk 1) and voronezh (novovoronezh 1) in 1964 (iaea 2002a). both already have been decommissioned7. the first reactors in north-west russia were connected to the grid in 1973 when kola 1 and leningrad 1 started to deliver electricity commercially (iaea 2002a). the geographical pattern of nnps indicates that power plants serve the energy demands of large population centres and industrial districts in areas where other sources of primary energy are not abundant. nuclear energy production is concentrated in the european part of russia. in the north-west regional grid (including, amongst others, st. petersburg, karelia and the kola peninsula) in 1999, 41% of the electricity generated came from npps (iea 2002a, 171). in the urals regional grid (es) in 1999 (fig. 5), almost all electricity was generated by thermal power plants using fossil fuels (90% in 1999; iea 2002a, 194). in siberia’s es, electricity is generated by using hydropower (49% in 1999) or fossil fuels (48% in 1999; iea 2002a, 194). at the beginning of the millennium, russia had 30 nuclear reactors for energy production and they were built between 1971 and 2001 (fig. 5)8. the small reactors of bilibino are located in the arctic region near the bering strait and are thus outside the map in fig. 5. the newest npps are the fourth reactor of the balakovo npp (southern russia), which was put into operation in 1993, and the first reactor of the rostov npp, which commenced operations in 2001 (iaea 2002a). the npp at sosnovyy bor west of st. petersburg is called the leningradskaya aes/leningrad npp. in 2001, the power output of all russian npps accounted for 21,242 mw (iea 2002a, 193), excluding the output of the first reactor of the rostov npp, which was being tested at that time. in finland, the power output of its four reactors is 2656 mw, i.e. 12.5% of russian npp output. however, the utilisation rate of finnish nuclear power plants is higher than in russia and, as a result of this, the annual electricity generation of finnish power plants accounts for one-fifth of russian nuclear electricity generation (european commission 2001, 74, 167). during the economic recession of 1990–98, nnps’ production decreased slower (12.5%) than other electricity generation (22%; iea 2002a, 171). the recent recovery of the russian economy has caused a strong increase in nnp electricity generation. the record level of electricity output from 1992 was reached again in 1999 (122 twh). in 2000, russian npps produced 131 twh (iea 2002a, 177). from an economic perspective, nuclear energy is a competitive mode of electricity generation in russia. russia has plans to increase the levels of nuclear electricity generation, unlike many other western countries, though such a strategy is not exceptional as nuclear power plants are being built in many counties9. the different generations of nuclear reactors in russian npps vary in technology and safety. the 12 first generation still operational nuclear reactors were built before the implementation of safety regulations concerning npp construction. some of the first-generation nuclear reactors are located close to the border regions with finland: kola 1 and 2 in polyarnye zori and leningrad 1 and 2 166 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen in sosnovyy bor. the reactors’ lifetime will be over in the nearest future; they are being renovated and their safety increased. authorities in russia accept the further development of nuclear energy. the cornerstones of the nuclear strategy of the country are 1) the safe and effective use of npps, 2) the modernisation of obsolete npps with the improvement of their safety and productivity, and 3) the development of new technically advanced nuclear reactors and their production (iea 2002a, 183). according to plans through to 2005, the reactors of kola 1 and 2, leningrad 1 and 2, novovoronezh 3 and 4, as well as bilibino 1–4 will be renovated. at the same time, new npps are being built and planned. kalinin 3 and kursk 5 are soon to commence construction (fig. 5). in 2001, rostov 1 was plugged into the russian grid. a proposed npp in karelia will not be included in the russian energy strategy – at least not during this decade. on the other hand, heat and electricity generation in arkhangelsk will probably be developed with the help of a npp. in comparison with the planned projects of the soviet union, the russian federation has stopped, at least for now, the npp construction projects not only for karelia, but also for the northern caucasus, and for yaroslavl and nizhniy novgorod along the upper reaches of the volga (fig. 5). energy and changes in the geoeconomic structure energy projections and geography since the crisis of 1998, the russian economy has been growing and developing. during the past few years, several projections of russian energy supply and demand have been published. in november 2000, the government of the russian federation approved the energy programme “the main provisions of the russian energy strategy to 2020” (iea 2002a). the main provisions represent the energy interests and energy geopolitics of the russian government and energy players. the international energy agency (iea) has issued two volumes of world energy outlook (weo) in 2000 and 2002 (iea 2000 and 2002b). both the russian energy strategy and iea’s outlooks have given growing figures for primary energy production to 2020, but the projections are based on significantly differing views of the energy sector’s structural changes. iea has increased the estimated energy consumption figures in its latter outlook. in the main, both institutions result in similar geopolitical developments and geographical macro structures. the russian energy strategy, presented in the main provisions, expects the economy to grow (under favourable conditions) five per cent annually. such an economic growth rate would shrink the differences in the standard of living between western europe and russia in the long run. this scenario, however, conjectures that energy efficiency will improve substantially and will result from growth in the service sector, which does not use much energy. thus the scenario arrives at rather moderate energy growth figures. in this scenario, russia’s energy consumption would grow to 884 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe; iea 2002a, 51)10, and energy production would reach the pre-transition level (fig. 6). energy consumption would only grow by 36% when compared with the figures of 2000, when without growth in energy efficiency the energy consumption would have to almost triple (iea 2002a, 50–51). in the late 1990s, the russian economy was highly dependent on natural gas. according to the main provisions, this situation is to be changed. the government’s scenario assumes a shift away from natural gas to coal in electricity generation and an increase in the share of nuclear power. by 2020, the share of nuclear power in electricity generation is projected to increase to 21% while, in 2000, it accounted for 15% (iea 2002a, 56). according to the iea’s scenario issued in 2000, the russian economy will grow considerably slower (2.9% annually), and the anticipated annual growth in energy production will be 1.5% up to 2020. the energy efficiency of the economy will increase, but not as rapidly as suggested in the main provisions. as a result, energy consumption would reach 802 mtoe. the iea’s scenario published in 2002 (iea 2002b) is more optimistic about russian economic growth than the outlook issued in 2000. the 2002 outlook assumes that economic growth will accelerate from 2.9% a year in 2000–2010 to 3.5% in 2010–20 (iea 2002b, 271). the scenario assumes that growth will decrease to 2.6% in the period 2020– 30 as the economy matures. under these conditions, the scenario foresees that total energy consumption would be 841 mtoe in 2020 and 918 in 2030 (iea 2002b, 454). the two outlooks of iea do not assume considerable growth in the confennia 181: 2 (2003) 167north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics sumption of coal and nuclear energy. both coal consumption and the production of nuclear energy are assumed to start to decline before 2030. an increase in the share of coal is considered logistically difficult, as reserves are located mostly in siberia and the russian far east. the present gas and oil pipelines also provide the domestic transport infrastructure, the maintenance of which is paid for not only by domestic income but also by export income. thus, the argument for a large increase in coal consumption can be approached with scepticism. russia’s strategy in regard to coal aims to increase its production in the kuznetsk basin, kansk-achinsk region, as well as in the russian far east. other production areas are only of local and regional importance. near the estonian border, coal is exported from the port of ust-luga lying west of st. petersburg, and the capacity of the port can be increased by eight million tonnes. ust-luga is planned to be a big, but not the only coal exporting harbour, as coal can be exported from various harbours on the gulf of finland and the barents sea (hernesniemi & dudarev 2003, 51). long rail-transport distances weaken the competitiveness of coal exports, which affects the competitiveness of siberian coal. coal exports to japan have taken place from the russian far east, where coal production and its logistics have been competitive. russia aims to increase oil production at a moderate rate. oil companies carry out test drilling and develop new oilfields to replace depleting ones. oil production grows more dynamically according to iea’s prognoses than in the russian programme (fig. 7). in the main provisions, the oil exports of 2020 will be at the same level as those of the late 1990s (fig. 7). measured by transport capacity the two largest pipeline construction projects are the baltic pipeline system and the angarsk-daqing (from eastern siberia to china) system (iea 2002b, 274–277). the third largest is the construction of an export terminal on and pipelines from sakhalin. if planned logistical development is realised and new oilfields receive investments, the growth of oil exports will be possible, particularly if many oil companies compete in the oil sector. besides the logistical investments for the oil harbours of the arctic ocean and the baltic sea (such as varandey and primorsk), and the investments in the eastern siberian and russian far east hydrocarbon projects, repairs to the druzhba pipeline and a pipeline bypass of eastern ukraine are under construction. the growing usage of the ports of vysotsk, murmansk, st. petersburg, and some others will contribute to the transport of oil and petroleum products (hernesniemi & dudarev 2003, 51). nevertheless, the port of primorsk will be the largest oilloading port. some of the new transport capacity replaces the obsolete and problematic sections of the export pipelines. in the future the realisation of the recently proposed murmansk pipeline project may increase export capacity clearly more than any of the above-mentioned pipeline investments (iea 2003b, 150). the oil harbours of the black sea will be expanded, although turkey does not want to increase oil transport via the bosphorus. the port of novorossiyskiy greatly needs to be expanded, figure 6. energy consumption and energy sources in russia. future projections according to iea’s calculations and the russian energy strategy. source: iea 2000, 177; iea 2002a, 47, 51; iea 2002b, 273. 168 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen partly because oil is shipped to this port also from kazakhstan. the pipeline connecting odessa to the druzhba pipeline was ready in december 2001 and it is now possible to transport oil to europe through it, first shipping it by tanker across the black sea (fig. 2). besides russia’s own production, the oil of other cis countries cross the black sea. russian companies also are developing caspian production and they are participating in the caspian pipeline consortium by utilising kazakhstan’s tengiz production. oil transport from azerbaijan will be developed by the construction of an oil pipeline via georgia to cheyhan, on the coast of turkey. consequently, there will be fewer oil deliveries from the independent southern caucasian republics to the oil harbours of the black sea. according to the prognoses, oil consumption in russian domestic markets will grow owing to increasing traffic and freight. the transport sector’s proportion in total final oil demand is estimated to grow from 51% in 2000 to 59% in 2030 (iea 2002b, 274). other types of energy sources increasingly will substitute part of the oil consumption, e.g. in district heating. in north-west russia, wood and wood residue may be used for the generation of energy instead of oil, for instance in saw and pulp mills. as a result, the structural changes in production and refining, as well as the increasing consumption of petroleum products will bring about growth of 85% to russia’s oil refining capacity by 2020 (iea 2002a, 54). russia is aiming to gradually reduce its dependence on the present gas fields in western siberia by developing new production both in western siberia and other areas. this aim is primarily influenced by a gradual decrease in the production volumes of the present fields, which are already beyond the halfway mark of their lifetime. in russia, many development projects aim to guarantee the future gas supply. these are of great importance also for the development of the northern areas of russia. there are plans for new production in the lower reaches of the ob and the taz, near the gas fields of yamburg and urengoy, and thus also close to present production and transport infrastructure. the gas production and transport to europe in the nadym-pur-taz region is less costly than the future production of yamal, and especially of shtokmanovskoye in the barents sea (iea 2002b, 190). the new fields are planned for development at a radius of 300 km from nadym (fig. 4). a notable new site on the european side is the shtokmanovskoye gas field in the barents sea. the licence holder of the field was rosself for 1993– 2002. the project did not progress as scheduled (moe & jørgensen 2000, 118). high gas production and transport costs make the investment less lucrative (iea 2002b, 190). the licence was reregistered in 2002 in the name of sevmorneftegaz, formed in accordance to rosneft and gazprom’s commitment to jointly explore the northern gas and oil fields (rosneft 2003b). gas production is scheduled to begin in 2006, which would mean construction of a pipeline south to the kola peninsula although gas may first have to be conveyed as condensate by ship. the gas fields on the yamal peninsula are planned to be in production probably after 2015. these fields are located figure 7. projections for crude oil production according to iea’s calculations and the russian energy strategy. source: iea 2000, 180; iea 2002a, 52, 61; iea 2002b, 276. fennia 181: 2 (2003) 169north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics in an arctic environment north of the present western siberian fields. the expansion of gas production is planned for the gas fields in siberia north of irkutsk, where the kovytkinskiy field and other fields along the lena are located. the eastern siberian fields will be developed in so far as consumers of natural gas are found in asia. the lena-tunguska fields can provide gas to mongolia and china. the first trunk line is planned from kovykta to daqing via irkutsk (iea 2002a, 142). the pipeline could be extended later to beijing and the korean peninsula. an optional route is from kovykta via irkutsk and ulaanbaatar to beijing (iea 2002a, 14). japanese-russian consortia are developing the utilisation of russian gas (and oil) from sakhalin in the russian far east. on the european side, gazprom and the italian company eni completed the siniy potok/blue stream gas pipeline across the black sea to turkey in october 2002 (spies 2003). the gas of western siberia will run through this pipeline. the russian gas pipeline network is not in good condition. seventy per cent of the large-diameter trunk pipes were constructed before 1985, and 19,000 km (13%) of the pipelines have passed their estimated lifetime (iea 2002a, 118). consequently, considerable investments have to be made in the replacement and renovation of wornout pipes. in addition, new fields require investments in trunk pipelines. the construction of the pipeline near the barents sea and the pipeline connecting the yamal fields with ukhta are the most challenging technically. both of these projects affect neighbouring areas; pipes will go from the shtokmanovskoye gas field via karelia, and the pipeline to be built from the yamal peninsula will be connected with the northern lights pipeline that transports gas southwest to the european market. russia plans to increase gas transported to europe by circumventing ukraine. a new trunk pipeline via belarus and poland is to be developed before the gas of yamal will be put into production. at the same time it would be possible to develop a connecting pipeline from poland to slovakia, i.e. to the bratstvo/ brotherhood pipeline in the south. this connection would also pass ukraine. russia is developing plans concerning the expansion of gas pipelines through the baltic sea. this plan is partly an alternative to the belaruspoland pipeline project. the north transgas project aims to construct a gas pipeline from the northernmost areas of st. petersburg and to greifswald in germany. the pipeline will stretch across the bottom of the baltic sea and it would have a connecting pipe to sweden. if this project is realised, russian natural gas could be sold to the swedish market as well. sweden has had many reservations about russia’s plans for increasing the supply of natural gas; it is not considered to be an environmentally-friendly alternative source of energy. thus, the plan may be realised without a connection to sweden. the nordic countries’ gas market could be broadly set up along with russian gas pipeline construction. if norwegian gas pipes were enlarged and connected to the trunk pipes coming from russia, multiple-actor markets would emerge. such a gas market structure is the target for the european union. the eu is attempting to open formerly monopolistic markets with the assistance of deregulating directives. according to these directives, the owner of the gas pipeline and the distributor are to be judicially separate actors. this promotes competition and, at the same time, increases the reliability of the operations. consequently, gas markets could not be monopolised. the modernisation of the nuclear energy sector should be rapidly realised in russia (iea 2002a, 182–186, 188). plans exist to replace the old first-generation reactors and to modernise second-generation reactors so that their lifetimes will reach 50 years. replacement investments are targeted at the first-generation reactors (40% of all reactors), which were put into production in 1971–79. these are still in operation and require renovation over the next years. as the lifetime of the first-generation reactors is 40 years (their original lifetime of 30 years has been prolonged to 40), the last of the 12 first-generation reactors should be replaced by 2020. at the same time the second-generation reactors should be modernised and new capacities created. the plans to expand nuclear energy rest mainly on the carrying out of projects not implemented since 1993. new nuclear power plants are planned for central and southern russia, outside north-west russia (fig. 5). plans concerning the modernisation of the nuclear power plants close to the border areas of finland are not far from realisation11. various security aspects (e.g. the military action in chechnya) appear to promote the energy sector’s growth in the north. northern transport routes also are being explored. ukraine has increased transit and transport rates to such an extent that 170 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen the northern routes are beginning to attract investments (martelius 1999, 159). the ukrainian government is an active actor in regulating the use of pipelines (e.g. interfax 2003). belarus also has been able to pay its energy debts to russia through transit charges. against this background, attempts to expand the system of transport northwards can be well understood. the shortest way from the siberian gas and oil fields to the centre of europe is via north-west russia and the baltic sea region. from the barents sea the shortest way is through fennoscandia. russia is striving to reduce dependence on the baltic states. latvia and lithuania are important for oil transport, but russia has negatively viewed the development project of ventspils oil harbour, referring to security risks (iea 2002a, 98). in truth, the ownership arrangements of the harbour are in contention. however, the strategic importance of the baltic states may grow when these countries join the european union in 2004. russia’s energy policy in the northern and north-western economic regions in the main provisions, the russian federation is divided into economic regions and russia’s regional energy strategies are based on this geographical division. the division into economic regions significantly differs from the country’s division into the seven regional grids (see fig. 5). the main provisions’ geographical division in the european north matches in full the area of the north-west federal okrug, which consists of the northern and north-western economic regions and the kaliningrad oblast enclave. from the beginning of the millennium these areas have become more important to energy conveyance. for instance, the gulf of finland, finland and even the arctic ocean are becoming increasingly important channels of energy exports to the west. is this a temporary phenomenon or does it reflect a new, more stable geopolitical arrangement? the main provisions to 2020 assume that oil and gas production will decrease in western siberia and increase in the european north. according to this strategy, the northern economic region (as well as eastern siberia and the far east) will become a net exporter of gas (iea 2002a, 57). the northern region, in regard to oil, is already a net exporter, and there are plans to increase oil production in the area. growth is anticipated in asia as well. for this reason, it is planned to develop oil exports from eastern siberia and the russian far east. the northern economic region is the largest net exporter of oil and gas after western siberia. the urals and the volga-vyatka economic regions will change from net exporters to net importers when the oil resources of these areas are depleted. the export volumes of coal production in western siberia, and particularly in eastern siberia, will grow. the implementation of the russian federation’s main provisions calls for considerable investments in the northern region. the aim of the strategy is to increase both continental and offshore oil and gas production (iea 2002a, 58). this means increased production in the timan-pechora basin and the start of barents sea and yamal gas production. in the north, the aim is to develop electricity generation based on various energy resources and to improve the power grids, as well as to modernise the four nuclear reactors on the kola peninsula. the main provisions support the upkeep of coal and steam production, as well as the respective transport network. this means support for russia’s preferred utilisation of coal. the main provisions’ strategy focuses on the energy needs of industrial enterprises and the development of proper conditions for their operations in the future. gas supply networks will be developed in the republic of karelia, in arkhangelsk and murmansk oblasts, as well as in the republic of komi; this refers to the petrozavodsk-murmansk gas pipe construction. in the north-western economic region, the main provisions recommend the modernisation of electricity-generating and heat generation plants and logistical investments. in line with the main provisions, it is planned to develop electricity generation by renovating conventional thermal and nuclear power plants, as well as constructing new units (iea 2002a, 58). the four reactors of sosnovyy bor are to be replaced with new reactors. heat generation with gas will be particularly developed in st. petersburg. the energy dependence of kaliningrad oblast will be decreased by the versatile development of heat generation, as well as the development of local energy production. thus lukoil’s efforts to open the small kravtsovskoye offshore oilfield near the border with lithuania is in accordance with this energy strategy (lukoil 2001b; kaliningrad regional administration 2003; baltenergy 2002)). the construction of a new oil harbour on the baltic sea is also mentioned in the main provisions, and was fennia 181: 2 (2003) 171north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics realised with the completion of the primorsk facilities. if all the main provisions’ steps are realised in the northern and north-western economic regions, there will be a versatile energy system that will promote the welfare and competitiveness of the country’s regions. with the development of the energy system, the forest and mining industries of the northern region, as well as the competitive advantages of the heavy industry in this area, will be improved, and a more stable energy supply will be ensured. in this way, it is possible to slow down the depopulation of the northern region. the efficiency of electricity and heat generation is of great importance for st. petersburg. logistic investments assist in obtaining export income, which will have considerable multiplier effects on the russian economy. the renovation of nuclear power plants reduces risks connected with nuclear energy. according to the main provisions, the share of the northern and north-western economic regions and kaliningrad oblast in the total energy production of the european part of russia accounted for 18.7% in 2000, and it is expected to increase to 19.7% by 2020 (iea 2002a, 57). this will happen mainly because of the utilisation of new oil and gas fields. regional demand also gives a boost to the growth of energy production: russia’s industry is built on the sizable utilisation of natural resources that will continue to require large energy inputs. energy consumption can be controlled with the assistance of modern technologies, to which the main provisions’ strategy strives. the use of environmentally-friendly energy resources can be increased with the assistance of technological solutions. modernisation requires investment activities in order to rejuvenate energy production based on obsolete equipment. the development trends of russian energy consumption are highly dependent on energy efficiency, i.e. technical-economic solutions, and the working order of the production plants and the consumer sector utilising the energy. besides oil and gas, finland imports electricity from russia. for russia, finland is the largest electricity purchaser. in 1990–2000, finland’s net imports of electricity annually accounted for 5–17% of the country’s total electricity supply (ktm 2001, 27), and almost all of these imports came from russia. at its lowest level, annual imports were equal to one-fifth of total finnish nuclear power’s electricity generation, while at its highest level, imports were equal to 59%. at the turn of the millennium, the russian electricity company rao ues increased the capacity of the st. petersburg–vyborg trunk line (iea 2002a, 215). the electricity company has made contracts concerning electricity exports to poland, germany and austria. projects in electric power grid construction are being planned in the northern parts of europe, and they will pave the way for russian electricity exports to the european market. for instance, the kola nuclear power plant would like to sell its excess electricity abroad and to st. petersburg. the question, however, is whether russians are able to modernise their old power plants and set up transmission systems. moreover, northwest russia’s electricity generation is needed to satisfy local demand. north-west russia’s multifaceted industry, infrastructure and households need much electricity in high-latitude conditions, but geographical changes in demand are anticipated. the aims of russia’s energy plans are to increase and ensure energy supply and the systems of transport. the logistic importance of fennoscandia is becoming more significant than it has been. the construction of the gas pipeline network opens new potential and expands gas supply in the baltic sea region. various investments as well as r&d and technological improvements are necessary to realise the steps of the main provisions. new technology is needed for the increase of energy efficiency as well as for environmental safety. russian energy measures rest on national interests. for example, in logistic arrangements, russia is striving to keep all benefits and control over exports inside the country. partly because of this, the main provisions support the increased activities via the baltic sea. the goals of the main provisions support the growth of the russian economy and the improvement of its economic performance. the russian economic structures are expected to change significantly with the growth of services, private consumption and transport. russians strive to create a more efficient and sustainable economic system out of an economy using energy wastefully. such intentions narrow the gap of the economies of russia and the eu-europe. north-west russia, aided by its geography and european legacy, contributes in no small measure to russia’s transformation and economic evolution. 172 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen conclusions: geo-economic restructuring and future visions geographical shifts of energy production and the new regional growth pattern eronen (1996, 44) has estimated that 40% of russian purchasing power is within the radius of 1000 km from the southern corner of the finnish-russian border. the majority of people live on the western edge of this large country, but its energy resources are located across eleven time zones. during recent decades there has been a considerable geographical shift in the extraction of energy resources. oil, gas and coal are extracted increasingly from siberian sources and this trend continues in addition to the opening up and utilising the resources of the arctic. the second shift is the decreasing significance of energy production and networks, which included the southern areas that were part of the soviet union. all the restructuring of production and networks demands considerable infrastructure (table 6). the outcome of the shifts and anticipated energy production changes is that the geographical focus of russia’s energy-driven geopolitics is returning to the north and high-latitude zones in general. due to locational factors the main market of russian energy is in europe. nevertheless, the improving infrastructure enhances russia’s opportunities to sell oil worldwide. the asian market for russian hydrocarbon resources is developing but the capacity to deliver energy to these markets is still rather small and will continue to be for some time to come. market forces increasingly determine trade and business connections with remote districts inside the country. production closures and the investments of the energy sector have strengthened this market-led geographical restructuring. some structures have reversed; for example oil and gas pipelines, which ensured economic co-operation between small cmea countries and the soviet union, nowadays have become export channels that earn revenues from the market. nevertheless, this central european gateway is losing it significance as russia constructs new ports and pipelines in the northern parts of the country. the reorganisation of transport does not decrease the significance of european actors as trade partners, but russia is merely less dependent on old export routes to the european and world markets. both human-made and physical contingencies, manifested in production systems and transport practices, change slowly. table 6. geographical shifts of russian energy production. main production areas and the targets of logistical investments. source of primary soviet union since russia at the turn of russia during the early decades energy (and the second world war the millennium of the 21st century logistics) coal donets basin, southern kuznetsk basin, kanskkuznetsk basin, kanskareas of the fsu achinsk, eastern siberia, far achinsk, eastern siberia, east, some european areas far east (pechora, moscow, donets basin) oil caucasus, volga-urals west siberian plain west siberian plain, sakhalin, timan-pechora gas caucasus, southern areas west siberian plain west siberian plain, sakhalin, of the fsu, volga-urals barents sea, lena-tunguska, yamal peninsula nuclear european parts, some pilot european russia european russia plants on the asian side logistics construction of internal baltic pipeline system and north transgas, baltic sea pipeline network, bratstvo northern gateway: pipes and pipelines and ports, barents and druzhba, black sea ports ports, black sea ports, caspian sea and yamal pipelines and pipeline consortium, ports and ports, pipeline from eastern pipes in russian far east siberia to china, pipes and ports in the far east, arctic ocean transport systems fennia 181: 2 (2003) 173north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics impacts of new borders russia’s energy strategy supports the country’s economic orientation to the advanced economies and global economy but, on the other hand, it attempts to develop production and logistics for the needs of the domestic market. due to the changing geopolitical conditions (such as new borders), the resource-rich northern areas of russia’s asian and european territories are of great importance for the russian federation. these high-latitude regions and their localities have greatly differing future prospects (heleniak 1999), and they are mostly explained by the potential of the energy sector’s regional development and logistical position both in europe and siberia. russia has lost its control in the southern former soviet states. clearly, there are cultural grounds to assume that this divide is fundamental and persistent (e.g. huntington 1993). having achieved independence, the former soviet republics created their own profiles both in the economy and foreign policy. for example, nowadays the usa and china are, more than earlier, visible in the oil and gas market of the southern independent republics (martelius 1999, 157–163). the usa has supported the cheyhan (turkey) oil pipeline project, which is being developed by, amongst others, the independent republics. the northern caucasus is not a peaceful area, which creates difficulties for economic development and energy production. the geography of russia is different compared to the geographical domain and power of the soviet union and its sphere of influence. the core of the russian economy is formed around moscow and st. petersburg as well as around the rich oil and gas areas (sutherland et al. 2000). the nucleus of growth of the russian economy is in the industrial urban agglomerations, in which the population has concentrated already since the beginning of the soviet period. the industries of these agglomerations act to meet the needs of their domestic markets or strive to enter the global market. industrial investments, political steps and restructuring programmes support, in the main, the existing geo-economic structures (i.e. production, communities and logistics). in the regions of eastern siberia and the russian far east, the energy strategy is developed towards the markets of china and japan, because those economies demand energy from the easternmost regions of russia. this economic coupling in asia is not likely to lead to the disintegration of the federation or to other conflicts, but the economic development of the regions will be uneven. stakeholders and mutual interests under the influence of enterprises, policy makers (from the new shrunken russian territory) and inherited structures, russia’s orientation towards europe is in the current interests of stakeholders. europe is now relatively more important to russia than earlier when the country included large southern republics located in asia and had thus stronger eurasian cultural attributes. one of the latest signs of this europe-oriented policy was the proposal of the common european economic space (cees), which would comprise both the eu and russia. this was adopted at the eu-russia summit in may 2001 and has been developed further in the co-operation council between the european union and russia. it also was highlighted in the 300th anniversary of the foundation of st. petersburg in 2003 (e.g. prodi 2003), which indicates its importance. the geographical characteristics of the world energy market and the development of the energy transport system promote the integration of russia with europe. economic development is binding russia and europe together through economic reasons: the economic connection between russia and the advanced industrial countries is profitable for both sides because their production systems are complementary to each other. the viability of the russian energy cluster brings benefits both to the eu and to russia, and the stability of russian energy production benefits also the us economy. the formation of such mutual interests causes new security configurations in the foreign policies of these countries. this is seen, for example, in the relations between russia and nato and in russia’s attempts to abolish the visa requirements between russia and the eu. instead of being trusted companions in business co-operation, the former empire’s regions bordering on russia in the west – belarus and particularly ukraine – have become problematic due to transit and transport payment conflicts. consequently, the focus of logistic visions has geographically moved farther north. russian companies are developing the existing northern pipelines and ports as well as planning the construction of new oil and gas pipelines through fennoscandia. on 174 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen the other hand, these northern infrastructure plans are also a geographical manifestation in the way that new oil and gas deposits lie in northern highlatitude zones. logistic investments near the border regions of finland are supported by the fact that the shortest way for gas (and partly oil) transport to central europe is through the baltic sea area. logistic advantages russia’s continuing efforts to avoid the ports of other countries means that logistic decisions for energy production will not significantly change when the countries of east central europe become members of the eu in 2004. in regards to exports to western europe, however, changes may take place. as the new members enter the eu, direct land access from russia to the heart of europe will become available through the baltic states and poland, but the shortest routes from the barents sea to western europe will continue to run through the baltic sea region. moreover, finland’s logistic location is favourable also from the point of view of the gas and oil projects in the timan-pechora and yamal peninsula. in any event, finland can take part in the construction projects of the energy industry and its infrastructure. the energy infrastructure of russia has been created in a way that it serves energy transport to the west. industrial investments are required for upgrading russia’s energy system. the potential growth of primary energy production is limited in europe, and for this reason energy exports, and gas exports in particular, to europe are anticipated to increase (iea 2000, 146–148). russia will be able to supply large volumes of gas if the planned investments are realised. russian activities in the oil market create common european energy markets, thus decreasing energy dependence on persian gulf countries’ and african oil12. the eu countries also purchase russian electricity, and for this reason electric power lines to the eu are being developed. in europe, electric power grids are utilised for distributing electricity from one state to another on a co-operative and transfer-contract basis. russia is attempting to join this integrating electricity market. the network of actors and geopolitics co-operation with european actors makes sense for russia. russian companies can export energy to places where it is relatively easy to transport. this direction is also positive from the political perspective, because through energy sales russia can be seen as an important trade partner in europe. this also increases the political importance of russia in europe. close co-operation between russia and the european union in the energy field will bring the former east central european countries and the baltic states, when they take eu membership, back into the energy system from which they wanted to be separated when the soviet union collapsed. however, conditions for this integration have changed. for example, gas directives create totally different markets, in comparison with the command economy period, for these former soviet energy purchasers. during the past few years, energy companies have played a central role in the russian economy as sources of hard currency. these revenues can be increasingly spent on purchasing production technologies from the west and on investments in other economic sectors. if this mechanism works, the potential of economic development in the country is highly dependent on the success of its energy production. the energy sector with its multiplier effects will continue to be an important economic cluster. the investment behaviour at the beginning of the twenty-first century indicates that the energy sector’s revenues are invested in the maintenance and modernisation of its energy infrastructure. restructuring processes in the russian economy also have an effect on refining and petrochemical production. new production capacities are to be created and the old – renovated or closed down. moreover, russia’s attempts to increase coal and nuclear energy consumption, partly as part of the russian trade policy, are very ambitious. the adaptation to new market and institutional conditions inevitably means the emergence of new geopolitics. otherwise, trade relations suffer. the new post-socialist reality differs very much from the past, but still debated doctrine, which emphasised the role of superpower, non-western eurasian cultural identity and unique anti-capitalist institutions. that time is over for the time being. in a globalised and capitalist world, geopolitics means a constant competition between alternatives in the search for the most useful external relations. energy is part of this network of actors and relations. for russia, this game means integration with partners (companies, nations and fennia 181: 2 (2003) 175north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics economic areas) that are able to co-operate successfully in the economic sector and to maintain unproblematic socio-cultural relations. the new russian geopolitics and the russian initiatives of integration and co-operation are understandable in this context. acknowledgements the contributions of paul fryer and sisko porter in composing the english manuscript are acknowledged. notes 1 energy consumption consists of energy used in primary production, in manufacturing, services (e.g. transport) and households. energy consumption is usually estimated by total primary energy supply (tpes), which is made up of indigenous production + imports – exports – international marine bunkers “ stock changes (iea 2003a, 62). the concept commercial energy use is defined in the same way (world bank 2000, 323). 2 one oil tonne equivalent (toe) is equal to the heat energy of one tonne of crude oil. for example, the heat energy of a coal tonne in russia is 0.545 toe (iea 2003a, 59). the conversion factor varies by country and the quality of coal. 3 cmea and comecon are abbreviations for the council for mutual economic assistance. its russian name, sovet ekonomicheskoi vzaimopomoshchi, is abbreviated to sev. it was founded in 1949 as the socialist countries’ economic union. finland had a co-operation contract with this union from 1973 until june 1991 when the union was dissolved. 4 brown coal (lignite) is a type of coal formed out of the relatively young layers of peat. carbon content is low (50–75%). anthracite is the best, in respect to heat value, type of coal formed of the oldest layers. its carbon content is 87–98%. 5 the khanty-mansi autonomous okrug was formerly known as the ostyak-vogul national okrug, after the russian name for these two indigenous peoples. they speak ob-ugrian languages from the finno-ugrian family of languages. together they numbered some 30,000, but their proportion of the okrug’s population has decreased, being nowadays only two per cent. 6 geological sediment formations comprise of petrified or otherwise compressed soil that contains oil and gas between the layers. the age of the timanpechora’s sediment formations belonging to the palaeozoic and mesozoic eras is 65–570 million years. 7 the four oldest reactors have been put out of production (lifetime in brackets): novovoronezh 1 (1964–88) and 2 (1970–90), as well as beloyarsk 1 (1964–83) and 2 (1967–90) (iaea 2003b). these reactors were built in the 1950s and 1960s. 8 the information on reactors is updated by the iaea (iaea 2002b), ministry for atomic energy of the russian federation (minatom 2002), and institute for physics and power engineering (ippe 2002). 9 nuclear power plants under construction in 2003: 8 units in india, 4 in china, 4 in ukraine, 3 in japan, 3 in russia, 2 in south korea, 2 in the slovak republic, 2 in iran, 2 in taiwan, 1 in argentina, 1 in north korea and 1 in romania (iaea 2003c). the total power of the 33 npps under construction is 27,112 mw in 2003. 10 the original units of data, the coal tonne equivalent (mtce) used by russians, have been converted into toe, tonnes of oil equivalent. energy consumption is measured by total primary energy supply (tpes) in the iea’s calculations. 11 1000 mw vver reactors are planned to replace the reactors of the kola npp and the leningrad npp (vtt energy 1999, 254). 12 oil is imported into europe from cis countries (29%, 1999), saudi arabia (14%), libya (13%), iran (10%), iraq (9%), algeria (6%), nigeria (5%) and kuwait (2%) (iea 2000, 145). russia is the leading gas importer into europe (65%, 1999), followed by algeria (32%) (iea 2000, 148). europe is defined here as oecd-europe with 22 countries. references agnew ja (2001). disputing the nature of the international in political geography. geographische zeitschrift 89: 1, 1–16. alekseyev bv (2002). from the heart of asia to a threshold of the european arctic region. a position paper presented to the 2nd northern research forum, veliky novgorod, russia, 19–22 september 2002. 2 p. andreev oa & m-o olsson (2002). overview of the environmental problems of north-west russia. challenges of industrial ecology in the barents region, helsinki university of technology, laboratory of environmental protection, finland, 9– 10 december 2002. 9 p. baltenergy (2002). lithuania: russia pleged more information to baltic countries on lukoil oil field. <http://www.baltenergy.com>. 9.8.2003. bassan m (2003). electricity statistics. statistics in focus, environment and energy, theme 8 – 4/ 2003, ks-nq-03-004-en-n. european communities, luxembourg. bater jh (1996). russia and the post-soviet scene: a geographical perspective. 354 p. arnold, london. bellona (1997). petroleumsvirksomhet i nordvestrussland. arbeidsnotat 1997:1. <http:// www.bellona.no/no/energi/fossil/wp_1-1997/ 24567.htm>. 5.8.2003. 176 fennia 181: 2 (2003)markku tykkyläinen blakkisrud h & g hønnesland (2001). introduction. hønnesland, g & h blakkisrud (eds.): centre-periphery relations in russia, 3–32. ashgate, aldershot. conocophillips (2002). 2002 fact book. 52 p. conocophillips, new york and houston. considine ji & wa kerr (2002). the russian oil economy. 360 p. edward elgar, celtenham. eronen j (1996). alueelliset markkinat venäjällä 1990-luvulla. helsinki school of economics and business administration w-156. 52 p. eronen j (1999). distance and logistics as problems – their soviet solutions. studia historica 62, 201–206. european commission (2001). 2000 – annual energy review. energy in europe. 223 p. european communities, belgium. filippov p, g dudarev & a osipov (2003). energy: raw materials, production and technology, a competitive analysis of the northwest russian energy cluster. etla b 197. 210 p. finnbarents (1996). oil and gas fields in the timanpechora region. a map. university of lapland, rovaniemi. gasum (2003). maakaasun siirtoverkko. <http:// www.gasum.fi/gasumint.nsf>. 6.9.2003. heleniak t (1999). out-migration and depopulation of the russian north during the 1990s. postsoviet geography and economics 40: 3, 155– 205. hernesniemi h & g dudarev (2003). russian energy cluster focusing on the northwest. economic trends 2003/2, 49–52. huntington sp (1993). the clash of civilizations? foreign affair 72: 3, 22–49. iaea (2002a). nuclear power reactor details – alphabetic. <http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page. pl/…rt?reactor.status,&sortlong =by%20status>. 29.6.2002. iaea (2002b). russian federation: nuclear power reactors – alphabetic. <http://www.iaea.org/cgib i n / d b . p a g e . p l / … t m ? c o u n t r y = r u & s o r t = &sortlong=alphabet>. 29.6.2002. iaea (2003a). nuclear share in electricity generation in 2002. <http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db. page.pl/pris.status.htm>. 6.9.2003. iaea (2003b). russian federation: nuclear power reactors – by status. <http://www.iaea.org/cgib i n / d b . p a g e . p l / p r i s . p ow r e a . h t m ? c o u n t r y = ru&sort=reactor.status,&sortlong=by%20status>. 6.9.2003. iaea (2003c). nuclear power plants information. operational and under construction reactors by country. <http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page. pl/pris.reaopucct.htm>. 6.9.2003. iea (1995). energy policy and the russian federation. 323 p. international energy agency, paris. iea (2000). world energy outlook 2000. 457 p. international energy agency, paris. iea (2002a). russia energy survey 2002. 278 p. international energy agency, paris. iea (2002b). world energy outlook 2002. 530 p. international energy agency, paris. iea (2003a). key world energy statistics. 75 p. international energy agency, paris. iea (2003b). world energy investment outlook 2003 insights. 511 p. international energy agency, paris. interfax (2003). ukraine denies possible reverse use of odessa-brody pipeline. petroleum report 12: 21, 17. ippe (2002). russian npp. <http://www.ippe. obninsk.ru/rnpp/rnpp_eng.htm>. 3.5.2002. jumppanen p (1999). natural resources. lausala, t & l valkonen (eds): economic geography and structure of the russian territories of the barents region, 81–116. the university of lapland, the arctic centre’s information, 31. 250 p. kaliningrad regional administration (2003). construction of the d-6 oilfield surface facilities on the baltic shelf. <http://www.government. kaliningrad.ru/en_shelf.php3>. 9.8.2003 khodorkovsky m (2003). yukos. london, april. presentations. <http://www.yukos.com>. 9.9.2003 kom (2001). energian sisämarkkinoiden toteuttaminen. komission tiedonanto neuvostolle ja euroopan parlamentille, kom 2001 125. 33 p. ktm (2001). energy survey 2001/2. the ministry of trade and industry, helsinki. 41 p. kvaerner masa-yards (2003). kvaerner masa-yards signs contracts for icebreaking stand-by and supply vessels for russia. <http://intro.masa-yards.fi/ news.asp?id==101&m=1>. 8.9.2003. liuhto k (2002). russian oil and gas – a source of integration. lappeenranta university of technology, department of industrial engineering and management, research report 131. 37 p. lukoil (1999). annual report –98. <http:// www.lukoil.com/reports/annual_reports_98/ annual_reports-98_23.html>. 17.5.2001. lukoil (2001a). facts and figures. <http:// www.lukoil.com/about/figures.html>. 17.5.2001. lukoil (2001b). lukoil management committee discussed the development of kravtsovskoye (d-6) oil field and projects for transport of oil and oil products. press release 11.9.2001. <http:// w w w. l u k o i l . c o m / p r e s s _ c e n t e r / p r e s s _ r e l i z . htm?artid=494>. 9.8.2003 lukoil (2002). annual report 2001. 112 p. lukoil, moscow. lukoil (2003). annual report 2002. 61 p. lukoil, moscow. lynch ac (2002). roots of russia’s economic dilemmas: economics and illiberal geography. europeasia studies 54: 1, 31–49. martelius j (1999). the military policy of the ussr/ russia. (neuvostoliiton/venäjän sotilaspolitiikka.) national defence college, julkaisusarja 1, strategian tutkimuksia 13. 231 p. minatom (2002). field of activities. <http://www. minatom.ru/english/activity/print_stations.htm>. 4.5.2002. fennia 181: 2 (2003) 177north-west russia as a gateway in russian energy geopolitics misamore b (2003). yukos. presentations. presentation in ubs warburg global energy conference, 22.5.2003. <http://www.yukos.com>. 9.9.2003 moe a (2001). offshore developments: the compatibility of federal decisions and regional concern. hønnesland g & h blakkisrud (eds): centre-periphery relations in russia, 133–164. ashgate, aldershot. moe a & a-k jørgensen (2000). offshore mineral development in the russian barents sea. postsoviet geography and economics 41: 2, 98–133. prodi r (2003). eu-russia summit, ”300th anniversary of st. petersburg” celebrating three centuries of common european history and culture. <http:/ /europa.eu.int/comm/commissioners/prodi/audio/ 31052003_en.htm>. 11.6.2003. quattrogemini (2003). quattrogemini to built cgbs’s for two offshore oil and gas platforms in russia. qattrogemini news 2/2003. <http:// www.quattrogemini.fi/ge_news.php?>. 8.9.2003. rautava j (2002). the role of oil price and the real exchange rate in russia’s economy. bofit discussions papers 2002/3. 21 p. rose r (1998). getting things done in an anti-modern society: social capital networks in russia. university of strathclyde, studies in public policy 304. 32 p. rosneft (2003a). rosneft. operations. <http:// www.rosneft.ru/english/operations.sales.htm>. 9.9.2003. rosneft (2003b). rosneft, projects, shtokmanovskoye field. <http://www.rosneft.ru/english/projects/ stockmanovskoye.html>. 30.6.2003. sagers mj (2001). development in russian crude oil production. post-soviet geography and economics 42: 3, 153–201. sagers mj & mb green (1986). the transport of soviet energy resources. 177 p. rowman & littlefield, totowa. sibneft (2003). yukos and sibneft agree in principle to merge. press release archive. <http://www. sibneft.ru/paper.jsp?page=184&lang=1&id= 476>. 9.9.2003. sidanco (2003). tnk-bp commences operations. company news. <http://www.sidancp.ru/news>. 9.9.2003. spies m (2003). north or east? germany’s crude oil and natural gas supply from norway and russia. master’s thesis. university of joensuu. 127 p. statistics finland (2001). venäjän tilastoja. economic trends 5/2001, 97–99. surgutneftegas (2001). <http://www.surgutneftegas. ru/english/svede_oao.asp>. 11.12.2001. surgutneftegas (2003). annual report 2002. 54 p. ojsc surgutneftegas, surgut. sutherland d, m bradshaw & p hanson (2000). regional dynamics of economic restructuring across russia. in hanson p & m bradshaw (eds): regional economic change in russia, 43–75. edward elgar, cheltenham. tatneft (2003). monthly report july–august 2003. <http://www.tatneftjsc.ru>. 9.9.2003. tnk (2002). tyumen oil company. presentation. <http://www.tnk.com>. 9.9.2003. tnk-bp (2003a). slavneft assets to be included in tnk-bp deal. media centre 2003-06-27. <http:/ / w w w. t n k b p . c o m / e n g / o u r c o m pa n y _ p r e s s c e n t e r _ s m i a b o u t u s _ 0 8 . a s p > . 9.9.2003. tnk-bp (2003b). our history. <http://www.tnkbp.com/eng/ourcompany_history.asp>. 9.9.2003. tnk-bp (2003c). business brief – bp plc: tnk international merger approved by russian agency. media centre 2003-08-27. <http://www.tnkbp.com/eng/ourcompany_presscenter_ smiaboutus_03.asp>. 9.9.2003. tsygankov ap (2003). mastering space in eurasia: russia’s geopolitical thinking after the soviet break-up. communist and post-communist studies 36, 101–127. united nations (1996). energy statistics yearbook 1994. 490 p. united nations, new york. united nations (2000). energy statistics yearbook 1997. 514 p. united nations, new york. united nations (2001). energy statistics yearbook 1998. 516 p. united nations, new york. wingas (2000). european gas pipeline system. a map. wingas gmbh & winterhall erdgas handelshaus gmbh, kassel & berlin. verlag glückauf gmbh, essen. world bank (2000). world development report 2000/2001 – attacking poverty. 335 p. oxford university press, new york. vtt energy (1999). energia suomessa. tekniikka, talous ja ympäristövaikutukset. 368 p. edita, helsinki. yeung hwc (2003). practicing new economic geographies: a methodological examination. annals of the association of american geographers 93: 2, 442–462. yukos (2001). plans and projects. <http://www. yukos.com/new/ep/plans.htm>. 11.12.2001. yukos (2003). yukos review 2/2003. yukos, moscow.